10592	----	Proofreading Team ADVENTURES IN FRIENDSHIP By David Grayson I AN ADVENTURE IN FRATERNITY This, I am firmly convinced, is a strange world, as strange a one as I was ever in. Looking about me I perceive that the simplest things are the most difficult, the plainest things, the darkest, the commonest things, the rarest. I have had an amusing adventure--and made a friend. This morning when I went to town for my marketing I met a man who was a Mason, an Oddfellow and an Elk, and who wore the evidences of his various memberships upon his coat. He asked me what lodge I belonged to, and he slapped me on the back in the heartiest manner, as though he had known me intimately for a long time. (I may say, in passing, that he was trying to sell me a new kind of corn-planter.) I could not help feeling complimented--both complimented and abashed. For I am not a Mason, or an Oddfellow, or an Elk. When I told him so he seemed much surprised and disappointed. "You ought to belong to one of our lodges," he said. "You'd be sure of having loyal friends wherever you go." He told me all about his grips and passes and benefits; he told me how much it would cost me to get in and how much more to stay in and how much for a uniform (which was not compulsory). He told me about the fine funeral the Masons would give me; he said that the Elks would care for my widow and children. "You're just the sort of a man," he said, "that we'd like to have in our lodge. I'd enjoy giving you the grip of fellowship." He was a rotund, good-humoured man with a shining red nose and a husky voice. He grew so much interested in telling me about his lodges that I think (I _think_) he forgot momentarily that he was selling corn-planters, which was certainly to his credit. As I drove homeward this afternoon I could not help thinking of the Masons, the Oddfellows and the Elks--and curiously not without a sense of depression. I wondered if my friend of the corn-planters had found the pearl of great price that I have been looking for so long. For is not friendliness the thing of all things that is most pleasant in this world? Sometimes it has seemed to me that the faculty of reaching out and touching one's neighbour where he really lives is the greatest of human achievements. And it was with an indescribable depression that I wondered if these Masons and Oddfellows and Elks had in reality caught the Elusive Secret and confined it within the insurmountable and impenetrable walls of their mysteries, secrets, grips, passes, benefits. "It must, indeed," I said to myself, "be a precious sort of fraternity that they choose to protect so sedulously." I felt as though life contained something that I was not permitted to live. I recalled how my friend of the corn-planters had wished to give me the grip of the fellowship--only he could not. I was not entitled to it. I knew no grips or passes. I wore no uniform. "It is a complicated matter, this fellowship," I said to myself. So I jogged along feeling rather blue, marveling that those things which often seem so simple should be in reality so difficult. But on such an afternoon as this no man could possibly remain long depressed. The moment I passed the straggling outskirts of the town and came to the open road, the light and glow of the countryside came in upon me with a newness and sweetness impossible to describe. Looking out across the wide fields I could see the vivid green of the young wheat upon the brown soil; in a distant high pasture the cows had been turned out to the freshening grass; a late pool glistened in the afternoon sunshine. And the crows were calling, and the robins had begun to come: and oh, the moist, cool freshness of the air! In the highest heaven (never so high as at this time of the year) floated a few gauzy clouds: the whole world was busy with spring! I straightened up in my buggy and drew in a good breath. The mare, half startled, pricked up her ears and began to trot. She, too, felt the spring. "Here," I said aloud, "is where I belong. I am native to this place; of all these things I am a part." But presently--how one's mind courses back, like some keen-scented hound, for lost trails--I began to think again of my friend's lodges. And do you know, I had lost every trace of depression. The whole matter lay as clear in my mind, as little complicated, as the countryside which met my eye so openly. "Why!" I exclaimed to myself, "I need not envy my friend's lodges. I myself belong to the greatest of all fraternal orders. I am a member of the Universal Brotherhood of Men." It came to me so humorously as I sat there in my buggy that I could not help laughing aloud. And I was so deeply absorbed with the idea that I did not at first see the whiskery old man who was coming my way in a farm wagon. He looked at me curiously. As he passed, giving me half the road, I glanced up at him and called out cheerfully: "How are you, Brother?" You should have seen him look--and look--and look. After I had passed I glanced back. He had stopped his team, turned half way around in his high seat and was watching me--for he did not understand. "Yes, my friend," I said to myself, "I _am_ intoxicated--with the wine of spring!" I reflected upon his astonishment when I addressed him as "Brother." A strange word! He did not recognize it. He actually suspected that he was not my Brother. So I jogged onward thinking about my fraternity, and I don't know when I have had more joy of an idea. It seemed so explanatory! "I am glad," I said to myself, "that I am a Member. I am sure the Masons have no such benefits to offer in their lodges as we have in ours. And we do not require money of farmers (who have little to pay). We will accept corn, or hen's eggs, or a sandwich at the door, and as for a cheerful glance of the eye, it is for us the best of minted coin." (Item: to remember. When a man asks money for any good thing, beware of it. You can get a better for nothing.) I cannot undertake to tell where the amusing reflections which grew out of my idea would finally have led me if I had not been interrupted. Just as I approached the Patterson farm, near the bridge which crosses the creek, I saw a loaded wagon standing on the slope of the hill ahead. The horses seemed to have been unhooked, for the tongue was down, and a man was on his knees between the front wheels. Involuntarily I said: "Another member of my society: and in distress!" I had a heart at that moment for anything. I felt like some old neighbourly Knight travelling the earth in search of adventure. If there had been a distressed mistress handy at that moment, I feel quite certain I could have died for her--if absolutely necessary. As I drove alongside, the stocky, stout lad of a farmer in his brown duck coat lined with sheep's wool, came up from between the wheels. His cap was awry, his trousers were muddy at the knees where he had knelt in the moist road, and his face was red and angry. A true knight, I thought to myself, looks not to the beauty of his lady, but only to her distress. "What's the matter, Brother?" I asked in the friendliest manner. "Bolt gone," he said gruffly, "and I got to get to town before nightfall." "Get in," I said, "and we'll drive back. We shall see it in the road." So he got in. I drove the mare slowly up the hill and we both leaned out and looked. And presently there in the road the bolt lay. My farmer got out and picked it up. "It's all right," he said. "I was afraid it was clean busted. I'm obliged to you for the lift." "Hold on," I said, "get in, I'll take you back." "Oh, I can walk." "But I can drive you faster," I said, "and you've got to get the load to town before nightfall." I could not let him go without taking tribute. No matter what the story books say, I am firmly of the opinion that no gentle knight (who was human) ever parted with the fair lady whose misery he had relieved without exchanging the time of day, or offering her a bun from his dinner pail, or finding out (for instance) if she were maid or married. My farmer laughed and got in. "You see," I said, "when a member of my society is in distress I always like to help him out." He paused; I watched him gradually evolve his reply: "How did you know I was a Mason?" "Well, I wasn't _sure_." "I only joined last winter," he said. "I like it first-rate. When you're a Mason you find friends everywhere." I had some excellent remarks that I could have made at this point, but the distance was short and bolts were irresistibly uppermost. After helping him to put in the bolt, I said: "Here's the grip of fellowship." He returned it with a will, but afterward he said doubtfully. "I didn't feel the grip." "Didn't you?" I asked. "Well, Brother, it was all there." "If ever I can do anything for you," he said, "just you let me know. Name's Forbes, Spring Brook." And so he drove away. "A real Mason," I said to myself, "could not have had any better advantage of his society at this moment than I. I walked right into it without a grip or a pass. And benefits have also been distributed." As I drove onward I felt as though anything might happen to me before I got home. I know now exactly how all old knights, all voyageurs, all crusaders, all poets in new places, must have felt! I looked out at every turn of the road; and, finally, after I had grown almost discouraged of encountering further adventure I saw a man walking in the road ahead of me. He was much bent over, and carried on his back a bag. When he heard me coming he stepped out of the road and stood silent, saving every unnecessary motion, as a weary man will. He neither looked around nor spoke, but waited for me to go by. He was weary past expectation. I stopped the mare. "Get in, Brother," I said; "I am going your way." He looked at me doubtfully; then, as I moved to one side, he let his bag roll off his back into his arms. I could see the swollen veins of his neck; his face had the drawn look of the man who bears burdens. "Pretty heavy for your buggy," he remarked. "Heavier for you," I replied. So he put the bag in the back of my buggy and stepped in beside me diffidently. "Pull up the lap robe," I said, "and be comfortable." "Well, sir, I'm glad of a lift," he remarked. "A bag of seed wheat is about all a man wants to carry for four miles." "Aren't you the man who has taken the old Rucker farm?" I asked. "I'm that man." "I've been intending to drop in and see you," I said. "Have you?" he asked eagerly. "Yes," I said. "I live just across the hills from you, and I had a notion that we ought to be neighbourly--seeing that we belong to the same society." His face, which had worn a look of set discouragement (he didn't know beforehand what the Rucker place was like!), had brightened up, but when I spoke of the society it clouded again. "You must be mistaken," he said. "I'm not a Mason!" "No more am I," I said. "Nor an Oddfellow." "Nor I." As I looked at the man I seemed to know all about him. Some people come to us like that, all at once, opening out to some unsuspected key. His face bore not a few marks of refinement, though work and discouragement had done their best to obliterate them; his nose was thin and high, his eye was blue, too blue, and his chin somehow did not go with the Rucker farm. I knew! A man who in his time had seen many an open door, but who had found them all closed when he attempted to enter! If any one ever needed the benefits of my fraternity, he was that man. "What Society did you think I belonged to?" he asked. "Well," I said, "when I was in town a man who wanted to sell me a corn-planter asked me if I was a Mason----" "Did he ask you that, too?" interrupted my companion. "He did," I said. "He did----" and I reflected not without enthusiasm that I had come away without a corn-planter. "And when I drove out of town I was feeling rather depressed because I wasn't a member of the lodge." "Were you?" exclaimed my companion. "So was I. I just felt as though I had about reached the last ditch. I haven't any money to pay into lodges and it don't seems if a man could get acquainted and friendly without." "Farming is rather lonely work sometimes, isn't it?" I observed. "You bet it is," he responded. "You've been there yourself, haven't you?" There may be such a thing as the friendship of prosperity; but surely it cannot be compared with the friendship of adversity. Men, stooping, come close together. "But when I got to thinking it over," I said, "it suddenly occurred to me that I belonged to the greatest of all fraternities. And I recognized you instantly as a charter member." He looked around at me expectantly, half laughing. I don't suppose he had so far forgotten his miseries for many a day. "What's that?" he asked. "The Universal Brotherhood of Men." Well, we both laughed--and understood. After that, what a story he told me!--the story of a misplaced man on an unproductive farm. Is it not marvellous how full people are--all people--of humour, tragedy, passionate human longings, hopes, fears--if only you can unloosen the floodgates! As to my companion, he had been growing bitter and sickly with the pent-up humours of discouragement; all he needed was a listener. He was so absorbed in his talk that he did not at first realize that we had turned into his own long lane. When he discovered it he exclaimed: "I didn't mean to bring you out of your way. I can manage the bag all right now." "Never mind," I said, "I want to get you home, to say nothing of hearing how you came out with your pigs." As we approached the house, a mournful-looking woman came to the door. My companion sprang out of the buggy as much elated now as he had previously been depressed (for that was the coinage of his temperament), rushed up to his wife and led her down to the gate. She was evidently astonished at his enthusiasm. I suppose she thought he had at length discovered his gold mine! When I finally turned the mare around, he stopped me, laid his hand on my arm and said in a confidential voice: "I'm glad we discovered that we belong to the same society." As I drove away I could not help chuckling when I heard his wife ask suspiciously: "What society is that?" I heard no word of his answer: only the note in his voice of eager explanation. And so I drove homeward in the late twilight, and as I came up the lane, the door of my home opened, the light within gleamed kindly and warmly across the darkened yard: and Harriet was there on the step, waiting. II A DAY OF PLEASANT BREAD They have all gone now, and the house is very still. For the first time this evening I can hear the familiar sound of the December wind blustering about the house, complaining at closed doorways, asking questions at the shutters; but here in my room, under the green reading lamp, it is warm and still. Although Harriet has closed the doors, covered the coals in the fireplace, and said good-night, the atmosphere still seems to tingle with the electricity of genial humanity. The parting voice of the Scotch Preacher still booms in my ears: "This," said he, as he was going out of our door, wrapped like an Arctic highlander in cloaks and tippets, "has been a day of pleasant bread." One of the very pleasantest I can remember! I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays--let them overtake me unexpectedly--waking up some fine morning and suddenly saying to myself: "Why, this is Christmas Day!" How the discovery makes one bound out of his bed! What a new sense of life and adventure it imparts! Almost anything may happen on a day like this--one thinks. I may meet friends I have not seen before in years. Who knows? I may discover that this is a far better and kindlier world than I had ever dreamed it could be. [Illustration: "Merry Christmas, Harriet!"] So I sing out to Harriet as I go down: "Merry Christmas, Harriet"--and not waiting for her sleepy reply I go down and build the biggest, warmest, friendliest fire of the year. Then I get into my thick coat and mittens and open the back door. All around the sill, deep on the step, and all about the yard lies the drifted snow: it has transformed my wood pile into a grotesque Indian mound, and it frosts the roof of my barn like a wedding cake. I go at it lustily with my wooden shovel, clearing out a pathway to the gate. Cold, too; one of the coldest mornings we've had--but clear and very still. The sun is just coming up over the hill near Horace's farm. From Horace's chimney the white wood-smoke of an early fire rises straight upward, all golden with sunshine, into the measureless blue of the sky--on its way to heaven, for aught I know. When I reach the gate my blood is racing warmly in my veins. I straighten my back, thrust my shovel into the snow pile, and shout at the top of my voice, for I can no longer contain myself: "Merry Christmas, Harriet." Harriet opens the door--just a crack. "Merry Christmas yourself, you Arctic explorer! Oo--but it's cold!" And she closes the door. Upon hearing these riotous sounds the barnyard suddenly awakens. I hear my horse whinnying from the barn, the chickens begin to crow and cackle, and such a grunting and squealing as the pigs set up from behind the straw stack, it would do a man's heart good to hear! "It's a friendly world," I say to myself, "and full of business." I plow through the snow to the stable door. I scuff and stamp the snow away and pull it open with difficulty. A cloud of steam arises out of the warmth within. I step inside. My horse raises his head above the stanchion, looks around at me, and strikes his forefoot on the stable floor--the best greeting he has at his command for a fine Christmas morning. My cow, until now silent, begins to bawl. I lay my hand on the horse's flank and he steps over in his stall to let me go by. I slap his neck and he lays back his ears playfully. Thus I go out into the passageway and give my horse his oats, throw corn and stalks to the pigs and a handful of grain to Harriet's chickens (it's the only way to stop the cackling!). And thus presently the barnyard is quiet again except for the sound of contented feeding. Take my word for it, this is one of the pleasant moments of life. I stand and look long at my barnyard family. I observe with satisfaction how plump they are and how well they are bearing the winter. Then I look up at my mountainous straw stack with its capping of snow, and my corn crib with the yellow ears visible through the slats, and my barn with its mow full of hay--all the gatherings of the year, now being expended in growth. I cannot at all explain it, but at such moments the circuit of that dim spiritual battery which each of us conceals within seems to close, and the full current of contentment flows through our lives. All the morning as I went about my chores I had a peculiar sense of expected pleasure. It seemed certain to me that something unusual and adventurous was about to happen--and if it did not happen offhand, why I was there to make it happen! When I went in to breakfast (do you know the fragrance of broiling bacon when you have worked for an hour before breakfast on a morning of zero weather? If you do not, consider that heaven still has gifts in store for you!)--when I went in to breakfast, I fancied that Harriet looked preoccupied, but I was too busy just then (hot corn muffins) to make an inquiry, and I knew by experience that the best solvent of secrecy is patience. "David," said Harriet, presently, "the cousins can't come!" "Can't come!" I exclaimed. "Why, you act as if you were delighted." "No--well, yes," I said, "I knew that some extraordinary adventure was about to happen!" "Adventure! It's a cruel disappointment--I was all ready for them." "Harriet," I said, "adventure is just what we make it. And aren't we to have the Scotch Preacher and his wife?" "But I've got such a _good_ dinner." "Well," I said, "there are no two ways about it: it must be eaten! You may depend upon me to do my duty." "We'll have to send out into the highways and compel them to come in," said Harriet ruefully. I had several choice observations I should have liked to make upon this problem, but Harriet was plainly not listening; she sat with her eyes fixed reflectively on the coffeepot. I watched her for a moment, then I remarked: "There aren't any." "David," she exclaimed, "how did you know what I was thinking about?" "I merely wanted to show you," I said, "that my genius is not properly appreciated in my own household. You thought of highways, didn't you? Then you thought of the poor; especially the poor on Christmas day; then of Mrs. Heney, who isn't poor any more, having married John Daniels; and then I said, 'There aren't any.'" Harriet laughed. "It has come to a pretty pass," she said "when there are no poor people to invite to dinner on Christmas day." "It's a tragedy, I'll admit," I said, "but let's be logical about it." "I am willing," said Harriet, "to be as logical as you like." "Then," I said, "having no poor to invite to dinner we must necessarily try the rich. That's logical, isn't it?" "Who?" asked Harriet, which is just like a woman. Whenever you get a good healthy argument started with her, she will suddenly short-circuit it, and want to know if you mean Mr. Smith, or Joe Perkins's boys, which I maintain is _not_ logical. "Well, there are the Starkweathers," I said. "David!" "They're rich, aren't they?" "Yes, but you know how they live--what dinners they have--and besides, they probably have a houseful of company." "Weren't you telling me the other day how many people who were really suffering were too proud to let anyone know about it? Weren't you advising the necessity of getting acquainted with people and finding out--tactfully, of course--you made a point of tact--what the trouble was?" "But I was talking of _poor_ people." "Why shouldn't a rule that is good for poor people be equally as good for rich people? Aren't they proud?" "Oh, you can argue," observed Harriet. "And I can act, too," I said. "I am now going over to invite the Starkweathers. I heard a rumor that their cook has left them and I expect to find them starving in their parlour. Of course they'll be very haughty and proud, but I'll be tactful, and when I go away I'll casually leave a diamond tiara in the front hall." "What _is_ the matter with you this morning?" "Christmas," I said. I can't tell how pleased I was with the enterprise I had in mind: it suggested all sorts of amusing and surprising developments. Moreover, I left Harriet, finally, in the breeziest of spirits, having quite forgotten her disappointment over the non-arrival of the cousins. "If you _should_ get the Starkweathers----" "'In the bright lexicon of youth,'" I observed, "'there is no such word as fail.'" So I set off up the town road. A team or two had already been that way and had broken a track through the snow. The sun was now fully up, but the air still tingled with the electricity of zero weather. And the fields! I have seen the fields of June and the fields of October, but I think I never saw our countryside, hills and valleys, tree spaces and brook bottoms more enchantingly beautiful than it was this morning. Snow everywhere--the fences half hidden, the bridges clogged, the trees laden: where the road was hard it squeaked under my feet, and where it was soft I strode through the drifts. And the air went to one's head like wine! So I tramped past the Pattersons'. The old man, a grumpy old fellow, was going to the barn with a pail on his arm. "Merry Christmas," I shouted. He looked around at me wonderingly and did not reply. At the corners I met the Newton boys so wrapped in tippets that I could see only their eyes and the red ends of their small noses. I passed the Williams's house, where there was a cheerful smoke in the chimney and in the window a green wreath with a lively red bow. And I thought how happy everyone must be on a Christmas morning like this! At the hill bridge who should I meet but the Scotch Preacher himself, God bless him! "Well, well, David," he exclaimed heartily, "Merry Christmas." I drew my face down and said solemnly: "Dr. McAlway, I am on a most serious errand." "Why, now, what's the matter?" He was all sympathy at once. "I am out in the highways trying to compel the poor of this neighbourhood to come to our feast." The Scotch Preacher observed me with a twinkle in his eye. "David," he said, putting his hand to his mouth as if to speak in my ear, "there is a poor man you will na' have to compel." "Oh, you don't count," I said. "You're coming anyhow." Then I told him of the errand with our millionaire friends, into the spirit of which he entered with the greatest zest. He was full of advice and much excited lest I fail to do a thoroughly competent job. For a moment I think he wanted to take the whole thing out of my hands. "Man, man, it's a lovely thing to do," he exclaimed, "but I ha' me doots--I ha' me doots." At parting he hesitated a moment, and with a serious face inquired: "Is it by any chance a goose?" "It is," I said, "a goose--a big one." He heaved a sigh of complete satisfaction. "You have comforted my mind," he said, "with the joys of anticipation--a goose, a big goose." So I left him and went onward toward the Starkweathers'. Presently I saw the great house standing among its wintry trees. There was smoke in the chimney but no other evidence of life. At the gate my spirits, which had been of the best all the morning, began to fail me. Though Harriet and I were well enough acquainted with the Starkweathers, yet at this late moment on Christmas morning it did seem rather a hair-brained scheme to think of inviting them to dinner. "Never mind," I said, "they'll not be displeased to see me anyway." I waited in the reception-room, which was cold and felt damp. In the parlour beyond I could see the innumerable things of beauty--furniture, pictures, books, so very, very much of everything--with which the room was filled. I saw it now, as I had often seen it before, with a peculiar sense of weariness. How all these things, though beautiful enough in themselves, must clutter up a man's life! Do you know, the more I look into life, the more things it seems to me I can successfully lack--and continue to grow happier. How many kinds of food I do not need, nor cooks to cook them, how much curious clothing nor tailors to make it, how many books that I never read, and pictures that are not worth while! The farther I run, the more I feel like casting aside all such impedimenta--lest I fail to arrive at the far goal of my endeavour. I like to think of an old Japanese nobleman I once read about, who ornamented his house with a single vase at a time, living with it, absorbing its message of beauty, and when he tired of it, replacing it with another. I wonder if he had the right way, and we, with so many objects to hang on our walls, place on our shelves, drape on our chairs, and spread on our floors, have mistaken our course and placed our hearts upon the multiplicity rather than the quality of our possessions! Presently Mr. Starkweather appeared in the doorway. He wore a velvet smoking-jacket and slippers; and somehow, for a bright morning like this, he seemed old, and worn, and cold. "Well, well, friend," he said, "I'm glad to see you." He said it as though he meant it. "Come into the library; it's the only room in the whole house that is comfortably warm. You've no idea what a task it is to heat a place like this in really cold weather. No sooner do I find a man who can run my furnace than he goes off and leaves me." "I can sympathize with you," I said, "we often have trouble at our house with the man who builds the fires." He looked around at me quizzically. "He lies too long in bed in the morning," I said. By this time we had arrived at the library, where a bright fire was burning in the grate. It was a fine big room, with dark oak furnishings and books in cases along one wall, but this morning it had a dishevelled and untidy look. On a little table at one side of the fireplace were the remains of a breakfast; at the other a number of wraps were thrown carelessly upon a chair. As I came in Mrs. Starkweather rose from her place, drawing a silk scarf around her shoulders. She is a robust, rather handsome woman, with many rings on her fingers, and a pair of glasses hanging to a little gold hook on her ample bosom; but this morning she, too, looked worried and old. "Oh, yes," she said with a rueful laugh, "we're beginning a merry Christmas, as you see. Think of Christmas with no cook in the house!" I felt as if I had discovered a gold mine. Poor starving millionaires! But Mrs. Starkweather had not told the whole of her sorrowful story. "We had a company of friends invited for dinner to-day," she said, "and our cook was ill--or said she was--and had to go. One of the maids went with her. The man who looks after the furnace disappeared on Friday, and the stableman has been drinking. We can't very well leave the place without some one who is responsible in charge of it--and so here we are. Merry Christmas!" I couldn't help laughing. Poor people! "You might," I said, "apply for Mrs. Heney's place." "Who is Mrs. Heney?" asked Mrs. Starkweather. "You don't mean to say that you never heard of Mrs. Heney!" I exclaimed. "Mrs. Heney, who is now Mrs. 'Penny' Daniels? You've missed one of our greatest celebrities." With that, of course, I had to tell them about Mrs. Heney, who has for years performed a most important function in this community. Alone and unaided she has been the poor whom we are supposed to have always with us. If it had not been for the devoted faithfulness of Mrs. Heney at Thanksgiving, Christmas and other times of the year, I suppose our Woman's Aid Society and the King's Daughters would have perished miserably of undistributed turkeys and tufted comforters. For years Mrs. Heney filled the place most acceptably. Curbing the natural outpourings of a rather jovial soul she could upon occasion look as deserving of charity as any person that ever I met. But I pitied the little Heneys: it always comes hard on the children. For weeks after every Thanksgiving and Christmas they always wore a painfully stuffed and suffocated look. I only came to appreciate fully what a self-sacrificing public servant Mrs. Heney really was when I learned that she had taken the desperate alternative of marrying "Penny" Daniels. "So you think we might possibly aspire to the position?" laughed Mrs. Starkweather. Upon this I told them of the trouble in our household and asked them to come down and help us enjoy Dr. McAlway and the goose. When I left, after much more pleasant talk, they both came with me to the door seeming greatly improved in spirits. "You've given us something to live for, Mr. Grayson," said Mrs. Starkweather. So I walked homeward in the highest spirits, and an hour or more later who should we see in the top of our upper field but Mr. Starkweather and his wife floundering in the snow. They reached the lane literally covered from top to toe with snow and both of them ruddy with the cold. "We walked over," said Mrs. Starkweather breathlessly, "and I haven't had so much fun in years." Mr. Starkweather helped her over the fence. The Scotch Preacher stood on the steps to receive them, and we all went in together. I can't pretend to describe Harriet's dinner: the gorgeous brown goose, and the apple sauce, and all the other things that best go with it, and the pumpkin pie at the end--the finest, thickest, most delicious pumpkin pie I ever ate in all my life. It melted in one's mouth and brought visions of celestial bliss. And I wish I could have a picture of Harriet presiding. I have never seen her happier, or more in her element. Every time she brought in a new dish or took off a cover it was a sort of miracle. And her coffee--but I must not and dare not elaborate. And what great talk we had afterward! I've known the Scotch Preacher for a long time, but I never saw him in quite such a mood of hilarity. He and Mr. Starkweather told stories of their boyhood--and we laughed, and laughed--Mrs. Starkweather the most of all. Seeing her so often in her carriage, or in the dignity of her home, I didn't think she had so much jollity in her. Finally she discovered Harriet's cabinet organ, and nothing would do but she must sing for us. "None of the new-fangled ones, Clara," cried her husband: "some of the old ones we used to know." So she sat herself down at the organ and threw her head back and began to sing: "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day----," Mr. Starkweather jumped up and ran over to the organ and joined in with his deep voice. Harriet and I followed. The Scotch Preacher's wife nodded in time with the music, and presently I saw the tears in her eyes. As for Dr. McAlway, he sat on the edge of his chair with his hands on his knees and wagged his shaggy head, and before we got through he, too, joined in with his big sonorous voice: "Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art----," Oh, I can't tell here--it grows late and there's work to-morrow--all the things we did and said. They stayed until it was dark, and when Mrs. Starkweather was ready to go, she took both of Harriet's hands in hers and said with great earnestness: "I haven't had such a good time at Christmas since I was a little girl. I shall never forget it." And the dear old Scotch Preacher, when Harriet and I had wrapped him up, went out, saying: "This has been a day of pleasant bread." It has; it has. I shall not soon forget it. What a lot of kindness and common human nature--childlike simplicity, if you will--there is in people once you get them down together and persuade them that the things they think serious are not serious at all. III THE OPEN ROAD "To make space for wandering is it that the world was made so wide." --GOETHE, _Wilhelm Meister_. I love sometimes to have a day alone--a riotous day. Sometimes I do not care to see even my best friends: but I give myself up to the full enjoyment of the world around me. I go out of my door in the morning--preferably a sunny morning, though any morning will do well enough--and walk straight out into the world. I take with me the burden of no duty or responsibility. I draw in the fresh air, odour-laden from orchard and wood. I look about me as if everything were new--and behold everything _is_ new. My barn, my oaks, my fences--I declare I never saw them before. I have no preconceived impressions, or beliefs, or opinions. My lane fence is the end of the known earth. I am a discoverer of new fields among old ones. I see, feel, hear, smell, taste all these wonderful things for the first time. I have no idea what discoveries I shall make! So I go down the lane, looking up and about me. I cross the town road and climb the fence on the other side. I brush one shoulder among the bushes as I pass: I feel the solid yet easy pressure of the sod. The long blades of the timothy-grass clasp at my legs and let go with reluctance. I break off a twig here and there and taste the tart or bitter sap. I take off my hat and let the warm sun shine on my head. I am an adventurer upon a new earth. Is it not marvellous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness. For want of that ardent inner curiosity which is the only true foundation for the appreciation of beauty--for beauty is inward, not outward--we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere curious resemblances which, like unassimilated property, possess no power of fecundation. With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and passes in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain cathedrals! Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach? For wilderness, for foreignness, I have no need to go a mile: I have only to come up through my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside--and behold, a new heaven and a new earth! Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we look the roads are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps! It has seemed to me sometimes as though I could see men hardening before my eyes, drawing in a feeler here, walling up an opening there. Naming things! Objects fall into categories for them and wear little sure channels in the brain. A mountain is a mountain, a tree a tree to them, a field forever a field. Life solidifies itself in words. And finally how everything wearies them and that is old age! Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of to-day?--is not that the best life we know? And so to the Open Road! Not many miles from my farm there is a tamarack swamp. The soft dark green of it fills the round bowl of a valley. Around it spread rising forests and fields; fences divide it from the known land. Coming across my fields one day, I saw it there. I felt the habit of avoidance. It is a custom, well enough in a practical land, to shun such a spot of perplexity; but on that day I was following the Open Road, and it led me straight to the moist dark stillness of the tamaracks. I cannot here tell all the marvels I found in that place. I trod where human foot had never trod before. Cobwebs barred my passage (the bars to most passages when we came to them are only cobwebs), the earth was soft with the thick swamp mosses, and with many an autumn of fallen dead, brown leaves. I crossed the track of a muskrat, I saw the nest of a hawk--and how, how many other things of the wilderness I must not here relate. And I came out of it renewed and refreshed; I know now the feeling of the pioneer and the discoverer. Peary has no more than I; Stanley tells me nothing I have not experienced! What more than that is the accomplishment of the great inventor, poet, painter? Such cannot abide habit-hedged wildernesses. They follow the Open Road, they see for themselves, and will not accept the paths or the names of the world. And Sight, kept clear, becomes, curiously, Insight. A thousand had seen apples fall before Newton. But Newton was dowered with the spirit of the Open Road! Sometimes as I walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience with scarcely diminished emotion. And one of these words--how it brings to me the very mood of a gray October day! A sleepy west wind blowing. The fields are bare, the corn shocks brown, and the long road looks flat and dull. Away in the marsh I hear a single melancholy crow. A heavy day, namelessly sad! Old sorrows flock to one's memory and old regrets. The creeper is red in the swamp and the grass is brown on the hill. It comes to me that I was a boy once---- So to the flat road and away! And turn at the turning and rise with the hill. Will the mood change: will the day? I see a lone man in the top of a pasture crying "Coo-ee, coo-ee." I do not see at first why he cries and then over the hill come the ewes, a dense gray flock of them, huddling toward me. The yokel behind has a stick in each hand. "Coo-ee, coo-ee," he also cries. And the two men, gathering in, threatening, sidling, advancing slowly, the sheep turning uncertainly this way and that, come at last to the boarded pen. "That's the idee," says the helper. "A poor lot," remarks the leader: "such is the farmer's life." From the roadway they back their frame-decked wagon to the fence and unhook their team. The leader throws off his coat and stands thick and muscular in his blue jeans--a roistering fellow with a red face, thick neck and chapped hands. "I'll pass 'em up," he says; "that's a man's work. You stand in the wagon and put 'em in." So he springs into the yard and the sheep huddle close into the corner, here and there raising a timid head, here and there darting aside in a panic. "Hi there, it's for you," shouts the leader, and thrusts his hands deep in the wool of one of the ewes. "Come up here, you Southdown with the bare belly," says the man in the wagon. "That's my old game--wrastling," the leader remarks, struggling with the next ewe. "Stiddy, stiddy, now I got you, up with you dang you!" "That's the idee," says the man in the wagon. So I watch and they pass up the sheep one by one and as I go down the road I hear the leader's thick voice, "Stiddy, stiddy," and the response of the other, "That's the idee." And so on into the gray day! My Open Road leads not only to beauty, not only to fresh adventures in outer observation. I believe in the Open Road in religion, in education, in politics: there is nothing really settled, fenced in, nor finally decided upon this earth, Nothing that is not questionable. I do not mean that I would immediately tear down well-built fences or do away with established and beaten roads. By no means. The wisdom of past ages is likely to be wiser than any hasty conclusions of mine. I would not invite any other person to follow my road until I had well proven it a better way toward truth than that which time had established. And yet I would have every man tread the Open Road; I would have him upon occasion question the smuggest institution and look askance upon the most ancient habit. I would have him throw a doubt upon Newton and defy Darwin! I would have him look straight at men and nature with his own eyes. He should acknowledge no common gods unless he proved them gods for himself. The "equality of men" which we worship: is there not a higher inequality? The material progress which we deify: is it real progress? Democracy--is it after all better than monarchy? I would have him question the canons of art, literature, music, morals: so will he continue young and useful! And yet sometimes I ask myself. What do I travel for? Why all this excitement and eagerness of inquiry? What is it that I go forth to find? Am I better for keeping my roads open than my neighbour is who travels with contentment the paths of ancient habit? I am gnawed by the tooth of unrest--to what end? Often as I travel I ask myself that question and I have never had a convincing answer. I am looking for something I cannot find. My Open Road is open, too, at the end! What is it that drives a man onward, that scourges him with unanswered questions! We only know that we are driven; we do not know who drives. We travel, we inquire, we look, we work--only knowing that these activities satisfy a certain deep and secret demand within us. We have Faith that there is a Reason: and is there not a present Joy in following the Open Road? "And O the joy that is never won, But follows and follows the journeying sun." And at the end of the day the Open Road, if we follow it with wisdom as well as fervour, will bring us safely home again. For after all the Open Road must return to the Beaten Path. The Open Road is for adventure; and adventure is not the food of life, but the spice. Thus I came back this evening from rioting in my fields. As I walked down the lane I heard the soft tinkle of a cowbell, a certain earthy exhalation, as of work, came out of the bare fields, the duties of my daily life crowded upon me bringing a pleasant calmness of spirit, and I said to myself: "Lord be praised for that which is common." And after I had done my chores I came in, hungry, to my supper. IV ON BEING WHERE YOU BELONG Sunday Morning, May 20th. On Friday I began planting my corn. For many days previously I went out every morning at sun-up, in the clear, sharp air, and thrust my hand deep down in the soil of the field. I do not know that I followed any learned agricultural rule, but somehow I liked to do it. It has seemed reasonable to me, instead of watching for a phase of the moon (for I do not cultivate the moon), to inquire of the earth itself. For many days I had no response; the soil was of an icy, moist coldness, as of death. "I am not ready yet," it said; "I have not rested my time." Early in the week we had a day or two of soft sunshine, of fecund warmth, to which the earth lay open, willing, passive. On Thursday morning, though a white frost silvered the harrow ridges, when I thrust my hand into the soil I felt, or seemed to feel, a curious response: a strange answering of life to life. The stone had been rolled from the sepulchre! And I knew then that the destined time had arrived for my planting. That afternoon I marked out my corn-field, driving the mare to my home-made wooden marker, carefully observant of the straightness of the rows; for a crooked corn-row is a sort of immorality. I brought down my seed corn from the attic, where it had hung waiting all winter, each ear suspended separately by the white, up-turned husks. They were the selected ears of last year's crop, even of size throughout, smooth of kernel, with tips well-covered--the perfect ones chosen among many to perpetuate the highest excellencies of the crop. I carried them to the shed next my barn, and shelled them out in my hand machine: as fine a basket of yellow dent seed as a man ever saw. I have listened to endless discussions as to the relative merits of flint and dent corn. I here cast my vote emphatically for yellow dent: it is the best Nature can do! I found my seed-bag hanging, dusty, over a rafter in the shed, and Harriet sewed a buckle on the strip that goes around the waist. I cleaned and sharpened my hoe. "Now," I said to myself, "give me a good day and I am ready to plant." The sun was just coming up on Friday, looking over the trees into a world of misty and odorous freshness. When I climbed the fence I dropped down in the grass at the far corner of the field. I had looked forward this year with pleasure to the planting of a small field by hand--the adventure of it--after a number of years of horse planting (with Horace's machine) of far larger fields. There is an indescribable satisfaction in answering, "Present!" to the roll-call of Nature; to plant when the earth is ready, to cultivate when the soil begins to bake and harden, to harvest when the grain is fully ripe. It is the chief joy of him who lives close to the soil that he comes, in time, to beat in consonance with the pulse of the earth; its seasons become his seasons; its life his life. Behold me, then, with a full seed-bag suspended before me, buckled both over the shoulders and around the waist, a shiny hoe in my hand (the scepter of my dominion), a comfortable, rested feeling in every muscle of my body, standing at the end of the first long furrow there in my field on Friday morning--a whole spring day open before me! At that moment I would not have changed my place for the place of any king, prince, or president. At first I was awkward enough, for it has been a long time since I have done much hand planting; but I soon fell into the rhythmic swing of the sower, the sure, even, accurate step; the turn of the body and the flexing of the wrists as the hoe strikes downward; the deftly hollowed hole; the swing of the hand to the seed-bag; the sure fall of the kernels; the return of the hoe; the final determining pressure of the soil upon the seed. One falls into it and follows it as he would follow the rhythm of a march. Even the choice of seed becomes automatic, instinctive. At first there is a conscious counting by the fingers--five seeds: One for the blackbird, One for the crow, One for the cutworm, Two to grow. But after a time one ceases to count five, and _feels_ five, instinctively rejecting a monstrous six, or returning to complete an inferior four. I wonder if you know the feel of the fresh, soft soil, as it answers to your steps, giving a little, responding a little (as life always does)--and is there not something endlessly good and pleasant about it? And the movement of the arms and shoulders, falling easily into that action and reaction which yields the most service to the least energy! Scientists tell us that the awkward young eagle has a wider wing-stretch than the old, skilled eagle. So the corn planter, at noon, will do his work with half the expended energy of the early morning: he attains the artistry of motion. And quite beyond and above this physical accomplishment is the ever-present, scarcely conscious sense of reward, repayment, which one experiences as he covers each planting of seeds. As the sun rose higher the mists stole secretly away, first toward the lower brook-hollows, finally disappearing entirely; the morning coolness passed, the tops of the furrows dried out to a lighter brown, and still I followed the long planting. At each return I refilled my seed-bag, and sometimes I drank from the jug of water which I had hidden in the grass. Often I stood a moment by the fence to look up and around me. Through the clear morning air I could hear the roosters crowing vaingloriously from the barnyard, and the robins were singing, and occasionally from the distant road I heard the rumble of a wagon. I noted the slow kitchen smoke from Horace's chimney, the tip of which I could just see over the hill from the margin of my field--and my own pleasant home among its trees--and my barn--all most satisfying to look upon. Then I returned to the sweat and heat of the open field, and to the steady swing of the sowing. [Illustration: "OFTEN I STOOD A MOMENT BY THE FENCE"] Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. In the advertisements of the country paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich--overnight--by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers. It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures. We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly!--not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry. I understand it perfectly; I too, followed long after false gods. I thought I must rush forth to see the world, I must forthwith become great, rich, famous; and I hurried hither and thither, seeking I knew not what. Consuming my days with the infinite distractions of travel, I missed, as one who attempts two occupations at once, the sure satisfaction of either. Beholding the exteriors of cities and of men, I was deceived with shadows; my life took no hold upon that which is deep and true. Colour I got, and form, and a superficial aptitude in judging by symbols. It was like the study of a science: a hasty review gives one the general rules, but it requires a far profounder insight to know the fertile exceptions. But as I grow older I remain here on my farm, and wait quietly for the world to pass this way. My oak and I, we wait, and we are satisfied. Here we stand among our clods; our feet are rooted deep within the soil. The wind blows upon us and delights us, the rain falls and refreshes us, the sun dries and sweetens us. We are become calm, slow, strong; so we measure rectitudes and regard essentials, my oak and I. I would be a hard person to dislodge or uproot from this spot of earth. I belong here; I grow here. I like to think of the old fable of the wrestler of Irassa. For I am veritably that Anteus who was the wrestler of Irassa and drew his strength from the ground. So long as I tread the long furrows of my planting, with my feet upon the earth, I am invincible and unconquerable. Hercules himself, though he comes upon me in the guise of Riches, or Fame, or Power, cannot overthrow me--save as he takes me away from this soil. For at each step my strength is renewed. I forget weariness, old age has no dread for me. Some there may be who think I talk dreams; they do not know reality. My friend, did it ever occur to you that you are unhappy because you have lost connection with life? Because your feet are not somewhere firm planted upon the soil of reality? Contentment, and indeed usefulness, comes as the infallible result of great acceptances, great humilities--of not trying to make ourselves this or that (to conform to some dramatized version of ourselves), but of surrendering ourselves to the fullness of life--of letting life flow through us. To be used!--that is the sublimest thing we know. It is a distinguishing mark of greatness that it has a tremendous hold upon real things. I have seen men who seemed to have behind them, or rather within them, whole societies, states, institutions: how they come at us, like Atlas bearing the world! For they act not with their own feebleness, but with a strength as of the Whole of Life. They speak, and the words are theirs, but the voice is the Voice of Mankind. I don't know what to call it: being right with God or right with life. It is strangely the same thing; and God is not particular as to the name we know him by, so long as we know Him. Musing upon these secret things, I seem to understand what the theologians in their darkness have made so obscure. Is it not just this at-one-moment with life which sweetens and saves us all? In all these writings I have glorified the life of the soil until I am ashamed. I have loved it because it saved me. The farm for me, I decided long ago, is the only place where I can flow strongly and surely. But to you, my friend, life may present a wholly different aspect, variant necessities. Knowing what I have experienced in the city, I have sometimes wondered at the happy (even serene) faces I have seen in crowded streets. There must be, I admit, those who can flow and be at one with that life, too. And let them handle their money, and make shoes, and sew garments, and write in ledgers--if that completes and contents them. I have no quarrel with any one of them. It is, after all, a big and various world, where men can be happy in many ways. For every man is a magnet, highly and singularly sensitized. Some draw to them fields and woods and hills, and are drawn in return; and some draw swift streets and the riches which are known to cities. It is not of importance what we draw, but that we really draw. And the greatest tragedy in life, as I see it, is that thousands of men and women never have the opportunity to draw with freedom; but they exist in weariness and labour, and are drawn upon like inanimate objects by those who live in unhappy idleness. They do not farm: they are farmed. But that is a question foreign to present considerations. We may be assured, if we draw freely, like the magnet of steel which gathers its iron filings about it in beautiful and symmetrical forms, that the things which we attract will also become symmetrical and harmonious with our lives. Thus flowing with life, self-surrendering to life a man becomes indispensable to life, he is absolutely necessary to the conduct of this universe. And it is the feeling of being necessary, of being desired, flowing into a man that produces the satisfaction of contentment. Often and often I think to myself: These fields have need of me; my horse whinnies when he hears my step; my dog barks a welcome. These, my neighbours, are glad of me. The corn comes up fresh and green to my planting; my buckwheat bears richly. I am indispensable in this place. What is more satisfactory to the human heart than to be needed and to know we are needed? One line in the Book of Chronicles, when I read it, flies up at me out of the printed page as though it were alive, conveying newly the age-old agony of a misplaced man. After relating the short and evil history of Jehoram, King of Judah, the account ends--with the appalling terseness which often crowns the dramatic climaxes of that matchless writing: "And (he) departed without being desired." Without being desired! I have wondered if any man was ever cursed with a more terrible epitaph! And so I planted my corn; and in the evening I felt the dumb weariness of physical toil. Many times in older days I have known the wakeful nerve-weariness of cities. This was not it. It was the weariness which, after supper, seizes upon one's limbs with half-aching numbness. I sat down on my porch with a nameless content. I looked off across the countryside. I saw the evening shadows fall, and the moon come up. And I wanted nothing I had not. And finally sleep swept in resistless waves upon me and I stumbled up to bed--and sank into dreamless slumber. V THE STORY OF ANNA It is the prime secret of the Open Road (but I may here tell it aloud) that you are to pass nothing, reject nothing, despise nothing upon this earth. As you travel, many things both great and small will come to your attention; you are to regard all with open eyes and a heart of simplicity. Believe that everything belongs somewhere; each thing has its fitting and luminous place within this mosaic of human life. The True Road is not open to those who withdraw the skirts of intolerance or lift the chin of pride. Rejecting the least of those who are called common or unclean, it is (curiously) you yourself that you reject. If you despise that which is ugly you do not know that which is beautiful. For what is beauty but completeness? The roadside beggar belongs here, too; and the idiot boy who wanders idly in the open fields; and the girl who withholds (secretly) the name of the father of her child. * * * * * I remember as distinctly as though it happened yesterday the particular evening three years ago when I saw the Scotch Preacher come hurrying up the road toward my house. It was June. I had come out after supper to sit on my porch and look out upon the quiet fields. I remember the grateful cool of the evening air, and the scents rising all about me from garden and roadway and orchard. I was tired after the work of the day and sat with a sort of complete comfort and contentment which comes only to those who work long in the quiet of outdoor places. I remember the thought came to me, as it has come in various forms so many times, that in such a big and beautiful world there should be no room for the fever of unhappiness or discontent. And then I saw McAlway coming up the road. I knew instantly that something was wrong. His step, usually so deliberate, was rapid; there was agitation in every line of his countenance. I walked down through the garden to the gate and met him there. Being somewhat out of breath he did not speak at once. So I said: "It is not, after all, as bad as you anticipate." "David," he said, and I think I never heard him speak more seriously, "it is bad enough." He laid his hand on my arm. "Can you hitch up your horse and come with me--right away?" McAlway helped with the buckles and said not a word. In ten minutes, certainly not more, we were driving together down the lane. "Do you know a family named Williams living on the north road beyond the three corners?" asked the Scotch Preacher. Instantly a vision of a somewhat dilapidated house, standing not unpicturesquely among ill-kept fields, leaped to my mind. "Yes," I said; "but I can't remember any of the family except a gingham girl with yellow hair. I used to see her on her way to school,'' "A girl!" he said, with a curious note in his voice; "but a woman now." He paused a moment; then he continued sadly: "As I grow older it seems a shorter and shorter step between child and child. David, she has a child of her own,'' "But I didn't know--she isn't--" "A woods child," said the Scotch Preacher. I could not find a word to say. I remember the hush of the evening there in the country road, the soft light fading in the fields. I heard a whippoorwill calling from the distant woods. "They made it hard for her," said the Scotch Preacher, "especially her older brother. About four o'clock this afternoon she ran away, taking her baby with her. They found a note saying they would never again see her alive. Her mother says she went toward the river." I touched up the mare. For a few minutes the Scotch Preacher sat silent, thinking. Then he said, with a peculiar tone of kindness in his voice. "She was a child, just a child. When I talked with her yesterday she was perfectly docile and apparently contented. I cannot imagine her driven to such a deed of desperation. I asked her: 'Why did you do it, Anna?' She answered, 'I don't know: I--I don't know!' Her reply was not defiant or remorseful: it was merely explanatory." He remained silent again for a long time. "David," he said finally, "I sometimes think we don't know half as much about human nature as we--we preach. If we did, I think we'd be more careful in our judgments." He said it slowly, tentatively: I knew it came straight from his heart. It was this spirit, more than the title he bore, far more than the sermons he preached, that made him in reality the minister of our community. He went about thinking that, after all, he didn't know much, and that therefore he must be kind. As I drove up to the bridge, the Scotch Preacher put one hand on the reins. I stopped the horse on the embankment and we both stepped out. "She would undoubtedly have come down this road to the river," McAlway said in a low voice. It was growing dark. When I walked out on the bridge my legs were strangely unsteady; a weight seemed pressing on my breast so that my breath came hard. We looked down into the shallow, placid water: the calm of the evening was upon it; the middle of the stream was like a rumpled glassy ribbon, but the edges, deep-shaded by overhanging trees, were of a mysterious darkness. In all my life I think I never experienced such a degree of silence--of breathless, oppressive silence. It seemed as if, at any instant, it must burst into some fearful excess of sound. Suddenly we heard a voice--in half-articulate exclamation. I turned, every nerve strained to the uttermost. A figure, seemingly materialized out of darkness and silence, was moving on the bridge. "Oh!--McAlway," a voice said. Then I heard the Scotch Preacher in low tones. "Have you seen Anna Williams?" "She is at the house," answered the voice. "Get your horse," said the Scotch Preacher. I ran back and led the mare across the bridge (how I remember, in that silence, the thunder of her hoofs on the loose boards!) Just at the top of the little hill leading up from the bridge the two men turned in at a gate. I followed quickly and the three of us entered the house together. I remember the musty, warm, shut-in odour of the front room. I heard the faint cry of a child. The room was dim, with a single kerosene lamp, but I saw three women huddled by the stove, in which a new fire was blazing. Two looked up as we entered, with feminine instinct moving aside to hide the form of the third. "She's all right, as soon as she gets dry," one of them said. The other woman turned to us half complainingly: "She ain't said a single word since we got her in here, and she won't let go of the baby for a minute." "She don't cry," said the other, "but just sits there like a statue." McAlway stepped forward and said: "Well--Anna?" The girl looked up for the first time. The light shone full in her face: a look I shall never forget. Yes, it was the girl I had seen so often, and yet not the girl. It was the same childish face, but all marked upon with inexplicable wan lines of a certain mysterious womanhood. It was childish, but bearing upon it an inexpressible look of half-sad dignity, that stirred a man's heart to its profoundest depths. And there was in it, too, as I have thought since, a something I have seen in the faces of old, wise men: a light (how shall I explain it?) as of experience--of boundless experience. Her hair hung in wavy dishevelment about her head and shoulders, and she clung passionately to the child in her arms. The Scotch Preacher had said, "Well--Anna?" She looked up and replied: "They were going to take my baby away." "Were they!" exclaimed McAlway in his hearty voice. "Well, we'll never permit _that_. Who's got a better right to the baby than you, I'd like to know?" Without turning her head, the tears came to her eyes and rolled unheeded down her face. * * * * * "Yes, sir, Dr. McAlway," the man said, "I was coming across the bridge with the cows when I see her standing there in the water, her skirts all floating around her. She was hugging the baby up to her face and saying over and over, just like this: 'I don't dare! Oh, I don't dare! But I must. I must,' She was sort of singin' the words: 'I don't dare, I don't dare, but I must.' I jumped the railing and run down to the bank of the river. And I says, 'Come right out o' there'; and she turned and come out just as gentle as a child, and I brought her up here to the house." * * * * * It seemed perfectly natural at this time that I should take the girl and her child home to Harriet. She would not go back to her own home, though we tried to persuade her, and the Scotch Preacher's wife was visiting in the city, so she could not go there. But after I found myself driving homeward with the girl--while McAlway went over the hill to tell her family--the mood of action passed. It struck me suddenly, "What will Harriet say?" Upon which my heart sank curiously, and refused to resume its natural position. In the past I had brought her tramps and peddlers and itinerant preachers, all of whom she had taken in with patience--but this, I knew, was different. For a few minutes I wished devoutly I were in Timbuctu or some other far place. And then the absurdity of the situation struck me all at once, and I couldn't help laughing aloud. "It's a tremendous old world," I said to myself. "Why, anything may happen anywhere!" The girl stirred, but did not speak. I was afraid I had frightened her. "Are you cold?" I asked. "No, sir," she answered faintly. I could think of nothing whatever to say, so I said it: "Are you fond of hot corn-meal mush?" "Yes, sir," very faintly. "With cream on it--rich yellow cream--and plenty of sugar?" "Yes, sir." "Well, I'll bet a nickel that's what we're going to get!" "Yes, sir." We drove up the lane and stopped at the yard gate. Harriet opened the door. I led the small dark figure into the warmth and light of the kitchen. She stood helplessly holding the baby tight in her arms--as forlorn and dishevelled a figure as one could well imagine. "Harriet," I said, "this is Anna Williams." Harriet gave me her most tremendous look. It seemed to me at that moment that it wasn't my sister Harriet at all that I was facing, but some stranger and much greater person than I had ever known. Every man has, upon occasion, beheld his wife, his sister, his mother even, become suddenly unknown, suddenly commanding, suddenly greater than himself or any other man. For a woman possesses the occult power of becoming instantly, miraculously, the Accumulated and Personified Customs, Morals and Institutions of the Ages. At this moment, then, I felt myself slowly but surely shrinking and shriveling up. It is a most uncomfortable sensation to find one's self face to face with Society-at-Large. Under such circumstances I always know what to do. I run. So I clapped my hat on my head, declared that the mare must be unharnessed immediately, and started for the door. Harriet followed. Once outside she closed the door behind her. "David, _David_, DAVID," she said. It occurred to me now for the first time (which shows how stupid I am) that Harriet had already heard the story of Anna Williams. And it had gained so much bulk and robustity in travelling, as such stories do in the country, that I have no doubt the poor child seemed a sort of devastating monster of iniquity. How the country scourges those who do not walk the beaten path! In the, careless city such a one may escape to unfamiliar streets and consort with unfamiliar people, and still find a way of life, but here in the country the eye of Society never sleeps! For a moment I was appalled by what I had done. Then I thought of the Harriet I knew so well: the inexhaustible heart of her. With a sudden inspiration I opened the kitchen door and we both looked in. The girl stood motionless just where I left her: an infinitely pathetic figure. "Harriet," I said, "that girl is hungry--and cold." Well, it worked. Instantly Harriet ceased to be Society-at-Large and became the Harriet I know, the Harriet of infinite compassion for all weak creatures. When she had gone in I pulled my hat down and went straight for the barn. I guess I know when it's wise to be absent from places. I unharnessed the mare, and watered and fed her; I climbed up into the loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, how feeble his judgments. And I thought as I stood there how many a man, deep down in his heart, knows to a certainty that he has escaped being an outcast, not because of any real moral strength or resolution of his own, but because Society has bolstered him up, hedged him about with customs and restrictions until he never has had a really good opportunity to transgress. And some do not sin for very lack of courage and originality: they are helplessly good. How many men in their vanity take to themselves credit for the built-up virtues of men who are dead! There is no cause for surprise when we hear of a "foremost citizen," the "leader in all good works," suddenly gone wrong; not the least cause for surprise. For it was not he that was moral, but Society. Individually he had never been tested, and when the test came he fell. It will give us a large measure of true wisdom if we stop sometimes when we have resisted a temptation and ask ourselves why, at that moment, we did right and not wrong. Was it the deep virtue, the high ideals in our souls, or was it the compulsion of the Society around us? And I think most of us will be astonished to discover what fragile persons we really are--in ourselves. I stopped for several minutes at the kitchen door before I dared to go in. Then I stamped vigorously on the boards, as if I had come rushing up to the house without a doubt in my mind--I even whistled--and opened the door jauntily. And had my pains for nothing! The kitchen was empty, but full of comforting and homelike odours. There was undoubtedly hot mush in the kettle. A few minutes later Harriet came down the stairs. She held up one finger warningly. Her face was transfigured. "David," she whispered, "the baby's asleep." So I tiptoed across the room. She tiptoed after me. Then I faced about, and we both stood there on our tiptoes, holding our breath--at least I held mine. "David," Harriet whispered, "did you see the baby?" "No," I whispered. "I think it's the finest baby I ever saw in my life." When I was a boy, and my great-aunt, who lived for many years in a little room with dormer windows at the top of my father's house, used to tell me stories (the best I ever heard), I was never content with the endings of them. "What happened next?" I remember asking a hundred times; and if I did not ask the question aloud it arose at least in my own mind. If I were writing fiction I might go on almost indefinitely with the story of Anna; but in real life stories have a curious way of coming to quick fruition, and withering away after having cast the seeds of their immortality. "Did you see the baby?" Harriet had asked. She said no word about Anna: a BABY had come into the world. Already the present was beginning to draw the charitable curtains of its forgetfulness across this simple drama; already Harriet and Anna and all the rest of us were beginning to look to the "finest baby we ever saw in all our lives." I might, indeed, go into the character of Anna and the whys and wherefores of her story; but there is curiously little that is strange or unusual about it. It was just Life. A few days with us worked miraculous changes in the girl; like some stray kitten brought in crying from the cold, she curled herself up comfortably there in our home, purring her contentment. She was not in the least a tragic figure: though down deep under the curves and dimples of youth there was something finally resistant, or obstinate, or defiant--which kept its counsel regarding the past. It is curious how acquaintanceship mitigates our judgments. We classify strangers into whose careers the newspapers or our friends give us glimpses as "bad" or "good"; we separate humanity into inevitable goathood and sheephood. But upon closer acquaintance a man comes to be not bad, but Ebenezer Smith or J. Henry Jones; and a woman is not good, but Nellie Morgan or Mrs. Arthur Cadwalader. Take it in our own cases. Some people, knowing just a little about us, might call us pretty good people; but we know that down in our hearts lurk the possibilities (if not the actual accomplishment) of all sorts of things not at all good. We are exceedingly charitable persons--toward ourselves. And thus we let other people live! The other day, at Harriet's suggestion, I drove to town by the upper road, passing the Williams place. The old lady has a passion for hollyhocks. A ragged row of them borders the dilapidated picket fence behind which, crowding up to the sociable road, stands the house. As I drive that way it always seems to look out at me like some half-earnest worker, inviting a chat about the weather or the county fair; hence, probably, its good-natured dilapidation. At the gate I heard a voice, and a boy about three years old, in a soiled gingham apron, a sturdy, blue-eyed little chap, whose face was still eloquent of his recent breakfast, came running to meet me. I stopped the mare. A moment later a woman was at the gate between the rows of hollyhocks; when she saw me she began hastily to roll down her sleeves. "Why, Mr. Grayson!" "How's the boy, Anna?" And it was the cheerful talk we had there by the roadside, and the sight of the sturdy boy playing in the sunshine--and the hollyhocks, and the dilapidated house--that brought to memory the old story of Anna which I here set down, not because it carries any moral, but because it is a common little piece out of real life in which Harriet and I have been interested. VI THE DRUNKARD It is a strange thing: Adventure. I looked for her high and I looked for her low, and she passed my door in a tattered garment--unheeded. For I had neither the eye of simplicity nor the heart of humility. One day I looked for her anew and I saw her beckoning from the Open Road; and underneath the tags and tatters I caught the gleam of her celestial garment; and I went with her into a new world. I have had a singular adventure, in which I have made a friend. And I have seen new things which are also true. My friend is a drunkard--at least so I call him, following the custom of the country. On his way from town he used often to come by my farm. I could hear him singing afar off. Beginning at the bridge, where on still days one can hear the rattle of a wagon on the loose boards, he sang in a peculiar clear high voice. I make no further comment upon the singing, nor the cause of it; but in the cool of the evening when the air was still--and he usually came in the evening--I often heard the cadences of his song with a thrill of pleasure. Then I saw him come driving by my farm, sitting on the spring seat of his one-horse wagon, and if he chanced to see me in my field, he would take off his hat and make me a grandiloquent bow, but never for a moment stop his singing. And so he passed by the house and I, with a smile, saw him moving up the hill in the north road, until finally his voice, still singing, died away in the distance. Once I happened to reach the house just as the singer was passing, and Harriet said: "There goes that drunkard." It gave me an indescribable shock. Of course I had known as much, and yet I had not directly applied the term. I had not thought of my singer as _that_, for I had often been conscious in spite of myself, alone in my fields, of something human and cheerful which had touched me, in passing. After Harriet applied her name to my singer, I was of two minds concerning him. I struggled with myself: I tried instinctively to discipline my pulses when I heard the sound of his singing. For was he not a drunkard? Lord! how we get our moralities mixed up with our realities! And then one evening when I saw him coming--I had been a long day alone in my fields--I experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. With an indescribable joyousness of adventure I stepped out toward the fence and pretended to be hard at work. "After all," I said to myself, "this is a large world, with room in it for many curious people." I waited in excitement. When he came near me I straightened up just as though I had seen him for the first time. When he lifted his hat to me I lifted my hat as grandiloquently as he. "How are you, neighbour?" I asked. He paused for a single instant and gave me a smile; then he replaced his hat as though he had far more important business to attend to, and went on up the road. My next glimpse of him was a complete surprise to me. I saw him on the street in town. Harriet pointed him out, else I should never have recognized him: a quiet, shy, modest man, as different as one could imagine from the singer I had seen so often passing my farm. He wore neat, worn clothes; and his horse stood tied in front of the store. He had brought his honey to town to sell. He was a bee-man. I stopped and asked him about his honey, and whether the fall flowers had been plenty; I ran my eye over his horse, and said that it seemed to be a good animal. But I could get very little from him, and that little in a rather low voice. I came away with my interest whetted to a still keener edge. How a man has come to be what he is--is there any discovery better worth making? [Illustration: "HE USUALLY CAME IN THE EVENING"] After that day in town I watched for the bee-man, and I saw him often on his way to town, silent, somewhat bent forward in his seat, driving his horse with circumspection, a Dr. Jekyll of propriety; and a few hours later he would come homeward a wholly different person, straight of back, joyous of mien, singing his songs in his high clear voice, a very Hyde of recklessness. Even the old horse seemed changed: he held his head higher and stepped with a quicker pace. When the bee-man went toward town he never paused, nor once looked around to see me in my field; but when he came back he watched for me, and when I responded to his bow he would sometimes stop and reply to my greeting. One day he came from town on foot and when he saw me, even though I was some distance away, he approached the fence and took off his hat, and held out his hand. I walked over toward him. I saw his full face for the first time: a rather handsome face. The hair was thin and curly, the forehead generous and smooth; but the chin was small. His face was slightly flushed and his eyes--his eyes _burned_! I shook his hand. "I had hoped," I said, "that you would stop sometime as you went by." "Well, I've wanted to stop--but I'm a busy man. I have important matters in hand almost all the time." "You usually drive." "Yes, ordinarily I drive. I do not use a team, but I have in view a fine span of roadsters. One of these days you will see me going by your farm in style. My wife and I both enjoy driving." I wish I could here convey the tone of buoyancy with which he said these words. There was a largeness and confidence in them that carried me away. He told me that he was now "working with the experts"--those were his words--and that he would soon begin building a house that would astonish the country. Upon this he turned abruptly away, but came back and with fine courtesy shook my hand. "You see," he said, "I am a busy man, Mr. Grayson--and a happy man." So he set off down the road, and as he passed my house he began singing again in his high voice. I walked away with a feeling of wonder, not unmixed with sorrow. It was a strange case! Gradually I became really acquainted with the bee-man, at first with the exuberant, confident, imaginative, home-going bee-man; far more slowly with the shy, reserved, townward-bound bee-man. It was quite an adventure, my first talk with the shy bee-man. I was driving home; I met him near the lower bridge. I cudgeled my brain to think of some way to get at him. As he passed, I leaned out and said: "Friend, will you do me a favour? I neglected to stop at the post-office. Would you call and see whether anything has been left for me in the box since the carrier started?'" "Certainly," he said, glancing up at me, but turning his head swiftly aside again. On his way back he stopped and left me a paper. He told me volubly about the way he would run the post-office if he were "in a place of suitable authority." "Great things are possible," he said, "to the man of ideas." At this point began one of the by-plays of my acquaintance with the bee-man. The exuberant bee-man referred disparagingly to the shy bee-man. "I must have looked pretty seedy and stupid this morning on my way in. I was up half the night; but I feel all right now." The next time I met the shy bee-man he on his part apologised for the exuberant bee-man--hesitatingly, falteringly, winding up with the words, "I think you will understand." I grasped his hand, and left him with a wan smile on his face. Instinctively I came to treat the two men in a wholly different manner. With the one I was blustering, hail-fellow-well-met, listening with eagerness to his expansive talk; but to the other I said little, feeling my way slowly to his friendship, for I could not help looking upon him as a pathetic figure. He needed a friend! The exuberant bee-man was sufficient unto himself, glorious in his visions, and I had from him no little entertainment. I told Harriet about my adventures: they did not meet with her approval. She said I was encouraging a vice. "Harriet," I said, "go over and see his wife. I wonder what she thinks about it." "Thinks!" exclaimed Harriet. "What should the wife of a drunkard think?" But she went over. As soon as she returned I saw that something was wrong, but I asked no questions. During supper she was extraordinarily preoccupied, and it was not until an hour or more afterward that she came into my room. "David," she said, "I can't understand some things." "Isn't human nature doing what it ought to?" I asked. But she was not to be joked with. "David, that man's wife doesn't seem to be sorry because he comes home drunken every week or two! I talked with her about it and what do you think she said? She said she knew it was wrong, but she intimated that when he was in that state she loved--liked--him all the better. Is it believable? She said: 'Perhaps you won't understand--it's wrong, I know, but when he comes home that way he seems so full of--life. He--he seems to understand me better then!' She was heartbroken, one could see that, but she would not admit it. I leave it to you, David, what can anyone do with a woman like that? How is the man ever to overcome his habits?" It is a strange thing, when we ask questions directly of life, how often the answers are unexpected and confusing. Our logic becomes illogical! Our stories won't turn out. She told much more about her interview: the neat home, the bees in the orchard, the well-kept garden. "When he's sober," she said, "he seems to be a steady, hard worker." After that I desired more than ever to see deep into the life of the strange bee-man. Why was he what he was? And at last the time came, as things come to him who desires them faithfully enough. One afternoon not long ago, a fine autumn afternoon, when the trees were glorious on the hills, the Indian summer sun never softer, I was tramping along a wood lane far back of my farm. And at the roadside, near the trunk of an oak tree, sat my friend, the bee-man. He was a picture of despondency, one long hand hanging limp between his knees, his head bowed down. When he saw me he straightened up, looked at me, and settled back again. My heart went out to him, and I sat down beside him. "Have you ever seen a finer afternoon?" I asked. He glanced up at the sky. "Fine?" he answered vaguely, as if it had never occurred to him. I saw instantly what the matter was; the exuberant bee-man was in process of transformation into the shy bee-man. I don't know exactly how it came about, for such things are difficult to explain, but I led him to talk of himself. "After it is all over," he said, "of course I am ashamed of myself. You don't know, Mr. Grayson, what it all means. I am ashamed of myself now, and yet I know I shall do it again." "No," I said, "you will not do it again." "Yes, I shall. Something inside of me argues: Why should you be sorry? Were you not free for a whole afternoon?" "Free?" I asked. "Yes--free. You will not understand. But every day I work, work, work. I have friends, but somehow I can't get to them; I can't even get to my wife. It seems as if a wall hemmed me in, as if I were bound to a rock which I couldn't get away from, I am also afraid. When I am sober I know how to do great things, but I can't do them. After a few glasses--I never take more--I not only know I can do great things, but I feel as though I were really doing them." "But you never do?" "No, I never do, but I _feel_ that I can. All the bonds break and the wall falls down and I am free. I can really touch people. I feel friendly and neighbourly." He was talking eagerly now, trying to explain, for the first time in his life, he said, how it was that he did what he did. He told me how beautiful it made the world, where before it was miserable and friendless, how he thought of great things and made great plans, how his home seemed finer and better to him, and his work more noble. The man had a real gift of imagination and spoke with an eagerness and eloquence that stirred me deeply. I was almost on the point of asking him where his magic liquor was to be found! When he finally gave me an opening, I said: "I think I understand. Many men I know are in some respects drunkards. They all want some way to escape themselves--to be free of their own limitations." "That's it! That's it!" he exclaimed eagerly. We sat for a time side by side, saying nothing. I could not help thinking of that line of Virgil referring to quite another sort of intoxication: "With Voluntary dreams they cheat their minds." Instead of that beautiful unity of thought and action which marks the finest character, here was this poor tragedy of the divided life. When Fate would destroy a man it first separates his forces! It drives him to think one way and act another; it encourages him to seek through outward stimulation--whether drink, or riches, or fame--a deceptive and unworthy satisfaction in place of that true contentment which comes only from unity within. No man can be two men successfully. So we sat and said nothing. What indeed can any man _say_ to another under such circumstances? As Bobbie Burns remarks out of the depths of his own experience: "What's done we partly may compute But know not what's resisted." I've always felt that the best thing one man can give another is the warm hand of understanding. And yet when I thought of the pathetic, shy bee-man, hemmed in by his sunless walls, I felt that I should also say something. Seeing two men struggling shall I not assist the better? Shall I let the sober one be despoiled by him who is riotous? There are realities, but there are also moralities--if we can keep them properly separated. "Most of us," I said finally, "are in some respects drunkards. We don't give it so harsh a name, but we are just that. Drunkenness is not a mere matter of intoxicating liquors; it goes deeper--far deeper. Drunkenness is the failure of a man to control his thoughts." The bee-man sat silent, gazing out before him. I noted the blue veins in the hand that lay on his knee. It came over me with sudden amusement and I said: "I often get drunk myself." "You?" "Yes--dreadfully drunk." He looked at me and laughed--for the first time! And I laughed, too. Do you know, there's a lot of human nature in people! And when you think you are deep in tragedy, behold, humour lurks just around the corner! "I used to laugh at it a good deal more than I do now," he said. "I've been through it all. Sometimes when I go to town I say to myself, 'I will not turn at that corner,' but when I come to the corner, I do turn. Then I say 'I will not go into that bar,' but I do go in. 'I will not order anything to drink,' I say to myself, and then I hear myself talking aloud to the barkeeper just as though I were some other person. 'Give me a glass of rye,' I say, and I stand off looking at myself, very angry and sorrowful. But gradually I seem to grow weaker and weaker--or rather stronger and stronger--for my brain begins to become clear, and I see things and feel things I never saw or felt before. I want to sing." "And you do sing," I said. "I do, indeed," he responded, laughing, "and it seems to me the most beautiful music in the world." "Sometimes," I said, "when I'm on _my_ kind of spree, I try not so much to empty my mind of the thoughts which bother me, but rather to fill my mind with other, stronger thoughts----" Before I could finish he had interrupted: "Haven't I tried that, too? Don't I think of other things? I think of bees--and that leads me to honey, doesn't it? And that makes me think of putting the honey in the wagon and taking it to town. Then, of course, I think how it will sell. Instantly, stronger than you can imagine, I see a dime in my hand. Then it appears on the wet bar. I _smell_ the _smell_ of the liquor. And there you are!" We did not talk much more that day. We got up and shook hands and looked each other in the eye. The bee-man turned away, but came back hesitatingly. "I am glad of this talk, Mr. Grayson. It makes me feel like taking hold again. I have been in hell for years----" "Of course," I said. "You needed a friend. You and I will come up together." As I walked toward home that evening I felt a curious warmth of satisfaction in my soul--and I marvelled at the many strange things that are to be found upon this miraculous earth. * * * * * I suppose, if I were writing a story, I should stop at this point; but I am dealing in life. And life does not always respond to our impatience with satisfactory moral conclusions. Life is inconclusive: quite open at the end. I had a vision of a new life for my neighbour, the bee-man--and have it yet, for I have not done with him--but---- Last evening, and that is why I have been prompted to write the whole story, my bee-man came again along the road by my farm; my exuberant bee-man. I heard him singing afar off. He did not see me as he went by, but as I stood looking out at him, it came over me with a sudden sense of largeness and quietude that the sun shone on him as genially as it did on me, and that the leaves did not turn aside from him, nor the birds stop singing when he passed. "He also belongs here," I said. And I watched him as he mounted the distant hill, until I could no longer hear the high clear cadences of his song. And it seemed to me that something human, in passing, had touched me. VII AN OLD MAID One of my neighbours whom I never have chanced to mention before in these writings is a certain Old Maid. She lives about two miles from my farm in a small white house set in the midst of a modest, neat garden with well-kept apple trees in the orchard behind it. She lives all alone save for a good-humoured, stupid nephew who does most of the work on the farm--and does it a little unwillingly. Harriet and I had not been here above a week when we first made the acquaintance of Miss Aiken, or rather she made our acquaintance. For she fills the place, most important in a country community, of a sensitive social tentacle--reaching out to touch with sympathy the stranger. Harriet was amused at first by what she considered an almost unwarrantable curiosity, but we soon formed a genuine liking for the little old lady, and since then we have often seen her in her home, and often she has come to ours. She was here only last night. I considered her as she sat rocking in front of our fire; a picture of wholesome comfort. I have had much to say of contentment. She seems really to live it, although I have found that contentment is easier to discover in the lives of our neighbours than in our own. All her life long she has lived here in this community, a world of small things, one is tempted to say, with a sort of expected and predictable life. I thought last night, as I observed her gently stirring her rocking-chair, how her life must be made up of small, often-repeated events: pancakes, puddings, patchings, who knows what other orderly, habitual, minute affairs? Who knows? Who knows when he looks at you or at me that there is anything in us beyond the humdrummery of this day? In front of her house are two long, boarded beds of old-fashioned flowers, mignonette and petunias chiefly, and over the small, very white door with its shiny knob, creeps a white clematis vine. Just inside the hall-door you will discover a bright, clean, oval rag rug, which prepares you, as small things lead to greater, for the larger, brighter, cleaner rug of the sitting-room. There on the centre-table you will discover "Snow Bound," by John Greenleaf Whittier; Tupper's Poems; a large embossed Bible; the family plush album; and a book, with a gilt ladder on the cover which leads upward to gilt stars, called the "Path of Life." On the wall are two companion pictures of a rosy fat child, in faded gilt frames, one called "Wide Awake" the other "Fast Asleep." Not far away, in a corner, on the top of the walnut whatnot, is a curious vase filled with pampas plumes; there are sea-shells and a piece of coral on the shelf below. And right in the midst of the room are three very large black rocking-chairs with cushions in every conceivable and available place--including cushions on the arms. Two of them are for you and me, if we should come in to call; the other is for the cat. When you sit down you can look out between the starchiest of starchy curtains into the yard, where there is an innumerable busy flock of chickens. She keeps chickens, and all the important ones are named. She has one called Martin Luther, another is Josiah Gilbert Holland. Once she came over to our house with a basket, from one end of which were thrust the sturdy red legs of a pullet. She informed us that she had brought us one of Evangeline's daughters. But I am getting out of the house before I am fairly well into it. The sitting-room expresses Miss Aiken; but not so well, somehow, as the immaculate bedroom beyond, into which, upon one occasion, I was permitted to steal a modest glimpse. It was of an incomparable neatness and order, all hung about--or so it seemed to me--with white starchy things, and ornamented with bright (but inexpensive) nothings. In this wonderful bedroom there is a secret and sacred drawer into which, once in her life, Harriet had a glimpse. It contains the clothes, all gently folded, exhaling an odour of lavender, in which our friend will appear when she has closed her eyes to open them no more upon this earth. In such calm readiness she awaits her time. Upon the bureau in this sacred apartment stands a small rosewood box, which is locked, into which no one in our neighbourhood has had so much as a single peep. I should not dare, of course, to speculate upon its contents; perhaps an old letter or two, "a ring and a rose," a ribbon that is more than a ribbon, a picture that is more than art. Who can tell? As I passed that way I fancied I could distinguish a faint, mysterious odour which I associated with the rosewood box: an old-fashioned odour composed of many simples. On the stand near the head of the bed and close to the candlestick is a Bible--a little, familiar, daily Bible, very different indeed from the portentous and imposing family Bible which reposes on the centre-table in the front room, which is never opened except to record a death. It has been well worn, this small nightly Bible, by much handling. Is there a care or a trouble in this world, here is the sure talisman. She seeks (and finds) the inspired text. Wherever she opens the book she seizes the first words her eyes fall upon as a prophetic message to her. Then she goes forth like some David with his sling, so panoplied with courage that she is daunted by no Goliath of the Philistines. Also she has a worshipfulness of all ministers. Sometimes when the Scotch Preacher comes to tea and remarks that her pudding is good, I firmly believe that she interprets the words into a spiritual message for her. Besides the drawer, the rosewood box, and the worn Bible, there is a certain Black Cape. Far be it from me to attempt a description, but I can say with some assurance that it also occupies a shrine. It may not be in the inner sanctuary, but it certainly occupies a goodly part of the outer porch of the temple. All this, of course, is figurative, for the cape hangs just inside the closet door on a hanger, with a white cloth over the shoulders to keep off the dust. For the vanities of the world enter even such a sanctuary as this. I wish, indeed, that you could see Miss Aiken wearing her cape on a Sunday in the late fall when she comes to church, her sweet old face shining under her black hat, her old-fashioned silk skirt giving out an audible, not unimpressive sound as she moves down the aisle. With what dignity she steps into her pew! With what care she sits down so that she may not crush the cookies in her ample pocket; with what meek pride--if there is such a thing as meek pride--she looks up at the Scotch Preacher as he stands sturdily in his pulpit announcing the first hymn! And many an eye turning that way to look turns with affection. Several times Harriet and I have been with her to tea. Like many another genius, she has no conception of her own art in such matters as apple puddings. She herself prefers graham gems, in which she believes there inheres a certain mysterious efficacy. She bakes gems on Monday and has them steamed during the remainder of the week--with tea. And as a sort of dessert she tells us about the Danas, the Aikens and the Carnahans, who are, in various relationships, her progenitors. We gravitate into the other room, and presently she shows us, in the plush album, the portraits of various cousins, aunts and uncles. And by-and-by Harriet warms up and begins to tell about the Scribners, the MacIntoshes, and the Strayers, who are _our_ progenitors. "The Aikens," says Miss Aiken, "were always like that--downright and outspoken. It is an Aiken trait. No Aiken could ever help blurting out the truth if he knew he were to die for it the next minute." "That was like the Macintoshes," Harriet puts in. "Old Grandfather Macintosh----" By this time I am settled comfortably in the cushioned rocking-chair to watch the fray. Miss Aiken advances a Dana, Harriet counters with a Strayer. Miss Aiken deploys the Carnahans in open order, upon which Harriet entrenches herself with the heroic Scribners and lets fly a Macintosh who was a general in the colonial army. Surprised, but not defeated, Miss Aiken withdraws in good order, covering her retreat with two _Mayflower_ ancestors, the existence of whom she establishes with a blue cup and an ancient silver spoon. No one knows the joy of fighting relatives until he has watched such a battle, following the complete comfort of a good supper. If any one is sick in the community Miss Aiken hears instantly of it by a sort of wireless telegraphy, or telepathy which would astonish a mystery-loving East Indian. She appears with her little basket, which has two brown flaps for covers opening from the middle and with a spring in them somewhere so that they fly shut with a snap. Out of this she takes a bowl of chicken broth, a jar of ambrosial jelly, a cake of delectable honey and a bottle of celestial raspberry shrub. If the patient will only eat, he will immediately rise up and walk. Or if he dies, it is a pleasant sort of death. I have myself thought on several occasions of being taken with a brief fit of sickness. In telling all these things about Miss Aiken, which seem to describe her, I have told only the commonplace, the expected or predictable details. Often and often I pause when I see an interesting man or woman and ask myself: "How, after all, does this person live?" For we all know it is not chiefly by the clothes we wear or the house we occupy or the friends we touch. There is something deeper, more secret, which furnishes the real motive and character of our lives. What a triumph, then, is every fine old man! To have come out of a long life with a spirit still sunny, is not that an heroic accomplishment? Of the real life of our friend I know only one thing; but that thing is precious to me, for it gives me a glimpse of the far dim Alps that rise out of the Plains of Contentment. It is nothing very definite--such things never are; and yet I like to think of it when I see her treading the useful round of her simple life. As I said, she has lived here in this neighbourhood--oh, sixty years. The country knew her father before her. Out of that past, through the dimming eyes of some of the old inhabitants, I have had glimpses of the sprightly girlhood which our friend must have enjoyed. There is even a confused story of a wooer (how people try to account for every old maid!)--a long time ago--who came and went away again. No one remembers much about him--such things are not important, of course, after so many years---- But I must get to _the_ thing I treasure. One day Harriet called at the little house. It was in summer and the door stood open; she presumed on the privilege of friendship and walked straight in. There she saw, sitting at the table, her head on her arm in a curious girlish abandon unlike the prim Miss Aiken we knew so well, our Old Maid. When she heard Harriet's step she started up with breath quickly indrawn. There were tears in her eyes. Something in her hand she concealed in the folds of her skirt then impulsively--unlike her, too--she threw an arm around Harriet and buried her face on Harriet's shoulder. In response to Harriet's question she said: "Oh, an old, old trouble. No _new_ trouble." That was all there was to it. All the new troubles were the troubles of other people. You may say this isn't much of a clue; well it isn't, and yet I like to have it in mind. It gives me somehow the _other_ woman who is not expected or predictable or commonplace. I seem to understand our Old Maid the better; and when I think of her bustling, inquisitive, helpful, gentle ways and the shine of her white soul, I'm sure I don't know what we should do without her in this community. VIII A ROADSIDE PROPHET From my upper field, when I look across the countryside, I can see in the distance a short stretch of the gray town road. It winds out of a little wood, crosses a knoll, and loses itself again beyond the trees of an old orchard. I love that spot in my upper field, and the view of the road beyond. When I am at work there I have only to look up to see the world go by--part of it going down to the town, and part of it coming up again. And I never see a traveller on the hill, especially if he be afoot, without feeling that if I met him I should like him, and that whatever he had to say I should like to hear. * * * * * At first I could not make out what the man was doing. Most of the travellers I see from my field are like the people I commonly meet--so intent upon their destination that they take no joy of the road they travel. They do not even see me here in the fields; and if they did, they would probably think me a slow and unprofitable person. I have nothing that they can carry away and store up in barns, or reduce to percentages, or calculate as profit and loss; they do not perceive what a wonderful place this is; they do not know that here, too, we gather a crop of contentment. But apparently this man was the pattern of a loiterer. I saw him stop on the knoll and look widely about him. Then he stooped down as though searching for something, then moved slowly forward for a few steps. Just at that point in the road lies a great smooth boulder which road-makers long since dead had rolled out upon the wayside. Here to my astonishment I saw him kneel upon the ground. He had something in one hand with which he seemed intently occupied. After a time he stood up, and retreating a few steps down the road, he scanned the boulder narrowly. "This," I said to myself, "may be something for me." So I crossed the fence and walked down the neighbouring field. It was an Indian summer day with hazy hillsides, and still sunshine, and slumbering brown fields--the sort of a day I love. I leaped the little brook in the valley and strode hastily up the opposite slope. I cannot describe what a sense I had of new worlds to be found here in old fields. So I came to the fence on the other side and looked over. My man was kneeling again at the rock. I was scarcely twenty paces from him, but so earnestly was he engaged that he never once saw me. I had a good look at him. He was a small, thin man with straight gray hair; above his collar I could see the weather-brown wrinkles of his neck. His coat was of black, of a noticeably neat appearance, and I observed, as a further evidence of fastidiousness rare upon the Road, that he was saving his trousers by kneeling on a bit of carpet. What he could be doing there so intently by the roadside I could not imagine. So I climbed the fence, making some little intentional noise as I did so. He arose immediately. Then I saw at his side on the ground two small tin cans, and in his hands a pair of paint brushes. As he stepped aside I saw the words he had been painting on the boulder: GOD IS LOVE A meek figure, indeed, he looked, and when he saw me advancing he said, with a deference that was almost timidity: "Good morning, sir." "Good morning, brother," I returned heartily. His face brightened perceptibly. "Don't stop on my account," I said; "finish off your work." He knelt again on his bit of carpet and proceeded busily with his brushes. I stood and watched him. The lettering was somewhat crude, but he had the swift deftness of long practice. "How long," I inquired, "have you been at this sort of work?" "Ten years," he replied, looking up at me with a pale smile. "Off and on for ten years. Winters I work at my trade--I am a journeyman painter--but when spring comes, and again in the fall, I follow the road." He paused a moment and then said, dropping his voice, in words of the utmost seriousness: "I live by the Word." "By the Word?" I asked. "Yes, by the Word," and putting down his brushes he took from an inner pocket a small package of papers, one of which he handed to me. It bore at the top this sentence in large type: "Is not my word like fire, saith the Lord: and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?" I stood and looked at him a moment. I suppose no one man is stranger than any other, but at that moment it seemed to me I had never met a more curious person. And I was consumed with a desire to know why he was what he was. "Do you always paint the same sign?" I asked. "Oh, no," he answered. "I have a feeling about what I should paint. When I came up the road here this morning I stopped a minute, and it all seemed so calm and nice"--he swept his arm in the direction of the fields--"that I says to myself, 'I will paint "God is Love."'" "An appropriate text," I said, "for this very spot." He seemed much gratified. "Oh, you can follow your feelings!" he exclaimed. "Sometimes near towns I can't paint anything but 'Hell yawns,' and 'Prepare to meet thy God.' I don't like 'em as well as 'God is Love,' but it seems like I had to paint 'em. Now, when I was in Arizona----" He paused a moment, wiping his brushes. "When I was in Arizona," he was saying, "mostly I painted 'Repent ye.' It seemed like I couldn't paint anything else, and in some places I felt moved to put 'Repent ye' twice on the same rock." I began to ask him questions about Arizona, but I soon found how little he, too, had taken toll of the road he travelled: for he seemed to have brought back memories only of the texts he painted and the fact that in some places good stones were scarce, and that he had to carry extra turpentine to thin his paint, the weather being dry. I don't know that he is a lone representative of this trait. I have known farmers who, in travelling, saw only plows and butter-tubs and corn-cribs, and preachers who, looking across such autumn fields as these would carry away only a musty text or two. I pity some of those who expect to go to heaven: they will find so little to surprise them in the golden streets. But I persevered with my painter, and it was not long before we were talking with the greatest friendliness. Having now finished his work, he shook out his bit of carpet, screwed the tops on his paint cans, wrapped up his brushes, and disposed of them all with the deftness of long experience in his small black bag. Then he stood up and looked critically at his work. "It's all right," I said; "a great many people coming this way in the next hundred years will see it." "That's what I want," he said eagerly; "that's what I want. Most people never hear the Word at all." He paused a moment and then continued: "It's a curious thing, Mister--perhaps you've noticed it yourself--that the best things of all in the world people won't have as a gift." "I've noticed it," I said. "It's strange, isn't it?" he again remarked. "Very strange," I said. "I don't know's I can blame them," he continued. "I was that way myself for a good many years: all around me gold and diamonds and precious jewels, and me never once seeing them. All I had to do was to stoop and take them--but I didn't do it." I saw that I had met a philosopher, and I decided that I would stop and wrestle with him and not let him go without his story--something like Jacob, wasn't it, with the angel? "Do you do all this without payment?" He looked at me in an injured way. "Who'd pay me?" he asked. "Mostly people think me a sort of fool. Oh, I know, but I don't mind. I live by the Word. No, nobody pays me: I am paying myself." By this time he was ready to start. So I said, "Friend, I'm going your way, and I'll walk with you." So we set off together down the hill. "You see, sir," he said, "when a man has got the best thing in the world, and finds it's free, he naturally wants to let other people know about it." He walked with the unmistakable step of those who knew the long road--an easy, swinging, steady step--carrying his small black bag. So I gradually drew him out, and when I had his whole story it was as simple and common, but as wonderful, as daylight: as fundamental as a tree or a rock. "You see, Mister," he said, "I was a wild sort when I was young. The drink, and worse. I hear folks say sometimes that if they'd known what was right they'd have done it. But I think that conscience never stops ringing little bells in the back of a man's head; and that if he doesn't do what is right, it's because he _wants_ to do what is wrong. He thinks it's more amusing and interesting. I went through all that, Mister, and plenty more besides. I got pretty nearly as low as a man ever gets. Oh, I was down and out: no home, no family, not a friend that wanted to see me. If you never got down that low, Mister, you don't know what it is. You are just as much dead as if you were in your grave. I'm telling you. "I thought there was no help for me, and I don't know's I wanted to be helped. I said to myself, 'You're just naturally born weak and it isn't your fault,' It makes a lot of men easier in their minds to lay up their troubles to the way they are born. I made all sorts of excuses for myself, but all the time I knew I was wrong; a man can't fool himself. "So it went along for years. I got married and we had a little girl." He paused for a long moment. "I thought _that_ was going to help me. I thought the world and all of that little girl----" He paused again. "Well, _she_ died. Then I broke my wife's heart and went on down to hell. When a man lets go that way he kills everything he loves and everything that loves him. He's on the road to loneliness and despair, that man. I'm telling you. "One day, ten years ago this fall, I was going along the main street in Quinceyville. I was near the end of my rope. Not even money enough to buy drink with, and yet I was then more'n half drunk, I happened to look up on the end of that stone wall near the bridge--were you ever there, Mister?--and I saw the words 'God is Love' painted there. It somehow hit me hard. I couldn't anyways get it out of my mind. 'God is Love.' Well, says I to myself if God is Love, he's the only one that _is_ Love for a chap like me. And there's no one else big enough to save me--I says. So I stopped right there in the street, and you may believe it or explain it anyhow you like, Mister, but it seemed to me a kind of light came all around me, and I said, solemn-like, 'I will try God.'" He stopped a moment. We were walking down the hill: all about us on either side spread the quiet fields. In the high air above a few lacy clouds were drifting eastward. Upon this story of tragic human life crept in pleasantly the calm of the countryside. "And I did try Him," my companion was saying, "and I found that the words on the wall were true. They were true back there and they've been true ever since. When I began to be decent again and got back my health and my job, I figured that I owed a lot to God. I wa'n't no orator, and no writer and I had no money to give, 'but,' says I to myself, I'm a painter. I'll help God with paint.' So here I am a-travelling up and down the roads and mostly painting 'God is Love,' but sometimes 'Repent ye' and 'Hell yawns.' I don't know much about religion--but I do know that His Word is like a fire, and that a man can live by it, and if once a man has it he has everything else he wants." He paused: I looked around at him again. His face was set steadily ahead--a plain face showing the marks of his hard earlier life, and yet marked with a sort of high beauty. "The trouble with people who are unhappy, Mister," he said, "is that they won't try God." I could not answer my companion. There seemed, indeed, nothing more to be said. All my own speculative incomings and outgoings--how futile they seemed compared with this! Near the foot of the hill there is a little-bridge. It is a pleasant, quiet spot. My companion stopped and put down his bag. "What do you think," said he, "I should paint here?" "Well," I said, "you know better than I do. What would _you_ paint?" He looked around at me and then smiled as though he had a quiet little joke with himself. "When in doubt," he said, "I always paint 'God is Love,' I'm sure of that. Of course 'Hell yawns' and 'Repent ye' have to be painted--near towns--but I much rather paint 'God is Love.'" I left him kneeling there on the bridge, the bit of carpet under his knees, his two little cans at his side. Half way up the hill I turned to look back. He lifted his hand with the paint brush in it, and I waved mine in return. I have never seen him since, though it will be a long, long time before the sign of him disappears from our roadsides. At the top of the hill, near the painted boulder, I climbed the fence, pausing a moment on the top rail to look off across the hazy countryside, warm with the still sweetness of autumn. In the distance, above the crown of a little hill, I could see the roof of my own home--and the barn near it--and the cows feeding quietly in the pastures. IX THE GUNSMITH Harriet and I had the first intimation of what we have since called the "gunsmith problem" about ten days ago. It came to us, as was to be expected, from that accomplished spreader of burdens, the Scotch Preacher. When he came in to call on us that evening after supper I could see that he had something important on his mind; but I let him get to it in his own way. "David," he said finally, "Carlstrom, the gunsmith, is going home to Sweden." "At last!" I exclaimed. Dr. McAlway paused a moment and then said hesitatingly: "He _says_ he is going." Harriet laughed. "Then it's all decided," she said; "he isn't going." "No," said the Scotch Preacher, "it's not decided--yet." "Dr. McAlway hasn't made up his mind," I said, "whether Carlstrom is to go or not." But the Scotch Preacher was in no mood for joking. "David," he said, "did you ever know anything about the homesickness of the foreigner?" He paused a moment and then continued, nodding his great shaggy head: "Man, man, how my old mither greeted for Scotland! I mind how a sprig of heather would bring the tears to her eyes; and for twenty years I dared not whistle "Bonnie Doon" or "Charlie Is My Darling" lest it break her heart. 'Tis a pain you've not had, I'm thinking, Davy." "We all know the longing for old places and old times," I said. "No, no, David, it's more than that. It's the wanting and the longing to see the hills of your own land, and the town where you were born, and the street where you played, and the house----" He paused, "Ah, well, it's hard for those who have it." "But I haven't heard Carlstrom refer to Sweden for years," I said. "Is it homesickness, or just old age?" "There ye have it, Davy; the nail right on the head!" exclaimed the Scotch Preacher. "Is it homesickness, or is he just old and tired?" With that we fell to talking about Carlstrom, the gunsmith. I have known him pretty nearly ever since I came here, now more than ten years ago--and liked him well, too--but it seemed, as Dr. McAlway talked that evening, as though we were making the acquaintance of quite a new and wonderful person. How dull we all are! How we need such an artist as the Scotch Preacher to mould heroes out of the common human clay around us! It takes a sort of greatness to recognize greatness. In an hour's time the Scotch Preacher had both Harriet and me much excited, and the upshot of the whole matter was that I promised to call on Carlstrom the next day when I went to town. I scarcely needed the prompting of the Scotch Preacher, for Carlstrom's gunshop has for years been one of the most interesting places in town for me. I went to it now with a new understanding. Afar off I began to listen for Carlstrom's hammer, and presently I heard the familiar sounds. There were two or three mellow strokes, and I knew that Carlstrom was making the sparks fly from the red iron. Then the hammer rang, and I knew he was striking down on the cold steel of the anvil. It is a pleasant sound to hear. Carlstrom's shop is just around the corner from the main street. You may know it by a great weather-beaten wooden gun fastened over the doorway, pointing in the daytime at the sky, and in the night at the stars. A stranger passing that way might wonder at the great gun and possibly say to himself: "A gunshop! How can a man make a living mending guns in such a peaceful community!" Such a remark merely shows that he doesn't know Carlstrom, nor the shop, nor _us_. I tied my horse at the corner and went down to the shop with a peculiar new interest. I saw as if for the first time the old wheels which have stood weathering so long at one end of the building. I saw under the shed at the other end the wonderful assortment of old iron pipes, kettles, tires, a pump or two, many parts of farm machinery, a broken water wheel, and I don't know what other flotsam of thirty years of diligent mending of the iron works of an entire community. All this, you may say--the disorder of old iron, the cinders which cover part of the yard but do not keep out the tangle of goldenrod and catnip and boneset which at this time of the year grows thick along the neighbouring fences--all this, you say, makes no inviting picture. You are wrong. Where honest work is, there is always that which invites the eye. I know of few things more inviting than to step up to the wide-open doors and look into the shop. The floor, half of hard worn boards half of cinders, the smoky rafters of the roof, the confusion of implements on the benches, the guns in the corners--how all of these things form the subdued background for the flaming forge and the square chimney above it. At one side of the forge you will see the great dusty bellows and you will hear its stertorous breathing. In front stands the old brown anvil set upon a gnarly maple block. A long sweep made of peeled hickory wood controls the bellows, and as you look in upon this lively and pleasant scene you will see that the grimy hand of Carlstrom himself is upon the hickory sweep. As he draws it down and lets it up again with the peculiar rhythmic swing of long experience--heaping up his fire with a little iron paddle held in the other hand--he hums to himself in a high curious old voice, no words at all, just a tune of contented employment in consonance with the breathing of the bellows and the mounting flames of the forge. As I stood for a moment in the doorway the other day before Carlstrom saw me, I wished I could picture my friend as the typical blacksmith with the brawny arms, the big chest, the deep voice and all that. But as I looked at him newly, the Scotch Preacher's words still in my ears, he seemed, with his stooping shoulders, his gray beard not very well kept, and his thin gray hair, more than ordinarily small and old. I remember as distinctly as though it were yesterday the first time Carlstrom really impressed himself upon me. It was in my early blind days at the farm. I had gone to him with a part of a horse-rake which I had broken on one of my stony hills'. "Can you mend it?" I asked. If I had known him better I should never have asked such a question. I saw, indeed, at the time that I had not said the right thing; but how could I know then that Carlstrom never let any broken thing escape him? A watch, or a gun, or a locomotive--they are all alike to him, if they are broken. I believe he would agree to patch the wrecked chariot of Phaëthon! A week later I came back to the shop. "Come in, come in," he said when he saw me. He turned from his forge, set his hands on his hips and looked at me a moment with feigned seriousness. "So!" he said. "You have come for your job?" He softened the "j" in job; his whole speech, indeed, had the engaging inflection of the Scandinavian tongue overlaid upon the English words. "So," he said, and went to his bench with a quick step and an air of almost childish eagerness. He handed me the parts of my hay-rake without a word. I looked them over carefully. "I can't see where you mended them," I said. You should have seen his face brighten with pleasure! He allowed me to admire the work in silence for a moment and then he had it out of my hand, as if I couldn't be trusted with anything so important, and he explained how he had done it. A special tool for his lathe had been found necessary in order to do my work properly. This he had made at his forge, and I suppose it had taken him twice as long to make the special tool as it had to mend the parts of my rake; but when I would have paid him for it he would take nothing save for the mending itself. Nor was this a mere rebuke to a doubter. It had delighted him to do a difficult thing, to show the really great skill he had. Indeed, I think our friendship began right there and was based upon the favour I did in bringing him a job that I thought he couldn't do! When he saw me the other day in the door of his shop he seemed greatly pleased. "Come in, come in," he said. "What is this I hear," I said, "about your going back to Sweden?" "For forty years," he said, "I've been homesick for Sweden. Now I'm an old man and I'm going home." "But, Carlstrom," I said, "we can't get along without you. Who's going to keep us mended up?" "You have Charles Baxter," he said, smiling. For years there had been a quiet sort of rivalry between Carlstrom and Baxter, though Baxter is in the country and works chiefly in wood. "But Baxter can't mend a gun or a hay-rake, or a pump, to save his life," I said. "You know that." The old man seemed greatly pleased: he had the simple vanity which is the right of the true workman. But for answer he merely shook his head. "I have been here forty years," he said. "and all the time I have been homesick for Sweden." I found that several men of the town had been in to see Carlstrom and talked with him of his plans, and even while I was there two other friends came in. The old man was delighted with the interest shown. After I left him I went down the street. It seemed as though everybody had heard of Carlstrom's plans, and here and there I felt that the secret hand of the Scotch Preacher had been at work. At the store where I usually trade the merchant talked about it, and the postmaster when I went in for my mail, and the clerk at the drug store, and the harness-maker. I had known a good deal about Carlstrom in the past, for one learns much of his neighbours in ten years, but it seemed to me that day as though his history stood out as something separate and new and impressive. When he first came here forty years ago I suppose Carlstrom was not unlike most of the foreigners who immigrate to our shores, fired with faith in a free country. He was poor--as poor as a man could possibly be. For several years he worked on a farm--hard work, for which, owing to his frail physique, he was not well fitted. But he saved money constantly, and after a time he was able to come to town and open a little shop. He made nearly all of his tools with his own hands, he built his own chimney and forge, he even whittled out the wooden gun which stands for a sign over the door of his shop. He had learned his trade in the careful old-country way. Not only could he mend a gun, but he could make one outright, even to the barrel and the wooden stock. In all the years I have known him he has always had on hand some such work--once I remember, a pistol--which he was turning out at odd times for the very satisfaction it gave him. He could not sell one of his hand-made guns for half as much as it cost him, nor does he seem to want to sell them, preferring rather to have them stand in the corner of his shop where he can look at them. His is the incorruptible spirit of the artist! What a tremendous power there is in work. Carlstrom worked. He was up early in the morning to work, and he worked in the evening as long as daylight lasted, and once I found him in his shop in the evening, bending low over his bench with a kerosene lamp in front of him. He was humming his inevitable tune and smoothing off with a fine file the nice curves of a rifle trigger. When he had trouble--and what a lot of it he has had in his time!--he worked; and when he was happy he worked all the harder. All the leisurely ones of the town drifted by, all the children and the fools, and often rested in the doorway of his shop. He made them all welcome: he talked with them, but he never stopped working. Clang, clang, would go his anvil, whish, whish, would respond his bellows, creak, creak, would go the hickory sweep--he was helping the world go round! All this time, though he had sickness in his family, though his wife died, and then his children one after another until only one now remains, he worked and he saved. He bought a lot and built a house to rent; then he built another house; then he bought the land where his shop stands and rebuilt the shop itself. It was an epic of homely work. He took part in the work of the church and on election days he changed his coat, and went to the town hall to vote. [Illustration: "THE CHILDREN ... OFTEN RESTED IN THE DOORWAY OF HIS SHOP"] In the years since I have known the old gunsmith and something of the town where he works, I have seen young men, born Americans, with every opportunity and encouragement of a free country, growing up there and going to waste. One day I heard one of them, sitting in front of a store, grumbling about the foreigners who were coming in and taking up the land. The young man thought it should be prevented by law. I said nothing; but I listened and heard from the distance the steady clang, clang, of Carlstrom's hammer upon the anvil. Ketchell, the store-keeper, told me how Carlstrom had longed and planned and saved to be able to go back once more to the old home he had left. Again and again he had got almost enough money ahead to start, and then there would be an interest payment due, or a death in the family, and the money would all go to the banker, the doctor, or the undertaker. "Of recent years," said Ketchell, "we thought he'd given up the idea. His friends are all here now, and if he went back, he certainly would be disappointed." A sort of serenity seemed, indeed, to come upon him: his family lie on the quiet hill, old things and old times have grown distant, and upon that anvil of his before the glowing forge he has beaten out for himself a real place in this community. He has beaten out the respect of a whole town; and from the crude human nature with which he started he has fashioned himself wisdom, and peace of mind, and the ripe humour which sees that God is in his world. There are men I know who read many books, hoping to learn how to be happy; let me commend them to Carlstrom, the gunsmith. I have often reflected upon the incalculable influence of one man upon a community. The town is better for having stood often looking into the fire of Carlstrom's forge, and seeing his hammer strike. I don't know how many times I have heard men repeat observations gathered in Carlstrom's shop. Only the other day I heard the village school teacher say, when I asked him why he always seemed so merry and had so little fault to find with the world. "Why," he replied, "as Carlstrom, the smith says, 'when I feel like finding fault I always begin with myself and then I never get any farther,'" Another of Carlstrom's sayings is current in the country. "It's a good thing," he says, "when a man knows what he pretends to know." The more I circulated among my friends, the more I heard of Carlstrom. It is odd that I should have gone all these years knowing Carlstrom, and yet never consciously until last week setting him in his rightful place among the men I know. It makes me wonder what other great souls about me are thus concealing themselves in the guise of familiarity. (This stooped gray neighbour of mine whom I have seen so often working in his field that he has almost become a part of the landscape--who can tell what heroisms may be locked away from my vision under his old brown hat?) On Wednesday night Carlstrom was at Dr. McAlway's house--with Charles Baxter, my neighbour Horace, and several others. And I had still another view of him. I think there is always something that surprises one in finding a familiar figure in a wholly new environment. I was so accustomed to the Carlstrom of the gunshop that I could not at once reconcile myself to the Carlstrom of Dr. McAlway's sitting room. And, indeed, there was a striking change in his appearance. He came dressed in the quaint black coat which he wears at funerals. His hair was brushed straight back from his broad, smooth forehead and his mild blue eyes were bright behind an especially shiny pair of steel-bowed spectacles. He looked more like some old-fashioned college professor than he did like a smith. The old gunsmith had that pride of humility which is about the best pride in this world. He was perfectly at home at the Scotch Preacher's hearth. Indeed, he radiated a sort of beaming good will; he had a native desire to make everything pleasant. I did not realize before what a fund of humour the old man had. The Scotch Preacher rallied him on the number of houses he now owns, and suggested that he ought to get a wife to keep at least one of them for him. Carlstrom looked around with a twinkle in his eye. "When I was a poor man," he said, "and carried boxes from Ketchell's store to help build my first shop, I used to wish I had a wheelbarrow. Now I have four. When I had no house to keep my family in, I used to wish that I had one. Now I have four. I have thought sometimes I would like a wife--but I have not dared to wish for one." The old gunsmith laughed noiselessly, and then from habit, I suppose, began to hum as he does in his shop--stopping instantly, however, when he realized what he was doing. During the evening the Scotch Preacher got me to one side and said: "David, we can't let the old man go." "No, sir," I said, "we can't." "All he needs, Davy, is cheering up. It's a cold world sometimes to the old." I suppose the Scotch Preacher was saying the same thing to all the other men of the company. When we were preparing to go, Dr. McAlway turned to Carlstrom and said: "How is it, Carlstrom, that you have come to hold such a place in this community? How is it that you have got ahead so rapidly?" The old man leaned forward, beaming through his spectacles, and said eagerly: "It ist America; it ist America." "No, Carlstrom, no--it is not all America. It is Carlstrom, too. You work, Carlstrom, and you save." Every day since Wednesday there has been a steady pressure on Carlstrom; not so much said in words, but people stopping in at the shop and passing a good word. But up to Monday morning the gunsmith went forward steadily with his preparations to leave. On Sunday I saw the Scotch Preacher and found him perplexed as to what to do. I don't know yet positively, that he had a hand in it, though I suspect it, but on Monday afternoon Charles Baxter went by my house on his way to town with a broken saw in his buggy. Such is the perversity of rival artists that I don't think Charles Baxter had ever been to Carlstrom with any work. But this morning when I went to town and stopped at Carlstrom's shop I found the gunsmith humming louder than ever. "Well, Carlstrom, when are we to say good-by?" I asked. "I'm not going," he said, and taking me by the sleeve he led me over to his bench and showed me a saw he had mended. Now, a broken saw is one of the high tests of the genius of the mender. To put the pieces together so that the blade will be perfectly smooth, so that the teeth match accurately, is an art which few workmen of to-day would even attempt. "Charles Baxter brought it in," answered the old gunsmith, unable to conceal his delight. "He thought I couldn't mend it!" To the true artist there is nothing to equal the approbation of a rival. It was Charles Baxter, I am convinced, who was the deciding factor. Carlstrom couldn't leave with one of Baxter's saws unmended! But back of it all, I know, is the hand and the heart of the Scotch Preacher. The more I think of it the more I think that our gunsmith possesses many of the qualities of true greatness. He has the serenity, and the humour, and the humility of greatness. He has a real faith in God. He works, he accepts what comes. He thinks there is no more honourable calling than that of gunsmith, and that the town he lives in is the best of all towns, and the people he knows the best people. Yes, it _is_ greatness. X THE MOWING "Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth." This is a well earned Sunday morning. My chores were all done long ago, and I am sitting down here after a late and leisurely breakfast with that luxurious feeling of irresponsible restfulness and comfort which comes only upon a clean, still Sunday morning like this--after a week of hard work--a clean Sunday morning, with clean clothes, and a clean chin, and clean thoughts, and the June airs stirring the clean white curtains at my windows. From across the hills I can hear very faintly the drowsy sounds of early church bells, never indeed to be heard here except on a morning of surpassing tranquillity. And in the barnyard back of the house Harriet's hens are cackling triumphantly: they are impiously unobservant of the Sabbath day. I turned out my mare for a run in the pasture. She has rolled herself again and again in the warm earth and shaken herself after each roll with an equine delight most pleasant to see. Now, from time to time, I can hear her gossipy whickerings as she calls across the fields to my neighbour Horace's young bay colts. When I first woke up this morning I said to myself: "Well, nothing happened yesterday." Then I lay quiet for some time--it being Sunday morning--and I turned over in my mind all that I had heard or seen or felt or thought about in that one day. And presently I said aloud to myself: "Why, nearly everything happened yesterday." And the more I thought of it the more interesting, the more wonderful, the more explanatory of high things, appeared the common doings of that June Saturday. I had walked among unusual events--and had not known the wonder of them! I had eyes, but I did not see--and ears, but I heard not. It may be, it _may_ be, that the Future Life of which we have had such confusing but wistful prophecies is only the reliving with a full understanding, of this marvellous Life that we now know. To a full understanding this day, this moment even--here in this quiet room--would contain enough to crowd an eternity. Oh, we are children yet--playing with things much too large for us--much too full of meaning. * * * * * Yesterday I cut my field of early clover. I should have been at it a full week earlier if it had not been for the frequent and sousing spring showers. Already half the blossoms of the clover had turned brown and were shriveling away into inconspicuous seediness. The leaves underneath on the lower parts of the stems were curling up and fading; many of them had already dropped away. There is a tide also in the affairs of clover and if a farmer would profit by his crop, it must be taken at its flood. I began to watch the skies with some anxiety, and on Thursday I was delighted to see the weather become clearer, and a warm dry wind spring up from the southwest. On Friday there was not so much as a cloud of the size of a man's hand to be seen anywhere in the sky, not one, and the sun with lively diligence had begun to make up for the listlessness of the past week. It was hot and dry enough to suit the most exacting hay-maker. Encouraged by these favourable symptoms I sent word to Dick Sheridan (by one of Horace's men) to come over bright and early on Saturday morning. My field is only a small one and so rough and uneven that I had concluded with Dick's help to cut it by hand. I thought that on a pinch it could all be done in one day. "Harriet," I said, "we'll cut the clover to-morrow." "That's fortunate," said Harriet, "I'd already arranged to have Ann Spencer in to help me." Yesterday morning, then, I got out earlier than usual. It was a perfect June morning, one of the brightest and clearest I think I ever saw. The mists had not yet risen from the hollows of my lower fields, and all the earth was fresh with dew and sweet with the mingled odours of growing things. No hour of the whole day is more perfect than this. I walked out along the edge of the orchard and climbed the fence of the field beyond. As I stooped over I could smell the heavy sweet odour of the clover blossoms. I could see the billowy green sweep of the glistening leaves. I lifted up a mass of the tangled stems and laid the palm of my hand on the earth underneath. It was neither too wet nor too dry. "We shall have good cutting to-day," I said to myself. So I stood up and looked with a satisfaction impossible to describe across the acres of my small domain, marking where in the low spots the crop seemed heaviest, where it was lodged and tangled by the wind and the rain, and where in the higher spaces it grew scarce thick enough to cover the sad baldness of the knolls. How much more we get out of life than we deserve! So I walked along the edge of the field to the orchard gate, which I opened wide. "Here," I said, "is where we will begin." So I turned back to the barn. I had not reached the other side of the orchard when who should I see but Dick Sheridan himself, coming in at the lane gate. He had an old, coarse-woven straw hat stuck resplendently on the back of his head. He was carrying his scythe jauntily over his shoulder and whistling "Good-bye, Susan" at the top of his capacity. Dick Sheridan is a cheerful young fellow with a thin brown face and (milky) blue eyes. He has an enormous Adam's apple which has an odd way of moving up and down when he talks--and one large tooth out in front. His body is like a bundle of wires, as thin and muscular and enduring as that of a broncho pony. He can work all day long and then go down to the lodge-hall at the Crossing and dance half the night. You should really see him when he dances! He can jump straight up and click his heels twice together before he comes down again! On such occasions he is marvellously clad, as befits the gallant that he really is, but this morning he wore a faded shirt and one of his suspender cords behind was fastened with a nail instead of a button. His socks are sometimes pale blue and sometimes lavender and commonly, therefore, he turns up his trouser legs so that these vanities may not be wholly lost upon a dull world. His full name is Richard Tecumseh Sheridan, but every one calls him Dick. A good, cheerful fellow, Dick, and a hard worker. I like him. "Hello, Dick," I shouted. "Hello yourself, Mr. Grayson," he replied. He hung his scythe in the branches of a pear tree and we both turned into the barnyard to get the chores out of the way. I wanted to delay cutting as long as I could--until the dew on the clover should begin--at least--to disappear. By half-past-seven we were ready for work. We rolled back our sleeves, stood our scythes on end and gave them a final lively stoning. You could hear the brisk sound of the ringing metal pealing through the still morning air. "It's a great day for haying," I said. "A dang good one," responded the laconic Dick, wetting his thumb to feel the edge of his scythe. I cannot convey with any mere pen upon any mere paper the feeling of jauntiness I had at that moment, as of conquest and fresh adventure, as of great things to be done in a great world! You may say if you like that this exhilaration was due to good health and the exuberance of youth. But it was more than that--far more. I cannot well express it, but it seemed as though at that moment Dick and I were stepping out into some vast current of human activity: as though we had the universe itself behind us, and the warm regard and approval of all men. I stuck my whetstone in my hip-pocket, bent forward and cut the first short sharp swath in the clover. I swept the mass of tangled green stems into the open space just outside the gate. Three or four more strokes and Dick stopped whistling suddenly, spat on his hands and with a lively "Here she goes!" came swinging in behind me. The clover-cutting had begun. At first I thought the heat would be utterly unendurable, and, then, with dripping face and wet shoulders, I forgot all about it. Oh, there is something incomparable about such work--the long steady pull of willing and healthy muscles, the mind undisturbed by any disquieting thought, the feeling of attainment through vigorous effort! It was a steady swing and swish, swish and swing! When Dick led I have a picture of him in my mind's eye--his wiry thin legs, one heel lifted at each step and held rigid for a single instant, a glimpse of pale blue socks above his rusty shoes and three inches of whetstone sticking from his tight hip-pocket. It was good to have him there whether he led or followed. At each return to the orchard end of the field we looked for and found a gray stone jug in the grass. I had brought it up with me filled with cool water from the pump. Dick had a way of swinging it up with one hand, resting it in his shoulder, turning his head just so and letting the water gurgle into his throat. I have never been able myself to reach this refinement in the art of drinking from a jug. And oh! the good feel of a straightened back after two long swathes in the broiling sun! We would stand a moment in the shade, whetting our scythes, not saying much, but glad to be there together. Then we would go at it again with renewed energy. It is a great thing to have a working companion. Many times that day Dick and I looked aside at each other with a curious sense of friendliness--that sense of friendliness which grows out of common rivalries, common difficulties and a common weariness. We did not talk much: and that little of trivial matters. "Jim Brewster's mare had a colt on Wednesday." "This'll go three tons to the acre, or I'll eat my shirt." Dick was always about to eat his shirt if some particular prophecy of his did not materialize. "Dang it all," says Dick, "the moon's drawin' water." "Something is undoubtedly drawing it," said I, wiping my dripping face. A meadow lark sprang up with a song in the adjoining field, a few heavy old bumblebees droned in the clover as we cut it, and once a frightened rabbit ran out, darting swiftly under the orchard fence. So the long forenoon slipped away. At times it seemed endless, and yet we were surprised when we heard the bell from the house (what a sound it was!) and we left our cutting in the middle of the field, nor waited for another stroke. "Hungry, Dick?" I asked. "Hungry!" exclaimed Dick with all the eloquence of a lengthy oration crowded into one word. So we drifted through the orchard, and it was good to see the house with smoke in the kitchen chimney, and the shade of the big maple where it rested upon the porch. And not far from the maple we could see our friendly pump with the moist boards of the well-cover in front of it. I cannot tell you how good it looked as we came in from the hot, dry fields. "After you," says Dick. I gave my sleeves another roll upward and unbuttoned and turned in the moist collar of my shirt. Then I stooped over and put my head under the pump spout. "Pump, Dick," said I. And Dick pumped. "Harder, Dick," said I in a strangled voice. And Dick pumped still harder, and presently I came up gasping with my head and hair dripping with the cool water. Then I pumped for Dick. "Gee, but that's good," says Dick. Harriet came out with clean towels, and we dried ourselves, and talked together in low voices. And feeling a delicious sense of coolness we sat down for a moment in the shade of the maple and rested our arms on our knees. From the kitchen, as we sat there, we could hear the engaging sounds of preparation, and busy voices, and the tinkling of dishes, and agreeable odours! Ah, friend and brother, there may not be better moments in life than this! So we sat resting, thinking of nothing; and presently we heard the screen door click and Ann Spencer's motherly voice: "Come in now, Mr. Grayson, and get your dinner." Harriet had set the table on the east porch, where it was cool and shady. Dick and I sat down opposite each other and between us there was a great brown bowl of moist brown beans with crispy strips of pork on top, and a good steam rising from its depths; and a small mountain of baked potatoes, each a little broken to show the snowy white interior; and two towers of such new bread as no one on this earth (or in any other planet so far as I know) but Harriet can make. And before we had even begun our dinner in came the ample Ann Spencer, quaking with hospitality, and bearing a platter--let me here speak of it with the bated breath of a proper respect, for I cannot even now think of it without a sort of inner thrill--bearing a platter of her most famous fried chicken. Harriet had sacrificed the promising careers of two young roosters upon the altar of this important occasion. I may say in passing that Ann Spencer is more celebrated in our neighbourhood by virtue of her genius at frying chicken, than Aristotle or Solomon or Socrates, or indeed all the big-wigs of the past rolled into one. So we fell to with a silent but none the less fervid enthusiasm. Harriet hovered about us, in and out of the kitchen, and poured the tea and the buttermilk, and Ann Spencer upon every possible occasion passed the chicken. "More chicken, Mr. Grayson?" she would inquire in a tone of voice that made your mouth water. "More chicken, Dick?" I'd ask. "More chicken, Mr. Grayson," he would respond--and thus we kept up a tenuous, but pleasant little joke between us. Just outside the porch in a thicket of lilacs a catbird sang to us while we ate, and my dog lay in the shade with his nose on his paws and one eye open just enough to show any stray flies that he was not to be trifled with--and far away to the North and East one could catch glimpses--if he had eyes for such things--of the wide-stretching pleasantness of our countryside. I soon saw that something mysterious was going on in the kitchen. Harriet would look significantly at Ann Spencer and Ann Spencer, who could scarcely contain her overflowing smiles, would look significantly at Harriet. As for me, I sat there with perfect confidence in myself--in my ultimate capacity, as it were. Whatever happened, I was ready for it! And the great surprise came at last: a SHORT-CAKE: a great, big, red, juicy, buttery, sugary short-cake, with raspberries heaped up all over it. When It came in--and I am speaking of it in that personal way because it radiated such an effulgence that I cannot now remember whether it was Harriet or Ann Spencer who brought it in--when It came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occasions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a long, low, expressive whistle. When Beethoven found himself throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evidently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled--and then looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have infringed upon the proprieties of that occasion. "Harriet," I said, "you and Ann Spencer are benefactors of the human race." "Go 'way now," said Ann Spencer, shaking all over with pleasure, "and eat your shortcake." And after dinner how pleasant it was to stretch at full length for a few minutes on the grass in the shade of the maple tree and look up through the dusky thick shadows of the leaves. If ever a man feels the blissfulness of complete content it is at such a moment--every muscle in the body deliciously resting, and a peculiar exhilaration animating the mind to quiet thoughts. I have heard talk of the hard work of the hay-fields, but I never yet knew a healthy man who did not recall many moments of exquisite pleasure connected with the hardest and the hottest work. I think sometimes that the nearer a man can place himself in the full current of natural things the happier he is. If he can become a part of the Universal Process and know that he is a part, that is happiness. All day yesterday I had that deep quiet feeling that I was somehow not working for myself, not because I was covetous for money, nor driven by fear, not surely for fame, but somehow that I was a necessary element in the processes of the earth. I was a primal force! I was the indispensable Harvester. Without me the earth could not revolve! Oh, friend, there are spiritual values here, too. For how can a man know God without yielding himself fully to the processes of God? I _lived_ yesterday. I played my part. I took my place. And all hard things grew simple, and all crooked things seemed straight, and all roads were open and clear before me. Many times that day I paused and looked up from my work knowing that I had something to be happy for. At one o'clock Dick and I lagged our way unwillingly out to work again--rusty of muscles, with a feeling that the heat would now surely be unendurable and the work impossibly hard. The scythes were oddly heavy and hot to the touch, and the stones seemed hardly to make a sound in the heavy noon air. The cows had sought the shady pasture edges, the birds were still, all the air shook with heat. Only man must toil! "It's danged hot," said Dick conclusively. How reluctantly we began the work and how difficult it seemed compared with the task of the morning! In half an hour, however, the reluctance passed away and we were swinging as steadily as we did at any time in the forenoon. But we said less--if that were possible--and made every ounce of energy count. I shall not here attempt to chronicle all the events of the afternoon, how we finished the mowing of the field and how we went over it swiftly and raked the long windrows into cocks, or how, as the evening began to fall, we turned at last wearily toward the house. The day's work was done. Dick had stopped whistling long before the middle of the afternoon, but now as he shouldered his scythe he struck up "My Fairy Fay" with some marks of his earlier enthusiasm. "Well, Dick," said I, "we've had a good day's work together." "You bet," said Dick. And I watched him as he went down the lane with a pleasant friendly feeling of companionship. We had done great things together. I wonder if you ever felt the joy of utter physical weariness: not exhaustion, but weariness. I wonder if you have ever sat down, as I did last night, and felt as though you would like to remain just there always--without stirring a single muscle, without speaking, without thinking even! Such a moment is not painful, but quite the reverse--it is supremely pleasant. So I sat for a time last evening on my porch. The cool, still night had fallen sweetly after the burning heat of the day. I heard all the familiar sounds of the night. A whippoorwill began to whistle in the distant thicket. Harriet came out quietly--I could see the white of her gown--and sat near me. I heard the occasional sleepy tinkle of a cowbell, and the crickets were calling. A star or two came out in the perfect dark blue of the sky. The deep, sweet, restful night was on. I don't know that I said it aloud--such things need not be said aloud--but as I turned almost numbly into the house, stumbling on my way to bed, my whole being seemed to cry out: "Thank God, thank God!" XI AN OLD MAN Today I saw Uncle Richard Summers walking in the town road: and cannot get him out of my mind. I think I never knew any one who wears so plainly the garment of Detached Old Age as he. One would not now think of calling him a farmer, any more than one would think of calling him a doctor, or a lawyer, or a justice of the peace. No one would think now of calling him "Squire Summers," though he bore that name with no small credit many years ago. He is no longer known as hardworking, or able, or grasping, or rich, or wicked: he is just Old. Everything seems to have been stripped away from Uncle Richard except age. How well I remember the first time Uncle Richard Summers impressed himself upon my mind. It was after the funeral of his old wife, now several years ago. I saw him standing at the open grave with his broad-brimmed felt hat held at his breast. His head was bowed and his thin, soft, white hair stirred in the warm breeze. I wondered at his quietude. After fifty years or more together his nearest companion and friend had gone, and he did not weep aloud. Afterward I was again impressed with the same fortitude or quietude. I saw him walking down the long drive to the main road with all the friends of our neighbourhood about him--and the trees rising full and calm on one side, and the still greenery of the cemetery stretching away on the other. Half way down the drive he turned aside to the fence and all unconscious of the halted procession, he picked a handful of the large leaves of the wild grape. It was a hot day; he took off his hat, and put the cool leaves in the crown of it and rejoined the procession. It did not seem to me to be the mere forgetfulness of old age, nor yet callousness to his own great sorrow. It was rather an instinctive return to the immeasurable continuity of the trivial things of life--the trivial necessary things which so often carry us over the greatest tragedies. I talked with the Scotch Preacher afterward about the incident. He said that he, too, marveling at the old man's calmness, had referred to it in his presence. Uncle Richard turned to him and said slowly: "I am an old man, and I have learned one thing. I have learned to accept life." Since that day I have seen Uncle Richard Summers many times walking on the country roads with his cane. He always looks around at me and slowly nods his head, but rarely says anything. At his age what is there to say that has not already been said? His trousers appear a size too large for him, his hat sets too far down, his hands are long and thin upon the head of his cane. But his face is tranquil. He has come a long way; there have been times of tempest and keen winds, there have been wild hills in his road, and rocky places, and threatening voices in the air. All that is past now: and his face is tranquil. I think we younger people do not often realize how keenly dependent we are upon our contemporaries in age. We get little understanding and sympathy either above or below them. Much of the world is a little misty to us, a little out of focus. Uncle Richard Summer's contemporaries have nearly all gone--mostly long ago: one of the last, his old wife. At his home--I have been there often to see his son--he sits in a large rocking chair with a cushion in it, and a comfortable high back to lean upon. No one else ventures to sit in his chair, even when he is not there. It is not far from the window; and when he sits down he can lean his cane against the wall where he can easily reach it again. There is a turmoil of youth and life always about him; of fevered incomings and excited outgoings, of work and laughter and tears and joy and anger. He watches it all, for his mind is still clear, but he does not take sides. He accepts everything, refuses nothing; or, if you like, he refuses everything, accepts nothing. He once owned the house where he now lives, with the great barns behind it and the fertile acres spreading far on every hand. From his chair he can look out through a small window, and see the sun on the quiet fields. He once went out swiftly and strongly, he worked hotly, he came in wearied to sleep. Now he lives in a small room--and that is more than is really necessary--and when he walks out he does not inquire who owns the land where he treads. He lets the hot world go by, and waits with patience the logic of events. Often as I have passed him in the road, I have wondered, as I have been wondering to-day, how he must look out upon us all, upon our excited comings and goings, our immense concern over the immeasurably trivial. I have wondered, not without a pang, and a resolution, whether I shall ever reach the point where I can let this eager and fascinating world go by without taking toll of it! XII THE CELEBRITY Not for many weeks have I had a more interesting, more illuminating, and when all is told, a more amusing experience, than I had this afternoon. Since this afternoon the world has seemed a more satisfactory place to live in, and my own home here, the most satisfactory, the most central place in all the world. I have come to the conclusion that anything may happen here! We have had a celebrity in our small midst, and the hills, as the Psalmist might say, have lifted up their heads, and the trees have clapped their hands together. He came here last Tuesday evening and spoke at the School House. I was not there myself; if I had been, I should not, perhaps, have had the adventure which has made this day so livable, nor met the Celebrity face to face. Let me here set down a close secret regarding celebrities: _They cannot survive without common people like you and me_. It follows that if we do not pursue a celebrity, sooner or later he will pursue us. He must; it is the law of his being. So I wait here very comfortably on my farm, and as I work in my fields I glance up casually from time to time to see if any celebrities are by chance coming up the town road to seek me out. Oh, we are crusty people, we farmers! Sooner or later they all come this way, all the warriors and the poets, all the philosophers and the prophets and the politicians. If they do not, indeed, get time to come before they are dead, we have full assurance that they will straggle along afterward clad neatly in sheepskin, or more gorgeously in green buckram with gilt lettering. Whatever the airs of pompous importance they may assume as they come, back of it all we farmers can see the look of wistful eagerness in their eyes. They know well enough that they must give us something which we in our commonness regard as valuable enough to exchange for a bushel of our potatoes, or a sack of our white onions. No poem that we can enjoy, no speech that tickles us, no prophecy that thrills us--neither dinner nor immortality for them! And we are hard-headed Yankees at our bargainings; many a puffed-up celebrity loses his puffiness at our doors! This afternoon, as I came out on my porch after dinner, feeling content with myself and all the world, I saw a man driving our way in a one-horse top-buggy. In the country it is our custom first to identify the horse, and that gives us a sure clue to the identification of the driver. This horse plainly did not belong in our neighbourhood and plainly as it drew nearer, it bore the unmistakable marks of the town livery. Therefore, the driver, in all probability, was a stranger in these parts. What strangers were in town who would wish to drive this way? The man who occupied the buggy was large and slow-looking; he wore a black, broad-brimmed felt hat and a black coat, a man evidently of some presence. And he drove slowly and awkwardly; not an agent plainly. Thus the logic of the country bore fruitage. "Harriet," I said, calling through the open doorway, "I think the Honourable Arthur Caldwell is coming here." "Mercy me!" exclaimed Harriet, appearing in the doorway, and as quickly disappearing. I did not see her, of course, but I knew instinctively that she was slipping off her apron, moving our most celebrated rocking-chair two inches nearer the door, and whisking a few invisible particles of dust from the centre table. Every time any one of importance comes our way, or is distantly likely to come our way. Harriet resolves herself into an amiable whirlwind of good order, subsiding into placidity at the first sound of a step on the porch. As for me I remain in my shirt sleeves, sitting on my porch resting a moment after my dinner. No sir, I will positively not go in and get my coat. I am an American citizen, at home in my house with the sceptre of my dominion--my favourite daily newspaper--in my hand. Let all kings, queens, and other potentates approach! And besides, though I am really much afraid that the Honourable Arthur Caldwell will not stop at my gate but will pass on towards Horace's, I am nursing a somewhat light opinion of Mr. Caldwell. When he spoke at the School House on Tuesday, I did not go to hear him, nor was my opinion greatly changed by what I learned afterward of the meeting. I take both of our weekly county papers. This is necessary. I add the news of both together, divide by two to strike a fair average, and then ask Horace, or Charles Baxter, or the Scotch Preacher what really happened. The Republican county paper said of the meeting: "The Honourable Arthur Caldwell, member of Congress, who is seeking a reelection, was accorded a most enthusiastic reception by a large and sympathetic audience of the citizens of Blandford township on Tuesday evening." Strangely enough the Democratic paper, observing exactly the same historic events, took this jaundiced view of the matter: "Arty Caldwell, Republican boss of the Sixth District, who is out mending his political fences, spellbound a handful of his henchmen at the School House near Blandford Crossing on Tuesday evening." And here was Mr. Caldwell himself, Member of Congress, Leader of the Sixth District, Favourably Mentioned for Governor, drawing up at my gate, deliberately descending from his buggy, with dignity stopping to take the tie-rein from under the seat, carefully tying his horse to my hitching-post. I confess I could not help feeling a thrill of excitement. Here was a veritable Celebrity come to my house to explain himself! I would not have it known, of course, outside of our select circle of friends, but I confess that although I am a pretty independent person (when I talk) in reality there are few things in this world I would rather see than a new person coming up the walk to my door. We cannot, of course, let the celebrities know it, lest they grow intolerable in their top-loftiness, but if they must have us, we cannot well get along without them--without the colour and variety which they lend to a gray world. I have spent many a precious moment alone in my fields looking up the road (with what wistful casualness!) for some new Socrates or Mark Twain, and I have not been wholly disappointed when I have had to content myself with the Travelling Evangelist or the Syrian Woman who comes this way monthly bearing her pack of cheap suspenders and blue bandana handkerchiefs. "Good afternoon, Mr. Grayson," said the Honourable Mr. Caldwell, taking off his large hat and pausing with one foot on my step. "Good afternoon, sir," I responded, "won't you come up?" He sat down in the chair opposite me with a certain measured and altogether impressive dignity. I cannot say that he was exactly condescending in his manners, yet he made me feel that it was no small honour to have so considerable a person sitting there on the porch with me. At the same time he was outwardly not without a sort of patient deference which was evidently calculated to put me at my ease. Oh, he had all the arts of the schooled politician! He knew to the last shading just the attitude that he as a great man, a leader in Congress, a dominant force in his party, a possible candidate for Governor (and yet always a seeker for the votes of the people!) must observe in approaching a free farmer--like me--sitting at ease in his shirt-sleeves on his own porch, taking a moment's rest after dinner. It was a perfect thing to see! He had evidently heard, what was not altogether true, that I was a questioner of authority, a disturber of the political peace, and that (concretely) I was opposing him for reëlection. And it was as plain as a pikestaff that he was here to lay down the political law to me. He would do it smilingly and patiently, but firmly. He would use all the leverage of his place, his power, his personal appearance, to crush the presumptuous uprising against his authority. I confess my spirits rose at the thought. What in this world is more enthralling than the meeting of an unknown adversary upon the open field, and jousting him a tourney. I felt like some modern Robin Hood facing the panoplied authority of the King's man. And what a place and time it was for a combat--in the quietude of the summer afternoon, no sound anywhere breaking the still warmth and sweetness except the buzzing of bees in the clematis at the end of the porch--and all about the green countryside, woods and fields and old fences--and the brown road leading its venturesome way across a distant hill toward the town. After explaining who he was--I told him I had recognized him on sight--we opened with a volley of small shot. We peppered one another with harmless comments on the weather and the state of the crops. He advanced cabbages and I countered with sugar-beets. I am quite aware that there are good tacticians who deprecate the use of skirmish lines and the desultory fire of the musketry of small talk. They would advance in grim silence and open at once with the crushing fire of their biggest guns. But such fighting is not for me. I should lose half the joy of the battle, and kill off my adversary before I had begun to like him! It wouldn't do, it wouldn't do at all. "It's a warm day," observes my opponent, and I take a sure measure of his fighting form. I rather like the look of his eye. "I never saw the corn ripening better," I observe, and let him feel a little of the cunning of the arrangement of my forces. There is much in the tone of the voice, the cut of the words, the turn of a phrase. I can be your servant with a "Yes sir," or your master with a "No sir." Thus we warm up to one another--a little at a time--we mass our forces, each sees the white of his adversary's eyes. I can even see my opponent--with some joy--trotting up his reserves, having found the opposition stronger than he at first supposed. "I hear," said Mr. Caldwell, finally, with a smile intended to be disarming, "that you are opposing my reëlection." Boom! the cannon's opening roar! "Well," I replied, also smiling, and not to be outdone in the directness of my thrust, "I have told a few of my friends that I thought Mr. Gaylord would represent us better in Congress than you have done." Boom! the fight is on! "You are a Republican, aren't you, Mr. Grayson?" It was the inevitable next stroke. When he found that I was a doubtful follower of him personally, he marshalled the Authority of the Institution which he represented. "I have voted the Republican ticket," I said, "but I confess that recently I have not been able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats--and I've had my doubts," said I, "whether there is any real Republican party left to vote with." I cannot well describe the expression on his face, nor indeed, now that the battle was on, horsemen, footmen, and big guns, shall I attempt to chronicle every stroke and counter-stroke of that great conflict. This much is certain: there was something universal and primal about the battle waged this quiet afternoon on my porch between Mr. Caldwell and me; it was the primal struggle between the leader and the follower; between the representative and the represented. And it is a never-ending conflict. When the leader gains a small advantage the pendulum of civilization swings toward aristocracy; and when the follower, beginning to think, beginning to struggle, gains a small advantage, then the pendulum inclines toward democracy. And always, and always, the leaders tend to forget that they are only servants, and would be masters. "The unending audacity of elected persons!" And always, and always, there must be a following bold enough to prick the pretensions of the leaders and keep them in their places! Thus, through the long still afternoon, the battle waged upon my porch. Harriet came out and met the Honourable Mr. Caldwell, and sat and listened, and presently went in again, without having got half a dozen words into the conversation. And the bees buzzed, and in the meadows the cows began to come out of the shade to feed in the open land. Gradually, Mr. Caldwell put off his air of condescension; he put off his appeal to party authority; he even stopped arguing the tariff and the railroad question. Gradually, he ceased to be the great man, Favourably Mentioned for Governor, and came down on the ground with me. He moved his chair up closer to mine; he put his hand on my knee. For the first time I began to see what manner of man he was: to find out how much real fight he had in him. [Illustration: "HE MOVED HIS CHAIR CLOSER TO MINE"] "You don't understand," he said, "what it means to be down there at Washington in a time like this. Things clear to you are not clear when you have to meet men in the committees and on the floor of the house who have a contrary view from yours and hold to it just as tenaciously as you do to your views." Well, sir, he gave me quite a new impression of what a Congressman's job was like, of what difficulties and dissensions he had to meet at home, and what compromises he had to accept when he reached Washington. "Do you know," I said to him, with some enthusiasm, "I am more than ever convinced that farming is good enough for me." He threw back his head and laughed uproariously, and then moved up still closer. "The trouble with you, Mr. Grayson," he said, "is that you are looking for a giant intellect to represent you at Washington." "Yes," I said, "I'm afraid I am." "Well," he returned, "they don't happen along every day. I'd like to see the House of Representatives full of Washingtons and Jeffersons and Websters and Roosevelts. But there's a Lincoln only once in a century." He paused and then added with a sort of wry smile: "And any quantity of Caldwells!" That took me! I liked him for it. It was so explanatory. The armour of political artifice, the symbols of political power, had now all dropped away from him, and we sat there together, two plain and friendly human beings, arriving through stress and struggle at a common understanding. He was not a great leader, not a statesman at all, but plainly a man of determination, with a fair measure of intelligence and sincerity. He had a human desire to stay in Congress, for the life evidently pleased him, and while he would never be crucified as a prophet, I felt--what I had not felt before in regard to him--that he was sincerely anxious to serve the best interests of his constituents. Added to these qualities he was a man who was loyal to his friends; and not ungenerous to his enemies. Up to this time he had done most of the talking; but now, having reached a common basis, I leaned forward with some eagerness. "You won't mind," I said, "if I give you my view--my common country view of the political situation. I am sure I don't understand, and I don't think my neighbours here understand, much about the tariff or the trusts or the railroad question--in detail. We get general impressions--and stick to them like grim death--for we know somehow that we are right. Generally speaking, we here in the country work for what we get----" "And sometimes put the big apples at the top of the barrel," nodded Mr. Caldwell. "And sometimes put too much salt on top of the butter," I added--"all that, but on the whole we get only what we earn by the hard daily work of ploughing and planting and reaping: You admit that." "I admit it," said Mr. Caldwell. "And we've got the impression that a good many of the men down in New York and Boston, and elsewhere, through the advantages which the tariff laws, and other laws, are giving them, are getting more than they earn--a lot more. And we feel that laws must be passed which will prevent all that." "Now, I believe that, too," said Mr. Caldwell very earnestly. "Then we belong to the same party," I said. "I don't know what the name of it is yet, but we both belong to it." Mr. Caldwell laughed. "And I'll appoint you," I said, "my agent in Washington to work out the changes in the laws." "Well, I'll accept the appointment," said Mr. Caldwell--continuing very earnestly, "if you'll trust to my honesty and not expect too much of me all at once." With that we both sat back in our chairs and looked at each other and laughed with the greatest good humour and common understanding. "And now," said I, rising quickly, "let's go and get a drink of buttermilk." So we walked around the house arm in arm and stopped in the shade of the oak tree which stands near the spring-house. Harriet came out in the whitest of white dresses, carrying a tray with the glasses, and I opened the door of the spring-house, and felt the cool air on my face and smelt the good smell of butter and milk and cottage cheese, and I passed the cool pitcher to Harriet. And so we drank together there in the shade and talked and laughed. I walked down with Mr. Caldwell to the gate. He took my arm and said to me: "I'm glad I came out here and had this talk. I feel as though I understood my job better for it." "Let's organize a new party," I said, "let's begin with two members, you and I, and have only one plank in the platform." He smiled. "You'd have to crowd a good deal into that one plank," he said. "Not at all," I responded. "What would you have it?" "I'd have it in one sentence," I said, "and something like this: We believe in the passage of legislation which shall prevent any man taking from the common store any more than he actually earns." Mr. Caldwell threw up his arms. "Mr. Grayson," he said, "you're an outrageous idealist." "Mr. Caldwell," I said, "you'll say one of these days that I'm a practical politician." * * * * * "Well, Harriet," I said, "he's got my vote." "Well, David," said Harriet, "that's what he came for." "It's an interesting world, Harriet," I said. "It is, indeed," said Harriet. As we stood on the porch we could see at the top of the hill, where the town road crosses it, the slow moving buggy, and through the open curtain at the back the heavy form of our Congressman with his slouch hat set firmly on his big head. "We may be fooled, Harriet," I observed, "on dogmas and doctrines and platforms--but if we cannot trust human nature in the long run, what hope is there? It's men we must work with, Harriet." "And women." said Harriet. "And women, of course," said I. XIII ON FRIENDSHIP I come now to the last of these Adventures in Friendship. As I go out--I hope not for long--I wish you might follow me to the door, and then as we continue to talk quietly, I may beguile you, all unconsciously, to the top of the steps, or even find you at my side when we reach the gate at the end of the lane. I wish you might hate to let me go, as I myself hate to go!--And when I reach the top of the hill (if you wait long enough) you will see me turn and wave my hand; and you will know that I am still relishing the joy of our meeting, and that I part unwillingly. Not long ago, a friend of mine wrote a letter asking me an absurdly difficult question--difficult because so direct and simple. "What is friendship, anyway?" queried this philosophical correspondent. The truth is, the question came to me with a shock, as something quite new. For I have spent so much time thinking of my friends that I have scarcely ever stopped to reflect upon the abstract quality of friendship. My attention being thus called to the subject, I fell to thinking of it the other night as I sat by the fire, Harriet not far away rocking and sewing, and my dog sleeping on the rug near me (his tail stirring whenever I made a motion to leave my place). And whether I would or no my friends came trooping into my mind. I thought of our neighbour Horace, the dryly practical and sufficient farmer, and of our much loved Scotch Preacher; I thought of the Shy Bee-man and of his boisterous double, the Bold Bee-man; I thought of the Old Maid, and how she talks, for all the world like a rabbit running in a furrow (all on the same line until you startle her out, when she slips quickly into the next furrow and goes on running as ardently as before). And I thought of John Starkweather, our rich man; and of the life of the girl Anna. And it was good to think of them all living around me, not far away, connected with me through darkness and space by a certain mysterious human cord. (Oh, there are mysteries still left upon this scientific earth!) As I sat there by the fire I told them over one by one, remembering with warmth or amusement or concern this or that characteristic thing about each of them. It was the next best thing to hearing the tramp of feet on my porch, to seeing the door fly open (letting in a gust of the fresh cool air!), to crying a hearty greeting, to drawing up an easy chair to the open fire, to watching with eagerness while my friend unwraps (exclaiming all the while of the state of the weather: "Cold, Grayson, mighty cold!") and finally sits down beside me, not too far away. The truth is,--my philosophical correspondent--I cannot formulate any theory of friendship which will cover all the conditions. I know a few things that friendship is not, and a few things that it is, but when I come to generalize upon the abstract quality I am quite at a loss for adequate language. Friendship, it seems to me, is like happiness. She flies pursuit, she is shy, and wild, and timid, and will be best wooed by indirection. Quite unexpectedly, sometimes, as we pass in the open road, she puts her hand in ours, like a child. Friendship is neither a formality nor a mode: it is rather a life. Many and many a time I have seen Charles Baxter at work in his carpentry-shop--just working, or talking in his quiet voice, or looking around occasionally through his steel-bowed spectacles, and I have had the feeling that I should like to go over and sit on the bench near him. He literally talks me over! I even want to touch him! It is not the substance of what we say to one another that makes us friends, nor yet the manner of saying it, nor is it what you do or I do, nor is it what I give you, or you give me, nor is it because we chance to belong to the same church, or society or party that makes us friendly. Nor is it because we entertain the same views or respond to the same emotions. All these things may serve to bring us nearer together but no one of them can of itself kindle the divine fire of friendship. A friend is one with whom we are fond of being when no business is afoot nor any entertainment contemplated. A man may well be silent with a friend. "I do not need to ask the wounded person how he feels," says the poet, "I myself became the wounded person." Not all people come to friendship in the same way. Some possess a veritable genius for intimacy and will be making a dozen friends where I make one. Our Scotch Preacher is such a person. I never knew any man with a gift of intimacy so persuasive as his. He is so simple and direct that he cuts through the stoniest reserve and strikes at once upon those personal things which with all of us are so far more real than any outward interest. "Good-morning, friend," I have heard him say to a total stranger, and within half an hour they had their heads together and were talking of things which make men cry. It is an extraordinary gift. As for me, I confess it to be a selfish interest or curiosity which causes me to stop almost any man by the way, and to take something of what he has--because it pleases me to do so. I try to pay in coin as good as I get, but I recognize it as a lawless procedure, For the coin I give (being such as I myself secretly make) is for them sometimes only spurious metal, while what I get is for me the very treasure of the Indies. For a lift in my wagon, a drink at the door, a flying word across my fences, I have taken argosies of minted wealth! Especially do I enjoy all travelling people. I wait for them (how eagerly) here on my farm. I watch the world drift by in daily tides upon the road, flowing outward in the morning toward the town, and as surely at evening drifting back again. I look out with a pleasure impossible to convey upon those who come this way from the town: the Syrian woman going by in the gray town road, with her bright-coloured head-dress, and her oil-cloth pack; and the Old-ironman with his dusty wagon, jangling his little bells, and the cheerful weazened Herb-doctor in his faded hat, and the Signman with his mouth full of nails--how they are all marked upon by the town, all dusted with the rosy bloom of human experience. How often in fancy I have pursued them down the valley and watched them until they drifted out of sight beyond the hill! Or how often I have stopped them or they (too willingly) have stopped me--and we have fenced and parried with fine bold words. If you should ever come by my farm--you, whoever you are--take care lest I board you, hoist my pirate flag, and sail you away to the Enchanted Isle where I make my rendezvous. It is not short of miraculous how, with cultivation, one's capacity for friendship increases. Once I myself had scarcely room in my heart for a single friend, who am now so wealthy in friendships. It is a phenomenon worthy of consideration by all hardened disbelievers in that which is miraculous upon this earth that when a man's heart really opens to a friend he finds there room for two, And when he takes in the second, behold the skies lift, and the earth grows wider, and he finds there room for two more! In a curious passage (which I understand no longer darkly) old mystical Swedenborg tells of his wonderment that the world of spirits (which he says he visited so familiarly) should not soon become too small for all the swelling hosts of its ethereal inhabitants, and was confronted with the discovery that the more angels there were, the more heaven to hold them! So let it be with our friendships! THE END 
10593	----	Proofreading Team GREAT POSSESSIONS By David Grayson CHAPTER I THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH "Sweet as Eden is the air And Eden-sweet the ray. No Paradise is lost for them Who foot by branching root and stem, And lightly with the woodland share The change of night and day." For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have had it in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of this well-flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the sense of taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of the senses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers, and sight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon the business of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairy Esau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing to trade its inheritance for a mess of pottage. I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident and adventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrance than I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, of beginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the good odours and flavours that ever I have had in my life. As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, as it comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of the temporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of a beauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as it passes by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hear it, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a new kind of intensity and eagerness. Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than I get out of the supper itself. "I never need to ring for you," says she, "but only open the kitchen door. In a few minutes I'll see you straighten up, lift your head, sniff a little, and come straight for the house." "The odour of your suppers, Harriet," I said, "after a day in the fields, would lure a man out of purgatory." My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when I was a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often through miles of unbroken forest, how he would sometimes break a long silence, lift his head with sudden awareness, and say to me: "David, I smell open fields." In a few minutes we were sure to come to a settler's cabin, a log barn, or a clearing. Among the free odours of the forest he had caught, afar off, the common odours of the work of man. When we were tramping or surveying in that country, I have seen him stop suddenly, draw in a long breath, and remark: "Marshes," or, "A stream yonder." Part of this strange keenness of sense, often noted by those who knew that sturdy old cavalryman, may have been based, as so many of our talents are, upon a defect. My father gave all the sweet sounds of the world, the voices of his sons, the songs of his daughters, to help free the Southern slaves. He was deaf. It is well known that when one sense is defective the others fly to the rescue, and my father's singular development of the sense of smell may have been due in part to this defect, though I believe it to have been, to a far larger degree, a native gift. Me had a downright good nose. All his life long he enjoyed with more than ordinary keenness the odour of flowers, and would often pick a sprig of wild rose and carry it along with him in his hand, sniffing at it from time to time, and he loved the lilac, as I do after him. To ill odours he was not less sensitive, and was impatient of rats in the barn, and could smell them, among other odours, the moment the door was opened. He always had a peculiar sensitiveness to the presence of animals, as of dogs, cats, muskrats, cattle, horses, and the like, and would speak of them long before he had seen them or could know that they were about. I recall once on a wild Northern lake, when we were working along the shore in a boat, how he stopped suddenly and exclaimed: "David, do you hear anything?"--for I, a boy, was ears for him in those wilderness places. "No, Father. What is it?" "Indians." And, sure enough, in a short time I heard the barking of their dogs and we came soon upon their camp, where, I remember, they were drying deer meat upon a frame of poplar poles over an open fire. He told me that the smoky smell of the Indians, tanned buckskin, parched wild rice, and the like, were odours that carried far and could not be mistaken. My father had a big, hooked nose with long, narrow nostrils, I suppose that this has really nothing to do with the matter, although I have come, after these many years, to look with a curious interest upon people's noses, since I know what a vehicle of delight they often are. My own nose is nothing to speak of, good enough as noses go--but I think I inherited from my father something of the power of enjoyment he had from that sense, though I can never hope to become the accomplished smeller he was. I am moved to begin this chronicle because of my joy this morning early--a May morning!--just after sunrise, when the shadows lay long and blue to the west and the dew was still on the grass, and I walked in the pleasant spaces of my garden. It was so still...so still...that birds afar off could be heard singing, and once through the crystal air came the voice of a neighbour calling his cows. But the sounds and the silences, the fair sights of meadow and hill I soon put aside, for the lilacs were in bloom and the bush-honeysuckles and the strawberries. Though no movement of the air was perceptible, the lilacs well knew the way of the wind, for if I stood to the north of them the odour was less rich and free than to the south, and I thought I might pose as a prophet of wind and weather upon the basis of this easy magic, and predict that the breezes of the day would be from the north--as, indeed, they later appeared to be. I went from clump to clump of the lilacs testing and comparing them with great joy and satisfaction. They vary noticeably in odour; the white varieties being the most delicate, while those tending to deep purple are the richest. Some of the newer double varieties seem less fragrant--and I have tested them now many times--than the old-fashioned single varieties which are nearer the native stock. Here I fancy our smooth Jacob has been at work, and in the lucrative process of selection for the eye alone the cunning horticulturist has cheated us of our rightful heritage of fragrance. I have a mind some time to practise the art of burbankry or other kind of wizardy upon the old lilac stock and select for odour alone, securing ravishing original varieties--indeed, whole new gamuts of fragrance. I should devise the most animating names for my creations, such as the Double Delicious, the Air of Arcady, the Sweet Zephyr, and others even more inviting, which I should enjoy inventing. Though I think surely I could make my fortune out of this interesting idea, I present it freely to a scent-hungry world--here it is, gratis!--for I have my time so fully occupied during all of this and my next two or three lives that I cannot attend to it. I have felt the same defect in the cultivated roses. While the odours are rich, often of cloying sweetness, or even, as in certain white roses, having a languor as of death, they never for me equal the fragrance of the wild sweet rose that grows all about these hills, in old tangled fence rows, in the lee of meadow boulders, or by some unfrequented roadside. No other odour I know awakens quite such a feeling--light like a cloud, suggesting free hills, open country, sunny air; and none surely has, for me, such an after-call. A whiff of the wild rose will bring back in all the poignancy of sad happiness a train of ancient memories old faces, old scenes, old loves--and the wild thoughts I had when a boy. The first week of the wild-rose blooming, beginning here about the twenty-fifth of June, is always to me a memorable time. I was a long time learning how to take hold of nature, and think now with some sadness of all the life I lost in former years. The impression the earth gave me was confused: I was as one only half awake. A fine morning made me dumbly glad, a cool evening, after the heat of the day, and the work of it, touched my spirit restfully; but I could have explained neither the one nor the other. Gradually as I looked about me I began to ask myself, "Why is it that the sight of these common hills and fields gives me such exquisite delight? And if it is beauty, why is it beautiful? And if I am so richly rewarded by mere glimpses, can I not increase my pleasure with longer looks?" I tried longer looks both at nature and at the friendly human creatures all about me. I stopped often in the garden where I was working, or loitered a moment in the fields, or sat down by the roadside, and thought intently what it was that so perfectly and wonderfully surrounded me; and thus I came to have some knowledge of the Great Secret. It was, after all, a simple matter, as such matters usually are when we penetrate them, and consisted merely in shutting out all other impressions, feelings, thoughts, and concentrating the full energy of the attention upon what it was that I saw or heard at that instant. At one moment I would let in all the sounds of the earth, at another all the sights. So we practise the hand at one time, the foot at another, or learn how to sit or to walk, and so acquire new grace for the whole body. Should we do less in acquiring grace for the spirit? It will astonish one who has not tried it how full the world is of sounds commonly unheard, and of sights commonly unseen, but in their nature, like the smallest blossoms, of a curious perfection and beauty. Out of this practice grew presently, and as it seems to me instinctively, for I cannot now remember the exact time of its beginning, a habit of repeating under my breath, or even aloud, and in a kind of singsong voice, fragmentary words and sentences describing what it was that I saw or felt at the moment, as, for example: "The pink blossoms of the wild crab-apple trees I see from the hill.... The reedy song of the wood thrush among the thickets of the wild cherry.... The scent of peach leaves, the odour of new-turned soil in the black fields.... The red of the maples in the marsh, the white of apple trees in bloom.... I cannot find Him out--nor know why I am here...." Some form of expression, however crude, seemed to reenforce and intensify the gatherings of the senses; and these words, afterward remembered, or even written down in the little book I sometimes carried in my pocket, seemed to awaken echoes, however faint, of the exaltation of that moment in the woods or fields, and enabled me to live twice where formerly I had been able to live but once. It was by this simple process of concentrating upon what I saw or heard that I increased immeasurably my own joy of my garden and fields and the hills and marshes all about. A little later, for I was a slow learner, I began to practise the same method with the sense of smell, and still later with the sense of taste. I said to myself, "I will no longer permit the avid and eager eye to steal away my whole attention. I will learn to enjoy more completely all the varied wonders of the earth." So I tried deliberately shutting the doorways of both sight and hearing, and centring the industry of my spirit upon the flavours of the earth. I tested each odour narrowly, compared it well with remembered odours, and often turned the impression I had into such poor words as I could command. What a new and wonderful world opened to me then! My takings of nature increased tenfold, a hundredfold, and I came to a new acquaintance with my own garden, my own hills, and all the roads and fields around about--and even the town took on strange new meanings for me. I cannot explain it rightly, but it was as though I had found a new earth here within the old one, but more spacious and beautiful than any I had known before. I have thought, often and often, that this world we live in so dumbly, so carelessly, would be more glorious than the tinsel heaven of the poets if only we knew how to lay hold upon it, if only we could win that complete command of our own lives which is the end of our being. At first, as I said, I stopped my work, or loitered as I walked, in order to see, or hear, or smell--and do so still, for I have entered only the antechamber of the treasure-house; but as I learned better the modest technic of these arts I found that the practice of them went well with the common tasks of the garden or farm, especially with those that were more or less monotonous, like cultivating corn, hoeing potatoes, and the like. The air is just as full of good sights and good odours for the worker as for the idler, and it depends only upon the awareness, the aliveness, of our own spirits whether we toil like dumb animals or bless our labouring hours with the beauty of life. Such enjoyment and a growing command of our surroundings are possible, after a little practice, without taking much of that time we call so valuable and waste so sinfully. "I haven't time," says the farmer, the banker, the professor, with a kind of disdain for the spirit of life, when, as a matter of fact, he has all the time there is, all that anybody has--to wit, _this_ moment, this great and golden moment!--but knows not how to employ it. He creeps when he might walk, walks when he might run, runs when he might fly--and lives like a woodchuck in the dark body of himself. Why, there are men in this valley who scout the idea that farming, carpentry, merchantry, are anything but drudgery, defend all the evils known to humankind with the argument that "a man must live," and laugh at any one who sees beauty or charm in being here, in working with the hands, or, indeed, in just living! While they think of themselves cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit both of beauty and of friendliness. I say truly, having now reached the point in my life where it seems to me I care only for writing that which is most deeply true for me, that I rarely walk in my garden or upon the hills of an evening without thinking of God. It is in my garden that all things become clearer to me, even that miracle whereby one who has offended may still see God; and this I think a wonderful thing. In my garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world, and in my garden learn how transitory it is. Just now I have come in from work, and will note freshly one of the best odours I have had to-day. As I was working in the corn, a lazy breeze blew across the meadows from the west, and after loitering a moment among the blackberry bushes sought me out where I was busiest. Do you know the scent of the blackberry? Almost all the year round it is a treasure-house of odours, even when the leaves first come out; but it reaches crescendo in blossom time when, indeed, I like it least, for being too strong. It has a curious fragrance, once well called by a poet "the hot scent of the brier," and aromatically hot it is and sharp like the briers themselves. At times I do not like it at all, for it gives me a kind of faintness, while at other times, as to-day, it fills me with a strange sense of pleasure as though it were the very breath of the spicy earth. It is also a rare friend of the sun, for the hotter and brighter the day, the hotter and sharper the scent of the brier. Many of the commonest and least noticed of plants, flowers, trees, possess a truly fragrant personality if once we begin to know them. I had an adventure in my own orchard, only this spring, and made a fine new acquaintance in a quarter least of all expected. I had started down the lane through the garden one morning in the most ordinary way, with no thought of any special experience, when I suddenly caught a whiff of pure delight that stopped me short. "What now can _that_ be?" and I thought to myself that nature had played some new prank on me. I turned into the orchard, following my nose. It was not the peach buds, nor the plums, nor the cherries, nor yet the beautiful new coloured leaves of the grape, nor anything I could see along the grassy margin of the pasture. There were other odours all about, old friends of mine, but this was some shy and pleasing stranger come venturing upon my land. A moment later I discovered a patch of low green verdure upon the ground, and dismissed it scornfully as one of my ancient enemies. But it is this way with enemies, once we come to know them, they often turn out to have a fragrance that is kindly. Well, this particular fierce enemy was a patch of chickweed. Chickweed! Invader of the garden, cossack of the orchard! I discovered, however, that it was in full bloom and covered with small, star-like white blossoms. "Well, now," said I, "are you the guilty rascal?" So I knelt there and took my delight of it and a rare, delicate good odour it was. For several days afterward I would not dig out the patch, for I said to myself, "What a cheerful claim it makes these early days, when most of the earth is still cold and dead, for a bit of immortality." The bees knew the secret already, and the hens and the blackbirds! And I thought it no loss, but really a new and valuable pleasure, to divert my path down the lane for several days that I might enjoy more fully this new odour, and make a clear acquaintance with something fine upon the earth I had not known before. CHAPTER II OF GOOD AND EVIL ODOURS Of all times of the day for good odours I think the early morning the very best, although the evening just after sunset, if the air falls still and cool, is often as good. Certain qualities or states of the atmosphere seem to favour the distillation of good odours and I have known times even at midday when the earth was very wonderful to smell. There is a curious, fainting fragrance that comes only with sunshine and still heat. Not long ago I was cutting away a thicket of wild spiraea which was crowding in upon the cultivated land. It was a hot day and the leaves wilted quickly, giving off such a penetrating, fainting fragrance that I let the branches lie where they fell the afternoon through and came often back to smell of them, for it was a fine thing thus to discover an odour wholly new to me. I like also the first wild, sweet smell of new-cut meadow grass, not the familiar odour of new-mown hay, which comes a little later, and is worthy of its good report, but the brief, despairing odour of grass just cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly in the fields at the mowing. I like also the midday smell of peach leaves and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let any one else cut out the old canes from the blackberry rows in my garden for the goodness of the scents which wait upon that work. Another odour I have found animating is the odour of burning wastage in new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the smoke drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange chemical process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that nothing will so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered odour. I have had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street such a vivid return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have stopped, trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought forgotten. Once in a foreign city, passing a latticed gateway that closed in a narrow court, I caught the odour of wild sweet balsam. I do not know now where it came from, or what could have caused it--but it stopped me short where I stood, and the solid brick walls of that city rolled aside like painted curtains, and the iron streets dissolved before my eyes, and with the curious dizziness of nostalgia, I was myself upon the hill of my youth--with the gleaming river in the valley, and a hawk sailing majestically in the high blue of the sky, and all about and everywhere the balsams--and the balsams--full of the sweet, wild odours of the north, and of dreaming boyhood. And there while my body, the shell of me, loitered in that strange city, I was myself four thousand miles and a quarter of a century away, reliving, with a conscious passion that boyhood never knew, a moment caught up, like a torch, out of the smouldering wreckage of the past. Do not tell me that such things die! They all remain with us-all the sights, and sounds, and thoughts of by-gone times awaiting only the whiff from some latticed gateway, some closed-in court to spring again into exuberant life. If only we are ready for the great moment! As for the odour of the burning wastage of the fields at evening I scarcely know if I dare say it. I find it produces in the blood of me a kind of primitive emotion, as though it stirred memories older than my present life. Some drowsy cells of the brain awaken to a familiar stimulus--the odour of the lodge-fire of the savage, the wigwam of the Indian. Racial memories! But it is not the time of the day, nor the turn of the season, nor yet the way of the wind that matters most but the ardour and glow we ourselves bring to the fragrant earth. It is a sad thing to reflect that in a world so overflowing with goodness of smell, of fine sights and sweet sounds, we pass by hastily and take so little of them. Days pass when we see no beautiful sight, hear no sweet sound, smell no memorable odour: when we exchange no single word of deeper understanding with a friend. We have lived a day and added nothing to our lives! A blind, grubbing, senseless life--that! It is a strange thing, also, that instead of sharpening the tools by which we take hold of life we make studied efforts to dull them. We seem to fear life and early begin to stop our ears and close our eyes lest we hear and see too much: we clog our senses and cloud our minds. We seek dull security and ease and cease longer to desire adventure and struggle. And then--the tragedy of it--the poet we all have in us in youth begins to die, the philosopher in us dies, the martyr in us dies, so that the long, long time beyond youth with so many of us becomes a busy death. And this I think truer of men than of women: beyond forty many women just begin to awaken to power and beauty, but most men beyond that age go on dying. The task of the artist, whether poet, or musician, or painter, is to keep alive the perishing spirit of free adventure in men: to nourish the poet, the prophet, the martyr, we all have in us. One's sense of smell, like the sense of taste, is sharpest when he is hungry, and I am convinced also that one sees and hears best when unclogged with food, undulled with drink, undrugged with smoke. For me, also, weariness, though not exhaustion, seems to sharpen all the senses. Keenness goes with leanness. When I have been working hard or tramping the country roads in the open air and come in weary and hungry at night and catch the fragrance of the evening along the road or upon the hill, or at barn-doors smell the unmilked cows, or at the doorway, the comfortable odours of cooking supper how good that all is! At such times I know Esau to the core: the forthright, nature-loving, simple man he was, coming in dabbled with the blood of hunted animals and hungry for the steaming pottage. It follows that if we take excessive joys of one sense, as of taste, nature, ever seeking just balances, deprives us of the full enjoyment of the others, "I am stuffed, cousin," cries Beatrice in the play, "I cannot smell." "I have drunk," remarks the Clown in Arcady, "what are roses to me?" We forget that there are five chords in the great scale of life--sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and--few of us ever master the chords well enough to get the full symphony of life, but are something like little pig-tailed girls playing Peter Piper with one finger while all the music of the universe is in the Great Instrument, and all to be had for the taking. Of most evil odours, it can be said that they are temporary or unnecessary: and any unpleasant odour, such as that of fruit sprays in spring, or fertilizer newly spread on the land, can be borne and even welcomed if it is appropriate to the time and place. Some smells, evil at first, become through usage not unpleasant. I once stopped with a wolf-trapper in the north country, who set his bottle of bait outside when I came in. He said it was "good and strong" and sniffed it with appreciation. I agreed with him that it was strong. To him it was not unpleasant, though made of the rancid fat of the muscallonge. All nature seems to strive against evil odours, for when she warns us of decay she is speeding decay: and a manured field produces later the best of all odours. Almost all shut-in places sooner or later acquire an evil odour: and it seems a requisite for good smells that there be plenty of sunshine and air; and so it is with the hearts and souls of men. If they are long shut in upon themselves they grow rancid. CHAPTER III FOLLOW YOUR NOSE! "Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn-- Look to this day! For it is Life, The very Life of Life!" On a spring morning one has only to step out into the open country, lift his head to the sky--and follow his nose.... It was a big and golden morning, and Sunday to boot, and I walked down the lane to the lower edge of the field, where the wood and the marsh begin. The sun was just coming up over the hills and all the air was fresh and clear and cool. High in the heavens a few fleecy clouds were drifting, and the air was just enough astir to waken the hemlocks into faint and sleepy exchanges of confidence. It seemed to me that morning that the world was never before so high, so airy, so golden, All filled to the brim with the essence of sunshine and spring morning--so that one's spirit dissolved in it, became a part of it. Such a morning! Such a morning! From that place and just as I was I set off across the open land. It was the time of all times for good odours--soon after sunrise--before the heat of the day had drawn off the rich distillations of the night. In that keen moment I caught, drifting, a faint but wild fragrance upon the air, and veered northward full into the way of the wind. I could not at first tell what this particular odour was, nor separate it from the general good odour of the earth; but I followed it intently across the moor-like open land. Once I thought I had lost it entirely, or that the faint northern airs had shifted, but I soon caught it clearly again, and just as I was saying to myself, "I've got it, I've got it!"--for it is a great pleasure to identify a friendly odour in the fields--I saw, near the bank of the brook, among ferns and raspberry bushes, a thorn-apple tree in full bloom. "So there you are!" I said. I hastened toward it, now in the full current and glory of its fragrance. The sun, looking over the taller trees to the east, had crowned the top of it with gold, so that it was beautiful to see; and it was full of honey bees as excited as I. A score of feet onward toward the wind, beyond the thorn-apple tree, I passed wholly out of the range of its fragrance into another world, and began trying for some new odour. After one or two false scents, for this pursuit has all the hazards known to the hunter, I caught an odour long known to me, not strong, nor yet very wonderful, but distinctive. It led me still a little distance northward to a sunny slope just beyond a bit of marsh, and, sure enough, I found an old friend, the wild sweet geranium, a world of it, in full bloom, and I sat down there for some time to enjoy it fully. Beyond that, and across a field wild with tangles of huckleberry bushes and sheep laurel where the bluets and buttercups were blooming, and in shady spots the shy white violet, I searched for the odour of a certain clump of pine trees I discovered long ago. I knew that I must come upon it soon, but could not tell just when or where. I held up a moistened finger to make sure of the exact direction of the wind, and bearing, then, a little eastward, soon came full upon it--as a hunter might surprise a deer in the forest. I crossed the brook a second time and through a little marsh, making it the rule of the game never to lose for an instant the scent I was following--even though I stopped in a low spot to admire a mass of thrifty blue flags, now beginning to bloom--and came thus to the pines I was seeking. They are not great trees, nor noble, but gnarled and angular and stunted, for the soil in that place is poor and thin, and the winds in winter keen; but the brown blanket of needles they spread and the shade they offer the traveller are not less hospitable; nor the fragrance they give off less enchanting. The odour of the pine is one I love. I sat down there in a place I chose long ago--a place already as familiar with pleasing memories as a favourite room--so that I wonder that some of the notes I have written there do not of themselves exhale the very odour of the pines. And all about was hung a fair tapestry of green, and the earthy floor was cleanly carpeted with brown, and the roof above was in arched mosaic, the deep, deep blue of the sky seen through the gnarled and knotted branches of the pines. Through a little opening among the trees, as through a window, I could see the cattle feeding in the wide meadows, all headed alike, and yellow butterflies drifted across the open spaces, and there were bumblebees and dragonflies. And presently I heard some one tapping, tapping, at the door of the wood and glancing up quickly I saw my early visitor. There he was, as neighbourly as you please, and not in the least awed by my intrusion; there he was, far out on the limb of a dead tree, stepping energetically up and down, like a sailor reefing a sail, and rapping and tapping as he worked--a downy woodpecker. "Good morning, sir," I said. He stopped for scarcely a second, cocked one eye at me, and went back to his work again. Who was I that I should interrupt his breakfast? And I was glad I was there, and I began enumerating, as though I were the accredited reporter for the _Woodland Gazette_, all the good news of the day. "The beech trees." said aloud, "have come at last to full leafage. The wild blackberries are ready to bloom, the swamp roses are budded. Brown planted fields I see, and drooping elms, and the young crows cry from their nests on the knoll.... I know now that, whoever I am, whatever I do, I am welcome here; the meadows are as green this spring for Tom the drunkard, and for Jim the thief, as for Jonathan the parson, or for Walt the poet: the wild cherry blooms as richly, and the odour of the pine is as sweet--" At that moment, like a flame for clearness, I understood some of the deep and simple things of life, as that we are to be like the friendly pines, and the elm trees, and the open fields, and reject no man and judge no man. Once, a long time ago, I read a sober treatise by one who tried to prove with elaborate knowledge that, upon the whole, good was triumphant in this world, and that probably there was a God, and I remember going out dully afterward upon the hill, for I was weighed down with a strange depression, and the world seemed to me a hard, cold, narrow place where good must be heavily demonstrated in books. And as I sat there the evening fell, a star or two came out in the clear blue of the sky, and suddenly it became all simple to me, so that I laughed aloud at that laborious big-wig for spending so many futile years in seeking doubtful proof of what he might have learned in one rare home upon my hill. And far more than he could prove far more. As I came away from that place I knew I should never again be quite the same person I was before. [Illustration: And as I sat there the evening fell, a star or two came out in the clear blue of the sky] Well, we cannot remain steadily upon the heights. At least I cannot, and would not if I could. After I have been out about so long on such an adventure as this, something lets go inside of me, and I come down out of the mountain--and yet know deeply that I have been where the bush was burning; and have heard the Voice in the Fire. So it was yesterday morning. I realized suddenly that I was hungry--commonly, coarsely hungry. My whole attention, I was going to say my whole soul, shifted to the thought of ham and eggs! This may seem a tremendous anti-climax, but it is, nevertheless, a sober report of what happened. At the first onset of this new mood, the ham-and-eggs mood, let us call it, I was a little ashamed or abashed at the remembrance of my wild flights, and had a laugh at the thought of myself floundering around in the marshes and fields a mile from home, when Harriet, no doubt, had breakfast waiting for me! What absurd, contradictory, inconsistent, cowardly creatures we are, anyway! The house seemed an inconceivable distance away, and the only real thing in the world the gnawing emptiness under my belt. And I was wet to my knees, and the tangled huckleberry bashes and sheep laurel and hardback I had passed through so joyously a short time before now clung heavily about my legs as I struggled through them. And the sun was hot and high--and there were innumerable small, black buzzing flies. To cap the climax, whom should I meet as I was crossing the fence into the lower land but my friend Horace, He had been out early looking for a cow that had dropped her calf in the woods, and was now driving them slowly up the lane, the cow a true pattern of solicitous motherhood, the calf a true pattern of youth, dashing about upon uncertain legs. "Takin' the air, David?" I amuse Horace. Horace is an important man in this community. He has big, solid barns, and money in the bank, and a reputation for hardheadedness. He is also known as a "driver"; and has had sore trouble with a favourite son. He believes in "goin' it slow" and "playin' safe," and he is convinced that "ye can't change human nature." His question came to me with a kind of shock. I imagined with a vividness impossible to describe what Horace would think if I answered him squarely and honestly, if I were to say: "I've been down in the marshes following my nose--enjoying the thorn apples and the wild geraniums, talking with a woodpecker and reporting the morning news of the woods for an imaginary newspaper." I was hungry, and in a mood to smile at myself anyway (good-humouredly and forgivingly as we always smile at ourselves!) before I met Horace, and the flashing vision I had of Horace's dry, superior smile finished me. Was there really anything in this world but cows and calves, and great solid barns, and oatcrops, and cash in the bank? "Been in the brook?" asked Horace, observing my wet legs. Talk about the courage to face cannon and Cossacks! It is nothing to the courage required to speak aloud in broad daylight of the finest things we have in us! I was not equal to it. "Oh, I've been down for a tramp in the marsh," I said, trying to put him off. But Horace is a Yankee of the Yankees and loves nothing better than to chase his friends into corners with questions, and leave them ultimately with the impression that they are somehow less sound, sensible, practical, than he is and he usually proves it, not because he is right, but because he is sure, and in a world of shadowy halt-beliefs and half-believers he is without doubts. "What ye find down there?" asked Horace. "Oh, I was just looking around to see how the spring was coming on." "Hm-m," said Horace, eloquently, and when I did not reply, he continued, "Often git out in the morning as early as this?" "Yes," I said, "often." "And do you find things any different now from what they would be later in the day?" At this the humour of the whole situation dawned on me and I began to revive. When things grow hopelessly complicated, and we can't laugh, we do either one of two things: we lie or we die. But if we can laugh, we can fight! And be honest! "Horace," I said, "I know what you are thinking about." Horace's face remained perfectly impassive, but there was a glint of curiosity in his eye. "You've been thinking I've been wasting my time beating around down there in the swamp just to look at things and smell of things--which you wouldn't do. You think I'm a kind of impractical dreamer, now, don't you, Horace? I'll warrant you've told your wife just that more than once. Come, now!" I think I made a rather shrewd hit, for Horace looked uncomfortable and a little foolish. "Come now, honest!" I laughed and looked him in the eye. "Waal, now, ye see--" "Of course you do, and I don't mind it in the least." A little dry gleam of humour came in his eye. "Ain't ye?" It's a fine thing to have it straight out with a friend. "No," I said, "I'm the practical man and you're the dreamer. I've rarely known in all my life, Horace, such a confirmed dreamer as you are, nor a more impractical one." Horace laughed. "How do ye make that out?" With this my spirit returned to me and I countered with a question as good as his. It is as valuable in argument as in war to secure the offensive. "Horace, what are you working for, anyhow?" This is always a devastating shot. Ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings are desperately at work grubbing, sweating, worrying, thinking, sorrowing, enjoying, without in the least knowing why. "Why, to make a living--same as you," said Horace. "Oh, come now, if I were to spread the report in town that a poor neighbour of mine, that's you, Horace, was just making his living, that he himself had told me so, what would you say? Horace, what are you working for? It's something more than a mere living." "Waal, now, I'll tell ye, if ye want it straight, I'm layin' aside a little something for a rainy day." "A little something!" this in the exact inflection of irony by which here in the country we express our opinion that a friend has really a good deal more laid aside than anybody knows about. Horace smiled also in the exact manner of one so complimented. "Horace, what are you going to do with that thirty thousand dollars?" "Thirty thousand!" Horace looks at me and smiles, and I look at Horace and smile. "Honest now!" "Waal, I'll tell ye--a little peace and comfort for me and Josie in our old age, and a little something to make the children remember us when we're gone. Isn't that worth working for?" He said this with downright seriousness. I did not press him further, but if I had tried I could probably have got the even deeper admission of that faith that lies, like bed rock, in the thought of most men--that honesty and decency here will not be without its reward there, however they may define the "there." Some "prophet's paradise to come!" "I knew it!" I said. "Horace, you're a dreamer, too. You are dreaming of peace and comfort in your old age, a little quiet house in town where you won't have to labour as hard as you do now, where you won't be worried by crops and weather, and where Mrs. Horace will be able to rest after so many years of care and work and sorrow--a kind of earthly heaven! And you are dreaming of leaving a bit to your children and grandchildren, and dreaming of the gratitude they will express. All dreams, Horace!" "Oh, waal---" "The fact is, you are working for a dream, and living on dreams--isn't that true?" "Waal, now, if you mean it that way----" "I see I haven't got you beaten yet, Horace!" He smiled broadly, "We are all amiable enough with our own dreams. You think that what you are working for--your dream--is somehow sounder and more practical than what I am working for." Horace started to reply, but had scarcely debouched from his trenches when I opened on him with one of my twenty-fours. "How do you know that you are ever going to be old?" It hit. "And if you do grow old, how do you know that thirty thousand dollars--oh, we'll call it that--is really enough, provided you don't lose it before, to buy peace and comfort for you, or that what you leave your children will make either you or them any happier? Peace and comfort and happiness are terribly expensive, Horace--and prices have been going up fast since this war began!" Horace looked at me uncomfortably, as men do in the world when you shake the foundations of the tabernacle. I have thought since that I probably pressed him too far; but these things go deep with me. "No, Horace," I said, "you are the dreamer--and the impractical dreamer at that!" For a moment Horace answered nothing; and we both stood still there in the soft morning sunshine with the peaceful fields and woods all about us, two human atoms struggling hotly with questions too large for us. The cow and the new calf were long out of sight. Horace made a motion as if to follow them up the lane, but I held him with my glittering eye--as I think of it since, not without a kind of amusement at my own seriousness. "I'm the practical man, Horace, for I want my peace now, and my happiness now, and my God now. I can't wait. My barns may burn or my cattle die, or the solid bank where I keep my deferred joy may fail, or I myself by to-morrow be no longer here." So powerfully and vividly did this thought take possession of me that I cannot now remember to have said a decent good-bye to Horace (never mind, he knows me!). At least when I was halfway up the hill I found myself gesticulating with one clenched fist and saying to myself with a kind of passion: "Why wait to be peaceful? Why not he peaceful now? Why not be happy now? Why not be rich now?" For I think it truth that a life uncommanded now is uncommanded; a life unenjoyed now is unenjoyed; a life not lived wisely now is not lived wisely: for the past is gone and no one knows the future. As for Horace is he convinced that he is an impractical dreamer. Not a bit of it! He was merely flurried for a moment in his mind, and probably thinks me now, more than ever before, just what I think him. Absurd place, isn't it, this world? So I reached home at last. You have no idea, unless you have tried it yourself, how good breakfast tastes alter a three-mile tramp in the sharp morning air. The odour of ham and eggs, and new muffins, and coffee, as you come up the hill, there is an odour for you! And it was good to see Harriet. "Harriet," I said, "you are a sight for tired eyes." CHAPTER IV THE GREEN PEOPLE I have always had a fondness, when upon my travels about the world of the near-by woods and fields, for nipping a bit of a twig here and there and tasting the tart or bitter quality of it. I suppose the instinct descends to me from the herbivorous side of my distant ancestry. I love a spray of white cedar, especially the spicy, sweet inside bark, or a pine needle, or the tender, sweet, juicy end of a spike of timothy grass drawn slowly from its close-fitting sheath, or a twig of the birch that tastes like wintergreen. I think this no strange or unusual instinct, for I have seen many other people doing it, especially farmers around here, who go through the fields nipping the new oats, testing the red-top, or chewing a bit of sassafras bark. I have in mind a clump of shrubbery in the town road, where an old house once stood, of the kind called here by some the "sweet-scented shrub," and the brandies of it nearest the road are quite clipped and stunted I'm being nipped at by old ladies who pass that way and take to it like cat to catnip. For a long time this was a wholly unorganized, indeed all but unconscious, pleasure, a true pattern of the childish way we take hold of the earth; but when I began to come newly alive to all things as I have already related--I chanced upon this curious, undeveloped instinct. "What is it I have here?" I asked myself, for I thought this might be a new handle for getting hold of nature. Along one edge of my field is a natural hedge of wild cherry, young elms and ashes, dogwood, black raspberry bushes and the like, which has long been a pleasure to the eye, especially in the early morning when the shadows of it lie long and cool upon the meadow. Many times I have walked that way to admire it, or to listen for the catbirds that nest there, or to steal upon a certain gray squirrel who comes out from his home in the chestnut tree on a fine morning to inspect his premises. It occurred to me one day that I would make the acquaintance of this hedge in a new way; so I passed slowly along it where the branches of the trees brushed my shoulder and picked a twig here and there and bit it through. "This is cherry," I said; "this is elm, this is dogwood." And it was a fine adventure to know old friends in new ways, for I had never thought before to test the trees and shrubs by their taste and smell. After that, whenever I passed that way, I closed my eyes and tried for further identifications by taste, and was soon able to tell quickly half a dozen other varieties of trees, shrubs, and smaller plants along that bit of meadow. Presently, as one who learns to navigate still water near shore longs for more thrilling voyages, I tried the grassy old roads in the woods, where young trees and other growths were to be found in great variety: and had a joy of it I cannot describe, for old and familiar places were thus made new and wonderful to me. And when I think of those places, now, say in winter, I grasp them more vividly and strongly than ever I did before, for I think not only how they look, but how they taste and smell, and I even know many of the growing things by the touch of them. It is certain that our grasp of life is in direct proportion to the variety and warmth of the ways in which we lay hold of it. No thought no beauty and no joy. On these excursions I have often reflected that if I were blind, I should still find here unexplored joys of life, and should make it a point to know all the friendly trees and shrubs around about by the taste or smell or touch of them. I think seriously that this method of widening the world of the blind, and increasing their narrower joys, might well be developed, though it would be wise for such as do take it to borrow first the eyes of a friend to see that no poison ivy, which certain rascally birds plant along our fences and hedges, is lurking about. Save for this precaution I know of nothing that will injure the taster, though he must be prepared, here and there, for shocks and thrills of bitterness. A lilac leaf, for example, and to a scarcely lesser degree the willow and the poplar are, when bitten through, of a penetrating and intense bitterness; but do no harm, and will daunt no one who is really adventurous. There is yet to be written a botany, or, better yet, a book of nature, for the blind. It is by knowing human beings that we come to understand them, and by understanding them come to love them, and so it is with the green people. When I was a boy in the wild north country trees were enemies to be ruthlessly fought--to be cut down, sawed, split, burned--anything to be rid of them. The ideal in making a home place was to push the forest as far away from it as possible. But now, when I go to the woods, it is like going among old and treasured friends, and with riper acquaintance the trees come to take on, curiously, a kind of personality, so that I am much fonder of some trees than of others, and instinctively seek out the companionship of certain trees in certain moods, as one will his friends. I love the unfolding beeches in spring, and the pines in winter; the elms I care for afar off, like great aloof men, whom I can admire; but for friendly confidences give me an apple tree in an old green meadow. [Illustration: For friendly confidences give me an apple tree in an old green meadow.] In this more complete understanding I have been much aided by getting hold of my friends of the hedges and hills in the new ways I have described. At times I even feel that I have become a fully accepted member of the Fraternity of the Living Earth, for I have already received many of the benefits which go with that association; and I know now for a certainty that it makes no objection to its members because they are old, or sad, or have sinned, but welcomes them all alike. The essential taste of the cherry and peach and all their numerous relatives is, in variation, that of the peach pit, so that the whole tribe may be easily recognized, though it was some time before I could tell with certainty the peach from the cherry. The oak shoot, when chewed a little, tastes exactly like the smell of new oak lumber; the maple has a peculiar taste and smell of its own that I can find no comparison for, and the poplar is one of the bitterest trees that ever I have tasted. The trees--pines, spruces, hemlocks, balsams, cedars--are to me about the pleasantest of all, both in taste and odour, and though the spruces and pines taste and smell much alike at first, one soon learns to distinguish them. The elm has a rather agreeable, nondescript, bitterish taste, but the linden is gummy and of a mediocre quality, like the tree itself, which I dislike. Some of the sweetest flowering shrubs, such as the lilac, have the bitterest of leaves and twigs or, like certain kinds of clematis, have a seed that when green is sharper than cayenne pepper, while others, like the rose, are pleasanter in flavour. The ash tree is not too bitter and a little sour. I give here only a few of the commoner examples, for I wish to make this no tedious catalogue of the flavours of the green people. I am not a scientist, nor would wish to be taken for one. Only last winter I had my pretensions sadly shocked when I tasted twigs cut from various trees and shrubs and tried to identify them by taste or by smell, and while it was a pleasing experiment I found I could not certainly place above half of them; partly, no doubt, because many growing things keep their flavours well wrapped up in winter. No, I have not gone far upon this pleasant road, but neither am I in any great hurry; for there yet remains much time in this and my future lives to conquer the secrets of the earth. I plan to devote at least one entire life to science, and may find I need several! One great reason why the sense of taste and the sense of smell have not the same honour as the sense of sight or of hearing is that no way has yet been found to make a true art of either. For sight, we have painting, sculpturing, photography, architecture, and the like; and for hearing, music; and for both, poetry and the drama. But the other senses are more purely personal, and have not only been little studied or thought about, but are the ones least developed, and most dimmed and clogged by the customs of our lives. For the sense of smell we have, indeed, the perfumer's art, but a poor rudimentary art it is, giving little freedom for the artist who would draw his inspirations freshly from nature. I can, indeed, describe poorly in words the odours of this June morning--the mingled lilacs, late wild cherries, new-broken soil, and the fragrance of the sun on green verdure, for there are here both lyrical and symphonic odours--but how inadequate it is! I can tell you what I feel and smell and taste, and give you, perhaps, a desire another spring to spend the months of May and June in the country, but I can scarcely make you live again the very moment of life I have lived, which is the magic quality of the best art. The art of the perfumer which, like all crude art, thrives upon blatancy, does not make us go to gardens, or love the rose, but often instils in us a kind of artificiality, so that perfumes, so far from being an inspiration to us, increasing our lives, become often the badge of the abnormal, used by those unsatisfied with simple, clean, natural things. And as a people deficient in musical art delights in ragtime tunes, so a people deficient in the true art of tasting and smelling delights in ragtime odours and ragtime tastes. I do not know that the three so-called lesser senses will ever be organized to the point where they are served by well-established arts, but this I do know--that there are three great ways of entering upon a better understanding of this magic earth which are now neglected. I think we have come upon hasty and heated days, and are too much mastered by the god of hurry and the swift and greedy eye. We accept flashing pictures of life for life itself; we rush here and rush there and, having arrived, rush away again--to what sensible purpose? Be still a little! Be still! I do not mean by stillness, stagnation not yet lazy contentment, but life more deeply thought about, more intensely realized, an activity so concentrated that it is quiet. Be still then! So it is that, though I am no worshipper of the old, I think the older gardeners had in some ways a better practice of the art than we have, for they planted not for the eye alone but for the nose and the sense of taste and even, in growing such plants as the lamb's tongue, to gratify, curiously, the sense of touch. They loved the scented herbs, and appropriately called them simples. Some of these old simples I am greatly fond of, and like to snip a leaf as I go by to smell or taste; but many of them, I here confess, have for me a rank and culinary odour--as sage and thyme and the bold scarlet monarda, sometimes called bergamot. But if their actual fragrance is not always pleasing, and their uses are now grown obscure, I love well the names of many of them--whether from ancient association or because the words themselves fall pleasantly upon the ear, as, for example, sweet marjoram and dill, anise and summer savoury, lavender and sweet basil. Coriander! Caraway! Cumin! And "there's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember,... there's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you: and here's some for me--" All sweet names that one loves to roll under his tongue. I have not any great number of these herbs in my own garden, but, when I go among those I do have, I like to call them by their familiar names as I would a dignified doctor or professor, if ever I knew him well enough. It is in this want of balance and quietude that the age fails most. We are all for action, not at all for reflection; we think there are easy ways to knowledge and shortcuts to perfection; we are for laws rather than for life. And this reminds me inevitably of a mellow-spirited old friend who lives not a thousand miles from here--I must not tell his name--whose greatest word is "proportion." At this moment, as I write, I can hear the roll of his resonant old voice on the syllable p-o-r--prop-o-rtion. He is the kind of man good to know and to trust. If ever I bring him a hard problem, as, indeed, I delight to do, it is a fine thing to see him square himself to meet it. A light comes in his eye, he draws back his chin a little and exclaims occasionally: "Well--well!" He will have all the facts and circumstances fully mobilized, standing up side by side before him like an awkward squad, and there's nothing more awkward than some facts that have to stand out squarely in daylight! And he inquires into their ancestry, makes them run out their tongues, and pokes them once or twice in the ribs, to make sure that they are lively and robust facts capable of making a good fight for their lives. He never likes to see any one thing too large, as a church, a party, a reform, a new book, or a new fashion, lest he see something else too small; but will have everything, as he says, in true proportion. If he occasionally favours a little that which is old, solid, well-placed, it is scarcely to be measured to him as a fault in an age so overwhelmed with the shiny new. He is a fine, up-standing, hearty old gentleman with white hair and rosy cheeks, and the bright eyes of one who has lived all his life with temperance. One incident I cannot resist telling, though it has nothing directly to do with this story, but it will let you know what kind of a man my old friend is, and when all is said, it would be a fine thing to know about any man. Not long ago he was afflicted with a serious loss, a loss that would have crushed some men, but when I met him not long afterward, though the lines around his eyes were grown deeper, he greeted me in his old serene, courtly manner, When I would have comforted him with my sympathy, for I felt myself near enough to speak of his loss, he replied calmly: "How can we know whether a thing is evil until we reach the end of it? It may be good!" One of the events I esteem among the finest of the whole year is my old friend's birthday party. Every winter, on the twenty-sixth of February, a party of his friends drop in to see him. Some of us go out of habit, drawn by our affection for the old gentleman; others, I think, he invites, for he knows to perfection the delicate shadings of companionship which divide those who come unbidden from those, not less loved but shyer, who must be summoned. Now this birthday gathering has one historic ceremony which none of us would miss, because it expresses so completely the essence of our friend's generous and tolerant, but just, nature. He is, as I have said, a temperate man, and dislikes as much as any one I know the whole alcohol business; but living in a community where the struggle for temperance has often been waged intemperately, and where there is a lurking belief that cudgelling laws can make men virtuous, he publishes abroad once a year his declaration of independence. After we have been with our friend for an hour or so, and are well warmed and happy with the occasion, he rises solemnly and goes to the toby-closet at the end of his generous fireplace, where the apple-log specially cut for the occasion is burning merrily, and as we all fall silent, knowing well what is coming, he unlocks the door and takes from the shelf a bottle of old peach brandy which, having uncorked, he gravely smells of and possibly lets his nearest neighbour smell of too. Then he brings from the sideboard a server set with diminutive glasses that have been polished until they shine for the great occasion, and, having filled them all with the ripe liquor, he passes them around to each of us. We have all risen and are becomingly solemn as he now proposes the toast of the year--and it is always the same toast: "Here's to moderation--in all things!" He takes a sip or two, and continues: "Here's to temperance--the queen of the virtues." So we all drink off our glasses. Our mellow old friend smacks his lips, corks the tall bottle, and returns it to his toby-closet, where it reposes undisturbed for another year. "And now, gentlemen," he says, heartily, "let us go in to dinner."... As I think of it, now that it is written, this story bears no very close relationship to my original subject, and yet it seemed to follow naturally enough as I set it down, and to belong with the simple and well-flavoured things of the garden and fields; and recalling the advice of Cobbett to his nephew on the art of writing, "never to alter a thought, for that which has come of itself into your mind is likely to pass into that of another more readily and with more effect than anything which you can by reflection invent," I leave it here just as I wrote it, hoping that the kinship of my genial old friend with simple and natural and temperate things may plainly appear. CHAPTER V PLACES OF RETIREMENT "Good God, how sweet are all things here! How beautiful the fields appear! How cleanly do we feed and lie! Lord, what good hours do we keep! How quietly we sleep!" CHARLES COTTON (a friend of Izaak Walton) _April 29th_. I have been spending a Sunday of retirement in the woods. I came out with a strange, deep sense of depression, and though I knew it was myself and not the world that was sad, yet I could not put it away from me. ... As I write, the wood seems full of voices, the little rustling of leaves, the minute sounds of twigs chafing together, the cry of frogs from the swamp so steady and monotonous that it scarcely arrests attention. Of odours, a-plenty! Just behind me, so that by turning my head I can see into their cool green depths, are a number of hemlock trees, the breath of which is incalculably sweet. All the earth the very earth itself has a good rich growing odour, pleasant to smell. These things have been here a thousand years a million years and yet they are not stale, but are ever fresh, ever serene, ever here to loosen one's crabbed spirit and make one quietly happy. It seems to me I could not live if it were not possible often to come thus alone to the woods. ...On later walking I discover that here and there on warm southern slopes the dog-tooth violet is really in bloom, and worlds of hepatica, both lavender and white, among the brown leaves. One of the notable sights of the hillsides at this time of the year is the striped maple, the long wands rising straight and chaste among thickets of less-striking young birches and chestnuts, and having a bud of a delicate pink--a marvel of minute beauty. A little trailing arbutus I found and renewed my joy with one of the most exquisite odours of all the spring; Solomon's seal thrusting up vivid green cornucopias from the lifeless earth, and often near a root or stone the red partridge berries among their bright leaves. The laurel on the hills is sharply visible, especially when among deciduous trees, and along the old brown roads are patches of fresh wintergreen. In a cleft of the hills near the top of Norwottuck, though the day is warm, I found a huge snowbank--the last held trench of old winter, the last guerilla of the cold, driven to the fastnesses of the hills.... I have enjoyed this day without trying. After the first hour or so of it all the worries dropped away, all the ambitions, all the twisted thoughts-- It is strange how much thrilling joy there is in the discovery of the ages-old miracle of returning life in the woods: each green adventurer, each fragrant joy, each bird-call--and the feel of the soft, warm sunshine upon one's back after months of winter. On any terms life is good. The only woe, the only Great Woe, is the woe of never having been born. Sorrow, yes; failure, yes; weakness, yes the sad loss of dear friends--yes! But oh, the good God: I still live! Being alone without feeling alone is one of the great experiences of life, and he who practises it has acquired an infinitely valuable possession. People fly to crowds for happinesss not knowing that all the happiness they find there they must take with them. Thus they divert and distract that within them which creates power and joy, until by flying always away from themselves, seeking satisfaction from without rather than from within, they become infinitely boresome to themselves, so that they can scarcely bear a moment of their own society. But if once a man have a taste of true and happy retirement, though it be but a short hour, or day, now and then, he has found, or is beginning to find, a sure place of refuge, of blessed renewal, toward which in the busiest hours he will find his thoughts wistfully stealing. How stoutly will he meet the buffets of the world if he knows he has such a place of retirement where all is well-ordered and full of beauty, and right counsels prevail, and true things are noted. As a man grows older, if he cultivate the art of retirement, not indeed as an end in itself, but as a means of developing a richer and freer life, he will find his reward growing surer and greater until in time none of the storms or shocks of life any longer disturbs him. He might in time even reach the height attained by Diogenes, of whom Epictetus said, "It was not possible for any man to approach him, nor had any man the means of laying hold upon him to enslave him. He had everything easily loosed, everything only hanging to him. If you laid hold of his property, he would rather have let it go and be yours than he would have followed you for it; if you laid hold of his leg he would have let go his leg: if all of his body, all his poor body; his intimates, friends, country, just the same. For he knew from whence he had them, and from whom and on what conditions." The best partners of solitude are books. I like to take a book with me in my pocket, although I find the world so full of interesting things--sights, sounds, odours--that often I never read a word in it. It is like having a valued friend with you, though you walk for miles without saying a word to him or he to you: but if you really know your friend, it is a curious thing how, subconsciously, you are aware of what he is thinking and feeling about this hillside or that distant view. And so it is with books. It is enough to have this writer in your pocket, for the very thought of him and what he would say to these old fields and pleasant trees is ever freshly delightful. And he never interrupts at inconvenient moments, nor intrudes his thoughts upon yours unless you desire it. I do not want long books and least of all story books in the woods--these are for the library--but rather scraps and extracts and condensations from which thoughts can be plucked like flowers and carried for a while in the buttonhole. So it is that I am fond of all kinds of anthologies. I have one entitled "Traveller's Joy," another, "Songs of Nature," and I have lately found the best one I know called "The Spirit of Man" by Robert Bridges, the English laureate. Other little books that fit well in the pocket on a tramp, because they are truly companionable, are Ben Jonson's "Timber," one of the very best, and William Penn's "Fruits of Solitude." An anthology of Elizabethan verse, given me by a friend, is also a good companion. It is not a discourse or a narrative we want as we walk abroad, but conversation. Neither do we want people or facts or stories, but a person. So I open one of these little books and read therein the thoughtful remark of a wise companion. This I may reply to, or merely enjoy, as I please. I am in no hurry, as I might be with a living companion, for my book friend, being long dead, is not impatient and gives me time to reply, and is not resentful if I make no reply at all. Submitted to such a test as this few writers, old or new, give continued profit or delight. To be considered in the presence of the great and simple things of nature, or worn long in the warm places of the spirit, a writer must have supreme qualities of sense or humour, a great sensitiveness to beauty, or a genuine love of goodness--but above all he must somehow give us the flavour of personality. He must be a true companion of the spirit. * * * * * There is an exercise given to young soldiers which consists in raising the hands slowly above the head, taking in a full breath at the same time, and then letting them down in such a way as to square the shoulders. This leaves the body erect, the head high, the eyes straight ahead, the lungs full of good air. It is the attitude that every man at arms should wish to take, After a day in the woods I feel some such erectness of spirit, a life of the head, and a clearer and calmer vision, for I have raised up my hands to the heavens, and drawn in the odours and sights and sounds of the good earth. * * * * * One of the great joys of such times of retirement perhaps the greatest of the joys is the return, freshened and sweetened, to the common life. How good then appear the things of the garden and farm, the house and shop, that weariness had staled; how good the faces of friends. CHAPTER VI +NO TRESPASS+ I live in a country of beautiful hills, and in the last few years, since I have been here with Harriet, I have made familiar and pleasant acquaintance with several of them.... One hill I know is precious to me for a peculiar reason. Upon the side of it, along the town road, are two or three old farms with lilacs like trees about their doorways, and ancient apple orchards with great gnarly branches, and one has an old garden of hollyhocks, larkspurs, zinnias, mignonette, and I know not how many other old-fashioned flowers. Wild grapes there are along the neglected walls, and in a corner of one of them, by a brook, a mass of sweet currant which in blossom time makes all that bit of valley a bower of fragrance, I have gone that way often in spring for the sheer joy of the friendly odours I had across the ancient stone fences. The largest and stoniest of the farms is owned by an old man named Howieson. A strange, brown-clad, crooked, crabbed old man, I have seen him often creeping across his fields with his horses. An ineffective worker all his life long, he has scarcely made a living from his stony acres. His farm is tipped up behind upon the hill and runs below to the brook, and the buildings are old and worn, and a rocky road goes by to the town. Once, in more prosperous days, before the factories took over the winter work of these hill farms, the busy families finished shoes, and wove cloth, and plaited straw hats--and one I know was famous for wooden bowls craftily hollowed out of maple knots--and the hill people relied upon their stony fields for little more than their food. But in these later days, the farm industries are gone, the houses are no longer overflowing with children, for there is nothing for children to do, and those who remain are old or discouraged. Some homes have entirely disappeared, so that all that remains is a clump of lilacs or a wild tangle of rose bushes about a grass-covered or bush-grown cellar wall. The last thing to disappear is not that which the old farmers most set their hearts upon, their fine houses and barns or their cultivated fields, but the one touch of beauty they left--lilac clump or rose-tangle. Old Howieson, with that passion for the sense of possession which thrives best when the realities of possession are slipping away, has posted all his fields with warnings against intrusion. You may not enter this old field, nor walk by this brook, nor climb this hill, for all this belongs, in fee simple, to James Howieson! [Illustration: NO TRESPASS +JAMES HOWIESON+] For a long time I did not meet James Howieson face to face, though I had often seen his signs, and always with a curious sense of the futility of them. I did not need to enter his fields, nor climb his hill, nor walk by his brook, but as the springs passed and the autumns whitened into winter, I came into more and more complete possession of all those fields that he so jealously posted. I looked with strange joy upon his hill, saw April blossom in his orchard, and May colour the wild grape leaves along his walls. June I smelled in the sweet vernal of his hay fields, and from the October of his maples and beeches I gathered rich crops and put up no hostile signs of ownership, paid no taxes, worried over no mortgage, and often marvelled that he should be so poor within his posted domain and I so rich without. One who loves a hill, or a bit of valley, will experiment long until he finds the best spot to take his joy of it; and this is no more than the farmer himself does when he experiments year after year to find the best acres for his potatoes, his corn, his oats, his hay. Intensive cultivation is as important in these wider fields of the spirit as in any other. If I consider the things that I hear and see and smell, and the thoughts that go with them or grow out of them, as really valuable possessions, contributing to the wealth of life, I cannot see why I should not willingly give to them a tenth or a hundredth part of the energy and thought I give to my potatoes or my blackberries or to the writing I do. I chose a place in a field just below Old Howieson's farm, where there is a thorn-apple tree to sit or lie under. From the thorn-apple tree, by turning my head in one direction, I can look up at the crown of the hill with its green hood of oaks and maples and chestnuts, and high above it I can see the clouds floating in the deep sky, or, if I turn my head the other way, for I am a kind of monarch there on the hill and command the world to delight me, I can look off across the pleasant valley with its spreading fields and farmsteads set about with trees, and the town slumbering by the riverside. I come often with a little book in one pocket to read from, and a little book in the other to write in, but I rarely use either the one or the other, for there is far too much to see and think about. From this spot I make excursions round about, and have had many strange and interesting adventures: and now find thoughts of mine, like lichens, upon all the boulders and old walls and oak trees of that hillside. Sometimes I climb to the top of the hill. If I am in a leisurely mood I walk lawfully around Old Howieson's farm by a kind of wood lane that leads to the summit, but often I cross his walls, all regardless of his trespass signs, and go that way to the top. [Illustration: It was on one of these lawless excursions in Old Howieson's field that I first saw that strange old fellow] It was on one of these lawless excursions in Old Howieson's field that I first saw that strange old fellow who is known hereabout as the Herbman. I came upon him so suddenly that I stopped short, curiously startled, as one is startled at finding anything human that seems less than human. He was kneeling there among the low verdure of a shallow valley, and looked like an old gray rock or some prehistoric animal. I stopped to look at him, but he paid no heed, and seemed only to shrink into himself as though, if he kept silent, he might be taken for stock or stone. I addressed him but he made no answer. I went nearer, with a sensation of uncanny wonder; but he did not so much as glance up at me, though he knew I was there. His old brown basket was near him and the cane beside it. He was gathering pennyroyal. "Another man who is taking an unexpected crop from Old Howieson's acres," I thought to myself. I watched him for some moments, quite still, as one might watch a turtle or a woodchuck--and left him there. Since then I have heard something about him, and seen him once or twice. A strange old man, a wanderer upon the face of the fragrant earth. Spring and summer he wears always an old overcoat, and carries a basket with double covers, very much worn and brown with usage. His cane is of hickory with a crooked root for a handle, this also shiny with age. He gathers bitter-bark, tansy; ginseng, calamus, smartweed, and slippery elm, and from along old fences and barnyards, catnip and boneset, I suppose he lives somewhere, a hole in a log, or the limb of a tree, but no one knows where it is, or how he dries or cures his findings. No one knows his name: perhaps he has forgotten it himself. A name is no great matter anyway. He is called simply the Herbman. He drifts into our valley in the spring, is seen here and there on the hills or in the fields, like the crows or the blackbirds, and disappears in the fall with the robins and the maple leaves. Perhaps he is one of those favoured souls to whom life is all spring and summer. The age has passed him by, and except for certain furtive old women, few care now for his sovereign remedies. I met him once in the town road, and he stopped humbly without lifting his eyes, and opening his basket let out into the air such a fragrance of ancient simples as I never smelled before. He said nothing at all; but took out dry bundles of catnip, sassafras, slippery elm, to show me. He had also pennyroyal for healing teas, and calamus and bitter-bark for miseries. I selected a choice assortment of his wares to take home to Harriet, but could get him to name no price. He took what I gave without objection and without thanks, and went his way. A true man of the hills. As I said, I came often to the field below Old Howieson's farm. I think the old man saw me coming and going, for the road winds along the side of the hill within sight of his house, skirts a bit of wood, and with an unexpected turn comes out triumphantly to the top of the ridge beyond. At the turn of the road I always disappeared, for I crossed the wall into the field below Old Howieson's farm, and mysteriously failed to appear to the watchful eye upon the ridge beyond. What could be more provoking or suspicious! To go in at one end of a well-travelled road and not to come out in the regular and expected way at the other! Or to be suspected of not being deferential toward trespass signs, or observant of closed ways! How disturbing to all those who dwell tremulously within posted enclosures of whatever sort, or those who base their sense of possession upon stumped paper, or take their God from a book. Men have been crucified for less. Sooner or later those who cross boundaries clash with those who defend boundaries: and those who adventure offend those who seek security; but it was a long time before I came face to face with Old Man Howieson. This was the way of it: Well back of Howieson's buildings and reaching upward upon the face of the hill stretches a long and narrow field, a kind of barren back pasture with boulders in it, and gnarly hawthorn trees, and a stunted wild apple or so. A stone fence runs down one side of the cleared land and above it rises the hill. It is like a great trough or ravine which upon still spring evenings gathers in all the varied odours of Old Howieson's farm and orchard and brings them down to me as I sit in the field below. I need no book then, nor sight of the distant town, nor song of birds, for I have a singular and incomparable album of the good odours of the hill. This is one reason why I chose this particular spot in the fields for my own, and it has given me a secret name for the place which I will not here disclose. If ever you should come this way in May, my friend, I might take you there of an evening, but could warrant you no joy of it that you yourself could not take. But you need not come here, or go there, but stop where you are at this moment, and I here assure you that if you look up, and look in, you, also, will see something of the glory of the world. One evening I had been upon the hill to seek again the pattern and dimensions of my tabernacle, and to receive anew the tables of the Jaw. I had crossed Old Howieson's field so often that I had almost forgotten it was not my own. It was indeed mine by the same inalienable right that it belonged to the crows that flew across it, or to the partridges that nested in its coverts, or the woodchucks that lived in its walls, or the squirrels in its chestnut trees. It was mine by the final test of all possession--that I could use it. He came out of a thicket of hemlocks like a wraith of the past, a gray and crabbed figure, and confronted me there in the wide field. I suppose he thought he had caught me at last. I was not at all startled or even surprised, for as I look back upon it now I know that I had always been expecting him. Indeed, I felt a lift of the spirit, the kind of jauntiness with which one meets a crucial adventure. He stood there for a moment quite silent, a grim figure of denial, and I facing him. "You are on my land, sir," he said. I answered him instantly and in a way wholly unexpected to myself: "You are breathing my air, sir." He looked at me dully, but with a curious glint of fear in his eye, fear and anger, too. "Did you see the sign down there? This land is posted." "Yes," I said, "I have seen your signs. But let me ask you: If I were not here would you own this land any more than you do now? Would it yield you any better crops?" It is never the way of those who live in posted enclosures, of whatever sort, to reason. They assert. "This land is posted," said the old man doggedly. "Are you sure you own it?" I asked. "Is it really yours?" "My father owned this farm before me," he said, "and my grandfather cleared this field and built these walls. I was born in that house and have lived there all my life." "Well, then, I must be going--and I will not come here again," I said. "I am sorry I walked on your land--" I started to go down the hill, but stopped, and said, as though it were an afterthought: "I have made some wonderful discoveries upon your land, and that hill there. You don't seem to know how valuable this field is.... Good-bye." With that I took two or three steps down the hill--but felt the old man's hand on my arm. "Say, mister," he asked, "are you one of the electric company men? Is that high-tension line comin' across here?" "No," I said, "it is something more valuable than that!" I walked onward a few steps, as though I was quite determined to get out of his field, but he followed close behind me. "It ain't the new trolley line, is it?" "No," I said, "it isn't the trolley line." "What is it, then?" In that question, eager and shrill, spoke the dry soul of the old man, the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barren acres would bring him from the outside some miraculous profit. His whole bearing had changed. He had ceased to be truculent or even fearful, but was now shrilly beseeching, A great wave of compassion came over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of his own making, and expecting wealth from the outside when there was wealth in plenty within and everywhere about him. But how could I help him? You can give no valuable thing to any man who has not the vision to take it. If I had told him what I found upon his hill or in his fields he would have thought me--well, crazy; or he would have suspected that under cover of such a quest I hid some evil design. As well talk adventure to an old party man, or growth to a set churchman. So I left him there within his walls. So often when we think we are barring other people out, we are only barring ourselves in. The last I saw of him as I turned into the road was a gray and crabbed figure standing alone, looking after me, and not far off his own sign: [Illustration: NO TRESPASS JAMES HOWIESON] Sometime, I thought, this old farm will be owned by a man who is also capable of possessing it. More than one such place I know already has been taken by those who value the beauty of the hills and the old walls, and the boulder-strewn fields. One I know is really possessed by a man who long ago had a vision of sheep feeding on fields too infertile to produce profitable crops, and many others have been taken by men who saw forests growing where forests ought to grow. For real possession is not a thing of inheritance or of documents, but of the spirit; and passes by vision and imagination. Sometimes, indeed, the trespass signs stand long--so long that we grow impatient--but nature is in no hurry. Nature waits, and presently the trespass signs rot away, one arm falls off, and lo! where the adventurer found only denial before he is now invited to--"pass." The old walls are conquered by the wild cherries and purple ivy and blackberry bushes, and the old Howiesons sleep in calm forgetfulness of their rights upon the hills they thought they possessed, and all that is left is a touch of beauty--lilac clump and wild-rose tangle. CHAPTER VII LOOK AT THE WORLD! "Give me to struggle with weather and wind; Give me to stride through the snow; Give me the feel of the chill on my cheeks, And the glow and the glory within!" _March 17th._ The joy of winter: the downright joy of winter! I tramped to-day through miles of open, snow-clad country. I slipped in the ruts of the roads or ploughed through the drifts in the fields with such a sense of adventure as I cannot describe. Day before yesterday we had a heavy north wind with stinging gusts of snow. Yesterday fell bright and cold with snow lying fine and crumbly like sugar. To the east of the house where I shovelled a path the heaps are nearly as high as my shoulder.... This perfect morning a faint purplish haze is upon all the hills, with bright sunshine and still, cold air through which the chimney smoke rises straight upward. Hungry crows flap across the fields, or with unaccustomed daring settle close in upon the manure heaps around the barns. All the hillsides glisten and sparkle like cloth of gold, each glass knob on the telephone poles is like a resplendent jewel, and the long morning shadows of the trees lie blue upon the snow. Horses' feet crunch upon the road as the early farmers go by with milk for the creamery--the frosty breath of each driver fluttering aside like a white scarf. Through the still air ordinary voices cut sharply and clearly, and a laugh bounds out across the open country with a kind of superabundance of joy. I see two men beating their arms as they follow their wood sled. They are bantering one another noisily. I see a man shovelling snow from his barn doors; as each shovelful rises and scatters, the sun catches it for an instant and it falls, a silvery shower. ... I tramped to-day through miles of it: and whether in broken roads or spotless fields, had great joy of it. It was good to stride through opposing drifts and to catch the tingling air upon one's face. The spring is beautiful indeed, and one is happy at autumn, but of all the year no other mornings set the blood to racing like these; none gives a greater sense of youth, strength, or of the general goodness of the earth. Give me the winter: give me the winter! Not all winter, but just winter enough, just what nature sends. ...Dry air in the throat so cold at first as to make one cough; and dry, sharp, tingling air in the nostrils; frost on beard and eyebrows; cheeks red and crusty, so that to wrinkle them hurts: but all the body within aglow with warmth and health. Twice the ordinary ozone in the air, so that one wishes to whistle or sing, and if the fingers grow chill, what are shoulders for but to beat them around! * * * * * It is a strange and yet familiar experience how all things present their opposites. Do you enjoy the winter? Your neighbour loathes or fears it. Do you enjoy life? To your friend it is a sorrow and a heaviness. Even to you it is not always alike. Though the world itself is the same to-day as it was yesterday and will be to-morrow--the same snowy fields and polar hills, the same wintry stars, the same infinitely alluring variety of people--yet to-day you, that were a god, have become a grieving child. Even at moments when we are well pleased with the earth we often have a wistful feeling that we should conceal it lest it hurt those borne down by circumstances too great or too sad for them. What is there to offer one who cannot respond gladly to the beauty of the fields, or opens his heart widely to the beckoning of friends? And we ask ourselves: Have I been tried as this man has? Would I be happy then? Have I been wrung with sorrow, worn down by ill-health, buffeted with injustice as this man has? Would I be happy then? I saw on my walk to-day an old woman with a crossed shawl upon her breast creeping out painfully to feed her hens. She lives on a small, ill-kept farm I have known for years. She is old and poor and asthmatic, and the cold bites through her with the sharpness of knives. The path to the hen-house is a kind of via dolorosa, a terror of slipperiness and cold. She might avoid it: her son, worthless as he is, might do it for her, but she clings to it as she clings to her life. It is the last reason for staying here! But the white fields and drifted roads are never joyfully met, never desired. She spends half the summer dreading the return of winter from the severities of which she cannot escape. Nor is it all mere poverty, though she is poor, for there are those who would help to send her away, but she will not go. She is wrapped about with Old Terrors, Ancient Tyrannies--that Terror of the Unknown which is more painful even than the Terror of the Known: those Tyrannies of Habit and of Place which so often and so ruthlessly rule the lives of the old. She clings desperately to the few people she knows ("'tis hard to die among strangers!") and the customs she has followed all her life. Against the stark power of her tragic helplessness neither the good nor the great of the earth may prevail. This reality too.... I had a curious experience not long ago: One of those experiences which light up as in a flash some of the fundamental things of life. I met a man in the town road whom I have come to know rather more than slightly. He is a man of education and has been "well-off" in the country sense, is still, so far as I know, but he has a sardonic outlook upon life. He is discouraged about human nature. Thinks that politics are rotten, and that the prices of potatoes and bread are disgraceful. The state of the nation, and of the world, is quite beyond temperate expression. Few rays of joy seem to illuminate his pathway. As we approached in the town road I called out to him: "Good morning." He paused and, to my surprise, responded: "Are you happy?" It had not occurred to me for some time whether I was happy or not, so I replied: "I don't know; why do you ask?" He looked at me in a questioning, and I thought rather indignant, way. "Why shouldn't a man be happy?" I pressed him. "Why _should_ he be? Answer me that!" he responded, "Why should he be? Look at the world!" With that he passed onward with a kind of crushing dignity. I have laughed since when I have recalled the tone of his voice as he said, "Look at the world!" Gloomy and black it was. It evidently made him indignant to be here. But at the moment his bitter query, the essential attitude of spirit which lay behind it, struck into me with a poignancy that stopped me where I stood. Was I, then, all wrong about the world? I actually had a kind of fear lest when I should look up again I should find the earth grown wan and bleak and unfriendly, so that I should no longer desire it. "Look at the world!" I said aloud. And with that I suddenly looked all around me and it is a strange, deep thing, as I have thought of it since, how the world came back upon me with a kind of infinite, calm assurance, as beautiful as ever it was. There were the hills and the fields and the great still trees--and the open sky above. And even as I looked down the road and saw my sardonic old friend plodding through the snow--his very back frowning--I had a sense that he belonged in the picture, too--and couldn't help himself. That he even had a kind of grace, and gave a human touch to that wintry scene! He had probably said a great deal more than he meant! _Look at the world_! Well, look at it. CHAPTER VIII A GOOD APPLE "I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods." I have just had one of the pleasant experiences of life. From time to time, these brisk winter days, I like to walk across the fields to Horace's farm. I take a new way each time and make nothing of the snow in the fields or the drifts along the fences.... "Why," asks Harriet, "do you insist on struggling through the snow when there's a good beaten road around?" "Harriet," I said, "why should any one take a beaten road when there are new and adventurous ways to travel?" When I cross the fields I never know at what moment I may come upon some strange or surprising experience, what new sights I may see, what new sounds I may hear, and I have the further great advantage of appearing unexpectedly at Horace's farm. Sometimes I enter by the cow lane, sometimes by way of the old road through the wood-lot, or I appear casually, like a gust of wind, around the corner of the barn, or I let Horace discover me leaning with folded arms upon his cattle fence. I have come to love doing this, for unexpectedness in visitors, as in religion and politics, is disturbing to Horace and, as sand-grits in oysters produce pearls, my unexpected appearances have more than once astonished new thoughts in Horace, or yielded pearly bits of native humour. Ever since I have known him, Horace has been rather high-and-mighty with me; but I know he enjoys my visits, for I give him always, I think, a pleasantly renewed sense of his own superiority. When he sees me his eye lights up with the comfortable knowledge that he can plough so much better than I can, that his corn grows taller than mine, and his hens lay more eggs. He is a wonderfully practical man, is Horace; hard-headed, they call it here. And he never feels so superior, I think, as when he finds me sometimes of a Sunday or an evening walking across the fields where my land joins his, or sitting on a stone fence, or lying on my back in the pasture under a certain friendly thorn-apple tree. This he finds it difficult to understand, and thinks it highly undisciplined, impractical, no doubt reprehensible. One incident of the sort I shall never forget. It was on a June day only a year or so after I came here, and before Horace knew me as well as he does now. I had climbed the hill to look off across his own high-field pasture, where the white daisies, the purple fleabane, and the buttercups made a wild tangle of beauty among the tall herd's grass. Light airs moved billowing across the field, bobolinks and meadow larks were singing, and all about were the old fences, each with its wild hedgerow of choke cherry, young elms, and black raspberry bushes, and beyond, across miles and miles of sunny green countryside, the mysterious blue of the ever-changing hills. It was a spot I loved then, and have loved more deeply every year since. Horace found me sitting on the stone fence which there divides our possessions; I think he had been observing me with amusement for some time before I saw him, for when I looked around his face wore a comfortably superior, half-disdainful smile. "David," said he, "what ye doin' here?" "Harvesting my crops," I said. He looked at me sharply to see if I was joking, but I was perfectly sober. "Harvestin' yer crops?" "Yes," I said, the fancy growing suddenly upon me, "and just now I've been taking a crop from the field you think you own." I waved my hand to indicate his high-field pasture. "Don't I own it?" "No, Horace, I'm sorry to say, not all of it. To be frank with you, since I came here, I've quietly acquired an undivided interest in that land. I may as well tell you first as last. I'm like you, Horace, I'm reaching out in all directions." I spoke in as serious a voice as I could command: the tone I use when I sell potatoes. Horace's smile wholly disappeared. A city feller like me was capable of anything! "How's that?" he exclaimed sharply. "What do you mean? That field came down to me from my grandfather Jamieson." I continued to look at Horace with great calmness and gravity. "Judging from what I now know of your title, Horace," said I, "neither your grandfather Jamieson nor your father ever owned all of that field. And I've now acquired that part of it, in fee simple, that neither they nor you ever really had." At this Horace began to look seriously worried. The idea that any one could get away from him anything that he possessed, especially without his knowledge, was terrible to him. "What do you mean, Mr. Grayson?" He had been calling me "David," but he now returned sharply to "Mister." In our country when we "Mister" a friend something serious is about to happen. It's the signal for general mobilization. I continued to look Horace rather coldly and severely in the eye. "Yes," said I, "I've acquired a share in that field which I shall not soon surrender." An unmistakable dogged look came into Horace's face, the look inherited from generations of land-owning, home-defending, fighting ancestors. Horace is New England of New England. "Yes," I said, "I have already had two or three crops from that field." "Huh!" said Horace. "I've cut the grass and I've cut the rowen every year since you bin here. What's more, I've got the money fer it in the bank." He tapped his fingers on the top of the wall. "Nevertheless, Horace," said I, "I've got my crops, also, from that field, and a steady income, too." "What crops?" "Well, Eve just now been gathering in one of them. What do you think of the value of the fleabane, and the daisies, and the yellow five-finger in that field?" "Huh!" said Horace. "Well, I've just been cropping them. And have you observed the wind in the grass--and those shadows along the southern wall? Aren't they valuable?" "Huh!" said Horace. "I've rarely seen anything more beautiful," I said, "than this field and the view across it--I'm taking that crop now, and later I shall gather in the rowen of goldenrod and aster, and the red and yellow of the maple trees--and store it all away in _my_ bank--to live on next winter." It was some time before either of us spoke again, but I could see from the corner of my eye that mighty things were going on inside of Horace; and suddenly he broke out into a big laugh and clapped his knee with his hand in a way he has. "Is that all!" said Horace. I think it only confirmed him in the light esteem in which he held me. Though I showed him unmeasured wealth in his own fields, ungathered crops of new enjoyment, he was unwilling to take them, but was content with hay. It is a strange thing to me, and a sad one, how many of our farmers (and be it said in a whisper, other people, too) own their lands without ever really possessing them: and let the most precious crops of the good earth go to waste. After that, for a long time, Horace loved to joke me about my crops and his. A joke with Horace is a durable possession. "S'pose you think that's your field," he'd say. "The best part of it," I'd return, "but you can have all I've taken, and there'll still be enough for both of us." "You're a queer one!" he'd say, and then add sometimes, dryly, "but there's one crop ye don't git, David," and he'd tap his pocket where he carries his fat, worn, leather pocket-book. "And as fer feelin's, it can't be beat." So many people have the curious idea that the only thing the world desires enough to pay its hard money for is that which can be seen or eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange, intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a feverish world the unknown great possessions. So it was that one day, some months afterward, when we had been thus bantering each other with great good humour, I said to him: "Horace, how much did you get for your hay this year?" "Off that one little piece," he replied, "I figger fifty-two dollars." "Well, Horace," said I, "I have beaten you. I got more out of it this year than you did." "Oh, I know what you mean----" "No, Horace, you don't. This time I mean just what you do: money, cash, dollars." "How's that, now?" "Well, I wrote a little piece about your field, and the wind in the grass, and the hedges along the fences, and the weeds among the timothy, and the fragrance of it all in June and sold it last week----" I leaned over toward Horace and whispered behind my hand--in just the way he tells me the price he gets for his pigs. "What!" he exclaimed. Horace had long known that I was "a kind of literary feller," but his face was now a study in astonishment. "_What?_" Horace scratched his head, as he is accustomed to do when puzzled, with one finger just under the rim of his hat. "Well, I vum!" said he. Here I have been wandering all around Horace's barn--in the snow--getting at the story I really started to tell, which probably supports Horace's conviction that I am an impractical and unsubstantial person. If I had the true business spirit I should have gone by the beaten road from my house to Horace's, borrowed the singletree I went for, and hurried straight home. Life is so short when one is after dollars! I should not have wallowed through the snow, nor stopped at the top of the hill to look for a moment across the beautiful wintry earth--gray sky and bare wild trees and frosted farmsteads with homely smoke rising from the chimneys--I should merely have brought home a singletree--and missed the glory of life! As I reflect upon it now, I believe it took me no longer to go by the fields than by the road; and I've got the singletree as securely with me as though I had not looked upon the beauty of the eternal hills, nor reflected, as I tramped, upon the strange ways of man. Oh, my friend, is it the settled rule of life that we are to accept nothing not expensive? It is not so settled for me; that which is freest, cheapest, seems somehow more valuable than anything I pay for; that which is given better than that which is bought; that which passes between you and me in the glance of an eye, a touch of the hand, is better than minted money! I found Horace upon the March day I speak of just coming out of his new fruit cellar. Horace is a progressive and energetic man, a leader in this community, and the first to have a modern fruit cellar. By this means he ministers profitably to that appetite of men which craves most sharply that which is hardest to obtain: he supplies the world with apples in March. It being a mild and sunny day, the door of the fruit cellar was open, and as I came around the corner I had such of whiff of fragrance as I cannot describe. It seemed as though the vials of the earth's most precious odours had been broken there in Horace's yard! The smell of ripe apples! In the dusky depths of the cellar, down three steps, I could see Horace's ruddy face. "How are ye, David," said he. "Will ye have a Good Apple?" So he gave me a good apple. It was a yellow Bellflower without a blemish, and very large and smooth. The body of it was waxy yellow, but on the side where the sun had touched it, it blushed a delicious deep red. Since October it had been in the dark, cool storage-room, and Horace, like some old monkish connoisseur of wines who knows just when to bring up the bottles of a certain vintage, had chosen the exact moment in all the year when the vintage of the Bellflower was at its best. As he passed it to me I caught, a scent as of old crushed apple blossoms, or fancied I did or it may have been the still finer aroma of friendship which passed at the touching of our fingers. It was a hand-filling apple and likewise good for tired eyes, an antidote for winter, a remedy for sick souls. "A wonderful apple!" I said to Horace, holding it off at arm's length. "No better grown anywhere," said he, with scarcely restrained pride. I took my delight of it more nearly; and the odour was like new-cut clover in an old orchard, or strawberry leaves freshly trod upon, or the smell of peach wood at the summer pruning--how shall one describe it? at least a compound or essence of all the good odours of summer. "Shall I eat it?" I asked myself, for I thought such a perfection of nature should be preserved for the blessing of mankind. As I hesitated, Horace remarked: "It was grown to be eaten." So I bit into it, a big liberal mouthful, which came away with a rending sound such as one hears sometimes in a winter's ice-pond. The flesh within, all dewy with moisture, was like new cream, except a rim near the surface where the skin had been broken; here it was of a clear, deep yellow. New odours came forth and I knew for the first time how perfect in deliciousness such an apple could be. A mild, serene, ripe, rich bouquet, compounded essence of the sunshine from these old Massachusetts hills, of moisture drawn from our grudging soil, of all the peculiar virtues of a land where the summers make up in the passion of growth for the long violence of winter; the compensatory aroma of a life triumphant, though hedged about by severity, was in the bouquet of this perfect Bellflower. Like some of the finest of wines and the warmest of friends it was of two flavours, and was not to be eaten for mere nourishment, but was to be tasted and enjoyed. The first of the flavours came readily in a sweetness, richness, a slight acidity, that it might not cloy; but the deeper, more delicate flavour came later--if one were not crudely impatient--and was, indeed, the very soul of the fruit. One does not quickly arrive at souls either in apples or in friends. And I said to Horace with solemnity, for this was an occasion not to be lightly treated: "I have never in my life tasted a fine apple." "There is no finer apple," said Horace with conviction. With that we fell to discussing the kinds and qualities of all the apples grown this side China, and gave our more or less slighting opinions of Ben Davises and Greenings and Russets, and especially of trivial summer apples of all sorts, and came to the conclusion at last that it must have been just after God created this particular "tree yielding fruit" that he desisted from his day's work and remarked that what he saw was good. The record is silent upon the point, and Moses is not given to adjectives, but I have often wondered what He would have said if He had not only seen the product of His creation, but _tasted_ it. I forgot to say that when I would have slurred the excellence of the Baldwin in comparison with the Bellflower, Horace began at once to interpose objections, and defended the excellence and perfection of that variety. ...He has fifty barrels of Baldwins in his cellar. While we talked with much enjoyment of the lore of apples and apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds: "Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life." CHAPTER IX I GO TO THE CITY. "Surely man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers and wavering subject: It is very hard to * ground and directly constant and uniforme judgement upon him." Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do, sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and amusing. I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of noon I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city pauses a moment to refresh itself. One of the eddies I like best of all is near the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third Street swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the transverse currents of Madison Avenue. Here, of a bright morning when Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and Old Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of refreshment: a "red-hot" enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the paper--or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads of the crowd by a man on a soap box. I love this corner of the great city; I love the sense of the warm human tide flowing all about me. I love to look into the strange, dark, eager, sensitive, blunt faces. The other noon, drifting there in that human eddy, I stopped to listen to a small, shabby man who stood in transitory eminence upon his soap box, half his body reaching above the knobby black soil of human heads around him--black, knobby soil that he was seeking, there in the spring sunshine, to plough with strange ideas. He had ruddy cheeks and a tuft of curly hair set like an upholstery button on each side of his bald head. The front teeth in his upper jaw were missing, and as he opened his mouth one could see the ample lining of red flannel. He raised his voice penetratingly to overcome the noise of the world, straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead. As though his life depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to that close-packed crowd that there was no God. From time to time he offered for sale pamphlets by R.G. Ingersoll and Frederic Harrison, with grimy back numbers of a journal called the "Truth-Seeker." By the slant and timbre of his speech he was an Englishman; he had a gift of vigorous statement, and met questioners like an intellectual pugilist with skilful blows between the eyes: and his grammar was bad. I stood for some time listening to him while he proved with excellent logic, basing his reasoning on many learned authorities, that there was no God. His audience cheered with glee his clever hits, and held up their hands for the books he had for sale. "Who is this speaker?" I asked the elbowing helper who came through the crowd to deliver the speaker's wares and collect the silver for them. "Who is this speaker who says there is no God?" "Henry Moore," he responded. "And who," I asked, "is Henry Moore?" "He is an Englishman and was brought up a Presbyterian--but he seen the light." "And no longer thinks there is any God?" "Nope." "And these books prove the same thing?" "Yep." So I bought one of them, thinking it wonderful that proof of so momentous a conclusion could be had for so small a sum. This Henry Moore could fling arguments like thunderbolts; he could marshall his authorities like an army; he could talk against the roar of the city and keep his restless audience about him; and if he did not believe in God he had complete faith in Haeckel and Jacques Loeb, and took at face value the lightest utterances of John Stuart Mill. I enjoyed listening to Henry Moore. I enjoyed looking into the faces all around me--mostly keen foreign or half-foreign faces, and young faces, and idle faces, and curious faces, and faces that drank in, and faces that disdainfully rejected. After a time, however, I grew unaccountably weary of the vehemence of Henry Moore and of the adroit helper who hawked his books. And suddenly I looked up into the clear noon blue of the ancient sky. A pigeon was flying across the wide open spaces of the square, the sunlight glinting on its wings. I saw the quiet green tops of the trees in the park, and the statue of Roscoe Conkling, turning a nonchalant shoulder toward the heated speaker who said there was no God. How many strange ideas, contradictory arguments, curious logic, have fallen, this last quarter century, upon the stony ears of Roscoe Conkling! Far above me the Metropolitan tower, that wonder work of men, lifted itself grandly to the heavens, and all about I suddenly heard and felt the roar and surge of the mighty city, the mighty, careless, busy city, thousands of people stirring about me, souls full of hot hopes and mad desires, unsatisfied longings, unrealized ideals. And I stepped out of the group who were gathered around the man who said there was no God.... But I still drifted in the eddy, thinking how wonderful and strange all these things were, and came thus to another group, close gathered at the curb. It was much smaller than the other, and at the centre stood a patriarchal man with a white beard, and with him two women. He was leaning against the iron railing of the park, and several of the free-thinker's audience, freshly stuffed with arguments, had engaged him hotly. Just as I approached he drew from his pocket a worn, leather-covered Bible, and said, tapping it with one finger: "For forty years I have carried this book with me. It contains more wisdom than any other book in the world. Your friend there can talk until he is hoarse--it will do no harm--but the world will continue to follow the wisdom of this book." A kind of exaltation gleamed in his eye, and he spoke with an earnestness equal to that of Henry Moore. He, too, was a street speaker, waiting with his box at his side to begin. He would soon be standing up there to prove, also with logic and authority, that there was a God. He, also, would plough that knobby black soil of human heads with the share of his vehement faith. The two women were with him to sing their belief, and one had a basket to take up a collection, and the other, singling me out as I listened with eagerness, gave me a printed tract, a kind of advertisement of God. I looked at the title of it. It was called: "God in His World." "Does this prove that God is really in the world?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Will you read it?" "Yes," I said, "I am glad to get it. It is wonderful that so great a truth can he established in so small a pamphlet, and all for nothing." She looked at me curiously, I thought, and I put the tract by the side of the pamphlet I had bought from the freethinker, and drifted again in the eddy. The largest crowd of all was close packed about a swarthy young chap whose bushy hair waved in response to the violence of his oratory. He, too, was perspiring with his ideas. He had a marvellous staccato method of question and answer. He would shoot a question like a rifle bullet at the heads of his audience, and then stiffen back like a wary boxer, both clenched hands poised in a tremulous gesticulation, and before any one could answer his bullet-like question, he was answering it himself. As I edged my way nearer to him I discovered that he, also, had a little pile of books at his feet which a keen-eyed assistant was busily selling. How well-established the technic of this art of the city eddies! How well-studied the psychology! I thought this example the most perfect of them all, and watched with eagerness the play of the argument as it was mirrored in the intent faces all about me. And gradually I grew interested in what the man was saying, and thought of many good answers I could give to his questionings if he were not so cunning with answers of his own. Finally, in the midst of one of his loftiest flights, he demanded, hotly: "Are you not, every one of you, a slave of the capitalist class?" It was perfectly still for a second after he spoke, and before I knew what I was doing, I responded: "Why, no, I'm not." It seemed to astonish the group around me: white faces turned my way. But it would have been difficult to dash that swarthy young man. He was as full of questions as a porcupine is full of quills. "Well, sir," said he, "if I can prove to you that you are a slave, will you believe it?" "No," I said, "unless you make me feel like a slave, too! No man is a slave who does not feel slavish." But I was no match for that astonishing young orator; and he had the advantage over me of a soap box! Moreover, at that moment, the keen-eyed assistant, never missing an opportunity, offered me one of his little red books. "If you can read this without feeling a slave," he remarked, "you're John D. himself in disguise." I bought his little red book and put it with the pamphlet of the freethinker, and the tract of the God-fearing man, and stepped out of that group, feeling no more servile than when I went in. And I said to myself: "This, surely, is a curious place to be in." For I was now strangely interested in these men of the eddy. "There are more gods preached here," I said, "than ever were known on the Acropolis." Up the square a few paces I saw a covered wagon with a dense crowd around it. And in front of it upon a little platform which raised the speaker high above the heads of the audience stood a woman, speaking with shrill ardour. Most of the hearers were men; and she was telling them with logic and authority that the progress of civilization waited upon the votes of women. The army of the world stood still until the rear rank of its women could be brought into line! Morals languished, religion faded, industries were brutalized, home life destroyed! If only women had their rights the world would at once become a beautiful and charming place! Oh, she was a powerful and earnest speaker; she made me desire above everything, at the first opportunity, to use my share of the power in this Government to provide each woman with a vote. And just as I had reached this compliant stage there came a girl smiling and passing her little basket. The sheer art of it! So I dropped in my coin and took the little leaflet she gave me and put it side by side with the other literature of my accumulating library. And so I came away from those hot little groups with their perspiring orators, and felt again the charm of the tall buildings and the wide sunny square, and the park with Down-at-Heels warming his ragged shanks, and the great city clanging heedlessly by. How serious they all were there in their eddies! Is there no God? Will woman suffrage or socialism cure all the evils of this mad world which, ill as it is, we would not be without? Is a belief for forty years in the complete wisdom of the Book the final solution? Why do not all of the seeking and suffering thousands flowing by in Twenty-third Street stop here in the eddies to seek the solution of their woes, the response to their hot desires? So I came home to the country, thinking of what I had seen and heard, asking myself, "What is the truth, after all? What _is_ real?" And I was unaccountably glad to be at home again. As I came down the hill through the town road the valley had a quiet welcome for me, and the trees I know best, and the pleasant fields of corn and tobacco, and the meadows ripe with hay. I know of nothing more comforting to the questioning spirit than the sight of distant hills.... I found that Bill had begun the hay cutting. I saw him in the lower field as I came by in the road. There he was, stationed high on the load, and John, the Pole, was pitching on. When he saw me he lifted one arm high in the air and waved his hand--and I in return gave him the sign of the Free Fields. "Harriet," I said, "it seems to me I was never so glad before to get home." "It's what you always say," she remarked placidly. "This time it's true!" And I put the pamphlets I had accumulated in the city eddies upon the pile of documents which I fully intend to read but rarely get to. The heavenly comfort of an old shirt! The joy of an old hat! As I walked down quickly into the field with my pitchfork on my shoulder to help Bill with the hay, I was startled to see, hanging upon a peach tree at the corner of the orchard, a complete suit of black clothes. Near it, with the arms waving gently in the breeze, was a white shirt and a black tie, and at the foot of the tree a respectable black hat. It was as though the peach tree had suddenly, on that bright day, gone into mourning. I laughed to myself. "Bill," I said, "what does this mean?" Bill is a stout jolly chap with cheeks that look, after half a day's haying, like raw beef-steaks. He paused on his load, smiling broadly, his straw hat set like a halo on the back of his head. "Expected a funeral," he said cheerfully. Bill is the undertaker's assistant, and is always on call in cases of emergency. "What happened, Bill?" "They thought they'd bury 'im this afternoon, but they took an' kep' 'im over till to-morrow." "But you came prepared." "Yas, no time to go home in hayin'. The pump fer me, and the black togs." Bill calls the first rakings of the hay "tumbles," and the scattered re-rakings, which he despises, he calls "scratchings." I took one side of the load and John, the Pole, the other and we put on great forkfuls from the tumbles which Bill placed skilfully at the corners and sides of the load, using the scratchings for the centre. John, the Pole, watched the load from below. "Tank he too big here," he would say, or, "Tank you put more there"; but Bill told mostly by the feel of the load under his feet or by the "squareness of his eye." John, the Pole, is a big, powerful fellow, and after smoothing down the load with his fork he does not bother to rake up the combings, but gathering a bunch of loose hay with his fork, he pushes it by main strength, and very quickly, around the load, and running his fork through the heap, throws it upon the mountain-high load in a twinkling--an admirable, deft performance. Hay-making is a really beautiful process: the clicking mower cutting its clean, wide swath, a man stepping after, where the hay is very heavy, to throw the windrow back a little. Then, after lying to wilt and dry in the burning sun--all full of good odours--the horse-rake draws it neatly into wide billows, and after that, John, the Pole, and I roll the billows into tumbles. Or, if the hay is slow in drying, as it was not this year, the kicking tedder goes over it, spreading it widely. Then the team and rack on the smooth-cut meadow and Bill on the load, and John and I pitching on; and the talk and badinage that goes on, the excitement over disturbed field mice, the discussion of the best methods of killing woodchucks, tales of marvellous exploits of loaders and stackers, thrilling incidents of the wet year of '98 when two men and one team saved four acres of hay by working all night--"with lanterns, I jing"--much talk of how she goes on, "she" being the hay, and no end of observations upon the character, accomplishments, faults, and excesses of the sedate old horses waiting comfortably out in front, half hidden by the mountain of hay above them and nibbling at the tumbles as they go by. Then the proud moment when Bill the driver, with legs apart, almost pushing on the reins, drives his horses up the hill. "Go it, Dick. Let 'er out, Daisy. Stiddy, ol' boy. Whoa, there. Ease down now. Hey, there, John, block the wheel--block the wheel I tell ye. Ah-h now, jes' breathe a bit. I jing, it's hot." And then the barn, the cavernous dark doors, the hoofs of the horses thundering on the floor, the smell of cattle from below, the pigeons in the loft whirring startled from their perches. Then the hot, scented, dusty "pitching off" and "mowing in"--a fine process, an _honest_ process: men sweating for what they get. As I came in from the field that night the sun was low in the hills, and a faint breeze had begun to blow, sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day. And I felt again that curious deep sense I have so often here in the country, of the soundness and reality of the plain things of life. CHAPTER X THE OLD STONE MASON Of well-flavoured men, I know none better than those who live close to the soil or work in common things. Men are like roses and lilacs, which, too carefully cultivated to please the eye, lose something of their native fragrance. One of the best-flavoured men I know is my friend, the old stone mason. To-day I rode over with the old stone mason to select some wide stones for steps in my new building. The old man loves stones. All his life long--he is now beyond seventy years old--he has lived among stones, lifted stones, fitted stones. He knows all the various kinds, shapes, sizes, and where they will go best in a wall. He can tell at a glance where to strike a stone to make it fit a particular place, and out of a great pile he can select with a shrewd eye the stone for the exact opening he has to fill. He will run his stubby rough hand over a stone and remark: "Fine face that. Ye don't see many such stones these days," as though he were speaking of the countenance of a friend. I veritably believe there are stones that smile at him, stones that frown at him, stones that appear good or ill-humoured to him as he bends his stocky strong body to lift or lay them. He is a slow man, a slow, steady, geologic man, as befits one who works with the elemental stuff of nature. His arms are short and his hands powerful. He has been a servant of stones in this neighbourhood alone for upward of fifty years. He loves stones and can no more resist a good stone than I a good book. When going about the country, if he sees comely stones in a wayside pile, or in a fine-featured old fence he will have them, whether or no, and dickers for them with all the eagerness, sly pride, and half-concealed cunning with which a lover of old prints chaffers for a Seymour Haden in a second-hand book shop. And when he has bought them he takes the first idle day he has, and with his team of old horses goes into the hills, or wherever it may be, and brings them down. He has them piled about his barn and even in his yard, as another man might have flower beds. And he can tell you, as he told me to-day, just where a stone of such a size and such a face can be found, though it be at the bottom of a pile. No book lover with a feeling sense for the place in his cases where each of his books may be found has a sharper instinct than he. In his pocket he carries a lump of red chalk, and when we had made our selections he marked each stone with a broad red cross. I think it good fortune that I secured the old stone mason to do my work, and take to myself some credit for skill in enticing him. He is past seventy years old, though of a ruddy fresh countenance and a clear bright eye, and takes no more contracts, and is even reluctantly persuaded to do the ordinary stone work of the neighbourhood. He is "well enough off," as the saying goes, to rest during the remainder of his years, for he has lived a temperate and frugal life, owns his own home with the little garden behind it, and has money in the bank. But he can be prevailed upon, like an old artist who has reached the time of life when it seems as important to enjoy as to create, he can sometimes be prevailed upon to lay a wall for the joy of doing it. So I had the stone hauled onto the ground, the best old field stone I could find, and I had a clean, straight foundation dug, and when all was ready I brought the old man over to look at it. I said I wanted his advice. No sooner did his glance light upon the stone, no sooner did he see the open and ready earth than a new light came in his eye. His step quickened and as he went about he began to hum an old tune under his breath. I knew then that I had him! He had taken fire. I could see that his eye was already selecting the stones that should "go down," the fine square stones to make the corners or cap the wall, and measuring with a true eye the number of little stones for the fillers. In no time at all he had agreed to do my work; indeed, would have felt aggrieved if I had not employed him. I enjoyed the building of the wall, I think, as much as he did, and helped him what I could by rolling the larger stones close down to the edge of the wall. As the old man works he talks, if any one cares to listen, or if one does not care to listen he is well content to remain silent among his stones. But I enjoyed listening, for nothing in this world is so fascinating to me as the story of how a man has come to be what he is. When we think of it there are no abstract adventures in this world, but only your adventure and my adventure, and it is only as we come to know a man that we can see how wonderful his life has been. He told me all about the great walls and the little walls--miles and miles of them--he has built in the course of fifty years. He told of crude boyhood walls when he was a worker for wages only, he told of proud manhood walls when he took contracts for foundations, retaining walls, and even for whole buildings, such as churches, where the work was mostly of stone; he told me of thrilling gains and profits, and of depressing losses; and he told me of his calm later work, again on wages, for which he is chosen as a master of his craft. A whole long lifetime of it--and the last years the best of all! As we drove up yesterday to select the steps from his piles of old field stone, riding behind his great, slow, hairy-hoofed horse, in the battered and ancient wagon, he pointed with his stubby whip to this or that foundation, the work of his hands. "Fine job, that," said he, and I looked for the first time in my life at the beautiful stonework beneath the familiar home of a friend. I had seen the house a thousand times, and knew well the people in it, but my unobservant eye had never before rested consciously upon that bit of basement wall. How we go through life, losing most of the beauties of it from sheer inability to see! But the old man, as he drives about, rarely sees houses at all, especially wooden houses, and for all modern stucco and cement work he entertains a kind of lofty contempt. Sham work of a hasty and unskilled age! He never, I think, put in a shovelful of cement except in the place where it belongs, as a mortar for good walls, and never will do so as long as he lives. So long as he lives the standards of high art will never be debased! He built that foundation, and this chimney, he worked on the tower of the Baptist church in the town, "and never yet has there been a crack in her, winter or summer"; and more than forty years ago he laid the cornerstone of the old schoolhouse, the foundation walls of which stand to-day as sound and strong as they were when they were put down. In dry walls I think the old stone mason takes the greatest pride of all: for it is in the dry wall--I mean by that a wall laid without mortar--that the sheer art of the mason comes most into play. Any one can throw a wall together if he has mortar to make it stick, but a dry wall must stand out for what it is, built solid from the bottom up, each stone resting securely upon those below it, and braced and nested in by the sheer skill of the mason. The art of the dry wall is the ancient heritage of New England and speaks not only of the sincerity and the conscientiousness of the old Puritan spirit but strikes the higher note of beauty. Many of the older walls I know are worth going far to see, for they exhibit a rare sense of form and proportion, and are sometimes set in the landscape with a skill that only the Master-Artist himself could exceed. Those old, hard-wrought stone fences of the Burnham Hills and Crewsbury, the best of them, were honestly built, and built to last a thousand years. A beautiful art--and one that is passing away! It is the dry wall that stands of itself that the old stone mason loves best of all. As we drove along the road the old man pointed out to me with his stubby whip so many examples of his work that it seemed finally as if he had borne a hand in nearly everything done in this neighbourhood in the last half-century. He has literally built himself into the country and into the town, and at seventy years of age he can look back upon it all with honest pride. It stands. No jerry-work anywhere. No cracks. It stands. I never realized before how completely the neighbourhood rests upon the work of this simple old man. He _founded_ most of the homes here, and upon his secure walls rest many of the stores, the churches, and the schools of the countryside. I see again how important each man is to the complete fabric of civilization and know that we are to leave no one out, despise no one, look down upon no one. He told me stories of this ancient settler and of that. He was a powerful queer man--he wanted the moss left on his stones when I put 'em in; never a hammer touched the facings of _his_ wall... "That is properly a woman's wall. She was the boss, you might call it, and wanted stone, but _he_ wanted brick. So you see the front, where people can see it, is of stone, but the sides is all brick." Thus like the true artist that he is, he has not only built himself his own honesty, truth, skill, into the town, but he has built in the inexhaustible peculiarities, the radiant charm, the hates and the loves, of the people of this place. He has mirrored his own little age in stone. He knows the town, indeed, better than most of us, having a kind of stone-age knowledge of it--the fundamental things men build in when they set about building permanently. "And that is what you might call a spite-wall," said he, showing me a long wall leading between two shady homes, making one of them a prison on the south, and the other a prison on the north. He told me the story of an ancient and bitter quarrel between two old friends, a story which sounded to-day among spring blossoms like the account of some ancient baronial feud. But if the old stone mason has built walls to keep enemies apart how many more walls has he built to keep friends together? How many times has he been consulted by shy lovers seeking a foundation for a new home, a new family, how many times by Darby and Joan planning a resting place for the sunny closing years of their lives! He could point, indeed, to one wall that symbolized hatred; all the others meant homes, roof-trees, families, or they were the foundations for the working places of men, or else, like the tower of the church, they pointed heavenward and were built to the glory of God. The old stone mason has not the slightest idea that he has done anything unusual or wonderful. He is as simple and honest a man as ever I knew; and if he has pride, simple and honest also in that. He was anxious not to charge me too much for the stone I bought--in an age like this! I have never talked with him about God, or about religion: I had no need to. [Illustration: All the others meant homes, roof-trees, families, or else, like the tower of the church, they pointed heavenward, and were built to the glory of God.] He has done his duty in other ways by his time and his place. He has brought up a large family of children; and has known sorrow and loss, as well as happiness and contentment. Two of his children were taken in one day with pneumonia. He told me about it with a quaver in his old voice. "How long ago was it?" I asked. "Twenty-seven years." He has sons and daughters left, and two of the sons he has well trained as stone masons after him. They are good as young men go in a degenerate age. They insist on working in cement! He has grandchildren in school, and spoils them. He is also a man of public interests and upon town-meeting day puts on his good clothes and sits modestly toward the back of the hall. Though he rarely says anything he always has a strong opinion, an opinion as sound and hard as stones and as simple, upon most of the questions that come up. And he votes as he thinks, though the only man in meeting who votes that way. For when a man works in the open, laying walls true to lines and measurements, being honest with natural things, he comes clear, sane, strong, upon many things. I would sooner trust his judgment upon matters that are really important as between man and man, and man and God, than I would trust the town lawyer. And if he has grown a little testy with some of the innovations of modern life, and thinks they did everything better forty years ago--and says so--he speaks, at least, his honest conviction. If I can lay my walls as true as he does, if I can build myself a third part as firmly into any neighbourhood as he has into this, if at seventy years of age--if ever I live to lay walls with joy at that time of life--if I can look back upon _my_ foundations, _my_ heaven-pointing towers, and find no cracks or strains in them, I shall feel that I have made a great success of my life.... I went out just now: the old man was stooping to lift a heavy stone. His hat was off and the full spring sunshine struck down warmly upon the ruddy bald spot on the top of his head, the white hair around about it looking silvery in that light. As he placed the stone in the wall, he straightened up and rubbed his stubby hand along it. "A fine stone that!" said he. CHAPTER XI AN AUCTION OF ANTIQUES "I would not paint a face Or rocks or streams or trees Mere semblances of things-- But something more than these." "I would not play a tune Upon the sheng or lute Which did not also sing Meanings that else were mute." John Templeton died on the last day of August, but it was not until some weeks later that his daughter Julida, that hard-favoured woman, set a time for the auction. It fell happily upon a mellow autumn day, and as I drove out I saw the apples ripening in all the orchards along the road, and the corn was beginning to look brown, and the meadows by the brook were green with rowen. It was an ideal day for an auction, and farmers and townsmen came trooping from all parts of the country, for the Templeton antiques were to be sold. John Templeton lived in one house for seventy-eight years; he was born there, and you will find the like of that in few places in America. It was a fine house for its time, for any time, and not new when John Templeton was born. A great, solid, square structure, such as they built when the Puritan spirit was virile in New England, with an almost Greek beauty of measured lines. It has a fanlight over the front door, windows exquisitely proportion, and in the center a vast brick chimney. Even now, though weathered and unpainted, it stands four-square upon the earth with a kind of natural dignity. A majestic chestnut tree grows near it, and a large old barn and generous sheds, now somewhat dilapidated, ramble away to the rear. Enclosing the fields around about are stone fences representing the infinite labour of John Templeton's forebears. More toil has gone into the stone fences of New England, free labour of a free people, than ever went into the slave-driven building of the Pyramids of Egypt. I knew John Templeton in his old age--a stiff, weather-beaten old man driving to town in a one-horse buggy. "How are you, Mr. Templeton?" "Comin' on, comin' on." This was his invariable reply. He had the old New England pronunciation, now disappearing. He said "rud" for road, "daown" for down, and gave an indescribable twist to the word garden, best spelled "gardin." He had also the old New England ways. He was forehanded with his winter woodpile, immaculately neat with his dooryard, determined in his Sunday observance, and if he put the small apples in the middle of the barrel he refused to raise tobacco, lest it become a cause of stumbling to his neighbour. He paid his debts, disciplined his children, and in an age which has come to look chummily upon God, he dreaded His wrath. He grew a peculiar, very fine variety of sweet apple which I have never seen anywhere else. He called it the Pumpkin Sweet, for it was of a rich yellow. I can see him yet, driving into town with a shallow wagon box half full of this gold of the orchard; can see him turn stiffly to get one of the apples for me; can hear him say in the squeaky voice of age: "Ye won't find no sweeter apples hereabout, I can tell ye that." He was a dyed-in-the-wool abolition Republican and took the Boston _Transcript_ for forty-six years. He left two cords of them piled up in a back storeroom. He loved to talk about Napoleon Bonaparte and the Battle of Waterloo, and how, if there had not been that delay of half an hour, the history of the world might have been different. I can see him saying, with the words puffing out his loose cheeks: "And then Blooker kem up--" To the very last, even when his eyes were too dim to read and his voice was cracked, he would start up, like some old machine set a-whirring when you touched the rusty lever, and talk about the Battle of Waterloo. No one, so far as I know, ever heard him complain, or bemoan his age, or regret the change in the times; and when his day came, he lay down upon his bed and died. "Positively nothing will be reserved," were the familiar words of the poster, and they have a larger meaning in an old country neighbourhood than the mere sale of the last pan and jug and pig and highboy. Though we live with our neighbours for fifty years we still secretly wonder about them. We still suspect that something remains covered, something kept in and hidden away, some bits of beauty unappreciated--as they are, indeed, with ourselves. But death snatches away the last friendly garment of concealment; and after the funeral the auction. We may enter now. The doors stand at last flung widely open; all the attics have been ransacked; all the chests have been turned out; a thousand privacies stand glaringly revealed in the sunny open spaces of the yard. Positively nothing will be reserved; everything will be knocked down to the highest bidder. What wonder that the neighbourhood gathers, what wonder that it nods its head, leaves sentences half uttered, smiles enigmatically. Nearly all the contents of the house had been removed to the yard, under the great chesnut tree. A crowd of people, mostly women, were moving about among the old furniture, the old furniture that had been in John Templeton's family for no one knows how long--old highboys and lowboys, a beautifully simple old table or so, and beds with carved posts, and hand-wrought brasses, and an odd tall clock that struck with sonorous dignity. These things, which had been temptingly advertised as "antiques," a word John Templeton never knew, were only the common serviceable things of uncounted years of family life. Nothing about the place was of any great value except the antiques, and it was these that drew the well-dressed women in automobiles from as far away as Hempfield and Nortontown; and yet there were men in plenty to poke the pigs, look sarcastically at the teeth of the two old horses, and examine with calculating and rather jeering eyes John Templeton's ancient buggy, and the harness and the worn plough and cultivator and mowing machine. Everything seems so cheap, so poor, so unprotected, when the spirit has departed. Under the chestnut tree the swarthy auctioneer with his amiable countenance and ironical smile acquired through years of dispassionate observation of the follies of human emotion, the mutability of human affairs, the brevity of human endeavour, that brought everything at last under his hammer--there by the chestnut tree the auctioneer had taken his stand in temporary eminence upon an old chest, with an ancient kitchen cupboard near him which served at once as a pulpit for exhortation, and a block for execution. Already the well-worn smile had come pat to his countenance, and the well-worn witticisms were ready to his tongue. "Now, gentlemen, if you'll give me such attention as you can spare from the ladies, we have here to-day----" But I could not, somehow, listen to him: the whole scene, the whole deep event, had taken hold upon me strangely. It was so full of human meaning, human emotion, human pathos. I drifted away from the crowd and stepped in at the open door of the old house, and walked through the empty, resounding rooms with their curious old wallpaper and low ceilings and dusty windows. And there were the old fireplaces where the heavy brick had been eaten away by the pokings and scrapings of a century; and the thresholds worn by the passage of many feet, the romping feet of children, the happy feet of youth the bride passed here on her wedding night with her arm linked in the arm of the groom; the sturdy, determined feet of maturity; the stumbling feet of old age creeping in; the slow, pushing feet of the bearers with the last burden, crowding out-- The air of the house had a musty, shut-in odour, ironically cut through, as all old things are, by the stinging odour of the new: the boiling of the auction coffee in the half-dismantled kitchen, the epochal moment in the life of Julia Templeton. I could hear, occasionally, her high, strident worried voice ordering a helper about. Such a hard-favoured woman! It is the studied and profitable psychology of the auction that the rubbish must be sold first--pots and bottles and jugs at five-cent bids, and hoes at ten--and after that, the friction of the contest having warmed in the bidders an amiable desire to purchase goods they do not want and cannot use, the auctioneer gradually puts forth the treasures of the day. As I came out of the old house I could see that the mystic web had been spun, that the great moment of the sale was arriving. The auctioneer was leaning forward now upon the tall cupboard with an air of command, and surveying the assembled crowd with a lordly eye. "Now, Jake, careful there--pass it along--steady.... We come now to the cheff dooves of the day, the creem delly creems of this sale. Gentleman _and_ ladies, it is a great moment in the life of an auctioneer when he can offer, for sale, free and without reservation, such treasures as these...." I could feel the warming interest of the crowd gathering in more closely about Mr. Harpworth, the furtive silences of shrewd bargainers, eagerness masked as indifference, and covetousness cloaking itself with smiling irony. It is in the auction that trade glorifies itself finally as an Art. "Here, gentlemen _and_ ladies, is a genuine antique, hand-wrought and solid all the way through. Just enough worn to give the flavour and distinction of age. Well built in the first place, plain, simple lines, but, ladies, _beautiful_." It was the tall four-post bed he was selling and he now put his hand upon this object--a hardy service with a cunningly simulated air of deference. It was to be profaned by no irreverent handling! "What am I offered for this heirloom of the Templeton family? Ten? Ten! Fifteen over there, thank you, Mr. Cody. Why, gentlemen, that bed cannot be duplicated in America! A real product of Colonial art! Look at the colour of it! Where will you find such depth of colour in any modern piece? Age varnished it, gentlemen, age and use--the use of a hundred years.... Twenty over there, twenty I hear, twenty, twenty, make it thirty.... Speak up now, Ike, we know you've come here to-day to make your fortune--do I hear thirty?" No sooner had the great bed been sold ("it's yours, Mrs. Craigie, a treasure and dirt cheap") there came an ancient pair of hand-wrought andirons, and a spider-legged table, and a brass warming-pan, and a banjo clock.... I scarcely know how to explain it, but the sale of these inanimate antiques, so charged with the restrained grace, the reticent beauty, the serviceable strength, of a passing age, took hold upon me with strange intensity. In times of high emotion the veil between sight and insight slips aside and that which lies about us suddenly achieves a higher reality. We are conscious of "Something beside the form Something beyond the sound." It came to me with a thrill that this was no mere sale of antique wood and brass and iron, but a veritable auction, here symbolized, of the decaying fragments of a sternly beautiful civilization. I looked off across the stony fields, now softly green in the sunlight, from which three generations of the Templeton family had wrung an heroic living; I looked up at the majestic old house where they had lived and married and died.... As my eye came back to the busy scene beneath the chestnut tree it seemed to me, how vividly I cannot describe--that beside or behind the energetic and perspiring Mr. Harpworth there stood Another Auctioneer. And I thought he had flowing locks and a patriarchal beard, and a scythe for a sign of the uncertainty of life, and a glass to mark the swiftness of its passage. He was that Great Auctioneer who brings all things at last under his inexorable hammer. After that, though Mr. Harpworth did his best, he claimed my attention only intermittently from that Greater Sale which was going on at his side, from that Greater Auctioneer who was conducting it with such consummate skill--for _he_ knew that nothing is for sale but life. The mahogany highboy, so much packed and garnered life cut into inanimate wood; the andirons, so much life; the bookshelves upon which John Templeton kept his "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," so much life. Life for sale, gentlemen! What am I offered to-day for this bit of life--and this--and this-- Mr. Harpworth had paused, for even an auctioneer, in the high moment of his art, remains human; and in the silence following the cessation of the metallic click of his voice, "Thirty, thirty, thirt, thirt--make it thirty-five--thank you--forty," one could hear the hens gossiping in the distant yard. "There were craftsmen in those days, gentlemen," he was resuming; "look at this example of their art--there is quality here and durability----" At this point the Great Auctioneer broke in upon my attention and caught up Mr. Harpworth's words: "Yes, quality and durability--quality and durability. I also have here to-day, and will offer you, gentlemen, a surpassing antique, not built of wood nor fashioned in brass or iron, but a thing long attached to these acres and this house. I present for your consideration the married life of John Templeton and Hannah his wife. They lived together forty years, and the record scarcely shows a dent. In all that time hardly a word of love passed between them; but never a word of hatred, either. They had a kind of hard and fast understanding, like the laws of Moses. He did the work of the fields and she did the work of the house, from sunrise to sunset. On Sunday they went to church together. He got out at five o'clock to milk and harness up; and it made double work for her, what with getting the children cleaned, and the milk taken care of, and the Sunday dinner made ready. But neither he nor she every doubted or complained. It was the Lord's way. She bore him eight children. She told him before the last one came that she was not equal to it.... After that she was an invalid for seventeen years until she died. And there was loss of children to bear between them, and sickness, and creeping age, but this bit of furniture held firm to the last. Gentlemen, it was mad solid, no veneer, a good job all the way through." As he spoke I thought that his roving eye (perhaps it was only my own!) fell upon Johnny Holcomb, whose married life has been full of vicissitudes. "John, take this home with you; _you_ can use it." "Nope, no such married life for me," I thought I could hear him responding, rather pleased than not to be the butt of the auctioneer. "Do I hear any bids?" the Great Auctioneer was saying, almost in the words of Mr. Harpworth. "_What!_ No one wants n married life like this? Well, put it aside, Jake. It isn't wanted. Too old-fashioned." It was Julia Templeton herself who now appeared with certain of the intimate and precious "bedroom things"--a wonderful old linen bedspread, wrought upon with woollen figures, and exaling an ancient and exquisite odour of lavender, and a rag rug or so, and a little old rocking chair with chintz coverings in which more than one Templeton mother had rocked her baby to sleep. Julia herself---- I saw Julia, that hard-favoured woman, for the first time at that moment, really saw her. How fiercely she threw down the spread and the rugs! How bold and unweeping her eyes! How hard and straight the lines of her mouth! "Here they are, Mr. Harpworth!" How shrill her voice; and how quickly she turned back to the noisy kitchen! I could see the angular form, the streakings of gray in her hair. ... "What am I offered now for this precious antique? This hand-made spread? Everything sold without reserve! Come, now, don't let this opportunity slip by." He leaned forward confidentially and persuasively: "Fellah citizens, styles change and fashions pass away, but things made like these, good lines, strong material, honest work, they never grow old...." Here the Shadowy Auctioneer broke in again and lifted me out of that limited moment. "A true word!" he was saying. "Styles change and fashions pass away, and only those things that are well made, and made for service the beautiful things remain. I am offering to-day, without reservation, another precious antique. What will you give for such a religious faith as that of John Templeton? Worn for a lifetime and sound to the end. He read the Bible every Sunday morning of his life, went to church, and did his religious duty by his children. Do you remember young Joe Templeton? Wouldn't learn his chapter one Sunday, and the old gentleman prayed about it and then beat him with a hitching strap. Joe ran away from home and made his fortune in Minnesota. Nearly broke the mother's heart, and old John's, too; but he thought it right, and never repented it. Gentlemen, an honest man who feared God and lived righteously all his days! What am I offered for this durable antique, this characteristic product of New England? Do I hear a bid?" At this I felt coming over me that strange urge of the auction, to bid and to buy. A rare possession indeed, not without a high, stern kind of beauty! It would be wonderful to possess such a faith; but what had I to offer that Shadowy Auctioneer? What coin that would redeem past times and departed beliefs? It was curious how the words of Mr. Harpworth fitted into the fabric of my imaginings. When he next attracted my attention he was throwing up his hands in a fine semblance of despair. We were such obtuse purchasers! "I think," said Mr. Harpworth, "that this crowd came here to-day only to eat Julia Templeton's auction luncheon. What's the matter with this here generation? You don't want things that are well made and durable, but only things that are cheap and flashy. Put 'er aside, Jake. We'll sell 'er yet to some historical museum devoted to the habits and customs of the early Americans." He was plainly disgusted with us, and we felt it keenly, and were glad and pleased when, a moment later, he gave evidence of being willing to go on with us, paltry as we were. "Jake, pass up that next treasure." His spirits were returning; his eyes gleamed approvingly upon the newly presented antique. He looked at us with fresh confidence; he was still hopeful that we would rise to his former good opinion of us. "And now before I sell the hail clock by Willard, date of 1822, I am going to offer what is possibly the best single piece in this sale...." Here again the Old Auctioneer, having caught his cue broke in. When he spoke, who could listen to Mr. Harpworth? "... the best single piece in this sale, gentlemen! I offer you now the Templeton family pride! A choice product of old New England. A little battered, but still good and sound. The Templetons! They never did anything notable except to work, work early and late, summer and winter, for three generations. They were proud of any one who bore the Templeton name; they were proud even of Jim, simple Jim, who got a job driving the delivery wagon at the hill store, and drove it for twenty-two years and was drowned in Mill River. I'll tell you what family pride meant to old John Templeton...." I thought he leaned forward to take us into his confidence, motioning at the same time toward the house. "You know Julia Templeton----" Know her? Of course we knew her! Knew her as only the country knows its own. "When Julia ran away with that sewing-machine agent--it was her only chance!--old John Templeton drove his best cow into town and sold her, he mortgaged his team of horses, and went after the girl and brought her home with him. They were firm and strong and as righteous as God with her; and they paid off, without whining, the mortgages on the horses, and never spoke of the loss of the cow--but never forgot it. They held up their heads to the end. Gentlemen, what am I offered for this interesting antique, this rare work of art?" * * * * * The auction was considered, upon the whole, a great success. Mr. Harpworth himself said so. Ike, the Jewish dealer, bought the family clock and the spring-tooth harrow, and even bid on the family crayon portraits (the frames could be sold for something or other); a Swede bought the pigs and the old buggy; an Irish teamster bid in John Templeton's horses, and a Pole, a good man, I know him well, bought the land, and will no doubt keep his geese in the summer kitchen, and get rich from the cultivation of the ancient fields. While old John Templeton bowed himself humbly before a wrathful God he would never go down on his knees, as the Poles do, to the fertile earth. And--I forgot--an Italian from Nortontown bought for a song the apple and chestnut crops, and busy third generation Americans loaded in the antiques and drove off with them to the city. The last I saw of Julia Templeton, that hard-favoured woman, she was standing, an angular figure, in the midst of the wreck of the luncheon dishes, one arm wrapped in her apron, the other hand shading her eyes while she watched the company, in wagons and automobiles, trailing away to the westward, and the towns.... The sale was over; but the most valuable antiques of all found no purchasers: they were left behind with Julia Templeton: only she could use them. CHAPTER XII A WOMAN OF FORTY-FIVE We have an Astonishing Woman in this community. She acts in a way that no one expects, and while we are intensely interested in everything she does, and desire to know about it to the uttermost detail, we are inclined to speak of her in bated breath. Some Woman to Talk About in a country neighbourhood is a kind of public necessity. She fills one of the stated functions like the town assessor, or the president of the Dorcas Society; and if ever the office falls vacant we have immediate resort to one of those silent elections at which we choose our town celebrities. There are usually several candidates, and the campaign is accompanied by much heated argument and exemplification. We have our staunch party men and our irresponsible independents on whom you can never put your finger; and if we are sometimes a little vague in our discussion of principles and issues we share with our national political leaders an intense interest in personalities. Prominent citizens "come out" for this candidate or that, we "spring surprises," and launch new booms, and often, at the last moment, we are taken off our feet by the circulation of comebacks. I take a pardonable pride, however, in saying, to the credit of our democratic institutions that most of the candidates elected are chosen strictly upon merit. I shall never forget the afternoon, now more than a year ago, that Harriet came up the road bearing the news which, beyond a doubt, placed the present incumbent in office; and has served to keep her there, despite the efforts in certain quarters, which shall be nameless, to use that pernicious instrument of radicalism, the recall. I can always tell when Harriet brings important news. She has a slightly quicker step, carries her head a little more firmly, and when she speaks impresses her message upon me with a lowered voice. When Harriet looks at me severely and drops down an octave I prepare for the worst. "David," she said, "Mary Starkweather has gone to live in the barn!" "In the _barn_!" "In the barn." I don't know quite why it is, but I dislike being surprised, and do my best to cover it up, and, besides, I have always liked Mary Starkweather. So I remarked, as casually as I could: "Why not? It's a perfectly good barn." "David Grayson!" "Well, it is. It's a better building to-day than many of the people of this town live in. Why shouldn't Mary Starkweather live in the barn if she wants to? It's her barn." "But, _David_--there are her children--and her husband!" "There always are, when anybody wants to live in a barn." "I shall not talk with you any more," said Harriet, "until you can be serious." I had my punishment, as I richly deserved to have, in the gnawing of unsatisfied curiosity, which is almost as distressing as a troubled conscience. Within the next few days, I remember, I heard the great news buzzing everywhere I went. We had conjectured that the barn was being refitted for the family of a caretaker, and it was Mary Starkweather herself, our sole dependable representative of the Rich, who was moving in! Mary Starkweather, who had her house in town, and her home in the country, and her automobiles, and her servants, and her pictures, and her books, to say nothing of her husband and her children and her children's maid going to live in her barn! I leave it to you if there was not a valid reason for our commotion. It must have been two weeks later that I went to town by the upper hill road in order to pass the Starkweather place. It is a fine old estate, the buildings, except the barn, set well back from the road with a spacious garden near them, and pleasant fields stretching away on every hand. As I skirted the shoulder of the hill I looked eagerly for the first glimpse of the barn. I confess that I had woven a thousand stories to explain the mystery, and had reached the point where I could no longer resist seeing if I could solve it. Well, the barn was transformed. Two or three new windows, a door with a little porch, a lattice or so for vines, a gable upon the roof lifting an inquiring eyebrow--and what was once a barn had become a charming cottage. It seemed curiously to have come alive, to have acquired a personality of its own. A corner of the great garden had been cut off and included in the miniature grounds of the cottage; and a simple arbour had been built against a background of wonderful beech trees. You felt at once a kind of fondness for it. I saw Mary Starkweather in her garden, in a large straw hat, with a trowel in her hand. "How are you, David Grayson?" she called out when I stopped. "I have been planning for several days," I said, "to happen casually by your new house." "Have you?" "You don't know how you have stirred our curiosity. We haven't had a good night's rest since you moved in." "I've no doubt of it," she laughed. "Won't you come in? I'd like to tell you all about it." "I also prepared to make excuses for not stopping," I said, "and thought up various kinds of urgent business, such as buying a new snow shovel to use next winter, but after making these excuses I intended to stop--if I were sufficiently urged." "You are more than urged: you are commanded." As I followed her up the walk she said earnestly: "Will you do me a favour? When you come in will you tell me the first impression my living-room gives you? No second thoughts. Tell me instantly." "I'll do it." I said, my mind leaping eagerly to all manner of mysterious surprises. At the centre of the room she turned toward me and with a sweeping backward motion of the arms, made me a bow--a strong figure instinct with confident grace: a touch of gray in the hair, a fleeting look of old sadness about the eyes. "Now, David Grayson," she said, "quick!" It was not that the room itself was so remarkable as that it struck me as being confusingly different from the heavily comfortable rooms of the old Starkweather house with their crowded furnishings, their overloaded mantels, their plethoric bookcases. "I cannot think of you yet," I stumbled, "as being here." "Isn't it _like_ me?" "It is a beautiful room--" I groped lamely. "I was afraid you would say that." "But it is. It really is." "Then I've failed, after all." She said it lightly enough, but there was an undertone of real disappointment in her voice. "I'm in rather the predicament," I said, "of old Abner Coates. You probably don't know Abner. He sells nursery stock, and each spring when he comes around and I tell him that the peach trees or the raspberry bushes I bought of him the year before have not done well, he says, with the greatest astonishment, 'Wal, now, ye ain't said what I hoped ye would.' I see that I haven't said what you hoped I would." It was too serious a matter, however, for Mary Starkweather to joke about. "But, David Grayson," she said, "isn't it _simple_?" I glanced around me with swift new comprehension. "Why, yes, it _is_ simple." I saw that my friend was undergoing some deep inner change of which this room, this renovated barn, were mere symbols. "Tell me," I said, "how you came to such a right-about-face." "It's just that!" she returned earnestly, "It _is_ a right-about-face. I think I am really in earnest for the first time in my life." I had a moment of flashing wonder if her marriage had not been in earnest, a flashing picture of Richard Starkweather with his rather tired, good-humoured face, and I wondered if her children were not earnest realities to her, if her busy social life had meant nothing. Then I reflected that we all have such moments, when the richest experiences of the past seem as nothing in comparison with the fervour of this glowing moment. "Everything in my life in the past," she was saying, "seems to have happened to me. Life has done things _for_ me; I have had so few chances of doing anything for myself." "And now you are expressing yourself." "Almost for the first time in my life!" She paused. "All my life, it seems to me, I have been smothered with things. Just things! Too much of everything. All my time has been taken up in caring for things and none in enjoying them." "I understand!" I said with a warm sense of corroboration and sympathy. "I had so many pictures on my walls that I never saw, really saw, any of them. I saw the dust on them, I saw the cracks in the frames, that needed repairing, I even saw better ways of arranging them, but I very rarely saw, with the inner eye, what the artists were trying to tell me. And how much time I have wasted on mere food and clothing--it is appalling! I had become nothing short of a slave to my house and my things." "I see now," I said, "why you have just one rose on your table." "Yes"--she returned eagerly--"isn't it a beauty! I spent half an hour this morning looking for the best and most perfect rose in the garden, and there it is!" She was now all alight with her idea, and I saw her, as we sometimes see our oldest friends, as though I had not seen her before. She was that phenomenon of the modern world--the free woman of forty-five. When a woman reaches the old age of youth, the years between forty and forty-five, she either surrenders or revolts. In the older days in America it was nearly always surrender. Those women of a past generation bore many children: how many graves there are in our hill cemeteries of women of forty to fifty who died leading families of five or eight or ten children! How many second and third wives there were, often with second and third families. Or if they did not die, how terribly they toiled, keeping the house, clothing the children, cooking the food. Or if they bore no children, yet they were bound down by a thousand chains of convention and formality. But in these days we have a woman of forty-five who has not surrendered. She is a vigorous, experienced, active-minded human being, just beginning to look restlessly around her and take a new interest in the world. Such a woman was Mary Starkweather; and this was her first revolt. "You cannot imagine," she was saying, "what a joy it has been to unaccumulate! To get rid of things! To select." "To become an artist in life!" "Yes! At last! What a lot of perfectly worthless trash accumulates around us. Not beautiful, not even useful! And it is not only the lives of the well-to-do that are choked and cluttered with things. I wish you could see the house of our Polish farmer. He's been saving money, and filling up his house with perfectly worthless ornaments--ornate clocks, gorgeous plush furniture, impossible rugs--and yet he is only doing what we are all doing on a more elaborate scale." I laughed. "That reminds me of a family of squirrels that lives in an oak tree on my hill," I said. "I am never tired of watching them. In the fall they work desperately, stealing all the hickory nuts and chestnuts on my neighbour Horace's back pastures, five times as many as they need, and then they forget, half the time, where they've hidden them. We're all more or less in the squirrel stage of civilization." "Yes," she responded. "There are my books! I gathered up books for years, just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put them. You cannot know what joy I'm going to have in selecting just the essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions. All the others, I see now, are temporary rubbish." "And you've made your selections?" "No, but I'm making them. You'll laugh when you come next time and I show them to you. Oh, I am going to be stern with myself. I'm not going to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give the impression that I'm profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck or woman suffrage, when I'm positively not." "It's terribly risky," I said. "And I'm terribly reckless," she responded. As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure. Here was life changing under my eyes! Here was a human being struggling with one of the deep common problems that come to all of us. The revolt from things! The struggle with superfluities! And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the cattle feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself letting go--how can I explain it?--relaxing! I had been keyed up to a high pitch there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it _was_ beautiful--and yet as I thought of the sharp little green gate, the new gable, the hard, clean mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted something.... As I was gathering the rowen crop of after-enjoyment which rewards us when we reflect freshly upon our adventures, whom should I meet but Richard Starkweather himself in his battered machine. The two boys, one of whom was driving, and the little girl, were with him. "How are you, David?" he called out. "Whoa, there! Draw up, Jamie." We looked at each other for a moment with that quizzical, half-humorous look that so often conveys, better than any spoken words, the sympathetic greeting of friends. I like Richard Starkweather. He had come up from the city looking rather worn, for the weather had been trying. He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour wrinkles at the corners. I never knew a man with fewer theories, or with a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be. At everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in his regard for his own knowledge; he smiles at everything else because it doesn't seem quite real to him. "Been up to see Mary's new house?" he asked. "Yes," And for the life of me I couldn't help smiling in response. "It's a wonder isn't it?" He thought his wife a very extraordinary woman. I remember his saying to me once, "David, she's got the soul of a poet and the brain of a general." "It _is_ a wonder," I responded. "I can't decide yet what chair to sit in, nor just what she wants the kids to do." I still smiled. "I expect she hasn't determined yet," he went drawling on, "in what chair I will look most decorative." He ruminated. "You know, she's got the idea that there's too much of everything. I guess there is, too--and that she ought to select only those things that an essential. I've been wondering, if she had more than one husband whether or not she'd select me----" The restless young Jamie was now starting the machine, and Richard Starkweather leaned out and said to me in parting: "isn't she a wonder! Did all the planning herself--wouldn't have an architect--wouldn't have a decorator--all I could do--" As he turned around I saw him throw one arm carelessly about the shoulders of the sturdy younger boy who sat next him. When I got home I told Harriet all about what I had seen and heard. I think I must feel when I am retailing such fascinating neighbourhood events to Harriet--how she _does_ enjoy them!--I must feel very much as she does when she is urging me to have just a little more of the new gingerbread. In the next few months I watched with indescribable interest the unfolding of the drama of Mary Starkweather. I saw her from time to time that summer and she seemed, and I think she was, happier than ever she had been before in her whole life. Making over her garden, selecting the "essential books," choosing the best pictures for her rooms, even reforming the clothing of the boys, all with an emphasis upon perfect simplicity--her mind was completely absorbed. Occasionally Richard appeared upon the stage, a kind of absurd Greek chorus of one, who remarked what a wonderful woman this was and poked fun at himself and at the new house, and asserted that Mary could be as simple as ever she liked, he insisted on thick soup for dinner and would not sacrifice his beloved old smoking jacket upon the altar of any new idea. "She's a wonder, David," he'd wind up: "but this simple life is getting more complicated every day." It was in December, about the middle of the month, as I remember, that I had a note one day from Mary Starkweather. "The next time you go to town," it ran, "stop in and see me. I've made a discovery." With such a note as that us my hand it appeared imperative that I go to town at once. I discovered, to Harriet's astonishment, that we were running out of all sorts of necessaries. "Now, David," she said, "you know perfectly well that you're just making up to call on Mary Starkweather." "That," I said, "relieves my conscience of a great burden." As I went out of the door I heard her saying: "Why Mary Starkweather should _care_ to live in her barn...." It was a sparkling cold day, sun on the snow and the track crunching under one's feet, and I walked swiftly and with a warm sense of coming adventure. To my surprise there was no smoke in the cottage chimney, and when I reached the door I found a card pinned upon it: PLEASE CALL AT THE HOUSE Mary Starkweather herself opened the door--she had seen me coming--and took me into the big comfortable old living-room, the big, cluttered, overfurnished living-room, with the two worn upholstered chairs at the fireplace, in which a bright log fire was now burning. There was a pleasant litter of books and magazines, and a work basket on the table, and in the bay window an ugly but cheerful green rubber plant in a tub. "Well!" I exclaimed. "Don't smile--not yet." As I looked at her I felt not at all like smiling. "I know," she was saying, "it does have a humorous side. I can see that. Dick has seen it all along. Do you know, although Dick pretends to pooh-pooh everything intellectual, he has a really penetrating mind." I had a sudden vision of Dick in his old smoking jacket, standing in the midst of the immaculate cottage that was once a barn, holding his pipe with one finger crooked around the stem just in front of his nose in the way he had, and smiling across at me. "Have you deserted the cottage entirely?" "Oh, we may possibly go back in the spring-----" She paused and looked into the fire, her fine, strong face a little sad in composure, full of thought. "I am trying to be honest with myself David. Honest above everything else. That's fundamental. It seems to me I have wanted most of all to learn how to live my life more freely and finely.... I thought I was getting myself free of things when, as a matter of fact, I was devoting more time to them than ever before-and, besides that, making life more or less uncomfortable for Dick and the children. So I've taken my courage squarely in my hands and come back here into this blessed old home, this blessed, ugly, stuffy old home--I've learned _that_ lesson." At this, she glanced up at me with that rare smile which sometimes shines out of her very nature: the smile that is herself. "I found," she said, "that when I had finished the work of becoming simple--there was nothing else left to do." I laughed outright, for I couldn't help it, and she joined me. How we do like people who can laugh at themselves. "But," I said, "there was sound sense in a great deal that you were trying to do." "The fireplace smoked; and the kitchen sink froze up; and the cook left because we couldn't keep her room warm." "But you were right," I interrupted, "and I am not going to be put off by smoking fireplaces or chilly cooks; you were right. We do have too much, we are smothered in things, we don't enjoy what we do have--" I paused. "And you were making a beautiful thing, a beautiful house." "The trouble with making a beautiful thing," she replied, "is that when you have got it done you must straightway make another. Now I don't want to keep on building houses or furnishing rooms. I am not after beauty--I mean primarily--what I want is to _live_, live simply, live greatly." She was desperately in earnest. "Perhaps," I said, feeling as though I were treading on dangerous ground, "you were trying to be simple for the sake of being simple. I wonder if true simplicity is ever any thing but a by-product. If we aim directly for it, it eludes us: but if we are on fire with some great interest that absorbs on lives to the uttermost, we forget ourselves into simplicity, Everything falls into simple lines around us, like a worn garment." I had the rather uncomfortable feeling on the way home that I had been preachy; and the moment you became preachy begin to build up barriers between yourself and your friends: but that's a defect of character I've never been able, quite, to overcome. I keep thinking I've got the better of it, but along will come a beautiful temptation and down I go--and come out as remorseful as I was that afternoon on the way home from Mary Starkweather's. A week or two later I happened to meet Richard Starkweather on the street in Hempfield. He was on his way home. "Yes," he said, "we're in the old house again until spring, anyway. I haven't been so comfortable in a year. And, say," here he looked at me quizzically, "Mary has joined the new cemetery association; you know they're trying to improve the resting places of the forefathers, and, by George, if they didn't elect her chairman at the first meeting. She's a wonder!" CHAPTER XIII HIS MAJESTY--BILL RICHARDS Well, I have just been having an amusing and delightful adventure and have come to know a Great Common Person. His name is Bill Richards, and he is one of the hereditary monarchs of America. He belongs to our ruling dynasty. I first saw Bill about two weeks ago, and while I was strongly interested in him I had no idea, at the time, that I should ever come to know him well. It was a fine June day, and I was riding on the new trolley line that crosses the hills to Hewlett--a charming trip through a charming country--and there in the open car just in front of me sat Bill himself. One huge bare forearm rested on the back of the seat, the rich red blood showing through the weathered brown of the skin. His clean brown neck rose strongly from the loose collar of his shirt, which covered but could not hide the powerful lines of his shoulders. He wore blue denim and khaki, and a small round felt hat tipped up jauntily at the back. He had crisp, coarse light hair rather thin--not by age, but by nature--so that the ruddy scalp could be seen through it, and strong jaws and large firm features, and if the beard was two days old, his face was so brown, so full of youthful health, that it gave no ill impression. He could not sit still for the very life that was in him. He seemed to have some grand secret with the conductor and frequently looked around at him, his eyes full of careless laughter, and once or twice he called out--some jocose remark. He helped the conductor, in pantomime, to pull the cord and stop or start the car, and he watched with the liveliest interest each passenger getting on or getting off. A rather mincing young girl with a flaring red ribbon at her throat was to him the finest comedy in the world, so that he had to wink a telegram to the conductor about her. An old woman with a basket of vegetables who delayed the car was exquisitely funny. I set him down as being about twenty-two years old and some kind of outdoor workman, not a farmer. When he got off, which was before the car stopped, so that he had to jump and run with it, he gave a wild flourish with both arms, grimaced at the conductor, and went off down the road whistling for all he was worth. How I enjoyed the sight of him! He was so charged with youthful energy, so overflowing with the joy of life, that he could scarcely contain himself. What a fine place the world was to him! And what comical and interesting people it contained! I was sorry when he got off. Two or three days later I was on my way up the town road north of my farm when I was astonished and delighted to see Bill for the second time. He was coming down the road pulling a wire over the crosspiece of a tall telephone pole (the company is rebuilding and enlarging its system through our town). He was holding the wire close drawn over his right shoulder, his strong hands gripped and pressed upon his breast. The veins stood out in his brown neck where the burlap shoulder pad he wore was drawn aside by the wire. He leaned forward, stepping first on his toe, which he dug into the earth and then, heavily letting down his heel, he drew the other foot forward somewhat stiffly. The muscles stood out in his powerful shoulders and thighs. His legs were double-strapped with climbing spurs. He was a master lineman. As I came alongside he turned a good-humoured sweaty face toward me. "It's dang hot," said he. "It is," said I. There is something indescribably fascinating about the sight of a strong workman in the full swing of his work, something--yes, beautiful! A hard pull of a job, with a strong man doing it joyfully, what could be finer to see? And he gave such a jaunty sense of youth and easy strength! I watched him for some time, curiously interested, and thought I should like well to know him, but could not see just how to go about it. The man astride the cross-arm who was heaving the wire forward from the spool on the distant truck suddenly cried out: "Ease up there, Bill, she's caught." So Bill eased up and drew his arm across his dripping face. "How many wires are you putting up?" I asked, fencing for some opening. "Three," said Bill. Before I could get in another stroke the man on the pole shouted: "Let 'er go, Bill." And Bill let 'er go, and buckled down again to his job. "Gee, but it's hot," said he. In the country there are not so many people passing our way that we cannot be interested in all of them. That evening I could not help thinking about Bill, the lineman, wondering where he came from, how he happened to be what he was, who and what sort were the friends he made, and the nature of his ambitions, if he had any. Talk about going to the North Pole! It is not to be compared, for downright fascination, with the exploration of an undiscovered human being. With that I began to think how I might get at Bill, the lineman, and not merely weather talk, or wages talk, or work talk, but at Bill himself. He was a character quite unusual in our daily lives here in the country. I wondered what his interests could be, surely not mine nor Horace's nor the Starkweathers'. As soon as I began trying to visualize what his life might be, I warmed up to a grand scheme of capturing him, if by chance he was to be found the next day upon the town road. All this may seem rather absurd in the telling, but I found it a downright good adventure for a quiet evening, and fully believe I felt for the moment like General Joffre planning to meet the Germans on the Marne. "I have it!" I said aloud. "You have what?" asked Harriet, somewhat startled. "The grandest piece of strategy ever devised in this town," said I. With that I went delving in a volume of universal information I keep near me, one of those knowing books that tells you how tall the great Pryamid is and why a hen cackles after laying an egg, and having found what I wanted I asked Harriet if she could find a tape measure around the place. She is a wonderful person and knows where everything is. When she handed me the tape measure she asked me what in the world I was so mysterious about. "Harriet," I said, "I'm going on a great adventure. I'll tell you all about it to-morrow." "Nonsense," said Harriet. It is this way with the fancies of the evening--they often look flat and flabby and gray the next morning. Quite impossible! But if I'd acted on half the good and grand schemes I've had o' nights I might now be quite a remarkable person. I went about my work the next morning just as usual. I even avoided looking at the little roll of tape on the corner of the mantel as I went out. It seemed a kind of badge of my absurdity. But about the middle of the fore-noon, while I was in my garden, I heard a tremendous racket up the road. Rattle--bang, zip, toot! As I looked up I saw the boss lineman and his crew careering up the road in their truck, and the bold driver was driving like Jehu, the son of Nimshi. And there were ladders and poles clattering out behind, and rolls of wire on upright spools rattling and flashing in the sunshine, and the men of the crew were sitting along the sides of the truck with hats off and hair flying as they came bumping and bounding up the road. It was a brave thing to see going by on a spring morning! As they passed, whom should I see but Bill himself, at the top of the load, with a broad smile on his face. When his eye fell on me he threw up one arm, and gave me the railroad salute. "Hey, there!" he shouted. "Hey there, yourself," I shouted in return--and could not help it. I had a curious warm feeling of being taken along with that jolly crowd of workmen, with Bill on the top of the load. It was this that finished me. I hurried through an early dinner, and taking the tape measure off the mantel I put it in my pocket as though it were a revolver or a bomb, and went off up the road feeling as adventurous as ever I felt in my life. I never said a word to Harriet but disappeared quietly around the lilac bushes. I was going to waylay that crew, and especially Bill. I hoped to catch them at their nooning. Well, I was lucky. About a quarter of a mile up the road, in a little valley near the far corner of Horace's farm, I found the truck, and Bill just getting out his dinner pail. It seems they had flipped pennies and Bill hod been left behind with the truck and the tools while the others went down to the mill pond in the valley below. "How are you?" said I. "How are _you_?" said he. I could see that he was rather cross over having been left behind. "Fine day," said I. "You bet," said he. He got out his pail, which was a big one, and seated himself on the roadside, a grassy, comfortable spot near the brook which runs below into the pond. There were white birches and hemlocks on the hill, and somewhere in the thicket I heard a wood thrush singing. "Did you ever see John L. Sullivan?" I asked. He glanced up at me quickly, but with new interest. "No, did you?" "Or Bob Fitzsimmons?" "Nope--but I was mighty near it once. I've seen 'em both in the movies." "Well, sir," said I, "that's interesting. I should like to see them myself. Do you know what made me speak of them?" He had spread down a newspaper and was taking the luncheon out of his "bucket," as he called it, including a large bottle of coffee; but he paused and looked at me with keen interest. "Well," said I, "when I saw you dragging that wire yesterday I took you to be a pretty husky citizen yourself." He grinned and took a big mouthful from one of his sandwiches. I could see that my shot had gone home. "So when I got back last night," I said, "I looked up the arm measurements of Sullivan and Fitzsimmons in a book I have and got to wondering how they compared with mine and yours. They were considerably larger than mine--" Bill thought this a fine joke and laughed out in great good humour. "But I imagine you'd not be far behind either of them." He looked at me a little suspiciously, as if doubtful what I was driving at or whether or not I was joking him. But I was as serious as the face of nature; and proceeded at once to get out my tape measure. "I get very much interested in such things," I said, "and I had enough curiosity to want to see how big your arm really was." He smiled broadly. "You're a queer one," said he. But he took another bite of sandwich, and clenching his great fist drew up his forearm until the biceps muscles looked like a roll of Vienna bread--except that they had the velvety gleam of life. So I measured first one arm, then the other. "By George!" said I, "you're ahead of Fitzsimmons, but not quite up to Sullivan." "Fitz wasn't a heavy man," said Bill, "but a dead game fighter." I saw then that I had him! So I sat down on the grass near by and we had great talk about the comparative merits of Fitzsimmons and Sullivan and Corbett and Jack Johnson, a department of knowledge in which he out-distanced me. He even told me of an exploit or two of his own, which showed that he was able to take care of himself. While we talked he ate his luncheon, and a downright gargantuan luncheon it was, backed by an appetite which if it were offered to the highest bidder on the New York Stock Exchange would, I am convinced, bring at least ten thousand dollars in cash. It even made me envious. There were three huge corned-beef sandwiches, three hard-boiled eggs, a pickle six inches long and fat to boot, four doughnuts so big that they resembled pitching quoits, a bottle of coffee and milk, a quarter of a pie, and, to cap the climax, an immense raw onion. It was worth a long journey to see Bill eat that onion. He took out his clasp knife, and after stripping off the papery outer shell, cut the onion into thick dewy slices. Then he opened one of the sandwiches and placed several of them on the beef, afterward sprinkling them with salt from a small paper parcel. Having restored the top slice of bread he took a moon-shaped bite out of one end of this glorified sandwich. "I like onions," said he. When we first sat down he had offered to share his luncheon with me but I told him I had just been to dinner, and I observed that he had no difficulty in taking care of every crumb in his "bucket." It was wonderful to see. Having finished his luncheon he went down to the brook and got a drink, and then sat down comfortably with his back among the ferns of the roadside, crossed his legs, and lit his pipe. There was a healthy and wholesome flush in his face, and as he blew off the first cloud of smoke he drew a sigh of complete comfort and looked around at me with a lordly air such as few monarchs, no matter how well fed, could have bettered. He had worked and sweat for what he got, and was now taking his ease in his roadside inn. I wonder sometimes if anybody in the world experiences keener joys than unwatched common people. How we talked! From pugilists we proceeded to telephones, and from that to wages, hours, and strikes, and from that we leaped easily to Alaska and gold-mining, and touched in passing upon Theodore Roosevelt. "I was just thinking," I said, "that you and I can enjoy some things that were beyond the reach of the greatest kings of the world." "How's that?" said he. "Why, Napoleon never saw a telephone nor talked through one." "That's so!" he laughed. "And Caesar couldn't have dreamed that such a thing as you are doing now was a possibility--nor George Washington, either." "Say, that's so. I never thought o' that." "Why," I said, "the world is only half as big as it was before you fellows came along stringing your wires! I can get to town now from my farm in two minutes, when it used to take me an hour." I really believe I gave him more of his own business than ever he had before, for he listened so intently that his pipe went out. I found that Bill was from Ohio, and that he had been as far south as Atlanta and as far west as Denver. He got his three dollars and a half a day, rain or shine, and thought it wonderful pay; and besides, he was seein' the country "free, gratis, fer nothing." He got his coat out of the truck and took from the pocket a many-coloured folder. "Say, Mister, have you ever been to the Northwest?" "No," said I. "Well, it's a great country, and I'm goin' up there." He spread out the glittering folder and placed his big forefinger on a spot about the size of Rhode Island somewhere this side of the Rockies. "How'll you do it?" I asked. "Oh, a lineman can go anywhere," said he with a flourish, "A lineman don't have to beg a job. Besides, I got eighty dollars sewed up." Talk about freedom! Never have I got a clearer impression of it than Bill gave me that day. No millionaire, no potentate, could touch him. The crew came back all too soon for me. Bill knocked the ashes out of his pipe on his boot heel, and put his "bucket" back in the truck. Five minutes later he was climbing a tall pole with legs bowed out, striking in his spikes at each step. From the cross-arm, up among the hemlock tops, he called out to me: "Good-bye, pard." "Stop in, Bill, and see me when you come by my place," said I. "You bet," said he. And he did, the next day, and I showed him off to Harriet, who brought him a plate of her best doughnuts and asked him about his mother. Yesterday I saw him again careering by in the truck. The job was finished. He waved his hand at me. "I'm off," said he. "Where?" I shouted. "Canada." CHAPTER XIV ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY "Why risk with men your hard won gold*? Buy grain and sow your Brother Dust Will pay you back a hundred fold-- The earth commits no breach of trust." _Hindu Proverb, Translated by Arthur Guiterman_. It is astonishing how many people there are in cities and towns who have a secret longing to get back into quiet country places, to own a bit of the soil of the earth, and to cultivate it. To some it appears as a troublesome malady only in spring and will be relieved by a whirl or two in country roads, by a glimpse of the hills, or a day by the sea; but to others the homesickness is deeper seated and will be quieted by no hasty visits. These must actually go home. I have had, in recent years, many letters from friends asking about life in the country, but the longer I remain here, the more I know about it, the less able I am to answer them--at least briefly. It is as though one should come and ask: "Is love worth trying?" or, "How about religion?" For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange, original adventure. We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more probably, we do both. It is packed and crowded with the zest of adventure, or it is dull and miserable. We may, if we are skilled enough, make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for other work, whatever it may be. There is many a man whose strength is renewed like that of the wrestler of Irassa, every time his feet touch the earth. Of all places in the world where life can be lived to its fullest and freest, where it can be met in its greatest variety and beauty, I am convinced that there is none to equal the open country, or the country town. For all country people in these days may have the city--some city or town not too far away: but there are millions of men and women in America who have no country and no sense of the country. What do they not lose out of life! I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its worst. At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an income pitifully small. Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and loneliness. But where is there not drudgery when men are poor--where life is at its worst? I have never seen drudgery in the country comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops. And in recent years both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the gasoline engine. I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one day as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week. While there is, indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only good, honest, wholesome hard work--the kind of work that makes for fiber in a man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise provides. There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who come face to face with nature itself. You have set out your upper acres to peach trees: and the deer come down from the hills at night and strip the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the snow, girdle and kill them. The season brings too much rain and the potatoes rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm when no out is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens' eggs prove infertile, and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been growing all summer. A constant warfare with insects and blights and fungi--a real, bitter warfare, which can cease neither summer nor winter! It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of the land. While it is patient, it never waits long for you. There is a chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for harvesting. You accept the gauge thrown down--well and good, you shall have a chance to fight! You do not accept it? There is no complaint. The land cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and pig-weed--and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you. Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a small piece of land at second hand. To be accepted as One Who Belongs, there must be sweat and weariness. The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt, about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full rich green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the cluck of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed green. And as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling of coming somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own land. For titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor with money changing from one hand to another, but for true possession one must work and serve according to the most ancient law. There is no mitigation and no haggling of price. Those who think they can win the greatest joys of country life on any easier terms are mistaken. But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it, and planted it and harvested it--even though it be only a few acres-- how he comes to know and to love every rod of it. He knows the wet spots, and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots --until his acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every characteristic he knows. It is so also that he comes to know his horses and cattle and pigs and hens. It is a fine thing, on a warm day in early spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their first flight in the sunshine. What cleanly folk they are! And later to see them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows! It is a fine thing to watch the cherries and plum trees come into blossom, with us about the first of May, while all the remainder of the orchard seems still sleeping. It is a fine thing to see the cattle turned for the first time in spring into the green meadows. It is a fine thing--one of the finest of all--to see and smell the rain in a corn-field after weeks of drought. How it comes softly out of gray skies, the first drops throwing up spatters of dust and losing themselves in the dry soil. Then the clouds sweep forward up the valley, darkening the meadows and blotting out the hills, and then there is the whispering of the rain as it first sweeps across the corn-field. At once what a stir of life! What rustling of the long green leaves. What joyful shaking and swaying of the tassels! And have you watched how eagerly the grooved leaves catch the early drops, and, lest there be too little rain after all, conduct them jealously down the stalks where they will soonest reach the thirsty roots? What a fine thing is this to see! One who thus takes part in the whole process of the year comes soon to have an indescribable affection for his land, his garden, his animals. There are thoughts of his in every tree: memories in every fence corner. Just now, the fourth of June, I walked down past my blackberry patch, now come gorgeously into full white bloom--and heavy with fragrance. I set out these plants with my own hands, I have fed them, cultivated them, mulched them, pruned them, trellised them, and helped every year to pick the berries. How could they be otherwise than full of associations! They bear a fruit more beautiful than can be found in any catalogue: and stranger and wilder than in any learned botany book! Why, one who comes thus to love a bit of countryside may enjoy it all the year round. When he awakens in the middle of a long winter night he may send his mind out to the snowy fields--I've done it a thousand times!--and visit each part in turn, stroll through the orchard and pay his respects to each tree--in a small orchard one comes to know familiarly every tree as he knows his friends--stop at the strawberry bed, consider the grape trellises, feel himself opening the door of the warm, dark stable and listening to the welcoming whicker of his horses, or visiting his cows, his pigs, his sheep, his hens, or so many of them as he may have. So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master Poet come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories were so often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and illustrations so often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the fields. "Consider the lilies how they grow." It was on a hillside that he preached his greatest Sermon, and when in the last agony he sought a place to meet his God, where did he go but to a garden? A carpenter you say? Yes, but of this one may be sure: there were gardens and fields all about: he knew gardens, and cattle, and the simple processes of the land: he must have worked in a garden and loved it well. A country life rather spoils one for the so-called luxuries. A farmer or gardener may indeed have a small cash income, but at least he eats at the first table. He may have the sweetest of the milk, there are thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women in America who have never in their lives tasted really sweet milk and the freshest of eggs, and the ripest of fruit. One does not know how good strawberries or raspberries are when picked before breakfast and eaten with the dew still on them. And while he must work and sweat for what he gets, he may have all these things in almost unmeasured abundance, and without a thought of what they cost. A man from the country is often made uncomfortable, upon visiting the city, to find two cans of sweet corn served for twenty or thirty cents, or a dish of raspberries at twenty-five or forty--and neither, even at their best, equal in quality to those he may have fresh from the garden every day. One need say this in no boastful spirit, but as a simple statement of the fact: for fruits sent to the city are nearly always picked before they are fully ripe--and lose that last perfection of flavour which the sun and the open air impart: and both fruits and vegetables, as well as milk and eggs, suffer more than most people think from handling and shipment. These things can be set down as one of the make-weights against the familiar presentation of the farmer's life as a hard one. One of the greatest curses of mill or factory work and with much city work of all kinds, is its interminable monotony: the same process repeated hour after hour and day after day. In the country there is indeed monotonous work but rarely monotony. No task continues very long: everything changes infinitely with the seasons. Processes are not repetitive but creative. Nature hates monotony, is ever changing and restless, brings up a storm to drive the haymakers from their hurried work in the fields, sends rain to stop the ploughing, or a frost to hurry the apple harvest. Everything is full of adventure and vicissitude! A man who has been a farmer for two hours at the mowing must suddenly turn blacksmith when his machine breaks down and tinker with wrench and hammer; and later in the day he becomes dairyman, farrier, harness-maker, merchant. No kind of wheat but is grist to his mill, no knowledge that he cannot use! And who is freer to be a citizen than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his state in some one of the innumerable small offices which form the solid blocks of organization beneath our commonwealth. I thought last fall that corn-husking came as near being monotonous work, as any I had ever done in the country. I presume in the great corn-fields of the West, where the husking goes on for weeks at a time, it probably does grow really monotonous. But I soon found that there was a curious counter-reward attending even a process as repetitive as this. I remember one afternoon in particular. It was brisk and cool with ragged clouds like flung pennants in a poverty-stricken sky, and the hills were a hazy brown, rather sad to see, and in one of the apple trees at the edge of the meadow the crows were holding their mournful autumn parliament. At such work as this one's mind often drops asleep, or at least goes dreaming, except for the narrow margin of awareness required for the simple processes of the hands. Its orders have indeed been given: you must kneel here, pull aside the stalks one by one, rip down the husks, and twist off the ear--and there is the pile for the stripped stalks, and here the basket for the gathered corn, and these processes infinitely repeated. While all this is going on, the mind itself wanders off to its own far sweet pastures, upon its own dear adventures--or rests, or plays. It is in these times that most of the airy flying things of this beautiful world come home to us--things that heavy-footed reason never quite overtakes, nor stodgy knowledge ever knows. I think sometimes (as Sterne says) we thus intercept thoughts never intended for us at all, or uncover strange primitive memories of older times than these--racial memories. At any rate, the hours pass and suddenly the mind comes home again, it comes home from its wanderings refreshed, stimulated, happy. And nowhere, whether in cities, or travelling in trains, or sailing upon the sea, have I so often felt this curious enrichment as I have upon this hillside, working alone in field, or garden, or orchard, It seems to come up out of the soil, or respond to the touch of growing things. What makes any work interesting is the fact that one can make experiments, try new things, develop specialties and _grow_. And where can he do this with such success as on the land and in direct contact with nature. The possibilities are here infinite new machinery, spraying, seed testing, fertilizers, experimentation with new varieties. A thousand and one methods, all creative, which may be tried out in that great essential struggle of the farmer or gardener to command all the forces of nature. Because there are farmers, and many of them, who do not experiment and do not grow, but make their occupation a veritable black drudgery, this is no reason for painting a sombre-hued picture of country life. Any calling, the law, the ministry, the medical profession, can be blasted by fixing one's eyes only upon its ugliest aspects. And farming, at its best, has become a highly scientific, extraordinarily absorbing, and when all is said, a profitable, profession. Neighbours of mine have developed systems of overhead irrigation to make rain when there is no rain, and have covered whole fields with cloth canopies to increase the warmth and to protect the crops from wind and hail, and by the analysis of the soil and exact methods of feeding it with fertilizers, have come as near a complete command of nature as any farmers in the world. What independent, resourceful men they are! And many of them have also grown rich in money. It is not what nature does with a man that matters but what he does with nature. Nor is it necessary in these days for the farmer or the country dweller to be uncultivated or uninterested in what are often called, with no very clear definition, the "finer things of life." Many educated men are now on the farms and have their books and magazines, and their music and lectures and dramas not too far off in the towns. A great change in this respect has come over American country life in twenty years. The real hardships of pioneering have passed away, and with good roads and machinery, and telephones, and newspapers every day by rural post, the farmer may maintain as close a touch with the best things the world has to offer as any man. And if he really have such broader interests the winter furnishes him time and leisure that no other class of people can command. I do not know, truly, what we are here for upon this wonderful and beautiful earth, this incalculably interesting earth, unless it is to crowd into a few short years--when all is said, terribly short years!--every possible fine experience and adventure: unless it is to live our lives to the uttermost: unless it is to seize upon every fresh impression, develop every latent capacity: to grow as much as ever we have it in our power to grow. What else can there be? If there is no life beyond this one, we have lived _here_ to the uttermost. We've had what we've had! But if there is more life, and still more life, beyond this one, and above and under this one, and around and through this one, we shall be well prepared for that, whatever it may be. The real advantages of country life have come to be a strong lure to many people in towns and cities: but no one should attempt to "go back to the land" with the idea that it is an easy way to escape the real problems and difficulties of life. The fact is, there is no escape. The problems and the difficulties must be boldly met whether in city or country. Farming in these days is not "easy living," but a highly skilled profession, requiring much knowledge, and actual manual labour and plenty of it. So many come to the country too light-heartedly, buy too much land, attempt unfamiliar crops, expect to hire the work done--and soon find themselves facing discouragement and failure. Any city man who would venture on this new way of life should try it first for a year or so before he commits himself--try himself out against the actual problems. Or, by moving to the country, still within reach of his accustomed work, he can have a garden or even a small farm to experiment with. The shorter work-day has made this possible for a multitude of wage-workers, and I know many instances in which life because of this opportunity to get to the soil has become a very different and much finer thing for them. It is easy also for many men who are engaged in professional work to live where they can get their hands into the soil for part of the time at least: and this may be made as real an experience as far as it goes as though they owned wider acres and devoted their whole time to the work. A man who thus faces the problem squarely will soon see whether country life is the thing for him; if he finds it truly so, he can be as nearly assured of "living happily ever after" as any one outside of a story-book can ever be. Out of it all is likely to come some of the greatest rewards that men can know, a robust body, a healthy appetite, a serene and cheerful spirit! And finally there is one advantage not so easy to express. Long ago I read a story of Tolstoi's called "The Candle"--how a peasant Russian forced to plough on Easter Day lighted a candle to his Lord and kept it burning on his plough as he worked through the sacred day. When I see a man ploughing in his fields I often think of Tolstoi's peasant, and wonder if this is not as true a way as any of worshipping God. I wonder if any one truly worships God who sets about it with deliberation, or knows quite why he does it. "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as showers upon the grass." THE END 
10605	----	Proofreading Team [*Note: Please Credit to Sjaani] _ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT_ David Grayson I "THE BURDEN OF THE VALLEY OF VISION" I came here eight years ago as the renter of this farm, of which soon afterward I became the owner. The time before that I like to forget. The chief impression it left, upon my memory, now happily growing indistinct, is of being hurried faster than I could well travel. From the moment, as a boy of seventeen, I first began to pay my own way, my days were ordered by an inscrutable power which drove me hourly to my task. I was rarely allowed to look up or down, but always forward, toward that vague Success which we Americans love to glorify. My senses, my nerves, even my muscles were continually strained to the utmost of attainment. If I loitered or paused by the wayside, as it seems natural for me to do, I soon heard the sharp crack of the lash. For many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never rested. I neither thought nor reflected. I had no pleasure, even though I pursued it fiercely during the brief respite of vacations. Through many feverish years I did not work: I merely produced. The only real thing I did was to hurry as though every moment were my last, as though the world, which now seems so rich in everything, held only one prize which might be seized upon before I arrived. Since then I have tried to recall, like one who struggles to restore the visions of a fever, what it was that I ran to attain, or why I should have borne without rebellion such indignities to soul and body. That life seems now, of all illusions, the most distant and unreal. It is like the unguessed eternity before we are born: not of concern compared with that eternity upon which we are now embarked. All these things happened in cities and among crowds. I like to forget them. They smack of that slavery of the spirit which is so much worse than any mere slavery of the body. One day--it was in April, I remember, and the soft maples in the city park were just beginning to blossom--I stopped suddenly. I did not intend to stop. I confess in humiliation that it was no courage, no will of my own. I intended to go on toward Success: but Fate stopped me. It was as if I had been thrown violently from a moving planet: all the universe streamed around me and past me. It seemed to me that of all animate creation, I was the only thing that was still or silent. Until I stopped I had not known the pace I ran; and I had a vague sympathy and understanding, never felt before, for those who left the running. I lay prostrate with fever and close to death for weeks and watched the world go by: the dust, the noise, the very colour of haste. The only sharp pang that I suffered was the feeling that I should be broken-hearted and that I was not; that I should care and that I did not. It was as though I had died and escaped all further responsibility. I even watched with dim equanimity my friends racing past me, panting as they ran. Some of them paused an instant to comfort me where I lay, but I could see that their minds were still upon the running and I was glad when they went away. I cannot tell with what weariness their haste oppressed me. As for them, they somehow blamed me for dropping out. I knew. Until we ourselves understand, we accept no excuse from the man who stops. While I felt it all, I was not bitter. I did not seem to care. I said to myself: "This is Unfitness. I survive no longer. So be it." Thus I lay, and presently I began to hunger and thirst. Desire rose within me: the indescribable longing of the convalescent for the food of recovery. So I lay, questioning wearily what it was that I required. One morning I wakened with a strange, new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh plow furrows as I had once done when a boy. So vividly the memory came to me--the high airy world as it was at that moment, and the boy I was walking free in the furrows--that the weak tears filled my eyes, the first I had shed in many years. Then I thought of sitting in quiet thickets in old fence corners, the wood behind me rising still, cool, mysterious, and the fields in front stretching away in illimitable pleasantness. I thought of the good smell of cows at milking--you do not know, if you do not know!--I thought of the sights and sounds, the heat and sweat of the hay fields. I thought of a certain brook I knew when a boy that flowed among alders and wild parsnips, where I waded with a three-foot rod for trout. I thought of all these things as a man thinks of his first love. Oh, I craved the soil. I hungered and thirsted for the earth. I was greedy for growing things. And thus, eight years ago, I came here like one sore-wounded creeping from the field of battle. I remember walking in the sunshine, weak yet, but curiously satisfied. I that was dead lived again. It came to me then with a curious certainty, not since so assuring, that I understood the chief marvel of nature hidden within the Story of the Resurrection, the marvel of plant and seed, father and son, the wonder of the seasons, the miracle of life. I, too, had died: I had lain long in darkness, and now I had risen again upon the sweet earth. And I possessed beyond others a knowledge of a former existence, which I knew, even then, I could never return to. For a time, in the new life, I was happy to drunkenness--working, eating, sleeping. I was an animal again, let out to run in green pastures. I was glad of the sunrise and the sunset. I was glad at noon. It delighted me when my muscles ached with work and when, after supper, I could not keep my eyes open for sheer weariness. And sometimes I was awakened in the night out of a sound sleep--seemingly by the very silences--and lay in a sort of bodily comfort impossible to describe. I did not want to feel or to think: I merely wanted to live. In the sun or the rain I wanted to go out and come in, and never again know the pain of the unquiet spirit. I looked forward to an awakening not without dread for we are as helpless before birth as in the presence of death. But like all birth, it came, at last, suddenly. All that summer I had worked in a sort of animal content. Autumn had now come, late autumn, with coolness in the evening air. I was plowing in my upper field--not then mine in fact--and it was a soft afternoon with the earth turning up moist and fragrant. I had been walking the furrows all day long. I had taken note, as though my life depended upon it, of the occasional stones or roots in my field, I made sure of the adjustment of the harness, I drove with peculiar care to save the horses. With such simple details of the work in hand I had found it my joy to occupy my mind. Up to that moment the most important things in the world had seemed a straight furrow and well-turned corners--to me, then, a profound accomplishment. I cannot well describe it, save by the analogy of an opening door somewhere within the house of my consciousness. I had been in the dark: I seemed to emerge. I had been bound down: I seemed to leap up--and with a marvellous sudden sense of freedom and joy. I stopped there in my field and looked up. And it was as if I had never looked up before. I discovered another world. It had been there before, for long and long, but I had never seen nor felt it. All discoveries are made in that way: a man finds the new thing, not in nature but in himself. It was as though, concerned with plow and harness and furrow, I had never known that the world had height or colour or sweet sounds, or that there was _feeling_ in a hillside. I forgot myself, or where I was. I stood a long time motionless. My dominant feeling, if I can at all express it, was of a strange new friendliness, a warmth, as though these hills, this field about me, the woods, had suddenly spoken to me and caressed me. It was as though I had been accepted in membership, as though I was now recognised, after long trial, as belonging here. Across the town road which separates my farm from my nearest neighbour's, I saw a field, familiar, yet strangely new and unfamiliar, lying up to the setting sun, all red with autumn, above it the incalculable heights of the sky, blue, but not quite clear, owing to the Indian summer haze. I cannot convey the sweetness and softness of that landscape, the airiness of it, the mystery of it, as it came to me at that moment. It was as though, looking at an acquaintance long known, I should discover that I loved him. As I stood there I was conscious of the cool tang of burning leaves and brush heaps, the lazy smoke of which floated down the long valley and found me in my field, and finally I heard, as though the sounds were then made for the first time, all the vague murmurs of the country side--a cow-bell somewhere in the distance, the creak of a wagon, the blurred evening hum of birds, insects, frogs. So much it means for a man to stop and look up from his task. So I stood, and I looked up and down with a glow and a thrill which I cannot now look back upon without some envy and a little amusement at the very grandness and seriousness of it all. And I said aloud to myself: "I will be as broad as the earth. I will not be limited." Thus I was born into the present world, and here I continue, not knowing what other world I may yet achieve. I do not know, but I wait in expectancy, keeping my furrows straight and my corners well turned. Since that day in the field, though my fences include no more acres, and I still plow my own fields, my real domain has expanded until I crop wide fields and take the profit of many curious pastures. From my farm I can see most of the world; and if I wait here long enough all people pass this way. And I look out upon them not in the surroundings which they have chosen for themselves, but from the vantage ground of my familiar world. The symbols which meant so much in cities mean little here. Sometimes it seems to me as though I saw men naked. They come and stand beside my oak, and the oak passes solemn judgment; they tread my furrows and the clods give silent evidence; they touch the green blades of my corn, the corn whispers its sure conclusions. Stern judgments that will be deceived by no symbols! Thus I have delighted, secretly, in calling myself an unlimited farmer, and I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand of the soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn, or banknotes, or spindles; that we are not the used, but the users; that life is more than profit and loss. And so I shall expect that while I am talking farm some of you may be thinking dry goods, banking, literature, carpentry, or what-not. But if you can say: I am an unlimited dry goods merchant, I am an unlimited carpenter, I will give you an old-fashioned country hand-shake, strong and warm. We are friends; our orbits coincide. II I BUY A FARM As I have said, when I came here I came as a renter, working all of the first summer without that "open vision" of which the prophet Samuel speaks. I had no memory of the past and no hope of the future. I fed upon the moment. My sister Harriet kept the house and I looked after the farm and the fields. In all those months I hardly knew that I had neighbours, although Horace, from whom I rented my place, was not infrequently a visitor. He has since said that I looked at him as though he were a "statute." I was "citified," Horace said; and "citified" with us here in the country is nearly the limit of invective, though not violent enough to discourage such a gift of sociability as his. The Scotch Preacher, the rarest, kindest man I know, called once or twice, wearing the air of formality which so ill becomes him. I saw nothing in him: it was my fault, not his, that I missed so many weeks of his friendship. Once in that time the Professor crossed my fields with his tin box slung from his shoulder; and the only feeling I had, born of crowded cities, was that this was an intrusion upon my property. Intrusion: and the Professor! It is now unthinkable. I often passed the Carpentry Shop on my way to town. I saw Baxter many times at his bench. Even then Baxter's eyes attracted me: he always glanced up at me as I passed, and his look had in it something of a caress. So the home of Starkweather, standing aloof among its broad lawns and tall trees, carried no meaning for me. Of all my neighbours, Horace is the nearest. From the back door of my house, looking over the hill, I can see the two red chimneys of his home, and the top of the windmill. Horace's barn and corn silo are more pretentious by far than his house, but fortunately they stand on lower ground, where they are not visible from my side of the hill. Five minutes' walk in a straight line across the fields brings me to Horace's door; by the road it takes at least ten minutes. In the fall after my arrival I had come to love the farm and its surroundings so much that I decided to have it for my own. I did not look ahead to being a farmer. I did not ask Harriet's advice. I found myself sitting one day in the justice's office. The justice was bald and as dry as corn fodder in March. He sat with spectacled impressiveness behind his ink-stained table. Horace hitched his heel on the round of his chair and put his hat on his knee. He wore his best coat and his hair was brushed in deference to the occasion. He looked uncomfortable, but important. I sat opposite him, somewhat overwhelmed by the business in hand. I felt like an inadequate boy measured against solemnities too large for him. The processes seemed curiously unconvincing, like a game in which the important part is to keep from laughing; and yet when I thought of laughing I felt cold chills of horror. If I had laughed at that moment I cannot think what that justice would have said! But it was a pleasure to have the old man read the deed, looking at me over his spectacles from time to time to make sure I was not playing truant. There are good and great words in a deed. One of them I brought away with me from the conference, a very fine, big one, which I love to have out now and again to remind me of the really serious things of life. It gives me a peculiar dry, legal feeling. If I am about to enter upon a serious bargain, like the sale of a cow, I am more avaricious if I work with it under my tongue. Hereditaments! Hereditaments! Some words need to be fenced in, pig-tight, so that they cannot escape us; others we prefer to have running at large, indefinite but inclusive. I would not look up that word for anything: I might find it fenced in so that it could not mean to me all that it does now. Hereditaments! May there be many of them--or it! Is it not a fine Providence that gives us different things to love? In the purchase of my farm both Horace and I got the better of the bargain--and yet neither was cheated. In reality a fairly strong lantern light will shine through Horace, and I could see that he was hugging himself with the joy of his bargain; but I was content. I had some money left--what more does anyone want after a bargain?--and I had come into possession of the thing I desired most of all. Looking at bargains from a purely commercial point of view, someone is always cheated, but looked at with the simple eye both seller and buyer always win. We came away from the gravity of that bargaining in Horace's wagon. On our way home Horace gave me fatherly advice about using my farm. He spoke from the height of his knowledge to me, a humble beginner. The conversation ran something like this: HORACE: Thar's a clump of plum trees along the lower pasture fence. Perhaps you saw 'm---- MYSELF: I saw them: that is one reason I bought the back pasture. In May they will be full of blossoms. HORACE: They're _wild_ plums: they ain't good for nothing. MYSELF: But think how fine they will be all the year round. HORACE: Fine! They take up a quarter-acre of good land. I've been going to cut 'em myself this ten years. MYSELF: I don't think I shall want them cut out. HORACE: Humph. After a pause: HORACE: There's a lot of good body cord-wood in that oak on the knoll. MYSELF: Cord-wood! Why, that oak is the treasure of the whole farm, I have never seen a finer one. I could not think of cutting it. HORACE: It will bring you fifteen or twenty dollars cash in hand. MYSELF: But I rather have the oak. HORACE: Humph. So our conversation continued for some time. I let Horace know that I preferred rail fences, even old ones, to a wire fence, and that I thought a farm should not be too large, else it might keep one away from his friends. And what, I asked, is corn compared with a friend? Oh, I grew really oratorical! I gave it as my opinion that there should be vines around the house (Waste of time, said Horace), and that no farmer should permit anyone to paint medicine advertisements on his barn (Brings you ten dollars a year, said Horace), and that I proposed to fix the bridge on the lower road (What's a path-master for? asked Horace). I said that a town was a useful adjunct for a farm; but I laid it down as a principle that no town should be too near a farm. I finally became so enthusiastic in setting forth my conceptions of a true farm that I reduced Horace to a series of humphs. The early humphs were incredulous, but as I proceeded, with some joy, they became humorously contemptuous, and finally began to voice a large, comfortable, condescending tolerance. I could fairly feel Horace growing superior as he sat there beside me. Oh, he had everything in his favour. He could prove what he said: One tree + one thicket = twenty dollars. One landscape = ten cords of wood = a quarter-acre of corn = twenty dollars. These equations prove themselves. Moreover, was not Horace the "best off" of any farmer in the country? Did he not have the largest barn and the best corn silo? And are there better arguments? Have you ever had anyone give you up as hopeless? And is it not a pleasure? It is only after people resign you to your fate that you really make friends of them. For how can you win the friendship of one who is trying to convert you to his superior beliefs? As we talked, then, Horace and I, I began to have hopes of him. There is no joy comparable to the making of a friend, and the more resistant the material the greater the triumph. Baxter, the carpenter, says that when he works for enjoyment he chooses curly maple. When Horace set me down at my gate that afternoon he gave me his hand and told me that he would look in on me occasionally, and that if I had any trouble to let him know. A few days later I heard by the roundabout telegraph common in country neighbourhoods that Horace had found a good deal of fun in reporting what I said about farming and that he had called me by a highly humorous but disparaging name. Horace has a vein of humour all his own. I have caught him alone in his fields chuckling to himself, and even breaking out in a loud laugh at the memory of some amusing incident that happened ten years ago. One day, a month or more after our bargain, Horace came down across his field and hitched his jean-clad leg over my fence, with the intent, I am sure, of delving a little more in the same rich mine of humour. "Horace," I said, looking him straight in the eye, "did you call me an--Agriculturist!" I have rarely seen a man so pitifully confused as Horace was at that moment. He flushed, he stammered, he coughed, the perspiration broke out on his forehead. He tried to speak and could not. I was sorry for him. "Horace," I said, "you're a Farmer." We looked at each other a moment with dreadful seriousness, and then both of us laughed to the point of holding our sides. We slapped our knees, we shouted, we wriggled, we almost rolled with merriment. Horace put out his hand and we shook heartily. In five minutes I had the whole story of his humorous reports out of him. No real friendship is ever made without an initial clashing which discloses the metal of each to each. Since that day Horace's jean-clad leg has rested many a time on my fence and we have talked crops and calves. We have been the best of friends in the way of whiffle-trees, butter tubs and pig killings--but never once looked up together at the sky. The chief objection to a joke in the country is that it is so imperishable. There is so much room for jokes and so few jokes to fill it. When I see Horace approaching with a peculiar, friendly, reminiscent smile on his face I hasten with all ardour to anticipate him: "Horace," I exclaim, "you're a Farmer." [Illustration: "The heat and sweat of the hay fields"] III THE JOY OF POSSESSION "How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees: How graceful climb these shadows on my hill." Always as I travel, I think, "Here I am, let anything happen!" I do not want to know the future; knowledge is too certain, too cold, too real. It is true that I have not always met the fine adventure nor won the friend, but if I had, what should I have more to look for at other turnings and other hilltops? The afternoon of my purchase was one of the great afternoons of my life. When Horace put me down at my gate, I did not go at once to the house; I did not wish, then, to talk with Harriet. The things I had with myself were too important. I skulked toward my barn, compelling myself to walk slowly until I reached the corner, where I broke into an eager run as though the old Nick himself were after me. Behind the barn I dropped down on the grass, panting with laughter, and not without some of the shame a man feels at being a boy. Close along the side of the barn, as I sat there in the cool of the shade, I could see a tangled mat of smartweed and catnip, and the boards of the barn, brown and weather-beaten, and the gables above with mud swallows' nests, now deserted; and it struck me suddenly, as I observed these homely pleasant things: "All this is mine." I sprang up and drew a long breath. "Mine," I said. It came to me then like an inspiration that I might now go out and take formal possession of my farm. I might experience the emotion of a landowner. I might swell with dignity and importance--for once, at least. So I started at the fence corner back of the barn and walked straight up through the pasture, keeping close to my boundaries, that I might not miss a single rod of my acres. And oh, it was a prime afternoon! The Lord made it! Sunshine--and autumn haze--and red trees--and yellow fields--and blue distances above the far-away town. And the air had a tang which got into a man's blood and set him chanting all the poetry he ever knew. "I climb that was a clod, I run whose steps were slow, I reap the very wheat of God That once had none to sow!" So I walked up the margin of my field looking broadly about me: and presently, I began to examine my fences--_my_ fences--with a critical eye. I considered the quality of the soil, though in truth I was not much of a judge of such matters. I gloated over my plowed land, lying there open and passive in the sunshine. I said of this tree: "It is mine," and of its companion beyond the fence: "It is my neighbour's." Deeply and sharply within myself I drew the line between _meum_ and _tuum_: for only thus, by comparing ourselves with our neighbours, can we come to the true realisation of property. Occasionally I stopped to pick up a stone and cast it over the fence, thinking with some truculence that my neighbour would probably throw it back again. Never mind, I had it out of _my_ field. Once, with eager surplusage of energy, I pulled down a dead and partly rotten oak stub, long an eye-sore, with an important feeling of proprietorship. I could do anything I liked. The farm was _mine_. How sweet an emotion is possession! What charm is inherent in ownership! What a foundation for vanity, even for the greater quality of self-respect, lies in a little property! I fell to thinking of the excellent wording of the old books in which land is called "real property," or "real estate." Money we may possess, or goods or chattels, but they give no such impression of mineness as the feeling that one's feet rest upon soil that is his: that part of the deep earth is his with all the water upon it, all small animals that creep or crawl in the holes of it, all birds or insects that fly in the air above it, all trees, shrubs, flowers, and grass that grow upon it, all houses, barns and fences--all, his. As I strode along that afternoon I fed upon possession. I rolled the sweet morsel of ownership under my tongue. I seemed to set my feet down more firmly on the good earth. I straightened my shoulders: _this land was mine_. I picked up a clod of earth and let it crumble and drop through my fingers: it gave me a peculiar and poignant feeling of possession. I can understand why the miser enjoys the very physical contact of his gold. Every sense I possessed, sight, hearing, smell, touch, led upon the new joy. At one corner of my upper field the fence crosses an abrupt ravine upon leggy stilts. My line skirts the slope halfway up. My neighbour owns the crown of the hill which he has shorn until it resembles the tonsured pate of a monk. Every rain brings the light soil down the ravine and lays it like a hand of infertility upon my farm. It had always bothered me, this wastage; and as I looked across my fence I thought to myself: "I must have that hill. I will buy it. I will set the fence farther up. I will plant the slope. It is no age of tonsures either in religion or agriculture." The very vision of widened acres set my thoughts on fire. In imagination I extended my farm upon all sides, thinking how much better I could handle my land than my neighbours. I dwelt avariciously upon more possessions: I thought with discontent of my poverty. More land I wanted. I was enveloped in clouds of envy. I coveted my neighbour's land: I felt myself superior and Horace inferior: I was consumed with black vanity. So I dealt hotly with these thoughts until I reached the top of the ridge at the farther corner of my land. It is the highest point on the farm. For a moment I stood looking about me on a wonderful prospect of serene beauty. As it came to me--hills, fields, woods--the fever which had been consuming me died down. I thought how the world stretched away from my fences--just such fields--for a thousand miles, and in each small enclosure a man as hot as I with the passion of possession. How they all envied, and hated, in their longing for more land! How property kept them apart, prevented the close, confident touch of friendship, how it separated lovers and ruined families! Of all obstacles to that complete democracy of which we dream, is there a greater than property? I was ashamed. Deep shame covered me. How little of the earth, after all, I said, lies within the limits of my fences. And I looked out upon the perfect beauty of the world around me, and I saw how little excited it was, how placid, how undemanding. I had come here to be free and already this farm, which I thought of so fondly as my possession, was coming to possess me. Ownership is an appetite like hunger or thirst, and as we may eat to gluttony and drink to drunkenness so we may possess to avarice. How many men have I seen who, though they regard themselves as models of temperance, wear the marks of unbridled indulgence of the passion of possession, and how like gluttony or licentiousness it sets its sure sign upon their faces. I said to myself, Why should any man fence himself in? And why hope to enlarge one's world by the creeping acquisition of a few acres to his farm? I thought of the old scientist, who, laying his hand upon the grass, remarked: "Everything under my hand is a miracle"--forgetting that everything outside was also a miracle. [Illustration: "HOW GRACEFUL CLIMB THESE SHADOWS ON MY HILL"] As I stood there I glanced across the broad valley wherein lies the most of my farm, to a field of buckwheat which belongs to Horace. For an instant it gave me the illusion of a hill on fire: for the late sun shone full on the thick ripe stalks of the buckwheat, giving forth an abundant red glory that blessed the eye. Horace had been proud of his crop, smacking his lips at the prospect of winter pancakes, and here I was entering his field and taking without hindrance another crop, a crop gathered not with hands nor stored in granaries: a wonderful crop, which, once gathered, may long be fed upon and yet remain unconsumed. So I looked across the countryside; a group of elms here, a tufted hilltop there, the smooth verdure of pastures, the rich brown of new-plowed fields--and the odours, and the sounds of the country--all cropped by me. How little the fences keep me out: I do not regard titles, nor consider boundaries. I enter either by day or by night, but not secretly. Taking my fill, I leave as much as I find. And thus standing upon the highest hill in my upper pasture, I thought of the quoted saying of a certain old abbot of the middle ages--"He that is a true monk considers nothing as belonging to him except a lyre." What finer spirit? Who shall step forth freer than he who goes with nothing save his lyre? He shall sing as he goes: he shall not be held down nor fenced in. With a lifting of the soul I thought of that old abbot, how smooth his brow, how catholic his interest, how serene his outlook, how free his friendships, how unlimited his whole life. Nothing but a lyre! So I made a covenant there with myself. I said: "I shall use, not be used. I do not limit myself here. I shall not allow possessions to come between me and my life or my friends." For a time--how long I do not know--I stood thinking. Presently I discovered, moving slowly along the margin of the field below me, the old professor with his tin botany box. And somehow I had no feeling that he was intruding upon my new land. His walk was slow and methodical, his head and even his shoulders were bent--almost habitually--from looking close upon the earth, and from time to time he stooped, and once he knelt to examine some object that attracted his eye. It seemed appropriate that he should thus kneel to the earth. So he gathered _his_ crop and fences did not keep him out nor titles disturb him. He also was free! It gave me at that moment a peculiar pleasure to have him on my land, to know that I was, if unconsciously, raising other crops than I knew. I felt friendship for this old professor: I could understand him, I thought. And I said aloud but in a low tone, as though I were addressing him: --Do not apologise, friend, when you come into my field. You do not interrupt me. What you have come for is of more importance at this moment than corn. Who is it that says I must plow so many furrows this day? Come in, friend, and sit here on these clods: we will sweeten the evening with fine words. We will invest our time not in corn, or in cash, but in life.-- I walked with confidence down the hill toward the professor. So engrossed was he with his employment that he did not see me until I was within a few paces of him. When he looked up at me it was as though his eyes returned from some far journey. I felt at first out of focus, unplaced, and only gradually coming into view. In his hand he held a lump of earth containing a thrifty young plant of the purple cone-flower, having several blossoms. He worked at the lump deftly, delicately, so that the earth, pinched, powdered and shaken out, fell between his fingers, leaving the knotty yellow roots in his hand. I marked how firm, slow, brown, the old man was, how little obtrusive in my field. One foot rested in a furrow, the other was set among the grass of the margin, near the fence--his place, I thought. His first words, though of little moment in themselves, gave me a curious satisfaction, as when a coin, tested, rings true gold, or a hero, tried, is heroic. "I have rarely," he said, "seen a finer display of rudbeckia than this, along these old fences." If he had referred to me, or questioned, or apologised, I should have been disappointed. He did not say, "your fences," he said "these fences," as though they were as much his as mine. And he spoke in his own world, knowing that if I could enter I would, but that if I could not, no stooping to me would avail either of us. "It has been a good autumn for flowers," I said inanely, for so many things were flying through my mind that I could not at once think of the great particular words which should bring us together. At first I thought my chance had passed, but he seemed to see something in me after all, for he said: "Here is a peculiarly large specimen of the rudbeckia. Observe the deep purple of the cone, and the bright yellow of the petals. Here is another that grew hardly two feet away, in the grass near the fence where the rails and the blackberry bushes have shaded it. How small and undeveloped it is." "They crowd up to the plowed land," I observed. "Yes, they reach out for a better chance in life--like men. With more room, better food, freer air, you see how much finer they grow." It was curious to me, having hitherto barely observed the cone-flowers along my fences, save as a colour of beauty, how simply we fell to talking of them as though in truth they were people like ourselves, having our desires and possessed of our capabilities. It gave me then, for the first time, the feeling which has since meant such varied enjoyment, of the peopling of the woods. "See here," he said, "how different the character of these individuals. They are all of the same species. They all grow along this fence within two or three rods; but observe the difference not only in size but in colouring, in the shape of the petals, in the proportions of the cone. What does it all mean? Why, nature trying one of her endless experiments. She sows here broadly, trying to produce better cone-flowers. A few she plants on the edge of the field in the hope that they may escape the plow. If they grow, better food and more sunshine produce more and larger flowers." So we talked, or rather he talked, finding in me an eager listener. And what he called botany seemed to me to be life. Of birth, of growth, of reproduction, of death, he spoke, and his flowers became sentient creatures under my eyes. And thus the sun went down and the purple mists crept silently along the distant low spots, and all the great, great mysteries came and stood before me beckoning and questioning. They came and they stood, and out of the cone-flower, as the old professor spoke, I seemed to catch a glimmer of the true light. I reflected how truly everything is in anything. If one could really understand a cone-flower he could understand this Earth. Botany was only one road toward the Explanation. Always I hope that some traveller may have more news of the way than I, and sooner or later, I find I must make inquiry of the direction of every thoughtful man I meet. And I have always had especial hope of those who study the sciences: they ask such intimate questions of nature. Theology possesses a vain-gloriousness which places its faith in human theories; but science, at its best, is humble before nature herself. It has no thesis to defend: it is content to kneel upon the earth, in the way of my friend, the old professor, and ask the simplest questions, hoping for some true reply. I wondered, then, what the professor thought, after his years of work, of the Mystery; and finally, not without confusion, I asked him. He listened, for the first time ceasing to dig, shake out and arrange his specimens. When I had stopped speaking he remained for a moment silent, then he looked at me with a new regard. Finally he quoted quietly, but with a deep note in his voice: "Canst thou by searching find God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven: what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know?" When the professor had spoken we stood for a moment silent, then he smiled and said briskly: "I have been a botanist for fifty-four years. When I was a boy I believed implicitly in God. I prayed to him, having a vision of him--a person--before my eyes. As I grew older I concluded that there was no God. I dismissed him from the universe. I believed only in what I could see, or hear, or feel. I talked about Nature and Reality." He paused, the smile still lighting his face, evidently recalling to himself the old days. I did not interrupt him. Finally he turned to me and said abruptly. "And now--it seems to me--there is nothing but God." As he said this he lifted his arm with a peculiar gesture that seemed to take in the whole world. For a time we were both silent. When I left him I offered my hand and told him I hoped I might become his friend. So I turned my face toward home. Evening was falling, and as I walked I heard the crows calling, and the air was keen and cool, and I thought deep thoughts. And so I stepped into the darkened stable. I could not see the outlines of the horse or the cow, but knowing the place so well I could easily get about. I heard the horse step aside with a soft expectant whinny. I smelled the smell of milk, the musty, sharp odour of dry hay, the pungent smell of manure, not unpleasant. And the stable was warm after the cool of the fields with a sort of animal warmth that struck into me soothingly. I spoke in a low voice and laid my hand on the horse's flank. The flesh quivered and shrunk away from my touch--coming back confidently, warmly. I ran my hand along his back and up his hairy neck. I felt his sensitive nose in my hand. "You shall have your oats," I said, and I gave him to eat. Then I spoke as gently to the cow, and she stood aside to be milked. And afterward I came out into the clear bright night, and the air was sweet and cool, and my dog came bounding to meet me.--So I carried the milk into the house, and Harriet said in her heartiest tone: "You are late, David. But sit up, I have kept the biscuits warm." And that night my sleep was sound. IV ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES With the coming of winter I thought the life of a farmer might lose something of its charm. So much interest lies in the growth not only of crops but of trees, vines, flowers, sentiments and emotions. In the summer the world is busy, concerned with many things and full of gossip: in the winter I anticipated a cessation of many active interests and enthusiasms. I looked forward to having time for my books and for the quiet contemplation of the life around me. Summer indeed is for activity, winter for reflection. But when winter really came every day discovered some new work to do or some new adventure to enjoy. It is surprising how many things happen on a small farm. Examining the book which accounts for that winter, I find the history of part of a forenoon, which will illustrate one of the curious adventures of a farmer's life. It is dated January 5. * * * * * I went out this morning with my axe and hammer to mend the fence along the public road. A heavy frost fell last night and the brown grass and the dry ruts of the roads were powdered white. Even the air, which was perfectly still, seemed full of frost crystals, so that when the sun came up one seemed to walk in a magic world. I drew in a long breath and looked out across the wonderful shining country and I said to myself: "Surely, there is nowhere I would rather be than here." For I could have travelled nowhere to find greater beauty or a better enjoyment of it than I had here at home. As I worked with my axe and hammer, I heard a light wagon come rattling up the road. Across the valley a man had begun to chop a tree. I could see the axe steel flash brilliantly in the sunshine before I heard the sound of the blow. The man in the wagon had a round face and a sharp blue eye. I thought he seemed a businesslike young man. "Say, there," he shouted, drawing up at my gate, "would you mind holding my horse a minute? It's a cold morning and he's restless." "Certainly not," I said, and I put down my tools and held his horse. He walked up to my door with a brisk step and a certain jaunty poise of the head. "He is well contented with himself," I said. "It is a great blessing for any man to be satisfied with what he has got." I heard Harriet open the door--how every sound rang through the still morning air! The young man asked some question and I distinctly heard Harriet's answer: "He's down there." The young man came back: his hat was tipped up, his quick eye darted over my grounds as though in a single instant he had appraised everything and passed judgment upon the cash value of the inhabitants. He whistled a lively little tune. "Say," he said, when he reached the gate, not at all disconcerted, "I thought you was the hired man. Your name's Grayson, ain't it? Well, I want to talk with you." After tying and blanketing his horse and taking a black satchel from his buggy he led me up to my house. I had a pleasurable sense of excitement and adventure. Here was a new character come to my farm. Who knows, I thought, what he may bring with him: who knows what I may send away by him? Here in the country we must set our little ships afloat on small streams, hoping that somehow, some day, they will reach the sea. It was interesting to see the busy young man sit down so confidently in our best chair. He said his name was Dixon, and he took out from his satchel a book with a fine showy cover. He said it was called "Living Selections from Poet, Sage and Humourist." "This," he told me, "is only the first of the series. We publish six volumes full of literchoor. You see what a heavy book this is?" I tested it in my hand: it was a heavy book. "The entire set," he said, "weighs over ten pounds. There are 1,162 pages, enough paper if laid down flat, end to end, to reach half a mile." I cannot quote his exact language: there was too much of it, but he made an impressive showing of the amount of literature that could be had at a very low price per pound. Mr. Dixon was a hypnotist. He fixed me with his glittering eye, and he talked so fast, and his ideas upon the subject were so original that he held me spellbound. At first I was inclined to be provoked: one does not like to be forcibly hypnotised, but gradually the situation began to amuse me, the more so when Harriet came in. "Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?" asked the agent, holding his book admiringly at arm's length. "This up here," he said, pointing to the illuminated cover, "is the Muse of Poetry She is scattering flowers--poems, you know. Fine idea, ain't it? Colouring fine, too." He jumped up quickly and laid the book on my table, to the evident distress of Harriet. "Trims up the room, don't it?" he exclaimed, turning his head a little to one side and observing the effect with an expression of affectionate admiration. "How much," I asked, "will you sell the covers for without the insides?" "Without the insides?" "Yes," I said, "the binding will trim up my table just as well without the insides." I thought he looked at me a little suspiciously, but he was evidently satisfied by my expression of countenance, for he answered promptly: "Oh, but you want the insides. That's what the books are for. The bindings are never sold alone." He then went on to tell me the prices and terms of payment, until it really seemed that it would be cheaper to buy the books than to let him carry them away again. Harriet stood in the doorway behind him frowning and evidently trying to catch my eye. But I kept my face turned aside so that I could not see her signal of distress and my eyes fixed on the young man Dixon. It was as good as a play. Harriet there, serious-minded, thinking I was being befooled, and the agent thinking he was befooling me, and I, thinking I was befooling both of them--and all of us wrong. It was very like life wherever you find it. Finally, I took the book which he had been urging upon me, at which Harriet coughed meaningly to attract my attention. She knew the danger when I really got my hands on a book. But I made up as innocent as a child. I opened the book almost at random--and it was as though, walking down a strange road, I had come upon an old tried friend not seen before in years. For there on the page before me I read: "The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not." And as I read it came back to me--a scene like a picture--the place, the time, the very feel of the hour when I first saw those lines. Who shall say that the past does not live! An odour will sometimes set the blood coursing in an old emotion, and a line of poetry is the resurrection and the life. For a moment I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot myself, I even forgot the book on my knee--everything but that hour in the past--a view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat and dust and noise of an August evening in the city, the dumb weariness of it all, the loneliness, the longing for green fields; and then these great lines of Wordsworth, read for the first time, flooding in upon me: "Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn: So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; And hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn." When I had finished I found myself standing in my own room with one arm raised, and, I suspect, a trace of tears in my eyes--there before the agent and Harriet. I saw Harriet lift one hand and drop it hopelessly. She thought I was captured at last. I was past saving. And as I looked at the agent I saw "grim conquest glowing in his eye!" So I sat down not a little embarrassed by my exhibition--when I had intended to be self-poised. "You like it, don't you?" said Mr. Dixon unctuously. "I don't see," I said earnestly, "how you can afford to sell such things as this so cheap." "They _are_ cheap," he admitted regretfully. I suppose he wished he had tried me with the half-morocco. "They are priceless," I said, "absolutely priceless. If you were the only man in the world who had that poem, I think I would deed you my farm for it." Mr. Dixon proceeded, as though it were all settled, to get out his black order book and open it briskly for business. He drew his fountain pen, capped it, and looked up at me expectantly. My feet actually seemed slipping into some irresistible whirlpool. How well he understood practical psychology! I struggled within myself, fearing engulfment: I was all but lost. "Shall I deliver the set at once," he said, "or can you wait until the first of February?" At that critical moment a floating spar of an idea swept my way and I seized upon it as the last hope of the lost. [Illustration: 'Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?'] "I don't understand," I said, as though I had not heard his last question, "how you dare go about with all this treasure upon you. Are you not afraid of being stopped in the road and robbed? Why, I've seen the time when, if I had known you carried such things as these, such cures for sick hearts, I think I should have stopped you myself!" "Say, you _are_ an odd one," said Mr. Dixon. "Why do you sell such priceless things as these?" I asked, looking at him sharply. "Why do I sell them?" and he looked still more perplexed. "To make money, of course; same reason you raise corn." "But here is wealth," I said, pursuing my advantage. "If you have these you have something more valuable than money." Mr. Dixon politely said nothing. Like a wise angler, having failed to land me at the first rush, he let me have line. Then I thought of Ruskin's words, "Nor can any noble thing be wealth except to a noble person." And that prompted me to say to Mr. Dixon: "These things are not yours; they are mine. You never owned them; but I will sell them to you." He looked at me in amazement, and then glanced around--evidently to discover if there were a convenient way of escape. "You're all straight, are you?" he asked tapping his forehead; "didn't anybody ever try to take you up?" "The covers are yours," I continued as though I had not heard him, "the insides are mine and have been for a long time: that is why I proposed buying the covers separately." I opened his book again. I thought I would see what had been chosen for its pages. And I found there many fine and great things. "Let me read you this," I said to Mr. Dixon; "it has been mine for a long time. I will not sell it to you. I will give it to you outright. The best things are always given." Having some gift in imitating the Scotch dialect, I read: "November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh; The shortening winter day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, This night his weekly moil is at an end, Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend." So I read "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I love the poem very much myself, sometimes reading it aloud, not so much for the tenderness of its message, though I prize that, too, as for the wonder of its music: "Compared with these, Italian trills are tame; The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise." I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice. As I glanced up from time to time I saw the agent's face change, and his look deepen and the lips, usually so energetically tense, loosen with emotion. Surely no poem in all the language conveys so perfectly the simple love of the home, the quiet joys, hopes, pathos of those who live close to the soil. When I had finished--I stopped with the stanza beginning: "Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way"; the agent turned away his head trying to brave out his emotion. Most of us, Anglo-Saxons, tremble before a tear when we might fearlessly beard a tiger. I moved up nearer to the agent and put my hand on his knee; then I read two or three of the other things I found in his wonderful book. And once I had him laughing and once again I had the tears in his eyes. Oh, a simple young man, a little crusty without, but soft inside--like the rest of us. Well, it was amazing once we began talking not of books but of life, how really eloquent and human he became. From being a distant and uncomfortable person, he became at once like a near neighbour and friend. It was strange to me--as I have thought since--how he conveyed to us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simple voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home. The very incongruity of detail--he told us how he grew onions in his back yard--added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision which he gave us. The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottage organ, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in Seventeenth Street--were all, curiously, fabrics of his emotion. It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phosphorescent in the heat of true feeling. How little we may come to know Romance by the cloak she wears and how humble must be he who would surprise the heart of her! It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill that I heard him add the details, one by one--the mortgage on his place, now rapidly being paid off, the brother who was a plumber, the mother-in-law who was not a mother-in-law of the comic papers. And finally he showed us the picture of the wife and baby that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat baby with its head resting on its mother's shoulder. "Mister," he said, "p'raps you think it's fun to ride around the country like I do, and be away from home most of the time. But it ain't. When I think of Minnie and the kid--" He broke off sharply, as if he had suddenly remembered the shame of such confidences. "Say," he asked, "what page is that poem on?" I told him. "One forty-six," he said. "When I get home I'm going to read that to Minnie. She likes poetry and all such things. And where's that other piece that tells how a man feels when he's lonesome? Say, that fellow knew!" We had a genuinely good time, the agent and I, and when he finally rose to go, I said: "Well, I've sold you a new book." "I see now, mister, what you mean." I went down the path with him and began to unhitch his horse. "Let me, let me," he said eagerly. Then he shook hands, paused a moment awkwardly as if about to say something, then sprang into his buggy without saying it. When he had taken up his reins he remarked: "Say! but you'd make an agent! You'd hypnotise 'em." I recognised it as the greatest compliment he could pay me: the craft compliment. Then he drove off, but pulled up before he had gone five yards. He turned in his seat, one hand on the back of it, his whip raised. "Say!" he shouted, and when I walked up he looked at me with fine embarrassment. "Mister, perhaps you'd accept one of these sets from Dixon free gratis, for nothing." "I understand," I said, "but you know I'm giving the books to you--and I couldn't take them back again." "Well," he said, "you're a good one, anyhow. Good-bye again," and then, suddenly, business naturally coming uppermost, he remarked with great enthusiasm: "You've given me a new idea. _Say_, I'll sell 'em." "Carry them carefully, man," I called after him; "they are precious." So I went back to my work, thinking how many fine people there are in this world--if you scratch 'em deep enough. [Illustration: "Horace 'hefted' it"] V THE AXE-HELVE _April the 15th._ This morning I broke my old axe handle. I went out early while the fog still filled the valley and the air was cool and moist as it had come fresh from the filter of the night. I drew a long breath and let my axe fall with all the force I could give it upon a new oak log. I swung it unnecessarily high for the joy of doing it and when it struck it communicated a sharp yet not unpleasant sting to the palms of my hands. The handle broke short off at the point where the helve meets the steel. The blade was driven deep in the oak wood. I suppose I should have regretted my foolishness, but I did not. The handle was old and somewhat worn, and the accident gave me an indefinable satisfaction: the culmination of use, that final destruction which is the complement of great effort. This feeling was also partly prompted by the thought of the new helve I already had in store, awaiting just such a catastrophe. Having come somewhat painfully by that helve, I really wanted to see it in use. Last spring, walking in my fields, I looked out along the fences for a well-fitted young hickory tree of thrifty second growth, bare of knots at least head high, without the cracks or fissures of too rapid growth or the doziness of early transgression. What I desired was a fine, healthy tree fitted for a great purpose and I looked for it as I would look for a perfect man to save a failing cause. At last I found a sapling growing in one of the sheltered angles of my rail fence. It was set about by dry grass, overhung by a much larger cherry tree, and bearing still its withered last year's leaves, worn diaphanous but curled delicately, and of a most beautiful ash gray colour, something like the fabric of a wasp's nest, only yellower. I gave it a shake and it sprung quickly under my hand like the muscle of a good horse. Its bark was smooth and trim, its bole well set and solid. A perfect tree! So I came up again with my short axe and after clearing away the grass and leaves with which the wind had mulched it, I cut into the clean white roots. I had no twinge of compunction, for was this not fulfillment? Nothing comes of sorrow for worthy sacrifice. When I had laid the tree low, I clipped off the lower branches, snapped off the top with a single clean stroke of the axe, and shouldered as pretty a second-growth sapling stick as anyone ever laid his eyes upon. I carried it down to my barn and put it on the open rafters over the cow stalls. A cow stable is warm and not too dry, so that a hickory log cures slowly without cracking or checking. There it lay for many weeks. Often I cast my eyes up at it with satisfaction, watching the bark shrink and slightly deepen in colour, and once I climbed up where I could see the minute seams making way in the end of the stick. In the summer I brought the stick into the house, and put it in the dry, warm storeroom over the kitchen where I keep my seed corn. I do not suppose it really needed further attention, but sometimes when I chanced to go into the storeroom, I turned it over with my foot. I felt a sort of satisfaction in knowing that it was in preparation for service: good material for useful work. So it lay during the autumn and far into the winter. One cold night when I sat comfortably at my fireplace, listening to the wind outside, and feeling all the ease of a man at peace with himself, my mind took flight to my snowy field sides and I thought of the trees there waiting and resting through the winter. So I came in imagination to the particular corner in the fence where I had cut my hickory sapling. Instantly I started up, much to Harriet's astonishment, and made my way mysteriously up the kitchen stairs. I would not tell what I was after: I felt it a sort of adventure, almost like the joy of seeing a friend long forgotten. It was as if my hickory stick had cried out at last, after long chrysalishood: "I am ready." I stood it on end and struck it sharply with my knuckles: it rang out with a certain clear resonance. "I am ready." I sniffed at the end of it. It exhaled a peculiar good smell, as of old fields in the autumn. "I am ready." So I took it under my arm and carried it down. "Mercy, what are you going to do?" exclaimed Harriet. "Deliberately, and with malice aforethought," I responded, "I am going to litter up your floor. I have decided to be reckless. I don't care what happens." Having made this declaration, which Harriet received with becoming disdain, I laid the log by the fireplace--not too near--and went to fetch a saw, a hammer, a small wedge, and a draw-shave. I split my log into as fine white sections as a man ever saw--every piece as straight as morality, and without so much as a sliver to mar it. Nothing is so satisfactory as to have a task come out in perfect time and in good order. The little pieces of bark and sawdust I swept scrupulously into the fireplace, looking up from time to time to see how Harriet was taking it. Harriet was still disdainful. Making an axe-helve is like writing a poem (though I never wrote one). The material is free enough, but it takes a poet to use it. Some people imagine that any fine thought is poetry, but there was never a greater mistake. A fine thought, to become poetry, must be seasoned in the upper warm garrets of the mind for long and long, then it must be brought down and slowly carved into words, shaped with emotion, polished with love. Else it is no true poem. Some people imagine that any hickory stick will make an axe-helve. But this is far from the truth. When I had whittled away for several evenings with my draw-shave and jack-knife, both of which I keep sharpened to the keenest edge, I found that my work was not progressing as well as I had hoped. "This is more of a task," I remarked one evening, "than I had imagined." Harriet, rocking placidly in her arm-chair, was mending a number of pairs of new socks, Poor Harriet! Lacking enough old holes to occupy her energies, she mends holes that may possibly appear. A frugal person! "Well, David," she said, "I warned you that you could buy a helve cheaper than you could make it." "So I can buy a book cheaper than I can write it," I responded. I felt somewhat pleased with my return shot, though I took pains not to show it. I squinted along my hickory stick which was even then beginning to assume, rudely, the outlines of an axe-handle. I had made a prodigious pile of fine white shavings and I was tired, but quite suddenly there came over me a sort of love for that length of wood. I sprung it affectionately over my knee, I rubbed it up and down with my hand, and then I set it in the corner behind the fireplace. "After all," I said, for I had really been disturbed by Harriet's remark--"after all, power over one thing gives us power over everything. When you mend socks prospectively--into futurity--Harriet, that is an evidence of true greatness." "Sometimes I think it doesn't pay," remarked Harriet, though she was plainly pleased. "Pretty good socks," I said, "can be bought for fifteen cents a pair." Harriet looked at me suspiciously, but I was as sober as the face of nature. For the next two or three evenings I let the axe-helve stand alone in the corner. I hardly looked at it, though once in a while, when occupied with some other work, I would remember, or rather half remember, that I had a pleasure in store for the evening. The very thought of sharp tools and something, to make with them acts upon the imagination with peculiar zest. So we love to employ the keen edge of the mind upon a knotty and difficult subject. One evening the Scotch preacher came in. We love him very much, though he sometimes makes us laugh--perhaps, in part, because he makes us laugh. Externally he is a sort of human cocoanut, rough, brown, shaggy, but within he has the true milk of human kindness. Some of his qualities touch greatness. His youth was spent in stony places where strong winds blew; the trees where he grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug was full of roots. But the crop was human love. He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred exclusively in the country, of magnanimity toward the unlike. In the country we are tempted to throw stones at strange hats! But to the Scotch preacher every man in one way seems transparent to the soul. He sees the man himself, not his professions any more than his clothes. And I never knew anyone who had such an abiding disbelief in the wickedness of the human soul. Weakness he sees and comforts; wickedness he cannot see. When he came in I was busy whittling my axe-helve, it being my pleasure at that moment to make long, thin, curly shavings so light that many of them were caught on the hearth and bowled by the draught straight to fiery destruction. There is a noisy zest about the Scotch preacher: he comes in "stomping" as we say, he must clear his throat, he must strike his hands together; he even seems noisy when he unwinds the thick red tippet which he wears wound many times around his neck. It takes him a long time to unwind it, and he accomplishes the task with many slow gyrations of his enormous rough head. When he sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair, spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight as a post, and blows his nose with a noise like the falling of a tree. His interest in everything is prodigious. When he saw what I was doing he launched at once upon an account of the methods of axe-helving, ancient and modern, with true incidents of his childhood. "Man," he exclaimed, "you've clean forgotten one of the preenciple refinements of the art. When you chop, which hand do you hold down?" At the moment, I couldn't have told "to save my life, so we both got up on our feet and tried. "It's the right hand down," I decided; "that's natural to me." "You're a normal right-handed chopper, then," said the Scotch preacher, "as I was thinking. Now let me instruct you in the art. Being right-handed, your helve must bow out--so. No first-class chopper uses a straight handle." He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mysteries of the bowed handle, and as I listened I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task This was a final perfection to be accomplished, the finality of technique! So we sat with our heads together talking helves and axes, axes with single blades and axes with double blades, and hand axes and great choppers' axes, and the science of felling trees, with the true philosophy of the last chip, and arguments as to the best procedure when a log begins to "pinch"--until a listener would have thought that the art of the chopper included the whole philosophy of existence--as indeed it does, if you look at it in that way. Finally I rushed out and brought in my old axe-handle, and we set upon it like true artists, with critical proscription for being a trivial product of machinery. "Man," exclaimed the preacher, "it has no character. Now your helve here, being the vision of your brain and work of your hands, will interpret the thought of your heart." Before the Scotch preacher had finished his disquisition upon the art of helve-making and its relations with all other arts, I felt like Peary discovering the Pole. In the midst of the discourse, while I was soaring high, the Scotch preacher suddenly stopped, sat up, and struck his knee with a tremendous resounding smack. "Spoons!" he exclaimed. Harriet and I stopped and looked at him in astonishment. "Spoons," repeated Harriet. "Spoons," said the Scotch preacher. "I've not once thought of my errand; and my wife told me to come straight home. I'm more thoughtless every day!" Then he turned to Harriet: "I've been sent to borrow some spoons," he said. "Spoons!" exclaimed Harriet. "Spoons," answered the Scotch preacher. "We've invited friends for dinner to-morrow, and we must have spoons." "But why--how--I thought--" began Harriet, still in astonishment. The Scotch preacher squared around toward her and cleared his throat. "It's the baptisms," he said: "when a baby is brought for baptism, of course it must have a baptismal gift. What is the best gift for a baby? A spoon. So we present it with a spoon. To-day we discovered we had only three spoons left, and company coming. Man, 'tis a proleefic neighbourhood." [Illustration: "LET MY AXE FALL"] He heaved a great sigh. Harriet rushed out and made up a package. When she came in I thought it seemed suspiciously large for spoons, but the Scotch preacher having again launched into the lore of the chopper, took it without at first perceiving anything strange. Five minutes after we had closed the door upon him he suddenly returned holding up the package. "This is an uncommonly heavy package," he remarked; "did I say table-spoons?" "Go on!" commanded Harriet; "your wife will understand." "All right--good-bye again," and his sturdy figure soon disappeared in the dark. "The impractical man!" exclaimed Harriet. "People impose on him." "What was in that package, Harriet?" "Oh, I put in a few jars of jelly and a cake of honey." After a moment Harriet looked up from her work. "Do you know the greatest sorrow of the Scotch preacher and his wife?" "What is it?" I asked. "They have no chick nor child of their own," said Harriet. It is prodigious, the amount of work required to make a good axe-helve--I mean to make it according to one's standard. I had times of humorous discouragement and times of high elation when it seemed to me I could not work fast enough. Weeks passed when I did not touch the helve but left it standing quietly in the corner. Once or twice I took it out and walked about with it as a sort of cane, much to the secret amusement, I think, of Harriet. At times Harriet takes a really wicked delight in her superiority. Early one morning in March the dawn came with a roaring wind, sleety snow drove down over the hill, the house creaked and complained in every clapboard. A blind of one of the upper windows, wrenched loose from its fastenings, was driven shut with such force that it broke a window pane. When I rushed up to discover the meaning of the clatter and to repair the damage, I found the floor covered with peculiar long fragments of glass--the pane having been broken inward from the centre. "Just what I have wanted," I said to myself. I selected a few of the best pieces and so eager was I to try them that I got out my axe-helve before breakfast and sat scratching away when Harriet came down. Nothing equals a bit of broken glass for putting on the final perfect touch to a work of art like an axe-helve. Nothing will so beautifully and delicately trim out the curves of the throat or give a smoother turn to the waist. So with care and an indescribable affection, I added the final touches, trimming the helve until it exactly fitted my hand. Often and often I tried it in pantomime, swinging nobly in the centre of the sitting-room (avoiding the lamp), attentive to the feel of my hand as it ran along the helve. I rubbed it down with fine sandpaper until it fairly shone with whiteness. Then I borrowed a red flannel cloth of Harriet and having added a few drops--not too much--of boiled oil, I rubbed the helve for all I was worth. This I continued for upward of an hour. At that time the axe-helve had taken on a yellowish shade, very clear and beautiful. I do not think I could have been prouder if I had carved a statue or built a parthenon. I was consumed with vanity; but I set the new helve in the corner with the appearance of utter unconcern. "There," I remarked, "it's finished." I watched Harriet out of the corner of my eye: she made as if to speak and then held silent. That evening friend Horace came in. I was glad to see him. Horace is or was a famous chopper. I placed him at the fireplace where his eye, sooner or later, must fall upon my axe-helve. Oh, I worked out my designs! Presently he saw the helve, picked it up at once and turned it over in his hands. I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense of self-consciousness. I know how a poet must feel at hearing his first poem read aloud by some other person who does not know its authorship. I suffer and thrill with the novelist who sees a stranger purchase his book in a book-shop. I felt as though I stood that moment before the Great Judge. Horace "hefted" it and balanced it, and squinted along it; he rubbed it with his thumb, he rested one end of it on the floor and sprung it roughly. "David," he said severely, "where did you git this?" Once when I was a boy I came home with my hair wet. My father asked: "David, have you been swimming?" I had exactly the same feeling when Horace asked his question. Now I am, generally speaking, a truthful man. I have written a good deal about the immorality, the unwisdom, the short-sightedness, the sinful wastefulness of a lie. But at that moment, if Harriet had not been present--and that illustrates one of the purposes of society, to bolster up a man's morals--I should have evolved as large and perfect a prevarication as it lay within me to do--cheerfully. But I felt Harriet's moral eye upon me: I was a coward as well as a sinner. I faltered so long that Horace finally looked around at me. Horace has no poetry in his soul, neither does he understand the philosophy of imperfection nor the art of irregularity. It is a tender shoot, easily blasted by cold winds, the creative instinct: but persistent. It has many adventitious buds. A late frost destroying the freshness of its early verdure, may be the means of a richer growth in later and more favourable days. * * * * * For a week I left my helve standing there in the corner. I did not even look at it. I was slain. I even thought of getting up in the night and putting the helve on the coals--secretly. Then, suddenly, one morning, I took it up not at all tenderly, indeed with a humorous appreciation of my own absurdities, and carried it out into the yard. An axe-helve is not a mere ornament but a thing of sober purpose. The test, after all, of axe-helves is not sublime perfection, but service. We may easily find flaws in the verse of the master--how far the rhythm fails of the final perfect music, how often uncertain the rhyme--but it bears within it, hidden yet evident, that certain incalculable fire which kindles and will continue to kindle the souls of men. The final test is not the perfection of precedent, not regularity, but life, spirit. It was one of those perfect, sunny, calm mornings that sometimes come in early April: the zest of winter yet in the air, but a promise of summer. I built a fire of oak chips in the middle of the yard, between two flat stones. I brought out my old axe, and when the fire had burned down somewhat, leaving a foundation of hot coals, I thrust the eye of the axe into the fire. The blade rested on one of the flat stones, and I kept it covered with wet rags in order that it might not heat sufficiently to destroy the temper of the steel. Harriet's old gray hen, a garrulous fowl, came and stood on one leg and looked at me first with one eye and then with the other. She asked innumerable impertinent questions and was generally disagreeable. "I am sorry, madam," I said finally, "but I have grown adamant to criticism. I have done my work as well as it lies in me to do it. It is the part of sanity to throw it aside without compunction. A work must prove itself. Shoo!" I said this with such conclusiveness and vigour that the critical old hen departed hastily with ruffled feathers. So I sat there in the glorious perfection of the forenoon, the great day open around me, a few small clouds abroad in the highest sky, and all the earth radiant with sunshine. The last snow of winter was gone, the sap ran in the trees, the cows fed further afield. When the eye of the axe was sufficiently expanded by the heat I drew it quickly from the fire and drove home the helve which I had already whittled down to the exact size. I had a hickory wedge prepared, and it was the work of ten seconds to drive it into the cleft at the lower end of the helve until the eye of the axe was completely and perfectly filled. Upon cooling the steel shrunk upon the wood, clasping it with such firmness that nothing short of fire could ever dislodge it. Then, carefully, with knife and sandpaper I polished off the wood around the steel of the axe until I had made as good a job of it as lay within my power. So I carried the axe to my log-pile. I swung it above my head and the feel of it was good in my hands. The blade struck deep into the oak wood. And I said to myself with satisfaction: "It serves the purpose." VI THE MARSH DITCH "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-smelling herbs--is more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your Success." In all the days of my life I have never been so well content as I am this spring. Last summer I thought I was happy, the fall gave me a finality of satisfaction, the winter imparted perspective, but spring conveys a wholly new sense of life, a quickening the like of which I never before experienced. It seems to me that everything in the world is more interesting, more vital, more significant. I feel like "waving aside all roofs," in the way of Le Sage's Asmodeus. I even cease to fear Mrs. Horace, who is quite the most formidable person in this neighbourhood. She is so avaricious in the saving of souls--and so covetous of mine, which I wish especially to retain. When I see her coming across the hill I feel like running and hiding, and if I were as bold as a boy, I should do it, but being a grown-up coward I remain and dissemble. She came over this morning. When I beheld her afar off, I drew a long breath: "One thousand," I quoted to myself, "shall flee at the rebuke of one." In calmness I waited. She came with colours flying and hurled her biblical lance. When I withstood the shock with unexpected jauntiness, for I usually fall dead at once, she looked at me with severity and said: "Mr. Grayson, you are a materialist." "You have shot me with a name," I replied. "I am unhurt." It would be impossible to slay me on a day like this. On a day like this I am immortal. It comes to me as the wonder of wonders, these spring days, how surely everything, spiritual as well as material, proceeds out of the earth. I have times of sheer Paganism when I could bow and touch my face to the warm bare soil. We are so often ashamed of the Earth--the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness of it. To us in our fine raiment and soft manners, it seems indelicate. Instead of seeking that association with the earth which is the renewal of life, we devise ourselves distant palaces and seek strange pleasures. How often and sadly we repeat the life story of the yellow dodder of the moist lanes of my lower farm. It springs up fresh and clean from the earth itself, and spreads its clinging viny stems over the hospitable wild balsam and golden rod. In a week's time, having reached the warm sunshine of the upper air, it forgets its humble beginnings. Its roots wither swiftly and die out, but the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder--rootless, leafless, parasitic--reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be like that: so much of our civilization is like that. Men and women there are--the pity of it--who, eating plentifully, have never themselves taken a mouthful from the earth. They have never known a moment's real life of their own. Lying up to the sun in warmth and comfort--but leafless--they do not think of the hosts under them, smothered, strangled, starved. They take _nothing_ at first hand. They experience described emotion, and think prepared thoughts. They live not in life, but in printed reports of life. They gather the odour of odours, not the odour itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A poor, sad, second-rate existence! Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail, every one, until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil! My wild plum trees grow in the coarse earth, among excrementitious mould, a physical life which finally blossoms and exhales its perfect odour: which ultimately bears the seed of its immortality. Human happiness is the true odour of growth, the sweet exhalation of work: and the seed of human immortality is borne secretly within the coarse and mortal husk. So many of us crave the odour without cultivating the earthly growth from which it proceeds: so many, wasting mortality, expect immortality! ----"Why," asks Charles Baxter, "do you always put the end of your stories first?" "You may be thankful," I replied, "that I do not make my remarks all endings. Endings are so much more interesting than beginnings." Without looking up from the buggy he was mending, Charles Baxter intimated that my way had at least one advantage: one always knew, he said, that I really had an end in view--and hope deferred, he said---- ----How surely, soundly, deeply, the physical underlies the spiritual. This morning I was up and out at half-past four, as perfect a morning as I ever saw: mists yet huddled in the low spots, the sun coming up over the hill, and all the earth fresh with moisture, sweet with good odours, and musical with early bird-notes. It is the time of the spring just after the last seeding and before the early haying: a catch-breath in the farmer's year. I have been utilising it in digging a drainage ditch at the lower end of my farm. A spot of marsh grass and blue flags occupies nearly half an acre of good land and I have been planning ever since I bought the place to open a drain from its lower edge to the creek, supplementing it in the field above, if necessary, with submerged tiling. I surveyed it carefully several weeks ago and drew plans and contours of the work as though it were an inter-oceanic canal. I find it a real delight to work out in the earth itself the details of the drawing. This morning, after hastening with the chores, I took my bag and my spade on my shoulder and set off (in rubber boots) for the ditch. My way lay along the margin of my cornfield in the deep grass. On my right as I walked was the old rail fence full of thrifty young hickory and cherry trees with here and there a clump of blackberry bushes. The trees beyond the fence cut off the sunrise so that I walked in the cool broad shadows. On my left stretched the cornfield of my planting, the young corn well up, very attractive and hopeful, my really frightful scarecrow standing guard on the knoll, a wisp of straw sticking up through a hole in his hat and his crooked thumbs turned down--"No mercy." "Surely no corn ever before grew like this," I said to myself. "To-morrow I must begin cultivating again." So I looked up and about me--not to miss anything of the morning--and I drew in a good big breath and I thought the world had never been so open to my senses. I wonder why it is that the sense of smell is so commonly under-regarded. To me it is the source of some of my greatest pleasures. No one of the senses is more often allied with robustity of physical health. A man who smells acutely may be set down as enjoying that which is normal, plain, wholesome. He does not require seasoning: the ordinary earth is good enough for him. He is likely to be sane--which means sound, healthy--in his outlook upon life. Of all hours of the day there is none like the early morning for downright good odours--the morning before eating. Fresh from sleep and unclogged with food a man's senses cut like knives. The whole world comes in upon him. A still morning is best, for the mists and the moisture seem to retain the odours which they have distilled through the night. Upon a breezy morning one is likely to get a single predominant odour as of clover when the wind blows across a hay field or of apple blossoms when the wind comes through the orchard, but upon a perfectly still morning, it is wonderful how the odours arrange themselves in upright strata, so that one walking passes through them as from room to room in a marvellous temple of fragrance, (I should have said, I think, if I had not been on my way to dig a ditch, that it was like turning the leaves of some delicate volume of lyrics!) So it was this morning. As I walked along the margin of my field I was conscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool, heavy aroma which one associates with the night: as of moist woods and earth mould. The penetrating scent of the night remains long after the sights and sounds of it have disappeared. In sunny spots I had the fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity--a warm, generous odour of daylight and sunshine. Down the field, toward the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crab-apple blossoms, almost tropical in their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and the frogs. How few of us really use our senses! I mean give ourselves fully at any time to the occupation of the senses. We do not expect to understand a treatise on Economics without applying our minds to it, nor can we really smell or hear or see or feel without every faculty alert. Through sheer indolence we miss half the joy of the world! Often as I work I stop to see: really see: see everything, or to listen, and it is the wonder of wonders, how much there is in this old world which we never dreamed of, how many beautiful, curious, interesting sights and sounds there are which ordinarily make no impression upon our clogged, overfed and preoccupied minds. I have also had the feeling--it may be unscientific but it is comforting--that any man might see like an Indian or smell like a hound if he gave to the senses the brains which the Indian and the hound apply to them. And I'm pretty sure about the Indian! It is marvellous what a man can do when he puts his entire mind upon one faculty and bears down hard. So I walked this morning, not hearing nor seeing, but smelling. Without desiring to stir up strife among the peaceful senses, there is this further marvel of the sense of smell. No other possesses such an after-call. Sight preserves pictures: the complete view of the aspect of objects, but it is photographic and external. Hearing deals in echoes, but the sense of smell, while saving no vision of a place or a person, will re-create in a way almost miraculous the inner _emotion_ of a particular time or place. I know of nothing that will so "create an appetite under the ribs of death." Only a short time ago I passed an open doorway in the town. I was busy with errands, my mind fully engaged, but suddenly I caught an odour from somewhere within the building I was passing. I stopped! It was as if in that moment I lost twenty years of my life: I was a boy again, living and feeling a particular instant at the time of my father's death. Every emotion of that occasion, not recalled in years, returned to me sharply and clearly as though I experienced it for the first time. It was a peculiar emotion: the first time I had ever felt the oppression of space--can I describe it?--the utter bigness of the world and the aloofness of myself, a little boy, within it--now that my father was gone. It was not at that moment sorrow, nor remorse, nor love: it was an inexpressible cold terror--that anywhere I might go in the world, I should still be alone! And there I stood, a man grown, shaking in the sunshine with that old boyish emotion brought back to me by an odour! Often and often have I known this strange rekindling of dead fires. And I have thought how, if our senses were really perfect, we might lose nothing, out of our lives: neither sights, nor sounds, nor emotions: a sort of mortal immortality. Was not Shakespeare great because he lost less of the savings of his senses than other men? What a wonderful seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, he must have been--and how, all the time, his mind must have played upon the gatherings of his senses! All scenes, all men, the very turn of a head, the exact sound of a voice, the taste of food, the feel of the world--all the emotions of his life must he have had there before him as he wrote, his great mind playing upon them, reconstructing, re-creating and putting them down hot upon his pages. There is nothing strange about great men; they are like us, only deeper, higher, broader: they think as we do, but with more intensity: they suffer as we do, more keenly: they love as we do, more tenderly. I may be over-glorifying the sense of smell, but it is only because I walked this morning in a world of odours. The greatest of the senses, of course, is not smell or hearing, but sight. What would not any man exchange for that: for the faces one loves, for the scenes one holds most dear, for all that is beautiful and changeable and beyond description? The Scotch Preacher says that the saddest lines in all literature are those of Milton, writing of his blindness. "Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine." --I have wandered a long way from ditch-digging, but not wholly without intention. Sooner or later I try to get back into the main road. I throw down my spade in the wet trampled grass at the edge of the ditch. I take off my coat and hang it over a limb of the little hawthorn tree. I put my bag near it. I roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt: I give my hat a twirl; I'm ready for work. --The senses are the tools by which we lay hold upon the world: they are the implements of consciousness and growth. So long as they are used upon the good earth--used to wholesome weariness--they remain healthy, they yield enjoyment, they nourish growth; but let them once be removed from their natural employment and they turn and feed upon themselves, they seek the stimulation of luxury, they wallow in their own corruption, and finally, worn out, perish from off the earth which they have not appreciated. Vice is ever the senses gone astray. --So I dug. There is something fine in hard physical labour, straight ahead: no brain used, just muscles. I stood ankle-deep in the cool water: every spadeful came out with a smack, and as I turned it over at the edge of the ditch small turgid rivulets coursed back again. I did not think of anything in particular. I dug. A peculiar joy attends the very pull of the muscles. I drove the spade home with one foot, then I bent and lifted and turned with a sort of physical satisfaction difficult to describe. At first I had the cool of the morning, but by seven o'clock the day was hot enough! I opened the breast of my shirt, gave my sleeves another roll, and went at it again for half an hour, until I dripped with perspiration. "I will knock off," I said, so I used my spade as a ladder and climbed out of the ditch. Being very thirsty, I walked down through the marshy valley to the clump of alders which grows along the creek. I followed a cow-path through the thicket and came to the creek side, where I knelt on a log and took a good long drink. Then I soused my head in the cool stream, dashed the water upon my arms and came up dripping and gasping! Oh, but it was fine! So I came back to the hawthorn tree, where I sat down comfortably and stretched my legs. There is a poem in stretched legs--after hard digging--but I can't write it, though I can feel it! I got my bag and took out a half loaf of Harriet's bread. Breaking off big crude pieces, I ate it there in the shade. How rarely we taste the real taste of bread! We disguise it with butter, we toast it, we eat it with milk or fruit. We even soak it with gravy (here in the country where we aren't at all polite--but very comfortable), so that we never get the downright delicious taste of the bread itself. I was hungry this morning and I ate my half loaf to the last crumb--and wanted more. Then I lay down for a moment in the shade and looked up into the sky through the thin outer branches of the hawthorn. A turkey buzzard was lazily circling cloud-high above me: a frog boomed intermittently from the little marsh, and there were bees at work in the blossoms. --I had another drink at the creek and went back somewhat reluctantly, I confess, to the work. It was hot, and the first joy of effort had worn off. But the ditch was to be dug and I went at it again. One becomes a sort of machine--unthinking, mechanical: and yet intense physical work, though making no immediate impression on the mind, often lingers in the consciousness. I find that sometimes I can remember and enjoy for long afterward every separate step in a task. It is curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself--down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it--and repeat. And yet sometimes--mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired--I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me--a sense of its beauty and its meanings--giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is near complete content-- Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks: she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up suddenly from hard work you will see her, but if you look too long she fades sorrowfully away. --Down toward the town there is a little factory for barrel hoops and staves. It has one of the most musical whistles I ever heard in my life. It toots at exactly twelve o'clock: blessed sound! The last half-hour at ditch-digging is a hard, slow pull. I'm warm and tired, but I stick down to it and wait with straining ear for the music. At the very first note, of that whistle I drop my spade. I will even empty out a load of dirt half way up rather than expend another ounce of energy; and I spring out of the ditch and start for home with a single desire in my heart--or possibly lower down. And Harriet, standing in the doorway, seems to me a sort of angel--a culinary angel! Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread--there may be-- VII AN ARGUMENT WITH A MILLIONNAIRE "Let the mighty and great Roll in splendour and state, I envy them not, I declare it. I eat my own lamb, My own chicken and ham, I shear my own sheep and wear it. I have lawns, I have bowers, I have fruits, I have flowers. The lark is my morning charmer; So you jolly dogs now, Here's God bless the plow-- Long life and content to the farmer." ----_Rhyme on an old pitcher of English pottery_. I have been hearing of John Starkweather ever since I came here. He is a most important personage in this community. He is rich. Horace especially loved to talk about him. Give Horace half a chance, whether the subject be pigs or churches, and he will break in somewhere with the remark: "As I was saying to Mr. Starkweather--" or, "Mr. Starkweather says to me--" How we love to shine by reflected glory! Even Harriet has not gone unscathed; she, too, has been affected by the bacillus of admiration. She has wanted to know several times if I saw John Starkweather drive by: "the finest span of horses in this country," she says, and "_did_ you see his daughter?" Much other information concerning the Starkweather household, culinary and otherwise, is current among our hills. We know accurately the number of Mr. Starkweather's bedrooms, we can tell how much coal he uses in winter and how many tons of ice in summer, and upon such important premises we argue his riches. Several times I have passed John Starkweather's home. It lies between my farm and the town, though not on the direct road, and it is really beautiful with the groomed and guided beauty possible to wealth. A stately old house with a huge end chimney of red brick stands with dignity well back from the road; round about lie pleasant lawns that once were cornfields: and there are drives and walks and exotic shrubs. At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to understand why I should also enjoy Starkweather's groomed surroundings. But it came to me that after all, much as we may love wildness, we are not wild, nor our works. What more artificial than a house, or a barn, or a fence? And the greater and more formal the house, the more formal indeed must be the nearer natural environments. Perhaps the hand of man might well have been less evident in developing the surroundings of the Starkweather home--for art, dealing with nature, is so often too accomplished! But I enjoy the Starkweather place and as I look in from the road, I sometimes think to myself with satisfaction: "Here is this rich man who has paid his thousands to make the beauty which I pass and take for nothing--and having taken, leave as much behind." And I wonder sometimes whether he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than I, who walk the roads outside. Anyway, I am grateful to him for using his riches so much to my advantage. On fine mornings John Starkweather sometimes comes out in his slippers, bare-headed, his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and walks slowly around his garden. Charles Baxter says that on these occasions he is asking his gardener the names of the vegetables. However that may be, he has seemed to our community the very incarnation of contentment and prosperity--his position the acme of desirability. What was my astonishment, then, the other morning to see John Starkweather coming down the pasture lane through my farm. I knew him afar off, though I had never met him. May I express the inexpressible when I say he had a rich look; he walked rich, there was richness in the confident crook of his elbow, and in the positive twitch of the stick he carried: a man accustomed to having doors opened before he knocked. I stood there a moment and looked up the hill at him, and I felt that profound curiosity which every one of us feels every day of his life to know something of the inner impulses which stir his nearest neighbour. I should have liked to know John Starkweather; but I thought to myself as I have thought so many times how surely one comes finally to imitate his surroundings. A farmer grows to be a part of his farm; the sawdust on his coat is not the most distinctive insignia of the carpenter; the poet writes his truest lines upon his own countenance. People passing in my road take me to be a part of this natural scene. I suppose I seem to them as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like the grass and leaves as to be invisible. We all come to be marked upon by nature and dismissed--how carelessly!--as genera or species. And is it not the primal struggle of man to escape classification, to form new differentiations? Sometimes--I confess it--when I see one passing in my road, I feel like hailing him and saying: "Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, am a person; I am different and curious. I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts of people; if you are not interested in me, at least I am intensely interested in you. Come over now and let's talk!" So we are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs which separate us even from our nearest friends! Once or twice this feeling has been so real to me that I've been near to the point of hailing utter strangers--only to be instantly overcome with a sense of the humorous absurdity of such an enterprise. So I laugh it off and I say to myself: "Steady now: the man is going to town to sell a pig; he is coming back with ten pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can of coffee and some new blades for his mowing machine. He hasn't time for talk"--and so I come down with a bump to my digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or whatever it is. ----Here I've left John Starkweather in my pasture while I remark to the extent of a page or two that I didn't expect him to see me when he went by. I assumed that he was out for a walk, perhaps to enliven a worn appetite (do you know, confidentially, I've had some pleasure in times past in reflecting upon the jaded appetites of millionnaires!), and that he would pass out by my lane to the country road; but instead of that, what should he do but climb the yard fence and walk over toward the barn where I was at work. Perhaps I was not consumed with excitement: here was fresh adventure! "A farmer," I said to myself with exultation, "has only to wait long enough and all the world comes his way." I had just begun to grease my farm wagon and was experiencing some difficulty in lifting and steadying the heavy rear axle while I took off the wheel. I kept busily at work, pretending (such is the perversity of the human mind) that I did not see Mr. Starkweather. He stood for a moment watching me; then he said: "Good morning, sir." I looked up and said: "Oh, good morning!" "Nice little farm you have here." "It's enough for me," I replied. I did not especially like the "little." One is human. Then I had an absurd inspiration: he stood there so trim and jaunty and prosperous. So rich! I had a good look at him. He was dressed in a woollen jacket coat, knee-trousers and leggins; on his head he wore a jaunty, cocky little Scotch cap; a man, I should judge, about fifty years old, well-fed and hearty in appearance, with grayish hair and a good-humoured eye. I acted on my inspiration: "You've arrived," I said, "at the psychological moment." "How's that?" "Take hold here and help me lift this axle and steady it. I'm having a hard time of it." The look of astonishment in his countenance was beautiful to see. For a moment failure stared me in the face. His expression said with emphasis: "Perhaps you don't know who I am." But I looked at him with the greatest good feeling and my expression said, or I meant it to say: "To be sure I don't: and what difference does it make, anyway!" "You take hold there," I said, without waiting for him to catch his breath, "and I'll get hold here. Together we can easily get the wheel off." Without a word he set his cane against the barn and bent his back, up came the axle and I propped it with a board. "Now," I said, "you hang on there and steady it while I get the wheel off"--though, indeed, it didn't really need much steadying. As I straightened up, whom should I see but Harriet standing transfixed in the pathway half way down to the barn, transfixed with horror. She had recognised John Starkweather and had heard at least part of what I said to him, and the vision of that important man bending his back to help lift the axle of my old wagon was too terrible! She caught my eye and pointed and mouthed. When I smiled and nodded, John Starkweather straightened up and looked around. "Don't, on your life," I warned, "let go of that axle." He held on and Harriet turned and retreated ingloriously. John Starkweather's face was a study! "Did you ever grease a wagon?" I asked him genially. "Never," he said. "There's more of an art in it than you think," I said, and as I worked I talked to him of the lore of axle-grease and showed him exactly how to put it on--neither too much nor too little, and so that it would distribute itself evenly when the wheel was replaced. "There's a right way of doing everything," I observed. "That's so," said John Starkweather: "if I could only get workmen that believed it." By that time I could see that he was beginning to be interested. I put back the wheel, gave it a light turn and screwed on the nut. He helped me with the other end of the axle with all good humour. "Perhaps," I said, as engagingly as I knew how, "you'd like to try the art yourself? You take the grease this time and I'll steady the wagon." "All right!" he said, laughing, "I'm in for anything." He took the grease box and the paddle--less gingerly than I thought he would. "Is that right?" he demanded, and so he put on the grease. And oh, it was good to see Harriet in the doorway! "Steady there," I said, "not so much at the end: now put the box down on the reach." And so together we greased the wagon, talking all the time in the friendliest way. I actually believe that he was having a pretty good time. At least it had the virtue of unexpectedness. He wasn't bored! When he had finished we both straightened our backs and looked at each other. There was a twinkle in his eye: then we both laughed. "He's all right," I said to myself. I held up my hands, then he held up his: it was hardly necessary to prove that wagon-greasing was not a delicate operation. "It's a good wholesome sign," I said, "but it'll come off. Do you happen to remember a story of Tolstoi's called Ivan the Fool'?" ("What is a farmer doing quoting Tolstoi!" remarked his countenance--though he said not a word.) "In the kingdom of Ivan, you remember," I said, "it was the rule that whoever had hard places on his hands came to table, but whoever had not must eat what the others left." Thus I led him up to the back steps and poured him a basin of hot water--which I brought myself from the kitchen, Harriet having marvellously and completely disappeared. We both washed our hands, talking with great good humour. When we had finished I said: "Sit down, friend, if you've time, and let's talk." So he sat down on one of the logs of my woodpile: a solid sort of man, rather warm after his recent activities. He looked me over with some interest and, I thought, friendliness. "Why does a man like you," he asked finally, "waste himself on a little farm back here in the country?" For a single instant I came nearer to being angry than I have been for a long time. _Waste_ myself! So we are judged without knowledge. I had a sudden impulse to demolish him (if I could) with the nearest sarcasms I could lay hand to. He was so sure of himself! "Oh well," I thought, with vainglorious superiority, "he doesn't know," So I said: "What would you have me be--a millionnaire?" He smiled, but with a sort of sincerity. "You might be," he said: "who can tell!" I laughed outright: the humour of it struck me as delicious. Here I had been, ever since I first heard of John Starkweather, rather gloating over him as a poor suffering millionnaire (of course millionnaires _are_ unhappy), and there he sat, ruddy of face and hearty of body, pitying _me_ for a poor unfortunate farmer back here in the country! Curious, this human nature of ours, isn't it? But how infinitely beguiling! So I sat down beside Mr. Starkweather on the log and crossed my legs. I felt as though I had set foot in a new country. "Would you really advise me," I asked, "to start in to be a millionnaire?" He chuckled: "Well, that's one way of putting it. Hitch your wagon to a star; but begin by making a few dollars more a year than you spend. When I began----" he stopped short with an amused smile, remembering that I did not know who he was. "Of course," I said, "I understand that." "A man must begin small"--he was on pleasant ground--"and anywhere he likes, a few dollars here, a few there. He must work hard, he must save, he must be both bold and cautious. I know a man who began when he was about your age with total assets of ten dollars and a good digestion. He's now considered a fairly wealthy man. He has a home in the city, a place in the country, and he goes to Europe when he likes. He has so arranged his affairs that young men do most of the work and he draws the dividends--and all in a little more than twenty years. I made every single cent--but as I said, it's a penny business to start with. The point is, I like to see young men ambitious." [Illustration: "What would you have me be--a millionaire?"] "Ambitious," I asked, "for what?" "Why, to rise in the world; to get ahead." "I know you'll pardon me," I said, "for appearing to cross-examine you, but I'm tremendously interested in these things. What do you mean by rising? And who am I to get ahead of?" He looked at me in astonishment, and with evident impatience at my consummate stupidity. "I am serious," I said. "I really want to make the best I can of my life. It's the only one I've got." "See here," he said: "let us say you clear up five hundred a year from this farm----" "You exaggerate--" I interrupted. "Do I?" he laughed; "that makes my case all the better. Now, isn't it possible to rise from that? Couldn't you make a thousand or five thousand or even fifty thousand a year?" It seems an unanswerable argument: fifty thousand dollars! "I suppose I might," I said, "but do you think I'd be any better off or happier with fifty thousand a year than I am now? You see, I like all these surroundings better than any other place I ever knew. That old green hill over there with the oak on it is an intimate friend of mine. I have a good cornfield in which every year I work miracles. I've a cow and a horse, and a few pigs. I have a comfortable home. My appetite is perfect, and I have plenty of food to gratify it. I sleep every night like a boy, for I haven't a trouble in this world to disturb me. I enjoy the mornings here in the country: and the evenings are pleasant. Some of my neighbours have come to be my good friends. I like them and I am pretty sure they like me. Inside the house there I have the best books ever written and I have time in the evenings to read them--I mean _really_ read them. Now the question is, would I be any better off, or any happier, if I had fifty thousand a year?" John Starkweather laughed. "Well, sir," he said, "I see I've made the acquaintance of a philosopher." "Let us say," I continued, "that you are willing to invest twenty years of your life in a million dollars." ("Merely an illustration," said John Starkweather.) "You have it where you can put it in the bank and take it out again, or you can give it form in houses, yachts, and other things. Now twenty years of my life--to me--is worth more than a million dollars. I simply can't afford to sell it for that. I prefer to invest it, as somebody or other has said, unearned in life. I've always had a liking for intangible properties." "See here," said John Starkweather, "you are taking a narrow view of life. You are making your own pleasure the only standard. Shouldn't a man make the most of the talents given him? Hasn't he a duty to society?" "Now you are shifting your ground," I said, "from the question of personal satisfaction to that of duty. That concerns me, too. Let me ask you: Isn't it important to society that this piece of earth be plowed and cultivated?" "Yes, but----" "Isn't it honest and useful work?" "Of course." "Isn't it important that it shall not only be done, but well done?" "Certainly." "It takes all there is in a good man," I said, "to be a good farmer." "But the point is," he argued, "might not the same faculties applied to other things yield better and bigger results?" "That is a problem, of course," I said. "I tried money-making once--in a city--and I was unsuccessful and unhappy; here I am both successful and happy. I suppose I was one of the young men who did the work while some millionnaire drew the dividends." (I was cutting close, and I didn't venture to look at him). "No doubt he had his houses and yachts and went to Europe when he liked. I know I lived upstairs--back--where there wasn't a tree to be seen, or a spear of green grass, or a hill, or a brook: only smoke and chimneys and littered roofs. Lord be thanked for my escape! Sometimes I think that Success has formed a silent conspiracy against Youth. Success holds up a single glittering apple and bids Youth strip and run for it; and Youth runs and Success still holds the apple." John Starkweather said nothing. "Yes," I said, "there are duties. We realise, we farmers, that we must produce more than we ourselves can eat or wear or burn. We realise that we are the foundation: we connect human life with the earth. We dig and plant and produce, and having eaten at the first table ourselves, we pass what is left to the bankers and millionnaires. Did you ever think, stranger, that most of the wars of the world have been fought for the control of this farmer's second table? Have you thought that the surplus of wheat and corn and cotton is what the railroads are struggling to carry? Upon our surplus run all the factories and mills; a little of it gathered in cash makes a millionnaire. But we farmers, we sit back comfortably after dinner, and joke with our wives and play with our babies, and let all the rest of you fight for the crumbs that fall from our abundant tables. If once we really cared and got up and shook ourselves, and said to the maid: 'Here, child, don't waste the crusts: gather 'em up and to-morrow we'll have a cottage pudding,' where in the world would all the millionnaires be?" Oh, I tell you, I waxed eloquent. I couldn't let John Starkweather, or any other man, get away with the conviction that a millionnaire is better than a farmer. "Moreover," I said, "think of the position of the millionnaire. He spends his time playing not with life, but with the symbols of life, whether cash or houses. Any day the symbols may change; a little war may happen along, there may be a defective flue or a western breeze, or even a panic because the farmers aren't scattering as many crumbs as usual (they call it crop failure, but I've noticed that the farmers still continue to have plenty to eat) and then what happens to your millionnaire? Not knowing how to produce anything himself, he would starve to death if there were not always, somewhere, a farmer to take him up to the table." "You're making a strong case," laughed John Starkweather. "Strong!" I said. "It is simply wonderful what a leverage upon society a few acres of land, a cow, a pig or two, and a span of horses gives a man. I'm ridiculously independent. I'd be the hardest sort of a man to dislodge or crush. I tell you, my friend, a farmer is like an oak, his roots strike deep in the soil, he draws a sufficiency of food from the earth itself, he breathes the free air around him, his thirst is quenched by heaven itself--and there's no tax on sunshine." I paused for very lack of breath. John Starkweather was laughing. "When you commiserate me, therefore" ("I'm sure I shall never do it again," said John Starkweather)--"when you commiserate me, therefore, and advise me to rise, you must give me really good reasons for changing my occupation and becoming a millionnaire. You must prove to me that I can be more independent, more honest, more useful as a millionnaire, and that I shall have better and truer friends!" John Starkweather looked around at me (I knew I had been absurdly eager and I was rather ashamed of myself) and put his hand on my knee (he has a wonderfully fine eye!). "I don't believe," he said, "you'd have any truer friends." "Anyway," I said repentantly, "I'll admit that millionnaires have their place--at present I wouldn't do entirely away with them, though I do think they'd enjoy farming better. And if I were to select a millionnaire for all the best things I know, I should certainly choose you, Mr. Starkweather." He jumped up. "You know who I am?" he asked. I nodded. "And you knew all the time?" I nodded. "Well, you're a good one!" We both laughed and fell to talking with the greatest friendliness. I led him down my garden to show him my prize pie-plant, of which I am enormously proud, and I pulled for him some of the finest stalks I could find. "Take it home," I said, "it makes the best pies of any pie-plant in this country." He took it under his arm. "I want you to come over and see me the first chance you get," he said. "I'm going to prove to you by physical demonstration that it's better sport to be a millionnaire than a farmer--not that I am a millionnaire: I'm only accepting the reputation you give me." So I walked with him down to the lane. "Let me know when you grease up again," he said, "and I'll come over." So we shook hands: and he set off sturdily down the road with the pie-plant leaves waving cheerfully over his shoulder. [Illustration: "Somehow, and suddenly, I was a boy again"] VIII A BOY AND A PREACHER This morning I went to church with Harriet. I usually have some excuse for not going, but this morning I had them out one by one and they were altogether so shabby that I decided not to use them. So I put on my stiff shirt and Harriet came out in her best black cape with the silk fringes. She looked so immaculate, so ruddy, so cheerfully sober (for Sunday) that I was reconciled to the idea of driving her up to the church. And I am glad I went, for the experience I had. It was an ideal summer Sunday: sunshiny, clear and still. I believe if I had been some Rip Van Winkle waking after twenty years' sleep I should have known it for Sunday. Away off over the hill somewhere we could hear a lazy farm boy singing at the top of his voice: the higher cadences of his song reached us pleasantly through the still air. The hens sitting near the lane fence, fluffing the dust over their backs, were holding a small and talkative service of their own. As we turned into the main road we saw the Patterson children on their way to church, all the little girls in Sunday ribbons, and all the little boys very uncomfortable in knit stockings. "It seems a pity to go to church on a day like this," I said to Harriet. "A pity!" she exclaimed. "Could anything be more appropriate?" Harriet is good because she can't help it. Poor woman!--but I haven't any pity for her. It sometimes seems to me the more worshipful I feel the less I want to go to church. I don't know why it is, but these forms, simple though they are, trouble me. The moment an emotion, especially a religious emotion, becomes an institution, it somehow loses life. True emotion is rare and costly and that which is awakened from without never rises to the height of that which springs spontaneously from within. Back of the church stands a long low shed where we tied our horse. A number of other buggies were already there, several women were standing in groups, preening their feathers, a neighbour of ours who has a tremendous bass voice was talking to a friend: "Yas, oats is showing up well, but wheat is backward." His voice, which he was evidently trying to subdue for Sunday, boomed through the still air. So we walked among the trees to the door of the church. A smiling elder, in an unaccustomed long coat, bowed and greeted us. As we went in there was an odour of cushions and our footsteps on the wooden floor echoed in the warm emptiness of the church. The Scotch preacher was finding his place in the big Bible; he stood solid and shaggy behind the yellow oak pulpit, a peculiar professional look on his face. In the pulpit the Scotch preacher is too much minister, too little man. He is best down among us with his hand in ours. He is a sort of human solvent. Is there a twisted and hardened heart in the community he beams upon it from his cheerful eye, he speaks out of his great charity, he gives the friendly pressure of his large hand, and that hardened heart dissolves and its frozen hopelessness loses itself in tears. So he goes through life, seeming always to understand. He is not surprised by wickedness nor discouraged by weakness: he is so sure of a greater Strength! But I must come to my experience, which I am almost tempted to call a resurrection--the resurrection of a boy, long since gone away, and of a tall lank preacher who, in his humility, looked upon himself as a failure. I hardly know how it all came back to me; possibly it was the scent-laden breeze that came in from the woods and through the half-open church window, perhaps it was a line in one of the old songs, perhaps it was the droning voice of the Scotch preacher--somehow, and suddenly, I was a boy again. ----To this day I think of death as a valley: a dark shadowy valley: the Valley of the Shadow of Death. So persistent are the impressions of boyhood! As I sat in the church I could see, as distinctly as though I were there, the church of my boyhood and the tall dyspeptic preacher looming above the pulpit, the peculiar way the light came through the coarse colour of the windows, the barrenness and stiffness of the great empty room, the raw girders overhead, the prim choir. There was something in that preacher, gaunt, worn, sodden though he appeared: a spark somewhere, a little flame, mostly smothered by the gray dreariness of his surroundings, and yet blazing up at times to some warmth. As I remember it, our church was a church of failures. They sent us the old gray preachers worn out in other fields. Such a succession of them I remember, each with some peculiarity, some pathos. They were of the old sort, indoctrinated Presbyterians, and they harrowed well our barren field with the tooth of their hard creed. Some thundered the Law, some pleaded Love; but of all of them I remember best the one who thought himself the greatest failure. I think he had tried a hundred churches--a hard life, poorly paid, unappreciated--in a new country. He had once had a family, but one by one they had died. No two were buried in the same cemetery; and finally, before he came to our village, his wife, too, had gone. And he was old, and out of health, and discouraged: seeking some final warmth from his own cold doctrine. How I see him, a trifle bent, in his long worn coat, walking in the country roads: not knowing of a boy who loved him! He told my father once: I recall his exact, words: "My days have been long, and I have failed. It was not given me to reach men's hearts." Oh, gray preacher, may I now make amends? Will you forgive me? I was a boy and did not know; a boy whose emotions were hidden under mountains of reserve: who could have stood up to be shot more easily than he could have said: "I love you!" Of that preacher's sermons I remember not one word, though I must have heard scores of them--only that they were interminably long and dull and that my legs grew weary of sitting and that I was often hungry. It was no doubt the dreadful old doctrine that he preached, thundering the horrors of disobedience, urging an impossible love through fear and a vain belief without reason. All that touched me not at all, save with a sort of wonder at the working of his great Adam's apple and the strange rollings of his cavernous eyes. This he looked upon as the work of God; thus for years he had sought, with self-confessed failure, to touch the souls of his people. How we travel in darkness and the work we do in all seriousness counts for naught, and the thing we toss off in play-time, unconsciously, God uses! One tow-headed boy sitting there in a front row dreaming dreams, if the sermons touched him not, was yet thrilled to the depths of his being by that tall preacher. Somewhere, I said, he had a spark within him. I think he never knew it: or if he knew it, he regarded it as a wayward impulse that might lead him from his God. It was a spark of poetry: strange flower in such a husk. In times of emotion it bloomed, but in daily life it emitted no fragrance. I have wondered what might have been if some one--some understanding woman--had recognised his gift, or if he himself as a boy had once dared to cut free! We do not know: we do not know the tragedy of our nearest friend! By some instinct the preacher chose his readings mostly from the Old Testament--those splendid, marching passages, full of oriental imagery. As he read there would creep into his voice a certain resonance that lifted him and his calling suddenly above his gray surroundings. How vividly I recall his reading of the twenty-third Psalm--a particular reading. I suppose I had heard the passage many times before, but upon this certain morning---- Shall I ever forget? The windows were open, for it was May, and a boy could look out on the hillside and see with longing eyes the inviting grass and trees. A soft wind blew in across the church; it was full of the very essence of spring. I smell it yet. On the pulpit stood a bunch of crocuses crowded into a vase: some Mary's offering. An old man named Johnson who sat near us was already beginning to breathe heavily, preparatory to sinking into his regular Sunday snore. Then those words from the preacher, bringing me suddenly--how shall I express it?--out of some formless void, to intense consciousness--a miracle of creation: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." Well, I saw the way to the place of death that morning; far more vividly I saw it than any natural scene I know: and myself walking therein. I shall know it again when I come to pass that way; the tall, dark, rocky cliffs, the shadowy path within, the overhanging dark branches, even the whitened dead bones by the way--and as one of the vivid phantasms of boyhood--cloaked figures I saw, lurking mysteriously in deep recesses, fearsome for their very silence. And yet I with magic rod and staff walking within--boldly, fearing no evil, full of faith, hope, courage, love, invoking images of terror but for the joy of braving them. Ah, tow-headed boy, shall I tread as lightly that dread pathway when I come to it? Shall I, like you, fear no evil! So that great morning went away. I heard nothing of singing or sermon and came not to myself until my mother, touching my arm, asked me if I had been asleep! And I smiled and thought how little grown people knew--and I looked up at the sad sick face of the old preacher with a new interest and friendliness. I felt, somehow, that he too was a familiar of my secret valley. I should have liked to ask him, but I did not dare. So I followed my mother when she went to speak to him, and when he did not see, I touched his coat. After that how I watched when he came to the reading. And one great Sunday, he chose a chapter from Ecclesiastes, the one that begins sonorously: "Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth." Surely that gaunt preacher had the true fire in his gray soul. How his voice dwelt and quivered and softened upon the words! "While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain----" Thus he brought in the universe to that small church and filled the heart of a boy. "In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened." "And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird and all the daughters of music shall be brought low." Do not think that I understood the meaning of those passages: I am not vain enough to think I know even now--but the _sound_ of them, the roll of them, the beautiful words, and above all, the pictures! Those Daughters of Music, how I lived for days imagining them! They were of the trees and the hills, and they were very beautiful but elusive; one saw them as he heard singing afar off, sweet strains fading often into silences. Daughters of Music! Daughters of Music! And why should they be brought low? Doors shut in the street--how I _saw_ them--a long, long street, silent, full of sunshine, and the doors shut, and no sound anywhere but the low sound of the grinding: and the mill with the wheels drowsily turning and no one there at all save one boy with fluttering heart, tiptoeing in the sunlit doorway. And the voice of the bird. Not the song but the _voice_. Yes, a bird had a voice. I had known it always, and yet somehow I had not dared to say it. I felt that they would look at me with that questioning, incredulous look which I dreaded beyond belief. They might laugh! But here it was in the Book--the voice of a bird. How my appreciation of that Book increased and what a new confidence it gave me in my own images! I went about for days, listening, listening, listening--and interpreting. So the words of the preacher and the fire in them: "And when they shall be afraid of that which is high and fears shall be in the way----" I knew the fear of that which is high: I had dreamed of it commonly. And I knew also the Fear that stood in the way: him I had seen in a myriad of forms, looming black by darkness in every lane I trod; and yet with what defiance I met and slew him! And then, more thrilling than all else, the words of the preacher: "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern." Such pictures: that silver cord, that golden bowl! And why and wherefore? A thousand ways I turned them in my mind--and always with the sound of the preacher's voice in my ears--the resonance of the words conveying an indescribable fire of inspiration. Vaguely and yet with certainty I knew the preacher spoke out of some unfathomable emotion which I did not understand--which I did not care to understand. Since then I have thought what those words must have meant to him! Ah, that tall lank preacher, who thought himself a failure: how long I shall remember him and the words he read and the mournful yet resonant cadences of his voice--and the barren church, and the stony religion! Heaven he gave me, unknowing, while he preached an ineffectual hell. As we rode home Harriet looked into my face. "You have enjoyed the service," she said softly. "Yes," I said. "It _was_ a good sermon," she said. "Was it?" I replied. IX THE TRAMP I have had a new and strange experience--droll in one way, grotesque in another and when everything is said, tragic: at least an adventure. Harriet looks at me accusingly, and I have had to preserve the air of one deeply contrite now for two days (no easy accomplishment for me!), even though in secret I have smiled and pondered. How our life has been warped by books! We are not contented with realities: we crave conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond to real events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as unconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ending. An instinctive desire for completeness animates the human mind (a struggle to circumscribe the infinite). We would like to have life "turn out"--but it doesn't--it doesn't. Each event is the beginning of a whole new genealogy of events. In boyhood I remember asking after every story I heard: "What happened next?" for no conclusion ever quite satisfied me--even when the hero died in his own gore. I always knew there was something yet remaining to be told. The only sure conclusion we can reach is this: Life changes. And what is more enthralling to the human mind than this splendid, boundless, coloured mutability!--life in the making? How strange it is, then, that we should be contented to take such small parts of it as we can grasp, and to say, "This is the true explanation." By such devices we seek to bring infinite existence within our finite egoistic grasp. We solidify and define where solidification means loss of interest; and loss of interest, not years, is old age. So I have mused since my tramp came in for a moment out of the Mystery (as we all do) and went away again into the Mystery (in our way, too). There are strange things in this world! * * * * * As I came around the corner I saw sitting there on my steps the very personification of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck of manhood. He gave one the impression of having been dropped where he sat, all in a heap. My first instinctive feeling was not one of recoil or even of hostility, but rather a sudden desire to pick him up and put him where he belonged, the instinct, I should say, of the normal man who hangs his axe always on the same nail. When he saw me he gathered himself together with reluctance and stood fully revealed. It was a curious attitude of mingled effrontery and apology. "Hit me if you dare," blustered his outward personality. "For God's sake, don't hit me," cried the innate fear in his eyes. I stopped and looked at him sharply, His eyes dropped, his look slid away, so that I experienced a sense of shame, as though I had trampled upon him. A damp rag of humanity! I confess that my first impulse, and a strong one, was to kick him for the good of the human race. No man has a right to be like that. And then, quite suddenly, I had a great revulsion of feeling. What was I that I should judge without knowledge? Perhaps, after all, here was one bearing treasure. So I said: "You are the man I have been expecting." He did not reply, only flashed his eyes up at me, wherein fear deepened. "I have been saving up a coat for you," I said, "and a pair of shoes. They are not much worn," I said, "but a little too small for me. I think they will fit you." He looked at me again, not sharply, but with a sort of weak cunning. So far he had not said a word. "I think our supper is nearly ready," I said: "let us go in." "No, mister," he mumbled, "a bite out here--no, mister"--and then, as though the sound of his own voice inspired him, he grew declamatory. "I'm a respectable man, mister, plumber by trade, but----" "But," I interrupted, "you can't get any work, you're cold and you haven't had anything to eat for two days, so you are walking out here in the country where we farmers have no plumbing to do. At home you have a starving wife and three small children----" "Six, mister----" "Well, six--And now we will go in to supper." I led him into the entry way and poured for him a big basin of hot water. As I stepped out again with a comb he was slinking toward the doorway. "Here," I said, "is a comb; we are having supper now in a few minutes." I wish I could picture Harriet's face when I brought him into her immaculate kitchen. But I gave her a look, one of the commanding sort that I can put on in times of great emergency, and she silently laid another place at the table. When I came to look at our Ruin by the full lamplight I was surprised to see what a change a little warm water and a comb had wrought in him. He came to the table uncertain, blinking, apologetic. His forehead, I saw, was really impressive--high, narrow and thin-skinned. His face gave one somehow the impression of a carving once full of significant lines, now blurred and worn as though Time, having first marked it with the lines of character, had grown discouraged and brushed the hand of forgetfulness over her work. He had peculiar thin, silky hair of no particular colour, with a certain almost childish pathetic waviness around the ears and at the back of the neck. Something, after all, about the man aroused one's compassion. I don't know that he looked dissipated, and surely he was not as dirty as I had at first supposed. Something remained that suggested a care for himself in the past. It was not dissipation, I decided; it was rather an indefinable looseness and weakness, that gave one alternately the feeling I had first experienced, that of anger, succeeded by the compassion that one feels for a child. To Harriet, when she had once seen him, he was all child, and she all compassion. We disturbed him with no questions. Harriet's fundamental quality is homeliness, comfortableness. Her tea-kettle seems always singing; an indefinable tabbiness, as of feather cushions, lurks in her dining-room, a right warmth of table and chairs, indescribably comfortable at the end of a chilly day. A busy good-smelling steam arises from all her dishes at once, and the light in the middle of the table is of a redness that enthralls the human soul. As for Harriet herself, she is the personification of comfort, airy, clean, warm, inexpressibly wholesome. And never in the world is she so engaging as when she ministers to a man's hunger. Truthfully, sometimes, when she comes to me out of the dimmer light of the kitchen to the radiance of the table with a plate of muffins, it is as though she and the muffins were a part of each other, and that she is really offering some of herself. And down in my heart I know she is doing just that! Well, it was wonderful to see our Ruin expand in the warmth of Harriet's presence. He had been doubtful of me; of Harriet, I could see, he was absolutely sure. And how he did eat, saying nothing at all, while Harriet plied him with food and talked to me of the most disarming commonplaces. I think it did her heart good to see the way he ate: as though he had had nothing before in days. As he buttered his muffin, not without some refinement, I could see that his hand was long, a curious, lean, ineffectual hand, with a curving little finger. With the drinking of the hot coffee colour began to steal up into his face, and when Harriet brought out a quarter of pie saved over from our dinner and placed it before him--a fine brown pie with small hieroglyphics in the top from whence rose sugary bubbles--he seemed almost to escape himself. And Harriet fairly purred with hospitality. The more he ate the more of a man he became. His manners improved, his back straightened up, he acquired a not unimpressive poise of the head. Such is the miraculous power of hot muffins and pie! "As you came down," I asked finally, "did you happen to see old man Masterson's threshing machine?" "A big red one, with a yellow blow-off?" "That's the one," I said. "Well, it was just turning into a field about two miles above here," he replied. "Big gray, banked barn?" I asked. "Yes, and a little unpainted house," said our friend. "That's Parsons'," put in Harriet, with a mellow laugh. "I wonder if he ever _will_ paint that house. He builds bigger barns every year and doesn't touch the house. Poor Mrs. Parsons----" And so we talked of barns and threshing machines in the way we farmers love to do and I lured our friend slowly into talking about himself. At first he was non-committal enough and what he said seemed curiously made to order; he used certain set phrases with which to explain simply what was not easy to explain--a device not uncommon to all of us. I was fearful of not getting within this outward armouring, but gradually as we talked and Harriet poured him a third cup of hot coffee he dropped into a more familiar tone. He told with some sprightliness of having seen threshings in Mexico, how the grain was beaten out with flails in the patios, and afterwards thrown up in the wind to winnow out. "You must have seen a good deal of life," remarked Harriet sympathetically. At this remark I saw one of our Ruin's long hands draw up and clinch. He turned his head toward Harriet. His face was partly in the shadow, but there was something striking and strange in the way he looked at her, and a deepness in his voice when he spoke: "Too much! I've seen too much of life." He threw out one arm and brought it back with a shudder. "You see what it has left me," he said, "I am an example of too much life." In response to Harriet's melting compassion he had spoken with unfathomable bitterness. Suddenly he leaned forward toward me with a piercing gaze as though he would look into my soul. His face had changed completely; from the loose and vacant mask of the early evening it had taken on the utmost tensity of emotion. "You do not know," he said, "what it is to live too much--and to be afraid." "Live too much?" I asked. "Yes, live too much, that is what I do--and I am afraid." He paused a moment and then broke out in a higher key: "You think I am a tramp. Yes--you do. I know--a worthless fellow, lying, begging, stealing when he can't beg. You have taken me in and fed me. You have said the first kind words I have heard, it seems to me, in years. I don't know who you are. I shall never see you again." I cannot well describe the intensity of the passion with which he spoke, his face shaking with emotion, his hands trembling. "Oh, yes," I said easily, "we are comfortable people here--and it is a good place to live." "No no," he returned. "I know, I've got my call--" Then leaning forward he said in a lower, even more intense voice--"I live everything beforehand." I was startled by the look of his eyes: the abject terror of it: and I thought to myself, "The man is not right in his mind." And yet I longed to know of the life within this strange husk of manhood. "I know," he said, as if reading my thought, "you think"--and he tapped his forehead with one finger--"but I'm not. I'm as sane as you are." It was a strange story he told. It seems almost unbelievable to me as I set it down here, until I reflect how little any one of us knows of the deep life within his nearest neighbour--what stories there are, what tragedies enacted under a calm exterior! What a drama there _may_ be in this commonplace man buying ten pounds of sugar at the grocery store, or this other one driving his two old horses in the town road! We do not know. And how rarely are the men of inner adventure articulate! Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me. I do not question its truth. It came as all truth does, through a clouded and unclean medium: and any judgment of the story itself must be based upon a knowledge of the personal equation of the Ruin who told it. "I am no tramp," he said, "in reality, I am no tramp. I began as well as anyone--It doesn't matter now, only I won't have any of the sympathy that people give to the man who has seen better days. I hate sentiment. _I hate it_----" I cannot attempt to set down the story in his own words. It was broken with exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes of self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of the narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so little that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal, some ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking form. "I am afraid before life," he said. "It makes me dizzy with thought." At another time he said, "If I am a tramp at all, I am a mental tramp. I have an unanchored mind." It seems that he came to a realisation that there was something peculiar about him at a very early age. He said they would look at him and whisper to one another and that his sayings were much repeated, often in his hearing. He knew that he was considered an extraordinary child: they baited him with questions that they might laugh at his quaint replies. He said that as early as he could remember he used to plan situations so that he might say things that were strange and even shocking in a child. His father was a small professor in a small college--a "worm" he called him bitterly--"one of those worms that bores in books and finally dries up and blows off." But his mother--he said she was an angel. I recall his exact expression about her eyes that "when she looked at one it made him better." He spoke of her with a softening of the voice, looking often at Harriet. He talked a good deal about his mother, trying to account for himself through her. She was not strong, he said, and very sensitive to the contact of either friends or enemies--evidently a nervous, high-strung woman. "You have known such people," he said, "everything hurt her." He said she "starved to death." She starved for affection and understanding. One of the first things he recalled of his boyhood was his passionate love for his mother. "I can remember," he said, "lying awake in my bed and thinking how I would love her and serve her--and I could see myself in all sorts of impossible places saving her from danger. When she came to my room to bid me good night, I imagined how I should look--for I have always been able to see myself doing things--when I threw my arms around her neck to kiss her." Here he reached a strange part of his story. I had been watching Harriet out of the corner of my eye. At first her face was tearful with compassion, but as the Ruin proceeded it became a study in wonder and finally in outright alarm. He said that when his mother came in to bid him good night he saw himself so plainly beforehand ("more vividly than I see you at this moment") and felt his emotion so keenly that when his mother actually stooped to kiss him, somehow he could not respond, he could not throw his arms around her neck. He said he often lay quiet, in waiting, trembling all over until she had gone, not only suffering himself but pitying her, because he understood how she must feel. Then he would follow her, he said, in imagination through the long hall, seeing himself stealing behind her, just touching her hand, wistfully hoping that she might turn to him again--and yet fearing. He said no one knew the agonies he suffered at seeing his mother's disappointment over his apparent coldness and unresponsiveness. "I think," he said, "it hastened her death." He would not go to the funeral; he did not dare, he said. He cried and fought when they came to take him away, and when the house was silent he ran up to her room and buried his head in her pillows and ran in swift imagination to her funeral. He said he could see himself in the country road, hurrying in the cold rain--for it seemed raining--he said he could actually feel the stones and ruts, although he could not tell how it was possible that he should have seen himself at a distance and _felt_ in his own feet the stones of the road. He said he saw the box taken from the wagon--_saw_ it--and that he heard the sound of the clods thrown in, and it made him shriek until they came running and held him. As he grew older he said he came to live everything beforehand, and that the event as imagined was so far more vivid and affecting that he had no heart for the reality itself. "It seems strange to you," he said, "but I am telling you exactly what my experience was." It was curious, he said, when his father told him he must not do a thing, how he went on and imagined in how many different ways he could do it--and how, afterward, he imagined he was punished by that "worm," his father, whom he seemed to hate bitterly. Of those early days, in which he suffered acutely--in idleness, apparently--and perhaps that was one of the causes of his disorder--he told us at length, but many of the incidents were so evidently worn by the constant handling of his mind that they gave no clear impression. Finally, he ran away from home, he said. At first he found that a wholly new place and new people took him out of himself ("surprised me," he said, "so that I could not live everything beforehand"). Thus he fled. The slang he used, "chased himself all over the country," seemed peculiarly expressive. He had been in foreign countries; he had herded sheep in Australia (so he said), and certainly from his knowledge of the country he had wandered with the gamboleros of South America; he had gone for gold to Alaska, and worked in the lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. But he could not escape, he said. In a short time he was no longer "surprised." His account of his travels, while fragmentary, had a peculiar vividness. He _saw_ what he described, and he saw it so plainly that his mind ran off into curious details that made his words strike sometimes like flashes of lightning. A strange and wonderful mind--uncontrolled. How that man needed the discipline of common work! I have rarely listened to a story with such rapt interest. It was not only what he said, nor how he said it, but how he let me see the strange workings of his mind. It was continuously a story of a story. When his voice finally died down I drew a long breath and was astonished to perceive that it was nearly midnight--and Harriet speechless with her emotions. For a moment he sat quiet and then burst out: "I cannot get away: I cannot escape," and the veritable look of some trapped creature came into his eyes, fear so abject that I reached over and laid my hand on his arm: "Friend," I said, "stop here. We have a good country. You have travelled far enough. I know from experience what a cornfield will do for a man." "I have lived all sorts of life," he continued as if he had not heard a word I said, "and I have lived it all twice, and I am afraid." "Face it," I said, gripping his arm, longing for some power to "blow grit into him." "Face it!" he exclaimed, "don't you suppose I have tried. If I could do a thing--anything--a few times without thinking--_once_ would be enough--I might be all right. I should be all right." He brought his fist down on the table, and there was a note of resolution in his voice. I moved my chair nearer to him, feeling as though I were saving an immortal soul from destruction. I told him of our life, how the quiet and the work of it would solve his problems. I sketched with enthusiasm my own experience and I planned swiftly how he could live, absorbed in simple work--and in books. "Try it," I said eagerly. "I will," he said, rising from the table, and grasping my hand. "I'll stay here." I had a peculiar thrill of exultation and triumph. I know how the priest must feel, having won a soul from torment! He was trembling with excitement and pale with emotion and weariness. One must begin the quiet life with rest. So I got him off to bed, first pouring him a bathtub of warm water. I laid out clean clothes by his bedside and took away his old ones, talking to him cheerfully all the time about common things. When I finally left him and came downstairs I found Harriet standing with frightened eyes in the middle of the kitchen. "I'm afraid to have him sleep in this house," she said. But I reassured her. "You do not understand," I said. Owing to the excitement of the evening I spent a restless night. Before daylight, while I was dreaming a strange dream of two men running, the one who pursued being the exact counterpart of the one who fled, I heard my name called aloud: "David, David!" I sprang out of bed. "The tramp has gone," called Harriet. He had not even slept in his bed. He had raised the window, dropped out on the ground and vanished. X THE INFIDEL I find that we have an infidel in this community. I don't know that I should set down the fact here on good white paper; the walls, they say, have eyes, the stones have ears. But consider these words written in bated breath! The worst of it is--I gather from common report--this infidel is a Cheerful Infidel, whereas a true infidel should bear upon his face the living mark of his infamy. We are all tolerant enough of those who do not agree with us, provided only they are sufficiently miserable! I confess when I first heard of him--through Mrs. Horace (with shudders)--I was possessed of a consuming secret desire to see him. I even thought of climbing a tree somewhere along the public road--like Zaccheus, wasn't it?--and watching him go by. If by any chance he should look my way I could easily avoid discovery by crouching among the leaves. It shows how pleasant must be the paths of unrighteousness that we are tempted to climb trees to see those who walk therein. My imagination busied itself with the infidel. I pictured him as a sort of Moloch treading our pleasant countryside, flames and smoke proceeding from his nostrils, his feet striking fire, his voice like the sound of a great wind. At least that was the picture I formed of him from common report. And yesterday afternoon I met the infidel and I must here set down a true account of the adventure. It is, surely, a little new door opened in the house of my understanding. I might travel a whole year in a city, brushing men's elbows, and not once have such an experience. In country spaces men develop sensitive surfaces, not calloused by too frequent contact, accepting the new impression vividly and keeping it bright to think upon. I met the infidel as the result of a rather unexpected series of incidents. I don't think I have said before that we have for some time been expecting a great event on this farm. We have raised corn and buckwheat, we have a fertile asparagus bed and onions and pie-plant (enough to supply the entire population of this community) and I can't tell how many other vegetables. We have had plenty of chickens hatched out (I don't like chickens, especially hens, especially a certain gaunt and predatory hen named [so Harriet says] Evangeline, who belongs to a neighbour of ours) and we have had two litters of pigs, but until this bright moment of expectancy we never have had a calf. Upon the advice of Horace, which I often lean upon as upon a staff, I have been keeping my young heifer shut up in the cow-yard now for a week or two. But yesterday, toward the middle of the afternoon, I found the fence broken down and the cow-yard empty. From what Harriet said, the brown cow must have been gone since early morning. I knew, of course, what that meant, and straightway I took a stout stick and set off over the hill, tracing the brown cow as far as I could by her tracks. She had made way toward a clump of trees near Horace's wood lot, where I confidently expected to find her. But as fate would have it, the pasture gate, which is rarely used, stood open and the tracks led outward into an old road. I followed rapidly, half pleased that I had not found her within the wood. It was a promise of new adventure which I came to with downright enjoyment (confidentially--I should have been cultivating corn!). I peered into every thicket as I passed: once I climbed an old fence and, standing on the top rail, intently surveyed my neighbour's pasture. No brown cow was to be seen. At the crossing of the brook I shouldered my way from the road down a path among the alders, thinking the brown cow might have gone that way to obscurity. It is curious how, in spite of domestication and training, Nature in her great moments returns to the primitive and instinctive! My brown cow, never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an animal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless, ages-old law of her breed: she had escaped in her great moment to the most secret place she knew. It did not matter that she would have been safer in my yard--both she and her calf--that she would have been surer of her food; she could only obey the old wild law. So turkeys will hide their nests. So the tame duck, tame for unnumbered generations, hearing from afar the shrill cry of the wild drake, will desert her quiet surroundings, spread her little-used wings and become for a time the wildest of the wild. So we think--you and I--that we are civilised! But how often, how often, have we felt that old wildness which is our common heritage, scarce shackled, clamouring in our blood! I stood listening among the alders, in the deep cool shade. Here and there a ray of sunshine came through the thick foliage: I could see it where it silvered the cobweb ladders of those moist spaces. Somewhere in the thicket I heard an unalarmed catbird trilling her exquisite song, a startled frog leaped with a splash into the water; faint odours of some blossoming growth, not distinguishable, filled the still air. It was one of those rare moments when one seems to have caught Nature unaware. I lingered a full minute, listening, looking; but my brown cow had not gone that way. So I turned and went up rapidly to the road, and there I found myself almost face to face with a ruddy little man whose countenance bore a look of round astonishment. We were both surprised. I recovered first. "Have you seen a brown cow?" I asked. He was still so astonished that he began to look around him; he thrust his hands nervously into his coat pockets and pulled them out again. "I think you won't find her in there," I said, seeking to relieve his embarrassment. But I didn't know, then, how very serious a person I had encountered. "No--no," he stammered, "I haven't seen your cow." So I explained to him with sobriety, and at some length, the problem I had to solve. He was greatly interested and inasmuch as he was going my way he offered at once to assist me in my search. So we set off together. He was rather stocky of build, and decidedly short of breath, so that I regulated my customary stride to suit his deliberation. At first, being filled with the spirit of my adventure, I was not altogether pleased with this arrangement. Our conversation ran something like this: STRANGER: Has she any spots or marks on her? MYSELF: No, she is plain brown. STRANGER: How old a cow is she? MYSELF: This is her first calf. STRANGER: Valuable animal? MYSELF: _(fencing):_ I have never put a price on her; she is a promising young heifer. STRANGER: Pure blood? MYSELF: No, grade. After a pause: STRANGER: Live around here? MYSELF: Yes, half a mile below here. Do you? STRANGER: Yes, three miles above here. My name's Purdy. MYSELF: Mine is Grayson. He turned to me solemnly and held out his hand. "_I'm_ glad to meet you, Mr. Grayson," he said. "And I'm glad," I said, "to meet you, Mr. Purdy." I will not attempt to put down all we said: I couldn't. But by such devices is the truth in the country made manifest. So we continued to walk and look. Occasionally I would unconsciously increase my pace until I was warned to desist by the puffing of Mr. Purdy. He gave an essential impression of genial timidity: and how he _did_ love to talk! We came at last to a rough bit of land grown up to scrubby oaks and hazel brush. "This," said Mr. Purdy, "looks hopeful." We followed the old road, examining every bare spot of earth for some evidence of the cow's tracks, but without finding so much as a sign. I was for pushing onward but Mr. Purdy insisted that this clump of woods was exactly such a place as a cow would like. He developed such a capacity for argumentation and seemed so sure of what he was talking about that I yielded, and we entered the wood. "We'll part here," he said: "you keep over there about fifty yards and I'll go straight ahead. In that way we'll cover the ground. Keep a-shoutin'." So we started and I kept a-shoutin'. He would answer from time to time: "Hulloo hulloo!" It was a wild and beautiful bit of forest. The ground under the trees was thickly covered with enormous ferns or bracken, with here and there patches of light where the sun came through the foliage. The low spots were filled with the coarse green verdure of skunk cabbage. I was so sceptical about finding the cow in a wood where concealment was so easy that I confess I rather idled and enjoyed the surroundings. Suddenly, however, I heard Mr. Purdy's voice, with a new note in it: "Hulloo, hulloo----" "What luck?" "Hulloo, hulloo----" "I'm coming--" and I turned and ran as rapidly as I could through the trees, jumping over logs and dodging low branches, wondering what new thing my friend had discovered. So I came to his side. "Have you got trace of her?" I questioned eagerly. "Sh!" he said, "over there. Don't you see her?" "Where, where?" He pointed, but for a moment I could see nothing but the trees and the bracken. Then all at once, like the puzzle in a picture, I saw her plainly. She was standing perfectly motionless, her head lowered, and in such a peculiar clump of bushes and ferns that she was all but indistinguishable. It was wonderful, the perfection with which her instinct had led her to conceal herself. All excitement, I started toward her at once. But Mr. Purdy put his hand on my arm. "Wait," he said, "don't frighten her. She has her calf there." "No!" I exclaimed, for I could see nothing of it. We went, cautiously, a few steps nearer. She threw up her head and looked at us so wildly for a moment that I should hardly have known her for my cow. She was, indeed, for the time being, a wild creature of the wood. She made a low sound and advanced a step threateningly. "Steady," said Mr. Purdy, "this is her first calf. Stop a minute and keep quiet. She'll soon get used to us." Moving to one side cautiously, we sat down on an old log. The brown heifer paused, every muscle tense, her eyes literally blazing, We sat perfectly still. After a minute or two she lowered her head, and with curious guttural sounds she began to lick her calf, which lay quite hidden in the bracken. "She has chosen a perfect spot," I thought to myself, for it was the wildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft and springy with leaf mould.-- Mr. Purdy was one to whom silence was painful; he fidgeted about, evidently bursting with talk, and yet feeling compelled to follow his own injunction of silence. Presently he reached into his capacious pocket and handed me a little paper-covered booklet. I took it, curious, and read the title: "Is There a Hell?" It struck me humorously. In the country we are always--at least some of us are--more or less in a religious ferment, The city may distract itself to the point where faith is unnecessary; but in the country we must, perforce, have something to believe in. And we talk about it, too! I read the title aloud, but in a low voice: "Is There a Hell?" Then I asked: "Do you really want to know?" "The argument is all there," he replied. "Well," I said, "I can tell you off-hand, out of my own experience, that there certainly is a hell----" He turned toward me with evident astonishment, but I proceeded with tranquillity: "Yes, sir, there's no doubt about it. I've been near enough myself several times to smell the smoke. It isn't around here," I said. As he looked at me his china-blue eyes grew larger, if that were possible, and his serious, gentle face took on a look of pained surprise. "Before you say such things," he said, "I beg you to read my book." He took the tract from my hands and opened it on his knee. "The Bible tells us," he said, "that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, He made the firmament and divided the waters. But does the Bible say that He created a hell or a devil? Does it?" I shook my head. "Well, then!" he said triumphantly, "and that isn't all, either. The historian Moses gives in detail a full account of what was made in six days. He tells how day and night were created, how the sun and the moon and the stars were made; he tells how God created the flowers of the field, and the insects, and the birds, and the great whales, and said, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' He accounts for every minute of the time in the entire six days--and of course God rested on the seventh--and there is not one word about hell. Is there?" I shook my head. "Well then--" exultantly, "where is it? I'd like to have any man, no matter how wise he is, answer that. Where is it?" "That," I said, "has troubled me, too. We don't always know just where our hells are. If we did we might avoid them. We are not so sensitive to them as we should be--do you think?" He looked at me intently: I went on before he could answer: "Why, I've seen men in my time living from day to day in the very atmosphere of perpetual torment, and actually arguing that there was no hell. It is a strange sight, I assure you, and one that will trouble you afterwards. From what I know of hell, it is a place of very loose boundaries. Sometimes I've thought we couldn't be quite sure when we were in it and when we were not." I did not tell my friend, but I was thinking of the remark of old Swedenborg: "The trouble with hell is we shall not know it when we arrive." At this point Mr. Purdy burst out again, having opened his little book at another page. "When Adam and Eve had sinned," he said, "and the God of Heaven walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called for them and they had hidden themselves on account of their disobedience, did God say to them: Unless you repent of your sins and get forgiveness I will shut you up in yon dark and dismal hell and torment you (or have the devil do it) for ever and ever? Was there such a word?" I shook my head. [Illustration: "He reached into his pocket and handed me a little paper-covered booklet"] "No, sir," he said vehemently, "there was not." "But does it say," I asked, "that Adam and Eve had not themselves been using their best wits in creating a hell? That point has occurred to me. In my experience I've known both Adams and Eves who were most adroit in their capacity for making places of torment--and afterwards of getting into them. Just watch yourself some day after you've sown a crop of desires and you'll see promising little hells starting up within you like pigweeds and pusley after a warm rain in your garden. And our heavens, too, for that matter--they grow to our own planting: and how sensitive they are too! How soon the hot wind of a passion withers them away! How surely the fires of selfishness blacken their perfection!" I'd almost forgotten Mr. Purdy--and when I looked around, his face wore a peculiar puzzled expression not unmixed with alarm. He held up his little book eagerly almost in my face. "If God had intended to create a hell," he said, "I assert without fear of successful contradiction that when God was there in the Garden of Eden it was the time for Him to have put Adam and Eve and all their posterity on notice that there was a place of everlasting torment. It would have been only a square deal for Him to do so. But did He?" I shook my head. "He did not. If He had mentioned hell on that occasion I should not now dispute its existence. But He did not. This is what He said to Adam--the very words: 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground: for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' You see He did not say 'Unto hell shalt thou return.' He said, 'Unto dust.' That isn't hell, is it?" "Well," I said, "there are in my experience a great many different kinds of hells. There are almost as many kinds of hells as there are men and women upon this earth. Now, your hell wouldn't terrify me in the least. My own makes me no end of trouble. Talk about burning pitch and brimstone: how futile were the imaginations of the old fellows who conjured up such puerile torments. Why, I can tell you of no end of hells that are worse--and not half try. Once I remember, when I was younger----" I happened to glance around at my companion. He sat there looking at me with horror--fascinated horror. "Well, I won't disturb your peace of mind by telling _that_ story," I said. "Do you believe that we shall go to hell?" he asked in a low voice. "That depends," I said. "Let's leave out the question of 'we'; let's be more comfortably general in our discussion. I think we can safely say that some go and some do not. It's a curious and noteworthy thing," I said, "but I've known of cases--There are some people who aren't really worth good honest tormenting--let alone the rewards of heavenly bliss. They just haven't anything to torment! What is going to become of such folks? I confess I don't know. You remember when Dante began his journey into the infernal regions----" "I don't believe a word of that Dante," he interrupted excitedly; "it's all a made up story. There isn't a word of truth in it; it is a blasphemous book. Let me read you what I say about it in here." "I will agree with you without argument," I said, "that it is not _all_ true. I merely wanted to speak of one of Dante's experiences as an illustration of the point I'm making. You remember that almost the first spirits he met on his journey were those who had never done anything in this life to merit either heaven or hell. That always struck me as being about the worst plight imaginable for a human being. Think of a creature not even worth good honest brimstone!" Since I came home, I've looked up the passage; and it is a wonderful one. Dante heard wailings and groans and terrible things said in many tongues. Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were only those "who had lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing but themselves." "Heaven would not dull its brightness with those, nor would lower hell receive them." "And what is it," asked Dante, "that makes them so grievously suffer?" "Hopelessness of death," said Virgil, "Their blind existence here, and immemorable former life, make them so wretched that they envy every other lot. Mercy and Justice alike disdain them. Let us speak of them no more. Look, and pass!" But Mr. Purdy, in spite of his timidity, was a man of much persistence. "They tell me," he said, "when they try to prove the reasonableness of hell, that unless you show sinners how they're goin' to be tormented, they'd never repent. Now, I say that if a man has to be scared into religion, his religion ain't much good." "There," I said, "I agree with you completely." His face lighted up, and he continued eagerly: "And I tell 'em: You just go ahead and try for heaven; don't pay any attention to all this talk about everlasting punishment." "Good advice!" I said. It had begun to grow dark. The brown cow was quiet at last. We could hear small faint sounds from the calf. I started slowly through the bracken. Mr. Purdy hung at my elbow, stumbling sideways as he walked, but continuing to talk eagerly. So we came to the place where the calf lay. I spoke in a low voice: "So boss, so boss." I would have laid my hand on her neck but she started back with a wild toss of her horns. It was a beautiful calf! I looked at it with a peculiar feeling of exultation, pride, ownership. It was red-brown, with a round curly pate and one white leg. As it lay curled there among the ferns, it was really beautiful to look at. When we approached, it did not so much as stir. I lifted it to its legs, upon which the cow uttered a strange half-wild cry and ran a few steps off, her head thrown in the air. The calf fell back as though it had no legs. "She is telling it not to stand up," said Mr. Purdy. I had been afraid at first that something was the matter! "Some are like that," he said. "Some call their calves to run. Others won't let you come near 'em at all; and I've even known of a case where a cow gored its calf to death rather than let anyone touch it." I looked at Mr. Purdy not without a feeling of admiration. This was a thing he knew: a language not taught in the universities. How well it became him to know it; how simply he expressed it! I thought to myself: There are not many men in this world, after all, that it will not pay us to go to school to--for something or other. I should never have been able, indeed, to get the cow and calf home, last night at least, if it had not been for my chance friend. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it. He wore a stout coat of denim, rather long in the skirts. This he slipped off, while I looked on in some astonishment, and spread it out on the ground. He placed my staff under one side of it and found another stick nearly the same size for the other side. These he wound into the coat until he had made a sort of stretcher. Upon this we placed the unresisting calf. What a fine one it was! Then, he in front and I behind, we carried the stretcher and its burden out of the wood. The cow followed, sometimes threatening, sometimes bellowing, sometimes starting off wildly, head and tail in the air, only to rush back and, venturing up with trembling muscles, touch her tongue to the calf, uttering low maternal sounds. "Keep steady," said Mr. Purdy, "and everything'll be all right." When we came to the brook we stopped to rest. I think my companion would have liked to start his argument again, but he was too short of breath. It was a prime spring evening! The frogs were tuning up. I heard a drowsy cowbell somewhere over the hills in the pasture. The brown cow, with eager, outstretched neck, was licking her calf as it lay there on the improvised stretcher. I looked up at the sky, a blue avenue of heaven between the tree tops; I felt the peculiar sense of mystery which nature so commonly conveys. "I have been too sure!" I said. "What do we know after all! Why may there not be future heavens and hells--'other heavens for other earths'? We do not know--we do not _know_--" So, carrying the calf, in the cool of the evening, we came at last to my yard. We had no sooner put the calf down than it jumped nimbly to its feet and ran, wobbling absurdly, to meet its mother. "The rascal," I said, "after all our work." "It's the nature of the animal," said Mr. Purdy, as he put on his coat. I could not thank him enough. I invited him to stay with us to supper, but he said he must hurry home. "Then come down soon to see me," I said, "and we will settle this question as to the existence of a hell." He stepped up close to me and said, with an appealing note in his voice: "You do not really believe in a hell, do you?" How human nature loves collusiveness: nothing short of the categorical will satisfy us! What I said to Mr. Purdy evidently appeased him, for he seized my hand and shook and shook. "We haven't understood each other," he said eagerly. "You don't believe in eternal damnation any more than I do." Then he added, as though some new uncertainty puzzled him, "Do you?" At supper I was telling Harriet with gusto of my experiences. Suddenly she broke out: "What was his name?" "Purdy." "Why, he's the infidel that Mrs. Horace tells about!" "Is that possible?" I said, and I dropped my knife and fork. The strangest sensation came over me. "Why," I said, "then I'm an infidel too!" So I laughed and I've been laughing gloriously ever since--at myself, at the infidel, at the entire neighbourhood. I recalled that delightful character in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (my friend the Scotch Preacher loves to tell about him), who seasons error by crying out "Fudge!" "Fudge!" I said. We're all poor sinners! XI THE COUNTRY DOCTOR _Sunday afternoon, June 9._ We had a funeral to-day in this community and the longest funeral procession, Charles Baxter says, he has seen in all the years of his memory among these hills. A good man has gone away--and yet remains. In the comparatively short time I have been here I never came to know him well personally, though I saw him often in the country roads, a ruddy old gentleman with thick, coarse, iron-gray hair, somewhat stern of countenance, somewhat shabby of attire, sitting as erect as a trooper in his open buggy, one muscular hand resting on his knee, the other holding the reins of his familiar old white horse. I said I did not come to know him well personally, and yet no one who knows this community can help knowing Doctor John North. I never so desired the gift of moving expression as I do at this moment, on my return from his funeral, that I may give some faint idea of what a good man means to a community like ours--as the more complete knowledge of it has come to me to-day. In the district school that I attended when a boy we used to love to leave our mark, as we called it, wherever our rovings led us. It was a bit of boyish mysticism, unaccountable now that we have grown older and wiser (perhaps); but it had its meaning. It was an instinctive outreaching of the young soul to perpetuate the knowledge of its existence upon this forgetful earth. My mark, I remember, was a notch and a cross. With what secret fond diligence I carved it in the gray bark of beech trees, on fence posts, or on barn doors, and once, I remember, on the roof-ridge of our home, and once, with high imaginings of how long it would remain, I spent hours chiseling it deep in a hard-headed old boulder in the pasture, where, if man has been as kind as Nature, it remains to this day. If you should chance to see it you would not know of the boy who carved it there. So Doctor North left his secret mark upon the neighbourhood--as all of us do, for good or for ill, upon _our_ neighbourhoods, in accordance with the strength of that character which abides within us. For a long time I did not know that it was he, though it was not difficult to see that some strong good man had often passed this way. I saw the mystic sign of him deep-lettered in the hearthstone of a home; I heard it speaking bravely from the weak lips of a friend; it is carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. No, I do not doubt the immortalities of the soul; in this community, which I have come to love so much, dwells more than one of John North's immortalities--and will continue to dwell. I, too, live more deeply because John North was here. He was in no outward way an extraordinary man, nor was his life eventful. He was born in this neighbourhood: I saw him lying quite still this morning in the same sunny room of the same house where he first saw the light of day. Here among these common hills he grew up, and save for the few years he spent at school or in the army, he lived here all his life long. In old neighbourhoods and especially farm neighbourhoods people come to know one another--not clothes knowledge, or money knowledge--but that sort of knowledge which reaches down into the hidden springs of human character. A country community may be deceived by a stranger, too easily deceived, but not by one of its own people. For it is not a studied knowledge; it resembles that slow geologic uncovering before which not even the deep buried bones of the prehistoric saurian remain finally hidden. I never fully realised until this morning what a supreme triumph it is, having grown old, to merit the respect of those who know us best. Mere greatness offers no reward to compare with it, for greatness compels that homage which we freely bestow upon goodness. So long as I live I shall never forget this morning. I stood in the door-yard outside of the open window of the old doctor's home. It was soft, and warm, and very still--a June Sunday morning. An apple tree not far off was still in blossom, and across the road on a grassy hillside sheep fed unconcernedly. Occasionally, from the roadway where the horses of the countryside were waiting, I heard the clink of a bit-ring or the low voice of some new-comer seeking a place to hitch. Not half those who came could find room in the house: they stood uncovered among the trees. From within, wafted through the window, came the faint odour of flowers, and the occasional minor intonation of someone speaking--and finally our own Scotch Preacher! I could not see him, but there lay in the cadences of his voice a peculiar note of peacefulness, of finality. The day before he died Dr. North had said: "I want McAlway to conduct my funeral, not as a minister but as a man. He has been my friend for forty years; he will know what I mean." The Scotch Preacher did not say much. Why should he? Everyone there _knew_: and speech would only have cheapened what we knew. And I do not now recall even the little he said, for there was so much all about me that spoke not of the death of a good man, but of his life. A boy who stood near me--a boy no longer, for he was as tall as a man--gave a more eloquent tribute than any preacher could have done. I saw him stand his ground for a time with that grim courage of youth which dreads emotion more than a battle: and then I saw him crying behind a tree! He was not a relative of the old doctor's; he was only one of many into whose deep life the doctor had entered. They sang "Lead, Kindly Light," and came out through the narrow doorway into the sunshine with the coffin, the hats of the pallbearers in a row on top, and there was hardly a dry eye among us. And as they came out through the narrow doorway, I thought how the Doctor must have looked out daily through so many, many years upon this beauty of hills and fields and of sky above, grown dearer from long familiarity--which he would know no more. And Kate North, the Doctor's sister, his only relative, followed behind, her fine old face gray and set, but without a tear in her eye. How like the Doctor she looked: the same stern control! In the hours which followed, on the pleasant winding way to the cemetery, in the groups under the trees, on the way homeward again, the community spoke its true heart, and I have come back with the feeling that human nature, at bottom, is sound and sweet. I knew a great deal before about Doctor North, but I knew it as knowledge, not as emotion, and therefore it was not really a part of my life. I heard again the stories of how he drove the country roads, winter and summer, how he had seen most of the population into the world and had held the hands of many who went out! It was the plain, hard life of a country doctor, and yet it seemed to rise in our community like some great tree, its roots deep buried in the soil of our common life, its branches close to the sky. To those accustomed to the outward excitements of city life it would have seemed barren and uneventful. It was significant that the talk was not so much of what the Doctor did as of _how_ he did it, not so much of his actions as of the natural expression of his character. And when we come to think of it, goodness _is_ uneventful. It does not flash, it glows. It is deep, quiet and very simple. It passes not with oratory, it is commonly foreign to riches, nor does it often sit in the places of the mighty: but may be felt in the touch of a friendly hand or the look of a kindly eye. Outwardly, John North often gave the impression of brusqueness. Many a woman, going to him for the first time, and until she learned that he was in reality as gentle as a girl, was frightened by his manner. The country is full of stories of such encounters. We laugh yet over the adventure of a woman who formerly came to spend her summers here. She dressed very beautifully and was "nervous." One day she went to call on the Doctor. He made a careful examination and asked many questions. Finally he said, with portentous solemnity: "Madam, you're suffering from a very common complaint." The Doctor paused, then continued, impressively: "You haven't enough work to do. This is what I would advise. Go home, discharge your servants, do your own cooking, wash your own clothes and make your own beds. You'll get well." She is reported to have been much offended, and yet to-day there was a wreath of white roses in Doctor North's room sent from the city by that woman. If he really hated anything in this world the Doctor hated whimperers. He had a deep sense of the purpose and need of punishment, and he despised those who fled from wholesome discipline. A young fellow once went to the Doctor--so they tell the story--and asked for something to stop his pain. "Stop it!" exclaimed the Doctor: "why, it's good for you. You've done wrong, haven't you? Well, you're being punished; take it like a man. There's nothing more wholesome than good honest pain." And yet how much pain he alleviated in this community--in forty years! The deep sense that a man should stand up to his fate was one of the key-notes of his character; and the way he taught it, not only by word but by every action of his life, put heart into many a weak man and woman, Mrs. Patterson, a friend of ours, tells of a reply she once had from the Doctor to whom she had gone with a new trouble. After telling him about it she said: "I've left it all with the Lord." "You'd have done better," said the Doctor, "to keep it yourself. Trouble is for your discipline: the Lord doesn't need it." It was thus out of his wisdom that he was always telling people what they knew, deep down in their hearts, to be true. It sometimes hurt at first, but sooner or later, if the man had a spark of real manhood in him, he came back, and gave the Doctor an abiding affection. There were those who, though they loved him, called him intolerant. I never could look at it that way. He _did_ have the only kind of intolerance which is at all tolerable, and that is the intolerance of intolerance. He always set himself with vigour against that unreason and lack of sympathy which are the essence of intolerance; and yet there was a rock of conviction on many subjects behind which he could not be driven. It was not intolerance: it was with him a reasoned certainty of belief. He had a phrase to express that not uncommon state of mind in this age particularly, which is politely willing to yield its foothold within this universe to almost any reasoner who suggests some other universe, however shadowy, to stand upon. He called it a "mush of concession." He might have been wrong in his convictions, but he, at least, never floundered in a "mush of concession." I heard him say once: "There are some things a man can't concede, and one is, that a man who has broken a law, like a man who has broken a leg, has got to suffer for it." It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be prevailed upon to present a bill. It was not because the community was poor, though some of our people are poor, and it was certainly not because the Doctor was rich and could afford such philanthropy, for, saving a rather unproductive farm which during the last ten years of his life lay wholly uncultivated, he was as poor as any man in the community. He simply seemed to forget that people owed him. It came to be a common and humorous experience for people to go to the Doctor and say: "Now, Doctor North, how much do I owe you? You remember you attended my wife two years ago when the baby came--and John when he had the diphtheria----" "Yes, yes," said the Doctor, "I remember." "I thought I ought to pay you." "Well, I'll look it up when I get time." But he wouldn't. The only way was to go to him and say: "Doctor, I want to pay ten dollars on account." "All right," he'd answer, and take the money. To the credit of the community I may say with truthfulness that the Doctor never suffered. He was even able to supply himself with the best instruments that money could buy. To him nothing was too good for our neighbourhood. This morning I saw in a case at his home a complete set of oculist's instruments, said to be the best in the county--a very unusual equipment for a country doctor. Indeed, he assumed that the responsibility for the health of the community rested upon him. He was a sort of self-constituted health officer. He was always sniffing about for old wells and damp cellars--and somehow, with his crisp humour and sound sense, getting them cleaned. In his old age he even grew querulously particular about these things--asking a little more of human nature than it could quite accomplish. There were innumerable other ways--how they came out to-day all glorified now that he is gone!--in which he served the community. Horace tells how he once met the Doctor driving his old white horse in the town road. "Horace," called the Doctor, "why don't you paint your barn?" "Well," said Horace, "it _is_ beginning to look a bit shabby." "Horace," said the Doctor, "you're a prominent citizen. We look to you to keep up the credit of the neighbourhood." Horace painted his barn. I think Doctor North was fonder of Charles Baxter than of anyone else, save his sister. He hated sham and cant: if a man had a single _reality_ in him the old Doctor found it; and Charles Baxter in many ways exceeds any man I ever knew in the downright quality of genuineness. The Doctor was never tired of telling--and with humour--how he once went to Baxter to have a table made for his office. When he came to get it he found the table upside clown and Baxter on his knees finishing off the under part of the drawer slides. Baxter looked up and smiled in the engaging way he has, and continued his work. After watching him for some time the Doctor said: "Baxter, why do you spend so much time on that table? Who's going to know whether or not the last touch has been put on the under side of it?" Baxter straightened up and looked at the Doctor in surprise. "Why, I will," he said. How the Doctor loved to tell that story! I warrant there is no boy who ever grew up in this country who hasn't heard it. It was a part of his pride in finding reality that made the Doctor such a lover of true sentiment and such a hater of sentimentality. I prize one memory of him which illustrates this point. The district school gave a "speaking" and we all went. One boy with a fresh young voice spoke a "soldier piece"--the soliloquy of a one-armed veteran who sits at a window and sees the troops go by with dancing banners and glittering bayonets, and the people cheering and shouting. And the refrain went something like this: "Never again call 'Comrade' To the men who were comrades for years; Never again call 'Brother' To the men we think of with tears." I happened to look around while the boy was speaking, and there sat the old Doctor with the tears rolling unheeded down his ruddy face; he was thinking, no doubt, of _his_ war time and the comrades _he_ knew. On the other hand, how he despised fustian and bombast. His "Bah!" delivered explosively, was often like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room. Several years ago, before I came here--and it is one of the historic stories of the county--there was a semi-political Fourth of July celebration with a number of ambitious orators. One of them, a young fellow of small worth who wanted to be elected to the legislature, made an impassioned address on "Patriotism." The Doctor was present, for he liked gatherings: he liked people. But he did not like the young orator, and did not want him to be elected. In the midst of the speech, while the audience was being carried through the clouds of oratory, the Doctor was seen to be growing more and more uneasy. Finally he burst out: "Bah!" The orator caught himself, and then swept on again. "Bah!" said the Doctor. By this time the audience was really interested. The orator stopped. He knew the Doctor, and he should have known better than to say what he did. But he was very young and he knew the Doctor was opposing him. "Perhaps," he remarked sarcastically, "the Doctor can make a better speech than I can." The Doctor rose instantly, to his full height--and he was an impressive-looking man. "Perhaps," he said, "I can, and what is more, I will." He stood up on a chair and gave them a talk on Patriotism--real patriotism--the patriotism of duty done in the small concerns of life. That speech, which ended the political career of the orator, is not forgotten to-day. One thing I heard to-day about the old Doctor impressed me deeply. I have been thinking about it ever since: it illuminates his character more than anything I have heard. It is singular, too, that I should not have known the story before. I don't believe it was because it all happened so long ago; it rather remained untold out of deference to a sort of neighbourhood delicacy. I had, indeed, wondered why a man of such capacities, so many qualities of real greatness and power, should have escaped a city career. I said something to this effect to a group of men with whom I was talking this morning. I thought they exchanged glances; one said: "When he first came out of the army he'd made such a fine record as a surgeon that everyone-urged him to go to the city and practice----" A pause followed which no one seemed inclined to fill. "But he didn't go," I said. "No, he didn't go. He was a brilliant young fellow. He _knew_ a lot, and he was popular, too. He'd have had a great success----" Another pause. "But he didn't go?" I asked promptingly. "No; he staid here. He was better educated than any man in this county. Why, I've seen him more'n once pick up a book of Latin and read it _for pleasure_." I could see that all this was purposely irrelevant, and I liked them for it. But walking home from the cemetery Horace gave me the story; the community knew it to the last detail. I suppose it is a story not uncommon among men, but this morning, told of the old Doctor we had just laid away, it struck me with a tragic poignancy difficult to describe. "Yes," said Horace, "he was to have been married, forty years ago, and the match was broken off because he was a drunkard." "A drunkard!" I exclaimed, with a shock I cannot convey. "Yes, sir," said Horace, "one o' the worst you ever see. He got it in the army. Handsome, wild, brilliant--that was the Doctor. I was a little boy but I remember it mighty well." He told me the whole distressing story. It was all a long time ago and the details do not matter now. It was to be expected that a man like the old Doctor should love, love once, and love as few men do. And that is what he did--and the girl left him because he was a drunkard! "They all thought," said Horace, "that he'd up an' kill himself. He said he would, but he didn't. Instid o' that he put an open bottle on his table and he looked at it and said: 'Which is stronger, now, you or John North? We'll make that the test,' he said, 'we'll live or die by that.' Them was his exact words. He couldn't sleep nights and he got haggard like a sick man, but he left the bottle there and never touched it." How my heart throbbed with the thought of that old silent struggle! How much it explained; how near it brought all these people around him! It made him so human. It is the tragic necessity (but the salvation) of many a man that he should come finally to an irretrievable experience, to the assurance that everything is lost. For with that moment, if he be strong, he is saved. I wonder if anyone ever attains real human sympathy who has not passed through the fire of some such experience. Or to humour either! For in the best laughter do we not hear constantly that deep minor note which speaks of the ache in the human heart? It seems to me I can understand Doctor North! He died Friday morning. He had been lying very quiet all night; suddenly he opened his eyes and said to his sister: "Good-bye, Kate," and shut them again. That was all. The last call had come and he was ready for it. I looked at his face after death. I saw the iron lines of that old struggle in his mouth and chin; and the humour that it brought him in the lines around his deep-set eyes. ----And as I think of him this afternoon, I can see him--curiously, for I can hardly explain it--carrying a banner as in battle right here among our quiet hills. And those he leads seem to be the people we know, the men, and the women, and the boys! He is the hero of a new age. In olden days he might have been a pioneer, carrying the light of civilisation to a new land; here he has been a sort of moral pioneer--a pioneering far more difficult than any we have ever known. There are no heroics connected with it, the name of the pioneer will not go ringing down the ages; for it is a silent leadership and its success is measured by victories in other lives. We see it now, only too dimly, when he is gone. We reflect sadly that we did not stop to thank him. How busy we were with our own affairs when he was among us! I wonder is there anyone here to take up the banner he has laid down! ----I forgot to say that the Scotch Preacher chose the most impressive text in the Bible for his talk at the funeral: "He that is greatest among you, let him be ... as he that doth serve." And we came away with a nameless, aching sense of loss, thinking how, perhaps, in a small way, we might do something for somebody else--as the old Doctor did. XII AN EVENING AT HOME "How calm and quiet a delight Is it, alone, To read and meditate and write, By none offended, and offending none. To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease, And, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease." --_Charles Cotton, a friend of Izaak Walton_, 1650 During the last few months so many of the real adventures of life have been out of doors and so much of the beauty, too, that I have scarcely written a word about my books. In the summer the days are so long and the work so engrossing that a farmer is quite willing to sit quietly on his porch after supper and watch the long evenings fall--and rest his tired back, and go to bed early. But the winter is the true time for indoor enjoyment! Days like these! A cold night after a cold day! Well wrapped, you have made arctic explorations to the stable, the chicken-yard and the pig-pen; you have dug your way energetically to the front gate, stopping every few minutes to beat your arms around your shoulders and watch the white plume of your breath in the still air--and you have rushed in gladly to the warmth of the dining-room and the lamp-lit supper. After such a day how sharp your appetite, how good the taste of food! Harriet's brown bread (moist, with thick, sweet, dark crusts) was never quite so delicious, and when the meal is finished you push back your chair feeling like a sort of lord. "That was a good supper, Harriet," you say expansively. "Was it?" she asks modestly, but with evident pleasure. "Cookery," you remark, "is the greatest art in the world----" "Oh, you were hungry!" "Next to poetry," you conclude, "and much better appreciated. Think how easy it is to find a poet who will turn you a presentable sonnet, and how very difficult it is to find a cook who will turn you an edible beefsteak----" I said a good deal more on this subject which I shall not attempt to repeat. Harriet did not listen through it all. She knows what I am capable of when I really get started; and she has her well-defined limits. A practical person, Harriet! When I have gone about so far, she begins clearing the table or takes up her mending--but I don't mind it at all. Having begun talking, it is wonderful how pleasant one's own voice becomes. And think of having a clear field--and no interruptions! My own particular room, where I am permitted to revel in the desert of my own disorder, opens comfortably off the sitting-room. A lamp with a green shade stands invitingly on the table shedding a circle of light on the books and papers underneath, but leaving all the remainder of the room in dim pleasantness. At one side stands a comfortable big chair with everything in arm's reach, including my note books and ink bottle. Where I sit I can look out through the open doorway and see Harriet near the fireplace rocking and sewing. Sometimes she hums a little tune which I never confess to hearing, lest I miss some of the unconscious cadences. Let the wind blow outside and the snow drift in piles around the doorway and the blinds rattle--I have before me a whole long pleasant evening. * * * * * What a convenient and delightful world is this world of books!--if you bring to it not the obligations of the student, or look upon it as an opiate for idleness, but enter it rather with the enthusiasm of the adventurer! It has vast advantages over the ordinary world of daylight, of barter and trade, of work and worry. In this world every man is his own King--the sort of King one loves to imagine, not concerned in such petty matters as wars and parliaments and taxes, but a mellow and moderate despot who is a true patron of genius--a mild old chap who has in his court the greatest men and women in the world--and all of them vying to please the most vagrant of his moods! Invite any one of them to talk, and if your highness is not pleased with him you have only to put him back in his corner--and bring some jester to sharpen the laughter of your highness, or some poet to set your faintest emotion to music! I have marked a certain servility in books. They entreat you for a hearing: they cry out from their cases--like men, in an eternal struggle for survival, for immortality. "Take me," pleads this one, "I am responsive to every mood. You will find in me love and hate, virtue and vice. I don't preach: I give you life as it is. You will find here adventures cunningly linked with romance and seasoned to suit the most fastidious taste. Try _me_." "Hear such talk!" cries his neighbour. "He's fiction. What he says never happened at all. He tries hard to make you believe it, but it isn't true, not a word of it. Now, I'm fact. Everything you find in me can be depended upon." "Yes," responds the other, "but who cares! Nobody wants to read you, you're dull." "You're false!" As their voices grow shriller with argument your highness listens with the indulgent smile of royalty when its courtiers contend for its favour, knowing that their very life depends upon a wrinkle in your august brow. * * * * * As for me I confess to being a rather crusty despot. When Horace was over here the other evening talking learnedly about silos and ensilage I admit that I became the very pattern of humility, but when I take my place in the throne of my arm-chair with the light from the green-shaded lamp falling on the open pages of my book, I assure you I am decidedly an autocratic person. My retainers must distinctly keep their places! I have my court favourites upon whom I lavish the richest gifts of my attention. I reserve for them a special place in the worn case nearest my person, where at the mere outreaching of an idle hand I can summon them to beguile my moods. The necessary slavies of literature I have arranged in indistinct rows at the farther end of the room where they can be had if I require their special accomplishments. * * * * * How little, after all, learning counts in this world either in books or in men. I have often been awed by the wealth of information I have discovered in a man or a book: I have been awed and depressed. How wonderful, I have thought, that one brain should hold so much, should be so infallible in a world of fallibility. But I have observed how soon and completely such a fount of information dissipates itself. Having only things to give, it comes finally to the end of its things: it is empty. What it has hived up so painfully through many a studious year comes now to be common property. We pass that way, take our share, and do not even say "Thank you." Learning is like money; it is of prodigious satisfaction to the possessor thereof, but once given forth it diffuses itself swiftly. "What have you?" we are ever asking of those we meet. "Information, learning, money?" We take it cruelly and pass onward, for such is the law of material possessions. "What have you?" we ask. "Charm, personality, character, the great gift of unexpectedness?" How we draw you to us! We take you in. Poor or ignorant though you may be, we link arms and loiter; we love you not for what you have or what you give us, but for what you are. I have several good friends (excellent people) who act always as I expect them to act. There is no flight! More than once I have listened to the edifying conversation of a certain sturdy old gentleman whom I know, and I am ashamed to say that I have thought: "Lord! if he would jump up now and turn an intellectual handspring, or slap me on the back (figuratively, of course: the other would be unthinkable), or--yes, swear! I--think I could love him." But he never does--and I'm afraid he never will! When I speak then of my books you will know what I mean. The chief charm of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairly hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the centuries. How we love 'em! They laughed for themselves, not for us! Yes, there must be surprise in the books that I keep in the worn case at my elbow, the surprise of a new personality perceiving for the first time the beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of truth. It doesn't matter at all whether the writer is a poet, a scientist, a traveller, an essayist or a mere daily space-maker, if he have the God-given grace of wonder. "What on _earth_ are you laughing about?" cries Harriet from the sitting-room. When I have caught my breath, I say, holding up my book: "This absurd man here is telling of the adventures of a certain chivalrous Knight." "But I can't see how you can laugh out like that, sitting all alone there. Why, it's uncanny." "You don't know the Knight, Harriet, nor his squire Sancho." "You talk of them just as though they were real persons." "Real!" I exclaim, "real! Why they are much more real than most of the people we know. Horace is a mere wraith compared with Sancho." And then I rush out. "Let me read you this," I say, and I read that matchless chapter wherein the Knight, having clapped on his head the helmet which Sancho has inadvertently used as a receptacle for a dinner of curds and, sweating whey profusely, goes forth to fight two fierce lions. As I proceed with that prodigious story, I can see Harriet gradually forgetting her sewing, and I read on the more furiously until, coming to the point of the conflict wherein the generous and gentle lion, having yawned, "threw out some half yard of tongue wherewith he licked and washed his face," Harriet begins to laugh. "There!" I say triumphantly. Harriet looks at me accusingly. "Such foolishness!" she says. "Why should any man in his senses try to fight caged lions!" "Harriet," I say, "you are incorrigible." She does not deign to reply, so I return with meekness to my room. * * * * * The most distressing thing about the ordinary fact writer is his cock-sureness. Why, here is a man (I have not yet dropped him out of the window) who has written a large and sober book explaining life. And do you know when he gets through he is apparently much discouraged about this universe. This is the veritable moment when I am in love with my occupation as a despot! At this moment I will exercise the prerogative of tyranny: "Off with his head!" I do not believe this person though he have ever so many titles to jingle after his name, nor in the colleges which gave them, if they stand sponsor for that which he writes, I do not believe he has compassed this universe. I believe him to be an inconsequent being like myself--oh, much more learned, of course--and yet only upon the threshold of these wonders. It goes too deep--life--to be solved by fifty years of living. There is far too much in the blue firmament, too many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain. We are not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the "scheme of things entire." This is no place for weak pessimism--this universe. This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fine adventure! What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, are insignificant compared with that which may be known. What this person explains is not, after all, the Universe--but himself, his own limited, faithless personality. I shall not accept his explanation. I escape him utterly! Not long ago, coming in from my fields, I fell to thinking of the supreme wonder of a tree; and as I walked I met the Professor. "How," I asked, "does the sap get up to the top of these great maples and elms? What power is there that should draw it upward against the force of gravity?" He looked at me a moment with his peculiar slow smile. "I don't know," he said. "What!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to tell me that science has not solved this simplest of natural phenomena?" "We do not know," he said. "We explain, but we do not know." No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not know--we do not know the why of the flowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not even know why, in our own hearts, we should be asking this curious question--and other deeper questions. * * * * * No man becomes a great writer unless he possesses a highly developed sense of Mystery, of wonder. A great writer is never _blasé_; everything to him happened not longer ago than this forenoon. The other night the Professor and the Scotch Preacher happened in here together and we fell to discussing, I hardly know how, for we usually talk the neighbourhood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace and of Charles Baxter, we fell to discussing old Izaak Walton--and the nonsense (as a scientific age knows it to be) which he sometimes talked with such delightful sobriety. "How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment and progress of his age," said the Professor, "when he reads Izaak's extraordinary natural history." "Does it make you feel that way?" asked the Scotch Preacher. "It makes me want to go fishing." And he took the old book and turned the leaves until he came to page 54. "Let me read you," he said, "what the old fellow says about the 'fearfulest of fishes.'" "'... Get secretly behind a tree, and stand as free from motion as possible; then put a grasshopper on your hook, and let your hook hang a quarter of a yard short of the water, to which end you must rest your rod on some bough of a tree; but it is likely that the Chubs will sink down towards the bottom of the water at the first shadow of your rod, for a Chub is the fearfulest of fishes, and will do so if but a bird flies over him and makes the least shadow on the water; but they will presently rise up to the top again, and there lie soaring until some shadow affrights them again; I say, when they lie upon the top of the water, look at the best Chub, which you, getting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see, and move your rod as slowly as a snail moves, to that Chub you intend to catch, let your bait fall gently upon the water three or four inches before him, and he will infallibly take the bait, and you will be as sure to catch him.... Go your way presently, take my rod, and do as I bid you, and I will sit down and mend my tackling till you return back----'" "Now I say," said the Scotch Preacher, "that it makes me want to go fishing." "That," I said, "is true of every great book: it either makes us want to do things, to go fishing, or fight harder or endure more patiently--or it takes us out of ourselves and beguiles us for a time with the friendship of completer lives than our own." The great books indeed have in them the burning fire of life; .... "nay, they do preserve, as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; which being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men." How soon we come to distinguish the books of the mere writers from the books of real men! For true literature, like happiness, is ever a by-product; it is the half-conscious expression of a man greatly engaged in some other undertaking; it is the song of one working. There is something inevitable, unrestrainable about the great books; they seemed to come despite the author. "I could not sleep," says the poet Horace, "for the pressure of unwritten poetry." Dante said of his books that they "made him lean for many days." I have heard people say of a writer in explanation of his success: "Oh, well, he has the literary knack." It is not so! Nothing is further from the truth. He writes well not chiefly because he is interested in writing, or because he possesses any especial knack, but because he is more profoundly, vividly interested in the activities of life and he tells about them--over his shoulder. For writing, like farming, is ever a tool, not an end. How the great one-book men remain with us! I can see Marcus Aurelius sitting in his camps among the far barbarians writing out the reflections of a busy life. I see William Penn engaged in great undertakings, setting down "Some of the Fruits of Solitude," and Abraham Lincoln striking, in the hasty paragraphs written for his speeches, one of the highest notes in our American literature. * * * * * "David?" "Yes, Harriet." "I am going up now; it is very late." "Yes." "You will bank the fire and see that the doors are locked?" "Yes." After a pause: "And, David, I didn't mean--about the story you read. Did the Knight finally kill the lions?" "No," I said with sobriety, "it was not finally necessary." "But I thought he set out to kill them." "He did; but he proved his valour without doing it." Harriet paused, made as if to speak again, but did not do so. "Valour"--I began in my hortatory tone, seeing a fair opening, but at the look in her eye I immediately desisted. "You won't stay up late?" she warned. "N-o," I said. Take John Bunyan as a pattern of the man who forgot himself into immortality. How seriously he wrote sermons and pamphlets, now happily forgotten! But it was not until he was shut up in jail (some writers I know might profit by his example) that he "put aside," as he said, "a more serious and important work" and wrote "Pilgrim's Progress." It is the strangest thing in the world--the judgment of men as to what is important and serious! Bunyan says in his rhymed introduction: "I only thought to make I knew not what: nor did I undertake Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I: I did it my own self to gratify." Another man I love to have at hand is he who writes of Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, and of The Hairy Ones. How Borrow escapes through his books! His object was not to produce literature but to display his erudition as a master of language and of outlandish custom, and he went about the task in all seriousness of demolishing the Roman Catholic Church. We are not now so impressed with his erudition that we do not smile at his vanity and we are quite contented, even after reading his books, to let the church survive; but how shall we spare our friend with his inextinguishable love of life, his pugilists, his gypsies, his horse traders? We are even willing to plow through arid deserts of dissertation in order that we may enjoy the perfect oases in which the man forgets himself! Reading such books as these and a hundred others, the books of the worn case at my elbow. "The bulged and the bruised octavos, The dear and the dumpy twelves----" I become like those initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries who, as Cicero tells us, have attained "the art of living joyfully and of dying with a fairer hope." * * * * * It is late, and the house is still. A few bright embers glow in the fireplace. You look up and around you, as though coming back to the world from some far-off place. The clock in the dining-room ticks with solemn precision; you did not recall that it had so loud a tone. It has been a great evening, in this quiet room on your farm, you have been able to entertain the worthies of all the past! You walk out, resoundingly, to the kitchen and open the door. You look across the still white fields. Your barn looms black in the near distance, the white mound close at hand is your wood-pile, the great trees stand like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has drifted upon the doorstep and lies there untracked. It is, indeed, a dim and untracked world: coldly beautiful but silent--and of a strange unreality! You close the door with half a shiver and take the real world with you up to bed. For it is past one o'clock. [Illustration: "The beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the greatness of truth"] XIII THE POLITICIAN In the city, as I now recall it (having escaped), it seemed to be the instinctive purpose of every citizen I knew not to get into politics but to keep out. We sedulously avoided caucuses and school-meetings, our time was far too precious to be squandered in jury service, we forgot to register for elections, we neglected to vote. We observed a sort of aristocratic contempt for political activity and then fretted and fumed over the low estate to which our government had fallen--and never saw the humour of it all. At one time I experienced a sort of political awakening: a "boss" we had was more than ordinarily piratical. I think he had a scheme to steal the city hall and sell the monuments in the park (something of that sort), and I, for one, was disturbed. For a time I really wanted to bear a man's part in helping to correct the abuses, only I did not know how and could not find out. In the city, when one would learn anything about public matters, he turns, not to life, but to books or newspapers. What we get in the city is not life, but what someone else tells us about life. So I acquired a really formidable row of works on Political Economy and Government (I admire the word "works" in that application) where I found Society laid out for me in the most perfect order--with pennies on its eyes. How often, looking back, I see myself as in those days, read my learned books with a sort of fury of interest!-- From the reading of books I acquired a sham comfort. Dwelling upon the excellent theory of our institutions, I was content to disregard the realities of daily practice. I acquired a mock assurance under which I proceeded complacently to the polls, and cast my vote without knowing a single man on the ticket, what he stood for, or what he really intended to do. The ceremony of the ballot bears to politics much the relationship that the sacrament bears to religion: how often, observing the formality, we yet depart wholly from the spirit of the institution. It was good to escape that place of hurrying strangers. It was good to get one's feet down into the soil. It was good to be in a place where things _are_ because they _grow_, and politics, not less than corn! Oh, my friend, say what you please, argue how you like, this crowding together of men and women in unnatural surroundings, this haste to be rich in material things, this attempt to enjoy without production, this removal from first-hand life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin. If our cities were not recruited constantly with the fresh, clean blood of the country, with boys who still retain some of the power and the vision drawn from the soil, where would they be! "We're a great people," says Charles Baxter, "but we don't always work at it." "But we talk about it," says the Scotch Preacher. "By the way," says Charles Baxter, "have you seen George Warren? He's up for supervisor." "I haven't yet." "Well, go around and see him. We must find out exactly what he intends to do with the Summit Hill road. If he is weak on that we'd better look to Matt Devine. At least Matt is safe." The Scotch Preacher looked at Charles Baxter and said to me with a note of admiration in his voice: "Isn't this man Baxter getting to be intolerable as a political boss!" * * * * * Baxter's shop! Baxter's shop stands close to the road and just in the edge of a grassy old apple orchard. It is a low, unpainted building, with generous double doors in front, standing irresistibly open as you go by. Even as a stranger coming here first from the city I felt the call of Baxter's shop. Shall I ever forget! It was a still morning--one of those days of warm sunshine--and perfect quiet in the country--and birds in the branches--and apple trees all in bloom. Baxter whistling at his work in the sunlit doorway of his shop, in his long, faded apron, much worn at the knees. He was bending to the rhythmic movement of his plane, and all around him as he worked rose billows of shavings. And oh, the odours of that shop! the fragrant, resinous odour of new-cut pine, the pungent smell of black walnut, the dull odour of oak wood--how they stole out in the sunshine, waylaying you as you came far up the road, beguiling you as you passed the shop, and stealing reproachfully after you as you went onward down the road. Never shall I forget that grateful moment when I first passed Baxter's shop--a failure from the city--and Baxter looking out at me from his deep, quiet, gray eyes--eyes that were almost a caress! My wayward feet soon took me, unintroduced, within the doors of that shop, the first of many visits. And I can say no more in appreciation of my ventures there than that I came out always with more than I had when I went in. The wonders there! The long bench with its huge-jawed wooden vises, and the little dusty windows above looking out into the orchard, and the brown planes and the row of shiny saws, and the most wonderful pattern squares and triangles and curves, each hanging on its own peg; and above, in the rafters, every sort and size of curious wood. And oh! the old bureaus and whatnots and high-boys in the corners waiting their turn to be mended; and the sticky glue-pot waiting, too, on the end of the sawhorse. There is family history here in this shop--no end of it--the small and yet great (because intensely human) tragedies and humours of the long, quiet years among these sunny hills. That whatnot there, the one of black walnut with the top knocked off, that belonged in the old days to---- "Charles Baxter," calls my friend Patterson from the roadway, "can you fix my cupboard?" "Bring it in," says Charles Baxter, hospitably, and Patterson brings it in, and stops to talk--and stops--and stops--There is great talk in Baxter's shop--the slow-gathered wisdom of the country, the lore of crops and calves and cabinets. In Baxter's shop we choose the next President of these United States! You laugh! But we do--exactly that. It is in the Baxters' shops (not in Broadway, not in State Street) where the presidents are decided upon. In the little grocery stores you and I know, in the blacksmithies, in the schoolhouses back in the country! * * * * * Forgive me! I did not intend to wander away. I meant to keep to my subject--but the moment I began to talk of politics in the country I was beset by a compelling vision of Charles Baxter coming out of his shop in the dusk of the evening, carrying his curious old reflector lamp and leading the way down the road to the schoolhouse. And thinking of the lamp brought a vision of the joys of Baxter's shop, and thinking of the shop brought me naturally around to politics and presidents; and here I am again where I started! Baxter's lamp is, somehow, inextricably associated in my mind with politics. Being busy farmers, we hold our caucuses and other meetings in the evening and usually in the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is conveniently near to Baxter's shop, so we gather at Baxter's shop. Baxter takes his lamp down from the bracket above his bench, reflector and all, and you will see us, a row of dusky figures, Baxter in the lead, proceeding down the roadway to the schoolhouse. Having arrived, some one scratches a match, shields it with his hand (I see yet the sudden fitful illumination of the brown-bearded, watchful faces of my neighbours!) and Baxter guides us into the schoolhouse--with its shut-in dusty odours of chalk and varnished desks and--yes, leftover lunches! Baxter's lamp stands on the table, casting a vast shadow of the chairman on the wall. "Come to order," says the chairman, and we have here at this moment in operation the greatest institution in this round world: the institution of free self-government. Great in its simplicity, great in its unselfishness! And Baxter's old lamp with its smoky tin reflector, is not that the veritable torch of our liberties? This, I forgot to say, though it makes no special difference--a caucus would be the same--is a school meeting. You see, ours is a prolific community. When a young man and a young woman are married they think about babies; they want babies, and what is more, they have them! and love them afterward! It is a part of the complete life. And having babies, there must be a place to teach them to live. Without more explanation you will understand that we needed an addition to our schoolhouse. A committee reported that the amount required would be $800. We talked it over. The Scotch Preacher was there with a plan which he tacked up on the blackboard and explained to us. He told us of seeing the stone-mason and the carpenter, he told us what the seats would cost, and the door knobs and the hooks in the closet. We are a careful people; we want to know where every penny goes! "If we put it all in the budget this year what will that make the rate?" inquires a voice from the end of the room. We don't look around; we know the voice. And when the secretary has computed the rate, if you listen closely you can almost hear the buzz of multiplications and additions which is going on in each man's head as he calculates exactly how much the addition will mean to him in taxes on his farm, his daughter's piano his wife's top-buggy. And many a man is saying to himself: "If we build this addition to the schoolhouse, I shall have to give up the new overcoat I have counted upon, or Amanda won't be able to get the new cooking-range." That's _real_ politics: the voluntary surrender of some private good for the upbuilding of some community good. It is in such exercises that the fibre of democracy grows sound and strong. There is, after all, in this world no real good for which we do not have to surrender something. In the city the average voter is never conscious of any surrender. He never realises that he is giving anything himself for good schools or good streets. Under such conditions how can you expect self-government? No service, no reward! The first meeting that I sat through watching those bronzed farmers at work gave me such a conception of the true meaning of self-government as I never hoped to have. "This is the place where I belong," I said to myself. It was wonderful in that school meeting to see how every essential element of our government was brought into play. Finance? We discussed whether we should put the entire $800 into the next year's budget or divide it paying part in cash and bonding the district for the remainder. The question of credit, of interest, of the obligations of this generation and the next, were all discussed. At one time long ago I was amazed when I heard my neighbours arguing in Baxter's shop about the issuance of certain bonds by the United States government: how completely they understood it! I know now where they got that understanding. Right in the school meetings and town caucuses where they raise money yearly for the expenses of our small government! There is nothing like it in the city. The progress of a people can best be judged by those things which they accept as matters-of-fact. It was amazing to me, coming from the city, and before I understood, to see how ingrained had become some of the principles which only a few years ago were fiercely-mooted problems. It gave me a new pride in my country, a new appreciation of the steps in civilisation which we have already permanently gained. Not a question have I ever heard in any school meeting of the necessity of educating every American child--at any cost. Think of it! Think how far we have come in that respect, in seventy--yes, fifty--years. Universal education has become a settled axiom of our life. And there was another point--so common now that we do not appreciate the significance of it. I refer to majority rule. In our school meeting we were voting money out of men's pockets--money that we all needed for private expenses--and yet the moment the minority, after full and honest discussion, failed to maintain its contention in opposition to the new building, it yielded with perfect good humour and went on with the discussion of other questions. When you come to think of it, in the light of history, is not that a wonderful thing? One of the chief property owners in our neighbourhood is a rather crabbed old bachelor. Having no children and heavy taxes to pay, he looks with jaundiced eye on additions to schoolhouses. He will object and growl and growl and object, and yet pin him down as I have seen the Scotch Preacher pin him more than once, he will admit that children ("of course," he will say, "certainly, of course") must be educated. "For the good of bachelors as well as other people?" the Scotch Preacher will press it home. "Certainly, of course." And when the final issue comes, after full discussion, after he has tried to lop off a few yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks or dispense with the clothes-closet, he votes for the addition with the rest of us. It is simply amazing to see how much grows out of these discussions--how much of that social sympathy and understanding which is the very tap-root of democracy. It's cheaper to put up a miserable shack of an addition. Why not do it? So we discuss architecture--blindly, it is true; we don't know the books on the subject--but we grope for the big true things, and by our own discussion we educate ourselves to know why a good building is better than a bad one. Heating and ventilation in their relation to health, the use of "fad studies"--how I have heard those things discussed! How Dr. North, who has now left us forever, shone in those meetings, and Charles Baxter and the Scotch Preacher--broad men, every one--how they have explained and argued, with what patience have they brought into that small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles Baxter's lamp, the grandest conceptions of human society--not in the big words of the books, but in the simple, concrete language of our common life. "Why teach physiology?" What a talk Dr. North once gave us on that! "Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one can be had for $30?" You should have heard the Scotch Preacher answer that question! Many a one of us went away with some of the education which we had come, somewhat grudgingly, to buy for our children. These are our political bosses: these unknown patriots, who preach the invisible patriotism which expresses itself not in flags and oratory, but in the quiet daily surrender of private advantage to the public good. There is, after all, no such thing as perfect equality; there must be leaders, flag-bearers, bosses--whatever you call them. Some men have a genius for leading; others for following; each is necessary and dependent upon the other. In cities, that leadership is often perverted and used to evil ends. Neither leaders nor followers seem to understand. In its essence politics is merely a mode of expressing human sympathy. In the country many and many a leader like Baxter works faithfully year in and year out, posting notices of caucuses, school meetings and elections, opening cold schoolhouses, talking to candidates, prodding selfish voters--and mostly without reward. Occasionally they are elected to petty offices where they do far more work than they are paid for (we have our eyes on 'em); often they are rewarded by the power and place which leadership gives them among their neighbours, and sometimes--and that is Charles Baxter's case--they simply like it! Baxter is of the social temperament: it is the natural expression of his personality. As for thinking of himself as a patriot, he would never dream of it. Work with the hands, close touch with the common life of the soil, has given him much of the true wisdom of experience. He knows us and we know him; he carries the banner, holds it as high as he knows how, and we follow. Whether there can be a real democracy (as in a city) where there is not that elbow knowledge, that close neighbourhood sympathy, that conscious surrender of little personal goods for bigger public ones, I don't know. We haven't many foreigners in our district, but all three were there on the night we voted for the addition. They are Polish. Each has a farm where the whole family works--and puts on a little more Americanism each year. They're good people. It is surprising how much all these Poles, Italians, Germans and others, are like us, how perfectly human they are, when we know them personally! One Pole here, named Kausky, I have come to know pretty well, and I declare I have forgotten that he _is_ a Pole. There's nothing like the rub of democracy! The reason why we are so suspicious of the foreigners in our cities is that they are crowded together in such vast, unknown, undigested masses. We have swallowed them too fast, and we suffer from a sort of national dyspepsia. Here in the country we promptly digest our foreigners and they make as good Americans as anybody. "Catch a foreigner when he first comes here," says Charles Baxter, "and he takes to our politics like a fish to water." The Scotch Preacher says they "gape for education," And when I see Kausky's six children going by in the morning to school, all their round, sleepy, fat faces shining with soap, I believe it! Baxter tells with humour how he persuaded Kausky to vote for the addition to the schoolhouse. It was a pretty stiff tax for the poor fellow to pay, but Baxter "figgered children with him," as he said. With six to educate, Baxter showed him that he was actually getting a good deal more than he paid for! Be it far from me to pretend that we are always right or that we have arrived in our country at the perfection of self-government. I do not wish to imply that all of our people are interested, that all attend the caucuses and school-meetings (some of the most prominent never come near--they stay away, and if things don't go right they blame Charles Baxter!) Nor must I over-emphasise the seriousness of our public interest. But we certainly have here, if anywhere in this nation, real self-government. Growth is a slow process. We often fail in our election of delegates to State conventions; we sometimes vote wrong in national affairs. It is an easy thing to think school district; difficult, indeed, to think State or nation. But we grow. When we make mistakes, it is not because we are evil, but because we don't know. Once we get a clear understanding of the right or wrong of any question you can depend upon us--absolutely--to vote for what is right. With more education we shall be able to think in larger and larger circles--until we become, finally, really national in our interests and sympathies. Whenever a man comes along who knows how simple we are, and how much we really want to do right, if we can be convinced that a thing _is_ right--who explains how the railroad question, for example, affects us in our intimate daily lives, what the rights and wrongs of it are, why, we can understand and do understand--and we are ready to act. It is easy to rally to a flag in times of excitement. The patriotism of drums and marching regiments is cheap; blood is material and cheap; physical weariness and hunger are cheap. But the struggle I speak of is not cheap. It is dramatised by few symbols. It deals with hidden spiritual qualities within the conscience of men. Its heroes are yet unsung and unhonoured. No combats in all the world's history were ever fought so high upward in the spiritual air as these; and, surely, not for nothing! And so, out of my experience both in city and country, I feel--yes, I _know_--that the real motive power of this democracy lies back in the little country neighbourhoods like ours where men gather in dim schoolhouses and practice the invisible patriotism of surrender and service. XIV THE HARVEST "Oh, Universe, what thou wishest, I wish." --_Marcus Aurelius_ I come to the end of these Adventures with a regret I can scarcely express. I, at least, have enjoyed them. I began setting them down with no thought of publication, but for my own enjoyment; the possibility of a book did not suggest itself until afterwards. I have tried to relate the experiences of that secret, elusive, invisible life which in every man is so far more real, so far more important than his visible activities--the real expression of a life much occupied in other employment. When I first came to this farm, I came empty-handed. I was the veritable pattern of the city-made failure. I believed that life had nothing more in store for me. I was worn out physically, mentally and, indeed, morally. I had diligently planned for Success; and I had reaped defeat. I came here without plans. I plowed and harrowed and planted, expecting nothing. In due time I began to reap. And it has been a growing marvel to me, the diverse and unexpected crops that I have produced within these uneven acres of earth. With sweat I planted corn, and I have here a crop not only of corn but of happiness and hope. My tilled fields have miraculously sprung up to friends! This book is one of the unexpected products of my farm. It is this way with the farmer. After the work of planting and cultivating, after the rain has fallen in his fields, after the sun has warmed them, after the new green leaves have broken the earth--one day he stands looking out with a certain new joy across his acres (the wind bends and half turns the long blades of the corn) and there springs up within him a song of the fields. No matter how little poetic, how little articulate he is, the song rises irrepressibly in his heart, and he turns aside from his task with a new glow of fulfillment and contentment. At harvest time in our country I hear, or I imagine I hear, a sort of chorus rising over all the hills, and I meet no man who is not, deep down within him, a singer! So song follows work: so art grows out of life! And the friends I have made! They have come to me naturally, as the corn grows in my fields or the wind blows in my trees. Some strange potency abides within the soil of this earth! When two men stoop (there must be stooping) and touch it together, a magnetic current is set up between them: a flow of common understanding and confidence. I would call the attention of all great Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians to this phenomenon: it will repay investigation. It is at once the rarest and the commonest thing I know. It shows that down deep within us, where we really live, we are all a good deal alike. We have much the same instincts, hopes, joys, sorrows. If only it were not for the outward things that we commonly look upon as important (which are in reality not at all important) we might come together without fear, vanity, envy, or prejudice and be friends. And what a world it would be! If civilisation means anything at all it means the increasing ability of men to look through material possessions, through clothing, through differences of speech and colour of skin, and to see the genuine man that abides within each of us. It means an escape from symbols! I tell this merely to show what surprising and unexpected things have grown out of my farm. All along I have had more than I bargained for. From now on I shall marvel at nothing! When I ordered my own life I failed; now that I work from day to day, doing that which I can do best and which most delights me, I am rewarded in ways that I could not have imagined. Why, it would not surprise me if heaven were at the end of all this! Now, I am not so foolish as to imagine that a farm is a perfect place. In these Adventures I have emphasised perhaps too forcibly the joyful and pleasant features of my life. In what I have written I have naturally chosen only those things which were most interesting and charming. My life has not been without discouragement and loss and loneliness (loneliness most of all). I have enjoyed the hard work; the little troubles have troubled me more than the big ones. I detest unharnessing a muddy horse in the rain! I don't like chickens in the barn. And somehow Harriet uses an inordinate amount of kindling wood. But once in the habit, unpleasant things have a way of fading quickly and quietly from the memory. And you see after living so many years in the city the worst experience on the farm is a sort of joy! In most men as I come to know them--I mean men who dare to look themselves in the eye--I find a deep desire for more naturalness, more directness. How weary we all grow of this fabric of deception which is called modern life. How passionately we desire to escape but cannot see the way! How our hearts beat with sympathy when we find a man who has turned his back upon it all and who says "I will live it no longer." How we flounder in possessions as in a dark and suffocating bog, wasting our energies not upon life but upon _things_. Instead of employing our houses, our cities, our gold, our clothing, we let these inanimate things possess and employ us--to what utter weariness. "Blessed be nothing," sighs a dear old lady of my knowledge. Of all ways of escape I know, the best, though it is far from perfection, is the farm. There a man may yield himself most nearly to the quiet and orderly processes of nature. He may attain most nearly to that equilibrium between the material and spiritual, with time for the exactions of the first, and leisure for the growth of the second, which is the ideal of life. In times past most farming regions in this country have suffered the disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed at the expense of a friendly community life: neighbourhood feuds were common. Country life was marked with the rigidity of a hard provincialism. All this, however, is rapidly changing. The closer settlement of the land, the rural delivery of mails (the morning newspaper reaches the tin box at the end of my lane at noon), the farmer's telephone, the spreading country trolleys, more schools and churches, and cheaper railroad rates, have all helped to bring the farmer's life well within the stimulating currents of world thought without robbing it of its ancient advantages. And those advantages are incalculable: Time first for thought and reflection (narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom of action--which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who has his feet firmly planted upon his own land. A city hammers and polishes its denizens into a defined model: it worships standardisation; but the country encourages differentiation, it loves new types. Thus it is that so many great and original men have lived their youth upon the land. It would be impossible to imagine Abraham Lincoln brought up in a street of tenements. Family life on the farm is highly educative; there is more discipline for a boy in the continuous care of a cow or a horse than in many a term of school. Industry, patience, perseverance are qualities inherent in the very atmosphere of country life. The so-called manual training of city schools is only a poor makeshift for developing in the city boy those habits which the country boy acquires naturally in his daily life. An honest, hard-working country training is the best inheritance a father can leave his son. And yet a farm is only an opportunity, a tool. A cornfield, a plow, a woodpile, an oak tree, will cure no man unless he have it in himself to be cured. The truth is that no life, and least of all a farmer's life, is simple--unless it is simple. I know a man and his wife who came out here to the country with the avowed purpose of becoming, forthwith, simple. They were unable to keep the chickens out of their summer kitchen. They discovered microbes in the well, and mosquitoes in the cistern, and wasps in the garret. Owing to the resemblance of the seeds, their radishes turned out to be turnips! The last I heard of them they were living snugly in a flat in Sixteenth Street--all their troubles solved by a dumb-waiter. The great point of advantage in the life of the country is that if a man is in reality simple, if he love true contentment, it is the place of all places where he can live his life most freely and fully, where he can _grow_. The city affords no such opportunity; indeed, it often destroys, by the seductiveness with which it flaunts its carnal graces, the desire for the higher life which animates every good man. While on the subject of simplicity it may be well to observe that simplicity does not necessarily, as some of those who escape from the city seem to think, consist in doing without things, but rather in the proper use of things. One cannot return, unless with affectation, to the crudities of a former existence. We do not believe in Diogenes and his tub. Do you not think the good Lord has given us the telephone (that we may better reach that elbow-rub of brotherhood which is the highest of human ideals) and the railroad (that we may widen our human knowledge and sympathy)--and even the motor-car? (though, indeed, I have sometimes imagined that the motor-cars passing this way had a different origin!). He may have given these things to us too fast, faster than we can bear; but is that any reason why we should denounce them all and return to the old, crude, time-consuming ways of our ancestors? I am no reactionary. I do not go back. I neglect no tool of progress. I am too eager to know every wonder in this universe. The motor-car, if I had one, could not carry me fast enough! I must yet fly! After my experience in the country, if I were to be cross-examined as to the requisites of a farm, I should say that the chief thing to be desired in any sort of agriculture, is good health in the farmer. What, after all, can touch that! How many of our joys that we think intellectual are purely physical! This joy of the morning that the poet carols about so cheerfully, is often nothing more than the exuberance produced by a good hot breakfast. Going out of my kitchen door some mornings and standing for a moment, while I survey the green and spreading fields of my farm, it seems to me truly as if all nature were making a bow to me. It seems to me that there never was a better cow than mine, never a more really perfect horse, and as for pigs, could any in this world herald my approach with more cheerful gruntings and squealings! But there are other requisites for a farm. It must not be too large, else it will keep you away from your friends. Provide a town not too far off (and yet not too near) where you can buy your flour and sell your grain. If there is a railroad convenient (though not so near that the whistling of the engines reaches you), that is an added advantage. Demand a few good old oak trees, or walnuts, or even elms will do. No well-regulated farm should be without trees; and having secured the oaks--buy your fuel of your neighbours. Thus you will be blessed with beauty both summer and winter. As for neighbours, accept those nearest at hand; you will find them surprisingly human, like yourself. If you like them you will be surprised to find how much they all like you (and will upon occasion lend you a spring-tooth harrow or a butter tub, or help you with your plowing); but if you hate them they will return your hatred with interest. I have discovered that those who travel in pursuit of better neighbours never find them. Somewhere on every farm, along with the other implements, there should be a row of good books, which should not be allowed to rust with disuse: a book, like a hoe, grows brighter with employment. And no farm, even in this country where we enjoy the even balance of the seasons, rain and shine, shine and rain, should be devoid of that irrigation from the currents of the world's thought which is so essential to the complete life. From the papers which the postman puts in the box flow the true waters of civilisation. You will find within their columns how to be good or how to make pies: you will get out of them what you look for! And finally, down the road from your farm, so that you can hear the bell on Sunday mornings, there should be a little church. It will do you good even though, like me, you do not often attend. It's a sort of Ark of the Covenant; and when you get to it, you will find therein the True Spirit--if you take it with you when you leave home. Of course you will look for good land and comfortable buildings when you buy your farm: they are, indeed, prime requisites. I have put them last for the reason that they are so often first. I have observed, however, that the joy of the farmer is by no means in proportion to the area of his arable land. It is often a nice matter to decide between acres and contentment: men perish from too much as well as from too little. And if it be possible there should be a long table in the dining-room and little chairs around it, and small beds upstairs, and young voices calling at their play in the fields--if it be possible. Sometimes I say to myself: I have grasped happiness! Here it is; I have it. And yet, it always seems at that moment of complete fulfillment as though my hand trembled, that I might not take it! I wonder if you recall the story of Christian and Hopeful, how, standing on the hill Clear (as we do sometimes--at our best) they looked for the gates of the Celestial City (as we look--how fondly!): "Then they essayed to look, but the remembrance of that last thing that the shepherds had showed them made their hands shake, by means of which impediment they could not look steadily through the glass: yet they thought they saw something like the gate, and also some of the glory of the place." How often I have thought that I saw some of the glory of the place (looking from the hill Clear) and how often, lifting the glass, my hand has trembled! 
11249	----	FOUR FAMOUS AMERICAN WRITERS Washington Irving Edgar Allan Poe James Russell Lowell Bayard Taylor A Book For Young Americans By Sherwin Cody 1899 CONTENTS THE STORY OF WASHINGTON IRVING CHAPTER I. HIS CHILDHOOD II. IRVING'S FIRST VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON RIVER III. A TRIP TO MONTREAL IV. IRVING GOES TO EUROPE V. "SALMAGUNDI" VI. "DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER" VII. A COMIC HISTORY OF NEW YORK VIII. FIVE UNEVENTFUL YEARS IX. FRIENDSHIP WITH SIR WALTER SCOTT X. "RIP VAN WINKLE" XI. LITERARY SUCCESS IN ENGLAND XII. IRVING GOES TO SPAIN XIII. "THE ALHAMBRA" XIV. THE LAST YEARS OF IRVING'S LIFE THE STORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE CHAPTER I. THE ARTIST IN WORDS II. POE'S FATHER AND MOTHER III. YOUNG EDGAR ALLAN IV. COLLEGE LIFE V. FORTUNE CHANGES VI. LIVING BY LITERATURE VII. POE'S EARLY POETRY VIII. POE'S CHILD WIFE IX. POE'S LITERARY HISTORY X. POE AS A STORY-WRITER XI. HOW "THE RAVEN" WAS WRITTEN XII. MUSIC AND POETRY XIII. POE'S LATER YEARS THE STORY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL CHAPTER I. ELMWOOD II. AN IMPETUOUS YOUNG MAN III. COLLEGE AND THE MUSES IV. HOW LOWELL STUDIED LAW V. LOVE AND LETTERS VI. THE UNCERTAIN SEAS OF LITERATURE VII. HOSEA BIGLOW, YANKEE HUMORIST VIII. PARSON WILBUR IX. A FABLE FOR CRITICS X. THE TRUEST POETRY XI. PROFESSOR, EDITOR, AND DIPLOMAT THE STORY OF BAYARD TAYLOR CHAPTER I. HIS BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD II. SCHOOL LIFE III. HIS FIRST POEM IV. SELF-EDUCATION AND AMBITION V. A TRAVELER AT NINETEEN VI. TWO YEARS IN EUROPE FOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS VII. THE HARDSHIPS OF TRAMP TRAVEL VIII. HIS FIRST LOVE AND GREATEST SORROW IX. "THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAVELER" X. HIS POETRY XI. "POEMS OF THE ORIENT" XII. BAYARD TAYLOR'S FRIENDSHIPS XIII. LAST YEARS THE STORY OF WASHINGTON IRVING [Illustration: _WASHINGTON IRVING._] WASHINGTON IRVING CHAPTER I HIS CHILDHOOD The Revolutionary War was over. The British soldiers were preparing to embark on their ships and sail back over the ocean, and General Washington would soon enter New York city at the head of the American army. While all true patriots were rejoicing at this happy turn of affairs, a little boy was born who was destined to be the first great American author. William Irving, the father of this little boy, had been a merchant in New York city. He had been very prosperous until the war broke out. After the battle of Long Island, the British then occupying the city, he had taken his family to New Jersey. But later, although he was a loyal American, he went back to the city to attend to his business. There he helped the American cause by doing everything he could for the American prisoners whom the British held. His wife, especially, had a happy way of persuading Sir Henry Clinton, and when the British general saw her coming, he prepared himself to grant any request about the prisoners which she might make. Often she sent them food from her own table, and cared for them when they were sick. When their last son, the eleventh child, was born, on April 3, 1783, the parents showed their loyalty by naming him Washington, after the beloved Father of his Country. Six years after this, George Washington was elected president, and went to New York to live. The Scotch maid who took care of little Washington Irving made up her mind to introduce the boy to his great namesake. So one day she followed the general into a shop, and, pointing to the lad, said, "Please, your honor, here's a bairn was named after you." Washington turned around, smiled, and placing his hand on the boy's head, gave him his blessing. Little did General Washington suspect that in later years this boy, grown to manhood and become famous, would write his biography. In those days New York was only a small town at the south end of Manhattan Island. It extended barely as far north as the place where now stand the City Hall and the Postoffice. Broadway was then a country road. The Irvings lived at 131 William Street, afterward moving across to 128. This is now one of the oldest parts of New York. The streets in that section are narrow, and the buildings, though put up long after Irving's birth, seem very old. Here the little boy grew up with his brothers and sisters. At four he went to school. His first teacher was a lady; but he was soon transferred to a school kept by an old Revolutionary soldier who became so fond of the boy that he gave him the pet name of "General." This teacher liked him because, though often in mischief, he never tried to protect himself by telling a falsehood, but always confessed the truth. Washington was not very fond of study, but he was a great reader. At eleven his favorite stories were "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sindbad the Sailor." Besides these, he read many books of travel, and soon found himself wishing that he might go to sea. As he grew up he was able to gratify his taste for travel, and some of his finest books and stories relate to his experiences in foreign lands. In the introduction to the "Sketch Book" he says, "How wistfully would I wander about the pier-heads in fine weather, and watch the parting ships bound to distant climes--with what longing eyes would I gaze after their lessening sails, and waft myself in imagination to the ends of the earth!" CHAPTER II IRVING'S FIRST VOYAGE UP THE HUDSON RIVER Irving's first literary composition seems to have been a play written when he was thirteen. It was performed at the house of a friend, in the presence of a famous actress of that day; but in after years Irving had forgotten even the title. His schooling was finished when he was sixteen. His elder brothers had attended college, and he never knew exactly why he did not. But he was not fond of hard study or hard work. He lived in a sort of dreamy leisure, which seemed particularly suited to his light, airy genius, so full of humor, sunshine, and loving-kindness. After leaving school, he began to study law in the office of a certain Henry Masterton. This was in the year 1800. He was admitted to the bar six years later; but he spent a great deal more of the intervening time in traveling and scribbling than in the study of law. His first published writing was a series of letters signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," printed in his brother's daily paper, "The Morning Chronicle," when the writer was nineteen years old. Irving's first journey was made the very year after he left school. It was a voyage in a sailing boat up the Hudson river to Albany; and a land journey from there to Johnstown, New York, to visit two married sisters. In the early days this was on the border of civilization, where the white traders went to buy furs from the Indians. Steamboats and railroads had not been invented, and a journey that can now be made in a few hours, then required several days. Years afterward, Irving described his first voyage up the Hudson. "My first voyage up the Hudson," said he, "was made in early boyhood, in the good old times before steamboats and railroads had annihilated time and space, and driven all poetry and romance out of travel.... We enjoyed the beauties of the river in those days.[+] [Footnote +: Irving was the first to describe the wonderful beauties of the Hudson river.] "I was to make the voyage under the protection of a relative of mature age--one experienced in the river. His first care was to look out for a favorite sloop and captain, in which there was great choice.... "A sloop was at length chosen; but she had yet to complete her freight and secure a sufficient number of passengers. Days were consumed in drumming up a cargo. This was a tormenting delay to me, who was about to make my first voyage, and who, boy-like, had packed my trunk on the first mention of the expedition. How often that trunk had to be unpacked and repacked before we sailed! "At length the sloop actually got under way. As she worked slowly out of the dock into the stream, there was a great exchange of last words between friends on board and friends on shore, and much waving of handkerchiefs when the sloop was out of hearing. "... What a time of intense delight was that first sail through the Highlands! I sat on the deck as we slowly tided along at the foot of those stern mountains, and gazed with wonder and admiration at cliffs impending far above me, crowned with forests, with eagles sailing and screaming around them; or listened to the unseen stream dashing down precipices; or beheld rock, and tree, and cloud, and sky reflected in the glassy stream of the river.... "But of all the scenery of the Hudson, the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of the first view of them predominating over a wide extent of country, part wild, woody, and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a long summer's day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach, at other times to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the hazy sun, until, in the evening, they printed themselves against the glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape." CHAPTER III A TRIP TO MONTREAL Soon after returning from this trip, Irving became a clerk in the law office of a Mr. Hoffman. There was a warm friendship between him and Mr. Hoffman's family. Mrs. Hoffman was his lifelong friend and, as he afterwards said, like a sister to him; and he finally fell in love with Matilda, one of Mr. Hoffman's daughters, and was engaged to be married to her. Her sad death at the age of seventeen was perhaps the greatest unhappiness of his life. He never married, but held her memory sacred as long as he lived. In 1803 he was invited by Mr. Hoffman to go with him to Montreal and Quebec. Irving kept a journal during this expedition, and it shows what a rough time travelers had in those days. Part of the way they sailed in a scow on Black River. They were partially sheltered from the rain by sheets stretched over hoops. At night they went ashore and slept in a log cabin. One morning after a rainy night they awoke to find the sky clear and the sun shining brightly. Setting out again in their boat, they were soon surprised by meeting three canoes in pursuit of a deer. "The deer made for our shore," says Irving in his journal. "We pushed ashore immediately, and as it passed, Mr. Ogden fired and wounded it. It had been wounded before. I threw off my coat and prepared to swim after it. As it came near, a man rushed through the bushes, sprang into the water, and made a grasp at the animal. He missed his aim, and I jumped after, fell on his back, and sunk him under water. At the same time I caught the deer by one ear, and Mr. Ogden seized it by a leg. The submerged gentleman, who had risen above the water, got hold of another. We drew it ashore, when the man immediately dispatched it with a knife. We claimed a haunch for our share, permitting him to keep all the rest." Irving had one or two experiences with the Indians which were not altogether pleasant at the time, but which afterward appeared very amusing. On one occasion he went with another young man to a small island in a river, where he hoped to be able to hire a boat to take the party to a place some distance farther down the stream. They found there a wigwam in which were a number of Indians, both men and women; but the Indian they were looking for was away selling furs. He soon came in, with his squaw, who was rather a pretty woman. Both he and she had been drinking. While the other young man was trying to explain their business, the Indian woman sat down beside Irving, and in her half drunken way began to pay him great attention. The husband, a tall, strapping Hercules of an Indian, sat scowling at them with his blanket drawn up to his chin, and his face between his hands, while his elbows rested on his knees. But soon the Indian could no longer endure the flirtation his wife was carrying on with Irving. He rushed upon him, calling him a "cursed Yankee," and gave him a blow which stretched him on the floor. While Irving was picking himself up and getting out of the way, his friend went to the Indian and tried to quiet him. By this time the feelings of the drunken redman had quite changed. He fell on the young man's neck, exchanged names with him after the Indian fashion, and declared that they would be sworn friends and brothers as long as they lived. Irving hastened to get into his boat, and he and his companion made off as quickly as possible, having no wish for any further intercourse with drunken Indians. CHAPTER IV IRVING GOES TO EUROPE Irving's health was by no means good, and his friends were so alarmed that when he was twenty-one they planned a trip to Europe for him. As he stepped on board the boat that was to take him, the captain eyed him from head to foot and remarked to himself, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across." To the surprise of the captain and other passengers, however, he did not die, but got much better. He disembarked at Bordeaux, in France, and joining a merry company, traveled with them in a kind of stagecoach called a diligence. Among the company were a jolly little Pennsylvania doctor, and a French officer going home to see his mother. In one of the little French towns where they stopped they had an amusing experience, which Irving has described in his journal. "In one of our strolls in the town of Tonneins," says he, "we entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. They gave me a needle and set me to work. My bad French seemed to give them much amusement. They asked me several questions; as I could not understand them I made them any answer that came into my head, which caused a great deal of laughter amongst them. "At last the little doctor told them that I was an English prisoner, whom the young French officer (who was with us) had in custody. Their merriment immediately gave place to pity. "'Ah, the poor fellow!' said one to another, 'he is merry, however, in all his trouble,' "'And what will they do with him?' said a young woman to the traveler. "'Oh, nothing of consequence,' replied he; 'perhaps shoot him or cut off his head.' "The honest souls seemed quite distressed for me, and when I mentioned that I was thirsty, a bottle of wine was immediately placed before me, nor could I prevail on them to take a recompense. In short, I departed, loaded with their good wishes and benedictions, and I suppose I furnished a theme of conversation throughout the village." Years afterward, when Mr. Irving was minister to Spain, he went some miles out of his way to visit this town. Says he: "As my carriage rattled through the quiet streets of Tonneins, and the postilion smacked his whip with the French love of racket, I looked out for the house where, forty years before, I had seen the quilting party. I believe I recognized the house; and I saw two or three old women, who might once have formed part of the merry group of girls; but I doubt whether they recognized in the stout, elderly gentleman, who thus rattled in his carriage through their streets, the pale young English prisoner of forty years since." * * * * * In this manner he wandered about for nearly two years. He visited Genoa, the birthplace of Columbus, and climbed Mount Vesuvius. He dined with Madame de Stael, the famous author of "Corinne." At Rome he met Washington Allston, the great American painter, then a young man not much older than he. They became good friends, and Allston afterward illustrated some of Irving's works. Irving was tempted to remain in Rome and become a painter like Allston. But he finally decided that he did not have any special talent for art, and went home to finish his study of law. CHAPTER V "SALMAGUNDI" Washington Irving returned to New York, quite restored to health; and there he soon became a social hero. Trips to Europe were so uncommon in those days that to have made one was a distinction in itself. Besides, Irving was now a polished young gentleman, very fond of amusement; and having become a lawyer with little to do, he made up his mind to enjoy himself. He and his brother Peter, with a number of young men about the same age, called themselves "the nine worthies," or the "lads of Kilkenny," and many a gay time they had together,--rather too gay, some people thought. One of their favorite resorts was an old family mansion, which had descended from a deceased uncle to one of the nine lads. It was on the banks of the Passaic river, about a mile from Newark, New Jersey. It was full of antique furniture, and the walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks and orgies. "'Who would have thought," said Irving at the age of sixty-three to another of those nine lads, "that we should ever have lived to be two such respectable old gentlemen!" About this time Irving and a friend named James K. Paulding proposed to start a paper, to be called "Salmagundi." It was an imitation of Addison's _Spectator_, and consisted of light, humorous essays, most of them making fun of the fads and fancies of New York life in those days. The numbers were published from a week to a month apart, and were continued for about a year. The young men had no idea of making money by the venture, for they were then well-to-do; but to their surprise it proved a great success, and the publisher is said to have made ten or fifteen thousand dollars out of it. He afterwards paid the editors four hundred dollars each. Irving now visited Philadelphia, Boston, and other places. He thought of trying for a government office, and was tempted into politics. His description of his experience is amusing enough. "Before the third day was expired, I was as deep in mud and politics as ever a moderate gentleman would wish to be; and I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked handbill-fashion with the demagogues, and I shook hands with the mob--whom my heart abhorreth. 'Tis true, for the two first days I maintained my coolness and indifference.... But the third day--ah! then came the tug of war. My patriotism all at once blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! O, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks, sweep offices, and oyster cellars!" He closes by saying that this saving one's country is such a sickening business that he wants no more of it. CHAPTER VI "DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER" On October 26, 1809, there appeared in the _New York Evening Post_ the following paragraph: "DISTRESSING. "Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry street, or at the office of this paper, will be thankfully received. "P.S. Printers of newspapers will be aiding the cause of humanity in giving an insertion to the above." Two weeks later a letter was printed in the _Evening Post_, signed "A Traveler," saying that such a gentleman as the one described had been seen a little above King's Bridge, north of New York, "resting himself by the side of the road." Ten days after this the following letter was printed: "_To the Editor of the Evening Post_: "Sir,--You have been good enough to publish in your paper a paragraph about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely some time since; but a very curious kind of a written book has been found in his room, in his own handwriting. Now I wish to notice[+] him, if he is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for boarding and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his book to satisfy me for the same. [Footnote +: Legal term, meaning "to give notice to."] "I am, sir, your obedient servant, "Seth Handaside, "Landlord of the Independent Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street." On November 28th there appeared in the advertising columns the announcement of "A History of New York," in two volumes, price three dollars. The advertisement says, "This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind." When the book was published the people took it up, expecting to find a grave and learned history of New York. It was dedicated to the New York Historical Society, and began with an account of the supposed author, Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker. "He was a small, brisk-looking old gentleman, dressed in a rusty black coat, a pair of olive velvet breeches, and a small cocked hat. He had a few gray hairs plaited and clubbed behind.... The only piece of finery which he bore about him was a bright pair of square silver shoe-buckles." The landlord of the inn, who writes this description, adds: "My wife at once set him down for some eminent country schoolmaster." Imagine for yourself the astonishment, and then the amusement--in some cases even the anger--of those who read, to find a most ludicrous description of the old Dutch settlers of New York, the ancestors of the most aristocratic families of the metropolis of America. The people that laughed got the best of it, however, and the book was considered one of the popular successes of the day. The real author of this book was, of course, Washington Irving. When forty years later the book was to be included in his collected works he wrote an "Apology," in which he says, "When I find, after a lapse of nearly forty years, this haphazard production of my youth still cherished among them (the New Yorkers); when I find its very name become a 'household word,' and used to give the home stamp to everything recommended for popular acceptance, such as Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice,--and when I find New Yorkers of Dutch descent priding themselves upon being 'genuine Knickerbockers,' I please myself with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord." CHAPTER VII A COMIC HISTORY OF NEW YORK "Knickerbocker's History of New York" was undertaken by Irving and his brother Peter as a parody on a book that had lately appeared, entitled "A Picture of New York." The two young men, one of whom had already proved himself something of an author, were so full of humor and the spirit of mischief that they must amuse themselves and their friends, and they thought this a good way of doing it. There was to be an introduction giving the history of New York from the foundation of the world, and the main body of the book was to consist of "notices of the customs, manners, and institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies, and abuses with good-humored satire." The introduction was not more than fairly begun when Peter Irving started for Europe, leaving the completion of the work to the younger brother. Washington decided to change the plan, and merely give a humorous history of the Dutch settlement of New York. Let us take a peep into this amusing history. First, here is the portrait of "that worthy and irrecoverable discoverer (as he has justly been called), Master Henry Hudson," who "set sail from Holland in a stout vessel called the Half-Moon, being employed by the Dutch East India Company to seek a northwest passage to China." "Henry (or as the Dutch historians call him, Hendrick) Hudson was a seafaring man of renown, who had learned to smoke tobacco under Sir Walter Raleigh, and is said to have been the first to introduce it into Holland, which gained him much popularity in that country, and caused him to find great favor in the eyes of their High Mightinesses, the Lords States General, and also of the honorable East India Company. He was a short, square, brawny old gentleman, with a double chin, a mastiff mouth, and a broad copper nose, which was supposed in those days to have acquired its fiery hue from the constant neighborhood of his tobacco pipe. "He wore a commodore's cocked hat on one side of his head. He was remarkable for always jerking up his breeches when he gave out his orders, and his voice sounded not unlike the brattling of a tin trumpet--owing to the number of hard northwesters which he had swallowed in the course of his seafaring. "Such was Hendrick Hudson, of whom we have heard so much and know so little." You must read in the history itself the amusing account of Ten Breeches and Tough Breeches. One of the Dutch colonists bought of the Indians for sixty guelders as much land as could be covered by a man's breeches. When the time for measuring came Mr. Ten Breeches was produced, and peeling off one pair of breeches after another, soon produced enough material to surround the entire island of Manhattan, which was thus bought for sixty guelders, or Dutch dollars. In due time came the first Dutch governor, Wouter Van Twiller. Governor Van Twiller was five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference, his figure "the very model of majesty and lordly grandeur." On the very morning after he had entered upon his office, he gave an example of his great legal knowledge and wise judgment. As the governor sat at breakfast an important old burgher came in to complain that Barent Bleecker refused to settle accounts, which was very annoying, as there was a heavy balance in the complainant's favor. "Governor Van Twiller, as I have already observed, was a man of few words; he was likewise a mortal enemy to multiplying writings--or being disturbed at his breakfast. Having listened attentively to the statement of Wandle Schoonhoven, giving an occasional grunt, as he shoveled a spoonful of Indian pudding into his mouth,--either as a sign that he relished the dish or comprehended the story,--he called unto him his constable, and pulling out of his breeches pocket a huge jack-knife, dispatched it after the defendant as a summons, accompanied by his tobacco-box as a warrant." When the account books were before him, "the sage Wouter took them one after the other, and having poised them in his hands, and attentively counted over the number of leaves, fell straightway into a great doubt, and smoked for half an hour without saying a word; at length, laying his finger beside his nose, and shutting his eyes for a moment, with the air of a man who had just caught a subtle idea by the tail, he slowly took his pipe from his mouth, puffed forth a column of tobacco smoke, and with marvelous gravity and solemnity pronounced, that, having carefully counted over the leaves and weighed the books, it was found that one was just as thick and heavy as the other; therefore, it was the final opinion of the court that the accounts were equally balanced; therefore, Wandle should give Barent a receipt, and Barent should give Wandle a receipt, and the constable should pay the costs." It is not wonderful that this was the first and last lawsuit during his administration, and that no one was found who cared to hold the office of constable. This is only one of scores of droll stories to be found in this most interesting "history." CHAPTER VIII FIVE UNEVENTFUL YEARS It seems strange that the success of the "History of New York" did not make Irving a professional man of letters at once. The profits on the first edition were three thousand dollars, and several other editions were to follow steadily. But though he wished to be a literary man, and now knew that he might make a fair living by his writings, there was still lacking the force to compel him to work. He had always lived in easy circumstances, doing as he liked, enjoying society, and amusing himself, and it was hard for him to devote his attention strictly to any set task. He applied for a clerkship at Albany, but failed to get it. Then his brothers, with whom he must have been a great favorite, as he was the youngest of the family, arranged a mercantile business in which he was to be a partner. Peter was to buy goods in England and ship them to New York, while Ebenezer was to sell them. Washington was to be a silent partner, and enjoy one fifth of the profits. At first he objected to taking no active part in the business; but his brothers persuaded him that this was his chance to become independent and have his entire time for literary work. But five years passed away and little was accomplished. This covered the period of the War of 1812. At first Irving was opposed to the war; but when he heard the news of the burning of Washington his patriotism blazed forth. "He was descending the Hudson in the steamboat when the tidings first reached him," says his nephew in the biography which he wrote. "It was night and the passengers had betaken themselves to their settees to rest, when a person came on board at Poughkeepsie with the news of the inglorious triumph, and proceeded in the darkness of the cabin to relate the particulars: the destruction of the president's house, the treasury, war, and navy offices, the capitol, the depository of the national library and the public records. There was a momentary pause after the speaker had ceased, when some paltry spirit lifted his head from his settee, and in a tone of complacent derision, 'wondered what _Jimmy_ Madison would say now.' 'Sir,' said Mr. Irving, glad of an escape to his swelling indignation, 'do you seize on such a disaster only for a sneer? Let me tell you, sir, it is not now a question about _Jimmy_ Madison or _Jimmy_ Armstrong.[+] The pride and honor of the nation are wounded; the country is insulted and disgraced by this barbarous success, and every loyal citizen should feel the ignominy and be earnest to avenge it.' 'I could not see the fellow,' said Mr. Irving when he related the anecdote, 'but I let fly at him in the dark.'" [Footnote +: The Secretary of War.] As soon as he reached New York, Irving went to the governor and offered his services. He was immediately appointed military secretary and aide with the rank of colonel. His duties were neither difficult nor dangerous, and he enjoyed his position; but he was glad when the war came to an end the following year. When the War of 1812 was over, his friend Commodore Decatur invited him to accompany him on an expedition to the Mediterranean, the United States having declared war against the pirates of Algiers. Irving's trunks were put on board the _Guerriere_, but as the expedition was delayed on account of the escape of Napoleon from Elba, he had them again brought ashore, and finally gave up his plan of going with Decatur. His mind was set on visiting Europe, however, and he immediately took passage for Liverpool in another vessel. Little did he think that he was not to return for seventeen years. One of Irving's married sisters was living in Birmingham, and his brother Peter was in Liverpool managing the business in which he was a partner. Soon after Washington's arrival, however, Peter fell ill, and the younger brother was obliged to take charge of affairs. He found a great many bills to pay, and very little money with which to pay them. He was now beginning to face some of the stern realities of life. He worked hard; but the black cloud of ruin came nearer and nearer. Other difficulties were added to those they already had to face, and finally, in 1818, the brothers were obliged to go into bankruptcy. It was now absolutely necessary that Irving should earn his living in some way. His brothers procured him an appointment at Washington; but to their astonishment he declined it and said he had made up his mind to live by his pen. He immediately went to London and set to work on the "Sketch Book," and during the next dozen years wrote the greater number of his more famous works. CHAPTER IX FRIENDSHIP WITH SIR WALTER SCOTT While he was worrying over the failure of his business, Irving was fortunate enough to make some distinguished literary friendships. He had already helped to introduce Thomas Campbell's works in the United States, and had written a biography of Campbell; one of the first things he did, therefore, after reaching Liverpool, was to go to see the English poet. It was not until a little later that he became acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, who was the literary giant of those times. In 1813 Henry Brevoort, one of Irving's most intimate boyhood friends, had presented to Scott a copy of the "History of New York," and Scott had written a letter of thanks in which he said, "I have been employed these few evenings in reading the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker aloud to Mrs. S, and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I think, too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind." Irving, too, had been a great admirer of Scott's "Lady of the Lake." Campbell gave him a letter of introduction to the bard, and in a letter to his brother, Irving gives a delightful description of his visit to Abbotsford, Scott's home. "On Saturday morning early," says he, "I took a chaise for Melrose; and on the way stopped at the gate of Abbotsford, and sent in my letter of introduction, with a request to know whether it would be agreeable for Mr. Scott to receive a visit from me in the course of the day. The glorious old minstrel himself came limping to the gate, and took me by the hand in a way that made me feel as if we were old friends; in a moment I was seated at his hospitable board among his charming little family, and here I have been ever since.... I cannot tell you how truly I have enjoyed the hours I have passed here. They fly by too quickly, yet each is loaded with story, incident, or song; and when I consider the world of ideas, images, and impressions that have been crowded upon my mind since I have been here, it seems incredible that I should only have been two days at Abbotsford." And here is Scott's impression of Irving: "When you see Tom Campbell," he writes to a friend, "tell him, with my best love, that I have to thank him for making me known to Mr. Washington Irving, who is one of the best and pleasantest acquaintances I have made this many a day." When the "Sketch Book" was coming out in the United States, and Irving was thinking of publishing it in England, he received some advice and assistance from Scott; and finally Scott persuaded the great English publisher Murray to take it up, even after that publisher had once declined it. On this occasion Irving wrote to a friend as follows: "He (Scott) is a man that, if you knew, you would love; a right honest-hearted, generous-spirited being; without vanity, affectation, or assumption of any kind. He enters into every passing scene or passing pleasure with the interest and simple enjoyment of a child." CHAPTER X "RIP VAN WINKLE" Irving's most famous work is undoubtedly the "Sketch Book"; and of the thirty-two stories and essays in this volume, all Americans love best "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." After the failure of his business, when Irving saw that he must write something at once to meet his ordinary living expenses, he went up to London and prepared several sketches, which he sent to his friend, Henry Brevoort, in New York. Among them was the story of Rip Van Winkle. This, with the other sketches, was printed in handsome form as the first number of a periodical, which was offered for sale at seventy-five cents. Though "The Sketch Book," as the periodical was called, professed to be edited by "Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.," every one knew that Washington Irving was the real author. In fact, the best story in the first number, "Rip Van Winkle," was represented to be a posthumous writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the author of the "History of New York." There are few Americans who do not know the story of "Rip Van Winkle" by heart; for those who have not read the story, have at least seen the play in which Joseph Jefferson, the great actor, has made himself so famous. Attached to the story is a note supposed to have been written by Diedrich Knickerbocker, which a careless reader might overlook, but which is an excellent introduction to the story. Says he: "The story of Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, but nevertheless I give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our old Dutch settlements to have been very subject to marvelous events and appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories than this in the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who, when I last saw him, was a very venerable old man, and so perfectly rational and consistent on every point, that I think no conscientious person could refuse to take this into the bargain; nay, I have seen a certificate on the subject, taken before a country justice, and signed with a cross, in the justice's own handwriting. The story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt." Rip was truly an original character. He had a shrewish wife who was always scolding him; and he seems to have deserved all the cross things she said to him, for he had "an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor--in other words, he was as lazy a fellow as you could find in all the country side." Nevertheless, every one liked him, he was so good-natured. "He was a great favorite among all the good wives of the village, who took his part in all the family squabbles; and never failed whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hanging on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thousand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at him throughout the neighborhood." You can't find much fault with a man who is so well liked that even the dogs will not bark at him. You are reminded of Irving himself, who for so many years was so idle; and yet who, out of his very idleness, produced such charming stories. "Rip Van Winkle," continues the narrative, "was one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away in perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family." This description is as perfect and as delightful as any in the English language. Any one who cannot enjoy this has no perception of human nature, and no love of humor in his composition. In time Rip discovered that his only escape from his termagant wife was to take his gun, and stroll off into the woods with his dog. "Here he would sometimes seat himself at the foot of a tree, and share the contents of his wallet with Wolf, with whom he sympathized as a fellow sufferer in persecution. 'Poor Wolf,' he would say, 'thy mistress leads thee a dog's life of it; but never mind, my lad, whilst I live thou shalt never want a friend to stand by thee!' Wolf would wag his tail, look wistfully into his master's face, and if dogs can feel pity, I verily believe he reciprocated with all his heart." Rip is just the sort of fellow to have some sort of adventure, and we are not at all astonished when we find him helping the dwarf carry his keg of liquor up the mountain. The description of "the odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins" whom he finds on entering the amphitheater, is a perfect picture in words; for the truly great writer is a painter of pictures quite as much as the great artist. "They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts. Their visages, too, were peculiar: one had a large head, broad face, and small piggish eyes; the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red cock's tail. They all had beards of various shapes and colors. There was one who seemed to be the commander. He was a stout old gentleman, with a weather-beaten countenance; he wore a laced doublet, broad belt and hanger, high-crowned hat and feather, red stockings, and high-heeled shoes, with roses in them.... What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder." But now comes a surprise. Rip indulges too freely in the contents of the keg and falls asleep. When he wakes he finds a rusty old gun beside him, and he whistles in vain for his dog. He goes back to the village; but every thing and everybody is strange and changed. Putting his hand to his chin he finds that his beard has grown a foot. He has been sleeping twenty years. But you must read the story for yourselves. It will bear reading many times, and each time you will find in it something to smile at and enjoy. CHAPTER XI LITERARY SUCCESS IN ENGLAND "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" also purports to be written by Diedrich Knickerbocker, and it is only less famous than "Rip Van Winkle." When he was a boy, Irving had gone hunting in Sleepy Hollow, which is not far from New York city; and in the latter part of his life he bought a low stone house there of Mr. Van Tassel and fitted it up for his bachelor home. "The outline of this story," says his nephew Pierre Irving, "had been sketched more than a year before[+] at Birmingham, after a conversation with his brother-in-law, Van Wart, who had been dwelling on some recollections of his early years at Tarrytown, and had touched upon a waggish fiction of one Brom Bones, a wild blade, who professed to fear nothing, and boasted of his having once met the devil on a return from a nocturnal frolic, and run a race with him for a bowl of milk punch. The imagination of the author suddenly kindled over the recital, and in a few hours he had scribbled off the framework of his renowned story, and was reading it to his sister and her husband. He then threw it by until he went up to London, where it was expanded into the present legend." [Footnote +: That is, before it was finally written and published.] No sooner had the first number of the "Sketch Book," as published in New York, come to England, than a periodical began reprinting it, and Irving heard that a publisher intended to bring it out in book form. That made him decide to publish it in England himself, and he did so at his own expense. The publisher soon failed, and by Scott's help, as already explained, Irving got his book into the hands of Murray. Murray finally gave him a thousand dollars for the copyright. But when it was published, it proved so very popular that Murray paid him five hundred more. From that time forward he received large sums for his writings, both in the United States and in England. The "Sketch Book" was followed by "Bracebridge Hall," consisting of stories and sketches of the same character; and later by the "Tales of a Traveller." In the "Tales of a Traveller" we are most interested in "Buckthorne and his Friends," a series of English stories, with descriptions of literary life in London. Most famous of all is the account of a publishers' dinner, with a description of the carving partner sitting gravely at one end, with never a smile on his face, while at the other end of the table sits the laughing partner; and the poor authors are arranged at the table and are treated by the partners according to the number of editions their books have sold. Irving's father was a Scotchman, and his mother was an Englishwoman; and one of his sisters and one of his brothers, as we have already learned, lived in England for many years. It is not strange, then, that England became to him a second home, and that many of his best stories and descriptions in the "Sketch Book," "Bracebridge Hall," and the "Tales of a Traveller" relate to English characters and scenes. CHAPTER XII IRVING GOES TO SPAIN When Irving went to Liverpool in 1815, it was his intention to travel on the continent of Europe. As we have seen, business reasons made that impossible. But after the publication and success of the "Sketch Book" he was free. He was now certain of an income, and his reputation was so great that he attracted notice wherever he went. In 1820, after having spent five years in England, he at last set out on his European journey. We cannot follow him in all his wanderings; but one country that he visited furnished him the materials for the most serious, and in one way the most important part of his literary work. This was Spain. Here he spent a great deal of time, returning again and again; and finally he was appointed United States minister to that country. He first went to Spain to collect materials for the "Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus." This was a much more serious work than anything he had before undertaken. It was, unlike the history of New York, a genuine investigation of facts derived from the musty old volumes of the libraries of Spanish monasteries and other ancient collections. It was a record of the life of the discoverer of America that was destined to remain the highest authority on that subject. Murray, the London publisher, paid him over fifteen thousand dollars for the English copyright alone. In his study among the ruins of Spain, Irving found many other things which greatly interested him--legends, and tales of the Moors who had once ruled there, and of the ruined beauties of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra. His imagination was set on fire, he was delighted with the images of by-gone days of glittering pageantry which his fancy called up. Before his history of Columbus was finished, he began the writing of a book so precisely to his taste that he could not restrain himself until it was finished. This was the "Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada"--a true history, but one which reads more like a romance of the Middle Ages than a simple record of facts. This was followed by four other books based on Spanish history and legend. It seemed as if Irving could never quite abandon this entrancing subject, for during the entire remainder of his life he went back to it constantly. When his great history of the life of Columbus was published and proved its merit, Irving was honored in a way he had little expected in his more idle days. The Royal Society of Literature bestowed upon him one of two fifty-guinea[+] gold medals awarded annually, and the University of Oxford conferred the degree of L.L.D. [Footnote +: Two hundred and fifty dollars.] The "Life of Columbus" was followed in 1831 by the "Voyages of the Companions of Columbus." In the following year Irving returned to the United States after an absence of seventeen years. He was no longer an idle young man unable to fix his mind on any serious work; he had become the most famous of American men of letters. When he reached New York his countrymen hastened to heap honors upon him, and almost overwhelmed him with public attentions. CHAPTER XIII "THE ALHAMBRA" Just before Irving's return to the United States in 1832, he prepared for publication some sketches which he had made three or four years before while living for a few months in the ruins of the Alhambra, the ancient palace of the Moorish kings when they ruled the kingdom of Granada. Next to the stories of "Rip Van Winkle" and the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," nothing that Irving has written has proved more popular than this volume of "The Alhambra;" and it has made the ancient ruin a place of pilgrimage for tourists in Europe ever since. In this volume Irving not only describes in his own peculiarly charming manner his experiences in the halls of the Alhambra itself, but he gives many of the stories and legends of the place, most of which were told to him by Mateo Ximenes, a "son of the Alhambra," who acted as his guide. This is the way he came to secure Mateo's services: "At the gate were two or three ragged, super-annuated soldiers, dozing on a stone bench, the successors of the Zegris and the Abencerrages; while a tall, meagre valet, whose rusty-brown cloak was evidently intended to conceal the ragged state of his nether garments, was lounging in the sunshine and gossipping with the ancient sentinel on duty. He joined us as we entered the gate, and offered his services to show us the fortress. "I have a traveler's dislike to officious ciceroni, and did not altogether like the garb of the applicant. "'You are well acquainted with the place, I presume?' "'Nobody better; in fact, sir, I am a son of the Alhambra.' "'The common Spaniards have certainly a most poetical way of expressing themselves. 'A son of the Alhambra!' the appellation caught me at once; the very tattered garb of my new acquaintance assumed a dignity in my eyes. It was emblematic of the fortunes of the place, and befitted the progeny of a ruin." Accompanied by Mateo, the travelers pass on to "the great vestibule, or porch of the gate," which "is formed by an immense Arabian arch, of the horseshoe form, which springs to half the height of the tower. On the keystone of this arch, is engraven a gigantic hand. Within the vestibule, on the keystone of the portal, is sculptured, in like manner, a gigantic key," emblems, say the learned, of Moorish superstition and religious belief. "A different explanation of these emblems, however, was given by the legitimate son of Alhambra, and one more in unison with the notions of the common people, who attach something of mystery and magic to everything Moorish, and have all kinds of superstitions connected with this old Moslem fortress. According to Mateo, it was a tradition handed down from the oldest inhabitants, and which he had from his father and grandfather, that the hand and key were magical devices on which the fate of the Alhambra depended. The Moorish king who built it was a great magician, or, as some believed, had sold himself to the devil, and had laid the whole fortress under a magic spell. By this means it had remained standing for several years, in defiance of storms and earthquakes, while almost all other buildings of the Moors had fallen to ruin and disappeared. This spell, the tradition went on to say, would last until the hand on the outer arch should reach down and grasp the key, when the whole pile would tumble to pieces, and all the treasures buried beneath it by the Moors would be revealed." The travelers at once made application to the governor for permission to take up their residence in the palace of the Alhambra, and to their astonishment and delight he placed his own suite of apartments at their disposal, as he himself preferred to live in the city of Granada. Irving's companion soon left him, and he remained sole lord of the palace. For a time he occupied the governor's rooms, which were very scantily furnished; but one day he came upon an eerie suite of rooms which he liked better. They were the rooms that had been fitted up for the beautiful Elizabetta of Farnese, the second wife of Philip V. "The windows, dismantled and open to the wind and weather, looked into a charming little secluded garden, where an alabaster fountain sparkled among roses and myrtles, and was surrounded by orange and citron trees, some of which flung their branches into the chambers." This was the garden of Lindaraxa. "Four centuries had elapsed since the fair Lindaraxa passed away, yet how much of the fragile beauty of the scenes she inhabited remained! The garden still bloomed in which she delighted; the fountain still presented the crystal mirror in which her charms may once have been reflected; the alabaster, it is true, had lost its whiteness; the basin beneath, overrun with weeds, had become the lurking-place of the lizard, but there was something in the very decay that enhanced the interest of the scene, speaking as it did of the mutability, the irrevocable lot of man and all his works." In spite of warnings of the dangers of the place, Irving had his bed set up in the chamber beside this little garden. The first night was full of frightful terrors. The garden was dark and sinister. "There was a slight rustling noise overhead; a bat suddenly emerged from a broken panel of the ceiling, flitting about the room and athwart my solitary lamp; and as the fateful bird almost flouted my face with his noiseless wing, the grotesque faces carved in high relief in the cedar ceiling, whence he had emerged, seemed to mope and mow at me. "Rousing myself, and half smiling at this temporary weakness, I resolved to brave it out in the true spirit of the hero of the enchanted house," says the narrator. So taking his lamp in his hand he started out to make a midnight tour of the palace. "My own shadow, cast upon the wall, began to disturb me," he continues. "The echoes of my own footsteps along the corridors made me pause and look around. I was traversing scenes fraught with dismal recollections. One dark passage led down to the mosque where Yusef, the Moorish monarch, the finisher of the Alhambra, had been basely murdered. In another place I trod the gallery where another monarch had been struck down by the poniard of a relative whom he had thwarted in his love." In a few nights, however, all this was changed; for the moon, which had been invisible, began to "roll in full splendor above the towers, pouring a flood of tempered light into every court and hall." Says Irving, "I now felt the merit of the Arabic inscription on the walls--'How beauteous is this garden; where the flowers of the earth vie with the stars of heaven. What can compare with the vase of yon alabaster fountain filled with crystal water? Nothing but the moon in her fullness, shining in the midst of an unclouded sky!" "On such heavenly nights," he goes on, "I would sit for hours at my window inhaling the sweetness of the garden, and musing on the checkered fortunes of those whose history was dimly shadowed out in the elegant memorials around. Sometimes, when all was quiet, and the clock from the distant cathedral of Granada struck the midnight hour, I have sallied out on another tour and wandered over the whole building; but how different from my first tour! No longer dark and mysterious; no longer peopled with shadowy foes; no longer recalling scenes of violence and murder; all was open, spacious, beautiful; everything called up pleasing and romantic fancies; Lindaraxa once more walked in her garden; the gay chivalry of Moslem Granada once more glittered about the Court of Lions! "Who can do justice to a moonlight night in such a climate and in such a place? The temperature of a summer night in Andalusia is perfectly ethereal. We seem lifted up into an ethereal atmosphere; we feel a serenity of soul, a buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of frame, which render mere existence happiness. But when moonlight is added to all this, the effect is like enchantment. Under its plastic sway the Alhambra seems to regain its pristine glories. Every rent and chasm of time; every moldering tint and weather-stain is gone; the marble resumes its original whiteness; the long colonnades brighten in the moonbeams; the halls are illuminated with a softened radiance--we tread the enchanted palace of an Arabian tale!" When one may journey with such a companion, through a whole volume of enchantment and legend and moonlight, it is not strange that "The Alhambra" has been one of the most widely read books ever produced by an American writer. CHAPTER XIV THE LAST YEARS OF IRVING'S LIFE Some people have thought that Irving's long residence abroad indicated that he did not care so much as he should for his native land. But the truth is, the years after his return to the United States were among the happiest of his life; and more and more he felt that here was his home. In 1835 he purchased, as I have already said, a small piece of land on the Hudson, on which stood the Van Tassel house mentioned in the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." It was an old Dutch cottage which had stood for so many years that it needed to be almost entirely rebuilt; and Irving spent a considerable sum of money to fit it up as his bachelor quarters. First he shared it with one of his bachelor brothers; but soon he invited his brother Ebenezer to come with his family of girls to occupy it with him. As the years went on, Irving took a delight in this cottage that can hardly be expressed. At first he called it "Wolfert's Roost"; afterward the name was changed to "Sunnyside," the name by which it is still known. Little by little he bought more land, he planted trees, and cultivated flowers and vegetables. At one time he boasts that he has become so proficient in gardening that he can raise his own fruits and vegetables at a cost to him of little more than twice the market price. During this period several books were published, among them a description of a tour on the prairies which he took soon after his return from abroad; a collection of "Legends of the Conquest of Spain" which had been lying in his trunk since his residence in the Alhambra seven or eight years before; and "Astoria," a book of Western life and adventure, describing John Jacob Astor's settlement on the Columbia river. It was his wish to write a history of the conquest of Mexico, for which he had collected materials in Spain; but hearing that Prescott, the well-known American historian, was at work on the same subject, he gave it up to him. The chief work of his later years was his "Life of George Washington." This was a great undertaking, of which he had often thought. He was actually at work on it for many years, and it was finally published only a short time before his death in 1859. Irving's friends in the United States had long wished to give him some honor or distinction. He had been offered several public offices, among them the secretaryship of the navy; but he had declined them all. But in 1842, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, Irving was nominated minister to Spain. It was Webster's idea, and he took great delight in carrying out his plan. After the notification of his nomination had been sent to Irving, and Webster thought time enough had elapsed for him to receive it, he remarked to a friend: "Washington Irving is now the most astonished man in the city of New York." When Irving heard the news he seemed to think less of the distinction conferred upon him than of the unhappiness of being once more banished from his home. "It is hard--very hard," he murmured, half to himself; "yet," he added, whimsically enough (says his nephew), being struck with the seeming absurdity of such a view, "I must try to bear it. _God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb_." Later, however, Irving speaks of this as the "crowning honor of his life." He remained abroad four years, when he sent in his resignation, and hurried home to spend his last years at Sunnyside. His first thought was to build an addition to his cottage, in order to have room for all his nieces and nephews. His enjoyment in every detail of the work was almost that of a boy. Though now an old man, he seemed as sunny and as gay as ever. Every one who knew him loved him; and all the people who now read his books must have the same affectionate fondness for this most delightful of companions. In the United States he met both Dickens and Thackeray. His friendship with Dickens was begun by a letter which Irving wrote to the great novelist, enthusiastically praising his work. At once Dickens replied in a long letter, fairly bubbling over with delight and friendship. Here is a part of it: "There is no man in the world who could have given me the heartfelt pleasure you have. There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. "I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were, naturally, and by the very laws of gravity, into your open arms.... My dear Washington Irving, I cannot thank you enough for your cordial and generous praise, or tell you what deep and lasting gratification it has given me. I hope to have many letters from you, and to exchange a frequent correspondence. I send this to say so.... "Always your faithful friend, "CHARLES DICKENS." The warmth of feeling which Dickens displays on receiving his first letter from Irving, we must all feel when we have become as well acquainted with Irving's works as Dickens was. Washington Irving died on the 28th of November, 1859, at his dear Sunnyside, and now lies buried in a cemetery upon a hill near by, in a beautiful spot overlooking the Hudson river and Sleepy Hollow. * * * * * NOTE.--The thanks of the publishers are due to G. P. Putnam's Sons for kind permission to use extracts from the Works of Washington Irving. THE STORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE [Illustration: _EDGAR ALLAN POE_.] EDGAR ALLAN POE CHAPTER I THE ARTIST IN WORDS Who has not felt the weird fascination of Poe's strangely beautiful poem "The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it until the "silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has "thrilled you, filled you, with fantastic terrors never felt before." That poem is the almost perfect mirror of the life of the man who wrote it--the most brilliant poetic genius in the whole range of American literature, the most unfortunate and unhappy. Poe had a singular fate. When Longfellow and Bryant and Lowell and Holmes were winning their way to fame quietly and steadily, Poe was writing wonderful poems and wonderful stories, and more than that, he was inventing new principles and new artistic methods, on which other great writers in time to come should build their finest work; yet he barely escaped starvation, and the critics made it appear that, compared with such men as Longfellow and Bryant, he was more notorious than really great. Lowell in his "Fable for Critics" said: "There comes Poe,... three fifths of him genius, and two fifths sheer fudge." But now, fifty years after his death, we see how great a man Poe was. Poe invented the modern art of short story writing. His tales were translated into French by a famous writer named Charles Baudelaire. Other French writers saw how fine they were and modeled their work upon them. They learned the art of short story writing from Poe. Then these French stories were translated into English, and English and American writers have imitated them and adopted similar methods of writing. Conan Doyle's detective stories would probably never have been written had not Poe first composed "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; and the stories of horror and fear so common to-day are possible because Poe wrote "William Wilson," "The Black Cat," and other stories of the same kind. Have you ever learned to scan poetry? If you have, you know that the rules which tell you that a foot is composed of one long syllable and one short one, two short syllables and one long one, or whatever else it may be, are frequently disregarded. You know, too, that some lines are cut off short at the end, and others are made a little too long. Why is this permitted? In his "Rationale of Verse," Poe explained all these things, and showed how the learned of past ages had made mistakes. In a subsequent chapter we shall see just what the relation between music and poetry is, and what Poe taught about the art of making poetry. For years people thought that Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition," in which he tells in what a cold-blooded way he wrote "The Raven," was a joke; but in later times we have learned to understand what he meant and to know that he was very sensible in his methods of working. When Poe was young he was not a very remarkable poet; but, as years went on and he learned more and more the art of writing, he rewrote and rewrote his verses until at last in conscious art he was almost, if not quite, the master poet of America. CHAPTER II POE'S FATHER AND MOTHER Edgar Allan Poe was descended on his father's side from a Revolutionary hero, General David Poe. The Poes were a good family of Baltimore, where many of them still live as prominent citizens. It is said that General Poe was descended from one of Cromwell's officers, who received grants of land in Ireland. One of the poet's ancestors, John Poe, emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania; and from there the Poes went to Maryland. General Poe was an ardent patriot both before and during the Revolution. General Poe's son David, the eldest, was not much like his father. In Baltimore he enjoyed himself with his friends and played at amateur theatricals with the Thespian Club. He was supposed to be studying law. For this purpose he went to live with an uncle in Augusta, Georgia; but his father soon heard that he had given up law to become an actor. General Poe was very angry and after that allowed the young man to shift for himself. Edgar Allan Poe's mother was an English actress, whose mother had also been an actress. She was born at sea, and as she went with her mother on her travels from town to town, naturally the daughter learned the mother's art as a means of self-support, and in time became very successful. At seventeen, her mother having married again, Elizabeth Arnold, for that was her name, was thrown upon her own resources. She joined a Philadelphia company, and remained with it for the next four years. In June, 1802, she acted in Baltimore, and perhaps it was there that David Poe, Jr., first saw her. She was pretty and gay, yet a good girl and a very fine actress. She soon married a young Mr. Hopkins, who had been playing with the company, and for the following two years the young couple lived in Virginia. It was then that David Poe, Jr., having left his uncle's home at Augusta and gone on the stage in Charleston, joined the same company. He was not a very good actor; and he never rose to a high place in his profession. In the following year Mr. Hopkins died, and a few months later young David Poe married Mrs. Hopkins, who had been Elizabeth Arnold. Mr. and Mrs. David Poe were now husband and wife, and very poor, as most actors are. Soon after their marriage they went to Boston, and remained for some years. There Edgar Poe, their second son, was born, January 19, 1809. While Edgar was still a little child his parents went to Richmond, Virginia, to fill an engagement in the theater there. Misfortune followed them. His father died in poverty, and his mother did not survive him long. Edgar and his brother and sister were thus left penniless orphans. But good friends took care of them. Edgar was adopted by a Mrs. Allan, the wife of a wealthy man in the city of Richmond. She was very fond of the bright little boy, and as long as she lived he had a good home. He was petted and spoiled; but those were almost the only years of his life when he had plenty of money. He was very fond of his adoptive mother, and held her memory dear to the day of his death. He was now known as Edgar Allan. CHAPTER III YOUNG EDGAR ALLAN Edgar was a beautiful child, with dark eyes, curly dark hair, and lively manners. At six he could read, draw, and dance. After dessert, sometimes they would put him up on the old-fashioned table, where he would make amusement for the company. He could speak pieces, too, and did it so well that people were astonished. He understood how to emphasize his words correctly. He had a pony and dogs, with which he ran about; and everywhere he was a great favorite. In June, 1815, when Edgar was about six years old, his adoptive father and mother, with an aunt, went to England to stay several years. Before starting, Mr. Allan bought a Murray's reader, two Murray's spelling books, and another book to keep the little fellow busy on the long sailing voyage across the Atlantic; for at that time a trip to England occupied several weeks instead of a few days as now. When the family reached London and were settled down, Edgar was sent to a famous English school. This school was at Stoke Newington, a quiet, old-fashioned country town, only a few miles out from London. Here was the house of Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth, whose story you may read in Scott's "Kenilworth"; and here too was the house of Anne Boleyn's ill-fated lover, Earl Percy. The Manor House School, as it was called, was in a quaint and very old building, with high walls about the grounds, and great spiked, iron-studded gates. Here the boys lived and studied, seldom returning home, and seldom going outside the grounds, except when they went with a teacher. In this strange school, Edgar Allan lived and studied for five years. The schoolroom was long, narrow, and low; it was ceiled with dark oak, and had Gothic windows. The desks were black and irregular, covered with the names and initials which the boys had cut with their jackknives. In the corners were what might be called boxes, where sat the masters--one of them Eugene Aram, the criminal made famous in one of Bulwer's romances. Back of the schoolroom, reached by winding, narrow passages, were the bedrooms, one of which Poe occupied. When the boys went out to walk they passed under the giant elms, amid which once lived Shakespeare's friend Essex, and they gazed up at the thick walls, deep windows, and doors massive with locks and bars, behind which the author of Robinson Crusoe wrote some of his famous works. Within the walls of this school a large number of boys had a little world all to themselves; they had their societies and their games and their tricks, along with hard work in Latin and French and mathematics; and though such work may seem monotonous and dreary, they managed to enjoy it. Poe has described his life here very carefully in his famous story of "William Wilson." "Oh, a fine time were those years of iron!" says he. The life produced a deep impression on his mind, and molded it for the strange, weird poetry and fiction which in later years he was to write. At last, in 1820, the Allans returned with Edgar to their home in Richmond, Virginia. The lad now added his own name to that of Edgar Allan, and became known as Edgar Allan Poe. He was at once sent to the English and Classical School of Joseph H. Clarke, where he prepared for college. He did not study very hard, but was bright and quick, and at one time stood at the head of his class with but one rival. He was a great athlete, too, being a good runner and jumper and boxer. He was a remarkable swimmer, and it is stated that he once swam six miles in the James River, against a strong tide in a hot sun, and then walked back without seeming in the least tired. He was slight in figure, but robust and tough, and was a very decided character among his classmates. He took part in the debating society, where he was prominent, and was known as a versifier of both love poems and satire. When Master Clarke retired, in 1823, Poe read an English ode addressed to the outgoing principal. One of his friends said of him at this time that he was "self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and though of generous impulses, not steadily kind, nor even amiable." Part of this temper on his part may have come from the fact that the aristocratic boys of the school hinted that his father and mother had not been of the best people. They knew, however, that Mr. Allan belonged to the best society; and it was chiefly Edgar's imperious manners that made some of them shun him. He had friends, however, and Mr. Allan gave him money liberally. It was at this time that he found and lost his first sympathetic friend. This was Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of one of his younger schoolmates. When one day he went home with this friend, he met Mrs. Stanard, a lovely, gentle, and gracious woman, was thrilled by the tenderness of her tones and her sympathetic manner toward him, and immediately made her his boyhood friend and confidante. To his great grief, however, she died not very long afterward. When she was gone he visited her grave time after time, and in after years when he was unhappy he often thought and spoke of her. CHAPTER IV COLLEGE LIFE Poe left the English and Classical School in March, 1825, and spent the next few months in studying with a private tutor. On the 14th of February, 1826, he wrote his name and the place and date of his birth, in the matriculation book of the University of Virginia, the famous college founded by Jefferson and opened about a year before. Poe is described at this time as short, thickset, bowlegged, with the rapid and jerky gait of an English boy. His face, surrounded by dark curly hair, wore a grave, half-melancholy look; but it would light up expressively when he talked. He was a noted walker; and being the adopted child of a rich man, he dressed well and carried himself proudly. He studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, and stood well in his classes. At the end of the year he went home with the highest honors in Latin and French. Before the term closed, however, Mr. Allan went up to investigate some stories of Poe's wildness that had reached him, and found that besides other debts, Poe owed two thousand dollars in "debts of honor"--that is, gambling debts. Mr. Allan paid all but the latter, and quietly determined that as soon as the term closed, Poe's college life should end. Poe was, however, a studious and well-behaved young man in the opinion of the professors, and he was never found guilty of any serious misconduct. He was fond of wandering over the Ragged Mountains, whither he went alone or with only a dog, and he delighted to fancy that he was the very first white person to penetrate some lonely glen or ravine. He was also something of an artist, and decorated his rooms with charcoal sketches. He and a classmate bought a volume of Byron with steel engravings in it. The next time his friend went to see Poe he found him copying one of these on the ceiling, and he continued this until he had covered the whole of the walls with figures that were said to be artistic and striking. CHAPTER V FORTUNE CHANGES At the age of eighteen there came a change in Poe's life. Until then he had been a petted child in a wealthy family. Mr. Allan did not have that affection for him which Mrs. Allan had. He did not understand the boy's peculiar and erratic nature, and was particularly displeased when he found that Edgar had run into debt at college. There was an angry scene between the two, and Edgar was told that he must leave the university and go into the counting-room. It appears that he made some attempt to tie himself down to figures and accounts and business routine; but as he had not been brought up to this kind of life, he soon tired of it, and decided to go into the world to seek his own fortune. He went to Boston, where he published a volume of poetry. In the preface to this volume, Poe says that the poems were written before he was fourteen. Though this may not be strictly true, there is little doubt that some of them were. While he was still at school he had collected enough of his poems to make a volume, and Mr. Allan had taken them up to the master of the English and Classical School to get his advice about publishing them. This gentleman advised against it on the ground that it would make Edgar conceited,--a fault from which he was already suffering. As soon as he was free to do as he pleased, therefore, it was natural that he should rewrite his poems and publish them. The volume was entitled "Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian." It was published by a young printer named Calvin Thomas, and was a thin little book, not very attractive in appearance. Several of the pieces then published are now included in Poe's collected works, but they have been greatly changed. Naturally the poems of an obscure young man did not sell, and the volume was soon suppressed--Poe says "for private reasons." The "private reasons" were doubtless merely the fact that the book was a complete failure, and the young, proud poet was much ashamed that he could not sell even a dozen copies--possibly not even one. The little money Poe had was now spent, and he was obliged to do something to keep from starvation. The only chance he saw was to enlist in the army. He did so under the name of Edgar A. Perry, and the record of his service may be found in the War Department of our government at Washington. He was assigned to Battery H, First Artillery, and conducted himself so well that he was promoted from the ranks to be sergeant-major. From Boston the company was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, and a year later to Fortress Monroe, Virginia. From Fortress Monroe Poe wrote to Mr. Allan for the first time. He soon afterwards learned of the illness of Mrs. Allan, who died February 28, 1829. He got leave of absence to attend her funeral, and went to Richmond. Poe was such a bright young man that it seemed a pity for him to remain in the ranks, when he might become an officer; therefore it was suggested that he be sent to West Point. Mr. Allan agreed to help him; but it is said that, after the death of Mrs. Allan, he no longer entertained any affection for Edgar. In a letter to the Secretary of War, he said: "Frankly, sir, I do declare that he is no relation to me whatever; that I have many in whom I have taken an active interest to promote theirs; with no other feeling than that, every man is my care, if he be in distress. For myself I ask nothing, but I do request your kindness to aid this youth in the promotion of his future prospects." Poe did not like the life at West Point in the least, though he amused his mates by writing satirical verses about the professors. After a few months he asked to be discharged; but Mr. Allan would not consent. So Poe made up his mind that he would have himself expelled. He stayed away from parade, roll-call, and guard duty. As a court-martial was then in session, he was summoned before it. He denied the most flagrant charge against him; but this only made his case worse, and he was expelled from the academy. CHAPTER VI LIVING BY LITERATURE Once more the young poet found himself cast out on the world, without home or friends. He could hope for nothing more from Mr. Allan, after his disgrace at the military academy, and he had found out that army life was not so fine a refuge from starvation as he had thought it. He was a proud, melancholy young man, and in school and college had learned many bad habits. He had no trade nor practical knowledge of any kind of work, though he was quick and ingenious. He had studied the art of writing, and this alone offered him the means of earning a livelihood. How poor and precarious a chance it was, we shall see as we go on. While waiting for appointment to the Military Academy the preceding year, Poe had made acquaintance with his father's relatives in Baltimore. He formed some literary connections there, and had a volume of his poems published. It was entitled "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe." "Al Aaraaf" was a poem about a star that a great astronomer had seen blaze forth and then disappear. When he left West Point in April, 1831, nearly two years after the publication of his Baltimore volume, Poe was short of money; and to supply his needs his fellow-students subscribed for a new edition of his poems. For this, seventy-five cents was stopped out of the pay of each, and a publisher in New York agreed to issue the book in good style. The cadets thought his volume would contain the many funny squibs he had written on the professors; but they were disappointed. Poe next went to Baltimore. There he tried to get employment in vain. Friends helped him, but it was some time before he made his first literary success. It happened at last that a weekly paper called the _Saturday Visiter_ was started in Baltimore. To give the paper popularity, two prizes were offered, one of a hundred dollars for the best short story, and the other of fifty for the best poem. Poe tried for both. He had six short stories, which he copied in a neat little manuscript volume entitled "Tales of the Folio Club." The poem he sent was "The Coliseum." The judges were well-known gentlemen of the city of Baltimore, one of whom, John P. Kennedy, afterward became Poe's intimate friend. When they met they looked over several stories, which did not interest them very much. They then came to the "Tales of the Folio Club." One was read aloud, and the three gentlemen were so much interested that they kept on till they had read all, and at once decided to give the prize to one of these. They chose Poe's famous story "A MS. Found in a Bottle." Afterward they decided that his poem was the best submitted; but noticing that it was in the same handwriting as the stories, they thought it best to give the prize to another. When they made their report they greatly complimented the stories Poe had sent in, and said they should be published in a volume. We have said that one of the judges, Mr. Kennedy, became Poe's friend. To show how very poor Poe was, I copy this passage from Mr. Kennedy's diary: "It was many years ago that I found Poe in Baltimore in a state of starvation. I gave him clothing, free access to my table, and the use of a horse for exercise whenever he chose; in fact, I brought him up from the very verge of despair." Here, too, is an extract from a letter from Poe to Mr. Kennedy: "Your invitation to dinner has wounded me to the quick. I cannot come for reasons of the most humiliating nature--my personal appearance. You may imagine my mortification in making this disclosure to you, but it is necessary." Mr. Kennedy did all that a friend could do for the future poet and story-writer. Says Poe: "He has been at all times a true friend to me--he was the first true friend I ever had--I am indebted to him for _life itself_." Poe now contributed regularly to the _Saturday Visiter,_ its young editor, Lambert A. Wilmer, becoming his friend and constant companion. It is said that at this time he dressed very neatly, though inexpensively, "wore Byron collars and a black stock, and looked the poet all over." CHAPTER VII POE'S EARLY POETRY We have seen how persistently Poe clung to his poetry. Three times he published the little volume of his verses, revising, enlarging, and strengthening. In those days there was no market for poetic writing, and as Poe wrote in a strange, weird style, it is not remarkable that no one took any notice of the contents of his little volumes. It was his own opinion, however, that these early poems contained more real poetic imagination than his later successes, and it is perhaps as well that we should begin our study of Poe with some of the first fruits of his genius. First let us read that most pathetic of autobiographical poems, "Alone." With strange sincerity and directness the poet tells us how his spirit grew and learned the burden of its melancholy, yet scintillating song: From childhood's hour I have not been As others were,--I have not seen As others saw,--I could not bring My passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, I loved alone. Then--in my childhood--in the dawn Of a most stormy life was drawn From every depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still: From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain, From the sun that round me rolled In its autumn tint of gold,-- From the lightning in the sky As it passed me flying by,-- From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view. As a poem written in early youth we should not expect this to be as perfect as "The Raven," for instance. Let us see if we can find some of its faults, as well as some of its beauties: First, we notice that it ends rather abruptly, as if it were unfinished. In his essay on "The Poetic Principle" Poe pointed out that many a poem fails of its effect by being too short. It must not be so long that one is wearied out before it can be read through; at the same time it must be long enough to convey the whole of the idea. This poem of his own is an example of the fault he himself pointed out. It is too short to give us clear ideas of all he evidently had in his mind. We notice, also, that it is rhymed in couplets, that is, every two lines are rhymed together. Now the couplets in the last half of the poem seem to strike the ear with more satisfaction than those in the first part. For instance, we are pleased with the sound of these lines: From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain. But in some of the lines the pauses of punctuation do not come at the right points to make smooth reading: From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I loved, _I_ loved alone. The semicolon after "sorrow" should have come at the end of the line instead of in the middle. Poe had not yet learned the secret of the rhythmic flow which we find in such perfection in "The Bells," for instance. But in the last part of the poem we find a beauty of image and comparison that thrills us, and something of that strange, weird suggestiveness which was characteristic of all of Poe's poetry, the thing he has in common with no other poet. This weird suggestiveness is found in still greater vividness in another poem entitled "The Lake." In this, besides, we see how Poe had a sort of fascination for the horrible. Notice how he says: Yet that terror was not fright, But a tremulous delight. Here is the complete poem. The young student of poetry may study it for himself, and discover, if he can, its shortcomings, as we have pointed out the faults in the poem "Alone." In spring of youth it was my lot To haunt of the wide world a spot The which I could not love the less,-- So lovely was the loveliness Of a wild lake, with black rock bound, And the tall pines that towered around. But when the night had thrown her pall Upon that spot as upon all, And the mystic wind went by Murmuring in melody,-- Then,--ah, then I would awake To the terror of the lone lake. Yet that terror was not fright, But a tremulous delight,-- A feeling not the jeweled mine Could teach or bribe me to define,-- Nor Love--although the Love were thine. Death was in that poisonous wave, And its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his lone imagining,-- Whose solitary soul could make An Eden of that dim lake. These poems are chiefly interesting as they give us some idea of the nature of the young poet's mind. Poe had what may be called a scientific mind, infused through and through with poetry. At times he was exact, keen-minded, and patient as the scientist; then again he wandered away into mere fanciful suggestion of things that "never were on land or sea." His scientific turn we see in his detective stories; his poetic nature we see struggling against this intellectual exactness in the following sonnet: Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? CHAPTER VIII POE'S CHILD WIFE While Poe was in Baltimore, after he had begun to earn something by his pen, he went to live with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm. She was very poor, and whatever Poe earned went toward the support of the whole family, which included not only Poe and his aunt, but her young daughter Virginia, at this time only eleven years of age. Virginia was an exceedingly delicate and beautiful girl. She had dark hair and eyes, and a fine, transparent complexion. She was very modest and quiet; but she had a fine mind, and a very sweet and winning manner. She had also a poetic nature, and became an accomplished musician. Mrs. Clemm, on the other hand, was a large, coarsely formed woman, and it seemed impossible that she could be the mother of so delicate and graceful a girl. She was very faithful and hardworking, however, and sincerely devoted to Poe as well as to her daughter. She had the business ability to manage Poe's small income in the best way, and made for him a home that would have been extremely happy had it not been for poverty and other misfortunes. While Poe lived in Baltimore he would go out to walk nearly every day with the editor of the _Saturday Visiter_; but he sometimes walked alone or with Virginia. After a time the young poet and story-writer decided to go to Richmond, his early home. He had many friends there, who welcomed him back, and a good position was offered him. The _Southern Literary Messenger_ had been started by a Mr. White, and Poe was made assistant editor. He had become very much attached to Mrs. Clemm and Virginia while in Baltimore, and now wished to marry Virginia. She was but fourteen years of age,--indeed, not quite fourteen,--and Mrs. Clemm's friends thought the girl too young to marry. But Poe gained the mother's consent, and he and Virginia were united in May, 1836. Virginia was Poe's ideal of womanhood, and we find her figuring as the model for nearly all the heroines of his poems. In a letter after the death of both Virginia and her poet husband, Mrs. Clemm wrote, "She was an excellent linguist and a perfect musician, and she was very beautiful. How often has Eddie said, 'I see no one so beautiful as my sweet little wife.'" Poe undertook her education as soon as they were married, and was very proud of her brilliant accomplishments. As she was the source of his greatest happiness, her loss was the occasion of his greatest sorrow. A year after their marriage she burst a blood vessel while singing. The following extract from a letter of Poe's to a friend will explain how this misfortune affected him. "You say," he writes, "'Can you hint to me what was the terrible evil which caused the irregularities so profoundly lamented?' Yes, I can do more than hint. This 'evil' was the greatest which can befall a man. Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year the blood vessel broke again. I went through precisely the same scene.--Then again--again--and even once again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death--and at each accession of her disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity." Virginia gradually grew worse and finally died at their home at Fordham, near New York. After this sad event Poe wrote a poem which is a sort of requiem for her death. It was not published during his life, but after his death it appeared in the _New York Tribune_. Immediately it took rank as one of the three greatest poems Poe ever wrote. It is long enough to be complete, it has none of those metrical imperfections found in his earlier poems, and it possesses in a wonderful degree that haunting thrill so characteristic of all the best things Poe wrote. Moreover, it has a musical flow surpassing any other of Poe's poems except "The Bells," and in some respects it is even more pleasing to the ear when read aloud than is "The Bells." ANNABEL LEE. It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. _I_ was a child and _she_ was a child, In this kingdom by the sea: But we loved with a love that was more than love,-- I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulcher In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in heaven, Went envying her and me,-- Yes!--that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we,-- Of many far wiser than we; And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride, In the sepulcher there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea. CHAPTER IX POE'S LITERARY HISTORY As assistant editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, Poe achieved great literary success. In this paper he began those spirited criticisms of the writers of the day, which attracted attention everywhere. He also published numerous stories. Poetry was almost completely abandoned for prose. The circulation of the magazine increased by the thousands, and there could be no doubt that its success was due chiefly to Poe. At first his salary was ten dollars a week; later, it was raised to fifteen dollars, and was to have been raised to twenty, but Poe suddenly resigned his position. Precisely why he did this is not known. Experiences similar to that with the _Southern Literary Messenger_ were repeated many times afterward, during his literary career. Just as he was getting well settled at his work, he would have some difficulty with the proprietor, or commit some indiscretion, and then he must find some other place. In those days, when a great New York daily paper like Bryant's _Evening Post_ could be bought for from $5,000 to $10,000, there was not much money to be made in publishing or in literature. To make money, Poe should have been a business man, and he was not so in any sense. Many another literary man, even in our own times, has had similar misfortunes, even without those faults of character and that fatality for falling out with everything and everybody which distinguished Poe. From Richmond, Poe went with his family to New York, where Mrs. Clemm supported the household by keeping boarders. Poe himself spent the winter chiefly in writing "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," a tale of the sea, which was first published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers. From New York he went to Philadelphia, where he wrote various magazine articles and stories, and did part of the work of preparing a school textbook on "Conchology." He soon became associate editor of _The Gentleman's Magazine_ with its proprietor Burton. The following year, 1840, his first volume of stories was published, under the title, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." The volume was not a popular success. An edition of seven hundred and fifty copies was barely disposed of, and all that Poe received was twenty copies for distribution among his friends. His connection with Burton's magazine did not last above a year. Burton had been a comic actor, and offered prizes which Poe says he never intended to pay. Poe's remarks on this transaction caused the rupture. Poe had already been thinking about starting a periodical of his own, and now he sent out the prospectus of _The Penn Magazine_. To found a magazine which should be better and higher in literary art than any other in America was his lifelong ambition. He tried again and again to do this, first with _The Penn Magazine_, and later with a periodical to be called _The Stylus_. He never succeeded, however. George R. Graham, proprietor of the _Saturday Evening Post_, now bought _The Gentleman's Magazine_, united it with a periodical of his own called _The Casket_, and named the new venture _Graham's Magazine_. Of this Poe soon became the editor. After Poe's death, Mr. Graham published an article in which he said that, while he was in Philadelphia, Poe seemed to think only of the happiness and welfare of his family. There were but two things for which he cared to have money--to give them comforts and to start a magazine of his own. He never spent any money on himself. Everything was intrusted to Mrs. Clemm, who managed all his household affairs. His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before his eyes. "I have seen him," says Mr. Graham, "hovering around her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born--her slightest cough causing him a shudder, a heart chill, that was visible. I rode out one summer evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful eyes, eagerly bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved face, haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain. It was this hourly anticipation of her loss which made him a sad and thoughtful man, and lent a mournful melody to his undying song." At last he left Philadelphia and returned to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. This is the childlike way he writes to his mother-in-law concerning the journey: "My Dear Muddy, "We have just this minute done breakfast, and I now sit down to write you about everything. * * * In the first place, we arrived safe at Walnut St. wharf. The driver wanted to make me pay a dollar, but I wouldn't. Then I had to pay a boy a levy to put the trunks in the baggage car. "In the meantime I took Sis [Virginia] in the Depot Hotel. * * * We went in the cars to Amboy, * * * and then took the steamboat the rest of the way. Sissy coughed none at all. I left her on board the boat. * * * Then I went up Greenwich St. and soon found a boarding house. * * * I made a bargain in a few minutes and then got a hack and went for Sis. * * * When we got to the house we had to wait about half an hour before the room was ready. The house is old and looks buggy, * * * the cheapest board I ever knew, taking into consideration the central situation and the _living_. I wish Kate [Catterina, the cat] could see it--she would faint." They had a little cottage at Fordham, in the country just out of New York. It was a very humble place, but the scenery about it was beautiful. Poe himself became ill, and his dear Virginia was dying of consumption. They were so poor that friends had to help them. One of these friends wrote: "There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom." On one Saturday in January, 1847, Virginia died. Her husband, wrapped in the military cloak that had once covered her, followed the body to the tomb in the family vault of the Valentines, relatives of the family. CHAPTER X POE AS A STORY-WRITER Next to "The Raven," Poe's most famous work is that fascinating story, "The Gold-Bug," perhaps the best detective story that was ever written, for it is based on logical principles which are instructive as well as interesting. Poe's powerful mind was always analyzing and inventing. It is these inventions and discoveries of his which make him famous. The story of the gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of conjuring trick, but it is all the more interesting because he fully explains it. Cryptographs are systems of secret writing. The letter _e_ is represented by some strange character, perhaps the figure 8. In "The Gold-Bug" _t_ is a semicolon and _h_ is 4, so that; 48 means _the_. Sometimes the letter _e_ is represented by several signs, any one of which the writer may use; and perhaps the word _the_, which occurs so often, is represented by a single character, like _x_. Often, too, the words are run together, so that at first sight you cannot tell where one word begins and another ends. Solving a cryptograph is like doing a mathematical problem, and Poe was very clever at it. He published a series of articles on "Cryptography" or systems of secret writing, in _Alexander's Weekly Messenger_, and challenged any reader to send in a cipher which he could not translate into ordinary language. Hundreds were sent to him, and he solved them all, though it took up a great deal of his time. In the same line with this was another feat of his. Dickens's story, "Barnaby Rudge," was coming out in parts from week to week, as a serial publication. From the first chapters Poe calculated what the outcome of the plot would be, and published it in the _Saturday Evening Post_. He guessed the story so accurately that Dickens was greatly surprised and asked him if he were the devil. Again at a later date Poe wrote a remarkable story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget." A young girl had been murdered in New York. The newspapers were full of accounts of the crime, but the police could get no clew to the murderers. In Poe's story he wrote out exactly what happened on the night of the murder, and explained the whole thing, as if he were an expert detective. Afterward, by the confessions of two of the participants, it was proved that his solution of the mystery was almost exactly the truth. "The Gold-Bug" was not published until sometime later, but it was as editor of _Graham's Magazine_ that Poe first became known as a writer of detective stories. One of the most famous is "The Murders of the Rue Morgue." It is an imaginary story, but none the less interesting. A murder was committed in Paris by an orang-outang, which had climbed in at a window and then closed the window behind it. The police could find no clew; but the hero of Poe's story follows the facts out by a number of clever observations of small facts. "The Gold-Bug" seems to have been written in 1842 for Poe's projected magazine, _The Stylus_. F.O.C. Darley, the well-known artist, was to draw pictures for it at seven dollars each. Poe himself took to him the manuscript of "The Gold-Bug" and that of "The Black Cat." As this magazine was never published, the story of "The Gold-Bug" was sent to Graham some time after Poe had left him; but he did not like it, and made some criticisms upon it. Poe got it back from Graham in order to submit it for a prize of $100 offered by _The Dollar Newspaper_. It won the prize, and became Poe's most popular story. * * * * * CHAPTER XI HOW "THE RAVEN" WAS WRITTEN "The Raven" was published in New York just two years before Mrs. Poe died; it instantly made its author famous, although it brought him little or no money. It is said that he was paid only ten dollars for the poem; but as soon as it appeared it was the talk of the nation,--being copied into almost every newspaper. Poe had written and published many other poems, but none of them had attracted much attention. We have spoken of Poe as a story-writer, and now in "The Raven" we see him a great poet. It is not unusual to think of poetry as the work of inspiration or genius; but how it is written, nobody knows. Poe maintained that literary art is something that can be studied and learned. To illustrate this he told how he wrote "The Raven." Some people considered this a sort of joke; but it was not. When Poe began to write, his work was not at all good; as years went on, he learned by patient practice to write well. It was more than anything else this long course of training that made him so great. The essay in which he tells how he wrote "The Raven," begins by saying that when he thought of writing it he decided that it must not be too long nor too short. It must be short enough so that one could read it through at a sitting; but also it must be long enough to express fully the idea which he had in mind. Then, it must be beautiful. All true poetry is about beauty. It doesn't teach anything useful, or analyze anything, but it simply makes the reader feel a certain effect. When you read "The Raven" you hardly know what the poet is saying; but you feel the ghostly scene, and it makes you shudder; and there is a strange fascination about it that makes you like it, even if it is horrible. He goes on to say that he decided to have a refrain at the end of each stanza, the single word "Nevermore." At first he thought he would have a parrot utter it; but a raven can talk as well as a parrot, and is more picturesque. The most striking subject he could think of was the death of a beautiful woman--this he felt to be so because of his own impressions concerning the approaching death of his sweet wife. Besides this, Poe said that poetry and music are much alike, and he tried to have his poem produce the effect of solemn music. All his best poetry is very much like music. With these materials at his command, he now turned his attention to the construction of the poem. He would ask questions, and the raven would always reply by croaking "Nevermore." As an answer to some questions, this would sound very terrible. Says he: "I first established in my mind the climax, or concluding query,--that query in reply to which the word 'nevermore' should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair. Here, then, the poem may be said to have its beginning--at the end, where all works of art should begin--for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:-- "'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil! By the heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore!-- Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore,-- Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.' Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" This principle of beginning at the end or climax to write a poem or story was one so important that Poe insisted on it at great length. In the "Murders in the Rue Morgue" the author necessarily began at the end, imagined the solution of the mystery, and gradually worked back to the beginning, bringing in his detective after everything had been carefully constructed for him, though to the ordinary reader of the story it seems as if the detective came to a real mystery. It may be observed that all of Poe's stories and poems are built up about some principle of the mind. They illustrate how the mind works. After the principle is stated the illustration is given. Can anything be more important and interesting than to know how the mind thinks, how it is inspired with terror or love or a sense of beauty? If you know just how the mind of a man works in regard to these things, you can yourself create the conditions which will make others laugh or cry, be filled with horror, or overflow with a sense of divine holiness. Ordinary story-tellers and ordinary poets write poems or stories that are pretty and amusing; but it is only a master like Poe who writes to illustrate and explain some great principle. His stories teach us how we may go about producing similar effects in the affairs of life. We wish success in business, in society, in politics. To gain it we must make people think and feel as we think and feel. To do that we must understand the principles on which men's minds work, and no poet or writer analyzed and illustrated those principles so clearly as Poe. CHAPTER XII MUSIC AND POETRY Poe always maintained that music and poetry are very near of kin, and in nearly all his greatest poems he seems to write in such a way as to produce the impression of music. As you read his verses you seem to hear a musical accompaniment to the words, which runs through the very sounds of the words themselves. Poe explained that poetry and music are alike in that both obey absolute laws of time, and that the laws of time or rhythm in poetry are just as exact as the laws of time in music. He wrote an essay entitled "The Rationale of Verse," in which he demonstrated that all the rules for scanning poetry are defective. Every one knows that the ordinary rules for meter have numerous exceptions, but that if the rules were exact in the first place, there would be no exceptions. Perhaps you know something about musical notes. If so, a simple illustration will show you what "feet" in poetry are. You have perhaps been taught that a "foot" in verse is an accented syllable with one or more unaccented syllables, and you scan poetry by marking all the accented syllables. In Latin, poetry was scanned by marking long vowels and short. Let us scan the first two lines of "The Raven": "�nce up | ón a mídnight | dréary, || whíle I | póndered | wéak and | wéary, �ver | mány a | quáint and | cúrious | vólume | óf for | gótten | lóre." Observe that most of the feet have two syllables each, while two have three. But if you read the lines in a natural tone you will see that you give just as much time to one foot as to another, and where there are three syllables they are short and can be pronounced quickly. Some syllables take more time to pronounce than other syllables; and to accent a syllable simply means to give it more time in pronouncing. In music, time is accurately represented by notes, and a bar of music always contains exactly the same amount of time, no matter how it is divided by the notes; for if you wish, in place of a half note you can use two quarter notes, or in place of a quarter note you can use two eighth notes. Represented in music, our lines will be as follows: [Illustration: (music) Once up on a midnight dreary, as I pondered, weak and weary, O-ver man-y a quaint and cur-i--ous vol-ume of for- got-ten lore.] We see this still further illustrated in a poem of Tennyson's, where a foot consists of but one long syllable, thus: [Illustration: (music) Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, O sea!] One of Poe's greatest poems, "The Bells," was written for the express purpose of imitating music in verse. The story of how it was first written is as follows: Poe went one Sunday morning to call on a lady friend of his, Mrs. Shaw, who was something of a physician and had been very kind to his wife. It was a bright morning, and the church bells were ringing. For all that, Poe felt moody, and the church bells seemed to jangle. "I must write a poem," said he, "and I haven't an idea in my head. For some reason the bells seem frightfully out of tune this morning, and nearly drive me distracted." After he had been chatting with Mrs. Shaw for some time, he evidently felt in better mood, and the sound of the bells grew more musical; or perhaps their actual sound had stopped and his imagination suggested bells that were indeed musical. As he kept on complaining about his inability to write a poem, Mrs. Shaw placed pen and ink and paper before him, first writing at the top of a sheet the title, "The Bells, by E. A. Poe." Underneath she wrote, "The bells, the little silver bells." Poe caught the idea, and immediately wrote the first draft of the following stanza. According to his habit he rewrote this poem many, many times. The original stanza began with the words Mrs. Shaw had written. Here are the verses as they may now be read in Poe's works: Hear the sledges with the bells-- Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heaven, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells,-- From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. Mrs. Shaw then wrote the words, "The heavy iron bells." Poe immediately completed the stanza which now reads: Hear the tolling of the bells,-- Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people--ah, the people-- They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone! They are neither man nor woman,-- They are neither brute nor human,-- They are Ghouls; And their king it is who tolls,-- And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls a paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells, Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells, Of the bells. The other stanzas were written afterward. There is music in these words; but do not think that the music is all. Underneath is the deep harmony of human suggestion, as in the lines, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone. Now let us see if we can represent by musical notes the meter in which this poem is written. We must remember that a punctuation mark at the end of a line often makes a complete pause, which is represented in music by a rest. In music a rest has the same effect in completing a bar as the corresponding note. Here are the first two lines: [Illustration: (music) Hear the sledg-es with the bells, Sil-ver bells!] In the two following lines the commas in the middle of the line stand for rests, like the punctuation at the end of the first line; or if we wish we can make the words "time, time, time," three longer notes. It all depends on how we pronounce them: [Illustration: (music) Keep--ing time, time, time, in a sort of Ru-nic rhyme.] CHAPTER XIII POE'S LATER YEARS Poe had the hardest time of his life when he was at New York, living in that little cottage at Fordham, where his poor wife died. He was always borrowing money, from sheer necessity, to keep himself and his wife from starvation. Once while in New York he was so hard pressed that Mrs. Clemm went out to see if she could not get work for him. She went to the office of Nathaniel P. Willis, who was the editor and proprietor of _The Mirror_. Willis was then starting _The Evening Mirror_, and said he would give Poe work. So the poet came; he had his little desk in the corner, and did his work meekly and regularly,--poor hack work for which he was paid very little. Later he had an interest in a paper called _The Broadway Journal_. When it was about to cease publication Poe bought it himself for fifty dollars, giving a note which Horace Greeley endorsed and finally paid. Once a young man wrote to Greeley, saying, "Doubtless among your papers you have many autographs of the poet, Edgar Allan Poe," and intimated that he should like to have one of them. Greeley wrote back that he had just one autograph of Poe among his papers; it was attached to a note for fifty dollars, and Greeley's own signature was across the back. The young man might have it for just half its face value. But after Poe bought _The Broadway Journal_ he had no money to carry it on, and its publication was soon suspended. He earned his livelihood mainly by writing stories or articles for various magazines and papers, which paid him from $5 to $50 each. It was a hand to mouth way of living, for he was often, often disappointed. In 1845, a volume entitled, "Tales. By Edgar A. Poe," was published by Wiley and Putnam, and in the same year "The Raven and Other Poems" appeared in book form from the same publishing house. Poe also delivered lectures, and by way of criticism carried on what was called the "Longfellow War." Though he considered Longfellow the greatest American poet, he accused him of plagiarism, or stealing some of his ideas, which was very unjust on the part of Poe. Hawthorne and Lowell he praised highly. After the death of his wife, Poe was very melancholy. He went to lecture, and to visit friends in Providence, Rhode Island, and in Lowell, Massachusetts, and afterward went south to Richmond, where he planned to raise enough money by lecturing to start _The Stylus_. He was hospitably entertained in Richmond, and became engaged to marry his boyhood's first love, Miss Royster, now the widow, Mrs. Shelton. Their marriage was to take place at once, and Poe started north to close up his business in New York and bring Mrs. Clemm south. In Baltimore it seems that he fell in with some politicians who were conducting an election. They took him about from one polling place to another to vote illegally; then some one drugged him, and left him on a bench near a saloon. Here he was found by a printer, who notified his friends, and they sent him to the hospital, where he died on the 7th of October, 1849. He was nearly forty-one years old. Poe had a great and wonderful mind. In the latter part of his life he gave much of his time to a book called "Eureka," which was intended to explain the meaning of the universe. Of course he was not a philosopher; but he wrote some things in that book which were destined afterward to be accepted by such great men as Darwin and Huxley and many others. His life was so full of work and poverty, so crossed and crossed again by unhappiness and hardship, that he never had time or strength of mind to think out anything as he would otherwise have done. All his work is fragmentary, broken bits on this subject or on that. He wrote very few poems, not many stories, and only a little serious criticism. But a Frenchman will tell you that Poe, among American poets and writers, is the greatest; his writings have been translated into nearly every European language. In England, too, he is spoken of as our one great poet and critic, our first great story-writer, the inventor of the artistic short story. Poor, unhappy Poe! After his death a monument was to have been erected over his grave; but by a strange fatality it was destroyed before it was finished. Twenty-five years later admiring friends placed over his remains the first monument to an American poet. No such memorial was needed, however, for American hearts will never cease to thrill at the weird, beautiful music of "Annabel Lee," "The Bells," and "The Raven." THE STORY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL [Illustration: _JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL_.] JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL CHAPTER I ELMWOOD James Russell Lowell was born on the 22d of February, 1819, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Elmwood, the home of the Lowells, was to the west of the village of Cambridge, quite near Mount Auburn cemetery. When James Russell was a boy, Elmwood was practically in the country, and was surrounded on nearly all sides by woods, meadows, and pastures. The house stood on a triangular piece of land surrounded by a very high and thick hedge, made up of all sorts of trees and shrubs, such as pines, spruces, willows, and oaks, with smaller shrubs at the bottom so as to form a thick wall of green. In front of the house were some fine English elms, quite different from the American variety, and from these the house got its name. It was a large, square, old-fashioned wooden house, and though it had stood for over a hundred years, it remained during Lowell's life in perfect condition. The house was surrounded by a fine, well-kept lawn, and at the back were pasture, orchard, and garden, while half a mile away lay Fresh Pond, the haunt of herons and other shy birds and land creatures. From the upper windows one could look out on beautiful Mount Auburn cemetery, which was to the south, while to the east was a low hill called Symonds's Hill, beyond which could be seen a bright stretch of the Charles River. Elmwood faced on a lane, between two roads. In his essay in "Fireside Travels," entitled "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," Lowell describes the scene towards the village as it was in his childhood. Approaching "from the west, by what was then called the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our names whenever we can, to the great detriment of all historical association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts.... Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square brown tower of the church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward." One of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous as the headquarters of Washington in 1776, and afterwards as the home of Longfellow. And at the end of the New Road toward Cambridge was a row of six fine willows, which had remained from the stockade built in early days as a defense against the Indians. And here is Harvard Square, where stand the buildings of the famous college: "A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People still lived who regretted the unhappy separation from the mother island. . . The hooks were to be seen from which swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was--the festival of Santa Scholastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-books instead of bay." James was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, a handsome boy, and his mother's darling. He always thought he inherited his love of nature and poetic aspirations from her, whose family was from the Orkneys--those islands at the extreme north of Scotland. His father was a strikingly handsome man, gracious and of rare personal qualities, and a faithful pastor over his flock. Often he took his youngest son on long drives with him, when he went to exchange pulpits with neighboring clergymen. Because of his wide family connection, and his father's position, James saw not a little of New England society as it was in those days, pure Yankee through and through. CHAPTER II AN IMPETUOUS YOUNG MAN Young James was sent first to a dame school, as a private school for very small children kept by a lady in her own house was called in those days. But when he was eight or nine he was sent to a boarding school near Elmwood--going, of course, only as a day scholar. This school was kept by an Englishman named Wells, who had belonged to a publishing firm in Boston which had failed. This teacher was very sharp and severe, but he made all his boys learn Latin, as you may see by reading the learned notes and introductions to the "Biglow Papers," supposed to have been written by "Parson Wilbur," but in reality by Lowell himself. We sometimes find it difficult to believe that a great man whom we admire was ever an ordinary human being, with faults and errors like our own. But when we do find natural, childish letters, or read anecdotes of youthful naughtiness, we immediately feel like shaking hands with the scapegrace, and a real liking for him begins. Lowell was so reserved in after life, and so very correct and elegant both in his writing and in his deportment, that when we come across two letters written at about nine years of age, badly punctuated and badly spelled, but displaying all the natural spirits of a boy, we begin at once to feel at home with him and to have a genuine affection for the man we had before only admired as a very great and learned author. Here are the two letters just as they were written. It will be a good exercise for you to rewrite them, correcting the spelling, punctuation, and other faults. Jan. 25, 1827. My dear brother The dog and the colt went down to-day with our boy for me and the colt went before and then the horse and slay and dog--I went to a party and I danced a great deal and was very happy--I read french stories--The colt plays very much--and follows the horse when it is out. Your affectionate brother, James R. Lowell. I forgot to tell you that sister mary has not given me any present but I have got three books Nov. 2, 1828. My Dear Brother,--I am now going to tell you melancholy news. I have got the ague together with a gumbile. I presume you know that September has got a lame leg, but he grows better every day and now is very well but limps a little. We have a new scholar from round hill, his name is Hooper and we expect another named Penn who I believe also comes from there. The boys are all very well except Nemaise, who has got another piece of glass in his leg and is waiting for the doctor to take it out, and Samuel Storrow is also sick. I am going to have a new suit of blue broadcloth clothes to wear every day and to play in. Mother tells me I may have any sort of buttons I choose. I have not done anything to the hut, but if you wish I will. I am now very happy; but I should be more so if you were there. I hope you will answer my letter if you do not I shall write you no more letters, when you write my letters you must direct them all to me and not write half to mother as generally do. Mother has given me the three volumes of tales of a grandfather farewell Yours truly James R. Lowell. You must excuse me for making so many mistakes. You must keep what I have told you about my new clothes a secret if you don't I shall not divulge any more secrets to you. I have got quite a library. The Master has not taken his rattan out since the vacation. Your little kitten is as well and as playful as ever and I hope you are to for I am sure I love you as well as ever. Why is grass like a mouse you cant guess that he he he ho ho ho ha ha ha hum hum hum. Young Lowell's life was so very quiet and uneventful that we have very little account of his boyhood and youth. We know, however, that he was fond of books and was rather lazy, and did pretty much as he pleased. A poem which in later years he dedicated to his friend Charles Eliot Norton gives a very good picture of the life at Elmwood: The wind is roistering out of doors, My windows shake and my chimney roars; My Elmwood chimneys seem crooning to me, As of old, in their moody, minor key, And out of the past the hoarse wind blows, As I sit in my arm-chair and toast my toes. "Ho! ho! nine-and-forty," they seem to sing, "We saw you a little toddling thing. We knew you child and youth and man, A wonderful fellow to dream and plan, With a great thing always to come,--who knows? Well, well! 'tis some comfort to toast one's toes. "How many times have you sat at gaze Till the mouldering fire forgot to blaze, Shaping among the whimsical coals Fancies and figures and shining goals! What matters the ashes that cover those? While hickory lasts you can toast your toes. "O dream-ship builder! where are they all, Your grand three-deckers, deep-chested and tall, That should crush the waves under canvas piles, And anchor at last by the Fortunate Isles? There's gray in your beard, the years turn foes, While you muse in your arm-chair and toast your toes." I sit and dream that I hear, as of yore, My Elmwood chimneys' deep-throated roar; If much be gone, there is much remains; By the embers of loss I count my gains, You and yours with the best, till the old hope glows In the fanciful flame as I toast my toes. Lowell entered Harvard College when he was but fifteen years old, very nearly the youngest man in his class. In those days the college was small, there were few teachers, and only about fifty students in a class. CHAPTER III COLLEGE AND THE MUSES Soon after he entered college, young Lowell made the acquaintance of a senior, W.H. Shackford, to whom many of his published letters of college life are addressed. Another intimate friend was George Bailey Loring, who afterward became distinguished in politics. To one or other of these men he was constantly writing of his literary ambitions, always uppermost in his mind. Josiah Quincy was president of Harvard when Lowell was there, and afterward Lowell wrote an essay on "A Great Public Character," which describes this distinguished president. In it he refers to college life in a way that shows he thoroughly enjoyed it. "Almost every one," he writes, "looks back regretfully to the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were eyes so bright, never had wine so much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were we ourselves so capable of the various great things we have never done.... This is especially true of college life, when we first assume the titles without the responsibilities of manhood, and the president of our year is apt to become our Plancus very early." In another of his essays he tells one of the standing college jokes, which is worth repeating. The students would go into one of the grocery stores of the town, whose proprietor was familiarly called "The Deacon." "Have you any sour apples, Deacon?" the first student to enter would ask. "Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly sour," he would answer; "but there's the bellflower apple, and folks that like a sour apple generally like that." Enter the second student. "Have you any sweet apples, Deacon?" "Well, no, I haven't any now that are exactly sweet; but there's the bellflower apple, and folks that like a sweet apple generally like that." "There is not even a tradition of any one's ever having turned the wary Deacon's flank," says Lowell, "and his Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one thing nor another." It did not take young Lowell long to find out that he had a weakness for poetry (as his seniors sometimes spoke of it). Writing to his friend Loring, probably at the beginning of the Christmas vacation, 1836, he says, "Here I am alone in Bob's room with a blazing fire, in an atmosphere of 'poesy' and soft coal smoke. Pope, Dante, a few of the older English poets, Byron, and last, not least, some of my own compositions, lie around me. Mark my modesty. I don't put myself in the same line with the rest, you see.... Been quite 'grouty' all the vacation, 'black as Erebus.' Discovered two points of very striking resemblance between myself and Lord Byron; and if you will put me in mind of it, I will propound next term, or in some other letter, 'Vanity, thy name is Lowell!'" And again, in a letter to his mother, he says, "I am engaged in several poetic effusions, one of which I dedicated to you, who have always been the patron and encourager of my youthful muse. If you wish to see me as much as I do you, I shall be satisfied." This is Mrs. Lowell's answer to the last wish. She and Dr. Lowell were then making a visit to Europe: "Babie Jamie: Your poetry was very pleasing to me, and I am glad to have a letter, but not to remind me of you, for you are seldom long out of my head.... Don't leave your whistling, which used to cheer me so much. I frequently listen to it here, though far from you." In later years Lowell would often tell how he used to whistle as he came near home from school, in order to let his mother know he was coming, and she seldom failed to be sitting at her window to welcome him. Early in 1837 Lowell was elected to the Hasty Pudding Club. "At the very first meeting I attended," he writes to his friend, Shackford, "I was chosen secretary, which is considered the most honorable office in the club, as the records are kept in _verse (mind,_ I do not say _poetry_). This first brought my rhyming powers into notice, and since that I have been chosen to deliver the next anniversary poem by a vote of twenty out of twenty-four." Not long afterward he writes to his friend Loring, "I have written about a hundred lines of my poem (?), and I suspect it is going to be pretty good. At least, some parts of it will take." And after a few lines he goes on, "I am as busy as a bee--almost. I study and read and write all the time." A little later he writes a letter to Loring in Scotch dialect verse. This was not the sort of work, however, that the college authorities expected of him. He was lazy and got behind his classes, so that near the end of his course he was rusticated, or suspended from college for some weeks. He had been chosen class poet, but on account of his suspension he could not read his poem, though it was printed. He was sent to Concord during this interval to carry on his studies under the minister of the town. Here he found it pretty dull, though Emerson and Thoreau were there. But he did not then care for either one of them. In one of his letters he said, "I feel like a fool. I must go down and see Emerson and if he doesn't make me feel more like one, it won't be for want of sympathy. He is a good-natured man in spite of his doctrines." Of Thoreau he said, "I met (him) last night, and it is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn't know them apart." In the autumn he came back to Cambridge and took his degree of Bachelor of Arts with his class. CHAPTER IV HOW LOWELL STUDIED LAW While at Concord, Lowell wrote to his friend Loring, as though explaining himself. "Everybody almost is calling me 'indolent.' 'Blind dependent on my own powers' and 'on fate.' Confound everybody! since everybody confounds me. Everybody seems to see but one side of my character, and that the worst. As for my dependence on my own powers, 'tis all fudge. As for fate, I believe that in every man's breast are the stars of his fortune, which, if he choose, he may rule as easily as does the child the mimic constellations in the orrery he plays with. I acknowledge, too, that I have been something of a dreamer, and have sacrificed, perchance, too assiduously on that altar to the 'unknown God,' which the Divinity has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man, sometimes blazing out clear with flame, like Abel's sacrifice, heaven-seeking; sometimes smothered with greenwood and earthward, like that of Cain. Lazy quota! I haven't dug, 'tis true, but I have done as well, and 'since my free soul was mistress of her choice, and could of books distinguish her election,' I have chosen what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes scholars and sometimes not." Once out of college he had to take up some profession. Had poetry been a profession, he would have taken that; but such a choice at that time would have been considered sheer folly. He did not consider that he had any "call" to be a minister, still less a doctor. As there was nothing else left, he began the study of law. It is truly amusing to see how he manages to "wriggle along" until he takes his degree of LL.B. and is admitted to the bar. First, he announces that he is "reading Blackstone with as good a grace and as few wry faces as he may." Only a few days later he declares, "A very great change has come o'er the spirit of my dreams. I have renounced the law." He is going to be a business man, and sets about looking for a place, in a store. He is going to give up all thoughts of literary pursuits and devote himself to money-making. He also says, "I have been thinking seriously of the ministry, but then--I have also thought of medicine, but then--still worse!" A few days pass by. He goes into Boston and hears Webster speak in a case before the United States Court. "I had not been there an hour before I determined to continue in my profession and study as well as I could." Still, it was hard work to keep at his law studies. He is soon writing to his friend George Loring, "I sometimes think that I have it in me, and shall one day do somewhat; meantime I am schooling myself and shaping my theory of poesy." Six weeks later: "I have written a great deal of _pottery_ lately. I have quitted the law forever." Then he inquires if he can make any money by lecturing at Andover. He already has an engagement to lecture at Concord, where he has hopes to "astonish them a little." A fortnight later we find him in a "miserable state. The more I think of business the more really unhappy do I feel, and think more and more of studying law." What he really wants to do all the time is to write poetry. "I don't know how it is," he says, "but sometimes I actually _need_ to write somewhat in verse." Sunday is his work day in the "pottery business." As for the law, it is settled at last. He writes to his friend, "Rejoice with me, for to-morrow I shall be free. Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as that is concerned." A fortnight later he declares, "I begin to like the law, and therefore it is quite interesting. I am determined that I _will_ like it and therefore I _do_." In the summer of 1840 he completed his studies and was admitted to the bar. A little later he opened an office in Boston. Misfortune had overtaken his father, and his personal property had been nearly swept away. It was now necessary for the young man to earn his own living. His friends were therefore glad that he had his profession to depend on. CHAPTER V LOVE AND LETTERS Lowell always had a presentiment that he should never practice law. He was always dreaming of becoming independent in some other way. "Above all things," he declares, "should I love to sit down and do something literary for the rest of my natural life." He did not then think of marrying, and it does not require much to support a single man. Though he opened a law office in Boston, it does not appear that he did any business. He wrote a story entitled "My First Client," but one of his biographers unkindly suggests that this may have been purely imaginary. All through his letters we see his ambitious yearning. "George," says he in one place, "before I die your heart shall be gladdened by seeing your wayward, vain, and too often selfish friend do something that shall make his name honored. As Sheridan once said, 'It's _in_ me, and' (we'll skip the oath) 'it shall come _out_!'" His bachelor dreams were soon dissipated, however. He went to visit a friend of his, W.A. White, and there met the young man's sister Maria. He thought her a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and he discovered that she knew a great deal of poetry. She could repeat more verse than any other one of his acquaintances, though he laments that she was more familiar with modern poets than with the "pure wellsprings of English poesy." The friendship grew apace. In the same fall that he began the pretended practice of law he became engaged to her, and she caused a fresh and voluminous outpouring of verse. His productions were printed in various periodicals, such as the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, to which Longfellow had contributed, and the _Southern Literary Messenger_, which Poe once edited. Miss White was a most charming and interesting young lady. She was herself a poet, and had a delicate intellectual sympathy that enabled her to enter into her lover's ambitions, and assist him even in the minutest details of his work. It is fair to suppose that Lowell's friends brought every possible pressure to bear upon him to make him give up poetry and _dig_ at the law. His father's financial losses had left him without an inherited income; he was engaged to a beautiful girl and anxious to be married; in some way he must earn his living, and if possible do more. Such was not the effect, however. He devoted himself to poetry with an almost feverish activity. He has made up his mind that he will do something great; for only so can he hope possibly to make literature a paying profession. It was Maria who inspired most of his verse at this time. One of his best poems even to this day was written directly for her. It is called "Irene'." It may be taken as the best possible description of his lady herself: Hers is a spirit deep, and crystal-clear; Calm beneath her earnest face it lies, Free without boldness, meek without a fear, Quicker to look than speak its sympathies; Far down into her large and patient eyes I gaze, deep-drinking of the infinite, As, in the mid-watch of a clear, still night, I look into the fathomless blue skies. As the struggle between money and law on the one side and literature on the other still went on, he expressed his feelings on the subject to his friend Loring in the following stanza, which puts the whole argument into a nutshell: They tell me I must study law. They say that I have dreamed and dreamed too long, That I must rouse and seek for fame and gold; That I must scorn this idle gift of song, And mingle with the vain and proud and cold. Is, then, this petty strife The end and aim of life, All that is worth the living for below? _O God! then call me hence, for I would gladly go_! Thus he had finally come to the conclusion that he would rather die than give up literature. "Irené" won the good opinion of many. The young poet, though but twenty-one, felt that he was beginning to be a lion. His next definite step was to publish a volume of verses. Says he, "I shall print my volume. Maria wishes me to do it, and that is enough." So his first volume, "A Year's Life," was published, with the motto in German, "I have lived and loved." The young poet's friends were very much opposed to this publication, for the reason that a rising young lawyer is not helped on in his profession at all by being known as a poet. Who would employ a _poet_ to defend his business in a court room? No one! A hard-headed business man is wanted. Walter Scott was a lawyer of much such a temperament as Lowell's, and when he put forth a similar volume he suffered as it was certain that Lowell would suffer. But it is probable that Lowell was now fully determined to give up law altogether. "I know," he declares passionately, "that God has given me powers such as are not given to all, and I will not 'hide my talent in mean clay.' I do not care what others may think of me or of my book, because if I am worth anything I shall one day show it. I do not fear criticism as much as I love truth. Nay, I do not fear it at all. In short, I am happy. Maria fills my ideal and I satisfy her. And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is every way noble. People have called 'Irene' a beautiful piece of poetry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her." It is very plain that she was on the side of the poet, not of the worldly-minded persons who advocated the law, business, money-making. She did not dread the prospect of being a poor man's wife. To be the wife of a poet, a man of courage and ambition and nobleness of heart, was far more to her. The turning point in Lowell's life was past; and he had been led to that turning point by the little woman who was soon to become his wife. CHAPTER VI THE UNCERTAIN SEAS OF LITERATURE As far as is known, Lowell never earned a dollar by the law. He soon began to pick up a five or a ten dollar bill here and there by writing for current periodicals. His book brought him some reputation, but not much. A few hundred copies were sold, and most of the reviews and criticisms were favorable. He received a slating from the _Morning Post_ in Boston, however, just as an inkling of what a literary man might expect. Three years of hard literary work now followed. Lowell wrote assiduously and heroically, getting what happiness he could in the meantime out of his love. He was young and strong, and life was not a burden. He tells us of having spent an evening at the house of a friend "where Maria is making sunshine just now," and he declared that he had been exceedingly funny. He had in the course of the evening recited "near upon five hundred extempore macaronic verses; composed and executed an oratorio and opera" upon a piano without strings, namely the center-table; drawn "an entirely original view of Nantasket Beach"; made a temperance address; and given vent to "innumerable jests, jokes, puns, oddities, quiddities and nothings," interrupted by his own laughter and that of his hearers. Besides this, he had eaten "an indefinite number of raisins, chestnuts(!), etc., etc., etc., etc., etc." In 1842 Lowell and Cobert G. Carter, who was about the same sort of a business man as the poet himself, started a periodical which they called the _Pioneer_. They had no capital; but they did have literary connections, and they were able to get together for the three numbers they published a larger number of contributions from distinguished contributors than has often fallen to the lot of any American periodical. It is true that these men were not as famous in those days as they have since become; still, their names were known and their reputations were rapidly growing. The best known were Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier and Emerson; but there were not a few others whose names are well known to-day. The magazine had a high literary character, and was well worthy of the future greatness of the contributors. Unfortunately, it takes something more than literary excellence to make a successful magazine. Sometimes the literary quality is too high for the public to appreciate. This was true of the _Pioneer_. A magazine also requires a large capital and commercial ability in the business office. It is not at all strange that the venture did not succeed. It could not have done so. Three numbers only were issued, and those three left behind them a debt which the young publishers were unable to pay until some time after. At the same time that Lowell was having trouble with his magazine, he found his eyes becoming affected, and he was obliged to spend the greater part of the winter of 1842-43 in New York to undergo treatment. Here he made many new literary acquaintances, among others that of Charles F. Briggs, who started the _Broadway Journal_ with the assistance of Poe. In the meantime, he kept on writing poetry with more vigor than ever, and in 1843 published a second volume of verse, containing his best work since "A Year's Life" appeared. His contributions to the periodicals included much prose as well as poetry. Among other things, he wrote a series of "Conversations on some of the Old Poets," which was published in a volume the same year that the second book of poems came out. It consisted mainly of essays on Chaucer, Chapman, Ford, and the old dramatists. He never cared to reprint this first excursion into the realm of literary criticism; but it opened up a field which he was to work with distinction in after years. Lowell's prose is delicate, airy, and fanciful, but at the same time keenly critical and sharp in its thought. "Fireside Travels" and "From My Study Window" are books which are known all over the world and which are everywhere voted "delightful". CHAPTER VII HOSEA BIGLOW, YANKEE HUMORIST In December, 1844, Lowell felt that his income from his literary work, though very small and precarious, was sufficient to justify him in marrying, and accordingly he was united to Miss White. She was delicate in health, and after their marriage the couple went to Philadelphia, where they spent the winter in lodgings. Lowell became a regular contributor to the _Freeman_, an antislavery paper once edited by Whittier. From this he derived a very small but steady income; and the next year he was engaged to write every week for the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ on a yearly salary of five hundred dollars. This connection he maintained for the next four years. In June, 1846, the editor of the _Boston Courier_, a weekly paper well known in the "Hub" for its literary character even to this day, received a strange communication. It was a letter signed "Ezekiel Biglow," enclosing a poem written by his son Hosea. This is the way the letter began: Jaylem, June, 1846. Mister Eddyter:--Our Hosea wuz down to Boston last week, and he see a cruetin Sarjunt a struttin round as popler as a hen with 1 chicking, with 2 fellers a drummin and fifin arter him like all nater, the sarjunt he thout Hosea hedn't gut his i teeth cut cos he looked a kindo's though he 'd jest cum down, so he cal'lated to hook him in, but Hosy woodn't take none o his sarse for all he hed much as 20 Rooster's tales stuck onto his hat and eenamost enuf brass a bobbin up and down on his shoulders and figureed onto his coat and trousis, let alone wut nater hed sot in his featers, to make a 6 pounder out on. The letter was rather a long one, and closed thus. Referring to the verses enclosed, the writer says:-- If you print em I wish you'd jest let folks know who hosy's father is, cos my ant Kesiah used to say it's nater to be curus ses she, she aint livin though and he's a likely kind o lad. Ezekiel Biglow. The poem itself began with this stanza: Thrash away, you'll _hev_ to rattle On them kittle-drums o' yourn,-- 'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle Thet is ketched with mouldy corn; Put in stiff, you fifer feller, Let folks see how spry you be,-- Guess you'll toot till you are yeller 'Fore you git ahold o' me! The letter and the poem were printed together in the _Courier_, and immediately were the talk of the town. You will remember that in 1846 the war with Mexico was just beginning, and many people were opposed to it as the work of "jingo" politicians, controlled in some degree by the slavery power. Southern slaveholders wished to increase the territory of the United States in such a way as to enlarge the territory where slavery would be lawful. The antislavery people of New England were violently opposed to the war, and this poem by the Yankee Hosea Biglow immediately became popular, because it put in a humorous, common-sense way what everybody else had been saying with deadly earnest. Charles Sumner saw the common sense of the poem, but didn't see the fun in the bad spelling. Said he, "This Yankee poet has the true spirit. He puts the case admirably. I wish, however, he could have used good English." Evidently Sumner did not suspect that so cultured and polished a poet as James Russell Lowell was the author of a stanza like this: 'Wut 's the use o' meetin'-goin' Every Sabbath, wet or dry, Ef it's right to go amowin' Feller-men like oats and rye? I dunno but wut it's pooty Trainin' round in bobtail coats.-- But it's curus Christian dooty, This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats. The fact is, however, Lowell had written all this, even the letter with bad spelling purporting to come from Ezekiel Biglow. He was deeply interested in the antislavery cause, in good politics and sound principles; yet he saw that it would be useless for him to get up and preach against what he did not like. There were plenty of other earnest, serious-minded men like Garrison and Whittier who were fighting against the evil in the straightforward, blunt way. Lowell was as interested as they in having the wrongs righted; but he was more cool-headed than the rest. He considered the matter. A joke, he said to himself, will carry the crowd ten times as quickly as a serious protest; and people will listen to one of their own number, a common, every-day, sensible fellow with a spark of wit in him, where they would go away bored by polished and cultured writing full of Latin quotations. This is how he came to begin the Biglow papers. Their instant success proved that he was quite right. Of course it was not long before shrewd people began to see that this fine humor, with its home-thrusts, was not in reality written by a country bumpkin. Through the rough dialect and homely way of stating the case, there shone the fine intellect of a cultivated and skillful writer. The _Post_ guessed that James Russell Lowell was the real author. This was regarded only as a rumor, however, and many people scouted the idea that a young poet, whose books sold only in small numbers and were known only to literary people, could have written anything as good as this. "I have heard it demonstrated in the pauses of a concert," wrote Lowell afterward, "that I was utterly incompetent to have written anything of the kind." It was early in this same summer of 1846 that Lowell made his contract to write regularly for the _Anti-Slavery Standard_; and he soon began sending the "Biglow" poems to that paper instead of to the _Courier_. The most popular of the whole series of poems by Hosea Biglow was the one on John P. Robinson. Robinson was a worthy gentleman who happened to come out publicly on the side of a political wire-puller. Immediately Hosea caught up his name and wrote a comic poem on voting for a bad candidate for office. Looked at in that light, the poem applies just as well to political candidates to-day as it did then. Here are a few stanzas of the poem. You will want to turn to "Lowell's Poetical Works" and read the whole piece. WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS. Guvener B. is a sensible man; He stays to his home an' looks arter his folks; He draws his furrer ez straight ez he can, An' into nobody's tater-patch pokes; But John P. Robinson he Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. My! aint it terrible? Wut shall we du? We can't never choose him o' course--thet's flat; Guess we shall hev to come round, (don't you?) An' go in fer thunder an' guns, an' all that, Fer John P. Robinson he Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man: He's ben on all sides thet give places or pelf; But consistency still wuz a part of his plan-- He's been true to _one_ party--an' thet is himself; So John P. Robinson he Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C. Gineral C. he goes in fer the war; He don't vally principle more'n an old cud; Wut did God make us raytional creeturs fer, But glory an' gunpowder, plunder an' blood? So John P. Robinson he Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C. The side of our country must ollers be took, An' President Polk, you know, _he_ is our country. An' the angel that writes all our sins in a book Puts the _debit_ to him, an' to us the _per contry_; And John P. Robinson he Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T. There is a story that Mr. Robinson couldn't go anywhere after this poem was published without hearing some one humming or reciting, Fer John P. Robinson he Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. School children shouted it everywhere, people on the street repeated it as they met, and the funny rhyme was heard even in polite drawing-rooms, amid roars of laughter. Mr. Robinson went abroad, but scarcely had he landed in Liverpool before he heard a child crooning over to himself, Fer John P. Robinson he Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B. In Genoa, Italy, it was a parody, telling what John P.--Robinson he--would do down in Judee. CHAPTER VIII PARSON WILBUR In the course of time the "Biglow Papers" were published in book form. Not only was Lowell's name not yet connected publicly with the Yankee humor, but the poems were provided with an elaborate introduction, notes and comments, by the learned pastor of the church at Jaalam, Homer Wilbur. His notes and introduction are filled with Latin quotations, and he appears as much a scholar as Hosea Biglow does a natural. He says he tried to teach Hosea better English, but decided to let him work out his own ideas in his own way. Still, he endorses Hosea's principles, and is in every way thoroughly his friend. This Parson Wilbur is almost as much of a character in the book as Hosea himself, and his prose, printed at the beginning and end of each poem in small type, is almost as clear and effective and interesting as Hosea's poems. We are always tempted to skip anything printed in small type, and placed in brackets; but in this case that would be a great mistake. Speaking of "What Mr. Robinson Thinks," Parson Wilbur says, "A bad principle is comparatively harmless while it continues to be an abstraction, nor can the general mind comprehend it fully till it is printed in that large type which all men can read at sight, namely the life and character, the sayings and doings, of particular persons.... "Meanwhile, let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood, and as Truth and Falsehood start from the same point, and sometimes even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at the end of it. Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine. The danger of the satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of language. He becomes more and more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends. He may put on his boxing gloves, and yet forget that the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through the dust of the ring which obscures Truth's wreath of simple leaves." There is another very interesting passage which is said to be an extract from one of the Parson's sermons, describing the modern newspaper. "Wonderful, to him that has eyes to see it rightly, is the newspaper. To me, for example, sitting on the critical front bench of the pit, in my study here in Jaalam, the advent of my weekly journal is as that of a strolling theater, or rather of a puppet-show, on whose stage, narrow as it is, the tragedy, comedy, and farce of life are played in little. Behold the huge earth sent to me hebdomidally in a brown paper wrapper." You see that what he says is very learned in its choice of words; but if you read it carefully you will find it interesting. But after all, Parson Wilbur is a humorous character, though he has his sense, too. At the end of his introduction are some fragmentary notes which are intended as a general satire on editors of books. He goes on at some length to say that he thought he ought to have his picture printed in the book which he professes to be editing. But he has only two likenesses, one a black profile, the other a painting in which he is made cross-eyed. He speaks of it as "strabismus," which sounds very learned of course, and he goes on to explain that in actual fact this is not a bad thing, for he can preach very directly at his congregation, and no one will think the preacher has him particularly in his eye. He also says Mrs. Wilbur objected to having a cross-eyed picture reproduced, and he is therefore driven to take the position of those great people who refuse to have their features copied at all. Then he puts in a lot of absurd genealogical notes. At the beginning of the book there are also a number of imaginary notices of "the independent press." Of course there are no such papers as those mentioned, and the praise and the blame are alike satirical. In the original volume of "Biglow Papers," part of a page at the end of these "Notices of the Press" remained unfilled, and the printer asked Lowell if he could not send in something to occupy that space. As poetry came easiest, Lowell wrote a number of stanzas about "Zekle's Courtin'." There were only six stanzas in the original edition. Lowell wrote more, but told the printer to break off when the page was filled. This the printer did, and the stanzas which were not put in type were lost, as Lowell had kept no copy. This piece became so popular that friends urged the poet to finish the story, and he wrote a few more stanzas. Then he wrote still others. In the course of time it developed into the long poem printed with the second series of "Biglow Papers," under the title of "The Courtin'." This is the way it runs in the first version; but you will want to read it also in its complete form: Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown, An' peeked in thru the winder, An' there sot Huldy all alone, 'ith no one nigh to hender. He kin' o' l'itered on the mat, Some doubtfle o' the sekle, His heart kep' goin' pitypat, But hern went pity Zekle. He stood a spell on one foot fust, Then stood a spell on tother, An' on which one he felt the wust He could n't ha' told ye, nuther. Sez he, "I'd better call agin;" Sez she, "Think likely, _Mister_;" The last word pricked him like a pin, An'--wal, he up and kist her. When in the course of the publication of the second series of "Biglow Papers," twenty years after the first, it was announced that Parson Wilbur was dead, people who had read the first series felt very much as though they had lost a personal friend. The public had learned to love the pedantic, vain old man as if he were a real human being. Lowell had created in him a great character of fiction, almost as if he were a novelist instead of a poet. CHAPTER IX A FABLE FOR CRITICS Lowell's next attempt in the satirical and humorous line was a long poem written somewhat after the style of the old Latin fable writers, and hence called "A Fable for Critics." It was written in double rhymes, for the most part, which are very hard to make, and not altogether easy to read; but they help the humorous impression. This poem was published anonymously, and in it the author hits off all the prominent authors of the day, speaking as the god Apollo. Of course he did not attach his name to it, and as it appeared anonymously he felt that he could say what he liked--in other words, tell the truth about his friends and acquaintances, or at least give his opinion of them. Incidentally, he pokes fun at the literary fads of the day. Among other things, to give the impression that he was not the author of the poem, he puts in a free criticism of himself: There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb With a whole bale of _isms_ tied together with rhyme. He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders, But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders. The top of the hill he will never come nigh reaching Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching; His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell, And rattle away till he's old as Mathusalem, At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. Evidently he thought that he paid too much attention to politics, as in the "Biglow Papers," and to lecturing, and various side issues, when he ought to be cultivating pure poetry more assiduously; or rather, he would have liked to be a simple poet and do nothing else, not even earn a living. The way he characterizes in this poem the great writers whom we know is both amusing and interesting, and he generally tells the truth. For instance, he writes-- There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge. The best of his criticisms are not satirical, but true and appreciative. Thus, Hawthorne: There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare That you hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet. His reference to Whittier, too, is a noble tribute by one poet to another: There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect. Bryant was the oldest of the American poets, and the generation to which Lowell belonged had been taught to look up to him as the head of American poetical literature. Of course the younger poets felt that they ought to receive a share of the homage, and perhaps they were a little jealous of Bryant. There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, As a smooth, silent iceberg that never is ignified, Save when by reflection 't is kindled o' nights With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights. This is not at all complimentary, it would seem, but a little farther along Lowell makes up for it in part by saying-- But, my dear little bardlings, don't prick up your ears, Nor suppose I would rank you and Bryant as peers; If I call him an iceberg I don't mean to say, There is nothing in that which is grand in its way; He is almost the one of your poets that knows How much grace, strength, and dignity lie in Repose. You will remember that in one of his college letters, written while he was at Concord because rusticated, Lowell did not seem to care for Emerson. He afterward became his great admirer, and in this fable leads off with Emerson, saying: There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr--No, 'tis not even prose. Irving and Holmes are two more of his favorites. Of the first he says: What! Irving? Thrice welcome, warm heart and fine brain, You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain, And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair. Holmes he happily hits off thus: There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit; A Leyden jar always full charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit. His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satiric; In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon are your own or your foe's. And he ends by saying: Nature fits all her children with something to do; He who would write and can't write, can surely review, Can set up a small booth as critic and sell us his Petty conceit and his pettier jealousies. Lowell was a good critic, and clearly saw the merit of the really great writers of his time. We have quoted his characterizations of those he admires. His keen thrusts at those who are not half as great as they would have us believe are both amusing and true, and no doubt made their victims smart sharply enough, for instance that-- One person whose portrait just gave the least hint Its original had a most horrible squint. CHAPTER X THE TRUEST POETRY While Lowell was becoming famous indirectly as the anonymous author of the "Biglow Papers" and "A Fable for Critics," he was writing and publishing over his own name sweet, simple lines that came straight from his heart and which will no doubt be remembered when the uncouth Yankee dialect of Hosea Biglow and the hard rhymes of the "Fable" are forgotten. The simpler a true poet is the more beautiful and really poetic he is likely to be. The simplest thing Lowell ever wrote was "The First Snow-Fall," composed in 1847 after the death of his little daughter Blanche, with the sorrow for whose loss was mingled the joy at the coming of another child. THE FIRST SNOW-FALL. The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white. I stood and watched by the window The noiseless work of the sky, And the sudden flurries of snow-birds, Like brown leaves whirling by. I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn Where a little headstone stood; How the flakes were folding it gently, As did robins the babes in the wood. Up spoke our own little Mabel, Saying, "Father, who makes it snow?" And I told of the good All-father Who cares for us here below. Again I looked at the snow-fall, And thought of the leaden sky That arched o'er our first great sorrow, When that mound was heaped so high. I remembered the gradual patience That fell from that cloud like snow, Flake by flake, healing and hiding The scar that renewed our woe. And again to the child I whispered, "The snow that husheth all, Darling, the merciful Father Alone can make it fall!" Then with eyes that saw not, I kissed her; And she, kissing back, could not know That my kiss was given to her sister, Folded close under deepening snow. Lowell's greatest poem, "The Vision of Sir Launfal," was written in the same simple, beautiful spirit of "The First Snow-Fall," and that is why we all like to read it over and over again. "Sir Launfal" was a favorite with Mrs. Lowell from the beginning. She probably knew better that it was a great poem than the poet himself did. The "Prelude" to the first part is beautiful because it contains so much that cannot but touch the heart of every one, however he may dislike poetry. A great poem like this cannot be read hastily, nor must we stop with reading it once. Great poetry must be read so many times that it is committed entirely to memory before we begin to reach the end of the beauties in it. Each time we reread we see new beauties, we feel new thrills. Over his keys the musing organist, Beginning doubtfully and far away, First lets his fingers wander as they list, And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay; Then, as the touch of his loved instrument Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme, First guessed by faint auroral flashes sent Along the wavering vista of his dream. The first time you read this passage it may mean little to you; but as you read again and again you gradually picture in your mind a grand cathedral, just filling with people for the morning worship. The organist begins with a few light notes, fanciful, merely suggestive; then louder and louder swells the strain; the music begins to bring up before your mind pictures of waterfalls, cities, men and women with passionate hearts; at last, in the grand flood of the music, you forget yourself, the world around you, the church, the thronging congregation, everything. After this pretty and suggestive prelude, describing the musician, we read such passages as this, which suggest the theme as by a "faint auroral flash": And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays. A little farther along the music seems to broaden and deepen: Now is the high-tide of the year, And whatever of life hath ebbed away Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer, Into every bare inlet and creek and bay; Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it, We are happy now because God wills it. You must read the rest of the poem for yourself, ever remembering that to read poetry so that you understand it and love it means that you yourself are a poet at heart; and if you come to love a great poem you may be proud of your achievement. CHAPTER XI PROFESSOR, EDITOR, AND DIPLOMAT There was a touching and very warm affection between Longfellow and Lowell. Mrs. Lowell says of it, "I have never seen such a beautiful friendship between men of such distinct personalities, though closely linked together by mutual tastes and affections. They criticise and praise each other's performances with frankness not to be surpassed, and seem to have attained that happy height of faith where no misunderstanding, no jealousy, no reserve exists." Often in his diary Longfellow speaks of "walking to see Lowell," who was either "musing before his fire in his study," or occupied in his "celestial study, with its pleasant prospect through the small square windows." Longfellow was some dozen years the elder; and when the time came that he wished to retire from the professorship of belles-lettres in Harvard College, he was very desirous that Lowell should take the place. There were others who wanted it; but it was arranged that Lowell should become Longfellow's successor. Lowell had never before been a professor and he did not particularly like the work. In 1867 he speaks of "beginning my annual dissatisfaction of lecturing next week." Still, he was popular with the students and highly successful because of his fine gift of literary criticism. Here, for instance, is his definition of poetry: "Poetry, as I understand it, is the recognition of something new and true in thought or feeling, the recollection of some profound experience, the conception of some heroic action, the creation of something beautiful and pathetic." In his diary Longfellow sometimes refers to Mrs. Lowell, "slender and pale as a lily"; and once when he and Charles Sumner had gone to see Lowell and found that he was not at home, Longfellow adds, "but we saw his gentle wife, who, I fear, is not long for this world." His words were prophetic. She gradually failed in strength. Of their four children, three died while mere babes. In 1853 Mrs. Lowell herself died. The appointment to Longfellow's professorship did not come until a little over a year after the death of Mrs. Lowell. During her life Mr. Lowell's income was very small and irregular, a few hundred dollars a year in payment of royalties on his books and for articles and poems contributed to various periodicals. With his appointment to the Harvard professorship he became financially independent for the first time. To prepare for it he went abroad, spending most of his time at Dresden. He returned sooner than he expected, and for a reason that very well illustrates his business habits. When he set out he had a limited amount of money. This he placed with London bankers, arranging to draw on them for such sums as he might need from time to time. He asked that when he had drawn down to a certain sum the bankers should notify him, and then he would immediately prepare to return home. He settled down, and thought that he was getting on moderately well and had a considerable sum still to draw. What was his surprise when he was notified by his bankers that he had drawn his account down to the amount he had mentioned! As there was nothing better for him to do, he packed his trunk and went home. Some years after that, he received a letter from these London bankers informing him that an error had been made in his account, and that a draft for a hundred pounds sterling (five hundred dollars) which had been drawn by some other person named Lowell had by mistake been charged to his account. This money, with compound interest, was now at his disposal. The bankers suggested, however, that if he was not in immediate need of the money, they would use it for an admirable investment they knew of which might considerably increase it within a year. At the end of a year he received a draft for seven hundred pounds. This he used to refurnish Elmwood. "Now, you, who are always preaching figures and Poor Richard, and business habits," said he, in telling the story to some friends, "what do you say to that? If I had kept an account and known how it stood, _I should have spent that money_ and you would not now be sitting in those easy chairs, or walking on Wilton carpet. No; hang accounts and figures!" In 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_ was started, and Lowell was made editor, with a salary of three thousand dollars a year, of course in addition to his salary as a Harvard professor. Though he was the editor, he recognized that the success of the magazine would be made by Holmes. Said he, "You see, the doctor is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up among the hills and is waiting for an outlet into the Atlantic. You will find that he has a wonderful store of thought--serious, comic, pathetic, and poetic,--of comparisons, figures, and illustrations. I have seen nothing of his preparation, but I imagine he is ready. It will be something wholly new, and his reputation as a prose writer will date from this magazine." When you recollect the success of the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" you cannot help remarking that Lowell was a veritable prophet. President Hayes, soon after his inauguration, offered Lowell an appointment as minister to Austria, but Lowell declined. When he was asked if he would accept an appointment as minister to Spain, he consented, and thither he went in the early part of President Hayes' administration. After a time he was transferred to London, where he became a striking diplomatic figure. He was one of the most popular and polished gentlemen ever sent as ambassador to a European nation, and as such his presence at the Court of Saint James was highly appreciated by the English people. When, in 1884, on the election of Cleveland to the presidency, he prepared to leave London, many glowing tributes were paid him by the English press, but none was more hearty than this, printed in _Punch_: Send you away? No, Lowell, no. That phrase, indeed, is scarce well chosen. We're glad, of course, to have you go More like a brother than a cousin; True, we must "speed the parting guest," If such a guest from us _must_ sever; But what we all should like the best Would be to keep you here forever. You've won our hearts; your words, your ways, Are what we like. Without desiring To sicken you with fulsome praise, We think you've seen no signs of tiring. Of graceful speech, of pleasant lore, How much to you the English mind owes! We're sad to think we'll see no more Of you--save through your Study Windows. Well, well, the best of friends must part; That's commonplace, like Gray, but true, sir. Commend us to the Yankee heart; If you can come again, why, _do_, sir. What Biglow calls our "English sarse," Is not _all_ tarts and bitters, is it? Farewell!--if from us you must pass, But try, _do_ try, another visit! After his return from England, Mr. Lowell did comparatively little literary work. Some years before this, he had married the lady who was educating his only daughter. He now spent the most of his time at Elmwood among his books and in the society of his friends. In 1888 a volume of his later poems appeared, bearing the title of "Heartsease and Rue." About the same time "Democracy," a collection of the addresses which he had delivered in England, was published. But neither of these volumes added materially to his fame. On the twelfth of August, 1891, the famous poet, essayist, and man of affairs died. He was nearly seventy-three years of age. * * * * * [NOTE.--The thanks of the publishers are due Messrs. Harper & Brothers for permission to use extracts from "Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton," and to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to use extracts from the Poetical Works of Lowell.] THE STORY OF BAYARD TAYLOR [Illustration: BAYARD TAYLOR.] BAYARD TAYLOR CHAPTER I HIS BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD Bayard Taylor was born in the country village of Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jan. 11, 1825, "the year when the first locomotive successfully performed its trial trip. I am, therefore," he says, "just as old as the railroad." He was descended from Robert Taylor, a rich Friend, or Quaker, who had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn in 1681, and settled near Brandywine Creek. Bayard's grandfather married a Lutheran of pure German blood, and on that account was expelled from the Society of Friends, which at that time had very strict rules regarding the marriage of its members. Although the family still used the peculiar speech of the Quakers, and clung to the Quaker principles of peace and order, none of them ever returned to the society. When Bayard was four years old, the family moved to a farm about a mile from the village. There they lived, until, years afterward, the successful traveler and poet bought an estate near by and built a magnificent house upon it, into which he received his father and mother and brothers and sisters, with that open-hearted generosity and hospitality which was so much a part of his nature. He was the fourth child of his parents; but the three older children had died in infancy, and he remained as the eldest of the family. Chester County, Pennsylvania, has always been a rich farming region, peopled by solid, well-to-do farmers, many of whom are Quakers. Here the northern elms toss their arms to the southern cypresses, as the poet has it; the two climates seem to meet and mingle, in a sort of calm, neutral zone, and the vegetation of the North is united with the vegetation of the South, to produce a peculiar richness and variety. In such surroundings the boy grew up, a farmer's lad, and learned that love of nature which was a part of his being till the day he died. "The child," says he, "that has tumbled into a newly plowed furrow never forgets the smell of the fresh earth.... Almost my first recollection is of a swamp, into which I went barelegged at morning, and out of which I came, when driven by hunger, with long stockings of black mud, and a mask of the same. If the child was missed from the house, the first thing that suggested itself was to climb upon a mound which overlooked the swamp. Somewhere among the tufts of rushes and the bladed leaves of the calamus, a little brown ball was sure to be seen moving, now dipping out of sight, now rising again, like a bit of drift on the rippling green. It was my head. The treasures I there collected were black terrapins with orange spots, baby frogs the size of a chestnut, thrush's eggs, and stems of purple phlox." He loved his home with a passionate intensity; but he also had yearnings for the unknown world beyond the horizon. "I remember," says he, "as distinctly as if it were yesterday the first time this passion was gratified. Looking out of the garret window, on a bright May morning, I discovered a row of slats which had been nailed over the shingles for the convenience of the carpenters in roofing the house, and had not been removed. Here was, at least, a chance to reach the comb of the steep roof, and take my first look abroad into the world! Not without some trepidation I ventured out, and was soon seated astride of the sharp ridge. Unknown forests, new fields and houses, appeared to my triumphant view. The prospect, though it did not extend more than four miles in any direction, was boundless. Away in the northwest, glimmering through the trees, was a white object, probably the front of a distant barn; but I shouted to the astonished servant girl, who had just discovered me from the garden below, 'I see the Falls of Niagara!'" He was a sensitive child and had a horror of dirty hands, "and," says he, "my first employments--picking stones and weeding corn--were rather a torture to this superfine taste." In his mother, however, he had a friend who understood and protected him. So his life on the farm was as happy as it well could be, in spite of its roughness. He himself has described it with a zest which no one else could lend it. "Almost every field had its walnut tree, melons were planted among the corn, and the meadow which lay between never exhausted its store of wonders. Besides, there were eggs to hide at Easter; cherries and strawberries in May; fruit all summer; fishing parties by torchlight; lobelia and sumac to be gathered, dried and sold for pocket money; and in the fall, chestnuts, persimmons, wild grapes, cider, and the grand butchering after frost came, so that all the pleasures I knew were incidental to a farmer's life. The books I read came from the village library, and the task of helping to 'fodder' on the dark winter evenings was lightened by the anticipation of sitting down to 'Gibbon's Rome' or 'Thaddeus of Warsaw' afterwards." He was fond of reading, and especially fond of poetry, and his wife in her biography says: "In the evening after he had gone to bed, his mother would hear him repeating poem after poem to his brother, who slept in the same room with him." CHAPTER II SCHOOL LIFE Bayard had the advantage of regular attendance at the country schools near his father's home, with two or three years at the local academy; but his father could not afford to send him to college. He enjoyed his school life, and in after years wrote to one of his early Quaker teachers thus: "I have never forgotten the days I spent in the little log schoolhouse and the chestnut grove behind it, and I have always thought that some of the poetry I then copied from thy manuscript books has kept an influence over all my life since. There was one verse in particular which has cheered and encouraged me a thousand times when prospects seemed rather gloomy. It ran thus: 'O, why should we seek to anticipate sorrow By throwing the flowers of the present away, And gathering the dark-rolling, cloudy to-morrow To darken the generous sun of to-day?' Thou seest I have good reason to remember those old times, and to be grateful to thee for encouraging instead of checking the first developments of my mind." You may easily guess from this letter that Bayard's school life was very sedate and Quakerish. Nearly all the people in Kennett Square were Quakers, and though Bayard's father and mother were not, they had all the Quaker habits. Among other things, he was taught the wickedness of all kinds of swearing. His mother "talked so earnestly on this point that his mind became full of it; his observation and imagination were centered upon oaths, until at last he was so fascinated that he became filled with an uncontrollable desire to swear. So he went out into a field, beyond hearing, and there delivered himself of all the oaths he had ever heard or could invent, and in as loud a voice as possible." After this he felt quite satisfied to swear no more. When Bayard was about twelve years old, his father was elected sheriff of the county and went to live at West Chester for three years. The young lad was sent to Bolmar's Academy at that place; and when the family went back to the farm he was sent to the academy at Unionville, three or four miles from his home. Here, at the age of sixteen, he finished his regular schooling. During the last two years he studied Latin and French, and during the last year Spanish. His Latin and French he continued by private study for three years longer. He now went back to work on the farm for a season, and, as he says, "first felt the delight and refreshment of labor in the open air. I was then able to take the plow handle, and I still remember the pride I felt when my furrows were pronounced even and well turned. Although it was already decided that I should not make farming the business of my life, I thrust into my plans a slender wedge of hope that I might one day own a bit of ground, for the luxury of having, if not the profit of cultivating, it. The aroma of the sweet soil had tinctured my blood; the black mud of the swamp still stuck to my feet." After a few weeks of farm life he was apprenticed to a printer in West Chester for a term of four years. CHAPTER III HIS FIRST POEM It is the will and the spirit that makes every life seem happy or the reverse. If Bayard Taylor had remained a farmer in Kennett Square all his life, he would not have looked back on his early experiences with so much pleasure as he did. Indeed, we may safely say that he would not have liked his life so well at the time had it not been for his buoyant and hopeful nature, which made him feel that he was destined for higher and better things, for a world beyond the horizon. Already he was a poet, with all a poet's aspirations and eagerness. A year before he left the academy his first printed poem appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ of Philadelphia. It is not wonderful as poetry. Yet we read it with interest, because it shows so plainly the earnest and ambitious, yet cheerful, nature of the boy. He did not merely sit and hope; he was determined to _win his way_. It is entitled, "Soliloquy of a Young Poet." A dream!--a fleeting dream! Childhood has passed, with all its joy and song, And my life's frail bark on youth's impetuous stream Is swiftly borne along. High hopes spring up within; Hopes of the future--thoughts of glory--fame, Which prompt my mind to toil, and bid me win That dream--a deathless name. * * * * * I know it all is vain, That earthly honors ever must decay, That all the laurels bought by toil and pain Must pass with earth away. But still my spirit high, Longing for fame won by the immortal mind-- On fancy's pinion fain would scale the sky, And leave dull earth behind. Yes, I would write my name With the star's burning ray on heaven's broad scroll, That I might still the restless thirst for fame Which fills my soul. Bayard Taylor was not a great genius, and he did not succeed in winning quite all of that high fame for which he struggled throughout his life. He never expected to have earth's blessings showered upon him without working for them; and the fact that he failed somewhat in his highest ambition--to be a far-famed poet--makes his life seem nearer to our own. We call him a great man because he did well what came to him to do, working hard all his life. In this we can all follow his example. CHAPTER IV SELF-EDUCATION AND AMBITION "The Village Record" (to the proprietor of which Bayard was apprenticed) was printed upon an old-fashioned hand press, and it was the business of the apprentices to set the type, help make up the paper, pull the forms, and send the weekly issues off to the subscribers. The mechanical work was soon learned, and the young apprentice found considerable time for reading. He now began that work of self-education which he carried on through his whole life. Already, before he left the academy, he had become acquainted with the works of Charles Dickens, and had secured the great man's autograph. "I went to the Academy," says he, "where I received a letter that had come on Saturday. It was from Hartford; I knew instantly it was from Dickens. It was double, and sealed neatly with a seal bearing the initials C.D. In the inside was a sheet of satin notepaper, on which was written, 'Faithfully yours, Charles Dickens, City Hotel, Hartford, Feb. 10, 1842'; and below, 'with the compliments of Mr. Dickens.' I can long recollect the thrill of pleasure I experienced on seeing the autograph of one whose writings I so ardently admired, and to whom, in spirit, I felt myself attached; and it was not without a feeling of ambition that I looked upon it that as he, a humble clerk, had risen to be the guest of a mighty nation, so I, a humble pedagogue [he was then pupil teacher at the Academy], might by unremitted and arduous intellectual and moral exertion become a light, a star, among the names of my country. May it be!" When he went to work at West Chester his reading was chiefly poetry and travel. The result of his "fireside travels" we shall soon see. The way in which he read poetry may be gathered from the following extract from a letter to one of his comrades: "By the way, what do you think of Bryant as a poet, and especially of 'Thanatopsis? For my part, my admiration knows no bounds. There is an all-pervading love of nature, a calm and quiet but still deep sense of everything beautiful. And then the high and lofty feeling which mingles with the whole! It seems to me when I read his poetry that our hearts are united, and that I can feel every throb of his answered back by mine. This is what makes a poet immortal. There are but few who make me feel so thrillingly their glowing thoughts as Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell (all Americans, you know), and these I _love_. It is strange, the sway a master mind has over those who have felt his power." Another poet of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer was Tennyson. He had read a criticism by Poe. "I still remember," he wrote afterward, "the eagerness with which as a boy of seventeen, after reading his paper, I sought for the volume; and I remember also the strange sense of mental dazzle and bewilderment I experienced on the first perusal of it. I can only compare it to the first sight of a sunlit landscape through a prism; every object has a rainbow outline. One is fascinated to look again and again, though the eyes ache." He contributed several poems to the _Saturday Evening Post_, and then wrote to Rufus W. Griswold, who, besides being connected with the _Post_, was the editor of _Graham's Magazine_, the leading literary periodical at that time. Those of us who know the life of Poe remember Griswold as the man who pretended to be his friend, but who after Poe's death wrote his life, filling it with all the scandalous falsehoods he could hear of or invent. To Bayard Taylor, however, he seems to have been a helpful friend. "I have met with strange things since I wrote last," writes Taylor to a school friend in March, 1843. "Last November I wrote to Mr. Griswold, sending a poem to be inserted in the _Post_. However, I said that it was my highest ambition to appear in _Grahams Magazine_. Some time ago I got an answer. He said he had read my lines 'To the Brandywine,' which appeared in the _Post_, with much pleasure, and would have put them in the magazine if he had seen them in time. He said the poem I sent him would appear in April in the magazine, and requested me to contribute often and to call on him when I came to town. I never was more surprised in my life." He went to Philadelphia the next autumn, and consulted Griswold regarding a poetic romance he had written--about a thousand lines in length--and Griswold advised him to publish it in a volume with other poems. He wrote to a friend to inquire how much the printing and binding would cost, and finding that the expense would not be very great, he concluded to ask his friends to subscribe for the volume. When he had received enough subscriptions to pay the cost of publication, he brought the volume out. It was entitled "Ximena; or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and Other Poems. By James Bayard Taylor." (The James was added by mistake by Griswold.) It was dedicated "To Rufus W. Griswold, as an expression of gratitude for the kind encouragement he has shown the author." The poems contained in this volume were never republished in after years. The book was fairly successful, and was distinctly a step upward; but it did not fill the young writer with undue conceit. In writing to a friend of his ambition at this time, he says: "It is useless to deny that I have cherished hopes of occupying at some future day a respectable station among our country's poets. I believe all poets are possessed in a greater or less degree of ambition; it is inseparable from the nature of poetry. And though I may be mistaken, I think this ambition is never given without a mind of sufficient power to sustain it, and to achieve its lofty object. Although I am desirous of the world's honors, yet with all the sincerity I possess I declare that my highest hope is to do good; to raise the hopes of the desponding; to soothe the sorrows of the afflicted. I believe that poetry owns as its true sphere the happiness of mankind." What could be nobler and more sensible than that! Even his earliest poetry has in it no false, slipshod sentiment. Its subject is nature and heroic incident, and is indeed a faithful attempt to carry out the aim so well stated above. Some have doubted whether Bayard Taylor really had the power which he says he thinks is given to all who have the ambition which he felt. But none can fail to admire the spirit in which he worked, and to feel satisfied with the results, whatever they may be. CHAPTER V A TRAVELER AT NINETEEN It was not as a poet, however, that Bayard Taylor was to win his first fame. At the age of nineteen, when he had but half completed his four years' term of apprenticeship, he made up his mind to go to Europe. He had no money; but that did not appear to him an insurmountable obstacle. He thought he could work his way by writing letters for the newspapers. So he went up to Philadelphia and visited all the editors. For three days he went about; but all in vain. The editors gave him little encouragement. He was on the point of going home, but with no thought of giving up his project. At last two different editors offered him each fifty dollars in advance for twelve letters, and the proprietor of _Graham's Magazine_ paid him forty dollars for some poems. So he went back to Kennett Square the jubilant possessor of a hundred and forty dollars. He succeeded in buying his release from the articles of apprenticeship, and immediately prepared to set out on foot for New York, where he and two others were to take ship for England. That was the beginning of a career of travel which lasted many years, and brought him both fame and money. In a delightful essay on "The First Journey I Ever Made," he says that while other great travelers have felt in childhood an inborn propensity to go out into the world to see the regions beyond, he had the intensest desire to climb upward--so that without shifting his horizon, he could yet extend it, and take in a far wider sweep of vision. "I envied every bird," he goes on, "that sat singing on the topmost bough of the great, century-old cherry tree; the weathercock on our barn seemed to me to whirl in a higher region of the air; and to rise from the earth in a balloon was a bliss which I would almost have given my life to enjoy." His desire to ascend soon took the practical form of wishing to climb a mountain. By great economy he saved up fifteen dollars, and with a companion who had twenty-seven dollars (enormous wealth!) he set out for a walking tour to the Catskills, with the hope of going even so far as the Connecticut valley. No doubt the feelings he experienced in setting out on that excursion, at the end of his first year as an apprentice, would apply equally well to the greater journey he was to attempt a year later. "The steamboat from Philadelphia deposited me at Bordentown, on the forenoon of a warm, clear day. I buckled on my knapsack, inquired the road to Amboy, and struck off, resolutely, with the feelings of an explorer on the threshold of great discoveries. The sun shone brightly, the woods were green, and the meadows were gay with phlox and buttercups. Walking was the natural impulse of the muscles; and the glorious visions which the next few days would unfold to me, drew me onward with a powerful fascination. Thus, mile after mile went by; and early in the afternoon I reached Hightstown, very hot and hungry, and a little footsore. Twenty-five cents only had been expended thus far--and was I now to dine for half a dollar? The thought was banished as rapidly as it came, and six cakes, of remarkable toughness and heaviness, put an effectual stop to any further promptings of appetite that day. "The miles now became longer, and the rosy color of my anticipations faded a little. The sandy level of the country fatigued my eyes; the only novel objects I had yet discovered were the sweep-poles of the wells....The hot afternoon was drawing to a close, and I was wearily looking out for Spotswood, when a little incident occurred, the memory of which has ever since been as refreshing to me as the act in itself was at the time. "I stopped to get a drink from a well in front of a neat little farmhouse. While I was awkwardly preparing to let down the bucket, a kind, sweet voice suddenly said: 'Let me do it for you.' I looked up, and saw before me a girl of sixteen, with blue eyes, wavy auburn hair, and slender form--not strikingly handsome, but with a shy, pretty face, which blushed the least bit in the world, as she met my gaze. "Without waiting for my answer, she seized the pole and soon drew up the dripping bucket, which she placed upon the curb. 'I will get you a glass,' she then said, and darted into the house--reappearing presently with a tumbler in one hand and a plate of crisp tea-cakes in the other. She stood beside me while I drank, and then extended the plate with a gesture more inviting than any words would have been. I had had enough of cake for one day; but I took one, nevertheless, and put a second in my pocket, at her kind persuasion. "This was the first of many kindnesses which I have experienced from strangers all over the wide world; and there are few, if any, which I shall remember longer. "At sunset I had walked about twenty-two miles, and had taken to the railroad track by way of change, when I came upon a freight train, which had stopped on account of some slight accident. "'Where are you going?' inquired the engineer. "'To Amboy.' "'Take you there for a quarter!' "It was too tempting; so I climbed upon the tender and rested my weary legs, while the pines and drifted sands flew by us an hour or more-- and I had crossed New Jersey!" This little description may be taken as a type of the way in which he traveled and the way in which he described his travels--a way that almost immediately made him famous, and caused the public to call for volume after volume from his pen. CHAPTER VI TWO YEARS IN EUROPE FOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS A journey to Europe was not the common thing in those days that it has since become, and no American had then thought of tramping over historic scenes with little or no money. So this journey, projected and carried out by Bayard Taylor, was really an original and daring undertaking. It was all the more remarkable from the fact that the people of the community where he had been born and brought up had scarcely ever gone farther from their homesteads than Philadelphia. In New York he visited all the editors with an introduction from Nathaniel P. Willis; but none of them gave him any encouragement, except Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the _Tribune_. Here is Bayard Taylor's own description of the interview: "When I first called upon this gentleman, whose friendship it is now my pride to claim, he addressed me with that honest bluntness which is habitual to him: 'I am sick of descriptive letters, and will have no more of them. But I should like some sketches of German life and society, after you have been there and know something about it. If the letters are good, you shall be paid for them, but don't write until you know something.' This I faithfully promised, and kept my promise so well that I am afraid the eighteen letters which I afterward sent from Germany, and which were published in the _Tribune_, were dull in proportion as they were wise." The journey was indeed to Taylor a serious thing. "It did not and does not seem like a pleasure excursion," he writes; "it is a duty, a necessity." On the 1st of July, 1844, Taylor and his two companions embarked on the ship "Oxford," bound for Liverpool. They had taken a second-cabin passage, the second cabin being a small place amidships, flanked with bales of cotton and fitted with temporary and rough planks. They paid ten dollars each for the passage, but were obliged to find their own bedding and provisions. These latter the ship's cook would prepare for them for a small compensation. All expenses included, they found they could reach Liverpool for twenty-four dollars apiece. At last they were actually afloat. "As the blue hills of Neversink faded away, and sank with the sun behind the ocean, and I felt the first swells of the Atlantic," he writes, "and the premonitions of seasickness, my heart failed me for the first and last time. The irrevocable step was taken; there was no possibility of retreat, and a vague sense of doubt and alarm possessed me. Had I known anything of the world, this feeling would have been more than momentary; but to my ignorance and enthusiasm all things seemed possible, and the thoughtless and happy confidence of youth soon returned." The experiences of the next two years he has also told briefly and tersely. "After landing in Liverpool," he says, "I spent three weeks in a walk through Scotland and the north of England, and then traveled through Belgium, and up the Rhine to Heidelberg, where I arrived in September, 1844. The winter of 1844-45 I spent in Frankfurt on the Main [in the family in which N.P. Willis's brother Richard was boarding], and by May I was so good a German that I was often not suspected of being a foreigner. I started off again on foot, a knapsack on my back, and visited the Brocken, Leipsic, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, returning to Frankfurt in July. A further walk over the Alps and through Northern Italy took me to Florence, where I spent four months learning Italian. Thence I wandered, still on foot, to Rome and Civita Vecchia, where I bought a ticket as deck-passenger to Marseilles, and then tramped on to Paris through the cold winter rains. I arrived there in February, 1846, and returned to America after a stay of three months in Paris and London. I had been abroad two years, and had supported myself entirely during the whole time by my literary correspondence. The remuneration which I received was in all $500, and only by continual economy and occasional self-denial was I able to carry out my plan. I saw almost nothing of intelligent European society; my wanderings led me among the common people. But literature and art were nevertheless open to me, and a new day had dawned in my life." CHAPTER VII THE HARDSHIP OF TRAMP TRAVEL Making a journey without money, without knowing the language of the people, and without any experience in travel is not at all the sort of thing it seems to one who has not gone through its toils, but only sees the glow and glamour of success. We cannot pass on without giving some of the details of commonplace hardship which Bayard Taylor endured on this first European journey. Taylor knew a little book French, but neither he nor either of his companions could speak it or understand it when spoken, and they knew nothing at all of German. When they reached Frankfurt they tried to inquire the way to the house of the American consul. At first they were not at all able to make themselves understood; but finally they found a man who could speak a little French and who told them that the consul resided in "Bellevue" street. It was in reality "Shone Aussicht," which is the German for beautiful view, as Bellevue is the French. But the young travelers knew nothing of this. They went in search of "Bellevue" street, and though they wandered over the greater part of the town and suburbs, they did not find it. At last they decided to try all the streets which had a beautiful view, and in this way soon found the consul's house. Not only did they have very little money in any case, but they were frequently obliged to wait months for remittances. While in Italy, Taylor's funds ran so low, and he became so discouraged, that he gave up going to Greece, as he had at first planned. He was expecting a draft for a hundred dollars; but that would barely pay his debts. "My clothes," he writes to one of his companions, "are as bad as yours were when you got to Heidelberg, nearly dropping from me; and I cannot get them mended. What is worse, they must last till I get to Paris." Later he speaks of spending three dollars for a pair of trousers, as those he wore would not hold together any longer. In despair, he exclaims, "It is really a horrible condition. If there ever were any young men who made the tour of Europe under such difficulties and embarrassments as we, I should like to see them." But all this only urged him to greater efforts. "I tell you what, Frank," he writes almost in his next letter, "I am getting a real rage in me to carve out my own fortune, and not a poor one, either. Sometimes I almost desire that difficulties should be thrown in my way, for the sake of the additional strength gained in surmounting them." These words were written from Italy; but yet harder things were in store for him. "I reached London for the second time about the middle of March, 1846," he writes in his paper on "A Young Author's Life in London," "after a dismal walk through Normandy and a stormy passage across the Channel. I stood upon London Bridge, in the raw mist and the falling twilight, with a franc and a half in my pocket, and deliberated what I should do. Weak from sea-sickness, hungry, chilled, and without a single acquaintance in the great city, my situation was about as hopeless as it is possible to conceive. Successful authors in their libraries, sitting in cushioned chairs and dipping their pens into silver inkstands, may write about money with a beautiful scorn, and chant the praise of Poverty--the 'good goddess of Poverty,' as George Sand, making 50,000 francs a year, enthusiastically terms her;--but there is no condition in which the Real is so utterly at variance with the Ideal, as to be actually out of money, and hungry, with nothing to pawn and no friend to borrow from. Have you ever known it, my friend? If not, I could wish that you might have the experience for twenty-four hours, only once in your life." On this occasion Bayard Taylor went to a chop-house where he could get a wretched bed for a shilling. The next morning he took a sixpenny breakfast, and started out to look for work. By good fortune he met Putnam, the American publisher, who lent him a sovereign (five dollars) and gave him work that would enable him to earn his living until he could get money from America for his return passage. CHAPTER VIII HIS FIRST LOVE AND GREATEST SORROW At the very first school which Bayard Taylor attended there was a little Quaker girl who would whisper with a blush to her teacher, "May I sit beside Bayard?" Her name was Mary Agnew. As schoolmates and neighbors the two children grew up together; and in time Bayard began to confide to his diary his dream of happiness with her. Toward this object, all his thoughts and plans were gradually directed. Mary Agnew's father did not countenance this neighbor lover, however, and when Bayard set out for Europe he was not allowed to write to her. He sent messages through his mother, and occasionally heard from the young girl in the same way. On his return, however, he grew more bold, and soon became openly engaged to her. The romance is a sadly beautiful one; for this fair girl who was his inspiration during the years of his hardest struggles, finally fell into a decline and died just as he was beginning to earn the money that would have made them happy together. "I remember him," says a neighbor, speaking of the two at this time, "as a bright, blushing, diffident youth, just entering manhood; and with him I always associate that gentle and beautiful girl, with matchless eyes, who inspired many of his early lyrics, and whose death filled the nest of love with snow." Mary Agnew reminds us of Poe's beautiful Virginia Clemm, his "Annabel Lee." Grace Greenwood wrote of her as "a dark-eyed young girl with the rose yet unblighted on cheek and lip, with soft brown, wavy hair, which, when blown by the wind, looked like the hair oft given to angels by the old masters, producing a sort of halo-like effect about a lovely head." And Taylor at this time was evidently her match in looks as well as spirit. A German friend describes him thus: "He was a tall, slender, blooming young man, the very image of youthful beauty and purity. His intellectual head was surrounded by dark hair; the glance of his eyes was so modest, and yet so clear and lucid, that you seemed to look right into his heart." On his return from Europe, young Taylor found that his letters to the newspapers had attracted some attention, perhaps largely owing to the fact that one who was almost a boy had made the journey on foot, with little or no money. At the same time he had told his story in a simple, straightforward way, which proved him to be a good reporter. Friends advised him to gather the letters into a volume, which he did under the title, "Views Afoot; or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff." Within a year six editions were sold, and the sale continued large for a number of years. Yet this success, quick as it was, did not solve all his difficulties at once. He was anxious to earn a good living as soon as possible, that he might marry Mary Agnew. After looking the field over, he and a friend bought a weekly paper published in Phoenixville, a lively manufacturing town in the same county as his home. This, with the aid of his friend, he edited and managed for a year. He not only failed to make money, but accumulated debts which he was three years in paying off. At the same time he found that he could no longer endure a narrow country life. He tried to give his paper a literary tone; but the people did not want a literary paper. They cared more for local news and gossip, which he hated. The old ambition and aspiration to be and to do something really worth doing was still uppermost with him. In a letter to Mary Agnew he says: "Sometimes I feel as if there were a Providence watching over me, and as if an unseen and uncontrollable hand guided my actions. I have often dim, vague forebodings that an eventful destiny is in store for me; that I have vast duties yet to accomplish, and a wider sphere of action than that which I now occupy. These thoughts may be vain; they spring only from the ceaseless impulses of an upward-aspiring spirit; but if they _are_ real, and to be fulfilled, I shall the more need thy love and the gladness of thy dear presence." He wrote to his friends in New York about getting work there, but they did not encourage him much. Horace Greeley bluntly advised him to stay where he was. The editor of the _Literary World,_ however, offered him employment at five dollars a week. He thereupon sold out his interest in his country paper at a loss, and went to try his fortunes in New York. Before he had been there many weeks, Horace Greeley offered him a position on the _Tribune_ at twelve dollars a week. The connection thus begun lasted for the rest of his life. It was as the _Tribunes_ correspondent that he traveled all over the world. He was soon able to buy stock in the _Tribune_ company, and this was the foundation of his future fortune. He had many literary and other distinguished friends in New York. And during these first few years he worked very hard indeed, hoping soon to earn enough money to provide for Mary Agnew. In 1850, after three years in New York, he was able to set the date of their marriage. But it was postponed from time to time on account of her illness. At last he knew that she could never be well again; yet in any case he wished the marriage ceremony performed. They were accordingly married October 24, 1850; and two months later she was dead. CHAPTER IX "THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAVELER" It had been Bayard Taylor's boyhood ambition to become a great poet; but it seemed as if fate meant him for a great traveler. He was sorry that this was so: yet he was fond of travel, and never refused any opportunity to visit other lands. In 1849, when the California gold fever was at its height, he was sent by the _Tribune_ to the Pacific Coast. "I went," he says, "by way of the Isthmus of Panama--the route had just been opened--reached San Francisco in August, and spent five months in the midst of the rough, half-savage life of a new country. I lived almost entirely in the open air, sleeping on the ground with my saddle for a pillow, and sharing the hardships of the gold diggers, without taking part in their labors." On his return he gathered his letters into a volume entitled "Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire: comprising a voyage to California, via Panama; Life in San Francisco and Monterey; Pictures of the Gold Region, and Experiences of Mexican Travel." He now began to feel the strength and confidence of success; his brain was seething with new ideas, and he felt as if he could do that which would realize the destiny of which he had dreamed. But sorrow was already at his door. His hopes were for the time broken and thrown back by the death of Mary Agnew. In the summer of 1851 he found himself worn out and depressed. His health was shattered and his mind was overpowered. But a change and rest were at hand. The editors of the _Tribune_ suggested his going to Egypt and the Holy Land. In the autumn he set out, and spent the winter in ascending the Nile to Khartoum. He even went up the White Nile to the country of the Shillooks, a region then scarcely known to white men. Bayard Taylor fancied that he had two natures, one a southern nature and one a northern nature. Of course the northern nature was his regular and ordinary one. In one of his later journeys, when he had entered Spain from France and was sitting down to a breakfast of red mullet and oranges fresh from the trees, "straightway," he says, "I took off my northern nature as a garment, folded it and packed it neatly away in my knapsack, and took out in its stead the light, beribboned and bespangled southern nature, which I had not worn for eight or nine years." He donned this southern nature for the first time on his trip to California by way of Panama. Horace Greeley especially commended his letter from Panama. But it was during his journey in Egypt that he became most saturated with the south, and composed his "Poems of the Orient"--perhaps the best he ever wrote. He had not been in Alexandria a day and a half before he wrote to his mother that he had never known such a delicious climate. "The very air is a luxury to breathe," he said. "I am going to don the red cap and sash," he wrote from Cairo, "and sport a saber at my side. To-day I had my hair all cut within a quarter of an inch of the skin, and when I look in the glass I see a strange individual. Think of me as having no hair, a long beard, and a copper-colored face." So much like a native did he become that when he entered the bank in Constantinople for his letters and money, they addressed him in Turkish. He made the journey up the Nile on a boat with a wealthy German landowner, a Mr. Bufleb, who became to him like a brother, though he was nearly twice the age of Taylor. Some years later the young man married Mrs. Bufleb's niece. When he reached Constantinople he received a letter from the managers of the _Tribune_ suggesting that he go across Asia to Hong-Kong, China, and join the expedition of Commodore Perry to Japan. As the expedition would not reach Hong-Kong for some months, however, he had time to visit his German friend and go on to London. From London he returned through Spain and went by way of the Suez, Bombay, and Calcutta to China, stopping on the way to view the Himalayas. Commodore Perry made the young journalist "master's mate," and gave him a place on the flagship. This was necessary, because no one not a member of the navy was allowed to accompany the expedition. There is not space to detail the wonderful sights he saw or the interesting experiences he had. He reached New York, December 20, 1853, after an absence of more than two years, and found that in his absence he had become almost famous. His letters in the _Tribune_ had been read all over the country, and everybody wanted to know more of the "great American traveler." He at once prepared for the press three books. They were "A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the Nile "; "The Land of the Saracens; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain"; and "A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853." He had hundreds of calls to lecture; and thereafter for several years he made lecturing his principal business. From his books and his lectures he received large sums of money, so that before he was thirty he had accumulated a modest fortune. In 1856 Bayard Taylor took his two sisters and his youngest brother to Europe. He left them in Germany, while he himself carried out a plan long in his mind, of visiting northern Sweden and Lapland in winter. The following summer he visited Norway, and later published the results of these journeys in "Northern Travel." While in Germany, after his trip to Sweden, he became engaged to Marie Hansen, daughter of Prof. Peter A. Hansen, the noted astronomer and founder of Erfurt Observatory. They were married in the following autumn, October 27, 1857. He now hurried home with his wife and prepared to build a house and lay out the country estate which he called Cedarcroft. The land had belonged to one of his ancestors, and he was very proud of his fine country house; but he found it a rather expensive enjoyment. CHAPTER X HIS POETRY We have seen how in youth Bayard Taylor conceived the ambition to be known as one of his country's great poets. He saw his books of travel sell by the hundred thousand; but while this brought him money and notoriety, he clung still to his poetry. He even felt annoyed when he heard himself spoken of as "the great American traveler" instead of the great American poet. The truth is, he had not been able to give to poetry the time or energy he could have wished; and he afterwards worked with desperate energy to recover those lost poetic opportunities. Yet in his busiest days he was always writing verses, which in the minds of excellent judges are the best he ever did. From time to time he published volumes of poetry, and with certain of his intimate friends he always maintained himself on the footing of a poet. We remember the publication of his first volume, entitled "Ximena," which he never cared to reprint in his collected works. During his first European trip he wrote a great deal. Some of his shorter poems he afterwards published under the title "Rhymes of Travel." The fate of a longer poem we must hear in his own words. "I had in my knapsack," he says, "a manuscript poem of some twelve hundred lines, called 'The Liberated Titan,'--the idea of which I fancied to be something entirely new in literature. Perhaps it was. I did not doubt for a moment that any London publisher would gladly accept it, and I imagined that its appearance would create not a little sensation. Mr. Murray gave the poem to his literary adviser, who kept it about a month, and then returned it with a polite message. I was advised to try Moxon; but, by this time, I had sobered down considerably, and did not wish to risk a second rejection. "I therefore solaced myself by reading the immortal poem at night, in my bare chamber, looking occasionally down into the graveyard, and thinking of mute, inglorious Miltons. "The curious reader may ask how I escaped the catastrophe of publishing the poem at last. That is a piece of good fortune for which I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford. We were fellow-passengers on board the same ship to America, a few weeks later, and I had sufficient confidence in his taste to show him the poem. His verdict was charitable; but he asserted that no poem of that length should be given to the world before it had received the most thorough study and finish--and exacted from me a promise not to publish it within a year. At the end of that time I renewed the promise to myself for a thousand years." Of other poems written at that time he thought better. In the preface to his volume he says of them,--"They are faithful records of my feelings at the time, often noted down hastily by the wayside, and aspiring to no higher place than the memory of some pilgrim who may, under like circumstances, look upon the same scenes. An ivy leaf from a tower where a hero of old history may have dwelt, or the simplest weed growing over the dust that once held a great soul, is reverently kept for memories it inherited through the chance fortune of the wind-sown seed; and I would fain hope that these rhymes may bear with them a like simple claim to reception, from those who have given me their company through the story of my wanderings." Soon after he went to New York he began a series of Californian ballads, which were published anonymously in the _Literary World_, and attracted considerable attention. They appeared before he had made his trip to California; but while on that trip he wrote still others. At the same time he began several more ambitious poems, among them "Hylas," and just before he set out for Egypt he had another volume of poems ready for the press. It was entitled "A Book of Romances, Lyrics and Songs," and was published in Boston just after he set out on his Eastern journey. But while his volumes of travel sold edition after edition his volumes of verse scarcely paid expenses. The previous year, however,--1850,--he had had a bit of success which caused him no end of annoyance. Jenny Lind had been brought to America to sing, and her manager had offered a prize of $200 for the best song that might be written for her. "Bayard Taylor came to me one afternoon early in September," says Mr. R.H. Stoddard, "and confided to me the fact that he was to be declared the winner of this perilous prize, and that he foresaw a row. They will say it was given to me because Putnam, who is my publisher, is one of the committee, and because Ripley, who is my associate on the _Tribune_, is another.'" Mr. Stoddard kindly suggested to him that if he feared the results, he might substitute his (Stoddard's) name for the real one, and take the money while Stoddard got the abuse. He did not choose to do this, however, and the indignation of the seven or eight hundred disappointed contributors was unbounded. Taylor bore their abuse well enough, but he was heartily ashamed of the reputation which the poem brought him. CHAPTER XI "POEMS OF THE ORIENT" During the months he spent in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, Bayard Taylor wrote his "Poems of the Orient," of which Mr. Stoddard says, "I thought, and I think so still when I read these spirited and picturesque poems, that Bayard Taylor had captured the poetic secret of the East as no English-writing poet but Byron had. He knew the East as no one can possibly know it from books." Certainly these poems of the East have a haunting ring that can never be forgotten. What more stirring than this Bedouin love song! From the desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire. Under thy window I stand, And the midnight hears my cry: I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die, _Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold_! Or what more grand and affectionate than this from "Hassan to his Mare": Come, my beauty! come, my desert darling! On my shoulder lay thy glossy head! Fear not, though the barley-sack be empty, Here's the half of Hassan's scanty bread. Thou shalt have thy share of dates, my beauty! And thou know'st my water-skin is free; Drink and welcome, for the wells are distant, And my strength and safety lie in thee. Bend thy forehead now, to take my kisses! Lift in love thy dark and splendid eye: Thou art glad when Hassan mounts the saddle,-- Thou art proud he owns thee: so am I. Let the Sultan bring his boasted horses, Prancing with their diamond-studded reins; They, my darling, shall not match thy fleetness When they course with thee the desert plains! Let the Sultan bring his famous horses, Let him bring his golden swords to me,-- Bring his slaves, his eunuchs, and his harem; He would offer them in vain for thee. We have seen Damascus, O my beauty! And the splendor of the Pashas there: What's their pomp and riches? Why, I would not Take them for a handful of thy hair! Another stirring poem of the East is "Tyre." The wild and windy morning is lit with lurid fire; The thundering surf of ocean beats on the rocks of Tyre,-- Beats on the fallen columns and round the headlands roars, And hurls its foamy volume along the hollow shores, And calls with hungry clamor, that speaks its long desire: "Where are the ships of Tarshish, the mighty ships of Tyre?" In his "L'Envoi" at the end of these poems, Bayard Taylor gives us a hint of his meaning when he spoke of his "southern nature" as distinguished from his "northern nature." I found, among those Children of the Sun, The cipher of my nature,--the release Of baffled powers, which else had never won That free fulfillment, whose reward is peace. For not to any race or any clime Is the complete sphere of life revealed; He who would make his own that round sublime, Must pitch his tent on many a distant field. Upon his home a dawning lustre beams, But through the world he walks to open day, Gathering from every land the prismal gleams, Which, when united, form the perfect ray. CHAPTER XII BAYARD TAYLOR'S FRIENDSHIPS A biography of Bayard Taylor would not be complete without some account of his friendships. He was always on the best of terms with all living beings, and this subtle attraction of his nature was an important part of his greatness. In "Views Afoot" he tells of a charming little incident which is enough in itself to make us love the man. It occurred in Florence, Italy, where he was a stranger, a foreigner; and this makes the incident in itself seem the more wonderful. "I know of nothing," he writes, "that has given me a more sweet and tender delight than the greeting of a little child, who, leaving his noisy playmates, ran across the street to me, and taking my hand, which he could barely clasp in both his soft little ones, looked up in my face with an expression so winning and affectionate that I loved him at once." We recall the girl with the tea-cakes whom he met on his first journey while tramping across New Jersey. There was also something of human love and fellowship in his familiarity with wild animals in Egypt. In a free, joyous letter to his betrothed, Mary Agnew, he tells a curious incident of a similar kind, which occurred while he was editing the paper at Phoenixville. "On Sunday," says he, "I took [Schiller's] 'Don Carlos' with me in our boat, and rowed myself out of sight of the village into the solitude of the autumn woods. The sky was blue and bright as that of Eden, and the bright trees waved over me like gorgeous banners from the hilltops. I sat on a sunny slope and read for hours; it was a rare enjoyment! As I moved to rise I found a snake, which had crept up to me for warmth, and was coiled up quietly under my arm. I was somewhat startled, but the reptile slid noiselessly away, and I could not harm it." A pretty story is told of Taylor by one who called on him when he was on one of his lecture tours. He was a stranger in the house of strangers, and no doubt as much a stranger to the cat as to any of the people; but it did not take him long to slip into easy intercourse with men or animals. "I had listened for some time to his intelligent descriptions, enunciated with extreme modesty in the modulated tones of his pleasing voice, when Tom, a large Maltese cat, entered the room. At Mr. Taylor's invitation Tom approached him, and as he stroked the fur of the handsome cat, a sort of magnetism seemed to be imparted to the family pet, for he rolled over at the feet of his new-made friend, and seemed delighted with the beginning of the interview. In the most natural manner possible, Mr. Taylor slid off, as it were, from the sofa on which he had been sitting, and assumed the position of a Turk on the rug before the sofa, playing with delighted Tom in the most buoyant manner, still continuing his conversation, but changing the subject, for the nonce, to that of cats, and narrating many stories respecting the weird and wise conduct of these animals, which are at once loved and feared by the human race." He even felt a sort of personal tenderness for the old trees on his place at Kennett. He said that friends were telling him to cut this tree and cut that. To him this would have been almost a sacrilege. The trees seemed to depend on him for _protection_, and they should have it. Writing from this country home which he had built, he says, "The birds know me already, and I have learned to imitate the partridge and rain-dove, so that I can lure them to me." And Bayard Taylor was the accepted friend of nearly all the distinguished men of letters of his time. He knew Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes in Boston, and even in his early years, when he first went to New York to work, he was able to pay them such flying visits as he describes in the following to Mary Agnew: "Reached Boston Sunday morning, galloped out to Cambridge, and spent the evening with Lowell; went on Monday to the pine woods of Abingdon to report Webster's speech, and dispatched it to the _Tribune_; got up early on Tuesday and galloped to Brookline to see Colonel Perkins; then off in the cars to Amesbury, and rambled over the Merrimac hills with Whittier; then Wednesday morning to Lynn, where I stopped a while at Helen Irving's; back in the afternoon to Cambridge, where I smoked a cigar with Lowell, and then stayed all night at Longfellow's." In New York his enjoyment of his friends, whom he met often and familiarly, was of the keenest. Says Mr. R. H. Stoddard, "I recall many nights which Bayard Taylor spent in our rooms.... Great was our merriment; for if we did not always sink the shop, we kept it solely for our own amusement. Fitz-James O'Brien was a frequent guest, and an eager partaker of our merriment, which sometimes resolved itself into the writing of burlesque poems. We sat around a table, and whenever the whim seized us, we each wrote down themes on little pieces of paper, and putting them into a hat or box we drew out one at random, and then scribbled away for dear life. We put no restriction upon ourselves: we could be grave or gay, or idiotic even; but we must be rapid, for half the fun was in noting who first sang out, 'Finished!'" The reader will remember Taylor's joy when a boy at receiving the autograph of Dickens. The time was coming when he should be on terms almost of intimacy with all the leading poets and writers of London. "I spent two days with Tennyson in June," he writes to a literary friend in 1857, "and you take my word for it, he is a noble fellow, every inch of him. He is as tall as I am, with a head which Read capitally calls that of a dilapidated Jove, long black hair, splendid dark eyes, and a full mustache and beard. The portraits don't look a bit like him; they are handsomer, perhaps, but haven't half the splendid character of his face. We smoked many a pipe together, and talked of poetry, religion, politics, and geology.... Our intercourse was most cordial and unrestrained, and he asked me, at parting, to be sure and visit him every time I came to England." A similar tale might be told of his relations with Thackeray and a score of others. But an account of his friendships would not be complete without a reference to Mr. Bufleb, whom he met on his journey up the Nile. Taylor writes to his mother from Nubia: "I want to speak of the friend from whom I have just parted, because I am very much moved by his kindness, and the knowledge may be grateful to you. His friendship for me is something wonderful, and it seems like a special Providence that in Egypt, where I anticipated the want of all near sympathy and kindness, I should find it in such abundant measure. He is a man of totally different experience from myself: accustomed all his life to wealth, to luxury, and to the exercise of authority. He was even prejudiced against America and the Americans, and he confessed to me that he was by nature stubborn and selfish. Yet few persons have ever placed such unbounded confidence in me, or treated me with such devotion and generosity.... For two days before our parting he could scarcely eat or sleep, and when the time drew near he was so pale and agitated that I almost feared to leave him. I have rarely been so moved as when I saw a strong, proud man exhibit such an attachment for me.... I told him all my history, and showed him the portrait I have with me [that of Mary Agnew]. He went out of the cabin after looking at it, and when he returned I saw that he had been weeping." Surely, there must have been something peculiarly noble and sweet in Bayard Taylor's nature to have drawn to him so powerfully a man of another nation and another race. The friendship was lasting, and Taylor spent many happy weeks at Mr. Bufleb's home in Gotha, Germany. The latter even bought a little house and garden adjoining his own estate, which was for the special use of his friend, and he closes the letter which describes it by saying: "You see how I have written to you, my dear Taylor. In spite of our long separation and remoteness from each other, your heart I know could never tell you of any change in my feelings and thoughts. On the contrary, this _rapport_ which we enjoy has for me a profound meaning; whilst you were dedicating your glorious work on Central Africa to me, I was setting in order for you the most cherished part of my possessions." CHAPTER XIII LAST YEARS With the building of Cedarcroft, and the publication of his "Poet's Journal," Bayard Taylor's fame and fortune reached their height. The Civil War was now on the point of breaking out. He entered into the Northern cause with ardor, and even sold a share of _Tribune_ stock to raise a thousand dollars with which to fit out his brother Frederick and provide arms for his neighbors to defend their homes. But the war put an end to his lectures, and cut off other sources of his income. In 1862 he was appointed secretary of legation at the court of St. Petersburg, and not long after was left there as _charge d'affaires_. The cause of the Union had received some heavy reverses, and France had invited England and Russia to join her in intervening between the combatants. But, perhaps owing to Bayard Taylor's diplomatic skill, Russia refused to take part in such an enterprise without the express desire of the United States. About this time, also, Taylor began to write a series of novels, in the hope of bettering his fortunes thereby. The books brought him some reputation, but to-day "Hannah Thurston" and "John Godfrey's Fortunes" are seldom read. A more important undertaking was his translation of "Faust," which was accepted abroad as a monument of his scholarship, and remains to-day one of the best translations into English of the great Goethe's most famous work. Other books of travel were written and published, and various fresh volumes of poems. During this period of his life he produced most of his longer descriptive and philosophic poems, such as "The Picture of St. John," "Lars," and "Prince Deukalion"; but his songs and ballads have proved more popular than these, though he threw into them all his energy and ambition. On July 4, 1876, he delivered his stately National Ode at the Philadelphia Centennial, and the same year he returned to his desk at the _Tribune_ office. But failing health compelled him to give up this drudgery, and in the following year he was nominated United States minister to Berlin. A grand banquet at which Bryant presided was given him in New York, on April 4, the eve of his departure; but before the year was finished he died in Berlin--December 19, 1878. 
16931	----	FOUR AMERICAN LEADERS BY CHARLES W. ELIOT BOSTON AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 1906 Copyright, 1906 American Unitarian Association _Note_ The four essays in this volume were written for celebrations or commemorations in which several persons took part. Each of them is, therefore, only a partial presentation of the life and character of its subject. The delineation in every case is not comprehensive and proportionate, but rather portrays the man in some of his aspects and qualities. _Contents_ I. Franklin 1 An address delivered before the meeting of the American Philosophical Society to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, April 20, 1906. II. Washington 31 An address given before the Union League Club of Chicago at the exercises in commemoration of the birth of Washington, February 23, 1903. III. Channing 57 An address made at the unveiling of the Channing statue on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing, Boston, June 1, 1903. IV. Emerson 73 An address delivered on the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, May 24, 1903. _Four American Leaders_ FRANKLIN The facts about Franklin as a printer are simple and plain, but impressive. His father, respecting the boy's strong disinclination to become a tallow-chandler, selected the printer's trade for him, after giving him opportunities to see members of several different trades at their work, and considering the boy's own tastes and aptitudes. It was at twelve years of age that Franklin signed indentures as an apprentice to his older brother James, who was already an established printer. By the time he was seventeen years old he had mastered the trade in all its branches so completely that he could venture, with hardly any money in his pocket, first into New York and then into Philadelphia without a friend or acquaintance in either place, and yet succeed promptly in earning his living. He knew all departments of the business. He was a pressman as well as a compositor. He understood both newspaper and book work. There were at that time no such sharp subdivisions of labor and no such elaborate machinery as exist in the trade to-day; and Franklin could do with his own eyes and hands, long before he was of age, everything which the printer's art was then equal to. When the faithless Governor Keith caused Franklin to land in London without any resources whatever except his skill at his trade, the youth was fully capable of supporting himself in the great city as a printer. Franklin had been induced by the governor to go to England, where he was to buy a complete outfit for a good printing office to be set up in Philadelphia. He had already presented the governor with an inventory of the materials needed in a small printing office, and was competent to make a critical selection of all these materials; yet when he arrived in London on this errand he was only eighteen years old. Thrown completely on his own resources in the great city, he immediately got work at a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, but soon moved to a still larger printing house, in which he remained during the rest of his stay in London. Here he worked as a pressman at first, but was soon transferred to the composing room, evidently excelling his comrades in both branches of the art. The customary drink money was demanded of him, first by the pressmen with whom he was associated, and afterwards by the compositors. Franklin undertook to resist the second demand; and it is interesting to learn that after a resistance of three weeks he was forced to yield to the demands of the men by just such measures as are now used against any scab in a unionized printing office. He says in his autobiography: "I had so many little pieces of private mischief done me by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages, breaking my matter, and so forth, if I were ever so little out of the room ... that, notwithstanding the master's protection, I found myself obliged to comply and pay the money, convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually." He was stronger than any of his mates, kept his head clearer because he did not fuddle it with beer, and availed himself of the liberty which then existed of working as fast and as much as he chose. On this point he says: "My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally better paid. So I went on now very agreeably." On his return to Philadelphia Franklin obtained for a few months another occupation than that of printer; but this employment failing through the death of his employer, Franklin returned to printing, becoming the manager of a small printing office, in which he was the only skilled workman and was expected to teach several green hands. At that time he was only twenty-one years of age. This printing office often wanted sorts, and there was no type-foundry in America. Franklin succeeded in contriving a mould, struck the matrices in lead, and thus supplied the deficiencies of the office. The autobiography says: "I also engraved several things on occasion; I made the ink; I was warehouse man and everything, and in short quite a factotum." Nevertheless, he was dismissed before long by his incompetent employer, who, however, was glad to re-engage him a few days later on obtaining a job to print some paper money for New Jersey. Thereupon Franklin contrived a copperplate press for this job--the first that had been seen in the country--and cut the ornaments for the bills. Meantime Franklin, with one of the apprentices, had ordered a press and types from London, that they two might set up an independent office. Shortly after the New Jersey job was finished, these materials arrived in Philadelphia, and Franklin immediately opened his own printing office. His partner "was, however, no compositor, a poor pressman, and seldom sober." The office prospered, and in July, 1730, when Franklin was twenty-four years old, the partnership was dissolved, and Franklin was at the head of a well-established and profitable printing business. This business was the foundation of Franklin's fortune; and better foundation no man could desire. His industry was extraordinary. Contrary to the current opinion, Dr. Baird of St. Andrews testified that the new printing office would succeed, "for the industry of that Franklin," he said, "is superior to anything I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I go home from the club, and he is at work again before the neighbors are out of bed." No trade rules or customs limited or levied toll on his productiveness. He speedily became by far the most successful printer in all the colonies, and in twenty years was able to retire from active business with a competency. One would, however, get a wrong impression of Franklin's career as a printer, if he failed to observe that from his boyhood Franklin constantly used his connection with a printing office to facilitate his remarkable work as an author, editor, and publisher. Even while he was an apprentice to his brother James he succeeded in getting issued from his brother's press ballads and newspaper articles of which he was the anonymous author. When he had a press of his own he used it for publishing a newspaper, an almanac, and numerous essays composed or compiled by himself. His genius as a writer supported his skill and industry as a printer. The second part of the double subject assigned to me is Franklin as philosopher. The philosophy he taught and illustrated related to four perennial subjects of human interest--education, natural science, politics, and morals. I propose to deal in that order with these four topics. Franklin's philosophy of education was elaborated as he grew up, and was applied to himself throughout his life. In the first place, he had no regular education of the usual sort. He studied and read with an extraordinary diligence from his earliest years; but he studied only the subjects which attracted him, or which he himself believed would be good for him, and throughout life he pursued only those inquiries for pursuing which he found within himself an adequate motive. The most important element in his training was reading, for which he had a precocious desire which was imperative, and proved to be lasting. His opportunities to get books were scanty; but he seized on all such opportunities, and fortunately he early came upon the "Pilgrim's Progress," the Spectator, Plutarch, Xenophon's "Memorabilia," and Locke "On the Human Understanding." Practice of English composition was the next agency in Franklin's education; and his method--quite of his own invention--was certainly an admirable one. He would make brief notes of the thoughts contained in a good piece of writing, and lay these notes aside for several days; then, without looking at the book, he would endeavor to express these thoughts in his own words as fully as they had been expressed in the original paper. Lastly, he would compare his product with the original, thus discovering his shortcomings and errors. To improve his vocabulary he turned specimens of prose into verse, and later, when he had forgotten the original, turned the verse back again into prose. This exercise enlarged his vocabulary and his acquaintance with synonyms and their different shades of meaning, and showed him how he could twist phrases and sentences about. His times for such exercises and for reading were at night after work, before work in the morning, and on Sundays. This severe training he imposed on himself; and he was well advanced in it before he was sixteen years of age. His memory and his imagination must both have served him well; for he not only acquired a style fit for narrative, exposition, or argument, but also learned to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, proverb, and dialogue. The third element in his education was writing for publication; he began very early, while he was still a young boy, to put all he had learned to use in writing for the press. When he was but nineteen years old he wrote and published in London "A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain." In after years he was not proud of this pamphlet; but it was, nevertheless, a remarkable production for a youth of nineteen. So soon as he was able to establish a newspaper in Philadelphia he wrote for it with great spirit, and in a style at once accurate, concise, and attractive, making immediate application of his reading and of the conversation of intelligent acquaintances on both sides of the ocean. His fourth principle of education was that it should continue through life, and should make use of the social instincts. To that end he thought that friends and acquaintances might fitly band together in a systematic endeavor after mutual improvement. The Junto was created as a school of philosophy, morality, and politics; and this purpose it actually served for many years. Some of the questions read at every meeting of the Junto, with a pause after each one, would be curiously opportune in such a society at the present day. For example, No. 5, "Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?" And No. 6, "Do you know of a fellow-citizen ... who has lately committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?" When a new member was initiated he was asked, among other questions, the following: "Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name, or goods, for mere speculative opinions or his external way of worship?" and again, "Do you love truth for truth's sake, and will you endeavor impartially to find it, receive it yourself, and communicate it to others?" The Junto helped to educate Franklin, and he helped greatly to train all its members. The nature of Franklin's own education accounts for many of his opinions on the general subject. Thus, he believed, contrary to the judgment of his time, that Latin and Greek were not essential subjects in a liberal education, and that mathematics, in which he never excelled, did not deserve the place it held. He believed that any one who had acquired a command of good English could learn any other modern language that he really needed when he needed it; and this faith he illustrated in his own person, for he learned French, when he needed it, sufficiently well to enable him to exercise great influence for many years at the French court. As the fruit of his education he exhibited a clear, pungent, persuasive English style, both in writing and in conversation--a style which gave him great and lasting influence among men. It is easy to say that such a training as Franklin's is suitable only for genius. Be that as it may, Franklin's philosophy of education certainly tells in favor of liberty for the individual in his choice of studies, and teaches that a desire for good reading and a capacity to write well are two very important fruits of any liberal culture. It was all at the service of his successor Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia. Franklin's studies in natural philosophy are characterized by remarkable directness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute candor in seeking the truth, and a powerful scientific imagination. What has been usually considered his first discovery was the now familiar fact that northeast storms on the Atlantic coast begin to leeward. The Pennsylvania fireplace he invented was an ingenious application to the warming and ventilating of an apartment of the laws that regulate the movement of hot air. At the age of forty-one he became interested in the subject of electricity, and with the aid of many friends and acquaintances pursued the subject for four years, with no thought about personal credit for inventing either theories or processes, but simply with delight in experimentation and in efforts to explain the phenomena he observed. His kite experiment to prove lightning to be an electrical phenomenon very possibly did not really draw lightning from the cloud; but it supplied evidence of electrical energy in the atmosphere which went far to prove that lightning was an electrical discharge. The sagacity of Franklin's scientific inquiries is well illustrated by his notes on colds and their causes. He maintains that influenzas usually classed as colds do not arise, as a rule, from either cold or dampness. He points out that savages and sailors, who are often wet, do not catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is not taken by swimming. He maintains that people who live in the forest, in open barns, or with open windows, do not catch cold, and that the disease called a cold is generally caused by impure air, lack of exercise, or overeating. He comes to the conclusion that influenzas and colds are contagious--a doctrine which, a century and a half later, was proved, through the advance of bacteriological science, to be sound. The following sentence exhibits remarkable insight, considering the state of medical art at that time: "I have long been satisfied from observation, that besides the general colds now termed influenzas (which may possibly spread by contagion, as well as by a particular quality of the air), people often catch cold from one another when shut up together in close rooms and coaches, and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other's transpiration; the disorder being in a certain state." In the light of present knowledge what a cautious and exact statement is that! There being no learned society in all America at the time, Franklin's scientific experiments were almost all recorded in letters written to interested friends; and he was never in any haste to write these letters. He never took a patent on any of his inventions, and made no effort either to get a profit from them, or to establish any sort of intellectual proprietorship in his experiments and speculations. One of his English correspondents, Mr. Collinson, published in 1751 a number of Franklin's letters to him in a pamphlet called "New Experiments and Observations in Electricity made at Philadelphia in America." This pamphlet was translated into several European languages, and established over the continent--particularly in France--Franklin's reputation as a natural philosopher. A great variety of phenomena engaged his attention, such as phosphorescence in sea water, the cause of the saltness of the sea, the form and the temperatures of the Gulf Stream, the effect of oil in stilling waves, and the cause of smoky chimneys. Franklin also reflected and wrote on many topics which are now classified under the head of political economy,--such as paper currency, national wealth, free trade, the slave trade, the effects of luxury and idleness, and the misery and destruction caused by war. Not even his caustic wit could adequately convey in words his contempt and abhorrence for war as a mode of settling questions arising between nations. He condensed his opinions on that subject into the epigram: "There never was a good war or a bad peace." Franklin's political philosophy may all be summed up in seven words--"first freedom, then public happiness and comfort." The spirit of liberty was born in him. He resented his brother's blows when he was an apprentice, and escaped from them. As a mere boy he refused to attend church on Sundays in accordance with the custom of his family and his town, and devoted his Sundays to reading and study. In practising his trade he claimed and diligently sought complete freedom. In public and private business alike he tried to induce people to take any action desired of them by presenting to them a motive they could understand and feel--a motive which acted on their own wills and excited their hopes. This is the only method possible under a régime of liberty. A perfect illustration of his practice in this respect is found in his successful provision of one hundred and fifty four-horse wagons for Braddock's force, when it was detained on its march from Annapolis to western Pennsylvania by the lack of wagons. The military method would have been to seize horses, wagons, and drivers wherever found. Franklin persuaded Braddock, instead of using force, to allow him (Franklin) to offer a good hire for horses, wagons, and drivers, and proper compensation for the equipment in case of loss. By this appeal to the frontier farmers of Pennsylvania he secured in two weeks all the transportation required. To defend public order Franklin was perfectly ready to use public force, as, for instance, when he raised and commanded a regiment of militia to defend the northwestern frontier from the Indians after Braddock's defeat, and again, when it became necessary to defend Philadelphia from a large body of frontiersmen who had lynched a considerable number of friendly Indians, and were bent on revolutionizing the Quaker government. But his abhorrence of all war was based on the facts, first, that during war the law must be silent, and, secondly, that military discipline, which is essential for effective fighting, annihilates individual liberty. "Those," he said, "who would give up essential liberty for the sake of a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The foundation of his firm resistance on behalf of the colonies to the English Parliament was his impregnable conviction that the love of liberty was the ruling passion of the people of the colonies. In 1766 he said of the American people: "Every act of oppression will sour their tempers, lessen greatly, if not annihilate, the profits of your commerce with them, and hasten their final revolt; for the seeds of liberty are universally found there, and nothing can eradicate them." Because they loved liberty, they would not be taxed without representation; they would not have soldiers quartered on them, or their governors made independent of the people in regard to their salaries; or their ports closed, or their commerce regulated by Parliament. It is interesting to observe how Franklin's experiments and speculations in natural science often had a favorable influence on freedom of thought. His studies in economics had a strong tendency in that direction. His views about religious toleration were founded on his intense faith in civil liberty; and even his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon brought deliverance for mankind from an ancient terror. It removed from the domain of the supernatural a manifestation of formidable power that had been supposed to be a weapon of the arbitrary gods; and since it increased man's power over nature, it increased his freedom. This faith in freedom was fully developed in Franklin long before the American Revolution and the French Revolution made the fundamental principles of liberty familiar to civilized mankind. His views concerning civil liberty were even more remarkable for his time than his views concerning religious liberty; but they were not developed in a passionate nature inspired by an enthusiastic idealism. He was the very embodiment of common sense, moderation, and sober honesty. His standard of human society is perfectly expressed in the description of New England which he wrote in 1772: "I thought often of the happiness in New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!" Such was Franklin's conception of a free and happy people. Such was his political philosophy. The moral philosophy of Franklin consisted almost exclusively in the inculcation of certain very practical and unimaginative virtues, such as temperance, frugality, industry, moderation, cleanliness, and tranquillity. Sincerity and justice, and resolution--that indispensable fly-wheel of virtuous habit--are found in his table of virtues; but all his moral precepts seem to be based on observation and experience of life, and to express his convictions concerning what is profitable, prudent, and on the whole satisfactory in the life that now is. His philosophy is a guide of life, because it searches out virtues, and so provides the means of expelling vices. It may reasonably determine conduct. It did determine Franklin's conduct to a remarkable degree, and has had a prodigious influence for good on his countrymen and on civilized mankind. Nevertheless, it omits all consideration of the prime motive power, which must impel to right conduct, as fire supplies the power which actuates the engine. That motive power is pure, unselfish love--love to God and love to man. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart ... and thy neighbor as thyself." Franklin never seems to have perceived that the supreme tests of civilization are the tender and honorable treatment of women as equals, and the sanctity of home life. There was one primary virtue on his list which he did not always practise. His failures in this respect diminished his influence for good among his contemporaries, and must always qualify the admiration with which mankind will regard him as a moral philosopher and an exhorter to a good life. His sagacity, intellectual force, versatility, originality, firmness, fortunate period of service, and longevity combined to make him a great leader of his people. In American public affairs the generation of wise leaders next to his own felt for him high admiration and respect; and the strong republic, whose birth and youthful growth he witnessed, will carry down his fame as political philosopher, patriot, and apostle of liberty through long generations. WASHINGTON The virtues of Washington were of two kinds, the splendid and the homely; I adopt, for my part in this celebration, some consideration of Washington as a man of homely virtues, giving our far-removed generation a homely example. The first contrast to which I invite your attention is the contrast between the early age at which Washington began to profit by the discipline of real life and the late age at which our educated young men exchange study under masters, and seclusion in institutions of learning, for personal adventure and responsibility out in the world. Washington was a public surveyor at sixteen years of age. He could not spell well; but he could make a correct survey, keep a good journal, and endure the hardships to which a surveyor in the Virginia wilderness was inevitably exposed. Our expectation of good service and hard work from boys of sixteen, not to speak of young men of twenty-six, is very low. I have heard it maintained in a learned college faculty that young men who were on the average nineteen years of age, were not fit to begin the study of economics or philosophy, even under the guidance of skilful teachers, and that no young man could nowadays begin the practice of a profession to advantage before he was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. Now, Washington was at twenty-one the Governor of Virginia's messenger to the French forts beyond the Alleghanies. He was already an accomplished woodman, an astute negotiator with savages and the French, and the cautious yet daring leader of a company of raw, insubordinate frontiersmen, who were to advance 500 miles into a wilderness with nothing but an Indian trail to follow. In 1755, at twenty-three years of age, twenty years before the Revolutionary War broke out, he was a skilful and experienced fighter, and a colonel in the Virginia service. What a contrast to our college under-graduates of to-day, who at twenty-two years of age are still getting their bodily vigor through sports and not through real work, and who seldom seem to realize that, just as soon as they have acquired the use of the intellectual tools and stock with which a livelihood is to be earned in business or in the professions, the training of active life is immeasurably better than the training of the schools! Yet Washington never showed at any age the least spark of genius; he was only "sober, sensible, honest, and brave," as he said of Major-General Lincoln in 1791. By inheritance and by marriage Washington became, while he was still young, one of the richest men in the country; but what a contrast between his sort of riches and our sorts! He was a planter and sportsman--a country gentleman. All his home days were spent in looking after his farms; in breeding various kinds of domestic animals; in fishing for profit; in attending to the diseases and accidents which befall livestock, including slaves; in erecting buildings, and repairing them; in caring for or improving his mills, barns, farm implements, and tools. He always lived very close to nature, and from his boyhood studied the weather, the markets, his crops and woods, and the various qualities of his lands. He was an economical husbandman, attending to all the details of the management of his large estates. He was constantly on horseback, often riding fifteen miles on his daily rounds. At sixty-seven years of age he caught the cold which killed him by getting wet on horseback, riding as usual about his farms. Compare this sort of life, physical and mental, with the life of the ordinary rich American of to-day, who has made his money in stocks and bonds, or as a banker, broker, or trader, or in the management of great transportation or industrial concerns. This modern rich man, in all probability, has nothing whatever to do with nature or with country life. He is soft and tender in body; lives in the city; takes no vigorous exercise, and has very little personal contact with the elemental forces of either nature or mankind. He is not like Washington an out-of-door man. Washington was a combination of land-owner, magistrate, and soldier,--the best combination for a leader of men which the feudal system produced. Our modern rich man is apt to possess no one of these functions, any one of which, well discharged, has in times past commanded the habitual respect of mankind. It is a grave misfortune for our country, and especially for our rich men, that the modern forms of property,--namely, stocks and bonds, mortgages, and city buildings--do not carry with them any inevitable responsibilities to the state, or involve their owner in personal risks and charges as a leader or commander of the people. The most enviable rich man to-day is the intelligent industrial or commercial adventurer or promoter, in the good sense of those terms. He takes risks and assumes burdens on a large scale, and has a chance to develop will, mind, and character, just as Queen Elizabeth's adventurers did all over the then known world. Again, Washington, as I have already indicated, was an economical person, careful about little expenditures as well as great, averse to borrowing money, and utterly impatient of waste. If a slave were hopelessly ill, he did not call a doctor, because it would be a useless expenditure. He insisted that the sewing woman, Carolina, who had only made five shirts in a week, not being sick, should make nine. He entered in his account "thread and needle, one penny," and used said thread and needle himself. All this closeness and contempt for shiftlessness and prodigality were perfectly consistent with a large and hospitable way of living; for during many years of his life he kept open house at Mt. Vernon. This frugal and prudent man knew exactly what it meant to devote his "life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if needful," as he wrote in 1774. This was not an exaggerated or emotional phrase. It was moderate, but it meant business. He risked his whole fortune. What he lost through his service in the Revolutionary War is clearly stated in a letter written from Mt. Vernon in 1784: "I made no money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it, and brought none home with me. Those who owed me, for the most part, took advantage of the depreciation, and paid me off with sixpence in the pound. Those to whom I was indebted, I have yet to pay, without other means, if they will wait, than selling part of my estate, or distressing those who were too honest to take advantage of the tender laws to quit scores with me." Should we not all be glad if to-day a hundred or two multi-millionaires could give such an account as that of their losses incurred in the public service, even if they had not, like Washington, risked their lives as well? In our times we have come to think that a rich man should not be frugal or economical, but rather wasteful or extravagant. We have even been asked to believe that a cheap coat makes a cheap man. If there were a fixed relation between a man's character and the price of his clothes, what improvement we should have seen in the national character since 1893! At Harvard University, twelve hundred students take three meals a day in the great dining-room of Memorial Hall, and manage the business themselves through an elected President and Board of Directors. These officers proscribe stews, apparently because it is a form in which cheap meat may be offered them, neglecting the more important fact that the stew is the most nutritious and digestible form in which meats can be eaten. Mr. Edward Atkinson, the economist, invented an oven in which various kinds of foods may be cheaply and well prepared with a minimum of attention to the process. The workingmen, among whom he attempted to introduce it, took no interest in it whatever, because it was recommended to them as a cheap way of preparing inexpensive though excellent foods. This modern temper affords a most striking contrast to the practices and sentiments of Washington, sentiments and practices which underlay his whole public life as well as his private life. If he were alive to-day, would he not be bewildered by much of our talk about the rights of men and animals? Washington's mind dwelt very little on rights and very much on duties. For him, patriotism was a duty; good citizenship was a duty; and for the masses of mankind it was a duty to clear away the forest, till the ground, and plant fruit trees, just as he prescribed to the hoped-for tenants on his Ohio and Kanawha lands. For men and women in general he thought it a duty to increase and multiply, and to make the wilderness glad with rustling crops, lowing herds, and children's voices. When he retired from the Presidency, he expressed the hope that he might "make and sell a little flour annually." For the first soldier and first statesman of his country, surely this was a modest anticipation of continued usefulness. We think more about our rights than our duties. He thought more about his duties than his rights. Posterity has given him first place because of the way in which he conceived and performed his duties; it will judge the leaders of the present generation by the same standard, whatever their theories about human rights. Having said thus much about contrasts, let me now turn to some interesting resemblances between Washington's times and our own. We may notice in the first place the permanency of the fighting quality in the English-American stock. Washington was all his life a fighter. The entire American people is to-day a fighting people, prone to resort to force and prompt to take arms, the different sections of the population differing chiefly in regard to the nature and amount of the provocation which will move them to violence and combat. To this day nothing moves the admiration of the people so quickly as composure, ingenuity, and success in fighting; so that even in political contests all the terms and similes are drawn from war, and among American sports the most popular have in them a large element of combat. Washington was roused and stimulated by the dangers of the battlefield, and utterly despised cowards, or even men who ran away in battle from a momentary terror which they did not habitually manifest. His early experience taught him, however, that the Indian way of fighting in woods or on broken ground was the most effective way; and he did not hesitate to adopt and advocate that despised mode of fighting, which has now, one hundred and fifty years later, become the only possible mode. The Indian in battle took instantly to cover, if he could find it. In our Civil War both sides learned to throw up breastworks wherever they expected an engagement to take place; and the English in South Africa have demonstrated that the only possible way to fight with the present long range quick-firing guns, is the way in which the "treacherous devils," as Washington called the Indians, fought General Braddock, that is, with stratagem, surprise, and ambuscade; with hiding and crawling behind screens and obstacles; with the least possible appearance in open view, with nothing that can glitter on either arms or clothes, and with no visible distinction between officers and men. War is now a genuinely Indian performance, just as Washington saw one hundred and fifty years ago that it ought to be. The silent Washington's antipathy to the press finds an exact parallel in our own day. He called the writers of the press "infamous scribblers." President Cleveland called them "ghouls." But it must be confessed that the newspapers of Washington's time surpassed those of the present day in violence of language, and in lack of prophetic insight and just appreciation of men and events. When Washington retired from the Presidency the _Aurora_ said, "If ever a Nation was debauched by a man, the American Nation has been debauched by Washington." Some of the weaknesses or errors of the Congresses of Washington's time have been repeated in our own day, and seem as natural to us as they doubtless seemed to the men of 1776 and 1796. Thus, the Continental Congress incurred all the evils of a depreciated currency with the same blindness which afflicted the Congress of the Southern Confederacy and the Union Congress during the Civil War, or the Democrat-Populist party of still more recent times. The refusal of the Congress of 1777 to carry out the agreement made with the Hessian prisoners at Saratoga reminds one of the refusal of Congress, in spite of the public exhortations of our present Executive, and his cabinet, to carry out the understanding with Cuba in regard to the commercial relations of the island with the United States. In both cases the honor of the country was tarnished. The intensity of party spirit in Washington's time closely resembles that of our own day, but was certainly fiercer than it is now, the reason being that the questions at issue were absolutely fundamental. When the question was whether the Constitution of the United States was a sure defence for freedom or a trap to ensnare an unsuspecting people, intensity of feeling on both sides was well-nigh inevitable. During Washington's two administrations a considerable number of the most eminent American publicists feared that dangerous autocratic powers had been conferred on the President by the Constitution. Washington held that there was no ground for these fears, and acted as if the supposition was absurd. When the question was whether we should love and adhere to revolutionary France, or rather become partisans of Great Britain--the power from which we had just won independence--it is no wonder that political passions burnt fiercely. On this question Washington stood between the opposing parties, and often commended himself to neither. In spite of the tremendous partisan heat of the times, Washington, through both his administrations, made appointments to public office from both parties indifferently. He appointed some well-known Tories and many Democrats. He insisted only on fitness as regards character, ability, and experience, and preferred persons, of whatever party, who had already proved their capacity in business or the professions, or in legislative or administrative offices. It is a striking fact that Washington is the only one of the Presidents of the United States who has, as a rule, acted on these principles. His example was not followed by his early successors, or by any of the more recent occupants of the Presidency. His successors, elected by a party, have not seen their way to make appointments without regard to party connections. The Civil Service Reform agitation of the last twenty-five years is nothing but an effort to return, in regard to the humbler national offices, to the practice of President Washington. In spite of these resemblances between Washington's time and our own, the profound contrasts make the resemblances seem unimportant. In the first years of the Government of the United States there was widespread and genuine apprehension lest the executive should develop too much power, and lest the centralization of the Government should become overwhelming. Nothing can be farther from our political thoughts to-day than this dread of the power of the national executive. On the contrary, we are constantly finding that it is feeble where we wish it were strong, impotent where we wish it omnipotent. The Senate of the United States has deprived the President of much of the power intended for his office, and has then found it, on the whole, convenient and desirable to allow itself to be held up by any one of its members who possesses the bodily strength and the assurance to talk or read aloud by the week. Other forces have developed within the Republic quite outside of the Government, which seem to us to override and almost defy the closely limited governmental forces. Quite lately we have seen two of these new forces--one a combination of capitalists, the other a combination of laborers--put the President of the United States into a position of a mediator between two parties whom he could not control, and with whom he must intercede. This is part of the tremendous nineteenth century democratic revolution, and of the newly acquired facilities for combination and association for the promotion of common interests. We no longer dread abuse of the power of state or church; we do dread abuse of the powers of compact bodies of men, highly organized and consenting to be despotically ruled, for the advancement of their selfish interests. Washington was a stern disciplinarian in war; if he could not shoot deserters he wanted them "stoutly whipped." He thought that army officers should be of a different class from their men, and should never put themselves on an equality with their men; he went himself to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and always believed that firm government was essential to freedom. He never could have imagined for a moment the toleration of disorder and violence which is now exhibited everywhere in our country when a serious strike occurs. He was the chief actor through the long struggles, military and civil, which attended the birth of this nation, and took the gravest responsibilities which could then fall to the lot of soldiers or statesmen; but he never encountered, and indeed never imagined, the anxieties and dangers which now beset the Republic of which he was the founder. We face new difficulties. Shall we face them with Washington's courage, wisdom, and success? Finally, I ask your attention to the striking contrast between the wealth of Washington and the poverty of Abraham Lincoln, the only one of the succeeding Presidents who won anything like the place in the popular heart that Washington has always occupied. Washington, while still young, was one of the richest men in the country; Lincoln, while young, was one of the poorest; both rendered supreme service to their country and to freedom; between these two extremes men of many degrees as regards property holding have occupied the Presidency, the majority of them being men of moderate means. The lesson to be drawn from these facts seems to be that the Republic can be greatly served by rich and poor alike, but has oftenest been served creditably by men who were neither rich nor poor. In the midst of the present conflicts between employers and employed, between the classes that are already well to do and the classes who believe it to be the fault of the existing order that they too are not well to do, and in plain sight of the fact that democratic freedom permits the creation and perpetuation of greater differences as regards possessions than the world has ever known before, it is comforting to remember that true patriots and wise men are bred in all the social levels of a free commonwealth, and that the Republic may find in any condition of life safe leaders and just rulers. CHANNING We commemorate to-day a great preacher. It is the fashion to say that preaching is a thing of the past, other influences having taken its place. But Boston knows better; for she had two great preachers in the nineteenth century, and is sure that an immense and enduring force was theirs, and through them, hers. Channing and Brooks! Men very unlike in body and mind, but preachers of like tendency and influence from their common love of freedom and faith in mankind. This city has learned by rich experience that preaching becomes the most productive of all human works the moment the adequate preacher appears--a noble man with a noble message. Such was Channing. His public work was preceded and accompanied by a great personal achievement. All his life he grew in spirit, becoming always freer, broader, and more sympathetic. In forty years he worked his way out of moderate Calvinism without the Trinity into such doctrines as these:--"The idea of God ... is the idea of our own spiritual natures purified and enlarged to infinity." "The sense of duty is the greatest gift of God. The idea of right is the primary and highest revelation of God to the human mind; and all outward revelations are founded on and addressed to it." There is "but one object of cherished and enduring love in heaven or on earth, and that is moral goodness." "I do and I must reverence human nature.... I honor it for its struggles against oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine origin and pledges of a celestial inheritance." "Perfection is man's proper and natural goal." What an immense distance between these doctrines of Channing's maturity and the Calvinism of his youth! He was a meditative, reflecting man, who read much, but took selected thoughts of others into the very substance and fibre of his being, and made them his own. The foundation of his professional power and public influence was this great personal achievement, this attuning of his own soul to noblest harmonies. Thousands of ministers and spiritually-minded laymen of many denominations have travelled since Channing's death the road he laid out, and so have been delivered from the inhuman doctrines of the fall of man, the wrath of God, vicarious atonement, everlasting hell for the majority, and the rescue of a predestined few. They should all join in giving heartfelt praise and thanks to Channing, who thought out clearly, and preached with fervid reiteration, the doctrines which have delivered them from a painful bondage. Another remarkable quality of Channing's teachings is their universality. Men of learning and spirituality in all the civilized nations have welcomed his words, and found in them teachings of enduring and expansive influence. Many Biblical scholars, in the technical sense, have arrived eighty years later at Channing's conclusions about the essential features of Christianity, although Channing was no scholar in the modern sense; while they go far beyond him in treating the Bible as a collection of purely human writings and in rejecting the so-called supernatural quality of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Indeed, many Biblical scholars belonging to-day to evangelical sects have arrived not only at Channing's position, but also at Emerson's. Just how much Channing's published works have had to do with this quiet but fateful revolution no man can tell. The most eminent to-day of American Presbyterian divines preached an excellent sermon in the Harvard College Chapel one Sunday evening not many years ago, and asked me, as we walked away together, how I liked it. I replied: "Very much; it was all straight out of Channing." "That is strange," he said, "for I have never read Channing." It is great testimony to the pervasive quality of a prophet's teachings when they become within fifty years a component of the intellectual atmosphere of the new times. At a dinner of Harvard graduates I once complained that, although I heard in the College Chapel a great variety of preachers connected with many different denominations, the preaching was, after all, rather monotonous, because they all preached Channing. Phillips Brooks spoke after me and said: "The President is right in thinking our present preaching monotonous, and the reason he gives for this monotony is correct; we all do preach Channing." The direct influence of Channing's writings has been vast, for they are read in English in all parts of the world, and have been translated into many languages. Thirty years ago I spent a long day in showing Don Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, some of the interesting things in the laboratories and collections of Harvard University. He was the most assiduous visitor that I ever conducted through the University buildings, intelligently interested in a great variety of objects and ideas. Late in the afternoon he suddenly said, with a fresh eagerness: "Now I will visit the tomb of Channing." We drove to Mount Auburn, and found the monument erected by the Federal Street Church. The Emperor copied with his own hand George Ticknor's inscriptions on the stone, and made me verify his copies. Then, with his great weight and height, he leaped into the air, and snatched a leaf from the maple which overhung the tomb. "I am going to put that leaf," he said, "into my best edition of Channing. I have read all his published works,--some of them many times over. He was a very great man." The Emperor of Brazil was a Roman Catholic. Channing's philanthropy was a legitimate outcome of his view of religion. For him practical religion was character-building by the individual human being. But character-building in any large group or mass of human beings means social reform; therefore Channing was a preacher and active promoter of social regeneration in this world. He depicted the hideous evils and wrongs of intemperance, slavery, and war. He advocated and supported every well-directed effort to improve public education, the administration of charity, and the treatment of criminals, and to lift up the laboring classes. He denounced the bitter sectarian and partisan spirit of his day. He refused entire sympathy to the abolitionists, because of the ferocity and violence of their habitual language and the injustice of their indiscriminate attacks. He distrusted money worship, wealth, and luxury. These sentiments and actions grew straight out of his religious conceptions, and were their legitimate fruit. All his social aspirations and hopes were rooted in his fundamental conception of the fatherhood of God, and its corollary the brotherhood of men. It was his lofty idea of the infinite worth of human nature and of the inherent greatness of the human soul, in contrast with the then prevailing doctrines of human vileness and impotency, which made him resent with such indignation the wrongs of slavery, intemperance, and war, and urge with such ardor every effort to deliver men from poverty and ignorance, and to make them gentler and juster to one another. In no subject which he discussed does the close connection between Channing's theology and his philanthropy appear more distinctly than in education. He says in his remarks on education: ... "There is nothing on earth so precious as the mind, soul, character of the child.... There should be no economy in education. Money should never be weighed against the soul of a child. It should be poured out like water for the child's intellectual and moral life." It is more than two generations since those sentences were written, and still the average public expenditure on the education of a child in the United States is less than fifteen dollars a year. Eastern Massachusetts is the community in the whole world which gives most thought, time, and money to education, public and endowed. Whence came this social wisdom? From Protestantism, from Congregationalism, from the religious teachings of Channing and his disciples. Listen to this sentence: "Benevolence is short-sighted indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education the chief interest of the human race." It is impossible to join in this centennial celebration of the advent to Boston of this religious pioneer and philanthropic leader without perceiving that in certain respects the country has recently fallen away from the moral standards he set up. Channing taught that no real good can come through violence, injustice, greed, and the inculcation of hatred and enmities, or of suspicions and contempts. He believed that public well-being can be promoted only through public justice, freedom, peace, and good will among men. He never could have imagined that there would be an outburst in his dear country, grown rich and strong, of such doctrines as that the might of arms, possessions, or majorities makes right; that a superior civilization may rightly force itself on an inferior by wholesale killing, hurting, and impoverishing; that an extension of commerce, or of missionary activities, justifies war; that the example of imperial Rome is an instructive one for republican America; and that the right to liberty and the brotherhood of man are obsolete sentimentalities. Nevertheless, in spite of these temporary aberrations of the public mind and heart, it is plain that many of Channing's anticipations and hopes have already been realized, that his influence on three generations of men has been profound and wholly beneficent, and that the world is going his way, though with slow and halting steps. His life brightened to its close. In its last summer but one he wrote: "This morning I plucked a globe of the dandelion--the seed-vessel--and was struck as never before with the silent, gentle manner in which nature sows her seed.... I saw, too, how nature sows her seed broadcast.... So we must send truth abroad, not forcing it on here and there a mind, and watching its progress anxiously, but trusting that it will light on a kindly soil, and yield its fruit. So nature teaches." May those who stand here one hundred years hence say,--the twentieth century supplied more of kindly soil for Channing seed than the nineteenth. EMERSON Emerson was not a logician or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the common sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in verse. His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. During his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to her: "I am born a poet,--of a low class without doubt, yet a poet; that is my nature and vocation. My singing, be sure, is very husky, and is, for the most part, in prose. Still, I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those." This husky poet had his living to get. His occupations in life were those of the teacher, minister, lecturer, and author. He was a teacher at various times between 1818 and 1826; but he never liked teaching. He was a preacher at intervals from 1826 to 1847, but a settled minister only from 1829 to 1832. His career as a lecturer began in the autumn of 1833; and his first book, "Nature," was published in 1836, when he was thirty-three years old. His lectures for money were given as a rule during the winter and early spring; and for thirty years the travelling he was obliged to do in search of audiences was often extremely fatiguing, and not without serious hardships and exposures. These occupations usually gave him an income sufficient for his simple wants; but there were times when outgo exceeded income. The little property his first wife left him ($1200 a year) relieved him from serious pecuniary anxiety by 1834; although it did not relieve him from earning by his own labor the livelihood of his family. In 1834 he went to live in Concord, where his grandfather had been the minister at the time of the Revolution, and in 1835 he bought the house and grounds there which were his home for the rest of his days. Before settling in Concord, he had spent one winter and spring (1826-27) in the Southern states, and seven months of 1833 in Europe. Both of these absences were necessitated by the state of his health, which was precarious during his young manhood. With these exceptions, he had lived in Boston or its immediate neighborhood, until he settled in Concord. His progenitors on both sides were chiefly New England ministers. His formal education was received in the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, and was therefore purely local. How narrow and provincial seems his experience of life! A little city, an isolated society, a country village! Yet through books, and through intercourse with intelligent persons, he was really "set in a large place." The proof of this largeness, and of the keenness of his mental and moral vision, is that, in regard to some of the chief concerns of mankind, he was a seer and a fore-seer. This prophetic quality of his I hope to demonstrate to-night in three great fields of thought--education, social organization, and religion. Although a prophet and inspirer of reform, Emerson was not a reformer. He was but a halting supporter of the reforms of his day; and the eager experimenters and combatants in actual reforms found him a disappointing sort of sympathizer. His visions were far-reaching, his doctrines often radical, and his exhortations fervid; but when it came to action, particularly to habitual action, he was surprisingly conservative. With an exquisite candor, and a gentle resolution of rarest quality he broke his strong ties to the Second Church of Boston before he was thirty years old, abandoning the profession for which he had been trained, and which, in many of its aspects, he honored and enjoyed; yet he attended church on Sundays all his life with uncommon regularity. He refused to conduct public prayer, and had many things to say against it; but when he was an Overseer of Harvard College, he twice voted to maintain the traditional policy of compelling all the students to attend morning prayers, in spite of the fact that a large majority of the Faculty urgently advocated abandoning that policy. He manifested a good deal of theoretical sympathy with the community experiments at Brook Farm and Fruitlands; but he declined to take part in them himself. He was intimate with many of the leading abolitionists; but no one has described more vividly their grave intellectual and social defects. He laid down principles which, when applied, would inevitably lead to progress and reform; but he took little part in the imperfect step-by-step process of actual reforming. He probably would have been an ineffective worker in any field of reform; and, at any rate, strenuous labor on applications of his philosophy would have prevented him from maintaining the flow of his philosophic and prophetic visions. The work of giving practical effect to his thought was left for other men to do,--indeed for generations of other serviceable men, who, filled with his ideals, will slowly work them out into institutions, customs, and other practical values. When we think of Emerson as a prophet, we at once become interested in the dates at which he uttered certain doctrines, or wrote certain pregnant sentences; but just here the inquirer meets a serious difficulty. He can sometimes ascertain that a given doctrine or sentence was published at a given date; but he may be quite unable to ascertain how much earlier the doctrine was really formulated, or the sentence written. Emerson has been dead twenty-one years, and it is thirty years since he wrote anything new; but his whole philosophy of life was developed by the time he was forty years old, and it may be doubted if he wrote anything after 1843, the germinal expression of which may not be found in his journals, sermons, or lectures written before that date. If, therefore, we find in the accepted thought, or established institutions, of to-day recent developments of principles and maxims laid down by Emerson, we may fairly say that his thought outran his times certainly by one, and probably by two generations of men. * * * * * I take up now the prophetic teachings of Emerson with regard to education. In the first place, he saw, with a clearness to which very few people have yet attained, the fundamental necessity of the school as the best civilizing agency, next to steady labor, and the only sure means of permanent and progressive reform. He says outright: "We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up--namely, in education." He taught that if we hope to reform mankind, we must begin not with adults, but with children: we must begin in the school. There are some signs that this doctrine has now at last entered the minds of the so-called practical men. The Cubans are to be raised in the scale of civilization and public happiness; so both they and we think they must have more and better schools. The Filipinos, too, are to be developed after the American fashion; so we send them a thousand teachers of English. The Southern states are to be rescued from the persistent poison of slavery; and, after forty years of failure with political methods, we at last accept Emerson's doctrine, and say: We must begin earlier,--at school. The city slums are to be redeemed; and the scientific charity workers find the best way is to get the children into kindergartens and manual training schools. Since the Civil War, a whole generation of educational administrators has been steadily at work developing what is called the elective system in the institutions of education which deal with the ages above twelve. It has been a slow, step-by-step process, carried on against much active opposition and more sluggish obstruction. The system is a method of educational organization which recognizes the immense expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century, and takes account of the needs and capacities of the individual child and youth. Now, Emerson laid down in plain terms the fundamental doctrines on which this elective system rests. He taught that the one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil, dissipation. He said: "You must elect your work: you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest." To this exhortation he added the educational reason for it,--only by concentration can the youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing. As Emerson puts it, "Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing." The educational institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important step from knowing to doing. They are only beginning to perceive that, all along the course of education, the child and the youth should be doing something as well as learning something; should be stimulated and trained by achievement; should be constantly encouraged to take the step beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,--the step, as Emerson says, "out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness." Emerson carried this doctrine right on into mature life. He taught that nature arms each man with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society; and that this faculty should determine the man's career. The advocates of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous for society as a whole, as well as for the individual. Emerson put this argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago: "Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do." Education used to be given almost exclusively through books. In recent years there has come in another sort of education through tools, machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages; the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems; and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has been recognized as having good educational effects. The education of men by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had fully developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it afterwards. In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands. He saw clearly that manual labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good moral qualities. To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the commodity; and that labor is God's education. This was Emerson's doctrine more than sixty years ago. It is only ten years since the Mechanic Arts High School was opened in Boston. We are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been a determined movement of the American people toward the cultivation of art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of beauty and increase public enjoyment. It is curious to see how literally Emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:-- "On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square; Let statue, picture, park, and hall, Ballad, flag, and festival The past restore, the day adorn, And make to-morrow a new morn!" We have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing, modelling, and designing,--not sufficiently, but in a promising and hopeful way. Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he says: "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." That sentence is the inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. But how slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! We are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable elements of true culture, which speak a universal language. Yet the ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair. Take up to-day the last essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them penetrated with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher of mankind. Emerson insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of beauty; that "a man is a beggar who only lives to the useful." It will probably require several generations yet to induce the American people to accept his doctrine that all moments and objects can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, serenity, and repose in energy are the "end of culture and success enough." It has been clearly perceived of late that a leading object in education is the cultivation of fine manners. On this point the teachings of Emerson are fundamental; but the American institutions of education are only beginning to appreciate their significance. He teaches that genius or love invents fine manners, "which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode." There is much in that phrase, "by the advantage of a palace." For generations, American institutions of education were content with the humblest sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds about the buildings. They are only lately beginning to acquire fine buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning to carry into practice Emerson's wisdom of sixty years ago. The American cities are beginning to build handsome houses for their High Schools. Columbia University builds a noble temple for its library. The graduates and friends of Harvard like to provide her with a handsome fence round the Yard, with a fair array of shrubs within the fence, with a handsome stadium instead of shabby, wooden seats round the football gridiron, and to take steps for securing in the future broad connections between the grounds of the University and the Cambridge parks by the river. They are just now carrying into practice Emerson's teaching; by the advantage of a palace they mean to better Harvard's instruction in manners. They are accepting his doctrine that "manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that for the most part his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners. When we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons, and inspiring tokens of character they convey, and what divination is required in us for the reading of this fine telegraph,--we see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty." In Emerson's early days there was nothing in our schools and colleges which at all corresponded to what we now know too much about under the name of athletic sports. The elaborate organization of these sports is a development of the last thirty years in our schools and colleges; but I find in Emerson the true reason for the athletic cult, given a generation before it existed among us. Your boy "hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training.... Football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn.... Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret free-masonries." We shall never find a completer justification of athletic sports than that. In his memorable address on The American Scholar, which was given at Cambridge in 1837, Emerson pointed out that the function of the scholar should include creative action, or, as we call it in these days, research, or the search for new truth. He says: "The soul active ... utters truth, or creates.... In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward. Man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;--cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame." And more explicitly still, he says: "Colleges have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create." When Emerson wrote this passage, the spirit of research, or discovery, or creation had not yet breathed life into the higher institutions of learning in our country; and to-day they have much to do and to acquire before they will conform to Emerson's ideal. There are innumerable details in which Emerson anticipated the educational experiences of later generations. I can cite but two of them. He taught that each age must write its own books; "or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this." How true that is in our own day when eighty thousand new books come from the press of the civilized world in a single year! Witness the incessant remaking or re-casting of the books of the preceding generation! Emerson himself has gone into thousands of books in which his name is never mentioned. Even history has to be re-written every few years, the long-surviving histories being rather monuments of style and method than accepted treasuries of facts. Again, contrary to the prevailing impression that the press has, in large measure, stripped eloquence of its former influence, Emerson taught that "if there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States." He included under eloquence the useful speech, all sorts of political persuasion in the great arena of the Republic, and the lessons of science, art, and religion which should be "brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people," now become eighty. The colleges and universities have now answered in the affirmative Emerson's question, "Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character to serve such a constituency?" But then Emerson's definition of eloquence is simple, and foretells the practice of to-day rather than describes the practice of Webster, Everett, Choate, and Winthrop, his contemporaries: "Know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity.... Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak." * * * * * I turn next to some examples of Emerson's anticipation of social conditions, visible to him as seer in his own day, and since become plain to the sight of the ordinary millions. When he accumulated in his journals the original materials of his essay on Worship, there were no large cities in the United States in the present sense of that term. The great experiment of democracy was not far advanced, and had not developed many of its sins and dangers; yet how justly he presented them in the following description: "In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on, so aimless as they are? ... There is faith in chemistry, in meat and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine wheels, sewing-machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes." In Emerson's day, luxury in the present sense had hardly been developed in our country; but he foresaw its coming, and its insidious destructiveness. "We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs us so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of amusement? Only for want of thought.... We are first thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual and then must be rich." He foresaw the young man's state of mind to-day about marriage--I must have money before I can marry; and deals with it thus: "Give us wealth and the home shall exist. But that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no solution. Give us wealth! You ask too much. Few have wealth; but all must have a home. Men are not born rich; in getting wealth the man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last." We have come to understand by experience that the opinion of masses of men is a formidable power which can be made safe and useful. In earlier days this massed opinion was either despised or dreaded; and it is dreadful, if either confined or misdirected. Emerson compares it to steam. Studied, economized, and directed, steam has become the power by which all great labors are done. Like steam is the opinion of political masses! If crushed by castles, armies, and police, dangerously explosive; but if furnished with schools and the ballot, developing "the most harmless and energetic form of a state." His eyes were wide open to some of the evil intellectual effects of democracy. The individual is too apt to wear the time-worn yoke of the multitude's opinions. No multiplying of contemptible units can produce an admirable mass. "If I see nothing to admire in a unit, shall I admire a million units?" The habit of submitting to majority rule cultivates individual subserviency. He pointed out two generations ago that the action of violent political parties in a democracy might provide for the individual citizen a systematic training in moral cowardice. It is interesting, at the stage of industrial warfare which the world has now reached, to observe how Emerson, sixty years ago, discerned clearly the absurdity of paying all sorts of service at one rate, now a favorite notion with some labor unions. He points out that even when all labor is temporarily paid at one rate, differences in possessions will instantly arise: "In one hand the dime became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it." Emerson was never deceived by a specious philanthropy, or by claims of equality which find no support in the nature of things. He was a true democrat, but still could say: "I think I see place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,--by making his life secretly beautiful." How fine a picture of the democratic nobility is that! In his lecture on Man the Reformer, which was read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Association in Boston in January, 1841, Emerson described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran through the community. He also described, with perfect precision, the only ultimate remedy,--namely, the sentiment of love. "Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long.... The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine." It is more than sixty years since those words were uttered, and in those years society has had large experience of industrial and social strife, of its causes and consequences, and of many attempts to remedy or soften it; but all this experience only goes to show that there is but one remedy for these ills. It is to be found in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections. In Emerson's words, "We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible." The world will wait long for this remedy, but there is no other. Like every real seer and prophet whose testimony is recorded, Emerson had intense sympathy with the poor, laborious, dumb masses of mankind, and being a wide reader in history and biography, he early arrived at the conviction that history needed to be written in a new manner. It was long before Green's History of the English People that Emerson wrote: "Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor." In recent years this view of history has come to prevail, and we are given the stories of institutions, industries, commerce, crafts, arts, and beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties and wars. For Emerson it is always feats of liberty and wit which make epochs of history. Commerce is civilizing because "the power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights. The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital stages of human progress are marked by steps toward personal, individual freedom. The love of liberty was Emerson's fundamental passion:-- "For He that ruleth high and wise, Nor pauseth in His plan, Will take the sun out of the skies Ere freedom out of man." The new National League of Independent Workmen of America has very appropriately taken its motto from Emerson:-- "For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life, if freedom fail?" The sympathetic reader of Emerson comes often upon passages written long ago which are positively startling in their anticipation of sentiments common to-day and apparently awakened by very recent events. One would suppose that the following passage was written yesterday. It was written fifty-six years ago. "And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations,--I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;--indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon." Before the Civil War the Jew had no such place in society as he holds to-day. He was by no means so familiar to Americans as he is now. Emerson speaks twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in terms precisely similar to those we commonly hear to-day: "We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.... The sufferance which is the badge of the Jew has made him in these days the ruler of the rulers of the earth." Those keen observations were made certainly more than forty years ago, and probably more than fifty. Landscape architecture is not yet an established profession among us, in spite of the achievements of Downing, Cleveland, and Olmsted and their disciples; yet much has been accomplished within the last twenty-five years to realize the predictions on this subject made by Emerson in his lecture on The Young American. He pointed out in that lecture that the beautiful gardens of Europe are unknown among us, but might be easily imitated here, and said that the landscape art "is the Fine Art which is left for us.... The whole force of all arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwellings.... I look on such improvement as directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant." The following sentence might have been written yesterday, so consistent is it with the thought of to-day: "Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape." In regard to books, pictures, statues, collections in natural history, and all such refining objects of nature and art, which heretofore only the opulent could enjoy, Emerson pointed out that in America the public should provide these means of culture and inspiration for every citizen. He thus anticipated the present ownership by cities, or by endowed trustees, of parks, gardens, and museums of art or science, as well as of baths and orchestras. Of music in particular he said: "I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms; could I ... know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,--that were a bath and a medicine." It has been a long road from that sentence, written probably in the forties, to the Symphony Orchestra in this Hall, and to the new singing classes on the East Side of New York City. For those of us who have attended to the outburst of novels and treatises on humble or squalid life, to the copious discussions on child-study, to the masses of slum literature, and to the numerous writings on home economics, how true to-day seems the following sentence written in 1837: "The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life are the topics of the time." * * * * * I pass now to the last of the three topics which time permits me to discuss,--Emerson's religion. In no field of thought was Emerson more prophetic, more truly a prophet of coming states of human opinion, than in religion. In the first place, he taught that religion is absolutely natural,--not supernatural, but natural:-- "Out from the heart of Nature rolled The burdens of the Bible old." He believed that revelation is natural and continuous, and that in all ages prophets are born. Those souls out of time proclaim truth, which may be momentarily received with reverence, but is nevertheless quickly dragged down into some savage interpretation which by and by a new prophet will purge away. He believed that man is guided by the same power that guides beast and flower. "The selfsame power that brought me here brought you," he says to beautiful Rhodora. For him worship is the attitude of those "who see that against all appearances the nature of things works for truth and right forever." He saw good not only in what we call beauty, grace, and light, but in what we call foul and ugly. For him a sky-born music sounds "from all that's fair; from all that's foul:"-- "'Tis not in the high stars alone, Nor in the cups of budding flowers, Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, But in the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings." The universe was ever new and fresh in his eyes, not spent, or fallen, or degraded, but eternally tending upward:-- "No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, My oldest force is good as new, And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew." When we come to his interpretation of historical Christianity, we find that in his view the life and works of Jesus fell entirely within the field of human experience. He sees in the deification of Jesus an evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human soul. He sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of God, but some atom of His nature. As a preacher he had no tone of authority. A true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his views on anybody. Religious truth, like all other truth, was to his thought an unrolling picture, not a deposit made once for all in some sacred vessel. When people who were sure they had drained that vessel, and assimilated its contents, attacked him, he was irresponsive or impassive, and yielded to them no juicy thought; so they pronounced him dry or empty. Yet all of Emerson's religious teaching led straight to God,--not to a withdrawn creator, or anthropomorphic judge or king, but to the all-informing, all-sustaining soul of the universe. It was a prophetic quality of Emerson's religious teaching that he sought to obliterate the distinction between secular and sacred. For him all things were sacred, just as the universe was religious. We see an interesting fruition of Emerson's sowing in the nature of the means of influence, which organized churches and devout people have, in these later days, been compelled to resort to. Thus the Catholic Church keeps its hold on its natural constituency quite as much by schools, gymnasiums, hospitals, entertainments, and social parades as it does by its rites and sacraments. The Protestant Churches maintain in city slums "settlements," which use the secular rather than the so-called sacred methods. The fight against drunkenness, and the sexual vice and crimes of violence which follow in its train, is most successfully maintained by eliminating its physical causes and providing mechanical and social protections. For Emerson inspiration meant not the rare conveyance of supernatural power to an individual, but the constant incoming into each man of the "divine soul which also inspires all men." He believed in the worth of the present hour:-- "Future or Past no richer secret folds, O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds." He believed that the spiritual force of human character imaged the divine:-- "The sun set, but set not his hope: Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: Fixed on the enormous galaxy, Deeper and older seemed his eye." Yet man is not an order of nature, but a stupendous antagonism, because he chooses and acts in his soul. "So far as a man thinks, he is free." It is interesting to-day, after all the long discussion of the doctrine of evolution, to see how the much earlier conceptions of Emerson match the thoughts of the latest exponents of the philosophic results of evolution. The present generation of scholars and ministers has been passing through an important crisis in regard to the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity. All the features of the contest over "the higher criticism" are foretold by Emerson in "The American Scholar." "The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man; henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit; henceforward it is settled the book is perfect. Colleges are built on it; books are written on it.... Instantly the book becomes noxious; the guide is a tyrant." This is exactly what has happened to Protestantism, which substituted for infallible Pope and Church an infallible Book; and this is precisely the evil from which modern scholarship is delivering the world. In religion Emerson was only a nineteenth-century non-conformist instead of a fifteenth or seventeenth century one. It was a fundamental article in his creed that, although conformity is the virtue in most request, "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist." In the midst of increasing luxury, and of that easygoing, unbelieving conformity which is itself a form of luxury, Boston, the birthplace of Emerson, may well remember with honor the generations of non-conformists who made her, and created the intellectual and moral climate in which Emerson grew up. Inevitably, to conformists and to persons who still accept doctrines and opinions which he rejected, he seems presumptuous and consequential. In recent days we have even seen the word "insolent" applied to this quietest and most retiring of seers. But have not all prophets and ethical teachers had something of this aspect to their conservative contemporaries? We hardly expect the messages of prophets to be welcome; they imply too much dissatisfaction with the present. The essence of Emerson's teaching concerning man's nature is compressed into the famous verse:-- "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can." The cynic or the fall-of-man theologian replies--Grandeur indeed, say rather squalor and shame. To this ancient pessimism Emerson makes answer with a hard question--"We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean?" To this question no straight answer has been found, the common answer running in a circle. It is hard indeed to conceive of a measure which will measure depths but not heights; and besides, every measure implies a standard. * * * * * I have endeavored to set before you some of the practical results of Emerson's visions and intuitions, because, though quite unfit to expound his philosophical views, I am capable of appreciating some of the many instances in which his words have come true in the practical experience of my own generation. My own work has been a contribution to the prosaic, concrete work of building, brick by brick, the new walls of old American institutions of education. As a young man I found the writings of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. I was concerned with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and Emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. In regard to religious belief, I was brought up in the old-fashioned Unitarian conservatism of Boston, which was rudely shocked by Emerson's excursions beyond its well-fenced precincts. But when I had got at what proved to be my lifework for education, I discovered in Emerson's poems and essays all the fundamental motives and principles of my own hourly struggle against educational routine and tradition, and against the prevailing notions of discipline for the young; so when I was asked to speak to you to-night about him, although I realized my unfitness in many respects for such a function, I could not refuse the opportunity to point out how many of the sober, practical undertakings of to-day had been anticipated in all their principles by this solitary, shrewd, independent thinker, who, in an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory way, wrought out many sentences and verses which will travel far down the generations. I was also interested in studying in this example the quality of prophets in general. We know a good deal about the intellectual ancestors and inspirers of Emerson; and we are sure that he drank deep at many springs of idealism and poetry. Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare, and Milton were of his teachers; Oken, Lamarck, and Lyell lent him their scientific theories; and Channing stirred the residuum which came down to him through his forbears from Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. All these materials he transmuted and moulded into lessons which have his own individual quality and bear his stamp. The precise limits of his individuality are indeterminable, and inquiry into them would be unprofitable. In all probability the case would prove to be much the same with most of the men that the world has named prophets, if we knew as much of their mental history as we know of Emerson's. With regard to the Semitic prophets and seers, it is reasonable to expect that as Semitic exploration and discovery advance, the world will learn much about the historical and poetical sources of their inspiration. Then the Jewish and Christian peoples may come nearer than they do now to Emerson's conceptions of inspiration and worship, of the naturalness of revelation and religion, and of the infinite capacities of man. Meantime, it is an indisputable fact that Emerson's thought has proved to be consonant with the most progressive and fruitful thinking and acting of two generations since his working time. This fact, and the sweetness, fragrance, and loftiness of his spirit, prophesy for him an enduring power in the hearts and lives of spiritually-minded men. 
25915	----	produced from images generously made available by The Kentuckiana Digital Library) James Lane Allen A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK WITH PORTRAIT The Macmillan Company 66 Fifth Avenue, New York NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. JAMES LANE ALLEN A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK While "_The Choir Invisible_" was primarily a love story, the setting in which its action moved was historical. Apart from the masterly handling of human passion and the harmony of thought and expression with which he has treated the larger and deeper movements of life, it is probably Mr. Allen's ability to picture forth the early settlement of Kentucky that has given his writings so solid a foundation in the literary affections of English speaking people. The fascination that "_The Choir Invisible_" has had for so many thousands of readers is assuredly due as much to the author's faithful historic treatment of the mighty stream of migration which had begun to spread through the jagged channels of the Alleghanies over the then unknown illimitable West as to his power to tell an absorbing story. When "_The Choir Invisible_" appeared, this perhaps most fascinating period of early American history had not been used as a background of his story by any great master of fiction, and it requires no very keen literary insight to discover the sources of the popularity which has been accorded to the four or five recent novels, each of which has for its setting a period in our history whose glamour has touched our hearts and stirred our imaginations. Contemporary judgment is singularly unanimous in placing Mr. Allen in the front rank of American novelists, and it may not be out of place here to quote the opinions of two or three of the leading literary critical journals. WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE, in the _Dial_ says that: "Looking about among our younger men of letters for the promise of some new and vital impulse, it has for several years seemed to us that such an impulse might be expected to come from the work of Mr. James Lane Allen. He has published few books as yet, but the number is sufficient to reveal a steadily increasing mastery of his art, and the quality such as to warrant readers of discernment in predicting for him a brilliant career and an assured place in the front rank of American writers. _The Choir Invisible_ does not disappoint these expectations. It is not only the most ambitious of Mr. Allen's books, considered merely as to its sale, but it is also the one in which he has carried to the highest pitch that fineness of perception and that distinction of manner that have from the first set his work apart from the work of nearly all of his contemporaries. Hardly since Hawthorne have we had such pages as the best of these; hardly since _The Scarlet Letter_ and _The Marble Faun_ have we had fictive work so spiritual in essence and adorned with such delicate and lovely embroiderings of the imagination. There are descriptive passages so exquisitely wrought that the reader lingers over them to make them a possession forever; there are inner experiences so intensely realized that they become a part of the life of his own soul."... And again writing in the _Boston Transcript_, Bliss Carman, says: "There are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain and yet with an enviable aptness for the sudden inevitable word.... And yet that care, that deliberation is never tedious." Hamilton W. Mabie is attracted more by the landscape beauty of Mr. Allen's work, and he too makes an original contribution to our subject. He says in _The Outlook_: "No American novelist has so imbedded his stories in Nature as has James Lane Allen; and among English novels one recalls only Mr. Hardy's three classics of pastoral England, and among French novelists George Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the background of many charming American stories, and finds delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse. There was a fine note in Mr. Allen's earliest work; a prelusive note with the quality of the flute.... In _Summer in Arcady_ a deeper note in the treatment of Nature was struck, and Mr. Allen's style took on, not only greater freedom, but a richer beauty. The story is a kind of incarnation of the tremendous vitality of Nature, the unconscious, unmoral sweep of the force which makes for life. So completely enveloped is the reader in the atmosphere of the opulent world about him, so deeply does he realize the primeval forces rushing tumultuous through that world, that at times the human figures seem as subordinate as those in Corot's landscapes. And yet these human struggles are intensely real, the human drama intensely genuine. Whatever may be thought of the wisdom of presenting the sex problem so frankly, Mr. Allen's sharpest critic must confess that in no other American book is atmosphere so pervasive, so potential, so charged with passion and beauty. In _The Choir Invisible_ a still deeper note is struck; the moral insight, always clear, is more penetrating; the feeling for life is at once more restrained and more passionate; the constructive skill is more marked; the style surer and entirely moulded to its theme. This story is so steeped in beauty, both of the world and of the spirit, that it is not easy to write of it dispassionately. It has a richness of texture which American fiction, as a rule, has lacked; there are depths in it which American fiction has not, as rule, brought to the consciousness of readers; depths of life below the region of observation. There is in it the unconsciousness and abandon which are the very substance of art, and which are so constantly missed in the fiction of extreme sophistication." Our final opinion, that of James McArthur when he was editor of the _Bookman_ carries some weight both on account of the position of the writer and also by reason of his keen literary sense. "... Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'--that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art--unfailing in its inspiration, unfaltering in its classic accent.... So that when we arrive at _The Choir Invisible_ we find there a ripeness of matured thought, an insight into the moral depths of passion, and an entrance into the larger, deeper movements of life, a realizing power, a broader sense of humor, as well as humor itself, a concentrated and universal human interest; all of which is not so much the result of finer art as of a greater absorption of life, which comes not from more knowledge, but from more wisdom. _The Choir Invisible_ is like an inward realization of the 'Domain of Arnheim!' More than in his other books there rests upon this work that unembarrassed calm, where truth sits Jove-like 'on the quiet seat above the thunder,' where the spirit is dignified, is priest-like, and inspired; where beauty dwells in a harmony of thought and expression that subdues and haunts us. In short, in _The Choir Invisible_ Mr. Allen has come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty burn as one fire, shine as one light, which, as Sidney Lanier has demonstrated, denotes the great artist. _The Choir Invisible_ undeniably places its author among the foremost in American letters. Indeed, we venture to say that it would be difficult to recall any other novel since _The Scarlet Letter_ that has touched the same note of greatness, or given to one section of our national life, as Hawthorne's classic did to another, a voice far beyond singing. A word, however, about Mr. Allen's _Summer in Arcady_ which precedes this, and was published * * * subsequent to _A Kentucky Cardinal_ and _Aftermath_. In these two books Nature was interwoven benignantly with the human nature resting on her bosom, leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influences to the human lover, and when bereft of human love, receiving him back into her healing arms. Not so in _Summer in Arcady_; the sunlight that brooded in calm over the forces of Nature that nursed Adam Moss's latent powers of loving into domestic serenity, rouses the fierce claw and tooth of Nature to drag Hilary and Daphne down to her level. As clearly as the poet saw that, 'all's Love, yet all's Law' so clearly is the same truth held in these stories with their divergent ends. The lawlessness of Nature is the lawlessness of man, untempered and ungoverned by that principle of chastity which is the law of love; and again Nature, lawless in herself, becomes beneficent, law-abiding, when controlled by that higher law of instinct in man which is the seal and sign of the Divine upon his soul. Without moralizing, a moral principle is at work in _Summer in Arcady_; it is its vital distinction that over the whole action reigns a moral simplicity which, like sunlight, licks up the foetid, the exciting, sickening, uncertain torch-flames of passion. And in order to point the way to a full justification of the author's sincerity and moral purpose against the charge of pandering to a decadent taste for the 'downwardtending' fiction of the hour, it will be sufficient to show that the plea for the Divine supremacy of goodness, and for an unfallen purity in man and woman, has never been more strongly urged in modern fiction than in _The Choir Invisible_. If in _Summer in Arcady_ there were readers who were troubled by the heat lightning of passion that incessantly fluttered in its bosom and threatened to bolt from the blue, their fears will be laid to rest in the contemplation of Mr. Allen's new work which is pervaded by an intense summer calm--the brooding calm of the Country of the Spirit--but which does not preclude, rather is reached through, the fierce fightings of human spirit for victory over the evil passions of human nature--the fiercest struggle that can rend asunder the human breast, that of holding fast the integrity and purity of manhood and womanhood at any cost." As a historical novelist then, Mr. Allen has taken his rank with the few men of whom Nathaniel Hawthorne is perhaps the most famous; and for the same reason. Both have given us pictures of the lives of our forefathers, whose faithfulness has assured them a position as classics in American literature. True to the instinct of his genius Mr. Allen has again chosen a stirring period in our history as a background for his new novel "_The Reign of Law_" which THE MACMILLAN COMPANY publish. Both the hero and heroine are products of a Revolution, and the scene of the plot is situated in the Kentucky hemp fields. The Revolution on the one hand was the social upheaval that our Civil War caused in the South. While on the other hand it was the moral and intellectual Revolution which followed the great discoveries in physical and social science in the middle of this Century. The two chief characters of the story are a young man and a young woman. The young man sprung from the lowest stratum of Southern society, and the young woman from the highest. The story of the intermingling of their lives must be left for the reader to discover. As was so often the case during the political reconstruction of the South, the heroine passed from the sphere of the high social organization which existed at her birth to the humblest and most obscure hard manual work, while the hero rose from the lowest social condition to the highest intellectual plane, finding his development along the lines of religious and scientific thought. When they finally meet, the latter half of the story shows their influences on each other. The involved social and political conditions, the play and interaction of phases of life, so utterly different as those which form the experiences of these two people, have allowed Mr. Allen a wide scope for the subtle analysis of character of which in his exquisitely delicate art he is such a master. The trend of the book, and the religious crisis through which its hero passes, give the story its title; while an important part in the development of the hero's character is played by his passionate love story. A well known critic affirms that the story contains by far the finest and noblest work Mr. Allen has yet done, both in respect of that human passion and interest which characterizes his former work, and also in the tender reverential feeling with which he dwells on the simple rural life of the Kentucky which he loves so well. In spite of the reserve which characterizes the author, a few of the leading facts of his life have found their way into print, and may be of interest to many who read his books. He comes from Virginia ancestry and a pioneer Kentucky family. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster, whose parents settled in Mississippi and were of Revolutionary Scotch-Irish stock of Pennsylvania. He was born on a farm in Fayette County seven miles from Lexington, Kentucky, where he spent his early childhood. He was educated in Kentucky (Transylvania) University, and graduated in 1872. For several years afterward he taught in District schools, at first near his home and then in Missouri. He afterward became a private tutor, and finally accepted a Professorship at his Alma Mater which he exchanged for a similar position at Bethany College, West Virginia. He gave up this latter profession in 1884 and began his career as a writer in the city of New York. The chief literary and critical Magazines and papers of those years contain many of his essays, while all his short stories saw the light in "Harper's Magazine" and the "Century." These short stories were collected and published under the title of "_Flute and Violin_." His other books are "_The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_," "_A Kentucky Cardinal_," and its sequel, "_Aftermath_," "_A Summer in Arcady_," and lastly "_The Choir Invisible_," some two hundred and fifty thousand copies of which have found their way into the hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. A new and complete edition of Mr. Allen's works is now being issued by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. It will contain seven volumes; including _The Reign of Law, A Story of the Kentucky Hemp Fields_, an account of which has been given in the preceding pages. * * * * * JAMES LANE ALLEN'S NEW NOVEL The Reign of Law A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS Cloth, 8vo. Illustrated $1.50 OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR FLUTE AND VIOLIN Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 BLUE GRASS REGION OF KENTUCKY Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 A KENTUCKY CARDINAL Cloth, 16mo, $1.00 AFTERMATH Cloth, 16mo, $1.00 TWO GENTLEMEN OF KENTUCKY Cloth, 18mo, $2.00 A SUMMER IN ARCADY Cloth, 12mo, $2.00 THE CHOIR INVISIBLE Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 The same Illustrated with Photogravures and Line Drawings, by ORSON LOWELL. Sateen. $2.50 PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 
16622	----	[Illustration: THE HOME OF AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON, ASHLAND PLACE Now owned by Mrs. George Fearn, Jr.] LITERARY HEARTHSTONES OF DIXIE _By_ LA SALLE CORBELL PICKETT AUTHOR OF "PICKETT AND HIS MEN," "JINNY," ETC. _With Portraits and Illustrations_ PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1912 COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1912 PRINTED BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A. Transcriber's Note: There is an inconsistency in the fifth paragraph of the Forword where the author refers to Dr. Bagley's "The Old Fashioned Gentleman," and the reference to Dr. Bagby's "The Old Virginia Gentleman" in the chapter "Bacon and Greens". FOREWORD. The fires still glow upon the hearthstones to which our southern writers in the olden days gave us friendly welcome. They are as bright to-day as when, "four feet on the fender," we talked with some gifted friend whose pen, dipped in the heart's blood of life, gave word to thoughts which had flamed within us and sought vainly to escape the walls of our being that they might go out to the world and fulfil their mission. They who built the shrines before which we offer our devotion have passed from the world of men, but the fires they kindled yet burn with fadeless light. To us who have dwelt in the same environment and found beauty in the same scenes that inspired them to eloquent expression of the thoughts, the loves, the hopes, and the aspirations which were our own as well as theirs, these writers of our South are living still and will live through the long procession of the years. In the garden of our lives they planted the flowers of poesy, of fable, and of romance. With the changes of the years those flowers may have passed into the realm of the old-fashioned, like the blossoms in Grandmother's garden, but are there any sweeter or more royally blooming than these? The lustre of our gifted ones is not dimmed by the passage of time, but in the rush of new books upon the world the readers of to-day lose sight of the volumes which wove threads of gold into the joys and sorrows of the generation now travelling the downward slope of life. Their starry radiance is sometimes lost to view in the electric flash of the present day. If these pages can in any slight way aid in keeping their memory bright they will have reached their highest aim. The poets of Dixie in war days tended the flames that glowed upon the altar of patriotism. Their lives were given to their country as truly as if their blood had crimsoned the sod of hard-fought fields. They gave of their best to our cause. Their bugle notes echo through the years, and the mournful tones of the dirges they sang over the grave of our dreams yet thrill our hearts. Before our eyes "The Conquered Banner" sorrowfully droops on its staff and "The Sword of Lee" flashes in the lines of our Poet-Priest. For the quotations with which are illustrated the varying phases of his poetic thought I am indebted to the kindness of the publishers of Father Ryan's poems, Messrs. P.J. Kenedy & Sons. For certain selections from the poems of Hayne I am indebted to the Lothrop, Lee & Shephard Company, and for selections from Dr. Bagley's "The Old Fashioned Gentleman," Messrs. Charles Schribner's Sons. My thanks are due the Houghton, Mifflin Company for permission to include in my paper on Margaret Junkin Preston two poems and other quotations from the "Life and Letters of Margaret J. Preston," by Mrs. Allan, the step-daughter of Mrs. Preston. The selections in the article on Georgia's doubly gifted son, Sidney Lanier, poet and musician, are given through the kind permission of Professor Edwin Mims and of Doubleday, Page & Company, publishers of Mrs. Clay's "A Belle of the Fifties." CONTENTS PAGE "THE POET OF THE NIGHT" 11 Edgar Allan Poe "THE SUNRISE POET" 41 Sidney Lanier "THE POET OF THE PINES" 69 Paul Hamilton Hayne "THE FLAME-BORN POET" 99 Henry Timrod "FATHER ABBOT" 125 William Gilmore Simms "UNCLE REMUS" 151 Joel Chandler Harris "THE POET OF THE FLAG" 175 Francis Scott Key "THE POET-PRIEST" 201 Father Ryan "BACON AND GREENS" 225 Dr. George William Bagby "WOMAN AND POET" 253 Margaret Junkin Preston "THE 'MOTHER' OF 'ST. ELMO'" 283 Augusta Evans Wilson ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE THE HOME OF AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON, ASHLAND PLACE _Frontispiece_ EDGAR ALLAN POE 20 SIDNEY LANIER 58 HOUSE WHERE TIMROD LIVED DURING HIS LAST YEARS 116 WOODLANDS, THE HOME OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS 126 JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS 156 SNAP-BEAN FARM, ATLANTA, GEORGIA 166 FRANCIS SCOTT KEY 194 FATHER RYAN 204 ST. MARY'S CHURCH, MOBILE. FATHER RYAN'S LATE RESIDENCE ADJOINING 216 DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY 236 "AVENEL" 240 LITERARY HEARTHSTONES OF DIXIE "THE POET OF THE NIGHT" EDGAR ALLAN POE "I am a Virginian; at least, I call myself one, for I have resided all my life until within the last few years in Richmond." Thus Edgar A. Poe wrote to a friend. The fact of his birth in Boston he regarded as merely an unfortunate accident, or perhaps the work of that malevolent "Imp of the Perverse" which apparently dominated his life. That it constituted any tie between him and the "Hub of the Universe," unless it might be the inverted tie of opposition, he never admitted. The love which his charming little actress mother cherished for the city in which she had enjoyed her greatest triumphs seemed to have turned to hatred in the heart of her brilliant and erratic son. In his short and disastrous sojourn in Boston, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, it is not likely that his thought once turned to the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, where his ill-starred life began. The reason given by Poe, "I have resided there all my life until within the last few years," suggests but slight cause for his love of Richmond, the home of his childhood, the darkening clouds of which, viewed through the softening lens of years, may have shaded off to brighter tints, as the roughness of a landscape disappears and melts into mystic, dreamy beauty as we journey far from the scene. The three women who had been the stars in the troubled sky of his youth irradiated his memory of the Queen City of the South. In the churchyard of historic old Saint John's, that once echoed to the words of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Poe's mother lay in an unidentified grave. In Hollywood slept his second mother, who had surrounded his boyhood with the maternal affection that, like an unopened rose in her heart, had awaited the coming of the little child who was to be the sunbeam to develop it into perfect flowering. On Shockoe Hill was the tomb of "Helen," his chum's mother, whose beauty of face and heart brought the boyish soul To the Glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. Through the three-fold sanctification of the twin priestesses, Love and Sorrow, Richmond was his home. So Virginia claims her poet son, the tragedy of whose life is a gloomy, though brilliant, page in the history of American literature. There are varying stories told of Poe's Richmond home. The impression that he was the inmate of a stately mansion, where he was trained to extravagance which wrought disaster in later years, is not borne out by the evidence. When the loving heart and persistent will of Mrs. Allan opened her husband's reluctant door to the orphaned son of the unfortunate players, that door led into the second story of the building at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Tobacco Alley, in which Messrs. Ellis & Allan earned a comfortable, but not luxurious, living by the sale of the commodity which gave the alley its name. As it was customary in those days for merchants to live in the same building with their business, the fact that he did so does not argue that Mr. Allan was "down on his luck," but neither does it presuppose that he was the possessor of wealth. But it was a home in the truest sense for little Edgar, for it was radiant with the love of the tender-hearted woman who had brought him within its friendly walls. From this home Mr. Allan went to London to establish a branch of the Company business. He was accompanied by Mrs. Allan and Edgar, and the boy was placed in the school of Stoke-Newington, shadowy with the dim procession of the ages and gloomed over by the memory of Eugene Aram. The pictured face of the head of the Manor School, Dr. Bransby, indicates that the hapless boys under his care had stronger than historic reasons for depression in that ancient institution. England was thrilling with the triumph of Waterloo, and even Stoke-Newington must have awakened to the pulsing of the atmosphere. Not far away were Byron, Shelley, and Keats, at the beginning of their brief and brilliant careers, the glory and the tragedy of which may have thrown a prophetic shadow over the American boy who was to travel a yet darker path than any of these. Under the elms that bordered the old Roman road, what forms of antique romance would lie in wait for the dreamy lad, joining him in his Saturday afternoon walks and telling him stories of their youth in the ancient days to mingle with the age-youth in the heart of the dual-souled boy. The green lanes were haunted by memories of broken-hearted lovers: Earl Percy, mourning for the fair and fickle Anne; Essex, calling vainly for the royal ring that was to have saved him; Leicester, the Lucky, a more contented ghost, returning in pleasing reminiscence to the scenes of his earthly triumphs, comfortably oblivious of his earthly crimes. What boy would not have found inspiration in gazing at the massive walls, locked and barred against him though they were, within which the immortal Robinson Crusoe sprang into being and found that island of enchantment, the favorite resort of the juvenile imagination in all the generations since? At Stoke-Newington the introspective boy found little to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and its heart of solemn truth. Incidentally, he uplifted the reputation of the American boy, so far as regarded Stoke-Newington's opinion, by assuring his mates when they marvelled over his athletic triumphs and feats of skill that all the boys in America could do those things. At the end of the year in which the family returned from Stoke-Newington Mr. Allan moved into a plain little cottage a story and a half high, with five rooms on the ground floor, at the corner of Clay and Fifth Streets. Here they lived until, in 1825, Mr. Allan inherited a considerable amount of money and bought a handsome brick residence at the corner of Main and Fifth Streets, since known as the Allan House. With the exception of two very short intervals, from June of this year until the following February was all the time that Poe spent in the Allan mansion. The Allan House, in its palmy days, might appeal irresistibly to the mind of a poet, attuned to the harmonies of artistic design and responsive to the beauties of romantic environment. It was a two-story building with spacious rooms and appointments that suggested the taste of the cultivated mistress of the stately dwelling. On the second floor was "Eddie's room," as she lovingly called it, wherein her affectionate imagination as well as her skill expended themselves lavishly for the pleasure of the son of her heart. A few years later, upon his sudden return after a long absence, it was his impetuous inquiry of the second Mrs. Allan as to the dismantling of this room that led to his hasty retreat from the house, an incident upon which his early biographers, led by Dr. Griswold, based the fiction that Mr. Allan cherished Poe affectionately in his home until his conduct toward "the young and beautiful wife" forced the expulsion of the poet from the Allan house. The fact is that Poe saw the second Mrs. Allan only once, for a moment marked by fiery indignation on his part, and on hers by a cold resentment from which the unfortunate visitor fled as from a north wind; the second Mrs. Allan's strong point being a grim and middle-aged determination, rather than "youth and beauty." Not that the thirty calendar years of that lady would necessarily have conducted her across the indefinite boundaries of the uncertain region known as "middle age," but the second Mrs. Allan was born middle-aged, and the almanac had nothing to do with it. It was in the sunshine of youth and the warmth of love and the fragrance of newly opening flowers of poetry that Edgar Poe lived in the new Allan home and from the balcony of the second story looked out upon the varied scenes of the river studded with green islets, the village beyond the water, and far away the verdant slopes and forested hills into the depths of which he looked with rapt eyes, seeing visions which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the forest--the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star that shone for him alone. In the dim paths of the moonlit garden flitted before his eyes the dreamful forms that were afterward prisoned in the golden net of his wondrous poesy. [Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE From the daguerreotype formerly owned by Edmund Clarence Stedman] To these poetic scenes he soon bade farewell, and on St. Valentine's day, 1826, entered the University of Virginia, where Number 13, West Range, is still pointed out as the old-time abiding place of Virginia's greatest poet, whose genius has given rise to more acrimonious discussion than has ever gathered about the name of any other American man of letters. The real home of Poe at this time was the range of hills known as the Ragged Mountains, for it was among their peaks and glens and caverns and wooded paths and rippling streams that he roamed in search of strange tales and mystic poems that would dazzle his readers in after days. His rambles among the hills of the University town soon came to a close. Mr. Allan, being confronted by a gaming debt which he regarded as too large to fit the sporting necessities of a boy of seventeen, took him from college and put him into the counting-room of Ellis & Allan, a position far from agreeable to one accustomed to counting only poetic feet. The inevitable rupture soon came, and Poe went to Boston, the city of his physical birth and destined to become the place of his birth into the tempestuous world of authorship. Forty copies of "Tamerlane and Other Poems" appeared upon the shelf of the printer--and nowhere else. It is said that seventy-three years later a single copy was sold for $2,250. Had this harvest been reaped by the author in those early days, who can estimate the gain to the field of literature? Boston proving inhospitable to the firstling of her gifted son's imagination, the Common soon missed the solitary, melancholy figure that had for months haunted the old historic walks. Edgar A. Poe dropped out of the world, or perhaps out of the delusion of fancying himself in the world, and Edgar A. "Perry" appeared, an enlisted soldier in the First Artillery at Fort Independence. For two years "Perry" served his country in the sunlight, and Poe, under night's starry cover, roamed through skyey aisles in the service of the Muse and explored "Al Araaf," the abode of those volcanic souls that rush in fatal haste to an earthly heaven, for which they recklessly exchange the heaven of the spirit that might have achieved immortality. A severe illness resulted in the disclosure of the identity of the young soldier, and a message was sent to Mr. Allan, who effected his discharge and helped secure for him an appointment to West Point. On his way to the Academy he stopped in Baltimore and arranged for the publication of a new volume, to contain "Al Araaf," a revised version of "Tamerlane," and some short poems. Some months later No. 28 South Barracks, West Point, was the despair of the worthy inspector who spent his days and nights in unsuccessful efforts to keep order among the embryo protectors of his country. Poe, the leader of the quartette that made life interesting in Number 28, was destined never to evolve into patriotic completion. He soon reached the limit of the endurance of the officials, that being, in the absence of a pliant guardian, the only method by which a cadet could be freed from the walls of the Academy. Soon after leaving the military school Poe made a brief visit to Richmond, the final break with Mr. Allan took place, and the poet went to Baltimore. Number 9 Front Street, Baltimore, is claimed as the birthplace of Poe. There is a house in Norfolk that is likewise so distinguished. There are other places, misty with passing generations, similarly known to history. Poe, though not Homeric in his literary methods, had much the same post-mortem experience as the Father of the Epicists. At the time of the Poet-wanderer's return to Baltimore his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, had her humble but neat and comfortable home on Eastern Avenue, then Wilks Street, and here he found the first home he had known since his childhood and, incidentally, his charming child cousin, Virginia, who was to make his home bright with her devotion through the remainder of her brief life. In these early days no thought of any but a cousinly affection had rippled the smooth surface of Virginia's childish mind, and she was the willing messenger between Poe and his "Mary," who lived but a short distance from the home of the Clemms, and who, when the frosts of years had descended upon her, denied having been engaged to him--apparently because her elders were more discreet than she was--but admitted that she cried when she heard of his death. In his attic room on Wilks Street he toiled over the poems and tales that some time would bring him fame. Poe was living in Amity Street when he won the hundred-dollar prize offered by the _Saturday Visitor_, with his "Manuscript Found in a Bottle," and wrote his poem of "The Coliseum," which failed of a prize merely because the plan did not admit of making two awards to the same person. A better reward for his work was an engagement as assistant editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, which led to his removal to Richmond. The _Messenger_ was in a building at Fifteenth and Main Streets, in the second story of which Mr. White, the editor, and Poe, had their offices. The young assistant soon became sole editor of the publication, and it was in this capacity that he entered upon the critical work which was destined to bring him effective enemies to assail his reputation, both literary and personal, when the grave had intervened to prevent any response to their slanders. Not but that he praised oftener than he censured, but the thorn of censure pricks deeply, and the rose of praise but gently diffuses its fragrance to be wafted away on the passing breeze. The sharp satire attracted attention to the _Messenger_, as attested by the rapid growth of the subscription list. Here Poe was surrounded by memories of his childhood. The building was next door to that in which Ellis & Allan had their tobacco store in Poe's school days in Richmond. The old Broad Street Theatre, on the site of which now stands Monumental Church, was the scene of his beautiful mother's last appearance before the public. Near Nineteenth and Main she died in a damp cellar in the "Bird in Hand" district, through which ran Shockoe Creek. Eighteen days later the old theatre was burned, and all Richmond was in mourning for the dead. At the northwest corner of Fifth and Main Streets, opposite the Allan mansion, was the MacKenzie school for girls, which Rosalie Poe attended in Edgar's school days. He was the only young man who enjoyed the much-desired privilege of being received in that hall of learning, and some of the bright girls of the institution beguiled him into revealing the authorship of the satiric verses, "Don Pompioso," which caused their victim, a wealthy and popular young gentleman of Richmond, to quit the city with undue haste. The verses were the boy's revenge upon "Don Pompioso" for insulting remarks about the position of Poe as the son of stage people. On Franklin Street, between First and Second, was the Ellis home, where Poe, with Mr. and Mrs. Allan, lived for a time after their return from England. On North Fifth Street, near Clay, still stood the cottage that was the next home of the Allans. At the southeast corner of Eleventh and Broad Streets was the school which Poe had attended, afterward the site of the Powhatan Hotel. Near it was the home of Mrs. Stanard, whose memory comes radiantly down to us in the lines "To Helen." Ever since the tragedy of the Hellespont, it has been the ambition of poets to perform a noteworthy swimming feat, and one of Poe's schoolboy memories was of his six-mile swim from Ludlam's Wharf to Warwick Bar. On May 16, 1836, in Mrs. Yarrington's boarding-house, at the corner of Twelfth and Bank Streets, Poe and Virginia Clemm were married. The house was burned in the fire of 1865. In January, 1837, Poe left the _Messenger_ and went north, after which most of his work was done in New York and Philadelphia. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was written when he lived on Sixth Avenue, near Waverley Place, and "The Raven" perched above his chamber door in a house on the Bloomingdale Road, now Eighty-Fourth Street. When living in Philadelphia Poe went to Washington for the double purpose of securing subscribers for his projected magazine, and of gaining a government appointment. The house in which he stayed during his short and ill-starred sojourn in the Capital is on New York Avenue, on a terrace with steps to a landing whence a longer flight leads to a side entrance lost in a greenery of dark and heavy bushes. On the opposite side is a small, square veranda. The building, which is two stories and a half high, was apparently a cheerful yellow color in the beginning, but it has become dingy with time and weather. The scars of its long battle with fate give it the appearance of being about to crumble and crash, after the fashion of the "House of Usher." It has windows with gloomy casements, opening even with the ground in the first story, and in the second upon a narrow balcony. A sign on the front of the building invites attention to a popular make of glue.[1] [1] Since this was written the old house has been torn down. In 1849, about two years after the passing of the gentle soul of Virginia, Poe returned to Richmond. He went first to the United States Hotel, at the southwest corner of Nineteenth and Main Streets, in the "Bird in Hand" neighborhood where he had looked for the last time on the face of his young mother. He soon removed to the "Swan," because it was near Duncan Lodge, the home of his friends, the MacKenzies, where his sister Rose had found protection. The Swan was a long, two-storied structure with combed roof, tall chimneys at the ends, and a front piazza with a long flight of steps leading down to the street. It was famous away back in the beginning of the century, having been built about 1795. When it sheltered Poe it wore a look of having stood there from the beginning of time and been forgotten by the passing generations. Duncan Lodge, now an industrial home, was then a stately mansion, shaded by magnificent trees. Here Poe spent much of his time, and one evening in this friendly home he recited "The Raven" with such artistic effect that his auditors induced him to give it as a public reading at the Exchange Hotel. Unfortunately, it was in midsummer, and both literary Richmond and gay Richmond were at seashore and mountain, and there were few to listen to the poem read as only its author could read it. Later in the same hall he gave, with gratifying success, his lecture on "The Poetic Principle." In early September, with some friends, he spent a Sunday in the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point. At the request of one of the party he recited "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "Ulalume," saying that the last stanza of "Ulalume" might not be intelligible to them, as it was not to him and for that reason had not been published. Even if he had known what it meant, he objected to furnishing it with a note of explanation, quoting Dr. Johnson's remark about a book, that it was "as obscure as an explanatory note." Miss Susan Ingram, an old friend of Poe, and one of the party at Old Point, tells of a visit he made at her home in Norfolk following the day at Point Comfort. Noting the odor of orris root, he said that he liked it because it recalled to him his boyhood, when his adopted mother kept orris root in her bureau drawers, and whenever they were opened the fragrance would fill the room. Near old St. John's in Richmond was the home of Mrs. Shelton, who, as Elmira Royster, was the youthful sweetheart from whom Poe took a tender and despairing farewell when he entered the University of Virginia. Here he spent many pleasant evenings, writing to Mrs. Clemm with enthusiasm of his renewed acquaintance with his former lady-love. Next to the last evening that Poe spent in Richmond he called on Susan Talley, afterward Mrs. Weiss, with whom he discussed "The Raven," pointing out various defects which he might have remedied had he supposed that the world would capture that midnight bird and hang it up in the golden cage of a "Collection of Best Poems." He was haunted by the "ghost" which "each separate dying ember wrought" upon the floor, and had never been able to explain satisfactorily to himself how and why, his head should have been "reclining on the cushion's velvet lining" when the topside would have been more convenient for any purpose except that of rhyme. But it cannot be demanded of a poet that he should explain himself to anybody, least of all to himself. To his view, the shadow of the raven upon the floor was the most glaring of its impossibilities. "Not if you suppose a transom with the light shining through from an outer hall," replied the ingenious Susan. When Poe left the Talley home he went to Duncan Lodge, a short distance away, and spent the night. The next night he was at Sadler's Old Market Hotel, leaving early in the morning for Philadelphia, but stopping in Baltimore, where came to him the tragic, mysterious end of all things. Poe knew men as little as he knew any of the other every-day facts of life. In the depths of that ignorance he left his reputation in the hands of the only being he ever met who would tear it to shreds and throw it into the mire. "THE SUNRISE POET" SIDNEY LANIER In my memory-gallery hangs a beautiful picture of the Lanier home as I saw it years ago, on High Street in Macon, Georgia, upon a hillock with greensward sloping down on all sides. It is a wide, roomy mansion, with hospitality written all over its broad steps that lead up to a wide veranda on which many windows look out and smile upon the visitor as he enters. One tall dormer window, overarched with a high peak, comes out to the very edge of the roof to welcome the guest. Two, smaller and more retiring, stand upon the verge of the high-combed house-roof and look down in friendly greeting. There are tall trees in the yard, bending a little to touch the old house lovingly. Far away stretched the old oaks that girdled Macon with greenery, where Sidney Lanier and his brother Clifford used to spend their schoolboy Saturdays among the birds and rabbits. Near by flows the Ocmulgee, where the boys, inseparable in sport as well as in the more serious aspects of life, were wont to fish. Here Sidney cut the reed with which he took his first flute lesson from the birds in the woods. Above the town were the hills for which the soul of the poet longed in after life. Macon was the "live" city of middle Georgia. She made no effort to rival Richmond or Charleston as an educational or literary centre, but she had an admirable commercial standing, and offered a generous hospitality that kept her in fond remembrance. In the Macon post-office Sidney Lanier had his first business experience, to offset the drowsy influence of sleepy Midway, the seat of Oglethorpe College, where he continued his studies after completing the course laid out in the "'Cademy" under the oaks and hickories of Macon. January 6, 1857, Lanier entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe, where it was unlawful to purvey any commodity, except Calvinism, "within a mile and a half of the University"--a sad regulation for college boys, who, as a rule, have several tastes unconnected with religious orthodoxy. Lanier carried with him the "small, yellow, one-keyed flute" which had superseded the musical reed provided by Nature, and practised upon it so fervently that a college-mate said that he "would play upon his flute like one inspired." Montvale Springs, in the mountains of Tennessee, where Sidney's grandfather, Sterling Lanier, built a hotel in which he gave his twenty-five grandchildren a vacation one summer, still holds the memory of that wondrous flute and yet more marvellous nature among the "strong, sweet trees, like brawny men with virgins' hearts." From its ferns and mosses and "reckless vines" and priestly oaks lifting yearning arms toward the stars, Lanier returned to Oglethorpe as a tutor. Here amid hard work and haunting suggestions of a coming poem, "The Jacquerie," he tried to work out the problem of his life's expression. * * * * * When the guns of Fort Sumter thundered across Sidney Lanier's dreams of music and poetry, he joined the Macon volunteers, the first company to march from Georgia into Virginia. It was stationed near Norfolk, camping in the fairgrounds in the time that Lanier describes as "the gay days of mandolin and guitar and moonlight sails on the James River." Life there seems not to have been "all beer and skittles," or the poetic substitutes therefor, for he goes on to say that their principal duties were to picket the beach, their "pleasures and sweet rewards of toil consisting in ague which played dice with our bones, and blue mass pills that played the deuce with our livers." In 1862, the Company went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where they indulged "for two or three months in what are called the 'dry shakes of the sand-hills,' a sort of brilliant tremolo movement." The time not required for the "tremolo movement" was spent in building Fort Fischer, until they were ordered to Drewry's Bluff, and then to the Chickahominy, where they took part in the Seven Days' fight. Even war places were literary shrines for Lanier, for wherever he chanced to be he was constantly dedicating himself anew to the work of his life. In Petersburg he studied in the Public Library. In that old town he first saw General R.E. Lee, and watched his calm face until he "felt that the antique earth returned out of the past and some mystic god sat on a hill, sculptured in stone, presiding over a terrible, yet sublime, contest of human passions"--perhaps the most poetic conception ever awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an elderly gentleman asleep under the influence of a sermon on a drowsy mid-summer day. Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him to "seize at any price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, Tieck." In the spring of 1863, on a visit to his old home in Macon, Lanier met Miss Mary Day and promptly fell in love, a fortunate occurrence for him, in that he secured an inspiring companion in his short and brilliant life, and for us because it is to her loving care that we owe the preservation of much of his finest work. On the return to Virginia, he and his brother Clifford had as companions the charming Mrs. Clement C. Clay and her sister, who wanted escorts from Macon to Virginia. She claims to have bribed them with "broiled partridges, sho' 'nuf sugar, and sho' 'nuf butter and spring chickens, 'quality size,'" to which allurements the youthful poets are alleged to have succumbed with grace and gallantry. I recall an evening that General Pickett and I spent with Mrs. Clay at the Spotswood Hotel, when she told us of her trip from Macon, and her two poet escorts. I remember that Senator Vest was present and played the violin while Senator and Mrs. Clay danced. Sidney Lanier said of his experience at Fort Boykin, on Burwell's Bay, that it was in many respects "the most delicious period" of his life. It may be that no other young soldier found so much of romance and poetry in the service of Mars or put so much of it into the lives of those around him. There are old men, now, who in their youth lived on the James River, in whose hearts the melody of Sidney Lanier's flute yet lingers in golden fire and dewy flowering. At Fort Boykin he decided the question of his vocation, writing to his father so eloquent a letter upon the desirability of pursuing his tastes, rather than trying to follow the paternal footsteps in a profession for which he had no talent, that his father relinquished all hope of making a lawyer of his gifted son. In Wilmington, North Carolina, Lanier served as signal officer until he was captured and taken to the prison camp at Point Lookout, in which gloomy place was developed the disease which in a few years deprived literature and music of a light that would have sparkled in beauty through the mists of centuries. Imprisonment did not serve as an interruption to the work of the student, for even a prison cell was a shrine to the radiant gods of Lanier's vision. Probably Heine and Herder were never before translated in surroundings so little congenial to those masters of poesy. One of his fellow-prisoners said that Lanier's flute "was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us." To the few who are left to remember him at that time, the waves of the Chesapeake, with the sandy beach sweeping down to kiss the waters, and the far-off dusky pines, are still melodious with that music. After his release he was taken to the Macon home, where he was dangerously ill for two months, being there when General Wilson captured the town and Mr. Jefferson Davis and Senator Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier house on their gloomy journey to Fortress Monroe. In that month Lanier's mother died of consumption, and he spent the summer months at home with his father and sister. In the autumn he taught on a large plantation nine miles from Macon, where, with "mind fairly teeming with beautiful things," he was shut up in the "tare and tret" of the school-room. He spent the winter at Point Clear on Mobile Bay, breathing in health with the sea-breezes and the air that drifted fragrantly through the pines. As clerk in the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, the property of his grandfather and his uncles, he may have found no more advantageous a field for his "beautiful things" than in the Georgia school-room, but even in that "dreamy and drowsy and drone-y town" there was some life "late in the afternoon, when the girls come out one by one and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later." But Lanier was as patient and self-contained in peace as he had been brave in war, and he accepted the drowsy life of Montgomery as he had accepted the romance and adventures of Fort Boykin, on Sundays playing the pipe-organ in the Presbyterian Church, and spending his leisure in finishing "Tiger Lilies," begun in the wild days of '63, on Burwell's Bay. In 1867 he returned to Macon, where in September he read the proof of his book, his one effort at romance-writing, chiefly noticeable for its musical element. The fluting of the author is recalled by the description of the hero's flute-playing: "It is like walking in the woods among wild flowers just before you go into some vast cathedral." * * * * * The next winter Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was about as appropriately placed there as Arion would have been in a tin-shop, but he kept his humorous outlook on life, departing from his serenity so far as to make his only attempts at expressing in verse his political indignation, the results of which he did not regard as poetry, and they do not appear in the collection of his poems. His muse was better adapted to the harmonies than to the discords of life. Some lines written then furnish a graphic picture of conditions in the South at that time: Young Trade is dead, And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fern And folds his arms that find no bread to earn, And bows his head. In 1868, after Lanier's marriage, he took up the practice of law in his father's office in Macon. In that town he made his eloquent Confederate Memorial address, April 26, 1870. Lanier, to whom "Home" meant all that was radiant and joyous in life, wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne that he was "homeless as the ghost of Judas Iscariot." He was thrust upon a wandering existence by the always unsuccessful attempt to find strength enough to do his work. At Brunswick he found the scene of his Marsh poems in "the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn," in which he reaches his depth of poetic feeling and his height of poetic expression. From Lookout Mountain he wrote Hayne that at about midnight he had received his letter and poem, and had read the poem to some friends sitting on the porch, among them Mr. Jefferson Davis. From Alleghany Springs he wrote his wife that new strength and new serenity "continually flash from out the gorges, the mountains, and the streams into the heart and charge it as the lightnings charge the earth with subtle and heavenly fires." Lanier's soul belonged to music more than to any other form of art, and more than any other has he linked music with poetry and the ever-varying phenomena of Nature. Of a perfect day in Macon he wrote: "If the year was an orchestra, to-day would be the calm, passionate, even, intense, quiet, full, ineffable flute therein." In November, 1872, Lanier went to San Antonio in quest of health, which he did not find. Incidentally, he found hitherto unrevealed depths of feeling in his "poor old flute" which caused the old leader of the Maennerchor, who knew the whole world of music, to cry out with enthusiasm that he had "never heard de flude accompany itself pefore." That part of his musical life which Sidney Lanier gave to the world was for the most part spent in Baltimore, where he played in the Peabody Orchestra, the Germania Maennerchor, and other music societies. An old German musician who used to play with him in the Orchestra told me that Lanier was the finest flutist he had ever heard. It was in Baltimore, too, that he gave the lectures which resulted in his most important prose-writings, "The Science of English Verse," "The English Novel," "Shakespeare and His Forerunners." In August, 1874, at Sunnyside, Georgia, amid the loneliness of abandoned farms, the glory of cornfields, and the mysterious beauty of forest, he wrote "Corn," the first of his poems to attract the attention of the country. It was published in _Lippincott's_ in 1875. Charlotte Cushman was so charmed by it that she sought out the author in Baltimore, and the two became good friends. At 64 Centre Street, Baltimore, Lanier wrote "The Symphony," which he said took hold of him "about four days ago like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since," which is the only way that a real poem or real music or a real picture ever can get into the world. He says that he "will be rejoiced when it is finished, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit." It appeared in _Lippincott's_, June, 1875. Lanier was at 66 Centre Street, Baltimore, when he wrote the words of the Centennial Cantata, which he said he "tried to make as simple and candid as a melody of Beethoven." He wrote to a friend that he was not disturbed because a paper had said that the poem of the Cantata was like a "communication from the spirit of Nat Lee through a Bedlamite medium." It was "but a little grotesque episode, as when a catbird paused in the midst of the most exquisite roulades and melodies to mew and then take up his song again." * * * * * In December of that year he was compelled to seek a milder climate in Florida, taking with him a commission to write a book about Florida for the J.B. Lippincott Company. Upon arriving at Tampa, he wrote to a friend: Tampa is the most forlorn collection of little one-story frame houses imaginable, and as May and I walked behind our landlord, who was piloting us to Orange Grove Hotel, our hearts fell nearer and nearer towards the sand through which we dragged. Presently we turned a corner and were agreeably surprised to find ourselves in front of a large three-story house with old nooks and corners, clean and comfortable in appearance and surrounded by orange trees in full fruit. We have a large room in the second story, opening upon a generous balcony fifty feet long, into which stretch the liberal arms of a fine orange tree holding out their fruitage to our very lips. In front is a sort of open plaza containing a pretty group of gnarled live-oaks full of moss and mistletoe. [Illustration: SIDNEY LANIER From a photograph owned by H.W. Lanier] In May he made an excursion of which he wrote: For a perfect journey God gave us a perfect day. The little Ocklawaha steamboat _Marion_--a steamboat which is like nothing in the world so much as a Pensacola gopher with a preposterously exaggerated back--had started from Palatka some hours before daylight, having taken on her passengers the night previous; and by seven o'clock of such a May morning as no words could describe, unless words were themselves May mornings, we had made the twenty-five miles up the St. John's to where the Ocklawaha flows into that stream nearly opposite Welaka, one hundred miles above Jacksonville. It was on this journey that he saw the most magnificent residence that he had ever beheld, the home of an old friend of his, an alligator, who possessed a number of such palatial mansions and could change his residence at any time by the simple process of swimming from one to another. On his return to Baltimore he lived at 55 Lexington in four rooms arranged as a French flat. He makes mention of a gas stove "on which my comrade magically produces the best coffee in the world, and this, with fresh eggs (boiled through the same handy little machine), bread, butter, and milk, forms our breakfast." December 3 he writes from the little French flat, announcing that he "has plunged in and brought forth captive a long Christmas poem for _Every Saturday_," a Baltimore weekly publication. The poem was "Hard Times in Elfland." He says, "Wife and I have been to look at a lovely house with eight rooms and many charming appliances," whereof the rent was less than that of the four rooms. The next month he writes from 33 Denmead Street, the eight-room house, to which he had gone, with the attendant necessity of buying "at least three hundred twenty-seven household utensils" and "hiring a colored gentlewoman who is willing to wear out my carpets, burn out my range, freeze out my water-pipes, and be generally useful." He mentions having written a couple of poems, and part of an essay on Beethoven and Bismarck, but his chief delight is in his new home, which invests him with the dignity of paying taxes and water rates. He takes the view that no man is a Bohemian who has to pay water rates and street tax. * * * * * In addition to supporting his new dignity he finds time and strength for his usual work, and he writes on January 30, 1878, "I have been mainly at work on some unimportant prose matter for pot-boilers, but I get off a short poem occasionally, and in the background of my mind am writing my Jacquerie." Unfortunately, "Jacquerie" remained in the background of his mind, with the exception of two songs--all we have to indicate what a stirring presentation our literature might have had of the fourteenth century awakening of "Jacques Bonhomme," that early precursor of the more terrible arousing in 'Ninety-Three. In the latter part of the year Lanier was living at Number 180 St. Paul Street, and in December he wrote to a friend: "Bayard Taylor's death slices a huge cantle out of the world.... It only seems that he has gone to some other Germany a little farther off.... He was such a fine fellow, one almost thinks he might have talked Death over and made him forego his stroke." At Bayard Taylor's home, where Lanier visited, were two immense chestnut trees, much loved by the two poets. Mrs. Taylor wrote that one of the trees died soon after the death of its poet owner. The other lingered until a short time after the passing of Lanier. It was in connection with the lines of the "Cantata," written in the Baltimore home of the Southern poet, that the poet friends began a long-continued series of letters which one loves to read on a winter night, when the winds are battling with the world outside, and the fire gleams redly in the open grate, and the lamp burns softly on the library table, and all things invite to poetic dreams. November 12, 1880, Sidney Lanier wrote to his publisher a letter of appreciation of the beautiful work done upon his volume, "The Boy's King Arthur." It is dated at Number 435 North Calvert Street, the latest Baltimore address that we have. * * * * * The distinction Sidney Lanier achieved as first flutist in the orchestra of the Peabody Institute led to an offer of a position in the Thomas Orchestra, which the condition of his health did not permit him to accept. In the summer of 1880 his "Science of English Verse" was published. "Shakespeare and His Forerunners" resulted from his work with his classes in Elizabethan Poetry. "The English Novel" is the course of lectures on "Personality Illustrated by the Development of Fiction," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in the winter of 1880-'81. As we read the printed work in its depth and strength, we do not realize that his wife took the notes from his whispered dictation, and that his auditors as they listened trembled lest, with each sentence, that deep musical voice should fall on eternal silence. All this while he had been working at lectures and boys' books, when, as he said, "a thousand songs are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon." One of the thousand, "Sunrise," he uttered with a temperature of 104 degrees burning out his life, but it is full of the rapture of the dawn. To the pines of North Carolina the poet was taken, in the hope that they might give him of their strength. But the wind-song through their swaying branches lulled him to his last earthly sleep. On the 7th of September the narrow stream of his earthly existence broadened and deepened and flowed triumphantly into the great ocean of Eternal Life. "THE POET OF THE PINES" PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE "Why are not your countrymen all poets, surrounded as they are by beautiful things to inspire them?" I asked a young Swiss. "Because," he replied, "my people are so accustomed to beauty that it has no influence upon them." They had never known anything but beauty: there were no sharp contrasts to clash, flint-like, and strike out sparks of divine fire. Had the beauty of old Charleston produced the same negative effect, Southern literature would have suffered a distinct loss--if that may be regarded as lost which has never been possessed. For centuries the Queen of the Sea stood in a vision of splendor, the tumultuous waves of the Atlantic dashing at her feet, eternal sunshine crowning her royal brow. Her gardens were stately with oleanders and pomegranates, brilliant with jonquils and hyacinths, myrtle and gardenia. Roses of the olden time, Lancaster and York and the sweet pink cinnamon, breathed the fragrance of days long past. The hills that environed her were snowy with Cherokee roses and odorous with jasmine and honeysuckle. Her people dwelt in mansions in the corridors of which ancestral ghosts from Colonial days kept guard. In old Charleston that goes back in history almost a century before the Revolution and extends to the opening of the Sixties--the old Queen City by the Sea, which now few are left to remember--was a circle of congenial creative souls just before the first shot at Fort Sumter heralded the destruction of the old-time life of the Colonial city. William Gilmore Simms was the head and mentor of the brilliant little band, and the much younger men, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, were the fiery souls that gave it the mental electricity necessary to furnish the motive power. Through all the coming days of trial and hardship, of aspiration and defeat, of watching from the towers of high achievement or lying prone in the valley of failure, not one of that little circle ever lost the golden memory of those magic evenings in the home of the novelist and poet, the thinker and dreamer, William Gilmore Simms, the intellectual father of them all. At that time in the old city was another picturesque home that harked back to Colonial days--stately, veranda-circled, surrounded by that fascinating atmosphere of history and poetry known to those old dwellings alone of all the structures of the New World: the home of the Southern poet of Nature, Paul Hamilton Hayne. Its many-windowed front looked cheerfully out upon a wide lawn radiant with flowers of bygone fashion, loved by the poets of olden times, and bright with the greenery that kept perpetual summer around the historic dwelling. This beautiful pre-Revolutionary home was burned in the bombardment of Charleston, and with it was destroyed the library that had been the pride of the poet's heart. In this old home the Poet of the Pines was born of a family that looked back to the opening days of the eighteenth century, when Charleston was young, glowing with the beauty of her birth into the forests of the New World, wearing proudly the tiara of her loyalty to King and Crown. Looking back along the road that stretched between the first Hayne, who helped to make of the old city a memory to be cherished on the page of history and a picture on the canvas of the present to awaken admiration, and the young soul that looked with poetic vision on the beginning of the new era, one sees a long succession of brilliant names and powerful figures. Paul Hayne was the great-grand-nephew of "the Martyr Hayne," who has given to Charleston her only authentic ghost-story, the scene of which was a brick dwelling which stood till 1896 at the corner of Atlantic and Meeting Streets. Colonel Isaac H. Hayne, a soldier of the Revolution, secured a parole, that he might be with his dying wife. While on parole he was ordered to fight against his country. Rather than be forced to the crime of treason, he broke his parole, was captured and condemned to death. From her beautiful, mahogany-panelled drawing-room in that old home where the two streets cross, his sister-in-law, who had gone with his two little children to plead for his life, watched as he passed on his way from the vault of the old Custom House, used then as a prison, to the gallows. "Return, return to us!" she called in an agony of grief. As he walked on he replied, "If I can I will." It is said that his old negro mammy, to whom he was always "my chile," ran out to the gate with the playthings she had fondly cherished since the days when they were to him irresistible attractions, crying, "Come back! Come back!" To both calls his heart responded with such longing love that when the soul was released, the old home knew the step and the voice again. Ever afterward when eventide fell, one standing at that window would hear a ghostly voice from the street below and steps upon the stairs and in the hall; footsteps of one coming--never going. Paul Hamilton Hayne's uncle, Colonel Arthur P. Hayne, fought under Jackson at New Orleans, and was afterward United States Senator. Paul was nephew of Robert Y. Hayne, whose career as a statesman and an orator won for him a fame that has not faded with the years. With this uncle, Paul found a home in his orphaned childhood. Of his sailor father, Lieutenant Hayne, his shadowy memory takes form in a poem, one stanza of which gives us a view of the brave seaman's life and death: He perished not in conflict nor in flame, No laurel garland rests upon his tomb; Yet in stern duty's path he met his doom; A life heroic, though unwed to fame. Though he pathetically mourns: Never in childhood have I blithely sprung To catch my father's voice, or climb his knee, still Love limned his wavering likeness on my soul, Till through slow growths it waxed a perfect whole Of clear conceptions, brightening heart and mind. That clear conception remained a lifelong treasure in the poet's heart. Through a great ancestral corridor had Paul Hamilton Hayne descended, with soul enjewelled with all the gems of character and thought that had sparkled in the long gallery through which he had travelled into the earth-light. In the school of Mr. Coates, in Charleston, he was fitted to enter Charleston College, a plain, narrow-fronted structure with six severely classic columns supporting the façade. It stood on the foundation of the "old brick barracks" held by the Colonial troops through a six-weeks siege by twelve thousand British regulars under Sir Henry Clinton. Hayne satisfied the hunger and thirst of his excursive and ardent mind by browsing in the Charleston Library on Broad and Church streets. It may be that sometimes, on his way to that friendly resort, he passed the old house on Church Street which once sheltered General Washington; a substantial three-storied building with ornamental woodwork which might cause its later use as a bakery to seem out of harmony to any but _chefs_ with high ideals of their art. The Library of old Charleston was composed chiefly of English classics and the literature of France in the olden time when Europe furnished us with something more than anarchy, clothes, and bargain-counter titles. A sample of the Young America of that early day asked an old gentleman, "Why are you always reading that old Montaigne?" The reply was, "Why, child, there is in this book all that a gentleman needs to think about," with the discreet addition, "Not a book for little girls, though." If we find in our circle of poets a certain stateliness of style scarcely to be looked for in a somewhat new republic that might be expected to rush pell-mell after an idea and capture it by the sudden impact of a lusty blow, after the manner of the minute-men catching a red-coat at Lexington; if we observe in their writing old world expressions that woo us subtly, like the odor of lavender from a long-closed linen chest, we may attribute it to the fact that aristocratic old Charleston, though the first to assert her independence of the political yoke, yet clung tenaciously to the literary ideals of the Old World. On Meeting Street was Apprentices' Library Hall, where Glidden led his hearers through the intricacies of Egyptian Archæology. Here Agassiz sometimes lectured on Zoölogy, and our youthful poet may have watched animals from the jungle climb up the blackboard at the touch of what would have been only a piece of chalk in any other hand, but became a magic creative force under the guidance of that wizard of science. Here he could have followed with Thackeray the varying fortunes and ethic vagaries of the royal Georges. His poetic soul may have kindled with the fire of Macready's "Hamlet" when, thinking that he was too far down the slope of life to hark back to the days of the youthful Dane, he proved that he still had the glow of the olden time in his soul by reading the part as only Macready could. In this old hall he may have looked upon the paintings which inspired him to create his own pictures, luminous with softly tinted word-colors. Meeting Street seems to have been named with reference to its uses, for here, too, was the old theatre, gone long ago, where Fannie Ellsler danced with a wavering, quivering, shimmering grace that drove humming-birds to despair. In that theatre it may be that Paul Hayne heard Jenny Lind fill the night with a melody which would irradiate his soul throughout life and reproduce itself in the music-tones of his gently cadenced verse. There the ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur lived and died again in her wondrous transmigration into the soul of the great Rachel. When a boy, Hayne's heart may have often thrilled to the voice of the scholarly Hugh Swinton Legare, as he made the heart of some classic old poem live in the music of his organ-tones. A sensitive soul surrounded by the influences of life in old Charleston had many incentives to high and harmonious expression. That the Queen City of the Sea did not claim the privilege of the fickleness alleged to be incident to the feminine character is illustrated by the fact that she had but two postmasters in seventy years, a circumstance worthy of note "in days like these, when ev'ry gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow," and the disbursing counter is crowded with claimants for the rewards due for commendable activity in the campaign. One of those two was Peter Bascot, an appointee of Washington. The other was Alfred Huger, "the last of the Barons," who had refused to take the office in the time of Bascot. In old Charleston the servants were the severest sticklers for propriety, and the butlers of the old families rivalled each other in the loftiness of their standards. Jack, the butler of "the last of the Barons," was wide awake to the demands of his position, and when an old sea captain, an intimate friend of Mr. Huger, dining with the family, asked for rice when the fish was served he was first met with a chill silence. Thinking that he had not been heard, he repeated the request. Jack bent and whispered to him. With a burst of laughter, the captain said, "Judge, you have a treasure. Jack has saved me from disgrace, from exposing my ignorance. He whispered, 'That would not do, sir; _we_ never eats rice with fish.'" Russell's book-shop on King Street was a favorite place of meeting for the Club which recognized Simms as king by divine right. From these pleasant gatherings grew the thought of giving to Charleston a medium through which the productions of her thought might go out to the world. In April, 1857, appeared _Russell's Magazine_, bearing the names of Paul Hamilton Hayne and W.B. Carlisle as editors, though upon Hayne devolved all the editorial work and much of the other writing for the new publication. He had helped to keep alive the _Southern Literary Messenger_ after the death of Mr. White and the departure of Poe for other fields of labor, had assisted Richards on the _Southern Literary Gazette_ and had been associate editor of Harvey's _Spectator_. For Charleston had long been ambitious to become the literary centre of the South. The object of _Russell's Magazine_ was to uphold the cause of literature in Charleston and in the South, and incidentally to stand by the friends of the young editor, who carried his partisanship of William Gilmore Simms so far as to permit the publication of a severe criticism of Dana's "Household Book of Poetry" because it did not include any of the verse of the Circle's rugged mentor. _Russell's_ had a brilliant and brief career, falling upon silence in March, 1860; probably not much to the regret of Paul Hayne, who, while too conscientious to withhold his best effort from any enterprise that claimed him, was too distinctly a poet not to feel somewhat like Pegasus in pound when tied down to the editorial desk. This quiet life, in which the gentle soul of Hayne, with its delicate sensitiveness, poetic insight, and appreciation of all beauty, found congenial environment, soon suffered a rude interruption. As Charleston was the first to throw off the yoke of Great Britain and draw up a constitution which she thought adapted to independent government, so did she first express the determination of South Carolina to break the bonds that held her turbulent political soul in uncongenial association. Hayne heard the twelve-hour cannonade of Fort Sumter's hundred and forty guns echoing over the sea, and saw the Stars and Bars flutter above the walls of the old fort. He saw Generals Bee and Johnson come back from Manassas, folded in the battle flag for which they had given their lives, to lie in state in the City Hall at the marble feet of Calhoun, the great political leader whom they had followed to the inevitable end. General Lee was in the old town for a little while. A man said to him, "It is difficult for so many men to abandon their business for the war." The general replied, "Believe me, sir, the business of this generation _is_ the war." In the spirit of this answer Charleston met the crisis so suddenly come upon her. All the young poet's patriotic love and inherited martial instinct urged him to the battle, but his frail physique withheld him from the field, and he took service as an aide on the staff of Governor Pickens. At the close of the war, wrecked in health, with only the memory of his beautiful home and library left to him, with not even a piece of the family silver remaining from the "march to the sea," Hayne went to the pine-barrens of Georgia, eighteen miles from Augusta, to build a new home. When the first man and woman were sent out from their garden home, it was not as a punishment for sin, but as an answer to their ambitious quest for knowledge and their new-born longing for a wider life. It was not that the gate of Eden was closed upon them; it was that the gates of all the Edens of the world were opened for them and for the generations of their children. One of those gates opened upon the Eden of Copse Hill, where the poet of Nature found a home and all friendly souls met a welcome that filled the pine-barrens with joy for them. Of Copse Hill the poet says: A little apology for a dwelling was perched on the top of a hill overlooking in several directions hundreds of leagues of pine-barrens there was as yet neither garden nor inclosure near it; and a wilder, more desolate and savage-looking home could hardly have been seen east of the prairies. What that "little apology of a dwelling" was to him is best pictured in his own words: On a steep hillside, to all airs that blow, Open, and open to the varying sky, Our cottage homestead, smiling tranquilly, Catches morn's earliest and eve's latest glow; Here, far from worldly strife and pompous show, The peaceful seasons glide serenely by, Fulfil their missions and as calmly die As waves on quiet shores when winds are low. Fields, lonely paths, the one small glimmering rill That twinkles like a wood-fay's mirthful eye, Under moist bay-leaves, clouds fantastical That float and change at the light breeze's will,-- To me, thus lapped in sylvan luxury, Are more than death of kings, or empires' fall. Here with "the bonny brown hand" in his that was "dearer than all dear things of earth" Paul Hayne found a life that was filled with beauty, notwithstanding its moments of discouragement and pain. We like to remember that always with him, helping him bear the burdens of life, was that wifely hand of which the poet could say, "The hand which points the path to heaven, yet makes a heaven of earth." On sunny days he paced to and fro under the pines, the many windows of his mind opened to the studies in light and shade and his soul attuned to the music of the drifting winds and the whispering trees. When Nature was in darkened mood and gave him no invitation to the open court wherein she reigned, he walked up and down his library floor, engrossed with some beautiful thought which, in harmonious garb of words, would go forth and bless the world with its music. The study, of which he wrote: This is my world! within these narrow walls I own a princely service was perhaps as remarkable a room as any in which student ever spent his working hours, the walls being papered wholly with cuts from papers and periodicals. The furniture was decorated in the same way, even to the writing desk, which was an old work bench left by some carpenters. All had been done by the "bonny brown hands" that never wearied in loving service. Many of his friends made pilgrimages to the little cottage on the hill, where they were cordially welcomed by the poet, who, happy in his home with his wife and little son, lived among the flowers which he tended with his own hands, surrounded by the majesty of the pines whose Passion and mystery murmur through the leaves,-- Passion and mystery touched by deathless pain, Whose monotone of long, low anguish grieves For something lost that shall not live again. Hither came Henry Timrod, doomed to failure, loss, and early death, but with soul eternally alive with the fires of genius. In the last days of his sad and broken life William Gilmore Simms came to renew old memories and recount the days when life in old Charleston was iridescent as the waves that washed the feet of the Queen of the Sea. Congenial spirits they were who met in that charming little study where Paul Hayne walked "the fields of quiet Arcadies" and ... gleamings of the lost, heroic life Flashed through the gorgeous vistas of romance. Hayne had the subtle power of touching the friendliness in the hearts of those who were far away, as well as of the comrades who had walked with him along the road of life. Often letters came from friends in other lands, known to him only by that wireless intuitional telegraphy whereby kindred souls know each other, though hands have not met nor eyes looked into eyes. Many might voice the thought expressed by one: "I may boast that Paul Hayne was my friend, though it was never my good fortune to meet him." Many a soul was upheld and strengthened by him, as was that of a man who wrote that he had been saved from suicide by reading the "Lyric of Action." His album held autographed photographs of many writers, among them Charles Kingsley, William Black, and Wilkie Collins. He cherished an ivy vine sent him by Blackmore from Westminister Abbey. Hayne's many-windowed mind looked out upon all the phases of the beauty of Nature. Her varied moods found in him a loving response. He awaited her coming as the devotee at the temple gate waits for the approach of his Divinity: I felt, through dim, awe-laden space, The coming of thy veiled face; And in the fragrant night's eclipse The kisses of thy deathless lips, Like strange star-pulses, throbbed through space! Whether it is drear November and But winds foreboding fill the desolate night And die at dawning down wild woodland ways, or in May "couched in cool shadow" he hears The bee-throngs murmurous in the golden fern, The wood-doves veiled by depths of flickering green, for him the music of the spheres is in it all. Whether at midnight The moon, a ghost of her sweet self, * * * * * Creeps up the gray, funereal sky wearily, how wearily, or morning comes "with gracious breath of sunlight," it is a part of glorious Nature, his star-crowned Queen, his sun-clad goddess. To no other heart has the pine forest come so near unfolding its immemorial secret. That poet-mind was a wind-harp, and its quivering strings echoed to every message that came from the dim old woods on the "soft whispers of the twilight breeze," the flutterings of the newly awakened morn or the crash of the storm. "The Dryad of the Pine" bent "earth-yearning branches" to give him loving greeting and receive his quick response: Leaning on thee, I feel the subtlest thrill Stir thy dusk limbs, tho' all the heavens are still, And 'neath thy rings of rugged fretwork mark What seems a heart-throb muffled in the dark. "The imprisoned spirits of all winds that blow" echoed to his ear from the heart of the pine-cone fallen from "the wavering height of yon monarchal pine." When a glorious pine, to him a living soul, falls under the axe he hears "the wail of Dryads in their last distress." In the greenery of his loved and loving pines, with memories happy, though touched to tender sadness by the sorrows that had come to the old-time group of friends, blessed with the companionship of the two loving souls who were dearest to him of all the world, he sang the melodies of his heart till a cold hand swept across the strings of his wonderful harp and chilled them to silence. In his last year of earth he was invited to deliver at Vanderbilt University a series of lectures on poetry and literature. Before the invitation reached him he had "fallen into that perfect peace that waits for all." "THE FLAME-BORN POET" HENRY TIMROD A writer on Southern poets heads his article on one of the most gifted of our children of song, "Henry Timrod, the Unfortunate Singer." At first glance the title may seem appropriate. Viewed by the standard set up by the world, there was little of the wine of success in Timrod's cup of life. Bitter drafts of the waters of Marah were served to him in the iron goblet of Fate. But he lived. Of how many of the so-called favorites of Fortune could that be said? Through the mists of his twilit life, he caught glimpses of a sun-radiant morning of wondrous glory. Thirty years after Timrod's death a Northern critic, writing of the new birth of interest in Timrod's work, said: "Time is the ideal editor." Surely, Editor Time's blue pencil has dealt kindly with our flame-born poet. In Charleston, December 8, 1829, the "little blue-eyed boy" of his father's verse first opened his eyes upon a world that would give him all its beauty and much of its sadness, verifying the paternal prophecy: And thy full share of misery Must fall in life on thee! In early childhood he was destined to lose the loving father to whom his "shouts of joy" were the sweetest strain in life's harmony. Henry Timrod and Paul Hayne, within a month of the same age, were seat-mates in school. Writing of him many years later, Hayne tells of the time that Timrod made the thrilling discovery that he was a poet; that being, perhaps, the most exciting epoch in any life. Coming into school one morning, he showed Paul his first attempt at verse-writing, which Hayne describes as "a ballad of stirring adventures and sanguinary catastrophe," which he thought wonderful, the youthful author, of course, sharing that conviction. Convictions are easy at thirteen, even when one has not the glamour of the sea and the romance of old Charleston to prepare the soul for their riveting. Unfortunately, the teacher of that school thus honored by the presence of two budding poets had not a mind attuned to poesy. Seeing the boys communing together in violation of the rules made and provided for school discipline, he promptly and sharply recalled them to the subjects wisely laid down in the curriculum. Notwithstanding this early discouragement, the youthful poet, abetted by his faithful fellow song-bird, persevered in his erratic way, and Charleston had the honor of being the home of one who has been regarded as the most brilliant of Southern poets. When Henry Timrod finished his course of study in the chilling atmosphere in which his poetic ambition first essayed to put forth its tender leaflets, he entered Franklin College, in Athens, the nucleus of what is now the University of Georgia. A few years ago a visitor saw his name in pencil on a wall of the old college. The "Toombs oak" still stood on the college grounds, and it may be that its whispering leaves brought to the youthful poet messages of patriotism which they had garnered from the lips of the embryonic Georgia politician. Timrod spent only a year in the college, quitting his studies partly because his health failed, and partly because the family purse was not equal to his scholastic ambition. Returning to Charleston at a time when that city cherished the ambition to become to the South what Boston was to the North, he helped form the coterie of writers who followed the leadership of that burly and sometimes burry old Mentor, William Gilmore Simms. The young poet seems not to have been among the docile members of the flock, for when Timrod's first volume of poems was published Hayne wrote to Simms, requesting him to write a notice of Timrod's work, not that he (Timrod) deserved it of Simms, but that he (Hayne) asked it of him. It may be that Timrod's recognition of the fact that he could write poetry and that Simms could only try to write it led to a degree of youthful assumption which clashed with the dignity of the older man. The Nestor of Southern literature seems not to have cherished animosity, for he not only noticed Timrod favorably, but in after years, when the poet's misfortunes pressed most heavily upon him, made every possible exertion to give him practical and much needed assistance. Upon his return from college, Timrod, with some dim fancies concerning a forensic career circling around the remote edges of his imagination, entered the office of his friend, Judge Petigru. The "irrepressible conflict" between Law and Poesy that has been waged through the generations broke forth anew, and Timrod made the opposite choice from that reached by Blackstone. Judging from the character of the rhythmic composition in which the great expounder of English law took leave of the Lyric Muse, his decision was a judicious one. Doubtless that of our poet was equally discreet. When the Club used to gather in Russell's book-shop on King Street, Judge Petigru and his recalcitrant protégé had many pleasant meetings, unmarred by differences as to the relative importance of the Rule in Shelley's Case and the flight of Shelley's Lark. Henry Timrod was thrust into the literary life of Charleston at a time when that life was most full of impelling force. It was a Charleston filled with memories quite remote from the poetry and imaginative literature which represented life to the youthful writers. It was a Charleston with an imposing background of history and oratory, forensic and legislative, against which the poetry and imagination of the new-comers glittered capriciously, like the glimmering of fireflies against the background of night, with swift, uncertain vividness that suggested the early extinguishing of those quivering lamps. But the heart of Charleston was kindled with a new ambition, and the new men brought promise of its fulfilment. Others have given us a view of the literary life of Charleston, of her social position, of her place in the long procession of history. To Timrod it was left to give us martial Charleston, "girt without and garrisoned at home," looking "from roof and spire and dome across her tranquil bay." With him, we see her while Calm as that second summer which precedes The first fall of the snow, In the broad sunlight of heroic deeds The City bides the foe. Through his eyes we look seaward to where Dark Sumter, like a battlemented cloud, Looms o'er the solemn deep. We behold the Queen City of the Sea standing majestically on the sands, the storm-clouds lowering darkly over her, the distant thunders of war threatening her, and the pale lightnings of the coming tempest flashing nearer, And down the dunes a thousand guns lie couched, Unseen, beside the flood-- Like tigers in some Orient jungle crouched That wait and watch for blood. We see her in those dark days before the plunge into the darkness has been taken, as Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade, Walk grave and thoughtful men, Whose hands may one day wield the patriot's blade As lightly as the pen. Thus he gives us the picture of the beautiful city of his love as All untroubled in her faith, she waits The triumph or the tomb. Hayne said that of all who shared the suppers at the hospitable home of Simms in Charleston none perhaps enjoyed them as vividly as Timrod. He chooses the word that well applies to Timrod's life in all its variations. He was vivid in all that he did. Being little of a talker, he was always a vivid listener, and when he spoke, his words leaped forth like a flame. Russell's book-shop, where the Club used to spend their afternoons in pleasant conversation and discourse of future work, was a place of keen interest to Timrod, and when their discussions resulted in the establishment of _Russell's Magazine_ he was one of the most enthusiastic contributors to the ambitious publication. While Charleston was not the place of what would be called Timrod's most successful life, it was the scene in which he reached his highest exemplification of Browning's definition of poetry: "A presentment of the correspondence of the universe to the Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal." In the environments of Charleston he roamed with his Nature-worshipping mother, who taught him the beauties of clouds and trees and streams and flowers, the glory of the changeful pageantry of the sky, the exquisite grace of the bird atilt on a swaying branch. Through the glowing picture which Nature unfolded before him he looked into the heart of the truth symbolized there and gave us messages from woods and sky and sea. While it may be said that a poet can make his own environment, yet he is fortunate who finds his place where nature has done so much to fit the outward scene to the inward longing. In Charleston he met "Katie, the Fair Saxon," brown-eyed and with Entangled in her golden hair Some English sunshine, warmth and air. He straightway entered into the kingdom of Love, and that sunshine made a radiance over the few years he had left to give to love and art. In the city of his home he answered his own "Cry to Arms" when the "festal guns" roared out their challenge. Had his physique been as strong as his patriotism, his sword might have rivaled his pen in reflecting honor upon his beautiful city. Even then the seeds of consumption had developed, and he was discharged from field service. Still wishing to remain in the service of his country, he tried the work of war correspondent, reaching the front just after the battle of Shiloh. Overcome by the horrors of the retreat, he returned to Charleston, and was soon after appointed assistant editor of the _Daily South Carolinian_, published in Columbia. He removed to the capital, where his prospects became bright enough to permit his marriage to Kate Goodwin, the English girl to whom his Muse pays such glowing tribute. In May, 1864, Simms was in Columbia, and on his return to "Woodlands" wrote to Hayne that Timrod was in better health and spirits than for years, saying: "He has only to prepare a couple of dwarf essays, making a single column, and the pleasant public is satisfied. These he does so well that they have reason to be so. Briefly, our friend is in a fair way to fatten and be happy." This prosperity came to an end when the capital city fell a victim to the fires of war, and Timrod returned to the city of his birth, where for a time the publication of the _South Carolinian_ was continued, he writing editorials nominally for fifteen dollars a month, practically for exercise in facile expression, as the small stipend promised was never paid. With the paper, he soon returned to Columbia, where after a time he secured work in the office of Governor Orr, writing to Hayne that twice he copied papers from ten o'clock one morning till sunrise of the next. With the close of the session, his work ended, and in the spring he visited Paul Hayne at Copse Hill. Hayne says: "He found me with my family established in a crazy wooden shanty, dignified as a cottage, near the track of the main Georgia railroad, about sixteen miles from Augusta." To Timrod, that "crazy wooden shanty," set in immemorial pines and made radiant by the presence of his poet friend, was finer than a palace. On that "windy, frowzy, barren hill," as Maurice Thompson called it, the two old friends spent together the spring days of '67--such days as lingered in golden beauty in the memory of one of them and have come down to us in immortal verse. Again in August of that year he visited Copse Hill, hoping to find health among the pines. Of these last days Paul Hayne wrote years later: In the latter summer-tide of this same year I again persuaded him to visit me. Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet, are the memories of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67! We would rest on the hillsides, in the swaying golden shadows, watching together the Titanic masses of snow-white clouds which floated slowly and vaguely through the sky, suggesting by their form, whiteness, and serene motion, despite the season, flotillas of icebergs upon Arctic seas. Like lazzaroni we basked in the quiet noons, sunk into the depths of reverie, or perhaps of yet more "charmed sleep." Or we smoked, conversing lazily between the puffs, "Next to some pine whose antique roots just peeped From out the crumbling bases of the sand." But the evenings, with their gorgeous sunsets, "rolling down like a chorus" and the "gray-eyed melancholy gloaming," were the favorite hours of the day with him. One of those pines was especially his own, by his love and his choice of its shade as a resting place. Of it Paul Hayne wrote when his friend had passed from its shadows for the last time: The same majestic pine is lifted high Against the twilight sky, The same low, melancholy music grieves Amid the topmost leaves, As when I watched and mused and dreamed with him Beneath those shadows dim. Such dreams we can dimly imagine sometimes when we stand beneath a glorious pine and try to translate its whisperings into words, and watch "the last rays of sunset shimmering down, flashed like a royal crown." Sometimes we catch glimpses of such radiant visions when we stand in the pine shadows and think, as Hayne did so often after that beautiful August, "Of one who comes no more." Under that stately tree he Seemed to drink the sunset like strong wine Or, hushed in trance divine, Hailed the first shy and timorous glance from far Of evening's virgin star. In all his years after, Paul Hayne held in his heart the picture of his friend with head against that "mighty trunk" when The unquiet passion died from out his eyes, As lightning from stilled skies. So through that glowing August on Copse Hill the two Southern poets walked and talked and built their shrine to the shining Olympic goddess to whom their lives were dedicated. When summer had wrapped about her the purple and crimson glories of her brilliant life and drifted into the tomb of past things, Timrod left the friend of his heart alone with the "soft wind-angels" and memories of "that quiet eve" When, deeply, thrillingly, He spake of lofty hopes which vanquish Death; And on his mortal breath A language of immortal meanings hung That fired his heart and tongue. [Illustration: HOUSE WHERE TIMROD LIVED DURING HIS LAST YEARS 1108 Henderson Street, Columbia, S.C.] Impelled by circumstances to leave the pines before their inspiring breath had given him of their life, he had little strength to renew the battle for existence, and of the sacrifice of his possessions to which he had been forced to resort he writes to Hayne: "We have eaten two silver pitchers, one or two dozen silver forks, several sofas, innumerable chairs, and a huge bedstead." We should like to think of life as flowing on serenely in that pretty cottage on Henderson Street, Columbia, its wide front veranda crowned with a combed roof supported by a row of white columns. In its cool dimness we may in fancy see the nature-loving poet at eventide looking into the greenery of a friendly tree stretching great arms lovingly to the shadowy porch. A taller tree stands sentinel at the gate, as if to guard the poet-soul from the world and close it around with the beauty that it loved. But life did not bring him any more of joy or success than he had achieved in the long years of toil and sorrow and disappointment, brightened by the flame of his own genius throwing upon the dark wall of existence the pictures that imagination drew with magic hand upon his sympathetic, ever responsive mind. On the sixth of October, after that month of iridescent beauty on Copse Hill, came the days of which he had written long before: As it purples in the zenith, As it brightens on the lawn, There's a hush of death about me, And a whisper, "He is gone!" On Copse Hill, "Under the Pine," his lifelong friend stood and sorrowfully questioned: O Tree! have not his poet-touch, his dreams So full of heavenly gleams, Wrought through the folded dulness of thy bark, And all thy nature dark Stirred to slow throbbings, and the fluttering fire Of faint, unknown desire? Near the end of his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not wish to live to be old--"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or fifty-five; "one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical." If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful ones, a brighter radiance might have crowned our literature. Or, would the vision have faded away with youth? On the seventh of October, 1867, Henry Timrod was laid to rest in Trinity Churchyard, Columbia, beside his little Willie, "the Christmas gift of God" that brought such divine light to the home only to leave it in darkness when the gift was recalled before another Christmas morn had gladdened the world. The poet's grave is marked by a shaft erected by loving hands, but a memorial more fitting to one who so loved the beautiful is found in the waving grasses and the fragrant flowers that Nature spreads for her lover, and the winds of heaven that breathe soft dirges over his lowly mound. In Washington Square, Charleston, stands a monument erected in 1901 by the Timrod Memorial Association of South Carolina to the memory of the most vivid poet the South has given to the world. On the west panel is an inscription which expresses to us the mainspring of his character: Through clouds and through sunshine, in peace and in war, amid the stress of poverty and the storms of civil strife, his soul never faltered and his purpose never failed. To his poetic mission he was faithful to the end. In life and in death he was "not disobedient unto the Heavenly vision." On the panel facing the War Monument are three stanzas from his own beautiful Ode, sung at the decoration of Confederate graves in Magnolia Cemetery in 1867--such a little time before his passing that it seems to have mournful, though unconscious, allusion to his own early fall in the heat of earth's battle: Sleep sweetly in your humble graves; Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause, Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned! The shaft which the prophetic eye of Timrod saw "in the stone" was in time revealed, and years later that other shaft, awaiting the hour for doing homage to the poet, found the light. To-day the patriot soldiers asleep in Magnolia, and their poet alike, have stately testimonials of the loving memory of their people. [Note: The quotations from Henry Timrod found in this book are used by special permission of the B.F. Johnson Publishing Company, the authorized publishers of Timrod's Poems.] "FATHER ABBOT" WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS Woodlands, near Midway, the half-way stop between Charleston and Augusta, was a little kingdom of itself in the years of its greatness when William Gilmore Simms was monarch of the fair domain. It was far from being a monastery, though its master was known as "Father Abbot." The title had clung to him from the pseudonym under which he had written a series of letters to a New York paper, upholding the view that Charlestonians should not go north on health-seeking vacations when they had better places nearer home, mentioning Sullivan's Island where the hospitable Fort Moultrie officers "were good hands at drawing a cork." Of course, he meant a trigger. Rather was Woodlands a bit of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediæval knights on foaming steeds--every-day folk ride jogging horses--threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic adventures which were necessary to give knights of that period an excuse for existence. It chanced, however, that the only knights known to Woodlands were the old-time friends of its master and the youthful writers who looked to "Father Abbot" for literary guidance. Having welcomed his guests with the warmth and urbanity which made him a most enjoyable comrade, Father Abbot would disperse them to seek entertainment after the manner agreeable to them. For the followers of old Isaac Walton there was prime fishing in the Edisto River, that "sweet little river" that ripples melodiously through "Father Abbot's" pages. To hunters the forest offered thrilling occupation. For the pleasure rider smooth, white, sandy bridle-paths led in silvery curves through forests of oak or pine to the most delightful of Nowheres. [Illustration: WOODLANDS, THE HOME OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS By courtesy of D. Appleton & Company] Having put each guest into the line of his fancy, the master of Woodlands would betake himself to his library to write his thirty pages, the daily stint he demanded from the loom of his imagination. Sometimes he had a companion in Paul Hayne who, not so much given to outdoor life as many of the frequenters of Woodlands, liked to sit in the library, weaving some poetic vision of his own or watching the flight of the tireless pen across the page. By and by the pen would drop upon the desk, its task finished for that morning, and the worker would look up with an air of surprise at becoming aware of his companion and say: "Near dinner time, old boy. What do you say to a sherry and soda?" As there was only one thing to be said to a sherry and soda, this was the signal for repairing to the dining room. By the time the sherry and soda sparkled hospitable welcome the sportsmen returned and after doing justice to the genius of the host in mixed drinks, they were seated around a generous table, most of the good things with which it was laden having come from the waters and fields and vines of Woodlands. For if a world-wide war had closed all the harbors of earth Woodlands could still have offered luxurious banquets to its guests. The host beguiled the time with anecdotes, of which he had an unfailing store that never lost a point in his telling, or declaimed poetry, of which his retentive memory held an inexhaustible collection. The feast was followed by cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had celebrated in his verse. Here Cypresses, Each a great, ghastly giant, eld and gray Stride o'er the dusk, dank tract. Around the sombre cypress trees coiled Fantastic vines That swing like monstrous serpents in the sun. There are living snakes in the swamp, yet more terrifying than the viny serpents that circle the cypresses, and The steel-jaw'd cayman from his grassy slope Slides silent to the slimy, green abode Which is his province. Now and then a bit of sunny, poetic life touches upon the gloomy place, for See! a butterfly That, travelling all the day, has counted climes Only by flowers ... Lights on the monster's brow. An insecure perch for the radiant wanderer. The inhospitable saurian dives with embarrassing suddenness and dips the airy visitor into the "rank water." The butterfly finds no charm in the gloomy place and flies away, which less ethereal wanderers might likewise be fain to do. Now and then the stillness that reigned over that home of malign things was broken by the sound of a boat-horn on a lumber raft floating down the Edisto. A song written by Simms chants the charms of a grapevine swing in the festoons of which half a dozen guests could be seated at once, all on different levels, book in one hand, leaving the other free to reach up and gather the clusters of grapes as they read. After supper they sat on the portico, from which they looked through a leafy archway formed by the meeting of the branches of magnificent trees, and discussed literature and metaphysics. The Christmas guests at Woodlands would be awakened in early morning by the sound of voice and banjo and, looking from their windows, could see the master distributing gifts to his seventy dusky servitors. In the evenings host and guests met in the spacious dining room where Simms would brew a punch of unparalleled excellence, he being as famous for the concoction of that form of gayety as was his friend, Jamison, down the river, for the evolution of the festive cocktail. Life flowed on pleasantly at Woodlands from October till May in those idyllic years before death had made a graveyard of the old home and fire had swept away the beautiful mansion. William Gilmore Simms first opened his eyes upon the world of men in Charleston, at a time when to be properly born in Charleston meant to be born to the purple. William Gilmore, alas! did not inherit that imperial color. He sprang from the good red earth, whence comes the vigor of humanity, and dwelt in the rugged atmosphere of toil which the Charleston eye could never penetrate. Politically, the City by the Sea led the van in the hosts of Democracy; ethically, she remained far in the rear with the Divine Right of Kings and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Aristocracy. So Charleston took little note of the boy whose father failed in trade and fared forth to fight British and Indians under Old Hickory and to wander in that far Southwest known as Mississippi to ascertain whether that remote frontier might offer a livelihood to the unfortunate. The small William Gilmore, left in the care of his grandmother, was apprenticed to a druggist and became a familiar figure on the streets of Charleston as he came and went on his round of errands. Small wonder that the Queen of the Sea, having swallowed his pills and powders in those early days, had little taste for his literary output in after years. In Charleston he not only learned the drug business, but took his first course in the useful art of deception, reading and writing verses by the light of a candle concealed in a box, to hide its rays from his thrifty grandmother, who was adverse not only to the waste of candles but to the squandering of good sleep-time. Fortunately, she had no objection to furnishing him with entertainment in off hours. For the material of much of his work in after life was he indebted to the war stories and ancient traditions that she told her eager little grandson in those 'prentice days. But for her olden tales, the romances of Revolutionary South Carolina and the shivery fascination of "Dismal Castle" might have been unknown to future readers. All the region around Charleston, so rich in historic memories, was an inspiration to the future romance writer. The aged trees festooned with heavy gray moss lent him visions of the past to reappear in many a volume. In his boat in Charleston harbor, and on the sands looking out over the ocean, he gathered that collection of sea pictures which adorned his prose and verse in the years to come. Over on Morris Island glowed the Charleston light, "the pale, star-like beacon, set by the guardian civilization on the edges of the great deep." Lying on the shore he watched "the swarthy beauty, Night, enveloped in dark mantle, passing with all her train of starry servitors; even as some queenly mourner, followed by legions of gay and brilliant courtiers, glides slowly and mournfully in sad state and solemnity on a duteous pilgrimage to some holy shrine." He saw "over the watery waste that sad, sweet, doubtful light, such as Spenser describes in the cathedral wood: 'A little glooming light, most like a shade.'" Drifting about in his boat he might pass Long Island, where in 1776 the ocean herself fought for Charleston, interposing an impassable barrier to the advance of Sir Henry Clinton. While sea and shore and sky and earth were giving him of their best, his father came back with innumerable stories of adventure that would of themselves have set up a young romancer in business. Having talked his mind dry of experiences he returned to Mississippi to make another collection of thrilling tales, leaving William Gilmore, Jr., with a mental outlook upon life which the glories of Charleston could never have opened to him. Drugs, considered as a lifelong pursuit, did not appeal to the youth who had been writing verses ever since he had arrived at the age of eight years and now held a place in the poet's corner of a Charleston paper. He went into the law office of his friend, Charles E. Carroll, where his perusal of Blackstone was interspersed with reading poetry and writing Byronic verses. While thus variously engaged he received an invitation to visit his father in the wilds of Mississippi, a call to which his adventurous spirit gave willing response. Were there not Indians and other wild things and the choicest assortment of the odds and ends of humanity out there, just waiting to be made useful as material for the pen of an ambitious romancer? Through untrodden forests he rode in a silence broken only by his horse's feet and the howl of wolves in the distance. To all the new views of the world he kept open the windows of his mind and they were transmitted to his readers in the years to come. If he did not sleep with head pillowed upon the grave of one of De Soto's faithful followers, he at least thought he did, and the fancy served him as the theme of verse. And those varying types of human nature and beast nature--do they not all appear again upon the printed page? When the end of his visit came his father pleaded: "Do not think of Charleston. Whatever your talents they will there be poured out like water on the sands. Charleston! I know it only as a place of tombs." There came a time when he, too, knew it only as a place of tombs. Just now he knew it as the home of the Only Girl in the world, so--what was the use? And then, Charleston is born into the blood of all her sons, whether she recognizes them or not. It is better to be a door-keeper in Charleston than to dwell in the most gorgeous tents of outside barbarians. So he who was born to the Queen City would hang on to the remotest hem of her trailing robe at the imminent risk of having his brains dashed out on the cobble-stones as she swept along her royal way, rather than sit comfortably upon velvet-cushioned thrones in a place unknown to her regal presence. Simms came back to his native city with her "unsociable houses which rose behind walls, shutting in beautiful gardens that it would have been a sacrilege to let the public enjoy." Soon after his return he was admitted to the bar and proved his forensic prowess by earning $600 in the first year of his practice, a degree of success which enabled him to unite his destiny with that of the Only Girl, and begin housekeeping in Summerville, a suburban village where living was cheap. For, though "Love gives itself and is not bought," there are other essentials of existence which are not so lavish with themselves. The pen-fever had seized upon Simms with great virulence and he followed his fate. Soon after his return from Mississippi, General Charles Coates Pinckney died and Simms wrote the memorial poem for him. When LaFayette visited Charleston the pen of Simms was called upon to do suitable honor to the great occasion. Such periodical attacks naturally resulted in a chronic condition. Charleston was the scene of his brief, though not wholly unsuccessful, career as a play-wright. In Charleston he edited the _Daily Gazette_ in the exciting tunes of Nullification, taking with all the strength that was in him the unpopular side of the burning question. In the doorway of the Gazette office he stood defiantly as the procession of Nullifiers came down the street, evidently with hostile intentions toward the belligerent editor. Seeing his courageous attitude the enthusiasts became good-natured and contented themselves with marching by, giving three cheers for their cause. In that famous bookshop, Russell's, on King Street he was accustomed to meet in the afternoons with the youthful writers who looked upon him as their natural born leader. In his "Wigwam," as he called his Charleston home, he welcomed his followers to evenings of brightness that were like stars in their memory through many after years of darkness. When he made his home at Woodlands he often came to the "Wigwam" to spend a night, calling his young disciples in for an evening of entertainment. His powerful voice would be heard ringing out in oratory and declamation so that neighbors blocks away would say to Hayne or Timrod next morning, "I noticed that you had Simms with you last night." In 1860 the "Wigwam" was accidentally burned. At Woodlands, Simms awaited the coming of the war which he had predicted for a number of years. There he was when the battle of Fredericksburg filled him with triumphant joy, and he saw in fancy "Peace with her beautiful rainbow plucked from the bosom of the storm and spread from east to west, from north to south, over all the sunny plains and snowy heights." Unfortunately, his radiant fancy wrought in baseless visions and the fires of the storm had burned away that brilliant rainbow before Peace came, as a mourning dove with shadowy wings hovering over a Nation's grave. In May, 1864, Simms went to Columbia and was there when the town was destroyed by fire, the house in which he was staying being saved by his presence therein. "You belong to the whole Union," said an officer, placing a guard around the dwelling to protect the sturdy writer who counted his friends all over the Nation. He said to friends who sympathized with him over his losses, "Talk not to me about my losses when the State is lost." Simms describes the streets of Columbia as "wide and greatly protected by umbrageous trees set in regular order, which during the vernal season confer upon the city one of its most beautiful features." The _Daily South Carolinian_ was sent to Charleston to save it from destruction. Its editors, Julian Selby and Henry Timrod, remained in the office on the south side of Washington Street near Main, where they prepared and sent out a daily bulletin while bomb-shells fell around them, until their labors were ended by the burning of the building. From the ashes of the _Carolinian_ arose the _Phoenix_ and Simms was its editor through its somewhat brief existence. Selby relates that Simms offended General Hartwell and was summoned to trial at the General's headquarters on the corner of Bull and Gervais Streets. The result of the trial was an invitation for the defendant to a sumptuous luncheon and a ride home in the General's carriage accompanied by a basket of champagne and other good things. The next day the General told a friend that if Mr. Simms was a specimen of a South Carolina gentleman he would not again enter into a tilt with one. "He outtalked me, out-drank me, and very clearly and politely showed me that I lacked proper respect for the aged." The _Phoenix_ promptly sank back into its ashes and Simms returned to Charleston to a life of toil and struggle, not only for his own livelihood but to help others bear the burden of existence that was very heavy in Charleston immediately succeeding the war. Timrod wrote to him, "Somehow or other, you always magnetize me on to a little strength." In 1866 Simms visited Paul Hayne at Copse Hill, the shrine to which many footsteps were turned in the days when the poet and his little family made life beautiful on that pine-clad summit. Hayne welcomed his guest with joy and with sorrow--joy to behold again the face of his old friend; sorrow to see it lined with the pain and losses of the years. Of all their old circle, Simms was the one whose wreck was the most disastrous. He had possessed so many of the things which make life desirable that his loss had left him as the storm leaves the ruined ship which, in the days of its magnificence, had ridden the waves with the greatest pride. The fortnight in Copse Hill was the first relief from toil that had come to him since death and fire and defeat had done their worst upon him. His biographer says, "He was as eager as ever to pass the night in profitless, though pleasant, discussions when he should have been trying to regain his strength through sleep." To a later visitor Paul Hayne showed a cherished pine log on which were inscribed the names of Simms and Timrod. Upon the return of Simms he wrote to his friend at Copse Hill that no language could describe the suffering of Charleston. He said that the picture of Irving, given him by Hayne, served a useful purpose in helping to cover the bomb-shell holes still in his walls. "For the last three years," he writes, "I have written till two in the morning. Does not this look like suicide?" He mentions the fact that he shares with his two sons his room in which he sleeps, works, writes and studies, and is "cabin'd, cribbed, confined"--"I who have had such ample range before, with a dozen rooms and a house range for walking, in bad weather, of 134 feet." The old days were very fair as seen through the heavy clouds that had gathered around the Master of Woodlands. In 1870, June 11th, the bell of Saint Michael's tolled the message that Charleston's most distinguished son had passed away. His funeral was in Saint Paul's. He was buried in Magnolia Cemetery, at the dedication of which twenty-one years earlier he had read the dedication poem. The stone above him bears simply the name, "Simms." On the Battery in Charleston a monument commemorates the broken life of one who gave of his best to the city of his home and his love. Verily might he say: I asked for bread and you gave me a stone. "UNCLE REMUS" JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS Seeing the name of Joel Chandler Harris, many people might have to stop and reflect a moment before recalling exactly what claim that gentleman had upon the attention of the reader. "Uncle Remus" brings before the mind at once a whole world of sunlight and fun, with not a few grains of wisdom planted here and there. The good old fun-loving Uncle has put many a rose and never a thorn into life's flower-garden. Being in Atlanta some years ago, when Mr. Harris was on the editorial staff of the _Constitution_, I called up the office and asked if I might speak to him. The gentleman who answered my call replied that Mr. Harris was not in, adding the information that if he were he would not talk through the telephone. I asked what time I should be likely to find him in the office. "He will be in this afternoon, but I fear that he would not see you if you were the angel Gabriel," was the discouraging reply. "I am not the angel Gabriel," I said. "Tell him that I am a lady--Mrs. Pickett--and that I should like very much to see him." "If you are a lady, and Mrs. Pickett, I fear that he will vanish and never be found again." Notwithstanding the discouragements, I was permitted to call that afternoon in the hope that the obdurate Uncle Remus might graciously consent to see me. I found him in his office in the top story of the building, an appropriate place to avoid being run to covert by the public, but inconvenient because of the embarrassment which might result from dropping out of the window if he should have the misfortune to be cornered. To say that I was received might be throwing too much of a glamour over the situation. At least, I was not summarily ejected, nor treated to a dissolving view of Uncle Remus disappearing in the distance, so I considered myself fortunate. I told him that I had called up by telephone that morning to speak to him. "I never talk through the telephone," he said. "I do not like to talk in a hole. I look into a man's eyes when I talk to him." When Uncle Remus was fairly run to earth and could not escape, he was quite human in his attitude toward his caller; his only fault being that he was prone to talk of his visitor's work rather than his own, and a question that would seem to lead up to any personal revelation on his part would result in so strong an indication of a desire for flight that the conversation would be directed long distances away from Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. He was a born story-teller, and had not the made author's owl-like propensity to perch upon high places and hoot his wisdom to the passing crowd. The expression "literary" as applied to him filled him with surprise. He called himself an "accidental author"; said he had never had an opportunity of acquiring style, and probably should not have taken advantage of it if he had. He was always as much astonished by his success as other people are by their failures. * * * * * I met him once at a Confederate reunion in Atlanta, where I took my little grand-children, who had been brought up on Uncle Remus, to see him. Having heard their beauty praised, he cautioned them not to think too much of their looks, telling them that appearance was of little consequence. He gave each of them a coin, saying, "I don't believe in giving money to boys; I believe in their working for it." "Well," said little George, "haven't we earned it listening to Uncle Remus?" "If that is so, I'm afraid I haven't money enough to pay you what I owe you." He was at ease and natural and like other people with children. He invited them to come to his farm and see the flowers and trees, telling them how his home received the name of "The Wren's Nest." As he sat one morning on the veranda, he saw a wren building a nest on his letter-box by the gate. When the postman came he went out and asked him to deliver the mail at the door, to avoid disturbing Madam Wren's preparations for housekeeping. The postman was faithful, and the Wren family had a prosperous and happy home. "You must never steal an egg from a nest," he told the boys. Curving one hand into an imitation nest holding an imaginary egg, he hovered over it with the other hand, rubbing it gently, explaining to the boys, who watched him with absorbing interest, how the egg would change to a beautiful fluff of feathers and music, and after a while would fly away among the trees and fill the woods with sweet sounds. "If you destroy the egg, you kill all that beauty and music, and there will be no little bird to sit on the tree and sing to you." The boys assured him that they had never taken an egg, nor even so much as looked into the nest, because some birds will leave their nests if you just look into them. At the reception given to Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Stuart, Winnie Davis, and myself, Mr. Harris was invited to stand in line, but declined. It would be difficult to imagine him as standing with a receiving party, shaking hands with the public. He was asked to speak, but that was even less to be expected. The nearest he ever came to making a speech was once when he sat upon the platform while his friend, Henry O. Grady, was addressing a large assemblage with all that eloquence for which he was noted. When he had finished, the call for "Harris" came with great volume and persistency. He arose and said, "I am coming," walked down from the platform and was lost in the crowd. [Illustration: JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS At Home] Uncle Remus wrote his stories at "Snap Bean Farm," in West End, a suburb of Atlanta. They filled his evenings with pleasure after the office grind was over. If no one but himself had ever seen them, he would have been as happy in the work as he was when the public was delighting in the adventures of Br'er Wolf and Br'er B'ar. In that cosy home the early evening was given to the children, and the later hours to recording the tales which had amused them through the twilight. A home it was, not only to him but to all who came in friendship to see him in his quiet retreat. There was no room in it for those whom curiosity brought there to see the man of letters or to do honor to a lion. The lionizing of Uncle Remus was the one ambition impossible of achievement in the literary world. For everything else that touched upon the human, the vine-embowered, tree-shaded house on Gordon Street opened hospitable doors. * * * * * Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, the county-seat of Putnam County, Georgia, and in his early days attended the Eatonton Academy, where he received all the academic training he ever had. His vitally helpful education was gained in the wider and deeper school of life, and few have been graduated therefrom with greater honors. At six years of age he had the good fortune to encounter "The Vicar of Wakefield," than whom, it is safe to assert, no boy of such tender years had ever a better and more inspiring friend. This beloved clerical gentleman led young Joel into a charmed land of literature, in which he dwelt all his life. In the post-office at Eatonton was an old green sofa, very much the worse for wear, which yet offered a comfortable lounging place for the boy Joel, adapted to his kittenish taste for curling up in quiet retreats. There he would spend hours in reading the newspapers that came to the office. In one of them he found an announcement of a new periodical to be published by Colonel Turner on his plantation nine miles from Eatonton. In connection with this announcement was an advertisement for an office boy. It occurred to the future "Uncle Remus," then twelve years old, that this might open a way for him. He wrote to Colonel Turner, and a few days later the Colonel drove up to town to take the unknown boy to his plantation. So beside the editor Joel Chandler Harris rode to the office of the _Countryman_ and to his happy destiny. It has been said that but for the Turner plantation there would have been no Uncle Remus, but what would have become of the possibilities of that good old darky if the little Joel had not enjoyed the acquaintance of a good-natured post-master who permitted him to occupy the old green sofa and browse among the second-class mail of the Eatonton community? Surely there was never a better school for the development of a budding author than the office of the _Countryman_, and the well-selected library in the home of its editor, and the great wildwood that environed the plantation. Best of all, there were the "quarters," where "Uncle Remus" conducted a whole university of history and zoölogy and philosophy and ethics and laughter and tears. Down in the cabins at night the printer's boy would sit and drink in such stores of wit and wisdom as could not lie unexpressed in his facile mind, and the world is the richer for every moment he spent in that primitive, child-mind community, with its ancient traditions that made it one with the beginning of time. At times he joined a 'coon hunt, and with a gang of boys and a pack of hounds chased the elusive little animal through the night, returning home triumphant in the dawn. He hunted rabbits in the woods, and, maybe, became acquainted with the character of the original Br'er Rabbit from his descendants in the old plantation forest. From the window near which his type-case stood he saw the squirrels scampering over trees and roofs, heard the birds singing in the branches, caught dissolving views of Br'er Fox flitting across the garden path, and breathed in beauty and romance to be exhaled later for the enchantment of a world of readers. In Colonel Hunter's library, selected with scholarly taste, he found the great old English masters who had the good fortune to be born into the language while it was yet "a well of English undefiled." In that well he became saturated with a pure, direct, simple diction which later contact with the tendencies of his era and the ephemeral production of the daily press was not able to change. * * * * * It was in the office of the _Countryman_ that Joel Chandler Harris made his first venture into the world of print, shyly, as became one who would afterward be known as the most modest literary man in America. When Colonel Hunter found out the authorship of the bright paragraphs that slipped into his paper now and then with increasing frequency, he captured the elusive young genius and set it to work as a regular contributor. In this periodical the young writer's first poem appeared: a mournful lay of love and death, as a first poem usually is, however cheerful a philosopher its author may ultimately become. This idyllic life soon ceased. When the tide of war rolled over central Georgia, it swept many lives out of their accustomed paths and destroyed many a support around which budding aspirations had wound their tendrils. The "printer's boy" sat upon a fence on the old Turner plantation, watching Slocum's Corps march by, and amiably receiving the good-natured gibes and jests of the soldiers, who apparently found something irresistibly mirth-provoking in the quaint little figure by the wayside. Sherman was marching to the sea, and the Georgia boy was taking his first view of the progress of war. Among the many enterprises trampled to earth by those ruthless feet was the _Countryman_, which survived the desolating raid but a short time. It was years before the young journalist knew another home. For some months he set type on the Macon _Daily Telegraph_, going from there to New Orleans as private secretary of the editor of the _Crescent Monthly_. When the _Crescent_ waned and disappeared from the journalistic sky, he returned to Georgia and became editor, compositor, pressman, mailing clerk, and entire force on the Forsyth _Advertiser_. A pungent editorial upon the abuses of the State government, which appeared in the _Advertiser_, attracted the attention of Colonel W.T. Thompson and led him to offer Mr. Harris a place on the staff of the Savannah _Daily News_. Happily, there lived in Savannah the charming young lady who was to be the loving centre of the pleasant home of "Uncle Remus." The marriage took place in 1873, and Mr. Harris remained with the _News_ until '76, when, to escape yellow fever, he removed to Atlanta. He was soon after placed on the editorial staff of the _Constitution_, and in its columns Uncle Remus was first introduced to the world. * * * * * In his home in West End, "Snap-Bean Farm," he lived in calm content with his harmonious family and his intimate friends, Shakespeare and his associates, and those yet older companions who have come down to us from ancient Biblical times. Some of his intimates were chosen from later writers. Among poets, he told me that Tom Moore was his most cherished companion, the one to whom he fled for consolation in moments of life's insufficiencies. Mr. Harris had no objection to talking in sociable manner of other writers, but if his visitor did not wish to see him close up like a clam and vanish to the seclusion of an upper room it was better not to mention Uncle Remus. Neither had he any fancy for the kind of talk that prevails at "pink teas" and high functions of society in general. Anything that would be appropriate to the topics introduced in such places would never occur to him, and the vapory nothingness was so filled with mysterious terrors for him that he fled before them in unspeakable alarm. [Illustration: SNAP-BEAN FARM, ATLANTA, GEORGIA The residence of Joel Chandler Harris] "Snap-Bean Farm" was all the world that he cared for, and here he lived and wove his enchantments, not in his well-appointed study, as a thoroughly balanced mind would have done, but all over the house, just where he happened to be, preferably beside the fire after the little ones had gone to bed, leaving memories of their youthful brightness to make yet more glowing the flames, and waves of their warmth of soul to linger in enchantment about the hearth. It was a sunny, happy day when I visited "Snap-Bean Farm." A violet-bordered walk led me to the pretty frame cottage, built upon a terrace quite a distance from the street--a shady, woodsy, leafy, flowery, fragrant distance--a distance that suggested infinite beauty and melody, infinite fascination. When the home was established there, the rumbling and clang of the trolley never broke the stillness of the peaceful spot. A horse-car crept slowly and softly to a near-by terminus and stopped, as if, having reached Uncle Remus and his woodsy home, there could be nothing beyond worth the effort. There were wide reaches of pine-woods, holding illimitable possibilities of romance, of legend, of wildwood and wild-folk tradition. It was a country home in the beginning, and it remained a country home, regardless of the outstretching of the city's influences. Joel Chandler Harris had a country soul, and if he had been set down in the heart of a metropolis his home would have stretched out into mystic distances of greenery and surrounded itself with a limitless reach of cool, vibrant, amber atmosphere, and looked out upon a colorful and fragrant wilderness of flowers, and he would have dwelt in the solitudes that God made. As I walked, a fragrance wrapped me around as with a veil of radiant mist. It came straight from the heart of his many-varied roses that claimed much of his time and care. The shadow of two great cedar trees reached protecting arms after me as I went up to the steps of the cottage hidden away in a green and purple and golden and pink tangle of bloom and sweet odors; ivy and wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle. Beside the steps grew some of his special pet roses. Their glowing and fragrant presence sometimes afforded him a congenial topic of discourse when a guest chanced to approach too closely the subject of the literary work of the host, if one may use the term in connection with a writer who so constantly disclaimed any approach to literature, and so persistently declined to take himself seriously. In the front yard was a swing that appealed to me reminiscently with the force of the olden days when I had a swing of my very own. As I "let the old cat die," we talked of James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Waitin' fer the Cat to Die," and Mr. Harris told me of the visit Riley had made to him not long before. Two men with such cheerful views of life could not but be congenial, and it was apparent that the visit had brought joy to them both. I did not see the three dogs and seven cats--mystic numbers!--but felt confident that my genial host could not have been satisfied with any less. The charmed circle in which Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit shone as social stars is yet with us, and we shall not let it go out from our lives. The mystic childhood of a dim, mysterious race is brought to us through these beings that have come to us from the olden time "when animals talked like people." "The Sign of the Wren's Nest" is peopled by these legendary forms with their never-dying souls. They lurk in every corner and peer out from every crevice. They hide behind the trees, and sometimes in the moonlight we see them looking out at us as we walk along the path. They crouch among interlacing vines and look at us through the lacy screen with eyes in which slumber the traditions of the ages. We look for the Magician who, with a wave of the hand, made all these to live and move before us. We know he must be there. We "cannot make him dead"; but he can make himself and us alive in the life of the past. A little door, with one shutter of Memory and one of Faith, opens before us, and he comes to dwell again in the world which he created in "The Sign of the Wren's Nest." "THE POET OF THE FLAG" FRANCIS SCOTT KEY Away back in the years, Terra Rubra, the colonial home of John Ross Key, spread out broad acres under the sky of Maryland, in the northern part of Frederick County. Girt by noble trees, the old mansion, built of brick that came from England in the days when the New World yet remained in ignorance of the wealth of her natural and industrial resources, stood in the middle of the spacious lawn which afforded a beautiful playground for little Francis Scott Key and his young sister, who lived here the ideal home life of love and happiness. Among the flowers of the terraced garden they learned the first lessons of beauty and sweetness and the triumph of growth and blossoming. At a short distance was a dense line of forest, luring the young feet into tangled wildernesses of greenery and the colorful beauty of wild flowers in summer, and lifting great gray arms in solemn majesty against the dun skies of winter. Through it flowed the rippling silver of Pipe Creek on its sparkling way to the sea. At the foot of a grassy slope a spring offered draughts of the clear pure water which is said to be the only drink for one who would write epics or live an epic. Beyond a wide expanse of wind-blown grass the young eyes saw the variant gray and purple tints of the Catoctin Mountains, showing mystic changes in the floodtide of day or losing themselves in the crimson and gold sea of sunset. In this stately, old, many-verandaed home, looking across nearly three thousand acres of fertile land as if with a proud sense of lordship, the wide-browed, poet-faced boy with the beautiful dreamy eyes and the line of genius between his delicately arched brows passed the golden years of his childhood. It is said that President Washington once went to Terra Rubra to visit his old friend. General John Ross Key, of Revolutionary fame. It may be that the venerated hand of the "Father of His Country"--the hand that had so resolutely put away all selfish ambitions and had reached out only for good things to bestow upon his people and his nation--was laid in blessing upon the bright young head of little Francis Scott Key, helping to plant in the youthful heart the seed that afterward blossomed into the thought which he expressed many years later: I have said that patriotism is the preserving virtue of Republics. Let this virtue wither and selfish ambition assume its place as the motive for action, and the Republic is lost. Here, my countrymen, is the sole ground of danger. Seven miles from Annapolis, where the Severn River flows into Round Bay, stands Belvoir, a spacious manor-house with sixteen-inch walls, in which are great windows reaching down to the polished oak floor. In this home of Francis Key, his grandfather, the young Francis Scott Key spent a part of the time of his tutelage, preparing for entrance into St. John's College, the stately buildings of which were erected by a certain early Key, who had come to our shore to help unlock the gates of liberty for the world. The old college, with its historic campus, fits well into the atmosphere of Annapolis, standing proudly in her eighteenth-century dignity, watching the rest of the world scramble in a helter-skelter rush for modern trivialities. Its old walls are in pleasing harmony with the colonial mansions poised on little hillocks, from which they look down on you with benevolent condescension and invite you to climb the long flights of steps that lead to their very hearts, grand but hospitable, which you do in a glow of high-pitched ambition, as if you were scaling an arduous but fascinating intellectual height. Having reached the summit, you stop an instant on the landing, partly for breathing purposes, but more especially to exult a moment on the height of triumph. The four-storied college at the end of Prince George Street--regal Annapolis would not be content with a street of less than royal dignity--looks down with pleased approval on its wide expanse of green campus, for that stretch of ground has a history that makes it worthy of the noble building which it supports. It spread its greenery to the view of those window-eyes decades before the Revolution, and when that fiery torch flamed upon the country's record the college green furnished a camping place for the freedom-loving Frenchmen who came over the sea to help set our stars permanently into the blue of our national sky. In 1812 American troops pitched their tents on the famous campus, and under the waving green of its summer grasses and the white canopy of its winter snows men who died for their country's honor lie in their long sleep. On the grounds east of the college buildings stands the Tulip Tree which sheltered the first settlers of Annapolis in 1649, and may have hidden away in the memory-cells of its stanch old heart reminiscences of a time when a bluff old Latin sailor, with more ambition in his soul than geography in his head, unwittingly blundered onto a New World. Whatever may be its recollections, it has sturdily weathered the storms of centuries, surviving the tempests hurled against it by Nature and the poetry launched upon it by Man. It has been known by the name of the "Treaty Tree," from a tradition that in the shade of its branches the treaty with the Susquehannoghs was signed in 1652. In 1825 General La Fayette was entertained under its spreading boughs, and it has since extended hospitable arms over many a patriotic celebration. In "the antiente citie" Francis Scott Key found many things which appealed to his patriotic soul. On the State House hill was the old cannon brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore's colony and rescued from a protracted bath in St. Mary's River to take its place among the many relics of history which make Annapolis the repository of old stories tinged by time and fancy with a mystic coloring of superstition. He lived in the old "Carvel House," erected by Dr. Upton Scott on Shipwright Street. Not far away was the "Peggy Stewart" dwelling, overlooking the harbor where the owner of the unfortunate _Peggy Stewart_, named for the mistress of the mansion, was forced by the revolutionary citizens of Annapolis, perhaps incited by an over-zealous enthusiasm but with good intentions, to burn his ship in penalty for having paid the tax on its cargo of tea. If Francis Key had a taste for the supernatural, there was ample opportunity for its gratification in this haven of tradition. He may have seen the headless man who was accustomed to walk down Green Street to Market Space, with what intention was never divulged. Every old house had its ghost, handed down through the generations, as necessary a piece of furniture as the tester-bed or the sideboard. Perhaps not all of these mysterious visitants were as quiet as the shadowy lady of the Brice house, who would glide softly in at the hour of gloaming and, with her head on her hand, lean against the mantel, look sadly into the faces of the occupants of the room, and vanish without a sound--of course, it is undeniable that Annapolis would have only well-bred ghosts. After graduation from St. John's, in that famous class known as the "Tenth Legion" because of its brilliancy, Francis Scott Key studied law in the office of his uncle, Philip Barton Key, in Annapolis, where his special chum was Roger Brooke Taney, who persuaded him to begin the practice of his profession in Frederick City. In 1801 the youthful advocate opened his law office in the town from which the Revolutionary Key had marched away to Boston to join Colonel Washington's troops. Francis Key invited his friend to visit Terra Rubra with him, and Mr. Taney found the old plantation home so fascinating that many visits followed. Soon there was a wedding at beautiful Terra Rubra, when pretty, graceful Ann Key became the wife of the future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In 1802, at Annapolis, in the mahogany wainscoted drawing-room of the old Lloyd house, built in 1772, Key was married to Mary Tayloe Lloyd. After a few years of practice in Frederick City, Francis Scott Key removed to Georgetown, now West Washington. Here at the foot of what is known as M Street, but was Bridge Street in the good old days before Georgetown had given up her picturesque street names for the insignificant numbers and letters of Washington, half a block from the old Aqueduct Bridge, stands a two-storied, gable-roofed, dormer-windowed house, bearing in black letters the inscription, "The Key Mansion." Below is the announcement that it is open to the public from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily, excepting Sunday. On a placard between two front doors are printed the words, "Home of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner," the patriotic color-scheme being shown in the white placard and blue and red lettering. For more than a century the house has stood there, and the circling years have sent it into remote antiquity of appearance, the storms of time having so swept it with their winds and beaten it with their rains and bombarded it with snow and sleet and hail as to make difficult the realization that it was once the home of bounding, scintillant life, and that its walls in the years gone by were radiant with the visions and hopes and ambitions of a happy group of youthful souls. It stands at the foot of what is now a street of shops, and the wearing away of the decades have taken from it all suggestion of home surroundings. Through a door at the left I passed into a wide hall, on the walls of which are some patriotic inscriptions. There is one, a quotation from President McKinley, that conveys an admonition the disregard of which leads to consequences we often have occasion to deplore: "The vigilance of the Citizen is the safety of the Republic." At the right of the hall are two rooms, locked now, but serving as parlors when the sad old house was a bright, beautiful home. A steep Colonial stairway leads to a hall on the second floor, where again there are inscriptions on the walls to remind the visitor of his duties as a citizen of the nation over which the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves. On the second floor the first sign of life appeared. A door stood slightly ajar, and in answer to a touch a tall woman with a face of underlying tragedy and a solitary aspect that fitted well with the loneliness of the old house appeared and courteously invited me to enter. She is the care-taker of the mansion, bears an aristocratic old Virginia name, and is wrapped around with that air of gloomily garnered memories characteristic of women who were in the heart of the crucial period of our history. I am not surprised when she tells me that she watched the battle of Fredericksburg from her window as she lay ill in her room, and that she witnessed the burning of Richmond after the surrender. I recognize the fact that life has been a harder battle, since all her own have passed over the line and left her to the lonely conflict, than was ever a contest in those days of war. She tells me that the Key relics have all been taken to the Betsy Ross house in Philadelphia. What they were she does not know, for they were all packed in boxes when she first came to the Key mansion. The only object left from the possessions of the man who made that old dwelling a shrine upon which Americans of to-day ought to place offerings of patriotism is an old frame in a small room at the end of the hall. On the bottom of the frame is printed in large black letters the name, Francis Scott Key. Some jagged fragments within the frame indicate that something, either picture or flag, has been hastily and carelessly removed. Finding no relic of the man whose life once glorified the now dark and gloomy house, I hold with the greater tenacity the mental picture I have of the old flag I used to see in the National Museum. Faded, discolored, and tattered, it is yet the most glorious piece of bunting our country owns to-day--the flag that floated over Fort McHenry through the fiery storm of that night of anxious vigil in which our national anthem was born. In this old house on Bridge Street Francis Scott Key lived when he was Attorney for the District of Columbia, and in a small brick office adjoining his home he did the work that placed him in the front rank of the American bar. St. John's Episcopal Church, not far away, where he was vestryman, has a tablet to the memory of Reverend Johannes I. Sayrs, a former rector, on which is an inscription by Key. In Christ Church is a memorial window dedicated to Francis Scott Key. "It is a pity that the old house is to be sold," said a resident of Georgetown. "Is it to be sold?" I asked. For a long time this fate has been hovering over the old Key home, but I had hoped, even when there was no hope. "Yes," was the reply. "The ground is wanted for business buildings." "A pity?" I said. "It is more than a pity; it is a national shame." Is there not patriotism enough in our land to keep that shrine sacred to historic memory? It was from this house that Key set out September 4, 1814, to negotiate for the release of Dr. Beanes, one of his friends, who, after having most kindly cared for British soldiers when wounded and helpless, was arrested and taken to the British fleet as a prisoner in revenge for his having sent away from his door-yard some intoxicated English soldiers who were creating disorder and confusion. Key, in company with Colonel John S. Skinner, United States Agent for Parole of Prisoners, arrived at Fort McHenry, on Whetstone Point, in time to witness the effort of General Ross to make good his boast that he "did not care if it rained militia, he would take Baltimore and make it his winter headquarters." They were on the ship _Surprise_, and, upon making their plea for their captive friend, were told that he had inflicted atrocious injuries upon British soldiers, and the Admiral had resolved to hang him from the yard-arm. The eloquence of Mr. Key, supplemented by letters written by British officers to Dr. Beanes, thanking him for the many kindnesses which they had received from him, finally won Admiral Cochrane from his vengeful decision. After the release of the captive the Americans were not permitted to return to land, lest they might carry information detrimental to the British cause. Thus Admiral Cochrane, who enjoyed well-merited distinction for doing the wrong thing, placed his unwilling guests in their own boat, the _Minden_, as near the scene of action as possible, with due regard for their physical safety, in order that they might suffer the mortification of seeing their flag go down. Two hours had been assigned, in the British mind, for the accomplishment of that beneficent result, after which "terms for Baltimore" might be considered. For three days Key and his companions watched the landing of nine thousand soldiers and marines at North Point, preparatory to the attack on the fort, which was defended by a small force of raw militia, partly composed of the men who had been so easily defeated at Bladensburg. They were under command of Colonel George Armistead, who faced a court-martial if he should not win, for the Washington administration had peremptorily ordered him to surrender the fort. Through the long hours of the 13th Key paced the deck of his boat, watching the battle with straining eyes and a heart that thrilled and leaped and sank with every thunder of gun and flash of shell. The day was calm and still, with no wind to lift the flag that drooped around its staff over Fort McHenry. At eventide a breeze unfurled its folds, and as it floated out a shell struck it and tore out one of its fifteen stars. Night fell. His companions went below to seek rest in such unquiet slumbers as might visit them, but there was no sleep in the heart of Key. Not until the mighty question which filled the night sky with thunder and flame and surged in whelming billows through his own soul found its answer in the court of Eternal Destiny could rest come to the man who watched through the long hours of darkness, waiting for dawn to bring triumph or despair. Silence came--the silence that meant victory and defeat. Whose was the victory? The night gave no answer, and the lonely man still paced up and down the deck of the _Minden_. Then day dawned in a glory in the east, and a glory in the heart of the anxious watcher. In that first thrill of joy and triumph our majestic anthem was formed. Key took from his pocket an old letter, and on its blank page pencilled the opening lines of the song. In the boat which took him back to Baltimore he finished the poem, and in his hotel made a copy for the press. The next day the lines were put into type by Samuel Sands, an apprentice in the office of the _Baltimore American_, who had been deserted in the general rush to see the battle as being too young to be trusted at the front, and that evening they were sung in the Holliday Street Theatre. The next day the air was heard upon the streets of Baltimore from every boy who had been gifted with a voice or a whistle, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" was soon waving over the musical domain as victoriously as it had floated from the ramparts of Fort McHenry. [Illustration: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY At the age of 35] It is in the great moments of life that a man gives himself to the world, and in the giving parts from nothing of himself, for in the gift he but expands his own nature and keeps himself in greater measure than before. May not he to whom our great anthem came through the battle-storm smile pityingly upon the futile efforts of to-day to supply a national song that shall eclipse the noble lines born of patriotism and battle ardor and christened in flame? Thus it was that Francis Scott Key reached the high tide of life before the defences of the Monumental City, and to Baltimore he returned when that tide was ebbing away, and in view of the old fort, under the battlements of which he had fallen to unfathomable depths of suffering and risen to immeasurable heights of triumphant joy, he crossed the bar into the higher tide beyond. On a beautiful hill Baltimore has erected a stately monument to the memory of the man who linked her name with the majestic anthem which gives fitting voice to our national hopes. Away on the other edge of our continent, in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, another noble shaft tells the world that "the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves" over all our land and knows no distinctions of North, South, East, or West. In Olivet Cemetery, in the old historic city of Frederick, Maryland, is the grave of Francis Scott Key. Over it stands a marble column supporting a statue of Key, his poet face illumined by the art of the sculptor, his arms outstretched, his left hand bearing a scroll inscribed with the lines of "The Star-Spangled Banner," while on the pedestal sits Liberty, holding the flag for which those immortal lines were written. Thus, perpetuated in granite, the noble patriot stands, looking over the town to which he long ago gave this message: But if ever, forgetful of her past and present glory, she shall cease to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and become the purchased possession of a company of stock-jobbers and speculators; if her people are to become the vassals of a great moneyed corporation, and to bow down to her pensioned and privileged nobility; if the patriots who shall dare to arraign her corruptions and denounce her usurpations are to be sacrificed upon her gilded altar,--such a country may furnish venal orators and presses, but the soul of national poetry will be gone. That muse will "never bow the knee in mammon's fane." No, the patriots of such a land must hide their shame in her deepest forests, and her bards must hang their harps upon the willows. Such a people, thus corrupted and degraded, "Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence they sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung." "THE POET-PRIEST" FATHER RYAN My first meeting with Father Ryan was at the Atlantic Hotel in Norfolk, in which town he had spent the first seven years of his life, his parents having emigrated from Limerick and found a home there a short time before his birth. He has been claimed by a number of cities, and the dates of his nativity, as assigned by biographers, range from 1834 to 1840, 1839 being the one best established. He told me that his early memories of his Norfolk home were especially associated with figs and oysters, the oysters there being the largest and finest he had ever seen, they and the figs seeming to "rhyme with his appetite." Then he told me an oyster story: "A negro boatman was rowing some people down the river, among them two prominent politicians who were discussing an absent one. 'He has no more backbone than an oyster,' said one. The boatman laughed, and said, 'Skuse me, marsers, but if you-all gemmen don' know no mo' 'bout politicians dan you does 'bout oyschers you don' know much. No mo' backbone dan a oyscher! Why, oyschers has as much backbone as folks has, en ef you cuts into 'em lengfwise a little way ter one side en looks at 'em close you'll see dar backbone's jes' lak we all's backbone is. De only diffunce is de oyscher's backbone is ter one side, jes' whar it ought ter be, 'stead er in de middle. Dat's de reason I t'ink de debbil mus' er tuck a han' en he'ped ter mek we alls, en you know de Lord says, Let _us_ mek man; dat shows dat He didn' do hit all by Hese'f; ef He had He'd a meked we all's backbone ter de side whar de oyscher's is, ter pertect us, en put our shin bones behime our legs, whar dey wouldn't all de time git skint, en put our calfs in de front.'" My impression of Father Ryan was of being in the presence of a great power--something indefinable and indescribable, but invincibly sure. He was of medium height, and his massive head seemed to bend by its own weight, giving him a somewhat stooped appearance. His hair, brown, with sunny glints touching it to gold, was brushed back from his wide, high forehead, falling in curls around his pale face and over his shoulders. I recall with especial distinctness the dimple in his chin, a characteristic of many who have been very near to me, for which reason it attracted my attention when appearing in a face new to me. His eyes were his greatest beauty,--Irish blue, under gracefully arched brows, and luminous with the sunshine that has sparkled in the eyes of his race in all the generations, caught by looking skyward for a light that dawned not upon earth. His expression was sad, and the beautiful smile that illumined his face, radiating compassion, kindness, gentleness and the humor of the Kelt, made me think of a brilliant noontide sun shining across a grave. We discussed Folk Lore, and he said that some of the best lessons were taught in the Folk Lore of the plantation negro. One of his sermons was on "Obstinacy," illustrated by a story told him by an old colored man: "Marser, does you know de reason dat de crab walks back'ards? Well, hit's dis away: when de Lord wuz mekin' uv de fishes He meked de diffunt parts en put 'em in piles, de legs in one pile, de fins in anudder, en de haids in anudder. Do' de crab wan't no fish, He meked hit at de same time. Afterwards He put 'em tergedder en breaved inter 'em de bref er life. He stuck all de fishes' haids on, but de crab wuz obstreperous en he say, 'Gib me my haid; I gwine put hit on myse'f.' De Lord argufied wid him but de crab wouldn' listen, en he say he gwine put hit on. So de Lord gin him his haid en 'course he put hit on back'ards. Den he went ter de Lord en ax' Him ter put hit straight, but de Lord wouldn' do hit, en He tole him he mus' go back'ards all his life fer his obstinacy. En so 'tis wid some people." [Illustration: FATHER RYAN From the portrait in Murphy's Hotel, Richmond, Virginia] Father Ryan told me that one of the greatest obstacles with which he had to contend in his dealings with people was the lack of ethic sensitiveness which rendered them oblivious to the harm of deviations from principle which seemed not to result in great evil. People who would not steal articles of value did not hesitate to cheat in car-fare, taking the view that the company got enough out of the public without their small contribution. He said, "They are like two very religious old ladies who, driving through a toll-gate, asked the keeper the rate. Being newly appointed, he looked into his book and read so much for a man and a horse. The woman who was driving whipped up the horse, calling out, 'G'lang, Sally, we goes free. We are two old maids and a mare.' On they went without paying." When Abram Ryan was seven years old the family moved to St. Louis, where the boy attended the schools of the Christian Brothers, in his twelfth year entering St. Mary's Seminary, in Perry County, Missouri. He completed his preparation for the work to which his life was dedicated, in the Ecclesiastical Seminary at Niagara, New York. Upon ordination he was placed in charge of a parish in Missouri. On a boat going down the canal from Lynchburg to Lexington, where he was a fellow-passenger with us, he met his old friend, John Wise, and entered into conversation with him, in the course of which he made the statement that he came from Missouri. "All the way from Pike?" quoted Mr. Wise. "No," replied Father Ryan, "my name is _not_ Joe Bowers, I have _no_ brother Ike," whereupon he sang the old song, "Joe Bowers," in a voice that would have lifted any song into the highest realms of music. He recited his poem, "In Memoriam," written for his brother David, who was killed in battle, one stanza of which impressed me deeply because of the longing love in his voice when he spoke the lines: Thou art sleeping, brother, sleeping In thy lonely battle grave; Shadows o'er the past are creeping, Death, the reaper, still is reaping, Years have swept and years are sweeping Many a memory from my keeping, But I'm waiting still and weeping For my beautiful and brave. The readers of his poetry are touched by its pathetic beauty, but only they who have heard his verses in the tones of his deep, musical voice can know of the wondrous melody of his lines. When I said to him that I wished he would write a poem on Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, he replied: "It has been put into poetry. Every flower that blooms on that field is a poem far greater than I could write. There are some things too great for me to attempt. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg is one of them." A lady who chanced to be on the boat with us repeated Owen Meredith's poem of "The Portrait." At its close he said with sad earnestness, "I am sorry to hear you recite that. Please never do it again. It is a libel on womanhood." It may be that he was thinking of "Ethel," the maiden whom, it is said, he loved in his youth, from whom he parted because Heaven had chosen them both for its own work, and his memories deepened the sacredness with which all women were enshrined in his thought. She was to be a nun and he a priest, and thus he tells of their parting: One night in mid of May their faces met As pure as all the stars that gazed on them. They met to part from themselves and the world; Their hearts just touched to separate and bleed; Their eyes were linked in look, while saddest tears Fell down, like rain, upon the cheeks of each: They were to meet no more. The "great brown, wond'ring eyes" of the girl went with him on his way through life, shadowed like the lights of a dim cathedral, but luminous with love and sacrifice. How much of the story he tells in pathetic verse was his very own perhaps no one may ever know, but the reader feels that it was Father Ryan himself who, after "years and years and weary years," walked alone in a place of graves and found "in a lone corner of that resting-place" a solitary grave with its veil of "long, sad grass" and, parting the mass of white roses that hid the stone, beheld the name he had given the girl from whom he had parted on that mid-May night. "ULLAINEE." Those who were nearest him thought that the vein of sadness winding through his life and his poetry was in memory of the girl who loved and sacrificed and died. When they marvelled over the mournful minor tones in his melodious verse he made answer: Go stand on the beach of the blue boundless deep, When the night stars are gleaming on high, And hear how the billows are moaning in sleep, On the low-lying strand by the surge-beaten steep, They're moaning forever wherever they sweep. Ask them what ails them: they never reply; They moan on, so sadly, but will not tell you why! Why does your poetry sound like a sigh? The waves will not answer you; neither shall I. At the beginning of the war Father Ryan was appointed a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia, but often served as a soldier. He was in New Orleans in 1862 when an epidemic broke out, and devoted himself to the care of the victims. Having been accused of refusing to bury a Federal he was escorted by a file of soldiers into the presence of General Butler, who accosted him with great sternness: "I am told that you refused to bury a dead soldier because he was a Yankee." "Why," answered Father Ryan in surprise, facing the hated general without a tremor, "I was never asked to bury him and never refused. The fact is, General, it would give me great pleasure to bury the whole lot of you." Butler lay back in his arm-chair and roared with laughter. "You've got ahead of me, Father," he said. "You may go. Good morning, Father." One of the incidents of which Father Ryan told me occurred when smallpox was raging in a State prison. The official chaplain had fled and no one could be found to take his place. One day a prisoner asked for a minister to pray for him, and Father Ryan, whose parish was not far away, was sent for. He was in the prison before the messenger had returned and, having been exposed to contagion, was not permitted to leave. He remained in the prison ministering to the sick until the epidemic had passed. Immediately after the war he was stationed in New Orleans where he edited _The Star_, a Roman Catholic weekly. Afterward he was in Nashville, Clarksville, and Knoxville, and from there went to Augusta, Georgia, where he founded and edited the "_Banner of the South_," which was permanently furled after having waved for a few years. Unlike most Southern poets, Father Ryan did not take his themes from Nature, and when her phenomena enters into his verse it is usually as a setting for the expression of some ethic or emotional sentiment. He has been called "the historian of a human soul," and it was in the crises of life that his feeling claimed poetical expression. When he heard of Lee's surrender "The Conquered Banner" drooped its mournful folds over the heart-broken South. In his memorial address at Fredericksburg when the Southern soldiers were buried, he first read "March of the Deathless Dead," closing with the lines: And the dead thus meet the dead, While the living' o'er them weep; And the men by Lee and Stonewall led, And the hearts that once together bled, Together still shall sleep. June 28, 1883, I was in Lexington and saw the unveiling of Valentine's recumbent statue of General Lee in Washington and Lee University. At the conclusion of Senator Daniel's eloquent oration Father Ryan recited his poem, "The Sword of Lee," the first time that it had been heard. In Lexington I was at a dinner where Father Ryan was a guest. He told a story of a reprobate Irishman, for whom he had stood godfather. Upon one occasion the man took too much liquor and, under its influence, killed a man, for which he was sentenced to a term in the penitentiary. Through the efforts of the Father he was, after a time, pardoned and employment secured for him. One evening he came to the priest's house intoxicated and asked permission to sleep in the barn. "No," said the Father, "go sleep in the gutter." "Ah, Father, sure an' I've shlept in the gutter till me bones is all racked with the rheumatism." "I can't help that; I can't let you sleep in the barn; you will smoke, you drunken beast, and set the barn on fire and maybe burn the house, and they belong to the parish." "Ah, Father, forgive me! I've been bad, very bad; I've murdered an' kilt an' shtole an' been dhrunk, an' I've done a heap of low things besides, but low as I'm afther gettin', Father, I never got low enough to shmoke." The man slept in the barn and the parish suffered no loss. One evening at a supper at Governor Letcher's we were responding to the sentiment, "Life." I gave some verses which, in Father Ryan's view, were not serious enough for a subject so solemn. He looked at me through his wonderfully speaking eyes and answered me in his melodious voice: Life is a duty--dare it, Life is a burden--bear it, Life is a thorn-crown--wear it; Though it break your heart in twain Seal your lips and hush your pain; Life is God--all else is vain. "Yes, Father," I said, and there was silence. [Illustration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH, MOBILE. FATHER RYAN'S LATE RESIDENCE ADJOINING By courtesy of P.J. Kenedy & Sons] Always a wanderer, our Poet-Priest found his first real home, since his childhood, when pastor of St. Mary's Church in Mobile. To that home he pays a tribute in verse. It was an enchanting solitude for the "restless heart,"--the plain little church with its cross pointing the way upward, the front half-hidden by trees through which its window-eyes look out to the street. A short distance from the church and farther back was the priest's house, set in a bewilderment of trees and vines and shrubbery from which window, chimney, roof, and cornice peep out as if with inquisitive desire to see what manner of world lies beyond the forest. Up into the silent skies Where the sunbeams veil the star, Up,--beyond the clouds afar, Where no discords ever mar, Where rests peace that never dies. Here, amid the "songs and silences," he wrote "just when the mood came, with little of study and less of art," as he said, his thoughts leaping spontaneously into rhymes and rhythms which he called verses, objecting to the habit of his friends of giving them "the higher title of poems," never dreaming of "taking even lowest place in the rank of authors." I sing with a voice too low To be heard beyond to-day, In minor keys of my people's woe, But my songs will pass away. To-morrow hears them not-- To-morrow belongs to fame-- My songs, like the birds', will be forgot, And forgotten shall be my name. But a touch of prophecy adds the thought: And yet who knows? Betimes The grandest songs depart, While the gentle, humble, and low-toned rhymes Will echo from heart to heart. So the "low-toned rhymes" of him to whom "souls were always more than songs," written "at random--off and on, here, there, anywhere," touch the heart and linger like remembered music in a long-gone twilight. In 1872 Father Ryan travelled in Europe, visited Rome and had an audience with the Pope, of whom he wrote: I saw his face to-day; he looks a chief Who fears nor human rage, nor human guile; Upon his cheeks the twilight of a grief, But in that grief the starlight of a smile. In 1883 he began an extended lecture tour in support of a charity of deep interest in the South, but his failing health brought his effort to an early close. The fiery soul of Father Ryan soon burned out its frail setting. In his forty-eighth year he retired to a Franciscan Monastery in Louisville, intending to make the annual retreat and at its close to finish his "Life of Christ," begun some time before. He arrived at the Convent of St. Bonifacius March 23, 1886. The environment of the old Monastery, the first German Catholic establishment in Louisville, built in 1838, is not attractive. The building is on a narrow side street filled with small houses and shops crowded up to the sidewalk. But the interior offered a peaceful home for which the world-weary heart of the Poet-Priest was grateful. From a balcony where he would sit, breathing in the cool air and resting his soul in the unbroken silence, he looked across the courtyard shaded by beautiful trees, filled with flowers and trellised vines, his heart revelling in the riot of color, the wilderness of greenery, all bathed in golden floods of sunshine and canopied with an ever-changing and ever-glorious stretch of azure sky. Father Ryan was never again to go out from this peaceful harbor into the tumultuous billows of world-life. He had been there but a short time when his physician told him that he must prepare for death. "Why," he said, "I did that long years ago." The time of rest for which he had prayed in years gone by was near at hand. My feet are wearied and my hands are tired, My soul oppressed-- And I desire, what I have long desired-- Rest--only rest. * * * * * The burden of my days is hard to bear, But God knows best; And I have prayed--but vain has been my prayer For rest--sweet rest. In his last days his mind was filled with reminiscences of the war and he would arouse the monastery and tell the priests and brothers, "Go out into the city and tell the people that trouble is at hand. War is coming with pestilence and famine and they must prepare to meet the invader." On Thursday of Holy Week, April 22, 1886, the weary life drifted out upon the calm sea of Eternal Peace. "BACON AND GREENS" DR. GEORGE WILLIAM BAGBY We, the general and I, were the first to be informed of the supernal qualities of bacon and greens. All Virginians were aware of the prime importance of this necessary feature of an Old Dominion dinner, but that "a Virginian could not be a Virginian without bacon and greens" was unknown to us until the discoverer of that ethnological fact. Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in the chilly breeze." In the early days after the war Dr. Bagby had a pleasant habit of dropping into our rooms at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, and as soon as the ink was dry on that combination of humor and pathos and wisdom to which he gave the classic title of "Bacon and Greens" he brought it and read it to us. I can still follow the pleasant ramble on which he took us in fancy through a plantation road, the innumerable delights along the way never to be appreciated to their full extent by any but a real Virginian brought up on bacon and greens, and the arrival at the end of the journey, where we were taken possession of as if we "were the Prodigal Son or the last number of the _Richmond Enquirer_." My eyes were the first to fill with tears over the picture of the poor old man at the last, sitting by the dying fire in the empty house, while the storm raged outside. Though so thoroughly approving of "bacon and greens," there was another feature of Virginia life, as well as of Southern life generally, that met with Dr. Bagby's stern opposition--the duel. I once had opportunity to note his earnestness in trying to prevent a meeting of this kind. Two young men of whom General Pickett was very fond, Page McCarty, a writer for the press and an idol of Richmond society, and a brilliant young lawyer named Mordecai became involved in a quarrel which led to a challenge. The innocent cause of the dispute was the golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty, Mary Triplett, the belle of Richmond, who had long been the object of Page McCarty's devotion but had shown a preference for another adorer. Page wrote some satiric verses which, though no name was given, were known by all Richmond to be leveled at Miss Triplett. Mr. Mordecai resented the verses and the dispute which followed resulted in a challenge. Dr. Bagby came to our rooms when Page McCarty was there and made an unavailing effort to secure peace. Both he and the general were unsuccessful in their pacific attempts, the duel took place and Page McCarty, who bore a name that had in former times become famous in the duelling annals of Virginia, killed his antagonist at first shot. Though so strongly opposed to the practice, Dr. Bagby twice came near taking a principal part in a duel. Soon after the close of the war he wrote an editorial on prisoners of war, in which he took the ground that more Southern soldiers died in Northern prisons than Northerners in Southern prisons, giving figures in support of his statement. A Northern officer in Richmond answered the article, questioning its veracity. The doctor promptly sent a challenge to combat which the officer declined, saying that he had fought hard enough for the prisoners in war-time, he did not intend to fight for them now that hostilities were over. The second time that our genial humorist came near the serious reality of a duel he was the party challenged. The cause of the misunderstanding that promised to result so tragically was a magazine article in which the doctor caricatured a peculiar kind of Virginia Editor. The essay was a source of amusement to all its readers except one editor, who imagined himself insulted. Urged on by misguided friends, he challenged the author of the offending paper who, notwithstanding his opposition to the code, accepted. A meeting was arranged and the belligerents had arrived at historic Bladensburg with blood-thirsty intent, when one of those sunny souls, possessed of a universality of mind which rendered him a friend to all parties, arrived on the scene and a disastrous outcome was averted. Dr. Bagby has been called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture of loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years later a memory of his early home returns to him in the dawn: Suddenly there came from thicket or copse of the distant forest, I could not tell where, a "wood-note wild" of some bird I had not heard for half a century nearly, and in an instant the beauty, the mystery, the holiness of nature came back to me just as it came in childhood when sometimes my playmates left me alone in the great orchard of my home in Cumberland. He avows himself --a pagan and a worshipper of Pan, loving the woods and waters, and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed by the mightiest telescope, or by the hope mightier even than the imagination of the highest mind, is but as a parcel of motes shining in a single thin beam of the great sun unseen and hidden behind shutters never to be wide opened. Our "Virginia Realist" needed not to call upon his imagination for personalities with which to fill his free-hand sketches of nature, for there was in his kindly humor and geniality a charm which drew forth from all he met just the qualities necessary to fill in his world with the characters he desired. A wide and deep sympathy enabled him to make that world so real and true that his readers entered it at once and found therein such entertaining companionship that they were fain to abide there ever after. In 1835, when a boy fresh from Parley's History of America, the future humorist made a journey from Cumberland County to Lynchburg, hearing by the way alarming sounds which the initiated recognized as the report of the blasting of rocks on the "Jeems and Kanawha Canell." To the boy, with second-hand memories of Washington and his men tramping confusedly about his mind, the noises signified a cannonade and he waited in terrified excitement for the British bullet that was to put him beyond the conflicts of the world, trying to postpone the evil moment by hiding between two large men who were fellow-passengers with him. This was in the days when the celebrated "Canell" was a subject for the imagination to contemplate as a triumph of futurity and an object for hope to feed upon--a period in which the traveller embarked upon a fascinating batteau and spent a week of dreamy beauty in sailing from Lynchburg to Richmond and ten days back to the hill city. Time was not money in those days, it was vision and peace and color and sunshine and all wherein the soul of man delighteth itself and reveleth in the joy of living. The stream of imagination was no more dammed than the river in which "shad used to run to Lynchburg," showing a highly developed æsthetic taste on the part of the shad. The youthful traveller went to the Eagle Hotel and took a view of Main Street and dared not even wonder if he should ever be big enough to live in Richmond. Rapt soul of youth's dawn, with myriad dreams all to vanish when the sun rises upon the morning! On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great Canal was completed and, while his early impression of the unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his visions of journeying by canal were yet to be realized. At the foot of Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, passed under Seventh Street bridge, and with the other passengers lingered on deck to see Richmond slowly disappear in the distance. That night the doleful packet-horn, contrasted with his memory of the cheerful, musical note of the old stage-horn, brought to the lad his first realization of the inadequacies of modern improvements. Ascending the James the traveller had a view of the best of the old Virginia life, its wealth of beauty, its home comfort, its atmosphere of serenity, of old memories, rich and vivid, like the wine that lay cob-webbed in ancestral cellars, of gracious hospitality, of a softly tinted life like the color in old pictures and the soul in old books. The gentle humorist lived to see that life pass away from the Old Dominion and all too soon he vanished into another world where, like all true Virginians, he expected to find the old home-life again. These canal days were in the early Dickens period, and occasionally the youthful traveller could not resist the temptation to go below and lose himself in those pages which had then almost as potent a charm in their novelty as they have now in their friendly familiarity. But the river-isle, which held an interest in futurity for him because of his intention to found a romance there when he should be "big enough to write for the papers," would draw him back to the deck. There was a path across the hills that the passengers must follow, disembarking for that purpose. Near Manchester was a haunted house which he looked upon with those ghostly shivers that made a person so delightfully uncomfortable, for he, like the rest of us, did believe in ghosts, whatever he might say to the contrary. There was the ruined mill and, best of all, the Three-Mile Lock, inspiring him with the highest ambition of his life, to be a lock-keeper. Then came Richmond; the metropolis of the world, to the young voyager. [Illustration: DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY From the portrait in the possession of the family] Dr. Bagby studied for his profession at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania and from there went to Lynchburg, opening an office where now stands the opera house. Unfortunately for his professional career but happily for the cause of the literature of Virginia life, the office of the _Lynchburg Virginian_ was near, and its editor, Mr. James McDonald, proved a kindred soul to the young physician. In the absences of the editor, Dr. Bagby filled his chair and fell a victim to the fascination with which the Demon of the Fourth Estate lures his chosen to their doom. In Lynchburg he first found his true calling and there, too, he met with his first failure, the demise of the _Lynchburg Express_, of which he was part owner, and which went to the wall by reason of the well-known weakness of genius in regard to business matters. Upon the collapse of the _Express_ Dr. Bagby went to Washington as correspondent for a number of papers, and while there attained distinction as a humorist through the "Letters of Mozis Addums," written for the _Southern Literary Messenger_, of Richmond. His abiding place is of hazy uncertainty, one of his kinsmen saying--"He didn't live anywhere," He might as well have dwelt in his own "Hobgoblinopolis." His wanderings had taught him the peculiar charm of the Virginia roads of that day, as evidenced by the aspiration of "Mozis Addums" when contemplating the limitations of his "Fifty Millions": I want to give Virginia a perfect system of county roads, so that one may get off at a station and go to the nearest country-house without breaking his neck, and it would take five hundred millions to do that. It may be, as the doctor laments, that "The old Virginia gentleman, All of the olden time," has passed away, the colonial house is modernized, and the ghost, the killing of whom would be "an enormity far greater than the crime of killing a live man," has been laid to rest for half a century, but the old scenes and the old-time life come back to us who once knew it, in the pages of the perennial boy who recalls the time when "me and Billy Ivins and the other fellows set forth with six pine poles and a cymling full of the best and biggest fishing worms," to fish in the Appomattox where it "curves around the foot of Uncle Jim's plantation," and where there is a patriarchal beech with a tangle of roots whereon the Randolphs of historic note were wont to repose in the days long gone. This fishing party is under the fair October skies when "the morn, like an Eastern queen, is sumptuously clad in blue and gold; the sheen of her robes in dazzling sunlight, and she comes from her tent of glistening, silken, celestial warp, beaming with tender smiles." "It is a day of days for flatback, provided the moon is right." But "Billy Ivins swears that the planetary bodies have nothing to do with fish--it's all confounded superstition." So they cast in their hooks, "Sutherland's best," and talk about Harper's Ferry and "old Brown" until one of the party "thinks he has a nibble" and begs for silence, which at once supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the balance. When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun, after the manner of a newspaper man, and "Billy Ivins swears he will kill him for a fool." Oh, there were great old times on the Appomattox in the olden days, before its waves had turned battle-red and flashed that savage tint along the river-bank for all coming time. [Illustration: "AVENEL" The home of the Burwells, where Dr. Bagby spent many happy days] A part of the conversation shows us that this fishing expedition took place in the autumn of 1859, not a year before Dr. Bagby was called to the post of editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, taking the place of the poet, John R. Thompson, who was sent to England to lead the forlorn hope of a magazine to represent the Southern cause in London. A banquet was given at Zetelle's restaurant as a farewell to Mr. Thompson and welcome to Dr. Bagby. The office of the _Messenger_ was in the Law Building, a four-storied structure erected in 1846 on the southeast corner of Capitol Square, fronting on Franklin Street. Here he was hard at work, making the _Messenger_ worthy of its former editors, his predecessor, Mr. Thompson, Mr. White, of early days, Edgar A. Poe, and a succession of brilliant writers, only less widely known, when the guns before Sumter tempted the new editor to the field, a position for which he was ill fitted as to physical strength, whatever might be the force of his patriotism. He was soon running risks of pneumonia from the effects of over-drilling and the chilling breezes from Bull Run Mountain, and making up his mind "not to desert, but to get killed at the first opportunity," that being the most direct route he could think of to the two prime essentials of life, a clean shirt and solitude. He neither deserted nor was killed, but was detailed to write letters and papers for one of the officers, and slept through the fight of the 18th at Manassas as a result of playing night orderly from midnight to morning. Under the cloudless sky of the perfect Sunday, the twenty-first, he watched the progress of the battle till the cheer that rang from end to end of the Confederate line told him that the South had won. After midnight that night he carried to the telegraph office the message in which President Davis announced the victory and, walking back through the clear, still night, saw the comet, forerunner of evil, hanging over the field, as if in recognition of a fiery spirit on earth akin to its own. At headquarters on Monday, the 22d, he looked out at the pouring rain and raged over the inaction which kept the victorious army idle on the field of victory instead of following up the advantage by a march into the enemy's Capital, a movement which he thought could have been carried through to complete success. Having watched over his wounded friend, Lieutenant James K. Lee, until death came with eternal peace. Dr. Bagby was sent with the dead soldier to Richmond and soon afterward was discharged because of ill health, "and thus ended the record of an unrenowned warrior." He returned to his work on the _Messenger_ and the editorial sanctum became the meeting place of the wits of Richmond. It was here that the celebrated Confederate version of "Mother Goose" was evolved from the conjoined wisdom of the circle and written with the stub of the editorial pencil on the "cartridge-paper table-cloth," one stanza dealing with a certain Northern general thus: Little Be-Pope came on with a lope, Jackson, the Rebel, to find him; He found him at last, then ran very fast, With his gallant invaders behind him. The various authors were astonished to find their productions in the next issue of the _Messenger_ and were later dismayed when the verses were read at a meeting of the Mosaic Club, each with the name of the writer attached. While editor of the _Messenger_, Dr. Bagby wrote occasionally for the _Richmond Examiner_, thereby becoming associated in a friendly way with its editor, John M. Daniel, whose brilliant and continuous fight upon the administration at Richmond kept him vividly before the public. Though the genial doctor deplored the aggressiveness of the _Examiner_, he could not resist the temptation to employ his trenchant pen in treating of public affairs. This led to his possession of the famous latchkey which "fitted the door of the house on Broad Street, opposite the African Church," a key of which he wrote that it "has its charm," and certainly one which he made more enchanting to his readers than any other such article has ever proved. These two men, so different in view-point and expression, so similar in principle and purpose, met in Washington in 1861 at Brown's Hotel, that famous old hostelry dear to the Southern heart in the years before the tide of war swept the old Washington away forever and brought a new South to take the place of the old plantation life. Congenial as they were in many ways, the possession of the latchkey, Dr. Bagby tells us, did not argue an intimate personal relation, as the fancy of the brilliant editor of the _Examiner_ was apparently changeable, and wavered when he discovered that his assistant neither played chess nor talked sufficiently to inspire him to conversational excellence. But the key opened to the younger man, whenever he so willed, the pleasant three-storied brick house on Broad Street where the valiant editor kept bachelor's hall in a manner that would suggest the superfluity of complicating the situation with a wife and family. That latchkey gave to its holder entrance to the first floor front room parlor where hung two fine paintings, the special treasures of the fastidious owner, and if he could not play chess upon the handsome mosaic chess-table he could at least enjoy its artistic beauty. The dining-room contained a set of solid antique-patterned tables to which Mr. Daniel was wont to refer as the former property of "old Memminger," that is, Secretary Memminger of the Confederate Treasury, who had sold his household effects on leaving his home on Church Hill. Over the mantel in the bachelor's chamber hung a miniature on ivory, "the most beautiful I have ever seen," said the doctor, an unknown beauty whose charms mystified as well as enchanted the observer; a wondrously accomplished lady of title and wealth whom Mr. Daniel had known abroad. The visitor must have viewed with some degree of curiosity the effective arrangement of mirrors in the dressing-room, whereby the owner of the mansion surveyed himself front, rear, head and foot, as he made his toilet, perhaps reflecting humorously upon the dismay of his manager, Mr. Walker, upon being advised as to the necessity of wearing a white vest to a party: "But, Mr. Daniel, suppose a man hasn't got a white vest and is too poor these war times to buy one?" "---- it, sir! let him stay at home," was the decisive answer. On a second floor passage was an object which must have excited more envy than the magnificent mirrors and solid old furniture were capable of arousing--a bag of Java coffee, and coffee thirty dollars a pound--the latter fact not deterring the luxurious owner of this stately abode from imbuing his pet terriers with the coffee-drinking habit. A little room cut off from a passage in the third story was a library of old and rare editions of the classics. A back room, sunlit and warm, gave a view of James River, the Henrico Hills, and the spacious dells and forests of Chesterfield. To the mind of Dr. Bagby all these things were represented by "John M. Daniel's Latchkey" and, for all the charm of "Home, Sweet Home," is it not better to have the privileges without the responsibilities of a latchkey? Next to the editorial office of the _Messenger_ that of the _Daily Examiner_ was the place with which Dr. Bagby was, perhaps, best acquainted in Richmond. There, with the fiery editor, he spent his evenings in reading proof, comforted by a mild cigar and protected by a Derringer which Mr. Daniel would put on the table when he first arrived, a not unnecessary precaution, for if there was one place more dangerous than another in the Richmond of war days it was almost any point in the near vicinity of the belligerent editor of the _Examiner_. Dr. Bagby was married to Miss Parke Chamberlayne of Richmond, and we may be sure that she was the model from which he drew his charming study of "the Virginia lady of the best type," who accompanies "The Old Virginia Gentleman" in his pages. After the close of the war Dr. Bagby attained high distinction as a lecturer on Southern topics and later served his State as assistant secretary. But in all that he did there was with him the lost dream of the nation he had served so well through the dark and stormy years of strife, and in August, 1883, he passed beyond into the land where earth's broken hearts are renewed to youth. It was written of him: "There is no man left in Virginia fit to lift the lid of his inkstand." "WOMAN AND POET" MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON "Whoever has the good fortune to follow its trails and shimmering waters is already half a poet," wrote Professor Harris of the road that leads down from the verdant hills of the Alleghanies over picturesque gorge and crag and fissure into the quiet of the valley and brings us by exquisite stages to the beautiful town of Lexington, Virginia. Making that journey in taking my boy, fourteen years old, to the Virginia Military Institute, I entered at once two charming regions--Lexington with its romantic environment, and the heart of Margaret Junkin Preston. When I spoke of the beautiful scenery Mrs. Preston asked me if I had read Professor Maury's description of it. I replied that I had not. "I am glad," she said, "because now that you have seen our Nature-pictures you will enjoy the description so much more." Though the name and work of Margaret Preston had long been shrined in the hearts of a host of known friends and endeared to many unknown readers whose lives had been cheered by the buoyant hopefulness expressed in her writings, she was very modest in regard to her productions, yet held it a duty to continue writing for others the thoughts which had helped her. When we were at supper in the home of Professor Lyle, who was gifted with an unusually poetic mind, he repeated passages from favorite authors. On being asked if he did not sometimes write poetry, he replied that he had often written rhymes and loved to do it, but when he would afterward read Virgil and Shakespeare and Tennyson he would tear up his own verses, feeling that he ought not to make the effort. "Then," replied Mrs. Preston, "the gardener should not plant the seeds that bring forth the little forget-me-nots and snowdrops. He should plant only the great multiflora roses and the Lady Bankshires and magnolias." Mrs. Preston spent much of her time in knitting because the weakness of her eyes made reading and writing difficult. "Are you never tired of knitting?" I asked. She replied that it did not tire her, and told me that Mrs. Lee said she loved to knit because she did not have to put her mind on the work. She could think and talk as well when she was knitting for the reason that she did not have to keep her eyes nor her attention upon what she was doing. She knew perfectly well when she came to a seam. In a letter from a soldier to Mrs. Lee he thanked her for the socks she had sent him, and wrote; "I have fourteen pairs of socks knitted by my mother and my mother's sisters and the Church Sewing Society, and I have not a shirt to my back nor a pair of trousers to my legs nor a whole pair of shoes to my feet." "But," said Mrs. Lee as she concluded the story, "I continued to knit socks just the same." The first open-end thimble I ever saw was one Mrs. Preston used when I was with her at the Springs. I remarked upon it and she said that when she used a thimble she always had that kind. "I feel about a thimble as I do about mitts, which I always wear instead of gloves, because I like to see my fingers come through. So I like to see my finger come through my thimble. It is a tailor's thimble. Tailors always use that kind. I do not know whether they like to see their fingers come through or not." I had heard it said that it takes nine tailors to make a man and now I reflected that it would take eighteen tailors to make a thimble. Upon presenting this mathematical problem to Mrs. Preston she told me about the origin of the old saying: "It was not that kind of tailor at first. In old England the custom was to announce a death by tolling a bell. After the bell had ceased tolling, a number of strokes, called 'tailers,' indicated whether the death was of a child, a woman or a man; three for a child, nine for a man. People counting would say, 'Nine tailers, that's a man,' which in time became colloquially 'Nine tailers make a man.' When the custom became obsolete the saying remained, its application was forgotten, _o_ was substituted for _e_ and it was used in derogation of a most worthy and necessary member of the body politic." Margaret Preston was very small, in explanation of which fact she told me there was a story that she had been tossed on the horns of a cow. There was Scotch blood in the Junkin family and with it had descended the superstition that this experience dwarfs a child's growth. When she sat upon an ordinary chair her little feet did not touch the floor. She had a way of smoothing the front of her dress with her hands as she talked. Knowing her as she was then and remembering her devotion to the South and the sacrifices she had made for her home through the dark years, one might have thought that she was a native daughter of Virginia. In the village of Milton, Pennsylvania, where her father, Reverend George Junkin, was pastor of the Associate Reformed Church, Margaret Junkin was born on the 19th of May, 1820, in a small, plain, rented house, a centre of love and harmony, with simple surroundings, for the family finances did not purchase household luxuries, but were largely expended in assisting those less fortunately placed. In this little home, where rigid economy was practised and high aspirations reigned, our future poet entered upon the severe intellectual training which caused her at twenty-one, when the door of scholastic learning was closed upon her by the partial failure of her sight, to be called a scholar, though she sorrowfully resented the title, asking, "How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies were cut short at twenty-one?" She received her first instruction from her mother, passing then under the tutorship of her father, who fed his own ambition by gratifying her scholarly tastes, teaching her the Greek alphabet when she was six years old and continuing her training in collegiate subjects until she was forced by failing sight to give up her reading. When she was ten the family removed to Germantown, where her father had charge of the Manual Labor School, and Margaret enjoyed the advantages at that time afforded by the city of Philadelphia, gathering bright memories which irradiated her somewhat sombre life then and lightened her coming years. In Lafayette, a new college in Easton, Pennsylvania, Dr. Junkin soon found opportunity to carry on his system of training for practical and religious life and here Margaret spent sixteen happy and busy years--happy but for the gray veil that fell between her and her loved studies before those years had passed. She was obliged to prepare her Greek lessons at night, and the only time her father had for hearing her recitations was in the early morning before breakfast, which in that household meant in the dim candlelight of the period; not a wholesome time for perusing Greek text. For Margaret Junkin it meant seven years of physical pain, a part of the time in a darkened room, and the lifelong regret of unavailing aspirations. It was in Easton that she began to write in any serious and purposeful fashion, the result of her semi-blindness, as, but for that, she would have devoted her life to painting, for which she had decided talent. In the beautiful environment of Easton the young soul had found the poetic glow that tinged its early dawn. Hills crowned with a wealth of forests, fields offering hospitality to the world, glimmering of the Delaware waters rippling silverly along their happy way, auroral dawns and glorious sunsets, all inspired the youthful poet's imagination to melodious effort. Of Margaret as she was in the Easton days in 1836, a Lafayette freshman thus writes: A taste for literary pursuits soon drew us together and a warm friendship sprang up, which continued unbroken to the day of her death. Her remarkable poetic talent had even then won the admiration of her associates, and to have been admitted into the charmed circle of which she was the center, where literature and literary work were discussed, admired and appreciated, I have ever counted a high privilege. Her next home, in Oxford, Ohio, where Dr. Junkin had been elected to the presidency of Miami University, was not a dream of delight to the poetic soul of the young girl, for Scotch Calvinism, perhaps more rigid than the Calvinism of Calvin himself, which did not admit of fitting square dogmatic nails into round theological holes, insured a succession of oft-recurrent tempests for the family, as well as for the good doctor. The one letter which remains from the correspondence of Margaret Junkin at that time, though indicating a buoyant nature on the part of the writer, gives a sad view of financial difficulties, her mother's fragility, uncongenial climate, and the persecution directed against her father. Some of these misfortunes were obviated by a return to Easton, Dr. Junkin having been recalled to the presidency of Lafayette College, from which he had withdrawn a few years before because of a disagreement with the trustees on a question of government. Not long afterward the failing health of Margaret's young brother Joseph led Dr. Junkin to accept the presidency of Washington College, Lexington, Virginia, in the hope that change of climate might bring health to the invalid. Thus in the fall of 1848 the step was taken which made Margaret Junkin one of our Southern poets, devoted to her adopted State and a loved and honored daughter thereof. On the arrival in Lexington a younger member of the family wrote: My first memory of Lexington is of arriving, at midnight, in a December snowstorm, after a twelve hours' ride from Staunton in an old stage coach. This was before there was a turnpike or plank road, and the ups and downs we had that night made an impression on our bodies as well as our minds. A later memory gives us a pretty glimpse of daily life as it went on in that charming little Virginia town: From the time we went to Lexington we all used to take delightful, long rambles, rather to the surprise of Lexington people, who were not quite so energetic. We found the earliest spring flowers on the "Cliffs," and "Cave Spring" was a favorite spot to walk to (several miles from town) stopping always for a rest at the picturesque ruins of old "Liberty Hall." "Liberty Hall" was the name of an old school building outside of Lexington. Writing reproachfully to a friend for not coming to visit her, Margaret tells of the "sweet pure air of our Virginia mountains," of the morning "overture of the birds," "such as all the Parodis and Linds and Albonis in the world could never equal." She tantalizes her friend with a glowing picture of a gallop "over misty hills, down into little green shaded glens, under overhanging branches all sparkling with silvery dew." She tells her that they might take a walk "to 'The Cliffs,' to see the sun go down behind yon wavy horizon of mountains, if its setting promised to be fine, and saunter back in the gloaming, just in time to have coffee handed in the free and easy social Virginia style in the library." In Lexington, Margaret's first sorrow came to her, the death of her brother Joseph, whose health had not improved with the change to Lexington and who had been sent to Florida, where he found a "far-off lonely grave." A description of the young poet at this time is given by a girl admirer: Miss Maggie was the object of my secret, enthusiastic worship. She was not exactly pretty, but her slight figure, fair complexion and beautiful auburn curls furnished a piquant setting for her refined, intelligent countenance which made up for the lack of mere beauty. I used to thrill with admiration as I watched her riding at a swift gallop, a little black velvet cap showing off her fairness, the long curls blowing about her face.... We wondered that a person who could write poetry, which seemed to our limited experience a sort of miraculous gift, should condescend to talk to us about our studies and games as if she were one of us. It was in Lexington that her power reached its full development, and she even took prizes in magazines and newspapers for some stories with what her friends called "prim heroes and pasteboard heroines," classifications which she good-naturedly accepted, as she readily acknowledged that she had no gift for story-telling. In Lexington, Margaret's sister, Eleanor, met the grave and dignified Major T.J. Jackson, Professor of Mathematics in the Virginia Military Institute, and in 1853 was married to him. Here the death of the sweet and gentle mother brought to the life of Margaret Junkin its crowning sorrow, and shortly afterward the lovely young wife of Major Jackson left the earthly home. The Professor of Latin in the Virginia Military Institute was Major J.T.L. Preston, grandson of Edmund Randolph. He was a man of great dignity of character and manner and of unusual scholarship. Though Margaret Junkin had at times requested her nearest of kin to seclude her in an asylum for the insane should she ever manifest a tendency to marry a widower with children, she proceeded quite calmly and with reason apparently unclouded, to fall in love with and marry Professor Preston, notwithstanding his possession of seven charming and amiable sons and daughters left over from a former congenial marriage. She proved a most devoted mother to her large family, who returned her affection in full measure. A volume of her poetry is dedicated to her eldest stepdaughter who, after the death of Margaret, was her most loving and appreciative biographer. To her great sorrow, one of the sons was killed in battle. The marriage was followed by a visit to "Oakland" on the James River, the home of Major Preston's sister, Mrs. William Armstead Cocke, where at first the ornately dignified style of living rather dazed the bride accustomed as she had been to the simplicity of a home in which the only luxury was in giving help to others. Colonel William C. Preston, the eloquent South Carolina orator, met the "little red-headed Yankee" with distinct aversion to her "want of style and presence," but was soon heard to declare with enthusiastic admiration that she was "an encyclopedia in small print." Here among ancestral trees she found inspiration and in the society of her new sister she enjoyed the most delightful soul companionship. In the early years of her married life writing was laid aside while she devoted herself to the care of her family, the entertainment of the many visitors who came to the Preston house and the beautification of her new home, finding plenty of space in the attractive house and extensive grounds with their noble trees, orchard, garden and meadow for the outlet of all her imagination. In this ideal home she was living her peaceful and happy life when the bugle call destroyed the serenity of the country. She suffered one of her greatest sorrows in the difference of political opinion between her Northern father and her Southern husband. The latter, holding that while secession was unwise, coercion was tyranny, followed Virginia when she cast in her lot with the seceding States. Dr. Junkin and his widowed youngest daughter, Julia, returned to Philadelphia, while Colonel Preston joined Stonewall Jackson's army. Margaret Preston's worship of the muses was woven in with her devotion to the household goddesses, and in her journal the receiving of the first copy of her new volume of poems is sandwiched in between the making of twenty-two gallons of blackberry wine and thirty-three bottles of ketchup. House-cleaning and "Tintoretto"; pickles and "Mona Lisa"; hearth-painting and "Bacharach wine" were all closely connected in her every-day experience. From a ride through the blue hills she would return with a poem singing in her heart, radiant with sun, shaded with the mists of the darkening heights, and when it had bubbled over in laughter and dreams and tears and was safe upon the written page, she would go into the kitchen and produce such marvels of cookery as made her a housewife of more than local fame. One of her dearest friends was Commodore Matthew F. Maury, who was connected with the Military Institute in the early years after the war. On his death-bed his wife asked him if she might bury him in Hollywood near Richmond. "As you please, my dear," he said, "but do not carry me through the pass until the ivy and laurel are in bloom and you can cover my bier with their beauty." When the burial service was read over him lying in state in the Institute library, Mrs. Preston was not able to venture over the threshold, so she remained in the shelter of the porch, and when the family returned from the funeral she read them the lines she had composed in the hour that they had been gone: THROUGH THE PASS "Home, bear me home at last," he said, "And lay me where my dead are lying; But not while skies are overspread, And mournful wintry winds are sighing. "Wait till the royal march of Spring Carpets your mountain fastness over,-- Till chattering birds are on the wing, And buzzing bees are in the clover. "Wait till the laurel bursts its buds, And creeping ivy flings its graces About the lichened rocks, and floods Of sunshine fill the shady places. "Then, when the sky, the air, the grass, Sweet Nature all, is glad and tender, Then bear me through the Goshen Pass Amid its flush of May-day splendor." So _will_ we bear him! Human heart To the warm earth's drew never nearer, And never stooped she to impart Lessons to one who held them dearer. Stars lit new pages for him; seas Revealed the depths their waves were screening; The ebbs gave up their masteries, The tidal flows confessed their meaning. Of ocean paths the tangled clue He taught the nations to unravel; And mapped the track where safely through The lightning-footed thought might travel. And yet unflattered by the store Of these supremer revelations, Who bowed more reverently before The lowliest of earth's fair creations? What sage of all the ages past, Ambered in Plutarch's limpid story, Upon the age he served, has cast A radiance touched with worthier glory? His noble living for the ends God set him (duty underlying Each thought, word, action) naught transcends In lustre, save his nobler dying. Do homage, sky, and air, and grass, All things he cherished, sweet and tender, As through our gorgeous mountain pass We bear him in the May-day splendor! The summer of 1884 Margaret Preston spent abroad in the places of which she had read with a loving enthusiasm which made them her own. "Don't show me; let me find it," she would say, and go straight to the object of her quest. Her reading had brought her into companionship with all the beautiful minds of the world, and all the places that had been dear to them were sacred to her heart. Windermere was "redolent all over with the memories of Wordsworth, Southey, Kit North, Hartley Coleridge, Harriet Martineau, Dr. Arnold." "Ambleside--Wordsworth's Ambleside--Southey's; and such hills, such greenery, I never expect to see again. Then we took carriage to Grasmere Lake, a lovely little gem." "I walked to Wordsworth's grave without being directed, and on reading his name on his stone, and Mary Wordsworth's on his wife's, I am free to confess to a rush of tears, Dora Quillinan, his daughter's, and dear old Dorothy, whom Coleridge, you know, pronounced the grandest woman he had ever known. Suddenly turning I read the name of poor Hartley Coleridge and again I felt my eyes flow." Perhaps few travellers have seen as much in a summer's wandering as did Margaret Preston, yet it was on her "blind slate" that she was forced to write of these things and of the "crowning delight of the summer," the tour through Switzerland. She said, "My picture gallery of memory is hung henceforth with glorious frescoes which blindness cannot blot or cause to fade." Life in Preston House with all its enchantments came to an end for Margaret Preston with the passing of the noble and loving man who had made her the priestess of that home shrine. The first two years after his death she spent with her stepdaughter, Mrs. Allan, who lived near the old home. Then she went to the home of Dr. George J. Preston, of Baltimore, where she was the centre of the home and took great delight in his children with their pretty "curly red heads." She never walked again except to take a few steps with a crutch. From 819 North Charles Street she wrote: "Here my large airy room faces brick walls and housetops and when I sit at the library windows I only see throngs of passers-by, all of whom are strangers to me." Her life was beautiful and content, but she must often have longed for the old friends and the "laureled avenues" and the "edges of the glorious Goshen Pass lit with the wavering flames of the July rhododendrons." March 29, 1897, Margaret Preston died as she had wished when she expressed her desire in her poem "Euthanasia," written in memory of a friend who had passed away unconscious of illness or death: With faces the dearest in sight, With a kiss on the lips I love best, To whisper a tender "Good-night" And pass to my pillow of rest. To kneel, all my service complete, All duties accomplished--and then To finish my orisons sweet With a trustful and joyous "Amen." And softly, when slumber was deep, Unwarned by a shadow before, On a halcyon billow of sleep To float to the Thitherward shore. Without a farewell or a tear, A sob or a flutter of breath, Unharmed by the phantom of Fear, To glide through the darkness of death! Just so would I choose to depart, Just so let the summons be given; A quiver--a pause of the heart-- A vision of angels--then Heaven! "THE 'MOTHER' OF 'ST. ELMO'" AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON Let me introduce to you Augusta Evans Wilson as I first met her when she was a bride, when her soul, like mine, was allied to love, faith and romance, when every day was made perfect with its own contentment and to-morrow's hope, when we were happy because we loved and were loved. I do not know why, when she clasped my hand and said, "How young you are," I thought of the poem of Lucas, "The land where we lay dreaming," or why those lines should come back to me now when her feet are treading the path where silence is. It may have been because of her sweet voice, "Which did thrill until at eve the whip-poor-will and at noon the mocking-birds were mute and still," or because of the exchange of memories of those days of shot and shell and red meteors, of the camp, of the march, of the sick and wounded to whom she ministered, and of the realization that "All our glorious visions fled and left us nothing real but the dead, in the land where we lay dreaming." When she remarked upon my youth the fancy drifted through my mind that she was rather old for a bride, or at least looked so, for I was accustomed to seeing very youthful brides, being only half her years when I was one, while she had passed through ageing experiences, had written many books, and looked older than she really was. I had not formed the habit of thinking of her as Mrs. Wilson, and in the confusion of the old name and the new could not recall either, so called her "Mrs. Macaria." She laughed and told me that she was accustomed to being called "Beulah," but this was the first time that she had been addressed as "Mrs. Macaria." She told me of the many adventures of "Macaria" in its early days. Camp "Beulah," named in honor of her second book, which appeared not long before the opening of the war and brought her at once into prominence as a writer, was near Summerville, the girlhood home of Augusta Evans, and in that camp and its hospital, as well as in the many others which soon sprang up around the Evans residence, she took a Southern woman's share in the work, the darkness and the heartache of the time. Her friend, Mr. Thomas Cooper De Leon, of Mobile, gives a picture of her in those days: The slim, willowy girl, with masses of brown hair coiled in the funnel depths of a poke bonnet, a long check apron and a pair of tin buckets, became the typical guardian angel of the nearby hospitals. She was amanuensis, as well as nurse, cook and general purveyor of light and comfort, and she sent many a cheering letter to waiting hearts at home, and never was the power of her glowing pen used more nobly and helpfully than when, forced to write the last dread message of all, it wove into the sorrowful words a golden thread of love and faith and hope. In the pauses of her work she wrote most of her war-novel, "Macaria," which, to a great extent, shared the uncertainties and excitements of the period. It was published in 1864 by West & Johnson, of Richmond, being printed on wrapping paper, and soon became a favorite with the Southern soldiers, who probably found in it more human nature and more of the logic of possible events than it revealed to the general reader, their own experience in those days having led them to grave doubts as to the accuracy of the philosophic theory that not all conceivable things are possible. At that time it stood to reason that the kind of literature popular in Southern camps would not appeal forcibly to the approval of the Northern army, and a Federal officer captured and burned all the copies of "Macaria" that he could find. Miss Evans contrived to slip a copy of her new book across the lines to a publisher friend who, being unable at that time to bring out a new edition, took it to the J.B. Lippincott Company and arranged for its publication. Immediately afterward it was found that another publisher had come into possession of a copy and had an edition of five thousand ready to issue but, upon inquiry, expressed his intention of paying no royalty to the author. Through the efforts of Mr. Lippincott he was induced to allow a royalty. Miss Evans afterward wrote to her friend: I have always felt profoundly grateful to Mr. Lippincott, but fate has never indulged me in an opportunity of adequately thanking him for his generous and chivalrous action in behalf of an unknown rebel, who at that period was nursing Confederate soldiers in a hospital established near "Camp Beulah." In telling me of this she said that the kindness of Mr. Lippincott did not surprise her, as she remembered with gratitude the generosity of the Lippincott Company in regard to Southern obligations at the opening of the war. With the beautiful voice which so enchanted me she once took captive General Bragg's army on Lookout Mountain. With her mother she had gone to visit her brother, Captain Howard Evans, just before the battle of Chickamauga. It chanced that he had been sent to the front before they arrived, but they were hospitably received and given a hut on the slope. At midnight they were awakened by steps and whispers and upon inquiry found that their unexpected visitors were soldiers who had crept through the lines to see Miss Evans and hear her sing. The mother was disposed to object to her appearing at a time and place not conventionally appropriate to artistic performances, but, wrapping her travelling coat and robe about her, she went out into the moonlight with her mass of hair streaming in the wind like a flying cloud, and sang that thrilling song written by her friend, Randall, "Maryland, my Maryland." As the melodious tones swelled out upon the night and came floating back in echoes from the rugged peaks and mountain walls, they filled the audience with rapt delight. When the song was finished the sobs and cheers that burst from the soldier-hearts formed an encore not to be denied, and again that battle-cry thrilled out upon the air. The moment of silence that followed was broken by the high, shrill, quavering, penetrating note of the rebel yell. The singer has passed into the land of the higher music and most of those who thrilled to the sound of her battle-song on that war-crowned height have passed away from the melodies of earth, but somewhere in this wide land there may be hearts through which yet pulses the music of that midnight song. Among the most valued possessions of Mrs. Wilson were the rings, bracelets and baskets fashioned from buttons and fruit-seeds by her soldiers in hospital, tokens of their grateful remembrance of her. I showed her a little cross cut from a button in a prison and given to me by my uncle, Colonel Phillips, of the Confederate Army, who had been a captive on Johnson's Island. The prisoners used the cross to certify to the validity of secret messages. It was sent with the message and returned with the answer, carrying conviction of the truthfulness of both. I told her the story of another cross, connected with the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Colonel Aylett, of the Fifty-Third Virginia, a very religious man, was talking with some friends when a letter came bringing the sad tidings. "I do not believe it," he said. "If it could be true I should not have faith in God or in prayer." As he talked he took from his pocket a letter folded in the way that was followed when we had no envelopes, and, cutting it, let it fall to the floor. One of his companions took it up, placing the pieces on the table to look for an address, and found that the fragments formed a crucifix, the cross at each side to which the thieves were nailed, the block supporting the crucifix, the block on which the dice were thrown, the sponge and the reed, as if in imitation of a celebrated painting of the Crucifixion. "And this beautiful cross," said Mrs. Wilson, touching the one I wore, "it must have a story, too." I replied that it had been in my family for nearly three centuries, that General Pickett had worn it at the battle of Gettysburg, and that it had been blessed by the Pope three times. The last time, it was taken to Rome by Father Walter who, in his long service as Rector of Saint Patrick's Church in Washington, had by his sweet spirit of kindness and liberality endeared himself to the whole community, regardless of religious differences. Mrs. Wilson said that when she was in Washington she went to see Father Walter because of his great kindness to the people of the South. She spoke, too, of the most pathetic and tragic service of his life, his faithful attendance upon Mrs. Surratt to the last awful moment. In 1868 Augusta Evans was married to Mr. Lorenze M. Wilson, President of the Mobile & Montana Railroad, and became mistress of the beautiful home on the Spring Hill shell road near the picturesque city of Mobile. The house looked toward the road through aisles of greenery across a yard filled with flowers diffusing a perfume blended of geraniums, roses, tropical plants and the blossoms of the North. A chorus of birds filled the air with music. Majestic old live-oaks with twilight veils of gray moss were like tall and stately nuns pausing suddenly to count their beads to the music of vesper bells. Magnolia trees in dense white blossom gave the impression that winter had aroused from his summer sleep and unfolded his blanket of snow to add his most beautiful touch to the charms of the golden days. A handsome driveway led across a lawn to a veranda, vine-wreathed and hidden in a crush of flowers. The house, divided by a wide hall, opened upon broad piazzas. Leading up to it through brilliant blossoming was a white path between sentinel lines of oak trees that reached out friendly hands to clasp each other above the broad footway. Amid such beauty one felt lost in a mystic world of which he had never dreamed and revelled in a vision from which he might hope that there would be no waking. Augusta Jane Evans was born May 4, 1835, near Columbus, Georgia. "The Queen City of the Chattahoochee" is enthroned in a pine forest amid a range of hills that form a semi-circle about the city with its fine wide streets and magnificent shade trees. The St. Elmo Institute for girls, with its great oak grove and its beautiful lake, was the model for the school in the book, "St. Elmo." Sweet memories of the beautiful home in Columbus remained in the heart of Miss Evans and she said in after years that many of the happiest days of her girlhood were spent there. In later years she had here her "White Farm," on which all the animals and fowls were white. In her childhood the family removed to Galveston, Texas, going afterward to San Antonio. In the two years spent here she studied under the tutorship of her mother, who never gave up her charge to the care of a professional teacher, though the responsibility of seven other children might have furnished her with an excuse for doing so. In the most enchanting city of Texas the future novelist was surrounded by the romantic myths of Indian lore. On a day long past, the miracle of the San Antonio River and its valley had burst upon the enraptured eyes of Tremanos, the young Apache brave, from the hilltop to which he had climbed with weary footsteps, followed by the gaunt shadow of death, dazed by the phantoms on the distant horizon, lured on by mystic spirit music brought to him on the wings of the scorching winds; and he had gone with glad heart down into the rich and verdant plains of "Tejas, the Beautiful." Not far from the picturesque old city of San Antonio was the Huisache, one of the three springs which join to form the San Antonio River. Along its banks the gray dove's sad note was heard. When the two Indian sisters, "Flower of Gladness" and "Flower of Pity," used to come down to drink from the Spring of the Huisache the song of the dove was all of joy. A youthful Indian brave of rare enchantment came into their lives and brought love and treachery, and the assassin's knife felled the Indian youth on the brink of the Huisache. "Flower of Pity," coming to the spring, found the lifeless form of the young warrior and snatched the knife from the wound and plunged it into her own heart. A little later "Flower of Gladness" found her sister and the Indian brave dead by the water's edge and straightway went mad. Manitou graciously allowed the poor lost soul to find a voice for its woes in the note of the dove and henceforth she was the mourning dove. The lives of the youth and maiden, floating out in white clouds of mist, descended into the earth and became two living springs which united with the Huisache to form the San Antonio River. In her story of "Inez," founded upon the most tragic event in the history of the Lone Star State, the defence of the Alamo, Miss Evans thus described the scene from the viewpoint of the newly arrived immigrant: The river wound around the town like an azure girdle, gliding along the surface and reflecting in its deep blue waters the rustling tule which fringed the margin. An occasional pecan or live-oak flung a majestic shadow athwart its azure bosom. Now and then a clump of willows sigh low in the evening breeze. Far away to the north stretched a mountain range, blue in the distance; to the south lay the luxuriant valley of the stream. The streets were narrow and laid out with a total disregard of the points of the compass. By this river of romantic beauty and old-time myth Augusta Evans spent two of youth's impressionable years. On Main Plaza, near the Alamo, where the Frost National Bank now stands, was the Evans store, where she, the daughter of the store-keeper, lived. Almost under the shadow of the tragically historic old mission, by the park near which Santa Ana had his headquarters, she received the incentive and gathered the material for her first novel, "Inez," written in her own room at night as a gift with which to surprise her father and mother. The work of a girl of fifteen, it did not appeal to many readers, but it contained a vivid description of the inspired heroism and self-sacrifice of the men whose deeds crowned the history of Texas with the sanctity of the supreme glory of self-immolation upon the altar of patriotism. We have fallen upon commercial days now, and the traditions of the old Alamo circle around a warehouse. Alamo Plaza is now the scene of the annual "Battle of the Flowers," a joyous and beautiful occasion which throws a fragrant floral veil about the terrible memories that gloom over the place. At the close of the two years spent in San Antonio, the family returned to Columbus and later found a home in Mobile, Alabama, the town of the "Maubila," Choctaw, Indians. It is a pleasant town of shaded streets, romantic drives and beautiful homes. Its history reaches back through the centuries to a time long before the United States had being, and it is the only American city that has seen five flags wave over it: French, English, Spanish, United States and Confederate. While in this home Augusta Evans became widely known through the publication in 1859 of her second novel, "Beulah." Then came the war, bringing forth her one war-novel, "Macaria." "Vashti," "St. Elmo," "Infelice," "At the Mercy of Tiberius," the latter being her best, followed in quick succession, until her marriage put a close to her work, for Mr. Wilson was unwilling that she should tax her strength by close application. Life in the delightful home furnished interest enough to make resort to fiction unnecessary as an entertainment. In 1879 the death of Mr. Wilson ended the idyllic home life and she returned to her desk, writing "The Speckled Bird" and "Devota," with a pen that had lost much of its charm in the days of happy absorption. Having no children of her own, Mrs. Wilson gave her devoted affection to the children and grandchildren of her husband, who was a widower at the time of their marriage. It has been observed that the stories of Augusta Evans have no location. They happen in any place where the people chance to be and, given that kind of people, the story would evolve itself in the same way anywhere else. But for her there was always a place in which flowers grew and trees waved their branches to the breeze and made mystic aisles of purpled glooms, shot through with glimpses of sun amid silences broken happily by the songs of birds. There were always the wide sky and dim reaches of space and great walls of majestic mountains against the horizon. However gifted might be her maidens in roaming amid the stars or delving in philosophic depths, they, like herself, had always eyes for the beauties which Nature sets in place, and why should all these things be geographically bounded and designated by appellations to be recorded in the Postoffice Guide? Being in Mobile some years ago, I called upon Mrs. Wilson after her husband had passed on and left her alone in the charming home. She was in her work-room, if a place so decoratively enchanting can be connected with a subject so stern and prosaic, so crowded with every-day commonplaceness, as work. It was a bower of beauty, with light, graceful furniture, and pots of plants making cheerful greenery at every available spot. Vases of flowers cut from her garden, tended by her own care and love, were on desk and table and in sunny alcoves, filling the room with a glory of color and a fragrance as of incense from jewelled censers swung in adoration of the goddess of the exquisite shrine. Remembering that charming study as I saw it then, blossoming and redolent with the flowers beloved of the heart of its mistress, I wonder at times if all that beauty is still there and if some bright soul, as in the dead days, is sunning itself in that warmth and glow. The old home has passed into stranger hands, as Mrs. Wilson was persuaded to sell it after the death of her husband and her removal to the city. In Magnolia Cemetery in the home city so dear to her, Augusta Evans Wilson rests beside the brother whom she was seeking when her midnight song thrilled the hearts of the defenders of the Stars and Bars on Look-out Mountain. On her laurel-wreathed monument are the lines written by Mr. De Leon when the dawn of one May morning brought him the sad tidings that his friend of many years had passed from earth: Dead, in her fulness of years and of fame, What has she left? High on the roll of fair Duty, a name: Love, friends devoted as few mortals claim: A Nation bereft! 
14658	----	THE ROAD by JACK LONDON (New York: Macmillan) 1907 TO JOSIAH FLYNT The Real Thing, Blowed in the Glass CONTENTS CONFESSION HOLDING HER DOWN PICTURES "PINCHED" THE PEN HOBOES THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT ROAD-KIDS AND GAY-CATS TWO THOUSAND STIFFS BULLS "Speakin' in general, I 'ave tried 'em all, The 'appy roads that take you o'er the world. Speakin' in general, I 'ave found them good For such as cannot use one bed too long, But must get 'ence, the same as I 'ave done, An' go observin' matters till they die." --Sestina of the Tramp-Royal CONFESSION There is a woman in the state of Nevada to whom I once lied continuously, consistently, and shamelessly, for the matter of a couple of hours. I don't want to apologize to her. Far be it from me. But I do want to explain. Unfortunately, I do not know her name, much less her present address. If her eyes should chance upon these lines, I hope she will write to me. It was in Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1892. Also, it was fair-time, and the town was filled with petty crooks and tin-horns, to say nothing of a vast and hungry horde of hoboes. It was the hungry hoboes that made the town a "hungry" town. They "battered" the back doors of the homes of the citizens until the back doors became unresponsive. A hard town for "scoffings," was what the hoboes called it at that time. I know that I missed many a meal, in spite of the fact that I could "throw my feet" with the next one when it came to "slamming a gate" for a "poke-out" or a "set-down," or hitting for a "light piece" on the street. Why, I was so hard put in that town, one day, that I gave the porter the slip and invaded the private car of some itinerant millionnaire. The train started as I made the platform, and I headed for the aforesaid millionnaire with the porter one jump behind and reaching for me. It was a dead heat, for I reached the millionnaire at the same instant that the porter reached me. I had no time for formalities. "Gimme a quarter to eat on," I blurted out. And as I live, that millionnaire dipped into his pocket and gave me ... just ... precisely ... a quarter. It is my conviction that he was so flabbergasted that he obeyed automatically, and it has been a matter of keen regret ever since, on my part, that I didn't ask him for a dollar. I know that I'd have got it. I swung off the platform of that private car with the porter manoeuvring to kick me in the face. He missed me. One is at a terrible disadvantage when trying to swing off the lowest step of a car and not break his neck on the right of way, with, at the same time, an irate Ethiopian on the platform above trying to land him in the face with a number eleven. But I got the quarter! I got it! But to return to the woman to whom I so shamelessly lied. It was in the evening of my last day in Reno. I had been out to the race-track watching the ponies run, and had missed my dinner (_i.e._ the mid-day meal). I was hungry, and, furthermore, a committee of public safety had just been organized to rid the town of just such hungry mortals as I. Already a lot of my brother hoboes had been gathered in by John Law, and I could hear the sunny valleys of California calling to me over the cold crests of the Sierras. Two acts remained for me to perform before I shook the dust of Reno from my feet. One was to catch the blind baggage on the westbound overland that night. The other was first to get something to eat. Even youth will hesitate at an all-night ride, on an empty stomach, outside a train that is tearing the atmosphere through the snow-sheds, tunnels, and eternal snows of heaven-aspiring mountains. But that something to eat was a hard proposition. I was "turned down" at a dozen houses. Sometimes I received insulting remarks and was informed of the barred domicile that should be mine if I had my just deserts. The worst of it was that such assertions were only too true. That was why I was pulling west that night. John Law was abroad in the town, seeking eagerly for the hungry and homeless, for by such was his barred domicile tenanted. At other houses the doors were slammed in my face, cutting short my politely and humbly couched request for something to eat. At one house they did not open the door. I stood on the porch and knocked, and they looked out at me through the window. They even held one sturdy little boy aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the tramp who wasn't going to get anything to eat at their house. It began to look as if I should be compelled to go to the very poor for my food. The very poor constitute the last sure recourse of the hungry tramp. The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food by the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh, you charity-mongers! Go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from their excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves, and very often from what they cruelly need for themselves. A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog. There was one house in particular where I was turned down that evening. The porch windows opened on the dining room, and through them I saw a man eating pie--a big meat-pie. I stood in the open door, and while he talked with me, he went on eating. He was prosperous, and out of his prosperity had been bred resentment against his less fortunate brothers. He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, "I don't believe you want to work." Now this was irrelevant. I hadn't said anything about work. The topic of conversation I had introduced was "food." In fact, I didn't want to work. I wanted to take the westbound overland that night. "You wouldn't work if you had a chance," he bullied. I glanced at his meek-faced wife, and knew that but for the presence of this Cerberus I'd have a whack at that meat-pie myself. But Cerberus sopped himself in the pie, and I saw that I must placate him if I were to get a share of it. So I sighed to myself and accepted his work-morality. "Of course I want work," I bluffed. "Don't believe it," he snorted. "Try me," I answered, warming to the bluff. "All right," he said. "Come to the corner of blank and blank streets"--(I have forgotten the address)--"to-morrow morning. You know where that burned building is, and I'll put you to work tossing bricks." "All right, sir; I'll be there." He grunted and went on eating. I waited. After a couple of minutes he looked up with an I-thought-you-were-gone expression on his face, and demanded:-- "Well?" "I ... I am waiting for something to eat," I said gently. "I knew you wouldn't work!" he roared. He was right, of course; but his conclusion must have been reached by mind-reading, for his logic wouldn't bear it out. But the beggar at the door must be humble, so I accepted his logic as I had accepted his morality. "You see, I am now hungry," I said still gently. "To-morrow morning I shall be hungrier. Think how hungry I shall be when I have tossed bricks all day without anything to eat. Now if you will give me something to eat, I'll be in great shape for those bricks." He gravely considered my plea, at the same time going on eating, while his wife nearly trembled into propitiatory speech, but refrained. "I'll tell you what I'll do," he said between mouthfuls. "You come to work to-morrow, and in the middle of the day I'll advance you enough for your dinner. That will show whether you are in earnest or not." "In the meantime--" I began; but he interrupted. "If I gave you something to eat now, I'd never see you again. Oh, I know your kind. Look at me. I owe no man. I have never descended so low as to ask any one for food. I have always earned my food. The trouble with you is that you are idle and dissolute. I can see it in your face. I have worked and been honest. I have made myself what I am. And you can do the same, if you work and are honest." "Like you?" I queried. Alas, no ray of humor had ever penetrated the sombre work-sodden soul of that man. "Yes, like me," he answered. "All of us?" I queried. "Yes, all of you," he answered, conviction vibrating in his voice. "But if we all became like you," I said, "allow me to point out that there'd be nobody to toss bricks for you." I swear there was a flicker of a smile in his wife's eye. As for him, he was aghast--but whether at the awful possibility of a reformed humanity that would not enable him to get anybody to toss bricks for him, or at my impudence, I shall never know. "I'll not waste words on you," he roared. "Get out of here, you ungrateful whelp!" I scraped my feet to advertise my intention of going, and queried:-- "And I don't get anything to eat?" He arose suddenly to his feet. He was a large man. I was a stranger in a strange land, and John Law was looking for me. I went away hurriedly. "But why ungrateful?" I asked myself as I slammed his gate. "What in the dickens did he give me to be ungrateful about?" I looked back. I could still see him through the window. He had returned to his pie. By this time I had lost heart. I passed many houses by without venturing up to them. All houses looked alike, and none looked "good." After walking half a dozen blocks I shook off my despondency and gathered my "nerve." This begging for food was all a game, and if I didn't like the cards, I could always call for a new deal. I made up my mind to tackle the next house. I approached it in the deepening twilight, going around to the kitchen door. I knocked softly, and when I saw the kind face of the middle-aged woman who answered, as by inspiration came to me the "story" I was to tell. For know that upon his ability to tell a good story depends the success of the beggar. First of all, and on the instant, the beggar must "size up" his victim. After that, he must tell a story that will appeal to the peculiar personality and temperament of that particular victim. And right here arises the great difficulty: in the instant that he is sizing up the victim he must begin his story. Not a minute is allowed for preparation. As in a lightning flash he must divine the nature of the victim and conceive a tale that will hit home. The successful hobo must be an artist. He must create spontaneously and instantaneously--and not upon a theme selected from the plenitude of his own imagination, but upon the theme he reads in the face of the person who opens the door, be it man, woman, or child, sweet or crabbed, generous or miserly, good-natured or cantankerous, Jew or Gentile, black or white, race-prejudiced or brotherly, provincial or universal, or whatever else it may be. I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door for grub. After all, art is only consummate artfulness, and artfulness saves many a "story." I remember lying in a police station at Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Of course, the police wanted my story, and I gave it to them--on the spur of the moment. They were landlubbers, in the heart of the continent, and what better story for them than a sea story? They could never trip me up on that. And so I told a tearful tale of my life on the hell-ship _Glenmore_. (I had once seen the _Glenmore_ lying at anchor in San Francisco Bay.) I was an English apprentice, I said. And they said that I didn't talk like an English boy. It was up to me to create on the instant. I had been born and reared in the United States. On the death of my parents, I had been sent to England to my grandparents. It was they who had apprenticed me on the _Glenmore_. I hope the captain of the _Glenmore_ will forgive me, for I gave him a character that night in the Winnipeg police station. Such cruelty! Such brutality! Such diabolical ingenuity of torture! It explained why I had deserted the _Glenmore_ at Montreal. But why was I in the middle of Canada going west, when my grandparents lived in England? Promptly I created a married sister who lived in California. She would take care of me. I developed at length her loving nature. But they were not done with me, those hard-hearted policemen. I had joined the _Glenmore_ in England; in the two years that had elapsed before my desertion at Montreal, what had the _Glenmore_ done and where had she been? And thereat I took those landlubbers around the world with me. Buffeted by pounding seas and stung with flying spray, they fought a typhoon with me off the coast of Japan. They loaded and unloaded cargo with me in all the ports of the Seven Seas. I took them to India, and Rangoon, and China, and had them hammer ice with me around the Horn and at last come to moorings at Montreal. And then they said to wait a moment, and one policeman went forth into the night while I warmed myself at the stove, all the while racking my brains for the trap they were going to spring on me. I groaned to myself when I saw him come in the door at the heels of the policeman. No gypsy prank had thrust those tiny hoops of gold through the ears; no prairie winds had beaten that skin into wrinkled leather; nor had snow-drift and mountain-slope put in his walk that reminiscent roll. And in those eyes, when they looked at me, I saw the unmistakable sun-wash of the sea. Here was a theme, alas! with half a dozen policemen to watch me read--I who had never sailed the China seas, nor been around the Horn, nor looked with my eyes upon India and Rangoon. I was desperate. Disaster stalked before me incarnate in the form of that gold-ear-ringed, weather-beaten son of the sea. Who was he? What was he? I must solve him ere he solved me. I must take a new orientation, or else those wicked policemen would orientate me to a cell, a police court, and more cells. If he questioned me first, before I knew how much he knew, I was lost. But did I betray my desperate plight to those lynx-eyed guardians of the public welfare of Winnipeg? Not I. I met that aged sailorman glad-eyed and beaming, with all the simulated relief at deliverance that a drowning man would display on finding a life-preserver in his last despairing clutch. Here was a man who understood and who would verify my true story to the faces of those sleuth-hounds who did not understand, or, at least, such was what I endeavored to play-act. I seized upon him; I volleyed him with questions about himself. Before my judges I would prove the character of my savior before he saved me. He was a kindly sailorman--an "easy mark." The policemen grew impatient while I questioned him. At last one of them told me to shut up. I shut up; but while I remained shut up, I was busy creating, busy sketching the scenario of the next act. I had learned enough to go on with. He was a Frenchman. He had sailed always on French merchant vessels, with the one exception of a voyage on a "lime-juicer." And last of all--blessed fact!--he had not been on the sea for twenty years. The policeman urged him on to examine me. "You called in at Rangoon?" he queried. I nodded. "We put our third mate ashore there. Fever." If he had asked me what kind of fever, I should have answered, "Enteric," though for the life of me I didn't know what enteric was. But he didn't ask me. Instead, his next question was:-- "And how is Rangoon?" "All right. It rained a whole lot when we were there." "Did you get shore-leave?" "Sure," I answered. "Three of us apprentices went ashore together." "Do you remember the temple?" "Which temple?" I parried. "The big one, at the top of the stairway." If I remembered that temple, I knew I'd have to describe it. The gulf yawned for me. I shook my head. "You can see it from all over the harbor," he informed me. "You don't need shore-leave to see that temple." I never loathed a temple so in my life. But I fixed that particular temple at Rangoon. "You can't see it from the harbor," I contradicted. "You can't see it from the town. You can't see it from the top of the stairway. Because--" I paused for the effect. "Because there isn't any temple there." "But I saw it with my own eyes!" he cried. "That was in--?" I queried. "Seventy-one." "It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1887," I explained. "It was very old." There was a pause. He was busy reconstructing in his old eyes the youthful vision of that fair temple by the sea. "The stairway is still there," I aided him. "You can see it from all over the harbor. And you remember that little island on the right-hand side coming into the harbor?" I guess there must have been one there (I was prepared to shift it over to the left-hand side), for he nodded. "Gone," I said. "Seven fathoms of water there now." I had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time's changes, I prepared the finishing touches of my story. "You remember the custom-house at Bombay?" He remembered it. "Burned to the ground," I announced. "Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me. "Dead," I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest idea. I was on thin ice again. "Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him quickly. That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of my imagination was beyond his faded memory. "Of course you remember Billy Harper," I insisted. "Everybody knows him. He's been there forty years. Well, he's still there, that's all." And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper. Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai for forty years and was still there; but it was news to me. For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in similar fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I represented myself to be, and after a night's lodging and a breakfast I was released to wander on westward to my married sister in San Francisco. But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my cue. I became a sweet, innocent, unfortunate lad. I couldn't speak. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality, thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy. "You are hungry, my poor boy," she said. I had made her speak first. I nodded my head and gulped. "It is the first time I have ever ... asked," I faltered. "Come right in." The door swung open. "We have already finished eating, but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you." She looked at me closely when she got me into the light. "I wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you," she said. "But he is not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this afternoon and hurt himself badly, the poor dear." She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it that I yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the table, slender and pale, his head swathed in bandages. He did not move, but his eyes, bright in the lamplight, were fixed upon me in a steady and wondering stare. "Just like my poor father," I said. "He had the falling sickness. Some kind of vertigo. It puzzled the doctors. They never could make out what was the matter with him." "He is dead?" she queried gently, setting before me half a dozen soft-boiled eggs. "Dead," I gulped. "Two weeks ago. I was with him when it happened. We were crossing the street together. He fell right down. He was never conscious again. They carried him into a drug-store. He died there." And thereat I developed the pitiful tale of my father--how, after my mother's death, he and I had gone to San Francisco from the ranch; how his pension (he was an old soldier), and the little other money he had, was not enough; and how he had tried book-canvassing. Also, I narrated my own woes during the few days after his death that I had spent alone and forlorn on the streets of San Francisco. While that good woman warmed up biscuits, fried bacon, and cooked more eggs, and while I kept pace with her in taking care of all that she placed before me, I enlarged the picture of that poor orphan boy and filled in the details. I became that poor boy. I believed in him as I believed in the beautiful eggs I was devouring. I could have wept for myself. I know the tears did get into my voice at times. It was very effective. In fact, with every touch I added to the picture, that kind soul gave me something also. She made up a lunch for me to carry away. She put in many boiled eggs, pepper and salt, and other things, and a big apple. She provided me with three pairs of thick red woollen socks. She gave me clean handkerchiefs and other things which I have since forgotten. And all the time she cooked more and more and I ate more and more. I gorged like a savage; but then it was a far cry across the Sierras on a blind baggage, and I knew not when nor where I should find my next meal. And all the while, like a death's-head at the feast, silent and motionless, her own unfortunate boy sat and stared at me across the table. I suppose I represented to him mystery, and romance, and adventure--all that was denied the feeble flicker of life that was in him. And yet I could not forbear, once or twice, from wondering if he saw through me down to the bottom of my mendacious heart. "But where are you going to?" she asked me. "Salt Lake City," said I. "I have a sister there--a married sister." (I debated if I should make a Mormon out of her, and decided against it.) "Her husband is a plumber--a contracting plumber." Now I knew that contracting plumbers were usually credited with making lots of money. But I had spoken. It was up to me to qualify. "They would have sent me the money for my fare if I had asked for it," I explained, "but they have had sickness and business troubles. His partner cheated him. And so I wouldn't write for the money. I knew I could make my way there somehow. I let them think I had enough to get me to Salt Lake City. She is lovely, and so kind. She was always kind to me. I guess I'll go into the shop and learn the trade. She has two daughters. They are younger than I. One is only a baby." Of all my married sisters that I have distributed among the cities of the United States, that Salt Lake sister is my favorite. She is quite real, too. When I tell about her, I can see her, and her two little girls, and her plumber husband. She is a large, motherly woman, just verging on beneficent stoutness--the kind, you know, that always cooks nice things and that never gets angry. She is a brunette. Her husband is a quiet, easy-going fellow. Sometimes I almost know him quite well. And who knows but some day I may meet him? If that aged sailorman could remember Billy Harper, I see no reason why I should not some day meet the husband of my sister who lives in Salt Lake City. On the other hand, I have a feeling of certitude within me that I shall never meet in the flesh my many parents and grandparents--you see, I invariably killed them off. Heart disease was my favorite way of getting rid of my mother, though on occasion I did away with her by means of consumption, pneumonia, and typhoid fever. It is true, as the Winnipeg policemen will attest, that I have grandparents living in England; but that was a long time ago and it is a fair assumption that they are dead by now. At any rate, they have never written to me. I hope that woman in Reno will read these lines and forgive me my gracelessness and unveracity. I do not apologize, for I am unashamed. It was youth, delight in life, zest for experience, that brought me to her door. It did me good. It taught me the intrinsic kindliness of human nature. I hope it did her good. Anyway, she may get a good laugh out of it now that she learns the real inwardness of the situation. To her my story was "true." She believed in me and all my family, and she was filled with solicitude for the dangerous journey I must make ere I won to Salt Lake City. This solicitude nearly brought me to grief. Just as I was leaving, my arms full of lunch and my pockets bulging with fat woollen socks, she bethought herself of a nephew, or uncle, or relative of some sort, who was in the railway mail service, and who, moreover, would come through that night on the very train on which I was going to steal my ride. The very thing! She would take me down to the depot, tell him my story, and get him to hide me in the mail car. Thus, without danger or hardship, I would be carried straight through to Ogden. Salt Lake City was only a few miles farther on. My heart sank. She grew excited as she developed the plan and with my sinking heart I had to feign unbounded gladness and enthusiasm at this solution of my difficulties. Solution! Why I was bound west that night, and here was I being trapped into going east. It _was_ a trap, and I hadn't the heart to tell her that it was all a miserable lie. And while I made believe that I was delighted, I was busy cudgelling my brains for some way to escape. But there was no way. She would see me into the mail-car--she said so herself--and then that mail-clerk relative of hers would carry me to Ogden. And then I would have to beat my way back over all those hundreds of miles of desert. But luck was with me that night. Just about the time she was getting ready to put on her bonnet and accompany me, she discovered that she had made a mistake. Her mail-clerk relative was not scheduled to come through that night. His run had been changed. He would not come through until two nights afterward. I was saved, for of course my boundless youth would never permit me to wait those two days. I optimistically assured her that I'd get to Salt Lake City quicker if I started immediately, and I departed with her blessings and best wishes ringing in my ears. But those woollen socks were great. I know. I wore a pair of them that night on the blind baggage of the overland, and that overland went west. HOLDING HER DOWN Barring accidents, a good hobo, with youth and agility, can hold a train down despite all the efforts of the train-crew to "ditch" him--given, of course, night-time as an essential condition. When such a hobo, under such conditions, makes up his mind that he is going to hold her down, either he does hold her down, or chance trips him up. There is no legitimate way, short of murder, whereby the train-crew can ditch him. That train-crews have not stopped short of murder is a current belief in the tramp world. Not having had that particular experience in my tramp days I cannot vouch for it personally. But this I have heard of the "bad" roads. When a tramp has "gone underneath," on the rods, and the train is in motion, there is apparently no way of dislodging him until the train stops. The tramp, snugly ensconced inside the truck, with the four wheels and all the framework around him, has the "cinch" on the crew--or so he thinks, until some day he rides the rods on a bad road. A bad road is usually one on which a short time previously one or several trainmen have been killed by tramps. Heaven pity the tramp who is caught "underneath" on such a road--for caught he is, though the train be going sixty miles an hour. The "shack" (brakeman) takes a coupling-pin and a length of bell-cord to the platform in front of the truck in which the tramp is riding. The shack fastens the coupling-pin to the bell-cord, drops the former down between the platforms, and pays out the latter. The coupling-pin strikes the ties between the rails, rebounds against the bottom of the car, and again strikes the ties. The shack plays it back and forth, now to this side, now to the other, lets it out a bit and hauls it in a bit, giving his weapon opportunity for every variety of impact and rebound. Every blow of that flying coupling-pin is freighted with death, and at sixty miles an hour it beats a veritable tattoo of death. The next day the remains of that tramp are gathered up along the right of way, and a line in the local paper mentions the unknown man, undoubtedly a tramp, assumably drunk, who had probably fallen asleep on the track. As a characteristic illustration of how a capable hobo can hold her down, I am minded to give the following experience. I was in Ottawa, bound west over the Canadian Pacific. Three thousand miles of that road stretched before me; it was the fall of the year, and I had to cross Manitoba and the Rocky Mountains. I could expect "crimpy" weather, and every moment of delay increased the frigid hardships of the journey. Furthermore, I was disgusted. The distance between Montreal and Ottawa is one hundred and twenty miles. I ought to know, for I had just come over it and it had taken me six days. By mistake I had missed the main line and come over a small "jerk" with only two locals a day on it. And during these six days I had lived on dry crusts, and not enough of them, begged from the French peasants. Furthermore, my disgust had been heightened by the one day I had spent in Ottawa trying to get an outfit of clothing for my long journey. Let me put it on record right here that Ottawa, with one exception, is the hardest town in the United States and Canada to beg clothes in; the one exception is Washington, D.C. The latter fair city is the limit. I spent two weeks there trying to beg a pair of shoes, and then had to go on to Jersey City before I got them. But to return to Ottawa. At eight sharp in the morning I started out after clothes. I worked energetically all day. I swear I walked forty miles. I interviewed the housewives of a thousand homes. I did not even knock off work for dinner. And at six in the afternoon, after ten hours of unremitting and depressing toil, I was still shy one shirt, while the pair of trousers I had managed to acquire was tight and, moreover, was showing all the signs of an early disintegration. At six I quit work and headed for the railroad yards, expecting to pick up something to eat on the way. But my hard luck was still with me. I was refused food at house after house. Then I got a "hand-out." My spirits soared, for it was the largest hand-out I had ever seen in a long and varied experience. It was a parcel wrapped in newspapers and as big as a mature suit-case. I hurried to a vacant lot and opened it. First, I saw cake, then more cake, all kinds and makes of cake, and then some. It was all cake. No bread and butter with thick firm slices of meat between--nothing but cake; and I who of all things abhorred cake most! In another age and clime they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. And in a vacant lot in Canada's proud capital, I, too, sat down and wept ... over a mountain of cake. As one looks upon the face of his dead son, so looked I upon that multitudinous pastry. I suppose I was an ungrateful tramp, for I refused to partake of the bounteousness of the house that had had a party the night before. Evidently the guests hadn't liked cake either. That cake marked the crisis in my fortunes. Than it nothing could be worse; therefore things must begin to mend. And they did. At the very next house I was given a "set-down." Now a "set-down" is the height of bliss. One is taken inside, very often is given a chance to wash, and is then "set-down" at a table. Tramps love to throw their legs under a table. The house was large and comfortable, in the midst of spacious grounds and fine trees, and sat well back from the street. They had just finished eating, and I was taken right into the dining room--in itself a most unusual happening, for the tramp who is lucky enough to win a set-down usually receives it in the kitchen. A grizzled and gracious Englishman, his matronly wife, and a beautiful young Frenchwoman talked with me while I ate. I wonder if that beautiful young Frenchwoman would remember, at this late day, the laugh I gave her when I uttered the barbaric phrase, "two-bits." You see, I was trying delicately to hit them for a "light piece." That was how the sum of money came to be mentioned. "What?" she said. "Two-bits," said I. Her mouth was twitching as she again said, "What?" "Two-bits," said I. Whereat she burst into laughter. "Won't you repeat it?" she said, when she had regained control of herself. "Two-bits," said I. And once more she rippled into uncontrollable silvery laughter. "I beg your pardon," said she; "but what ... what was it you said?" "Two-bits," said I; "is there anything wrong about it?" "Not that I know of," she gurgled between gasps; "but what does it mean?" I explained, but I do not remember now whether or not I got that two-bits out of her; but I have often wondered since as to which of us was the provincial. When I arrived at the depot, I found, much to my disgust, a bunch of at least twenty tramps that were waiting to ride out the blind baggages of the overland. Now two or three tramps on the blind baggage are all right. They are inconspicuous. But a score! That meant trouble. No train-crew would ever let all of us ride. I may as well explain here what a blind baggage is. Some mail-cars are built without doors in the ends; hence, such a car is "blind." The mail-cars that possess end doors, have those doors always locked. Suppose, after the train has started, that a tramp gets on to the platform of one of these blind cars. There is no door, or the door is locked. No conductor or brakeman can get to him to collect fare or throw him off. It is clear that the tramp is safe until the next time the train stops. Then he must get off, run ahead in the darkness, and when the train pulls by, jump on to the blind again. But there are ways and ways, as you shall see. When the train pulled out, those twenty tramps swarmed upon the three blinds. Some climbed on before the train had run a car-length. They were awkward dubs, and I saw their speedy finish. Of course, the train-crew was "on," and at the first stop the trouble began. I jumped off and ran forward along the track. I noticed that I was accompanied by a number of the tramps. They evidently knew their business. When one is beating an overland, he must always keep well ahead of the train at the stops. I ran ahead, and as I ran, one by one those that accompanied me dropped out. This dropping out was the measure of their skill and nerve in boarding a train. For this is the way it works. When the train starts, the shack rides out the blind. There is no way for him to get back into the train proper except by jumping off the blind and catching a platform where the car-ends are not "blind." When the train is going as fast as the shack cares to risk, he therefore jumps off the blind, lets several cars go by, and gets on to the train. So it is up to the tramp to run so far ahead that before the blind is opposite him the shack will have already vacated it. I dropped the last tramp by about fifty feet, and waited. The train started. I saw the lantern of the shack on the first blind. He was riding her out. And I saw the dubs stand forlornly by the track as the blind went by. They made no attempt to get on. They were beaten by their own inefficiency at the very start. After them, in the line-up, came the tramps that knew a little something about the game. They let the first blind, occupied by the shack, go by, and jumped on the second and third blinds. Of course, the shack jumped off the first and on to the second as it went by, and scrambled around there, throwing off the men who had boarded it. But the point is that I was so far ahead that when the first blind came opposite me, the shack had already left it and was tangled up with the tramps on the second blind. A half dozen of the more skilful tramps, who had run far enough ahead, made the first blind, too. At the next stop, as we ran forward along the track, I counted but fifteen of us. Five had been ditched. The weeding-out process had begun nobly, and it continued station by station. Now we were fourteen, now twelve, now eleven, now nine, now eight. It reminded me of the ten little niggers of the nursery rhyme. I was resolved that I should be the last little nigger of all. And why not? Was I not blessed with strength, agility, and youth? (I was eighteen, and in perfect condition.) And didn't I have my "nerve" with me? And furthermore, was I not a tramp-royal? Were not these other tramps mere dubs and "gay-cats" and amateurs alongside of me? If I weren't the last little nigger, I might as well quit the game and get a job on an alfalfa farm somewhere. By the time our number had been reduced to four, the whole train-crew had become interested. From then on it was a contest of skill and wits, with the odds in favor of the crew. One by one the three other survivors turned up missing, until I alone remained. My, but I was proud of myself! No Croesus was ever prouder of his first million. I was holding her down in spite of two brakemen, a conductor, a fireman, and an engineer. And here are a few samples of the way I held her down. Out ahead, in the darkness,--so far ahead that the shack riding out the blind must perforce get off before it reaches me,--I get on. Very well. I am good for another station. When that station is reached, I dart ahead again to repeat the manoeuvre. The train pulls out. I watch her coming. There is no light of a lantern on the blind. Has the crew abandoned the fight? I do not know. One never knows, and one must be prepared every moment for anything. As the first blind comes opposite me, and I run to leap aboard, I strain my eyes to see if the shack is on the platform. For all I know he may be there, with his lantern doused, and even as I spring upon the steps that lantern may smash down upon my head. I ought to know. I have been hit by lanterns two or three times. But no, the first blind is empty. The train is gathering speed. I am safe for another station. But am I? I feel the train slacken speed. On the instant I am alert. A manoeuvre is being executed against me, and I do not know what it is. I try to watch on both sides at once, not forgetting to keep track of the tender in front of me. From any one, or all, of these three directions, I may be assailed. Ah, there it comes. The shack has ridden out the engine. My first warning is when his feet strike the steps of the right-hand side of the blind. Like a flash I am off the blind to the left and running ahead past the engine. I lose myself in the darkness. The situation is where it has been ever since the train left Ottawa. I am ahead, and the train must come past me if it is to proceed on its journey. I have as good a chance as ever for boarding her. I watch carefully. I see a lantern come forward to the engine, and I do not see it go back from the engine. It must therefore be still on the engine, and it is a fair assumption that attached to the handle of that lantern is a shack. That shack was lazy, or else he would have put out his lantern instead of trying to shield it as he came forward. The train pulls out. The first blind is empty, and I gain it. As before the train slackens, the shack from the engine boards the blind from one side, and I go off the other side and run forward. As I wait in the darkness I am conscious of a big thrill of pride. The overland has stopped twice for me--for me, a poor hobo on the bum. I alone have twice stopped the overland with its many passengers and coaches, its government mail, and its two thousand steam horses straining in the engine. And I weigh only one hundred and sixty pounds, and I haven't a five-cent piece in my pocket! Again I see the lantern come forward to the engine. But this time it comes conspicuously. A bit too conspicuously to suit me, and I wonder what is up. At any rate I have something else to be afraid of than the shack on the engine. The train pulls by. Just in time, before I make my spring, I see the dark form of a shack, without a lantern, on the first blind. I let it go by, and prepare to board the second blind. But the shack on the first blind has jumped off and is at my heels. Also, I have a fleeting glimpse of the lantern of the shack who rode out the engine. He has jumped off, and now both shacks are on the ground on the same side with me. The next moment the second blind comes by and I am aboard it. But I do not linger. I have figured out my countermove. As I dash across the platform I hear the impact of the shack's feet against the steps as he boards. I jump off the other side and run forward with the train. My plan is to run forward and get on the first blind. It is nip and tuck, for the train is gathering speed. Also, the shack is behind me and running after me. I guess I am the better sprinter, for I make the first blind. I stand on the steps and watch my pursuer. He is only about ten feet back and running hard; but now the train has approximated his own speed, and, relative to me, he is standing still. I encourage him, hold out my hand to him; but he explodes in a mighty oath, gives up and makes the train several cars back. The train is speeding along, and I am still chuckling to myself, when, without warning, a spray of water strikes me. The fireman is playing the hose on me from the engine. I step forward from the car-platform to the rear of the tender, where I am sheltered under the overhang. The water flies harmlessly over my head. My fingers itch to climb up on the tender and lam that fireman with a chunk of coal; but I know if I do that, I'll be massacred by him and the engineer, and I refrain. At the next stop I am off and ahead in the darkness. This time, when the train pulls out, both shacks are on the first blind. I divine their game. They have blocked the repetition of my previous play. I cannot again take the second blind, cross over, and run forward to the first. As soon as the first blind passes and I do not get on, they swing off, one on each side of the train. I board the second blind, and as I do so I know that a moment later, simultaneously, those two shacks will arrive on both sides of me. It is like a trap. Both ways are blocked. Yet there is another way out, and that way is up. So I do not wait for my pursuers to arrive. I climb upon the upright ironwork of the platform and stand upon the wheel of the hand-brake. This has taken up the moment of grace and I hear the shacks strike the steps on either side. I don't stop to look. I raise my arms overhead until my hands rest against the down-curving ends of the roofs of the two cars. One hand, of course, is on the curved roof of one car, the other hand on the curved roof of the other car. By this time both shacks are coming up the steps. I know it, though I am too busy to see them. All this is happening in the space of only several seconds. I make a spring with my legs and "muscle" myself up with my arms. As I draw up my legs, both shacks reach for me and clutch empty air. I know this, for I look down and see them. Also I hear them swear. I am now in a precarious position, riding the ends of the down-curving roofs of two cars at the same time. With a quick, tense movement, I transfer both legs to the curve of one roof and both hands to the curve of the other roof. Then, gripping the edge of that curving roof, I climb over the curve to the level roof above, where I sit down to catch my breath, holding on the while to a ventilator that projects above the surface. I am on top of the train--on the "decks," as the tramps call it, and this process I have described is by them called "decking her." And let me say right here that only a young and vigorous tramp is able to deck a passenger train, and also, that the young and vigorous tramp must have his nerve with him as well. The train goes on gathering speed, and I know I am safe until the next stop--but only until the next stop. If I remain on the roof after the train stops, I know those shacks will fusillade me with rocks. A healthy shack can "dewdrop" a pretty heavy chunk of stone on top of a car--say anywhere from five to twenty pounds. On the other hand, the chances are large that at the next stop the shacks will be waiting for me to descend at the place I climbed up. It is up to me to climb down at some other platform. Registering a fervent hope that there are no tunnels in the next half mile, I rise to my feet and walk down the train half a dozen cars. And let me say that one must leave timidity behind him on such a _passear_. The roofs of passenger coaches are not made for midnight promenades. And if any one thinks they are, let me advise him to try it. Just let him walk along the roof of a jolting, lurching car, with nothing to hold on to but the black and empty air, and when he comes to the down-curving end of the roof, all wet and slippery with dew, let him accelerate his speed so as to step across to the next roof, down-curving and wet and slippery. Believe me, he will learn whether his heart is weak or his head is giddy. As the train slows down for a stop, half a dozen platforms from where I had decked her I come down. No one is on the platform. When the train comes to a standstill, I slip off to the ground. Ahead, and between me and the engine, are two moving lanterns. The shacks are looking for me on the roofs of the cars. I note that the car beside which I am standing is a "four-wheeler"--by which is meant that it has only four wheels to each truck. (When you go underneath on the rods, be sure to avoid the "six-wheelers,"--they lead to disasters.) I duck under the train and make for the rods, and I can tell you I am mighty glad that the train is standing still. It is the first time I have ever gone underneath on the Canadian Pacific, and the internal arrangements are new to me. I try to crawl over the top of the truck, between the truck and the bottom of the car. But the space is not large enough for me to squeeze through. This is new to me. Down in the United States I am accustomed to going underneath on rapidly moving trains, seizing a gunnel and swinging my feet under to the brake-beam, and from there crawling over the top of the truck and down inside the truck to a seat on the cross-rod. Feeling with my hands in the darkness, I learn that there is room between the brake-beam and the ground. It is a tight squeeze. I have to lie flat and worm my way through. Once inside the truck, I take my seat on the rod and wonder what the shacks are thinking has become of me. The train gets under way. They have given me up at last. But have they? At the very next stop, I see a lantern thrust under the next truck to mine at the other end of the car. They are searching the rods for me. I must make my get-away pretty lively. I crawl on my stomach under the brake-beam. They see me and run for me, but I crawl on hands and knees across the rail on the opposite side and gain my feet. Then away I go for the head of the train. I run past the engine and hide in the sheltering darkness. It is the same old situation. I am ahead of the train, and the train must go past me. The train pulls out. There is a lantern on the first blind. I lie low, and see the peering shack go by. But there is also a lantern on the second blind. That shack spots me and calls to the shack who has gone past on the first blind. Both jump off. Never mind, I'll take the third blind and deck her. But heavens, there is a lantern on the third blind, too. It is the conductor. I let it go by. At any rate I have now the full train-crew in front of me. I turn and run back in the opposite direction to what the train is going. I look over my shoulder. All three lanterns are on the ground and wobbling along in pursuit. I sprint. Half the train has gone by, and it is going quite fast, when I spring aboard. I know that the two shacks and the conductor will arrive like ravening wolves in about two seconds. I spring upon the wheel of the hand-brake, get my hands on the curved ends of the roofs, and muscle myself up to the decks; while my disappointed pursuers, clustering on the platform beneath like dogs that have treed a cat, howl curses up at me and say unsocial things about my ancestors. But what does that matter? It is five to one, including the engineer and fireman, and the majesty of the law and the might of a great corporation are behind them, and I am beating them out. I am too far down the train, and I run ahead over the roofs of the coaches until I am over the fifth or sixth platform from the engine. I peer down cautiously. A shack is on that platform. That he has caught sight of me, I know from the way he makes a swift sneak inside the car; and I know, also, that he is waiting inside the door, all ready to pounce out on me when I climb down. But I make believe that I don't know, and I remain there to encourage him in his error. I do not see him, yet I know that he opens the door once and peeps up to assure himself that I am still there. The train slows down for a station. I dangle my legs down in a tentative way. The train stops. My legs are still dangling. I hear the door unlatch softly. He is all ready for me. Suddenly I spring up and run forward over the roof. This is right over his head, where he lurks inside the door. The train is standing still; the night is quiet, and I take care to make plenty of noise on the metal roof with my feet. I don't know, but my assumption is that he is now running forward to catch me as I descend at the next platform. But I don't descend there. Halfway along the roof of the coach, I turn, retrace my way softly and quickly to the platform both the shack and I have just abandoned. The coast is clear. I descend to the ground on the off-side of the train and hide in the darkness. Not a soul has seen me. I go over to the fence, at the edge of the right of way, and watch. Ah, ha! What's that? I see a lantern on top of the train, moving along from front to rear. They think I haven't come down, and they are searching the roofs for me. And better than that--on the ground on each side of the train, moving abreast with the lantern on top, are two other lanterns. It is a rabbit-drive, and I am the rabbit. When the shack on top flushes me, the ones on each side will nab me. I roll a cigarette and watch the procession go by. Once past me, I am safe to proceed to the front of the train. She pulls out, and I make the front blind without opposition. But before she is fully under way and just as I am lighting my cigarette, I am aware that the fireman has climbed over the coal to the back of the tender and is looking down at me. I am filled with apprehension. From his position he can mash me to a jelly with lumps of coal. Instead of which he addresses me, and I note with relief the admiration in his voice. "You son-of-a-gun," is what he says. It is a high compliment, and I thrill as a schoolboy thrills on receiving a reward of merit. "Say," I call up to him, "don't you play the hose on me any more." "All right," he answers, and goes back to his work. I have made friends with the engine, but the shacks are still looking for me. At the next stop, the shacks ride out all three blinds, and as before, I let them go by and deck in the middle of the train. The crew is on its mettle by now, and the train stops. The shacks are going to ditch me or know the reason why. Three times the mighty overland stops for me at that station, and each time I elude the shacks and make the decks. But it is hopeless, for they have finally come to an understanding of the situation. I have taught them that they cannot guard the train from me. They must do something else. And they do it. When the train stops that last time, they take after me hot-footed. Ah, I see their game. They are trying to run me down. At first they herd me back toward the rear of the train. I know my peril. Once to the rear of the train, it will pull out with me left behind. I double, and twist, and turn, dodge through my pursuers, and gain the front of the train. One shack still hangs on after me. All right, I'll give him the run of his life, for my wind is good. I run straight ahead along the track. It doesn't matter. If he chases me ten miles, he'll nevertheless have to catch the train, and I can board her at any speed that he can. So I run on, keeping just comfortably ahead of him and straining my eyes in the gloom for cattle-guards and switches that may bring me to grief. Alas! I strain my eyes too far ahead, and trip over something just under my feet, I know not what, some little thing, and go down to earth in a long, stumbling fall. The next moment I am on my feet, but the shack has me by the collar. I do not struggle. I am busy with breathing deeply and with sizing him up. He is narrow-shouldered, and I have at least thirty pounds the better of him in weight. Besides, he is just as tired as I am, and if he tries to slug me, I'll teach him a few things. But he doesn't try to slug me, and that problem is settled. Instead, he starts to lead me back toward the train, and another possible problem arises. I see the lanterns of the conductor and the other shack. We are approaching them. Not for nothing have I made the acquaintance of the New York police. Not for nothing, in box-cars, by water-tanks, and in prison-cells, have I listened to bloody tales of man-handling. What if these three men are about to man-handle me? Heaven knows I have given them provocation enough. I think quickly. We are drawing nearer and nearer to the other two trainmen. I line up the stomach and the jaw of my captor, and plan the right and left I'll give him at the first sign of trouble. Pshaw! I know another trick I'd like to work on him, and I almost regret that I did not do it at the moment I was captured. I could make him sick, what of his clutch on my collar. His fingers, tight-gripping, are buried inside my collar. My coat is tightly buttoned. Did you ever see a tourniquet? Well, this is one. All I have to do is to duck my head under his arm and begin to twist. I must twist rapidly--very rapidly. I know how to do it; twisting in a violent, jerky way, ducking my head under his arm with each revolution. Before he knows it, those detaining fingers of his will be detained. He will be unable to withdraw them. It is a powerful leverage. Twenty seconds after I have started revolving, the blood will be bursting out of his finger-ends, the delicate tendons will be rupturing, and all the muscles and nerves will be mashing and crushing together in a shrieking mass. Try it sometime when somebody has you by the collar. But be quick--quick as lightning. Also, be sure to hug yourself while you are revolving--hug your face with your left arm and your abdomen with your right. You see, the other fellow might try to stop you with a punch from his free arm. It would be a good idea, too, to revolve away from that free arm rather than toward it. A punch going is never so bad as a punch coming. That shack will never know how near he was to being made very, very sick. All that saves him is that it is not in their plan to man-handle me. When we draw near enough, he calls out that he has me, and they signal the train to come on. The engine passes us, and the three blinds. After that, the conductor and the other shack swing aboard. But still my captor holds on to me. I see the plan. He is going to hold me until the rear of the train goes by. Then he will hop on, and I shall be left behind--ditched. But the train has pulled out fast, the engineer trying to make up for lost time. Also, it is a long train. It is going very lively, and I know the shack is measuring its speed with apprehension. "Think you can make it?" I query innocently. He releases my collar, makes a quick run, and swings aboard. A number of coaches are yet to pass by. He knows it, and remains on the steps, his head poked out and watching me. In that moment my next move comes to me. I'll make the last platform. I know she's going fast and faster, but I'll only get a roll in the dirt if I fail, and the optimism of youth is mine. I do not give myself away. I stand with a dejected droop of shoulder, advertising that I have abandoned hope. But at the same time I am feeling with my feet the good gravel. It is perfect footing. Also I am watching the poked-out head of the shack. I see it withdrawn. He is confident that the train is going too fast for me ever to make it. And the train _is_ going fast--faster than any train I have ever tackled. As the last coach comes by I sprint in the same direction with it. It is a swift, short sprint. I cannot hope to equal the speed of the train, but I can reduce the difference of our speed to the minimum, and, hence, reduce the shock of impact, when I leap on board. In the fleeting instant of darkness I do not see the iron hand-rail of the last platform; nor is there time for me to locate it. I reach for where I think it ought to be, and at the same instant my feet leave the ground. It is all in the toss. The next moment I may be rolling in the gravel with broken ribs, or arms, or head. But my fingers grip the hand-hold, there is a jerk on my arms that slightly pivots my body, and my feet land on the steps with sharp violence. I sit down, feeling very proud of myself. In all my hoboing it is the best bit of train-jumping I have done. I know that late at night one is always good for several stations on the last platform, but I do not care to trust myself at the rear of the train. At the first stop I run forward on the off-side of the train, pass the Pullmans, and duck under and take a rod under a day-coach. At the next stop I run forward again and take another rod. I am now comparatively safe. The shacks think I am ditched. But the long day and the strenuous night are beginning to tell on me. Also, it is not so windy nor cold underneath, and I begin to doze. This will never do. Sleep on the rods spells death, so I crawl out at a station and go forward to the second blind. Here I can lie down and sleep; and here I do sleep--how long I do not know--for I am awakened by a lantern thrust into my face. The two shacks are staring at me. I scramble up on the defensive, wondering as to which one is going to make the first "pass" at me. But slugging is far from their minds. "I thought you was ditched," says the shack who had held me by the collar. "If you hadn't let go of me when you did, you'd have been ditched along with me," I answer. "How's that?" he asks. "I'd have gone into a clinch with you, that's all," is my reply. They hold a consultation, and their verdict is summed up in:-- "Well, I guess you can ride, Bo. There's no use trying to keep you off." And they go away and leave me in peace to the end of their division. I have given the foregoing as a sample of what "holding her down" means. Of course, I have selected a fortunate night out of my experiences, and said nothing of the nights--and many of them--when I was tripped up by accident and ditched. In conclusion, I want to tell of what happened when I reached the end of the division. On single-track, transcontinental lines, the freight trains wait at the divisions and follow out after the passenger trains. When the division was reached, I left my train, and looked for the freight that would pull out behind it. I found the freight, made up on a side-track and waiting. I climbed into a box-car half full of coal and lay down. In no time I was asleep. I was awakened by the sliding open of the door. Day was just dawning, cold and gray, and the freight had not yet started. A "con" (conductor) was poking his head inside the door. "Get out of that, you blankety-blank-blank!" he roared at me. I got, and outside I watched him go down the line inspecting every car in the train. When he got out of sight I thought to myself that he would never think I'd have the nerve to climb back into the very car out of which he had fired me. So back I climbed and lay down again. Now that con's mental processes must have been paralleling mine, for he reasoned that it was the very thing I would do. For back he came and fired me out. Now, surely, I reasoned, he will never dream that I'd do it a third time. Back I went, into the very same car. But I decided to make sure. Only one side-door could be opened. The other side-door was nailed up. Beginning at the top of the coal, I dug a hole alongside of that door and lay down in it. I heard the other door open. The con climbed up and looked in over the top of the coal. He couldn't see me. He called to me to get out. I tried to fool him by remaining quiet. But when he began tossing chunks of coal into the hole on top of me, I gave up and for the third time was fired out. Also, he informed me in warm terms of what would happen to me if he caught me in there again. I changed my tactics. When a man is paralleling your mental processes, ditch him. Abruptly break off your line of reasoning, and go off on a new line. This I did. I hid between some cars on an adjacent side-track, and watched. Sure enough, that con came back again to the car. He opened the door, he climbed up, he called, he threw coal into the hole I had made. He even crawled over the coal and looked into the hole. That satisfied him. Five minutes later the freight was pulling out, and he was not in sight. I ran alongside the car, pulled the door open, and climbed in. He never looked for me again, and I rode that coal-car precisely one thousand and twenty-two miles, sleeping most of the time and getting out at divisions (where the freights always stop for an hour or so) to beg my food. And at the end of the thousand and twenty-two miles I lost that car through a happy incident. I got a "set-down," and the tramp doesn't live who won't miss a train for a set-down any time. PICTURES "What do it matter where or 'ow we die, So long as we've our 'ealth to watch it all?" --Sestina of the Tramp-Royal Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean--an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance. Often I think over my tramp days, and ever I marvel at the swift succession of pictures that flash up in my memory. It matters not where I begin to think; any day of all the days is a day apart, with a record of swift-moving pictures all its own. For instance, I remember a sunny summer morning in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and immediately comes to my mind the auspicious beginning of the day--a "set-down" with two maiden ladies, and not in their kitchen, but in their dining room, with them beside me at the table. We ate eggs, out of egg-cups! It was the first time I had ever seen egg-cups, or heard of egg-cups! I was a bit awkward at first, I'll confess; but I was hungry and unabashed. I mastered the egg-cup, and I mastered the eggs in a way that made those two maiden ladies sit up. Why, they ate like a couple of canaries, dabbling with the one egg each they took, and nibbling at tiny wafers of toast. Life was low in their bodies; their blood ran thin; and they had slept warm all night. I had been out all night, consuming much fuel of my body to keep warm, beating my way down from a place called Emporium, in the northern part of the state. Wafers of toast! Out of sight! But each wafer was no more than a mouthful to me--nay, no more than a bite. It is tedious to have to reach for another piece of toast each bite when one is potential with many bites. When I was a very little lad, I had a very little dog called Punch. I saw to his feeding myself. Some one in the household had shot a lot of ducks, and we had a fine meat dinner. When I had finished, I prepared Punch's dinner--a large plateful of bones and tidbits. I went outside to give it to him. Now it happened that a visitor had ridden over from a neighboring ranch, and with him had come a Newfoundland dog as big as a calf. I set the plate on the ground. Punch wagged his tail and began. He had before him a blissful half-hour at least. There was a sudden rush. Punch was brushed aside like a straw in the path of a cyclone, and that Newfoundland swooped down upon the plate. In spite of his huge maw he must have been trained to quick lunches, for, in the fleeting instant before he received the kick in the ribs I aimed at him, he completely engulfed the contents of the plate. He swept it clean. One last lingering lick of his tongue removed even the grease stains. As that big Newfoundland behaved at the plate of my dog Punch, so behaved I at the table of those two maiden ladies of Harrisburg. I swept it bare. I didn't break anything, but I cleaned out the eggs and the toast and the coffee. The servant brought more, but I kept her busy, and ever she brought more and more. The coffee was delicious, but it needn't have been served in such tiny cups. What time had I to eat when it took all my time to prepare the many cups of coffee for drinking? At any rate, it gave my tongue time to wag. Those two maiden ladies, with their pink-and-white complexions and gray curls, had never looked upon the bright face of adventure. As the "Tramp-Royal" would have it, they had worked all their lives "on one same shift." Into the sweet scents and narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms--the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon their charity. Ah, I can see them now, those dear, sweet ladies, just as I sat at their breakfast table twelve years ago, discoursing upon the way of my feet in the world, brushing aside their kindly counsel as a real devilish fellow should, and thrilling them, not alone with my own adventures, but with the adventures of all the other fellows with whom I had rubbed shoulders and exchanged confidences. I appropriated them all, the adventures of the other fellows, I mean; and if those maiden ladies had been less trustful and guileless, they could have tangled me up beautifully in my chronology. Well, well, and what of it? It was fair exchange. For their many cups of coffee, and eggs, and bites of toast, I gave full value. Right royally I gave them entertainment. My coming to sit at their table was their adventure, and adventure is beyond price anyway. Coming along the street, after parting from the maiden ladies, I gathered in a newspaper from the doorway of some late-riser, and in a grassy park lay down to get in touch with the last twenty-four hours of the world. There, in the park, I met a fellow-hobo who told me his life-story and who wrestled with me to join the United States Army. He had given in to the recruiting officer and was just about to join, and he couldn't see why I shouldn't join with him. He had been a member of Coxey's Army in the march to Washington several months before, and that seemed to have given him a taste for army life. I, too, was a veteran, for had I not been a private in Company L of the Second Division of Kelly's Industrial Army?--said Company L being commonly known as the "Nevada push." But my army experience had had the opposite effect on me; so I left that hobo to go his way to the dogs of war, while I "threw my feet" for dinner. This duty performed, I started to walk across the bridge over the Susquehanna to the west shore. I forget the name of the railroad that ran down that side, but while lying in the grass in the morning the idea had come to me to go to Baltimore; so to Baltimore I was going on that railroad, whatever its name was. It was a warm afternoon, and part way across the bridge I came to a lot of fellows who were in swimming off one of the piers. Off went my clothes and in went I. The water was fine; but when I came out and dressed, I found I had been robbed. Some one had gone through my clothes. Now I leave it to you if being robbed isn't in itself adventure enough for one day. I have known men who have been robbed and who have talked all the rest of their lives about it. True, the thief that went through my clothes didn't get much--some thirty or forty cents in nickels and pennies, and my tobacco and cigarette papers; but it was all I had, which is more than most men can be robbed of, for they have something left at home, while I had no home. It was a pretty tough gang in swimming there. I sized up, and knew better than to squeal. So I begged "the makings," and I could have sworn it was one of my own papers I rolled the tobacco in. Then on across the bridge I hiked to the west shore. Here ran the railroad I was after. No station was in sight. How to catch a freight without walking to a station was the problem. I noticed that the track came up a steep grade, culminating at the point where I had tapped it, and I knew that a heavy freight couldn't pull up there any too lively. But how lively? On the opposite side of the track rose a high bank. On the edge, at the top, I saw a man's head sticking up from the grass. Perhaps he knew how fast the freights took the grade, and when the next one went south. I called out my questions to him, and he motioned to me to come up. I obeyed, and when I reached the top, I found four other men lying in the grass with him. I took in the scene and knew them for what they were--American gypsies. In the open space that extended back among the trees from the edge of the bank were several nondescript wagons. Ragged, half-naked children swarmed over the camp, though I noticed that they took care not to come near and bother the men-folk. Several lean, unbeautiful, and toil-degraded women were pottering about with camp-chores, and one I noticed who sat by herself on the seat of one of the wagons, her head drooped forward, her knees drawn up to her chin and clasped limply by her arms. She did not look happy. She looked as if she did not care for anything--in this I was wrong, for later I was to learn that there was something for which she did care. The full measure of human suffering was in her face, and, in addition, there was the tragic expression of incapacity for further suffering. Nothing could hurt any more, was what her face seemed to portray; but in this, too, I was wrong. I lay in the grass on the edge of the steep and talked with the men-folk. We were kin--brothers. I was the American hobo, and they were the American gypsy. I knew enough of their argot for conversation, and they knew enough of mine. There were two more in their gang, who were across the river "mushing" in Harrisburg. A "musher" is an itinerant fakir. This word is not to be confounded with the Klondike "musher," though the origin of both terms may be the same; namely, the corruption of the French _marche ons_, to march, to walk, to "mush." The particular graft of the two mushers who had crossed the river was umbrella-mending; but what real graft lay behind their umbrella-mending, I was not told, nor would it have been polite to ask. It was a glorious day. Not a breath of wind was stirring, and we basked in the shimmering warmth of the sun. From everywhere arose the drowsy hum of insects, and the balmy air was filled with scents of the sweet earth and the green growing things. We were too lazy to do more than mumble on in intermittent conversation. And then, all abruptly, the peace and quietude was jarred awry by man. Two bare-legged boys of eight or nine in some minor way broke some rule of the camp--what it was I did not know; and a man who lay beside me suddenly sat up and called to them. He was chief of the tribe, a man with narrow forehead and narrow-slitted eyes, whose thin lips and twisted sardonic features explained why the two boys jumped and tensed like startled deer at the sound of his voice. The alertness of fear was in their faces, and they turned, in a panic, to run. He called to them to come back, and one boy lagged behind reluctantly, his meagre little frame portraying in pantomime the struggle within him between fear and reason. He wanted to come back. His intelligence and past experience told him that to come back was a lesser evil than to run on; but lesser evil that it was, it was great enough to put wings to his fear and urge his feet to flight. Still he lagged and struggled until he reached the shelter of the trees, where he halted. The chief of the tribe did not pursue. He sauntered over to a wagon and picked up a heavy whip. Then he came back to the centre of the open space and stood still. He did not speak. He made no gestures. He was the Law, pitiless and omnipotent. He merely stood there and waited. And I knew, and all knew, and the two boys in the shelter of the trees knew, for what he waited. The boy who had lagged slowly came back. His face was stamped with quivering resolution. He did not falter. He had made up his mind to take his punishment. And mark you, the punishment was not for the original offence, but for the offence of running away. And in this, that tribal chieftain but behaved as behaves the exalted society in which he lived. We punish our criminals, and when they escape and run away, we bring them back and add to their punishment. Straight up to the chief the boy came, halting at the proper distance for the swing of the lash. The whip hissed through the air, and I caught myself with a start of surprise at the weight of the blow. The thin little leg was so very thin and little. The flesh showed white where the lash had curled and bitten, and then, where the white had shown, sprang up the savage welt, with here and there along its length little scarlet oozings where the skin had broken. Again the whip swung, and the boy's whole body winced in anticipation of the blow, though he did not move from the spot. His will held good. A second welt sprang up, and a third. It was not until the fourth landed that the boy screamed. Also, he could no longer stand still, and from then on, blow after blow, he danced up and down in his anguish, screaming; but he did not attempt to run away. If his involuntary dancing took him beyond the reach of the whip, he danced back into range again. And when it was all over--a dozen blows--he went away, whimpering and squealing, among the wagons. The chief stood still and waited. The second boy came out from the trees. But he did not come straight. He came like a cringing dog, obsessed by little panics that made him turn and dart away for half a dozen steps. But always he turned and came back, circling nearer and nearer to the man, whimpering, making inarticulate animal-noises in his throat. I saw that he never looked at the man. His eyes always were fixed upon the whip, and in his eyes was a terror that made me sick--the frantic terror of an inconceivably maltreated child. I have seen strong men dropping right and left out of battle and squirming in their death-throes, I have seen them by scores blown into the air by bursting shells and their bodies torn asunder; believe me, the witnessing was as merrymaking and laughter and song to me in comparison with the way the sight of that poor child affected me. The whipping began. The whipping of the first boy was as play compared with this one. In no time the blood was running down his thin little legs. He danced and squirmed and doubled up till it seemed almost that he was some grotesque marionette operated by strings. I say "seemed," for his screaming gave the lie to the seeming and stamped it with reality. His shrieks were shrill and piercing; within them no hoarse notes, but only the thin sexlessness of the voice of a child. The time came when the boy could stand it no more. Reason fled, and he tried to run away. But now the man followed up, curbing his flight, herding him with blows back always into the open space. Then came interruption. I heard a wild smothered cry. The woman who sat in the wagon seat had got out and was running to interfere. She sprang between the man and boy. "You want some, eh?" said he with the whip. "All right, then." He swung the whip upon her. Her skirts were long, so he did not try for her legs. He drove the lash for her face, which she shielded as best she could with her hands and forearms, drooping her head forward between her lean shoulders, and on the lean shoulders and arms receiving the blows. Heroic mother! She knew just what she was doing. The boy, still shrieking, was making his get-away to the wagons. And all the while the four men lay beside me and watched and made no move. Nor did I move, and without shame I say it; though my reason was compelled to struggle hard against my natural impulse to rise up and interfere. I knew life. Of what use to the woman, or to me, would be my being beaten to death by five men there on the bank of the Susquehanna? I once saw a man hanged, and though my whole soul cried protest, my mouth cried not. Had it cried, I should most likely have had my skull crushed by the butt of a revolver, for it was the law that the man should hang. And here, in this gypsy group, it was the law that the woman should be whipped. Even so, the reason in both cases that I did not interfere was not that it was the law, but that the law was stronger than I. Had it not been for those four men beside me in the grass, right gladly would I have waded into the man with the whip. And, barring the accident of the landing on me with a knife or a club in the hands of some of the various women of the camp, I am confident that I should have beaten him into a mess. But the four men _were_ beside me in the grass. They made their law stronger than I. Oh, believe me, I did my own suffering. I had seen women beaten before, often, but never had I seen such a beating as this. Her dress across the shoulders was cut into shreds. One blow that had passed her guard, had raised a bloody welt from cheek to chin. Not one blow, nor two, not one dozen, nor two dozen, but endlessly, infinitely, that whip-lash smote and curled about her. The sweat poured from me, and I breathed hard, clutching at the grass with my hands until I strained it out by the roots. And all the time my reason kept whispering, "Fool! Fool!" That welt on the face nearly did for me. I started to rise to my feet; but the hand of the man next to me went out to my shoulder and pressed me down. "Easy, pardner, easy," he warned me in a low voice. I looked at him. His eyes met mine unwaveringly. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and heavy-muscled; and his face was lazy, phlegmatic, slothful, withal kindly, yet without passion, and quite soulless--a dim soul, unmalicious, unmoral, bovine, and stubborn. Just an animal he was, with no more than a faint flickering of intelligence, a good-natured brute with the strength and mental caliber of a gorilla. His hand pressed heavily upon me, and I knew the weight of the muscles behind. I looked at the other brutes, two of them unperturbed and incurious, and one of them that gloated over the spectacle; and my reason came back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I sank down in the grass. My mind went back to the two maiden ladies with whom I had had breakfast that morning. Less than two miles, as the crow flies, separated them from this scene. Here, in the windless day, under a beneficent sun, was a sister of theirs being beaten by a brother of mine. Here was a page of life they could never see--and better so, though for lack of seeing they would never be able to understand their sisterhood, nor themselves, nor know the clay of which they were made. For it is not given to woman to live in sweet-scented, narrow rooms and at the same time be a little sister to all the world. The whipping was finished, and the woman, no longer screaming, went back to her seat in the wagon. Nor did the other women come to her--just then. They were afraid. But they came afterward, when a decent interval had elapsed. The man put the whip away and rejoined us, flinging himself down on the other side of me. He was breathing hard from his exertions. He wiped the sweat from his eyes on his coat-sleeve, and looked challengingly at me. I returned his look carelessly; what he had done was no concern of mine. I did not go away abruptly. I lay there half an hour longer, which, under the circumstances, was tact and etiquette. I rolled cigarettes from tobacco I borrowed from them, and when I slipped down the bank to the railroad, I was equipped with the necessary information for catching the next freight bound south. Well, and what of it? It was a page out of life, that's all; and there are many pages worse, far worse, that I have seen. I have sometimes held forth (facetiously, so my listeners believed) that the chief distinguishing trait between man and the other animals is that man is the only animal that maltreats the females of his kind. It is something of which no wolf nor cowardly coyote is ever guilty. It is something that even the dog, degenerated by domestication, will not do. The dog still retains the wild instinct in this matter, while man has lost most of his wild instincts--at least, most of the good ones. Worse pages of life than what I have described? Read the reports on child labor in the United States,--east, west, north, and south, it doesn't matter where,--and know that all of us, profit-mongers that we are, are typesetters and printers of worse pages of life than that mere page of wife-beating on the Susquehanna. I went down the grade a hundred yards to where the footing beside the track was good. Here I could catch my freight as it pulled slowly up the hill, and here I found half a dozen hoboes waiting for the same purpose. Several were playing seven-up with an old pack of cards. I took a hand. A coon began to shuffle the deck. He was fat, and young, and moon-faced. He beamed with good-nature. It fairly oozed from him. As he dealt the first card to me, he paused and said:-- "Say, Bo, ain't I done seen you befo'?" "You sure have," I answered. "An' you didn't have those same duds on, either." He was puzzled. "D'ye remember Buffalo?" I queried. Then he knew me, and with laughter and ejaculation hailed me as a comrade; for at Buffalo his clothes had been striped while he did his bit of time in the Erie County Penitentiary. For that matter, my clothes had been likewise striped, for I had been doing my bit of time, too. The game proceeded, and I learned the stake for which we played. Down the bank toward the river descended a steep and narrow path that led to a spring some twenty-five feet beneath. We played on the edge of the bank. The man who was "stuck" had to take a small condensed-milk can, and with it carry water to the winners. The first game was played and the coon was stuck. He took the small milk-tin and climbed down the bank, while we sat above and guyed him. We drank like fish. Four round trips he had to make for me alone, and the others were equally lavish with their thirst. The path was very steep, and sometimes the coon slipped when part way up, spilled the water, and had to go back for more. But he didn't get angry. He laughed as heartily as any of us; that was why he slipped so often. Also, he assured us of the prodigious quantities of water he would drink when some one else got stuck. When our thirst was quenched, another game was started. Again the coon was stuck, and again we drank our fill. A third game and a fourth ended the same way, and each time that moon-faced darky nearly died with delight at appreciation of the fate that Chance was dealing out to him. And we nearly died with him, what of our delight. We laughed like careless children, or gods, there on the edge of the bank. I know that I laughed till it seemed the top of my head would come off, and I drank from the milk-tin till I was nigh waterlogged. Serious discussion arose as to whether we could successfully board the freight when it pulled up the grade, what of the weight of water secreted on our persons. This particular phase of the situation just about finished the coon. He had to break off from water-carrying for at least five minutes while he lay down and rolled with laughter. The lengthening shadows stretched farther and farther across the river, and the soft, cool twilight came on, and ever we drank water, and ever our ebony cup-bearer brought more and more. Forgotten was the beaten woman of the hour before. That was a page read and turned over; I was busy now with this new page, and when the engine whistled on the grade, this page would be finished and another begun; and so the book of life goes on, page after page and pages without end--when one is young. And then we played a game in which the coon failed to be stuck. The victim was a lean and dyspeptic-looking hobo, the one who had laughed least of all of us. We said we didn't want any water--which was the truth. Not the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, nor the pressure of a pneumatic ram, could have forced another drop into my saturated carcass. The coon looked disappointed, then rose to the occasion and guessed he'd have some. He meant it, too. He had some, and then some, and then some. Ever the melancholy hobo climbed down and up the steep bank, and ever the coon called for more. He drank more water than all the rest of us put together. The twilight deepened into night, the stars came out, and he still drank on. I do believe that if the whistle of the freight hadn't sounded, he'd be there yet, swilling water and revenge while the melancholy hobo toiled down and up. But the whistle sounded. The page was done. We sprang to our feet and strung out alongside the track. There she came, coughing and spluttering up the grade, the headlight turning night into day and silhouetting us in sharp relief. The engine passed us, and we were all running with the train, some boarding on the side-ladders, others "springing" the side-doors of empty box-cars and climbing in. I caught a flat-car loaded with mixed lumber and crawled away into a comfortable nook. I lay on my back with a newspaper under my head for a pillow. Above me the stars were winking and wheeling in squadrons back and forth as the train rounded the curves, and watching them I fell asleep. The day was done--one day of all my days. To-morrow would be another day, and I was young. "PINCHED" I rode into Niagara Falls in a "side-door Pullman," or, in common parlance, a box-car. A flat-car, by the way, is known amongst the fraternity as a "gondola," with the second syllable emphasized and pronounced long. But to return. I arrived in the afternoon and headed straight from the freight train to the falls. Once my eyes were filled with that wonder-vision of down-rushing water, I was lost. I could not tear myself away long enough to "batter" the "privates" (domiciles) for my supper. Even a "set-down" could not have lured me away. Night came on, a beautiful night of moonlight, and I lingered by the falls until after eleven. Then it was up to me to hunt for a place to "kip." "Kip," "doss," "flop," "pound your ear," all mean the same thing; namely, to sleep. Somehow, I had a "hunch" that Niagara Falls was a "bad" town for hoboes, and I headed out into the country. I climbed a fence and "flopped" in a field. John Law would never find me there, I flattered myself. I lay on my back in the grass and slept like a babe. It was so balmy warm that I woke up not once all night. But with the first gray daylight my eyes opened, and I remembered the wonderful falls. I climbed the fence and started down the road to have another look at them. It was early--not more than five o'clock--and not until eight o'clock could I begin to batter for my breakfast. I could spend at least three hours by the river. Alas! I was fated never to see the river nor the falls again. The town was asleep when I entered it. As I came along the quiet street, I saw three men coming toward me along the sidewalk. They were walking abreast. Hoboes, I decided, like myself, who had got up early. In this surmise I was not quite correct. I was only sixty-six and two-thirds per cent correct. The men on each side were hoboes all right, but the man in the middle wasn't. I directed my steps to the edge of the sidewalk in order to let the trio go by. But it didn't go by. At some word from the man in the centre, all three halted, and he of the centre addressed me. I piped the lay on the instant. He was a "fly-cop" and the two hoboes were his prisoners. John Law was up and out after the early worm. I was a worm. Had I been richer by the experiences that were to befall me in the next several months, I should have turned and run like the very devil. He might have shot at me, but he'd have had to hit me to get me. He'd have never run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me. Our conversation was brief. "What hotel are you stopping at?" he queried. He had me. I wasn't stopping at any hotel, and, since I did not know the name of a hotel in the place, I could not claim residence in any of them. Also, I was up too early in the morning. Everything was against me. "I just arrived," I said. "Well, you turn around and walk in front of me, and not too far in front. There's somebody wants to see you." I was "pinched." I knew who wanted to see me. With that "fly-cop" and the two hoboes at my heels, and under the direction of the former, I led the way to the city jail. There we were searched and our names registered. I have forgotten, now, under which name I was registered. I gave the name of Jack Drake, but when they searched me, they found letters addressed to Jack London. This caused trouble and required explanation, all of which has passed from my mind, and to this day I do not know whether I was pinched as Jack Drake or Jack London. But one or the other, it should be there to-day in the prison register of Niagara Falls. Reference can bring it to light. The time was somewhere in the latter part of June, 1894. It was only a few days after my arrest that the great railroad strike began. From the office we were led to the "Hobo" and locked in. The "Hobo" is that part of a prison where the minor offenders are confined together in a large iron cage. Since hoboes constitute the principal division of the minor offenders, the aforesaid iron cage is called the Hobo. Here we met several hoboes who had already been pinched that morning, and every little while the door was unlocked and two or three more were thrust in on us. At last, when we totalled sixteen, we were led upstairs into the court-room. And now I shall faithfully describe what took place in that court-room, for know that my patriotic American citizenship there received a shock from which it has never fully recovered. In the court-room were the sixteen prisoners, the judge, and two bailiffs. The judge seemed to act as his own clerk. There were no witnesses. There were no citizens of Niagara Falls present to look on and see how justice was administered in their community. The judge glanced at the list of cases before him and called out a name. A hobo stood up. The judge glanced at a bailiff. "Vagrancy, your Honor," said the bailiff. "Thirty days," said his Honor. The hobo sat down, and the judge was calling another name and another hobo was rising to his feet. The trial of that hobo had taken just about fifteen seconds. The trial of the next hobo came off with equal celerity. The bailiff said, "Vagrancy, your Honor," and his Honor said, "Thirty days." Thus it went like clockwork, fifteen seconds to a hobo--and thirty days. They are poor dumb cattle, I thought to myself. But wait till my turn comes; I'll give his Honor a "spiel." Part way along in the performance, his Honor, moved by some whim, gave one of us an opportunity to speak. As chance would have it, this man was not a genuine hobo. He bore none of the ear-marks of the professional "stiff." Had he approached the rest of us, while waiting at a water-tank for a freight, we should have unhesitatingly classified him as a "gay-cat." Gay-cat is the synonym for tenderfoot in Hobo Land. This gay-cat was well along in years--somewhere around forty-five, I should judge. His shoulders were humped a trifle, and his face was seamed by weather-beat. For many years, according to his story, he had driven team for some firm in (if I remember rightly) Lockport, New York. The firm had ceased to prosper, and finally, in the hard times of 1893, had gone out of business. He had been kept on to the last, though toward the last his work had been very irregular. He went on and explained at length his difficulties in getting work (when so many were out of work) during the succeeding months. In the end, deciding that he would find better opportunities for work on the Lakes, he had started for Buffalo. Of course he was "broke," and there he was. That was all. "Thirty days," said his Honor, and called another hobo's name. Said hobo got up. "Vagrancy, your Honor," said the bailiff, and his Honor said, "Thirty days." And so it went, fifteen seconds and thirty days to each hobo. The machine of justice was grinding smoothly. Most likely, considering how early it was in the morning, his Honor had not yet had his breakfast and was in a hurry. But my American blood was up. Behind me were the many generations of my American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine had fought and died for was the right of trial by jury. This was my heritage, stained sacred by their blood, and it devolved upon me to stand up for it. All right, I threatened to myself; just wait till he gets to me. He got to me. My name, whatever it was, was called, and I stood up. The bailiff said, "Vagrancy, your Honor," and I began to talk. But the judge began talking at the same time, and he said, "Thirty days." I started to protest, but at that moment his Honor was calling the name of the next hobo on the list. His Honor paused long enough to say to me, "Shut up!" The bailiff forced me to sit down. And the next moment that next hobo had received thirty days and the succeeding hobo was just in process of getting his. When we had all been disposed of, thirty days to each stiff, his Honor, just as he was about to dismiss us, suddenly turned to the teamster from Lockport--the one man he had allowed to talk. "Why did you quit your job?" his Honor asked. Now the teamster had already explained how his job had quit him, and the question took him aback. "Your Honor," he began confusedly, "isn't that a funny question to ask?" "Thirty days more for quitting your job," said his Honor, and the court was closed. That was the outcome. The teamster got sixty days all together, while the rest of us got thirty days. We were taken down below, locked up, and given breakfast. It was a pretty good breakfast, as prison breakfasts go, and it was the best I was to get for a month to come. As for me, I was dazed. Here was I, under sentence, after a farce of a trial wherein I was denied not only my right of trial by jury, but my right to plead guilty or not guilty. Another thing my fathers had fought for flashed through my brain--habeas corpus. I'd show them. But when I asked for a lawyer, I was laughed at. Habeas corpus was all right, but of what good was it to me when I could communicate with no one outside the jail? But I'd show them. They couldn't keep me in jail forever. Just wait till I got out, that was all. I'd make them sit up. I knew something about the law and my own rights, and I'd expose their maladministration of justice. Visions of damage suits and sensational newspaper headlines were dancing before my eyes when the jailers came in and began hustling us out into the main office. A policeman snapped a handcuff on my right wrist. (Ah, ha, thought I, a new indignity. Just wait till I get out.) On the left wrist of a negro he snapped the other handcuff of that pair. He was a very tall negro, well past six feet--so tall was he that when we stood side by side his hand lifted mine up a trifle in the manacles. Also, he was the happiest and the raggedest negro I have ever seen. We were all handcuffed similarly, in pairs. This accomplished, a bright nickel-steel chain was brought forth, run down through the links of all the handcuffs, and locked at front and rear of the double-line. We were now a chain-gang. The command to march was given, and out we went upon the street, guarded by two officers. The tall negro and I had the place of honor. We led the procession. After the tomb-like gloom of the jail, the outside sunshine was dazzling. I had never known it to be so sweet as now, a prisoner with clanking chains, I knew that I was soon to see the last of it for thirty days. Down through the streets of Niagara Falls we marched to the railroad station, stared at by curious passers-by, and especially by a group of tourists on the veranda of a hotel that we marched past. There was plenty of slack in the chain, and with much rattling and clanking we sat down, two and two, in the seats of the smoking-car. Afire with indignation as I was at the outrage that had been perpetrated on me and my forefathers, I was nevertheless too prosaically practical to lose my head over it. This was all new to me. Thirty days of mystery were before me, and I looked about me to find somebody who knew the ropes. For I had already learned that I was not bound for a petty jail with a hundred or so prisoners in it, but for a full-grown penitentiary with a couple of thousand prisoners in it, doing anywhere from ten days to ten years. In the seat behind me, attached to the chain by his wrist, was a squat, heavily-built, powerfully-muscled man. He was somewhere between thirty-five and forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for me, were those corners of his eyes--the humor and laughter and kindliness of the beast when unaroused. He was my "meat." I "cottoned" to him. While my cuff-mate, the tall negro, mourned with chucklings and laughter over some laundry he was sure to lose through his arrest, and while the train rolled on toward Buffalo, I talked with the man in the seat behind me. He had an empty pipe. I filled it for him with my precious tobacco--enough in a single filling to make a dozen cigarettes. Nay, the more we talked the surer I was that he was my meat, and I divided all my tobacco with him. Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in 'most anywhere. I laid myself out to fit in with that man, though little did I dream to what extraordinary good purpose I was succeeding. He had never been in the particular penitentiary to which we were going, but he had done "one-," "two-," and "five-spots" in various other penitentiaries (a "spot" is a year), and he was filled with wisdom. We became pretty chummy, and my heart bounded when he cautioned me to follow his lead. He called me "Jack," and I called him "Jack." The train stopped at a station about five miles from Buffalo, and we, the chain-gang, got off. I do not remember the name of this station, but I am confident that it is some one of the following: Rocklyn, Rockwood, Black Rock, Rockcastle, or Newcastle. But whatever the name of the place, we were walked a short distance and then put on a street-car. It was an old-fashioned car, with a seat, running the full length, on each side. All the passengers who sat on one side were asked to move over to the other side, and we, with a great clanking of chain, took their places. We sat facing them, I remember, and I remember, too, the awed expression on the faces of the women, who took us, undoubtedly, for convicted murderers and bank-robbers. I tried to look my fiercest, but that cuff-mate of mine, the too happy negro, insisted on rolling his eyes, laughing, and reiterating, "O Lawdy! Lawdy!" We left the car, walked some more, and were led into the office of the Erie County Penitentiary. Here we were to register, and on that register one or the other of my names will be found. Also, we were informed that we must leave in the office all our valuables: money, tobacco, matches, pocketknives, and so forth. My new pal shook his head at me. "If you do not leave your things here, they will be confiscated inside," warned the official. Still my pal shook his head. He was busy with his hands, hiding his movements behind the other fellows. (Our handcuffs had been removed.) I watched him, and followed suit, wrapping up in a bundle in my handkerchief all the things I wanted to take in. These bundles the two of us thrust into our shirts. I noticed that our fellow-prisoners, with the exception of one or two who had watches, did not turn over their belongings to the man in the office. They were determined to smuggle them in somehow, trusting to luck; but they were not so wise as my pal, for they did not wrap their things in bundles. Our erstwhile guardians gathered up the handcuffs and chain and departed for Niagara Falls, while we, under new guardians, were led away into the prison. While we were in the office, our number had been added to by other squads of newly arrived prisoners, so that we were now a procession forty or fifty strong. Know, ye unimprisoned, that traffic is as restricted inside a large prison as commerce was in the Middle Ages. Once inside a penitentiary, one cannot move about at will. Every few steps are encountered great steel doors or gates which are always kept locked. We were bound for the barber-shop, but we encountered delays in the unlocking of doors for us. We were thus delayed in the first "hall" we entered. A "hall" is not a corridor. Imagine an oblong cube, built out of bricks and rising six stories high, each story a row of cells, say fifty cells in a row--in short, imagine a cube of colossal honeycomb. Place this cube on the ground and enclose it in a building with a roof overhead and walls all around. Such a cube and encompassing building constitute a "hall" in the Erie County Penitentiary. Also, to complete the picture, see a narrow gallery, with steel railing, running the full length of each tier of cells and at the ends of the oblong cube see all these galleries, from both sides, connected by a fire-escape system of narrow steel stairways. We were halted in the first hall, waiting for some guard to unlock a door. Here and there, moving about, were convicts, with close-cropped heads and shaven faces, and garbed in prison stripes. One such convict I noticed above us on the gallery of the third tier of cells. He was standing on the gallery and leaning forward, his arms resting on the railing, himself apparently oblivious of our presence. He seemed staring into vacancy. My pal made a slight hissing noise. The convict glanced down. Motioned signals passed between them. Then through the air soared the handkerchief bundle of my pal. The convict caught it, and like a flash it was out of sight in his shirt and he was staring into vacancy. My pal had told me to follow his lead. I watched my chance when the guard's back was turned, and my bundle followed the other one into the shirt of the convict. A minute later the door was unlocked, and we filed into the barber-shop. Here were more men in convict stripes. They were the prison barbers. Also, there were bath-tubs, hot water, soap, and scrubbing-brushes. We were ordered to strip and bathe, each man to scrub his neighbor's back--a needless precaution, this compulsory bath, for the prison swarmed with vermin. After the bath, we were each given a canvas clothes-bag. "Put all your clothes in the bags," said the guard. "It's no good trying to smuggle anything in. You've got to line up naked for inspection. Men for thirty days or less keep their shoes and suspenders. Men for more than thirty days keep nothing." This announcement was received with consternation. How could naked men smuggle anything past an inspection? Only my pal and I were safe. But it was right here that the convict barbers got in their work. They passed among the poor newcomers, kindly volunteering to take charge of their precious little belongings, and promising to return them later in the day. Those barbers were philanthropists--to hear them talk. As in the case of Fra Lippo Lippi, never was there such prompt disemburdening. Matches, tobacco, rice-paper, pipes, knives, money, everything, flowed into the capacious shirts of the barbers. They fairly bulged with the spoil, and the guards made believe not to see. To cut the story short, nothing was ever returned. The barbers never had any intention of returning what they had taken. They considered it legitimately theirs. It was the barber-shop graft. There were many grafts in that prison, as I was to learn; and I, too, was destined to become a grafter--thanks to my new pal. There were several chairs, and the barbers worked rapidly. The quickest shaves and hair-cuts I have ever seen were given in that shop. The men lathered themselves, and the barbers shaved them at the rate of a minute to a man. A hair-cut took a trifle longer. In three minutes the down of eighteen was scraped from my face, and my head was as smooth as a billiard-ball just sprouting a crop of bristles. Beards, mustaches, like our clothes and everything, came off. Take my word for it, we were a villainous-looking gang when they got through with us. I had not realized before how really altogether bad we were. Then came the line-up, forty or fifty of us, naked as Kipling's heroes who stormed Lungtungpen. To search us was easy. There were only our shoes and ourselves. Two or three rash spirits, who had doubted the barbers, had the goods found on them--which goods, namely, tobacco, pipes, matches, and small change, were quickly confiscated. This over, our new clothes were brought to us--stout prison shirts, and coats and trousers conspicuously striped. I had always lingered under the impression that the convict stripes were put on a man only after he had been convicted of a felony. I lingered no longer, but put on the insignia of shame and got my first taste of marching the lock-step. In single file, close together, each man's hands on the shoulders of the man in front, we marched on into another large hall. Here we were ranged up against the wall in a long line and ordered to strip our left arms. A youth, a medical student who was getting in his practice on cattle such as we, came down the line. He vaccinated just about four times as rapidly as the barbers shaved. With a final caution to avoid rubbing our arms against anything, and to let the blood dry so as to form the scab, we were led away to our cells. Here my pal and I parted, but not before he had time to whisper to me, "Suck it out." As soon as I was locked in, I sucked my arm clean. And afterward I saw men who had not sucked and who had horrible holes in their arms into which I could have thrust my fist. It was their own fault. They could have sucked. In my cell was another man. We were to be cell-mates. He was a young, manly fellow, not talkative, but very capable, indeed as splendid a fellow as one could meet with in a day's ride, and this in spite of the fact that he had just recently finished a two-year term in some Ohio penitentiary. Hardly had we been in our cell half an hour, when a convict sauntered down the gallery and looked in. It was my pal. He had the freedom of the hall, he explained. He was unlocked at six in the morning and not locked up again till nine at night. He was in with the "push" in that hall, and had been promptly appointed a trusty of the kind technically known as "hall-man." The man who had appointed him was also a prisoner and a trusty, and was known as "First Hall-man." There were thirteen hall-men in that hall. Ten of them had charge each of a gallery of cells, and over them were the First, Second, and Third Hall-men. We newcomers were to stay in our cells for the rest of the day, my pal informed me, so that the vaccine would have a chance to take. Then next morning we would be put to hard labor in the prison-yard. "But I'll get you out of the work as soon as I can," he promised. "I'll get one of the hall-men fired and have you put in his place." He put his hand into his shirt, drew out the handkerchief containing my precious belongings, passed it in to me through the bars, and went on down the gallery. I opened the bundle. Everything was there. Not even a match was missing. I shared the makings of a cigarette with my cell-mate. When I started to strike a match for a light, he stopped me. A flimsy, dirty comforter lay in each of our bunks for bedding. He tore off a narrow strip of the thin cloth and rolled it tightly and telescopically into a long and slender cylinder. This he lighted with a precious match. The cylinder of tight-rolled cotton cloth did not flame. On the end a coal of fire slowly smouldered. It would last for hours, and my cell-mate called it a "punk." And when it burned short, all that was necessary was to make a new punk, put the end of it against the old, blow on them, and so transfer the glowing coal. Why, we could have given Prometheus pointers on the conserving of fire. At twelve o'clock dinner was served. At the bottom of our cage door was a small opening like the entrance of a runway in a chicken-yard. Through this were thrust two hunks of dry bread and two pannikins of "soup." A portion of soup consisted of about a quart of hot water with floating on its surface a lonely drop of grease. Also, there was some salt in that water. We drank the soup, but we did not eat the bread. Not that we were not hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good bread. But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the walls and ceiling by hundreds. My cell-mate was wise in the ways of the beasts. Like Childe Roland, dauntless the slug-horn to his lips he bore. Never was there such a battle. It lasted for hours. It was shambles. And when the last survivors fled to their brick-and-mortar fastnesses, our work was only half done. We chewed mouthfuls of our bread until it was reduced to the consistency of putty. When a fleeing belligerent escaped into a crevice between the bricks, we promptly walled him in with a daub of the chewed bread. We toiled on until the light grew dim and until every hole, nook, and cranny was closed. I shudder to think of the tragedies of starvation and cannibalism that must have ensued behind those bread-plastered ramparts. We threw ourselves on our bunks, tired out and hungry, to wait for supper. It was a good day's work well done. In the weeks to come we at least should not suffer from the hosts of vermin. We had foregone our dinner, saved our hides at the expense of our stomachs; but we were content. Alas for the futility of human effort! Scarcely was our long task completed when a guard unlocked our door. A redistribution of prisoners was being made, and we were taken to another cell and locked in two galleries higher up. Early next morning our cells were unlocked, and down in the hall the several hundred prisoners of us formed the lock-step and marched out into the prison-yard to go to work. The Erie Canal runs right by the back yard of the Erie County Penitentiary. Our task was to unload canal-boats, carrying huge stay-bolts on our shoulders, like railroad ties, into the prison. As I worked I sized up the situation and studied the chances for a get-away. There wasn't the ghost of a show. Along the tops of the walls marched guards armed with repeating rifles, and I was told, furthermore, that there were machine-guns in the sentry-towers. I did not worry. Thirty days were not so long. I'd stay those thirty days, and add to the store of material I intended to use, when I got out, against the harpies of justice. I'd show what an American boy could do when his rights and privileges had been trampled on the way mine had. I had been denied my right of trial by jury; I had been denied my right to plead guilty or not guilty; I had been denied a trial even (for I couldn't consider that what I had received at Niagara Falls was a trial); I had not been allowed to communicate with a lawyer nor any one, and hence had been denied my right of suing for a writ of habeas corpus; my face had been shaved, my hair cropped close, convict stripes had been put upon my body; I was forced to toil hard on a diet of bread and water and to march the shameful lock-step with armed guards over me--and all for what? What had I done? What crime had I committed against the good citizens of Niagara Falls that all this vengeance should be wreaked upon me? I had not even violated their "sleeping-out" ordinance. I had slept outside their jurisdiction, in the country, that night. I had not even begged for a meal, or battered for a "light piece" on their streets. All that I had done was to walk along their sidewalk and gaze at their picayune waterfall. And what crime was there in that? Technically I was guilty of no misdemeanor. All right, I'd show them when I got out. The next day I talked with a guard. I wanted to send for a lawyer. The guard laughed at me. So did the other guards. I really was _incommunicado_ so far as the outside world was concerned. I tried to write a letter out, but I learned that all letters were read, and censured or confiscated, by the prison authorities, and that "short-timers" were not allowed to write letters anyway. A little later I tried smuggling letters out by men who were released, but I learned that they were searched and the letters found and destroyed. Never mind. It all helped to make it a blacker case when I did get out. But as the prison days went by (which I shall describe in the next chapter), I "learned a few." I heard tales of the police, and police-courts, and lawyers, that were unbelievable and monstrous. Men, prisoners, told me of personal experiences with the police of great cities that were awful. And more awful were the hearsay tales they told me concerning men who had died at the hands of the police and who therefore could not testify for themselves. Years afterward, in the report of the Lexow Committee, I was to read tales true and more awful than those told to me. But in the meantime, during the first days of my imprisonment, I scoffed at what I heard. As the days went by, however, I began to grow convinced. I saw with my own eyes, there in that prison, things unbelievable and monstrous. And the more convinced I became, the profounder grew the respect in me for the sleuth-hounds of the law and for the whole institution of criminal justice. My indignation ebbed away, and into my being rushed the tides of fear. I saw at last, clear-eyed, what I was up against. I grew meek and lowly. Each day I resolved more emphatically to make no rumpus when I got out. All I asked, when I got out, was a chance to fade away from the landscape. And that was just what I did do when I was released. I kept my tongue between my teeth, walked softly, and sneaked for Pennsylvania, a wiser and a humbler man. THE PEN For two days I toiled in the prison-yard. It was heavy work, and, in spite of the fact that I malingered at every opportunity, I was played out. This was because of the food. No man could work hard on such food. Bread and water, that was all that was given us. Once a week we were supposed to get meat; but this meat did not always go around, and since all nutriment had first been boiled out of it in the making of soup, it didn't matter whether one got a taste of it once a week or not. Furthermore, there was one vital defect in the bread-and-water diet. While we got plenty of water, we did not get enough of the bread. A ration of bread was about the size of one's two fists, and three rations a day were given to each prisoner. There was one good thing, I must say, about the water--it was hot. In the morning it was called "coffee," at noon it was dignified as "soup," and at night it masqueraded as "tea." But it was the same old water all the time. The prisoners called it "water bewitched." In the morning it was black water, the color being due to boiling it with burnt bread-crusts. At noon it was served minus the color, with salt and a drop of grease added. At night it was served with a purplish-auburn hue that defied all speculation; it was darn poor tea, but it was dandy hot water. We were a hungry lot in the Erie County Pen. Only the "long-timers" knew what it was to have enough to eat. The reason for this was that they would have died after a time on the fare we "short-timers" received. I know that the long-timers got more substantial grub, because there was a whole row of them on the ground floor in our hall, and when I was a trusty, I used to steal from their grub while serving them. Man cannot live on bread alone and not enough of it. My pal delivered the goods. After two days of work in the yard I was taken out of my cell and made a trusty, a "hall-man." At morning and night we served the bread to the prisoners in their cells; but at twelve o'clock a different method was used. The convicts marched in from work in a long line. As they entered the door of our hall, they broke the lock-step and took their hands down from the shoulders of their line-mates. Just inside the door were piled trays of bread, and here also stood the First Hall-man and two ordinary hall-men. I was one of the two. Our task was to hold the trays of bread as the line of convicts filed past. As soon as the tray, say, that I was holding was emptied, the other hall-man took my place with a full tray. And when his was emptied, I took his place with a full tray. Thus the line tramped steadily by, each man reaching with his right hand and taking one ration of bread from the extended tray. The task of the First Hall-man was different. He used a club. He stood beside the tray and watched. The hungry wretches could never get over the delusion that sometime they could manage to get two rations of bread out of the tray. But in my experience that sometime never came. The club of the First Hall-man had a way of flashing out--quick as the stroke of a tiger's claw--to the hand that dared ambitiously. The First Hall-man was a good judge of distance, and he had smashed so many hands with that club that he had become infallible. He never missed, and he usually punished the offending convict by taking his one ration away from him and sending him to his cell to make his meal off of hot water. And at times, while all these men lay hungry in their cells, I have seen a hundred or so extra rations of bread hidden away in the cells of the hall-men. It would seem absurd, our retaining this bread. But it was one of our grafts. We were economic masters inside our hall, turning the trick in ways quite similar to the economic masters of civilization. We controlled the food-supply of the population, and, just like our brother bandits outside, we made the people pay through the nose for it. We peddled the bread. Once a week, the men who worked in the yard received a five-cent plug of chewing tobacco. This chewing tobacco was the coin of the realm. Two or three rations of bread for a plug was the way we exchanged, and they traded, not because they loved tobacco less, but because they loved bread more. Oh, I know, it was like taking candy from a baby, but what would you? We had to live. And certainly there should be some reward for initiative and enterprise. Besides, we but patterned ourselves after our betters outside the walls, who, on a larger scale, and under the respectable disguise of merchants, bankers, and captains of industry, did precisely what we were doing. What awful things would have happened to those poor wretches if it hadn't been for us, I can't imagine. Heaven knows we put bread into circulation in the Erie County Pen. Ay, and we encouraged frugality and thrift ... in the poor devils who forewent their tobacco. And then there was our example. In the breast of every convict there we implanted the ambition to become even as we and run a graft. Saviours of society--I guess yes. Here was a hungry man without any tobacco. Maybe he was a profligate and had used it all up on himself. Very good; he had a pair of suspenders. I exchanged half a dozen rations of bread for it--or a dozen rations if the suspenders were very good. Now I never wore suspenders, but that didn't matter. Around the corner lodged a long-timer, doing ten years for manslaughter. He wore suspenders, and he wanted a pair. I could trade them to him for some of his meat. Meat was what I wanted. Or perhaps he had a tattered, paper-covered novel. That was treasure-trove. I could read it and then trade it off to the bakers for cake, or to the cooks for meat and vegetables, or to the firemen for decent coffee, or to some one or other for the newspaper that occasionally filtered in, heaven alone knows how. The cooks, bakers, and firemen were prisoners like myself, and they lodged in our hall in the first row of cells over us. In short, a full-grown system of barter obtained in the Erie County Pen. There was even money in circulation. This money was sometimes smuggled in by the short-timers, more frequently came from the barber-shop graft, where the newcomers were mulcted, but most of all flowed from the cells of the long-timers--though how they got it I don't know. What of his preeminent position, the First Hall-man was reputed to be quite wealthy. In addition to his miscellaneous grafts, he grafted on us. We farmed the general wretchedness, and the First Hall-man was Farmer-General over all of us. We held our particular grafts by his permission, and we had to pay for that permission. As I say, he was reputed to be wealthy; but we never saw his money, and he lived in a cell all to himself in solitary grandeur. But that money was made in the Pen I had direct evidence, for I was cell-mate quite a time with the Third Hall-man. He had over sixteen dollars. He used to count his money every night after nine o'clock, when we were locked in. Also, he used to tell me each night what he would do to me if I gave away on him to the other hall-men. You see, he was afraid of being robbed, and danger threatened him from three different directions. There were the guards. A couple of them might jump upon him, give him a good beating for alleged insubordination, and throw him into the "solitaire" (the dungeon); and in the mix-up that sixteen dollars of his would take wings. Then again, the First Hall-man could have taken it all away from him by threatening to dismiss him and fire him back to hard labor in the prison-yard. And yet again, there were the ten of us who were ordinary hall-men. If we got an inkling of his wealth, there was a large liability, some quiet day, of the whole bunch of us getting him into a corner and dragging him down. Oh, we were wolves, believe me--just like the fellows who do business in Wall Street. He had good reason to be afraid of us, and so had I to be afraid of him. He was a huge, illiterate brute, an ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an "ex-con" who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a general all-around stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our hall through the open bars. When he made a capture, he hurried away with it into his cell, where I have seen him crunching bones and spitting out feathers as he bolted it raw. Oh, no, I never gave away on him to the other hall-men. This is the first time I have mentioned his sixteen dollars. But I grafted on him just the same. He was in love with a woman prisoner who was confined in the "female department." He could neither read nor write, and I used to read her letters to him and write his replies. And I made him pay for it, too. But they were good letters. I laid myself out on them, put in my best licks, and furthermore, I won her for him; though I shrewdly guess that she was in love, not with him, but with the humble scribe. I repeat, those letters were great. Another one of our grafts was "passing the punk." We were the celestial messengers, the fire-bringers, in that iron world of bolt and bar. When the men came in from work at night and were locked in their cells, they wanted to smoke. Then it was that we restored the divine spark, running the galleries, from cell to cell, with our smouldering punks. Those who were wise, or with whom we did business, had their punks all ready to light. Not every one got divine sparks, however. The guy who refused to dig up, went sparkless and smokeless to bed. But what did we care? We had the immortal cinch on him, and if he got fresh, two or three of us would pitch on him and give him "what-for." You see, this was the working-theory of the hall-men. There were thirteen of us. We had something like half a thousand prisoners in our hall. We were supposed to do the work, and to keep order. The latter was the function of the guards, which they turned over to us. It was up to us to keep order; if we didn't, we'd be fired back to hard labor, most probably with a taste of the dungeon thrown in. But so long as we maintained order, that long could we work our own particular grafts. Bear with me a moment and look at the problem. Here were thirteen beasts of us over half a thousand other beasts. It was a living hell, that prison, and it was up to us thirteen there to rule. It was impossible, considering the nature of the beasts, for us to rule by kindness. We ruled by fear. Of course, behind us, backing us up, were the guards. In extremity we called upon them for help; but it would bother them if we called upon them too often, in which event we could depend upon it that they would get more efficient trusties to take our places. But we did not call upon them often, except in a quiet sort of way, when we wanted a cell unlocked in order to get at a refractory prisoner inside. In such cases all the guard did was to unlock the door and walk away so as not to be a witness of what happened when half a dozen hall-men went inside and did a bit of man-handling. As regards the details of this man-handling I shall say nothing. And after all, man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say "unprintable"; and in justice I must also say "unthinkable." They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them. At times, say in the morning when the prisoners came down to wash, the thirteen of us would be practically alone in the midst of them, and every last one of them had it in for us. Thirteen against five hundred, and we ruled by fear. We could not permit the slightest infraction of rules, the slightest insolence. If we did, we were lost. Our own rule was to hit a man as soon as he opened his mouth--hit him hard, hit him with anything. A broom-handle, end-on, in the face, had a very sobering effect. But that was not all. Such a man must be made an example of; so the next rule was to wade right in and follow him up. Of course, one was sure that every hall-man in sight would come on the run to join in the chastisement; for this also was a rule. Whenever any hall-man was in trouble with a prisoner, the duty of any other hall-man who happened to be around was to lend a fist. Never mind the merits of the case--wade in and hit, and hit with anything; in short, lay the man out. I remember a handsome young mulatto of about twenty who got the insane idea into his head that he should stand for his rights. And he did have the right of it, too; but that didn't help him any. He lived on the topmost gallery. Eight hall-men took the conceit out of him in just about a minute and a half--for that was the length of time required to travel along his gallery to the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He travelled the whole distance on every portion of his anatomy except his feet, and the eight hall-men were not idle. The mulatto struck the pavement where I was standing watching it all. He regained his feet and stood upright for a moment. In that moment he threw his arms wide apart and omitted an awful scream of terror and pain and heartbreak. At the same instant, as in a transformation scene, the shreds of his stout prison clothes fell from him, leaving him wholly naked and streaming blood from every portion of the surface of his body. Then he collapsed in a heap, unconscious. He had learned his lesson, and every convict within those walls who heard him scream had learned a lesson. So had I learned mine. It is not a nice thing to see a man's heart broken in a minute and a half. The following will illustrate how we drummed up business in the graft of passing the punk. A row of newcomers is installed in your cells. You pass along before the bars with your punk. "Hey, Bo, give us a light," some one calls to you. Now this is an advertisement that that particular man has tobacco on him. You pass in the punk and go your way. A little later you come back and lean up casually against the bars. "Say, Bo, can you let us have a little tobacco?" is what you say. If he is not wise to the game, the chances are that he solemnly avers that he hasn't any more tobacco. All very well. You condole with him and go your way. But you know that his punk will last him only the rest of that day. Next day you come by, and he says again, "Hey, Bo, give us a light." And you say, "You haven't any tobacco and you don't need a light." And you don't give him any, either. Half an hour after, or an hour or two or three hours, you will be passing by and the man will call out to you in mild tones, "Come here, Bo." And you come. You thrust your hand between the bars and have it filled with precious tobacco. Then you give him a light. Sometimes, however, a newcomer arrives, upon whom no grafts are to be worked. The mysterious word is passed along that he is to be treated decently. Where this word originated I could never learn. The one thing patent is that the man has a "pull." It may be with one of the superior hall-men; it may be with one of the guards in some other part of the prison; it may be that good treatment has been purchased from grafters higher up; but be it as it may, we know that it is up to us to treat him decently if we want to avoid trouble. We hall-men were middle-men and common carriers. We arranged trades between convicts confined in different parts of the prison, and we put through the exchange. Also, we took our commissions coming and going. Sometimes the objects traded had to go through the hands of half a dozen middle-men, each of whom took his whack, or in some way or another was paid for his service. Sometimes one was in debt for services, and sometimes one had others in his debt. Thus, I entered the prison in debt to the convict who smuggled in my things for me. A week or so afterward, one of the firemen passed a letter into my hand. It had been given to him by a barber. The barber had received it from the convict who had smuggled in my things. Because of my debt to him I was to carry the letter on. But he had not written the letter. The original sender was a long-timer in his hall. The letter was for a woman prisoner in the female department. But whether it was intended for her, or whether she, in turn, was one of the chain of go-betweens, I did not know. All that I knew was her description, and that it was up to me to get it into her hands. Two days passed, during which time I kept the letter in my possession; then the opportunity came. The women did the mending of all the clothes worn by the convicts. A number of our hall-men had to go to the female department to bring back huge bundles of clothes. I fixed it with the First Hall-man that I was to go along. Door after door was unlocked for us as we threaded our way across the prison to the women's quarters. We entered a large room where the women sat working at their mending. My eyes were peeled for the woman who had been described to me. I located her and worked near to her. Two eagle-eyed matrons were on watch. I held the letter in my palm, and I looked my intention at the woman. She knew I had something for her; she must have been expecting it, and had set herself to divining, at the moment we entered, which of us was the messenger. But one of the matrons stood within two feet of her. Already the hall-men were picking up the bundles they were to carry away. The moment was passing. I delayed with my bundle, making believe that it was not tied securely. Would that matron ever look away? Or was I to fail? And just then another woman cut up playfully with one of the hall-men--stuck out her foot and tripped him, or pinched him, or did something or other. The matron looked that way and reprimanded the woman sharply. Now I do not know whether or not this was all planned to distract the matron's attention, but I did know that it was my opportunity. My particular woman's hand dropped from her lap down by her side. I stooped to pick up my bundle. From my stooping position I slipped the letter into her hand, and received another in exchange. The next moment the bundle was on my shoulder, the matron's gaze had returned to me because I was the last hall-man, and I was hastening to catch up with my companions. The letter I had received from the woman I turned over to the fireman, and thence it passed through the hands of the barber, of the convict who had smuggled in my things, and on to the long-timer at the other end. Often we conveyed letters, the chain of communication of which was so complex that we knew neither sender nor sendee. We were but links in the chain. Somewhere, somehow, a convict would thrust a letter into my hand with the instruction to pass it on to the next link. All such acts were favors to be reciprocated later on, when I should be acting directly with a principal in transmitting letters, and from whom I should be receiving my pay. The whole prison was covered by a network of lines of communication. And we who were in control of the system of communication, naturally, since we were modelled after capitalistic society, exacted heavy tolls from our customers. It was service for profit with a vengeance, though we were at times not above giving service for love. And all the time I was in the Pen I was making myself solid with my pal. He had done much for me, and in return he expected me to do as much for him. When we got out, we were to travel together, and, it goes without saying, pull off "jobs" together. For my pal was a criminal--oh, not a jewel of the first water, merely a petty criminal who would steal and rob, commit burglary, and, if cornered, not stop short of murder. Many a quiet hour we sat and talked together. He had two or three jobs in view for the immediate future, in which my work was cut out for me, and in which I joined in planning the details. I had been with and seen much of criminals, and my pal never dreamed that I was only fooling him, giving him a string thirty days long. He thought I was the real goods, liked me because I was not stupid, and liked me a bit, too, I think, for myself. Of course I had not the slightest intention of joining him in a life of sordid, petty crime; but I'd have been an idiot to throw away all the good things his friendship made possible. When one is on the hot lava of hell, he cannot pick and choose his path, and so it was with me in the Erie County Pen. I had to stay in with the "push," or do hard labor on bread and water; and to stay in with the push I had to make good with my pal. Life was not monotonous in the Pen. Every day something was happening: men were having fits, going crazy, fighting, or the hall-men were getting drunk. Rover Jack, one of the ordinary hall-men, was our star "oryide." He was a true "profesh," a "blowed-in-the-glass" stiff, and as such received all kinds of latitude from the hall-men in authority. Pittsburg Joe, who was Second Hall-man, used to join Rover Jack in his jags; and it was a saying of the pair that the Erie County Pen was the only place where a man could get "slopped" and not be arrested. I never knew, but I was told that bromide of potassium, gained in devious ways from the dispensary, was the dope they used. But I do know, whatever their dope was, that they got good and drunk on occasion. Our hall was a common stews, filled with the ruck and the filth, the scum and dregs, of society--hereditary inefficients, degenerates, wrecks, lunatics, addled intelligences, epileptics, monsters, weaklings, in short, a very nightmare of humanity. Hence, fits flourished with us. These fits seemed contagious. When one man began throwing a fit, others followed his lead. I have seen seven men down with fits at the same time, making the air hideous with their cries, while as many more lunatics would be raging and gibbering up and down. Nothing was ever done for the men with fits except to throw cold water on them. It was useless to send for the medical student or the doctor. They were not to be bothered with such trivial and frequent occurrences. There was a young Dutch boy, about eighteen years of age, who had fits most frequently of all. He usually threw one every day. It was for that reason that we kept him on the ground floor farther down in the row of cells in which we lodged. After he had had a few fits in the prison-yard, the guards refused to be bothered with him any more, and so he remained locked up in his cell all day with a Cockney cell-mate, to keep him company. Not that the Cockney was of any use. Whenever the Dutch boy had a fit, the Cockney became paralyzed with terror. The Dutch boy could not speak a word of English. He was a farmer's boy, serving ninety days as punishment for having got into a scrap with some one. He prefaced his fits with howling. He howled like a wolf. Also, he took his fits standing up, which was very inconvenient for him, for his fits always culminated in a headlong pitch to the floor. Whenever I heard the long wolf-howl rising, I used to grab a broom and run to his cell. Now the trusties were not allowed keys to the cells, so I could not get in to him. He would stand up in the middle of his narrow cell, shivering convulsively, his eyes rolled backward till only the whites were visible, and howling like a lost soul. Try as I would, I could never get the Cockney to lend him a hand. While he stood and howled, the Cockney crouched and trembled in the upper bunk, his terror-stricken gaze fixed on that awful figure, with eyes rolled back, that howled and howled. It was hard on him, too, the poor devil of a Cockney. His own reason was not any too firmly seated, and the wonder is that he did not go mad. All that I could do was my best with the broom. I would thrust it through the bars, train it on Dutchy's chest, and wait. As the crisis approached he would begin swaying back and forth. I followed this swaying with the broom, for there was no telling when he would take that dreadful forward pitch. But when he did, I was there with the broom, catching him and easing him down. Contrive as I would, he never came down quite gently, and his face was usually bruised by the stone floor. Once down and writhing in convulsions, I'd throw a bucket of water over him. I don't know whether cold water was the right thing or not, but it was the custom in the Erie County Pen. Nothing more than that was ever done for him. He would lie there, wet, for an hour or so, and then crawl into his bunk. I knew better than to run to a guard for assistance. What was a man with a fit, anyway? In the adjoining cell lived a strange character--a man who was doing sixty days for eating swill out of Barnum's swill-barrel, or at least that was the way he put it. He was a badly addled creature, and, at first, very mild and gentle. The facts of his case were as he had stated them. He had strayed out to the circus ground, and, being hungry, had made his way to the barrel that contained the refuse from the table of the circus people. "And it was good bread," he often assured me; "and the meat was out of sight." A policeman had seen him and arrested him, and there he was. Once I passed his cell with a piece of stiff thin wire in my hand. He asked me for it so earnestly that I passed it through the bars to him. Promptly, and with no tool but his fingers, he broke it into short lengths and twisted them into half a dozen very creditable safety pins. He sharpened the points on the stone floor. Thereafter I did quite a trade in safety pins. I furnished the raw material and peddled the finished product, and he did the work. As wages, I paid him extra rations of bread, and once in a while a chunk of meat or a piece of soup-bone with some marrow inside. But his imprisonment told on him, and he grew violent day by day. The hall-men took delight in teasing him. They filled his weak brain with stories of a great fortune that had been left him. It was in order to rob him of it that he had been arrested and sent to jail. Of course, as he himself knew, there was no law against eating out of a barrel. Therefore he was wrongly imprisoned. It was a plot to deprive him of his fortune. The first I knew of it, I heard the hall-men laughing about the string they had given him. Next he held a serious conference with me, in which he told me of his millions and the plot to deprive him of them, and in which he appointed me his detective. I did my best to let him down gently, speaking vaguely of a mistake, and that it was another man with a similar name who was the rightful heir. I left him quite cooled down; but I couldn't keep the hall-men away from him, and they continued to string him worse than ever. In the end, after a most violent scene, he threw me down, revoked my private detectiveship, and went on strike. My trade in safety pins ceased. He refused to make any more safety pins, and he peppered me with raw material through the bars of his cell when I passed by. I could never make it up with him. The other hall-men told him that I was a detective in the employ of the conspirators. And in the meantime the hall-men drove him mad with their stringing. His fictitious wrongs preyed upon his mind, and at last he became a dangerous and homicidal lunatic. The guards refused to listen to his tale of stolen millions, and he accused them of being in the plot. One day he threw a pannikin of hot tea over one of them, and then his case was investigated. The warden talked with him a few minutes through the bars of his cell. Then he was taken away for examination before the doctors. He never came back, and I often wonder if he is dead, or if he still gibbers about his millions in some asylum for the insane. At last came the day of days, my release. It was the day of release for the Third Hall-man as well, and the short-timer girl I had won for him was waiting for him outside the wall. They went away blissfully together. My pal and I went out together, and together we walked down into Buffalo. Were we not to be together always? We begged together on the "main-drag" that day for pennies, and what we received was spent for "shupers" of beer--I don't know how they are spelled, but they are pronounced the way I have spelled them, and they cost three cents. I was watching my chance all the time for a get-away. From some bo on the drag I managed to learn what time a certain freight pulled out. I calculated my time accordingly. When the moment came, my pal and I were in a saloon. Two foaming shupers were before us. I'd have liked to say good-by. He had been good to me. But I did not dare. I went out through the rear of the saloon and jumped the fence. It was a swift sneak, and a few minutes later I was on board a freight and heading south on the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railroad. HOBOES THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT In the course of my tramping I encountered hundreds of hoboes, whom I hailed or who hailed me, and with whom I waited at water-tanks, "boiled-up," cooked "mulligans," "battered" the "drag" or "privates," and beat trains, and who passed and were seen never again. On the other hand, there were hoboes who passed and repassed with amazing frequency, and others, still, who passed like ghosts, close at hand, unseen, and never seen. It was one of the latter that I chased clear across Canada over three thousand miles of railroad, and never once did I lay eyes on him. His "monica" was Skysail Jack. I first ran into it at Montreal. Carved with a jack-knife was the skysail-yard of a ship. It was perfectly executed. Under it was "Skysail Jack." Above was "B.W. 9-15-94." This latter conveyed the information that he had passed through Montreal bound west, on October 15, 1894. He had one day the start of me. "Sailor Jack" was my monica at that particular time, and promptly I carved it alongside of his, along with the date and the information that I, too, was bound west. I had misfortune in getting over the next hundred miles, and eight days later I picked up Skysail Jack's trail three hundred miles west of Ottawa. There it was, carved on a water-tank, and by the date I saw that he likewise had met with delay. He was only two days ahead of me. I was a "comet" and "tramp-royal," so was Skysail Jack; and it was up to my pride and reputation to catch up with him. I "railroaded" day and night, and I passed him; then turn about he passed me. Sometimes he was a day or so ahead, and sometimes I was. From hoboes, bound east, I got word of him occasionally, when he happened to be ahead; and from them I learned that he had become interested in Sailor Jack and was making inquiries about me. We'd have made a precious pair, I am sure, if we'd ever got together; but get together we couldn't. I kept ahead of him clear across Manitoba, but he led the way across Alberta, and early one bitter gray morning, at the end of a division just east of Kicking Horse Pass, I learned that he had been seen the night before between Kicking Horse Pass and Rogers' Pass. It was rather curious the way the information came to me. I had been riding all night in a "side-door Pullman" (box-car), and nearly dead with cold had crawled out at the division to beg for food. A freezing fog was drifting past, and I "hit" some firemen I found in the round-house. They fixed me up with the leavings from their lunch-pails, and in addition I got out of them nearly a quart of heavenly "Java" (coffee). I heated the latter, and, as I sat down to eat, a freight pulled in from the west. I saw a side-door open and a road-kid climb out. Through the drifting fog he limped over to me. He was stiff with cold, his lips blue. I shared my Java and grub with him, learned about Skysail Jack, and then learned about him. Behold, he was from my own town, Oakland, California, and he was a member of the celebrated Boo Gang--a gang with which I had affiliated at rare intervals. We talked fast and bolted the grub in the half-hour that followed. Then my freight pulled out, and I was on it, bound west on the trail of Skysail Jack. I was delayed between the passes, went two days without food, and walked eleven miles on the third day before I got any, and yet I succeeded in passing Skysail Jack along the Fraser River in British Columbia. I was riding "passengers" then and making time; but he must have been riding passengers, too, and with more luck or skill than I, for he got into Mission ahead of me. Now Mission was a junction, forty miles east of Vancouver. From the junction one could proceed south through Washington and Oregon over the Northern Pacific. I wondered which way Skysail Jack would go, for I thought I was ahead of him. As for myself I was still bound west to Vancouver. I proceeded to the water-tank to leave that information, and there, freshly carved, with that day's date upon it, was Skysail Jack's monica. I hurried on into Vancouver. But he was gone. He had taken ship immediately and was still flying west on his world-adventure. Truly, Skysail Jack, you were a tramp-royal, and your mate was the "wind that tramps the world." I take off my hat to you. You were "blowed-in-the-glass" all right. A week later I, too, got my ship, and on board the steamship Umatilla, in the forecastle, was working my way down the coast to San Francisco. Skysail Jack and Sailor Jack--gee! if we'd ever got together. Water-tanks are tramp directories. Not all in idle wantonness do tramps carve their monicas, dates, and courses. Often and often have I met hoboes earnestly inquiring if I had seen anywhere such and such a "stiff" or his monica. And more than once I have been able to give the monica of recent date, the water-tank, and the direction in which he was then bound. And promptly the hobo to whom I gave the information lit out after his pal. I have met hoboes who, in trying to catch a pal, had pursued clear across the continent and back again, and were still going. "Monicas" are the nom-de-rails that hoboes assume or accept when thrust upon them by their fellows. Leary Joe, for instance, was timid, and was so named by his fellows. No self-respecting hobo would select Stew Bum for himself. Very few tramps care to remember their pasts during which they ignobly worked, so monicas based upon trades are very rare, though I remember having met the following: Moulder Blackey, Painter Red, Chi Plumber, Boiler-Maker, Sailor Boy, and Printer Bo. "Chi" (pronounced shy), by the way, is the argot for "Chicago." A favorite device of hoboes is to base their monicas on the localities from which they hail, as: New York Tommy, Pacific Slim, Buffalo Smithy, Canton Tim, Pittsburg Jack, Syracuse Shine, Troy Mickey, K.L. Bill, and Connecticut Jimmy. Then there was "Slim Jim from Vinegar Hill, who never worked and never will." A "shine" is always a negro, so called, possibly, from the high lights on his countenance. Texas Shine or Toledo Shine convey both race and nativity. Among those that incorporated their race, I recollect the following: Frisco Sheeny, New York Irish, Michigan French, English Jack, Cockney Kid, and Milwaukee Dutch. Others seem to take their monicas in part from the color-schemes stamped upon them at birth, such as: Chi Whitey, New Jersey Red, Boston Blackey, Seattle Browney, and Yellow Dick and Yellow Belly--the last a Creole from Mississippi, who, I suspect, had his monica thrust upon him. Texas Royal, Happy Joe, Bust Connors, Burley Bo, Tornado Blackey, and Touch McCall used more imagination in rechristening themselves. Others, with less fancy, carry the names of their physical peculiarities, such as: Vancouver Slim, Detroit Shorty, Ohio Fatty, Long Jack, Big Jim, Little Joe, New York Blink, Chi Nosey, and Broken-backed Ben. By themselves come the road-kids, sporting an infinite variety of monicas. For example, the following, whom here and there I have encountered: Buck Kid, Blind Kid, Midget Kid, Holy Kid, Bat Kid, Swift Kid, Cookey Kid, Monkey Kid, Iowa Kid, Corduroy Kid, Orator Kid (who could tell how it happened), and Lippy Kid (who was insolent, depend upon it). On the water-tank at San Marcial, New Mexico, a dozen years ago, was the following hobo bill of fare:-- (1) Main-drag fair. (2) Bulls not hostile. (3) Round-house good for kipping. (4) North-bound trains no good. (5) Privates no good. (6) Restaurants good for cooks only. (7) Railroad House good for night-work only. Number one conveys the information that begging for money on the main street is fair; number two, that the police will not bother hoboes; number three, that one can sleep in the round-house. Number four, however, is ambiguous. The north-bound trains may be no good to beat, and they may be no good to beg. Number five means that the residences are not good to beggars, and number six means that only hoboes that have been cooks can get grub from the restaurants. Number seven bothers me. I cannot make out whether the Railroad House is a good place for any hobo to beg at night, or whether it is good only for hobo-cooks to beg at night, or whether any hobo, cook or non-cook, can lend a hand at night, helping the cooks of the Railroad House with their dirty work and getting something to eat in payment. But to return to the hoboes that pass in the night. I remember one I met in California. He was a Swede, but he had lived so long in the United States that one couldn't guess his nationality. He had to tell it on himself. In fact, he had come to the United States when no more than a baby. I ran into him first at the mountain town of Truckee. "Which way, Bo?" was our greeting, and "Bound east" was the answer each of us gave. Quite a bunch of "stiffs" tried to ride out the overland that night, and I lost the Swede in the shuffle. Also, I lost the overland. I arrived in Reno, Nevada, in a box-car that was promptly side-tracked. It was a Sunday morning, and after I threw my feet for breakfast, I wandered over to the Piute camp to watch the Indians gambling. And there stood the Swede, hugely interested. Of course we got together. He was the only acquaintance I had in that region, and I was his only acquaintance. We rushed together like a couple of dissatisfied hermits, and together we spent the day, threw our feet for dinner, and late in the afternoon tried to "nail" the same freight. But he was ditched, and I rode her out alone, to be ditched myself in the desert twenty miles beyond. Of all desolate places, the one at which I was ditched was the limit. It was called a flag-station, and it consisted of a shanty dumped inconsequentially into the sand and sagebrush. A chill wind was blowing, night was coming on, and the solitary telegraph operator who lived in the shanty was afraid of me. I knew that neither grub nor bed could I get out of him. It was because of his manifest fear of me that I did not believe him when he told me that east-bound trains never stopped there. Besides, hadn't I been thrown off of an east-bound train right at that very spot not five minutes before? He assured me that it had stopped under orders, and that a year might go by before another was stopped under orders. He advised me that it was only a dozen or fifteen miles on to Wadsworth and that I'd better hike. I elected to wait, however, and I had the pleasure of seeing two west-bound freights go by without stopping, and one east-bound freight. I wondered if the Swede was on the latter. It was up to me to hit the ties to Wadsworth, and hit them I did, much to the telegraph operator's relief, for I neglected to burn his shanty and murder him. Telegraph operators have much to be thankful for. At the end of half a dozen miles, I had to get off the ties and let the east-bound overland go by. She was going fast, but I caught sight of a dim form on the first "blind" that looked like the Swede. That was the last I saw of him for weary days. I hit the high places across those hundreds of miles of Nevada desert, riding the overlands at night, for speed, and in the day-time riding in box-cars and getting my sleep. It was early in the year, and it was cold in those upland pastures. Snow lay here and there on the level, all the mountains were shrouded in white, and at night the most miserable wind imaginable blew off from them. It was not a land in which to linger. And remember, gentle reader, the hobo goes through such a land, without shelter, without money, begging his way and sleeping at night without blankets. This last is something that can be realized only by experience. In the early evening I came down to the depot at Ogden. The overland of the Union Pacific was pulling east, and I was bent on making connections. Out in the tangle of tracks ahead of the engine I encountered a figure slouching through the gloom. It was the Swede. We shook hands like long-lost brothers, and discovered that our hands were gloved. "Where'd ye glahm 'em?" I asked. "Out of an engine-cab," he answered; "and where did you?" "They belonged to a fireman," said I; "he was careless." We caught the blind as the overland pulled out, and mighty cold we found it. The way led up a narrow gorge between snow-covered mountains, and we shivered and shook and exchanged confidences about how we had covered the ground between Reno and Ogden. I had closed my eyes for only an hour or so the previous night, and the blind was not comfortable enough to suit me for a snooze. At a stop, I went forward to the engine. We had on a "double-header" (two engines) to take us over the grade. The pilot of the head engine, because it "punched the wind," I knew would be too cold; so I selected the pilot of the second engine, which was sheltered by the first engine. I stepped on the cowcatcher and found the pilot occupied. In the darkness I felt out the form of a young boy. He was sound asleep. By squeezing, there was room for two on the pilot, and I made the boy budge over and crawled up beside him. It was a "good" night; the "shacks" (brakemen) didn't bother us, and in no time we were asleep. Once in a while hot cinders or heavy jolts aroused me, when I snuggled closer to the boy and dozed off to the coughing of the engines and the screeching of the wheels. The overland made Evanston, Wyoming, and went no farther. A wreck ahead blocked the line. The dead engineer had been brought in, and his body attested the peril of the way. A tramp, also, had been killed, but his body had not been brought in. I talked with the boy. He was thirteen years old. He had run away from his folks in some place in Oregon, and was heading east to his grandmother. He had a tale of cruel treatment in the home he had left that rang true; besides, there was no need for him to lie to me, a nameless hobo on the track. And that boy was going some, too. He couldn't cover the ground fast enough. When the division superintendents decided to send the overland back over the way it had come, then up on a cross "jerk" to the Oregon Short Line, and back along that road to tap the Union Pacific the other side of the wreck, that boy climbed upon the pilot and said he was going to stay with it. This was too much for the Swede and me. It meant travelling the rest of that frigid night in order to gain no more than a dozen miles or so. We said we'd wait till the wreck was cleared away, and in the meantime get a good sleep. Now it is no snap to strike a strange town, broke, at midnight, in cold weather, and find a place to sleep. The Swede hadn't a penny. My total assets consisted of two dimes and a nickel. From some of the town boys we learned that beer was five cents, and that the saloons kept open all night. There was our meat. Two glasses of beer would cost ten cents, there would be a stove and chairs, and we could sleep it out till morning. We headed for the lights of a saloon, walking briskly, the snow crunching under our feet, a chill little wind blowing through us. Alas, I had misunderstood the town boys. Beer was five cents in one saloon only in the whole burg, and we didn't strike that saloon. But the one we entered was all right. A blessed stove was roaring white-hot; there were cosey, cane-bottomed arm-chairs, and a none-too-pleasant-looking barkeeper who glared suspiciously at us as we came in. A man cannot spend continuous days and nights in his clothes, beating trains, fighting soot and cinders, and sleeping anywhere, and maintain a good "front." Our fronts were decidedly against us; but what did we care? I had the price in my jeans. "Two beers," said I nonchalantly to the barkeeper, and while he drew them, the Swede and I leaned against the bar and yearned secretly for the arm-chairs by the stove. The barkeeper set the two foaming glasses before us, and with pride I deposited the ten cents. Now I was dead game. As soon as I learned my error in the price I'd have dug up another ten cents. Never mind if it did leave me only a nickel to my name, a stranger in a strange land. I'd have paid it all right. But that barkeeper never gave me a chance. As soon as his eyes spotted the dime I had laid down, he seized the two glasses, one in each hand, and dumped the beer into the sink behind the bar. At the same time, glaring at us malevolently, he said:-- "You've got scabs on your nose. You've got scabs on your nose. You've got scabs on your nose. See!" I hadn't either, and neither had the Swede. Our noses were all right. The direct bearing of his words was beyond our comprehension, but the indirect bearing was clear as print: he didn't like our looks, and beer was evidently ten cents a glass. I dug down and laid another dime on the bar, remarking carelessly, "Oh, I thought this was a five-cent joint." "Your money's no good here," he answered, shoving the two dimes across the bar to me. Sadly I dropped them back into my pocket, sadly we yearned toward the blessed stove and the arm-chairs, and sadly we went out the door into the frosty night. But as we went out the door, the barkeeper, still glaring, called after us, "You've got scabs on your nose, see!" I have seen much of the world since then, journeyed among strange lands and peoples, opened many books, sat in many lecture-halls; but to this day, though I have pondered long and deep, I have been unable to divine the meaning in the cryptic utterance of that barkeeper in Evanston, Wyoming. Our noses _were_ all right. We slept that night over the boilers in an electric-lighting plant. How we discovered that "kipping" place I can't remember. We must have just headed for it, instinctively, as horses head for water or carrier-pigeons head for the home-cote. But it was a night not pleasant to remember. A dozen hoboes were ahead of us on top the boilers, and it was too hot for all of us. To complete our misery, the engineer would not let us stand around down below. He gave us our choice of the boilers or the outside snow. "You said you wanted to sleep, and so, damn you, sleep," said he to me, when, frantic and beaten out by the heat, I came down into the fire-room. "Water," I gasped, wiping the sweat from my eyes, "water." He pointed out of doors and assured me that down there somewhere in the blackness I'd find the river. I started for the river, got lost in the dark, fell into two or three drifts, gave it up, and returned half-frozen to the top of the boilers. When I had thawed out, I was thirstier than ever. Around me the hoboes were moaning, groaning, sobbing, sighing, gasping, panting, rolling and tossing and floundering heavily in their torment. We were so many lost souls toasting on a griddle in hell, and the engineer, Satan Incarnate, gave us the sole alternative of freezing in the outer cold. The Swede sat up and anathematized passionately the wanderlust in man that sent him tramping and suffering hardships such as that. "When I get back to Chicago," he perorated, "I'm going to get a job and stick to it till hell freezes over. Then I'll go tramping again." And, such is the irony of fate, next day, when the wreck ahead was cleared, the Swede and I pulled out of Evanston in the ice-boxes of an "orange special," a fast freight laden with fruit from sunny California. Of course, the ice-boxes were empty on account of the cold weather, but that didn't make them any warmer for us. We entered them through hatchways in the top of the car; the boxes were constructed of galvanized iron, and in that biting weather were not pleasant to the touch. We lay there, shivered and shook, and with chattering teeth held a council wherein we decided that we'd stay by the ice-boxes day and night till we got out of the inhospitable plateau region and down into the Mississippi Valley. But we must eat, and we decided that at the next division we would throw our feet for grub and make a rush back to our ice-boxes. We arrived in the town of Green River late in the afternoon, but too early for supper. Before meal-time is the worst time for "battering" back-doors; but we put on our nerve, swung off the side-ladders as the freight pulled into the yards, and made a run for the houses. We were quickly separated; but we had agreed to meet in the ice-boxes. I had bad luck at first; but in the end, with a couple of "hand-outs" poked into my shirt, I chased for the train. It was pulling out and going fast. The particular refrigerator-car in which we were to meet had already gone by, and half a dozen cars down the train from it I swung on to the side-ladders, went up on top hurriedly, and dropped down into an ice-box. But a shack had seen me from the caboose, and at the next stop a few miles farther on, Rock Springs, the shack stuck his head into my box and said: "Hit the grit, you son of a toad! Hit the grit!" Also he grabbed me by the heels and dragged me out. I hit the grit all right, and the orange special and the Swede rolled on without me. Snow was beginning to fall. A cold night was coming on. After dark I hunted around in the railroad yards until I found an empty refrigerator car. In I climbed--not into the ice-boxes, but into the car itself. I swung the heavy doors shut, and their edges, covered with strips of rubber, sealed the car air-tight. The walls were thick. There was no way for the outside cold to get in. But the inside was just as cold as the outside. How to raise the temperature was the problem. But trust a "profesh" for that. Out of my pockets I dug up three or four newspapers. These I burned, one at a time, on the floor of the car. The smoke rose to the top. Not a bit of the heat could escape, and, comfortable and warm, I passed a beautiful night. I didn't wake up once. In the morning it was still snowing. While throwing my feet for breakfast, I missed an east-bound freight. Later in the day I nailed two other freights and was ditched from both of them. All afternoon no east-bound trains went by. The snow was falling thicker than ever, but at twilight I rode out on the first blind of the overland. As I swung aboard the blind from one side, somebody swung aboard from the other. It was the boy who had run away from Oregon. Now the first blind of a fast train in a driving snow-storm is no summer picnic. The wind goes right through one, strikes the front of the car, and comes back again. At the first stop, darkness having come on, I went forward and interviewed the fireman. I offered to "shove" coal to the end of his run, which was Rawlins, and my offer was accepted. My work was out on the tender, in the snow, breaking the lumps of coal with a sledge and shovelling it forward to him in the cab. But as I did not have to work all the time, I could come into the cab and warm up now and again. "Say," I said to the fireman, at my first breathing spell, "there's a little kid back there on the first blind. He's pretty cold." The cabs on the Union Pacific engines are quite spacious, and we fitted the kid into a warm nook in front of the high seat of the fireman, where the kid promptly fell asleep. We arrived at Rawlins at midnight. The snow was thicker than ever. Here the engine was to go into the round-house, being replaced by a fresh engine. As the train came to a stop, I dropped off the engine steps plump into the arms of a large man in a large overcoat. He began asking me questions, and I promptly demanded who he was. Just as promptly he informed me that he was the sheriff. I drew in my horns and listened and answered. He began describing the kid who was still asleep in the cab. I did some quick thinking. Evidently the family was on the trail of the kid, and the sheriff had received telegraphed instructions from Oregon. Yes, I had seen the kid. I had met him first in Ogden. The date tallied with the sheriff's information. But the kid was still behind somewhere, I explained, for he had been ditched from that very overland that night when it pulled out of Rock Springs. And all the time I was praying that the kid wouldn't wake up, come down out of the cab, and put the "kibosh" on me. The sheriff left me in order to interview the shacks, but before he left he said:-- "Bo, this town is no place for you. Understand? You ride this train out, and make no mistake about it. If I catch you after it's gone ..." I assured him that it was not through desire that I was in his town; that the only reason I was there was that the train had stopped there; and that he wouldn't see me for smoke the way I'd get out of his darn town. While he went to interview the shacks, I jumped back into the cab. The kid was awake and rubbing his eyes. I told him the news and advised him to ride the engine into the round-house. To cut the story short, the kid made the same overland out, riding the pilot, with instructions to make an appeal to the fireman at the first stop for permission to ride in the engine. As for myself, I got ditched. The new fireman was young and not yet lax enough to break the rules of the Company against having tramps in the engine; so he turned down my offer to shove coal. I hope the kid succeeded with him, for all night on the pilot in that blizzard would have meant death. Strange to say, I do not at this late day remember a detail of how I was ditched at Rawlins. I remember watching the train as it was immediately swallowed up in the snow-storm, and of heading for a saloon to warm up. Here was light and warmth. Everything was in full blast and wide open. Faro, roulette, craps, and poker tables were running, and some mad cow-punchers were making the night merry. I had just succeeded in fraternizing with them and was downing my first drink at their expense, when a heavy hand descended on my shoulder. I looked around and sighed. It was the sheriff. Without a word he led me out into the snow. "There's an orange special down there in the yards," said he. "It's a damn cold night," said I. "It pulls out in ten minutes," said he. That was all. There was no discussion. And when that orange special pulled out, I was in the ice-boxes. I thought my feet would freeze before morning, and the last twenty miles into Laramie I stood upright in the hatchway and danced up and down. The snow was too thick for the shacks to see me, and I didn't care if they did. My quarter of a dollar bought me a hot breakfast at Laramie, and immediately afterward I was on board the blind baggage of an overland that was climbing to the pass through the backbone of the Rockies. One does not ride blind baggages in the daytime; but in this blizzard at the top of the Rocky Mountains I doubted if the shacks would have the heart to put me off. And they didn't. They made a practice of coming forward at every stop to see if I was frozen yet. At Ames' Monument, at the summit of the Rockies,--I forget the altitude,--the shack came forward for the last time. "Say, Bo," he said, "you see that freight side-tracked over there to let us go by?" I saw. It was on the next track, six feet away. A few feet more in that storm and I could not have seen it. "Well, the 'after-push' of Kelly's Army is in one of them cars. They've got two feet of straw under them, and there's so many of them that they keep the car warm." His advice was good, and I followed it, prepared, however, if it was a "con game" the shack had given me, to take the blind as the overland pulled out. But it was straight goods. I found the car--a big refrigerator car with the leeward door wide open for ventilation. Up I climbed and in. I stepped on a man's leg, next on some other man's arm. The light was dim, and all I could make out was arms and legs and bodies inextricably confused. Never was there such a tangle of humanity. They were all lying in the straw, and over, and under, and around one another. Eighty-four husky hoboes take up a lot of room when they are stretched out. The men I stepped on were resentful. Their bodies heaved under me like the waves of the sea, and imparted an involuntary forward movement to me. I could not find any straw to step upon, so I stepped upon more men. The resentment increased, so did my forward movement. I lost my footing and sat down with sharp abruptness. Unfortunately, it was on a man's head. The next moment he had risen on his hands and knees in wrath, and I was flying through the air. What goes up must come down, and I came down on another man's head. What happened after that is very vague in my memory. It was like going through a threshing-machine. I was bandied about from one end of the car to the other. Those eighty-four hoboes winnowed me out till what little was left of me, by some miracle, found a bit of straw to rest upon. I was initiated, and into a jolly crowd. All the rest of that day we rode through the blizzard, and to while the time away it was decided that each man was to tell a story. It was stipulated that each story must be a good one, and, furthermore, that it must be a story no one had ever heard before. The penalty for failure was the threshing-machine. Nobody failed. And I want to say right here that never in my life have I sat at so marvellous a story-telling debauch. Here were eighty-four men from all the world--I made eighty-five; and each man told a masterpiece. It had to be, for it was either masterpiece or threshing-machine. Late in the afternoon we arrived in Cheyenne. The blizzard was at its height, and though the last meal of all of us had been breakfast, no man cared to throw his feet for supper. All night we rolled on through the storm, and next day found us down on the sweet plains of Nebraska and still rolling. We were out of the storm and the mountains. The blessed sun was shining over a smiling land, and we had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours. We found out that the freight would arrive about noon at a town, if I remember right, that was called Grand Island. We took up a collection and sent a telegram to the authorities of that town. The text of the message was that eighty-five healthy, hungry hoboes would arrive about noon and that it would be a good idea to have dinner ready for them. The authorities of Grand Island had two courses open to them. They could feed us, or they could throw us in jail. In the latter event they'd have to feed us anyway, and they decided wisely that one meal would be the cheaper way. When the freight rolled into Grand Island at noon, we were sitting on the tops of the cars and dangling our legs in the sunshine. All the police in the burg were on the reception committee. They marched us in squads to the various hotels and restaurants, where dinners were spread for us. We had been thirty-six hours without food, and we didn't have to be taught what to do. After that we were marched back to the railroad station. The police had thoughtfully compelled the freight to wait for us. She pulled out slowly, and the eighty-five of us, strung out along the track, swarmed up the side-ladders. We "captured" the train. We had no supper that evening--at least the "push" didn't, but I did. Just at supper time, as the freight was pulling out of a small town, a man climbed into the car where I was playing pedro with three other stiffs. The man's shirt was bulging suspiciously. In his hand he carried a battered quart-measure from which arose steam. I smelled "Java." I turned my cards over to one of the stiffs who was looking on, and excused myself. Then, in the other end of the car, pursued by envious glances, I sat down with the man who had climbed aboard and shared his "Java" and the hand-outs that had bulged his shirt. It was the Swede. At about ten o'clock in the evening, we arrived at Omaha. "Let's shake the push," said the Swede to me. "Sure," said I. As the freight pulled into Omaha, we made ready to do so. But the people of Omaha were also ready. The Swede and I hung upon the side-ladders, ready to drop off. But the freight did not stop. Furthermore, long rows of policemen, their brass buttons and stars glittering in the electric lights, were lined up on each side of the track. The Swede and I knew what would happen to us if we ever dropped off into their arms. We stuck by the side-ladders, and the train rolled on across the Missouri River to Council Bluffs. "General" Kelly, with an army of two thousand hoboes, lay in camp at Chautauqua Park, several miles away. The after-push we were with was General Kelly's rear-guard, and, detraining at Council Bluffs, it started to march to camp. The night had turned cold, and heavy wind-squalls, accompanied by rain, were chilling and wetting us. Many police were guarding us and herding us to the camp. The Swede and I watched our chance and made a successful get-away. The rain began coming down in torrents, and in the darkness, unable to see our hands in front of our faces, like a pair of blind men we fumbled about for shelter. Our instinct served us, for in no time we stumbled upon a saloon--not a saloon that was open and doing business, not merely a saloon that was closed for the night, and not even a saloon with a permanent address, but a saloon propped up on big timbers, with rollers underneath, that was being moved from somewhere to somewhere. The doors were locked. A squall of wind and rain drove down upon us. We did not hesitate. Smash went the door, and in we went. I have made some tough camps in my time, "carried the banner" in infernal metropolises, bedded in pools of water, slept in the snow under two blankets when the spirit thermometer registered seventy-four degrees below zero (which is a mere trifle of one hundred and six degrees of frost); but I want to say right here that never did I make a tougher camp, pass a more miserable night, than that night I passed with the Swede in the itinerant saloon at Council Bluffs. In the first place, the building, perched up as it was in the air, had exposed a multitude of openings in the floor through which the wind whistled. In the second place, the bar was empty; there was no bottled fire-water with which we could warm ourselves and forget our misery. We had no blankets, and in our wet clothes, wet to the skin, we tried to sleep. I rolled under the bar, and the Swede rolled under the table. The holes and crevices in the floor made it impossible, and at the end of half an hour I crawled up on top the bar. A little later the Swede crawled up on top his table. And there we shivered and prayed for daylight. I know, for one, that I shivered until I could shiver no more, till the shivering muscles exhausted themselves and merely ached horribly. The Swede moaned and groaned, and every little while, through chattering teeth, he muttered, "Never again; never again." He muttered this phrase repeatedly, ceaselessly, a thousand times; and when he dozed, he went on muttering it in his sleep. At the first gray of dawn we left our house of pain, and outside, found ourselves in a mist, dense and chill. We stumbled on till we came to the railroad track. I was going back to Omaha to throw my feet for breakfast; my companion was going on to Chicago. The moment for parting had come. Our palsied hands went out to each other. We were both shivering. When we tried to speak, our teeth chattered us back into silence. We stood alone, shut off from the world; all that we could see was a short length of railroad track, both ends of which were lost in the driving mist. We stared dumbly at each other, our clasped hands shaking sympathetically. The Swede's face was blue with the cold, and I know mine must have been. "Never again what?" I managed to articulate. Speech strove for utterance in the Swede's throat; then faint and distant, in a thin whisper from the very bottom of his frozen soul, came the words:-- "Never again a hobo." He paused, and, as he went on again, his voice gathered strength and huskiness as it affirmed his will. "Never again a hobo. I'm going to get a job. You'd better do the same. Nights like this make rheumatism." He wrung my hand. "Good-by, Bo," said he. "Good-by, Bo," said I. The next we were swallowed up from each other by the mist. It was our final passing. But here's to you, Mr. Swede, wherever you are. I hope you got that job. ROAD-KIDS AND GAY-CATS Every once in a while, in newspapers, magazines, and biographical dictionaries, I run upon sketches of my life, wherein, delicately phrased, I learn that it was in order to study sociology that I became a tramp. This is very nice and thoughtful of the biographers, but it is inaccurate. I became a tramp--well, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest. Sociology was merely incidental; it came afterward, in the same manner that a wet skin follows a ducking. I went on "The Road" because I couldn't keep away from it; because I hadn't the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn't work all my life on "one same shift"; because--well, just because it was easier to than not to. It happened in my own town, in Oakland, when I was sixteen. At that time I had attained a dizzy reputation in my chosen circle of adventurers, by whom I was known as the Prince of the Oyster Pirates. It is true, those immediately outside my circle, such as honest bay-sailors, longshoremen, yachtsmen, and the legal owners of the oysters, called me "tough," "hoodlum," "smoudge," "thief," "robber," and various other not nice things--all of which was complimentary and but served to increase the dizziness of the high place in which I sat. At that time I had not read "Paradise Lost," and later, when I read Milton's "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," I was fully convinced that great minds run in the same channels. It was at this time that the fortuitous concatenation of events sent me upon my first adventure on The Road. It happened that there was nothing doing in oysters just then; that at Benicia, forty miles away, I had some blankets I wanted to get; and that at Port Costa, several miles from Benicia, a stolen boat lay at anchor in charge of the constable. Now this boat was owned by a friend of mine, by name Dinny McCrea. It had been stolen and left at Port Costa by Whiskey Bob, another friend of mine. (Poor Whiskey Bob! Only last winter his body was picked up on the beach shot full of holes by nobody knows whom.) I had come down from "up river" some time before, and reported to Dinny McCrea the whereabouts of his boat; and Dinny McCrea had promptly offered ten dollars to me if I should bring it down to Oakland to him. Time was heavy on my hands. I sat on the dock and talked it over with Nickey the Greek, another idle oyster pirate. "Let's go," said I, and Nickey was willing. He was "broke." I possessed fifty cents and a small skiff. The former I invested and loaded into the latter in the form of crackers, canned corned beef, and a ten-cent bottle of French mustard. (We were keen on French mustard in those days.) Then, late in the afternoon, we hoisted our small spritsail and started. We sailed all night, and next morning, on the first of a glorious flood-tide, a fair wind behind us, we came booming up the Carquinez Straits to Port Costa. There lay the stolen boat, not twenty-five feet from the wharf. We ran alongside and doused our little spritsail. I sent Nickey forward to lift the anchor, while I began casting off the gaskets. A man ran out on the wharf and hailed us. It was the constable. It suddenly came to me that I had neglected to get a written authorization from Dinny McCrea to take possession of his boat. Also, I knew that constable wanted to charge at least twenty-five dollars in fees for capturing the boat from Whiskey Bob and subsequently taking care of it. And my last fifty cents had been blown in for corned beef and French mustard, and the reward was only ten dollars anyway. I shot a glance forward to Nickey. He had the anchor up-and-down and was straining at it. "Break her out," I whispered to him, and turned and shouted back to the constable. The result was that he and I were talking at the same time, our spoken thoughts colliding in mid-air and making gibberish. The constable grew more imperative, and perforce I had to listen. Nickey was heaving on the anchor till I thought he'd burst a blood-vessel. When the constable got done with his threats and warnings, I asked him who he was. The time he lost in telling me enabled Nickey to break out the anchor. I was doing some quick calculating. At the feet of the constable a ladder ran down the dock to the water, and to the ladder was moored a skiff. The oars were in it. But it was padlocked. I gambled everything on that padlock. I felt the breeze on my cheek, saw the surge of the tide, looked at the remaining gaskets that confined the sail, ran my eyes up the halyards to the blocks and knew that all was clear, and then threw off all dissimulation. "In with her!" I shouted to Nickey, and sprang to the gaskets, casting them loose and thanking my stars that Whiskey Bob had tied them in square-knots instead of "grannies." The constable had slid down the ladder and was fumbling with a key at the padlock. The anchor came aboard and the last gasket was loosed at the same instant that the constable freed the skiff and jumped to the oars. "Peak-halyards!" I commanded my crew, at the same time swinging on to the throat-halyards. Up came the sail on the run. I belayed and ran aft to the tiller. "Stretch her!" I shouted to Nickey at the peak. The constable was just reaching for our stern. A puff of wind caught us, and we shot away. It was great. If I'd had a black flag, I know I'd have run it up in triumph. The constable stood up in the skiff, and paled the glory of the day with the vividness of his language. Also, he wailed for a gun. You see, that was another gamble we had taken. Anyway, we weren't stealing the boat. It wasn't the constable's. We were merely stealing his fees, which was his particular form of graft. And we weren't stealing the fees for ourselves, either; we were stealing them for my friend, Dinny McCrea. Benicia was made in a few minutes, and a few minutes later my blankets were aboard. I shifted the boat down to the far end of Steamboat Wharf, from which point of vantage we could see anybody coming after us. There was no telling. Maybe the Port Costa constable would telephone to the Benicia constable. Nickey and I held a council of war. We lay on deck in the warm sun, the fresh breeze on our cheeks, the flood-tide rippling and swirling past. It was impossible to start back to Oakland till afternoon, when the ebb would begin to run. But we figured that the constable would have an eye out on the Carquinez Straits when the ebb started, and that nothing remained for us but to wait for the following ebb, at two o'clock next morning, when we could slip by Cerberus in the darkness. So we lay on deck, smoked cigarettes, and were glad that we were alive. I spat over the side and gauged the speed of the current. "With this wind, we could run this flood clear to Rio Vista," I said. "And it's fruit-time on the river," said Nickey. "And low water on the river," said I. "It's the best time of the year to make Sacramento." We sat up and looked at each other. The glorious west wind was pouring over us like wine. We both spat over the side and gauged the current. Now I contend that it was all the fault of that flood-tide and fair wind. They appealed to our sailor instinct. If it had not been for them, the whole chain of events that was to put me upon The Road would have broken down. We said no word, but cast off our moorings and hoisted sail. Our adventures up the Sacramento River are no part of this narrative. We subsequently made the city of Sacramento and tied up at a wharf. The water was fine, and we spent most of our time in swimming. On the sand-bar above the railroad bridge we fell in with a bunch of boys likewise in swimming. Between swims we lay on the bank and talked. They talked differently from the fellows I had been used to herding with. It was a new vernacular. They were road-kids, and with every word they uttered the lure of The Road laid hold of me more imperiously. "When I was down in Alabama," one kid would begin; or, another, "Coming up on the C. & A. from K.C."; whereat, a third kid, "On the C. & A. there ain't no steps to the 'blinds.'" And I would lie silently in the sand and listen. "It was at a little town in Ohio on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern," a kid would start; and another, "Ever ride the Cannonball on the Wabash?"; and yet another, "Nope, but I've been on the White Mail out of Chicago." "Talk about railroadin'--wait till you hit the Pennsylvania, four tracks, no water tanks, take water on the fly, that's goin' some." "The Northern Pacific's a bad road now." "Salinas is on the 'hog,' the 'bulls' is 'horstile.'" "I got 'pinched' at El Paso, along with Moke Kid." "Talkin' of 'poke-outs,' wait till you hit the French country out of Montreal--not a word of English--you say, 'Mongee, Madame, mongee, no spika da French,' an' rub your stomach an' look hungry, an' she gives you a slice of sow-belly an' a chunk of dry 'punk.'" And I continued to lie in the sand and listen. These wanderers made my oyster-piracy look like thirty cents. A new world was calling to me in every word that was spoken--a world of rods and gunnels, blind baggages and "side-door Pullmans," "bulls" and "shacks," "floppings" and "chewin's," "pinches" and "get-aways," "strong arms" and "bindle-stiffs," "punks" and "profesh." And it all spelled Adventure. Very well; I would tackle this new world. I "lined" myself up alongside those road-kids. I was just as strong as any of them, just as quick, just as nervy, and my brain was just as good. After the swim, as evening came on, they dressed and went up town. I went along. The kids began "battering" the "main-stem" for "light pieces," or, in other words, begging for money on the main street. I had never begged in my life, and this was the hardest thing for me to stomach when I first went on The Road. I had absurd notions about begging. My philosophy, up to that time, was that it was finer to steal than to beg; and that robbery was finer still because the risk and the penalty were proportionately greater. As an oyster pirate I had already earned convictions at the hands of justice, which, if I had tried to serve them, would have required a thousand years in state's prison. To rob was manly; to beg was sordid and despicable. But I developed in the days to come all right, all right, till I came to look upon begging as a joyous prank, a game of wits, a nerve-exerciser. That first night, however, I couldn't rise to it; and the result was that when the kids were ready to go to a restaurant and eat, I wasn't. I was broke. Meeny Kid, I think it was, gave me the price, and we all ate together. But while I ate, I meditated. The receiver, it was said, was as bad as the thief; Meeny Kid had done the begging, and I was profiting by it. I decided that the receiver was a whole lot worse than the thief, and that it shouldn't happen again. And it didn't. I turned out next day and threw my feet as well as the next one. Nickey the Greek's ambition didn't run to The Road. He was not a success at throwing his feet, and he stowed away one night on a barge and went down river to San Francisco. I met him, only a week ago, at a pugilistic carnival. He has progressed. He sat in a place of honor at the ring-side. He is now a manager of prize-fighters and proud of it. In fact, in a small way, in local sportdom, he is quite a shining light. "No kid is a road-kid until he has gone over 'the hill'"--such was the law of The Road I heard expounded in Sacramento. All right, I'd go over the hill and matriculate. "The hill," by the way, was the Sierra Nevadas. The whole gang was going over the hill on a jaunt, and of course I'd go along. It was French Kid's first adventure on The Road. He had just run away from his people in San Francisco. It was up to him and me to deliver the goods. In passing, I may remark that my old title of "Prince" had vanished. I had received my "monica." I was now "Sailor Kid," later to be known as "'Frisco Kid," when I had put the Rockies between me and my native state. At 10.20 P.M. the Central Pacific overland pulled out of the depot at Sacramento for the East--that particular item of time-table is indelibly engraved on my memory. There were about a dozen in our gang, and we strung out in the darkness ahead of the train ready to take her out. All the local road-kids that we knew came down to see us off--also, to "ditch" us if they could. That was their idea of a joke, and there were only about forty of them to carry it out. Their ring-leader was a crackerjack road-kid named Bob. Sacramento was his home town, but he'd hit The Road pretty well everywhere over the whole country. He took French Kid and me aside and gave us advice something like this: "We're goin' to try an' ditch your bunch, see? Youse two are weak. The rest of the push can take care of itself. So, as soon as youse two nail a blind, deck her. An' stay on the decks till youse pass Roseville Junction, at which burg the constables are horstile, sloughin' in everybody on sight." The engine whistled and the overland pulled out. There were three blinds on her--room for all of us. The dozen of us who were trying to make her out would have preferred to slip aboard quietly; but our forty friends crowded on with the most amazing and shameless publicity and advertisement. Following Bob's advice, I immediately "decked her," that is, climbed up on top of the roof of one of the mail-cars. There I lay down, my heart jumping a few extra beats, and listened to the fun. The whole train crew was forward, and the ditching went on fast and furious. After the train had run half a mile, it stopped, and the crew came forward again and ditched the survivors. I, alone, had made the train out. Back at the depot, about him two or three of the push that had witnessed the accident, lay French Kid with both legs off. French Kid had slipped or stumbled--that was all, and the wheels had done the rest. Such was my initiation to The Road. It was two years afterward when I next saw French Kid and examined his "stumps." This was an act of courtesy. "Cripples" always like to have their stumps examined. One of the entertaining sights on The Road is to witness the meeting of two cripples. Their common disability is a fruitful source of conversation; and they tell how it happened, describe what they know of the amputation, pass critical judgment on their own and each other's surgeons, and wind up by withdrawing to one side, taking off bandages and wrappings, and comparing stumps. But it was not until several days later, over in Nevada, when the push caught up with me, that I learned of French Kid's accident. The push itself arrived in bad condition. It had gone through a train-wreck in the snow-sheds; Happy Joe was on crutches with two mashed legs, and the rest were nursing skins and bruises. In the meantime, I lay on the roof of the mail-car, trying to remember whether Roseville Junction, against which burg Bob had warned me, was the first stop or the second stop. To make sure, I delayed descending to the platform of the blind until after the second stop. And then I didn't descend. I was new to the game, and I felt safer where I was. But I never told the push that I held down the decks the whole night, clear across the Sierras, through snow-sheds and tunnels, and down to Truckee on the other side, where I arrived at seven in the morning. Such a thing was disgraceful, and I'd have been a common laughing-stock. This is the first time I have confessed the truth about that first ride over the hill. As for the push, it decided that I was all right, and when I came back over the hill to Sacramento, I was a full-fledged road-kid. Yet I had much to learn. Bob was my mentor, and he was all right. I remember one evening (it was fair-time in Sacramento, and we were knocking about and having a good time) when I lost my hat in a fight. There was I bare-headed in the street, and it was Bob to the rescue. He took me to one side from the push and told me what to do. I was a bit timid of his advice. I had just come out of jail, where I had been three days, and I knew that if the police "pinched" me again, I'd get good and "soaked." On the other hand, I couldn't show the white feather. I'd been over the hill, I was running full-fledged with the push, and it was up to me to deliver the goods. So I accepted Bob's advice, and he came along with me to see that I did it up brown. We took our position on K Street, on the corner, I think, of Fifth. It was early in the evening and the street was crowded. Bob studied the head-gear of every Chinaman that passed. I used to wonder how the road-kids all managed to wear "five-dollar Stetson stiff-rims," and now I knew. They got them, the way I was going to get mine, from the Chinese. I was nervous--there were so many people about; but Bob was cool as an iceberg. Several times, when I started forward toward a Chinaman, all nerved and keyed up, Bob dragged me back. He wanted me to get a good hat, and one that fitted. Now a hat came by that was the right size but not new; and, after a dozen impossible hats, along would come one that was new but not the right size. And when one did come by that was new and the right size, the rim was too large or not large enough. My, Bob was finicky. I was so wrought up that I'd have snatched any kind of a head-covering. At last came the hat, the one hat in Sacramento for me. I knew it was a winner as soon as I looked at it. I glanced at Bob. He sent a sweeping look-about for police, then nodded his head. I lifted the hat from the Chinaman's head and pulled it down on my own. It was a perfect fit. Then I started. I heard Bob crying out, and I caught a glimpse of him blocking the irate Mongolian and tripping him up. I ran on. I turned up the next corner, and around the next. This street was not so crowded as K, and I walked along in quietude, catching my breath and congratulating myself upon my hat and my get-away. And then, suddenly, around the corner at my back, came the bare-headed Chinaman. With him were a couple more Chinamen, and at their heels were half a dozen men and boys. I sprinted to the next corner, crossed the street, and rounded the following corner. I decided that I had surely played him out, and I dropped into a walk again. But around the corner at my heels came that persistent Mongolian. It was the old story of the hare and the tortoise. He could not run so fast as I, but he stayed with it, plodding along at a shambling and deceptive trot, and wasting much good breath in noisy imprecations. He called all Sacramento to witness the dishonor that had been done him, and a goodly portion of Sacramento heard and flocked at his heels. And I ran on like the hare, and ever that persistent Mongolian, with the increasing rabble, overhauled me. But finally, when a policeman had joined his following, I let out all my links. I twisted and turned, and I swear I ran at least twenty blocks on the straight away. And I never saw that Chinaman again. The hat was a dandy, a brand-new Stetson, just out of the shop, and it was the envy of the whole push. Furthermore, it was the symbol that I had delivered the goods. I wore it for over a year. Road-kids are nice little chaps--when you get them alone and they are telling you "how it happened"; but take my word for it, watch out for them when they run in pack. Then they are wolves, and like wolves they are capable of dragging down the strongest man. At such times they are not cowardly. They will fling themselves upon a man and hold on with every ounce of strength in their wiry bodies, till he is thrown and helpless. More than once have I seen them do it, and I know whereof I speak. Their motive is usually robbery. And watch out for the "strong arm." Every kid in the push I travelled with was expert at it. Even French Kid mastered it before he lost his legs. I have strong upon me now a vision of what I once saw in "The Willows." The Willows was a clump of trees in a waste piece of land near the railway depot and not more than five minutes walk from the heart of Sacramento. It is night-time and the scene is illumined by the thin light of stars. I see a husky laborer in the midst of a pack of road-kids. He is infuriated and cursing them, not a bit afraid, confident of his own strength. He weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, and his muscles are hard; but he doesn't know what he is up against. The kids are snarling. It is not pretty. They make a rush from all sides, and he lashes out and whirls. Barber Kid is standing beside me. As the man whirls, Barber Kid leaps forward and does the trick. Into the man's back goes his knee; around the man's neck, from behind, passes his right hand, the bone of the wrist pressing against the jugular vein. Barber Kid throws his whole weight backward. It is a powerful leverage. Besides, the man's wind has been shut off. It is the strong arm. The man resists, but he is already practically helpless. The road-kids are upon him from every side, clinging to arms and legs and body, and like a wolf at the throat of a moose Barber Kid hangs on and drags backward. Over the man goes, and down under the heap. Barber Kid changes the position of his own body, but never lets go. While some of the kids are "going through" the victim, others are holding his legs so that he cannot kick and thresh about. They improve the opportunity by taking off the man's shoes. As for him, he has given in. He is beaten. Also, what of the strong arm at his throat, he is short of wind. He is making ugly choking noises, and the kids hurry. They really don't want to kill him. All is done. At a word all holds are released at once, and the kids scatter, one of them lugging the shoes--he knows where he can get half a dollar for them. The man sits up and looks about him, dazed and helpless. Even if he wanted to, barefooted pursuit in the darkness would be hopeless. I linger a moment and watch him. He is feeling at his throat, making dry, hawking noises, and jerking his head in a quaint way as though to assure himself that the neck is not dislocated. Then I slip away to join the push, and see that man no more--though I shall always see him, sitting there in the starlight, somewhat dazed, a bit frightened, greatly dishevelled, and making quaint jerking movements of head and neck. Drunken men are the especial prey of the road-kids. Robbing a drunken man they call "rolling a stiff"; and wherever they are, they are on the constant lookout for drunks. The drunk is their particular meat, as the fly is the particular meat of the spider. The rolling of a stiff is ofttimes an amusing sight, especially when the stiff is helpless and when interference is unlikely. At the first swoop the stiff's money and jewellery go. Then the kids sit around their victim in a sort of pow-wow. A kid generates a fancy for the stiff's necktie. Off it comes. Another kid is after underclothes. Off they come, and a knife quickly abbreviates arms and legs. Friendly hoboes may be called in to take the coat and trousers, which are too large for the kids. And in the end they depart, leaving beside the stiff the heap of their discarded rags. Another vision comes to me. It is a dark night. My push is coming along the sidewalk in the suburbs. Ahead of us, under an electric light, a man crosses the street diagonally. There is something tentative and desultory in his walk. The kids scent the game on the instant. The man is drunk. He blunders across the opposite sidewalk and is lost in the darkness as he takes a short-cut through a vacant lot. No hunting cry is raised, but the pack flings itself forward in quick pursuit. In the middle of the vacant lot it comes upon him. But what is this?--snarling and strange forms, small and dim and menacing, are between the pack and its prey. It is another pack of road-kids, and in the hostile pause we learn that it is their meat, that they have been trailing it a dozen blocks and more and that we are butting in. But it is the world primeval. These wolves are baby wolves. (As a matter of fact, I don't think one of them was over twelve or thirteen years of age. I met some of them afterward, and learned that they had just arrived that day over the hill, and that they hailed from Denver and Salt Lake City.) Our pack flings forward. The baby wolves squeal and screech and fight like little demons. All about the drunken man rages the struggle for the possession of him. Down he goes in the thick of it, and the combat rages over his body after the fashion of the Greeks and Trojans over the body and armor of a fallen hero. Amid cries and tears and wailings the baby wolves are dispossessed, and my pack rolls the stiff. But always I remember the poor stiff and his befuddled amazement at the abrupt eruption of battle in the vacant lot. I see him now, dim in the darkness, titubating in stupid wonder, good-naturedly essaying the role of peacemaker in that multitudinous scrap the significance of which he did not understand, and the really hurt expression on his face when he, unoffending he, was clutched at by many hands and dragged down in the thick of the press. "Bindle-stiffs" are favorite prey of the road-kids. A bindle-stiff is a working tramp. He takes his name from the roll of blankets he carries, which is known as a "bindle." Because he does work, a bindle-stiff is expected usually to have some small change about him, and it is after that small change that the road-kids go. The best hunting-ground for bindle-stiffs is in the sheds, barns, lumber-yards, railroad-yards, etc., on the edges of a city, and the time for hunting is the night, when the bindle-stiff seeks these places to roll up in his blankets and sleep. "Gay-cats" also come to grief at the hands of the road-kid. In more familiar parlance, gay-cats are short-horns, _chechaquos_, new chums, or tenderfeet. A gay-cat is a newcomer on The Road who is man-grown, or, at least, youth-grown. A boy on The Road, on the other hand, no matter how green he is, is never a gay-cat; he is a road-kid or a "punk," and if he travels with a "profesh," he is known possessively as a "prushun." I was never a prushun, for I did not take kindly to possession. I was first a road-kid and then a profesh. Because I started in young, I practically skipped my gay-cat apprenticeship. For a short period, during the time I was exchanging my 'Frisco Kid monica for that of Sailor Jack, I labored under the suspicion of being a gay-cat. But closer acquaintance on the part of those that suspected me quickly disabused their minds, and in a short time I acquired the unmistakable airs and ear-marks of the blowed-in-the-glass profesh. And be it known, here and now, that the profesh are the aristocracy of The Road. They are the lords and masters, the aggressive men, the primordial noblemen, the _blond beasts_ so beloved of Nietzsche. When I came back over the hill from Nevada, I found that some river pirate had stolen Dinny McCrea's boat. (A funny thing at this day is that I cannot remember what became of the skiff in which Nickey the Greek and I sailed from Oakland to Port Costa. I know that the constable didn't get it, and I know that it didn't go with us up the Sacramento River, and that is all I do know.) With the loss of Dinny McCrea's boat, I was pledged to The Road; and when I grew tired of Sacramento, I said good-by to the push (which, in its friendly way, tried to ditch me from a freight as I left town) and started on a _passear_ down the valley of the San Joaquin. The Road had gripped me and would not let me go; and later, when I had voyaged to sea and done one thing and another, I returned to The Road to make longer flights, to be a "comet" and a profesh, and to plump into the bath of sociology that wet me to the skin. TWO THOUSAND STIFFS A "stiff" is a tramp. It was once my fortune to travel a few weeks with a "push" that numbered two thousand. This was known as "Kelly's Army." Across the wild and woolly West, clear from California, General Kelly and his heroes had captured trains; but they fell down when they crossed the Missouri and went up against the effete East. The East hadn't the slightest intention of giving free transportation to two thousand hoboes. Kelly's Army lay helplessly for some time at Council Bluffs. The day I joined it, made desperate by delay, it marched out to capture a train. It was quite an imposing sight. General Kelly sat a magnificent black charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fife and drum corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand stiffs countermarched before him and hit the wagon-road to the little burg of Weston, seven miles away. Being the latest recruit, I was in the last company, of the last regiment, of the Second Division, and, furthermore, in the last rank of the rear-guard. The army went into camp at Weston beside the railroad track--beside the tracks, rather, for two roads went through: the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, and the Rock Island. Our intention was to take the first train out, but the railroad officials "coppered" our play--and won. There was no first train. They tied up the two lines and stopped running trains. In the meantime, while we lay by the dead tracks, the good people of Omaha and Council Bluffs were bestirring themselves. Preparations were making to form a mob, capture a train in Council Bluffs, run it down to us, and make us a present of it. The railroad officials coppered that play, too. They didn't wait for the mob. Early in the morning of the second day, an engine, with a single private car attached, arrived at the station and side-tracked. At this sign that life had renewed in the dead roads, the whole army lined up beside the track. But never did life renew so monstrously on a dead railroad as it did on those two roads. From the west came the whistle of a locomotive. It was coming in our direction, bound east. We were bound east. A stir of preparation ran down our ranks. The whistle tooted fast and furiously, and the train thundered at top speed. The hobo didn't live that could have boarded it. Another locomotive whistled, and another train came through at top speed, and another, and another, train after train, train after train, till toward the last the trains were composed of passenger coaches, box-cars, flat-cars, dead engines, cabooses, mail-cars, wrecking appliances, and all the riff-raff of worn-out and abandoned rolling-stock that collects in the yards of great railways. When the yards at Council Bluffs had been completely cleaned, the private car and engine went east, and the tracks died for keeps. That day went by, and the next, and nothing moved, and in the meantime, pelted by sleet, and rain, and hail, the two thousand hoboes lay beside the track. But that night the good people of Council Bluffs went the railroad officials one better. A mob formed in Council Bluffs, crossed the river to Omaha, and there joined with another mob in a raid on the Union Pacific yards. First they captured an engine, next they knocked a train together, and then the united mobs piled aboard, crossed the Missouri, and ran down the Rock Island right of way to turn the train over to us. The railway officials tried to copper this play, but fell down, to the mortal terror of the section boss and one member of the section gang at Weston. This pair, under secret telegraphic orders, tried to wreck our train-load of sympathizers by tearing up the track. It happened that we were suspicious and had our patrols out. Caught red-handed at train-wrecking, and surrounded by twenty hundred infuriated hoboes, that section-gang boss and assistant prepared to meet death. I don't remember what saved them, unless it was the arrival of the train. It was our turn to fall down, and we did, hard. In their haste, the two mobs had neglected to make up a sufficiently long train. There wasn't room for two thousand hoboes to ride. So the mobs and the hoboes had a talkfest, fraternized, sang songs, and parted, the mobs going back on their captured train to Omaha, the hoboes pulling out next morning on a hundred-and-forty-mile march to Des Moines. It was not until Kelly's Army crossed the Missouri that it began to walk, and after that it never rode again. It cost the railroads slathers of money, but they were acting on principle, and they won. Underwood, Leola, Menden, Avoca, Walnut, Marno, Atlantic, Wyoto, Anita, Adair, Adam, Casey, Stuart, Dexter, Carlham, De Soto, Van Meter, Booneville, Commerce, Valley Junction--how the names of the towns come back to me as I con the map and trace our route through the fat Iowa country! And the hospitable Iowa farmer-folk! They turned out with their wagons and carried our baggage; gave us hot lunches at noon by the wayside; mayors of comfortable little towns made speeches of welcome and hastened us on our way; deputations of little girls and maidens came out to meet us, and the good citizens turned out by hundreds, locked arms, and marched with us down their main streets. It was circus day when we came to town, and every day was circus day, for there were many towns. In the evenings our camps were invaded by whole populations. Every company had its campfire, and around each fire something was doing. The cooks in my company, Company L, were song-and-dance artists and contributed most of our entertainment. In another part of the encampment the glee club would be singing--one of its star voices was the "Dentist," drawn from Company L, and we were mighty proud of him. Also, he pulled teeth for the whole army, and, since the extractions usually occurred at meal-time, our digestions were stimulated by variety of incident. The Dentist had no anaesthetics, but two or three of us were always on tap to volunteer to hold down the patient. In addition to the stunts of the companies and the glee club, church services were usually held, local preachers officiating, and always there was a great making of political speeches. All these things ran neck and neck; it was a full-blown Midway. A lot of talent can be dug out of two thousand hoboes. I remember we had a picked baseball nine, and on Sundays we made a practice of putting it all over the local nines. Sometimes we did it twice on Sundays. Last year, while on a lecturing trip, I rode into Des Moines in a Pullman--I don't mean a "side-door Pullman," but the real thing. On the outskirts of the city I saw the old stove-works, and my heart leaped. It was there, at the stove-works, a dozen years before, that the Army lay down and swore a mighty oath that its feet were sore and that it would walk no more. We took possession of the stove-works and told Des Moines that we had come to stay--that we'd walked in, but we'd be blessed if we'd walk out. Des Moines was hospitable, but this was too much of a good thing. Do a little mental arithmetic, gentle reader. Two thousand hoboes, eating three square meals, make six thousand meals per day, forty-two thousand meals per week, or one hundred and sixty-eight thousand meals per shortest month in the calendar. That's going some. We had no money. It was up to Des Moines. Des Moines was desperate. We lay in camp, made political speeches, held sacred concerts, pulled teeth, played baseball and seven-up, and ate our six thousand meals per day, and Des Moines paid for it. Des Moines pleaded with the railroads, but they were obdurate; they had said we shouldn't ride, and that settled it. To permit us to ride would be to establish a precedent, and there weren't going to be any precedents. And still we went on eating. That was the terrifying factor in the situation. We were bound for Washington, and Des Moines would have had to float municipal bonds to pay all our railroad fares, even at special rates, and if we remained much longer, she'd have to float bonds anyway to feed us. Then some local genius solved the problem. We wouldn't walk. Very good. We should ride. From Des Moines to Keokuk on the Mississippi flowed the Des Moines River. This particular stretch of river was three hundred miles long. We could ride on it, said the local genius; and, once equipped with floating stock, we could ride on down the Mississippi to the Ohio, and thence up the Ohio, winding up with a short portage over the mountains to Washington. Des Moines took up a subscription. Public-spirited citizens contributed several thousand dollars. Lumber, rope, nails, and cotton for calking were bought in large quantities, and on the banks of the Des Moines was inaugurated a tremendous era of shipbuilding. Now the Des Moines is a picayune stream, unduly dignified by the appellation of "river." In our spacious western land it would be called a "creek." The oldest inhabitants shook their heads and said we couldn't make it, that there wasn't enough water to float us. Des Moines didn't care, so long as it got rid of us, and we were such well-fed optimists that we didn't care either. On Wednesday, May 9, 1894, we got under way and started on our colossal picnic. Des Moines had got off pretty easily, and she certainly owes a statue in bronze to the local genius who got her out of her difficulty. True, Des Moines had to pay for our boats; we had eaten sixty-six thousand meals at the stove-works; and we took twelve thousand additional meals along with us in our commissary--as a precaution against famine in the wilds; but then, think what it would have meant if we had remained at Des Moines eleven months instead of eleven days. Also, when we departed, we promised Des Moines we'd come back if the river failed to float us. It was all very well having twelve thousand meals in the commissary, and no doubt the commissary "ducks" enjoyed them; for the commissary promptly got lost, and my boat, for one, never saw it again. The company formation was hopelessly broken up during the river-trip. In any camp of men there will always be found a certain percentage of shirks, of helpless, of just ordinary, and of hustlers. There were ten men in my boat, and they were the cream of Company L. Every man was a hustler. For two reasons I was included in the ten. First, I was as good a hustler as ever "threw his feet," and next, I was "Sailor Jack." I understood boats and boating. The ten of us forgot the remaining forty men of Company L, and by the time we had missed one meal we promptly forgot the commissary. We were independent. We went down the river "on our own," hustling our "chewin's," beating every boat in the fleet, and, alas that I must say it, sometimes taking possession of the stores the farmer-folk had collected for the Army. For a good part of the three hundred miles we were from half a day to a day or so in advance of the Army. We had managed to get hold of several American flags. When we approached a small town, or when we saw a group of farmers gathered on the bank, we ran up our flags, called ourselves the "advance boat," and demanded to know what provisions had been collected for the Army. We represented the Army, of course, and the provisions were turned over to us. But there wasn't anything small about us. We never took more than we could get away with. But we did take the cream of everything. For instance, if some philanthropic farmer had donated several dollars' worth of tobacco, we took it. So, also, we took butter and sugar, coffee and canned goods; but when the stores consisted of sacks of beans and flour, or two or three slaughtered steers, we resolutely refrained and went our way, leaving orders to turn such provisions over to the commissary boats whose business was to follow behind us. My, but the ten of us did live on the fat of the land! For a long time General Kelly vainly tried to head us off. He sent two rowers, in a light, round-bottomed boat, to overtake us and put a stop to our piratical careers. They overtook us all right, but they were two and we were ten. They were empowered by General Kelly to make us prisoners, and they told us so. When we expressed disinclination to become prisoners, they hurried ahead to the next town to invoke the aid of the authorities. We went ashore immediately and cooked an early supper; and under the cloak of darkness we ran by the town and its authorities. I kept a diary on part of the trip, and as I read it over now I note one persistently recurring phrase, namely, "Living fine." We did live fine. We even disdained to use coffee boiled in water. We made our coffee out of milk, calling the wonderful beverage, if I remember rightly, "pale Vienna." While we were ahead, skimming the cream, and while the commissary was lost far behind, the main Army, coming along in the middle, starved. This was hard on the Army, I'll allow; but then, the ten of us were individualists. We had initiative and enterprise. We ardently believed that the grub was to the man who got there first, the pale Vienna to the strong. On one stretch the Army went forty-eight hours without grub; and then it arrived at a small village of some three hundred inhabitants, the name of which I do not remember, though I think it was Red Rock. This town, following the practice of all towns through which the Army passed, had appointed a committee of safety. Counting five to a family, Red Rock consisted of sixty households. Her committee of safety was scared stiff by the eruption of two thousand hungry hoboes who lined their boats two and three deep along the river bank. General Kelly was a fair man. He had no intention of working a hardship on the village. He did not expect sixty households to furnish two thousand meals. Besides, the Army had its treasure-chest. But the committee of safety lost its head. "No encouragement to the invader" was its programme, and when General Kelly wanted to buy food, the committee turned him down. It had nothing to sell; General Kelly's money was "no good" in their burg. And then General Kelly went into action. The bugles blew. The Army left the boats and on top of the bank formed in battle array. The committee was there to see. General Kelly's speech was brief. "Boys," he said, "when did you eat last?" "Day before yesterday," they shouted. "Are you hungry?" A mighty affirmation from two thousand throats shook the atmosphere. Then General Kelly turned to the committee of safety:-- "You see, gentlemen, the situation. My men have eaten nothing in forty-eight hours. If I turn them loose upon your town, I'll not be responsible for what happens. They are desperate. I offered to buy food for them, but you refused to sell. I now withdraw my offer. Instead, I shall demand. I give you five minutes to decide. Either kill me six steers and give me four thousand rations, or I turn the men loose. Five minutes, gentlemen." The terrified committee of safety looked at the two thousand hungry hoboes and collapsed. It didn't wait the five minutes. It wasn't going to take any chances. The killing of the steers and the collecting of the requisition began forthwith, and the Army dined. And still the ten graceless individualists soared along ahead and gathered in everything in sight. But General Kelly fixed us. He sent horsemen down each bank, warning farmers and townspeople against us. They did their work thoroughly, all right. The erstwhile hospitable farmers met us with the icy mit. Also, they summoned the constables when we tied up to the bank, and loosed the dogs. I know. Two of the latter caught me with a barbed-wire fence between me and the river. I was carrying two buckets of milk for the pale Vienna. I didn't damage the fence any; but we drank plebian coffee boiled with vulgar water, and it was up to me to throw my feet for another pair of trousers. I wonder, gentle reader, if you ever essayed hastily to climb a barbed-wire fence with a bucket of milk in each hand. Ever since that day I have had a prejudice against barbed wire, and I have gathered statistics on the subject. Unable to make an honest living so long as General Kelly kept his two horsemen ahead of us, we returned to the Army and raised a revolution. It was a small affair, but it devastated Company L of the Second Division. The captain of Company L refused to recognize us; said we were deserters, and traitors, and scalawags; and when he drew rations for Company L from the commissary, he wouldn't give us any. That captain didn't appreciate us, or he wouldn't have refused us grub. Promptly we intrigued with the first lieutenant. He joined us with the ten men in his boat, and in return we elected him captain of Company M. The captain of Company L raised a roar. Down upon us came General Kelly, Colonel Speed, and Colonel Baker. The twenty of us stood firm, and our revolution was ratified. But we never bothered with the commissary. Our hustlers drew better rations from the farmers. Our new captain, however, doubted us. He never knew when he'd see the ten of us again, once we got under way in the morning, so he called in a blacksmith to clinch his captaincy. In the stern of our boat, one on each side, were driven two heavy eye-bolts of iron. Correspondingly, on the bow of his boat, were fastened two huge iron hooks. The boats were brought together, end on, the hooks dropped into the eye-bolts, and there we were, hard and fast. We couldn't lose that captain. But we were irrepressible. Out of our very manacles we wrought an invincible device that enabled us to put it all over every other boat in the fleet. Like all great inventions, this one of ours was accidental. We discovered it the first time we ran on a snag in a bit of a rapid. The head-boat hung up and anchored, and the tail-boat swung around in the current, pivoting the head-boat on the snag. I was at the stern of the tail-boat, steering. In vain we tried to shove off. Then I ordered the men from the head-boat into the tail-boat. Immediately the head-boat floated clear, and its men returned into it. After that, snags, reefs, shoals, and bars had no terrors for us. The instant the head-boat struck, the men in it leaped into the tail-boat. Of course, the head-boat floated over the obstruction and the tail-boat then struck. Like automatons, the twenty men now in the tail-boat leaped into the head-boat, and the tail-boat floated past. The boats used by the Army were all alike, made by the mile and sawed off. They were flat-boats, and their lines were rectangles. Each boat was six feet wide, ten feet long, and a foot and a half deep. Thus, when our two boats were hooked together, I sat at the stern steering a craft twenty feet long, containing twenty husky hoboes who "spelled" each other at the oars and paddles, and loaded with blankets, cooking outfit, and our own private commissary. Still we caused General Kelly trouble. He had called in his horsemen, and substituted three police-boats that travelled in the van and allowed no boats to pass them. The craft containing Company M crowded the police-boats hard. We could have passed them easily, but it was against the rules. So we kept a respectful distance astern and waited. Ahead we knew was virgin farming country, unbegged and generous; but we waited. White water was all we needed, and when we rounded a bend and a rapid showed up we knew what would happen. Smash! Police-boat number one goes on a boulder and hangs up. Bang! Police-boat number two follows suit. Whop! Police-boat number three encounters the common fate of all. Of course our boat does the same things; but one, two, the men are out of the head-boat and into the tail-boat; one, two, they are out of the tail-boat and into the head-boat; and one, two, the men who belong in the tail-boat are back in it and we are dashing on. "Stop! you blankety-blank-blanks!" shriek the police-boats. "How can we?--blank the blankety-blank river, anyway!" we wail plaintively as we surge past, caught in that remorseless current that sweeps us on out of sight and into the hospitable farmer-country that replenishes our private commissary with the cream of its contributions. Again we drink pale Vienna and realize that the grub is to the man who gets there. Poor General Kelly! He devised another scheme. The whole fleet started ahead of us. Company M of the Second Division started in its proper place in the line, which was last. And it took us only one day to put the "kibosh" on that particular scheme. Twenty-five miles of bad water lay before us--all rapids, shoals, bars, and boulders. It was over that stretch of water that the oldest inhabitants of Des Moines had shaken their heads. Nearly two hundred boats entered the bad water ahead of us, and they piled up in the most astounding manner. We went through that stranded fleet like hemlock through the fire. There was no avoiding the boulders, bars, and snags except by getting out on the bank. We didn't avoid them. We went right over them, one, two, one, two, head-boat, tail-boat, head-boat, tail-boat, all hands back and forth and back again. We camped that night alone, and loafed in camp all of next day while the Army patched and repaired its wrecked boats and straggled up to us. There was no stopping our cussedness. We rigged up a mast, piled on the canvas (blankets), and travelled short hours while the Army worked over-time to keep us in sight. Then General Kelly had recourse to diplomacy. No boat could touch us in the straight-away. Without discussion, we were the hottest bunch that ever came down the Des Moines. The ban of the police-boats was lifted. Colonel Speed was put aboard, and with this distinguished officer we had the honor of arriving first at Keokuk on the Mississippi. And right here I want to say to General Kelly and Colonel Speed that here's my hand. You were heroes, both of you, and you were men. And I'm sorry for at least ten per cent of the trouble that was given you by the head-boat of Company M. At Keokuk the whole fleet was lashed together in a huge raft, and, after being wind-bound a day, a steamboat took us in tow down the Mississippi to Quincy, Illinois, where we camped across the river on Goose Island. Here the raft idea was abandoned, the boats being joined together in groups of four and decked over. Somebody told me that Quincy was the richest town of its size in the United States. When I heard this, I was immediately overcome by an irresistible impulse to throw my feet. No "blowed-in-the-glass profesh" could possibly pass up such a promising burg. I crossed the river to Quincy in a small dug-out; but I came back in a large riverboat, down to the gunwales with the results of my thrown feet. Of course I kept all the money I had collected, though I paid the boat-hire; also I took my pick of the underwear, socks, cast-off clothes, shirts, "kicks," and "sky-pieces"; and when Company M had taken all it wanted there was still a respectable heap that was turned over to Company L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! I told a thousand "stories" to the good people of Quincy, and every story was "good"; but since I have come to write for the magazines I have often regretted the wealth of story, the fecundity of fiction, I lavished that day in Quincy, Illinois. It was at Hannibal, Missouri, that the ten invincibles went to pieces. It was not planned. We just naturally flew apart. The Boiler-Maker and I deserted secretly. On the same day Scotty and Davy made a swift sneak for the Illinois shore; also McAvoy and Fish achieved their get-away. This accounts for six of the ten; what became of the remaining four I do not know. As a sample of life on The Road, I make the following quotation from my diary of the several days following my desertion. "Friday, May 25th. Boiler-Maker and I left the camp on the island. We went ashore on the Illinois side in a skiff and walked six miles on the C.B. & Q. to Fell Creek. We had gone six miles out of our way, but we got on a hand-car and rode six miles to Hull's, on the Wabash. While there, we met McAvoy, Fish, Scotty, and Davy, who had also pulled out from the Army. "Saturday, May 26th. At 2.11 A.M. we caught the Cannonball as she slowed up at the crossing. Scotty and Davy were ditched. The four of us were ditched at the Bluffs, forty miles farther on. In the afternoon Fish and McAvoy caught a freight while Boiler-Maker and I were away getting something to eat. "Sunday, May 27th. At 3.21 A.M. we caught the Cannonball and found Scotty and Davy on the blind. We were all ditched at daylight at Jacksonville. The C. & A. runs through here, and we're going to take that. Boiler-Maker went off, but didn't return. Guess he caught a freight. "Monday, May 28th. Boiler-Maker didn't show up. Scotty and Davy went off to sleep somewhere, and didn't get back in time to catch the K.C. passenger at 3.30 A.M. I caught her and rode her till after sunrise to Masson City, 25,000 inhabitants. Caught a cattle train and rode all night. "Tuesday, May 29th. Arrived in Chicago at 7 A.M...." * * * * * And years afterward, in China, I had the grief of learning that the device we employed to navigate the rapids of the Des Moines--the one-two-one-two, head-boat-tail-boat proposition--was not originated by us. I learned that the Chinese river-boatmen had for thousands of years used a similar device to negotiate "bad water." It is a good stunt all right, even if we don't get the credit. It answers Dr. Jordan's test of truth: "Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?" BULLS If the tramp were suddenly to pass away from the United States, widespread misery for many families would follow. The tramp enables thousands of men to earn honest livings, educate their children, and bring them up God-fearing and industrious. I know. At one time my father was a constable and hunted tramps for a living. The community paid him so much per head for all the tramps he could catch, and also, I believe, he got mileage fees. Ways and means was always a pressing problem in our household, and the amount of meat on the table, the new pair of shoes, the day's outing, or the text-book for school, were dependent upon my father's luck in the chase. Well I remember the suppressed eagerness and the suspense with which I waited to learn each morning what the results of his past night's toil had been--how many tramps he had gathered in and what the chances were for convicting them. And so it was, when later, as a tramp, I succeeded in eluding some predatory constable, I could not but feel sorry for the little boys and girls at home in that constable's house; it seemed to me in a way that I was defrauding those little boys and girls of some of the good things of life. But it's all in the game. The hobo defies society, and society's watch-dogs make a living out of him. Some hoboes like to be caught by the watch-dogs--especially in winter-time. Of course, such hoboes select communities where the jails are "good," wherein no work is performed and the food is substantial. Also, there have been, and most probably still are, constables who divide their fees with the hoboes they arrest. Such a constable does not have to hunt. He whistles, and the game comes right up to his hand. It is surprising, the money that is made out of stone-broke tramps. All through the South--at least when I was hoboing--are convict camps and plantations, where the time of convicted hoboes is bought by the farmers, and where the hoboes simply have to work. Then there are places like the quarries at Rutland, Vermont, where the hobo is exploited, the unearned energy in his body, which he has accumulated by "battering on the drag" or "slamming gates," being extracted for the benefit of that particular community. Now I don't know anything about the quarries at Rutland, Vermont. I'm very glad that I don't, when I remember how near I was to getting into them. Tramps pass the word along, and I first heard of those quarries when I was in Indiana. But when I got into New England, I heard of them continually, and always with danger-signals flying. "They want men in the quarries," the passing hoboes said; "and they never give a 'stiff' less than ninety days." By the time I got into New Hampshire I was pretty well keyed up over those quarries, and I fought shy of railroad cops, "bulls," and constables as I never had before. One evening I went down to the railroad yards at Concord and found a freight train made up and ready to start. I located an empty box-car, slid open the side-door, and climbed in. It was my hope to win across to White River by morning; that would bring me into Vermont and not more than a thousand miles from Rutland. But after that, as I worked north, the distance between me and the point of danger would begin to increase. In the car I found a "gay-cat," who displayed unusual trepidation at my entrance. He took me for a "shack" (brakeman), and when he learned I was only a stiff, he began talking about the quarries at Rutland as the cause of the fright I had given him. He was a young country fellow, and had beaten his way only over local stretches of road. The freight got under way, and we lay down in one end of the box-car and went to sleep. Two or three hours afterward, at a stop, I was awakened by the noise of the right-hand door being softly slid open. The gay-cat slept on. I made no movement, though I veiled my eyes with my lashes to a little slit through which I could see out. A lantern was thrust in through the doorway, followed by the head of a shack. He discovered us, and looked at us for a moment. I was prepared for a violent expression on his part, or the customary "Hit the grit, you son of a toad!" Instead of this he cautiously withdrew the lantern and very, very softly slid the door to. This struck me as eminently unusual and suspicious. I listened, and softly I heard the hasp drop into place. The door was latched on the outside. We could not open it from the inside. One way of sudden exit from that car was blocked. It would never do. I waited a few seconds, then crept to the left-hand door and tried it. It was not yet latched. I opened it, dropped to the ground, and closed it behind me. Then I passed across the bumpers to the other side of the train. I opened the door the shack had latched, climbed in, and closed it behind me. Both exits were available again. The gay-cat was still asleep. The train got under way. It came to the next stop. I heard footsteps in the gravel. Then the left-hand door was thrown open noisily. The gay-cat awoke, I made believe to awake; and we sat up and stared at the shack and his lantern. He didn't waste any time getting down to business. "I want three dollars," he said. We got on our feet and came nearer to him to confer. We expressed an absolute and devoted willingness to give him three dollars, but explained our wretched luck that compelled our desire to remain unsatisfied. The shack was incredulous. He dickered with us. He would compromise for two dollars. We regretted our condition of poverty. He said uncomplimentary things, called us sons of toads, and damned us from hell to breakfast. Then he threatened. He explained that if we didn't dig up, he'd lock us in and carry us on to White River and turn us over to the authorities. He also explained all about the quarries at Rutland. Now that shack thought he had us dead to rights. Was not he guarding the one door, and had he not himself latched the opposite door but a few minutes before? When he began talking about quarries, the frightened gay-cat started to sidle across to the other door. The shack laughed loud and long. "Don't be in a hurry," he said; "I locked that door on the outside at the last stop." So implicitly did he believe the door to be locked that his words carried conviction. The gay-cat believed and was in despair. The shack delivered his ultimatum. Either we should dig up two dollars, or he would lock us in and turn us over to the constable at White River--and that meant ninety days and the quarries. Now, gentle reader, just suppose that the other door had been locked. Behold the precariousness of human life. For lack of a dollar, I'd have gone to the quarries and served three months as a convict slave. So would the gay-cat. Count me out, for I was hopeless; but consider the gay-cat. He might have come out, after those ninety days, pledged to a life of crime. And later he might have broken your skull, even your skull, with a blackjack in an endeavor to take possession of the money on your person--and if not your skull, then some other poor and unoffending creature's skull. But the door was unlocked, and I alone knew it. The gay-cat and I begged for mercy. I joined in the pleading and wailing out of sheer cussedness, I suppose. But I did my best. I told a "story" that would have melted the heart of any mug; but it didn't melt the heart of that sordid money-grasper of a shack. When he became convinced that we didn't have any money, he slid the door shut and latched it, then lingered a moment on the chance that we had fooled him and that we would now offer him the two dollars. Then it was that I let out a few links. I called him a son of a toad. I called him all the other things he had called me. And then I called him a few additional things. I came from the West, where men knew how to swear, and I wasn't going to let any mangy shack on a measly New England "jerk" put it over me in vividness and vigor of language. At first the shack tried to laugh it down. Then he made the mistake of attempting to reply. I let out a few more links, and I cut him to the raw and therein rubbed winged and flaming epithets. Nor was my fine frenzy all whim and literary; I was indignant at this vile creature, who, in default of a dollar, would consign me to three months of slavery. Furthermore, I had a sneaking idea that he got a "drag" out of the constable fees. But I fixed him. I lacerated his feelings and pride several dollars' worth. He tried to scare me by threatening to come in after me and kick the stuffing out of me. In return, I promised to kick him in the face while he was climbing in. The advantage of position was with me, and he saw it. So he kept the door shut and called for help from the rest of the train-crew. I could hear them answering and crunching through the gravel to him. And all the time the other door was unlatched, and they didn't know it; and in the meantime the gay-cat was ready to die with fear. Oh, I was a hero--with my line of retreat straight behind me. I slanged the shack and his mates till they threw the door open and I could see their infuriated faces in the shine of the lanterns. It was all very simple to them. They had us cornered in the car, and they were going to come in and man-handle us. They started. I didn't kick anybody in the face. I jerked the opposite door open, and the gay-cat and I went out. The train-crew took after us. We went over--if I remember correctly--a stone fence. But I have no doubts of recollection about where we found ourselves. In the darkness I promptly fell over a grave-stone. The gay-cat sprawled over another. And then we got the chase of our lives through that graveyard. The ghosts must have thought we were going some. So did the train-crew, for when we emerged from the graveyard and plunged across a road into a dark wood, the shacks gave up the pursuit and went back to their train. A little later that night the gay-cat and I found ourselves at the well of a farmhouse. We were after a drink of water, but we noticed a small rope that ran down one side of the well. We hauled it up and found on the end of it a gallon-can of cream. And that is as near as I got to the quarries of Rutland, Vermont. When hoboes pass the word along, concerning a town, that "the bulls is horstile," avoid that town, or, if you must, go through softly. There are some towns that one must always go through softly. Such a town was Cheyenne, on the Union Pacific. It had a national reputation for being "horstile,"--and it was all due to the efforts of one Jeff Carr (if I remember his name aright). Jeff Carr could size up the "front" of a hobo on the instant. He never entered into discussion. In the one moment he sized up the hobo, and in the next he struck out with both fists, a club, or anything else he had handy. After he had man-handled the hobo, he started him out of town with a promise of worse if he ever saw him again. Jeff Carr knew the game. North, south, east, and west to the uttermost confines of the United States (Canada and Mexico included), the man-handled hoboes carried the word that Cheyenne was "horstile." Fortunately, I never encountered Jeff Carr. I passed through Cheyenne in a blizzard. There were eighty-four hoboes with me at the time. The strength of numbers made us pretty nonchalant on most things, but not on Jeff Carr. The connotation of "Jeff Carr" stunned our imagination, numbed our virility, and the whole gang was mortally scared of meeting him. It rarely pays to stop and enter into explanations with bulls when they look "horstile." A swift get-away is the thing to do. It took me some time to learn this; but the finishing touch was put upon me by a bull in New York City. Ever since that time it has been an automatic process with me to make a run for it when I see a bull reaching for me. This automatic process has become a mainspring of conduct in me, wound up and ready for instant release. I shall never get over it. Should I be eighty years old, hobbling along the street on crutches, and should a policeman suddenly reach out for me, I know I'd drop the crutches and run like a deer. The finishing touch to my education in bulls was received on a hot summer afternoon in New York City. It was during a week of scorching weather. I had got into the habit of throwing my feet in the morning, and of spending the afternoon in the little park that is hard by Newspaper Row and the City Hall. It was near there that I could buy from pushcart men current books (that had been injured in the making or binding) for a few cents each. Then, right in the park itself, were little booths where one could buy glorious, ice-cold, sterilized milk and buttermilk at a penny a glass. Every afternoon I sat on a bench and read, and went on a milk debauch. I got away with from five to ten glasses each afternoon. It was dreadfully hot weather. So here I was, a meek and studious milk-drinking hobo, and behold what I got for it. One afternoon I arrived at the park, a fresh book-purchase under my arm and a tremendous buttermilk thirst under my shirt. In the middle of the street, in front of the City Hall, I noticed, as I came along heading for the buttermilk booth, that a crowd had formed. It was right where I was crossing the street, so I stopped to see the cause of the collection of curious men. At first I could see nothing. Then, from the sounds I heard and from a glimpse I caught, I knew that it was a bunch of gamins playing pee-wee. Now pee-wee is not permitted in the streets of New York. I didn't know that, but I learned pretty lively. I had paused possibly thirty seconds, in which time I had learned the cause of the crowd, when I heard a gamin yell "Bull!" The gamins knew their business. They ran. I didn't. The crowd broke up immediately and started for the sidewalk on both sides of the street. I started for the sidewalk on the park-side. There must have been fifty men, who had been in the original crowd, who were heading in the same direction. We were loosely strung out. I noticed the bull, a strapping policeman in a gray suit. He was coming along the middle of the street, without haste, merely sauntering. I noticed casually that he changed his course, and was heading obliquely for the same sidewalk that I was heading for directly. He sauntered along, threading the strung-out crowd, and I noticed that his course and mine would cross each other. I was so innocent of wrong-doing that, in spite of my education in bulls and their ways, I apprehended nothing. I never dreamed that bull was after me. Out of my respect for the law I was actually all ready to pause the next moment and let him cross in front of me. The pause came all right, but it was not of my volition; also it was a backward pause. Without warning, that bull had suddenly launched out at me on the chest with both hands. At the same moment, verbally, he cast the bar sinister on my genealogy. All my free American blood boiled. All my liberty-loving ancestors clamored in me. "What do you mean?" I demanded. You see, I wanted an explanation. And I got it. Bang! His club came down on top of my head, and I was reeling backward like a drunken man, the curious faces of the onlookers billowing up and down like the waves of the sea, my precious book falling from under my arm into the dirt, the bull advancing with the club ready for another blow. And in that dizzy moment I had a vision. I saw that club descending many times upon my head; I saw myself, bloody and battered and hard-looking, in a police-court; I heard a charge of disorderly conduct, profane language, resisting an officer, and a few other things, read by a clerk; and I saw myself across in Blackwell's Island. Oh, I knew the game. I lost all interest in explanations. I didn't stop to pick up my precious, unread book. I turned and ran. I was pretty sick, but I ran. And run I shall, to my dying day, whenever a bull begins to explain with a club. Why, years after my tramping days, when I was a student in the University of California, one night I went to the circus. After the show and the concert I lingered on to watch the working of the transportation machinery of a great circus. The circus was leaving that night. By a bonfire I came upon a bunch of small boys. There were about twenty of them, and as they talked with one another I learned that they were going to run away with the circus. Now the circus-men didn't want to be bothered with this mess of urchins, and a telephone to police headquarters had "coppered" the play. A squad of ten policemen had been despatched to the scene to arrest the small boys for violating the nine o'clock curfew ordinance. The policemen surrounded the bonfire, and crept up close to it in the darkness. At the signal, they made a rush, each policeman grabbing at the youngsters as he would grab into a basket of squirming eels. Now I didn't know anything about the coming of the police; and when I saw the sudden eruption of brass-buttoned, helmeted bulls, each of them reaching with both hands, all the forces and stability of my being were overthrown. Remained only the automatic process to run. And I ran. I didn't know I was running. I didn't know anything. It was, as I have said, automatic. There was no reason for me to run. I was not a hobo. I was a citizen of that community. It was my home town. I was guilty of no wrong-doing. I was a college man. I had even got my name in the papers, and I wore good clothes that had never been slept in. And yet I ran--blindly, madly, like a startled deer, for over a block. And when I came to myself, I noted that I was still running. It required a positive effort of will to stop those legs of mine. No, I'll never get over it. I can't help it. When a bull reaches, I run. Besides, I have an unhappy faculty for getting into jail. I have been in jail more times since I was a hobo than when I was one. I start out on a Sunday morning with a young lady on a bicycle ride. Before we can get outside the city limits we are arrested for passing a pedestrian on the sidewalk. I resolve to be more careful. The next time I am on a bicycle it is night-time and my acetylene-gas-lamp is misbehaving. I cherish the sickly flame carefully, because of the ordinance. I am in a hurry, but I ride at a snail's pace so as not to jar out the flickering flame. I reach the city limits; I am beyond the jurisdiction of the ordinance; and I proceed to scorch to make up for lost time. And half a mile farther on I am "pinched" by a bull, and the next morning I forfeit my bail in the police court. The city had treacherously extended its limits into a mile of the country, and I didn't know, that was all. I remember my inalienable right of free speech and peaceable assemblage, and I get up on a soap-box to trot out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet, and a bull takes me off that box and leads me to the city prison, and after that I get out on bail. It's no use. In Korea I used to be arrested about every other day. It was the same thing in Manchuria. The last time I was in Japan I broke into jail under the pretext of being a Russian spy. It wasn't my pretext, but it got me into jail just the same. There is no hope for me. I am fated to do the Prisoner-of-Chillon stunt yet. This is prophecy. I once hypnotized a bull on Boston Common. It was past midnight and he had me dead to rights; but before I got done with him he had ponied up a silver quarter and given me the address of an all-night restaurant. Then there was a bull in Bristol, New Jersey, who caught me and let me go, and heaven knows he had provocation enough to put me in jail. I hit him the hardest I'll wager he was ever hit in his life. It happened this way. About midnight I nailed a freight out of Philadelphia. The shacks ditched me. She was pulling out slowly through the maze of tracks and switches of the freight-yards. I nailed her again, and again I was ditched. You see, I had to nail her "outside," for she was a through freight with every door locked and sealed. The second time I was ditched the shack gave me a lecture. He told me I was risking my life, that it was a fast freight and that she went some. I told him I was used to going some myself, but it was no go. He said he wouldn't permit me to commit suicide, and I hit the grit. But I nailed her a third time, getting in between on the bumpers. They were the most meagre bumpers I had ever seen--I do not refer to the real bumpers, the iron bumpers that are connected by the coupling-link and that pound and grind on each other; what I refer to are the beams, like huge cleats, that cross the ends of freight cars just above the bumpers. When one rides the bumpers, he stands on these cleats, one foot on each, the bumpers between his feet and just beneath. But the beams or cleats I found myself on were not the broad, generous ones that at that time were usually on box-cars. On the contrary, they were very narrow--not more than an inch and a half in breadth. I couldn't get half of the width of my sole on them. Then there was nothing to which to hold with my hands. True, there were the ends of the two box-cars; but those ends were flat, perpendicular surfaces. There were no grips. I could only press the flats of my palms against the car-ends for support. But that would have been all right if the cleats for my feet had been decently wide. As the freight got out of Philadelphia she began to hit up speed. Then I understood what the shack had meant by suicide. The freight went faster and faster. She was a through freight, and there was nothing to stop her. On that section of the Pennsylvania four tracks run side by side, and my east-bound freight didn't need to worry about passing west-bound freights, nor about being overtaken by east-bound expresses. She had the track to herself, and she used it. I was in a precarious situation. I stood with the mere edges of my feet on the narrow projections, the palms of my hands pressing desperately against the flat, perpendicular ends of each car. And those cars moved, and moved individually, up and down and back and forth. Did you ever see a circus rider, standing on two running horses, with one foot on the back of each horse? Well, that was what I was doing, with several differences. The circus rider had the reins to hold on to, while I had nothing; he stood on the broad soles of his feet, while I stood on the edges of mine; he bent his legs and body, gaining the strength of the arch in his posture and achieving the stability of a low centre of gravity, while I was compelled to stand upright and keep my legs straight; he rode face forward, while I was riding sidewise; and also, if he fell off, he'd get only a roll in the sawdust, while I'd have been ground to pieces beneath the wheels. And that freight was certainly going some, roaring and shrieking, swinging madly around curves, thundering over trestles, one car-end bumping up when the other was jarring down, or jerking to the right at the same moment the other was lurching to the left, and with me all the while praying and hoping for the train to stop. But she didn't stop. She didn't have to. For the first, last, and only time on The Road, I got all I wanted. I abandoned the bumpers and managed to get out on a side-ladder; it was ticklish work, for I had never encountered car-ends that were so parsimonious of hand-holds and foot-holds as those car-ends were. I heard the engine whistling, and I felt the speed easing down. I knew the train wasn't going to stop, but my mind was made up to chance it if she slowed down sufficiently. The right of way at this point took a curve, crossed a bridge over a canal, and cut through the town of Bristol. This combination compelled slow speed. I clung on to the side-ladder and waited. I didn't know it was the town of Bristol we were approaching. I did not know what necessitated slackening in speed. All I knew was that I wanted to get off. I strained my eyes in the darkness for a street-crossing on which to land. I was pretty well down the train, and before my car was in the town the engine was past the station and I could feel her making speed again. Then came the street. It was too dark to see how wide it was or what was on the other side. I knew I needed all of that street if I was to remain on my feet after I struck. I dropped off on the near side. It sounds easy. By "dropped off" I mean just this: I first of all, on the side-ladder, thrust my body forward as far as I could in the direction the train was going--this to give as much space as possible in which to gain backward momentum when I swung off. Then I swung, swung out and backward, backward with all my might, and let go--at the same time throwing myself backward as if I intended to strike the ground on the back of my head. The whole effort was to overcome as much as possible the primary forward momentum the train had imparted to my body. When my feet hit the grit, my body was lying backward on the air at an angle of forty-five degrees. I had reduced the forward momentum some, for when my feet struck, I did not immediately pitch forward on my face. Instead, my body rose to the perpendicular and began to incline forward. In point of fact, my body proper still retained much momentum, while my feet, through contact with the earth, had lost all their momentum. This momentum the feet had lost I had to supply anew by lifting them as rapidly as I could and running them forward in order to keep them under my forward-moving body. The result was that my feet beat a rapid and explosive tattoo clear across the street. I didn't dare stop them. If I had, I'd have pitched forward. It was up to me to keep on going. I was an involuntary projectile, worrying about what was on the other side of the street and hoping that it wouldn't be a stone wall or a telegraph pole. And just then I hit something. Horrors! I saw it just the instant before the disaster--of all things, a bull, standing there in the darkness. We went down together, rolling over and over; and the automatic process was such in that miserable creature that in the moment of impact he reached out and clutched me and never let go. We were both knocked out, and he held on to a very lamb-like hobo while he recovered. If that bull had any imagination, he must have thought me a traveller from other worlds, the man from Mars just arriving; for in the darkness he hadn't seen me swing from the train. In fact, his first words were: "Where did you come from?" His next words, and before I had time to answer, were: "I've a good mind to run you in." This latter, I am convinced, was likewise automatic. He was a really good bull at heart, for after I had told him a "story" and helped brush off his clothes, he gave me until the next freight to get out of town. I stipulated two things: first, that the freight be east-bound, and second, that it should not be a through freight with all doors sealed and locked. To this he agreed, and thus, by the terms of the Treaty of Bristol, I escaped being pinched. I remember another night, in that part of the country, when I just missed another bull. If I had hit him, I'd have telescoped him, for I was coming down from above, all holds free, with several other bulls one jump behind and reaching for me. This is how it happened. I had been lodging in a livery stable in Washington. I had a box-stall and unnumbered horse-blankets all to myself. In return for such sumptuous accommodation I took care of a string of horses each morning. I might have been there yet, if it hadn't been for the bulls. One evening, about nine o'clock, I returned to the stable to go to bed, and found a crap game in full blast. It had been a market day, and all the negroes had money. It would be well to explain the lay of the land. The livery stable faced on two streets. I entered the front, passed through the office, and came to the alley between two rows of stalls that ran the length of the building and opened out on the other street. Midway along this alley, beneath a gas-jet and between the rows of horses, were about forty negroes. I joined them as an onlooker. I was broke and couldn't play. A coon was making passes and not dragging down. He was riding his luck, and with each pass the total stake doubled. All kinds of money lay on the floor. It was fascinating. With each pass, the chances increased tremendously against the coon making another pass. The excitement was intense. And just then there came a thundering smash on the big doors that opened on the back street. A few of the negroes bolted in the opposite direction. I paused from my flight a moment to grab at the all kinds of money on the floor. This wasn't theft: it was merely custom. Every man who hadn't run was grabbing. The doors crashed open and swung in, and through them surged a squad of bulls. We surged the other way. It was dark in the office, and the narrow door would not permit all of us to pass out to the street at the same time. Things became congested. A coon took a dive through the window, taking the sash along with him and followed by other coons. At our rear, the bulls were nailing prisoners. A big coon and myself made a dash at the door at the same time. He was bigger than I, and he pivoted me and got through first. The next instant a club swatted him on the head and he went down like a steer. Another squad of bulls was waiting outside for us. They knew they couldn't stop the rush with their hands, and so they were swinging their clubs. I stumbled over the fallen coon who had pivoted me, ducked a swat from a club, dived between a bull's legs, and was free. And then how I ran! There was a lean mulatto just in front of me, and I took his pace. He knew the town better than I did, and I knew that in the way he ran lay safety. But he, on the other hand, took me for a pursuing bull. He never looked around. He just ran. My wind was good, and I hung on to his pace and nearly killed him. In the end he stumbled weakly, went down on his knees, and surrendered to me. And when he discovered I wasn't a bull, all that saved me was that he didn't have any wind left in him. That was why I left Washington--not on account of the mulatto, but on account of the bulls. I went down to the depot and caught the first blind out on a Pennsylvania Railroad express. After the train got good and under way and I noted the speed she was making, a misgiving smote me. This was a four-track railroad, and the engines took water on the fly. Hoboes had long since warned me never to ride the first blind on trains where the engines took water on the fly. And now let me explain. Between the tracks are shallow metal troughs. As the engine, at full speed, passes above, a sort of chute drops down into the trough. The result is that all the water in the trough rushes up the chute and fills the tender. Somewhere along between Washington and Baltimore, as I sat on the platform of the blind, a fine spray began to fill the air. It did no harm. Ah, ha, thought I; it's all a bluff, this taking water on the fly being bad for the bo on the first blind. What does this little spray amount to? Then I began to marvel at the device. This was railroading! Talk about your primitive Western railroading--and just then the tender filled up, and it hadn't reached the end of the trough. A tidal wave of water poured over the back of the tender and down upon me. I was soaked to the skin, as wet as if I had fallen overboard. The train pulled into Baltimore. As is the custom in the great Eastern cities, the railroad ran beneath the level of the streets on the bottom of a big "cut." As the train pulled into the lighted depot, I made myself as small as possible on the blind. But a railroad bull saw me, and gave chase. Two more joined him. I was past the depot, and I ran straight on down the track. I was in a sort of trap. On each side of me rose the steep walls of the cut, and if I ever essayed them and failed, I knew that I'd slide back into the clutches of the bulls. I ran on and on, studying the walls of the cut for a favorable place to climb up. At last I saw such a place. It came just after I had passed under a bridge that carried a level street across the cut. Up the steep slope I went, clawing hand and foot. The three railroad bulls were clawing up right after me. At the top, I found myself in a vacant lot. On one side was a low wall that separated it from the street. There was no time for minute investigation. They were at my heels. I headed for the wall and vaulted it. And right there was where I got the surprise of my life. One is used to thinking that one side of a wall is just as high as the other side. But that wall was different. You see, the vacant lot was much higher than the level of the street. On my side the wall was low, but on the other side--well, as I came soaring over the top, all holds free, it seemed to me that I was falling feet-first, plump into an abyss. There beneath me, on the sidewalk, under the light of a street-lamp was a bull. I guess it was nine or ten feet down to the sidewalk; but in the shock of surprise in mid-air it seemed twice that distance. I straightened out in the air and came down. At first I thought I was going to land on the bull. My clothes did brush him as my feet struck the sidewalk with explosive impact. It was a wonder he didn't drop dead, for he hadn't heard me coming. It was the man-from-Mars stunt over again. The bull did jump. He shied away from me like a horse from an auto; and then he reached for me. I didn't stop to explain. I left that to my pursuers, who were dropping over the wall rather gingerly. But I got a chase all right. I ran up one street and down another, dodged around corners, and at last got away. After spending some of the coin I'd got from the crap game and killing off an hour of time, I came back to the railroad cut, just outside the lights of the depot, and waited for a train. My blood had cooled down, and I shivered miserably, what of my wet clothes. At last a train pulled into the station. I lay low in the darkness, and successfully boarded her when she pulled out, taking good care this time to make the second blind. No more water on the fly in mine. The train ran forty miles to the first stop. I got off in a lighted depot that was strangely familiar. I was back in Washington. In some way, during the excitement of the get-away in Baltimore, running through strange streets, dodging and turning and retracing, I had got turned around. I had taken the train out the wrong way. I had lost a night's sleep, I had been soaked to the skin, I had been chased for my life; and for all my pains I was back where I had started. Oh, no, life on The Road is not all beer and skittles. But I didn't go back to the livery stable. I had done some pretty successful grabbing, and I didn't want to reckon up with the coons. So I caught the next train out, and ate my breakfast in Baltimore. 
25908	----	The Riverside Biographical Series NUMBER 11 [Illustration: Washington Irving] WASHINGTON IRVING BY HENRY W. BOYNTON BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HENRY W. BOYNTON * * * * * CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS 1 II. MAN ABOUT TOWN 16 III. MAN OF LETTERS--FIRST PERIOD 35 IV. MAN OF LETTERS--SECOND PERIOD 59 V. A PUBLIC CHARACTER 81 VI. THE MAN HIMSELF 105 * * * * * WASHINGTON IRVING I EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS Irving's name stands as the first landmark in American letters. No other American writer has won the same sort of recognition abroad or esteem at home as became his early in life. And he has lost very little ground, so far as we can judge by the appeal to figures. The copyright on his works ran out long since, and a great many editions of Irving, cheap and costly, complete and incomplete, have been issued from many sources. Yet his original publishers are now selling, year by year, more of his books than ever before. There is little doubt that his work is still widely read, and read not because it is prescribed, but because it gives pleasure; not as the product of a "standard author," but as the expression of a rich and engaging personality, which has written itself like an indorsement across the face of a young nation's literature. It is that of a man so sensitive that the scornful finger of a child might have left him sleepless; so kindly that nobody ever applied to him in vain for sympathy; so modest that the smallest praise embarrassed him. His manner and tastes were simple and unassuming. He had no great passions; the brother was stronger in him than the lover. To these qualities, which might by themselves belong to ineffectiveness, he added courage, firmness, magnanimity. It was because he was such a man, and because what he was shines on every page he wrote, that the world still warms to him. Not that so elusive a thing as personal charm can be neatly plotted by the card. We love certain people because we love them; and since that is so, everything they do is interesting to us. A great writer lives in his books, to be sure, but we want to know what he actually did in the flesh. Did he walk, eat, sleep, like other men? Was he as strong, as human, as lovable as one would think? What sort of boy was he? Did he marry a wife, and was she good enough for him? The world will never believe that such questions are impertinent. There are, of course, more formal matters to be considered,--his debt to circumstance, his place in the practical world, his influence on the moral or intellectual or national life of his day. Some of these themes may be touched on, even within the narrow limits of the present sketch; not categorically, but rather by way of such suggestion and indirection as may be consistent with a compact narrative. * * * * * One of those apparent chances which are the commonplaces of history led William Irving from his far home in the Orkneys, married him to Sarah Sanders, and made him the father of Washington Irving. The Irvings--a branch of the well-known Scotch Irvines--had been for generations the leading family on the Island of Shapinsha. Finally they had gone threadbare, and with a fortune to seek, William Irving chose the natural ordeal for an islander, the trial by sea. Toward the close of the French War he had become petty officer on an armed English packet. In New York he met Mistress Sanders, who was also English-born, and in 1761 they were married. He must have saved money, for at the end of the war he left the sea, and entered trade in New York. William Irving and his wife were very different in up-bringing and in temperament. He was a stern man, a strict Presbyterian, with the cold fire of Calvin in his bones. She had been bred an Episcopalian, and was genial and sympathetic by nature. The husband was the master-spirit, and the children grew up under the rigid exactions of his sect. Sunday was a long day of penance, and one of their two half-holidays was consecrated to the cheerful uses of the catechism. To New England ears it all has a familiar sound. When the children grew old enough they promptly left the fold and resigned themselves to her of Babylon and England. There were eleven of them, and Washington was the youngest, born in New York, April 3, 1783. As a very little child he had the honor of a pat on the head from his great namesake, for whom he was to do an important service many years later. He was a perfectly normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad the Sailor" as the end of all literary things. The savagery of boyhood he lacked. He was fond of playing battle, but could not bear to see his schoolfellows publicly thrashed, according to the amiable custom of that day. Otherwise he was all that a mother might deplore or an uncle delight in. Altogether the most interesting story of his schooldays has a dramatic setting. Addison's "Cato" was to be spouted in public by the schoolchildren. Irving, in the part of Juba, was called a little sooner than he expected, and came on the boards with his mouth full of honey-cake. Speech was out of the question--_vox haesit_--there was a momentary deadlock in his throat. The audience began to laugh, but the prince was not to be counted out. With a skillful rotary finger he removed the viand, and brought down the house by calmly taking up his lines as if nothing had happened. He was then ten years old, and deep in love with the leading lady. A year or two later he had decided to follow the sea; but a short experiment of sleeping on the floor and eating salt pork was too much for his enthusiasm, and at fourteen he gave up the ship. By this time he had begun to fancy that he could write, but there is nothing preserved which shows the least promise. "When I was young," he said long afterward, "I was led to think that somehow or other everything that was pleasant was wicked." The theatre was one of the forbidden sweets, and he naturally seized every chance to taste it. Family prayers at nine were something of an interruption, but he had managed a private exit by way of the roof which got him back to the theatre in time for the after-piece. This early liking for the stage he never outgrew. In the meantime he was going through with the ordinary schooling of the New York boy of that period. He learned a little Latin; he hated mathematics, and had very little love for dull books of any sort. At sixteen his formal education was over. Two of his elder brothers had studied at Columbia College, and no doubt Irving might have done the same. He was too lazy, or, to put it more gracefully, too little interested in set tasks. Later he expressed regret for the lost chance, but the loss cannot have been very great for him or for us. If we could imagine that he might have gained any sort of scholarship, its effect upon his writing would still be more than doubtful. His order of genius gains little from bookishness. Addison was supposed to be a classical scholar, but the "De Coverley Papers" are not a product of scholarship, and we could better spare anything else that he wrote. At sixteen Irving entered a law office, and for the next five years was understood to be studying law. He had no real aptitude for such study, to be sure, and must have known it; certainly he learned very little law. He had other things to be interested in. He was an eager reader in his own way, and a handsome, well-mannered boy, already fond of society. And I doubt if very much was expected of him in the way of steady application, for during this whole period his health was uncertain. More than once he had to give up study entirely, and go to this watering-place or that for weeks or months. His family and friends were afraid of consumption, and it was against all forecasts that he held his own till manhood. In 1800 he made his first voyage up the Hudson. "A voyage to Albany then," he wrote in 1851, "was equal to a voyage to Europe at present, and took almost as much time." The journey was made in a sloop manned by slaves, and commanded by a native of Albany, who spoke nothing but Dutch. Two years later his brother Peter became proprietor and editor of the New York "Morning Chronicle," for which Irving presently wrote a series of satirical letters signed "Jonathan Oldstyle." In these letters, his earliest work of any significance, he touches the Addisonian string upon which his critics have harped so insistently ever since. They are decidedly clever for a boy of nineteen, but not cleverer than the best college work of to-day, and perhaps more consciously imitative. The fact that they were greatly praised and gained some vogue through copying in other journals, is rather an indication of the unfruitfulness of the period than of their merit. One of their greatest admirers was Charles Brockden Browne, the only American before Irving to make a profession of writing. In 1804 the young amateur came of age. He was still threatened with consumption, and his family determined to send him abroad. Nobody felt very sanguine about his returning. As he was helped on board, the captain eyed him dubiously and said in an undertone, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across." If it had been in him to die just then, the captain gave him plenty of time; it was six weeks later when they landed at Bordeaux. But though the voyage had been not over-comfortable, it did him much good. Before the end of it he was scrambling about the vessel, and describes himself as "quite expert at climbing to the masthead, and going out on the maintopsail yard." Irving's body was never to be altogether tractable, but we shall hear nothing further of the consumptive tendency. His early letters from abroad are full of life and spirits. He jaunted about through France and Italy, picked up acquaintances everywhere, and was evidently much more interested in the people he met than in the "doing" of buildings or galleries. Evidently he was growing stronger all the time. In the company of a little Pennsylvania doctor, whom he had picked up in a diligence, he played several boyish pranks in France; he kicked out an insolent porter at Montpellier, and fell foul of a police spy at Avignon. In the main, however, he was inclined to take things as they came. "There is nothing I dread more," he wrote from Marseilles, "than to be taken for one of the Smellfungi of this world. I therefore endeavor to be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses, and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have 'all the dispositions in the world' to serve me; as Sterne says, 'It is enough for Heaven, and ought to be enough for me.'" At that day the European traveler was not hedged in from adventure. On the way from Genoa to Messina Irving's vessel was boarded by a piratical picaroon. The consequences were not dreadful, but the _mise en scène_ was all that could have been desired. The pirates had "fierce black eyes scowling under enormous bushy eyebrows.... They seemed to regard us with the most malignant looks, and I thought I could perceive a sinister smile upon their countenances, as if triumphing over us, who had fallen so easily into their hands." Nothing could have been more satisfactory. At Termini he had a romantic adventure with a masked Turk. At Genoa he was captivated by the beauty of a young Italian lady. Instead of trying to make her acquaintance, as he might easily have done, he contented himself with stealing a handkerchief which she had dropped. Some time later it was stolen from him. Thereupon he wrote an account of the affair to a friend whom he had left in Genoa. The lady heard of it, as ladies will, and sent him a lock of her hair, with a friendly hint that she might be better admired at closer quarters. By a natural paradox of boyish sentiment he did not return to Genoa, but had the hair put into a locket, which he wore for years. It was later unearthed by a friend from a pair of breeches borrowed from Irving, and made the subject of some badinage between them. Both his brothers and his biographer have made the aimlessness of this first European experience an occasion for something like reproach. His plans were of the vaguest. Such as they were, he was willing to sacrifice any of them for the sake of congenial companionship. After a few weeks he left Rome hurriedly because he could not bear to be parted from a friend who was going to Paris. He was anxious, he told his brothers quaintly, to study various arts and sciences there. In Paris he kept a journal for about three weeks; it records attendance upon a single lecture in botany and seventeen theatrical performances. Naturally his brothers could only see that he was an amiable, idle young fellow, who had drifted into a dilettante attitude toward life, and showed little promise of usefulness. But idling as well as industry has to be judged by its fruits. He was in a real sense seeing life, as he personally needed to see it, not in its passion and mystery, but in its lighter moods of humor and sentiment. Paris frankly seemed to him at this time the most profitable place in the world. Two months after his arrival, he wrote airily, "You will excuse the shortness and hastiness of this letter, for which I can only plead as an excuse that I am a young man and in Paris." He had momentary fancies as to a possible direction for his talents. A sudden intimacy at Rome with Washington Allston made him think for a time of turning painter. He was something of a dandy, and puts on record a Paris costume of "gray coat, white embroidered vest, and colored small-clothes." Presently he left Paris for London, where Kemble and Mrs. Siddons seem to have pleased him more than anything else English. Three months later he set sail for New York, and arrived in March, 1826, after an absence of nearly two years. Irving was now twenty-three years old. All that he had done so far was haphazard enough. He had trifled with his schooling, loitered over his law, read a great deal at random, seen many theatres, and made many friends. He had escaped from the valley of the shadow, and was now free to go on in the primrose way of much society, little literature, and less law. For the next ten or twelve years he was to be little more than a petted man about town. II MAN ABOUT TOWN At that time New York was hardly more than a big village, such as Boston continued to be for a half-century later. Everybody (who was anybody) knew everybody else in the friendly and informal way which nowadays belongs to a "set." Conviviality--this dignified name of the thing best suggests the way in which it was looked at then--was as much a part of fashionable life in New York as in Edinburgh or London. Into this society Irving entered with zest, flirting, dancing, tippling with other young swaggerers according to the mode. He went back nominally to his legal studies, but was really very little concerned with law or gospel. Of this kind of life, "Salmagundi," the first number of which, appeared in January, 1807, was the legitimate outcome. It was made up of short satirical sketches of the "Spectator" type. Irving and J. K. Paulding were the principal contributors, but they had some assistance from William Irving and a few others. In the course of a year twenty numbers were published at irregular intervals, when they suddenly ceased to appear. The authors, who wrote under fictitious names, affected from the start complete indifference to fame or profit. Their purpose, they said with whimsical assurance, was simply "to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." The audacity of the thing caught the town; it was a decided success, and very profitable--for the publisher. There is a mildly sophomoric flavor about the "Salmagundi" papers, as there is about Irving's letters of the same period. But they are full of amusing things, and worth reading, too, for the odd side-lights they throw upon the foibles of that old New York. As he grew older, Irving came to feel the shallowness of fashionable society, but in the Salmagundi days he appears to have asked for nothing better. He had good looks, good humor, and good manners, showed a proper susceptibility, and knew how to turn a compliment or write a graceful letter. No wonder he found himself welcome wherever he went. After a visit to Philadelphia one of the ladies to whom he had made himself agreeable wrote, "Half the people exist but in the idea that _you_ will one day return." Early in the following year he had a little experience of the practical working of ward politics, which he described in a letter to a certain charming Mary Fairlie: "Truly, this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,--prythee, no more of it.... Such haranguing and puffing and strutting among the little great men of the day. Such shoals of unfledged heroes from the lower wards, who had broke away from their mammas, and run to electioneer with a slice of bread and butter in their hands." Irving's patriotism was not found wanting when the time came, but he had a life-long contempt for the petty trickery of party politics. That year he made another of his leisurely jaunts, nominally on business, this time to Virginia. His letters record the usual round of social gallantries, and some graver matter. Burr's trial was on in Richmond. Irving made his acquaintance, and was retained in some ornamental sense among his counsel. One or two letters from Richmond show a sentimental sympathy for his client of which the less said the better. A characteristic weakness of Irving's was always an unreasoning fondness for the under dog. In the autumn of 1807 his father died, one of the most sincere among the "unco guid," a man whom few people loved and everybody respected. Not long after the discontinuance of the Salmagundi papers a new idea suggested itself to Irving and his brother Peter, which in its original form does not look especially promising. It was to develop into a really remarkable work, and to place Irving's name in a secure place among living humorists. The "Knickerbocker History of New York" really laid the foundation of his fame. The first plan was for a mere burlesque of an absurd book just published, a Dr. Samuel Mitchill's "Picture of New York." Mitchill began with the aborigines: the Irvings began with the creation of the world. Fortunately Peter was soon called away to Europe, and Irving was left to his own devices, which presently took a different and more original turn. He threw out most of the pompous erudition which belonged to the work as a burlesque, and condensed what remained. Everything after the five introductory chapters is his own. At this time he had begun to do commission business for certain New York houses, with a genuine impulse toward steadiness and industry which it is easy to account for. He was deep in love with the second daughter of Mr. Hoffman, in whose office he had originally idled. He had been for years very intimate with the family, and had ended by making a remarkable discovery about one of them. As he was evidently not in a position to marry, he was now setting to work with real energy to improve his means. Matilda Hoffman was a girl of seventeen, pretty, amiable, and clever. She died of quick consumption in April, 1809. It is certain that they loved each other very much, and that Irving never forgot her. The claim put forth by his nephew and biographer that he gave up marriage for her sake, and was romantically scrupulous in his faithfulness to her memory, seems hardly borne out by the facts. He was crushed for the moment, but not heartbroken. The truth is Irving's nature was sentimental rather than passionate. His love for Miss Hoffman appears to have been the deepest feeling of his life, but it did not absorb his whole nature. The first effect of her loss was to fill him with a sort of horror--the rebellion of a young and sensitive health against the tyranny of death. It was enough to show that the mourner was by no means in desperate case, for extreme grief is not afraid. In after life he never mentioned her name, and wrote of her only once. At the same time pretty faces and the charm of womanly companionship continued to attract him; indeed, a few years later he openly expressed his expectation of some time marrying. That he did not was clearly due to temper and circumstance rather than to romantic fidelity or abnegation. In the end his susceptibility became purely impersonal; his satisfaction in the exercise of a gentle old-school gallantry did much to take the sting from his life-long bachelorhood. Plainly, Irving was the sort of man who finds a grace in every feminine presence. It is encouraging to find him in a few months at work again upon the Knickerbocker history. Its appearance was cleverly heralded by a series of preliminary advertisements, announcing the disappearance of one Diedrich Knickerbocker, and the finding of a manuscript history by his hand. The book was published in December, 1809, and made a remarkable impression, in England as well as in America. Henry Brevoort, a close friend of Irving's, in 1813 sent a copy of the second edition to Walter Scott, who wrote at once: "I beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose History of New York.... I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. Scott and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I think, too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind, and has some touches which remind me much of Sterne." The work in its completed form is a history of the three Dutch governors of New York, whom Irving uses as a stalking-horse for purposes of satire. Everybody laughed at it except a few descendants of the old Dutch worthies with whose names and characters he had made free. As late as the year 1818, G. C. Verplanck, a personal friend of Irving's, called him to account in an address before the New York Historical Society, to which the first edition of Knickerbocker was gravely dedicated, for "wasting the riches of his fancy on an ungrateful theme, and his exuberant humor in a coarse caricature." One of his brothers wrote to Irving, deprecating the attack. Irving replied: "I have seen what Verplanck said of my work. He did me more than justice in what he said of my mental qualifications; and he said nothing of my work that I have not long thought of it myself.... I am sure he wishes me well, and his own talents and acquirements are too great to suffer him to entertain jealousy; but were I his bitterest enemy, such an opinion have I of his integrity of mind, that I would refer any one to him for an honest account of me, sooner than to almost any one else." Soon after Knickerbocker came out, Irving went to Albany in the fruitless pursuit of a minor court appointment. There he found his name come not altogether pleasantly before him. "I have somehow or another formed acquaintance with some of the good people," he wrote, "and several of the little Yffrouws, and have even made my way and intrenched myself strongly in the parlors of several genuine Dutch families, who had declared utter hostility to me." One lady had said that if she were a man she would horsewhip him; but an hour with Irving, who had made a point of meeting her, left her resigned to be a woman. Irving had now scored his first great literary success. He had proved himself master of a fluent humorous style which might have been applied indefinitely to the treatment of similar themes. He was twenty-seven years old, and there was no reason why the next ten years should not be a most fruitful period. Unfortunately, during most of that time life was made too easy for him. He knew now that he could write, but he had no desire to write for a living. Probably he felt that such a course would be in some way not quite suitable for a man of fashion. At all events, ten years passed, and middle age was at hand before the promising author began to fulfill his promise. Not till 1819 appeared his next literary venture, conceived in a more serious spirit, and launched with many misgivings as the first performance of the professional man of letters. He had by this time pretty much given up any notion he may have had of living by the law. His attempts to gain civil appointments were not successful. The brilliant younger brother must be provided for; presently Peter and Ebenezer, who were proprietors of a fairly prosperous hardware business, offered him a partnership, with nominal duties and one fifth of the profits. His connection with the firm was at first a sinecure. Later, and when the business had come to the brink of failure, the burden fell upon him, and absorbed his whole time and energies for nearly two years. His literary idling cannot be said to have been due to this entanglement. In his view writing was apparently little more than an agreeable indulgence which had brought him some half-deserved praise, and a pleasant social recognition in desirable quarters. One of the first results of his new connection was a visit to Washington, ostensibly in the interests of the business. The character of his services may be surmised from the fact that his journey from New York to Washington, _via_ Philadelphia and Baltimore, consumed nineteen days; and that was when the affairs of the firm were in some straits, and supposed to be particularly in need of representation at Washington. In 1812 he accepted the editorship of a periodical called "Select Reviews," to which during the next two years he contributed various critical and biographical articles. He found little to his liking in the editorial and still less in the critical part of his work. "I do not profess," he wrote, "the art and mystery of reviewing, and am not ambitious of being wise or facetious at the expense of others." He was never a good critic, for he was too soft-hearted, and too little in conceit with his own judgment to give an unfavorable opinion. And this was in the period of "slashing" criticism, when it was the proper thing, unless an author could show good reason for being declared the greatest man of the age, to hang, draw, and quarter him on the spot. At about this time, Jeffrey of the "Edinburgh Review," a critic who made the most of his prerogative, visited America. His coming was heralded by Irving's friend Brevoort in a letter whose ludicrous climax is worth quoting: "It is essential that Jeffrey may imbibe a just estimate of the United States and its inhabitants.... Persuade him to visit Washington _and by all means to see the falls of Niagara_." Apparently Irving received the great Jeffrey with courtesy and composure; as an equal, and not in the least as an idol to be propitiated with gewgaws. It was an anxious time, the year 1813. The struggle with England had assumed a more serious form. At last the British succeeded in entering Washington, and destroyed most of the public buildings. Irving's attitude had been uncompromisingly American from the outset. This act of vandalism aroused his indignation; he promptly offered his services to Governor Tompkins of New York, and was made an aide on his staff, with the brevet rank of colonel. This position he held for four months, when Governor Tompkins retired from the command. During that time Irving showed much military zeal, and enough capacity to be ordered to the front at Sackett's Harbor, at an important moment, with powers of which he made creditable use. In the spring of 1815 he narrowly escaped sailing with Decatur on the expedition to Algiers. It was largely by his advice that Decatur decided to accept the command. Irving's trunks had been taken on board the commodore's frigate when orders came from Washington delaying the expedition. Irving was afraid that his presence might in some way embarrass the commander, and left the ship at once. He was not to be balked of Europe, however; he was ready to sail and the affairs of the firm seemed to promise an easy competence. On May 25 he embarked for Liverpool, with no very distinct plans, but with no expectation of being long abroad. It was seventeen years before he saw America again. He reached Liverpool at a dramatic moment. Napoleon had fallen, and the mail coaches were rushing through England with the news of Waterloo. It was the sort of pageant which always roused Irving's fancy. He was absorbed in the situation. His letters show that however he may have shrunk from concerning himself with practical politics, he viewed the great _coups_ of statecraft with the greatest interest. His sympathies are with Bonaparte; the English were perhaps too recent enemies to be treated quite charitably. "I have made a short visit to London," he wrote to one of his brothers in July. "The spirits of this nation, as you may suppose, are wonderfully elated by their successes on the Continent, and English pride is inflated to its full distention by the idea of having Paris at the mercy of Wellington and his army. The only thing that annoys the honest mob is that old Louis will not cut throats and lop off heads, and that Wellington will not blow up bridges and monuments, and plunder palaces and galleries. As to Bonaparte, they have disposed of him in a thousand ways; every fat-sided John Bull has him dished up in a way to please his own palate, excepting that as yet they have not observed the first direction in the famous receipt to cook a turbot,--'First catchy our turbot.'" Then comes a postscript: "The bells are ringing, and this moment news is brought that poor Boney is a prisoner at Plymouth. _John has caught the turbot!_" Peter Irving was in charge of the firm's English office at Liverpool. He was a bachelor, and Irving had to go to Birmingham, to the house of his brother-in-law, Henry van Wart, to find an American home in England. But he did not make his permanent escape from Liverpool so easily. Not many months had passed before Peter fell ill, had to leave Liverpool, and Irving was left in charge. For over eight months the entire management of an ill-ordered establishment fell into his hands. He seems to have made a thorough attempt to examine and arrange the confusions of the office. He studied bookkeeping, so that he might get some knowledge of the accounts, and otherwise busied himself in a methodical way foreign to his habit. At last, in 1818, the best thing possible under the circumstances happened,--the business collapsed, and the brothers found a road out of their difficulties by way of the bankruptcy court. It was a great relief. "For upwards of two years," he wrote to Brevoort, "I have been bowed down in spirit, and harassed by the most sordid cares. As yet, I trust, my mind has not lost its elasticity, and I hope to recover some cheerful standing in the world. Indeed, I feel very little solicitude about my own prospects. I trust something will turn up to procure me subsistence, and am convinced, however scanty and precarious may be my lot, I can bring myself to be content. But I feel harassed in mind at times on behalf of my brothers. It is a dismal thing to look round on the wrecks of such a family connection. This is what, in spite of every exertion, will sometimes steep my soul in bitterness." Irving had now fairly arrived at maturity. The experience of the last few years had done much to sober him. He was still fond of society, and still of a cheerful temper; but the absorbing sophomoric joy in cakes and ale was now past and not to return. The pinch of necessity had come at last: the world no longer offered him the life of an elegant dawdler. He had a serious business before him,--to gain a competency for himself and his brother. The unpractical younger brother was to be after this the mainstay of the family fortunes. And what especially makes this the finest moment of his life is the sudden and clear perception that to gain this end he must depend upon the steady and fruitful exercise of his gift for writing. It was not to be taken up as a last resort, but as a matter of deliberate choice. Presently he received the offer of a good position on the Navy Board at Washington, with a salary of $2400. A few years earlier he would have snatched at it. "Flattering as the prospect undoubtedly is which your letters hold out," he wrote to his brother Ebenezer, "I have concluded to decline it for various reasons.... The principal one is, that I do not wish to undertake any situation that must involve me in such a routine of duties as to prevent my attending to literary pursuits." His determination was sturdy enough, but he was not then nor afterward the master of his moods. "I have heard him say," notes Pierre Irving, "that he was so disturbed by the responsibility he had taken in refusing such an offer and trusting to the uncertain chances of literary success, that for two months he could scarcely write a line." His elder brothers were heartily disappointed by the decision. They could not suppose that he would prove greatly more busy or fruitful in the future than he had in the past, and up to this time, he had done little enough. The youthful "Salmagundi" sketches, the broad satire of the Knickerbocker History were not much for a man of leisure to boast of at thirty-five. But they did not reckon justly with the new seriousness which had come into his purposes. Washington Irving was always fitful in his manner of working, often uncertain of himself and of his work. But from this time on he had no doubt of his calling; he had ceased to be a man about town, and become a man of letters. III MAN OF LETTERS--FIRST PERIOD The appearance of the "Sketch Book," in 1819, marks the beginning of Irving's professional life as a literary man. It was, moreover, the first original literary work of moment by an American. Two years later Bryant's first volume of poems was published, and Cooper's novels had begun to appear; at this time Irving had the field to himself. Firm as his determination was to depend upon writing for support, he was by no means satisfied with what he was able to do. Even after the complete "Sketch Book" had appeared, and had been met with hearty applause in England and America, he continued to be doubtful of its merits, and embarrassed by its reception. In sending the manuscript of the first number to America, he wrote to his brother Ebenezer: "I have sent the first number of a work which I hope to continue from time to time. I send it more for the purpose of showing you what I am about, as I find my declining the situation at Washington has given you chagrin. The fact is, that situation would have given me barely a genteel subsistence. It would have led to no higher situations, for I am quite unfitted for political life. My talents are merely literary, and all my habits of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that required by the active politician. It is a mistake also to suppose I would fill an office there, and devote myself at the same time to literature. I require much leisure, and a mind entirely abstracted from other cares and occupations, if I would write much or write well.... If I ever get any solid credit with the public, it must be in the quiet and assiduous operations of my pen, under the mere guidance of fancy or feeling.... I feel myself completely committed in literary reputation by what I have already written; and I feel by no means satisfied to rest my reputation on my preceding writings. I have suffered several precious years of youth and lively imagination to pass by unimproved, and it behooves me to make the most of what is left. If I indeed have the means within me of establishing a legitimate literary reputation, this is the very period of life most auspicious for it, and I am resolved to devote a few years exclusively to the attempt.... In fact, I consider myself at present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed--should my writings not acquire critical applause, I am content to throw up the pen and take to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed, it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among the established authors of my country, and to win the affections of my countrymen.... Do not, I beseech you, impute my lingering in Europe to any indifference to my own country or my friends.... I am determined not to return home until I have sent some writings before me that shall, if they have merit, make me return to the smiles, rather than skulk back to the pity, of my friends." To Brevoort he wrote at the same time: "I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our American writers, at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the feeling and fancy of the reader, more than to his judgment. My writings, therefore, may appear light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians; but if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and French horn." The favorable reception of the "Sketch Book" not only failed to remove his diffidence, but left him oppressed by a new sense of obligation to the public which had lauded his work. This feeling is expressed in a letter to Leslie, the painter, with whom he had become very intimate: "I am glad to find the second number pleases more than the first. The sale is very rapid, and, altogether, the success exceeds my most sanguine expectation. Now you suppose I am all on the alert, full of spirit and excitement. No such thing. I am just as good for nothing as ever I was; and indeed I have been flurried and put out of my way by these puffings. I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with success--anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do." Murray, who a little later was eager to publish anything from Irving's hand, declined to undertake the first English edition of the "Sketch Book." Irving was afraid of some incomplete pirated edition, and finally published the first number entirely at his own expense. Murray was glad enough to change his mind and bring out the later numbers. Among the many friends whom the young American had made in England was Walter Scott. A few days spent by Irving at Abbotsford had been enough to attach them strongly to each other. Scott had by no means outgrown his interest in the author of the "Knickerbocker History," and Irving found nothing that was not delightful in the great romancer's character and way of life. "As to Scott," he wrote, "I cannot express my delight at his character and manners. He is a sterling, golden-hearted old worthy, full of the joyousness of youth, with an imagination continually furnishing forth pictures, and a charming simplicity of manner that puts you at ease with him in a moment. It has been a constant source of pleasure to me to remark his deportment towards his family, his neighbors, his domestics, his very dogs and cats; everything that comes within his influence seems to catch a beam of that sunshine that plays round his heart." Now, while the prospects of the "Sketch Book" were still dubious, Scott offered him the editorship of an Anti-Jacobin magazine. Irving declined it, first on the ground of his dislike for politics, and second on account of his irregular habits of mind. "My whole course of life has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would a weathercock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians or a Don Cossack." In August of this year, Irving and his brother Peter left England for the Continent. They had got no farther than Havre when their fancy was taken with an apparent business opening for Peter, who had been idle since the failure of the firm. A steamboat had just been put upon the Seine, to run between Havre and Rouen. Peter should be a chief stockholder and director; he and Washington would each put in $5000, and between Havre and Rouen the river would presently run gold for them. To be sure the money was yet to be found, but there were brothers William and Ebenezer, who would no doubt be glad to help set that little golden river flowing. Unfortunately brothers William and Ebenezer did not approve of the scheme at all. They flatly refused to lend brother Peter $5000, or to honor brother Washington's drafts for the same amount. More unfortunately still, Irving had already committed himself. All of his literary property had to be disposed of, to provide the pledged amount, which was forthwith placed in the little steamboat on the Seine, and never heard of more. Peter was associated with the management, and kept busy, at least, for several years. This was the first of a long series of business ventures which made Irving's life uneasy. He would no sooner turn a few thousand by writing than he must sink it in this or that absolutely safe and immensely profitable enterprise. It was not for many years that he learned how certainly he might count upon disastrous results from such experiments. After the settlement of this affair, Irving took lodgings in Paris. Here he met Tom Moore, and in his house more than anywhere else he became intimate. Moore's diary makes frequent mention of him; one of the most interesting entries records that Irving at this time wrote in ten days one hundred and thirty pages of the "Sketch Book" size. This was undoubtedly material for "Bracebridge Hall," the suggestion of which had come from Moore. In the meantime the "Sketch Book" had continued to gain ground in England. Byron admired it greatly, and its popularity with the general public may be judged from the fact that it was commonly attributed to Scott. Irving described himself in a letter to Murray as leading "a 'miscellaneous' kind of life at Paris.... Anacreon Moore is living here, and has made me a gayer fellow than I could have wished; but I found it impossible to resist the charm of his society." In July (1821) he returned to London, in poor physical condition. He had now been tormented at intervals for several years by an eruptive complaint which kept him from exercise, and brought on other troubles. After his return he was bedridden for four or five months, most of which he passed at his sister's house in Birmingham. He grew very fond of his little nephews and nieces--particularly an urchin named George, of whom his letters record such items as: "George has made his appearance in a new pair of Grimaldi breeches, with pockets full as deep as the former. To balance his ball and marbles, he has the opposite pocket filled with a peg-top and a quantity of dry peas, so that he can only lie comfortably on his back or belly." He was by no means idle at this time. In January of the following year he sent the manuscript of "Bracebridge Hall" to his brother Ebenezer with the remark, "My health is still unrestored. This work has kept me from getting well, and my indisposition on the other hand has retarded the work. I have now been about five weeks in London, and have only once been out of doors, about a month since, and that made me worse." That single escape from the sick-room, his biographer says, was made for the sake of persuading Murray to publish Cooper's "Spy," which had already appeared in America. Irving's own experience was duplicated: Murray refused to take "The Spy," but was glad to publish Cooper's later work. He now gave Irving a thousand guineas for the English rights in "Bracebridge Hall." It was less than he might have given, but Irving could never be persuaded to haggle over prices. He seems to have agreed with Peter, who wrote cheerfully, "A thousand guineas has a golden sound." It was the amount which had been sunk in poor Peter's steamboat, which was still making its unprofitable trips up and down the Seine; and two hundred guineas of this thousand soon passed into his pocket, where no doubt he found their melody even pleasanter. "Bracebridge Hall" was well received; and confirmed its author's reputation, especially in England. He had only to be passive to find himself overwhelmed with social engagements. A more liberal diet and plenty of exercise had improved his condition, and for a month or so after getting rid of "Bracebridge Hall," he gave himself up to the engagements of a London season. But his ankles soon began to trouble him again, and in July, 1822, he set out for Aix-la-Chapelle, where he hoped to get permanent relief from his distressing complaint. He found nothing to keep him long at Aix. The baths and waters were well enough, but he was too dependent upon cheerful companionship to endure life among a company of invalids. He began a leisurely round of the Continental watering-places, staying a few weeks here and a few days there, and gradually improving in condition. Toward the close of the year he brought up at Dresden. The only touch of mystery which belongs to the story of Irving is connected with this six months' stay at Dresden. He made many friends there, and grew especially intimate with an English family named Foster, a mother and two daughters. It is said--and denied--that he would have liked to marry the youngest daughter, Emily. His biographer insists that there was nothing in the affair but friendship. To Mrs. Foster he wrote the only account he ever gave of his early love and loss; and his nephew quotes the closing passage as proof that he had no thought of marrying Emily Foster, however fond of her he may have been: "You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are. I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for." But this might be the modest speech of a middle-aged lover. Years later the written reminiscences of the two daughters unmistakably impute the attentions of the brilliant American to something more than friendliness. It is certain that he had a very warm feeling for somebody or something in Dresden, which led to a temporary return of his youthful delight in society. For his time was by no means given up to the Fosters. He was received into the life of the little German court, and evidently derived such pleasure as is proper to a Republican from dancing with princesses, and acting in private theatricals with Highnesses and Excellencies. On the whole it seems to have been a peaceful, idle, rather trivial time of sojourn among congenial people. He danced, he strolled, he wrote verses to little Miss Emily; in short, he enjoyed himself as a youngish man may, whether the muse is waiting for him, or some less high-flown customer. "I wish I could give you a good account of my literary labors," he wrote his sister after several months in Dresden, "but I have nothing to report. I am merely seeing, and hearing, and my mind seems in too crowded and confused a state to produce anything. I am getting very familiar with the German language; and there is a lady here who is so kind as to give me lessons every day in Italian [Mrs. Foster], which language I have nearly forgotten, but which I am fast regaining. Another lady is superintending my French [Miss Emily Foster], so that if I am not acquiring ideas, I am at least acquiring a variety of modes of expressing them when they do come." Very likely the confusion of his mind was not lessened by the frequency of those French lessons. There really seems to be no reason for doubting the testimony of the elder sister's journal; "He has written. He has confessed to my mother, as to a dear and true friend, his love for E----, and his conviction of its utter hopelessness. He feels himself unable to combat it. He thinks he must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind.... He has almost resolved to make a tour in Silesia, which will keep him absent for a few weeks." The tour in Silesia was certainly made; and during the brief absence Irving wrote sundry sentimental letters to Mrs. Foster. There are occasions when he seems to imagine a pretty daughter looking over the admirable mother's shoulder, and being much affected by the famous author's tenderness for Dresden. Presently he comes back to be their escort, for they are going home to England; and at Rotterdam the good-bys are said. They met afterward in England, but the old intimacy was gone. More than thirty years after, Irving had a letter from a Mrs. Emily Fuller, whose name he did not know. Pleasantly and discreetly it recalled those happy Emily Foster days in Dresden. "She addresses him because she hopes that her eldest boy Henry may have the happiness and advantage of meeting him." Poor Irving! Her eldest boy Henry.... Well, the sting was all gone by that time, fortunately. His reply is all that it ought to be, and nothing more. Those first days in Paris were not cheerful ones for Irving. His pleasant dream was over, and he had forgotten what to do with waking moments. His memorandum-book records that he felt oppressed by "a strange horror on his mind--a dread of future evil--of failure in future literary attempts--a dismal foreboding that he could not drive off by any effort of reason." "When I once get going again with my pen," he wrote to Peter, "I mean to keep on steadily, until I can scrape together enough to produce a regular income, however moderate. We shall then be independent of the world and its chances." But he could not manage to get going. For some time he could write nothing at all. Fortunately, after an unprofitable month or two, he fell in with John Howard Payne, now remembered only for his "Home, Sweet Home," but then esteemed as an actor and dramatist. Irving had met him several years before, and now became associated with him in some dramatic translating and adapting. The results were nearly worthless from a literary point of view, but served to keep him busy, and to put him once more in the writing vein. For some time Murray had been pressing him hard for copy, and in the spring of 1824 the "Tales of a Traveler" were completed and sent to press. After the task of proof-reading came a reaction of high spirits which expressed itself in the most amusing letter Irving ever wrote:-- "BRIGHTON, August 14, 1824. "My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea. "I forget how the song ends, but here I am at Brighton just on the point of embarking for France. I have dragged myself out of London, as a horse drags himself out of the slough, or a fly out of a honey-pot, almost leaving a limb behind him at every tug. Not that I have been immersed in pleasure and surrounded by sweets, but rather up to the ears in ink and harassed by printers' devils. "I never have had such fagging in altering, adding, and correcting; and I have been detained beyond all patience by the delays of the press. Yesterday I absolutely broke away, without waiting for the last sheets. They are to be sent after me here by mail, to be corrected this morning, or else they must take their chance. From the time I first started pen in hand on this work, it has been nothing but hard driving with me. "I have not been able to get to Tunbridge to see the Donegals, which I really and greatly regret. Indeed I have seen nobody except a friend or two who had the kindness to hunt me out. Among these was Mr. Story, and I ate a dinner there that it took me a week to digest, having been obliged to swallow so much hard-favored nonsense from a loud-talking baronet whose name, thank God, I forget, but who maintained Byron was not a man of courage, and therefore his poetry was not readable. I was really afraid he would bring John Story to the same way of thinking. "I went a few evenings since to see Kenney's new piece, the Alcaid. It went off lamely, and the Alcaid is rather a bore, and comes near to be generally thought so. Poor Kenney came to my room next evening, and I could not believe that one night could have ruined a man so completely. I swear to you I thought at first it was a flimsy suit of clothes had left some bedside and walked into my room without waiting for the owner to get up; or that it was one of those frames on which clothiers stretch coats at their shop doors; until I perceived a thin face sticking edgeways out of the collar of the coat like the axe in a bundle of fasces. He was so thin, and pale, and nervous, and exhausted--he made a dozen difficulties in getting over a spot in the carpet, and never would have accomplished it if he had not lifted himself over by the points in his shirt-collar. "I saw Rogers just as I was leaving town. I had not time to ask him any particulars about you, and indeed he is not exactly the man from whom I would ask news about my friends. I dined tête-à-tête with him some time ago, and he served up his friends as he served up his fish, with a squeeze of lemon over each. It was very piquant, but it rather set my teeth on edge.... "Farewell, my dear Moore. Let me hear from you, if but a line; particularly if my work pleases you, but don't say a word against it. I am easily put out of humor with what I do." Surely no more delicious bit of nonsense was ever written than the description of poor Kenney. Moore read it to a group of friends in the presence of the victim--a situation which would have been too "piquant" for Irving's taste. Moore had only the desired praise for the "Tales of a Traveler," but elsewhere it did not fare so well. Irving considered it on the whole his best work; but though it had a large sale, its reception in England was not quite what he had hoped for; and in America it was received by the press with something like hostility. Unfortunately some busybody in America made it his concern to forward to Irving all the ill-natured flings which could be gleaned from American notices of the new book. The incident--with all its unpleasantness--was trifling enough, but to Irving's raw sensitiveness it was torture. He was overwhelmed with an almost ludicrous melancholy, could not write, could not sleep, could not bear to be alone. This petty outburst of critical spleen, backed as it evidently was by personal antagonism on the part of a few obscure journalists, actually left him dumb for more than a year. Of course the public was right in its general estimate of the "Tales of a Traveler": they are not as good as the "Sketch Book." In kind they are similar--that in itself would be enough to excite prejudice against new work from an author who had been so long before the public; but they are also undeniably inferior in quality. One or two of the stories are distinctly morbid in tone, several give the impression of being long drawn out. In some way the collection lacks atmosphere; Italian scenery is painted with accuracy, but not Italian life or character. Irving could draw the early Dutch in America, or the mediæval Moors in Spain, or the Englishman in England or Italy: the modern Italian on his own soil he did not know except in his melodramatic exterior. Irving had now given his brother Peter a place in his little ménage. The steamboat scheme had failed utterly, and he had from this time on no sort of regular employment. Irving set himself cheerfully to provide for both. His goal at this time was less fame than fortune--"by every exertion to attain sufficient to make us both independent for the rest of our lives." Not for many years did he come to perceive that a life of leisure was not only impossible, but undesirable for him, and to express it as his fondest wish that he might "die in harness." The profits of the "Tales of a Traveler" went the way of most of his earnings--this time to help develop a Bolivia copper mine. He had been studying Spanish for a year or two, and had an increased desire to see Spain. As a mere aid in traveling, he asked for the nominal post of attaché to the American legation at Madrid. Alexander H. Everett, then minister to Spain, at once granted the request, and in replying suggested a possible literary task--the translation of a new Spanish work, Navarrete's "Voyages of Columbus," which was shortly to make its appearance. Murray, who was then in some difficulties, did not think favorably of the project. Irving went to Madrid, and by good fortune got lodgings with the American consul Rich, who had made an extensive private collection of documents dealing with early American history. Presently Navarrete's work was published, and found to be "rather a mass of rich materials for history than a history itself." This was in February, 1826. Irving at once began to take notes and sift materials for an original history of Columbus. For six months he worked incessantly. "Sometimes," says his biographer, "he would write all day and until twelve at night; in one instance his note-book shows him to have written from five in the morning until eight at night, stopping only for meals." IV MAN OF LETTERS--SECOND PERIOD There is something interesting, and in a sense pathetic, in this sudden steady diligence from the man of desultory habits, who had never written but by whim, whose finger had always been lifted to catch the lightest literary airs. Here, at last, was the firm trade wind, and the satisfaction of steady and methodical progress. The qualified success of the "Tales of a Traveler" had led him to feel that his vein was running out. The prospect of producing a solid work gave him keen pleasure. One cannot be always building castles in the air; why not try a pyramid, if only a little one? Since the world is perfectly delighted with our pretty things, very well, let us show that we can do a sublime thing. As for history--"Whatever may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly," says Walter Bagehot, "it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style--every means of saying everything, but nothing to say. Of course he is an able man; of course he has an active intellect, besides wonderful culture: but still, one cannot always have original ideas. Every day cannot be an era; a train of new speculation very often will not be found: and how dull it is to make it your business to write, to stay by yourself in a room to write, and then to have nothing to say! It is dreary work mending seven pens, and waiting for a theory to 'turn up.' What a gain if something would happen! then one could describe it. Something has happened, and that something is history." There is no doubt that Irving's early delicate sallies in literature represent his best. In a single department of belles-lettres he had shown mastery. During the remainder of his life he continued to work at intervals in that field with similar felicity; and, for the rest, to write amiably and respectably upon many topics foreign to his natural bent. But his greatest work was done in odd moments and at a heat; all the method in the world could not increase his real stature by a cubit. A word may perhaps be said here of Irving as an historian and biographer. Of course he could not write dully; his histories are just as readable as Goldsmith's, and rather more veracious. But he plainly had not the scholar's training and methods which we now demand of the historian; nor had he the larger view of men and events in their perspective. Generalization was beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is only a part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,--this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely and impersonally in the mind, a mere great man, when Irving with a touch turned him from cold bronze into flesh and blood again. During the years of Irving's stay abroad other American writers had come into notice. Bryant's poetry had become well known. Cooper had produced "The Spy," "The Pilot," "The Pioneers," and "The Last of the Mohicans." In 1827 appeared the first volume of poems by Edgar Allan Poe. In this year, too, Irving's diary records a meeting with Longfellow, who was then twenty-one, and came abroad to prepare himself for his professorship at Bowdoin. Longfellow's recollection of the incident is worth quoting: "I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Irving in Spain, and found the author, whom I had loved, repeated in the man. The same playful humor; the same touches of sentiment; the same poetic atmosphere; and, what I admired still more, the entire absence of all literary jealousy, of all that mean avarice of fame, which counts what is given to another as so much taken from one's self-- "'And trembling, hears in every breeze The laurels of Miltiades.'" In the following summer the "History of Columbus" was finished, and sold to Murray. It won high praise from the reviewers, especially from Alexander H. Everett, his former diplomatic chief, and at this time editor of the "North American Review." Early in the following year he made his first visit to Andalusian Spain. In the course of his grubbing among the Columbus archives, he had found a good deal of interesting material about the Moorish occupancy. The beauty of the country and the grandeur of its Moorish relics took strong hold upon him. In April, 1828, he settled in Seville, and there the "Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada" were written. By this time the market price of his wares had gone up very much. There is no doubt that his historical work had increased his temporary reputation. Murray gave him 2000 guineas for the "Conquest of Granada;" he further offered him £1000 a year to edit a new literary and scientific magazine, as well as £100 an article for any contribution he might choose to make to the "London Quarterly." He refused the first offer on the ground that he did not care to be tied in England, the second because the "Quarterly" had always been hostile to America. He continued to take an interest in affairs at home. Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own as to candidates and measures. The election of Jackson called forth the following comment in a letter to Mr. Everett: "I was rather sorry when Mr. Adams was first raised to the presidency, but I am much more so at his being displaced; for he has made a far better president than I expected, and I am loth to see a man superseded who has filled his station worthily. These frequent changes in our administration are prejudicial to the country; we ought to be wary of using our power of changing our chief magistrate when the welfare of the country does not require it. In the present election there has, doubtless, been much honest, warm, grateful feeling toward Jackson, but I fear much pique, passion, and caprice as it respects Mr. Adams. "Since the old general was to be the man, however, I am well pleased upon the whole that he has a great majority, as it will, for the reasons you mention, produce a political calm in the country, and lull those angry passions which have been exasperated during the Adams administration, by the close contest of nearly balanced parties. As to the old general, with all his _hickory_ characteristics, I suspect he has good stuff in him, and will make a sagacious, independent, and high-spirited president; and I doubt his making so high-handed a one as many imagine." The "Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada" were well treated by critics, but never very popular. The humor of the mythical Fray Antonio's narrative was too sly and covert; the public was mystified, and had half a notion it was being made game of. But Irving was not yet done with Granada. Presently he went back, and in the course of a solitary two months in the Alhambra, got together the materials for the most characteristic work he had published since the "Tales of a Traveler" and the strongest since the "Sketch Book." His idyllic stay in the Alhambra was one of the pleasantest episodes of his life. When it was cut short by his appointment as secretary of legation at London, he made up his mind to leave the quiet breathing-spot with real regret. One cannot help seeing from the tone of his letter to Peter that the years have given him as much as they have taken away: "My only horror is the bustle and turmoil of the world: how shall I stand it after the delicious quiet and repose of the Alhambra? I had intended, however, to quit this place before long, and, indeed, was almost reproaching myself for protracting my sojourn, having little better than sheer self-indulgence to plead for it; for the effect of the climate, the air, the serenity and sweetness of the place, is almost as seductive as that of the Castle of Indolence, and I feel at times an impossibility of working, or of doing anything but yielding to a mere voluptuousness of sensation." At London he found himself associated with congenial men, but tied so closely to the legation that he could not even get away to visit his sister at Birmingham. The constraint chafed him at first, but before long his letters show him reconciled, and even interested in the practical business of diplomacy. They complain, however, of his growing stout. This, indeed, he had a perfect right to do. He was now forty-seven years old, and a man of solid reputation; weighty honors were being heaped upon him. Before leaving Spain he had been made a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History; and in England he had just received a medal from the Royal Society of Literature, and the degree of LL. D. from Oxford. His leisure for literary work was not great in London, but he was making some progress with the Alhambra stories, and had begun to think seriously of the "Life of Washington," which was to hold the main place in his thoughts for the rest of his life. At this time England was suffering under the double discomfort of cholera and the Reform Bill. A letter from Irving to his brother shows that even in the midst of his successes the popular author was subject to moods of mental gloom, and even to business difficulties: "The restlessness and uncertainty in which I have been kept have disordered my mind and feelings too much for imaginative writing, and I now doubt whether I could get the Alhambra ready in time for Christmas.... The present state of things here completely discourages the idea of publication of any kind. There is no knowing who among the booksellers is safe. Those who have published most are worst off, for in this time of public excitement nobody reads books or buys them." In 1831, Van Buren was nominated as Minister to the Court of St. James, and at once took charge of his diplomatic duties. His nomination was rejected by the Senate, however; and Irving determined to take advantage of the incident to make his own escape from the service, and return at last to America. In May, 1831, he arrived in New York. He had been a young man when he left America; he was now leaning toward the farther verge of his prime. In character he had refined and sobered greatly; and he had more than fulfilled his promise of literary excellence. He had still twenty-six years to live, and was to do much useful service in life and letters; but he could do nothing in that time to alter his reputation; he could merely confirm it. Irving had grown immensely, too, in the favor of his countrymen. He was welcomed back with extravagant effusion by his old friends and by the country at large. He had in fact come to be regarded as one of the chief glories of America; for he had been the first to make her a world-power in literature. During those seventeen years New York had changed almost beyond recognition in size, in appearance, in the tone of its life; but Irving was delighted with everything and everybody. All that he had to regret was the ordeal of a great public dinner in his honor, at which, after a great deal of preliminary nervousness, he made the one speech of his life. It was a good speech, but he could never be prevailed upon to repeat the experiment. He was always at his worst in a large company. The sight of a great number of unknown or half-known faces confused his thoughts and clogged his tongue. His intimates knew him for a brilliant and ready talker, full of easy fun and unaffected sentiment. Not long after his return, the "Tales of the Alhambra" were published. In the somewhat florid concert of critical praises which greeted the book, a simple theme is dominant. Everybody felt that in these stories Irving had come back to his own. The material was very different from that of the "Sketch Book," yet it yielded to similar treatment. The grace, romance, humor, of this "beautiful Spanish Sketch Book," as the historian Prescott called it, appealed at once to an audience which had listened somewhat coldly to the less spontaneous "Tales of a Traveler," and had given a formal approbation to the "History of Columbus," without finding very much Irving in it. A visit to Washington to clear up various odds and ends of his diplomatic experience resulted in an interview with President Jackson, which he reported in a letter to Peter Irving, now living alone in Paris: "I have been most kindly received by the old general, with whom I am much pleased as well as amused. As his admirers say, he is truly an _old Roman_--to which I could add, _with a little dash of the Greek_; for I suspect he is as _knowing_ as I believe he is _honest_. I took care to put myself promptly on a fair and independent footing with him; for, in expressing warmly and sincerely how much I had been gratified by the unsought but most seasonable mark of confidence he had shown me, when he hinted something about a disposition to place me elsewhere, I let him know emphatically that I wished for nothing more--that my whole desire was to live among my countrymen, and to follow my usual pursuits. In fact, I am persuaded that my true course is to be master of myself and of my time. Official station cannot add to my happiness or respectability, and certainly would stand in the way of my literary career." This disinclination to take office he never got over, although he was frequently approached with offers of place. In 1834, he was offered a nomination for Congress by the Jackson party; in 1838, he was offered the Tammany nomination as mayor of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy by Van Buren. And when three years later he was given a still more important post, it was only the evident spontaneity of the choice, and the feeling that in taking the office he should be representing country rather than party, which led him to accept it. Impatient as he was of political methods, he had opinions of his own on specific questions, and a broad political platform which he once stated in a letter to his old friend Kemble:-- "As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican, and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some of those loco-foco luminaries who of late have been urging strong and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but, if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the state and constitution of the patient; otherwise, what is intended to cure, may produce convulsion. The late elections have shown that the measures proposed by Government are repugnant to the feelings and habitudes or disastrous to the interests of great portions of our fellow citizens. They should not, then, be forced home with rigor. Ours is a government of compromise. We have several great and distinct interests bound up together, which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may harass and impair each other. A stern, inflexible, and uniform policy may do for a small compact republic, like one of those of ancient Greece, where there is a unity of character, habits, and interests; but a more accommodating, discriminating, and variable policy must be observed in a vast republic like ours, formed of a variety of states widely differing in habits, pursuits, characters, and climes, and banded together by a few general ties. "I always distrust the soundness of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow citizens. Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading and financial classes of our country. You yourself know, from education and experience, how important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know, in spite of all the commonplace cant and obloquy that has been cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes." At this time he was studying with increasing interest the shifting spectacle of American life. The openings of the West especially caught his imagination, and when the chance came to travel on what was then the frontier, the trans-Mississippi territories, he was quick to accept it. As guest of one of the members of a commission appointed to treat with several Indian tribes, he went as far as Fort Gibson on the Arkansas. The literary fruits of this journey were "A Tour on the Prairies," and "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville." In April, 1833, he bought the little estate of Sunnyside, near the Sleepy Hollow which he had made famous. His first name for it was "The Roost" (Dutch for "Rest"), which he changed for reasons which are not recorded; possibly the little nieces who became regular inmates may have thought the old name not dignified enough. This he regarded as his home for the rest of his life. He set to work at once to enlarge the old Dutch stone cottage which stood upon the place; and from this time on he is continually "puttering" about the estate, building a poultry-yard here, planting trees there, with the full zeal of the rural landlord. His family letters are given to accounts of little country doings: "The goose war is happily terminated: Mr. Jones' squadron has left my waters, and my feathered navy now plows the Tappan Sea in triumph. I cannot but attribute this great victory to the valor and good conduct of the enterprising little duck, who seems to enjoy great power and popularity among both geese and ganders, and absolutely to be the master of the fleet.... I am happy to inform you that, among the many other blessings brought to the cottage by the good Mr. Lawrence is a pig of first-rate stock and lineage. It has been duly put in possession of the palace in the rear of the barn, where it is shown to every visitor with as much pride as if it was the youngest child of a family. As it is of the fair sex, and in the opinion of the best judges a pig of peerless beauty, I have named it 'Fanny.' I know it is a name which with Kate and you has a romantic charm, and about the cottage everything, as old Mrs. Marthing says, must be romance." This was during the vogue of Fanny Kemble. In this quiet retreat the next five uneventful years were passed, with occasional excursions to New York or farther, which only served to make the seclusion of the country home more inviting. Peter Irving spent his last days at the Roost; and Ebenezer Irving and his family gave up their New York house to make their home with the now famous brother. While this arrangement greatly increased Irving's satisfaction in life, it made heavy demands upon his purse. One cannot be a country gentleman for nothing. The cottage had to be enlarged repeatedly, the grounds cared for; and the mere running expenses were a considerable matter for a man without dependable income. Irving had by this time received a great deal of money for his books, but an unfortunate "knack of hoping" had locked up most of it in unprofitable land speculations. In 1835 the three volumes of the "Crayon Miscellanies," were published. The "Tour on the Prairies" was especially palatable to Americans. Edward Everett said of it, in the highly colored style of the period: "We are proud of Mr. Irving's sketches of English life, proud of the gorgeous canvas upon which he has gathered in so much of the glowing imagery of Moorish times. We behold with delight his easy and triumphant march over these beaten fields; but we glow with rapture as we see him coming back, laden with the poetical treasures of the primitive wilderness, rich with spoil from the uninhabited desert." The second volume, containing "Abbotsford" and "Newstead Abbey," naturally gained special praise in England; the third, "Legends of the Conquest of Spain," had comparatively little success. Of "Astoria" (1836) it is hard to know what to say; on the whole, it seems the most doubtful of his works in motive and quality. John Jacob Astor, now an old man, was anxious to perpetuate the fame of his commercial exploits, and was lucky enough to subsidize for this purpose the most prominent American writer of the day. The adventures of the various expeditions sent out to found an American trading company on the Pacific coast are interesting; but one puts down Irving's account of them with the feeling that it reflects rather more credit on Mr. Astor than on the writer. The truth is, Irving, like many less successful literary men, was constantly in need of money; and he had begun to be in some difficulty for subjects upon which to exercise his craft. The "Adventures of Captain Bonneville" (1837) was also a piece of skillful book-making rather than an original creative work; and after that nearly two years passed without his writing anything. At last, toward the close of 1838, he hit upon a subject which attracted him greatly--a "History of the Conquest of Mexico." He began at once upon preliminary studies, and had made considerable progress when he learned by chance that Prescott, who had recently made a name for himself by his "Ferdinand and Isabella," was at work upon the same subject. Irving immediately retired from the field, and conveyed a courteous assurance to Prescott of his satisfaction in leaving the theme to such hands. He felt this sacrifice keenly, however; the project had appealed to him peculiarly, and he had no other in mind to take its place. For lack of other literary work, therefore, he presently engaged to write a monthly article for the New York "Knickerbocker," at a salary of $2000 a year. The arrangement was just not too irksome to continue for two years. It is easy to see, then, that at fifty-five Irving was pretty well written out. In the twenty years that remained to him he produced nothing of account except the "Life of Washington," which, like his other works in biography and history, may be regarded as a _tour de force_ rather than a spontaneous outcome of his genius. V A PUBLIC CHARACTER The data of Irving's literary achievements have been brought near a conclusion; what remains to be said may now deal less with what he wrote, and more with what he did and was. It is luckily unnecessary to try for a sharply drawn distinction between his popularity as a writer and as a man. In his home, in society, and in literature the single charm of his personality had made him beloved in the same way. And he had become, in the best sense of the term, a public character. For many years his name had been better known abroad than that of any other living American; and his reception at home after an absence of seventeen years showed in what regard his countrymen had come to hold him. Their pride in his success and gratitude for the new fame he had given a country which was still felt to be on probation, can hardly account for it; only the confidence of affection could have excused so prolonged an absenteeism. His peculiar hold upon popular affection cannot be better suggested than by the tone of a letter written by the only Englishman who during Irving's life could pretend to rival him in his peculiar field. In 1841, Irving wrote to Dickens, expressing pleasure in his work. Dickens replied: "There is no man in the world who could have given me the heartfelt pleasure you have, by your kind note of the 13th of last month. There is no living writer, and there are very few among the dead, whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so.... I wish I could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit England. I can't. I have held it at arm's length, and taken a bird's eye view of it, after reading it a great many times, but there is no greater encouragement in it this way than on a microscopic inspection. I should love to go with you--as I have gone, God knows how often--into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbor Court, and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with you, outside the last of the coaches, down to Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart glad to compare notes with you about that shabby gentleman in the oilcloth hat and red nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back parlor of the Masons' Arms; and about Robert Preston, and the tallow chandler's widow, whose sitting-room is second nature to me; and about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in the daytime, when a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy. I have a good deal to say, too, about that dashing Alonzo de Ojeda, that you can't help being fonder of than you ought to be; and much to hear concerning Moorish legend and poor, unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet I should show you his mutilated carcass with a joy past all expression." Not long afterward Dickens visited America. Irving and he saw much of each other, though they did not meet many times. Irving presided at a great dinner given to Boz in New York, broke down in his introductory speech, and otherwise endeared himself to his brother author. When presently Dickens went back, he wrote, "I did not come to see you, for I really have not the heart to say 'good-by' again, and felt more than I can tell you when we shook hands last Wednesday." Pretty soon Irving himself was leaving America. In February, 1842, he was startled from the home quiet of Sunnyside by a summons which he could not disregard. Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, had secured his appointment as Minister to Spain. The Senate confirmed it almost by acclamation, and letters came from various quarters urging him to accept it. He could not doubt that the wish was general. But it was very hard for him to leave home and America again. For some time after accepting the post he was plunged into a dejection which seemed laughable to himself. "The crowning honor of his life," he admitted, had come to him, and he could only groan under it. "'It is hard, very hard,' he half murmured to himself, half to me; yet he added whimsically enough, being struck with the seeming absurdity of such a view, 'I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb'" (P. M. Irving). In April he sailed from New York, and made a leisurely journey by way of England and France, not reaching Madrid till the end of July. Europe had lost its old charm. Many places reminded him painfully of the favorite brother Peter who had shared his first impressions of them, and whose loss was one of the keenest griefs of his life. "My visit to Europe has by no means the charm of former visits," he wrote from Paris; "scenes and objects have no longer the effect of novelty with me. I am no longer curious to see great sights or great people, and have been so long accustomed to a life of quiet, that I find the turmoil of the world becomes irksome to me. Then I have a house of my own, a little domestic world, created in a manner by my own hand, which I have left behind, and which is continually haunting my thoughts, and coming in contrast with the noisy, tumultuous, heartless world in which I am called to mingle. However, I am somewhat of a philosopher, and can accommodate myself to changes, so I shall endeavor to resign myself to the splendor of courts and the conversation of courtiers, comforting myself with the thought that the time will come when I shall once more return to sweet little Sunnyside, and be able to sit on a stone fence, and talk about politics and rural affairs with Neighbor Forkel and Uncle Brom." At Madrid he very soon found himself too much occupied for the literary work he had counted on. He had accepted the place under the impression that his duties would not greatly interfere with the writing of the "Life of Washington," on which he was then fairly launched. But from the beginning he found the situation in Spain unexpectedly absorbing. It was the usual Spanish situation, to be sure: a designing pretender, a child monarch, a court honeycombed with intrigue, and a people ready for anything spectacular. When Irving was presented to the young queen, she was closely guarded. "On ascending the grand staircase, we found the portal at the head of it, opening into the royal suite of apartments, still bearing the marks of the midnight attack upon the palace in October last, when an attempt was made to get possession of the persons of the little queen and her sister, to carry them off.... The marble casements of the doors had been shattered in several places, and the double doors themselves pierced all over with bullet-holes, from the musketry that played upon them from the staircase during that eventful night. What must have been the feelings of those poor children, on listening from their apartment to the horrid tumult, the outcries of a furious multitude, and the reports of fire-arms, echoing and reverberating through the vaulted halls and spacious courts of the immense edifice, and dubious whether their own lives were not the object of the assault!" Such an appeal to Irving's sympathy and chivalry was enough to deprive the situation of its quality of opéra-bouffe. Presently an insurrection takes place in Barcelona. The regent hurries off to quell it, and Irving's letters are full of the pomp and circumstance of war. The regent is successful, and returns apparently firmer than ever in power. But a few months later the trouble breaks out again, more seriously; Madrid is placed in a state of siege, and martial law declared. The life of the queen is thought to be in danger, and the diplomatic corps, headed by Irving, offers its services for her protection. Finally the regent is driven out of power, and blows are once again succeeded by intrigue. Such, briefly, was the character of the little drama in which the quiet American author was to take a significant part, during his whole ministry. This Spanish experience is fully recorded in his family letters. He was always a voluminous letter-writer; during this period he is fairly encyclopedic. A single letter to his sister fills thirteen closely printed pages of his nephew's biography. His official dispatches, too, were very full and thorough. Webster valued them particularly, and remarked that he "always laid aside every other correspondence to read a diplomatic dispatch from Mr. Irving." He had time, too, for many charming chatty letters to the nieces at Sunnyside. Here is a Thackerayish passage from one of them: "You seem to pity the poor little queen, shut up with her sister like two princesses in a fairy tale, in a great, grand, dreary palace, and wonder whether she would not like to change her situation for a nice little cottage on the Hudson? Perhaps she would, Kate, if she knew anything of the gayeties of cottage life; if she had ever been with us at a picnic, or driven out in the shandry-dan with the two roans, and James, in his slipshod hat, for a coachman, or _yotted_ in the Dream, or sang in the Tarrytown choir, or shopped at Tommy Dean's; but, poor thing! she would not know how to set about enjoying herself. She would not think of appearing at church without a whole train of the Miss ----s and the Miss ----s, and the Miss ----s, as maids of honor, nor drive through Sleepy Hollow except in a coach and six, with a cloud of dust, and a troop of horsemen in glittering armor. So I think, Kate, we must be content with pitying her, and leaving her in ignorance of the comparative desolateness of her situation." In 1842, Irving suffered another of those petty persecutions which he was not thick-skinned enough to endure without suffering, nor confident enough to ignore. The charges were of the most ordinary sort, and advanced by men of little weight: he had appropriated material without giving due credit for it, and he had puffed his own work. Their only claim upon our notice lies in the fact that Irving thought it worth while to confute them at length. He was perhaps especially sensitive to critical attacks at this time. His income from literary property had nearly ceased. Some of his books were out of print, and the rest were having comparatively little sale. A wave of indifference had overtaken his public. "Everything behind me seems to have turned to chaff and stubble," he wrote. "And if I desire any further profits from literature, it must be by the further exercise of my pen." It is characteristic of his modesty that he was disposed to accept this momentary neglect as final. He planned to revise all his works, in the hope of finding a renewed market for them later, but evidently expected little. A letter to Brevoort from Bordeaux dated November, 1843, accounts for the first break in his Madrid residence: "I am now on my way back to my post, after between two and three months' absence. I set out in pursuit of health, and thought a little traveling and a change of air would 'make me my own man again'; but I was laid by the heels at Paris by a recurrence of my malady, and have just escaped out of the doctor's hands.... This indisposition has been a sad check upon all my plans. I had hoped, by zealous employment of all the leisure afforded me at Madrid, to accomplish one or two literary tasks which I have in hand.... A year, however, has now been lost to me, and a precious year, at my time of life. The 'Life of Washington,' and indeed all my literary tasks, have remained suspended; and my pen has remained idle, excepting now and then in writing a dispatch to Government, or scrawling a letter to my family. In the mean time the income which I used to derive from farming out my writings has died away, and my moneyed investments yield scarce any interest.... However, thank God, my health and with it my capacity for work are returning. I shall soon again have pen in hand, and hope to get two or three good years of literary labor out of myself." After his return to Spain he was again laid by. He was disappointed, but not discouraged, for the self-pity of the invalid never deprived him of his strong man's humor. "When I drive out and notice the opening of spring, I feel sometimes almost moved to tears at the thought that in a little while I shall again have the use of my limbs, and be able to ramble about and enjoy these green fields and meadows. It seems almost too great a privilege. I am afraid when I once more sally forth and walk the streets, I shall feel like a boy with a new coat, who thinks everybody will turn around to look at him. 'Bless my soul, how that gentleman has the use of his legs!'" A few days after this was written, he got word that one of his friends had just undergone a successful surgical operation. "God bless these surgeons and dentists!" he exclaims. "May their good deeds be returned upon them a thousand fold! May they have the felicity, in the next world, to have successful operations performed upon them to all eternity!" By this time he had come to take Spanish politics rather too seriously. The insincerity and profligacy of the Spanish character, the corruption of the court and state, fairly sicken him: "The last ten or twelve years of my life," he writes, "have shown me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow men, and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination, and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be." His sense of responsibility for the young queen oppressed him, and he looked forward impatiently to the hour of his release. A year later he had gained far better health and spirits. On his sixty-second birthday--"I caught myself bounding upstairs three steps at a time, to the astonishment of the porter, and checked myself, recollecting that it was not the pace befitting a minister and a man of my years." His mental life had, however, caught the sober tone of age. "I am now at that time of life when the mind has a stock of recollections on which to employ itself; and though these may sometimes be of a melancholy nature, yet it is a 'sweet-souled melancholy,' mellowed and softened by the operation of time, and has no bitterness in it.... When I was young, my imagination was always in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling, which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in the distance." In July, 1846, his successor arrived, and Irving was free to leave Europe for the last time. His services in Spain had brought nothing but honor to himself and his country; he had earned a right to the quiet years that followed in his favorite home nook at Sunnyside. Soon after his return he began to busy himself with the revised edition of his works which he had projected in Spain. It was disheartening to find his old publishers dubious about undertaking the republication, and for a time the work went hard. "I am growing a sad laggard in literature," he wrote to his nephew, "and need some one to bolster me up occasionally. I am too ready to do anything else rather than write." For more than a year his time was largely devoted to overseeing an enlargement of the cottage, and a renovation of the grounds, at Sunnyside. At last he got it all into satisfactory order. "My own place has never been so beautiful as at present. I have made more openings by pruning and cutting down trees, so that from the piazza I have several charming views of the Tappan Zee and the hills beyond, all set, as it were, in verdant flames; and I am never tired of sitting there in my old Voltaire chair of a long summer morning with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing, and sometimes dozing, and mixing all up in a pleasant dream." As for New York, "For my part, I dread the noise and turmoil of it, and visit it but now and then, preferring the quiet of my country retreat; which shows that the bustling time of life is over with me, and that I am settling down into a sober, quiet, good-for-nothing old gentleman." This was all very well--for a mood. He spent the next winter in town, moving freely in society, and "not missing a single performance" of the opera. "One meets all one's acquaintances at the opera, and there is much visiting from box to box, and pleasant conversation, between the acts. The opera house is in fact the great feature of polite society in New York, and I believe is the great attraction that keeps me in town. Music is to me the great sweetener of existence, and I never enjoyed it more abundantly than at present." Clearly, the old social instinct was by no means dead in him, however he might express himself in less buoyant moods. Two years after his return from Spain the house of Putnam agreed to publish the revised edition of his works on very liberal terms--a twelve and a half per cent. royalty. The result of the enterprise was a surprise to author and publisher, for during the ten remaining years of his life the royalties amounted to more than $88,000. The arrangement brought about an immediate accession of courage and power, and he returned with fresh zeal to the "Life of Washington." "All I fear," he said, "is to fail in health, and fail in completing this work at the same time. If I can only live to finish it, I would be willing to die the next moment. I think I can make it a most interesting book. If I had only ten years more of life! I never felt more able to write. I might not conceive as I did in earlier days, when I had more romance of feeling, but I could execute with more rapidity and freedom." The consciousness of approaching age grew stronger in him, but without weakening his capacity for enjoyment or his turn for humorous expression. Early in 1850, George Ticknor sent him a copy of his "History of Spanish Literature." Irving dipped into it, liked it, and "When I have once read it through," he wrote, "I shall keep it by me, like a Stilton cheese, to give a dig into whenever I want a relishing morsel. I began to fear it would never see the light in my day, or that it might fare with you as with that good lady who went thirteen years with child, and then brought forth a little old man, who died in the course of a month of extreme old age. But you have produced three strapping volumes, full of life and freshness and vigor, that will live forever." This sounds well for Ticknor; but it needs only a glance at Irving's recorded correspondence to see that he was inclined to overestimate the work of others. That kind heart must needs assume the functions of a head which was very well able to take care of itself. In larger matters his judgment was often colored, but seldom warped, by feeling. The line between sentiment and common sense is clearly drawn in his comment upon the Kossuth obsession which held New York in 1852. "I have heard and seen Kossuth both in public and private, and he is really a noble fellow, quite the beau ideal of a poetic hero.... He is a kind of man that you would idolize. Yet, poor fellow, he has come here under a great mistake, and is doomed to be disappointed in the high-wrought expectations he had formed of coöperation on the part of our government in the affairs of his unhappy country. Admiration and sympathy he has in abundance from individuals; but there is no romance in councils of state or deliberative assemblies. There, cool judgment and cautious policy must restrain and regulate the warm impulses of feeling. I trust we are never to be carried away, by the fascinating eloquence of this second Peter the Hermit, into schemes of foreign interference, that would rival the wild enterprises of the Crusades." The letter concludes in a minor strain: "It is now half-past twelve at night, and I am sitting here scribbling in my study, long after the family are abed and asleep--a habit I have fallen much into of late. Indeed, I never fagged more steadily with my pen than I do at present. I have a long task in hand, which I am anxious to finish, that I may have a little leisure in the brief remnant of life that is left to me. However, I have a strong presentiment that I shall die in harness; and I am content to do so, provided I have the cheerful exercise of intellect to the last." By this time some of his Western investments had begun to make handsome returns. With an easy pocket, and a single congenial task for his leisure, it seemed that Irving's last years were certain to be peacefully rounded. Unfortunately his health did not hold; all his former ailments came back upon him, and the "Life of Washington" became an Old Man of the Sea, which one wishes heartily he might have been rid of. A visit to Saratoga in the summer of 1852, and the company of many pretty women, seemed for the moment to lift the years from his shoulders. "No one seemed more unconscious of the celebrity to which he had attained," wrote one of his Saratoga acquaintances, long after. "In this there was not a particle of affectation. Nothing he shrank from with greater earnestness and sincerity and (I may add) pertinacity, than any attempt to lionize him." His name was used to conjure with too often for his comfort. An "Irving Literary Union" had been formed in New York. Irving's attitude toward it was amusing and characteristic; he was always invited to attend the anniversary meeting, always accepted, and always stayed away. Events abroad continued to interest him. His sister had sent an account from Paris of the marriage of Louis Napoleon. "Louis Napoleon and Eugénie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!" he wrote. "One of whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the other of whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada! It seems to cap the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has been the theatre during my lifetime." In 1855, "Wolfert's Roost" was published. Most of its contents had figured years before in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." It is one of the best of his miscellaneous collections, and should be better known to the modern reader of Irving. Thereafter, his work was over, except for the "Life of Washington," which was to appear in parts during the next three years. Its merits were perhaps exaggerated at the time; to the modern critic they lie chiefly in its possession of the lucid simplicity of method without which its author could not write, and in the life which it infuses into a cold abstraction. If this is not Washington, it is at least a living and breathing person, whose interest for us lies not altogether in his career. These closing years were sadly clouded by sleeplessness and depression of spirits, from which at times he roused himself to bursts of his old brilliancy and humor. A year before his death he said to one of the innumerable inquiries about his health, "I have a streak of old age. Pity, when we have grown old, we could not turn round and grow young again, and die of cutting our teeth." A few months later, when he had begun to be troubled with difficulty of breathing, he had a long and prosy letter from a total stranger, who proposed a call. "Oh, if he could only give me his long wind," gasped Irving, "he should be most welcome." We need not follow here the rather pitiful struggle of those last months. "I do not fear death," said he, "but I would like to go down with all sail set." The thoughts of the gradual loss of his faculties haunted him with curious insistency. He conceived a dislike for his own room, could not bear to be alone, and hung with pathetic eagerness to the companionship of the few whom he held dearest. His fear was groundless. To the end his mind remained clear; and on the 29th of November, 1859, he "went down with all sail set." VI THE MAN HIMSELF One is tempted to ask himself, in concluding a review of this man's life and work, what it was that he peculiarly stood for; what new kind of excellence he brought into being, and how far it survived him. Oddly enough, the accident of his birthplace is made at once his chief merit, and the subtle derogation of that merit; he is the first distinguished name in American letters, and he is "the American Addison." From the outset one who wishes to study his work is hampered by the fact of place. One must be always considering solemnly, "Although he was an American, he succeeded in doing this," or, "Because he was an American, he might have done that," till one is fairly inclined to wish that his English parents had not happened to marry and settle in New York. As a matter of fact, there are few writers against whom the point of nationality may be pushed with less pertinence. It is plain that earlier American writing interests us only in a local and guarded sense. The critical microscope discovers certain merits; but the least shifting of the eye-piece throws the object out of field. We value what these men wrote because of what they did as Americans, or stood for in American life. Of Irving and a few later writers this is not true. And our regard for them may lead us to suspect that from the literary point of view, it is better to be great than American; or at least that there is no formula to express the ratio between a writer's Americanism and his literary power. The historian esteems a flavor of nationality in literature; to the lover of pure letters, it is only a superior sort of local color. Irving's distinction is that he was the first prophet of pure letters in America. This is to speak thickly; and it will not help matters greatly to say that the mark of pure letters is style. The application of that foggy term to such a writer as Irving is likely to be particularly unfair; it has not been spared him. He has had more praise for his style than for anything else; indeed, it has been commonly suggested that there is little else to praise him for. This is, of course, a survival of the old notion that style is a sort of achievement in decorative art; that fine feathers may do much for the literary bird, at least. The style of a writer like Irving--a mere loiterer in the field of letters--is at best a creditable product of artifice. To him even so much credit has not been always allowed; the clever imitator of Addison--or, as some sager say, of Goldsmith--has not even invented a manner; he has borrowed one. Fortunately, novelty of form is a very different thing from literary excellence. Irving wrote like a well-bred Englishman, brought up in the sound traditions of the days of good Queen Anne. Whatever local merit his work may have, belongs to theme rather than to treatment. Its delicate humor is as far as possible from what has come to be known as American humor. His only conscious Americanism in motive--to speak of him merely as an artist--was to show England that "an American could write decent English." At that time, it seems, Englishmen considered this to be a good thing for an American to do; and the poet Campbell's remark was thought to be high praise: that Washington Irving had "added clarity to the English tongue." This was a service of which the language just then stood sadly in need. There are always men ready enough to make English turbid, to wreak their ingenuity upon oddities of phrase and diction. At that moment, certainly, the anxious courtier of words was not so much needed as the easy autocrat, whose style, however cavalier, should have grace and firmness and clarity to commend it. When Irving began to express himself, there was very little straightforward simple writing being done, either in America or in England. The stuffed buckram of Johnsonese had been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and purity of the prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it should have been for this acquired manner that the world thought it liked him while he lived, and has chiefly praised him since he died. But after all, as was said of Milton in a different connection, Irving has worn "the garb, but not the clothes, of the ancients." His kinship to them in temper of thought and feeling was closer than his resemblance in manner. Like Addison and Goldsmith, he wins his audience through sheer charm of personality. To open one of his books is like meeting a congenial stranger. You like his looks at first glance, you feel somehow that he likes yours; and while you may be hesitating about advances, he is at your side, and there is nothing more to be said. You do not care whether he is American or English, you are not particular what he talks about, but you do not willingly part with him. The charm of creative genius is less the charm of mind than of feeling. And it is to feeling refined and colored by temperament, that the more delicate modes of belles-lettres owe their whole power. That is, a writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues language and subordinates thought to his own temper, not as he gives elegant utterance to thought or feeling in their abstracted and general estate. Through a surface artificiality of style, which is far more marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, "A rancorous prejudice against us has been diligently inculcated of late years by the British press, and it is daily producing its fruits of bitterness." What he said was: "Bulwer,"--then English minister to Spain,--"I should deplore exceedingly a war with England, for depend upon it, if we must come to blows, it will be serious work for both. You might break our head at first, but by Heaven! we would break your back in the end!" But one need not write in the vernacular to be sincere and effective; personality may utter itself through different media, whether in different tongues or in distinct strata of the same tongue. Just now we have a bent toward colloquialism on paper; it was not the bent of Irving's day. As far as the external features of his style are concerned, he has had praise enough, and more than enough. Clearness, ease, a certain Gallic grace it has; the ink flows readily, the thing says itself without crabbedness or constraint. On the other hand this ready writer is often conventional; a set phrase contents him, why should he labor to escape the usual formula? He knew nothing of the struggle or the reward of the artist in words, who wrestles for the exact _nuance_, and will not let a sentence go till he has obtained its blessing. Consequently he is never finicking in his phraseology, and seldom final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a rarer quality--that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent question. All that we know is that, through his use of words or in spite of it, a new melody has come into being, a golden _motif_ which is to ring in the world's ears nobody knows how long. It seems idle to say of such a man that because he does not concern himself with "the mystery of existence," and "the solemn eternities," he has nothing to say. Surely the simple-souled artist may leave such matters for the philosophers and theologians to deal with. Surely his "message" is as significant as theirs. Irving is admirable not mainly because he "wrote beautifully," but because he said something which no one else could say: he uttered the most meaning of all messages--himself. And if literature is really a criticism of life, such a message from such a man has, it would seem, dignity enough. Evidently Irving, like Goldsmith and Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing influence largely to his cheerful and wholesome this-worldliness. He was a sentimentalist, but obviously different in spirit from the two great English writers of sentiment who were most nearly his contemporaries. Thackeray is sophisticated; fortune's buffets have left him still a tender interest in life, but pity rather than hopefulness gives color to his mood. Dickens's sentiment seldom rings perfectly true; too often it is sharped to flippancy, or flatted to mawkishness. The tone of Irving, in sentiment or in humor, is the clear and even utterance of a healthy nature. It was a period of sickly sentimentalism in which he began to write; men drew tears frequently and mechanically then, as they drew corks. The sentimentalist passed easily from broad mirth to unwinking pathos. Fortunately that weakest mood of sentiment without humor came seldom to Irving; he wrote only one "History of Margaret Nicholson." It was his nature to be achingly considerate of others, so that he was a better friend than critic; and he was as careful of their good opinion as of their comfort. Always doubtful what treatment his work would meet, and even what it deserved, he would ask his friends to say nothing about it, unless they liked it. "One condemning whisper," said one of them, "sounded louder in his ear than the plaudits of thousands." Socially, on the other hand, he never had the least doubt of himself. The tastes and manner of a gentleman did not need to be acquired; there was no question of his fitness for any society. During his whole career, thrown as he was into the choicest company of two continents, there was evidently not the least suspicion of embarrassment or awkwardness in his quiet bearing. He was in the largest sense of the word a generous man; and even in the smaller sense his generosity has distinction and significance. Addison we know to have been a little on the hither side of open-handedness. Goldsmith was by his own satirical confession the "good-natured man," to whom giving was a conscious indulgence. Irving was simply not aware that he gave; to share his best was a natural function. And it is our sense of this, of being admitted as a matter of course to share in all that he is and has, which largely explains his delightfulness as man and author. Citizen of the world as he was in his literary character, in practical life his Americanism was real and potent. He deplored the War of 1812 and the war with Mexico, but believed firmly that it was no man's duty to go back of the government's decision. In the conduct of his mission to Spain he showed the utmost steadiness, loyalty, and self-possession in many trying situations. He was, in short, a valuable citizen, to whom honors came unsought, and who, out of office, and not desirous of political power, was trusted by all parties, and tempted by none. The mere existence of such a figure, calm, simple, incorruptible, honored wherever he was known, and known prominently throughout Europe, was a valuable stay to the young republic in that purgatorial first half of the nineteenth century. One fact about him will perhaps bear emphasis; that with all his gentlenesses he was strong and firm and full of spirit. He was susceptible to advice, yet nobody ever forced him to do a thing that was against his mind or conscience. That he was amiable, congenial, companionable--we do not forget these traits of his; we should remember, too, that he never faced an emergency to which he did not prove himself equal. His personal hold upon his contemporaries was plainly due to the fact that their confidence in him as a man was as perfect as their delight in him as an artist. What he did was, after all, only a little part of what he was. * * * * * 
15984	----	[Illustration] American Men of Letters. WASHINGTON IRVING. BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. FIFTH THOUSAND. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET, NEW YORK. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1884. Copyright, 1881, BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. _All rights reserved_. _The Riverside Press, Cambridge:_ Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE PRELIMINARY 1 CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD 21 CHAPTER III. MANHOOD: FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE 31 CHAPTER IV. SOCIETY AND "SALMAGUNDI" 43 CHAPTER V. THE KNICKERBOCKER PERIOD 58 CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN EUROPE: LITERARY ACTIVITY 94 CHAPTER VII. IN SPAIN 141 CHAPTER VIII. RETURN TO AMERICA: SUNNYSIDE: THE MISSION TO MADRID 158 CHAPTER IX. THE CHARACTERISTIC WORKS 190 CHAPTER X. LAST YEARS: THE CHARACTER OF HIS LITERATURE 282 WASHINGTON IRVING. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY. It is over twenty years since the death of Washington Irving removed that personal presence which is always a powerful, and sometimes the sole, stimulus to the sale of an author's books, and which strongly affects the contemporary judgment of their merits. It is nearly a century since his birth, which was almost coeval with that of the Republic, for it took place the year the British troops evacuated the city of New York, and only a few months before General Washington marched in at the head of the Continental army and took possession of the metropolis. For fifty years Irving charmed and instructed the American people, and was the author who held, on the whole, the first place in their affections. As he was the first to lift American literature into the popular respect of Europe, so for a long time he was the chief representative of the American name in the world of letters. During this period probably no citizen of the Republic, except the Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as his namesake, Washington Irving. It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in enduring qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary rank and achievement. The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as much upon fashion or whim, as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the final rank of an author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in disregard of the critics; but the rank is after all determined by the few best minds of any given age, and the popular judgment has very little to do with it. Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of merit. The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most widely read at any given time. Some who attain the position of classics are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or neglect. It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not read. The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen years after his death as the "dear son of memory, great heir to fame,"-- "So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"-- he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to his preëminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign peoples. There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another, and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy. The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which is most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read. It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have faithfully painted the manners of their own time. Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It would be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development of American literature (using the term in its broadest sense) in the past forty years is greater than could have been expected in a nation which had its ground to clear, its wealth to win, and its new governmental experiment to adjust; if we confine our view to the last twenty years, the national production is vast in amount and encouraging in quality. It suffices to say of it here, in a general way, that the most vigorous activity has been in the departments of history, of applied science, and the discussion of social and economic problems. Although pure literature has made considerable gains, the main achievement has been in other directions. The audience of the literary artist has been less than that of the reporter of affairs and discoveries and the special correspondent. The age is too busy, too harassed, to have time for literature; and enjoyment of writings like those of Irving depends upon leisure of mind. The mass of readers have cared less for form than for novelty and news and the satisfying of a recently awakened curiosity. This was inevitable in an era of journalism, one marked by the marvelous results attained in the fields of religion, science, and art, by the adoption of the comparative method. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the vigor and intellectual activity of the age than a living English writer, who has traversed and illuminated almost every province of modern thought, controversy, and scholarship; but who supposes that Mr. Gladstone has added anything to permanent literature? He has been an immense force in his own time, and his influence the next generation will still feel and acknowledge, while it reads not the writings of Mr. Gladstone but may be those of the author of "Henry Esmond" and the biographer of "Rab and his Friends." De Quincey divides literature into two sorts, the literature of power and the literature of knowledge. The latter is of necessity for to-day only, and must be revised to-morrow. The definition has scarcely De Quincey's usual verbal felicity, but we can apprehend the distinction he intended to make. It is to be noted also, and not with regard to Irving only, that the attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted by the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying the wants of the day, produced and distributed with marvelous cheapness and facility that the standard works of approved literature remain for the most part unread upon the shelves. Thirty years ago Irving was much read in America by young people and his clear style helped to form a good taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The manufacturers of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep the rising generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and mental fibre which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some apprehension. The "plant," in the way of money and writing industry invested in the production of juvenile literature, is so large and is so permanent an interest, that it requires more discriminating consideration than can be given to it in a passing paragraph. Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been in America a criticism--sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the Donnybrook Fair--that found "earnestness" the only thing in the world amusing, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and disparaged what is called the "Knickerbocker School" (assuming Irving to be the head of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic development of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some extent the fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the creator of American literature as the "genial" Irving. Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative American author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain periods, more or less marked, in our literature. I do not include in it the works of writers either born in England or completely English in training, method, and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American in their writings except the incidental subject. The first authors whom we may regard as characteristic of the new country--leaving out the productions of speculative theology--devoted their genius to politics. It is in the political writings immediately preceding and following the Revolution--such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson--that the new birth of a nation of original force and ideas is declared. It has been said, and I think the statement can be maintained, that for any parallel to those treatises on the nature of government, in respect to originality and vigor, we must go back to classic times. But literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving. Some foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no question that his writings were the first that bore the national literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our only man of letters who had a reputation beyond seas. Irving was not, however, the first American who made literature a profession and attempted to live on its fruits. This distinction belongs to Charles Brockden Brown, who was born in Philadelphia, January 17, 1771, and, before the appearance in a newspaper of Irving's juvenile essays in 1802, had published several romances, which were hailed as original and striking productions by his contemporaries, and even attracted attention in England. As late as 1820 a prominent British review gives Mr. Brown the first rank in our literature as an original writer and characteristically American. The reader of to-day who has the curiosity to inquire into the correctness of this opinion will, if he is familiar with the romances of the eighteenth century, find little originality in Brown's stories, and nothing distinctively American. The figures who are moved in them seem to be transported from the pages of foreign fiction to the New World, not as it was, but as it existed in the minds of European sentimentalists. Mr. Brown received a fair education in a classical school in his native city, and studied law, which he abandoned on the threshold of practice, as Irving did, and for the same reason. He had the genuine literary impulse, which he obeyed against all the arguments and entreaties of his friends. Unfortunately, with a delicate physical constitution he had a mind of romantic sensibility, and in the comparative inaction imposed by his frail health he indulged in visionary speculation, and in solitary wanderings which developed the habit of sentimental musing. It was natural that such reveries should produce morbid romances. The tone of them is that of the unwholesome fiction of his time, in which the "seducer" is a prominent and recognized character in social life, and female virtue is the frail sport of opportunity. Brown's own life was fastidiously correct, but it is a curious commentary upon his estimate of the natural power of resistance to vice in his time, that he regarded his feeble health as good fortune, since it protected him from the temptations of youth and virility. While he was reading law he constantly exercised his pen in the composition of essays, some of which were published under the title of the "Rhapsodist;" but it was not until 1797 that his career as an author began, by the publication of "Alcuin: a Dialogue on the Rights of Women." This and the romances which followed it show the powerful influence upon him of the school of fiction of William Godwin, and the movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader. The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In "Alcuin" are anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women to property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that founded upon the inclination of the hour is as ingeniously urged in "Alcuin" as it has been in our own day. Mr. Brown's reputation rests upon six romances: "Wieland," "Ormond," "Arthur Mervyn," "Edgar Huntly," "Clara Howard," and "Jane Talbot." The first five were published in the interval between the spring of 1798 and the summer of 1801, in which he completed his thirtieth year. "Jane Talbot" appeared somewhat later. In scenery and character, these romances are entirely unreal. There is in them an affectation of psychological purpose which is not very well sustained, and a somewhat clumsy introduction of supernatural machinery. Yet they have a power of engaging the attention in the rapid succession of startling and uncanny incidents and in adventures in which the horrible is sometimes dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what the children call a "crawly" impression. There is undeniable power in many of his scenes, notably in the descriptions of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, found in the romance of "Arthur Mervyn." There is, however, over all of them a false and pallid light; his characters are seen in a spectral atmosphere. If a romance is to be judged not by literary rules, but by its power of making an impression upon the mind, such power as a ghastly story has, told by the chimney-corner on a tempestuous night, then Mr. Brown's romances cannot be dismissed without a certain recognition. But they never represented anything distinctively American, and their influence upon American literature is scarcely discernible. Subsequently Mr. Brown became interested in political subjects, and wrote upon them with vigor and sagacity. He was the editor of two short-lived literary periodicals which were nevertheless useful in their day: "The Monthly Magazine and American Review," begun in New York in the spring of 1798, and ending in the autumn of 1800; and "The Literary Magazine and American Register," which was established in Philadelphia in 1803. It was for this periodical that Mr. Brown, who visited Irving in that year, sought in vain to enlist the service of the latter, who, then a youth of nineteen, had a little reputation as the author of some humorous essays in the "Morning Chronicle" newspaper. Charles Brockden Brown died, the victim of a lingering consumption, in 1810, at the age of thirty-nine. In pausing for a moment upon his incomplete and promising career, we should not forget to recall the strong impression he made upon his contemporaries as a man of genius, the testimony to the charm of his conversation and the goodness of his heart, nor the pioneer service he rendered to letters before the provincial fetters were at all loosened. The advent of Cooper, Bryant, and Halleck, was some twenty years after the recognition of Irving, but thereafter the stars thicken in our literary sky, and when in 1832 Irving returned from his long sojourn in Europe, he found an immense advance in fiction, poetry, and historical composition. American literature was not only born,--it was able to go alone. We are not likely to overestimate the stimulus to this movement given by Irving's example, and by his success abroad. His leadership is recognized in the respectful attitude towards him of all his contemporaries in America. And the cordiality with which he gave help whenever it was asked, and his eagerness to acknowledge merit in others, secured him the affection of all the literary class, which is popularly supposed to have a rare appreciation of the defects of fellow craftsmen. The period from 1830 to 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from 1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had been growing before, it did not altogether disappear at the time named, and it was so conspicuous that this may properly be called the sentimental era in our literature. The causes of it, and its relation to our changing national character, are worthy the study of the historian. In politics, the discussion of constitutional questions, of tariffs and finance, had given way to moral agitations. Every political movement was determined by its relation to slavery. Eccentricities of all sorts were developed. It was the era of "transcendentalism" in New England, of "come-outers" there and elsewhere, of communistic experiments, of reform notions about marriage, about woman's dress, about diet; through the open door of abolitionism women appeared upon its platform, demanding a various emancipation; the agitation for total abstinence from intoxicating drinks got under full headway, urged on moral rather than on the statistical and scientific grounds of to-day; reformed drunkards went about from town to town depicting to applauding audiences the horrors of delirium tremens,--one of these peripatetics led about with him a goat, perhaps as a scapegoat and sin-offering; tobacco was as odious as rum; and I remember that George Thompson, the eloquent apostle of emancipation, during his tour in this country, when on one occasion he was the cynosure of a protracted antislavery meeting at Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, deeply offended some of his co-workers, and lost the admiration of many of his admirers, the maiden devotees of green tea, by his use of snuff. To "lift up the voice" and wear longhair were signs of devotion to a purpose. In that seething time, the lighter literature took a sentimental tone, and either spread itself in manufactured fine writing, or lapsed into a reminiscent and melting mood. In a pretty affectation, we were asked to meditate upon the old garret, the deserted hearth, the old letters, the old well-sweep, the dead baby, the little shoes; we were put into a mood in which we were defenseless against the lukewarm flood of the Tupperean Philosophy. Even the newspapers caught the bathetic tone. Every "local" editor breathed his woe over the incidents of the police court, the falling leaf, the tragedies of the boarding-house, in the most lachrymose periods he could command, and let us never lack fine writing, whatever might be the dearth of news. I need not say how suddenly and completely this affectation was laughed out of sight by the coming of the "humorous" writer, whose existence is justified by the excellent service he performed in clearing the tearful atmosphere. His keen and mocking method, which is quite distinct from the humor of Goldsmith and Irving, and differs, in degree at least, from the comic almanac exaggeration and coarseness which preceded it, puts its foot on every bud of sentiment, holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard anything in life seriously. But it has no mercy for any sham. I refer to this sentimental era--remembering that its literary manifestation was only a surface disease, and recognizing fully the value of the great moral movement in purifying the national life--because many regard its literary weakness as a legitimate outgrowth of the Knickerbocker School, and hold Irving in a manner responsible for it. But I find nothing in the manly sentiment and true tenderness of Irving to warrant the sentimental gush of his followers, who missed his corrective humor as completely as they failed to catch his literary art. Whatever note of localism there was in the Knickerbocker School, however _dilettante_ and unfruitful it was, it was not the legitimate heir of the broad and eclectic genius of Irving. The nature of that genius we shall see in his life. CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD. Washington Irving was born in the city of New York, April 3, 1783. He was the eighth son of William and Sarah Irving, and the youngest of eleven children, three of whom died in infancy. His parents, though of good origin, began life in humble circumstances. His father was born on the island of Shapinska. His family, one of the most respectable in Scotland, traced its descent from William De Irwyn, the secretary and armor-bearer of Robert Bruce; but at the time of the birth of William Irving its fortunes had gradually decayed, and the lad sought his livelihood, according to the habit of the adventurous Orkney Islanders, on the sea. It was during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, the only daughter of John and Anna Sanders, who had the distinction of being the granddaughter of an English curate. The youthful pair were married in 1761, and two years after embarked for New York, where they landed July 18, 1763. Upon settling in New York William Irving quit the sea and took to trade, in which he was successful until his business was broken up by the Revolutionary War. In this contest he was a staunch Whig, and suffered for his opinions at the hands of the British occupants of the city, and both he and his wife did much to alleviate the misery of the American prisoners. In this charitable ministry his wife, who possessed a rarely generous and sympathetic nature, was especially zealous, supplying the prisoners with food from her own table, visiting those who were ill, and furnishing them with clothing and other necessaries. Washington was born in a house on William Street, about half-way between Fulton and John; the following year the family moved across the way into one of the quaint structures of the time, its gable end with attic window towards the street, the fashion of which, and very likely the bricks, came from Holland. In this homestead the lad grew up, and it was not pulled down till 1849, ten years before his death. The patriot army occupied the city. "Washington's work is ended," said the mother, "and the child shall be named after him." When the first President was again in New York, the first seat of the new government, a Scotch maid-servant of the family, catching the popular enthusiasm, one day followed the hero into a shop and presented the lad to him. "Please, your honor," said Lizzie, all aglow, "here's a bairn was named after you." And the grave Virginian placed his hand on the boy's head and gave him his blessing. The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his future biographer. New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery. It did not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country residences, orchards, and corn-fields. The city was half burned down during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition. There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy with the best of both nationalities. The habits of living were primitive; the manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table was the fashion, and strong expletives had not gone out of use in conversation. Society was the reverse of intellectual: the aristocracy were the merchants and traders; what literary culture found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theatre had existed since 1750. Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air. These were the surroundings in which the boy's literary talent was to develop. His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate, God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter, serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature, but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,--a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates. He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality. One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother, whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of her children. Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant as wicked. The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the religious forms and worship of her husband but she was never in sympathy with his rigid views. The children were repelled from the creed of their father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached to the Episcopal Church. Washington, in order to make sure of his escape, and feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his father's church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite of confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his biographer, with a half mournful admiration, and exclaim, "O Washington! if you were only good!" He had a love of music, which became later in life a passion, and great fondness for the theatre. The stolen delight of the theatre he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,--James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving's brother William. Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theatre in John Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece. Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen. The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity; he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him. He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating about, in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad;" at ten he was inspired by a translation of "Orlando Furioso;" he devoured books of voyages and travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to be that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth. His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had not shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress in his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well as books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he was afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his first voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first to celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden Hoffman, and began that enduring intimacy with the refined and charming Hoffman family which was so deeply to influence all his life. His health had always been delicate, and his friends were now alarmed by symptoms of pulmonary weakness. This physical disability no doubt had much to do with his disinclination to severe study. For the next two or three years much time was consumed in excursions up the Hudson and the Mohawk, and in adventurous journeys as far as the wilds of Ogdensburg and to Montreal, to the great improvement of his physical condition, and in the enjoyment of the gay society of Albany, Schenectady, Ballston, and Saratoga Springs. These explorations and visits gave him material for future use, and exercised his pen in agreeable correspondence; but his tendency at this time, and for several years afterwards, was to the idle life of a man of society. Whether the literary impulse which was born in him would have ever insisted upon any but an occasional and fitful expression, except for the necessities of his subsequent condition, is doubtful. Irving's first literary publication was a series of letters, signed Jonathan Oldstyle, contributed in 1802 to the "Morning Chronicle," a newspaper then recently established by his brother Peter. The attention that these audacious satires of the theatre, the actors, and their audience attracted is evidence of the literary poverty of the period. The letters are open imitations of the "Spectator" and the "Tatler," and although sharp upon local follies are of no consequence at present except as foreshadowing the sensibility and quiet humor of the future author, and his chivalrous devotion to woman. What is worthy of note is that a boy of nineteen should turn aside from his caustic satire to protest against the cruel and unmanly habit of jesting at ancient maidens. It was enough for him that they are women, and possess the strongest claim upon our admiration, tenderness, and protection. CHAPTER III. MANHOOD: FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE. Irving's health, always delicate, continued so much impaired when he came of age, in 1804, that his brothers determined to send him to Europe. On the 19th of May he took passage for Bordeaux in a sailing vessel, which reached the mouth of the Garonne on the 25th of June. His consumptive appearance when he went on board caused the captain to say to himself, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get across;" but his condition was much improved by the voyage. He stayed six weeks at Bordeaux to improve himself in the language, and then set out for the Mediterranean. In the diligence he had some merry companions, and the party amused itself on the way. It was their habit to stroll about the towns in which they stopped, and talk with whomever they met. Among his companions was a young French officer and an eccentric, garrulous doctor from America. At Tonneins, on the Garonne, they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. The girls gave Irving a needle and set him to work. He could not understand their patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on very merrily. At last the little doctor told them that the interesting young man was an English prisoner whom the French officer had in custody. Their merriment at once gave place to pity. "Ah! le pauvre garçon!" said one to another; "he is merry, however, in all his trouble." "And what will they do with him?" asked a young woman. "Oh, nothing of consequence," replied the doctor; "perhaps shoot him, or cut off his head." The good souls were much distressed; they brought him wine, loaded his pockets with fruit, and bade him good-by with a hundred benedictions. Over forty years after, Irving made a detour, on his way from Madrid to Paris, to visit Tonneins, drawn thither solely by the recollection of this incident, vaguely hoping perhaps to apologize to the tender-hearted villagers for the imposition. His conscience, had always pricked him for it; "It was a shame," he said, "to leave them with such painful impressions." The quilting party had dispersed by that time. "I believe I recognized the house," he says; "and I saw two or three old women who might once have formed part of the merry group of girls; but I doubt whether they recognized, in the stout elderly gentleman, thus rattling in his carriage through their streets, the pale young English prisoner of forty years since." Bonaparte was emperor. The whole country was full of suspicion. The police suspected the traveler, notwithstanding his passport, of being an Englishman and a spy, and dogged him at every step. He arrived at Avignon, full of enthusiasm at the thought of seeing the tomb of Laura. "Judge of my surprise," he writes, "my disappointment, and my indignation, when I was told that the church, tomb, and all were utterly demolished in the time of the Revolution. Never did the Revolution, its authors and its consequences, receive a more hearty and sincere execration than at that moment. Throughout the whole of my journey I had found reason to exclaim against it for depriving me of some valuable curiosity or celebrated monument, but this was the severest disappointment it had yet occasioned." This view of the Revolution is very characteristic of Irving, and perhaps the first that would occur to a man of letters. The journey was altogether disagreeable, even to a traveler used to the rough jaunts in an American wilderness: the inns were miserable; dirt, noise, and insolence reigned without control. But it never was our author's habit to stroke the world the wrong way: "When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner." And he adds: "There is nothing I dread more than to be taken for one of the Smell-fungi of this world. I therefore endeavor to be pleased with everything about me, and with the masters, mistresses, and servants of the inns, particularly when I perceive they have 'all the dispositions in the world' to serve me; as Sterne says, 'It is enough for heaven and ought to be enough for me.'" The traveler was detained at Marseilles, and five weeks at Nice, on one frivolous pretext of the police or another, and did not reach Genoa till the 20th of October. At Genoa there was a delightful society, and Irving seems to have been more attracted by that than by the historical curiosities. His health was restored, and his spirits recovered elasticity in the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families, among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady Shaftesbury. From the latter he experienced the most cordial and unreserved friendship; she greatly interested herself in his future, and furnished him with letters from herself and the nobility to persons of the first distinction in Florence, Rome, and Naples. Late in December Irving sailed for Sicily in a Genoese packet. Off the island of Planoca it was overpowered and captured by a little pickaroon, with lateen sails and a couple of guns, and a most villainous crew, in poverty-stricken garments, rusty cutlasses in their hands and stilettos and pistols stuck in their waistbands. The pirates thoroughly ransacked the vessel, opened all the trunks and portmanteaus, but found little that they wanted except brandy and provisions. In releasing the vessel, the ragamuffins seem to have had a touch of humor, for they gave the captain a "receipt" for what they had taken, and an order on the British consul at Messina to pay for the same. This old-time courtesy was hardly appreciated at the moment. Irving passed a couple of months in Sicily, exploring with some thoroughness the ruins, and making several perilous inland trips, for the country was infested by banditti. One journey from Syracuse through the centre of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed existed in the world. The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin. "God knows my mind never suffered so much as on this journey," he writes, "when I saw such scenes of want and misery continually before me, without the power of effectually relieving them." His stay in the ports was made agreeable by the officers of American ships cruising in those waters. Every ship was a home, and every officer a friend. He had a boundless capacity for good-fellowship. At Messina he chronicles the brilliant spectacle of Lord Nelson's fleet passing through the straits in search of the French fleet that had lately got out of Toulon. In less than a year, Nelson's young admirer was one of the thousands that pressed to see the remains of the great admiral as they lay in state at Greenwich, wrapped in the flag that had floated at the mast-head of the Victory. From Sicily he passed over to Naples in a fruit boat which dodged the cruisers, and reached Rome the last of March. Here he remained several weeks, absorbed by the multitudinous attractions. In Italy the worlds of music and painting were for the first time opened to him. Here he made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and the influence of this friendship came near changing the whole course of his life. To return home to the dry study of the law was not a pleasing prospect; the masterpieces of art, the serenity of the sky, the nameless charm which hangs about an Italian landscape, and Allston's enthusiasm as an artist, nearly decided him to remain in Rome and adopt the profession of a painter. But after indulging in this dream, it occurred to him that it was not so much a natural aptitude for the art as the lovely scenery and Allston's companionship that had attracted him to it. He saw something of Roman society; Torlonia the banker was especially assiduous in his attentions. It turned out when Irving came to make his adieus that Torlonia had all along supposed him a relative of General Washington. This mistake is offset by another that occurred later, after Irving had attained some celebrity in England. An English lady passing through an Italian gallery with her daughter stopped before a bust of Washington. The daughter said, "Mother, who was Washington?" "Why, my dear, don't you know?" was the astonished reply. "He wrote the 'Sketch-Book.'" It was at the house of Baron von Humboldt, the Prussian minister, that Irving first met Madame de Staël, who was then enjoying the celebrity of "Delphine." He was impressed with her strength of mind, and somewhat astounded at the amazing flow of her conversation, and the question upon question with which she plied him. In May the wanderer was in Paris, and remained there four months, studying French and frequenting the theatres with exemplary regularity. Of his life in Paris there are only the meagrest reports, and he records no observations upon political affairs. The town fascinated him more than any other in Europe; he notes that the city is rapidly beautifying under the emperor, that the people seem gay and happy, and _Vive la bagatelle!_ is again the burden of their song. His excuse for remissness in correspondence was, "I am a young man and in Paris." By way of the Netherlands he reached London in October and remained in England till January. The attraction in London seems to have been the theatre, where he saw John Kemble, Cooke, and Mrs. Siddons. Kemble's acting seemed to him too studied and over-labored; he had the disadvantage of a voice lacking rich, base tones. Whatever he did was judiciously conceived and perfectly executed; it satisfied the head, but rarely touched the heart. Only in the part of Zanga was the young critic completely overpowered by his acting,--Kemble seemed to have forgotten himself. Cooke, who had less range than Kemble, completely satisfied Irving as Iago. Of Mrs. Siddons, who was then old, he scarcely dares to give his impressions lest he should be thought extravagant. "Her looks," he says, "her voice, her gestures, delighted me. She penetrated in a moment to my heart. She froze and melted it by turns; a glance of her eye, a start, an exclamation, thrilled through my whole frame. The more I see her the more I admire her. I hardly breathe while she is on the stage. She works up my feelings till I am like a mere child." Some years later, after the publication of the "Sketch-Book," in a London assembly Irving was presented to the tragedy queen, who had left the stage, but had not laid aside its stately manner. She looked at him a moment, and then in a deep-toned voice slowly enunciated, "You've made me weep." The author was so disconcerted that he said not a word, and retreated in confusion. After the publication of "Bracebridge Hall" he met her in company again, and was persuaded to go through the ordeal of another presentation. The stately woman fixed her eyes on him as before, and slowly said, "You've made me weep again." This time the bashful author acquitted himself with more honor. This first sojourn abroad was not immediately fruitful in a literary way, and need not further detain us. It was the irresolute pilgrimage of a man who had not yet received his vocation. Everywhere he was received in the best society, and the charm of his manner and his ingenuous nature made him everywhere a favorite. He carried that indefinable passport which society recognizes and which needs no _visé_. He saw the people who were famous, the women whose recognition is a social reputation; he made many valuable friends; he frequented the theatre, he indulged his passion for the opera; he learned how to dine, and to appreciate the delights of a brilliant salon; he was picking up languages; he was observing nature and men, and especially women. That he profited by his loitering experience is plain enough afterward, but thus far there is little to prophesy that Irving would be anything more in life than a charming _flâneur_. CHAPTER IV. SOCIETY AND "SALMAGUNDI." On Irving's return to America in February, 1806, with reëstablished health, life did not at first take on a more serious purpose. He was admitted to the bar, but he still halted.[1] Society more than ever attracted him and devoured his time. He willingly accepted the office of "champion at the tea-parties;" he was one of a knot of young fellows of literary tastes and convivial habits, who delighted to be known as "The Nine Worthies," or "Lads of Kilkenny." In his letters of this period I detect a kind of callowness and affectation which is not discernible in his foreign letters and journal. [Footnote 1: Irving once illustrated his legal acquirements at this time by the relation of the following anecdote to his nephew: Josiah Ogden Hoffman and Martin Wilkins, an effective and witty advocate, had been appointed to examine students for admission. One student acquitted himself very lamely, and at the supper which it was the custom for the candidates to give to the examiners, when they passed upon their several merits, Hoffman paused in coming to this one, and turning to Wilkins said, as if in hesitation, though all the while intending to admit him, "Martin, I think he knows a _little_ law." "Make it stronger, Jo," was the reply; "_d----d_ little."] These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic, which is celebrated in the "Salmagundi" papers as Cockloft Hall. We are reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper of a porter house, "who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played the piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters." There was some affectation of roystering in all this; but it was a time of social good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest. Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends, Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings. He told Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath. The solitude, he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had on the whole a pleasant night of it. These young gentlemen liked to be thought "sad dogs." That they were less abandoned than they pretended to be the sequel of their lives shows: among Irving's associates at this time who attained honorable consideration were John and Gouverneur Kemble, Henry Brevoort, Henry Ogden, James K. Paulding, and Peter Irving. The saving influence for all of them was the refined households they frequented and the association of women who were high-spirited without prudery, and who united purity and simplicity with wit, vivacity, and charm of manner. There is some pleasant correspondence between Irving and Miss Mary Fairlie, a belle of the time, who married the tragedian, Thomas A. Cooper; the "fascinating Fairlie," as Irving calls her, and the Sophie Sparkle of the "Salmagundi." Irving's susceptibility to the charms and graces of women--a susceptibility which continued always fresh--was tempered and ennobled by the most chivalrous admiration for the sex as a whole. He placed them on an almost romantic pinnacle, and his actions always conformed to his romantic ideal, although in his writings he sometimes adopts the conventional satire which was more common fifty years ago than now. In a letter to Miss Fairlie, written from Richmond, where he was attending the trial of Aaron Burr, he expresses his exalted opinion of the sex. It was said in accounting for the open sympathy of the ladies with the prisoner that Burr had always been a favorite with them; "but I am not inclined," he writes, "to account for it in so illiberal a manner; it results from that merciful, that heavenly disposition, implanted in the female bosom, which ever inclines in favor of the accused and the unfortunate. You will smile at the high strain in which I have indulged; believe me, it is because I feel it; and I love your sex ten times better than ever."[1] [Footnote 1: An amusing story in connection with this Richmond visit illustrates the romantic phase of Irving's character. Cooper, who was playing at the theatre, needed small-clothes for one of his parts; Irving lent him a pair,--knee-breeches being still worn,--and the actor carried them off to Baltimore. From that city he wrote that he had found in the pocket an emblem of love, a mysterious locket of hair in the shape of a heart. The history of it is curious: when Irving sojourned at Genoa he was much taken with the beauty of a young Italian lady, the wife of a Frenchman. He had never spoken with her, but one evening before his departing he picked up from the floor her handkerchief which she had dropped, and with more gallantry than honesty carried it off to Sicily. His pocket was picked of the precious relic while he was attending a religious function in Catania, and he wrote to his friend Storm, the consul at Genoa, deploring his loss. The consul communicated the sad misfortune to the lovely Bianca, for that was the lady's name, who thereupon sent him a lock of her hair, with the request that he would come to see her on his return. He never saw her again, but the lock of hair was inclosed in a locket and worn about his neck, in memory of a radiant vision that had crossed his path and vanished.] Personally, Irving must have awakened a reciprocal admiration. A drawing by Vanderlyn, made in Paris in 1805, and a portrait by Jarvis in 1809, present him to us in the fresh bloom of manly beauty. The face has an air of distinction and gentle breeding; the refined lines, the poetic chin, the sensitive mouth, the shapely nose, the large dreamy eyes, the intellectual forehead, and the clustering brown locks are our ideal of the author of the "Sketch-Book" and the pilgrim in Spain. His biographer, Mr. Pierre M. Irving, has given no description of his appearance; but a relative, who saw much of our author in his latter years, writes to me: "He had dark gray eyes; a handsome straight nose, which might perhaps be called large; a broad, high, full forehead, and a small mouth. I should call him of medium height, about five feet eight and a half to nine inches, and inclined to be a trifle stout. There was no peculiarity about his voice; but it was pleasant and had a good intonation. His smile was exceedingly genial, lighting up his whole face and rendering it very attractive; while, if he were about to say anything humorous, it would beam forth from his eyes even before the words were spoken. As a young man his face was exceedingly handsome, and his head was well covered with dark hair; but from my earliest recollection of him he wore neither whiskers nor moustache, but a dark brown wig, which, although it made him look younger, concealed a beautifully shaped head." We can understand why he was a favorite in the society of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and Albany, as well as of New York, and why he liked to linger here and there, sipping the social sweets, like a man born to leisure and seemingly idle observation of life. It was in the midst of these social successes, and just after his admission to the bar, that Irving gave the first decided evidence of the choice of a career. This was his association with his eldest brother, William, and Paulding in the production of "Salmagundi," a semi-monthly periodical, in small duodecimo sheets, which ran with tolerable regularity through twenty numbers, and stopped in full tide of success, with the whimsical indifference to the public which had characterized its every issue. Its declared purpose was "simply to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." In manner and purpose it was an imitation of the "Spectator" and the "Citizen of the World," and it must share the fate of all imitations; but its wit was not borrowed, and its humor was to some extent original; and so perfectly was it adapted to local conditions that it may be profitably read to-day as a not untrue reflection of the manners and spirit of the time and city. Its amusing audacity and complacent superiority, the mystery hanging about its writers, its affectation of indifference to praise or profit, its fearless criticism, lively wit, and irresponsible humor, piqued, puzzled, and delighted the town. From the first it was an immense success; it had a circulation in other cities, and many imitations of it sprung up. Notwithstanding many affectations and puerilities it is still readable to Americans. Of course, if it were offered now to the complex and sophisticated society of New York, it would fail to attract anything like the attention it received in the days of simplicity and literary dearth; but the same wit, insight, and literary art, informed with the modern spirit and turned upon the follies and "whim-whams" of the metropolis, would doubtless have a great measure of success. In Irving's contributions to it may be traced the germs of nearly everything that he did afterwards; in it he tried the various stops of his genius; he discovered his own power; his career was determined; thereafter it was only a question of energy or necessity. In the summer of 1808 there were printed at Ballston-Spa--then the resort of fashion and the arena of flirtation--seven numbers of a duodecimo bagatelle in prose and verse, entitled "The Literary Picture Gallery and Admonitory Epistles to the Visitors of Ballston-Spa, by Simeon Senex, Esquire." This piece of summer nonsense is not referred to by any writer who has concerned himself about Irving's life, but there is reason to believe that he was a contributor to it if not the editor.[1] [Footnote 1: For these stray reminders of the old-time gayety of Ballston-Spa, I am indebted to J. Carson Brevoort, Esq., whose father was Irving's most intimate friend, and who told him that Irving had a hand in them.] In these yellow pages is a melancholy reflection of the gayety and gallantry of the Sans Souci hotel seventy years ago. In this "Picture Gallery," under the thin disguise of initials, are the portraits of well-known belles of New York whose charms of person and graces of mind would make the present reader regret his tardy advent into this world, did not the "Admonitory Epistles," addressed to the same sex, remind him that the manners of seventy years ago left much to be desired. In respect of the habit of swearing, "Simeon" advises "Myra" that if ladies were to confine themselves to a single round oath, it would be quite sufficient; and he objects, when he is at the public table, to the conduct of his neighbor who carelessly took up "Simeon's" fork and used it as a tooth-pick. All this, no doubt, passed for wit in the beginning of the century. Punning, broad satire, exaggerated compliment, verse which has love for its theme and the "sweet bird of Venus" for its object, an affectation of gallantry and of _ennui_, with anecdotes of distinguished visitors, out of which the screaming fun has quite evaporated, make up the staple of these faded mementos of ancient watering-place. Yet how much superior is our comedy of to-day? The beauty and the charms of the women of two generations ago exist only in tradition; perhaps we should give to the wit of that time equal admiration if none of it had been preserved. Irving, notwithstanding the success of "Salmagundi," did not immediately devote himself to literature, nor seem to regard his achievements in it as anything more than aids to social distinction. He was then, as always, greatly influenced by his surroundings. These were unfavorable to literary pursuits. Politics was the attractive field for preferment and distinction; and it is more than probable that, even after the success of the Knickerbocker history, he would have drifted through life, half lawyer and half placeman, if the associations and stimulus of an old civilization, in his second European residence, had not fired his ambition. Like most young lawyers with little law and less clients, he began to dabble in local politics. The experiment was not much to his taste, and the association and work demanded, at that time, of a ward politician soon disgusted him. "We have toiled through the purgatory of an election," he writes to the fair Republican, Miss Fairlie, who rejoiced in the defeat he and the Federals had sustained:-- "What makes me the more outrageous is, that I got fairly drawn into the vortex, and before the third day was expired, I was as deep in mud and politics as ever a moderate gentleman would wish to be; and I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked hand-bill fashion with the demagogues; and I shook hands with the mob, whom my heart abhorreth. 'Tis true, for the first two days I maintained my coolness and indifference. The first day I merely hunted for whim, character, and absurdity, according to my usual custom; the second day being rainy, I sat in the bar-room at the Seventh Ward, and read a volume of 'Galatea,' which I found on a shelf; but before I had got through a hundred pages, I had three or four good Feds sprawling round me on the floor, and another with his eyes half shut, leaning on my shoulder in the most affectionate manner, and spelling a page of the book as if it had been an electioneering hand-bill. But the third day--ah! then came the tug of war. My patriotism then blazed forth, and I determined to save my country! Oh, my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners; sweep offices and oyster cellars! 'I have sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life,'--faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer and tobacco for a month to come.... Truly this saving one's country is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty virtue,--prythee, no more of it." He unsuccessfully solicited some civil appointment at Albany, a very modest solicitation, which was never renewed, and which did not last long, for he was no sooner there than he was "disgusted by the servility and duplicity and rascality witnessed among the swarm of scrub politicians." There was a promising young artist at that time in Albany, and Irving wishes he were a man of wealth, to give him a helping hand; a few acts of munificence of this kind by rich nabobs, he breaks out, "would be more pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and more to the glory and advantage of their country, than building a dozen shingle church steeples, or buying a thousand venal votes at an election." This was in the "good old times!" Although a Federalist, and, as he described himself, "an admirer of General Hamilton, and a partisan with him in politics," he accepted a retainer from Burr's friends in 1807, and attended his trial in Richmond, but more in the capacity of an observer of the scene than a lawyer. He did not share the prevalent opinion of Burr's treason, and regarded him as a man so fallen as to be shorn of the power to injure the country, one for whom he could feel nothing but compassion. That compassion, however, he received only from the ladies of the city, and the traits of female goodness manifested then sunk deep into Irving's heart. Without pretending, he says, to decide on Burr's innocence or guilt, "his situation is such as should appeal eloquently to the feelings of every generous bosom. Sorry am I to say the reverse has been the fact: fallen, proscribed, pre-judged, the cup of bitterness has been administered to him with an unsparing hand. It has almost been considered as culpable to evince toward him the least sympathy or support; and many a hollow-hearted caitiff have I seen, who basked in the sunshine of his bounty while in power, who now skulked from his side, and even mingled among the most clamorous of his enemies.... I bid him farewell with a heavy heart, and he expressed with peculiar warmth and feeling his sense of the interest I had taken in his fate. I never felt in a more melancholy mood than when I rode from his solitary prison." This is a good illustration of Irving's tender-heartedness; but considering Burr's whole character, it is altogether a womanish case of misplaced sympathy with the cool slayer of Alexander Hamilton. CHAPTER V. THE KNICKERBOCKER PERIOD. Not long after the discontinuance of "Salmagundi," Irving in connection with his brother Peter projected the work that was to make him famous. At first nothing more was intended than a satire upon the "Picture of New York," by Dr. Samuel Mitchell, just then published. It was begun as a mere burlesque upon pedantry and erudition, and was well advanced, when Peter was called by his business to Europe, and its completion was fortunately left to Washington. In his mind the idea expanded into a different conception. He condensed the mass of affected learning, which was their joint work, into five introductory chapters,--subsequently he said it would have been improved if it had been reduced to one, and it seems to me it would have been better if that one had been thrown away,--and finished "A History of New York," by Diedrich Knickerbocker, substantially as we now have it. This was in 1809, when Irving was twenty-six years old. But before this humorous creation was completed, the author endured the terrible bereavement which was to color all his life. He had formed a deep and tender passion for Matilda Hoffman, the second daughter of Jeremiah Ogden Hoffman, in whose family he had long been on a footing of the most perfect intimacy, and his ardent love was fully reciprocated. He was restlessly casting about for some assured means of livelihood which would enable him to marry, and perhaps his distrust of a literary career was connected with this desire, when after a short illness Miss Hoffman died, in the eighteenth year of her age. Without being a dazzling beauty, she was lovely in person and mind, with most engaging manners, a refined sensibility, and a delicate and playful humor. The loss was a crushing blow to Irving, from the effects of which he never recovered, although time softened the bitterness of his grief into a tender and sacred memory. He could never bear to hear her name spoken even by his most intimate friends, or any allusion to her. Thirty years after her death, it happened one evening at the house of Mr. Hoffman, her father, that a granddaughter was playing for Mr. Irving, and in taking her music from the drawer, a faded piece of embroidery was brought forth. "Washington," said Mr. Hoffman, picking it up, "this is a piece of poor Matilda's workmanship." The effect was electric. He had been talking in the sprightliest mood before, but he sunk at once into utter silence, and in a few moments got up and left the house. After his death, in a private repository of which he always kept the key, was found a lovely miniature, a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper, on which was written in his own hand, "Matilda Hoffman;" and with these treasures were several pages of a memorandum in ink long since faded. He kept through life her Bible and Prayer Book; they were placed nightly under his pillow in the first days of anguish that followed her loss, and ever after they were the inseparable companions of all his wanderings. In this memorandum--which was written many years afterwards--we read the simple story of his love:-- "We saw each other every day, and I became excessively attached to her. Her shyness wore off by degrees. The more I saw of her the more I had reason to admire her. Her mind seemed to unfold leaf by leaf, and every time to discover new sweetness. Nobody knew her so well as I, for she was generally timid and silent; but I in a manner studied her excellence. Never did I meet with more intuitive rectitude of mind, more native delicacy, more exquisite propriety in word, thought, and action, than in this young creature. I am not exaggerating; what I say was acknowledged by all who knew her. Her brilliant little sister used to say that people began by admiring her, but ended by loving Matilda. For my part, I idolized her. I felt at times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as if I was a coarse, unworthy being in comparison." At this time Irving was much perplexed about his career. He had "a fatal propensity to belles-lettres;" his repugnance to the law was such that his mind would not take hold of the study; he anticipated nothing from legal pursuits or political employment; he was secretly writing the humorous history, but was altogether in a low-spirited and disheartened state. I quote again from the memorandum:-- "In the mean time I saw Matilda every day, and that helped to distract me. In the midst of this struggle and anxiety she was taken ill with a cold. Nothing was thought of it at first; but she grew rapidly worse, and fell into a consumption. I cannot tell you what I suffered. The ills that I have undergone in this life have been dealt out to me drop by drop, and I have tasted all their bitterness. I saw her fade rapidly away; beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelical to the last. I was often by her bedside; and in her wandering state of mind she would talk to me with a sweet, natural, and affecting eloquence, that was overpowering. I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that delirious state than I had ever known before. Her malady was rapid in its career, and hurried her off in two months. Her dying struggles were painful and protracted. For three days and nights I did not leave the house, and scarcely slept. I was by her when she died; all the family were assembled round her, some praying, others weeping, for she was adored by them all. I was the last one she looked upon. I have told you as briefly as I could what, if I were to tell with all the incidents and feelings that accompanied it, would fill volumes. She was but about seventeen years old when she died. "I cannot tell you what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I abandoned all thoughts of the law. I went into the country, but could not bear solitude, yet could not endure society. There was a dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts. "Months elapsed before my mind would resume any tone; but the despondency I had suffered for a long time in the course of this attachment, and the anguish that attended its catastrophe, seemed to give a turn to my whole character, and throw some clouds into my disposition, which have ever since hung about it. When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it was produced rendered me always unable to look upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America. I was noticed, caressed, and, for a time, elevated by the popularity I had gained. I found myself uncomfortable in my feelings in New York, and traveled about a little. Wherever I went I was overwhelmed with attentions; I was full of youth and animation, far different from the being I now am, and I was quite flushed with this early taste of public favor. Still, however, the career of gayety and notoriety soon palled on me. I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage. I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually recur to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal dejection. For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly." This memorandum, it subsequently appeared, was a letter, or a transcript of it, addressed to a married lady, Mrs. Foster, in which the story of his early love was related, in reply to her question why he had never married. It was in the year 1823, the year after the publication of "Bracebridge Hall," while he sojourned in Dresden, that he became intimate with an English family residing there, named Foster, and conceived for the daughter, Miss Emily Foster, a warm friendship and perhaps a deep attachment. The letter itself, which for the first time broke the guarded seclusion of Irving's heart, is evidence of the tender confidence that existed between him and this family. That this intimacy would have resulted in marriage, or an offer of marriage, if the lady's affections had not been preoccupied, the Fosters seem to have believed. In an unauthorized addition to the "Life and Letters," inserted in the English edition without the knowledge of the American editor, with some such headings as, "History of his First Love brought to us, and returned," and "Irving's Second Attachment," the Fosters tell the interesting story of Irving's life in Dresden, and give many of his letters, and an account of his intimacy with the family. From this account I quote:-- "Soon after this, Mr. Irving, who had again for long felt 'the tenderest interest warm his bosom, and finally enthrall his whole soul,' made one vigorous and valiant effort to free himself from a hopeless and consuming attachment. My mother counseled him, I believe, for the best, and he left Dresden on an expedition of several weeks into a country he had long wished to see, though, in the main, it disappointed him; and he started with young Colbourne (son of General Colbourne) as his companion. Some of his letters on this journey are before the public; and in the agitation and eagerness he there described, on receiving and opening letters from us, and the tenderness in his replies,--the longing to be once more in the little Pavilion, to which we had moved in the beginning of the summer,--the letters (though carefully guarded by the delicacy of her who intrusted them to the editor, and alone retained among many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings), even fragmentary as they are, point out the truth. "Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden, and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving had intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently could not find in his heart to part. Hence, after a night of pale and speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance with which he sprang to our coachbox to take his old seat on it, and accompany us to Rotterdam. There even could he not part, but joined us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as a boat could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself in Paris, and try to work.... "It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the _warmest friendship_ only, since it was destined that the accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one who for some time past has been the wife of another." Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment, but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:-- "You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are. I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for." Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving says:-- "While the editor does not question Mr. Irving's great enjoyment of his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes. Indeed, his 'memorandum book' and letters show him to have had, at this time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature. The allusion to his having 'to put once more to sea' evidently refers to his anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of entire idleness." It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden, and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost. That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his confidence. In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15, 1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and then says:-- "It is what we must all come to at last. I see you are hankering after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past. We are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man marries suddenly and inconsiderately. We may be longer making a choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later. I therefore recommend you to marry without delay. You have sufficient means, connected with your knowledge and habits of business, to support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that as soon as you are married you will experience a change in your ideas. All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy. Get a wife, and she'll anchor you. But don't marry a fool because she has a pretty face, and don't seek after a great belle. Get such a girl as Mary ----, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has still an unlucky kindness for poor ----, which will stand in the way of her fortunes. I wish to God they were rich, and married, and happy!" The business reverses which befell the Irving brothers, and which drove Washington to the toil of the pen, and cast upon him heavy family responsibilities, defeated his plans of domestic happiness in marriage. It was in this same year, 1816, when the fortunes of the firm were daily becoming more dismal, that he wrote to Brevoort, upon the report that the latter was likely to remain a bachelor: "We are all selfish beings. Fortune by her tardy favors and capricious freaks seems to discourage all my matrimonial resolves, and if I am doomed to live an old bachelor, I am anxious to have good company. I cannot bear that all my old companions should launch away into the married state, and leave me alone to tread this desolate and sterile shore." And, in view of a possible life of scant fortune, he exclaims: "Thank Heaven, I was brought up in simple and inexpensive habits, and I have satisfied myself that, if need be, I can resume them without repining or inconvenience. Though I am willing, therefore, that Fortune should shower her blessings upon me, and think I can enjoy them as well as most men, yet I shall not make myself unhappy if she chooses to be scanty, and shall take the position allotted me with a cheerful and contented mind." When Irving passed the winter of 1823 in the charming society of the Fosters at Dresden, the success of the "Sketch-Book" and "Bracebridge Hall" had given him assurance of his ability to live comfortably by the use of his pen. To resume. The preliminary announcement of the History was a humorous and skillful piece of advertising. Notices appeared in the newspapers of the disappearance from his lodging of "a small, elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker." Paragraphs from week to week, purporting to be the result of inquiry, elicited the facts that such an old gentleman had been seen traveling north in the Albany stage; that his name was Diedrich Knickerbocker; that he went away owing his landlord; and that he left behind a very curious kind of a written book, which would be sold to pay his bills if he did not return. So skillfully was this managed that one of the city officials was on the point of offering a reward for the discovery of the missing Diedrich. This little man in knee-breeches and cocked hat was the germ of the whole "Knickerbocker legend," a fantastic creation, which in a manner took the place of history, and stamped upon the commercial metropolis of the New World the indelible Knickerbocker name and character; and even now in the city it is an undefined patent of nobility to trace descent from "an old Knickerbocker family." The volume, which was first printed in Philadelphia, was put forth as a grave history of the manners and government under the Dutch rulers, and so far was the covert humor carried that it was dedicated to the New York Historical Society. Its success was far beyond Irving's expectation. It met with almost universal acclaim. It is true that some of the old Dutch inhabitants who sat down to its perusal, expecting to read a veritable account of the exploits of their ancestors, were puzzled by the indirection of its commendation; and several excellent old ladies of New York and Albany were in blazing indignation at the ridicule put upon the old Dutch people, and minded to ostracize the irreverent author from all social recognition. As late as 1818, in an address before the Historical Society, Mr. Gulian C. Verplanck, Irving's friend, showed the deep irritation the book had caused, by severe strictures on it as a "coarse caricature." But the author's winning ways soon dissipated the social cloud, and even the Dutch critics were erelong disarmed by the absence of all malice in the gigantic humor of the composition. One of the first foreigners to recognize the power and humor of the book was Walter Scott. "I have never," he wrote, "read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I think, too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses power of a different kind, and has some touches which remind me of Sterne." The book is indeed an original creation, and one of the few masterpieces of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous vigor, it belongs to the spring-time of literature. It has entered into the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit, has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost as real as that of Olympus. The introductory chapters are of that elephantine facetiousness which pleased our great-grandfathers, but which is exceedingly tedious to modern taste; and the humor of the book occasionally has a breadth that is indelicate to our apprehension, though it perhaps did not shock our great-grandmothers. But, notwithstanding these blemishes, I think the work has more enduring qualities than even the generation which it first delighted gave it credit for. The world, however, it must be owned, has scarcely yet the courage of its humor, and dullness still thinks it necessary to apologize for anything amusing. There is little doubt that Irving himself supposed that his serious work was of more consequence to the world. It seems strange that after this success Irving should have hesitated to adopt literature as his profession. But for two years, and with leisure, he did nothing. He had again some hope of political employment in a small way; and at length he entered into a mercantile partnership with his brothers, which was to involve little work for him, and a share of the profits that should assure his support, and leave him free to follow his fitful literary inclinations. Yet he seems to have been mainly intent upon society and the amusements of the passing hour, and, without the spur of necessity to his literary capacity, he yielded to the temptations of indolence, and settled into the unpromising position of a "man about town." Occasionally, the business of his firm and that of other importing merchants being imperiled by some threatened action of Congress, Irving was sent to Washington to look after their interests. The leisurely progress he always made to the capital through the seductive society of Philadelphia and Baltimore did not promise much business dispatch. At the seat of government he was certain to be involved in a whirl of gayety. His letters from Washington are more occupied with the odd characters he met than with the measures of legislation. These visits greatly extended his acquaintance with the leading men of the country; his political leanings did not prevent an intimacy with the President's family, and Mrs. Madison and he were sworn friends. It was of the evening of his first arrival in Washington that he writes: "I emerged from dirt and darkness into the blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison's drawing-room. Here I was most graciously received; found a crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and beautiful young ones, and in ten minutes was hand and glove with half the people in the assemblage. Mrs. Madison is a fine, portly, buxom dame, who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody. Her sisters, Mrs. Cutts and Mrs. Washington, are like two merry wives of Windsor; but as to Jemmy Madison,--oh, poor Jemmy!--he is but a withered little apple-john." Odd characters congregated then in Washington as now. One honest fellow, who, by faithful fagging at the heels of Congress, had obtained a profitable post under government, shook Irving heartily by the hand, and professed himself always happy to see anybody that came from New York; "somehow or another, it was _natteral_ to him," being the place where he was _first_ born. Another fellow-townsman was "endeavoring to obtain a deposit in the Mechanics' Bank, in case the United States Bank does not obtain a charter. He is as deep as usual; shakes his head and winks through his spectacles at everybody he meets. He swore to me the other day that he had not told anybody what his opinion was,--whether the bank ought to have a charter or not. Nobody in Washington knew what his opinion was--not one--nobody; he defied any one to say what it was--'anybody--damn the one! No, sir, nobody knows;' and if he had added nobody cares, I believe honest ---- would have been exactly in the right. Then there's his brother George: 'Damn that fellow,--knows eight or nine languages; yes, sir, nine languages,--Arabic, Spanish, Greek, Ital--And there's his wife, now,--she and Mrs. Madison are always together. Mrs. Madison has taken a great fancy to her little daughter. Only think, sir, that child is only six years old, and talks the Italian like a book, by ----; little devil learnt it from an Italian servant,--damned clever fellow; lived with my brother George ten years. George says he would not part with him for all Tripoli,'" etc. It was always difficult for Irving, in those days, to escape from the genial blandishments of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Writing to Brevoort from Philadelphia, March 16, 1811, he says: "The people of Baltimore are exceedingly social and hospitable to strangers, and I saw that if I once let myself get into the stream I should not be able to get out under a fortnight at least; so, being resolved to push home as expeditiously as was honorably possible, I resisted the world, the flesh, and the devil at Baltimore; and after three days' and nights' stout carousal, and a fourth's sickness, sorrow, and repentance, I hurried off from that sensual city." Jarvis, the artist, was at that time the eccentric and elegant lion of society in Baltimore. "Jack Randolph" had recently sat to him for his portrait. "By the bye [the letter continues] that little 'hydra and chimera dire,' Jarvis, is in prodigious circulation at Baltimore. The gentlemen have all voted him a rare wag and most brilliant wit; and the ladies pronounce him one of the queerest, ugliest, most agreeable little creatures in the world. The consequence is there is not a ball, tea-party, concert, supper, or other private regale but that Jarvis is the most conspicuous personage; and as to a dinner, they can no more do without him than they could without Friar John at the roystering revels of the renowned Pantagruel." Irving gives one of his _bon mots_ which was industriously repeated at all the dinner tables, a profane sally, which seemed to tickle the Baltimoreans exceedingly. Being very much importuned to go to church, he resolutely refused, observing that it was the same thing whether he went or stayed at home. "If I don't go," said he, "the minister says I'll be d----d, and I'll be d----d if I do go." This same letter contains a pretty picture, and the expression of Irving's habitual kindly regard for his fellow-men:-- "I was out visiting with Ann yesterday, and met that little assemblage of smiles and fascinations, Mary Jackson. She was bounding with youth, health, and innocence, and good humor. She had a pretty straw hat, tied under her chin with a pink ribbon, and looked like some little woodland nymph, just turned out by spring and fine weather. God bless her light heart, and grant it may never know care or sorrow! It's enough to cure spleen and melancholy only to look at her. "Your familiar pictures of home made me extremely desirous again to be there.... I shall once more return to sober life, satisfied with having secured three months of sunshine in this valley of shadows and darkness. In this space of time I have seen considerable of the world, but I am sadly afraid I have not grown wiser thereby, inasmuch as it has generally been asserted by the sages of every age that wisdom consists in a knowledge of the wickedness of mankind, and the wiser a man grows the more discontented he becomes with those around him. Whereas, woe is me, I return in infinitely better humor with the world than I ever was before, and with a most melancholy good opinion and good will for the great mass of my fellow-creatures!" Free intercourse with men of all parties, he thought, tends to divest a man's mind of party bigotry. "One day [he writes] I am dining with a knot of honest, furious Federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of consummate scoundrels, panders of Bonaparte, etc. The next day I dine, perhaps, with some of the very men I have heard thus anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm, and indignant; and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before with some of the greatest knaves in the nation, men absolutely paid and suborned by the British government." His friends at this time attempted to get him appointed secretary of legation to the French mission, under Joel Barlow, then minister, but he made no effort to secure the place. Perhaps he was deterred by the knowledge that the author of "The Columbiad" suspected him, though unjustly, of some strictures on his great epic. He had in mind a book of travel in his own country, in which he should sketch manners and characters; but nothing came of it. The peril to trade involved in the War of 1812 gave him some forebodings, and aroused him to exertion. He accepted the editorship of a periodical called "Select Reviews," afterwards changed to the "Analectic Magazine," for which he wrote sketches, some of which were afterwards put into the "Sketch-Book," and several reviews and naval biographies. A brief biography of Thomas Campbell was also written about this time, as introductory to an edition of "Gertrude of Wyoming." But the slight editorial care required by the magazine was irksome to a man who had an unconquerable repugnance to all periodical labor. In 1813 Francis Jeffrey made a visit to the United States. Henry Brevoort, who was then in London, wrote an anxious letter to Irving to impress him with the necessity of making much of Mr. Jeffrey. "It is essential," he says, "that Jeffrey may imbibe a just estimate of the United States and its inhabitants; he goes out strongly biased in our favor, and the influence of his good opinion upon his return to this country will go far to efface the calumnies and the absurdities that have been laid to our charge by ignorant travelers. Persuade him to visit Washington, and by all means to see the Falls of Niagara." The impression seems to have prevailed that if Englishmen could be made to take a just view of the Falls of Niagara the misunderstandings between the two countries would be reduced. Peter Irving, who was then in Edinburgh, was impressed with the brilliant talent of the editor of the "Review," disguised as it was by affectation, but he said he "would not give the Minstrel for a wilderness of Jeffreys." The years from 1811 to 1815, when he went abroad for the second time, were passed by Irving in a sort of humble waiting on Providence. His letters to Brevoort during this period are full of the _ennui_ of irresolute youth. He idled away weeks and months in indolent enjoyment in the country; he indulged his passion for the theatre when opportunity offered; and he began to be weary of a society which offered little stimulus to his mind. His was the temperament of the artist, and America at that time had little to evoke or to satisfy the artistic feeling. There were few pictures and no galleries; there was no music, except the amateur torture of strings which led the country dance, or the martial inflammation of fife and drum, or the sentimental dawdling here and there over the ancient harpsichord, with the songs of love, and the broad or pathetic staves and choruses of the convivial table; and there was no literary atmosphere. After three months of indolent enjoyment in the winter and spring of 1811, Irving is complaining to Brevoort in June of the enervation of his social life: "I do want most deplorably to apply my mind to something that will arouse and animate it; for at present it is very indolent and relaxed, and I find it very difficult to shake off the lethargy that enthralls it. This makes me restless and dissatisfied with myself, and I am convinced I shall not feel comfortable and contented until my mind is fully employed. Pleasure is but a transient stimulus, and leaves the mind more enfeebled than before. Give me rugged toils, fierce disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research,--give me anything that calls forth the energies of the mind; but for Heaven's sake shield me from those calms, those tranquil slumberings, those enervating triflings, those siren blandishments, that I have for some time indulged in, which lull the mind into complete inaction, which benumb its powers, and cost it such painful and humiliating struggles to regain its activity and independence!" Irving at this time of life seemed always waiting by the pool for some angel to come and trouble the waters. To his correspondent, who was in the wilds of Michilimackinac, he continues to lament his morbid inability. The business in which his thriving brothers were engaged was the importation and sale of hardware and cutlery, and that spring his services were required at the "store." "By all the martyrs of Grub Street [he exclaims], I'd sooner live in a garret, and starve into the bargain, than follow so sordid, dusty, and soul-killing a way of life, though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob Astor himself!" The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than the rattle of cutlery. "I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything of the ----s since your departure; business and an amazing want of inclination have kept me from their threshold. Jim, that sly poacher, however, prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of their charms. I accompanied him there on Sunday evening last, and found the Lads and Miss Knox with them. S---- was in great spirits, and played the sparkler with such great success as to silence the whole of us excepting Jim, who was the _agreeable rattle_ of the evening. God defend me from such vivacity as hers, in future,--such smart speeches without meaning, such bubble and squeak nonsense! I'd as lieve stand by a frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters. After two hours' dead silence and suffering on my part I made out to drag him off, and did not stop running until I was a mile from the house." Irving gives his correspondent graphic pictures of the social warfare in which he was engaged, the "host of rascally little tea-parties" in which he was entangled; and some of his portraits of the "divinities," the "blossoms," and the beauties of that day would make the subjects of them flutter with surprise in the church-yards where they lie. The writer was sated with the "tedious commonplace of fashionable society," and languishing to return to his books and his pen. In March, 1812, in the shadow of the war and the depression of business, Irving was getting out a new edition of the "Knickerbocker," which Inskeep was to publish, agreeing to pay $1,200 at six months for an edition of fifteen hundred. The modern publisher had not then arisen and acquired a proprietary right in the brains of the country, and the author made his bargains like an independent being who owned himself. Irving's letters of this period are full of the gossip of the town and the matrimonial fate of his acquaintances. The fascinating Mary Fairlie is at length married to Cooper, the tragedian, with the opposition of her parents, after a dismal courtship and a cloudy prospect of happiness. "Goodhue is engaged to Miss Clarkson, the sister to the pretty one. The engagement suddenly took place as they walked from church on Christmas Day, and report says the action was shorter than any of our naval victories, for the lady struck on the first broadside." The war colored all social life and conversation. "This war [the letter is to Brevoort, who is in Europe] has completely changed the face of things here. You would scarcely recognize our old peaceful city. Nothing is talked of but armies, navies, battles, etc." The same phenomenon was witnessed then that was observed in the war for the Union: "Men who had loitered about, the hangers-on and encumbrances of society, have all at once risen to importance, and been the only useful men of the day." The exploits of our young navy kept up the spirits of the country. There was great rejoicing when the captured frigate Macedonian was brought into New York, and was visited by the curious as she lay wind-bound above Hell Gate. "A superb dinner was given to the naval heroes, at which all the great eaters and drinkers of the city were present. It was the noblest entertainment of the kind I ever witnessed. On New Year's Eve a grand ball was likewise given, where there was a vast display of great and little people. The Livingstons were there in all their glory. Little Rule Britannia made a gallant appearance at the head of a train of beauties, among whom were the divine H----, who looked very inviting, and the little Taylor, who looked still more so. Britannia was gorgeously dressed in a queer kind of hat of stiff purple and silver stuff, that had marvelously the appearance of copper, and made us suppose that she had procured the real Mambrino helmet. Her dress was trimmed with what we simply mistook for scalps, and supposed it was in honor of the nation; but we blushed at our ignorance on discovering that it was a gorgeous trimming of marten tips. Would that some eminent furrier had been there to wonder and admire!" With a little business and a good deal of loitering, waiting upon the whim of his pen, Irving passed the weary months of the war. As late as August, 1814, he is still giving Brevoort, who has returned, and is at Rockaway Beach, the light gossip of the town. It was reported that Brevoort and Dennis had kept a journal of their foreign travel, "which is so exquisitely humorous that Mrs. Cooper, on only looking at the first word, fell into a fit of laughing that lasted half an hour." Irving is glad that he cannot find Brevoort's flute, which the latter requested should be sent to him: "I do not think it would be an innocent amusement for you, as no one has a right to entertain himself at the expense of others." In such dallying and badinage the months went on, affairs every day becoming more serious. Appended to a letter of September 9, 1814, is a list of twenty well-known mercantile houses that had failed within the preceding three weeks. Irving himself, shortly after this, enlisted in the war, and his letters thereafter breathe patriotic indignation at the insulting proposals of the British and their rumored attack on New York, and all his similes, even those having love for their subject, are martial and bellicose. Item: "The gallant Sam has fairly changed front, and, instead of laying siege to Douglas castle, has charged sword in hand, and carried little Cooper's entrenchments." As a Federalist and an admirer of England, Irving had deplored the war, but his sympathies were not doubtful after it began, and the burning of the national Capitol by General Ross aroused him to an active participation in the struggle. He was descending the Hudson in a steamboat when the tidings first reached him. It was night, and the passengers had gone into the cabin, when a man came on board with the news, and in the darkness related the particulars: the burning of the President's house and government offices, and the destruction of the Capitol, with the library and public archives. In the momentary silence that followed, somebody raised his voice, and in a tone of complacent derision "wondered what _Jimmy_ Madison would say now." "Sir," cried Mr. Irving, in a burst of indignation that overcame his habitual shyness, "do you seize upon such a disaster only for a sneer? Let me tell you, sir, it is not now a question about _Jimmy_ Madison or _Jimmy_ Armstrong. The pride and honor of the nation are wounded; the country is insulted and disgraced by this barbarous success, and every loyal citizen would feel the ignominy and be earnest to avenge it." There was an outburst of applause, and the sneerer was silenced. "I could not see the fellow," said Mr. Irving, in relating the anecdote, "but I let fly at him in the dark." The next day he offered his services to Governor Tompkins, and was made the governor's aid and military secretary, with the right to be addressed as Col. Washington Irving. He served only four months in this capacity, when Governor Tompkins was called to the session of the legislature at Albany. Irving intended to go to Washington and apply for a commission in the regular army, but he was detained at Philadelphia by the affairs of his magazine, until news came in February, 1815, of the close of the war. In May of that year he embarked for England to visit his brother, intending only a short sojourn. He remained abroad seventeen years. CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN EUROPE: LITERARY ACTIVITY. When Irving sailed from New York, it was with lively anticipations of witnessing the stirring events to follow the return of Bonaparte from Elba. When he reached Liverpool the curtain had fallen in Bonaparte's theatre. The first spectacle that met the traveler's eye was the mail coaches, darting through the streets, decked with laurel and bringing the news of Waterloo. As usual, Irving's sympathies were with the unfortunate. "I think," he says, writing of the exile of St. Helena, "the cabinet has acted with littleness toward him. In spite of all his misdeeds he is a noble fellow [_pace_ Madame de Rémusat], and I am confident will eclipse, in the eyes of posterity, all the crowned wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy. If anything could place the Prince Regent in a more ridiculous light, it is Bonaparte suing for his magnanimous protection. Every compliment paid to this bloated sensualist, this inflation of sack and sugar, turns to the keenest sarcasm." After staying a week with his brother Peter, who was recovering from an indisposition, Irving went to Birmingham, the residence of his brother-in-law, Henry Van Wart, who had married his youngest sister, Sarah; and from thence to Sydenham, to visit Campbell. The poet was not at home. To Mrs. Campbell Irving expressed his regret that her husband did not attempt something on a grand scale. "'It is unfortunate for Campbell,' said she, 'that he lives in the same age with Scott and Byron.' I asked why. 'Oh,' said she, 'they write so much and so rapidly. Mr. Campbell writes slowly, and it takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has fairly begun out comes one of their poems, that sets the world agog, and quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in despair.' I pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of poetry, and the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of her husband. 'You can't persuade Campbell of that,' said she. 'He is apt to undervalue his own works, and to consider his own little lights put out, whenever they come blazing out with their great torches.' "I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and it drew forth a characteristic comment. 'Pooh!' said he, good humoredly; 'how can Campbell mistake the matter so much? Poetry goes by quality, not by bulk. My poems are mere cairngorms, wrought up, perhaps, with a cunning hand, and may pass well in the market as long as cairngorms are the fashion; but they are mere Scotch pebbles, after all. Now, Tom Campbell's are real diamonds, and diamonds of the first water.'" Returning to Birmingham, Irving made excursions to Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon, and a tour through Wales with James Renwick, a young American of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had for a time filled the chair of natural philosophy in Columbia College. He was a son of Mrs. Jane Renwick, a charming woman and a life-long friend of Irving, the daughter of the Rev. Andrew Jeffrey, of Lochmaben, Scotland, and famous in literature as "The Blue-Eyed Lassie" of Burns. From another song, "When first I saw my Jeanie's Face," which does not appear in the poet's collected works, the biographer quotes:-- "But, sair, I doubt some happier swain Has gained my Jeanie's favor; If sae, may every bliss be hers, Tho' I can never have her. "But gang she east, or gang she west, 'Twixt Nith and Tweed all over, While men have eyes, or ears, or taste, She'll always find a lover." During Irving's protracted stay in England he did not by any means lose his interest in his beloved New York and the little society that was always dear to him. He relied upon his friend Brevoort to give him the news of the town, and in return he wrote long letters,--longer and more elaborate and formal than this generation has leisure to write or to read; letters in which the writer laid himself out to be entertaining, and detailed his emotions and state of mind as faithfully as his travels and outward experiences. No sooner was our war with England over than our navy began to make a reputation for itself in the Mediterranean. In his letter of August, 1815, Irving dwells with pride on Decatur's triumph over the Algerine pirates. He had just received a letter from that "worthy little tar, Jack Nicholson," dated on board the Flambeau, off Algiers. In it Nicholson says that "they fell in with and captured the admiral's ship, and _killed him_." Upon which Irving remarks: "As this is all that Jack's brevity will allow him to say on the subject, I should be at a loss to know whether they killed the admiral _before_ or _after_ his capture. The well-known humanity of our tars, however, induces me to the former conclusion." Nicholson, who has the honor of being alluded to in "The Croakers," was always a great favorite with Irving. His gallantry on shore was equal to his bravery at sea, but unfortunately his diffidence was greater than his gallantry; and while his susceptibility to female charms made him an easy and a frequent victim, he could never muster the courage to declare his passion. Upon one occasion, when he was desperately enamored of a lady whom he wished to marry, he got Irving to write for him a love-letter, containing an offer of his heart and hand. The enthralled but bashful sailor carried the letter in his pocket till it was worn out, without ever being able to summon pluck enough to deliver it. While Irving was in Wales the Wiggins family and Madame Bonaparte passed through Birmingham, on their way to Cheltenham. Madame was still determined to assert her rights as a Bonaparte. Irving cannot help expressing sympathy for Wiggins: "The poor man has his hands full, with such a bevy of beautiful women under his charge, and all doubtless bent on pleasure and admiration." He hears, however, nothing further of her, except the newspapers mention her being at Cheltenham. "There are so many stars and comets thrown out of their orbits, and whirling about the world at present, that a little star like Madame Bonaparte attracts but slight attention, even though she draw after her so sparkling a tail as the Wiggins family." In another letter he exclaims: "The world is surely topsy-turvy, and its inhabitants shaken out of place: emperors and kings, statesmen and philosophers, Bonaparte, Alexander, Johnson, and the Wigginses, all strolling about the face of the earth." The business of the Irving brothers soon absorbed all Washington's time and attention. Peter was an invalid, and the whole weight of the perplexing affairs of the failing firm fell upon the one who detested business, and counted every hour lost that he gave to it. His letters for two years are burdened with harassments in uncongenial details and unsuccessful struggles. Liverpool, where he was compelled to pass most of his time, had few attractions for him, and his low spirits did not permit him to avail himself of such social advantages as were offered. It seems that our enterprising countrymen flocked abroad, on the conclusion of peace. "This place [writes Irving] swarms with Americans. You never saw a more motley race of beings. Some seem as if just from the woods, and yet stalk about the streets and public places with all the easy nonchalance that they would about their own villages. Nothing can surpass the dauntless independence of all form, ceremony, fashion, or reputation of a downright, unsophisticated American. Since the war, too, particularly, our lads seem to think they are 'the salt of the earth' and the legitimate lords of creation. It would delight you to see some of them playing Indian when surrounded by the wonders and improvements of the Old World. It is impossible to match these fellows by anything this side the water. Let an Englishman talk of the battle of Waterloo, and they will immediately bring up New Orleans and Plattsburg. A thoroughbred, thoroughly appointed soldier is nothing to a Kentucky rifleman," etc., etc. In contrast to this sort of American was Charles King, who was then abroad: "Charles is exactly what an American should be abroad: frank, manly, and unaffected in his habits and manners, liberal and independent in his opinions, generous and unprejudiced in his sentiments towards other nations, but most loyally attached to his own." There was a provincial narrowness at that date and long after in America, which deprecated the open-minded patriotism of King and of Irving as it did the clear-sighted loyalty of Fenimore Cooper. The most anxious time of Irving's life was the winter of 1815-16. The business worry increased. He was too jaded with the din of pounds, shillings, and pence to permit his pen to invent facts or to adorn realities. Nevertheless, he occasionally escapes from the tread-mill. In December he is in London, and entranced with the acting of Miss O'Neil. He thinks that Brevoort, if he saw her, would infallibly fall in love with this "divine perfection of a woman." He writes: "She is, to my eyes, the most soul-subduing actress I ever saw; I do not mean from her personal charms, which are great, but from the truth, force, and pathos of her acting. I have never been so completely melted, moved, and overcome at a theatre as by her performances.... Kean, the prodigy, is to me insufferable. He is vulgar, full of trick, and a complete mannerist. This is merely my opinion. He is cried up as a second Garrick, as a reformer of the stage, etc. It may be so. He may be right, and all the other actors wrong. This is certain: he is either very good or very bad. I think decidedly the latter; and I find no medium opinions concerning him. I am delighted with Young, who acts with great judgment, discrimination, and feeling. I think him much the best actor at present on the English stage.... In certain characters, such as may be classed with Macbeth, I do not think that Cooper has his equal in England. Young is the only actor I have seen who can compare with him." Later, Irving somewhat modified his opinion of Kean. He wrote to Brevoort: "Kean is a strange compound of merits and defects. His excellence consists in sudden and brilliant touches, in vivid exhibitions of passion and emotion. I do not think him a discriminating actor, or critical either at understanding or delineating character; but he produces effects which no other actor does." In the summer of 1816, on his way from Liverpool to visit his sister's family at Birmingham, Irving tarried for a few days at a country place near Shrewsbury on the border of Wales, and while there encountered a character whose portrait is cleverly painted. It is interesting to compare this first sketch with the elaboration of it in the essay on The Angler in the "Sketch-Book." "In one of our morning strolls [he writes, July 15th] along the banks of the Aleen, a beautiful little pastoral stream that rises among the Welsh mountains and throws itself into the Dee, we encountered a veteran angler of old Isaac Walton's school. He was an old Greenwich out-door pensioner, had lost one leg in the battle of Camperdown, had been in America in his youth, and indeed had been quite a rover, but for many years past had settled himself down in his native village, not far distant, where he lived very independently on his pension and some other small annual sums, amounting in all to about £40. His great hobby, and indeed the business of his life, was to angle. I found he had read Isaac Walton very attentively; he seemed to have imbibed all his simplicity of heart, contentment of mind, and fluency of tongue. We kept company with him almost the whole day, wandering along the beautiful banks of the river, admiring the ease and elegant dexterity with which the old fellow managed his angle, throwing the fly with unerring certainty at a great distance and among overhanging bushes, and waving it gracefully in the air, to keep it from entangling, as he stumped with his staff and wooden leg from one bend of the river to another. He kept up a continual flow of cheerful and entertaining talk, and what I particularly liked him for was, that though we tried every way to entrap him into some abuse of America and its inhabitants, there was no getting him to utter an ill-natured word concerning us. His whole conversation and deportment illustrated old Isaac's maxims as to the benign influence of angling over the human heart.... I ought to mention that he had two companions--one, a ragged, picturesque varlet, that had all the air of a veteran poacher, and I warrant would find any fish-pond in the neighborhood in the darkest night; the other was a disciple of the old philosopher, studying the art under him, and was son and heir apparent to the landlady of the village tavern." A contrast to this pleasing picture is afforded by some character sketches at the little watering-place of Buxton, which our kindly observer visited the same year. "At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular and whimsical assemblage of beings. I don't know whether you were ever at an English watering-place, but if you have not been, you have missed the best opportunity of studying English oddities, both moral and physical. I no longer wonder at the English being such excellent caricaturists, they have such an inexhaustible number and variety of subjects to study from. The only care should be not to follow fact too closely, for I'll swear I have met with characters and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently efflorescent, like a full-blown cauliflower. But as to the persons that were attached to these noses, fancy any distortion, protuberance, and fungous embellishment that can be produced in the human form by high and gross feeding, by the bloating operations of malt liquors, and by the rheumy influence of a damp, foggy, vaporous climate. One old fellow was an exception to this, for instead of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in the process of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that he could not close eyes or mouth--the latter, therefore, stood on a perpetual ghastly grin, and the former on an incessant stare. He had but one serviceable joint in his body, which was at the bottom of the backbone, and that creaked and grated whenever he bent. He could not raise his feet from the ground, but skated along the drawing-room carpet whenever he wished to ring the bell. The only sign of moisture in his whole body was a pellucid drop that I occasionally noticed on the end of a long, dry nose. He used generally to shuffle about in company with a little fellow that was fat on one side and lean on the other. That is to say, he was warped on one side as if he had been scorched before the fire; he had a wry neck, which made his head lean on one shoulder; his hair was smugly powdered, and he had a round, smirking, smiling, apple face, with a bloom on it like that of a frost-bitten leaf in autumn. We had an old, fat general by the name of Trotter, who had, I suspect, been promoted to his high rank to get him out of the way of more able and active officers, being an instance that a man may occasionally rise in the world through absolute lack of merit. I could not help watching the movements of this redoubtable old Hero, who, I'll warrant, has been the champion and safeguard of half the garrison towns in England, and fancying to myself how Bonaparte would have delighted in having such toast-and-butter generals to deal with. This old cad is doubtless a sample of those generals that flourished in the old military school, when armies would manoeuvre and watch each other for months; now and then have a desperate skirmish, and, after marching and countermarching about the 'Low Countries' through a glorious campaign, retire on the first pinch of cold weather into snug winter quarters in some fat Flemish town, and eat and drink and fiddle through the winter. Boney must have sadly disconcerted the comfortable system of these old warriors by the harrowing, restless, cut-and-slash mode of warfare that he introduced. He has put an end to all the old _carte and tierce_ system in which the cavaliers of the old school fought so decorously, as it were with a small sword in one hand and a chapeau bras in the other. During his career there has been a sad laying on the shelf of old generals who could not keep up with the hurry, the fierceness and dashing of the new system; and among the number I presume has been my worthy house-mate, old Trotter. The old gentleman, in spite of his warlike title, had a most pacific appearance. He was large and fat, with a broad, hazy, muffin face, a sleepy eye, and a full double chin. He had a deep ravine from each corner of his mouth, not occasioned by any irascible contraction of the muscles, but apparently the deep-worn channels of two rivulets of gravy that oozed out from the huge mouthfuls that he masticated. But I forbear to dwell on the odd beings that were congregated together in one hotel. I have been thus prolix about the old general because you desired me in one of your letters to give you ample details whenever I happened to be in company with the 'great and glorious,' and old Trotter is more deserving of the epithet than any of the personages I have lately encountered." It was at the same resort of fashion and disease that Irving observed a phenomenon upon which Brevoort had commented as beginning to be noticeable in America. "Your account [he writes] of the brevity of the old lady's nether garments distresses me.... I cannot help observing that this fashion of short skirts must have been invented by the French ladies as a complete trick upon John Bull's 'woman-folk.' It was introduced just at the time the English flocked in such crowds to Paris. The French women, you know, are remarkable for pretty feet and ankles, and can display them in perfect security. The English are remarkable for the contrary. Seeing the proneness of the English women to follow French fashions, they therefore led them into this disastrous one, and sent them home with their petticoats up to their knees, exhibiting such a variety of sturdy little legs as would have afforded Hogarth an ample choice to match one of his assemblages of queer heads. It is really a great source of curiosity and amusement on the promenade of a watering-place to observe the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their stout leather shoes, and to study the various 'understandings' betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion." The years passed rather wearily in England. Peter continued to be an invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs. Of his own want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career. The times were depressing. "In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the poor--not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of nature: hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the laboring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve. How the country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how it is to escape from the poverty that seems to be overwhelming it, and how the government is to quiet the multitudes that are already turbulent and clamorous, and are yet but in the beginning of their real miseries, I cannot conceive." The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881. During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there; glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper the long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton, and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still sensitive to the allurements of life, and liable to wander over the "dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says, "and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow--then--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by the course of this romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm, pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the author of the "Sketch-Book." The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His brother-in-law Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving brothers floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and Washington, who could not think of returning home to face poverty in New York, began to revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but sufficient support. The idea of the "Sketch-Book" was in his mind. He had as yet made few literary acquaintances in England. It is an illustration of the warping effect of friendship upon the critical faculty that his opinion of Moore at this time was totally changed by subsequent intimacy. At a later date the two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla Rookh" was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion--it spreads into mere surface." Too much cream for the strawberry! Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in London, dining at Murray's, where he made the acquaintance of the elder D'Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at Murray's is this: "Lord Byron told Murray that he was much happier after breaking with Lady Byron--he hated this still, quiet life"); he was publishing a new edition of the "Knickerbocker," illustrated by Leslie and Allston; and we find him at home in the friendly and brilliant society of Edinburgh; both the magazine publishers, Constable and Blackwood, were very civil to him, and Mr. Jeffrey (Mrs. Renwick was his sister) was very attentive; and he passed some days with Walter Scott, whose home life he so agreeably describes in his sketch of "Abbotsford." He looked back longingly to the happy hours there (he writes to his brother): "Scott reading, occasionally, from 'Prince Arthur'; telling border stories or characteristic anecdotes; Sophy Scott singing with charming _naïveté_ a little border song; the rest of the family disposed in listening groups, while greyhounds, spaniels, and cats bask in unbounded indulgence before the fire. Everything about Scott is perfect character and picture." In the beginning of 1818 the business affairs of the brothers became so irretrievably involved that Peter and Washington went through the humiliating experience of taking the bankrupt act. Washington's connection with the concern was little more than nominal, and he felt small anxiety for himself, and was eager to escape from an occupation which had taken all the elasticity out of his mind. But on account of his brothers, in this dismal wreck of a family connection, his soul was steeped in bitterness. Pending the proceedings of the commissioners, he shut himself up day and night to the study of German, and while waiting for the examination used to walk up and down the room, conning over the German verbs. In August he went up to London and cast himself irrevocably upon the fortune of his pen. He had accumulated some materials, and upon these he set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington. Subsequently his brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was keeping open for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department. To the mortification and chagrin of his brothers, Washington declined the position. He was resolved to enter upon no duties that would interfere with his literary pursuits. This resolution, which exhibited a modest confidence in his own powers, and the energy with which he threw himself into his career, showed the fibre of the man. Suddenly, by the reverse of fortune, he who had been regarded as merely the ornamental genius of the family became its stay and support. If he had accepted the aid of his brothers, during the experimental period of his life, in the loving spirit of confidence in which it was given, he was not less ready to reverse the relations when the time came; the delicacy with which his assistance was rendered, the scrupulous care taken to convey the feeling that his brothers were doing him a continued favor in sharing his good fortune, and their own unjealous acceptance of what they would as freely have given if circumstances had been different, form one of the pleasantest instances of brotherly concord and self-abnegation. I know nothing more admirable than the life-long relations of this talented and sincere family. Before the "Sketch-Book" was launched, and while Irving was casting about for the means of livelihood, Walter Scott urged him to take the editorship of an Anti-Jacobin periodical in Edinburgh. This he declined because he had no taste for politics, and because he was averse to stated, routine literary work. Subsequently Mr. Murray offered him a salary of a thousand guineas to edit a periodical to be published by himself. This was declined, as also was another offer to contribute to the "London Quarterly" with the liberal pay of one hundred guineas an article. For the "Quarterly" he would not write, because, he says, "it has always been so hostile to my country, I cannot draw a pen in its service." This is worthy of note in view of a charge made afterwards, when he was attacked for his English sympathies, that he was a frequent contributor to this anti-American review. His sole contributions to it were a gratuitous review of the book of an American author, and an explanatory article, written at the desire of his publisher, on the "Conquest of Granada." It is not necessary to dwell upon the small scandal about Irving's un-American feeling. If there was ever a man who loved his country and was proud of it; whose broad, deep, and strong patriotism did not need the saliency of ignorant partisanship, it was Washington Irving. He was like his namesake an American, and with the same pure loyalty and unpartisan candor. The first number of the "Sketch-Book" was published in America in May, 1819. Irving was then thirty-six years old. The series was not completed till September, 1820. The first installment was carried mainly by two papers, "The Wife" and "Rip Van Winkle;" the one full of tender pathos that touched all hearts, because it was recognized as a genuine expression of the author's nature; and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor,--one of those strokes of genius that recreate the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas. The "Sketch-Book" created a sensation in America, and the echo of it was not long in reaching England. The general chorus of approval and the rapid sale surprised Irving, and sent his spirits up, but success had the effect on him that it always has on a fine nature. He writes to Leslie: "Now you suppose I am all on the alert, and full of spirit and excitement. No such thing. I am just as good for nothing as ever I was; and, indeed, have been flurried and put out of my way by these puffings. I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with success,--anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do." It was with much misgiving that Irving made this venture. "I feel great diffidence," he writes Brevoort, March 3, 1819, "about this reappearance in literature. I am conscious of my imperfections, and my mind has been for a long time past so pressed upon and agitated by various cares and anxieties, that I fear it has lost much of its cheerfulness and some of its activity. I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our American writers at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment. My writings may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians. But if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work. I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and French-horn." This diffidence was not assumed. All through his career, a breath of criticism ever so slight acted temporarily like a hoar-frost upon his productive power. He always saw reasons to take sides with his critic. Speaking of "vanity" in a letter of March, 1820, when Scott and Lockhart and all the Reviews were in a full chorus of acclaim, he says: "I wish I did possess more of it, but it seems my curse at present to have anything but confidence in myself or pleasure in anything I have written." In a similar strain he had written, in September, 1819, on the news of the cordial reception of the "Sketch-Book" in America:-- "The manner in which the work has been received and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it in the American papers and periodical works, have completely overwhelmed me. They go far, _far_ beyond my most sanguine expectations, and indeed are expressed with such peculiar warmth and kindness as to affect me in the tenderest manner. The receipt of your letter, and the reading of some of the criticisms this morning, have rendered me nervous for the whole day. I feel almost appalled by such success, and fearful that it cannot be real, or that it is not fully merited, or that I shall not act up to the expectations that may be formed. We are whimsically constituted beings. I had got out of conceit of all that I had written, and considered it very questionable stuff; and now that it is so extravagantly bepraised, I begin to feel afraid that I shall not do as well again. However, we shall see as we get on. As yet I am extremely irregular and precarious in my fits of composition. The least thing puts me out of the vein, and even applause flurries me and prevents my writing, though of course it will ultimately be a stimulus.... "I have been somewhat touched by the manner in which my writings have been noticed in the 'Evening Post.' I had considered Coleman as cherishing an ill-will toward me, and, to tell the truth, have not always been the most courteous in my opinions concerning him. It is a painful thing either to dislike others or to fancy they dislike us, and I have felt both pleasure and self-reproach at finding myself so mistaken with respect to Mr. Coleman. I like to out with a good feeling as soon as it rises, and so I have dropt Coleman a line on the subject. "I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind reception I have met to an author's vanity. I am sure it proceeds from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen. I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these sudden rays of sunshine agitate me more than they revive me. I hope--I hope I may yet do something more worthy of the appreciation lavished on me." Irving had not contemplated publishing in England, but the papers began to be reprinted, and he was obliged to protect himself. He offered the sketches to Murray, the princely publisher, who afterwards dealt so liberally with him, but the venture was declined in a civil note, written in that charming phraseology with which authors are familiar, but which they would in vain seek to imitate. Irving afterwards greatly prized this letter. He undertook the risks of the publication himself, and the book sold well, although "written by an author the public knew nothing of, and published by a bookseller who was going to ruin." In a few months Murray, who was thereafter proud to be Irving's publisher, undertook the publication of the two volumes of the "Sketch-Book," and also of the "Knickerbocker" history, which Mr. Lockhart had just been warmly praising in "Blackwood's." Indeed, he bought the copyright of the "Sketch-Book" for two hundred pounds. The time for the publisher's complaisance had arrived sooner even than Scott predicted in one of his kindly letters to Irving, "when 'Your name is up and may go From Toledo to Madrid.'" Irving passed five years in England. Once recognized by the literary world, whatever was best in the society of letters and of fashion was open to him. He was a welcome guest in the best London houses, where he met the foremost literary personages of the time, and established most cordial relations with many of them; not to speak of statesmen, soldiers, and men and women of fashion, there were the elder D'Israeli, Southey, Campbell, Hallam, Gifford, Milman, Foscolo, Rogers, Scott, and Belzoni fresh from his Egyptian explorations. In Irving's letters this old society passes in review: Murray's drawing-rooms; the amusing blue-stocking coteries of fashion of which Lady Caroline Lamb was a promoter; the Countess of Besborough's, at whose house The Duke could be seen; the Wimbledon country seat of Lord and Lady Spence; Belzoni, a giant of six feet five, the centre of a group of eager auditors of the Egyptian marvels; Hallam, affable and unpretending, and a copious talker; Gifford, a small, shriveled, deformed man of sixty, with something of a humped back, eyes that diverge, and a large mouth, reclining on a sofa, propped up by cushions, with none of the petulance that you would expect from his Review, but a mild, simple, unassuming man,--he it is who prunes the contributions and takes the sting out of them (one would like to have seen them before the sting was taken out); and Scott, the right honest-hearted, entering into the passing scene with the hearty enjoyment of a child, to whom literature seems a sport rather than a labor or ambition, an author void of all the petulance, egotism, and peculiarities of the craft. We have Moore's authority for saying that the literary dinner described in the "The Tales of a Traveller," whimsical as it seems and pervaded by the conventional notion of the relations of publishers and authors, had a personal foundation. Irving's satire of both has always the old-time Grub Street flavor, or at least the reminiscent tone, which is, by the way, quite characteristic of nearly everything that he wrote about England. He was always a little in the past tense. Buckthorne's advice to his friend is, never to be eloquent to an author except in praise of his own works, or, what is nearly as acceptable, in disparagement of the work of his contemporaries. "If ever he speaks favorably of the productions of a particular friend, dissent boldly from him; pronounce his friend to be a blockhead; never fear his being vexed. Much as people speak of the irritability of authors, I never found one to take offense at such contradictions. No, no, sir, authors are particularly candid in admitting the faults of their friends." At the dinner Buckthorne explains the geographical boundaries in the land of literature: you may judge tolerably well of an author's popularity by the wine his bookseller gives him. "An author crosses the port line about the third edition, and gets into claret; and when he has reached the sixth or seventh, he may revel in champagne and burgundy." The two ends of the table were occupied by the two partners, one of whom laughed at the clever things said by the poet, while the other maintained his sedateness and kept on carving. "His gravity was explained to us by my friend Buckthorne. He informed me that the concerns of the house were admirably distributed among the partners. Thus, for instance, said he, the grave gentleman is the carving partner, who attends to the joints; and the other is the laughing partner, who attends to the jokes." If any of the jokes from the lower end of the table reached the upper end, they seldom produced much effect. "Even the laughing partner did not think it necessary to honor them with a smile; which my neighbor Buckthorne accounted for by informing me that there was a certain degree of popularity to be obtained before a bookseller could afford to laugh at an author's jokes." In August, 1820, we find Irving in Paris, where his reputation secured him a hearty welcome: he was often at the Cannings' and at Lord Holland's; Talma, then the king of the stage, became his friend, and there he made the acquaintance of Thomas Moore, which ripened into a familiar and lasting friendship. The two men were drawn to each other; Irving greatly admired the "noble-hearted, manly, spirited little fellow, with a mind as generous as his fancy is brilliant." Talma was playing Hamlet to overflowing houses, which hung on his actions with breathless attention, or broke into ungovernable applause; ladies were carried fainting from the boxes. The actor is described as short in stature, rather inclined to fat, with a large face and a thick neck; his eyes are bluish, and have a peculiar cast in them at times. He said to Irving that he thought the French character much changed--graver; the day of the classic drama, mere declamation and fine language, had gone by; the Revolution had taught them to demand real life, incident, passion, character. Irving's life in Paris was gay enough, and seriously interfered with his literary projects. He had the fortunes of his brother Peter on his mind also, and invested his earnings, then and for some years after, in enterprises for his benefit that ended in disappointment. The "Sketch-Book" was making a great fame for him in England. Jeffrey, in the "Edinburgh Review," paid it a most flattering tribute, and even the savage "Quarterly" praised it. A rumor attributed it to Scott, who was always masquerading; at least, it was said, he might have revised it, and should have the credit of its exquisite style. This led to a sprightly correspondence between Lady Littleton, the daughter of Earl Spencer, one of the most accomplished and lovely women of England, and Benjamin Rush, Minister to the Court of St. James, in the course of which Mr. Rush suggested the propriety of giving out under his official seal that Irving was the author of "Waverley." "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the day," wrote the painter Leslie. Lord Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author, and subsequently said to an American: "His Crayon,--I know it by heart; at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately." And afterwards he wrote to Moore, "His writings are my delight." There seemed to be, as some one wrote, "a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over the heads of his contemporaries." Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence of his popularity was his publisher's enthusiasm. The publisher is an infallible contemporary barometer. It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the English-reading world. In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was, indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge of nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his lungs,--appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking, tormented him at intervals, so that literary composition was impossible, sent him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken for distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing and absorbing material had to be postponed. He was subject to this recurring invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the work he did as a pure triumph of determination over physical discouragement. This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared in "Bracebridge Hall," a volume that was well received, but did not add much to his reputation, though it contained "Dolph Heyliger," one of his most characteristic Dutch stories, and the "Stout Gentleman," one of his daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.[1] [Footnote 1: I was once [says his biographer] reading aloud in his presence a very flattering review of his works, which had been sent him by the critic in 1848, and smiled as I came to this sentence: "His most comical pieces have always a serious end in view." "You laugh," said he, with that air of whimsical significance so natural to him, "but it is true. I have kept that to myself hitherto, but that man has found me out. He has detected the moral of the _Stout Gentleman_."] Irving sought relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany. He sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded him, and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia. Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily Fuller (_née_ Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to, wrote in 1860:-- "He was thoroughly a gentleman, not merely in external manners and look, but to the inner-most fibres and core of his heart: sweet-tempered, gentle, fastidious, sensitive, and gifted with the warmest affections; the most delightful and invariably interesting companion; gay and full of humor, even in spite of occasional fits of melancholy, which he was, however, seldom subject to when with those he liked; a gift of conversation that flowed like a full river in sunshine,--bright, easy, and abundant." Those were pleasant days at Dresden, filled up with the society of bright and warm-hearted people, varied by royal boar hunts, stiff ceremonies at the little court, tableaux, and private theatricals, yet tinged with a certain melancholy, partly constitutional, that appears in most of his letters. His mind was too unsettled for much composition. He had little self-confidence, and was easily put out by a breath of adverse criticism. At intervals he would come to the Fosters to read a manuscript of his own. "On these occasions strict orders were given that no visitor should be admitted till the last word had been read, and the whole praised or criticised, as the case may be. Of criticism, however, we were very spare, as a slight word would put him out of conceit of a whole work. One of the best things he has published was thrown aside, unfinished, for years, because the friend to whom he read it, happening, unfortunately, not to be well, and sleepy, did not seem to take the interest in it he expected. Too easily discouraged, it was not till the latter part of his career that he ever appreciated himself as an author. One condemning whisper sounded louder in his ear than the plaudits of thousands." This from Miss Emily Foster, who elsewhere notes his kindliness in observing life:-- "Some persons, in looking upon life, view it as they would view a picture, with a stern and criticising eye. He also looks upon life as a picture, but to catch its beauties, its lights,--not its defects and shadows. On the former he loves to dwell. He has a wonderful knack at shutting his eyes to the sinister side of anything. Never beat a more kindly heart than his; alive to the sorrows, but not to the faults, of his friends, but doubly alive to their virtues and goodness. Indeed, people seemed to grow more good with one so unselfish and so gentle." In London, some years later:-- "He was still the same; time changed him very little. His conversation was as interesting as ever [he was always an excellent relater]; his dark gray eyes still full of varying feeling; his smile half playful, half melancholy, but ever kind. All that was mean, or envious, or harsh, he seemed to turn from so completely that, when with him, it seemed that such things were not. All gentle and tender affections, Nature in her sweetest or grandest moods, pervaded his whole imagination, and left no place for low or evil thoughts; and when in good spirits, his humor, his droll descriptions, and his fun would make the gravest or the saddest laugh." As to Irving's "state of mind" in Dresden, it is pertinent to quote a passage from what we gather to be a journal kept by Miss Flora Foster:-- "He has written. He has confessed to my mother, as to a true and dear friend, his love for E----, and his conviction of its utter hopelessness. He feels himself unable to combat it. He thinks he must try, by absence, to bring more peace to his mind. Yet he cannot bear to give up our friendship,--an intercourse become so dear to him, and so necessary to his daily happiness. Poor Irving!" It is well for our peace of mind that we do not know what is going down concerning us in "journals." On his way to the Herrnhuthers, Mr. Irving wrote to Mrs. Foster:-- "When I consider how I have trifled with my time, suffered painful vicissitudes of feeling, which for a time damaged both mind and body,--when I consider all this, I reproach myself that I did not listen to the first impulse of my mind, and abandon Dresden long since. And yet I think of returning! Why should I come back to Dresden? The very inclination that dooms me thither should furnish reasons for my staying away." In this mood, the Herrnhuthers, in their right-angled, whitewashed world, were little attractive. "If the Herrnhuthers were right in their notions, the world would have been laid out in squares and angles and right lines, and everything would have been white and black and snuff-color, as they have been clipped by these merciless retrenchers of beauty and enjoyment. And then their dormitories! Think of between one and two hundred of these simple gentlemen cooped up at night in one great chamber! What a concert of barrel-organs in this great resounding saloon! And then their plan of marriage! The very birds of the air choose their mates from preference and inclination; but this detestable system of _lot_! The sentiment of love may be, and is, in a great measure, a fostered growth of poetry and romance, and balderdashed with false sentiment; but with all its vitiations, it is the beauty and the charm, the flavor and the fragrance, of all intercourse between man and woman; it is the rosy cloud in the morning of life; and if it does too often resolve itself into the shower, yet, to my mind, it only makes our nature more fruitful in what is excellent and amiable." Better suited him Prague, which is certainly a part of the "naughty world" that Irving preferred:-- "Old Prague still keeps up its warrior look, and swaggers about with its rusty corselet and helm, though both sadly battered. There seems to me to be an air of style and fashion about the first people of Prague, and a good deal of beauty in the fashionable circle. This, perhaps, is owing to my contemplating it from a distance, and my imagination lending it tints occasionally. Both actors and audience, contemplated from the pit of a theatre, look better than when seen in the boxes and behind the scenes. I like to contemplate society in this way occasionally, and to dress it up by the help of fancy, to my own taste. When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and _ennui_ of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing. I am glad, therefore, that I brought no letters to Prague. I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; and with a firm belief that every pretty woman I have seen is an angel, as I am apt to think every pretty woman, until I have found her out." In July, 1823, Irving returned to Paris, to the society of the Moores and the fascinations of the gay town, and to fitful literary work. Our author wrote with great facility and rapidity when the inspiration was on him, and produced an astonishing amount of manuscript in a short period; but he often waited and fretted through barren weeks and months for the movement of his fitful genius. His mind was teeming constantly with new projects, and nothing could exceed his industry when once he had taken a work in hand; but he never acquired the exact methodical habits which enable some literary men to calculate their power and quantity of production as accurately as that of a cotton mill. The political changes in France during the period of Irving's long sojourn in Paris do not seem to have taken much of his attention. In a letter dated October 5, 1824, he says: "We have had much bustle in Paris of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another. I have become a little callous to public sights, but have, notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the entrance into Paris of the present one. Charles X. begins his reign in a very conciliating manner, and is really popular. The Bourbons have gained great accession of power within a few years." The succession of Charles X. was also observed by another foreigner, who was making agreeable personal notes at that time in Paris, but who is not referred to by Irving, who for some unexplained reason failed to meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast. Perhaps it is to his failure to do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle's "Reminiscences." Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote: "Washington Irving was said to be in Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed. One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had engaged him to breakfast with us at a certain _café_ next morning. We all attended duly, Strackey among the rest, but no Washington came. 'Couldn't rightly come,' said Malcolm to me in a judicious _aside_, as we cheerfully breakfasted without him. I never saw Washington at all, but still have a mild esteem of the good man." This ought to be accepted as evidence of Carlyle's disinclination to say ill-natured things of those he did not know. The "Tales of a Traveller" appeared in 1824. In the author's opinion, with which the best critics agreed, it contained some of his best writing. He himself said in a letter to Brevoort, "There was more of an artistic touch about it, though this is not a thing to be appreciated by the many." It was rapidly written. The movement has a delightful spontaneity, and it is wanting in none of the charms of his style, unless, perhaps, the style is over-refined; but it was not a novelty, and the public began to criticise and demand a new note. This may have been one reason why he turned to a fresh field and to graver themes. For a time he busied himself on some American essays of a semi-political nature, which were never finished, and he seriously contemplated a Life of Washington; but all these projects were thrown aside for one that kindled his imagination,--the Life of Columbus; and in February, 1826, he was domiciled at Madrid, and settled down to a long period of unremitting and intense labor. CHAPTER VII. IN SPAIN. Irving's residence in Spain, which was prolonged till September, 1829, was the most fruitful period in his life, and of considerable consequence to literature. It is not easy to overestimate the debt of Americans to the man who first opened to them the fascinating domain of early Spanish history and romance. We can conceive of it by reflecting upon the blank that would exist without "The Alhambra," "The Conquest of Granada," "The Legends of the Conquest of Spain," and I may add the popular loss if we had not "The Lives of Columbus and his Companions." Irving had the creative touch, or at least the magic of the pen, to give a definite, universal, and romantic interest to whatever he described. We cannot deny him that. A few lines about the inn of the Red Horse at Stratford-on-Avon created a new object of pilgrimage right in the presence of the house and tomb of the poet. And how much of the romantic interest of all the English-reading world in the Alhambra is due to him; the name invariably recalls his own, and every visitor there is conscious of his presence. He has again and again been criticised almost out of court, and written down to the rank of the mere idle humorist; but as often as I take up "The Conquest of Granada" or "The Alhambra" I am aware of something that has eluded the critical analysis, and I conclude that if one cannot write for the few it may be worth while to write for the many. It was Irving's intention, when he went to Madrid, merely to make a translation of some historical documents which were then appearing, edited by M. Navarrete, from the papers of Bishop Las Casas and the journals of Columbus, entitled "The Voyages of Columbus." But when he found that this publication, although it contained many documents, hitherto unknown, that threw much light on the discovery of the New World, was rather a rich mass of materials for a history than a history itself, and that he had access in Madrid libraries to great collections of Spanish colonial history, he changed his plan, and determined to write a Life of Columbus. His studies for this led him deep into the old chronicles and legends of Spain, and out of these, with his own travel and observation, came those books of mingled fables, sentiment, fact, and humor which are after all the most enduring fruits of his residence in Spain. Notwithstanding his absorption in literary pursuits, Irving was not denied the charm of domestic society, which was all his life his chief delight. The house he most frequented in Madrid was that of Mr. D'Oubril, the Russian Minister. In his charming household were Madame D'Oubril and her niece, Mademoiselle Antoinette Bollviller, and Prince Dolgorouki, a young _attaché_ of the legation. His letters to Prince Dolgorouki and to Mademoiselle Antoinette give a most lively and entertaining picture of his residence and travels in Spain. In one of them to the prince, who was temporarily absent from the city, we have glimpses of the happy hours, the happiest of all hours, passed in this refined family circle. Here is one that exhibits the still fresh romance in the heart of forty-four years:-- "Last evening, at your house, we had one of the most lovely tableaux I ever beheld. It was the conception of Murillo, represented by Madame A----. Mademoiselle Antoinette arranged the tableau with her usual good taste, and the effect was enchanting. It was more like a vision of something spiritual and celestial than a representation of anything merely mortal; or rather it was woman as in my romantic days I have been apt to imagine her, approaching to the angelic nature. I have frequently admired Madame A----as a mere beautiful woman, when I have seen her dressed up in the fantastic attire of the _mode_; but here I beheld her elevated into a representative of the divine purity and grace, exceeding even the _beau idéal_ of the painter, for she even surpassed in beauty the picture of Murillo. I felt as if I could have knelt down and worshiped her. Heavens! what power women would have over us, if they knew how to sustain the attractions which nature has bestowed upon them, and which we are so ready to assist by our imaginations! For my part, I am superstitious in my admiration of them, and like to walk in a perpetual delusion, decking them out as divinities. I thank no one to undeceive me, and to prove that they are mere mortals." And he continues in another strain:-- How full of interest everything is connected with the old times in Spain! I am more and more delighted with the old literature of the country, its chronicles, plays, and romances. It has the wild vigor and luxuriance of the forests of my native country, which, however savage and entangled, are more captivating to my imagination than the finest parks and cultivated woodlands. "As I live in the neighborhood of the library of the Jesuits' College of St. Isidoro, I pass most of my mornings there. You cannot think what a delight I feel in passing through its galleries, filled with old parchment-bound books. It is a perfect wilderness of curiosity to me. What a deep-felt, quiet luxury there is in delving into the rich ore of these old, neglected volumes! How these hours of uninterrupted intellectual enjoyment, so tranquil and independent, repay one for the _ennui_ and disappointment too often experienced in the intercourse of society! How they serve to bring back the feelings into a harmonious tone, after being jarred and put out of tune by the collisions with the world!" With the romantic period of Spanish history Irving was in ardent sympathy. The story of the Saracens entranced his mind; his imagination disclosed its Oriental quality while he pored over the romance and the ruin of that land of fierce contrasts, of arid wastes beaten by the burning sun, valleys blooming with intoxicating beauty, cities of architectural splendor and picturesque squalor. It is matter of regret that he, who seemed to need the southern sun to ripen his genius, never made a pilgrimage into the East, and gave to the world pictures of the lands that he would have touched with the charm of their own color and the witchery of their own romance. I will quote again from the letters, for they reveal the man quite as well as the more formal and better known writings. His first sight of the Alhambra is given in a letter to Mademoiselle Bollviller:-- "Our journey through La Mancha was cold and uninteresting, excepting when we passed through the scenes of some of the exploits of Don Quixote. We were repaid, however, by a night amidst the scenery of the Sierra Morena, seen by the light of the full moon. I do not know how this scenery would appear in the daytime, but by moonlight it is wonderfully wild and romantic, especially after passing the summit of the Sierra. As the day dawned we entered the stern and savage defiles of the Despeña Perros, which equals the wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa. For some time we continued winding along the brinks of precipices, overhung with cragged and fantastic rocks; and after a succession of such rude and sterile scenes we swept down to Carolina, and found ourselves in another climate. The orange-trees, the aloes, and myrtle began to make their appearance; we felt the warm temperature of the sweet South, and began to breathe the balmy air of Andalusia. At Andujar we were delighted with the neatness and cleanliness of the houses, the _patios_ planted with orange and citron trees, and refreshed by fountains. We passed a charming evening on the banks of the famous Guadalquivir, enjoying the mild, balmy air of a southern evening, and rejoicing in the certainty that we were at length in this land of promise.... "But Granada, _bellissima_ Granada! Think what must have been our delight when, after passing the famous bridge of Pinos, the scene of many a bloody encounter between Moor and Christian, and remarkable for having been the place where Columbus was overtaken by the messenger of Isabella, when about to abandon Spain in despair, we turned a promontory of the arid mountains of Elvira, and Granada, with its towers, its Alhambra, and its snowy mountains, burst upon our sight! The evening sun shone gloriously upon its red towers as we approached it, and gave a mellow tone to the rich scenery of the vega. It was like the magic glow which poetry and romance have shed over this enchanting place.... "The more I contemplate these places, the more my admiration is awakened for the elegant habits and delicate taste of the Moorish monarchs. The delicately ornamented walls; the aromatic groves, mingling with the freshness and the enlivening sounds of fountains and rivers of water; the retired baths, bespeaking purity and refinement; the balconies and galleries, open to the fresh mountain breeze, and overlooking the loveliest scenery of the valley of the Darro and the magnificent expanse of the vega,--it is impossible to contemplate this delicious abode and not feel an admiration of the genius and the poetical spirit of those who first devised this earthly paradise. There is an intoxication of heart and soul in looking over such scenery at this genial season. All nature is just teeming with new life, and putting on the first delicate verdure and bloom of spring. The almond-trees are in blossom; the fig-trees are beginning to sprout; everything is in the tender bud, the young leaf, or the half-open flower. The beauty of the season is but half developed, so that while there is enough to yield present delight there is the flattering promise of still further enjoyment. Good heavens! after passing two years amidst the sunburnt wastes of Castile, to be let loose to rove at large over this fragrant and lovely land!" It was not easy, however, even in the Alhambra, perfectly to call up the past:-- "The verity of the present checks and chills the imagination in its picturings of the past. I have been trying to conjure up images of Boabdil passing in regal splendor through these courts; of his beautiful queen; of the Abencerrages, the Gomares, and the other Moorish cavaliers, who once filled these halls with the glitter of arms and the splendor of Oriental luxury; but I am continually awakened from my reveries by the jargon of an Andalusian peasant who is setting out rose-bushes, and the song of a pretty Andalusian girl who shows the Alhambra, and who is chanting a little romance that has probably been handed down from generation to generation since the time of the Moors." In another letter, written from Seville, he returns to the subject of the Moors. He is describing an excursion to Alcala de la Guadayra:-- "Nothing can be more charming than the windings of the little river among banks hanging with gardens and orchards of all kinds of delicate southern fruits, and tufted with flowers and aromatic plants. The nightingales throng this lovely little valley as numerously as they do the gardens of Aranjuez. Every bend of the river presents a new landscape, for it is beset by old Moorish mills of the most picturesque forms, each mill having an embattled tower,--a memento of the valiant tenure by which those gallant fellows, the Moors, held this earthly paradise, having to be ready at all times for war, and as it were to work with one hand and fight with the other. It is impossible to travel about Andalusia and not imbibe a kind feeling for those Moors. They deserved this beautiful country. They won it bravely; they enjoyed it generously and kindly. No lover ever delighted more to cherish and adorn a mistress, to heighten and illustrate her charms, and to vindicate and defend her against all the world than did the Moors to embellish, enrich, elevate, and defend their beloved Spain. Everywhere I meet traces of their sagacity, courage, urbanity, high poetical feeling, and elegant taste. The noblest institutions in this part of Spain, the best inventions for comfortable and agreeable living, and all those habitudes and customs which throw a peculiar and Oriental charm over the Andalusian mode of living may be traced to the Moors. Whenever I enter these beautiful marble _patios_, set out with shrubs and flowers, refreshed by fountains, sheltered with awnings from the sun; where the air is cool at noonday, the ear delighted in sultry summer by the sound of falling water; where, in a word, a little paradise is shut up within the walls of home, I think on the poor Moors, the inventors of all these delights. I am at times almost ready to join in sentiment with a worthy friend and countryman of mine whom I met in Malaga, who swears the Moors are the only people that ever deserved the country, and prays to Heaven that they may come over from Africa and conquer it again." In a following paragraph we get a glimpse of a world, however, that the author loves still more:-- "Tell me everything about the children. I suppose the discreet princess will soon consider it an indignity to be ranked among the number. I am told she is growing with might and main, and is determined not to stop until she is a woman outright. I would give all the money in my pocket to be with those dear little women at the round table in the saloon, or on the grass-plot in the garden, to tell them some marvelous tales." And again:-- "Give my love to all my dear little friends of the round table, from the discreet princess down to the little blue-eyed boy. Tell _la petite Marie_ that I still remain true to her, though surrounded by all the beauties of Seville; and that I swear (but this she must keep between ourselves) that there is not a little woman to compare with her in all Andalusia." The publication of "The Life of Columbus," which had been delayed by Irving's anxiety to secure historical accuracy in every detail, did not take place till February, 1828. For the English copyright Mr. Murray paid him £3,150. He wrote an abridgment of it, which he presented to his generous publisher, and which was a very profitable book (the first edition of ten thousand copies sold immediately). This was followed by the "Companions," and by "The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada," for which he received two thousand guineas. "The Alhambra" was not published till just before Irving's return to America, in 1832, and was brought out by Mr. Bentley, who bought it for one thousand guineas. "The Conquest of Granada," which I am told Irving in his latter years regarded as the best of all his works, was declared by Coleridge "a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of its kind." I think it bears re-reading as well as any of the Spanish books. Of the reception of the "Columbus" the author was very doubtful. Before it was finished he wrote:-- "I have lost confidence in the favorable disposition of my countrymen, and look forward to cold scrutiny and stern criticism, and this is a line of writing in which I have not hitherto ascertained my own powers. Could I afford it, I should like to write, and to lay my writings aside when finished. There is an independent delight in study and in the creative exercise of the pen; we live in a world of dreams, but publication lets in the noisy rabble of the world, and there is an end of our dreaming." In a letter to Brevoort, February 23, 1828, he fears that he can never regain "That delightful confidence which I once enjoyed of not the good opinion, but the good will, of my countrymen. To me it is always ten times more gratifying to be liked than to be admired; and I confess to you, though I am a little too proud to confess it to the world, the idea that the kindness of my countrymen toward me was withering caused me for a long time the most weary depression of spirits, and disheartened me from making any literary exertions." It has been a popular notion that Irving's career was uniformly one of ease. In this same letter he exclaims: "With all my exertions, I seem always to keep about up to my chin in troubled water, while the world, I suppose, thinks I am sailing smoothly, with wind and tide in my favor." In a subsequent letter to Brevoort, dated at Seville, December 26, 1828, occurs almost the only piece of impatience and sarcasm that this long correspondence affords. "Columbus" had succeeded beyond his expectation, and its popularity was so great that some enterprising American had projected an abridgment, which it seems would not be protected by the copyright of the original. Irving writes:-- "I have just sent to my brother an abridgment of 'Columbus' to be published immediately, as I find some paltry fellow is pirating an abridgment. Thus every line of life has its depredation. 'There be land rats and water rats, land pirates and water pirates,--I mean thieves,' as old Shylock says. I feel vexed at this shabby attempt to purloin this work from me, it having really cost me more toil and trouble than all my other productions, and being one that I trusted would keep me current with my countrymen; but we are making rapid advances in literature in America, and have already attained many of the literary vices and diseases of the old countries of Europe. We swarm with reviewers, though we have scarce original works sufficient for them to alight and prey upon, and we closely imitate all the worst tricks of the trade and of the craft in England. Our literature, before long, will be like some of those premature and aspiring whipsters, who become old men before they are young ones, and fancy they prove their manhood by their profligacy and their diseases." But the work had an immediate, continued, and deserved success. It was critically contrasted with Robertson's account of Columbus, and it is open to the charge of too much rhetorical color here and there, and it is at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned, and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance of the theme. Irving understood, what our later historians have fully appreciated, the advantage of vivid individual portraiture in historical narrative. His conception of the character and mission of Columbus is largely outlined, but firmly and most carefully executed, and is one of the noblest in literature. I cannot think it idealized, though it required a poetic sensibility to enter into sympathy with the magnificent dreamer, who was regarded by his own generation as the fool of an idea. A more prosaic treatment would have utterly failed to represent that mind, which existed from boyhood in an ideal world, and, amid frustrated hopes, shattered plans, and ignoble returns for his sacrifices, could always rebuild its glowing projects, and conquer obloquy and death itself with immortal anticipations. Towards the close of his residence in Spain, Irving received unexpectedly the appointment of Secretary of Legation to the Court of St. James, at which Louis McLane was American Minister; and after some hesitation, and upon the urgency of his friends, he accepted it. He was in the thick of literary projects. One of these was the History of the Conquest of Mexico, which he afterwards surrendered to Mr. Prescott and another was the "Life of Washington," which was to wait many years for fulfillment. His natural diffidence and his reluctance to a routine life made him shrink from the diplomatic appointment; but once engaged in it, and launched again in London society, he was reconciled to the situation. Of honors there was no lack, nor of the adulation of social and literary circles. In April, 1830, the Royal Society of Literature awarded him one of the two annual gold medals placed at the disposal of the society by George IV., to be given to authors of literary works of eminent merit, the other being voted to the historian Hallam; and this distinction was followed by the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford,--a title which the modest author never used. CHAPTER VIII. RETURN TO AMERICA: SUNNYSIDE: THE MISSION TO MADRID. In 1831 Mr. Irving was thrown, by his diplomatic position, into the thick of the political and social tumult, when the Reform Bill was pending and war was expected in Europe. It is interesting to note that for a time he laid aside his attitude of the dispassionate observer, and caught the general excitement. He writes in March, expecting that the fate of the cabinet will be determined in a week, looking daily for decisive news from Paris, and fearing dismal tidings from Poland. "However," he goes on to say in a vague way, "the great cause of all the world will go on. What a stirring moment it is to live in! I never took such intense interest in newspapers. It seems to me as if life were breaking out anew with me, or that I were entering upon quite a new and almost unknown career of existence, and I rejoice to find my sensibilities, which were waning as to many objects of past interest, reviving with all their freshness and vivacity at the scenes and prospects opening around me." He expects the breaking of the thralldom of falsehood woven over the human mind; and, more definitely, hopes that the Reform Bill will prevail. Yet he is oppressed by the gloom hanging over the booksellers' trade, which he thinks will continue until reform and cholera have passed away. During the last months of his residence in England, the author renewed his impressions of Stratford (the grateful landlady of the Red Horse Inn showed him a poker which was locked up among the treasures of her house, on which she had caused to be engraved "Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre"); spent some time at Newstead Abbey; and had the sorrowful pleasure in London of seeing Scott once more, and for the last time. The great novelist, in the sad eclipse of his powers, was staying in the city, on his way to Italy, and Mr. Lockhart asked Irving to dine with him. It was but a melancholy repast. "Ah," said Scott, as Irving gave him his arm, after dinner, "the times are changed, my good fellow, since we went over the Eildon Hills together. It is all nonsense to tell a man that his mind is not affected when his body is in this state." Irving retired from the legation in September, 1831, to return home, the longing to see his native land having become intense; but his arrival in New York was delayed till May, 1832. If he had any doubts of the sentiments of his countrymen toward him, his reception in New York dissipated them. America greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love and admiration. The public banquet in New York, that was long remembered for its brilliancy, was followed by the tender of the same tribute in other cities,--an honor which his unconquerable shrinking from this kind of publicity compelled him to decline. The "Dutch Herodotus, Diedrich Knickerbocker," to use the phrase of a toast, having come out of one such encounter with fair credit, did not care to tempt Providence further. The thought of making a dinner-table speech threw him into a sort of whimsical panic,--a noble infirmity, which characterized also Hawthorne and Thackeray. The enthusiasm manifested for the homesick author was equaled by his own for the land and the people he supremely loved. Nor was his surprise at the progress made during seventeen years less than his delight in it. His native place had become a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants; the accumulation of wealth and the activity of trade astonished him, and the literary stir was scarcely less unexpected. The steamboat had come to be used, so that he seemed to be transported from place to place by magic; and on a near view the politics of America seemed not less interesting than those of Europe. The nullification battle was set; the currency conflict still raged; it was a time of inflation and land speculation; the West, every day more explored and opened, was the land of promise for capital and energy. Fortunes were made in a day by buying lots in "paper towns." Into some of these speculations Irving put his savings; the investments were as permanent as they were unremunerative. Irving's first desire, however, on his recovery from the state of astonishment into which these changes plunged him, was to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the entire country and its development. To this end he made an extended tour in the South and West, which passed beyond the bounds of frontier settlement. The fruit of his excursion into the Pawnee country, on the waters of the Arkansas, a region untraversed by white men, except solitary trappers, was "A Tour on the Prairies," a sort of romance of reality, which remains to-day as good a description as we have of hunting adventure on the plains. It led also to the composition of other books on the West, which were more or less mere pieces of book-making for the market. Our author was far from idle. Indeed, he could not afford to be. Although he had received considerable sums from his books, and perhaps enough for his own simple wants, the responsibility of the support of his two brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, and several nieces, devolved upon him. And, besides, he had a longing to make himself a home, where he could pursue his calling undisturbed, and indulge the sweets of domestic and rural life, which of all things lay nearest his heart. And these two undertakings compelled him to be diligent with his pen to the end of his life. The spot he chose for his "Roost" was a little farm on the bank of the river at Tarrytown, close to his old Sleepy Hollow haunt, one of the loveliest, if not the most picturesque, situations on the Hudson. At first he intended nothing more than a summer retreat, inexpensive and simply furnished. But his experience was that of all who buy, and renovate, and build. The farm had on it a small stone Dutch cottage, built about a century before, and inhabited by one of the Van Tassels. This was enlarged, still preserving the quaint Dutch characteristics; it acquired a tower and a whimsical weathercock, the delight of the owner ("it was brought from Holland by Gill Davis, the King of Coney Island, who says he got it from a windmill which they were demolishing at the gate of Rotterdam, which windmill has been mentioned in 'Knickerbocker'"), and became one of the most snug and picturesque residences on the river. When the slip of Melrose ivy, which was brought over from Scotland by Mrs. Renwick and given to the author, had grown and well overrun it, the house, in the midst of sheltering groves and secluded walks, was as pretty a retreat as a poet could desire. But the little nook proved to have an insatiable capacity for swallowing up money, as the necessities of the author's establishment increased: there was always something to be done to the grounds; some alterations in the house; a green-house, a stable, a gardener's cottage, to be built,--and to the very end the outlay continued. The cottage necessitated economy in other personal expenses, and incessant employment of his pen. But Sunnyside, as the place was named, became the dearest spot on earth to him; it was his residence, from which he tore himself with reluctance, and to which he returned with eager longing; and here, surrounded by relatives whom he loved, he passed nearly all the remainder of his years, in as happy conditions, I think, as a bachelor ever enjoyed. His intellectual activity was unremitting, he had no lack of friends, there was only now and then a discordant note in the general estimation of his literary work, and he was the object of the most tender care from his nieces. Already, he writes, in October, 1838, "my little cottage is well stocked. I have Ebenezer's five girls, and himself also, whenever he can be spared from town; sister Catherine and her daughter; Mr. Davis occasionally, with casual visits from all the rest of our family connection. The cottage, therefore, is never lonely." I like to dwell in thought upon this happy home, a real haven of rest after many wanderings; a seclusion broken only now and then by enforced absence, like that in Madrid as minister, but enlivened by many welcome guests. Perhaps the most notorious of these was a young Frenchman, a "somewhat quiet guest," who, after several months' imprisonment on board a French man-of-war, was set on shore at Norfolk, and spent a couple of months in New York and its vicinity, in 1837. This visit was vividly recalled to Irving in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Storrow, who was in Paris in 1853, and had just been presented at court:-- "Louis Napoleon and Eugénie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France! one of whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the other, whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada. It seems to cap the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has been the theatre during my life-time. I have repeatedly thought that each grand _coup de théâtre_ would be the last that would occur in my time; but each has been succeeded by another equally striking; and what will be the next, who can conjecture? "The last time I saw Eugénie Montijo she was one of the reigning belles of Madrid; and she and her giddy circle had swept away my charming young friend, the beautiful and accomplished ---- ----, into their career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugénie is upon a throne, and ---- a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the most rigorous orders! Poor ----! Perhaps, however, her fate may ultimately be the happiest of the two. 'The storm' with her 'is o'er, and she's at rest;' but the other is launched upon a returnless shore, on a dangerous sea, infamous for its tremendous shipwrecks. Am I to live to see the catastrophe of her career, and the end of this suddenly conjured-up empire, which seems to be of 'such stuff as dreams are made of'?" As we have seen, the large sums Irving earned by his pen were not spent in selfish indulgence. His habits and tastes were simple, and little would have sufficed for his individual needs. He cared not much for money, and seemed to want it only to increase the happiness of those who were confided to his care. A man less warm-hearted and more selfish, in his circumstances, would have settled down to a life of more ease and less responsibility. To go back to the period of his return to America. He was now past middle life, having returned to New York in his fiftieth year. But he was in the full flow of literary productiveness. I have noted the dates of his achievements, because his development was somewhat tardy compared with that of many of his contemporaries; but he had the "staying" qualities. The first crop of his mind was of course the most original; time and experience had toned down his exuberant humor; but the spring of his fancy was as free, his vigor was not abated, and his art was more refined. Some of his best work was yet to be done. And it is worthy of passing mention, in regard to his later productions, that his admirable sense of literary proportion, which is wanting in many good writers, characterized his work to the end. High as his position was as a man of letters at this time, the consideration in which he was held was much broader than that,--it was that of one of the first citizens of the Republic. His friends, readers, and admirers were not merely the literary class and the general public, but included nearly all the prominent statesmen of the time. Almost any career in public life would have been open to him if he had lent an ear to their solicitations. But political life was not to his taste, and it would have been fatal to his sensitive spirit. It did not require much self-denial, perhaps, to decline the candidacy for mayor of New York, or the honor of standing for Congress; but he put aside also the distinction of a seat in Mr. Van Buren's Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. His main reason for declining it, aside from a diffidence in his own judgment in public matters, was his dislike of the turmoil of political life in Washington, and his sensitiveness to personal attacks which beset the occupants of high offices. But he also had come to a political divergence with Mr. Van Buren. He liked the man,--he liked almost everybody,--and esteemed him as a friend, but he apprehended trouble from the new direction of the party in power. Irving was almost devoid of party prejudice, and he never seemed to have strongly marked political opinions. Perhaps his nearest confession to a creed is contained in a letter he wrote to a member of the House of Representatives, Gouverneur Kemble, a little time before the offer of a position in the cabinet, in which he said that he did not relish some points of Van Buren's policy, nor believe in the honesty of some of his elbow counselors. I quote a passage from it:-- "As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican, and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for Puritans, either in religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme, and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career.... Ours is a government of compromise. We have several great and distinct interests bound up together, which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated may harass and impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens. Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading and financial classes of our country." During the ten years preceding his mission to Spain, Irving kept fagging away at the pen, doing a good deal of miscellaneous and ephemeral work. Among his other engagements was that of regular contributor to the "Knickerbocker Magazine," for a salary of two thousand dollars. He wrote the editor that he had observed that man, as he advances in life, is subject to a plethora of the mind, occasioned by an accumulation of wisdom upon the brain, and that he becomes fond of telling long stories and doling out advice, to the annoyance of his friends. To avoid becoming the bore of the domestic circle, he proposed to ease off this surcharge of the intellect by inflicting his tediousness on the public through the pages of the periodical. The arrangement brought reputation to the magazine (which was published in the days when the honor of being in print was supposed by the publisher to be ample compensation to the scribe), but little profit to Mr. Irving. During this period he interested himself in an international copyright, as a means of fostering our young literature. He found that a work of merit, written by an American who had not established a commanding name in the market, met very cavalier treatment from our publishers, who frankly said that they need not trouble themselves about native works, when they could pick up every day successful books from the British press, for which they had to pay no copyright. Irving's advocacy of the proposed law was entirely unselfish, for his own market was secure. His chief works in these ten years were, "A Tour on the Prairies," "Recollections of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey," "The Legends of the Conquest of Spain," "Astoria" (the heavy part of the work of it was done by his nephew Pierre), "Captain Bonneville," and a number of graceful occasional papers, collected afterwards under the title of "Wolfert's Roost." Two other books may properly be mentioned here, although they did not appear until after his return from his absence of four years and a half at the court of Madrid; these are the "Biography of Goldsmith" and "Mahomet and his Successors." At the age of sixty-six, he laid aside the "Life of Washington," on which he was engaged, and rapidly "threw off" these two books. The "Goldsmith" was enlarged from a sketch he had made twenty-five years before. It is an exquisite, sympathetic piece of work, without pretension or any subtle verbal analysis, but on the whole an excellent interpretation of the character. Author and subject had much in common: Irving had at least a kindly sympathy for the vagabondish inclinations of his predecessor, and with his humorous and cheerful regard of the world; perhaps it is significant of a deeper unity in character that both, at times, fancied they could please an intolerant world by attempting to play the flute. The "Mahomet" is a popular narrative, which throws no new light on the subject; it is pervaded by the author's charm of style and equity of judgment, but it lacks the virility of Gibbon's masterly picture of the Arabian prophet and the Saracenic onset. We need not dwell longer upon this period. One incident of it, however, cannot be passed in silence: that was the abandonment of his life-long project of writing the History of the Conquest of Mexico to Mr. William H. Prescott. It had been a scheme of his boyhood; he had made collections of materials for it during his first residence in Spain; and he was actually and absorbedly engaged in the composition of the first chapters, when he was sounded by Mr. Cogswell, of the Astor Library, in behalf of Mr. Prescott. Some conversation showed that Mr. Prescott was contemplating the subject upon which Mr. Irving was engaged, and the latter instantly authorized Mr. Cogswell to say that he abandoned it. Although our author was somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him, nor the full extent of his own obligation. Some years afterwards Irving wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place: "I was," he wrote, "dismounted from my _cheval de bataille_, and have never been completely mounted since." But he added that he was not sorry for the warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that Mr. Prescott's treatment of it had justified his opinion of him. Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the manner most likely to impress both the imagination and the memory; and with his artistic sense of the value of the picturesque he would have brought into strong relief the _dramatis personæ_ of the story. In 1842, Irving was tendered the honor of the mission to Madrid. It was an entire surprise to himself and to his friends. He came to look upon this as the "crowning honor of his life," and yet when the news first reached him he paced up and down his room, excited and astonished, revolving in his mind the separation from home and friends, and was heard murmuring, half to himself and half to his nephew, "It is hard,--very hard; yet I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." His acceptance of the position was doubtless influenced by the intended honor to his profession, by the gratifying manner in which it came to him, by his desire to please his friends, and the belief, which was a delusion, that diplomatic life in Madrid would offer no serious interruption to his "Life of Washington," in which he had just become engaged. The nomination, the suggestion of Daniel Webster, Tyler's Secretary of State, was cordially approved by the President and cabinet, and confirmed almost by acclamation in the Senate. "Ah," said Mr. Clay, who was opposing nearly all the President's appointments, "this is a nomination everybody will concur in!" "If a person of more merit and higher qualification," wrote Mr. Webster in his official notification, "had presented himself, great as is my personal regard for you, I should have yielded it to higher considerations." No other appointment could have been made so complimentary to Spain, and it remains to this day one of the most honorable to his own country. In reading Irving's letters written during his third visit abroad, you are conscious that the glamour of life is gone for him, though not his kindliness towards the world, and that he is subject to few illusions; the show and pageantry no longer enchant,--they only weary. The novelty was gone, and he was no longer curious to see great sights and great people. He had declined a public dinner in New York, and he put aside the same hospitality offered by Liverpool and by Glasgow. In London he attended the Queen's grand fancy ball, which surpassed anything he had seen in splendor and picturesque effect. "The personage," he writes, "who appeared least to enjoy the scene seemed to me to be the little Queen herself. She was flushed and heated, and evidently fatigued and oppressed with the state she had to keep up and the regal robes in which she was arrayed, and especially by a crown of gold, which weighed heavy on her brow, and to which she was continually raising her hand to move it slightly when it pressed. I hope and trust her real crown sits easier." The bearing of Prince Albert he found prepossessing, and he adds, "He speaks English very well;" as if that were a useful accomplishment for an English Prince Consort. His reception at court and by the ministers and diplomatic corps was very kind, and he greatly enjoyed meeting his old friends, Leslie, Rogers, and Moore. At Paris, in an informal presentation to the royal family, he experienced a very cordial welcome from the King and Queen and Madame Adelaide, each of whom took occasion to say something complimentary about his writings; but he escaped as soon as possible from social engagements. "Amidst all the splendors of London and Paris, I find my imagination refuses to take fire, and my heart still yearns after dear little Sunnyside." Of an anxious friend in Paris, who thought Irving was ruining his prospects by neglecting to leave his card with this or that duchess who had sought his acquaintance, he writes: "He attributes all this to very excessive modesty, not dreaming that the empty intercourse of saloons with people of rank and fashion could be a bore to one who has run the rounds of society for the greater part of half a century, and who likes to consult his own humor and pursuits." When Irving reached Madrid the affairs of the kingdom had assumed a powerful dramatic interest, wanting in none of the romantic elements that characterize the whole history of the peninsula. "The future career [he writes] of this gallant soldier, Espartero, whose merits and services have placed him at the head of the government, and the future fortunes of these isolated little princesses, the Queen and her sister, have an uncertainty hanging about them worthy of the fifth act in a melodrama." The drama continued, with constant shifting of scene, as long as Irving remained in Spain, and gave to his diplomatic life intense interest, and at times perilous excitement. His letters are full of animated pictures of the changing progress of the play; and although they belong rather to the gossip of history than to literary biography, they cannot be altogether omitted. The duties which the minister had to perform were unusual, delicate, and difficult; but I believe he acquitted himself of them with the skill of a born diplomatist. When he went to Spain before, in 1826, Ferdinand VII. was, by aid of French troops, on the throne, the liberties of the kingdom were crushed, and her most enlightened men were in exile. While he still resided there, in 1829, Ferdinand married, for his fourth wife, Maria Christina, sister of the King of Naples, and niece of the Queen of Louis Philippe. By her he had two daughters, his only children. In order that his own progeny might succeed him, he set aside the Salique law (which had been imposed by France) just before his death, in 1833, and revived the old Spanish law of succession. His eldest daughter, then three years old, was proclaimed Queen, by the name of Isabella II., and her mother guardian during her minority, which would end at the age of fourteen. Don Carlos, the king's eldest brother, immediately set up the standard of rebellion, supported by the absolutist aristocracy, the monks, and a great part of the clergy. The liberals rallied to the Queen. The Queen Regent did not, however, act in good faith with the popular party: she resisted all salutary reform, would not restore the Constitution of 1812 until compelled to by a popular uprising, and disgraced herself by a scandalous connection with one Muños, one of the royal body guards. She enriched this favorite and amassed a vast fortune for herself, which she sent out of the country. In 1839, when Don Carlos was driven out of the country by the patriot soldier Espartero, she endeavored to gain him over to her side, but failed. Espartero became Regent, and Maria Christina repaired to Paris, where she was received with great distinction by Louis Philippe, and Paris became the focus of all sorts of machinations against the constitutional government of Spain, and of plots for its overthrow. One of these had just been defeated at the time of Irving's arrival. It was a desperate attempt of a band of soldiers of the rebel army to carry off the little Queen and her sister, which was frustrated only by the gallant resistance of the halberdiers in the palace. The little princesses had scarcely recovered from the horror of this night attack when our minister presented his credentials to the Queen through the Regent, thus breaking a diplomatic dead-lock, in which he was followed by all the other embassies except the French. I take some passages from the author's description of his first audience at the royal palace:-- "We passed through the spacious court, up the noble staircase, and through the long suites of apartments of this splendid edifice, most of them silent and vacant, the casements closed to keep out the heat, so that a twilight reigned throughout the mighty pile, not a little emblematical of the dubious fortunes of its inmates. It seemed more like traversing a convent than a palace. I ought to have mentioned that in ascending the grand staircase we found the portal at the head of it, opening into the royal suite of apartments, still bearing the marks of the midnight attack upon the palace in October last, when an attempt was made to get possession of the persons of the little Queen and her sister, to carry them off.... The marble casements of the doors had been shattered in several places, and the double doors themselves pierced all over with bullet holes, from the musketry that played upon them from the staircase during that eventful night. What must have been the feelings of those poor children, on listening, from their apartment, to the horrid tumult, the outcries of a furious multitude, and the reports of fire-arms echoing and reverberating through the vaulted halls and spacious courts of this immense edifice, and dubious whether their own lives were not the object of the assault! "After passing through various chambers of the palace, now silent and sombre, but which I had traversed in former days, on grand court occasions in the time of Ferdinand VII., when they were glittering with all the splendor of a court, we paused in a great saloon, with high-vaulted ceiling incrusted with florid devices in porcelain, and hung with silken tapestry, but all in dim twilight, like the rest of the palace. At one end of the saloon the door opened to an almost interminable range of other chambers, through which, at a distance, we had a glimpse of some indistinct figures in black. They glided into the saloon slowly, and with noiseless steps. It was the little Queen, with her governess, Madame Mina, widow of the general of that name, and her guardian, the excellent Arguelles, all in deep mourning for the Duke of Orleans. The little Queen advanced some steps within the saloon and then paused. Madame Mina took her station a little distance behind her. The Count Almodovar then introduced me to the Queen in my official capacity, and she received me with a grave and quiet welcome, expressed in a very low voice. She is nearly twelve years of age, and is sufficiently well grown for her years. She had a somewhat fair complexion, quite pale, with bluish or light gray eyes; a grave demeanor, but a graceful deportment. I could not but regard her with deep interest, knowing what important concerns depended upon the life of this fragile little being, and to what a stormy and precarious career she might be destined. Her solitary position, also, separated from all her kindred except her little sister, a mere effigy of royalty in the hands of statesmen, and surrounded by the formalities and ceremonials of state, which spread sterility around the occupant of a throne." I have quoted this passage not more on account of its intrinsic interest, than as a specimen of the author's consummate art of conveying an impression by what I may call the tone of his style; and this appears in all his correspondence relating to this picturesque and eventful period. During the four years of his residence the country was in a constant state of excitement and often of panic. Armies were marching over the kingdom. Madrid was in a state of siege, expecting an assault at one time; confusion reigned amid the changing adherents about the person of the child Queen. The duties of a minister were perplexing enough, when the Spanish government was changing its character and its _personnel_ with the rapidity of shifting scenes in a pantomime. "This consumption of ministers," wrote Irving to Mr. Webster, "is appalling. To carry on a negotiation with such transient functionaries is like bargaining at the window of a railroad car: before you can get a reply to a proposition the other party is out of sight." Apart from politics, Irving's residence was full of half-melancholy recollections and associations. In a letter to his old comrade Prince Dolgorouki, then Russian Minister at Naples, he recalls the days of their delightful intercourse at the D'Oubrils:-- "Time dispels charms and illusions. You remember how much I was struck with a beautiful young woman (I will not mention names) who appeared in a tableau as Murillo's Virgin of the Assumption? She was young, recently married, fresh and unhackneyed in society, and my imagination decked her out with everything that was pure, lovely, innocent, and angelic in womanhood. She was pointed out to me in the theatre shortly after my arrival in Madrid. I turned with eagerness to the original of the picture that had ever remained hung up in sanctity in my mind. I found her still handsome, though somewhat matronly in appearance, seated, _with her daughters,_ in the box of a fashionable nobleman, younger than herself, rich in purse but poor in intellect, and who was openly and notoriously her _cavalier servante_. The charm was broken, the picture fell from the wall. She may have the customs of a depraved country and licentious state of society to excuse her; but I can never think of her again in the halo of feminine purity and loveliness that surrounded the Virgin of Murillo." During Irving's ministry he was twice absent, briefly in Paris and London, and was called to the latter place for consultation in regard to the Oregon boundary dispute, in the settlement of which he rendered valuable service. Space is not given me for further quotations from Irving's brilliant descriptions of court, characters, and society in that revolutionary time, nor of his half-melancholy pilgrimage to the southern scenes of his former reveries. But I will take a page from a letter to his sister, Mrs. Paris, describing his voyage from Barcelona to Marseilles, which exhibits the lively susceptibility of the author and diplomat who was then in his sixty-first year:-- "While I am writing at a table in the cabin, I am sensible of the power of a pair of splendid Spanish eyes which are occasionally flashing upon me, and which almost seem to throw a light upon the paper. Since I cannot break the spell, I will describe the owner of them. She is a young married lady, about four or five and twenty, middle sized, finely modeled, a Grecian outline of face, a complexion sallow yet healthful, raven black hair, eyes dark, large, and beaming, softened by long eyelashes, lips full and rosy red, yet finely chiseled, and teeth of dazzling whiteness. She is dressed in black, as if in mourning; on one hand is a black glove; the other hand, ungloved, is small, exquisitely formed, with taper fingers and blue veins. She has just put it up to adjust her clustering black locks. I never saw female hand more exquisite. Really, if I were a young man, I should not be able to draw the portrait of this beautiful creature so calmly. "I was interrupted in my letter writing, by an observation of the lady whom I was describing. She had caught my eye occasionally, as it glanced from my letter toward her. 'Really, Señor,' said she, at length, with a smile, 'one would think you were a painter taking my likeness.' I could not resist the impulse. 'Indeed,' said I, 'I am taking it; I am writing to a friend the other side of the world, discussing things that are passing before me, and I could not help noting down one of the best specimens of the country that I had met with.' A little bantering took place between the young lady, her husband, and myself, which ended in my reading off, as well as I could into Spanish, the description I had just written down. It occasioned a world of merriment, and was taken in excellent part. The lady's cheek, for once, mantled with the rose. She laughed, shook her head, and said I was a very fanciful portrait painter; and the husband declared that, if I would stop at St. Filian, all the ladies in the place would crowd to have their portraits taken,--my pictures were so flattering. I have just parted with them. The steamship stopped in the open sea, just in front of the little bay of St. Filian; boats came off from shore for the party. I helped the beautiful original of the portrait into the boat, and promised her and her husband if ever I should come to St. Filian I would pay them a visit. The last I noticed of her was a Spanish farewell wave of her beautiful white hand, and the gleam of her dazzling teeth as she smiled adieu. So there's a very tolerable touch of romance for a gentleman of my years." When Irving announced his recall from the court of Madrid, the young Queen said to him in reply: "You may take with you into private life the intimate conviction that your frank and loyal conduct has contributed to draw closer the amicable relations which exist between North America and the Spanish nation, and that your distinguished personal merits have gained in my heart the appreciation which you merit by more than one title." The author was anxious to return. From the midst of court life in April, 1845, he had written: "I long to be once more back at dear little Sunnyside, while I have yet strength and good spirits to enjoy the simple pleasures of the country, and to rally a happy family group once more about me. I grudge every year of absence that rolls by. To-morrow is my birthday. I shall then be sixty-two years old. The evening of life is fast drawing over me; still I hope to get back among my friends while there is a little sunshine left." It was the 19th of September, 1846, says his biographer, "when the impatient longing of his heart was gratified, and he found himself restored to his home for the thirteen years of happy life still remaining to him." CHAPTER IX. THE CHARACTERISTIC WORKS. The Knickerbocker's "History of New York" and the "Sketch-Book" never would have won for Irving the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature, or the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford. However much the world would have liked frankly to honor the writer for that which it most enjoyed and was under most obligations for, it would have been a violent shock to the constitution of things to have given such honor to the mere humorist and the writer of short sketches. The conventional literary proprieties must be observed. Only some laborious, solid, and improving work of the pen could sanction such distinction,--a book of research or an historical composition. It need not necessarily be dull, but it must be grave in tone and serious in intention, in order to give the author high recognition. Irving himself shared this opinion. He hoped, in the composition of his "Columbus" and his "Washington," to produce works which should justify the good opinion his countrymen had formed of him, should reasonably satisfy the expectations excited by his lighter books, and lay for him the basis of enduring reputation. All that he had done before was the play of careless genius, the exercise of frolicsome fancy, which might amuse and perhaps win an affectionate regard for the author, but could not justify a high respect or secure a permanent place in literature. For this, some work of scholarship and industry was needed. And yet everybody would probably have admitted that there was but one man then living who could have created and peopled the vast and humorous world of the Knickerbockers; that all the learning of Oxford and Cambridge together would not enable a man to draw the whimsical portrait of Ichabod Crane, or to outline the fascinating legend of Rip Van Winkle; while Europe was full of scholars of more learning than Irving, and writers of equal skill in narrative, who might have told the story of Columbus as well as he told it and perhaps better. The under-graduates of Oxford who hooted their admiration of the shy author when he appeared in the theatre to receive his complimentary degree perhaps understood this, and expressed it in their shouts of "Diedrich Knickerbocker," "Ichabod Crane," "Rip Van Winkle." Irving's "gift" was humor; and allied to this was sentiment. These qualities modified and restrained each other; and it was by these that he touched the heart. He acquired other powers which he himself may have valued more highly, and which brought him more substantial honors; but the historical compositions, which he and his contemporaries regarded as a solid basis of fame, could be spared without serious loss, while the works of humor, the first fruits of his genius, are possessions in English literature the loss of which would be irreparable. The world may never openly allow to humor a position "above the salt," but it clings to its fresh and original productions, generation after generation, finding room for them in its accumulating literary baggage, while more "important" tomes of scholarship and industry strew the line of its march. I feel that this study of Irving as a man of letters would be incomplete, especially for the young readers of this generation, if it did not contain some more extended citations from those works upon which we have formed our estimate of his quality. We will take first a few passages from the "History of New York." * * * * * It has been said that Irving lacked imagination. That, while he had humor and feeling and fancy, he was wanting in the higher quality, which is the last test of genius. We have come to attach to the word "imagination" a larger meaning than the mere reproduction in the mind of certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me that the transmutation of the crude and theretofore unpoetical materials, which he found in the New World, into what is as absolute a creation as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the imagination. Its humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness of outline, nor with its essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical and comical as is the "Knickerbocker" creation, it is enlarged to the proportion of a realm, and over that new country of the imagination is always the rosy light of sentiment. This largeness of modified conception cannot be made apparent in such brief extracts as we can make, but they will show its quality and the author's humor. The Low-Dutch settlers of the Nieuw Nederlandts are supposed to have sailed from Amsterdam in a ship called the Goede Vrouw, built by the carpenters of that city, who always model their ships on the fair forms of their countrywomen. This vessel, whose beauteous model was declared to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, had one hundred feet in the beam, one hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet from the bottom of the stern-post to the taffrail. Those illustrious adventurers who sailed in her landed on the Jersey flats, preferring a marshy ground, where they could drive piles and construct dykes. They made a settlement at the Indian village of Communipaw, the egg from which was hatched the mighty city of New York. In the author's time this place had lost its importance:-- "Communipaw is at present but a small village pleasantly situated, among rural scenery, on that beauteous part of the Jersey shore which was known in ancient legends by the name of Pavonia,[1] and commands a grand prospect of the superb bay of New York. It is within but half an hour's sail of the latter place, provided you have a fair wind, and may be distinctly seen from the city. Nay, it is a well-known fact, which I can testify from my own experience, that on a clear still summer evening, you may hear, from the Battery of New York, the obstreperous peals of broad-mouthed laughter of the Dutch negroes at Communipaw, who, like most other negroes, are famous for their risible powers. This is peculiarly the case on Sunday evenings, when, it is remarked by an ingenious and observant philosopher who has made great discoveries in the neighborhood of this city, that they always laugh loudest, which he attributes to the circumstance of their having their holiday clothes on. "These negroes, in fact, like the monks of the dark ages, engross all the knowledge of the place, and being infinitely more adventurous and more knowing than their masters, carry on all the foreign trade; making frequent voyages to town in canoes loaded with oysters, buttermilk, and cabbages. They are great astrologers, predicting the different changes of weather almost as accurately as an almanac; they are moreover exquisite performers on three-stringed fiddles; in whistling they almost boast the far-famed powers of Orpheus's lyre, for not a horse or an ox in the place, when at the plough or before the wagon, will budge a foot until he hears the well-known whistle of his black driver and companion. And from their amazing skill at casting up accounts upon their fingers, they are regarded with as much veneration us were the disciples of Pythagoras of yore, when initiated into the sacred quaternary of numbers. "As to the honest burghers of Communipaw, like wise men and sound philosophers, they never look beyond their pipes, nor trouble their heads about any affairs out of their immediate neighborhood; so that they live in profound and enviable ignorance of all the troubles, anxieties, and revolutions of this distracted planet. I am even told that many among them do verily believe that Holland, of which they have heard so much from tradition, is situated somewhere on Long Island,--that _Spiking-devil_ and _the Narrows_ are the two ends of the world,--that the country is still under the dominion of their High Mightinesses,--and that the city of New York still goes by the name of Nieuw Amsterdam. They meet every Saturday afternoon at the only tavern in the place, which bears as a sign a square-headed likeness of the Prince of Orange, where they smoke a silent pipe, by way of promoting social conviviality, and invariably drink a mug of cider to the success of Admiral Van Tromp, who they imagine is still sweeping the British channel with a broom at his mast-head. "Communipaw, in short, is one of the numerous little villages in the vicinity of this most beautiful of cities, which are so many strongholds and fastnesses, whither the primitive manners of our Dutch forefathers have retreated, and where they are cherished with devout and scrupulous strictness. The dress of the original settlers is handed down inviolate, from father to son: the identical broad-brimmed hat, broad-skirted coat, and broad-bottomed breeches, continue from generation to generation; and several gigantic knee-buckles of massy silver are still in wear, that made gallant display in the days of the patriarchs of Communipaw. The language likewise continues unadulterated by barbarous innovations; and so critically correct is the village schoolmaster in his dialect, that his reading of a Low-Dutch psalm has much the same effect on the nerves as the filing of a handsaw." [Footnote 1: Pavonia in the ancient maps, is given to a tract of country extending from about Hoboken to Amboy.] The early prosperity of this settlement is dwelt on with satisfaction by the author:-- "The neighboring Indians in a short time became accustomed to the uncouth sound of the Dutch language, and an intercourse gradually took place between them and the new-comers. The Indians were much given to long talks, and the Dutch to long silence;--in this particular, therefore, they accommodated each other completely. The chiefs would make long speeches about the big bull, the Wabash, and the Great Spirit, to which the others would listen very attentively, smoke their pipes, and grunt _yah, mynher_,--whereat the poor savages were wondrously delighted. They instructed the new settlers in the best art of curing and smoking tobacco, while the latter, in return, made them drunk with true Hollands,--and then taught them the art of making bargains. "A brisk trade for furs was soon opened; the Dutch traders were scrupulously honest in their dealings and purchased by weight, establishing it as an invariable table of avoirdupois, that the hand of a Dutchman weighed one pound, and his foot two pounds. It is true, the simple Indians were often puzzled by the great disproportion between bulk and weight, for let them place a bundle of furs, never so large, in one scale, and a Dutchman put his hand or foot in the other, the bundle was sure to kick the beam;--never was a package of furs known to weigh more than two pounds in the market of Communipaw! "This is a singular fact,--but I have it direct from my great-great-grandfather, who had risen to considerable importance in the colony, being promoted to the office of weigh-master, on account of the uncommon heaviness of his foot. "The Dutch possessions in this part of the globe began now to assume a very thriving appearance, and were comprehended under the general title of Nieuw Nederlandts, on account, as the Sage Vander Donck observes, of their great resemblance to the Dutch Netherlands,--which indeed was truly remarkable, excepting that the former were rugged and mountainous, and the latter level and marshy. About this time the tranquillity of the Dutch colonists was doomed to suffer a temporary interruption. In 1614, Captain Sir Samuel Argal, sailing under a commission from Dale, governor of Virginia, visited the Dutch settlements on Hudson River, and demanded their submission to the English crown and Virginian dominion. To this arrogant demand, as they were in no condition to resist it, they submitted for the time, like discreet and reasonable men. "It does not appear that the valiant Argal molested the settlement of Communipaw; on the contrary, I am told that when his vessel first hove in sight, the worthy burghers were seized with such a panic, that they fell to smoking their pipes with astonishing vehemence; insomuch that they quickly raised a cloud, which, combining with the surrounding woods and marshes, completely enveloped and concealed their beloved village, and overhung the fair regions of Pavonia--so that the terrible Captain Argal passed on totally unsuspicious that a sturdy little Dutch settlement lay snugly couched in the mud, under cover of all this pestilent vapor. In commemoration of this fortunate escape, the worthy inhabitants have continued to smoke, almost without intermission, unto this very day; which is said to be the cause of the remarkable fog which often hangs over Communipaw of a clear afternoon." The golden age of New York was under the reign of Walter Van Twiller, the first governor of the province, and the best it ever had. In his sketch of this excellent magistrate Irving has embodied the abundance and tranquillity of those halcyon days:-- "The renowned Wouter (or Walter) Van Twiller was descended from a long line of Dutch burgomasters, who had successively dozed away their lives, and grown fat upon the bench of magistracy in Rotterdam; and who had comported themselves with such singular wisdom and propriety, that they were never either heard or talked of--which, next to being universally applauded, should be the object of ambition of all magistrates and rulers. There are two opposite ways by which some men make a figure in the world: one, by talking faster than they think, and the other, by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, many a smatterer acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual remark, which I would not, for the universe, have it thought I apply to Governor Van Twiller. It is true he was a man shut up within himself, like an oyster, and rarely spoke, except in monosyllables; but then it was allowed he seldom said a foolish thing. So invincible was his gravity that he was never known to laugh or even to smile through the whole course of a long and prosperous life. Nay, if a joke were uttered in his presence, that set light-minded hearers in a roar, it was observed to throw him into a state of perplexity. Sometimes he would deign to inquire into the matter, and when, after much explanation, the joke was made as plain as a pike-staff, he would continue to smoke his pipe in silence, and at length, knocking out the ashes, would exclaim, 'Well! I see nothing in all that to laugh about.' "With all his reflective habits, he never made up his mind on a subject. His adherents accounted for this by the astonishing magnitude of his ideas. He conceived every subject on so grand a scale that he had not room in his head to turn it over and examine both sides of it. Certain it is, that, if any matter were propounded to him on which ordinary mortals would rashly determine at first glance, he would put on a vague, mysterious look, shake his capacious head, smoke some time in profound silence, and at length observe, that 'he had his doubts about the matter'; which gained him the reputation of a man slow of belief and not easily imposed upon. What is more, it has gained him a lasting name; for to this habit of the mind has been attributed his surname of Twiller; which is said to be a corruption of the original Twijfler, or, in plain English, _Doubter_. "The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned, as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions, that dame Nature, with all her sex's ingenuity, would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone, just between the shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits, and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were short, but sturdy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain; so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a spitzenberg apple. "His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty. Such was the renowned Wouter Van Twiller,--a true philosopher, for his mind was either elevated above, or tranquilly settled below, the cares and perplexities of this world. He had lived in it for years, without feeling the least curiosity to know whether the sun revolved round it, or it round the sun; and he had watched, for at least half a century, the smoke curling from his pipe to the ceiling, without once troubling his head with any of those numerous theories by which a philosopher would have perplexed his brain, in accounting for its rising above the surrounding atmosphere. "In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He sat in a huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of the Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and curiously carved about the arms and feet into exact imitations of gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a sceptre, he swayed a long Turkish pipe, wrought with jasmin and amber, which had been presented to a stadtholder of Holland at the conclusion of a treaty with one of the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would he sit, and this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council-chamber. Nay, it has even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects; and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the noise of conflict, made by his contending doubts and opinions.... "I have been the more anxious to delineate fully the person and habits of Wouter Van Twiller, from the consideration that he was not only the first but also the best governor that ever presided over this ancient and respectable province; and so tranquil and benevolent was his reign, that I do not find throughout the whole of it a single instance of any offender being brought to punishment,--a most indubitable sign of a merciful governor, and a case unparalleled, excepting in the reign of the illustrious King Log, from whom, it is hinted, the renowned Van Twiller was a lineal descendant. "The very outset of the career of this excellent magistrate was distinguished by an example of legal acumen that gave flattering presage of a wise and equitable administration. The morning after he had been installed in office, and at the moment that he was making his breakfast from a prodigious earthen dish, filled with milk and Indian pudding, he was interrupted by the appearance of Wandle Schoonhoven, a very important old burgher of New Amsterdam, who complained bitterly of one Barent Bleecker, inasmuch as he refused to come to a settlement of accounts, seeing that there was a heavy balance in favor of the said Wandle. Governor Van Twiller, as I have already observed, was a man of few words; he was likewise a mortal enemy to multiplying writings--or being disturbed at his breakfast. Having listened attentively to the statement of Wandle Schoonhoven, giving an occasional grunt, as he shoveled a spoonful of Indian pudding into his mouth,--either as a sign that he relished the dish, or comprehended the story,--he called unto him his constable, and pulling out of his breeches-pocket a huge jack-knife, dispatched it after the defendant as a summons, accompanied by his tobacco-box as a warrant. "This summary process was as effectual in those simple days as was the seal-ring of the great Haroun Alraschid among the true believers. The two parties being confronted before him, each produced a book of accounts, written in a language and character that would have puzzled any but a High-Dutch commentator, or a learned decipherer of Egyptian obelisks. The sage Wouter took them one after the other, and having poised them in his hands, and attentively counted over the number of leaves, fell straightway into a very great doubt, and smoked for half an hour without saying a word; at length, laying his finger beside his nose, and shutting his eyes for a moment, with the air of a man who has just caught a subtle idea by the tail, he slowly took his pipe from his mouth, puffed forth a column of tobacco-smoke, and with marvelous gravity and solemnity pronounced, that, having carefully counted over the leaves and weighed the books, it was found, that one was just as thick and as heavy as the other: therefore, it was the final opinion of the court that the accounts were equally balanced: therefore, Wandle should give Barent a receipt, and Barent should give Wandle a receipt, and the constable should pay the costs. "This decision, being straightway made known, diffused general joy throughout New Amsterdam, for the people immediately perceived that they had a very wise and equitable magistrate to rule over them. But its happiest effect was, that not another lawsuit took place throughout the whole of his administration; and the office of constable fell into such decay, that there was not one of those losel scouts known in the province for many years. I am the more particular in dwelling on this transaction, not only because I deem it one of the most sage and righteous judgments on record, and well worthy the attention of modern magistrates, but because it was a miraculous event in the history of the renowned Wouter--being the only time he was ever known to come to a decision in the whole course of his life." This peaceful age ended with the accession of William the Testy, and the advent of the enterprising Yankees. During the reigns of William Kieft and Peter Stuyvesant, between the Yankees of the Connecticut and the Swedes of the Delaware, the Dutch community knew no repose, and the "History" is little more than a series of exhausting sieges and desperate battles, which would have been as heroic as any in history if they had been attended with loss of life. The forces that were gathered by Peter Stuyvesant for the expedition to avenge upon the Swedes the defeat at Fort Casimir, and their appearance on the march, give some notion of the military prowess of the Dutch. Their appearance, when they were encamped on the Bowling Green, recalls the Homeric age:-- "In the centre, then, was pitched the tent of the men of battle of the Manhattoes, who, being the inmates of the metropolis, composed the lifeguards of the governor. These were commanded by the valiant Stoffel Brinkerhoof, who, whilom had acquired such immortal fame at Oyster Bay; they displayed as a standard a beaver _rampant_ on a field of orange, being the arms of the province, and denoting the persevering industry and the amphibious origin of the Nederlands. "On their right hand might be seen the vassals of that renowned Mynheer, Michael Paw, who lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia, and the lands away south even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island. His standard was borne by his trusty squire, Cornelius Van Vorst; consisting of a huge oyster _recumbent_ upon a sea-green field; being the armorial bearings of his favorite metropolis Communipaw. He brought to the camp a stout force of warriors, heavily armed, being each clad in ten pair of linsey-woolsey breeches, and overshadowed by broad-brimmed beavers, with short pipes twisted in their hat-bands. These were the men who vegetated in the mud along the shores of Pavonia, being of the race of genuine copperheads, and were fabled to have sprung from oysters. "At a little distance was encamped the tribe of warriors who came from the neighborhood of Hell-gate. These were commanded by the Suy Dams, and the Van Dams,--incontinent hard swearers, as their names betoken. They were terrible looking fellows, clad in broad-skirted gaberdines, of that curious colored cloth called thunder and lightning,--and bore as a standard three devil's darning-needles, _volant_, in a flame-colored field. "Hard by was the tent of the men of battle from the marshy borders of the Waale-Boght and the country thereabouts. These were of a sour aspect, by reason that they lived on crabs, which abound in these parts. They were the first institutors of that honorable order of knighthood called _Fly-market shirks_, and, if tradition speak true, did likewise introduce the far-famed step in dancing called 'double trouble.' They were commanded by the fearless Jacobus Varra Vanger,--and had, moreover, a jolly band of Breuckelen ferry-men, who performed a brave concerto on conch shells. "But I refrain from pursuing this minute description which goes on to describe the warriors of Bloemen-dael, and Weehawk, and Hoboken, and sundry other places, well known in history and song; for now do the notes of martial music alarm the people of New Amsterdam, sounding afar from beyond the walls of the city. But this alarm was in a little while relieved, for lo! from the midst of a vast cloud of dust, they recognized the brimstone-colored breeches and splendid silver leg of Peter Stuyvesant, glaring in the sunbeams; and beheld him approaching at the head of a formidable army, which he had mustered along the banks of the Hudson. And here the excellent but anonymous writer of the Stuyvesant manuscript breaks out into a brave and glorious description of the forces, as they defiled through the principal gate of the city, that stood by the head of Wall Street. "First of all came the Van Bummels, who inhabit the pleasant borders of the Bronx: these were short fat men, wearing exceeding large trunk-breeches, and were renowned for feats of the trencher. They were the first inventors of suppawn, or mush and milk.--Close in their rear marched the Van Vlotens, of Kaatskill, horrible quaffers of new cider, and arrant braggarts in their liquor.--After them came the Van Pelts of Groodt Esopus, dexterous horsemen, mounted upon goodly switch-tailed steeds of the Esopus breed. These were mighty hunters of minks and musk-rats, whence came the word _Peltry_.--Then the Van Nests of Kinderhoeck, valiant robbers of birds'-nests, as their name denotes. To these, if report may be believed, are we indebted for the invention of slap-jacks, or buckwheat-cakes.--Then the Van Higginbottoms, of Wapping's creek. These came armed with ferules and birchen rods, being a race of schoolmasters, who first discovered the marvelous sympathy between the seat of honor and the seat of intellect,--and that the shortest way to get knowledge into the head was to hammer it into the bottom.--Then the Van Grolls, of Antony's Nose, who carried their liquor in fair round little pottles, by reason they could not bouse it out of their canteens, having such rare long noses.--Then the Gardeniers, of Hudson and thereabouts, distinguished by many triumphant feats, such as robbing water-melon patches, smoking rabbits out of their holes, and the like, and by being great lovers of roasted pigs' tails. These were the ancestors of the renowned congressman of that name.--Then the Van Hoesens, of Sing-Sing, great choristers and players upon the jews-harp. These marched two and two, singing the great song of St. Nicholas.--Then the Couenhovens, of Sleepy Hollow. These gave birth to a jolly race of publicans, who first discovered the magic artifice of conjuring a quart of wine into a pint bottle.--Then the Van Kortlandts, who lived on the wild banks of the Croton, and were great killers of wild ducks, being much spoken of for their skill in shooting with the long bow.--Then the Van Bunschotens, of Nyack and Kakiat, who were the first that did ever kick with the left foot. They were gallant bushwhackers and hunters of raccoons by moonlight.--Then the Van Winkles, of Haerlem, potent suckers of eggs, and noted for running of horses, and running up of scores at taverns. They were the first that ever winked with both eyes at once.--Lastly came the KNICKERBOCKERS, of the great town of Scaghtikoke, where the folk lay stones upon the houses in windy weather, lest they should be blown away. These derive their name, as some say, from _Knicker_, to shake, and _Beker_, a goblet, indicating thereby that they were sturdy toss-pots of yore; but, in truth, it was derived from _Knicker_, to nod, and _Boeken_, books: plainly meaning that they were great nodders or dozers over books. From them did descend the writer of this history." In the midst of Irving's mock-heroics, he always preserves a substratum of good sense. An instance of this is the address of the redoubtable wooden-legged governor, on his departure at the head of his warriors to chastise the Swedes:-- "Certain it is, not an old woman in New Amsterdam but considered Peter Stuyvesant as a tower of strength, and rested satisfied that the public welfare was secure so long as he was in the city. It is not surprising, then, that they looked upon his departure as a sore affliction. With heavy hearts they draggled at the heels of his troop, as they marched down to the river-side to embark. The governor, from the stern of his schooner, gave a short but truly patriarchal address to his citizens, wherein he recommended them to comport like loyal and peaceable subjects--to go to church regularly on Sundays, and to mind their business all the week besides. That the women should be dutiful and affectionate to their husbands,--looking after nobody's concerns but their own,--eschewing all gossipings and morning gaddings,--and carrying short tongues and long petticoats. That the men should abstain from intermeddling in public concerns, intrusting the cares of government to the officers appointed to support them,--staying at home, like good citizens, making money for themselves, and getting children for the benefit of their country. That the burgomasters should look well to the public interest,--not oppressing the poor nor indulging the rich,--not tasking their ingenuity to devise new laws, but faithfully enforcing those which were already made,--rather bending their attention to prevent evil than to punish it; ever recollecting that civil magistrates should consider themselves more as guardians of public morals than rat-catchers employed to entrap public delinquents. Finally, he exhorted them, one and all, high and low, rich and poor, to conduct themselves _as well as they could_, assuring them that if they faithfully and conscientiously complied with this golden rule, there was no danger but that they would all conduct themselves well enough. This done, he gave them a paternal benediction, the sturdy Antony sounded a most loving farewell with his trumpet, the jolly crews put up a shout of triumph, and the invincible armada swept off proudly down the bay." The account of an expedition against Fort Christina deserves to be quoted in full, for it is an example of what war might be, full of excitement, and exercise, and heroism, without danger to life. We take up the narrative at the moment when the Dutch host,-- "Brimful of wrath and cabbage,"-- and excited by the eloquence of the mighty Peter, lighted their pipes, and charged upon the fort. "The Swedish garrison, ordered by the cunning Risingh not to fire until they could distinguish the whites of their assailants' eyes, stood in horrid silence on the covert-way, until the eager Dutchmen had ascended the glacis. Then did they pour into them such a tremendous volley, that the very hills quaked around, and were terrified even unto an incontinence of water, insomuch that certain springs burst forth from their sides, which continue to run unto the present day. Not a Dutchman but would have bitten the dust beneath that dreadful fire, had not the protecting Minerva kindly taken care that the Swedes should, one and all, observe their usual custom of shutting their eyes and turning away their heads at the moment of discharge. "The Swedes followed up their fire by leaping the counterscarp, and falling tooth and nail upon the foe with curious outcries. And now might be seen prodigies of valor, unmatched in history or song. Here was the sturdy Stoffel Brinkerhoff brandishing his quarter-staff, like the giant Blanderon his oak-tree (for he scorned to carry any other weapon), and drumming a horrific tune upon the hard heads of the Swedish soldiery. There were the Van Kortlandts, posted at a distance, like the Locrian archers of yore, and plying it most potently with the long-bow, for which they were so justly renowned. On a rising knoll were gathered the valiant men of Sing-Sing, assisting marvelously in the fight by chanting the great song of St. Nicholas; but as to the Gardeniers of Hudson, they were absent on a marauding party, laying waste the neighboring water-melon patches. "In a different part of the field were the Van Grolls of Antony's Nose, struggling to get to the thickest of the fight, but horribly perplexed in a defile between two hills, by reason of the length of their noses. So also the Van Bunschotens of Nyack and Kakiat, so renowned for kicking with the left foot, were brought to a stand for want of wind, in consequence of the hearty dinner they had eaten, and would have been put to utter rout but for the arrival of a gallant corps of voltigeurs, composed of the Hoppers, who advanced nimbly to their assistance on one foot. Nor must I omit to mention the valiant achievements of Antony Van Corlear, who, for a good quarter of an hour, waged stubborn fight with a little pursy Swedish drummer, whose hide he drummed most magnificently, and whom he would infallibly have annihilated on the spot, but that he had come into the battle with no other weapon but his trumpet. "But now the combat thickened. On came the mighty Jacobus Varra Vanger and the fighting-men of the Wallabout; after them thundered the Van Pelts of Esopus, together with the Van Rippers and the Van Brunts, bearing down all before them; then the Suy Dams, and the Van Dams, pressing forward with many a blustering oath, at the head of the warriors of Hell-gate, clad in their thunder-and-lightning gaberdines; and lastly, the standard-bearers and body-guard of Peter Stuyvesant, bearing the great beaver of the Manhattoes. "And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the maddening ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and self-abandonment of war. Dutchman and Swede commingled, tugged, panted, and blowed. The heavens were darkened with a tempest of missives. Bang! went the guns; whack! went the broad-swords; thump! went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs, scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, head-over-heels, rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine! roared stout Risingh. Tanta-rar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;--until all voice and sound became unintelligible,--grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumph mingling in one hideous clamor. The earth shook as if struck with a paralytic stroke; trees shrunk aghast, and withered at the sight; rocks burrowed in the ground like rabbits; and even Christina Creek turned from its course and ran up a hill in breathless terror! "Long hung the contest doubtful; for though a heavy shower of rain, sent by the "cloud-compelling Jove," in some measure cooled their ardor, as doth a bucket of water thrown on a group of fighting mastiffs, yet did they but pause for a moment, to return with tenfold fury to the charge. Just at this juncture a vast and dense column of smoke was seen slowly rolling toward the scene of battle. The combatants paused for a moment, gazing in mute astonishment, until the wind, dispelling the murky cloud, revealed the flaunting banner of Michael Paw, the Patroon of Communipaw. That valiant chieftain came fearlessly on at the head of a phalanx of oyster-fed Pavonians and a _corps de reserve_ of the Van Arsdales and Van Bummels, who had remained behind to digest the enormous dinner they had eaten. These now trudged manfully forward, smoking their pipes with outrageous vigor, so as to raise the awful cloud that has been mentioned, but marching exceedingly slow, being short of leg, and of great rotundity in the belt. "And now the deities who watched over the fortunes of the Nederlanders having unthinkingly left the field, and stepped into a neighboring tavern to refresh themselves with a pot of beer, a direful catastrophe had wellnigh ensued. Scarce had the myrmidons of Michael Paw attained the front of battle, when the Swedes, instructed by the cunning Risingh, leveled a shower of blows full at their tobacco-pipes. Astounded at this assault, and dismayed at the havoc of their pipes, these ponderous warriors gave way, and like a drove of frightened elephants broke through the ranks of their own army. The little Hoppers were borne down in the surge; the sacred banner emblazoned with the gigantic oyster of Communipaw was trampled in the dirt; on blundered and thundered the heavy-sterned fugitives, the Swedes pressing on their rear and applying their feet _a parte poste_ of the Van Arsdales and the Van Bummels with a vigor that prodigiously accelerated their movements; nor did the renowned Michael Paw himself fail to receive divers grievous and dishonorable visitations of shoe-leather. "But what, oh Muse! was the rage of Peter Stuyvesant, when from afar he saw his army giving way! In the transports of his wrath he sent forth a roar, enough to shake the very hills. The men of the Manhattoes plucked up new courage at the sound, or, rather, they rallied at the voice of their leader, of whom they stood more in awe than of all the Swedes in Christendom. Without waiting for their aid, the daring Peter dashed, sword in hand, into the thickest of the foe. Then might be seen achievements worthy of the days of the giants. Wherever he went the enemy shrank before him; the Swedes fled to right and left, or were driven, like dogs, into their own ditch; but as he pushed forward, singly with headlong courage, the foe closed behind and hung upon his rear. One aimed a blow full at his heart; but the protecting power which watches over the great and good turned aside the hostile blade and directed it to a side-pocket, where reposed an enormous iron tobacco-box, endowed, like the shield of Achilles, with supernatural powers, doubtless from bearing the portrait of the blessed St. Nicholas. Peter Stuyvesant turned like an angry bear upon the foe, and seizing him, as he fled, by an immeasurable queue, 'Ah, whoreson caterpillar,' roared he, 'here's what shall make worms' meat of thee!' so saying he whirled his sword and dealt a blow that would have decapitated the varlet, but that the pitying steel struck short and shaved the queue forever from his crown. At this moment an arquebusier leveled his piece from a neighboring mound, with deadly aim; but the watchful Minerva, who had just stopped to tie up her garter, seeing the peril of her favorite hero, sent old Boreas with his bellows, who, as the match descended to the pan, gave a blast that blew the priming from the touch-hole. "Thus waged the fight, when the stout Risingh, surveying the field from the top of a little ravelin, perceived his troops banged, beaten, and kicked by the invincible Peter. Drawing his falchion, and uttering a thousand anathemas, he strode down to the scene of combat with some such thundering strides as Jupiter is said by Hesiod to have taken when he strode down the spheres to hurl his thunder-bolts at the Titans. "When the rival heroes came face to face, each made a prodigious start in the style of a veteran stage-champion. Then did they regard each other for a moment with the bitter aspect of two furious ram-cats on the point of a clapper-clawing. Then did they throw themselves into one attitude, then into another, striking their swords on the ground, first on the right side, then on the left: at last at it they went with incredible ferocity. Words cannot tell the prodigies of strength and valor displayed in this direful encounter,--an encounter compared to which the far-famed battles of Ajax with Hector, of Æneas with Turnus, Orlando with Rodomont, Guy of Warwick with Colbrand the Dane, or of that renowned Welsh knight, Sir Owen of the Mountains, with the giant Guylon, were all gentle sports and holiday recreations. At length the valiant Peter, watching his opportunity, aimed a blow enough to cleave his adversary to the very chine; but Risingh, nimbly raising his sword, warded it off so narrowly, that, glancing on one side, it shaved away a huge canteen in which he carried his liquor,--thence pursuing its trenchant course, it severed off a deep coat-pocket, stored with bread and cheese,--which provant, rolling among the armies, occasioned a fearful scrambling between the Swedes and Dutchmen, and made the general battle to wax more furious than ever. "Enraged to see his military stores laid waste, the stout Risingh, collecting all his forces, aimed a mighty blow full at the hero's crest. In vain did his fierce little cocked hat oppose its course. The biting steel clove through the stubborn ram beaver, and would have cracked the crown of any one not endowed with supernatural hardness of head; but the brittle weapon shivered in pieces on the skull of Hardkoppig Piet, shedding a thousand sparks, like beams of glory, round his grizzly visage. "The good Peter reeled with the blow, and turning up his eyes beheld a thousand suns, besides moons and stars, dancing about the firmament; at length, missing his footing, by reason of his wooden leg, down he came on his seat of honor with a crash which shook the surrounding hills, and might have wrecked his frame, had he not been received into a cushion softer than velvet, which Providence, or Minerva, or St. Nicholas, or some cow, had benevolently prepared for his reception. "The furious Risingh, in despite of the maxim, cherished by all true knights, that 'fair play is a jewel,' hastened to take advantage of the hero's fall; but, as he stooped to give a fatal blow, Peter Stuyvesant dealt him a thwack over the sconce with his wooden leg, which set a chime of bells ringing triple bob-majors in his cerebellum. The bewildered Swede staggered with the blow, and the wary Peter seizing a pocket-pistol, which lay hard by, discharged it full at the head of the reeling Risingh. Let not my reader mistake; it was not a murderous weapon loaded with powder and ball, but a little sturdy stone pottle charged to the muzzle with a double dram of true Dutch courage, which the knowing Antony Van Corlear carried about him by way of replenishing his valor, and which had dropped from his wallet during his furious encounter with the drummer. The hideous weapon sang through the air, and true to its course as was the fragment of a rock discharged at Hector by bully Ajax, encountered the head of the gigantic Swede with matchless violence. "This heaven-directed blow decided the battle. The ponderous pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with affright, lest he should have broken through the roof of his infernal palace. "His fall was the signal of defeat and victory: the Swedes gave way, the Dutch pressed forward; the former took to their heels, the latter hotly pursued. Some entered with them, pell-mell, through the sally-port; others stormed the bastion, and others scrambled over the curtain. Thus in a little while the fortress of Fort Christina, which, like another Troy, had stood a siege of full ten hours, was carried by assault, without the loss of a single man on either side. Victory, in the likeness of a gigantic ox-fly, sat perched upon the cocked hat of the gallant Stuyvesant; and it was declared by all the writers whom he hired to write the history of his expedition that on this memorable day he gained a sufficient quantity of glory to immortalize a dozen of the greatest heroes in Christendom!" In the "Sketch-Book," Irving set a kind of fashion in narrative essays, in brief stories of mingled humor and pathos, which was followed for half a century. He himself worked the same vein in "Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of a Traveller." And there is no doubt that some of the most fascinating of the minor sketches of Charles Dickens, such as the story of the Bagman's Uncle, are lineal descendants of, if they were not suggested by, Irving's "Adventure of My Uncle," and the "Bold Dragoon." The taste for the leisurely description and reminiscent essay of the "Sketch-Book" does not characterize the readers of this generation, and we have discovered that the pathos of its elaborated scenes is somewhat "literary." The sketches of "Little Britain," and "Westminster Abbey," and, indeed, that of "Stratford-on-Avon," will for a long time retain their place in selections of "good reading;" but the "Sketch-Book" is only floated, as an original work, by two papers, the "Rip Van Winkle" and the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow;" that is to say by the use of the Dutch material, and the elaboration of the "Knickerbocker Legend," which was the great achievement of Irving's life. This was broadened and deepened and illustrated by the several stories of the "Money Diggers," of "Wolfert Webber" and "Kidd the Pirate," in "The Tales of a Traveller," and by "Dolph Heyliger" in "Bracebridge Hall." Irving was never more successful than in painting the Dutch manners and habits of the early time, and he returned again and again to the task until he not only made the shores of the Hudson and the islands of New York harbor and the East River classic ground, but until his conception of Dutch life in the New World had assumed historical solidity and become a tradition of the highest poetic value. If in the multiplicity of books and the change of taste the bulk of Irving's works shall go out of print, a volume made up of his Knickerbocker history and the legends relating to the region of New York and the Hudson would survive as long as anything that has been produced in this country. The philosophical student of the origin of New World society may find food for reflection in the "materiality" of the basis of the civilization of New York. The picture of abundance and of enjoyment of animal life is perhaps not overdrawn in Irving's sketch of the home of the Van Tassels, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." It is all the extract we can make room for from that careful study:-- "Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was, withal, a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round. "Ichabod Crane had a soft and foolish heart towards the sex; and it is not to be wondered at that so tempting a morsel soon found favor in his eyes, more especially after he had visited her in her paternal mansion. Old Baltus Van Tassel was a perfect picture of a thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer. He seldom, it is true, sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those everything was snug, happy, and well-conditioned. He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance rather than the style in which he lived. His stronghold was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling. A great elm-tree spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well, formed of a barrel, and then stole sparkling away through the grass to a neighboring brook, that bubbled along among alders and dwarf willows. Hard by the farm-house was a vast barn, that might have served for a church, every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm. The flail was busily resounding within it from morning till night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves; and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling and cooing and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof. Sleek, unwieldy porkers were grunting in the repose and abundance of their pens, whence sallied forth, now and then, troops of sucking pigs, as if to snuff the air. A stately squadron of snowy geese were riding in an adjoining pond, convoying whole fleets of ducks; regiments of turkeys were gobbling through the farm-yard, and guinea fowls fretting about it, like ill-tempered housewives, with their peevish, discontented cry. Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished wings, and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart--sometimes tearing up the earth with his feet, and then generously calling his ever-hungry family of wives and children to enjoy the rich morsel which he had discovered. "The pedagogue's mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind's eye he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy, and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion-sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back, in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living. "As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchard burdened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where. "When he entered the house, the conquest of his heart was complete. It was one of those spacious farm-houses, with high-ridged, but lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the first Dutch settlers; the low projecting eaves forming a piazza along the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather. Under this were hung flails, harness, various utensils of husbandry, and nets for fishing in the neighboring river. Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning-wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted. From this piazza the wondering Ichabod entered the hall, which formed the centre of the mansion and the place of usual residence. Here, rows of resplendent pewter, ranged on a long dresser, dazzled his eyes. In one corner stood a huge bag of wool ready to be spun; in another a quantity of linsey-woolsey just from the loom; ears of Indian corn, and strings of dried apples and peaches, hung in gay festoons along the walls, mingled with the gaud of red peppers; and a door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor, where the claw-footed chairs and dark mahogany tables shone like mirrors; and irons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops; mock-oranges and conch-shells decorated the mantelpiece; strings of various colored birds' eggs were suspended above it; a great ostrich egg was hung from the centre of the room, and a corner cupboard, knowingly left open, displayed immense treasures of old silver and well-mended china." It is an abrupt transition from these homely scenes, which humor commends to our liking, to the chivalrous pageant unrolled for us in the "Conquest of Granada." The former are more characteristic and the more enduring of Irving's writings, but as a literary artist his genius lent itself just as readily to Oriental and mediæval romance as to the Knickerbocker legend; and there is no doubt that the delicate perception he had of chivalric achievements gave a refined tone to his mock heroics, which greatly heightened their effect. It may almost be claimed that Irving did for Granada and the Alhambra what he did, in a totally different way, for New York and its vicinity. The first passage I take from the "Conquest" is the description of the advent at Cordova of the Lord Scales, Earl of Rivers, who was brother of the queen of Henry VII., a soldier who had fought at Bosworth field, and now volunteered to aid Ferdinand and Isabella in the extermination of the Saracens. The description is put into the mouth of Fray Antonio Agapida, a fictitious chronicler invented by Irving, an unfortunate intervention which gives to the whole book an air of unveracity:-- "'This cavalier [he observes] was from the far island of England, and brought with him a train of his vassals; men who had been hardened in certain civil wars which raged in their country. They were a comely race of men, but too fair and fresh for warriors, not having the sunburnt, warlike hue of our old Castilian soldiery. They were huge feeders also, and deep carousers, and could not accommodate themselves to the sober diet of our troops, but must fain eat and drink after the manner of their own country. They were often noisy and unruly, also, in their wassail; and their quarter of the camp was prone to be a scene of loud revel and sudden brawl. They were, withal, of great pride, yet it was not like our inflammable Spanish pride: they stood not much upon the _pundonor_, the high punctilio, and rarely drew the stiletto in their disputes; but their pride was silent and contumelious. Though from a remote and somewhat barbarous island, they believed themselves the most perfect men upon earth, and magnified their chieftain, the Lord Scales, beyond the greatest of their grandees. With all this, it must be said of them that they were marvelous good men in the field, dexterous archers, and powerful with the battle-axe. In their great pride and self-will, they always sought to press in the advance and take the post of danger, trying to outvie our Spanish chivalry. They did not rush on fiercely to the fight, nor make a brilliant onset like the Moorish and Spanish troops, but they went into the fight deliberately, and persisted obstinately, and were slow to find out when they were beaten. Withal they were much esteemed yet little liked by our soldiery, who considered them staunch companions in the field, yet coveted but little fellowship with them in the camp. "'Their commander, the Lord Scales, was an accomplished cavalier, of gracious and noble presence and fair speech; it was a marvel to see so much courtesy in a knight brought up so far from our Castilian court. He was much honored by the king and queen, and found great favor with the fair dames about the court, who indeed are rather prone to be pleased with foreign cavaliers. He went always in costly state, attended by pages and esquires, and accompanied by noble young cavaliers of his country, who had enrolled themselves under his banner, to learn the gentle exercise of arms. In all pageants and festivals, the eyes of the populace were attracted by the singular bearing and rich array of the English earl and his train, who prided themselves in always appearing in the garb and manner of their country--and were indeed something very magnificent delectable, and strange to behold.' "The worthy chronicler is no less elaborate in his description of the masters of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara, and their valiant knights, armed at all points, and decorated with the badges of their orders. These, he affirms, were the flower of Christian chivalry; being constantly in service they became more steadfast and accomplished in discipline than the irregular and temporary levies of feudal nobles. Calm, solemn, and stately, they sat like towers upon their powerful chargers. On parades they manifested none of the show and ostentation of the other troops: neither, in battle, did they endeavor to signalize themselves by any fiery vivacity, or desperate and vainglorious exploit,--everything, with them, was measured and sedate; yet it was observed that none were more warlike in their appearance in the camp, or more terrible for their achievements in the field. "The gorgeous magnificence of the Spanish nobles found but little favor in the eyes of the sovereigns. They saw that it caused a competition in expense ruinous to cavaliers of moderate fortune; and they feared that a softness and effeminacy might thus be introduced, incompatible with the stern nature of the war. They signified their disapprobation to several of the principal noblemen, and recommended a more sober and soldier-like display while in actual service. "'These are rare troops for a tournay, my lord [said Ferdinand to the Duke of Infantado, as he beheld his retainers glittering in gold and embroidery]; but gold, though gorgeous, is soft and yielding: iron is the metal for the field.' "'Sire [replied the duke], if my men parade in gold, your majesty will find they fight with steel.' The king smiled, but shook his head, and the duke treasured up his speech in his heart." Our author excels in such descriptions as that of the progress of Isabella to the camp of Ferdinand after the capture of Loxa, and of the picturesque pageantry which imparted something of gayety to the brutal pastime of war:-- "It was in the early part of June that the queen departed from Cordova, with the Princess Isabella and numerous ladies of her court. She had a glorious attendance of cavaliers and pages, with many guards and domestics. There were forty mules for the use of the queen, the princess and their train. "As this courtly cavalcade approached the Rock of the Lovers, on the banks of the river Yeguas, they beheld a splendid train of knights advancing to meet them. It was headed by that accomplished cavalier the Marques Duke de Cadiz, accompanied by the adelantado of Andalusia. He had left the camp the day after the capture of Illora, and advanced thus far to receive the queen and escort her over the borders. The queen received the marques with distinguished honor, for he was esteemed the mirror of chivalry. His actions in this war had become the theme of every tongue, and many hesitated not to compare him in prowess with the immortal Cid. "Thus gallantly attended, the queen entered the vanquished frontier of Granada, journeying securely along the pleasant banks of the Xenel, so lately subject to the scourings of the Moors. She stopped at Loxa, where she administered aid and consolation to the wounded, distributing money among them for their support, according to their rank. "The king, after the capture of Illora, had removed his camp before the fortress of Moclin, with an intention of besieging it. Thither the queen proceeded, still escorted through the mountain roads by the Marques of Cadiz. As Isabella drew near to the camp, the Duke del Infantado issued forth a league and a half to receive her, magnificently arrayed, and followed by all his chivalry in glorious attire. With him came the standard of Seville, borne by the men-at-arms of that renowned city, and the Prior of St. Juan, with his followers. They ranged themselves in order of battle, on the left of the road by which the queen was to pass. "The worthy Agapida is loyally minute in his description of the state and grandeur of the Catholic sovereigns. The queen rode a chestnut mule, seated in a magnificent saddle-chair, decorated with silver gilt. The housings of the mule were of fine crimson cloth; the borders embroidered with gold; the reins and head-piece were of satin, curiously embossed with needlework of silk, and wrought with golden letters. The queen wore a brial or regal skirt of velvet, under which were others of brocade; a scarlet mantle, ornamented in the Moresco fashion; and a black hat, embroidered round the crown and brim. "The infanta was likewise mounted on a chestnut mule, richly caparisoned. She wore a brial or skirt of black brocade, and a black mantle ornamented like that of the queen. "When the royal cavalcade passed by the chivalry of the Duke del Infantado, which was drawn out in battle array, the queen made a reverence to the standard of Seville, and ordered it to pass to the right hand. When she approached the camp, the multitude ran forth to meet her, with great demonstrations of joy; for she was universally beloved by her subjects. All the battalions sallied forth in military array, bearing the various standards and banners of the camp, which were lowered in salutation as she passed. "The king now came forth in royal state, mounted on a superb chestnut horse, and attended by many grandees of Castile. He wore a jubon or close vest of crimson cloth, with cuisses or short skirts of yellow satin, a loose cassock of brocade, a rich Moorish scimiter, and a hat with plumes. The grandees who attended him were arrayed with wonderful magnificence, each according to his taste and invention. "These high and mighty princes [says Antonio Agapida] regarded each other with great deference, as allied sovereigns rather than with connubial familiarity, as mere husband and wife. When they approached each other, therefore, before embracing, they made three profound reverences, the queen taking off her hat, and remaining in a silk net or cawl, with her face uncovered. The king then approached and embraced her, and kissed her respectfully on the cheek. He also embraced his daughter the princess; and, making the sign of the cross, he blessed her, and kissed her on the lips. "The good Agapida seems scarcely to have been more struck with the appearance of the sovereigns than with that of the English earl. He followed [says he] immediately after the king, with great pomp, and, in an extraordinary manner, taking precedence of all the rest. He was mounted '_a la guisa_,' or with long stirrups, on a superb chestnut horse, with trappings of azure silk which reached to the ground. The housings were of mulberry, powdered with stars of gold. He was armed in proof, and wore over his armor a short French mantle of black brocade; he had a white French hat with plumes, and carried on his left arm a small round buckler, banded with gold. Five pages attended him, apparelled in silk and brocade, and mounted on horses sumptuously caparisoned; he had also a train of followers, bravely attired after the fashion of his country. "He advanced in a chivalrous and courteous manner, making his reverences first to the queen and infanta, and afterwards to the king. Queen Isabella received him graciously, complimenting him on his courageous conduct at Loxa, and condoling with him on the loss of his teeth. The earl, however, made light of his disfiguring wound, saying that 'our blessed Lord, who had built all that house, had opened a window there, that he might see more readily what passed within;' whereupon the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida is more than ever astonished at the pregnant wit of this island cavalier. The earl continued some little distance by the side of the royal family, complimenting them all with courteous speeches, his horse curveting and caracoling, but being managed with great grace and dexterity,--leaving the grandees and the people at large not more filled with admiration at the strangeness and magnificence of his state than at the excellence of his horsemanship. "To testify her sense of the gallantry and services of this noble English knight, who had come from so far to assist in their wars, the queen sent him the next day presents of twelve horses, with stately tents, fine linen, two beds with coverings of gold brocade, and many other articles of great value." The protracted siege of the city of Granada was the occasion of feats of arms and hostile courtesies which rival in brilliancy any in the romances of chivalry. Irving's pen is never more congenially employed than in describing these desperate but romantic encounters. One of the most picturesque of these was known as "the queen's skirmish." The royal encampment was situated so far from Granada that only the general aspect of the city could be seen as it rose from the vega, covering the sides of the hills with its palaces and towers. Queen Isabella expressed a desire for a nearer view of the city, whose beauty was renowned throughout the world, and the courteous Marques of Cadiz proposed to give her this perilous gratification. "On the morning of June the 18th, a magnificent and powerful train issued from the Christian camp. The advanced guard was composed of legions of cavalry, heavily armed, looking like moving masses of polished steel. Then came the king and queen, with the prince and princesses, and the ladies of the court, surrounded by the royal body-guard, sumptuously arrayed, composed of the sons of the most illustrious houses of Spain; after these was the rear-guard, a powerful force of horse and foot; for the flower of the army sallied forth that day. The Moors gazed with fearful admiration at this glorious pageant, wherein the pomp of the court was mingled with the terrors of the camp. It moved along in radiant line, across the vega, to the melodious thunders of martial music, while banner and plume, and silken scarf, and rich brocade, gave a gay and gorgeous relief to the grim visage of iron war that lurked beneath. "The army moved towards the hamlet of Zubia, built on the skirts of the mountain to the left of Granada, and commanding a view of the Alhambra, and the most beautiful quarter of the city. As they approached the hamlet, the Marques of Villena, the Count Ureña, and Don Alonzo de Aguilar filed off with their battalions, and were soon seen glittering along the side of the mountain above the village. In the mean time the Marques of Cadiz, the Count de Tendilla, the Count de Cabra, and Don Alonzo Fernandez, senior of Alcaudrete and Montemayor, drew up their forces in battle array on the plain below the hamlet, presenting a living barrier of loyal chivalry between the sovereigns and the city. "Thus securely guarded, the royal party alighted, and, entering one of the houses of the hamlet, which had been prepared for their reception, enjoyed a full view of the city from its terraced roof. The ladies of the court gazed with delight at the red towers of the Alhambra, rising from amid shady groves, anticipating the time when the Catholic sovereigns should be enthroned within its walls, and its courts shine with the splendor of Spanish chivalry. 'The reverend prelates and holy friars, who always surrounded the queen, looked with serene satisfaction,' says Fray Antonio Agapida, 'at this modern Babylon, enjoying the triumph that awaited them, when those mosques and minarets should be converted into churches, and goodly priests and bishops should succeed to the infidel alfaquis.' "When the Moors beheld the Christians thus drawn forth in full array in the plain, they supposed it was to offer battle, and hesitated not to accept it. In a little while the queen beheld a body of Moorish cavalry pouring into the vega, the riders managing their fleet and fiery steeds with admirable address. They were richly armed, and clothed in the most brilliant colors, and the caparisons of their steeds flamed with gold and embroidery. This was the favorite squadron of Muza, composed of the flower of the youthful cavaliers of Granada. Others succeeded, some heavily armed, others _à la gineta_, with lance and buckler; and lastly came the legions of foot-soldiers, with arquebus and cross-bow, and spear and scimiter. "When the queen saw this army issuing from the city, she sent to the Marques of Cadiz, and forbade any attack upon the enemy, or the acceptance of any challenge to a skirmish; for she was loth that her curiosity should cost the life of a single human being. "The marques promised to obey, though sorely against his will; and it grieved the spirit of the Spanish cavaliers to be obliged to remain with sheathed swords while bearded by the foe. The Moors could not comprehend the meaning of this inaction of the Christians, after having apparently invited a battle. They sallied several times from their ranks, and approached near enough to discharge their arrows; but the Christians were immovable. Many of the Moorish horsemen galloped close to the Christian ranks, brandishing their lances and scimiters, and defying various cavaliers to single combat; but Ferdinand had rigorously prohibited all duels of this kind, and they dared not transgress his orders under his very eye. "Here, however, the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida, in his enthusiasm for the triumphs of the faith, records the following incident, which we fear is not sustained by any grave chronicler of the times, but rests merely on tradition, or the authority of certain poets and dramatic writers, who have perpetuated the tradition in their works. While this grim and reluctant tranquillity prevailed along the Christian line, says Agapida, there rose a mingled shout and sound of laughter near the gate of the city. A Moorish horseman, armed at all points, issued forth, followed by a rabble, who drew back as he approached the scene of danger. The Moor was more robust and brawny than was common with his countrymen. His visor was closed; he bore a huge buckler and a ponderous lance; his scimiter was of a Damascus blade, and his richly ornamented dagger was wrought by an artificer of Fez. He was known by his device to be Tarfe, the most insolent, yet valiant, of the Moslem warriors--the same who had hurled into the royal camp his lance, inscribed to the queen. As he rode slowly along in front of the army, his very steed, prancing with fiery eye and distended nostril, seemed to breathe defiance to the Christians. "But what were the feelings of the Spanish cavaliers when they beheld, tied to the tail of his steed, and dragged in the dust, the very inscription, 'AVE MARIA,' which Hernan Perez del Pulgar had affixed to the door of the mosque! A burst of horror and indignation broke forth from the army. Hernan was not at hand to maintain his previous achievement; but one of his young companions in arms, Garcilasso de la Vega by name, putting spurs to his horse, galloped to the hamlet of Zubia, threw himself on his knees before the king, and besought permission to accept the defiance of this insolent infidel, and to revenge the insult offered to our Blessed Lady. The request was too pious to be refused. Garcilasso remounted his steed, closed his helmet, graced by four sable plumes, grasped his buckler of Flemish workmanship, and his lance of matchless temper, and defied the haughty Moor in the midst of his career. A combat took place in view of the two armies and of the Castilian court. The Moor was powerful in wielding his weapons, and dexterous in managing his steed. He was of larger frame than Garcilasso, and more completely armed, and the Christians trembled for their champion. The shock of their encounter was dreadful; their lances were shivered and sent up splinters in the air. Garcilasso was thrown back in his saddle--his horse made a wide career before he could recover, gather up the reins, and return to the conflict. They now encountered each other with swords. The Moor circled round his opponent, as a hawk circles when about to make a swoop; his steed obeyed his rider with matchless quickness; at every attack of the infidel, it seemed as if the Christian knight must sink beneath his flashing scimiter. But if Garcilasso was inferior to him in power, he was superior in agility; many of his blows he parried; others he received upon his Flemish shield, which was proof against the Damascus blade. The blood streamed from numerous wounds received by either warrior. The Moor, seeing his antagonist exhausted, availed himself of his superior force, and, grappling, endeavored to wrest him from his saddle. They both fell to earth; the Moor placed his knee upon the breast of his victim, and, brandishing his dagger, aimed a blow at his throat. A cry of despair was uttered by the Christian warriors, when suddenly they beheld the Moor rolling lifeless in the dust. Garcilasso had shortened his sword, and, as his adversary raised his arm to strike, had pierced him to the heart. 'It was a singular and miraculous victory,' says Fray Antonio Agapida; 'but the Christian knight was armed by the sacred nature of his cause, and the Holy Virgin gave him strength, like another David, to slay this gigantic champion of the Gentiles.' "The laws of chivalry were observed throughout the combat--no one interfered on either side. Garcilasso now despoiled his adversary; then, rescuing the holy inscription of 'AVE MARIA' from its degrading situation, he elevated it on the point of his sword, and bore it off as a signal of triumph, amidst the rapturous shouts of the Christian army. "The sun had now reached the meridian, and the hot blood of the Moors was inflamed by its rays, and by the sight of the defeat of their champion. Muza ordered two pieces of ordnance to open a fire upon the Christians. A confusion was produced in one part of their ranks: Muza called to the chiefs of the army, 'Let us waste no more time in empty challenges--let us charge upon the enemy: he who assaults has always an advantage in the combat.' So saying, he rushed forward, followed by a large body of horse and foot, and charged so furiously upon the advance guard of the Christians, that he drove it in upon the battalion of the Marques of Cadiz. "The gallant marques now considered himself absolved from all further obedience to the queen's commands. He gave the signal to attack. 'Santiago!' was shouted along the line; and he pressed forward to the encounter, with his battalion of twelve hundred lances. The other cavaliers followed his example, and the battle instantly became general. "When the king and queen beheld the armies thus rushing to the combat, they threw themselves on their knees, and implored the Holy Virgin to protect her faithful warriors. The prince and princess, the ladies of the court, and the prelates and friars who were present, did the same; and the effect of the prayers of these illustrious and saintly persons was immediately apparent. The fierceness with which the Moors had rushed to the attack was suddenly cooled; they were bold and adroit for a skirmish, but unequal to the veteran Spaniards in the open field. A panic seized upon the foot-soldiers--they turned and took to flight. Muza and his cavaliers in vain endeavored to rally them. Some took refuge in the mountains; but the greater part fled to the city, in such confusion that they overturned and trampled upon each other. The Christians pursued them to the very gates. Upwards of two thousand were either killed, wounded, or taken prisoners; and the two pieces of ordnance were brought off as trophies of the victory. Not a Christian lance but was bathed that day in the blood of an infidel. "Such was the brief but bloody action which was known among the Christian warriors by the name of "The Queen's Skirmish;" for when the Marques of Cadiz waited upon her majesty to apologize for breaking her commands, he attributed the victory entirely to her presence. The queen, however, insisted that it was all owing to her troops being led on by so valiant a commander. Her majesty had not yet recovered from her agitation at beholding so terrible a scene of bloodshed, though certain veterans present pronounced it as gay and gentle a skirmish as they had ever witnessed." The charm of "The Alhambra" is largely in the leisurely, loitering, dreamy spirit in which the temporary American resident of the ancient palace-fortress entered into its mouldering beauties and romantic associations, and in the artistic skill with which he wove the commonplace daily life of his attendants there into the more brilliant woof of its past. The book abounds in delightful legends, and yet these are all so touched with the author's airy humor that our credulity is never overtaxed; we imbibe all the romantic interest of the place without for a moment losing our hold upon reality. The enchantments of this Moorish paradise become part of our mental possessions, without the least shock to our common sense. After a few days of residence in the part of the Alhambra occupied by Dame Tia Antonia and her family, of which the handmaid Dolores was the most fascinating member, Irving succeeded in establishing himself in a remote and vacant part of the vast pile, in a suite of delicate and elegant chambers, with secluded gardens and fountains, that had once been occupied by the beautiful Elizabeth of Farnese, daughter of the Duke of Parma, and more than four centuries ago by a Moorish beauty named Lindaraxa, who flourished in the court of Muhamed the Left-Handed. These solitary and ruined chambers had their own terrors and enchantments, and for the first nights gave the author little but sinister suggestions and grotesque food for his imagination. But familiarity dispersed the gloom and the superstitious fancies. "In the course of a few evenings a thorough change took place in the scene and its associations. The moon, which when I took possession of my new apartments was invisible, gradually gained each evening upon the darkness of the night, and at length rolled in full splendor above the towers, pouring a flood of tempered light into every court and hall. The garden beneath my window, before wrapped in gloom, was gently lighted up; the orange and citron trees were tipped with silver; the fountain sparkled in the moonbeams, and even the blush of the rose was faintly visible. "I now felt the poetic merit of the Arabic inscription on the walls: 'How beauteous is this garden; where the flowers of the earth vie with the stars of heaven. What can compare with the vase of yon alabaster fountain filled with crystal water? nothing but the moon in her fullness, shining in the midst of an unclouded sky!' "On such heavenly nights I would sit for hours at my window inhaling the sweetness of the garden, and musing on the checkered fortunes of those whose history was dimly shadowed out in the elegant memorials around. Sometimes, when all was quiet, and the clock from the distant cathedral of Granada struck the midnight hour, I have sallied out on another tour and wandered over the whole building; but how different from my first tour! No longer dark and mysterious; no longer peopled with shadowy foes; no longer recalling scenes of violence and murder; all was open, spacious, beautiful; everything called up pleasing and romantic fancies; Lindaraxa once more walked in her garden; the gay chivalry of Moslem Granada once more glittered about the Court of Lions! Who can do justice to a moonlight night in such a climate and such a place? The temperature of a summer midnight in Andalusia is perfectly ethereal. We seem lifted up into a purer atmosphere; we feel a serenity of soul, a buoyancy of spirits, an elasticity of frame, which render mere existence happiness. But when moonlight is added to all this, the effect is like enchantment. Under its plastic sway the Alhambra seems to regain its pristine glories. Every rent and chasm of time, every mouldering tint and weather-stain, is gone; the marble resumes its original whiteness; the long colonnades brighten in the moonbeams; the halls are illuminated with a softened radiance,--we tread the enchanted palace of an Arabian tale! "What a delight, at such a time, to ascend to the little airy pavilion of the queen's toilet (el tocador de la reyna), which, like a bird-cage, overhangs the valley of the Darro, and gaze from its light arcades upon the moonlight prospect! To the right, the swelling mountains of the Sierra Nevada, robbed of their ruggedness and softened into a fairy land, with their snowy summits gleaming like silver clouds against the deep blue sky. And then to lean over the parapet of the Tocador and gaze down upon Granada and the Albaycin spread out like a map below; all buried in deep repose; the white palaces and convents sleeping in the moonshine, and beyond all these the vapory vega fading away like a dreamland in the distance. "Sometimes the faint click of castanets rise from the Alameda, where some gay Andalusians are dancing away the summer night. Sometimes the dubious tones of a guitar and the notes of an amorous voice, tell perchance the whereabout of some moonstruck lover serenading his lady's window. "Such is a faint picture of the moonlight nights I have passed loitering about the courts and halls and balconies of this most suggestive pile; 'feeding my fancy with sugared suppositions,' and enjoying that mixture of reverie and sensation which steal away existence in a southern climate; so that it has been almost morning before I have retired to bed, and been lulled to sleep by the falling waters of the fountain of Lindaraxa." One of the writer's vantage points of observation was a balcony of the central window of the Hall of Ambassadors, from which he had a magnificent prospect of mountain, valley, and vega, and could look down upon a busy scene of human life in an alameda, or public walk, at the foot of the hill, and the suburb of the city, filling the narrow gorge below. Here the author used to sit for hours, weaving histories out of the casual incidents passing under his eye, and the occupations of the busy mortals below. The following passage exhibits his power in transmuting the commonplace life of the present into material perfectly in keeping with the romantic associations of the place:-- "There was scarce a pretty face or a striking figure that I daily saw, about which I had not thus gradually framed a dramatic story, though some of my characters would occasionally act in direct opposition to the part assigned them, and disconcert the whole drama. Reconnoitring one day with my glass the streets of the Albaycin, I beheld the procession of a novice about to take the veil; and remarked several circumstances which excited the strongest sympathy in the fate of the youthful being thus about to be consigned to a living tomb. I ascertained to my satisfaction that she was beautiful, and, from the paleness of her cheek, that she was a victim rather than a votary. She was arrayed in bridal garments, and decked with a chaplet of white flowers, but her heart evidently revolted at this mockery of a spiritual union, and yearned after its earthly loves. A tall stern-looking man walked near her in the procession: it was, of course, the tyrannical father, who, from some bigoted or sordid motive, had compelled this sacrifice. Amid the crowd was a dark handsome youth, in Andalusian garb, who seemed to fix on her an eye of agony. It was doubtless the secret lover from whom she was forever to be separated. My indignation rose as I noted the malignant expression painted on the countenances of the attendant monks and friars. The procession arrived at the chapel of the convent; the sun gleamed for the last time upon the chaplet of the poor novice, as she crossed the fatal threshold and disappeared within the building. The throng poured in with cowl, and cross, and minstrelsy; the lover paused for a moment at the door. I could divine the tumult of his feelings; but he mastered them, and entered. There was a long interval. I pictured to myself the scene passing within: the poor novice despoiled of her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow. I saw her extended on a bier; the death-pall spread over her; the funeral service performed that proclaimed her dead to the world; her sighs were drowned in the deep tones of the organ, and the plaintive requiem of the nuns; the father looked on, unmoved, without a tear; the lover--no--my imagination refused to portray the anguish of the lover--there the picture remained a blank. "After a time the throng again poured forth and dispersed various ways, to enjoy the light of the sun and mingle with the stirring scenes of life; but the victim, with her bridal chaplet, was no longer there. The door of the convent closed that severed her from the world forever. I saw the father and the lover issue forth; they were in earnest conversation. The latter was vehement in his gesticulations; I expected some violent termination to my drama; but an angle of a building interfered and closed the scene. My eye afterwards was frequently turned to that convent with painful interest. I remarked late at night a solitary light twinkling from a remote lattice of one of its towers. 'There,' said I, 'the unhappy nun sits weeping in her cell, while perhaps her lover paces the street below in unavailing anguish.' "--The officious Mateo interrupted my meditations and destroyed in an instant the cobweb tissue of my fancy. With his usual zeal he had gathered facts concerning the scene, which put my fictions all to flight. The heroine of my romance was neither young nor handsome; she had no lover; she had entered the convent of her own free will, as a respectable asylum, and was one of the most cheerful residents within its walls. "It was some little while before I could forgive the wrong done me by the nun in being thus happy in her cell, in contradiction to all the rules of romance; I diverted my spleen, however, by watching, for a day or two, the pretty coquetries of a dark-eyed brunette, who, from the covert of a balcony shrouded with flowering shrubs and a silken awning, was carrying on a mysterious correspondence with a handsome, dark, well-whiskered cavalier, who lurked frequently in the street beneath her window. Sometimes I saw him at an early hour, stealing forth wrapped to the eyes in a mantle. Sometimes he loitered at a corner, in various disguises, apparently waiting for a private signal to slip into the house. Then there was the tinkling of a guitar at night, and a lantern shifted from place to place in the balcony. I imagined another intrigue like that of Almaviva, but was again disconcerted in all my suppositions. The supposed lover turned out to be the husband of the lady, and a noted contrabandista; and all his mysterious signs and movements had doubtless some smuggling scheme in view. "--I occasionally amused myself with noting from this balcony the gradual changes of the scenes below, according to the different stages of the day. "Scarce has the gray dawn streaked the sky, and the earliest cock crowed from the cottages of the hill-side, when the suburbs give sign of reviving animation; for the fresh hours of dawning are precious in the summer season in a sultry climate. All are anxious to get the start of the sun, in the business of the day. The muleteer drives forth his loaded train for the journey; the traveler slings his carbine behind his saddle, and mounts his steed at the gate of the hostel; the brown peasant from the country urges forward his loitering beasts, laden with panniers of sunny fruit and fresh dewy vegetables, for already the thrifty housewives are hastening to the market. "The sun is up and sparkles along the valley, tipping the transparent foliage of the groves. The matin bells resound melodiously through the pure bright air, announcing the hour of devotion. The muleteer halts his burdened animals before the chapel, thrusts his staff through his belt behind, and enters with hat in hand, smoothing his coal-black hair, to hear a mass, and to put up a prayer for a prosperous wayfaring across the sierra. And now steals forth on fairy foot the gentle Señora, in trim basquiña, with restless fan in hand, and dark eye flashing from beneath the gracefully folded mantilla; she seeks some well-frequented church to offer up her morning orisons; but the nicely adjusted dress, the dainty shoe and cobweb stocking, the raven tresses exquisitely braided, the fresh-plucked rose, gleaming among them like a gem, show that earth divides with Heaven the empire of her thoughts. Keep an eye upon her, careful mother, or virgin aunt, or vigilant duenna, whichever you may be, that walk behind! "As the morning advances, the din of labor augments on every side; the streets are thronged with man, and steed, and beast of burden, and there is a hum and murmur, like the surges of the ocean. As the sun ascends to his meridian, the hum and bustle gradually decline; at the height of noon there is a pause. The panting city sinks into lassitude, and for several hours there is a general repose. The windows are closed, the curtains drawn, the inhabitants retired into the coolest recesses of their mansions; the full-fed monk snores in his dormitory; the brawny porter lies stretched on the pavement beside his burden; the peasant and the laborer sleep beneath the trees of the Alameda, lulled by the sultry chirping of the locust. The streets are deserted, except by the water-carrier, who refreshes the ear by proclaiming the merits of his sparkling beverage, 'colder than the mountain snow (_mas fria que la nieve_).' "As the sun declines, there is again a gradual reviving, and when the vesper bell rings out his sinking knell, all nature seems to rejoice that the tyrant of the day has fallen. Now begins the bustle of enjoyment, when the citizens pour forth to breathe the evening air, and revel away the brief twilight in the walks and gardens of the Darro and Xenil. "As night closes, the capricious scene assumes new features. Light after light gradually twinkles forth; here a taper from a balconied window; there a votive lamp before the image of a saint. Thus, by degrees, the city emerges from the pervading gloom, and sparkles with scattered lights, like the starry firmament. Now break forth from court and garden, and street and lane, the tinkling of innumerable guitars, and the clicking of castanets; blending, at this lofty height, in a faint but general concert. 'Enjoy the moment' is the creed of the gay and amorous Andalusian, and at no time does he practice it more zealously than on the balmy nights of summer, wooing his mistress with the dance, the love-ditty, and the passionate serenade." How perfectly is the illusion of departed splendor maintained in the opening of the chapter on "The Court of Lions." "The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination. As I delight to walk in these 'vain shadows,' I am prone to seek those parts of the Alhambra which are most favorable to this phantasmagoria of the mind; and none are more so than the Court of Lions, and its surrounding halls. Here the hand of time has fallen the lightest, and the traces of Moorish elegance and splendor exist in almost their original brilliancy. Earthquakes have shaken the foundations of this pile, and rent its rudest towers; yet see! not one of those slender columns has been displaced, not an arch of that light and fragile colonnade given way, and all the fairy fretwork of these domes, apparently as unsubstantial as the crystal fabrics of a morning's frost, exist after the lapse of centuries, almost as fresh as if from the hand of the Moslem artist. I write in the midst of these mementos of the past, in the fresh hour of early morning, in the fated Hall of the Abencerrages. The blood-stained fountain, the legendary monument of their massacre, is before me; the lofty jet almost casts its dew upon my paper. How difficult to reconcile the ancient tale of violence and blood with the gentle and peaceful scene around! Everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and happy feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. The very light falls tenderly from above, through the lantern of a dome tinted and wrought as if by fairy hands. Through the ample and fretted arch of the portal I behold the Court of Lions, with brilliant sunshine gleaming along its colonnades and sparkling in its fountains. The lively swallow dives into the court, and, rising with a surge, darts away twittering over the roofs; the busy bee toils humming among the flower-beds; and painted butterflies hover from plant to plant, and flutter up and sport with each other in the sunny air. It needs but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive beauty of the harem loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental luxury. "He, however, who would behold this scene under an aspect more in unison with its fortunes, let him come when the shadows of evening temper the brightness of the court, and throw a gloom into the surrounding halls. Then nothing can be more serenely melancholy, or more in harmony with the tale of departed grandeur. "At such times I am apt to seek the Hall of Justice, whose deep shadowy arcades extend across the upper end of the court. Here was performed, in presence of Ferdinand and Isabella and their triumphant court, the pompous ceremonial of high mass, on taking possession of the Alhambra. The very cross is still to be seen upon the wall, where the altar was erected, and where officiated the Grand Cardinal of Spain, and others of the highest religious dignitaries of the land. I picture to myself the scene when this place was filled with the conquering host, that mixture of mitred prelate and shaven monk, and steel-clad knight and silken courtier; when crosses and crosiers and religious standards were mingled with proud armorial ensigns and the banners of the haughty chiefs of Spain, and flaunted in triumph through these Moslem halls. I picture to myself Columbus, the future discoverer of a world, taking his modest stand in a remote corner, the humble and neglected spectator of the pageant. I see in imagination the Catholic sovereigns prostrating themselves before the altar, and pouring forth thanks for their victory; while the vaults resound with sacred minstrelsy and the deep-toned Te Deum. "The transient illusion is over,--the pageant melts from the fancy,--monarch, priest, and warrior return into oblivion with the poor Moslems over whom they exulted. The hall of their triumph is waste and desolate. The bat flits about its twilight vault, and the owl hoots from the neighboring tower of Comares." It is a Moslem tradition that the court and army of Boabdil, the Unfortunate, the last Moorish King of Granada, are shut up in the mountain by a powerful enchantment, and that it is written in the book of fate that when the enchantment is broken, Boabdil will descend from the mountain at the head of his army, resume his throne in the Alhambra, and gathering together the enchanted warriors from all parts of Spain, reconquer the Peninsula. Nothing in this volume is more amusing and at the same time more poetic and romantic than the story of "Governor Manco and the Soldier," in which this legend is used to cover the exploit of a dare-devil contrabandista. But it is too long to quote. I take, therefore, another story, which has something of the same elements, that of a merry, mendicant student of Salamanca, Don Vicente by name, who wandered from village to village, and picked up a living by playing the guitar for the peasants, among whom, he was sure of a hearty welcome. In the course of his wandering he had found a seal-ring, having for its device the cabalistic sign, invented by King Solomon the Wise, and of mighty power in all cases of enchantment. "At length he arrived at the great object of his musical vagabondizing, the far-famed city of Granada, and hailed with wonder and delight its Moorish towers, its lovely vega, and its snowy mountains glistening through a summer atmosphere. It is needless to say with what eager curiosity he entered its gates and wandered through its streets, and gazed upon its Oriental monuments. Every female face peering through a window or beaming from a balcony was to him a Zorayda or a Zelinda, nor could he meet a stately dame on the Alameda but he was ready to fancy her a Moorish princess, and to spread his student's robe beneath her feet. "His musical talent, his happy humor, his youth and his good looks, won him a universal welcome in spite of his ragged robes, and for several days he led a gay life in the old Moorish capital and its environs. One of his occasional haunts was the fountain of Avellanos, in the valley of Darro. It is one of the popular resorts of Granada, and has been so since the days of the Moors; and here the student had an opportunity of pursuing his studies of female beauty; a branch of study to which he was a little prone. "Here he would take his seat with his guitar, improvise love-ditties to admiring groups of majos and majas, or prompt with his music the ever-ready dance. He was thus engaged one evening when he beheld a padre of the church advancing, at whose approach every one touched the hat. He was evidently a man of consequence; he certainly was a mirror of good if not of holy living; robust and rosy-faced, and breathing at every pore with the warmth of the weather and the exercise of the walk. As he passed along he would every now and then draw a maravedi out of his pocket and bestow it on a beggar, with an air of signal beneficence. 'Ah, the blessed father!' would be the cry; 'long life to him, and may he soon be a bishop!' "To aid his steps in ascending the hill he leaned gently now and then on the arm of a handmaid, evidently the pet-lamb of this kindest of pastors. Ah, such a damsel! Andalus from head to foot; from the rose in her hair, to the fairy shoe and lacework stocking; Andalus in every movement; in every undulation of the body:--ripe, melting Andalus! But then so modest!--so shy!--ever, with downcast eyes, listening to the words of the padre; or, if by chance she let flash a side glance, it was suddenly checked and her eyes once more cast to the ground. "The good padre looked benignantly on the company about the fountain, and took his seat with some emphasis on a stone bench, while the handmaid hastened to bring him a glass of sparkling water. He sipped it deliberately and with a relish, tempering it with one of those spongy pieces of frosted eggs and sugar so dear to Spanish epicures, and on returning the glass to the hand of the damsel pinched her cheek with infinite loving-kindness. "'Ah, the good pastor!' whispered the student to himself; 'what a happiness would it be to be gathered into his fold with such a pet-lamb for a companion!' "But no such good fare was likely to befall him. In vain he essayed those powers of pleasing which he had found so irresistible with country curates and country lasses. Never had he touched his guitar with such skill; never had he poured forth more soul-moving ditties, but he had no longer a country curate or country lass to deal with. The worthy priest evidently did not relish music, and the modest damsel never raised her eyes from the ground. They remained but a short time at the fountain; the good padre hastened their return to Granada. The damsel gave the student one shy glance in retiring; but it plucked the heart out of his bosom! "He inquired about them after they had gone. Padre Tomás was one of the saints of Granada, a model of regularity; punctual in his hour of rising; his hour of taking a paseo for an appetite; his hours of eating; his hour of taking his siesta; his hour of playing his game of tresillo, of an evening, with some of the dames of the cathedral circle; his hour of supping, and his hour of retiring to rest, to gather fresh strength for another day's round of similar duties. He had an easy sleek mule for his riding; a matronly housekeeper skilled in preparing tidbits for his table; and the pet-lamb, to smooth his pillow at night and bring him his chocolate in the morning. "Adieu now to the gay, thoughtless life of the student; the side-glance of a bright eye had been the undoing of him. Day and night he could not get the image of this most modest damsel out of his mind. He sought the mansion of the padre. Alas! it was above the class of houses accessible to a strolling student like himself. The worthy padre had no sympathy with him; he had never been _Estudiante sopista_, obliged to sing for his supper. He blockaded the house by day, catching a glance of the damsel now and then as she appeared at a casement; but these glances only fed his flame without encouraging his hope. He serenaded her balcony at night, and at one time was flattered by the appearance of something white at a window. Alas, it was only the night-cap of the padre. "Never was lover more devoted; never damsel more shy: the poor student was reduced to despair. At length arrived the eve of St. John, when the lower classes of Granada swarm into the country, dance away the afternoon, and pass midsummer's night on the banks of the Darro and the Xenil. Happy are they who on this eventful night can wash their faces in those waters just as the cathedral bell tells midnight; for at that precise moment they have a beautifying power. The student, having nothing to do, suffered himself to be carried away by the holiday-seeking throng until he found himself in the narrow valley of the Darro, below the lofty hill and ruddy towers of the Alhambra. The dry bed of the river; the rocks which border it; the terraced gardens which overhang it, were alive with variegated groups, dancing under the vines and fig-trees to the sound of the guitar and castanets. "The student remained for some time in doleful dumps, leaning against one of the huge misshapen stone pomegranates which adorn the ends of the little bridge over the Darro. He cast a wistful glance upon the merry scene, where every cavalier had his dame; or, to speak more appropriately, every Jack his Jill; sighed at his own solitary state, a victim to the black eye of the most unapproachable of damsels, and repined at his ragged garb, which seemed to shut the gate of hope against him. "By degrees his attention was attracted to a neighbor equally solitary with himself. This was a tall soldier, of a stern aspect and grizzled beard, who seemed posted as a sentry at the opposite pomegranate. His face was bronzed by time; he was arrayed in ancient Spanish armor, with buckler and lance, and stood immovable as a statue. What surprised the student was, that though thus strangely equipped, he was totally unnoticed by the passing throng, albeit that many almost brushed against him. "'This is a city of old time peculiarities,' thought the student, 'and doubtless this is one of them with which the inhabitants are too familiar to be surprised.' His own curiosity, however, was awakened, and being of a social disposition, he accosted the soldier. "'A rare old suit of armor that which you wear, comrade. May I ask what corps you belong to?' "The soldier gasped out a reply from a pair of jaws which seemed to have rusted on their hinges. "'The royal guard of Ferdinand and Isabella.' "'Santa Maria! Why, it is three centuries since that corps was in service.' "'And for three centuries have I been mounting guard. Now I trust my tour of duty draws to a close. Dost thou desire fortune?' "The student held up his tattered cloak in reply. "'I understand thee. If thou hast faith and courage, follow me, and thy fortune is made.' "'Softly, comrade, to follow thee would require small courage in one who has nothing to lose but life and an old guitar, neither of much value; but my faith is of a different matter, and not to be put in temptation. If it be any criminal act by which I am to mend my fortune, think not my ragged cloak will make me undertake it.' "The soldier turned on him a look of high displeasure. 'My sword,' said he, 'has never been drawn but in the cause of the faith and the throne. I am a _Cristiano viejo_; trust in me and fear no evil.' "The student followed him wondering. He observed that no one heeded their conversation, and that the soldier made his way through the various groups of idlers unnoticed, as if invisible. "Crossing the bridge, the soldier led the way by a narrow and steep path past a Moorish mill and aqueduct, and up the ravine which separates the domains of the Generalife from those of the Alhambra. The last ray of the sun shone upon the red battlements of the latter, which beetled far above; and the convent-bells were proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the butt-end of his spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones yawned apart, leaving an opening as wide as a door. "'Enter in the name of the Holy Trinity', said the soldier, 'and fear nothing.' The student's heart quaked, but he made the sign of the cross, muttered his Ave Maria, and followed his mysterious guide into a deep vault cut out of the solid rock under the tower, and covered with Arabic inscriptions. The soldier pointed to a stone seat hewn along one side of the vault. 'Behold,' said he, 'my couch for three hundred years.' The bewildered student tried to force a joke. 'By the blessed St. Anthony,' said he, 'but you must have slept soundly, considering the hardness of your couch.' "'On the contrary, sleep has been a stranger to these eyes; incessant watchfulness has been my doom. Listen to my lot. I was one of the royal guards of Ferdinand and Isabella; but was taken prisoner by the Moors in one of their sorties, and confined a captive in this tower. When preparations were made to surrender the fortress to the Christian sovereigns, I was prevailed upon by an alfaqui, a Moorish priest, to aid him in secreting some of the treasures of Boabdil in this vault. I was justly punished for my fault. The alfaqui was an African necromancer, and by his infernal arts cast a spell upon me--to guard his treasures. Something must have happened to him, for he never returned, and here have I remained ever since, buried alive. Years and years have rolled away; earthquakes have shaken this hill; I have heard stone by stone of the tower above tumbling to the ground, in the natural operation of time; but the spell-bound walls of this vault set both time and earthquakes at defiance. "'Once every hundred years, on the festival of St. John, the enchantment ceases to have thorough sway; I am permitted to go forth and post myself upon the bridge of the Darro, where you met me, waiting until some one shall arrive who may have power to break this magic spell. I have hitherto mounted guard there in vain. I walk as in a cloud, concealed from mortal sight. You are the first to accost me for now three hundred years. I behold the reason. I see on your finger the seal-ring of Solomon the Wise, which is proof against all enchantment. With you it remains to deliver me from this awful dungeon, or to leave me to keep guard here for another hundred years.' "The student listened to this tale in mute wonderment. He had heard many tales of treasures shut up under strong enchantment in the vaults of the Alhambra, but had treated them as fables. He now felt the value of the seal-ring, which had, in a manner, been given to him by St. Cyprian. Still, though armed by so potent a talisman, it was an awful thing to find himself _tête-à-tête_ in such a place with an enchanted soldier, who, according to the laws of nature, ought to have been quietly in his grave for nearly three centuries. "A personage of this kind, however, was quite out of the ordinary run, and not to be trifled with, and he assured him he might rely upon his friendship and good will to do everything in his power for his deliverance. "'I trust to a motive more powerful than friendship,' said the soldier. "He pointed to a ponderous iron coffer, secured by locks inscribed with Arabic characters. 'That coffer,' said he, 'contains countless treasure in gold and jewels and precious stones. Break the magic spell by which I am enthralled, and one half of this treasure shall be thine.' "'But how am I to do it?' "'The aid of a Christian priest and a Christian maid is necessary. The priest to exorcise the powers of darkness; the damsel to touch this chest with the seal of Solomon. This must be done at night. But have a care. This is solemn work, and not to be effected by the carnal-minded. The priest must be a _Cristiano viejo_, a model of sanctity; and must mortify the flesh before he comes here, by a rigorous fast of four-and-twenty hours: and as to the maiden, she must be above reproach, and proof against temptation. Linger not in finding such aid. In three days my furlough is at an end; if not delivered before midnight of the third, I shall have to mount guard for another century.' "'Fear not,' said the student, 'I have in my eye the very priest and damsel you describe; but how am I to regain admission to this tower?' "'The seal of Solomon will open the way for thee.' "The student issued forth from the tower much more gayly than he had entered. The wall closed behind him, and remained solid as before. "The next morning he repaired boldly to the mansion of the priest, no longer a poor strolling student, thrumming his way with a guitar; but an ambassador from the shadowy world, with enchanted treasures to bestow. No particulars are told of his negotiation, excepting that the zeal of the worthy priest was easily kindled at the idea of rescuing an old soldier of the faith and a strong box of King Chico from the very clutches of Satan; and then what alms might be dispensed, what churches built, and how many poor relatives enriched with the Moorish treasure! "As to the immaculate handmaid, she was ready to lend her hand, which was all that was required, to the pious work; and if a shy glance now and then might be believed, the ambassador began to find favor in her modest eyes. "The greatest difficulty, however, was the fast to which the good padre had to subject himself. Twice he attempted it, and twice the flesh was too strong for the spirit. It was only on the third day that he was enabled to withstand the temptations of the cupboard; but it was still a question whether he would hold out until the spell was broken. "At a late hour of the night the party groped their way up the ravine by the light of a lantern, and bearing a basket with provisions for exorcising the demon of hunger so soon as the other demons should be laid in the Red Sea. "The seal of Solomon opened their way into the tower. They found the soldier seated on the enchanted strong-box, awaiting their arrival. The exorcism was performed in due style. The damsel advanced and touched the locks of the coffer with the seal of Solomon. The lid flew open; and such treasures of gold and jewels and precious stones as flashed upon the eye! "'Here's cut and come again!' cried the student, exultingly, as he proceeded to cram his pockets. "'Fairly and softly,' exclaimed the soldier. 'Let us get the coffer out entire, and then divide.' "They accordingly went to work with might and main; but it was a difficult task; the chest was enormously heavy, and had been imbedded there for centuries. While they were thus employed the good dominie drew on one side and made a vigorous onslaught on the basket, by way of exorcising the demon of hunger which was raging in his entrails. In a little while a fat capon was devoured, and washed down by a deep potation of Val de peñas; and, by way of grace after meat, he gave a kind-hearted kiss to the pet-lamb who waited on him. It was quietly done in a corner, but the tell-tale walls babbled it forth as if in triumph. Never was chaste salute more awful in its effects. At the sound the soldier gave a great cry of despair; the coffer, which was half raised, fell back in its place and was locked once more. Priest, student, and damsel found themselves outside of the tower, the wall of which closed with a thundering jar. Alas! the good padre had broken his fast too soon! "When recovered from his surprise, the student would have reëntered the tower, but learnt to his dismay that the damsel, in her fright, had let fall the seal of Solomon; it remained within the vault. "In a word, the cathedral bell tolled midnight; the spell was renewed; the soldier was doomed to mount guard for another hundred years, and there he and the treasure remain to this day--and all because the kind-hearted padre kissed his handmaid. 'Ah, father! father!' said the student, shaking his head ruefully, as they returned down the ravine, 'I fear there was less of the saint than the sinner in that kiss!' * * * * * "Thus ends the legend as far as it has been authenticated. There is a tradition, however, that the student had brought off treasure enough in his pocket to set him up in the world; that he prospered in his affairs, that the worthy padre gave him the pet-lamb in marriage, by way of amends for the blunder in the vault; that the immaculate damsel proved a pattern for wives as she had been for handmaids, and bore her husband a numerous progeny; that the first was a wonder; it was born seven months after her marriage, and though a seven-months' boy, was the sturdiest of the flock. The rest were all born in the ordinary course of time. "The story of the enchanted soldier remains one of the popular traditions of Granada, though told in a variety of ways; the common people affirm that he still mounts guard on mid-summer eve, beside the gigantic stone pomegranate on the bridge of the Darro; but remains invisible excepting to such lucky mortal as may possess the seal of Solomon." These passages from the most characteristic of Irving's books, do not by any means exhaust his variety, but they afford a fair measure of his purely literary skill, upon which his reputation must rest. To my apprehension this "charm" in literature is as necessary to the amelioration and enjoyment of human life as the more solid achievements of scholarship. That Irving should find it in the prosaic and materialistic conditions of the New World as well as in the tradition-laden atmosphere of the Old, is evidence that he possessed genius of a refined and subtle quality if not of the most robust order. CHAPTER X. LAST YEARS: THE CHARACTER OF HIS LITERATURE. The last years of Irving's life, although full of activity and enjoyment,--abated only by the malady which had so long tormented him,--offer little new in the development of his character, and need not much longer detain us. The calls of friendship and of honor were many, his correspondence was large, he made many excursions to scenes that were filled with pleasant memories, going even as far south as Virginia, and he labored assiduously at the "Life of Washington,"--attracted however now and then by some other tempting theme. But his delight was in the domestic circle at Sunnyside. It was not possible that his occasional melancholy vein should not be deepened by change and death and the lengthening shade of old age. Yet I do not know the closing days of any other author of note that were more cheerful serene, and happy than his. Of our author, in these latter days, Mr. George William Curtis put recently into his "Easy Chair" papers an artistically-touched little portrait: "Irving was as quaint a figure," he says, "as the Diedrich Knickerbocker in the preliminary advertisement of the 'History of New York.' Thirty years ago he might have been seen on an autumnal afternoon tripping with an elastic step along Broadway, with 'low-quartered' shoes neatly tied, and a Talma cloak--a short garment that hung from the shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in his appearance which was undeniably Dutch, and most harmonious with the associations of his writing. He seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of his own books; and the cordial grace and humor of his address, if he stopped for a passing chat, were delightfully characteristic. He was then our most famous man of letters, but he was simply free from all self-consciousness and assumption and dogmatism." Congenial occupation was one secret of Irving's cheerfulness and contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" issued from the press. Yet he lived long enough to receive the hearty approval of it from the literary men whose familiarity with the Revolutionary period made them the best judges of its merits. He had time also to revise his works. It is perhaps worthy of note that for several years, while he was at the height of his popularity, his books had very little sale. From 1842 to 1848 they were out of print, with the exception of some stray copies of a cheap Philadelphia edition, and a Paris collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series entitled a "Collection of Ancient and Modern _British_ Authors"), they were not to be found. The Philadelphia publishers did not think there was sufficient demand to warrant a new edition. Mr. Irving and his friends judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher offered to assume the responsibility. This was Mr. George P. Putnam. The event justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise; from July, 1848, to November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over eighty-eight thousand dollars. And it should be added that the relations between author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of business disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both. If the like relations always obtained we should not have to say: "May the Lord pity the authors in this world, and the publishers in the next." I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man and of his books. If I were exactly to follow his literary method I should do nothing more. The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength and weakness of his works. I do not know any other author whose writings so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more certainly measured by his writings. His character is perfectly transparent: his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method is simple. He _felt_ his subject, and he expressed his conception not so much by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible touches and shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with very little show of analysis. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to say that his method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could have explained his sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked precision in any philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his letters, he touches upon politics there is a little vagueness of definition that indicates want of mental grip in that direction. But in the region of feeling his genius is sufficient to his purpose; either when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in the "Columbus" and the "Washington." The analysis of a nature so simple and a character so transparent as Irving's, who lived in the sunlight and had no envelope of mystery, has not the fascination that attaches to Hawthorne. Although the direction of his work as a man of letters was largely determined by his early surroundings,--that is, by his birth in a land void of traditions, and into a society without much literary life, so that his intellectual food was of necessity a foreign literature that was at the moment becoming a little antiquated in the land of its birth, and his warm imagination was forced to revert to the past for that nourishment which his crude environment did not offer,--yet he was by nature a retrospective man. His face was set towards the past, not towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century, nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit he still, by mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that of Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist himself. His writings induce to reflection, to quiet musing, to tenderness for tradition; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the feverishness of modern life; but they are rarely stimulating or suggestive. They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a deeper consideration of the problems of life. And it is very fortunate that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature. It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is very little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is comparable to Irving's books, and, especially, it seems to me, because they were not written for children. Irving's position in American literature, or in that of the English tongue, will only be determined by the slow settling of opinion, which no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems able to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism. The service that he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is there any question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a crude and new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition. In this respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and Burns; and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and there a fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind. The Knickerbocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the Hudson are a priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable possession in popular tradition if the literature creating it were destroyed. This sort of creation is unique in modern times. New York is the Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by his fiction; and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure supplies to it what great age has given to European cities. This creation is sufficient to secure for him an immortality, a length of earthly remembrance that all the rest of his writings together might not give. Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the literary point of view. He belongs to that small class of which Johnson and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mould human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like the poems of Horace. You must not ask more of them than that. This attitude toward life is defensible on the highest grounds. A man with Irving's gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and describer, and not to be called on for a more active participation in affairs than he chooses to take. He is doing the world the highest service of which he is capable, and the most enduring it can receive from any man. It is not a question whether the work of the literary man is higher than that of the reformer or the statesman; it is a distinct work, and is justified by the result, even when the work is that of the humorist only. We recognize this in the ease of the poet. Although Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy with the liberalizing movement of his day (as if his novels were quieting social influences), it is felt by this generation that the author of "Faust" needs no apology that he did not spend his energies in the effervescing politics of the German states. I mean, that while we may like or dislike the man for his sympathy or want of sympathy, we concede to the author the right of his attitude; if Goethe had not assumed freedom from moral responsibility, I suppose that criticism of his aloofness would long ago have ceased. Irving did not lack sympathy with humanity in the concrete; it colored whatever he wrote. But he regarded the politics of his own country, the revolutions in France, the long struggle in Spain, without heat; and he held aloof from projects of agitation and reform, and maintained the attitude of an observer, regarding the life about him from the point of view of the literary artist, as he was justified in doing. Irving had the defects of his peculiar genius, and these have no doubt helped to fix upon him the complimentary disparagement of "genial." He was not aggressive; in his nature he was wholly unpartisan, and full of lenient charity; and I suspect that his kindly regard of the world, although returned with kindly liking, cost him something of that respect for sturdiness and force which men feel for writers who flout them as fools in the main. Like Scott, he belonged to the idealists, and not to the realists, whom our generation affects. Both writers stimulate the longing for something better. Their creed was short: "Love God and honor the King." It is a very good one for a literary man, and might do for a Christian. The supernatural was still a reality in the age in which they wrote, Irving's faith in God and his love of humanity were very simple; I do not suppose he was much disturbed by the deep problems that have set us all adrift. In every age, whatever is astir, literature, theology, all intellectual activity, takes one and the same drift, and approximates in color. The bent of Irving's spirit was fixed in his youth, and he escaped the desperate realism of this generation, which has no outcome, and is likely to produce little that is noble. I do not know how to account, on principles of culture which we recognize, for our author's style. His education was exceedingly defective, nor was his want of discipline supplied by subsequent desultory application. He seems to have been born with a rare sense of literary proportion and form; into this, as into a mould, were run his apparently lazy and really acute observations of life. That he thoroughly mastered such literature as he fancied there is abundant evidence; that his style was influenced by the purest English models is also apparent. But there remains a large margin for wonder how, with his want of training, he could have elaborated a style which is distinctively his own, and is as copious, felicitous in the choice of words, flowing, spontaneous, flexible, engaging, clear, and as little wearisome when read continuously in quantity as any in the English tongue. This is saying a great deal, though it is not claiming for him the compactness, nor the robust vigor, nor the depth of thought, of many others masters in it. It is sometimes praised for its simplicity. It is certainly lucid, but its simplicity is not that of Benjamin Franklin's style; it is often ornate, not seldom somewhat diffuse, and always exceedingly melodious. It is noticeable for its metaphorical felicity. But it was not in the sympathetic nature of the author, to which I just referred, to come sharply to the point. It is much to have merited the eulogy of Campbell that he had "added clarity to the English tongue." This elegance and finish of style (which seems to have been as natural to the man as his amiable manner) is sometimes made his reproach, as if it were his sole merit, and as if he had concealed under this charming form a want of substance. In literature form is vital. But his case does not rest upon that. As an illustration his "Life of Washington" may be put in evidence. Probably this work lost something in incisiveness and brilliancy by being postponed till the writer's old age. But whatever this loss, it is impossible for any biography to be less pretentious in style, or less ambitious in proclamation. The only pretension of matter is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is elaborated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity to give a fictitious importance to his family and his childhood, and to accept the southern estimate of the hut in which he was born as a "mansion." In much of this false estimate Irving was doubtless misled by the fables of Weems. But while he has given us a dignified portrait of Washington, it is as far as possible removed from that of the smileless prig which has begun to weary even the popular fancy. The man he paints is flesh and blood, presented, I believe, with substantial faithfulness to his character; with a recognition of the defects of his education and the deliberation of his mental operations; with at least a hint of that want of breadth of culture and knowledge of the past, the possession of which characterized many of his great associates; and with no concealment that he had a dower of passions and a temper which only vigorous self-watchfulness kept under. But he portrays, with an admiration not too highly colored, the magnificent patience, the courage to bear misconstruction, the unfailing patriotism, the practical sagacity, the level balance of judgment combined with the wisest toleration, the dignity of mind, and the lofty moral nature which made him the great man of his epoch. Irving's grasp of this character; his lucid marshaling of the scattered, often wearisome and uninteresting details of our dragging, unpicturesque Revolutionary War; his just judgment of men; his even, almost judicial, moderation of tone; and his admirable proportion of space to events, render the discussion of style in reference to this work superfluous. Another writer might have made a more brilliant performance: descriptions sparkling with antitheses, characters projected into startling attitudes by the use of epithets; a work more exciting and more piquant, that would have started a thousand controversies, and engaged the attention by daring conjectures and attempts to make a dramatic spectacle; a book interesting and notable, but false in philosophy and untrue in fact. When the "Sketch-Book" appeared, an English critic said it should have been first published in England, for Irving was an English writer. The idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is that while Irving was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular. He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the romantic story of the people and the fascination of the clime; and he was so true an interpreter of both as to earn from the Spaniards the title of "the poet Irving." I chanced once, in an inn at Frascati, to take up "The Tales of a Traveller," which I had not seen for many years. I expected to revive the somewhat faded humor and fancy of the past generation. But I found not only a sprightly humor and vivacity which are modern, but a truth to Italian local color that is very rare in any writer foreign to the soil. As to America, I do not know what can be more characteristically American than the Knickerbocker, the Hudson River tales, the sketches of life and adventure in the far West. But underneath all this diversity there is one constant quality,--the flavor of the author. Open by chance and read almost anywhere in his score of books,--it may be the "Tour on the Prairies," the familiar dream of the Alhambra, or the narratives of the brilliant exploits of New World explorers; surrender yourself to the flowing current of his transparent style, and you are conscious of a beguilement which is the crowning excellence of all lighter literature, for which we have no word but "charm." The consensus of opinion about Irving in England and America for thirty years was very remarkable. He had a universal popularity rarely enjoyed by any writer. England returned him to America medalled by the king, honored by the university which is chary of its favors, followed by the applause of the whole English people. In English households, in drawing-rooms of the metropolis, in political circles no less than among the literary coteries, in the best reviews, and in the popular newspapers the opinion of him was pretty much the same. And even in the lapse of time and the change of literary fashion authors so unlike as Byron and Dickens were equally warm in admiration of him. To the English indorsement America added her own enthusiasm, which was as universal. His readers were the million, and all his readers were admirers. Even American statesmen, who feed their minds on food we know not of, read Irving. It is true that the uncritical opinion of New York was never exactly re-echoed in the cool recesses of Boston culture; but the magnates of the "North American Review" gave him their meed of cordial praise. The country at large put him on a pinnacle. If you attempt to account for the position he occupied by his character, which won the love of all men, it must be remembered that the quality which won this, whatever its value, pervades his books also. And yet it must be said that the total impression left upon the mind by the man and his works is not that of the greatest intellectual force. I have no doubt that this was the impression he made upon his ablest contemporaries. And this fact, when I consider the effect the man produced, makes the study of him all the more interesting. As an intellectual personality he makes no such impression, for instance, as Carlyle, or a dozen other writers now living who could be named. The incisive critical faculty was almost entirely wanting in him. He had neither the power nor the disposition to cut his way transversely across popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin has, nor to draw around him disciples equally well pleased to see him fiercely demolish to-day what they had delighted to see him set up yesterday as eternal. He evoked neither violent partisanship nor violent opposition. He was an extremely sensitive man, and if he had been capable of creating a conflict he would only have been miserable in it. The play of his mind depended upon the sunshine of approval. And all this shows a certain want of intellectual virility. A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of our day is characterized by an intellectual strain. I have no doubt that this will appear to be the case to the next generation. It is a strain to say something new even at the risk of paradox, or to say something in a new way at the risk of obscurity. From this Irving was entirely free. There is no visible straining to attract attention. His mood is calm and unexaggerated. Even in some of his pathos, which is open to the suspicion of being "literary," there is no literary exaggeration. He seems always writing from an internal calm, which is the necessary condition of his production. If he wins at all by his style, by his humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle force, like that of the sun in spring. There are many men now living, or recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought, upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in as fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson. What verdict the next generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend largely upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and their judgments of character. I think the calm work of Irving will stand when much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual achievement of this age has passed away. And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who had only the dimmest of ideas of their personality. This was some quality perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for himself; there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the authors--an element in the estimate of their future position--as what we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their art. However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influence in the world without it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart,--"Be a good man, my dear." We know well enough that the great author of "The Newcomes" and the great author of "The Heart of Midlothian" recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and Irving's literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature. The author loved good women and little children and a pure life; he had faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous actions, and did not care to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was an author still capable of an enthusiasm.* His books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension. *Transcriber's note: Word printed as "enthusiam" in original text. Washington Irving died on the 28th of November, 1859, at the close of a lovely day of that Indian Summer which is nowhere more full of a melancholy charm than on the banks of the lower Hudson, and which was in perfect accord with the ripe and peaceful close of his life. 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13105	----	MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI VOL. I. * * * * * Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should with even powers The rock, the spindle, and the shears control Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. BEN JONSON. Però che ogni diletto nostro e doglia Sta in si e nò saper, voler, potere; Adunque quel sol può, che col dovere Ne trae la ragion fuor di sua soglia. Adunque tu, lettor di queste note, S' a te vuoi esser buono, e agli altri caro, Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi. LEONARDO DA VINCI BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY. MDCCCLVII. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, BY R.F. FULLER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Stereotyped by HOBART & ROBBINS; NEW ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY BOSTON. TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR VOLUME FIRST. I. YOUTH. AUTOBIOGRAPHY PARENTS DEATH IN THE HOUSE OVERWORK THE WORLD OF BOOKS FIRST FRIEND SCHOOL-LIFE SELF-CULTURE II. CAMBRIDGE, _By J.F. Clarke_ FRIENDSHIP CONVERSATION.--SOCIAL INTERCOURSE STUDIES CHARACTER.--AIMS AND IDEAS OF LIFE III. GROTON AND PROVIDENCE. LETTERS AND JOURNALS SAD WELCOME HOME OCCUPATIONS MISS MARTINEAU ILLNESS DEATH OF HER FATHER TRIAL BIRTH-DAY DEATH IN LIFE LITERATURE FAREWELL TO GROTON WINTER IN BOSTON PROVIDENCE SCHOOL EXPERIENCES PERSONS ART FANNY KEMBLE MAGNANIMITY SPIRITUAL LIFE FAREWELL TO SUMMER IV. CONCORD, _By R.W. Emerson_ ARCANA DÆMONOLOGY TEMPERAMENT SELF-ESTEEM BOOKS CRITICISM NATURE ART LETTERS FRIENDSHIP PROBLEMS OF LIFE WOMAN, OR ARTIST? HEROISM TRUTH ECSTASY CONVERSATION V. BOSTON, _By R.W. Emerson_ CONVERSATIONS ON THE FINE ARTS YOUTH. AUTOBIOGRAPHY. * * * * * "Aus Morgenduft gewebt und Sonnenklarheit Der Dichtung Schleir aus der Hand der Wahrheit." GOETHE. "The million stars which tremble O'er the deep mind of dauntless infancy." TENNYSON. "Wie leicht ward er dahin gefragen, Was war dem Glücklichen zu schwer! Wie tanzte vor des Lebens Wagen Die luftige Begleitung her! Die Liebe mit dem süssen Lohne, Das Glück mit seinem gold'nen Kranz, Der Ruhm mit seiner Sternenkrone, Die Wahrheit in der Sonne Glanz." SCHILLER What wert thou then? A child most infantine, Yet wandering far beyond that innocent age, In all but its sweet looks and mien divine; Even then, methought, with the world's tyrant rage A patient warfare thy young heart did wage, When those soft eyes of scarcely conscious thought Some tale, or thine own fancies, would engage To overflow with tears, or converse fraught With passion o'er their depths its fleeting light had wrought.' SHELLE "And I smiled, as one never smiles but once; Then first discovering my own aim's extent, Which sought to comprehend the works of God. And God himself, and all God's intercourse With the human mind." BROWNING. I. YOUTH. * * * * * 'Tieck, who has embodied so many Runic secrets, explained to me what I have often felt toward myself, when he tells of the poor changeling, who, turned from the door of her adopted home, sat down on a stone and so pitied herself that she wept. Yet me also, the wonderful bird, singing in the wild forest, has tempted on, and not in vain.' Thus wrote Margaret in the noon of life, when looking back through youth to the "dewy dawn of memory." She was the eldest child of Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, and was born in Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, on the 23d of May, 1810. Among her papers fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth, prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance. PARENTS. 'My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely endowed with that sagacious energy, which the state of New England society, for the last half century, has been so well fitted to develop. His father was a clergyman, settled as pastor in Princeton, Massachusetts, within the bounds of whose parish-farm was Wachuset. His means were small, and the great object of his ambition was to send his sons to college. As a boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing himself for Harvard University, and when there of preparing himself for the profession of Law. As a Lawyer, again, the ends constantly presented were to work for distinction in the community, and for the means of supporting a family. To be an honored citizen, and to have a home on earth, were made the great aims of existence. To open the deeper fountains of the soul, to regard life here as the prophetic entrance to immortality, to develop his spirit to perfection,--motives like these had never been suggested to him, either by fellow-beings or by outward circumstances. The result was a character, in its social aspect, of quite the common sort. A good son and brother, a kind neighbor, an active man of business--in all these outward relations he was but one of a class, which surrounding conditions have made the majority among us. In the more delicate and individual relations, he never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself. 'His love for my mother was the green spot on which he stood apart from the common-places of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence. She was one of those fair and flower-like natures, which sometimes spring up even beside the most dusty highways of life--a creature not to be shaped into a merely useful instrument, but bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic,--of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the golden age.' DEATH IN THE HOUSE. 'My earliest recollection is of a death,--the death of a sister, two years younger than myself. Probably there is a sense of childish endearments, such as belong to this tie, mingled with that of loss, of wonder, and mystery; but these last are prominent in memory. I remember coming home and meeting our nursery-maid, her face streaming with tears. That strange sight of tears made an indelible impression. I realize how little I was of stature, in that I looked up to this weeping face;--and it has often seemed since, that--full-grown for the life of this earth, I have looked up just so, at times of threatening, of doubt, and distress, and that just so has some being of the next higher order of existences looked down, aware of a law unknown to me, and tenderly commiserating the pain I muse endure in emerging from my ignorance. 'She took me by the hand and led me into a still and dark chamber,--then drew aside the curtain and showed me my sister. I see yet that beauty of death! The highest achievements of sculpture are only the reminder of its severe sweetness. Then I remember the house all still and dark,--the people in their black clothes and dreary faces,--the scent of the newly-made coffin,--my being set up in a chair and detained by a gentle hand to hear the clergyman,--the carriages slowly going, the procession slowly doling out their steps to the grave. But I have no remembrance of what I have since been told I did,--insisting, with loud cries, that they should not put the body in the ground. I suppose that my emotion was spent at the time, and so there was nothing to fix that moment in my memory. 'I did not then, nor do I now, find any beauty in these ceremonies. What had they to do with the sweet playful child? Her life and death were alike beautiful, but all this sad parade was not. Thus my first experience of life was one of death. She who would have been the companion of my life was severed from me, and I was left alone. This has made a vast difference in my lot. Her character, if that fair face promised right, would have been soft, graceful and lively: it would have tempered mine to a gentler and more gradual course. OVERWORK. 'My father,--all whose feelings were now concentred on me,--instructed me himself. The effect of this was so far good that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak persons as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented to me. My father was a man of business, even in literature; he had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated memories of success and good repute. He was, beside, well read in French literature, and in English, a Queen Anne's man. He hoped to make me the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as the income of his profession enabled him to give me means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit it to be with the next. He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible. Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me,--even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament,--to a premature grave. 'No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling to retire. My aunts cried out upon the "spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever was,--if brother could but open his eyes to see it,--who was never willing to go to bed." They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away, she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. They did not know that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright; or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her "leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,"--never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often she dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother, as she had done that of her sister, and woke to find the pillow drenched in tears. These dreams softened her heart too much, and cast a deep shadow over her young days; for then, and later, the life of dreams,--probably because there was in it less to distract the mind from its own earnestness,--has often seemed to her more real, and been remembered with more interest, than that of waking hours. 'Poor child! Far remote in time, in thought, from that period, I look back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and perceive that I had no natural childhood.' BOOKS. 'Thus passed my first years. My mother was in delicate health, and much absorbed in the care of her younger children. In the house was neither dog nor bird, nor any graceful animated form of existence. I saw no persons who took my fancy, and real life offered no attraction. Thus my already over-excited mind found no relief from without, and was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. I was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily. In this branch of study, first by my father, and afterwards by a tutor, I was trained to quite a high degree of precision. I was expected to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and in translating to give the thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and without breaks or hesitation,--for with these my father had absolutely no patience. 'Indeed, he demanded accuracy and clearness in everything: you must not speak, unless you can make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought, unless you can give a reason for it, if required; must not make a statement, unless sure of all particulars--such were his rules. "But," "if," "unless," "I am mistaken," and "it may be so," were words and phrases excluded from the province where he held sway. Trained to great dexterity in artificial methods, accurate, ready, with entire command of his resources, he had no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive. He had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling. His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and self-forgetfulness. He made the common prose world so present to me, that my natural bias was controlled. I did not go mad, as many would do, at being continually roused from my dreams. I had too much strength to be crushed,--and since I must put on the fetters, could not submit to let them impede my motions. My own world sank deep within, away from the surface of my life; in what I did and said I learned to have reference to other minds. But my true life was only the dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect, and that coarse, but wearable stuff woven by the ages,--Common Sense. 'In accordance with this discipline in heroic common sense, was the influence of those great Romans, whose thoughts and lives were my daily food during those plastic years. The genius of Rome displayed itself in Character, and scarcely needed an occasional wave of the torch of thought to show its lineaments, so marble strong they gleamed in every light. Who, that has lived with those men, but admires the plain force of fact, of thought passed into action? They take up things with their naked hands. There is just the man, and the block he casts before you,--no divinity, no demon, no unfulfilled aim, but just the man and Rome, and what he did for Rome. Everything turns your attention to what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions, not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought, an earnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, and force of expression. Architecture was the art in which Rome excelled, and this corresponds with the feeling these men of Rome excite. They did not grow,--they built themselves up, or were built up by the fate of Rome, as a temple for Jupiter Stator. The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in "_us_," seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence,--that tramp and march,--which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language,--make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the _thought_ of Rome. Man present in nature, commanding nature too sternly to be inspired by it, standing like the rock amid the sea, or moving like the fire over the land, either impassive, or irresistible; knowing not the soft mediums or fine flights of life, but by the force which he expresses, piercing to the centre. 'We are never better understood than when we speak of a "Roman virtue," a "Roman outline." There is somewhat indefinite, somewhat yet unfulfilled in the thought of Greece, of Spain, of modern Italy; but ROME! it stands by itself, a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose is what it utters. Every Roman was an emperor. It is well that the infallible church should have been founded on this rock, that the presumptuous Peter should hold the keys, as the conquering Jove did before his thunderbolts, to be seen of all the world. The Apollo tends flocks with Admetus; Christ teaches by the lonely lake, or plucks wheat as he wanders through the fields some Sabbath morning. They never come to this stronghold; they could not have breathed freely where all became stone as soon as spoken, where divine youth found no horizon for its all-promising glance, but every thought put on, before it dared issue to the day in action, its _toga virilis_. 'Suckled by this wolf, man gains a different complexion from that which is fed by the Greek honey. He takes a noble bronze in camps and battle-fields; the wrinkles of council well beseem his brow, and the eye cuts its way like the sword. The Eagle should never have been used as a symbol by any other nation: it belonged to Rome. 'The history of Rome abides in mind, of course, more than the literature. It was degeneracy for a Roman to use the pen; his life was in the day. The "vaunting" of Rome, like that of the North American Indians, is her proper literature. A man rises; he tells who he is, and what he has done; he speaks of his country and her brave men; he knows that a conquering god is there, whose agent is his own right hand; and he should end like the Indian, "I have no more to say." 'It never shocks us that the Roman is self-conscious. One wants no universal truths from him, no philosophy, no creation, but only his life, his Roman life felt in every pulse, realized in every gesture. The universal heaven takes in the Roman only to make us feel his individuality the more. The Will, the Resolve of Man!--it has been expressed,--fully expressed! 'I steadily loved this ideal in my childhood, and this is the cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know how to stand firm on the ground, before he can fly. In vain for me are men more, if they are less, than Romans. Dante was far greater than any Roman, yet I feel he was right to take the Mantuan as his guide through hell, and to heaven. 'Horace was a great deal to me then, and is so still. Though his words do not abide in memory, his presence does: serene, courtly, of darting hazel eye, a self-sufficient grace, and an appreciation of the world of stern realities, sometimes pathetic, never tragic. He is the natural man of the world; he is what he ought to be, and his darts never fail of their aim. There is a perfume and raciness, too, which makes life a banquet, where the wit sparkles no less that the viands were bought with blood. 'Ovid gave me not Rome, nor himself, but a view into the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology. This path I followed, have been following ever since; and now, life half over, it seems to me, as in my childhood, that every thought of which man is susceptible, is intimated there. In those young years, indeed, I did not see what I now see, but loved to creep from amid the Roman pikes to lie beneath this great vine, and see the smiling and serene shapes go by, woven from the finest fibres of all the elements. I knew not why, at that time,--but I loved to get away from the hum of the forum, and the mailed clang of Roman speech, to these shifting shows of nature, these Gods and Nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill. 'As with Rome I antedated the world of deeds, so I lived in those Greek forms the true faith of a refined and intense childhood. So great was the force of reality with which these forms impressed me, that I prayed earnestly for a sign,--that it would lighten in some particular region of the heavens, or that I might find a bunch of grapes in the path, when I went forth in the morning. But no sign was given, and I was left a waif stranded upon the shores of modern life! 'Of the Greek language, I knew only enough to feel that the sounds told the same story as the mythology;--that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was a stern composure. I wish I had learned as much of Greece as of Rome,--so freely does the mind play in her sunny waters, where there is no chill, and the restraint is from within out; for these Greeks, in an atmosphere of ample grace, could not be impetuous, or stern, but loved moderation as equable life always must, for it is the law of beauty. 'With these books I passed my days. The great amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling, which, under other circumstances, might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts of others. This was not a tame state, for the energies brought out by rapid acquisition gave glow enough. I thought with rapture of the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will. A Cæsar seemed great enough. I did not then know that such men impoverish the treasury to build the palace. I kept their statues as belonging to the hall of my ancestors, and loved to conquer obstacles, and fed my youth and strength for their sake. * * * * * 'Still, though this bias was so great that in earliest years I learned, in these ways, how the world takes hold of a powerful nature, I had yet other experiences. None of these were deeper than what I found in the happiest haunt of my childish years,--our little garden. Our house, though comfortable, was very ugly, and in a neighborhood which I detested,--every dwelling and its appurtenances having a _mesquin_ and huddled look. I liked nothing about us except the tall graceful elms before the house, and the dear little garden behind. Our back door opened on a high flight of steps, by which I went down to a green plot, much injured in my ambitious eyes by the presence of the pump and tool-house. This opened into a little garden, full of choice flowers and fruit-trees, which was my mother's delight, and was carefully kept. Here I felt at home. A gate opened thence into the fields,--a wooden gate made of boards, in a high, unpainted board wall, and embowered in the clematis creeper. This gate I used to open to see the sunset heaven; beyond this black frame I did not step, for I liked to look at the deep gold behind it. How exquisitely happy I was in its beauty, and how I loved the silvery wreaths of my protecting vine! I never would pluck one of its flowers at that time, I was so jealous of its beauty, but often since I carry off wreaths of it from the wild-wood, and it stands in nature to my mind as the emblem of domestic love. 'Of late I have thankfully felt what I owe to that garden, where the best hours of my lonely childhood were spent. Within the house everything was socially utilitarian; my books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden. There my thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. I loved to gaze on the roses, the violets, the lilies, the pinks; my mother's hand had planted them, and they bloomed for me. I culled the most beautiful. I looked at them on every side. I kissed them, I pressed them to my bosom with passionate emotions, such as I have never dared express to any human being. An ambition swelled my heart to be as beautiful, as perfect as they. I have not kept my vow. Yet, forgive, ye wild asters, which gleam so sadly amid the fading grass; forgive me, ye golden autumn flowers, which so strive to reflect the glories of the departing distant sun; and ye silvery flowers, whose moonlight eyes I knew so well, forgive! Living and blooming in your unchecked law, ye know nothing of the blights, the distortions, which beset the human being; and which at such hours it would seem that no glories of free agency could ever repay! * * * * * 'There was, in the house, no apartment appropriated to the purpose of a library, but there was in my father's room a large closet filled with books, and to these I had free access when the task-work of the day was done. Its window overlooked wide fields, gentle slopes, a rich and smiling country, whose aspect pleased without much occupying the eye, while a range of blue hills, rising at about twelve miles distance, allured to reverie. "Distant mountains," says Tieck, "excite the fancy, for beyond them we place the scene of our Paradise." Thus, in the poems of fairy adventure, we climb the rocky barrier, pass fearless its dragon caves, and dark pine forests, and find the scene of enchantment in the vale behind. My hopes were never so definite, but my eye was constantly allured to that distant blue range, and I would sit, lost in fancies, till tears fell on my cheek. I loved this sadness; but only in later years, when the realities of life had taught me moderation, did the passionate emotions excited by seeing them again teach how glorious were the hopes that swelled my heart while gazing on them in those early days. 'Melancholy attends on the best joys of a merely ideal life, else I should call most happy the hours in the garden, the hours in the book closet. Here were the best French writers of the last century; for my father had been more than half a Jacobin, in the time when the French Republic cast its glare of promise over the world. Here, too, were the Queen Anne authors, his models, and the English novelists; but among them I found none that charmed me. Smollett, Fielding, and the like, deal too broadly with the coarse actualities of life. The best of their men and women--so merely natural, with the nature found every day--do not meet our hopes. Sometimes the simple picture, warm with life and the light of the common sun, cannot fail to charm,--as in the wedded love of Fielding's Amelia,--but it is at a later day, when the mind is trained to comparison, that we learn to prize excellence like this as it deserves. Early youth is prince-like: it-will bend only to "the king, my father." Various kinds of excellence please, and leave their impression, but the most commanding, alone, is duly acknowledged at that all-exacting age. 'Three great authors it was my fortune to meet at this important period,--all, though of unequal, yet congenial powers,--all of rich and wide, rather than aspiring genius,--all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took in,--all fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to be lost sight of, or superseded, but always to be apprehended more and more. 'Ever memorable is the day on which I first took a volume of SHAKSPEARE in my hand to read. It was on a Sunday. '--This day was punctiliously set apart in our house. We had family prayers, for which there was no time on other days. Our dinners were different, and our clothes. We went to church. My father put some limitations on my reading, but--bless him for the gentleness which has left me a pleasant feeling for the day!--he did not prescribe what was, but only what was _not_, to be done. And the liberty this left was a large one. "You must not read a novel, or a play;" but all other books, the worst, or the best, were open to me. The distinction was merely technical. The day was pleasing to me, as relieving me from the routine of tasks and recitations; it gave me freer play than usual, and there were fewer things occurred in its course, which reminded me of the divisions of time; still the church-going, where I heard nothing that had any connection with my inward life, and these rules, gave me associations with the day of empty formalities, and arbitrary restrictions; but though the forbidden book or walk always seemed more charming then, I was seldom tempted to disobey.-- 'This Sunday--I was only eight years old--I took from the book-shelf a volume lettered SHAKSPEARE. It was not the first time I had looked at it, but before I had been deterred from attempting to read, by the broken appearance along the page, and preferred smooth narrative. But this time I held in my hand "Romeo and Juliet" long enough to get my eye fastened to the page. It was a cold winter afternoon. I took the book to the parlor fire, and had there been 'seated an hour or two, when my father looked up and asked what I was reading so intently. "Shakspeare," replied the child, merely raising her eye from the page. "Shakspeare,--that won't do; that's no book for Sunday; go put it away and take another." I went as I was bid, but took no other. Returning to my seat, the unfinished story, the personages to whom I was but just introduced, thronged and burnt my brain. I could not bear it long; such a lure it was impossible to resist. I went and brought the book again. There were several guests present, and I had got half through the play before I again attracted attention. "What is that child about that she don't hear a word that's said to her?" quoth my aunt. "What are you reading?" said my father. "Shakspeare" was again the reply, in a clear, though somewhat impatient, tone. "How?" said my father angrily,--then restraining himself before his guests,--"Give me the book and go directly to bed." 'Into my little room no care of his anger followed me. Alone, in the dark, I thought only of the scene placed by the poet before my eye, where the free flow of life, sudden and graceful dialogue, and forms, whether grotesque or fair, seen in the broad lustre of his imagination, gave just what I wanted, and brought home the life I seemed born to live. My fancies swarmed like bees, as I contrived the rest of the story;--what all would do, what say, where go. My confinement tortured me. I could not go forth from this prison to ask after these friends; I could not make my pillow of the dreams about them which yet I could not forbear to frame. Thus was I absorbed when my father entered. He felt it right, before going to rest, to reason with me about my disobedience, shown in a way, as he considered, so insolent. I listened, but could not feel interested in what he said, nor turn my mind from what engaged it. He went away really grieved at my impenitence, and quite at a loss to understand conduct in me so unusual. '--Often since I have seen the same misunderstanding between parent and child,--the parent thrusting the morale, the discipline, of life upon the child, when just engrossed by some game of real importance and great leadings to it. That is only a wooden horse to the father,--the child was careering to distant scenes of conquest and crusade, through a country of elsewhere unimagined beauty. None but poets remember their youth; but the father who does not retain poetical apprehension of the world, free and splendid as it stretches out before the child, who cannot read his natural history, and follow out its intimations with reverence, must be a tyrant in his home, and the purest intentions will not prevent his doing much to cramp him. Each new child is a new Thought, and has bearings and discernings, which the Thoughts older in date know not yet, but must learn.-- 'My attention thus fixed on Shakspeare, I returned to him at every hour I could command. Here was a counterpoise to my Romans, still more forcible than the little garden. My author could read the Roman nature too,--read it in the sternness of Coriolanus, and in the varied wealth of Cæsar. But he viewed these men of will as only one kind of men; he kept them in their place, and I found that he, who could understand the Roman, yet expressed in Hamlet a deeper thought. 'In CERVANTES, I found far less productive talent,--'indeed, a far less powerful genius,--but the same wide wisdom, a discernment piercing the shows and symbols of existence, yet rejoicing in them all, both for their own life, and as signs of the unseen reality. Not that Cervantes philosophized,--his genius was too deeply philosophical for that; he took things as they came before him, and saw their actual relations and bearings. Thus the work he produced was of deep meaning, though he might never have expressed that meaning to himself. It was left implied in the whole. A Coleridge comes and calls Don Quixote the pure Reason, and Sancho the Understanding. Cervantes made no such distinctions in his own mind; but he had seen and suffered enough to bring out all his faculties, and to make him comprehend the higher as well as the lower part of our nature. Sancho is too amusing and sagacious to be contemptible; the Don too noble and clear-sighted towards absolute truth, to be ridiculous. And we are pleased to see manifested in this way, how the lower must follow and serve the higher, despite its jeering mistrust and the stubborn realities which break up the plans of this pure-minded champion. 'The effect produced on the mind is nowise that described by Byron:-- "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away," &c. 'On the contrary, who is not conscious of a sincere reverence for the Don, prancing forth on his gaunt steed? Who would not rather be he than any of the persons who laugh at him?--Yet the one we would wish to be is thyself, Cervantes, unconquerable spirit! gaining flavor and color like wine from every change, while being carried round the world; in whose eye the serene sagacious laughter could not be dimmed by poverty, slavery, or unsuccessful authorship. Thou art to us still more the Man, though less the Genius, than Shakspeare; thou dost not evade our sight, but, holding the lamp to thine own magic shows, dost enjoy them with us. 'My third friend was MOLIÉRE, one very much lower, both in range and depth, than the-others, but, as far as he goes, of the same character. Nothing secluded or partial is there about his genius,--a man of the world, and a man by himself, as he is. It was, indeed, only the poor social world of Paris that he saw, but he viewed it from the firm foundations of his manhood, and every lightest laugh rings from a clear perception, and teaches life anew. 'These men were all alike in this,--they loved the _natural history_ of man. Not what he should be, but what he is, was the favorite subject of their thought. Whenever a noble leading opened to the eye new paths of light, they rejoiced; but it was never fancy, but always fact, that inspired them. They loved a thorough penetration of the murkiest dens, and most tangled paths of nature; they did not spin from the desires of their own special natures, but reconstructed the world from materials which they collected on every side. Thus their influence upon me was not to prompt me to follow out thought in myself so much as to detect it everywhere, for each of these men is not only a nature, but a happy interpreter of many natures. They taught me to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience. Perhaps, too, they taught me to overvalue an outward experience at the expense of inward growth; but all this I did not appreciate till later. 'It will be seen that my youth was not unfriended, since those great minds came to me in kindness. A moment of action in one's self, however, is worth an age of apprehension through others; not that our deeds are better, but that they produce a renewal of our being. I have had more productive moments and of deeper joy, but never hours of more tranquil pleasure than those in which these demi-gods visited me,--and with a smile so familiar, that I imagined the world to be full of such. They did me good, for by them a standard was early given of sight and thought, from which I could never go back, and beneath which I cannot suffer patiently my own life or that of any friend to fall. They did me harm, too, for the child fed with meat instead of milk becomes too soon mature. Expectations and desires were thus early raised, after which I must long toil before they can be realized. How poor the scene around, how tame one's own existence, how meagre and faint every power, with these beings in my mind! Often I must cast them quite aside in order to grow in my small way, and not sink into despair. Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dulness that they blunt the senses and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later,--that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences, but should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpretation are needed. With me, much of life was devoured in the bud. FIRST FRIEND. 'For a few months, this bookish and solitary life was invaded by interest in a living, breathing figure. At church, I used to look around with a feeling of coldness and disdain, which, though I now well understand its causes, seems to my wiser mind as odious as it was unnatural. The puny child sought everywhere for the Roman or Shakspeare figures, and she was met by the shrewd, honest eye, the homely decency, or the smartness of a New England village on Sunday. There was beauty, but I could not see it then; it was not of the kind I longed for. In the next pew sat a family who were my especial aversion. There were five daughters, the eldest not above four-and-twenty,--yet they had the old fairy, knowing look, hard, dry, dwarfed, strangers to the All-Fair,--were working-day residents in this beautiful planet. They looked as if their thoughts had never strayed beyond the jobs of the day, and they were glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear looking at them. 'As my eye one day was ranging about with its accustomed coldness, and the proudly foolish sense of being in a shroud of thoughts that were not their thoughts, it was arrested by a face most fair, and well-known as it seemed at first glance,--for surely I had met her before and waited for her long. But soon I saw that she was a new apparition foreign to that scene, if not to me. Her dress,--the arrangement of her hair, which had the graceful pliancy of races highly cultivated for long,--the intelligent and full picture of her eye, whose reserve was in its self-possession, not in timidity,--all combined to make up a whole impression, which, though too young to understand, I was well prepared to feel. 'How wearisome now appears that thorough-bred _millefleur_ beauty, the distilled result of ages of European culture! Give me rather the wild heath on the lonely hill-side, than such a rose-tree from the daintily clipped garden. But, then, I had but tasted the cup, and knew not how little it could satisfy; more, more, was all my cry; continued through years, till I had been at the very fountain. Indeed, it was a ruby-red, a perfumed draught, and I need not abuse the wine because I prefer water, but merely say I have had enough of it. Then, the first sight, the first knowledge of such a person was intoxication. 'She was an English lady, who, by a singular chance, was cast upon this region for a few months. Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture was tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known. She was in various ways "accomplished," as it is called, though to what degree I cannot now judge. She painted in oils;--I had never before seen any one use the brush, and days would not have been too long for me to watch the pictures growing beneath her hand. She played the harp; and its tones are still to me the heralds of the promised land I saw before me then. She rose, she looked, she spoke; and the gentle swaying motion she made all through life has gladdened memory, as the stream does the woods and meadows. 'As she was often at the house of one of our neighbors, and afterwards at our own, my thoughts were fixed on her with all the force of my nature. It was my first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me wholly. I had seen her,--I should see her,--and my mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed from this source. My task-work I went through with, as I have done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride that could not bear to fail, or be questioned. Could I cease from doing the work of the day, and hear the reason sneeringly given,--"Her head is so completely taken up with ---- that she can do nothing"? Impossible. 'Should the first love be blighted, they say, the mind loses its sense of eternity. All forms of existence seem fragile, the prison of time real, for a god is dead. Equally true is this of friendship. I thank Heaven that this first feeling was permitted its free flow. The years that lay between the woman and the girl only brought her beauty into perspective, and enabled me to see her as I did the mountains from my window, and made her presence to me a gate of Paradise. That which she was, that which she brought, that which she might have brought, were mine, and over a whole region of new life I ruled proprietor of the soil in my own right. 'Her mind was sufficiently unoccupied to delight in my warm devotion. She could not know what it was to me, but the light cast by the flame through so delicate a vase cheered and charmed her. All who saw admired her in their way; but she would lightly turn her head from their hard or oppressive looks, and fix a glance of full-eyed sweetness on the child, who, from a distance, watched all her looks and motions. She did not say much to me--not much to any one; she spoke in her whole being rather than by chosen words. Indeed, her proper speech was dance or song, and what was less expressive did not greatly interest her. But she saw much, having in its perfection the woman's delicate sense for sympathies and attractions. We walked in the fields, alone. Though others were present, her eyes were gliding over all the field and plain for the objects of beauty to which she was of kin. She was not cold to her seeming companions; a sweet courtesy satisfied them, but it hung about her like her mantle that she wore without thinking of it; her thoughts were free, for these civilized beings can really live two lives at the same moment. With them she seemed to be, but her hand was given to the child at her side; others did not observe me, but to her I was the only human presence. Like a guardian spirit she led me through the fields and groves, and every tree, every bird greeted me, and said, what I felt, "She is the first angel of your life." 'One time I had been passing the afternoon with her. She had been playing to me on the harp, and I sat listening in happiness almost unbearable. Some guests were announced. She went into another room to receive them, and I took up her book. It was Guy Mannering, then lately published, and the first of Scott's novels I had ever seen. I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been. It was the description of the rocks on the sea-coast where the little Harry Bertram was lost. I had never seen such places, and my mind was vividly stirred to imagine them. The scene rose before me, very unlike reality, doubtless, but majestic and wild. I was the little Harry Bertram, and had lost her,--all I had to lose,--and sought her vainly in long dark caves that had no end, plashing through the water; while the crags beetled above, threatening to fall and crush the poor child. Absorbed in the painful vision, tears rolled down my cheeks. Just then she entered with light step, and full-beaming eye. When she saw me thus, a soft cloud stole over her face, and clothed every feature with a lovelier tenderness than I had seen there before. She did not question, but fixed on me inquiring looks of beautiful love. I laid my head against her shoulder and wept,--dimly feeling that I must lose her and all,--all who spoke to me of the same things,--that the cold wave must rush over me. She waited till my tears were spent, then rising, took from a little box a bunch of golden amaranths or everlasting flowers, and gave them to me. They were very fragrant. "They came," she said, "from Madeira." These flowers stayed with me seventeen years. "Madeira" seemed to me the fortunate isle, apart in the blue ocean from all of ill or dread. Whenever I saw a sail passing in the distance,--if it bore itself with fulness of beautiful certainty,--I felt that it was going to Madeira. Those thoughts are all gone now. No Madeira exists for me now,--no fortunate purple isle,--and all these hopes and fancies are lifted from the sea into the sky. Yet I thank the charms that fixed them here so long,--fixed them till perfumes like those of the golden flowers were drawn from the earth, teaching me to know my birth-place. 'I can tell little else of this time,--indeed, I remember little, except the state of feeling in which I lived. For I _lived_, and when this is the case, there is little to tell in the form of thought. We meet--at least those who are true to their instincts meet--a succession of persons through our lives, all of whom have some peculiar errand to us. There is an outer circle, whose existence we perceive, but with whom we stand in no real relation. They tell us the news, they act on us in the offices of society, they show us kindness and aversion; but their influence does not penetrate; we are nothing to them, nor they to us, except as a part of the world's furniture. Another circle, within this, are dear and near to us. We know them and of what kind they are. They are to us not mere facts, but intelligible thoughts of the divine mind. We like to see how they are unfolded; we like to meet them and part from them: we like their action upon us and the pause that succeeds and enables us to appreciate its quality. Often we leave them on our path, and return no more, but we bear them in our memory, tales which have been told, and whose meaning has been felt. 'But yet a nearer group there are, beings born under the same star, and bound with us in a common destiny. These are not mere acquaintances, mere friends, but, when we meet, are sharers of our very existence. There is no separation; the same thought is given at the same moment to both,--indeed, it is born of the meeting, and would not otherwise have been called into existence at all. These not only know themselves more, but _are_ more for having met, and regions of their being, which would else have laid sealed in cold obstruction, burst into leaf and bloom and song. 'The times of these meetings are fated, nor will either party be able ever to meet any other person in the same way. Both seem to rise at a glance into that part of the heavens where the word can be spoken, by which they are revealed to one another and to themselves. The step in being thus gained, can never be lost, nor can it be re-trod; for neither party will be again what the other wants. They are no longer fit to interchange mutual influence, for they do not really need it, and if they think they do, it is because they weakly pine after a past pleasure. 'To this inmost circle of relations but few are admitted, because some prejudice or lack of courage has prevented the many from listening to their instincts the first time they manifested themselves. If the voice is once disregarded it becomes fainter each time, till, at last, it is wholly silenced, and the man lives in this world, a stranger to its real life, deluded like the maniac who fancies he has attained his throne, while in reality he is on a bed of musty straw. Yet, if the voice finds a listener and servant the first time of speaking, it is encouraged to more and more clearness. Thus it was with me,--from no merit of mine, but because I had the good fortune to be free enough to yield to my impressions. Common ties had not bound me; there were no traditionary notions in my mind; I believed in nothing merely because others believed in it; I had taken no feelings on trust. Thus my mind was open to their sway. 'This woman came to me, a star from the east, a morning star, and I worshipped her. She too was elevated by that worship, and her fairest self called out. To the mind she brought assurance that there was a region congenial with its tendencies and tastes, a region of elegant culture and intercourse, whose object, fulfilled or not, was to gratify the sense of beauty, not the mere utilities of life. In our relation she was lifted to the top of her being. She had known many celebrities, had roused to passionate desire many hearts, and became afterwards a wife; but I do not believe she ever more truly realized her best self than towards the lonely child whose heaven she was, whose eye she met, and whose possibilities she predicted. "He raised me," said a woman inspired by love, "upon the pedestal of his own high thoughts, and wings came at once, but I did not fly away. I stood there with downcast eyes worthy of his love, for he had made me so." 'Thus we do always for those who inspire us to expect from them the best. That which they are able to be, they become, because we demand it of them. "We expect the impossible--and find it." 'My English friend went across the sea. She passed into her former life, and into ties that engrossed her days. But she has never ceased to think of me. Her thoughts turn forcibly back to the child who was to her all she saw of the really New World. On the promised coasts she had found only cities, careful men and women, the aims and habits of ordinary life in her own land, without that elegant culture which she, probably, over-estimated, because it was her home. But in the mind of the child she found the fresh prairie, the untrodden forests for which she had longed. I saw in her the storied castles, the fair stately parks and the wind laden with tones from the past, which I desired to know. We wrote to one another for many years;--her shallow and delicate epistles did not disenchant me, nor did she fail to see something of the old poetry in my rude characters and stammering speech. But we must never meet again. 'When this friend was withdrawn I fell into a profound depression. I knew not how to exert myself, but lay bound hand and foot. Melancholy enfolded me in an atmosphere, as joy had done. This suffering, too, was out of the gradual and natural course. Those who are really children could not know such love, or feel such sorrow. "I am to blame," said my father, "in keeping her at home so long merely to please myself. She needs to be with other girls, needs play and variety. She does not seem to me really sick, but dull rather. She eats nothing, you say. I see she grows thin. She ought to change the scene." 'I was indeed _dull_. The books, the garden, had lost all charm. I had the excuse of headache, constantly, for not attending to my lessons. The light of life was set, and every leaf was withered. At such an early age there are no back or side scenes where the mind, weary and sorrowful, may retreat. Older, we realize the width of the world more, and it is not easy to despair on any point. The effort at thought to which we are compelled relieves and affords a dreary retreat, like hiding in a brick-kiln till the shower be over. But then all joy seemed to have departed with my friend, and the emptiness of our house stood revealed. This I had not felt while I every day expected to see or had seen her, or annoyance and dulness were unnoticed or swallowed up in the one thought that clothed my days with beauty. But now she was gone, and I was roused from habits of reading or reverie to feel the fiery temper of the soul, and to learn that it must have vent, that it would not be pacified by shadows, neither meet without consuming what lay around it. I avoided the table as much as possible, took long walks and lay in bed, or on the floor of my room. I complained of my head, and it was not wrong to do so, for a sense of dulness and suffocation, if not pain, was there constantly. 'But when it was proposed that I should go to school, that was a remedy I could not listen to with patience for a moment. The peculiarity of my education had separated me entirely from the girls around, except that when they were playing at active games, I would sometimes go out and join them. I liked violent bodily exercise, which always relieved my nerves. But I had no success in associating with them beyond the mere play. Not only I was not their school-mate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a hauteur which turned all hearts away. Yet, as this reserve was superficial, and rather ignorance than arrogance, it produced no deep dislike. Besides, the girls supposed me really superior to themselves, and did not hate me for feeling it, but neither did they like me, nor wish to have me with them. Indeed, I had gradually given up all such wishes myself; for they seemed to me rude, tiresome, and childish, as I did to them dull and strange. This experience had been earlier, before I was admitted to any real friendship; but now that I had been lifted into the life of mature years, and into just that atmosphere of European life to which I had before been tending, the thought of sending me to school filled me with disgust. 'Yet what could I tell my father of such feelings? I resisted all I could, but in vain. He had no faith in medical aid generally, and justly saw that this was no occasion for its use. He thought I needed change of scene, and to be roused to activity by other children. "I have kept you at home," he said, "because I took such pleasure in teaching you myself, and besides I knew that you would learn faster with one who is so desirous to aid you. But you will learn fast enough wherever you are, and you ought to be more with others of your own age. I shall soon hear that you are better, I trust."' SCHOOL-LIFE. The school to which Margaret was sent was that of the Misses Prescott, in Groton, Massachusetts. And her experience there has been described with touching truthfulness by herself, in the story of "Mariana."[A] 'At first her school-mates were captivated with her ways; her love of wild dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and of wit. She was always new, always surprising, and, for a time, charming. 'But after a while, they tired of her. She could never be depended on to join in their plans, yet she expected them, to follow out hers with their whole strength. She was very loving, even infatuated in her own affections, and exacted from those who had professed any love for her the devotion she was willing to bestow. 'Yet there was a vein of haughty caprice in her character, and a love of solitude, which made her at times wish to retire apart, and at these times she would expect to be entirely understood, and let alone, yet to be welcomed back when she returned. She did not thwart others in their humors, but she never doubted of great indulgence from them. 'Some singular habits she had, which, when new, charmed, but, after acquaintance, displeased her companions. She had by nature the same habit and power of excitement that is described in the spinning dervishes of the East. Like them she would spin until all around her were giddy, while her own brain, instead of being disturbed, was excited to great action. Pausing, she would declaim, verses of others, or her own, or act many parts, with strange catchwords and burdens, that seemed to act with mystical power on her own fancy, sometimes stimulating her to convulse the hearers with laughter, sometimes to melt them to tears. When her power began to languish, she would spin again till fired to re-commence her singular drama, into which she wove figures from the scenes of her earlier childhood, her companions, and the dignitaries she sometimes saw, with fantasies unknown to life, unknown to heaven or earth. 'This excitement, as may be supposed, was not good for her. It usually came on in the evening, and often spoiled her sleep. She would wake in the night, and cheat her restlessness by inventions that teased, while they sometimes diverted her companions. 'She was also a sleep-walker; and this one trait of her case did somewhat alarm her guardians, who, otherwise, showed the profound ignorance as to this peculiar being, usual in the overseeing of the young. They consulted a physician, who said she would outgrow it, and prescribed a milk diet. 'Meantime, the fever of this ardent and too early stimulated nature was constantly increased by the restraints and narrow routine of the boarding school. She was always devising means to break in upon it. She had a taste--which would have seemed ludicrous to her mates, if they had not felt some awe of her, from the touch of genius and power that never left her--for costume and fancy dresses. There was always some sash twisted about her, some drapery, something odd in the arrangement of her hair and dress; so that the methodical preceptress dared not let her go out without a careful scrutiny and remodelling, whose soberizing effects generally disappeared the moment she was in the free air. 'At last a vent was assured for her in private theatricals. Play followed play, and in these and the rehearsals, she found entertainment congenial with her. The principal parts, as a matter of course, fell to her lot; most of the good suggestions and arrangements came from her: and, for a time, she ruled mostly, and shone triumphant. 'During these performances, the girls had heightened their bloom with artificial red; this was delightful to them, it was something so out of the way. But Mariana, after the plays were over, kept her carmine saucer on the dressing-table, and put on her blushes, regularly as the morning. When stared and jeered at, she at first said she did it because she thought it made her look pretty; but, after a while, she became petulant about it,--would make no reply to any joke, but merely kept up the habit. 'This irritated the girls, as all eccentricity does the world in general, more than vice or malignity. They talked it over among themselves till they were wrought up to a desire of punishing, once for all, this sometimes amusing, but so often provoking non-conformist. And having obtained leave of the mistress, they laid, with great glee, a plan, one evening, which was to be carried into execution next day at dinner. 'Among Mariana's irregularities was a great aversion to the meal-time ceremonial,--so long, so tiresome, she found it, to be seated at a certain moment, and to wait while each one was served, at so large a table, where there was scarcely any conversation; and from day to day it became more heavy to sit there, or go there at all; often as possible she excused herself on the ever-convenient plea of headache, and was hardly ever ready when the dinner-bell rang. 'To-day the summons found her on the balcony, but gazing on the beautiful prospect. I have heard her say afterwards, that she had scarcely in her life been so happy,--and she was one with whom happiness was a still rapture. It was one of the most blessed summer days; the shadows of great white clouds empurpled the distant hills for a few moments, only to leave them more golden; the tall grass of the wide fields waved in the softest breeze. Pure blue were the heavens, and the same hue of pure contentment was in the heart of Mariana. 'Suddenly on her bright mood jarred the dinner-bell. At first rose her usual thought, I will not, cannot go; and then the _must_, which daily life can always enforce, even upon the butterflies and birds, came, and she walked reluctantly to her room. She merely changed her dress, and never thought of adding the artificial rose to her cheek. 'When she took her seat in the dining-hall, and was asked if she would be helped, raising her eyes, she saw the person who asked her was deeply rouged, with a bright glaring spot, perfectly round, on either cheek. She looked at the next,--same apparition! She then slowly passed her eyes down the whole line, and saw the same, with a suppressed smile distorting every countenance. Catching the design at once, she deliberately looked along her own side of the table, at every schoolmate in turn; every one had joined in the trick. The teachers strove to be grave, but she saw they enjoyed the joke. The servants could not suppress a titter. 'When Warren Hastings stood at the bar of Westminster Hall,--when the Methodist preacher walked through a line of men, each of whom greeted him with a brickbat or rotten egg,--they had some preparation for the crisis, though it might be very difficult to meet it with an impassible brow. Our little girl was quite unprepared to find herself in the midst of a world which despised her, and triumphed in her disgrace. 'She had ruled like a queen, in the midst of her companions; she had shed her animation through their lives, and loaded them with prodigal favors, nor once suspected that a popular favorite might not be loved. Now she felt that she had been but a dangerous plaything in the hands of those whose hearts she never had doubted. 'Yet the occasion found her equal to it, for Mariana had the kind of spirit which, in a better cause, had made the Roman matron truly say of her death-wound, "It is not painful, Poetus." She did not blench,--she did not change countenance. She swallowed her dinner with apparent composure. She made remarks to those near her, as if she had no eyes. 'The wrath of the foe, of course, rose higher, and the moment they were freed from the restraints of the dining room, they all ran off, gayly calling, and sarcastically laughing, with backward glances, at Mariana, left alone. 'Alone she went to her room, locked the door, and threw herself on the floor in strong convulsions. These had sometimes threatened her life, in earlier childhood, but of later years she had outgrown them. School-hours came, and she was not there. A little girl, sent to her door, could get no answer. The teachers became alarmed, and broke it open. Bitter was their penitence, and that of her companions, at the state in which they found her. For some hours terrible anxiety was felt, but at last nature, exhausted, relieved herself by a deep slumber. 'From this Mariana arose an altered being. She made no reply to the expressions of sorrow from her companions, none to the grave and kind, but undiscerning, comments of her teacher. She did not name the source of her anguish, and its poisoned dart sank deeply in. This was the thought which stung her so:--"What, not one, not a single one, in the hour of trial, to take my part? not one who refused to take part against me?" Past words of love, and caresses, little heeded at the time, rose to her memory, and gave fuel to her distempered heart. Beyond the sense of burning resentment at universal perfidy, she could not get. And Mariana, born for love, now hated all the world. 'The change, however, which these feelings made in her conduct and appearance, bore no such construction to the careless observer. Her gay freaks were quite gone, her wildness, her invention. Her dress was uniform, her manner much subdued. Her chief interest seemed to be now in her studies, and in music. Her companions she never sought; but they, partly from uneasy, remorseful feelings, partly that they really liked her much better now that she did not puzzle and oppress them, sought her continually. And here the black shadow comes upon her life, the only stain upon the history of Mariana. 'They talked to her, as girls having few topics naturally do, of one another. Then the demon rose within her, and spontaneously, without design, generally without words of positive falsehood, she became a genius of discord amongst them. She fanned those flames of envy and jealousy which a wise, true word from a third person will often quench forever; and by a glance, or seemingly light reply, she planted the seeds of dissension, till there was scarcely a peaceful affection, or sincere intimacy, in the circle where she lived, and could not but rule, for she was one whose nature was to that of the others as fire to clay. 'It was at this time that I came to the school, and first saw Mariana. Me she charmed at once, for I was a sentimental child, who, in my early ill health, had been indulged in reading novels, till I had no eyes for the common. It was not, however, easy to approach her. Did I offer to run and fetch her handkerchief, she was obliged to go to her room, and would rather do it herself. She did not like to have people turn over for her the leaves of the music-book as she played. Did I approach my stool to her feet, she moved away as if to give me room. The bunch of wild flowers, which I timidly laid beside her plate, was left untouched. After some weeks, my desire to attract her notice really preyed upon me; and one day, meeting her alone in the entry, I fell upon my knees, and, kissing her hand, cried "O, Mariana, do let me love you, and try to love me a little!" But my idol snatched away her hand, and laughing wildly, ran into her room. After that day, her manner to me was not only cold, but repulsive, and I felt myself scorned. 'Perhaps four months had passed thus, when, one afternoon, it became obvious that something more than common was brewing. Dismay and mystery were written in many faces of the older girls; much whispering was going on in corners. 'In the evening, after prayers, the principal bade us stay; and, in a grave, sad voice, summoned forth Mariana to answer charges to be made against her. 'Mariana stood up and leaned against the chimney-piece. Then eight of the older girls came forward, and preferred against her charges,--alas! too well founded, of calumny and falsehood. 'At first, she defended herself with self-possession and eloquence. But when she found she could no more resist the truth, she suddenly threw herself down, dashing her head with all her force against the iron hearth, on which a fire was burning, and was taken up senseless. 'The affright of those present was great. Now that they had perhaps killed her, they reflected it would have been as well if they had taken warning from the former occasion, and approached very carefully a nature so capable of any extreme. After a while she revived, with a faint groan, amid the sobs of her companions. I was on my knees by the bed, and held her cold hand. One of those most aggrieved took it from me, to beg her pardon, and say, it was impossible not to love her. She made no reply. 'Neither that night, nor for several days, could a word be obtained from her, nor would she touch food; but, when it was presented to her, or any one drew near from any cause, she merely turned away her head, and gave no sign. The teacher saw that some terrible nervous affection had fallen upon her--that she grew more and more feverish. She knew not what to do. 'Meanwhile, a new revolution had taken place in the mind of the passionate but nobly-tempered child. All these months nothing but the sense of injury had rankled in her heart. She had gone on in one mood, doing what the demon prompted, without scruple, and without fear. 'But at the moment of detection, the tide ebbed, and the bottom of her soul lay revealed to her eye. How black, how stained, and sad! Strange, strange, that she had not seen before the baseness and cruelty of falsehood, the loveliness of truth! Now, amid the wreck, uprose the moral nature, which never before had attained the ascendant. "But," she thought, "too late sin is revealed to me in all its deformity, and sin-defiled, I will not, cannot live. The main-spring of life is broken." 'The lady who took charge of this sad child had never well understood her before, but had always looked on her with great tenderness. And now love seemed,--when all around were in the greatest distress, fearing to call in medical aid, fearing to do without it,--to teach her where the only balm was to be found that could heal the wounded spirit. 'One night she came in, bringing a calming draught. Mariana was sitting as usual, her hair loose, her dress the same robe they had put on her at first, her eyes fixed vacantly upon the whited wall. To the proffers and entreaties of her nurse, she made no reply. 'The lady burst into tears, but Mariana did not seem even to observe it. 'The lady then said, "O, my child, do not despair; do not think that one great fault can mar a whole life! Let me trust you; let me tell you the griefs of my sad life. I will tell you, Mariana, what I never expected to impart to any one." 'And so she told her tale. It was one of pain, of shame, borne not for herself, but for one near and dear as herself. Mariana knew the dignity and reserve of this lady's nature. She had often admired to see how the cheek, lovely, but no longer young, mantled with the deepest blush of youth, and the blue eyes were cast down at any little emotion. She had understood the proud sensibility of her character. She fixed her eyes on those now raised to hers, bright with fast-falling tears. She heard the story to the end, and then, without saying a word, stretched out her hand for the cup. 'She returned to life, but it was as one who had passed through the valley of death. The heart of stone was quite broken in her,--the fiery will fallen from flame to coal. When her strength was a little restored, she had all her companions summoned, and said to them,--"I deserved to die, but a generous trust has called me back to life. I will be worthy of it, nor ever betray the trust, or resent injury more. Can you forgive the past?" 'And they not only forgave, but, with love and earnest tears, clasped in their arms the returning sister. They vied with one another in offices of humble love to the humbled one; and let it be recorded, as an instance of the pure honor of which young hearts are capable, that these facts, known to some forty persons, never, so far as I know, transpired beyond those walls. 'It was not long after this that Mariana was summoned home. She went thither a wonderfully instructed being, though in ways those who had sent her forth to learn little dreamed of. 'Never was forgotten the vow of the returning prodigal. Mariana could not _resent_, could not _play false._ The terrible crisis, which she so early passed through, probably prevented the world from hearing much of her. A wild fire was tamed in that hour of penitence at the boarding-school, such as has oftentimes wrapped court and camp in a destructive glow.' [Footnote A: Summer on the Lakes, p. 81.] SELF-CULTURE. Letters written to the beloved teacher, who so wisely befriended Margaret in her trial-hour, will best show how this high-spirited girl sought to enlarge and harmonize her powers. '_Cambridge, July 11, 1825._--Having excused myself from accompanying my honored father to church, which I always do in the afternoon, when possible, I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes,--as, lying on my writing-desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week to their owner. 'You keep me to my promise of giving you some sketch of my pursuits. I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano, till seven, when we breakfast. Next I read French,--Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe,--till eight, then two or three lectures in Brown's Philosophy. About half-past nine I go to Mr. Perkins's school and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, if the conversation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an hour over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but I am often interrupted. At six, I walk, or take a drive. Before going to bed, I play or sing, for half an hour or so, to make all sleepy, and, about eleven, retire to write a little while in my journal, exercises on what I have read, or a series of characteristics which I am filling up according to advice. Thus, you see, I am learning Greek, and making acquaintance with metaphysics, and French and Italian literature. '"How," you will say, "can I believe that my indolent, fanciful, pleasure-loving pupil, perseveres in such a course?" I feel the power of industry growing every day, and, besides the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately given through a friend, I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable. I am determined on distinction, which formerly I thought to win at an easy rate; but now I see that long years of labor must be given to secure even the "_succès de societé_,"--which, however, shall never content me. I see multitudes of examples of persons of genius, utterly deficient in grace and the power of pleasurable excitement. I wish to combine both. I know the obstacles in my way. I am wanting in that intuitive tact and polish, which nature has bestowed upon some, but which I must acquire. And, on the other hand, my powers of intellect, though sufficient, I suppose, are not well disciplined. Yet all such hindrances may be overcome by an ardent spirit. If I fail, my consolation shall be found in active employment.' * * * * * '_Cambridge, March 5, 1826._--Duke Nicholas is to succeed the Emperor Alexander, thus relieving Europe from the sad apprehension of evil to be inflicted by the brutal Constantine, and yet depriving the Holy Alliance of its very soul. We may now hope more strongly for the liberties of unchained Europe; we look in anxious suspense for the issue of the struggle of Greece, the result of which seems to depend on the new autocrat. I have lately been reading Anastasius, the Greek Gil Bias, which has excited and delighted me; but I do not think you like works of this cast. You did not like my sombre and powerful Ormond,--though this is superior to Ormond in every respect; it translates you to another scene, hurls you into the midst of the burning passions of the East, whose vicissitudes are, however, interspersed by deep pauses of shadowy reflective scenes, which open upon you like the green watered little vales occasionally to be met with in the burning desert. There is enough of history to fix profoundly the attention, and prevent you from revolting from scenes profligate and terrific, and such characters as are never to be met with in our paler climes. How delighted am I to read a book which can absorb me to tears and shuddering,--not by individual traits of beauty, but by the spirit of adventure,--happiness which one seldom enjoys after childhood in this blest age, so philosophic, free, and enlightened to a miracle, but far removed from the ardent dreams and soft credulity of the world's youth. Sometimes I think I would give all our gains for those times when young and old gathered in the feudal hall, listening with soul-absorbing transport to the romance of the minstrel, unrestrained and regardless of criticism, and when they worshipped nature, not as high-dressed and pampered, but as just risen from the bath.' '_Cambridge, May 14, 1826._--I am studying Madame de Stael, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Castiliain ballads, with great delight. There's an assemblage for you. Now tell me, had you rather be the brilliant De Stael or the useful Edgeworth?--though De Stael is useful too, but it is on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles, and has not the immediate practical success that Edgeworth has. I met with a parallel the other day between Byron and Rousseau, and had a mind to send it to you, it was so excellent.' * * * * * '_Cambridge, Jan. 10, 1827._--As to my studies, I am engrossed in reading the elder Italian poets, beginning with Berni, from whom I shall proceed to Pulci and Politian. I read very critically. Miss Francis[A] and I think of reading Locke, as introductory to a course of English metaphysics, and then De Stael on Locke's system. Allow me to introduce this lady to you as a most interesting woman, in my opinion. She is a natural person,--a most rare thing in this age of cant and pretension. Her conversation is charming,--she brings all her powers to bear upon it; her style is varied, and she has a very pleasant and spirited way of thinking. I should judge, too, that she possesses peculiar purity of mind. I am going to spend this evening with her, and wish you were to be with us.' * * * * * '_Cambridge, Jan. 3, 1828._--I am reading Sir William Temple's works, with great pleasure. Such enlarged views are rarely to be found combined with such acuteness and discrimination. His style, though diffuse, is never verbose or overloaded, but beautifully expressive; 'tis English, too, though he was an accomplished linguist, and wrote much and well in. French, Spanish, and Latin. The latter he used, as he says of the Bishop of Munster, (with whom he corresponded in that tongue,) "more like a man of the court and of business than a scholar." He affected not Augustan niceties, but his expressions are free and appropriate. I have also read a most entertaining book, which I advise you to read, (if you have not done so already,) Russell's Tour in Germany. There you will find more intelligent and detailed accounts than I have seen anywhere of the state of the German universities, Viennese court, secret associations, Plica Polonica, and other very interesting matters. There is a minute account of the representative government given to his subjects by the Duke of Weimar. I have passed a luxurious afternoon, having been in bed from dinner till tea, reading Rammohun Roy's book, and framing dialogues aloud on every argument beneath the sun. Really, I have not had my mind so exercised for months; and I have felt a gladiatorial disposition lately, and don't enjoy mere light conversation. The love of knowledge is prodigiously kindled within my soul of late; I study much and reflect more, and feel an aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully and openly. 'Did you ever read the letters and reflections of Prince de Ligne, the most agreeable man of his day? I have just had it, and if it is new to you, I recommend it as an agreeable book to read at night just before you go to bed. There is much curious matter concerning Catharine II.'s famous expedition into Taurida, which puts down some of the romantic stories prevalent on that score, but relates more surprising realities. Also it gives much interesting information about that noble philosopher, Joseph II., and about the Turkish tactics and national character.' * * * * * '_Cambridge, Jan. 1830_.--You need not fear to revive painful recollections. I often think of those sad experiences. True, they agitate me deeply. But it was best so. They have had a most powerful effect on my character. I tremble at whatever looks like dissimulation. The remembrance of that evening subdues every proud, passionate impulse. My beloved supporter in those sorrowful hours, your image shines as fair to my mind's eye as it did in 1825, when I left you with my heart overflowing with gratitude for your singular and judicious tenderness. Can I ever forget that to your treatment in that crisis of youth I owe the true life,--the love of Truth and Honor?' [Footnote A: Lydia Maria Child.] LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE. BY JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. * * * * * "Extraordinary, generous seeking." GOETHE. "Through, brothers, through,--this be Our watchword in danger or sorrow, Common clay to its mother dust, All nobleness heavenward!" THEODORE KOERNER. "Thou friend whose presence on my youthful heart Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain; How beautiful and calm and free thou wert In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain, And walk as free as light the clouds among!" SHELLY. "There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the case with the despotism of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living. It is a struggle, indeed, between unequal powers,--between the man, who is a conscious moral person, and nature, or events, or bodies of men, which either want personality or unity; and hence the man, after fearful and desolating war, sometimes rises on the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the prescriptions of society. But what these want in personality they possess in number, in recurrency, in invulnerability. The spirit of man, an agent indeed of curious power and boundless resource, but trembling with sensibilities, tender and irritable, goes out against the inexorable conditions of destiny, the lifeless forces of nature, or the ferocious cruelty of the multitude, and long before the hands are weary or the invention exhausted, the heart may be broken in the warfare." N.A. REVIEW, Jan., 1817, article "_Dichtung und Wahrheit_." II. CAMBRIDGE * * * * * The difficulty which we all feel in describing our past intercourse and friendship with Margaret Fuller, is, that the intercourse was so intimate, and the friendship so personal, that it is like making a confession to the public of our most interior selves. For this noble person, by her keen insight and her generous interest, entered into the depth of every soul with which she stood in any real relation. To print one of her letters, is like giving an extract from our own private journal. To relate what she was to us, is to tell how she discerned elements of worth and beauty where others could only have seen what was common-place and poor; it is to say what high hopes, what generous assurance, what a pure ambition, she entertained on our behalf,--a hope and confidence which may well be felt as a rebuke to our low attainments and poor accomplishments. Nevertheless, it seems due to this great soul that those of us who have been blessed and benefited by her friendship should be willing to say what she has done for us,--undeterred by the thought that to reveal her is to expose ourselves. My acquaintance with Sarah Margaret Fuller began in 1829. We both lived in Cambridge, and from that time until she went to Groton to reside, in 1833, I saw her, or heard from her, almost every day. There was a family connection, and we called each other cousin.[A] During this period, her intellect was intensely active. With what eagerness did she seek for knowledge! What fire, what exuberance, what reach, grasp, overflow of thought, shone in her conversation! She needed a friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express the ideas which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted me for this friend, and to me it was a gift of the gods, an influence like no other. For the first few months of our acquaintance, our intercourse was simply that of two young persons seeking entertainment in each other's society. Perhaps a note written at this time will illustrate the easy and graceful movement of her mind in this superficial kind of intercourse. '_March 16th, 1830. Half-past six, morning_.--I have encountered that most common-place of glories, sunrise, (to say naught of being praised and wondered at by every member of the family in succession,) that I might have leisure to answer your note even as you requested. I thank you a thousand times for "The Rivals."[B] Alas!! I must leave my heart in the book, and spend the livelong morning in reading to a sick lady from some amusing story-book. I tell you of this act of (in my professedly unamiable self) most unwonted charity, for three several reasons. Firstly, and foremostly, because I think that you, being a socialist by vocation, a sentimentalist by nature, and a Channingite from force of circumstances and fashion, will peculiarly admire this little self-sacrifice exploit. Secondly, because 'tis neither conformable to the spirit of the nineteenth century, nor the march of mind, that those churlish reserves should be kept up between _the right and left hands_, which belonged to ages of barbarism and prejudice, and could only have been inculcated for their use. Thirdly, and lastly, the true ladylike reason,--because I would fain have my correspondent enter into and sympathize with my feelings of the moment. 'As to the relationship; 'tis, I find, on inquiry, by no means to be compared with that between myself and ----; of course, the intimacy cannot be so great. But no matter; it will enable me to answer your notes, and you will interest my imagination much more than if I knew you better. But I am exceeding legitimate note-writing limits. With a hope that this epistle may be legible to your undiscerning eyes, I conclude, 'Your cousin only thirty-seven degrees removed, 'M.' The next note which I shall give was written not many days after, and is in quite a different vein. It is memorable to me as laying the foundation of a friendship which brought light to my mind, which enlarged my heart, and gave elevation and energy to my aims and purposes. For nearly twenty years, Margaret remained true to the pledges of this note. In a few years we were separated, but our friendship remained firm. Living in different parts of the country, occupied with different thoughts and duties, making other friends,--sometimes not seeing nor hearing from each other for months,--we never met without my feeling that she was ready to be interested in all my thoughts, to love those whom I loved, to watch my progress, to rebuke my faults and follies, to encourage within me every generous and pure aspiration, to demand of me, always, the best that I could be or do, and to be satisfied with no mediocrity, no conformity to any low standard. And what she thus was to me, she was to many others. Inexhaustible in power of insight, and with a good-will "broad as ether," she could enter into the needs, and sympathize with the various excellences, of the greatest variety of characters. One thing only she demanded of all her friends,--that they should have some "extraordinary generous seeking,"[C] that they should not be satisfied with the common routine of life,--that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained. Where this element of aspiration existed, she demanded no originality of intellect, no greatness of soul. If these were found, well; but she could love, tenderly and truly, where they were not. But for a worldly character, however gifted, she felt and expressed something very like contempt. At this period, she had no patience with self-satisfied mediocrity. She afterwards learned patience and unlearned contempt; but at the time of which I write, she seemed, and was to the multitude, a haughty and supercilious person,--while to those whom she loved, she was all the more gentle, tender and true. Margaret possessed, in a greater degree than any person I ever knew, the power of so magnetizing others, when she wished, by the power of her mind, that they would lay open to her all the secrets of their nature. She had an infinite curiosity to know individuals,--not the vulgar curiosity which seeks to find out the circumstances of their outward lives, but that which longs to understand the inward springs of thought and action in their souls. This desire and power both rested on a profound conviction of her mind in the individuality of every human being. A human being, according to her faith, was not the result of the presence and stamp of outward circumstances, but an original _monad_, with a certain special faculty, capable of a certain fixed development, and having a profound personal unity, which the ages of eternity might develop, but could not exhaust. I know not if she would have stated her faith in these terms, but some such conviction appeared in her constant endeavor to see and understand the germinal principle, the special characteristic, of every person whom she deemed worthy of knowing at all. Therefore, while some persons study human nature in its universal laws, and become great philosophers, moralists and teachers of the race,--while others study mankind in action, and, seeing the motives and feelings by which masses are swayed, become eminent politicians, sagacious leaders, and eminent in all political affairs,--a few, like Margaret, study character, and acquire the power of exerting profoundest influence on individual souls. I had expressed to her my desire to know something of the history of her mind,--to understand her aims, her hopes, her views of life. In a note written in reply, she answered me thus:-- 'I cannot bring myself to write you what you wished. You would be disappointed, at any rate, after all the solemn note of preparation; the consciousness of this would chill me now. Besides, I cannot be willing to leave with you such absolute _vagaries_ in a tangible, examinable shape. I think of your after-smiles, of your colder moods. But I will tell you, when a fitting opportunity presents, all that can interest you, and perhaps more. And excuse my caution. I do not profess, I may not dare, to be generous in these matters.' To this I replied to the effect that, "in my coldest mood I could not criticize words written in a confiding spirit;" and that, at all events, she must not expect of me a confidence which she dared not return. This was the substance of a note to which Margaret thus replied:-- 'I thank you for your note. Ten minutes before I received it, I scarcely thought that anything again would make my stifled heart throb so warm a pulse of pleasure. Excuse my cold doubts, my selfish arrogance,--you will, when I tell you that this experiment has before had such uniform results; those who professed to seek my friendship, and whom, indeed, I have often truly loved, have always learned to content themselves with that inequality in the connection which I have never striven to veil. Indeed, I have thought myself more valued and better beloved, because the sympathy, the interest, were all on my side. True! such regard could never flatter my pride, nor gratify my affections, since it was paid not to myself, but to the need they had of me; still, it was dear and pleasing, as it has given me an opportunity of knowing and serving many lovely characters; and I cannot see that there is anything else for me to do on earth. And I should rejoice to cultivate generosity, since (see that _since_) affections gentler and more sympathetic are denied me. 'I would have been a true friend to you; ever ready to solace your pains and partake your joy as far as possible. Yet I cannot but rejoice that I have met a person who could discriminate and reject a proffer of this sort. Two years ago I should have ventured to proffer you friendship, indeed, on seeing such an instance of pride in you; but I have gone through a sad process of feeling since, and those emotions, so necessarily repressed, have lost their simplicity, their ardent beauty. _Then_, there was nothing I might not have disclosed to a person capable of comprehending, had I ever seen such an one! Now there are many voices of the soul which I imperiously silence. This results not from any particular circumstance or event, but from a gradual ascertaining of realities. 'I cannot promise you any limitless confidence, but I _can_ promise that no timid caution, no haughty dread shall prevent my telling you the truth of my thoughts on any subject we may have in common. Will this satisfy you? Oh let it! suffer me to know you.' In a postscript she adds, 'No other cousin or friend of any style is to see this note.' So for twenty years it has lain unseen, but for twenty years did we remain true to the pledges of that period. And now that noble heart sleeps beneath the tossing Atlantic, and I feel no reluctance in showing to the world this expression of pure youthful ardor. It may, perhaps, lead some wise worldlings, who doubt the possibility of such a relation, to reconsider the grounds of their scepticism; or, if not that, it may encourage some youthful souls, as earnest and eager as ours, to trust themselves to their hearts' impulse, and enjoy some such blessing as came to us. Let me give extracts from other notes and letters, written by Margaret, about the same period. '_Saturday evening, May 1st_, 1830.--The holy moon and merry-toned wind of this night woo to a vigil at the open window; a half-satisfied interest urges me to live, love and perish! in the noble, wronged heart of Basil;[D] my Journal, which lies before me, tempts to follow out and interpret the as yet only half-understood musings of the past week. Letter-writing, compared with any of these things, takes the ungracious semblance of a duty. I have, nathless, after a two hours' reverie, to which this resolve and its preliminaries have formed excellent warp, determined to sacrifice this hallowed time to you. 'It did not in the least surprise me that you found it impossible at the time to avail yourself of the confidential privileges I had invested you with. On the contrary, I only wonder that we should ever, after such gage given and received, (not by a look or tone, but by letter,) hold any frank communication. Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous. I felt this even before I sent my note, but could not persuade myself to consign an impulse so embodied, to oblivion, from any consideration of expediency.' * * * * * * * '_May 4th_, 1830.--* * I have greatly wished to see among us such a person of genius as the nineteenth century can afford--_i.e._, one who has tasted in the morning of existence the extremes of good and ill, both imaginative and real. I had imagined a person endowed by nature with that acute sense of Beauty, (_i.e._, Harmony or Truth,) and that vast capacity of desire, which give soul to love and ambition. I had wished this person might grow up to manhood alone (but not alone in crowds); I would have placed him in a situation so retired, so obscure, that he would quietly, but without bitter sense of isolation, stand apart from all surrounding him. I would have had him go on steadily, feeding his mind with congenial love, hopefully confident that if he only nourished his existence into perfect life, Fate would, at fitting season, furnish an atmosphere and orbit meet for his breathing and exercise. I wished he might adore, not fever for, the bright phantoms of his mind's creation, and believe them but the shadows of external things to be met with hereafter. After this steady intellectual growth had brought his powers to manhood, so far as the ideal can do it, I wished this being might be launched into the world of realities, his heart glowing with the ardor of an immortal toward perfection, his eyes searching everywhere to behold it; I wished he might collect into one burning point those withering, palsying convictions, which, in the ordinary routine of things, so gradually pervade the soul; that he might suffer, in brief space, agonies of disappointment commensurate with his unpreparedness and confidence. And I thought, thus thrown back on the representing pictorial resources I supposed him originally to possess, with such material, and the need he must feel of using it, such a man would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory,--a centre, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally,--a man fitted to act as interpreter to the one tale of many-languaged eyes! 'What words are these! Perhaps you will feel as if I sought but for the longest and strongest. Yet to my ear they do but faintly describe the imagined powers of such a being.' Margaret's home at this time was in the mansion-house formerly belonging to Judge Dana,--a large, old-fashioned building, since taken down, standing about a quarter of a mile from the Cambridge Colleges, on the main road to Boston. The house stood back from the road, on rising ground, which overlooked an extensive landscape. It was always a pleasure to Margaret to look at the outlines of the distant hills beyond the river, and to have before her this extent of horizon and sky. In the last year of her residence in Cambridge, her father moved to the old Brattle place,--a still more ancient edifice, with large, old-fashioned garden, and stately rows of Linden trees. Here Margaret enjoyed the garden walks, which took the place of the extensive view. During these five years her life was not diversified by events, but was marked by an inward history. Study, conversation, society, friendship, and reflection on the aim and law of life, made up her biography. Accordingly, these topics will constitute the substance of this chapter, though sometimes, in order to give completeness to a subject, we may anticipate a little, and insert passages from the letters and journals of her Groton life. [Footnote A: I had once before seen Margaret, when we were both children about five years of age. She made an impression on my mind which was never effaced, and I distinctly recollect the joyful child, with light flowing locks and bright face, who led me by the hand down the back-steps of her house into the garden. This was when her father lived in Cambridgeport, in a house on Cherry street, in front of which still stand some handsome trees, planted by him in the year of Margaret's birth.] [Footnote B: "The Rivals" was a novel I had lent her,--if I remember right, by the author of "The Collegians;" a writer who in those days interested us not a little.] [Footnote C: These words of Goethe, which I have placed among the mottoes at the beginning of this chapter, were written by Margaret on the first page of a richly gilt and bound blank book, which she gave to me, in 1832, for a private journal. The words of Körner are also translated by herself, and were given to me about the same time.] [Footnote D: The hero of a novel she was reading.] I. FRIENDSHIP. "Friendly love perfecteth mankind." BACON. "To have found favor in thy sight Will still remain A river of thought, that full of light Divides the plain." MILNES. "Cui potest vita esse vitalis, (ut ait Ennius,) quæ non in amici mutatâ benevolentiâ requiescat?"--CICERO. * * * * * It was while living at Cambridge that Margaret commenced several of those friendships which lasted through her life, and which were the channels for so large a part of her spiritual activity. In giving some account of her in these relations, there is only the alternative of a prudent reserve which omits whatever is liable to be misunderstood, or a frank utterance which confides in the good sense and right feeling of the reader. By the last course, we run the risk of allowing our friend to be misunderstood; but by the first we make it certain that the most important part of her character shall not be understood at all. I have, therefore, thought it best to follow, as far as I can, her own ideas on this subject, which I find in two of her letters to myself. The first is dated, Groton, Jan. 8th, 1839. I was at that time editing a theological and literary magazine, in the West, and this letter was occasioned by my asking her to allow me to publish therein certain poems, and articles of hers, which she had given me to read. 'And I wish now, as far as I can, to give my reasons for what you consider absurd squeamishness in me. You may not acquiesce in my view, but I think you will respect it _as_ mine and be willing to act upon it so far as I am concerned. 'Genius seems to me excusable in taking the public for a confidant. Genius is universal, and can appeal to the common heart of man. But even here I would not have it too direct. I prefer to see the thought or feeling made universal. How different the confidence of Goethe, for instance, from that of Byron! 'But for us lesser people, who write verses merely as vents for the overflowings of a personal experience, which in every life of any value craves occasionally the accompaniment of the lyre, it seems to me that all the value of this utterance is destroyed by a hasty or indiscriminate publicity. The moment I lay open my heart, and tell the fresh feeling to any one who chooses to hear, I feel profaned. 'When it has passed into experience, when the flower has gone to seed, I don't care who knows it, or whither they wander. I am no longer it,--I stand on it. I do not know whether this is peculiar to me, or not, but I am sure the moment I cease to have any reserve or delicacy about a feeling, it is on the wane. 'About putting beautiful verses in your Magazine, I have no feeling except what I should have about furnishing a room. I should not put a dressing-case into a parlor, or a book-case into a dressing-room, because, however good things in their place, they were not in place there. And this, not in consideration of the public, but of my own sense of fitness and harmony.' The next extract is from a letter written to me in 1842, after a journey which we had taken to the White Mountains, in the company of my sister, and Mr. and Mrs. Farrar. During this journey Margaret had conversed with me concerning some passages of her private history and experience, and in this letter she asks me to be prudent in speaking of it, giving her reasons as follows:-- '_Cambridge, July 31, 1842._--... I said I was happy in having no secret. It is my nature, and has been the tendency of my life, to wish that all my thoughts and deeds might lie, as the "open secrets" of Nature, free to all who are able to understand them. I have no reserves, except intellectual reserves; for to speak of things to those who cannot receive them is stupidity, rather than frankness. But in this case, I alone am not concerned. Therefore, dear James, give heed to the subject. You have received a key to what was before unknown of your friend; you have made use of it, now let it be buried with the past, over whose passages profound and sad, yet touched with heaven-born beauty, "let silence stand sentinel."' I shall endeavor to keep true to the spirit of these sentences in speaking of Margaret's friendships. Yet not to speak of them in her biography would be omitting the most striking feature of her character. It would be worse than the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. Henry the Fourth without Sully, Gustavus Adolphus without Oxenstiern, Napoleon without his marshals, Socrates without his scholars, would be more complete than Margaret without her friends. So that, in touching on these private relations, we must be everywhere "bold," yet not "too bold." The extracts will be taken indiscriminately from letters written to many friends. The insight which Margaret displayed in finding her friends, the magnetism by which she drew them toward herself, the catholic range of her intimacies, the influence which she exercised to develop the latent germ of every character, the constancy with which she clung to each when she had once given and received confidence, the delicate justice which kept every intimacy separate, and the process of transfiguration which took place when she met any one on this mountain of Friendship, giving a dazzling lustre to the details of common life,--all these should be at least touched upon and illustrated, to give any adequate view of her in these relations. Such a prejudice against her had been created by her faults of manner, that the persons she might most wish to know often retired from her and avoided her. But she was "sagacious of her quarry," and never suffered herself to be repelled by this. She saw when any one belonged to her, and never rested till she came into possession of her property. I recollect a lady who thus fled from her for several years, yet, at last, became most nearly attached to her. This "wise sweet" friend, as Margaret characterized her in two words, a flower hidden in the solitude of deep woods, Margaret saw and appreciated from the first. See how, in the following passage, she describes to one of her friends her perception of character, and her power of attracting it, when only fifteen years old. '_Jamaica Plains, July, 1840_.--Do you remember my telling you, at Cohasset, of a Mr. ---- staying with us, when I was fifteen, and all that passed? Well, I have not seen him since, till, yesterday, he came here. I was pleased to find, that, even at so early an age, I did not overrate those I valued. He was the same as in memory; the powerful eye dignifying an otherwise ugly face; the calm wisdom, and refined observation, the imposing _manière d'être_, which anywhere would give him an influence among men, without his taking any trouble, or making any sacrifice, and the great waves of feeling that seemed to rise as an attractive influence, and overspread his being. He said, nothing since his childhood had been so marked as his visit to our house; that it had dwelt in his thoughts unchanged amid all changes. I could have wished he had never returned to change the picture. He looked at me continually, and said, again and again, he should have known me anywhere; but O how changed I must be since that epoch of pride and fulness! He had with him his son, a wild boy of five years old, all brilliant with health and energy, and with the same powerful eye. He said,--You know I am not one to confound acuteness and rapidity of intellect with real genius; but he is for those an extraordinary child. He would astonish you, but I look deep enough into the prodigy to see the work of an extremely nervous temperament, and I shall make him as dull as I can. "_Margaret_," (pronouncing the name in the same deliberate searching way he used to do,) "I love him so well, I will try to teach him moderation. If I can help it, he shall not feed on bitter ashes, nor try these paths of avarice and ambition." It made me feel very strangely to hear him talk so to my old self. What a gulf between! There is scarce a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he remembered and loved. I felt affection for him still; for his character was formed then, and had not altered, except by ripening and expanding! But thus, in other worlds, we shall remember our present selves.' Margaret's constancy to any genuine relation, once established, was surprising. If her friends' _aim_ changed, so as to take them out of her sphere, she was saddened by it, and did not let them go without a struggle. But wherever they continued "true to the original standard," (as she loved to phrase it) her affectionate interest would follow them unimpaired through all the changes of life. The principle of this constancy she thus expresses in a letter to one of her brothers:-- 'Great and even _fatal_ errors (so far as this life is concerned) could not destroy my friendship for one in whom I am sure of the kernel of nobleness.' She never formed a friendship until she had seen and known this germ of good; and afterwards judged conduct by this. To this germ of good, to this highest law of each individual, she held them true. But never did she act like those who so often judge of their friend from some report of his conduct, as if they had never known him, and allow the inference from a single act to alter the opinion formed by an induction from years of intercourse. From all such weakness Margaret stood wholly free. I have referred to the wide range of Margaret's friendships. Even at this period this variety was very apparent. She was the centre of a group very different from each other, and whose only affinity consisted in their all being polarized by the strong attraction of her mind,--all drawn toward herself. Some of her friends were young, gay and beautiful; some old, sick or studious. Some were children of the world, others pale scholars. Some were witty, others slightly dull. But all, in order to be Margaret's friends, must be capable of seeking something,--capable of some aspiration for the better. And how did she glorify life to all! all that was tame and common vanishing away in the picturesque light thrown over the most familiar things by her rapid fancy, her brilliant wit, her sharp insight, her creative imagination, by the inexhaustible resources of her knowledge, and the copious rhetoric which found words and images always apt and always ready. Even then she displayed almost the same marvellous gift of conversation which afterwards dazzled all who knew her,--with more perhaps of freedom, since she floated on the flood of our warm sympathies. Those who know Margaret only by her published writings know her least; her notes and letters contain more of her mind; but it was only in conversation that she was perfectly free and at home. Margaret's constancy in friendship caused her to demand it in others, and thus she was sometimes exacting. But the pure Truth of her character caused her to express all such feelings with that freedom and simplicity that they became only as slight clouds on a serene sky, giving it a tenderer beauty, and casting picturesque shades over the landscape below. From her letters to different friends I select a few examples of these feelings. 'The world turns round and round, and you too must needs be negligent and capricious. You have not answered my note; you have not given me what I asked. You do not come here. Do not you act so,--it is the drop too much. The world seems not only turning but tottering, when my kind friend plays such a part.' * * * * * 'You need not have delayed your answer so long; why not at once answer the question I asked? Faith is not natural to me; for the love I feel to others is not in the idleness of poverty, nor can I persist in believing the best; merely to save myself pain, or keep a leaning place for the weary heart. But I should believe you, because I have seen that your feelings are strong and constant; they have never disappointed me, when closely scanned.' * * * * * '_July 6, 1832._--I believe I behaved very badly the other evening. I did not think so yesterday. I had been too surprised and vexed to recover very easily, but to-day my sophistries have all taken wing, and I feel that nothing good could have made me act with such childish petulance and bluntness towards one who spoke from friendly emotions. Be at peace; I will astonish you by my repose, mildness, and self-possession. No, that is silly; but I believe it cannot be right to be on such terms with any one, that, on the least vexation, I indulge my feelings at his or her expense. We will talk less, but we shall be very good friends still, I hope. Shall not we?' In the last extract, we have an example of that genuine humility, which, being a love of truth, underlaid her whole character, notwithstanding its seeming pride. She could not have been great as she was, without it.[A] '_December 19th, 1829._--I shall always be glad to have you come to me when saddened. The melancholic does not misbecome you. The lights of your character are _wintry_. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath,--its gentle, down-looking shades. Sadness in some is intolerably ungraceful and oppressive; it affects one like a cold rainy day in June or September, when all pleasure departs with the sun; everything seems out of place and irrelative to the time; the clouds are fog, the atmosphere leaden,--but 'tis not so with you.' Of her own truthfulness to her friends, which led her frankly to speak to them of their faults or dangers, her correspondence gives constant examples. The first is from a letter of later date than properly belongs to this chapter, but is so wholly in her spirit of candor that I insert it here. It is from a letter written in 1843. 'I have been happy in the sight of your pure design, of the sweetness and serenity of your mind. In the inner sanctuary we met. But I shall say a few blunt words, such as were frequent in the days of intimacy, and, if they are needless, you will let them fall to the ground. Youth is past, with its passionate joys and griefs, its restlessness, its vague desires. You have chosen your path, you have rounded out your lot, your duties are before you. _Now_ beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dulness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness. Remember the limitations that threaten every professional man, only to be guarded against by great earnestness and watchfulness. So take care of yourself, and let not the intellect more than the spirit be quenched. * * * * * 'It is such a relief to me to be able to speak to you upon a subject which I thought would never lie open between us. Now there will be no place which does not lie open to the light. I can always say what I feel. And the way in which you took it, so like yourself, so manly and noble, gives me the assurance that I shall have the happiness of seeing in you that symmetry, that conformity in the details of life with the highest aims, of which I have sometimes despaired. How much higher, dear friend, is "the mind, the music breathing from the" _life_, than anything we can say! Character is higher than intellect; this I have long felt to be true; may we both live as if we knew it. * * 'I hope and believe we may be yet very much to each other. Imperfect as I am, I feel myself not unworthy to be a true friend. Neither of us is unworthy. In few natures does such love for the good and beautiful survive the ruin of all youthful hopes, the wreck of all illusions.' * * * * * 'I supposed our intimacy would terminate when I left Cambridge. Its continuing to subsist is a matter of surprise to me. And I expected, ere this, you would have found some Hersilia, or such-like, to console you for losing your Natalia. See, my friend, I am three and twenty. I believe in love and friendship, but I cannot but notice that circumstances have appalling power, and that those links which are not riveted by situation, by _interest_, (I mean, not mere worldly interest, but the instinct of self-preservation,) may be lightly broken by a chance touch. I speak not in misanthropy, I believe "Die Zeit ist schlecht, doch giebts noch grosse Herzen." 'Surely I maybe pardoned for aiming at the same results with the chivalrous "gift of the Gods." I cannot endure to be one of those shallow beings who can never get beyond the primer of experience,--who are ever saying,-- "Ich habe geglaubt, _nun glaube ich erst recht_, Und geht es auch wunderlich, geht es auch schlecht, Ich bleibe in glaubigen Orden." Yet, when you write, write freely, and if I don't like what you say, let me say so. I have ever been frank, as if I expected to be intimate with you good three-score years and ten. I am sure we shall always esteem each other. I have that much faith.' * * * * * '_Jan_. 1832.--All that relates to--must be interesting to me, though I never voluntarily think of him now. The apparent caprice of his conduct has shaken my faith, but not destroyed my hope. That hope, if I, who have so mistaken others, may dare to think I know myself, was never selfish. It is painful to lose a friend whose knowledge and converse mingled so intimately with the growth of my mind,--an early friend to whom I was all truth and frankness, seeking nothing but equal truth and frankness in return. But this evil may be borne; the hard, the lasting evil was to learn to distrust my own heart, and lose all faith in my power of knowing others. In this letter I see again that peculiar pride, that contempt of the forms and shows of goodness, that fixed resolve to be anything but "like unto the Pharisees," which were to my eye such happy omens. Yet how strangely distorted are all his views! The daily influence of his intercourse with me was like the breath he drew; it has become a part of him. Can he escape from himself? Would he be unlike all other mortals? His feelings are as false as those of Alcibiades. He influenced me, and helped form me to what I am. Others shall succeed him. Shall I be ashamed to owe anything to friendship? But why do I talk?--a child might confute him by defining the term _human being_. He will gradually work his way into light; if too late for our friendship, not, I trust, too late for his own peace and honorable well-being. I never insisted on being the instrument of good to him. I practised no little arts, no! not to effect the good of the friend I loved. I have prayed to Heaven, (surely we are sincere when doing that,) to guide him in the best path for him, however far from me that path might lead. The lesson I have learned may make me a more useful friend, a more efficient aid to others than I could be to him; yet I hope I shall not be denied the consolation of knowing surely, one day, that all which appeared evil in the companion of happy years was but error.' * * * * * 'I think, since you have seen so much of my character, that you must be sensible that any reserves with those whom I call my friends, do not arise from duplicity, but an instinctive feeling that I could not be understood. I can truly say that I wish no one to overrate me; undeserved regard could give me no pleasure; nor will I consent to practise charlatanism, either in friendship or anything else.' * * * * * 'You ought not to think I show a want of generous confidence, if I sometimes try the ground on which I tread, to see if perchance it may return the echoes of hollowness.' * * * * * 'Do not cease to respect me as formerly. It seems to me that I have reached the "parting of the ways" in my life, and all the knowledge which I have toiled to gain only serves to show me the disadvantages of each. None of those who think themselves my friends can aid me; each, careless, takes the path to which present convenience impels; and all would smile or stare, could they know the aching and measureless wishes, the sad apprehensiveness, which make me pause and strain my almost hopeless gaze to the distance. What wonder if my present conduct should be mottled by selfishness and incertitude? Perhaps you, who _can_ make your views certain, cannot comprehend me; though you showed me last night a penetration which did not flow from sympathy. But this I may say--though the glad light of hope and ambitious confidence, which has vitalized my mind, should be extinguished forever, I will not in life act a mean, ungenerous, or useless part. Therefore, let not a slight thing lessen your respect for me. If you feel as much pain as I do, when obliged to diminish my respect for any person, you will be glad of this assurance. I hope you will not think this note in the style of a French novel.' [Footnote A: According to Dryden's beautiful statement-- 'For as high turrets, in their airy sweep Require foundations, in proportion deep And lofty cedars as far upward shoot As to the nether heavens they drive the root; So low did her secure foundation lie, She was not humble, but humility.'] POWER OF CIRCUMSTANCES. 'Do you remember a conversation we had in the garden, one starlight evening, last summer, about the incalculable power which outward circumstances have over the character? You would not sympathize with the regrets I expressed, that mine had not been formed amid scenes and persons of nobleness and beauty, eager passions and dignified events, instead of those secret trials and petty conflicts which make my transition state so hateful to my memory and my tastes. You then professed the faith which I resigned with such anguish,--the faith which a Schiller could never attain,--a faith in the power of the human will. Yet now, in every letter, you talk to me of the power of circumstances. You tell me how changed you are. Every one of your letters is different from the one preceding, and all so altered from your former self. For are you not leaving all our old ground, and do you not apologize to me for all your letters? Why do you apologize? I think I know you very, very well; considering that we are both human, and have the gift of concealing our thoughts with words. Nay, further--I do not believe you will be able to become anything which I cannot understand. I know I can sympathize with all who feel and think, from a Dryfesdale up to a Max Piccolomini. You say, you have become a machine. If so, I shall expect to find you a grand, high-pressure, wave-compelling one--requiring plenty of fuel. You must be a steam-engine, and move some majestic fabric at the rate of thirty miles an hour along the broad waters of the nineteenth century. None of your pendulum machines for me! I should, to be sure, turn away my head if I should hear you tick, and mark the quarters of hours; but the buzz and whiz of a good large life-endangerer would be music to mine ears. Oh, no! sure there is no danger of your requiring to be set down quite on a level, kept in a still place, and wound up every eight days. Oh no, no! you are not one of that numerous company, who --"live and die, Eat, drink, wake, sleep between, Walk, talk like clock-work too, So pass in order due, Over the scene, To where the past--_is_ past, The future--nothing yet," &c. &c. But we must all be machines: you shall be a steam-engine;--shall be a mill, with extensive water-privileges,--and I will be a spinning jenny. No! upon second thoughts, I will not be a machine. I will be an instrument, not to be confided to vulgar hands,--for instance, a chisel to polish marble, or a whetstone to sharpen steel!' In an unfinished tale, Margaret has given the following studies of character. She is describing two of the friends of the hero of her story. Unquestionably the traits here given were taken from life, though it might not be easy to recognize the portrait of any individual in either sketch. Yet we insert it here to show her own idea of this relation, and her fine feeling of the action and reaction of these subtle intimacies. 'Now, however, I found companions, in thought, at least One, who had great effect on my mind, I may call Lytton. He was as premature as myself; at thirteen a man in the range of his thoughts, analyzing motives, and explaining principles, when he ought to have been playing cricket, or hunting in the woods. The young Arab, or Indian, may dispense with mere play, and enter betimes into the histories and practices of manhood, for all these are, in their modes of life, closely connected with simple nature, and educate the body no less than the mind; but the same good cannot be said of lounging lazily under a tree, while mentally accompanying Gil Blas through his course of intrigue and adventure, and visiting with him the impure atmosphere of courtiers, picaroons, and actresses. This was Lytton's favorite reading; his mind, by nature subtle rather than daring, would in any case have found its food in the now hidden workings of character and passion, the by-play of life, the unexpected and seemingly incongruous relations to be found there. He loved the natural history of man, not religiously, but for entertainment. What he sought, he found, but paid the heaviest price. All his later days were poisoned by his subtlety, which made it impossible for him to look at any action with a single and satisfied eye. He tore the buds open to see if there were no worm sheathed in the blushful heart, and was so afraid of overlooking some mean possibility, that he lost sight of virtue. Grubbing like a mole beneath the surface of earth, rather than reading its living language above, he had not faith enough to believe in the flower, neither faith enough to mine for the gem, and remains at penance in the limbo of halfnesses, I trust not forever. Then all his characteristics wore brilliant hues. He was very witty, and I owe to him the great obligation of being the first and only person who has excited me to frequent and boundless gayety. The sparks of his wit were frequent, slight surprises; his was a slender dart, and rebounded easily to the hand. I like the scintillating, arrowy wit far better than broad, genial humor. The light metallic touch pleases me. When wit appears as fun and jollity, she wears a little of the Silenus air;--the Mercurial is what I like. 'In later days,--for my intimacy with him lasted many years,--he became the feeder of my intellect. He delighted to ransack the history of a nation, of an art or a science, and bring to me all the particulars. Telling them fixed them in his own memory, which was the most tenacious and ready I have ever known; he enjoyed my clear perception as to their relative value, and I classified them in my own way. As he was omnivorous, and of great mental activity, while my mind was intense, though rapid in its movements, and could only give itself to a few things of its own accord, I traversed on the wings of his effort large demesnes that would otherwise have remained quite unknown to me. They were not, indeed, seen to the same profit as my own province, whose tillage I knew, and whose fruits were the answer to my desire; but the fact of seeing them at all gave a largeness to my view, and a candor to my judgment. I could not be ignorant how much there was I did not know, nor leave out of sight the many sides to every question, while, by the law of affinity, I chose my own. 'Lytton was not loved by any one. He was not positively hated, or disliked; for there was nothing which the general mind could take firm hold of enough for such feelings. Cold, intangible, he was to play across the life of others. A momentary resentment was sometimes felt at a presence which would not mingle with theirs; his scrutiny, though not hostile, was recognized as unfeeling and impertinent, and his mirth unsettled all objects from their foundations. But he was soon forgiven and forgotten. Hearts went not forth to war against or to seek one who was a mere experimentalist and observer in existence. For myself, I did not love, perhaps, but was attached to him, and the attachment grew steadily, for it was founded, not on what I wanted of him, but on his truth to himself. His existence was a real one; he was not without a pathetic feeling of his wants, but was never tempted to supply them by imitating the properties of any other character. He accepted the law of his being, and never violated it. This is next best to the nobleness which transcends it. I did not disapprove, even when I disliked, his acts. 'Amadin, my other companion, was as slow and deep of feeling, as Lytton was brilliant, versatile, and cold. His temperament was generally grave, even to apparent dulness; his eye gave little light, but a slow fire burned in its depths. His was a character not to be revealed to himself, or others, except by the important occasions of life. Though every day, no doubt, deepened and enriched him, it brought little that he could show or recall. But when his soul, capable of religion, capable of love, was moved, all his senses were united in the word or action that followed, and the impression made on you was entire. I have scarcely known any capable of such true manliness as he. His poetry, written, or unwritten, was the experience of life. It lies in few lines, as yet, but not one of them will ever need to be effaced. 'Early that serious eye inspired in me a trust that has never been deceived. There was no magnetism in him, no lights and shades that could stir the imagination; no bright ideal suggested by him stood between the friend and his self. As the years matured that self, I loved him more, and knew him as he knew himself, always in the present moment; he could never occupy my mind in absence.' Another of her early friends, Rev. F.H. Hedge, has sketched his acquaintance with her in the following paper, communicated by him for these memoirs. Somewhat older than Margaret, and having enjoyed an education at a German university, his conversation was full of interest and excitement to her. He opened to her a whole world of thoughts and speculations which gave movement to her mind in a congenial direction. * * * * * "My acquaintance with Margaret commenced in the year 1823, at Cambridge, my native place and hers. I was then a member of Harvard College, in which my father held one of the offices of instruction, and I used frequently to meet her in the social circles of which the families connected with the college formed the nucleus. Her father, at this time, represented the county of Middlesex in the Congress of the United States. "Margaret was then about thirteen,--a child in years, but so precocious in her mental and physical developments, that she passed for eighteen or twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society, as a lady full-grown. "When I recall her personal appearance, as it was then and for ten or twelve years subsequent to this, I have the idea of a blooming girl of a florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress or conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, that awakened a lively interest, that made one desirous of a nearer acquaintance. It was a face that fascinated, without satisfying. Never seen in repose, never allowing a steady perusal of its features, it baffled every attempt to judge the character by physiognomical induction. You saw the evidence of a mighty force, but what direction that force would assume,--whether it would determine itself to social triumphs, or to triumphs of art,--it was impossible to divine. Her moral tendencies, her sentiments, her true and prevailing character, did not appear in the lines of her face. She seemed equal to anything, but might not choose to put forth her strength. You felt that a great possibility lay behind that brow, but you felt, also, that the talent that was in her might miscarry through indifference or caprice. "I said she had no pretensions to beauty. Yet she was not plain. She escaped the reproach of positive plainness, by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, dancing, busy eyes, which, though usually half closed from near-sightedness, shot piercing glances at those with whom she conversed, and, most of all, by the very peculiar and graceful carriage of her head and neck, which all who knew her will remember as the most characteristic trait in her personal appearance. "In conversation she had already, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and made much the same impression in society that she did in after years, with the exception, that, as she advanced in life, she learned to control that tendency to sarcasm,--that disposition to 'quiz,'--which was then somewhat excessive. It frightened shy young people from her presence, and made her, for a while, notoriously unpopular with the ladies of her circle. "This propensity seems to have been aggravated by unpleasant encounters in her school-girl experience. She was a pupil of Dr. Park, of Boston, whose seminary for young ladies was then at the height of a well-earned reputation, and whose faithful and successful endeavors in this department have done much to raise the standard of female education among us. Here the inexperienced country girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing misses of the city, who pleased themselves with giggling criticisms not inaudible, nor meant to be inaudible to their subject, on whatsoever in dress and manner fell short of the city mark. Then it was first revealed to her young heart, and laid up for future reflection, how large a place in woman's world is given to fashion and frivolity. Her mind reacted on these attacks with indiscriminate sarcasms. She made herself formidable by her wit, and, of course, unpopular. A root of bitterness sprung up in her which years of moral culture were needed to eradicate. "Partly to evade the temporary unpopularity into which she had fallen, and partly to pursue her studies secure from those social avocations which were found unavoidable in the vicinity of Cambridge and Boston, in 1824 or 5 she was sent to Groton, where she remained two years in quiet seclusion. "On her return to Cambridge, in 1826, I renewed my acquaintance, and an intimacy was then formed, which continued until her death. The next seven years, which were spent in Cambridge, were years of steady growth, with little variety of incident, and little that was noteworthy of outward experience, but with great intensity of the inner life. It was with her, as with most young women, and with most young men, too, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a period of preponderating sentimentality, a period of romance and of dreams, of yearning and of passion. She pursued at this time, I think, no systematic study, but she read with the heart, and was learning more from social experience than from books. "I remember noting at this time a trait which continued to be a prominent one through life,--I mean, a passionate love for the beautiful, which comprehended all the kingdoms of nature and art. I have never known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from the contemplation of lovely forms. "Her intercourse with girls of her own age and standing was frank and excellent. Personal attractions, and the homage which they received, awakened in her no jealousy. She envied not their success, though vividly aware of the worth of beauty, and inclined to exaggerate her own deficiencies in that kind. On the contrary, she loved to draw these fair girls to herself, and to make them her guests, and was never so happy as when surrounded, in company, with such a bevy. This attraction was mutual, as, according to Goethe, every attraction is. Where she felt an interest, she awakened an interest. Without flattery or art, by the truth and nobleness of her nature, she won the confidence, and made herself the friend and intimate, of a large number of young ladies,--the belles of their day,--with most of whom she remained in correspondence during the greater part of her life. "In our evening re-unions she was always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew around her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction of the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a prominent object. "I have spoken of her conversational talent. It continued to develop itself in these years, and was certainly her most decided gift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearing her converse. She did many things well, but nothing so well as she talked. It is the opinion of all her friends, that her writings do her very imperfect justice. For some reason or other, she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips. She required the stimulus of attentive ears, and answering eyes, to bring out all her power. She must have her auditory about her. "Her conversation, as it was then, I have seldom heard equalled. It was not so much attractive as commanding. Though remarkably fluent and select, it was neither fluency, nor choice diction, nor wit, nor sentiment, that gave it its peculiar power, but accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment, which contrasted strongly and charmingly with the youth and sex of the speaker. I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking 'like a book' was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it. The fact was, her speech, though finished and true as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen, had always an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment,--the result of some organic provision that made finished sentences as natural to her as blundering and hesitation are to most of us. With a little more imagination, she would have made an excellent improvisatrice. "Here let me say a word respecting the character of Margaret's mind. It was what in woman is generally called a masculine mind; that is, its action was determined by ideas rather than by sentiments. And yet, with this masculine trait, she combined a woman's appreciation of the beautiful in sentiment and the beautiful in action. Her intellect was rather solid than graceful, yet no one was more alive to grace. She was no artist,--she would never have written an epic, or romance, or drama,--yet no one knew better the qualities which go to the making of these; and though catholic as to kind, no one was more rigorously exacting as to quality. Nothing short of the best in each kind would content her. "She wanted imagination, and she wanted productiveness. She wrote with difficulty. Without external pressure, perhaps, she would never have written at all. She was dogmatic, and not creative. Her strength was in characterization and in criticism. Her _critique_ on Goethe, in the second volume of the Dial, is, in my estimation, one of the best things she has written. And, as far as it goes, it is one of the best criticisms extant of Goethe. "What I especially admired in her was her intellectual sincerity. Her judgments took no bribe from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom nor tradition, nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was not what should be believed, or what ought to be true, but what _is_ true. Her yes and no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unexpected dissent from the common-places of popular acceptation." * * * * * Margaret, we have said, saw in each of her friends the secret interior capability, which might become hereafter developed into some special beauty or power. By means of this penetrating, this prophetic insight, she gave each to himself, acted on each to draw out his best nature, gave him an ideal out of which he could draw strength and liberty hour by hour. Thus her influence was ever ennobling, and each felt that in her society he was truer, wiser, better, and yet more free and happy, than elsewhere. The "dry light" which Lord Bacon loved, she never knew; her light was life, was love, was warm with sympathy and a boundless energy of affection and hope. Though her love flattered and charmed her friends, it did not spoil them, for they knew her perfect truth. They knew that she loved them, not for what she imagined, but for what she saw, though she saw it only in the germ. But as the Greeks beheld a Persephone and Athene in the passing stranger, and ennobled humanity into ideal beauty, Margaret saw all her friends thus idealized. She was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float, far above the low details of earthly life. Earth lay beneath us as a lovely picture,--its sounds came up mellowed into music. Margaret was, to persons younger than herself, a Makaria and Natalia. She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and glory "known to neither sea nor land." To those of her own age she was sibyl and seer,--a prophetess, revealing the future, pointing the path, opening their eyes to the great aims only worthy of pursuit in life. To those older than herself she was like the Euphorion in Goethe's drama, child of Faust and Helen,--a wonderful union of exuberance and judgment, born of romantic fulness and classic limitation. They saw with surprise her clear good-sense balancing her now of sentiment and ardent courage. They saw her comprehension of both sides of every question, and gave her their confidence, as to one of equal age, because of so ripe a judgment. But it was curious to see with what care and conscience she kept her friendships distinct. Her fine practical understanding, teaching her always the value of limits, enabled her to hold apart all her intimacies, nor did one ever encroach on the province of the other. Like a moral Paganini, she played always on a single string, drawing from each its peculiar music,--bringing wild beauty from the slender wire, no less than from the deep-sounding harp string. Some of her friends had little to give her when compared with others; but I never noticed that she sacrificed in any respect the smaller faculty to the greater. She fully realized that the Divine Being makes each part of this creation divine, and that He dwells in the blade of grass as really if not as fully as in the majestic oak which has braved the storm for a hundred years. She felt in full the thought of a poem which she once copied for me from Barry Cornwall, which begins thus:-- "She was not fair, nor full of grace, Nor crowned with thought, nor aught beside No wealth had she of mind or face, To win our love, or gain our pride,-- No lover's thought her heart could touch,-- No poet's dream was round her thrown; And yet we miss her--ah, so much! Now--she has flown." I will close this section of Cambridge Friendship with the two following passages, the second of which was written to some one unknown to me: 'Your letter was of cordial sweetness to me, as is ever the thought of our friendship,--that sober-suited friendship, of which the web was so deliberately and well woven, and which wears so well. * * * * * 'I want words to express the singularity of all my past relations; yet let me try. 'From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn; that I should be a pilgrim and sojourner on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a place to lay the head than I. You understand me, of course; such beings can only find their homes in hearts. All material luxuries, all the arrangements of society, are mere conveniences to them. 'This thought, all whose bearings I did not, indeed, understand, affected me sometimes with sadness, sometimes with pride. I mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being; I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way, that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife. All this I did not understand as I do now; but this destiny of the thinker, and (shall I dare to say it?) of the poetic priestess, sibylline, dwelling in the cave, or amid the Lybian sands, lay yet enfolded in my mind. Accordingly, I did not look on any of the persons, brought into relation with me, with common womanly eyes. 'Yet, as my character is, after all, still more feminine than masculine, it would sometimes happen that I put more emotion into a state than I myself knew. I really was capable or attachment, though it never seemed so till the hour of separation. And if a connexion was torn up by the roots, the soil of my existence showed an unsightly wound, which long refused to clothe itself in verdure. 'With regard to yourself, I was to you all that I wished to be. I knew that I reigned in your thoughts in my own way. And I also lived with you more truly and freely than with any other person. We were truly friends, but it was not friends as men are friends to one another, or as brother and sister. There was, also, that pleasure, which may, perhaps, be termed conjugal, of finding oneself in an alien nature. Is there any tinge of love in this? Possibly! At least, in comparing it with my relation to--, I find _that_ was strictly fraternal. I valued him for himself. I did not care for an influence over him, and was perfectly willing to have one or fifty rivals in his heart. * * * * 'I think I may say, I never loved. I but see my possible life reflected on the clouds. As in a glass darkly, I have seen what I might feel as child, wife, mother, but I have never really approached the close relations of life. A sister I have truly been to many,--a brother to more,--a fostering nurse to, oh how many! The bridal hour of many a spirit, when first it was wed, I have shared, but said adieu before the wine was poured out at the banquet. And there is one I always love in my poetic hour, as the lily looks up to the star from amid the waters; and another whom I visit as the bee visits the flower, when I crave sympathy. Yet those who live would scarcely consider that I am among the living,--and I am isolated, as you say. 'My dear--, all is well; all has helped me to decipher the great poem of the universe. I can hardly describe to you the happiness which floods my solitary hours. My actual life is yet much clogged and impeded, but I have at last got me an oratory; where I can retire and pray. With your letter, vanished a last regret. You did not act or think unworthily. It is enough. As to the cessation of our confidential inter course, circumstances must have accomplished that long ago; my only grief was that you should do it with your own free will, and for reasons that I thought unworthy. I long to honor you, to be honored by you. Now we will have free and noble thoughts of one another, and all that is best of our friendship shall remain.' II. CONVERSATION.--SOCIAL INTERCOURSE. "Be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature, and live but one man." SIR THOMAS BROWNE. "Ah, how mournful look in letters Black on white, the words to me, Which from lips of thine cast fetters Bound the heart, or set It free." GOETHE, _translated by J.S. Dwight_. "Zu erfinden, zu beschliessen, Bleibe, Kunstler, oft allein; Deines Wirkes zu geniessen Eile freudig zum Verein, Hier im Ganzen schau erfahre Deines eignes Lebenslauf, Und die Thaten mancher Jahre Gehn dir in dem Nachbar auf." GOETHE, _Artist's Song_. * * * * * When I first knew Margaret, she was much in society, but in a circle of her own,--of friends whom she had drawn around her, and whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent. Of those belonging to this circle, let me recall a few characters. The young girls whom Margaret had attracted were very different from herself, and from each other. From Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, they came to her, and the little circle of companions would meet now in one house, and now in another, of these pleasant towns. There was A----, a dark-haired, black-eyed beauty, with clear olive complexion, through which the rich blood flowed. She was bright, beauteous, and cold as a gem,--with clear perceptions of character within a narrow limit,--enjoying society, and always surrounded with admirers, of whose feelings she seemed quite unconscious. While they were just ready to die of unrequited love, she stood untouched as Artemis, scarcely aware of the deadly arrows which had flown from her silver bow. I remember that Margaret said, that Tennyson's little poem of the skipping-rope must have been written for her,--where the lover expressing his admiration of the fairy-like motion and the light grace of the lady, is told-- "Get off, or else my skipping-rope Will hit you in the eye." Then there was B----, the reverse of all this,--tender, susceptible, with soft blue eyes, and mouth of trembling sensibility. How sweet were her songs, in which a single strain of pure feeling ever reminded me of those angel symphonies,-- "In all whose music, the pathetic minor Our ears will cross--" and when she sang or spoke, her eyes had often the expression of one looking _in_ at her thought, not _out_ at her companion. Then there was C----, all animated and radiant with joyful interest in life,--seeing with ready eye the beauty of Nature and of Thought,--entering with quick sympathy into all human interest, taking readily everything which belonged to her, and dropping with sure instinct whatever suited her not. Unknown to her was struggle, conflict, crisis; she grew up harmonious as the flower, drawing nutriment from earth and air,--from "common things which round us lie," and equally from the highest thoughts and inspirations. Shall I also speak of D----, whose beauty had a half-voluptuous character, from those ripe red lips, those ringlets overflowing the well-rounded shoulders, and the hazy softness of those large eyes? Or of E----, her companion, beautiful too, but in a calmer, purer style,--with eye from which looked forth self-possession, truth and fortitude? Others, well worth notice, I must not notice now. But among the young men who surrounded Margaret, a like variety prevailed. One was to her interesting, on account of his quick, active intellect, and his contempt for shows and pretences; for his inexhaustible wit, his exquisite taste, his infinitely varied stores of information, and the poetic view which he took of life, painting it with Rembrandt depths of shadow and bursts of light. Another she gladly went to for his compact, thoroughly considered views of God and the world,--for his culture, so much more deep and rich than any other we could find here,--for his conversation, opening in systematic form new fields of thought. Yet men of strong native talent, and rich character, she also liked well to know, however deficient in culture, knowledge, or power of utterance. Each was to her a study, and she never rested till she had found the bottom of every mind,--till she had satisfied herself of its capacity and currents,--measuring it with her sure line, as --"All human wits Are measured, but a few." It was by her singular gift of speech that she cast her spells and worked her wonders in this little circle. Full of thoughts and full of words; capable of poetic improvisation, had there not been a slight overweight of a tendency to the tangible and real; capable of clear, complete, philosophic statement, but for the strong tendency to life which melted down evermore in its lava-current the solid blocks of thought; she was yet, by these excesses, better fitted for the arena of conversation. Here she found none adequate for the equal encounter; when she laid her lance in rest, every champion must go down before it. How fluent her wit, which, for hour after hour, would furnish best entertainment, as she described scenes where she had lately been, or persons she had lately seen! Yet she readily changed from gay to grave, and loved better the serious talk which opened the depths of life. Describing a conversation in relation to Christianity, with a friend of strong mind, who told her he had found, in this religion, a home for his best and deepest thoughts, she says--' Ah! what a pleasure 'to meet with such a daring, yet realizing, mind as his!' But her catholic taste found satisfaction in intercourse with persons quite different from herself in opinions and tendencies, as the following letter, written in her twentieth year, will indicate: * * * * * 'I was very happy, although greatly restrained by the apprehension of going a little too far with these persons of singular refinement and settled opinions. 'However, I believe I did pretty well, though I did make one or two little mistakes, when most interested; but I was not so foolish as to try to retrieve them. One occasion more particularly, when Mr. G----, after going more fully into his poetical opinions than I could have expected, stated his sentiments: first, that Wordsworth had, in truth, guided, or, rather, completely vivified the poetry of this age; secondly, that 't was his influence which had, in reality, given all his better individuality to Byron. He recurred again and again to this opinion, _con amore_, and seemed to wish much for an answer; but I would not venture, though 'twas hard for me to forbear, I knew so well what I thought. Mr. G----'s Wordsworthianism, however, is excellent; his beautiful simplicity of taste, and love of truth, have preserved him from any touch of that vague and imbecile enthusiasm, which has enervated almost all the exclusive and determined admirers of the great poet whom I have known in these parts. His reverence, his feeling, are thoroughly intelligent. Everything in his mind is well defined; and his horror of the vague, and false, nay, even (suppose another horror here, for grammar's sake) of the startling and paradoxical, have their beauty. I think I could know Mr. G---- long, and see him perpetually, without any touch of satiety; such variety is made by the very absence of pretension, and the love of truth. I found much amusement in leading him to sketch the scenes and persons which Lockhart portrays in such glowing colors, and which he, too, has seen with the _eye of taste_, but how different!' * * * * * Our friend was well aware that her _forte_ was in conversation. Here she felt at home. Here she felt her power, and the excitement which the presence of living persons brought, gave all her faculties full activity 'After all,' she says, in a letter, 'this writing is mighty dead. Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything--not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the mind!' Again, in 1832:-- 'Conversation is my natural element. I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion. Whether this be nature or the force of circumstances, I know not; it is my habit, and bespeaks a second-rate mind.' I am disposed to think, much as she excelled in general conversation, that her greatest mental efforts were made in intercourse with individuals. All her friends will unite in the testimony, that whatever they may have known of wit and eloquence in others, they have never seen one who, like her, by the conversation of an hour or two, could not merely entertain and inform, but make an epoch in one's life. We all dated back to this or that conversation with Margaret, in which we took a complete survey of great subjects, came to some clear view of a difficult question, saw our way open before us to a higher plane of life, and were led to some definite resolution or purpose which has had a bearing on all our subsequent career. For Margaret's conversation turned, at such times, to life,--its destiny, its duty, its prospect. With comprehensive glance she would survey the past, and sum up, in a few brief words, its results; she would then turn to the future, and, by a natural order, sweep through its chances and alternatives,--passing ever into a more earnest tone, into a more serious view,--and then bring all to bear on the present, till its duties grew plain, and its opportunities attractive. Happy he who can lift conversation, without loss of its cheer, to the highest uses! Happy he who has such a gift as this, an original faculty thus accomplished by culture, by which he can make our common life rich, significant and fair,--can give to the hour a beauty and brilliancy which shall make it eminent long after, amid dreary years of level routine! I recall many such conversations. I remember one summer's day, in which we rode together, on horseback, from Cambridge to Newton,--a day all of a piece, in which my eloquent companion helped me to understand my past life, and her own,--a day which left me in that calm repose which comes to us, when we clearly apprehend what we ought to do, and are ready to attempt it. I recall other mornings when, not having seen her for a week or two, I would walk with her for hours, beneath the lindens or in the garden, while we related to each other what we had read in our German studies. And I always left her astonished at the progress of her mind, at the amount of new thoughts she had garnered, and filled with a new sense of the worth of knowledge, and the value of life. There were other conversations, in which, impelled by the strong instinct of utterance, she would state, in words of tragical pathos, her own needs and longings,--her demands on life,--the struggles of mind, and of heart,--her conflicts with self, with nature, with the limitations of circumstances, with insoluble problems, with an unattainable desire. She seemed to feel relief from the expression of these thoughts, though she gained no light from her companion. Many such conversations I remember, while she lived in Cambridge, and one such in Groton; but afterwards, when I met her, I found her mind risen above these struggles, and in a self-possessed state which needed no such outlet for its ferment. It is impossible to give any account of _these_ conversations; but I add a few scraps, to indicate, however slightly, something of her ordinary manner. 'Rev. Mr. ---- preached a sermon on TIME. But what business had he to talk about time? We should like well to hear the opinions of a great man, who had made good use of time; but not of a little man, who had not used it to any purpose. I wished to get up and tell him to speak of something which he knew and felt.' * * * * * 'The best criticism on those sermons which proclaim so loudly the dignity of human nature was from our friend E.S. She said, coming out from Dr. Channing's church, that she felt fatigued by the demands the sermon made on her, and would go home and read what Jesus said,--"_Ye are of more value than many sparrows." That_ she could bear; it did not seem exaggerated praise.' * * * * * 'The Swedenborgians say, "that is _Correspondence_," and the phrenologists, "that it is _Approbativeness,_" and so think they know all about it. It would not be so, if we could be like the birds,--make one method, and then desert it, and make a new one,--as they build their nests.' * * * * * 'As regards crime, we cannot understand what we have not _already_ felt;--thus, all crimes have formed part of our minds. We do but recognize one part of ourselves in the worst actions of others. When you take the subject in this light, do you not incline to consider the capacity for action as something widely differing from the experience of a feeling?' * * * * * 'How beautiful the life of Benvenuto Cellini! How his occupations perpetually impelled to thought,--to gushings of thought naturally excited!' * * * * * 'Father lectured me for looking satirical when the man of Words spake, and so attentive to the man of Truth,--that is, of God.' Margaret used often to talk about the books which she and I were reading. GODWIN. 'I think you will be more and more satisfied with Godwin. He has fully lived the double existence of man, and he casts the reflexes on his magic mirror from a height where no object in life's panorama can cause one throb of delirious hope or grasping ambition. At any rate, if you study him, you may know all he has to tell. He is quite free from vanity, and conceals not miserly any of his treasures from the knowledge of posterity. M'LLE. D'ESPINASSE. 'I am swallowing by gasps that _cauldrony_ beverage of selfish passion and morbid taste, the letters of M'lle D'Espinasse. It is good for me. How odious is the abandonment of passion, such as this, unshaded by pride or delicacy, unhallowed by religion,--a selfish craving only; every source of enjoyment stifled to cherish this burning thirst. Yet the picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death. I should not like Delphine now.' Events in life, apparently trivial, often seemed to her full of mystic significance, and it was her pleasure to turn such to poetry. On one occasion, the sight of a passion-flower, given by one lady to another, and then lost, appeared to her so significant of the character, relation, and destiny of the two, that it drew from her lines of which two or three seem worth preserving, as indicating her feeling of social relations. 'Dear friend, my heart grew pensive when I saw The flower, for thee so sweetly set apart, By one whose passionless though tender heart Is worthy to bestow, as angels are, By an unheeding hand conveyed away, To close, in unsoothed night, the promise of its day. * * * * * 'The mystic flower read in thy soul-filled eye To its life's question the desired reply, But came no nearer. On thy gentle breast It hoped to find the haven of its rest; But in cold night, hurried afar from thee, It closed its once half-smiling destiny. 'Yet thus, methinks, it utters as it dies,-- "By the pure truth of those calm, gentle eyes Which saw my life should find its aim in thine, I see a clime where no strait laws confine. In that blest land where _twos_ ne'er know a _three_, Save as the accord of their fine sympathy, O, best-loved, I will wait for thee!"' III. STUDIES. "Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schönen Drangst du in der Erkenntniss Land; An höhen Glanz sich zu gewöhnen Uebt sich, am Reize der Verstand. Was bei dem Saitenklang der Musen Mit süssem Beben dich, durchdrang, Erzog die Kraft in deinem Busen, Die sich dereinst zum Weltgeist schwang." SCHILLER. "To work, with heart resigned and spirit strong; Subdue, with patient toil, life's bitter wrong, Through Nature's dullest, as her brightest ways, We will march onward, singing to thy praise." E.S., _in the Dial_. "The peculiar nature of the scholar's occupation consists in this,--that science, and especially that side of it from which he conceives of the whole, shall continually burst forth before him in new and fairer forms. Let this fresh spiritual youth never grow old within him; let no form become fixed and rigid; let each sunrise bring him new joy and love in his vocation, and larger views of its significance." FICHTE. * * * * * Of Margaret's studies while at Cambridge, I knew personally only of the German. She already, when I first became acquainted with her, had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian and Spanish literature. But all this amount of reading had not made her "deep-learned in books and shallow in herself;" for she brought to the study of most writers "a spirit and genius equal or superior."--so far, at least, as the analytic understanding was concerned. Every writer whom she studied, as every person whom she knew, she placed in his own class, knew his relation to other writers, to the world, to life, to nature, to herself. Much as they might delight her, they never swept her away. She breasted the current of their genius, as a stately swan moves up a stream, enjoying the rushing water the more because she resists it. In a passionate love-struggle she wrestled thus with the genius of De Staël, of Rousseau, of Alfieri, of Petrarch. The first and most striking element in the genius of Margaret was the clear, sharp understanding, which keenly distinguished between things different, and kept every thought, opinion, person, character, in its own place, not to be confounded with any other. The god Terminus presided over her intellect. She knew her thoughts as we know each other's faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities. Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both. No sophist could pass on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy. This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show the one Truth, or the one Law, manifesting itself in such various phenomena. Add to this her profound faith in truth, which made her a Realist of that order that thoughts to her were things. The world of her thoughts rose around her mind as a panorama,--the sun-in the sky, the flowers distinct in the foreground, the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance,--and all in pure light and shade, all in perfect perspective. Margaret began to study German early in 1832. Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards in the Foreign Quarterly. I believe that in about three months from the time that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of its literature. Within the year, she had read Goethe's Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck's William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Körner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller's principal dramas, and his lyric poetry. Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies. Her mind opened under this influence, as the apple-blossom at the end of a warm week in May. The thought and the beauty of this rich literature equally filled her mind and fascinated her imagination. * * * * * But if she studied books thus earnestly, still more frequently did she turn to the study of men. Authors and their personages were not ideal beings merely, but full of human blood and life. So living men and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid fancy,--every trait intensified, developed, ennobled. Lessing says that "The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him as art ought to flatter,--painting the face not as it actually is, but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the resistance of the material worked in." Margaret's portrait-painting intellect treated persons in this way. She saw them as God designed them,--omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from friction of untoward circumstances. If we may be permitted to take a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they _actually_ were, but as they _really_ were. This accounts for her high estimate of her friends,--too high, too flattering, indeed, but justified to her mind by her knowledge of their interior capabilities. * * * * * The following extract illustrates her power, even at the age of nineteen, of comprehending the relations of two things lying far apart from each other, and of rising to a point of view which could overlook both:-- 'I have had,--while staying a day or two in Boston,--some of Shirley's, Ford's, and Hey wood's plays from the Athenæum. There are some noble strains of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical, all-absorbing, passion. One of the finest fictions I recollect in those specimens of the Italian novelists,--which you, I think, read when I did,--noble, where it illustrated the Italian national spirit, is ruined by the English novelist, who has transplanted it to an uncongenial soil; yet he has given it beauties which an Italian eye could not see, by investing the actors with deep, continuing, truly English affections.' * * * * * The following criticism on some of the dialogues of Plato, (dated June 3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the book, illustrates her downright way of asking world-revered authors to accept the test of plain common sense. As a finished or deliberate opinion, it ought not to be read; for it was not intended as such, but as a first impression hastily sketched. But read it as an illustration of the method in which her mind worked, and you will see that she meets the great Plato modestly, but boldly, on human ground, asking him for satisfactory proof of all that he says, and treating him as a human being, speaking to human beings. '_June_ 3, 1833.--I part with Plato with regret. I could have wished to "enchant myself," as Socrates would say, with him some days longer. Eutyphron is excellent. Tis the best specimen I have ever seen of that mode of convincing. There is one passage in which Socrates, as if it were _aside_,--since the remark is quite away from the consciousness of Eutyphron,--declares, "qu'il aimerait incomparablement mieux des principes fixes et inébranlables à l'habilité de Dédale avec les tresors de Tantale." I delight to hear such things from those whose lives have given the right to say them. For 'tis not always true what Lessing says, and I, myself, once thought,-- "F.--Von was fur Tugenden spricht er denn? MINNA.----Er spricht von keiner; denn ihn fehlt keine." For the mouth sometimes talketh virtue from the overflowing of the heart, as well as love, anger, &c. '"Crito" I have read only once, but like it. I have not got it in my heart though, so clearly as the others. The "Apology" I deem only remarkable for the noble tone of sentiment, and beautiful calmness. I was much affected by Phaedo, but think the argument weak in many respects. The nature of abstract ideas is clearly set forth; but there is no justice in reasoning, from their existence, that our souls have lived previous to our present state, since it was as easy for the Deity to create at once the idea of beauty within us, as the sense which brings to the soul intelligence that it exists in some outward shape. He does not clearly show his opinion of what the soul is; whether eternal _as_ the Deity, created _by_ the Deity, or how. In his answer to Simmias, he takes advantage of the general meaning of the words harmony, discord, &c. The soul might be a result, without being a harmony. But I think too many things to write, and some I have not had time to examine. Meanwhile I can think over parts, and say to myself, "beautiful," "noble," and use this as one of my enchantments.' * * * * * 'I send two of your German books. It pains me to part with Ottilia. I wish we could learn books, as we do pieces of music, and repeat them, in the author's order, when taking a solitary walk. But, now, if I set out with an Ottilia, this wicked fairy association conjures up such crowds of less lovely companions, that I often cease to feel the influence of the elect one. I don't like Goethe so well as Schiller now. I mean, I am not so happy in reading him. That perfect wisdom and _merciless_ nature seems cold, after those seducing pictures of forms more beautiful than truth. Nathless, I should like to read the second part of Goethe's Memoirs, if you do not use it now.' * * * * * 1832.--I am thinking how I omitted to talk a volume to you about the "Elective Affinities." Now I shall never say half of it, for which I, on my own account, am sorry. But two or three things I would ask:-- 'What do you think of Charlotte's proposition, that the accomplished pedagogue must be tiresome in society? 'Of Ottilia's, that the afflicted, and ill-educated, are oftentimes singled out by fate to instruct others, and her beautiful reasons why? 'And what have you thought of the discussion touching graves and monuments? 'I am now going to dream of your sermon, and of Ottilia's china-asters. Both shall be driven from my head to-morrow, for I go to town, allured by despatches from thence, promising much entertainment. Woe unto them if they disappoint me! 'Consider it, I pray you, as the "nearest duty" to answer my questions, and not act as you did about the sphinx-song.' * * * * * 'I have not anybody to speak to, that does not talk common-place, and I wish to talk about such an uncommon person,--about Novalis! a wondrous youth, and who has only written one volume. That is pleasant! I feel as though I could pursue my natural mode with him, get acquainted, then make my mind easy in the belief that I know all that is to be known. And he died at twenty-nine, and, as with Körner, your feelings may be single; you will never be called upon to share his experience, and compare his future feelings with his present. And his life was so full and so still. Then it is a relief, after feeling the immense superiority of Goethe. It seems to me as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe. I have felt this lately, in reading his lyric poems. I am enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully: but when I shut the book, it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked with such an immense variety that belong to beings I had thought so different. What can I bring? There is no answer in my mind, except "It is so," or "It will be so," or "No doubt such and such feel so." Yet, while my judgment becomes daily more tolerant towards others, the same attracting and repelling work is going on in my feelings. But I persevere in reading the great sage, some part of every day, hoping the time will come, when I shall not feel so overwhelmed, and leave off this habit of wishing to grasp the whole, and be contented to learn a little every day, as becomes a pupil. 'But now the one-sidedness, imperfection, and glow, of a mind like that of Novalis, seem refreshingly human to me. I have wished fifty times to write some letters giving an account, first, of his very pretty life, and then of his one volume, as I re-read it, chapter by chapter. If you will pretend to be very much interested, perhaps I will get a better pen, and write them to you.' * * NEED OF COMMUNION. '_Aug_. 7, 1832.--I feel quite lost; it is so long since I have talked myself. To see so many acquaintances, to talk so many words, and never tell my mind completely on any subject--to say so many things which do not seem called out, makes me feel strangely vague and movable. ''Tis true, the time is probably near when I must live alone, to all intents and purposes,--separate entirely my acting from my thinking world, take care of my ideas without aid,--except from the illustrious dead,--answer my own questions, correct my own feelings, and do all that hard work for myself. How tiresome 'tis to find out all one's self-delusion! I thought myself so very independent, because I could conceal some feelings at will, and did not need the same excitement as other young characters did. And I am not independent, nor never shall be, while I can get anybody to minister to me. But I shall go where there is never a spirit to come, if I call ever so loudly. 'Perhaps I shall talk to you about Körner, but need not write. He charms me, and has become a fixed star in the heaven of my thought; but I understand all that he excites perfectly. I felt very '_new_ about Novalis,--"the good Novalis," as you call him after Mr. Carlyle. He is, indeed, _good_, most enlightened, yet most pure; every link of his experience framed--no, _beaten_--from the tried gold. 'I have read, thoroughly, only two of his pieces, "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais," and "Heinrich von Ofterdingen." From the former I have only brought away piecemeal impressions, but the plan and treatment of the latter, I believe, I understand. It describes the development of poetry in a mind; and with this several other developments are connected. I think I shall tell you all I know about it, some quiet time after your return, but if not, will certainly keep a Novalis-journal for you some favorable season, when I live regularly for a fort night.' * * * * * '_June_, 1833.--I return Lessing. I could hardly get through Miss Sampson. E. Galeotti is good in the same way as Minna. Well-conceived and sustained characters, interesting situations, but never that profound knowledge of human nature, those minute beauties, and delicate vivifying traits, which lead on so in the writings of some authors, who may be nameless. I think him easily followed; strong, but not deep.' * * * * * '_May_, 1833.--_Groton_.--I think you are wrong in applying your artistical ideas to occasional poetry. An epic, a drama, must have a fixed form in the mind of the poet from the first; and copious draughts of ambrosia quaffed in the heaven of thought, soft fanning gales and bright light from the outward world, give muscle and bloom,--that is, give life,--to this skeleton. But all occasional poems must be moods, and can a mood have a form fixed and perfect, more than a wave of the sea?' * * * * * 'Three or four afternoons I have passed very happily at my beloved haunt in the wood, reading Goethe's "Second Residence in Rome." Your pencil-marks show that you have been before me. I shut the book each time with an earnest desire to live as he did,--always to have some engrossing object of pursuit. I sympathize deeply with a mind in that state. While mine is being used up by ounces, I wish pailfuls might be poured into it. I am dejected and uneasy when I see no results from my daily existence, but I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.' * * * * * * * 'I think I am less happy, in many respects, than you, but particularly in this. You can speak freely to me of all your circumstances and feelings, can you not? It is not possible for me to be so profoundly frank with any earthly friend. Thus my heart has no proper home; it only can prefer some of its visiting-places to others; and with deep regret I realize that I have, at length, entered on the concentrating stage of life. It was not time. I had been too sadly cramped. I had not learned enough, and must always remain imperfect. Enough! I am glad I have been able to say so much.' * * * * * 'I have read nothing,--to signify,--except Goethe's "Campagne in Frankreich." Have you looked through it, and do you remember his intercourse with the Wertherian Plessing? That tale pained me exceedingly. We cry, "help, help," and there is no help--in man at least. How often I have thought, if I could see Goethe, and tell him my state of mind, he would support and guide me! He would be able to understand; he would show me how to rule circumstances, instead of being ruled by them; and, above all, he would not have been so sure that all would be for the best, without our making an effort to act out the oracles; he would have wished to see me what Nature intended. But his conduct to Plessing and Ohlenschlager shows that to him, also, an appeal would have been vain.' 'Do you really believe there is anything "all-comprehending" but religion? Are not these distinctions imaginary? Must not the philosophy of every mind, or set of minds, be a system suited to guide them, and give a home where they can bring materials among which to accept, reject, and shape at pleasure? Novalis calls those, who harbor these ideas, "unbelievers;" but hard names make no difference. He says with disdain, "To _such_, philosophy is only a system which will spare them the trouble of reflecting." Now this is just my case. I _do_ want a system which shall suffice to my character, and in whose applications I shall have faith. I do not wish to _reflect_ always, if reflecting must be always about one's identity, whether "_ich_" am the true "_ich_" &c. I wish to arrive at that point where I can trust myself, and leave off saying, "It seems to me," and boldly feel, It _is_ so TO ME. My character has got its natural regulator, my heart beats, my lips speak truth, I can walk alone, or offer my arm to a friend, or if I lean on another, it is not the debility of sickness, but only wayside weariness. This is the philosophy _I_ want; this much would satisfy _me_. 'Then Novalis says, "Philosophy is the art of discovering the place of truth in every encountered event and circumstance, to attune all relations to truth." 'Philosophy is peculiarly home-sickness; an over-mastering desire to be at home. 'I think so; but what is there _all-comprehending_; eternally-conscious, about that?' * * * * * '_Sept.,_ 1832.--"Not see the use of metaphysics?" A moderate portion, taken at stated intervals, I hold to be of much use as discipline of the faculties. I only object to them as having an absorbing and anti-productive tendency. But 'tis not always so; may not be so with you. Wait till you are two years older, before you decide that 'tis your vocation. Time enough at six-and-twenty to form yourself into a metaphysical philosopher. The brain does not easily get too dry for _that_. Happy you, in these ideas which give you a tendency to optimism. May you become a proselyte to that consoling faith. I shall never be able to follow you, but shall look after you with longing eyes.' * * * * * '_Groton._--Spring has come, and I shall see you soon. If I could pour into your mind all the ideas which have passed through mine, you would be well entertained, I think, for three or four days. But no hour will receive aught beyond its own appropriate wealth. 'I am at present engaged in surveying the level on which the public mind is poised. I no longer lie in wait for the tragedy and comedy of life; the rules of its _prose_ engage my attention. I talk incessantly with common-place people, full of curiosity to ascertain the process by which materials, apparently so jarring and incapable of classification, get united into that strange whole, the American public. I have read all Jefferson's letters, the North American, the daily papers, &c., without end. H. seems to be weaving his Kantisms into the American system in a tolerably happy manner.' * * * * * * * 'George Thompson has a voice of uncommon compass and beauty; never sharp in its highest, or rough and husky in its lowest, tones. A perfect enunciation, every syllable round and energetic; though his manner was the one I love best, very rapid, and full of eager climaxes. Earnestness in every part,--sometimes impassioned earnestness,--a sort of "Dear friends, believe, _pray_ believe, I love you, and you MUST believe as I do" expression, even in the argumentative parts. I felt, as I have so often done before, if I were a man, the gift I would choose should be that of eloquence. That power of forcing the vital currents of thousands of human hearts into ONE current, by the constraining power of that most delicate instrument, the voice, is so intense,--yes, I would prefer it to a more extensive fame, a more permanent influence.' 'Did I describe to you my feelings on hearing Mr. Everett's eulogy on Lafayette? No; I did not. That was exquisite. The old, hackneyed story; not a new anecdote, not a single reflection of any value; but the manner, the _manner_^ the delicate inflections of voice, the elegant and appropriate gesture, the sense of beauty produced by the whole, which thrilled us all to tears, flowing from a deeper and purer source than that which answers to pathos. This was fine; but I prefer the Thompson manner. Then there is Mr. Webster's, unlike either; simple grandeur, nobler, more impressive, less captivating. I have heard few fine speakers; I wish I could hear a thousand. Are you vexed by my keeping the six volumes of your Goethe? I read him very little either; I have so little time,--many things to do at home,--my three children, and three pupils besides, whom I instruct. 'By the way, I have always thought all that was said about the anti-religious tendency of a classical education to be old wives' tales. But their puzzles about Virgil's notions of heaven and virtue, and his gracefully-described gods and goddesses, have led me to alter my opinions; and I suspect, from reminiscences of my own mental history, that if all governors do not think the same 't is from want of that intimate knowledge of their pupils' minds which I naturally possess. I really find it difficult to keep their _morale_ steady, and am inclined to think many of my own sceptical sufferings are traceable to this source. I well remember what reflections arose in my childish mind from a comparison of the Hebrew history, where every moral obliquity is shown out with such naïveté, and the Greek history, full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power, with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over their vices and failings.' * * * * * 'My own favorite project, since I began seriously to entertain any of that sort, is six historical tragedies; of which I have the plans of three quite perfect. However, the attempts I have made on them have served to show me the vast difference between conception and execution. Yet I am, though abashed, not altogether discouraged. My next favorite plan is a series of tales illustrative of Hebrew history. The proper junctures have occurred to me during my late studies on the historical books of the Old Testament. This task, however, requires a thorough and imbuing knowledge of the Hebrew manners and spirit, with a chastened energy of imagination, which I am as yet far from possessing. But if I should be permitted peace and time to follow out my ideas, I have hopes. Perhaps it is a weakness to confide to you embryo designs, which never may glow into life, or mock me by their failure.' * * * * * 'I have long had a suspicion that no mind can systematize its knowledge, and carry on the concentrating processes, without some fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics. But that indisposition, or even dread of the study, which you may remember, has kept me from meddling with it, till lately, in meditating on the life of Goethe, I thought I must get some idea of the history of philosophical opinion in Germany, that I might be able to judge of the influence it exercised upon his mind. I think I can comprehend him every other way, and probably interpret him satisfactorily to others,--if I can get the proper materials. When I was in Cambridge, I got Fichte and Jacobi; I was much interrupted, but some time and earnest thought I devoted. Fichte I could not understand at all; though the treatise which I read was one intended to be popular, and which he says must compel (_bezwingen_) to conviction. Jacobi I could understand in details, but not in system. It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know him well,--perhaps Spinoza's. Since I came home, I have been consulting Buhle's and Tennemann's histories of philosophy, and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books.' * * * * * 'After I had cast the burden of my cares upon you, I rested, and read Petrarch for a day or two. But that could not last. I had begun to "take an account of stock," as Coleridge calls it, and was forced to proceed. He says few persons ever did this faithfully, without being dissatisfied with the result, and lowering their estimate of their supposed riches. With me it has ended in the most humiliating sense of poverty; and only just enough pride is left to keep your poor friend off the parish. As it is, I have already asked items of several besides yourself; but, though they have all given what they had, it has by no means answered my purpose; and I have laid their gifts aside, with my other hoards, which gleamed so fairy bright, and are now, in the hour of trial, turned into mere slate-stones. I am not sure that even if I do find the philosopher's stone, I shall be able to transmute them into the gold they looked so like formerly. It will be long before I can give a distinct, and at the same time concise, account of my present state. I believe it is a great era. I am thinking now,--really thinking, I believe; certainly it seems as if I had never done so before. If it does not kill me, something will come of it. Never was my mind so active; and the subjects are God, the universe, immortality. But shall I be fit for anything till I have absolutely re-educated myself? Am I, can I make myself, fit to write an account of half a century of the existence of one of the master-spirits of this world? It seems as if I had been very arrogant to dare to think it; yet will I not shrink back from what I have undertaken,--even by failure I shall learn much.' * * * * * 'I am shocked to perceive you think I am _writing_ the life of Goethe. No, indeed! I shall need a great deal of preparation before I shall have it clear in my head, I have taken a great many notes; but I shall not begin to write it, till it all lies mapped out before me. I have no materials for ten years of his life, from the time he went to Weimar, up to the Italian journey. Besides, I wish to see the books that have been written about him in Germany, by friend or foe. I wish to look at the matter from all sides. New lights are constantly dawning on me; and I think it possible I shall come out from the Carlyle view, and perhaps from yours, and distaste you, which will trouble me. * * 'How am I to get the information I want, unless I go to Europe? To whom shall I write to choose my materials? I have thought of Mr. Carlyle, but still more of Goethe's friend, Von Muller. I dare say he would be pleased at the idea of a life of G. written in this hemisphere, and be very willing to help me. If you have anything to tell me, you will, and not mince matters. Of course, my impressions of Goethe's works cannot be influenced by information I get about his _life_; but, as to this latter, I suspect I must have been hasty in my inferences. I apply to you without scruple. There are subjects on which men and women usually talk a great deal, but apart from one another. You, however, are well aware that I am very destitute of what is commonly _called_ modesty. With regard to this, how fine the remark of our present subject: "Courage and modesty are virtues which every sort of society reveres, because they are virtues which cannot be counterfeited; also, they are known by the _same hue_." When that blush does not come naturally to my face, I do not drop a veil to make people think it is there. All this may be very unlovely, but it is _I_.' CHANNING ON SLAVERY. 'This is a noble work. So refreshing its calm, benign atmosphere, after the pestilence-bringing gales of the day. It comes like a breath borne over some solemn sea which separates us from an island of righteousness. How valuable is it to have among us a man who, standing apart from the conflicts of the herd, watches the principles that are at work, with a truly paternal love for what is human, and may be permanent; ready at the proper point to give his casting-vote to the cause of Right! The author has amplified on the grounds of his faith, to a degree that might seem superfluous, if the question had not become so utterly bemazed and bedarkened of late. After all, it is probable that, in addressing the public at large, it is _not_ best to express a thought in as few words as possible; there is much classic authority for diffuseness.' RICHTER. _Groton_.--'Ritcher says, the childish heart vies in the height of its surges with the manly, only is not furnished with _lead_ for sounding them. 'How thoroughly am I converted to the love of Jean Paul, and wonder at the indolence or shallowness which could resist so long, and call his profuse riches want of system! What a mistake! System, plan, there is, but on so broad a basis that I did not at first comprehend it. In every page I am forced to pencil. I will make me a book, or, as he would say, bind me a bouquet from his pages, and wear it on my heart of hearts, and be ever refreshing my wearied inward sense with its exquisite fragrance. I must have improved, to love him as I do.' IV. CHARACTER.--AIMS AND IDEAS OF LIFE. "O friend, how flat and tasteless such a life! Impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed, Still toilsomely ascending step by step, Into an unknown realm of dark blue clouds. What crowns the ascent? Speak, or I go no further. I need a goal, an aim. I cannot toil, _Because the steps are here_ in their ascent Tell me THE END, or I sit still and weep." "NATURLICHE TOCHTER," _Translated by Margaret._ "And so he went onward, ever onward, for twenty-seven years--then, indeed, he had gone far enough." GOETHE'S _words concerning Schiller_ * * * * * I would say something of Margaret's inward condition, of her aims and views in life, while in Cambridge, before closing this chapter of her story. Her powers, whether of mind, heart, or will, have been sufficiently indicated in what has preceded. In the sketch of her friendships and of her studies, we have seen the affluence of her intellect, and the deep tenderness of her woman's nature. We have seen the energy which she displayed in study and labor. But to what _aim_ were these powers directed? Had she any clear view of the demands and opportunities of life, any definite plan, any high, pure purpose? This is, after all, the test question, which detects the low-born and low-minded wearer of the robe of gold,-- "Touch them inwardly, they smell of copper." Margaret's life _had an aim_, and she was, therefore, essentially a moral person, and not merely an overflowing genius, in whom "impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed." This aim was distinctly apprehended and steadily pursued by her from first to last. It was a high, noble one, wholly religious, almost Christian. It gave dignity to her whole career, and made it heroic. This aim, from first to last, was SELF-CULTURE. If she ever was ambitious of knowledge and talent, as a means of excelling others, and gaining fame, position, admiration,--this vanity had passed before I knew her, and was replaced by the profound desire for a full development of her whole nature, by means of a full experience of life. In her description of her own youth, she says, 'VERY EARLY I KNEW THAT THE ONLY OBJECT IN LIFE WAS TO GROW.' This is the passage:-- 'I was now in the hands of teachers, who had not, since they came on the earth, put to themselves one intelligent question as to their business here. Good dispositions and employment for the heart gave a tone to all they said, which was pleasing, and not perverting. They, no doubt, injured those who accepted the husks they proffered for bread, and believed that exercise of memory was study, and to know what others knew, was the object of study. But to me this was all penetrable. I had known great living minds.--I had seen how they took their food and did their exercise, and what their objects were. _Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow_. I was often false to this knowledge, in idolatries of particular objects, or impatient longings for happiness, but I have never lost sight of it, have always been controlled by it, and this first gift of thought has never been superseded by a later love.' In this she spoke truth. The good and the evil which flow from this great idea of self-development she fully realized. This aim of life, originally self-chosen, was made much more clear to her mind by the study of Goethe, the great master of this school, in whose unequalled eloquence this doctrine acquires an almost irresistible beauty and charm. "Wholly religious, and almost Christian," I said, was this aim. It was religious, because it recognized something divine, infinite, imperishable in the human soul,--something divine in outward nature and providence, by which the soul is led along its appointed way. It was almost Christian in its superiority to all low, worldly, vulgar thoughts and cares; in its recognition of a high standard of duty, and a great destiny for man. In its strength, Margaret was enabled to do and bear, with patient fortitude, what would have crushed a soul not thus supported. Yet it is not the highest aim, for in all its forms, whether as personal improvement, the salvation of the soul, or ascetic religion, it has at its core a profound selfishness. Margaret's soul was too generous for any low form of selfishness. Too noble to become an Epicurean, too large-minded to become a modern ascetic, the defective nature of her rule of life, showed itself in her case, only in a certain supercilious tone toward "the vulgar herd," in the absence (at this period) of a tender humanity, and in an idolatrous hero-worship of genius and power. Afterward, too, she may have suffered from her desire for a universal human experience, and an unwillingness to see that we must often be content to enter the Kingdom, of Heaven halt and maimed,--that a perfect development here must often be wholly renounced. But how much better to pursue with devotion, like that of Margaret, an imperfect aim, than to worship with lip-service, as most persons do, even though it be in a loftier temple, and before a holier shrine! With Margaret, the doctrine of self-culture was a devotion to which she sacrificed all earthly hopes and joys,--everything but manifest duty. And so her course was "onward, ever onward," like that of Schiller, to her last hour of life. Burned in her cheek with ever deepening fire The spirit's YOUTH, which never passes by;-- The COURAGE which, though worlds in hate conspire, Conquers, at last, their dull hostility;-- The lofty FAITH, which, ever mounting higher, Now presses on, now waiteth patiently,-- With which the good tends ever to his goal, With which day finds, at last, the earnest soul. But this high idea which governed our friend's life, brought her into sharp conflicts, which constituted the pathos and tragedy of her existence,--first with her circumstances, which seemed so inadequate to the needs of her nature,--afterwards with duties to relatives and friends,--and, finally, with the law of the Great Spirit, whose will she found it so hard to acquiesce in. The circumstances in which Margaret lived appeared to her life a prison. She had no room for utterance, no sphere adequate; her powers were unemployed. With what eloquence she described this want of a field! Often have I listened with wonder and admiration, satisfied that she exaggerated the evil, and yet unable to combat her rapid statements. Could she have seen in how few years a way would open before her, by which she could emerge into an ample field,--how soon she would find troops of friends, fit society, literary occupation, and the opportunity of studying the great works of art in their own home,--she would have been spared many a sharp pang. Margaret, like every really earnest and deep nature, felt the necessity of a religious faith as the foundation of character. The first notice which I find of her views on this point is contained in the following letter to one of her youthful friends, when only nineteen:-- * * * * * 'I have hesitated much whether to tell you what you ask about my religion. You are mistaken! I have not formed an opinion. I have determined not to form settled opinions at present. Loving or feeble natures need a positive religion, a visible refuge, a protection, as much in the passionate season of youth as in those stages nearer to the grave. But mine is not such. My pride is superior to any feelings I have yet experienced: my affection is strong admiration, not the necessity of giving or receiving assistance or sympathy. When disappointed, I do not ask or wish consolation,--I wish to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source; I will not have my thoughts diverted, or my feelings soothed; 'tis therefore that my young life is so singularly barren of illusions. I know, I feel the time must come when this proud and impatient heart shall be stilled, and turn from the ardors of Search and Action, to lean on something above. But--shall I say it?--the thought of that calmer era is to me a thought of deepest sadness; so remote from my present being is that future existence, which still the mind may conceive. I believe in Eternal Progression. I believe in a God, a Beauty and Perfection to which I am to strive all my life for assimilation. From these two articles of belief, I draw the rules by which I strive to regulate my life. But, though I reverence all religions as necessary to the happiness of man, I am yet ignorant of the religion of Revelation. Tangible promises! well defined hopes! are things of which I do not _now_ feel the need. At present, my soul is intent on this life, and I think of religion as its rule; and, in my opinion, this is the natural and proper course from youth to age. What I have written is not hastily concocted, it has a meaning. I have given you, in this little space, the substance of many thoughts, the clues to many cherished opinions. 'Tis a subject on which I rarely speak. I never said so much but once before. I have here given you all I know, or think, on the most important of subjects--could you but read understandingly!' * * * * * I find, in her journals for 1833, the following passages, expressing the religious purity of her aspirations at that time:-- 'Blessed Father, nip every foolish wish in blossom. Lead me _any way_ to truth and goodness; but if it might be, I would not pass from idol to idol. Let no mean sculpture deform a mind disorderly, perhaps ill-furnished, but spacious and life-warm. Remember thy child, such as thou madest her, and let her understand her little troubles, when possible, oh, beautiful Deity!' * * * * * '_Sunday morning_.--Mr.--preached on the nature of our duties, social and personal. The sweet dew of truth penetrated my heart like balm. He pointed out the various means of improvement, whereby the humblest of us may be beneficent at last. How just, how nobly true,--how modestly, yet firmly uttered,--his opinions of man,--of time,--of God! 'My heart swelled with prayer. I began to feel hope that time and toil might strengthen me to despise the "vulgar parts of felicity," and live as becomes an immortal creature. I am sure, quite sure, that I am getting into the right road. Oh, lead me, my Father! root out false pride and selfishness from my heart; inspire me with virtuous energy, and enable me to improve every talent for the eternal good of myself and others.' A friend of Margaret, some years older than herself, gives me the following narrative:-- "I was," says she, in substance, "suffering keenly from a severe trial, and had secluded myself from all my friends, when Margaret, a girl of twenty, forced her way to me. She sat with me, and gave me her sympathy, and, with most affectionate interest, sought to draw me away from my gloom. As far as she was able, she gave me comfort. But as my thoughts were then much led to religious subjects, she sought to learn my religious experience, and listened to it with great interest. I told her how I had sat in darkness for two long years, waiting for the light, and in full faith that it would come; how I had kept my soul patient and quiet,--had surrendered self-will to God's will,--had watched and waited till at last His great mercy came in an infinite peace to my soul. Margaret was never weary of asking me concerning this state, and said, 'I would gladly give all my talents and knowledge for such an experience as this.' "Several years after," continues this friend, "I was travelling with her, and we sat, one lovely night, looking at the river, as it rolled beneath the yellow moonlight. We spoke again of God's light in the soul, and I said--'Margaret! has that light dawned on _your_ soul?' She answered, 'I think it has. But, oh! it is so glorious that I fear it will not be permanent, and so precious that I dare not speak of it, lest it should be gone.' "That was the whole of our conversation, and I did not speak to her again concerning it." * * * * * Before this time, however, during her residence at Cambridge, she seemed to reach the period of her existence in which she descended lowest into the depths of gloom. She felt keenly, at this time, the want of a home for her heart. Full of a profound tendency toward life, capable of an ardent love, her affections were thrown back on her heart, to become stagnant, and for a while to grow bitter there; Then it was that she felt how empty and worthless were all the attainments and triumphs of the mere intellect; then it was that "she went about to cause her heart to despair of all the labor she had taken under the sun." Had she not emerged from this valley of the shadow of death, and come on to a higher plane of conviction and hope, her life would have been a most painful tragedy. But, when we know how she passed on and up, ever higher and higher, to the mountain-top, leaving one by one these dark ravines and mist-shrouded valleys, and ascending to where a perpetual sunshine lay, above the region of clouds, and was able to overlook with eagle glance the widest panorama,--we can read, with sympathy indeed, but without pain, the following extracts from a journal:-- 'It was Thanksgiving day, (Nov., 1831,) and I was obliged to go to church, or exceedingly displease my father. I almost always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher; but to-day, more than ever before, the services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful tone. I was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sadness. I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high. I looked round the church, and envied all the little children; for I supposed they had parents who protected them, so that they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty. I knew not, then, that none could have any father but God. I knew not, that I was not the only lonely one, that I was not the selected Oedipus, the special victim of an iron law. I was in haste for all to be over, that I might get into the free air. * * 'I walked away over the fields as fast as I could walk. This was my custom at that time, when I could no longer bear the weight of my feelings, and fix my attention on any pursuit; for I do believe I never voluntarily gave way to these thoughts one moment. The force I exerted I think, even now, greater than I ever knew in any other character. But when I could bear myself no longer, I walked many hours, till the anguish was wearied out, and I returned in a state of prayer. To-day all seemed to have reached its height. It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place,--to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer. It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of sad clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull, and gray, and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there; sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path;--there was no life else. In the sweetness of my present peace, such days seem to me made to tell man the worst of his lot; but still that November wind can bring a chill of memory. 'I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fulness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marvelled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child. I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it MUST do it,--that it must make all this false true,--and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena. * * 'My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow; and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since. When I consider that this will be nine years ago next November, I am astonished that I have not gone on faster since; that I am not yet sufficiently purified to be taken back to God. Still, I did but touch then on the only haven of Insight. You know what I would say. I was dwelling in the ineffable, the unutterable. But the sun of earth set, and it grew dark around; the moment came for me to go. I had never been accustomed to walk alone at night, for my father was very strict on that subject, but now I had not one fear. When I came back, the moon was riding clear above the houses. I went into the churchyard, and there offered a prayer as holy, if not as deeply true, as any I know now; a prayer, which perhaps took form as the guardian angel of my life. If that word in the Bible, Selah, means what gray-headed old men think it does, when they read aloud, it should be written here,--Selah! 'Since that day, I have never more been completely engaged in self; but the statue has been emerging, though slowly, from the block. Others may not see the promise even of its pure symmetry, but I do, and am learning to be patient. I shall be all human yet; and then the hour will come to leave humanity, and live always in the pure ray. 'This first day I was taken up; but the second time the Holy Ghost descended like a dove. I went out again for a day, but this time it was spring. I walked in the fields of Groton. But I will not describe that day; its music still sounds too sweetly near. Suffice it to say, I gave it all into our Father's hands, and was no stern-weaving Fate more, but one elected to obey, and love, and at last know. Since then I have suffered, as I must suffer again, till all the complex be made simple, but I have never been in discord with the grand harmony.' GROTON AND PROVIDENCE. LETTERS AND JOURNALS. * * * * * "What hath not man sought out and found, But his dear God? Who yet his glorious love Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground With showers, and frosts, with love and awe." HERBERT. "No one need pride himself upon Genius, for it is the free-gift of God; but of honest Industry and true devotion to his destiny any man may well be proud; indeed, this thorough, integrity of purpose is itself the Divine Idea in its most common form, and no really honest mind is without communion with God" FICHTE. "God did anoint thee with his odorous oil, To wrestle, not to reign; and he assigns All thy tears over, like pure crystallines, For younger fellow-workers of the soil To wear for amulets. So others shall Take patience, labor, to their hearts and hands, From thy hands, and thy heart, and thy brave cheer, And God's grace fructify through thee to all." ELIZABETH B. BARRETT. "While I was restless, nothing satisfied, Distrustful, most perplexed--yet felt somehow A mighty power was brooding, taking shape Within me; and this lasted till one night When, as I sat revolving it and more, A still voice from without said,--'Seest thou not, Desponding child, whence came defeat and loss? Even from thy strength.'" BROWNING. III. GROTON AND PROVIDENCE. * * * * * 'Heaven's discipline has been invariable to me. The seemingly most pure and noble hopes have been blighted; the seemingly most promising connections broken. The lesson has been endlessly repeated: "Be humble, patient, self-sustaining; hope only for occasional aids; love others, but not engrossingly, for by being much alone your appointed task can best be done!" What a weary work is before me, ere that lesson shall be fully learned! Who shall wonder at the stiff-necked, and rebellious folly of young Israel, bowing down to a brute image, though the prophet was bringing messages from the holy mountain, while one's own youth is so obstinately idolatrous! Yet will I try to keep the heart with diligence, nor ever fear that the sun is gone out because I shiver in the cold and dark!' Such was the tone of resignation in which Margaret wrote from Groton, Massachusetts, whither, much to her regret, her father removed in the spring of 1833. Extracts from letters and journals will show how stern was her schooling there, and yet how constant was her faith, that "God keeps a niche In heaven to hold our idols! And albeit He breaks them to our faces, and denies That our close kisses should impair their white, I know we shall behold them raised, complete, The dust shook from their beauty,--glorified, New Memnons singing in the great God-light." SAD WELCOME HOME. '_Groton, April_ 25, 1833.--I came hither, summoned by the intelligence, that our poor--had met with a terrible accident. I found the dear child,--who had left me so full of joy and eagerness, that I thought with a sigh, not of envy, how happy he, at least, would be here,--burning with fever. He had expected me impatiently, and was very faint lest it should not be "Margaret" who had driven up. I confess I greeted our new home with a flood of bitter tears. He behaves with great patience, sweetness, and care for the comfort of others. This has been a severe trial for mother, fatigued, too, as she was, and full of care; but her conduct is angelic. I try to find consolation in all kinds of arguments, and to distract my thoughts till the precise amount of injury is surely known. I am not idle a moment. When not-with--, in whose room I sit, sewing, and waiting upon him, or reading aloud a great part of the day, I solace my soul with Goethe, and follow his guidance into realms of the "Wahren, Guten, and Schönen."' OCCUPATIONS. '_May_, 1833.--As to German, I have done less than I hoped, so much had the time been necessarily broken up. I have with me the works of Goethe which I have not yet read, and am now engaged upon "Kunst and Alterthum," and "Campagne in Frankreich." I still prefer Goethe to any one, and, as I proceed, find more and more to learn, and am made to feel that my general notion of his mind is most imperfect, and needs testing and sifting. 'I brought your beloved Jean Paul with me, too. I cannot yet judge well, but think we shall not be intimate. His infinitely variegated, and certainly most exquisitely colored, web fatigues attention. I prefer, too, wit to humor, and daring imagination to the richest fancy. Besides, his philosophy and religion seem to be of the sighing sort, and, having some tendency that way myself, I want opposing force in a favorite author. Perhaps I have spoken unadvisedly; if so, I shall recant on further knowledge.' And thus recant she did, when familiar acquaintance with the genial and sagacious humorist had won for him her reverent love. RICHTER. 'Poet of Nature! Gentlest of the wise, Most airy of the fanciful, most keen Of satirists!--thy thoughts, like butterflies, Still near the sweetest scented flowers have been With Titian's colors thou canst sunset paint, With Raphael's dignity, celestial love; With Hogarth's pencil, each deceit and feint Of meanness and hypocrisy reprove; Canst to devotion's highest flight sublime Exalt the mind, by tenderest pathos' art, Dissolve, in purifying tears, the heart, Or bid it, shuddering, recoil at crime; The fond illusions of the youth and maid, At which so many world-formed sages sneer, When by thy altar-lighted torch displayed, Our natural religion must appear. All things in thee tend to one polar star, Magnetic all thy influences are!' 'Some murmur at the "want of system" in Richter's writings. 'A labyrinth! a flowery wilderness! Some in thy "slip-boxes" and "honey-moons" Complain of--_want of order_, I confess, But not of _system_ in its highest sense. Who asks a guiding clue through this wide mind, In love of Nature such will surely find. In tropic climes, live like the tropic bird, Whene'er a spice-fraught grove may tempt thy stay; Nor be by cares of colder climes disturbed-- No frost the summer's bloom shall drive away; Nature's wide temple and the azure dome Have plan enough, for the free spirit's home!' 'Your Schiller has already given me great pleasure. I have been reading the "Revolt in the Netherlands" with intense interest, and have reflected much upon it. The volumes are numbered in my little book-case, and as the eye runs over them, I thank the friendly heart that put all this genius and passion within my power. 'I am glad, too, that you thought of lending me "Bigelow's Elements." I have studied the Architecture attentively, till I feel quite mistress of it all. But I want more engravings, Vitruvius, Magna Græcia, the Ionian Antiquities, &c. Meanwhile, I have got out all our tours in Italy. Forsyth, a book I always loved much, I have re-read with increased pleasure, by this new light. Goethe, too, studied architecture while in Italy; so his books are full of interesting information; and Madame De Stael, though not deep, is tasteful.' * * * * * 'American History! Seriously, my mind is regenerating as to my country, for I am beginning to appreciate the United States and its great men. The violent antipathies,--the result of an exaggerated love for, shall I call it by so big a name as the "poetry of being?"--and the natural distrust arising from being forced to hear the conversation of half-bred men, all whose petty feelings were roused to awkward life by the paltry game of local politics,--are yielding to reason and calmer knowledge. Had I but been educated in the knowledge of such men as Jefferson, Franklin, Rush! I have learned now to know them partially. And I rejoice, if only because my father and I can have so much in common on this topic. All my other pursuits have led me away from him; here he has much information and ripe judgment. But, better still, I hope to feel no more that sometimes despairing, sometimes insolently contemptuous, feeling of incongeniality with my time and place. Who knows but some proper and attainable object of pursuit may present itself to the cleared eye? At any rate, wisdom is good, if it brings neither bliss nor glory.' * * * * * _March_, 1834.--Four pupils are a serious and fatiguing charge for one of my somewhat ardent and impatient disposition. Five days in the week I have given daily lessons in three languages, in Geography and History, besides many other exercises on alternate days. This has consumed often eight, always five hours of my day. There has been, also, a great deal of needle-work to do, which is now nearly finished, so that I shall not be obliged to pass my time about it when everything looks beautiful, as I did last summer. We have had very poor servants, and, for some time past, only one. My mother has been often ill. My grandmother, who passed the winter with us, has been ill. Thus, you may imagine, as I am the only grown-up daughter, that my time has been considerably taxed. 'But as, sad or merry, I must always be learning, I laid down a course of study at the beginning of winter, comprising certain subjects, about which I had always felt deficient. These were the History and Geography of modern Europe, beginning the former in the fourteenth century; the Elements of Architecture; the works of Alfieri, with his opinions on them; the historical and critical works of Goethe and Schiller, and the outlines of history of our own country. 'I chose this time as one when I should have nothing to distract or dissipate my mind. I have nearly completed this course, in the style I proposed,--not minute or thorough. I confess,--though I have had only three evenings in the week, and chance hours in the day, for it. I am very glad I have undertaken it, and feel the good effects already. Occasionally, I try my hand at composition, but have not completed anything to my own satisfaction. I have sketched a number of plans, but if ever accomplished, it must be in a season of more joyful energy, when my mind has been renovated, and refreshed by change of scene or circumstance. My translation of Tasso cannot be published at present, if 'it ever is.' * * * * * 'My object is to examine thoroughly, as far as my time and abilities will permit, the evidences of the Christian Religion. I have endeavored to get rid of this task as much and as long as possible; to be content with superficial notions, and, if I may so express it, to adopt religion as a matter of taste. But I meet with infidels very often; two or three of my particular friends are deists; and their arguments, with distressing sceptical notions of my own, are haunting me forever. I must satisfy myself; and having once begun, I shall go on as far as I can. 'My mind often swells with thoughts on these subjects, which I long to pour out on some person of superior calmness and strength, and fortunate in more accurate knowledge. I should feel such a quieting reaction. But, generally, it seems best that I should go through these conflicts alone. The process will be slower, more irksome, more distressing, but the results will be my own, and I shall feel greater confidence in them.' MISS MARTINEAU. In the summer of 1835, Margaret found a fresh stimulus to self-culture in the society of Miss Martineau, whom she met while on a visit at Cambridge, in the house of her friend, Mrs. Farrar. How animating this intercourse then was to her, appears from her journals. Miss Martineau received me so kindly as to banish all embarrassment at once. We had some talk about "Carlyleism," and I was not quite satisfied with the ground she took, but there was no opportunity for full discussion. I wished to give myself wholly up to receive an impression of her. What shrewdness in detecting various shades of character! Yet, what she said of Hannah More and Miss Edgeworth, grated upon my feelings.' Again, later:-- 'I cannot conceive how we chanced upon the subject of our conversation, but never shall I forget what she said. It has bound me to her. In that hour, most unexpectedly to me, we passed the barrier that separates acquaintance from friendship, and I saw how greatly her heart is to be valued.' And again:-- 'We sat together close to the pulpit. I was deeply moved by Mr.--'s manner of praying for "our friends," and I put up this prayer for my companion, which I recorded, as it rose in my heart: "Author of good, Source of all beauty and holiness, thanks to Thee for the purifying, elevating communion that I have enjoyed with this beloved and revered being. Grant, that the thoughts she has awakened, and the bright image of her existence, may live in my memory, inciting my earth-bound spirit to higher words and deeds. May her path be guarded and blessed. May her noble mind be kept firmly poised in its native truth, unsullied by prejudice or error, and strong to resist whatever outwardly or inwardly shall war against its high vocation. May each day bring to this generous seeker new riches of true philosophy and of Divine Love. And, amidst all trials, give her to know and feel that Thou, the All-sufficing, art with her, leading her on through eternity to likeness of Thyself." * * * * * 'I sigh for an intellectual guide. Nothing but the sense of what God has done for me, in bringing me nearer to himself, saves me from despair. With what envy I looked at Flaxman's picture of Hesiod sitting at the feet of the Muse! How blest would it be to be thus instructed in one's vocation! Anything would I do and suffer, to be sure that, when leaving earth, I should not be haunted with recollections of "aims unreached, occasions lost." I have hoped some friend would do,--what none has ever yet done,--comprehend me wholly, mentally, and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself. I have had some hope that Miss Martineau might be this friend, but cannot yet tell. She has what I want,--vigorous reasoning powers, invention, clear views of her objects,--and she has been trained to the best means of execution. Add to this, that there are no strong intellectual sympathies between us, such as would blind her to my defects.' * * * * * 'A delightful letter from Miss Martineau. I mused long upon the noble courage with which she stepped forward into life, and the accurate judgment with which she has become acquainted with its practical details, without letting her fine imagination become tamed. I shall be cheered and sustained, amidst all fretting and uncongenial circumstances, by remembrance of her earnest love of truth and ardent faith.' ILLNESS 'A terrible feeling in my head, but kept about my usual avocations. Read Ugo Foscolo's Sepolcri, and Pindemonti's answer, but could not relish either, so distressing was the weight on the top of the brain; sewed awhile, and then went out to get warm, but could not, though I walked to the very end of Hazel-grove, and the sun was hot upon me. Sat down, and, though seemingly able to think with only the lower part of my head, meditated literary plans, with full hope that, if I could command leisure, I might do something good. It seemed as if I should never reach home, as I was obliged to sit down incessantly. 'For nine long days and nights, without intermission, all was agony,--fever and dreadful pain in my head. Mother tended me like an angel all that time, scarcely ever leaving me, night or day. My father, too, habitually so sparing in tokens of affection, was led by his anxiety to express what he felt towards me in stronger terms than he had ever used in the whole course of my life. He thought I might not recover, and one morning, coming into my room, after a few moments' conversation, he said: "My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any _faults_. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault." These words,--so strange from him, who had scarce ever in my presence praised me, and who, as I knew, abstained from praise as hurtful to his children,--affected me to tears at the time, although I could not foresee how dear and consolatory this extravagant expression of regard would very soon become. The family were deeply moved by the fervency of his prayer of thanksgiving, on the Sunday morning when I was somewhat recovered; and to mother he said, "I have no room for a painful thought now that our daughter is restored." 'For myself, I thought I should die; but I was calm, and looked to God without fear. When I remembered how much struggle awaited me if I remained, and how improbable it was that any of my cherished plans would bear fruit, I felt willing to go. But Providence did not so will it. A much darker dispensation for our family was in store.' DEATH OF HER FATHER. 'On the evening of the 30th of September, 1835, my father was seized with cholera, and on the 2d of October, was a corpse. For the first two days, my grief, under this calamity, was such as I dare not speak of. But since my father's head is laid in the dust, I feel an awful calm, and am becoming familiar with the thoughts of being an orphan. I have prayed to God that duty may now be the first object, and self set aside. May I have light and strength to do what is right, in the highest sense, for my mother, brothers, and sister. * * 'It has been a gloomy week, indeed. The children have all been ill, and dearest mother is overpowered with sorrow, fatigue, and anxiety. I suppose she must be ill too, when the children recover. I shall endeavor to keep my mind steady, by remembering that there is a God, and that grief is but for a season. Grant, oh Father, that neither the joys nor sorrows of this past year shall have visited my heart in vain! Make me wise and strong for the performance of immediate duties, and ripen me, by what means Thou seest best, for those which lie beyond. 'My father's image follows me constantly. Whenever I am in my room, he seems to open the door, and to look on me with a complacent, tender smile. What would I not give to have it in my power, to make that heart once more beat with joy! The saddest feeling is the remembrance of little things, in which I have fallen short of love and duty. I never sympathized in his liking for this farm, and secretly wondered how a mind which had, for thirty years, been so widely engaged in the affairs of men, could care so much for trees and crops. But now, amidst the beautiful autumn days, I walk over the grounds, and look with painful emotions at every little improvement. He had selected a spot to place a seat where I might go to read alone, and had asked me to visit it. I contented myself with "When you please, father;" but we never went! What would I not now give, if I had fixed a time, and shown more interest! A day or two since, I went there. The tops of the distant blue hills were veiled in delicate autumn haze; soft silence brooded over the landscape; on one side, a brook gave to the gently sloping meadow spring-like verdure; on the other, a grove,--which he had named for me,--lay softly glowing in the gorgeous hues of October. It was very sad. May this sorrow give me a higher sense of duty in the relationships which remain. 'Dearest mother is worn to a shadow. Sometimes, when I look on her pale face, and think of all her grief, and the cares and anxieties which now beset her, I am appalled by the thought that she may not continue with us long. Nothing sustains me now but the thought that God, who saw fit to restore me to life when I was so very willing to leave it,--more so, perhaps than I shall ever be again,--must have some good work for me to do.' * * * * * '_Nov. 3, 1835_.--I thought I should be able to write ere now, how our affairs were settled, but that time has not come yet. My father left no will, and, in consequence, our path is hedged in by many petty difficulties. He has left less property than we had anticipated, for he was not fortunate in his investments in real estate. There will, however, be enough to maintain my mother, and educate the children decently. I have often had reason to regret being of the softer sex, and never more than now. If I were an eldest son, I could be guardian to my brothers and sister, administer the estate, and really become the head of my family. As it is, I am very ignorant of the management and value of property, and of practical details. I always hated the din of such affairs, and hoped to find a life-long refuge from them in the serene world of literature and the arts. But I am now full of desire to learn them, that I may be able to advise and act, where it is necessary. The same mind which has made other attainments, can, in time, compass these, however uncongenial to its nature and habits.' * * * * * 'I shall be obliged to give up selfishness in the end. May God enable me to see the way clear, and not to let down the intellectual, in raising the moral tone of my mind. Difficulties and duties became distinct the very night after my father's death, and a solemn prayer was offered then, that I might combine what is due to others with what is due to myself. The spirit of that prayer I shall constantly endeavor to maintain. What ought to be done for a few months to come is plain, and, as I proceed, the view will open.' TRIAL. The death of her father brought in its train a disappointment as keen as Margaret could well have been called on to bear. For two years and more she had been buoyed up to intense effort by the promise of a visit to Europe, for the end of completing her culture. And as the means of equitably remunerating her parents for the cost of such a tour, she had faithfully devoted herself to the teaching of the younger members of the family. Her honored friends, Professor and Mrs. Farrar, who were about visiting the Old World, had invited her to be their companion; and, as Miss Martineau was to return to England in the ship with them, the prospect before her was as brilliant with generous hopes as her aspiring imagination could conceive. But now, in her journal of January 1, 1836, she writes:-- 'The New-year opens upon me under circumstances inexpressibly sad. I must make the last great sacrifice, and, apparently, for evil to me and mine. Life, as I look forward, presents a scene of struggle and privation only. Yet "I bate not a jot of heart," though much "of hope." My difficulties are not to be compared with those over which many strong souls have triumphed. Shall I then despair? If I do, I am not a strong soul.' Margaret's family treated her, in this exigency, with the grateful consideration due to her love, and urgently besought her to take the necessary means, and fulfil her father's plan. But she could not make up her mind to forsake them, preferring rather to abandon her long-cherished literary designs. Her struggles and her triumph thus appear in her letters:-- '_January 30, 1836_.--I was a great deal with Miss Martineau, while in Cambridge, and love her more than ever. She is to stay till August, and go to England with Mr. and Mrs. Farrar. If I should accompany them I shall be with her while in London, and see the best literary society. If I should go, you will be with mother the while, will not you?[A] Oh, dear E----, you know not how I fear and tremble to come to a decision. My temporal all seems hanging upon it, and the prospect is most alluring. A few thousand dollars would make all so easy, so safe. As it is, I cannot tell what is coming to us, for the estate will not be settled when I go. I pray to God ceaselessly that I may decide wisely.' * * * * * '_April 17th, 1836_.--If I am not to go with you I shall be obliged to tear my heart, by a violent effort, from its present objects and natural desires. But I shall feel the necessity, and will do it if the life-blood follows through the rent. Probably, I shall not even think it best to correspond with you at all while you are in Europe. Meanwhile, let us be friends indeed. The generous and unfailing love which you have shown me during these three years, when I could be so little to you, your indulgence for my errors and fluctuations, your steady faith in my intentions, have done more to shield and sustain me than any other earthly influence. If I must now learn to dispense with feeling them constantly near me, at least their remembrance can never, never be less dear. I suppose I ought, instead of grieving that we are soon to be separated, now to feel grateful for an intimacy of extraordinary permanence, and certainly of unstained truth and perfect freedom on both sides. 'As to my feelings, I take no pleasure in speaking of them; but I know not that I could give you a truer impression of them, than by these lines which I translate from the German of Uhland. They are entitled "JUSTIFICATION." "Our youthful fancies, idly fired, The fairest visions would embrace; These, with impetuous tears desired, Float upward into starry space; Heaven, upon the suppliant wild, Smiles down a gracious _No_!--In vain The strife! Yet be consoled, poor child, For the wish passes with the pain. But when from such idolatry The heart has turned, and wiser grown, In earnestness and purity Would make a nobler plan its own,-- Yet, after all its zeal and care, Must of its chosen aim despair,-- Some bitter tears may be forgiven By _Man_, at least,--_we trust, by Heaven_."' [Footnote A: Her eldest brother.] BIRTH-DAY. '_May 23d, 1836_.--I have just been reading Goethe's Lebensregel. It is easy to say "Do not trouble yourself with useless regrets for the past; enjoy the present, and leave the future to God." But it is _not_ easy for characters, which are by nature neither _calm_ nor _careless_, to act upon these rules. I am rather of the opinion of Novalis, that "Wer sich der hochsten Lieb ergeben Genest von ihnen Wunden nie." 'But I will endeavor to profit by the instructions of the great philosopher who teaches, I think, what Christ did, to use without overvaluing the world. 'Circumstances have decided that I must not go to Europe, and shut upon me the door, as I think, forever, to the scenes I could have loved. Let me now try to forget myself, and act for others' sakes. What I can do with my pen, I know not. At present, I feel no confidence or hope. The expectations so many have been led to cherish by my conversational powers, I am disposed to deem ill-founded. I do not think I can produce a valuable work. I do not feel in my bosom that confidence necessary to sustain me in such undertakings,--the confidence of genius. But I am now but just recovered from bodily illness, and still heart-broken by sorrow and disappointment. I may be renewed again, and feel differently. If I do not soon, I will make up my mind to teach. I can thus get money, which I will use for the benefit of my dear, gentle, suffering mother,--my brothers and sister. This will be the greatest consolation to me, at all events.' DEATH IN LIFE. 'The moon tempted me out, and I set forth for a house at no great distance. The beloved south-west was blowing; the heavens were flooded with light, which could not diminish the tremulously pure radiance of the evening star; the air was full of spring sounds, and sweet spring odors came up from the earth. I felt that happy sort of feeling, as if the soul's pinions were budding. My mind was full of poetic thoughts, and nature's song of promise was chanting in my heart. 'But what a change when I entered that human dwelling! I will try to give you an impression of what you, I fancy, have never come in contact with. The little room--they have but one--contains a bed, a table, and some old chairs. A single stick of wood burns in the fire-place. It is not needed now, but those who sit near it have long ceased to know what spring is. They are all frost. Everything is old and faded, but at the same time as clean and carefully mended as possible. For all they know of pleasure is to get strength to sweep those few boards, and mend those old spreads and curtains. That sort of self-respect they have, and it is all of pride their many years of poor-tith has left them. 'And there they sit,--mother and daughter! In the mother, ninety years have quenched every thought and every feeling, except an imbecile interest about her daughter, and the sort of self-respect I just spoke of. Husband, sons, strength, health, house and lands, all are gone. And yet these losses have not had power to bow that palsied head to the grave. Morning by morning she rises without a hope, night by night she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it in its summer day. 'But can we think of spring, or summer, or anything joyous or really life-like, when we look at the daughter?--that bloodless effigy of humanity, whose care is to eke out this miserable existence by means of the occasional doles of those who know how faithful and good a child she has been to that decrepit creature; who thinks herself happy if she can be well enough, by hours of patient toil, to perform those menial services which they both require; whose talk is of the price of pounds of sugar, and ounces of tea, and yards of flannel; whose only intellectual resource is hearing five or six verses of the Bible read every day,--"my poor head," she says, "cannot bear any more;" and whose only hope is the death to which she has been so slowly and wearily advancing, through many years like this. 'The saddest part is, that she does _not wish_ for death. She clings to this sordid existence. Her soul is now so habitually enwrapt in the meanest cares, that if she were to be lifted two or three steps upward, she would not know what to do with life; how, then, shall she soar to the celestial heights? Yet she ought; for she has ever been good, and her narrow and crushing duties have been performed with a self-sacrificing constancy, which I, for one, could never hope to equal. 'While I listened to her,--and I often think it good for me to listen to her patiently,--the expressions you used in your letter, about "drudgery," occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the "soul's impulses." It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what "Ought" means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good enough to love the _Ought_. 'Then I came again into the open air, and saw those resplendent orbs moving so silently, and thought that they were perhaps tenanted, not only by beings in whom I can see the germ of a possible angel, but by myriads like this poor creature, in whom that germ is, so far as we can see, blighted entirely, I could not help saying, "O my Father! Thou, whom we are told art all Power, and also all Love, how canst Thou suffer such even transient specks on the transparence of Thy creation? These grub-like lives, undignified even by passion,--these life-long quenchings of the spark divine.--why dost Thou suffer them? Is not Thy paternal benevolence impatient till such films be dissipated?" 'Such questionings once had power to move my spirit deeply; now, they but shade my mind for an instant. I have faith in a glorious explanation, that shall make manifest perfect justice and perfect wisdom.' LITERATURE. Cut off from access to the scholars, libraries, lectures, galleries of art, museums of science, antiquities, and historic scenes of Europe, Margaret bent her powers to use such opportunities of culture as she could command in her solitary country-home. Journals and letters thus bear witness to her zeal:-- 'I am having one of my "intense" times, devouring book after book. I never stop a minute, except to talk with mother, having laid all little duties on the shelf for a few days. Among other things, I have twice read through the life of Sir J. Mackintosh; and it has suggested so much to me, that I am very sorry I did not talk it over with you. It is quite gratifying, after my late chagrin, to find Sir James, with all his metaphysical turn, and ardent desire to penetrate it, puzzling so over the German philosophy, and particularly what I was myself troubled about, at Cambridge,--Jacobi's letters to Fichte. 'Few things have ever been written more discriminating or more beautiful than his strictures upon the Hindoo character, his portrait of Fox, and his second letter to Robert Hall, after his recovery from derangement. Do you remember what he says of the want of brilliancy in Priestley's moral sentiments? Those remarks, though slight, seem to me to show the quality of his mind more decidedly than anything in the book. That so much learning, benevolence, and almost unparalleled fairness of mind, should be in a great measure lost to the world, for want of earnestness of purpose, might impel us to attach to the latter attribute as much importance as does the wise uncle in Wilhelm Meister.' * * * * * 'As to what you say of Shelley, it is true that the unhappy influences of early education prevented his ever attaining clear views of God, life, and the soul. At thirty, he was still a seeker,--an experimentalist. But then his should not be compared with such a mind as ----'s, which, having no such exuberant fancy to tame, nor various faculties to develop, naturally comes to maturity sooner. Had Shelley lived twenty years longer, I have no doubt he would have become a fervent Christian, and thus have attained that mental harmony which was necessary to him. It is true, too, as you say, that we always feel a melancholy imperfection in what he writes. But I love to think of those other spheres in which so pure and rich a being shall be perfected; and I cannot allow his faults of opinion and sentiment to mar my enjoyment of the vast capabilities, and exquisite perception of beauty, displayed everywhere in his poems.' * * * * * '_March 17, 1836_.--I think Herschel will be very valuable to me, from the slight glance I have taken of it, and I thank Mr. F.; but do not let him expect anything of me because I have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum. I have been examining myself with severity, intellectually as well as morally, and am shocked to find how vague and superficial is all my knowledge. I am no longer surprised that I should have appeared harsh and arrogant in my strictures to one who, having a better-disciplined mind, is more sensible of the difficulties in the way of really knowing and doing anything, and who, having more Wisdom, has more Reverence too. All that passed at your house will prove very useful to me; and I trust that I am approximating somewhat to that genuine humility which is so indispensable to true regeneration. But do not speak of this to--, for I am not yet sure of the state of my mind.' * * * * * '1836.--I have, for the time, laid aside _De Stael_ and _Bacon_, for _Martineau_ and _Southey_. I find, with delight, that the former has written on the very subjects I wished most to talk out with her, and probably I shall receive more from her in this way than by personal intercourse,--for I think more of her character when with her, and am stimulated through my affections. As to Southey, I am steeped to the lips in enjoyment. I am glad I did not know this poet earlier; for I am now just ready to receive his truly exalting influences in some degree. I think, in reading, I shall place him next to Wordsworth. I have finished Herschel, and really believe I am a little wiser. I have read, too, Heyne's letters twice, Sartor Resartus once, some of Goethe's late diaries, Coleridge's Literary Remains, and drank a great deal from Wordsworth. By the way, do you know his "Happy Warrior"? I find my insight of this sublime poet perpetually deepening.' * * * * * 'Mr. ---- says the Wanderjahre is "_wise._" It must be presumed so; and yet one is not satisfied. I was perfectly so with my manner of interpreting the Lehrjahre; but this sequel keeps jerking my clue, and threatens to break it. I do not know our Goethe yet. I have changed my opinion about his religious views many times. Sometimes I am tempted to think that it is only his wonderful knowledge of human nature which has excited in me such reverence for his philosophy, and that no worthy fabric has been elevated on this broad foundation. Yet often, when suspecting that I have found a huge gap, the next turning it appears that it was but an air-hole, and there is a brick all ready to stop it. On the whole, though my enthusiasm for the Goetherian philosophy is checked, my admiration for the genius of Goethe is in nowise lessened, and I stand in a sceptical attitude, ready to try his philosophy, and, if needs must, play the Eclectic.' 'Did I write that a kind-hearted neighbor, fearing I might be _dull_, sent to offer me the use of a _book-caseful_ of Souvenirs, Gems, and such-like glittering ware? I took a two or three year old "Token," and chanced on a story, called the "Gentle Boy," which I remembered to have heard was written by somebody in Salem. It is marked by so much grace and delicacy of feeling, that I am very desirous to know the author, whom I take to be a lady.' * * 'With regard to what you say about the American Monthly, my answer is, I would gladly sell some part of my mind for lucre, to get the command of time; but I will not sell my soul: that is, I am perfectly willing to take the trouble of writing for money to pay the seamstress; but I am _not_ willing to have what I write mutilated, or what I ought to say dictated to suit the public taste. You speak of my writing about Tieck. It is my earnest wish to interpret the German authors of whom I am most fond to such Americans as are ready to receive. Perhaps some might sneer at the notion of my becoming a teacher; but where I love so much, surely I might inspire others to love a little; and I think this kind of culture would be precisely the counterpoise required by the utilitarian tendencies of our day and place. My very imperfections may be of value. While enthusiasm is yet fresh, while I am still a novice, it may be more easy to communicate with those quite uninitiated, than when I shall have attained to a higher and calmer state of knowledge. I hope a periodical may arise, by and by, which may think me worthy to furnish a series of articles on German literature, giving room enough and perfect freedom to say what I please. In this case, I should wish to devote at least eight numbers to Tieck, and should use the Garden of Poesy, and my other translations. 'I have sometimes thought of translating his Little Red Riding Hood, for children. If it could be adorned with illustrations, like those in the "Story without an End," it would make a beautiful little book; but I do not know that this could be done in Boston. There is much meaning that children could not take in; but, as they would never discover this till able to receive the whole, the book corresponds exactly with my notions of what a child's book should be. 'I should like to begin the proposed series with a review of Heyne's letters on German Literature, which afford excellent opportunity for some preparatory hints. My plans are so undecided for several coming months, that I cannot yet tell whether I shall have the time and tranquillity needed to write out the whole course, though much tempted by the promise of perfect liberty. I could engage, however, to furnish at least two articles on Novalis and Körner. I trust you will be interested in my favorite Körner. Great is my love for both of them. But I wish to write something which shall not only _be_ free from exaggeration, but which shall _seem_ so, to those unacquainted with their works. 'I have so much reading to go through with this month, that I have but few hours for correspondents. I have already discussed five volumes in German, two in French, three in English, and not without thought and examination. 'Tell--that I read "Titan" by myself, in the afternoons and evenings of about three weeks. She need not be afraid to undertake it. Difficulties of detail may, perhaps, not be entirely conquered without a master or a good commentary, but she could enjoy all that is most valuable alone. I should be very unwilling to read it with a person of narrow or unrefined mind; for it is a noble work, and fit to raise a reader into that high serene of thought where pedants cannot enter.' FAREWELL TO GROTON. 'The place is beautiful, in its way, but its scenery is too tamely smiling and sleeping. My associations with it are most painful. There darkened round us the effects of my father's ill-judged exchange,--ill-judged, so far at least as regarded himself, mother, and me,--all violently rent from the habits of our former life, and cast upon toils for which we were unprepared: there my mother's health was impaired, and mine destroyed; there my father died; there were undergone the miserable perplexities of a family that has lost its head; there I passed through the conflicts needed to give up all which my heart had for years desired, and to tread a path for which I had no skill, and no-call, except that it must be trodden by some one, and I alone was ready. Wachuset and the Peterboro' hills are blended in my memory with hours of anguish as great as I am capable of suffering. I used to look at them towering to the sky, and feel that I, too, from birth, had longed to rise, and, though for the moment crushed, was not subdued. 'But if those beautiful hills, and wide, rich fields, saw this sad lore well learned, they also saw some precious lessons given in faith, fortitude, self-command, and unselfish love. There too, in solitude, the mind acquired more power of concentration, and discerned the beauty of strict method; there too, more than all, the heart was awakened to sympathize with the ignorant, to pity the vulgar, to hope for the seemingly worthless, and to commune with the Divine Spirit of Creation, which cannot err, which never sleeps, which will not permit evil to be permanent, nor its aim of beauty in the smallest particular eventually to fail.' WINTER IN BOSTON. In the autumn of 1836 Margaret went to Boston, with the two-fold design of teaching Latin and French in Mr. Alcott's school, which was then highly prosperous, and of forming classes of young ladies in French, German, and Italian. Her view of Mr. Alcott's plan of education was thus hinted in a journal, one day, after she had been talking with him, and trying to place herself in his mental position:-- _Mr. A._ 'O for the safe and natural way of Intuition! I cannot grope like a mole in the gloomy passages of experience. To the attentive spirit, the revelation contained in books is only so far valuable as it comments upon, and corresponds with, the universal revelation. Yet to me, a being social and sympathetic by natural impulse, though recluse and contemplative by training and philosophy, the character and life of Jesus have spoken more forcibly than any fact recorded in human history. This story of incarnate Love has given me the key to all mysteries, and showed me what path should be taken in returning to the Fountain of Spirit. Seeing that other redeemers have imperfectly fulfilled their tasks, I have sought a new way. They all, it seemed to me, had tried to influence the human being at too late a day, and had laid their plans too wide. They began with men; I will begin with babes. They began with the world; I will begin with the family. So I preach the Gospel of the Nineteenth Century.' _M_. 'But, preacher, you make _three_ mistakes. 'You do not understand the nature of Genius or creative power. 'You do not understand the reaction of matter on spirit. 'You are too impatient of the complex; and, not enjoying variety in unity, you become lost in abstractions, and cannot illustrate your principles.' On the other hand, Mr. Alcott's impressions of Margaret were thus noted in his diaries:-- "She is clearly a person given to the boldest speculation, and of liberal and varied acquirements. Not wanting in imaginative power, she has the rarest good sense and discretion. She adopts the Spiritual Philosophy, and has the subtlest perception of its bearings. She takes large and generous views of all subjects, and her disposition is singularly catholic. The blending of sentiment and of wisdom in her is most remarkable; and her taste is as fine as her prudence. I think her the most brilliant talker of the day. She has a quick and comprehensive wit, a firm command of her thoughts, and a speech to win the ear of the most cultivated." In her own classes Margaret was very successful, and thus in a letter sums up the results:-- 'I am still quite unwell, and all my pursuits and propensities have a tendency to make my head worse. It is but a bad head,--as bad as if I were a great man! I am not entitled to so bad a head by anything I have done; but I flatter myself it is very interesting to suffer so much, and a fair excuse for not writing pretty letters, and saying to my friends the good things I think about them. 'I was so desirous of doing all I could, that I took a great deal more upon myself than I was able to bear. Yet now that the twenty-five weeks of incessant toil are over, I rejoice in it all, and would not have done an iota less. I have fulfilled all my engagements faithfully; have acquired more power of attention, self-command, and fortitude; have acted in life as I thought I would in my lonely meditations; and have gained some knowledge of means. Above all,--blessed be the Father of our spirits!--my aims are the same as they were in the happiest flight of youthful fancy. I have learned too, at last, to rejoice in all past pain, and to see that my spirit has been judiciously tempered for its work. In future I may sorrow, but can I ever despair? 'The beginning of the winter was forlorn. I was always ill; and often thought I might not live, though the work was but just begun. The usual disappointments, too, were about me. Those from whom aid was expected failed, and others who aided did not understand my aims. Enthusiasm for the things loved best fled when I seemed to be buying and selling them. I could not get the proper point of view, and could not keep a healthful state of mind. Mysteriously a gulf seemed to have opened between me and most intimate friends, and for the first time for many years I was entirely, absolutely, alone. Finally, my own character and designs lost all romantic interest, and I felt vulgarized, profaned, forsaken,--though obliged to smile brightly and talk wisely all the while. But these clouds at length passed away. 'And now let me try to tell you what has been done. To one class I taught the German language, and thought it good success, when, at the end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at a lesson, and very well. This class, of course, was not interesting, except in the way of observation and analysis of language. 'With more advanced pupils I read, in twenty-four weeks, Schiller's Don Carlos, Artists, and Song of the Bell, besides giving a sort of general lecture on Schiller; Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, first part of Faust,--three weeks of thorough study this, as valuable to me as to them,--and Clavigo,--thus comprehending samples of all his efforts in poetry, and bringing forward some of his prominent opinions; Lessing's Nathan, Minna, Emilia Galeotti; parts of Tieck's Phantasus, and nearly the whole first volume of Richter's Titan. 'With the Italian class, I read parts of Tasso, Petrarch--whom they came to almost adore,--Ariosto, Alfieri, and the whole hundred cantos of the Divina Commedia, with the aid of the fine Athenæum copy, Flaxman's designs, and all the best commentaries. This last piece of work was and will be truly valuable to myself. 'I had, besides, three private pupils, Mrs. ----, who became very attractive to me, ----, and little ----, who had not the use of his eyes. I taught him Latin orally, and read the History of England and Shakspeare's historical plays in connection. This lesson was given every day for ten weeks, and was very interesting, though very fatiguing. The labor in Mr. Alcott's school was also quite exhausting. I, however, loved the children, and had many valuable thoughts suggested, and Mr. A.'s society was much to me. 'As you may imagine, the Life of Goethe is not yet written; but I have studied and thought about it much. It grows in my mind with everything that does grow there. My friends in Europe have sent me the needed books on the subject, and I am now beginning to work in good earnest. It is very possible that the task may be taken from me by somebody in England, or that in doing it I may find myself incompetent; but I go on in hope, secure, at all events, that it will be the means of the highest culture.' In addition to other labors, Margaret translated, one evening every week, German authors into English, for the gratification of Dr. Channing; their chief reading being in De Wette and Herder. 'It was not very pleasant,' she writes, 'for Dr. C. takes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us feminine people, with our habits of ducking, diving, or flying for truth. Doubtless, however, he makes better use of what he gets, and if his sympathies were livelier he would not view certain truths in so steady a light. But there is much more talking than reading; and I like talking with him. I do not feel that constraint which some persons complain of, but am perfectly free, though less called out than by other intellects of inferior power. I get too much food for thought from him, and am not bound to any tiresome formality of respect on account of his age and rank in the world of intellect. He seems desirous to meet even one young and obscure as myself on equal terms, and trusts to the elevation of his thoughts to keep him in his place.' She found higher satisfaction still in his preaching:-- 'A discourse from Dr. C. on the spirituality of man's nature. This was delightful! I came away in the most happy, hopeful, and heroic mood. The tone of the discourse was so dignified, his manner was so benignant and solemnly earnest, in his voice there was such a concentration of all his force, physical and moral, to give utterance to divine truth, that I felt purged as by fire. If some speakers feed intellect more, Dr. C. feeds the whole spirit. O for a more calm, more pervading faith in the divinity of my own nature! I am so far from being thoroughly tempered and seasoned, and am sometimes so presumptuous, at others so depressed. Why cannot I lay more to heart the text, "God is never in a hurry: let man be patient and confident"? PROVIDENCE. In the spring of 1837, Margaret received a very favorable offer to become a principal teacher in the Greene Street School, at Providence, R.I. 'The proposal is, that I shall teach the elder girls my favorite branches, for four hours a day,--choosing my own hours, and arranging the course,--for a thousand dollars a year, if, upon trial, I am well enough pleased to stay. This would be independence, and would enable me to do many slight services for my family. But, on the other hand, I am not sure that I shall like the situation, and am sanguine that, by perseverance, the plan of classes in Boston might be carried into full effect. Moreover, Mr. Ripley,--who is about publishing a series of works on Foreign Literature,--has invited me to prepare the "Life of Goethe," on very advantageous terms. This I should much prefer. Yet when the thousand petty difficulties which surround us are considered, it seems unwise to relinquish immediate independence.' She accepted, therefore, the offer which promised certain means of aiding her family, and reluctantly gave up the precarious, though congenial, literary project. SCHOOL EXPERIENCES. 'The new institution of which I am to be "Lady Superior" was dedicated last Saturday. People talk to me of the good I am to do; but the last fortnight has been so occupied in the task of arranging many scholars of various ages and unequal training, that I cannot yet realize this new era. * * 'The gulf is vast, wider than I could have conceived possible, between me and my pupils; but the sight of such deplorable ignorance, such absolute burial of the best powers, as I find in some instances, makes me comprehend, better than before, how such a man as Mr. Alcott could devote his life to renovate elementary education. I have pleasant feelings when I see that a new world has already been opened to them. * * 'Nothing of the vulgar feeling towards teachers, too often to be observed in schools, exists towards me. The pupils seem to reverence my tastes and opinions in all things; they are docile, decorous, and try hard to please; they are in awe of my displeasure, but delighted whenever permitted to associate with me on familiar terms. As I treat them like ladies, they are anxious to prove that they deserve to be so treated. * * 'There is room here for a great move in the cause of education, and if I could resolve on devoting five or six years to this school, a good work might, doubtless, be done. Plans are becoming complete in my mind, ways and means continually offer, and, so far as I have tried them, they succeed. I am left almost as much at liberty as if no other person was concerned. Some sixty scholars are more or less under my care, and many of them begin to walk in the new paths pointed out. General activity of mind, accuracy in processes, constant looking for principles, and search after the good and the beautiful, are the habits I strive to develop. * * 'I will write a short record of the last day at school. For a week past I have given the classes in philosophy, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral science, short lectures on the true objects of study, with advice as to their future course; and to-day, after recitation, I expressed my gratification that the minds of so many had been opened to the love of good and beauty. 'Then came the time for last words. First, I called into the recitation room the boys who had been under my care. They are nearly all interesting, and have showed a chivalric feeling in their treatment of me. People talk of women not being able to govern boys; but I have always found it a very easy task. He must be a coarse boy, indeed, who, when addressed in a resolute, yet gentle manner, by a lady, will not try to merit her esteem. These boys have always rivalled one another in respectful behavior. I spoke a few appropriate words to each, mentioning his peculiar errors and good deeds, mingling some advice with more love, which will, I hope, make it remembered. We took a sweet farewell. With the younger girls I had a similar interview.' 'Then I summoned the elder girls, who have been my especial charge. I reminded them of the ignorance in which some of them were found, and showed them how all my efforts had necessarily been directed to stimulating their minds,--leaving undone much which, under other circumstances, would have been deemed indispensable. I thanked them for the favorable opinion of my government which they had so generally expressed, but specified three instances in which I had been unjust. I thanked them, also, for the moral beauty of their conduct, bore witness that an appeal to conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the faith thus confirmed, that young persons can be best guided by addressing their highest nature. I declared my consciousness of having combined, not only in speech but in heart, tolerance and delicate regard for the convictions of their parents, with fidelity to my own, frankly uttered. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my never having cajoled or caressed them into good. Every word of praise had been earned; all my influence over them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their faults; I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength; I had offered to them, always, the loftiest motives, and had made every other end subordinate to that of spiritual growth. With a heartfelt blessing, I dismissed them; but none stirred, and we all sat for some moments, weeping. Then I went round the circle and bade each, separately, farewell.' PERSONS. Margaret's Providence journals are made extremely piquant and entertaining, by her life-like portraiture of people and events; and every page attests the scrupulous justice with which she sought to penetrate through surfaces to reality, and, forgetting personal prejudices, to apply universally the test of truth. A few sketches of public characters may suffice to show with what sagacious, all-observing eyes, she looked about her. 'At the whig caucus, I heard TRISTAM BURGESS,--"The old bald Eagle!" His baldness increases the fine effect of his appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated, that the contour of his very strongly marked head might be revealed to every eye. His _personnel_, as well as I could see, was fitted to command respect rather than admiration. He is a venerable, not a beautiful old man. 'He is a rhetorician,--if I could judge from this sample; style in woven and somewhat ornate, matter frequently wrought up to a climax, manner rather declamatory, though strictly that of a gentleman and a scholar. One art in his oratory was, no doubt, very effective, before he lost force and distinctness of voice. I allude to his way,--after having reasoned a while, till he has reached the desired conclusion,--of leaning forward, with hands reposing but figure very earnest, and communicating, confidentially as it were, the result to the audience. The impression produced in former days, when those low, emphatic passages could be distinctly heard, must have been very strong. Yet there is too much apparent trickery in this, to bear frequent repetition. His manner is well adapted for argument, and for the expression either of satire or of chivalric sentiment.' * * * * * 'Mr. JOHN NEAL addressed my girls on the destiny and vocation of Woman in this country. He gave, truly, a _manly_ view, though not the view of common men, and it was pleasing to watch his countenance, where energy is animated by genius. He then spoke to the boys, in the most noble and liberal spirit, on the exercise of political rights. If there is one among them who has the germ of a truly independent man, too generous to become a party tool, and with soul enough to think, as well as feel, for himself, those words were not spoken in vain. He was warmed up into giving a sketch of his boyhood. It was an eloquent narrative, and is ineffaceably impressed on my memory, with every look and gesture of the speaker. What gave chief charm to this history was its fearless ingenuousness. It was delightful to note the impression produced by his magnetic genius and independent character. 'In the evening we had a long conversation upon Woman, Whigism, modern English Poets, Shakspeare,--and, in particular, Richard the Third,--about which we had actually a fight. Mr. Neal does not argue quite fairly, for he uses reason while it lasts, and then helps himself out with wit, sentiment and assertion. I should quarrel with his definitions upon almost every subject, but his fervid eloquence, brilliancy, endless resource, and ready tact, give him great advantage. There was a sort of exaggeration and coxcombry in his talk; but his lion-heart, and keen sense of the ludicrous, alike in himself as in others, redeem them. I should not like to have my motives scrutinized as he would scrutinize them, for I prefer rather to disclose them myself than to be found out; but I was dissatisfied in parting from this remarkable man before having seen him more thoroughly. * * * * * 'Mr. WHIPPLE addressed the meeting at length. His presence is not imposing, though his face is intellectual. It is difficult to look at him, for you cannot be taken prisoner by his eye, while, _en revanche_, he can look at you as long as he pleases; and, as usual, with one who can get the better of his auditors, he does not call out the best in them. His gestures are remarkably fine, free, graceful, and expressive. He has no natural advantages of voice,--for it is without compass, depth, sweetness,--and has none of the winning tones which reach the inmost soul, and none of the tones of passionate energy, which raise you out of your own world into the speaker's. But his modulation is smooth, measured, dignified, though occasionally injured by too elaborate a swell, and his enunciation is admirable. 'His theme was one which has been so thoroughly discussed that novelty was not to be looked for; but his method and arrangement were excellent, though parts were too much expanded, and the whole might well have been condensed. There were many felicitous popular hits. The humorous touches were skilful, and the illustrations on a broad scale good, though in single images he failed. Altogether, there was a pervading air of ease and mastery, which showed him fit to be a leader of the flock. Though not a man of the Webster class, he is among the first of the second class of men who apply their powers to practical purposes,--and that is saying much.' * * * * * 'I went to hear JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, one of the most distinguished and influential, it is said, of the English Quakers. He is a thick-set, beetle-browed man, with a well-to-do-in-the-world air of pious stolidity. I was grievously disappointed; for Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But his manner was as wooden as his matter, and had no merit but that of distinct elocution. His sermon was a tissue of texts, illy selected, and worse patched together, in proof of the assertion that a belief in the Trinity is the one thing needful, and that reason, unless manacled by a creed, is the one thing dangerous. His figures were paltry, his thoughts narrowed down, and his very sincerity made corrupt by spiritual pride. One could not but pity his notions of the Holy Ghost, and his bat-like fear of light. His Man-God seemed to be the keeper of a mad-house, rather than the informing Spirit of all spirits. After finishing his discourse, Mr. G. sang a prayer, in a tone of mingled shout and whine, and then requested his audience to sit a while in devout meditation. For one, I passed the interval in praying for him, that the thick film of self-complacency might be removed from the eyes of his spirit, so that he might no more degrade religion.' * * * * * 'Mr. HAGUE is of the Baptist persuasion, and is very popular with his own sect. He is small, and carries his head erect; he has a high and intellectual, though not majestic, forehead; his brows are lowering and, when knit in indignant denunciation, give a thunderous look to the countenance, and beneath them flash, sparkle, and flame,--for all that may be said of light in rapid motion is true of them,--his dark eyes. Hazel and blue eyes with their purity, steadfastness, subtle penetration and radiant hope, may persuade and win, but black is the color to command. His mouth has an equivocal expression, but as an orator perhaps he gains power by the air of mystery this gives. 'He has a very active intellect, sagacity and elevated sentiment; and, feeling strongly that God is love, can never preach without earnestness. His power comes first from his glowing vitality of temperament. While speaking, his every muscle is in action, and all his action is towards one object. There is perfect _abandon_. He is permeated, overborne, by his thought. This lends a charm above grace, though incessant nervousness and heat injure his manner. He is never violent, though often vehement; pleading tones in his voice redeem him from coarseness, even when most eager; and he throws himself into the hearts of his hearers, not in weak need of sympathy, but in the confidence of generous emotion. His second attraction is his individuality. He speaks direct from the conviction of his spirit, without temporizing, or artificial method. His is the "unpremeditated art," and therefore successful. He is full of intellectual life; his mind has not been fettered by dogmas, and the worship of beauty finds a place there. I am much interested in this truly animated being.' * * * * * 'Mr. R.H. DANA has been giving us readings in the English dramatists, beginning with Shakspeare. The introductory was beautiful. After assigning to literature its high place in the education of the human soul, he announced his own view in giving these readings: that he should never pander to a popular love of excitement, but quietly, without regard to brilliancy or effect, would tell what had struck him in these poets; that he had no belief in artificial processes of acquisition or communication, and having never learned anything except through love, he had no hope of teaching any but loving spirits, &c. All this was arrayed in a garb of most delicate grace; but a man of such genuine refinement undervalues the cannon-blasts and rockets which are needed to rouse the attention of the vulgar. His naïve gestures, the rapt expression of his face, his introverted eye, and the almost childlike simplicity of his pathos, carry one back into a purer atmosphere, to live over again youth's fresh emotions. I greatly enjoyed his readings in Hamlet, and have reviewed in connection what Goethe and Coleridge have said. Both have successfully seized on the main points in the character of Hamlet, and Mr. D. took nearly the same range. His views of Ophelia, however, are unspeakably more just than are those of Serlo in Wilhelm Meister. I regret that the whole course is not to be on Shakspeare, for I should like to read with him all the plays. 'I never have met with a person of finer perceptions. He leaves out nothing; though he over-refines on some passages. He has the most exquisite taste, and freshens the souls of his hearers with ever new beauty. He is greatly indebted to the delicacy of his physical organization for the delicacy of his mental appreciation. But when he has told you what _he_ likes, the pleasure of intercourse is over: for he is a man of prejudice more than of reason, and though he can make a lively _exposé_ of his thoughts and feelings, he does not justify them. In a word, Mr. Dana has the charms and the defects of one whose object in life has been to preserve his individuality unprofaned.' ART. While residing at Providence, and during her visits to Boston, in her vacations, Margaret's mind was opening more and more to the charms of art. 'The Ton-Kunst, the Ton-Welt, give me now more stimulus than the written Word; for music seems to contain everything in nature, unfolded into perfect harmony. In it the _all_ and _each_ are manifested in most rapid transition; the spiral and undulatory movement of beautiful creation is felt throughout, and, as we listen, thought is most clearly, because most mystically, perceived. * * 'I have been to hear Neukomm's Oratorio of David. It is to music what Barry Cornwall's verses and Talfourd's Ion are to poetry. It is completely modern, and befits an age of consciousness. Nothing can be better arranged as a drama; the parts are in excellent gradation, the choruses are grand and effective, the composition, as a whole, brilliantly imposing. Yet it was dictated by taste and science only. Where are the enrapturing visions from the celestial world which shone down upon Haydn and Mozart; where the revelations from the depths of man's nature, which impart such passion to the symphonies of Beethoven; where, even, the fascinating fairy land, gay with delight, of Rossini? O, Genius! none but thee shall make our hearts and heads throb, our cheeks crimson, our eyes overflow, or fill our whole being with the serene joy of faith.' * * 'I went to see Vandenhoff twice, in Brutus and Virginius. Another fine specimen of the conscious school; no inspiration, yet much taste. Spite of the thread-paper Tituses, the chambermaid Virginias, the washerwoman Tullias, and the people, made up of half a dozen chimney-sweeps, in carters' frocks and red nightcaps, this man had power to recall a thought of the old stately Roman, with his unity of will and deed. He was an admirable _father_, that fairest, noblest part,--with a happy mixture of dignity and tenderness, blending the delicate sympathy of the companion with the calm, wisdom of the teacher, and showing beneath the zone of duty a heart that has not forgot to throb with youthful love. This character,--which did actual fathers know how to be, they would fulfil the order of nature, and image Deity to their children,--Vandenhoff represented sufficiently, at least, to call up the beautiful ideal.' FANNY KEMBLE. 'When in Boston, I saw the Kembles twice,--in "Much ado about Nothing," and "The Stranger." The first night I felt much disappointed in Miss K. In the gay parts a coquettish, courtly manner marred the wild mirth and wanton wit of Beatrice. Yet, in everything else, I liked her conception of the part; and where she urges Benedict to fight with Claudio, and where she reads Benedict's sonnet, she was admirable. But I received no more pleasure from Miss K.'s acting out the part than I have done in reading it, and this disappointed me. Neither did I laugh, but thought all the while of Miss K.,--how very graceful she was, and whether this and that way of rendering the part was just. I do not believe she has comic power within herself, though tasteful enough to comprehend any part. So I went home, vexed because my "heart was not full," and my "brain not on fire" with enthusiasm. I drank my milk, and went to sleep, as on other dreary occasions, and dreamed not of Miss Kemble. 'Next night, however, I went expectant, and all my soul was satisfied. I saw her at a favorable distance, and she looked beautiful. And as the scene rose in interest, her attitudes, her gestures, had the expression which an Angelo could give to sculpture. After she tells her story,--and I was almost suffocated by the effort she made to divulge her sin and fall,--she sunk to the earth, her head bowed upon her knee, her white drapery falling in large, graceful folds about this broken piece of beautiful humanity, _crushed_ in the very manner so well described by Scott when speaking of a far different person, "not as one who intentionally stoops, kneels, or prostrates himself to excite compassion, but like a man borne down on all sides by the pressure of some invisible force, which crushes him to the earth without power of resistance." A movement of abhorrence from me, as her insipid confidante turned away, attested the triumph of the poet-actress. Had not all been over in a moment, I believe I could not have refrained from rushing forward to raise the fair frail being, who seemed so prematurely humbled in her parent dust. I burst into tears; and, with the stifled, hopeless feeling of a real sorrow, continued to weep till the very end; nor could I recover till I left the house. 'That is genius, which could give such life to this play; for, if I may judge from other parts, it is defaced by inflated sentiments, and verified by few natural touches. I wish I had it to read, for I should like to recall her every tone and look.' * * * * * 'I have been studying Flaxman and Retzsch. How pure, how immortal, the language of Form! Fools cannot fancy they fathom its meaning; witless _dillettanti_ cannot degrade it by hackneyed usage; none but genius can create or reproduce it. Unlike the colorist, he who expresses his thought in form is secure as man can be against the ravages of time.' * * * * * 'I went to the Athenæum in an agonizing conflict of mind, when some high influence was needed to rouse me from the state of sickly sensitiveness, which, much as I despise, I cannot wholly conquer. How soothing it was to feel the blessed power of the Ideal world, to be surrounded, once more with the records of lives poured out in embodying thought in beauty! I seemed to breathe my native atmosphere, and smoothed my ruffled pinions.' * * * * * 'No wonder God made a world to express his thought. Who, that has a soul for beauty, does not feel the need of creating, and that the power of creation alone can satisfy the spirit? When I thus reflect, the Artist seems the only fortunate man. Had I but as much creative genius as I have apprehensiveness!' * * * * * 'How transcendently lovely was the face of one young angel by Raphael! It was the perfection of physical, moral, and mental life. Variegated wings, of pinkish-purple touched with green, like the breasts of doves, and in perfect harmony with the complexion, spring from the shoulders upwards, and against them leans the divine head. The eye seems fixed on the centre of being, and the lips are gently parted, as if uttering strains of celestial melody.' * * * * * 'The head of Aspasia was instinct with the voluptuousness of intellect. From the eyes, the cheek, the divine lip, one might hive honey. Both the Loves were exquisite: one, that zephyr sentiment which visits all the roses of life; the other, the Amore Greco, may be fitly described in these words of Landor: "There is a gloom in deep love, as in deep water; there is a silence in it which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, with a low and tremulous and melancholy song."' * * * * * 'The Sibyl I understood. What grace in that beautiful oval! what apprehensiveness in the eye! Such is female Genius; it alone understands the God. The Muses only sang the praises of Apollo; the Sibyls interpreted his will. Nay, she to whom it was offered, refused the divine union, and preferred remaining a satellite to being absorbed into the sun. You read in the eye of this one, and the observation is confirmed by the low forehead, that the secret of her inspiration lay in the passionate enthusiasm of her nature, rather than in the ideal perfection of any faculty. * * * * * 'A Christ, by Raphael, that I saw the other night, brought Christianity more home to my heart, made me more long to be like Jesus, than ever did sermon. It is from one of the Vatican frescoes. The Deity,--a stern, strong, wise man, of about forty-five, in a square velvet cap, truly the Jewish God, inflexibly just, yet jealous and wrathful,--is at the top of the picture, looking with a gaze of almost frowning scrutiny down into his world. A step below is the Son. Stately angelic shapes kneel near him in dignified adoration,--brothers, but not peers. A cloud of more ecstatic seraphs floats behind the Father. At the feet of the Son is the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove. In the description, by a connoisseur, of this picture, read to me while I was looking at it, it is spoken of as in Raphael's first manner, cold, hard, trammeled. But to me how did that face proclaim the Infinite Love! His head is bent back, as if seeking to behold the Father. His attitude expresses the need of adoring something higher, in order to keep him at his highest. What sweetness, what purity, in the eyes! I can never express it; but I felt, when looking at it, the beauty of reverence, of self-sacrifice, to a degree that stripped the Apollo of his beams.' MAGNANIMITY. Immediately after reading Miss Martineau's book on America, Margaret felt bound in honor to write her a letter, the magnanimity of which is brought out in full relief, by contrast with the expressions already given of her affectionate regard. Extracts from this letter, recorded in her journals, come here rightfully in place:-- 'On its first appearance, the book was greeted by a volley of coarse and outrageous abuse, and the nine days' wonder was followed by a nine days' hue-and-cry. It was garbled, misrepresented, scandalously ill-treated. This was all of no consequence. The opinion of the majority you will find expressed in a late number of the North American Review. I should think the article, though ungenerous, not more so than great part of the critiques upon your book. 'The minority may be divided into two classes: The one, consisting of those who knew you but slightly, either personally, or in your writings. These have now read your book; and, seeing in it your high ideal standard, genuine independence, noble tone of sentiment, vigor of mind and powers of picturesque description, they value your book very much, and rate you higher for it. 'The other comprises those who were previously aware of these high qualities,--and who, seeing in a book to which they had looked for a lasting monument to your fame, a degree of presumptuousness, irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many points, which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing. To this class I belong. 'I got the book as soon as it came out,--long before I received the copy endeared by your handwriting,--and devoted myself to reading it. I gave myself up to my natural impressions, without seeking to ascertain those of others. Frequently I felt pleasure and admiration, but more frequently disappointment, sometimes positive distaste. 'There are many topics treated of in this book of which I am not a judge; but I do pretend, even where I cannot criticize in detail, to have an opinion as to the general tone of thought. When Herschel writes his Introduction to Natural Philosophy, I cannot test all he says, but I cannot err about his fairness, his manliness, and wide range of knowledge. When Jouffroy writes his lectures, I am not conversant with all his topics of thought, but I can appreciate his lucid style and admirable method. When Webster speaks on the currency, I do not understand the subject, but I do understand his mode of treating it, and can see what a blaze of light streams from his torch. When Harriet Martineau writes about America, I often cannot test that rashness and inaccuracy of which I hear so much, but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness, of habits of patient investigation, of completeness, of arrangement, are felt throughout the book; and, for all its fine descriptions of scenery, breadth of reasoning, and generous daring, I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend, and I think a few months given to ripen it, to balance, compare, and mellow, would have made it so. * * 'Certainly you show no spirit of harshness towards this country in general. I think your tone most kindly. But many passages are deformed by intemperance of epithet. * * Would your heart, could you but investigate the matter, approve such overstatement, such a crude, intemperate tirade as you have been guilty of about Mr. Alcott,--a true and noble man, a philanthropist, whom a true and noble woman, also a philanthropist, should have delighted to honor; whose disinterested and resolute efforts, for the redemption of poor humanity, all independent and faithful minds should sustain, since the "broadcloth" vulgar will be sure to assail them; a philosopher, worthy of the palmy times of ancient Greece; a man whom Carlyle and Berkely, whom you so uphold, would delight to honor; a man whom the worldlings of Boston hold in as much horror as the worldlings of ancient Athens did Socrates. They smile to hear their verdict confirmed from the other side of the Atlantic, by their censor, Harriet Martineau. 'I do not like that your book should be an abolition book. You might have borne your testimony as decidedly as you pleased; but why leaven the whole book with it? This subject haunts us on almost every page. It _is_ a great subject, but your book had other purposes to fulfil. 'I have thought it right to say all this to you, since I felt it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear that I must lose you. Not that I think all authors are like Gil Bias' archbishop. No; if your heart turns from me, I shall still love you, still think you noble. I know it must be so trying to fail of sympathy, at such a time, where we expect it. And, besides, I felt from the book that the sympathy between us is less general than I had supposed, it was so strong on several points. It is strong enough for me to love you ever, and I could no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had not spoken out now.' SPIRITUAL LIFE. 'You question me as to the nature of the benefits conferred upon me by Mr. E.'s preaching. I answer, that his influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American, and that from him I first learned what is meant by an inward life. Many other springs have since fed the stream of living waters, but he first opened the fountain. That the "mind is its own place," was a dead phrase to me, till he cast light upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history. It would take a volume to tell what this one influence did for me. But perhaps I shall some time see that it was best for me to be forced to help myself.' * * * * * 'Some remarks which I made last night trouble me, and I cannot fix my attention upon other things till I have qualified them. I suffered myself to speak in too unmeasured terms, and my expressions were fitted to bring into discredit the religious instruction which has been given me, or which I have sought. 'I do not think "all men are born for the purpose of unfolding beautiful ideas;" for the vocation of many is evidently the culture of affections by deeds of kindness. But I do think that the vocations of men and women differ, and that those who are forced to act out of their sphere are shorn of inward and outward brightness. 'For myself, I wish to say, that, if I am in a mood of darkness and despondency, I nevertheless consider such a mood unworthy of a Christian, or indeed of any one who believes in the immortality of the soul. No one, who had steady faith in this and in the goodness of God, could be otherwise than cheerful. I reverence the serenity of a truly religious mind so much, that I think, if I live, I may some time attain to it. 'Although I do not believe in a Special Providence regulating outward events, and could not reconcile such a belief with what I have seen of life, I do not the less believe in the paternal government of a Deity. That He should visit the souls of those who seek Him seems to me the nobler way to conceive of his influence. And if there were not some error in my way of seeking, I do not believe I should suffer from languor or deadness on spiritual subjects, at the time when I have most need to feel myself at home there. To find this error is my earnest wish; and perhaps I am now travelling to that end, though by a thorny road. It is a mortification to find so much yet to do; for at one time the scheme of things seemed so clear, that, with Cromwell, I might say, "I was once in grace." With my mind I prize high objects as much as then: it is my heart which is cold. And sometimes I fear that the necessity of urging them on those under my care dulls my sense of their beauty. It is so hard to prevent one's feelings from evaporating in words.' * * * * * '"The faint sickness of a wounded heart." How frequently do these words of Beckford recur to my mind! His prayer, imperfect as it is, says more to me than many a purer aspiration. It breathes such an experience of impassioned anguish. He had everything,--health, personal advantages, almost boundless wealth, genius, exquisite taste, culture; he could, in some way, express his whole being. Yet well-nigh he sank beneath the sickness of the wounded heart; and solitude, "country of the unhappy," was all he craved at last. 'Goethe, too, says he has known, in all his active, wise, and honored life, no four weeks of happiness. This teaches me on the other side; for, like Goethe, I have never given way to my feelings, but have lived active, thoughtful, seeking to be wise. Yet I have long days and weeks of heartache; and at those times, though I am busy every moment, and cultivate every pleasant feeling, and look always upwards to the pure ideal region, yet this ache is like a bodily wound, whose pain haunts even when it is not attended to, and disturbs the dreams of the patient who has fallen asleep from exhaustion. 'There is a German in Boston, who has a wound in his breast, received in battle long ago. It never troubles him, except when he sings, and then, if he gives out his voice with much expression, it opens, and cannot, for a long time, be stanched again. So with me: when I rise into one of those rapturous moods of thought, such as I had a day or two since, my wound opens again, and all I can do is to be patient, and let it take its own time to skin over. I see it will never do more. Some time ago I thought the barb was fairly out; but no, the fragments rankle there still, and will, while there is any earth attached to my spirit. Is it not because, in my pride, I held the mantle close, and let the weapon, which some friendly physician might have extracted, splinter in the wound?' * * * * * '_Sunday, July_, 1838.--I partook, for the first time, of the Lord's Supper. I had often wished to do so, but had not been able to find a clergyman,--from whom I could be willing to receive it,--willing to admit me on my own terms. Mr. H---- did so; and I shall ever respect and value him, if only for the liberality he displayed on this occasion. It was the Sunday after the death of his wife, a lady whom I truly honored, and should, probably, had we known one another longer, have also loved. She was the soul of truth and honor; her mind was strong, her reverence for the noble and beautiful fervent, her energy in promoting the best interests of those who came under her influence unusual. She was as full of wit and playfulness as of goodness. Her union with her husband was really one of mind and heart, of mutual respect and tenderness; likeness in unlikeness made it strong. I wished particularly to share in this rite on an occasion so suited to bring out its due significance.' FAREWELL TO SUMMER. 'The Sun, the Moon, the Waters, and the Air, The hopeful, holy, terrible, and fair, All that is ever speaking, never spoken, Spells that are ever breaking, never broken, Have played upon my soul; and every string Confessed the touch, which once could make it ring Celestial notes. And still, though changed the tone, Though damp and jarring fall the lyre hath known It would, if fitly played, its deep notes wove Into one tissue of belief and love, Yield melodies for angel audience meet, And pæans fit Creative Power to greet. O injured lyre! thy golden frame is marred, No garlands deck thee, no libations poured Tell to the earth the triumphs of thy song; No princely halls echo thy strains along. But still the strings are there; and, if they break, Even in death rare melody will make, Might'st thou once more be tuned, and power be given To tell in numbers all thou canst of heaven!' VISITS TO CONCORD. BY R.W. EMERSON. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER FROM MADAME ARCONATI TO R.W. EMERSON. Je n'ai point rencontré, dans ma vie, de femme plus noble; ayant autant de sympathie pour ses semblables, et dont l'esprit fut plus vivifiant. Je me suis tout de suite sentie attirée par elle. Quand je fis sa connoissance, j'ignorais que ce fut une femme remarquable. IV. VISITS TO CONCORD. * * * * * I became acquainted with Margaret in 1835. Perhaps it was a year earlier that Henry Hedge, who had long been her friend, told me of her genius and studies, and loaned me her manuscript translation of Goethe's Tasso. I was afterwards still more interested in her, by the warm praises of Harriet Martineau, who had become acquainted with her at Cambridge, and who, finding Margaret's fancy for seeing me, took a generous interest in bringing us together. I remember, during a week in the winter of 1835-6, in which Miss Martineau was my guest, she returned again and again to the topic of Margaret's excelling genius and conversation, and enjoined it on me to seek her acquaintance: which I willingly promised. I am not sure that it was not in Miss Martineau's company, a little earlier, that I first saw her. And I find a memorandum, in her own journal, of a visit, made by my brother Charles and myself, to Miss Martineau, at Mrs. Farrar's. It was not, however, till the next July, after a little diplomatizing in billets by the ladies, that her first visit to our house was arranged, and she came to spend a fortnight with my wife. I still remember the first half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice,--all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far. It is to be said, that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them. I believe I fancied her too much interested in personal history; and her talk was a comedy in which dramatic justice was done to everybody's foibles. I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me, and, when I returned to my library, had much to think of the crackling of thorns under a pot. Margaret, who had stuffed me out as a philosopher, in her own fancy, was too intent on establishing a good footing between us, to omit any art of winning. She studied my tastes, piqued and amused me, challenged frankness by frankness, and did not conceal the good opinion of me she brought with her, nor her wish to please. She was curious to know my opinions and experiences. Of course, it was impossible long to hold out against such urgent assault. She had an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to give an absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes, which were so plain at first, soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joy and superabundant life. This rumor was much spread abroad, that she was sneering, scoffing, critical, disdainful of humble people, and of all but the intellectual. I had heard it whenever she was named. It was a superficial judgment. Her satire was only the pastime and necessity of her talent, the play of superabundant animal spirits. And it will be seen, in the sequel, that her mind presently disclosed many moods and powers, in successive platforms or terraces, each above each, that quite effaced this first impression, in the opulence of the following pictures. Let us hear what she has herself to say on the subject of tea-table-talk, in a letter to a young lady, to whom she was already much attached:-- I am repelled by your account of your party. It is beneath you to amuse yourself with active satire, with what is vulgarly called quizzing. When such a person as ---- chooses to throw himself in your way, I sympathize with your keen perception of his ridiculous points. But to laugh a whole evening at vulgar nondescripts,--is that an employment for one who was born passionately to love, to admire, to sustain truth? This would be much more excusable in a chameleon like me. Yet, whatever may be the vulgar view of my character, I can truly say, I know not the hour in which I ever looked for the ridiculous. It has always been forced upon me, and is the accident of my existence. I would not want the sense of it when it comes, for that would show an obtuseness of mental organization; but, on peril of my soul, I would not move an eyelash to look for it.' When she came to Concord, she was already rich in friends, rich in experiences, rich in culture. She was well read in French, Italian, and German literature. She had learned Latin and a little Greek. But her English reading was incomplete; and, while she knew Molière, and Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that her sympathy and taste had led her to an exclusive culture of southern European books. She had large experiences. She had been a precocious scholar at Dr. Park's school; good in mathematics and in languages. Her father, whom she had recently lost had been proud of her, and petted her. She had drawn at Cambridge, numbers of lively young men about her. She had had a circle of young women who were devoted to her, and who described her as "a wonder of intellect, who had yet no religion." She had drawn to her every superior young man or young woman she had met, and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy. These histories are rapid, so that she had already beheld many times the youth, meridian, and old age of passion. She had, besides, selected, from so many, a few eminent companions, and already felt that she was not likely to see anything more beautiful than her beauties, anything more powerful and generous than her youths. She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. Her powers were maturing, and nobler sentiments were subliming the first heats and rude experiments. She had outward calmness and dignity. She had come to the ambition to be filled with all nobleness. Of the friends who surrounded her, at that period, it is neither easy to speak, nor not to speak. A life of Margaret is impossible without them, she mixed herself so inextricably with her company; and when this little book was first projected, it was proposed to entitle it "Margaret and her Friends," the subject persisting to offer itself in the plural number. But, on trial, that form proved impossible, and it only remained that the narrative, like a Greek tragedy, should suppose the chorus always on the stage, sympathizing and sympathized with by the queen of the scene. Yet I remember these persons as a fair, commanding troop, every one of them adorned by some splendor of beauty, of grace, of talent, or of character, and comprising in their band persons who have since disclosed sterling worth and elevated aims in the conduct of life. Three beautiful women,--either of whom would have been the fairest ornament of Papanti's Assemblies, but for the presence of the other,--were her friends. One of these early became, and long remained, nearly the central figure in Margaret's brilliant circle, attracting to herself, by her grace and her singular natural eloquence, every feeling of affection, hope, and pride. Two others I recall, whose rich and cultivated voices in song were,--one a little earlier, the other a little later,--the joy of every house into which they came; and, indeed, Margaret's taste for music was amply gratified in the taste and science which several persons among her intimate friends possessed. She was successively intimate with two sisters, whose taste for music had been opened, by a fine and severe culture, to the knowledge and to the expression of all the wealth of the German masters. I remember another, whom every muse inspired, skilful alike with the pencil and the pen, and by whom both were almost contemned for their inadequateness, in the height and scope of her aims. 'With her,' said Margaret, 'I can talk of anything. She is like me. She is able to look facts in the face. We enjoy the clearest, widest, most direct communication. She may be no happier than ----, but she will know her own mind too clearly to make any great mistake in conduct, and will learn a deep meaning from her days.' 'It is not in the way of tenderness that I love ----. I prize her always; and this is all the love some natures ever know. And I also feel that I may always expect she will be with me. I delight to picture to myself certain persons translated, illuminated. There are a few in whom I see occasionally the future being piercing, promising,--whom I can strip of all that masks their temporary relations, and elevate to their natural position. Sometimes I have not known these persons intimately,--oftener I have; for it is only in the deepest hours that this light is likely to break out. But some of those I have best befriended I cannot thus portray, and very few men I can. It does not depend at all on the beauty of their forms, at present; it is in the eye and the smile, that the hope shines through. I can see exactly how ---- will look: not like this angel in the paper; she will not bring flowers, but a living coal, to the lips of the singer; her eyes will not burn as now with smothered fires, they will be ever deeper, and glow more intensely; her cheek will be smooth, but marble pale; her gestures nobly free, but few.' Another was a lady who was devoted to landscape-painting, and who enjoyed the distinction of being the only pupil of Allston, and who, in her alliance with Margaret, gave as much honor as she received, by the security of her spirit, and by the heroism of her devotion to her friend. Her friends called her "the perpetual peace-offering," and Margaret says of her,--'She is here, and her neighborhood casts the mildness and purity too of the moonbeam on the else parti-colored scene.' There was another lady, more late and reluctantly entering Margaret's circle, with a mind as high, and more mathematically exact, drawn by taste to Greek, as Margaret to Italian genius, tempted to do homage to Margaret's flowing expressive energy, but still more inclined and secured to her side by the good sense and the heroism which Margaret disclosed, perhaps not a little by the sufferings which she addressed herself to alleviate, as long as Margaret lived. Margaret had a courage in her address which it was not easy to resist. She called all her friends by their Christian names. In their early intercourse I suppose this lady's billets were more punctiliously worded than Margaret liked; so she subscribed herself, in reply, 'Your affectionate "Miss Fuller."' When the difficulties were at length surmounted, and the conditions ascertained on which two admirable persons could live together, the best understanding grew up, and subsisted during her life. In her journal is a note:-- 'Passed the morning in Sleepy Hollow, with ----. What fine, just distinctions she made! Worlds grew clearer as we talked. I grieve to see her fine frame subject to such rude discipline. But she truly said, "I am not a failed experiment; for, in the bad hours, I do not forget what I thought in the better."' None interested her more at that time, and for many years after, than a youth with whom she had been acquainted in Cambridge before he left the University, and the unfolding of whose powers she had watched with the warmest sympathy. He was an amateur, and, but for the exactions not to be resisted of an _American_, that is to say, of a commercial, career,--his acceptance of which she never ceased to regard as an apostasy,--himself a high artist. He was her companion, and, though much younger, her guide in the study of art. With him she examined, leaf by leaf, the designs of Raphael, of Michel Angelo, of Da Vinci, of Guercino, the architecture of the Greeks, the books of Palladio, the Ruins, and Prisons of Piranesi; and long kept up a profuse correspondence on books and studies in which they had a mutual interest. And yet, as happened so often, these literary sympathies, though sincere, were only veils and occasions to beguile the time, so profound was her interest in the character and fortunes of her friend. There was another youth, whom she found later, of invalid habit, which had infected in some degree the tone of his mind, but of a delicate and pervasive insight, and the highest appreciation for genius in letters, arts, and life. Margaret describes 'his complexion as clear in its pallor, and his eye steady.' His turn of mind, and his habits of life, had almost a monastic turn,--a jealousy of the common tendencies of literary men either to display or to philosophy. Margaret was struck with the singular fineness of his perceptions, and the pious tendency of his thoughts, and enjoyed with him his proud reception, not as from above, but almost on equal ground, of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and Petrarch, of Montaigne, of Calderon, of Goethe. Margaret wished, also, to defend his privacy from the dangerous solicitations to premature authorship:-- 'His mind should be approached close by one who needs its fragrance. All with him leads rather to glimpses and insights, than to broad, comprehensive views. Till he needs the public, the public does not need him. The lonely lamp, the niche, the dark cathedral grove, befit him best. Let him shroud himself in the symbols of his native ritual, till he can issue forth on the wings of song.' She was at this time, too, much drawn also to a man of poetic sensibility, and of much reading,--which he took the greatest pains to conceal,--studious of the art of poetry, but still more a poet in his conversation than in his poems,--who attracted Margaret by the flowing humor with which he filled the present hour, and the prodigality with which he forgot all the past. 'Unequal and uncertain,' she says, 'but in his good moods, of the best for a companion, absolutely abandoned to the revelations of the moment, without distrust or check of any kind, unlimited and delicate, abundant in thought, and free of motion, he enriches life, and fills the hour.' 'I wish I could retain ----'s talk last night. It was wonderful; it was about all the past experiences frozen down in the soul, and the impossibility of being penetrated by anything. "Had I met you," said he, "when I was young!--but now nothing can penetrate." Absurd as was what he said, on one side, it was the finest poetic-inspiration on the other, painting the cruel process of life, except where genius continually burns over the stubble fields. "Life," he said, "is continually eating us up." He said, "Mr. E. is quite wrong about books. He wants them all good; now I want many bad. Literature is not merely a collection of gems, but a great system of interpretation." He railed at me as artificial. "It don't strike me when you are alone with me," he says; "but it does when others are present. You don't follow out the fancy of the moment; you converse; you have treasured thoughts to tell; you are disciplined,--artificial." I pleaded guilty, and observed that I supposed that it must be so with one of any continuity of thought, or earnestness of character. "As to that," says he, "I shall not like you the better for your excellence. I don't know what is the matter. I feel strongly attracted towards you; but there is a drawback in my mind,--I don't know exactly what. You will always be wanting to grow forward; now I like to grow backward, too. You are too ideal. Ideal people anticipate their lives; and they make themselves and everybody around them restless, by always being beforehand with themselves." 'I listened attentively; for what he said was excellent. Following up the humor of the moment, he arrests admirable thoughts on the wing. But I cannot but see, that what they say of my or other obscure lives is true of every prophetic, of every tragic character. And then I like to have them make me look on that side, and reverence the lovely forms of nature, and the shifting moods, and the clinging instincts. But I must not let them disturb me. There is an only guide, the voice in the heart, that asks, "Was thy wish sincere? If so, thou canst not stray from nature, nor be so perverted but she will make thee true again." I must take my own path, and learn from them all, without being paralyzed for the day. We need great energy, faith, and self-reliance to endure to-day. My age may not be the best, my position may be bad, my character ill-formed; but Thou, oh Spirit! hast no regard to aught but the seeking heart; and, if I try to walk upright, wilt guide me. What despair must he feel, who, after a whole life passed in trying to build up himself, resolves that it would have been far better if he had kept still as the clod of the valley, or yielded easily as the leaf to every breeze! A path has been appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the others. I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of doubt. E. must not shake me in my worldliness, nor ---- in the fine motion that has given me what I have of life, nor this child of genius make me lay aside the armor, without which I had lain bleeding on the field long since; but, if they can keep closer to nature, and learn to interpret her as souls, also, let me learn from them what I have not.' And, in connection with this conversation, she has copied the following lines which this gentleman addressed to her:-- "TO MARGARET. I mark beneath thy life the virtue shine That deep within the star's eye opes its day; I clutch the gorgeous thoughts thou throw'st away From the profound unfathomable mine, And with them this mean common hour do twine, As glassy waters on the dry beach play. And I were rich as night, them to combine With, my poor store, and warm me with thy ray. From the fixed answer of those dateless eyes I meet bold hints of spirit's mystery As to what's past, and hungry prophecies Of deeds to-day, and things which are to be; Of lofty life that with the eagle flies, And humble love that clasps humanity." I have thus vaguely designated, among the numerous group of her friends, only those who were much in her company, in the early years of my acquaintance with her. She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other, that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and, to know her, was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, and the nobleness in New England, seemed, at that moment, related to her, and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were open to her, and every hospitable attention eagerly offered. Her arrival was a holiday, and so was her abode. She stayed a few days, often a week, more seldom a month, and all tasks that could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating, to talk with this joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad web of relations to so many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been finally referred. Persons were her game, specially, if marked by fortune, or character, or success;--to such was she sent. She addressed them with a hardihood,--almost a haughty assurance,--queen-like. Indeed, they fell in her way, where the access might have seemed difficult, by wonderful casualties; and the inveterate recluse, the coyest maid, the waywardest poet, made no resistance, but yielded at discretion, as if they had been waiting for her, all doors to this imperious dame. She disarmed the suspicion of recluse scholars by the absence of bookishness. The ease with which she entered into conversation made them forget all they had heard of her; and she was infinitely less interested in literature than in life. They saw she valued earnest persons, and Dante, Petrarch, and Goethe, because they thought as she did, and gratified her with high portraits, which she was everywhere seeking. She drew her companions to surprising confessions. She was the wedding-guest, to whom the long-pent story must be told; and they were not less struck, on reflection, at the suddenness of the friendship which had established, in one day, new and permanent covenants. She extorted the secret of life, which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow; and thus had the best of those she saw. Whatever romance, whatever virtue, whatever impressive experience,--this came to her; and she lived in a superior circle; for they suppressed all their common-place in her presence. She was perfectly true to this confidence. She never confounded relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling any. An entire intimacy, which seemed to make both sharers of the whole horizon of each others' and of all truth, did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the history that an equal trust of another friend had put in her keeping. In this reticence was no prudery and no effort. For, so rich her mind, that she never was tempted to treachery, by the desire of entertaining. The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,--from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe,--never saw her without surprise at her new powers. Of the conversations above alluded to, the substance was whatever was suggested by her passionate wish for equal companions, to the end of making life altogether noble. With the firmest tact she led the discourse into the midst of their daily living and working, recognizing the good-will and sincerity which each man has in his aims, and treating so playfully and intellectually all the points, that one seemed to see his life _en beau_, and was flattered by beholding what he had found so tedious in its workday weeds, shining in glorious costume. Each of his friends passed before him in the new light; hope seemed to spring under his feet, and life was worth living. The auditor jumped for joy, and thirsted for unlimited draughts. What! is this the dame, who, I heard, was sneering and critical? this the blue-stocking, of whom I stood in terror and dislike? this wondrous woman, full of counsel, full of tenderness, before whom every mean thing is ashamed, and hides itself; this new Corinne, more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent, who seems to have learned all languages, Heaven knows when or how,--I should think she was born to them,--magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles like this, 'Yours is an example of a destiny springing from character:' and, again, 'I see your destiny hovering before you, but it always escapes from you.' The test of this eloquence was its range. It told on children, and on old people; on men of the world, and on sainted maids. She could hold them all by her honeyed tongue. A lady of the best eminence, whom Margaret occasionally visited, in one of our cities of spindles, speaking one day of her neighbors, said, "I stand in a certain awe of the moneyed men, the manufacturers, and so on, knowing that they will have small interest in Plato, or in Biot; but I saw them approach Margaret, with perfect security, for she could give them bread that they could eat." Some persons are thrown off their balance when in society; others are thrown on to balance; the excitement of company, and the observation of other characters, correct their biases. Margaret always appeared to unexpected advantage in conversation with a large circle. She had more sanity than any other; whilst, in private, her vision was often through colored lenses. Her talents were so various, and her conversation so rich and entertaining, that one might talk with her many times, by the parlor fire, before he discovered the strength which served as foundation to so much accomplishment and eloquence. But, concealed under flowers and music, was the broadest good sense, very well able to dispose of all this pile of native and foreign ornaments, and quite able to work without them. She could always rally on this, in every circumstance, and in every company, and find herself on a firm footing of equality with any party whatever, and make herself useful, and, if need be, formidable. The old Anaximenes, seeking, I suppose, for a source sufficiently diffusive, said, that Mind must be _in the air_, which, when all men breathed, they were filled with one intelligence. And when men have larger measures of reason, as Æsop, Cervantes, Franklin, Scott, they gain in universality, or are no longer confined to a few associates, but are good company for all persons,--philosophers, women, men of fashion, tradesmen, and servants. Indeed, an older philosopher than Anaximenes, namely, language itself, had taught to distinguish superior or purer sense as _common_ sense. Margaret had, with certain limitations, or, must we say, _strictures_, these larger lungs, inhaling this universal element, and could speak to Jew and Greek, free and bond, to each in his own tongue. The Concord stage-coachman distinguished her by his respect, and the chambermaid was pretty sure to confide to her, on the second day, her homely romance. I regret that it is not in my power to give any true report of Margaret's conversation. She soon became an established friend and frequent inmate of our house, and continued, thenceforward, for years, to come, once in three or four months, to spend a week or a fortnight with us. She adopted all the people and all the interests she found here. Your people shall be my people, and yonder darling boy I shall cherish as my own. Her ready sympathies endeared her to my wife and my mother, each of whom highly esteemed her good sense and sincerity. She suited each, and all. Yet, she was not a person to be suspected of complaisance, and her attachments, one might say, were chemical. She had so many tasks of her own, that she was a very easy guest to entertain, as she could be left to herself, day after day, without apology. According to our usual habit, we seldom met in the forenoon. After dinner, we read something together, or walked, or rode. In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held, whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner;--talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest. Her topics were numerous, but the cardinal points of poetry, love, and religion, were never far off. She was a student of art, and, though untravelled, knew, much better than most persons who had been abroad, the conventional reputation of each of the masters. She was familiar with all the field of elegant criticism in literature. Among the problems of the day, these two attracted her chiefly, Mythology and Demonology; then, also, French Socialism, especially as it concerned woman; the whole prolific family of reforms, and, of course, the genius and career of each remarkable person. She had other friends, in this town, beside those in my house. A lady, already alluded to, lived in the village, who had known her longer than I, and whose prejudices Margaret had resolutely fought down, until she converted her into the firmest and most efficient of friends. In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne, already then known to the world by his Twice-Told Tales, came to live in Concord, in the "Old Manse," with his wife, who was herself an artist. With these welcomed persons Margaret formed a strict and happy acquaintance. She liked their old house, and the taste which had filled it with new articles of beautiful form, yet harmonized with the antique furniture left by the former proprietors. She liked, too, the pleasing walks, and rides, and boatings, which that neighborhood commanded. In 1842, William Ellery Channing, whose wife was her sister, built a house in Concord, and this circumstance made a new tie and another home for Margaret. ARCANA. It was soon evident that there was somewhat a little pagan about her; that she had some faith more or less distinct in a fate, and in a guardian genius; that her fancy, or her pride, had played with her religion. She had a taste for gems, ciphers, talismans, omens, coincidences, and birth-days. She had a special love for the planet Jupiter, and a belief that the month of September was inauspicious to her. She never forgot that her name, Margarita, signified a pearl. 'When I first met with the name Leila,' she said, 'I knew, from the very look and sound, it was mine; I knew that it meant night,--night, which brings out stars, as sorrow brings out truths.' Sortilege she valued. She tried _sortes biblicæ_, and her hits were memorable. I think each new book which interested her, she was disposed to put to this test, and know if it had somewhat personal to say to her. As happens to such persons, these guesses were justified by the event. She chose carbuncle for her own stone, and when a dear friend was to give her a gem, this was the one selected. She valued what she had somewhere read, that carbuncles are male and female. The female casts out light, the male has his within himself. 'Mine,' she said, 'is the male.' And she was wont to put on her carbuncle, a bracelet, or some selected gem, to write letters to certain friends. One of her friends she coupled with the onyx, another in a decided way with the amethyst. She learned that the ancients esteemed this gem a talisman to dispel intoxication, to give good thoughts and understanding 'The Greek meaning is _antidote against drunkenness_.' She characterized her friends by these stones, and wrote to the last mentioned, the following lines:-- 'TO ----. 'Slow wandering on a tangled way, To their lost child pure spirits say:-- The diamond marshal thee by day, By night, the carbuncle defend, Heart's blood of a bosom friend. On thy brow, the amethyst, Violet of purest earth, When by fullest sunlight kissed, Best reveals its regal birth; And when that haloed moment flies, Shall keep thee steadfast, chaste, and wise.' Coincidences, good and bad, _contretemps_, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent's calendar. She signalized saints' days, "All-Souls," and "All-Saints," by poems, which had for her a mystical value. She remarked a preëstablished harmony of the names of her personal friends, as well as of her historical favorites; that of Emanuel, for Swedenborg; and Rosencrantz, for the head of the Rosicrucians. 'If Christian Rosencrantz,' she said, 'is not a made name, the genius of the age interfered in the baptismal rite, as in the cases of the archangels of art, Michael and Raphael, and in giving the name of Emanuel to the captain of the New Jerusalem. _Sub rosa crux_, I think, is the true derivation, and not the chemical one, generation, corruption, &c.' In this spirit, she soon surrounded herself with a little mythology of her own. She had a series of anniversaries, which she kept. Her seal-ring of the flying Mercury had its legend. She chose the _Sistrum_ for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time:-- 'In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.' She valued, of course, the significance of flowers, and chose emblems for her friends from her garden. 'TO ----, WITH HEARTSEASE. 'Content, in purple lustre clad, Kingly serene, and golden glad, No demi-hues of sad contrition, No pallors of enforced submission;-- Give me such content as this, And keep awhile the rosy bliss.' DÆMONOLOGY. This catching at straws of coincidence, where all is geometrical, seems the necessity of certain natures. It, is true, that, in every good work, the particulars are right, and, that every spot of light on the ground, under the trees, is a perfect image of the sun. Yet, for astronomical purposes, an observatory is better than an orchard; and in a universe which is nothing but generations, or an unbroken suite of cause and effect, to infer Providence, because a man happens to find a shilling on the pavement just when he wants one to spend, is puerile, and much as if each of us should date his letters and notes of hand from his own birthday, instead of from Christ's or the king's reign, or the current Congress. These, to be sure, are also, at first, petty and private beginnings, but, by the world of men, clothed with a social and cosmical character. It will be seen, however, that this propensity Margaret held with certain tenets of fate, which always swayed her, and which Goethe, who had found room and fine names for all this in his system, had encouraged; and, I may add, which her own experiences, early and late, seemed strangely to justify. Some extracts, from her letters to different persons, will show how this matter lay in her mind. '_December 17, 1829_.--The following instance of beautiful credulity, in Rousseau, has taken my mind greatly. This remote seeking for the decrees of fate, this feeling of a destiny, casting its shadows from the very morning of thought, is the most beautiful species of idealism in our day. 'Tis finely manifested in Wallenstein, where the two common men sum up their superficial observations on the life and doings of Wallenstein, and show that, not until this agitating crisis, have they caught any idea of the deep thoughts which shaped that hero, who has, without their feeling it, moulded _their_ existence. '"Tasso," says Rousseau, "has predicted my misfortunes. Have you remarked that Tasso has this peculiarity, that you cannot take from his work a single strophe, nor from any strophe a single line, nor from any line a single word, without disarranging the whole poem? Very well! take away the strophe I speak of, the stanza has no connection with those that precede or follow it; it is absolutely useless. _Tasso probably wrote it involuntarily, and without comprehending it himself_." 'As to the impossibility of taking from Tasso without disarranging the poem, &c., I dare say 'tis not one whit more justly said of his, than, of any other narrative poem. _Mais, n'importe_, 'tis sufficient if Rousseau believed this. I found the stanza in question; admire its meaning beauty. 'I hope you have Italian enough to appreciate the singular perfection in expression. If not, look to Fairfax's Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 12, Stanza 77; but Rousseau says these lines have no connection with what goes before, or after; _they are preceded_, stanza 76, by these three lines, which he does not think fit to mention.' * * * * * "Misero mostro d'infelice amore; Misero mostro a cui sol pena è degna Dell' immensa impietà, la vita indegna." "Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e fra le cure, Mie giuste furie, forsennato errante. Paventerò l'ombre solinghe e scure, Che l'primo error mi recheranno avante E del sol che scoprì le mie sventure, A schivo ed in orrore avrò il sembiante. Temerò me medesmo; e da me stesso Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso." LA GERUSALEMME: LIBERATA, C. XII. 76, 77. TO R.W.E. '_Dec._12, 1843.--When Goethe received a letter from Zelter, with a handsome superscription, he said. "Lay that aside; it is Zelter's true hand-writing. Every man has a dæmon, who is busy to confuse and limit his life. No way is the action of this power more clearly shown, than in the hand-writing. On this occasion, the evil influences have been evaded; the mood, the hand, the pen and paper have conspired to let our friend write truly himself." 'You may perceive, I quote from memory, as the sentences are anything but Goethean; but I think often of this little passage. With me, for weeks and months, the dæmon works his will. Nothing succeeds with me. I fall ill, or am otherwise interrupted. At these times, whether of frost, or sultry weather, I would gladly neither plant nor reap,--wait for the better times, which sometimes come, when I forget that sickness is ever possible; when all interruptions are upborne like straws on the full stream of my life, and the words that accompany it are as much in harmony as sedges murmuring near the bank. Not all, yet not unlike. But it often happens, that something presents itself, and must be done, in the bad time; nothing presents itself in the good: so I, like the others, seem worse and poorer than I am.' In another letter to an earlier friend, she expatiates a little. 'As to the Dæmoniacal, I know not that I can say to you anything more precise than you find from Goethe. There are no precise terms for such thoughts. The word _instinctive_ indicates their existence. I intimated it in the little piece on the Drachenfels. It may be best understood, perhaps, by a symbol. As the sun shines from the serene heavens, dispelling noxious exhalations, and calling forth exquisite thoughts on the surface of earth in the shape of shrub or flower, so gnome-like works the fire within the hidden caverns and secret veins of earth, fashioning existences which have a longer share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in thought. Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but this power moves only to seize its prey. It is not necessarily either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond demonstrating its existence. When conscious, self-asserting, it becomes (as power working for its own sake, unwilling to acknowledge love for its superior, must) the devil. That is the legend of Lucifer, the star that would not own its centre. Yet, while it is unconscious, it is not devilish, only dæmoniac. In nature, we trace it in all volcanic workings, in a boding position of lights, in whispers of the wind, which has no pedigree; in deceitful invitations of the water, in the sullen rock, which never shall find a voice, and in the shapes of all those beings who go about seeking what they may devour. We speak of a mystery, a dread; we shudder, but we approach still nearer, and a part of our nature listens, sometimes answers to this influence, which, if not indestructible, is at least indissolubly linked with the existence of matter. 'In genius, and in character, it works, as you say, instinctively; it refuses to be analyzed by the understanding, and is most of all inaccessible to the person who possesses it. We can only say, I have it, he has it. You have seen it often in the eyes of those Italian faces you like. It is most obvious in the eye. As we look on such eyes, we think on the tiger, the serpent, beings who lurk, glide, fascinate, mysteriously control. For it is occult by its nature, and if it could meet you on the highway, and be familiarly known as an acquaintance, could not exist. The angels of light do not love, yet they do not insist on exterminating it. 'It has given rise to the fables of wizard, enchantress, and the like; these beings are scarcely good, yet not necessarily bad. Power tempts them. They draw their skills from the dead, because their being is coeval with that of matter, and matter is the mother of death.' In later days, she allowed herself sometimes to dwell sadly on the resistances which she called her fate, and remarked, that 'all life that has been or could be natural to me, is invariably denied.' She wrote long afterwards:-- 'My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy hours, but they all lead to sorrow, and not only the cups of wine, but of milk, seem drugged with poison, for me. It does not seem to be my fault, this destiny. I do not court these things,--they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract.' TEMPERAMENT. I said that Margaret had a broad good sense, which brought her near to all people. I am to say that she had also a strong temperament, which is that counter force which makes individuality, by driving all the powers in the direction of the ruling thought or feeling, and, when it is allowed full sway, isolating them. These two tendencies were always invading each other, and now one and now the other carried the day. This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer. We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would say with emphasis the very word. I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament. In the first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner,--that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk. She had a strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her _fate_. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration. She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed formed for high emergencies. Her life concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy moments. The rest was a void. She had read that a man of letters must lose many days, to work well in one. Much more must a Sappho or a sibyl. The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain. 'If I had wist!--' she writes, 'I am a worse self-tormentor than Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire. My beautiful lore, like the tropic clime, hatches scorpions to sting me. There is a verse, which Annie of Lochroyan sings about her ring, that torments my memory, 'tis so true of myself.' When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises, and had a feeling as if a voice cried, _Stand from under!_--as if, a little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses, which no friendship could avert or console. This feeling partly wore off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more purely intellectual natures. She seemed more vulnerable. For the same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my strength,--her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head. 'My parents,' she said, 'were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.' She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She read and wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in recent years. She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot.' In some verses which she wrote 'To the Moon,' occur these lines:-- 'But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face, A human secret, like my own, I trace; For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye.' And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac's, "_Le Livre Mystique_," in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot. Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious, and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would carry, and to draw advantage from it. 'Attica,' she said to a friend, 'is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.' 'I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and leap, blind force for the sake of force.' * * * * * 'Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.' * * * * * 'Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods. The more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at giving out thought and life in regulated rations,--the more I weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without props and sedan chairs.' TO R.W.E. '_Dec._ 26, 1839.--If you could look into my mind just now, you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter, describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due direction. 'I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.' She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon's, and, later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to write every day. 'I think less than a daily offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems to pass unspoken.' In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has 'more than a hundred correspondents;' and it was her habit there to devote one day of every week to those distant friends. The facility with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders of the press would shrink from,--assumed and performed,--when her friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonder, and with fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health, and the manner in which her life heaped itself in high and happy moments, which were avenged by lassitude and pain. 'As each task comes,' she said, 'I borrow a readiness from its aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend. Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.' I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated, and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow circulation of others as a torrent with a rill. She found no full expression of it but in music. Beethoven's Symphony was the only right thing the city of the Puritans had for her. Those to whom music has a representative value, affording them a stricter copy of their inward life than any other of the expressive arts, will, perhaps, enter into the spirit which dictated the following letter to her patron saint, on her return, one evening, from the Boston Academy of Music. TO BEETHOVEN. '_Saturday Evening. 25th Nov._, 1843. 'My only friend, 'How shall I thank thee for once more breaking the chains of my sorrowful slumber? My heart beats. I live again, for I feel that I am worthy audience for thee, and that my being would be reason enough for thine. 'Master, my eyes are always clear. I see that the universe is rich, if I am poor. I see the insignificance of my sorrows. In my will, I am not a captive; in my intellect, not a slave. Is it then my fault that the palsy of my affections benumbs my whole life? 'I know that the curse is but for the time. I know what the eternal justice promises. But on this one sphere, it is sad. Thou didst say, thou hadst no friend but thy art. But that one is enough. I have no art, in which to vent the swell of a soul as deep as thine, Beethoven, and of a kindred frame. Thou wilt not think me presumptuous in this saying, as another might. I have always known that thou wouldst welcome and know me, as would no other who ever lived upon the earth since its first creation. 'Thou wouldst forgive me, master, that I have not been true to my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side "the pangs of despised love." Thou didst the same; but thou didst borrow from those errors the inspiration of thy genius. Why is it not thus with me? Is it because, as a woman, I am bound by a physical-law, which prevents the soul from manifesting itself? Sometimes the moon seems mockingly to say so,--to say that I, too, shall not shine, unless I can find a sun. O, cold and barren moon, tell a different tale! 'But thou, oh blessed master! dost answer all my questions, and make it my privilege to be. Like a humble wife to the sage, or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand and cherish thee: like a mistress, I arm thee for the fight: like a young daughter, I tenderly bind thy wounds. Thou art to me beyond compare, for thou art all I want. No heavenly sweetness of saint or martyr, no many-leaved Raphael, no golden Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee. The infinite Shakspeare, the stern Angelo, Dante,--bittersweet like thee,--are no longer seen in thy presence. And, beside these names, there are none that could vibrate in thy crystal sphere. Thou hast all of them, and that ample surge of life besides, that great winged being which they only dreamed of. There is none greater than Shakspeare; he, too, is a god; but his creations are successive; thy _fiat_ comprehends them all. 'Last summer, I met thy mood in nature, on those wide impassioned plains flower and crag-bestrown. There, the tide of emotion had rolled over, and left the vision of its smiles and sobs, as I saw to-night from thee. 'If thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself--! I am lost in this world, where I sometimes meet angels, but of a different star from mine. Even so does thy spirit plead with all spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in. 'Master, I have this summer envied the oriole which had even a swinging nest in the high bough. I have envied the least flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the wind. But I envy none when I am with thee.' SELF-ESTEEM. Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.' In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth of genius, and my curiosity in his future,--'O no, she was intimate with his mind,' and I 'spoiled him, by overrating him.' Meantime, we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle superiorities. I have heard, that from the beginning of her life, she idealized herself as a sovereign. She told--she early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, and that for years she dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her parents' child, but an European princess confided to their care. She remembered, that, when a little girl, she was walking one day under the apple trees with such an air and step, that her father pointed her out to her sister, saying, _Incedit regina._ And her letters sometimes convey these exultations, as the following, which was written to a lady, and which contained Margaret's translation of Goethe's "Prometheus." To ----. 1838.--Which of us has not felt the questionings expressed in this bold fragment? Does it not seem, were we gods, or could steal their fire, we would make men not only happier, but free,--glorious? Yes, my life is strange; thine is strange. We are, we shall be, in this life, mutilated beings, but there is in my bosom a faith, that I shall see the reason; a glory, that I can endure to be so imperfect; and a feeling, ever elastic, that fate and time shall have the shame and the blame, if I am mutilated. I will do all I can,--and, if one cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom. Your letters are excellent. I did not mean to check your writing, only I thought that you might wish a confidence that I must anticipate with a protest. But I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen. It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, 'He appreciates _me_.' There was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which as yet had found no right channels. I remember she once said to me, what I heard as a mere statement of fact, and nowise as unbecoming, that 'no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a full expression; that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to such as she conversed with.' Her impatience she expressed as she could. 'I feel within myself,' she said, 'an immense force, but I cannot bring it out. It may sound like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.' In her journal, in the summer of 1844, she writes:-- 'Mrs. Ware talked with me about education,--wilful education,--in which she is trying to get interested. I talk with a Goethean moderation on this subject, which rather surprises her and ----, who are nearer the entrance of the studio. I am really old on this subject. In near eight years' experience, I have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great talent at explanation, tact in the use of means, and immediate and invariable power over the minds of my pupils. My wish has been, to purify my own conscience, when near them; give clear views of the aims of this life; show them where the magazines of knowledge lie; and leave the rest to themselves and the Spirit, who must teach and help them to self-impulse. I told Mrs. W. it was much if we did not injure them; if they were passing the time in a way that was _not bad_, so that good influences have a chance. Perhaps people in general must expect greater outward results, or they would feel no interest.' Again: 'With the intellect I always have, always shall, overcome; but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life! O, my God! shall the life never be sweet?' I have inquired diligently of those who saw her often, and in different companies, concerning her habitual tone, and something like this is the report:--In conversation, Margaret seldom, except as a special grace, admitted others upon an equal ground with herself. She was exceedingly tender, when she pleased to be, and most cherishing in her influence; but to elicit this tenderness, it was necessary to submit first to her personally. When a person was overwhelmed by her, and answered not a word, except, "Margaret, be merciful to me, a sinner," then her love and tenderness would come like a seraph's, and often an acknowledgment that she had been too harsh, and even a craving for pardon, with a humility,--which, perhaps, she had caught from the other. But her instinct was not humility,--that was always an afterthought. This arrogant tone of her conversation, if it came to be the subject of comment, of course, she defended, and with such broad good nature, and on grounds of simple truth, as were not easy to set aside. She quoted from Manzoni's _Carmagnola_, the lines:-- "Tolga il ciel che alcuno Piu altamente di me pensi ch'io stesso." "God forbid that any one should conceive more highly of me than I myself." Meantime, the tone of her journals is humble, tearful, religious, and rises easily into prayer. I am obliged to an ingenious correspondent for the substance of the following account of this idiosyncrasy:-- Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art. She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her. No one could be more lenient in her judgments of those whom she saw to be living in this light. Their faults were to be held as "the disproportions of the ungrown giant." But the faults of persons who were unjustified by this ideal, were odious. Unhappily, her constitutional self-esteem sometimes blinded the eyes that should have seen that an idea lay at the bottom of some lives which she did not quite so readily comprehend as beauty; that truth had other manifestations than those which engaged her natural sympathies; that sometimes the soul illuminated only the smallest arc--of a circle so large that it was lost in the clouds of another world. This apology reminds me of a little speech once made to her, at his own house, by Dr. Channing, who held her in the highest regard: "Miss Fuller, when I consider that you are and have all that Miss ---- has so long wished for, and that you scorn her, and that she still admires you,--I think her place in heaven will be very high." But qualities of this kind can only be truly described by the impression they make on the bystander; and it is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any other. Many years since, one of her earliest and fastest friends quoted Spenser's sonnet as accurately descriptive of Margaret:-- "Rudely thou wrongest my dear heart's desire, In finding fault with her too portly pride; The thing which I do most in her admire Is of the world unworthy most envied. For, in those lofty looks is close implied Scorn of base things, disdain of foul dishonor, Threatening rash eyes which gaze on her so wide That loosely they ne dare to look upon her: Such pride is praise, such portliness is honor, That boldened innocence bears in her eyes; And her fair countenance, like a goodly banner, Spreads in defiance of all enemies. Was never in this world aught worthy tried, Without a spark of some self-pleasing pride." BOOKS. She had been early remarked for her sense and sprightliness, and for her skill in school exercises. Now she had added wide reading, and of the books most grateful to her. She had read the Italian poets by herself, and from sympathy. I said, that, by the leading part she naturally took, she had identified herself with all the elegant culture in this country. Almost every person who had any distinction for wit, or art, or scholarship, was known to her; and she was familiar with the leading books and topics. There is a kind of undulation in the popularity of the great writers, even of the first rank. We have seen a recent importance given to Behmen and Swedenborg; and Shakspeare has unquestionably gained with the present generation. It is distinctive, too, of the taste of the period,--the new vogue given to the genius of Dante. An edition of Cary's translation, reprinted in Boston, many years ago, was rapidly sold; and, for the last twenty years, all studious youths and maidens have been reading the Inferno. Margaret had very early found her way to Dante, and from a certain native preference which she felt or fancied for the Italian genius. The following letter, though of a later date, relates to these studies:-- TO R.W.E. '_December_, 1842.--When you were here, you seemed to think I might perhaps have done something on the _Vita Nuova_; and the next day I opened the book, and considered how I could do it. But you shall not expect that, either, for your present occasion. When I first mentioned it to you, it was only as a piece of Sunday work, which I thought of doing for you alone; and because it has never seemed to me you entered enough into the genius of the Italian to apprehend the mind, which has seemed so great to me, and a star unlike, if not higher than all the others in our sky. Else, I should have given you the original, rather than any version of mine. I intended to translate the poems, with which it is interspersed, into plain prose. Milnes and Longfellow have tried each their power at doing it in verse, and have done better, probably, than I could, yet not well. But this would not satisfy me for the public. Besides, the translating Dante is a piece of literary presumption, and challenges a criticism to which I am not sure that I am, as the Germans say, _gewachsen_. Italian, as well as German, I learned by myself, unassisted, except as to the pronunciation. I have never been brought into connection with minds trained to any severity in these kinds of elegant culture. I have used all the means within my reach, but my not going abroad is an insuperable defect in the technical part of my education. I was easily capable of attaining excellence, perhaps mastery, in the use of some implements. Now I know, at least, _what I do not know_, and I get along by never voluntarily going beyond my depth, and, when called on to do it, stating my incompetency. At moments when I feel tempted to regret that I could not follow out the plan I had marked for myself, and develop powers which are not usual here, I reflect, that if I had attained high finish and an easy range in these respects, I should not have been thrown back on my own resources, or known them as I do. But Lord Brougham should not translate Greek orations, nor a maid-of-all-work attempt such a piece of delicate handling as to translate the _Vita Nuova_.' Here is a letter, without date, to another correspondent: 'To-day, on reading over some of the sonnets of Michel Angelo, I felt them more than usual. I know not why I have not read them thus before, except that the beauty was pointed out to me at first by another, instead of my coming unexpectedly upon it of myself. All the great writers, all the persons who have been dear to me, I have found and chosen; they have not been proposed to me. My intimacy with them came upon me as natural eras, unexpected and thrice dear. Thus I have appreciated, but not been able to feel, Michel Angelo as a poet. 'It is a singular fact in my mental history, that, while I understand the principles and construction of language much better than formerly, I cannot read so well _les langues méridionales_. I suppose it is that I am less _méridionale_ myself. I understand the genius of the north better than I did.' Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old poets,--for to Ariosto she assigned a far lower place,--Alfieri and Manzoni, among the new. But what was of still more import to her education, she had read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost exclusively,--Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above all, GOETHE. It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her, though her rich and busy mind never reproduced undigested reading, that the last writer,--food or poison,--the most powerful of all mental reagents,--the pivotal mind in modern literature,--for all before him are ancients, and all who have read him are moderns,--that this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled, nor was there room for any other. She had that symptom which appears in all the students of Goethe,--an ill-dissembled contempt of all criticism on him which they hear from others, as if it were totally irrelevant; and they are themselves always preparing to say the right word,--a _prestige_ which is allowed, of course, until they do speak: when they have delivered their volley, they pass, like their foregoers, to the rear. The effect on Margaret was complete. She was perfectly timed to it. She found her moods met, her topics treated, the liberty of thought she loved, the same climate of mind. Of course, this book superseded all others, for the time, and tinged deeply all her thoughts. The religion, the science, the Catholicism, the worship of art, the mysticism and dæmonology, and withal the clear recognition of moral distinctions as final and eternal, all charmed her; and Faust, and Tasso, and Mignon, and Makaria, and Iphigenia, became irresistible names. It was one of those agreeable historical coincidences, perhaps invariable, though not yet registered, the simultaneous appearance of a teacher and of pupils, between whom exists a strict affinity. Nowhere did Goethe find a braver, more intelligent, or more sympathetic reader. About the time I knew her, she was meditating a biography of Goethe, and did set herself to the task in 1837. She spent much time on it, and has left heaps of manuscripts, which are notes, transcripts, and studies in that direction. But she wanted leisure and health to finish it, amid the multitude of projected works with which her brain teemed. She used great discretion on this point, and made no promises. In 1839, she published her translation of Eckermann, a book which makes the basis of the translation of Eckermann since published in London, by Mr. Oxenford. In the Dial, in July, 1841, she wrote an article on Goethe, which is, on many accounts, her best paper. CRITICISM. Margaret was in the habit of sending to her correspondents, in lieu of letters, sheets of criticism on her recent readings. From such quite private folios, never intended for the press, and, indeed, containing here and there names and allusions, which it is now necessary to veil or suppress, I select the following notices, chiefly of French books. Most of these were addressed to me, but the three first to an earlier friend. 'Reading Schiller's introduction to the Wars of the League, I have been led back to my old friend, the Duke of Sully, and his charming king. He was a man, that Henri! How gay and graceful seems his unflinching frankness! He wore life as lightly as the feather in his cap. I have become much interested, too, in the two Guises, who had seemed to me mere intriguers, and not of so splendid abilities, when I was less able to appreciate the difficulties they daily and hourly combated. I want to read some more books about them. Do you know whether I could get Matthieu, or de Thou, or the Memoirs of the House of Nevers? 'I do not think this is a respectable way of passing my summer, but I cannot help it. 'I never read any life of Molière. Are the facts very interesting? You see clearly in his writing what he was: a man not high, not poetic; but firm, wide, genuine, whose clearsightedness only made him more noble. I love him well that he could see without showing these myriad mean faults of the social man, and yet make no nearer approach to misanthropy than his Alceste. These witty Frenchmen. Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière, are great as were their marshals and _preux chevaliers_; when the Frenchman tries to be poetical, he becomes theatrical, but he can be romantic, and also dignified, maugre shrugs and snuff-boxes.' * * * * * '_Thursday Evening_.--Although I have been much engaged these two days. I have read Spiridion twice. I could have wished to go through it the second time more at leisure, but as I am going away, I thought I would send it back, lest it should be wanted before my return. 'The development of the religious sentiment being the same as in Hélene, I at first missed the lyric effusion of that work, which seems to me more and more beautiful, as I think of it more. This, however, was a mere prejudice, of course, as the thought here is poured into a quite different mould, and I was not troubled by it on a second reading. 'Again, when I came to look at the work by itself, I thought the attempt too bold. A piece of character-painting does not seem to be the place for a statement of these wide and high subjects. For here the philosophy is not merely implied in the poetry and religion, but assumes to show a face of its own. And, as none should meddle with these matters who are not in earnest, so, such will prefer to find the thought of a teacher or fellow-disciple expressed as directly and as bare of ornament as possible. 'I was interested in De Wette's Theodor, and that learned and (_on dit_) profound man seemed to me so to fail, that I did not finish the book, nor try whether I could believe the novice should ever arrive at manly stature. 'I am not so clear as to the scope and bearing of this book, as of that. I suppose if I were to read Lamennais, or L'Erminier, I should know what they all want or intend. And if you meet with _Les paroles d'un Croyant_, I will beg you to get it for me, for I am more curious than ever. I had supposed the view taken by these persons in France, to be the same with that of Novalis and the German Catholics, in which I have been deeply interested. But from this book, it would seem to approach the faith of some of my friends here, which has been styled Psychotheism. And the gap in the theoretical fabric is the same as with them. I read with unutterable interest the despair of Alexis in his Eclectic course, his return to the teachings of external nature, his new birth, and consequent appreciation of poetry and music. But the question of Free Will,--how to reconcile its workings with necessity and compensation,--how to reconcile the life of the heart with that of the intellect,--how to listen to the whispering breeze of Spirit, while breasting, as a man should, the surges of the world,--these enigmas Sand and her friends seem to have solved no better than M.F. and her friends. 'The practical optimism is much the same as ours, except that there is more hope for the masses--soon. 'This work is written with great vigor, scarce any faltering on the wing. The horrors are disgusting, as are those of every writer except Dante. Even genius should content itself in dipping the pencil in cloud and mist. The apparitions of Spiridion are managed with great beauty. As in Hélene, as in Novalis, I recognized, with delight, the eye that gazed, the ear that listened, till the spectres came, as they do to the Highlander on his rocky couch, to the German peasant on his mountain. How different from the vulgar eye which looks, but never sees! Here the beautiful apparition advances from the solar ray, or returns to the fountain of light and truth, as it should, when eagle eyes are gazing. 'I am astonished at her insight into the life of thought. She must know it through some man. Women, under any circumstances, can scarce do more than dip the foot in this broad and deep river; they have not strength to contend with the current. Brave, if they do not delicately shrink from the cold water. No Sibyls have existed like those of Michel Angelo; those of Raphael are the true brides of a God, but not themselves divine. It is easy for women to be heroic in action, but when it comes to interrogating God, the universe, the soul, and, above all, trying to live above their own hearts, they dart down to their nests like so many larks, and, if they cannot find them, fret like the French Corinne. Goethe's Makaria was born of the stars. Mr. Flint's Platonic old lady a _lusus naturæ_, and the Dudevant has loved a philosopher. 'I suppose the view of the present state of Catholicism no way exaggerated. Alexis is no more persecuted than Abelard was, and is so, for the same reasons. From the examinations of the Italian convents in Leopold's time, it seems that the grossest materialism not only reigns, but is taught and professed in them. And Catholicism loads and infects as all dead forms do, however beautiful and noble during their lives.' * * GEORGE SAND, AGAIN. '1839.--When I first knew George Sand, I thought I found tried the experiment I wanted. I did not value Bettine so much; she had not pride enough for me; only now when I am sure of myself, would I pour out my soul at the feet of another. In the assured soul it is kingly prodigality; in one which cannot forbear, it is mere babyhood. I love _abandon_ only when natures are capable of the extreme reverse. I knew Bettine would end in nothing, when I read her book. I knew she could not outlive her love. 'But in _Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre_, which I read first, I saw the knowledge of the passions, and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which rose above them. I loved Hélene, who could so well hear the terrene voices, yet keep her eye fixed on the stars. That would be my wish, also, to know all, then choose; I ever revered her, for I was not sure that I could have resisted the call of the Now, could have left the spirit, and gone to God. And, at a more ambitious age, I could not have refused the philosopher. But I hoped from her steadfastness, and I thought I heard the last tones of a purified life:--Gretchen, in the golden cloud, raised above all past delusions, worthy to redeem and upbear the wise man, who stumbled into the pit of error while searching for truth. 'Still, in _André_, and in _Jacques_, I traced the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law, to know that license is the foe of freedom. And, though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dank and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and began a new existence beneath the sun of a true Ideal. 'But here (in the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_) what do I see? An unfortunate bewailing her loneliness, bewailing her mistakes, writing for money! She has genius, and a manly grasp of mind, but not a manly heart! Will there never be a being to combine a mail's mind and woman's heart, and who yet finds life too rich to weep over? Never? 'When I read in _Leone Lioni_ the account of the jeweller's daughter's life with her mother, passed in dress and in learning to be looked at when dressed, _avec un front impassible_, it reminded me exceedingly of ----, and her mother. What a heroine she would be for Sand! She has the same fearless softness with Juliet, and a sportive _naïveté_, a mixture of bird and kitten, unknown to the dupe of Lioni. 'If I were a man, and wished a wife, as many do, merely as an ornament, or silken toy, I would take ---- as soon as any I know. Her fantastic, impassioned, and mutable nature would yield an inexhaustible amusement. She is capable of the most romantic actions;--wild as the falcon, and voluptuous as the tuberose,--yet she has not in her the elements of romance, like a deeper and less susceptible nature. My cold and reasoning E., with her one love lying, perhaps, never to be unfolded, beneath such sheaths of pride and reserve, would make a far better heroine. 'Both these characters are natural, while S. and T. are _naturally factitious_, because so imitative, and her mother differs from Juliet and her mother, by the impulse a single strong character gave them. Even at this distance of time, there is a slight but perceptible taste of iron in the water. 'George Sand disappoints me, as almost all beings have, especially since I have been brought close to her person by the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_. Her remarks on Lavater seem really shallow, and hasty, _à la mode du genre feménin_. No self-ruling Aspasia she, but a frail woman mourning over a lot. Any peculiarity in her destiny seems accidental. She is forced to this and that, to earn her bread forsooth! 'Yet her style,--with what a deeply smouldering fire it burns!--not vehement, but intense, like Jean Jacques.' ALFRED DE VIGNY. '_Sept._, 1839. '"La harpe tremble encore, et la flûte soupire." 'Sometimes we doubt this, and think the music has finally ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the parade-ground of social life. The ear grows dull. '"Faith asks her daily bread, And Fancy is no longer fed." 'So materialistic is the course of common life, that we _ask daily_ new Messiahs from literature and art, to turn us from the Pharisaic observance of law, to the baptism of spirit. But stars arise upon our murky sky, and the flute _soupire_ from the quarter where we least expect it. '_La jeune France_! I had not believed in this youthful pretender. I thought she had no pure blood in her veins, no aristocratic features in her face, no natural grace in her gait. I thought her an illegitimate child of the generous, but extravagant youth of Germany. I thought she had been left at the foundling hospital, as not worth a parent's care, and that now, grown up, she was trying to prove at once her parentage and her charms by certificates which might be headed, Innocent Adultery, Celestial Crime, &c. 'The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not dispel these impressions. And I thought Chateaubriand (far too French for my taste also,) belonged to _l'ancien régime_, and that Béranger and Courier stood apart. Nodier, Paul de Kock, Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as little. 'But I have now got a peep at this galaxy. I begin to divine the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres. I perceive that _la jeune France_ is the legitimate, though far younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her, but of a common mother. I see, at least begin to see, what she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too light. 'Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau, prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the hill-top,--as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country that has no heed of them till her railroads and canals are finished,--I need not jot down my petty impressions of the movement writers. I wish to speak of one among them, aided, honored by them, but not of them. He is to _la jeune France_ rather the herald of a tourney, or the master of ceremonies at a patriotic festival, than a warrior for her battles, or an advocate to win her cause. 'The works of M. de Vigny having come in my way, I have read quite through this thick volume. 'I read, a year since, in the London and Westminster, an admirable sketch of Armand Carrel. The writer speaks particularly of the use of which Carrel's experience of practical life had been to him as an author; how it had tempered and sharpened the blade of his intellect to the Damascene perfection. It has been of like use to de Vigny, though not in equal degree. 'De Vigny _passed_,--but for manly steadfastness, he would probably say _wasted_,--his best years in the army. He is now about forty; and we have in this book the flower of these best years. It is a night-blooming Cereus, for his days were passed in the duties of his profession. These duties, so tiresome and unprofitable in time of peace, were the ground in which the seed sprang up, which produced these many-leaved and calm night-flowers. 'The first portion of this volume, _Servitude et Grandeurs Militaires_, contains an account of the way in which he received his false tendency. Cherished on the "wounded knees" of his aged father, he listened to tales of the great Frederic, whom the veteran had known personally. After an excellent sketch of the king, he says: "I expatiate here, almost in spite of myself, because this was the first great man whose portrait was thus drawn for me at home,--a portrait after nature,--and because my admiration of him was the first symptom of my useless love of arms,--the first cause of one of the most complete delusions of my life." This admiration for the great king remained so lively in his mind, that even Bonaparte in his gestures seemed to him, in later days, a plagiarist. 'At the military school, "the drum stifled the voices of our masters, and the mysterious voices of books seemed to us cold and pedantic. Tropes and logarithms seemed to us only steps to mount to the star of the Legion of Honor,--the fairest star of heaven to us children." '"No meditation could keep long in chains heads made constantly giddy by the noise of cannon and bells for the _Te Deum_. When one of our former comrades returned to pay us a visit in uniform, and his arm in a scarf, we blushed at our books, and threw them at the heads of our teachers. Our teachers were always reading us bulletins from the _grande armée_, and our cries of _Vive l'Empereur_ interrupted Tacitus and Plato. Our preceptors resembled heralds of arms, our study halls barracks, and our examinations reviews." 'Thus was he led into the army; and, he says, "It was only very late, that I perceived that my services were one long mistake, and that I had imported into a life altogether active, a nature altogether contemplative." 'He entered the army at the time of Napoleon's fall, and, like others, wasted life in waiting for war. For these young persons could not believe that peace and calm were possible to France; could not believe that she could lead any life but one of conquest. 'As De Vigny was gradually undeceived, he says: "Loaded with an ennui which I did not dream of in a life I had so ardently desired, it became a necessity to me to detach myself by night from the vain and tiresome tumult of military days. From these nights, in which I enlarged in silence the knowledge I had acquired from our public and tumultuous studies, proceeded my poems and books. From these days, there remain to me these recollections, whose chief traits I here assemble around one idea. For, not reckoning for the glory of arms, either on the present or future, I sought it in the souvenirs of my comrades. My own little adventures will not serve, except as frame to those pictures of the military life, and of the manners of our armies, all whose traits are by no means known." 'And thus springs up, in the most natural manner, this little book on the army. 'It has the truth, the delicacy, and the healthiness of a production native to the soil; the merit of love-letters, journals, lyric poems, &c., written without any formal intention of turning life into a book, but because the writer could not help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best, because with profounder _connoissance du fait_. For De Vigny is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence of these birds of heaven. But in few ways, except their own broken harp-tone's thrill, have their peculiar sorrows and difficulties been so well illustrated. The character of the soldier, with its virtues and faults, is portrayed with such delicacy, that to condense would ruin. The peculiar reserve, the habit of duty, the beauty of a character which cannot look forward, and need not look back, are given with distinguished finesse. 'Of the three stories which adorn this part of the book, _Le Cachet Rouge_ is the loveliest, _La Canne au Jonc_ the noblest. Never was anything more sweetly naïve than parts of _Le Cachet Rouge_. _La pauvre petite femme_, she was just such a person as my ----. And then the farewell injunctions,--_du pauvre petite maré_,--the nobleness and the coarseness of the poor captain. It is as original as beautiful, _c'est dire beaucoup_. In _La Canne au Jonc_, Collingwood, who embodies the high feeling of duty, is taken too raw out of a book,--his letters to his daughters. But the effect on the character of _le Capitaine Renaud_, and the unfolding of his interior life, are done with the spiritual beauty of Manzoni. '_Cinq-Mars_ is a romance in the style of Walter Scott. It is well brought out, figures in good relief, lights well distributed, sentiment high, but nowhere exaggerated, knowledge exact, and the good and bad of human nature painted with that impartiality which becomes a man, and a man of the world. All right, no failure anywhere; also, no wonderful success, no genius, no magic. It is one of those works which I should consider only excusable as the amusement of leisure hours; and, though few could write it, chiefly valuable to the writer. 'Here he has arranged, as in a bouquet, what he knew,--and a great deal it is,--of the time of Louis XIII., as he has of the Regency in "La Marechale d'Ancre,"--a much finer work, indeed one of the best-arranged and finished modern dramas. The Leonora Galigai is better than anything I have seen in Victor Hugo, and as good as Schiller. Stello is a bolder attempt. It is the history of three poets,--Gilbert, André Chenier, Chatterton. He has also written a drama called Chatterton, inferior to the story here. The "marvellous boy" seems to have captivated his imagination marvellously. In thought, these productions are worthless; for taste, beauty of sentiment, and power of description, remarkable. His advocacy of the poets' cause is about as effective and well-planned as Don Quixote's tourney with the wind-mill. How would you provide for the poet _bon homme_ De Vigny?--from a joint-stock company Poet's Fund, or how? 'His translation of Othello, which I glanced at, is good for a Frenchman. 'Among his poems, La Frégate, La Sérieuse, Madame de Soubise, and Dolorida, please me especially. The last has an elegiac sweetness and finish, which are rare. It also makes a perfect gem of a cabinet picture. Some have a fine strain of natural melody, and give you at once the key-note of the situation, as this:-- '"J'aime le son du cor le soir, au fond des bois, Soit qu'il chante," &c. And '"Qu'il est doux, qu'il est doux d'ecouter les histoires Des histoires du temps passe Quand les branches des arbres sont noires, Quand la neige est essaisse, et charge un sol glacé, Quand seul dans un ciel pâle un peuplier s'élance, Quand sous le manteau blanc qui vient de le cacher L'immobile corbeau sur l'arbre se balance Comme la girouette au bout du long clocher." 'These poems generally are only interesting as the leisure hours of an interesting man. 'De Vigny writes in an excellent style; soft, fresh, deliberately graceful. Such a style is like fine manners; you think of the words select, appropriate, rather than distinguished, or beautiful. De Vigny is a perfect gentleman; and his refinement is rather that of the gentleman than that of the poets whom he is so full of. In character, he looks naturally at those things which interest the man of honor and the man of taste. But for literature, he would have known nothing about the poets. He should be the elegant and instructive companion of social, not the priest or the minstrel of solitary hours. 'Neither has he logic or grasp with his reasoning powers, though of this, also, he is ambitious. Observation is his forte. To see, and to tell with grace, often with dignity and pathos, what he sees, is his proper vocation. Yet, where he fails, he has too much tact and modesty to be despised; and we cannot enough admire the absence of faults in a man whose ambition soared so much beyond his powers, and in an age and a country so full of false taste. He is never seduced into sentimentality, paradox, violent contrast, and, above all, never makes the mistake of confounding the horrible with the sublime. Above all, he never falls into the error, common to merely elegant minds, of painting leading minds "_en gigantesque_." His Richelieu and his Bonaparte are treated with great calmness, and with dignified ease, almost as beautiful as majestic superiority. 'In this volume is contained all that is on record of the inner life of a man of forty years. How many suns, how many rains and dews, to produce a few buds and flowers, some sweet, but not rich fruit! We cannot help demanding of the man of talent that he should be like "the orange tree, that busy plant." But, as Landor says, "He who has any thoughts of any worth can, and probably will, afford to let the greater part lie fallow." 'I have not made a note upon De Vigny's notions of abnegation, which he repeats as often as Dr. Channing the same watch-word of self-sacrifice. It is that my views are not yet matured, and I can have no judgment on the point.' BÉRANGER. '_Sept._, 1839.--I have lately been reading some of Béranger's _chansons_. The hour was not propitious. I was in a mood the very reverse of Roger Bontemps, and beset with circumstances the most unsuited to make me sympathize with the prayer-- '"Pardonnez la gaieté De ma philosophie;" yet I am not quite insensible to their wit, high sentiment, and spontaneous grace. A wit that sparkles all over the ocean of life, a sentiment that never puts the best foot forward, but prefers the tone of delicate humor, to the mouthings of tragedy; a grace so aerial, that it nowhere requires the aid of a thought, for in the light refrains of these productions, the meaning is felt as much as in the most pointed lines. Thus, in "Les Mirmidons," the refrain-- '"Mirmidons, race féconde, Mirmidons Enfin nous commandons, Jupiter livre le monde, Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons, (bis.)" 'The swarming of the insects about the dead lion is expressed as forcibly as in the most sarcastic passage of the chanson. In "La Faridondaine" every sound is a witticism, and levels to the ground a bevy of what Byron calls "garrison people." "Halte là! ou la système des interpretations" is equally witty, though there the form seems to be as much in the saying, as in the comic melody of sound. 'In "Adieux à la Campagne," "Souvenirs du Peuple," "La Déesse de la Liberté," "La Convoi de David," a melancholy pathos breathes, which touches the heart the more that it is so unpretending. "Ce n'est plus Lisette," "Mon Habit," "L'Indépendant," "Vous vieillirez, O ma belle Maitresse," a gentle graceful sadness wins us. In "Le Dieu des Bonnes Gens," "Les Etoiles qui filent," "Les Conseils de Lise," "Treize à Table," a noble dignity is admired, while such as "La Fortune" and "La Métempsycose" are inimitable in their childlike playfulness. "Ma Vocation" I have had and admired for many years. He is of the pure ore, a darling fairy changling of great mother Nature; the poet of the people, and, therefore, of all in the upper classes sufficiently intelligent and refined to appreciate the wit and sentiment of the people. But his wit is so truly French in its lightness and sparkling, feathering vivacity, that one like me, accustomed to the bitterness of English tonics, suicidal November melancholy, and Byronic wrath of satire, cannot appreciate him at once. But when used to the gentler stimuli, we like them best, and we also would live awhile in the atmosphere of music and mirth, content if we have "bread for to-day, and hope for to-morrow." 'There are fine lines in his "Cinq Mai;" the sentiment is as grand as Manzoni's, though not sustained by the same majestic sweep of diction, as,-- '"Ce rocher repousse l'espérance, L'Aigle n'est plus dans le secret des dieux, Il fatiguait la victoire à le suivre, Elle était lasse: il ne l'attendit pas." 'And from "La Gérontocratie, ou les infiniment petits:" '"Combien d'imperceptibles êtres, De petits jésuites bilieux! De milliers d'autres petits prêtres, Lui portent de petits bons dieux." 'But wit, poet, man of honor, tailor's grandson and fairy's favorite, he must speak for himself, and the best that can be felt or thought of him cannot be said in the way of criticism. I will copy and keep a few of his songs. I should like to keep the whole collection by me, and take it up when my faith in human nature required the gentlest of fortifying draughts. 'How fine his answer to those who asked about the "de" before his name!-- '"Je suis vilain, Vilain, vilain," &c. J'honore une race commune, Car, sensible, quoique malin, Je n'ai flatté que l'infortune." 'In a note to "Couplets on M. Laisney, _imprimeur à Peronne_," he says: "It was in his printing-house that I was put to prentice; not having been able to learn orthography, he imparted to me the taste for poetry, gave me lessons in versification, and corrected my first essays." 'Of Bonaparte,-- '"Un conquérant, dans sa fortune altière, Se fit un jeu des sceptres et des lois, Et de ses pieds on peut voir la poussière Empreinte encore sur le bandeau des rois." 'I admire, also, "Le Violon brisé," for its grace and sweetness. How fine Béranger on Waterloo!-- '"Its name shall never sadden verse of mine."' TO R.W.E. '_Niagara, 1st June, 1843_.--I send you a token, made by the hands of some Seneca Indian lady. If you use it for a watch-pocket, hang it, when you travel, at the head of your bed, and you may dream of Niagara. If you use it for a purse, you can put in it alms for poets and artists, and the subscription-money you receive for Mr. Carlyle's book. His book, as it happened, you gave me as a birthday gift, and you may take this as one to you; for, on yours, was W.'s birthday, J.'s wedding-day, and the day of ----'s death, and we set out on this journey. Perhaps there is something about it on the purse. The "number five which nature loves," is repeated on it. 'Carlyle's book I have, in some sense, read. It is witty, full of pictures, as usual. I would have gone through with it, if only for the sketch of Samson, and two or three bits of fun which happen to please me. No doubt it may be of use to rouse the unthinking to a sense of those great dangers and sorrows. But how open is he to his own assault. He rails himself out of breath at the short-sighted, and yet sees scarce a step before him. There is no valuable doctrine in his book, except the Goethean, _Do to-day the nearest duty_. Many are ready for that, could they but find the way. This he does not show. His proposed measures say nothing. Educate the people. That cannot be done by books, or voluntary effort, under these paralyzing circumstances. Emigration! According to his own estimate of the increase of population, relief that way can have very slight effect. He ends as he began; as he did in Chartism. Everything is very bad. You are fools and hypocrites, or you would make it better. I cannot but sympathize with him about hero-worship; for I, too, have had my fits of rage at the stupid irreverence of little minds, which also is made a parade of by the pedantic and the worldly. Yet it is a good sign. Democracy is the way to the new aristocracy, as irreligion to religion. By and by, if there are great men, they will not be brilliant exceptions, redeemers, but favorable samples of their kind. 'Mr. C.'s tone is no better than before. He is not loving, nor large; but he seems more healthy and gay. 'We have had bad weather here, bitterly cold. The place is what I expected: it is too great and beautiful to agitate or surprise: it satisfies: it does not excite thought, but fully occupies. All is calm; even the rapids do not hurry, as we see them in smaller streams. The sound, the sight, fill the senses and the mind. 'At Buffalo, some ladies called on us, who extremely regretted they could not witness our emotions, on first seeing Niagara. "Many," they said, "burst into tears; but with those of most sensibility, the hands become cold as ice, and they would not mind if buckets of cold water were thrown over them!"' NATURE. Margaret's love of beauty made her, of course, a votary of nature, but rather for pleasurable excitement than with a deep poetic feeling. Her imperfect vision and her bad health were serious impediments to intimacy with woods and rivers. She had never paid,--and it is a little remarkable,--any attention to natural sciences. She neither botanized, nor geologized, nor dissected. Still she delighted in short country rambles, in the varieties of landscape, in pastoral country, in mountain outlines, and, above all, in the sea-shore. At Nantasket Beach, and at Newport, she spent a month or two of many successive summers. She paid homage to rocks, woods, flowers, rivers, and the moon. She spent a good deal of time out of doors, sitting, perhaps, with a book in some sheltered recess commanding a landscape. She watched, by day and by night, the skies and the earth, and believed she knew all their expressions. She wrote in her journal, or in her correspondence, a series of "moonlights," in which she seriously attempts to describe the light and scenery of successive nights of the summer moon. Of course, her raptures must appear sickly and superficial to an observer, who, with equal feeling, had better powers of observation. Nothing is more rare than a talent to describe landscape, and, especially, skyscape, or cloudscape, although a vast number of letters, from correspondents between the ages of twenty and thirty, are filled with experiments in this kind. Margaret, in her turn, made many vain attempts, and, to a lover of nature, who knows that every day has new and inimitable lights and shades, one of these descriptions is as vapid as the raptures of a citizen arrived at his first meadow. Of course, he is charmed, but, of course, he cannot tell what he sees, or what pleases him. Yet Margaret often speaks with a certain tenderness and beauty of the impressions made upon her. TO ----. '_Fishkill, 25 Nov., 1844_.--You would have been happy as I have been in the company of the mountains. They are companions both bold and calm. They exhilarate and they satisfy. To live, too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the realization of a dream. Though I have been reading and thinking, yet this has been my life.' 'After they were all in bed,' she writes from the "Manse," in Concord, 'I went out, and walked till near twelve. The moonlight filled my heart. These embowering elms stood in solemn black, the praying monastics of this holy night; full of grace, in every sense; their life so full, so hushed; not a leaf stirred.' * * * * * 'You say that nature does not keep her promise; but, surely, she satisfies us now and then for the time. The drama is always in progress, but here and there she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the time, the sense and the thought. We have no care for promises. Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit,--all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is it because of the superficial mind, or the believing heart, that I can say this?' * * * * * 'Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We lean upon thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own. That is knowledge, for that is love. Thought will never reach it.' ART. There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings. The BOSTON ATHENÆUM,--on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!--added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster;--the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,--all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring. To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo. Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our dreams and readings. It was easy to collect, from the drawing-rooms of the city, a respectable picture-gallery for a summer exhibition. This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary. The Brimmer donation, in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and other masters. The separate chamber in which these collections were at first contained, made a favorite place of meeting for Margaret and a few of her friends, who were lovers of these works. First led perhaps by Goethe, afterwards by the love she herself conceived for them, she read everything that related to Michel Angelo and Raphael. She read, pen in hand, Quatremère de Quincy's lives of those two painters, and I have her transcripts and commentary before me. She read Condivi, Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, Duppa, Fuseli, and Von Waagen,--great and small. Every design of Michel, the four volumes of Raphael's designs, were in the rich portfolios of her most intimate friend. 'I have been very happy,' she writes, 'with four hundred and seventy designs of Raphael in my possession for a week.' * * * * * These fine entertainments were shared with many admirers, and, as I now remember them, certain months about the years 1839, 1840, seem colored with the genius of these Italians. Our walls were hung with prints of the Sistine frescoes; we were all petty collectors; and prints of Correggio and Guercino took the place, for the time, of epics and philosophy. In the summer of 1839, Boston was still more rightfully adorned with the Allston Gallery; and the sculptures of our compatriots Greenough, and Crawford, and Powers, were brought hither. The following lines were addressed by Margaret to the Orpheus:-- 'CRAWFORD'S ORPHEUS. 'Each Orpheus must to the abyss descend, For only thus the poet can be wise,-- Must make the sad Persephone his friend, And buried love to second life arise; Again his love must lose, through too much love, Must lose his life by living life too true; For what he sought below has passed above, Already done is all that he would do; Must tune all being with his single lyre; Must melt all rocks free from their primal pain, Must search all nature with his one soul's fire; Must bind anew all forms in heavenly chain: If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view.' Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist, in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored to see what she saw. But, on several occasions, finding myself unable to reach it, I came to suspect my guide, and to believe, at last, that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic, grounds. As it has proved one of the most difficult problems of the practical astronomer to obtain an achromatic telescope, so an achromatic eye, one of the most needed, is also one of the rarest instruments of criticism. She was very susceptible to pleasurable stimulus, took delight in details of form, color, and sound. Her fancy and imagination were easily stimulated to genial activity, and she erroneously thanked the artist for the pleasing emotions and thoughts that rose in her mind. So that, though capable of it, she did not always bring that highest tribunal to a work of art, namely, the calm presence of greatness, which only greatness in the object can satisfy. Yet the opinion was often well worth hearing on its own account, though it might be wide of the mark as criticism. Sometimes, too, she certainly brought to beautiful objects a fresh and appreciating love; and her written notes, especially on sculpture, I found always original and interesting. Here are some notes on the Athenæum Gallery of Sculpture, in August, 1840, which she sent me in manuscript:-- 'Here are many objects worth study. There is Thorwaldsen's Byron. This is the truly beautiful, the ideal Byron. This head is quite free from the got-up, caricatured air of disdain, which disfigures most likenesses of him, as it did himself in real life; yet sultry, stern, all-craving, all-commanding. Even the heavy style of the hair, too closely curled for grace, is favorable to the expression of concentrated life. While looking at this head, you learn to account for the grand failure in the scheme of his existence. The line of the cheek and chin are here, as usual, of unrivalled beauty. 'The bust of Napoleon is here also, and will naturally be named, in connection with that of Byron, since the one in letters, the other in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their time; more than any other gave it a chance for reaction. There was another point of resemblance in the external being of the two, perfectly corresponding with that of the internal, a sense of which peculiarity drew on Byron some ridicule. I mean that it was the intention of nature, that neither should ever grow fat, but remain a Cassius in the commonwealth. And both these heads are taken while they were at an early age, and so thin as to be still beautiful. This head of Napoleon is of a stern beauty. A head must be of a style either very stern or very chaste, to make a deep impression on the beholder; there must be a great force of will and withholding of resources, giving a sense of depth below depth, which we call sternness; or else there must be that purity, flowing as from an inexhaustible fountain through every lineament, which drives far off or converts all baser natures. Napoleon's head is of the first description; it is stern, and not only so, but ruthless. Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion; the artist has caught its true character, and given us here the Attila, the instrument of fate to serve a purpose not his own. While looking on it, came full to mind the well-known lines,-- '"Speak gently of his crimes: Who knows, Scourge of God, but in His eyes, those crimes Were virtues?" His brows are tense and damp with the dews of thought. In that head you see the great future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, that Russia's snows, and mountains of the slain, seem the tragedy that must naturally follow the appearance of such an actor. You turn from him, feeling that he is a product not of the day, but of the ages, and that the ages must judge him. 'Near him is a head of Ennius, very intellectual; self-centred and self-fed; but wrung and gnawed by unceasing thoughts. 'Yet, even near the Ennius and Napoleon, our American men look worthy to be perpetuated in marble or bronze, if it were only for their air of calm, unpretending sagacity. If the young American were to walk up an avenue lined with such effigies, he might not feel called to such greatness as the strong Roman wrinkles tell of, but he must feel that he could not live an idle life, and should nerve himself to lift an Atlas weight without repining or shrinking. 'The busts of Everett and Allston, though admirable as every-day likenesses, deserved a genius of a different order from Clevenger. Clevenger gives the man as he is at the moment, but does not show the possibilities of his existence. Even thus seen, the head of Mr. Everett brings back all the age of Pericles, so refined and classic is its beauty. The two busts of Mr. Webster, by Clevenger and Powers, are the difference between prose,--healthy and energetic prose, indeed, but still prose,--and poetry. Clevenger's is such as we see Mr. Webster on any public occasion, when his genius is not called forth. No child could fail to recognize it in a moment. Powers' is not so good as a likeness, but has the higher merit of being an ideal of the orator and statesman at a great moment. It is quite an American Jupiter in its eagle calmness of conscious power. 'A marble copy of the beautiful Diana, not so spirited as the Athenæum cast. S. C---- thought the difference was one of size. This work may be seen at a glance; yet does not tire one after survey. It has the freshness of the woods, and of morning dew. I admire those long lithe limbs, and that column of a throat. The Diana is a woman's ideal of beauty; its elegance, its spirit, its graceful, peremptory air, are what we like in our own sex: the Venus is for men. The sleeping Cleopatra cannot be looked at enough; always her sleep seems sweeter and more graceful, always more wonderful the drapery. A little Psyche, by a pupil of Bartolini, pleases us much thus far. The forlorn sweetness with which she sits there, crouched down like a bruised butterfly, and the languid tenacity of her mood, are very touching. The Mercury and Ganymede with the Eagle, by Thorwaldsen, are still as fine as on first acquaintance. Thorwaldsen seems the grandest and simplest of modern sculptors. There is a breadth in his thought, a freedom in his design, we do not see elsewhere. 'A spaniel, by Gott, shows great talent, and knowledge of the animal. The head is admirable; it is so full of playfulness and of doggish knowingness.' I am tempted, by my recollection of the pleasure it gave her, to insert here a little poem, addressed to Margaret by one of her friends, on the beautiful imaginative picture in the gallery of 1840, called "The Dream." "A youth, with gentle brow and tender cheek, Dreams in a place so silent, that no bird, No rustle of the leaves his slumbers break; Only soft tinkling from the stream is heard, As in bright little waves it comes to greet The beauteous One, and play upon his feet. "On a low bank, beneath the thick shade thrown, Soft gleams over his brown hair are flitting, His golden plumes, bending, all lovely shone; It seemed an angel's home where he was sitting, Erect, beside, a silver lily grew, And over all the shadow its sweet beauty threw. "Dreams he of life? O, then a noble maid Toward him floats, with eyes of starry light, In richest robes all radiantly arrayed, To be his ladye and his dear delight. Ah no! the distance shows a winding stream; No lovely ladye moves, no starry eyes do gleam. "Cold is the air, and cold the mountains blue; The banks are brown, and men are lying there, Meagre and old; O, what have they to do With joyous visions of a youth so fair? He must not ever sleep as they are sleeping, Onward through life he must be ever sweeping. "Let the pale glimmering distance pass away; Why in the twilight art thou slumbering there? Wake, and come forth into triumphant day; Thy life and deeds must all be great and fair. Canst thou not from the lily learn true glory, Pure, lofty, lowly?--such should be thy story. "But no! thou lovest the deep-eyéd Past, And thy heart clings to sweet remembrances; In dim cathedral aisles thou'lt linger last, And fill thy mind with flitting fantasies. But know, dear One, the world is rich to-day, And the unceasing God gives glory forth alway." I have said she was never weary of studying Michel Angelo and Raphael; and here are some manuscript "notes," which she sent me one day, containing a clear expression of her feeling toward each of these masters, after she had become tolerably familiar with their designs, as far as prints could carry her:-- 'On seeing such works as these of Michel Angelo, we feel the need of a genius scarcely inferior to his own, which should invent some word, or some music, adequate to express our feelings, and relieve us from the Titanic oppression. '"Greatness," "majesty," "strength,"--to these words we had before thought we attached their proper meaning. But now we repent that they ever passed our lips. Created anew by the genius of this man, we would create language anew, and give him a word of response worthy his sublime profession of faith. Could we not at least have reserved "godlike" for him? For never till now did we appreciate the primeval vigor of creation, the instant swiftness with which thought can pass to deed; never till now appreciate the passage, "Let there be light, and there was light," which, be grateful, Michel! was clothed in human word before thee. 'One feels so repelled and humbled, on turning from Raphael to his contemporary, that I could have hated him as a Gentile Choragus might hate the prophet Samuel. Raphael took us to his very bosom, as if we had been fit for disciples,-- '"Parting with smiles the hair upon the brow, And telling me none ever was preferred" 'This man waves his serpent wand over me, and beauty's self seems no better than a golden calf! 'I could not bear M. De Quincy for intimating that the archangel Michel could be jealous; yet I can easily see that he might have given cause, by undervaluing his divine contemporary. Raphael was so sensuous, so lovely and loving. All undulates to meet the eye, glides or floats upon the soul's horizon, as soft as is consistent with perfectly distinct and filled-out forms. The graceful Lionardo might see his pictures in moss; the beautiful Raphael on the cloud, or wave, or foliage; but thou, Michel, didst look straight upwards to the heaven, and grasp and bring thine down from the very sun of invention. 'How Raphael revels in the image! His life is all reproduced; nothing was abstract or conscious. Pantheism, Polytheism, Greek god of Beauty, Apollo Musagetes,--what need of life beyond the divine work? "I paint," said he, "from an idea that comes into my mind." 'But thou, Michel, didst not only feel but see the divine Ideal. Thine is the conscious monotheism of Jewry. Like thy own Moses, even on the mount of celestial converse, thou didst ask thy God to show now his face, and didst write his words, not in the alphabet of flowers, but on stone tables. 'It is, indeed, the two geniuses of Greece and Jewry, which are reproduced in these two men. Thaumaturgus nature saw fit to wait but a very few years before using these moulds again, in smaller space. Would you read the Bible aright? look at Michel; the Greek Mythology? look at Raphael. Would you know how the sublime coëxists with the beautiful, or the beautiful with the sublime? would you see power and truth regnant on the one side, with beauty and love harmonious and ministrant, but subordinate; or would you look at the other aspect of Deity?--study here. Would you open all the founts of marvel, admiration, and tenderness?--study both. 'One is not higher than the other; yet I am conscious of a slight rebuke from Michel, for having so poured out my soul at the feet of his brother angel. He seems to remind of Mr. E.'s view, and ask, "Why did you not question whether there was not aught else? why not reserve some inaccessible stronghold for me? why did you unlock the floodgates of the mind to such tides of emotion?" But there is no reality or permanence in this; it is only a reminder that the feminine part of human nature must not be dominant. 'The prophets of Michel Angelo excite all my admiration at the man capable of giving to such a physique an expression which commands it. The soul is worthily lodged in these powerful frames; and she has the ease and dignity of one accustomed to command, and to command servants able to obey her hests. Who else could have so animated such forms, that they are imposing, but never heavy? The strong man is made so majestic by his office, that you scarcely feel how strong he is. The wide folds of the drapery, the breadth of light and shade, are great as anything in "the large utterance of the early gods." 'How they read,--these prophets and sibyls! Never did the always-baffled, always reäspiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the _sehnsucht_ of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and divine, matter and spirit. Evidently, they hope to find it on the very next page. I have always thought, that clearly enough did nature and the soul's own consciousness respond to the craving for immortality. I have thought it great weakness to need the voucher of a miracle, or of any of those direct interpositions of a divine power, which, in common parlance, are alone styled revelation. When the revelations of nature seemed to me so clear, I had thought it was the weakness of the heart, or the dogmatism of the understanding, which had such need of _a book_. But in these figures of Michel, the highest power seizes upon a scroll, hoping that some other mind may have dived to the depths of eternity for the desired pearl, and enable him, without delay, consciously to embrace the Everlasting Now. 'How fine the attendant intelligences! So youthful and fresh, yet so strong. Some merely docile and reverent, others eager for utterance before the thought be known,--so firm is the trust in its value, so great the desire for sympathy. Others so brilliant in the attention of the inquiring eye, so intelligent in every feature, that they seem to divine the whole, before they hear it. 'Zachariah is much the finer of the two prophets. 'Of the sibyls, the _Cumæa_ would be disgusting, from her overpowering strength in the feminine form, if genius had not made her tremendous. Especially the bosom gives me a feeling of faintness and aversion I cannot express. The female breast looks made for the temple of sweet and chaste thoughts, while this is so formed as to remind you of the lioness in her lair, and suggest a word which I will not write. 'The _Delphica_ is even beautiful, in Michel's fair, calm, noble style, like the mother and child asleep in the _Persica_, and _Night_ in the casts I have just seen. 'The _Libica_ is also more beautiful than grand. Her adjuncts are admirable. The elder figure, in the lowest pannel,--with what eyes of deep experience, and still unquenched enthusiasm, he sits meditating on the past! The figures at top are fiery with genius, especially the melancholy one, worthy to lift any weight, if he did but know how to set about it. As it is, all his strength may be wasted, yet he no whit the less noble. 'But the _Persica_ is my favorite above all. She is the true sibyl. All the grandeur of that wasted frame comes from within. The life of thought has wasted the fresh juices of the body, and hardened the sere leaf of her cheek to parchment; every lineament is sharp, every tint tarnished; her face is seamed with wrinkles,--usually as repulsive on a woman's face as attractive on a man. We usually feel, on looking at a woman, as if Nature had given them their best dower, and Experience could prove little better than a step-dame. But here, her high ambition and devotion to the life of thought gives her the masculine privilege of beauty in advancing years. Read on, hermitess of the world! what thou seekest is not there, yet thou dost not seek in vain. 'The adjuncts to this figure are worthy of it. On the right, below, those two divine sleepers, redeeming human nature, and infolding expectation in a robe of pearly sheen. Here is the sweetness of strength,--honey to the valiant; on the other side, its awfulness,--meat to the strong man. His sleep is more powerful than the waking of myriads of other men. What will he do when he has recruited his strength in this night's slumber? What wilt thou sing of it, wild-haired child of the lyre? 'I admire the heavy fall of the sleeper's luxuriant hair, which reminds one of the final shutting down of night upon a sullen twilight. 'The other figures, too, are full of augury, sad but life-like, in its poetry. On the shield, how perfectly is the expression of being struck home to the heart given! I wish I could have that shield, in some shape. Only a single blow was needed; the hand was sure, the breast shrinking, but unresisting. Die, child of my affection, child of my old age! Let the blood follow to the hilt, for it is the sword of the Lord! 'In looking again, this shield is on the _Libica_, and that of the _Persica_ represents conquest, not sacrifice. 'Over all these figures broods the spirit of prophecy. You see their sternest deed is under the theocratic form. There is pride in action, but no selfism in these figures. 'When I first came to Michel, I clung to the beautiful Raphael, and feared his Druidical axe. But now, after the sibyls of Michel, it is unsafe to look at those of Raphael; for they seem weak, which is not so, only seems so, beside the sterner ideal. 'The beauty of composition here is great, and you feel that Michel's works are looked at fragment-wise in comparison. Here the eye glides along so naturally, does so easily justice to each part.' LETTERS. I fear the remark already made on that susceptibility to details in art and nature which precluded the exercise of Margaret's sound catholic judgment, must be extended to more than her connoisseurship. She _had_ a sound judgment, on which, in conversation, she could fall back, and anticipate and speak the best sense of the largest company. But, left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the victim of Lord Bacon's _idols of the cave_, or self-deceived by her own phantasms. I have looked over volumes of her letters to me and others. They are full of probity, talent, wit, friendship, charity, and high aspiration. They are tainted with a mysticism, which to me appears so much an affair of constitution, that it claims no more respect than the charity or patriotism of a man who has dined well, and feels better for it. One sometimes talks with a genial _bon vivant_, who looks as if the omelet and turtle have got into his eyes. In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world. This is easily felt in ordinary women, and a large deduction is civilly made on the spot by whosoever replies to their remark. But when the speaker has such brilliant talent and literature as Margaret, she gives so many fine names to these merely sensuous and subjective phantasms, that the hearer is long imposed upon, and thinks so precise and glittering nomenclature cannot be of mere _muscae volitantes_, phoenixes of the fancy, but must be of some real ornithology, hitherto unknown to him. This mere feeling exaggerates a host of trifles into a dazzling mythology. But when one goes to sift it, and find if there be a real meaning, it eludes search. Whole sheets of warm, florid writing are here, in which the eye is caught by "sapphire," "heliotrope," "dragon," "aloes," "Magna Dea," "limboes," "stars," and "purgatory," but can connect all this, or any part of it, with no universal experience. In short, Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism. That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors, of wonderful gleams,--so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and stimulated thought, and communicated mental activity to all who approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her fancy, and she made numerous mistakes. Her integrity was perfect, and she was led and followed by love, and was really bent on truth, but too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy. FRIENDSHIP. "Friends she must have, but in no one could find A tally fitted to so large a mind." It is certain that Margaret, though unattractive in person, and assuming in manners, so that the girls complained that "she put upon them," or, with her burly masculine existence, quite reduced them to satellites, yet inspired an enthusiastic attachment. I hear from one witness, as early as 1829, that "all the girls raved about Margaret Fuller," and the same powerful magnetism wrought, as she went on, from year to year, on all ingenuous natures. The loveliest and the highest endowed women were eager to lay their beauty, their grace, the hospitalities of sumptuous homes, and their costly gifts, at her feet. When I expressed, one day, many years afterwards, to a lady who knew her well, some surprise at the homage paid her by men in Italy,--offers of marriage having there been made her by distinguished parties,--she replied: "There is nothing extraordinary in it. Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in love with her, she understood them so well." She had seen many persons, and had entire confidence in her own discrimination of characters. She saw and foresaw all in the first interview. She had certainly made her own selections with great precision, and had not been disappointed. When pressed for a reason, she replied, in one instance, 'I have no good reason to give for what I think of ----. It is a dæmoniacal intimation. Everybody at ---- praised her, but their account of what she said gave me the same unfavorable feeling. This is the first instance in which I have not had faith, if you liked a person. Perhaps I am wrong now; perhaps, if I saw her, a look would give me a needed clue to her character, and I should change my feeling. Yet I have never been mistaken in these intimations, as far as I recollect. I hope I am now.' I am to add, that she gave herself to her friendships with an entireness not possible to any but a woman, with a depth possible to few women. Her friendships, as a girl with girls, as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had passages of romantic sacrifice and of ecstatic fusion, which I have heard with the ear, but could not trust my profane pen to report. There were, also, the ebbs and recoils from the other party,--the mortal unequal to converse with an immortal,--ingratitude, which was more truly incapacity, the collapse of overstrained affections and powers. At all events, it is clear that Margaret, later, grew more strict, and values herself with her friends on having the tie now "redeemed from all search after Eros." So much, however, of intellectual aim and activity mixed with her alliances, as to breathe a certain dignity and myrrh through them all. She and her friends are fellow-students with noblest moral aims. She is there for help and for counsel. 'Be to the best thou knowest ever true!' is her language to one. And that was the effect of her presence. Whoever conversed with her felt challenged by the strongest personal influence to a bold and generous life. To one she wrote,-- 'Could a word from me avail you, I would say, that I have firm faith that nature cannot be false to her child, who has shown such an unalterable faith in her piety towards her.' * * * * * 'These tones of my dear ----'s lyre are of the noblest. Will they sound purely through her experiences? Will the variations be faithful to the theme? Not always do those who most devoutly long for the Infinite, know best how to modulate their finite into a fair passage of the eternal Harmony. 'How many years was it the cry of my spirit,-- "Give, give, ye mighty Gods! Why do ye thus hold back?"-- and, I suppose, all noble young persons think for the time that they would have been more generous than the Olympians. But when we have learned the high lesson _to deserve_,--that boon of manhood,--we see they esteemed us too much, to give what we had not earned.' The following passages from her journal and her letters are sufficiently descriptive, each in its way, of her strong affections. 'At Mr. G.'s we looked over prints, the whole evening, in peace. Nothing fixed my attention so much as a large engraving of Madame Recamier in her boudoir. I have so often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame De Stael. 'It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. I like to be sure of it, for it is the same love which angels feel, where-- '"Sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib." 'It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes; only it is purely intellectual and spiritual. Its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek in another being what it finds not in itself. Thus the beautiful seek the strong, and the strong the beautiful; the mute seeks the eloquent, &c.; the butterfly settles always on the dark flower. Why did Socrates love Alcibiades? Why did Körner love Schneider? How natural is the love of Wallenstein for Max; that of De Stael for De Recamier; mine for ----. I loved ----, for a time, with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. Her face was always gleaming before me; her voice was always echoing in my ear; all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image. This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess; it was the carbuncle which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature. She loved me, too, though not so much, because her nature was "less high, less grave, less large, less deep." But she loved more tenderly, less passionately. She loved me, for I well remember her suffering when she first could feel my faults, and knew one part of the exquisite veil rent away; how she wished to stay apart, and weep the whole day. * * * * * 'I do not love her now with passion, but I still feel towards her as I can to no other woman. I thought of all this as I looked at Madame Recamier.' * * * * * TO R.W.E. '_7th Feb., 1843._--I saw the letter of your new friend, and liked it much; only, at this distance, one could not be sure whether it was the nucleus or the train of a comet, that lightened afar. The daemons are not busy enough at the births of most men. They do not give them individuality deep enough for truth to take root in. Such shallow natures cannot resist a strong head; its influence goes right through them. It is not stopped and fermented long enough. But I do not understand this hint of hesitation, because you have many friends already. We need not economize, we need not hoard these immortal treasures. Love and thought are not diminished by diffusion. In the widow's cruse is oil enough to furnish light for all the world.' * * * * * TO R.W.E. '_15th March, 1842._--It is to be hoped, my best one, that the experiences of life will yet correct your vocabulary, and that you will not always answer the burst of frank affection by the use of such a word as "flattery." 'Thou knowest, O all-seeing Truth! whether that hour is base or unworthy thee, in which the heart turns tenderly towards some beloved object, whether stirred by an apprehension of its needs, or of its present beauty, or of its great promise; when it would lay before it all the flowers of hope and love, would soothe its weariness as gently as might the sweet south, and _flatter_ it by as fond an outbreak of pride and devotion as is seen on the sunset clouds. Thou knowest whether these promptings, whether these longings, be not truer than intellectual scrutiny of the details of character; than cold distrust of the exaggerations even of heart. What we hope, what we think of those we love, is true, true as the fondest dream of love and friendship that ever shone upon the childish heart. 'The faithful shall yet meet a full-eyed love, ready as profound, that never needs turn the key on its retirement, or arrest the stammering of an overweening trust.' * * * * * TO ---- 'I wish I could write you often, to bring before you the varied world-scene you cannot so well go out to unfold for yourself. But it was never permitted me, even where I wished it most. But the forest leaves fall unseen, and make a soil on which shall be reared the growths and fabrics of a nobler era. This thought rounds off each day. Your letter was a little golden key to a whole volume of thoughts and feelings. I cannot make the one bright drop, like champagne in ice, but must pour a full gush, if I speak at all, and not think whether the water is clear either.' With this great heart, and these attractions, it was easy to add daily to the number of her friends. With her practical talent, her counsel and energy, she was pretty sure to find clients and sufferers enough, who wished to be guided and supported. 'Others,' she said, 'lean on this arm, which I have found so frail. Perhaps it is strong enough to have drawn a sword, but no better suited to be used as a _bolt_, than that of Lady Catharine Douglas, of loyal memory.' She could not make a journey, or go to an evening party, without meeting a new person, who wished presently to impart his history to her. Very early, she had written to ----, 'My museum is so well furnished, that I grow lazy about collecting new specimens of human nature.' She had soon enough examples of the historic development of rude intellect under the first rays of culture. But, in a thousand individuals, the process is much the same; and, like a professor too long pent in his college, she rejoiced in encountering persons of untutored grace and strength, and felt no wish to prolong the intercourse when culture began to have its effect I find in her journal a characteristic note, on receiving a letter on books and speculations, from one whom she had valued for his heroic qualities in a life of adventure:-- 'These letters of ---- are beautiful, and moved me deeply. It looks like the birth of a soul. But I loved _thee_, fair, rich _earth_,--and all that is gone forever. This that comes now, we know in much farther stages. Yet there is silver sweet in the tone, generous nobility in the impulses.' * * * * * 'Poor Tasso in the play offered his love and service too officiously to all. They all rejected it, and declared him mad, because he made statements too emphatic of his feelings. If I wanted only ideal figures to think about, there are those in literature I like better than any of your living ones. But I want far more. I want habitual intercourse, cheer, inspiration, tenderness. I want these for myself; I want to impart them. I have done as Timon did, for these last eight years. My early intercourses were more equal, because more natural. Since I took on me the vows of renunciation, I have acted like a prodigal. Like Timon, I have loved to give, perhaps not from beneficence, but from restless love. Now, like Fortunatus, I find my mistresses will not thank me for fires made of cinnamon; rather they run from too rich an odor. What shall I do? not curse, like him, (oh base!) nor dig my grave in the marge of the salt tide. Give an answer to my questions, dæmon! Give a rock for my feet, a bird of peaceful and sufficient song within my breast! I return to thee, my Father, from the husks that have been offered me. But I return as one who meant not to leave Thee.' Of course, she made large demands on her companions, and would soon come to sound their knowledge, and guess pretty nearly the range of their thoughts. There yet remained to command her constancy, what she valued more, the quality and affection proper to each. But she could rarely find natures sufficiently deep and magnetic. With her sleepless curiosity, her magnanimity, and her diamond-ring, like Annie of Lochroyan's, to exchange for gold or for pewter, she might be pardoned for her impatient questionings. To me, she was uniformly generous; but neither did I escape. Our moods were very different; and I remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised with hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness. She stigmatized our friendship as commercial. It seemed, her magnanimity was not met, but I prized her only for the thoughts and pictures she brought me;--so many thoughts, so many facts yesterday,--so many to-day;--when there was an end of things to tell, the game was up: that, I did not know, as a friend should know, to prize a silence as much as a discourse,--and hence a forlorn feeling was inevitable; a poor counting of thoughts, and a taking the census of virtues, was the unjust reception so much love found. On one occasion, her grief broke into words like these: 'The religious nature remained unknown to you, because it could not proclaim itself, but claimed to be divined. The deepest soul that approached you was, in your eyes, nothing but a magic lantern, always bringing out pretty shows of life.' But as I did not understand the discontent then,--of course, I cannot now. It was a war of temperaments, and could not be reconciled by words; but, after each party had explained to the uttermost, it was necessary to fall back on those grounds of agreement which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence. The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius. It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, that existed between us. I ought to add here, that certain mental changes brought new questions into conversation. In the summer of 1840, she passed into certain religious states, which did not impress me as quite healthy, or likely to be permanent; and I said, "I do not understand your tone; it seems exaggerated. You are one who can afford to speak and to hear the truth. Let us hold hard to the common-sense, and let us speak in the positive degree." And I find, in later letters from her, sometimes playful, sometimes grave allusions to this explanation. 'Is ---- there? Does water meet water?--no need of wine, sugar, spice, or even a _soupçon_ of lemon to remind of a tropical climate? I fear me not. Yet, dear positives, believe me superlatively yours, MARGARET.' The following letter seems to refer, under an Eastern guise, and with something of Eastern exaggeration of compliment too, to some such native sterilities in her correspondent:--- * * * * * TO R.W.E. '_23d Feb., 1840._--I am like some poor traveller of the desert, who saw, at early morning, a distant palm, and toiled all day to reach it. All day he toiled. The unfeeling sun shot pains into his temples; the burning air, filled with sand, checked his breath; he had no water, and no fountain sprung along his path. But his eye was bright with courage, for he said, "When I reach the lonely palm, I will lie beneath its shade. I will refresh myself with its fruit. Allah has reared it to such a height, that it may encourage the wandering, and bless and sustain the faint and weary." But when he reached it, alas! it had grown too high to shade the weary man at its foot. On it he saw no clustering dates, and its one draught of wine was far beyond his reach. He saw at once that it was so. A child, a bird, a monkey, might have climbed to reach it. A rude hand might have felled the whole tree; but the full-grown man, the weary man, the gentle-hearted, religious man, was no nearer to its nourishment for being close to the root; yet he had not force to drag himself further, and leave at once the aim of so many fond hopes, so many beautiful thoughts. So he lay down amid the inhospitable sands. The night dews pierced his exhausted frame; the hyena laughed, the lion roared, in the distance; the stars smiled upon him satirically from their passionless peace; and he knew they were like the sun, as unfeeling, only more distant. He could not sleep for famine. With the dawn he arose. The palm stood as tall, as inaccessible, as ever; its leaves did not so much as rustle an answer to his farewell sigh. On and on he went, and came, at last, to a living spring. The spring was encircled by tender verdure, wild fruits ripened near, and the clear waters sparkled up to tempt his lip. The pilgrim rested, and refreshed himself, and looked back with less pain to the unsympathizing palm, which yet towered in the distance. 'But the wanderer had a mission to perform, which must have forced him to leave at last both palm and fountain. So on and on he went, saying to the palm, "Thou art for another;" and to the gentle waters, "I will return." 'Not far distant was he when the sirocco came, and choked with sand the fountain, and uprooted the fruit-trees. When years have passed, the waters will have forced themselves up again to light, and a new oasis will await a new wanderer. Thou, Sohrab, wilt, ere that time, have left thy bones at Mecca. Yet the remembrance of the fountain cheers thee as a blessing; that of the palm haunts thee as a pang. 'So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Genuine Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not. Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly discontent?' PROBLEMS OF LIFE. Already, too, at this time, each of the main problems of human life had been closely scanned and interrogated by her, and some of them had been much earlier settled. A worshipper of beauty, why could not she also have been beautiful?--of the most radiant sociality, why should not she have been so placed, and so decorated, as to have led the fairest and highest? In her journal is a bitter sentence, whose meaning I cannot mistake: 'Of a disposition that requires the most refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire it:--poor Mignon! fear not the transition through death; no penal fires can have in store worse torments than thou art familiar with already.' In the month of May, she writes:-- 'When all things are blossoming, it seems so strange not to blossom too; that the quick thought within cannot remould its tenement. Man is the slowest aloes, and I am such a shabby plant, of such coarse tissue. I hate not to be beautiful, when all around is so.' Again, after recording a visit to a family, whose taste and culture, united to the most liberal use of wealth, made the most agreeable of homes, she writes: 'Looking out on the wide view, I felt the blessings of my comparative freedom. I stand in no false relations. Who else is so happy? Here are these fair, unknowing children envying the depth of my mental life. They feel withdrawn by sweet duties from reality. Spirit! I accept; teach me to prize and use whatsoever is given me.' 'At present,' she writes elsewhere, 'it skills not. I am able to take the superior view of life, and my place in it. But I know the deep yearnings of the heart and the bafflings of time will be felt again, and then I shall long for some dear hand to hold. But I shall never forget that my curse is nothing, compared with that of those who have entered into those relations, but not made them real; who only _seem_ husbands, wives, and friends.' 'I remain fixed to be, without churlishness or coldness, as much alone as possible. It is best for me. I am not fitted to be loved, and it pains me to have close dealings with those who do not love, to whom my feelings are "strange." Kindness and esteem are very well. I am willing to receive and bestow them; but these alone are not worth feelings such as mine. And I wish I may make no more mistakes, but keep chaste for mine own people.' There is perhaps here, as in a passage of the same journal quoted already, an allusion to a verse in the ballad of the Lass of Lochroyan:-- "O yours was gude, and gude enough, But aye the best was mine; For yours was o' the gude red gold, But mine o' the diamond fine." 'There is no hour of absolute beauty in all my past, though some have been made musical by heavenly hope, many dignified by intelligence. Long urged by the Furies, I rest again in the temple of Apollo. Celestial verities dawn constellated as thoughts in the Heaven of my mind. 'But, driven from home to home, as a renouncer, I get the picture and the poetry of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron, and lead, are in my casket. No one loves me; but I love many a good deal, and see, more or less, into their eventual beauty. Meanwhile, I have no fetter on me, no engagement, and, as I look on others,--almost every other,--can I fail to feel this a great privilege? I have nowise tied my hands or feet; yet the varied calls on my sympathy have been such, that I hope not to be made partial, cold, or ignorant, by this isolation. I have no child; but now, as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what low and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother! The children of the muse come quicker, and have not on them the taint of earthly corruption.' Practical questions in plenty the days and months brought her to settle,--questions requiring all her wisdom, and sometimes more than all. None recurs with more frequency, at one period, in her journals, than the debate with herself, whether she shall make literature a profession. Shall it be woman, or shall it be artist? WOMAN, OR ARTIST? Margaret resolved, again and again, to devote herself no more to these disappointing forms of men and women, but to the children of the muse. 'The _dramatis personæ_' she said, 'of my poems shall henceforth be chosen from the children of immortal Muse. I fix my affections no more on these frail forms.' But it was vain; she rushed back again to persons, with a woman's devotion. Her pen was a non-conductor. She always took it up with some disdain, thinking it a kind of impiety to attempt to report a life so warm and cordial, and wrote on the fly-leaf of her journal,-- '"_Scrivo sol per sfogar' l'interno_."' 'Since you went away,' she said, 'I have thought of many things I might have told you, but I could not bear to be eloquent and poetical. It is a mockery thus to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one's own heart's blood. One would fain be no more artist, or philosopher, or lover, or critic, but a soul ever rushing forth in tides of genial life.' * * * * * '_26 Dec., 1842._--I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby. These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians. What I demand of men,--that they could act out all their thoughts,--these have. They are lives;--and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year,--there is the energy to redeem them. Do you not admire Lord Herbert's two poems on life, and the conjectures concerning celestial life? I keep reading them.' * * * * * 'When I look at my papers, I feel as if I had never had a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when, on talking with people, I find I tell them what they did not know, that my confidence at all returns.' * * * * * 'My verses,--I am ashamed when I think there is scarce a line of poetry in them,--all rhetorical and impassioned, as Goethe said of De Stael. However, such as they are, they have been overflowing drops from the somewhat bitter cup of my existence.' * * * * * 'How can I ever write with this impatience of detail? I shall never be an artist; I have no patient love of execution; I am delighted with my sketch, but if I try to finish it, I am chilled. Never was there a great sculptor who did not love to chip the marble.' * * * * * 'I have talent and knowledge enough to furnish a dwelling for friendship, but not enough to deck with golden gifts a Delphi for the world.' * * * * * 'Then a woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our knowledge; and, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, and fly, and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write, and, without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in us. Because we seemed to know all, they think we can tell all; and, finding we can tell so little, lose faith in their first opinion of us, _which, nathless, was true_.' And again: 'These gentlemen are surprised that I write no better, because I talk so well. But I have served a long apprenticeship to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel inspired. The means are pleasant; my voice excites me, my pen never. I shall not be discouraged, nor take for final what they say, but sift from it the truth, and use it. I feel the strength to dispense with all illusions. I will stand steady, and rejoice in the severest probations.' * * * * * 'What a vulgarity there seems in this writing for the multitude! We know not yet, have not made ourselves known to a single soul, and shall we address those still more unknown? Shall we multiply our connections, and thus make them still more superficial? 'I would go into the crowd, and meet men for the day, to help them for the day, but for that intercourse which most becomes us. Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Cleone, is circle wide enough for me. I should think all the resources of my nature, and all the tribute it could enforce from external nature, none too much to furnish the banquet for this circle. 'But where to find fit, though few, representatives for all we value in humanity? Where obtain those golden keys to the secret treasure-chambers of the soul? No samples are perfect. We must look abroad into the wide circle, to seek a little here, and a little there, to make up our company. And is not the "prent book" a good beacon-light to tell where we wait the bark?--a reputation, the means of entering the Olympic game, where Pindar may perchance be encountered? 'So it seems the mind must reveal its secret; must reproduce. And I have no castle, and no natural circle, in which I might live, like the wise Makaria, observing my kindred the stars, and gradually enriching my archives. Makaria here must go abroad, or the stars would hide their light, and the archive remain a blank. 'For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist.' HEROISM. These practical problems Margaret had to entertain and to solve the best way she could. She says truly, 'there was none to take up her burden whilst she slept.' But she was formed for action, and addressed herself quite simply to her part. She was a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money; and these negatives will suggest what difficulties were to be surmounted where the tasks dictated by her talents required the good-will of "good society," in the town where she was to teach and write. But she was even-tempered and erect, and, if her journals are sometimes mournful, her mind was made up, her countenance beamed courage and cheerfulness around her. Of personal influence, speaking strictly,--an efflux, that is, purely of mind and character, excluding all effects of power, wealth, fashion, beauty, or literary fame,--she had an extraordinary degree; I think more than any person I have known. An interview with her was a joyful event. Worthy men and women, who had conversed with her, could not forget her, but worked bravely on in the remembrance that this heroic approver had recognized their aims. She spoke so earnestly, that the depth of the sentiment prevailed, and not the accidental expression, which might chance to be common. Thus I learned, the other day, that, in a copy of Mrs. Jameson's Italian Painters, against a passage describing Correggio as a true servant of God in his art, above sordid ambition, devoted to truth, "one of those superior beings of whom there are so few;" Margaret wrote on the margin, 'And yet all might be such.' The book lay long on the table of the owner, in Florence, and chanced to be read there by a young artist of much talent. "These words," said he, months afterwards, "struck out a new strength in me. They revived resolutions long fallen away, and made me set my face like a flint." But Margaret's courage was thoroughly sweet in its temper. She accused herself in her youth of unamiable traits, but, in all the later years of her life, it is difficult to recall a moment of malevolence. The friends whom her strength of mind drew to her, her good heart held fast; and few persons were ever the objects of more persevering kindness. Many hundreds of her letters remain, and they are alive with proofs of generous friendship given and received. Among her early friends, Mrs. Farrar, of Cambridge, appears to have discovered, at a critical moment in her career, the extraordinary promise of the young girl, and some false social position into which her pride and petulance, and the mistakes of others, had combined to bring her, and she set herself, with equal kindness and address, to make a second home for Margaret in her own house, and to put her on the best footing in the agreeable society of Cambridge. She busied herself, also, as she could, in removing all superficial blemishes from the gem. In a well-chosen travelling party, made up by Mrs. Farrar, and which turned out to be the beginning of much happiness by the friendships then formed, Margaret visited, in the summer of 1835, Newport, New York, and Trenton Falls; and, in the autumn, made the acquaintance, at Mrs. F.'s house, of Miss Martineau, whose friendship, at that moment, was an important stimulus to her mind. Mrs. Farrar performed for her, thenceforward, all the offices of an almost maternal friendship. She admired her genius, and wished that all should admire it. She counselled and encouraged her, brought to her side the else unsuppliable aid of a matron and a lady, sheltered her in sickness, forwarded her plans with tenderness and constancy, to the last. I read all this in the tone of uniform gratitude and love with which this lady is mentioned in Margaret's letters. Friendships like this praise both parties; and the security with which people of a noble disposition approached Margaret, indicated the quality of her own infinite tenderness. A very intelligent woman applied to her what Stilling said of Goethe: "Her heart, which few knew, was as great as her mind, which all knew;" and added, that, "in character, Margaret was, of all she had beheld, the largest woman, and not a woman who wished, to be a man." Another lady added, "She never disappointed you. To any one whose confidence she had once drawn out, she was thereafter faithful. She could talk of persons, and never gossip; for she had a fine instinct that kept her from any reality, and from any effect of treachery." I was still more struck with the remark that followed. "Her life, since she went abroad, is wholly unknown to me; but I have an unshaken trust that what Margaret did she can defend." She was a right brave and heroic woman. She shrunk from no duty, because of feeble nerves. Although, after her father died, the disappointment of not going to Europe with Miss Martineau and Mrs. Farrar was extreme, and her mother and sister wished her to take her portion of the estate and go; and, on her refusal, entreated the interference of friends to overcome her objections; Margaret would not hear of it, and devoted herself to the education of her brothers and sisters, and then to the making a home for the family. She was exact and punctual in money matters, and maintained herself, and made her full contribution to the support of her family, by the reward of her labors as a teacher, and in her conversation classes. I have a letter from her at Jamaica Plain, dated November, 1840, which begins, 'This day I write you from my own hired house, and am full of the dignity of citizenship. Really, it is almost happiness. I retain, indeed, some cares and responsibilities; but these will sit light as feathers, for I can take my own time for them. Can it be that this peace will be mine for five whole months? At any rate, five days have already been enjoyed.' Here is another, written in the same year:-- 'I do not wish to talk to you of my ill-health, except that I like you should know when it makes me do anything badly, since I wish you to excuse and esteem me. But let me say, once for all, in reply to your letter, that you are mistaken if you think I ever wantonly sacrifice my health. I have learned that we cannot injure ourselves without injuring others; and besides, that we have no right; for ourselves are all we know of heaven. I do not try to domineer over myself. But, unless I were sure of dying, I cannot dispense with making some exertion, both for the present and the future. There is no mortal, who, if I laid down my burden, would take care of it while I slept. Do not think me weakly disinterested, or, indeed, disinterested at all.' Every one of her friends knew assuredly that her sympathy and aid would not fail them when required. She went, from the most joyful of all bridals, to attend a near relative during a formidable surgical operation. She was here to help others. As one of her friends writes, 'She helped whoever knew her.' She adopted the interests of humble persons, within her circle, with heart-cheering warmth, and her ardor in the cause of suffering and degraded women, at Sing-Sing, was as irresistible as her love of books. She had, many years afterwards, scope for the exercise of all her love and devotion, in Italy, but she came to it as if it had been her habit and her natural sphere. The friends who knew her in that country, relate, with much surprise, that she, who had all her lifetime drawn people by her wit, should recommend herself so highly, in Italy, by her tenderness and large affection. Yet the tenderness was only a face of the wit; as before, the wit was raised above all other wit by the affection behind it. And, truly, there was an ocean of tears always, in her atmosphere, ready to fall. There was, at New York, a poor adventurer, half patriot, half author, a miserable man, always in such depths of distress, with such squadrons of enemies, that no charity could relieve, and no intervention save him. He believed Europe banded for his destruction, and America corrupted to connive at it. Margaret listened to these woes with such patience and mercy, that she drew five hundred dollars, which had been invested for her in a safe place, and put them in those hapless hands, where, of course, the money was only the prey of new rapacity, to be bewailed by new reproaches. When one of her friends had occasion to allude to this, long afterwards, she replied:-- 'In answer to what you say of ----, I wish, indeed, the little effort I made for him had been wiselier applied. Yet these are not the things one regrets. It will not do to calculate too closely with the affectionate human impulse. We must consent to make many mistakes, or we should move too slow to help our brothers much. I am sure you do not regret what you spent on Miani, and other worthless people. As things looked then, it would have been wrong not to have risked the loss.' TRUTH. But Margaret crowned all her talents and virtues with a love of truth, and the power to speak it. In great and in small matters, she was a woman of her word, and gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort that flows from plain dealing. Her nature was frank and transparent, and she had a right to say, as she says in her journal:-- 'I have the satisfaction of knowing, that, in my counsels, I have given myself no air of being better than I am.' And again:-- 'In the chamber of death, I prayed in very early years, "Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion." O, the granting of this prayer is sometimes terrible to me! I walk over the burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet. Yet nothing but truth will do; no love will serve that is not eternal, and as large as the universe; no philanthropy in executing whose behests I myself become unhealthy; no creative genius which bursts asunder my life, to leave it a poor black chrysalid behind. And yet this last is too true of me.' She describes a visit made in May, 1844, at the house of some valued friends in West Roxbury, and adds: 'We had a long and deep conversation, happy in its candor. Truth, truth, thou art the great preservative! Let free air into the mind, and the pestilence cannot lurk in any corner.' And she uses the following language in an earnest letter to another friend:-- 'My own entire sincerity, in every passage of life, gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions.' * * * * * 'Reading to-day a few lines of ----, I thought with refreshment of such lives as T.'s, and V.'s, and W.'s, so private and so true, where each line written is really the record of a thought or a feeling. I hate poems which are a melancholy monument of culture for the sake of being cultivated, not of growing.' Even in trifles, one might find with her the advantage and the electricity of a little honesty. I have had from an eye-witness a note of a little scene that passed in Boston, at the Academy of Music. A party had gone early, and taken an excellent place to hear one of Beethoven's symphonies. Just behind them were soon seated a young lady and two gentlemen, who made an incessant buzzing, in spite of bitter looks cast on them by the whole neighborhood, and destroyed all the musical comfort. After all was over, Margaret leaned across one seat, and catching the eye of this girl, who was pretty and well-dressed, said, in her blandest, gentlest voice, "May I speak with you one moment?" "Certainly," said the young lady, with a fluttered, pleased look, bending forward. "I only wish to say," said Margaret, "that I trust, that, in the whole course of your life, you will not suffer so great a degree of annoyance as you have inflicted on a large party of lovers of music this evening." This was said with the sweetest air, as if to a little child, and it was as good as a play to see the change of countenance which the young lady exhibited, who had no replication to make to so Christian a blessing. On graver occasions, the same habit was only more stimulated; and I cannot remember certain passages which called it into play, without new regrets at the costly loss which our community sustains in the loss of this brave and eloquent soul. People do not speak the truth, not for the want of not knowing and preferring it, but because they have not the organ to speak it adequately. It requires a clear sight, and, still more, a high spirit, to deal with falsehood in the decisive way. I have known several honest persons who valued truth as much as Peter and John, but, when they tried to speak it, _they_ grew red and black in the face instead of Ananias, until, after a few attempts, they decided that aggressive truth was not their vocation, and confined themselves thenceforward to silent honesty, except on rare occasions, when either an extreme outrage, or a happier inspiration, loosened their tongue. But a soul is now and then incarnated, whom indulgent nature has not afflicted with any cramp or frost, but who can speak the right word at the right moment, qualify the selfish and hypocritical act with its real name, and, without any loss of serenity, hold up the offence to the purest daylight. Such a truth-speaker is worth more than the best police, and more than the laws or governors; for these do not always know their own side, but will back the crime for want of this very truth-speaker to expose them. That is the theory of the newspaper,--to supersede official by intellectual influence. But, though the apostles establish the journal, it usually happens that, by some strange oversight, Ananias slips into the editor's chair. If, then, we could be provided with a fair proportion of truth-speakers, we could very materially and usefully contract the legislative and the executive functions. Still, the main sphere for this nobleness is private society, where so many mischiefs go unwhipped, being out of the cognizance of law, and supposed to be nobody's business. And society is, at all times, suffering for want of judges and headsmen, who will mark and lop these malefactors. Margaret suffered no vice to insult her presence, but called the offender to instant account, when the law of right or of beauty was violated. She needed not, of course, to go out of her way to find the offender, and she never did, but she had the courage and the skill to cut heads off which were not worn with honor in her presence. Others might abet a crime by silence, if they pleased; she chose to clear herself of all complicity, by calling the act by its name. It was curious to see the mysterious provocation which the mere presence of insight exerts in its neighborhood. Like moths about a lamp, her victims voluntarily came to judgment: conscious persons, encumbered with egotism; vain persons, bent on concealing some mean vice; arrogant reformers, with some halting of their own; the compromisers, who wished to reconcile right and wrong;--all came and held out their palms to the wise woman, to read their fortunes, and they were truly told. Many anecdotes have come to my ear, which show how useful the glare of her lamp proved in private circles, and what dramatic situations it created. But these cannot be told. The valor for dragging the accused spirits among his acquaintance to the stake is not in the heart of the present writer. The reader must be content to learn that she knew how, without loss of temper, to speak with unmistakable plainness to any party, when she felt that the truth or the right was injured. For the same reason, I omit one or two letters, most honorable both to her mind and heart, in which she felt constrained to give the frankest utterance to her displeasure. Yet I incline to quote the testimony of one witness, which is so full and so pointed, that I must give it as I find it. "I have known her, by the severity of her truth, mow down a crop of evil, like the angel of retribution itself, and could not sufficiently admire her courage. A conversation she had with Mr. ----, just before he went to Europe, was one of these things; and there was not a particle of ill-will in it, but it was truth which she could not help seeing and uttering, nor he refuse to accept. "My friends told me of a similar verdict, pronounced upon Mr. ----, at Paris, which they said was perfectly tremendous. They themselves sat breathless; Mr. ---- was struck dumb; his eyes fixed on her with wonder and amazement, yet gazing too with an attention which seemed like fascination. When she had done, he still looked to see if she was to say more, and when he found she had really finished, he arose, took his hat, said faintly, 'I thank you.' and left the room. He afterwards said to Mr. ----, 'I never shall speak ill of her. She has done me good.' And this was the greater triumph, for this man had no theories of impersonality, and was the most egotistical and irritable of self-lovers, and was so unveracious, that one had to hope in charity that his organ for apprehending truth was deficient." ECSTASY. I have alluded to the fact, that, in the summer of 1840, Margaret underwent some change in the tone and the direction of her thoughts, to which she attributed a high importance. I remember, at an earlier period, when in earnest conversation with her, she seemed to have that height and daring, that I saw she was ready to do whatever she thought; and I observed that, with her literary riches, her invention and wit, her boundless fun and drollery, her light satire, and the most entertaining conversation in America, consisted a certain pathos of sentiment, and a march of character, threatening to arrive presently at the shores and plunge into the sea of Buddhism and mystical trances. The literature of asceticism and rapturous piety was familiar to her. The conversation of certain mystics, who had appeared in Boston about this time, had interested her, but in no commanding degree. But in this year, 1840, in which events occurred which combined great happiness and pain for her affections, she remained for some time in a sort of ecstatic solitude. She made many attempts to describe her frame of mind to me, but did not inspire me with confidence that she had now come to any experiences that were profound or permanent. She was vexed at the want of sympathy on my part, and I again felt that this craving for sympathy did not prove the inspiration. There was a certain restlessness and fever, which I did not like should deceive a soul which was capable of greatness. But jets of magnanimity were always natural to her; and her aspiring mind, eager for a higher and still a higher ground, made her gradually familiar with the range of the mystics, and, though never herself laid in the chamber called Peace, never quite authentically and originally speaking from the absolute or prophetic mount, yet she borrowed from her frequent visits to its precincts an occasional enthusiasm, which gave a religious dignity to her thought. 'I have plagues about me, but they don't touch me now. I thank nightly the benignant Spirit, for the unaccustomed serenity in which it enfolds me. '---- is very wretched; and once I could not have helped taking on me all his griefs, and through him the griefs of his class; but now I drink only the wormwood of the minute, and that has always equal parts,--a drop of sweet to a drop of bitter. But I shall never be callous, never unable to understand _home-sickness_. Am not I, too, one of the band who know not where to lay their heads? Am I wise enough to hear such things? Perhaps not; but happy enough, surely. For that Power which daily makes me understand the value of the little wheat amid the field of tares, and shows me how the kingdom of heaven is sown in the earth like a grain of mustard-seed, is good to me, and bids me call unhappiness happy.' * * * * * TO ---- '_March_, 1842.--My inward life has been more rich and deep, and of more calm and musical flow than ever before. It seems to me that Heaven, whose course has ever been to cross-bias me, as Herbert said, is no niggard in its compensations. I have indeed been forced to take up old burdens, from which I thought I had learned what they could teach; the pen has been snatched from my hand just as I most longed to use it; I have been forced to dissipate, when I most wished to concentrate; to feel the hourly presence of others' mental wants, when, it seemed, I was just on the point of satisfying my own. But a new page is turned, and an era begun, from which I am not yet sufficiently remote to describe it as I would. I have lived a life, if only in the music I have heard, and one development seemed to follow another therein, as if bound together by destiny, and all things were done for me. All minds, all scenes, have ministered to me. Nature has seemed an ever-open secret; the Divine, a sheltering love; truth, an always-springing fountain; and my soul more alone, and less lonely, more hopeful, patient, and, above all, more gentle and humble in its living. New minds have come to reveal themselves to me, though I do not wish it, for I feel myself inadequate to the ties already formed. I have not strength or time to meet the thoughts of those I love already. But these new have come with gifts too fair to be refused, and which have cheered my passive mind.' * * * * * '_June_, 1844.--Last night, in the boat, I could not help thinking, each has something, none has enough. I fear to want them all; and, through ages, if not forever, promises and beckons the life of reception, of renunciation. Passing every seven days from one region to the other, the maiden grows weary of _packing the trunk_, yet blesses Thee, O rich God!' Her letters at this period betray a pathetic alternation of feeling, between her aspiring for a rest in the absolute Centre, and her necessity of a perfect sympathy with her friends. She writes to one of them:-- 'What I want, the word I crave, I do not expect to hear from the lips of man. I do not wish to be, I do not wish to have, a _mediator_; yet I cannot help wishing, when I am with you, that some tones of the longed-for music could be vibrating in the air around us. But I will not be impatient again; for, though I am but as I am, I like not to feel the eyes I have loved averted.' CONVERSATION. I have separated and distributed as I could some of the parts which blended in the rich composite energy which Margaret exerted during the ten years over which my occasional interviews with her were scattered. It remains to say, that all these powers and accomplishments found their best and only adequate channel in her conversation;--a conversation which those who have heard it, unanimously, as far as I know, pronounced to be, in elegance, in range, in flexibility, and adroit transition, in depth, in cordiality, and in moral aim, altogether admirable; surprising and cheerful as a poem, and communicating its own civility and elevation like a charm to all hearers. She was here, among our anxious citizens, and frivolous fashionists, as if sent to refine and polish her countrymen, and announce a better day. She poured a stream of amber over the endless store of private anecdotes, of bosom histories, which her wonderful persuasion drew forth, and transfigured them into fine fables. Whilst she embellished the moment, her conversation had the merit of being solid and true. She put her whole character into it, and had the power to inspire. The companion was made a thinker, and went away quite other than he came. The circle of friends who sat with her were not allowed to remain spectators or players, but she converted them into heroes, if she could. The muse woke the muses, and the day grew bright and eventful. Of course, there must be, in a person of such sincerity, much variety of aspect, according to the character of her company. Only, in Margaret's case, there is almost an agreement in the testimony to an invariable power over the minds of all. I conversed lately with a gentleman who has vivid remembrances of his interviews with her in Boston, many years ago, who described her in these terms:--"No one ever came so near. Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companion, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives; yet she had a light sort of laugh, when all was said, as if she thought she could live over that revelation. And this sufficient sympathy she had for all persons indifferently,--for lovers, for artists, and beautiful maids, and ambitious young statesmen, and for old aunts, and coach-travellers. Ah! she applied herself to the mood of her companion, as the sponge applies itself to water." The description tallies well enough with my observation. I remember she found, one day, at my house, her old friend Mr. ----, sitting with me. She looked at him attentively, and hardly seemed to know him. In the afternoon, he invited her to go with him to Cambridge. The next, day she said to me, 'You fancy that you know--. It is too absurd; you have never seen him. When I found him here, sitting like a statue, I was alarmed, and thought him ill. You sit with courteous, _un_confiding smile, and suppose him to be a mere man of talent. He is so with you. But the moment I was alone with him, he was another creature; his manner, so glassy and elaborate before, was full of soul, and the tones of his voice entirely different.' And I have no doubt that she saw expressions, heard tones, and received thoughts from her companions, which no one else ever saw or heard from the same parties, and that her praise of her friends, which seemed exaggerated, was her exact impression. We were all obliged to recall Margaret's testimony, when we found we were sad blockheads to other people. I find among her letters many proofs of this power of disposing equally the hardest and the most sensitive people to open their hearts, on very short acquaintance. Any casual rencontré, in a walk, in a steamboat, at a concert, became the prelude to unwonted confidences. * * * * * 1843.--'I believe I told you about one new man, a Philistine, at Brook Farm. He reproved me, as such people are wont, for my little faith. At the end of the first meeting in the hall, he seemed to me perfectly hampered in his old ways and technics, and I thought he would not open his mind to the views of others for years, if ever. After I wrote, we had a second meeting, by request, on personal relations; at the end of which, he came to me, and expressed delight, and a feeling of new light and life, in terms whose modesty might have done honor to the wisest.' * * * * * 'This afternoon we met Mr. ---- in his wood; and he sat down and told us the story of his life, his courtship, and painted the portraits of his father and mother with most amusing naïveté. He says:--"How do you think I offered myself? I never had told Miss ---- that I loved her; never told her she was handsome; and I went to her, and said, 'Miss ----, I've come to offer myself; but first I'll give you my character. I'm very poor; you'll have to work: I'm very cross and irascible; you'll have everything to bear: and I've liked many other pretty girls. Now what do you say?' and she said, 'I'll have you:' and she's been everything to me." '"My mother was a Calvinist, very strict, but she was always reading 'Abelard and Eloisa,' and crying over it. At sixteen I said to her: 'Mother, you've brought me up well; you've kept me strict. Why don't I feel that regeneration they talk of? why an't I one of the elect?' And she talked to me about the potter using his clay as he pleased; and I said: 'Mother, God is not a potter: He's a perfect being; and he can't treat the vessels he makes, anyhow, but with perfect justice, or he's no God. So I'm no Calvinist.'"' * * * * * Here is a very different picture:-- '---- has infinite grace and shading in her character: a springing and tender fancy, a Madonna depth of meditative softness, and a purity which has been unstained, and keeps her dignified even in the most unfavorable circumstances. She was born for the love and ornament of life. I can scarcely forbear weeping sometimes, when I look on her, and think what happiness and beauty she might have conferred. She is as yet all unconscious of herself, and she rather dreads being with me, because I make her too conscious. She was on the point, at ----, of telling me all she knew of herself; but I saw she dreaded, while she wished, that I should give a local habitation and a name to what lay undefined, floating before her, the phantom of her destiny; or rather lead her to give it, for she always approaches a tragical clearness when talking with me.' * * * * * '---- has been to see us. But it serves not to know such a person, who perpetually defaces the high by such strange mingling with the low. It certainly is not pleasant to hear of God and Miss Biddeford in a breath. To me, this hasty attempt at skimming from the deeps of theosophy is as unpleasant as the rude vanity of reformers. Dear Beauty! where, where, amid these morasses and pine barrens, shall we make thee a temple? where find a Greek to guard it,--clear-eyed, deep-thoughted, and delicate enough to appreciate the relations and gradations which nature always observes?' An acute and illuminated woman, who, in this age of indifferentism, holds on with both hands to the creed of the Pilgrims, writes of Margaret, whom she saw but once:--"She looked very sensible, but as if contending with ill health and duties. She lay, all the day and evening, on the sofa, and catechized me, who told my literal traditions, like any old bobbin-woman." I add the testimony of a man of letters, and most competent observer, who had, for a long time, opportunities of daily intercourse with her:-- "When I knew Margaret, I was so young, and perhaps too much disposed to meet people on my own ground, that I may not be able to do justice to her. Her nature was so large and receptive, so sympathetic with youth and genius, so aspiring, and withal so womanly in her understanding, that she made her companion think more of himself, and of a common life, than of herself. She was a companion as few others, if indeed any one, have been. Her heart was underneath her intellectualness, her mind was reverent, her spirit devout; a thinker without dryness; a scholar without pedantry. She could appreciate the finest thoughts, and knew the rich soil and large fields of beauty that made the little vase of otto. With her unusual wisdom and religious spirit, she seemed like the priestess of the youth, opening to him the fields of nature; but she was more than a priestess, a companion also. As I recall her image, I think she may have been too intellectual, and too conscious of intellectual relation, so that she was not sufficiently self-centred on her own personality; and hence something of a duality: but I may not be correct in this impression." CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON. BY R.W. EMERSON. "Do not scold me; they are guests of my eyes. Do not frown,--they want no bread; they are guests of my words." TARTAR ECLOGUES V. CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON. * * * * * In the year 1839, Margaret removed from Groton, and, with her mother and family, took a house at Jamaica Plain, five miles from Boston. In November of the next year the family removed to Cambridge, and rented a house there, near their old home. In 1841, Margaret took rooms for the winter in town, retaining still the house in Cambridge. And from the day of leaving Groton, until the autumn of 1844, when she removed to New York, she resided in Boston, or its immediate vicinity. Boston was her social centre. There were the libraries, galleries, and concerts which she loved; there were her pupils and her friends; and there were her tasks, and the openings of a new career. I have vaguely designated some of the friends with whom she was on terms of intimacy at the time when I was first acquainted with her. But the range of her talents required an equal compass in her society; and she gradually added a multitude of names to the list. She knew already all the active minds at Cambridge; and has left a record of one good interview she had with Allston. She now became intimate with Doctor Channing, and interested him to that point in some of her studies, that, at his request, she undertook to render some selections of German philosophy into English for him. But I believe this attempt was soon abandoned. She found a valuable friend in the late Miss Mary Rotch, of New Bedford, a woman of great strength of mind, connected with the Quakers not less by temperament than by birth, and possessing the best lights of that once spiritual sect. At Newport, Margaret had made the acquaintance of an elegant scholar, in Mr. Calvert, of Maryland. In Providence, she had won, as by conquest, such a homage of attachment, from young and old, that her arrival there, one day, on her return from a visit to Bristol, was a kind of ovation. In Boston, she knew people of every class,--merchants, politicians, scholars, artists, women, the migratory genius, and the rooted capitalist,--and, amongst all, many excellent people, who were every day passing, by new opportunities, conversations, and kind offices, into the sacred circle of friends. The late Miss Susan Burley had many points of attraction for her, not only in her elegant studies, but also in the deep interest which that lady took in securing the highest culture for women. She was very well read, and, avoiding abstractions, knew how to help herself with examples and facts. A friendship that proved of great importance to the next years was that established with Mr. George Ripley; an accurate scholar, a man of character, and of eminent powers of conversation, and already then deeply engaged in plans of an expansive practical bearing, of which the first fruit was the little community which nourished for a few years at Brook Farm. Margaret presently became connected with him in literary labors, and, as long as she remained in this vicinity, kept up her habits of intimacy with the colonists of Brook Farm. At West-Roxbury, too, she knew and prized the heroic heart, the learning and wit of Theodore Parker, whose literary aid was, subsequently, of the first importance to her. She had an acquaintance, for many years,--subject, no doubt, to alternations of sun and shade,--with Mr. Alcott. There was much antagonism in their habitual views, but each learned to respect the genius of the other. She had more sympathy with Mr. Alcott's English friend, Charles Lane, an ingenious mystic, and bold experimenter in practical reforms, whose dexterity and temper in debate she frankly admired, whilst his asceticism engaged her reverence. Neither could some marked difference of temperament remove her from the beneficent influences of Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who, by her constitutional hospitality to excellence, whether mental or moral, has made her modest abode for so many years the inevitable resort of studious feet, and a private theatre for the exposition of every question of letters, of philosophy, of ethics, and of art. The events in Margaret's life, up to the year 1840, were few, and not of that dramatic interest which readers love. Of the few events of her bright and blameless years, how many are private, and must remain so. In reciting the story of an affectionate and passionate woman, the voice lowers itself to a whisper, and becomes inaudible. A woman in our society finds her safety and happiness in exclusions and privacies. She congratulates herself when she is not called to the market, to the courts, to the polls, to the stage, or to the orchestra. Only the most extraordinary genius can make the career of an artist secure and agreeable to her. Prescriptions almost invincible the female lecturer or professor of any science must encounter; and, except on points where the charities which are left to women as their legitimate province interpose against the ferocity of laws, with us a female politician is unknown. Perhaps this fact, which so dangerously narrows the career of a woman, accuses the tardiness of our civility, and many signs show that a revolution is already on foot. Margaret had no love of notoriety, or taste for eccentricity, to goad her, and no weak fear of either. Willingly she was confined to the usual circles and methods of female talent. She had no false shame. Any task that called out her powers was good and desirable. She wished to live by her strength. She could converse, and teach, and write. She took private classes of pupils at her own house. She organized, with great success, a school for young ladies at Providence, and gave four hours a day to it, during two years. She translated Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, and published in 1839. In 1841, she translated the Letters of Gunderode and Bettine, and published them as far as the sale warranted the work. In 1843, she made a tour to Lake Superior and to Michigan, and published an agreeable narrative of it, called "Summer on the Lakes." Apparently a more pretending, but really also a private and friendly service, she edited the "Dial," a quarterly journal, for two years from its first publication in 1840. She was eagerly solicited to undertake the charge of this work, which, when it began, concentrated a good deal of hope and affection. It had its origin in a club of speculative students, who found the air in America getting a little close and stagnant; and the agitation had perhaps the fault of being too secondary or bookish in its origin, or caught not from primary instincts, but from English, and still more from German books. The journal was commenced with much hope, and liberal promises of many coöperators. But the workmen of sufficient culture for a poetical and philosophical magazine were too few; and, as the pages were filled by unpaid contributors, each of whom had, according to the usage and necessity of this country, some paying employment, the journal did not get his best work, but his second best. Its scattered writers had not digested their theories into a distinct dogma, still less into a practical measure which the public could grasp; and the magazine was so eclectic and miscellaneous, that each of its readers and writers valued only a small portion of it. For these reasons it never had a large circulation, and it was discontinued after four years. But the Dial betrayed, through all its juvenility, timidity, and conventional rubbish, some sparks of the true love and hope, and of the piety to spiritual law, which had moved its friends and founders, and it was received by its early subscribers with almost a religious welcome. Many years after it was brought to a close, Margaret was surprised in England by very warm testimony to its merits; and, in 1848, the writer of these pages found it holding the same affectionate place in many a private bookshelf in England and Scotland, which it had secured at home. Good or bad, it cost a good deal of precious labor from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all. As editor, she received a compensation for the first years, which was intended to be two hundred dollars _per annum_, but which, I fear, never reached even that amount. But it made no difference to her exertion. She put so much heart into it that she bravely undertook to open, in the Dial, the subjects which most attracted her; and she treated, in turn, Goethe, and Beethoven, the Rhine and the Romaic Ballads, the Poems of John Sterling, and several pieces of sentiment, with a spirit which spared no labor; and, when the hard conditions of journalism held her to an inevitable day, she submitted to jeopardizing a long-cherished subject, by treating it in the crude and forced article for the month. I remember, after she had been compelled by ill health to relinquish the journal into my hands, my grateful wonder at the facility with which she assumed the preparation of laborious articles, that might have daunted the most practised scribe. But in book or journal she found a very imperfect expression of herself, and it was the more vexatious, because she was accustomed to the clearest and fullest. When, therefore, she had to choose an employment that should pay money, she consulted her own genius, as well as the wishes of a multitude of friends, in opening a class for conversation. In the autumn of 1839, she addressed the following letter, intended for circulation, to Mrs. George Ripley, in which her general design was stated:-- 'My dear friend:--The advantages of a weekly meeting, for conversation, might be great enough to repay the trouble of attendance, if they consisted only in supplying a point of union to well-educated and thinking women, in a city which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts, at present, nothing of the kind, and where I have heard many, of mature age, wish for some such means of stimulus and cheer, and those younger, for a place where they could state their doubts and difficulties, with a hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others. And, if my office were only to suggest topics, which would lead to conversation of a better order than is usual at social meetings, and to turn back the current when digressing into personalities or common-places, so that what is valuable in the experience of each might be brought to bear upon all, I should think the object not unworthy of the effort. 'But my ambition goes much further. It is to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge, and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our minds. To systematize thought, and give a precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements to test and classify what they receive. To ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us, in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action. 'Could a circle be assembled in earnest, desirous to answer the questions,--What were we born to do? and how shall we do it?--which so few ever propose to themselves till their best years are gone by, I should think the undertaking a noble one, and, if my resources should prove sufficient to make me its moving spring, I should be willing to give to it a large portion of those coming years, which will, as I hope, be my best. I look upon it with no blind enthusiasm, nor unlimited faith, but with a confidence that I have attained a distinct perception of means, which, if there are persons competent to direct them, can supply a great want, and promote really high objects. So far as I have tried them yet, they have met with success so much beyond my hopes, that my faith will not easily be shaken, nor my earnestness chilled. Should I, however, be disappointed in Boston, I could hardly hope that such a plan could be brought to bear on general society, in any other city of the United States. But I do not fear, if a good beginning can be made. I am confident that twenty persons cannot be brought together from better motives than vanity or pedantry, to talk upon such subjects as we propose, without finding in themselves great deficiencies, which they will be very desirous to supply. 'Should the enterprise fail, it will be either from incompetence in me, or that sort of vanity in them which wears the garb of modesty. On the first of these points, I need not speak. I cannot be supposed to have felt so much the wants of others, without feeling my own still more deeply. And, from the depth of this feeling, and the earnestness it gave, such power as I have yet exerted has come. Of course, those who are inclined to meet me, feel a confidence in me, and should they be disappointed, I shall regret it not solely or most on my own account. I have not given my gauge without measuring my capacity to sustain defeat. For the other, I know it is very hard to lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the art of coterie criticism, and the "delicate disdains" of _good society_, and fearlessly meet the light, even though it flow from the sun of truth. Yet, as, without such generous courage, nothing of value can be learned or done, I hope to see many capable of it; willing that others should think their sayings crude, shallow, or tasteless, if, by such unpleasant means, they may attain real health and vigor, which need no aid from rouge or candle-light, to brave the light of the world. 'Since I saw you, I have been told of persons who are desirous to join the class, "if only they need not talk." I am so sure that the success of the whole depends on conversation being general, that I do not wish any one to come, who does not intend, if possible, to take an active part. No one will be forced, but those who do not talk will not derive the same advantages with those who openly state their impressions, and can consent to have it known that they learn by blundering, as is the destiny of man here below. And general silence, or side talks, would paralyze me. I should feel coarse and misplaced, were I to harangue over-much. In former instances, I have been able to make it easy and even pleasant, to twenty-five out of thirty, to bear their part, to question, to define, to state, and examine opinions. If I could not do as much now, I should consider myself as unsuccessful, and should withdraw. But I shall expect communication to be effected by degrees, and to do a great deal myself at the first meetings. My method has been to open a subject,--for instance, Poetry, as expressed in-- External Nature; The life of man; Literature; The fine arts; or, The history of a nation to be studied in-- Its religious and civil institutions; Its literature and arts; The characters of its great men; and, after as good a general statement as I know how to make, select a branch of the subject, and lead others to give their thoughts upon it. When they have not been successful in verbal utterance of their thoughts, I have asked them to attempt it in writing. At the next meeting, I would read these "skarts of pen and ink" aloud, and canvass their adequacy, without mentioning the names of the writers. I found this less necessary, as I proceeded, and my companions attained greater command both of thought and language; but for a time it was useful, and may be now. Great advantage in point of discipline may be derived from even this limited use of the pen. 'I do not wish, at present, to pledge myself to any course of subjects. Generally, I may say, they will be such as literature and the arts present in endless profusion. Should a class be brought together, I should wish, first, to ascertain our common ground, and, in the course of a few meetings, should see whether it be practicable to follow out the design in my mind, which, as yet, would look too grand on paper. 'Let us see whether there will be any organ, before noting down the music to which it may give breath.' Accordingly, a class of ladies assembled at Miss Peabody's rooms, in West Street, on the 6th November, 1839. Twenty-five were present, and the circle comprised some of the most agreeable and intelligent women to be found in Boston and its neighborhood. The following brief report of this first day's meeting remains:-- 'Miss Fuller enlarged, in her introductory conversation, on the topics which she touched in her letter to Mrs. Ripley. 'Women are now taught, at school, all that men are; they run over, superficially, even _more_ studies, without being really taught anything. When they come to the business of life, they find themselves inferior, and all their studies have not given them that practical good sense, and mother wisdom, and wit, which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning-wheel. But, with this difference; men are called on, from a very early period, to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for purposes of display. 'It is to supply this defect,' Miss Fuller said, 'that these conversations have been planned. She was not here to teach; but she had had some experience in the management of such a conversation as was now proposed; she meant to give her view on each subject, and provoke the thoughts of others. 'It would be best to take subjects on which we know words, and have vague impressions, and compel ourselves to define those words. We should have, probably, mortifications to suffer; but we should be encouraged by the rapid gain that comes from making a simple and earnest effort for expression.' Miss Fuller had proposed the Grecian Mythology as the subject of the first conversations, and now gave her reasons for the choice. 'It is quite separated from all exciting local subjects. It is serious, without being solemn, and without excluding any mode of intellectual action; it is playful, as well as deep. It is sufficiently wide, for it is a complete expression of the cultivation of a nation. It is objective and tangible. It is, also, generally known, and associated with all our ideas of the arts. 'It originated in the eye of the Greek. He lived out of doors: his climate was genial, his senses were adapted to it. He was vivacious and intellectual, and personified all he beheld. He _saw_ the oreads, naiads, nereids. Their forms, as poets and painters give them, are the very lines of nature humanized, as the child's eye sees faces in the embers or in the clouds. 'Other forms of the mythology, as Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, are great instincts, or ideas, or facts of the internal constitution, separated and personified.' After exhibiting their enviable mental health, and rebutting the cavils of some of the speakers,--who could not bear, in Christian times, by Christian ladies, that heathen Greeks should be envied,--Miss Fuller declared, 'that she had no desire to go back, and believed we have the elements of a deeper civilization; yet, the Christian was in its infancy; the Greek in its maturity; nor could she look on the expression of a great nation's intellect, as insignificant. These fables of the Gods were the result of the universal sentiments of religion, aspiration, intellectual action, of a people, whose political and æsthetic life had become immortal; and we must leave off despising, if we would begin to learn.' The reporter closes her account by saying:--"Miss Fuller's thoughts were much illustrated, and all was said with the most captivating address and grace, and with beautiful modesty. The position in which she placed herself with respect to the rest, was entirely ladylike, and companionable. She told what she intended, the earnest purpose with which she came, and, with great tact, indicated the indiscretions that might spoil the meeting." Here is Margaret's own account of the first days. TO R.W.E. '_25th Nov._, 1839.--My class is prosperous. I was so fortunate as to rouse, at once, the tone of simple earnestness, which can scarcely, when once awakened, cease to vibrate. All seem in a glow, and quite as receptive as I wish. They question and examine, yet follow leadings; and thoughts, not opinions, have ruled the hour every time. There are about twenty-five members, and every one, I believe, full of interest. The first time, ten took part in the conversation; the last, still more. Mrs. ---- came out in a way that surprised me. She seems to have shaken off a wonderful number of films. She showed pure vision, sweet sincerity, and much talent. Mrs. ---- ---- keeps us in good order, and takes care that Christianity and morality are not forgotten. The first day's topic was, the genealogy of heaven and earth; then the Will, (Jupiter); the Understanding, (Mercury): the second day's, the celestial inspiration of genius, perception, and transmission of divine law, (Apollo); the terrene inspiration, the impassioned abandonment of genius, (Bacchus). Of the thunderbolt, the caduceus, the ray, and the grape, having disposed as well as might be, we came to the wave, and the sea-shell it moulds to Beauty, and Love her parent and her child. 'I assure you, there is more Greek than Bostonian spoken at the meetings; and we may have pure honey of Hymettus to give you yet.' To another friend she wrote:-- 'The circle I meet interests me. So even devoutly thoughtful seems their spirit, that, from the very first, I took my proper place, and never had the feeling I dreaded, of display, of a paid Corinne. I feel as I would, truly a teacher and a guide. All are intelligent; five or six have talent. But I am never driven home for ammunition; never put to any expense; never truly called out. What I have is always enough; though I feel how superficially I am treating my subject.' Here is an extract from the letter of a lady, who joined the class, for the first time, at the eighth meeting, to her friend in New Haven:-- "Christmas made a holiday for Miss Fuller's class, but it met on Saturday, at noon. As I sat there, my heart overflowed with joy at the sight of the bright circle, and I longed to have you by my side, for I know not where to look for so much character, culture, and so much love of truth and beauty, in any other circle of women and girls. The names and faces would not mean so much to you as to me, who have seen more of the lives, of which they are the sign. Margaret, beautifully dressed, (don't despise that, for it made a fine picture,) presided with more dignity and grace than I had thought possible. The subject was Beauty. Each had written her definition, and Margaret began with reading her own. This called forth questions, comments, and illustrations, on all sides. The style and manner, of course, in this age, are different, but the question, the high point from which it was considered, and the earnestness and simplicity of the discussion, as well as the gifts and graces of the speakers, gave it the charm of a Platonic dialogue. There was no pretension or pedantry in a word that was said. The tone of remark and question was simple as that of children in a school class; and, I believe, every one was gratified." The conversations thus opened proceeded with spirit and success. Under the mythological forms, room was found for opening all the great questions, on which Margaret and her friends wished to converse. Prometheus was made the type of Pure Reason; Jupiter, of Will; Juno, the passive side of the same, or Obstinacy; Minerva, Intellectual Power, Practical Reason; Mercury, Executive Power, Understanding; Apollo was Genius, the Sun; Bacchus was Geniality, the Earth's answer. "Apollo and Bacchus were contrasted," says the reporter. "Margaret unfolded her idea of Bacchus. His whole life was triumph. Born from fire; a divine frenzy; the answer of the earth to the sun,--of the warmth of joy to the light of genius. He is beautiful, also; not severe in youthful beauty, like Apollo; but exuberant,--liable to excess. She spoke of the fables of his destroying Pentheus, &c., and suggested the interpretations. This Bacchus was found in Scripture. The Indian Bacchus is glowing; he is the genial apprehensive power; the glow of existence; mere joy." Venus was Grecian womanhood, instinctive; Diana, chastity; Mars, Grecian manhood, instinctive. Venus made the name for a conversation on Beauty, which was extended through four meetings, as it brought in irresistibly the related topics of poetry, genius, and taste. Neptune was Circumstance; Pluto, the Abyss, the Undeveloped; Pan, the glow and sportiveness and music of Nature; Ceres, the productive power of Nature; Proserpine, the Phenomenon. Under the head of Venus, in the fifth conversation, the story of Cupid and Psyche was told with fitting beauty, by Margaret; and many fine conjectural interpretations suggested from all parts of the room. The ninth conversation turned on the distinctive qualities of poetry, discriminating it from the other fine arts. Rhythm and Imagery, it was agreed, were distinctive. An episode to dancing, which the conversation took, led Miss Fuller to give the thought that lies at the bottom of different dances. Of her lively description the following record is preserved:-- 'Gavottes, shawl dances, and all of that kind, are intended merely to exhibit the figure in as many attitudes as possible. They have no character, and say nothing, except, Look! how graceful I am! 'The minuet is conjugal; but the wedlock is chivalric. Even so would Amadis wind slow, stately, calm, through the mazes of life, with Oriana, when he had made obeisances enough to win her for a partner. 'English, German, Swiss, French, and Spanish dances all express the same things, though in very different ways. Love and its life are still the theme. 'In the English country dance, the pair who have chosen one another, submit decorously to the restraints of courtship and frequent separations, cross hands, four go round, down outside, in the most earnest, lively, complacent fashion. If they join hands to go down the middle, and exhibit their union to all spectators, they part almost as soon as meet, and disdain not to give hands right and left to the most indifferent persons, like marriage in its daily routine. 'In the Swiss, the man pursues, stamping with energy, marking the time by exulting flings, or snapping of the fingers, in delighted confidence of succeeding at last; but the maiden coyly, demurely, foots it round, yet never gets out of the way, intending to be won. 'The German asks his _madchen_ if she will, with him, for an hour forget the cares and common-places of life in a tumult of rapturous sympathy, and she smiles with Saxon modesty her _Ja_. He sustains her in his arms; the music begins. At first, in willing mazes they calmly imitate the planetary orbs, but the melodies flow quicker, their accordant hearts beat higher, and they whirl at last into giddy raptures, and dizzy evolutions, which steal from life its free-will and self-collection, till nothing is left but mere sensation. 'The French couple are somewhat engaged with one another, but almost equally so with the world around them. They think it well to vary existence with plenty of coquetry and display. First, the graceful reverence to one another, then to their neighbors. Exhibit your grace in the _chassé_,--made apparently solely for the purpose of _déchasséing_;--then civil intimacy between the ladies, in _la chaine_, then a decorous promenade of partners, then right and left with all the world, and balance, &c. The quadrille also offers opportunity for talk. Looks and sympathetic motions are not enough for our Parisian friends, unless eked out by words. 'The impassioned bolero and fandango are the dances for me. They are not merely loving, but living; they express the sweet Southern ecstasy at the mere gift of existence. These persons are together, they live, they are beautiful; how can they say this in sufficiently plain terms?--I love, I live, I am beautiful!--I put on my festal dress to do honor to my happiness; I shake my castanets, that my hands, too, may be busy; I _felice,--felicissima_!' This first series of conversations extended to thirteen, the class meeting once a week at noon, and remaining together for two hours. The class were happy, and the interest increased. A new series of thirteen more weeks followed, and the general subject of the new course was "the Fine Arts." A few fragmentary notes only of these hours have been shown me, but all those who bore any part in them testify to their entire success. A very competent witness has given me some interesting particulars:-- "Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed, and, altogether, looked sumptuously. She began them with an exordium, in which she gave her leading views; and those exordiums were excellent, from the elevation of the tone, the ease and flow of discourse, and from the tact with which they were kept aloof from any excess, and from the gracefulness with which they were brought down, at last, to a possible level for others to follow. She made a pause, and invited the others to come in. Of course, it was not easy for every one to venture her remark, after an eloquent discourse, and in the presence of twenty superior women, who were all inspired. But whatever was said, Margaret knew how to seize the good meaning of it with hospitality, and to make the speaker feel glad, and not sorry, that she had spoken. She showed herself thereby fit to preside at such meetings, and imparted to the susceptible a wonderful reliance on her genius." In her writing she was prone to spin her sentences without a sure guidance, and beyond the sympathy of her reader. But in discourse, she was quick, conscious of power, in perfect tune with her company, and would pause and turn the stream with grace and adroitness, and with so much spirit, that her face beamed, and the young people came away delighted, among other things, with "her beautiful looks." When she was intellectually excited, or in high animal spirits, as often happened, all deformity of features was dissolved in the power of the expression. So I interpret this repeated story of sumptuousness of dress, that this appearance, like her reported beauty, was simply an effect of a general impression of magnificence made by her genius, and mistakenly attributed to some external elegance; for I have been told by her most intimate friend, who knew every particular of her conduct at that time, that there was nothing of special expense or splendor in her toilette. The effect of the winter's work was happiest. Margaret was made intimately known to many excellent persons.[A] In this company of matrons and maids, many tender spirits had been set in ferment. A new day had dawned for them; new thoughts had opened; the secret of life was shown, or, at least, that life had a secret. They could not forget what they had heard, and what they had been surprised into saying. A true refinement had begun to work in many who had been slaves to trifles. They went home thoughtful and happy, since the steady elevation of Margaret's aim had infused a certain unexpected greatness of tone into the conversation. It was, I believe, only an expression of the feeling of the class, the remark made, perhaps at the next year's course, by a lady of eminent powers, previously by no means partial to Margaret, and who expressed her frank admiration on leaving the house:--"I never heard, read of, or imagined a conversation at all equal to this we have now heard." The strongest wishes were expressed, on all sides, that the conversations should be renewed at the beginning of the following winter. Margaret willingly consented; but, as I have already intimated, in the summer and autumn of 1840, she had retreated to some interior shrine, and believed that she came into life and society with some advantage from this devotion. Of this feeling the new discussion bore evident traces. Most of the last year's class returned, and new members gave in their names. The first meeting was holden on the twenty-second of November, 1840. By all accounts it was the best of all her days. I have again the notes, taken at the time, of the excellent lady at whose house it was held, to furnish the following sketch of the first and the following meetings. I preface these notes by an extract from a letter of Margaret. TO W.H.C. '_Sunday, Nov. 8th, 1840_.--On Wednesday I opened with my class. It was a noble meeting. I told them the great changes in my mind, and that I could not be sure they would be satisfied with me now, as they were when I was in deliberate possession of myself. I tried to convey the truth, and though I did not arrive at any full expression of it, they all, with glistening eyes, seemed melted into one love. Our relation is now perfectly true, and I do not think they will ever interrupt me. ---- sat beside me, all glowing; and the moment I had finished, she began to speak. She told me afterwards, she was all kindled, and none there could be strangers to her more. I was really delighted by the enthusiasm of Mrs. ----. I did not expect it. All her best self seemed called up, and she feels that these meetings will be her highest pleasure. ----, too, was most beautiful. I went home with Mrs. F., and had a long attack of nervous headache. She attended anxiously on me, and asked if it would be so all winter. I said, if it were I did not care; and truly I feel just now such a separation from pain and illness,--such a consciousness of true life, while suffering most,--that pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.' [Footnote A: A friend has furnished me with the names of so many of the ladies as she recollects to have met, at one or another time, at these classes. Some of them were perhaps only occasional members. The list recalls how much talent, beauty, and worth were at that time constellated here:-- Mrs. George Bancroft, Mrs. Barlow, Miss Burley, Mrs. L.M. Child, Miss Mary Channing, Miss Sarah Clarke, Mrs. E.P. Clark, Miss Dorr, Mrs. Edwards, Mrs. R.W. Emerson, Mrs. Farrar, Miss S.J. Gardiner, Mrs. R.W. Hooper, Mrs. S. Hooper, Miss Haliburton, Miss Howes, Miss E. Hoar, Miss Marianne Jackson, Mrs. T. Lee, Miss Littlehale, Mrs. E.G. Loring, Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Horace Mann, Mrs. Newcomb, Mrs. Theodore Parker, Miss E.P. Peabody, Miss S. Peabody, Mrs. S. Putnam, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Josiah Quincy, Miss B. Randall, Mrs. Samuel Ripley, Mrs. George Ripley, Mrs. George Russell, Miss Ida Russell, Mrs. Frank Shaw, Miss Anna B. Shaw, Miss Caroline Sturgis, Miss Tuckerman, Miss Maria White, Mrs. S.G. Ward, Miss Mary Ward, Mrs. W. Whiting.] CONVERSATIONS ON THE FINE ARTS. "Miss Fuller's fifth conversation was pretty much a monologue of her own. The company collected proved much larger than any of us had anticipated: a chosen company,--several persons from homes out of town, at considerable inconvenience; and, in one or two instances, fresh from extreme experiences of joy and grief,--which Margaret felt a very grateful tribute to her. She knew no one came for experiment, but all in earnest love and trust, and was moved by it quite to the heart, which threw an indescribable charm of softness over her brilliancy. It is sometimes said, that women never are so lovely and enchanting in the company of their own sex, merely, but it requires the other to draw them out. Certain it is that Margaret never appears, when I see her, either so brilliant and deep in thought, or so desirous to please, or so modest, or so heart-touching, as in this very party. Well, she began to say how gratifying it was to her to see so many come, because all knew why they came,--that it was to learn from each other and ourselves the highest ends of life, where there could be no excitements and gratifications of personal ambition, &c. She spoke of herself, and said she felt she had undergone changes in her own mind since the last winter, as doubtless we all felt we had done; that she was conscious of looking at all things less objectively,--more from the law with which she identified herself. This, she stated, was the natural progress of our individual being, when we did not hinder its development, to advance from objects to law, from the circumference of being, where we found ourselves at our birth, to the centre. "This advance was enacted poesy. We could not, in our individual lives, amid the disturbing influences of other wills, which had as much right to their own action as we to ours, enact poetry entirely; the discordant, the inferior, the prose, would intrude, but we should always keep in mind that poetry of life was not something aside,--a path that might or might not be trod,--it was the only path of the true soul; and prose you may call the deviation. We might not always be poetic in life, but we might and should be poetic in our thought and intention. The fine arts were one compensation for the necessary prose of life. The man who could not write his thought of beauty in his life,--the materials of whose life would not work up into poetry,--wrote it in stone, drew it on canvas, breathed it in music, or built it in lofty rhyme. In this statement, however, she guarded her meaning, and said that to seek beauty was to miss it often. We should only seek to live as harmoniously with the great laws as our social and other duties permitted, and solace ourselves with poetry and the fine arts." I find a further record by the same friendly scribe, which seems a second and enlarged account of the introductory conversation, or else a sketch of the course of thought which ran through several meetings, and which very naturally repeated occasionally the same thoughts. I give it as I find it:-- "She then recurred to the last year's conversations; and, first, the Grecian mythologies, which she looked at as symbolical of a deeper intellectual and æsthetic life than we were wont to esteem it, when looking at it from a narrow religious point of view. We had merely skimmed along the deeper study. She spoke of the conversations on the different part played by Inspiration and Will in the works of man, and stated the different views of inspiration,--how some had felt it was merely perception; others apprehended it as influx upon the soul from the soul-side of its being. Then she spoke of the conversation upon poesy as the ground of all the fine arts, and also of the true art of life; it being not merely truth, not merely good, but the beauty which integrates both. On this poesy, she dwelt long, aiming to show how life,--perfect life,--could be the only perfect manifestation of it. Then she spoke of the individual as surrounded, however, by _prose_,--so we may here call the manifestation of the temporary, in opposition to the eternal, always trenching on it, and circumscribing and darkening. She spoke of the acceptance of this limitation, but it should be called by the right name, and always measured; and we should inwardly cling to the truth that poesy was the natural life of the soul; and never yield inwardly to the common notion that poesy was a luxury, out of the common track; but maintain in word and life that prose carried the soul out of its track; and then, perhaps, it would not injure us to walk in these by-paths, when forced thither. She admitted that prose was the necessary human condition, and quickened our life indirectly by necessitating a conscious demand on the source of life. In reply to a remark I made, she very strongly stated the difference between a poetic and a _dilettante_ life, and sympathized with the sensible people who were tired of hearing all the young ladies of Boston sighing like furnace after being beautiful. Beauty was something very different from prettiness, and a microscopic vision missed the grand whole. The fine arts were our compensation for not being able to live out our poesy, amid the conflicting and disturbing forces of this moral world in which we are. In sculpture, the heights to which our being comes are represented; and its nature is such as to allow us to leave out all that vulgarizes,--all that bridges over to the actual from the ideal. She dwelt long upon sculpture, which seems her favorite art. That was grand, when a man first thought to engrave his idea of man upon a stone, the most unyielding and material of materials,--the backbone of this phenomenal earth,--and, when he did not succeed, that he persevered; and so, at last, by repeated efforts, the Apollo came to be. "But, no; music she thought the greatest of arts,--expressing what was most interior,--what was too fine to be put into any material grosser than air; conveying from soul to soul the most secret motions of feeling and thought. This was the only fine art which might be thought to be nourishing now. The others had had their day. This was advancing upon a higher intellectual ground. "Of painting she spoke, but not so well. She seemed to think painting worked more by illusion than sculpture. It involved more prose, from its representing more objects. She said nothing adequate about _color_. "She dwelt upon the histrionic art as the most complete, its organ being the most flexible and powerful. "She then spoke of life, as the art, of which these all were beautiful symbols; and said, in recurring to her opinions expressed last winter, of Dante and Wordsworth, that she had taken another view, deeper, and more in accordance with some others which were then expressed. She acknowledged that Wordsworth had done more to make all men poetical, than perhaps any other; that he was the poet of reflection; that where he failed to poetize his subject, his simple faith intimated to the reader a poetry that he did not find in the book. She admitted that Dante's Narrative was instinct with the poetry concentrated often in single words. She uttered her old heresies about Milton, however, unmodified. "I do not remember the transition to modern poetry and Milnes; but she read (very badly indeed) the Legendary Tale. "We then had three conversations upon Sculpture, one of which was taken up very much in historical accounts of the sculpture of the ancients, in which color was added to form, and which seemed to prove that they were not, after all, sufficiently intellectual to be operated on by form exclusively. The question, of course, arose whether there was a modern sculpture, and why not. This led us to speak of the Greek sculpture as growing naturally out of their life and religion, and how alien it was to our life and to our religion. The Swiss lion, carved by Thorwaldsen out of the side of a mountain rock, was described as a natural growth. Those who had seen it described it; and Mrs. ---- spoke of it. She was also led to the story of her acquaintance with Thorwaldsen, and drew tears from many eyes with her natural eloquence. "Mrs. C. asked, if sculpture could express as well as painting the idea of immortality. "Margaret thought the Greek art expressed immortality as much as Christian art, but did not throw it into the future, by preëminence. They expressed it in the present, by casting out of the mortal body every expression of infirmity and decay. The idealization of the human form makes a God. The fact that man can conceive and express this perfection of being, is as good a witness to immortality, as the look of aspiration in the countenance of a Magdalen. "It is quite beyond the power of my memory to recall all the bright utterances of Margaret, in these conversations on Sculpture. It was a favorite subject with her. Then came two or three conversations on Painting, in which it seemed to be conceded that color expressed passion, whilst sculpture more severely expressed thought: yet painting did not exclude the expression of thought, or sculpture that of feeling,--witness Niobe,--but it must be an universal feeling, like the maternal sentiment." * * * * * "_March 22, 1841_.--The question of the day was, What is life? "Let us define, each in turn, our idea of living. Margaret did not believe we had, any of us, a distinct idea of life. "A.S. thought so great a question ought to be given for a written definition. 'No,' said Margaret, 'that is of no use. When we go away to think of anything, we never do think. We all talk of life. We all have some thought now. Let us tell it. C----, what is life?' "C---- replied,--'It is to laugh, or cry, according to our organization.' "'Good,' said Margaret, 'but not grave enough. Come, what is life? I know what I think; I want you to find out what you think.' "Miss P. replied,--'Life is division from one's principle of life in order to a conscious reörganization. We are cut up by time and circumstance, in order to feel our reproduction of the eternal law.' "Mrs. E.,--'We live by the will of God, and the object of life is to submit,' and went on into Calvinism. "Then came up all the antagonisms of Fate and Freedom. "Mrs. H. said,--'God created us in order to have a perfect sympathy from us as free beings.' "Mrs. A.B. said she thought the object of life was to attain absolute freedom. At this Margaret immediately and visibly kindled. "C.S. said,--'God creates from the fulness of life, and cannot but create; he created us to overflow, without being exhausted, because what he created, necessitated new creation. It is not to make us happy, but creation is his happiness and ours.' "Margaret was then pressed to say what she considered life to be. "Her answer was so full, clear, and concise, at once, that it cannot but be marred by being drawn through the scattering medium of my memory. But here are some fragments of her satisfying statement. "She began with God as Spirit, Life, so full as to create and love eternally, yet capable of pause. Love and creativeness are dynamic forces, out of which we, individually, as creatures, go forth bearing his image, that is, having within our being the same dynamic forces, by which we also add constantly to the total sum of existence, and shaking off ignorance, and its effects, and by becoming more ourselves, i.e., more divine;--destroying sin in its principle, we attain to absolute freedom, we return to God, conscious like himself, and, as his friends, giving, as well as receiving, felicity forevermore. In short, we become gods, and able to give the life which we now feel ourselves able only to receive. "On Saturday morning, Mrs. L.E. and Mrs. E.H. were present, and begged Margaret to repeat the statement concerning life, with which she closed the last conversation. Margaret said she had forgotten every word she said. She must have been inspired by a good genius, to have so satisfied everybody.--but the good genius had left her. She would try, however, to say what she thought, and trusted it would resemble what she had said already. She then went into the matter, and, true enough, she did not use a single word she used before." The fame of these conversations spread wide through all families and social circles of the ladies attending, and the golden report they gave, led to a proposal, that Margaret should undertake an evening class, of four or five lessons, to which gentlemen should also be admitted. This was put in effect, in the course of the winter, and I had myself the pleasure of assisting at one--the second--of these soirées. The subject was Mythology, and several gentlemen took part in it. Margaret spoke well,--she could not otherwise,--but I remember that she seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men, whom she had not had the advantage of training, and who fancied, no doubt, that, on such a question, they, too, must assert and dogmatize. But, how well or ill they fared, may still be known; since the same true hand which reported for the Ladies' Class, drew up, at the time, the following note of the Evenings of Mythology. My distance from town, and engagements, prevented me from attending again. I was told that on the preceding and following evenings the success was more decisive. "Margaret's plan, in these conversations, was a very noble one, and, had it been seconded, as she expected, they would have been splendid. She thought, that, by admitting gentlemen, who had access, by their classical education, to the whole historical part of the mythology, her own comparative deficiency, as she felt it, in this part of learning, would be made up; and that taking her stand on the works of art, which were the final development in Greece of these multifarious fables, the whole subject might be swept from zenith to nadir. But all that depended on others entirely failed. Mr. W. contributed some isolated facts,--told the etymology of names, and cited a few fables not so commonly known as most; but, even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess, on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party, while no one brought an idea, except herself. "Her general idea was, that, upon the Earth-worship and Sabæanism of earlier ages, the Grecian genius acted to humanize and idealize, but, still, with some regard to the original principle. What was a seed, or a root, merely, in the Egyptian mind, became a flower in Greece,--Isis, and Osiris, for instance, are reproduced in Ceres and Proserpine, with some loss of generality, but with great gain of beauty; Hermes, in Mercury, with only more grace of form, though with great loss of grandeur; but the loss of grandeur was also an advance in philosophy, in this instance, the brain in the hand being the natural consequence of the application of Idea to practice,--the Hermes of the Egyptians. "I do not feel that the class, by their apprehension of Margaret, do any justice to the scope and depth of her views. They come,--myself among the number,--I confess,--to be entertained; but she has a higher purpose. She, amid all her infirmities, studies and thinks with the seriousness of one upon oath, and there has not been a single conversation this winter, in either class, that had not in it the spirit which giveth life. Just in proportion to the importance of the subject, does she tax her mind, and say what is most important; while, of necessity, nothing is reported from the conversations but her brilliant sallies, her occasional paradoxes of form, and, sometimes, her impatient reacting upon dulness and frivolity. In particular points, I know, some excel her; in particular departments I sympathize more with some other persons; but, take her as a whole, she has the most to bestow on others by conversation of any person I have ever known. I cannot conceive of any species of vanity living in her presence. She distances all who talk with her. "Mr. E. only served to display her powers. With his sturdy reiteration of his uncompromising idealism, his absolute denial of the fact of human nature, he gave her opportunity and excitement to unfold and illustrate her realism and acceptance of conditions. What is so noble is, that her realism is transparent with idea,--her human nature is the germ of a divine life. She proceeds in her search after the unity of things, the divine harmony, not by exclusion, as Mr. E. does, but by comprehension,--and so, no poorest, saddest spirit, but she will lead to hope and faith. I have thought, sometimes, that her acceptance of evil was _too great_,--that her theory of the good to be educed proved too much. But in a conversation I had with her yesterday, I understood her better than I had done. 'It might never be sin to us, at the moment,' she said, 'it must be an excess, on which conscience puts the restraint.'" The classes thus formed were renewed in November of each year, until Margaret's removal to New York, in 1844. But the notes of my principal reporter fail me at this point. Afterwards, I have only a few sketches from a younger hand. In November, 1841, the class numbered from twenty-five to thirty members: the general subject is stated as "Ethics." And the influences on Woman seem to have been discussed under the topics of the Family, the School, the Church, Society, and Literature. In November, 1842, Margaret writes that the meetings have been unusually spirited, and congratulates herself on the part taken in them by Miss Burley, as 'a presence so positive as to be of great value to me.' The general subject I do not find. But particular topics were such as these:--"Is the ideal first or last; divination or experience?" "Persons who never awake to life in this world." "Mistakes;" "Faith;" "Creeds;" "Woman;" "Dæmonology;" "Influence;" "Catholicism" (Roman); "The Ideal." In the winter of 1843-4, the general subject was "Education." Culture, Ignorance, Vanity, Prudence, Patience, and Health, appear to have been the titles of conversations, in which wide digressions, and much autobiographic illustration, with episodes on War, Bonaparte, Goethe, and Spinoza, were mingled. But the brief narrative may wind up with a note from Margaret on the last day. '_28th April, 1844_.--It was the last day with my class. How noble has been my experience of such relations now for six years, and with so many and so various minds! Life is worth living, is it not? 'We had a most animated meeting. On bidding me good-bye, they all, and always, show so much good-will and love, that I feel I must really have become a friend to them. I was then loaded with beautiful gifts, accompanied with those little delicate poetic traits, of which I should delight to tell you, if we were near. Last came a beautiful bouquet, passion-flower, heliotrope, and soberer blooms. Then I went to take my repose on C----'s sofa, and we had a most serene afternoon together.' 
13583	----	THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1834-1872 VOLUME I. "To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--Emerson "What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--Carlyle EDITORIAL NOTE The trust of editing the following Correspondence, committed to me several years since by the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a few notes of introduction, and one or two essentially duplicate letters. I cannot but hope that some of the letters now missing may hereafter come to light. In printing, a dash has been substituted here and there for a proper name, and some passages, mostly relating to details of business transactions, have been omitted. These omissions are distinctly designated. The punctuation and orthography of the original letters have been in the main exactly followed. I have thought best to print much concerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of the material conditions of literature during the middle of the century, as well as of the relations of the two friends. The notes in the two volumes are mine. My best thanks and those of the readers of this Correspondence are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, for his energetic and successful effort to recover some of Emerson's early letters which had fallen into strange hands. --Charles Eliot Norton Cambridge, Massachusetts January 29, 1883 --------- NOTE TO REVISED EDITION The hope that some of the letters missing from it when this correspondence was first published might come to light, has been fulfilled by the recovery of thirteen letters of Carlyle, and of four of Emerson. Besides these, the rough drafts of one or two of Emerson's letters, of which the copies sent have gone astray, have been found. Comparatively few gaps in the Correspondence remain to be filled. The letters and drafts of letters now first printed are those numbered as follows:-- Vol. I. XXXVI. Carlyle XLI. Emerson XLII. Carlyle XLVI. " XLVII. " LXVIII. " Vol. II. C. Emerson CIV. Carlyle CV. " CVI. " CVII. " CVIII. " CIX. " CXII. " CXVI. " CXLIX. Emerson CLII. " CLXV. " CLXXXVI. " Emerson's letter of 1 May, 1859 (CLXIV.), of which only fragments were printed in the former edition, is now printed complete, and the extract from his Diary accompanying it appears in the form in which it seems to have been sent to Carlyle. --C.E.N. December 31, 1884 ----------- CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. Introduction. Emerson's early recognition of Carlyle's genius. --His visit at Craigenputtock, in 1833.--Extracts concerning it from letter of Carlyle, from letter of Emerson, and from English Traits. I. Emerson. Boston, 14 May, 1834. First acquaintance with Carlyle's writings.--Visit to Craigenputtock.--_Sartor Resartus,_ its contents, its diction.--Gift of Webster's _Speeches_ and Sampson Reed's _Growth of the Mind._ II. Carlyle. Chelsea, 12 August, 1834. Significance of Emerson's gift and visit.--Sampson Reed.--Webster.-- Teufelsdrockh, its sorry reception.--Removal to London.--Article on the Diamond Necklace.--Preparation for book on the French Revolution.--Death of Coleridge. III. Emerson. Concord, 20 November, 1834. Death of his brother Edward.--Consolation in Carlyle's friendship.--Pleasure in receiving stitched copy of Teufelsdrockh.--Goethe.-- Swedenborgianism.--Of himself.--Hope of Carlyle's coming to America.--Gift of various publications. IV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 February, 1835. Acknowledgments and inquiries.--Sympathy for death of Edward Emerson.--Unitarianism. --Emerson's position and pursuits.--Goethe.-Volume of French Revolution finished.--Condition of literature.--Lecturing in America.--Mrs. Austin. V. Emerson. Concord, 12 March, 1835. Appreciation of Sartor. --Dr. Channing.--Prospect of Carlyle's visit to America.--His own approaching marriage.--Plan of a journal of Philosophy in Boston.--Encouragement of Carlyle. VI. Emerson. Concord, 30 April, 1835. Apathy of English public toward Carlyle.--Hope of his visit to America.--Lectures and lecturers in Boston.--Estimate of receipts and expenses.--Esteem of Carlyle in America. VII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1835. Emerson's marriage. --Astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in New England. --Boston Transcendentalism.--Destruction of manuscript of first volume of _French Revolution._--Result of a year's life in London.--Wordsworth.--Southey. VIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 27 June, 1835. Visit to America questionable.--John Carlyle.--Tired out with rewriting _French Revolution._--A London rout.--O'Connell.--Longfellow.--Emerson and Unitarianism. IX. Emerson. Concord, 7 October, 1835. Mrs. Child.--Public addresses.--Marriage.--Destruction of manuscript of _French Revolution._--Notice of _Sartor_ in _North American Review._ --Politics.--Charles Emerson. X. Emerson. Concord, 8 April, 1836. Concern at Carlyle's silence.--American reprint of _Sartor._--Carlyle's projected visit.--Lecturing in New England. XI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 April, 1836. Weariness over _French Revolution._--Visit to Scotland.--Charm of London.--Letter from James Freeman Clarke.--Article on _Sartor_ in _North American Review._--Quatrain from Voss. XII. Emerson. Concord, 17 September,1836. Death of Charles Emerson.--Solicitude concerning Carlyle.--Urgency to him to come to Concord.--Sends _Nature_ to him.--Reflections. XIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 5 November, 1836. Charles Emerson's death.--Concord.--His own condition.--_French Revolution_ almost ended.--Character of the book.--Weariness.--London and its people.--Plans for rest.--John Sterling.--Articles on Mirabeau and the _Diamond Necklace._--Mill's _London_ Review.--Thanks for American Teufelsdrockh.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Might and Right, Canst and Shalt.--Books about Goethe. XIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 February, 1837. Teufelsdrockh in America and England.--_Nature._--Miss Martineau on Emerson. --Mammon.--Completion of _French Revolution._--Scheme of Lecturing in London.--America fading into the background. XV. Emerson. Concord, 31 March, 1837. Receipt of the Mirabeau and Diamond Necklace.--Their substance and style.--Proof-sheet of _French Revolution._--Society in America.--Renewed invitation. --Mrs. Carlyle.--His son Waldo.--Bronson Alcott.--Second edition of _Sartor._ XVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 June, 1837. Lectures on German Literature.--Copy of _French Revolution_ sent.--Review of himself in _Christian Examiner._--George Ripley.--Miss Martineau and her book on America.--Plans. XVII. Emerson. Concord, 13 September, 1837. _The French Revolution._--Sale of Carlyle's books.--Lectures. XVIII. Emerson. Concord, 2 November, 1837. Introduction given to Charles Sumner.--Reprint of _French Revolution._--Lectures. XIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 December, 1837. Visit to Scotland. --Mrs. Carlyle's ill-health.--His own need of rest.--John Sterling; his regard for Emerson.--Emerson's Oration on the American Scholar.--Proposed collection of his own Miscellanies. XX. Emerson. Concord, 9 February, 1838. Lectures on Human Culture.--Carlyle's praise of his Oration.--John Sterling. --Reprint of _French Revolution._--Profits from it.--American selection and edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ XXI. Emerson. Boston, 12 March, 1838. Sale of _French Revolution._--Arrangements concerning American edition of _Miscellanies._ XXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 16 March, 1838. Prospect of cash from Yankee-land.--Poverty.--American and English reprints of _Miscellanies._--Sterling's _Crystals from a Cavern._--Miss Martineau on Emerson.--Lectures.--Plans. XXIII. Emerson. Concord, 10 May, 1838. American edition of _Miscellanies._--Invitation to Concord.--His means and mode of life.--Sterling.--Miss Martineau.--Carlyle's poverty. XXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 June, 1838. American _French Revolution._--London edition of Teufelsdrockh.--Miscellanies. --Lectures, their money result.--Plans.--Emerson's Oration. --Mrs. Child's _Philothea._ XXV. Emerson. Boston, 30 July, 1838. Encloses bill for L50. --_Miscellanies_ published. XXVI. Emerson. Concord, 6 August, 1838. Publication of _Miscellanies._--Two more volumes proposed.--Orations at Theological School, Cambridge, and at Dartmouth College.--Carlyle desired in America. XXVII. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 25 September, 1838. Visit to his Mother.--Remittance from Emerson of L50.-- _Miscellanies_ again.--Another Course of Lectures.--Sterling.-- Miss Martineau. XXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 17 October, 1838. Business.--Outcry against address to Divinity College.--Injury to Carlyle's repute in America from association with him.--Article in _Quarterly_ on German Religious Writers.--Sterling. XXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 7 November, 1838. Emerson's letters.-- Dyspepsia.--Use of money from America.--Arrangements concerning publication of _Miscellanies._--Emerson's Orations.--Tempest in a washbowl concerning Divinity School Address.--John Carlyle-- Postscript by Mrs. Carlyle. XXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 November, 1838. Arrangements concerning Miscellanies.--Employments, outlooks.--Concord not forgotten, but Emerson to come first to England.--John Carlyle. --Miss Martineau and her books. XXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 December, 1838. Arrival of American reprint of _Miscellanies._--English and American bookselling.-- Proposed second edition of _French Revolution._--Reading Horace Walpole.--Sumner.--Dartmouth Oration.--Sterling.--Dwight's German Translations. XXXII. Emerson. Concord, 13 January, 1839. Business.-- Remittance of L100.--Lectures on Human Life.--Dr. Carlyle. XXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 February, 1839. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Arrangements for new edition of _French Revolution._--London.--Wish for quiet.--Ill-health.--Suggestion of writing on Cromwell.--Mr. Joseph Coolidge.--Divinity School Address.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Gladstone cites from Emerson in his Church and State. XXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 15 March, 1839. Account of sales.-- Second series of _Miscellanies._--Ill wind raised by Address blown over.--Lectures.--Birth of daughter.--_The Onyx Ring._ --Alcott. XXXV. Emerson. Concord, 19 March, 1839. Need of copy to fill out second series of _Miscellanies._--John S. Dwight. XXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 April, 1839. Solicitude on account of Emerson's silence.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson.--Book business. --New edition of _French Revolution._--New lectures.--Better circumstances, better health.--Arthur Buller urges a visit to America.--Milnes.--Emerson's growing popularity. XXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 April, 1839. Nothing in manuscript fit for _Miscellanies._--Essay on Varnhagen.--Translation of Goethe's _Mahrchen._--Cruthers and Jonson.--Dwight's book. --Lectures.--Discontent among working people. XXXVIII. Emerson. Boston, 20 April, 1839. Proposals of publishers concerning _French Revolution._--Introduction of Miss Sedgwick. XXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 25 April, 1839. Account.--Sales of books. XL. Emerson. Concord, 28 April, 1839. Proposals of publishers and accounts. XLI. Emerson. Concord, 15 May, 1839. Arrangements with publishers.--Matter for completion of fourth volume of _Miscellanies._--Stearns Wheelers faithful labor.--Arthur Buller's good witnessing.--Plans for Carlyle's visit to America. --Milnes.--Copy of _Nature_ for him. XLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 May, 1839. Lectures happily over.-- Sansculottism.--Horse must be had.--Extempore speaking an art.-- Must lecture in America or write a book.--Wordsworth.--Sterling. --Messages. XLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 June, 1839. Delay in arrival of _Miscellanies._--Custom-house rapacities.--Accounts..--No longer poor.--Emerson's work.--Miss Sedgwick.--Daniel Webster.--Proposed visit to Scotland.--Sinking of the Vengeur. XLIV. Emerson. Concord, 4 July, 1839. Proof-sheet of new edition of _French Revolution_ received.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson of engraving of Guido's Aurora.--Publishers' accounts.--Sterling.-- Occupations.--Margaret Fuller. XLV. Emerson. Concord, 8 August, 1839. _Miscellanies_ sent. --Daniel Webster.--Alcott.--Thoreau. XLVI. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839. Rusticating.--Arrival of _Miscellanies._--Errata.--Reprint of _Wilhelm Meister._--Estimate of the book.--Copies of _French Revolution_ sent.--Eager expectation of Emerson's book.-- Sterling.--Plans. XLVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 December, 1839. Long silence.--Stay in Scotland.--Chartism.--Reprint of _Miscellanies._--Stearns Wheeler.--_Wilhelm Meister._--Boston steamers.--Speculations about Hegira into New England.--Visitor from America who had never seen Emerson.--Miss Martineau.--Silence and speech.-- Sterling.--Southey.--No longer desperately poor. XLVIII. Emerson. Concord, 12 December, 1839. Copies of _French Revolution_ arrived.--Lectures on the Present Age.--Letter from Sterling, his paper on Carlyle.--Friends. XLIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 January, 1840. _Chartism._-- Sterling.--Monckton Milnes, paper by him on Emerson. L. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 January, 1840. Export and import of books.--New editions.--Books sent to Emerson.--Cromwell as a subject for writing.--No appetite for lecturing.--Madame Necker on Emerson. LI. Emerson. New York, 18 March, 1840. New York.--Loss of faith on entering cities.--Margaret Fuller to edit a journal.--Lectures on the Present Age.--His children.--Renewed invitation. LII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 April, 1840. Count D'Orsay, his portrait of Carlyle.--Wages for books, due to Emerson.--Milnes's review.--Heraud.--Landor.--Lectures in prospect on Heroes and Hero-worship. LIII. Emerson. Concord, 21 April, 1840. Introduction of Mr. Grinnell.--Chartism.--Reprint of it.--At work on a book.-- Booksellers' accounts.--_The Dial._--Alcott. LIV. Emerson. Concord, 30 June, 1840. _Wilhelm Meister_ received.--Landor.--Letter to Milnes.--Lithograph of Concord. --_The Dial,_ No. 1. LV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 July, 1840. Bibliopoliana.--Lectures about Great Men.--Lecturing in America.--Milnes and his _Poems._ --Controversial volume from Ripley. LVI. Emerson. Concord, 30 August, 1840. Booksellers' accounts. --Faith cold concerning Carlyle's coming to America.-- Transcendentalism and _The Dial._--Social problems.--Character of his writing.--Charles Sumner. LVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 26 September, 1840. Not to go to America for the present.--_Heroes and Hero-Worship._--Journey on horseback.--Reading on Cromwell.--_Dial_ No. 1.--Puseyism.--Dr. Sewell on Carlyle.--Landor.--Sterling. LVIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1840. Booksellers' accounts.--Projects of social reform.--Studies unproductive. --Hopes to print a book of essays. LIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 December, 1840. Booksellers' carelessness and accounts.--Puseyism.--Dial No. 2.--Goethe. --Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man._--Working in Cromwellism. LX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 February, 1841. To Mrs. Emerson.-- London transmuted by her alchemy.--Hope of seeing Concord. --Miss Martineau.--Toussaint l'Ouverture.--Sheets of _Heroes and Hero-worship_ sent to Emerson. LXI. Emerson. Concord, 28 February, 1841. Accounts.--Essays soon to appear.--Lecture on Reform. LXII. Emerson. Boston, 30 April, 1841. Remittance of L100.-- Accounts.--Piratical reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._-- _Dial_ No. 4. LXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 May, 1841. Visit to Milnes.--To his Mother.--Emerson's _Essays._--His own condition. LXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 May, 1841. Acknowledgment of remittance of L100.--Unauthorized American reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._--Improvement in circumstances.--Desire for solitude.--Article on Emerson in _Fraser's Magazine._ LXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 May, 1841. Accounts.--Book by Jones Very.--_Heroes and Hero-worship._--Thoreau. LXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 25 June, 1841. Proposed stay at Annan. --Motives for it.--London reprint of Emerson's Essays.--Rio. LXVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1841. London reprint of _Essays._--Carlyle in his own land.--Writing an oration. LXVIII. Carlyle. Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841. Speedy receipt of letter.--Stay in Scotland.--Seclusion and sadness.--Reprint of Emerson's _Essays._--Shipwreck. LXIX. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1841. Pleasure in English reprint of _Essays._--Lectures on the Times.--Opportunities of the Lecture-room.--Accounts. LXX. Emerson. Concord, 14 November, 1841. Remittance of L40.-- His banker.--Gambardella.--Preparation for lectures on the Times. LXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 November, 1841. Gambardella.-- Lawrence's portrait.--Emerson's Essays in England.--Address at Waterville College.--_The Dial._--Emerson's criticism on Landor. LXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 December, 1841. Acknowledgment of remittance of L40.--American funds.--Landor.--Emerson's Lectures. LXXIII. Emerson. New York, 28 February, 1842. Remittance of L48.--American investments.--Death of his son.--Alcott going to England. LXXIV. Carlyle. Templand, 28 March, 1842. Sympathy, with Emerson.--Death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother.--At Templand to settle affairs.--Life there.--A book on Cromwell begun. LXXV. Emerson. Concord, 31 March, 1842. Bereavement.--Alcott going to England.--Editorship of _Dial._--Mr. Henry Lee.-- Lectures in New York. --------------------- CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle's name was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius, and felt sympathy with it. The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say. The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. But toward the end of this time a series of articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics," displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his contemporaries. He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope," at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded, most helpless creature that I have been for many years..... Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The way to speak it when found?" The next entry in his Journal shows that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name "Ralph Waldo Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit. "I shall never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards, "who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day." At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances radically different, with views of life and of the universe widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same foundation of principle. In their independence and their sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent, and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference, they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata, miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one" Two days after Emerson's visit Carlyle wrote to his mother:-- "Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner, procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here, entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again. Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.' Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful." On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland. "I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature (say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called 'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon, --are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates, the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society." * ------------- * _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_ By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58. ------------ Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of Carlyle. "From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics. "He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave of the last sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, _Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey. "We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted. "He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. "He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. 'Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.' "We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. 'Christ died on the tree that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.' "He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served." Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between Carlyle and Emerson. What place this friendship held in the lives of both, the following Correspondence shows. --------- I. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, Massachusetts, 14 May, 1884 My Dear Sir,--There are some purposes we delay long to execute simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of writing you an epistle. Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished (as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound essays of the day,--the works of a man of Faith as well as Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to hope and to speak sincerely. Like somebody in _Wilhelm Meister_, I said: This person has come under obligations to me and to all whom he has enlightened. He knows not how deeply I should grieve at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always hears the Devil's whisper, "All these kingdoms will I give thee," his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age. When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house only to say, "Faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails." Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock. Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "If I love you, what is that to you?" Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of happiness;--not that I had the remotest hope that he should so far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. On my arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had seen and heard, and they with joy received it. In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say _our,_ for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an objection to the form. Can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience, and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths. Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it. ------------ * This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold. ------------- I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately espy you as a man, myself as another. And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and _could_ the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato has erred? I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent. But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present evils give you less solicitude. In the last six years government in the United States has been fast becoming a job, like great charities. A most unfit person in the Presidency has been doing the worst things; and the worse he grew, the more popular. Now things seem to mend. Webster, a good man and as strong as if he were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them; yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly unseated. I send herewith a volume of Webster's that you may see his speech on Foot's Resolutions, a speech which the Americans have never done praising. I have great doubts whether the book reaches you, as I know not my agents. I shall put with it the little book of my Swedenborgian druggist,* of whom I told you. And if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, I shall not fail to give it the same direction. -------------- * _Observations on the Growth of the Mind,_ by Sampson Reed, first published in 1825. A fifth edition of this thoughtful little treatise was published in 1865. Mr. Reed was a graduate of Harvard College in 1818; he died in 1880, at the age of eighty. --------------- I need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a friend. If any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply, I shall rejoice in my sauciness. I am spending the summer in the country, but my address is Boston, care of Barnard, Adams, & Co. Care of O. Rich, London. Please do make my affectionate respects to Mrs. Carlyle, whose kindness I shall always gratefully remember. I depend upon her intercession to insure your writing to me. May God grant you both his best blessing. Your friend, R. Waldo Emerson II. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 12 August, 1834 My Dear Sir,--Some two weeks ago I received your kind gift from Fraser. To say that it was welcome would be saying little: is it not as a voice of affectionate remembrance, coming from beyond the Ocean waters, first decisively announcing for me that a whole New Continent _exists,_--that I too have part and lot there! "Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste Earth become a peopled Garden." Among the figures I can recollect as visiting our Nithsdale hermitage,--all like _Apparitions_ now, bringing with them airs from Heaven or else blasts from the other region,--there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself: so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, as an Apparition should! Never has your Address in my Notebook met my eye but with a friendly influence. Judge if I am glad to know that there, in Infinite Space, you still hold by me. I have read in both your books at leisure times, and now nearly finished the smaller one. He is a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian Druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be. "Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite." Webster also I can recognize a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to, and prophesy well of. The sound of him is nowise poetic-rhythmic; it is clear, one-toned, you might say metallic, yet distinct, significant, not without melody. In his face, above all, I discern that "indignation" which, if it do not make "verses," makes _useful_ way in the world. The higher such a man rises, the better pleased I shall be. And so here, looking over the water, let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two _parishes_ of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes _Vivant! vivant!_ And among the glories of _both_ be Yankee-doodle-doo, and the Felling of the Western Forest, proudly remembered; and for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully take such George Washington or George Guelph as it can get, and bless Heaven! I am weary of hearing it said, "We love the Americans," "We wish well," &c., &c. What in God's name should we do else? You thank me for _Teufelsdrockh;_ how much more ought I to thank you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment of it! Blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity, and contradiction proclaims to us, _Euge!_ Nothing ever was more ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has been thrown on here; none cries, Good speed to it; the sorriest nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome. For indeed our British periodical critics, and especially the public of _Fraser's_ Magazine (which I believe I have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. Poor Teufelsdrockh!--Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet "for Friends," cannot be _burnt_ or lost before his time. I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would rather surprise me. From the British side of the water I have met simply one intelligent response,--clear, true, though almost enthusiastic as your own. My British Friend too is utterly a stranger, whose very name I know not, who did not print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.* Shall I say then, "In the mouth of two witnesses"? In any case, God be thanked, I am done with it; can wash my hands of it, and send it forth; sure that the Devil will get his full share of it, and not a whit more, clutch as he may. But as for you, my Transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it _was_ earnestly meant and written, and contains no _voluntary_ falsehood of mine. For the rest, if you dislike it, say that I wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on the whole (as Fritz the Only said) "will do better another time." With regard to style and so forth, what you call your "saucy" objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and instructive. You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon. For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, and one may say generally all manner of _Pulpits_ for addressing mankind from, as good as broken and abolished: alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but _believed_ and _done,_ you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it _there,_ but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity were _felt_ to have become a mummery; and so one leaves the pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and Blair's Lectures, quite behind; and feels only that there is _nothing sacred,_ then, but the _Speech of Man_ to believing Men! This, come what will, was, is, and forever must be _sacred;_ and will one day, doubtless, anew environ itself with fit modes; with solemnities that are _not_ mummeries. Meanwhile, however, is it not pitiable? For though Teufelsdrockh exclaims, "Pulpit! canst thou not make a pulpit by simply _inverting the nearest tub?_" yet, alas! he does not sufficiently reflect that it is still only a tub, that the most inspired utterance will come from _it,_ inconceivable, misconceivable, to the million; questionable (not of _ascertained_ significance) even to the few. Pity us therefore; and with your just shake of the head join a sympathetic, even a hopeful smile. Since I saw you I have been trying, am still trying, other methods, and shall surely get nearer the truth, as I honestly strive for it. Meanwhile, I know no method of much consequence, except that of _believing,_ of being _sincere:_ from Homer and the Bible down to the poorest Burns's Song, I find no other Art that promises to be perennial. --------- * In his Diary, July 26, 1834, Carlyle writes--"In the midst of innumerable discouragements, all men indifferent or finding fault, let me mention two small circumstances that are comfortable. The first is a letter from some nameless Irishman in Cork to another here, (Fraser read it to me without names,) actually containing a _true_ and one of the friendliest possible recognitions of me. One mortal, then, says I am _not_ utterly wrong. Blessings on him for it! The second is a letter I got today from Emerson, of Boston in America; sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated estimation. Precious is man to man." Fifteen years later, in his _Reminiscences of My Irish Journey,_ he enters, under date of July 16, 1849: "Near eleven o'clock [at night] announces himself 'Father O'Shea'! (who I thought had been _dead_); to my astonishment enter a little gray-haired, intelligent-and-bred-looking man, with much gesticulation, boundless loyal welcome, red with dinner and some wine, engages that we are to meet tomorrow,--and again with explosions of welcomes goes his way. This Father O'Shea, some fifteen years ago, had been, with Emerson of America, one of the _two_ sons of Adam who encouraged poor bookseller Fraser, and didn't discourage him, to go on with Teufelsdrockh. I had often remembered him since; had not long before _re_-inquired his name, but understood somehow that he was dead--and now." --------------- But now quitting theoretics, let me explain what you long to know, how it is that I date from London. Yes, my friend, it is even so: Craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness, with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it; and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal disruption, are here with our household gods. Censure not; I came to London for the best of all reasons,--to seek bread and work. So it literally stands; and so do I literally stand with the hugest, gloomiest Future before me, which in all sane moments I good-humoredly defy. A strange element this, and I as good as an Alien in it. I care not for Radicalism, for Toryism, for Church, Tithes, or the "Confusion" of useful Knowledge. Much as I can speak and hear, I am alone, alone. My brave Father, now victorious from his toil, was wont to pray in evening worship: "Might we say, We are not alone, for God is with us!" Amen! Amen! I brought a manuscript with me of another curious sort, entitled _The Diamond Necklace._ Perhaps it will be printed soon as an Article, or even as a separate Booklet,--a _queer_ production, which you shall see. Finally, I am busy, constantly studying with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the Only Poetry is History, could we tell it right. This truth (if it prove one) I have not yet got to the limitations of; and shall in no way except by _trying_ it in practice. The story of the Necklace was the first attempt at an experiment. My sheet is nearly done; and I have still to complain of you for telling me nothing of yourself except that you are in the country. Believe that I want to know much and all. My wife too remembers you with unmixed friendliness; bids me send you her kindest wishes. Understand too that your old bed stands in a new room here, and the old welcome at the door. Surely we shall see you in London one day. Or who knows but Mahomet may go to the mountain? It occasionally rises like a mad prophetic dream in me, that I might end in the Western Woods! From Germany I get letters, messages, and even visits; but now no tidings, no influences, of moment. Goethe's Posthumous Works are all published; and Radicalism (poor hungry, yet inevitable Radicalism!) is the order of the day. The like, and even more, from France. Gustave d'Eichthal (did you hear?) has gone over to Greece, and become some kind of Manager under King Otho.* ----------- * Gustave d'Eichthal, whose acquaintance Emerson had made at Rome, and who had given him an introduction to Carlyle, was one of a family of rich Jewish bankers at Paris. He was an ardent follower of Saint-Simon, and an associate of Enfantin. After the dispersion of the Saint-Simonians in 1832, he traveled much, and continued to devote himself to the improvement of society. ---------- Continue to love me, you and my other friends; and as packets sail so swiftly, let me know it frequently. All good be with you! Most faithfully, T. Carlyle Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone. How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result! They are delivering Orations about him, and emitting other kinds of froth, _ut mos est._ What hurt can it do? III. Emerson to Carlyle * Concord, Mass., 20 November, 1834 My Dear Sir,--Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother** in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow. As he passes out of sight, come to me visible as well as spiritual tokens of a fraternal friendliness which, by its own law, transcends the tedious barriers of custom and nation; and opens its way to the heart. This is a true consolation, and I thanked my jealous [Greek] for the godsend so significantly timed. It, for the moment, realizes the hope to which I have clung with both hands, through each disappointment, that I might converse with a man whose ear of faith was not stopped, and whose argument I could not predict. May I use the word, "I thank my God whenever I call you to remembrance." ---------- * This letter was printed in the _Athenaeum,_ London, June 24, 1882. It, as well as three others which appeared in the same journal, is now reprinted, through the courtesy of its editor, from the original. ** Edward Bliss Emerson, his next younger brother, "brother of the brief but blazing star," of whom Emerson wrote _In Memoriam:_-- "There is no record left on earth, Save in tablets of the heart, Of the rich, inherent worth, Of the grace that on him shone, Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit; He could not frame a word unfit, An act unworthy to be done. On his young promise Beauty smiled, Drew his free homage unbeguiled, And prosperous Age held out his hand, And richly his large future planned, And troops of friends enjoyed the tide,-- All, all was given, and only health denied." ---------- I receive with great pleasure the wonderful Professor now that first the decent limbs of Osiris are collected.* We greet him well to Cape Cod and Boston Bay. The rigid laws of matter prohibit that the soul imprisoned within the strait edges of these types should add one syllable thereto, or we had adjured the Sage by every name of veneration to take possession by so much as a Salve! of his Western World, but he remained inexorable for any new communications. ------------- * The four copies of _Sartor_ which Carlyle had sent were a "stitched pamphlet," with a title-page bearing the words: "Sartor Resartus: in Three Books. Reprinted for Friends, from Fraser's Magazine. London, 1834." ------------- I feel like congratulating you upon the cold welcome which you say Teufelsdrockh* has met. As it is not earthly happy, it is marked of a high sacred sort. I like it a great deal better than ever, and before it was all published I had eaten nearly all my words of objection. But do not think it shall lack a present popularity. That it should not be known seems possible, for if a memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser's Magazine, who would be the wiser? But this has too much wit and imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a faithful mirror of this very Hour. But you know the proverb, "To be fortunate, be not too wise." The great men of the day are on a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar. Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always become the last opinion of Society. Truth is ever born in a manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for its kingdom. Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation that followed your eminent friend Goethe. With him I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. It is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. I cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius, that velvet life he led. What incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"! Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious Dark. Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent, according to the definition,--mere skill in attaining vulgar ends. A certain wonderful friend of mine said that "a false priest is the falsest of false things." But what makes the priest? A cassock? O Diogenes! Or the power (and thence the call) to teach man's duties as they flow from the Superhuman? Is not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who has once intelligently pronounced the words "Self-Renouncement," "Invisible Leader," "Heavenly Powers of Sorrow," and so on, forever the liege of the same? ------------ * Emerson uniformly spells this name "Teufelsdroch." ------------ Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new and worse offence. It implies an intellectual defect also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state. The good word lasts forever: the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God. May I not call it temporary? for when I ascend into the pure region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as Epictetus and Teufelsdrockh would say), I see that to abide inviolate, although all men fall away from it; yea, though the whole generation of Adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation. So, my friend, live Socrates and Milton, those starch Puritans, for evermore! Strange is it to me that you should not sympathize (yet so you said) with Socrates, so ironical, so true, and who "tramped in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force him into the clouds." I seem to see him offering the hand to you across the ages which some time you will grasp. I am glad you like Sampson Reed, and that he has inspired some curiosity respecting his Church. Swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, "The poetry of the Old Church is the reality of the New," which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part; the animals to be the incarnations of certain affections; and scarce a popular expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simplest statement of fact. Then is their whole theory of social relations--both in and out of the body--most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop. They are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all. You express a desire to know something of myself. Account me "a drop in the ocean seeking another drop," or God-ward, striving to keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every point of the concave heaven. Since my return home, I have been left very much at leisure. It were long to tell all my speculations on my profession and my doings thereon; but, possessing my liberty, I am determined to keep it, at the risk of uselessness (which risk God can very well abide), until such duties offer themselves as I can with integrity discharge. One thing I believe,--that Utterance is place enough: and should I attain through any inward revelation to a more clear perception of my assigned task, I shall embrace it with joy and praise. I shall not esteem it a low place, for instance, if I could strengthen your hands by true expressions of the hope and pleasure which your writings communicate to me and to some of my countrymen. Yet the best poem of the Poet is his own mind, and more even than in any of the works I rejoice in the promise of the workman. Now I am only reading and musing, and when I have any news to tell of myself, you shall hear them. Now as to the welcome hint that you might come to America, it shall be to me a joyful hope. Come and found a new Academy that shall be church and school and Parnassus, as a true Poet's house should be. I dare not say that wit has better chance here than in England of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it can scarce find competition. Indeed, indeed, you shall have the continent to yourself were it only as Crusoe was king. If you cared to read literary lectures, our people have vast curiosity, and the apparatus is very easy to set agoing. Such 'pulpit' as you pleased to erect would at least find no hindrance in the building. A friend of mine and of yours remarked, when I expressed the wish that you would come here, "that people were not here, as in England, sacramented to organized schools of opinion, but were a far more convertible audience." If at all you can think of coming here, I would send you any and all particulars of information with cheerfulest speed. I have written a very long letter, yet have said nothing of much that I would say upon chapters of the _Sartor._ I must keep that, and the thoughts I had upon 'poetry in history',' for another letter, or (might it be!) for a dialogue face to face. Let me not fail of _The Diamond Necklace._ I found three greedy receivers of Teufelsdrockh, who also radiate its light. For the sake of your knowing what manner of men you move, I send you two pieces writ by one of them, Frederic Henry Hedge, the article on Swedenborg and that on Phrenology. And as you like Sampson Reed, here are one or two more of his papers. Do read them. And since you study French history do not fail to look at our Yankee portrait of Lafayette. Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of London. If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of John Knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of God amidst wild men and wild beasts. Your friend and servant, R. Waldo Emerson IV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 3 February, 1835 My Dear Sir,--I owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful one; for, in spite of the swift ships of the Americans, our communings pass too slowly. Your letter, written in November, did not reach me till a few days ago; your Books or Papers have not yet come,--though the ever-punctual Rich, I can hope, will now soon get them for me. He showed me his _way-bill_ or invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects "to another gentleman," and undertook with an air of great fidelity to bring all to a right bearing. On the whole, as the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove? Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. Time was when "they that feared the Lord spake _often_ one to another." A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. "Speech" also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself." The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of Space and Time. As you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own? I can imagine Boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion. Alas! I can too well fancy one other thing: the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred. Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it. Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. He is, in very deed and truth, with God,--_where_ you and I both are. What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin." Let us turn back into Life. That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. It is a great truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none. To speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, I like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to Unitarians a Gospel after their heart. I will say farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in "faint possible Theism," which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat.... Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till _ill health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows _what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_ are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive. Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! I do not assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would have passed on, wondering not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it _done_): Behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful? On the whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic); but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that one far better. Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet.--And then as to "misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill health_ too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane,--as Light, the Naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I appeal to Philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but something far higher, it is not so, and _therefore_ I have spoken and appealed; and hope the new curiosity, if I have awakened any, will do you no mischief. ------------ * Obviously Carlyle's _Specimens of German Romance,_ of which the fourth volume was devoted to Goethe. ------------ But now as to myself; for you will grumble at a sheet of speculation sent so far: I am here still, as Rob Roy was on Glasgow Bridge, _biding tryste;_ busy extremely, with work that will not profit me at all in some senses; suffering rather in health and nerves; and still with nothing like dawn on any quarter of my horizon. _The Diamond Necklace_ has not been printed, but will be, were this _French Revolution_ out; which latter, however, drags itself along in a way that would fill your benevolent heart with pity. I am for three small volumes now, and have one done. It is the dreadfulest labor (with these nerves, this liver) I ever undertook; all is so inaccurate, superficial, vague, in the numberless books I consult; and without accuracy at least, what other good is possible? Add to this that I have no hope about the thing, except only that I _shall be done with it:_ I can reasonably expect nothing from any considerable class here, but at _best_ to be scolded and reproached; perhaps to be left standing "on my own basis," without note or comment of any kind, save from the Bookseller, who will lose his printing. The hope I have however is sure: if life is lent me, I shall be _done with_ the business; I will write this "History of Sansculottism," the notablest phenomenon I meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier; after which my part is played. As for the future, I heed it little when so busy; but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming indisputable: that I must seek another craft than literature for these years that may remain to me. Surely, I often say, if ever man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with: quit it in God's name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead. The truth is, I believe literature to be as good as dead and gone in all parts of Europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations; I do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another dialect than that, in England at least; so that if you determine on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some distinctness. I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me, to feel myself among my brothers. And then, How? Alas! I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay I feel it to be a wretched necessity, unfit for me; Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand Categories under which all English spiritual activity that so much as thinks remuneration possible must range itself. I look around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things; and pray to God only, that as my day, is so my strength may be. What will come out of it is wholly uncertain: for I have possibilities too; the possibilities of London are far from exhausted yet: I have a brave brother, who invites me to come and be quiet with him in Rome; a brave friend (known to you) who opens the door of a new Western world,--and so we will stand considering and consulting, at least till the Book be over. Are all these things interesting to you? I know they are. As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. What your friend says of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand it. But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or money's worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a _purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree one? Or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more substantial; on the whole better? At all events ours is fast becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as near as may be gone: _Gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and second. So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it will be on no Utopia; but on a _conditional_ piece of ground where some things are to be expected and other things not. I may say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were _speaking_) is a thing I have always had some hankering after: it seems to me I could really _swim_ in that element, were I once thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in me which struggle violently for development. The great want I have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by. Could any one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's science,-- "Things in general"! To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. However, there is no doubt that were the child born it _might_ be christened; wherefore I will really request you to take the business into your consideration, and give me in the most rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it. How many Discourses; what Towns; the probable Expenses, the probable net Income, the Time, &c., &c.: all that you can suppose a man wholly ignorant might want to know about it. America I should like well enough to visit, much as I should another part of my native country: it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide. Have I involved you in double postage by this loquacity? or What is your American rule? I did not intend it when I began; but today my confusion of head is very great and words must be multiplied with only a given quantity of meaning. My wife, who is just gone out to spend the day with a certain "celebrated Mrs. Austin," (called also the "celebrated Translatress of Puckler-Muskau,") charged me very specially to send you her love, her good wishes and thanks: I assure you there is no hypocrisy in that. She votes often for taking the Transatlantic scheme into contemplation; declares farther that my Book and Books must and will indisputably prosper (at some future era), and takes the world beside me--as a good wife and daughter of John Knox should. Speaking of "celebrated" persons here, let me mention that I have learned by stern experience, as children do with fire, to keep in general quite out of the way of celebrated persons, more especially celebrated women. This Mrs. Austin, who is half ruined by celebrity (of a kind), is the only woman I have seen not wholly ruined by it. Men, strong men, I have seen die of it, or go mad by it. _Good_ fortune is far worse than bad! Will you write with all despatch, my dear sir; fancy me a fellow-wayfarer, who cordially bids you God-speed, and would fain keep in sight of you, within sound of you. Yours with great sincerity, T. Carlyle V. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 12 March, 1838 My Dear Sir,--I am glad of the opportunity of Mr. Barnard's* visit to say health and peace be with you. I esteem it the best sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days, that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and highly appreciate the _Sartor._ Dr. Channing sent to me for it the other day, and I have since heard that he had read it with great interest. As soon as I go into town I shall see him and measure his love. I know his genius does not and cannot engage your attention much. He possesses the mysterious endowment of natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of course, to personal communication. I can see myself that his writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble. But please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the _Sartor,_ born and inveterated as he is in old books. Moreover, he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. So much for our gossip of today. --------- * Mr. Henry Barnard, of Hartford, Connecticut, to whom Emerson had given a note of introduction to Carlyle. --------- But my errand is yet to tell. Some friends here are very desirous that Mr. Fraser should send out to a bookseller here fifty or a hundred copies of the _Sartor._ So many we want very much; they would be sold at once. If we knew that two or three hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now. But we think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to reproduce it, a naturalized Yankee. The lovers of Teufelsdrockh here are sufficiently enthusiastic. I am an icicle to them. They think England must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods, becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and Levite must do after his kind. Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer and life would promise something better than peace. There is a part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every debt is paid. And the skill with which the great All maketh clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,-- will I hope make a chapter in your thesis. I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside. Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has thrown any memorable truths into circulation? So live and rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of many more than your mortal eyes shall see. Especially seek with recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that dwells there and creates all. Have you received a letter from me with a pamphlet sent in December? Fail not, I beg of you, to remember me to Mrs. Carlyle. Can you not have some _Sartors_ sent? Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are the best publishers in Boston. Or Mr. Rich has connections with Burdett in Boston. Yours with respect and affection, R. Waldo Emerson VI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 April, 1835 My Dear Sir,--I received your letter of the 3d of February on the 20th instant, and am sorry that hitherto we have not been able to command a more mercantile promptitude in the transmission of these light sheets. If desire of a letter before it arrived, or gladness when it came, could speed its journey, I should have it the day it was written. But, being come, it makes me sad and glad by turns. I admire at the alleged state of your English reading public without comprehending it, and with a hoping scepticism touching the facts. I hear my Prophet deplore, as his predecessors did, the deaf ear and the gross heart of his people, and threaten to shut his lips; but, happily, this he cannot do, any more than could they. The word of the Lord _will_ be spoken. But I shall not much grieve that the English people and you are not of the same mind if that apathy or antipathy can by any means be the occasion of your visiting America. The hope of this is so pleasant to me, that I have thought of little else for the week past, and having conferred with some friends on the matter, I shall try, in obedience to your request, to give you a statement of our capabilities, without indulging my penchant for the favorable side. Your picture of America is faithful enough: yet Boston contains some genuine taste for literature, and a good deal of traditional reverence for it. For a few years past, we have had, every winter, several courses of lectures, scientific, political, miscellaneous, and even some purely literary, which were well attended. Some lectures on Shakespeare were crowded; and even I found much indulgence in reading, last winter, some Biographical Lectures, which were meant for theories or portraits of Luther, Michelangelo, Milton, George Fox, Burke. These courses are really given under the auspices of Societies, as "Natural History Society," "Mechanics' Institutes," "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," &c., &c., and the fee to the lecturer is inconsiderable, usually $20 for each lecture. But in a few instances individuals have undertaken courses of lectures, and have been well paid. Dr. Spurzheim* received probably $3,000 in the few months that he lived here. Mr. Silliman, a Professor of Yale College, has lately received something more than that for a course of fifteen or sixteen lectures on Geology. Private projects of this sort are, however, always attended with a degree of uncertainty. The favor of my townsmen is often sudden and spasmodic, and Mr. Silliman, who has had more success than ever any before him, might not find a handful of hearers another winter. But it is the opinion of many friends whose judgment I value, that a person of so many claims upon the ear and imagination of our fashionable populace as the "author of the _Life of Schiller,_" "the reviewer of _Burns's Life,_" the live "contributor to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign_ Reviews," nay, the "worshipful Teufelsdrockh," the "personal friend of Goethe," would, for at least one season, batter down opposition, and command all ears on whatever topic pleased him, and that, quite independently of the merit of his lectures, merely for so many names' sake. ----------- * The memory of Dr. Spurzheim has faded, but his name is still known to men of science on both sides of the Atlantic as that of the most ardent and accomplished advocate of the doctrine of Phrenology. He came to the United States in 1832 to advance the cause he had at heart, but he had been only a short time in the country when he died at Boston of a fever. ------------- But the subject, you say, does not yet define itself. Whilst it is "gathering to a god," we who wait will only say, that we know enough here of Goethe and Schiller to have some interest in German literature. A respectable German here, Dr. Follen, has given lectures to a good class upon Schiller. I am quite sure that Goethe's name would now stimulate the curiosity of scores of persons. On English literature, a much larger class would have some preparedness. But whatever topics you might choose, I need not say you must leave under them scope for your narrative and pictorial powers; yes, and space to let out all the length of all the reins of your eloquence of moral sentiment. What "Lay Sermons" might you not preach! or methinks "Lectures on Europe" were a sea big enough for you to swim in. The only condition our adolescent ear insists upon is, that the English as it is spoken by the unlearned shall be the bridge between our teacher and our tympanum. _Income and Expenses._--All our lectures are usually delivered in the same hall, built for the purpose. It will hold 1,200 persons; 900 are thought a large assembly. The expenses of rent, lights, doorkeeper, &c. for this hall, would be $12 each lecture. The price of $3 is the least that might be demanded for a single ticket of admission to the course,--perhaps $4; $5 for a ticket admitting a gentleman and lady. So let us suppose we have 900 persons paying $3 each, or $2,700. If it should happen, as did in Prof. Silliman's case, that many more than 900 tickets were sold, it would be easy to give the course in the day and in the evening, an expedient sometimes practised to divide an audience, and because it is a great convenience to many to choose their time. If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of 15,000. They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three miles from Boston, and probably at Philadelphia, thirty-six hours distant. At New York anything literary has hitherto had no favor. The lectures might be fifteen or sixteen in number, of about an hour each. They might be delivered, one or two in each week. And if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the city. They must be delivered in the winter. Another plan suggested in addition to this. A gentleman here is giving a course of lectures on English literature to a private class of ladies, at $10 to each subscriber. There is no doubt, were you so disposed, you might turn to account any writings in the bottom of your portfolio, by reading lectures to such a class, or, still better, by speaking. _Expense of Living._--You may travel in this country for $4 to $4.50 a day. You may board in Boston in a "gigmanic" style for $8 per week, including all domestic expenses. Eight dollars per week is the board paid by the permanent residents at the Tremont House,--probably the best hotel in North America. There, and at the best hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays at the rate of $1.50 per day. Twice eight dollars would provide a gentleman and lady with board, chamber, and private parlor, at a fashionable boardinghouse. In the country, of course, the expenses are two thirds less. These are rates of expense where economy is not studied. I think the Liverpool and New York packets demand $150 of the passenger, and their accommodations are perfect. (N.B.--I set down all sums in dollars. You may commonly reckon a pound sterling worth $4.80.) "The man is certain of success," say those I talk with, "for one winter, but not afterwards." That supposes no extraordinary merit in the lectures, and only regards you in your leonine aspect. However, it was suggested that, if Mr. C. would undertake a Journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ or _The Spiritual Inquirer,_ or the like, and of which F.H. Hedge* was to be editor. Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contributions to its pages, until its success could be assured. Hedge is just leaving our neighborhood to be settled as a minister two hundred and fifty miles off, in Maine, and entreats that you will edit the journal. He will write, and I please myself with thinking I shall be able to write under such auspices. Then you might (though I know not the laws respecting literary property) collect some of your own writings and reprint them here. I think the _Sartor_ would now be sure of a sale. Your _Life of Schiller,_ and _Wilhelm Meister,_ have been long reprinted here. At worst, if you wholly disliked us, and preferred Old England to New, you can judge of the suggestion of a knowing man, that you might see Niagara, get a new stock of health, and pay all your expenses by printing in England a book of travels in America. ---------- *Now the Rev. Dr. Hedge, late Professor of German and of Ecclesiastical History in Harvard College. ------------ I wish you to know that we do not depend for your _eclat_ on your being already known to rich men here. You are not. Nothing has ever been published here designating you by name. But Dr. Channing reads and respects you. That is a fact of importance to our project. Several clergymen, Messrs. Frothingham, Ripley, Francis, all of them scholars and Spiritualists, (some of them, unluckily, called Unitarian,) love you dearly, and will work heartily in your behalf. Mr. Frothing ham, a worthy and accomplished man, more like Erasmus than Luther, said to me on parting, the other day, "You cannot express in terms too extravagant my desire that he should come." George Ripley, having heard, through your letter to me, that nobody in England had responded to the _Sartor,_ had secretly written you a most reverential letter, which, by dint of coaxing, be read to me, though he said there was but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. I prayed him, though I thought the letter did him no justice, save to his heart, to send you it or another; and he says he will. He is a very able young man, even if his letter should not show it.* He said he could, and would, bring many persons to hear you, and you should be sure of his utmost aid. Dr. Bradford, a medical man, is of good courage. Mr. Loring,** a lawyer, said,"--Invite Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to spend a couple of months at my house," (I assured him I was too selfish for that,) "and if our people," he said, "cannot find out his worth, I will subscribe, with, others, to make him whole of any expense he shall incur in coming." Hedge promised more than he ought. There are several persons beside, known to me, who feel a warm interest in this thing. Mr. Furness, a popular and excellent minister in Philadelphia, at whose house Harriet Martineau was spending a few days, I learned the other day "was feeding Miss Martineau with the _Sartor._" And here some of the best women I know are warm friends of yours, and are much of Mrs. Carlyle's opinion when she says, Your books shall prosper. ----------- * Emerson's estimate of Mr. Ripley was justified as the years went on. His _Life,_ by Mr. Octavius Frothingham,--like his father, "a worthy and accomplished, man," but more like Luther than Erasmus,--forms one of the most attractive volumes of the series of _Lives of American Men of Letters._ ** The late Ellis Gray Loring, a man of high character, well esteemed in his profession, and widely respected. ---------- On the other hand, I make no doubt you shall be sure of some opposition. Andrews Norton, one of our best heads, once a theological professor, and a destroying critic, lives upon a rich estate at Cambridge, and frigidly excludes the Diderot paper from a _Select Journal_ edited by him, with the remark, "Another paper of the Teufelsdrockh School." The University perhaps, and much that is conservative in literature and religion, I apprehend, will give you its cordial opposition, and what eccentricity can be collected from the Obituary Notice on Goethe, or from the _Sartor,_ shall be mustered to demolish you. Nor yet do I feel quite certain of this. If we get a good tide with us, we shall sweep away the whole inertia, which is the whole force of these gentlemen, except Norton. That you do not like the Unitarians will never hurt you at all, if possibly you do like the Calvinists. If you have any friendly relations to your native Church, fail not to bring a letter from a Scottish Calvinist to a Calvinist here, and your fortune is made. But that were too good to happen. Since things are so, can you not, my dear sir, finish your new work and cross the great water in September or October, and try the experiment of a winter in America? I cannot but think that if we do not make out a case strong enough to make you build your house, at least you should pitch your tent among us. The country is, as you say, worth visiting, and to give much pleasure to a few persons will be some inducement to you. I am afraid to press this matter. To me, as you can divine, it would be an unspeakable comfort; and the more, that I hope before that time so far to settle my own affairs as to have a wife and a house to receive you. Tell Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate regards, that some friends whom she does not yet know do hope with me to have her company for the next winter at our house, and shall not cease to hope it until you come. I have many things to say upon the topics of your letter, but my letter is already so immeasurably long, it must stop. Long as it is, I regret I have not more facts. Dr. Channing is in New York, or I think, despite your negligence of him, I should have visited him on account of his interest in you. Could you see him you would like him. I shall write you immediately on learning anything new bearing on this business. I intended to have despatched this letter a day or two sooner, that it might go by the packet of the 1st of May from New York. Now it will go by that of the 8th, and ought to reach you in thirty days. Send me your thoughts upon it as soon as you can. I _jalouse_ of that new book. I fear its success may mar my project. Yours affectionately, R. Waldo Emerson VII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 13 May, 1835 Thanks, my kind friend, for the news you again send me. Good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. As if the "Golden West" seen by Poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! To me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole Existence here below more and more does. We have seen your Barnard: a most modest, intelligent, compact, hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests from his expedition hither. We expect to see much more of him; to instruct him, to learn of him: especially about that real-imaginary locality of "Concord," where a kindly-speaking voice lives incarnated, there is much to learn. That you will take to yourself a wife is the cheerfulest tidings you could send us. It is in no wise meet for man to be alone; and indeed the beneficent Heavens, in creating Eve, did mercifully guard against that. May it prove blessed, this new arrangement! I delight to prophesy for you peaceful days in it; peaceful, not idle; filled rather with that best activity which is the stillest. To the future, or perhaps at this hour actual Mrs. Emerson, will you offer true wishes from two British Friends; who have not seen her with their eyes, but whose thoughts need not be strangers to the Home she will make for you. Nay, you add the most chivalrous summons: which who knows but one day we may actually stir ourselves to obey! It may hover for the present among the gentlest of our day-dreams; mild-lustrous; an impossible possibility. May all go well with you, my worthy Countryman, Kinsman, and brother Man! This so astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in your New England circle seems to me not only astonishing, but questionable; not, however, to be quarreled with. I may say: If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in Old England whole antiseptic floods of good _hop_-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new Edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a _Sartor:_ in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, Conservative Younger-brothers, Regent-Street Loungers, Crockford Gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken Reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the idea. Accordingly I realized these four copies from [him,] all he will surrender; and can do no more. Take them with my blessing. I beg you will present one to the honorablest of those "honorable women"; say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of mere sunbeams; to be loved and worshiped; the best of all Transatlantic women! Do at any rate, in a more business like style, offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for I reckoned tolerance had its limits. His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is Best, I knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both. Finally, on behalf of the British world (which is not all contained in Fraser's shop) I should tell you that various persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have privately expressed their recognition of this poor Rhapsody, the best the poor Clothes-Professor could produce in the circumstances; nay, I have Scottish Presbyterian Elders who read, and thank. So true is what you say about the aptitude of all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to them. As face answereth to face! Brother, if thou wish me to believe, do thou thyself believe first: this is as true as that of the _flere_ and _dolendum;_ perhaps truer. Wherefore, putting all things together, cannot I feel that I have washed my hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner? Let a man be thankful; and on the whole go along, while he has strength left to go. This Boston _Transcendentalist,_ whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish! I shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. The Visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the Invisible. Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I construe aright), as the _Euthanasia_ of Metaphysic altogether. May it be sure, may it be speedy! Thou shalt open thy _eyes,_ O Son of Adam; thou shalt _look,_ and not forever jargon about _laws_ of Optics and the making of spectacles! For myself, I rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could I but _lay_ them aside,--with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two. Man _lives_ by Belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live. Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little! "Why? and WHEREFORE? God wot, simply THEREFORE! Ask not WHY; 't is SITH thou hast to care for." Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me: the saddest, I think, of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front. By dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume of that miserable _French Revolution_ rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book, defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. A Friend borrowed this volume of Manuscript,--a kind Friend but a careless one,--to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do. One evening about two months ago he came in on us, "distraction (literally) in his aspect"; the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do: at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself: In this mood thou makest no way, writest _nothing_ that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for one complete week! And so it lies, under lock and key. I have digested the whole misery; I say, if thou canst _never_ write this thing, why then never do write it: God's Universe will go along _better_--without it. My Belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable: however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement I have got to strive with, and will pity me in it. Bodily exhaustion (and "Diana in the shape of bile")* I will at least try to exclude from the controversy. By God's blessing, perhaps the Book shall yet be written; but I find it will not do, by sheer direct force; only by gentler side-methods. I have much else to write too: I feel often as if with one year of health and peace I could write something considerable;--the image of which sails dim and great through my head. Which year of health and peace, God, if He see meet, will give me yet; or withhold from me, as shall be for the best. --------- * This allusion to Diana as an obstruction was a favorite one with Carlyle. "Sir Hudibras, according to Butler, was about to do a dreadful homicide,--an all-important catastrophe,--and had drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have done it, had not, says Butler, 'Diana in the shape of rust' imperatively intervened. A miracle she has occasionally wrought upon me in other shapes." So wrote Carlyle in a letter in 1874. --------- I have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom of London; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. Hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must "set his face like a flint." Madness rules the world, as it has generally done: one cannot, unhappily, without loss, say to it, Rule then; and yet must say it.--However, in two months more I expect my good Brother from Italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me); we are then for Scotland to gather a little health, to consider ourselves a little. I must have this Book done before anything else will prosper with me. Your American Pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago; worthy old Rich had them not originally; seemed since to have been oblivious, out of Town, perhaps unwell. I called one day, and unearthed them. Those papers you marked I have read. Genuine endeavor; which may the Heavens forward!--In this poor Country all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics: Ministries tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of "Ignorance and Hunger" weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards--the melting-pot. There will be news from England by and by: many things have reached their term; Destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken them, and there will be a reckoning. O blessed are you where, what jargoning soever there be at Washington, the poor man (_un_governed can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks into the Western Woods, sure of a nourishing Earth and an overarching Sky! It is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.--That too shall be for good. I wish I had anything to send you besides these four poor Pamphlets; but I fear there is nothing going. Our Ex-Chancellor has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties, when _he_ with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the Aristocracy; whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized. In Literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still unknown) volume of Wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing.--Did I tell you that I _saw_ Wordsworth this winter? Twice, at considerable length; with almost no disappointment. He is a _natural_ man (which means whole immensities here and now); flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness,--though, as it would not but seem to me, in _small_ quantity, and astonishingly _diluted._ Franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes I never heard from any man; at least never, whom I could _honor_ for uttering them. I am thankful for Wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual _sky-rockets_ and _coruscations,_ one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle. Southey also I saw; a far _cleverer_ man in speech, yet a considerably smaller man. Shovel-hatted; the shovel-hat is _grown_ to him: one must take him as he is. The second leaf is done; I must not venture on another. God bless you, my worthy Friend; you and her who is to be yours! My Wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too across the Sea. Perhaps we shall all meet one another some day, --if not Here, then Yonder! Faithfully always, T. Carlyle VIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 27 June, 1835 My Dear Friend,--Your very kind Letter has been in my hand these four weeks,--the subject of much meditation, which has not yet cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue. Indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before me: for if the American side of it, thanks to your perspicuous minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the European side continues dubious, too dim for a decision. So much in my own position here is vague, not to be measured; then there is a Brother, coming home to me from Italy, almost daily expected now; whose ulterior resolutions cannot but be influential on mine; for we are Brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one interest and object, and even one purse; and Jack is a _good man,_ for whom I daily thank Heaven, as for one of its principal mercies. He is Traveling Physician to the Countess of Clare, well entreated by her and hers; but, I think, weary of that inane element of "the English Abroad," and as good as determined to have done with it; to seek _work_ (he sees not well how), if possible, with wages; but even almost _without,_ or with the lowest endurable, if need be. Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one _must,_ in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then. This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be in Paris one of these days; then here speedily; and "the House must resolve itself into a Committee"--of ways and means. Add to all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything: were I to give you my actual _view_ of this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of the Anarch old. Alas! it is all too like Chaos: confusion of dense and rare: I also know what it is to drop _plumb,_ fluttering my pennons vain,--for a series of weeks. One point only is clear: that you, my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England. Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a _house of my own_ in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful brine"; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most _monstrous_ "tissue," this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from "that roaring Loom of Time,"--miraculous ever as of old! To Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind. Long shall we remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us. My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you too heartily;--which really is very sound doctrine. I write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell. It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as it is,--were I once fairly started. If so, what an unspeakable relief were it too! Of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often say, is that you cannot utter yourself. The poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it. Imprisoned, enchanted, like the Arabian Prince with half his body marble: it is really bad work. Then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio. Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz the Temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of Heaven he will speak a word or two. Would it were come so far,-- if it be ever to come! On the whole I think the odds are that I shall some time or other get over to you; but that for this winter I ought not to go. My London expedition is not decided hitherto; I have begun various relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut short so soon. That beggarly Book, were there nothing else, hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. To finish it, on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much as to work at it. What am I to do? When my Brother arrives, we go all back to Scotland for some weeks: there, in seclusion, with such calmness as I can find or create, the plan for the winter must be settled. You shall hear from me then; let us hope something more reasonable than I can write at present. For about a month I have gone to and fro utterly _idle:_ understand that, and I need explain no more. The wearied machine refused to be urged any farther; after long spasmodic struggling comes collapse. The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really been a sore business for me. Nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a _favor_ of the Upper Powers: _tomorrow_ to fresh fields and pastures new! This monstrous London has taught me several things during the past year; for if its Wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its Folly abounds with lessons,--which one ought to learn. I feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; defeated, yet not altogether disgraced. As the great Fritz said, when the battle had gone against him, "Another time we will do better." As to Literature, Politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of existence here, expect me not to say one word. We are a singular people, in a singular condition. Not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of O'Connell and Company (the Tail was a Peacock's tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic Parliamentary men), one of the company, a "distinguished female" (as we call them), informed my Wife "O'Connell was the master-spirit of this age." If so, then for what we have received let us be thankful, --and enjoy it _without_ criticism.--It often painfully seems to me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here; as if the crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing rapidly down, down, to its end! Wreckage is swift; rebuilding is slow and distant. Happily another than we has charge of it. My new American Friends have come and gone. Barnard went off northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and furtherance as I could give him. Professor Longfellow went about the same time; to Sweden, then to Berlin and Germany: we saw him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind greeting as they pass. I inquired considerably about Concord, and a certain man there; one of the fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things. By the bye, how very good you are, in regard to this of Unitarianism! I declare, I am ashamed of my intolerance:--and yet you have ceased to be a Teacher of theirs, have you not? I mean to address you this time by the secular title of Esquire; as if I liked you better so. But truly, in black clothes or in white, by this style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome to me. You will further allow me to fancy that you are now wedded; and offer our united congratulations and kindest good wishes to that new fair Friend of ours, whom one day we shall surely know more of,--if the Fates smile. My sheet is ending, and I must not burden you with double postage for such stuff as this. By dint of some inquiry I have learnt the law of the American Letter-carrying; and I now mention it for our mutual benefit. There are from New York to London three packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th); the masters of these carry Letters gratis for all men; and put the same into the Post-Office; there are some pence charged on the score of "Ship-letter" there, and after that, the regular postage of the country, if the Letter has to go farther. I put this, for example, into a place called North and South American Coffee-house in the City here, and pay twopence for it, and it flies. Doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its "leather bag" somewhere in New York, and fixed days (probably the same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching, said leather bag: if you deal with the London Packets (so long as I am here) in preference to the Liverpool ones, it will all be well. As for the next Letter, (if you write as I hope you may before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, "Care of John Mill, Esq., India House, London"; and he will forward it directly, should I even be still absent in the North.--Now will you write? and pray write something about yourself. We both love you here, and send you all good prayers. _Vale faveque!_ Yours ever, T. Carlyle IX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 7 October, 1835 My Dear Friend,--Please God I will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it. ----------- * The original of this letter is missing; what is printed here is from the rough draft. ----------- I received in August your letter of June, and just then hearing that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, Mrs. Child,* whom I scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit England (invited thither for work's sake by the African or Abolition Society) and that she begged an introduction to you, I used the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended. I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter written in May, with the four copies of the _Sartor,_ which by a strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the Custom-House. On such provocation I can sit still no longer. ------------ * The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of _Philothea_ was published in this year, 1835. "If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen." says Lowell, in his _Fable for Critics._ ----------- The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord* (my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated. All three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information. Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying. So know now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle. ---------- * "A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Published by Request. Concord: G.F. Bemis, Printer. 1835." 8vo, pp. 52.--A discourse worthy of the author and of the town. It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson's Works, Boston, 1883. ----------- I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book. My brother Charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so. Such mischance might well quicken one's curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it. You have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor. I trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first took life. Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain. And whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue. So do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much. To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication. And yet I hold to a more orthodox immortality too. This morning in happiest time I have a letter from George Ripley, who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty confidently you will come next summer. _Io paean!_ He tells me also that Alexander Everett (brother of Edward) has sent you the friendly notice that has just appeared in the _North American Review,_ with a letter.* All which I hope you have received. I am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which I am a stranger, and which I supposed might not love you. It must be you shall succeed when Saul prophesies. Indeed, I have heard that you may hear the _Sartor_ preached from some of our best pulpits and lecture-rooms. Don't think I speak of myself, for I cherish carefully a salutary horror at the German style, and hold off my admiration as long as ever I can. But all my importance is quite at an end. For now that Doctors of Divinity and the solemn Review itself have broke silence to praise you, I have quite lost my plume as your harbinger. ----------- * Mr. A.H. Everett's paper on _Sartor Resartus_ was published in the _North American Review_ for October, 1835. ----------- I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him. If virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe we keep your face for the living type. I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other. X. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Mass., 8 April, 1856 My Dear Friend,--I am concerned at not hearing from you. I have written you two letters, one in October, one in November, I believe, since I had any tidings of you.* Your last letter is dated 27 June, 1835. I have counted all the chances of delay and miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have forgotten us. I have looked at the advertising sheet of the booksellers, but it promised nothing of the _History._ I thought I had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise of your coming,--I was to take possession of a new kingdom of virtue and friendship. Let not the new wine mourn. Speak to me out of the wide silence. Many friends inquire of me concerning you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of this sheet. ------------ * One in August by Mrs. Child, apparently not delivered, and one, the preceding, in October. ----------- With it goes an American reprint of the _Sartor._ Five hundred copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy. About one hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for. How it will be received I know not. I am not very sanguine, for I often hear and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style. Certainly, I tell them, it is very odd. Yet I read a chapter lately with great pleasure. I send you also, with Dr. Channing's regards and good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our great local question of Slavery. You must have written me since July. I have reckoned upon your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element. Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. Beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell, Salem, courses are given by individuals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, or St. Paul say that cannot be said here? The audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is? Another thing. I am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lectures; I had written as many last year. And for reading both these and those at places whither I was invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars. Had I, in lieu of receiving a lecturer's fee, myself advertised that I would deliver these in certain places, these receipts would have been greatly increased. I insert all this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a commercial spirit. If you lose no dollar by us, I shall joyfully trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all other points. I cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are specially vital at this time except Criticism and Parliamentary Debate. I think this of ours would possess in the hands of a great genius great advantages over both. But what avail any commendations of the form, until I know that the man is alive and well? If you love them that love you, write me straightway of your welfare. My wife desires to add to mine her friendliest greetings to Mrs. Carlyle and to yourself. Yours affectionately, R. Waldo Emerson I ought to say that Le-Baron Russell, a worthy young man who studies Engineering, did cause the republication of Teufelsdrockh.* I trust you shall yet see a better American review of it than the _North American._ ------------ * This first edition of _Sartor_ as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much like all prefaces." ----------- XI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 29 April, 1836 My Dear Emerson,--Barnard is returning across the water, and must not go back without a flying salutation for you. These many weeks I have had your letter by me; these many weeks I have felt always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and, alas! also that I could give it none. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought, That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing,--which also in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went about possessed with. Have compassion for me! It is really very miserable: but it will end. Some months more, and it is _ended;_ and I am done with _French Revolution,_ and with Revolution and Revolt in general; and look once more with free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the bright Sun, on this green Mother's-bosom (though the Devil does dwell in it)! For the present, really, it is like a Nessus' shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all _other_ mischiefs. I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done. My familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, I answer, you are very right; but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.--In such sort do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all. For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a _Fact_ in the world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which Philosophy and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil;--neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in _that._ There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,--a stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much. Coleridge is the Father of all these. _Ay de mi!_ But to look across the "divine salt-sea." A letter reached me, some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama; the writer, a kind friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.* I have mislaid, not lost his Letter; and do not at present know his permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at Mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. Will you therefore take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from me; that I see him, and love him in this Letter; and hope we shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any rate, with many a kind thought towards one another. ---------- * Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston. ---------- The _North American Review_ you spoke of never came (I mean that copy of it with the Note in it); but another copy became rather public here, to the amusement of some. I read the article myself: surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]* otherwise, is an original: either a _thrice_-plied quiz (_Sartor's_ "Editor" a twice-plied one); or else opening on you a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth. ------------- * The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter. ------------- My friend! I must end here. Forgive me till I get done with this Book. Can you have the generosity to write, _without_ an answer? Well, if you can_not,_ I will answer. Do not forget me. My love and my Wife's to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all friends. Tell me what you do; what your world does. As for my world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it:-- "As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces, And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests, Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force, Goal, and Time, go still onwards." Adieu, my dear friend! Believe me ever Yours, Thomas Carlyle XII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Massachusetts, 17 September, 1836 My Dear Friend,--I hope you do not measure my love by the tardiness of my messages. I have few pleasures like that of receiving your kind and eloquent letters. I should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years. Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles,* of whom I have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him. --------- * Charles Chauncy Emerson,--died May 9, 1836,--whose memory still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain who knew him in life. A few papers of his published in the _Dial_ show to others what he was and what he might have become. ----------- We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. I find now I must hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt. And of you I think much and anxiously since Mrs. Channing, amidst her delight at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness respecting your untempered devotion to study. I am the more disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion to your work, and I know there is no gentle dulness in your temperament to counteract the mischief. I fear Nature has not inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal blade from whetting it through. I write to implore you to be careful of your health. You are the property of all whom you rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as your own. O my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, I will thank God and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits. My wife has been lately an invalid, but she loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays her new carpet without some hopeful reference to Mrs. Carlyle. And in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the _History of the French Revolution_ before it is published,--or at least whilst it is publishing in England, and before it is published here. There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the _five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold,_ and read with great delight by many persons. This I suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of _doing;_ but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture. If you will come here like a noble brother, you shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of eating and walking; and as I will abstain from you myself, so I will defend you from others. I entreat Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in these space-destroying days a prayer from Boston, Massachusetts, is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one from Edinburgh or Oxford. I send you a little book I have just now published, as an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and significant.* This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear. I am mortified to learn the ill fate of my former packet containing the _Sartor_ and Dr. Channing's work. My mercantile friend is vexed, for he says accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a letter. I shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain another copy of our American edition. ----------- * This was _Nature,_ the first clear manifesto of Emerson's genius. ----------- I wish I could come to you instead of sending this sheet of paper. I think I should persuade you to get into a ship this Autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun. I have many, many things to learn of you. How melancholy to think how much we need confession!...* Yet the great truths are always at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities. How little of you is in your _will!_ Above your will how intimately are you related to all of us! In God we meet. Therein we _are,_ thence we descend upon Time and these infinitesimal facts of Christendom, and Trade, and England Old and New. Wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the Past serves to contribute nothing to the result. ----------- ** Some words appear to be lost here. ----------- I read Goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest. A friend of mine who studies his life with care would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years after his settlement at Weimar, and what Books there are in Germany about him beside what Mrs. Austin has collected and Heine. Can you tell me? Write me of your health, or else come. Yours ever, R.W. Emerson. P.S.--I learn that an acquaintance is going to England, so send the packet by him. XIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 5 November, 1836 My Dear Friend,--You are very good to write to me in my silence, in the mood you must be in. My silence you may well judge is not forgetfulness; it is a forced silence; which this kind Letter enforces into words. I write the day after your letter comes, lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me. What a bereavement, my Friend, is this that has overtaken you! Such a Brother, with such a Life opening around him, like a blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye! It is a loss, a sore loss; which God had appointed you. I do not tell you not to mourn: I mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the spirit you have in this sorrow. Oh, I know it well! Often enough in this noisy Inanity of a vision where _we_ still linger, I say to myself, Perhaps thy Buried Ones are not far from thee, are with thee; they are in Eternity, which is a Now and HERE! And yet Nature will have her right; Memory would feel desecrated if she could forget. Many times in the crowded din of the Living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you the Loved Face; and in these turmoiling streets you see the little silent Churchyard, the green grave that lies there so silent, inexpressibly _wae._ O, perhaps we _shall_ all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes! One thing is no Perhaps: surely we _shall_ all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will,--then is it not better so? Silence,--since in these days we have no speech! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, in any day. You inquire so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! It is very good, and precious for me. As for my health, be under no apprehension. I am always sick; I am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present; but it has no deep significance: it is _weariness_ merely; and now, by the bounty of Heaven, I am as it were within sight of land. In two months more, this unblessed Book will be _finished;_ at Newyearday we begin printing: before the end of March, the thing is out; and I am a free man! Few happinesses I have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me. And yet I ought not to call the poor Book unblessed: no, it has girdled me round like a panoply these two years; kept me invulnerable, indifferent, to innumerable things. The poorest man in London has perhaps been one of the freest: the roaring press of gigs and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his.--As for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply _zero._ It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that have not a Reality within them, which so few have;--testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and low. My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck: "Jack," I answered, "innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false? At all events, thou seest, I cannot help it. It is the nature of the beast." So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I. Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the Devil's wages for it; which one does not incline to do. A _disjectum membrum;_ cut off from relations with men? Verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical: a hopeless-looking man. Yet full of what I call desperate-hope! One does verily stand on the Earth, a Star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,--what can one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out?--This surely is very idle talk. As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad Book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man. Yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places: so we will print it, and be done with it;--and try a new turn next time. What I am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain. How gladly would I run to Concord! And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me. That my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me. It is frightful what an impatience I have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures. Their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate. There is no resource but to say: Brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;-- alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying: go thy ways, with my blessing. There are hardly three people among these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in the humor I have. Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit London finally till I have as it were _seen it out._ In the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one's self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world: people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you. Some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom I have even learned to love,--though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly. Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do?--the answer is clear so far, "Rest myself awhile"; and all farther is as dark as Chaos. Now for resting, taking that by itself, my Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in Rome. On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that I must come to him, and walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over the Alps next spring!* Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;--which I incline to think were the wisest course of all. And lastly from over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson's voice. We will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. _Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Glucke._ ------------ * In his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle prints a letter from Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which Sterling urges him to come "in the first fine days of spring." It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter to Emerson. --------- I ought to say, however, that about New-year's-day I will send you an Article on _Mirabeau,_ which they have printed here (for a thing called the _London Review_), and some kind of Note to escort it. I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England, provided you leave the ends of them open: if I be mistaken, pray instruct Messrs. Barnard to _refuse_ the thing, for it has small value. _The Diamond Necklace_ is to be printed also, in _Fraser;_ inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had; till now Fraser takes it--for L50: not being able to get it for nothing. The _Mirabeau_ was written at the passionate request of John Mill; and likewise for needful lucre. I think it is the first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four years: where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. As for Mill's _London Review_ (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you. Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! Open it not: a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it. A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see.--Alas! the bottom of the sheet! Take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh: the _first_ too is now in my possession; Brother John went to the Post-Office, and worked it out for a ten shillings. It is a beautiful little Book; and a Preface to it such as no kindest friend could have improved. Thank my kind Editor** very heartily from me. --------- * Sir William Molesworth. In his _Autobiography_ Mill gives an interesting account of the founding of this _Review,_ and his quasi-editorial relations to it. "In the beginning," he says, "it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion." ** Dr. Le-Baron Russell --------- My wife was in Scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health; she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong; she sends over to Concord her kindest wishes. If I fly to the Alps or the Ocean, her Mother and she must keep one another company, we think, till there be better news of me. You are to thank Dr. Channing also for his valued gift. I read the Discourse, and other friends of his read it, with great estimation; but the _end_ of that black question lies beyond my ken. I suppose, as usual, Might and Right will have to make themselves synonymous in some way. CANST and SHALT, if they are _very_ well understood, mean the same thing under this Sun of ours. Adieu, my dear Emerson. _Gehab' Dich wohl!_ Many affectionate regards to the Lady Wife: it is far within the verge of Probabilities that I shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day. But she must not get sick! It is a dreadful thing, sickness; really a thing which I begin frequently to think _criminal_--at least in myself. Nay, in myself it really is criminal; wherefore I determine to be well one day. Good be with you and Yours. T. Carlyle As to Goethe and your Friend: I know not anything out of Goethe's own works (which have many notices in them) that treats specially of those ten years. Doubtless your Friend knows Jordens's _Lexicon_ (which dates all the writings, for one thing), the _Conversations-Lexicon Supplement,_ and such like. There is an essay by one Schubarth which has reputation; but it is critical and ethical mainly. The Letters to Zelter, and the Letters to Schiller, will do nothing for those years, but are essential to see. Perhaps in some late number of the _Zeitgenossen_ there may be something? Blackguard Heine is worth very little; Mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser. A very curious Book is Eckermann's _Conversations with Goethe,_ just published. No room more!* ----------- * Concerning this letter Emerson wrote in his Diary: "January 7, 1837. Received day before yesterday a letter from Thomas Carlyle, dated 5 November;--as ever, a cordial influence. Strong he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our human nature. Quite in consonance with my delight in his eloquent letters I read in Bacon this afternoon this sentence (of Letters): 'And such as are written from wise men are of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches.'" ------------- XIV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 13 February, 1837 My Dear Emerson,--You had promise of a letter to be despatched you about New-year's-day; which promise I was myself in a condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to delays of printers and certain "Articles" that were to go with it. Six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard animals: however, I will delay no longer for them. Nay, it seems the Articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the Letter; but must fare round by Liverpool or Portsmouth, in a separate conveyance. We will leave them to the bounty of Time. Your little Book and the Copy of _Teufelsdrockh_ came safely; soon after I had written. The _Teufelsdrockh_ I instantaneously despatched to Hamburg, to a Scottish merchant there, to whom there is an allusion in the Book; who used to be my _Speditor_ (one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my missions and packages to and from Weimar.* The other, former Copy, more specially yours, had already been, as I think I told you, delivered out of durance; and got itself placed in the bookshelf, as _the_ Teufelsdrockh. George Ripley tells me you are printing another edition; much good may it do you! There is now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising _here_ about printing one. I said to myself once, when Bookseller Fraser shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him: "Perhaps after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a Book, after I am dead it may be,--if so seem good to them. _Either_ way!" As it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the more cheerfully. Ripley says farther he has sent me a critique of it by a better hand than the _North American:_ I expect it, but have not got it Yet.** The _North American_ seems to say that he too sent me one. It never came to hand, nor any hint of it,--except I think once before through you. It was not at all an unfriendly review; but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in it that filled one with amazement. Since the Irish Bishop who said there were some things in _Gulliver_ on which he for one would keep his belief _suspended,_ nothing equal to it, on that side, has come athwart me. However, he _has_ made out that Teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious character; which is always something, for an Inquirer into Truth.--Will you, finally, thank Friend Ripley in my name, till I have time to write to him and thank him. ----------- * The allusion referred to is the following: "By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky Weissnichtwo packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost."--_Sartor Resartus,_ Book I. ch. xi. ** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the _Christian Examiner._ ---------- Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the "Open Secret" becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine--with an ear for the _Ewigen Melodien,_ which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. You will see what the years will bring you. It is not one of your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly and let the years do their best. He that cannot keep himself quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be like him in that, whatever else it be. Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you "are the only man in America" who has quietly set himself down on a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will prescribes for him. Pity that you were the only one! But be one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second and a third. It is a poor country where all men are _sold_ to Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of Parliamentary Eloquence! And yet your New England here too has the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe: we too are sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, I pray you, with double pity) Mammon will not _pay_ us,--we, are "Two Million three hundred thousand in Ireland that have not potatoes enough"! I declare, in History I find nothing more tragical. I find also that it will alter; that for me as one it has altered. Me Mammon will _pay_ or not as he finds convenient; buy me he will not.--In fine, I say, sit still at Concord, with such spirit as you are of; under the blessed skyey influences, with an open sense, with the great Book of Existence open round you: we shall see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it. The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation. Along with these two "Articles" (to be sent by Liverpool; there are two of them, _Diamond Necklace_ and _Mirabeau_), you will very probably get some stray Proofsheet--of the unutterable _French Revolution!_ It is actually at Press; two Printers working at separate Volumes of it,--though still too slow. In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! You, I hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both. No such _spell_ shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! And yet I ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man's doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in. Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination I have had; perhaps I shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood. The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying _under_ my feet; a mean imbroglio, which I never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with: welcome and welcome to go wholly _its own way;_ I wholly clear for going mine. Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep. The residue is vague as the wind,--unheeded as the wind. Some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse: _any_ way,--or even _no_ way, if that be it,--I shall be content. There is a scheme here among Friends for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution; but it will not do there, I think. The instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I can teach them,--then we will, most readily, as Burns says, "loose our tinkler jaw"; but not I think till then; were the Institution even Imperial. America has faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God's sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, 'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! To rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain.-- What a pity this poor sheet is done! I had innumerable things to tell you about people whom I have seen, about books,--Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament, Literature and the Life of Man,--the whole of which must lie over till next time. Write to me; do not forget me. My Wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends "kindest remembrances," "compliments" she expressly does not send. Good be with you always, my dear Friend! --T. Carlyle We send our felicitation to the Mother and little Boy; which latter you had better tell us the name of. XV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Mass., 31 March, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Last night, I said I would write to you forthwith. This morning I received your letter of February 13th, and _with it_ the _Diamond Necklace,_ the _Mirabeau,_ and the olive leaf of a proof-sheet. I write out the sum of my debt as the best acknowledgment I can make. I had already received, about New-Year's-Day, the preceding letter. It came in the midst of my washbowl-storm of a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For all these gifts and pledges,--thanks. Over the finished _History,_ joy and evergreen laurels. I embrace you with all my heart. I solace myself with the noble nature God has given you, and in you to me, and to all. I had read the _Diamond Necklace_ three weeks ago at the Boston Athenaeum, and the _Mirabeau_ I had just read when my copy came. But the proof-sheet was virgin gold. The _Mirabeau_ I forebode is to establish your kingdom in England. That is genuine thunder, which nobody that wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels. I please myself with thinking that my Angelo has blocked a Colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all competitors. To be sure, that is its least merit,--that nobody can do the like,--yet is it a gag to Cerberus. Its better merit is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources that are in human nature; so I sent it to be read by a brave man who is poor and decried. The doctrine is indeed true and grand which you preach as by cannonade, that God made a man, and it were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and, however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far; a faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all the individuals. The _Diamond Necklace_ I read with joy, whilst I read with my own eyes. When I read with English or New-English eyes, my joy is marred by the roaring of the opposition. I doubt not the exact story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time; but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics whereby the meaning is conveyed. And for the Gig,--the Gig,--it is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that particular symbol no more. I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it is your own; and it is English; and every word stands for somewhat; and it cheers and fortifies me. And what more can a man ask of his writing fellow-man? Why, all things; inasmuch as a good mind creates wants at every stroke. The proof-sheet rhymes well with _Mirabeau,_ and has abated my fears from your own and your brother's account of the new book. I greet it well. Auspicious Babe, be born! The first good of the book is that it makes you free, and as I anxiously hope makes your body sound. A possible good is that it will cause me to see your face. But I seemed to read in _Mirabeau_ what you intimate in your letter, that you will not come westward. Old England is to find you out, and then the New will have no charm. For me it will be the worst; for you, not. A man, a few men, cannot be to you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far to find. Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals. I see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to the _respectabilities_ of religion and education as yours; that there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere; and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than others. Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie wheat. I have really never believed that you would do us that crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of Oxenstiern's little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards--provided for them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of newspapers--do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish. If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. So I leave you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say "Go," why fly to us instantly. Come and spend a year with me, and see if I cannot respect your retirements. I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class. They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to make, their living is usually weak and hapless. But you are so companionable--God has made you Man as well as Poet--that I lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water. Burns might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one might write Iliads or Hamlets, and yet come short of Truth by infinity, as every written word must; but "the man's the gowd for a' that." And I heartily thank the Lady for her good-will. Please God she may be already well. We all grieve to know of her ill health. People who have seen her never stop with _Mr._ Carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her. My wife believes in nothing for her but the American voyage. I shall never cease to expect you both until you come. My boy is five months old, he is called Waldo,--a lovely wonder that made the Universe look friendlier to me. My Wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards to Mrs. Carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your letters only to that sentence that she would go to Scotland if you came here. My Wife beseeches her to come and possess her new-dressed chamber. Do not cease to write whenever you can spare me an hour. A man named Bronson Alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. Good bye. --R.W. Emerson The second edition of _Sartor_ is out and sells well. I learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered for England. It was very amiable of you, that word about it in _Mirabeau._* ---------- * This refers to Carlyle's introducing, in his paper on _Mirabeau,_ a citation from _Sartor,_ with the words, "We quote from a New England Book." ---------- XVI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 1 June, 1857 My Dear Friend,--A word must go to Concord in answer to your last kind word. It reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of a most unspeakable day; the day when I, half dead with fret, agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience of London quality people on the subject of German Literature! The heart's wish of me was that I might be left in deepest oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come. My Printers had only let me go, out of their Treadmill, the day before. However, all that is over now; and I am still here alive to write to you, and hope for better days. Almost a month ago there went a copy of a Book called _French Revolution,_ with your address on it, over to Red-Lion Square, and thence, as old Rich declared, himself now _emeritus,_ back to one Kennet (I think) near Covent Garden; who professes to correspond with Hilliard and Company, Boston, and undertook the service. The Book is not gone yet, I understand; but Kennet engages that it shall leave Liverpool infallibly on the 5th of June. I wish you a happy reading of it, therefore: it is the only copy of my sending that has crossed the water. Ill printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! But in fine it _is_ off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate nothing or little. Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. We will let it go its way. Beat this thing, I say always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, kill it in God's name: if thou canst not kill it, why then thou wilt not. By the by, speaking of dull Publics, I ought to say that I have seen a review of myself in the _Christian Examiner_ (I think that is it) of Boston; the author of which, if you know him, I desire you to thank on my part. For if a dull million is good, then withal a seeing unit or two is also good. This man images back a beautiful idealized Clothes-Philosopher, very satisfactory to look upon; in whose beatified features I did verily detect more similitude to what I myself meant to be, than in any or all the other criticisms I have yet seen written of me. That a man see himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this brotherly improved way: there surely is one of the most legitimate joys of existence. Friend Ripley took the trouble to send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own; there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of; a Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours; and a set of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom I grieved to see confusing himself with that. Progress of the species is a thing I can get no good of at all. These Books, which Miss Martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till three weeks ago or less. I pray you to thank Ripley for them very kindly; which at present I still have not time to do. He seems to me a good man, with good aims; with considerable natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow better, all clearness to grow clearer. Miss Martineau laments that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity, into the Black Controversy; a thing lamentable in the extreme, when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would be could Mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his squash as a stupid _Apprentice_ instead of stupid _Slave!_ Miss Martineau's Book on America is out, here and with you. I have read it for the good Authoress's sake, whom I love much. She is one of the strangest phenomena to me. A genuine little Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that! "God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech," say the Arabs. Even the English Unitarians were one day to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said. I admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes: her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great: the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough. What they say to her Book here I do not well know. I fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant. I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, "in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth," one of those oceans common at present. Ach Gott! They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of Cloth Figures. ---------- * Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler. ---------- I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I intended. My Wife continues here with her Mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her. She is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough. I rest myself "on the sunny side of hedges" in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort. Once rested, I think of returning to London for another season. Several things are beginning which I ought to see end before taking up my staff again. In this enormous Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a _calm_ than you can elsewhere meet with. Men let you alone, which is an immense thing: they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you. London, or else the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock! We shall see. I still beg the comfort of hearing from you. I am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a Waldo Emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever. My Wife earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household. May a blessing be in it, on one and all! I do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet. On the contrary, it seems almost certain that I shall. Good be with you. Yours always, T. Carlyle* ----------- * Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837: "A letter today from Carlyle rejoiced me. Pleasant would life be with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you cannot have them. If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation." ---------- XVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 13 September, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Such a gift as the _French Revolution_ demanded a speedier acknowledgment. But you mountaineers that can scale Andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians. I am ashamed to think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent. The _French Revolution_ did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since landing. Between many visits received, and some literary haranguing done, I have read two volumes and half the third and I think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original and vast ambition of fun: pleasure and peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach fever and famine to dance and sing. I think you have written a wonderful book, which will last a very long time. I see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. You have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and of other relations than civism. You have broken away from all books, and written a mind. It is a brave experiment, and the success is great. We have men in your story and not names merely; always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have the historic men. We have great facts--and selected facts--truly set down. We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. The soul's right of wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise and doom awarded, assuredly without cant. Yes, comfort yourself on that particular, O ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never. Finally we have not--a dull word. Never was there a style so rapid as yours,--which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. I suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. Henry VIII loved a Man, and I see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents. And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your contemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever: not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named, person in this thy definite deed. I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance,--if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the Aurora borealis. However, I find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike terms. This character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake and ale before, though thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest, without defiance or sky-vaulting. I wish I could talk with you face to face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book. I feel assured of its good reception in this country. I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of _Sartor_ have been sold. I have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the _History_ until some space has been given to people to import British copies. I have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. At the present very high rate of exchange, which makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of Exchange; then my books shall come. I am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we should pirate your books. One day we will have a better law, or perhaps you will make our law yours. I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. Your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and useless. I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth and love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may to the nigh starving youth. So I religiously read lectures every winter, and at other times whenever summoned. Last year, "the Philosophy of History," twelve lectures; and now I meditate a course on what I call "Ethics." I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received. Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,--what you do, and will do,--tell me that your wife is strong and well again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come hither. I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a day with me,--counting fifteen souls,--each one of whom warmly loves you. So if the _French Revolution_ does not convert the "dull public" of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New England. Yours in love and honor. --R. Waldo Emerson May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City? You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square. Will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed? I wrote him once myself, once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P. Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston,--three times,--to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods. I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a literary society here, which is now being printed.* Gladly I hear of the Carlylet--so they say--in the new Westminster. --------- * This was Emerson's famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on "The American Scholar." In his admirable essay on Thoreau,--an essay which might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years,--Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling."--_My Study Windows,_ p. 197 --------- XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 2 November, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _The Jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing _Sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a bookseller to print the _French Revolution._ It is to be printed in two volumes of the size of our American _Sartor,_ one thousand copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet, I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take care that your friends here shall know my contract with the bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then, if so good a book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new relation of being your banker and attorney. They have had the wit in the London _Examiner,_ I find, to praise at last; and I mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page. The _Westminster_ they can read themselves. The printers think they can get the book out by Christmas. So it must be long before I can tell you what cheer. Meantime do you tell me, I entreat you, what speed it has had at home. The best, I hope, with the wise and good withal. I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. I have promised a course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships. The "tender ears," as George Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak. I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other relation than that of preacher. But I preach in the Lecture-Room and then it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever: two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your pledge? The day before yesterday my little boy was a year old,--no, the day before that,--and I cannot tell you what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God, which I heartily desire you also should see. Good, wise, kind friend, I shall see you one day. Let me hear, when you can write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again. --R. Waldo Emerson XIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837 My Dear Emerson,--How long it is since you last heard of me I do not very accurately know; but it is too long. A very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then. Whenever I delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again,--unweariable in pity. I did go to Scotland, for almost three months; leaving my Wife here with her Mother. The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look very grave indeed: she continued too weak for traveling: I was worn out as I had never in my life been. So, on the longest day of June, I got back to my Mother's cottage; threw myself down, I may say, into what we may call the "frightfulest _magnetic sleep,_" and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men. Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. But indeed all was unearthly in that humor. The gushing of my native brooks, the _sough_ of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly. It did not bring me to rest; yet _towards_ rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again. I have been here since September evidently another little "chapter" or paragraph, _not_ altogether inert, is getting forward. But I must not speak of these things. How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak: not here. Pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me: if I can (in all senses) _rightly hold my peace,_ I think much will yet be well with me. SILENCE is the great thing I worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon. Let a man know rightly how to hold his peace. I love to repeat to myself, "Silence is of Eternity." Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far, far away! I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of money to get "food and warmth" with, I would shake the mud of London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more. Perhaps it is better as it is. But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of "Silence") one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news. There is a man here called John Sterling (_Reverend_ John of the Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again. This Sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive. Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and others, my heart loves the man. He is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to _preach,_ to preach peace, were it only the spent _echo_ of a peace once preached. He is still only about thirty; young; and I think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps. Do you ever read _Blackwood?_ This John Sterling is the "New Contributor" whom Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month "Crystals from a Cavern," &c., which it is well worth your while to see. Well, and what then, cry you?--Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little Book _Nature_ lying here; and, across a whole _silva silvarum_ of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart,--and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to Madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors have ordered him. This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by God's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us: call you that nothing? And so now by a direct transition I am got to the _Oration._ My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. It was long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a _man's_ voice, and I _have_ a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have _wept_ to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart;--I said to my wife, "There, woman!" She read; and returned, and charges me to return for answer, "that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent." My brave Emerson! And all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the "vociferous platitude" dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of Thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, "Yes, I _am_ here too." Miss Martineau tells me, "Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad." Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a _fearful_ work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest. O for God's sake _keep yourself still quiet!_ Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is _not_ it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and one's left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper;--poor Cooper, he is _down in it;_ and had a climbing faculty too. Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and God speed you well! My space is done. And so adieu, for this time. You must write soon again. My copy of the _Oration_ has never come: how is this? I could dispose of a dozen well.--They say I am to lecture again in Spring, _Ay de mi!_ The "Book" is babbled about sufficiently in several dialects: Fraser wants to print my scattered Reviews and Articles; a pregnant sign. Teufelsdrockh to precede. The man "screamed" once at the name of it in a very musical manner. He shall not print a line; unless he give me money for it, more or less. I have had enough of printing for one while,--thrown into "magnetic sleep" by it! Farewell my brother. --T. Carlyle O. Rich, it seems, is in Spain. His representative assured me, some weeks since, that the Account was now sent. There is an Article on Sir W. Scott: shocking; invitissima Minerva!* ---------- *Carlyle's article on Scott published in the _London and Westminster Review,_ No. 12. Reprinted in his _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._ ---------- Miss Martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and your Lady: her words were kinder than I have room for here.--Can you not, in defect or delay of Letter, send me a Massachusetts Newspaper? I think it costs little or almost nothing now; and I shall know your hand. XX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 9 February, 1838 My Dear Friend,--It is ten days now--ten cold days--that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to write before. I have just finished--Wednesday evening--a course of lectures which I ambitiously baptized "Human Culture," and read once a week to the curious in Boston. I could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week's stated scribbling. Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear. Your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy,--fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge,-- fine things from CARLYLE. Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle's friend. What has life better to offer than such tidings? You may suppose I went directly and got me _Blackwood,_ and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;--a species of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance. I found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to love him very much. In this romancing of the gentle affections we are children evermore. We forget the age of life, the barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance; and I have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas and conditions--and meet at last. I heartily pray that the Sea and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a Voyager so kind and noble. For the _Oration,_ I am so elated with your goodwill that I begin to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the praise is not good on Parnassus but only in friendship. I sent it diffidently (I did send it through bookselling Munroe) to you, and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations. Yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a month. A new edition is now printing, and I will send you some copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read. I have a little budget of news myself. I hope you had my letter --sent by young Sumner--saying that we meant to print the _French Revolution_ here for the Author's benefit. It was published on the 25th of December. It is published at my risk, the booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies I can get subscriptions for. All the rest they are to sell and to have twenty percent on the retail price for their commission. The selling price of the book is $2.50; the cost of a copy, $1.26; the bookseller's commission, 50 cts.; so that T.C. only gains 74 cts. on each copy they sell. But we have two hundred subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of freight. You ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in terror of the Philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to the economical Public. We printed one thousand copies: of these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks; and Brown the bookseller talks, as I think, much too modestly, of getting rid of the whole edition in one year. I say six months. The printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months from the day of publication; and I hope the settlement will be the final one. And I confide in sending you seven hundred dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers in the West. Yet, I own, I shake a little at the thought of the bookseller's account. Whenever I have seen that species of document, it was strange how the hopefulest ideal dwindled away to a dwarfish actual. But you may be assured I shall on this occasion summon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion. The book has the best success with the best. Young men say it is the only history they have ever read. The middle-aged and the old shake their heads, and cannot make anything of it. In short, it has the success of a book which, as people have not fashioned, has to fashion the people. It will take some time to win all, but it wins and will win. I sent a notice of it to the _Christian Examiner,_ but the editor sent it all back to me except the first and last paragraphs; those he printed. And the editor of the _North American_ declined giving a place to a paper from another friend of yours. But we shall see. I am glad you are to print your _Miscellanies;_ but--forgive our Transatlantic effrontery--we are beforehand of you, and we are already selecting a couple of volumes from the same, and shall print them on the same plan as the _History,_ and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again. I surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection but that I had no choice. If I waited, the bookseller would have done it himself, and carried off the profit. I sent you (to Kennet) a copy of the _French Revolution._ I regret exceedingly the printer's blunder about the numbering the Books in the volumes, but he had warranted me in a literal, punctual reprint of the copy without its leaving his office, and I trusted him. I am told there are many errors. I am going to see for myself. I have filled my paper, and not yet said a word of how many things. You tell me how ill was Mrs. C., and you do not tell me that she is well again. But I see plainly that I must take speedily another sheet. I love you always. --R.W. Emerson XXI. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 12 March, 1838 My Dear Friend,--Here in a bookseller's shop I have secured a stool and corner to say a swift benison. Mr. Bancroft told me that the presence of English Lord Gosford in town would give me a safe conveyance of pamphlets to you, so I send some _Orations_ of which you said so kind and cheering words. Give them to any one who will read them. I have written names in three. You have, I hope, got the letter sent nearly a month ago, giving account of our reprint of the _French Revolution,_ and have received a copy of the same. I learn from the bookseller today that six hundred and fifty copies are sold, and the book continues to sell. So I hope that our settlement at the end of six months will be final, or nearly so. I had nearly closed my agreement the other day with a publisher for the emission of _Carlyle's Miscellanies,_ when just in the last hour comes word from E.G. Loring that he has an authentic catalogue from the Bard himself. Now I have that, and could wish Loring had communicated his plan to me at first, or that I had bad wit enough to have undertaken this matter long ago and conferred with you. I designed nothing for you or your friends; but merely a lucrative book for our daily market that would have yielded a pecuniary compensation to you, such as we are all bound to make, and have bought our Socrates a cloak. Loring contemplated something quite different,--a "Complete Works," etc.,--and now clamors for the same thing, and I do not know but I shall have to gratify him and others at the risk of injury to this my vulgar hope of dollars,--that innate idea of the American mind. This I shall settle in a few days. No copyright can be secured here for an English book unless it contain original matter: But my moments are going, and I can only promise to write you quickly, at home and at leisure, for I have just been reading the _History_ again with many, many thoughts, and I revere, wonder at, and love you. --R. Waldo Emerson XXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 16 March, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Your letter through Sumner was sent by him from Paris about a month ago; the man himself has not yet made his appearance, or been heard of in these parts: he shall be very welcome to me, arrive when he will. The February letter came yesterday, by direct conveyance from Dartmouth. I answer it today rather than tomorrow; I may not for long have a day freer than this. _Fronte capillata, post est occasio calva:_ true either in Latin or English! You send me good news, as usual. You have been very brisk and helpful in this business of the _Revolution_ Book, and I give you many thanks and commendations. It will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the _number_ of the coins, whether seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the _first_ cash I realize for that piece of work,--Angle-land continuing still _in_solvent to me! Well, it is a wide Motherland we have here, or are getting to have, from Bass's Straits all round to Columbia River, already almost circling the Globe: it must be hard with a man if somewhere or other he find not some one or other to take his part, and stand by him a little! Blessings on you, my brother: nay, your work is already twice blessed.--I believe after all, with the aid of my Scotch thrift, I shall not be absolutely thrown into the streets here, or reduced to borrow, and become the slave of somebody, for a morsel of bread. Thank God, no! Nay, of late I begin entirely to despise that whole matter, so as I never hitherto despised it: "Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary that hast chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in the Devil's name, let us see what is in thee! Will the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years of it, quail before _thee?_" Better, however, is my good pious Mother's version of it: "They cannot take God's Providence from thee; thou hast never wanted yet."* ---------- * In his Diary, May 9, 1838, Emerson wrote: "A letter this morning from T. Carlyle. How should he be so poor? It is the most creditable poverty I know of." ---------- But to go on with business; and the republication of books in that Transoceanic England, New and improved Edition of England. In January last, if I recollect right, Miss Martineau, in the name of a certain Mr. Loring, applied to me for a correct List of all my fugitive Papers; the said Mr. Loring meaning to publish them for my behoof. This List she, though not without solicitation, for I had small hope in it, did at last obtain, and send, coupled with a request from me that you should be consulted in the matter. Now it appears you had of yourself previously determined on something of the same sort, and probably are far on with the printing of your Two select volumes. I confess myself greatly better pleased with it on that footing than on another. Who Mr. Loring may be I know not, with any certainty, at first hand; but who Waldo Emerson is I do know; and more than one god from the machine is not necessary. I pray you, thank Mr. Loring for his goodness towards me (his intents are evidently charitable and not wicked); but consider yourself as in nowise bound at all by that blotted Paper he has, but do the best you can for me, consulting with him or not taking any counsel just as you see to be fittest on the spot. And so Heaven prosper you, both in your "aroused Yankee" state, and in all others;--and let us for the present consider that we have enough about Books and Guineas. I must add, however, that Fraser and I have yet made no bargain. We found, on computing, that there would be five good volumes, including _Teufelsdrockh._ For an edition of Seven hundred and Fifty I demanded L50 a volume, and Fraser refused: the poor man then fell dangerously ill, and there could not be a word farther said on the subject; till very lately, when it again became possible, but has not yet been put in practice. All the world cries out, Why _do you_ publish with Fraser? "Because my soul is sick of Booksellers, and of trade, and deception, and 'need and greed' altogether; and this poor Fraser, not worse than the rest of them, has in some sort grown less hideous to me by custom." I fancy, however, either Fraser will publish these things before long; or some Samaritan here will take me to some bolder brother of the trade that will. Great Samuel Johnson assisted at the beginning of Bibliopoly; small Thomas Carlyle assists at the ending of it: both are sorrowful seasons for a man. For the rest, people here continue to receive that _Revolution_ very much as you say they do _there:_ I am right well quit of it; and the elderly gentlemen on both sides of the water may take comfort, they will not soon have to suffer the like again. But really England is wonderfully changed within these ten years; the old gentlemen all shrunk into nooks, some of them even voting with the young.--The American ill-printed Two and-a-half-dollars Copy shall, for Emerson's sake, be welcomest to me of all. Kennet will send it when it comes. The _Oration_ did arrive, with my name on it, one snowy night in January. It is off to Madeira; probably there now. I can dispose of a score of copies to good advantage. Friend Sterling has done the best of all his things in the current _Blackwood,_-- "Crystals from a Cavern,"--which see. He writes kind things of you from Madeira, in expectation of the Speech. I will gratify him with your message; he is to be here in May; better, we hope, and in the way towards safety. Miss Martineau has given you a luminous section in her new Book about America; you are one of the American "Originals,"--the good Harriet! And now I have but one thing to add and to repeat: Be quiet, be quiet! The fire that is in one's own stomach is enough, without foreign bellows to blow it ever and anon. My whole heart shudders at the thrice-wretched self-combustion into which I see all manner of poor paper-lanterns go up, the wind of "popularity" puffing at them, and nothing left erelong but ashes and sooty wreck. It is sad, most sad. I shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer's hodbearer rather. O the "cabriolets, neatflies," and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor Mrs. Rigmarole to the Devil!*--As for me, I continue doing as nearly nothing as I can manage. I decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a London rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; a London dinner makes me sicker for a week, and I say often, It is better to be even dull than to be witty, better to be silent than to speak. -------- * This sentence is a variation on one at the beginning of the article on Scott. -------- Curious: your Course of Lectures "on Human Culture" seems to be on the very subject I am to discourse upon here in May coming; but I am to call it "on the History of Literature," and _speak_ it, not write it. While you read this, I shall be in the agonies! Ah me! often when I think of the matter, how my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue, and by what bayonets of Necessity clapt to my back I am driven into that Lecture-room, and in what mood, and ordered to speak or die, I feel as if my only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering! But that, clearly, will not do. Then again I think it is perhaps better so; who knows? At all events, we will try what is in this Lecturing in London. If something, well; if nothing, why also well. But I do want to get out of these coils for a tune. My Brother is to be home again in May; if he go back to Italy, if our Lecturing proved productive, why might we not all set off thitherward for the winter coming? There is a dream to that effect. It would suit my wife, too: she was alarmingly weak this time twelvemonth; and I can only yet tell you that she is stronger, not strong: she has not ventured out except at midday, and rarely then, since Autumn last; she sits here patiently waiting Summer, and charges me to send you her love.--America also always lies in the background: I do believe, if I live long, I shall get to Concord one day. Your wife must love me. If the little Boy be a well-behaved fellow, he shall ride on my back yet: if not, tell him I will have nothing to do with him, the riotous little imp that he is. And so God bless you always, my dear friend! Your affectionate, --T. Carlyle XXIII. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 10 May, 1838 My Dear Friend,--Yesterday I had your letter of March. It quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you. If it had come earlier I should have been confirmed in my original purpose of publishing _Select Miscellanies of T.C._ As it is, we are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900 pages) of the papers as they stand in your list. And now I find we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth article. I regret it, because this book will not embrace those papers I chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more. But Loring is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of Nile. I, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the readers we should publish _from the last_ backwards, beginning with the paper on Scott, which has had the best reception ever known. Carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most austere Seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation by applauding this review. I have agreed with the bookseller publishing the _Miscellanies_ that he is to guarantee to you one dollar on every copy he sells; and you are to have the total profit on every copy subscribed for. The retail price [is] to be $2.50. The cost of the work is not yet precisely ascertained. The work will probably appear in six or seven weeks. We print one thousand copies. So whenever it is sold you shall have one thousand dollars. ---------- * Printed in the _Athenaeum,_ July 8, 1882. ---------- The _French Revolution_ continues to find friends and purchasers. It has gone to New Orleans, to Nashville, to Vicksburg. I have not been in Boston lately, but have determined that nearly or quite eight hundred copies should be gone. On the 1st of July I shall make up accounts with the booksellers, and I hope to make you the most favorable returns. I shall use the advice of Barnard, Adams, & Co. in regard to remittances. When you publish your next book I think you must send it out to me in sheets, and let us print it here contemporaneously with the English edition. The _eclat_ of so new a book would help the sale very much. But a better device would be, that you should embark in the "Victoria" steamer, and come in a fortnight to New York, and in twenty-four hours more to Concord. Your study arm-chair, fireplace, and bed, long vacant, auguring expect you. Then you shall revise your proofs and dictate wit and learning to the New World. Think of it in good earnest. In aid of your friendliest purpose, I will set down some of the facts. I occupy, or _improve,_ as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six percent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend,_ because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year.--But my story is too long already. God grant that you will come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife's and my mother's nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to blooming health. My wife sends to her this message: "Come, and I will be to you a sister." What have you to do with Italy? Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West. Come and live with me a year, and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years (when the _History_ has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you. I gladly hear what you say of Sterling. I am foolish enough to be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man I have never seen, and who has not seen me. I have not yet got the _Blackwood_ for March, which I long to see, but the other three papers I have read with great satisfaction. They lie here on my table. But he must get well. As to Miss Martineau, I know not well what to say. Meaning to do me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of justice) she does me a great annoyance,--to take away from me my privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time) into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. I was ashamed to read, and am ashamed to remember. Yet, as you see her, I would not be wanting in gratitude to a gifted and generous lady who so liberally transfigures our demerits. So you shall tell her, if you please, that I read all her book with pleasure but that part, and if ever I shall travel West or South, I think she has furnished me with the eyes. Farewell, dear wise man. I think your poverty honorable above the common brightness of that thorn-crown of the great. It earns you the love of men and the praise of a thousand years. Yet I hope the angelical Beldame, all-helping, all-hated, has given you her last lessons, and, finding you so striding a proficient, will dismiss you to a hundred editions and the adoration of the booksellers. --R.W. Emerson I have never heard from Rich, who, you wrote, had sent his account to me. Let him direct to me at Concord. A young engineer in Cambridge, by name McKean,* volunteers his services in correcting the proofs of the _Miscellanies,_--and he has your errata,--for the love of the reading. Shall we have anthracite coal or wood in your chamber? My old mother is glad you are coming. ----------- * The late Mr. Henry S. McKean, a son of Professor McKean, and a graduate of Harvard College in 1828. ----------- XXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 15 June, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Our correspondence has fallen into a raveled state; which would doubtless clear itself could I afford to wait for your next Letter, probably tumbling over the Atlantic brine about this very moment: but I cannot afford to wait; I must write straightway. Your answer to this will bring matters round again. I have had two irregular Notes of your writing, or perhaps three; two dated March, one by Mr. Bancroft's Parcel,-- bringing Twelve _Orations_ withal; then some ten days later, just in this very time, another Note by Mr. Sumner, whom I have not yet succeeded in seeing, though I have attempted it, and hope soon to do it. The Letter he forwarded me from Paris was acknowledged already, I think. And now if the Atlantic will but float me in safe that other promised Letter! I got your American _French Revolution_ a good while ago. It seems to me a very pretty Book indeed, wonderfully so for the money; neither does it seem what we can call _incorrectly_ printed so far as I have seen; compared with the last _Sartor_ it is correctness itself. Many thanks to you, my Friend, and much good may it do us all! Should there be any more reprinting, I will request you to rectify at least the three following errors, copied out of the English text indeed; nay, mark them in your own New-English copy, whether there be reprinting or not: Vol. I. p. 81, last paragraph, _for_ September _read_ August; Vol. II. p. 344, first line, _for_ book of prayer _read_ look of prayer; p. 357, _for_ blank _read_ black (2d paragraph, "all black "). And so _basta._ And let us be well content about this F.R. on both sides of the water, yours as well as mine. "Too many cooks"! the Proverb says: it is pity if this new apparition of a Mr. Loring should spoil the broth. But I calculate you will adjust it well and smoothly between you, some way or other. How you shall adjust it, or have adjusted it, is what I am practically anxious now to learn. For you are to understand that our English Edition has come to depend partly on yours. After long higgling with the foolish Fraser, I have quitted him, quite quietly, and given "Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street," the privilege of printing a small edition of _Teufelsdrockh_ (Five Hundred copies), with a prospect of the "Miscellaneous Writings" soon following. Saunders and Ottley are at least more reputable persons, they are useful to me also in the business of Lecturing. _Teufelsdrockh_ is at Press, to be out very soon; I will send you a correct copy, the only one in America I fancy. The enterprise here too is on the "half-profits" plan, which I compute generally to mean equal partition of the oyster-shells and a net result of zero. But the thing will be economically useful to me otherwise; as a publication of the "Miscellaneous" also would be; which latter, however, I confess myself extremely unwilling to undertake the trouble of for _nothing._ To me they are grown or fast growing _obsolete,_ these Miscellanies, for most part; if money lie not in them, what does lie for me? Now it strikes me you will infallibly edit these things, at least as well as I, and are doing it at any rate; your printing too would seem to be cheaper than ours: I said to Saunders and Ottley, Why not have two hundred or three hundred of this American Edition struck off with "London: Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street," on the title-page, and sent over hither in sheets at what price they have cost my friends yonder? Saunders of course threw cold water on this project, but was obliged to admit that there would be some profit in it, and that for me it would be far easier. The grand profit for me is that people would understand better what I mean, and come better about me if I lectured again, which seems the only way of getting any wages at all for me here at present. Pray meditate my project, if it be not already too late, hear what your Booksellers say about it, and understand that I will not in any case set to printing till I hear from you in answer to this. How my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the _Lecturing_ I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. It is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in _due_ time, for I had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. Poverty and Youth may do; Poverty and Age go badly together.--For the rest, I feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick,--ah me! The question as ever is: Rest. But then where? My Brother invites us to come to Rome for the winter; my poor sick Wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, Natty Leatherstocking's lodge in the Western Wood, I think, were welcomer still. I have a great mind, too, to run off and see my Mother, by the new railways. What we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. Write you always hither, till you hear otherwise. The _Orations_ were right welcome; my _Madeira_ one, returned thence with Sterling, was circulating over the West of England. Sterling and Harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. I have read, a second or third time. Robert Southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of _Lake_land: if he keep his word as to _me,_ he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "It is German Poetry given out in American Prose." Friend Emerson ought to be content;--and has now above all things, as I said, to _be in no haste._ Slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! Also his next work ought to be a _concrete_ thing; not _theory_ any longer, but _deed._ Let him "live it," as he says; that is the way to come to "painting of it." Geometry and the art of Design being once well over, take the brush, and _andar con Dios!_ Mrs. Child has sent me a Book, _Philothea,_ and a most magnanimous epistle. I have answered as I could. The Book is beautiful, but of a _hectic_ beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking. Such things grow not in the ground, on Mother Earth's honest bosom, but in hothouses,--Sentimental-Calvinist fire traceable underneath! Bancroft also is of the hothouse partly: I have a Note to send him by Sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about _hothouses!_ But, on the whole, men ought in New England, too to "swallow their formulas";* there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. Good speed to _him._ I had to send my Wife's love: she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to _struggle_ to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too. Adieu, dear Friend; may Good always be with you and yours. --T. Carlyle ----------- * This was the saying of the old Marquis de Mirabeau concerning his son, _Il a hume toutes les formules,_ and is used as a text by Carlyle in his article on Mirabeau. "Of inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye instead of a pair of spectacles merely'; that, seeing through the formulas of things and even 'making away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it!" ---------- XXV. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 30 July, 1838 My Dear Sir,--I am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small. I enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent. I shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet. An exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than I expected, yet, as far as I understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised: at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more Heaven and the subscribers may grant. I shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet. The _Miscellanies_ is published in two volumes, a copy of which goes to you immediately. Munroe tells me that two hundred and fifty copies of it are already sold. Writing in a bookshop, my dear friend, I have no power to say aught than that I am heartily and always, Yours, R. Waldo Emerson XXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 6 August, 1838 My Dear Friend,--The swift ships are slow when they carry our letters. Your letter dated the 15th of June arrived here last Friday, the 3d of August. That day I was in Boston, and I have only now got the information necessary to answer it. You have probably already learned from my letter sent by the "Royal William" (enclosing a bill of exchange for L50), that our first two volumes of the _Miscellanies_ are published. I have sent you a copy. The edition consists of one thousand copies. Of these five hundred are bound, five hundred remain in sheets. The title-pages, of course, are all printed alike; but the publishers assure me that new title-pages can be struck off at a trifling expense, with the imprint of Saunders and Ottley. The cost of a copy in sheets or "folded" (if that means somewhat more?) is eighty-nine cents; and bound is $1.15. The retail price is $2.50 a copy; and the author's profit, $1; and the bookseller's, 35 cents per copy; according to my understanding of the written contract. Here I believe you have all the material facts. I think there is no doubt that the book will sell very well here. But if, for the reasons you suggest, you wish any part of it, you can have it as soon as ships can bring your will. When you see your copy, you will perceive that we have printed half the matter. I should presently begin to print the remainder, inclusive of the Article on Lockhart's Scott, in two more volumes; but now I think I shall wait until I hear from you. Of those books we will print a larger edition, say twelve hundred and fifty or fifteen hundred, if you want a part of it in London. For I feel confident now that our public here is one thousand strong. Write me therefore _by the steam packet_ your wishes. I am sure you will like our edition. It has been most carefully corrected by two young gentlemen who successively volunteered their services, (the second when the first was called away,) and who, residing in Cambridge, where the book was printed, could easilier oversee it. They are Henry S. McBean, an engineer, and Charles Stearns Wheeler, a Divinity student,--working both for love of you. To one other gentleman I have brought you in debt, --Rev. Convers Francis* (brother of Mrs. Child), who supplied from his library all the numbers of the _Foreign Review_ from which we printed the work. We could not have done without his books, and he is a noble-hearted man, who rejoices in you. I have sent to all three copies of the work as from you, and I shall be glad if you will remember to sanction this expressly in your next letter. ---------- * This worthy man and lover of good books was, from 1842 till his death in 1863, Professor in the Divinity School of Harvard University. ---------- Thanks for the letter: thanks for your friendliest seeking of friends for the poor _Oration._ Poor little pamphlet, to have gone so far and so high! I am ashamed. I shall however send you a couple more of the thin gentry presently, maugre all your hopes and cautions. I have written and read a kind of sermon to the Senior Class of our Cambridge Theological School a fortnight ago; and an address to the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College;* for though I hate American pleniloquence, I cannot easily say No to young men who bid me speak also. And both these are now in press. The first I hear is very offensive. I will now try to hold my tongue until next winter. But I am asked continually when you will come to Boston. Your lectures are boldly and joyfully expected by brave young men. So do not forget us: and if ever the scale-beam trembles, I beseech you, let the love of me decide for America. I will not dare to tease you on a matter of so many relations, and so important, and especially as I have written out, I believe, my requests in a letter sent two or three months ago,--but I must see you somewhere, somehow, may it please God! I grieve to hear no better news of your wife. I hoped she was sound and strong ere this, and can only hope still. My wife and I send her our hearty love. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson ----------- * The Address at the Cambridge Divinity School was delivered on the 15th of July, and that at Dartmouth College on the 24th of the same month. The title of the latter was "Literary Ethics." Both are reprinted in Emerson's _Miscellanies._ These remarkable discourses excited deep interest and wide attention. They established Emerson's position as the leader of what was known as the Transcendental movement. They were the expressions of his inmost convictions and his matured thought. The Address at the Divinity School gave rise to a storm of controversy which did not disturb the serenity of its author. "It was," said Theodore Parker, "the noblest, the most inspiring strain I ever listened to." To others it seemed "neither good divinity nor good sense." The Address at Dartmouth College set forth the high ideals of intellectual life with an eloquence made irresistible by the character of the speaker. From this time Emerson's influence upon thought in America was acknowledged. ---------- XXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, (Annandale, Scotland) 25 September, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--There cannot any right answer be written you here and now; yet I must write such answer as I can. You said, "by steamship"; and it strikes me with a kind of remorse, on this my first day of leisure and composure, that I have delayed so long. For you must know, this is my Mother's house,--a place to me unutterable as Hades and the Land of Spectres were; likewise that my Brother is just home from Italy, and on the wing thitherward or somewhither swiftly again; in a word, that all is confusion and flutter with me here,--fit only for _silence!_ My Wife sent me off hitherward, very sickly and unhappy, out of the London dust, several weeks ago; I lingered in Fifeshire, I was in Edinburgh, in Roxburghshire; have some calls to Cumberland, which I believe I must refuse; and prepare to creep homeward again, refreshed in health, but with a head and heart all seething and tumbling (as the wont is, in such cases), and averse to pens beyond all earthly implements. But my Brother is off for Dumfries this morning; you before all others deserve an hour of my solitude. I will abide by business; one must write about that. Your Bill and duplicate of a Bill for L50, with the two Letters that accompanied them, you are to know then, did duly arrive at Chelsea; and the larger Letter (of the 6th of August) was forwarded to me hither some two weeks ago. I had also, long before that, one of the friendliest of Letters from you, with a clear and most inviting description of the Concord Household, its inmates and appurtenances; and the announcement, evidently authentic, that an apartment and heart's welcome was ready there for my Wife and me; that we were to come quickly, and stay for a twelvemonth. Surely no man has such friends as I. We ought to say, May the Heavens give us thankful hearts! For, in truth, there are blessings which do, like sun-gleams in wild weather, make this rough life beautiful with rainbows here and there. Indicating, I suppose, that there is a Sun, and general Heart of Goodness, behind all that;--for which, as I say again, let us be thankful evermore. My Wife says she received your American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a _Dante,_ or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler the well- meant Book is, the more "pathetic" is the whole transaction: and so we will go on, fuller than ever of "desperate hope" (if you know what that is), with a feeling one would not give and could not get for several money-bags; and say or think, Long live true friends and Emersons, and (in Scotch phrase) "May ne'er waur be amang us!"--I will buy something permanent, I think, out of this L50, and call it either _Ebenezer_ or _Yankee-doodle-doo._ May good be repaid you manifold, my kind Brother! may good be ever with you, my kind Friends all! But now as to this edition of the _Miscellanies_ (poor things), I really think my Wife is wisest, who says I ought to leave you altogether to your own resources with it, America having an art of making money out of my Books which England is unfortunately altogether without. Besides, till I once see the Two Volumes now under way, and can let a Bookseller see them, there could no bargain be made on the subject. We will let it rest there, therefore. Go on with your second Two Volumes, as if there were no England extant, according to your own good judgment. When I get to London, I will consult some of the blockheads with the Book in my hand: if we do want Two Hundred copies, you can give us them with a trifling loss. It is possible they may make some better proposal about an Edition here: that depends on the fate of _Sartor_ here, at present trying itself; which I have not in the least ascertained. For the present, thank as is meet all friends in your world that have interested themselves for me. Alas! I have nothing to give them but thanks. Henry McKean, Charles Wheeler, Convers Francis; these Names shall, if it please Heaven, become Persons for me, one day. Well!--But I will say nothing more. That too is of the things on which all Words are poor to Silence. Good to the Good and Kind! A Letter from me must have crossed that _descriptive_ Concord one, on the Ocean, I think. Our correspondence is now standing on its feet. I will write to you again, whether I hear from you or not, so soon as my hand finds its cunning again in London,--so soon as I can see there what is to be done or said. All goes decidedly better, I think. My Wife was and is much healthier than last year, than in any late year. I myself get visibly quieter my preternatural _Meditations in Hades,_ apropos of this Annandale of mine, are calm compared with those of last year. By another Course of Lectures I have a fair prospect of living for another season; nay, people call it a "new profession" I have devised for myself, and say I may live by it as many years as I like. This too is partly the fruit of my poor Book; one should not say that it was worth nothing to me even in money. Last year I fancied my Audience mainly the readers of it; drawn round me, in spite of many things, by force of it. Let us be content. I have Jesuits, Swedenborgians, old Quakeresses, _omne cum Proteus,_ --God help me, no man ever had so confused a public!--I salute you, my dear Friend, and your hospitable circle. May blessings be on your kind household, on your kind hearts! --T. Carlyle A copy of the English _Teufelsdrockh_ has lain with your name on it these two months in Chelsea; waiting an opportunity. It is worth nothing to you: a dingy, ill-managed edition; but correct or nearly correct as to printing; it is right that such should be in your hands in case of need. The New England Pamphlets will be greedily expected. More than one inquires of me, Has that Emerson of yours written nothing else? And I have lent them the little Book _Nature,_ till it is nearly thumbed to pieces. Sterling is gone to Italy for the winter since I left town; swift as a flash! I cannot teach him the great art of _sitting still;_ his fine qualities are really like to waste for want of that. I read your paragraph to Miss Martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. But I doubt, I doubt, O Ralph Waldo Emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her,--thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! In truth there _are_ bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. Patience and shuffle the cards. XXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 October, 1838 My Dear Friend,--I am quite uneasy that I do not hear from you. On the 21st of July I wrote to you and enclosed a remittance of L50 by a Bill of Exchange on Baring Brothers, drawn by Chandler, Howard, & Co., which was sent in the steamer "Royal William." On the 2d of August I received your letter of inquiry respecting our edition of the _Miscellanies,_ and wrote a few days later in reply, that we could send you out two or three hundred copies of our first two volumes, in sheets, at eighty-nine cents per copy of two volumes, and the small additional price of the new title- page. I said also that I would wait until I heard from you before commencing the printing of the last two volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ and, if you desired it, would print any number of copies with a title-page for London. This letter went in a steamer--he "Great Western" probably--about the 10th or 12th of August. (Perhaps I misremember the names [of the steamers], and the first should be last.) I have heard nothing from you since. I trust my letters have not miscarried. (A third was sent also by another channel inclosing a duplicate of the Bill of Exchange.) With more fervency, I trust that all goes well in the house of my friend,--and I suppose that you are absent on some salutary errand of repairs and recreation. _Use, I pray you, your earliest_ hour in certifying me of the facts. One word more in regard to business. I believe I expressed some surprise, in the July letter, that the booksellers should have no greater balance for us at this settlement. I have since studied the account better, and see that we shall not be disappointed in the year of obtaining at least the sum first promised,--seven hundred and sixty dollars; but the whole expense of the edition is paid out of the copies first sold, and our profits depend on the last sales. The edition is almost gone, and you shall have an account at the end of the year. In a letter within a twelvemonth I have urged you to pay us a visit in America, and in Concord. I have believed that you would come one day, and do believe it. But if, on your part, you have been generous and affectionate enough to your friends here--or curious enough concerning our society--to wish to come, I think you must postpone, for the present, the satisfaction of your friendship and your curiosity. At this moment I would not have you here, on any account. The publication of my _Address to the Divinity College_ (copies of which I sent you) has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my "infidelity," "pantheism," and "atheism." The writers warn all and sundry against me, and against whatever is supposed to be related to my connection of opinion, &c.; against Transcendentalism, Goethe, and _Carlyle._ I am heartily sorry to see this last aspect of the storm in our washbowl. For, as Carlyle is nowise guilty, and has unpopularities of his own, I do not wish to embroil him in my parish differences. You were getting to be a great favorite with us all here, and are daily a greater with the American public, but just now, _in Boston,_ where I am known as your editor, I fear you lose by the association. Now it is indispensable to your right influence here, that you should never come before our people as one of a clique, but as a detached, that is, universally associated man; so I am happy, as I could not have thought, that you have not yielded yourself to my entreaties. Let us wait a little until this foolish clamor be overblown. My position is fortunately such as to put me quite out of the reach of any real inconvenience from the panic-strikers or the panic-struck; and, indeed, so far as this uneasiness is a necessary result of mere inaction of mind, it seems very clear to me that, if I live, my neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, and perhaps harder to bear. The article on German Religious Writers in the last _Foreign Quarterly Review_ suits our meridian as well as yours; as is plainly signified by the circumstance that our newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade and _no more._ Who wrote that paper? And who wrote the paper on Montaigne in the _Westminster?_ I read with great satisfaction the Poems and Thoughts of Archaeus in _Blackwood._ "The Sexton's Daughter" is a beautiful poem: and I recognize in them all _the_ Soul, with joy and love. Tell me of the author's health and welfare; or, will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand? And tell me of yourself, what task of love and wisdom the Muses impose; and what happiness the good God sends to you and yours. I hope your wife has not forgotten me. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson The _Miscellanies,_ Vols. I. and II., are a popular book. About five hundred copies have been sold. The second article on Jean Paul works with might on the inner man of young men. I hate to write you letters on business and facts like this. There are so few Friends that I think some time I shall meet you nearer, for I love you more than is fit to say. W.H. Channing has written a critique on you, which I suppose he has sent you, in the _Boston Review._ XXIX. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 7 November, 1838 My Dear Friend,--It is all right; all your Letters with their inclosures have arrived in due succession: the last, inquiring after the fate of the others, came this morning. I was in Scotland, as you partly conjecture; I wrote to you already (though not without blamable delay), from my Mother's house in Annandale, a confused scrawl, which I hope has already got to hand, and quieted your kind anxieties. I am as well as usual in health, my Wife better than usual; nothing is amiss, except my negligence and indolence, which has put you to this superfluous solicitude on my account. However, I have an additional Letter by it; you must pardon me, you must not grudge me that undeserved pleasure, the reward of evil-doing. I may well say, you are a blessing to me on this Earth; no Letter comes from you with other than good tidings,--or can come while you live there to love me. The Bill was thrust duly into Baring's brass slit "for acceptance," on my return hither some three weeks ago; and will, no doubt, were the days of grace run, come out in the shape of Fifty Pounds Sterling; a very curious product indeed. Do you know what I think of doing with it? _Dyspepsia,_ my constant attendant in London, is incapable of help in my case by any medicine or appliance except one only, Riding on horseback. With a good horse to whirl me over the world for two hours daily, I used to keep myself supportably well. Here, the maintenance of a Horse far transcends my means; yet it seems hard I should not for a little while be in a kind of approximate health in this Babylon where I have my bread to seek it is like swimming with a millstone round your neck,--ah me! In brief, I am about half resolved to buy myself a sharp little nag with Twenty of these Transatlantic Pounds, and ride him till the other Thirty be eaten: I will call the creature "Yankee," and kind thoughts of those far away shall be with me every time I mount him. Will not that do? My Wife says it is the best plan I have had for years, and strongly urges it on. My kind friends! As to those copies of the Carlyle Miscellanies, I unfortunately still can say nothing, except what was said in the former (Scotch) letter, that you must proceed in the business with an eye to America and not to us. My Booksellers, Saunders and Ottley, have no money for me, no definite offer in money to make for those Two Hundred copies, of which you seem likely to make money if we simply leave them alone. I have asked these Booksellers, I have asked Fraser too: What will you _give me in ready money_ for Two Hundred and Fifty copies of that work, sell it afterwards as you can? They answer always, We must see it first. Now the copy long ago sent me has never come to hand; I have asked for it of Kennet, but without success; I have nothing for it but to wait the winds and chances. Meanwhile Saunders and Ottley want forsooth a _Sketches of German Literature_ in three volumes: then a _Miscellanies_ in three volumes: that is their plan of publishing an English edition; and the outlook they hold out for me is certain trouble in this matter, and recompense entirely uncertain. I think on the whole it is extremely likely I shall apply to you for Two Hundred and Fifty copies (that is their favorite number) of these four volumes, (nay, if it be of any moment, you can bind me down to it _now,_ and take it for sure,) but I cannot yet send you the title-page; no bookseller purchasing till "we see it first." But after all, will it suit America to print an _unequal_ number of your two pairs of volumes? Do not the two together make one work? On the whole, consider that I shall in all likelihood want Two Hundred and Fifty copies, and consider it certain if that will serve the enterprise: we must leave it here today. I will stir in it now, however, and take no rest till in one way or other you do get a title-page from me, or some definite deliverance on the matter. O Athenians, what a trouble I _give,_ having _got_ your applauses! Kennet the Bookseller gave me yesterday (on my way to "the City" with that Brother of mine, the Italian Doctor who is here at present and a great lover of yours) ten copies of your Dartmouth Oration: we read it over dinner in a chop-house in Bucklersbury, amid the clatter of some fifty stand of knives and forks; and a second time more leisurely at Chelsea here. A right brave Speech; announcing, in its own way, with emphasis of full conviction, to all whom it may concern, that great forgotten truth, _Man is still man._ May it awaken a pulsation under the ribs of Death! I believe the time is come for such a Gospel. They must speak it out who have it,--with what audience there may be. I have given away two copies this morning; I will take care of the rest. Go on, and speed.--And now where is the heterodox Divinity one, which awakens such "tempest in a washbowl," brings Goethe, Transcendentalism, and Carlyle into question, and on the whole evinces "what [difference] New England also makes between _Pan_-theism and _Pot_-theism"? I long to see that; I expect to congratulate you on that too. Meanwhile we will let the washbowl storm itself out; and Emerson at Concord shall recognize it for a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. As to my share in it, grieve not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pottheism, Mydoxy, Thydoxy, are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon, which I avoid speaking of, decline listening to: _Live,_ for God's sake, with what Faith thou couldst get; leave off _speaking_ about Faith! Thou knowest it not. Be _silent,_ do not speak.--As to you, my friend, you are even to go on, giving still harder shocks if need be; and should I come into censure by means of you, there or here, think that I am proud of my company; that, as the boy Hazlitt said after hearing Coleridge, "I will go with that man"; or, as our wild Burns has it, "Wi' sic as he, where'er he be, May I be saved or damned!" Oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is! If it were not [for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be all-too lonely. This is nothing at all like the letter I meant to write you; but I will write again, I trust, in few days, and the first paragraph shall, if possible, hold all the business. I have much to tell you, which perhaps is as well not written. O that I did see you face to face! But the time shall come, if Heaven will. Why not you come over, since I cannot? There is a room here, there is welcome here, and two friends always. It must be done one way or the other. I will take, care of your messages to Sterling. He is in Florence; he was the Author of _Montaigne._* The _Foreign Quarterly_ Reviewer of _Strauss_ I take to be one Blackie, an Advocate in Edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine and other men's; I guess this, but I have not read the Article: the man Blackie is from Aberdeen, has been roaming over Europe, and carries more sail than ballast. Brother John, spoken of above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for Italy again, we expect, in few days, on a better appointment: know that you have a third friend in him under this roof,--a man who quarrels with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul of him. My Wife demanded to have "room for one line." What she is to write I know not, except it be what she has said, holding up the pamphlet, "Is it not a noble thing? None of them all but he," &c., &c. I will write again without delay when the stray volumes arrive; before that if they linger. Commend me to all the kind household of Concord: Wife, Mother, and Son. Ever yours, T. Carlyle --------- * See _ante,_ p. 184. Sterling's essay on Montaigne was his first contribution, in 1837, to the _London and Westminster Review._ It is reprinted in "Essays and Tales, by John Sterling, collected and edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius Charles Hare," London, 1848, Vol. I. p. 129. ---------- _"Forgotten you?"_ O, no indeed! If there were nothing else to remember you by, I should never forget the Visitor, who years ago in the Desert descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only _one_ day. When I think of America, it is of you,--neither Harriet Martineau nor any one else succeeds in giving me a more extended idea of it. When I wish to see America it is still you, and those that are yours. I read all that you write with an interest which I feel in no other writing but my Husband's,--or it were nearer the truth to say there is no other writing of living men but yours and his that I _can_ read. God Bless you and Weib and Kind. Surely I shall some day see you all. Your affectionate Jane Carlyle XXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 15 November, 1835 Dear Emerson,--Hardly above a week ago, I wrote you in immediate answer to some friendly inquiries produced by negligence of mine: the Letter is probably tumbling on the salt waves at this hour, in the belly of the "Great Western"; or perhaps it may be still on firm land waiting, in which case this will go along with it. I had written before out of Scotland a Letter of mere acknowledgment and postponement; you must have received that before now, I imagine. Our small piece of business is now become articulate, and I will despatch it in a paragraph. Pity my stupidity that I did not put the thing on this footing long ago! It never struck me till the other day that though no copy of our _Miscellanies_ would turn up for inspection here, and no Bookseller would bargain for a thing unseen, I myself might bargain, and leave their hesitations resting on their own basis. In fine, I have rejected all their schemes of printing _Miscellaneous Works_ here, printing _Sketches of German Literature,_ or printing anything whatever on the "half-profits system," which is like toilsomely scattering seed into the sea: and I settled yesterday with Fraser to give him the American sheets, and let them sell _themselves,_ on clear principles, or remain unsold if they like. I find it infinitely the best plan, and to all appearance the profitablest as to money that could have been devised for me. What you have to do therefore is to get Two Hundred and Fifty copies (_in sheets_) of the whole Four Volumes, so soon as the second two are printed, and have them, with the proper title- page, sent off hither to Fraser's address; the sooner the better. The American title-page, instead of "Boston," &c. at the bottom, will require to bear, in three lines "London: / James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, / 1839." Fraser is anxious that you should not spell him with a z; your man can look on the Magazine and beware. I suppose also you should print _labels_ for the backs of the four volumes, to be used by the _half_-binder; they do the books in that way here now: but if it occasion any difficulty, never mind this; it was not spoken of to Fraser, and is my own conjecture merely; the thing can be managed in various other ways. Two Hundred and Fifty copies, then, of the entire book: there is nothing else to be attended to that you do not understand as well as I. Fraser will announce it in his Magazine: the eager, select public will wait. Probably, there is no chance before the middle of March or so? Do not hurry yourselves, or at all change your rate for _us:_ but so soon as the work is ready in the course of Nature, the earliest conveyance to the Port of London will bring a little cargo which one will welcome with a strange feeling! I declare myself delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of romance and reality: fancy me riding on _Yankee_ withal, at the time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes bread for one beyond the great Ocean-stream, and how a poor man is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere. _Allah akbar!_ God is great; no saying truer than that.--And so now, by the blessing of Heaven, we will talk no more of business this day. My employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a long chapter; on which I could like so well to talk with you face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery. In these four years, so full of pain and toil, I seem to have lived four decades. By degrees, the creature gets accustomed to its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be of the same temperature with it. Ah me! I feel as if grown old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. And yet perhaps I am not old, only wearied, and there is a stroke or two of work in me yet. For the rest, the fret and agitation of this Babylon wears me down: it is the most unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction which no head can reconcile. Pain and poverty are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison: God deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! On the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as _rest?_ A sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be entirely cherubic, _all_ face and wings. "Mes enfans," said a French gentleman to the cherubs in the Picture, "Mes enfans, asseyez-vous?"--"Monseigneur," answer they, "il n'y a pas de quoi!" I rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that I _can_ sit.--But, after all, ought I not to be thankful? I positively can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing I had been for many years ambitious of to no purpose. I shall have to lecture again in spring, Heaven knows on what; it will be a wretched fever for me; but once through it there will be board wages for another year. The wild Ishmael can hunt in _this_ desert too, it would seem. I say, I will be thankful; and wait quietly what farther is to come, or whether anything farther. But indeed, to speak candidly, I do feel sometimes as if another Book were growing in me,--though I almost tremble to think of it. Not for this winter, O no! I will write an Article merely, or some such thing, and read trash if better be not. This, I do believe, is my horoscope for the next season: an Article on something about New-Year's-day (the Westminster Editor, a good- natured, admiring swan-goose from the North Country, will not let me rest); then Lectures; then--what? I am for some practical subject too; none of your pictures in the air, or _aesthetisches Zeug_ (as Mullner's wife called it, Mullner of the _Midnight Blade_): nay, I cannot get up the steam on any such best; it is extremely irksome as well as fruitless at present. In the next _Westminster Review,_ therefore, if you see a small scrub of a paper signed "S.P." on one Varnhagen a German, say that it is by "Simon Pure," or by "Scissars and Paste," or even by "Soaped Pig"--whom no man shall _catch!_ Truly it is a secret which you must not mention: I was driven to it by the Swan-goose above mentioned, not Mill but another. Let this suffice for my winter's history: may the summer be more productive. As for Concord and New England, alas! my Friend, I should but deface your Idyllion with an ugly contradiction, did I come in such mood as mine is. I am older in years than you; but in humor I am older by centuries. What a hope is in that ever young heart, cheerful, healthful as the morning! And as for me, you have no conception what a crabbed, sulky piece of sorrow and dyspepsia I am grown; and growing, if I do not draw bridle. Let me gather heart a little! I have not forgotten Concord or the West; no, it lies always beautiful in the blue of the horizon, afar off and yet attainable; it is a great possession to me; should it even never be attained. But I have got to consider lately that it is you who are coming hither first. That is the right way, is it not? New England is becoming more than ever part of Old England; why, you are nearer to us now than Yorkshire was a hundred years ago; this is literally a fact: you can come _without_ making your will. It is one of my calculations that all Englishmen from all zones and hemispheres will, for a good while yet, resort occasionally to the Mother- Babel, and see a thing or two there. Come if you dare; I said there was a room, house-room and heart-room, constantly waiting you here, and you shall see blockheads by the million. _Pickwick_ himself shall be visible; innocent young Dickens reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany-brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, "man of genius in the shape of a Cockney," is my near neighbor, full of quips and cranks, with good humor and no common sense. Old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, will work on you with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf-chin:--This is the Man, O Rogers, that wrote the German Poetry in American Prose; consider him well!--But whither am I running? My sheet is done! My Brother John returns again almost immediately to Italy. He has got appointed Traveling Doctor to a certain Duke of Buccleuch, the chief of our Scotch Dukes: an excellent position for him as far as externals go. His departure will leave me lonelier; but I must reckon it for the best: especially I must begin working. Harriet Martineau is coming hither this evening; with beautiful enthusiasm for the Blacks and others. She is writing a Novel. The first American book proved generally rather wearisome, the second not so; we have since been taught (not I) "How to observe." Suppose you and I promulgate a treatise next, "How to see"? The old plan was, to have a pair of _eyes _first of all, and then to open them: and endeavor with your whole strength to _look._ The good Harriet! But "God," as the Arabs say, "has given to every people a Prophet (or Poet) in its own speech": and behold now Unitarian mechanical Formalism was to have its Poetess too; and stragglings of genius were to spring up even through that like grass through a Macadam highway!--Adieu, my Friend, I wait still for your heterodox Speech; and love you always. --T. Carlyle An English _Sartor_ goes off to you this day; through Kennet, to C.C. Little and J. Brown of Boston; the likeliest conveyance. It is correctly printed, and that is all. Its fate here (the fate of the publication, I mean) remains unknown; "unknown and unimportant." XXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 December, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Almost the very day after my last Letter went off, the long-expected two volumes of _Miscellanies_ arrived. The heterodox pamphlet has never yet come to hand. I am now to write you again about that _Miscellany_ concern the fourth letter, I do believe; but it is confirmatory of the foregoing three, and will be the last, we may hope. Fraser is charmed with the look of your two volumes; declares them unsurpassable by art of his; and wishes (what is the main part of this message) that you would send his cargo in the _bound_ state, bound and lettered as these are, with the sole difference that the leaves be _not_ cut, or shaved on the sides, our English fashion being to have them _rough._ He is impatient that the Book were here; desires further that it be sent to the Port of London rather than another Port, and that it be packed in _boxes_ "to keep the covers of the volumes safe,"--all which I doubt not the Packers and the Shippers of New England have dexterity enough to manage for the best, without desire of his. If you have printed off nothing yet, I will desire for my own behoof that Two hundred and _Sixty_ be the number sent; I find I shall need some ten to give away: if your first sheet is printed off, let the number stand as it was. It would be an improvement if you could print our title-pages on paper a little stronger; that would stand ink, I mean: the fly leaves in the same, if you have such paper convenient; if not, not. Farther as to the matter of the title-page, it seems to me your Printer might give a bolder and a broader type to the words "Critical and Miscellaneous," and add after "Essays" with a colon (:), the line "Collected and Republished," with a colon also; then the "By," &c. "In Four Volumes, Vol. I.," &c. I mean that we want, in general, a little more ink and decisiveness: show your man the title-page of the English _French Revolution,_ or look at it your self, and you will know. R.W.E.'s "Advertisement," friendly and good, as all his dealings are to me ward, will of course be suppressed in the English copies. I see not that with propriety I can say anything by way of substitute: silence and the New England _imprint_ will tell the story as eloquently as there is need. For the rest you must tell Mr. Loring, and all men who had a hand in it along with you, that I am altogether right well pleased with this edition, and find it far beyond my expectation. To my two young Friends, Henry S. McKean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a _great_ service had I known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, "We think"s, &c., &c., common in Jeffrey's time in the _Edinburgh Review_) and London misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. It is _extremely_ correct printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. I have not the other _Articles_ by me at present; I think they are of themselves a little more correct; at all events there are nothing but _misprints_ to deal with;--the Editors, by this time, had got bound up to let me alone. In the _Life of Scott,_ fourth page of it (p. 296 of our edition), there is a sentence to be deleted. "It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know": out with this, for it is nonsense, and was marked for erasure in the manuscript, I dare say. I know with certainty no more at present. Fraser is to sell the Four Volumes at Two Guineas here. On studying accurately your program of the American mercantile method, I stood amazed to contrast it with our English one. The Bookseller here admits that he could, by diligent bargaining, get up such a book for something like the same cost or a _little_ more; but the "laws of the trade" deduct from the very front of the selling price--how much think you--_forty percent_ and odd, when your man has only _fifteen;_ for the mere act of vending! To cover all, they charge that enormous price. (A man, while I stood consulting with Fraser, came in and asked for Carlyle's _Revolution;_ they showed it him, he asked the price; and exclaimed, "Guinea and a half! I can get it from America for nine shillings!" and indignantly went his way; not without reason.) There are "laws of the trade" which ought to be _repealed;_ which I will take the liberty of contravening to all lengths by all opportunities--if I had but the power! But if this joint-stock American plan prosper, it will answer rarely. Fraser's first _French Revolution,_ for instance, will be done, he calculates, about New-Year's-day; and a second edition wanted; mine to do with what I like. If you in America wanted more also--? I leave you to think of this.--And now enough, enough! My Brother went from us last Tuesday; ought to be in Paris yesterday. I am yet writing nothing; feel forsaken, sad, sick, --not unhappy. In general Death seems beautiful to me; sweet and great. But Life also is beautiful, is great and divine, were it never to be joyful any more. I read Books, my wife sewing by me, with the light of a sinumbra, in a little apartment made snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all,--though many men love me rather, ungrateful that I am. My present book is _Horace Walpole;_ I get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. An old blind Schoolmaster in Annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, "But are ye sure _he's not a Dunce?_" It is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed (if we will candidly understand it) all else is presupposed in that. Horace Walpole is no dunce, not a fibre of him is duncish. Your Friend Sumner was here yesterday, a good while, for the first time: an ingenious, cultivated, courteous man; a little sensitive or so, and with no other fault that I discerned. He borrowed my copy of your Dartmouth business, and bound himself over to return with it soon. Some approve of that here, some condemn: my Wife and another lady call it better even than the former, I not so good. And now the Heterodox, the Heterodox, where is that? Adieu, my dear Friend. Commend me to the Concord Household; to the little Boy, to his Grandmother, and Mother, and Father; we must all meet some day,--or _some no-day_ then (as it shall please God)! My Wife heartily greets you all. Ever yours, T. Carlyle I sent your book, message, and address to Sterling; he is in Florence or Rome. Read the article _Simonides_ by him in the _London and Westminster_--brilliant prose, translations--wooden? His signature is L (Pounds Sterling!).--_Now_ you are to write _soon?_ I always forgot to tell you, there came long since two packages evidently in your hand, marked "One printed sheet," and "one Newspaper," for which the Postman demanded about Fifteen shillings: _rejected._ After considerable correspondence the Newspaper was again offered me at _ten pence;_ the _sheet_ unattainable altogether: "No," even at tenpence. The fact is, it was wrong wrapped, that Newspaper. Leave it open at the ends, and try me again, once; I think it will come almost gratis. Steam and Iron are making all the Planet into one Village.--A Mr. Dwight wrote to me about the dedicating of some German translations: _Yes._ What are they or he?*--Your _Sartor_ is off through Kennet. Could you send me two copies of the American _Life of Schiller,_ if the thing is fit for making a present of, and easy to be got? If not, do not mind it at all.--Addio! ------------- * Mr. John S. Dwight, whose volume of _Select Minor Poems from the German of Goethe and Schiller,_ published in 1839, was dedicated to Carlyle. It was the third volume of _Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, edited by George Ripley. Beside Mr. Dwight's own excellent versions, it contained translations by Mr. Bancroft, Dr. Hedge, Dr. Frothingham, and others. For many years Mr. Dwight rendered a notable public service as the editor of _Dwight's Journal of Music,_--a publication which did more than any other to raise and to maintain high the standard of musical taste and culture in America. --------- XXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 13 January, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I am not now in any Condition to write a letter, having neither the facts from the booksellers which you would know touching our future plans, nor yet a satisfactory account balanced and settled of our past dealings; and lastly, no time to write what I would say,--as my poor lectures are in full course, and absorb all my wits; but as the "Royal William" will not wait, and as I have a hundred pounds to send on account of the sales of the _French Revolution,_ I must steal a few minutes to send my salutation. I have received all your four good letters: and you are a good and generous man to write so many. Two came on the 2d and 3d of January, and the last on the 9th. If the bookselling Munroe had answered me yesterday, as he ought, I should be able to satisfy you as to the time when to expect our cargo of _Miscellanies._ The third and fourth volumes are now printing: 't is a fortnight since we began. You shall have two hundred and fifty copies,--I am not quite sure you can have more,--bound, and _entitled,_ and directed as you desire, at least according to the best ability of our printer as far as the typography is concerned, and we will speed the work as fast as we can; but as we have but a single copy of _Fraser's Magazine_--we do not get on rapidly. The _French Revolution_ was all sold more than a month since. We should be glad of more copies, but the bookseller thinks not of enough copies to justify a new edition yet. I should not be surprised, however, to see that some bold brother of the trade had undertaken it. Now, what does your question point at in reference to your new edition, asking "if we want more"? Could you send us out a part of your edition at American prices, and at the same time to your advantage? I wish I knew the precise answer to this question, then perhaps I could keep all pirates out of our bay. I shall convey in two days your message to Stearns Wheeler, who is now busy in correcting the new volumes. He is now Greek Tutor in Harvard College.*--Kindest thanks to Jane Carlyle for her generous remembrances, which I will study to deserve. Has the heterodoxy arrived in Chelsea, and quite destroyed us even in the charity of our friend? I am sorry to have worried you so often about the summer letter. Now am I your debtor four times. The parish commotion, too, has long ago subsided here, and my course of Lectures on "Human Life" finds a full attendance. I wait for the coming of the _Westminster,_ which has not quite yet arrived here, though I have seen the London advertisement. It sounds prosperously in my ear what you say of Dr. Carlyle's appointments. I was once very near the man in Rome, but did not see him. I will atone as soon as I can for this truncated epistle. You must answer it immediately, so far as to acknowledge the receipt of the enclosed bill of exchange, and soon I will send you the long promised _account_ of the _French Revolution,_ and also such moral account of the same as is over due. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson --------- * This promising young scholar edited with English notes the first American edition of Herodotus. He went to Europe to pursue his studies, and died, greatly regretted, at Rome, of a fever, in 1848. --------- XXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 February, 1859 My Dear Friend,--Your welcome little Letter, with the astonishing inclosure, arrived safe four days ago; right welcome, as all your Letters are, and bringing as these usually do the best news I get here. The miraculous draught of Paper I have just sent to a sure hand in Liverpool, there to lie till in due time it have ripened into a crop of a hundred gold sovereigns! On this subject, which gives room for so many thoughts, there is little that can be said, that were not an impertinence more or less. The matter grows serious to me, enjoins me to be silent and reflect. I will say, at any rate, there never came money into my hands I was so proud of; the promise of a blessing looks from the face of it; nay, it _will_ be _twice_ blessed. So I will ejaculate, with the Arabs, _Allah akbar!_ and walk silent by the shore of the many-sounding Babel-tumult, meditating on much. Thanks to the mysterious all-bounteous Guide of men, and to you my true Brother, far over the sea!--For the rest, I showed Fraser this Nehemiah document, and said I hoped he would blush very deep;--which indeed the poor creature did, till I was absolutely sorry for him. But now first as to this question, What I mean? You must know poor Fraser, a punctual but most pusillanimous mortal, has been talking louder and louder lately of a "second edition" here; whereupon, as labor-wages are not higher here than with you, and printing-work, if well bargained for, ought to be about the same price, it struck me that, as in the case of the _Miscellanies,_ so here inversely the supply of both the New and the Old England might be profitably combined. Whether aught can come of this, now that it is got close upon us, I yet know not. Fraser has only seventy-five copies left; but when these will be done his prophecy comprehends not,--"surely within the year"! For the present I have set him to ascertain, and will otherwise ascertain for myself, what the exact cost of _stereotyping_ the Book were, in the same letter and style as yours; it is not so much more than printing, they tell me: I should then have done with it forever and a day. You on your side, and we on ours, might have as many copies as were wanted for all time coming. This is, in these very days, under inquisition; but there are many points to be settled before the issue. I have not yet succeeded in finding a Bookseller of any fitness, but am waiting for one always. And even had I found such a one, I mean an energetic seller that would sell on other terms than forty percent for his trouble, it were still a question whether one ought to venture on such a speculation: "quitting the old highways," as I say, "in indignation at the excessive tolls, with hope that you will arrive cheaper in the steeple-chase way!" It is clear, however, that said highways are of the corduroy sort, said tolls an anomaly that must be remedied soon; and also that in all England there is no Book in a likelier case to adventure it with than this same,--which did not sell at all for two months, as I hear, which all Booksellers got terrified for, and which has crept along mainly by its own gravitation ever since. We will consider well, we shall see. You can understand that such a thing, for your market too, is in agitation; if any pirate step in before us in the meanwhile, we cannot help it. Thanks again for your swift attention to the _Miscellanies;_ poor Fraser is in great haste to see them; hoping for his forty- per-cent division of the spoil. If you have not yet got to the very end with your printing, I will add a few errata; if they come too late, never mind; they are of small moment.... This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont; and, as for my particular case, uses me not worse, but better, than of old. Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for me. For example, the other night, a massive portmanteau of Books, sent according to my written list, from the Cambridge University Library, from certain friends there whom I have never seen; a gratifying arrival. For we have no Library here, from which we can borrow books home; and are only in these weeks striving to get one:* think of that! The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine. The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where Fate tethers me in life! If Fate always tether me;--but if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of _Malebolge,_ and only visit it now and then! Yet perhaps it is the proper place after all, seeing all places are improper: who knows? Meanwhile I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself,--too rare a case of late. The ground of my existence is black as Death; too black, when all void too but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold and rainbow and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal I am very much of a fool.--Some people will have me write on _Cromwell,_ which I have been talking about. I do read on that and English subjects, finding that I know nothing and that nobody knows anything of that: but whether anything will come of it remains to be seen. Mill, the _Westminster_ friend, is gone in bad health to the Continent, and has left a rude Aberdeen Longear, a great admirer of mine too, with whom I conjecture I cannot act at all: so good-bye to that. The wisest of all, I do believe, were that I bought my nag _Yankee_ and set to galloping about the elevated places here! A certain Mr. Coolidge,** a Boston man of clear iron visage and character, came down to me the other day with Sumner; he left a newspaper fragment, containing "the Socinian Pope's denunciation of Emerson." --------- * The beginning of the London Library, a most useful institution, from which books may be borrowed. It served Carlyle well in later years, and for a long time he was President of it. ** The late Mr. Joseph Coolidge. --------- The thing denounced had not then arrived, though often asked for at Kennet's; it did not arrive till yesterday, but had lain buried in bales of I know not what. We have read it only once, and are not yet at the bottom of it. Meanwhile, as I judge, the Socinian "tempest in a washbowl" is all according to nature, and will be profitable to you, not hurtful. A man is called to let his light shine before men; but he ought to understand better and better what medium it is through, what retinas it falls on: wherefore look _there._ I find in this, as in the two other Speeches, that noblest self-assertion, and believing originality, which is like sacred fire, the _beginning_ of whatsoever is to flame and work; and for young men especially one sees not what could be more vivifying. Speak, therefore, while you feel called to do it; and when you feel called. But for yourself, my friend, I prophesy it will not do always: a faculty is in you for a _sort_ of speech which is itself _action,_ an artistic sort. You _tell_ us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; _show_ us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonized,_ depictured by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself. If these Orations balk me of this, how profitable soever they be for others. I will not love them.--And yet, what am I saying? How do I know what is good for _you,_ what authentically makes your own heart glad to work in it? I speak from _without,_ the friendliest voice must speak from without; and a man's ultimate monition comes only from _within._ Forgive me, and love me, and write soon. _A Dieu!_ --T. Carlyle My Wife, very proud of your salutation, sends a sick return of greeting. After a winter of unusual strength, she took cold the other day, and coughs again; though she will not call it serious yet. One likes none of these things. She has a brisk heart and a stout, but too weak a frame for this rough life of mine. I will not get sad about it. One of the strangest things about these New England Orations is a fact I have heard, but not yet seen, that a certain W. Gladstone, an Oxford crack Scholar, Tory M.P., and devout Churchman of great talent and hope, has contrived to insert a piece of you (_first_ Oration it must be) in a work of his on _Church and State,_ which makes some figure at present! I know him for a solid, serious, silent-minded man; but how with his Coleridge Shovel-Hattism he has contrived to relate himself to _you,_ there is the mystery. True men of all creeds, it _would_ seem, are Brothers. To write soon! XXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 15 March, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I will spare you my apologies for not writing, they are so many. You have been very generous, I very promising and dilatory. I desired to send you an Account of the sales of the _History,_ thinking that the details might be more intelligible to you than to me, and might give you some insight into literary and social, as well as bibliopolical relations. But many details of this account will not yet settle themselves into sure facts, but do dance and mystify me as one green in ledgers. Bookseller says nine hundred and ninety-one copies came from Binder, nine remaining imperfect, and so not bound. But in all my reckonings of the particulars of distribution I make either more or less than nine hundred and ninety-one copies. And some of my accounts are with private individuals at a distance, and they have their uncertainties and misrememberings also. But the facts will soon show themselves, and I count confidently on a small balance against the world to your credit. ---------- * This letter appeared in the _Athenaeum,_ July 22, 1882. ---------- The _Miscellanies_ go forward too slowly, at about the rate of seventy-two pages a week, as I understand. Of the _Fraser_ articles and of some others we have but a single copy, (such are the tough limits of some English immortalities and editorial renowns,) but we expect the end of the printing in six weeks. The first two volumes, with title-pages, are gone to the binder-- two hundred and sixty copies--with strait directions; and I presume will go to sea very soon. We shall send the last two volumes by a later ship. You will pay nothing for the books we send except freight. We shall deduct the cost of the books from the credit side of your account here. We print of the second series twelve hundred and fifty copies, with the intention of printing a second edition of the first series of five hundred, if we see fit hereafter to supply the place of the emigrating portion of the first. You express some surprise at the cheapness of our work. The publishers, I believe, generally get more profits. They grumbled a little at the face of the account on the 1st of January; so in the new contract for the new volumes I have allowed them nine cents more on each copy sold by them. So that you should receive ninety-one cents on a copy instead of one dollar. When the two hundred and fifty copies of our first two volumes are gone to you, I think they will have but about one hundred copies more to sell. Your books are read. I hear, I think, more gratitude expressed for the _Miscellanies_ than for the _History._ Young men at all our colleges study them in closets, and the Copernican is eradicating the Ptolemaic lore. I have frequent and cordial testimonies to the good working of the leaven, and continual inquiry whether the man will come hither. _Speriamo._ I was a fool to tell you once you must not come if I did tell you so. I knew better at the time, and did steadily believe, as far as I was concerned, that no polemical mud, however much was thrown, could by any possibility stick to me; for I was purely an observer; had not the smallest personal or _partial_ interest; and merely spoke to the question as a historian; and I knew whoever could see me must see that. But, at the moment, the little pamphlet made much stir and excitement in the newspapers; and the whole thousand copies were bought up. The ill wind has blown over. I advertised, as usual, my winter course of Lectures, and it prospered very well. Ten Lectures: I. Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on "Human Life." Now I am well again.--But, as I said, as I could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that I could mix your cause with mine and hurt you. Nothing is more certain than that you shall have all our ears, whenever you wish for them, and free from that partial position which I deprecated. Yet I cannot regret my letter, which procured me so affectionate and magnanimous a reply. Thanks, too, for your friendliest invitation. But I have a new reason why I should not come to England,--a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old,--a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite piques me. Yet how gladly should I be near you for a time. The months and years make me more desirous of an unlimited conversation with you; and one day, I think, the God will grant it, after whatever way is best. I am lately taken with _The Onyx Ring,_ which seemed to me full of knowledge, and good, bold, true drawing. Very saucy, was it not? in John Sterling to paint Collins; and what intrepid iconoclasm in this new Alcibiades to break in among your Lares and disfigure your sacred Hermes himself in Walsingham.* To me, a profane man, it was good sport to see the Olympic lover of Frederica, Lili, and so forth, lampooned. And by Alcibiades too, over whom the wrath of Pericles must pause and brood ere it falls. I delight in this Sterling, but now that I know him better I shall no longer expect him to write to me. I wish I could talk to you on the grave questions, graver than all literature, which the trifles of each day open. Our doing seems to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our nondoing. I wish, too, you could know my friends here. A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation is possible. He is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does. -------- * Collins and Walsingham, two characters in _The Onyx Ring,_ are partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe. In his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle says of the story: "A tale still worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various friends of Sterling's are shadowed forth not always in the truest manner." It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling's Essays and Tales, edited by Julius Hare. --------- As I hear not yet of your reception of the bill of exchange, which went by the "Royal William" in January, I enclose the duplicate. And now all success to the Lectures of April or May! A new Kingdom with new extravagances of power and splendor I know. Unless you can keep your own secret better in _Rahel,_ &c., you must not give it me to keep. The London _Sartor_ arrived in my hands March 5th, dated the 15th of November, so long is the way from Kennet to Little & Co. The book is welcome, and awakens a sort of nepotism in me,--my brother's child. --R.W. Emerson I rejoice in the good accounts you give me of your household; in your wife's health; in your brother's position. My wife wishes to be affectionately remembered to you and yours. And the lady must continue to love her _old_ Transatlantic friend. XXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 19 March, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Only last Saturday I despatched a letter to you containing a duplicate of the bill of exchange sent in January, and all the facts I knew of our books; and now comes to me a note from Wheeler, at Cambridge, saying that the printers, on reckoning up their amount of copy, find that nowise can they make 450 pages per volume, as they have promised, for these two last of the _Miscellanies._ They end the third volume with page 390, and they have not but 350 or less pages for the fourth. They ask, What shall be done? Nothing is known to me but to give them _Rahel,_ though I grudge it, for I vastly prefer to end with _Scott._ _Rahel,_ I fancy, cost you no night and no morning, but was writ in that gentle after-dinner hour so friendly to good digestion. Stearns Wheeler dreams that it is possible to draw at this eleventh hour some possible manuscript out of the unedited treasures of Teufelsdrockh's cabinets. If the manuscripts were ready, all fairly copied out by foreseeing scribes in your sanctuary at Chelsea, the good goblin of steam would--with the least waiting, perhaps a few days--bring the packet to our types in time. I have little hope, almost none, from a sally so desperate on possible portfolios; but neither will I be wanting to my sanguine co-editor, your good friend. So I told him I would give you as instant notice as Mr. Rogers at the Merchants' Exchange Bar can contrive, and tell you plainly that we shall proceed to print _Rahel_ when we come so far on; and with that paper end; unless we shall receive some contrary word from you. And if we can obtain any manuscript from you before we have actually bound our book, we will cancel our last sheets and insert it. And so may the friendly Heaven grant a speedy passage to my letter and to yours! I fear the possibility of our success is still further reduced by the season of the year, as the Lectures must shortly be on foot. Well, the best speed to them also. When I think of you as speaking and not writing them, I remember Luther's words, "He that can speak well, the same is a man." I hope you liked John Dwight's translations of Goethe, and his notes. He is a good, susceptible, yearning soul, not so apt to create as to receive with the freest allowance, but I like his books very much. Do think to say in a letter whether you received _from me_ a copy of our edition of your _French Revolution._ I ordered a copy sent to you,--probably wrote your name in it,--but it does not appear in the bookseller's account. Farewell. --R.W. Emerson XXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 13 April, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--Has anything gone wrong with you? How is it that you do not write to me? These three or four weeks, I know not whether _duly_ or not so long, I have been in daily hope of some sign from you; but none comes; not even a Newspaper,--open at the ends. The German Translator, Mr. Dwight, mentioned, at the end of a Letter I had not long ago, that you had given a brilliant course of Lectures at Boston, but had been obliged to _intermit it on account of illness._ Bad news indeed, that latter clause; at the same time, it was thrown in so cursorily I would not let myself be much alarmed; and since that, various New England friends have assured me here that there was nothing of great moment in it, that the business was all well over now, and you safe at Concord again. Yet how is it that I do not hear? I will tell you my guess is that those Boston Carlylean _Miscellanies_ are to blame. The Printer is slack and lazy as Printers are; and you do not wish to write till you can send some news of him? I will hope and believe that only this is it, till I hear worse. I sent you a Dumfries Newspaper the other week, for a sign of my existence and anxiety. A certain Mr. Ellis of Boston is this day packing up a very small memorial of me to your Wife; a poor Print rolled about a bit of wood: let her receive it graciously in defect of better. It comes under your address. Nay, properly it is my Wife's memorial to your Wife. It is to be hung up in the Concord drawing-room. The two Households, divided by wide seas, are to understand always that they are united nevertheless. My special cause for writing this day rather than another is the old story, book business. You have brought that upon yourself, my friend; and must do the best you can with it. After all, why should not Letters be on business too? Many a kind thought, uniting man with man, in gratitude and helpfulness, is founded on business. The speaker at Dartmouth College seems to think it ought to be so. Nor do I dissent.--But the case is this, Fraser and I are just about bargaining for a second edition of the _Revolution._ He will print fifteen hundred for the English market, in a somewhat closer style, and sell them here at twenty- four shillings a copy. His first edition is all gone but some handful; and the man is in haste, and has taken into a mood of hope,--for he is weak and aguish, alternating from hot to cold; otherwise, I find, a very accurate creature, and deals in his unjust trade as justly as any other will. He has settled with me; his half-profits amount to some L130, which by charging me for every presentation copy he cuts down to somewhere about L110; _not_ the lion's share in the gross produce, yet a great share compared with an expectancy no higher than _zero!_ We continue on the same system for this second adventure; I cannot go hawking about in search of new terms; I might go farther and fare worse. And now comes your part of the affair; in which I would fain have had your counsel; but must ask your help, proceeding with my own light alone. After Fraser's fifteen hundred are printed off, the types remain standing, and I for my own behoof throw off five hundred more, designed for your market. Whether five hundred are too many or too few, I can only guess; if too many, we can retain them here and turn them to account; if too few, there is no remedy. At all events, costing me only the paper and press-work, there is surely no Pirate in the Union that can _undersell_ us! Nay, it seems they have a drawback on our taxed paper, sufficient or nearly so to land the cargo at Boston without more charge. You see, therefore, how it is. Can you find me a Bookseller, as for yourself; he and you can fix what price the ware will carry when you see it. Meanwhile I must have his Title-page; I must have his directions (if any be needed); nay, for that matter, you might write a Preface if you liked,--though I see not what you have to say, and recommend silence rather! The book is to be in three volumes duodecimo, and we will take care it be fit to show its face in your market. A few errors of the press; and one correction (about the sinking of the _Vengeur,_ which I find lately to be an indisputable falsehood); these are all the changes. We are to have done printing, Fraser predicts, "in two months";--say two and a half! I suppose you decipher the matter out of this plastering and smearing; and will do what is needful in it. "Great inquiry" is made for the _Miscellanies,_ Fraser says; though he suspects it may perhaps be but one or two men inquiring _often,_--the dog! I am again upon the threshold of extempore lecturing: on "the Revolutions of Modern Europe"; Protestantism, 2 lectures; Puritanism, 2; French Revolution, 2. I almost regret that I had undertaken the thing this year at all, for I am no longer driven by Poverty as heretofore. Nay, I am richer than I have been for ten years; and have a kind of prospect, for the first time this great while, of being allowed to subsist in this world for the future: a great blessing, perhaps the greatest, when it comes as a novelty! However, I thought it right to keep this Lecture business open, come what might. I care less about it than I did; it is not agony and wretched trembling to the marrow of the bone, as it was the last two times. I believe, in spite of all my perpetual indigestions and nervous woes, I am actually getting into better health; the weary heart of me is quieter; I wait in silence for the new chapter,--feeling truly that we are at the end of one period here. I count it _two_ in my autobiography: we shall see what the _third_ is; [if] third there be. But I am in small haste for a third. How true is that of the old Prophets, "The _word of the Lord_ came unto" such and such a one! When it does not come, both Prophet and Prosaist ought to be thankful (after a sort), and rigorously hold their tongue.--Lord Durham's people have come over with golden reports of the Americans, and their brotherly feelings. One Arthur Buller preaches to me, with emphasis, on a quite personal topic till one explodes in laughter to hear him, the good soul: That I, namely, am the most esteemed, &c., and ought to go over and Lecture in all great towns of the Union, and make, &c., &c.! I really do begin to think of it in this interregnum that I am in. But then my Lectures must be written; but then I must become a _hawker, --ach Gott!_ The people are beginning to quote you here: _tant pis pour eux!_ I have found you in two Cambridge books. A certain Mr. Richard M. Milnes, M.P., a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and politician whom I love much, applied to me for _Nature_ (the others he has) that he might write upon it. Somebody has stolen _Nature_ from me, or many have thumbed it to pieces; I could not find a copy. Send me one, the first chance you have. And see Miss Martineau in the last _Westminster Review:_--these things you are old enough to stand? They are even of benefit? Emerson is not without a select public, the root of a select public on this side of the water too.--Popular Sumner is off to Italy, the most popular of men,--inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left. We preferred Coolidge to him in this circle; a square-cut iron man, yet with clear symptoms of a heart in him. Your people will come more and more to their maternal Babylon, will they not, by the steamers?-- Adieu, my dear friend. My Wife joins me in all good prayers for you and yours. --Thomas Carlyle XXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 April, 1839 Dear Friend,--Some four days ago I wrote you a long Letter, rather expressive of anxiety about you; it will probably come to hand along with this. I had heard vaguely that you were unwell, and wondered why you did not write. Happily, that point is as good as settled now, even by your silence about it. I have, half an hour ago, received your Concord Letter of the 19th of March. The Letter you speak of there as "written last Saturday" has not yet made its appearance, but may be looked for now shortly: as there is no mention here of any mischance, except the shortcoming of Printers' copy, I infer that all else is in a tolerably correct state; I wait patiently for the "last Saturday" tidings, and will answer as to the matters of copy, in good heart, without loss of a moment. There is nothing of the manuscript sort in Teufelsdrockh's repositories that would suit you well; nothing at all in a completed state, except a long rigmarole dissertation (in a crabbed sardonic vein) about the early history of the Teutonic Kindred, wriggling itself along not in the best style through Proverb lore, and I know not what, till it end (if my memory serve) in a kind of Essay on the _Minnesingers._ It was written almost ten years ago, and never contented me well. It formed part of a lucklessly projected _History of German Literature,_ subsequent portions of which, the _Nibelungen_ and _Reinecke Fox,_ you have already printed. The unfortunate "_Cabinet Library_ Editor," or whatever his title was, broke down; and I let him off,--without paying me; and this alone remains of the misventure; a thing not fit for you, nor indeed at bottom for anybody, though I have never burnt it yet. My other Manuscripts are scratchings and scrawlings;--children's _infant_ souls weeping because they never could be born, but were left there whimpering _in limine primo!_ On this side, therefore, is no help. Nevertheless, it seems to me, otherwise there is. _Varnhagen_ may be printed I think without offence, since there is need of it: if that will make up your fourth volume to a due size, why not? It is the last faint murmur one gives in Periodical Literature, and may indicate the approach of silence and slumber. I know no errors of the Press in _Varnhagen:_ there is one thing about Jean Paul F. Richter's _want_ of humor in his _speech,_ which somehow I could like to have the opportunity of uttering a word on, though _what_ word I see not very well. My notion is partly that V. overstates the thing, taking a Berlin _propos de salon_ for a scientifically accurate record; and partly farther that the defect (if any) was _creditable_ to Jean Paul, indicating that he talked from the abundance of the heart, not burning himself off in miserable perpetual sputter like a Town-wit, but speaking what he had to say, were it dull, were it not dull,--for his own satisfaction first of all! If you in a line or two could express at the right point something of that sort, it were well; yet on the whole, if not, then is almost no matter. Let the whole stand then as the commencement of slumber and stertorous breathing! Varnhagen himself will not bring up your fourth volume to the right size; hardly beyond 380 pages, I should think; yet what more can be done? Do you remember Fraser's Magazine for October, 1832, and a Translation there, with Notes, of a thing called Goethe's Mahrchen? It is by me; I regard it as a most remarkable piece, well worthy of perusal, especially by all readers of mine. The printing of your third volume will of course be finished before this letter arrive; nevertheless I have a plan: that you (as might be done, I suppose, by cancelling and reprinting the concluding leaf or leaves) append the said Translated Tale, in a smaller type, to that volume. It is 21 or 22 pages of _Fraser,_ and will perhaps bring yours up to the mark. Nay, indeed there are two other little Translations from Goethe which I reckon good, though of far less interest than the _Mahrchen;_ I think they are in the Frasers almost immediately preceding; one of them is called _Fragment from Goethe_ (if I remember); in his _Works,_ it is _Novelle;_ it treats of a visit by some princely household to a strange Mountain ruin or castle, and the catastrophe is the escape of a show-lion from its booth in the neighboring Market-Town. I have not the thing here,--alas, sinner that I am, it now strikes me that the "two other things" are this one thing, which my treacherous memory is making into two! This however you will find in the Number immediately, or not far from immediately, preceding that of the _Mahrchen;_ along with which, in the same type with which, it would give us letter-press enough. It ought to stand _before_ the _Mahrchen:_ read it, and say whether it is worthy or not worthy. Will this _Appendix_ do, then? I should really rather like the _Mahrchen_ to be printed, and had thoughts of putting [it] at the end of the English _Sartor._ The other I care not for, intrinsically, but think it very beautiful in its kind.--Some rubbish of my own, in small quantity, exists here and there in _Fraser;_ one story, entitled _Cruthers and Jonson,_* was written sixteen years ago, and printed somewhere early (probably the second year) in that rubbish heap, with several gross errors of the press (mares for maces was one!): it is the first thing I wrote, or among the very first;--otherwise a thing to be kept rather secret, except from the like of you! This or any other of the "original" immaturities I will _not_ recommend as an Appendix; I hope the _Mahrchen,_ or the _Novelle_ and _Mahrchen,_ will suffice. But on the whole, to thee, O Friend, and thy judgment and decision, without appeal, I leave it altogether. Say Yes, say No; do what seemeth good to thee.--Nay now, writing with the speed of light, another consideration strikes me: Why should Volume Third be interfered with if it is finished? Why will not this _Appendix_ do, these _Appendixes,_ to hang to the skirts of Volume Four as well? Perhaps better! the _Mahrchen_ in any case closing the rear. I leave it all to Emerson and Stearns Wheeler, my more than kind Editors: E. knows it better than I; be his decision irrevocable. ----------- * "Cruthers and Jonson; or, The Outskirts of Life. A True Story." _Fraser's Magazine,_ January, 1831. ------------ This letter is far too long, but I had not time to make it shorter.--I got your _French Revolution,_ and have seen no other: my name is on it in your hand. I received Dwight's Book, liked it, and have answered him: a good youth, of the kind you describe; no Englishman, to my knowledge, has yet uttered as much sense about Goethe and German things. I go this day to settle with Fraser about printers and a second edition of the _Revolution_ Book,--as specified in the other Letter: five hundred copies for America, which are to cost he computes about 2/7, and _your_ Bookseller will bind them, and defy Piracy. My Lectures come on, this day two weeks: O Heaven! I cannot "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! Shall it be Switzerland, shall it be Scotland, nay, shall it be America and Concord? Ever your affectionate T. Carlyle All love from both of us to the Mother and Boy. My Wife is better than usual; rejoices in the promise of summer now at last visible after a spring like Greenland. Scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. God help them! In man as yet is small help. There will be work yet, before that account is liquidated; a generation or two of work! Miss Martineau is gone to Switzerland, after emitting _Deerwood_ [sic], a Novel.* How do you like it? people ask. To which there are serious answers returnable, but few so good as none. Ah me! Lady Bulwer too has written a Novel, in satire of her Husband. I saw the Husband not long since; one of the wretchedest Phantasms, it seemed to me, I had yet fallen in with,--many, many, as they are here. The L100 Sterling Bill came, in due time, in perfect order; and will be payable one of these days. I forget dates; but had well calculated that before the 19th of March this piece of news and my gratitude for it had reached you. -------- * _Deerbrook_ -------- XXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 20 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Learning here in town that letters may go today to the "Great Western," I seize the hour to communicate a bookseller's message. I told Brown, of C.C. Little & Co., that you think of stereotyping the _History._ He says that he can make it profitable to himself and to you to use your plates here in this manner (which he desires may be kept secret here, and I suppose with you also). You are to get your plates made and proved, then you are to send them out here to him, having first insured them in London, and he is to pay you a price for every copy he prints from them. As soon as he has printed a supply for our market,--and we want, he says, five hundred copies now,--he will send them back to you. I told him I thought he had better fix the price per copy to be paid by him, and I would send it to you as his offer. He is willing to do so, but not today. It was only this morning I informed him of your plan. I think in a fortnight I shall need to write again,--probably to introduce to you my countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick, the writer of affectionate New England tales and the like, who is about to go to Europe for a year or more. I will then get somewhat definite from Brown as to rates and prices. Brown thought you might better send the plates here first, as we are in immediate want of copies; and afterwards print with them in London. He is quite sure that it would be more profitable to print them in this manner than to try to import and sell here the books after being manufactured in London. On the 30th of April we shall ship at New York the first two volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ two hundred and sixty copies. In four weeks, the second two volumes will be finished, unless we wait for something to be added by yourself, agreeably to a suggestion of Wheeler's and mine. Two copies of _Schiller's Life_ will go in the same box. We send them to the port of London. When these are gone, only one hundred copies remain unsold of the first two volumes (_Miscellanies_). Brown said it was important that the plates should be proved correct at London by striking off impressions before they were sent hither. This is the whole of my present message. I shall have somewhat presently to reply to your last letter, received three weeks since. And may health and peace dwell with you and yours! --R.W. Emerson XXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 25 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Behold my account! A very simple thing, is it not! A very mouse, after such months, almost years, of promise! Despise it not, however; for such is my extreme dulness at figures and statements that this nothing has been a fear to me, a long time, how to extract it from the bookseller's promiscuous account with me, and from obscure records of my own. You see that it promises yet to pay you between $60 and $70 more, if Mr. Fuller (a gentleman of Providence, who procured many _subscribers_ for us there) and Mr. Owen (who owes us also for copies subscribed for) will pay us our demand. They have both been lately reminded of their delinquency. Herrick and Noyes, you will see credited for eight copies, $18. They are booksellers who supplied eight subscribers, and charged us $2 for their trouble and some alleged damage to a copy. One copy you will see is sold to Ann Pomeroy for $3. This lady bought the copy of me, and preferred sending me $3 to sending $2.50 for so good a book. You will notice one or two other variations in the prices, in each of which I aimed to use a friend's discretion. Add lastly, that you must revise all my figures, as I am a hopeless blunderer, and quite lately made a brilliant mistake in regard to the amount of 9 multiplied by 12. Have I asked you whether you received from me a copy of the _History?_ I designated a copy to go, and the bookseller's boy thinks he sent one, but there is none charged in their account. The account of the _Miscellanies_ does not prosper quite so well.... Thanks for your too friendly and generous expectations from my wit. Alas! my friend, I can do no such gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters; suburban men. But in God we are all great, all rich, each entitled to say, All is mine. I hope the advancing season has restored health to your wife, and, if benedictions will help her, tell her we send them on every west wind. My wife and babes are well. --R.W.E. XL. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I received last night C.C. Little & Co.'s proposition in reference to the stereotyping the _History._ Their offer is based on my statement that you proposed to print the book in two volumes similar to ours. They say, "We should be willing to pay three hundred dollars for the use of plates for striking off five hundred copies of the two volumes, with the farther agreement that, if we wished to strike off another five hundred in nine months after the publication of the first five hundred, we should have the liberty to do so, paying the same again; that is, another three hundred dollars for the privilege of printing another five hundred copies;--the plates to be furnished us ready for use and free of expense." They add, "Should Mr. Carlyle send the plates to this country, he should be particular to ship them to _this port direct._" I am no judge of the liberality of this offer, as I know nothing of the expense of the plates. The men, Little and Brown, are fair in their dealings, and the most respectable book-selling firm in Boston. When you have considered the matter, I hope you will send me as early an answer as you can. For as we have no protection from pirates we must use speed. I ought to have added to my account and statement sent by Miss Sedgwick one explanation. You will find in the account a credit of $13.75, agreed on with Little & Co., as compensation for lost subscribers. We had a little book, kept in the bookshop, into which were transferred the names of subscribers from all lists which were returned from various places. These names amounted to two hundred, more or less. When we came to settle the account, this book could not be found. They expressed much regret, and made much vain searching. Their account with me recorded only one hundred and thirty-four copies delivered to subscribers. Thus, a large number, say sixty-six, had been sold by them to our subscribers, and our half-dollar on each copy put in their pocket as commission, expressly contrary to treaty! With some ado, I mustered fifty-five names of subscribers known to me as such, not recorded on their books as having received copies, and demanded $27.50. They replied that they also had claims; that they had sent the books to distant subscribers in various States, and had charged no freight (with one or two exceptions, when the books went alone); that other booksellers had, no doubt, in many cases, sold the copies to subscribers for which I claimed the half-dollar; and lastly, which is indeed the moving reason, that they had sent twenty copies up the Mississippi to a bookseller (in Vicksburg, I think), who had made them no return. On these grounds they proposed that they should pay half my demand, and so compromise. They said, however, that, if I insisted, they would pay the whole. I was so glad to close the affair with mutual goodwill that I said with the unjust steward, write $13.75. So are we all pleased at your expense. [Greek] I think I will not give you any more historiettes,--they take too much room; but as I write this time only on business, you are welcome to this from your friend, --R.W. Emerson XLI. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 15 May, 1839. My Dear Friend,--Last Saturday, 11th instant, I had your two letters of 13th and 17th April. Before now, you must have one or two notes of mine touching the stereotype plates: a proposition superseded by your new plan. I have also despatched one or two sheets lately containing accounts. Now for the new matter. I was in Boston yesterday, and saw Brown, the bookseller. He accedes gladly, to the project of five hundred American copies of the _History._ He says, that the duty is the same on books in sheets and books in boards; and desires, therefore, that the books may come out _bound._ You bind yours in cloth? Put up his in the same style as those for your market, only a little more strongly than is the custom with London books, as it will only cost a little more. He would be glad also to have his name added in the titlepage (London: Published by J. Fraser; and Boston: by C.C. Little and James Brown, 112 Washington St.), or is not this the right way? He only said he should like to have his name added. He threatens to charge me 20 percent commission. If, as he computes from your hint of 2/7, the work costs you, say, 70 cents per copy, unbound; he reckons it at a dollar, when bound; then 75 cents duty in Boston, $1.75. He thinks we cannot set a higher price on it than $3.50, _because_ we sold our former edition for $2.50. On that price, his commissions would be 70 cents; and $1.05 per copy will to you. If when we see the book, we venture to put a higher price on it, your remainder shall be more. I confess, when I set this forth on paper, it looks as bad as your English trade,--this barefaced 20 percent; but their plea is, We guarantee the sales; we advertise; we pay you when it is sold, though we give our customers six months' credit. I have made no final bargain with the man, and perhaps before the books arrive I shall be better advised, and may get better terms from him. Meantime, give me the best advice you can; and despatch the books with all speed, and if you send six hundred, I think, we will sell them. ------------ * In the first edition of this Correspondence a portion of this letter was printed from a rough draft, such as Emerson was accustomed to make of his letters to Carlyle. I owe the original to the kindness of the editor of the _Athenaeum,_ in the pages of which it was printed. ----------- I went to the _Athenaeum,_ and procured the _Frasers'_ and will print the _Novelle_ and the _Mahrchen_ at the end of the Fourth Volume, which has been loitering under one workman for a week or two past, awaiting this arrival. Now we will finish at once. _Cruthers and Jonson_ I read gladly. It is indispensable to such as would see the fountains of Nile: but I incline to what seems your opinion, that it will be better in the final edition of your Works than in this present First Collection of them. I believe I could find more matter now of yours if we should be pinched again. The Cat-Raphael? and _Mirabeau_ and _Macaulay?_ Stearns Wheeler is very faithful in his loving labor,--has taken a world of pains with the sweetest smile. We are very fortunate in having him to friend.--For the _Miscellanies_ once more, the two boxes containing two hundred and sixty copies of the first series went to sea in the "St. James," Captain Sebor, addressed to Mr. Fraser. (I hope rightly addressed; yet I saw a memorandum at Munroe's in which he was named _John_ Fraser.) Arthur Buller has my hearty thanks for his good and true witnessing. And now that our old advice is indorsed by John Bull himself, you will believe and come. Nothing can be better. As soon as the lectures are over, let the trunks be packed. Only my wife and my blessed sister dear--Elizabeth Hoar, betrothed in better times to my brother Charles,--my wife and this lovely nun do say that Mrs. Carlyle must come hither also; that it will make her strong, and lengthen her days on the earth, and cheer theirs also. Come, and make a home with me; and let us make a truth that is better than dreams. From this farm-house of mine you shall sally forth as God shall invite you, and "lecture in the great cities." You shall do it by proclamation of your own, or by the mediation of a committee, which will readily be found. Wife, mother, and sister shall nurse thy wife meantime, and you shall bring your republican laurels home so fast that she shall not sigh for the Old England. Eyes here do sparkle at the very thought. And my little placid Musketaquid River looked gayer today in the sun. In very sooth and love, my friend, I shall look for you in August. If aught that we know not must forbid your wife at present, you will still come. In October, you shall lecture in Boston; in November, in New York; in December, in Philadelphia; in January, in Washington. I can show you three or four great natures, as yet unsung by Harriet Martineau or Anna Jameson, that content the heart and provoke the mind. And for yourself, you shall be as cynical and headstrong and fantastical as you can be. I rejoice in what you say of better health and better prospects. I was glad to hear of Milnes, whose _Poems_ already lay on my table when your letter came. Since the little _Nature_ book is not quite dead, I have sent you a few copies, and wish you would offer one to Mr. Milnes with my respects. I hope before a great while I may have somewhat better to send him. I am ashamed that my little books should be "quoted" as you say. My affectionate salutations to Mrs. Carlyle, who is to sanction and enforce all I have written on the migration. In the prospect of your coming I feel it to be foolish to write. I have very much to say to you. But now only Good Bye. --R.W. Emerson XLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 29 May, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, dated Boston, 20th April, has been here for some two weeks. Miss Sedgwick, whom it taught us to expect in "about a fortnight," has yet given no note of herself, but shall be right welcome whenever she appears. Miss Martineau's absence (she is in Switzerland this summer) will probably be a loss to the fair Pilgrim;--which of course the rest of us ought to exert ourselves to make good.... My Lectures are happily over ten days ago; with "success" enough, as it is called; the only _valuable_ part of which is some L200, gained with great pain, but also with great brevity:--economical respite for another solar year! The people were boundlessly tolerant; my agitation beforehand was less this year, my remorse afterwards proportionally greater. There was but one moderately good Lecture, the last,--on Sausculottism, to an audience mostly Tory, and rustling with the beautifulest quality silks! Two things I find: first that _I ought to have had a horse;_ I had only three incidental rides or gallops, hired rides; my horse _Yankee_ is never yet purchased, but it shall be, for I cannot live, except in great pain, without a horse. It was sweet beyond measure to escape out of the dustwhirlpool here, and _fly,_ in solitude, through the ocean of verdure and splendor, as far as Harrow and back again; and one's nerves were _clear_ next day, and words lying in one like water in a well. But the _second_ thing I found was, that extempore speaking, especially in the way of Lecture, is an _art_ or craft, and requires an apprenticeship, which I have never served. Repeatedly it has come into my head that I should go to America, this very Fall, and belecture you from North to South till I learn it! Such a thing does lie in the bottom-scenes, should hard come to hard; and looks pleasant enough.--On the whole, I say sometimes, I must either begin a Book, or do it. Books are the lasting thing; Lectures are like corn ground into flour; there are loaves for today, but no wheat harvests for next year. Rudiments of a new Book (thank Heaven!) do sometimes disclose themselves in me. _Festina lente._ It ought to be better than the _French Revolution;_ I mean better written. The greater part of that Book, as I read proof-sheets of it in these weeks, does nothing but _disgust_ me. And yet it was, as nearly as was good, the utmost that lay in me. I should not like to be nearer killed with any other Book!--Books too are a triviality. Life alone is great; with its infinite spaces, its everlasting times, with its Death, with its Heaven and its Hell. Ah me! Wordsworth is here at present; a garrulous, rather watery, not wearisome old man. There is a freshness as of brooks and mountain breezes in him; one says of him: Thou art not great, but thou art genuine; well speed _thou._ Sterling is home from Italy, recovered in health, indeed very well could he but _sit still._ He is for Clifton, near Bristol, for the next three months. I hear him speak of some sonnet or other he means to address to you: as for me he knows well that I call his verses timber toned, without true melody either in thought, phrase or sound. The good John! Did you ever see such a vacant turnip-lantern as that Walsingham Goethe? Iconoclast Collins strikes his wooden shoe through him, and passes on, saying almost nothing.--My space is done! I greet the little _maidkin,_ and bid her welcome to this unutterable world. Commend her, poor little thing, to her little Brother, to her Mother and Father;-- Nature, I suppose, has sent her strong letters of recommendation, without our help, to them all. Where I shall be in six weeks is not very certain; likeliest in Scotland, whither our whole household, servant and all, is pressingly invited, where they have provided horses and gigs. Letters sent hither will still find me, or lie waiting for me, safe: but perhaps the _speediest_ address will be "Care of Fraser, 215 Regent Street." My Brother wants me to the Tyrol and Vienna; but I think I shall not go. Adieu, dear friend. It is a great treasure to me that I have you in this world. My Wife salutes you all.-- Yours ever and ever, T. Carlyle XLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 24 June, 1833 Dear Friend,--Two Letters from you were brought hither by Miss Sedgwick last week. The series of post Letters is a little embroiled in my head; but I have a conviction that all hitherto due have arrived; that up to the date of my last despatch (a _Proof-sheet_ and a Letter), which ought to be getting into your hands in these very days, our correspondence is clear. That Letter and Proof-sheet, two separate pieces, were sent to Liverpool some three weeks ago, to be despatched by the first conveyance thence; as I say, they are probably in Boston about this time. The Proof-sheet was one of the forty-seven such which the new _French Revolution_ is to consist of: with this, as with a correct sample, you were to act upon some Boston Bookseller, and make a bargain for me,--or at least report that none was to be made. A bad bargain will content me now, my hopes are not at all high. For the present, I am to announce on the part of Bookseller Fraser that the First Portion of our celebrated _Miscellanies_ have been hovering about on these coasts for several weeks, have lain safe "in the River" for some two weeks, and ought at last to be safe in Fraser's shop today or else to morrow. I will ask there, and verify, before this Letter go. The reason of these "two weeks in the river" is that the packages were addressed "_John_ Fraser, London," and the people had tried all the Frasers in London before they attempted the right individual, James, of 215 Regent Street. Of course, the like mistake in the second case will be avoided. A Letter, put ashore at Falmouth, and properly addressed, but without any _signature,_ had first of all announced that the thing was at the door, and so with this "John Fraser," it has been knocking ever since, finding difficult admission. In the present instance, such delay has done no ill, for Fraser will not sell till the Second Portion come; and with this the mistake will be avoided. What has shocked poor James much more is a circumstance which your Boston Booksellers have no power to avoid: the "enormousness" of the charges in our Port here! He sends me the account of them last Saturday, with eyes-- such as drew Priam's curtains: L31 and odd silver, whereof L28 as duty on Books at L5 per cwt. is charged by the rapacious Custom-house alone! What help, O James? I answer: we cannot bombard the British Custom-house, and sack it, and explode it; we must yield, and pay it the money; thankful for what is still left.--On the whole, one has to learn by trying. This notable finance-expedient, of printing in the one country what is to be sold in the other, did not take Vandalic custom-houses into view, which nevertheless do seem to exist. We must persist in it for the present reciprocal pair of times, having started in it for these: but on future occasions always, we can ask the past; and _see_ whether it be not better to let each side of the water stand on its own basis. As for your "accounts," my Friend, I find them clear as day, verifiable to the uttermost farthing. You are a good man to conquer your horror of arithmetic; and, like hydrophobic Peter of Russia making himself a sailor, become an Accountant for my sake. But now will you forgive me if I never do verify this same account, or look at it more in this world except as a memento of affection, its arithmetical ciphers so many hierograms, really _sacred_ to me! A reflection I cannot but make is that at bottom this money was all yours; not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful Friendship. I feel as if I could not examine it without a kind of crime. For the rest, you may rejoice to think that, thanks to you and the Books, and to Heaven over all, I am for the present no longer poor; but have a reasonable prospect of existing, which, as I calculate, is literally the most that money can do for a man. Not for these twelve years, never since I had a house to maintain with money, have I had as much money in my possession as even now. _Allah kerim!_ We will hope all that is good on that side. And herewith enough of _it._ You tell me you are but "a reporter": I like you for thinking so. And you will never know that it is _not true,_ till you have tried. Meanwhile, far be it from me to urge you to a trial before your time come. Ah, it will come, and soon enough; much better, perhaps, if it never came!--A man has "_such_ a baptism to be baptized withal," no easy baptism; and is "straitened till it be accomplished." As for me I honor peace before all things; the silence of a great soul is to me greater than anything it will ever say, it ever can say. Be tranquil, my friend; utter no word till you cannot help it;--and think yourself a "reporter," till you find (not with any great joy) that you are not altogether that! We have not yet seen Miss Sedgwick: your Letters with her card were sent hither by post we went up next day, but she was out; no meeting could be arranged earlier than tomorrow evening, when we look for her here. Her reception, I have no doubt, will be abundantly flattering in this England. American Notabilities are daily becoming notabler among us; the ties of the two Parishes, Mother and Daughter, getting closer and closer knit. Indissoluble ties:--I reckon that this huge smoky Wen may, for some centuries yet, be the best Mycale for our Saxon _Panionium,_ a yearly meeting-place of "All the Saxons," from beyond the Atlantic, from the Antipodes, or wherever the restless wanderers dwell and toil. After centuries, if Boston, if New York, have become the most convenient _"All-Saxondom,"_ we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival, and leave the Wen.-- Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notabest of all your Notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such Limbs _we_ make in Yankeeland! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown;_ the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of _silent Berserkir-rage,_ that I remember of, in any other man. "I guess I should not like to be your nigger!"-- Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding: a man worthy of the best reception from us; and meeting such, I understand. He did not speak much with me that morning, but seemed not at all to dislike me: I meditate whether it is fit or not fit that I should seek out his residence, and leave _my_ card too, before I go? Probably not; for the man is political, seemingly altogether; has been at the Queen's levee, &c., &c.: it is simply as a mastiff-mouthed _man_ that he is interesting to me, and not otherwise at all. In about seven days hence we go to Scotland till the July heats be over. That is our resolution after all. Our address there, probably till the end of August, is "Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, N. B.,"--the residence of my Mother-in-law, within a day's drive of my Mother's. Any Letter of yours sent by the old constant address (Cheyne Row, Chelsea) will still find me there; but the other, for that time, will be a day or two shorter. We all go, servant and all. I am bent on writing _something;_ but have no faith that I shall be able. I _must_ try. There is a thing of mine in _Fraser_ for July, of no account, about the "sinking of the _Vengeur_" as you will see. The _French Revolution_ printing is not to stop; two thirds of it are done; at this present rate, it ought to finish, and the whole be ready, within three weeks hence. A Letter will be here from you about that time, I think: I will print no title-page for the Five Hundred till it do come. "Published by _Fraser and_ Little" would, I suppose, be unobjectionable, though Fraser is the most nervous of creatures: but why put _him_ in at all, since these Five hundred copies are wholly Little's and yours? Adieu, my Friend. Our blessings are with you and your house. My wife grows better with the hot weather; I, always worse. Yours ever, T. Carlyle I say not a word about America or Lecturing at present; because I mean to consider it intently in Scotland, and there to decide. My Brother is to be at Ischl (not far from Salzburg) during Summer: he was anxious to have me there, and I to have gone; but--but--Adieu. _Fraser's Shop._ Books not yet come, but known to be safe, and expected soon. Nay, the dexterous Fraser has argued away L15 of the duty, he says! All is right therefore. N.B. he says you are to send the second Portion _in sheets,_ the weight will be less. This if it be still time.--_Basta._ --T.C. XLIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 July, 1839 I hear tonight, O excellent man! that, unless I send a letter to Boston tomorrow with the peep of day, it will miss the Liverpool steamer, which sails earlier than I dreamed of. O foolish Steamer! I am not ready to write. The facts are not yet ripe, though on the turn of the blush. Couldst not wait a little? Hurry is for slaves;--and Aristotle, if I rightly remember only that little from my college lesson, affirmed that the high-minded man never walked fast. O foolish Steamer! wait but a week, and we will style thee Megalopsyche, and hang thee by the Argo in the stars. Meantime I will not deny the dear and admirable man the fragments of intelligence I have. Be it known unto you then, Thomas Carlyle, that I received yesterday morning your letter by the "Liverpool" with great contentment of heart and mind, in all respects, saving that the American Hegira, so often predicted on your side and prayed on ours, is treated with a most unbecoming levity and oblivion; and, moreover, that you do not seem to have received all the letters I seem to have sent. With the letter came the proof-sheet safe, and shall be presently exhibited to Little and Brown. You must have already the result of our first colloquy on that matter. I can now bring the thing nearer to certainty. But you must print their names as before advised on the title-page. Nearly four weeks ago Ellis sent me the noble Italian print for my wife.* She is in Boston at this time, and I believe will be glad that I have written without her aid or word this time, for she was so deeply pleased with the gift that she said she never could write to you. It came timely to me at least. It is a right morning thought, full of health and flowing genius, and I rejoice in it. It is fitly framed and tomorrow is to be hung in the parlor. -------- * Morghen's engraving of Guido's Aurora. -------- Our Munroe's press, you must believe, was of Aristotle's category of the high-minded and slow. Chiding would do no good. They still said, "We have but one copy, and so but one hand at work"! At last, on the 1st of July, the book appeared in the market, but does not come from the binder fast enough to supply the instant demand; and therefore your two hundred and sixty copies cannot part from New York until the 20th of July. They will be on board the London packet which sails on that day. The publisher has his instructions to bind the volumes to match the old ones. Our year since the publication of the Vols. I. and II. is just complete, and I have set the man on the account, but doubt if I get it before twelve or fourteen days. All the edition is gone except forty copies, he told me; and asked me if I would not begin to print a small edition of this First Series, five hundred, as we have five hundred of the new Series too many, with that view. But I am now so old a fox that I suspend majestically my answer until I have his account. For on the 21st of July I am to pay $462 for the paper of this new book: and by and by the printer's bill,--whose amount I do not yet know; and it is better to be "slow and high-minded" a little more, since we have been so much, and not go deeper into these men's debt until we have tasted somewhat of their credit. We are to get, as you know, by contract, near a thousand dollars from these first two volumes; yet a month ago I was forced to borrow two hundred dollars for you on interest, such advances had the account required. But the coming account will enlighten us all. I am very happy in the "success" of the London lectures. I have no word to add tonight, only that Sterling is not timber-toned, that I love his poetry, that I admire his prose with reservations here and there. What he knows he writes manly and well. Now and then he puts in a pasteboard man; but all our readers here take _Blackwood_ for his sake, and lately seek him in vain. I am getting on with some studies of mine prosperously for me, have got three essays nearly done, and who knows but in the autumn I shall have a book? Meantime my little boy and maid, my mother and wife, are well, and the two ladies send to you and yours affectionate regards,--they would fain say urgent invitations. My mother sends tonight, my wife always. I shall send you presently a copy of a translation published here of Eckermann, by Margaret Fuller, a friend of mine and of yours, for the sake of its preface mainly. She is a most accomplished lady, and her culture belongs rather to Europe than to America. Good bye. --R.W. Emerson XLV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 8 August, 1839 Dear Friend,--This day came the letter dated 24 June, with "steam packet" written by you on the outside, but no paddles wheeled it through the sea. It is forty-five days old, and too old to do its errand even had it come twenty days sooner--so far as printer and bookbinder are concerned. I am truly grieved for the mischance of the _John_ Fraser, and will duly lecture the sinning bookseller. I noticed the misnomer in a letter of his New York correspondent, and, I believe, mentioned to you in a letter my fear of such a mischance. I am more sorry for the costliness of this adventure to you, though in a gracious note to me you cut down the fine one half. The new books, tardily printed, were tardily bound and tardily put to sea on the packet ship "Ontario," which left New York for London on the 1st of August. At least this was the promise of Munroe & Co. I stood over the boxes in which they were packing them in the latter days of July. I hope they have not gone to John again, but you must keep an eye to both names.... I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have seen my brave Senator, and seen him as I see him. All my days I have wished that he should go to England, and never more than when I listened two or three times to debates in the House of Commons. We send out usually mean persons as public agents, mere partisans, for whom I can only hope that no man with eyes will meet them; and now those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions, have fallen full on the great forehead which I followed about all my young days, from court-house to senate-chamber, from caucus to street. He has his own sins no doubt, is no saint, is a prodigal. He has drunk this rum of Party too so long, that his strong head is soaked, sometimes even like the soft sponges, but the "man's a man for a' that." Better, he is a great boy,--as wilful, as nonchalant and good-humored. But you must hear him speak, not a show speech which he never does well, but _with cause_ he can strike a stroke like a smith. I owe to him a hundred fine hours and two or three moments of Eloquence. His voice in a great house is admirable. I am sorry if you decided not to visit him. He loves a _man,_ too. I do not know him, but my brother Edward read law with him, and loved him, and afterwards in sick and unfortunate days received the steadiest kindness from him. Well, I am glad you are to think in earnest in Scotland of our Cisatlantic claims. We shall have more rights over the wise and brave, I believe before many years or months. We shall have more men and a better cause than has yet moved on our stagnant waters. I think our Church, so called, must presently vanish. There is a universal timidity, conformity, and rage; and on the other hand the most resolute realism in the young. The man Alcott bides his time. I have a young poet in this village named Thoreau, who writes the truest verses. I pine to show you my treasures; and tell your wife, we have women who deserve to know her. --R.W. Emerson The Yankees read and study the new volumes of _Miscellanies_ even more than the old. The "Sam Johnson" and "Scott" are great favorites. Stearns Wheeler corrected proofs affectionately to the last. Truth and Health be with you alway! XLVI. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839 Dear Emerson,--A cheerful and right welcome Letter of yours, dated 4th July, reached me here, duly forwarded, some three weeks ago; I delayed answering till there could some definite statement, as to bales of literature shipped or landed, or other matter of business forwarded a stage, be made. I am here, with my Wife, rusticating again, these two months; amid diluvian rains, Chartism, Teetotalism, deficient harvest, and general complaint and confusion; which not being able to mend, all that I can do is to heed them as little as possible. "What care I for the house? I am only a lodger." On the whole, I have sat under the wing of Saint Swithin; uncheery, sluggish, murky, as the wettest of his Days;--hoping always, nevertheless, that blue sky, figurative and real, does exist, and will demonstrate itself by and by. I have been the stupidest and laziest of men. I could not write even to you, till some palpable call told me I must. Yesternight, however, there arrives a despatch from Fraser, apprising me that the American _Miscellanies,_ second cargo, are announced from Portsmouth, and "will probably be in the River tomorrow"; where accordingly they in all likelihood now are, a fair landing and good welcome to them! Fraser "knows not whether they are bound or not"; but will soon know. The first cargo, of which I have a specimen here, contented him extremely; only there was one fatality, the cloth of the binding was multiplex, party-colored, some sets done in green, others in red, blue, perhaps skyblue! Now if the second cargo were not multiplex, party-colored, nay multiplex, _in exact concordance with the first,_ as seemed almost impossible--?--Alas, in that case, one could not well predict the issue!--Seriously, it is a most handsome Book you have made; and I have nothing to return but thanks and again thanks. By the bye, if you do print a small second edition of the First Portion, I might have had a small set of errata ready: but _where are they?_ The Book only came into my hand here a few days ago; and I have been whipt from post to pillar without will of my own, without energy to form a will! The only glaring error I recollect at this moment is one somewhere in the second article on _Jean Paul:_ "Osion" (I think, or some such thing) instead of "Orson": it is not an original American error, but copied from the English; if the Printer get his eye upon it, let him rectify; if not, not, I _deserve_ to have it stand against me there. Fraser's joy, should the Books prove either unbound or multiplex in the right way, will be great and unalloyed; he calculates on selling all the copies very soon. He has begun reprinting Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ too, the _Apprenticeship_ and _Travels_ under one; and hopes to remunerate himself for that by and by: whether there will then remain any small peculium for me is but uncertain; meanwhile I correct the press, nothing doubting. One of these I call my best Translation, the other my worst; I have read that latter, the _Apprenticeship,_ again in these weeks; not without surprise, disappointment, nay, aversion here and there, yet on the whole with ever new esteem. I find I can pardon _all_ things in a man except purblindness, falseness of vision,--for, indeed, does not that presuppose every other kind of falseness? But let me hasten to say that the _French Revolution,_ five hundred strong for the New England market, is also, as Fraser advises, "to go to sea in three days." It is bound in red cloth, gilt; a pretty book, James says; which he will sell for twenty-five shillings here;--nay, the London brotherhood have "subscribed" for one hundred and eighty at once, which he considers great work. I directed him to consign to Little and Brown in Boston, the _property_ of the thing _yours,_ with such phraseology and formalities as they use in those cases. I paid him for it yesterday (to save discount) L95; that is the whole cost to me, twenty or thirty pounds more than was once calculated on. Do the best with it you can, my friend; and never mind the result. If the thing fail, as is likely enough, we will simply quit that transport trade, and my experience must be _paid for._ The Title-page was "Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown," then in a second line and smaller type, "London James Fraser"; to which arrangement James made not the slightest objection, or indeed rather seemed to like it.--So much for trade matters: is it not _enough?_ I declare I blush sometimes, and wonder where the good Emerson gets all his patience. We shall be through the affair one day, and find something better to speak about than dollars and pounds. And yet, as you will say, why not even of dollars? Ah, there are leaden-worded [bills] of exchange I have seen which have had an almost sacred character to me! _Pauca verba._ Doubt not your new utterances are eagerly waited for here; above all things the "Book" is what I want to see. You might have told me what it was about. We shall see by and by. A man that has discerned somewhat, and knows it for himself, let him speak it out, and thank Heaven. I pray that they do not confuse you by praises; their blame will do no harm at all. Praise is sweet to all men; and yet alas, alas, if the light of one's own heart go out, bedimmed with poor vapors and sickly false glitterings and flashings, what profit is it! Happier in darkness, in all manner of mere outward darkness, misfortune and neglect, "so that _thou canst endure,_"--which however one cannot to all lengths. God speed you, my Brother! I hope all good things of you; and wonder whether like Phoebus Apollo you are destined to be a youth forever.--Sterling will be right glad to hear your praises; not unmerited, for he is a man among millions that John of mine, though his perpetual mobility wears me out at times. Did he ever write to you? His latest speculation was that he should and would; but I fancy it is among the clouds again. I hear from him the other day, out of Welsh villages where he passed his boyhood, &c., all in a flow of "lyrical recognition," hope, faith, and sanguine unrest; I have even some thoughts of returning by Bristol (in a week or so, that must be), and seeing him. The dog has been reviewing me, he says, and it is coming out in the next _Westminster!_ He hates terribly my doctrine of _"Silence."_ As to America and lecturing, I cannot in this torpid condition venture to say one word. Really it is not impossible; and yet lecturing is a thing I shall never grow to like; still less lionizing, Martineau-ing: _Ach Gott!_ My Wife sends a thousand regards; _she_ will never get across the ocean, you must come to her; she was almost _dead_ crossing from Liverpool hither, and declares she will never go to sea for any purpose whatsoever again. Never till next time! My good old Mother is here, my Brother John (home with his Duke from Italy); all send blessings and affection to you and yours. Adieu till I get to London. Yours ever, T. Carlyle XLVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--What a time since we have written to one another! was it you that defalcated? Alas, I fear it was myself; I have had a feeling these nine or ten weeks that you were expecting to hear from me; that I absolutely could not write. Your kind gift of Fuller's _Eckermann_* was handed in to our Hackney coach, in Regent Street, as we wended homewards from the railway and Scotland, on perhaps the 8th of September last; a welcome memorial of distant friends and doings: nay, perhaps there was a Letter two weeks prior to that:--I am a great sinner! But the truth is, I could not write; and now I can and do it! ---------- * "Conversations with Goethe. Translated from the German of Eckermann. By S.M. Fuller." Boston, 1839. This was the fourth volume in the series of "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," edited by George Ripley. The book has a characteristic Preface by Miss Fuller, in which she speaks of Carlyle as "the only competent English critic" of Goethe. ---------- Our sojourn in Scotland was stagnant, sad; but tranquil, _well let alone,_--an indispensable blessing to a poor creature fretted to fiddle-strings, as I grow to be in this Babylon, take it as I will. We had eight weeks of desolate rain; with about eight days bright as diamonds intercalated in that black monotony of bad weather. The old Hills are the same; the old Streams go gushing along as in past years, in past ages; but he that looks on them is no longer the same: and the old Friends, where are they? I walk silent through my old haunts in that country; sunk usually in inexpressible reflections, in an immeasurable chaos of musings and mopings that cannot be reflected or articulated. The only work I had on hand was one that would not prosper with me: an Article for the _Quarterly Review_ on the state of the Working Classes here. The thoughts were familiar to me, old, many years old; but the utterance of them, in what spoken dialect to utter them! The _Quarterly Review_ was not an eligible vehicle, and yet the eligiblest; of Whigs, abandoned to Dilettantism and withered sceptical conventionality, there was no hope at all; the _London-and-Westminster_ Radicals, wedded to their Benthamee Formulas, and tremulous at their own shadows, expressly rejected my proposal many months ago: Tories alone remained; Tories I often think have more stuff in them, in spite of their blindness, than any other class we have;--Walter Scott's _sympathy_ with his fellow creatures, what is it compared with Sydney Smith's, with a Poor Law Commissioner's! Well: this thing would not prosper with me in Scotland at all; nor here at all, where nevertheless I had to persist writing; writing and burning, and cursing my destiny, and then again writing. Finally the thing came out, as an Essay on _Chartism;_ was shown to Lockhart, according to agreement; was praised by him, but was also found unsuitable by him; suitable to _explode_ a whole fleet of Quarterlies into sky-rockets in these times! And now Fraser publishes it himself, with some additions, as a little Volume; and it will go forth in a week or two on its own footing; and England will see what she has to say to it, whether something or nothing; and one man, as usual, is right glad that he has nothing more to do with it. This is the reason why I could not write. I mean to send you the Proof-sheets of this thing, to do with as you see cause; there will be but some five or six, I think. It is probable my New England brothers may approve some portions of it; may be curious to see it reprinted; you ought to say Yes or No in regard to that. I think I will send all the sheets together; or at farthest, at two times. Fraser, when we returned hither, had already received his _Miscellanies;_ had about despatched his five hundred _French Revolutions,_ insured and so, forth, consigned, I suppose, to your protection and the proper booksellers; probably they have got over from New York into your neighborhood before now. Much good may they do you! The _Miscellanies,_ with their variegated binding, proved to be in perfect order; and are now all sold; with much regret from poor James that we had not a thousand more of them! This thousand he now sets about providing by his own industry, poor man; I am revising the American copy in these days; the printer is to proceed forthwith. I admire the good Stearns Wheeler as I proceed; I write to him my thanks by this post, and send him by Kennet a copy of Goethe's _Meister,_ for symbol of acknowledgment. Another copy goes off for you, to the care of Little and Company. Fraser has got it out two weeks ago; a respectable enough book, now that the version is corrected somewhat. Tell me whether you dislike it less; what you do think of it? By the by, have you not learned to read German now? I rather think you have. It is three months spent well, if ever months were, for a thinking Englishman of this age.--I hope Kennet will use more despatch than he sometimes does. Thank Heaven for these Boston Steamers they project! May the Nereids and Poseidon favor them! They will bring us a thousand miles nearer, at one step; by and by we shall be of one parish after all. During Autumn I speculated often about a Hegira into New England this very year: but alas! my horror of _Lecturing_ continues great; and what else is there for me to do there? These several years I have had no wish so pressing as to hold my peace. I begin again to feel some use in articulate speech; perhaps I shall one day have something that I want to utter even in your side of the water. We shall see. Patience, and shuffle the cards.--I saw no more of Webster; did not even learn well where he was, till lately I noticed in the Newspapers that he had gone home again. A certain Mr. Brown (I think) brought me a letter from you, not long since; I forwarded him to Cambridge and Scotland: a modest inoffensive man. He said he had never personally met with Emerson. My Wife recalled to him the story of the Scotch Traveler on the top of Vesuvius: "Never saw so beautiful a scene in the world!"--"Nor I," replied a stranger standing there, "except once; on the top of Dunmiot, in the Ochil Hills in Scotland."--"Good Heavens! That is a part of my Estate, and I was never there! I will go thither." Yes, do!--We have seen no other Transoceanic that I remember. We expect your _Book_ soon! We know the subject of your Winter Lectures too; at least Miss Martineau thinks she does, and makes us think so. Heaven speed the work! Heaven send my good Emerson a clear utterance, in all right ways, of the nobleness that dwells in him! He knows what silence means; let him know speech also, in its season the two are like canvas and pigment, like darkness and light-image painted thereon; the one is essential to the other, not possible without the other. Poor Miss Martineau is in Newcastle-on-Tyne this winter; sick, painfully not dangerously; with a surgical brother-in-law. Her meagre didacticalities afflict me no more; but also her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more. We wish she were back. This silence, I calculate, forced silence, will do her much good. If I were a Legislator, I would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours: it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow. Such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, --like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice! Silence, silence! Sterling sent you a Letter from Clifton, which I set under way here, having added the address. He is not well again, the good Sterling; talks of Madeira this season again: but I hope otherwise. You of course read his sublime "article"? I tell him it was--a thing untellable! Mr. Southey has fallen, it seems, into a mournful condition: oblivion, mute hebetation, loss of all faculty. He suffered greatly, nursing his former wife in her insanity, for years till her relief by death; suffered, worked, and made no moan; the brunt of the task over, he sank into collapse in the hands of a new wife he had just wedded. What a lot for him; for her especially! The most excitable but most methodic man I have ever seen. [Greek] that is a word that awaits us all.--I have my brother here at present; though talking of Lisbon with his Buccleuchs. My Wife seems better than of late winters. I actually had a Horse, nay actually have it, though it has gone to the country till the mud abate again! It did me perceptible good; I mean to try it farther. I am no longer so desperately poor as I have been for twelve years back; sentence of starvation or beggary seems revoked at last, a blessedness really very considerable. Thanks, thanks! We send a thousand regards to the two little ones, to the two mothers. _Valete nostrum memores._ --T. Carlyle XLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 12 December, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Not until the 29th of November did the five hundred copies of the _French Revolution_ arrive in Boston. Fraser unhappily sent them to New York, whence they came not without long delays. They came in perfectly good order, not in the pretty red you told us of, but in a sober green;--not so handsome and salable a back, our booksellers said, as their own; but in every other respect a good book. The duties at the New York Custom House on these and a quantity of other books sent by Fraser amounted to $400.36, whereof, I understand, the _French Revolution_ pays for its share $243. No bill has been brought us for freight, so we conclude that you have paid it. I confided the book very much to the conscience and discretion of Little and Brown, and after some ciphering they settle to sell it at $3.75 per copy, wherefrom you are to get the cost of the book, and (say) $1.10 per copy profit, and no more. The booksellers eat the rest. The book is rather too dear for our market of cheap manufactures, and therefore we are obliged to give the booksellers a good percentage to get it off at all: for we stand in daily danger of a cheap edition from some rival neighbor. I hope to give you good news of its sale soon, although I have been assured today that no book sells, the times are so bad. Brown had disposed of fifty or sixty copies to the trade, and twelve at retail. He doubted not to sell them all in six months.... Several persons have asked me to get some copies of the _German Romance_ sent over here for sale. Last week a gentleman desired me to say he wanted four copies, and today I have been charged to procure another. I think, if you will send me by Little and Brown, through Longman, six copies, we can find an immediate market. It gives me great joy to write to my friend once more, slow as you may think me to use the privilege. For a good while I dared believe you were coming hither, and why should I write?--and now for weeks I have been absorbed in my foolish lectures, of which only two are yet delivered and ended. There should be eight more; subject, "The Present Age." Out of these follies I remember you with glad heart. Lately I had Sterling's letter, which, since I have read his article on you, I am determined to answer speedily. I delighted in the spirit of that paper, loving you so well and accusing you so conscientiously. What does he at Clifton? If you communicate with him, tell him I thank him for his letter, and hold him dear. I am very happy lately in adding one or two new friends to my little circle, and you may be sure every friend of mine is a friend of yours. So when you come here you shall not be lonely. A new person is always to me a great event, and will not let me sleep.--I believe I was not wise to volunteer myself to this fever fit of lecturing again. I ought to have written instead in silence and serenity. Yet I work better under this base necessity, and then I have a certain delight (base also?) in speaking to a multitude. But my joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this _publication_ of myself.--After ten or twelve weeks I think I shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture. I beg you will write to me and tell me what you do, and give me good news of your wife and your brother. Can they not see the necessity of your coming to look after your American interests? My wife and mother love both you and them. A young man of New York told me the other day he was about getting you an invitation from an Association in that city to give them a course of lectures on such terms as would at least make you whole in the expenses of coming thither. We could easily do that in Boston. --R.W. Emerson What manner of person is Heraud? Do you read Landor, or know him, O seeing man? Farewell! XLIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 6 January, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--It is you, I surely think, that are in my debt now;* nevertheless I must fling you another word: may it cross one from you coming hither--as near the _Lizard Point_ as it likes! --------- * The preceding letter had not yet arrived. --------- Some four sheets making a Pamphlet called _Chartism_ addressed to you at Concord are, I suppose, snorting along through the waters this morning, part of the Cargo of the "British Queen." At least I gave them to Mr. Brown (your unseen friend) about ten days ago, who promised to dispose of them; the "British Queen," he said, was the earliest chance. The Pamphlet itself (or rather booklet, for Fraser has gilt it, &c., and asks five shillings for it as a Book) is out since then; radicals and others yelping considerably in a discordant manner about it; I have nothing other to say to _you_ about it than what I said last time, that the sheets were _yours_ to do with as you saw good,--to burn if you reckoned that fittest. It is not entirely a Political Pamphlet; nay, there are one or two things in it which my American Friends specially may like: but the interests discussed are altogether English, and cannot be considered as likely to concern New-Englishmen very much. However, it will probably be itself in your hand before this sheet, and you will have determined what is fit. A copy of _Wilhelm Meister,_ two copies, one for Stearns Wheeler, are probably in some of the "Line Ships" at this time too: good voyage to them! The _French Revolutions_ were all shipped, invoiced, &c.; they have, I will suppose, arrived safe, as we shall hear by and by. What freightages, landings, and embarkments! For only two days ago I sent you off, through Kennet, another Book: John Sterling's _Poems,_ which he has collected into a volume. Poor John has overworked himself again, or the climate without fault on his side has proved too hard for him: he sails for Madeira again next week! His Doctors tell me there is no intrinsic danger; but they judge the measure safe as one of precaution. It is very mortifying he had nestled himself down at Clifton, thinking he might now hope to continue there; and lo! he has to fly again.--Did you get his letter? The address to him now will be, for three months to come, "_Edward_ Sterling, Esq., South Place, Knightsbridge, London," his Father's designation. Farther I must not omit to say that Richard Monckton Milnes purposes, through the strength of Heaven, to _review_ you! In the next Number of the _London and Westminster,_ the courageous youth will do this feat, if they let him. Nay, he has already done it, the Paper being actually written he employed me last week in negotiating with the Editors about it; and their answer was, "Send us the Paper, it promises very well." We shall see whether it comes out or not; keeping silence till then. Milnes is a _Tory_ Member of Parliament; think of that! For the rest, he describes his religion in these terms: "I profess to be a Crypto-Catholic." Conceive the man! A most bland-smiling, semi- quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianized little man, who has long olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society! Let us hear now what he will say, of the American _Vates._* --------- * The end of this letter has been cut off. --------- L. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 January, 1840 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter of the 12th of December, greatly, to my satisfaction, has arrived; the struggling Steamship, in spite of all hurricanes, has brought it safe across the waters to me. I find it good to write you a word in return straightway; though I think there are already two, or perhaps even three, messages of mine to you flying about unacknowledged somewhere under the moon; nay, the last of them perhaps may go by the same packet as this, --having been forwarded, as this will be, to _Liverpool,_ after the "British Queen" sailed from London. Your account of the _French Revolution_ packages, and prognosis of what Little and Brown will do with them, is altogether as it should be. I apprised Fraser instantly of his invoiceless Books, &c.; he answers, that order has been taken in that long since, "instructions" sent, and, I conclude, arrangements for _bills_ least of all forgotten. I mentioned what share of the duty was his; and that your men meant to draw on him for it. That is all right. As to the _French Revolution,_ I agree with your Booksellers altogether about it; the American Edition actually pleases myself better for looking at; nor do I know that this new English one has much superiority for use: it is despicably printed, I fear, so far as false spellings and other slovenlinesses can go. Fraser "finds the people like it"; _credat Judaeus;_--as for me, I have told him I will _not print any more_ with that man, but with some other man. Curious enough, the price Little and Brown have fixed upon was the price I remember guessing at beforehand, and the result they propose to realize for me corresponds closely with my prophecy too. Thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the trouble you never grudge to take. We shall get ourselves handsomely out of this export and import speculation; and know, taught at a rather _cheap_ rate, not to embark in the like again. There went off a _Wilhelm Meister_ for you, and a letter to announce it, several weeks ago; that was message first. Your traveling neighbor, Brown, took charge of a Pamphlet named _Chartism,_ to be put into the "British Queen's" Letter-bag (where I hope, and doubt not, he did put it, though I have seen nothing of him since); that and a letter in reference to it was message second. Thirdly, I sent off a volume of _Poems_ by Sterling, likewise announced in that letter. And now this that I actually write is the fourth (it turns out to be) and last of all the messages. Let us take Arithmetic along with us in all things.--Of _Chartism_ I have nothing farther to say, except that Fraser is striking off another One Thousand copies to be called Second Edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative Sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a Tory,--thank Heaven. The _Miscellanies_ are at press; at _two_ presses; to be out, as Hope asseverates, in March: five volumes, without _Chartism;_ with Hoffmann and Tieck from German Romance, stuck in somewhere as Appendix; with some other trifles stuck in elsewhere, chiefly as Appendix; and no essential change from the Boston Edition. Fraser, "overwhelmed with business," does not yet send me his net result of those Two Hundred and Fifty Copies sold off some time ago; so soon as he does, you shall hear of it for your satisfaction.--As to _German Romance,_ tell my friends that it has been out of print these ten years; procurable, of late not without difficulty, only in the Old-Bookshops. The comfort is that the best part of it stands in the new _Wilhelm Meister:_ Fraser and I had some thought of adding Tieck's and Richter's parts, had they suited for a volume; the rest may without detriment to anybody perish. Such press-correctings and arrangings waste my time here, not in the agreeablest way. I begin, though in as sulky a state of health as ever, to look again towards some new kind of work. I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. Meanwhile I read rubbish of Books; Eichhorn, Grimm, &c.; very considerable rubbish; one grain in the cart load worth pocketing. It is pity I have no appetite for lecturing! Many applications have been made to me here;--none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine, innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers' shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to _me._--For you, good friend, I account you luckier; I do verily: lecture there what innumerable things you have got to say on "The Present Age";--yet withal do not forget to _write_ either, for that is the lasting plan after all. I have a curious Note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a Scotch Mr. Erskine (famed among the saints here) by a Madame Necker, Madame de Stael's kinswoman, to whom he, the said Mr. Erskine, had lent your first Pamphlet at Geneva. She regards you with a certain love, yet a _shuddering_ love. She says, "Cela sent l'Americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu'on doit de meme conquerir le monde intellectuel"! What R.M. Milnes will say of you we hope also to see.--I know both Heraud and Landor; but alas, what room is here! Another sheet with less of "Arithmetic" in it will soon be allowed me. Adieu, dear friend. Yours, ever and ever, T. Carlyle LI. Emerson to Carlyle* New York, 18 March, 1840 My Dear Friend,--I have just seen the steamer "British Queen" enter the harbor from sea, and here lies the "Great Western," to sail tomorrow. I will not resist hints so broad upon my long procrastinations. You shall have at least a tardy acknowledgment that I received in January your letter of December, which I should have answered at once had it not found me absorbed in writing foolish lectures which were then in high tide. I had written you, a little earlier, tidings of the receipt of your _French Revolution._ Your letter was very welcome, as all your letters are. I have since seen tidings of the _Essay on Chartism_ in an English periodical, but have not yet got my proof-sheets. They are probably still rolling somewhere outside of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest passages: only one has come in for many a week. We will be as patient as we can. -------- * This letter appeared in the _Athenaeum,_ for July 22, 1882 -------- I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour's sail. The city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls. And how they multiply! They estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. But I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret and each to keep the other's madness in countenance. You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason. I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground. Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an _universal_ workman. He solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body. I wish I may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope. And yet I am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I never shall. We will see. Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American verses and prose of good intent? My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good will if written at all. I saw some poetical fragments which charmed me,--if only the writer consents to give them to the public. I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself. I ended in the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age. They are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and Sapience. I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen. We shall have many Richmonds in the field presently. I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance. I left my wife, and boy, and girl,--the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house,--well at home a week ago. The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer when I am tired. Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy. I brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. All these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years. My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for your London disciples. May love and truth inspire them! I can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores. Our saintly Dr. T---, I am told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron's daughter, _informing_ the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends' brains, and him the very monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years. But do come in one of Mr. Cunard's ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. If they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will pay for. Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife's also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful Guido. You told me to send you no more accounts. But I certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers' accounts and long delays, by sharing them. I have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. Farewell. --R.W.E. LII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a D'Orsay _Portrait_ of myself, I see not what there is! Do you read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world. Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you would.--As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity: Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature _likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's Marshals, and _is,_ alas,--Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--Now if I do not send you the Portrait, after all? Fraser's account of the _Miscellanies_ stood legibly extended over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to look upon. I trouble _you_ only with the result. Two Hundred and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two "imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November, he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well, of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that belonged to me was L239,--the L261 had been the expense of handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";--it is a Trade, one would surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,--not to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America, that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams visit it;--mud _and_ sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old consisted of.--I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good- news that James is altogether content with the "progress" of all these Books, including even the well-abused _Chartism_ Book. We are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the _Miscellanies;_ of which I hope to send you a copy before long. And now why do not _you_ write to me? Your Lectures must be done long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is determined by what we _do not_ write! There is nothing truer than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He whom it concerns can consider it.--You have doubtless seen Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of _Emerson,_ to hit the nail on the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is gently, not unlovingly done;--and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of a man. You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as "wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing." To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of Bedlam. He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to "List the Music of the spheres." He escapes _assassination,_ as I calculate, chiefly by being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.--You cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" Really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."-- "That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring, unaspirating.*--Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy, with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that! They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-_providers;_ but consider them a worthless species.--When will you write, then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to give "On Heroes and Hero-worship,"--from Odin to Robert Burns! My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household! Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the _Dial_ for October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively with Carlyle's sketch. -------- LIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 21 April, 1840 My Dear Friend,--Three weeks ago I received a letter from you following another in the week before, which I should have immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr. Grinnell--a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence, R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and, though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such-- is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle, I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters, and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more. Your letter announces _Wilhelm Meister,_ Sterling's _Poems,_ and _Chartism._ I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no Mercury. _Wilhelm_ and _Sterling_ have not yet made their appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived. _Chartism_ arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it. Their estimate is:-- Printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35 Paper .....................................44.00 Binding .................................. 90.00 Total .................................... $197.35 Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound. The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,-- no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days. I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful experiments myself. I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.--I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings. I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face. _22 April._--Last evening came true the promised account drawn up by Munroe's clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I sent you, viz. of _French Revolution,_ ended, with a balance of $9.53 in your favor.... I send you also a paper which Munroe drew up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the first and second volumes [of the _Miscellanies_] were concerned, the result had accorded with the promise that you should have $1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper, but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend of yours in Fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm,-- chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner,--and yet it is a duty to understand one's own affair. When I ask, at each six months' reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary if it comes to good,--the account of the London five hundred _French Revolution_ is not yet six months old, and so does not come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first and second volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ for the same reason. They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend Margaret Fuller's Journal--after many false baptisms now saying it will be called _The Dial,_ and which is to appear in July-- will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else: but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time. There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books, least of all on _his_ books; but in a lecture on Literature, in my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you? I know not. A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people in England have a school called "Alcott House" after my friend. At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I will release your eyes. Yours always, R.W. Emerson LIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 June, 1840 My Dear Carlyle,--Since I wrote a couple of letters to you,--I know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago,-- there has come to me _Wilhelm Meister_ in three volumes, goodly to see, good to read,--indeed quite irresistible;--for though I thought I knew it all, I began at the beginning and read to the end of the _Apprenticeship,_ and no doubt shall despatch the _Travels,_ on the earliest holiday. My conclusions and inferences therefrom I will spare you now, since I appended them to a piece I had been copying fairly for Margaret Fuller's _Dial,_--"Thoughts on Modern Literature," and which is the substance of a lecture in my last winter's course. But I learn that my paper is crowded out of the first Number, and is not to appear until October. I will not reckon the accidents that threaten the ghost of an article through three months of pre- existence! Meantime, I rest your glad debtor for the good book. With it came Sterling's _Poems,_ which, in the interim, I have acknowledged in a letter to him. Sumner has since brought me a gay letter from yourself, concerning, in part, Landor and Heraud; in which as I know justice is not done to the one I suppose it is not done to the other. But Heraud I give up freely to your tender mercies: I have no wish to save him. Landor can be shorn of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for me to admire. Many years ago I have read a hundred fine memorable things in the _Imaginary Conversations,_ though I know well the faults of that book, and the _Pericles_ and _Aspasia_ within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the man Landor when I was in Florence, and he was very kind to me in answering a multitude of questions. His speech, I remember, was below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, I own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and terminated sometimes by a sudden tumble. I suspect you of very short and dashing reading in his books; and yet I should think you would like him,--both of you such glorious haters of cant. Forgive me, I have put you two together twenty times in my thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and vivacity. But you must leave me to my bad taste and my perverse and whimsical combinations. I have written to Mr. Milnes who sent me by Sumner a copy of his article with a note. I addressed my letter to him at "London,"-- no more. Will it ever reach him? I told him that if I should print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash, unwhipped generalization. For my journals, which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures. I ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid? I shall try and persuade Mr. Calvert, who has sent to me for a letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph portrait of our Concord "Battle-field," so called, and village, that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in which we walk and love you. The view includes my Grandfather's house (under the trees near the Monument), in which I lived for a time until I married and bought my present house, which is not in the scope of this drawing. I will roll up two of them, and, as Sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, I beg you will send him also this particle of foreign parts. With this, or presently after it, I shall send a copy of the _Dial._ It is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and I have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which I wish Sterling and Milnes to see. In this number what say you to the _Elegy_ written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me,--Henry Thoreau? A criticism on Persius is his also. From the papers of my brother Charles, I gave them the fragments on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke: and my brother Edward wrote the little _Farewell,_ when last he left his home. The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know. I am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown. They promised it at this time. It will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany it. But I am determined, if I can, to send one letter which is not on business. Send me some word of the Lectures. I have yet seen only the initial notices. Surely you will send me some time the D'Orsay portrait. Sumner thinks Mrs. Carlyle was very well when he saw her last, which makes me glad.--I wish you both to love me, as I am affectionately Yours, --R.W. Emerson LV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 July, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent Arithmetic you sent me! It is many weeks, perhaps it is months, since the worthy citizen--your Host as I understood you in some of your Northern States--stept in here, one mild evening, with his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into France. Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours, beautiful Disciples of yours:--I pray you forgive me! I have been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in all ways. Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got the _Bibliopoliana_ back from Fraser; to whom, as you recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand such things, had straightway handed them for examination. I always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken. I did not urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin. Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of money. A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade; mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. So he thinks. The only point on which I heard him make any criticism was on what he called, if I remember, "the number of Copies _delivered,_"--that is to say, delivered by the Printer and Binder as actually available for sale. The edition being of a Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are "waste." Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of _adding_ one for every fifty beforehand, whereby the _waste_ is usually made good, and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some dozen called "Author's copies" over and above. Fraser supposes your Printers have a different custom. That is all. The rest is apparently every-way _right;_ is to be received with faith; with faith, charity, and even hope,--and packed into the bottom of one's drawer, never to be looked at more except on the outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men! In that capacity it shall lie there. My Lectures were in May, about _Great Men._ The misery of it was hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful. I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience; as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them. At times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak. The beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager attention. I meant to tell them, among other things, that man was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,--Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than almost any of you!--Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as King") would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted to be and to have been Nothing, _chaff_ that would not grow: my poor Mahomet "was _wheat_ with barn sweepings"; Nature had tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the _wheat,_ behold she had said Yes to it, and it was growing!--On the whole, I fear I did little but confuse my esteemed audience: I was amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill;-- gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest _speech_ of a man's heart goes into men's hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. Withal I regretted that I had not six months of preaching, whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! In the fire of the moment I had all but decided on setting out for America this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion there. Quit your paper formulas, my brethren,--equivalent to old wooden idols, _un_divine as they: in the name of God, understand that you are alive, and that God is alive! Did the Upholsterer make this Universe? Were you created by the Tailor? I tell you, and conjure you to believe me literally, No, a thousand times No! Thus did I mean to preach, on "Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic"; in America too. Alas! the fire of determination died away again: all that I did resolve upon was to write these Lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. Two of them accordingly are actually written; the Third to be begun on Monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of May. Whether I go to preach them a second time extempore in America rests once more with the Destinies. It is a shame to talk so much about a thing, and have it still hang _in nubibus:_ but I was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than I had ever before been. A month or two now, I suppose, will bring us back to the old nonentity again. Is there, at bottom, in the world or out of it, anything one would like so well, with one's whole heart _well,_ as PEACE? Is lecturing and noise the way to get at that? Popular lecturer! Popular writer! If they would undertake in Chancery, or Heaven's Chancery, to make a wise man Mahomet Second and Greater, "Mahomet of Saxondom," not reviewed only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all Bulldom, Yankee- doodle-doodom, Felondom New Zealand, under the Tropics and in part of Flanders,--would he not rather answer: Thank you; but in a few years I shall be dead, twelve Centuries will have become Eternity; part of Flanders Immensity: we will sit still here if you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! Enough of this. Richard Milnes had a Letter from you, one morning lately, when I met him at old Rogers's. He is brisk as ever; his kindly _Dilettantism_ looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of Earnest by and by. He has a new volume of Poems out: I advised him to try Prose; he admitted that Poetry would not be generally read again in these ages,--but pleaded, "It was so convenient for veiling commonplace!" The honest little heart!--We did not know what to make of the bright Miss --- here; she fell in love with my wife;--the _contrary,_ I doubt, with me: my hard realism jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. Is not all that very morbid,--unworthy the children of Odin, not to speak of Luther, Knox, and the other Brave? I can do nothing with vapors, but wish them _condensed._ Kennet had a copy of the English _Miscellanies_ for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was just a day or two _before_ your advice to try Green henceforth. Has the _Meister_ ever arrived? I received a Controversial Volume from Mr. Ripley: pray thank him very kindly. Somebody borrowed the Book from me; I have not yet read it. I did read a Pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. Norton* surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are jarring about become? As healthy _worshiping_ Paganism is to Seneca and Company, so is healthy worshiping Christianity to--I had rather not work the sum!--Send me some swift news of yourself, dear Emerson. We salute you and yours, in all heartiness of brotherhood. Yours ever and always-- T. Carlyle --------- * Professor Andrews Norton. The controversy was that occasioned by Professor Norton's Discourse on "The Latest Form of Infidelity." --------- LVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 August, 1840 My Dear Carlyle,--I fear, nay I know, that when I wrote last to you, about the 1st of July, I promised to follow my sheet immediately with a bookseller's account. The bookseller did presently after render his account, but on its face appeared the fact--which with many and by me unanswerable reasons they supported--that the balance thereon credited to you was not payable until the 1st of October. The account is footed "Net sales of _French Revolution_ to 1 July, 1840, due October 1, $249.77." Let us hope then that we shall get, not only a new page of statement, but also some small payment in money a month hence. Having no better story to tell, I told nothing. But I will not let the second of the Cunard boats leave Boston without a word to you. Since I wrote by Calvert came your letter describing your lectures and their success: very welcome news, for a good London newspaper, which I consulted, promised reports, but gave none. I have heard so oft of your projected trip to America, that my ear would now be dull, and my faith cold, but that I wish it so much. My friend, your audience still waits for you here willing and eager, and greatly larger no doubt than it would have been when the matter was first debated. Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism, and the _Dial,_ poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public. But they would hardly be able to fasten on so huge a man as you are any party badge. We must all hear you for ourselves. But beside my own hunger to see and know you, and to hear you speak at ease and at large under my own roof, I have a growing desire to present you to three or four friends, and them to you. Almost all my life has been passed alone. Within three or four years I have been drawing nearer to a few men and women whose love gives me in these days more happiness than I can write of. How gladly I would bring your Jovial light upon this friendly constellation, and make you too know my distant riches! We have our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. I sometimes fancy our cipher is larger and easier to read than that of your English society. You will naturally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this,--I who have leisure, and write. No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility,--anything but history. And yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible, and challenges a painter. I can brag little of my diligence or achievement this summer. I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick kiln instead of a house.--Consider, however, that all summer I see a good deal of company,--so near as my fields are to the city. But next winter I think to omit lectures, and write more faithfully. Hope for me that I shall get a book ready to send you by New-Year's-day. Sumner came to see me the other day. I was glad to learn all the little that he knew of you and yours. I do not wonder you set so lightly by my talkative countryman. He has brought nothing home but names, dates, and prefaces. At Cambridge last week I saw Brown for the first time. I had little opportunity to learn what he knew. Mr. Hume has never yet shown his face here. He sent me his Poems from New York, and then went South, and I know no more of him. My Mother and Wife send you kind regards and best wishes,--to you and all your house. Tell your wife that I hate to hear that she cannot sail the seas. Perhaps now she is stronger she will be a better sailor. For the sake of America will she not try the trip to Leith again? It is only twelve days from Liverpool to Boston. Love, truth, and power abide with you always! --R.W.E. LVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 26 September, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions, uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me, even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as my wont is, I was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the _combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I must speak. According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I do _not_ go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker's fairy shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The nervous flutter of May Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for me; that I ought devoutly to thank Heaven there is no absolute compulsion laid on me at present to speak! My notion in general was but an absurd one: I fancied I might go across the sea, open my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the Union like a very lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months;--till I had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to come, or forever and a day perhaps! That was my poor little day dream;--incapable of being realized. It appears, I have to stay here, in this brick Babylon; tugging at my chains, which will not break for me: the less I tug, the better. Ah me! On the whole, I have written down my last course of lectures, and shall probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to America! It is truly very weak to speak about that matter so often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come. _Frey ist das Herz,_ as Goethe says, _doch ist der Fuss gebunden._ After innumerable projects, and invitations towards all the four winds, for this summer, I have ended about a week ago by--simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged Mother, but sitting still here under the Autumn sky such as I have it; in these vacant streets I am lonelier than elsewhere, have more chance for composure than elsewhere! With Sterne's starling I repeat to myself, "I can't get out."--Well, hang it, stay in then; and let people alone of it! I have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, I came to the conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not _enough_ of good to warrant such equestrianism: so I plunged out, into green England, in the end of July, for a whole week of riding, an _explosion_ of riding, therewith to end the business, and send off my poor quadruped for sale. I rode over Surrey,-- with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose _Guesses at Truth_ you perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan's stithy and hammer, at Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the nose;--finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or am like to have. I am now over head and ears in _Cromwellian_ Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man. Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this Cromwell was one of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate _Baresark;_ very interesting to me. I grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for some time. The _Dial_ No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest; it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet--you know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. I have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings, even Hebrew ones,--Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History is there the parallel of that,--a true worship rising at this hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor old English Formulism that has called itself for some two centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen's, and insist on saying, _Le roi le veut!_--I read last night the wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism on myself, in the _Quarterly Review._ It seems to be by one Sewell, an Oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the Pusey-and-Newman Corporation. A good man, and with good notions, whom I have noted for some years back. He finds me a very worthy fellow; "true, most true,"--except where I part from Puseyism, and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then I am false, most false. As the Turks say, _Allah akbar!_ I forget altogether what I said of Landor; but I hope I did not put him in the Heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing; a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true, is another. He has not been in town, this year; Milnes describes him as _eating_ greatly at Bath, and perhaps even cooking! Milnes did get your Letter: I told you? Sterling has the Concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and remind me of many things. Sterling is busy writing; he is to make Falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with Italy. He cannot away with my doctrine of _Silence;_ the good John. My Wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver again as winter draws nigh. Adieu, dear Emerson. Good be with you and yours. I must be far gone when I cease to love you. "The stars are above us, the graves are under us." Adieu. --T. Carlyle LVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1840 My Dear Friend,--My hope is that you may live until this creeping bookseller's balance shall incline at last to your side. My rude ciphering, based on the last account of this kind which I sent you in April from J. Munroe & Co., had convinced me that I was to be in debt to you at this time L40 or more; so that I actually bought L40 the day before the "Caledonia" sailed to send you; but on giving my new accounts to J.M. & Co., to bring the statement up to this time, they astonished me with the above written result. I professed absolute incredulity, but Nichols* labored to show me the rise and progress of all my blunders. Please to send the account with the last to your Fraser, and have it sifted. That I paid, a few weeks since, $481.34, and again, $28.12, for printing and paper respectively, is true.--C.C. Little & Co. acknowledge the sale of 82 more copies of the London Edition _French Revolution_ since the 187 copies of July 1; but these they do not get paid for until January 1, and we it seems must wait as long. We will see if the New-Year's-day will bring us more pence. --------- * Partner in the firm of J. Munroe & Co. --------- I received by the "Acadia" a letter from you, which I acknowledge now, lest I should not answer it more at large on another sheet, which I think to do. If you do not despair of American booksellers send the new proofs of the Lectures when they are in type to me by John Green, 121 Newgate Street (I believe), to the care of J. Munroe & Co. He sends a box to Munroe by every steamer. I sent a _Dial,_ No. 2, for you, to Green. Kennet, I hear, has failed. I hope he did not give his creditors my _Miscellanies,_ which you told me were there. I shall be glad if you will draw Cromwell, though if I should choose it would be Carlyle. You will not feel that you have done your work until those devouring eyes and that portraying hand have achieved England in the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps you cannot do it until you have made your American visit. I assure you the view of Britain is excellent from New England. We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.* One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope. ----------- * Preliminary to the experiment of Brook Farm, in 1841. ----------- I am ashamed to tell you, though it seems most due, anything of my own studies, they seem so desultory, idle, and unproductive. I still hope to print a book of essays this winter, but it cannot be very large. I write myself into letters, the last few months, to three or four dear and beautiful persons, my country-men and women here. I lit my candle at both ends, but will now be colder and scholastic. I mean to write no lectures this winter. I hear gladly of your wife's better health; and a letter of Jane Tuckerman's, which I saw, gave the happiest tidings of her. We do not despair of seeing her yet in Concord, since it is now but twelve and a half days to you. I had a letter from Sterling, which I will answer. In all love and good hope for you and yours, your affectionate --R.W. Emerson LIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 9 December, 1840 Dear Emerson,--My answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless Book-conveyer, Kennet, in reference to that copy of the _Miscellanies._ I was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come. My first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the Book, not to you, luckless man, but to _Lydia_ Emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy Green now has lying by him, waiting for the January Steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the New Year has got out of infancy the Lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance. And now as to Kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic Fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic Kennet: namely, that the said Kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical Book directed to Munroe's care, duly booked and engaged for, in May last, but left to repose itself in the Covent-Garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men! Fraser has brought back the Book, and you have lost it;--and the Library of my native village in Scotland is to get it; and not Kennet any more in this world, but Green ever henceforth is to be our Book Carrier. There is a history. Green, it seems, addresses also to Munroe; but the thing, I suppose, will now shift for itself without watching. As to the bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism,-- when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing _as_ true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. Of the truth of Waldo Emerson's heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, no doubt at all. My Hero-Lectures lie still in Manuscript. Fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though I rather feel of late as if it were clearing. To fly in the teeth of English Puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as I am pretty sure of, is questionable: yet at bottom why not? Dost thou not as entirely reject this new Distraction of a Puseyism as man can reject a thing,--and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it,--were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being _beheaded,_ with axe and block on Tower Hill, two centuries ago? I think it were as well to _tell_ Puseyism that it has something of good, but also much of bad and even worst. We shall see. If I print the thing, we shall surely take in America again; either by stereotype or in some other way. Fear not that!--Do you attend at all to this new _Laudism_ of ours? It spreads far and wide among our Clergy in these days; a most notable symptom, very cheering to me many ways; whether or not one of the fatalest our poor Church of England has ever exhibited, and betokening swifter ruin to it than any other, I do not inquire. Thank God, men do discover at last that there is still a God present in their affairs, and must be, or their affairs are of the Devil, naught, and worthy of being sent to the Devil! This once given, I find that all is given; daily History, in Kingdom and in Parish, is an _experimentum crucis_ to show what is the Devil's and what not. But on the whole are we not the _formalest_ people ever created under this Sun? Cased and overgrown with Formulas, like very lobsters with their shells, from birth upwards; so that in the man we see only his breeches, and believe and swear that wherever a pair of old breeches are there is a man! I declare I could both laugh and cry. These poor good men, merciful, zealous, with many sympathies and thoughts, there do they vehemently appeal to me, _Et tu, Brute?_ Brother, wilt thou too insist on the breeches being old,--not ply a needle among us here?--To the naked Caliban, gigantic, for whom such breeches would not be a glove, who is stalking and groping there in search of new breeches and accoutrements, sure to get them, and to tread into nonentity whoever hinders him in the search,--they are blind as if they had no eyes. Sartorial men; ninth-parts of a man:--enough of them. The second Number of the _Dial_ has also arrived some days ago. I like it decidedly better than the first; in fact, it is right well worth being put on paper, and sent circulating;--I find only, as before that it is still too much of a soul for circulating as it should. I wish you could in future contrive to mark at the end of each Article who writes it, or give me some general key for knowing. I recognize Emerson readily; the rest are of [Greek] for most part. But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal! Your Paper on Literature is incomparably the worthiest thing hitherto; a thing I read with delight. Speak out, my brave Emerson; there are many good men that listen! Even what you say of Goethe gratifies me; it is one of the few things yet spoken of him from personal insight, the sole kind of things that should be spoken! You call him _actual,_ not _ideal;_ there is truth in that too; and yet at bottom is not the whole truth rather this: The actual well-seen _is_ the ideal? The _actual,_ what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no less, do all lie there! Ah yes! one day you will find that this sunny-looking, courtly Goethe held veiled in him a Prophetic sorrow deep as Dante's,--all the nobler to me and to you, that he _could_ so hold it. I believe this; no man can _see_ as he sees, that has not suffered and striven as man seldom did.-- Apropos of _this,_ Have you got Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man?_ How curious it were to have the real History of the Negro Toussaint, and his _black_ Sansculottism in Saint Domingo,--the most atrocious form Sansculottism could or can assume! This of a "black Wilberforce-Washington," as Sterling calls it, is decidedly something. Adieu, dear Emerson: time presses, paper is done. Commend me to your good wife, your good Mother, and love me as well as you can. Peace and health under clear winter skies be with you all. --T. Carlyle My Wife rebukes me sharply that I have "forgot her love." She is much better this winter than of old. Having mentioned Sterling I should say that he is at Torquay (Devonshire) for the winter, meditating new publication of Poems. I work still in Cromwellism; all but desperate of any feasible issue worth naming. I "enjoy bad health" too, considerably! LX. Carlyle to Mrs. Emerson Chelsea, London, 21 February, 1841 Dear Mrs. Emerson,--Your Husband's Letter shall have answer when some moment of leisure is granted me; he will wait till then, and must. But the beautiful utterance which you send over to me; melodious as the voice of flutes, of Aeolian Harps borne on the rude winds so _far,_--this must have answer, some word or growl of answer, be there leisure or none! The "Acadia," it seems, is to return from Liverpool the day after tomorrow. I shove my paper-whirlpools aside for a little, and grumble in pleased response. You are an enthusiast; make Arabian Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you;--nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the _essential_ gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long may the talent abide with you; long may I abide to have it exercised on me! Except the Annandale Farm where my good Mother still lives, there is no House in all this world which I should be gladder to see than the one at Concord. It seems to stand as only over the hill, in the next Parish to me, familiar from boyhood. Alas! and wide-waste Atlantics roll between; and I cannot walk over of an evening!--I never give up the hope of getting thither some time. Were I a little richer, were I a little healthier; were I this and that--!--One has no Fortunatus' "Time-annihilating" or even "Space-annihilating Hat": it were a thing worth having in this world. My Wife unites with me in all kindest acknowledgments: she is getting stronger these last two years; but is still such a _sailor_ as the Island hardly parallels: had she the _Space- annihilating Hat,_ she too were soon with you. Your message shall reach Miss Martineau; my Dame will send it in her first Letter. The good Harriet is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart. She lives by the shore of the beautiful blue Northumbrian Sea; a "many-sounding" solitude which I often envy her. She writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. You saw her _Toussaint l'Ouverture:_ how she has made such a beautiful "black Washington," or "Washington-Christ-Macready," as I have heard some call it, of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semi- articulate gabbling Negro; and of the horriblest phasis that "Sansculottism" _can_ exhibit, of a Black Sansculottism, a musical Opera or Oratorio in pink stockings! It is very beautiful. Beautiful as a child's heart,--and in so shrewd a head as that. She is now writing express Children's-Tales, which I calculate I shall find more perfect. Some ten days ago there went from me to Liverpool, perhaps there will arrive at Concord by this very "Acadia," a bundle of Printed Sheets directed to your Husband: pray apprise the man of that. They are sheets of a Volume called _Lectures on Heroes;_ the Concord Hero gets them without direction or advice of any kind. I have got some four sheets more ready for him here; shall perhaps send them too, along with this. Some four again more will complete the thing. I know not what he will make of it;-- perhaps wry faces at it? Adieu, dear Mrs. Emerson. We salute you from this house. May all good which the Heavens grant to a kind heart, and the good which they never _refuse_ to one such, abide with you always. I commend myself to your and Emerson's good Mother, to the mischievous Boys and--all the Household. Peace and fair Spring- weather be there! Yours with great regard, T. Carlyle LXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 February, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Behold Mr. George Nichols's new digest and exegesis of his October accounts. The letter seems to me the most intelligible of the two papers, but I have long been that man's victim, semi-annually, and never dare to make head against his figures. You are a brave man, and out of the ring of his enchantments, and withal have magicians of your own who can give spell for spell, and read his incantations backward. I entreat you to set them on the work, and convict his figures if you can. He has really taken pains, and is quite proud of his establishment of his accounts. In a month it will be April, and be will have a new one to fender. Little and Brown also in April promise a payment on _French Revolution,_--and I suppose something is due from _Chartism._ We will hope that a Bill of Exchange will yet cross from us to you, before our booksellers fail. I hoped before this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,--no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. I read to some Mechanics' Apprentices a long lecture on Reform, one evening, a little while ago. They asked me to print it, but Margaret Fuller asked it also, and I preferred the _Dial,_ which shall have the dubious sermon, and I will send it to you in that.--You see the bookseller reverendizes me notwithstanding your laudable perseverance to adorn me with profane titles, on the one hand, and the growing habit of the majority of my correspondents to clip my name of all titles on the other. I desire that you and your wife will keep your kindness for --R. W. Emerson ---------- * The first series of _Essays._ ---------- LXII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 30 April, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Above you have a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds sterling drawn by T.W. Ward & Co. on the Messrs. Barings, payable at sight. Let us hope it is but the first of a long series. I have vainly endeavored to get your account to be rendered by Munroe & Co. to the date of the 1st of April. It was conditionally promised for the day of the last steamer (15 April). It is not ready for that which sails tomorrow and carries this. Little & Co. acknowledge a debt of $607.90 due to you 1st of April, and just now paid me; and regret that their sales have been so slow, which they attribute to the dulness of all trade among us for the last two years. You shall have the particulars of their account from Munroe's statement of the account between you and me. Munroe & Co. have a long apology for not rendering their own account; their book keeper left them at a critical moment, they were without one six weeks, &c.;--but they add, if we could give you it, to what use, since we should be utterly unable to make you any payment at this time? To what use, surely? I am too much used to similar statements from our booksellers and others in the last few years to be much surprised; nor do I doubt their readiness or their power to pay all their debts at last; but a great deal of mutual concession and accommodation has been the familiar resort of our tradesmen now for a good while, a vice which they are all fain to lay at the doors of the Government, whilst it belongs in the first instance, no doubt, to the rashness of the individual traders. These men I believe to be prudent, honest, and solvent, and that we shall get all our debt from them at last. They are not reckoned as rich as Little and Brown. By the next steamer they think they can promise to have their account ready. I am sorry to find that we have been driven from the market by the New York Pirates in the affair of the Six Lectures.* The book was received from London and for sale in New York and Boston before my last sheets arrived by the "Columbia." Appleton in New York braved us and printed it, and furthermore told us that he intends to print in future everything of yours that shall be printed in London,--complaining in rude terms of the monopoly your publishers here exercise, and the small commissions they allow to the trade, &c., &c. Munroe showed me the letter, which certainly was not an amiable one. In this distress, then, I beg you, when you have more histories and lectures to print, to have the manuscript copied by a scrivener before you print at home, and send it out to me, and I will keep all Appletons and Corsairs whatsoever out of the lists. Not only these men made a book (of which, by the by, Munroe sends you by this steamer a copy, which you will find at John Green's, Newgate Street), but the New York newspapers print the book in chapters, and you circulate for six cents per newspaper at the corners of all streets in New York and Boston; gaining in fame what you lose in coin.--The book is a good book, and goes to make men brave and happy. I bear glad witness to its cheering and arming quality. --------- * "Heroes and Hero-Worship." --------- I have put into Munroe's box which goes to Green a _Dial_ No. 4 also, which I could heartily wish were a better book. But Margaret Fuller, who is a noble woman, is not in sufficiently vigorous health to do this editing work as she would and should, and there is no other who can and will. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson LXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 May, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--Your last letter found me on the southern border of Yorkshire, whither Richard Milnes had persuaded me with him, for the time they call "Easter Holidays" here. I was to shake off the remnants of an ugly _Influenza_ which still hung about me; my little portmanteau, unexpectedly driven in again by perverse accidents, had stood packed, its cowardly owner, the worst of all travelers, standing dubious the while, for two weeks or more; Milnes offering to take me as under his cloak, I went with Milnes. The mild, cordial, though something dilettante nature of the man distinguishes him for me among men, as men go. For ten days I rode or sauntered among Yorkshire fields and knolls; the sight of the young Spring, new to me these seven years, was beautiful, or better than beauty. Solitude itself, the great Silence of the Earth, was as balm to this weary, sick heart of mine; not Dragons of Wantley (so they call Lord Wharncliffe, the wooden Tory man), not babbling itinerant Barrister people, fox-hunting Aristocracy, nor Yeomanry Captains cultivating milk-white mustachios, nor the perpetual racket, and "dinner at eight o'clock," could altogether countervail the fact that green Earth was around one and unadulterated sky overhead, and the voice of waters and birds,--not the foolish speech of Cockneys at _all_ times!--On the last morning, as Richard and I drove off towards the railway, your Letter came in, just in time; and Richard, who loves you well, hearing from whom it was, asked with such an air to see it that I could not refuse him. We parted at the "station," flying each his several way on the wings of Steam; and have not yet met again. I went over to Leeds, staid two days with its steeple-chimneys and smoke-volcano still in view; then hurried over to native Annandale, to see my aged excellent Mother yet again in this world while she is spared to me. My birth-land is always as the Cave of Trophonius to me; I return from it with a haste to which the speed of Steam is slow, --with no smile on my face; avoiding all speech with men! It is not yet eight-and-forty hours since I got back; your Letter is among the first I answer, even with a line; your new Book--But we will not yet speak of that.... My Friend, I _thank_ you for this Volume of yours; not for the copy alone which you send to me, but for writing and printing such a Book. _Euge!_ say I, from afar. The voice of one crying in the desert;--it is once more the voice of a _man._ Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own; as if the rest were all hearsays, melodious or unmelodious echoes; as if this alone were true and alive. My blessing on you, good Ralph Waldo! I read the Book all yesterday; my Wife scarcely yet done with telling me her news. It has rebuked me, it has aroused and comforted me. Objections of all kinds I might make, how many objections to superficies and detail, to a dialect of thought and speech as yet imperfect enough, a hundred-fold too narrow for the Infinitude it strives to speak: but what were all that? It is an Infinitude, the real vision and belief of one, seen face to face: a "voice of the heart of Nature" is here once more. This is the one fact for me, which absorbs all others whatsoever. Persist, persist; you have much to say and to do. These voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls, and censure sometimes for having no body,--how can they have a body? They are light-rays darting upwards in the East; they will yet make much and much to have a body! You are a new era, my man, in your new huge country: God give you strength, and speaking and silent faculty, to do such a work as seems possible now for you! And if the Devil will be pleased to set all the Popularities _against_ you and evermore against you,--perhaps that is of all things the very kindest any _Angel_ could do. Of myself I have nothing good to report. Years of sick idleness and barrenness have grown wearisome to me. I do nothing. I waver and hover, and painfully speculate even now as to health, and where I shall spend the summer out of London! I am a very poor fellow;--but hope to grow better by and by. Then this _alluvies_ of foul lazy stuff that has long swum over me may perhaps yield the better harvest. _Esperons!_--Hail to all of you from both of us. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 21 May, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--About a week ago I wrote to you, after too long a silence. Since that there has another Letter come, with a Draft of L100 in it, and other comfortable items not pecuniary; a line in acknowledgment of the money is again very clearly among my duties. Yesterday, on my first expedition up to Town, I gave the Paper to Fraser; who is to present the result to me in the shape of cash tomorrow. Thanks, and again thanks. This L100, I think, nearly clears off for me the outlay of the second _French Revolution;_ an ill-printed, ill-conditioned publication, the prime cost of which, once all lying saved from the Atlantic whirlpools and hard and fast in my own hand, it was not perhaps well done to venture thitherward again. To the new trouble of my friends withal! We will now let the rest of the game play itself out as it can; and my friends, and my one friend, must not take more trouble than their own kind feelings towards me will reward. The Books, the _Dial_ No. 4, and Appleton's pirated _Lectures,_ are still expected from Green. In a day or two he will send them: if not, we will jog him into wakefulness, and remind him of the _Parcels Delivery Company,_ which carries luggage of all kinds, like mere letters, many times a day, over all corners of our Babylon. In this, in the universal British _Penny Post,_ and a thing or two of that sort, men begin to take advantage of their crowded ever-whirling condition in these days, which brings such enormous disadvantages along with it _un_sought for.-- Bibliopolist Appleton does not seem to be a "Hero,"--except after his own fashion. He is one of those of whom the Scotch say, "Thou wouldst do little for God if the Devil were dead!" The Devil is unhappily dead, in that international bibliopolic province, and little hope of his reviving for some time; whereupon this is what Squire Appleton does. My respects to him even in the Bedouin department, I like to see a complete man, a clear decisive Bedouin. For the rest, there is one man who ought to be apprised that I can now stand robbery a little better; that I am no longer so very poor as I once was. In Fraser himself there do now lie vestiges of money! I feel it a great relief to see, for a year or two at least, the despicable bugbear of Beggary driven out of my sight; for _which_ small mercy, at any rate, be the Heavens thanked. Fraser himself, for these two editions, One thousand copies each, of the Lectures and _Sartor,_ pays me down on the nail L150; consider that miracle! Of the other Books which he is selling on a joint-stock basis, the poor man likewise promises something, though as yet, ever since New-Year's-day, I cannot learn what, owing to a grievous sickness of his,--for which otherwise I cannot but be sorry, poor Fraser within the Cockney limits being really a worthy, accurate, and rather friendly creature. So you see me here provided with bread and water for a season,--it is but for a season one needs either water or bread, --and rejoice with me accordingly. It is the one useful, nay, I will say the one _innoxious,_ result of all this trumpeting, reviewing, and dinner-invitationing; from which I feel it indispensable to withdraw myself more and more resolutely, and altogether count it as a thing not there. Solitude is what I long and pray for. In the babble of men my own soul goes all to babble: like soil you were forever _screening,_ tumbling over with shovels and riddles; in _which_ soil no fruit can grow! My trust in Heaven is, I shall yet get away "to some cottage by the sea-shore"; far enough from all the mad and mad making things that dance round me here, which I shall then look on only as a theatrical phantasmagory, with an eye only to the _meaning_ that lies hidden in it. You, friend Emerson, are to be a Farmer, you say, and dig Earth for your living? Well; I envy you that as much as any other of your blessednesses. Meanwhile, I sit shrunk together here in a small _dressing-closet,_ aloft in the back part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and, looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St. Paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke's very long- winded Book. I think of innumerable things; steal out westward at sunset among the Kensington lanes; would this _May_ weather last, I might be as well here as in any attainable place. But June comes; the rabid dogs get muzzles; all is brown-parched, dusty, suffocating, desperate, and I shall have to run! Enough of all that. On my paper there comes, or promises to come, as yet simply nothing at all. Patience;--and yet who can be patient? Had you the happiness to see yourself not long ago, in _Fraser's Magazine,_ classed _nominatim_ by an emphatic earnest man, not without a kind of splay-footed strength and sincerity,--among the chief Heresiarchs of the--world? Perfectly right. Fraser was very anxious to know what I thought of the Paper,--"by an entirely unknown man in the country." I counseled "that there was something in him, which he ought to improve by holding his peace for the next five years." Adieu, dear Emerson; there is not a scrap more of Paper. All copies of your _Essays_ are out at use; with what result we shall perhaps see. As for me I love the Book and man, and their noble rustic herohood and manhood:--one voice as of a living man amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: _Ach Gott!_ Yours evermore, T. Carlyle LXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 80 May, 1841 My Dear Friend,--In my letter written to you on the 1st of May (enclosing a bill of exchange of L100 sterling, which, I hope, arrived safely) I believe I promised to send you by the next steamer an account for April. But the false tardy Munroe & Co. did not send it to me until one day too late. Here it is, as they render it, compiled from Little and Brown's statement and their own. I have never yet heard whether you have received their _Analysis_ or explanation of the last abstract they drew up of the mutual claims between the great houses of T.C. and R.W.E., and I am impatient to know whether you have caused it to be examined, and whether it was satisfactory. This new one is based on that, and if that was incorrect, this must be also. I am daily looking for some letter from you, which is perhaps near at hand. If you have not written, write me exactly and immediately on this subject, I entreat you. You will see that in this sheet I am charged with a debt to you of $184.29. I shall tomorrow morning pay to Mr. James Brown (of Little and Brown), who should be the bearer of this letter, $185.00, which sum he will pay you in its equivalent of English coin. I give Mr. Brown an introductory letter to you, and you must not let slip the opportunity to make the man explain his own accounts, if any darkness hang on them. In due time, perhaps, we can send you Munroe, and Nichols also, and so all your factors shall render direct account of themselves to you. I believe I shall also make Brown the bearer of a little book written some time since by a young friend of mine in a very peculiar frame of mind,--thought by most persons to be mad,--and of the publication of which I took the charge.* Mr. Very requested me to send you a copy.--I had a letter from Sterling, lately, which rejoiced me in all but the dark picture it gave of his health. I earnestly wish good news of him. When you see him, show him these poems, and ask him if they have not a grandeur. --------- * _Essays and Poems,_ by Jones Very,--a little volume, the work of an exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it contains are as if written by a George Herbert who had studied Shakespeare, read Wordsworth, and lived in America. --------- When I wrote last, I believe all the sheets of the Six Lectures had not come to me. They all arrived safely, although the last package not until our American pirated copy was just out of press in New York. My private reading was not less happy for this robbery whereby the eager public were supplied. Odin was all new to me; and Mahomet, for the most part; and it was all good to read, abounding in truth and nobleness. Yet, as I read these pages, I dream that your audience in London are less prepared to hear, than is our New England one. I judge only from the tone. I think I know many persons here who accept thoughts of this vein so readily now, that, if you were speaking on this shore, you would not feel that emphasis you use to be necessary. I have been feeble and almost sick during all the spring, and have been in Boston but once or twice, and know nothing of the reception the book meets from the Catholic Carlylian Church. One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come,--Henry Thoreau,--a poet whom you may one day be proud of;--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong. My mother, my wife, my boy and girl, are all in usual health, and according to their several ability salute you and yours. Do not cease to tell me of the health of your wife and of the learned and friendly physician. Yours, R.W. Emerson LXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 25 June, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Now that there begins again to be some program possible of my future motions for some time, I hastily despatch you some needful outline of the same. After infinite confused uncertainty, I learn yesternight that there has been a kind of country-house got for us, at a place called Annan, on the north shore of the Solway Frith, in my native County of Dumfries. You passed through the little Burgh, I suppose, in your way homeward from Craigenputtock: it stands about midway, on the great road, between Dumfries and Carlisle. It is the place where I got my schooling;--consider what a _preter_natural significance such a scene has now got for me! It is within eight miles of my aged Mother's dwelling-place; within riding distance, in fact, of almost all the Kindred I have in the world.--The house, which is built since my time, and was never yet seen by me, is said to be a reasonable kind of house. We get it for a small sum in proportion to its value (thanks to kind accident); the three hundred miles of travel, very hateful to me, will at least entirely obliterate all traces of _this_ Dust- Babel; the place too being naturally almost ugly, as far as a green leafy place in sight of sea and mountains can be so nicknamed, the whole gang of picturesque Tourists, Cockney friends of Nature, &c., &c., who penetrate now by steam, in shoals every autumn, into the very centre of the Scotch Highlands, will be safe over the horizon! In short, we are all bound thitherward in few days; must cobble up some kind of gypsy establishment; and bless Heaven for solitude, for the sight of green fields, heathy moors; for a silent sky over one's head, and air to breathe which does not consist of coal-smoke, finely powdered flint, and other beautiful _etceteras_ of that kind among others! God knows I have need enough to be left altogether alone for some considerable while (_forever,_ as it at present seems to me), to get my inner world, and my poor bodily nerves, both all torn to pieces, set in order a little again! After much vain reluctance therefore; disregarding many considerations,-- disregarding _finance_ in the front of these,--I am off; and calculate on staying till I am heartily _sated_ with country, till at least the last gleam of summer weather has departed. My way of life has all along hitherto been a resolute _staying at home:_ I find now, however, that I must alter my habits, cost what it may; that I cannot live all the year round in London, under pain of dying or going rabid;--that I must, in fact, learn to travel, as others do, and be hanged to me! Wherefore, in brief, my Friend, our address for the next two or three months is "Newington Lodge, Annan, Scotland,"--where a letter from Emerson will be a right pleasant visitor! _Faustum sit._ My second piece of news, not less interesting I hope, is that _Emerson's Essays,_ the Book so called, is to be reprinted here; nay, I think, is even now at press,--in the hands of that invaluable Printer, Robson, who did the _Miscellanies._ Fraser undertakes it, "on _half-profits_";--T. Carlyle writing a Preface,*--which accordingly he did (in rather sullen humor,--not with you!) last night and the foregoing days. Robson will stand by the text to the very utmost; and I also am to read the Proof sheets. The edition is of Seven Hundred and Fifty; which Fraser thinks he will sell. With what joy shall I then sack up the small Ten Pounds Sterling perhaps of "Half-Profits," and remit them to the man Emerson; saying: There, Man! Tit for tat, the reciprocity _not_ all on one side!--I ought to say, moreover, that this was a volunteer scheme of Fraser's; the risk is all his, the origin of it was with him: I advised him to have it reviewed, as being a really noteworthy Book; "Write you a Preface," said he, "and I will reprint it";--to which, after due delay and meditation; I consented. Let me add only, on this subject, the story of a certain Rio,** a French Breton, with long, distracted, black hair. He found your Book at Richard Milnes's, a borrowed copy, and could not borrow it; whereupon he appeals passionately to me; carries off my Wife's copy, this distracted Rio; and is to "read it _four_ times" during this current autumn, at Quimperle, in his native Celtdom! The man withal is a _Catholic,_ eats fish on Friday;--a great lion here when he visits us; one of the _naivest_ men in the world: concerning whom nevertheless, among fashionables, there is a controversy, "Whether he is an Angel, or partially a Windbag and _Humbug?_" Such is the lot of loveliness in the World! A truer man I never saw; how _wind_less, how windy, I will not compute at present. Me he likes greatly (in spite of my unspeakable contempt for his fish on Friday); likes,--but withal is apt to bore. ---------- * The greater part of this interesting Preface is reprinted in Mr. George Willis Cooke's excellent book on the _Life, Writings, and Philosophy of Emerson,_ Boston, 1881, p. 109. ** The author of a book once much admired, _De 'l'Art Chretien._ In a later work entitled _Epilogue a l'Art Chretien,_ but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of his intercourse with Carlyle. ---------- Enough, dear Emerson; and more than enough for a day so hurried. Our Island is all in a ferment electioneering: Tories to come in;--perhaps not to come in; at all events not to stay long, without altering their figure much! I sometimes ask myself rather earnestly, What is the duty of a citizen? To be as I have been hitherto, a pacific _Alien?_ That is the _easiest,_ with my humor!--Our brave Dame here, just rallying for the _remove,_ sends loving salutations. Good be with you all always. Adieu, dear Emerson. --T. Carlyle Appleton's Book of _Hero-Worship_ has come; for which pray thank Mr. Munroe for me: it is smart on the surface; but printed altogether scandalously! LXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Eight days ago--when I had gone to Nantasket Beach, to sit by the sea and inhale its air and refresh this puny body of mine--came to me your letter, all bounteous as all your letters are, generous to a fault, generous to the shaming of me, cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor little arid book,-- which is as sand to my eyes,--and now in this you tell me it shall be printed in London, and graced with a preface from the man of men. I can only say that I heartily wish the book were better, and I must try and deserve so much favor from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to come; such as may perchance one day relax and invigorate this cramp hand of mine, and teach it to draw some grand and adequate strokes, which other men may find their own account and not their good-nature in repeating. Yet I think I shall never be killed by my ambition. I behold my failures and shortcomings there in writing, wherein it would give me much joy to thrive, with an equanimity which my worst enemy might be glad to see. And yet it is not that I am occupied with better things. One could well leave to others the record, who was absorbed in the life. But I have done nothing. I think the branch of the "tree of life" which headed to a bud in me, curtailed me somehow of a drop or two of sap, and so dwarfed all my florets and drupes. Yet as I tell you I am very easy in my mind, and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue. I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me,--and at some rate get off the numb palsy, and feel the new blood sting and tingle in my fingers' ends. Well, sure I am that the right word will be spoken though I cut out my tongue. Thanks, too, to your munificent Fraser for his liberal intention to divide the profits of the _Essays._ I wish, for the encouragement of such a bookseller, there were to be profits to divide. But I have no faith in your public for their heed to a mere book like mine. There are things I should like to say to them, in a lecture-room or in a "steeple house," if I were there. Seven hundred and fifty copies! Ah no! And so my dear brother has quitted the roaring city, and gone back in peace to his own land,--not the man he left it, but richer every way, chiefly in the sense of having done something valiantly and well, which the land, and the lands, and all that wide elastic English race in all their dispersion, will know and thank him for. The holy gifts of nature and solitude be showered upon you! Do you not believe that the fields and woods have their proper virtue, and that there are good and great things which will not be spoken in the city? I give you joy in your new and rightful home, and the same greetings to Jane Carlyle! with thanks and hopes and loves to you both. --R.W. Emerson As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges, nine days hence.* You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse. O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! Besides, I always am lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys. I hope Brown did not fail to find you, with thirty-eight sovereigns (I believe) which he should carry you. ---------- * "The Method of Nature. An Address to the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841." ---------- LXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--Two days ago your Letter, direct from Liverpool, reached me here; only fifteen days after date on the other side of the Ocean: one of the swiftest messengers that have yet come from you. Steamers have been known to come, they say, in nine days. By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another. What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece,--a place to hold your [Greek] in? A meeting of _All the English_ ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians; --and as Homeric "equal ships" are to Bristol steamers, so, or somewhat so, may New York and New Holland be to Ephesus and Crete, with their distances, relations, and etceteras!--Few things on this Earth look to me greater than the Future of that Family of Men. It is some two months since I got into this region; my Wife followed me with her maid and equipments some five weeks ago. Newington Lodge, when I came to inspect it with eyes, proved to be too rough an undertaking: upholsterers, expense and confusion,--the Cynic snarled, "Give me a whole Tub rather! I want nothing but shelter from the elements, and to be let alone of all men." After a little groping, this little furnished cottage, close by the beach of the Solway Frith, was got hold of: here we have been, in absolute seclusion, for a month,--no company but the corn-fields and the everlasting sands and brine; mountains, and thousand-voiced memories on all hands, sending their regards to one, from the distance. Daily (sometimes even nightly!) I have swashed about in the sea; I have been perfectly idle, at least inarticulate; I fancy I feel myself considerably sounder of body and of mind. Deeply do I agree with you in the great unfathomable meaning of a colloquy with the dumb Ocean, with the dumb Earth, and their eloquence! A Legislator would prescribe some weeks of that annually as a religious duty for all mortals, if he could. A Legislator will prescribe it for himself, since he can! You too have been at Nantasket; my Friend, this great rough purple sea-flood that roars under my little garret-window here, this too comes from Nantasket and farther,--swung hitherward by the Moon and the Sun. It cannot be said that I feel "happy" here, which means joyful;-- as far as possible from that. The Cave of Trophonius could not be grimmer for one than this old Land of Graves. But it is a sadness worth any hundred "happinesses." _N'en parlons plus._ By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function "view-hunting" is. Analogous to "philanthropy," "pleasures of virtue," &c., &c. I for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. Black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no Cockney to exclaim, "How charming it is!" One of the last things I did in London was to pocket Bookseller Brown's L38: a very honest-looking man, that Brown; whom I was sorry I could not manage to welcome better. You asked in that Letter about some other item of business,--Munroe's or Brown's account to acknowledge?--something or other that I was to _do:_ I only remember vaguely that it seemed to me I had as good as done it. Your Letter is not here now, but at Chelsea. Three sheets of the _Essays_ lay waiting me at my Mother's, for correction; needing as good as none. The type and shape is the same as that of late _Lectures on Heroes._ Robson the Printer, who is a very punctual intelligent man, a scholar withal, undertook to be himself the corrector of the other sheets. I hope you will find them "exactly conformable to the text, _minus_ mere Typographical blunders and the more salient American spellings (labor for labour, &c.)." The Book is perhaps just getting itself subscribed in these very days. It should have been out before now: but poor Fraser is in the country, dangerously ill, which perhaps retards it a little; and the season, at any rate, is at the very dullest. By the first conveyance I will send a certain Lady two copies of it. Little danger but the Edition will sell; Fraser knows his own Trade well enough, and is as much a "desperado" as poor Attila Schmelzle was! Poor James, I wish he were well again; but really at times I am very anxious about him.--The Book will sell; will be liked and disliked. Harriet Martineau, whom I saw in passing hitherward, writes with her accustomed enthusiasm about it. Richard Milnes too is very warm. John Sterling scolds and kisses it (as the manner of the man is), and concludes by inquiring, whether there is any procurable Likeness of Emerson? Emerson himself can answer. There ought to be. --Good Heavens! Here came my Wife, all in tears, pointing out to me a poor ship, just tumbled over on a sand-bank on the Cumberland coast; men still said to be alive on it,--a Belfast steamer doing all it can to get in contact with it! Moments are precious (say the people on the beach), the flood runs ten miles an hour. Thank God, the steamer's boat is out: "eleven men," says a person with a glass, "are saved: it is an American timber-ship, coming up without a Pilot." And now--in ten minutes more--there lies the melancholy mass alone among the waters, wreck-boats all hastening towards it, like birds of prey; the poor Canadians all up and away towards Annan. What an end for my Letter, which nevertheless must end! Adieu, dear Emerson. Address to Chelsea next time. I can say no more. Yours ever, T.C. LXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--I was in Boston yesterday, and found at Munroe's your promised packet of the two London Books. They are very handsome,--that for my wife is beautiful,--and I am not so old or so cold but that I can feel the hope and the pleasure that lie in this gift. It seems I am to speak in England--great England--fortified by the good word of one whose word is fame. Well, it is a lasting joy to be indebted to the wise and generous; and I am well contented that my little boat should swim, whilst it can, beside your great galleys, nor will I allow my discontent with the great faults of the book, which the rich English dress cannot hide, to spoil my joy in this fine little romance of friendship and hope. I am determined--so help me all Muses--to send you something better another day. But no more printing for me at present. I have just decided to go to Boston once more, with a course of lectures, which I will perhaps baptize "On the Times," by way of making once again the experiment whether I cannot, not only speak the truth, but speak it truly, or in proportion. I fancy I need more than another to speak, with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders; somebody asked me "if I built of medals." Besides, I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety,--rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession. I should love myself wonderfully better if I could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart and not in a paper. When I was in Boston I saw the booksellers, the children of Tantalus,--no, but they who trust in them are. This time, Little and Brown render us their credit account to T.C. $366 (I think it was), payable in three months from 1 October. They had sold all the London _French Revolutions_ but fifteen copies. May we all live until 1 January. J. Munroe & Co. acknowledge about $180 due and now rightfully payable to T.C., but, unhappily, not yet paid. By the help of brokers, I will send that sum more or less in some English Currency, by the next steamship, which sails in about a fortnight, and will address it, as you last bade me, to Chelsea. What news, my dear friend, from your study? what designs ripened or executed? what thoughts? what hopes? you can say nothing of yourself that will not greatly interest us all. Harriet Martineau, whose sicknesses may it please God to heal! wrote me a kind, cheerful letter, and the most agreeable notice of your health and spirit on a visit at her house. My little boy is five years old today, and almost old enough to send you his love. With kindest greetings to Jane Carlyle, I am her and your friend, --R.W.E. LXX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 November, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Above, you have a bill of exchange for forty pounds sterling, with which sum you must credit the Munroe account. The bill, I must not fail to notice, is drawn by a lover of yours who expresses great satisfaction in doing us this courtesy; and courtesy I must think it when he gives me a bill at sight, whilst of all other merchants I have got only one payable at some remote day. ---- is a beautiful and noble youth, of a most subtle and magnetic nature, made for an artist, a painter, and in his art has made admirable sketches, but his criticism, I fancy, was too keen for his poetry (shall I say?); he sacrificed to Despair, and threw away his pencil. For the present, he buys and sells. I wrote you some sort of letter a fortnight ago, promising to send a paper like this. The hour when this should be despatched finds me by chance very busy with little affairs. I sent you by an Italian, Signor Gambardella,*-- who took a letter to you with good intent to persuade you to sit to him for your portrait,--a _Dial,_ and some copies of an oration I printed lately. If you should have any opportunity to send one of them to Harriet Martineau, my debts to her are great, and I wish to acknowledge her abounding kindness by a letter, as I must. I am now in the rage of preparation for my Lectures "On the Times;" which begin in a fortnight. There shall be eight, but I cannot yet accurately divide the topics. If it were eighty, I could better. In fear lest this sheet should not safely and timely reach its man, I must now write some duplicate. Farewell, dear friend. R.W. Emerson -------- * Spiridione Gambardella was born at Naples. He was a refugee from Italy, having escaped, the story was, on board an American man-of-war. He had been educated as a public singer, but he had a facile genius, and turned readily to painting as a means of livelihood. He painted some excellent portraits in Boston, between 1835 and 1840, among them one of Dr. Channing, and one of Dr. Follen; both of these were engraved. He had some success for a time as a portrait-painter in London. ---------- LXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Since that going down of the American Timber-ship on one of the Banks of the Solway under my window, I do not remember that you have heard a word of me. I only added that the men were all saved, and the beach all in agitation, certain women not far from hysterics;--and there ended. I did design to send you some announcement of our return hither; but fear there is no chance that I did it! About ten days ago the Signor Gambardella arrived, with a Note and Books from you: and here now is your Letter of October 30th; which, arriving at a moment when I have a little leisure, draws forth an answer almost instantly. The Signor Gambardella, whom we are to see a second time tonight or tomorrow, amuses and interests us not a little. His face is the very image of the Classic God Pan's; with horns, and cloven feet, we feel that he would make a perfect wood-god;--really, some of Poussin's Satyrs are almost portraits of this brave Gambardella. I will warrant him a right glowing mass of Southern-Italian vitality,--full of laughter, wild insight, caricature, and every sort of energy and joyous savagery: a most profitable element to get introduced (in moderate quantity), I should say, into the general current of your Puritan blood over in New England there! Gambardella has behaved with magnanimity in that matter of the Portrait: I have already sat, to men in the like case, some four times, and Gambardella knows it is a dreadful weariness; I directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one Laurence, a man of real parts, whom I wished Gambardella to know,--and whom I wished to know Gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a _good_ picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness. Well: Gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that Laurence's picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in America or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to Laurence, not to Gambardella,--which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, Be it far from me! The brave Gambardella! if I can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his Visit to the _Community of Shakers,_ and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me. Inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in Gambardella's vision of that Phenomenon,-- the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue.--Alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present. True laughter is as rare as any other truth,--the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams. I know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than Christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once. Your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your English Book are such as I too am very thankful for. I understand them well. May worse guest never visit the Drawing-room at Concord than that bound Book. Tell the good Wife to rejoice in it: she has all the pleasure;--to her poor Husband it will be increase of pain withal: nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it! A man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it: some of it _is_ wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any _trial_ to digest it. A thinker, I take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue _alone;--alone:_ "silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves"! The clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much. The Book of _Essays,_ however, does decidedly "speak to England," in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate "sensation" here. Reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut;--of small value mostly; as you might see by the two Newspaper specimens I sent you. (Did you get those two Newspapers?) The worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed. Newspapers are busy with extracts;--much complaining that it is "abstruse," neological, hard to get the meaning of. All which is very proper. Still better,--though poor Fraser, alas, is dead, (poor Fraser!), and no help could come from industries of the Bookshop, and Books indeed it seems were never selling worse than of late months,--I learn that the "sale of the Essays goes very steadily forward," and will wind itself handsomely up in due time, we may believe! So Emerson henceforth has a real Public in Old England as well as New. And finally, my Friend, do _not_ disturb yourself about turning better, &c., &c.; write as it is given you, and not till it be given you, and never mind it a whit. The new _Adelphi_ piece seems to me, as a piece of Composition, the best _written_ of them all. People cry over it: "Whitherward? What, What?" In fact, I do again desiderate some _concretion_ of these beautiful _abstracta._ It seems to me they will never be _right_ otherwise; that otherwise they are but as prophecies yet, not fulfilments. The Dial too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man,_ with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back! These things I _say:_ and yet, very true, you alone can decide what practical meaning is in them. Write you always _as_ it is given you,_ be it in the solid, in the aeriform, or whatsoever way. There is no other rule given among men.--I have sent the criticism on Landor* to an Editorial Friend of L.'s, by whom I expect it will be put into the Newspapers here, for the benefit of Walter Savage; he is not often so well praised among us, and deserves a little good praise. -------- * From the Dial for October, 1841. -------- You propose again to send me Moneys,--surprising man! I am glad also to hear that that beggarly misprinted _French Revolution_ is nearly out among you. I only hope farther your Booksellers will have an eye on that rascal Appleton, and not let _him_ reprint and deface, if more copies of the Book turn out to be wanted. Adieu, dear Emerson! Good speed to you at Boston, and in all true things. I hope to write soon again. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 December, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Though I wrote to you very lately, and am in great haste today, I must lose no time in announcing that the Letter with the L40 draught came to hand some mornings ago; and now, this same morning, a second Letter round by Dumfriesshire, which had been sent as a duplicate, or substitute in case of accident, for the former. It is all right, my friend ----'s paper has got itself changed into forty gold sovereigns, and lies here waiting use; thanks, many thanks! Sums of that kind come always upon me like manna out of the sky; surely they, more emphatically than any others, are the gift of Heaven. Let us receive, use, and be thankful. I am not so poor now at all; Heaven be praised: indeed, I do not know, now and then when I reflect on it, whether being rich were not a considerably harder problem. With the wealth of Rothschild what farther good thing could one get,--if not perhaps some but to live in, under free skies, in the country, with a horse to ride and have a little less pain on? _Angulus ille ridet!_--I will add, for practical purposes in the future, that it is in general of little or no moment whether an American Bill be at sight or after a great many days; that the paper can wait as conveniently here as the cash can,--if your New England House and Baring of Old England will forbear bankruptcy in the mean while. By the bye, will you tell me some time or other in _what_ American funds it is that your funded money, you once gave me note of, now lies? I too am creditor to America,-- State of Illinois or some such State: one thousand dollars of mine, which some years ago I had no use for, now lies there, paying I suppose for canals, in a very obstructed condition! My Brother here is continually telling me that I shall lose it all, --which is not so bad; but lose it all by my own unreason,--which is very bad. It struck me I would ask where Emerson's money lies, and lay mine there too, let it live or perish as it likes! Your _Adelphi_ went straightway off to Miss Martineau with a message. Richard Milnes has another; John Sterling is to have a third,--had certain other parties seen it first. For the man Emerson is become a person to be _seen_ in these times. I also gave a _Morning-Chronicle_ Editor your brave eulogy on Landor, with instructions that it were well worth publishing there, for Landor's and others' sake. Landor deserves more praise than he gets at present; the world too, what is far more, should hear of him oftener than it does. A brave man after his kind,--though considerably "flamed on from the Hell beneath." He speaks notable things; and at lowest and worst has the faculty too of holding his peace. The "Lectures on the Times" are even now in progress? Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech. Your Country is luckier than most at this time; it has still real Preaching; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere--cant, and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence! That must alter everywhere the human tongue is no wooden watchman's-rattle or other _obsolete_ implement; it continues forever new and useful, nay indispensable. As for me and my doings--_Ay de mi!_* ------- * The signature has been cut off. ------- LXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle New York, 28 February, 1842 My Dear Friend,--I enclose a bill of exchange for forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by Baring Brothers & Co. after sixty days from the 25th of February. This Sum is part of a payment from Little and Brown on account of sales of your London _French Revolution and of Chartism._ As another part of their payment they asked me if they might not draw on the estate of James Fraser for a balance due from his house to them, and pay you so. I, perhaps unwisely, consented to make the proffer to you, with the distinct stipulation, however, that if it should not prove perfectly agreeable to you, and exactly as available as another form of money, you should instantly return it to me, and they shall pay me the amount, $41.57, or L8 12s. 5d. in cash. My mercantile friend, Abel Adams, did not admire my wisdom in accepting this bill of Little and Brown; so I told them I should probably bring it back to them, and if there is a shadow of inconvenience in it you will send it back to me by the next steamer. For they have no claims on us. I decide not to enclose the Little and Brown bill in this sheet,--but to let it accompany this letter in the same packet. I grieve to hear that you have bought any of our wretched Southern Stocks. In New England all Southern and Southwestern debt is usually regarded as hopeless, unless the debtor is personally known. Massachusetts stock is in the best credit of any public stock. Ward told me that it would be safest for you to keep your Illinois stock, although he could say nothing very good of it. Our city banks in Boston are in better credit than the banks in any other city here, yet one in which a large part of my own property is invested has failed, for the two last half-years, to pay any dividend, and I am a poor man until next April, when, I hope, it will not fail me again. If you wish to invest money here, my friend Abel Adams, who is the principal partner in one of our best houses, Barnard, Adams, & Co., will know how to give you the best assistance and action the case admits. My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life.* You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina.--We have two babes yet,--one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain. Lidian, the poor Lidian, moans at home by day and by night. You too will grieve for us, afar. I believe I have two letters from you since I wrote last. I shall write again soon, for Bronson Alcott will probably go to London in about a month, and him I shall surely send to you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller one, that have craved to see you. Give me early advice of receiving these Bills of Exchange. --------- * The memory of this Boy, "born for the future, to the future lost;" is enshrined in the heart of every lover of childhood and of poetry by his father's impassioned _Threnody._ ----------- Tell Jane Carlyle our sorrowing story with much love, and with all good hope for her health and happiness. Tell us when you write, with as much particularity as you can, how it stands with you, and all your household; with the Doctor, and the friends; what you do, and propose to do, and whether you will yet come to America, one good day? Yours with love, R. Waldo Emerson LXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, Scotland 28 March, 1842 My Dear Friend,--This is heavy news that you send me; the heaviest outward bereavement that can befall a man has overtaken you. Your calm tone of deep, quiet sorrow, coming in on the rear of poor trivial worldly businesses, all punctually despatched and recorded too, as if the Higher and Highest had not been busy with you, tells me a sad tale. What can we say in these cases? There is nothing to be said,--nothing but what the wild son of Ishmael, and every thinking heart, from of old have learned to say: God is great! He is terrible and stern; but we know also He is good. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Your bright little Boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away from you; but of very truth he is with God, even as we that yet live are,--and surely in the way that was best for him, and for you, and for all of us.--Poor Lidian Emerson, poor Mother! To her I have no word. Such poignant unspeakable grief, I believe, visits no creature as that of a Mother bereft of her child. The poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its young; how much more the human soul of one's Friend! I cannot bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. May good Influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. As the Hebrew David said, "We shall go to him, he will not return to us." I also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by Death. A sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor Wife (for what am I but like a spectator in comparison?): she has lost unexpectedly her good Mother, her sole surviving Parent, and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. The manner too was almost tragic. We had heard of illness here, but only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. The Doctor himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no danger: his poor Patient, in whose character the like of that intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor Daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own; why alarm her, make her wretched? The danger itself did seem over; the Doctor accordingly obeyed. Our first intimation of alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one. My poor Wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready, set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the morrow morning at her Uncle's door in Liverpool she is met by tidings that all is already ended. She broke down there; she is now home again at Chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger Jane Welsh to nurse her: the tone of her Letters is still full of disconsolateness. I had to proceed hither, and have to stay here till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks of it in some seemly manner swept away. It is above three weeks that I have been here; not till eight days ago could I so much as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. I lead a strange life; full of sadness, of solemnity, not without a kind of blessedness. I say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one's own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient Earth round one, the everlasting Heaven over one, and what one can make of these. Poor rustic businesses, subletting of Farms, disposal of houses, household goods: these strangely intervene, like matter upon spirit, every day;--wholesome this too perhaps. It is many years since I have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of Earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of Death and of Life. Yesterday, one of, the stillest Sundays, I sat long by the side of the swift river Nith; sauntered among woods all vocal only with rooks and pairing birds.* The hills are often white with snow-powder, black brief spring-tempests rush fiercely down from them, and then again the sky looks forth with a pale pure brightness,--like Eternity from behind Time. The _Sky,_ when one thinks of it, is _always_ blue, pure changeless azure; rains and tempests are only for the little dwellings where men abide. Let us think of this too. Think of this, thou sorrowing Mother! Thy Boy has escaped many showers. --------- * "Templand has a very fine situation; old Walter's walk, at the south end of the house, was one of the most picturesque and pretty to be found in the world. Nith valley (river half a mile off, winding through green holms, now in its border of clean shingle, now lost in pleasant woods and rushes) lay patent to the South. "Carlyle's Reminiscences," Vol. II. p. 137. --------- In some three weeks I shall probably be back at Chelsea. Write thitherward so soon as you have opportunity; I will write again before long, even if I do not hear from you. The moneys, &c. are all safe here as you describe: if Fraser's' Executors make any demur, your Bookseller shall soon hear of it. I had begun to write some Book on Cromwell: I have often begun, but know not how to set about it; the most unutterable of all subjects I ever felt much meaning to lie in. There is risk yet that, with the loss of still farther labor, I may have to abandon it;--and then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken forever; gathered to the mighty _Silent_ of the Earth; for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. To _him_ small matter. Adieu, my good kind Friend, ever dear to me, dearer now in sorrow. My Wife when she hears of your affliction will send a true thought over to you also. The poor Lidian!--John Sterling is driven off again, setting out I think this very day for Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples. Farewell, and better days to us. Your affectionate T. Carlyle LXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 81 March, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I wrote you a letter from my brother's office in New York nearly a month ago to tell you how hardly it had fared with me here at home, that the eye of my home was plucked out when that little innocent boy departed in his beauty and perfection from my sight. Well, I have come back hither to my work and my play, but he comes not back, and I must simply suffer it. Doubtless the day will come which will resolve this, as everything gets resolved, into light, but not yet. I write now to tell you of a piece of life. I wish you to know that there is shortly coming to you a man by the name of Bronson Alcott. If you have heard his name before, forget what you have heard. Especially if you have ever read anything to which this name was attached, be sure to forget that; and, inasmuch as in you lies, permit this stranger when he arrives at your gate to make a new and primary impression. I do not wish to bespeak any courtesies or good or bad opinion concerning him. You may love him, or hate him, or apathetically pass by him, as your genius shall dictate; only I entreat this, that you do not let him go quite out of your reach until you are sure you have seen him and know for certain the nature of the man. And so I leave contentedly my pilgrim to his fate. I should tell you that my friend Margaret Fuller, who has edited our little _Dial_ with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. The second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? You should know that, if its interior and spiritual life has been ill fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. Its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. Unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. I had not the cruelty to kill it, and so must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its new life. Perhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroitness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation, but the _Dial_ has certain charms to me as an opportunity, which I grudge to destroy. Lately at New York I found it to be to a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion. You cannot believe it? Mr. Lee,* who brings you this letter, is the son of one of the best men in Massachusetts, a man whose name is a proverb among merchants for his probity, for his sense and his information. The son, who bears his father's name, is a favorite among all the young people for his sense and spirit, and has lived always with good people. --------- * Mr. Henry Lee. -------- I have read at New York six out of eight lectures on the Times which I read this winter in Boston. I found a very intelligent and friendly audience. The penny papers reported my lectures, somewhat to my chagrin when I tried to read them; many persons came and talked with me, and I felt when I came away that New York is open to me henceforward whenever my Boston parish is not large enough. This summer, I must try to set in order a few more chapters from these rambling lectures, one on "The Poet" and one on "Character" at least. And now will you not tell me what you read and write? Is it Cromwell still? For I supposed from the _Westminster_ piece that the laborer must be in that quarter. I send herewith a new _Dial,_ No. 8, and the last of this dispensation. I hope you have received every number. They have been sent in order. I have written no line in this Number. I send a letter for Sterling, as I do not know whether his address is still at Falmouth. Is he now a preacher? By the "Acadia" you should have received a letter of exchange on the Barings, and another on James Fraser's estate. With constant good hope for yourself and for your wife, I am your friend, --R.W. Emerson End of Vol. I. 
12700	----	American Men of Letters EDITED BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. "_Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled: Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendor to the dead._" American Men of Letters * * * * * RALPH WALDO EMERSON. BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 1891 NOTE. My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson's family, and the other friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and furnishing valuable information. The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat abridged by myself. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. BOSTON, November 25, 1884. CONTENTS. * * * * * INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I. 1803-1823. To AET. 20. Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life. CHAPTER II. 1823-1828. AET. 20-25. Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in Various Places. CHAPTER III. 1828-1833. AET. 25-30. Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs. Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate. CHAPTER IV. 1833-1838. AET. 30-35. Section I. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus." Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of Charles Chauncy Emerson. Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society CHAPTER V. 1838-1843. AET. 35-40. Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address: Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The Dial."--Brook Farm. Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's Son.--Threnody CHAPTER VI. 1843-1848. AET. 40-45. "The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.--Publication of the Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience. --Character.--Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England CHAPTER VII. 1848-1853. AET. 45-50. The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review."--Visit to Europe.--England.--Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Lives of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli" CHAPTER VIII. 1853-1858. AET. 50-55. Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The "Saturday Club" CHAPTER IX 1858-1863. AET. 55-60. Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial Festival.--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture; Behavior; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions CHAPTER X. 1863-1868. AET. 60-65. "Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of President Lincoln."--Essay on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard University.--"Terminus". CHAPTER XI. 1868-1873. AET. 65-70. Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude. --Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming. --Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at Concord on his Return CHAPTER XII 1873-1878. AET. 70-75. Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of "Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality. --Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.--Greatness. --Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems CHAPTER XIII. 1878-1882. AET. 75-79. Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical Sketches."--"Miscellanies" CHAPTER XIV. Emerson's Poems CHAPTER XV. Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services CHAPTER XVI. EMERSON.---A RETROSPECT. Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard INTRODUCTION. "I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be known and believed." So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson. He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, "Some qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain." * * * * * We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls. A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the "survival of the fittest,"--in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended, was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood. His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as Minister of Concord, Massachusetts. Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson's sixty-four grandfathers at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn's move carries him from one square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight's move were repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of New England. The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or second hand, the _Magnolia Christi Americana_, of the Reverend Cotton Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies from the London-printed, folio of 1702. "He was descended of an Honourable Family in _Bedfordshire_.--He was born at _Woodhil_ (or _Odel_) in _Bedfordshire_, _January_ 31st, 1582. "His _Education_ was answerable unto his _Original_; it was _Learned_, it was _Genteel_, and, which was the top of all, it was very _Pious_: At length it made him a _Batchellor_ of _Divinity_, and a Fellow of Saint _John's_ Colledge in Cambridge.-- "When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him, added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which one would imagine _Temptations_ enough to keep him out of a _Wilderness_." But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the English Church, and so,-- "When Sir _Nathaniel Brent_ was Arch-Bishop _Laud's_ General, as Arch-Bishop _Laud_ was _another's_, Complaints were made against Mr. _Bulkly_, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced. "To _New-England_ he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there having been for a while, at _Cambridge_, he carried a good Number of Planters with him, up further into the _Woods_, where they gathered the _Twelfth Church_, then formed in the Colony, and call'd the Town by the Name of _Concord_. "Here he _buried_ a great Estate, while he _raised_ one still, for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his Husbandry.-- "He was a most excellent _Scholar_, a very-_well read_ Person, and one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that he knew what would go to make a _Scholar_. But it being essential unto a _Scholar_ to love a _Scholar_, so did he; and in Token thereof, endowed the Library of _Harvard_-Colledge with no small part of his own. "And he was therewithal a most exalted _Christian_--In his Ministry he was another _Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius_--And the observance which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of the Country, who would still address him as a _Father_, a _Prophet_, a _Counsellor_, on all occasions." These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will receive the following counsel:-- "If then any Person would know what Mr. _Peter Bulkly_ was, let him read his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the _Gospel Covenant_, which has passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People of God." It must be added that "he had a competently good Stroke at Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it. Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands." It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with Concord, with which it has since been so long associated. Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one, for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: "Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime Deacon of the first church in Newbury." He was noted for the virtue of patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were somewhat harder than needful,--"_but not often_." This same Edward was the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been "a merchant in Charlestown." Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Moody,--Father Moody,--of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers, and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord. This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter, like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for nothing. William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as Minister at Concord. The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession, and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second. The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own writings and from the record of his contemporaries. The Reverend Dr. Sprague's valuable and well-known work, "Annals of the American Pulpit," contains three letters from which we learn some of his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary, but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive; his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable. "He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an enemy.--In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated.--He was, however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most widely." Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, "Mr. Emerson was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly.--Mr. Emerson was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never foolish or undignified.--In his theological opinions he was, to say the least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been so." There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty, sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (_Hibernice_), than they did themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say about it. This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the "Christian Examiner" for September, 1849. "Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years before Mr. Buckminster's settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses, and the original resources that could command the few." As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows: "I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and historical.--I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so." Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston, besides his contributions to the "Monthly Anthology," of which he was the Editor. Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the "Christian Examiner," as a woman "of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it was ever ready, was a reward." The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son, says, "Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children resembled their mother." Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson's grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: "He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America.... The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley." It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of character than Mr. Emerson's living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson says, "He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all men.--His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door." How like Goldsmith's good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor,--of the picturesque in character,--and as a piece of composition, continuous, fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is admirable and delightful. Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more powerful influence on his character,--that of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman's Club several years ago, and published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,--how venerable and organic as Nature they are in her mind!" There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have come from his Essay, "Nature," but it was written when her nephew was only four years old. "Malden, 1807, September.--The rapture of feeling I would part from for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its Author,--feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of creation,--it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity,--then, however awed, who can fear?"--"A few pulsations of created beings, a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories,--to do more,--to date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approval of God." Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After speaking of "the poor old earth's chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist," she says:-- "Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses' Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to science."--"And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element."--"Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness.... Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive." So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples. * * * * * Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally. Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory,-- "Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star," the other his own "Last Farewell," written in 1832, whilst sailing out of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy, and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no more. I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson's character and intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist's studio one may find unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea. Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in life might well say with Dryden,-- "If by traduction came thy mind Our wonder is the less to find A soul so charming from a stock so good." His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from myself, since others have quoted them before me. Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now, The first young laurels on thy pallid brow, O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down In graceful folds the academic gown, On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought, And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye, Too bright to live,--but O, too fair to die. Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands. I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson's coming into my study,--this was probably in 1826 or 1827,--taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's poems, and Charles' liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo. When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called "The Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take this as an example:-- "Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility. I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy." The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson's poems. He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness in the bitter cold winter's day; the mountain that rose in the horizon; the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and sisters, and he with them as of his own household. The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth. "All men of gifted intellect and fine genius," says Charles Emerson, "must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are constrained to yield where it is due,--to rank, merit, talents. But our affections we give not thus easily. 'The hand of Douglas is his own.'" --"I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and, knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical--the affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept." Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence,--a dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson's sweetness of manner and expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action without recalling Milton's line, "Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed," and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial messenger. No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences, and of that exaggeration which belongs to the _laudator temporis acti_. But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the result of a Presidential election,--or the Winner of the Derby. But Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. "Who has a part with **** at this next exhibition?" I asked him one day, as I met him in the college yard. "***** the Post," answered Hillard. "Why call him _the Post_?" said I. "He is a wooden creature," said Hillard. "Hear him and Charles Emerson translating from the Latin _Domus tota inflammata erat_. The Post will render the words, 'The whole house was on fire.' Charles Emerson will translate the sentence 'The entire edifice was wrapped in flames.'" It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson's version to the simple nudity of "the Post's" rendering. * * * * * The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly. When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and there, waiting to form centres of condensation. Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries: John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University; Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor; Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of it, as reflected from the pages of "The Monthly Anthology," which very soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson. The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was born. John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating but musical accents: "_Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina_" or "_Vernacula_," if the "First Scholar" was about to deliver the English oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His "shining morning face" was round as a baby's, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did, with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks of his sermons as "full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom, with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor." It was of him that the story was always told,--it may be as old as the invention of printing,--that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: "He always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the labor." Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson's literary habits, says he used to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the same way. Emerson's father, however, was very methodical, according to Dr. Lowell, and had "a place for everything, and everything in its place." Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries. Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston. The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as images and pictures are to Romanism. John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to the interests of learning. William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the "Monthly Anthology," and that of the "North American Review," for he was a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of his "Letters on the Eastern States," as a scholar and a gentleman, an impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and character. Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the "Anthology" was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various controversial sermons, and writing the "Memoir of Buckminster." There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities. There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity. It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about "the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare well enough with the "Gentleman's Magazine," to say nothing of "My Grandmother's Review, the British." A writer in the third volume (1806) says: "A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our 'Anthology,' however superior such publications may now be in that kingdom." It is well worth one's while to look over the volumes of the "Anthology" to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that "The child,"--meaning the new periodical,--"shall not be destitute of the manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town shall furnish." The reader of the "Anthology" will find for his reward an improving discourse on "Ambition," and a commendable schoolboy's "theme" on "Inebriation." He will learn something which may be for his advantage about the "Anjou Cabbage," and may profit by a "Remedy for Asthma." A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine, Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:-- "Rise Columbia, brave and free, Poise the globe and bound the sea!" But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English literature, for there is a distinct mention of "Mr. Goethe's new novel," and an explicit reference to "Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard." But let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr. Buckminster's most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau. And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries, and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is sweetening our atmospheric existence. The late President Josiah Quincy, in his "History of the Boston Athenaeum," pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the "Anthology." A literary journal had already been published in Boston, but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of publishers, "being desirous that the work should be continued, applied to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties with which they had to struggle." The publication of the "Anthology" began in 1804, when Mr. William Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat obscure afterglow of the "Anthology" was in the western horizon of the New England sky. The nebula which was to form a cluster about the "North American Review" did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and, lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic literature would be left for a new edition of "Miller's Retrospect"? These were the writers who helped to make the "North American Review" what it was during the period of Emerson's youth and early manhood. These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We may count as symbols the three hills of "this darling town of ours," as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to those in which we are living. The social religious influences of the first part of the century must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called itself "society" was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both sexes from domestic service. A large part of the "hired help,"--for the word servant was commonly repudiated,--worshipped, not with their employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time in the whole country. Such were Emerson's intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to manhood. CHAPTER I. Birthplace.--Boyhood.--College Life. 1803-1823. To _AET_. 20. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of May, 1803. He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy. His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, were within a kite-string's distance of each other. When the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street through the narrow passage long known as Bishop's Alley, now Hawley Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street, and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner's maps of 1722 and 1769 as an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway. Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a most attractive little _rus in urbe_. The sunny gardens of the late Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the "Saint Michael," the "Brown Bury," found their natural homes in these sheltered enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other living person. Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr. Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed especially worthy of note from his letter. "I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very low fence divided my father's estate in Summer Street from the field in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed,--but this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys, William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year. "... I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection. He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him, his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in recalling College days. "The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc.... Emerson was not talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor. "On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that some years since, when it was known that our classmate ---- was reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to you some time since." The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer's side to advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and the conduct of his life. "It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the subject." From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in the history of Mr. Emerson's life that "bold appeal to the heart," that "tribute of honest conviction," were made eloquent and real. The boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he did not flinch from his early principles. It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked "'Song for Knights of Square Table,' R.W.E." There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to the festival. "Let the doors of Olympus be open for all To descend and make merry in Chivalry's hall." * * * * * Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by Emerson about his early years. The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as large as Dr. Ripley's, which might have been some two or three acres. Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick wall from a garden in which _pears grew_ (a fact a boy is likely to remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to _sit on this wall_,--but we cannot believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his nightgown to a neighboring house. After Reverend William Emerson's death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some boarders,--among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo and Charles used to drive their mother's cow there to pasture. * * * * * The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in "the new parsonage," which was, doubtless, the "brick house" above referred to. * * * * * We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek; was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses. But he thinks "the idle books under the bench at the Latin School" were as profitable to him as his regular studies. Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the "Boyhood Memories" of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as "a spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years old,--whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him so angelic and remarkable." That "blue nankeen" sounds strangely, it may be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen,--a dull-colored fabric, too nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering. Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy, generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college days:-- "Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons, have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so profound an impression upon the thought of his time. 'I went to the chapel to hear Emerson's dissertation: a very good one, but rather too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.' The fault, I suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of this critical class, the author of the 'Woodnotes' and the 'Humble Bee' ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because the works of the other five [seven] have been 'heroically unwritten' that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates, Emerson's ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better, he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to take the two prizes; but--Alas for the infallibility of academic decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who was to be the most original and influential writer born in America was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet, unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about my most distinguished classmate." Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly spoken of by Mr. Quincy. I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to Charleston, South Carolina. The "Southerners" were the reigning College _elegans_ of that time, the _merveilleux_, the _mirliflores_, of their day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin together as room-mates. CHAPTER II. 1823-1828. AET. 20-25. Extract from a Letter to a Classmate.--School-Teaching.--Study of Divinity.--"Approbated" to Preach.--Visit to the South.--Preaching in Various Places. We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard to Andover:-- "I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie." "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to emulation for a month." After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively. Emerson's older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo, after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or 1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell. One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott, has favored me with the following account of his recollections:-- The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned country "Academy." Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him; he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only these two words: "Oh, sad!" That was enough, for he had the faculty of making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them,--from some book like Plutarch's Lives,--and the next day to examine them and find out how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil's mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him. Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much like those of Judge Abbott. My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus:-- "Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny, but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items." In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled as one of its regular students. The teachings of that day were such as would now be called "old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality. From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church. There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De Tocqueville's account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians. At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature, followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which their light could shine before men. Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his instructors: "If they had examined me, they probably would not have let me preach at all." His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three years' study, he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a settled Minister in Boston. CHAPTER III. 1828-1833. AET. 25-30. Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware.--Married to Ellen Louisa Tucker.--Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin.--His Pastoral and Other Labors.--Emerson and Father Taylor.--Death of Mrs. Emerson.--Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners.--Sermon Explaining his Views.--Resignation of his Pastorate. On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker. The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of Father Taylor too good not to be repeated:-- "Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston. He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when establishing the Seaman's Mission in Boston. This was told me by Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson. Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to"--[the place which a divine of Charles the Second's day said it was not good manners to mention in church].--"'It does look so,' said Father Taylor, 'but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to'"--[that place]--"'he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.'" In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley's colleague. His address on giving the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his collected works. The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of consumption. He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties, and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper, in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon is in no sense "Emersonian" except in its directness, its sweet temper, and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon his "pressing a piece of _Charity_ disagreeable to the will of the _Ruling Elder_, there was occasioned an unhappy _Discord_ in the Church of _Concord_; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help of a _Council_ and the _Ruling Elder's_ Abdication." So says Cotton Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in Emerson's days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more formal declaration of views respecting the Lord's Supper, which he had previously made known in a conference with some of the most active members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no "discord," there was no need of a "council." Nothing could be more friendly, more truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the practice of the early ages. "But, it is said, 'Admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual.' What harm doth it?" He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which, as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God "the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or child." Again:-- "The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose; and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance,--really a duty to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?" To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable relation with those who do. The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity in these words at the close of his argument:-- "Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces." He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor's duties to administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been confided to him. This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson's ever published. It was impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning. It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career. CHAPTER IV. 1833-1838. AET. 30-35. Section 1. Visit to Europe.--On his Return preaches in Different Places.--Emerson in the Pulpit.--At Newton.--Fixes his Residence at Concord.--The Old Manse.--Lectures in Boston.--Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the "North American Review."--Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle.--Letters to the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.--Republication of "Sartor Resartus." Section 2. Emerson's Second Marriage.--His New Residence in Concord.--Historical Address.--Course of Ten Lectures on English Literature delivered in Boston.--The Concord Battle Hymn.--Preaching in Concord and East Lexington.--Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers.--A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of History.--Address on War.--Death of Edward Bliss Emerson.--Death of Charles Chauncy Emerson. Section 3. Publication of "Nature."--Outline of this Essay.--Its Reception.--Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled "English Traits." He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily, Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his microscopes "magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters." Emerson hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which, follows:-- "The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a larger horizon." Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh, who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland's presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen:-- "On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them,--his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard; nothing like it have I listened to since. 'That music in our hearts we bore Long after it was heard no more.'" Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of "the solemnity of his manner, and the earnest thought pervading his discourse." As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the following evidence in Mr. Cooke's diligently gathered collections. Mr. Sanborn says:-- "His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met, Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing's church on 'The Universality of the Moral Sentiment,' and was struck, as he said, with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers." Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular writer, gives the following account of Emerson's preaching in his "Reminiscences." I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway:-- "One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson's voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse." Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr. Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford, writes to me as follows:-- "After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his friend, without any action by the Society." All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable. But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to many a passage from old sermons of his,--for he tells us he borrowed from those old sermons for his lectures,--without ever thinking of the pulpit from which they were first heard. Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H. Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along, Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after generation. When they parted at the house of young Rice's father, Emerson invited the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off. "Boys," said Emerson, "here we recognize the presence of the Universal Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d' ye do? How d' ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with our own How d' ye do? How d' ye do? And all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, and the insect and the bird,--every living thing and things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the salutation of the Universal Spirit." We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson's earlier Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues:-- "You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson's presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day,--I only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under whose influence I had for the first time come.... "The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological dogma and genuine religion in the soul." In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord, Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr. Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the "Old Manse." It is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house Emerson wrote "Nature," and in the same room, some years later, Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse." The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they modestly call themselves,--one of which, Walden, is as well known in our literature as Windermere in that of Old England,--lie quietly in their clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges, a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters. The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson's ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid was fired the first fatal shot of the "rebel" farmers. Emerson appeals to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the working of our American institutions and the character of the men of Concord:-- "If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government." What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the dust that is covered by their turf. Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions. On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, "Water," and the "Relation of Man to the Globe," were hardly such as we should have expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834 he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his collected works, may be found in the "North American Review" for 1837 and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in prose and verse may be found in these Essays. The _Cosmos_ of the Ancient Greeks, the _piu nel' uno_, "The Many in One," appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his "Nature." The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little poem entitled "Each and All." The "Rhodora," another brief poem, finds itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, "What is Beauty?" and its answer, "This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But it cannot be defined." And throughout this Essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. _Noscitur a sociis_ applies as well to a man's dead as to his living companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, "When you strike at a _King_, you must kill him." He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble. Like his "Humble Bee," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," whom he speaks of as "Wiser far than human seer," and says of him, "Aught unsavory or unclean Hath my insect never seen," he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is repulsive to dwell upon, "Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet." Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the Essay. "He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness." Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us try Emerson by this test in his "Essay on Milton:"-- "It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to _inspire_. Virtue goes out of him into others." ... "He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race."--"Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity,--to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes." Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, "To raise the idea of man;" he had "the power _to inspire_" in a preëminent degree. If ever a man communicated those _vibrations_ he speaks of as characteristic of Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as "an expert swordsman" like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have been conscious, like Milton, of "a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness," which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in the line he quotes:-- "The hand of Douglas is his own." It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that of the divine singer. * * * * * My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson, who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters:-- TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY. PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834. MY DEAR SIR,--As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much, and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way; whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of two or three years afterward.--He has many, many tokens of Goethe's regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries. He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for "Fraser's Magazine." I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the "Mud Magazine," but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another time. Your obliged friend and servant, R. WALDO EMERSON. CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834. MY DEAR SIR,--Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account of Carlyle's later pieces, to wit: "Diderot," and "Sartor Resartus." The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public) of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem, reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his American readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry, could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or, as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson Reed's "Growth of the Mind"? I rejoice to be contemporary with that man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives; there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead. Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON. It occurs to me that 't is unfit to send any white paper so far as to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle's letter. [This may be found in Carlyle's first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.] Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication of "Sartor Resartus," which I will repeat in his own words:-- "It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of Emerson's marriage] that the 'Sartor Resartus' appeared in 'Fraser.' Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of 'Fraser,' to Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement which the book caused among young persons interested in the literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication. This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate, William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co., 1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London edition,[1] by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co. offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and to this I assented. [Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.] "This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the 'Sartor' in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of the sheets from 'Fraser,' it appears, were stitched together and sent to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think, how much more interest was taken in Carlyle's writings in this country than in England." On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a _De_ _Profundis_ answered by a _Sursum Corda_. "The ground of my existence is black as death," says Carlyle. "Come and live with me a year," says Emerson, "and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years; (when the 'History' has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you." Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their daughter still reside. This is the "plain, square, wooden house," with horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in "Poets' Homes," by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879. On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an "Historical Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town." There is no "mysticism," no "transcendentalism" in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix. One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain what they say. It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking, faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque touches which reveal the poetic philosopher. "I have read with care," he says, "the town records themselves. They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense.--The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just community." ... "The matters there debated (in town meetings) are such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man's capacity for self-government." There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord's citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr. Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for "mother-wit" and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream--peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed in the history of Concord's two hundred years of village life, that one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of self-government. After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his published volumes. On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight. For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the lines:-- Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American, and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of Emerson's whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied: "We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr. Emerson." He said of himself: "My pulpit is the Lyceum platform." Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not mourn over their not being reported. In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards published in Miss Peabody's "Aesthetic Papers." He recognizes war as one of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear with the advance of mankind:-- "At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual, but to the common good of all men." In 1834 Emerson's brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle, of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: "Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow." It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines "In Memoriam," in which he says,-- "There is no record left on earth Save on tablets of the heart, Of the rich, inherent worth, Of the grace that on him shone Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit; He could not frame a word unfit, An act unworthy to be done." Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October, 1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle:-- "I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other." Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle:-- "Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him." Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled "Nature." It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has proved for many,--I will not say a _pons asinorum_,--but a very narrow bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they must cross it, or one domain of Emerson's intellect will not be reached. It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which "a certain poet sang" to him. This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was peculiar,--almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" was unlike the style of his "Life of Schiller." It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats's "doubtful tale from fairy-land Hard for the non-elect to understand." The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth. "Whatever is too original," says De Quincey, "will be hated at the first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the echo of his name." No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of "Nature," his first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the Preface to "The Excursion" that we find in the Introduction to "Nature." "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" "Paradise and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was?" "Nature" is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos. Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country intoxicated him. There are sentences in "Nature" which are as exalted as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and the stars shone again in quiet reflection. After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes "part or particle of God," he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled _Commodity_, the ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural conveniences. But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of _Beauty_" which is his next subject. There are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and impressions for pictures. Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. "What is common to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty."--"Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole."--"No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty." How easily these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems, "Each and All," and "The Rhodora." A good deal of his philosophy comes out in these concluding sentences of the chapter:-- "Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of Nature.". In the "Rhodora" the flower is made to answer that "Beauty is its own excuse for being." In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper than itself. He passes next to a consideration of _Language_. Words are signs of natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature. "A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories." From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves when great exigencies call for them. "The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of power, are put into his hands." It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of Wordsworth:-- "These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye; But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness sensations sweet Felt in the blood and felt along the heart." It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the comparison. In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will. Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp, because "Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference."--"All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel?"--"From the child's successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, 'Thy will be done!' he is learning the secret that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character." The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to. He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with sweet and solid wisdom "it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time." This thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles, which occurred a few months before "Nature" was published. He had already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. "To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population." This was the first effect of the loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first. The chapter on _Idealism_ must be read by all who believe themselves capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: "He that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." The most essential statement is this:-- "It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?" We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which cheat the senses by false appearances. The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The philosopher pursues Truth, but, "not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought." Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. "The devotee flouts Nature."--"Plotinus was ashamed of his body."--"Michael Angelo said of external beauty, 'it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which He has called into time.'" Emerson would not undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and "the unrenewed understanding." "I have no hostility to Nature," he says, "but a child's love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons."--But, "seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God,"--as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the next chapter, which has for its title _Spirit_. Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. "It leaves God out of me."--Of these three questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. "But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves."--"As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power." Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a "creator in the finite." "As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us." All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next chapter he dreams of Paradise regained. This next and last chapter is entitled _Prospects_. He begins with a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction, undervaluing the "half sight of science" as against the "untaught sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,--the "imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all--or most of us, certainly--recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert's "Poem on Man." Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air of song, and finishes his Essay with "some traditions of man and nature which a certain poet sang to me."--"A man is a god in ruins."--"Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon."--But he no longer fills the mere shell he had made for himself; "he is shrunk to a drop." Still something of elemental power remains to him. "It is instinct." Such teachings he got from his "poet." It is a kind of New England Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the Mount: "Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect." The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us, "Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions." The seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, "There shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth." The sage of Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. "A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen." * * * * * It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the "Revelation." He found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet, considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble imagery and wonderful beauty. "Nature" is the Book of Revelation of our Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its pantheistic character, as Wordsworth's "Lines composed near Tintern Abbey" had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the "Democratic Review" in terms of enthusiastic admiration. Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical, semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner," headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for 1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article. The professor turns the book over and over,--inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying:-- "On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in itself." Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837:-- "Your little azure-colored 'Nature' gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the 'Open Secret' becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine,--with an ear for the _Ewigen Melodien_, which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; _not_ to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down." The first edition of "Nature" had prefixed to it the following words from Plotinus: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know." This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read:-- "A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form." The copy of "Nature" from which I take these lines, his own, of course, like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," twenty years and more before the publication of "The Descent of Man." But the "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in the poet's conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than the naturalist's theory that the progenitor of the human race was an acephalous mollusk. "I will not be sworn," says Benedick, "but love may transform me to an oyster." For "love" read science. Unity in variety, "_il piu nell uno_" symbolism of Nature and its teachings, generation of phenomena,--appearances,--from spirit, to which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome,--a stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation,-- "The golden key Which opes the palace of eternity," inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through the purification of their own souls. Next to "Nature" in the series of his collected publications comes "The American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837." The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest. Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!" Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered before such an audience. Every real thinker's world of thought has its centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It begins with a note like a trumpet call. "Thus far," he says, "our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,--a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship." This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making. It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of men's thoughts and working faculties. "In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites." Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence. "Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel. "Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this." When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to become an object of idolatrous regard. "Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.--One must he an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world." It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him. "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours." Emerson does not use the words "unconscious cerebration," but these last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to. "There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. "Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world must also soar and sing." Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by action, he speaks of the scholar's duties. "They may all," he says, "be comprised in self-trust." We have to remember that the _self_ he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in "The Sphinx ":-- "The heavens that now draw him With sweetness untold, Once found,--for new heavens He spurneth the old." "First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men." And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure; he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:-- "The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.--The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.--The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant." The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted. "What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." Each man must be a unit,--must yield that peculiar fruit which he was created to bear. "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.--A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence. Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, "Whether it be lawful to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there. The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in "the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan." They could understand the deep thoughts suggested by "the meanest flower that blows," but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them "Thus saith the Lord." No listener ever forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration. CHAPTER V. 1838-1843. AET. 35-40. Section 1. Divinity School Address.--Correspondence.--Lectures on Human Life.--Letters to James Freeman Clarke.--Dartmouth College Address: Literary Ethics.--Waterville College Address: The Method of Nature.--Other Addresses: Man the Reformer.--Lecture on the Times.--The Conservative.--The Transcendentalist.--Boston "Transcendentalism."--"The Dial."--Brook Farm. Section 2. First Series of Essays published.--Contents: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art.--Emerson's Account of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle.--Death of Emerson's Son.--Threnody. Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters. He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the change of an expression:-- "In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn." How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear, and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased attention! The "Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," could not have wooed the listener more sweetly. "Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon." And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But "when Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth." Such was probably the fate of many a copy of this famous discourse. It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that it is read as calmly to-day as a common "Election Sermon," if such are ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and its tendencies. The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty, deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and illustration of this mind. What am I? What is?--are questions always asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever. But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. "The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws.--These laws refuse to be adequately stated.--They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse.--The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.--As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell." These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind,--that one mind is everywhere active.--"All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."--"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom." "This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively creates all forms of worship.--This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion." But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,--"the doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul." The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by the discourse:-- "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am Divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.' But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us. "To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and peculiarity. Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of Christ is that the Moral Nature--the Law of Laws--is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society. "Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead."--"The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct.--The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity--a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of Man--is lost." When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the "practical application," some of his young hearers must have been startled at the style of his address. "Yourself a new--born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,--are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see,--but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind." Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of Christianity; first the Sabbath,--hardly a Christian institution,--and secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity, rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, "he speaks 'as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.'" Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its doctrines were repudiated in the "Christian Examiner," the leading organ of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson's discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer:-- "What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time, and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse, and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise. Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not, be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the 'address,' before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and love." Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson's philosophy, and sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings of that most excellent and truly apostolic man. To this letter Emerson sent the following reply:-- CONCORD, October 8, 1838. "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it assails any doctrine of mine,--perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally,--certainly I did not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been--from my very incapacity of methodical writing--a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail,--lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended me,--the joy of finding that my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley,--and so I am your affectionate servant," etc. The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just given,--"Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see." But among his listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution, not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration,--Theodore Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present day. In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: "Ten Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life." Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in "Lectures and Biographical Sketches;" and "The Comic" in "Letters and Social Aims." * * * * * I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke. The first letter was accompanied by the Poem "The Humble-bee," which was first published by Mr. Clarke in the "Western Messenger," from the autograph copy, which begins "Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!" and has a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected works. CONCORD, December 7, 1838. MY DEAR SIR,--Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me in the spring if I hadn't somewhat to contribute to your journal. I remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of yours that the verses, "Take, O take those lips away," were not Shakspeare's; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that stanza. I know it is in "Rollo," but it is in "Measure for Measure" also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not, and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we _who_ sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and servant, R.W. EMERSON. TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. CONCORD, February 27, 1839. MY DEAR SIR,--I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are quite welcome to the lines "To the Rhodora;" but I think they need the superscription ["Lines on being asked 'Whence is the Flower?'"]. Of the other verses ["Good-by proud world," etc] I send you a corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them that I think you must read them once again with your critical spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than _afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it; but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year, and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail, of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson's new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers, aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson. Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON. On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever. Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen, provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver. Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker. The subject of Mr. Emerson's Address is _Literary Ethics._ It is on the same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson's orations. But these discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative illustration. "Neither years nor books," he says, "have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men." And yet, he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled the reasonable expectation of mankind. "Men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought." For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie all his teachings. "The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect." New lessons of spiritual independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment:-- "An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical _plenum_ annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved." But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be forever blighted. From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied. "Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, 'The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day.'" And in the same way he would have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution of things. "He must embrace solitude as a bride." Not superstitiously, but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it:-- "You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. 'What is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?' men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, 'As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;'--then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men.--Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope." The next Address Emerson delivered was "The Method of Nature," before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841. In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: "As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence.... My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in a private letter. The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is "The Method of Nature." He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments and promises of this literary Anniversary. "The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the castle."--"We hear too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man."--"While the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself." I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than in any of those which preceded it. "Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?" That there is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it, that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force," that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into character,"--all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn. We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this discourse on "The Method of Nature," as the pictorial beauty of their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson's speculations is well shown in this paragraph:-- "We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy."--"It is God in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said: 'I am, and by me, O child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are mine; and all mine are thine.'" We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same paragraph, "I cannot,--nor can any man,--speak precisely of things so sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation." "We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy." Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme. "The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong." His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence:-- "We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they were." It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the "pantheism" which is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and vaguely to his Christian audience. "Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would feel that they lost by his counsels. "The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never touched; always giving health." Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture."--That he cannot give up labor without suffering some loss of power. "How can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we think?--Perhaps with his own hands.--Let us learn the meaning of economy.--Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality for gods and heroes." This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This "house with one apartment" was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in Thoreau's mind and was suggested to Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends "Teague and his jade," as he called the man and brother and sister, more commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman. "The Americans have many virtues," he says in this Address, "but they have not Faith and Hope." Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by "a great prospective prudence," which shall mediate between the spiritual and the actual world. In the "Lecture on the Times" he shows very clearly the effect which a nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves Reformers had upon him. "The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near!--I do not like it better. It is done in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics and clamor." All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. He knew the force of _felix audacia_ as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of those daring images which defy the critics. "As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds." He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in his "Lecture on the Times." It would have taken a long while to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson's teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence covers with its soothing tribute! "All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels." The Lecture called "The Transcendentalist" will naturally be looked at with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples. It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson explains that the "_new views_," as they are called, are the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould. "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism: Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture." "The materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.--His thought, that is the Universe." The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of "Transcendentalists" was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as "The Dial," has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these "same Transcendentalists," and a leading contributor to "The Dial," which was their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best witness. In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," he sketches in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the development of the "new views" above mentioned. "There are always two parties," he says, "the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement." About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life in a few old men's memories. It is therefore with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,--it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory. Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate community, the writings of Channing,--he left it to others to say of Emerson,--all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins Warren's,--Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on smoothly enough with the usual small talk,-- "When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before Dr. Warren's temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to establish aesthetic society in Boston. "Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present.--Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr. Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at each other's houses in a serious conversation." With them was another, "a pure Idealist,--who read Plato as an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were intellectual." He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to say:-- "I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston that there was some concert of _doctrinaires_ to establish certain opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary. I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody knows by whom, or when it was applied." Emerson's picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments. "In like manner, if there is anything grand and daring in human thought or virtue; any reliance on the vast, the unknown; any presentiment, any extravagance of faith, the Spiritualist adopts it as most in nature. The Oriental mind has always tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expression of it. The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors,' but who in his conviction that every good deed can by no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pretending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist. "These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man." The person who adopts "any presentiment, any extravagance as most in nature," is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known colloquially as a "crank." The person who does not thank, by word or look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a churl. Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each other than was reasonable,--so much occasionally that their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time. In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait,--a friend and not a scoffer:-- "They are not good citizens, not good members of society: unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote." After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this is what they have to say:-- "'New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.' 'Then,' says the world, 'show me your own.' 'We have none.' 'What will you do, then?' cries the world. 'We will wait.' 'How long?' 'Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.' 'But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.' 'Be it so: I can sit in a corner and _perish_ (as you call it), but I will not move until I have the highest command.'" And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his reasons for doing nothing. It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress for indolence than "the Everlasting No." The chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow. Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives. Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go. "Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from them to the state. Besides our coarse implements, there must be some few finer instruments,--rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the by-stander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark, with power to convey the electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or "line-packet" to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers." It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle, and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him:-- "There has sprung up in Boston," says Dickens, in his "American Notes," "a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist." In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled "The Conservative." It was a time of great excitement among the members of that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as well as that of the other. "Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men's tempers govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application,--law for all that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so, whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an impossible whole." He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be unjust to the present or the past. We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that Dr. Charming "lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called 'The Transcendentalist,' as the organ of a spiritual philosophy." Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this country, Emerson says:-- "It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called 'The Transcendentalist;' or, 'The Spiritual Inquirer,' or the like.... Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured." The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to know as "The Dial!" A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be content with Carlyle's purring from his own side of the water, as thus:-- "'The Boston Transcendentalist,' whatever the fate or merit of it may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of over in that _Transoceanic_ parish! I shall certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better." There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm. They were to a certain extent synchronous,--the Magazine beginning in July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in 1841, and breaking up in 1847. "The Dial" was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse, among them "The Conservative," "The Transcendentalist," "Chardon Street and Bible Convention," and some of his best and best known poems, "The Problem," "Woodnotes," "The Sphinx," "Fate." The other principal writers were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs. Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest. It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number. Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with his "trip-hammer" in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others, whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to "The Dial," with all its crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the "Anthology." Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the pledge of a better season. We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge of our _young people_ than any he has had. It is true that unfledged writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the inspiration of these "young people" to whom Emerson refers. He has to apologize for the first number. "It is not yet much," he says; "indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had.--The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know." They did print "The Problem." There were also some fragments of criticism from the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called "The Last Farewell," by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson's "May-day and other Pieces." On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple of months, Emerson writes:-- "Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism; and the _Dial_, poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public." Carlyle finds the second number of "The Dial" better than the first, and tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson's readily,--the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for the most part. "But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal." And again, "'The Dial,' too, it is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man_, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?" Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the "dubious approbation on the part of you and other men," notwithstanding which he found it with "a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion." So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. "I cannot bid you quit 'The Dial,'" says Carlyle, "though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge_, nevertheless." In the next letter he says:-- "I love your 'Dial,' and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof." A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic,--but he was not always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms. To all Carlyle's complaints of "The Dial's" short-comings Emerson did not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite. "For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys, that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed." "All the bright boys and girls in New England," and "'The Dial' dying of inanition!" In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle:-- "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book. One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope." Mr. Ripley's project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a moderate degree of faith in its practical working. "It was a noble and generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts." The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm experiment in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," its founder, and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his "Historic Notes" very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. "It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen." Is not the inaudible, inward laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest humorists? This is his benevolent summing up:-- "The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan." The public edifice called the "Phalanstery" was destroyed by fire in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon afterwards it was dissolved. Section 2. Emerson's first volume of his collected Essays was published in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History; Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence; Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. "The Young American," which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844. Once accustomed to Emerson's larger formulae we can to a certain extent project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays, for instance. "Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written." When we come to the application, in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one upon the other, but their sense is continuous. "I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?--How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?" The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being reminded of a certain great man's Rochester speech as commonly reported by the story-teller. "Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!" We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous. Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that "every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols." We have become familiar with his doctrine of "Self-Reliance," which is the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom. It is a man's true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind. "Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!" "Compensation" might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful, and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John Bunyan's view:-- "A Christian man is never long at ease, When one fright's gone, another doth him seize." Emerson shows up the "success" of the bad man and the failures and trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble scorn of the preacher's low standard of happiness and misery, which would have made him throw his sermon into the fire. The Essay on "Spiritual Laws" is full of pithy sayings:-- "As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue.--A man passes for that he is worth.--The ancestor of every action is a thought.--To think is to act.--Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature." This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud of George Herbert's. The Essay on "Love" is poetical, but the three poems, "Initial," "Daemonic," and "Celestial Love" are more nearly equal to his subject than his prose. There is a passage in the Lecture on "Friendship" which suggests some personal relation of Emerson's about which we cannot help being inquisitive:-- "It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both." Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson's most hospitable roof. "You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house." How could they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was wanting in the social graces. "Come rest in this bosom" is a sweet air, heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season of close proximity, by that other strain,-- "No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole! Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!" But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person, perhaps some "crude and cold companion" among his disciples, who was not equal to the demands of friendly intercourse. He discourses wisely on "Prudence," a virtue which he does not claim for himself, and nobly on "Heroism," which was a shining part of his own moral and intellectual being. The points which will be most likely to draw the reader's attention are the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America, for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of sad sincerity painful to recognize. "Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being." In the following Essay, "The Over-Soul," Emerson has attempted the impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his rhapsody,--nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of reaching, he says,-- "Every man's words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law." "The Over-Soul" might almost be called the Over-_flow_ of a spiritual imagination. We cannot help thinking of the "pious, virtuous, God-intoxicated" Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols, varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words, and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea, which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision. Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon Him whom "no man can see and live." But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled "Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would have confessed as much with reference to "The Over-Soul" as he has confessed with regard to "Circles," the Essay which follows "The Over-Soul." "I am not careful to justify myself.... But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back." Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might borrow Goethe's language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with which we are left. "I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine. "I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to understand him,--that is, he always appears to me consistent with himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences for my own way of feeling and acting." Emerson would not have pretended that he was always "consistent with himself," but these "salutary influences," restoring, enkindling, vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess, like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these, as he listened to them in a lecture, "made his head ache." The three essays which follow "The Over-Soul," "Circles," "Intellect," "Art," would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom. "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk." "God enters by a private door into every individual." "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,--you can never have both." "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not." But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from Babylon. Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838. "I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: "My little boy is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love." Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once more:-- "My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain." This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic of Emerson's poems, the "Threnody,"--a lament not unworthy of comparison with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper's well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother's picture, in the place of Milton's sonorous academic phrases. CHAPTER VI. 1843-1848. AET. 40-45. "The Young American."--Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.[1]--Publication of the Second Series of Essays.--Contents: The Poet.--Experience.--Character. --Manners.--Gifts.--Nature.--Politics.--Nominalist and Realist.--New England Reformers.--Publication of Poems.--Second Visit to England. [Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of Emerson's works, namely, "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures," and "Miscellanies."] Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the significance of the following contrast. "The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history in the world; but they need all and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to avoid it.... It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions.... If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others' censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded." Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are taken was delivered. The "Young American" of that day is the more than middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic, bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties. On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate method of action. * * * * * Emerson's second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are many sayings in the Essay called "The Poet," which are meant for the initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read:-- "All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology." Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and downs of the Hebrews,--what were the squabbles of the tribes with each other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to whom we owe the Psalms,--the sweet singer whose voice is still the dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind? The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this eloquent apostrophe:-- "Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should'st walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." "Experience" is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other essays. His most important confession is this:-- "All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal." The Essay on "Character" requires no difficult study, but is well worth the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone and doctrine. "Character is Nature in the highest form. It is of no use to ape it, or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of resistance and of persistence and of creation to this power, which will foil all emulation." "There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unanimously saluted as _divine_, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider. "The history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact." In his Essay on "Manners," Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman:-- "The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness.--Power first, or no leading class.--God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.--The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high rate.--I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person.--The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.--I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels in woman." So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme. This essay is plain enough for the least "transcendental" reader. Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners, a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the society of Philadelphia. "Gifts" is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse:-- "The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing." "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.--Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them." "It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap." Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the tingling effect of a witty over-statement. We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled "Nature," in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure. Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar:-- "Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought." And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this Essay:-- "They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors,--of our condensation and acceleration of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow." This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman gave it a name, he would probably call _Onditologie_. It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the present time, or when the Essay on "Politics" was written, some years before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson's view of them as they then were:-- "Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation." The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled "Nominalism and Realism." But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge "Phi Beta Kappa Oration," reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a collection of fragmentary men. As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously. "In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living. "Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars." _New England Reformers_.--Would any one venture to guess how Emerson would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism, his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous, too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth's thoughts were too deep for tears, in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin? We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing. To remodel society and the world into a "happy family" was the aim of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities. He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical way:-- "They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No, they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended,--that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!" We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment, which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation. Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of which he was in no sense responsible. He says in the lecture we are considering:-- "These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some compromise." His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too well to believe in a Noah's ark full of idealists. All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in and out of New England. His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to play the part of an accountant. He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and that some of this company exacted much time and attention,--more than he could spare,--is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered in prose. In 1846 Emerson's first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems had been long before the public--some of the best, as we have seen, having been printed in "The Dial." It is only their being brought together for the first time which belongs especially to this period, and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the title, "May-Day and other Pieces." In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which will be spoken of in the following chapter. CHAPTER VII. 1848-1853. AET. 45-50. The "Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" Visit to Europe.--England. --Scotland.--France.--"Representative Men" published. I. Uses of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer.--Contribution to the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name of the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." Emerson wrote the "Editor's Address," but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: "We rely on the truth for aid against ourselves." On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway quotes passages from a letter of Emerson's which show that he had some hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him. "I feel no call," he said, "to make a visit of literary propagandism in England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at home." He does not like the idea of "coaxing" or advertising to get him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of the kingdom. From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland's account of Emerson's visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr. Ireland, I borrow a single sentence,--one only, but what could a critic say more? Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he says: "In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared." Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances,--its preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and unstinted admiration? I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought "the two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and De Quincey." His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that "loud shout of laughter," which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would have been discordant to Emerson's ears, which were offended by such noisy manifestations. During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but never printed. From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for publication. These make up the volume entitled "Representative Men," which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical, and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography, no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally, unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize. Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation. Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of all great men: "The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor." Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes "rough and smooth," "scourges of God," and "darlings of the human race." He likes Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte. "I applaud," he says, "a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the potentate is nothing.-- "The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow.--All that respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence." No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But Plato takes the first place in Emerson's gallery of six great personages whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says:-- "Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, 'Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book.' Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought."-- "In proportion to the culture of men they become his scholars."--"How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night to be _his men_!--His contemporaries tax him with plagiarism.--But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors." The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his storehouses. A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples. The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the Indian Scriptures. "'The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.' As if he had said, 'All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.'" All of which we see reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."--"The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom."--"Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of each." But Emerson says,--and some will smile at hearing him say it of another,--"The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him." The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this "Euclid of holiness," as Emerson calls him, with his "soliform eye and his boniform soul,"--the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth,--are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called "Plato: New Readings." Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled "Swedenborg; or, the Mystic." The believers in his special communion as a revealer of divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence at the statement that "Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in its bosom." The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer. "Philosophers" will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called them "cockatrices," "asps," or "flying serpents;" "literary men" will not agree that they are "conjurers and charlatans," and will not listen with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the poets, they can take their choice of Emerson's poetical or prose estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In "The Test," the Muse says:-- "I hung my verses in the wind, Time and tide their faults may find; All were winnowed through and through, Five lines lasted good and true ... Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know. Have you eyes to find the five Which five hundred did survive?" In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, _Swedenborg_, and Goethe. And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that "his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning." Yet Emerson says of him that "He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature." Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer, he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better. "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," is easier reading than the last-mentioned Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes him as being. "There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. "The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.-- "Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion." The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he must have found a great relief in getting into "the middle of the road" with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often led him round to the point from which he started. As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the Essay itself. In writing of "Shakespeare; or, the Poet," Emerson naturally gives expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of poetry. "Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality." A poet has "a heart in unison with his time and country."--"There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times." When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of amusement. It was "ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field." Shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: "A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating." Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was their wit. "Chaucer is a huge borrower." Emerson gives a list of authors from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury's which I have had the privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us. The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing, especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough. He was arguing in his own cause,--not defending himself, as if there were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their acquisitions. "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us."--"Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors." After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare, he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares "the halfness and imperfection of humanity." "He converted the elements which waited on his command into entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind." And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: "It must be conceded that these are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with equal inspiration." It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to say about "Napoleon; or, the Man of the World." The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find:-- "The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate democrat.-- "Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers." As Plato borrowed, as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau "plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken in France," so Napoleon is not merely "representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other minds." He was "a man of stone and iron,"--equipped for his work by nature as Sallust describes Catiline as being. "He had a directness of action never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object; the obstacle must give way." "When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and satisfied."-- "I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.--He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse." But he was without generous sentiments, "a boundless liar," and finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation superfluous:-- "In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. "So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; '_Assez de Bonaparte_.'" It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks and ruins. But after all, Carlyle's "_carrière ouverte aux talens_" is the expression for Napoleon's great message to mankind. "Goethe; or, the Writer," is the last of the Representative Men who are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his author. "He has clothed our modern existence with poetry."--"He has said the best things about nature that ever were said.--He flung into literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus.--He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist.--I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions,--two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time and for all time." This must serve as an _ex pede_ guide to reconstruct the Essay which finishes the volume. In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took a part. Emerson's account of her conversation and extracts from her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written of her than by anything she ever wrote herself. CHAPTER VIII. 1858-1858. AEt. 50-55. Lectures in various Places.--Anti-Slavery Addresses.--Woman. A Lecture read before the Woman's Rights Convention.--Samuel Hoar. Speech at Concord.--Publication of "English Traits."--The "Atlantic Monthly."--The "Saturday Club." After Emerson's return from Europe he delivered lectures to different audiences,--one on Poetry, afterwards published in "Letters and Social Aims," a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York. His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because "it is the only practical course, and is innocent." It would cost two thousand millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but "was there ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would be?" His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in 1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency,--in steel and not in gold:-- "Pay ransom to the owner, And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay him." His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular "Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing" there is a hint of a possible solution of the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the cause of all the trouble. "The over-god Who marries Right to Might, Who peoples, unpeoples,-- He who exterminates Races by stronger races, Black by white faces,-- Knows to bring honey Out of the lion." Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he refused to leave his "honeyed thought" for the busy world where "Things are of the snake." The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to borrow Mr. Cooke's words, "As the agitation proceeded, and brave men took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a heartier assent to the outward methods adopted." * * * * * No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a lecture read to the "Woman's Rights Convention" in 1855, he takes bold, and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way in which he expresses himself: "I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it. Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs;--and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them,--according to our Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.--The new movement is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish." Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor, that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for "Putnam's Magazine," from which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch concluded:-- "He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are native." The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough for an Elizabethan monumental inscription. "With beams December planets dart His cold eye truth and conduct scanned; July was in his sunny heart, October in his liberal hand." Emerson's "English Traits," forming one volume of his works, was published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not a tourist's guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final; they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded, sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him well-disposed to all the world. A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal portion of his record. Only one _place_ is given as the heading of a chapter,--_Stonehenge_. The other eighteen chapters have general titles, _Land, Race, Ability, Manners_, and others of similar character. He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the British Aristocracy:-- "Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled." The race preserves some of its better characteristics. "They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island." English "Manners" are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck, vigor, independence. "Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable." They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form. "They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use a studied plainness." "In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury, but the dinner is the capital institution." "They confide in each other,--English believes in English."--"They require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in public men." "As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented. Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy." Emerson's observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly two hundred years ago. "_New England_, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those _Melancholy Indispositions_, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby to lay _Violent Hands_ upon themselves at the last. These are among the _unsearchable Judgments_ of God." If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton. "They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause." This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch. "A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The stability of England is the security of the modern world." Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies." In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain, or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a generation ago, when the noun "shoddy," and the verb "to scamp," had not grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England. A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a field of mushrooms. The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson's flashes of light that have not come through its stained windows. "The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman. "The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him." Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,--so great that he told a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,--and if next an archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,---but Sydney Smith would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a _banderillero_ leaves his little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose unwieldy bulk he is playing. Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with soft-spoken words. "Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne,_ that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame." "English Traits" closes with Emerson's speech at Manchester, at the annual banquet of the "Free Trade Athenaeum." This was merely an occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in their utterance. * * * * * The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people, tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame Tussaud's exhibition, the Lord-Mayor's gilt coach, and a coronation, if one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through the wide-awake town of Concord. In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing the name of "The Atlantic Monthly." Professor James Russell Lowell was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old contributors to "The Dial" wrote for the new magazine, among them Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as "The Romany Girl," "Days," "Brahma," "Waldeinsamkeit," "The Titmouse," "Boston Hymn," "Saadi," and "Terminus." At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association, which became at last well known as the "Saturday Club," the members dining together on the last Saturday of every month. The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic connection, and the "Atlantic Club" has been spoken of as if there was or had been such an institution, but it never existed. Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the habit of meeting him at dinner at "Parker's," the "Will's Coffee-House" of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look,--whose silence was better than many another man's conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion of freedom, Andrew, "the great War Governor" of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe, the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at its table, until within a year or two of his death. Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed unrecorded. CHAPTER IX. 1858-1863: AET. 55-60. Essay on Persian Poetry.--Speech at the Burns Centennial Festival--Letter from Emerson to a Lady.--Tributes to Theodore Parker and to Thoreau.--Address on the Emancipation Proclamation.--Publication of "The Conduct of Life." Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture; Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions. The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson's verse. In many of the shorter poems and fragments published since "May-Day," as well as in the "Quatrains" and others of the later poems in that volume, it is sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original. On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the poet's birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that "every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds." Judge Hoar, who was another of his hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel. I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends:-- CONCORD, May 13, 1859. Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet you the while,--keep him at the door. So long I have promised to write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with Gisela von Arnim (Bettina's daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E.,--wandering in Europe with hope of meeting you,--yet met. This contumacy of mine I shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn.--Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and bring home the author of "Counterparts" with you? Or did----write the novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent. But----is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him. I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain science. Our _praxis_ is never altered for that. We must forever hold our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed. I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but from a more convenient nature. But 'tis almost chemistry at last, though a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer, however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth, that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in the most passive acceptance,--if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out around me at this moment the new June,--the leaves say June, though the calendar says May,--and we must needs hail our young relatives again, though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan curiously your E.'s drawings, as they have seen them. The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours! R.W. EMERSON. In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in the Music Hall to Mr. Parker's society after his death. In 1862, he lost his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" for August of the same year. Thoreau had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the following extract:-- "Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet:-- "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.'" The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860. The chapter on "Fate" might leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let him hold fast to this reassuring statement:-- "If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.--We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times." But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are illustrated. "Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.--The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity." Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he believed in so fully:-- "They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear." But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words, which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:-- "People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that a free-soiler." Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"-- "All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were _causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and the last of things. "The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.-- "We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_ condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge." The "two economies which are the best _succedanea"_ for deficiency of temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example, and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which "Poor Richard" would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the Essay on "Wealth" as having a good sense so like his own that he could hardly tell the difference between them. "Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of necessity.-- "To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race.-- "The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone." Who can give better counsels on "Culture" than Emerson? But we must borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson's. We know something of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet. It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as follows:-- "The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is. "The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude." "We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily,--and will yield their best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars." We must remember, too, that "the calamities are our friends. Try the rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners." Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least. But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he respected. It was "the hand of Douglas" again,--the same feeling that Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the introduction to this volume. Here are a few good sayings about "Behavior." "There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love,--now repeated and hardened into usage." Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of "Manners" in his Essay under the above title. "The basis of good manners is self-reliance.--Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.-- "Men take each other's measure, when they meet for the first time,--and every time they meet.-- "It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also." In his Essay on "Worship," Emerson ventures the following prediction:-- "The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science.--There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry." It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the established facts of science and history when these last reach it in their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date than "Beauty," or "Illusions." But accidental circumstances made such confusion in the strata of Emerson's published thought that one is often at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer layer. We come to "Considerations by the Way." The common-sense side of Emerson's mind has so much in common with the plain practical intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth. "Franklin said, 'Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.'" "Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely." Here we have the doctrine of the "saving remnant," which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold's well-remembered lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this matter of the _vox populi_. "Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them." Père Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer in due time. After reading what Emerson says about "the masses," one is tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have "a constituency" and be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great necessity for Emerson's returning to the subject of "Beauty," to which he had devoted a chapter of "Nature," and of which he had so often discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the Essay thus entitled in the "Conduct of Life" that we need not trouble ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens, entertains, stimulates, inspires,--or as some may prefer to say,--amuses his listeners and readers. The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the following passage:-- "The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors, and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination." One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he would fain idealize. The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer's smile as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never show him. The Essay on "Illusions" has little which we have not met with, or shall not find repeating itself in the Poems. During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and verse to the "Atlantic Monthly," and several to "The Dial," a second periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have been, or will be, elsewhere referred to. CHAPTER X. 1863-1868. AET. 60-65. "Boston Hymn."--"Voluntaries."--Other Poems.--"May-Day and other Pieces."--"Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln."--Essay on Persian Poetry.--Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious Association.--"Progress of Culture." Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University.--Course of Lectures in Philadelphia.--The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard University.--"Terminus." The "Boston Hymn" was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning "Pay ransom to the owner," has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it:-- "I cause from every creature His proper good to flow: As much as he is and doeth So much shall he bestow. "But laying hands on another To coin his labor and sweat, He goes in pawn to his victim For eternal years in debt. "To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound: Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!" "Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than the plain song of the "Boston Hymn." "But best befriended of the God He who, in evil times, Warned by an inward voice, Heeds not the darkness and the dread, Biding by his rule and choice, Feeling only the fiery thread Leading over heroic ground, Walled with mortal terror round, To the aim which him allures, And the sweet heaven his deed secures. Peril around, all else appalling, Cannon in front and leaden rain Him duly through the clarion calling To the van called not in vain." It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years:-- "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_, The youth replies, _I can_." "Saadi" was published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1864, "My Garden" in 1866, "Terminus" in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many others were collected in a small volume, entitled "May-Day, and Other Pieces." The general headings of these poems are as follows: May-Day.--The Adirondacs.--Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces.--Nature and Life.--Elements.--Quatrains.--Translations.--Some of these poems, which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous pages. "The Adirondacs" is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared for its poetical character with "May-Day," one passage from which, beginning, "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth," is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found "Brahma," "Days," and others which are well known to all readers of poetry. Emerson's delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy:-- "Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years,--four years of battle-days,--his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue." In his "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association," Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and sufficiently "transcendental" way: intelligibly for those who wish to understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, "The Sphinx." --"As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within his own mind,--is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action." Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the suggestive remark,-- --"What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds expression.--The interests that grow out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the old eternal duties." In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:-- "I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous dispensation,--certainly not to the _doctrine_ of Christianity.--If you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings." The "Progress of Culture" was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in 1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains of the reforming movement:-- "Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power." He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of intelligence,--"All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary, teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and superseding kings." He repeats some of his fundamental formulae. "The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. "Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. "Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter." And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in 1867,--especially in the view of future possibilities. "Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough." _Non tali auxilio_, we exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these concluding words: "I read the promise of better times and of greater men." In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as the "grand climacteric." In that year Harvard University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift. In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips, he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards published in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in his second volume, under the title "Terminus." This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which must have been long shaping itself in the father's mind, had been so far from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a particular purpose, but here is the whole poem:-- TERMINUS. It is time to be old, To take in sail:-- The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: "No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. Fancy departs: no more invent; Contract thy firmament To compass of a tent. There's not enough for this and that, Make thy option which of two; Economize the failing river, Not the less revere the Giver, Leave the many and hold the few, Timely wise accept the terms, Soften the fall with wary foot; A little while Still plan and smile, And,--fault of novel germs,-- Mature the unfallen fruit. Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,-- Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb. "As the bird trims her to the gale I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: 'Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.'" CHAPTER XI. 1868-1873. AET. 65-70. Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect.--Publication of "Society and Solitude." Contents: Society and Solitude. --Civilization.--Art.--Eloquence.--Domestic Life.--Farming. --Works and Days.--Books.--Clubs.--Courage.--Success.--Old Age.--Other Literary Labors.--Visit to California.--Burning of his House, and the Story of its Rebuilding.--Third Visit to Europe.--His Reception at Concord on his Return. During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a series of Lectures at Harvard University on the "Natural History of the Intellect." These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an extract from Prof. Thayer's "Western Journey with Mr. Emerson." He is there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics. It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words "subject and object" with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions. Once he ventures on the _not me_, but in the main he uses plain English handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ. "Society and Solitude" was published in 1870. The first Essay in the volume bears the same name as the volume itself. In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of solitude. We are driven "as with whips into the desert." But there is danger in this seclusion. "Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.--Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line.--The conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our sympathy." The Essay on "Civilization" is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with special brilliancy:-- "Right position of woman in the State is another index.--Place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women." My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly:-- "The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart, longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer, driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,-- "'The pulses of her iron heart Go beating through the storm.'" I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called "The Steamboat:" "The beating of her restless heart Still sounding through the storm." It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer lives, for he is ready to "cavil on the ninth part of a hair" where his verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson's special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that 'tis better to be quoted wrong Than to be quoted not at all. This Essay of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals:-- "Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to _hitch his wagon to a star_, and see his chore done by the gods themselves."-- "'It was a great instruction,' said a saint in Cromwell's war, 'that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.' HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way,--Charles's Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote,--justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility."-- Charles's Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the same constellation; the _Dipper_ is what our people often call it, and the country folk all know "the pinters," which guide their eyes to the North Star. I find in the Essay on "Art" many of the thoughts with which we are familiar in Emerson's poem, "The Problem." It will be enough to cite these passages:-- "We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.-- --"The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men.-- --"The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone.-- "Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows." The discourse on "Eloquence" is more systematic, more professorial, than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its general purport:-- "Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.-- "He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight.-- --"The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment.-- --"Its great masters ... were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world and themselves also." "Domestic Life" begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught:-- "Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child,--the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation,--soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.--All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him." Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about "Farming." Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an address before the "Middlesex Agricultural Society," and printed in the "Transactions" of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily:-- "The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must not try to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is.--This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely." Emerson's chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make them almost a surprise:-- "By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises to pay a better rent than all the superstructure." In "Works and Days" there is much good reading, but I will call attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson's assertions and predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of "the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!" And once more, "We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air." Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles. The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose version of the fine poem, printed in "May-Day" under the title "Days." I shall refer to this more particularly hereafter. It is wronging the Essay on "Books" to make extracts from it. It is all an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader's consideration:-- "There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they are so few.-- "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home.-- "The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare's phrase,-- "'No profit goes where is no pleasure ta'en; In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'" Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on "Clubs," but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay. Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the "Saturday Club," of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a "clubable" man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have been speaking:-- "I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public questions of education and politics." "A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage." I do not think "public questions of education and politics" were very prominent at the social meetings of the "Saturday Club," but "worthy foreigners," and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and callings. All that Emerson has to say about "Courage" is worth listening to, for he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate save that which protects him "Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his utmost skill." He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. "I need not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men."--There are good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture, which closes with the spirited ballad of "George Nidiver," written "by a lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known." Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its subject, like the one now before me, "Success." Emerson complains of the same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England:-- "We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.-- "Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for success,--that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take Michael Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something of worth and value.'" Reading about "Success" is after all very much like reading in old books of alchemy. "How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. "Success" in its vulgar sense,--the gaining of money and position,--is not to be reached by following the rules of an instructor. Our "self-made men," who govern the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of "Poor Richard," or any other moralist or economist.--For such as these is meant the cheap cynical saying quoted by Emerson, "_Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès_." But this is not the aim and end of Emerson's teaching:-- "I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind." And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character, the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the market-place. The Essay on "Old Age" has a special value from its containing two personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825, Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all. But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling that he has found expression,--that his condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future:-- "When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment." Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the Introduction to "Plutarch's Morals" in 1870, and a Preface to William Ellery Channing's Poem, "The Wanderer," in 1871. He made a speech at Howard University, Washington, in 1872. In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married Emerson's daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B. Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes's letter:-- BOSTON, February 6, 1884. MY DEAR DR.,--What little I can give will be of a very rambling character. One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in 1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage. We passed on by rail, and the next day's papers brought us the telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were among the last persons on it! About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson, his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with B----, the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse's mouth, without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was he, at the moment, of his surroundings. In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers, in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all beholders. When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces. I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you some notes that would be valuable. Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which you and I know he possessed in a marked degree. Yours always, J.M. FORBES. Professor James B. Thayer's little book, "A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson," is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the following:-- "'How _can_ Mr. Emerson,' said one of the younger members of the party to me that day, 'be so agreeable, all the time, without getting tired!' It was the _naive_ expression of what we all had felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own estimation. One thing particularly impressed me,--the sense that he seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It was the behavior of one who really _believed_ in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power: 'Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour.'" This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the same subject. "The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his address on 'Immortality,' at Dr. Stebbins's church. It was the first time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since been printed. "At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the 'Alta California.' It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it warmly, and closed with the following observations: 'All left the church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the English language had contributed to that end.'" The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of "The Columbian Centinel," spoke of it in his paper the next day as "the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience." The "Alta California's" "elegant tribute" is not quite up to this rhetorical altitude. "'The minister,' said he, 'is in no danger of losing his position; he represents the moral sense and the humanities.' He spoke of his own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that 'some one had lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of negation?'" "I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent course of lectures at Cambridge, 'The Natural History of the Intellect.' This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas! I could recall but little of it,--little more than the mere hintings of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own mind,--about memory, for example. These he had set down from time to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake it." Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke of the Mormons. Some one had said, "They impress the common people, through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery." "Yes," he said, "it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this Father Abraham could go no further." The charm of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take leave of his agreeable little volume:-- "At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson's weaknesses. A pie stood before him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr.----; he too declined. 'But Mr.----!' Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner,--'but Mr.----, _what is pie for_?'" A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in the other,--such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed if one of Caesar's _cunei_, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge against her. Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never, so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness habitually centred beneath his diaphragm. Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a whiff of tobacco-smoke:-- "When alone," he said, "he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it. On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with him at home." Professor Thayer adds in a note:-- "Like Milton, Mr. Emerson 'was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,' and he used even less tobacco. Milton's quiet day seems to have closed regularly with a pipe; he 'supped,' we are told, 'upon ... some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed.'" As Emerson's name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in this semi-philosophical luxury. One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson, including his father's sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory which came over his declining years. His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court House, and the "Old Manse," which had sheltered his grandfather, and others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant. On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision,--that, as to his Humble-bee, "All was picture as he passed." But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house would have been as energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring the reprint of "Sartor Resartus." I have his kind permission to publish the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily carried out. _To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson's House, after the Fire of July_ 24, 1872: The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the offer to restore for him his ruined home. No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr. Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words. Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his letter of October 8, 1872. All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had been required, for the object in view. Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly "conspiracy" may well take pleasure in the thought that what they have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble life that was so dear to all of us. My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this message of good-will. LE BARON RUSSELL. BOSTON, May 8, 1882. BOSTON, August 13, 1872. DEAR MR. EMERSON: It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of rebuilding it. A few of them have united for this object, and now request your acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar. They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of your home. And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work, they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you. Very sincerely yours, LE BARON RUSSELL. CONCORD, August 14, 1872. DR. LE B. RUSSELL: _Dear Sir_,--I received your letters, with the check for ten thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson's credit in the Concord National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood. When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say,--that the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars, personally. I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend, Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book. I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily for what you have done about it. Very truly yours, E.R. HOAR. CONCORD, August 16, 1872. MY DEAR LE BARON: I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating, soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins, so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at night and at morning. Your affectionate friend and debtor, R.W. EMERSON. DR. LE BARON RUSSELL CONCORD, October 8, 1872. MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON: I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars. Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say, but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my old days abroad on a young man's excursion. I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best agree. Well, 'tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a better lesson. Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go to each one of them directly. My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them and you. Yours and theirs affectionately, R.W. EMERSON. DR. LE BARON KUSSELL. The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson's house:-- Mrs. Anne S. Hooper. Miss Alice S. Hooper. Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Miss Ellen S. Tappan. Miss Mary A. Tappan. Mr. T.G. Appleton. Mrs. Henry Edwards. Miss Susan E. Dorr. Misses Wigglesworth. Mr. Edward Wigglesworth. Mr. J. Elliot Cabot. Mrs. Sarah S. Russell. Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams. Mr. William Whiting. Mr. Frederick Beck. Mr. H.P. Kidder. Mrs. Abel Adams. Mrs. George Faulkner. Hon. E.R. Hoar. Mr. James B. Thayer. Mr. John M. Forbes. Mr. James H. Beal. Mrs. Anna C. Lodge. Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge. Mr. H.H. Hunnewell. Mrs. S. Cabot. Mr. James A. Dupee. Mrs. Anna C. Lowell. Mrs. M.F. Sayles. Miss Helen L. Appleton. J.R. Osgood & Co. Mr. Richard Soule. Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw. Dr. R.W. Hooper. Mr. William P. Mason. Mr. William Gray. Mr. Sam'l G. Ward. Mr. J.I. Bowditch. Mr. Geo. C. Ward. Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs. Mr. John E. Williams. Dr. Le Baron Russell. In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival. Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and admiring friends and neighbors. CHAPTER XII. 1873-1878. AET. 70-75. Publication of "Parnassus."--Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.--Publication of "Letters and Social Aims." Contents: Poetry and Imagination.--Social Aims.--Eloquence.--Resources.--The Comic.--Quotation and Originality.--Progress of Culture.--Persian Poetry.--Inspiration.-- Greatness.--Immortality.--Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of "The Minute-Man" at Concord.--Publication of Collected Poems. In December, 1874, Emerson published "Parnassus," a Collection of Poems by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together. They are as follows: "Nature."--"Human Life."--"Intellectual." --"Contemplation."--"Moral and Religious."--"Heroic."--"Personal." --"Pictures."--"Narrative Poems and Ballads."--"Songs."--"Dirges and Pathetic Poems."--"Comic and Humorous."--"Poetry of Terror."--"Oracles and Counsels." I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis Cooke's "Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy," that I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his excellent work. "This collection," he says, "was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections. With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls.--His poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and some whose merit is other than poetical.--This selection of poems is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of the poems and poets appearing in these selections." I will only add to Mr. Cooke's criticism these two remarks: First, that I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies at least, there was no paged index where each author's pieces were collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss of time and patience, under various heads, "imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris." The other remark is that each one of Emerson's American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen fit to indulge us. In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling:-- "I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my too partial advocate." Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to "Letters and Social Aims," that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what even he would have tolerated:-- "There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter." This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is that entitled "Poetry and Imagination." I have room for little more than the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are "Introductory;" "Poetry;" "Imagination;" "Veracity;" "Creation;" "Melody, Rhythm, Form;" "Bards and Trouveurs;" "Morals;" "Transcendency." Many thoughts with which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find repeated in his verse. Thus:-- "Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man!" And so in the well remembered lines of "The Problem":-- "Himself from God he could not free." "He knows that he did not make his thought,--no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars." "Art might obey but not surpass. The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned." Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson's as it was at the bottom of Pandora's box:-- "I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion of our own. --"Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song." Under the title "Social Aims" he gives some wise counsel concerning manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a specimen--if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear:-- "Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness; even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it." We have had one Essay on "Eloquence" already. One extract from this new discourse on the same subject must serve our turn:-- "These are ascending stairs,--a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement,--know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is _the power to_ _translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak_." The italics are Emerson's. If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson's Essay on "Resources":-- "A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,--teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things,--I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes." The Essay or Lecture on "The Comic" may have formed a part of a series he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings in it will show his view sufficiently:-- "The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. "If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character.--A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him." These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very recent date. "Quotation and Originality" furnishes the key to Emerson's workshop. He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription. "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.--We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.-- "The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."-- --"The Progress of Culture," his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has already been mentioned. --The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating, is repeated and enforced in the Essay on "Greatness." "There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears.--Stick to your own; don't inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in. "Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind.--We call this specialty the _bias_ of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone." If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is concentration.--To the bias of the individual mind must be added the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. "Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him."-- "The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws,--who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye;--he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall he found." What has Emerson to tell us of "Inspiration?" "I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury.-- "How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these." I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to reproduce his comments on each:-- 1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader. "Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood." What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on "Immortality"? It is to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed in this discourse,--what does it mean? We must tack together such sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer:-- "I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so." This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues:-- "Schiller said, 'What is so universal as death must be benefit.'" He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last plainly:-- "Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma." But turn over a few pages and we may read:-- "I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not to be good. 'If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,' said one of the old saints, 'and these by any man's suffering are enlarged and enthroned.'" Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson's creed, if such a word applies to a statement like the following:-- --"I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth's 'Ode' is the best modern essay on the subject." Wordsworth's "Ode" is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more? The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of reason. On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the "Fight at the Bridge," Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the statue of "The Minute-Man," erected at the place of the conflict, to commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies before me I extract a single passage:-- "In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England, but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent, America was instantly united, and the Nation born." There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary labors. Emerson's collected "Poems" constitute the ninth volume of the recent collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following chapter. CHAPTER XIII. 1878-1882. AET. 75-79. Last Literary Labors.--Addresses and Essays.--"Lectures and Biographical Sketches."--"Miscellanies." The decline of Emerson's working faculties went on gently and gradually, but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter, Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind faltered and needed a momentary impulse. With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,--"Fortune of the Republic." On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity College, Harvard University,--"The Preacher." In 1881 he read a paper on Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society.--He also published a paper in the "North American Review," in 1878,--"The Sovereignty of Ethics," and one on "Superlatives," in "The Century" for February, 1882. But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson's friend and literary executor, Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single period of his literary life. Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson's collected works, which bears the title, "Lectures and Biographical Sketches," the following:-- "NOTE. "Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from 'The Dial,' 'Character,' 'Plutarch,' and the biographical sketches of Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr. Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to 'Letters and Social Aims,'--some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new. Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others, namely, 'Aristocracy,' 'Education,' 'The Man of Letters,' 'The Scholar,' 'Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,' 'Mary Moody Emerson,' are now published for the first time." Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From several of the others I will make one or two extracts,--a difficult task, so closely are the thoughts packed together. From "Demonology":-- "I say to the table-rappers 'I will believe Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,' And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!" "Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful powers which transcend the ken of the understanding." I will not quote anything from the Essay called "Aristocracy." But let him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation. "Perpetual Forces" is one of those prose poems,--of his earlier epoch, I have no doubt,--in which he plays with the facts of science with singular grace and freedom. What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of "Character," than Emerson? When he says, "If all things are taken away, I have still all things in my relation to the Eternal," we feel that such an utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in which it was imprisoned. We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far above the teaching drill-master's desk is the chair from which he speaks to us of "Education." Compare the short and easy method of the wise man of old,--"He that spareth his rod hateth his son," with this other, "Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue,--but no kinsman of his sin." "The Superlative" will prove light and pleasant reading after these graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan]--_ne quid nimis_,--nothing in excess, was his precept as to adjectives. Two sentences from "The Sovereignty of Ethics" will go far towards reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster Assembly's Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual dynamite:-- "Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism.-- "If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more truly, have not yet their own legitimate force." So, too, this from "The Preacher":-- "All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and its use.--The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the substantial benefit endures." The special interest of the Address called "The Man of Letters" is, that it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where great principles were at the bottom of the conflict:-- "War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at once.--War ennobles the age.--Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie." "The Scholar" was delivered before two Societies at the University of Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to show his sense of their importance:-- "For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the invisible world are the interrogators: _Who are you? What do you? Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness? Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul_? "Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life! Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all who know them." The Essay on "Plutarch" has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. _Mutato nomine_, the portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his own:-- "Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science--natural, moral, or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to his pen with more or less fulness of record. "A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his. "Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure.-- "I do not know where to find a book--to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's--'so rammed with life,' and this in chapters chiefly ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental.--His vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an incident.-- "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.--'Tis all Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this emperor. "It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity for completing his studies. "He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like another Berkeley, 'Matter is itself privation.'-- "Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant. "His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a physicist. "But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. La Harpe said that 'Plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever existed.' "Plutarch thought 'truth to be the greatest good that man can receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.' "All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is more delightful to do than to receive a kindness. "Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned--eminently social, he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and knew the high value of good conversation.-- "He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by the force of morals." How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson! I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the "Plutarch." Some of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England;" "The Chardon Street Convention;" "Ezra Ripley, D.D.;" "Mary Moody Emerson;" "Samuel Hoar;" "Thoreau;" "Carlyle."-- Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson's writings with the following "Note":-- "The first five pieces in this volume, and the 'Editorial Address' from the 'Massachusetts Quarterly Review,' were published by Mr. Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott, and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation on his part. The 'Fortune of the Republic' appeared separately in 1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the Republic,' which was made up of several lectures for the occasion upon which it was read." The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The five referred to as having been previously published are, "The Lord's Supper," the "Historical Discourse in Concord," the "Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers' Monument in Concord," the "Address on Emancipation in the British West Indies," and the Lecture or Essay on "War,"--all of which have been already spoken of. Next in order comes a Lecture on the "Fugitive Slave Law." Emerson says, "I do not often speak on public questions.--My own habitual view is to the well-being of scholars." But he leaves his studies to attack the institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered any inconvenience, and the "Law," which the abolitionists would always call the "Fugitive Slave _Bill_." Emerson had a great admiration for Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture. He warns against false leadership:-- "To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others.--He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world,--to be himself the counter-balance of all falsehood and all wrong.--The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish.--England maintains trade, not liberty." Cowper had said long before this:-- "doing good, Disinterested good, is not our trade." And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of "a great empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth." It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:-- "The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom." These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on "The Assault upon Mr. Sumner." A few months later, in his "Speech on the Affairs of Kansas," delivered almost five years before the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and commanding words:-- "The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough. A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new, it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war. "Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic, I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land where freedom exists." Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after his execution:-- "Our blind statesmen," he says, "go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it." From his "Discourse on Theodore Parker" I take the following vigorous sentence:-- "His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits,--I cannot think of one rival,--that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants,--it is hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are." The Lecture on "American Civilization," made up from two Addresses, one of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is, as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the "Emancipation Proclamation," delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of "silent joy" at the advent of "a day which most of us dared not hope to see,--an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties." From the "Remarks" at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn character of the man:-- "He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue." The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume: "Harvard Commemoration Speech;" "Editor's Address: Massachusetts Quarterly Review;" "Woman;" "Address to Kossuth;" "Robert Burns;" "Walter Scott;" "Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association;" "Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association;" "The Fortune of the Republic." In treating of the "Woman Question," Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. "The new movement," he says, "is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman's heart is prompted to desire, the man's mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish." It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson's writing without finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from "The Fortune of the Republic," the last address he ever delivered, in which his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found fitting utterance:-- "Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for,--exalted manhood. What this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man corn. "They who find America insipid,--they for whom London and Paris have spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for more than there is in the world. "Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to their good." With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust in his country's God, we may take leave of Emerson's prose writings. CHAPTER XIV. EMERSON'S POEMS. The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume of the series of Emerson's collected works:-- "This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many. Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval, but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the Essays. "In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of time. "As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller strength than at the time of the last revision. "A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature." Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear. Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet. It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers and jewels of his vocabulary. Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"-- "The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away." Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference between prose and poetry:-- "DAYS. "Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I too late Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." --Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleachéd,_ an heir-loom from Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_. As a further illustration of what has just been said of the self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to in prose, except incidentally, in private letters. Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration. Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not? "The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to them, of all men, the severest criticism is due." These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus." His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric," and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some of the best of Milton's own. In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat at eighty degrees of Réaumur is a very different matter. The rank of poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation. And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of poet. It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so often quoted as "To point a moral or adorn a tale." We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing to Carlyle:-- "I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters, suburban men." But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:-- "He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me _is a poet_.'" These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and different periods. Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic confessional:-- "A dull uncertain brain, But gifted yet to know That God has cherubim who go Singing an immortal strain, Immortal here below. I know the mighty bards, I listen while they sing, And now I know The secret store Which these explore When they with torch of genius pierce The tenfold clouds that cover The riches of the universe From God's adoring lover. And if to me it is not given To fetch one ingot thence Of that unfading gold of Heaven His merchants may dispense, Yet well I know the royal mine And know the sparkle of its ore, Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,-- Explored, they teach us to explore." These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the "Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day, and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series. These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet." Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:-- "Thy trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear. No jingling serenader's art Nor tinkling of piano-strings Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs; The kingly bard Must smite the chords rudely and hard, As with hammer or with mace; That they may render back Artful thunder, which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of the supersolar blaze. * * * * * Great is the art, Great be the manners of the bard. He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number; But leaving rule and pale forethought He shall aye climb For his rhyme. 'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say, 'In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.'" And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:-- "A Brother of the world, his song Sounded like a tempest strong Which tore from oaks their branches broad, And stars from the ecliptic road. Time wore he as his clothing-weeds, He sowed the sun and moon for seeds. As melts the iceberg in the seas, As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze, As snow-banks thaw in April's beam, The solid kingdoms like a dream Resist in vain his motive strain, They totter now and float amain. For the Muse gave special charge His learning should be deep and large, And his training should not scant The deepest lore of wealth or want: His flesh should feel, his eyes should read Every maxim of dreadful Need; In its fulness he should taste Life's honeycomb, but not too fast; Full fed, but not intoxicated; He should be loved; he should be hated; A blooming child to children dear, His heart should palpitate with fear." We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe. Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"-- "And this at least I dare affirm, Since genius too has bound and term, There is no bard in all the choir, Not Homer's self, the poet-sire, Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure, Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure, Nor Collins' verse of tender pain, Nor Byron's clarion of disdain, Scott, the delight of generous boys, Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,-- Not one of all can put in verse, Or to this presence could rehearse The sights and voices ravishing The boy knew on the hills in spring."-- In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already mentioned. Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of description are not odious. The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular. The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes "Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked. This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet, never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object, as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science. Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest heavens: like Milton,-- "He passed the flaming bounds of place and time; The living throne, the sapphire blaze Where angels tremble while they gaze, HE SAW"-- Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson. Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:-- "Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake." He called upon the poet to "Tell men what they knew before; Paint the prospect from their door." And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or into a milking-pail. This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted moods he would have us "Give to barrows, trays and pans Grace and glimmer of romance." But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:-- "What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet." The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists" have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as he might see fit. French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that "In the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings." Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments, and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not for a mere sensational effect. What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and "Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the same he owned after the last of them:-- "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint," and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song." Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with "Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make rhyme without actual verbicide:-- "Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are! And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this? "In Adirondac lakes At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed." It was surely not difficult to say-- "At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide." And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over. There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often, indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line. It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies," knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse. But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's? "Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship Of minds that each can stand against the world By its own meek and incorruptible will?" These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood. As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand. If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking _lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model betrays itself:-- "These syllables that Nature spoke, And the thoughts that in him woke Can adequately utter none Save to his ear the wind-harp lone. Therein I hear the Parcae reel The threads of man at their humming wheel, The threads of life and power and pain, So sweet and mournful falls the strain. And best can teach its Delphian chord How Nature to the soul is moored, If once again that silent string, As erst it wont, would thrill and ring." There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension, not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it, but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come by and by to the verse:-- "Have I a lover Who is noble and free?-- I would he were nobler Than to love me." The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_. The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or "Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes." In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the poem called "Destiny":-- "Alas! that one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest. Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is sodden;' And another is born To make the sun forgotten." Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one conspicuous line, "And fired the shot heard round the world," must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn, musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom and her martyrs. These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,-- "I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth," "Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct, and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the "Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and larger pattern. Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his "Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of. We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another century or two of acclimation. Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties. He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought. Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by "The light that never was on sea or land," we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon. Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says, "he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature, imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself." Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without search:-- "Daily the bending skies solicit man, The seasons chariot him from this exile, The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels, The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along, Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the _sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more justly. It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others may be mentioned. In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged to him. "Good-by, proud world," recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade," may well have suggested Emerson's "The green silence dost displace With thy mellow, breezy bass." "The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by comparison with either. "Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:-- "All constellations of the sky Shed their virtue through his eye. Him Nature giveth for defence His formidable innocence." Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were original. So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many moods, but with one pervading spirit:-- "Melting matter into dreams, Panoramas which I saw, And whatever glows or seems Into substance, into Law." We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:-- "The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to complete in your turn." Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them as they flow by us. Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore" are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these pieces been cut?" We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's, and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we trust to meddle with them? His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden brilliancy. After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons, we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its articulating representatives should call us by name. All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon, and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the man." The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought; that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own, with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues, shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi. CHAPTER XV. Recollections of Emerson's Last Years.--Mr. Conway's Visits.--Extracts from Mr. Whitman's Journal.--Dr. Le Baron Russell's Visit.--Dr. Edward Emerson's Account.--Illness and Death.--Funeral Services. Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious:-- "In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time, it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall 'chair' he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and 'the implement that cultivates the soil' must do for plough.-- "In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He was still able to joke about his 'naughty memory;' and no complaint came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long. Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at his side, is quite indescribable."-- One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr. Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the following:-- "On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one, remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the same." Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and records:-- "As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a smile." Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period:-- "One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs. Emerson's request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs. Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she called our attention to especially; its 'hue' was so truly 'angry and brave' that I involuntarily repeated Herbert's line,-- 'Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,'-- from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago. Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, 'I take off my hat to it.'" Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier chapter. I do not remember Emerson's last time of attendance at the "Saturday Club," but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words had become well marked. "My memory hides itself," he said. The last time I saw him, living, was at Longfellow's funeral. I was sitting opposite to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to a friend near him, "That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name." Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request, with information regarding his father's last years which will interest every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to the hour of evening shadows. "May-Day," which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem "Boston," which had remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. "Greatness," and the "Phi Beta Kappa Oration" of 1867, were among his last pieces of work. His College Lectures, "The Natural History of the Intellect," were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from them for the "Little Classic" edition of his works, then called "Selected Poems." In that year he gave his "Address to the Students of the University of Virginia." This was a paper written long before, and its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with much difficulty. The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the Virginia students. Emerson left off going regularly to the "Saturday Club" probably in 1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot began to come regularly to work on "Letters and Social Aims," Emerson, who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings. The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled, and that "M's" and "N's" troubled him to read. He recognized the members of his own family and his _old_ friends; but, as I infer from this statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new acquaintances, as is common with old persons. He continued the habit of reading,--read through all his printed works with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found written "Examined 1877 or 1878," but he found no later date. In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a child. He liked to look over the "Advertiser," and was interested in the "Nation." He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to guests. All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr. Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to the very verge of its earthly existence. But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of the worn-out bodily frame. In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him, he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle "the good man,--my friend." His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882. Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for the most part, taken the following extracts:-- "The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped, and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman. "The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled with friends and neighbors. "At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath. "Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back, and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, 'Pleyel's Hymn' was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his voice many times trembling with emotion." I subjoin this most impressive "Address" entire, from the manuscript with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me:-- "The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his grave,--to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our parting tribute of memory and love. "There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the opening heavens. "Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was _ours_. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride. "'He is gone--is dust,-- He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished! For him there is no longer any future. His life is bright--bright without spot it was And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap. Far off is he, above desire and fear; No more submitted to the change and chance Of the uncertain planets.-- "'The bloom is vanished from my life, For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth; Transformed for me the real to a dream, Clothing the palpable and the familiar With golden exhalations of the dawn. Whatever fortunes wait my future toils, The _beautiful_ is vanished and returns not.' "That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high aspirations,--those lips of eloquent music,--that great soul, which trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality,--that large heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome,--that hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness,--oh, friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and farewell!" Judge Hoar's remarks were followed by the congregation singing the hymns, "Thy will be done," "I will not fear the fate provided by Thy love." The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures. The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an "Address," from which I extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their subject,--for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion. "The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that 'in the midst of life we are in death.' But it is still more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? 'He is not here: he is risen.' That power which we knew,--that soaring intelligence, that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit,--_that_ cannot have been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell, or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose, insight,--this agent of immense resource and boundless power,--this has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one as he, we can only think of life, never of death. "Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on 'Immortality.' But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the higher evidence of universal instincts,--the vast streams of belief which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun." * * * * * "Let us then ponder his words:-- 'Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know What rainbows teach and sunsets show? Voice of earth to earth returned, Prayers of saints that inly burned, Saying, _What is excellent As God lives, is permanent; Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Hearts' love will meet thee again._ * * * * House and tenant go to ground Lost in God, in Godhead found.'" After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M. Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion:--- "His harp is silent: shall successors rise, Touching with venturous hand the trembling string, Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise, And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing? Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes, As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise, World-wide his native melodies did sing, Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories? Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie: None hath the vanished minstrel's wondrous skill To touch that instrument with art and will. With him, winged poesy doth droop and die; While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament The bard high heaven had for its service sent." "Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final resting-place. "The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the Lord's Prayer, ending at the words, 'and deliver us from evil.' In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open grave and threw flowers into it." So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory. CHAPTER XVI. EMERSON.--A RETROSPECT. Personality and Habits of Life.--His Commission and Errand.--As a Lecturer.--His Use of Authorities.--Resemblance to Other Writers.--As influenced by Others.--His Place as a Thinker.--Idealism and Intuition.--Mysticism.--His Attitude respecting Science.--As an American.--His Fondness for Solitary Study.--His Patience and Amiability.--Feeling with which he was regarded.--Emerson and Burns.--His Religious Belief.--His Relations with Clergymen.--Future of his Reputation.--His Life judged by the Ideal Standard. Emerson's earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to let them all "soar and sing" as he left his earthly half-way house. It is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals, ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly "Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life was trivial and commonplace." The reader has had many extracts from Emerson's writings laid before him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life to their last syllable that we might letter every volume _Emersoniana_, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson's writings it may be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading. He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate. Emerson's personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller, Professor Thayer, "How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?" "A hundred and forty and a half," was the answer. "Yes, yes, a hundred and forty and a half! That _half_ I prize; it is an index of better things!" Emerson's head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the _cephalometer_ used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most heads. His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like "Ammon's great son," he carried one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide, well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement, centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my quoting, he says of Emerson:-- "There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts." From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record. His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick. His eyes were of the "strongest and brightest blue." The member of the family who tells me this says:-- "My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them." He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College, and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when his turn came, said to him, "Chord!" "What?" said Emerson. "Chord! Chord! I tell you," repeated the master. "I don't know what you mean," said Emerson. "Why, sing! Sing a note." "So I made some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, 'That will do, sir. You need not come again.'" Emerson's mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always _pie_ at breakfast. "It stood before him and was the first thing eaten." Ten o'clock was his bed-time, six his hour of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven. Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could do night after night. He never was hungry,--could go any time from breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for food when it was set before him. He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the better. It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency. He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes:-- "I bear in youth the sad infirmities That use to undo the limb and sense of age." Four years later:-- "Has God on thee conferred A bodily presence mean as Paul's, Yet made thee bearer of a word Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?" and again, in the same year:-- "Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base, Trembling for the body's sake."-- Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing in "Terminus" his inherited weakness of organization. And in writing to Carlyle, he says:-- "You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution." Again, "I am the victim of miscellany--miscellany of designs, vast debility and procrastination." He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough to make him a rapid and enduring walker. Emerson's voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him. He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the "ground swell," as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much. Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity, and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail, --which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work with a spade, cried out, "Take care, papa,--you will dig your leg." He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the words. There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen. Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy, over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos eseito]--Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here,--would have been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with impunity. In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham, Emerson is reported as saying, "God has given me the seeing eye, but not the working hand." His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (_odoratio quaedam venatica_),--a good scent for truth and beauty,--it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in the affairs of common life. He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships. We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still. What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree. Of Emerson's affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has already been written. Margaret Fuller,--I must call my early schoolmate as I best remember her,--leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of five artists,--Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell. How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That "majesty" Mr. Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better sphere of being. Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures, was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington. * * * * * What was the errand on which he visited our earth,--the message with which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life? Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound. Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country, perhaps by too long contact with the "Sons of Liberty," and their revolutionary notions. But the most "liberal" Boston pulpit still held to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any independent thinker. In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, "began," as was said of another,--"to be about thirty years of age." He had opened his sealed orders and had read therein: Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe. Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice of God in thine own soul. Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy fellow-servants. Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold interests of life and the typical characters of history. Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence. This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere. Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see God. Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning's sun. To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World, that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded. Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent, hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities. * * * * * He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles, privations, opposition, he would not "bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward." All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was done, not so much "As ever in his great Taskmaster's eye," as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship. He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces,--the promptings of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions. Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them, in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he "Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer." Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn, who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners. "His was the task and his the lordly gift Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift." This was his power,--to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier, calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine. "Nature," published in 1836, "the first clear manifestation of his genius," as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities. --"I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession." So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841. It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a play-actor. The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were, accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience would tire before the allotted time was over. Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists. They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an elevated sentiment. It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he was under the "base necessity," as he called it, of constant labor, writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and dangerous winter season. He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed plain people whose classics were the Bible and the "Farmer's Almanac." Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow. When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a lay sermon,--_concio ad populum_. We must always remember what we are dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,--no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together."--"Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," he says, "and there it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius." In England, he says, "I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors." But he did not tend to overvalue the calling which from "base necessity" he followed so diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again, "I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received." Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments. But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations enough. I remember Emerson's coming to my house to know if I could fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely, saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that season. No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly, without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full measure to his audience with perfect fairness. [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,] or, in Bryant's version, "as the scales Are held by some just woman, who maintains By spinning wool her household,--carefully She poises both the wool and weights, to make The balance even, that she may provide A pittance for her babes."-- As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on his younger listeners he says, "To some of us that long past experience remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of 'Chevy Chase,' and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of victory." There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in Emerson's voice that was infinitely soothing. So might "Peace, be still," have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror, I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson's, where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for a careworn soul. An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading. No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks very plainly of his limitations as a scholar. "As he confesses in the Essay on 'Books,' his learning is second hand; but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive glimpses, and he is content." One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has "contrived to read" almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well be ignorant of his friend's great idol, and his references to Goethe are very frequent. Emerson's quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because another writer's way of thinking falls in with his own,--never with a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse in his references to those from whom he borrowed,--more profuse than many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all, and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one thousand and sixty-five references. Authorities. Number of times mentioned. Shakespeare.....112 Napoleon.........84 Plato............81 Plutarch.........70 Goethe...........62 Swift............49 Bacon............47 Milton...........46 Newton...........43 Homer............42 Socrates.........42 Swedenborg.......40 Montaigne........30 Saadi............30 Luther...........30 Webster..........27 Aristotle........25 Hafiz............25 Wordsworth.......25 Burke............24 Saint Paul.......24 Dante............22 Shattuck (Hist. of Concord).......21 Chaucer..........20 Coleridge........20 Michael Angelo...20 The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times. It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all show the same fondness for Plutarch. Montaigne says, "I never settled myself to the reading of any book of solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca." Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father's library, "There was among them Plutarch's Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage." Emerson says, "I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers." Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well, has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of "English Traits" can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes. _Noscitur a sociis_ is as applicable to the books a man most affects as well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve. "All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote." What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself. "In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all." Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. "I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house." His journal is "full of disjointed dreams and audacities." Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of his "lapidary style" and say "I build my house of boulders." "It is to be remembered," says Mr. Ruskin, "that all men who have sense and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it." The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson's words and thoughts and those of others. Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. "Scorn trifles" comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph Waldo.--"What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar." So writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Lecture "New England Reformers."--"Hiding the badges of royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags." Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the "Harvard Register" nearly twenty years before. "The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats." The image comes from Pythagoras _via_ Plutarch. Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a sentence which recalls Carlyle. "The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling. The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule." Compare this passage from "English Traits" with the following one from Carlyle's "French Revolution":-- "So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch all men:--till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire, the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day! For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass; most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing will put out." "O what are heroes, prophets, men But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow A momentary music." The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a letter of Leibnitz. "He builded better than he knew" is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister's sermon; and a Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the "Address without a Phoenix" among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any trace of this idea elsewhere? In a little poem of Coleridge's, "William Tell," are these two lines: "On wind and wave the boy would toss Was great, nor knew how great he was." The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle called "Characteristics." It reappears in Emerson's poem "Fate." "Unknown to Cromwell as to me Was Cromwell's measure and degree; Unknown to him as to his horse, If he than his groom is better or worse." It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such resemblances. If we find Emerson's wonderful picture, "Initial Love" prefigured in the "Symposium" of Plato, we have only to look in the "Phaedrus" and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare's famous group,-- "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet." Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished copies, _éditions de luxe_ of sayings that all the world knows are old, but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again. The more improved versions of the world's great thoughts we have, the better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson's discourse has a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries. It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple's time at Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular article. Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him. Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau. Carlyle's harsh virility could not be without its effect on his valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott's psychological and physiological speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest stone in the darkest night,--or come nearer to seeing it than those of most mortals. Emerson's long intimacy with him taught him to give an outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well said: "Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.'" * * * * * Emerson's place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost, if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not always a writer's fault that he is not understood. Many persons have poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found under the title "Diogenes," in the work of his namesake, Diogenes Laertius. I translate from the Latin version. "Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of _mensality_ and _cyathity_ [_tableity_, and _gobletity_]. 'I can see a table and a goblet,' said the cynic, 'but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.' 'Quite so,' answered Plato, 'because you have the eyes to see a goblet and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and gobletity.'" This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation. Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, "as the wise Spenser teaches," that the soul makes its own body. This, of course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India, fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux, Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge. That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its retina,--why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such questions very simply by saying it is so. The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble Ode as working truths. "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant:-- "Mighty prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find."-- These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of whom he speaks in the lines,-- "A simple child-- That lightly draws its breath And feels its life in every limb,-- What should it know of death?" What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts. He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts, which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths,--not the truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory. It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new doctrine,--new to his young disciples,--of planting themselves on their instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance,--trusting to intuition,--without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as one word in their evolution of an original language, but _bekkos_ was a very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. "The Dial" was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness, incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation. The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence. It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or institutions. All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of emancipation. For the Fay _ce que voudras_ of the revellers of Medmenham Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense _ce que voudras_. There was an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally of the Bedlam sort. Emerson's disciples were never accused of falling into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates. Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over the world. * * * * * Too much has been made of Emerson's mysticism. He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe. I found in his library William Law's edition of Jacob Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader may have grown dizzy,--just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic asylums,--evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws. "Brahma," the poem which so mystified the readers of the "Atlantic Monthly," was one of his spiritual divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself. If "Rejected Addresses" had not been written half a century before Emerson's poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant to ridicule and parody it. "The song of Braham is an Irish howl; Thinking is but an idle waste of thought, And nought is everything and everything is nought." Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended. Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the "Yoga" doctrine of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The oriental side of Emerson's nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ever constructed. Some passages of "Nature," "The Over-Soul," "The Sphinx," "Uriel," illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson's calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes refers to,--that of ecstasy. The passage in "Nature" where he says "I become a transparent eyeball" is about as near it as he ever came. This was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels. Emerson's reflections in the "transcendental" mood do beyond question sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have a peculiar and mysterious beauty. "Uriel" is a poem which finds itself perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment, it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest imaginative conceptions. Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return. Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects in nature,--he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the landscape. Here is a curious extract from "The Adirondacs," in which the reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron's-- "The sky is changed,--and such a change! O night And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong."-- Now Emerson:-- "And presently the sky is changed; O world! What pictures and what harmonies are thine! The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene, _So like the soul of me, what if't were me_?" We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem printed among the "Translations" in the Appendix to Emerson's Poems. These are the last two lines of "The Flute, from Hilali":-- "Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains, If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?" The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": "Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical metempsychosis. The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not the wig. "It's no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it's no my wig," and he would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: "Ye'd better tak' it, sir, for there's nae waile [choice] o' wigs on Munrimmon Moor." And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman, whose _Ego_ was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of her four-footed companion:-- "If it be I, he'll wag his little tail; And if it be not I, he'll loudly bark and wail." I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about "a foresmell of the Infinite" which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who am innocent of all connection with it. The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes. * * * * * Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember that his brother Charles had something to say in the "Harvard Register" (1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of Emerson's which follow it. "Physician art thou, one all eyes; Philosopher, a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave?" Emerson's lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new edition of his works. "Philosophers are lined with eyes within, And, being so, the sage unmakes the man. In love he cannot therefore cease his trade; Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek, He feels it, introverts his learned eye To catch the unconscious heart in the very act. His mother died,--the only friend he had,-- Some tears escaped, but his philosophy Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind And throttled all his passion. Is't not like That devil-spider that devours her mate Scarce freed from her embraces?" The same feeling comes out in the Poem "Blight," where he says the "young scholars who invade our hills" "Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names;" and in "The Walk," where the "learned men" with their glasses are contrasted with the sons of Nature,--the poets are no doubt meant,--much to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson's mind was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is quantitative,--loves the foot-rule and the balance,--methodical, exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious, asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders, for instance,-- "Why Nature loves the number five," but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz, who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says:-- "Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet's curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection they awake."-- This was Emerson's own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of nature. Emerson's style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects. His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and _vice versa_, with a bound that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing _audacities_:-- "There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup."-- "He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic."-- "If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature."-- "Tapping the tempest for a little side wind."-- "The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast in one web."-- He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes the expression "mother-wit," which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word "husband" in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word "haughty" is so fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But his special, constitutional, word is "fine," meaning something like dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,--"my dainty Ariel,"--"fine Ariel." It belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of Emerson's. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word "haughty;" his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word "fine," with a certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the word "melioration." We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The "point and surprise" which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects, ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he "peddles out all the wit he can gather from Time or from Nature," and we find that "he has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun," and is carrying about the morning light as merchandise. * * * * * Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets familiar to all of us,--"This great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America." This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his Essay, "Works and Days," he is quite as outspoken: "This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America." "I see plainly," he says, "that our society is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours." "The war," he says, "gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation." All his life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization. All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them. To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. "Here," he said, in words I have already borrowed, "is the home of man--here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded." Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent; he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of Franklin's bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of Emerson's:-- "A blessing through the ages thus Shield all thy roofs and towers, GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US, Thou darling town of ours!" Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop, and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those "devastators of the day" who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration. * * * * * The natural purity and elevation of Emerson's character show themselves in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about Boileau,-- "Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas,--cela porte malheur." (Don't let us abuse Nicolas,--it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him, and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy, sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The _dour_ Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven's gate, until he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and find his perch on "the big ha' bible," if he would,--and as he did. So did the music of Emerson's words and life steal into the hearts of our stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep and anxious and devout religious scepticism. It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the more he found himself perplexed. The name most frequently applied to Emerson's form of belief is Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief in the omnipresence of the Deity? Theodore Parker explained Emerson's position, as he understood it, in an article in the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review." I borrow this quotation from Mr. Cooke:-- "He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it. He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates at Andover or Cambridge." We read in his Essay, "Self-Reliance ": "This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms." The "ever-blessed ONE" of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the doctrine of the Trinity. The "Over-Soul" of Emerson is that aspect of Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as he was willing to be called a Platonist. Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?" But on certain great points nothing could be clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character, brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any denial of the self-governing power of the will. His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through all nature he looked up to nature's God; and if he did not worship the "man Christ Jesus" as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of him as more like Christ than any man he had known. Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before. Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago. These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long as their perfume,--the odor of sanctity,--is diffused from the carefully treasured receptacles,--perhaps even longer than that. Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of Emerson's religious teachings I will select two as typical. Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with the following sentence:-- "Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole, tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest of human life: 'HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.'" "But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report," says Mr. Conway "('Macmillan,' June, 1879), that religion had there passed through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that 'the genial atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all the churches equally.'" What is this "genial atmosphere" but the very spirit of Christianity? The good Baptist minister's Essay is full of it. He comes asking what has become of Emerson's "wasted power" and lamenting his lack of "fruitage," and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him. The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals. It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote:-- "Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from the dead, to swell their number." The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson's writings and life is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke's elaborate work is remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson's teachings. Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway's "Emerson at Home and Abroad" is a lively picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr. Alexander Ireland's "Biographical Sketch" brings together, from a great variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of Emerson's history and the comments of those whose opinions were best worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject. From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and appreciative criticisms of Emerson's Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the portrait of the New England "Plotinus-Montaigne" in his brilliant "Fable for Critics," to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson's writings have furnished one of the most enduring _pièces de résistance_ at the critical tables of the old and the new world. He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services; Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him "a noble man." Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson's fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that "a prophet is not without honor save in his own country," will find an exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the glowing tributes of three of Concord's poets,--Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing, and Mr. Sanborn,--and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored, beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his own fireside. It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like "the adamant of Shakespeare," and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison or Gray's Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. _Corpora non agunt nisi soluta_, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as material substances before they can act. "That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die," or rather lose the form with which it was sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of "The Burial of Sir John Moore" an immortal, and endowed the language with a classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr. Cranch:-- "The wise will know thee and the good will love, The age to come will feel thy impress given In all that lifts the race a step above Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven." It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson's best literary work in prose and verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends, indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization. * * * * * It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation of the Divinity. Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity. He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen Mary's martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise. No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks, carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness. There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself. His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we can well believe that one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet" would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson. INDEX. [For many references, not found elsewhere, see under the general headings of _Emerson's Books, Essays, Poems_.] Abbott, Josiah Gardiner, a pupil of Emerson, 49, 50. Academic Races, 2, 3. (See _Heredity_.) Action, subordinate, 112. Adams, John, old age, 261. Adams, Samuel, Harvard debate, 115. Addison, Joseph, classic, 416. Advertiser, The, Emerson's interest in, 348. Aeolian Harp, his model, 329, 340. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Harp.) Aeschylus, tragedies, 253. (See _Greek_.) Agassiz, Louis: Saturday Club, 222; companionship, 403. Agriculture: in Anthology, 30; attacked, 190; not Emerson's field, 255, 256, 365. Akenside, Mark, allusion, 16. Alchemy, adepts, 260, 261. Alcott, A. Bronson: hearing Emerson, 66; speculations, 86; an idealist, 150; The Dial, 159; sonnet, 355; quoted, 373; personality traceable, 389. Alcott, Louisa M., funeral bouquet, 351. Alexander the Great: allusion, 184; mountain likeness, 322. Alfred the Great, 220, 306. Allston, Washington, unfinished picture, 334. (See _Pictures_.) Ambition, treated in Anthology, 30. America: room for a poet, 136, 137; virtues and defects, 143; faith in, 179; people compared with English, 216; things awry, 260; _aristocracy_, 296; in the Civil War, 304; Revolution, 305; Lincoln, the true history of his time, 307; passion for, 308, 309; artificial rhythm, 329; its own literary style, 342; home of man, 371; loyalty to, 406; epithets, 406, 407. (See _England, New England_, etc.) Amici, meeting Emerson, 63. (See _Italy_.) Amusements, in New England, 30. Anaemia, artistic, 334. Ancestry: in general, 1-3; Emerson's, 3 _et seq._ (See _Heredity_.) Andover, Mass.: Theological School, 48; graduates, 411. Andrew, John Albion: War Governor, 223; hearing Emerson, 379. (See _South_.) Angelo. (See _Michael Angelo_.) Antinomianism: in The Dial, 162; kept from, 177. (See _God, Religion_, etc.) Anti-Slavery: in Emerson's pulpit, 57; the reform, 141, 145, 152; Emancipation address, 181; Boston and New York addresses, 210-212; Emancipation Proclamation, 228; Fugitive Slave Law, and other matters, 303-307. (See _South_.) Antoninus, Marcus, allusion, 16. Architecture, illustrations, 253. Arianism, 51. (See _Unitarianism_.) Aristotle: influence over Mary Emerson, 17; times mentioned, 382. Arminianism, 51. (See _Methodism, Religion_, etc.) Arnim, Gisela von, 225. Arnold, Matthew: quotation about America, 137: lecture, 236; on Milton, 315; his Thyrsis, 333; criticism, 334; string of Emerson's epithets, 406. Aryans, comparison, 312. Asia: a pet name, 176; immovable, 200. Assabet River, 70, 71. Astronomy: Harp illustration, 108; stars against wrong, 252, 253. (See _Galileo, Stars, Venus_, etc.) Atlantic Monthly: sketch of Dr. Ripley, 14, 15; of Mary Moody Emerson, 16; established, 221; supposititious club, 222; on Persian Poetry, 224; on Thoreau, 228; Emerson's contributions, 239, 241; Brahma, 296. Atmosphere: effect on inspiration, 290; spiritual, 413, 414. Augustine, Emerson's study of, 52. Authors, quoted by Emerson, 381-383. (See _Plutarch_, etc.) Bacon, Francis: allusion, 22, 111; times quoted, 382. Bancroft, George: literary rank, 33; in college, 45. Barbier, Henri Auguste, on Napoleon, 208. Barnwell, Robert W.: in history, 45; in college, 47. Beaumont and Fletcher, disputed, line, 128, 129. Beauty: its nature, 74, 94, 95; an end, 99, 135, 182; study, 301. Beecher, Edward, on preexistence, 391. (See _Preexistence_.) Behmen, Jacob: mysticism, 201, 202, 396; citation, 380. Berkeley, Bishop: characteristics, 189; matter, 300. Bible: Mary Emerson's study, 16; Mosaic cosmogony, 18; the Exodus, 35; the Lord's Supper, 58; Psalms, 68, 181, 182, 253; lost Paradise, 101; Genesis, Sermon on the Mount, 102; Seer of Patmos, 102, 103; Apocalypse, 105; Song of Songs, 117; Baruch's roll, 117, 118; not closed, 122; the Sower, 154; Noah's Ark, 191; Pharisee's trumpets, 255; names and imagery, 268; sparing the rod, 297; rhythmic mottoes, 314; beauty of Israel, 351; face of an angel, 352; barren fig-tree, 367; a classic, 376; body of death, "Peace be still!" 379; draught of fishes, 381; its semi-detached sentences, 405; Job quoted, 411; "the man Christ Jesus," 412; scattering abroad, 414. (See _Christ, God, Religion,_ etc.) Bigelow, Jacob, on rural cemeteries, 31. Biography, every man writes his own, 1. Blackmore, Sir Richard, controversy, 31. Bliss Family, 9. Bliss, Daniel, patriotism, 72. Blood, transfusion of, 256. Books, use and abuse, 110, 111. (See _Emerson's Essays_.) Boston, Mass.: First Church, 10, 12, 13; Woman's Club, 16; Harbor, 19; nebular spot, 25, 26; its pulpit darling, 27; Episcopacy, 28; Athenaeum, 31; magazines, 28-34; intellectual character, lights on its three hills, high caste religion, 34; Samaria and Jerusalem, 35; streets and squares, 37-39; Latin School, 39, 40, 43; new buildings, 42; Mrs. Emerson's boarding-house, the Common as a pasture, 43; Unitarian preaching, 51; a New England centre, 52; Emerson's settlement, 54; Second Church, 55-61; lectures, 87, 88, 191; Trimount Oracle, 102; stirred by the Divinity-School address, 126; school-keeping, Roxbury, 129; aesthetic society, 149; Transcendentalists, 155, 156; Bay, 172; Freeman Place Chapel, 210: Saturday Club, 221-223; Burns Centennial, 224, 225; Parker meeting, 228; letters, 263, 274, 275; Old South lecture, 294; Unitarianism, 298; Emancipation Proclamation, 307; special train, 350; Sons of Liberty, 369; birthplace, 407; Baptists, 413. Boswell, James: allusion, 138; one lacking, 223; Life of Johnson, 268. Botany, 403. (See _Science_.) Bowen, Francis: literary rank, 34; on Nature, 103, 104. Brook Farm, 159, 164-166, 189, 191. (See _Transcendentalism_, etc.) Brown, Howard N., prayer, 355. Brown, John, sympathy with, 211. (See _Anti-Slavery, South_.) Brownson, Orestes A., at a party, 149. Bryant, William Cullen: his literary rank, 33; redundant syllable, 328; his translation of Homer quoted, 378. Buckminster, Joseph Stevens: minister in Boston, 12, 26, 27, 52; Memoir, 29; destruction of Goldau, 31. Buddhism: like Transcendentalism, 151; Buddhist nature, 188; saints 298. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma, --_India_, etc.) Buffon, on style, 341. Bulkeley Family, 4-7. Bulkeley, Peter: minister of Concord, 4-7, 71; comparison of sermons, 57; patriotism, 72; landowner, 327. Bunyan, John, quoted, 169. Burke, Edmund: essay, 73; times mentioned, 382. Burns, Robert: festival, 224, 225; rank, 281; image referred to, 386; religious position, 409. (See _Scotland_.) Burroughs, John, view of English life, 335. Burton, Robert, quotations, 109, 381. Buttrick, Major, in the Revolution, 71, 72. Byron, Lord: allusion, 16; rank, 281; disdain, 321; uncertain sky, 335; parallelism, 399. CABOT, J. ELLIOT: on Emerson's literary habits, 27; The Dial, 159; prefaces, 283, 302; Note, 295, 296; Prefatory Note, 310, 311; the last meetings, 347, 348. Caesar, Julius, 184,197. California, trip, 263-271, 359. (See _Thayer_.) Calvin, John: his Commentary, 103; used by Cotton, 286. Calvinism: William Emerson's want of sympathy with, 11, 12; outgrown, 51; predestination, 230; saints, 298; spiritual influx, 412. (See _God, Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism.)_ Cambridge, Mass.: Emerson teaching there, 50; exclusive circles, 52. (See _Harvard University_.) Cant, disgust with, 156. Carlyle, Thomas: meeting Emerson, 63; recollections of their relations, 78-80, 83; Sartor Resartus, 81, 82, 91; correspondence, 82, 83, 89, 90, 127, 176, 177, 192, 315, 317, 374, 380, 381, 406, 407; Life of Schiller, 91; on Nature, 104, 105; Miscellanies, 130; the Waterville Address, 136-138; influence, 149, 150; on Transcendentalism, 156-158; The Dial, 160-163; Brook Farm, 164; friendship, 171; Chelsea visit, 194; bitter legacy, 196; love of power, 197; on Napoleon and Goethe, 208; grumblings, 260; tobacco, 270; Sartor reprinted, 272; paper on, 294; Emerson's dying friendship, 349; physique, 363; Gallic fire, 386; on Characteristics, 387; personality traceable, 389. Carpenter, William B., 230. Century, The, essay in, 295. Cerebration, unconscious, 112, 113. Chalmers, Thomas, preaching, 65. Channing, Walter, headache, 175, 390. Channing, William Ellery: allusion, 16; directing Emerson's studies, 51; preaching, 52; Emerson in his pulpit, 66; influence, 147, 149; kept awake, 157. Channing, William Ellery, the poet: his Wanderer, 263; Poems, 403. Channing, William Henry: allusions, 131, 149; in The Dial, 159; the Fuller Memoir, 209; Ode inscribed to, 211, 212. Charleston, S C, Emerson's preaching, 53. (See _South_.) Charlestown, Mass., Edward Emerson's residence, 8. Charles V., 197. Charles XII., 197. Chatelet, Parent du, a realist, 326. Chatham, Lord, 255. Chaucer, Geoffrey: borrowings, 205; rank, 281; honest rhymes, 340; times mentioned, 382. Chelmsford, Mass., Emerson teaching there, 49, 50. Chemistry, 403. (See _Science_.) Cheshire, its "haughty hill," 323. Choate, Rufus, oratory, 148. Christ: reserved expressions about, 13; mediatorship, 59; true office, 120-122; worship, 412. (See _Jesus, Religion_, etc.) Christianity: its essentials, 13; primitive, 35; a mythus, defects, 121; the true, 122; two benefits, 123; authority, 124; incarnation of, 176; the essence, 306; Fathers, 391. Christian, Emerson a, 267. Christian Examiner, The: on William Emerson, 12; its literary predecessor, 29; on Nature, 103, 104; repudiates Divinity School Address, 124. Church: activity in 1820, 147; avoidance of, 153; the true, 244; music, 306. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.) Cicero, allusion, 111. Cid, the, 184. Clarke, James Freeman: letters, 77-80, 128-131; transcendentalism, 149; The Dial, 159; Fuller Memoir, 209; Emerson's funeral, 351, 353-355. Clarke, Samuel, allusion, 16. Clarke, Sarah, sketches, 130. Clarkson, Thomas, 220. Clergy: among Emerson's ancestry, 3-8; gravestones, 9. (See _Cotton, Heredity_, etc.) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: allusion, 16; Emerson's account, 63; influence, 149, 150; Carlyle's criticism, 196; Ancient Mariner, 333; Christabel, Abyssinian Maid, 334; times mentioned, 382; an image quoted, 386; William Tell, 387. Collins, William: poetry, 321; Ode and Dirge, 332. Commodity, essay, 94. Concentration, 288. Concord, Mass.: Bulkeley's ministry, 4-7; first association with the Emerson name, 7; Joseph's descendants, 8; the Fight, 9; Dr. Ripley, 10; Social Club, 14; Emerson's preaching, 54; Goodwin's settlement, 56; discord, 57; Emerson's residence begun, 69, 70; a typical town, 70; settlement, 71; a Delphi, 72; Emerson home, 83; Second Centennial, 84, 85, 303; noted citizens, 86; town government, the, monument, 87; the Sage, 102; letters, 125-131, 225; supposition of Carlyle's life there, 171; Emancipation Address, 181; leaving, 192; John Brown meeting, 211; Samuel Hoar, 213; wide-awake, 221; Lincoln obsequies, 243, 307; an _under_-Concord, 256; fire, 271-279; letters, 275-279; return, 279; Minute Man unveiled, 292; Soldiers' Monument, 303; land-owners, 327; memorial stone, 333; Conway's visits, 343, 344; Whitman's, 344, 345; Russell's, 345; funeral, 350-356; founders, 352; Sleepy Hollow, 356; a strong attraction, 369; neighbors, 373; Prophet, 415. Congdon, Charles, his Reminiscences, 66. Conservatism, fairly treated, 156, 157. (See _Reformers, Religion, Transcendentalism,_ etc.) Conversation: C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 258; inspiration, 290. Conway, Moncure D.: account of Emerson, 55, 56, 66, 194; two visits, 343, 344; anecdote, 346; error, 401; on Stanley, 414. Cooke, George Willis: biography of Emerson, 43, 44, 66, 88; on American Scholar, 107, 108; on anti-slavery, 212; on Parnassus, 280-282; on pantheism, 411. Cooper, James Fenimore, 33. Corot, pearly mist, 335, 336. (See _Pictures_, etc.) Cotton, John: service to scholarship, 34; reading Calvin, 286. Counterparts, the story, 226. Cowper, William: Mother's Picture, 178; disinterested good, 304; tenderness, 333; verse, 338. Cranch, Christopher P.: The Dial, 159; poetic prediction, 416, 417. Cromwell, Oliver: saying by a war saint, 252; in poetry, 387. Cudworth, Ralph, epithets, 200. Cupples, George, on Emerson's lectures, 195. Curtius, Quintus for Mettus, 388. Cushing, Caleb: rank, 33; in college, 45. Dana, Richard Henry, his literary place, 33, 223. Dante: allusion in Anthology, 31; rank, 202, 320; times mentioned, 382. Dartmouth College, oration, 131-135. Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, 105. Dawes, Rufus, Boyhood Memories, 44. Declaration of Independence, intellectual, 115. (See _American_, etc.) Delirium, imaginative, easily produced, 238. (See _Intuition_.) Delia Cruscans, allusion, 152. (See _Transcendentalism_.) Delos, allusion, 374. Delphic Oracle: of New England, 72; illustration, 84. Democratic Review, The, on Nature, 103. De Profundis, illustrating Carlyle's spirit, 83. De Quincey, Thomas: Emerson's interview with, 63, 195; on originality, 92. De Staël, Mme., allusion, 16. De Tocqueville, account of Unitarianism, 51. Dewey, Orville, New Bedford ministry, 67. Dexter, Lord Timothy, punctuation, 325, 326. Dial, The: established, 147, 158; editors, 159; influence, 160-163; death, 164; poems, 192; old contributors, 221; papers, 295; intuitions, 394. Dial, The (second), in Cincinnati, 239. Dickens, Charles: on Father Taylor, 56; American Notes, 155. Diderot, Denis, essay, 79. Diogenes, story, 401. (See _Laertius_.) Disinterestedness, 259. Disraeli, Benjamin, the rectorship, 282. Dramas, their limitations, 375. (See _Shakespeare_.) Dress, illustration of poetry, 311, 312. Dryden, John, quotation, 20, 21. Dwight, John S.: in The Dial, 159; musical critic, 223. East Lexington, Mass., the Unitarian pulpit, 88. Economy, its meaning, 142. Edinburgh, Scotland: Emerson's visit and preaching, 64, 65; lecture, 195. Education: through friendship, 97, 98; public questions, 258, 259. Edwards, Jonathan: allusions, 16, 51; the atmosphere changed, 414. (See _Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism_, etc.) Egotism, a pest, 233. Egypt: poetic teaching, 121; trip, 271, 272; Sphinx, 330. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Sphinx.) Election Sermon, illustration, 112. Elizabeth, Queen, verbal heir-loom, 313. (See _Raleigh_, etc.) Ellis, Rufus, minister of the First Church, Boston, 43. Eloquence, defined, 285, 286. Emerson Family, 3 _et seq_. Emerson, Charles Chauncy, brother of Ralph Waldo: feeling towards natural science, 18, 237; memories, 19-25, 37, 43; character, 77; death, 89, 90; influence, 98; The Dial, 161; "the hand of Douglas," 234; nearness, 368; poetry, 385; Harvard Register, 401. Emerson, Edith, daughter of Ralph Waldo, 263. Emerson, Edward, of Newbury, 8. Emerson, Edward Bliss, brother of Ralph Waldo: allusions, 19, 20, 37, 38; death, 89; Last Farewell, poem, 161; nearness, 368. Emerson, Edward Waldo, son of Ralph Waldo: in New York, 246; on the Farming essay, 255; father's last days, 346-349; reminiscences, 359. Emerson, Ellen, daughter of Ralph Waldo: residence, 83; trip to Europe, 271; care of her father, 294; correspondence, 347. Emerson, Mrs. Ellen Louisa Tucker, first wife of Ralph Waldo, 55. Emerson, Joseph, minister of Mendon, 4, 7, 8. Emerson, Joseph, the second, minister of Malden, 8. Emerson, Mrs. Lydia Jackson, second wife of Ralph Waldo: marriage, 83; _Asia_, 176. Emerson, Mary Moody: influence over her nephew, 16-18; quoted, 385. Emerson, Robert Bulkeley, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, His Life: moulding influences, 1; New England heredity, 2; ancestry, 3-10; parents, 10-16; Aunt Mary, 16-19; brothers, 19-25; the nest, 25; noted scholars, 26-36; birthplace, 37, 38; boyhood, 39, 40; early efforts, 41, 42; parsonages, 42; father's death, 43; boyish appearance, 44; college days, 45-47; letter, 48; teaching, 49, 50; studying theology, and preaching, 51-54; ordination, marriage, 55; benevolent efforts, wife's death, 56; withdrawal from his church, 57-61; first trip to Europe, 62-65; preaching in America, 66, 67; remembered conversations, 68, 69; residence in the Old Manse, 69-72; lecturing, essays in The North American, 73; poems, 74; portraying himself, 75; comparison with Milton, 76, 77; letters to Clarke, 78-80, 128-131; interest in Sartor Resartus, 81; first letter to Carlyle, 82; second marriage and Concord home, 83; Second Centennial, 84-87; Boston lectures, Concord Fight; 87; East Lexington church, War, 88; death of brothers, 89, 90; Nature published, 91; parallel with Wordsworth, 92; free utterance, 93; Beauty, poems, 94; Language, 95-97; Discipline, 97, 98; Idealism, 98, 99; Illusions, 99, 100; Spirit and Matter, 100; Paradise regained, 101; the Bible spirit, 102; Revelations, 103; Bowen's criticism, 104; Evolution, 105, 106; Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 108; fable of the One Man, 109; man thinking, 110; Books, 111; unconscious cerebration, 112; a scholar's duties, 113; specialists, 114; a declaration of intellectual independence, 115; address at the Theological School, 116, 117; effect on Unitarians, 118; sentiment of duty, 119; Intuition, 120; Reason, 121; the Traditional Jesus, 122; Sabbath and Preaching, 123; correspondence with Ware, 124-127; ensuing controversy, 127; Ten Lectures, 128; Dartmouth Address, 131-136; Waterville Address, 136-140; reforms, 141-145; new views, 146; Past and Present, 147; on Everett, 148; assembly at Dr. Warren's, 149; Boston _doctrinaires_, 150; unwise followers, 151-156; Conservatives, 156, 157; two Transcendental products, 157-166; first volume of Essays, 166; History, 167, 168; Self-reliance, 168, 169; Compensation, 169; other essays, 170; Friendship, 170, 171; Heroism, 172; Over-Soul, 172-175; house and income, 176; son's death, 177, 178; American and Oriental qualities, 179; English virtues, 180; Emancipation addresses in 1844, 181; second series of Essays, 181-188; Reformers, 188-191; Carlyle's business, Poems published, 192; a second trip to Europe, 193-196; Representative Men, 196-209; lectures again, 210; Abolitionism, 211, 212; Woman's Rights, 212, 213; a New England Roman, 213, 214; English Traits, 214-221; a new magazine, 221; clubs, 222, 223; more poetry, 224; Burns Festival, 224; letter about various literary matters, 225-227; Parker's death, Lincoln's Proclamation, 228; Conduct of Life, 228-239; Boston Hymn, 240; "So nigh is grandeur to our dust," 241; Atlantic contributions, 242; Lincoln obsequies, 243; Free Religion, 243, 244; second Phi Beta Kappa oration, 244-246; poem read to his son, 246-248; Harvard Lectures, 249-255; agriculture and science, 255, 256; predictions, 257; Books, 258; Conversation, 258; elements of Courage, 259; Success, 260, 261; on old men, 261, 262; California trip, 263-268; eating, 269; smoking, 270; conflagration, loss of memory, Froude banquet, third trip abroad, 272; friendly gifts, 272-279; editing Parnassus, 280-282; failing powers, 283; Hope everywhere, 284; negations, 285; Eloquence, Pessimism, 286; Comedy, Plagiarism, 287; lessons repeated, 288; Sources of Inspiration, 289, 290; Future Life, 290-292; dissolving creed, 292; Concord Bridge, 292, 293; decline of faculties, Old South lecture, 294; papers, 294, 295; quiet pen, 295; posthumous works, 295 _et seq.;_ the pedagogue, 297; University of Virginia, 299; indebtedness to Plutarch, 299-302; slavery questions, 303-308; Woman Question, 308; patriotism, 308, 309; nothing but a poet, 311; antique words, 313; self-revelation, 313, 314; a great poet? 314-316; humility, 317-319; poetic favorites, 320, 321; comparison with contemporaries, 321; citizen of the universe, 322; fascination of symbolism, 323; realism, science, imaginative coloring, 324; dangers of realistic poetry, 325; range of subjects, 326; bad rhymes, 327; a trick of verse, 328; one faultless poem, 332; spell-bound readers, 333; workshop, 334; octosyllabic verse, atmosphere, 335, 336; comparison with Wordsworth, 337; and others, 338; dissolving sentences, 339; incompleteness, 339, 340; personality, 341, 342; last visits received, 343-345; the red rose, 345; forgetfulness, 346; literary work of last years, 346, 347; letters unanswered, 347; hearing and sight, subjects that interested him, 348; later hours, death, 349; last rites, 350-356; portrayal, 357-419; atmosphere, 357; books, distilled alcohol, 358; physique, 359; demeanor, 360; hair and eyes, insensibility to music, 361; daily habits, 362; bodily infirmities, 362, 363; voice, 363; quiet laughter, want of manual dexterity, 364; spade anecdote, memory, ignorance of exact science, 305; intuition and natural sagacity united, fastidiousness, 366; impatience with small-minded worshippers, Frothingham's Biography, 367; intimates, familiarity not invited, 368; among fellow-townsmen, errand to earth, inherited traditions, 369; sealed orders, 370, 371; conscientious work, sacrifices for truth, essays instead of sermons, 372; congregation at large, charm, optimism, 373; financially straitened, 374; lecture room limitations, 374, 375; a Shakespeare parallel, 375, 376; platform fascination, 376; constructive power, 376, 377; English experiences, lecture-peddling, 377; a stove relinquished, utterance, an hour's weight, 378; trumpet-sound, sweet seriousness, diamond drops, effect on Governor Andrew, 379; learning at second hand, 380; the study of Goethe, 380; a great quoter, no pedantry, 381; list of authors referred to, 381, 382; special indebtedness, 382; penetration, borrowing, 383; method of writing and its results, aided by others, 384; sayings that seem family property, 385; passages compared, 385-387; the tributary streams, 388; accuracy as to facts, 388; personalities traceable in him, 389; place as a thinker, 390; Platonic anecdote, 391; preëxistence, 391, 392; mind-moulds, 393; relying on instinct, 394; dangers of intuition, 395; mysticism, 396; Oriental side, 397; transcendental mood, 398; personal identity confused, 399; a distorting mirror, 400; distrust of science, 401-403; style illustrated, 403, 404; favorite words, 405; royal imagery, 406; comments on America, 406, 407; common property of mankind, 407; public spirit, solitary workshop, martyrdom from visitors, 408; white shield invulnerable, 409; religious attitude, 409-411; spiritual influx, creed, 412; clerical relations, 413; Dr. Hague's criticism, 413, 414; ameliorating religious influence, 414; freedom, 415; enduring verse and thought, 416, 417; comparison with Jesus, 417; sincere manhood, 418; transparency, 419. Emerson's Books:-- Conduct of Life, 229, 237. English Traits: the first European trip, 62; published, 214; analysis, 214-220; penetration, 383; Teutonic fire, 386. Essays: Dickens's allusion, 156; collected, 166. Essays, second series, 183. Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 128, 295, 296, 347. Letters and Social Aims, 210, 283, 284, 296. May-day and Other Pieces, 161, 192, 224, 242, 257, 310, 318, 346. Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 209. Miscellanies, 302, 303. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 179. Nature: resemblance of extracts from Mary Moody Emerson, 17; where written, 70; the Many in One, 73; first published, 91, 92, 373; analysis, 93-107; obscure, 108; Beauty, 237. Parnassus: collected, 280; Preface, 314; allusion, 321. Poems, 293, 310, 318, 339. Representative Men, 196-209. Selected Poems, 311, 347. Society and Solitude, 250. Emerson's Essays, Lectures, Sermons, Speeches, etc.:-- In general: essays, 73, 88, 91, 92, 310; income from lectures, 176, 191, 192; lectures in England, 194-196; long series, 372; lecture-room, 374; plays and lectures, 375; double duty, 376, 377; charm, 379. (See _Emerson's Life, Lyceum_, etc.) American Civilization, 307. American Scholar, The, 107-115, 133, 188. Anglo-Saxon Race, The, 210. Anti-Slavery Address, New York, 210-212. Anti-Slavery Lecture, Boston, 210, 211. Aristocracy, 296. Art, 166, 175, 253, 254. Beauty, 235-237. Behavior, 234. Books, 257, 380. Brown, John, 302, 305, 306. Burke, Edmund, 73. Burns, Robert, 224, 225, 307. Carlyle, Thomas, 294, 302, 317. Channing's Poem, preface, 262, 263, 403. Character, 183, 295, 297. Chardon Street and Bible Convention, 159, 302. Circles, 166, 174, 175. Civilization, 250-253. Clubs, 258. Comedy. 128. Comic, The, 286, 287. Commodity, 94. Compensation, 166, 169. Concord Fight, the anniversary speech, 292, 293. Concord, Second Centennial Discourse, 84-86. Conservative, The, 156, 157, 159. Considerations by the Way, 235. Courage, 259. Culture, 232, 233. Demonology, 128, 296. Discipline, 97, 98. Divinity School Address, 116-127, 131. Doctrine of the Soul, 127. Domestic Life, 254, 255. Duty, 128. Editorial Address, Mass. Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307. Education, 296, 297. Eloquence, 254; second essay, 285, 286. Emancipation in the British West Indies, 181, 303. Emancipation Proclamation, 228, 307. Emerson, Mary Moody, 295, 296, 302. English Literature, 87. Experience, 182. Farming, 255, 256. Fate, 228-330. Fortune of the Republic, 294, 302, 307-309. Fox, George, 73. France, 196. Free Religious Association, 243, 302, 307. Friendship, 166, 170. Froude, James Anthony, after-dinner speech, 271. Fugitive Slave Law, 303, 304. Genius, 127. Gifts, 184, 185. Goethe, or the Writer, 208, 209. Greatness, 288, 346. Harvard Commemoration, 307. Heroism, 166, 172. Historical Discourse, at Concord, 303. Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, 147, 165, 296, 302. History, 166, 167. Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214, 295, 302. Home, 127. Hope, 284, 285. Howard University, speech, 263. Human Culture, 87. Idealism, 98-100. Illusions, 235, 239. Immortality, 266, 290-292, 354. Inspiration, 289. Intellect, 166, 175. Kansas Affairs, 305. Kossuth, 307. Language, 95-97. Lincoln, Abraham, funeral remarks, 242, 243, 307. Literary Ethics, 131-136. Lord's Supper, 57-60, 303. Love, 127,128,166,170. (See _Emerson's Poems_.) Luther, 73. Manners, 183, 234. Man of Letters, The, 296, 298. Man the Reformer, 142, 143. Method of Nature, The, 136-141. Michael Angelo, 73, 75. Milton, 73, 75. Montaigne, or the Skeptic, 202-204. Napoleon, or the Man of the World, 206-209. Natural History of the Intellect, 249, 268, 347. Nature (the essay), 185, 186, 398. New England Reformers, 188-191, 385. Nominalism and Realism, 188. Old Age, 261, 262. Over-Soul, The, 166, 172-175, 398, 411. Parker, Theodore, 228, 306. Perpetual Forces, 297. Persian Poetry, 224. Phi Beta Kappa oration, 347. Philosophy of History, 87. Plato, 198-200; New Readings, 200. Plutarch, 295, 299-302. Plutarch's Morals, introduction, 262. Poet, The, 181, 182. Poetry, 210. Poetry and Imagination, 283; subdivisions: Bards and Trouveurs, Creation, Form, Imagination, Melody, Morals, Rhythm, Poetry, Transcendency, Veracity, 283, 284; quoted, 325. Politics, 186, 187. Power, 230, 231. Preacher, The, 294, 298. Professions of Divinity, Law, and Medicine, 41. Progress of Culture, The, 244, 288. Prospects, 101-103. Protest, The, 127. Providence Sermon, 130. Prudence, 166, 171, 172. Quotation and Originality, 287, 288. Relation of Man to the Globe, 73. Resources, 286. Right Hand of Fellowship, The, at Concord, 56. Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 295, 302. Scholar, The, 296, 299. School, The, 127. Scott, speech, 302, 307. Self-Reliance, 166, 168, 411. Shakespeare, or the Poet, 204-206. Social Aims, 285. Soldiers' Monument, at Concord, 303. Sovereignty of Ethics, The, 295, 297, 298. Spirit, 100, 101. Spiritual Laws, 166, 168. Success, 260, 261. Sumner Assault, 304. Superlatives, 295, 297. Swedenborg, or the Mystic, 201, 202, 206. Thoreau, Henry D., 228, 295, 302. Times, The, 142-145. Tragedy, 127. Transcendentalist, The, 145-155, 159. Universality of the Moral Sentiment, 66. University of Virginia, address, 347. War, 88, 303. Water, 73. Wealth, 231, 232. What is Beauty? 74, 94, 95. Woman, 307, 308. Woman's Rights, 212, 213. Work and Days, 256, 312, 406, 407. Worship, 235. Young American, The, 166, 180, 181. Emerson's Poems:-- In general: inspiration from nature, 22, 96; poetic rank in college, 45, 46; prose-poetry and philosophy, 91, 93; annual _afflatus_, in America, 136, 137; first volume, 192; five immortal poets, 202; ideas repeated, 239; true position, 311 _et seq.; in carmine veritas_, 313; litanies, 314; arithmetic, 321, 322; fascination, 323; celestial imagery, 324; tin pans, 325; realism, 326; metrical difficulties, 327, 335; blemishes, 328; careless rhymes, 329; delicate descriptions, 331; pathos, 332; fascination, 333; unfinished, 334, 339, 340; atmosphere, 335; subjectivity, 336; sympathetic illusion, 337; resemblances, 337, 338; rhythms, 340; own order, 341, 342; always a poet, 346. (See _Emerson's Life, Milton, Poets_, etc.) Adirondacs, The, 242, 309, 327. Blight, 402. Boston, 346, 407, 408. Boston Hymn, 211, 221, 241, 242. Brahma, 221, 242, 396, 397. Celestial Love, 170. (Three Loves.) Class Day Poem, 45-47. Concord Hymn, 87, 332. Daemonic Love, 170. (Three Loves.) Days, 221, 242, 257, 312; _pleachéd_, 313. Destiny, 332. Each and All, 73, 74, 94, 331. Earth-Song, 327. Elements, 242. Fate, 159, 387. Flute, The, 399. Good-by, Proud World, 129, 130, 338. Hamatreya, 327. Harp, The, 320, 321, 329, 330. (See _Aeolian Harp_.) Hoar, Samuel, 213, 214. Humble Bee, 46, 74, 75, 128, 272, 326, 331, 338. Initial Love, 170, 387. (Three Loves.) In Memoriam, 19, 89. Latin Translations, 43. May Day, 242; changes, 311, 333. Merlin, 318, 319. (Merlin's Song.) Mithridates, 331. Monadnoc, 322, 331; alterations, 366. My Garden, 242. Nature and Life, 242. Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces, 242. Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing, 211, 212. Poet, The, 317-320, 333. Preface to Nature, 105. Problem, The, 159, 161, 253, 284, 326, 337, 380. Quatrains, 223, 242. Rhodora, The, 74, 94, 95, 129. Romany Girl, The, 221. Saadi, 221, 242. Sea-Shore, 333, 339. Snow-Storm, 331, 338, 339. Solution, 320. Song for Knights of Square Table, 42. Sphinx, The, 113, 159, 243, 330, 398. Terminus, 221, 242; read to his son, 246-248, 363. Test, The, 201, 202, 320. Threnody, 178, 333. Titmouse, The, 221, 326. Translations, 242, 399. Uriel, 326, 331, 398. Voluntaries, 241. Waldeinsamkeit, 221. Walk, The, 402. Woodnotes, 46, 159, 331, 338. World-Soul, The, 331. Emersoniana, 358. Emerson, Thomas, of Ipswich, 38. Emerson, Waldo, child of Ralph Waldo: death, 177, 178; anecdote, 265. Emerson, William, grandfather of Ralph Waldo: minister of Concord, 8-10, 14; building the Manse, 70; patriotism, 72. Emerson, William, father of Ralph Waldo: minister, in Harvard and Boston, 10-14; editorship, 26, 32, 33; the parsonage, 37, 42; death, 43. Emerson, William, brother of Ralph Waldo, 37, 39, 49, 53. England: first visit, 62-65; Lake Windermere, 70; philosophers, 76; the virtues of the people, 179, 180; a second visit, 192 _et seq.;_ notabilities 195; the lectures, 196; Stonehenge, 215; the aristocracy, 215; matters wrong, 260; Anglo-Saxon race, trade and liberty, 304; lustier life, 335; language, 352; lecturing, a key, 377; smouldering fire, 385. (See _America, Europe_, etc.) Enthusiasm: need of, 143; weakness, 154. Epicurus, agreement with, 301. Episcopacy: in Boston, 28, 34, 52; church in Newton, 68; at Hanover, 132; quotation from liturgy, 354; burial service, 356. (See _Calvinism, Church, Religion_, etc.) Esquimau, allusion, 167. Establishment, party of the, 147. (See _Puritanism, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.) Eternal, relations to the, 297. (See _God, Jesus, Religion_, etc.) Europe: Emerson's first visit, 62-65; return, 72; the Muses, 114; debt to the East, 120; famous gentlemen, 184; second visit, 193-196; weary of Napoleon, 207; return, 210; conflict possible, 218; third visit, 271-279; cast-out passion for, 308. (See _America, England, France_, etc.) Everett, Edward: on Tudor, 28; literary rank, 33; preaching, 52; influence, 148. Evolution, taught in "Nature," 105, 106. Eyeball, transparent, 398. Faith: lacking in America, 143, building cathedrals, 253. (See _God, Religion_, etc.) Fine, a characteristic expression, 405. Fire, illustration, 386. (See _England, France_, etc.) Forbes, John M., connected with the Emerson family, 263-265; his letter, 263. Foster, John, minister of Brighton, 15. Fourth-of-July, orations, 386. (See _America_, etc.) Fox, George, essay on, 73. France: Emerson's first visit, 62, 63; philosophers, 76; Revolution, 80; tired of Napoleon, 207, 208; realism, 326; wrath, 385, 386. (See _Carlyle, England, Europe_, etc.) Francis, Convers, at a party, 149. Franklin, Benjamin: birthplace, 37; allusion, 184; characteristics, 189; Poor Richard, 231; quoted, 236; maxims, 261; fondness for Plutarch, 382; bequest, 407. Fraunhofer, Joseph, optician, 230, 324. Frazer's Magazine: "The Mud," 79; Sartor Resartus, 81. (See _Carlyle_.) Freeman, James, minister of King's Chapel, 11, 12, 52. Free Trade, Athenaeum banquet, 220. Friendship, C.C. Emerson's essay, 22, 23, 77. Frothingham, Nathaniel L., account of Emerson's mother, 13. Frothingham, Octavius Brooks: Life of Ripley, 165; an unpublished manuscript, 365-367. Fuller, Margaret: borrowed sermon, 130; at a party, 149; The Dial, 159, 160, 162; Memoir, 209; causing laughter, 364; mosaic Biography, 368. Furness, William Henry: on the Emerson family, 14; Emerson's funeral, 350, 353. Future, party of the, 147. Galton, Francis, composite portraits, 232. Gardiner, John Sylvester John: allusion, 26; leadership in Boston, 28; Anthology Society, 32. (See _Episcopacy_.) Gardner, John Lowell, recollections of Emerson's boyhood, 38-42. Gardner, S.P., garden, 38. Genealogy, survival of the fittest, 3. (See _Heredity_.) Gentleman's Magazine, 30. Gentleman, the, 183. Geography, illustration, 391. German: study of, 48, 49, 78, 380; philosophers, 76; scholarship, 148; oracles, 206; writers unread, 208; philosophers, 380; professors, 391. Germany, a visit, 225, 226. (See _Europe, France, Goethe_, etc.) Gifts, 185. Gilfillan, George: on Emerson's preaching, 65; Emerson's physique, 360. Gilman, Arthur, on the Concord home, 83. Glasgow, the rectorship, 280. God: the universal spirit, 68, 69, 94; face to face, 92, 93; teaching the human mind, 98, 99; aliens from, 101; in us, 139-141; his thought, 146; belief, 170; seen by man, 174; divine offer, 176; writing by grace, 182; presence, 243; tribute to Great First Cause, 267; perplexity about, 410; ever-blessed One, 411; mirrored, 412. (See _Christianity, Religion_, etc.) Goethe: called _Mr_., 31; dead, 63; Clarke's essay, 79; generalizations, 148; influence, 150; on Spinoza, 174, 175; rank as a poet, 202, 320; lovers, 226; rare union, 324; his books read, 380, 381; times quoted, 382. (See _German_, etc.) Goldsmith, Oliver, his Vicar of Wakefield, 9, 10, 15. Good, the study of, 301. Goodwin, H.B., Concord minister, 56. Gould, Master of Latin School, 39. Gould, Thomas R., sculptor, 68. Gourdin, John Gaillard Keith and Robert, in college, 47. Government, abolition of, 141. Grandmother's Review, 30. Gray, Thomas, Elegy often quoted, 316, 317, 416. Greece: poetic teaching, 121; allusion, 108. Greek: Emerson's love for, 43, 44; in Harvard, 49; poets, 253; moralist, 299; Bryant's translation, 378; philosophers, 391. (See _Homer_, etc.) Greenough, Horatio, meeting Emerson, 63. Grimm, Hermann, 226. Guelfs and Ghibellines, illustration, 47. Hafiz, times mentioned, 382. (See _Persia_.) Hague, William, essay, 413. Haller, Albert von, rare union, 324. Harvard, Mass., William Emerson's settlement, 10, 11. Harvard University: the Bulkeley gift, 6; William Emerson's graduation, 10; list of graduates, 12; Emerson's brothers, 19, 21; Register, 21, 24, 385, 401; Hillard, 24, 25; Kirkland's presidency, 26, 27; Gardner, 39-41; Emerson's connection, 44-49; the Boylston prizes, 46; Southern students, 47; graduates at Andover, 48; Divinity School, 51, 53; a New England centre, 52; Bowen's professorship, 103; Phi Beta Kappa oration, 107, 115, 133, 188, 244; Divinity School address, 116-132; degree conferred, 246; lectures, 249; library, 257; last Divinity address, 294; Commemoration, 307; singing class, 361; graduates, 411. (See _Cambridge_.) Haskins, David Green, at Emerson's funeral, 356. Haskins, Ruth (Emerson's mother), 10, 13, 14. Haughty, a characteristic expression, 405. Hawthorne, Nathaniel: his Mosses, 70; "dream-peopled solitude," 86; at the club, 223; view of English life, 335; grave, 356; biography, 368. Hazlitt, William: British Poets, 21. Health, inspiration, 289. Hebrew Language, study, 48. (See _Bible_.) Hedge, Frederic Henry: at a party, 149; quoted, 383. Henry VII., tombs, 415. Herbert, George: Poem on Man, 102; parallel, 170; poetry, 281; a line quoted, 345. Herder, Johann Gottfried, allusion, 16. Heredity: Emerson's belief, 1, 2; in Emerson family, 4, 19; Whipple on, 389; Jonson, 393. Herrick, Robert, poetry, 281. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (See _Emerson's Books_,--Nature.) Hilali, The Flute, 399. Hillard, George Stillman: in college, 24, 25; his literary place, 33; aid, 276. Hindoo Scriptures, 199, 200. (See _Bible, India_, etc.) History, how it should be written, 168. Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood: reference to, 223; on the Burns speech, 225; kindness, 273, 274, 276-279; at Emerson's death-bed, 349; funeral address, 351-353. Hoar, Samuel: statesman, 72; tribute, 213, 214. Holland, description of the Dutch, 217. Holley, Horace, prayer, 267. Holmes, John, a pupil of Emerson, 50. Holmes, Oliver Wendell: memories of Dr. Ripley, 15; of C.C. Emerson, 20, 21; familiarity with Cambridge and its college, 45; erroneous quotation from, 251, 252; jest erroneously attributed to, 400, 401. Holy Ghost, "a new born bard of the," 123. (See _Christ, God, Religion_, etc.) Homer: poetic rank, 202, 320; plagiarism, 205; Iliad, 253; allusion, 315; tin pans, 325; times quoted, 382. (See _Greek_, etc.) Homer, Jonathan, minister of Newton, 15. Hooper, Mrs. Ellen, The Dial, 159, 160. Hope: lacking in America, 143; in every essay, 284. Horace: allusion, 22; Ars Poetica, 316. Horses, Flora Temple's time, 388. Howard University, speech, 263. Howe, Samuel Gridley, the philanthropist, 223. Hunt, Leigh, meeting Emerson, 195. Hunt, William, the painter, 223. Idealism, 98-100, 146, 150. Idealists: Ark full, 191; Platonic sense, 391. Imagination: the faculty, 141; defined, 237, 238; essay, 283; coloring life, 324. Imbecility, 231. Immortality, 262. (See _God, Religion_, etc.) Incompleteness, in poetry, 339. India: poetic models, 338; idea of preëxistence, 391; Brahmanism, 397. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Brahma.) Indians: in history of Concord, 71; Algonquins, 72. Inebriation, subject in Monthly Anthology, 30. Insects, defended, 190. Inspiration: of Nature, 22, 96, 141; urged, 146. Instinct, from God or Devil, 393. Intellect, confidence in, 134. Intuition, 394. Ipswich, Mass., 3, 4, 8. Ireland, Alexander: glimpses of Emerson, 44, 64, 65: reception, 193,194; on Carlyle, 196; letter from Miss Peabody, 317; quoting Whitman, 344; quoted, 350. Irving, Washington, 33. Italy: Emerson's first visit, 62, 63; Naples, 113. Jackson, Charles, garden, 38. Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, anaesthesia, 403. Jackson, Miss Lydia, reading Carlyle, 81. (See _Mrs. Emerson_.) Jahn, Johann, studied at Andover, 48. Jameson, Anna, new book, 131. Jesus: times mentioned, 382; a divine manifestation, 411; followers, 417; and Emerson, 419. (See _Bible, Christ, Church, Religion_, etc.) Joachim, the violinist, 225, 226. Johnson, Samuel, literary style, 29. Jonson, Ben: poetic rank, 281; a phrase, 300; _traduction_, 393. (See _Heredity_, etc.) Journals, as a method of work, 384. Jupiter Scapin, 207. Jury Trial, and dinners, 216. Justice, the Arch Abolitionist, 306. Juvenal: allusion, 22; precept from heaven, 252. Kalamazoo, Mich., allusion, 388. Kamschatka, allusion, 167. Keats, John: quoted, 92; Ode to a Nightingale, 316; _faint, swoon_, 405. King, the, illustration, 74. Kirkland, John Thornton: Harvard presidency, 26, 52; memories, 27. Koran, allusion, 198. (See _Bible, God, Religion_, etc.) Labor: reform, 141; dignity, 142. Lacenaire, evil instinct, 392. Laertius, Diogenes, 390, 391. La Harpe, Jean Francois, on Plutarch, 301. Lamarck, theories, 166. Lamb, Charles, Carlyle's criticism, 196. Landor, Walter Savage, meeting Emerson, 63. Landscape, never painted, 339, 240. (See _Pictures, etc_.) Language: its symbolism, 95-97; an original, 394. Latin: Peter Bulkeley's scholarship, 7; translation, 24, 25; Emerson's Translations, 43, 44. Laud, Archbishop, 6. Law, William, mysticism, 396. Lawrence, Mass., allusion, 44. Lecturing, given up, 295. (See _Emerson's Essays, Lectures_, etc.) Leibnitz, 386. Leroux, Pierre, preëxistance, 391. Letters, inspiration, 289. Lincoln, Abraham, character, 307. (See _Emerson's Essays_.) Linnaeus, illustration, 323, 324. Litanies, in Emerson, 314. (See _Episcopacy_.) Literature: aptitude for, 2, 3; activity in 1820, 147. Little Classics, edition, 347. Liverpool, Eng., a visit, 193, 194. (See _England, Europe, Scotland_, etc.) Locke, John, allusion, 16, 111. London, England.: Tower Stairs, 63; readers, 194; sights, 221; travellers, 308; wrath, 385. (See _England_, etc.) Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: allusions, 31, 33; Saturday Club, 222, 223; burial, 346. Lord, Nathan, President of Dartmouth College, 132. Lord's Supper, Emerson's doubts, 57-61. Lothrop & Co., publishers, 83. Louisville, Ky., Dr. Clarke's residence, 78-80. Lounsbury, Professor, Chaucer letter, 205. Love: in America, 143; the Arch Abolitionist, 306. (See _Emerson's Poems_.) Lowell, Charles: minister of the West Church, 11, 12, 52; on Kirkland, 27. Lowell, F.C., generosity, 276. Lowell, James Russell: an allusion, 33; on The American Scholar, 107; editorship, 221; club, 223; on the Burns speech, 225; on Emerson's bearing, 360, 361; Hawthorne biography, 368; on lectures, 379. Lowell, Mass., factories, 44. Luther, Martin: lecture, 73; his conservatism, 298; times mentioned, 382. Lyceum, the: a pulpit, 88; New England, 192; a sacrifice, 378. (See _Lecturing, Emerson's Lectures_, etc.) Lycurgus, 306. (See _Greece_.) Mackintosh, Sir James, an allusion, 16. Macmillan's Magazine, 414. Malden, Mass.: Joseph Emerson's ministry, 8; diary, 17. Man: a fable about, 109, 110; faith in, 122; apostrophe, 140. Manchester, Eng.: visit, 194, 195; banquet, 220. (See _England_, etc.) Marlowe, Christopher, expressions, 404. Marvell, Andrew: reading by C.C. Emerson, 21; on the Dutch, 217; verse, 338. Mary, Queen, her martyrs, 418. Massachusetts Historical Society: tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21; quality of its literature, 84; on Carlyle, 294. Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411. Materialism, 146, 391. (See _Religion_.) Mather, Cotton: his Magnalia, 5-7; on Concord discord, 57; on New England Melancholy, 216; a borrower, 381. Mathew, Father, disciples, 368. Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51. Melioration, a characteristic expression, 405. Mendon, Mass., Joseph Emerson's ministry, 4. Mephistopheles, Goethe's creation, 208. Merrimac River, 71. Metaphysics, indifference to, 249. Methodism, in Boston, 56. (See _Father Taylor_.) Michael Angelo: allusions, 73, 75; on external beauty, 99; course, 260; filled with God, 284; on immortality, 290; times mentioned, 382. Middlesex Agricultural Association, 235. (See _Agriculture, Emerson's Essays._) Middlesex Association, Emerson admitted, 53. Miller's Retrospect, 34. Milton, John: influence in New England, 16; quotation, 24; essay, 73, 75; compared with Emerson, 76, 77; Lycidas, 178; supposed speech, 220; diet, 270, 271; poetic rank, 281; Arnold's citation, Logic, Rhetoric, 315; popularity, 316; quoted, 324; tin pans, 325; inventor of harmonies, 328; Lycidas, 333; Comus, 338; times mentioned, 382; precursor, quotation, 415. Miracles: false impression, 121, 122; and idealism, 146; theories, 191; St. Januarius, 217; objections, 244. (See _Bible, Christ, Religion_, etc.) Modena, Italy, Emerson's visit, 63. Monadnoc, Mount, 70. Montaigne: want of religion, 300; great authority, 380; times quoted, 382. Montesquieu, on immortality, 291. Monthly Anthology: Wm. Emerson's connection, 13, 26; precursor of North American Review, 28, 29; character, 30, 31; Quincy's tribute, 31; Society formed, 32; career, 33; compared with The Dial, 160. Moody Family, of York, Me., 8,10. Morals, in Plutarch, 301. Morison, John Hopkins, on Emerson's preaching, 67. Mormons, 264, 268. Mother-wit, a favorite expression, 404, 405. Motley, John Lothrop, 33, 223. Mount Auburn, strolls, 40. Movement, party of the, 147. Munroe & Co., publishers, 81. Music: church, 306; inaptitude for, 361; great composers, 401. Musketaquid River, 22, 70, 71. Mysticism: unintelligible, 390; Emerson's, 396. Napoleon: allusion, 197; times mentioned, 382. Napoleon III., 225. Nation, The, Emerson's interest in, 348. Native Bias, 288. Nature: in undress, 72; solicitations, 110; not truly studied, 135; great men, 199; tortured, 402. (See _Emerson's Books, Emerson's Essays_, etc.) Negations, to be shunned, 285. New Bedford, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 52, 67. Newbury, Mass., Edward Emerson's deaconship, 8. New England: families, 2, 3, 5; Peter Bulkeley's coming, 6; clerical virtues, 9; Church, 14; literary sky, 33; domestic service, 34, 35; two centres, 52; an ideal town, 70, 71; the Delphi, 72; Carlyle invited, 83; anniversaries, 84; town records, 85; Genesis, 102; effect of Nature, 106; boys and girls, 163; Massachusetts, Connecticut River, 172; lyceums, 192; melancholy, 216; New Englanders and Old, 220; meaning of a word, 296, 297; eyes, 325; life, 325, 335; birthright, 364; a thorough New Englander, 406; Puritan, 409; theologians, 410; Jesus wandering in, 419. (See _America, England_, etc.) Newspapers: defaming the noble, 145; in Shakespeare's day, 204. Newton, Mass.: its minister, 15; Episcopal Church, 68. (See _Rice_.) Newton, Sir Isaac, times quoted, 382. Newton, Stuart, sketches, 130. New World, gospel, 371. (See _America_.) New York: Brevoort House, 246; Genealogical Society, 413. Niagara, visit, 263. Nidiver, George, ballad, 259. Nightingale, Florence, 220. Nithsdale, Eng., mountains, 78. Non-Resistance, 141. North American Review: its predecessor, 28, 29, 33; the writers, 34; Emerson's contributions, 73; Ethics, 294, 295; Bryant's article, 328. Northampton, Mass., Emerson's preaching, 53. Norton, Andrews: literary rank, 34; professorship, 52. Norton, Charles Eliot: editor of Correspondence, 82; on Emerson's genius, 373. Old Manse, The: allusion, 70; fire, 271-279. (See _Concord_.) Oliver, Daniel, in Dartmouth College, 132. Optimism: in philosophy, 136; "innocent luxuriance," 211; wanted by the young, 373. Oriental: genius, 120; spirit in Emerson, 179. Orpheus, allusion, 319. Paine, R.T., JR., quoted, 31. Palfrey, John Gorham: literary rank, 34; professorship, 52. Pan, the deity, 140. Pantheism: in Wordsworth and Nature, 103; dreaded, 141; Emerson's, 410, 411. Paris, Trance: as a residence, 78; allusion, 167; salons, 184; visit, 196, 308. Parker, Theodore: a right arm of freedom, 127; at a party, 149; The Dial, 159, 160; editorship, 193; death, 228; essence of Christianity, 306; biography, 368; on Emerson's position, 411. Parkhurst, John, studied at Andover, 48. Parr, Samuel, allusion, 28. Past, party of the, 147. Peabody, Andrew Preston, literary rank, 34. Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer: her Aesthetic Papers, 88; letter to Mr. Ireland, 317. Peirce, Benjamin, mathematician, 223. Pelagianisin, 51. (See _Religion_.) Pepys, Samuel, allusion, 12. Pericles, 184, 253. Persia, poetic models, 338. (See _Emerson's Poems, Saadi_). Pessimism, 286. (See _Optimism_). Philadelphia, Pa., society, 184. Philanthropy, activity in 1820, 147. Philolaus, 199. Pie, fondness for, 269. Pierce, John: the minister of Brookline, 11; "our clerical Pepys," 12. Pindar, odes, 253. (See _Greek, Homer_, etc.) Plagiarism, 205, 206, 287, 288, 384. (See _Quotations, Mather_, etc.) Plato: influence on Mary Emerson, 16, 17; over Emerson, 22, 52, 173, 188, 299, 301; youthful essay, 74; Alcott's study, 150; reading, 197; borrowed thought, 205, 206; Platonic idea, 222; a Platonist, 267; saints of Platonism, 298; academy inscription, 365; great authority, 380; times quoted, 382; Symposium and Phaedrus quoted, 387; _tableity_, preëxistence, 391; Diogenes dialogue, 401; a Platonist, 411. (See _Emerson's Books_, and _Essays, Greek_, etc.) Plotinus: influence over Mary Emerson, 16, 17; ashamed of his body, 99; motto, 105; opinions, 173, 174; studied, 380. Plutarch: allusion, 22; his Lives, 50; study, 197; on immortality, 291; influence over Emerson, 299 _et seq_.; his great authority, 380; times mentioned, 382; Emerson on, 383; imagery quoted, 385; style, 405. Plymouth, Mass.: letters written, 78, 79; marriage, 83. Poetry: as an inspirer, 290; Milton on, 315. (See _Shakespeare_, etc.) Poets: list in Parnassus, 281; comparative popularity, 316, 317; consulting Emerson, 408. (See _Emerson's Poems_). Politics: activity in 1820, 147; in Saturday Club, 259. Pomeroy, Jesse, allusion, 393. Pope, Alexander, familiar lines, 316 Porphyry: opinions, 173, 174; studied, 380. Porto Rico, E.B. Emerson's death, 19. Power, practical, 259. Prayer: not enough, 138, 139; anecdotes, 267. (See _God, Religion_, etc.) Preaching, a Christian blessing, 123. Preëxistence, 391. Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 409. Prescott, William, the Judge's mansion, 38. Prescott, William Hickling: rank, 33; Conquest of Mexico, 38. Prior, Matthew, 30. Proclus, influence, 173, 380. Prometheus, 209. Prospects, for man, 101-103. (See _Emerson's Essays_.) Protestantism, its idols, 28. (See _Channing, Religion, Unitarianism_, etc.) Psammetichus, an original language, 394. (See _Heredity, Language_, etc.) Punch, London, 204. Puritans, rear guard, 15. (See _Calvinism_, etc.) Puritanism: relaxation from, 30; after-clap, 268; in New England, 409. (See _Unitarianism_.) Putnam's Magazine, on Samuel Hoar, 213, 214. Pythagoras: imagery quoted, 385; preëxistence, 391. Quakers, seeing only broad-brims, 218. Quincy, Josiah: History of Boston Athenaeum, 31; tribute to the Anthology, 32, 33; memories of Emerson, 45-47; old age, 261. Quotations, 381-383. (See _Plagiarism_, etc.) Raleigh, Sir Walter, verse, 338. Raphael, his Transfiguration, 134. (See _Allston, Painters_, etc.) Rats, illustration, 167, 168. Reed, Sampson, his Growth of the Mind, 80. Reforms, in America, 141-145. Reformers, fairness towards, 156, 157, 188-192. (See _Anti-Slavery, John Brown_.) Religion: opinions of Wm. Emerson and others, 11-13; nature the symbol of spirit, 95; pleas for independence, 117; universal sentiment, 118-120; public rites, 152; Church of England, 219; of the future, 235; relative positions towards, 409, 410; Trinity, 411; Emerson's belief, 412-415; bigotry modified, 414. (See _Calvinism, Channing, Christ, Emerson's Life, Essays_, and _Poems, Episcopacy, God, Unitarianism_, etc.) Republicanism, spiritual, 36. Revolutionary War: Wm. Emerson's service, 8, 9; subsequent confusion, 25, 32; Concord's part, 71, 72, 292, 293. (See _America, New England_, etc.) Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 228. Rhythm, 328, 329, 340. (See _Emerson's Poems_, etc.) Rice, Alexander H., anecdote, 68, 69, 346. (See _Newton_.) Richard Plantagenet, 197. Ripley, Ezra: minister of Concord, 10; Emerson's sketch, 14-16; garden, 42; colleague, 56; residence, 70. Ripley, George: a party, 149; The Dial, 159; Brook Farm, 164-166; on Emerson's limitations, 380. Robinson, Edward, literary rank, 34. Rochester, N.Y., speech, 168. Rome: allusions, 167, 168; growth, 222; amphora, 321. (See _Latin_.) Romilly, Samuel, allusion, 220. Rose, anecdote, 345. (See _Flowers_.) Rousseau, Jean Jacques, his Savoyard Vicar, 51, 52. Ruskin, John: on metaphysics, 250; certain chapters, 336; pathetic fallacy, 337; plagiarism, 384. Russell, Ben., quoted, 267. Russell, Le Baron: on Sartor Resartus, 81, 82; groomsman, 83; aid in rebuilding the Old Manse, 272-279; Concord visit, 345. Saadi: a borrower, 205; times mentioned, 382. (See _Persia_.) Sabbath: a blessing of Christianity, 123, 298. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, on poetry, 339. Saint Paul, times mentioned, 382. (See _Bible_.) Saladin, 184. Sallust, on Catiline, 207. Sanborn, Frank B.: facts about Emerson, 42, 43, 66; Thoreau memoir, 368; old neighbor, 373. Sapor, 184. Satan, safety from, 306. (See _Mephistopheles, Religion_, etc.) Saturday Club: establishment, 221-223, 258; last visits, 346, 347; familiarity at, 368. Scaliger, quotation, 109, 110. Schelling, idealism, 148; influence 173. Schiller, on immortality, 290. Scholarship: a priesthood, 137; docility of, 289. School-teaching, 297. (See _Chelmsford_.) Schopenhauer, Arthur: his pessimism, 286; idea of a philosopher, 359. Science: growth of, 148; Emerson inaccurate in, 256; attitude toward, 401, 402. (See _C.C. Emerson_.) Scipio, 184. Scotland: Carlyle's haunts, 79; notabilities, 195, 196; Presbyterian, 409. Scott, Sir Walter: allusion, 22; quotations, 23, 77; dead, 63; "the hand of Douglas," 234; as a poet, 281; popularity, 316; poetic rank, 321. Self: the highest, 113; respect for, 288, 289. Seneca, Montaigne's study, 382. Shakespeare: allusion, 22; Hamlet, 90, 94; Benedick and love, 106; disputed line, 128, 129; an idol, 197; poetic rank, 202, 281, 320, 321; plagiarism, 204-206; on studies, 257, 258; supremacy, 328; a comparison, 374; a playwright, 375, 376; punctiliousness of Portia, 378; times mentioned, 382; lunatic, lover, poet, 387; Polonius, 389; _mother-wit_, 404; _fine_ Ariel, 405; adamant, 418. Shattuck, Lemuel, History of Concord, 382. Shaw, Lemuel, boarding-place, 43. Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Ode to the West Wind, 316, 399; redundant syllable, 328; Adonais, 333. Shenandoah Mountain, 306. Shingle, Emerson's jest, 364. Ships: illustration of longitude, 154; erroneous quotation, 251, 252; building illustration, 376, 377. Sicily: Emerson's visit, 62; Etna, 113. Sidney, Sir Philip, Chevy Chace, 379. Silsbee, William, aid in publishing Carlyle, 81. Simonides, prudence, 410. Sisyphus, illustration, 334. Sleight-of-hand, illustration, 332. Smith, James and Horace, Rejected Addresses, 387, 397. Smith, Sydney, on bishops, 219. Socrates: allusion, 203; times mentioned, 382. Solitude, sought, 135. Solomon, epigrammatic, 405. (See _Bible_.) Solon, 199. Sophron, 199. South, the: Emerson's preaching tour, 53; Rebellion, 305, 407. (See _America, Anti-Slavery_, etc.) Southerners, in college, 47. Sparks, Jared, literary rank, 33. Spenser, Edmund: stanza, 335, 338; soul making body, 391; _mother-wit_, 404. Spinoza, influence, 173, 380. Spirit and matter, 100, 101. (See _God, Religion, Spenser_, etc.) Spiritualism, 296. Sprague, William Buel, Annals of the American Pulpit, 10-12. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, on American religion, 414. Star: "hitch your wagon to a star," 252, 253; stars in poetry, 324. Sterling, J. Hutchinson, letter to, 282, 283. Stewart, Dugald, allusion, 16. Story, Joseph, literary rank, 33. Stuart, Moses, literary rank, 33. Studio, illustration, 20. Summer, description, 117. Sumner, Charles: literary rank, 33: the outrage on, 211; Saturday Club, 223. Swedenborg, Emanuel: poetic rank, 202, 320; dreams, 306; Rosetta-Stone, 322; times mentioned, 382. Swedenborgians: liking for a paper of Carlyle's, 78; Reed's essay, 80; spiritual influx, 412. Swift, Jonathan: allusion, 30; the Houyhnhnms, 163; times mentioned, 382. Synagogue, illustration, 169. Tappan, Mrs. Caroline, The Dial, 159. Tartuffe, allusion, 312. Taylor, Father, relation to Emerson, 55, 56, 413. Taylor, Jeremy: allusion, 22; Emerson's study, 52; "the Shakespeare of divines," 94; praise for, 306. Teague, Irish name, 143. Te Deum: the hymn, 68; illustration, 82. Temperance, the reform, 141, 152. (See _Reforms_.) Tennyson, Alfred: readers, 256; tobacco, 270; poetic rank, 281; In Memoriam, 333; on plagiarism, 384. Thacher, Samuel Cooper: allusion, 26; death, 29. Thayer, James B.: Western Journey with Emerson, 249, 263, 265-271, 359; _ground swell_, 364. (See _California_.) Thinkers, let loose, 175. Thomson, James, descriptions, 338. Thoreau, Henry D.: allusion, 22; a Crusoe, 72; "nullifier of civilization," 86; one-apartment house, 142, 143; The Dial, 159, 160; death, 228; Emerson's burial-place, 356; biography, 368; personality traceable, 389; woodcraft, 403. Ticknor, George: on William Emerson, 12; on Kirkland, 27; literary rank, 33. Traduction, 393. (See _Heredity, Jonson_, etc.) Transcendentalism: Bowen's paper, 103, 104; idealism, 146; adherents, 150-152; dilettanteism, 152-155; a terror, 161. Transcendentalist, The, 157-159. Truth: as an end, 99; sought, 135. Tudor, William: allusion, 26; connecting literary link, 28, 29. Turgot, quoted, 98, 99. Tyburn, allusion, 183. Unitarianism: Dr. Freeman's, 11, 12; nature of Jesus, 13; its sunshine, 28; white-handed, 34; headquarters, 35; lingual studies, 48, 49; transition, 51; domination, 52; pulpits, 53, 54; chapel in Edinburgh, 65; file-leaders, 118; its organ, 124; "pale negations," 298. (See _Religion, Trinity_, etc.) United States, intellectual history, 32. (See _America, New England_, etc.) Unity, in diversity, 73, 106, 284. Upham, Charles W., his History, 45. Verne, Jules, _onditologie_, 186. Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, literary rank, 33. Virginia, University of, 299. Volcano, illustration, 113. Voltaire, 409. Voting, done reluctantly, 152, 153. Wachusett, Mount, 70. Walden Pond: allusion, 22, 70, 72; cabin, 142, 143. (See _Concord_.) War: outgrown, 88, 89; ennobling, 298. Ware, Henry, professorship, 52. (See _Harvard University_.) Ware, Henry, Jr.: Boston ministry, 55; correspondence, 124-127. (See _Unitarianism_, etc.) Warren, John Collins, Transcendentalism and Temperance, 149. Warren, Judge, of New Bedford, 67. Warwick Castle, fire, 275. Washington City, addresses, 307. (See _Anti-Slavery_, etc.) Waterville College, Adelphi Society, 135-142. Webster, Daniel: E.B. Emerson's association with, 19; on Tudor, 28, 29; literary rank, 33; Seventh-of-March Speech, 303; times mentioned, 382. Weiss, John, Parker biography, 368. Wellington, Lord, seen by Emerson, 63, 64. Wesley, John, praise of, 306. (See _Methodism_.) Western Messenger, poems in, 128. West India Islands, Edward B. Emerson's death, 89. Westminster Abbey, Emerson's visit, 63, 64. (See _Emerson's Books_,--English Traits,--_England_, etc.) Westminster Catechism, 298. (See _Calvinism, Religion_, etc.) Whipple, Edwin Percy: literary rank, 33; club, 223; on heredity, 389. White of Selborne, 228. Whitman, Walt: his enumerations, 325, 326; journal, 344, 346. Wilberforce, William, funeral, 64. Will: inspiration of, 289; power of, 290. Windermere, Lake, 70. (See _England_.) Winthrop, Francis William, in college, 45. Wolfe, Charles, Burial of Moore, 416. Woman: her position, 212, 213, 251; crossing a street, 364. Woman's Club, 16. Words, Emerson's favorite, 404, 405. (See _Emerson's Poems_,--Days.) Wordsworth, William: Emerson's account, 63; early reception, Excursion, 92, 95; quoted, 96, 97; Tintern Abbey, 103; influence, 148, 150; poetic rank, 281, 321; on Immortality, 293, 392; popularity, 316; serenity, 335; study of nature, 337; times mentioned, 382; We are Seven, 393; prejudice against science, 401. Wotton, Sir Henry, quoted, 259. Yankee: a spouting, 136; _improve_, 176; whittling, 364. (See _America, New England_, etc.) Yoga, Hindoo idea, 397. Young, Brigham: Utah, 264, 268; on preëxistence, 391. Young, Edward, influence in New England, 16, 17. Zola, �mile, offensive realism, 326. 
13106	----	MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. VOL. II. * * * * * Only a learned and a manly soul I purposed her, that should with even powers The rock, the spindle, and the shears control Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. BEN JONSON Però che ogni diletto nostro e doglia Sta in sì e nò saper, voler, potere; Adunque quel sol può, che col dovere Ne trae la ragion fuor di sua soglia. Adunque tu, lettor di queste note, S'a tè vuoi esser buono, e agli altri caro, Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi. LEONARDO DA VINCI. BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY. MDCCCLVII. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, BY R.F. FULLER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts Stereotyped by HOBART & ROBBINS; NEW ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY; BOSTON. TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR VOLUME SECOND. VI. JAMAICA PLAIN, _By W.H. Channing_ FIRST IMPRESSIONS A CLUE TRANSCENDENTALISM GENIUS THE DIAL THE WOMAN THE FRIEND SOCIALISM CREDO SELF-SOVEREIGNTY VII. NEW YORK. JOURNALS, LETTERS, &c. LEAVING HOME THE HIGHLANDS WOMAN THE TRIBUNE AND HORACE GREELEY SOCIETY VIII. EUROPE. LETTERS LONDON EDINBURGH.--DE QUINCEY CHALMERS A NIGHT ON BEN LOMOND JOANNA BAILLIE.--HOWITTS.--SMITH CARLYLE PARIS RACHEL FOURIER,--ROUSSEAU ROME AMERICANS IN ITALY THE WIFE AND MOTHER THE PRIVATE MARRIAGE AQUILA AND RIETI CALM AFTER STORM MARGARET AND HER PEERS FLORENCE IX. HOMEWARD _By W.H. Channing_ SPRING-TIME OMENS THE VOYAGE THE WRECK JAMAICA PLAIN BY W.H. CHANNING. * * * * * "Quando Lo raggio della grazia, onde s'accende Verace amore, e che poi cresce amando, Multiplicato in tè tanto risplende, Che ti conduce su per quella scala, U' senza risalir nessun discende, Qual ti negasse 'l vin della sua fiàla Por la tua sete, in libertà non fôra, Se non com' acqua oh' al mar non si cala." DANTE. "Weite Welt und breites Leben, Langer Jahre redlich Streben, Stets geforscht und stets gegründet, Nie geschlossen, oft geründet, Aeltestes bewahrt mit Treue, Freundlich aufgefasstes Neue, Heitern Sinn und reine Zwecke: Nun! man kommt wohl eine Strecke." GOETHE. "My purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles." TENNYSON. "Remember how august the heart is. It contains the temple not only of Love but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of one to the extremity of the other." LANDOR "If all the gentlest-hearted friends I knew Concentred in one heart their gentleness, That still grew gentler till its pulse was less For life than pity,--I should yet be slow To bring my own heart nakedly below The palm of such a friend, that he should press My false, ideal joy and fickle woe Out to full light and knowledge." ELIZABETH BARRETT. VI. JAMAICA PLAIN * * * * * I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS. It was while Margaret was residing at Jamaica Plain, in the summer of 1839, that we first really met as friends, though for several years previous we had been upon terms of kindest mutual regard. And, as the best way of showing how her wonderful character opened upon me, the growth of our acquaintance shall be briefly traced. The earliest recollection of Margaret is as a schoolmate of my sisters, in Boston. At that period she was considered a prodigy of talent and accomplishment; but a sad feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of frivolous companions. Some seasons later, I call to mind seeing, at the "Commencements" and "Exhibitions" of Harvard University, a girl, plain in appearance, but of dashing air, who was invariably the centre of a listening group, and kept their merry interest alive by sparkles of wit and incessant small-talk. The bystanders called her familiarly, "Margaret," "Margaret Fuller;" for, though young, she was already noted for conversational gifts, and had the rare skill of attracting to her society, not spirited collegians only, but men mature in culture and of established reputation. It was impossible not to admire her fluency and fun; yet, though curiosity was piqued as to this entertaining personage, I never sought an introduction, but, on the contrary, rather shunned encounter with one so armed from head to foot in saucy sprightliness. About 1830, however, we often met in the social circles of Cambridge, and I began to observe her more nearly. At first, her vivacity, decisive tone, downrightness, and contempt of conventional standards, continued to repel. She appeared too _intense_ in expression, action, emphasis, to be pleasing, and wanting in that _retenue_ which we associate with delicate dignity. Occasionally, also, words flashed from her of such scathing satire, that prudence counselled the keeping at safe distance from a body so surcharged with electricity. Then, again, there was an imperial--shall it be said imperious?--air, exacting deference to her judgments and loyalty to her behests, that prompted pride to retaliatory measures. She paid slight heed, moreover, to the trim palings of etiquette, but swept through the garden-beds and into the doorway of one's confidence so cavalierly, that a reserved person felt inclined to lock himself up in his sanctum. Finally, to the coolly-scanning eye, her friendships wore a look of such romantic exaggeration, that she seemed to walk enveloped in a shining fog of sentimentalism. In brief, it must candidly be confessed, that I then suspected her of affecting the part of a Yankee Corinna. But soon I was charmed, unaware, with the sagacity of her sallies, the profound thoughts carelessly dropped by her on transient topics, the breadth and richness of culture manifested in her allusions or quotations, her easy comprehension of new views, her just discrimination, and, above all, her _truthfulness_. "Truth at all cost," was plainly her ruling maxim. This it was that made her criticism so trenchant, her contempt of pretence so quick and stern, her speech so naked in frankness, her gaze so searching, her whole attitude so alert. Her estimates of men, books, manners, events, art, duty, destiny, were moulded after a grand ideal; and she was a severe judge from the very loftiness of her standard. Her stately deportment, border though it might on arrogance, but expressed high-heartedness. Her independence, even if haughty and rash, was the natural action of a self-centred will, that waited only fit occasion to prove itself heroic. Her earnestness to read the hidden history of others was the gauge of her own emotion. The enthusiasm that made her speech so affluent, when measured by the average scale, was the unconscious overflow of a poetic temperament. And the ardor of her friends' affection proved the faithfulness of her love. Thus gradually the mist melted away, till I caught a glimpse of her real self. We were one evening talking of American literature,--she contrasting its boyish crudity, half boastful, half timid, with the tempered, manly equipoise of thorough-bred European writers, and I asserting that in its mingled practicality and aspiration might be read bright auguries; when, betrayed by sympathy, she laid bare her secret hope of what Woman might be and do, as an author, in our Republic. The sketch was an outline only, and dashed off with a few swift strokes, but therein appeared her own portrait, and we were strangers no more. It was through the medium of others, however, that at this time I best learned to appreciate Margaret's nobleness of nature and principle. My most intimate friend in the Theological School, James Freeman Clarke, was her constant companion in exploring the rich gardens of German literature; and from his descriptions I formed a vivid image of her industry, comprehensiveness, buoyancy, patience, and came to honor her intelligent interest in high problems of science, her aspirations after spiritual greatness, her fine æsthetic taste, her religiousness. By power to quicken other minds, she showed how living was her own. Yet more near were we brought by common attraction toward a youthful visitor in our circle, the untouched freshness of whose beauty was but the transparent garb of a serene, confiding, and harmonious soul, and whose polished grace, at once modest and naïve, sportive and sweet, fulfilled the charm of innate goodness of heart. Susceptible in temperament, anticipating with ardent fancy the lot of a lovely and refined woman, and morbidly exaggerating her own slight personal defects, Margaret seemed to long, as it were, to transfuse with her force this nymph-like form, and to fill her to glowing with her own lyric fire. No drop of envy tainted the sisterly love, with which she sought by genial sympathy thus to live in another's experience, to be her guardian-angel, to shield her from contact with the unworthy, to rouse each generous impulse, to invigorate thought by truth incarnate in beauty, and with unfelt ministry to weave bright threads in her web of fate. Thus more and more Margaret became an object of respectful interest, in whose honor, magnanimity and strength I learned implicitly to trust. Separation, however, hindered our growing acquaintance, as we both left Cambridge, and, with the exception of a few chance meetings in Boston and a ramble or two in the glens and on the beaches of Rhode Island, held no further intercourse till the summer of 1839, when, as has been already said, the friendship, long before rooted, grew up and leafed and bloomed. II. A CLUE. * * * * * I have no hope of conveying to readers my sense of the beauty of our relation, as it lies in the past with brightness falling on it from Margaret's risen spirit. It would be like printing a chapter of autobiography, to describe what is so grateful in memory, its influence upon one's self. And much of her inner life, as confidentially disclosed, could not be represented without betraying a sacred trust. All that can be done is to open the outer courts, and give a clue for loving hearts to follow. To such these few sentences may serve as a guide. 'When I feel, as I do this morning, the poem of existence, I am repaid for all trial. The bitterness of wounded affection, the disgust at unworthy care, the aching sense of how far deeds are transcended by our lowest aspirations, pass away as I lean on the bosom of Nature, and inhale new life from her breath. Could but love, like knowledge, be its own reward!' 'Oftentimes I have found in those of my own sex more gentleness, grace, and purity, than in myself; but seldom the heroism which I feel within my own breast. I blame not those who think the heart cannot bleed because it is so strong; but little they dream of what lies concealed beneath the determined courage. Yet mine has been the Spartan sternness, smiling while it hides the wound. I long rather for the Christian spirit, which even on the cross prays, "Father, forgive them," and rises above fortitude to heavenly satisfaction.' * * * * * 'Remember that only through aspirations, which sometimes make me what is called unreasonable, have I been enabled to vanquish unpropitious circumstances, and save my soul alive.' * * * * * 'All the good I have ever done has been by calling on every nature for its highest. I will admit that sometimes I have been wanting in gentleness, but never in tenderness, nor in noble faith.' * * * * * 'The heart which hopes and dares is also accessible to terror, and this falls upon it like a thunderbolt. It can never defend itself at the moment, it is so surprised. There is no defence but to strive for an equable temper of courageous submission, of obedient energy, that shall make assault less easy to the foe. '_This_ is the dart within the heart, as well as I can tell it:--At moments, the music of the universe, which daily I am upheld by hearing, seems to stop. I fall like a bird when the sun is eclipsed, not looking for such darkness. The sense of my individual law--that lamp of life--flickers. I am repelled in what is most natural to me. I feel as, when a suffering child, I would go and lie with my face to the ground, to sob away my little life.' * * * * * 'In early years, when, though so frank as to the thoughts of the mind, I put no heart confidence in any human being, my refuge was in my journal. I have burned those records of my youth, with its bitter tears, and struggles, and aspirations. Those aspirations were high, and have gained only broader foundations and wider reach. But the leaves had done their work. For years to write there, instead of speaking, had enabled me to soothe myself; and the Spirit was often my friend, when I sought no other. Once again I am willing to take up the cross of loneliness. Resolves are idle, but the anguish of my soul has been, deep. It will not be easy to profane life by rhetoric.' * * * * * 'I woke thinking of the monks of La Trappe;--how could they bear their silence? When the game of life was lost for me, in youthful anguish I knew well the desire for that vow; but if I had taken it, my heart would have burned out my physical existence long ago.' * * * * * 'Save me from plunging into the depths to learn the worst, or from being led astray by the winged joys of childish feeling. I pray for truth in proportion as there is strength to receive.' * * * * * 'My law is incapable of a charter. I pass all bounds, and cannot do otherwise. Those whom it seems to me I am to meet again in the Ages, I meet, soul to soul, now. I have no knowledge of any circumstances except the degree of affinity.' * * * * * 'I feel that my impatient nature needs the dark days. I would learn the art of limitation, without compromise, and act out my faith with a delicate fidelity. When loneliness becomes too oppressive, I feel Him drawing me nearer, to be soothed by the smile of an All-Intelligent Love. He will not permit the freedom essential to growth to be checked. If I can give myself up to Him, I shall not be too proud, too impetuous, neither too timid, and fearful of a wound or cloud.' III. TRANSCENDENTALISM. * * * * * The summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of the Transcendental movement in New England. The rise of this enthusiasm was as mysterious as that of any form of revival; and only they who were of the faith could comprehend how bright was this morning-time of a new hope. Transcendentalism was an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of Divinity in instinct. In part, it was a reaction against Puritan Orthodoxy; in part, an effect of renewed study of the ancients, of Oriental Pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch's Morals, Seneca and Epictetus; in part, the natural product of the culture of the place and time. On the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism,--whose characteristic dogma was trust in individual reason as correlative to Supreme Wisdom,--had been grafted German Idealism, as taught by masters of most various schools,--by Kant and Jacobi, Fichte and Novalis, Schelling and Hegel, Schleiermacher and De Wette, by Madame de Stael, Cousin, Coleridge, and Carlyle; and the result was a vague yet exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit. Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots, and sceptics, the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought to hold communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit, and gave himself up to the embrace of nature's beautiful joy, as a babe seeks the breast of a mother. To him the curse seemed past; and love was without fear. "All mine is thine" sounded forth to him in ceaseless benediction, from flowers and stars, through the poetry, art, heroism of all ages, in the aspirations of his own genius, and the budding promise of the time. His work was to be faithful, as all saints, sages, and lovers of man had been, to Truth, as the very Word of God. His maxims were,--"Trust, dare and be; infinite good is ready for your asking; seek and find. All that your fellows can claim or need is that you should become, in fact, your highest self; fulfil, then, your ideal." Hence, among the strong, withdrawal to private study and contemplation, that they might be "alone with the Alone;" solemn yet glad devotedness to the Divine leadings in the inmost will; calm concentration of thought to wait for and receive wisdom; dignified independence, stern yet sweet, of fashion and public opinion; honest originality of speech and conduct, exempt alike from apology or dictation, from servility or scorn. Hence, too, among the weak, whimsies, affectation, rude disregard of proprieties, slothful neglect of common duties, surrender to the claims of natural appetite, self-indulgence, self-absorption, and self-idolatry. By their very posture of mind, as seekers of the new, the Transcendentalists were critics and "come-outers" from the old. Neither the church, the state, the college, society, nor even reform associations, had a hold upon their hearts. The past might be well enough for those who, without make-belief, could yet put faith in common dogmas and usages; but for them the matin-bells of a new day were chiming, and the herald-trump of freedom was heard upon the mountains. Hence, leaving ecclesiastical organizations, political parties, and familiar circles, which to them were brown with drought, they sought in covert nooks of friendship for running waters, and fruit from the tree of life. The journal, the letter, became of greater worth than the printed page; for they felt that systematic results were not yet to be looked for, and that in sallies of conjecture, glimpses and flights of ecstasy, the "Newness" lifted her veil to her votaries. Thus, by mere attraction of affinity, grew together the brotherhood of the "Like-minded," as they were pleasantly nicknamed by outsiders, and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same opinion. The only password of membership to this association, which had no compact, records, or officers, was a hopeful and liberal spirit; and its chance conventions were determined merely by the desire of the caller for a "talk," or by the arrival of some guest from a distance with a budget of presumptive novelties. Its "symposium" was a pic-nic, whereto each brought of his gains, as he felt prompted, a bunch of wild grapes from the woods, or bread-corn from his threshing-floor. The tone of the assemblies was cordial welcome for every one's peculiarity; and scholars, farmers, mechanics, merchants, married women, and maidens, met there on a level of courteous respect. The only guest not tolerated was intolerance; though strict justice might add, that these "Illuminati" were as unconscious of their special cant as smokers are of the perfume of their weed, and that a professed declaration of universal independence turned out in practice to be rather oligarchic. Of the class of persons most frequently found at these meetings Margaret has left the following sketch:-- '"I am not mad, most noble Festus," was Paul's rejoinder, as he turned upon his vulgar censor with the grace of a courtier, the dignity of a prophet, and the mildness of a saint. But many there are, who, adhering to the faith of the soul with that unusual earnestness which the world calls "mad," can answer their critics only by the eloquence of their characters and lives. Now, the other day, while visiting a person whose highest merit, so far as I know, is to save his pennies, I was astounded by hearing him allude to some of most approved worth among us, thus: "You know _we_ consider _those men_ insane." 'What this meant, I could not at first well guess, so completely was my scale of character turned topsy-turvy. But revolving the subject afterward, I perceived that WE was the multiple of Festus, and THOSE MEN of Paul. All the circumstances seemed the same as in that Syrian hall; for the persons in question were they who cared more for doing good than for fortune and success,--more for the one risen from the dead than for fleshly life,--more for the Being in whom we live and move than for King Agrippa. 'Among this band of candidates for the mad-house, I found the young poet who valued insight of nature's beauty, and the power of chanting to his fellow-men a heavenly music, above the prospect of fortune, political power, or a standing in fashionable society. At the division of the goods of this earth, he was wandering like Schiller's poet. But the difference between American and German regulations would seem to be, that in Germany the poet, when not "with Jove," is left at peace on earth; while here he is, by a self-constituted police, declared "mad." 'Another of this band was the young girl who, early taking a solemn view of the duties of life, found it difficult to serve an apprenticeship to its follies. She could not turn her sweetness into "manner," nor cultivate love of approbation at the expense of virginity of heart. In so called society she found no outlet for her truest, fairest self, and so preferred to live with external nature, a few friends, her pencil, instrument, and books. She, they say, is "mad." 'And he, the enthusiast for reform, who gives away fortune, standing in the world, peace, and only not life, because bigotry is now afraid to exact the pound of flesh as well as the ducats,--he, whose heart beats high with hopes for the welfare of his race, is "mad." 'And he, the philosopher, who does not tie down his speculation to the banner of the day, but lets the wings of his thought upbear him where they will, as if they were stronger and surer than the balloon let off for the amusement of the populace,--he must be "mad." Off with him to the moon! that paradise of noble fools, who had visions of possibilities too grand and lovely for this sober earth. 'And ye, friends, and lovers, who see, through all the films of human nature, in those you love, a divine energy, worthy of creatures who have their being in very God, ye, too, are "mad" to think they can walk in the dust, and yet shake it from their feet when they come upon the green. These are no winged Mercuries, no silver-sandalled Madonnas. Listen to "the world's" truth and soberness, and we will show you that your heart would be as well placed in a hospital, as in these air-born palaces. 'And thou, priest, seek thy God among the people, and not in the shrine. The light need not penetrate thine own soul. Thou canst catch the true inspiration from the eyes of thy auditors. Not the Soul of the World, not the ever-flowing voice of nature, but the articulate accents of practical utility, should find thy ear ever ready. Keep always among men, and consider what they like; for in the silence of thine own breast will be heard the voices that make men "mad." Why shouldst thou judge of the consciousness of others by thine own? May not thine own soul have been made morbid, by retiring too much within? If Jesus of Nazareth had not fasted and prayed so much alone, the devil could never have tempted him; if he had observed the public mind more patiently and carefully, he would have waited till the time was ripe, and the minds of men prepared for what he had to say. He would thus have escaped the ignominious death, which so prematurely cut short his "usefulness." Jewry would thus, gently, soberly, and without disturbance, have been led to a better course. '"Children of this generation!"--ye Festuses and Agrippas!--ye are wiser, we grant, than "the children of light;" yet we advise you to commend to a higher tribunal those whom much learning, or much love, has made "mad." For if they stay here, almost will they persuade even you!' Amidst these meetings of the Transcendentalists it was, that, after years of separation, I again found Margaret. Of this body she was member by grace of nature. Her romantic freshness of heart, her craving for the truth, her self-trust, had prepared her from childhood to be a pioneer in prairie-land; and her discipline in German schools had given definite form and tendency to her idealism. Her critical yet aspiring intellect filled her with longing for germs of positive affirmation in place of the chaff of thrice-sifted negation; while her æsthetic instinct responded in accord to the praise of Beauty as the beloved heir of Good and Truth, whose right it is to reign. On the other hand, strong common-sense saved her from becoming visionary, while she was too well-read as a scholar to be caught by conceits, and had been too sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful effeminacy. It was a pleasing surprise to see how this friend of earlier days was acknowledged as a peer of the realm, in this new world of thought. Men,--her superiors in years, fame and social position,--treated her more with the frankness due from equal to equal, than the half-condescending deference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves to women. They did not talk down to her standard, nor translate their dialect into popular phrase, but trusted to her power of interpretation. It was evident that they prized her verdict, respected her criticism, feared her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire. Very observable was it, also, how, in side-talks with her, they became confidential, seemed to glow and brighten into their best mood, and poured out in full measure what they but scantily hinted in the circle at large. IV. GENIUS. * * * * * It was quite a study to watch the phases through which Margaret passed, in one of these assemblies. There was something in the air and step with which she chose her place in the company, betokening an instinctive sense, that, in intellect, she was of blood royal and needed to ask no favors. And then she slowly gathered her attention to take in the significance of the scene. Near-sighted and habitually using an eye-glass, she rapidly scanned the forms and faces, pausing intently where the expression of particular heads or groups suggested thought, and ending her survey with some apt home-thrust to her next neighbors, as if to establish full _rapport_, and so to become a medium for the circulating life. Only when thus in magnetic relations with all present, by a clear impress of their state and place, did she seem prepared to rise to a higher stage of communion. Then she listened, with ear finely vibrating to every tone, with all capacities responsive in sympathy, with a swift and ductile power of appreciation, that made her feel to the quick the varying moods of different speakers, and yet the while with coolest self-possession. Now and then a slight smile, flickering over her countenance, as lightning plays on the surface of a cloud, marked the inward process whereby she was harmonizing in equilibrium opposing thoughts. And, as occasion offered, a felicitous quotation, pungent apothegm, or symbolic epithet, dropped unawares in undertone, showed how swiftly scattered rays were brought in her mind to a focus. When her turn came, by a graceful transition she resumed the subject where preceding speakers had left it, and, briefly summing up their results, proceeded to unfold her own view. Her opening was deliberate, like the progress of some massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality. Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was affluent in historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as in novel hints. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the essential truth gathered from wide research, and distilled with patient toil; and by skilful treatment she could make green again the wastes of common-place. Her statements, however rapid, showed breadth of comprehension, ready memory, impartial judgment, nice analysis of differences, power of penetrating through surfaces to realities, fixed regard to central laws and habitual communion with the Life of life. Critics, indeed, might have been tempted to sneer at a certain oracular grandiloquence, that bore away her soberness in moments of elation; though even the most captious must presently have smiled at the humor of her descriptive touches, her dexterous exposure of folly and pretension, the swift stroke of her bright wit, her shrewd discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind. The reverential, too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men, measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash, revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could fail to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to break every trammel that checked her growth or fettered her movement. In conversations like these, one saw that the richness of Margaret's genius resulted from a rare combination of opposite qualities. To her might have been well applied the words first used as describing George Sand: "Thou large-brained Woman, and large-hearted Man." She blended in closest union and swift interplay feminine receptiveness with masculine energy. She was at once impressible and creative, impulsive and deliberate, pliant in sympathy yet firmly self-centred, confidingly responsive while commanding in originality. By the vivid intensity of her conceptions, she brought out in those around their own consciousness, and, by the glowing vigor of her intellect, roused into action their torpid powers. On the other hand, she reproduced a truth, whose germ had just been imbibed from others, moulded after her own image and quickened by her own life, with marvellous rapidity. And the presence of congenial minds so stimulated the prolific power of her imagination, that she was herself astonished at the fresh beauty of her new-born thoughts. 'There is a mortifying sense,' she writes, 'of having played the Mirabeau after a talk with a circle of intelligent persons. They come with a store of acquired knowledge and reflection, on the subject in debate, about which I may know little, and have reflected less; yet, by mere apprehensiveness and prompt intuition, I may appear their superior. Spontaneously I appropriate all their material, and turn it to my own ends, as if it was my inheritance from a long train of ancestors. Rays of truth flash out at the moment, and they are startled by the light thrown over their familiar domain. Still they are gainers, for I give them new impulse, and they go on their way rejoicing in the bright glimpses they have caught. I should despise myself, if I purposely appeared thus brilliant, but I am inspired as by a power higher than my own.' All friends will bear witness to the strict fidelity of this sketch. There were seasons when she seemed borne irresistibly on to the verge of prophecy, and fully embodied one's notion of a sibyl. Admirable as Margaret appeared in public, I was yet more affected by this peculiar mingling of impressibility and power to influence, when brought within her private sphere. I know not how otherwise to describe her subtle charm, than by saying that she was at once a clairvoyante and a magnetizer. She read another's bosom-secret, and she imparted of her own force. She interpreted the cipher in the talisman of one's destiny, that he had tried in vain to spell alone; by sympathy she brought out the invisible characters traced by experience on his heart; and in the mirror of her conscience he might see the image of his very self, as dwarfed in actual appearance, or developed after the divine ideal. Her sincerity was terrible. In her frank exposure no foible was spared, though by her very reproof she roused dormant courage and self-confidence. And so unerring seemed her insight, that her companion felt as if standing bare before a disembodied spirit, and communicated without reserve thoughts and emotions, which, even to himself, he had scarcely named. This penetration it was that caused Margaret to be so dreaded, in general society, by superficial observers. They, who came nigh enough to test the quality of her spirit, could not but perceive how impersonal was her justice; but, contrasted with the dead flat of conventional tolerance, her candor certainly looked rugged and sharp. The frivolous were annoyed at her contempt of their childishness, the ostentatious piqued at her insensibility to their show, and the decent scared lest they should be stripped of their shams; partisans were vexed by her spurning their leaders; and professional sneerers,--civil in public to those whom in private they slandered,--could not pardon the severe truth whereby she drew the sting from their spite. Indeed, how could so undisguised a censor but shock the prejudices of the moderate, and wound the sensibilities of the diffident; how but enrage the worshippers of new demi-gods in literature, art and fashion, whose pet shrines she demolished; how but cut to the quick, alike by silence or by speech, the self-love of the vain, whose claims she ignored? So gratuitous, indeed, appeared her hypercriticism, that I could not refrain from remonstrance, and to one of my appeals she thus replied: 'If a horror for the mania of little great men, so prevalent in this country,--if aversion to the sentimental exaggerations to which so many minds are prone,--if finding that most men praise, as well as blame, too readily, and that overpraise desecrates the lips and makes the breath unworthy to blow the coal of devotion,--if rejection of the ----s and ----s, from a sense that the priestess must reserve her pæans for Apollo,--if untiring effort to form my mind to justice and revere only the superlatively good, that my praise might be praise; if this be to offend, then have I offended.' V. THE DIAL. * * * * * Several talks among the Transcendentalists, during the autumn of 1839, turned upon the propriety of establishing an organ for the expression of freer views than the conservative journals were ready to welcome. The result was the publication of the "Dial," the first number of which appeared early in the summer of 1840, under the editorship of Margaret, aided by R.W. Emerson and George Ripley. How moderate were her own hopes, in regard to this enterprise, is clearly enough shown by passages from her correspondence. '_Jamaica Plain, 22d March, 1840._ * * * I have a great deal written, but, as I read it over, scarce a word seems pertinent to the place or time. When I meet people, it is easy to adapt myself to them; but when I write, it is into another world,--not a better one, perhaps, but one with very dissimilar habits of thought to this wherein I am domesticated. How much those of us, who have been formed by the European mind, have to unlearn, and lay aside, if we would act here! I would fain do something worthily that belonged to the country where I was born, but most times I fear it may not be. 'What others can do,--whether all that has been said is the mere restlessness of discontent, or there are thoughts really struggling for utterance,--will be tested now. A perfectly free organ is to be offered for the expression of individual thought and character. There are no party measures to be carried, no particular standard to be set up. A fair, calm tone, a recognition of universal principles, will, I hope, pervade the essays in every form. I trust there will be a spirit neither of dogmatism nor of compromise, and that this journal will aim, not at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to judge for himself, and to think more deeply and more nobly, by letting him see how some minds are kept alive by a wise self-trust. We must not be sanguine as to the amount of talent which will be brought to bear on this publication. All concerned are rather indifferent, and there is no great promise for the present. We cannot show high culture, and I doubt about vigorous thought. But we shall manifest free action as far as it goes, and a high aim. It were much if a periodical could be kept open, not to accomplish any outward object, but merely to afford an avenue for what of liberal and calm thought might be originated among us, by the wants of individual minds.' * * * * * * * '_April 19, 1840._--Things go on pretty well, but doubtless people will be disappointed, for they seem to be looking for the Gospel of Transcendentalism. It may prove as Jouffroy says it was with the successive French ministries: "The public wants something positive, and, seeing that such and such persons are excellent at fault-finding, it raises them to be rulers, when, lo! they have no noble and full Yea, to match their shrill and bold Nay, and so are pulled down again." Mr. Emerson knows best what he wants; but he has already said it in various ways. Yet, this experiment is well worth trying; hearts beat so high, they must be full of something, and here is a way to breathe it out quite freely. It is for dear New England that I want this review. For myself, if I had wished to write a few pages now and then, there were ways and means enough of disposing of them. But in truth I have not much to say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find that, so far from being an original genius, I have not yet learned to think to any depth, and that the utmost I have done in life has been to form my character to a certain consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth with a little better grace than I did at first. For this the world will not care much, so I shall hazard a few critical remarks only, or an unpretending chalk sketch now and then, till I have learned to do something. There will be beautiful poesies; about prose we know not yet so well. We shall be the means of publishing the little Charles Emerson left as a mark of his noble course, and, though it lies in fragments, all who read will be gainers.' * * * * * '1840.--Since the Revolution, there has been little, in the circumstances of this country, to call out the higher sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is the same on nations as on individuals,--it leaves the nobler faculties undeveloped. The need of bringing out the physical resources of a vast extent of country, the commercial and political fever incident to our institutions, tend to fix the eyes of men on what is local and temporary, on the external advantages of their condition. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by a correspondent deepening of its sources, is likely to vulgarize rather than to raise the thought of a nation, depriving them of another sort of education through sentiments of reverence, and leading the multitude to believe themselves capable of judging what they but dimly discern. They see a wide surface, and forget the difference between seeing and knowing. In this hasty way of thinking and living they traverse so much ground that they forget that not the sleeping railroad passenger, but the botanist, the geologist, the poet, really see the country, and that, to the former, "a miss is as good as a mile." In a word, the tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally. This tendency is no way balanced by the slight literary culture common here, which is mostly English, and consists in a careless reading of publications of the day, having the same utilitarian tendency with our own proceedings. The infrequency of acquaintance with any of the great fathers of English lore marks this state of things. 'New England is now old enough,--some there have leisure enough,--to look at all this; and the consequence is a violent reaction, in a small minority, against a mode of culture that rears such fruits. They see that political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions--vital religion; and, seeing that these changes cannot be wrought from without inwards, they are trying to quicken the soul, that they may work from within outwards. Disgusted with the vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy, they become radicals; disgusted with the materialistic working of "rational" religion, they become mystics. They quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough. They would, perhaps, be patient if they thought this the mere sensuality of childhood in our nation, which it might outgrow; but they think that they see the evil widening, deepening,--not only debasing the life, but corrupting the thought, of our people, and they feel that if they know not well what should be done, yet that the duty of every good man is to utter a protest against what is done amiss. 'Is this protest undiscriminating? are these opinions crude? do these proceedings threaten to sap the bulwarks on which men at present depend? I confess it all, yet I see in these men promise of a better wisdom than in their opponents. Their hope for man is grounded on his destiny as an immortal soul, and not as a mere comfort-loving inhabitant of earth, or as a subscriber to the social contract. It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul. Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual. In these principles I have confidence so profound, that I am not afraid to trust those who hold them, despite their partial views, imperfectly developed characters, and frequent want of practical sagacity. I believe, if they have opportunity to state and discuss their opinions, they will gradually sift them, ascertain their grounds and aims with clearness, and do the work this country needs. I hope for them as for "the leaven that is hidden in the bushel of meal, till all be leavened." The leaven is not good by itself, neither is the meal; let them combine, and we shall yet have bread. 'Utopia it is impossible to build up. At least, my hopes for our race on this one planet are more limited than those of most of my friends. I accept the limitations of human nature, and believe a wise acknowledgment of them one of the best conditions of progress. Yet every noble scheme, every poetic manifestation, prophesies to man his eventual destiny. And were not man ever more sanguine than facts at the moment justify, he would remain torpid, or be sunk in sensuality. It is on this ground that I sympathize with what is called the "Transcendental party," and that I feel their aim to be the true one. They acknowledge in the nature of man an arbiter for his deeds,--a standard transcending sense and time,--and are, in my view, the true utilitarians. They are but at the beginning of their course, and will, I hope, learn how to make use of the past, as well as to aspire for the future, and to be true in the present moment. 'My position as a woman, and the many private duties which have filled my life, have prevented my thinking deeply on several of the great subjects which these friends have at heart. I suppose, if ever I become capable of judging, I shall differ from most of them on important points. But I am not afraid to trust any who 'are true, and in intent noble, with their own course, nor to aid in enabling them to express their thoughts, whether I coincide with them or not. 'On the subject of Christianity, my mind is clear. If Divine, it will stand the test of any comparison. I believe the reason it has so imperfectly answered to the aspirations of its Founder is, that men have received it on external grounds. I believe that a religion, thus received, may give the life an external decorum, but will never open the fountains of holiness in the soul. 'One often thinks of Hamlet as the true representative of idealism in its excess. Yet if, in his short life, man be liable to some excess, should we not rather prefer to have the will palsied like Hamlet, by a deep-searching tendency and desire for poetic perfection, than to have it enlightened by worldly sagacity, as in the case of Julius Cæsar, or made intense by pride alone, as in that of Coriolanus? 'After all, I believe it is absurd to attempt to speak on these subjects within the limits of a letter. I will try to say what I mean in print some day. Yet one word as to "the material," in man. Is it not the object of all philosophy, as well as of religion and poetry, to prevent its prevalence? Must not those who see most truly be ever making statements of the truth to combat this sluggishness, or worldliness? What else are sages, poets, preachers, born to do? Men go an undulating course,--sometimes on the hill, sometimes in the valley. But he only is in the right who in the valley forgets not the hill-prospect, and knows in darkness that the sun will rise again. That is the real life which is subordinated to, not merged in, the ideal; he is only wise who can bring the lowest act of his life into sympathy with its highest thought. And this I take to be the one only aim of our pilgrimage here. I agree with those who think that no true philosophy will try to ignore or annihilate the material part of man, but will rather seek to put it in its place, as servant and minister to the soul.' VI. THE WOMAN. * * * * * In 1839 I had met Margaret upon the plane of intellect. In the summer of 1840, on my return from the West, she was to be revealed in a new aspect. It was a radiant and refreshing morning, when I entered the parlor of her pleasant house, standing upon a slope beyond Jamaica Plain to the south. She was absent at the moment, and there was opportunity to look from the windows on a cheerful prospect, over orchards and meadows, to the wooded hills and the western sky. Presently Margaret appeared, bearing in her hand a vase of flowers, which she had been gathering in the garden. After exchange of greetings, her first words were of the flowers, each of which was symbolic to her of emotion, and associated with the memory of some friend. I remember her references only to the Daphne Odora, the Provence Rose, the sweet-scented Verbena, and the Heliotrope; the latter being her chosen emblem, true bride of the sun that it is. From flowers she passed to engravings hanging round the room. 'Here,' said she, 'are Dante and Beatrice. "Approach, and know that I am Beatrice. The power of ancient love was strong within me." 'She is beautiful enough, is not she, for that higher moment? But Dante! Yet who could paint a Dante,--and Dante in heaven? They give but his shadow, as he walked in the forest-maze of earth. Then here is the Madonna del Pesce; not divine, like the Foligno, not deeply maternal, like the Seggiola, not the beätified "Mother of God" of the Dresden gallery, but graceful, and "not too bright and good for human nature's daily food." And here is Raphael himself, the young seer of beauty, with eyes softly contemplative, yet lit with central fires,' &c. There were gems, too, and medallions and seals, to be examined, each enigmatical, and each blended by remembrances with some fair hour of her past life. Talk on art led the way to Greece and the Greeks, whose mythology Margaret was studying afresh. She had been culling the blooms of that poetic land, and could not but offer me leaves from her garland. She spoke of the statue of Minerva-Polias, cut roughly from an olive-tree, yet cherished as the heaven-descended image of the most sacred shrine, to which was due the Panathenaic festival. 'The less ideal perfection in the figure, the greater the reverence of the adorer. Was not this because spiritual imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence to unfold Olympic splendors?' She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane erected in its place:-- 'This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in which life's earliest experiences become glorified by our perfecting destiny?' 'In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose, a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice;--who can read that riddle? '"Better is it," said Appollonius, "on entering a small shrine to find there a statue of gold and ivory, than in a large temple to behold only a coarse figure of terra cotta." How often, after leaving with disgust the so-called great affairs of men, do we find traces of angels' visits in quiet scenes of home. 'The Hours and the Graces appear as ornaments on all thrones and shrines, except those of Vulcan and Pluto. Alas for us, when we become so sunk in utilitarian toil as to be blind to the beauty with which even common cares are daily wreathed!' And so on and on, with myth and allusion. Next, Margaret spoke of the friends whose generosity had provided the decorations on her walls, and the illustrated books for her table,--friends who were fellow-students in art, history, or science,--friends whose very life she shared. Her heart seemed full to overflow with sympathy for their joys and sorrows, their special trials and struggles, their peculiar tendencies of character and respective relations. The existence of each was to her a sacred process, whose developments she watched with awe, and whose leadings she reverently sought to aid. She had scores of pretty anecdotes to tell, sweet bowers of sentiment to open, significant lessons of experience to interpret, and scraps of journals or letters to read aloud, as the speediest means of introducing me to her chosen circle. There was a fascinating spell in her piquant descriptions, and a genial glow of sympathy animated to characteristic movement the figures, who in varying pantomime replaced one another on the theatre of her fancy. Frost-bound New England melted into a dreamland of romance beneath the spice-breeze of her Eastern narrative. Sticklers for propriety might have found fault at the freedom with which she confided her friends' histories to one who was a comparative stranger to them; but I could not but note how conscientiousness reined in her sensibilities and curbed their career, as they reached the due bounds of privacy. She did but realize one's conception of the transparent truthfulness that will pervade advanced societies of the future, where the very atmosphere shall be honorable faith. Nearer and nearer Margaret was approaching a secret throned in her heart that day; and the preceding transitions were but a prelude of her orchestra before the entrance of the festal group. Unconsciously she made these preparations for paying worthy honors to a high sentiment. She had lately heard of the betrothal of two of her best-loved friends; and she wished to communicate the graceful story in a way that should do justice to the facts and to her own feelings. It was by a spontaneous impulse of her genius, and with no voluntary foreshaping, that she had grouped the previous tales; but no drama could have been more artistically constructed than the steps whereby she led me onward to the denouement; and the look, tone, words, with which she told it, were fluent with melody as the song of an improvisatrice. Scarcely had she finished, when, offering some light refreshment,--as it was now past noon,--she proposed a walk in the open air. She led the way to Bussey's wood, her favorite retreat during the past year, where she had thought and read, or talked with intimate friends. We climbed the rocky path, resting a moment or two at every pretty point, till, reaching a moss-cushioned ledge near the summit, she seated herself. For a time she was silent, entranced in delighted communion with the exquisite hue of the sky, seen through interlacing boughs and trembling leaves, and the play of shine and shadow over the wide landscape. But soon, arousing from her reverie, she took up the thread of the morning's talk. My part was to listen; for I was absorbed in contemplating this, to me, quite novel form of character. It has been seen how my early distaste for Margaret's society was gradually changed to admiration. Like all her friends, I had passed through an avenue of sphinxes before reaching the temple. But now it appeared that thus far I had never been admitted to the adytum. As, leaning on one arm, she poured out her stream of thought, turning now and then her eyes full upon me, to see whether I caught her meaning, there was leisure to study her thoroughly. Her temperament was predominantly what the physiologists would call nervous-sanguine; and the gray eye, rich brown hair and light complexion, with the muscular and well-developed frame, bespoke delicacy balanced by vigor. Here was a sensitive yet powerful being, fit at once for rapture or sustained effort, intensely active, prompt for adventure, firm for trial. She certainly had not beauty; yet the high arched dome of the head, the changeful expressiveness of every feature, and her whole air of mingled dignity and impulse, gave her a commanding charm. Especially characteristic were two physical traits. The first was a contraction of the eyelids almost to a point,--a trick caught from near-sightedness,--and then a sudden dilation, till the iris seemed to emit flashes;--an effect, no doubt, dependent on her highly-magnetized condition. The second was a singular pliancy of the vertebræ and muscles of the neck, enabling her by a mere movement to denote each varying emotion; in moments of tenderness, or pensive feeling, its curves were swan-like in grace, but when she was scornful or indignant it contracted, and made swift turns like that of a bird of prey. Finally, in the animation, yet _abandon_ of Margaret's attitude and look, were rarely blended the fiery force of northern, and the soft languor of southern races. Meantime, as I was thus, through her physiognomy, tracing the outlines of her spiritual form, she was narrating chapters from the book of experience. How superficially, heretofore, had I known her! We had met chiefly as scholars. But now I saw before me one whose whole life had been a poem,--of boundless aspiration and hope almost wild in its daring,--of indomitable effort amidst poignant disappointment,--of widest range, yet persistent unity. Yes! here was a poet in deed, a true worshipper of Apollo, who had steadfastly striven to brighten and make glad existence, to harmonize all jarring and discordant strings, to fuse most hard conditions and cast them in a symmetric mould, to piece fragmentary fortunes into a mosaic symbol of heavenly order. Here was one, fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought, sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirit pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of her fate she keenly felt. But the tragedy of Margaret's history was deeper yet. Behind the poet was the woman,--the fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was the confession that her heart had found no home. A "book-worm," "a dilettante," "a pedant," I had heard her sneeringly called; but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin pride, and her absorption in study the natural vent of emotions, which had met no object worthy of life-long attachment. At once, many of her peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitution of fancy for fact,--which had annoyed me during the previous season, as inconsistent in a person of such capacious judgment and sustained self-government,--were now referred to the morbid influence of affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness, by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst upon me, and as, rapidly recalling the past, I saw how faithful she had kept to her high purposes,--how patient, gentle, and thoughtful for others, how active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she had been,--I could not but bow to her in reverence. We walked back to the house amid a rosy sunset, and it was with no surprise that I heard her complain of an agonizing nervous headache, which compelled her at once to retire, and call for assistance. As for myself, while going homeward, I reflected with astonishment on the unflagging spiritual energy with which, for hour after hour, she had swept over lands and seas of thought, and, as my own excitement cooled, I became conscious of exhaustion, as if a week's life had been concentrated in a day. The interview, thus hastily sketched, may serve as a fair type of our usual intercourse. Always I found her open-eyed to beauty, fresh for wonder, with wings poised for flight, and fanning the coming breeze of inspiration. Always she seemed to see before her, "A shape all light, which with one hand did fling Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn, And the invisible rain did ever sing A silver music on the mossy lawn." Yet more and more distinctly did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow in her thought and speech, like the wail of an Æolian harp heard at intervals from some upper window. She had never met one who could love her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed. Through the mask of slight personal defects and ungraceful manners, of superficial hauteur and egotism, and occasional extravagance of sentiment, no equal had recognized the rare beauty of her spirit. She was yet alone. Among her papers remains this pathetic petition:-- 'I am weary of thinking. I suffer great fatigue from living. Oh God, take me! take me wholly! Thou knowest that I love none but Thee. All this beautiful poesy of my being lies in Thee. Deeply I feel it. I ask nothing. Each desire, each passionate feeling, is on the surface only; inmostly Thou keepest me strong and pure. Yet always to be thus going out into moments, into nature, and love, and thought! Father, I am weary! Reassume me for a while, I pray Thee. Oh let me rest awhile in Thee, Thou only Love! In the depth of my prayer I suffer much. Take me only awhile. No fellow-being will receive me. I cannot pause; they will not detain me by their love. Take me awhile, and again I will go forth on a renewed service. It is not that I repine, my Father, but I sink from want of rest, and none will shelter me. Thou knowest it all. Bathe me in the living waters of Thy Love.' VII. THE FRIEND. * * * * * Yet, conscious as she was of an unfulfilled destiny, and of an undeveloped being, Margaret was no pining sentimentalist. The gums oozing from wounded boughs she burned as incense in her oratory; but in outward relations she was munificent with sympathy. 'Let me be, Theodora, a bearer of heavenly gifts to my fellows,' is written in her journals, and her life fulfilled the aspiration. The more one observed her, the more surprising appeared the variety, earnestness, and constancy of her friendships. Far and wide reached her wires of communication, and incessant was the interchange of messages of good-will. She was never so preoccupied and absorbed as to deny a claimant for her affectionate interest; she never turned her visitors back upon themselves, mortified and vexed at being misunderstood. With delicate justice she appreciated the special form, force, tendency of utterly dissimilar characters and her heart responded to every appeal alike of humblest suffering or loftiest endeavor. In the plain, yet eloquent phrase of the backwoodsman, "the string of her door-latch was always out," and every wayfarer was free to share the shelter of her roof, or a seat beside her hearth-stone. Or, rather, it might be said, in symbol of her wealth of spirit, her palace, with its galleries of art, its libraries and festal-halls, welcomed all guests who could enjoy and use them. She was, indeed, The Friend. This was her vocation. She bore at her girdle a golden key to unlock all caskets of confidence. Into whatever home she entered she brought a benediction of truth, justice, tolerance, and honor; and to every one who sought her to confess, or seek counsel, she spoke the needed word of stern yet benignant wisdom. To how many was the forming of her acquaintance an era of renovation, of awakening from sloth, indulgence or despair, to heroic mastery of fate, of inward serenity and strength, of new-birth to real self-hood, of catholic sympathies, of energy consecrated to the Supreme Good. Thus writes to her one who stands among the foremost in his own department: "What I am I owe, in large measure, to the stimulus you imparted. You roused my heart with high hopes; you raised my aims from paltry and vain pursuits to those which tasked and fed the soul; you inspired me with a great ambition, and made me see the worth and meaning of life; you awakened in me confidence in my own powers, showed me my special and distinct ability, and quickened my individual consciousness by intelligent sympathy with tendencies and feelings which I but half understood; you gave me to myself. This is a most benign influence to exercise, and for it, above all other benefits, gratitude is due. Therefore have you an inexhaustible bank of gratitude to draw from. Bless God that he has allotted to you such a ministry." The following extracts from her letters will show how profusely Margaret poured out her treasures upon her friends; but they reveal, too, the painful processes of alchemy whereby she transmuted her lead into gold. 'Your idea of friendship apparently does not include intellectual intimacy, as mine does, but consists of mutual esteem and spiritual encouragement. This is the thought represented, on antique gems and bas-reliefs, of the meeting between God and Goddess, I find; for they rather offer one another the full flower of being, than grow together. As in the figures before me, Jupiter, king of Gods and men, meets Juno, the sister and queen, not as a chivalric suppliant, but as a stately claimant; and she, crowned, pure, majestic, holds the veil aside to reveal herself to her august spouse.' * * * * * 'How variously friendship is represented in literature! Sometimes the two friends kindle beacons from afar to apprize one another that they are constant, vigilant, and each content in his several home. Sometimes, two pilgrims, they go different routes in service of the same saint, and remember one another as they give alms, learn wisdom, or pray in shrines along the road. Sometimes, two knights, they bid farewell with mailed hand of truth and honor all unstained, as they ride forth on their chosen path to test the spirit of high emprise, and free the world from wrong,--to meet again for unexpected succor in the hour of peril, or in joyful surprise to share a frugal banquet on the plat of greensward opening from forest glades. Sometimes, proprietors of two neighboring estates, they have interviews in the evening to communicate their experiments and plans, or to study together the stars from an observatory; if either is engaged he simply declares it; they share enjoyments cordially; they exchange praise or blame frankly; in citizen-like good-fellowship they impart their gains. 'All these views of friendship are noble and beautiful, yet they are not enough for our manifold nature. Friends should be our incentives to Right, yet not only our guiding, but our prophetic stars. To love by sight is much, to love by faith is more; together they make up the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. Friends should love not merely for the absolute worth of each to the other, but on account of a mutual fitness of character. They are not merely one another's priests or gods, but ministering angels, exercising in their part the same function as the Great Soul does in the whole,--of seeing the perfect through the imperfect, nay, creating it there. Why am I to love my friend the less for any obstruction in his life? Is not that the very time for me to love most tenderly, when I must see his life in despite of seeming? When he shows it to me I can only admire; I do not give myself, I am taken captive. 'But how shall I express my meaning? Perhaps I can do so from the tales of chivalry, where I find what corresponds far more thoroughly with my nature, than in these stoical statements. The friend of Amadis expects to hear prodigies of valor of the absent Preux, but if he be mutilated in one of his first battles, shall he be mistrusted by the brother of his soul, more than if he had been tested in a hundred? If Britomart finds Artegall bound in the enchanter's spell, can she doubt therefore him whom she has seen in the magic glass? A Britomart does battle in his cause, and frees him from the evil power, while a dame of less nobleness might sit and watch the enchanted sleep, weeping night and day, or spur on her white palfrey to find some one more helpful than herself. These friends in chivalry are always faithful through the dark hours to the bright. The Douglas motto, "tender and true," seems to me most worthy of the strongest breast. To borrow again from Spencer, I am entirely satisfied with the fate of the three brothers. I could not die while there was yet life in my brother's breast. I would return from the shades and nerve him with twofold life for the fight. I could do it, for our hearts beat with one blood. Do you not see the truth and happiness of this waiting tenderness? The verse-- "Have I a lover Who is noble and free, I would he were nobler Than to love me,"-- does not come home to my heart, though _this_ does:-- "I could not love thee, sweet, so much, Loved I not honor more." * * * '_October 10th, 1840._--I felt singular pleasure in seeing you quote Hood's lines on "Melancholy." I thought nobody knew and loved his serious poems except myself, and two or three others, to whom I imparted them.[A] Do you like, also, the ode to Autumn, and-- "Sigh on, sad heart, for love's eclipse"? It was a beautiful time when I first read these poems. I was staying in Hallowell, Maine, and could find no books that I liked, except Hood's poems. You know how the town is built, like a terraced garden on the river's bank; I used to go every afternoon to the granite quarry which crowns these terraces, and read till the sunset came casting its last glory on the opposite bank. They were such afternoons as those in September and October, clear, soft, and radiant. Nature held nothing back. 'Tis many years since, and I have never again seen the Kennebec, but remember it as a stream of noble character. It was the first river I ever sailed up, realizing all which that emblem discloses of life. Greater still would the charm have been to sail downward along an unknown stream, seeking not a home, but a ship upon the ocean.' * * * * * '_Newbury, Oct. 18, 1840._--It rained, and the day was pale and sorrowful, the thick-fallen leaves even shrouded the river. We went out in the boat, and sat under the bridge. The pallid silence, the constant fall of the rain and leaves, were most soothing, life had been for many weeks so crowded with thought and feeling, pain and pleasure, rapture and care. Nature seemed gently to fold us in her matron's mantle. On such days the fall of the leaf does not bring sadness, only meditation. Earth seemed to loose the record of past summer hours from her permanent life, as lightly, and spontaneously, as the great genius casts behind him a literature,--the Odyssey he has outgrown. In the evening the rain ceased, the west wind came, and we went out in the boat again for some hours; indeed, we staid till the last clouds passed from the moon. Then we climbed the hill to see the full light in solemn sweetness over fields, and trees, and river. 'I never enjoyed anything more in its way than the three days alone with ---- in her boat, upon the little river. Not without reason was it that Goethe limits the days of intercourse to _three_, in the Wanderjahre. If you have lived so long in uninterrupted communion with any noble being, and with nature, a remembrance of man's limitations seems to call on Polycrates to cast forth his ring. She seemed the very genius of the scene, so calm, so lofty, and so secluded. I never saw any place that seemed to me so much like home. The beauty, though so great, is so unobtrusive. 'As we glided along the river, I could frame my community far more naturally and rationally than ----. A few friends should settle upon the banks of a stream like this, planting their homesteads. Some should be farmers, some woodmen, others bakers, millers, &c. By land, they should carry to one another the commodities; on the river they should meet for society. At sunset many, of course, would be out in their boats, but they would love the hour too much ever to disturb one another. I saw the spot where we should discuss the high mysteries that Milton speaks of. Also, I saw the spot where I would invite select friends to live through the noon of night, in silent communion. When we wished to have merely playful chat, or talk on politics or social reform, we would gather in the mill, and arrange those affairs while grinding the corn. What a happy place for children to grow up in! Would it not suit little ---- to go to school to the cardinal flowers in her boat, beneath the great oak-tree? I think she would learn more than in a phalanx of juvenile florists. But, truly, why has such a thing never been? One of these valleys so immediately suggests an image of the fair company that might fill it, and live so easily, so naturally, so wisely. Can we not people the banks of some such affectionate little stream? I distrust ambitious plans, such as Phalansterian organizations! '---- is quite bent on trying his experiment. I hope he may succeed; but as they were talking the other evening, I thought of the river, and all the pretty symbols the tide-mill presents, and felt if I could at all adjust the economics to the more simple procedure, I would far rather be the miller, hoping to attract by natural affinity some congenial baker, "und so weiter." However, one thing seems sure, that many persons will soon, somehow, somewhere, throw off a part, at least, of these terrible weights of the social contract, and see if they cannot lie more at ease in the lap of Nature. I do not feel the same interest in these plans, as if I had a firmer hold on life, but I listen with much pleasure to the good suggestions.' * * * * * '_Oct. 19th, 1840._ ---- was here. Generally I go out of the room when he comes, for his great excitability makes me nervous, and his fondness for detail is wearisome. But to-night I was too much fatigued to do anything else, and did not like to leave mother; so I lay on the sofa while she talked with him. 'My mind often wandered, yet ever and anon, as I listened again to him, I was struck with admiration at the compensations of Nature. Here is a man, isolated from his kind beyond any I know, of an ambitious temper and without an object of tender affections and without a love or a friend. I don't suppose any mortal, unless it be his aged mother, cares more for him than we do,--scarce any value him so much. The disease, which has left him, in the eyes of men, a scathed and blighted tree, has driven him back to Nature, and she has not refused him sympathy. I was surprised by the refinement of his observations on the animals, his pets. He has carried his intercourse with them to a degree of perfection we rarely attain with our human friends. There is no misunderstanding between him and his dogs and birds; and how rich has been the acquaintance in suggestion! Then the flowers! I liked to hear him, for he recorded all their pretty ways,--not like a botanist, but a lover. His interview with the Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain was most romantic. And what he said of the Yuca seems to me so pretty, that I will write it down, though somewhat more concisely than he told it:-- '"I had kept these plants of the Yuca Filamentosa six or seven years, though they had never bloomed. I knew nothing of them, and had no notion of what feelings they would excite. Last June I found in bud the one which had the most favorable exposure. A week or two after, another, which was more in the shade, put out flower-buds, and I thought I should be able to watch them, one after the other; but, no! the one which was most favored waited for the other, and both flowered together at the full of the moon. This struck me as very singular, but as soon as I saw the flower by moonlight I understood it. This flower is made for the moon, as the Heliotrope is for the sun, and refuses other influences or to display her beauty in any other light. '"The first night I saw it in flower, I was conscious of a peculiar delight, I may even say rapture. Many white flowers are far more beautiful by day; the lily, for instance, with its firm, thick leaf, needs the broadest light to manifest its purity. But these transparent leaves of greenish white, which look dull in the day, are melted by the moon to glistening silver. And not only does the plant not appear in its destined hue by day, but the flower, though, as bell-shaped, it cannot quite close again after having once expanded, yet presses its petals together as closely as it can, hangs down its little blossoms, and its tall stalk seems at noon to have reared itself only to betray a shabby insignificance. Thus, too, with the leaves, which have burst asunder suddenly like the fan-palm to make way for the stalk,--their edges in the day time look ragged and unfinished, as if nature had left them in a hurry for some more pleasing task. On the day after the evening when I had thought it so beautiful, I could not conceive how I had made such a mistake. '"But the second evening I went out into the garden again. In clearest moonlight stood my flower, more beautiful than ever. The stalk pierced the air like a spear, all the little bells had erected themselves around it in most graceful array, with petals more transparent than silver, and of softer light than the diamond. Their edges were clearly, but not sharply defined. They seemed to have been made by the moon's rays. The leaves, which had looked ragged by day, now seemed fringed by most delicate gossamer, and the plant might claim with pride its distinctive epithet of Filamentosa. I looked at it till my feelings became so strong that I longed to share it. The thought which filled my mind was that here we saw the type of pure feminine beauty in the moon's own flower. I have since had further opportunity of watching the Yuca, and verified these observations, that she will not flower till the full moon, and chooses to hide her beauty from the eye of day." 'Might not this be made into a true poem, if written out merely as history of the plant, and no observer introduced? How finely it harmonizes with all legends of Isis, Diana, &c.! It is what I tried to say in the sonnet,-- Woman's heaven, Where palest lights a silvery sheen diffuse. 'In tracing these correspondences, one really does take hold of a Truth, of a Divine Thought.' * * * * * * * '_October 25th, 1840._--This week I have not read any book, nor once walked in the woods and fields. I meant to give its days to setting outward things in order, and its evenings to writing. But, I know not how it is, I can never simplify my life; always so many ties, so many claims! However, soon the winter winds will chant matins and vespers, which may make my house a cell, and in a snowy veil enfold me for my prayer. If I cannot dedicate myself this time, I will not expect it again. Surely it should be! These Carnival masks have crowded on me long enough, and Lent must be at hand. * * '---- and ---- have been writing me letters, to answer which required all the time and thought I could give for a day or two. ----'s were of joyful recognition, and so beautiful I would give much to show them to you. ----'s have singularly affected me. They are noble, wise, of most unfriendly friendliness. I don't know why it is, I always seem to myself to have gone so much further with a friend than I really have. Just as at Newport I thought ---- met me, when he did not, and sang a joyful song which found no echo, so here ---- asks me questions which I thought had been answered in the first days of our acquaintance, and coldly enumerates all the charming qualities which make it impossible for him to part with me! He scolds me, though in the sweetest and solemnest way. I will not quote his words, though their beauty tempts me, for they do not apply, they do not touch ME. 'Why is it that the religion of my nature is so much hidden from my peers? why do they question me, who never question them? why persist to regard as a meteor an orb of assured hope? Can no soul know me wholly? shall I never know the deep delight of gratitude to any but the All-Knowing? I shall wait for ---- very peaceably, in reverent love as ever; but I cannot see why he should not have the pleasure of knowing now a friend, who has been "so tender and true."' * * * * * '---- was here, and spent twenty-four hours in telling me a tale of deepest tragedy. Its sad changes should be written out in Godwin's best manner: such are the themes he loved, as did also Rousseau. Through all the dark shadows shone a pure white ray, one high, spiritual character, a man, too, and of advanced age. I begin to respect men more,--I mean actual men. What men may be, I know; but the men of to-day have seemed to me of such coarse fibre, or else such poor wan shadows! '---- had scarcely gone, when ---- came and wished to spend a few hours with me. I was totally exhausted, but I lay down, and she sat beside me, and poured out all her noble feelings and bright fancies. There was little light in the room, and she gleamed like a cloud --"of pearl and opal," and reminded me more than ever of --"the light-haired Lombardess Singing a song of her own native land," to the dying Correggio, beside the fountain. 'I am astonished to see how much Bettine's book is to all these people. This shows how little courage they have had to live out themselves. She really brings them a revelation. The men wish they had been loved by Bettine; the girls wish to write down the thoughts that come, and see if just such a book does not grow up. ----, however, was one of the few who do not over-estimate her; she truly thought Bettine only publishes what many burn. Would not genius be common as light, if men trusted their higher selves?' * * * * * 'I heard in town that ---- is a father, and has gone to see his child. This news made me more grave even than such news usually does; I suppose because I have known the growth of his character so intimately. I called to mind a letter he had written me of what we had expected of our fathers. The ideal father, the profoundly wise, provident, divinely tender and benign, he is indeed the God of the human heart. How solemn this moment of being called to prepare the way, to _make way_ for another generation! What fulfilment does it claim in the character of a man, that he should be worthy to be a father!--what purity of motive, what dignity, what knowledge! When I recollect how deep the anguish, how deeper still the want, with which I walked alone in hours of childish passion, and called for a Father, often saying the word a hundred times, till stifled by sobs, how great seems the duty that name imposes! Were but the harmony preserved throughout! Could the child keep learning his earthly, as he does his heavenly Father, from all best experience of life, till at last it were the climax: "I am the Father. Have ye seen me?--ye have seen the Father." But how many sons have we to make one father? Surely, to spirits, not only purified but perfected, this must appear the climax of earthly being,--a wise and worthy parentage. Here I always sympathize with Mr. Alcott. He views the relation truly.' * * * * * '_Dec. 3, 1840._ ---- bids me regard her "as a sick child;" and the words recall some of the sweetest hours of existence. My brother Edward was born on my birth-day, and they said he should be my child. But he sickened and died just as the bud of his existence showed its first bright hues. He was some weeks wasting away, and I took care of him always half the night. He was a beautiful child, and became very dear to me then. Still in lonely woods the upturned violets show me the pleading softness of his large blue eyes, in those hours when I would have given worlds to prevent his suffering, and could not. I used to carry him about in my arms for hours; it soothed him, and I loved to feel his gentle weight of helpless purity upon my heart, while night listened around. At last, when death came, and the soul took wing like an overtasked bird from his sweet form, I felt what I feel now. Might I free ----, as that angel freed him! 'In daily life I could never hope to be an unfailing fountain of energy and bounteous love. My health is frail; my earthly life is shrunk to a scanty rill; I am little better than an aspiration, which the ages will reward, by empowering me to incessant acts of vigorous beauty. But now it is well with me to be with those who do not suffer overmuch to have me suffer. It is best for me to serve where I can better bear to fall short. I could visit ---- more nobly than in daily life, through the soul of our souls. When she named me her Priestess, that name made me perfectly happy. Long has been my consecration; may I not meet those I hold dear at the altar? How would I pile up the votive offerings, and crowd the fires with incense? Life might be full and fair; for, in my own way, I could live for my friends.' * * * * * * * '_Dec. 8th, 1840._--My book of amusement has been the Evenings of St. Petersburg. I do not find the praises bestowed on it at all exaggerated. Yet De Maistre is too logical for me. I only catch a thought here and there along the page. There is a grandeur even in the subtlety of his mind. He walks with a step so still, that, but for his dignity, it would be stealthy, yet with brow erect and wide, eye grave and deep. He is a man such as I have never known before.' * * 'I went to see Mrs. Wood in the Somnambula. Nothing could spoil this opera, which expresses an ecstasy, a trance of feeling, better than anything I ever heard. I have loved every melody in it for years, and it was happiness to listen to the exquisite modulations as they flowed out of one another, endless ripples on a river deep, wide and strewed with blossoms. I never have known any one more to be loved than Bellini. No wonder the Italians make pilgrimages to his grave. In him thought and feeling flow always in one tide; he never divides himself. He is as melancholy as he is sweet; yet his melancholy is not impassioned, but purely tender.' * * * * * '_Dec. 15, 1840._--I have not time to write out as I should this sweet story of Melissa, but here is the outline:-- 'More than four years ago she received an injury, which caused her great pain in the spine, and went to the next country town to get medical advice. She stopped at the house of a poor blacksmith, an acquaintance only, and has never since been able to be moved. Her mother and sister come by turns to take care of her. She cannot help herself in any way, but is as completely dependent as an infant. The blacksmith and his wife gave her the best room in their house, have ever since ministered to her as to a child of their own, and, when people pity them for having to bear such a burthen, they say, "It is none, but a blessing." 'Melissa suffers all the time, and great pain. She cannot amuse or employ herself in any way, and all these years has been as dependent on others for new thoughts, as for daily cares. Yet her mind has deepened, and her character refined, under those stern teachers, Pain and Gratitude, till she has become the patron saint of the village, and the muse of the village school-mistress. She has a peculiar aversion to egotism, and could not bear to have her mother enlarge upon her sufferings. '"Perhaps it will pain the lady to hear that," said the mild, religious sufferer, who had borne all without a complaint. "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." The poor are the generous: the injured, the patient and loving. All that ---- said of this girl was in perfect harmony with what De Maistre says of the saint of St. Petersburg, who, almost devoured by cancer, when, asked, "Quelle est la premiere grace que vous demanderez a Dieu, ma chére enfant, lorsque vous serez devant lui?" she replied, "Je lui demanderai pour mes bienfaiteurs la grace de Paimer autant que je l'aime." 'When they were lamenting for her, "Je ne suis pas, dit elle, aussi malheureuse que vous le croyez; Dieu me fait la grace de ne peuser, qu'a lui."' * * 'Next of Edith. Tall, gaunt, hard-favored was this candidate for the American calendar; but Bonilacia might be her name. From her earliest years she had valued all she knew, only as she was to teach it again. Her highest ambition was to be the school-mistress; her recreation to dress the little ragged things, and take care of them out of school hours. She had some taste for nursing the grown-up, but this was quite subordinate to her care of the buds of the forest. Pure, perfectly beneficent, lived Edith, and never thought of any thing or person, but for its own sake. When she had attained midway the hill of life, she happened to be boarding in the house with a young farmer, who was lost in admiration of her lore. How he wished he, too, could read! "What, can't you read? O, let me teach you!"--"You never can; I was too thick-skulled to learn even at school. I am sure I never could now." But Edith was not to be daunted by any fancies of incapacity, and set to work with utmost zeal to teach this great grown man the primer. She succeeded, and won his heart thereby. He wished to requite the raising him from the night of ignorance, as Howard and Nicholas Poussin did the kind ones who raised them from the night of the tomb, by the gift of his hand. Edith consented, on condition that she might still keep school. So he had his sister come to "keep things straight." Edith and he go out in the morning,--he to his field, she to her school, and meet again at eventide, to talk, and plan and, I hope, to read also. 'The first use Edith made of her accession of property through her wedded estate, was to give away all she thought superfluous to a poor family she had long pitied, and to invite a poor sick woman to her "spare chamber." Notwithstanding a course like this, her husband has grown rich, and proves that the pattern of the widow's cruse was not lost in Jewry. 'Edith has become the Natalia of the village, as is Melissa its "Schöne Seele."' * * * * * '_Dec., 22, 1840._--"Community" seems dwindling to a point, and I fancy the best use of the plan, as projected thus far, will prove the good talks it has caused here, upon principles. I feel and find great want of wisdom in myself and the others. We are not ripe to reconstruct society yet. O Christopher Columbus! how art thou to be admired, when we see how other men go to work with their lesser enterprises! ---- knows deepest what he wants, but not well how to get it. ---- has a better perception of means, and less insight as to principles; but this movement has done him a world of good. All should say, however, that they consider this plan as a mere experiment, and are willing to fail. I tell them that they are not ready till they can say that. ---- says he can bear to be treated unjustly by all concerned,--which is much. He is too sanguine, as it appears to me, but his aim is worthy, and, with his courage and clear intellect, his experiment will not, at least to him, be a failure.' * * * * * '_Feb. 19, 1841._--Have I never yet seen so much as _one_ of my spiritual family? The other night they sat round me, so many who have thought they loved, or who begin to love me. I felt myself kindling the same fire in all their souls. I looked on each, and no eye repelled me. Yet there was no warmth for me on all those altars. Their natures seemed deep, yet there was 'not one from which I could draw the living fountain. I could only cheat the hour with them, prize, admire, and pity. It was sad; yet who would have seen sadness in me? * * 'Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling. Nature vindicates her rights, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust. This cannot last long; I shall burn to ashes if all this smoulders here much longer. I must die if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism. 'I meant to have translated the best passages of "Die Gunderode,"--which I prefer to Bettine's correspondence with Goethe. The two girls are equal natures, and both in earnest. Goethe made a puppet-show, for his private entertainment, of Bettine's life, and we wonder she did not feel he was not worthy of her homage. Gunderode is to me dear and admirable, Bettine only interesting. Gunderode is of religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it found for them by fate.' * * * * * '_March_ 29. 1841.--* * Others have looked at society with far deeper consideration than I. I have felt so unrelated to this sphere, that it has not been hard for me to be true. Also, I do not believe in Society. I feel that every man must struggle with these enormous ills, in some way, in every age; in that of Moses, or Plato, or Angelo, as in our own. So it has not moved me much to see my time so corrupt, but it would if I were in a false position. '---- went out to his farm yesterday, full of cheer, as one who doeth a deed with sincere good will. He has shown a steadfastness and earnestness of purpose most grateful to behold. I do not know what their scheme will ripen to; at present it does not deeply engage my hopes. It is thus far only a little better way than others. I doubt if they will get free from all they deprecate in society.' * * * * * '_Paradise Farm, Newport, July, 1841._--Here are no deep forests, no stern mountains, nor narrow, sacred valleys; but the little white farm-house looks down from its gentle slope on the boundless sea, and beneath the moon, beyond the glistening corn-fields, is heard the endless surge. All around the house is most gentle and friendly, with many common flowers, that seem to have planted themselves, and the domestic honey-suckle carefully trained over the little window. Around are all the common farm-house sounds,--the poultry making a pleasant recitative between the carols of singing birds; even geese and turkeys are not inharmonious when modulated by the diapasons of the beach. The orchard of very old apple-trees, whose twisted forms tell of the glorious winds that have here held revelry, protects a little homely garden, such as gives to me an indescribable refreshment, where the undivided vegetable plots and flourishing young fruit-trees, mingling carelessly, seem as if man had dropt the seeds just where he wanted the plants, and they had sprung up at once. The family, too, look, at first glance, well-suited to the place,--homely, kindly, unoppressed, of honest pride and mutual love, not unworthy to look out upon the far-shining sea. 'Many, many sweet little things would I tell you, only they are so very little. I feel just now as if I could live and die here. I am out in the open air all the time, except about two hours in the early morning. And now the moon is fairly gone late in the evening. While she was here, we staid out, too. Everything seems sweet here, so homely, so kindly; the old people chatting so contentedly, the young men and girls laughing together in the fields,--not vulgarly, but in the true kinsfolk way,--little children singing in the house and beneath the berry-bushes. The never-ceasing break of the surf is a continual symphony, calming the spirits which this delicious air might else exalt too much. Everything on the beach becomes a picture; the casting the seine, the ploughing the deep for seaweed. This, when they do it with horses, is prettiest of all; but when you see the oxen in the surf, you lose all faith in the story of Europa, as the gay waves tumble in on their lazy sides. The bull would be a fine object on the shore, but not, not in the water. Nothing short of a dolphin will do! Late to-night, from the highest Paradise rocks, seeing ---- wandering, and the horsemen careering on the beach, so spectrally passing into nature, amid the pale, brooding twilight, I almost thought myself in the land of souls! 'But in the morning it is life, all cordial and common. This half-fisherman, half-farmer life seems very favorable to manliness. I like to talk with the fishermen; they are not boorish, not limited, but keen-eyed, and of a certain rude gentleness. Two or three days ago I saw the sweetest picture. There is a very tall rock, one of the natural pulpits, at one end of the beach. As I approached, I beheld a young fisherman with his little girl; he had nestled her into a hollow of the rock, and was standing before her, with his arms round her, and looking up in her face. Never was anything so pretty. I stood and stared, country fashion; and presently he scrambled up to the very top with her in his arms. She screamed a little as they went, but when they were fairly up on the crest of the rock, she chuckled, and stretched her tiny hand over his neck, to go still further. Yet, when she found he did not wish it, she leaned against his shoulder, and he sat, feeling himself in the child like that exquisite Madonna, and looking out over the great sea. Surely, the "kindred points of heaven and home" were known in his breast, whatever guise they might assume. 'The sea is not always lovely and bounteous, though generally, since we have been here, she has beamed her bluest. The night of the full moon we staid out on the far rocks. The afternoon was fair: the sun set nobly, wrapped in a violet mantle, which he left to the moon, in parting. She not only rose red, lowering, and of impatient attitude, but kept hiding her head all the evening with an angry, struggling movement. ---- said, "This is not Dian;" and I replied, "No; now we see the Hecate." But the damp, cold wind came sobbing, and the waves began wailing, too, till I was seized with a feeling of terror, such as I never had before, even in the darkest, and most treacherous, rustling wood. The moon seemed sternly to give me up to the dæmons of the rock, and the waves to mourn a tragic chorus, till I felt their cold grasp. I suffered so much, that I feared we should never get home without some fatal catastrophe. Never was I more relieved than when, as we came up the hill, the moon suddenly shone forth. It was ten o'clock, and here every human sound is hushed, and lamp put out at that hour. How tenderly the grapes and tall corn-ears glistened and nodded! and the trees stretched out their friendly arms, and the scent of every humblest herb was like a word of love. The waves, also, at that moment put on a silvery gleam, and looked most soft and regretful. That was a real voice from nature.' * * * * * '_February_, 1842.--I am deeply sad at the loss of little Waldo, from whom I hoped more than from almost any living being. I cannot yet reconcile myself to the thought that the sun shines upon the grave of the beautiful blue-eyed boy, and I shall see him no more. 'Five years he was an angel to us, and I know not that any person was ever more the theme of thought to me. As I walk the streets they swarm with apparently worthless lives, and the question will rise, why he, why just he, who "bore within himself the golden future," must be torn away? His father will meet him again; but to me he seems lost, and yet that is weakness. I _must_ meet that which he represented, since I so truly loved it. He was the only child I ever saw, that I sometimes wished I could have called mine. 'I loved him more than any child I ever knew, as he was of nature more fair and noble. You would be surprised to know how dear he was to my imagination. I saw him but little, and it was well; for it is unwise to bind the heart where there is no claim. But it is all gone, and is another of the lessons brought by each year, that we are to expect suggestions only, and not fulfilments, from each form of beauty, and to regard them merely as Angels of The Beauty.' * * * * * '_June, 1842._--Why must children be with perfect people, any more than people wait to be perfect to be friends? The secret is,--is it not?--for parents to feel and be willing their children should know that they are but little older than themselves: only a class above, and able to give them some help in learning their lesson. Then parent and child keep growing together, in the same house. Let them blunder as we blundered. God is patient for us; why should not we be for them? Aspiration teaches always, and God leads, by inches. A perfect being would hurt a child no less than an imperfect.' * * * * * 'It always makes my annoyances seem light, to be riding about to visit these fine houses. Not that I am intolerant towards the rich, but I cannot help feeling at such times how much characters require the discipline of difficult circumstances. To say nothing of the need the soul has of a peace and courage that cannot be disturbed, even as to the intellect, how can one be sure of not sitting down in the midst of indulgence to pamper tastes alone, and how easy to cheat one's self with the fancy that a little easy reading or writing is quite work. I am safer; I do not sleep on roses. I smile to myself, when with these friends, at their care of me. I let them do as they will, for I know it will not last long enough to spoil me.' * * * * * 'I take great pleasure in talking with Aunt Mary.[B] Her strong and simple nature checks not, falters not. Her experience is entirely unlike mine, as, indeed, is that of most others whom I know. No rapture, no subtle process, no slow fermentation in the unknown depths, but a rill struck out from the rock, clear and cool in all its course, the still, small voice. She says the guide of her life has shown itself rather as a restraining, than an impelling principle. I like her life, too, as far as I see it; it is dignified and true.' * * * * * '_Cambridge, July_, 1842.--A letter at Providence would have been like manna in the wilderness. I came into the very midst of the fuss,[C] and, tedious as it was at the time, I am glad to have seen it. I shall in future be able to believe real, what I have read with a dim disbelief of such times and tendencies. There is, indeed, little good, little cheer, in what I have seen: a city full of grown-up people as wild, as mischief-seeking, as full of prejudice, careless slander, and exaggeration, as a herd of boys in the play-ground of the worst boarding-school. Women whom I have seen, as the domestic cat, gentle, graceful, cajoling, suddenly showing the disposition, if not the force, of the tigress. I thought I appreciated the monstrous growths of rumor before, but I never did. The Latin poet, though used to a court, has faintly described what I saw and heard often, in going the length of a street. It is astonishing what force, purity and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods. These absurdities, of course, are linked with good qualities, with energy of feeling, and with a love of morality, though narrowed and vulgarized by the absence of the intelligence which should enlighten. I had the good discipline of trying to make allowance for those making none, to be charitable to their want of charity, and cool without being cold. But I don't know when I have felt such an aversion to my environment, and prayed so earnestly day by day,--"O, Eternal! purge from my inmost heart this hot haste about ephemeral trifles," and "keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me." 'What a change from the almost vestal quiet of "Aunt Mary's" life, to all this open-windowed, open-eyed screaming of "poltroon," "nefarious plan," "entire depravity," &c. &c.' * * * * * _'July, 1842. Boston_.--I have been entertaining the girls here with my old experiences at Groton. They have been very fresh in my mind this week. Had I but been as wise in such matters then as now, how easy and fair I might have made the whole! Too late, too late to live, but not too late to think! And as that maxim of the wise Oriental teaches, "the Acts of this life shall be the Fate of the next."' * * * 'I would have my friends tender of me, not because I am frail, but because I am capable of strength;--patient, because they see in me a principle that must, at last, harmonize all the exuberance of my character. I did not well understand what you felt, but I am willing to admit that what you said of my "over-great impetuosity" is just. You will, perhaps, feel it more and more. It may at times hide my better self. When it does, speak, I entreat, as harshly as you feel. Let me be always sure I know the worst I believe you will be thus just, thus true, for we are both servants of Truth.' * * * * * '_August, 1842. Cambridge._--Few have eyes for the pretty little features of a scene. In this, men are not so good as boys. Artists are always thus young; poets are; but the pilgrim does not lay aside his belt of steel, nor the merchant his pack, to worship the flowers on the fountain's brink. I feel, like Herbert, the weight of "business to be done," but the bird-like particle would skim and sing at these sweet places. It seems strange to leave them; and that we do so, while so fitted to live deeply in them, shows that beauty is the end but not the means. 'I have just been reading the new poems of Tennyson. Much has he thought, much suffered, since the first ecstasy of so fine an organization clothed all the world with rosy light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of fancy and passion, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life, and his conclusions are calmly noble. In these later verses is a still, deep sweetness; how different from the intoxicating, sensuous melody of his earlier cadence! I have loved him much this time, and taken him to heart as a brother. One of his themes has long been my favorite,--the last expedition of Ulysses,--and his, like mine, is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, with his deep romance of wisdom, and not the worldling of the Iliad. How finely marked his slight description of himself and of Telemachus. In Dora, Locksley Hall, the Two Voices, Morte D'Arthur, I find my own life, much of it, written truly out.' * * * * * _Concord, August 25. 1842._--Beneath this roof of peace, beneficence, and intellectual activity, I find just the alternation of repose and satisfying pleasure that I need. * * * 'Do not find fault with the hermits and scholars. The true text is:-- "Mine own Telemachus He does his work--I mine." 'All do the work, whether they will or no; but he is "mine own Telemachus" who does it in the spirit of religion, never believing that the last results can be arrested in any one measure or set of measures, listening always to the voice of the Spirit,--and who does this more than ----? 'After the first excitement of intimacy with him,--when I was made so happy by his high tendency, absolute purity, the freedom and infinite graces of an intellect cultivated much beyond any I had known,--came with me the questioning season. I was greatly disappointed in my relation to him. I was, indeed, always called on to be worthy,--this benefit was sure in our friendship. But I found no intelligence of my best self; far less was it revealed to me in new modes; for not only did he seem to want the living faith which enables one to discharge this holiest office of a friend, but he absolutely distrusted me in every region of my life with which he was unacquainted. The same trait I detected in his relations with others. He had faith in the Universal, but not in the Individual Man: he met men, not as a brother, but as a critic. Philosophy appeared to chill instead of exalting the poet. 'But now I am better acquainted with him. His "accept" is true; the "I shall learn," with which he answers every accusation, is no less true. No one can feel his limitations, in fact, more than he, though he always speaks confidently from his present knowledge as all he has yet, and never qualifies or explains. He feels himself "shut up in a crystal cell," from which only "a great love or a great task could release me," and hardly expects either from what remains in this life. But I already see so well how these limitations have fitted him for his peculiar work, that I can no longer quarrel with them; while from his eyes looks out the angel that must sooner or later break every chain. Leave him in his cell affirming absolute truth; protesting against humanity, if so he appears to do; the calm observer of the courses of things. Surely, "he keeps true to his thought, which is the great matter." He has already paid his debt to his time; how much more he will give we cannot know; but already I feel how invaluable is a cool mind, like his, amid the warring elements around us. As I look at him more by his own law, I understand him better; and as I understand him better, differences melt away. My inmost heart blesses the fate that gave me birth in the same clime and time, and that has drawn me into such a close bond with him as, it is my hopeful faith, will never be broken, but from sphere to sphere ever more hallowed. * * * 'What did you mean by saying I had imbibed much of his way of thought? I do indeed feel his life stealing gradually into mine; and I sometimes think that my work would have been more simple, and my unfolding to a temporal activity more rapid and easy, if we had never met. But when I look forward to eternal growth, I am always aware that I am far larger and deeper for him. His influence has been to me that of lofty assurance and sweet serenity. He says, I come to him as the European to the Hindoo, or the gay Trouvére to the Puritan in his steeple hat. Of course this implies that our meeting is partial. I present to him the many forms of nature and solicit with music; he melts them all into spirit and reproves performance with prayer. When I am with God alone, I adore in silence. With nature I am filled and grow only. With most men I bring words of now past life, and do actions suggested by the wants of their natures rather than my own. But he stops me from doing anything, and makes me think.' * * * * * _October_, 1842 * * To me, individually, Dr. Channing's kindness was great; his trust and esteem were steady, though limited, and I owe him a large debt of gratitude. 'His private character was gentle, simple, and perfectly harmonious, though somewhat rigid and restricted in its operations. It was easy to love, and a happiness to know him, though never, I think, a source of the highest social pleasure to be with him. His department was ethics; and as a literary companion, he did not throw himself heartily into the works of creative genius, but looked, wherever he read, for a moral. In criticism he was deficient in "individuality," if by that the phrenologists mean the power of seizing on the peculiar meanings of special forms. I have heard it said, that, under changed conditions, he might have been a poet. He had, indeed, the poetic sense of a creative spirit working everywhere. Man and nature were living to him; and though he did not yield to sentiment in particulars he did in universals. But his mind was not recreative, or even representative. 'He was deeply interesting to me as having so true a respect for woman. This feeling in him was not chivalrous; it was not the sentiment of an artist; it was not the affectionateness of the common son of Adam, who knows that only her presence can mitigate his loneliness; but it was a religious reverence. To him she was a soul with an immortal destiny. Nor was there at the bottom of his heart one grain of masculine assumption. He did not wish that Man should protect her, but that God should protect her and teach her the meaning of her lot. 'In his public relations he is to be regarded not only as a check upon the evil tendencies of his era, but yet more as a prophet of a better age already dawning as he leaves us. In his later days he filled yet another office of taking the middle ground between parties. Here he was a fairer figure than ever before. His morning prayer was, "Give me more light; keep my soul open to the light;" and it was answered. He steered his middle course with sails spotless and untorn. He was preserved in a wonderful degree from the prejudices of his own past, the passions of the present, and the exaggerations of those who look forward to the future. In the writings where, after long and patient survey, he sums up the evidence on both sides, and stands umpire, with the judicial authority of a pure intent, a steadfast patience, and a long experience, the mild wisdom of age is beautifully tempered by the ingenuous sweetness of youth. These pieces resemble charges to a jury; they have always been heard with affectionate deference, if not with assent, and have, exerted a purifying influence.' * * * * * * * '_November, 1842._--When souls meet direct and all secret thoughts are laid open, we shall need no forbearance, no prevention, no care-taking of any kind. Love will be pure light, and each action simple,--too simple to be noble. But there will not be always so much to pardon in ourselves and others. Yesterday we had at my class a conversation on Faith. Deeply true things were said and felt. But to-day the virtue has gone out of me; I have accepted all, and yet there will come these hours of weariness,--weariness of human nature in myself and others. "Could ye not watch one hour?" Not one faithfully through! * * To speak with open heart and "tongue affectionate and true,"--to enjoy real repose and the consciousness of a thorough mutual understanding in the presence of friends when we do meet, is what is needed. That being granted, I do believe I should not wish any surrender of time or thought from a human being. But I have always a sense that I cannot meet or be met _in haste_; as ---- said he could not look at the works of art in a chance half-hour, so cannot I thus rudely and hastily turn over the leaves of any mind. In peace, in stillness that permits the soul to flow, beneath the open sky, I would see those I love.' [Footnote A: This was some years before their reprint in this country, it should be noticed.] [Footnote B: Miss Rotch, of New Bedford.] [Footnote C: The Dorr rebellion.] VIII. SOCIALISM. * * * * * In the preceding extracts will have been noticed frequent reference to the Association Movement, which, during the winter of 1840-41, was beginning to appear simultaneously at several points in New England. In Boston and its vicinity several friends, for whose characters Margaret felt the highest honor, and with many of whose views, theoretic and practical, she accorded, were earnestly considering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and educational arrangements, as would simplify economies, combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of caste, equalize refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole. Chief among these was the Rev. George Ripley, who, convinced by his experience in a faithful ministry, that the need was urgent for a thorough application of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about staking his all of fortune, reputation, position, and influence, in an attempt to organize a joint-stock community at Brook Farm. How Margaret was inclined to regard this movement has been already indicated. While at heart sympathizing with the heroism that prompted it, in judgment she considered it premature. But true to her noble self, though regretting the seemingly gratuitous sacrifice of her friends, she gave them without stint the cheer of her encouragement and the light of her counsel. She visited them often; entering genially into their trials and pleasures, and missing no chance to drop good seed in every furrow upturned by the ploughshare or softened by the rain. In the secluded yet intensely animated circle of these co-workers I frequently met her during several succeeding years, and rejoice to bear testimony to the justice, magnanimity, wisdom, patience, and many-sided good-will, that governed her every thought and deed. The feelings with which she watched the progress of this experiment are thus exhibited in her journals:-- 'My hopes might lead to Association, too,--an association, if not of efforts, yet of destinies. In such an one I live with several already, feeling that each one, by acting out his own, casts light upon a mutual destiny, and illustrates the thought of a mastermind. It is a constellation, not a phalanx, to which I would belong.' * * * * * 'Why bind oneself to a central or any doctrine? How much nobler stands a man entirely unpledged, unbound! Association may be the great experiment of the age, still it is only an experiment. It is not worth while to lay such stress on it; let us try it, induce others to try it,--that is enough.' * * * * * 'It is amusing to see how the solitary characters tend to outwardness,--to association,--while the social and sympathetic ones emphasize the value of solitude,--of concentration,--so that we hear from each the word which, from his structure, we least expect.' * * * * * 'On Friday I came to Brook Farm. The first day or two here is desolate. You seem to belong to nobody--to have a right to speak to nobody; but very soon you learn to take care of yourself, and then the freedom of the place is delightful. 'It is fine to see how thoroughly Mr. and Mrs. R. act out, in their own persons, what they intend. 'All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground: The aim is perfection; patience the road. The present object is to give ourselves and others a tolerable chance. Let us not be too ambitious in our hopes as to immediate results. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approximation only. Parents and teachers expect to do too much. They are not legislators, but only interpreters to the next generation. Soon, very soon, does the parent become merely the elder brother of his child;--a little wiser, it is to be hoped. ---- differed from me as to some things I said about the gradations of experience,--that "to be brought prematurely near perfect beings would chill and discourage." He thought it would cheer and console. He spoke well,--with a youthful nobleness. ---- said "that the most perfect person would be the most impersonal"--philosophical bull that, I trow--"and, consequently, would impede us least from God." Mr. R. spoke admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the _sans-culotte_ tendency in their manners,--throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough. Yet, as the majority differ from me, to begin with,--that being the reason this subject was chosen,--they showed, on the whole, more respect and interest than I had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation which my part requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual. Still, I should like to have to face all this; it would have the same good effects that the Athenian assemblies had on the minds obliged to encounter them. 'Sunday. A glorious day;--the woods full of perfume. I was out all the morning. In the afternoon, Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here, as I could not work. ---- said:--"They would all like to work for a person of genius. They would not like to have this service claimed from them, but would like to render it of their own accord." "Yes," I told her; "but where would be my repose, when they were always to be judging whether I was worth it or not. It would be the same position the clergyman is in, or the wandering beggar with his harp. Each day you must prove yourself anew. You are not in immediate relations with material things." 'We talked of the principles of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because all the confidence in it I had was as an _experiment_ worth trying, and that it was a part of the great wave of inspired thought. ---- declared they none of them had confidence beyond this; but they seem to me to have. Then I said, "that though I entirely agreed about the dignity of labor, and had always wished for the present change, yet I did not agree with the principle of paying for services by time;[A] neither did I believe in the hope of excluding evil, for that was a growth of nature, and one condition of the development of good." We had valuable discussion on these points. 'All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and, by every day's observation of me, will see that she ought not to have done it.' * * * * * 'In the evening, a husking in the barn. Men, women, and children, all engaged. It was a most picturesque scene, only not quite light enough to bring it out fully. I staid and helped about half an hour, then took a long walk beneath the stars.' * * * * * 'Wednesday. I have been too much absorbed to-day by others, and it has made me almost sick. Mrs. ---- came to see me, and we had an excellent talk, which occupied nearly all the morning. Then Mrs. ---- wanted to see me, but after a few minutes I found I could not bear it, and lay down to rest. Then ---- came. Poor man;--his feelings and work are wearing on him. He looks really ill now. Then ---- and I went to walk in the woods. I was deeply interested in all she told me. If I were to write down all she and four other married women have confided to me, these three days past, it would make a cento, on one subject, in five parts. Certainly there should be some great design in my life; its attractions are so invariable.' * * * * * 'In the evening, a conversation on Impulse. The reason for choosing this subject is the great tendency here to advocate spontaneousness, at the expense of reflection. It was a much better conversation than the one before. None yawned, for none came, this time, from mere curiosity. There were about thirty-five present, which is a large enough circle. Many engaged in the talk. I defended nature, as I always do;--the spirit ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated to-night the claims of Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk. ---- spoke well. She seemed in a much more reverent humor than the other night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled. ----, seated on the floor, with the light falling from behind on his long gold locks, made, with sweet, serene aspect, and composed tones, a good exposé of his way of viewing things.' * * * * * 'Saturday. Well, good-by, Brook Farm. I know more about this place than I did when I came; but the only way to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in trying it. Some good things are proven, and as for individuals, they are gainers. Has not ---- vied, in her deeds of love, with "my Cid," and the holy Ottilia? That girl who was so rude to me stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-by. Truly, the soft answer turneth away wrath. 'I have found myself here in the amusing position of a conservative. Even so is it with Mr. R. There are too many young people in proportion to the others. I heard myself saying, with a grave air, "Play out the play, gentles." Thus, from generation to generation, rises and falls the wave.' Again, a year afterward, she writes:-- 'Here I have passed a very pleasant week. The tone of the society is much sweeter than when I was here a year ago. There is a pervading spirit of mutual tolerance and gentleness, with great sincerity. There is no longer a passion for grotesque freaks of liberty, but a disposition, rather, to study and enjoy the liberty of law. The great development of mind and character observable in several instances, persuades me that this state of things affords a fine studio for the soul-sculptor. To a casual observer it may seem as if there was not enough of character here to interest, because there are no figures sufficiently distinguished to be worth painting for the crowd; but there is enough of individuality in free play to yield instruction; and one might have, from a few months' residence here, enough of the human drama to feed thought for a long time.' Thus much for Margaret's impressions of Brook Farm and its inmates. What influence she in turn exerted on those she met there, may be seen from the following affectionate tribute, offered by one of the young girls alluded to in the journal:-- "Would that I might aid even slightly, in doing justice to the noble-hearted woman whose departure we must all mourn. But I feel myself wholly powerless to do so; and after I explain what my relation to her was, you will understand how this can be, without holding me indolent or unsympathetic. "When I first met Miss Fuller, I had already cut from my moorings, and was sailing on the broad sea of experience, conscious that I possessed unusual powers of endurance, and that I should meet with sufficient to test their strength. She made no offer of guidance, and once or twice, in the succeeding year, alluded to the fact that she 'had never helped me.' This was in a particular sense, of course, for she helped all who knew her. She was interested in my rough history, but could not be intimate, in any just sense, with a soul so unbalanced, so inharmonious as mine then was. For my part, I reverenced her. She was to me the embodiment of wisdom and tenderness. I heard her converse, and, in the rich and varied intonations of her voice, I recognized a being to whom every shade of sentiment was familiar. She knew, if not by experience then by no questionable intuition, how to interpret the inner life of every man and woman; and, by interpreting, she could soothe and strengthen. To her, psychology was an open book. When she came to Brook Farm, it was my delight to wait on one so worthy of all service,--to arrange her late breakfast in some remnants of ancient China, and to save her, if it might be, some little fatigue or annoyance, during each day. After a while she seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard." Being a confirmed Socialist, I often had occasion to discuss with Margaret the problems involved in the "Combined Order" of life; and though unmoved by her scepticism, I could not but admire the sagacity, foresight, comprehensiveness, and catholic sympathy with which she surveyed this complicated subject. Her objections, to be sure, were of the usual kind, and turned mainly upon two points,--the difficulty of so allying labor and capital as to secure the hoped-for coöperation, and the danger of merging the individual in the mass to such degree as to paralyze energy, heroism, and genius; but these objections were urged in a way that brought out her originality and generous hopes. There was nothing abject, timid, or conventional in her doubts. The end sought she prized; but the means she questioned. Though pleased in listening to sanguine visions of the future, she was slow to credit that an organization by "Groups and Series" would yield due incentive for personal development, while ensuring equilibrium through exact and universal justice. She felt, too, that Society was not a machine to be put together and set in motion, but a living body, whose breath must be Divine inspiration, and whose healthful growth is only hindered by forcing. Finally, while longing as earnestly as any Socialist for "Liberty and Law made one in living union," and assured in faith that an era was coming of "Attractive Industry" and "Harmony," she was still for herself inclined to seek sovereign independence in comparative isolation. Indeed, at this period, Margaret was in spirit and in thought preëminently a Transcendentalist. [Footnote A: This was a transitional arrangement only.] IX. CREDO. * * * * * In regard to Transcendentalism again, there was reason to rejoice in having found a friend, so firm to keep her own ground, while so liberal to comprehend another's stand-point, as was Margaret. She knew, not only theoretically, but practically, how endless are the diversities of human character and of Divine discipline, and she reverenced fellow-spirits too sincerely ever to wish to warp them to her will, or to repress their normal development. She was stern but in one claim, that each should be faithful to apparent leadings of the Truth; and could avow widest differences of conviction without feeling that love was thereby chilled, or the hand withheld from cordial aid. Especially did she render service by enabling one,--through her blended insight, candor, and clearness of understanding,--to see in bright reflection his own mental state. It would be doing injustice to a person like Margaret, always more enthusiastic than philosophical, to attribute to her anything like a system of theology; for, hopeful, reverent, aspiring, and free from scepticism, she felt too profoundly the vastness of the universe and of destiny ever to presume that with her span rule she could measure the Infinite. Yet the tendency of her thoughts can readily be traced in the following passages from note-books and letters:-- 'When others say to me, and not without apparent ground, that "the Outward Church is a folly which keeps men from enjoying the communion of the Church Invisible, and that in the desire to be helped by, and to help others, men lose sight of the only sufficient help, which they might find by faithful solitary intentness of spirit," I answer it is true, and the present deadness and emptiness summon us to turn our thoughts in that direction. Being now without any positive form of religion, any unattractive symbols, or mysterious rites, we are in the less danger of stopping at surfaces, of accepting a mediator instead of the Father, a sacrament instead of the Holy Ghost. And when I see how little there is to impede and bewilder us, I cannot but accept,--should it be for many years,--the forlornness, the want of fit expression, the darkness as to what is to be expressed, even that characterize our time. 'But I do not, therefore, as some of our friends do, believe that it will always be so, and that the church is tottering to its grave, never to rise again. The church was the growth of human nature, and it is so still. It is but one result of the impulse which makes two friends clasp one another's hands, look into one another's eyes at sight of beauty, or the utterance of a feeling of piety. So soon as the Spirit has mourned and sought, and waited long enough to open new depths, and has found something to express, there will again be a Cultus, a Church. The very people, who say that none is needed, make one at once. They talk with, they write to one another. They listen to music, they sustain themselves with the poets; they like that one voice should tell the thoughts of several minds, one gesture proclaim that the same life is at the same moment in many breasts. 'I am myself most happy in my lonely Sundays, and do not feel the need of any social worship, as I have not for several years, which I have passed in the same way. Sunday is to me priceless as a day of peace and solitary reflection. To all who will, it may be true, that, as Herbert says:-- "Sundays the pillars are On which Heaven's palace arched lies; The other days fill up the space And hollow room with vanities;" and yet in no wise "vanities," when filtered by the Sunday crucible. After much troubling of the waters of my life, a radiant thought of the meaning and beauty of earthly existence will descend like a healing angel. The stillness permits me to hear a pure tone from the One in All. But often I am not alone. The many now, whose hearts, panting for truth and love, have been made known to me, whose lives flow in the same direction as mine, and are enlightened by the same star, are with me. I am in church, the church invisible, undefiled by inadequate expression. Our communion is perfect; it is that of a common aspiration; and where two or three are gathered together in one region, whether in the flesh or the spirit, He will grant their request. Other communion would be a happiness,--to break together the bread of mutual thought, to drink the wine of loving life,--but it is not necessary. 'Yet I cannot but feel that the crowd of men whose pursuits are not intellectual, who are not brought by their daily walk into converse with sages and poets, who win their bread from an earth whose mysteries are not open to them, whose worldly intercourse is more likely to stifle than to encourage the sparks of love and faith in their breasts, need on that day quickening more than repose. The church is now rather a lecture-room than a place of worship; it should be a school for mutual instruction. I must rejoice when any one, who lays spiritual things to heart, feels the call rather to mingle with men, than to retire and seek by himself. 'You speak of men going up to worship by "households," &c. Were the actual family the intellectual family, this might be; but as social life now is, how can it? Do we not constantly see the child, born in the flesh to one father, choose in the spirit another? No doubt this is wrong, since the sign does not stand for the thing signified, but it is one feature of the time. How will it end? Can families worship together till it does end? * * * * * 'I have let myself be cheated out of my Sunday, by going to hear Mr. ----. As he began by reading the first chapter of Isaiah, and the fourth of John's Epistle, I made mental comments with pure delight. "Bring no more vain oblations." "Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God." "We know that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because he hath given us of the Spirit." Then pealed the organ, full of solemn assurance. But straightway uprose the preacher to deny mysteries, to deny the second birth, to deny influx, and to renounce the sovereign gift of insight, for the sake of what he deemed a "_rational_" exercise of will. As he spoke I could not choose but deny him all through, and could scarce refrain from rising to expound, in the light of my own faith, the words of those wiser Jews which had been read. Was it not a sin to exchange friendly greeting as we parted, and yet tell him no word of what was in my mind? 'Still I saw why he looked at things as he did. The old religionists did talk about "grace, conversion," and the like, technically, without striving to enter into the idea, till they quite lost sight of it. Undervaluing the intellect, they became slaves of a sect, instead of organs of the Spirit. This Unitarianism has had its place. There was a time for asserting "the dignity of human nature," and for explaining total depravity into temporary inadequacy,--a time to say that the truths of _essence_, if simplified at all in statement from their infinite variety of existence, should be spoken of as One, rather than Three, though that number, if they would only let it reproduce itself simply, is of highest significance. Yet the time seems now to have come for reinterpreting the old dogmas. For one I would now preach the Holy Ghost as zealously as they have been preaching Man, and faith instead of the understanding, and mysticism instead &c. But why go on? It certainly is by no means useless to preach. In my experience of the divine gifts of solitude, I had forgotten what might be done in this other way. That crowd of upturned faces, with their look of unintelligent complacency! Give tears and groans, rather, if there be a mixture of physical excitement and bigotry. Mr. ---- is heard because, though he has not entered into the secret of piety, he wishes to be heard, and with a good purpose,--can make a forcible statement, and kindle himself with his own thoughts. How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone, since they are content with so little! Can none wake the spark that will melt them, till they take beautiful forms? Were one to come now, who could purge us with fire, how would these masses glow and be clarified! 'Mr. ---- made a good suggestion:--"Such things could not be said in the open air." Let men preach for the open air, and speak now thunder and lightning, now dew and rustling leaves. Yet must the preacher have the thought of his day before he can be its voice. None have it yet; but some of our friends, perhaps, are nearer than the religious world at large, because neither ready to dogmatize, as if they had got it, nor content to stop short with mere impressions and presumptuous hopes. I feel that a great truth is coming. Sometimes it seems as if we should have it among us in a day. Many steps of the Temple have been ascended, steps of purest alabaster, and of shining jasper, also of rough-brick, and slippery moss-grown stone. We shall reach what we long for, since we trust and do not fear, for our God knows not fear, only reverence, and his plan is All in All.' * * * * * 'Who can expect to utter an absolutely pure and clear tone on these high subjects? Our earthly atmosphere is too gross to permit it. Yet, a severe statement has rather an undue charm for me, as I have a nature of great emotion, which loves free abandonment. I am ready to welcome a descending Moses, come to turn all men from idolatries. For my priests have been very generally of the Pagan greatness, revering nature and seeking excellence, but in the path of progress, not of renunciation. The lyric inspirations of the poet come very differently on the ear from the "still, small voice." They are, in fact, all one revelation; but one must be at the centre to interpret it. To that centre I have again and again been drawn, but my large natural life has been, as yet, but partially transfused with spiritual consciousness. I shun a premature narrowness, and bide my time. But I am drawn to look at natures who take a different way, because they seem to complete my being for me. They, too, tolerate me in my many phases for the same reason, probably. It pleased me to see, in one of the figures by which the Gnostics illustrated the progress of man, that Severity corresponded to Magnificence.' * * * * * 'In my quiet retreat, I read Xenophon, and became more acquainted with his Socrates. I had before known only the Socrates of Plato, one much more to my mind. Socrates conformed to the Greek Church, and it is evident with a sincere reverence, because it was the growth of the _national_ mind. He thought best to stand on its platform, and to illustrate, though with keen truth, by received forms. This was his right way, as his influence was naturally private, for individuals who could in some degree respond to the teachings of his dæmon; he knew the multitude would not understand him. But it was the other way that Jesus took, preaching in the fields, and plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath.' * * * * * 'Is it my defect of spiritual experience, that while that weight of sagacity, which is the iron to the dart of genius, is needful to satisfy me, the undertone of another and a deeper knowledge does not please, does not command me? Even in Handel's Messiah, I am half incredulous, half impatient, when the sadness of the second part comes to check, before it interprets, the promise of the first; and the strain, "Was ever sorrow like to his sorrow," is not for me, as I have been, as I am. Yet Handel was worthy to speak of Christ. The great chorus, "Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead; for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive," if understood in the large sense of every man his own Saviour, and Jesus only representative of the way all must walk to accomplish our destiny, is indeed a worthy gospel.' * * * * * 'Ever since ---- told me how his feelings had changed towards Jesus, I have wished much to write some sort of a Credo, out of my present state, but have had no time till last night. I have not satisfied myself in the least, and have written very hastily, yet, though not full enough to be true, this statement is nowhere false to me. * * * 'Whatever has been permitted by the law of being, must be for good, and only in time not good. We trust, and are led forward by experience. Light gives experience of outward life, faith of inward life, and then we discern, however faintly, the necessary harmony of the two. The moment we have broken through an obstruction, not accidentally, but by the aid of faith, we begin to interpret the Universe, and to apprehend why evil is permitted. Evil is obstruction; Good is accomplishment. 'It would seem that the Divine Being designs through man to express distinctly what the other forms of nature only intimate, and that wherever man remains imbedded in nature, whether from sensuality, or because he is not yet awakened to consciousness, the purpose of the whole remains unfulfilled. Hence our displeasure when Man is not in a sense above Nature. Yet, when he is not so closely bound with all other manifestations, as duly to express their Spirit, we are also displeased. He must be at once the highest form of Nature, and conscious of the meaning she has been striving successively to unfold through those below him. Centuries pass; whole races of men are expended in the effort to produce one that shall realize this Ideal, and publish Spirit in the human form. Here and there is a degree of success. Life enough is lived through a man, to justify the great difficulties attendant on the existence of mankind. And then throughout all realms of thought vibrates the affirmation, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." 'I do not mean to lay an undue stress upon the position and office of man merely because I am of his race, and understand best the scope of his destiny. The history of the earth, the motions of the heavenly bodies, suggest already modes of being higher than ours, and which fulfil more deeply the office of interpretation. But I do suppose man's life to be the rivet in one series of the great chain, and that all higher existences are analogous to his. Music suggests their mode of being, and, when carried up on its strong wings, we foresee how the next step in the soul's ascension shall interpret man to the universe, as he now interprets those forms beneath himself. * * 'The law of Spirit is identical, whether displaying itself as genius, or as piety, but its modes of expression are distinct dialects. All souls desire to become the fathers of souls, as citizens, legislators, poets, artists, sages, saints; and, so far as they are true to the law of their incorruptible essence, they are all Anointed, all Emanuel, all Messiah; but they are all brutes and devils so far as subjected to the law of corruptible existence. 'As wherever there is a tendency a form is gradually evolved, as its Type,--so is it the law of each class and order of human thoughts to produce a form which shall be the visible representation of its aim and strivings, and stand before it as its King. This effort to produce a kingly type it was, that clothed itself with power as Brahma or Osiris, that gave laws as Confucius or Moses, that embodied music and eloquence in the Apollo. This it was that incarnated itself, at one time as Plato, at another as Michel Angelo, at another as Luther, &c. Ever seeking, it has produced Ideal after Ideal of the beauty, into which mankind is capable of being developed; and one of the highest, in some respects the very highest, of these kingly types, was the life of Jesus of Nazareth. 'Few believe more in his history than myself, and it is very dear to me. I believe, in my own way, in the long preparation of ages for his coming, and the truth of prophecy that announced him. I see a necessity, in the character of Jesus, why Abraham should have been the founder of his nation, Moses its lawgiver, and David its king and poet. I believe in the genesis of the patriarchs, as given in the Old Testament. I believe in the prophets,--that they foreknew not only what their nation longed for, but what the development of universal Man requires,--a Redeemer, an Atoner, a Lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world. I believe that Jesus came when the time was ripe, and that he was peculiarly a messenger and Son of God. I have nothing to say in denial of the story of his birth; whatever the actual circumstances were, he was born of a Virgin, and the tale expresses a truth of the soul. I have no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please one's feelings. Why should not a spirit, so consecrate and intent, develop new laws, and make matter plastic? I can imagine him walking the waves, without any violation of my usual habits of thought. He could not remain in the tomb, they say; certainly not,--death is impossible to such a being. He remained upon earth; most true, and all who have met him since on the way, have felt their hearts burn within them. He ascended to heaven; surely, how could it be otherwise? 'Would I could express with some depth what I feel as to religion in my very soul; it would be a clear note of calm assurance. But for the present this must suffice with regard to Christ. I am grateful here, as everywhere, when Spirit bears fruit in fulness; it attests the justice of aspiration, it kindles faith, it rebukes sloth, it enlightens resolve. But so does a beautiful infant. Christ's life is only one modification of the universal harmony. I will not loathe sects, persuasions, systems, though I cannot abide in them one moment, for I see that by most men they are still needed. To them their banners, their tents; let them be Fire-worshippers, Platonists, Christians; let them live in the shadow of past revelations. But, oh, Father of our souls, the One, let me seek Thee! I would seek Thee in these forms, and in proportion as they reveal Thee, they teach me to go beyond themselves. I would learn from them all, looking only to Thee! But let me set no limits from the past, to my own soul, or to any soul. 'Ages may not produce one worthy to loose the shoes of the Prophet of Nazareth; yet there will surely be another manifestation of that Word which was in the beginning. And all future manifestations will come, like Christianity, "not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil." The very greatness of this manifestation demands a greater. As an Abraham called for a Moses, and a Moses for a David, so does Christ for another Ideal. We want a life more complete and various than that of Christ. We have had a Messiah to teach and reconcile; let us now have a Man to live out all the symbolical forms of human life, with the calm beauty of a Greek God, with the deep consciousness of a Moses, with the holy love and purity of Jesus.' X. SELF-SOVEREIGNTY. * * * * * To one studying the signs of the times, it was quite instructive to watch the moods of a mind so sensitive as Margaret's; for her delicate meter indicated in advance each coming change in the air-currents of thought. But I was chiefly interested in the processes whereby she was gaining harmony and unity. The more one studied her, the more plainly he saw that her peculiar power was the result of fresh, fervent, exhaustless, and indomitable affections. The emotive force in her, indeed, was immense in volume, and most various in tendency; and it was wonderful to observe the outward equability of one inwardly so impassioned. This was, in fact, the first problem to be solved in gaining real knowledge of her commanding character: "How did a person, by constitution so impetuous, become so habitually serene?" In temperament Margaret seemed a Bacchante,[A] prompt for wild excitement, and fearless to tread by night the mountain forest, with song and dance of delirious mirth; yet constantly she wore the laurel in token of purification, and, with water from fresh fountains, cleansed the statue of Minerva. Stagnancy and torpor were intolerable to her free and elastic impulses; a brilliant fancy threw over each place and incident Arcadian splendor; and eager desire, with energetic purposes, filled her with the consciousness of large latent life: and yet the lower instincts were duly subordinated to the higher, and dignified self-control ordered her deportment. Somehow, according to the doctrine of the wise Jacob Boehme, the fierce, hungry fire had met in embrace the meek, cool water, and was bringing to birth the pleasant light-flame of love. The transformation, though not perfected, was fairly begun. Partly I could see how this change had been wrought. Ill health, pain, disappointment, care, had tamed her spirits. A wide range through the romantic literature of ancient and modern times had exalted while expending her passions. In the world of imagination, she had discharged the stormful energy which would have been destructive in actual life. And in thought she had bound herself to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Through sympathy, also, from childhood, with the tragi-comedy of many lives around her, she had gained experience of the laws and limitations of providential order. Gradually, too, she had risen to higher planes of hope, whence opened wider prospects of destiny and duty. More than all, by that attraction of opposites which a strong will is most apt to feel, she had sought, as chosen companions, persons of scrupulous reserve, of modest coolness, and severe elevation of view. Finally, she had been taught, by a discipline specially fitted to her dispositions, to trust the leadings of the Divine Spirit. The result was, that at this period Margaret had become a Mystic. Her prisoned emotions found the freedom they pined for in contemplation of nature's exquisite harmonies,--in poetic regards of the glory that enspheres human existence, when seen as a whole from beyond the clouds,--and above all in exultant consciousness of life ever influent from the All-Living. A few passages from, her papers will best illustrate this proneness to rapture. 'My tendency is, I presume, rather to a great natural than to a deep religious life. But though others may be more conscientious and delicate, few have so steady a faith in Divine Love. I may be arrogant and impetuous, but I am never harsh and morbid. May there not be a mediation, rather than a conflict, between piety and genius? Greek and Jew, Italian and Saxon, are surely but leaves on one stern, at last.' * * * * * 'I am in danger of giving myself up to experiences till they so steep me in ideal passion that the desired goal is forgotten in the rich present. Yet I think I am learning how to use life more wisely.' * * * * * 'Forgive me, beautiful ones, who earlier learned the harmony of your beings,--with whom eye, voice, and hand are already true to the soul! Forgive me still some "lispings and stammerings of the passionate age." Teach me,--me, also,--to utter my paean in its full sweetness. These long lines are radii from one centre; aid me to fill the circumference. Then each moment, each act, shall be true. The pupil has found the carbuncle,[B] but knows not yet how to use it day by day. But "though his companions wondered at the pupil, the master loved him." He loves me, my friends. Do ye trust me. Wash the tears and black stains from the records of my life by the benignity of a true glance; make each discord harmony, by striking again the key-note; forget the imperfect interviews, burn the imperfect letters, till at last the full song bursts forth, the key-stone is given from heaven to the arch, the past is all pardoned and atoned for, and we live forever in the Now.' * * * * * * * 'Henceforth I hope I shall not write letters thus full of childish feeling; for in feeling I am indeed a child, and the least of children. Soon I must return into the Intellect, for _there_ in sight, at least, I am a man, and could write the words very calmly and in steadfast flow. But, lately, the intellect has been so subordinated to the soul, that I am not free to enter the Basilikon, and plead and hear till I am called. But let me not stay too long in this Sicilian valley, gathering my flowers, for "night cometh."' * * * * * 'The other evening, while hearing the Creation, in the music of "There shoots the healing plant," I felt what I would ever feel for suffering souls. Somewhere in nature is the Moly, the Nepenthe, desired from the earliest ages of mankind. No wonder the music dwelt so exultingly on the passage:-- "In native worth and honor clad." Yes; even so would I ever see man. I will wait, and never despair, through all the dull years.' * * * * * 'I am "too fiery." Even so. Ceres put her foster child in the fire because she loved him. If they thought so before, will they not far more now? Yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything. Let my friends be patient and gentle, and teach me to be so. I never promised any one patience or gentleness, for those beautiful traits are not natural to me; but I would learn them. Can I not?' * * * * * 'Of all the books, and men, and women, that have touched me these weeks past, what has most entered my soul is the music I have heard,--the masterly expression from that violin; the triumph of the orchestra, after the exploits on the piano; Braham, in his best efforts, when he kept true to the dignity of art; the Messiah, which has been given on two successive Sundays, and the last time in a way that deeply expressed its divine life; but above all, Beethoven's seventh symphony. What majesty! what depth! what tearful sweetness! what victory! This was truly a fire upon an altar. There are a succession of soaring passages, near the end of the third movement, which touch me most deeply. Though soaring, they hold on with a stress which almost breaks the chains of matter to the hearer. O, how refreshing, after polemics and philosophy, to soar thus on strong wings! Yes, Father, I will wander in dark ways with the crowd, since thou seest best for me to be tied down. But only in thy free ether do I know myself. When I read Beethoven's life, I said, "I will never repine." When I heard this symphony, I said, "I will triumph." * * * * * 'To-day I have finished the life of Raphael, by Quatremere de Quincy, which has so long engaged me. It scarce goes deeper than a _catalogue raisonnée_, but is very complete in its way. I could make all that splendid era alive to me, and inhale the full flower of the Sanzio. Easily one soars to worship these angels of Genius. To venerate the Saints you must well nigh be one. 'I went out upon the lonely rock which commands so delicious a panoramic view. A very mild breeze had sprung up after the extreme heat. A sunset of the melting kind was succeeded by a perfectly clear moon-rise. Here I sat, and thought of Raphael. I was drawn high up in the heaven of beauty, and the mists were dried from the white plumes of contemplation.'#/ 'Only by emotion do we know thee, Nature. To lean upon thy heart, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own;--that is knowledge, for that is love, the love of infinite beauty, of infinite love. Thought will never make us be born again. 'My fault is that I think I feel _too much_. O that my friends would teach me that "simple art of not too much!" How can I expect them to bear the ceaseless eloquence of my nature?' * * * * * 'Often it has seemed that I have come near enough to the limits to see what they are. But suddenly arises afar the Fata Morgana, and tells of new Sicilies, of their flowery valleys and fields of golden grain. Then, as I would draw near, my little bark is shattered on the rock, and I am left on the cold wave. Yet with my island in sight I do not sink.' * * * * * 'I look not fairly to myself, at the present moment. If noble growths are always slow, others may ripen far worthier fruit than is permitted to my tropical heats and tornadoes. Let me clasp the cross on my breast, as I have done a thousand times before.' 'Let me but gather from the earth one full-grown fragrant flower; Within my bosom let it bloom through, its one blooming hour; Within my bosom let it die, and to its latest breath My own shall answer, "Having lived, I shrink not now from death." It is this niggard halfness that turns my heart to stone; 'T is the cup seen, not tasted, that makes the infant moan. For once let me press firm my lips upon the moment's brow, For once let me distinctly feel I am all happy now, And bliss shall seal a blessing upon that moment's brow.' 'I was in a state of celestial happiness, which lasted a great while. For months I was all radiant with faith, and love, and life. I began to be myself. Night and day were equally beautiful, and the lowest and highest equally holy. Before, it had seemed as if the Divine only gleamed upon me; but then it poured into and through me a tide of light. I have passed down from the rosy mountain, now; but I do not forget its pure air, nor how the storms looked as they rolled beneath my feet. I have received my assurance, and if the shadows should lie upon me for a century, they could never make me forgetful of the true hour. Patiently I bide my time.' The last passage describes a peculiar illumination, to which Margaret often referred as the period when her earthly being culminated, and when, in the noon-tide of loving enthusiasm, she felt wholly at one with God, with Man, and the Universe. It was ever after, to her, an earnest that she was of the Elect. In a letter to one of her confidential female friends, she thus fondly looks back to this experience on the mount of transfiguration:-- 'You know how, when the leadings of my life found their interpretation, I longed to share my joy with those I prized most; for I felt that if they could but understand the past we should meet entirely. They received me, some more, some less, according to the degree of intimacy between our natures. But now I have done with the past, and again move forward. The path looks more difficult, but I am better able to bear its trials. We shall have much communion, even if not in the deepest places. I feel no need of isolation, but only of temperance in thought and speech, that the essence may not evaporate in words, but grow plenteous within. The Life will give me to my own. I am not yet so worthy to love as some others are, because my manifold nature is not yet harmonized enough to be faithful, and I begin, to see how much it was the want of a pure music in me that has made the good doubt me. Yet have I been true to the best light I had, and if I am so now much will be given. 'During my last weeks of solitude I was very happy, and all that had troubled me became clearer. The angel was not weary of waiting for Gunhilde, till she had unravelled her mesh of thought, and seeds of mercy, of purification, were planted in the breast. Whatever the past has been, I feel that I have always been reading on and on, and that the Soul of all souls has been patient in love to mine. New assurances were given me, that if I would be faithful and humble, there was no experience that would not tell its heavenly errand. If shadows have fallen, already they give way to a fairer if more tempered light; and for the present I am so happy that the spirit kneels. 'Life, is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope: and I take it to my breast. Amid these scenes of beauty, all that is little, foreign, unworthy, vanishes like a dream. So shall it be some time amidst the Everlasting Beauty, when true joy shall begin and never cease.' Filled thus as Margaret was with ecstasy, she was yet more than willing,--even glad,--to bear her share in the universal sorrow. Well she knew that pain must be proportioned to the fineness and fervor of her organization; that the very keenness of her sensibility exposed her to constant disappointment or disgust; that no friend, however faithful, could meet the demands of desires so eager, of sympathies so absorbing. Contrasted with her radiant visions, how dreary looked actual existence; how galling was the friction of petty hindrances; how heavy the yoke of drudging care! Even success seemed failure, when measured by her conscious aim; and experience had brought out to consciousness excesses and defects, which humbled pride while shaming self-confidence. But suffering as she did with all the intensity of so passionate a nature, Margaret still welcomed the searching discipline. 'It is only when Persephone returns from lower earth that she weds Dyonysos, and passes from central sadness into glowing joy,' she writes. And again: 'I have no belief in beautiful lives; we are born to be mutilated; and the blood must flow till in every vein its place is supplied by the Divine ichor.' And she reiterates: 'The method of Providence with me is evidently that of "cross-biassing," as Herbert hath it. In a word, to her own conscience and to intimate friends she avowed, without reserve, that there was in her 'much rude matter that needed to be spiritualized.' Comment would but weaken the pathos of the following passages, in which so plainly appears a once wilful temper striving, with child-like faith, to obey:-- 'I have been a chosen one; the lesson of renunciation was early, fully taught, and the heart of stone quite broken through. The Great Spirit wished to leave me no refuge but itself. Convictions have been given, enough to guide me many years if I am steadfast. How deeply, how gratefully I feel this blessing, as the fabric of others' hopes are shivering round me. Peace will not always flow thus softly in my life; but, O, our Father! how many hours has He consecrated to Himself. How often has the Spirit chosen the time, when no ray came from without, to descend upon the orphan life!' * * * * * 'A humbler, tenderer spirit! Yes, I long for it. But how to gain it? I see no way but prayerfully to bend myself to meet the hour. Let friends be patient with me, and pardon some faint-heartedness. The buds will shiver in the cold air when the sheaths drop. It will not be so long. The word "Patience" has been spoken; it shall be my talisman. A nobler courage will be given, with gentleness and humility. My conviction is clear that all my troubles are needed, and that one who has had so much light thrown upon the path, has no excuse for faltering steps.' * * * * * 'Could we command enthusiasm; had we an interest with the gods which would light up those sacred fires at will, we should be even seraphic in our influences. But life, if not a complete waste of wearisome hours, must be checkered with them; and I find that just those very times, when I feel all glowing and radiant in the happiness of receiving and giving out again the divine fluid, are preludes to hours of languor, weariness, and paltry doubt, born of--- "The secret soul's mistrust To find her fair ethereal wings Weighed down by vile, degraded dust." 'To this, all who have chosen or been chosen to a life of thought must submit. Yet I rejoice in my heritage. Should I venture to complain? Perhaps, if I were to reckon up the hours of bodily pain, those passed in society with which I could not coalesce, those of ineffectual endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature and of art, or, worse still, to reproduce the beautiful in some way for myself, I should find they far outnumbered those of delightful sensation, of full and soothing thought, of gratified tastes and affections, and of proud hope. Yet these last, if few, how lovely, how rich in presage! None, who have known them, can in their worst estate fail to hope that they may be again upborne to higher, purer blue.' * * * * * 'As I was steeped in the divine tenth book of the Republic, came ----'s letter, in which he so insultingly retracts his engagements. I finished the book obstinately, but could get little good of it; then went to ask comfort of the descending sun in the woods and fields. What a comment it was on the disparity between my pursuits and my situation to receive such a letter while reading that book! However, I will not let life's mean perplexities blur from my eye the page of Plato; nor, if natural tears must be dropt, murmur at a lot, which, with all its bitterness, has given time and opportunity to cherish an even passionate love for Truth and Beauty.' * * * * * 'Black Friday it has been, and my heart is well nigh wearied out. Shall I never be able to act and live with persons of views high as my own? or, at least, with some steadiness of feeling for me to calculate upon? Ah, me! what woes within and without; what assaults of folly; what mean distresses; and, oh, what wounds from cherished hands! Were ye the persons who should stab thus? Had I, too, the Roman right to fold my robe about me decently, and breathe the last sigh! The last! Horrible, indeed, should sobs, deep as these, be drawn to all eternity. But no; life could not hold out for more than one lease of sorrow. This anguish, however, will be wearied out, as I know by experience, alas! of how many such hours.' * * * * * 'I am reminded to-day of the autumn hours at Jamaica Plain, where, after arranging everything for others that they wanted of me, I found myself, at last, alone in my still home, where everything, for once, reflected my feelings. It was so still, the air seemed full of spirits. How happy I was! with what sweet and solemn happiness! All things had tended to a crisis in me, and I was in a higher state, mentally and spiritually, than I ever was before or shall be again, till death shall introduce me to a new sphere. I purposed to spend the winter in study and self-collection, and to write constantly. I thought I should thus be induced to embody in beautiful forms all that lay in my mind, and that life would ripen into genius. But a very little while these fair hopes bloomed; and, since I was checked then, I do never expect to blossom forth on earth, and all postponements come naturally. At that time it seemed as if angels left me. Yet, now, I think they still are near. Renunciation appears to be entire, and I quite content; yet, probably, 't is no such thing, and that work is to be done over and over again.' * * * * * 'Do you believe our prayers avail for one another? and that happiness is good for the soul? Pray, then, for me, that I may have a little peace,--some green and flowery spot, 'mid which my thoughts may rest; yet not upon fallacy, but only upon something genuine. I am deeply homesick, yet where is that home? If not on earth, why should we look to heaven? I would fain truly live wherever I must abide, and bear with full energy on my lot, whatever it is. He, who alone knoweth, will affirm that. I have tried to work whole-hearted from an earnest faith. Yet my hand is often languid, and my heart is slow. I would be gone; but whither? I know not; if I cannot make this spot of ground yield the corn and roses, famine must be my lot forever and ever, surely.' * * * * * 'I remember how at a similar time of perplexity, when there were none to counsel, hardly one to sympathize, and when the conflicting wishes of so many whom I loved pressed the aching heart on every side, after months of groping and fruitless thought, the merest trifle precipitated the whole mass; all became clear as crystal, and I saw of what use the tedious preparation had been, by the deep content I felt in the result.' * * * * * 'Beethoven! Tasso! It is well to think of you! What sufferings from baseness, from coldness! How rare and momentary were the flashes of joy, of confidence and tenderness, in these noblest lives! Yet could not their genius be repressed. The Eternal Justice lives. O, Father, teach the spirit the meaning of sorrow, and light up the generous fires of love and hope and faith, without which I cannot live!' * * * * * 'What signifies it that Thou dost always give me to drink more deeply of the inner fountains? And why do I seek a reason for these repulsions and strange arrangements of my mortal lot, when I always gain from them a deeper love for all men, and a deeper trust in Thee? Wonderful are thy ways! But lead me the darkest and the coldest as Thou wilt.' * * * * * 'Please, good Genius of my life, to make me very patient, resolute, gentle, while no less ardent; and after having tried me well, please present, at the end of some thousand years or so, a sphere of congenial and consecutive labors; of heart-felt, heart-filling wishes carried out into life on the instant; of aims obviously, inevitably proportioned to my highest nature. Sometime, in God's good time, let me live as swift and earnest as a flash of the eye. Meanwhile, let me gather force slowly, and drift along lazily, like yonder cloud, and be content to end in a few tears at last.' * * * * * 'To-night I lay on the sofa, and saw how the flame shot up from beneath, through the mass of coal that had been piled above. It shot up in wild beautiful jets, and then unexpectedly sank again, and all was black, unsightly and forlorn. And thus, I thought, is it with my life at present. Yet if the fire beneath persists and conquers, that black dead mass will become all radiant, life-giving, fit for the altar or the domestic hearth. Yes, and it shall be so.' * * * * * 'My tendency at present is to the deepest privacy. Where can I hide till I am given to myself? Yet I love the others more and more. When they are with me I must give them the best from my scrip. I see their infirmities, and would fain heal them, forgetful of my own! But am I left one moment alone, then, a poor wandering pilgrim, but no saint, I would seek the shrine, and would therein die to the world. Then if from the poor relics some miracles might be wrought, that should be for my fellows. Yet some of the saints were able to work in their generation, for they had renounced all!' * * * * * 'Forget, if you can, all of petulant or overstrained that may have displeased you in me, and commend me in your prayers to my best self. When, in the solitude of the spirit, comes upon you some air from the distance, a breath of aspiration, of faith, of pure tenderness, then believe that the Power which has guided me so faithfully, emboldens my thoughts to frame a prayer for you.' * * * * * 'Beneath all pain inflicted by Nature, be not only serene, but more; let it avail thee in prayer. Put up, at the moment of greatest suffering, a prayer; not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the Sovereign Spirit will accept thy ransom.' * * * * * 'Strive, strive, my soul, to be innocent; yes! beneficent. Does any man wound thee? not only forgive, but Work into thy thought intelligence of the kind of pain, that thou mayest never inflict it on another spirit. Then its work is done; it will never search thy whole nature again. O, love much, and be forgiven!' * * * * * 'No! we cannot leave society while one clod remains unpervaded by divine life. We cannot live and grow in consecrated earth, alone. Let us rather learn to stand up like the Holy Father, and with extended arms bless the whole world.' * * * * * 'It will be happiness indeed, if, on passing this first stage, we are permitted, in some degree, to alleviate the ills of those we love,--to lead them on a little way; to aid them when they call. Often it seems to me, it would be sweet to feel that I had certainly conferred one benefit. All my poor little schemes for others are apparently blighted, and now, as ever, I am referred to the Secular year for the interpretation of my moments.' In one of Margaret's manuscripts is found this beautiful symbol:--'There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.' Surely the preceding extracts prove that she was learning how to draw life-giving virtue from the very heart of evil. No superficial experience of sorrow embittered her with angry despair; but through profound acceptance, she sought to imbibe, from every ill, peace, purity and gentleness. * * * * * The two fiery trials through which she had been made to pass, and through which she was yet to pass again and again,--obstruction to the development of her genius, and loneliness of heart,--were the very furnace needed to burn the dross from her gold, till it could fitly image the Heavenly Refiner. By inherited traits, and indiscreet treatment, self-love had early become so excessive that only severest discipline could transmute it to disinterestedness. Pity for her own misfortunes had, indeed, taught her to curb her youthful scorn for mediocrity, and filled her with considerateness and delicate sensibility. Constant experience, too, of the wonderful modes whereby her fate was shaped by overruling mercy, had chastened her love of personal sway, and her passion for a commanding career; and Margaret could humble herself,--did often humble herself,--with an all-resigning contrition, that was most touching to witness in one naturally so haughty. Of this the following letter to a valued friend gives illustration:-- 'I ought, I know, to have laid aside my own cares and griefs, been on the alert for intelligence that would gratify you, and written letters such as would have been of use and given pleasure to my wise, tender, ever faithful friend. But no; I first intruded on your happiness with my sorrowful epistles, and then, because you did not seem to understand my position, with sullen petulance I resolved to write no more. Nay, worse; I tried to harden my heart against you, and felt, "If you cannot be all, you shall be nothing." 'It was a bad omen that I lost the locket you gave me, which I had constantly worn. Had that been daily before my eyes, to remind me of all your worth,--of the generosity with which you, a ripe and wise character, received me to the privileges of equal friendship; of the sincerity with which you reproved and the love with which you pardoned my faults; of how much you taught me, and bore with from me,--it would have softened the flint of my heart, and I should have relaxed from my isolation. 'How shall I apologize for feelings which I now recognize as having been so cold, so bitter and unjust? I can only say I have suffered greatly, till the tone of my spirits seems destroyed. Since I have been at leisure to realize how very ill I have been, under what constant pain and many annoyances I have kept myself upright, and how, if I have not done my work, I have learned my lesson to the end, I should be inclined to excuse myself for every fault, except this neglect and ingratitude against friends. Yet, if you can forgive, I will try to forgive myself, and I do think I shall never so deeply sin again.' Yet, though thus frank to own to herself and to her peers her errors, Margaret cherished a trust in her powers, a confidence in her destiny, and an ideal of her being, place and influence, so lofty as to be extravagant. In the morning-hour and mountain-air of aspiration, her shadow moved before her, of gigantic size, upon the snow-white vapor. In accordance with her earnest charge, 'Be true as Truth to me,' I could not but expose this propensity to self-delusion; and her answer is her best explanation and defence:-- 'I protest against your applying to me, even in your most transient thought, such an epithet as "determined exaggeration." Exaggeration, if you will; but not determined. No; I would have all open to the light, and would let my boughs be pruned, when they grow rank and unfruitful, even if I felt the knife to the quick of my being. Very fain would I have a rational modesty, without self-distrust; and may the knowledge of my failures leaven my soul, and check its intemperance. If you saw me wholly, you would not, I think, feel as you do; for you would recognize the force, that regulates my life and tempers the ardor with an eventual calmness. You would see, too, that the more I take my flight in poetical enthusiasm, the stronger materials I bring back for my nest. Certainly I am nowise yet an angel; but neither am I an utterly weak woman, and far less a cold intellect. God is rarely afar off. Exquisite nature is all around. Life affords vicissitudes enough to try the energies of the human will. I can pray, I can act, I can learn, I can constantly immerse myself in the Divine Beauty. But I also need to love my fellow-men, and to meet the responsive glance of my spiritual kindred.' Again, she says:-- 'I like to hear you express your sense of my defects. The word "arrogance" does not, indeed, appear to me to be just; probably because I do not understand what you mean. But in due time I doubtless shall; for so repeatedly have you used it, that it must stand for something real in my large and rich, yet irregular and unclarified nature. But though I like to hear you, as I say, and think somehow your reproof does me good, by myself, I return to my native bias, and feel as if there was plenty of room in the universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of them, when so many things interest me more. I have no defiance or coldness, however, as to these spiritual facts which I do not know; but I must follow my own law, and bide my time, even if, like Oedipus, I should return a criminal, blind and outcast, to ask aid from the gods. Such possibilities, I confess, give me great awe; for I have more sense than most, of the tragic depths that may open suddenly in the life. Yet, believing in God, anguish cannot be despair, nor guilt perdition. I feel sure that I have never wilfully chosen, and that my life has been docile to such truth as was shown it. In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.' Such Egoism as this, though lacking the angel grace of unconsciousness, has a stoical grandeur that commands respect. Indeed, in all that Margaret spoke, wrote, or did, no cynic could detect the taint of meanness. Her elation came not from opium fumes of vanity, inhaled in close chambers of conceit, but from the stimulus of sunshine, fresh breezes, and swift movement upon the winged steed of poesy. Her existence was bright with romantic interest to herself. There was an amplitude and elevation in her aim, which were worthy, as she felt, of human honor and of heavenly aid; and she was buoyed up by a courageous good-will, amidst all evils, that she knew would have been recognized as heroic in the chivalric times, when "every morning brought a noble chance." Neither was her self-regard of an engrossing temper. On the contrary, the sense of personal dignity taught her the worth of the lowliest human being, and her intense desire for harmonious conditions quickened a boundless compassion for the squalid, downcast, and drudging multitude. She aspired to live in majestic fulness of benignant and joyful activity, leaving a track of light with every footstep; and, like the radiant Iduna, bearing to man the golden apples of immortality, she would have made each meeting with her fellows rich with some boon that should never fade, but brighten in bloom forever. This characteristic self-esteem determined the quality of Margaret's influence, which was singularly penetrating, and most beneficent where most deeply and continuously felt. Chance acquaintance with her, like a breath from the tropics, might have prematurely burst the buds of feeling in sensitive hearts, leaving after blight and barrenness. Natures, small in compass and of fragile substance, might have been distorted and shattered by attempts to mould themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses,--whose latent law was honorable integrity,--eccentric spirits might have found encouragement for capricious license. Her morbid subjectivity, too, might, by contagion, have affected others with undue self-consciousness. And, finally, even intimate friends might have been tempted, by her flattering love, to exaggerate their own importance, until they recognized that her regard for them was but one niche in a Pantheon at whose every shrine she offered incense. But these ill effects were superficial accidents. The peculiarity of her power was to make all who were in concert with her feel the miracle of existence. She lived herself with such concentrated force in the moments, that she was always effulgent with thought and affection,--with conscience, courage, resource, decision, a penetrating and forecasting wisdom. Hence, to associates, her presence seemed to touch even common scenes and drudging cares with splendor, as when, through the scud of a rain-storm, sunbeams break from serene blue openings, crowning familiar things with sudden glory. By manifold sympathies, yet central unity, she seemed in herself to be a goodly company, and her words and deeds imparted the virtue of a collective life. So tender was her affection, that, like a guardian genius, she made her friends' souls her own, and identified herself with their fortunes; and yet, so pure and high withal was her justice, that, in her recognition of their past success and present claims, there came a summons for fresh endeavor after the perfect. The very thought of her roused manliness to emulate the vigorous freedom, with which one was assured, that wherever placed she was that instant acting; and the mere mention of her name was an inspiration of magnanimity, and faithfulness, and truth. '"Sincere has been their striving; great their love," 'is a sufficient apology for any life,' wrote Margaret; and how preëminently were these words descriptive of herself. Hers was indeed "The equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." This indomitable aspiration found utterance in the following verses, on 'SUB ROSA CRUX. 'In times of old, as we are told, When men more childlike at the feet Of Jesus sat than now, A chivalry was known, more bold Than ours, and yet of stricter vow, And worship more complete. 'Knights of the Rosy Cross! they bore Its weight within the breast, but wore Without the sign, in glistening ruby bright. The gall and vinegar they drank alone, But to the world at large would only own The wine of faith, sparkling with rosy light. 'They knew the secret of the sacred oil, Which, poured upon the prophet's head, Could keep him wise and pure for aye, Apart from all that might distract or soil; With this their lamps they fed, Which burn in their sepulchral shrines, Unfading night and day. 'The pass-word now is lost To that initiation full and free; Daily we pay the cost Of our slow schooling for divine degree. We know no means to feed an undying lamp, Our lights go out in every wind and damp. 'We wear the cross of Ebony and Gold, Upon a dark back-ground a form of light, A heavenly hope within a bosom cold, A starry promise in a frequent night; And oft the dying lamp must trim again, For we are conscious, thoughtful, striving men. 'Yet be we faithful to this present trust, Clasp to a heart resigned this faithful Must; Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold, Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold; Forget not oft to waft the prayer on high;-- The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky. 'And by that lovely light all truth revealed,-- The cherished forms, which sad distrust concealed, Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand, The kindred angels of a faithful band; Ruby and ebon cross then cast aside, No lamp more needed, for the night has died. '"Be to the best thou knowest ever true," Is all the creed. Then be thy talisman of rosy hue, Or fenced with thorns, that wearing, thou must bleed, Or, gentle pledge of love's prophetic view, The faithful steps it will securely lead. 'Happy are all who reach that distant shore, And bathe in heavenly day; Happiest are those who high the banner bore, To marshal others on the way, Or waited for them, fainting and way-worn, By burthens overborne.' [Footnote A: This sentence was written before I was aware that Margaret, as will be seen hereafter, had used the same symbol to describe Madame Sand. The first impulse, of course, when I discovered this coincidence, was to strike out the above passage; yet, on second thought, I have retained it, as indicating an actual resemblance between these two grand women. In Margaret, however, the benediction of their noble-hearted sister, Elizabeth Barrett, had already been fulfilled; for she to "woman's claim" had ever joined "the angel-grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame."] [Footnote B: Novalis.] NEW YORK. JOURNALS, LETTERS, &c. * * * * * "How much, preventing God, how much. I owe To the defences thou hast round me set! Example, Custom, Fear, Occasion slow,-- These scorned bondsmen were my parapet. I dare not peep over this parapet, To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below, The depths of sin to which I had descended, Had not these me against myself defended." "Di tè, finor, chiesto non hai severa Ragione a tè; di sua virtù non cade Sospetto in cor conscio a se stesso." ALFIERI. "He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend; Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them. Where sorrow's held intrusive, and turned out, There wisdom, will not enter, nor true power, Nor aught that dignifies humanity." TAYLOR. "That time of year thou may'st in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away,-- Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie; As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by." SHAKSPEARE. [Sonnet lxxiii.] "Aber zufrieden mit stillerem Ruhme, Brechen die Frauen des Augenblick's Blume, Nähren sie sorgsam mit liebendem Fleiss, Freier in ihrem gebundenen Wirken, Reicher als er in des Wissens Bezirken Und in der Dichtung unendlichem Kreiz." SCHILLER. "Not like to like, but like in difference; Yet in the long years liker must they grow,-- The man be more of woman, she of man; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world; She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care; More as the double-natured poet each; Till at the last she set herself to man, Like perfect music unto noble words." TENNYSON. VII. NEW YORK * * * * * LEAVING HOME. Incessant exertion in teaching and writing, added to pecuniary anxieties and domestic cares, had so exhausted Margaret's energy, in 1844, that she felt a craving for fresh interests, and resolved to seek an entire change of scene amid freer fields of action. 'The tax on my mind is such,' she writes, 'and I am so unwell, that I can scarcely keep up the spring of my spirits, and sometimes fear that I cannot go through with the engagements of the winter. But I have never stopped yet in fulfilling what I have undertaken, and hope I shall not be compelled to now. How farcical seems the preparation needed to gain a few moments' life; yet just so the plant works all the year round for a few days' flower.' But in brighter mood she says, again:-- 'I congratulate myself that I persisted, against every persuasion, in doing all I could last winter; for now I am and shall be free from debt, and I look on the position of debtor with a dread worthy of some respectable Dutch burgomaster. My little plans for others, too, have succeeded; our small household is well arranged, and all goes smoothly as a wheel turns round. Mother, moreover, has learned not to be over-anxious when I suffer, so that I am not obliged to suppress my feelings when it is best to yield to them. Thus, having more calmness, I feel often that a sweet serenity is breathed through every trifling duty. I am truly grateful for being enabled to fulfil obligations which to some might seem humble, but which to me are sacred.' And in mid-summer comes this pleasant picture:-- 'Every day, I rose and attended to the many little calls which are always on me, and which have been more of late. Then, about eleven, I would sit down to write, at my window, close to which is the apple-tree, lately full of blossoms, and now of yellow birds. Opposite me was Del Sarto's Madonna; behind me Silenus, holding in his arms the infant Pan. I felt very content with my pen, my daily bouquet, and my yellow birds. About five I would go out and walk till dark; then would arrive my proofs, like crabbed old guardians, coming to tea every night. So passed each day. The 23d of May, my birth-day, about one o'clock, I wrote the last line of my little book;[A] then I went to Mount Auburn, and walked gently among the graves.' As the brothers had now left college, and had entered or were entering upon professional and commercial life, while the sister was married, and the mother felt calls to visit in turn her scattered children, it was determined to break up the "Home." 'As a family,' Margaret writes, 'we are henceforth to be parted. But though for months I had been preparing for this separation, the last moments were very sad. Such tears are childish tears, I know, and belie a deeper wisdom. It is foolish in me to be so anxious about my family. As I went along, it seemed as if all I did was for God's sake; but if it had been, could I now thus fear? My relations to them are altogether fair, so far as they go. As to their being no more to me than others of my kind, there is surely a mystic thrill betwixt children of one mother, which can never cease to be felt till the soul is quite born anew. The earthly family is the scaffold whereby we build the spiritual one. The glimpses we here obtain of what such relations should be are to me an earnest that the family is of Divine Order, and not a mere school of preparation. And in the state of perfect being which we call Heaven, I am assured that family ties will attain to that glorified beauty of harmonious adaptation, which stellar groups in the pure blue typify.' Margaret's admirable fidelity, as daughter and sister,--amidst her incessant literary pursuits, and her far-reaching friendships,--can be justly appreciated by those only who were in her confidence; but from the following slight sketches generous hearts can readily infer what was the quality of her home-affections. 'Mother writes from Canton that my dear old grandmother is dead. I regret that you never saw her. She was a picture of primitive piety, as she sat holding the "Saint's Rest" in her hand, with her bowed, trembling figure, and her emphatic nods, and her sweet blue eyes. They were bright to the last, though she was ninety. It is a great loss to mother, who felt a large place warmed in her heart by the fond and grateful love of this aged parent.' 'We cannot be sufficiently grateful for our mother,--so so fair a blossom of the white amaranth; truly to us a mother in this, that we can venerate her piety. Our relations to her have known no jar. Nothing vulgar has sullied them; and in this respect life has been truly domesticated. Indeed, when I compare my lot with others, it seems to have had a more than usual likeness to home; for relations have been as noble as sincerity could make them, and there has been a frequent breath of refined affection, with its sweet courtesies. Mother thanks God in her prayers for "all the acts of mutual love which have been permitted;" and looking back, I see that these have really been many. I do not recognize this, as the days pass, for to my desires life would be such a flower-chain of symbols, that what is done seems very scanty, and the thread shows too much. 'She has just brought me a little bouquet. Her flowers have suffered greatly by my neglect, when I would be engrossed by other things in her absences. But, not to be disgusted or deterred, whenever she can glean one pretty enough, she brings it to me. Here is the bouquet,--a very delicate rose, with its half-blown bud, heliotrope, geranium, lady-pea, heart's-ease; all sweet-scented flowers! Moved by their beauty, I wrote a short note, to which this is the reply. Just like herself![B] '"I should not love my flowers if they did not put forth all the strength they have, in gratitude for your preserving care, last winter, and your wasted feelings over the unavoidable effects of the frost, that came so unexpectedly to nip their budding beauties. I appreciate all you have done, knowing at what cost any plant must be nourished by one who sows in fields more precious than those opened, in early life, to my culture. One must have grown up with flowers, and found joy and sweetness in them, amidst disagreeable occupations, to take delight in their whole existence as I do. They have long had power to bring me into harmony with the Creator, and to soothe almost any irritation. Therefore I understand your love for these beautiful things, and it gives me real pleasure to procure them for you. '"You have done everything that the most affectionate and loving daughter could, under all circumstances. My faith in your generous desire to increase my happiness is founded on the knowledge I have gained of your disposition, through your whole life. I should ask your sympathy and aid, whenever it could be available, knowing that you would give it first to me. Waste no thought on neglected duties. I know of none. Let us pursue our appointed paths, aiding each other in rough places; and if I live to need the being led by the hand, I always feel that you will perform this office wisely and tenderly. We shall ever have perfect peace between us. Yours, in all love."' Margaret adds:-- 'It has been, and still is, hard for me to give up the thought of serenity, and freedom from toil and care, for mother, in the evening of a day which has been all one work of disinterested love. But I am now confident that she will learn from every trial its lesson; and if I cannot be her protector, I can be at least her counsellor and soother.' From the less private parts of Margaret's correspondence with the younger members of the family, some passages may be selected, as attesting her quick and penetrating sympathy, her strict truth, and influential wisdom. They may be fitly prefaced by these few but emphatic words from a letter of one of her brothers:-- "I was much impressed, during my childhood, at Groton, with an incident that first disclosed to me the tenderness of Margaret's character. I had always viewed her as a being of different nature from myself, to whose altitudes of intellectual life I had no thought of ascending. She had been absent during the winter, and on her return asked me for some account of my experiences. Supposing that she could not enter into such insignificant details, I was not frank or warm in my confidence, though I gave no reason for my reserve; and the matter had passed from my mind, when our mother told me that Margaret had shed tears, because I seemed to heed so little her sisterly sympathy. 'Tears from one so learned,' thought I, 'for the sake of one so inferior!' Afterwards, my heart opened to her, as to no earthly friend. "The characteristic trait of Margaret, to which all her talents and acquirements were subordinate, was sympathy,--universal sympathy. She had that large intelligence and magnanimity which enabled her to comprehend the struggles and triumphs of every form of character. Loving all about her, whether rich or poor, rude or cultivated, as equally formed after a Divine Original, with an equal birth-right of immortal growth, she regarded rather their aspirations than their accomplishments. And this was the source of her marvellous influence. Those who had never thought of their own destiny, nor put faith in their own faculties, found in her society not so much a display of her gifts, as surprising discoveries of their own. She revealed to them the truth, that all can be noble by fidelity to the highest self. She appreciated, with delicate tenderness, each one's peculiar trials, and, while never attempting to make the unhappy feel that their miseries were unreal, she pointed out the compensations of their lot, and taught them how to live above misfortune. She had consolation and advice for every one in trouble, and wrote long letters to many friends, at the expense not only of precious time, but of physical pain. "When now, with the experience of a man, I look back upon her wise guardianship over our childhood, her indefatigable labors for our education, her constant supervision in our family affairs, her minute instructions as to the management of multifarious details, her painful conscientiousness in every duty; and then reflect on her native inaptitude and even disgust for practical affairs, on her sacrifice,--in the very flower of her genius,--of her favorite pursuits, on her incessant drudgery and waste of health, on her patient bearing of burdens, and courageous conflict with difficult circumstances, her character stands before me as heroic." It was to this brother that Margaret wrote as follows:-- 'It is a great pleasure to me to give you this book; both that I have a brother whom I think worthy to value it, and that I can give him something worthy to be valued more and more through all his life. Whatever height we may attain in knowledge, whatever facility in the expression of thoughts, will only enable us to do more justice to what is drawn from so deep a source of faith and intellect, and arrayed, oftentimes, in the fairest hues of nature. Yet it may not be well for a young mind to dwell too near one tuned to so high a pitch as this writer, lest, by trying to come into concord with him, the natural tones be overstrained, and the strings weakened by untimely pressure. Do not attempt, therefore, to read this book through, but keep it with you, and when the spirit is fresh and earnest turn to it. It is full of the tide-marks of great thoughts, but these can be understood by one only who has gained, by experience, some knowledge of these tides. The ancient sages knew how to greet a brother who had consecrated his life to thought, and was never disturbed from his purpose by a lower aim. But it is only to those perfected in purity that Pythagoras can show a golden thigh. 'One word as to your late readings. They came in a timely way to admonish you, amidst mere disciplines, as to the future uses of such disciplines. But systems of philosophy are mere pictures to him, who has not yet learned how to systematize. From an inward opening of your nature these knowledges must begin to be evolved, ere you can apprehend aught beyond their beauty, as revealed in the mind of another. Study in a reverent and patient spirit, blessing the day that leads you the least step onward. Do not ride hobbies. Do not hasten to conclusions. Be not coldly sceptical towards any thinker, neither credulous of his views. A man, whose mind is full of error, may give us the genial sense of truth, as a tropical sun, while it rears crocodiles, yet ripens the wine of the palm-tree. 'To turn again to my Ancients: while they believed in self-reliance with a force little known in our day, they dreaded no pains of initiation, but fitted themselves for intelligent recognition of the truths on which our being is based, by slow gradations of travel, study, speech, silence, bravery, and patience. That so it may be with you, dear ----, hopes your sister and friend.' A few extracts from family letters written at different times, and under various conditions, may be added. 'I read with great interest the papers you left with me. The picture and the emotions suggested are genuine. The youthful figure, no doubt, stands portress at the gate of Infinite Beauty; yet I would say to one I loved as I do you, do not waste these emotions, nor the occasions which excite them. There is danger of prodigality,--of lavishing the best treasures of the breast on objects that cannot be the permanent ones. It is true, that whatever thought is awakened in the mind becomes truly ours; but it is a great happiness to owe these influences to a cause so proportioned to our strength as to grow with it. I say this merely because I fear that the virginity of heart which I believe essential to feeling a real love, in all its force and purity, may be endangered by too careless excursions into the realms of fancy.' * * * * * 'It is told us, we should pray, "lead us not into temptation;" and I agree. Yet I think it cannot be, that, with a good disposition, and the means you have had to form your mind and discern a higher standard, your conduct or happiness can be so dependent on circumstances, as you seem to think. I never advised your taking a course which would blunt your finer powers and I do not believe that winning the means of pecuniary independence need do so. I have not found that it does, in my own case, placed at much greater disadvantage than you are. I have never considered, either, that there was any misfortune in your lot. Health, good abilities, and a well-placed youth, form a union of advantages possessed by few, and which leaves you little excuse for fault or failure. And so to your better genius and the instruction of the One Wise, I commend you.' * * * * * 'It gave me great pleasure to get your last letter, for these little impromptu effusions are the genuine letters. I rejoice that man and nature seem harmonious to you, and that the heart beats in unison with the voices of Spring. May all that is manly, sincere, and pure, in your wishes, be realized! Obliged to live myself without the sanctuary of the central relations, yet feeling I must still not despair, nor fail to profit by the precious gifts of life, while "leaning upon our Father's hand," I still rejoice, if any one can, in the true temper, and with well-founded hopes, secure a greater completeness of earthly existence. This fortune is as likely to be yours, as any one's I know. It seems to me dangerous, however, to meddle with the future. I never lay my hand on it to grasp it with impunity.' * * * * * 'Of late I have often thought of you with strong yearnings of affection and desire to see you. It would seem to me, also, that I had not devoted myself to you enough, if I were not conscious that by any more attention to the absent than I have paid, I should have missed the needed instructions from the present. And I feel that any bond of true value will endure necessary neglect.' * * * * * 'There is almost too much of bitter mixed in the cup of life. You say religion is a mere sentiment with you, and that if you are disappointed in your first, your very first hopes and plans, you do not know whether you shall be able to act well. I do not myself see how a reflecting soul can endure the passage through life, except by confidence in a Power that must at last order all things right, and the resolution that it shall not be our own fault if we are not happy,--that we will resolutely deserve to be happy. There are many bright glimpses in life, many still hours; much worthy toil, some deep and noble joys; but, then, there are so many, and such long, intervals, when we are kept from all we want, and must perish but for such thoughts.' * * * * * 'You need not fear, dear ----, my doing anything to chill you. I am only too glad of the pure happiness you so sweetly describe. I well understand what you say of its invigorating you for every enterprise. I was always sure it would be so with me,--that resigned, I could do well, but happy I could do excellently. Happiness must, with the well-born, expand the generous affections towards all men, and invigorate one to deserve what the gods have given.' Margaret's charities and courtesies were not limited to her kindred. She fell, at once, into agreeable relations with her domestics, became their confidant, teacher, and helper, studied their characters, consulted their convenience, warned them of their dangers or weaknesses, and rejoiced to gratify their worthy tastes; and, in return, no lady could receive, from servants, more punctual or hearty attendance. She knew how to command and how to persuade, and her sympathy was perfect. They felt the power of her mind, her hardy directness, prompt judgment, decision and fertility of resource, and liked to aid one who knew so well her own wants. 'Around my path,' she writes, 'how much humble love continually flows. These every-day and lowly friends never forget my wishes, never censure my whims, make no demands on me, and load me with gifts and uncomplaining service. Though sometimes forgetful of their claims, I try to make it up when we do meet, and I trust give little pain as I pass along this world.' Even in extreme cases of debasement she found more to admire than to contemn, and won the confidence of the fallen by manifesting her real respect. "There was in my family," writes a friend, "a very handsome young girl, who had been vicious in her habits, and so enamored of one of her lovers, that when he deserted her, she attempted to drown herself. She was rescued, and some good people were eager to reform her life. While she was engaged in housework for us, Margaret saw her, and one day asked ---- if she could not help her. ---- replied: 'No! for should I begin to talk with her, I should show my consciousness of her history so much as to be painful.' Margaret was very indignant at this weakness. Said she, 'This girl is taken away, you know, from all her objects of interest, and must feel her life vacant and dreary. Her mind should be employed; she should be made to feel her powers.' It was plain that if Margaret had been near her, she would have devoted herself at once to her education and reestablishment." About the time of breaking up their home, Margaret thus expressed, to one of her brothers, her hopes and plans. 'You wish, dear ----, that I was not obliged to toil and spin, but could live, for a while, like the lilies. I wish so, too, for life has fatigued me, my strength is little, and the present state of my mind demands repose and refreshment, that it may ripen some fruit worthy of the long and deep experiences through which I have passed. I do not regret that I have shared the labors and cares of the suffering million, and have acquired a feeling sense of the conditions under which the Divine has appointed the development of the human. Yet, if our family affairs could now be so arranged, that I might be tolerably tranquil for the next six or eight years, I should go out of life better satisfied with the page I have turned in it, than I shall if I must still toil on. A noble career is yet before me, if I can be unimpeded by cares. I have given almost all my young energies to personal relations; but, at present, I feel inclined to impel the general stream of thought. Let my nearest friends also wish that I should now take share in more public life.' [Footnote A: Summer on the Lakes.] [Footnote B: The editor must offer as excuse for printing, without permission asked, this note, found carefully preserved among Margaret's papers, that he knew no other way of so truly indicating the relation between mother and daughter. This lily is eloquent of the valley where it grew. W.H.C.] THE HIGHLANDS. Seeking thus, at once, expansion and rest in new employments, Margaret determined, in the autumn of 1844, to accept a liberal offer of Messrs. Greeley and McElrath, to become a constant contributor to the New York Tribune. But before entering upon her new duties, she found relaxation, for a few weeks, amid the grand scenery of the Hudson. In October, she writes from Fishkill Landing:-- 'Can I find words to tell you how I enjoy being here, encircled by the majestic beauty of these mountains? I felt regret, indeed, in bidding farewell to Boston, so many marks of affection were shown me at the last, and so many friendships, true if imperfect, were left behind. But now I am glad to feel enfranchized in the society of Nature. I have a well-ordered, quiet house to dwell in, with nobody's humors to consult but my own. From my windows I see over the tops of variegated trees the river, with its purple heights beyond, and a few moments' walk brings me to the lovely shore, where sails are gliding continually by, and the huge steamers sweep past with echoing tread, and a train of waves, whose rush relieves the monotone of the ripples. In the country behind us are mountain-paths, and lonely glens, with gurgling streams, and many-voiced water-falls. And over all are spread the gorgeous hues of autumn.' And again:-- '"From the brain of the purple mountain" flows forth cheer to my somewhat weary mind. I feel refreshed amid these bolder shapes of nature. Mere gentle and winning landscapes are not enough. How I wish my birth had been cast among the sources of the streams, where the voice of hidden torrents is heard by night, and the eagle soars, and the thunder resounds in prolonged peals, and wide blue shadows fall like brooding wings across the valleys! Amid such scenes, I expand and feel at home. All the fine days I spend among the mountain passes, along the mountain brooks, or beside the stately river. I enjoy just the tranquil happiness I need in communion with this fair grandeur.' And, again:-- 'The boldness, sweetness, and variety here, are just what I like. I could pass the autumn in watching the exquisite changes of light and shade on the heights across the river. How idle to pretend that one could live and write as well amid fallow flat fields! This majesty, this calm splendor, could not but exhilarate the mind, and make it nobly free and plastic.' These few weeks among the Highlands,--spent mostly in the open air, under October's golden sunshine, the slumberous softness of the Indian summer, or the brilliant, breezy skies of November,--were an important era for Margaret. She had-- "lost the dream of Doing And the other dream of Done; The first spring in the pursuing, The first pride in the Begun, First recoil from incompleteness in the face of what is won." But she was striving, also, to use her own words, 'to be patient to the very depths of the heart, to expect no hasty realizations, not to make her own plan her law of life, but to learn the law and plan of God.' She adds, however:-- 'What heaven it must be to have the happy sense of accomplishing something, and to feel the glow of action without exhausted weariness! Surely the race would have worn itself out by corrosion, if men in all ages had suffered, as we now do, from the consciousness of an unattained Ideal.' Extracts from journals will best reveal her state of mind. 'I have a dim consciousness of what the terrible experiences must be by which the free poetic element is harmonized with the spirit of religion. In their essence and their end these are one, but rarely in actual existence. I would keep what was pure and noble in my old native freedom, with that consciousness of falling below the best convictions which now binds me to the basest of mankind, and find some new truth that shall reconcile and unite them. Once it seemed to me, that my heart was so capable of goodness, my mind of clearness, that all should acknowledge and claim me as a friend. But now I see that these impulses were prophetic of a yet distant period. The "intensity" of passion, which so often unfits me for life, or, rather, for _life here_, is to be moderated, not into dulness or languor, but a gentler, steadier energy.' 'The stateliest, strongest vessel must sometimes be brought into port to rent. If she will not submit to be fastened to the dock, stripped of her rigging, and scrutinized by unwashed artificers, she may spring a leak when riding most proudly on the subject wave. Norway fir nor English oak can resist forever the insidious assaults of the seemingly conquered ocean. The man who clears the barnacles from the keel is more essential than he who hoists the pennant on the lofty mast.' * * * * * 'A week of more suffering than I have had for a long time,--from Sunday to Sunday,--headache night and day! And not only there has been no respite, but it has been fixed in one spot--between the eyebrows!--what does that promise?--till it grew real torture. Then it has been depressing to be able to do so little, when there was so much I had at heart to do. It seems that the black and white guardians, depicted on the Etrurian monuments, and in many a legend, are always fighting for my life. Whenever I have any cherished purpose, either outward obstacles swarm around, which the hand that would be drawing beautiful lines must be always busy in brushing away, or comes this great vulture, and fastens his iron talons on the brain. 'But at such times the soul rises up, like some fair child in whom sleep has been mistaken for death, a living flower in the dark tomb. He casts aside his shrouds and bands, rosy and fresh from the long trance, undismayed, not seeing how to get out, yet sure there is a way. 'I think the black jailer laughs now, hoping that while I want to show that Woman can have the free, full action of intellect, he will prove in my own self that she has not physical force to bear it. Indeed, I am too poor an example, and do wish I was bodily strong and fair. Yet, I will not be turned from the deeper convictions.' 'Driven from home to home, as a Renouncer, I gain the poetry of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron, lead, are in my casket. Though no one loves me as I would be loved, I yet love many well enough to see into their eventual beauty. Meanwhile, I have no fetters, and when one perceives how others are bound in false relations, this surely should be regarded as a privilege. And so varied have been my sympathies, that this isolation will not, I trust, make me cold, ignorant, nor partial. My history presents much superficial, temporary tragedy. The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture; the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled. Yet the time will come, when, from the union of this tragic king and queen, shall be born a radiant sovereign self.' * * * * * 'I have quite a desire to try my powers in a narrative poem; but my head teems with plans, of which there will be time for very few only to take form. Milton, it is said, made for himself a list of a hundred subjects for dramas, and the recorder of the fact seems to think this many. I think it very few, so filled is life with innumerable themes.' * * * * * '_Sunday Evening._--I have employed some hours of the day, with great satisfaction, in copying the Poet's Dreams from the Pentameron of Landor. I do not often have time for such slow, pleasing labor. I have thus imprinted the words in my mind, so that they will often recur in their original beauty. 'I have added three sonnets of Petrarca, all written after the death of Laura. They are among his noblest, all pertinent to the subject, and giving three aspects of that one mood. The last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio's dream. 'In copying both together, I find the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary. 'How fine it is to see the terms "onesto," "gentile," used in their original sense and force. 'Soft, solemn day! Where earth and heaven together seem to meet, I have been blest to greet From human thought a kindred sway; In thought these stood So near the simple Good, That what we nobleness and honor call, They viewed as honesty, the common dower of all.' Margaret was reading, in these weeks, the Four Books of Confucius, the Desatir, some of Taylor's translations from the Greek, a work on Scandinavian Mythology, Moehler's Symbolism, Fourier's Noveau Monde Industriel, and Landor's Pentameron,--but she says, in her journal, 'No book is good enough to read in the open air, among these mountains; even the best seem partial, civic, limiting, instead of being, as man's voice should be, a tone higher than nature's.' And again:-- 'This morning came ----'s letter, announcing Sterling's death:-- '"Weep for Dedalus all that is fairest." 'The news was very sad: Sterling did so earnestly wish to do a man's work, and had done so small a portion of his own. This made me feel how fast my years are flitting by, and nothing done. Yet these few beautiful days of leisure I cannot resolve to give at all to work. I want absolute rest, to let the mind lie fallow, to keep my whole nature open to the influx of truth.' At this very time, however, she was longing to write with full freedom and power. 'Formerly,' she says, 'the pen did not seem to me an instrument capable of expressing the spirit of a life like mine. An enchanter's mirror, on which, with a word, could be made to rise all apparitions of the universe, grouped in new relations; a magic ring, that could transport the wearer, himself invisible, into each region of grandeur or beauty; a divining-rod, to tell where lie the secret fountains of refreshment; a wand, to invoke elemental spirits;--only such as these seemed fit to embody one's thought with sufficient swiftness and force. In earlier years I aspired to wield the sceptre or the lyre; for I loved with wise design and irresistible command to mould many to one purpose, and it seemed all that man could desire to breathe in music and speak in words, the harmonies of the universe. But the golden lyre was not given to my hand, and I am but the prophecy of a poet. Let me use, then, the slow pen. I will make no formal vow to the long-scorned Muse; I assume no garland; I dare not even dedicate myself as a novice; I can promise neither patience nor energy:--but I will court excellence, so far as an humble heart and open eye can merit it, and, if I may gradually grow to some degree of worthiness in this mode of expression, I shall be grateful.' WOMAN. It was on "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" that Margaret was now testing her power as a writer. 'I have finished the pamphlet,' she writes, 'though the last day it kept spinning out beneath my hand. After taking a long walk, early one most exhilarating morning, I sat down to work, and did not give it the last stroke till near nine in the evening. Then I felt a delightful glow, as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it, and as if, should I go away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on the earth.' A few extracts from her manuscripts upon this subject may be of interest, as indicating the spirit and aim with which she wrote:-- 'To those of us who hate emphasis and exaggeration, who believe that whatever is good of its kind is good, who shrink from love of excitement and love of sway, who, while ready for duties of many kinds, dislike pledges and bonds to any,--this talk about "Woman's Sphere," "Woman's Mission," and all such phrases as mark the present consciousness of an impending transition from old conventions to greater freedom, are most repulsive. And it demands some valor to lift one's head amidst the shower of public squibs, private sneers, anger, scorn, derision, called out by the demand that women should be put on a par with their brethren, legally and politically; that they should hold property not by permission but by right, and that they should take an active part in all great movements. But though, with Mignon, we are prompted to characterize heaven as the place where "Sie fragen nicht nach Mann nie Weib," yet it is plain that we must face this agitation; and beyond the dull clouds overhead hangs in the horizon Venus, as morning-star, no less fair, though of more melting beauty, than the glorious Jupiter, who shares with her the watch. * * * * * 'The full, free expression of feeling must be rare, for this book of Bettina Brentano's to produce such an effect. Men who have lived in the society of women all their days, seem never before to have dreamed of their nature; they are filled with wonderment and delight at these revelations, and because they see the woman, fancy her a genius. But in truth her inspiration is nowise extraordinary; and I have letters from various friends, lying unnoticed in my portfolio, which are quite as beautiful. For one, I think that these veins of gold should pass in secret through the earth, inaccessible to all who will not take the trouble to mine for them. I do not like Bettina for publishing her heart, and am ready to repeat to her Serlo's reproof to Aurelia.' * * * * * 'How terrible must be the tragedy of a woman who awakes to find that she has given herself wholly to a person for whom she is not eternally fitted! I cannot look on marriage as on the other experiments of life: it is the one grand type that should be kept forever sacred. There are two kinds of love experienced by high and rich souls. The first seeks, according to Plato's myth, another half, as being not entire in itself, but needing a kindred nature to unlock its secret chambers of emotion, and to act with quickening influence on all its powers, by full harmony of senses, affections, intellect, will; the second is purely ideal, beholding in its object divine perfection, and delighting in it only in degree as it symbolizes the essential good. But why is not this love steadily directed to the Central Spirit, since in no form, however suggestive in beauty, can God be fully revealed? Love's delusion is owing to one of man's most godlike qualities,--the earnestness with which he would concentrate his whole being, and thus experience the Now of the I Am. Yet the noblest are not long deluded; they love really the Infinite Beauty, though they may still keep before them a human form, as the Isis, who promises hereafter a seat at the golden tables. How high is Michel Angelo's love, for instance, compared with Petrarch's! Petrarch longs, languishes; and it is only after the death of Laura that his muse puts on celestial plumage. But Michel always soars; his love is a stairway to the heavens. * * * * * 'Might not we women do something in regard to this Texas Annexation project? I have never felt that I had any call to take part in public affairs before; but this is a great moral question, and we have an obvious right to express our convictions. I should like to convene meetings of the women everywhere, and take our stand. * * * * * 'Had Christendom but been true to its standard, while accommodating its modes of operation to the calls of successive times, woman would now have not only equal _power_ with man,--for of that omnipotent nature will never permit her to be defrauded,--but a _chartered_ power, too fully recognized to be abused. Indeed, all that is wanting is, that man should prove his own freedom by making her free. Let him abandon conventional restriction, as a vestige of that Oriental barbarity which confined woman to a seraglio. Let him trust her entirely, and give her every privilege already acquired for himself,--elective franchise, tenure of property, liberty to speak in public assemblies, &c. 'Nature has pointed out her ordinary sphere by the circumstances of her physical existence. She cannot wander far. If here and there the gods send their missives through women, as through men, let them speak without remonstrance. In no age have men been able wholly to hinder them. A Deborah must always be a spiritual mother in Israel; a Corinna may be excluded from the Olympic games, yet all men will hear her song, and a Pindar sit at her feet. It is man's fault that there ever were Aspasias and Ninons. These exquisite forms were intended for the shrines of virtue. 'Neither need men fear to lose their domestic deities. Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it. Men should deserve her love as an inheritance, rather than seize and guard it like a prey. Were they noble, they would strive rather not to be loved too much, and to turn her from idolatry to the true, the only Love. Then, children of one Father, they could not err, nor misconceive one another. 'Society is now so complex, that it is no longer possible to educate woman merely as woman; the tasks which come to her hand are so various, and so large a proportion of women are thrown entirely upon their own resources. I admit that this is not their state of perfect development; but it seems as if heaven, having so long issued its edict in poetry and religion, without securing intelligent obedience, now commanded the world in prose, to take a high and rational view. The lesson reads to me thus:-- 'Sex, like rank, wealth, beauty, or talent, is but an accident of birth. As you would not educate a soul to be an aristocrat, so do not to be a woman. A general regard to her usual sphere is dictated in the economy of nature. You need never enforce these provisions rigorously. Achilles had long plied the distaff as a princess, yet, at first sight of a sword, he seized it. So with woman, one hour of love would teach her more of her proper relations, than all your formulas and conventions. Express your views, men, of what you _seek_ in woman: thus best do you give them laws. Learn, women, what you should _demand_ of men: thus only can they become themselves. Turn both from the contemplation of what is merely phenomenal in your existence, to your permanent life as souls. Man, do not prescribe how the Divine shall display itself in woman. Woman, do not expect to see all of God in man. Fellow-pilgrims and helpmeets are ye, Apollo and Diana, twins of one heavenly birth, both beneficent, and both armed. Man, fear not to yield to woman's hand both the quiver and the lyre; for if her urn be filled with light, she will use both to the glory of God. There is but one doctrine for ye both, and that is the doctrine of the SOUL. Thus, in communion with the serene loveliness of mother-earth, and inspired with memories of Isis and Ceres, of Minerva and Freia, and all the commanding forms beneath which earlier ages symbolized their sense of the Divine Spirit in woman, Margaret cherished visions of the future, and responded with full heart to the poet's prophecy:-- "Then comes the statelier Eden back to men; Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm; Then springs the crowning race of human-kind." It was but after the usual order of our discordant life,--where Purgatory lies so nigh to Paradise,--that she should thence be summoned to pass a Sunday with the prisoners at Sing-Sing. This was the period when, in fulfilment of the sagacious and humane counsels of Judge Edmonds, a system of kind discipline, combined with education, was in practice at that penitentiary, and when the female department was under the matronly charge of Mrs. E.W. Farnum, aided by Mrs. Johnson, Miss Bruce, and other ladies, who all united sisterly sympathy with energetic firmness. Margaret thus describes her impressions:-- 'We arrived on Saturday evening, in such resplendent moonlight, that we might have mistaken the prison for a palace, had we not known but too well what those massive walls contained. 'Sunday morning we attended service in the chapel of the male convicts. They listened with earnest attention, and many were moved to tears. I never felt such sympathy with an audience as when, at the words "Men and brethren," that sea of faces, marked with the scars of every ill, were upturned, and the shell of brutality burst apart at the touch of love. I knew that at least heavenly truth would not be kept out by self-complacence and dependence on good appearances. 'After twelve at noon, all are confined in their cells, that the keepers may have rest from their weekly fatigue. But I was allowed to have some of the women out to talk with, and the interview was very pleasant. They showed the natural aptitude of the sex for refinement. These women were among the so-called worst, and all from the lowest haunts of vice. Yet nothing could have been more decorous than their conduct, while it was also frank; and they showed a sensibility and sense of propriety, which would not have disgraced any society. All passed, indeed, much as in one of my Boston classes. I told them I was writing about Woman; and, as my path had been a favored one, I wanted to gain information from those who had been tempted and afflicted. They seemed to reply in the same spirit in which I asked. Several, however, expressed a wish to see me alone, as they could then say _all_, which they could not bear to before one another. I shall go there again, and take time for this. It is very gratifying to see the influence these few months of gentle and intelligent treatment have had upon these women; indeed, it is wonderful.' So much were her sympathies awakened by this visit, that she rejoiced in the opportunity, soon after offered, of passing Christmas with these outcasts, and gladly consented to address the women in their chapel. "There was," says one present, "a most touching tenderness, blended with dignity, in her air and tone, as, seated in the desk, she looked round upon her fallen sisters, and begun: 'To me the pleasant office has been given, of 'wishing you a happy Christmas.' A simultaneous movement of obeisance rippled over the audience, with a murmured 'Thank you;' and a smile was spread upon those sad countenances, like sunrise sparkling on a pool." A few words from this discourse,--which was extemporaneous, but of which she afterward made an imperfect record,--will show the temper in which she spoke:-- 'I have passed other Christmas days happily, but never felt as now, how fitting it is that this festival should come among the snows and chills of winter; for, to many of you, I trust, it is the birth-day of a higher life, when the sun of good-will is beginning to return, and the evergreen of hope gives promise of the eternal year. * * * 'Some months ago, we were told of the riot, the license, and defying spirit which made this place so wretched, and the conduct of some now here was such that the world said:--"Women once lost are far worse than abandoned men, and cannot be restored." But, no! It is not so! I know my sex better. It is because women have so much feeling, and such a rooted respect for purity, that they seem so shameless and insolent, when they feel that they have erred and that others think ill of them. They know that even the worst of men would like to see women pure as angels, and when they meet man's look of scorn, the desperate passion that rises is a perverted pride, which might have been their guardian angel. Might have been! Rather let me say, which may be; for the great improvement so rapidly wrought here gives us all warm hopes. * * * 'Be not in haste to leave these walls. Yesterday, one of you, who was praised, replied, that "if she did well she hoped that efforts would be made to have her pardoned." I can feel the monotony and dreariness of your confinement, but I entreat you to believe that for many of you it would be the greatest misfortune to be taken from here too soon. You know, better than I can, the temptations that await you in the world; and you must now perceive how dark is the gulf of sin and sorrow, towards which they would hurry you. Here, you have friends indeed; friends to your better selves; able and ready to help you. Born of unfortunate marriages, inheriting dangerous inclinations, neglected in childhood, with bad habits and bad associates, as certainly must be the case with some of you, how terrible will be the struggle when you leave this shelter! O, be sure that you are fitted to triumph over evil, before you again expose yourselves to it! And, instead of wasting your time and strength in vain wishes, use this opportunity to prepare yourselves for a better course of life, when you are set free. * * * 'When I was here before, I was grieved by hearing several of you say, "I will tell you what you wish to know, if I can be alone with you; but not before the other prisoners; for, if they know my past faults, they will taunt me with them." O, never do that! To taunt the fallen is the part of a fiend. And you! you were meant by Heaven to become angels of sympathy and love. It says in the Scripture: "Their angels do always behold in heaven the face of my Father." So was it with you in your childhood; so is it now. Your angels stand forever there to intercede for you; and to you they call to be gentle and good. Nothing can so grieve and discourage those heavenly friends as when you mock the suffering. It was one of the highest praises of Jesus, "The bruised reed he will not break." Remember that, and never insult, where you cannot aid, a companion. * * * 'Let me warn you earnestly against acting insincerely, and appearing to wish to do right for the sake of approbation I know you must prize the good opinion of your friendly protectors; but do not buy it at the cost of truth. Try to be, not to seem. Only so far as you earnestly wish to do right for the sake of right, can you gain a principle that will sustain you hereafter; and that is what we wish, not fair appearances now. A career can never be happy that begins with falsehood. Be inwardly, outwardly true; then you will never be weakened or hardened by the consciousness of playing a part; and if, hereafter, the unfeeling or thoughtless give you pain, or take the dreadful risk of pushing back a soul emerging from darkness, you will feel the strong support of a good conscience. * * * 'And never be discouraged; never despond; never say, "It is too late." Fear not, even if you relapse again and again. Many of you have much to contend with. Some may be so faulty, by temperament or habit, that they can never on this earth lead a wholly fair and harmonious life, however much they strive. Yet do what you can. If in one act,--for one day,--you can do right, let that live like a point of light in your memory; for if you have done well once you can again. If you fall, do not lie grovelling; but rise upon your feet once more, and struggle bravely on. And if aroused conscience makes you suffer keenly, have patience to bear it. God will not let you suffer more than you need to fit you for his grace. At the very moment of your utmost pain, persist to seek his aid, and it will be given abundantly. Cultivate this spirit of prayer. I do not mean agitation and excitement, but a deep desire for truth, purity, and goodness, and you will daily learn how near He is to every one of 'us.'' These fragments, from a hasty report transcribed when the impressions of the hour had grown faint, give but a shadow of the broad good sense, hearty fellow-feeling, and pathetic hopefulness, which made so effective her truly womanly appeal. This intercourse with the most unfortunate of her sex, and a desire to learn more of the causes of their degradation, and of the means of restoring them, led Margaret, immediately on reaching New York, to visit the various benevolent institutions, and especially the prisons on Blackwell's Island. And it was while walking among the beds of the lazar-house,--mis-called "hospital,"--which then, to the disgrace of the city, was the cess-pool of its social filth, that an incident occurred, as touching as it was surprising to herself. A woman was pointed out who bore a very bad character, as hardened, sulky, and impenetrable. She was in bad health and rapidly failing. Margaret requested to be left alone with her; and to her question, 'Are you 'willing to die?' the woman answered, "Yes;" adding, with her usual bitterness, "not on religious grounds, though." 'That is well,--to understand yourself,' was Margaret's rejoinder. She then began to talk with her about her health, and her few comforts, until the conversation deepened in interest. At length, as Margaret rose to go, she said: 'Is there not anything I can do 'for you?' The woman replied: "I should be glad if you will pray with me." The condition of these wretched beings was brought the more home to her heart, as the buildings were directly in sight from Mr. Greeley's house, at Turtle Bay, where Margaret, on her arrival, went to reside. 'Seven hundred females,' she writes, 'are now confined in the Penitentiary opposite this point. We can pass over in a boat in a few minutes. I mean to visit, talk, and read with them. I have always felt great interest in those women who are trampled in the mud to gratify the brute appetites of men, and wished that I might be brought naturally into contact with them. Now I am.' THE TRIBUNE AND HORACE GREELEY. It was early in December of 1844 that Margaret took up her abode with Mr. and Mrs. Greeley, in a spacious old wooden mansion, somewhat ruinous, but delightfully situated on the East River, which she thus describes:-- 'This place is, to me, entirely charming; it is so completely in the country, and all around is so bold and free. It is two miles or more from the thickly settled parts of New York, but omnibuses and cars give me constant access to the city, and, while I can readily see what and whom I will, I can command time and retirement. Stopping on the Haarlem road, you enter a lane nearly a quarter of a mile long, and going by a small brook and pond that locks in the place, and ascending a slightly rising ground, get sight of the house, which, old-fashioned and of mellow tint, fronts on a flower-garden filled with shrubs, large vines, and trim box borders. On both sides of the house are beautiful trees, standing fair, full-grown, and clear. Passing through a wide hall, you come out upon a piazza, stretching the whole length of the house, where one can walk in all weathers; and thence by a step or two, on a lawn, with picturesque masses of rocks, shrubs and trees, overlooking the East River. Gravel paths lead, by several turns, down the steep bank to the water's edge, where round the rocky point a small bay curves, in which boats are lying. And, owing to the currents, and the set of the tide, the sails glide sidelong, seeming to greet the house as they sweep by. The beauty here, seen by moonlight, is truly transporting. I enjoy it greatly, and the _genius loci_ receives me as to a home.' Here Margaret remained for a year and more, writing regularly for the Tribune. And how high an estimate this prolonged and near acquaintance led her to form for its Editor, will appear from a few passages in her letters:-- 'Mr. Greeley is a man of genuine excellence, honorable, benevolent, and of an uncorrupted disposition. He is sagacious, and, in his way, of even great abilities. In modes of life and manner he is a man of the people, and of the American people.' And again:--Mr. Greeley is in many ways very interesting for me to know. He teaches me things, which my own influence on those, who have hitherto approached me, has prevented me from learning. In our business and friendly relations, we are on terms of solid good-will and mutual respect. With the exception of my own mother, I think him the most disinterestedly generous person I have ever known.' And later she writes:-- 'You have heard that the Tribune Office was burned to the ground. For a day I thought it must make a difference, but it has served only to increase my admiration for Mr. Greeley's smiling courage. He has really a strong character.' On the other side, Mr. Greeley thus records his recollections of his friend:-- "My first acquaintance with Margaret Fuller was made through the pages of 'The Dial.' The lofty range and rare ability of that work, and its un-American richness of culture and ripeness of thought, naturally filled the 'fit audience, though few,' with a high estimate of those who were known as its conductors and principal writers. Yet I do not now remember that any article, which strongly impressed me, was recognized as from the pen of its female editor, prior to the appearance of 'The Great Lawsuit,' afterwards matured into the volume more distinctively, yet not quite accurately, entitled 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century.' I think this can hardly have failed to make a deep impression on the mind of every thoughtful reader, as the production of an original, vigorous, and earnest mind. 'Summer on the Lakes,' which appeared some time after that essay, though before its expansion into a book, struck me as less ambitious in its aim, but more graceful and delicate in its execution; and as one of the clearest and most graphic delineations, ever given, of the Great Lakes, of the Prairies, and of the receding barbarism, and the rapidly advancing, but rude, repulsive semi-civilization, which were contending with most unequal forces for the possession of those rich lands. I still consider 'Summer on the Lakes' unequalled, especially in its pictures of the Prairies and of the sunnier aspects of Pioneer life. "Yet, it was the suggestion of Mrs. Greeley,--who had spent some weeks of successive seasons in or near Boston, and who had there made the personal acquaintance of Miss Fuller, and formed a very high estimate and warm attachment for her,--that induced me, in the autumn of 1844, to offer her terms, which were accepted, for her assistance in the literary department of the Tribune. A home in my family was included in the stipulation. I was myself barely acquainted with her, when she thus came to reside with us, and I did not fully appreciate her nobler qualities for some months afterward. Though we were members of the same household, we scarcely met save at breakfast; and my time and thoughts were absorbed in duties and cares, which left me little leisure or inclination for the amenities of social intercourse. Fortune seemed to delight in placing us two in relations of friendly antagonism,--or rather, to develop all possible contrasts in our ideas and social habits. She was naturally inclined to luxury and a good appearance before the world. My pride, if I had any, delighted in bare walls and rugged fare. She was addicted to strong tea and coffee, both which I rejected and contemned, even in the most homoeopathic dilutions: while, my general health being sound, and hers sadly impaired, I could not fail to find in her dietetic habits the causes of her almost habitual illness; and once, while we were still barely acquainted, when she came to the breakfast-table with a very severe headache, I was tempted to attribute it to her strong potations of the Chinese leaf the night before. She told me quite frankly that she 'declined being lectured on the food or beverage she saw fit to take;' which was but reasonable in one who had arrived at her maturity of intellect and fixedness of habits. So the subject was thenceforth tacitly avoided between us; but, though words were suppressed, looks and involuntary gestures could not so well be; and an utter divergency of views on this and kindred themes created a perceptible distance between us. "Her earlier contributions to the Tribune were not her best, and I did not at first prize her aid so highly as I afterwards learned to do. She wrote always freshly, vigorously, but not always clearly; for her full and intimate acquaintance with continental literature, especially German, seemed to have marred her felicity and readiness of expression in her mother tongue. While I never met another woman who conversed more freely or lucidly, the attempt to commit her thoughts to paper seemed to induce a singular embarrassment and hesitation. She could write only when in the vein; and this needed often to be waited for through several days, while the occasion sometimes required an immediate utterance. The new book must be reviewed before other journals had thoroughly dissected and discussed it, else the ablest critique would command no general attention, and perhaps be, by the greater number, unread. That the writer should wait the flow of inspiration, or at least the recurrence of elasticity of spirits and relative health of body, will not seem unreasonable to the general reader; but to the inveterate hack-horse of the daily press, accustomed to write at any time, on any subject, and with a rapidity limited only by the physical ability to form the requisite pen-strokes, the notion of waiting for a brighter day, or a happier frame of mind, appears fantastic and absurd. He would as soon think of waiting for a change in the moon. Hence, while I realized that her contributions evinced rare intellectual wealth and force, I did not value them as I should have done had they been written more fluently and promptly. They often seemed to make their appearance 'a day after the fair.' "One other point of tacit antagonism between us may as well be noted. Margaret was always a most earnest, devoted champion of the Emancipation of Women, from their past and present condition of inferiority, to an independence on Men. She demanded for them the fullest recognition of Social and Political Equality with the rougher sex; the freest access to all stations, professions, employments, which are open to any. To this demand I heartily acceded. It seemed to me, however, that her clear perceptions of abstract right were often overborne, in practice, by the influence of education and habit; that while she demanded absolute equality for Woman, she exacted a deference and courtesy from men to women, _as_ women, which was entirely inconsistent with that requirement. In my view, the equalizing theory can be enforced only by ignoring the habitual discrimination of men and women, as forming separate _classes_, and regarding all alike as simply _persons_,--as human beings. So long as a lady shall deem herself in need of some gentleman's arm to conduct her properly out of a dining or ball-room,--so long as she shall consider it dangerous or unbecoming to walk half a mile alone by night,--I cannot see how the 'Woman's Rights' theory is ever to be anything more than a logically defensible abstraction. In this view Margaret did not at all concur, and the diversity was the incitement to much perfectly good-natured, but nevertheless sharpish sparring between us. Whenever she said or did anything implying the usual demand of Woman on the courtesy and protection of Manhood, I was apt, before complying, to look her in the face and exclaim with marked emphasis,--quoting from her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century,'--'LET THEM BE SEA-CAPTAINS IF THEY WILL!' Of course, this was given and received as raillery, but it did not tend to ripen our intimacy or quicken my esteem into admiration. Though no unkind word ever passed between us, nor any approach to one, yet we two dwelt for months under the same roof, as scarcely more than acquaintances, meeting once a day at a common board, and having certain business relations with each other. Personally, I regarded her rather as my wife's cherished friend than as my own, possessing many lofty qualities and some prominent weaknesses, and a good deal spoiled by the unmeasured flattery of her little circle of inordinate admirers. For myself, burning no incense on any human shrine, I half-consciously resolved to 'keep my eye beam clear,' and escape the fascination which she seemed to exert over the eminent and cultivated persons, mainly women, who came to our out-of-the-way dwelling to visit her, and who seemed generally to regard her with a strangely Oriental adoration. "But as time wore on, and I became inevitably better and better acquainted with her, I found myself drawn, almost irresistibly, into the general current. I found that her faults and weaknesses were all superficial and obvious to the most casual, if undazzled, observer. They rather dwindled than expanded upon a fuller knowledge; or rather, took on new and brighter aspects in the light of her radiant and lofty soul. I learned to know her as a most fearless and unselfish champion of Truth and Human Good at all hazards, ready to be their standard-bearer through danger and obloquy, and, if need be, their martyr. I think few have more keenly appreciated the material goods of life,--Rank, Riches, Power, Luxury, Enjoyment; but I know none who would have more cheerfully surrendered them all, if the well-being of our Race could thereby have been promoted. I have never met another in whom the inspiring hope of Immortality was so strengthened into profoundest conviction. She did not _believe_ in our future and unending existence,--she _knew_ it, and lived ever in the broad glare of its morning twilight. With a limited income and liberal wants, she was yet generous beyond the bounds of reason. Had the gold of California been all her own, she would have disbursed nine tenths of it in eager and well-directed efforts to stay, or at least diminish, the flood of human misery. And it is but fair to state, that the liberality she evinced was fully paralleled by the liberality she experienced at the hands of others. Had she needed thousands, and made her wants known, she had friends who would have cheerfully supplied her. I think few persons, in their pecuniary dealings, have experienced and evinced more of the better qualities of human nature than Margaret Fuller. She seemed to inspire those who approached her with that generosity which was a part of her nature. "Of her writings I do not purpose to speak critically. I think most of her contributions to the Tribune, while she remained with us, were characterized by a directness, terseness, and practicality, which are wanting in some of her earlier productions. Good judges have confirmed my own opinion, that, while her essays in the Dial are more elaborate and ambitious, her reviews in the Tribune are far better adapted to win the favor and sway the judgment of the great majority of readers. But, one characteristic of her writings I feel bound to commend,--their absolute truthfulness. She never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do, nor what would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, 'Is it the truth? Is it such as the public should know?' And if her judgment answered, 'Yes,' she uttered it; no matter what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down on her own head. Perfect conscientiousness was an unfailing characteristic of her literary efforts. Even the severest of her critiques,--that on Longfellow's Poems,--for which an impulse in personal pique has been alleged, I happen with certainty to know had no such origin. When I first handed her the book to review, she excused herself, assigning the wide divergence of her views of Poetry from those of the author and his school, as her reason. She thus induced me to attempt the task of reviewing it myself. But day after day sped by, and I could find no hour that was not absolutely required for the performance of some duty that _would not_ be put off, nor turned over to another. At length I carried the book back to her in utter despair of ever finding an hour in which even to look through it; and, at my renewed and earnest request, she reluctantly undertook its discussion. The statement of these facts is but an act of justice to her memory. "Profoundly religious,--though her creed was, at once, very broad and very short, with a genuine love for inferiors in social position, whom she was habitually studying, by her counsel and teachings, to elevate and improve,--she won the confidence and affection of those who attracted her, by unbounded sympathy and trust. She probably knew the cherished secrets of more hearts than any one else, because she freely imparted her own. With a full share both of intellectual and of family pride, she preëminently recognized and responded to the essential brotherhood of all human kind, and needed but to know that a fellow-being required her counsel or assistance, to render her, riot merely willing, but eager to impart it. Loving ease, luxury, and the world's good opinion, she stood ready to renounce them all, at the call of pity or of duty. I think no one, not radically averse to the whole system of domestic servitude, would have treated servants, of whatever class, with such uniform and thoughtful consideration,--a regard which wholly merged their factitious condition in their antecedent and permanent humanity. I think few servants ever lived weeks with her, who were not dignified and lastingly benefited by her influence and her counsels. They might be at first repelled, by what seemed her too stately manner and exacting disposition, but they soon learned to esteem and love her. "I have known few women, and scarcely another maiden, who had the heart and the courage to speak with such frank compassion, in mixed circles, of the most degraded and outcast portion of the sex. The contemplation of their treatment, especially by the guilty authors of their ruin, moved her to a calm and mournful indignation, which she did not attempt to suppress nor control. Others were willing to pity and deplore; Margaret was more inclined to vindicate and to redeem. She did not hesitate to avow that on meeting some of these abused, unhappy sisters, she had been surprised to find them scarcely fallen morally below the ordinary standard of Womanhood,--realizing and loathing their debasement; anxious to escape it; and only repelled by the sad consciousness that for them sympathy and society remained only so long as they should persist in the ways of pollution. Those who have read her 'Woman,' may remember some daring comparisons therein suggested between these Pariahs of society and large classes of their respectable sisters; and that was no fitful expression,--no sudden outbreak,--but impelled by her most deliberate convictions. I think, if she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of Virtue, would have been one of her most cherished and first realized conceptions. "Her love of children was one of her most prominent characteristics. The pleasure she enjoyed in their society was fully counterpoised by that she imparted. To them she was never lofty, nor reserved, nor mystical; for no one had ever a more perfect faculty for entering into their sports, their feelings, their enjoyments. She could narrate almost any story in language level to their capacities, and in a manner calculated to bring out their hearty and often boisterously expressed delight. She possessed marvellous powers of observation and imitation or mimicry; and, had she been attracted to the stage, would have been the first actress America has produced, whether in tragedy or comedy. Her faculty of mimicking was not needed to commend her to the hearts of children, but it had its effect in increasing the fascinations of her genial nature and heartfelt joy in their society. To amuse and instruct them was an achievement for which she would readily forego any personal object; and her intuitive perception of the toys, games, stories, rhymes, &c., best adapted to arrest and enchain their attention, was unsurpassed. Between her and my only child, then living, who was eight months old when she came to us, and something over two years when she sailed for Europe, tendrils of affection gradually intertwined themselves, which I trust Death has not severed, but rather multiplied and strengthened. She became his teacher, playmate, and monitor; and he requited her with a prodigality of love and admiration. "I shall not soon forget their meeting in my office, after some weeks' separation, just before she left us forever. His mother had brought him in from the country and left him asleep on my sofa, while she was absent making purchases, and he had rolled off and hurt himself in the fall, waking with the shock in a phrensy of anger, just before Margaret, hearing of his arrival, rushed into the office to find him. I was vainly attempting to soothe him as she entered; but he was running from one end to the other of the office, crying passionately, and refusing to be pacified. She hastened to him, in perfect confidence that her endearments would calm the current of his feelings,--that the sound of her well-remembered voice would banish all thought of his pain,--and that another moment would see him restored to gentleness; but, half-wakened, he did not heed her, and probably did not even realize who it was that caught him repeatedly in her arms and tenderly insisted that he should restrain himself. At last she desisted in despair; and, with the bitter tears streaming down her face, observed:--'Pickie, many friends have treated me unkindly, but no one had ever the power to cut me to the heart, as you have!' Being thus let alone, he soon came to himself, and their mutual delight in the meeting was rather heightened by the momentary estrangement. "They had one more meeting; their last on earth! 'Aunty Margaret' was to embark for Europe on a certain day, and 'Pickie' was brought into the city to bid her farewell. They met this time also at my office, and together we thence repaired to the ferry-boat, on which she was returning to her residence in Brooklyn to complete her preparations for the voyage. There they took a tender and affecting leave of each other. But soon his mother called at the office, on her way to the departing ship, and we were easily persuaded to accompany her thither, and say farewell once more, to the manifest satisfaction of both Margaret and the youngest of her devoted friends. Thus they parted, never to meet again in time. She sent him messages and presents repeatedly from Europe; and he, when somewhat older, dictated a letter in return, which was joyfully received and acknowledged. When the mother of our great-souled friend spent some days with us nearly two years afterward, 'Pickie' talked to her often and lovingly of 'Aunty Margaret,' proposing that they two should 'take a boat and go over and see her,'--for, to his infantile conception, the low coast of Long Island, visible just across the East River, was that Europe to which she had sailed, and where she was unaccountably detained so long. Alas! a far longer and more adventurous journey was required to reunite those loving souls! The 12th of July, 1849, saw him stricken down, from health to death, by the relentless cholera; and my letter, announcing that calamity, drew from her a burst of passionate sorrow, such as hardly any bereavement but the loss of a very near relative could have impelled. Another year had just ended, when a calamity, equally sudden, bereft a wide circle of her likewise, with her husband and infant son. Little did I fear, when I bade her a confident Good-by, on the deck of her outward-bound ship, that the sea would close over her earthly remains, ere we should meet again; far less that the light of my eyes and the cynosure of my hopes, who then bade her a tenderer and sadder farewell, would precede her on the dim pathway to that 'Father's house,' whence is no returning! Ah, well! God is above all, and gracious alike in what he conceals and what he discloses;--benignant and bounteous, as well when he reclaims as when he bestows. In a few years, at farthest, our loved and lost ones will welcome us to their home." Favorably as Mr. Greeley speaks of Margaret's articles in the Tribune, it is yet true that she never brought her full power to bear upon them; partly because she was too much exhausted by previous over-work, partly because it hindered her free action to aim at popular effect. Her own estimate of them is thus expressed:-- 'I go on very moderately, for my strength is not great, and I am connected with one who is anxious that I should not overtask it. Body and mind, I have long required rest and mere amusement, and now obey Nature as much as I can. If she pleases to restore me to an energetic state, she will by-and-by; if not, I can only hope this world will not turn me out of doors too abruptly. I value my present position very much, as enabling me to speak effectually some right words to a large circle; and, while I can do so, am content.' Again she says,-- 'I am pleased with your sympathy about the Tribune, for I do not find much among my old friends. They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am satisfied to aid in the great work of popular education. I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but rather as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree helped, the thoughts of every day seem worth noting, though in a form that does not inspire me.' The most valuable of her contributions, according to her own judgment, were the Criticisms on Contemporary Authors in Europe and America. A few of these were revised in the spring of 1846, and, in connection with some of her best articles selected from the Dial, Western Messenger, American Monthly, &c., appeared in two volumes of Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books, under the title of PAPERS ON ART AND LITERATURE. SOCIETY. Heralded by her reputation, as a scholar, writer, and talker, and brought continually before the public by her articles in the Tribune, Margaret found a circle of acquaintance opening before her, as wide, various, and rich, as time and inclination permitted her to know. Persons sought her in her country retreat, attracted alike by idle curiosity, desire for aid, and respectful sympathy. She visited freely in several interesting families in New York and Brooklyn: occasionally accepted invitations to evening parties, and often met, at the somewhat celebrated _soirées_ of Miss Lynch, the assembled authors, artists, critics, wits, and _dilettanti_ of New York. As was inevitable, also, for one of such powerful magnetic influence, liberal soul and broad judgment, she once again became, as elsewhere she had been, a confidant and counsellor of the tempted and troubled; and her geniality, lively conversation, and ever fresh love, gave her a home in many hearts. But the subdued tone of her spirits at this period led her to prefer seclusion. Of her own social habits she writes:-- 'It is not well to keep entirely apart from the stream of common life; so, though I never go out when busy, nor keep late hours, I find it pleasanter and better to enter somewhat into society. I thus meet with many entertaining acquaintance, and some friends. I can never, indeed, expect, in America, or in this world, to form relations with nobler persons than I have already known; nor can I put my heart into these new ties as into the old ones, though probably it would still respond to commanding excellence. But my present circle satisfies my wants. As to what is called "good society," I am wholly indifferent. I know several women, whom I like very much, and yet more men. I hear good music, which answers my social desires better than any other intercourse can; and I love four or five interesting children, in whom I always find more genuine sympathy than in their elders.' Of the impression produced by Margaret on those who were but slightly acquainted with her, some notion may be formed from the following sketch:-- "In general society, she commanded respect rather than admiration All persons were curious to see her, and in full rooms her fine head and spiritual expression at once marked her out from the crowd; but the most were repelled by what seemed conceit, pedantry, and a harsh spirit of criticism, while, on her part, she appeared to regard those around her as frivolous, superficial, and conventional. Indeed, I must frankly confess, that we did not meet in pleasant relations, except now and then, when the lifting of a veil, as it were, revealed for a moment the true life of each. Yet I was fond of looking at her from a distance, and defending her when silly people were inclined to cavil at her want of feminine graces. Then I would say, 'I would like to be an artist now, that I might paint, not the care-worn countenance and the uneasy air of one seemingly out of harmony with the scene about her, but the soul that sometimes looks out from under those large lids. Michel Angelo would have made her a Sibyl.' I remember I was surprised to find her height no greater; for her writings had always given me an impression of magnitude. Thus I studied though I avoided her, admitting, the while, proudly and joyously, that she was a woman to reverence. A trifling incident, however, gave me the key to much in her character, of which, before, I had not dreamed. It was one evening, after a Valentine party, where Frances Osgood, Margaret Fuller, and other literary ladies, had attracted some attention, that, as we were in the dressing-room preparing to go home, I heard Margaret sigh deeply. Surprised and moved, I said, 'Why?'--'Alone, as usual,' was her pathetic answer, followed by a few sweet, womanly remarks, touching as they were beautiful. Often, after, I found myself recalling her look and tone, with tears in my eyes; for before I had regarded her as a being cold, and abstracted, if not scornful." Cold, abstracted, and scornful! About this very time it was that Margaret wrote in her journal:-- 'Father, let me not injure my fellows during this period of repression. I feel that when we meet my tones are not so sweet as I would have them. O, let me not wound! I, who know so well how wounds can burn and ache, should not inflict them. Let my touch be light and gentle. Let me keep myself uninvaded, but let me not fail to be kind and tender, when need is. Yet I would not assume an overstrained poetic magnanimity. Help me to do just right, and no more. O, make truth profound and simple in me!' Again:-- 'The heart bleeds,--faith almost gives way, to see man's seventy years of chrysalis. Is it not too long? Enthusiasm must struggle fiercely to burn clear amid these fogs. In what little, low, dark cells of care and prejudice, without one soaring thought or melodious fancy, do poor mortals--well-intentioned enough, and with religious aspiration too--forever creep. And yet the sun sets to-day as gloriously bright as ever it did on the temples of Athens, and the evening star rises as heavenly pure as it rose on the eye of Dante. O, Father! help me to free my fellows from the conventional bonds whereby their sight is holden. By purity and freedom let me teach them justice.' And yet again:-- 'There comes a consciousness that I have no real hold on life,--no real, permanent connection with any soul. I seem a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot, that I may learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge. This thought envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I 'do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.' Casual observers mistook Margaret's lofty idealism for personal pride; but thus speaks one who really knew her:--"You come like one of the great powers of nature, harmonizing with all beauty of the soul or of the earth. You cannot be discordant with anything that is true and deep. I thank God for the noble privilege of being recognized by so large, tender, and radiant a soul as thine." EUROPE. LETTERS "I go to prove my soul. I see my way, as birds their trackless way. In some time, God's good time, I shall arrive He guides me and the bird. In his good time!" BROWNING. "One, who, if He be called upon to face Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for human kind, Is happy as a lover, and attired With sudden brightness, like a man inspired; And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw." WORDSWORTH. "Italia! Italia! O tu cui feo la sorte Dono infelice di bellezza, ond' hai Funesta dote d' infiniti guai, Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte. Deh, fossi tu men bella, ò almen píù forte!" FILICAJA. "Oh, not to guess it at the first. But I did guess it,--that is, I divined, Felt by an instinct how it was;--why else Should I pronounce you free from all that heap Of sins, which had been irredeemable? I felt they were not yours." BROWNING. "Nests there are many of this very year, Many the nests are, which the winds shall shake, The rains run through and other birds beat down Yours, O Aspasia! rests against the temple Of heavenly love, and, thence inviolate, It shall not fall this winter, nor the next." LANDOR. "Lift up your heart upon the knees of God, Losing yourself, your smallness and your darkness In His great light, who fills and moves the world, Who hath alone the quiet of perfect motion." STERLING. VIII. EUROPE * * * * * [It has been judged best to let Margaret herself tell the story of her travels. In the spring of 1846, her valued friends, Marcus Spring and lady, of New York, had decided to make a tour in Europe, with their son, and they invited Miss Fuller to accompany them. An arrangement was soon made on such terms as she could accept, and the party sailed from Boston in the "Cambria," on the first of August. The following narrative is made up of letters addressed by her to various correspondents. Some extracts, describing distinguished persons whom she saw, have been borrowed from her letters to the New York Tribune.] TO MRS. MARGARET FULLER. _Liverpool, Aug_. 16, 1846. My dear Mother:-- The last two days at sea passed well enough, as a number of agreeable persons were introduced to me, and there were several whom I knew before. I enjoyed nothing on the sea; the excessively bracing air so affected me that I could not bear to look at it. The sight of land delighted me. The tall crags, with their breakers and circling sea-birds; then the green fields, how glad! We had a very fine day to come ashore, and made the shortest passage ever known. The stewardess said, "Any one who complained this time tempted the Almighty." I did not complain, but I could hardly have borne another day. I had no appetite; but am now making up for all deficiencies, and feel already a renovation beginning from the voyage; and, still more, from freedom and entire change of scene. We came here Wednesday, at noon; next day we went to Manchester; the following day to Chester; returning here Saturday evening. On Sunday we went to hear James Martineau; were introduced to him, and other leading persons. The next day and evening I passed in the society of very pleasant people, who have made every exertion to give me the means of seeing and learning; but they have used up all my strength. LONDON. TO C.S. As soon as I reached England, I found how right we were in supposing there was elsewhere a greater range of interesting character among the men, than with us. I do not find, indeed, any so valuable as three or four among the most marked we have known; but many that are strongly individual, and have a fund of hidden life. In Westmoreland, I knew, and have since been seeing in London, a man, such as would interest you a good deal; Mr. Atkinson. He is sometimes called the "prince of the English mesmerisers;" and he has the fine instinctive nature you may suppose from that. He is a man of about thirty; in the fulness of his powers; tall, and finely formed, with a head for Leonardo to paint; mild and composed, but powerful and sagacious; he does not think, but perceives and acts. He is intimate with artists, having studied architecture himself as a profession; but has some fortune on which he lives. Sometimes stationary and acting in the affairs of other men; sometimes wandering about the world and learning; he seems bound by no tie, yet looks as if he had relatives in every place. I saw, also, a man,--an artist,--severe and antique in his spirit; he seemed burdened by the sorrows of aspiration; yet very calm, as secure in the justice of fate. What he does is bad, but full of a great desire. His name is David Scott. I saw another,--a pupil of De la Roche,--very handsome, and full of a voluptuous enjoyment of nature: him I liked a little in a different way. By far the most beauteous person I have seen is Joseph Mazzini. If you ever see Saunders' "People's Journal," you can read articles by him that will give you some notion of his mind, especially one on his friends, headed "Italian Martyrs." He is one in whom holiness has purified, but somewhat dwarfed the man. * * * * * Our visit to Mr. Wordsworth was fortunate. He is seventy-six; but his is a florid, fair old age. He walked with us to all his haunts about the house. Its situation is beautiful, and the "Rydalian Laurels" are magnificent. Still, I saw abodes among the hills that I should have preferred for Wordsworth; more wild and still more romantic. The fresh and lovely Rydal Mount seems merely the retirement of a gentleman, rather than the haunt of a poet. He showed his benignity of disposition in several little things, especially in his attentions to a young boy we had with us. This boy had left the circus, exhibiting its feats of horsemanship, in Ambleside, "for that day only," at his own desire to see Wordsworth; and I feared he would be dissatisfied, as I know I should have been at his age, if, when called to see a poet, I had found no Apollo flaming with youthful glory, laurel-crowned, and lyre in hand; but, instead, a reverend old man clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along the level garden-path. However, he was not disappointed; and Wordsworth, in his turn, seemed to feel and prize a congenial nature in this child. Taking us into the house, he showed us the picture of his sister, repeating with much expression some lines of hers, and those so famous of his about her, beginning "Five years," &c.; also, his own picture, by Inman, of whom he spoke with esteem. I had asked to see a picture in that room, which has been described in one of the finest of his later poems. A hundred times had I wished to see this picture, yet when seen was not disappointed by it. The light was unfavorable, but it had a light of its own,-- "whose mild gleam Of beauty never ceases to enrich The common light." Mr. Wordsworth is fond of the hollyhock; a partiality scarcely deserved by the flower, but which marks the simplicity of his tastes. He had made a long avenue of them, of all colors, from the crimson brown to rose, straw-color, and white, and pleased himself with having made proselytes to a liking for them, among his neighbors. I never have seen such magnificent fuchsias as at Ambleside, and there was one to be seen in every cottage-yard. They are no longer here under the shelter of the green-house, as with us, and as they used to be in England. The plant, from its grace and finished elegance, being a great favorite of mine, I should like to see it as frequently and of as luxuriant growth at home, and asked their mode of culture, which I here mark down for the benefit of all who may be interested. Make a bed of bog-earth and sand; put down slips of the fuchsia, and give them a great deal of water; this is all they need. People leave them out here in winter, but perhaps they would not bear the cold of our Januaries. Mr. Wordsworth spoke with more liberality than we expected of the recent measures about the Corn-laws, saying that "the principle was certainly right, though whether existing interests had been as carefully attended to as was right, he was not prepared to say," &c. His neighbors were pleased to hear of his speaking thus mildly, and hailed it as a sign that he was opening his mind to more light on these subjects. They lament that his habits of seclusion keep him ignorant of the real wants of England and the world. Living in this region, which is cultivated by small proprietors, where there is little poverty, vice, or misery, he hears not the voice which cries so loudly from other parts of England, and will not be stilled by sweet, poetic suasion, or philosophy, for it is the cry of men in the jaws of destruction. It was pleasant to find the reverence inspired by this great and pure mind warmest near home. Our landlady, in heaping praises upon him, added, constantly, "and Mrs. Wordsworth, too." "Do the people here," said I, "value Mr. Wordsworth most because he is a celebrated writer?" "Truly, madam," said she, "I think it is because he is so kind a neighbor." "True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home." EDINBURGH.----DE QUINCEY. At Edinburgh we were in the wrong season, and many persons we most wished to see were absent. We had, however, the good fortune to find Dr. Andrew Combe, who received us with great kindness. I was impressed with great and affectionate respect, by the benign and even temper of his mind, his extensive and accurate knowledge, accompanied by a large and intelligent liberality. Of our country he spoke very wisely and hopefully. * * * * * I had the satisfaction, not easily attainable now, of seeing De Quincey for some hours, and in the mood of conversation. As one belonging to the Wordsworth and Coleridge constellation (he, too, is now seventy years of age), the thoughts and knowledge of Mr. De Quincey lie in the past, and oftentimes he spoke of matters now become trite to one of a later culture. But to all that fell from his lips, his eloquence, subtle and forcible as the wind, full and gently falling as the evening dew, lent a peculiar charm. He is an admirable narrator; not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not absolutely required to give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon. I admired, too, his urbanity; so opposite to the rapid, slang, Vivian-Greyish style, current in the literary conversation of the day. "Sixty years since," men had time to do things better and more gracefully. CHALMERS. With Dr. Chalmers we passed a couple of hours. He is old now, but still full of vigor and fire. We had an opportunity of hearing a fine burst of indignant eloquence from him. "I shall blush to my very bones," said he, "if the _Chaarrch_" (sound these two _rrs_ with as much burr as possible, and you will get an idea of his mode of pronouncing that unweariable word,) "if the Chaarrch yield to the storm." He alluded to the outcry now raised by the Abolitionists against the Free Church, whose motto is, "Send back the money;" i.e., the money taken from the American slaveholders. Dr. C. felt, that if they did not yield from conviction, they must not to assault. His manner in speaking of this gave me a hint of the nature of his eloquence. He seldom preaches now. * * * * * A Scottish gentleman told me the following story:--Burns, still only in the dawn of his celebrity, was invited to dine with one of the neighboring so-called gentry, unhappily quite void of true gentle blood. On arriving, he found his plate set in the servants' room. After dinner, he was invited into a room where guests were assembled, and, a chair being placed for him at the lower end of the board, a glass of wine was offered, and he was requested to sing one of his songs for the entertainment, of the company. He drank off the wine, and thundered forth in reply his grand song "For a' that and a' that," and having finished his prophecy and prayer, nature's nobleman left his churlish entertainers to hide their heads in the home they had disgraced. A NIGHT ON BEN LOMOND. At Inversnaid, we took a boat to go down Loch Lomond, to the little inn of Rowardennan, from which the ascent is made of Ben Lomond. We found a day of ten thousand, for our purpose; but, unhappily, a large party had come with the sun, and engaged all the horses, so that if we went, it must be on foot. This was something of an enterprise for me, as the ascent is four miles, and toward the summit quite fatiguing. However, in the pride of newly-gained health and strength, I was ready, and set forth with Mr. S. alone. We took no guide, and the people of the house did not advise us to take one, as they ought. On reaching the peak, the sight was one of beauty and grandeur such as imagination never painted. You see around you no plain ground, but on every side constellations, or groups of hills, exquisitely dressed in the soft purple of the heather, amid which gleam the lakes, like eyes that tell the secrets of the earth, and drink in those of the heavens. Peak beyond peak caught from the shifting light all the colors of the prism, and, on the furthest, angel companies seemed hovering in glorious white robes. About four o'clock we began our descent. Near the summit, the traces of the path are not distinct, and I said to Mr. S., after a while, that we had lost it. He said he thought that was of no consequence; we could find our way down. I said I thought it was, as the ground was full of springs that were bridged over in the pathway. He accordingly went to look for it, and I stood still, because I was so tired I did not like to waste any labor. Soon he called to me that he had found it, and I followed in the direction where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, and saw him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, and called him many times. It seems, he on his side shouted also, but the brow of some hill was between us, and we neither saw nor heard one another. I then thought I would make the best of my way down, and I should find him when I arrived. But, in doing so, I found the justice of my apprehension about the springs, so soon as I got to the foot of the hills; for I would sink up to my knees in bog, and must go up the hills again, seeking better crossing places. Thus I lost much time. Nevertheless, in the twilight, I saw, at last, the lake, and the inn of Rowardennan on its shore. Between me and it, lay, direct, a high heathery hill, which I afterwards found is called "The Tongue," because hemmed in on three sides by a water-course. It looked as if, could I only get to the bottom of that, I should be on comparatively level ground. I then attempted to descend in the water-course, but, finding that impracticable, climbed on the hill again, and let myself down by the heather, for it was very steep, and full of deep holes. With great fatigue, I got to the bottom, but when I was about to cross the water-course there, I felt afraid, it looked so deep in the dim twilight. I got down as far as I could by the root of a tree, and threw down a stone. It sounded very hollow, and I was afraid to jump. The shepherds told me afterwards, if I had, I should probably have killed myself, it was so deep, and the bed of the torrent full of sharp stones. I then tried to ascend the hill again, for there was no other way to get off it; but soon sank down utterly exhausted. When able to get up again, and look about me, it was completely dark. I saw, far below me, a light, that looked about as big as a pin's head, that I knew to be from the inn at Rowardennan, but heard no sound except the rush of the waterfall, and the sighing of the night wind. For the first few minutes after I perceived I had come to my night's lodging, such as it was, the circumstance looked appalling. I was very lightly clad, my feet and dress were very wet, I had only a little shawl to throw round me, and the cold autumn wind had already come, and the night mist was to fall on me, all fevered and exhausted as I was. I thought I should not live through the night, or, if I did, I must be an invalid henceforward. I could not even keep myself warm by walking, for, now it was dark, it would be too dangerous to stir. My only chance, however, lay in motion, and my only help in myself; and so convinced was I of this, that I did keep in motion the whole of that long night, imprisoned as I was on such a little perch of that great mountain. For about two hours, I saw the stars, and very cheery and companionable they looked; but then the mist fell, and I saw nothing more, except such apparitions as visited Ossian, on the hill-side, when he went out by night, and struck the bosky shield, and called to him the spirits of the heroes, and the white-armed maids, with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came those visionary shapes. Floating slowly and gracefully, their white robes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they had been engaged, and come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of death. Then the moon rose. I could not see her, but her silver light filled the mist. Now I knew it was two o'clock, and that, having weathered out so much of the night, I might the rest; and the hours hardly seemed long to me more. It may give an idea of the extent of the mountain, that, though I called, every now and then, with all my force, in case by chance some aid might be near, and though no less than twenty men, with their dogs, were looking for me, I never heard a sound, except the rush of the waterfall and the sighing of the night wind, and once or twice the startling of the grouse in the heather. It was sublime indeed,--a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene realities. At last came the signs of day,--the gradual clearing and breaking up; some faint sounds from I know not what; the little flies, too, arose from their bed amid the purple heather, and bit me. Truly they were very welcome to do so. But what was my disappointment to find the mist so thick, that I could see neither lake nor inn, nor anything to guide me. I had to go by guess, and, as it happened, my Yankee method served me well. I ascended the hill, crossed the torrent, in the waterfall, first drinking some of the water, which was as good at that time as ambrosia. I crossed in that place, because the waterfall made steps, as it were, to the next hill. To be sure, they were covered with water, but I was already entirely wet with the mist, so that it did not matter. I kept on scrambling, as it happened, in the right direction, till, about seven, some of the shepherds found me. The moment they came, all my feverish strength departed, and they carried me home, where my arrival relieved my friends of distress far greater than I had undergone; for I had my grand solitude, my Ossianic visions, and the pleasure of sustaining myself; while they had only doubt, amounting to anguish, and a fruitless search through the night. Entirely contrary to my forebodings, I only suffered for this a few days, and was able to take a parting look at my prison, as I went down the lake, with feelings of complacency. It was a majestic-looking hill, that Tongue, with the deep ravines on either side, and the richest robe of heather I have anywhere seen. Mr. S. gave all the men who were looking for me a dinner in the barn, and he and Mrs. S. ministered to them; and they talked of Burns,--really the national writer, and known by them, apparently, as none other is,--and of hair-breadth 'scapes by flood and fell. Afterwards they were all brought up to see me, and it was gratifying to note the good breeding and good feeling with which they deported themselves. Indeed, this adventure created quite an intimate feeling between us and the people there. I had been much pleased before, in attending one of their dances, at the genuine independence and politeness of their conduct. They were willing to dance their Highland flings and strathspeys, for our amusement, and did it as naturally and as freely as they would have offered the stranger the best chair. JOANNA BAILLIE.--HOWITTS.--SMITH. I have mentioned with satisfaction seeing some persons who illustrated the past dynasty in the progress of thought here: Wordsworth, Dr. Chalmers, De Quincey, Andrew Combe. With a still higher pleasure, because to one of my own sex, whom I have honored almost above any, I went to pay my court to Joanna Baillie. I found on her brow, not, indeed, a coronal of gold; but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts have received. We found her in her little calm retreat, at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character and their mutual relations she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline. * * * * * Mary and William Howitt are the main support of the People's Journal. I saw them several times at their cheerful and elegant home. In Mary Howitt, I found the same engaging traits of character we are led to expect from her books for children. At their house, I became acquainted with Dr. Southwood Smith, the well-known philanthropist. He is at present engaged in the construction of good tenements, calculated to improve the condition of the working people. TO R.W.E. _Paris, Nov. 16, 1846._--I meant to write on my arrival in London, six weeks ago; but as it was not what is technically called "the season," I thought I had best send all my letters of introduction at once, that I might glean what few good people I could. But more than I expected were in town. These introduced others, and in three days I was engaged in such a crowd of acquaintance, that I had hardly time to dress, and none to sleep, during all the weeks I was in London. I enjoyed the time extremely. I find myself much in my element in European society. It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal, but so many of the encumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water. In Edinburgh, I met Dr. Brown. He is still quite a young man, but with a high ambition, and, I should think, commensurate powers. But all is yet in the bud with him. He has a friend, David Scott, a painter, full of imagination, and very earnest in his views of art. I had some pleasant hours with them, and the last night which they and I passed with De Quincey, a real grand _conversazione_, quite in the Landor style, which lasted, in full harmony, some hours. CARLYLE. Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. C. came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be passed at their house. That first time, I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet humor,--full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad. He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired. That evening, he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story of some poor farmer, or artisan, in the country, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading the Essays, and looking upon the sea. I left him that night, intending to go out very often to their house. I assure you there never was anything so witty as Carlyle's description of ---- ----. It was enough to kill one with laughing. I, on my side, contributed a story to his fund of anecdote on this subject, and it was fully appreciated. Carlyle is worth a thousand of you for that;--he is not ashamed to laugh, when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial human fashion. The second time, Mr. C. had a dinner-party, at which was a witty, French, flippant sort of man, author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a Life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little, of which one was glad, for, that night, he was in his more acrid mood; and, though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he said. For a couple of hours, he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind. Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmasters had taught him that it was great to do so, and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation. Shakspeare had not had the good sense to see that it would have been better to write straight on in prose;--and such nonsense, which, though amusing enough at first, he ran to death after a while. The most amusing part is always when he comes back to some refrain, as in the French Revolution of the _sea-green_. In this instance, it was Petrarch and _Laura_, the last word pronounced with his ineffable sarcasm of drawl. Although he said this over fifty times, I could not ever help laughing when _Laura_ would come,--Carlyle running his chin out, when he spoke it, and his eyes glancing till they looked like the eyes and beak of a bird of prey. Poor Laura! Lucky for her that her poet had already got her safely canonized beyond the reach of this Teufelsdrockh vulture. The worst of hearing Carlyle is that you cannot interrupt him. I understand the habit and power of haranguing have increased very much upon him, so that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you. To interrupt him is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears you down. True, he does you no injustice, and, with his admirable penetration, sees the disclaimer in your mind, so that you are not morally delinquent; but it is not pleasant to be unable to utter it. The latter part of the evening, however, he paid us for this, by a series of sketches, in his finest style of railing and raillery, of modern French literature, not one of them, perhaps, perfectly just, but all drawn with the finest, boldest strokes, and, from his point of view, masterly. All were depreciating, except that of Béranger. Of him he spoke with perfect justice, because with hearty sympathy. I had, afterward, some talk with Mrs. C., whom hitherto I had only _seen_, for who can speak while her husband is there? I like her very much;--she is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and charming. * * * After this, they went to stay at Lord Ashburton's, and I only saw them once more, when they came to pass an evening with us. Unluckily, Mazzini was with us, whose society, when he was there alone, I enjoyed more than any. He is a beauteous and pure music; also, he is a dear friend of Mrs. C.; but his being there gave the conversation a turn to "progress" and ideal subjects, and C. was fluent in invectives on all our "rose-water imbecilities." We all felt distant from him, and Mazzini, after some vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. C. said to me, "These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death." All Carlyle's talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force,--success the test of right;--if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks;--find a hero, and let them be his slaves, &c. It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial. I wish the last evening had been more melodious. However, I bid Carlyle farewell with feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration. We cannot feel otherwise to a great and noble nature, whether it harmonize with our own or not. I never appreciated the work he has done for his age till I saw England. I could not. You must stand in the shadow of that mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it. Honor to Carlyle! _Hoch!_ Although in the wine with which we drink this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised "rose-water." And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in the sketch of another, I will pass on more lowly,--more willing to be imperfect,--since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be only this or that. It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie;--Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanly fair. CARLYLE, AGAIN. _Paris, Dec, 1846._--Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse;--only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,--happily not one invariable or inevitable,--that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,--raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the habit of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness,--no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;--it is his nature, and the untamable energy that has given him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near. He seems, to me, quite isolated,--lonely as the desert,--yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. He sings, rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally, near the beginning, hits upon some singular epithet, which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it;--his works are true, to blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England,--great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil, than legislate for good. Of Dr. Wilkinson I saw a good deal, and found him a substantial person,--a sane, strong, and well-exercised mind,--but in the last degree unpoetical in its structure. He is very simple, natural, and good; excellent to see, though one cannot go far with him; and he would be worth more in writing, if he could get time to write, than in personal intercourse. He may yet find time;--he is scarcely more than thirty. Dr. W. wished to introduce me to Mr. Clissold, but I had not time; shall find it, if in London again. Tennyson was not in town. Browning has just married Miss Barrett, and gone to Italy. I may meet them there. Bailey is helping his father with a newspaper! His wife and child (Philip Festus by name) came to see me. I am to make them a visit on my return. Marston I saw several times, and found him full of talent. That is all I want to say at present;--he is a delicate nature, that can only be known in its own way and time. I went to see his "Patrician's Daughter." It is an admirable play for the stage. At the house of W.J. Fox, I saw first himself, an eloquent man, of great practical ability, then Cooper, (of the "Purgatory of Suicides,") and others. My poor selection of miscellanies has been courteously greeted in the London journals. Openings were made for me to write, had I but leisure; it is for that I look to a second stay in London, since several topics came before me on which I wished to write and publish _there_. * * * * * I became acquainted with a gentleman who is intimate with all the English artists, especially Stanfield and Turner, but was only able to go to his house once, at this time. Pictures I found but little time for, yet enough to feel what they are now to be to me. I was only at the Dulwich and National Galleries and Hampton Court. Also, have seen the Vandykes, at Warwick; but all the precious private collections I was obliged to leave untouched, except one of Turner's, to which I gave a day. For the British Museum, I had only one day, which I spent in the Greek and Egyptian Rooms, unable even to look at the vast collections of drawings, &c. But if I live there a few months, I shall go often. O, were life but longer, and my strength greater! Ever I am bewildered by the riches of existence, had I but more time to open the oysters, and get out the pearls. Yet some are mine, if only for a necklace or rosary. PARIS. TO HER MOTHER. _Paris, Dec. 26, 1846._--In Paris I have been obliged to give a great deal of time to French, in order to gain the power of speaking, without which I might as usefully be in a well as here. That has prevented my doing nearly as much as I would. Could I remain six months in this great focus of civilized life, the time would be all too short for my desires and needs. My Essay on American Literature has been translated into French, and published in "La Revue Indépendante," one of the leading journals of Paris; only, with that delight at manufacturing names for which the French are proverbial, they put, instead of _Margaret_, _Elizabeth_. Write to ----, that aunt Elizabeth has appeared unexpectedly before the French public! She will not enjoy her honors long, as a future number, which is to contain a notice of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," will rectify the mistake. I have been asked, also, to remain in correspondence with La Revue Indépendante, after my return to the United States, which will be very pleasant and advantageous to me. I have some French acquaintance, and begin to take pleasure in them, now that we can hold intercourse more easily. Among others, a Madame Pauline Roland I find an interesting woman. She is an intimate friend of Béranger and of Pierre Leroux. We occupy a charming suite of apartments, Hotel Rougement, Boulevard Poissonière. It is a new hotel, and has not the arched gateways and gloomy court-yard of the old mansions. My room, though small, is very pretty, with the thick, flowered carpet and marble slabs; the French clock, with Cupid, of course, over the fireplace, in which burns a bright little wood fire; the canopy bedstead, and inevitable large mirror; the curtains, too, are thick and rich, the closet, &c., excellent, the attendance good. But for all this, one pays dear. We do not find that one can live _pleasantly_ at Paris for little money; and we prefer to economize by a briefer stay, if at all. TO E.H. _Paris, Jan. 18, 1847,_ and _Naples, March 17, 1847._--You wished to hear of George Sand, or, as they say in Paris, "Madame Sand." I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I had supposed it might be exaggerated. She had every reason to leave her husband,--a stupid, brutal man, who insulted and neglected her. He afterwards gave up their child to her for a sum of money. But the love for which she left him lasted not well, and she has had a series of lovers, and I am told has one now, with whom she lives on the footing of combined means, independent friendship! But she takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts, and has just given her daughter in marriage. Her son is a grown-up young man, an artist. Many women visit her, and esteem it an honor. Even an American here, and with the feelings of our country on such subjects, Mrs. ----, thinks of her with high esteem. She has broken with La Mennais, of whom she was once a disciple. I observed to Dr. François, who is an intimate of hers, and loves and admires her, that it did not seem a good sign that she breaks with her friends. He said it was not so with her early friends; that she has chosen to buy a chateau in the region where she passed her childhood, and that the people there love and have always loved her dearly. She is now at the chateau, and, I begin to fear, will not come to town before I go. Since I came, I have read two charming stories recently written by her. Another longer one she has just sold to _La Presse_ for fifteen thousand francs. She does not receive nearly as much for her writings as Balzac, Dumas, or Sue. She has a much greater influence than they, but a less circulation. She stays at the chateau, because the poor people there were suffering so much, and she could help them. She has subscribed _twenty thousand francs_ for their relief, in the scarcity of the winter. It is a great deal to earn by one's pen: a novel of several volumes sold for only fifteen thousand francs, as I mentioned before. * * * At last, however, she came; and I went to see her at her house, Place d'Orleans. I found it a handsome modern residence. She had not answered my letter, written about a week before, and I felt a little anxious lest she should not receive me; for she is too much the mark of impertinent curiosity, as well as too busy, to be easily accessible to strangers. I am by no means timid, but I have suffered, for the first time in France, some of the torments of _mauvaise honte_, enough to see what they must be to many. It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters, and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in vain for utterance. The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a peasant, and, as Madame Sand afterward told me, her god-daughter, whom she had brought from her province. She announced me as "_Madame Salere,_" and returned into the ante-room to tell me. "_Madame says she does not know you_" I began to think I was doomed to a rebuff, among the crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if she has not received a letter from me." As I spoke, Madame S. opened the door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her figure; she is large, but well-formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest taste, her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and lady-like dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower, strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head Spanish, (as, indeed, she was born at Madrid, and is only on one side of French blood.) All these details I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was the expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power, that pervaded the whole,--the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "_C'est vous_" and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment, then I said, "_Il me fait de bien de vous voir_" and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed a character, and everything that _is_ good in it so _really_ good. I loved, shall always love her. She looked away, and said, "_Ah! vous m'avez écrit une lettre charmante_" This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went on as if we had always known one another. She told me, before I went away, that she was going that very day to write to me; that when the servant announced me she did not recognize the name, but after a minute it struck her that it might be _La dame Americaine,_ as the foreigners very commonly call me, for they find my name hard to remember. She was very much pressed for time, as she was then preparing copy for the printer, and, having just returned, there were many applications to see her, but she wanted me to stay then, saying, "It is better to throw things aside, and seize the present moment." I staid a good part of the day, and was very glad afterwards, for I did not see her again uninterrupted. Another day I was there, and saw her in her circle. Her daughter and another lady were present, and a number of gentlemen. Her position there was of an intellectual woman and good friend,--the same as my own in the circle of my acquaintance as distinguished from my intimates. Her daughter is just about to be married. It is said, there is no congeniality between her and her mother; but for her son she seems to have much love, and he loves and admires her extremely. I understand he has a good and free character, without conspicuous talent. Her way of talking is just like her writing,--lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep feeling, and the same skill in striking the nail on the head every now and then with a blow. We did not talk at all of personal or private matters. I saw, as one sees in her writings, the want of an independent, interior life, but I did not feel it as a fault, there is so much in her of her kind. I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better. For the rest I do not care to write about it much, for I cannot, in the room and time I have to spend, express my thoughts as I would; but as near as I can express the sum total, it is this. S---- and others who admire her, are anxious to make a fancy picture of her, and represent her as a Helena (in the Seven Chords of the Lyre); all whose mistakes are the fault of the present state of society. But to me the truth seems to be this. She has that purity in her soul, for she knows well how to love and prize its beauty; but she herself is quite another sort of person. She needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions. She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly a possibility of that, for such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the objects of her affection, and several times. Also, there may have been something of the Bacchante in her life, and of the love of night and storm, and the free raptures amid which roamed on the mountain-tops the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the great mother. But she was never coarse, never gross, and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of wine-press. When she has done with an intimacy, she likes to break it off suddenly, and this has happened often, both with men and women. Many calumnies upon her are traceable to this cause. I forgot to mention, that, while talking, she _does_ smoke all the time her little cigarette. This is now a common practice among ladies abroad, but I believe originated with her. For the rest, she holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but she has also enjoyed and done much, and her expression is one of calmness and happiness. I was sorry to see her _exploitant_ her talent so carelessly. She does too much, and this cannot last forever; but "Teverino" and the "Mare au Diable," which she has lately published, are as original, as masterly in truth, and as free in invention, as anything she has done. Afterwards I saw Chopin, not with her, although he lives with her, and has for the last twelve years. I went to see him in his room with one of his friends. He is always ill, and as frail as a snow-drop, but an exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked his talking scarcely less. Madame S. loved Liszt before him; she has thus been intimate with the two opposite sides of the musical world. Mickiewicz says, "Chopin talks with spirit, and gives us the Ariel view of the universe. Liszt is the eloquent _tribune_ to the world of men, a little vulgar and showy certainly, but I like the tribune best." It is said here, that Madame S. has long had only a friendship for Chopin, who, perhaps, on his side prefers to be a lover, and a jealous lover; but she does not leave him, because he needs her care so much, when sick and suffering. About all this, I do not know; you cannot know much about anything in France, except what you see with your two eyes. Lying is ingrained in "_la grande nation_" as they so plainly show no less in literature than life. RACHEL. In France the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life, I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer what is good to what is bad, if only a fair opportunity for choice be allowed. When I came here, my first thought was to go and see Mademoiselle Rachel. I was sure that in her I should find a true genius. I went to see her seven or eight times, always in parts that required great force of soul, and purity of taste, even to conceive them, and only once had reason to find fault with her. On one single occasion, I saw her violate the harmony of the character, to produce effect at a particular moment; but, almost invariably, I found her a true artist, worthy Greece, and worthy at many moments to have her conceptions immortalized in marble. Her range even in high tragedy is limited. She can only express the darker passions, and grief in its most desolate aspects. Nature has not gifted her with those softer and more flowery attributes, that lend to pathos its utmost tenderness. She does not melt to tears, or calm or elevate the heart by the presence of that tragic beauty that needs all the assaults of fate to make it show its immortal sweetness. Her noblest aspect is when sometimes she expresses truth in some severe shape, and rises, simple and austere, above the mixed elements around her. On the dark side, she is very great in hatred and revenge. I admired her more in Phèdre than in any other part in which I saw her; the guilty love inspired by the hatred of a goddess was expressed, in all its symptoms, with a force and terrible naturalness, that almost suffocated the beholder. After she had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system,--the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate,--were still more grand. I had heard so much about the power of her eye in one fixed look, and the expression she could concentrate in a single word, that the utmost results could only satisfy my expectations. It is, indeed, something magnificent to see the dark cloud give out such sparks, each one fit to deal a separate death; but it was not that I admired most in her. It was the grandeur, truth, and depth of her conception of each part, and the sustained purity with which she represented it. The French language from her lips is a divine dialect; it is stripped of its national and personal peculiarities, and becomes what any language must, moulded by such a genius, the pure music of the heart and soul. I never could remember her tone in speaking any word; it was too perfect; you had received the thought quite direct. Yet, had I never heard her speak a word, my mind would be filled by her attitudes. Nothing more graceful can be conceived, nor could the genius of sculpture surpass her management of the antique drapery. She has no beauty, except in the intellectual severity of her outline, and she bears marks of race, that will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly at last. Still it will be a _grandiose_, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen common lives. TO R.W.E. _Paris, Jan_. 18, 1847.--I can hardly tell you what a fever consumes me, from sense of the brevity of my time and opportunity. Here I cannot sleep at night, because I have been able to do so little in the day. Constantly I try to calm my mind into content with small achievements, but it is difficult. You will say, it is not so mightily worth knowing, after all, this picture and natural history of Europe. Very true; but I am so constituted that it pains me to come away, having touched only the glass over the picture. I am assiduous daily at the Academy lectures, picture galleries, Chamber of Deputies,--last week, at the court and court ball. So far as my previous preparation enabled me, I get something from all these brilliant shows,--thoughts, images, fresh impulse. But I need, to initiate me into various little secrets of the place and time,--necessary for me to look at things to my satisfaction,--some friend, such as I do not find here. My steps have not been fortunate in Paris, as they were in England. No doubt, the person exists here, whose aid I want; indeed, I feel that it is so; but we do not meet, and the time draws near for me to depart. French people I find slippery, as they do not know exactly what to make of me, the rather as I have not the command of their language. _I_ see _them_, their brilliancy, grace, and variety, the thousand slight refinements of their speech and manner, but cannot meet them in their way. My French teacher says, I speak and act like an Italian, and I hope, in Italy, I shall find myself more at home. I had, the other day, the luck to be introduced to Béranger, who is the only person beside George Sand I cared very particularly to see here. I went to call on La Mennais, to whom I had a letter. I found him in a little study; his secretary was writing in a large room through which I passed. With him was a somewhat citizen-looking, but vivacious elderly man, whom I was, at first, sorry to see, having wished for half an hour's undisturbed visit to the Apostle of Democracy. But those feelings were quickly displaced by joy, when he named to me the great national lyrist of France, the great Béranger. I had not expected to see him at all, for he is not to be seen in any show place; he lives in the hearts of the people, and needs no homage from their eyes. I was very happy, in that little study, in the presence of these two men, whose influence has been so real and so great. Béranger has been much to me,--his wit, his pathos, and exquisite lyric grace. I have not received influence from La Mennais, but I see well what he has been, and is, to Europe. TO LA MENNAIS. Monsieur:-- As my visit to you was cut short before I was quite satisfied, it was my intention to seek you again immediately; although I felt some scruples at occupying your valuable time, when I express myself so imperfectly in your language. But I have been almost constantly ill since, and now am not sure of finding time to pay you my respects before leaving Paris for Italy. In case this should be impossible, I take the liberty to write, and to present you two little volumes of mine. It is only as a tribute of respect. I regret that they do not contain some pieces of mine which might be more interesting to you, as illustrative of the state of affairs in our country. Some such will find their place in subsequent numbers. These, I hope, you will, if you do not read them, accept kindly as a salutation from our hemisphere. Many there delight to know you as a great apostle of the ideas which are to be our life, if Heaven intends us a great and permanent life. I count myself happy in having seen you, and in finding with you Béranger, the genuine poet, the genuine man of France. I have felt all the enchantment of the lyre of Béranger; have paid my warmest homage to the truth and wisdom adorned with such charms, such wit and pathos. It was a great pleasure to see himself. If your leisure permits, Monsieur, I will ask a few lines in reply. I should like to keep some words from your hand, in case I should not look upon you more here below; and am always, with gratitude for the light you have shed on so many darkened spirits, Yours, most respectfully, MARGARET FULLER. * * * * * _Paris, Jan_., 1847.--I missed hearing M. Guizot, (I am sorry for it,) in his speech on the Montpensier marriage. I saw the little Duchess, the innocent or ignorant topic of all this disturbance, when presented at court. She went round the circle on the arm of the queen. Though only fourteen, she looks twenty, but has something fresh, engaging, and girlish about her. I attended not only at the presentation, but at the ball given at the Tuileries directly after. These are fine shows, as the suite of apartments is very handsome, brilliantly lighted,--the French ladies surpassing all others in the art of dress; indeed, it gave me much pleasure to see them. Certainly there are many ugly ones; but they are so well dressed, and have such an air of graceful vivacity, that the general effect was of a flower-garden. As often happens, several American women were among the most distinguished for positive beauty; one from Philadelphia, who is by many persons considered the prettiest ornament of the dress circle at the Italian opera, was especially marked by the attention of the king. However, these ladies, even if here a long time, do not attain the air and manner of French women. The magnetic fluid that envelops them is less brilliant and exhilarating in its attractions. Among the crowd wandered Leverrier, in the costume of Academician, looking as if he had lost, not found, his planet. French _savants_ are more generally men of the world, and even men of fashion, than those of other climates; but, in his case, he seemed not to find it easy to exchange the music of the spheres for the music of fiddles. Speaking of Leverrier leads to another of my disappointments. I went to the Sorbonne to hear him lecture, not dreaming that the old pedantic and theological character of those halls was strictly kept up in these days of light. An old guardian of the inner temple seeing me approach, had his speech all ready, and, manning the entrance, said, with a disdainful air, before we had time to utter a word, "Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but madame must remain here" (_i.e._, in the court-yard). After some exclamations of surprise, I found an alternative in the Hotel de Clugny, where I passed an hour very delightfully, while waiting for my companion. I was more fortunate in hearing Arago, and he justified all my expectations. Clear, rapid, full, and equal, his discourse is worthy its celebrity, and I felt repaid for the four hours one is obliged to spend in going, in waiting, and in hearing, for the lecture begins at half past one, and you must be there before twelve to get a seat, so constant and animated is his popularity. I was present on one good occasion, at the Academy,--the day that M. Rémusat was received there, in the place of Royer Collard. I looked down, from one of the tribunes, upon the flower of the celebrities of France; that is to say, of the celebrities which are authentic, _comme il faut_. Among them were many marked faces, many fine heads; but, in reading the works of poets, we always fancy them about the age of Apollo himself, and I found with pain some of my favorites quite old, and very unlike the company on Parnassus, as represented by Raphael. Some, however, were venerable, even noble to behold. The poorer classes have suffered from hunger this winter. All signs of this are kept out of sight in Paris. A pamphlet called "The Voice of Famine," stating facts, though in a tone of vulgar and exaggerated declamation, was suppressed as soon as published. While Louis Philippe lives, the gases may not burst up to flame, but the need of radical measures of reform is strongly felt in France; and the time will come, before long, when such will be imperatively demanded. FOURIER. The doctrines of Fourier are making progress, and wherever they spread, the necessity of some practical application of the precepts of Christ, in lieu of the mummeries of a worn-out ritual, cannot fail to be felt. The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of these subjects,--such as is animated by the hope of prevention. Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its faults; in attempts to reorganize society, he commits the error of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the clothing of soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance with the population of London and Paris, could seek to hinder a study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes. ROUSSEAU. To the actually so-called Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the manuscripts of Rousseau treasured in their library. I saw them and touched them,--those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some _detours_ through villanous places; but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of genius,--to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain. TO R.W.E. _Naples, March_ 15, 1847.--Mickiewicz, the Polish poet, first introduced the Essays to acquaintance in Paris. I did not meet him anywhere, and, as I heard a great deal of him which charmed me, I sent him your poems, and asked him to come and see me. He came, and I found in him the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being, with a soul constantly inspiring. Unhappily, it was a very short time before I came away. How much time had I wasted on others which I might have given to this real and important relation. After hearing music from Chopin and Neukomm, I quitted Paris on the 25th February, and came, _via_ Chalons, Lyons, Avignon, (where I waded through melting snow to Laura's tomb,) Arles, to Marseilles; thence, by steamer, to Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa. Seen through a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm. Only at Naples have I found _my_ Italy. Between Leghorn and Naples, our boat was run into by another, and we only just escaped being drowned. ROME. _Rome, May_, 1847.--Of the fragments of the great time, I have now seen nearly all that are treasured up here. I have as yet nothing of consequence to say of them. Others have often given good hints as to how they _look_. As to what they _are_, it can only be known by approximating to the state of soul out of which they grew. They are many and precious; yet is there not so much of high excellence as I looked for. They will not float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on our Western Prairies. Yet I love much to see the galleries of marbles, even where there are not many separately admirable, amid the cypresses and ilexes of Roman villas; and a picture that is good at all, looks best in one of these old palaces. I have heard owls hoot in the Colosseum by moonlight, and they spoke more to the purpose than I ever heard any other voice on that subject. I have seen all the pomps of Holy Week in St. Peter's, and found them less imposing than an habitual acquaintance with the church itself, with processions of monks and nuns stealing in, now and then, or the swell of vespers from some side chapel. The ceremonies of the church have been numerous and splendid, during our stay, and they borrow unusual interest from the love and expectation inspired by the present pontiff. He is a man of noble and good aspect, who has set his heart on doing something solid for the benefit of man. A week or two ago, the Cardinal Secretary published a circular, inviting the departments to measures which would give the people a sort of representative council. Nothing could seem more limited than this improvement, but it was a great measure for Rome. At night, the Corso was illuminated, and many thousands passed through it in a torch-bearing procession, on their way to the Quirinal, to thank the Pope, upbearing a banner on which the edict was printed. TO W.H.C. _Rome, May_ 7, 1847.--I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more. Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendently good, and even with that feel very familiar and calm. I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier's future. But I like no Fourierites; they are terribly wearisome here in Europe; the tide of things does not wash through them as violently as with us, and they have time to run in the tread-mill of system. Still, they serve this great future which I shall not live to see. I must be born again. TO R.W.E. _Florence, June_ 20, 1847.--I have just come hither from Rome. Every minute, day and night, there is something to be seen or done at Rome, which we cannot bear to lose. We lived on the Corso, and all night long, after the weather became fine, there was conversation or music before my window. I never seemed really to sleep while there, and now, at Florence, where there is less to excite, and I live in a more quiet quarter, I feel as if I needed to sleep all the time, and cannot rest as I ought, there is so much to do. I now speak French fluently, though not correctly, yet well enough to make my thoughts avail in the cultivated society here, where it is much spoken. But to know the common people, and to feel truly in Italy, I ought to speak and understand the spoken Italian well, and I am now cultivating this sedulously. If I remain, I shall have, for many reasons, advantages for observation and enjoyment, such as are seldom permitted to a foreigner. I forgot to mention one little thing rather interesting. At the _Miserere_ of the Sistine chapel, I sat beside Goethe's favorite daughter-in-law, Ottilia, to whom I was introduced by Mrs. Jameson. TO R.F.F. _Florence, July_ 1, 1847.--I do not wish to go through Germany in a hurried way, and am equally unsatisfied to fly through Italy; and shall, therefore, leaving my companions in Switzerland, take a servant to accompany me, and return hither, and hence to Rome for the autumn, perhaps the winter. I should always suffer the pain of Tantalus thinking of Rome, if I could not see it more thoroughly than I have as yet even begun to; for it was all _outside_ the two months, just finding out where objects were. I had only just begun to know them, when I was obliged to leave. The prospect of returning presents many charms, but it leaves me alone in the midst of a strange land. I find myself happily situated here, in many respects. The Marchioness Arconati Visconti, to whom I brought a letter from a friend of hers in France, has been good to me as a sister, and introduced me to many interesting acquaintance. The sculptors, Powers and Greenough, I have seen much and well. Other acquaintance I possess, less known to fame, but not less attractive. Florence is not like Rome. At first, I could not bear the change; yet, for the study of the fine arts, it is a still richer place. Worlds of thought have risen in my mind; some time you will have light from all. * * * * * _Milan, Aug_. 9, 1847.--Passing from Florence, I came to Bologna. A woman should love Bologna, for there has the intellect of woman been cherished. In their Certosa, they proudly show the monument to Matilda Tambreni, late Greek professor there. In their anatomical hall, is the bust of a woman, professor of anatomy. In art, they have had Properzia di Rossi, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and delight to give their works a conspicuous place. In other cities, the men alone have their Casino dei Nobili, where they give balls and conversazioni. Here, women have one, and are the soul of society. In Milan, also, I see, in the Ambrosian Library, the bust of a female mathematician. TO HER MOTHER. _Lago di Garda, Aug_. 1, 1847.--Do not let what I have written disturb you as to my health. I have rested now, and am as well as usual. This advantage I derive from being alone, that, if I feel the need of it, I can stop. I left Venice four days ago; have seen well Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, and am reposing, for two nights and a day, in this tranquil room which overlooks the beautiful Lake of Garda. The air is sweet and pure, and I hear no noise except the waves breaking on the shore. I think of you a great deal, especially when there are flowers. Florence was all flowers. I have many magnolias and jasmines. I always wish you could see them. The other day, on the island of San Lazaro, at the Armenian Convent, where Lord Byron used to go, I thought of you, seeing the garden full of immense oleanders in full bloom. One sees them everywhere at Venice. TO HER TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AFTER PARTING. _Milan, Aug_. 9, 1847.--I remained at Venice near a week after your departure, to get strong and tranquil again. Saw all the pictures, if not enough, yet pretty well. My journey here was very profitable. Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, I saw really well, and much there is to see. Certainly I had learned more than ever in any previous ten days of my existence, and have formed an idea of what is needed for the study of art in these regions. But, at Brescia, I was taken ill with fever. I cannot tell you how much I was alarmed when it seemed to me it was affecting my head. I had no medicine; nothing could I do except abstain entirely from food, and drink cold water. The second day, I had a bed made in a carriage, and came on here. I am now pretty well, only very weak. TO R.W.E. _Milan, Aug. 10, 1847._--Since writing you from Florence, I have passed the mountains; two full, rich days at Bologna; one at Ravenna; more than a fortnight at Venice, intoxicated with the place, and with Venetian art, only to be really felt and known in its birth-place. I have passed some hours at Vicenza, seeing mainly the Palladian structures; a day at Verona,--a week had been better; seen Mantua, with great delight; several days in Lago di Garda,--truly happy days there; then, to Brescia, where I saw the Titians, the exquisite Raphael, the Scavi, and the Brescian Hills. I could charm you by pictures, had I time. To-day, for the first time, I have seen Manzoni. Manzoni has spiritual efficacy in his looks; his eyes glow still with delicate tenderness, as when he first saw Lucia, or felt them fill at the image of Father Cristoforo. His manners are very engaging, frank, expansive; every word betokens the habitual elevation of his thoughts; and (what you care for so much) he says distinct, good things; but you must not expect me to note them down. He lives in the house of his fathers, in the simplest manner. He has taken the liberty to marry a new wife for his own pleasure and companionship, and the people around him do not like it, because she does not, to their fancy, make a good pendant to him. But I liked her very well, and saw why he married her. They asked me to return often, if I pleased, and I mean to go once or twice, for Manzoni seems to like to talk with me. * * * * * _Rome, Oct., 1847._--Leaving Milan, I went on the Lago Maggiore, and afterward into Switzerland. Of this tour I shall not speak here; it was a little romance by itself. Returning from Switzerland, I passed a fortnight on the Lake of Como, and afterward visited Lugano. There is no exaggeration in the enthusiastic feeling with which artists and poets have viewed these Italian lakes. The _"Titan"_ of Richter, the _"Wanderjahre"_ of Goethe, the Elena of Taylor, the pictures of Turner, had not prepared me for the visions of beauty that daily entranced the eyes and heart in those regions. To our country, Nature has been most bounteous, but we have nothing in the same class that can compare with these lakes, as seen under the Italian heaven. As to those persons who have pretended to discover that the effects of light and atmosphere were no finer than they found in our own lake scenery, I can only say that they must be exceedingly obtuse in organization,--a defect not uncommon among Americans. Nature seems to have labored to express her full heart in as many ways as possible, when she made these lakes, moulded and planted their shores. Lago Maggiore is grandiose, resplendent in its beauty; the view of the Alps gives a sort of lyric exaltation to the scene. Lago di Garda is so soft and fair on one side,--the ruins of ancient palaces rise softly with the beauties of that shore; but at the other end, amid the Tyrol, it is so sublime, so calm, so concentrated in its meaning! Como cannot be better described in generals than in the words of Taylor:-- "Softly sublime, profusely fair" Lugano is more savage, more free in its beauty. I was on it in a high gale; there was little danger, just enough to exhilarate; its waters wild, and clouds blowing across its peaks. I like the boatmen on these lakes; they have strong and prompt character; of simple features, they are more honest and manly than Italian men are found in the thoroughfares; their talk is not so witty as that of the Venetian gondoliers, but picturesque, and what the French call _incisive._ Very touching were some of their histories, as they told them to me, while pausing sometimes on the lake. Grossi gives a true picture of such a man in his family relations; the story may be found in "Marco Visconti." On this lake, I met Lady Franklin, wife of the celebrated navigator. She has been in the United States, and showed equal penetration and candor in remarks on what she had seen there. She gave me interesting particulars as to the state of things in Van Diemen's Land, where she passed seven years, when her husband was in authority there. TO C.S. _Lake of Como, Aug_. 22, 1847.--Rome was much poisoned to me. But, after a time, its genius triumphed, and I became absorbed in its proper life. Again I suffered from parting, and have since resolved to return, and pass at least a part of the winter there. People may write and prate as they please of Rome, they cannot convey thus a portion of its spirit. The whole heart must be yielded up to it. It is something really transcendent, both spirit and body. Those last glorious nights, in which I wandered about amid the old walls and columns, or sat by the fountains in the Piazza del Popolo, or by the river, were worth an age of pain,--only one hates pain in Italy. Tuscany I did not like as well. It is a great place to study the history of character and art. Indeed, there I did really begin to study, as well as gaze and feel. But I did not like it. Florence is more in its spirit like Boston, than like an Italian city. I knew a good many Italians, but they were busy and intellectual, not like those I had known before. But Florence is full of really good, great pictures. There first I saw some of the great masters. Andrea del Sarto, in particular, one sees only there, and he is worth much. His wife, whom he always paints, and for whom he was so infatuated, has some bad qualities, and in what is good a certain wild nature or _diablerie_. Bologna is truly an Italian city, one in which I should like to live; full of hidden things, and its wonders of art are very grand. The Caracci and their friends had vast force; not much depth, but enough force to occupy one a good while,--and Domenichino, when good at all, is very great. Venice was a dream of enchantment; _there_ was no disappointment. Art and life are one. There is one glow of joy, one deep shade of passionate melancholy; Giorgione, as a man, I care more for now than any of the artists, though he had no ideas. In the first week, floating about in a gondola, I seemed to find myself again. I was not always alone in Venice, but have come through the fertile plains of Lombardy, seen the lakes Garda and Maggiore, and a part of Switzerland, alone, except for occasional episodes of companionship, sometimes romantic enough. In Milan I stayed a while, and knew some radicals, young, and interested in ideas. Here, on the lake, I have fallen into contact with some of the higher society,--duchesses, marquises, and the like. My friend here is Madame Arconati, Marchioness Visconti. I have formed connection with a fair and brilliant Polish lady, born Princess Radzivill. It is rather pleasant to come a little on the traces of these famous histories; also, both these ladies take pleasure in telling me of spheres so unlike mine, and do it well. The life here on the lake is precisely what we once imagined as being so pleasant. These people have charming villas and gardens on the lake, adorned with fine works of art. They go to see one another in boats. You can be all the time in a boat, if you like; if you want more excitement, or wild flowers, you climb the mountains. I have been here for some time, and shall stay a week longer. I have found soft repose here. Now, I am to return to Rome, seeing many things by the way. TO R.F.F. _Florence, Sept_. 25, 1847.--I hope not to want a further remittance for a long time. I shall not, if I can settle myself at Rome so as to avoid spoliation. That is very difficult in this country. I have suffered from it already. The haste, the fatigue, the frequent illness in travelling, have tormented me. At Rome I shall settle myself for five months, and make arrangements to the best of my judgment, and with counsel of experienced friends, and have some hope of economy while there; but am not sure, as much more vigilance than I can promise is needed against the treachery of servants and the cunning of landlords. You are disappointed by my letter from Rome. But I did not feel equal then to speaking of the things of Rome, and shall not, till better acquaintance has steadied my mind. It is a matter of conscience with me not to make use of crude impressions, and what they call here "coffee-house intelligence," as travellers generally do. I prefer skimming over the surface of things, till I feel solidly ready to write. Milan I left with great regret, and hope to return. I knew there a circle of the aspiring youth, such as I have not in any other city. I formed many friendships, and learned a great deal. One of the young men, Guerrieri by name, (and of the famous Gonzaga family,) I really love. He has a noble soul, the quietest sensibility, and a brilliant and ardent, though not a great, mind. He is eight-and-twenty. After studying medicine for the culture, he has taken law as his profession. His mind and that of Hicks, an artist of our country now here, a little younger, are two that would interest you greatly. Guerrieri speaks no English; I speak French now as fluently as English, but incorrectly. To make use of it, I ought to have learned it earlier. Arriving here, Mr. Mozier, an American, who from a prosperous merchant has turned sculptor, come hither to live, and promises much excellence in his profession, urged me so much to his house, that I came. At first, I was ill from fatigue, and staid several days in bed; but his wife took tender care of me, and the quiet of their house and regular simple diet have restored me. As soon as I have seen a few things here, I shall go to Rome. On my way, I stopped at Parma,--saw the works of Correggio and Parmegiano. I have now seen what Italy contains most important of the great past; I begin to hope for her also a great future,--the signs have improved so much since I came. I am most fortunate to be here at this time. Interrupted, as always. How happy I should be if my abode at Rome would allow some chance for tranquil and continuous effort. But I dare not hope much, from the difficulty of making any domestic arrangements that can be relied on. The fruit of the moment is so precious, that I must not complain. I learn much; but to do anything with what I learn is, under such circumstances, impossible. Besides, I am in great need of repose; I am almost inert from fatigue of body and spirit. TO E.H. _Florence, Sept.,_ 1847.--I cannot even begin to speak of the magnificent scenes of nature, nor the works of art, that have raised and filled my mind since I wrote from Naples. Now I begin to be in Italy! but I wish to drink deep of this cup before I speak my enamored words. Enough to say, Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here, and if I ever tell anything about it, you will hear something real and domestic. Among strangers I wish most to speak to you of my friend the Marchioness A. Visconti, a Milanese. She is a specimen of the really high-bred lady, such as I have not known. Without any physical beauty, the grace and harmony of her manners produce all the impression of beauty. She has also a mind strong, clear, precise, and much cultivated. She has a modest nobleness that you would dearly love. She is intimate with many of the first men. She seems to love me much, and to wish I should have whatever is hers. I take great pleasure in her friendship. TO R.W.E. _Rome, Oct_. 28, 1847.--I am happily settled for the winter, quite by myself, in a neat, tranquil apartment in the Corso, where I see all the motions of Rome,--in a house of loving Italians, who treat me well, and do not interrupt me, except for service. I live alone, eat alone, walk alone, and enjoy unspeakably the stillness, after all the rush and excitement of the past year. I shall make no acquaintance from whom I do not hope a good deal, as my time will be like pure gold to me this winter; and, just for happiness, Rome itself is sufficient. To-day is the last of the October feasts of the Trasteverini. I have been, this afternoon, to see them dancing. This morning I was out, with half Rome, to see the Civic Guard manoeuvring in that great field near the tomb of Cecilia Metella, which is full of ruins. The effect was noble, as the band played the Bolognese march, and six thousand Romans passed in battle array amid these fragments of the great time. TO R.F.F. _Rome, Oct_. 29, 1847.--I am trying to economize,--anxious to keep the Roman expenses for six months within the limits of four hundred dollars. Rome is not as cheap a place as Florence, but then I would not give a pin to live in Florence. We have just had glorious times with the October feasts, when all the Roman people were out. I am now truly happy here, quiet and familiar; no longer a staring, sight-seeing stranger, riding about finely dressed in a coach to see muses and sibyls. I see these forms now in the natural manner, and am contented. Keep free from false ties; they are the curse of life. I find myself so happy here, alone and free. TO M.S. _Rome, Oct_. 1847.--I arrived in Rome again nearly a fortnight ago, and all mean things were forgotten in the joy that rushed over me like a flood. Now I saw the true Rome. I came with no false expectations, and I came to live in tranquil companionship, not in the restless impertinence of sight-seeing, so much more painful here than anywhere else. I had made a good visit to Vicenza; a truly Italian town, with much to see and study. But all other places faded away, now that I again saw St. Peter's, and heard the music of the fountains. The Italian autumn is not as beautiful as I expected, neither in the vintage of Tuscany nor here. The country is really sere and brown; but the weather is fine, and these October feasts are charming. Two days I have been at the Villa Borghese. There are races, balloons, and, above all, the private gardens open, and good music on the little lake. TO ----. _Rome, morning of the 17th Nov_., 1847.--It seems great folly to send the enclosed letter. I have written it in my nightly fever. All day I dissipate my thoughts on outward beauty. I have many thoughts, happiest moments, but as yet I do not have even this part in a congenial way. I go about in a coach with several people; but English and Americans are not at home here. Since I have experienced the different atmosphere of the European mind, and been allied with it, nay, mingled in the bonds of love, I suffer more than ever from that which is peculiarly American or English. I should like to cease from hearing the language for a time. Perhaps I should return to it; but at present I am in a state of unnatural divorce from what I was most allied to. There is a Polish countess here, who likes me much. She has been very handsome, still is, in the style of the full-blown rose. She is a widow, very rich, one of the emancipated women, naturally vivacious, and with talent. This woman _envies me_; she says, "How happy you are; so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!" I say not a word, but I do not look on myself as particularly enviable. A little money would have made me much more so; a little money would have enabled me to come here long ago, and find those that belong to me, or at least try my experiments; then my health would never have sunk, nor the best years of my life been wasted in useless friction. Had I money now,--could I only remain, take a faithful servant, and live alone, and still see those I love when it is best, that would suit me. It seems to me, very soon I shall be calmed, and begin to enjoy. TO HER MOTHER. _Rome, Dec_. 16, 1847.--My life at Rome is thus far all I hoped. I have not been so well since I was a child, nor so happy ever, as during the last six weeks. I wrote you about my home; it continues good, perfectly clean, food wholesome, service exact. For all this I pay, but not immoderately. I think the sum total of my expenses here, for six months, will not exceed four hundred and fifty dollars. My _marchesa_, of whom I rent my rooms, is the greatest liar I ever knew, and the most interested, heartless creature. But she thinks it for her interest to please me, as she sees I have a good many persons who value me; and I have been able, without offending her, to make it understood that I do not wish her society. Thus I remain undisturbed. Every Monday evening, I receive my acquaintance. I give no refreshment, but only light the saloon, and decorate it with fresh flowers, of which I have plenty still. How I wish _you_ could see them! Among the frequent guests are known to you Mr. and Mrs. Cranch, Mr. and Mrs. Story. Mr. S. has finally given up law, for the artist's life. His plans are not matured, but he passes the winter at Rome. On other evenings, I do not receive company, unless by appointment. I spend them chiefly in writing or study. I have now around me the books I need to know Italy and Rome. I study with delight, now that I can verify everything. The days are invariably fine, and each day I am out from eleven till five, exploring some new object of interest, often at a great distance. TO R.W.E. _Rome, Dec_. 20, 1847.--Nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source. Since Destiny will not grant me that, I hope she will not leave me long in the world, for I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim. I should like to go to sleep, and be born again into a state where my young life should not be prematurely taxed. Italy has been glorious to me, and there have been hours in which I received the full benefit of the vision. In Rome, I have known some blessed, quiet days, when I could yield myself to be soothed and instructed by the great thoughts and memories of the place. But those days are swiftly passing. Soon I must begin to exert myself, for there is this incubus of the future, and none to help me, if I am not prudent to face it. So ridiculous, too, this mortal coil,--such small things! I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil. However, it is a less failure than with most others, and not worth thinking twice about. Heaven has room enough, and good chances in store, and I can live a great deal in the years that remain. TO R.W.E. _Rome, Dec_. 20, 1847.--I don't know whether you take an interest in the present state of things in Italy, but you would if you were here. It is a fine time to see the people. As to the Pope, it is as difficult here as elsewhere to put new wine into old bottles, and there is something false as well as ludicrous in the spectacle of the people first driving their princes to do a little justice, and then _evviva-ing_ them at such a rate. This does not apply to the Pope; he is a real great heart, a generous man. The love for him is genuine, and I like to be within its influence. It was his heart that gave the impulse, and this people has shown, to the shame of English and other prejudice, how unspoiled they were at the core, how open, nay, how wondrous swift to answer a generous appeal! They are also gaining some education by the present freedom of the press and of discussion. I should like to write a letter for England, giving my view of the present position of things here. * * * * * _Rome, October_ 18, 1847.--In the spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust. Still doubts were always present whether this joy was not premature. From the people themselves the help must come, and not from the princes. Rome, to resume her glory, must cease to be an ecclesiastical capital. Whilst I sympathized with the warm love of the people, the adulation of leading writers, who were willing to take all from the prince of the Church as a gift and a bounty, instead of steadily implying that it was the right of the people, was very repulsive to me. Passing into Tuscany, I found the liberty of the press just established. The Grand Duke, a well-intentioned, though dull, man, had dared to declare himself an Italian prince. I arrived in Florence too late for the great fête of the 12th September, in honor of the grant of the National Guard, but the day was made memorable by the most generous feeling on all sides. Some days before were passed by reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and individuals. On that day they all embraced in sign of this; exchanged banners as a token that they would fight for one another. AMERICANS IN ITALY. The Americans took their share in this occasion, and Greenough,--one of the few Americans who, living in Italy, takes the pains to know whether it is alive or dead, who penetrates beyond the cheats of tradesmen, and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to know the real mind, the vital blood of Italy,--took a leading part. I am sorry to say that a large portion of my countrymen here take the same slothful and prejudiced view as the English, and, after many years' sojourn, betray entire ignorance of Italian literature and Italian life beyond what is attainable in a month's passage through the thoroughfares. However, they did show, this time, a becoming spirit, and erected the American Eagle where its cry ought to be heard from afar. Crawford, here in Rome, has had the just feeling to join the Guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an artist to spend time on the exercises; but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus. In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms, that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better. I will only add some words upon the happy augury I draw from the wise docility of the people. With what readiness they listened to wise counsel and the hopes of the Pope that they would give no advantage to his enemies at a time when they were so fevered by the knowledge that conspiracy was at work in their midst! That was a time of trial. On all these occasions of popular excitement their conduct is like music, in such order, and with such union of the melody of feeling with discretion where to stop; but what is wonderful is that they acted in the same manner on that difficult occasion. The influence of the Pope here is without bounds; he can always calm the crowd at once. But in Tuscany, where they have no such one idol, they listened in the same way on a very trying occasion. The first announcement of the regulation for the Tuscan National Guard terribly disappointed the people. They felt that the Grand Duke, after suffering them to demonstrate such trust and joy on this feast of the 12th, did not really trust, on his side; that he meant to limit them all he could; they felt baffled, cheated; hence young men in anger tore down at once the symbols of satisfaction and respect; but the leading men went among the people, begged them to be calm, and wait till a deputation had seen the Grand Duke. The people listened at once to men who, they were sure, had at heart their best good--waited; the Grand Duke became convinced, and all ended without disturbance. If the people continue to act thus, their hopes cannot be baffled. The American in Europe would fain encourage the hearts of these long-oppressed nations, now daring to hope for a new era, by reciting triumphant testimony from the experience of his own country. But we must stammer and blush when we speak of many things. I take pride here, that I may really say the liberty of the press works well, and that checks and balances naturally evolve from it, which suffice to its government. I may say, that the minds of our people are alert, and that talent has a free chance to rise. It is much. But dare I say, that political ambition is not as darkly sullied as in other countries? Dare I say, that men of most influence in political life are those who represent most virtue, or even intellectual power? Can I say, our social laws are generally better, or show a nobler insight into the wants of man and woman? I do indeed say what I believe, that voluntary association for improvement in these particulars will be the grand means for my nation to grow, and give a nobler harmony to the coming age. Then there is this cancer of slavery, and this wicked war that has grown out of it. How dare I speak of these things here? I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico. How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life; and, if it was not the only thing worth thinking of, it was really something worth living and dying for, to free a great nation from such a blot, such a plague. God strengthen them, and make them wise to achieve their purpose! I please myself, too, with remembering some ardent souls among the American youth, who, I trust, will yet expand and help to give soul to the huge, over-fed, too-hastily-grown-up body. May they be constant! "Were man but constant, he were perfect." It is to the youth that Hope addresses itself. But I dare not expect too much of them. I am not very old; yet of those who, in life's morning, I saw touched by the light of a high hope, many have seceded. Some have become voluptuaries; some mere family men, who think it is quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people, and treat them decently; others are lost through indolence and vacillation. Yet some remain constant. "I have witnessed many a shipwreck, yet still beat noble hearts." * * * * * _Rome, January, 1848_.--As one becomes domesticated here, ancient and modern Rome, at first so jumbled together, begin to separate. You see where objects and limits anciently were. When this happens, one feels first truly at ease in Rome. Then the old kings, the consuls, the tribunes, the emperors, the warriors of eagle sight and remorseless beak, return for us, and the toga-clad procession finds room to sweep across the scene; the seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more. * * * * * _Rome, Jan. 12, 1848._--In Rome, here, the new Council is inaugurated, and the elections have given tolerable satisfaction. Twenty-four carriages had been lent by the princes and nobles, at the request of the city, to convey the councillors. Each deputy was followed by his target and banner. In the evening, there was a ball given at the Argentine. Lord Minto was there, Prince Corsini, now senator, the Torlonias, in uniform of the Civic Guard, Princess Torlonia, in a sash of their colors given her by the Civic Guard, which she waved in answer to their greetings. But the beautiful show of the evening was the _Trasteverini_ dancing the _Saltarello_ in their most beautiful costume. I saw them thus to much greater advantage than ever before. Several were nobly handsome, and danced admirably. The _saltarello_ enchants me; in this is really the Italian wine, the Italian sun. The Pope, in receiving the councillors, made a speech, intimating that he meant only to improve, not to _reform_ and should keep things safe locked with the keys of St. Peter. I was happy the first two months of my stay here, seeing all the great things at my leisure. But now, after a month of continuous rain, Rome is no more Rome. The atmosphere is far worse than that of Paris. It is impossible to walk in the thick mud. The ruins, and other great objects, always solemn, appear terribly gloomy, steeped in black rain and cloud; and my apartment, in a street of high houses, is dark all day. The bad weather may continue all this month and all next. If I could use the time for work, I should not care; but this climate makes me so ill, I can do but little. TO C.S. _Rome, Jan_. 12, 1848.--My time in Lombardy and Switzerland was a series of beautiful pictures, dramatic episodes, not without some original life in myself. When I wrote to you from Como, I had a peaceful season. I floated on the lake with my graceful Polish countess, hearing her stories of heroic sorrow; or I walked in the delicious gardens of the villas, with many another summer friend. Red banners floated, children sang and shouted, the lakes of Venus and Diana glittered in the sun. The pretty girls of Bellaggio, with their coral necklaces, brought flowers to the "American countess," and "hoped she would be as happy as she deserved." Whether this cautious wish is fulfilled, I know not, but certainly I left all the glitter of life behind at Como. My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy hours, but they all lead to sorrow; and not only the cups of wine, but of milk, seem drugged with poison for me. It does not _seem_ to be my fault, this Destiny; I do not court these things,--they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract. Leaving Milan, I had a brilliant day in Parma. I had not known Correggio before; he deserves all his fame. I stood in the parlor of the Abbess, the person for whom all was done, and Paradise seemed opened by the nymph, upon her car of light, and the divine children peeping through the vines. Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day. I had another good day, too, crossing the Apennines. The young crescent moon rose in orange twilight, just as I reached the highest peak. I was alone on foot; I heard no sound; I prayed. At Florence, I was very ill. For three weeks, my life hung upon a thread. The effect of the Italian climate on my health is not favorable. I feel as if I had received a great injury. I am tired and woe-worn; often, in the bed, I wish I could weep my life away. However, they brought me gruel, I took it, and after a while rose up again. In the time of the vintage, I went alone to Sienna. This is a real untouched Italian place. This excursion, and the grapes, restored me at that time. When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many circumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, childlike well-being. That is all over now, and, with this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death. It is useless to write of it; you are at a distance and cannot help me;--whether accident or angel will, I have no intimation. I have no reason to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark, sad enigma. The beautiful forms of art charm no more, and a love, in which there is all fondness, but no help, flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this. My numerous friendly acquaintances are troubled if they see me ill, and who so affectionate and kind as Mr. and Mrs. S.? TO MADAME ARCONATI. _Rome, Jan_. 14, 1848.--What black and foolish calumnies are these on Mazzini! It is as much for his interest as his honor to let things take their course, at present. To expect anything else, is to suppose him base. And on what act of his life dares any one found such an insinuation? I do not wonder that you were annoyed at his manner of addressing the Pope; but to me it seems that he speaks as he should,--near God and beyond the tomb; not from power to power, but from soul to soul, without regard to temporal dignities. It must be admitted that the etiquette, Most Holy Father, &c., jars with this. TO R.W.E. _Rome, March_ 14, 1848.--Mickiewicz is with me here, and will remain some time; it was he I wanted to see, more than any other person, in going back to Paris, and I have him much better here. France itself I should like to see, but remain undecided, on account of my health, which has suffered so much, this winter, that I must make it the first object in moving for the summer. One physician thinks it will of itself revive, when once the rains have passed, which have now lasted from 16th December to this day. At present, I am not able to leave the fire, or exert myself at all. * * * * * In all the descriptions of the Roman Carnival, the fact has been omitted of daily rain. I felt, indeed, ashamed to perceive it, when no one else seemed to, whilst the open windows caused me convulsive cough and headache. The carriages, with their cargoes of happy women dressed in their ball dresses and costumes, drove up and down, even in the pouring rain. The two handsome _contadine_, who serve me, took off their woollen gowns, and sat five hours at a time, in the street, in white cambric dresses, and straw hats turned up with roses. I never saw anything like the merry good-humor of these people. I should always be ashamed to complain of anything here. But I had always looked forward to the Roman Carnival as a time when I could play too; and it even surpassed my expectations, with its exuberant gayety and innocent frolic, but I was unable to take much part. The others threw flowers all day, and went to masked balls all night; but I went out only once, in a carriage, and was more exhausted with the storm of flowers and sweet looks than I could be by a storm of hail. I went to the German Artists' ball, where were some pretty costumes, and beautiful music; and to the Italian masked ball, where interest lies in intrigue. I have scarcely gone to the galleries, damp and cold as tombs; or to the mouldy old splendor of churches, where, by the way, they are just wailing over the theft of St. Andrew's head, for the sake of the jewels. It is quite a new era for this population to plunder the churches; but they are suffering terribly, and Pio's municipality does, as yet, nothing. TO W.H.C. _Rome, March 29, 1848._--I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur. It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see. I rejoice to be in Europe at this time, and shall return possessed of a great history. Perhaps I shall be called to act. At present, I know not where to go, what to do. War is everywhere. I cannot leave Rome, and the men of Rome are marching out every day into Lombardy. The citadel of Milan is in the hands of my friends, Guerriere, &c., but there may be need to spill much blood yet in Italy. France and Germany are riot in such a state that I can go there now. A glorious flame burns higher and higher in the heart of the nations. * * * * * The rain was constant through the Roman winter, falling in torrents from 16th December to 19th March. Now the Italian heavens wear again their deep blue, the sun is glorious, the melancholy lustres are stealing again over the Campagna, and hundreds of larks sing unwearied above its ruins. Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring. How much has happened since I wrote!--the resistance of Sicily, and the revolution of Naples; now the fall of Louis Philippe; and Metternich is crushed in Austria. I saw the Austrian arms dragged through the streets here, and burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The Italians embraced one another, and cried, _miracolo, Providenza!_ the Tribune Ciccronachio fed the flame with fagots; Adam Mickiewicz, the great poet of Poland, long exiled from his country, looked on; while Polish women brought little pieces that had been scattered in the street, and threw into the flames. When the double-headed eagle was pulled down from the lofty portal of the Palazzo di Venezia, the people placed there, in its stead, one of white and gold, inscribed with the name, ALTA ITALIA; and instantly the news followed, that Milan, Venice, Modena, and Parma, were driving out their tyrants. These news were received in Rome with indescribable rapture. Men danced, and women wept with joy along the street. The youths rushed to enrol themselves in regiments to go to the frontier. In the Colosseum, their names were received. * * * * * _Rome, April 1, 1848._-Yesterday, on returning from Ostia, I find the official news, that the Viceroy Ranieri has capitulated at Verona; that Italy is free, independent, and one. I trust this will prove no April foolery. It seems too good, too speedy a realization of hope. * * * * * _Rome, April 30, 1848._--It is a time such as I always dreamed of; and that fire burns in the hearts of men around me which can keep me warm. Have I something to do here? or am I only to cheer on the warriors, and after write the history of their deeds? The first is all I have done yet, but many have blessed me for my sympathy, and blest me by the action it impelled. My private fortunes are dark and tangled; my strength to govern them (perhaps that I am enervated by this climate) much diminished. I have thrown myself on God, and perhaps he will make my temporal state very tragical. I am more of a child than ever, and hate suffering more than ever, but suppose I shall live with it, if it must come. I did not get your letter, about having the rosary blessed for ----, before I left Rome, and now, I suppose, she would not wish it, as none can now attach any value to the blessing of Pius IX. Those who loved him can no longer defend him. It has become obvious, that those first acts of his in the papacy were merely the result of a kindly, good-natured temperament; that he had not thought to understand their bearing, nor force to abide by it. He seems quite destitute of moral courage. He is not resolute either on the wrong or right side. First, he abandoned the liberal party; then, yielding to the will of the people, and uniting, in appearance, with a liberal ministry, he let the cardinals betray it, and defeat the hopes of Italy. He cried peace, peace! but had not a word of blame for the sanguinary acts of the King of Naples, a word of sympathy for the victims of Lombardy. Seizing the moment of dejection in the nation, he put in this retrograde ministry; sanctioned their acts, daily more impudent: let them neutralize the constitution he himself had given; and when the people slew his minister, and assaulted him in his own palace, he yielded anew; he dared not die, or even run the slight risk,--for only by accident could he have perished. His person as a Pope is still respected, though his character as a man is despised. All the people compare him with Pius VII. saying to the French, "Slay me if you will; I _cannot_ yield," and feel the difference. I was on Monte Cavallo yesterday. The common people were staring at the broken windows and burnt door of the palace where they have so often gone to receive a blessing, the children playing, "_Sedia Papale. Morte ai Cardinali, e morte al Papa!_" The men of straw are going down in Italy everywhere; the real men rising into power. Montanelli, Guerazzi, Mazzini, are real men; their influence is of character. Had we only been born a little later! Mazzini has returned from his seventeen years' exile, "to see what he foresaw." He has a mind far in advance of his times, and yet Mazzini sees not all. * * * * * _Rome, May_ 7, 1848.--Good and loving hearts will be unprepared, and for a time must suffer much from the final dereliction of Pius IX. to the cause of freedom. After the revolution opened in Lombardy, the troops of the line were sent thither; the volunteers rushed to accompany them, the priests preached the war as a crusade, the Pope blessed the banners. The report that the Austrians had taken and hung as a brigand one of the Roman Civic Guard,--a well-known artist engaged in the war of Lombardy,--roused the people; and they went to the Pope, to demand that he should declare war against the Austrians. The Pope summoned a consistory, and then declared in his speech that he had only intended local reforms; that he regretted the misuse that had been made of his name; and wound up by lamenting the war as offensive to the spirit of religion. A momentary stupefaction, followed by a passion of indignation, in which the words _traitor_ and _imbecile_ were heard, received this astounding speech. The Pope was besieged with deputations, and, after two days' struggle, was obliged to place the power in the hands of persons most opposed to him, and nominally acquiesce in their proceedings. TO R.W.E. (_in London_). _Rome, May 19, 1848._--I should like to return with you, but I have much to do and learn in Europe yet. I am deeply interested in this public drama, and wish to see it _played out_. Methinks I have _my part_ therein, either as actor or historian. I cannot marvel at your readiness to close the book of European society. The shifting scenes entertain poorly. The flux of thought and feeling leaves some fertilizing soil; but for me, few indeed are the persons I should wish to see again; nor do I care to push the inquiry further. The simplest and most retired life would now please me, only I would not like to be confined to it, in case I grew weary, and now and then craved variety, for exhilaration. I want some scenes of natural beauty, and, imperfect as love is, I want human beings to love, as I suffocate without. For intellectual stimulus, books would mainly supply it, when wanted. Why did you not try to be in Paris at the opening of the Assembly? There were elements worth scanning. TO R.F.F. _Rome, May 20, 1848._--My health is much revived by the spring here, as gloriously beautiful as the winter was dreary. We know nothing of spring in our country. Here the soft and brilliant weather is unbroken, except now and then by a copious shower, which keeps everything fresh. The trees, the flowers, the bird-songs are in perfection. I have enjoyed greatly my walks in the villas, where the grounds are of three or four miles in extent, and like free nature in the wood-glades and still paths; while they have an added charm in the music of their many fountains, and the soft gleam, here and there, of sarcophagus or pillar. I have been a few days at Albano, and explored its beautiful environs alone, to much greater advantage than I could last year, in the carriage with my friends. I went, also, to Frascati and Ostia, with an English family, who had a good carriage, and were kindly, intelligent people, who could not disturb the Roman landscape. Now I am going into the country, where I can live very cheaply, even keeping a servant of my own, without which guard I should not venture alone into the unknown and wilder regions. I have been so disconcerted by my Roman winter, that I dare not plan decisively again. The enervating breath of Rome paralyzes my body, but I know and love her. The expression, "City of the Soul," designates her, and her alone. TO MADAME ARCONATI. _Rome, May 27, 1848._--This is my last day at Rome. I have been passing several days at Subiaco and Tivoli, and return again to the country to-morrow. These scenes of natural beauty have filled my heart, and increased, if possible, my desire that the people who have this rich inheritance may no longer be deprived of its benefits by bad institutions. The people of Subiaco are poor, though very industrious, and cultivating every inch of ground, with even English care and neatness;--so ignorant and uncultivated, while so finely and strongly made by Nature. May God grant now, to this people, what they need! An illumination took place last night, in honor of the "Illustrious Gioberti." He is received here with great triumph, his carriage followed with shouts of "_Viva Gioberti, morte ai Jesuiti!_" which must be pain to the many Jesuits, who, it is said, still linger here in disguise. His triumphs are shared by Mamiani and Orioli, self-trumpeted celebrities, self-constituted rulers of the Roman states,--men of straw, to my mind, whom the fire already kindled will burn into a handful of ashes. I sit in my obscure corner, and watch the progress of events. It is the position that pleases me best, and, I believe, the most favorable one. Everything confirms me in my radicalism; and, without any desire to hasten matters, indeed with surprise to see them rush so like a torrent, I seem to see them all tending to realize my own hopes. My health and spirits now much restored, I am beginning to set down some of my impressions. I am going into the mountains, hoping there to find pure, strengthening air, and tranquillity for so many days as to allow me to do something. TO R.F. F----. _Rieti, July 1, 1848._--Italy is as beautiful as even I hoped, and I should wish to stay here several years, if I had a moderate fixed income. One wants but little money here, and can have with it many of the noblest enjoyments. I should have been very glad if fate would allow me a few years of congenial life, at the end of not a few of struggle and suffering. But I do not hope it; my fate will be the same to the close,--beautiful gifts shown, and then withdrawn, or offered on conditions that make acceptance impossible. TO MADAME ARCONATI. _Corpus Domini, June_ 22, 1848.--I write such a great number of letters, having not less than a hundred correspondents, that it seems, every day, as if I had just written to each. There is no one, surely, this side of the salt sea, with whom I wish more to keep up the interchange of thought than with you. I believe, if you could know my heart as God knows it, and see the causes that regulate my conduct, you would always love me. But already, in absence, I have lost, for the present, some of those who were dear to me, by failure of letters, or false report. After sorrowing much about a falsehood told me of a dearest friend, I found his letter at Torlonia's, which had been there ten months, and, duly received, would have made all right. There is something fatal in my destiny about correspondence. But I will say no more of this; only the loss of that letter to you, at such an unfortunate time,--just when I most wished to seem the loving and grateful friend I was,--made me fear it might be my destiny to lose you too. But if any cross event shall do me this ill turn on earth, we shall meet again in that clear state of intelligence which men call heaven. I see by the journals that you have not lost Montanelli. That noble mind is still spared to Italy. The Pope's heart is incapable of treason; but he has fallen short of the office fate assigned him. I am no bigoted Republican, yet I think that form of government will eventually pervade the civilized world. Italy may not be ripe for it yet, but I doubt if she finds peace earlier; and this hasty annexation of Lombardy to the crown of Sardinia seems, to me, as well as I can judge, an act unworthy and unwise. Base, indeed, the monarch, if it was needed, and weak no less than base; for he was already too far engaged in the Italian cause to retire with honor or wisdom. I am here, in a lonely mountain home, writing the narrative of my European experience. To this I devote great part of the day. Three or four hours I pass in the open air, on donkey or on foot. When I have exhausted this spot, perhaps I shall try another. Apply as I may, it will take three months, at least, to finish my book. It grows upon me. TO R.W.E. _Rieti, July_ 11, 1848.--Once I had resolution to face my difficulties myself, and try to give only what was pleasant to others; but now that my courage has fairly given way, and the fatigue of life is beyond my strength, I do not prize myself, or expect others to prize me. Some years ago, I thought you very unjust, because you did not lend full faith to my spiritual experiences; but I see you were quite right. I thought I had tasted of the true elixir, and that the want of daily bread, or the pangs of imprisonment, would never make me a complaining beggar. A widow, I expected still to have the cruse full for others. Those were glorious hours, and angels certainly visited me; but there must have been too much earth,--too much taint of weakness and folly, so that baptism did not suffice. I know now those same things, but at present they are words, not living spells. I hear, at this moment, the clock of the Church del Purgatorio telling noon in this mountain solitude. Snow yet lingers on these mountain-tops, after forty days of hottest sunshine, last night broken by a few clouds, prefatory to a thunder storm this morning. It has been so hot here, that even the peasant in the field says, "_Non porro píù resistere_," and slumbers in the shade, rather than the sun. I love to see their patriarchal ways of guarding the sheep and tilling the fields. They are a simple race. Remote from the corruptions of foreign travel, they do not ask for money, but smile upon and bless me as I pass,--for the Italians love me; they say I am so "_simpatica._" I never see any English or Americans, and now think wholly in Italian: only the surgeon who bled me, the other day, was proud to speak a little French, which he had learned at Tunis! The ignorance of this people is amusing. I am to them a divine visitant,--an instructive Ceres,--telling them wonderful tales of foreign customs, and even legends of the lives of their own saints. They are people whom I could love and live with. Bread and grapes among them would suffice me. TO HER MOTHER. _Rome, Nov_. 16, 1848.--* * * Of other circumstances which complicate my position I cannot write. Were you here, I would confide in you fully, and have more than once, in the silence of the night, recited to you those most strange and romantic chapters in the story of my sad life. At one time when I thought I might die, I empowered a person, who has given me, as far as possible to him, the aid and sympathy of a brother, to communicate them to you, on his return to the United States. But now I think we shall meet again, and I am sure you will always love your daughter, and will know gladly that in all events she has tried to aid and striven never to injure her fellows. In earlier days, I dreamed of doing and being much, but now am content with the Magdalen to rest my plea hereon, "_She has loved much_." You, loved mother, keep me informed, as you have, of important facts, _especially_ the _worst_. The thought of you, the knowledge of your angelic nature, is always one of my greatest supports. Happy those who have such a mother! Myriad instances of selfishness and corruption of heart cannot destroy the confidence in human nature. I am again in Rome, situated for the first time entirely to my mind. I have but one room, but large; and everything about the bed so gracefully and adroitly disposed that it makes a beautiful parlor, and of course I pay much less. I have the sun all day, and an excellent chimney. It is very high and has pure air, and the most beautiful view all around imaginable. Add, that I am with the dearest, delightful old couple one can imagine, quick, prompt, and kind, sensible and contented. Having no children, they like to regard me and the Prussian sculptor, my neighbor, as such; yet are too delicate and too busy ever to intrude. In the attic, dwells a priest, who insists on making my fire when Antonia is away. To be sure, he pays himself for his trouble, by asking a great many questions. The stories below are occupied by a frightful Russian princess with moustaches, and a footman who ties her bonnet for her; and a fat English lady, with a fine carriage, who gives all her money to the church, and has made for the house a terrace of flowers that would delight you. Antonia has her flowers in a humble balcony, her birds, and an immense black cat; always addressed by both husband and wife as "Amoretto," (little love!) The house looks out on the Piazza Barberini, and I see both that palace and the Pope's. The scene to-day has been one of terrible interest. The poor, weak Pope has fallen more and more under the dominion of the cardinals, till at last all truth was hidden from his eyes. He had suffered the minister, Rossi, to go on, tightening the reins, and, because the people preserved a sullen silence, he thought they would bear it. Yesterday, the Chamber of Deputies, illegally prorogued, was opened anew. Rossi, after two or three most unpopular measures, had the imprudence to call the troops of the line to defend him, instead of the National Guard. On the 14th, the Pope had invested him with the privileges of a Roman citizen: (he had renounced his country when an exile, and returned to it as ambassador of Louis Philippe.) This position he enjoyed but one day. Yesterday, as he descended from his carriage, to enter the Chamber, the crowd howled and hissed; then pushed him, and, as he turned his head in consequence, a sure hand stabbed him in the back. He said no word, but died almost instantly in the arms of a cardinal. The act was undoubtedly the result of the combination of many, from the dexterity with which it was accomplished, and the silence which ensued. Those who had not abetted beforehand seemed entirely to approve when done. The troops of the line, on whom he had relied, remained at their posts, and looked coolly on. In the evening, they walked the streets with the people, singing, "Happy the hand which rids the world of a tyrant!" Had Rossi lived to enter the Chamber, he would have seen the most terrible and imposing mark of denunciation known in the history of nations,--the whole house, without a single exception, seated on the benches of opposition. The news of his death was received by the deputies with the same cold silence as by the people. For me, I never thought to have heard of a violent death with satisfaction, but this act affected me as one of terrible justice. To-day, all the troops and the people united and went to the Quirinal to demand a change of measures. They found the Swiss Guard drawn out, and the Pope dared not show himself. They attempted to force the door of his palace, to enter his presence, and the guard fired. I saw a man borne by wounded. The drum beat to call out the National Guard. The carriage of Prince Barberini has returned with its frightened inmates and liveried retinue, and they have suddenly barred up the court-yard gate. Antonia, seeing it, observes, "Thank Heaven, we are poor, we have nothing to fear!" This is the echo of a sentiment which will soon be universal in Europe. Never feel any apprehensions for my safety from such causes. There are those who will protect me, if necessary, and, besides, I am on the conquering side. These events have, to me, the deepest interest. These days are what I always longed for,--were I only free from private care! But, when the best and noblest want bread to give to the cause of liberty, I can just not demand _that_ of them; their blood they would give me. You cannot conceive the enchantment of this place. So much I suffered here last January and February, I thought myself a little weaned; but, returning, my heart swelled even to tears with the cry of the poet:-- "O, Rome, _my_ country, city of the soul!" Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. Warned, however, by the last winter, I dared not rent my lodgings for the year. I hope I am acclimated. I have been through what is called the grape-cure, much more charming, certainly, than the water-cure. At present I am very well; but, alas! because I have gone to bed early, and done very little. I do not know if I can maintain any labor. As to my life, I think that it is not the will of Heaven it should terminate very soon. I have had another strange escape. I had taken passage in the diligence to come to Rome; two rivers were to be passed,--the Turano and the Tiber,--but passed by good bridges, and a road excellent when not broken unexpectedly by torrents from the mountains. The diligence sets out between three and four in the morning, long before light. The director sent me word that the Marchioness Crispoldi had taken for herself and family a coach extraordinary, which would start two hours later, and that I could have a place in that, if I liked; so I accepted. The weather had been beautiful, but, on the eve of the day fixed for my departure, the wind rose, and the rain fell in torrents. I observed that the river which passed my window was much swollen, and rushed with great violence. In the night, I heard its voice still stronger, and felt glad I had not to set out in the dark. I rose with twilight, and was expecting my carriage, and wondering at its delay, when I heard, that the great diligence, several miles below, had been seized by a torrent; the horses were up to their necks in water, before any one dreamed of the danger. The postilion called on all the saints, and threw himself into the water. The door of the diligence could not be opened, and the passengers forced themselves, one after another, into the cold water,--dark too. Had I been there I had fared ill; a pair of strong men were ill after it, though all escaped with life. For several days, there was no going to Rome; but, at last, we set forth in two great diligences, with all the horses of the route. For many miles, the mountains and ravines were covered with snow; I seemed to have returned to my own country and climate. Few miles passed, before the conductor injured his leg under the wheel, and I had the pain of seeing him suffer all the way, while "Blood of Jesus," "Souls of Purgatory," was the mildest beginning of an answer to the jeers of the postilions upon his paleness. We stopped at a miserable osteria, in whose cellar we found a magnificent remain of Cyclopean architecture,--as indeed in Italy one is paid at every step, for discomfort or danger, by some precious subject of thought. We proceeded very slowly, and reached just at night a solitary little inn, which marks the site of the ancient home of the Sabine virgins, snatched away to become the mothers of Rome. We were there saluted with the news that the Tiber, also, had overflowed its banks, and it was very doubtful if we could pass. But what else to do? There were no accommodations in the house for thirty people, or even for three, and to sleep in the carriages, in that wet air of the marshes, was a more certain danger than to attempt the passage. So we set forth; the moon, almost at the full, smiling sadly on the ancient grandeurs, then half draped in mist, then drawing over her face a thin white veil. As we approached the Tiber, the towers and domes of Rome could be seen, like a cloud lying low on the horizon. The road and the meadows, alike under water, lay between us and it, one sheet of silver. The horses entered; they behaved nobly; we proceeded, every moment uncertain if the water would not become deep; but the scene was beautiful, and I enjoyed it highly. I have never yet felt afraid when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension. At last we entered the gate; the diligence stopping to be examined, I walked to the gate of Villa Ludovisi, and saw its rich shrubberies of myrtle, and its statues so pale and eloquent in the moonlight. Is it not cruel that I cannot earn six hundred dollars a year, living here? I could live on that well, now I know Italy. Where I have been, this summer, a great basket of grapes sells for one cent!--delicious salad, enough for three or four persons, one cent,--a pair of chickens, fifteen cents. Foreigners cannot live so, but I could, now that I speak the language fluently, and know the price of everything. Everybody loves, and wants to serve me, and I cannot earn this pitiful sum to learn and do what I want. Of course, I wish to see America again; but in my own time, when I am ready, and not to weep over hopes destroyed and projects unfulfilled. My dear friend, Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love;--a _contadina_, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday, she came in her holiday dress,--beautiful corset of red silk richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, in the other a pair of live chickens, to be eaten by me for her sake, ("_per amore mio_,") and wanted no present, no reward; it was, as she said, "for the honor and pleasure of her acquaintance." The old father of the family never met me but he took off his hat and said, "Madame, it is to me a _consolation_ to see you." Are there not sweet flowers of affection in life, glorious moments, great thoughts?--why must they be so dearly paid for? Many Americans have shown me great and thoughtful kindness, and none more so than W. S---- and his wife. They are now in Florence, but may return. I do not know whether I shall stay here or not; shall be guided much by the state of my health. All is quieted now in Rome. Late at night the Pope had to yield, but not till the door of his palace was half burnt, and his confessor killed. This man, Parma, provoked his fate by firing on the people from a window. It seems the Pope never gave order to fire; his guard acted from a sudden impulse of their own. The new ministry chosen are little inclined to accept. It is almost impossible for any one to act, unless the Pope is stripped of his temporal power, and the hour for that is not yet quite ripe; though they talk more and more of proclaiming the Republic, and even of calling my friend Mazzini. If I came home at this moment, I should feel as if forced to leave my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for. If I do come in this way, all I can promise is to plague other people as little as possible. My own plans and desires will be postponed to another world. Do not feel anxious about me. Some higher power leads me through strange, dark, thorny paths, broken at times by glades opening down into prospects of sunny beauty, into which I am not permitted to enter. If God disposes for us, it is not for nothing. This I can say, my heart is in some respects better, it is kinder and more humble. Also, my mental acquisitions have certainly been great, however inadequate to my desires. TO M.S. _Rome, Nov._ 23, 1848.--Mazzini has stood alone in Italy, on a sunny height, far above the stature of other men. He has fought a great fight against folly, compromise, and treason; steadfast in his convictions, and of almost miraculous energy to sustain them, is he. He has foes; and at this moment, while he heads the insurrection in the Valtellina, the Roman people murmur his name, and long to call him here. How often rings in my ear the consolatory word of Körner, after many struggles, many undeceptions, "Though the million suffer shipwreck, yet noble hearts survive!" I grieve to say, the good-natured Pio has shown himself utterly derelict, alike without resolution to abide by the good or the ill. He is now abandoned and despised by both parties. The people do not trust his word, for they know he shrinks from the danger, and shuts the door to pray quietly in his closet, whilst he knows the cardinals are misusing his name to violate his pledges. The cardinals, chased from Rome, talk of electing an anti-Pope; because, when there was danger, he has always yielded to the people, and they say he has overstepped his prerogative, and broken his papal oath. No one abuses him, for it is felt that in a more private station he would have acted a kindly part; but he has failed of so high a vocation, and balked so noble a hope, that no one respects him either. Who would have believed, a year ago, that the people would assail his palace? I was on Monte Cavallo yesterday, and saw the broken windows, the burnt doors, the walls marked by shot, just beneath the loggia, on which we have seen him giving the benediction. But this would never have happened, if his guard had not fired first on the people. It is true it was without his order, but, under a different man, the Swiss would never have dared to incur such a responsibility. Our old acquaintance, Sterbini, has risen to the ministry. He has a certain influence, from his consistency and independence, but has little talent. Of me you wish to know; but there is little I can tell you at this distance. I have had happy hours, learned much, suffered much, and outward things have not gone fortunately with me. I have had glorious hopes, but they are overclouded now, and the future looks darker than ever, indeed, quite impossible to my steps. I have no hope, unless that God will show me some way I do not know of now; but I do not wish to trouble you with more of this. TO W.S. _Rome, Dec_. 9, 1848.--As to Florence itself, I do not like it, with the exception of the galleries and churches, and Michel Angelo's marbles. I do not like it, for the reason you _do_, because it seems like home. It seems a kind of Boston to me,--the same good and the same ill; I have had enough of both. But I have so many dear friends in Boston, that I must always wish to go there sometimes; and there are so many precious objects of study in Florence, that a stay of several months could not fail to be full of interest. Still, the spring must be the time to be in Florence; there are so many charming spots to visit in the environs, much nearer than those you go to in Rome, within scope of an afternoon's drive. I saw them only when parched with sun and covered with dust. In the spring they must be very beautiful. * * * * * _December_, 1848.--I felt much what you wrote, "_if it were well with my heart_." How seldom it is that a mortal is permitted to enjoy a paradisaical scene, unhaunted by some painful vision from the past or the future! With me, too, dark clouds of care and sorrow have sometimes blotted out the sunshine. I have not lost from my side an only sister, but have been severed from some visions still so dear, they looked almost like hopes. The future seems too difficult for me. I have been as happy as I could, and I feel that this summer, as last, had I been with my country folks, the picture of Italy would not have been so lively to me. Now I have been quite off the beaten track of travel, have seen, thought, spoken, dreamed only what is Italian. I have learned much, received many strong and clear impressions. While among the mountains, I was for a good while quite alone, except for occasional chat with the contadine, who wanted to know if Pius IX. was not _un gran carbonaro!_--a reputation which he surely ought to have forfeited by this time. About me they were disturbed: "_E sempre sola soletta_," they said, "_eh perche?_" Later, I made one of those accidental acquaintances, such as I have spoken of to you in my life of Lombardy, which may be called romantic: two brothers, elderly men, the last of a very noble family, formerly lords of many castles, still of more than one; both unmarried, men of great polish and culture. None of the consequences ensued that would in romances: they did not any way adopt me, nor give me a casket of diamonds, nor any of their pictures, among which were originals by several of the greatest masters, nor their rich cabinets, nor miniatures on agate, nor carving in wood and ivory. They only showed me their things, and their family archives of more than a hundred volumes, (containing most interesting documents about Poland, where four of their ancestors were nuncios,) manuscript letters from Tasso, and the like. With comments on these, and legendary lore enough to furnish Cooper or Walter Scott with a thousand romances, they enriched me; unhappily, I shall never have the strength or talent to make due use of it. I was sorry to leave them, for now I have recrossed the frontier into the Roman States. I will not tell you where,--I know not that I shall ever tell where,--these months have been passed. The great Goethe hid thus in Italy; "Then," said he, "I did indeed feel alone,--when no former friend could form an _idea_ where I was." Why should not ---- and I enjoy this fantastic luxury of _incognito_ also, when we can so much more easily? I will not name the place, but I will describe it. The rooms are spacious and airy; the loggia of the sleeping room is rude, but it overhangs a lovely little river, with its hedge of willows. Opposite is a large and rich vineyard; on one side a ruined tower, on the other an old casino, with its avenues of cypress, give human interest to the scene. A cleft amid the mountains full of light leads on the eye to a soft blue peak, very distant. At night the young moon trembles in the river, and its soft murmur soothes me to sleep; it needs, for I have had lately a bad attack upon the nerves, and been obliged to stop writing for the present. I think I shall stay here some time, though I suppose there are such sweet places all over Italy, if one only looks for one's self. Poor, beautiful Italy! how she has been injured of late! It is dreadful to see the incapacity and meanness of those to whom she had confided the care of her redemption. I have thus far passed this past month of fine weather most delightfully in revisiting my haunts of the autumn before. Then, too, I was uncommonly well and strong; it was the golden period of my Roman life. The experience what long confinement may be expected after, from the winter rains, has decided me _never_ to make my hay when the sun shines: _i.e._, to give no fine day to books and pens. The places of interest I am nearest now are villas Albani and Ludovisi, and Santa Agnese, St. Lorenzo, and the vineyards near Porta Maggiore. I have passed one day in a visit to Torre dei Schiavi and the neighborhood, and another on Monte Mario, both Rome and the Campagna-day golden in the mellowest lustre of the Italian sun. * * * But to you I may tell, that I always go with Ossoli, the most congenial companion I ever had for jaunts of this kind. We go out in the morning, carrying the roast chestnuts from Rome; the bread and wine are found in some lonely little osteria; and so we dine; and reach Rome again, just in time to see it, from a little distance, gilded by the sunset. This moon having been so clear, and the air so warm, we have visited, on successive evenings, all the places we fancied: Monte Cavallo, now so lonely and abandoned,--no lights there but moon and stars,--Trinità de' Monti, Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Forum. So now, if the rain must come, or I be driven from Rome, I have all the images fair and fresh in my mind. About public events, why remain ignorant? Take a daily paper in the house. The Italian press has recovered from the effervescence of childish spirits;--you can now approximate to the truth from its reports. There are many good papers now in Italy. Whatever represents the Montanelli ministry is best for you. That gives the lead now. I see good articles copied from the "Alba." TO MADAME ARCONATI. _Rome, Feb. 5_, 1849.--I am so delighted to get your letter, that I must answer on the instant. I try with all my force to march straight onwards,--to answer the claims of the day; to act out my feeling as seems right at the time, and not heed the consequences;--but in my affections I am tender and weak; where I have really loved, a barrier, a break, causes me great suffering. I read in your letter that I am still dear to you as you to me. I always felt, that if we had passed more time together,--if the intimacy, for which there was ground in the inner nature, had become consolidated,--no after differences of opinion or conduct could have destroyed, though they might interrupt its pleasure. But it was of few days' standing,--our interviews much interrupted. I felt as if I knew you much better than you could me, because I had occasion to see you amid your various and habitual relations. I was afraid you might change, or become indifferent; now I hope not. True, I have written, shall write, about the affairs of Italy, what you will much dislike, if ever you see it. I have done, may do, many things that would be very unpleasing to you; yet there _is_ a congeniality, I dare to say, pure, and strong, and good, at the bottom of the heart, far, far deeper than these differences, that would always, on a real meeting, keep us friends. For me, I could never have but one feeling towards you. Now, for the first time, I enjoy a full communion with the spirit of Rome. Last winter, I had here many friends; now all are dispersed, and sometimes I long to exchange thoughts with a friendly circle; but generally I am better content to live thus:--the impression made by all the records of genius around is more unbroken; I begin to be very familiar with them. The sun shines always, when last winter it never shone. I feel strong; I can go everywhere on foot. I pass whole days abroad; sometimes I take a book, but seldom read it:--why should I, when every stone talks? In spring, I shall go often out of town. I have read "La Rome Souterraine" of Didier, and it makes me wish to see Ardea and Nettuno. Ostia is the only one of those desolate sites that I know yet. I study sometimes Niebuhr, and other books about Rome, but not to any great profit. In the circle of my friends, two have fallen. One a person of great wisdom, strength, and calmness. She was ever to me a most tender friend, and one whose sympathy I highly valued. Like you by nature and education conservative, she was through thought liberal. With no exuberance or passionate impulsiveness herself, she knew how to allow for these in others. The other was a woman of my years, of the most precious gifts in heart and genius. She had also beauty and fortune. She died at last of weariness and intellectual inanition. She never, to any of us, her friends, hinted her sufferings. But they were obvious in her poems, which, with great dignity, expressed a resolute but most mournful resignation. TO R.F.F. _Rome, Feb_. 23, 1849.--It is something if one can get free foot-hold on the earth, so as not to be jostled out of hearing the music, if there should be any spirits in the air to make such. For my part, I have led rather too lonely a life of late. Before, it seemed as if too many voices of men startled away the inspirations; but having now lived eight months much alone, I doubt that good has come of it, and think to return, and go with others for a little. I have realized in these last days the thought of Goethe,--"He who would in loneliness live, ah! he is soon alone. Each one loves, each one lives, and leaves him to his pain." I went away and hid, all summer. Not content with that, I said, on returning to Rome, I must be busy and receive people little. They have taken me at my word, and hardly one comes to see me. Now, if I want play and prattle, I shall have to run after them. It is fair enough that we all, in turn, should be made to feel our need of one another. Never was such a winter as this. Ten weeks now of unbroken sunshine and the mildest breezes. Of course, its price is to be paid. The spring, usually divine here, with luxuriant foliage and multitudinous roses, will be all scorched and dusty. There is fear, too, of want of food for the poor Roman state. I pass my days in writing, walking, occasional visits to the galleries. I read little, except the newspapers; these take up an hour or two of the day. I own, my thoughts are quite fixed on the daily bulletin of men and things. I expect to write the history, but because it is so much in my heart. If you were here, I rather think you would be impassive, like the two most esteemed Americans I see. They do not believe in the sentimental nations. Hungarians, Poles, Italians, are too demonstrative for them, too fiery, too impressible. They like better the loyal, slow-moving Germans: even the Russian, with his dog's nose and gentlemanly servility, pleases them better than _my_ people. There is an antagonism of race. TO E.S. _Rome, June_ 6, 1849.--The help I needed was external, practical. I knew myself all the difficulties and pains of my position; they were beyond present relief; from sympathy I could struggle with them, but had not life enough left, afterwards, to be a companion of any worth. To be with persons generous and refined, who would not pain; who would sometimes lend a helping hand across the ditches of this strange insidious marsh, was all I could have now, and this you gave. On Sunday, from our loggia, I witnessed a terrible, a real battle. It began at four in the morning: it lasted to the last gleam of light. The musket-fire was almost unintermitted; the roll of the cannon, especially from St. Angelo, most majestic. As all passed at Porta San Pancrazio and Villa Pamfili, I saw the smoke of every discharge, the flash of the bayonets; with a glass could see the men. Both French and Italians fought with the most obstinate valor. The French could not use their heavy cannon, being always driven away by the legions Garibaldi and ----, when trying to find positions for them. The loss on our side is about three hundred killed and wounded; theirs must be much greater. In one casino have been found seventy dead bodies of theirs. I find the wounded men at the hospital in a transport of indignation. The French soldiers fought so furiously, that they think them false as their general, and cannot endure the remembrance of their visits, during the armistice, and talk of brotherhood. You will have heard how all went:--how Lesseps, after appearing here fifteen days as _plenipotentiary_, signed a treaty not dishonorable to Rome; then Oudinot refused to ratify it, saying, _the plenipotentiary had surpassed his powers_: Lesseps runs back to Paris, and Oudinot attacks:--an affair alike infamous for the French from beginning to end. The cannonade on one side has continued day and night, (being full moon,) till this morning; they seeking to advance or take other positions, the Romans firing on them. The French throw rockets into the town: one burst in the court-yard of the hospital, just as I arrived there yesterday, agitating the poor sufferers very much; they said they did not want to die like mice in a trap. TO M.S. _Rome, March_ 9, 1849.--Last night, Mazzini came to see me. You will have heard how he was called to Italy, and received at Leghorn like a prince, as he is; unhappily, in fact, the only one, the only great Italian. It is expected, that, if the republic lasts, he will be President. He has been made a Roman citizen, and elected to the Assembly; the labels bearing, in giant letters, "_Giuseppe Mazzini, cittadino Romano_," are yet up all over Rome. He entered by night, on foot, to avoid demonstrations, no doubt, and enjoy the quiet of his own thoughts, at so great a moment. The people went under his windows the next night, and called him out to speak; but I did not know about it. Last night, I heard a ring; then somebody speak my name; the voice struck upon me at once. He looks more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings. He asked after all of you. He stayed two hours, and we talked, though rapidly, of everything. He hopes to come often, but the crisis is tremendous, and all will come on him; since, if any one can save Italy from her foes, inward and outward, it will be he. But he is very doubtful whether this be possible; the foes are too many, too strong, too subtle. Yet Heaven helps sometimes. I only grieve I cannot aid him; freely would I give my life to aid him, only bargaining for a quick death. I don't like slow torture. I fear that it is in reserve for him, to survive defeat. True, he can never be utterly defeated; but to see Italy bleeding, prostrate once more, will be very dreadful for him. He has sent me tickets, twice, to hear him speak in the Assembly. It was a fine, commanding voice. But, when he finished, he looked very exhausted and melancholy. He looks as if the great battle he had fought had been too much for his strength, and that he was only sustained by the fire of the soul. All this I write to you, because you said, when I was suffering at leaving Mazzini,--"You will meet him in heaven." This I believe will be, despite all my faults. [In April, 1849, Margaret was appointed, by the "Roman Commission for the succor of the wounded," to the charge of the hospital of the _Fate-Bene Fratetti_; the Princess Belgioioso having charge of the one already opened. The following is a copy of the original letter from the Princess, which is written in English, announcing the appointment.] _Comitato di Soccorso Pei Feriti_, } April 30, 1849. } Dear Miss Fuller:-- You are named Regolatrice of the Hospital of the _Fate-Rene Fratelli_. Go there at twelve, if the alarm bell has not rung before. When you arrive there, you will receive all the women coming for the wounded, and give them your directions, so that you are sure to have a certain number of them night and day. May God help us. CHRISTINE TRIVULZE, of Belgioioso. Miss Fuller, Piazza Barberini, No. 60. TO R.W.E. _Rome, June_ 10, 1849.--I received your letter amid the round of cannonade and musketry. It was a terrible battle fought here from the first till the last light of day. I could see all its progress from my balcony. The Italians fought like lions. It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honor and their rights, with little ground for hope that they can resist, now they are betrayed by France. Since the 30th April, I go almost daily to the hospitals, and, though I have suffered,--for I had no idea before, how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are,--yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men; there is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of the Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books and flowers; they read, and we talk. The palace of the Pope, on the Quirinal, is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens, I walk with them,--one with his sling, another with his crutch. The gardener plays off all his water-works for the defenders of the country, and gathers flowers for me, their friend. A day or two since, we sat in the Pope's little pavilion, where he used to give private audience. The sun was going gloriously down over Monte Mario, where gleamed the white tents of the French light-horse among the trees. The cannonade was heard at intervals. Two bright-eyed boys sat at our feet, and gathered up eagerly every word said by the heroes of the day. It was a beautiful hour, stolen from the midst of ruin and sorrow; and tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit,--with noble hope for man, with reverence for woman. The young ladies of the family, very young girls, were filled with enthusiasm for the suffering, wounded patriots, and they wished to go to the hospital to give their services. Excepting the three superintendents, none but married ladies were permitted to serve there, but their services were accepted. Their governess then wished to go too, and, as she could speak several languages, she was admitted to the rooms of the wounded soldiers, to interpret for them, as the nurses knew nothing but Italian, and many of these poor men were suffering, because they could not make their wishes known. Some are French, some German, and many Poles. Indeed, I am afraid it is too true that there were comparatively but few Romans among them. This young lady passed several nights there. Should I never return,--and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here,--if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself; the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp. I feel profoundly for Mazzini; at moments I am tempted to say, "Cursed with every granted prayer,"--so cunning is the dæmon. He is become the inspiring soul of his people. He saw Rome, to which all his hopes through life tended, for the first time as a Roman citizen, and to become in a few days its ruler. He has animated, he sustains her to a glorious effort, which, if it fails, this time, will not in the age. His country will be free. Yet to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, to dig the graves of such martyrs. Then Rome is being destroyed; her glorious oaks; her villas, haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world forever,--the villa of Raphael, the villa of Albani, home of Winkelmann, and the best expression of the ideal of modern Rome, and so many other sanctuaries of beauty,--all must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter. _I_ could not, could not! I know not, dear friend, whether I ever shall get home across that great ocean, but here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O, Rome, _my_ country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head! Speaking of the republic, you say, do not I wish Italy had a great man? Mazzini is a great man. In mind, a great poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Cæsar. Dearly I love Mazzini. He came in, just as I had finished the first letter to you. His soft, radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life, that, like the Magdalen, I may, at the important hour, shed all the consecrated ointment on his head. There is one, Mazzini, who understands thee well; who knew thee no less when an object of popular fear, than now of idolatry; and who, if the pen be not held too feebly, will help posterity to know thee too. TO W.H.C. _Rome, July_ 8, 1849.--I do not yet find myself tranquil and recruited from the painful excitements of these last days. But, amid the ruined hopes of Rome, the shameful oppressions she is beginning to suffer, amid these noble, bleeding martyrs, my brothers, I cannot fix my thoughts on anything else. I write that you may assure mother of my safety, which in the last days began to be seriously imperilled. Say, that as soon as I can find means of conveyance, without an expense too enormous, I shall go again into the mountains. There I shall find pure, bracing air, and I hope stillness, for a time. Say, she need feel no anxiety, if she do not hear from me for some time. I may feel indisposed to write, as I do now; my heart is too full. Private hopes of mine are fallen with the hopes of Italy. I have played for a new stake, and lost it. Life looks too difficult. But for the present I shall try to wave all thought of self and renew my strength. After the attempt at revolution in France failed, could I have influenced Mazzini, I should have prayed him to capitulate, and yet I feel that no honorable terms can be made with such a foe, and that the only way is _never_ to yield; but the sound of the musketry, the sense that men were perishing in a hopeless contest, had become too terrible for my nerves. I did not see Mazzini, the last two weeks of the republic. When the French entered, he walked about the streets, to see how the people bore themselves, and then went to the house of a friend. In the upper chamber of a poor house, with his life-long friends,--the Modenas,--I found him. Modena, who abandoned not only what other men hold dear,--home, fortune, peace,--but also endured, without the power of using the prime of his great artist-talent, a ten years' exile in a foreign land; his wife every way worthy of him,--such a woman as I am not. Mazzini had suffered millions more than I could; he had borne his fearful responsibility; he had let his dearest friends perish; he had passed all these nights without sleep; in two short months, he had grown old; all the vital juices seemed exhausted; his eyes were all blood-shot; his skin orange; flesh he had none; his hair was mixed with white: his hand was painful to the touch; but he had never flinched, never quailed; had protested in the last hour against surrender; sweet and calm, but full of a more fiery purpose than ever; in him I revered the hero, and owned myself not of that mould. You say truly, I shall come home humbler. God grant it may be entirely humble! In future, while more than ever deeply penetrated with principles, and the need of the martyr spirit to sustain them, I will ever own that there are few worthy, and that I am one of the least. A silken glove might be as good a gauntlet as one of steel, but I, infirm of mood, turn sick even now as I think of the past. * * * * * _July_, 1849.--I cannot tell you what I endured in leaving Rome; abandoning the wounded soldiers; knowing that there is no provision made for them, when they rise from the beds where they have been thrown by a noble courage, where they have suffered with a noble patience. Some of the poorer men, who rise bereft even of the right arm,--one having lost both the right arm and the right leg,--I could have provided for with a small sum. Could I have sold my hair, or blood from my arm, I would have done it. Had any of the rich Americans remained in Rome, they would have given it to me; they helped nobly at first, in the service of the hospitals, when there was far less need; but they had all gone. What would I have given that I could have spoken to one of the Lawrences, or the Phillipses; they could and would have saved the misery. These poor men are left helpless in the power of a mean and vindictive foe. You felt so oppressed in the slave-states; imagine what I felt at seeing all the noblest youth, all the genius of this dear land, again enslaved. TO W.H.C. _Rieti, Aug_. 28, 1849.--You say, you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles. Would it were so! I found myself inferior in courage and fortitude to the occasion. I knew not how to bear the havoc and anguish incident to the struggle for these principles. I rejoiced that it lay not with me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gardens, for the defence of Rome; I do not know that I could have done it. And the sight of these far nobler growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime, became too much for me. I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed. You say, I sustained them; often have they sustained my courage: one, kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them round his neck to be worn as the true relics of to-day; mementoes that he also had done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity. One fair young man, who is made a cripple for life, clasped my hand as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, "Viva l'Italia." "Think only, _cara bona donna_" said a poor wounded soldier, "that I can always wear my uniform on _festas_, just as it is now, with the holes where the balls went through, for a memory." "God is good; God knows," they often said to me, when I had not a word to cheer them. THE WIFE AND MOTHER.[A] Beneath the ruins of the Roman Republic, how many private fortunes were buried! and among these victims was Margaret. In that catastrophe, were swallowed up hopes sacredly cherished by her through weary months, at the risk of all she most prized. Soon after the entrance of the French, she wrote thus, to the resident Envoy of the United States: My dear Mr. Cass,--I beg you to come and see me, and give me your counsel, and, if need be, your aid, to get away from Rome. From what I hear this morning, I fear we may be once more shut up here; and I shall die, to be again separated from what I hold most dear. There are, as yet, no horses on the way we want to go, or we should post immediately. You may feel, like me, sad, in these last moments, to leave this injured Rome. So many noble hearts I abandon here, whose woes I have known! I feel, if I could not aid, I might soothe. But for my child, I would not go, till some men, now sick, know whether they shall live or die. * * * * * Her child! Where was he? In RIETI,--at the foot of the Umbrian Apennines,--a day's journey to the north-east of Rome. Thither Margaret escaped with her husband, and thence she wrote the following letter: Dearest Mother,--I received your letter a few hours before leaving Rome. Like all of yours, it refreshed me, and gave me as much satisfaction as anything could, at that sad time. Its spirit is of eternity, and befits an epoch when wickedness and perfidy so impudently triumph, and the best blood of the generous and honorable is poured out like water, seemingly in vain. I cannot tell you what I suffered to abandon the wounded to the care of their mean foes; to see the young men, that were faithful to their vows, hunted from their homes,--hunted like wild beasts; denied a refuge in every civilized land. Many of those I loved are sunk to the bottom of the sea, by Austrian cannon, or will be shot. Others are in penury, grief, and exile. May God give due recompense for all that has been endured! My mind still agitated, and my spirits worn out, I have not felt like writing to any one. Yet the magnificent summer does not smile quite in vain for me. Much exercise in the open air, living much on milk and fruit, have recruited my health, and I am regaining the habit of sleep, which a month of nightly cannonade in Rome had destroyed. * * * * * Receiving, a few days since, a packet of letters from America, I opened them with more feeling of hope and good cheer, than for a long time past. The first words that met my eye were these, in the hand of Mr. Greeley:--"Ah, Margaret, the world grows dark with us! You grieve, for Rome is fallen;--I mourn, for Pickie is dead." I have shed rivers of tears over the inexpressibly affecting letter thus begun. One would think I might have become familiar enough with images of death and destruction; yet somehow the image of Pickie's little dancing figure, lying, stiff and stark, between his parents, has made me weep more than all else. There was little hope he could do justice to himself, or lead a happy life in so perplexed a world; but never was a character of richer capacity,--never a more charming child. To me he was most dear, and would always have been so. Had he become stained with earthly faults, I could never have forgotten what he was when fresh from the soul's home, and what he was to me when my soul pined for sympathy, pure and unalloyed. The three children I have seen who were fairest in my eyes, and gave most promise of the future, were Waldo, Pickie, Hermann Clarke;--all nipped in the bud. Endless thoughts has this given me, and a resolve to seek the realization of all hopes and plans elsewhere, which resolve will weigh with me as much as it can weigh before the silver cord is finally loosed. Till then, Earth, our mother, always finds strange, unexpected ways to draw us back to her bosom,--to make us seek anew a nutriment which has never failed to cause us frequent sickness. * * * * * This brings me to the main object of my present letter,--a piece of intelligence about myself, which I had hoped I might be able to communicate in such a way as to give you _pleasure_. That I cannot,--after suffering much in silence with that hope,--is like the rest of my earthly destiny. The first moment, it may cause you a pang to know that your eldest child might long ago have been addressed by another name than yours, and has a little son a year old. But, beloved mother, do not feel this long. I do assure you, that it was only great love for you that kept me silent. I have abstained a hundred times, when your sympathy, your counsel, would have been most precious, from a wish not to harass you with anxiety. Even now I would abstain, but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together; and we have no hope, in the present state of Italian affairs, that we can do it at any better advantage, for several years, than now. My husband is a Roman, of a noble but now impoverished house. His mother died when he was an infant, his father is dead since we met, leaving some property, but encumbered with debts, and in the present state of Rome hardly available, except by living there. He has three older brothers, all provided for in the Papal service,--one as Secretary of the Privy Chamber, the other two as members of the Guard Noble. A similar career would have been opened to him, but he embraced liberal principles, and, with the fall of the Republic, has lost all, as well as the favor of his family, who all sided with the Pope. Meanwhile, having been an officer in the Republican service, it was best for him to leave Rome. He has taken what little money he had, and we plan to live in Florence for the winter. If he or I can get the means, we shall come together to the United States, in the summer;--earlier we could not, on account of the child. He is not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with me. He had no instructor except an old priest, who entirely neglected his education; and of all that is contained in books he is absolutely ignorant, and he has no enthusiasm of character. On the other hand, he has excellent practical sense; has been a judicious observer of all that passed before his eyes; has a nice sense of duty, which, in its unfailing, minute activity, may put most enthusiasts to shame; a very sweet temper, and great native refinement. His love for me has been unswerving and most tender. I have never suffered a pain that he could relieve. His devotion, when I am ill, is to be compared only with yours. His delicacy in trifles, his sweet domestic graces, remind me of E----. In him I have found a home, and one that interferes with no tie. Amid many ills and cares, we have had much joy together, in the sympathy with natural beauty,--with our child,--with all that is innocent and sweet. I do not know whether he will always love me so well, for I am the elder, and the difference will become, in a few years, more perceptible than now. But life is so uncertain, and it is so necessary to take good things with their limitations, that I have not thought it worth while to calculate too curiously. However my other friends may feel, I am sure that _you_ will love him very much, and that he will love you no less. Could we all live together, on a moderate income, you would find peace with us. Heaven grant, that, on returning, I may gain means to effect this object. He, of course, can do nothing, while we are in the United States, but perhaps I can; and now that my health is better, I shall be able to exert myself, if sure that my child is watched by those who love him, and who are good and pure. * * * * * What shall I say of my child? All might seem hyperbole, even to my dearest mother. In him I find satisfaction, for the first time, to the deep wants of my heart. Yet, thinking of those other sweet ones fled, I must look upon him as a treasure only lent. He is a fair child, with blue eyes and light hair; very affectionate, graceful, and sportive. He was baptized, in the Roman Catholic Church, by the name of Angelo Eugene Philip, for his father, grandfather, and my brother. He inherits the title of marquis. Write the name of my child in your Bible, ANGELO OSSOLI, _born September_ 5, 1848. God grant he may live to see you, and may prove worthy of your love! More I do not feel strength to say. You can hardly guess how all attempt to express something about the great struggles and experiences of my European life enfeebles me. When I get home,--if ever I do,--it will be told without this fatigue and excitement. I trust there will be a little repose, before entering anew on this wearisome conflict. I had addressed you twice,--once under the impression that I should not survive the birth of my child; again during the siege of Rome, the father and I being both in danger. I took Mrs. Story, and, when she left Rome, Mr. Cass, into my confidence. Both were kind as sister and brother. Amid much pain and struggle, sweet, is the memory of the generous love I received from William and Emelyn Story, and their uncle. They helped me gently through a most difficult period. Mr. Cass, also, who did not know me at all, has done everything possible for me. * * * * * A letter to her sister fills out these portraits of her husband and child. * * * * * About Ossoli[B] I do not like to say much, as he is an exceedingly delicate person. He is not precisely reserved, but it is not natural to him to talk about the objects of strong affection. I am sure he would not try to describe me to his sister, but would rather she would take her own impression of me; and, as much as possible, I wish to do the same by him. I presume that, to many of my friends, he will be nothing, and they will not understand that I should have life in common with him. But I do not think he will care;--he has not the slightest tinge of self-love. He has, throughout our intercourse, been used to my having many such ties. He has no wish to be anything to persons with whom he does not feel spontaneously bound, and when I am occupied, is happy in himself. But some of my friends and my family, who will see him in the details of practical life, cannot fail to prize the purity and simple strength of his character; and, should he continue to love me as he has done, his companionship will be an inestimable blessing to me. I say _if_, because all human affections are frail, and I have experienced too great revulsions in my own, not to know it. Yet I feel great confidence in the permanence of his love. It has been unblemished so far, under many trials; especially as I have been more desponding and unreasonable, in many ways, than I ever was before, and more so, I hope, than I ever shall be again. But at all such times, he never had a thought except to sustain and cheer me. He is capable of the sacred love,--the love passing that of woman. He showed it to his father, to Rome, to me. Now he loves his child in the same way. I think he will be an excellent father, though he could not speculate about it, nor, indeed, about anything. Our meeting was singular,--fateful, I may say. Very soon he offered me his hand through life, but I never dreamed I should take it. I loved him, and felt very unhappy to leave him; but the connection seemed so every way unfit, I did not hesitate a moment. He, however, thought I should return to him, as I did. I acted upon a strong impulse, and could not analyze at all what passed in my mind. I neither rejoice nor grieve;--for bad or for good, I acted out my character Had I never connected myself with any one, my path was clear; now it is all hid; but, in that case, my development must have been partial. As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life. Still, I do not find it burdensome. The friction that I have seen mar so much the domestic happiness of others does not occur with us, or, at least, has not occurred. Then, there is the pleasure of always being at hand to help one another. Still, the great novelty, the immense gain, to me, is my relation with my child. I thought the mother's heart lived in me before, but it did not;--I knew nothing about it. Yet, before his birth, I dreaded it. I thought I should not survive: but if I did, and my child did, was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world? I could not, at that time, get any other view. When he was born, that deep melancholy changed at once into rapture: but it did not last long. Then came the prudential motherhood. I grew a coward, a care-taker, not only for the morrow, but, impiously faithless, for twenty or thirty years ahead. It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves. I imagined everything;--he was to be in danger of every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the infants of Lombardy;--the house would be burned over his head; but, if he escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers? Then his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough, &c. &c. During the siege of Rome, I could not see my little boy. What I endured at that time, in various ways, not many would survive. In the burning sun, I went, every day, to wait, in the crowd, for letters about him. Often they did not come. I saw blood that had streamed on the wall where Ossoli was. I have a piece of a bomb that burst close to him. I sought solace in tending the suffering men; but when I beheld the beautiful fair young men bleeding to death, or mutilated for life, I felt the woe of all the mothers who had nursed each to that full flower, to see them thus cut down. I felt the _consolation_, too,--for those youths died worthily. I was a Mater Dolorosa, and I remembered that she who helped Angelino into the world came from the sign of the Mater Dolorosa. I thought, even if he lives, if he comes into the world at this great troubled time, terrible with perplexed duties, it may be to die thus at twenty years, one of a glorious hecatomb, indeed, but still a sacrifice! It seemed then I was willing he should die. * * * * * Angelino's birth-place is thus sketched: My baby saw mountains when he first looked forward into the world. RIETI,--not only an old classic town of Italy, but one founded by what are now called the Aborigines,--is a hive of very ancient dwellings with red brown roofs, a citadel and several towers. It is in a plain, twelve miles in diameter one way, not much less the other, and entirely encircled with mountains of the noblest form. Casinos and hermitages gleam here and there on their lower slopes. This plain is almost the richest in Italy, and full of vineyards. Rieti is near the foot of the hills on one side, and the rapid Velino makes almost the circuit of its walls, on its way to Terni. I had my apartment shut out from the family, on the bank of this river, and saw the mountains, as I lay on my restless couch. There was a piazza, too, or, as they call it here, a loggia, which hung over the river, where I walked most of the night, for I could not sleep at all in those months. In the wild autumn storms, the stream became a roaring torrent, constantly lit up by lightning flashes, and the sound of its rush was very sublime. I see it yet, as it swept away on its dark green current the heaps of burning straw which the children let down from the bridge. Opposite my window was a vineyard, whose white and purple clusters were my food for three months. It was pretty to watch the vintage,--the asses and wagons loaded with this wealth of amber and rubies,--the naked boys, singing in the trees on which the vines are trained, as they cut the grapes,--the nut-brown maids and matrons, in their red corsets and white head-clothes, receiving them below, while the babies and little children were frolicking in the grass. In Rieti, the ancient Umbrians were married thus. In presence of friends, the man and maid received together the gifts of fire and water; the bridegroom then conducted to his house the bride. At the door, he gave her the keys, and, entering, threw behind him nuts, as a sign that he renounced all the frivolities of boyhood. I intend to write all that relates to the birth of Angelino, in a little book, which I shall, I hope, show you sometime. I have begun it, and then stopped;--it seemed to me he would die. If he lives, I shall finish it, before the details are at all faded in my mind. Rieti is a place where I should have liked to have him born, and where I should like to have him now,--but that the people are so wicked. They are the most ferocious and mercenary population of Italy. I did not know this, when I went there, and merely expected to be solitary and quiet among poor people. But they looked on the "Marchioness" as an ignorant _Inglese_, and they fancy all _Inglesi_ have wealth untold. Me they were bent on plundering in every way. They made me suffer terribly in the first days. [Footnote A: The first part of this chapter is edited by R.W.E.; the remainder by W.H.C.] [Footnote B: Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.] THE PRIVATE MARRIAGE. The high-minded friend, spoken of with such grateful affection by Margaret, in her letter to her mother, thus gracefully narrates the romance of her marriage; and the narrative is a noble proof of the heroic disinterestedness with which, amidst her own engrossing trials, Margaret devoted herself to others. Mrs. Story writes as follows:-- "During the month of November, 1847, we arrived in Rome, purposing to spend the winter there. At that time, Margaret was living in the house of the Marchesa ----, in the Corso, _Ultimo Piano_. Her rooms were pleasant and cheerful, with a certain air of elegance and refinement, but they had not a sunny exposure, that all-essential requisite for health, during the damp Roman winter. Margaret suffered from ill health this winter, and she afterwards attributed it mainly to the fact, that she had not the sun. As soon as she heard of our arrival, she stretched forth a friendly, cordial hand, and greeted us most warmly. She gave us great assistance in our search for convenient lodgings, and we were soon happily established near her. Our intercourse was henceforth most frequent and intimate, and knew no cloud nor coldness. Daily we were much with her, and daily we felt more sensible of the worth and value of our friend. To me she seemed so unlike what I had thought her to be in America, that I continually said, 'How have I misjudged you,--you are not at all such a person as I took you to be.' To this she replied, 'I am not the same person, but in many respects another;--my life has new channels now, and how thankful I am that I have been able to come out into larger interests,--but, partly, you did not know me at home in the true light.' It was true, that I had not known her much personally, when in Boston; but through her friends, who were mine also, I had learned to think of her as a person on intellectual stilts, with a large share of arrogance, and little sweetness of temper. How unlike to this was she now!--so delicate, so simple, confiding, and affectionate; with a true womanly heart and soul, sensitive and generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed of so broad a charity, that she could cover with its mantle the faults and defects of all about her. "We soon became acquainted with the young Marquis Ossoli, and met him frequently at Margaret's rooms. He appeared to be of a reserved and gentle nature, with quiet, gentleman-like manners, and there was something melancholy in the expression of his face, which made one desire to know more of him. In figure, he was tall, and of slender frame, with dark hair and eyes; we judged that he was about thirty years of age, possibly younger. Margaret spoke of him most frankly, and soon told us the history of her first acquaintance with him, which, as nearly as I can recall, was as follows:-- "She went to hear vespers, the evening of 'Holy Thursday,' soon after her first coming to Rome, in the spring of 1847, at St. Peter's. She proposed to her companions that some place in the church should be designated, where, after the services, they should meet,--she being inclined, as was her custom always in St. Peter's, to wander alone among the different chapels. When, at length, she saw that the crowd was dispersing, she returned to the place assigned, but could not find her party. In some perplexity, she walked about, with her glass carefully examining each group. Presently, a young man of gentlemanly address came up to her, and begged, if she were seeking any one, that he might be permitted to assist her; and together they continued the search through all parts of the church. At last, it became evident, beyond a doubt, that her party could no longer be there, and, as it was then quite late, the crowd all gone, they went out into the piazza to find a carriage, in which she might go home. In the piazza, in front of St. Peter's, generally may be found many carriages; but, owing to the delay they had made, there were then none, and Margaret was compelled to walk, with her stranger friend, the long distance between the Vatican and the Corso. At this time, she had little command of the language for conversational purposes, and their words were few, though enough to create in each a desire for further knowledge and acquaintance. At her door, they parted, and Margaret, finding her friends already at home, related the adventure." This chance meeting at vesper service in St. Peter's prepared the way for many interviews; and it was before Margaret's departure for Venice, Milan, and Como, that Ossoli first offered her his hand, and was refused. Mrs. Story continues:-- "After her return to Rome, they met again, and he became her constant visitor; and as, in those days, Margaret watched with intense interest the tide of political events, his mind was also turned in the direction of liberty and better government. Whether Ossoli, unassisted, would have been able to emancipate himself from the influence of his family and early education, both eminently conservative and narrow, may be a question; but that he did throw off the shackles, and espouse the cause of Roman liberty with warm zeal, is most certain. Margaret had known Mazzini in London, had partaken of his schemes for the future of his country, and was taking every pains to inform herself in regard to the action of all parties, with a view to write a history of the period. Ossoli brought her every intelligence that might be of interest to her, and busied himself in learning the views of both parties, that she might be able to judge the matter impartially. "Here I may say, that, in the estimation of most of those who were in Italy at this time, the loss of Margaret's history and notes is a great and irreparable one. No one could have possessed so many avenues of direct information from both sides. While she was the friend and correspondent of Mazzini, and knew the springs of action of his party; through her husband's family and connections, she knew the other view; so that, whatever might be the value of her deductions, her facts could not have been other than of highest worth. Together, Margaret and Ossoli went to the meetings of either side; and to her he carried all the flying reports of the day, such as he had heard in the café, or through his friends. "In a short time, we went to Naples, and Margaret, in the course of a few months, to Aquila and Rieti. Meanwhile, we heard from her often by letter, and wrote to urge her to join us in our villa at Sorrento. During this summer, she wrote constantly upon her history of the Italian movement, for which she had collected materials through the past winter. We did not again meet, until the following spring, March, 1849, when we went from Florence back to Rome. Once more we were with her, then, in most familiar every-day intercourse, and as at this time a change of government had taken place,--the Pope having gone to Molo di Gaeta.--we watched with her the great movements of the day. Ossoli was now actively interested on the liberal side; he was holding the office of captain in the _Guardia Civica_, and enthusiastically looking forward to the success of the new measures. "During the spring of 1849, Mazzini came to Rome. He went at once to see Margaret, and at her rooms met Ossoli. After this interview with Mazzini, it was quite evident that they had lost something of the faith and hopeful certainty with which they had regarded the issue, for Mazzini had discovered the want of singleness of purpose in the leaders of the Provisional Government. Still zealously Margaret and Ossoli aided in everything the progress of events; and when it was certain that the French had landed forces at Civita Vecchia, and would attack Rome, Ossoli took station with his men on the walls of the Vatican gardens, where he remained faithfully to the end of the attack. Margaret had, at the same time, the entire charge of one of the hospitals, and was the assistant of the Princess Belgioioso, in charge of '_dei Pellegrini_,' where, during the first day, they received seventy wounded men, French and Romans. "Night and day, Margaret was occupied, and, with the princess, so ordered and disposed the hospitals, that their conduct was truly admirable. All the work was skilfully divided, so that there was no confusion or hurry and, from the chaotic condition in which these places had been left by the priests,--who previously had charge of them,--they brought them to a state of perfect regularity and discipline. Of money they had very little, and they were obliged to give their time and thoughts, in its place. From the Americans in Rome, they raised a subscription for the aid of the wounded of either party; but, besides this, they had scarcely any means to use. I have walked through the wards with Margaret, and seen how comforting was her presence to the poor suffering men. 'How long will the Signora stay?' 'When will the Signora come again?' they eagerly asked. For each one's peculiar tastes she had a care: to one she carried books; to another she told the news of the day; and listened to another's oft-repeated tale of wrongs, as the best sympathy she could give. They raised themselves up on their elbows, to get the last glimpse of her as she was going away. There were some of the sturdy fellows of Garibaldi's Legion there, and to them she listened, as they spoke with delight of their chief, of his courage and skill; for he seemed to have won the hearts of his men in a remarkable manner. "One incident I may as well narrate in this connection. It happened, that, some time before the coming of the French, while Margaret was travelling quite by herself, on her return from a visit to her child, who was out at nurse in the country, she rested for an hour or two at a little wayside _osteria_. While there, she was startled by the _padrone_, who, with great alarm, rushed into the room, and said, 'We are quite lost! here is the Legion Garibaldi! These men always pillage, and, if we do not give all up to them without pay, they will kill us.' Margaret looked out upon the road, and saw that it was quite true, that the legion was coming thither with all speed. For a moment, she said, she felt uncomfortably; for such was the exaggerated account of the conduct of the men, that she thought it quite possible that they would take her horses, and so leave her without the means of proceeding on her journey. On they came, and she determined to offer them a lunch at her own expense; having faith that gentleness and courtesy was the best protection from injury. Accordingly, as soon as they arrived, and rushed boisterously into the _osteria_, she rose, and said to the _padrone_, 'Give these good men wine and bread on my account; for, after their ride, they must need refreshment.' Immediately, the noise and confusion subsided; with respectful bows to her, they seated themselves and partook of the lunch, giving her an account of their journey. When she was ready to go, and her _vettura_ was at the door, they waited upon her, took down the steps, and assisted her with much gentleness and respectfulness of manner, and she drove off, wondering how men with such natures could have the reputation they had. And, so far as we could gather, except in this instance, their conduct was of a most disorderly kind. "Again, on another occasion, she showed how great was her power over rude men. This was when two _contadini_ at Rieti, being in a violent quarrel, had rushed upon each other with knives. Margaret was called by the women bystanders, as the Signora who could most influence them to peace. She went directly up to the men, whose rage was truly awful to behold, and, stepping between them, commanded them to separate. They parted, but with such a look of deadly revenge, that Margaret felt her work was but half accomplished. She therefore sought them out separately, and talked with each, urging forgiveness; it was long, however, before she could see any change of purpose, and only by repeated conversations was it, that she brought about her desire, and saw them meet as friends. After this, her reputation as peace-maker was great, and the women in the neighborhood came to her with long tales of trouble, urging her intervention. I have never known anything more extraordinary than this influence of hers over the passion and violence of the Italian character. Repeated instances come to my mind, when a look from her has had more power to quiet excitement, than any arguments and reasonings that could be brought to bear upon the subject. Something quite superior and apart from them, the people thought her, and yet knew her as the gentle and considerate judge of their vices. "I may also mention here, that Margaret's charities, according to her means, were larger than those of any other whom I ever knew. At one time, in Rome, while she lived upon the simplest, slenderest fare, spending only some ten or twelve cents a day for her dinner, she lent, unsolicited, her last fifty dollars to an artist, who was then in need. That it would ever be returned to her, she did not know; but the doubt did not restrain the hand from giving. In this instance, it was soon repaid her; but her charities were not always towards the most deserving. Repeated instances of the false pretences, under which demands for charity are made, were known to her after she had given to unworthy objects; but no experience of this sort ever checked her kindly impulse to give, and being once deceived taught her no lesson of distrust. She ever listened with ready ear to all who came to her in any form of distress. Indeed, to use the language of another friend, 'the prevalent impression at Rome, among all who knew her, was, that she was a mild saint and a ministering angel.' "I have, in order to bring in these instances of her influence on those about her, deviated from my track. We return to the life she led in Rome during the attack of the French, and her charge of the hospitals, where she spent daily some seven or eight hours, and, often, the entire night. Her feeble frame was a good deal shaken by so uncommon a demand upon her strength, while, at the same time, the anxiety of her mind was intense. I well remember how exhausted and weary she was; how pale and agitated she returned to us after her day's and night's watching; how eagerly she asked for news of Ossoli, and how seldom we had any to give her, for he was unable to send her a word for two or three days at a time. Letters from the country there were few or none, as the communication between Rieti and Rome was cut off. "After one such day, she called me to her bedside, and said that I must consent, for her sake, to keep the SECRET she was about to confide. Then she told me of her marriage; where her child was, and where he was born; and gave me certain papers and parchment documents which I was to keep; and, in the event of her and her husband's death, I was to take the boy to her mother in America, and confide him to her care, and that of her friend, Mrs. ----. "The papers thus given me, I had perfect liberty to read; but after she had told me her story, I desired no confirmation of this fact, beyond what her words had given. One or two of the papers she opened, and we together read them. One was written on parchment, in Latin, and was a certificate, given by the priest who married them, saying that Angelo Eugene Ossoli was the legal heir of whatever title and fortune should come to his father. To this was affixed his seal, with those of the other witnesses, and the Ossoli crest was drawn in full upon the paper. There was also a book, in which Margaret had written the history of her acquaintance and marriage with Ossoli, and of the birth of her child. In giving that to me, she said, 'If I do not survive to tell this myself to my family, this book will be to them invaluable. Therefore keep it for them. If I live, it will be of no use, for my word will be all that they will ask.' I took the papers, and locked them up. Never feeling any desire to look into them, I never did; and as she gave them to me, I returned them to her, when I left Rome for Switzerland. "After this, she often spoke to me of the necessity there had been, and still existed, for her keeping her marriage a secret. At the time, I argued in favor of her making it public, but subsequent events have shown me the wisdom of her decision. The _explanation_ she gave me of the secret marriage was this: "They were married in December, soon after,--as I think, though I am not positive,--the death of the old Marquis Ossoli. The estate he had left was undivided, and the two brothers, attached to the Papal household, were to be the executors. This patrimony was not large, but, when fairly divided, would bring to each a little property,--an income sufficient, with economy, for life in Rome. Everyone knows, that law is subject to ecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestant would be destructive to all prospects of favorable administration. And beside being of another religious faith, there was, in this case, the additional crime of having married a liberal,--one who had publicly interested herself in radical views. Taking the two facts together, there was good reason to suppose, that, if the marriage were known, Ossoli must be a beggar, and a banished man, under the then existing government; while, by waiting a little, there was a chance,--a fair one, too,--of an honorable post under the new government, whose formation every one was anticipating. Leaving Rome, too, at that time, was deserting the field wherein they might hope to work much good, and where they felt that they were needed. Ossoli's brothers had long before begun to look jealously upon him. Knowing his acquaintance with Margaret, they feared the influence she might exert over his mind in favor of liberal sentiments, and had not hesitated to threaten him with the Papal displeasure. Ossoli's education had been such, that it certainly argues an uncommon elevation of character, that he remained so firm and single in his political views, and was so indifferent to the pecuniary advantages which his former position offered, since, during many years, the Ossoli family had been high in favor and in office, in Rome, and the same vista opened for his own future, had he chosen to follow their lead. The Pope left for Molo di Gaeta, and then came a suspension of all legal procedure, so that the estate was never divided, before we left Italy, and I do not know that it has ever been. "Ossoli had the feeling, that, while his own sister and family could not be informed of his marriage, no others should know of it; and from day to day they hoped on for the favorable change which should enable them to declare it. Their child was born; and, for his sake, in order to defend him, as Margaret said, from the stings of poverty, they were patient waiters for the restored law of the land. Margaret felt that she would, at any cost to herself, gladly secure for her child a condition above want; and, although it was a severe trial,--as her letters to us attest,--she resolved to wait, and hope, and keep her secret. At the time when she took me into her confidence, she was so full of anxiety and dread of some shock, from which she might not recover, that it was absolutely necessary to make it known to some friend. She was living with us at the time, and she gave it to me. Most sacredly, but timidly, did I keep her secret; for, all the while, I was tormented with a desire to be of active service to her, and I was incapacitated from any action by the position in which I was placed. "Ossoli's post was one of considerable danger, he being in one of the most exposed places; and, as Margaret saw his wounded and dying comrades, she felt that another shot might take him from her, or bring him to her care in the hospital. Eagerly she watched the carts, as they came up with their suffering loads, dreading that her worst fears might be confirmed. No argument of ours could persuade Ossoli to leave his post to take food or rest. Sometimes we went to him, and carried a concealed basket of provisions, but he shared it with so many of his fellows, that his own portion must have been almost nothing. Haggard, worn, and pale, he walked over the Vatican grounds with us, pointing out, now here, now there, where some poor fellow's blood sprinkled the wall; Margaret was with us, and for a few moments they could have an anxious talk about their child. "To get to the child, or to send to him, was quite impossible, and for days they were in complete ignorance about him. At length, a letter came; and in it the nurse declared that unless they should immediately send her, in advance-payment, a certain sum of money, she would altogether abandon Angelo. It seemed, at first, impossible to forward the money, the road was so insecure, and the bearer of any parcel was so likely to be seized by one party or the other, and to be treated as a spy. But finally, after much consideration, the sum was sent to the address of a physician, who had been charged with the care of the child. I think it did reach its destination, and for a while answered the purpose of keeping the wretched woman faithful to her charge." AQUILA AND RIETI. Extracts from Margaret's and Ossoli's letters will guide us more into the heart of this home-tragedy, so sanctified with holy hope, sweet love, and patient heroism. They shall be introduced by a passage from a journal written many years before. "My Child! O, Father, give me a bud on my tree of life, so scathed by the lightning and bound by the frost! Surely a being born wholly of my being, would not let me lie so still and cold in lonely sadness. This is a new sorrow; for always, before, I have wanted a superior or equal, but now it seems that only the feeling of a parent for a child could exhaust the richness of one's soul. All powerful Nature, how dost thou lead me into thy heart and rebuke every factitious feeling, every thought of pride, which has severed me from the Universe! How did I aspire to be a pure flame, ever pointing upward on the altar! But these thoughts of consecration, though true to the time, are false to the whole. There needs no consecration to the wise heart for all is pervaded by One Spirit, and the Soul of all existence is the Holy of Holies. I thought ages would pass, before I had this parent feeling, and then, that the desire would rise from my fulness of being. But now it springs up in my poverty and sadness. I am well aware that I ought not to be so happy. I do not deserve to be well beloved in any way, far less as the mother by her child. I am too rough and blurred an image of the Creator, to become a bestower of life. Yet, if I refuse to be anything else than my highest self, the true beauty will finally glow out in fulness." At what cost, were bought the blessings so long pined for! Early in the summer of 1848, Margaret left Rome for Aquila, a small, old town, once a baronial residence, perched among the mountains of Abruzzi. She thus sketches her retreat:-- "I am in the midst of a theatre of glorious, snow-crowned mountains, whose pedestals are garlanded with the olive and mulberry, and along whose sides run bridle-paths, fringed with almond groves and vineyards. The valleys are yellow with saffron flowers; the grain fields enamelled with the brilliant blue corn-flower and red poppy. They are of intoxicating beauty, and like nothing in America. The old genius of Europe has so mellowed even the marbles here, that one cannot have the feeling of holy virgin loneliness, as in the New World. The spirits of the dead crowd me in most solitary places. Here and there, gleam churches or shrines. The little town, much ruined, lies on the slope of a hill, with the houses of the barons gone to decay, and unused churches, over whose arched portals are faded frescoes, with the open belfry, and stone wheel-windows, always so beautiful. Sweet little paths lead away through the fields to convents,--one of Passionists, another of Capuchins; and the draped figures of the monks, pacing up and down the hills, look very peaceful. In the churches still open, are pictures, not by great masters, but of quiet, domestic style, which please me much, especially one of the Virgin offering her breast to the child Jesus. There is often sweet music in these churches; they are dressed with fresh flowers, and the incense is not oppressive, so freely sweeps through them the mountain breeze." Here Margaret remained but a month, while Ossoli was kept fast by his guard duties in Rome. "_Addio, tutto caro_," she writes; "I shall receive you with the greatest joy, when you can come. If it were only possible to be nearer to you! for, except the good air and the security, this place does not please me." And again:--"How much I long to be near you! You write nothing of yourself, and this makes me anxious and sad. Dear and good! I pray for thee often, now that it is all I can do for thee. We must hope that Destiny will at last grow weary of persecuting. Ever thy affectionate." Meantime Ossoli writes:--"Why do you not send me tidings of yourself, every post-day? since the post leaves Aquila three times a week. I send you journals or letters every time the post leaves Rome. You should do the same. Take courage, and thus you will make me happier also; and you can think how sad I must feel in not being near you, dearest, to care for all your wants." By the middle of July, Margaret could bear her loneliness no longer, and, passing the mountains, advanced to Rieti, within the frontier of the Papal States. Here Ossoli could sometimes visit her on a Sunday, by travelling in the night from Rome. "Do not fail to come," writes Margaret. "I shall have your coffee warm. You will arrive early, and I can see the diligence pass the bridge from my window." But now threatened a new trial, terrible under the circumstances, yet met with the loving heroism that characterized all her conduct. The civic guard was ordered to prepare for marching to Bologna. Under date of August 17th, Ossoli writes:--"_Mia Cara!_ How deplorable is my state! I have suffered a most severe struggle. If your condition were other than it is, I could resolve more easily; but, in the present moment, I cannot leave you! Ah, how cruel is Destiny! I understand well how much you would sacrifice yourself for me, and am deeply grateful; but I cannot yet decide." Margaret is alone, without a single friend, and not only among strangers, but surrounded by people so avaricious, cunning, and unscrupulous, that she has to be constantly on the watch to avoid being fleeced; she is very poor, and has no confidant, even in Rome, to consult with; she is ill, and fears death in the near crisis; yet thus, with true Roman greatness, she counsels her husband:--"It seems, indeed, a marvel how all things go contrary to us! That, just at this moment, you should be called upon to go away. But do what is for your honor. If honor requires it, go. I will try to sustain myself. I leave it to your judgment when to come,--if, indeed, you can ever come again! At least, we have had some hours of peace together, if now it is all over. Adieu, love; I embrace thee always, and pray for thy welfare. Most affectionately, adieu." * * * * * From this trial, however, she was spared. Pio Nono hesitated to send the civic guard to the north of Italy. Then Margaret writes:--"On our own account, love, I shall be most grateful, if you are not obliged to go. But how unworthy, in the Pope! He seems now a man without a heart. And that traitor, Charles Albert! He will bear the curse of all future ages. Can you learn particulars from Milan? I feel sad for our poor friends there; how much they must suffer! * * * I shall be much more tranquil to have you at my side, for it would be sad to die alone, without the touch of one dear hand. Still, I repeat what I said in my last; if duty prevents you from coming, I will endeavor to take care of myself." Again, two days later, she says:--"I feel, love, a profound sympathy with you, but am not able to give perfectly wise counsel. It seems to me, indeed, the worst possible moment to take up arms, except in the cause of duty, of honor; for, with the Pope so cold, and his ministers so undecided, nothing can be well or successfully done. If it is possible for you to wait for two or three weeks, the public state will be determined,--as will also mine,--and you can judge more calmly. Otherwise, it seems to me that I ought to say nothing. Only, if you go, come here first. I must see you once more. Adieu, dear. Our misfortunes are many and unlooked for. Not often does destiny demand a greater price for some happy moments. Yet never do I repent of our affection; and for thee, if not for me, I hope that life has still some good in store. Once again, adieu! May God give thee counsel and help, since they are not in the power of thy affectionate Margherita." On the 5th of September, Ossoli was "at her side," and together, with glad and grateful hearts, they welcomed their boy; though the father was compelled to return the next day to Rome. Even then, however, a new chapter of sorrows was opening. By indiscreet treatment, Margaret was thrown into violent fever, and became unable to nurse her child. Her waiting maid, also, proved so treacherous, that she was forced to dismiss her, and wished "never to set eyes on her more;" and the family, with whom she was living, displayed most detestable meanness. Thus helpless, ill, and solitary, she could not even now enjoy the mother's privilege. Yet she writes cheerfully:--"My present nurse is a very good one, and I feel relieved. We must have courage but it is a great care, alone and ignorant, to guard an infant in its first days of life. He is very pretty for his age; and, without knowing what name I intended giving him, the people in the house call him _Angiolino_, because he is so lovely." Again:--"He is so dear! It seems to me, among all disasters and difficulties, that if he lives and is well, he will become a treasure for us two, that will compensate us for everything." And yet again:--"This ---- is faithless, like the rest. Spite of all his promises, he will not bring the matter to inoculate Nino, though, all about us, persons are dying with small-pox. I cannot sleep by night, and I weep by day, I am so disgusted; but you are too far off to help me. The baby is more beautiful every hour. He is worth all the trouble he causes me,--poor child that I am,--alone here, and abused by everybody." Yet new struggles; new sorrows! Ossoli writes:-- "Our affairs must be managed with the utmost caution imaginable, since my thought would be to keep the baby out of Rome for the sake of greater secrecy, if only we can find a good nurse who will take care of him like a mother." To which Margaret replies:--"He is always so charming, how can I ever, ever leave him! I wake in the night,--I look at him. I think: Ah, it is impossible! He is so beautiful and good, I could die for him!" Once more:--"In seeking rooms, do not pledge me to remain in Rome, for it seems to me, often, I cannot stay long without seeing the boy. He is so dear, and life seems so uncertain. It is necessary that I should be in Rome a month, at least, to write, and also to be near you. But I must be free to return here, if I feel too anxious and suffering for him. O, love! how difficult is life! But thou art good! If it were only possible to make thee happy!" And, finally, "Signora speaks very highly of ----, the nurse of Angelo, and says that her aunt is an excellent woman, and that the brothers are all good. Her conduct pleases me well. This consoles me a little, in the prospect of leaving my child, if that is necessary." So, early in November, Ossoli came for her, and they returned together. In December, however, Margaret passed a week more with her darling, making two fatiguing and perilous journeys, as snows had fallen on the mountains, and the streams were much swollen by the rains. And then, from the combined motives of being near her husband, watching and taking part in the impending struggle of liberalism, earning support by her pen, preparing her book, and avoiding suspicion, she remained for three months in Rome. "How many nights I have passed," she writes, "entirely in contriving possible means, by which, through resolution and effort on my part, that one sacrifice could be avoided. But it was impossible. I could not take the nurse from her family; I could not remove Angelo, without immense difficulty and risk. It is singular, how everything has worked to give me more and more sorrow. Could I but have remained in peace, cherishing the messenger dove, I should have asked no more, but should have felt overpaid for all the pains and bafflings of my sad and broken life." In March, she flies back to Rieti, and finds "our treasure in the best of health, and plump, though small. When first I took him in my arms, he made no sound, but leaned his head against my bosom, and kept it there, as if he would say, How could you leave me? They told me, that all the day of my departure he would not be comforted, always looking toward the door. He has been a strangely precocious infant, I think, through sympathy with me, for I worked very hard before his birth, with the hope that all my spirit might be incarnated in him. In that regard, it may have been good for him to be with these more instinctively joyous natures. I see that he is more serene, is less sensitive, than when with me, and sleeps better. The most solid happiness I have known has been when he has gone to sleep in my arms. What cruel sacrifices have I made to guard my secret for the present, and to have the mode of disclosure at my own option! It will, indeed, be just like all the rest, if these sacrifices are made in vain." * * * * * At Rieti, Margaret rested till the middle of April, when, returning once more to Rome, she was, as we have seen, shut up within the beleagured city. The siege ended, the anxious mother was free to seek her child once more, in his nest among the mountains. Her fears had been but too prophetic. "Though the physician sent me reassuring letters," she writes, "I yet often seemed to hear Angelino calling to me amid the roar of the cannon, and always his tone was of crying. And when I came, I found mine own fast waning to the tomb! His nurse, lovely and innocent as she appeared, had betrayed him, for lack of a few _scudi_! He was worn to a skeleton; his sweet, childish grace all gone! Everything I had endured seemed light to what I felt when I saw him too weak to smile, or lift his wasted little hand. Now, by incessant care, we have brought him back,--who knows if that be a deed of love?--into this hard world once more. But I could not let him go, unless I went with him; and I do hope that the cruel law of my life will, at least, not oblige us to be separated. When I saw his first returning smile,--that poor, wan, feeble smile!--and more than four weeks we watched him night and day, before we saw it,--new resolution dawned in my heart. I resolved to live, day by day, hour by hour, for his dear sake. So, if he is only treasure lent,--if he too must go, as sweet Waldo, Pickie, Hermann, did,--as all _my_ children do!--I shall at least have these days and hours with him." How intolerable was this last blow to one stretched so long on the rack, is plain from Margaret's letters. "I shall never again," she writes, "be perfectly, be religiously generous, so terribly do I need for myself the love I have given to other sufferers. When you read this, I hope your heart will be happy; for I still like to know that others are happy,--it consoles me." Again her agony wrung from her these bitter words,--the bitterest she ever uttered,--words of transient madness, yet most characteristic:--"Oh God! help me, is all my cry. Yet I have little faith in the Paternal love I need, so ruthless or so negligent seems the government of this earth. I feel calm, yet sternly, towards Fate. This last plot against me has been so cruelly, cunningly wrought, that I shall never acquiesce. I submit, because useless resistance is degrading, but I demand an explanation. I see that it is probable I shall never receive one, while I live here, and suppose I can bear the rest of the suspense, since I have comprehended all its difficulties in the first moments. Meanwhile, I live day by day, though not on manna." But now comes a sweeter, gentler strain:--"I have been the object of great love from the noble and the humble; I have felt it towards both. Yet I am _tired out_,--tired of thinking and hoping,--tired of seeing men err and bleed. I take interest in some plans,--Socialism for instance,--but the interest is shallow as the plans. These are needed, are even good; but man will still blunder and weep, as he has done for so many thousand years. Coward and footsore, gladly would I creep into some green recess, where I might see a few not unfriendly faces, and where not more wretches should come than I could relieve. Yes! I am weary, and faith soars and sings no more. Nothing good of me is left except at the bottom of the heart, a melting tenderness:--'She loves much.'" CALM AFTER STORM. Morning rainbows usher in tempests, and certainly youth's romantic visions had prefigured a stormy day of life for Margaret. But there was yet to be a serene and glowing hour before the sun went down. Angelo grew strong and lively once more; rest and peace restored her elasticity of spirit, and extracts from various letters will show in what tranquil blessedness, the autumn and winter glided by. After a few weeks' residence at Rieti, the happy three journeyed on, by way of Perugia, to Florence, where they arrived at the end of September. Thence, Margaret writes:-- It was so pleasant at Perugia! The pure mountain air is such perfect elixir, the walks are so beautiful on every side, and there is so much to excite generous and consoling feelings! I think the works of the Umbrian school are never well seen except in their home;--they suffer by comparison with works more rich in coloring, more genial, more full of common life. The depth and tenderness of their expression is lost on an observer stimulated to a point out of their range. Now, I can prize them. We went every morning to some church rich in pictures, returning at noon for breakfast. After breakfast, we went into the country, or to sit and read under the trees near San Pietro. Thus I read Nicolo di' Lapi, a book unenlivened by a spark of genius, but interesting, to me, as illustrative of Florence. Our little boy gained strength rapidly there;--every day he was able to go out with us more. He is now full of life and gayety. We hope he will live, and grow into a stout man yet. Our journey here was delightful;--it is the first time I have seen Tuscany when the purple grape hangs garlanded from tree to tree. We were in the early days of the vintage: the fields were animated by men and women, some of the latter with such pretty little bare feet, and shy, soft eyes, under the round straw hat. They were beginning to cut the vines, but had not done enough to spoil any of the beauty. Here, too, I feel better pleased than ever before. Florence seems so cheerful and busy, after ruined Rome, I feel as if I could forget the disasters of the day, for a while, in looking on the treasures she inherits. * * * * * To-day we have been out in the country, and found a little chapel, full of _contadine,_ their lovers waiting outside the door. They looked charming in their black veils,--the straw hat hanging on the arm,--with shy, glancing eyes, and cheeks pinched rosy by the cold; for it is cold here as in New England. On foot, we have explored a great part of the environs; and till now I had no conception of their beauty. When here before, I took only the regular drives, as prescribed for all lady and gentlemen travellers. This evening we returned by a path that led to the banks of the Arno. The Duomo, with the snowy mountains, were glorious in the rosy tint and haze, just before sunset. What a difference it makes to come home to a child!--how it fills up all the gaps of life, just in the way that is most consoling, most refreshing! Formerly, I used to feel sad at that hour; the day had not been nobly spent, I had not done my duty to myself and others, and I felt so lonely! Now I never feel lonely; for, even if my little boy dies, our souls will remain eternally united. And I feel _infinite_ hope for him,--hope that he will serve God and man more loyally than I have done; and, seeing how full he is of life,--how much he can afford to throw away,--I feel the inexhaustibleness of nature, and console myself for my own incapacities. * * * * * _Florence, Oct. 14, 1849._--Weary in spirit, with the deep disappointments of the last year, I wish to dwell little on these things for the moment, but seek some consolation in the affections. My little boy is quite well now, and I often am happy in seeing how joyous and full of activity he seems. Ossoli, too, feels happier here. The future is full of difficulties for us, but, having settled our plans for the present, we shall set it aside while we may. "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof;" and if the good be not always sufficient, in our case it is; so let us say grace to our dinner of herbs. * * * * * _Florence, Nov. 7._--Dearest Mother,--Of all your endless acts and words of love, never was any so dear to me as your last letter;--so generous, so sweet, so holy! What on earth is so precious as a mother's love; and who has a mother like mine! I was thinking of you and my father, all that first day of October, wishing to write, only there was much to disturb me that day, as the police were threatening to send us away. It is only since I have had my own child that I have known how much I always failed to do what I might have done for the happiness of you both; only since I have seen so much of men and their trials, that I have learned to prize my father as he deserved; only since I have had a heart daily and hourly testifying to me its love, that I have understood, too late, what it was for you to be deprived of it. It seems to me as if I had never sympathized with you as I ought, or tried to embellish and sustain your life, as far as is possible, after such an irreparable wound. It will be sad for me to leave Italy, uncertain of return. Yet when I think of you, beloved mother; of brothers and sisters, and many friends, I wish to come. Ossoli is perfectly willing. He leaves in Rome a sister, whom he dearly loves. His aunt is dying now. He will go among strangers; but to him, as to all the young Italians, America seems the land of liberty. He hopes, too, that a new revolution will favor return, after a number of years, and that then he may find really a home in Italy. All this is dark;--we can judge only for the present moment. The decision will rest with me, and I shall wait till the last moment, as I always do, that I may have all the reasons before me. I thought, to-day, ah, if she could only be with us now! But who knows how long this interval of peace will last? I have learned to prize such, as the halcyon prelude to the storm. It is now about a fortnight, since the police gave us leave to stay, and we feel safe in our little apartment. We have no servant except the nurse, with occasional aid from the porter's wife, and now live comfortably so, tormented by no one, helping ourselves. In the evenings, we have a little fire now;--the baby sits on his stool between us. He makes me think how I sat on mine, in the chaise, between you and father. He is exceedingly fond of flowers;--he has been enchanted, this evening, by this splendid Gardenia, and these many crimson flowers that were given me at Villa Correggi, where a friend took us in his carriage. It was a luxury, this ride, as we have entirely renounced the use of a carriage for ourselves. How enchanted you would have been with that villa! It seems now as if, with the certainty of a very limited income, we could be so happy! But I suppose, if we had it, one of us would die, or the baby. Do not you die, my beloved mother;--let us together have some halcyon moments, again, with God, with nature, with sweet childhood, with the remembrance of pure trust and good intent; away from perfidy and care, and the blight of noble designs. Ossoli wishes you were here, almost as much as I. When there is anything really lovely and tranquil, he often says, "Would not '_La Madre_' like that?" He wept when he heard your letter. I never saw him weep at any other time, except when his father died, and when the French entered Rome. He has, I think, even a more holy feeling about a mother, from having lost his own, when very small. It has been a life-long want with him. He often shows me a little scar on his face, made by a jealous dog, when his mother was caressing him as an infant. He prizes that blemish much. * * * * * _Florence, December_ 1, 1849.--I do not know what to write about the baby, he changes so much,--has so many characters. He is like me in that, for his father's character is simple and uniform, though not monotonous, any more than are the flowers of spring flowers of the valley. Angelino is now in the most perfect rosy health,--a very gay, impetuous, ardent, but sweet-tempered child. He seems to me to have nothing in common with his first babyhood, with its ecstatic smiles, its exquisite sensitiveness, and a distinction in the gesture and attitudes that struck everybody. His temperament is apparently changed by taking the milk of these robust women. He is now come to quite a knowing age,--fifteen months. In the morning, as soon as dressed, he signs to come into our room; then draws our curtain with his little dimpled hand, kisses me rather violently, pats my face, laughs, crows, shows his teeth, blows like the bellows, stretches himself, and says "_bravo_." Then, having shown off all his accomplishments, he expects, as a reward, to be tied in his chair, and have his playthings. These engage him busily, but still he calls to us to sing and drum, to enliven the scene. Sometimes he summons me to kiss his hand, and laughs very much at this. Enchanting is that baby-laugh, all dimples and glitter,--so strangely arch and innocent! Then I wash and dress him. That is his great time. He makes it last as long as he can, insisting to dress and wash me the while, kicking, throwing the water about, and full of all manner of tricks, such as, I think, girls never dream of. Then comes his walk;--we have beautiful walks here for him, protected by fine trees, always warm in mid-winter. The bands are playing in the distance, and children of all ages are moving about, and sitting with their nurses. His walk and sleep give me about three hours in the middle of the day. I feel so refreshed by his young life, and Ossoli diffuses such a power and sweetness over every day, that I cannot endure to think yet of our future. Too much have we suffered already, trying to command it. I do not feel force to make any effort yet. I suppose that very soon now I must do something, and hope I shall feel able when the time comes. My constitution seems making an effort to rally, by dint of much sleep. I had slept so little, for a year and a half, and, after the birth of the child, I had such anxiety and anguish when separated from him, that I was consumed as by nightly fever. The last two months at Rome would have destroyed almost any woman. Then, when I went to him, he was so ill, and I was constantly up with him at night, carrying him about. Now, for two months, we have been tranquil. We have resolved to enjoy being together as much as we can, in this brief interval,--perhaps all we shall ever know of peace. It is very sad we have no money, we could be so quietly happy a while. I rejoice in all Ossoli did; but the results, in this our earthly state, are disastrous, especially as my strength is now so impaired. This much I hope, in life or death, to be no more separated from Angelino. Last winter, I made the most vehement efforts at least to redeem the time, hoping thus good for the future. But, of at least two volumes written at that time, no line seems of any worth. I had suffered much constraint,--much that was uncongenial, harassing, even torturing, before; but this kind of pain found me unprepared;--the position of a mother separated from her only child is too frightfully unnatural. * * * * * The Christmas holidays interest me now, through my child, as they never did for myself. I like to go out to watch the young generation who will be his contemporaries. On Monday, we went to the _Caseine_. After we had taken the drive, we sat down on a stone seat in the sunny walk, to see the people pass;--the Grand Duke and his children; the elegant Austrian officers, who will be driven out of Italy when Angelino is a man; Princess Demidoff; Harry Lorrequer; an absurd brood of fops; many lovely children; many little frisking dogs, with their bells, &c. The sun shone brightly on the Arno; a barque moved gently by; all seemed good to the baby. He laid himself back in my arms, smiling, singing to himself, and dancing his feet. I hope he will retain some trace in his mind of the perpetual exhilarating picture of Italy. It cannot but be important in its influence while yet a child, to walk in these stately gardens, full of sculpture, and hear the untiring music of the fountains. Christmas-eve we went to the Annunziata, for midnight mass. Though the service is not splendid here as in Rome, we yet enjoyed it;--sitting in one of the side chapels, at the foot of a monument, watching the rich crowds steal gently by, every eye gleaming, every gesture softened by the influence of the pealing choir, and the hundred silver lamps swinging their full light, in honor of the abused Emanuel. But far finest was it to pass through the Duomo. No one was there. Only the altars were lit up, and the priests, who were singing, could not be seen by the faint light. The vast solemnity of the interior is thus really felt. The hour was worthy of Brunelleschi. I hope he walked there so. The Duomo is more divine than St. Peter's, and worthy of genius pure and unbroken. St. Peter's is, like Rome, a mixture of sublimest heaven with corruptest earth. I adore the Duomo, though no place can now be to me like St. Peter's, where has been passed the splendidest part of my life. My feeling was always perfectly regal, on entering the piazza of St. Peter's. No spot on earth is worthier the sunlight;--on none does it fall so fondly. * * * * * You ask me, how I employ myself here. I have been much engaged in writing out my impressions, which will be of worth so far as correct. I am anxious only to do historical justice to facts and persons; but there will not, so far as I am aware, be much thought, for I believe I have scarce expressed what lies deepest in my mind. I take no pains, but let the good genius guide my pen. I did long to lead a simple, natural life, _at home_, learning of my child, and writing only when imperatively urged by the need of utterance; but when we were forced to give up the hope of subsisting on a narrow independence, without tie to the public, we gave up the peculiar beauty of our lives, and I strive no more. I only hope to make good terms with the publishers. Then, I have been occupied somewhat in reading Louis Blanc's Ten Years, Lamartine's Girondists, and other books of that class, which throw light on recent transactions. I go into society, too, somewhat, and see several delightful persons, in an intimate way. The Americans meet twice a week, at the house of Messrs. Mozier and Chapman, and I am often present, on account of the friendly interest of those resident here. With our friends, the Greenoughs, I have twice gone to the opera. Then I see the Brownings often, and love and admire them both, more and more, as I know them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour I pass with him, and is a most cordial, true, and noble man. One of my most highly prized Italian friends, also, Marchioness Arconati Visconti, of Milan, is passing the winter here, and I see her almost every day. * * * * * My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except my mother or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does. To some, I have been obliged to make myself known; others have loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life. But Ossoli loves me from simple affinity;--he loves to be with me, and to serve and soothe me. Life will probably be a severe struggle, but I hope I shall be able to live through all that is before us, and not neglect my child or his father. He has suffered enough since we met;--it has ploughed furrows in his life. He has done all he could, and cannot blame himself. Our outward destiny looks dark, but we must brave it as we can. I trust we shall always feel mutual tenderness, and Ossoli has a simple, childlike piety, that will make it easier for him. MARGARET AND HER PEERS. Pure and peaceful as was the joy of Margaret's Florence winter, it was ensured and perfected by the fidelity of friends, who hedged around with honor the garden of her home. She had been called to pass through a most trying ordeal, and the verdict of her peers was heightened esteem and love. With what dignified gratitude she accepted this well-earned proof of confidence, will appear from the following extracts. TO MRS. E.S. Thus far, my friends have received news that must have been an unpleasant surprise to them, in a way that, _á moi_, does them great honor. None have shown littleness or displeasure, at being denied my confidence while they were giving their own. Many have expressed the warmest sympathy, and only one has shown a disposition to transgress the limit I myself had marked, and to ask questions. With her, I think, this was because she was annoyed by what people said, and wished to be able to answer them. I replied to her, that I had communicated already all I intended, and should not go into detail;--that when unkind things were said about me, she should let them pass. Will you, dear E----, do the same? I am sure your affection for me will prompt you to add, that you feel confident whatever I have done has been in a good spirit, and not contrary to _my_ ideas of right. For the rest, you will not admit for me,--as I do not for myself,--the rights of the social inquisition of the United States to know all the details of my affairs. If my mother is content; if Ossoli and I are content; if our child, when grown up, shall be content; that is enough. You and I know enough of the United States to be sure that many persons there will blame whatever is peculiar. The lower-minded persons, everywhere, are sure to think that whatever is mysterious must be bad. But I think there will remain for me a sufficient number of friends to keep my heart warm, and to help me earn my bread;--that is all that is of any consequence. Ossoli seems to me more lovely and good every day; our darling child is well now, and every day more gay and playful. For his sake I shall have courage; and hope some good angel will show us the way out of our external difficulties. TO W.W.S. It was like you to receive with such kindness the news of my marriage. A less generous person would have been displeased, that, when we had been drawn so together,--when we had talked so freely, and you had shown towards me such sweet friendship,--I had not told you. Often did I long to do so, but I had, for reasons that seemed important, made a law to myself to keep this secret as rigidly as possible, up to a certain moment. That moment came. Its decisions were not such as I had hoped; but it left me, at least, without that painful burden, which I trust never to bear again. Nature keeps so many secrets, that I had supposed the moral writers exaggerated the dangers and plagues of keeping them; but they cannot exaggerate. All that can be said about mine is, that I at least acted out, with, to me, tragic thoroughness, "The wonder, a woman keeps a secret." As to my not telling _you_, I can merely say, that I was keeping the information from my family and dearest friends at home; and, had you remained near me a very little later, you would have been the very first person to whom I should have spoken, as you would have been the first, on this side of the water, to whom I should have written, had I known where to address you. Yet I hardly hoped for your sympathy, dear W----. I am very glad if I have it. May brotherly love ever be returned unto you in like measure. Ossoli desires his love and respect to be testified to you both. TO THE MARCHIONESS VISCONTI ARCONATI. Reading a book called "The Last Days of the Republic in Rome," I see that my letter, giving my impressions of that period, may well have seemed to you strangely partial. If we can meet as once we did, and compare notes in the same spirit of candor, while making mutual allowance for our different points of view, your testimony and opinions would be invaluable to me. But will you have patience with my democracy,--my revolutionary spirit? Believe that in thought I am more radical than ever. The heart of Margaret you know,--it is always the same. Mazzini is immortally dear to me--a thousand times deafer for all the trial I saw made of him in Rome;--dearer for all he suffered. Many of his brave friends perished there. We who, less worthy, survive, would fain make up for the loss, by our increased devotion to him, the purest, the most disinterested of patriots, the most affectionate of brothers. You will not love me less that I am true to him. Then, again, how will it affect you to know that I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man,--younger than myself; a person of no intellectual culture, and in whom, in short, you will see no reason for my choosing; yet more, that this union is of long standing; that we have with us our child, of a year old, and that it is only lately I acquainted my family with the fact? If you decide to meet with me as before, and wish to say something about the matter to your friends, it will be true to declare that there have been pecuniary reasons for this concealment. But _to you_, in confidence, I add, this is only half the truth; and I cannot explain, or satisfy my dear friend further. I should wish to meet her independent of all relations, but, as we live in the midst of "society," she would have to inquire for me now as Margaret Ossoli. That being done, I should like to say nothing more on the subject. However you may feel about all this, dear Madame Arconati, you will always be the same in my eyes. I earnestly wish you may not feel estranged; but, if you do, I would prefer that you should act upon it. Let us meet as friends, or not at all. In all events, I remain ever yours, MARGARET. TO THE MARCHIONESS VISCONTI ARCONATI. My loved friend,--I read your letter with greatest content. I did not know but that there might seem something offensively strange in the circumstances I mentioned to you. Goethe says, "There is nothing men pardon so little as singular conduct, for which no reason is given;" and, remembering this, I have been a little surprised at the even increased warmth of interest with which the little American society of Florence has received me, with the unexpected accessories of husband and child,--asking no questions, and seemingly satisfied to find me thus accompanied. With you, indeed, I thought it would be so, because you are above the world; only, as you have always walked in the beaten path, though with noble port, and feet undefiled, I thought you might not like your friends to be running about in these blind alleys. It glads my heart, indeed, that you do not care for this, and that we may meet in love. You speak of our children. Ah! dear friend, I do, indeed, feel we shall have deep sympathy there. I do not believe mine will be a brilliant child, and, indeed, I see nothing peculiar about him. Yet he is to me a source of ineffable joys,--far purer, deeper, than anything I ever felt before,--like what Nature had sometimes given, but more intimate, more sweet. He loves me very much; his little heart clings to mine. I trust, if he lives, to sow there no seeds which are not good, to be always growing better for his sake. Ossoli, too, will be a good father. He has very little of what is called intellectual development, but unspoiled instincts, affections pure and constant, and a quiet sense of duty, which, to me,--who have seen much of the great faults in characters of enthusiasm and genius,--seems of highest value. When you write by post, please direct "Marchesa Ossoli," as all the letters come to that address. I did not explain myself on that point. The fact is, it looks to me silly for a radical like me to be carrying a title; and yet, while Ossoli is in his native land, it seems disjoining myself from him, not to bear it. It is a sort of thing that does not naturally belong to me, and, unsustained by fortune, is but a _souvenir_ even for Ossoli. Yet it has appeared to me, that for him to drop an inherited title would be, in some sort, to acquiesce in his brothers' disclaiming him, and to abandon a right he may passively wish to maintain for his child. How does it seem to you? I am not very clear about it. If Ossoli should drop the title, it would be a suitable moment to do so on becoming an inhabitant of Republican America. TO MRS. C.T. What you say of the meddling curiosity of people repels me, it is so different here. When I made my appearance with a husband and a child of a year old, nobody did the least act to annoy me. All were most cordial; none asked or implied questions. Yet there were not a few who might justly have complained, that, when they were confiding to me all their affairs, and doing much to serve me, I had observed absolute silence to them. Others might, for more than one reason, be displeased at the choice I made. All have acted in the kindliest and most refined manner. An Italian lady, with whom I was intimate,--who might be qualified in the Court Journal, as one of the highest rank, sustained by the most scrupulous decorum,--when I wrote, "Dear friend, I am married; I have a child. There are particulars, as to my reasons for keeping this secret, I do not wish to tell. This is rather an odd affair; will it make any difference in our relations?"--answered, "What difference can it make, except that I shall love you more, now that we can sympathize as mothers?" Her first visit here was to me: she adopted at once Ossoli and the child to her love. ---- wrote me that ---- was a little hurt, at first, that I did not tell him, even in the trying days of Rome, but left him to hear it, as he unluckily did, at the _table d'hôte_ in Venice; but his second and prevailing thought was regret that he had not known it, so as to soothe and aid me,--to visit Ossoli at his post,--to go to the child in the country. Wholly in that spirit was the fine letter he wrote me, one of my treasures. The little American society have been most cordial and attentive; one lady, who has been most intimate with me, dropped a tear over the difficulties before me, but she said, "Since you have seen fit to take the step, all your friends have to do, now, is to make it as easy for you as they can." TO MRS. E.S. I am glad to have people favorably impressed, because I feel lazy and weak, unequal to the trouble of friction, or the pain of conquest. Still, I feel a good deal of contempt for those so easily disconcerted or reässured. I was not a child; I had lived in the midst of that New England society, in a way that entitled me to esteem, and a favorable interpretation, where there was doubt about my motives or actions. I pity those who are inclined to think ill, when they might as well have inclined the other way. However, let them go; there are many in the world who stand the test, enough to keep us from shivering to death. I am, on the whole, fortunate in friends whom I can truly esteem, and in whom I know the kernel and substance of their being too well to be misled by seemings. TO MRS. C.T. I had a letter from my mother, last summer, speaking of the fact, that she had never been present at the marriage of one of her children. A pang of remorse came as I read it, and I thought, if Angelino dies,[A] I will not give her the pain of knowing that I have kept this secret from her;--she shall hear of this connection, as if it were something new. When I found he would live, I wrote to her and others. It half killed me to write those few letters, and yet, I know, many are wondering that I did not write more, and more particularly. My mother received my communication in the highest spirit. She said, she was sure a first object with me had been, now and always, to save her pain. She blessed us. She rejoiced that she should not die feeling there was no one left to love me with the devotion she thought I needed. She expressed no regret at our poverty, but offered her feeble means. Her letter was a noble crown to her life of disinterested, purifying love. [Footnote A: This was when Margaret found Nino so ill at Rieti.] FLORENCE. The following notes respecting Margaret's residence in Florence were furnished to the editors by Mr. W.H. Hurlbut. I passed about six weeks in the city of Florence, during the months of March and April, 1850. During the whole of that time Madame Ossoli was residing in a house at the corner of the Via della Misericordia and the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. This house is one of those large, well built modern houses that show strangely in the streets of the stately Tuscan city. But if her rooms were less characteristically Italian, they were the more comfortable, and, though small, had a quiet, home-like air. Her windows opened upon a fine view of the beautiful Piazza; for such was their position, that while the card-board façade of the church of Sta. Maria Novella could only be seen at an angle, the exquisite Campanile rose fair and full against the sky. She enjoyed this most graceful tower very much, and, I think, preferred it even to Giotto's noble work. Its quiet religious grace was grateful to her spirit, which seemed to be yearning for peace from the cares that had so vexed and heated the world about her for a year past. I saw her frequently at these rooms, where, surrounded by her books and papers, she used to devote her mornings to her literary labors. Once or twice I called in the morning, and found her quite immersed in manuscripts and journals. Her evenings were passed usually in the society of her friends, at her own rooms, or at theirs. With the pleasant circle of Americans, then living in Florence, she was on the best terms, and though she seemed always to bring with her her own most intimate society, and never to be quite free from the company of busy thoughts, and the cares to which her life had introduced her, she was always cheerful, and her remarkable powers of conversation subserved on all occasions the kindliest, purposes of good-will in social intercourse. The friends with whom she seemed to be on the terms of most sympathy, were an Italian lady, the Marchesa Arconati Visconti,[A]--the exquisite sweetness of whose voice interpreted, even to those who knew her only as a transient acquaintance, the harmony of her nature,--and some English residents in Florence, among whom I need only name Mr. and Mrs. Browning, to satisfy the most anxious friends of Madame Ossoli that the last months of her Italian life were cheered by all the light that communion with gifted and noble natures could afford. The Marchesa Arconati used to persuade Madame Ossoli to occasional excursions with her into the environs of Florence, and she passed some days of the beautiful spring weather at the villa of that lady. Her delight in nature seemed to be a source of great comfort and strength to her. I shall not easily forget the account she gave me, on the evening of one delicious Sunday in April, of a walk which she had taken with her husband in the afternoon of that day, to the hill of San Miniato. The amethystine beauty of the Apennines,--the cypress trees that sentinel the way up to the ancient and deserted church,--the church itself, standing high and lonely on its hill, begirt with the vine-clad, crumbling walls of Michel Angelo,--the repose of the dome-crowned city in the vale below,--seemed to have wrought their impression with peculiar force upon her mind that afternoon. On their way home, they had entered the conventual church that stands half way up the hill, just as the vesper service was beginning, and she spoke of the simple spirit of devotion that filled the place, and of the gentle wonder with which, to use her own words, the "peasant women turned their glances, the soft dark glances of the Tuscan peasant's eyes," upon the strangers, with a singular enthusiasm. She was in the habit of taking such walks with her husband, and she never returned from one of them, I believe, without some new impression of beauty and of lasting truth. While her judgment, intense in its sincerity, tested, like an _aqua regia_, the value of all facts that came within her notice, her sympathies seemed, by an instinctive and unerring action, to transmute all her experiences instantly into permanent treasures. The economy of the house in which she lived afforded me occasions for observing the decisive power, both of control and of consolation, which she could exert over others. Her maid,--an impetuous girl of Rieti, a town which rivals Tivoli as a hot-bed of homicide,--was constantly involved in disputes with a young Jewess, who occupied the floor above Madame Ossoli. On one occasion, this Jewess offered the maid a deliberate and unprovoked insult. The girl of Rieti, snatching up a knife, ran up stairs to revenge herself after her national fashion. The porter's little daughter followed her and, running into Madame Ossoli's rooms, besought her interference. Madame Ossoli reached the apartment of the Jewess, just in time to interpose between that beetle-browed lady and her infuriated assailant. Those who know the insane license of spirit which distinguishes the Roman mountaineers, will understand that this was a position of no slight hazard. The Jewess aggravated the danger of the offence by the obstinate maliciousness of her aspect and words. Such, however, was Madame Ossoli's entire self-possession and forbearance, that she was able to hold her ground, and to remonstrate with this difficult pair of antagonists so effectually, as to bring the maid to penitent tears, and the Jewess to a confession of her injustice, and a promise of future good behavior. The porter of the house, who lived in a dark cavernous hole on the first floor, was slowly dying of a consumption, the sufferings of which were imbittered by the chill dampness of his abode. His hollow voice and hacking cough, however, could not veil the grateful accent with which he uttered any allusion to Madame Ossoli. He was so close a prisoner to his narrow, windowless chamber, that when I inquired for Madame Ossoli he was often obliged to call his little daughter, before he could tell me whether Madame was at home, or not; and he always tempered the official uniformity of the question with some word of tenderness. Indeed, he rarely pronounced her name; sufficiently indicating to the child whom it was that I was seeking, by the affectionate epithet he used, "_Lita! e la cara Signora in casa_?" The composure and force of Madame Ossoli's character would, indeed, have given her a strong influence for good over any person with whom she was brought into contact; but this influence must have been even extraordinary over the impulsive and ill-disciplined children of passion and of sorrow, among whom she was thrown in Italy. Her husband related to me once, with a most reverent enthusiasm, some stories of the good she had done in Rieti, during her residence there. The Spanish troops were quartered in that town, and the dissipated habits of the officers, as well as the excesses of the soldiery, kept the place in a constant irritation. Though overwhelmed with cares and anxieties, Madame Ossoli found time and collectedness of mind enough to interest herself in the distresses of the towns-people, and to pour the soothing oil of a wise sympathy upon their wounded and indignant feelings. On one occasion, as the Marchese told me, she undoubtedly saved the lives of a family in Rieti, by inducing them to pass over in silence an insult offered to one of them by an intoxicated Spanish soldier,--and, on another, she interfered between two brothers, maddened by passion, and threatening to stain the family hearth with the guilt of fratricide.[B] Such incidents, and the calm tenor of Madame Ossoli's confident hopes.--the assured faith and unshaken bravery, with which she met and turned aside the complicated troubles, rising sometimes into absolute perils, of their last year in Italy,--seemed to have inspired her husband with a feeling of respect for her, amounting to reverence. This feeling, modifying the manifest tenderness with which he hung upon her every word and look, and sought to anticipate her simplest wishes, was luminously visible in the air and manner of his affectionate devotion to her. The frank and simple recognition of his wife's singular nobleness, which he always displayed, was the best evidence that his own nature was of a fine and noble strain. And those who knew him best, are, I believe, unanimous in testifying that his character did in no respect belie the evidence borne by his manly and truthful countenance, to its warmth and its sincerity. He seemed quite absorbed in his wife and child. I cannot remember ever to have found Madame Ossoli alone, on those evenings when she remained at home. Her husband was always with her. The picture of their room rises clearly on my memory. A small square room, sparingly, yet sufficiently furnished, with polished floor and frescoed ceiling,--and, drawn up closely before the cheerful fire, an oval table, on which stood a monkish lamp of brass, with depending chains that support quaint classic cups for the olive oil. There, seated beside his wife, I was sure to find the Marchese, reading from some patriotic book, and dressed in the dark brown, red-corded coat of the Guardia Civica, which it was his melancholy pleasure to wear at home. So long as the conversation could be carried on in Italian, he used to remain, though he rarely joined in it to any considerable degree; but if a number of English and American visitors came in, he used to take his leave and go to the Café d'Italia, being very unwilling, as Madame Ossoli told me, to impose any seeming restraint, by his presence, upon her friends, with whom he was unable to converse. For the same reason, he rarely remained with her at the houses of her English or American friends, though he always accompanied her thither, and returned to escort her home. I conversed with him so little that I can hardly venture to make any remarks on the impression which I received from his conversation, with regard to the character of his mind. Notwithstanding his general reserve and curtness of speech, on two or three occasions he showed himself to possess quite a quick and vivid fancy, and even a certain share of humor. I have heard him tell stories remarkably well. One tale, especially, which related to a dream he had in early life, about a treasure concealed in his father's house, which was thrice repeated, and made so strong an impression on his mind as to induce him to batter a certain panel in the library almost to pieces, in vain, but which received something like a confirmation from the fact, that a Roman attorney, who rented that and other rooms from the family, after his father's death, grew suddenly and unaccountably rich,--I remember as being told with great felicity and vivacity of expression. His recollections of the trouble and the dangers through which he had passed with his wife seemed to be overpoweringly painful. On one occasion, he began to tell me a story of their stay in the mountains: He had gone out to walk, and had unconsciously crossed the Neapolitan frontier. Suddenly meeting with a party of the Neapolitan _gendarmerie_, he was called to account for his trespass, and being unable to produce any papers testifying to his loyalty, or the legality of his existence, he was carried off, despite his protestations, and lodged for the night in a miserable guard-house, whence he-was taken, next morning, to the head-quarters of the officer commanding in the neighborhood. Here, matters might have gone badly with him, but for the accident that he had upon his person a business letter directed to himself as the Marchese Ossoli. A certain abbé, the regimental chaplain, having once spent some time in Rome, recognized the name as that of an officer in the Pope's Guardia Nobile,[C] whereupon, the Neapolitan officers not only ordered him to be released, but sent him back, with many apologies, in a carriage, and under an armed escort, to the Roman territory. When he reached this part of his story, and came to his meeting with Madame Ossoli, the remembrance of her terrible distress during the period of his detention so overcame him, that he was quite unable to go on. Towards their child he manifested an overflowing tenderness, and most affectionate care. Notwithstanding the intense contempt and hatred which Signore Ossoli, in common with all the Italian liberals, cherished towards the ecclesiastical body, he seemed to be a very devout Catholic. He used to attend regularly the vesper service, in some of the older and quieter churches of Florence; and, though I presume Madame Ossoli never accepted in any degree the Roman Catholic forms of faith, she frequently accompanied him on these occasions. And I know that she enjoyed the devotional influences of the church ritual, as performed in the cathedral, and at Santa Croce, especially during the Easter-week. Though condemned by her somewhat uncertain position at Florence,[D] as well as by the state of things in Tuscany at that time, to a comparative inaction, Madame Ossoli never seemed to lose in the least the warmth of her interest in the affairs of Italy, nor did she bate one jot of heart or hope for the future of that country. She was much depressed, however, I think, by the apparent apathy and prostration of the Liberals in Tuscany; and the presence of the Austrian troops in Florence was as painful and annoying to her, as it could have been to any Florentine patriot. When it was understood that Prince Lichtenstein had requested the Grand Duke to order a general illumination in honor of the anniversary of the battle of Novara, Madame Ossoli, I recollect, was more moved, than I remember on any other occasion to have seen her. And she used to speak very regretfully of the change which had come over the spirit of Florence, since her former residence there. Then all was gayety and hope. Bodies of artisans, gathering recruits as they passed along, used to form themselves into choral bands, as they returned from their work at the close of the day, and filled the air with the chants of liberty. Now, all was a sombre and desolate silence. Her own various cares so occupied Madame Ossoli that she seemed to be very much withdrawn from the world of art. During the whole time of my stay in Florence, I do not think she once visited either of the Grand Ducal Galleries, and the only studio in which she seemed to feel any very strong interest, was that of Mademoiselle Favand, a lady whose independence of character, self-reliance, and courageous genius, could hardly have failed to attract her congenial sympathies. But among all my remembrances of Madame Ossoli, there are none more beautiful or more enduring than those which recall to me another person, a young stranger, alone and in feeble health, who found, in her society, her sympathy, and her counsels, a constant atmosphere of comfort and of peace. Every morning, wild-flowers, freshly gathered, were laid upon her table by the grateful hands of this young man; every evening, beside her seat in her little room, his mild, pure face was to be seen, bright with a quiet happiness, that must have bound his heart by no weak ties to her with whose fate his own was so closely to be linked. And the recollection of such benign and holy influences breathed upon the human hearts of those who came within her sphere, will not, I trust, be valueless to those friends, in whose love her memory is enshrined with more immortal honors than the world can give or take away. [Footnote A: Just before I left Florence, Madame Ossoli showed me a small marble figure of a child, playing among flowers or vine leaves, which, she said, was a portrait of the child of Madame Arconati, presented to her by that lady. I mention this circumstance, because I have understood that a figure answering this description was recovered from the wreck of the Elizabeth.] [Footnote B: The circumstances of this story, perhaps, deserve to be recorded. The brothers were two young men, the sons and the chief supports of Madame Ossoli's landlord at Rieti. They were both married,--the younger one to a beautiful girl, who had brought him no dowry, and who, in the opinion of her husband's family, had not shown a proper disposition to bear her share of the domestic burdens and duties. The bickerings and disputes which resulted from this state of affairs, on one unlucky day, took the form of an open and violent quarrel. The younger son, who was absent from home when the conflict began, returned to find it at its height, and was received by his wife with passionate tears, and by his relations with sharp recriminations. His brother, especially, took it upon himself to upbraid him, in the name of all his family, for bringing into their home-circle such a firebrand of discord. Charges and counter charges followed in rapid succession, and hasty words soon led to blows. From blows the appeal to the knife was swiftly made, and when Madame Ossoli, attracted by the unusual clamor, entered upon the scene of action, she found that blood had been already drawn, and that the younger brother was only restrained from following up the first assault by the united force of all the females, who hung about him, while the older brother, grasping a heavy billet of wood, and pale with rage, stood awaiting his antagonist. Passing through the group of weeping and terrified women, Madame Ossoli made her way up to the younger brother and, laying her hand upon his shoulder, asked him to put down his weapon and listen to her. It was in vain that he attempted to ignore her presence. Before the spell of her calm, firm, well-known voice, his fury melted away. She spoke to him again, and besought him to show himself a man, and to master his foolish and wicked rage. With a sudden impulse, he flung his knife upon the ground, turned to Madame Ossoli, clasped and kissed her hand, and then running towards his brother, the two met in a fraternal embrace, which brought the threatened tragedy to a joyful termination.] [Footnote C: It will be understood, that this officer was the Marchese's older brother, who still adheres to the Papal cause.] [Footnote D: She believed herself to be, and I suppose really was, under the surveillance of the police during her residence in Florence.] HOMEWARD. BY W.H. CHANNING * * * * * Last, having thus revealed all I could love And having received all love bestowed on it, I would die: so preserving through my course God full on me, as I was full on men: And He would grant my prayer--"I have gone through All loveliness of life; make more for me, If not for men,--or take me to Thyself, Eternal, Infinite Love!" BROWNING. Till another open for me In God's Eden-land unknown, With an angel at the doorway, White with gazing at His Throne; And a saint's voice in the palm-trees, singing,--"ALL IS LOST, and _won_." ELIZABETH BARRETT. La ne venimmo: e lo scaglión primaio Bianco marmo éra si pulito e terso, Ch'io mi specchiava in esso, qual io paio. Era 'l secondo tinto, píù che pérso, D'una petrina ruvida ed arsiccia, Crepata per lo lungo e per traverso. Lo terzo, che di sopra s'ammassiccia, Pôrfido mi parea si fiammegiante, Come sangue che fuor di vena spiccia. Sopra questa teneva ambo le piante L' angel di Dio, sedendo in su la soglia, Che mi sembiava pietra di diamante. Per li tre gradi su di buona voglia Mi trasse 'l daca mio, dicendo, chiodi Umilmente che 'l serráme scioglia. DANTE. Che luce è questa, e qual nuova beltate? Dicean tra lor; perch' abito si adorno Dal mondo errante a quest 'alto soggiorno Non sail mai in tutta questa etàte. Ella contenta aver cangiato albergo, Si paragona pur coi più perfetti. PETRARCA. IX. HOMEWARD SPRING-TIME. Spring, bright prophet of God's eternal youth, herald forever eloquent of heaven's undying joy, has once more wrought its miracle of resurrection on the vineyards and olive-groves of Tuscany, and touched with gently-wakening fingers the myrtle and the orange in the gardens of Florence. The Apennines have put aside their snowy winding-sheet, and their untroubled faces salute with rosy gleams of promise the new day, while flowers smile upward to the serene sky amid the grass and grain fields, and fruit is swelling beneath the blossoms along the plains of Arno. "The Italian spring," writes Margaret, "is as good as Paradise. Days come of glorious sunshine and gently-flowing airs, that expand the heart and uplift the whole nature. The birds are twittering their first notes of love; the ground is enamelled with anemones, cowslips, and crocuses; every old wall and ruin puts on its festoon and garland; and the heavens stoop daily nearer, till the earth is folded in an embrace of light, and her every pulse beats music." "This world is indeed a sad place, despite its sunshine, birds, and crocuses. But I never felt as happy as now, when I always find the glad eyes of my little boy to welcome me. I feel the tie between him and me so real and deep-rooted, that even death shall not part us. So sweet is this unimpassioned love, it knows no dark reactions, it does not idealize, and cannot be daunted by the faults of its object. Nothing but a child can take the worst bitterness out of life, and break the spell of loneliness. I shall not be alone in other worlds, whenever Eternity may call me." And now her face is turned homeward. "I am homesick," she had written years before, "but where is that HOME?" OMENS. "My heart is very tired,--my strength is low,-- My hands are full of blossoms plucked before, Held dead within them till myself shall die." ELIZABETH BARRETT. Many motives drew Margaret to her native land: heart-weariness at the reaction in Europe; desire of publishing to best advantage the book whereby she hoped at once to do justice to great principles and brave men, and to earn bread for her dear ones and herself; and, above all, yearning to be again among her family and earliest associates. "I go back," she writes, "prepared for difficulties; but it will be a consolation to be with my mother, brothers, sister, and old friends, and I find it imperatively necessary to be in the United States, for a while at least, to make such arrangements with the printers as may free me from immediate care. I did think, at one time, of coming alone with Angelino, and then writing for Ossoli to come later, or returning to Italy; knowing that it will be painful for him to go, and that there he must have many lonely hours. But he is separated from his old employments and natural companions, while no career is open for him at present. Then, I would not take his child away for several months; for his heart is fixed upon him as fervently as mine. And, again, it would not only be very strange and sad to be so long without his love and care, but I should be continually solicitous about his welfare. Ossoli, indeed, cannot but feel solitary at first, and I am much more anxious about his happiness than my own. Still, he will have our boy, and the love of my family, especially of my mother, to cheer him, and quiet communings with nature give him pleasure so simple and profound, that I hope he will make a new life for himself, in our unknown country, till changes favor our return to his own. I trust, that we shall find the means to come together, and to remain together." Considerations of economy determined them, spite of many misgivings, to take passage in a merchantman from Leghorn. "I am suffering," she writes, "as never before, from the horrors of indecision. Happy the fowls of the air, who do not have to think so much about their arrangements! The barque _Elizabeth_ will take us, and is said to be an uncommonly good vessel, nearly new, and well kept. We may be two months at sea, but to go by way of France would more than double the expense. Yet, now that I am on the point of deciding to come in her, people daily dissuade me, saying that I have no conception of what a voyage of sixty or seventy days will be in point of fatigue and suffering; that the insecurity, compared with packet-ships or steamers, is great; that the cabin, being on deck, will be terribly exposed, in case of a gale, &c., &c. I am well aware of the proneness of volunteer counsellors to frighten and excite one, and have generally disregarded them. But this time I feel a trembling solicitude on account of my child, and am doubtful, harassed, almost ill." And again, under date of April 21, she says: "I had intended, if I went by way of France, to take the packet-ship _'Argo_,' from Havre; and I had requested Mrs. ---- to procure and forward to me some of my effects left at Paris, in charge of Miss F----, when, taking up _Galignani_, my eye fell on these words: 'Died, 4th of April, Miss F----; 'and, turning the page, I read, 'The wreck of the _Argo_,'--a somewhat singular combination! There were notices, also, of the loss of the fine English steamer _Adelaide_, and of the American packet _John Skiddy._ Safety is not to be secured, then, by the wisest foresight. I shall embark more composedly in our merchant-ship, praying fervently, indeed, that it may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or, if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief." Their state-rooms were taken, their trunks packed, their preparations finished, they were just leaving Florence, when letters came, which, had they reached her a week earlier, would probably have induced them to remain in Italy. But Margaret had already by letter appointed a rendezvous for the scattered members of her family in July; and she would not break her engagements with the commander of the barque. It was destined that they were to sail,--to sail in the _Elizabeth_, to sail then. And, even in the hour of parting, clouds, whose tops were golden in the sunshine, whose base was gloomy on the waters, beckoned them onward. "Beware of the sea," had been a singular prophecy, given to Ossoli when a boy, by a fortune-teller, and this was the first ship he had ever set his foot on. More than ordinary apprehensions of risk, too, hovered before Margaret. "I am absurdly fearful," she writes, "and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling. I am become indeed a miserable coward, for the sake of Angelino. I fear heat and cold, fear the voyage, fear biting poverty. I hope I shall not be forced to be as brave for him, as I have been for myself, and that, if I succeed to rear him, he will be neither a weak nor a bad man. But I love him too much! In case of mishap, however, I shall perish with my husband and my child, and we may be transferred to some happier state." And again: "I feel perfectly willing to stay my threescore years and ten, if it be thought I need so much tuition from this planet; but it seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close. It may be terribly trying, but it will not be so very long, now. God will transplant the root, if he wills to rear it into fruit-bearing." And, finally: "I have a vague expectation of some crisis,--I know not what. But it has long seemed, that, in the year 1850, I should stand on a plateau in the ascent of life, where I should be allowed to pause for a while, and take more clear and commanding views than ever before. Yet my life proceeds as regularly as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept the pages as they turn." * * * * * * * These were her parting words:-- "_Florence, May 14, 1850._--I will believe, I shall be welcome with my treasures,--my husband and child. For me, I long so much to see you! Should anything hinder our meeting upon earth, think of your daughter, as one who always wished, at least, to do her duty, and who always cherished you, according as her mind opened to discover excellence. "Give dear love, too, to my brothers; and first to my eldest, faithful friend! Eugene; a sister's love to Ellen; love to my kind and good aunts, and to my dear cousin. E.,--God bless them! "I hope we shall be able to pass some time together yet, in this world. But, if God decrees otherwise,--here and HEREAFTER,--my dearest mother, "Your loving child, MARGARET." THE VOYAGE.[A] The seventeenth of May, the day of sailing, came, and the _Elizabeth_ lay waiting for her company. Yet, even then, dark presentiments so overshadowed Margaret, that she passed one anxious hour more in hesitation, before she could resolve to go on board. But Captain Hasty was so fine a model of the New England seaman, strong-minded, prompt, calm, decided, courteous; Mrs. Hasty was so refined, gentle, and hospitable; both had already formed so warm an attachment for the little family, in their few interviews at Florence and Leghorn; Celeste Paolini, a young Italian girl, who had engaged to render kindly services to Angelino, was so lady-like and pleasing; their only other fellow-passenger, Mr. Horace Sumner, of Boston, was so obliging and agreeable a friend; and the good ship herself looked so trim, substantial, and cheery, that it seemed weak and wrong to turn back. They embarked; and, for the first few days, all went prosperously, till fear was forgotten. Soft breezes sweep them tranquilly over the smooth bosom of the Mediterranean; Angelino sits among his heaps of toys, or listens to the seraphine, or leans his head with fondling hands upon the white goat, who is now to be his foster-parent, or in the captain's arms moves to and fro, gazing curiously at spars and rigging, or watches with delight the swelling canvass; while, under the constant stars, above the unresting sea, Margaret and Ossoli pace the deck of their small ocean-home, and think of storms left behind,--perhaps of coming tempests. But now Captain Hasty fell ill with fever, could hardly drag himself from his state-room to give necessary orders, and lay upon the bed or sofa, in fast-increased distress, though glad to bid Nino good-day, to kiss his cheek, and pat his hand. Still, the strong man grew weaker, till he could no longer draw from beneath the pillow his daily friend, the Bible, though his mind was yet clear to follow his wife's voice, as she read aloud the morning and evening chapter. But alas for the brave, stout seaman! alas for the young wife, on almost her first voyage! alas for crew! alas for company! alas for the friends of Margaret! The fever proved to be confluent small-pox, in the most malignant form. The good commander had received his release from earthly duty. The _Elizabeth_ must lose her guardian. With calm con-[Transcriber's note: A word appears to be missing here.] authorities refused permission for any one to land, and directed that the burial should be made at sea. As the news spread through the port, the ships dropped their flags half-mast, and at sunset, towed by the boat of a neighboring frigate, the crew of the _Elizabeth_ bore the body of their late chief, wrapped in the flag of his nation, to its rest in deep water. Golden twilight flooded the western sky, and shadows of high-piled clouds lay purple on the broad Atlantic. In that calm, summer sunset funeral, what eye foresaw the morning of horror, of which it was the sad forerunner? At Gibraltar, they were detained a week by adverse winds, but, on the 9th of June, set sail again. The second day after, Angelino sickened with the dreadful malady, and soon became so ill, that his life was despaired of. His eyes were closed, his head and face swollen out of shape, his body covered with eruption. Though inexperienced in the disease, the parents wisely treated their boy with cooling drinks, and wet applications to the skin; under their incessant care, the fever abated, and, to their unspeakable joy, he rapidly recovered. Sobered and saddened, they could again hope, and enjoy the beauty of the calm sky and sea. Once more Nino laughs, as he splashes in his morning bath, and playfully prolongs the meal, which the careful father has prepared with his own hand, or, if he has been angered, rests his head upon his mother's breast, while his palm is pressed against her cheek, as, bending down, she sings to him; once more, he sits among his toys, or fondles and plays with the white-haired goat, or walks up and down in the arms of the steward, who has a boy of just his age, at home, now waiting to embrace him; or among the sailors, with whom he is a universal favorite, prattles in baby dialect as he tries to imitate their cry, to work the pumps, and pull the ropes. Ossoli and Sumner, meanwhile, exchange alternate lessons in Italian and English. And Margaret, among her papers, gives the last touches to her book on Italy, or with words of hope and love comforts like a mother the heart-broken widow. Slowly, yet peacefully, pass the long summer days, the mellow moonlit nights; slowly, and with even flight, the good Elizabeth, under gentle airs from the tropics, bears them safely onward. Four thousand miles of ocean lie behind; they are nearly home. THE WRECK. "There are blind ways provided, the foredone Heart-weary player in this pageant world Drops out by, letting the main masque defile By the conspicuous portal:--I am through, Just through." BROWNING. On Thursday, July 18th, at noon, the Elizabeth was off the Jersey coast, somewhere between Cape May and Barnegat; and, as the weather was thick, with a fresh breeze blowing from the east of south, the officer in command, desirous to secure a good offing, stood east-north-east. His purpose was, when daylight showed the highlands of Neversink, to take a pilot, and run before the wind past Sandy Hook. So confident, indeed, was he of safety, that he promised his passengers to land them early in the morning at New York. With this hope, their trunks were packed, the preparations made to greet their friends, the last good-night was spoken, and with grateful hearts Margaret and Ossoli put Nino to rest, for the last time, as they thought, on ship-board,--for the last time, as it was to be, on earth! By nine o'clock, the breeze rose to a gale, which every hour increased in violence, till at midnight it became a hurricane. Yet, as the Elizabeth was new and strong, and as the commander, trusting to an occasional cast of the lead, assured them that they were not nearing the Jersey coast,--which alone he dreaded,--the passengers remained in their state-rooms, and caught such uneasy sleep as the howling storm and tossing ship permitted. Utterly unconscious, they were, even then, amidst perils, whence only by promptest energy was it possible to escape. Though under close-reefed sails, their vessel was making way far more swiftly than any one on board had dreamed of; and for hours, with the combined force of currents and the tempest, had been driving headlong towards the sand-bars of Long Island. About four o'clock, on Friday morning, July 19th, she struck,--first draggingly, then hard and harder,--on Fire Island beach. The main and mizzen masts were at once cut away; but the heavy marble in her hold had broken through her bottom, and she bilged. Her bow held fast, her stern swung round, she careened inland, her broadside was bared to the shock of the billows, and the waves made a clear breach over her with every swell. The doom of the poor Elizabeth was sealed now, and no human power could save her. She lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean. At the first jar, the passengers, knowing but too well its fatal import, sprang from their berths. Then came the cry of "Cut away," followed by the crash of falling timbers, and the thunder of the seas, as they broke across the deck. In a moment more, the cabin skylight was dashed in pieces by the breakers, and the spray, pouring down like a cataract, put out the lights, while the cabin door was wrenched from its fastenings, and the waves swept in and out. One scream, one only, was heard from Margaret's state-room; and Sumner and Mrs. Hasty, meeting in the cabin, clasped hands, with these few but touching words: "We must die." "Let us die calmly, then." "I hope so, Mrs. Hasty." It was in the gray dusk, and amid the awful tumult, that the companions in misfortune met. The side of the cabin to the leeward had already settled under water; and furniture, trunks, and fragments of the skylight were floating to and fro; while the inclined position of the floor made it difficult to stand; and every sea, as it broke over the bulwarks, splashed in through the open roof. The windward cabin-walls, however, still yielded partial shelter, and against it, seated side by side, half leaning backwards, with feet braced upon the long table, they awaited what next should come. At first. Nino, alarmed at the uproar, the darkness, and the rushing water, while shivering with the wet, cried passionately; but soon his mother, wrapping him in such garments as were at hand and folding him to her bosom, sang him to sleep. Celeste too was in an agony of terror, till Ossoli, with soothing words and a long and fervent prayer, restored her to self-control and trust. Then calmly they rested, side by side, exchanging kindly partings and sending messages to friends, if any should survive to be their bearer. Meanwhile, the boats having been swamped or carried away, and the carpenter's tools washed overboard, the crew had retreated to the top-gallant forecastle; but, as the passengers saw and heard nothing of them, they supposed that the officers and crew had deserted the ship, and that they were left alone. Thus passed three hours. At length, about seven, as there were signs that the cabin would soon break up, and any death seemed preferable to that of being crushed among the ruins, Mrs. Hasty made her way to the door, and, looking out at intervals between the seas as they swept across the vessel amidships, saw some one standing by the foremast. His face was toward the shore. She screamed and beckoned, but her voice was lost amid the roar of the wind and breakers, and her gestures were unnoticed. Soon, however, Davis, the mate, through the door of the forecastle caught sight of her, and, at once comprehending the danger, summoned the men to go to the rescue. At first none dared to risk with him the perilous attempt; but, cool and resolute, he set forth by himself, and now holding to the bulwarks, now stooping as the waves combed over, he succeeded in reaching the cabin. Two sailors, emboldened by his example, followed. Preparations were instantly made to conduct the passengers to the forecastle, which, as being more strongly built and lying further up the sands, was the least exposed part of the ship. Mrs. Hasty volunteered to go the first. With one hand clasped by Davis, while with the other each grasped the rail, they started, a sailor moving close behind. But hardly had they taken three steps, when a sea broke loose her hold, and swept her into the hatch-way. "Let me go," she cried, "your life is important to all on board." But cheerily, and with a smile,[B] he answered, "Not quite yet;" and, seizing in his teeth her long hair, as it floated past him, he caught with both hands at some near support, and, aided by the seaman, set her once again upon her feet. A few moments more of struggle brought them safely through. In turn, each of the passengers was helped thus laboriously across the deck, though, as the broken rail and cordage had at one place fallen in the way, the passage was dangerous and difficult in the extreme. Angelino was borne in a canvas bag, slung round the neck of a sailor. Within the forecastle, which was comparatively dry and sheltered, they now seated themselves, and, wrapped in the loose overcoats of the seamen, regained some warmth. Three times more, however, the mate made his way to the cabin; once, to save her late husband's watch, for Mrs. Hasty; again for some doubloons, money-drafts, and rings in Margaret's desk; and, finally, to procure a bottle of wine and a drum of figs for their refreshment. It was after his last return, that Margaret said to Mrs. Hasty, "There still remains what, if I live, will be of more value to me than anything," referring, probably, to her manuscript on Italy; but it seemed too selfish to ask their brave preserver to run the risk again. There was opportunity now to learn their situation, and to discuss the chances of escape. At the distance of only a few hundred yards, appeared the shore,--a lonely waste of sand-hills, so far as could be seen through the spray and driving rain. But men had been early observed, gazing at the wreck, and, later, a wagon had been drawn upon the beach. There was no sign of a life-boat, however, or of any attempt at rescue; and, about nine o'clock, it was determined that some one should try to land by swimming, and, if possible, get help. Though it seemed almost sure death to trust one's self to the surf, a sailor, with a life-preserver, jumped overboard, and, notwithstanding a current drifting him to leeward, was seen to reach the shore. A second, with the aid of a spar, followed in safety; and Sumner, encouraged by their success, sprang over also; but, either struck by some piece of the wreck, or unable to combat with the waves, he sank. Another hour or more passed by; but though persons were busy gathering into carts whatever spoil was stranded, no life-boat yet appeared; and, after much deliberation, the plan was proposed,--and, as it was then understood, agreed to,--that the passengers should attempt to land, each seated upon a plank, and grasping handles of rope, while a sailor swam behind. Here, too, Mrs. Hasty was the first to venture, under the guard of Davis. Once and again, during their passage, the plank was rolled wholly over, and once and again was righted, with its bearer, by the dauntless steersman; and when, at length, tossed by the surf upon the sands, the half-drowned woman still holding, as in a death-struggle, to the ropes, was about to be swept back by the undertow, he caught her in his arms, and, with the assistance of a bystander, placed her high upon the beach. Thus twice in one day had he perilled his own life to save that of the widow of his captain, and even over that dismal tragedy his devotedness casts one gleam of light. Now came Margaret's turn. But she steadily refused to be separated from Ossoli and Angelo. On a raft with them, she would have boldly encountered the surf, but alone she would not go. Probably, she had appeared to assent to the plan for escaping upon planks, with the view of inducing Mrs. Hasty to trust herself to the care of the best man on board; very possibly, also, she had never learned the result of their attempt, as, seated within the forecastle, she could not see the beach. She knew, too, that if a life-boat could be sent, Davis was one who would neglect no effort to expedite its coming. While she was yet declining all persuasions, word was given from the deck, that the life-boat had finally appeared. For a moment, the news lighted up again the flickering fire of hope. They might yet be saved,--be saved together! Alas! to the experienced eyes of the sailors it too soon became evident that there was no attempt to launch or man her. The last chance of aid from shore, then, was gone utterly. They must rely on their own strength, or perish. And if ever they were to escape, the time had come; for, at noon, the storm had somewhat lulled; but already the tide had turned, and it was plain that the wreck could not hold together through another flood. In this emergency, the commanding officer, who until now had remained at his post, once more appealed to Margaret to try to escape,--urging that the ship would inevitably break up soon; that it was mere suicide to remain longer; that he did not feel free to sacrifice the lives of the crew, or to throw away his own; finally, that he would himself take Angelo, and that sailors should go with Celeste, Ossoli, and herself. But, as before, Margaret decisively declared that she would not be parted from her husband or her child. The order was then given to "save themselves," and all but four of the crew jumped over, several of whom, together with the commander, reached shore alive, though severely bruised and wounded by the drifting fragments. There is a sad consolation in believing that, if Margaret judged it to be impossible that the _three_ should escape, she in all probability was right. It required a most rare, combination of courage, promptness and persistency, to do what Davis had done for Mrs. Hasty. We may not conjecture the crowd of thoughts which influenced the lovers, the parents, in this awful crisis; but doubtless one wish was ever uppermost,--that, God willing, the last hour might come for ALL, if it must come for _one_. It was now past three o'clock, and as, with the rising tide, the gale swelled once more to its former violence, the remnants of the barque fast yielded to the resistless waves. The cabin went by the board, the after-parts broke up, and the stem settled out of sight. Soon, too, the forecastle was filled with water, and the helpless little band were driven to the deck, where they clustered round the foremast. Presently, even this frail support was loosened from the hull, and rose and fell with every billow. It was plain to all that the final moment drew swiftly nigh. Of the four seamen who still stood by the passengers, three were as efficient as any among the crew of the Elizabeth. These were the steward, carpenter, and cook. The fourth was an old sailor, who, broken down by hardships and sickness, was going home to die. These men were once again persuading Margaret, Ossoli and Celeste to try the planks, which they held ready in the lee of the ship, and the steward, by whom Nino was so much beloved, had just taken the little fellow in his arms, with the pledge that he would save him or die, when a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell, carrying with it the deck, and all upon it. The steward and Angelino were washed upon the beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty minutes after. The cook and carpenter were thrown far upon the foremast, and saved themselves by swimming. Celeste and Ossoli caught for a moment by the rigging, but the next wave swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once. When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders. It was over,--that twelve hours' communion, face to face, with Death! It was over! and the prayer was granted, "that Ossoli, Angelo, and I, may go together, and that the anguish may be brief!" * * * * * A passage from the journal of a friend of Margaret, whom the news of the wreck drew at once to the scene, shall close this mournful story:-- "The hull of the Elizabeth, with the foremast still bound to it by cordage, lies so near the shore, that it seems as if a dozen oar-strokes would carry a boat alongside. And as one looks at it glittering in the sunshine, and rocking gently in the swell, it is hard to feel reconciled to our loss. Seven resolute men might have saved every soul on board. I know how different was the prospect on that awful morning, when the most violent gale that had visited our coast for years, drove the billows up to the very foot of the sand-hills, and when the sea in foaming torrents swept across the beach into the bay behind. Yet I cannot but reluctantly declare my judgment, that this terrible tragedy is to be attributed, so far as human agency is looked at, to our wretched system, or _no-system_, of life-boats. The life-boat at Fire Island light-house, three miles distant only, was not brought to the beach till between twelve and one o'clock, more than eight hours after the Elizabeth was stranded, and more than six hours after the wreck could easily have been seen. When the life-boat did finally come, the beachmen could not be persuaded to launch or man her. And even the mortar, by which a rope could and should have been thrown on board, was not once fired. A single lesson like this might certainly suffice to teach the government, insurance companies, and humane societies, the urgent need, that to every life-boat should be attached ORGANIZED CREWS, stimulated to do their work faithfully, by ample pay for actual service, generous salvage-fees for cargoes and persons, and a pension to surviving friends where life is lost. * * * "No trace has yet been found of Margaret's manuscript on Italy, though the denials of the wreckers as to having seen it, are not in the least to be depended on. For, greedy after richer spoil, they might well have overlooked a mass of written paper; and, even had they kept it, they would be slow to give up what would so clearly prove their participation in the heartless robbery, that is now exciting such universal horror and indignation. Possibly it was washed away before reaching the shore, as several of the trunks, it is said, were open and empty, when thrown upon the beach. But it is sad to think, that very possibly the brutal hands of pirates may have tossed to the winds, or scattered on the sands, pages so rich with experience and life. The only papers of value saved, were the love-letters of Margaret and Ossoli.[C] "It is a touching coincidence, that the only one of Margaret's treasures which reached the shore, was the lifeless form of Angelino. When the body, stripped of every rag by the waves, was rescued from the surf, a sailor took it reverently in his arms, and, wrapping it in his neckcloth, bore it to the nearest house. There, when washed, and dressed in a child's frock, found in Margaret's trunk, it was laid upon a bed; and as the rescued seamen gathered round their late playfellow and pet, there were few dry eyes in the circle. Several of them mourned for Nino, as if he had been their own; and even the callous wreckers were softened, for the moment, by a sight so full of pathetic beauty. The next day, borne upon their shoulders in a chest, which one of the sailors gave for a coffin, it was buried in a hollow among the sand heaps. As I stood beside the lonely little mound, it seemed that never was seen a more affecting type of orphanage. Around, wiry and stiff, were scanty spires of beach-grass; near by, dwarf-cedars, blown flat by wintry winds, stood like grim guardians; only at the grave-head a stunted wild-rose, wilted and scraggy, was struggling for existence. Thoughts came of the desolate childhood of many a little one in this hard world; and there was joy in the assurance, that Angelo was neither motherless nor fatherless, and that Margaret and her husband were not childless in that New World, which so suddenly they had entered together. "To-morrow, Margaret's mother, sister, and brothers will remove Nino's body to New England." * * * * * Was this, then, thy welcome home? A howling hurricane, the pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend! In those twelve hours of agony, did the last scene appear but as the fitting close for a life of storms, where no safe haven was ever in reach; where thy richest treasures were so often stranded; where even the dearest and nearest seemed always too far off, or just too late, to help. Ah, no! not so. The clouds were gloomy on the waters, truly; but their tops were golden in the sun. It was in the Father's House that welcome awaited thee. "Glory to God! to God! he saith, Knowledge by suffering entereth, And Life is perfected by Death." [Footnote A: The following account is as accurate, even in minute details, as conversation with several of the survivors enabled me to make it.--W.H.C.] [Footnote B: Mrs. Hasty's own words while describing the incident.] [Footnote C: The letters from which extracts were quoted in the previous chapter.] 
13660	----	THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1834-1872 VOLUME II "To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--Emerson "What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--Carlyle CONTENTS OF VOLUME II LXXVI. Emerson. Concord, 1 July, 1842. Remittance of L51.-- Alcott.--Editorship of the _Dial._--Projected essay on Poetry.-- Stearns Wheeler. LXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 July, 1842. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Change of publishers.--Work on _Cromwell._-- Sterling.--Alcott. LXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 August, 1842. Impotence of speech.--Heart-sick for his own generation.--Transcendentalism of the _Dial._ LXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 15 October, 1842. The coming book on Cromwell.--Alcott.--The _Dial_ and its sins.--Booksellers' accounts. LXXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 November, 1842. Accounts.--Alcott.-- Sect-founders.--Man the Reformer.--James Stephen.--Gambardella. LXXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 11 March, 1843. _Past and Present._-- How to prevent pirated republication.--The _Dial._--Alcott's English Tail. LXXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 April, 1843. Copy of _Past and Present_ forwarded.--Prospect of pirated edition. LXXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 29 April, 1843. Carlyle's star.-- Lectures on "New England" at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.--Politics in Washington.--_Past and Present._--Effect of cheap press in America.--Reprint of the book.--The _Dial_ does not pay expenses. Extract from Emerson's Diary concerning _Past and Present._ LXXXIV. Carlyle. 27 August, 1843. Introduction of Mr. Macready. LXXXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1843. Remittance of L25.-- Piratical reprint of _Past and Present._--E.P. Clark, a Carlylese, to be asked to take charge of accounts.--Henry James. --Ellery Channing's Poems. LXXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 31 October, 1843. Summer wanderings. --The _Dial_ at the London Library.--Growth of Emerson's public in England.--Piratical reprint of his Essays in London.--of _Past and Present_ in America.--Criticism of Carlyle in the Dial.--Dr. Russell.--Theodore Parker.--Book about Cromwell.-- _Commons Journals._ LXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 November, 1843. Receipt of L25.-- E.P. Clark.--Henry James.--Channing's Poems.--Reverend W.H. Channing.--"Progress of the Species."--Emerson.--The Cromwell business. LXXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 December, 1843. Macready.-- Railroad to Concord.--Margaret Fuller's Review of Sterling's Poems in the _Dial._--Remittance of L32. LXXXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 31 January, 1844. Remittance received and made.--Criticism of Emerson by Gilfillan.--John Sterling.-- Cromwell book.--Hexameters from Voss. XC. Emerson. Concord, 29 February, 1844. Acknowledgment of remittance.--A new collection of Essays.--Faith in Writers as a class.--Remittance of L36.--Proposal concerning publication in America of _Cromwell._ XCI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 April, 1844. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Piratical reprints.--Professor Ferrier. XCII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 5 August, 1844. Fear for Sterling.-- Tennyson.--Work on _Cromwell_ frightful. XCIII. Emerson. Concord, 1 September, 1844. Sends proof sheets of new book of Essays.--Sterling. XCIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 September, 1844. Death of Sterling. XCV. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1844. Remittance of L30-- Sterling.--Tennyson.--Regrets having troubled Carlyle about proof-sheets.--Birth of Edward Emerson.--Purchase of land on Walden Pond. XCVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 November, 1844. Thanks for remittance.--London edition of _Essays,_ Second Series.-- Criticism on them. XCVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 December, 1844. Sterling's death.-- London edition of _Essays._--Carlyle's Preface and strictures. XCVIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 January, 1845. Bargain about _Miscellanies_ with Carey and Hart.--Portrait of Carlyle desired.--E.P. Clark's "Illustrations of Carlyle". XCIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 16 February, 1845. Bargain with Carey & Co.--Portrait.--Emerson's public in England.--Work on Cromwell. C. Emerson. Concord, 29 June, 1845. Death of Mr. Carey.-- Portrait.--His own occupations.--Preparing to print _Poems._-- Lectures in prospect. CI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 August, 1845. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_ finished.--Nature of the book.--New book from Emerson welcome.--Imperfection of all modes of utterance.--Forbids further plague with booksellers. CII. Emerson. Concord, 15 September, 1845. Payment sure from Carey and Hart.--Lectures on "Representative Men". CIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1845. Congratulations on completion of _Cromwell_ book.--Clark. CIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 11 November, 1845. Cromwell book sent.-- Visit to Scotland.--Changes there.--His mother.--Impatience with the times.--Weariness with the Cromwell book.--Visit to the Ashburtons. CV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 January, 1846. Thanks to Mr. Hart, Mr. Furness, and others.--_Cromwell proves popular.--New letters of Cromwell. CVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 February, 1846. Second edition of Cromwell.--Emerson to do what he will concerning republication.-- Anti-Corn-Law.--Aristocracy and Millocracy. CVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 March, 1846. Cromwell lumber.--Sheets of new edition sent.-Essay on Emerson in an Edinburgh Magazine.-- Mr. Everett.--Jargon in Newspapers and Parliament. CVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 April, 1846. Arrangements concerning reprint of _Cromwell._--Promise of Daguerrotype likeness.--Fifty years old.--Rides.--Emerson's voice wholly human.--Blessedness in work. CIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 April, 1846. Photograph sent.-- Arrangements with Wiley and Putnam for republication of _Cromwell_ and other books.--Photographs of Emerson and himself. --Remembrance of Craigenputtock. CX. Emerson. Concord, 14 May, 1846. Daguerrotype likeness.-- Wood-lot on Walden Pond. CXI. Emerson. Concord, 31 May, 1846. Photograph of Carlyle received.--One of himself sent in return.--Bargain with Wiley and Putnam. CXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 June, 1846. Bargain with Wiley and Putnam.--Emerson's photograph expected. CXIII. Emerson. Concord, 15 July, 1846. Wiley and Putnam.-- Dealings with booksellers.--Accounts.--E.P. Clark and his Illustrations of Carlyle's Writings.--Margaret Fuller going to Europe. CXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 July, 1846. Photograph of Emerson unsatisfactory.--Revision of his own books.--Spleen against books.--Going to Scotland.--Reading in American history.-- Marshall and Sparks.--Michelet.--Beriah Green. CXV. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1846. Thanks for copy of new edition of Cromwell.--Margaret Fuller.--Desires Carlyle to see her. CXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 December, 1846. Long silence.-- Disconsolate two months in Scotland.--Visit to Ireland.--A country cast into the melting-pot.--O'Connell.--Young Ireland.-- Returned home sad.--Miss Fuller; estimate of her.--What she thought of Carlyle.--Emerson's Poems. CXVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 January, 1847. Margaret Fuller's visit to Chelsea.--Speculates on going to England to lecture.-- His _Poems._ CXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 March, 1847. Visit to Hampshire.-- Emerson's _Poems._--Prospect of Emerson's Lectures in England.-- Miss Fuller. CXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 March, 1847. Remittance received.-- Alexander Ireland.--Advice concerning lectures. CXX. Emerson. Concord, 30 April, 1847. Prospect of lecturing in England.--Works in garden and orchard. CXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 May, 1847. Thoreau's Lecture on Carlyle.--Visit from E.R. Hoar.--Emerson's visit to England. CXXII. Emerson. Concord, 4 June, 1847. Prospect of visit to England.--F.H. Hedge. CXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1847. Visit to England decided upon.--Portrait of Sterling. CXXIV. Carlyle. Rawdon, Yorkshire, 31 August, 1847. Journeyings.--Emerson's expected visit.--Hedge.--Dr. Jacobson.-- Quaker hosts. CXXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1847. Plans for England. CXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 October, 1847. Delay of Emerson's letter announcing his coming.--Welcome to Chelsea. Emerson--Extracts from his Diary concerning Carlyle. CXXVIl. Emerson. Manchester, 5 November, 1847. His reception and occupations. CXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 November, 1847. Messages.-- Occupations.--Bancroft. CXXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea., 30 November, 1847. Messages.--Mr. Forster, &c. CXXX. Emerson. Manchester, 28 December, 1847. Message from Miss Fuller.--Hospitality shown him.--The English. CXXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 December, 1847. The Pepolis.-- Milnes.--Tennyson.--Idleness.--Visit to Hampshire.--Massachusetts Review. CXXXII. Emerson. Ambleside, 26 February, 1848. At Miss Martineau's.--Wordsworth.--Proposed return to Chelsea. CXXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 28 February, 1848. Welcome ready at Chelsea.--His own conditions.--The new French Republic. CXXXIV. Emerson. Manchester, 2 March, 1848. Return to London. CXXXV. Emerson. [London,] 19 June, 1848. Proposed call with Mrs. Crowe. CXXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 20 June, 1848. Mrs. Crowe.--Luncheon with the Duchess. CXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 23 June, 1848. Invitation to dinner. CXXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 December, 1848. Long silence.-- Questions concerning Indian meal.--Death of Charles Buller, and of Lord Ashburton's mother.--Neuberg and others. CXXXIX. Emerson. Boston, 23 January, 1849. John Carlyle's translation of the Inferno.--Indian corn.--Clough's Bothie. CXL. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 April, 1849. Indian corn from Concord; trial of it, reflections upon it.--No writing at present.--Macaulay's _History._--Political outlook.--Clough.-- Sterling Club. CXLI. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, 13 August, 1849. Indian corn again.-- Tour in Ireland.--Letter from Miss Fuller.--Message to Thoreau. CXLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 July, 1850. A year's silence.-- Latter Day Pamphlets.--Divergence from Emerson.--_Representative Men._--Prescott lionized. CXLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 14 November, 1850. "Eighteen million bores."--Emerson on Latter Day Pamphlets.--Autumn Journey.-- Disordered nerves. CXLIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 July, 1851. Appeal for news.--_Life of Sterling._--Crystal Palace.--Bossu's _Journal,_ Bartram's _Travels._--Margaret Fuller.--Mazzini.--Dr. Carlyle. CXLV. Emerson. Concord, 28 July, 1851. Story of the year.-- Journey in the West.--Memoir of Margaret Fuller.--_Life of Sterling._--English friends. CXLVI. Carlyle. Great Malvern, 25 August, 1851. _Life of Sterling._--Bossu's _Journal._--Water-cure.--Twisleton.--Milnes married.--Tennyson.--Browning on Miss Fuller. CXLVII. Emerson. Concord, 14 April, 1852. Browning's Reminiscences of Margaret Fuller.--Books on the Indians.--_Life of Sterling._ CXLVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 7 May, 1852. Correspondence must be revived.--Margaret Fuller.--Memoirs of her. CXLIX. Emerson. Concord, May, 1852. Relations with Carlyle.-- Carlyle's genius and his own.--Margaret Fuller. CL. Carlyle. Chelsea, 25 June, 1852. Emerson and himself.-- Reading about Frederick the Great. CLI. Emerson. Concord, 19 April, 1853. Excuses for not writing.--Chapter on Fate.--Visit to the West.--Conditions of American life.--Clough. CLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1853. Blessing of letters from Emerson.--Coming on of old age.--Modern democracy.--Visit to Germany.--Still reading about Fritz. CLIIa. Emerson. Concord, 10 August, 1853. Slowness to write.-- Regret at Clough's return to England.--Miss Bacon.--Carlyle's visit to Germany.--Thackeray in America.--New York and its society. CLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 September, 1853. Regrets for old days.--Not left town.--A new top story.--Miss Bacon, her Quixotic enterprise.--Clough.--Thackeray.--To Concord? CLIV. Emerson. Concord, 11 March, 1854. Laurence, the artist.-- Reading Latter Day Pamphlets.--Death of Carlyle's, and of Emerson's mother.--Miss Bacon.--His English Notes.--Lecturing tour in the West.--Speed _Frederick!_ CLV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 April, 1854. Thankful for Emerson's letter.--Death of his mother.--Makes no way in Prussian History. --The insuperable difficulty with _Frederick._--Literature in these days.--Emerson's picture of America.--Battle of Freedom and Slavery.--Emerson's book on England desired.--Miss Bacon. CLVI. Emerson. Concord, 17 April, 1855. Excuses for not writing.--Unchanged feeling for Carlyle.--The American.--True measure of life.--Musings of indolence. CLVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1855. Emerson's letters indispensable; his complete understanding of Carlyle.--A grim and lonely year.--Never had such a business as _Frederick._-- Frederick himself.--"Balaklava."--Persistence of the English.-- Urges Emerson to print his book on England. CLVIII. Emerson. Concord, 6 May, 1856. Letter-writing.--Leaves of Grass.--Mrs. ---. CLIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 20 July, 1856. Emerson's letter welcome.--Life a burden.--Going to Scotland.--_Life of Frederick_ to go to press.--Mrs. ---.--Miss Bacon.--Browning. CLX. Carlyle. The Gill, Cummertrees, Annan, 28 August, 1856. The debt of America to Emerson.--_English Traits_ will be welcome.--Grateful for whatever Emerson may have said of himself.--In retreat in Annan. CLXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 December, 1856. Close of negotiations for printing a complete edition of his Works in America.-- _English Traits._--Its excellence. CLXII. Emerson. Concord, 17 May, 1858. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Longworth.--Inquires for the _Frederick._--Desires a _liber veritatis._--Friendship of old gentlemen. CLXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 June, 1858. Emerson's letter and friends welcome.--First two volumes of Frederick just ready.-- Ugliness of the job.--Occasional tone of Emerson in the Magazines.--Health.--Separation of Dickens from his wife. CLXIII.* Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 April, 1859. Copy of _Frederick_ sent to Emerson.--Nearly choked by the job.--Self-pity.-- Emerson's speech on Burns. CLXIV. Emerson. Concord, I May, 1859. Arrival of first volumes of _Frederick._--Illusion of children.--His own children.--A correspondent of twenty-five years not to be disused. Extracts from Emerson's Diary respecting the _Frederick._ CLXV. Emerson. Concord, 16 April, 1860. Mr. O.W. Wight's new edition of the _Miscellanies._--Sight at Toronto of two nephews of Carlyle.--Carlyle commended to the Gods. CLXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 April, 1860. Encouragement from Emerson's words about _Frederick._--Message to Mr. Wight. CLXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 January, 1861. Emerson's _Conduct of Life._--Still twelve months from end of his task; nearly worn out. CLXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 16 April, 1861. Thanks for last note.--_Frederick._ CLXIX. Emerson. Concord, 8 December, 1862. The third volume of _Frederick._--The manner of it.--The war in America--Death of Clough. CLXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 March, 1864. Introduction of the Hon. Lyulph Stanley.--Mrs. Carlyle's ill-health. CLXXI. Emerson. Concord, 26 September, 1864. Sympathy.--Fourth volume of Frederick.--Nature of the war in America--Mr. Stanley. CLXXII. Carlyle. Annandale, Scotland, 14 June, 1865. Completion of _Frederick._--Saunterings.--Stay in Annandale.--Mrs. Carlyle. --Photographs.--Mr. M.D. Conway.--The American Peacock. CLXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 7 January, 1866. The last volumes of Friedrich.--America.--Conduct of Americans in war and in peace.-- Photographs.--Little to tell of himself. CLXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 16 May, 1866. Mrs. Carlyle's death. CLXXV. Carlyle. Mentone, 27 January, 1867. Sad interval since last writing.--His condition.--Mrs. Carlye's death.--Solace in writing reminiscences.--Visit in Kent during summer.--Tennyson's _Idyls._--Emerson's _English Traits._--Mentone. CLXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 November, 1869. Long abeyance of correspondence.--Plan of bequeathing books to New England.-- Emerson's counsel desired.--His own condition. CLXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 4 January, 1870. Arrangements respecting bequest of books to Harvard College. CLXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 23 January, 1870. Apologies for delay.--Writing new book.--Delight in proposed bequest.--Advice concerning. CLXXIX. Carlyle. Melchet Court, Romsey, 14 February, 1870. Acknowledgment of letter. CLXXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 February, 1870. Ending of the Harvard business. CLXXXI. Emerson. Concord, 21 March, 1870. Visit to President Eliot concerning the bequest to Harvard.--Reflections on the gift.--Speech about it to others.--Must renew correspondence.-- His own children. CLXXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 March, 1870. Possible delay of his last letter.--Society and Solitude not received. CLXXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 April, 1870. Emerson's letter received.--Thankful for the conclusion of the little Transaction.--Reflections on it.--Regrets that it has been spoken of.--_Society and Solitude._--News from Concord.--The night cometh. CLXXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 17 June, 1870. Excuses for delay in writing.--Lectures on Philosophy.--Steps taken to secure privacy in regard to bequest.--Chapman's Homer.--Error in address of books.--Report of Carlyle's coming to America. CLXXXV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 28 September, 1870. Delay in receiving Emerson's last letter.--Correction of error in address of books.--Emerson's lectures.--Philosophies.--Too late for him to come to America. CLXXXVI. Emerson. Concord, 15 October, 1870. The victim of miscellany.--Library Edition of Carlyle's Works received.-- Invitation.--The privilege of genius.--E.R. Hoar.--J.M. Forbes.-- The growing youth.--The Lowell race. CLXXXVIa. Emerson. Concord, 10 April, 1871. Account of himself and his work.--Introduction to Plutarch's _Morals._--Oration before the New England Society in New York.--Lectures at Cambridge.--Reprint of early writings.--About to go to California. CLXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 4 June, 1871. Gap in correspondence.--Unfriendly winter.--Completion of Library Edition of his Works.--Significance of piracy of Emerson.-- Conditions in America.--Anti-Anarchy.--J. Lee Bliss.--Finis of the Copper Captaincy. CLXXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 June, 1871. Return from California.--California.--The plains.--Brigham Young.--Lucy Garbett.--Carlyle's ill-health. CLXXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 4 September, 1871. Introduction of his son Edward. CXC. Emerson. Baltimore, 5 January, 1872. Last instalment of Library Edition of Carlyle's Works received.--Felicitations on this completion.--Happiness in having been Carlyle's contemporary and friend.--Carlyle's perversities.--Proposes to "retire and read the authors."--Carlyle's talk. CXCI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 April, 1872. Excuses for silence.-- Ill-health.--Emerson's letter about the West.--Aspect and meaning of that Western World.--Ruskin.--Froude.--Write. ----------- CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON LXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 1 July, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I have lately received from our slow friends, James Munroe & Co., $246 on account of their sales of the _Miscellanies,_--and I enclose a bill of Exchange for L51, which cost $246.50. It is a long time since I sent you any sketch of the account itself, and indeed a long time since it was posted, as the booksellers say; but I will find a time and a clerk also for this. I have had no word from you for a long space. You wrote me a letter from Scotland after the death of your wife's mother, and full of pity for me also; and since, I have heard nothing. I confide that all has gone well and prosperously with you; that the iron Puritan is emerging from the Past, in shape and stature as he lived; and you are recruited by sympathy and content with your picture; and that the sure repairs of time and love and active duty have brought peace to the orphan daughter's heart. My friend Alcott must also have visited you before this, and you have seen whether any relation could subsist betwixt men so differently excellent. His wife here has heard of his arrival on your coast,--no more. I submitted to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism,--I know not what else to call it,--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial,_ here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any laborer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed and circulated; and always we are waiting when somebody shall come and make it good. But I took it, as I said, and it took me, and a great deal of good time, to a small purpose. I am ashamed to compute how many hours and days these chores consume for me. I had it fully in my heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings opened by prayer or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse, a chapter on Poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation; but now it is July, and my chapter is rudest beginnings. Yet when I go out of doors in the summer night, and see how high the stars are, I am persuaded that there is time enough, here or somewhere, for all that I must do; and the good world manifests very little impatience. Stearns Wheeler, the Cambridge tutor, a good Grecian, and the editor, you will remember, of your American Editions, is going to London in August probably, and on to Heidelberg, &c. He means, I believe, to spend two years in Germany, and will come to see you on his way; a man whose too facile and good-natured manners do some injustice to his virtues, to his great industry and real knowledge. He has been corresponding with your Tennyson, and editing his Poems here. My mother, my wife, my two little girls, are well; the youngest, Edith, is the comfort of my days. Peace and love be with you, with you both, and all that is yours. --R. W. Emerson In our present ignorance of Mr. Alcott's address I advised his wife to write to your care, as he was also charged to keep you informed of his place. You may therefore receive letters for him with this. LXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 July, 1842 My Dear Emerson,--Lest Opportunity again escape me, I will take her, this time, by the forelock, and write while the matter is still hot. You have been too long without hearing of me; far longer, at least, than I meant. Here is a second Letter from you, besides various intermediate Notes by the hands of Friends, since that Templand Letter of mine: the Letter arrived yesterday; my answer shall get under way today. First under the head of business let it be authenticated that the Letter enclosed a Draft for L51; a new, unexpected munificence out of America; which is ever and anon dropping gifts upon me,-- to be received, as indeed they partly are, like Manna dropped out of the sky; the gift of unseen Divinities! The last money I got from you changed itself in the usual soft manner from dollars into sovereigns, and was what they call "all right,"--all except the little Bill (of Eight Pounds and odds, I think) drawn on Fraser's Executors by Brown (Little and Brown?); which Bill the said Executors having refused for I know not what reason, I returned it to Brown with note of the dishonor done it, and so the sum still stands on his Books in our favor. Fraser's people are not now my Booksellers, except in the matter of your _Essays_ and a second edition of _Sartor;_ the other Books I got transferred to a certain pair of people named "Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand"; which operation, though (I understand) it was transacted with great and vehement reluctance on the part of the Fraser people, yet produced no _quarrel_ between them and me, and they still forward parcels, &c., and are full of civility when I see them:--so that whether this had any effect or none in their treatment of Brown and his Bill I never knew; nor indeed, having as you explained it no concern with Brown's and their affairs, did I ever happen to inquire. I avoid all Booksellers; see them rarely, the blockheads; study never to think of them at all. Book-sales, reputation, profit, &c., &c.; all this at present is really of the nature of an encumbrance to me; which I study, not without success, to sweep almost altogether out of my head. One good is still possible to me in Life, one only: To screw a little more work out of myself, my miserable, despicable, yet living, acting, and so far imperial and celestial _self;_ and this, God knows, is difficulty enough without any foreign one! You ask after _Cromwell:_ ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad. There he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under two hundred years of Cant, Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind: through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction. The likelihood still is that I may abandon the task undone. I have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; I have visited Naseby Field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; I have &c., &c.:--alas, what a talent have I for getting into the Impossible! Meanwhile my studies still proceed; I even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; I have the strangest fellowship with that huge Genius of DEATH (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed _ulterior_ regions,--blessed, but as yet altogether _silent._ There is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply today and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is _ours:_ the dead ought to bury their dead, ought they not? In short, I am very unfortunate, and deserve your prayers,--in a quiet kind of way! If you lose tidings of me altogether, and never hear of me more,--consider simply that I have gone to my natal element, that the Mud Nymphs have sucked me in; as they have done several in their time! Sterling was here about the time your Letters to him came: your American reprint of his pieces was naturally gratifying him much.* He seems getting yearly more restless; necessitated to find an outlet for himself, unable as yet to do it well. I think he will now write Review articles for a while; which craft is really, perhaps, the one he is fittest for hitherto. I love Sterling: a radiant creature; but very restless;--incapable either of rest or of effectual motion: aurora borealis and sheet lightning; which if it could but _concentrate_ itself, as I [say] always--!--We had much talk; but, on the whole, even his talk is not much better for me than silence at present. _Me miserum!_ -------- * "The Poetical Works of John Sterling," Philadelphia, 1842. -------- Directly about the time of Sterling's departure came Alcott, some two weeks after I had heard of his arrival on these shores. He has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night. He is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!.... My poor Wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow: her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow's mite; for except her good Mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends-- they are not rife in this world.--God be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant! Have I not a Friend, and Friends, though they too are in sorrow? Good be with you all. --T. Carlyle. By far the valuablest thing that Alcott brought me was the Newspaper report of Emerson's last Lectures in New York. Really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the _morning;_ a thing _worth_ reading; which accordingly I clipped from the Newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many.--I cannot bid you quit the _Dial,_ though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge,_ nevertheless. --And so now an end. --T. C. LXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 29 August, 1842 My Dear. Emerson,--This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the gods and steam-demons! I already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former Letter,--acknowledging the manna-gift of the L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself. Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me, and a precious;--and when I mourn over the impotence of Human Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand _dumb,_ cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I could soonest _try_ to speak with,--were I within reach of him! Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a _man's_ meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very poor expression indeed! --------- * This letter of 15th August is missing. --------- Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute with the _Manes,_ as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write _two Books at once;_ cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the Irishman's bird: "Nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!" For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth _worthless_ except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! Heaven help me.--I believe at least that I ought _to hold my tongue;_ more especially at present. Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the _Dial._ Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,--march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!)--some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the _Dial._ In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your _Dial,_ and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof. Surely I could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;--that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for _you,_ for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!--"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"-- Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you;--and so for the present will "stamp" no more.... Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more. My Wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for Suffolk. I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon, and various _Cromwelliana._ My blessings on the Concord Household now and always. Commend me expressly to your Wife and your Mother. Farewell, dear friend. --T. Carlyle LXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 October, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I am in your debt for at least two letters since I sent you any word. I should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day's post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby certify that I love you well and prize all your messages. I read with special interest what you say of these English studies, and I doubt not the Book is in steady progress again. We shall see what change the changed position of the author will make in the book. The first _History_ expected its public; the second is written to an expecting people. The tone of the first was proud,--to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the master's temper. This time he has a hero, and we shall have a sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who writes. Well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on the Mount of Vision which commands the Centuries, and the book shall be an indispensable Benefit to men, which is the surest fame. Let me know all that can be told of your progress in it. You shall see in the last _Dial_ a certain shadow or mask of yours, "another Richmond," who has read your lectures and profited thereby.* Alcott sent me the paper from London, but I do not know the name of the writer. As for Alcott, you have discharged your conscience of him manfully and knightly; I absolve you well... He is a great man and was made for what is greatest, but I now fear that he has already touched what best he can, and through his more than a prophet's egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the wilderness. As you do not seem to have seen in him his pure and noble intellect, I fear that it lies under some new and denser clouds. -------- * An article on Cromwell, in the _Dial_ for October, 1842. -------- For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history, that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. Perhaps, one of these days, a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed. The booksellers have sent me accounts lately, but--I know not why--no money. Little and Brown from January to July had sold very few books. I inquired of them concerning the bill of exchange on Fraser's Estate, which you mention, and they said it had not been returned to them, but only some information, as I think, demanded by Fraser's administrator, which they had sent, and, as they heard nothing again, they suppose that it is allowed and paid to you. Inform me on this matter. Munroe & Co. allow some credits, but charge more debits for binding, &c., and also allege few sales in the hard times. I have got a good friend of yours, a banking man, to promise that he will sift all the account and see if the booksellers have kept their promises. But I have never yet got all the papers in readiness for him. I am looking to see if I have matter for new lectures, having left behind me last spring some half-promises in New York. If you can remember it, tell me who writes about Loyola and Xavier in the _Edinburgh._ Sterling's papers--if he is near you--are all in Mr. Russell's hands.* I played my part of Fadladeen with great rigor, and sent my results to Russell, but have not now written to J. S. Yours, R.W.E. ---------- * Mr. A.L. Russell, who had been instrumental in procuring the American edition of Sterling's _Poetical Works._ --------- LXXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1842 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter finds me here today; busied with many things, but not likely to be soon more at leisure; wherefore I may as well give myself the pleasure of answering it on the spot. The Fraser Bill by Brown and Little has come all right; the Dumfries Banker apprises me lately that he has got the cash into his hands. Pray do not pester yourself with these Bookseller unintelligibilities: I suppose their accounts are all reasonably correct, the cheating, such as it is, done according to rule: what signifies it at any rate? I am no longer in any vital want of money; alas, the want that presses far heavier on me is a want of faculty, a want of _sense;_ and the feeling of that renders one comparatively very indifferent to money! I reflect many times that the wealth of the Indies, the fame of ten Shakespeares or ten Mahomets, would at bottom do me no good at all. Let us leave these poor slaves of the Ingot and slaves of the Lamp to their own courses,--within a _certain_ extent of halter! What you say of Alcott seems to me altogether just. He is a man who has got into the Highest intellectual region,--if that be the Highest (though in that too there are many stages) wherein a man can believe and discern for himself, without need of help from any other, and even in opposition to all others: but I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His "more than prophetic egoism,"--alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, --in very _high,_ and in the highest regions, for that matter. Sect-founders withal are a class I do not like. No truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards, as I often say, ever founded a Sect,--I mean wilfully intended founding one. What a view must a man have of this Universe, who thinks "_he_ can swallow it all," who is not doubly and trebly happy that he can keep it from swallowing him! On the whole, I sometimes hope we have now done with Fanatics and Agonistic Posture-makers in this poor world: it will be an immense improvement on the Past; and the "New Ideas," as Alcott calls them, will prosper greatly the better on that account! The old gloomy Gothic Cathedrals were good; but the great blue Dome that hangs over all is better than any Cologne one.--On the whole, do not tell the good Alcott a word of all this; but let him love me as he can, and live on vegetables in peace; as I, living _partly_ on vegetables, will continue to love him! The best thing Alcott did while he staid among us was to circulate some copies of your _Man the Reformer._* I did not get a copy; I applied for one, so soon as I knew the right fountain; but Alcott, I think, was already gone. And now mark,--for this I think is a novelty, if you do not already know it: Certain Radicals have reprinted your Essay in Lancashire, and it is freely circulating there, and here, as a cheap pamphlet, with excellent acceptance so far as I discern. Various Newspaper reviews of it have come athwart me: all favorable, but all too shallow for sending to you. I myself consider it a _truly excellent_ utterance; one of the best words you have ever spoken. Speak many more such. And whosoever will distort them into any "vegetable" or other crotchet,--let it be at his own peril; for the word itself is _true;_ and will have to make itself a _fact_ therefore; though not a distracted _abortive_ fact, I hope! _Words_ of that kind are not born into Facts in the _seventh month;_ well if they see the light full-grown (they and their adjuncts) in the _second century;_ for old Time is a most deliberate breeder!--But to speak without figure, I have been very much delighted with the clearness, simplicity, quiet energy and veracity of this discourse; and also with the fact of its spontaneous appearance here among us. The prime mover of the Printing, I find, is one Thomas Ballantyne, editor of a Manchester Newspaper, a very good, cheery little fellow, once a Paisley weaver as he informs me,--a great admirer of all worthy things. ---------- * "A Lecture read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841." ---------- My paper is so fast failing, let me tell you of the writer on Loyola. He is a James Stephen, Head Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office,--that is to say, I believe, real governor of the British Colonies, so far as they have any governing. He is of Wilberforce's creed, of Wilberforce's kin; a man past middle age, yet still in full vigor; reckoned an enormous fellow for "despatch of business," &c., especially by Taylor (_van Artevelde_) and others who are with him or under him in Downing Street.... I regard the man as standing on the confines of Genius and Dilettantism,--a man of many really good qualities, and excellent at the despatch of business. There we will leave him. --A Mrs. Lee of Brookline near you has made a pleasant Book about Jean Paul, chiefly by excerpting.* I am sorry to find Gunderode & Co. a decided weariness!** Cromwell--Cromwell? Do not mention such a word, if you love me! And yet--Farewell, my Friend, tonight! Yours ever, T. Carlyle I will apprise Sterling before long: he is at Falmouth, and well; urging me much to start a Periodical here! Gambardella promises to become a real Painter; there is a glow of real fire in the wild southern man: next to no _articulate_ intellect or the like, but of inarticulate much, or I mistake. He has tried to paint _me_ for you; but cannot, he says! --------- * "Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter. Compiled from various Sources. Together with his Autobiography. Translated from the German." In Two Volumes. Boston, 1842. This book, which is one of the best in English concerning Jean Paul, was the work of the late Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Buckminster) Lee. ** In the _Dial,_ for January, 1842, is an article by Miss Fuller on "Bettine Brentano and Gunderode,"--a decided weariness. The Canoness Gunderode was a friend of Bettine's, older and not much wiser than herself. --------- LXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 11 March, 1848 Dear Emerson,--I know not whose turn it is to write; though a suspicion has long attended me that it was yours, and above all an indisputable wish that you would do it: but this present is a cursory line, all on business,--and as usual all on business of my own. I have finished a Book, and just set the Printer to it; one solid volume (rather bigger than one of the _French Revolution_ Volumes, as I compute); it is a somewhat fiery and questionable "Tract for the Times," _not_ by a Puseyite, which the terrible aspect of things here has forced from me,--I know not whether as preliminary to _Oliver_ or not; but it had gradually grown to be the preliminary of anything possible for me: so there it is written; and I am a very sick, but withal a comparatively very free man. The Title of the thing is to be _Past and Present:_ it is divided into Four Books, "Book I. Proem," "Book II. The Ancient Monk," "Book III. The Modern Worker," and "Book IV. Horoscope" (or some such thing):--the size of it I guessed at above. The practical business, accordingly, is: How to cut out that New York scoundrel, who fancies that because there is no gallows it is permitted to steal? I have a distinct desire to do that;-- altogether apart from the money to be gained thereby. A friend's goodness ought not to be frustrated by a scoundrel destitute of gallows.--You told me long since how to do the operation; and here, according to the best way I had of fitting your scheme into my materials, is my way of attempting it. The Book will not be out here for six good weeks from this date; it could be kept back for a week or two longer, if that were indispensable: but I hope it may not. In three weeks, half of it will be printed; I, in the meanwhile, get a correct manuscript Copy of the latter half made ready: joining the printed sheets and this manuscript, your Bookseller will have a three weeks' start of any rival, if I instantly despatch the Parcel to him. Will this do? this with the announcement of the Title as given above? Pray write to me straightway, and say. Your answer will be here before we can publish; and the Packet of Proof-sheets and Manuscript may go off whether there be word from you or none.--And so enough of _Past and Present._ And indeed enough of all things, for my haste is excessive in these hours. The last _Dial_ came to me about three weeks ago _as a Post-Letter,_ charged something like a guinea of postage, if I remember; so it had to be rejected, and I have not yet seen that Number; but will when my leeway is once brought up a little again. The two preceding Numbers were, to a marked extent, more like life than anything I had seen before of the _Dial._ There was not indeed anything, except the Emersonian Papers alone, which I know by the first ring of them on the tympanum of the mind, that I properly speaking _liked;_ but there was much that I did not dislike, and did half like; and I say, "_I fausto pede;_ that will decidedly do better!" By the bye, it were as well if you kept rather a strict outlook on Alcott and his English _Tail,_--I mean so far as we here have any business with it. Bottomless imbeciles ought not to be seen in company with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has already men listening to him on this side of the water. The "Tail" has an individual or two of that genus,--and the rest is mainly yet undecided. For example, I knew old --- myself; and can testify, if you will believe me, that few greater blockheads (if "blockhead" may mean "exasperated imbecile" and the ninth part of a thinker) broke the world's bread in his day. Have a care of such! I say always to myself, --and to you, which you forgive me. Adieu, my dear Emerson. May a good Genius guide you; for you are _alone, alone;_ and have a steep pilgrimage to make,-- leading _high,_ if you do not slip or stumble! Ever your affectionate, T. Carlyle LXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 1 April, 1843 My Dear Carlyle,--Along with this Letter there will go from Liverpool, on the 4th instant, the promised Parcel, complete Copy of the Book called _Past and Present,_ of which you already had two simultaneous announcements.* The name of the Steam Packet, I understand, is the "Britannia." I have addressed the Parcel to the care of "Messrs. Little and Brown, Booksellers, Boston," with your name atop: I calculate it will arrive safe enough. --------- * The letter making the second announcement, being very similar to the preceding, is omitted. --------- About one hundred pages of the Manuscript Copy have proved superfluous, the text being there also in a printed shape; I had misestimated the Printer's velocity; I was anxious too that there should be no failure as to time. The Manuscript is very indifferent in that section of it; the damage therefore is smaller: your press-corrector can acquaint himself with the _hand,_ &c. by means of it. A poor young governess, confined to a horizontal posture, and many sad thoughts, by a disease of the spine, was our artist in that part of the business: her writing is none of the distinctest; but it was a work of Charity to give it her. I hope the thing is all as correct as I could make it. I do not bethink me of anything farther I have to add in the way of explanation. In fact, my prophecy rather is at present that the gibbetless thief at New York, will beat us after all! Never mind if be do. To say truth, I myself shall almost be glad: there has been a botheration in this anxious arrangement of parts correcting of scrawly manuscript copies of what you never wished to read more, and insane terror withal of having your own Manuscript burnt or lost,--that has exceeded my computation. Not to speak of this trouble in which I involve you, my Friend; which, I truly declare, makes me ashamed! True one _is_ bound to resist the Devil in all shapes; if a man come to steal from you, you will put on what locks and padlocks are at hand, and not on the whole say, "Steal, then!" But if the locks prove insufficient, and the thief do break through,--that side of the alternative also will suit you very well; and, with perhaps a faint prayer for gibbets when they are necessary, you will say to him, next time, "_Macte virtute,_ my man." All is in a whirl with me here today; no other topic but this very poor one can be entered upon. I hope for a letter from your own hand soon, and some news about still more interesting matters. Adieu, my Friend; I feel still as if, in several senses, you stood alone with me under the sky at present!* ----------- * The signature to this letter has been cut off. ----------- LXXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 29 April, 1843 My Dear Carlyle,--It is a pleasure to set your name once more at the head of a sheet. It signifies how much gladness, how much wealth of being, that the good, wise, man-cheering, man-helping friend, though unseen, lives there yonder, just out of sight. Your star burns there just below our eastern horizon, and fills the lower and upper air with splendid and splendescent auroras. By some refraction which new lenses or else steamships shall operate, shall I not yet one day see again the disk of benign Phosphorus? It is a solid joy to me, that whilst you work for all, you work for me and with me, even if I have little to write, and seldom write your name. Since I last wrote to you, I found it needful, if only for the household's sake, to set some new lectures in order, and go to new congregations of men. I live so much alone, shrinking almost cowardly from the contact of worldly and public men, that I need more than others to quit home sometimes, and roll with the river of travelers, and live in hotels. I went to Baltimore, where I had an invitation, and read two lectures on New England. On my return, I stopped at Philadelphia, and, my Course being now grown to four lectures, read them there. At New York, my snowball was larger, and I read five lectures on New England. 1. Religion; 2. Trade; 3. Genius, Manners and Customs; 4. Recent literary and spiritual influences from abroad; 5. Domestic spiritual history.--Perhaps I have not quite done with them yet, but may make them the block of a new and somewhat larger structure for Boston, next winter. The newspaper reports of them in New York were such offensive misstatements, that I could not send you, as I wished, a sketch. Between my two speeches at Baltimore, I went to Washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. The two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to Canada, and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. Yet one feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there. I think, in the higher societies of the Universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating. But I must not delay to acknowledge the arrival of your Book. It came ten or eleven days ago, in the "Britannia," with the three letters of different dates announcing it.--I have read the superfluous hundred pages of manuscript, and find it only too popular. Beside its abundance of brilliant points and proverbs, there is a deep, steady tide taking in, either by hope or by fear, all the great classes of society,--and the philosophic minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the phenomenon. It is true contemporary history, which other books are not, and you have fairly set solid London city aloft, afloat in bright mirage in the air. I quarrel only with the popular assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the Humor itself, that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same thing in the days of Rabelais and of Aristophanes, as of Carlyle. Orators always allow something to masses, out of love to their own art, whilst austere philosophy will only know the particles. This were of no importance, if the historian did not so come to mix himself in some manner with his erring and grieving nations, and so saddens the picture; for health is always private and original, and its essence is in its unmixableness.--But this Book, with all its affluence of wit, of insight, and of daring hints, is born for a longevity which I will not now compute.--In one respect, as I hinted above, it is only too good, so sure of success, I mean, that you are no longer secure of any respect to your property in our freebooting America. You must know that the cheap press has, within a few months, made a total change in our book markets. Every English book of any name or credit is instantly converted into a newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a hundred boys in the streets of all of our cities for 25, 18, or 12 cents; Dickens's Notes for 12 cents, _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 18 cents, and so on. Three or four great New York and Philadelphia printing-houses do this work, with hot competition. One prints Bulwer's novel yesterday, for 35 cents; and already, in twenty-four hours, another has a coarser edition of it for 18 cents, in all thoroughfares.--What to do with my sealed parcel of manuscripts and proofs? No bookseller would in these perilous circumstances offer a dollar for my precious parcel. I inquired of the lawyers whether I could not by a copyright protect my edition from piracy until an English copy arrived, and so secure a sale of a few weeks. They said, no; yet advised the taking a certificate of copyright, that we might try the case if we wished. After much consulting and balancing for a few hours, I decided to print, as heretofore, on our own account, an edition, but cheap, to make the temptation less, to retail at seventy-five cents. I print fifteen hundred copies, and announce to the public that it is your edition, and all good men must buy this. I have written to the great Reprinters, namely to Park Benjamin, and to the Harpers, of New York, to request their forbearance; and have engaged Little and Brown to publish, because, I think, they have something more of weight with Booksellers, and are a little less likely to be invaded than Munroe. If we sell a thousand copies at seventy-five cents, it will only yield you about two hundred dollars; if we should be invaded, we can then afford to sell the other five hundred copies at twenty-five cents, without loss. In thus doing, I involve you in some risk; but it was the best course that occurred.--Hitherto, the _Miscellanies_ have not been reprinted in the cheap forms; and in the last year, James Munroe & Co. have sold few copies; all books but the cheapest being unsold in the hard times; something has however accrued to your credit there. J.M. & Co. fear that, if the new book is pirated at New York and the pirate prospers, instantly the _Miscellanies_ will be plundered. We will hope better, or at least exult in that which remains, to wit, a Worth unplunderable, yet infinitely communicable. I have hardly space left to say what I would concerning the _Dial._ I heartily hoped I had done with it, when lately our poor, good, publishing Miss Peabody,... wrote me that its subscription would not pay its expenses (we all writing for love). But certain friends are very unwilling it should die, and I a little unwilling, though very unwilling to be the life of it, as editor. And now that you are safely through your book, and before the greater Sequel rushes to its conclusion, send me, I pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points. Let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the _Dial,_ and this too Elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor.--Let Jane Carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden one. I think to send you a duplicate of the last number of the _Dial_ by Mr. Mann,* who with his bride (sister of the above-mentioned Miss Peabody) is going to London and so to Prussia. He is little known to me, but greatly valued as a philanthropist in this State. I must go to work a little more methodically this summer, and let something grow to a tree in my wide straggling shrubbery. With your letters came a letter from Sterling, who was too noble to allude to his books and manuscript sent hither, and which Russell all this time has delayed to print; I know not why, but discouraged, I suppose, in these times by booksellers. I must know precisely, and write presently to J.S. Farewell. R.W. Emerson** ----------- * The late Horace Mann. ** The following passages from Emerson's Diary relating to _Past and Present_ seem to have been written a few days after the preceding letter:--"How many things this book of Carlyle gives us to think! It is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but Literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists. The gods are come among us in the likeness of men. An honest Iliad of English woes. Who is he that can trust himself in the fray? Only such as cannot be familiarized, but nearest seen and touched is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere, bring him here and environ him, as the Ambassador carries his country with him. Love protects him from profanation. What a book this in its relation to English privileged estates! How shall Queen Victoria read this? how the Primate and Bishops of England? how the Lords? how the Colleges? how the rich? and how the poor? Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lord and lordship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless rebounds and kicks, and yet not a word in the book is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal, and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts,--this flaming sword of cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon and shows to the eyes of the Universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservation and impressing the reader with the conviction that Carlyle himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes. Gulliver among the Lilliputians... "Carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. What a man's book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. A masterly criticism on the times. Fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of today. The poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e.g. dwarf British Debt and raise Nature and social life. "But everything must be done well once; even bulletins and almanacs must have one excellent and immortal bulletin and almanac. So let Carlyle's be the immortal newspaper." ---------- LXXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson 27 August, 1843 Dear Emerson,--The bearer of this is Mr. Macready, our celebrated Actor, now on a journey to America, who wishes to know you. In the pauses of a feverish occupation which he strives honestly to make a noble one, this Artist, become once more a man, would like well to meet here and there a true American man. He loves Heroes as few do; and can recognize them, you will find, whether they have on the _Cothurnus_ or not. I recommend him to you; bid you forward him as you have opportunity, in this department of his pilgrimage. Mr. Macready's deserts to the English Drama are notable here to all the world; but his dignified, generous, and every-way honorable deportment in private life is known fully, I believe, only to a few friends. I have often said, looking at him as a manager of great London theatres, "This Man, presiding over the unstablest, most chaotic province of English things, is the one public man among us who has dared to take his stand on what he understood to be _the truth,_ and expect victory from that: he puts to shame our Bishops and Archbishops." It is literally so. With continued kind wishes, yours as of old. T. Carlyle LXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1843 My Dear Friend,--I seize the occasion of having this morsel of paper for twenty-five pounds sterling from the booksellers to send you, (and which fail not to find enclosed, as clerks say,) to inquire whether you still exist in Chelsea, London, and what is the reason that my generous correspondent has become dumb for weary months. I must go far back to resume my thread. I think in April last I received your Manuscript, &c. of the Book, which I forthwith proceeded to print, after some perplexing debate with the booksellers, as I fully informed you in my letter of April or beginning of May. Since that time I have had no line or word from you. I must think that my letter did not reach you, or that you have written what has never come to me. I assure myself that no harm has befallen you, not only because you do not live in a corner, and what chances in your dwelling will come at least to my ears, but because I have read with great pleasure the story of Dr. Francia,* which gave the best report of your health and vivacity. ---------- * Carlyle's article on Dr. Francia in the _Foreign Quarterly Review,_ No. 62. Reprinted in his _Miscellanies._ ---------- I wrote you in April or May an account of the new state of things which the cheap press has wrought in our book market, and specially what difficulties it put in the way of our edition of _Past and Present._ For a few weeks I believed that the letters I had written to the principal New York and Philadelphia booksellers, and the Preface, had succeeded in repelling the pirates. But in the fourth or fifth week appeared a mean edition in New York, published by one Collyer (an unknown person and supposed to be a mask of some other bookseller), sold for twelve and one half cents, and of this wretched copy several thousands were sold, whilst our seventy-five cents edition went off slower. There was no remedy, and we must be content that there was no expense from our edition, which before September had paid all its cost, and since that time has been earning a little, I believe. I am not fairly entitled to an account of the book from the publishers until the 1st of January.... I have never yet done what I have thought this other last week seriously to do, namely, to charge the good and faithful E.P. Clark, a man of accounts as he is a cashier in a bank, with the total auditing and analyzing of these accounts of yours. My hesitation has grown from the imperfect materials which I have to offer him to make up so long a story. But he is a good man, and, do you know it? a Carlylese of that intensity that I have often heard he has collected a sort of album of several volumes, containing illustrations of every kind, historical, critical, &c., to the _Sartor._ I must go to Boston and challenge him. Once when I asked him, he seemed willing to assume it. No more of accounts tonight. I send you by this ship a volume of translations from Dante, by Doctor Parsons of Boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist. It is his gift to you. Lately went Henry James to you with a letter from me. He is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as I learn. He carried a volume of poems from my friend and nearest neighbor, W. Ellery Channing, whereof give me, I pray you, the best opinion you can. I am determined he shall be a poet, and you must find him such.* I have too many things to tell you to begin at the end of this sheet, which after all this waiting I have been compelled to scribble in a corner, with company waiting for me. Send me instant word of yourself if you love me, and of those whom you love, and so God keep you and yours. --R. Waldo Emerson ---------- * In the second number of the _Dial,_ in October, 1840, Emerson had published, under the title of "New Poetry," an article warmly commending Mr. Channing's then unpublished poems. ---------- LXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 31 October, 1843 My Dear Emerson,--It is a long weary time since I have had the satisfaction of the smallest dialogue with you. The blame is all my own; the reasons would be difficult to give,--alas, they are properly no-reasons, children not of _Something,_ but of mere Idleness, Confusion, Inaction, Inarticulation, of _Nothing_ in short! Let us leave them there, and profit by the hour which yet is. I ran away from London into Bristol and, South Wales, when the heats grew violent, at the end of June. South Wales, North Wales, Lancashire, Scotland: I roved about everywhere seeking some Jacob's-pillow on which to lay my head, and dream of things heavenly;--yes, that at bottom was my modest prayer, though I disguised it from myself and the result was, I could find no pillow at all; but sank into ever meaner restlessness, blacker and blacker biliary gloom, and returned in the beginning of September thoroughly eclipsed and worn out, probably the weariest of all men living under the sky. Sure enough I have a fatal talent of converting all Nature into Preternaturalism for myself: a truly horrible Phantasm-Reality it is to me; what of heavenly radiances it has, blended in close neighborhood, in intimate union, with the hideousness of Death and Chaos;--a very ghastly business indeed! On the whole, it is better to hold one's peace about it. I flung myself down on sofas here,--for my little Wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and I had only to lie down: there, in reading books, and other make-believe employments, I could at least keep silence, which was an infinite relief. Nay, gradually, as indeed I anticipated, the black vortexes and deluges have subsided; and now that it is past, I begin to feel myself better for my travels after all. For one thing, articulate speech having returned to me,--you see what use I make of it. On the table of the London Library, voted in by some unknown benefactor whom I found afterwards to be Richard Milnes, there lay one thing highly gratifying to me: the last two Numbers of the _Dial._ It is to be one of our Periodicals henceforth; the current Number lies on the Table till the next arrive; then the former goes to the Binder; we have already, in a bound volume, all of it that Emerson has had the editing of. This is right. Nay, in Edinburgh, and indeed wherever ingenuous inquisitive minds were met with, I have to report that the said Emerson could number a select and most loving public; select, and I should say fast growing: for good and indifferent reasons it may behove the man to assure himself of this. Farther, to the horror of poor Nickerson (Bookseller Fraser's Successor), a certain scoundrel interloper here has reprinted _Emerson's Essays_ on grayish paper, to be sold at two shillings,--distracting Nickerson with the fear of change! I was glad at this, if also angry: it indicates several things. Nickerson has taken his measures, will reduce the price of his remaining copies; indeed, he informs me the best part of his edition was already sold, and he has even some color of money due from England to Emerson through me! With pride enough will I transmit this mournful, noble peculium: and after that, as I perceive, such chivalrous international doings must cease between us. _Past and Present,_ some one told me, was, in spite of all your precautions, straightway sent forth in modest gray, and your benevolent speculation ruined. Here too, you see, it is the same. Such chivalries, therefore, are now impossible; for myself I say, "Well, let them cease; thank God they once were, the Memory of that can never cease with us!" In this last Number of the _Dial_ which by the bye your Bookseller never forwarded to me, I found one little Essay, a criticism on myself,* which, if it should do me mischief, may the gods forgive you for! It is considerably the most dangerous thing I have read for some years. A decided likeness of myself recognizable in it, as in the celestial mirror of a friend's heart; but so enlarged, exaggerated, all _transfigured,_--the most delicious, the most dangerous thing! Well, I suppose I must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome _non_entity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you!--I have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it to my Mother: one of the _indubitablest_ benefits I could think of in regard to it. --------- * A criticism by Emerson of _Past and Present,_ in the _Dial_ for July, 1843. It embodies a great part of the extract from Emerson's Diary given in a preceding note, and is well worth reading in full for its appreciation of Carlyle's powers and defects. --------- There have been two friends of yours here in these very days: Dr. Russell, just returning from Paris; Mr. Parker, just bound thither.* We have seen them rather oftener than common, Sterling being in town withal. They are the best figures of strangers we have had for a long time; possessions, both of them, to fall in with in this pilgrimage of life. Russell carries friendliness in his eyes, a most courteous, modest, intelligent man; an English intelligence too, as I read, the best of it lying unspoken, not as a logic but as an instinct. Parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom I like much. They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion! ------------ * Dr. Le Baron Russell; Theodore Parker. ------------ As for myself, dear Emerson, you must ask me no questions till-- alas, till I know not when! After four weary years of the most unreadable reading, the painfulest poking and delving, I have come at last to the conclusion--that I must write a Book on Cromwell; that there is no rest for me till I do it. This point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, That a Book on Cromwell is _impossible._ Literally so: you would weep for me if you saw how, between these two adamantine certainties, I am whirled and tumbled. God only knows what will become of me in the business. Patience, Patience! By the bye, do you know a "Massachusetts Historical Society," and a James Bowdoin, seemingly of Boston? In "Vol. II. third series" of their _Collections,_ lately I met with a disappointment almost ludicrous. Bowdoin, in a kind of dancing, embarrassed style, gives long-winded, painfully minute account of certain precious volumes, containing "Notes of the Long Parliament," which now stand in the New York Library; poises them in his assaying balance, speculates, prophesies, inquires concerning them: to me it was like news of the lost Decades of Livy. Good Heavens, it soon became manifest that these precious Volumes are nothing whatever but a wretched broken old dead manuscript copy of part of our printed _Commons Journals!_ printed since 1745, and known to all barbers! If the Historical Society desired it, any Member of Parliament could procure them the whole stock, _Lords and Commons,_ a wheelbarrowful or more, with no cost but the carriage. Every Member has the right to demand a copy, and few do it, few will let such a mass cross their door-threshold! This of Bowdoin's is a platitude of some magnitude.--Adieu, dear Emerson. Rest not, haste not; you have work to do. --T. Carlyle LXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 November, 1843 Dear Emerson,--About this time probably you will be reading a Letter I hurried off for you by Dr. Russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. Had I kept silence so very long? I knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! It behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that I have safely received your Letter of the 30th October, safely the Bill for L25 it contained;--that you are a brave, friendly man, of most serene, beneficient way of life; and that I--God help me!-- By all means appoint this Mr. Clark to the honorary office of Account-keeper--if he will accept it! By Parker's list of questions from him, and by earlier reminiscences recalled on that occasion, I can discern that he is a man of lynx eyesight, of an all-investigating curiosity: if he will accept this sublime appointment, it will be the clearest case of elective affinity. Accounts to you must be horrible; as they are to me: indeed, I seldom read beyond the _last_ line of them, if I can find the last; and one of the insupportabilities of Bookseller Accounts is that nobody but a wizard, or regular adept in such matters, can tell where the last line, and final net result of the whole accursed babblement, is to be found! By all means solicit Clark;--at all events, do you give it up, I pray you, and let the Booksellers do their own wise way. It really is not material; let the poor fellows have length of halter. Every new Bill from America comes to me like a kind of heavenly miracle; a reaping where I never sowed, and did not expect to reap: the quantity of it is a thing I can never bring in question.--For your English account with Nickerson I can yet say nothing more; perhaps about Newyear's-day the poor man will enable me to say something. I hear however that the Pirate has sold off, or nearly so, his Two-shillings edition of the _Essays,_ and is preparing to print another; this, directly in the teeth of Cash and double-entry book-keeping, I take to be good news. James is a very good fellow, better and better as we see him more. Something shy and skittish in the man; but a brave heart intrinsically, with sound, earnest sense, with plenty of insight and even humor. He confirms an observation of mine, which indeed I find is hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer. Hammond l'Estrange says, "Who ever heard of a stammering man that was a fool?" Really there is something in that.--James is now off to the Isle of Wight; will see Sterling at Ventnor there; see whether such an Isle or France will suit better for a winter residence. W.E. Channing's _Poems_ are also a kind gift from you. I have read the pieces _you had cut up for me:_ worthy indeed of reading! That Poem _on Death_ is the utterance of a valiant, noble heart, which in rhyme or prose I shall expect more news of by and by. But at bottom "Poetry" is a most suspicious affair for me at present! You cannot fancy the oceans of Twaddle that human Creatures emit upon me, in these times; as if, when the lines had a jingle in them, a Nothing could be Something, and the point were gained! It is becoming a horror to me,--as all speech without meaning more and more is. I said to Richard Milnes, "Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative _before_ the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for God's sake let me have it the _shortest_ way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the _omission_ of the jingle at the end: cannot I do without that!"--Milnes answered, "Ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have no thought, or almost none; a little thought goes a great way when you put it into rhyme!" Let a man try to the very uttermost to _speak_ what he means, before _singing_ is had recourse to. Singing, in our curt English speech, contrived expressly and almost exclusively for "despatch of business," is terribly difficult. Alfred Tennyson, alone of our time, has proved it to be possible in some measure. If Channing will persist in melting such obdurate speech into music he shall have my true wishes,--my augury that it will take an enormous _heat_ from him!--Another Channing,* whom I once saw here, sends me a Progress-of-the-Species Periodical from New York. _Ach Gott!_ These people and their affairs seem all "melting" rapidly enough, into thaw-slush or one knows not what. Considerable madness is visible in them. _Stare super antiquas vias:_ "No," they say, "we cannot stand, or walk, or do any good whatever there; by God's blessing, we will fly,--will not you!-- here goes!" And their _flight,_ it is as the flight of the unwinged,--of oxen endeavoring to fly with the "wings" of an ox! By such flying, universally practised, the "ancient ways" are really like to become very deep before long. In short, I am terribly sick of all that;--and wish it would stay at home at Fruitland, or where there is good pasture for it. Friend Emerson, alone of all voices, out of America, has sphere-music in him for me,--alone of them all hitherto; and is a prophecy and sure dayspring in the East; immeasurably cheering to me. God long prosper him; keep him duly apart from that bottomless hubbub which is not, at all cheering! And so ends my Litany for this day. -------- * The Reverend William Henry Channing. -------- The Cromwell business, though I punch daily at it with all manner of levers, remains immovable as Ailsa Crag. Heaven alone knows what I shall do with it. I see and say to myself, It is heroical; Troy Town was probably not a more heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people,--must it be dead forever?--Perhaps yes,--and kill me too into the bargain. Really I think it very shocking that we run to Greece, to Italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. Were I absolute Sovereign and Chief Pontiff here, there should be a study of the Old _English_ ages first of all. I will pit Odin against any Jupiter of them; find Sea-kings that would have given Jason a Roland for his Oliver! We are, as you sometimes say, a book-ridden people,--a phantom-ridden people.--All this small household is well; salutes you and yours with love old and new. Accept this hasty messenger; accept my friendliest farewell, dear Emerson. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 December, 1843 My Dear Friend,--I have had two good letters from you, and it is fully my turn to write, so you shall have a token on this latest day of the year. I rejoice in this good will you bear to so many friends of mine,--if they will go to you, you must thank yourself. Best when you are mutually contented. I wished lately I might serve Mr. Macready, who sent me your letter.--I called on him and introduced him to Sam G. Ward, my friend and the best man in the city, and, besides all his personal merits, a master of all the offices of hospitality. Ward was to keep himself informed of Macready's times, and bring me to him when there was opportunity. But he stayed but a few days in Boston, and, Ward said, was in very good hands, and promised to see us when he returns by and by. I saw him in Hamlet, but should much prefer to see him as Macready. I must try to entice Mr. Macready out here into my pines and alder bushes. Just now the moon is shining on snow-drifts, four, five, and six feet high, but, before his return, they will melt; and already this my not native but ancestral village, which I came to live in nearly ten years ago because it was the quietest of farming towns, and off the road, is found to lie on the directest line of road from Boston to Montreal, a railroad is a-building through our secretest woodlands, and, tomorrow morning, our people go to Boston in two hours instead of three, and, next June, in one. This petty revolution in our country matters was very odious to me when it began, but it is hard to resist the joy of all one's neighbors, and I must be contented to be carted like a chattel in the cars and be glad to see the forest fall. This rushing on your journey is plainly a capital invention for our spacious America, but it is more dignified and man-like to walk barefoot.--But do you not see that we are getting to be neighbors? a day from London to Liverpool; twelve or eleven to Boston; and an hour to Concord; and you have owed me a visit these ten years. I mean to send with your January _Dial_ a copy of the number for Sterling, as it contains a review of his tragedy and poems, by Margaret Fuller. I have not yet seen the article, and the lady affirms that it is very bad, as she was ill all the time she was writing; but I hope and believe better. She, Margaret Fuller, is an admirable person, whose writing gives feeble account of her. But I was to say that I shall send this _Dial_ for J.S. to your care, as I know not the way to the Isle of Wight. Enclosed in this letter I send a bill of exchange for L32 8s. 2d. payable by Baring & Co. It happens to represent an exact balance on Munroe's books, and that slow mortal should have paid it before. I have not yet got to Clark, I who am a slow mortal, but have my eye fixed on him. Remember me and mine with kindest salutations to your wife and brother. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson LXXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 31 January, 1844 Dear Emerson, Some ten days ago came your Letter with a new Draft of L32 and odd money in it: all safe; the Draft now gone into the City to ripen into gold and silver, the Letter to be acknowledged by some hasty response now and here. America, I say to myself looking at these money drafts, is a strange place; the highest comes out of it and the lowest! Sydney Smith is singing dolefully about doleful American repudiation, "_dis_owning of the soft impeachment"; and here on the other hand is an American man, in virtue of whom America has become definable withal as a place from which fall heavenly manna-showers upon certain men, at certain seasons of history, when perhaps manna-showers were not the unneedfulest things!--We will take the good and the evil, here as elsewhere, and heartily bless Heaven. But now for the Draft at the top of this leaf. One Colman,* a kind of Agricultural Missionary, much in vogue here at present, has given it me; it is Emerson's, the net produce hitherto (all but two cents) of _Emerson's Essays._ I enclose farther the Bookseller's hieroglyph papers; unintelligible as all such are; but sent over to you for scrutiny by the expert. I gather only that there are some Five Hundred and odd of the dear-priced edition sold, some Two Hundred and odd still to sell, which the Bookseller says are (in spite of pirates) slowly selling; and that the half profit upon the whole adventure up to this date has been L24 15s. 11d. sterling,--equal, as I am taught, at $4.88 per pound sterling, to $121.02, for which, all but the cents, here is a draft on Boston, payable at sight. Pray have yourself straightway _paid;_ that if there be any mistake or delay I may rectify it while time yet is.--I add, for the intelligence of the Bookseller-Papers, that Fraser, with whom the bargain originally stood, was succeeded by Nickerson; these are the names of the parties. And so, dear Friend; accept this munificent sum of Money; and expect a blessing with it if good wishes from the heart of man can give one. So much for that. --------- * The Reverend Henry Colman. --------- Did you receive a Dumfries Newspaper with a criticism in it? The author is one Gilfillan, a young Dissenting Minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a Preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. He has written in that same Newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; Godwin, Corn-law Elliott and I know not all whom: if he publish the Book, I will take care to send it you.* I saw the man for the first time last autumn, at Dumfries; as I said, his being a Calvinist Dissenting Minister, economically fixed, and spiritually with such germinations in him, forces me to be very reserved to him. ----------- * The sketches were published the next year in a volume under the title of _The Gallery of Literary Portraits._ ----------- John Sterling's _Dial_ shall be forwarded to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, whenever it arrives. He was here, as probably I told you, about two months ago, the old unresting brilliantly radiating man. He is now much richer in money than he was, and poorer by the loss of a good Mother and good Wife: I understand he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a poem. He flings too much "sheet-lightning" and unrest into me when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always longs for him back again: "No doing with him or without him," the dog! My thrice unfortunate Book on Cromwell,--it is a real descent to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos! I feel oftenest as if it were possibler to die one's self than to bring it into life. Besides, my health is in general altogether despicable, my "spirits" equal to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor! One needs to be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or sunless, or it will never do. The planet Earth, says Voss,--take four hexameters from Voss: Journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces; Joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests; Falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour: So thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, March! I have not a moment more tonight;--and besides am inclined to write unprofitables if I persist. Adieu, my friend; all blessings be with you always. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle XC. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 29 February, 1844 My Dear Carlyle,--I received by the last steamer your letter, and its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which order I sent to Ward, who turned it at once into money. Thanks, dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me this pleasing and most unlooked for result. And I beg you, if you know any family representative of Mr. Fraser, to express my sense of obligation to that departed man. I feel a kindness not without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred Englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany. I shall not fail to send them a new collection, which I hope they will like better. My faith in the Writers, as an organic class, increases daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which shall be parallel with nature. Yet without any effort I fancy I make progress also in the doctrine of Indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. It is a poor second thought, this literary activity. Perhaps I am not made obnoxious to much suffering, but I have had happy hours enough in gazing from afar at the splendors of the Intellectual Law, to overpay me for any pains I know. Existence may go on to be better, and, if it have such insights, it never can be bad. You sometimes charge me with I know not what sky- blue, sky-void idealism. As far as it is a partiality, I fear I may be more deeply infected than you think me. I have very joyful dreams which I cannot bring to paper, much less to any approach to practice, and I blame myself not at all for my reveries, but that they have not yet got possession of my house and barn. But I shall not lose my love for books. I only worship Eternal Buddh in the retirements and intermissions of Brahma.--But I must not egotize and generalize to the end of my sheet, as I have a message or two to declare. I enclose a bill of exchange on the Barings for thirty-six pounds; which is the sum of two recent payments of Munroe and of Little and Brown, whereof I do not despair you shall yet have some account in booksellers' figures. I have got so far with Clark as to have his consent to audit the accounts when I shall get energy and time enough to compile them out of my ridiculous Journal. Munroe begs me to say what possibly I have already asked for him, that, when the _History of Cromwell_ is ready to be seen of men, you will have an entire copy of the Manuscript taken, and sent over to us. Then will he print a cheap edition such as no one will undersell, and secure such a share of profit to the author as the cheap press allows. Perhaps only thirty or forty pounds would make it worth while to take the trouble. A valued friend of mine wishes to know who wrote (perhaps three years ago) a series of metaphysical articles in _Blackwood_ on Consciousness. Can you remember and tell me? And now I commend you to the good God, you and your History, and the true kind wife who is always good to the eager Yankees, and am yours heartily, --R.W. Emerson XCI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 April, 1844 Dear Emerson,--Till within five minutes of the limit of my time, I had forgotten that this was the 3d of the Month; that I had a Letter to write acknowledging even money! Take the acknowledgment, given in all haste, not without a gratitude that will last longer: the Thirty-six pounds and odd shillings came safe in your Letter, a new unlooked-for Gift. America, I think, is like an amiable family teapot; you think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable implement yields you another cup, and another! Many thanks to you, who are the heart of America to me. Republishing for one's friend's sake, I find on consulting my Bookseller, is out here; we have Pirates waiting for every American thing of mark, as you have for every British; to the tender mercies of these, on both sides, I fancy the business must be committed. They do good too; as all does, even carrion: they send you _faster_ abroad, if the world have any use for you;--oftenest it only thinks it has. Your _Essays,_ the Pirated _Essays,_ make an ugly yellow tatter of a Pamphlet, price 1s. 6d.; but the edition is all sold, I understand: and even Nickerson has not entirely ceased to sell. The same Pirate who pounced upon you made an attempt the other day on my poor _Life of Schiller,_ but I put the due spoke in his wheel. They have sent me Lowell's _Poems;_ they are bringing out Jean Paul's Life, &c., &c.; the hungry _Canaille._ It is strange that men should feel themselves so entirely at liberty to steal, simply because there is no gallows to hang them for doing it. Your new Book will be eagerly waited for by that class of persons; and also by another class which is daily increasing here. The only other thing I am "not to forget" is that of the _Essay on Consciousness_ in _Blackwood._ The writer of those Papers is one Ferrier, a Nephew of the Edinburgh Miss Ferrier who wrote _Marriage_ and some other Novels; Nephew also of Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and married to one of his daughters. A man of perhaps five-and-thirty; I remember him in boyhood, while he was boarded with an Annandale Clergyman; I have seen him since manhood, and liked him well: a solid, square-visaged, dark kind of man, more like your Theodore Parker than any mutual specimen I can recollect. He got the usual education of an Edinburgh Advocate; but found no practice at the Bar, nor sought any with due anxiety, I believe; addicted himself to logical meditations;--became, the other year, Professor of Universal History, or some such thing, in the Edinburgh University, and lectures with hardly any audience: a certain _young_ public wanted me to be that Professor there, but I knew better,--Is this enough about Ferrier? I will not add another word; the time being _past,_ irretrievable except by half-running! Write us your Book; and be well and happy always!* ------- * The signature has been cut off. ------- XCII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 5 August, 1844 Dear Emerson,--There had been a long time without direct news from you, till four days ago your Letter arrived. This day I understand to be the ultimate limit of the American Mail; yesterday, had it not been Sunday, would have been the limit: I write a line, therefore, though in very great haste. Poor Sterling, even I now begin to fear, is in a very bad way. He had two successive attacks of spitting of blood, some three months ago or more; the second attack of such violence, and his previous condition then so weak, that the Doctor as good as gave up hope,--the poor Patient himself had from the first given it up. Our poor Friend has had so many attacks of that nature, and so rapidly always rallied from them, I gave no ear to these sinister prognostics; but now that I see the summer influences passing over him without visible improvement, and our good weather looking towards a close without so much strength added as will authorize even a new voyage to Madeira;--I too am at last joining in the general discouragement; all the sadder to me that I shut it out so long. Sir James Clark, our best-accredited Physician for such diseases, declares that Life, for certain months, may linger, with great pain; but that recovery is not to be expected. Great part of the lungs, it appears, is totally unserviceable for respiration; from the remainder, especially in times of coughing, it is with the greatest difficulty that breath enough is obtained. Our poor Patient passes the night in a sitting posture; cannot lie down: that fact sticks with me ever since I heard it! He is very weak, very pale; still "writes a great deal daily"; but does not wish to see anybody; declines to "see even Carlyle," who offered to go to him. His only Brother, Anthony Sterling, a hardy soldier, lately withdrawn from the Army, and settled in this quarter, whom we often communicate with, is about going down to the Isle of Wight this week: he saw John four days ago, and brings nothing but bad news,--of which indeed this removal of his to the neighborhood of the scene is a practical testimony. The old Father, a Widower for the last two years, and very lonely and dispirited, seems getting feebler and feebler: he was here yesterday: a pathetic kind of spectacle to us. Alas, alas! But what can be said? I say Nothing; I have written only one Note to Sterling: I feel it probable that I shall never see him more,--nor his like again in this world. His disease, as I have from of old construed it, is a burning of him up by his own fire. The restless vehemence of the man, struggling in all ways these many years to find a legitimate outlet, and finding, except for transitory, unsatisfactory coruscations, none, has undermined its Clay Prison in the weakest point (which proves to be the lungs), and will make outlet _there._ My poor Sterling! It is an old tragedy; and very stern whenever it repeats itself of new. Today I get answer about Alfred Tennyson: all is right on that side. Moxon informs me that the Russell Books and Letter arrived duly, and were duly forwarded and safely received; nay, farther, that Tennyson is now in Town, and means to come and see me. Of this latter result I shall be very glad: Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me;--a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother!--However, I doubt he will not come; he often skips me, in these brief visits to Town; skips everybody indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,--carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos! Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman Farmer, I think; indeed, you see in his verses that he is a native of "moated granges," and green, fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law or Church; being master of a small annuity on his Father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his Mother and some Sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy;--smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,--fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech, and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe!--We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic,--his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon. (O Paper!) I trust there is now joy in place of pain in the House at Concord, and a certain Mother grateful again to the Supreme Powers! We are all in our customary health here, or nearly so; my Wife has been in Lancashire, among her kindred there, for a month lately: our swollen City is getting empty and still; we think of trying an Autumn _here_ this time.--Get your Book ready; there are readers ready for it! And be busy and victorious! Ever Yours, T. Carlyle My _History_ is frightful! If I live, it is like to be completed; but whether I shall live, and not rather be buried alive, broken-hearted, in the Serbonian Quagmires of English Stupidity, and so sleep beside Cromwell, often seems uncertain. Erebus has no uglier, brutaler element. Let us say nothing of it. Let us do it, or leave it to the Devils. _Ay de mi!_ XCIII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 1 September, 1844 My Dear Carlyle,--I have just learned that in an hour Mr. Wilmer's mail-bag for London, by the "Acadia," closes, and I will not lose the occasion of sending you a hasty line: though I had designed to write you from home on sundry matters, which now must wait. I send by this steamer some sheets, to the bookseller John Chapman,--proofsheets of my new book of Essays. Chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to send him some manuscript that had not yet been published in America, and he thought he could make an advantage from printing it, and even, in some conditions, procure a copyright, and he would publish for me on the plan of half-profits. The request was so timely, since I was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet (an Address to citizens of some thirteen towns who celebrated in Concord the negro Emancipation on 1st August last), that I came to town yesterday, and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs of all the Address, and of more than half the book. If you can give Chapman any counsel, or save me from any nonsense by enjoining on him careful correction, you shall. I looked eagerly for a letter from you by the last steamer, to give me exact tidings of Sterling. None came; but I received a short note from Sterling himself, which intimated that he had but a few more days to live. It is gloomy news. I beg you will write me everything you can relate of him, by the next mail. If you can learn from his friends whether the packet of his Manuscripts and printed papers, returned by Russell and sent by me through Harnden's Express to Ventnor, arrived safely, it would be a satisfaction. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson XCIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 September, 1844 Dear Emerson,--There should a Letter have come for you by that Steamer; for I wrote one duly, and posted it in good time myself: I will hope therefore it was but some delay of some subaltern official, such as I am told occasionally chances, and that you got the Letter after all in a day or two. It would give you notice, more or less, up to its date, of all the points you had inquired about there is now little to be added; except concerning the main point, That the catastrophe has arrived there as we foresaw, and all is ended. John Sterling died at his house in Ventnor on the night of Wednesday, 18th September, about eleven o'clock; unexpectedly at last, and to appearance without pain. His Sister-in-law, Mrs. Maurice; had gone down to him from this place about a week before; other friends were waiting as it were in view of him; but he wished generally to be alone, to continue to the last setting his house and his heart more and more in order for the Great Journey. For about a fortnight back he had ceased to have himself formally dressed; had sat only in his dressing-gown, but I believe was still daily wheeled into his Library, and sat very calmly sorting and working there. He sent me two Notes, and various messages, and gifts of little keepsakes to my Wife and myself: the Notes were brief, stern and loving; altogether noble; never to be forgotten in this world. His Brother Anthony, who had been in the Isle of Wight within call for several weeks, had now come up to Town again; but, after about a week, decided that he would run down again, and look. He arrived on the Wednesday night, about nine o'clock; found no visible change; the brave Patient calm as ever, ready to speak as ever, --to say, in direct words which he would often do, or indirectly as his whole speech and conduct did, "God is Great." Anthony and he talked for a while, then took leave for the night; in few minutes more, Anthony was summoned to the bedside, and at eleven o'clock, as I said, the curtain dropt, and it was all ended.--_Euge!_ Whether the American _Manuscripts_ had arrived I do not yet know, but probably shall before this Letter goes; for Anthony is to return hither on Tuesday, and I will inquire. Our Friend is buried in Ventnor Churchyard; four big Elms overshadow the little spot; it is situated on the southeast side of that green Island, on the slope of steep hills (as I understand it) that look toward the Sun, and are close within sight and hearing of the Sea. There shall he rest, and have fit lullaby, this brave one. He has died as a man should; like an old Roman, yet with the Christian Bibles and all newest revelations present to him. He refused to see friends; men whom I think he loved as well as any,--me for one when I obliquely proposed it, he refused. He was even a little stern on his nearest relatives when they came to him: Do I need your help to die? Phocion-like he seemed to feel degraded by physical decay; to feel that he ought to wrap his mantle round him, and say, "I come, Persephoneia; it is not I that linger!"--His Sister-in-law, Anthony's Wife, probably about a month ago, while they were still in Wight, had begged that she might see him yet once; her husband would be there too, she engaged not to speak. Anthony had not yet persuaded him, when she, finding the door half open, went in: his pale changed countenance almost made her shriek; she stept forward silently, kissed his brow in silence; he burst into tears. Let us speak no more of this.--A great quantity of papers, I understand, are left for my determination; what is to be done with them I will sacredly endeavor to do. I have visited your Bookseller Chapman; seen the Proof-sheets lying on his table; taken order that the reprint shall be well corrected,--indeed, I am to read every sheet myself, and in that way get acquainted with it, before it go into stereotype. Chapman is a tall, lank youth of five-and-twenty; full of good will, but of what other equipment time must yet try. By a little Book of his, which I looked at some months ago, he seemed to me sunk very deep in the dust-hole of extinct Socinianism; a painful predicament for a man! He is not sure of saving much copyright for you; but he will do honestly what in that respect is doable; and he will print the Book correctly, and publish it decently, I saying _imprimatur_ if occasion be,--and your ever- increasing little congregation here will do with the new word what they can. I add no more today; reserving a little nook for the answer I hope to get two days hence. Adieu, my Friend: it is silent Sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beer- shops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubric- mummeries,--a much more audacious feat than beer! We have wet wind at Northeast, and a sky somewhat of the dreariest:-- Courage! a _little_ way above it reigns mere blue, and sunshine eternally!--T.C. _Wednesday, October 2d._--The Letter had to wait till today, and is still in time. Anthony Sterling, who is yet at Ventnor, apprises me this morning that according to his and the Governess's belief the Russell Manuscripts arrived duly, and were spoken of more than once by our Friend.--On Monday I received from this same Anthony a big packet by Post; it contains among other things all your Letters to John, wrapt up carefully, and addressed in his hand, "Emerson's Letters, to be returned through the hands of Carlyle": they shall go towards you next week, by Mr. James, who is about returning. Among the other Papers was one containing seven stanzas of verse addressed to T. Carlyle, 14th September; full of love and enthusiasm;--the Friday before his death: I was visiting the old City of Winchester that day, among the tombs of Canutes and eldest noble ones: you may judge how sacred the memory of those hours now is! I have read your Slavery Address; this morning the first _half_- sheet, in Proof, of the _Essays_ has come: perfectly correct, and right good reading. Yours ever, T. Carlyle XCV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1844 My Dear Friend,--I enclose a bill of exchange for thirty pounds sterling which I procured in town today at $5 each pound, or $150; so high, it seems, is the rate at present, higher, they said, than for years. It is good booksellers' money from Little and Brown, and James Munroe & Co., in unequal proportions. If you wish for more accurate information and have a great deal of patience, there is still hope that you may obtain it before death; for I this day met E.P. Clark in Washington Street, and he reported some progress in auditing of accounts, and said that when presently his family should return to town for the winter, he would see to the end of them, i.e. the accounts. I received with great satisfaction your letter of July, which came by a later steamer than it was written for, but gave me exact and solid information on what I most wished to know. May you live forever, and may your reports of men and things be accessible to me whilst I live! Even if, as now in Sterling's case, the news are the worst, or nearly so, yet let whatever comes for knowledge be precise, for the direst tragedy that is accurately true must share the blessing of the Universe. I have no later tidings from Sterling, and I must still look to you to tell me what you can. I dread that the story should be short. May you have much good to tell of him, and for many a day to come! The sketch you drew of Tennyson was right welcome, for he is an old favorite of mine,--I owned his book before I saw your face;--though I love him with allowance. O cherish him with love and praise, and draw from him whole books full of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. I have much regretted a sudden note I wrote you just before the steamer of 1 September sailed, entreating you to cumber yourself about my proofsheets sent to the London bookseller. I heartily absolve you from all such vexations. Nothing could be more inconsiderate. Mr. Chapman is undoubtedly amply competent to ordinary correction, and I much prefer to send you my little book in decent trim than in rags and stains and deformities more than its own. I have just corrected and sent to the steamer the last sheets for Mr. Chapman, who is to find English readers if he can. I shall ask Mr. Chapman to send you a copy, for his edition will be more correct than mine. What can I tell you better? Why even this, that this house rejoices in a brave boy, now near three months old. Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. When shall I show him to you? And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and wood-lot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond? One of these days, if I should have any money, I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the tree- tops, and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me. Yours with love, R.W. Emerson XCVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 November, 1844 Dear Emerson,--By the clearest law I am bound to write you a word today, were my haste even greater than it is. The last American fleet or ship, about the middle of last month, brought me a Draft for Thirty Pounds; which I converted into ready cash, and have here,--and am now your grateful debtor for, as of old. There seems to be no end to those Boston Booksellers! I think the well is dry; and straightway it begins to run again. Thanks to you: --it is, I dare say, a thing you too are grateful for. We will recognize it among the good things of this rather indifferent world.--By the way, if that good Clark _like_ his business, let him go on with it; but if not, stop him, poor fellow! It is to me a matter of really small moment whether those Booksellers' accounts be ever audited in this world, or left over to the General Day of Audit. I myself shudder at the sight of such things; and make my bargain here so always as to have no trade with them, but to be _netto_ from the first. Why should I plague poor Clark with them, if it be any plague to him? The Booksellers will never _know_ but we examine them! The very terror of Clark's name will be as the bark of chained Mastiff,-- and no need for actual biting! Have due pity on the man. Your English volume of _Essays,_ as Chapman probably informs you by this Post, was advertised yesterday, "with a Preface from me." That is hardly accurate, that latter clause. My "Preface" consists only of a certificate that the Book is correctly printed, and sent forth by a Publisher of your appointment, whom therefore all readers of yours ought to regard accordingly. Nothing more. There proves, I believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only Chapman asserts that he _has_ obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into Chancery,--which has a terrible sound; and indeed the Act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no Sergeant Talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. The sound of "Chancery," the stereotype character of this volume, and its cheap price, may perhaps deter pirates,--who are but a weak body in this country as yet. I judged it right to help in that; and impertinent, at this stage of affairs, to go any farther. The Book is very fairly printed, onward. at least to the Essay _New England Politics,_ where my "perfect-copy" of the sheets as yet stops. I did not read any of the Proofs except two; finding it quite superfluous, and a sad waste of time to the hurried Chapman himself. I have found yet but one error, and that a very correctable one, "narvest" for "harvest";--no other that I recollect at present. The work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right chance yet--not till I get it in the bound state, and read it all at once--to produce its due impression on me. But I will say already of it, It is a _sermon_ to me, as all your other deliberate utterances are; a real _word,_ which I feel to be such,--alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot pass with me for _words!_ This is a praise far beyond any "literary" one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison. For the rest, I have to object still (what you will call objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a Speaker indeed, but as it were a _Soliloquizer_ on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible,--whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, "Why won't you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do life-pictures, passions, facts,--which _transcend_ all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering! To which he answers that he won't, can't, and doesn't want to (as the Cockneys have it): and so I leave him, and say, "You Western Gymnosophist! Well, we can afford one man for that too. But--!--By the bye, I ought to say, the sentences are very _brief;_ and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me. Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty--But they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers: the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square _bag of duck-shot_ held together by canvas! I will try them again, with the Book deliberately before me.--There are also one or two utterances about "Jesus," "immortality," and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes here and there. I do not say it was wrong to utter them; a man obeys his own Daemon in these cases as his supreme law. I dare say you are a little bored occasionally with "Jesus," &c.,--as I confess I myself am, when I discern what a beggarly Twaddle they have made of all that, what a greasy Cataplasm to lay to their own poltrooneries;- -and an impatient person may exclaim with Voltaire, in serious moments: "_Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme-la!_ I have had enough of him;--I tell you I am alive too!" Well, I have scribbled at a great rate; regardless of Time's flight!--My Wife thanks many times for M. Fuller's Book. I sent by Mr. James a small Packet of _your_ letters--which will make you sad to look at them! Adieu, dear friend. --T. Carlyle XCVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 December, 1844 My Dear Friend,--I have long owed you a letter and have much to acknowledge. Your two letters containing tidings, the first of the mortal illness, and the second of the death of Sterling, I had no heart to answer. I had nothing to say. Alas! as in so many instances heretofore, I knew not what to think. Life is somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable qualities. That which we call faith seems somewhat stoical and selfish, if we use it as a retreat from the pangs this ravishment inflicts. I had never seen him, but I held him fast; now I see him not, but I can no longer hold him. Who can say what he yet is and will be to me? The most just and generous can best divine that. I have written in vain to James to visit me, or to send me tidings. He sent me, without any note, the parcel you confided to him, and has gone to Albany, or I know not whither. I have your notes of the progress of my London printing, and, at last, the book itself. It was thoughtless in me to ask your attention to the book at all in the proof state; the printer might have been fully trusted with corrected printed pages before him. Nor should Chapman have taxed you for an advertisement; only, I doubt not he was glad of a chance to have business with you; and, of course, was too thankful for any Preface. Thanks to you for the kind thought of a "Notice," and for its friendly wit. You shall not do this thing again, if I should send you any more books. A Preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme, a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. I fancy my readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class,--men and women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else mystical, and by no means including the great literary and fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your books. If you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers try to read me, and with false expectations. I had rather have fewer readers and only such as belong to me. I doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected and inconsecutive is just. Your words are very gentle. I should describe it much more harshly. My knowledge of the defects of these things I write is all but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all. I am only a sort of lieutenant here in the deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as thinking it a better homage than universal silence. You Londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country lyceums. But of what you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of Congress. And though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. Since I am not to see you from year to year, is there never an Englishman who knows you well, who comes to America, and whom you can send to me to answer all my questions? Health and love and joy to you and yours. --R.W. Emerson XCVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 January, 1845 My Dear Carlyle,--Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, booksellers, have lately proposed to buy the remainder of our Boston edition of your _Miscellanies,_ or to give you a bonus for sanctioning an edition of the same, which they propose to publish. On inquiry, I have found that only thirteen entire sets of four volumes remain to us unsold; whilst we have 226 copies of Volume III., and 243 copies of Volume IV., remaining. In replying to Mr. Carey, I proposed that, besides the proposed bonus, he should buy of me these old volumes, which are not bound but folded, at 25 cents a volume, (Monroe having roughly computed the cost at 40 cents a volume,) but this he declines to do, and offers fifty pounds sterling for his bonus. I decided at once to accept his offer, thinking it a more favorable winding up of our account than I could otherwise look for; as Mr. Carey knows much better how to defend himself from pirates than I do. So I am to publish that his edition is edited with your concurrence. Our own remaining copies of entire sets I shall sell at once to Monroe, at a reduced price, and the odd volumes I think to dispose of by giving them a new and independent title-page. In the circumstances of the trade here, I think Mr. Carey's offer a very liberal one, and he is reputed in his dealings eminently just and generous. My friend William Furness, who has corresponded with me on Carey's behalf, has added now another letter to say that Mr. Carey wishes to procure a picture of Mr. Carlyle to be engraved for this edition. "He understands there is a good head by Laurence, and he wishes to employ some London artist to make a copy of it in oil or water colors, or in any way that will suffice for the engraver; and he proposes to apply to Mr. Carlyle for permission through Inman the American artist who is now in England." Furness goes on to ask for my "good word" with you in furtherance of this design. Well, I heartily hope you will not resist so much good nature and true love; for Mr. Furness and Mr. Griswold, and others who compose a sort of advising committee to Mr. Carey, are sincere lovers of yours. One more opportunity this crisis in our accounts will give to that truest of all Carlylians, E.P. Clark, to make his report. I called at his house two nights ago, in Boston; he promised immediate attention, but quickly drew me aside to his "Illustrations of Carlyle," an endless train of books, and portfolios, and boxes of prints, in which every precious word of that master is explained or confirmed. Affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson XCIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 16 February, 1845 Dear Emerson,--By the last Packet, which sailed on the 3d of the month, I forgot to write to you, though already in your debt one Letter; and there now has another Letter arrived, which on the footing of mere business demands to be answered. I write straightway; not knowing how the Post-Office people will contrive the conveyance, or whether it can be sooner than by the next Steam ship, but willing to give them a chance. You have made another brave bargain for me with the Philadelphia people; to all of which I can say nothing but _"Euge! Papae!"_ It seems to me strange, in the present state of Copyright, how my sanction or the contrary can be worth L50 to any American Bookseller; but so it is, to all appearance; let it be so, therefore, with thanks and surprise. The Messrs. Carey and Lea distinguish themselves by the beauty of their Editions; a poor Author does not go abroad among his friends in dirty paper, full of misprints, under their guidance; this is as handsome an item of the business as any. As to the Portrait too, I will be as "amiable" as heart could wish; truly it will be worth my while to take a little pains that the kind Philadelphia Editors do once for all get a faithful Portrait of me, since they are about it, and so prevent counterfeits from getting into circulation. I will endeavor to do in that matter whatsoever they require of me; to the extent even of sitting two days for a Crayon Sketch such as may be engraved,--though this new sacrifice of patience will not be needed as matters are. It stands thus: there is no Painter, of the numbers who have wasted my time and their own with trying, that has indicated any capability of catching a true Likeness, but one Samuel Lawrence; a young Painter of real talent, not quite so young now, but still only struggling for complete mastership in the management of colors. He does crayon sketches in a way to please almost himself; but his oil paintings, at least till within a year or two, have indicated only a great faculty still crude in that particular. His oil portrait of me, which you speak of, is almost terrible to behold! It has the look of a Jotun, of a Scandinavian Demon, grim, sad, as the angel of Death;--and the coloring is so _brick_ish, the finishing so coarse, it reminds you withal of a flayed horse's head! _"Dinna speak o't."_ But the preparatory crayon-sketch of this, still in existence, is admired by some judges; poor John Sterling bought it from the Painter, and it is now here in the hands of his Brother, who will readily allow any authorized person to take a drawing of it. Lawrence himself, I imagine, would be the fittest man to employ; or your Mr. Ingham [Inman], if he be here and a capable person: one or both of these might superintend the Engraving of it here, and not part with the plate till it were pronounced satisfactory. In short, I am willing to do "anything in reason"! Only if a Portrait is to be, I confess I should rather avoid going abroad under the hands of bunglers, at least of bunglers sanctioned by myself. There is a Portrait of me in some miserable farrago called _Spirit of the Age;_* a farrago unknown to me, but a Portrait known, for poor Lawrence brought it down to me with sorrow in his face; it professes to be from his painting; is a "Lais _without_ the beauty" (as Charles Lamb used to say); a flayed horse's head without the spiritualism, good or bad,--and simply figures on my mind as a detestability; which I had much rather never have seen. These poor _Spirit of the Age_ people applied to me; I described myself as "busy," &c.; shoved them off me; and this monster of iniquity, resembling Nothing in the Earth or under it, is the result. In short, I am willing, I am willing; and so let us not waste another drop of ink on it at present!--On the whole, are not you a strange fellow? You apologize as if with real pain for "trouble" I had, or indeed am falsely supposed to have had, with Chapman here; and forthwith engage again in correspondences, in speculations, and negotiations, and I know not what, on my behalf! For shame, for shame! Nay, you have done one very ingenious thing; to set Clark upon the Boston Booksellers' accounts: it is excellent; Michael Scott setting the Devil to twist ropes of sand, "There, my brave one; see if you don't find work there for a while!" I never think of this Clark without love and laughter. Once more, _Euge!_ Chapman is fast selling your Books here; striking off a new Five Hundred from his Stereotypes. You are wrong as to your Public in this Country; it is a very pretty public; extends pretty much, I believe, through all ranks, and is a growing one,--and a truly _aristocratic,_ being of the bravest inquiring minds we have. All things are breaking up here, like Swedish Frost in the end of March; _gachis epouvantable._ Deep, very serious eternal instincts, are at work; but as yet no serious word at all that I hear, except what reaches me from Concord at intervals. Forward, forward! And you do not know what I mean by calling you "unpractical," "theoretic." _0 caeca corda!_ But I have no room for such a theme at present. ---------- * "A new Spirit of the Age. Edited by R.H. Horne." In Two Volumes. London, 1844. ---------- The reason I tell you nothing about Cromwell is, alas, that there is nothing to be told. I am day and night, these long months and years, very miserable about it,--nigh broken-hearted often. Such a scandalous accumulation of Human Stupidity in every form never lay before on such a subject. No history of it can be written to this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, God- forgetting generation. How can you explain men to Apes by the Dead Sea?* And I am very sickly too, and my Wife is ill all this cold weather,--and I am sunk in the bowels of Chaos, and scarce once in the three months or so see so much as a possibility of ever getting out! Cromwell's own _Letters and Speeches_ I have gathered together, and washed clean from a thousand ordures: these I do sometimes think of bringing out in a legible shape;-- perhaps soon. Adieu, dear friend, with blessings always. --T. Carlyle Poor Sydney Smith is understood to be dying; water on the chest; past hope of Doctors. Alas! --------- * The dwellers by the Dead Sea who were changed to apes are referred to in various places by Carlyle. He tells the story of the metamorphosis, which he got from the introduction to Sale's Koran, in _Past and Present,_ Book III. Ch. 3. --------- C. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, June 29, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I grieve to think of my slackness in writing, which suffers steamer after steamer to go without a letter. But I have still hoped, before each of the late packets sailed, that I should have a message to send that would enforce a letter. I wrote you some time ago of Mr. Carey's liberal proposition in relation to your _Miscellanies._ I wrote, of course, to Furness, through whom it was made to me, accepting the proposition; and I forwarded to Mr. Carey a letter from me to be printed at the beginning of the book, signifying your good-will to the edition, and acknowledging the justice and liberality of the publishers. I have heard no more from them, and now, a fortnight since, the newspaper announces the death of Mr. Carey. He died very suddenly, though always an invalid and extremely crippled. His death is very much regretted in the Philadelphia papers, where he bore the reputation of a most liberal patron of good and fine arts. I have not heard from Mr. Furness, and have thought I should still expect a letter from him. I hope our correspondence will stand as a contract which Mr. Carey's representatives will feel bound to execute. They had sent me a little earlier a copy of Mr. Sartain's engraving from their water-color copy of Laurence's head of you. They were eager to have the engraving pronounced a good likeness. I showed it to Sumner, and Russell, and Theodore Parker, who have seen you long since I had, and they shook their heads unanimously and declared that D'Orsay's profile was much more like. --------- ** From the rough draft. --------- I creep along the roads and fields of this town as I have done from year to year. When my garden is shamefully overgrown with weeds, I pull up some of them. I prune my apples and pears. I have a few friends who gild many hours of the year. I sometimes write verses. I tell you with some unwillingness, as knowing your distaste for such things, that I have received so many applications from readers and printers for a volume of poems that I have seriously taken in hand the collection, transcription, or scription of such a volume, and may do the enormity before New Year's day. Fear not, dear friend, you shall not have to read one line. Perhaps I shall send you an official copy, but I shall appeal to the tenderness of Jane Carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, for the benefit of us both. Where all writing is such a caricature of the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious? Meantime, I think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments. I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs. Now I have Plato, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind. What news of Naseby and Worcester? CI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 August, 1845 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, which had been very long expected, has been in my hand above a month now; and still no answer sent to it. I thought of answering straightway; but the day went by, days went by;--and at length I decided to wait till my insupportable Burden (the "Stupidity of Two Centuries" as I call it, which is a heavy load for one man!) were rolled off my shoulders, and I could resume the habit of writing Letters, which has almost left me for many months. By the unspeakable blessing of Heaven that consummation has now arrived, about four days ago I wrote my last word on _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches;_ and one of the earliest uses I make of my recovered freedom is to salute you again. The Book is nearly printed: two big volumes; about a half of it, I think, my own; the real utterances of the man Oliver Cromwell once more legible to earnest men. Legible really to an unexpected extent: for the Book took quite an unexpected figure in my hands; and is now a kind of Life of Oliver, the best that circumstances would permit me to do:-- whether either I or England shall be, in my time, fit for a better, remains submitted to the Destinies at present. I have tied up the whole Puritan Paper-Litter (considerable masses of it still unburnt) with tight strings, and hidden it at the bottom of my deepest repositories: there shall _it,_ if Heaven please, lie dormant for a time and times. Such an element as I have been in, no human tongue can give account of. The disgust of my Soul has been great; a really _pious_ labor: worth very little when I have done it; but the best I could do; and that is quite enough. I feel the liveliest gratitude to the gods that I have got out of it alive. The Book is very dull, but it is actually legible: all the ingenious faculty I had, and ten times as much would have been useful there, has been employed in elucidation; in saying, and chiefly in forbearing to say,--in annihilating continents of brutal wreck and dung: _Ach Gott!_--But in fact you will see it by and by; and then form your own conclusions about it. They are going to publish it in October, I find: I tried hard to get you a complete copy of the sheets by this Steamer; but it proves to be flatly impossible;--perhaps luckily; for I think you would have been bothering yourself with some new Bookseller negotiation about it; and that, as copyright and other matters now stand, is a thing I cannot recommend. --Enough of it now: only let all my silences and other shortcomings be explained thereby. I am now off for the North Country, for a snatch still at the small remnants of Summer, and a little free air and sunshine. I am really far from well, though I have been riding diligently for three months back, and doing what I could to help myself. Very glad shall I be, my Friend, to have some new utterances from you either in verse or in prose! What you say about the vast _imperfection_ of all modes of utterance is most true indeed. Let a man speak and sing, and do, and sputter and gesticulate as he may,--the meaning of him is most ineffectually shown forth, poor fellow; rather _indicated_ as if by straggling symbols, than _spoken_ or visually expressed! Poor fellow! So the great rule is, That he _have_ a good manful meaning, and then that he take what "mode of utterance" is honestly the readiest for him.-- I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; and give us a History of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in good _words_) of his Life and him! I do indeed.--But speak of what you will, you are welcome to me. Once more I say, No other voice in this wide waste world seems to my sad ear to be _speaking_ at all at present. The more is the pity for us. I forbid you to plague yourself any farther with those Philadelphia or other Booksellers. If you could hinder them to promulgate any copy of that frightful picture by Lawrence, or indeed any picture at all, I had rather stand as a shadow than as a falsity in the minds of my American friends: but this too we are prepared to encounter. And as for the money of these men,-- if they will pay it, good and welcome; if they will not pay it, let them keep it with what blessing there may be in it! I have your noble offices in that and in other such matters already unforgetably sure to me; and, in real fact, that is almost exactly the whole of valuable that could exist for me in the affair. Adieu, dear Friend. Write to me again; I will write again at more leisure. Yours always, T. Carlyle CII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 September, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I have seen Furness of Philadelphia, who was, last week, in Boston, and inquired of him what account I should send you of the new Philadelphia edition. "Has not Mr. Carey paid you?" he said.--No. "Then has he not paid Carlyle directly?" No, as I believe, or I should have heard of it.-- Furness replied, that the promised fifty pounds were sure, and that the debt would have been settled before this time, if Mr. Carey had lived. So as this is no longer a Three Blind Callenders' business of Arabian Nights, I shall rest secure. I have doubted whether the bad name which Philadelphia has gotten in these times would not have disquieted you in this long delay. If you have ever heard directly from Carey and Hart, you will inform me. I am to read to a society in Boston presently some lectures, --on Plato, or the Philosopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Sceptic; Shakespeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World;--if I dare, and much lecturing makes us incorrigibly rash. Perhaps, before I end it, my list will be longer, and the measure of presumption overflowed. I may take names less reverend than some of these,--but six lectures I have promised. I find this obligation usually a good spur to the sides of that dull horse I have charge of. But many of its advantages must be regarded at a long distance. I have heard nothing from you for a long time,--so may your writing prosper the more. I wish to hear, however, concerning you, and your house, and your studies, when there is little to tell. The steamers come so fast--to exchange cards would not be nothing. My wife and children and my mother are well. Peace and love to your household. --R.W. Emerson CIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I had hardly sent away my letter by the last steamer, when yours full of good news arrived. I greet you heartily on the achievement of your task, and the new days of freedom obtained and deserved. Happiest, first, that you can work, which seems the privilege of the great, and then, also, that thereby you can come at the sweetness of victory and rest. Yes, flee to the country, ride, run, leap, sit, spread yourself at large; and in all ways celebrate the immense benevolence of the Universe towards you; and never complain again of dyspepsia, crosses, or the folly of men; for in giving you this potent concentration, what has been withholden? I am glad with all men that a new book is made, that the gentle creation as well as the grosser goes ever on. Another month will bring it to me, and I shall know the secrets of these late silent years. Welcome the child of my friend! Why should I regret that I see you not, when you are forced thus intimately to discover yourself beyond the intimacy of conversation? But you should have sent me out the sheets by the last steamer, or a manuscript copy of the book. I do not know but Munroe would have printed it at once, and defied the penny press. And slow Time might have brought in his hands a most modest reward. I wrote you the other day the little I had to say on affairs. Clark, the financial Conscience, has never yet made any report, though often he promised. Half the year he lives out of Boston, and unless I go to his Bank I never see his face. I think he will not die till he have disburdened himself of this piece of arithmetic. I pray you to send me my copy of this book at the earliest hour, and to offer my glad congratulations to Jane Carlyle, on an occasion, I am sure, of great peace and relief to her spirit. And so farewell. --R.W. Emerson CIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 11 November, 1846 My Dear Emerson,--I have had two Letters from you since I wrote any; the latest of them was lying here for me when I returned, about three weeks ago; the other I had received in Scotland: it was only the last that demanded a special answer;--which, alas, I meant faithfully to give it, but did not succeed! With meet despatch I made the Bookseller get ready for you a Copy of the unpublished _Cromwell_ Book; hardly complete as yet, it was nevertheless put together, and even some kind of odious rudiments of a _Portrait_ were bound up with it; and the Packet inscribed with your address was put into Wiley and Putnam's hands in time for the Mail Steamer;--and I hope has duly arrived? If it have not, pray set the Booksellers a-hunting. Wiley and Putnam was the Carrier's name; this is all the indication I can give, but this, I hope, if indeed any prove needful, will be enough. One may hope you have the Book already in your hands, a fortnight before this reaches you, a month before any other Copy can reach America. In which case the Parcel, _without_ any Letter, must have seemed a little enigmatic to you! The reason was this: I miscounted the day of the month, unlucky that I was. Sitting down one morning with full purpose to write at large, and all my tools round me, I discover that it is no longer the third of November; that it is already the _fourth,_ and the American Mail-Packet has already lifted anchor! Irrevocable, irremediable! Nothing remained but to wait for the 18th;--and now, as you see, to take Time by the forelock,-- _queue,_ as we all know, he has none. My visit to Scotland was wholesome for me, tho' full of sadness, as the like always is. Thirty years mow away a Generation of Men. The old Hills, the old Brooks and Houses, are still there; but the Population has marched away, almost all; it is not there any more. I cannot enter into light talk with the survivors and successors; I withdraw into silence, and converse with the old dumb crags rather, in a melancholy and abstruse manner.--Thank God, my good old Mother is still there; old and frail, but still young of heart; as young and strong _there,_ I think, as ever. It is beautiful to see affection survive where all else is submitting to decay; the altar with its sacred fire still burning when the outer walls are all slowly crumbling; material Fate saying, "_They_ are mine!"--I read some insignificant Books; smoked a great deal of tobacco; and went moping about among the hills and hollow water-courses, somewhat like a shade in Hades. The Gospel which this World of Fact does preach to one differs considerably from the sugary twaddle one gets the offer of in Exeter-Hall and other Spouting-places! Of which, in fact, I am getting more and more weary; sometimes really impatient. It seems to me the reign of Cant and Spoonyism has about lasted long enough. Alas, in many respects, in this England I too often feel myself sorrowfully in a "minority of one";--if in the whole world, it amount to a minority of two, that is something! These words of Goethe often come into my mind, _"Verachtung ja Nicht- achtung."_ Lancashire, with its Titanic Industries, with its smoke and dirt, and brutal stupor to all but money and the five mechanical Powers, did not excite much admiration in me; considerably less, I think, than ever! Patience, and shuffle the cards! The Book on Cromwell is not to come out till the 22d of this month. For many weeks it has been a real weariness to me; my hope, always disappointed, that now is the last time I shall have any trade with it. Even since I began writing, there has been an Engraver here, requiring new indoctrination,--poor fellow! Nay, in about ten days it _must_ be over: let us not complain. I feel it well to be worth _nothing,_ except for the little fractions or intermittent fits of pious industry there really were in it; and my one wish is that the human species would be pleased to take it off my hands, and honestly let me hear no more about it! If it please Heaven, I will rest awhile still, and then try something better. In three days hence, my Wife and I are off to the Hampshire coast for a winter visit to kind friends there, if in such a place it will prosper long with us. The climate there is greatly better than ours; they are excellent people, well affected to us; and can be lived with, though of high temper and ways! They are the Lord Ashburtons, in fact; more properly the younger stratum of that house; partly a kind of American people,--who know Waldo Emerson, among other fine things, very well! I think we are to stay some three weeks: the bustle of moving is already begun. You promise us a new Book soon? Let it be soon, then. There are many persons here that will welcome it now. To one man here it is ever as an _articulate voice_ amid the infinite cackling and cawing. That remains my best definition of the effect it has on me. Adieu, my friend. Good be with you and your Household always. _Vale._ --T.C. CV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 January, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I received your Letter* by the last Packet three or four days ago: this is the last day of answering, the monthly Packet sails towards you again from Liverpool tomorrow morning; and I am in great pressure with many writings, elsewhither and thither: therefore I must be very brief. I have just written to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia; his Draft (as I judge clearly by the Banker's speech and silence) is accepted, all right; and in fact, means _money_ at this time: for which I have written to thank him heartily. Do you very heartily thank Mr. Furness for me;--Furness and various friends, as Transatlantic matters now are, must accept a _silent_ gratitude from me. The speech of men and American hero-worshipers is grown such a babblement: in very truth, _silence_ is the thing that chiefly has meaning,--there or here.... --------- * Missing --------- To my very great astonishment, the Book _Cromwell_ proves popular here; and there is to be another edition very soon. Edition with improvements--for some fifty or so of new (not _all_ insignificant) Letters have turned up, and I must try to do something rational with them;--with which painful operation I am again busy. It will make the two volumes about _equal_ perhaps, --which will be one benefit! If any American possibility lie in this, I will take better care of it.--Alas, I have not got one word with you yet! Tell me of your Lectures;--of all things. Ever yours, T. Carlyle We returned from Hampshire exactly a week ago; never passed six so totally idle weeks in our lives.--Better in health a little? Perhaps. CVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 February, 1848 Dear Emerson,--One word to you before the Packet sail;--on business of my own, once more; in such a state of _haste_ as could hardly be greater. The Printers are upon me, and I have not a moment. Contrary to all human expectation, this Book on Cromwell proves salable to mankind here, and a second Edition is now going forward with all speed. The publication of the First has brought out from their recesses a _new_ heap of Cromwell Letters;--which have been a huge embarrassment to me; for they are highly unimportant for most part, and do not tend to alter or materially modify anything. Some Fifty or Sixty new Letters in all (many of them from Printed Books that had escaped me) the great majority, with others yet that may come in future time, I determine to print simply as an Appendix; but several too, I think about twenty in all, are to be fitted into the Text, chiefly in the early part of the First Volume, as tending to bring some matters into greater clearness there. I am busy with that even now; sunk deep into the Dust-abysses again!--Of course I have made what provision I could for printing a Supplement, &c. to the possessors of the First Edition: but I find this Second will be the _Final_ standing Edition of the Book; decidedly preferable to the First; not to be touched by me _again,_ except on very good cause indeed. New letters, except they expressly contradict me, shall go at once into the back apartment, or Appendix, in future. The Printers have sent me some five or six sheets, they send me hitherto a sheet daily; but perhaps there are not above three or two in a perfect state: so I trouble you with none of them by this Packet. But by next Packet (3d of March), unless I hear to the contrary, I will send you all the Sheets that are ready; and so by the following Packets, till we are out of it;--that you, on the scene there, may do with them once for all whatsoever you like. If _nothing_ can be done with them, believe me I shall be very glad of that result. But if you can so much as oblige any honest Bookseller of your or my acquaintance by the gift of them, let it be done; let Pirates and ravenous Bipeds of Prey be excluded from participating: that of itself will be a comfortable and a proper thing!--You are hereby authorized to promulgate in any way you please, That the Second Edition will be augmented, corrected, as aforesaid; and that Mr. (Any Son of Adam you please to name) is, so far as I have any voice in the matter, appointed by me, to the exclusion of all and sundry others on what pretext soever, to print and vend the same to my American Friends. And so it stands; and the Sheets (probably near thirty in number) will be out with the March Packet:-- and if nothing can come of it, I for one shall be very glad! The Book is to be in Three Volumes now; the first ends at p. 403, Vol. I.; the third begins at p. 155, Vol. II., of the present edition. What are you doing? Write to me: how the Lectures went, how all things went and go! We are over head and ears in Anti-Corn-Law here; the Aristocracy struck almost with a kind of horror at sight of that terrible Millocracy, rising like a huge hideous Frankenstein up in Lancashire,--seemingly with boundless ready- money in its pocket, and a very fierce humor in its stomach! To me it is as yet almost uglier than the Aristocracy; and I will not fire guns when this small victory is gained; I will recommend a day of Fasting rather, that such a victory required such gaining. Adieu, my Friend. Is it likely we shall meet in "Oregon," think you? That would be a beautiful affair, on the part of the most enlightened Nation! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 March, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I must write you a word before this Packet go, tho' my haste is very great. I received your two Newspapers (price only twopence); by the same Ship there came, and reached me some days later, a Letter from Mr. Everett enclosing the _Cromwell_ portions of the same printed-matter, clipt out by scissors; written, it appeared, by Mr. Everett's nephew; some of whose remarks, especially his wish that I might once be in New England, and see people "praying," amused me much! The Cotton Letter, &c., I have now got to the bottom of; Birch's copy is in the Museum here,--a better edition than I had. Of "Levered" and the other small American Documents--alas, I get cartloads of the like or better tumbled down at my door, and my chief duty is to front them resolutely with a _shovel._ "Ten thousand tons" is but a small estimate for the quantity of loose and indurated lumber I have had to send sounding, on each hand of me, down, down to the eternal deeps, never to trouble _me_ more! The jingle of it, as it did at last get under way, and go down, was almost my one consolation in those unutterable operations.--I am again over head and ears; but shall be out soon: never to return more. By this Packet, according to volunteer contract, there goes out by the favor of your Chapman a number of sheets, how many I do not exactly know, of the New Edition: Chapman First and Chapman Second (yours and mine) have undertaken to manage the affair for this month and for the following months;--many thanks to them both for taking it out of my hands. What you are to do with the Article you already know. If no other customer present himself, can you signify to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia that the sheets are much at his service,--his conduct on another occasion having given him right to such an acknowledgment from me? Or at any rate, _you_ will want a new Copy of this Book; and can retain the sheets for that object.--Enough of them. From Mr. Everett I learn that your Boston Lectures have been attended with renown enough: when are the Lectures themselves to get to print? I read, last night, an Essay on you, by a kind of "Young Scotland," as we might call it, in an Edinburgh Magazine; very fond of you, but shocked that you were Antichristian:-- really not so bad. The stupidities of men go crossing one another; and miles down, at the bottom of all, there is a little veinlet of sense found running at last! If you see Mr. Everett, will you thank him for his kind remembrance of me, till I find leisure (as I have vainly hoped today to do) to thank him more in form. A dignified, compact kind of man; whom I remember with real pleasure. Jargon abounds in our Newspapers and Parliament Houses at present;--with which "the present Editor," and indeed I think the Public at large, takes little concern, beyond the regret of being _bored_ by it. The Corn-Laws are going very quietly the way of all deliriums; and then there will at least be one delirium less, and we shall start upon new ones. Not a word more today, but my blessings and regards. God be with you and yours always. Ever your affectionate, T. Carlyle CVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 April, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Your two Letters* have both come to hand, the last of them only three days ago. One word in answer before the Packet sail; one very hasty word, rather than none. ----------- * Missing. ---------- You have made the best of Bargains for me; once again, with the freest contempt of trouble on my behalf; which I cannot sufficiently wonder at! Apparently it is a fixed-idea of yours that the Bibliopolic Genus shall not cheat me; and you are decided to make it good. Very well: let it be so, in as far as the Fates will. Certainly I will conform in all points to this Wiley-and-Putnam Treaty, and faithfully observe the same. The London Wileys have not yet sent me any tidings; but when they do, I will say Your terms on the other side of the sea are the Law to us, and it is a finished thing.--No sheets, I think, will go by this mid-month Packet, the Printer and Bookseller were bidden not mind that: but by the Packet of May 3d, I hope the Second Volume will go complete; and, if the Printers make speed, almost the whole remainder may go by the June one. There is to be a "Supplement to the First Edition," containing all the new matter that is _separable:_ of this too the Wileys shall have their due Copy to reprint: it is what I could do to keep my faith with purchasers of the First Edition here; but, on the whole, there will be no emulating of the Second Edition except by a reprint of the whole of it; changes great and small have had to introduce themselves everywhere, as these new Letters were woven in.--I hope before May 3d I shall have ascertained whether it will not be the simplest way (as with my present light it clearly appears) to give the sheets direct to the Wiley and Putnam here, and let _them_ send them? In any case, the cargo shall come one way or other. Furthermore,--Yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness, as the sun shall please to paint it: there has often been talk of getting me to that establishment, but I never yet could go. If it be possible, we will have this also ready for the 3d of May. _Provided_ you, as you promise, go and do likewise! A strange moment that, when I look upon your dead shadow again; instead of the living face, which remains unchanged within me, enveloped in beautiful clouds, and emerging now and then into strange clearness! Has your head grown grayish? On me are "gray hairs here and there,"--and I do "know it." I have lived half a century in this world, fifty years complete on the 4th of December last: that is a solemn fact for me! Few and evil have been the days of the years of thy servant,--few for any good that was ever done in them. _Ay de mi!_ Within late weeks I have got my Horse again; go riding through the loud torrent of vehiculatory discords, till I get into the fields, into the green lanes; which is intrinsically a great medicine to me. Most comfortless riding it is, with a horse of such _kangaroo_ disposition, till I do get to the sight of my old ever-young green-mantled mother again; but for an hour there, it is a real blessing to me. I have company sometimes, but generally prefer solitude, and a dialogue with the trees and clouds. Alas, the speech of men, especially the witty-speech of men, is oftentimes afflictive to me: "in the wide Earth," I say sometimes with a sigh, "there is none but Emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!" All "Literature" too is become I cannot tell you how contemptible to me. On the whole, one's blessedness is to do as Oliver: Work while the sun is up; work _well_ as if Eternities depended on it; and then sleep,--if under the guano-mountains of Human Stupor, if handsomely _forgotten_ all at once, that latter is the handsome thing! I have often thought what W. Shakespeare would say, were he to sit one night in a "Shakespeare Society," and listen to the empty twaddle and other long-eared melody about him there!--Adieu, my Friend. I fear I have forgotten many things: at all events, I have forgotten the inexorable flight of the minutes, which are numbered out to me at present. Ever yours, T. Carlyle I think I recognize the Inspector of Wild-beasts, in the little Boston Newspaper you send!* A small hatchet-faced, gray- eyed, good-humored Inspector, who came with a Translated Lafontaine; and took his survey not without satisfaction? Comfortable too how rapidly he fathomed the animal, having just poked him up a little. _Ach Gott!_ Man is forever interesting to men;--and all men, even Hatchet-faces, are globular and complete! --------- * This probably refers to a letter of Mr. Elizur Wright's, describing a visit to Carlyle. --------- CIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 April, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Here is the _Photograph_ going off for you by Bookseller Munroe of Boston; the Sheets of _Cromwell,_ all the second and part of the last volume, are to go direct to New York: both Parcels by the Putnam conveyance. For Putnam has been here since I wrote, making large confirmations of what you conveyed to me; and large Proposals of an ulterior scope,--which will involve you in new trouble for me. But it is trouble you will not grudge, inasmuch as it promises to have some issue of moment; at all events the negotiation is laid entirely into your hands: therefore I must with all despatch explain to you the essentials of it, that you may know what Wiley says when he writes to you from New York. Mr. Putnam, really a very intelligent, modest, and reputable- looking little fellow, got at last to sight of me about a week ago;--explained with much earnestness how the whole origin of the mistake about the First Edition of _Cromwell_ had lain with Chapman, my own Bookseller (which in fact I had already perceived to be the case); and farther set forth, what was much more important, that he and his Partner were, and had been, ready and desirous to _make good_ said mistake, in the amplest, most satisfactory manner,--by the ready method of paying me _now_ ten percent on the selling-price of all the copies of _Cromwell_ sent into the market by them; and had (as I knew already) covenanted with you to do so, in a clear, _bona-fide,_ and to you satisfactory manner, in regard to that First Edition: in consequence of which you had made a bargain with them of like tenor in regard to the Second. To all which I could only answer, that such conduct was that of men of honor, and would, in all manner of respects, be satisfactory to me. Wherefore the new Sheets of _Cromwell_ should now go by _his_ Package direct to New York, and the other little Parcel for you he could send to Munroe:--that as one consequence? "Yes, surely," intimated he; but there were other consequences, of more moment, behind that. Namely, that they wanted (the Wiley & Putnam house did) to publish certain other Books of mine, the List of which I do not now recollect; under similar conditions: viz. that I was to certify, in a line or two prefixable to each Book, that I had read it over in preparation for their Printer, and did authorize them to print and sell it;--in return for which Ten percent on the sale-price (and all manner of facilities, volunteered to convince even Clark of Boston, the Lynx-eyed Friend now busy for me looking through millstones, that all was straight, and said Ten percent actually paid on every copy sold); This was Putnam's Offer, stated with all transparency, and in a way not to be misunderstood by either of us. To which I answered that the terms seemed clear and square and every way good, and such as I could comply with heartily,--so far as I was at liberty, but not farther. Not farther: for example, there was Hart of Philadelphia (I think the Wileys do not want the _Miscellanies_), there were Munroe, Little and Brown, &c.;-- in short, there was R.W. Emerson, who knew in all ways how far I was free and not free, and who would take care of my integrity and interest at once, and do what was just and prudent; and to _him_ I would refer the whole question, and whatever he engaged for, that and no other than that I would do. So that you see how it is, and what a coil you have again got into! Mr. Putnam would have had some "Letter," some "exchange of Letters," to the effect above-stated: but I answered, "It was better we did not write at all till the matter was clear and liquid with you, and then we could very swiftly write,--and act. I would apprise you how the matter stood, and expect your answer, and bid you covenant with Mr. Wiley what you found good, prompt I to fulfil whatever _you_ undertook for me."--This _is_ a true picture of the affair, the very truest I can write in haste; and so I leave it with you-- _Ach Gott!_ If your Photograph succeed as well as mine, I shall be almost _tragically_ glad of it. This of me is far beyond all pictures; really very like: I got Laurence the Painter to go with me, and he would not let the people off till they had actually made a likeness. My Wife has got another, which she asserts to be much "more amiable-looking," and even liker!* O my Friend, it is a strange Phantasmagory of a Fact, this huge, tremendous World of ours, Life of ours! Do you bethink you of Craigenputtock, and the still evening there? I could burst into tears, if I had that habit: but it is of no use. The Cromwell business will be ended about the end of May,--I do hope! You say not a word of your own affairs: I have vaguely been taught to look for some Book shortly;--what of it? We are well, or tolerably well, and the summer is come: adieu. Blessings on you and yours. --T.C. ---------- * The engraved portrait in the first volume of this Correspondence is from a photograph taken from this daguerrotype. ---------- CX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 May, 1846 Dear Friend,--I daily expect the picture, and wonder--so long as I have wished it--I had never asked it before. I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the house- mates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous. I must sit again; or, as true Elizabeth Hoar said, I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre and iodine delight in. I am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, I must sit to a good crayon sketcher, Mr. Cheney, and send you his draught.... Good rides to you and the longest escapes from London streets. I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had,--a wood-lot. Last fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond,--a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons. My lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily. In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. My two little girls know the road now, though it is nearly two miles from my house, and find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove, and with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties, all overgrown with mullein, which the Irish who built the railroad left behind them. At a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. Thereon I think to place a hut; perhaps it will have two stories and be a petty tower, looking out to Monadnoc and other New Hampshire Mountains. There I hope to go with book and pen when good hours come. I shall think there, a fortnight might bring you from London to Walden Pond.--Life wears on, and do you say the gray hairs appear? Few can so well afford them. The black have not hung over a vacant brain, as England and America know; nor, white or black, will it give itself any Sabbath for many a day henceforward, as I believe. What have we to do with old age? Our existence looks to me more than ever initial. We have come to see the ground and look up materials and tools. The men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitring. We shall yet have a right work, and kings for competitors. With ever affectionate remembrance to your wife, your friend, --R.W. Emerson CXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 May, 1846 My Dear Friend,--It is late at night and I have postponed writing not knowing but that my parcel would be ready to go,--and now a public meeting and the speech of a rarely honest and eloquent man have left me but a span of time for the morning's messenger. The photograph came safely, to my thorough content. I have what I have wished. This head is to me out of comparison more satisfying than any picture. I confirm my recollections and I make new observations; it is life to life. Thanks to the Sun. This artist remembers what every other forgets to report, and what I wish to know, the true sculpture of the features, the angles, the special organism, the rooting of the hair, the form and the placing of the head. I am accustomed to expect of the English a securing of the essentials in their work, and the sun does that, and you have done it in this portrait, which gives me much to think and feel.* I was instantly stirred to an emulation of your love and punctuality, and, last Monday, which was my forty-third birthday, I went to a new Daguerreotypist, who took much pains to make his picture right. I brought home three shadows not agreeable to my own eyes. The machine has a bad effect on me. My wife protests against the imprints as slanderous. My friends say they look ten years older, and, as I think, with the air of a decayed gentleman touched with his first paralysis. However I got yesterday a trusty vote or two for sending one of them to you, on the ground that I am not likely to get a better. But it now seems probable that it will not get cased and into the hands of Harnden in time for the steamer tomorrow. It will then go by that of the 16th. --------- * From Emerson's Diary, May 23, 1846:--"In Carlyle's head (photograph), which came last night, how much appears! How unattainable this truth to any painter! Here have I the inevitable traits which the sun forgets not to copy, and which I thirst to see, but which no painter remembers to give me. Here have I the exact sculpture, the form of the head, the rooting of the hair, thickness of the lips, the man that God made. And all the Laurences and D'Orsays now serve me well as illustration. I have the form and organism, and can better spare the expression and color. What would I not give for a head of Shakespeare by the same artist? of Plato? of Demosthenes? Here I have the jutting brow, and the excellent shape of the head. And here the organism of the eye full of England, the valid eye, in which I see the strong executive talent which has made his thought available to the nations, whilst others as intellectual as he are pale and powerless. The photograph comes dated 25 April, 1846, and he writes, 'I am fifty years old."' --------- I am heartily glad that you are in direct communication with these really energetic booksellers, Wiley and Putnam. I understood from Wiley's letter to me, weeks ago, that their ambition was not less than to have a monopoly of your books. I answered, it is very desirable for us too; saving always the rights of Mr. Hart in Philadelphia.--I told him you had no interest in Munroe's _Sartor,_ which from the first was his own adventure, and Little and Brown had never reprinted _Past and Present_ or _Chartism._ The _French Revolution, Past and Present, Chartism,_ and the _Sartor,_ I see no reason why they should not have. Munroe and L. & B. have no real claims, and I will speak to them. But there is one good particular in Putnam's proffer to you, which Wiley has not established in his (first and last) agreement with me, namely, that you shall have an interest in what is already sold of their first edition of _Cromwell._ By all means close with Putnam of the good mind, exempting only Hart's interest. I have no recent correspondence with Wiley and Putnam. And I greatly prefer that they should deal directly with you. Yet it were best to leave an American reference open for audit and umpirage to the stanch E.P. Clark of the New England Bank. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 June, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I have had two letters of yours, the last of them (31st May) only two days, and have seen a third written to Wiley of New York. Yesterday Putnam was here, and we made our bargain,--and are to have it signed this day at his Shop: two copies, one of which I mean to insert along with this, and give up to your or E.P. Clark's keeping. For, as you will see, I have appointed Clark my representative, economic plenipotentiary and factotum, if he will consent to act in that sublime capacity,-- subject always to your advice, to your control in all _ultra_- economic respects, of which you alone are cognizant of the circumstances or competent to give a judgment. Pray explain this with all lucidity to Mr. Clark: and endeavor to impress upon him that it is (to all appearance) a real affair of business we are now engaged in; that I would have him satisfy his own sharp eyes (by such methods as he finds convenient and sufficient, by examination at New York or how he can) that the conditions of this bargain _are_ fairly complied with by the New York Booksellers,--who promise "every facility for ascertaining _how many_ copies are printed," &c., &c.; and profess to be of the integrity of Israelites indeed, in all respects whatever! If so, it may be really useful to us. And I would have Mr. Clark, if he will allow me to look upon him as my _man of business_ in this affair, take reasonable pains, be at any reasonable expense, &c. (by himself or by deputy) to ascertain that it is so in very fact! In that case, if something come of it, we shall get the something and be thankful; if nothing come of it, we shall have the pleasure of caring nothing about it.--I have given Putnam two Books (_Heroes_ and _Sartor_) ready, corrected; the others I think will follow in the course of next month;--F. _Revolution_ waits only for an Index which my man is now busy with. The _Cromwell,_ Supplement and all, he has now got,--published two days ago, after sorrowful delays. Your Copy will be ready _this afternoon,_--too late, I fear, by just one day: it will lie, in that case, for a fortnight, and then come. Wiley will find that he has no resource but to reprint the Book; he will reprint the Supplement too, in justice to former purchasers; but this is the _final_ form of the Book, this second edition; and to this all readers of it will come at last. We expect the Daguerreotype by next Steamer; but you take good care not to prepossess us on its behalf! In fact, I believe, the only satisfactory course will be to get a Sketch done too; if you have any Painter that can manage it tolerably, pray set about that, as the true solution of the business--out of the two together we shall make a likeness for ourselves that will do. Let the Lady Wife be satisfied with it; then we shall pronounce it genuine!-- I envy you your forest-work, your summer umbrages, and clear silent lakes. The weather here is getting insupportable to us for heat. Indeed, if rain do not come within two weeks, I believe we must wind up our affairs, and make for some shady place direct:--Scotland is perhaps likeliest; but nothing yet is fixed: you shall duly hear.--Directly after this, I set off for Putnam's in Waterloo Place; sign his paper there; stick one copy under a cover for you, and despatch.--Send me word about all that you are doing and thinking. Be busy, be still and happy. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 July, 1846 My Dear Carlyle,--I received by the last steamer your letter with the copy of the covenant with Wiley and Putnam, which seems unexceptionable. I like the English side of those men very well; that is, Putnam seems eager to stand well and rightly with his fellow-men. Wiley at New York it was who provoked me, last winter, to write him an angry letter when he declared his intention to reprint our new matter without paying for it. When he thought better of it, and came to terms, I had not got so far as to be affectionate, and have never yet resumed the correspondence I had with him a year ago, about my own books. I hope you found my letter to them, though I do not remember which, properly cross. I believe I only enumerated difficulties. I have talked with Little and Brown about their editions of _Chartism,_ and _Past and Present;_ they have made no new sales of the books since they were printed on by the pirates, and say that the books lie still on their shelves, as also do a few copies of the London and Boston edition of _French Revolution._ I prayed them immediately to dispose of these things by auction, or at their trade sales, at whatever prices would sell them, and leave the market open for W. & P.; which they promise to do. To Munroe I went, and learn that he has bought the stereotype- plates of the New York pirate edition of _Sartor,_ and means to print it immediately. He is willing to stop if W. & P. will buy of him his plates at their cost. I wrote so to them, but they say no. And I have not spoken again with Munroe. I was in town yesterday, and carried the copy of the Covenant to E.P. Clark, and read him your message. His Bank occupies him entirely just now, for his President is gone to Europe, and Clark's duties are the more onerous. But finding that the new responsibilities delegated to him are light and tolerable, and, at any rate, involve no retrospection, he very cheerfully signified his readiness to serve you, and I graciously forbore all allusions to my heap of booksellers' accounts which he has had in keeping now --for years, I believe. He told me that he hopes at no distant day to have a house of his own,--he and his wife are always at board,--and, whenever that happens, he intends to devote a chamber in it to his "Illustrations of Mr. Carlyle's Writings," which, I believe, I have told you before, are a very large and extraordinary collection of prints, pictures, books, and manuscripts. I sent you the promised Daguerrotype with all unwillingness, by the steamer, I think of 16 June. On 1 August, Margaret Fuller goes to England and the Continent; and I shall not fail to write to you by her, and you must not fail to give a good and faithful interview to this wise, sincere, accomplished, and most entertaining of women. I wish to bespeak Jane Carlyle's friendliest ear to one of the noblest of women. We shall send you no other such. I was lately inquired of again by an agent of a huge Boston society of young men, whether Mr. Carlyle would not come to America and read Lectures, on some terms which they could propose. I advised them to make him an offer, and a better one than they had in view. Joy and Peace to you in your new freedom. --R.W.E. CXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 17 July, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Since I wrote last to you, I think, with the Wiley-and-Putnam Covenant enclosed,--the Photograph, after some days of loitering at the Liverpool Custom-house, came safe to hand. Many thanks to you for this punctuality: this poor Shadow, it is all you could do at present in that matter! But it must not rest there, no. This Image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! First of all, it is a bad Photograph; no _eyes_ discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favorable lights then, alas, Time itself and Oblivion must have been busy. I could not at first, nor can I yet with perfect decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old Emerson, that lighted on us from the Blue, at Craigenputtock, long ago,--_eheu!_ Here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, full of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, good humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades, as of the valley of Death; seems smiling on me as if in mockery. "Dost know me, friend? I am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee;--I belong already to the Eternities, and thou recognizest me not!" On the whole, it is the strangest feeling I have:--and practically the thing will be, that you get us by the earliest opportunity some _living_ pictorial sketch, chalk- drawing or the like, from a trustworthy hand; and send _it_ hither to represent you. Out of the two I shall compile for myself a likeness by degrees: but as for this present, we cannot put up with it at all; to my Wife and me, and to sundry other parties far and near that have interest in it, there is no satisfaction in this. So there will be nothing for you but compliance, by the first fair chance you have: furthermore, I bargain that the _Lady_ Emerson have, within reasonable limits, a royal veto in the business (not absolute, if that threaten extinction to the enterprise, but absolute within the limits of possibility); and that she take our case in hand, and graciously consider what can and shall be done. That will answer, I think. Of late weeks I have been either idle, or sunk in the sorrowfulest cobbling of old shoes again; sorrowfully reading over old Books for the Putnams and Chapmans, namely. It is really painful, looking in one's own old face; said "old face" no longer a thing extant now!--Happily I have at last finished it; the whole Lumber-troop with clothes duly brushed (_French Revolution_ has even got an Index too) travels to New York in the Steamer that brings you this. _Quod faustum sit:_--or indeed I do not much care whether it be faustum or not; I grow to care about an astonishingly small number of things as times turn with me! Man, all men seem radically _dumb;_ jabbering mere jargons and noises from the teeth outwards; the inner meaning of them,-- of them and of me, poor devils,--remaining shut, buried forever. If almost all Books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), I sometimes in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with us! Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of them altogether,--their fortunate successors would find a most improved world to start upon! For Cant does lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an Augean Stable with the poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our eyes again! When I see painful Professors of Greek, poring in their sumptuous Oxfords over dead _Greek_ for a thousand years or more, and leaving live _English_ all the while to develop itself under charge of Pickwicks and Sam Wellers, as if it were nothing and the other were all things: this, and the like of it everywhere, fills me with reflections! Good Heavens, will the people not come out of their wretched Old-Clothes Monmouth-Streets, Hebrew and other; but lie there dying of the basest pestilence,--dying and as good as dead! On the whole, I am very weary of most "Literature":--and indeed, in very sorrowful, abstruse humor otherwise at present. For remedy to which I am, in these very hours, preparing for a sally into the green Country and deep silence; I know not altogether how or whitherward as yet; only that I must tend towards Lancashire; towards Scotland at last. My Wife already waits me in Lancashire; went off, in rather poor case, much burnt by the hot Town, some ten days ago; and does not yet report much improvement. I will write to you somewhere in my wanderings. The address, "Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B.," if you chance to write directly or soon after this arrives, will, likely, be the shortest: at any rate, that, or "Cheyne Row" either, is always sure enough to find me in a day or two after trying. By a kind of accident I have fallen considerably into American History in these days; and am even looking out for American Geography to help me. Jared Sparks, Marshall, &c. are hickory and buckskin; but I do catch a credible trait of human life from them here and there; Michelet's genial champagne _froth,_--alas, I could find no fact in it that would stand handling; and so have broken down in the middle of _La France,_ and run over to hickory and Jared for shelter! Do you know Beriah Green?* A body of Albany newspapers represent to me the people quarreling in my name, in a very vague manner, as to the propriety of being "governed," and Beriah's is the only rational voice among them. Farewell, dear Friend. Speedy news of you! --T. Carlyle --------- * The Reverend Beriah Green, President for some years of Oneida Institute, a manual-labor school at Whitesboro, N.Y. He was an active reformer, and a leading member of the National Convention which met in Philadelphia, December 4th, 1833, to form the American Antislavery Society. He died in 1874, seventy-nine years old. --------- CXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1846 My Dear Friend,--The new edition of _Cromwell_ in its perfect form and in excellent dress, and the copy of the Appendix, came munificently safe by the last steamer. When thought is best, then is there most,--is a faith of which you alone among writing men at this day will give me experience. If it is the right frankincense and sandal-wood, it is so good and heavenly to give me a basketful and not a pinch. I read proudly, a little at a time, and have not yet got through the new matter. But I think neither the new letters nor the commentary could be spared. Wiley and Putnam shall do what they can, and we will see if New England will not come to reckon this the best chapter in her Pentateuch. I send this letter by Margaret Fuller, of whose approach I believe I wrote you some word. There is no foretelling how you visited and crowded English will like our few educated men or women, and in your learned populace my luminaries may easily be overlooked. But of all the travelers whom you have so kindly received from me, I think of none, since Alcott went to England, whom I so much desired that you should see and like, as this dear old friend of mine. For two years now I have scarcely seen her, as she has been at New York, engaged by Horace Greeley as a literary editor of his _Tribune_ newspaper. This employment was made acceptable to her by good pay, great local and personal conveniences of all kinds, and unbounded confidence and respect from Greeley himself, and all other parties connected with this influential journal (of 30,000 subscribers, I believe). And Margaret Fuller's work as critic of all new books, critic of the drama, of music, and good arts in New York, has been honorable to her. Still this employment is not satisfactory to me. She is full of all nobleness, and with the generosity native to her mind and character appears to me an exotic in New England, a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate. She is, I suppose, the earliest reader and lover of Goethe in this Country, and nobody here knows him so well. Her love too of whatever is good in French, and specially in Italian genius, give her the best title to travel. In short, she is our citizen of the world by quite special diploma. And I am heartily glad that she has an opportunity of going abroad that pleases her. Mr. Spring, a merchant of great moral merits, (and, as I am informed, an assiduous reader of your books,) has grown rich, and resolves to see the world with his wife and son, and has wisely invited Miss Fuller to show it to him. Now, in the first place, I wish you to see Margaret when you are in special good humor, and have an hour of boundless leisure. And I entreat Jane Carlyle to abet and exalt and secure this satisfaction to me. I need not, and yet perhaps I need say, that M.F. is the safest of all possible persons who ever took pen in hand. Prince Metternich's closet not closer or half so honorable. In the next place, I should be glad if you can easily manage to show her the faces of Tennyson and of Browning. She has a sort of right to them both, not only because she likes their poetry, but because she has made their merits widely known among our young people. And be it known to my friend Jane Carlyle, whom, if I cannot see, I delight to name, that her visitor is an immense favorite in the parlor, as well as in the library, in all good houses where she is known. And so I commend her to you. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 December, 1846 Dear Emerson,--This is the 18th of the month, and it is a frightful length of time, I know not how long, since I wrote to you,--sinner that I am! Truly we are in no case for paying debts at present, being all sick more or less, from the hard cold weather, and in a state of great temporary puddle but, as the adage says, "one should own debt, and crave days";--therefore accept a word from me, such as it may be. I went, as usual, to the North Country in the Autumn; passed some two extremely disconsolate months,--for all things distress a wretched thin-skinned creature like me,--in that old region, which is at once an Earth and a Hades to me, an unutterable place, now that I have become mostly a _ghost_ there! I saw Ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed the _Devil's_ leading, listened namely to blustering shallow- violent Impostors and Children of Darkness, saying, "Yes, we know _you,_ you are Children of Light!"--and so has fallen all out at elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its _potatoes_ is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,--say into the Medea's-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid _dissolution;_ whether into new _youth,_ into sound healthy life, or into eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know! Daniel O'Connell stood bodily before me, in his green Mullaghmart Cap; haranguing his retinue of Dupables: certainly the most _sordid_ Humbug I have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the miseries that can befall a Nation. I also conversed with Young Ireland in a confidential manner; for Young Ireland, really meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O'Connellism and the _Old_ Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with _lies;_ but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a _tongue,_ people used to know!--Ireland was not the place to console my sorrows. I returned home very sad out of Ireland;--and indeed have remained one of the saddest, idlest, most useless of Adam's sons ever since; and do still remain so. I care not to _write_ anything more,--so it seems to me at present. I am in my vacant interlunar cave (I suppose that is the truth);--and I ought to wrap my mantle round me, and lie, if dark, _silent_ also. But, alas, I have wasted almost all your poor sheet first!-- Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the Springs too were favorites. But, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that Gospel of Fraternity, Benevolence, and _new_ Heaven-on-Earth, preached forth by all manner of "advanced" creatures, from George Sand to Elihu Burritt, in these days; that in fact the said Carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as poisonous cant,--_sweetness_ of sugar-of-lead,--a detestable _phosphorescence_ from the dead body of a Christianity, that would not admit itself to be dead, and lie buried with all its unspeakable putrescences, as a venerable dead one ought!--Surely detestable enough.--To all which Margaret listened with much good nature; though of course with sad reflections not a few.*--She is coming back to us, she promises. Her dialect is very vernacular,--extremely exotic in the London climate. If she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of New-Era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connection here, and be very useful to herself and others. I could not show her Alfred (he has been here since) nor Landor: but surely if I can I will,--that or a hundred times as much as that,--when she returns.--They tell me you are about collecting your Poems. Well, though I do not approve of rhyme at all, yet it is impossible Emerson in rhyme or prose can put down any thought that was in his heart but I should wish to get into mine. So let me have the Book as fast as may be. And do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound's sake! And excuse the Critic who seems to you so unmusical; and say, It is the nature of beast! Adieu, dear Friend: write to me, write to me. Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * Miss Fullers impressions of Carlyle, much to this effect, may be found in the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," Boston, 1852, Vol. II. pp. 184-190. --------- CXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 January, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--Your letter came with a blessing last week. I had already learned from Margaret Fuller, at Paris, that you had been very good and gentle to her;--brilliant and prevailing, of course, but, I inferred, had actually restrained the volleys and modulated the thunder, out of true courtesy and goodness of nature, which was worthy of all praise in a spoiled conqueror at this time of day. Especially, too, she expressed a true recognition and love of Jane Carlyle; and thus her visit proved a solid satisfaction; to me, also, who think that few people have so well earned their pleasures as she. She wrote me a long letter; she has been very happy in England, and her time and strength fully employed. Her description of you and your discourse (which I read with lively curiosity also) was the best I have had on that subject. I tried hard to write you by the December steamer, to tell you how forward was my book of Poems; but a little affair makes me much writing. I chanced to have three or four items of business to despatch, when the steamer was ready to go, and you escaped hearing of them. I am the trustee of Charles Lane, who came out here with Alcott and bought land, which, though sold, is not paid for. Somebody or somebodies in Liverpool and Manchester* have proposed once or twice, with more or less specification, that I should come to those cities to lecture. And who knows but I may come one day? Steam is strong, and Liverpool is near. I should find my account in the strong inducement of a new audience to finish pieces which have lain waiting with little hope for months or years. ---------- * Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had made the acquaintance of Emerson at Edinburgh, in 1833, was his Manchester correspondent. His memorial volume on Emerson contains an interesting record of their relations. ---------- Ah then, if I dared, I should be well content to add some golden hours to my life in seeing you, now all full-grown and acknowledged amidst your own people,--to hear and to speak is so little yet so much. But life is dangerous and delicate. I should like to see your solid England. The map of Britain is good reading for me. Then I have a very ignorant love of pictures, and a curiosity about the Greek statues and stumps in the British Museum. So beware of me, for on that distant day when I get ready I shall come. Long before this time you ought to have received from John Chapman a copy of Emerson's Poems, so called, which he was directed to send you. Poor man, you need not open them. I know all you can say. I printed them, not because I was deceived into a belief that they were poems, but because of the softness or hardness of heart of many friends here who have made it a point to have them circulated.* Once having set out to print, I obeyed the solicitations of John Chapman, of an ill-omened street in London, to send him the book in manuscript, for the better securing of copyright. In printing them here I have corrected the most unpardonable negligences, which negligences must be all stereotyped under his fair London covers and gilt paper to the eyes of any curious London reader; from which recollection I strive to turn away. --------- * In the rough draft the following sentence comes in here "I reckon myself a good beginning of a poet, very urgent and decided in my bent, and in some coming millennium I shall yet sing." --------- Little and Brown have just rendered me an account, by which it appears that we are not quite so well off as was thought last summer, when they said they had sold at auction the balance of your books which had been lying unsold. It seems now that the books supposed to be sold were not all taken, and are returned to them; one hundred _Chartism,_ sixty-three _Past and Present._ Yet we are to have some eighty-three dollars ($83.68), which you shall probably have by the next steamer. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 March, 1847 Dear Emerson,--The Steamer goes tomorrow; I must, though in a very dim condition, have a little word for you conveyed by it. In the miscellaneous maw of that strange Steamer shall lie, among other things, a friendly _word!_ Your very kind Letter lay waiting me here, some ten days ago; doubly welcome, after so long a silence. We had been in Hampshire, with the Barings, where we were last year;--some four weeks or more; totally idle: our winter had been, and indeed still is, unusually severe; my Wife's health in consequence was sadly deranged; but this idleness, these Isle-of-Wight sea- breezes, have brought matters well round again; so we cannot grudge the visit or the idleness, which otherwise too might have its uses. Alas, at this time my normal state is to be altogether _idle,_ to look out upon a very lonely universe, full of grim sorrow, full of splendor too; and not to know at all, for the moment, on what side I am to attack it again!--I read your Book of Poems all faithfully, at Bay House (our Hampshire quarters); where the obstinate people,--with whom you are otherwise, in prose, a first favorite,--foolishly _refused_ to let me read aloud; foolishly, for I would have made it mostly all plain by commentary:--so I had to read for myself; and can say, in spite of my hard-heartedness, I did gain, though under impediments, a real satisfaction and some tone of the Eternal Melodies sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in my ear! This is fact; a truth in Natural History; from which you are welcome to draw inferences. A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily _far of,_ as it were) of a valiant, genuine Human Soul: this, even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for. But indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing radiances which affect me like the light of the _stars._ It is so: I wish you would become _concrete,_ and write in prose the straightest way; but under any form I must put up with you; that is my lot.--Chapman's edition, as you probably know, is very beautiful. I believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers in England to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study the same: as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of _Tradition,_ and mere "Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith," as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;--in a word, that Goethe-and- Schiller's _"Kunst"_ has far more brotherhood with Pusey-and- Newman's _Shovelhattery,_ and other the like deplorable phenomena, than it is in the least aware of! I beg you take warning: I am more serious in this than you suppose. But no, you will not; you whistle lightly over my prophecies, and go your own stiff-necked road. Unfortunate man!-- I had read in the Newspapers, and even heard in speech from Manchester people, that you were certainly coming this very summer to lecture among us: but now it seems, in your Letter, all postponed into the vague again. I do not personally know your Manchester negotiators, but I know in general that they are men of respectability, insight, and activity; much connected with the lecturing department, which is a very growing one, especially in Lancashire, at present;--men likely, for the rest, to _fulfil_ whatsoever they may become engaged for to you. My own ignorant though confident guess, moreover, is, that you would, in all senses of the word, _succeed_ there; I think, also rather confidently, we could promise you an audience of British aristocracy in London here,--and of British commonalty all manner of audiences that you liked to stoop to. I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called --- bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the City, one evening,--upon Universal Peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. In a word, I do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: Much prurient curiosity, with some ingenuous love of wisdom, an element of real reverence for the same: everywhere a perfect openness to any man speaking in any measure things manful. Come, therefore; gird yourself together, and come. With little or no peradventure, you will realize what your modest hope is, and more;--and I, for my share of it, shall see you once again under this Sun! O Heavens, there _might_ be some good in that! Nay, if you will travel like a private quiet person, who knows but I, the most unlocomotive of mortals, might be able to escort you up and down a little; to look at many a thing along with you, and even to open my long- closed heart and speak about the same?--There is a spare-room always in this House for you,--in this heart, in these two hearts, the like: bid me hope in this enterprise, in all manner of ways where I can; and on the whole, get it rightly put together, and embark on it, and arrive! The good Miss Fuller has painted us all _en beau,_ and your smiling imagination has added new colors. We have not a triumphant life here; very far indeed from that, _ach Gott!_--as you shall see. But Margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here. Since she went, I have been reading some of her Papers in a new Book we have got: greatly superior to all I knew before; in fact the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic mind;--altogether unique, so far as I know, among the Writing Women of this generation; rare enough too, God knows, among the writing Men. She is very narrow, sometimes; but she is truly high: honor to Margaret, and more and more good-speed to her.--Adieu dear Emerson. I am ever yours, --T.C. CXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 March, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Yesterday morning, setting out to breakfast with Richard Milnes (Milnes's breakfast is a thing you will yet have to experience) I met, by the sunny shore of the Thames, a benevolent Son of Adam in blue coat and red collar, who thrust into my hand a Letter from you. A truly miraculous Son of Adam in red collar, in the Sunny Spring Morning!--The Bill of Seventeen Pounds is already far on its way to Dumfries, there to be kneaded into gold by the due artists: today is American Post- day; and already in huge hurry about many things, I am scribbling you some word of answer.... The night _before_ Milnes's morning, I had furthermore seen your Manchester Correspondent, Ireland,--an old Edinborough acquaintance too, as I found. A solid, dark, broad, rather heavy man; full of energy, and broad sagacity and practicality;--infinitely well affected to the man Emerson too. It was our clear opinion that you might come at any time with ample assurance of "succeeding," so far as wages went, and otherwise; that you ought to come, and must, and would,--as he, Ireland, would farther write to you. There is only one thing I have to add of my own, and beg you to bear in mind,--a date merely. _Videlicet,_ That the time for lecturing to the London West-End, I was given everywhere to understand, is _from the latter end of April_ (or say April altogether) _to the end of May:_ this is a fixed Statistic fact, all men told me: of this you are in all arrangements to keep mind. For it will actually do your heart good to look into the faces, and speak into minds, of really Aristocratic Persons,-- being one yourself, you Sinner,--and perhaps indeed this will be the greatest of all the _novelties_ that await you in your voyage. Not to be seen, I believe, at least never seen by me in any perfection, except in London only. From April to the end of May; during those weeks you must be _here,_ and free: remember that date. Will you come in Winter then, next Winter,--or when? Ireland professed to know you by the Photograph too; which I never yet can.--I wrote by last Packet: enough here. Your friend Cunningham has not presented himself; shall be right welcome when he does,--as all that in the least belong to you may well hope to be. Adieu. Our love to you all. Ever Yours, T. Carlyle CXX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 April, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--I have two good letters from you, and until now you have had no acknowledgment. Especially I ought to have told you how much pleasure your noble invitation in March gave me. This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. At home, no man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience I address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say. Whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that can be heard. Of course, I have only myself to please, and my work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. It is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of your English culture would scare the most desultory of Yankees into precision and fidelity; and perhaps I am not yet too old to be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud privilege. If you shall fright me into labor and concentration, I shall win my game; for I can well afford to pay any price to get my work well done. For the rest, I hesitate, of course, to rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to me. No reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe:--I-- much more,--who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until now.--I hear nothing again from Mr. Ireland. So I will let the English Voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the East, and mind my apples and pears for the present. You are to know that in these days I lay out a patch of orchard near my house, very much to the improvement, as all the household affirm, of our homestead. Though I have little skill in these things, and must borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of the garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will eat up days and weeks, and a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments. For the present, I stay in the new orchard. Duyckinck, a literary man in New York, who advises Wiley and Putnam in their publishing enterprises, wrote me lately, that they had $600 for you, from _Cromwell._ So may it be. Yours, R.W.E. CXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 May, 1847 Dear Emerson,--....My time is nearly up today; but I write a word to acknowledge your last Letter (30 April), and various other things. For example, you must tell Mr. Thoreau (is that the exact name? for I have lent away the printed pages) that his Philadelphia Magazine with the _Lecture_* in two pieces was faithfully delivered here, about a fortnight ago; and carefully read, as beseemed, with due entertainment and recognition. A vigorous Mr. Thoreau,--who has formed himself a good deal upon one Emerson, but does not want abundant fire and stamina of his own;--recognizes us, and various other things, in a most admiring great-hearted manner; for which, as for _part_ of the confused voice from the jury bog (not yet summed into a verdict, nor likely to be summed till Doomsday, nor needful to sum), the poor prisoner at the bar may justly express himself thankful! In plain prose, I like Mr. Thoreau very well; and hope yet to hear good and better news of him:--only let him not "turn to foolishness"; which seems to me to be terribly easy, at present, both in New England and Old! May the Lord deliver us all from _Cant;_ may the Lord, whatever else he do or forbear, teach us to look Facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing _them_ over with our despicable and damnable palaver, into irrecognizability, and so _falsifying_ the Lord's own Gospels to his unhappy blockheads of children, all staggering down to Gehenna and the everlasting Swine's-trough for _want_ of Gospels.--O Heaven, it is the most accursed sin of man; and done everywhere, at present, on the streets and high places, at noonday! Very seriously I say, and pray as my chief orison, May the Lord deliver us from it.-- ---------- * On Carlyle, published in _Graham's Magazine_ in March and April, 1847. ---------- About a week ago there came your neighbor Hoar; a solid, sensible, effectual-looking man, of whom I hope to see much more. So soon as possible I got him under way for Oxford, where I suppose he was, last week;--_both_ Universities was too much for the limits of his time; so he preferred Oxford;--and now, this very day, I think, he was to set out for the Continent; not to return till the beginning of July, when he promises to call here again. There was something really pleasant to me in this Mr. Hoar: and I had innumerable things to ask him about Concord, concerning which topic we had hardly got a word said when our first interview had to end. I sincerely hope he will not fail to keep his time in returning. You do very well, my Friend, to plant orchards; and fair fruit shall they grow (if it please Heaven) for your grandchildren to pluck;--a beautiful occupation for the son of man, in all patriarchal and paternal times (which latter are patriarchal too)! But you are to understand withal that your coming hither to lecture is taken as a settled point by all your friends here; and for my share I do not reckon upon the smallest doubt about the _essential_ fact of it, simply on some calculation and adjustment about the circumstantials. Of Ireland, who I surmise is busy in the problem even now, you will hear by and by, probably in more definite terms: I did not see him again after my first notice of him to you; but there is no doubt concerning his determinations (for all manner of reasons) to get you to Lancashire, to England;--and in fact it is an adventure which I think you ought to contemplate as _fixed,_--say for this year and the beginning of next? Ireland will help you to fix the dates; and there is nothing else, I think, which should need fixing.-- Unquestionably you would get an immense quantity of food for ideas, though perhaps not at all in the way you anticipate, in looking about among us: nay, if you even thought us _stupid,_ there is something in the godlike indifference with which London will accept and sanction even that verdict,--something highly instructive at least! And in short, for the truth must be told, London is properly your Mother City too,--verily you have about as much to do with it, in spite of Polk and Q. Victory, as I had! And you ought to come and look at it, beyond doubt; and say to this land, "Old Mother, how are you getting on at all?" To which the Mother will answer, "Thankee, young son, and you?"--in a way useful to both parties! That is truth. Adieu, dear Emerson; good be with you always. Hoar gave me your _American_ Poems: thanks. _Vale et me ama._ --T. Carlyle CXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 June, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--I have just got your friendliest letter of May 18, with its varied news and new invitations. Really you are a dangerous correspondent with your solid and urgent ways of speaking. No affairs and no studies of mine, I fear, will be able to make any head against these bribes. Well, I will adorn the brow of the coming months with this fine hope; then if the rich God at last refuses the jewel, no doubt he will give something better--to both of us. But thinking on this project lately, I see one thing plainly, that I must not come to London as a lecturer. If the plan proceed, I will come and see you,-- thankful to Heaven for that mercy, should such a romance looking reality come to pass,--I will come and see you and Jane Carlyle, and will hear what you have to say. You shall even show me, if you will, such other men and women as will suffer themselves to be seen and heard, asking for nothing again. Then I will depart in peace, as I came. At Mr. Ireland's "Institutes," I will read lectures; and possibly in London too, if, when there, you looking with your clear eyes shall say that it is desired by persons who ought to be gratified. But I wish such lecturing to be a mere contingency, and nowise a settled purpose. I had rather stay at home, and forego the happiness of seeing you, and the excitement of England, than to have the smallest pains taken to collect an audience for me. So now we will leave this egg in the desert for the ostrich Time to hatch it or not. It seems you are not tired of pale Americans, or will not own it. You have sent our Country-Senator* where he wanted to go, and to the best hospitalities as we learn today directly from him. I cannot avoid sending you another of a different stamp. Henry Hedge is a recluse but Catholic scholar in our remote Bangor, who reads German and smokes in his solitary study through nearly eight months of snow in the year, and deals out, every Sunday, his witty apothegms to the lumber-merchants and township-owners of Penobscot River, who have actually grown intelligent interpreters of his riddles by long hearkening after them. They have shown themselves very loving and generous lately, in making a quite munificent provision for his traveling. Hedge has a true and mellow heart,... and I hope you will like him. -------- * The Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar. -------- I have seen lately a Texan, ardent and vigorous, who assured me that Carlyle's Writings were read with eagerness on the banks of the Colorado. There was more to tell, but it is too late. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--In my old age I am coming to see you. I have written this day, in answer to sundry letters brought me by the last steamer, from Mr. Ireland and Mr. Hudson of Leeds, that I mean in good earnest to sail for Liverpool or for London about the first of October; and I am disposing my astonished household--astonished at such a Somerset of the sedentary master --with that view. My brother William was here this week from New York, and will come again to carry my mother home with him for the winter; my wife and children three are combining for and against me; at all events, I am to have my visit. I pray you to cherish your good nature, your mercy. Let your wife cherish it,--that I may see, I indolent, this incredible worker, whose toil has been long since my pride and wonder,--that I may see him benign and unexacting,-- he shall not be at the crisis of some over-labor. I shall not stay but an hour. What do I care for his fame? Ah! how gladly I hoped once to see Sterling as mediator and amalgam, when my turn should come to see the Saxon gods at home: Sterling, who had certain American qualities in his genius;--and now you send me his shade. I found at Munroe's shop the effigy, which, he said, Cunningham, whom I have not seen or heard from, had left there for me; a front face, and a profile, both--especially the first --a very welcome satisfaction to my sad curiosity, the face very national, certainly, but how thoughtful and how friendly! What more belongs to this print--whether you are editing his books, or yourself drawing his lineaments--I know not. I find my friends have laid out much work for me in Yorkshire and Lancashire. What part of it I shall do, I cannot yet tell. As soon as I know how to arrange my journey best, I shall write you again. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Rawdon, Near Leeds, Yorkshire 31 August, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Almost ever since your last Letter reached me, I have been wandering over the country, enveloped either in a restless whirl of locomotives, view-hunting, &c., or sunk in the deepest torpor of total idleness and laziness, forgetting, and striving to forget, that there was any world but that of dreams; --and though at intervals the reproachful remembrance has arisen sharply enough on me, that I ought, on all accounts high and low, to have written you an answer, never till today have I been able to take pen in hand, and actually begin that operation! Such is the naked fact. My Wife is with me; we leave no household behind us but a servant; the face of England, with its mad electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so _abstruse_ and _un_speakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time one had _got_ into the country of the Lotos-Eaters, and it made no matter what became of anything and all things. In good truth, it is a wearied man, at least a dreadfully slothful and slumberous man, eager for _sleep_ in any quantity, that now addresses you! Be thankful for a few half-dreaming words, till we awake again. As to your visit to us, there is but one thing to be said and repeated: That a prophet's chamber is ready for you in Chelsea, and a brotherly and sisterly welcome, on whatever day at whatever hour you arrive: this, which is all of the Practical that I can properly take charge of, is to be considered a given quantity always. With regard to Lecturing, &c., Ireland, with whom I suppose you to be in correspondence, seems to have awakened all this North Country into the fixed hope of hearing you,--and God knows they have need enough to hear a man with sense in his head;--it was but the other day I read in one of their Newspapers, "We understand that Mr. Emerson the distinguished &c. is certainly &c. this winter," all in due Newspaper phrase, and I think they settled your arrival for "October" next. May it prove so! But on the whole there _is_ no doubt of your coming; that is a great fact. And if so, I should say, Why not come at once, even as the Editor surmises? You will evidently do no other considerable enterprise till this voyage to England is achieved. Come therefore;--and we shall see; we shall hear and speak! I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can _speak_ with clear hope of getting adequate response from him: if I speak to you, it will be a breaking of my silence for the last time perhaps,--perhaps for the first time, on some points! _Allons._ I shall not always be so roadweary, lifeweary, sleepy, and stony as at present. I even think there is yet another Book in me; "Exodus from Houndsditch" (I think it might be called), a peeling off of fetid _Jewhood_ in every sense from myself and my poor bewildered brethren: one other Book; and, if it were a right one, rest after that, the deeper the better, forevermore. _Ach Gott!_-- Hedge is one of the sturdiest little fellows I have come across for many a day. A face like a rock; a voice like a howitzer; only his honest kind gray eyes reassure you a little. We have met only once; but hope (mutually, I flatter myself) it may be often by and by. That hardy little fellow too, what has he to do with "Semitic tradition" and the "dust-hole of extinct Socinianism," George-Sandism, and the Twaddle of a thousand Magazines? Thor and his Hammer, even, seem to me a little more respectable; at least, "My dear Sir, endeavor to clear your mind of Cant." Oh, we are all sunk, much deeper than any of us imagines. And our worship of "beautiful sentiments," &c., &c. is as contemptible a form of long-ears as any other, perhaps the most so of any. It is in fact damnable.--We will say no more of it at present. Hedge came to me with tall lank Chapman at his side,--an innocent flail of a creature, with considerable impetus in him: the two when they stood up together looked like a circle and tangent,--in more senses than one. Jacobson, the Oxford Doctor, who welcomed your Concord Senator in that City, writes to me that he has received (with blushes, &c.) some grand "Gift for his Child" from that Traveler; whom I am accordingly to thank, and blush to,--Jacobson not knowing his address at present. The "address" of course is still more unknown to _me_ at present: but we shall know it, and the man it indicates, I hope, again before long. So, much for that. And now, dear Emerson, Adieu. Will your next Letter tell us the _when?_ O my Friend! We are here with Quakers, or Ex-Quakers rather; a very curious people, "like water from the crystal well"; in a very curious country too, most beautiful and very ugly: but why write of it, or of anything more, while half asleep and lotos-eating! Adieu, my Friend; come soon, and let us meet again under this Sun. Yours, T. Carlyle CXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--The last steamer brought, as ever, good tidings from you, though certainly from a new habitat, at Leeds, or near it. If Leeds will only keep you a little in its precinct, I will search for you there; for it is one of the parishes in the diocese which Mr. Ireland and his friends have carved out for me on the map of England. I have taken a berth in the packet-ship "Washington Irving," which leaves Boston for Liverpool next week, 5 October; having decided, after a little demurring and advising, to follow my inclination in shunning the steamer. The owners will almost take oath that their ship cannot be out of a port twenty days. At Liverpool and Manchester I shall take advice of Ireland and his officers of the "Institutes," and perhaps shall remain for some time in that region, if my courage and my head are equal to the work they offer me. I will write you what befalls me in the strange city. Who knows but I may have adventures--I who had never one, as I have just had occasion to write to Mrs. Howitt, who inquired what mine were? Well, if I survive Liverpool, and Manchester, and Leeds, or rather my errands thither, I shall come some fine day to see you in your burly city, you in the centre of the world, and sun me a little in your British heart. It seems a lively passage that I am entering in the old Dream World, and perhaps the slumbers are lighter and the Morning is near. Softly, dear shadows, do not scatter yet. Knit your panorama close and well, till these rare figures just before me draw near, and are greeted and known. But there is no more time in this late night--and what need? since I shall see you and yours soon. Ever yours, R.W.E. CXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 15 October, 1847 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter from Concord, of the 31st of July, had arrived duly in London; been duly forwarded to my transient address at Buxton in Derbyshire,--and there, by the faithless Postmaster, _retained_ among his lumber, instead of given to me when I called on him! We staid in Buxton only one day and night; two Newspapers, as I recollect, the Postmaster did deliver to me on my demand; but your Letter he, with scandalous carelessness, kept back, and left me to travel forwards without: there accordingly it lay, week after week, for a month or more; and only by half-accident and the extraordinary diligence and accuracy of our Chelsea Postman, was it recovered at all, not many days ago, after my Wife's return hither. Consider what kind of fact this was and has been for us! For now, if all have gone right, you are approaching the coast of England; Chelsea and your fraternal House _hidden_ under a disastrous cloud to you; and I know not so much as whitherward to write, and send you a word of solution. It is one of the most unpleasant mistakes that ever befell me; I have no resource but to enclose this Note to Mr. Ireland, and charge him by the strongest adjurations to have it ready for you the first thing when you set foot upon our shores.* ------------ * Mr. Ireland, in his Recollections of Emerson's Visit to England, p. 59, prints Carlyle's note to himself, enclosing this letter, and adds: "The ship reached Liverpool on the 22d of October, and Mr. Emerson at once proceeded to Manchester. After spending a few hours in friendly talk, he was 'shot up,' as Carlyle had desired, to Chelsea, and at the end of a week returned to Manchester, to begin his lectures." --------- Know then, my Friend, that in verity your Home while in England is _here;_ and all other places, whither work or amusement may call you, are but inns and temporary lodgings. I have returned hither a day or two ago, and free from any urgent calls or businesses of any kind; my Wife has your room all ready;--and here surely, if anywhere in the wide Earth, there ought to be a brother's welcome and kind home waiting you! Yes, by Allah!--An "Express Train" leaves Liverpool every afternoon; and in some six hours will set you down here. I know not what your engagements are; but I say to myself, Why not come at once, and rest a little from your sea-changes, before going farther? In six hours you can be out of the unstable waters, and sitting in your own room here. You shall not be bothered with talk till you repose; and you shall have plenty of it, hot and hot, when the appetite does arise in you. "No. 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea": come to the "London Terminus," from any side; say these magic words to any Cabman, and by night or by day you are a welcome apparition here,--foul befall us otherwise! This is the fact: what more can I say? I make my affidavit of the same; and require you in the name of all Lares and Penates, and Household Gods ancient and modern which are sacred to men, to consider it and take brotherly account of it!-- Shall we hear of you, then, in a day or two: shall we not perhaps see you in a day or two! That depends on the winds and the chances; but our affection is independent of such. Adieu; _au revoir,_ it now is! Come soon; come at once. Ever yours, T. Carlyle Extracts from Emerson's Diary October, 1847 "I found at Liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle, addressed to 'R.W.E. on the instant when he lands in England,' conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth. And finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the Lecture-rooms I came down to London on Monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said Carlyle, 'here we are shoveled together again.' The floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a plentiful stream. We had a wide talk that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning again. At noon or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. My few hours discourse with him, long ago, in Scotland, gave me not enough knowledge of him; and I have now at last been taken by surprise by him." "C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines." "I had a good talk with C. last night. He says over and over, for months, for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; and he, too, says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about _'Kunst,'_ also, in Germans, or English, or Americans;* and has a huge respect for the Duke of Wellington, as the only Englishman, or the only one in the Aristocracy, who will have nothing to do with any manner of lie." ---------- * See _English Traits,_ Ch. XVI.; and _Life of Sterling,_ Part II. Ch. VII. "Among the windy gospels addressed to our poor century there are few louder than this of Art." ---------- The following sentences are of later date than the preceding:-- "Carlyle had all the _kleinstadtlich_ traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which made light of the British Islands." "Carlyle has a hairy strength which makes his literary vocation a mere chance, and what seems very contemptible to him. I could think only of an enormous trip-hammer with an 'Aeolian attachment."' "In Carlyle as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." "England makes what a step from Dr. Johnson to Carlyle! what wealth of thought and science, what expansion of views and profounder resources does the genius and performance of this last imply! If she can make another step as large, what new ages open!" CXXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Mrs. Massey's, Manchester, 2 Fenny Place, Fenny St. November 5, 1847 Ah! my dear friend, all these days have gone, and you have had no word from me, when the shuttles fly so swiftly in your English loom, and in so few hours we may have tidings of the best that live. At last, and only this day for the first day, I am stablished in my own lodgings on English ground, and have a fair parlor and chamber, into both of which the sun and moon shine, into which friendly people have already entered. Hitherto I have been the victim of trifles,--which is the fate and the chief objection to traveling. Days are absorbed in precious nothings. But now that I am in some sort a citizen, of Manchester, and also of Liverpool (for there also I am to enter on lodgings tomorrow, at 56 Stafford Street, Islington), perhaps the social heart of this English world will include me also in its strong and healthful circulations. I get the best letters from home by the last steamers, and was much occupied in Liverpool yesterday in seeing Dr. Nichol of Glasgow, who was to sail in the "Acadia," and in giving him credentials to some Americans. I find here a very kind reception from your friends, as they emphatically are,--Ireland, Espinasse, Miss Jewsbury, Dr. Hodgson, and a circle expanding on all sides outward,--and Mrs. Paulet at Liverpool. I am learning there also to know friendly faces, and a certain Roscoe Club has complimented me with its privileges. The oddest part of my new position is my alarming penny correspondence, which, what with welcomes, invitations to lecture, proffers of hospitality, suggestions from good Swedenborgists and others for my better guidance touching the titles of my discourses, &c., &c., all requiring answers, threaten to eat up a day like a cherry. In this fog and miscellany, and until the heavenly sun shall give me one beam, will not you, friend and joy of so many years, send me a quiet line or two now and then to say that you still smoke your pipe in peace, side by side with wife and brother also well and smoking, or able to smoke? Now that I have in some measure calmed down the astonishment and consternation of seeing your dreams change into realities, I mean, at my next approximation or perihelion, to behold you with the most serene and sceptical calmness. So give my thanks and true affectionate remembrance to Jane Carlyle, and my regards also to Dr. Carlyle, whose precise address please also to send me. Ever your loving R.W.E. The address at the top of this note is the best for the present, as I mean to make this my centre. CXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 13 November, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Your Book-parcels were faithfully sent off, directly after your departure: in regard to one of them I had a pleasant visit from the proprietor in person,--the young Swedenborgian Doctor, whom to my surprise I found quite an agreeable, accomplished secular young gentleman, much given to "progress of the species," &c., &c.; from whom I suppose you have yourself heard. The wandering umbrella, still short of an owner, hangs upon its peg here, without definite outlook. Of yourself there have come news, by your own Letter, and by various excerpts from Manchester Newspapers. _Gluck zu!_-- This Morning I received the Enclosed, and send it off to you without farther response. Mudie, if I mistake not, is some small Bookseller in the Russell-Square region; pray answer him, if you think him worthy of answer. A dim suspicion haunts me that perhaps he was the Republisher (or Pirate) of your first set of _Essays:_ but probably he regards this as a mere office of untutored friendship on his part. Or possibly I do the poor man wrong by misremembrance? Chapman could tell. I am sunk deep here, in effete Manuscripts, in abstruse meditations, in confusions old and new; sinking, as I may describe myself, through stratum after stratum of the Inane,-- down to one knows not what depth! I unfortunately belong to the Opposition Party in many points, and am in a minority of one. To keep silence, therefore, is among the principal duties at present. We had a call from Bancroft, the other evening. A tough Yankee man; of many worthy qualities more tough than musical; among which it gratified me to find a certain small under-current of genial _humor,_ or as it were _hidden laughter,_ not noticed heretofore. My Wife and all the rest of us are well; and do all salute you with our true wishes, and the hope to have you here again before long. Do not bother yourself with other than voluntary writing to me, while there is so much otherwise that you are obliged to write. If on any point you want advice, information, or other help that lies within the limits of my strength, command me, now and always. And so Good be with you; and a happy meeting to us soon again. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle CXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 November, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Here is a word for you from Miss Fuller; I send you the Cover also, though I think there is little or nothing in that. It contained another little Note for Mazzini; who is wandering in foreign parts, on paths unknown to me at present. Pray send my regards to Miss Fuller, when you write. We hear of you pretty often, and of your successes with the Northern populations. We hope for you in London again before long.--I am busy, if at all, altogether _inarticulately_ in these days. My respect for _silence,_ my distrust of _Speech,_ seem to grow upon me. There is a time for both, says Solomon; but we, in our poor generation, have forgotten one of the "times." Here is a Mr. Forster* of Rawdon, or Bradford, in Yorkshire; our late host in the Autumn time; who expects and longs to be yours when you come into those parts. I am busy with William Conqueror's _Domesday Book_ and with the commentaries of various blockheads on it:--Ah me! All good be with you, and happy news from those dear to you. Yours ever, T. Carlyle ----------- * Now the Rt. Hon. W E. Forster, M.P. ----------- CXXX. Emerson to Carlyle 2 Fenny Street, Higher Broughton, Manchester 28 December, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--I am concerned to discover that Margaret Fuller in the letter which you forwarded prays me to ask you and Mrs. Carlyle respecting the Count and Countess Pepoli, who are in Rome for the winter, whether they would be good for her to know?--That is pretty nearly the form of her question. As one third of the winter is gone, and one half will be, before her question can be answered, I fear, it will have lost some of its pertinence. Well, it will serve as a token to pass between us, which will please me if it do not Margaret.--I have had nothing to send you tidings of. Yet I get the best accounts from home of wife and babes and friends. I am seeing this England more thoroughly than I had thought was possible to me. I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors. I have received everywhere the kindest hospitality from a great variety of persons. I see many intelligent and well-informed persons, and some fine geniuses. I have every day a better opinion of the English, who are a very handsome and satisfactory race of men, and, in the point of material performance, altogether incomparable. I have made some vain attempts to end my lectures, but must go on a little longer. With kindest regards to the Lady Jane, Your friend, R.W.E. Margaret Fuller's address, if anything is to be written, is, Care of Maquay, Pakenham & Co., Rome. CXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 December, 1847 My Dear Emerson,--We are very glad to see your handwriting again, and learn that you are well, and doing well. Our news of you hitherto, from the dim Lecture-element, had been satisfactory indeed, but vague. Go on and prosper. I do not much think Miss Fuller would do any great good with the Pepolis,--even if they are still in Rome, and not at Bologna as our advices here seemed to indicate. Madam Pepoli is an elderly Scotch lady, of excellent commonplace vernacular qualities, hardly of more; the Count, some years younger, and a much airier man, is on all sides a beautiful _Dilettante,_--little suitable, I fear, to the serious mind that can recognize him as such! However, if the people are still in Rome, Miss Fuller can easily try: Bid Miss Fuller present my Wife's compliments, or mine, or even _yours_ (for they know all our domesticities here, and are very intimate, especially Madam with _My_ dame); upon which the acquaintance is at once made, and can be continued if useful. This morning Richard Milnes writes to me for your address; which I have sent. He is just returned out of Spain; home swiftly to "vote for the Jew Bill"; is doing hospitalities at Woburn Abbey; and I suppose will be in Yorkshire (home, near Pontefract) before long. See him if you have opportunity: a man very easy to _see_ and get into flowing talk with; a man of much sharpness of faculty, well tempered by several inches of "Christian _fat_" he has upon his ribs for covering. One of the idlest, cheeriest, most gifted of fat little men. Tennyson has been here for three weeks; dining daily till he is near dead;--setting out a Poem withal. He came in to us on Sunday evening last, and on the preceding Sunday: a truly interesting Son of Earth, and Son of Heaven,--who has almost lost his way, among the will-o'-wisps, I doubt; and may flounder ever deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that abound! I like him well; but can do next to nothing for him. Milnes, with general co-operation, got him a Pension; and he has bread and tobacco: but that is a poor outfit for such a soul. He wants a _task;_ and, alas, that of spinning rhymes, and naming it "Art" and "high Art," in a Time like ours, will never furnish him. For myself I have been entirely _idle,_--I dare not even say, too abstrusely _occupied;_ for I have merely been _looking_ at the Chaos even, not by any means working in it. I have not even read a Book,--that I liked. All "Literature" has grown inexpressibly unsatisfactory to me. Better be silent than talk farther in this mood. We are going off, on Saturday come a week, into Hampshire, to certain Friends you have heard me speak of. Our address, till the beginning of February, is "Hon. W.B. Baring, Alverstoke, Gosport, Hants." My Wife sends you many kind regards; remember us across the Ocean too;--and be well and busy till we meet. Yours ever, T. Carlyle Last night there arrived No. 1 of the _Massachusetts Review:_ beautiful paper and print; and very promising otherwise. In the Introduction I well recognized the hand; in the first Article too,--not in any of the others. _Faustum sit._ CXXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Ambleside, 26 February, 1848 My Dear Carlyle,--I am here in Miss Martineau's house, and having seen a good deal of England, and lately a good deal of Scotland too, I am tomorrow to set forth again for Manchester, and presently for London. Yesterday, I saw Wordsworth for a good hour and a half, which he did not seem to grudge, for he talked freely and fast, and--bating his cramping Toryism and what belongs to it--wisely enough. He is in rude health, and, though seventy-seven years old, says he does not feel his age in any particular. Miss Martineau is in excellent health and spirits, though just now annoyed by the hesitations of Murray to publish her book;* but she confides infinitely in her book, which is the best fortune. But I please myself not a little that I shall in a few days see you again, and I will give you an account of my journey. I have heard almost nothing of your late weeks,--but that is my fault,--only I heard with sorrow that your wife had been ill, and could not go with you on your Christmas holidays. Now may her good days have come again! I say I have heard nothing of your late days; of your early days, of your genius, of your influence, I cease not to hear and to see continually, yea, often am called upon to resist the same with might and main. But I will not pester you with it now.--Miss Martineau, who is most happily placed here, and a model of housekeeping, sends kindest remembrances to you both. Yours ever, R. W. Emerson. --------- * "Eastern Life, Past and Present." --------- CXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 28 February, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We are delighted to hear of you again at first hand: our last traditions represented you at Edinburgh, and left the prospect of your return hither very vague. I have only time for one word tonight: to say that your room is standing vacant ever since you quitted it,--ready to be lighted up with all manner of physical and moral _fires_ that the place will yield; and is in fact _your_ room, and expects to be accounted such.--I know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big Babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done. Write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all already managed. Jane has never yet got out since the cold took her; but she has at no time been so ill as is frequent with her in these winter disorders; she is now steadily improving, and we expect will come out with the sun and the green leaves,--as she usually does. I too caught an ugly cold, and, what is very uncommon with me, a kind of cough, while down in Hampshire; which, with other inarticulate matters, has kept me in a very mute abstruse condition all this while; so that, for many weeks past, I have properly had no history,--except such as trees in winter, and other merely passive objects may have. That is not an agreeable side of the page; but I find it indissolubly attached to the other: no historical leaf with me but has them _both!_ Reading does next to nothing for me at present, neither will thinking or even dreaming rightly prosper; of no province can I be quite master except of the _silent_ one, in such a case. One feels there, at last, as if quite annihilated; and takes up arms again (the poor goose-quill is no great things of a weapon to arm with!) as if in a kind of sacred despair. All people are in a sort of joy-dom over the new French Republic, which has descended suddenly (or shall we say, _ascended_ alas?) out of the Immensities upon us; showing once again that the righteous Gods do yet live and reign! It is long years since I have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public event. Adieu: come soon; and warn us when. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle 2 Fenny St., Manchester, 2 March, Thursday [1848] Dear Friend,--I hope to set forward today for London, and to arrive there some time tonight. I am to go first to Chapman's house, where I shall lodge for a time. If it is too noisy, I shall move westward. But I hope you are to be at home tomorrow, for if I prosper, I shall come and beg a dinner with you,--is it not at five o'clock? I am sorry you have no better news to tell me of your health,--your own and your wife's. Tell her I shall surely report you to Alcott, who will have his revenge. Thanks that you keep the door so wide open for me still. I shall always come in. Ever yours, R.W.E. CXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Monday, P.M., 19 June, 1848 Dear Carlyle,--Mrs. Crowe of Edinburgh, an excellent lady, known to you and to many good people, wishes me to go to you with her. I tell her that I believe you relax the reins of labor as early as one hour after noon, and I propose one o'clock on Thursday for the invasion. If you are otherwise engaged, you must send me word. Otherwise, we shall come. It was sad to hear no good news last evening from Jane Carlyle. I heartily hope the night brought sleep, and the morning better health to her. Yours always, R.W. Emerson CXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 20 June, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We shall be very glad to become acquainted with Mrs. Crowe, of whom already by report we know many favorable things. Brown (of Portobello, Edinburgh) had given us intimation of her kind purposes towards Chelsea; and now on Thursday you (please the Pigs) shall see the adventure achieved. Two o'clock, not one, is the hour when labor ceases here,--if, alas, there be any "labor" so much as got begun; which latter is often enough the sad case. But at either hour we shall be ready for you. I hope you penetrated the Armida Palace, and did your devoir to the sublime Duchess and her Luncheon yesterday! I cannot without a certain internal amusement (foreign enough to my present humor) represent to myself such a conjunction of opposite stars! But you carry a new image off with you, and are a gainer, you. _Allons._ My Papers here are in a state of distraction, state of despair! I see not what is to become of them and me. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle My Wife arose without headache on Monday morning; but feels still a good deal beaten;--has not had "such a headache" for several years. CXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, Friday [23 June, 1848] Dear Emerson,--I forgot to say, last night, that you are to dine with us on Sunday; that after our call on the Lady Harriet* we will take a stroll through the Park, look at the Sunday population, and find ourselves here at five o'clock for the above important object. Pray remember, therefore, and no excuse! In haste. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle ------------- * Lady Ashburton ------------- CXXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 December, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We received your Letter* duly, some time ago, with many welcomes; and have as you see been too remiss in answering it. Not from forgetfulness, if you will take my word; no, but from many causes, too complicated to articulate, and justly producing an indisposition to put pen to paper at all! Never was I more silent than in these very months; and, with reason too, for the world at large, and my own share of it in small, are both getting more and more unspeakable with any convenience! In health we of this household are about as well as usual;--and look across to the woods of Concord with more light than we had, realizing for ourselves a most mild and friendly picture there. Perhaps it is quite as well that you are left alone of foreign interference, even of a Letter from Chelsea, till you get your huge bale of English reminiscences assorted a little. Nobody except me seems to have heard from you; at least the rest, in these parts, all plead destitution when I ask for news. What you saw and suffered and enjoyed here will, if you had once got it properly warehoused, be new wealth to you for many years. Of one impression we fail not here: admiration of your pacific virtues, of gentle and noble tolerance, often sorely tried in this place! Forgive me my ferocities; you do not quite know what I suffer in these latitudes, or perhaps it would be even easier for you. Peace for me, in a Mother of Dead Dogs like this, there is not, was not, will not be,--till the battle itself end; which, however, is a sure outlook, and daily growing a nearer one. ---------- * The letter is missing, but a fragment of the rough draft of it exists, dated Concord, 2 October, 1848. Emerson had returned home in July, and he begins: "'T is high time, no doubt, long since, that you heard from me, and if there were good news in America for you, you would be sure to hear. All goes at heavy trot with us... I fell again quickly into my obscure habits, more fit for me than the fine things I had seen. I made my best endeavor to praise the rich country I had seen, and its excellent, energetic, polished people. And it is very easy for me to do so. England is the country of success, and success has a great charm for me, more than for those I talk with at home. But they were obstinate to know if the English were superior to their possessions, and if the old religion warmed their hearts, and lifted a little the mountain of wealth. So I enumerated the list of brilliant persons I had seen, and the [break in MS.]. But the question returned. Did you find kings and priests? Did you find sanctities and beauties that took away your memory, and sent you home a changed man with new aims, and with a discontent of your old pastures?" Here the fragment ends. Emerson's answer to these questions may be found in the chapter entitled "Results," in his _English Traits._ ---------- Nay, there is another practical question,--but it is from the female side of the house to the female side,--and in fact concerns Indian meal, upon which Mrs. Emerson, or you, or the Miller of Concord (if he have any tincture of philosophy) are now to instruct us! The fact is, potatoes having vanished here, we are again, with motives large and small, trying to learn the use of Indian meal; and indeed do eat it daily to meat at dinner, though hitherto with considerable despair. Question _first,_ therefore: Is there by nature a _bitter_ final taste, which makes the throat smart, and disheartens much the apprentice in Indian meal;--or is it accidental, and to be avoided? We surely anticipate the latter answer; but do not yet see how. At first we were taught the meal, all ground on your side of the water, had got fusty, _raw;_ an effect we are well used to in oaten and other meals but, last year, we had a bushel of it ground _here,_ and the bitter taste was there as before (with the addition of much dirt and sand, our millstones I suppose being too soft);-- whereupon we incline to surmise that there is, perhaps, as in the case of oats, some pellicle or hull that ought to be _rejected_ in making the meal? Pray ask some philosophic Miller, if Mrs. Emerson or you do not know;--and as a corollary this _second_ question: What is the essential difference between _white_ (or brown-gray-white) Indian Meal and _yellow_ (the kind we now have; beautiful as new Guineas, but with an ineffaceable tastekin of _soot_ in it)?--And question _third,_ which includes all: How to cook _mush_ rightly, at least without bitter? _Long_-continued boiling seems to help the bitterness, but does not cure it. Let some oracle speak! I tell all people, our staff of life is in the Mississippi Valley henceforth;--and one of the truest benefactors were an American Minerva who could teach us to cook this meal; which our people at present (I included) are unanimous in finding nigh uneatable, and loudly exclaimable against! Elihu Burritt had a string of recipes that went through all newspapers three years ago; but never sang there oracle of longer ears than that,--totally destitute of practical significance to any creature here! And now enough of questioning. Alas, alas, I have a quite other batch of sad and saddest considerations,--on which I must not so much as enter at present! Death has been very busy in this little circle of ours within these few days. You remember Charles Buller, to whom I brought you over that night at the Barings' in Stanhope Street? He died this day week, almost quite unexpectedly; a sore loss to all that knew him personally, and his gladdening sunny presence in many circles here; a sore loss to the political people too, for he was far the cleverest of all Whig men, and indeed the only genial soul one can remember in that department of things.* We buried him yesterday; and now see what new thing has come. Lord Ashburton, who had left his mother well in Hampshire ten hours before, is summoned from poor Buller's funeral by telegraph; hurries back, finds his mother, whom he loved much, already dead! She was a Miss Bingham, I think, from Pennsylvania, perhaps from Philadelphia itself. You saw her; but the first sight by no means told one all or the best worth that was in that good Lady. We are quite bewildered by our own regrets, and by the far painfuler sorrow of those closely related to these sudden sorrows. Of which let me be silent for the present;--and indeed of all things else, for _speech,_ inadequate mockery of one's poor meaning, is quite a burden to me just now! --------- * The reader of Carlyle's _Reminiscences,_ and of Froude's volumes of his biography, is familiar with the close relations that had existed between Buller and Carlyle. ---------- Neuberg* comes hither sometimes; a welcome, wise kind of man. Poor little Espinasse still toils cheerily at the oar, and various friends of yours are about us. Brother John did send through Chapman all the _Dante,_ which we calculate you have received long ago: he is now come to Town; doing a Preface, &c., which also will be sent to you, and just about publishing.-- Helps, who has been alarmingly ill, and touring on the Rhine since we were his guests, writes to me yesterday from Hampshire about sending you a new Book of his. I instructed him How. Adieu, dear Emerson; do not forget us, or forget to think as kindly as you can of us, while we continue in this world together. Yours ever affectionately, T. Carlyle --------- * Mr. Ireland, in his _Recollections,_ p. 62, gives an interesting account of Mr. Neuberg,--a highly cultivated German, who assisted Carlyle in some of the later literary labors of his life. Neuberg died in 1867, and in a letter to his sister of that year Carlyle says: "No kinder friend had I in this world; no man of my day, I believe, had so faithful, loyal, and willing a helper as he generously was to me for the last twenty or more years." ----------- CXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 28 January, 1849 My Dear Carlyle,--Here in Boston for the day, though in no fit place for writing, you shall have, since the steamer goes tomorrow, a hasty answer to at least one of your questions.... You tell me heavy news of your friends, and of those who were friendly to me for your sake. And I have found farther particulars concerning them in the newspapers. Buller I have known by name ever since he was in America with Lord Durham, and I well remember his face and figure at Mr. Baring's. Even England cannot spare an accomplished man. Since I had your letter, and, I believe, by the same steamer, your brother's _Dante,_* complete within and without, has come to me, most welcome. I heartily thank him. 'T is a most workmanlike book, bearing every mark of honest value. I thank him for myself, and I thank him, in advance, for our people, who are sure to learn their debt to him, in the coming months and years. I sent the book, after short examination, the same day, to New York, to the Harpers, lest their edition should come out without Prolegomena. But they answered, the next day, that they had already received directly the same matter;--yet have not up to this time returned my book. For the Indian corn,--I have been to see Dr. Charles T. Jackson (my wife's brother, and our best chemist, inventor of etherization), who tells me that the reason your meal is bitter is, that all the corn sent to you from us is kiln-dried here, usually at a heat of three hundred degrees, which effectually kills the starch or diastase (?) which would otherwise become sugar. This drying is thought necessary to prevent the corn from becoming musty in the contingency of a long voyage. He says, if it should go in the steamer, it would arrive sound without previous drying. I think I will try that experiment, shortly on a box or a barrel of our Concord maize, as Lidian Emerson confidently engages to send you accurate recipes for johnny-cake, mush, and hominy. --------- * The _Inferno_ of Dante, a translation in prose by John Carlyle; an excellent piece of work, still in demand. --------- Why did you not send me word of Clough's hexameter poem, which I have now received and read with much joy.* But no, you will never forgive him his metres. He is a stout, solid, reliable man and friend,--I knew well; but this fine poem has taken me by surprise. I cannot find that your journals have yet discovered its existence. With kindest remembrances to Jane Carlyle, and new thanks to John Carlyle, your friend, --R.W. Emerson ---------- * "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich." ---------- CXL. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 19 April, 1849 My Dear Emerson,--Today is American Postday; and by every rule and law,--even if all laws but those of Cocker were abolished from this universe,--a word from me is due to you! Twice I have heard since I spoke last: prompt response about the Philadelphia Bill; exact performance of your voluntary promise,--Indian Corn itself is now here for a week past.... Still more interesting is the barrel of genuine Corn ears,-- Indian Cobs of edible grain, from the Barn of Emerson himself! It came all safe and right, according to your charitable program; without cost or trouble to us of any kind; not without curious interest and satisfaction! The recipes contained in the precedent letter, duly weighed by the competent jury of housewives (at least by my own Wife and Lady Ashburton), were judged to be of decided promise, reasonable-looking every one of them; and now that the stuff itself is come, I am happy to assure you that it forms a new epoch for us all in the Maize department: we find the grain _sweet,_ among the sweetest, with a touch even of the taste of _nuts_ in it, and profess with contrition that properly we have never tasted Indian Corn before. Millers of due faculty (with millstones of _iron_) being scarce in the Cockney region, and even cooks liable to err, the Ashburtons have on their resources undertaken the brunt of the problem one of their own Surrey or Hampshire millers is to grind the stuff, and their own cook, a Frenchman commander of a whole squadron, is to undertake the dressing according to the rules. Yesterday the Barrel went off to their country place in Surrey,-- a small Bag of select ears being retained here, for our own private experimenting;--and so by and by we shall see what comes of it.--I on my side have already drawn up a fit proclamation of the excellences of this invaluable corn, and admonitions as to the benighted state of English eaters in regard to it;--to appear in _Fraser's Magazine,_ or I know not where, very soon. It is really a small contribution towards World-History, this small act of yours and ours: there is no doubt to me, now that I taste the real grain, but all Europe will henceforth have to rely more and more upon your Western Valleys and this article. How beautiful to think of lean tough Yankee settlers, tough as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubduable fire in their belly, steering over the Western Mountains, to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the Posterity of Adam! The Pigs in about a year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles round: a most judicious function on the part of the Pigs. Behind the Pigs comes Jonathan with his all-conquering ploughshare,--glory to him too! Oh, if we were not a set of Cant-ridden blockheads, there is no _Myth_ of Athene or Herakles equal to this _fact;_--which I suppose _will_ find its real "Poets" some day or other; when once the Greek, Semitic, and multifarious other Cobwebs are swept away a little! Well, we must wait.--For the rest, if this skillful Naturalist and you will make any more experiments on Indian Corn for us, might I not ask that you would try for a method of preserving _the meal_ in a sound state for us? Oatmeal, which would spoil directly too, is preserved all year by kiln-drying the grain before it is ground,--parching it till it is almost _brown,_ sometimes the Scotch Highlanders, by intense parching, can keep their oatmeal good for a series of years. No Miller here at present is likely to produce such beautiful meal as some of the American specimens I have seen:--if possible, we must learn to get the grain over in the shape of proper durable meal. At all events, let your Friend charitably make some inquiry into the process of millerage, the possibilities of it for meeting our case;--and send us the result some day, on a separate bit of paper. With which let us end, for the present. Alas, I have yet written nothing; am yet a long way off writing, I fear! Not for want of matter, perhaps, but for redundance of it; I feel as if I had the whole world to write yet, with the day fast bending downwards on me, and did not know where to begin,--in what manner to address the deep-sunk populations of the Theban Land. Any way my Life is very _grim,_ on these terms, and is like to be; God only knows what farther quantity of braying in the mortar this foolish clay of mine may yet need!-- They are printing a third Edition of _Cromwell;_ that bothered me for some weeks, but now I am over with that, and the Printer wholly has it: a sorrowful, not now or ever a joyful thing to me, that. The _stupor_ of my fellow blockheads, for Centuries back, presses too heavy upon that,--as upon many things, O Heavens! People are about setting up some _Statue of Cromwell,_ at St. Ives, or elsewhere: the King-Hudson Statue is never yet set up; and the King himself (as you may have heard) has been _discovered_ swindling. I advise all men not to erect a statue for Cromwell just now. Macaulay's _History_ is also out, running through the fourth edition: did I tell you last time that I had read it,--with wonder and amazement? Finally, it seems likely Lord John Russell will shortly walk out (forever, it is hoped), and Sir R. Peel come in; to make what effort is in him towards delivering us from the _pedant_ method of treating Ireland. The _beginning,_ as I think, of salvation (if he can prosper a little) to England, and to all Europe as well. For they will all have to learn that man does need government, and that an able- bodied starving beggar is and remains (whatever Exeter Hall may say to it) a _Slave_ destitute of a _Master;_ of which facts England, and convulsed Europe, are fallen foundly ignorant in these bad ages, and will plunge ever deeper till they rediscover the same. Alas, alas, the Future for us is not to be made of _butter,_ as the Platforms prophesy; I think it will be harder than steel for some ages! No noble age was ever a soft one, nor ever will or can be.--Your beautiful curious little discourse (report of a discourse) about the English was sent me by Neuberg; I thought it, in my private heart, one of the best words (for _hidden_ genius lodged in it) I had ever heard; so sent it to the _Examiner,_ from which it went to the _Times_ and all the other Papers: an excellent sly little word. Clough has gone to Italy; I have seen him twice,--could not manage his hexameters, though I like the man himself, and hope much of him. "Infidelity" has broken out in Oxford itself,--immense emotion in certain quarters in consequence, virulent outcries about a certain "Sterling Club," altogether a secular society! Adieu, dear Emerson; I had much more to say, but there is no room. O, forgive me, forgive me all trespasses,--and love me what you can! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLI. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B., 13 August, 1849 Dear Emerson,--By all laws of human computation, I owe you a letter, and have owed, any time these seven weeks: let me now pay a little, and explain. Your _second_ Barrel of Indian Corn arrived also perfectly fresh, and of admirable taste and quality; the very bag of new-ground meal was perfect; and the "popped corn" ditto, when it came to be discovered: with the whole of which admirable materials such order was taken as promised to secure "the greatest happiness to the greatest number"; and due silent thanks were tendered to the beneficence of the unwearied Sender:--but all this, you shall observe, had to be done in the thick of a universal packing and household bustle; I just on the wing for a "Tour in Ireland," my Wife too contemplating a run to Scotland shortly after, there to meet me on my return. All this was seven good weeks ago: I hoped somewhere in my Irish wayfarings to fling you off a Letter; but alas, I reckoned there quite without my host (strict "host," called _Time_), finding nowhere half a minute left to me; and so now, having got home to my Mother, not to see my Wife yet for some days, it is my _earliest_ leisure, after all, that I employ in this purpose. I have been terribly knocked about too,--jolted in Irish cars, bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash, above all kept on dreadfully short allowance of sleep;--so that now first, when fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the uncomfortable one, "that I am not Caliban, but a Cramp": terribly cramped indeed, if I could tell you everything! What the other results of this Irish Tour are to be for me I cannot in the least specify. For one thing, I seem to be farther from _speech_ on any subject than ever: such masses of chaotic ruin everywhere fronted me, the general fruit of long-continued universal falsity and folly; and such mountains of delusion yet possessing all hearts and tongues I could do little that was not even _noxious,_ except _admire_ in silence the general "Bankruptcy of Imposture" as one there finds and sees it come to pass, and think with infinite sorrow of the tribulations, futile wrestlings, tumults, and disasters which yet await that unfortunate section of Adam's Posterity before any real improvement can take place among them. Alas, alas! The Gospels of Political Economy, of _Laissez-faire,_ No-Government, Paradise to all comers, and so many fatal Gospels,--generally, one may say, all the Gospels of this blessed "New Era,"--will first have to be tried, and found wanting. With a quantity of written and uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one sinks fairly dumb to estimate! A kind of comfort it is, however, to see that "Imposture" _has_ fallen openly "bankrupt," here as everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human tinkering, with all the Parliamentary Eloquence and Elective Franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go many yards more; but that _its_ goings and currencies in this Earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! God is great; all Lies do now, as from the first, travel incessantly towards Chaos, and there at length lodge! In some parts of Ireland (the Western "insolvent Unions," some twenty-seven of them in all), within a trifle of _one half_ of the whole population are on Poor-Law rations (furnished by the British Government, L1,100 a week furnished here, L1,300 there, L800 there); the houses stand roofless, the lands unstocked, uncultivated, the landlords hidden from bailiffs, living sometimes "on the hares of their domain": such a state of things was never witnessed under this sky before; and, one would humbly expect, cannot last long!--What is to be done? asks every one; incapable of _hearing_ any answer, were there even one ready for imparting to him. "_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars," I sometimes advised, "and sell them in Brazil as Niggers,--perhaps Parliament, on sweet constraint, will allow you to advance them to be Niggers!" In fact, the Emancipation Societies should send over a deputation or two to look at _these_ immortal Irish "Freemen," the _ne plus ultra_ of their class it would perhaps moderate the windpipe of much eloquence one hears on that subject! Is not this the most illustrious of all "ages"; making progress of the species at a grand rate indeed? Peace be with it. Waiting for me here, there was a Letter from Miss Fuller in Rome, written about a month ago; a dignified and interesting Letter; requesting help with Booksellers for some "History of the late Italian Revolution" she is about writing; and elegiacally recognizing the worth of Mazzini and other cognate persons and things. I instantly set about doing what little seemed in my power towards this object,--with what result is yet hidden, and have written to the heroic Margaret: "More power to her elbow!" as the Irish say. She has a beautiful enthusiasm; and is perhaps in the right stage of insight for doing that piece of business well.--Of other persons or interests I will say nothing till a calmer opportunity; which surely cannot be very long in coming. In four days I am to rejoin my wife; after which some bits of visits are to be paid in this North Country; necessary most of them, not likely to be profitable almost any. In perhaps a month I expect to be back in Chelsea; whither direct a word if you are still beneficent enough to think of such a Castaway! Yours ever, T. Carlyle I got Thoreau's Book; and meant well to read it, but have not yet succeeded, though it went with me through all Ireland: tell him so, please. Too Jean-Paulish, I found it hitherto. CXLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 19 July, 1850 My Dear Emerson, My Friend, my Friend,--You behold before you a remorseful man! It is well-nigh a year now since I despatched some hurried rag of paper to you out of Scotland, indicating doubtless that I would speedily follow it with a longer letter; and here, when gray Autumn is at hand again, I have still written nothing to you, heard nothing from you! It is miserable to think of:--and yet it is a fact, and there is no denying of it; and so we must let it lie. If it please Heaven, the like shall not occur again. "Ohone Arooh!" as the Irish taught me to say, "Ohone Arooh!" The fact is, my life has been black with care and toil,--labor above board and far worse labor below;--I have hardly had a heavier year (overloaded too with a kind of "health" which may be called frightful): to "burn my own smoke" in some measure, has really been all I was up to; and except on sheer immediate compulsion I have not written a word to any creature.-- Yesternight I finished the last of these extraordinary _Pamphlets;_ am about running off somewhither into the deserts, of Wales or Scotland, Scandinavia or still remoter deserts;--and my first signal of revived reminiscence is to you. Nay I have not at any time forgotten you, be that justice done the unfortunate: and though I see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world,--I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock- strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one. Poor devils!--Nay if there were no point of agreement at all, and I were more intolerant "of ways of thinking" than I even am,--yet has not the man Emerson, from old years, been a Human Friend to me? Can I ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly of the man Emerson? No more of this. Write to me in your first good hour; and say that there is still a brother-soul left to me alive in this world, and a kind thought surviving far over the sea!--Chapman, with due punctuality at the time of publication, sent me the _Representative Men;_ which I read in the becoming manner: you now get the Book offered you for a shilling, at all railway stations; and indeed I perceive the word "representative man"' (as applied to the late tragic loss we have had in Sir Robert Peel) has been adopted by the Able- Editors, and circulates through Newspapers as an appropriate household word, which is some compensation to you for the piracy you suffer from the Typographic Letter-of-marque men here. I found the Book a most finished clear and perfect set of _Engravings in the line manner;_ portraitures full of _likeness,_ and abounding in instruction and materials for reflection to me: thanks always for such a Book; and Heaven send us many more of them. _Plato,_ I think, though it is the most admired by many, did least for me: little save Socrates with his clogs and big ears remains alive with me from it. _Swedenborg_ is excellent in _likeness;_ excellent in many respects;--yet I said to myself, on reaching your general conclusion about the man and his struggles: "_Missed_ the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at _it,_ and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam,--which is a terrible _miss,_ if it were never so _near!_ A miss fully as good as a mile, I should say!" --In fact, I generally dissented a little about the _end_ of all these Essays; which was notable, and not without instructive interest to me, as I had so lustily shouted "Hear, hear!" all the way from the beginning up to that stage.--On the whole, let us have another Book with your earliest convenience: that is the modest request one makes of you on shutting this. I know not what I am now going to set about: the horrible barking of the universal dog-kennel (awakened by these _Pamphlets_) must still itself again; my poor nerves must recover themselves a little:--I have much more to say; and by Heaven's blessing must try to get it said in some way if I live.-- Bostonian Prescott is here, infinitely _lionized_ by a mob of gentlemen; I have seen him in two places or three (but forbore speech): the Johnny-cake is good, the twopence worth of currants in it too are good; but if you offer it as a bit of baked Ambrosia, _Ach Gott!_-- Adieu, dear Emerson, forgive, and love me a little. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 14 November, 1850 Dear Emerson,--You are often enough present to my thoughts; but yesterday there came a little incident which has brought you rather vividly upon the scene for me. A certain "Mr. ---" from Boston sends us, yesterday morning by post, a Note of yours addressed to Mazzini, whom he cannot find; and indicates that he retains a similar one addressed to myself, and (in the most courteous, kindly, and dignified manner, if Mercy prevent not) is about carrying it off with him again to America! To give Mercy a chance, I by the first opportunity get under way for Morley's Hotel, the address of Mr. ---; find there that Mr.--, since morning, _has been_ on the road towards Liverpool and America, and that the function of Mercy is quite extinct in this instance! My reflections as I wandered home again were none of the pleasantest. Of this Mr. --- I had heard some tradition, as of an intelligent, accomplished, and superior man; such a man's acquaintance, of whatever complexion he be, is and was always a precious thing to me, well worth acquiring where possible; not to say that any friend of yours, whatever his qualities otherwise, carries with him an imperative key to all bolts and locks of mine, real or imaginary. In fact I felt punished;--and who knows, if the case were seen into, whether I deserve it? What "business" it was that deprived me of a call from Mr. ---, or of the possibility of calling on him, I know very well,--and ---, the little dog, and others know! But the fact in that matter is very far different indeed from the superficial semblance; and I appeal to all the _gentlemen_ that are in America for a candid interpretation of the same. "Eighteen million bores,"--good Heavens don't I know how many of that species we also have; and how with us, as with you, the difference between them and the Eighteen thousand noble-men and non-bores is immeasurable and inconceivable; and how, with us as with you, the _latter_ small company, sons of the Empyrean, will have to fling the former huge one, sons of Mammon and Mud, into some kind of chains again, reduce them to some kind of silence again,--unless the old Mud-Demons are to rise and devour us all? Truly it is so I construe it: and if --- and the Eighteen millions are well justified in their anger at me, and the Eighteen thousand owe me thanks and new love. That is my decided opinion, in spite of you all! And so, along with ---, probably in the same ship with him, there shall go my protest against the conduct of ---; and the declaration that to the last I will protest! Which will wind up the matter (without any word of yours on it) at this time.--For the rest, though --- sent me his Pamphlet, it is a fact I have not read a word of it, nor shall ever read. My Wife read it; but I was away, with far other things in my head; and it was "lent to various persons" till it died!--Enough and ten times more than enough of all that. Let me on this last slip of paper give you some response to the Letter* I got in Scotland, under the silence of the bright autumn sun, in my Mother's house, and read there. -------- * This letter is missing. -------- You are bountiful abundantly in your reception of those _Latter Day Pamphlets;_ and right in all you say of them;--and yet withal you are not right, my Friend, but I am! Truly it does behove a man to know the inmost resources of this universe, and, for the sake both of his peace and of his dignity, to possess his soul in patience, and look nothing doubting (nothing wincing even, if that be his humor) upon all things. For it is most indubitable there is good in all;--and if you even see an Oliver Cromwell assassinated, it is certain you may get a cartload of turnips from his carcass. Ah me, and I suppose we had too much forgotten all this, or there had not been a man like you sent to show it us so emphatically! Let us well remember it; and yet remember too that it is _not_ good always, or ever, to be "at ease in Zion"; good often to be in fierce rage in Zion; and that the vile Pythons of this Mud-World do verily require to have sun-arrows shot into them and red-hot pokers struck through them, according to occasion: woe to the man that carries either of these weapons, and does not use it in their presence! Here, at this moment, a miserable Italian organ-grinder has struck up the _Marseillaise_ under my window, for example: was the _Marseillaise_ fought out on a bed of down, or is it worth nothing when fought? On those wretched _Pamphlets_ I set no value at all, or even less than none: to me their one benefit is, my own heart is clear of them (a benefit not to be despised, I assure you!)--and in the Public, athwart this storm of curses, and emptyings of vessels of dishonor, I can already perceive that it is all well enough there too in reference to them; and the controversy of the Eighteen millions _versus_ the Eighteen thousands, or Eighteen units, is going on very handsomely in that quarter of it, for aught I can see! And so, Peace to the brave that are departed; and, Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!-- I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus's old "College" (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far from _Merthyr Tydvil,_ Cyclops' Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; went through the Severn Valley; at Bath stayed a night with Landor (a proud and high old man, who charged me with express remembrances for you); saw Tennyson too, in Cumberland, with his new Wife; and other beautiful recommendable and 'questionable things;--and was dreadfully tossed about, and torn almost to tatters by the manifold brambles of my way: and so at length am here, a much- lamed man indeed! Oh my Friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me; you know not quite (I imagine) what a burden mine is, or perhaps you would find this duty, which you always do, a little easier done! Be happy, be busy beside your still waters, and think kindly of me there. My nerves, health I call them, are in a sad state of disorder: alas, that is nine tenths of all the battle in this world. Courage, courage!--My Wife sends salutations to you and yours. Good be with you all always. Your affectionate, T. Carlyle CXLIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 July, 1851 Dear Emerson,--Don't you still remember very well that there is such a man? I know you do, and will do. But it is a ruinously long while since we have heard a word from each other;--a state of matters that ought immediately to _cease._ It was your turn, I think, to write? It was somebody's turn! Nay I heard lately you complained of bad eyes; and were grown abstinent of writing. Pray contradict me this. I cannot do without some regard from you while we are both here. Spite of your many sins, you are among the most human of all the beings I now know in the world;-- who are a very select set, and are growing ever more so, I can inform you! In late months, feeling greatly broken and without heart for anything weighty, I have been upon a _Life of John Sterling;_ which will not be good for much, but will as usual gratify me by taking itself off my hands: it was one of the things I felt a kind of obligation to do, and so am thankful to have done. Here is a patch of it lying by me, if you will look at a specimen. There are four hundred or more pages (prophesies the Printer), a good many _Letters_ and Excerpts in the latter portion of the volume. Already half printed, wholly written; but not to come out for a couple of months yet,--all trade being at a stand till this sublime "Crystal Palace" go its ways again.--And now since we are upon the business, I wish you would mention it to E.P. Clark (is not that the name?) next time you go to Boston: if that friendly clear-eyed man have anything to say in reference to it and American Booksellers, let him say and do; he may have a Copy for anybody in about a month: if _he_ have nothing to say, then let there be nothing anywhere said. For, mark O Philosopher, I expressly and with emphasis prohibit _you_ at this stage of our history, and henceforth, unless I grow poor again. Indeed, indeed, the commercial mandate of the thing (Nature's little order on that behalf) being once fulfilled (by speaking to Clark), I do not care a snuff of tobacco how it goes, and will prefer, here as elsewhere, my night's rest to any amount of superfluous money. This summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us, and productive of little,--the "Wind-dust-ry of all Nations" involving everything in one inane tornado. The very shopkeepers complain that there is no trade. Such a sanhedrim of windy fools from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one city before. But they will go their ways again, they surely will! One sits quiet in that faith;--nay, looks abroad with a kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal Children's Ball which the British Nation in these extraordinary circumstances is giving it self! Silence above all, silence is very behoveful! I read lately a small old brown French duodecimo, which I mean to send you by the first chance there is. The writer is a Capitaine Bossu; the production, a Journal of his experiences in "La Louisiane," "Oyo" (_Ohio_), and those regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to me, like some fractional Odyssey or letter.* Only a hundred years ago, and the Mississippi has changed as never valley did: in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than Balbec or Nineveh! Say what we will, Jonathan is doing miracles (of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing.--Do you know _Bartram's Travels?_ This is of the Seventies (1770) or so; treats of _Florida_ chiefly, has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurably _old._ All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of future _biblical_ article.-- Finally on this head, can you tell me of any _good_ Book on California? Good: I have read several bad. But that too is worthy of some wonder; that too, like the Old Bucaniers, hungers and thirsts (in ingenuous minds) to have some true record and description given of it. ---------- * Bossu wrote two books which are known to the student of the history of the settlement of America; one, "Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales," Paris, 1768; the other, "Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amerique septentrionale," Amsterdam (Paris), 1777. ---------- And poor Miss Fuller, was there any _Life_ ever published of her? or is any competent hand engaged on it? Poor Margaret, I often remember her; and think how she is asleep now under the surges of the sea. Mazzini, as you perhaps know, is with us this summer; comes across once in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my Wife, all his news. The Roman revolution has made a man of him,--quite brightened up ever since;--and the best friend _he_ ever saw, I believe, was that same Quack-President of France, who relieved him while it was still time. My Brother is in Annandale, working hard over _Dante_ at last; talks of coming up hither shortly; I am myself very ill and miserable in the _liver_ regions; very tough otherwise,--though I have now got spectacles for small print in the twilight. _Eheu fugaces,_--and yet why _Eheu?_ In fact it is better to be silent.--Adieu, dear Emerson; I expect to get a great deal brisker by and by,--and in the first place to have a Missive from Boston again. My Wife sends you many regards. I am as ever,-- affectionately Yours, --T. Carlyle CXLV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 July, 1851 My Dear Carlyle,--You must always thank me for silence, be it never so long, and must put on it the most generous interpretations. For I am too sure of your genius and goodness, and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. There is very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my love of your letters, I think it the kind part to defend you from our imbecilities,--my own, and other men's. Besides, my eyes are bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper. And yet I owe you all my story, if story I have. I have been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio River to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky,--walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams,--and lost one day's light; then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands. "The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the "Iron" City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west.--I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara. No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more's the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret Fuller, or my part in one;--for Channing and Ward are to do theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New York _Tribune,_ and, a few days after, was on the point of writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in Rufus Griswold's Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E. possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about contents of Sterling's letters to me, or that I had letters, this paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, I know not. He once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known Margaret Fuller in New York; but probably never saw any letter of Sterling's or heard the contents of any. I have not read again Sterling's letters, which I keep as good Lares in a special niche, but I have no recollection of anything that would be valuable to you. For the American Public for the Book, I think it important that you should take the precise step of sending Phillips and Sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. I saw them, and also E.P. Clark, and put them in communication, and Clark is to write you at once. Having got so far in my writing to you, I do not know but I shall gain heart, and write more letters over sea. You will think my sloth suicidal enough. So many men as I learned to value in your country,--so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse,-- and I lose them all by silence. Arthur Helps is a chief benefactor of mine. I wrote him a letter by Ward,--who brought the letter back. I ought to thank John Carlyle, not only for me, but for a multitude of good men and women here who read his _Inferno_ duly. W.E. Forster sent me his Penn Pamphlet; I sent it to Bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought Forster might have made a still stronger case. Clough I prize at a high rate, the man and his poetry, but write not. Wilkinson I thought a man of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which school-boys and school-girls often show,--and we stop their mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion. But there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue. Kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your house, and health and strength and victory to you. Your affectionate, Waldo Emerson CXLVI. Carlyle to Emerson Great Malvern, Worcestershire, 25 August, 1851 Dear Emerson,--Many thanks for your Letter, which found me here about a week ago, and gave a full solution to my bibliopolic difficulties. However sore your eyes, or however taciturn your mood, there is no delay of writing when any service is to be done by it! In fact you are very good to me, and always were, in all manner of ways; for which I do, as I ought, thank the Upper Powers and you. That truly has been and is one of the possessions of my life in this perverse epoch of the world.... I have sent off by John Chapman a Copy of the _Life of Sterling,_ which is all printed and ready, but is not to appear till the first week of October.... Along with the _Sheets_ was a poor little French Book for you,--Book of a poor Naval _Mississippi_ Frenchman, one "Bossu," I think; written only a Century ago, yet which already seemed old as the Pyramids in reference to those strange fast-growing countries. I read it as a kind of defaced _romance;_ very thin and lean, but all _true,_ and very marvelous as such. It is above three weeks since my Wife and I left London, (the Printer having done,) and came hither with the purpose of a month of what is called "Water Cure"; for which this place, otherwise extremely pleasant and wholesome, has become celebrated of late years. Dr. Gully, the pontiff of the business in our Island, warmly encouraged my purpose so soon as he heard of it; nay, urgently offered at once that both of us should become his own guests till the experiment were tried: and here accordingly we are; I water-curing, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sad _steepages,_ and other singular procedures; my Wife not meddling for her own behoof, but only seeing me do it. These have been three of the idlest weeks I ever spent, and there is still one to come: after which we go northward to Lancashire, and across the Border where my good old Mother still expects me; and so, after some little visiting and dawdling, hope to find ourselves home again before September end, and the inexpressible Glass Palace with its noisy inanity have taken itself quite away again. It was no increase of ill-health that drove me hither, rather the reverse; but I have long been minded to try this thing: and now I think the result will be,--_zero_ pretty nearly, and one imagination the less. My long walks, my strenuous idleness, have certainly done me good; nor has the "water" done me any _ill,_ which perhaps is much to say of it. For the rest, it is a strange quasi-monastic--godless and yet _devotional_--way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. I foresee, this "Water Cure," under better forms, will become the _Ramadhan_ of the overworked unbelieving English in time coming; an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while!--We had Twisleton* here (often speaking of you), who is off to America again; will sail, I think, along with this Letter; a semi-articulate but solid- minded worthy man. We have other officials and other _litterateurs_ (T.B. Macaulay in his hired villa for one): but the mind rather shuns than seeks them, one finds solitary quasi- devotion preferable, and [Greek], as Pindar had it! ----------- * The late Hon. Edward Twisleton, a man of high character and large attainments, and with a personal disposition that won the respect and affection of a wide circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the author of a curious and learned treatise entitled "The Tongue not Essential to Speech," and his remarkable volume on "The Handwriting of Junius" seems to have effectually closed a long controversy. --------- Richard Milnes is married, about two weeks ago, and gone to Vienna for a jaunt. His wife, a Miss Crewe (Lord Crewe's sister), about forty, pleasant, intelligent, and rather rich: that is the end of Richard's long first act. Alfred Tennyson, perhaps you heard, is gone to Italy with his wife: their baby died or was dead-born; they found England wearisome: Alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here. Item Thackeray; who is coming over to lecture to you: a mad world, my Masters! Your Letter to Mazzini was duly despatched; and we hear from him that he will write to you, on the subject required, without delay. Browning and his wife, home from Florence, are both in London at present; mean to live in Paris henceforth for some time. They had seen something both of Margaret and her d'Ossoli, and appeared to have a true and lively interest in them; Browning spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the subject: I think it was I that had introduced poor Margaret to them. I said he ought to send these reminiscences to America,--that was the night before we left London, three weeks ago; his answer gave me the impression there had been some hindrance somewhere. Accordingly, when your Letter and Mazzini's reached me here, I wrote to Browning urgently on the subject: but he informs me that they _have_ sent all their reminiscences, at the request of Mr. Story; so that it is already all well.--Dear Emerson, you see I am at the bottom of my paper. I will write to you again before long; we cannot let you lie fallow in that manner altogether. Have you got proper _spectacles_ for your eyes? I have adopted that beautiful symbol of old age, and feel myself very venerable: take care of your eyes! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 April, 1852 My Dear Carlyle,--I have not grown so callous by my sulky habit, but that I know where my friends are, and who can help me, in time of need. And I have to crave your good offices today, and in a matter relating once more to Margaret Fuller.... You were so kind as to interest yourself, many months ago, to set Mazzini and Browning on writing their Reminiscences for us. But we never heard from either of them. Lately I have learned, by way of Sam Longfellow, in Paris, brother of our poet Longfellow, that Browning assured him that he did write and send a memoir to this country,--to whom, I know not. It never arrived at the hands of the Fullers, nor of Story, Channing, or me;--though the book was delayed in the hope of such help. I hate that his paper should be lost. The little French _Voyage,_ &c. of Bossu, I got safely, and compared its pictures with my own, at the Mississippi, the Illinois, and Chicago. It is curious and true enough, no doubt, though its Indians are rather dim and vague, and "Messieurs Sauvages" Good Indians we have in Alexander Henry's _Travels in Canada,_ and in our modern Catlin, and the best Western America, perhaps, in F.A. Michaux, _Voyage a l'ouest des monts Alleghanis,_ and in Fremont. But it was California I believe you asked about, and, after looking at Taylor, Parkman, and the rest, I saw that the only course is to read them all, and every private letter that gets into the newspapers. So there was nothing to say. I rejoiced with the rest of mankind in the _Life of Sterling,_ and now peace will be to his Manes, down in this lower sphere. Yet I see well that I should have held to his opinion, in all those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the palms. It is said: here, that you work upon Frederick the Great?? However that be, health, strength, love, joy, and victory to you. --R.W. Emerson CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 7 May, 1852 Dear Emerson,--I was delighted at the sight of your hand again. My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,--as if I could have _helped_ growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;--and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by! To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically _human._ God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog- kennel of a world! And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,-- considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take! Nevertheless _Marchons,_--and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking.... Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl. Such a predetermination to _eat_ this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her "mountain me" indeed:-- but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, _a toute epreuve._--Your Copy of the Book* came to me at last (to my joy): I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges. The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;--which is not the plan at all!--What can have become of Mazzini's Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable. Still less in the case of Browning: for Browning and his Wife did also write; I myself in the end of last July, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor Margaret and her Husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it,--at the request of Mrs. Story, I think. His address at present is, "No. 138 Avenue des Champs Elysees, a Paris," if your American travelers still thought of inquiring.--Adieu, dear Emerson, till next week. Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * "The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." -------- CXLIX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, May [?], 1852 You make me happy with your loving thoughts and meanings towards me. I have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. And the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous good-will, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me. -------- * From an imperfect rough draft. -------- It is good to be born in good air and outlook, and not less with a civilization, that is, with one poet still living in the world. O yes, and I feel all the solemnity and vital cheer of the benefit.--If only the mountains of water and of land and the steeper mountains of blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. It is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. I like that Thor should make comets and thunder, as well as Iduna apples, or Heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. Nor is it your fault that you do a hero's work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. Pity me, O strong man! I am of a puny constitution half made up, and as I from childhood knew,--not a poet but a lover of poetry, and poets, and merely serving as writer, &c. in this empty America, before the arrival of the poets. You must not misconstrue my silences, but thank me for them all, as a true homage to your diligence which I love to defend... She* had such reverence and love for Landor that I do not know but at any moment in her natural life she would have sunk in the sea, for an ode from him; and now this most propitious cake is offered to her Manes. The loss of the notes of Browning and of Mazzini, which you confirm, astonishes me. --------- * Margaret Fuller. The break in continuity is in the rough draft. --------- CL. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 25 June, 1852 Dear Emerson...... You are a born _enthusiast,_ as quiet as you are; and it will continue so, at intervals, to the end. I admire your sly low-voiced sarcasm too;--in short, I love the sternly-gentle close-buttoned man very well, as I have always done, and intend to continue doing!--Pray observe therefore, and lay it to heart as a practical fact, that you are bound to persevere in writing to me from time to time; and will never get it given up, how sulky soever you grow, while we both remain in this world. Do not I very well understand all that you say about "apathized moods," &c.? The gloom of approaching old age (approaching, nay arriving with some of us) is very considerable upon a man; and on the whole one contrives to take the very ugliest view, now and then, of all beautifulest things; and to shut one's lips with a kind of grim defiance, a kind of imperial sorrow which is almost like felicity,--so completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods! These too are necessary, moods to a man. But the Earth withal is verdant, sun-beshone; and the Son of Adam has his place on it, and his tasks and recompenses in it, to the close;--as one remembers by and by, too. On the whole, I am infinitely solitary; but not more heavy laden than I have all along been, perhaps rather less so; I could fancy even old age to be beautiful, and to have a real divineness: for the rest, I say always, I cannot part with you, however it go; and so, in brief, you must get into the way of holding yourself obliged as formerly to a kind of _dialogue_ with me; and speak, on paper since not otherwise, the oftenest you can. Let that be a point settled. I am not _writing_ on Frederic the Great; nor at all practically contemplating to do so. But, being in a reading mood after those furious _Pamphlets_ (which have procured me showers of abuse from all the extensive genus Stupid in this country, and not done me any other mischief, but perhaps good), and not being capable of reading except in a train and _about_ some object of interest to me,--I took to reading, near a year ago, about Frederick, as I had twice in my life done before; and have, in a loose way, tumbled up an immense quantity of shot rubbish on that field, and still continue. Not with much decisive approach to Frederick's _self,_ I am still afraid! The man looks brilliant and noble to me; but how _love_ him, or the sad wreck he lived and worked in? I do not even yet _see_ him clearly; and to try making others see him--?--Yet Voltaire and he _are_ the celestial element of the poor Eighteenth Century; poor souls. I confess also to a real love for Frederick's dumb followers: the Prussian _Soldiery._--I often say to myself, "Were not _here_ the real priests and virtuous martyrs of that loud-babbling rotten generation!" And so it goes on; when to end, or in what to end, God knows. Adieu, dear Emerson. A blockhead (by mistake) has been let in, and has consumed all my time. Good be ever with you and yours. --T. Carlyle CLI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 19 April, 1853 My Dear Friend,--As I find I never write a letter except at the dunning of the Penny Post,--which is the pest of the century,--I have thought lately of crossing to England to excuse to you my negligence of your injunction, which so flattered me by its affectionateness a year ago. I was to write once a month. My own disobedience is wonderful, and explains to me all the sins of omission of the whole world. The levity with which we can let fall into disuse such a sacrament as the exchange of greeting at short periods, is a kind of magnanimity, and should be an astonishing argument of the "Immortality"; and I wonder how it has escaped the notice of philosophers. But what had I, dear wise man, to tell you? What, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness;--but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret,--none whatever. I scribble always a little,--much less than formerly,--and I did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on Fate, which--if we all live long enough, that is, you, and I, and the chapter--I hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself--as you will--you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea. But I was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. They are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray... I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,--for it yields to no engineering,--are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful." On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succumb. Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants.... I have written hundreds of pages about England and America, and may send them to you in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to Jane Carlyle. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 13 May, 1853 Dear Emerson,--The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically _Old Age_ had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I have often said, was the _unique_ among my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: the _solitude_ one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs!--The truth is, moreover, I bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle- light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! "The buying of your first pair of spectacles," I said to an old Scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor."--"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so joyful perhaps!"--Well, well, I have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, what of the night?-- Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the _epic_ in them,--_ganz nach meinem Sinne._ I see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of _un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a "republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what _its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now _is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand "suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy: mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!-- I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will _reappear_ conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will take some time yet, I think.--And so we will leave it. I went to Germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,--and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!--In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image of calm _power_ (to say nothing of its other properties) I find I had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your _despatch-of-business_ talents,--a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two of Fritz's Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. Schiller's death-chamber, Goethe's sad Court-environment; above all, Luther's little room in the _Wartburg_ (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present so _holy_ a spot as that same. Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,--such my sad fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him. But on the whole _Universal Puseyism_ seemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;--and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,--unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent _silence,_ with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing,--_Ach Gott!_ Never, never.--Clough is coming home, I hope.--Write soon, if you be not enchanted! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 10 August, 1853 My Dear Carlyle,--Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to,--perhaps it was May,--I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts--and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking--outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture--rare enough here--with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come--the gay deceiver--once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. I beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat. I have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness,--which I hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge,--and mainly in the case of Miss Bacon, who has a private history that entitles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her Shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. Bancroft was to have given her letters to Hallam, but gave one to Sir H. Ellis. Everett, I believe, gave her one to Mr. Grote; and when I told her what I remembered hearing of Spedding, she was eager to see him; which access I knew not how to secure, except through you. She wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet Spedding at your house. But do not fancy that I send any one to you heedlessly; for I value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than I give. I shall not send you any more people without good reason. Your visit to Germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, I am preparing to read your history of Frederic. You are an inveterate European, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and I have long since forborne to importune you with America, as if it were a humorous repetition of Johnson's visit to Scotland. And yet since Thackeray's adventure, I have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. I was at New York, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. I am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. I hope to see him, if he comes again. New York would interest you, as I am told it did him; you both less and more. The "society" there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of Boston, and a very modest opinion of London. There is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. A new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. All Spanish America discovers that only in the U. States, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to New York. The Southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that Boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. Of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beatitudes,--and Thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. Have you a physician that can? Are you a physician, and will you come? If you will come, cities will go out to meet you. And now I see I have so much to say to you that I ought to write once a month, and I must begin at this point again incontinently. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 9 September, 1853 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! You ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. If we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. Alas, I do not find as I grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! I am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together. I have not quitted Town this year at all; have resisted calls to Scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the Ashburtons are gone to John of Groat's House, or the Scottish _Thule,_ to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)--I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts _settle_ (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place at all in these months,--with its long clean streets, green parks, and nobody in them, or nobody one has ever seen before. Out of La Trappe, which does not suit a Protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. I might study even but, as I said, there are noises going on; a _last_ desperate spasmodic effort of building,--a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one "spacious room" (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be air _ad libitum,_ light from the sky, and no _sound,_ not even that of the Cremorne Cannons, shall find access to me any more! Such is the prophecy; may the gods grant it! We shall see now in about a month;--then adieu to mortar-tubs to all Eternity:--I endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as I can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if I liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of German inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this, _this_ is here of its own will, and for a purpose! Seriously, I had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but Chelsea, as London generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; a _good_ builder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm I set him to. My notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. Alas, this is not the kind of _silence_ I could have coveted, and could once get,--with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! But one must take such as can be had,--and thank the gods. Even so, my friend. In the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, I hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact I am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circumstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. What a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! Enough, enough; there will be all Eternity to rest in, as Arnauld said: "Why in such a fuss, little sir?" You "apologize" for sending people to me: O you of little faith! Never dream of such a thing nay, whom _did_ you send? The Cincinnati Lecturer* I had provided for with Owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the Cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the Albemarle Street rooms;--and he never came to hand. As for Miss Bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragically _quixotic_ as her Shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can;--which is far more than she _asks_ of me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul);--but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far. --------- * Mr. O.M. Mitchell, the astronomer. --------- Clough is settled in his Office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. I see little of him hitherto; I did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but I think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. Of America, at least of New England, I can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression,--especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the Earth. More power to his elbow!--Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne superadded), of enormous _appetite_ withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his _outer breeding,_ which is fixed enough, and _perfect_ according to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. A _big,_ fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. _Ay de mi!_ But I must end, I must end. Your Letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. I said to myself: Well, if I live to finish this Frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not I go, in my old days, and see Concord, Yankeeland, and that man again, after all!--Adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always. --T. Carlyle CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 11 March, 1854 My Dear Carlyle,--The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For you,--I have too much constitutional regard and ---, not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the maxim which the French stole from our Indians,--and it was worth stealing,--"Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship." Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp in all men,--most in myself. And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel Laurence; for I lately looked into _Jesuitism,_ a Latter-Day Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in 1850. And to do this alone.--You must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale-- they like, without criticism. I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River, Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. It is very necessary that we should have mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think of home the heart is taken out. Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about you, and I have not written to him since his return to England. You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin. He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails. Greeley of the _New York Tribune_ is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,--multitudes of them in these very parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man. "There are no singing birds in the prairie," I truly heard. All the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land. One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other shore, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep. My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you. Faithfully yours, R.W. Emerson CLV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 April, 1854 Dear Emerson,--It was a morning not like any other which lay round it, a morning to be marked white, that one, about a week ago, when your Letter came to me; a word from you yet again, after so long a silence! On the whole, I perceive you will not utterly give up answering me, but will rouse yourself now and then to a word of human brotherhood on my behalf, so long as we both continue in this Planet. And I declare, the Heavens will reward you; and as to me, I will be thankful for what I get, and submissive to delays and to all things: all things are good compared with flat want in that respect. It remains true, and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. That is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me. The solitude, the silence of my poor soul, in the centre of this roaring whirlpool called Universe, is great, always, and sometimes strange and almost awful. I have two million talking bipeds without feathers, close at my elbow, too; and of these it is often hard for me to say whether the so-called "wise" or the almost professedly foolish are the more inexpressibly unproductive to me. "Silence, Silence!" I often say to myself: "Be silent, thou poor fool; and prepare for that Divine Silence which is now not far!"--On the whole, write to me whenever you can; and be not weary of well-doing. I have had sad things to do and see since I wrote to you: the loss of my dear and good old Mother, which could not be spared me forever, has come more like a kind of total bankruptcy upon me than might have been expected, considering her age and mine. Oh those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true, pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over; and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred;--and the all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay not _cruel_ altogether, let me say: huge, profound, _unspeakable,_ that is the word.--You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before.-- Forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be helped. "Paradise is under the shadow of our swords," said the Emir: "Forward!"-- I make no way in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct German shadows,--who answer nothing but mumblings. And on the whole Fritz himself is not sufficiently divine to me, far from it; and I am getting old, and heavy of heart;--and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of _Frederic_ is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically _lies_ THERE;--and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of _writing_ about him; for as to him, he with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere.--Pity me, pity me; I know not on what hand to turn; and have such a Chaos filling all my Earth and Heaven as was seldom seen in British or Foreign Literature! Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature itself, is not growing more venerable to me, but less and ever less: good Heavens, I feel often as if there were no madder set of bladders tumbling on the billows of the general Bedlam at this moment than even the Literary ones,--dear at twopence a gross, I should say, unless one could _annihilate_ them by purchase on those easy terms! But do not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family secret. I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your American speculations, and wild dashing portraitures of things as they are with you; and recognize well, under your light caricature, the outlines of a right true picture, which has often made me sad and grim in late years. Yes, I consider that the "Battle of Freedom and Slavery" is very far from ended; and that the fate of poor "Freedom" in the quarrel is very questionable indeed! Alas, there is but one _Slavery,_ as I wrote somewhere; and that, I think, is mounting towards a height, which may bring strokes to bear upon it again! Meanwhile, patience; for us there is nothing else appointed.--Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and don't loiter!-- Miss Bacon has fled away to _St. Alban's_ (the _Great_ Bacon's place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all _evidence_ from Museums or Archives; I have not had an answer from her since before Christmas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady: I sometimes silently wish she were safe home again; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured. Adieu, my Friend; I must stop short here. Write soon, if you have any charity. Good be with you ever. --T. Carlyle CLVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 April, 1855 My Dear Friend,--On this delicious spring day, I will obey the beautiful voices of the winds, long disobeyed, and address you; nor cloud the hour by looking at the letters in my drawer to know if a twelvemonth has been allowed to elapse since this tardy writing was due. Mr. Everett sent me one day a letter he had received from you, containing a kind message to me, which gave me pleasure and pain. I returned the letter with thanks, and with promises I would sin no more. Instantly, I was whisked, by "the stormy wing of Fate," out of my chain, and whirled, like a dry leaf, through the State of New York. Now at home again, I read English Newspapers, with all the world, and claim an imaginary privilege over my compatriots, that I revolve therein my friend's large part. Ward said to me yesterday, that Carlyle's star was daily rising. For C. had said years ago, when all men thought him mad, that which the rest of mortals, including the Times Newspaper, have at last got near enough to see with eyes, and therefore to believe. And one day, in Philadelphia, you should have heard the wise young Philip Randolph defend you against objections of mine. But when I have such testimony, I say to myself, the high-seeing austerely exigent friend whom I elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. Yet I have not changed. I have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the Genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. And I see well what a piece of Providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo Soprano to balance the roar of the Orchestra. The solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows.--And have I not put him into my Chapter of "English Spiritual Tendencies," with all thankfulness to the Eternal Creator,--though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk? 'T is fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. We shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. I follow, I find, the fortunes of my Country, in my privatest ways. An American is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on Saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. We admire the [Greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. No leisure except for the strong, the nimble have none.--I ought to tell you what I do, or I ought to have to tell you what I have done. But what can I? the same concession to the levity of the times, the noise of America comes again. I have even run on wrong topics for my parsimonious Muse, and waste my time from my true studies. England I see as a roaring volcano of Fate, which threatens to roast or smother the poor literary Plinys that come too near for mere purpose of reporting. I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Antony Wood;--which, and the like of which, I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. Yet this is measuring after appearance, measuring on hours and days; the true measure is quite other, for life takes its color and quality not from the days, but the dawns. The lucid intervals are like drowning men's moments, equivalent to the foregoing years. Besides, Nature uses us. We live but little for ourselves, a good deal for our children, and strangers. Each man is one more lump of clay to hold the world together. It is in the power of the Spirit meantime to make him rich reprisals,--which he confides will somewhere be done.--Ah, my friend, you have better things to send me word of, than these musings of indolence. Is Frederic recreated? Is Frederic the Great? Forget my short-comings and write to me. Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. I have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success! Kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother. Yours faithfully, R.W. Emerson CLVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 May, 1855 Dear Emerson,--Last Sunday, Clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of Letters you were grown; when, next morning, your Letter itself made its appearance. Thanks, thanks. You know not in the least, I perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your Letters are to me. How you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of Adam who, I felt, completely understood what I was saying; and answered with a truly _human_ voice,--inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "Silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!--Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! As the beneficent Presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and I will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all. This last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time. I did not go to the Country at all in summer or winter; refused even my Christmas at The Grange with the Ashburtons,--it was too sad an anniversary for me;--I have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet _must_ be _done._ These are truly the terms. I never had such a business in my life before. Frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern Muses as given hitherto. No man of _genius_ ever saw him with eyes, except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time. And the wretched Books have no _indexes,_ no precision of detail; and I am far away from Berlin and the seat of information;--and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days; _and_ (in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if I can before I die. This of obstinacy is the one quality I still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will complain no more at present. General Washington gained the freedom of America-- chiefly by this respectable quality I talk of; nor can a history of Frederick be written, in Chelsea in the year 1855, except as _against_ hope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner. We are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me! "Balaklava," I can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the English language henceforth: it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in English life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all a _Balaklava_ these many years. A Balaklava now _yielding,_ under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs,--towards the bottomless Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one. _Altum Silentium,_ what else can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on, _without_ any general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff. _Ach Gott!_ Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business? We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only _housebreaker_ qualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones, _or_ go to the Devil); and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued a _thief_ in all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling a _General_ as Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri,--we have got into a very strange problem indeed!--But there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. They have not _done_ yet, I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating often),--and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again. Pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls!--Before my paper quite end, I must in my own name, and that of a select company of others, inquire rigorously of R.W.E. why he does not _give_ us that little Book on England he has promised so long? I am very serious in saying, I myself want much to see it;--and that I can see no reason why we all should not, without delay. Bring it out, I say, and print it, _tale quale._ You will never get it in the least like what _you_ wish it, clearly no! But I venture to warrant, it is good enough,--far too good for the readers that are to get it. Such a pack of blockheads, and disloyal and bewildered unfortunates who know not their right hand from their left, as fill me with astonishment, and are more and more forfeiting all respect from me. Publish the Book, I say; let us have it and so have done! Adieu, my dear friend, for this time. I had a thousand things more to write, but have wasted my sheet, and must end. I will take another before long, whatever you do. In my lonely thoughts you are never long absent: _Valete_ all of you at Concord! --T. Carlyle CLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 6 May, 1856 Dear Carlyle,--There is no escape from the forces of time and life, and we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys, landlords, and tenants. But the planes and platforms on which all stand remain the same, and we are ever expecting the descent of the heavens, which is to put us into familiarity with the first named. When I ceased to write to you for a long time, I said to myself,--If anything really good should happen here,--any stroke of good sense or virtue in our politics, or of great sense in a book,--I will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but I will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. Thank me for my resolution, and for keeping it through the long night.--One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American,--which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again, I shall. It is called _Leaves of Grass,_--was written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it. By tomorrow's steamer goes Mrs. --- to Liverpool, and to Switzerland and Germany, by the advice of physicians, and I cannot let her go without praying you to drop your pen, and shut up German history for an hour, and extend your walk to her chambers, wherever they may be. _There's_ a piece of republicanism for you to see and hear! That person was, ten or fifteen years ago, the loveliest of women, and her speech and manners may still give you some report of the same. She has always lived with good people, and in her position is a centre of what is called good society, wherein her large heart makes a certain glory and refinement. She is one of nature's ladies, and when I hear her tell I know not what stories of her friends, or her children, or her pensioners, I find a pathetic eloquence which I know not where to match. But I suppose you shall never hear it. Every American is a little displaced in London, and, no doubt, her company has grown to her. Her husband is a banker connected in business with your ---, and is a man of elegant genius and tastes, and his house is a resort for fine people. Thorwaldsen distinguished Mrs. --- in Rome, formerly, by his attentions. Powers the sculptor made an admirable bust of her; Clough and Thackeray will tell you of her. Jenny Lind, like the rest, was captivated by her, and was married at her house. Is not Henry James in London? he knows her well. If Tennyson comes to London, whilst she is there, he should see her for his "Lays of Good Women." Now please to read these things to the wise and kind ears of Jane Carlyle, and ask her if I have done wrong in giving my friend a letter to her? I could not ask more than that each of those ladies might appear to the other what each has appeared to me. I saw Thackeray, in the winter, and he said he would come and see me here, in April or May; but he is still, I believe, in the South and West. Do not believe me for my reticency less hungry for letters. I grieve at the want and loss, and am about writing again, that I may hear from you. Ever affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson CLIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 20 July, 1856 Dear Emerson;--Welcome was your Letter to me, after the long interval; as welcome as any human Letter could now well be. These many months and years I have been sunk in what disastrous vortexes of foreign wreck you know, till I am fallen sick and almost broken-hearted, and my life (if it were not this one interest, of doing a problem which I see to be impossible, and of smallish value if found doable!) is burdensome and without meaning to me. It is so rarely I hear the voice of a magnanimous Brother Man addressing any word to me: ninety-nine hundredths of the Letters I get are impertinent clutchings of me by the button, concerning which the one business is, How to get handsomely loose again; What to say that shall soonest _end_ the intrusion,--if saying Nothing will not be the best way. Which last I often in my sorrow have recourse to, at what ever known risks. "We must pay our tribute to Time": ah yes, yes;--and yet I will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a _potential_ Letter coming out of New England for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb.--The best is, I am about going into Scotland, in two days, into deep solitude, for a couple of months beside the Solway sea: I absolutely need to have the dust blown out of me, and my mad nerves rested (there is nothing else quite gone wrong): this unblest _Life of Frederick_ is now actually to get along into the Printer's hand; --a good Book being impossible upon it, there shall a bad one be done, and one's poor existence rid of it:--for which great object two months of voluntary torpor are considered the fair preliminary. In another year's time, (if the Fates allow me to live,) I expect to have got a great deal of rubbish swept into chaos again. Unlucky it should ever have been dug up, much of it!-- Your Mrs. --- should have had our best welcome, for the sake of him who sent her, had there been nothing more: but the Lady never showed face at all; nor could I for a long time get any trace--and then it was a most faint and distant one as if by _double_ reflex--of her whereabout: too distant, too difficult for me, who do not make a call once in the six months lately. I did mean to go in quest (never had an _address_); but had not yet rallied for the Enterprise, when Mrs. --- herself wrote that she had been unwell, that she was going directly for Paris, and would see us on her return. So be it:--pray only I may not be absent next! I have not seen or distinctly heard of Miss Bacon for a year and half past: I often ask myself, what has become of that poor Lady, and wish I knew of her being safe among her friends again. I have even lost the address (which at any rate was probably not a lasting one); perhaps I could find it by the eye,--but it is five miles away; and my _non-plus-ultra_ for years past is not above half that distance. Heigho! My time is all up and more; and Chaos come again is lying round me, in the shape of "packing," in a thousand shapes!--Browning is coming tonight to take leave. Do you know Browning at all? He is abstruse, but worth knowing.--And what of the _Discourse on England_ by a certain man? Shame! We always hear of it again as "out"; and it continues obstinately _in._ Adieu, my friend. Ever yours, T. Carlyle CLX. Carlyle to Emerson The Gill, Cummertrees, Annan, N.B. 28 August, 1856 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter alighted here yesterday;* like a winged Mercury, bringing "airs from Heaven" (in a sense) along with his news. I understand very well your indisposition to write; we must conform to it, as to the law of _Chronos_ (oldest of the gods); but I will murmur always, "It is such a pity as of almost no other man!"--You are citizen of a "Republic," and perhaps fancy yourself republican in an eminent degree: nevertheless I have remarked there is no man of whom I am so certain always to get something _kingly:_--and whenever your huge inarticulate America gets settled into _kingdoms,_ of the New Model, fit for these Ages which are all upon the _Moult_ just now, and dreadfully like going to the Devil in the interim,--then will America, and all nations through her, owe the man Emerson a _debt,_ far greater than either they or he are in the least aware of at present! That I consider (for myself) to be an ascertained fact. For which I myself at least am thankful and have long been. --------- * It is missing now. --------- It pleases me much to know that this English [book], so long twinkling in our expectations and always drawn back again, is at last verily to appear: I wish I could get hold of my copy: there is no Book that would suit me better just now. But we must wait for four weeks till we get back to Chelsea,--unless I call find some trusty hand to extract it from the rubbish that will have accumulated there, and forward it by post. You speak as if there were something dreadful said of my own sacred self in that Book: Courage, my Friend, it will be a most miraculous occurrence to meet with anything said by you that does me _ill;_ whether the immediate taste of it be sweet or bitter, I will take it with gratitude, you may depend,--nay even with pleasure, what perhaps is still more incredible. But an old man deluged for half a century with the brutally nonsensical vocables of his fellow-creatures (which he grows to regard soon as _rain,_ "rain of frogs" or the like, and lifts his umbrella against with indifference),--such an old gentleman, I assure you, is grateful for a word that he can recognize perennial sense in; as in this case is his sure hope. And so be the little Book thrice welcome; and let all England understand (as some choice portion of England will) that there has not been a man talking about us these very many years whose words are worth the least attention in comparison. "Post passing!" I must end, in mid-course; so much still untouched upon. Thanks for Sampson & Co., and let them go their course upon me. If I can see Mrs. --- about the end of September or after, I shall be right glad:--but I fear she will have fled before that?-- I am here in my native Country, riding, seabathing, living on country diet,--uttering no word,--now into the fifth week; have had such a "retreat" as no La Trappe hardly could have offered me. A "retreat" _without cilices,_ thistle-mattresses; and with _silent_ devotions (if any) instead of blockhead spoken ones to the Virgin and others! There is still an Excursion to the Highlands ahead, which cannot be avoided;--then home again to _peine forte et dure._ Good be with you always, dear friend. --T. Carlyle CLXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 2 December, 1856 Dear Emerson,--I am really grieved to have hurt the feelings of Mr. Phillips;* a gentleman to whom I, on my side, had no feelings but those of respect and good will! I pray you smooth him down again, by all wise methods, into at least good-natured indifference to me. He may depend upon it I could not mean to irritate him; there lay no gain for me in that! Nor is there anything of business left now between us. It is doubly and trebly evident those Stereotype Plates are not to him worth their prime cost here, still less, their prime cost plus any vestige of definite motive for me to concern myself in them:--whereupon the Project falls on its face, and vanishes forever, with apologies all round. For as to that other method, that is a game I never thought, and never should think of playing at! You may also tell him this little Biographical fact, if you think it will any way help. Some ten or more years ago, I made a similar Bargain with a New York House (known to you, and now I believe extinct): "10" or something "percent," of selling price on the Copies Printed, was to be my return--not for four or five hundred pounds money laid out, but for various things I did, which gratis would by no means have been done; in fine, it was their own Offer, made and accepted in due form; "10 percent on the copies printed." --------- * This refers to a proposed arrangement, which fell through, for the publication in America by Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, of Boston, of a complete edition of Carlyle's works, to be printed from the stereotype plates of the English edition then in course of issue by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. --------- And how many were "printed," thinks Mr. Phillips? I saw one set; dreadfully ugly Books, errors in every page;--and to this hour I have never heard of any other! The amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy "printed," the ugly one sent to myself, which I instantly despatched again somewhither! On second thought perhaps you had better _not_ tell Mr. Phillips this story, at least not in this way. _His_ integrity I would not even question by insinuation, nor need I, at the point where we now are. I perceive he sees in extraordinary brilliancy of illumination his own side of the bargain; and thinks me ignorant of several things which I am well enough informed about. In brief, make a perfect peace between us, O friend, and man of peace; and let the wampums be all wrapped up, and especially the tomahawks entirely buried, and the thing end forever! To you also I owe apologies; but not to you do I pay them, knowing from of old what you are to me. Enough, enough! I got your Book by post in the Highlands; and had such a day over it as falls rarely to my lot! Not for seven years and more have I got hold of such a Book;--Book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things, in the heart of him. Such Books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century. In fact I believe it to be worth all the Books ever written by New England upon Old. Franklin might have written such a thing (in his own way); no other since! We do very well with it here, and the wise part of us _best._ That Chapter on the Church is inimitable; "the Bishop asking a troublesome gentleman to take wine,"--you should see the kind of grin it awakens here on our best kind of faces. Excellent the manner of that, and the matter too dreadfully _true_ in every part. I do not much seize your idea in regard to "Literature," though I do details of it, and will try again. Glad of that too, even in its half state; not "sorry" at _any_ part of it,--you Sceptic! On the whole, write _again,_ and ever again at greater length: there lies your only fault to me. And yet I know, that also is a right noble one, and rare in our day. O my friend, save always for me some corner in your memory; I am very lonely in these months and years,--sunk to the centre of the Earth, like to be throttled by the Pythons and Mudgods in my old days;--but shall get out again, too; and be a better boy! No "hurry" equals mine, and it is in permanence. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 May, 1858 My Dear Carlyle,--I see no way for you to avoid the Americans but to come to America. For, first or last, we are all embarking, and all steering straight to your door. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Longworth of Cincinnati are going abroad on their travels. Possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. Their father, Nicholas Longworth, is one of the founders of the city of Cincinnati, a bigger town than Boston, where he is a huge land lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. And his family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in the Ohio Valley, as people who have well used their great wealth. His chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement of German planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to the general benefit. His son Joseph is a well-bred gentleman of literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely hospitable. His wife is a very attractive and excellent woman, and they are good friends of mine. It seems I have at some former time told her that, when she went to England, she should see you. And they are going abroad, soon, for the first time. If you are in London, you must be seen of them. But I hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward. Please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong. Tell me what is become of _Frederic,_ for whose appearance I have watched every week for months? I am better ready for him, since one or two books about Voltaire, Maupertuis, and company, fell in my way. Yet that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis,_ a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men. All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is. And I say this to you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers. Every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown. The variations to be allowed for in the surveyor's compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book. And a friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions, survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony, and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe touching the problems of man and fate and the Cause of causes,--a friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more comely and profitable than anything I have read of love. Such a dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial panoramic styles. So, if ever I hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the perpendicular, I shall hasten to believe you are shearing your prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the citadel, and I may come in the first steamer to drop in of evenings and hear the central monosyllables. Be good now again, and send me quickly--though it be the shortest autograph certificate of....* -------- * The end of this letter is lost. -------- CLXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 2 June, 1858 Dear Emerson,--Glad indeed I am to hear of you on any terms, on any subject. For the last eighteen months I have pretty much ceased all human correspondence,--writing no Note that was not in a sense wrung from me; my one society the _Nightmares_ (Prussian and other) all that while:--but often and often the image of you, and the thoughts of old days between us, has risen sad upon me; and I have waited to get loose from the Nightmares to appeal to you again,--to edacious Time and you. Most likely in a couple of weeks you would have heard from me again at any rate.--Your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time. Nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score.--If only these Cincinnati Patricians can find me here when they come? For I am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native Scotland probably) so soon as I can shake the final tag rags of Printer people off me;--"surely within three weeks now!" I say to myself. But I shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will stand to her point, I hope. That book on Friedrich of Prussia--first half of it, two swoln unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his Father, &c., and leave him at his accession--is just getting out of my hands. One packet more of Proofs, and I have done with it,--thanks to all the gods! No job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out for me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad negative one, "Shall we be beaten in our old days, then?"--But it has thoroughly humbled me,--trampled me down into the _mud,_ there to wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of Mankind, German, English, French, and other, for _all_ have borne a hand in these sad centuries;--and here I emerge at last, not _killed,_ but almost as good. Seek not to look at the Book,--nay in fact it is "not to be _published_ till September" (so the man of affairs settles with me yesterday, "owing to the political &c., to the season," &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days I should be utterly out of it,--not to hear of it again till the Day of Judgment, and if possible not even then! In fact it is a bad book, poor, misshapen, feeble, _nearly_ worthless (thanks to _past_ generations and to me); and my one excuse is, I could not make it better, all the world having played such a game with it. Well, well!--How true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras! Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much. And in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,--unless sheer Fate force him to do it;--and then he ought (if _not_ of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. That is deliberately my opinion,--or far nearer it than you will believe. Once or twice I caught some tone of you in some American Magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the only thing that is _speech_ at all among my fellow-creatures in this time. For the years that remain, I suppose we must continue to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind: what can we do, at this late stage? But in the _real_ "Model Republic," it would have been different with two good boys of this kind!-- Though shattered and trampled down to an immense degree, I do not think any bones are broken yet,--though age truly is here, and you may engage your berth in the steamer whenever you like. In a few months I expect to be sensibly improved; but my poor Wife suffers sadly the last two winters; and I am much distressed by that item of our affairs. Adieu, dear Emerson: I have lost many things; let me not lose you till I must in some way! Yours ever, T. Carlyle P.S. If you read the Newspapers (which I carefully abstain from doing) they will babble to you about Dickens's "Separation from Wife," &c., &c.; fact of Separation I believe is true; but all the rest is mere lies and nonsense. No crime or misdemeanor specifiable on either side; _unhappy_ together, these good many years past, and they at length end it.--Sulzer said, "Men are by nature _good._" "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Er kennt nicht diese verdammte Race," ejaculated Fritz, at hearing such an axiom. CLXIII.* Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 9 April, 1859 Dear Emerson,--Long months ago there was sent off for you a copy of _Friedrich_ of Prussia, two big red volumes (for which Chapman the Publisher had found some "safe, swift" vehicle); and _now_ I have reason to fear they are still loitering somewhere, or at least have long loitered sorrow on them! This is to say: If you have not _yet_ got them, address a line to "Saml. F. Flower, Esq, Librarian of Antiquarian Society, _Worcester,_ Mass." (forty miles from you, they say), and that will at once bring them. In the Devil's name! I never in my life was so near choked; swimming in this mother of Dead Dogs, and a long spell of it still ahead! I profoundly _pity myself_ (if no one else does). You shall hear of me again if I survive,--but really that is getting beyond a joke with me, and I ought to hold my peace (even to you), and swim what I can. Your little touch of Human Speech on _Burns'_* was charming; had got into the papers here (and been clipt out by me) before your copy came, and has gone far and wide since. Newberg was to give it me in German, from the _Allgemeine Zeitung,_ but lost the leaf. Adieu, my Friend; very dear to me, tho' dumb. --T. Carlyle (in such haste as seldom was).** --------- * Emerson's fine speech was made at the celebration of the Burns Centenary, Boston, January 25, 1859. See his _Miscellanies_ (Works, vol. xi.), p. 363. ** The preceding letter was discovered in 1893, in a little package of letters put aside by Mr. Emerson and marked "Autographs." --------- CLXIV. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 1 May, 1859 Dear Carlyle,--Some three weeks ago came to me a note from Mr. Haven of Worcester, announcing the arrival there of "King Friedrich," and, after a fortnight, the good book came to my door. A week later, your letter arrived. I was heartily glad to get the crimson Book itself. I had looked for it with the first ships. As it came not, I had made up my mind to that hap also. It was quite fair: I had disentitled myself. He, the true friend, had every right to punish me for my sluggish contumacy,-- backsliding, too, after penitence. So I read with resignation our blue American reprint, and I enclose to you a leaf from my journal at the time, which leaf I read afterwards in one of my lectures at the Music Hall in Boston. But the book came from the man himself. He did not punish me. He is loyal, but royal as well, and, I have always noted, has a whim for dealing _en grand monarque._ The book came, with its irresistible inscription, so that I am all tenderness and all but tears. The book too is sovereignly written. I think you the true inventor of the stereoscope, as having exhibited that art in style, long before we had heard of it in drawing. ------- * This letter and the Extract from the Diary are printed from a copy of the original supplied to me by the kindness of Mr. Alexander Ireland, who first printed a portion of the letter in his "Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Biographical Sketch," London, 1882. One or two words missing in the copy are inserted from the rough draft, which, as usual, varies in minor points from the letter as sent. -------- The letter came also. Every child of mine knows from far that handwriting, and brings it home with speed. I read without alarm the pathetical hints of your sad plight in the German labyrinth. I know too well what invitations and assurance brought you in there, to fear any lack of guides to bring you out. More presence of mind and easy change from the microscopic to the telescopic view does not exist. I await peacefully your issue from your pretended afflictions. What to tell you of my coop and byre? Ah! you are a very poor fellow, and must be left with your glory. You hug yourself on missing the illusion of children, and must be pitied as having one glittering toy the less. I am a victim all my days to certain graces of form and behavior, and can never come into equilibrium. Now I am fooled by my own young people, and grow old contented. The heedless children suddenly take the keenest hold on life, and foolish papas cling to the world on their account, as never on their own. Out of sympathy, we _make believe_ to value the prizes of their ambition and hope. My, two girls, pupils once or now of Agassiz, are good, healthy, apprehensive, decided young people, who love life. My boy divides his time between Cicero and cricket, knows his boat, the birds, and Walter Scott--verse and prose, through and through,-- and will go to College next year. Sam Ward and I tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the new comers a marked improvement on their parents. There, I flatter myself, I see some emerging of our people from the prison of their politics. The insolvency of slavery shows and stares, and we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black-vomit extirpated by mere dying and planting. I am so glad to find myself speaking once more to you, that I mean to persist in the practice. Be as glad as you have been. You and I shall not know each other on this platform as long as we have known. A correspondence even of twenty-five years should not be disused unless through some fatal event. Life is too short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow such sacrifices. Eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest,--and I cannot spare what on noble terms is offered me. With congratulations to Jane Carlyle on the grandeur of the Book, Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson Extract From Diary* Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a _History of Frederick,_ infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written,--a book that one would think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to England, in acknowledgment of this donation,--a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;--the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective. With its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modeled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times. --------- * In the first edition, this extract was printed from the original Diary; it is now printed according to the copy sent abroad. -------- And this book makes no noise; I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas has been instructed to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration. But the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these. CLXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 April, 1860 My Dear Carlyle,--Can booksellers break the seal which the gods do not, and put me in communication again with the loyalest of men? On the ground of Mr. Wight's honest proposal to give you a benefit from his edition,* I, though unwilling, allowed him to copy the Daguerre of your head. The publishers ask also some expression of your good will to their work.... -------- * Mr. O.W. Wight of New York, an upright "able editor," who, had just made arrangements for the publication of a very satisfactory edition of Carlyle's _Miscellaneous Essays._ -------- I commend you to the gods who love and uphold you, and who do not like to make their great gifts vain, but teach us that the best life-insurance is a great task. I hold you to be one of those to whom all is permitted, and who carry the laws in their hand. Continue to be good to your old friends. 'T is no matter whether they write to you or not. If not, they save your time. When _Friedrich_ is once despatched to gods and men, there was once some talk that you should come to America! You shall have an ovation such, and on such sincerity, as none have had. Ever affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson I do not know Mr. Wight, but he sends his open letter, which I fear is already old, for me to write in: and I will not keep it, lest it lose another steamer. CLXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 30 April, 1860 Dear Emerson,--It is a special favor of Heaven to me that I hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word _de Profundis._ It is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this Stygian Abyss of a _Friedrich_ (should I ever get through it alive) that I _shall then_ begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! For I feel always, what I have some times written, that there is (in a sense) but one completely human voice to me in the world; and that you are it, and have been,--thanks to you, whether you speak or not! Let me say also, while I am at it, that the few words you sent me about those first Two volumes are present with me in the far more frightful darknesses of these last Two; and indeed are often almost my one encouragement. That is a fact, and not exaggerated, though you think it is. I read some criticisms of my wretched Book, and hundreds of others I in the gross refused to read; they were in praise, they were in blame; but not one of them looked into the eyes of the object, and in genuine human fashion responded to its human strivings, and recognized it,--completely right, though with generous exaggeration! That was well done, I can tell you: a human voice, far out in the waste deeps, among the inarticulate sea-krakens and obscene monsters, loud-roaring, inexpressibly ugly, dooming you as if to eternal solitude by way of wages,-- "hath exceeding much refreshment in it," as my friend Oliver used to say. Having not one spare moment at present, I will answer to _you_ only the whole contents of that letter; you in your charity will convey to Mr. Wight what portion belongs to him. Wight, if you have a chance of him, is worth knowing; a genuine bit of metal, too thin and ringing for my tastes (hammered, in fact, upon the Yankee anvils), but recognizably of steel and with a keen fire- edge. Pray signify to him that he has done a thing agreeable to me, and that it will be pleasant if I find it will not hurt _him._ Profit to me out of it, except to keep his own soul clear and sound (to his own sense, as it always will be to mine), is perfectly indifferent; and on the whole I thank him heartily for showing me a chivalrous human brother, instead of the usual vulturous, malodorous, and much avoidable phenomenon, in Transatlantic Bibliopoly! This is accurately true; and so far as his publisher and he can extract encouragement from this, in the face of vested interests which I cannot judge of, it is theirs without reserve.... Adieu, my friend; I have not written so much in the Letter way, not, I think, since you last heard of me. In my despair it often seems as if I should never write more; but be sunk here, and perish miserably in the most undoable, least worthy, most disgusting and heart breaking of all the labors I ever had. But perhaps also not, not quite. In which case-- Yours ever truly at any rate, T. Carlyle No time to re-read. I suppose you can decipher. CLXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 January, 1861 Dear Emerson,--The sight of my hand-writing will, I know, be welcome again. Though I literally do not write the smallest Note once in a month, or converse with anything but Prussian Nightmares of a hideous [nature], and with my Horse (who is human in comparison), and with my poor Wife (who is altogether human, and heroically cheerful to me, in her poor weak state),--I must use the five minutes, which have fallen to me today, in acknowledgment, _du_e by all laws terrestrial and celestial, of the last Book* that has come from you. -------- * "The Conduct of Life." -------- I read it a great while ago, mostly in sheets, and again read it in the finely printed form,--I can tell you, if you do not already guess, with a satisfaction given me by the Books of no other living mortal. I predicted to your English Bookseller a great sale even, reckoning it the best of all your Books. What the sale was or is I nowhere learned; but the basis of my prophecy remains like the rocks, and will remain. Indeed, except from my Brother John, I have heard no criticism that had much rationality,--some of them incredibly irrational (if that matter had not altogether become a barking of dogs among us);--but I always believe there are in the mute state a great number of thinking English souls, who can recognize a Thinker and a Sayer, of perennially human type and welcome him as the rarest of miracles, in "such a spread of knowledge" as there now is:--one English soul of that kind there indubitably is; and I certify hereby, notarially if you like, that such is emphatically his view of the matter. You have grown older, more pungent, piercing;--I never read from you before such lightning-gleams of meaning as are to be found here. The finale of all, that of "Illusions" falling on us like snow-showers, but again of "the gods sitting steadfast on their thrones" all the while,--what a _Fiat Lux_ is there, into the deeps of a philosophy, which the vulgar has not, which hardly three men living have, yet dreamt of! _Well done,_ I say; and so let that matter rest. I am still twelve months or so from the end of my Task; very uncertain often whether I can, even at this snail's pace, hold out so long. In my life I was never worn nearly so low, and seem to get _weaker_ monthly. Courage! If I do get through, you shall hear of me, again. Yours forever, T. Carlyle CLXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 April, 1861 My Dear Carlyle,--...I have to thank you for the cordial note which brought me joy, many weeks ago. It was noble and welcome in all but its boding account of yourself and your task. But I have had experience of your labors, and these deplorations I have long since learned to distrust. We have settled it in America, as I doubt not it is settled in England, that _Frederick_ is a history which a beneficent Providence is not very likely to interrupt. And may every kind and tender influence near you and over you keep the best head in England from all harm. Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXIX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 8 December, 1862 My Dear Friend,--Long ago, as soon as swift steamers could bring the new book across the sea, I received the third volume of _Friedrich,_ with your autograph inscription, and read it with joy. Not a word went to the beloved author, for I do not write or think. I would wait perhaps for happier days, as our President Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such. But he waited in vain for his triumph, nor dare I in my heavy months expect bright days. The book was heartily grateful, and square to the author's imperial scale. You have lighted the glooms, and engineered away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, according to the high Italian rule, and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. First, I read it honestly through for the history; then I pause and speculate on the Muse that inspires, and the friend that reports it. 'T is sovereignly written, above all literature, dictating to all mortals what they shall accept as fated and final for their salvation. It is Mankind's Bill of Rights and Duties, the royal proclamation of Intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure, that, hereafter, _as heretofore,_ and now once for all, the World shall be governed by Common Sense and law of Morals, or shall go to ruin. --------- * Portions of this and of the following letter of Emerson have been printed by Mr. Alexander Ireland in his "Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of his Visits to England," &c. London, 1882. ---------- But the manner of it!--the author sitting as Demiurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and bantering them, amused with their good performance, patting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls when they misbehave; and communicating his mind ever in measure, just as much as the young public can understand; hinting the future, when it would be useful; recalling now and then illustrative antecedents of the actor, impressing, the reader that he is in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he descends too on the petty plot of Prussia from higher and cosmical surveys. Better I like the sound sense and the absolute independence of the tone, which may put kings in fear. And, as the reader shares, according to his intelligence, the haughty _coup d'oeil_ of this genius, and shares it with delight, I recommend to all governors, English, French, Austrian, and other, to double their guards, and look carefully to the censorship of the press. I find, as ever in your books, that one man has deserved well of mankind for restoring the Scholar's profession to its highest use and dignity.* I find also that you are very wilful, and have made a covenant with your eyes that they shall not see anything you do not wish they should. But I was heartily glad to read somewhere that your book was nearly finished in the manuscript, for I could wish you to sit and taste your fame, if that were not contrary to law of Olympus. My joints ache to think of your rugged labor. Now that you have conquered to yourself such a huge kingdom among men, can you not give yourself breath, and chat a little, an Emeritus in the eternal university, and write a gossiping letter to an old American friend or so? Alas, I own that I have no right to say this last,--I who write never. -------- * As long before as 1843 Emerson wrote in his Diary: "Carlyle in his new book" (_Past and Present_), "as everywhere, is a continuer of the great line of scholars in the world, of Horace, Varro, Pliny, Erasmus, Scaliger, Milton, and well sustains their office in ample credit and honor." --------- Here we read no books. The war is our sole and doleful instructor. All our bright young men go into it, to be misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn,--to hate slavery, _teterrima causa._ But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. 'T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to peace at the cost of replacing the South in the _status ante bellum,_ we can, with something more of courage, leave the problem to another score of years,--free labor to fight with the Beast, and see if bales and barrels and baskets cannot find out that they pass more commodiously and surely to their ports through free hands, than through barbarians. I grieved that the good Clough, the generous, susceptible scholar, should die. I read over his _Bothie_ again, full of the wine of youth at Oxford. I delight in Matthew Arnold's fine criticism in two little books. Give affectionate remembrances from me to Jane Carlyle, whom ---'s happiness and accurate reporting restored to me in brightest image. Always faithfully yours, R.W. Emerson CLXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 March, 1864 Dear Emerson,--This will be delivered to you by the Hon. Lyulph Stanley, an excellent, intelligent young gentleman whom I have known ever since his infancy,--his father and mother being among my very oldest friends in London; "Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley" (not of Knowesley, but a cadet branch of it), whom perhaps you did not meet while here. My young Friend is coming to look with his own eyes at your huge and hugely travailing Country;--and I think will agree with you, better than he does with me, in regard to that latest phenomenon. At all events, he regards "Emerson" as intelligent Englishmen all do; and you will please me much by giving him your friendliest reception and furtherance,--which I can certify that he deserves for his own sake, not counting mine at all. Probably _he_ may deliver you the Vol. IV. of _Frederic;_ he will tell you our news (part of which, what regards my poor Wife, is very bad, though God be thanked not yet the worst);--and, in some six months, he may bring me back some human tidings from Concord, a place which always inhabits my memory,--though it is so dumb latterly! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 26 September, 1864 Dear Carlyle,--Your friend, young Stanley, brought me your letter now too many days ago. It contained heavy news of your household,--yet such as in these our autumnal days we must await with what firmness we can. I hear with pain that your Wife, whom I have only seen beaming goodness and intelligence, has suffered and suffers so severely. I recall my first visit to your house, when I pronounced you wise and fortunate in relations wherein best men are often neither wise nor fortunate. I had already heard rumors of her serious illness. Send me word, I pray you, that there is better health and hope. For the rest, the Colonna motto would fit your letter, "Though sad, I am strong." I had received in July, forwarded by Stanley, on his flight through Boston, the fourth Volume of _Friedrich,_ and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks my only reading: One fact was paramount in all the good I drew from it, that whomsoever many years had used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of your force:--a pure joy to me, who abhor the inroads which time makes on me and on my friends. To live too long is the capital misfortune, and I sometimes think, if we shall not parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our morals some bolder control of the facts. I read once, that Jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which--if he should entertain them--would put him to death: and perhaps we have weapons in our intellectual armory that are to save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the world we live in. But this book will excuse you from any unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness. I found joy and pride in it, and discerned a golden chain of continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me that one good head and great heart remained in England,--immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perversities, nay, wearing these, I can well believe, as a jaunty coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better securing his own peace, and the very ends which the idlers fancy he resists. England's lease of power is good during his days. I have in these last years lamented that you had not made the visit to America, which in earlier years you projected or favored. It would have made it impossible that your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind. Ten days' residence in this country would have made you the organ of the sanity of England and of Europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities and aspirations which struggle up in our Free States, which, as yet, have no organ to others, and are ill and unsteadily articulated here. In our today's division of Republican and Democrat, it is certain that the American nationality lies in the Republican party (mixed and multiform though that party be); and I hold it not less certain, that, viewing all the nationalities of the world, the battle for Humanity is, at this hour, in America. A few days here would show you the disgusting composition of the Party which within the Union resists the national action. Take from it the wild Irish element, imported in the last twenty-five year's into this country, and led by Romish Priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength. A man intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side. Ah! how gladly I would enlist you, with your thunderbolt, on our part! How gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England! We want England and Europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency. Are English of this day incapable of a great sentiment? Can they not leave caviling at petty failures, and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men? This war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it; and the foolish terrors, "What shall we do with the negro?" "The entire black population is coming North to be fed," &c., have strangely ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally and soldier of the Republic, in that climate; now takes the place of two hundred thousand white soldiers; and will be, as the conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns. Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their wishes and perhaps beliefs; and our people, generals, and politicians have carried the like, at first, to the war, until corrected by irresistible experience. I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, --breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. The dismal Malthus, the dismal DeBow, have had their night. Our Census of 1860, and the War, are poems, which will, in the next age, inspire a genius like your own. I hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, 't is wonderful what sublime lessons I have once and again read on the Bulletin-boards in the streets. Everybody has been wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of an Ideal right. I thank you for sending to me so gracious a gentleman as Mr. Stanley, who interested us in every manner, by his elegance, his accurate information of that we wished to know, and his surprising acquaintance with the camp and military politics on our frontier. I regretted that I could see him so little. He has used his time to the best purpose, and I should gladly have learned all his adventures from so competent a witness. Forgive this long writing, and keep the old kindness which I prize above words. My kindest salutations to the dear invalid! --R.W. Emerson CLXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Cummertrees, Annan, Scotland, 14 June, 1865 Dear Emerson,--Though my hand is shaking (as you sadly notice) I determine to write you a little Note today. What a severance there has been these many sad years past!--In the first days of February I ended my weary Book; a totally worn-out man, got to shore again after far the ugliest sea he had ever swam in. In April or the end of March, when the book was published, I duly handed out a Copy for Concord and you; it was to be sent by mail; but, as my Publisher (a _new_ Chapman, very unlike the _old_) discloses to me lately an incredible negligence on such points, it is quite possible the dog may _not,_ for a long while, have put it in the Post-Office (though he faithfully charged me the postage of it, and was paid), and that the poor waif may never yet have reached you! Patience: it will come soon enough,--there are two thick volumes, and they will stand you a great deal of reading; stiff rather than "light." Since February last, I have been sauntering about in Devonshire, in Chelsea, hither, thither; idle as a dry bone, in fact, a creature sinking into deeper and deeper _collapse,_ after twelve years of such mulish pulling and pushing; creature now good for nothing seemingly, and much indifferent to being so in permanence, if that be the arrangement come upon by the Powers that made us. Some three or four weeks ago, I came rolling down hither, into this old nook of my Birthland, to see poor old Annandale again with eyes, and the poor remnants of kindred and loved ones still left me there; I was not at first very lucky (lost sleep, &c.); but am now doing better, pretty much got adjusted to my new element, new to me since about six years past,--the longest absence I ever had from it before. My Work was getting desperate at that time; and I silently said to myself, "We won't return till _it_ is done, or _you_ are done, my man!" This is my eldest living sister's house; one of the most rustic Farmhouses in the world, but abounding in all that is needful to me, especially in the truest, _silently_-active affection, the humble generosity of which is itself medicine and balm. The place is airy, on dry waving knolls cheerfully (with such _water_ as I never drank elsewhere, except at Malvern) all round me are the Mountains, Cheviot and Galloway (three to fifteen miles off), Cumberland and Yorkshire (say forty and fifty, with the Solway brine and sands intervening). I live in total solitude, sauntering moodily in thin checkered woods, galloping about, once daily, by old lanes and roads, oftenest latterly on the wide expanses of Solway shore (when the tide is _out!_) where I see bright busy Cottages far off, houses over even in Cumberland, and the beautifulest amphitheatre of eternal Hills,--but meet no living creature; and have endless thoughts as loving and as sad and sombre as I like. My youngest Brother (whom on the whole I like best, a rustic man, the express image of my Father in his ways of living and thinking) is within ten miles of me; Brother John "the Doctor" has come down to Dumfries to a sister (twelve miles off), and runs over to me by rail now and then in few minutes. I have Books; but can hardly be troubled with them. Pitiful temporary babble and balderdash, in comparison to what the Silences can say to one. Enough of all that: you perceive me sufficiently at this point of my Pilgrimage, as withdrawn to _Hades_ for the time being; intending a month's walk there, till the muddy semi-solutions settle into sediment according to what laws they have, and there be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. I have to go deeper into Scotland by and by, perhaps to try _sailing,_ which generally agrees with me; but till the end of September I hope there will be no London farther. My poor Wife, who is again poorly since I left (and has had frightful sufferings, last year especially) will probably join me in this region before I leave it. And see here, This is authentically the way we figure in the eye of the Sun; and something like what your spectacles, could they reach across the Ocean into these nooks, would teach you of us. There are three Photographs which I reckon fairly _like;_ _these_ are properly what I had to send you today,--little thinking that so much surplusage would accumulate about them; to which I now at once put an end. Your friend Conway,* who is a boundless admirer of yours, used to come our way regularly now and then; and we always liked him well. A man of most gentlemanly, ingenious ways; turn of thought always loyal and manly, though tending to be rather _winged_ than solidly ambulatory. He talked of coming to Scotland too; but it seems uncertain whether we shall meet. He is clearly rather a favorite among the London people,--and tries to explain America to them; I know not if with any success. As for me, I have entirely lost count and reckoning of your enormous element, and its enormous affairs and procedures for some time past; and can only wish (which no man more heartily does) that all may issue in as blessed a way as you hope. Fat--(if you know and his fat commonplace at all) amused me much by a thing he had heard of yours in some lecture a year or two ago. "The American Eagle is a mighty bird; but what is he to the American Peacock." At which all the audience had exploded into laughter. Very good. Adieu, old Friend. Yours ever, T. Carlyle --------- * Mr. Moncure D. Conway. --------- CLXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 7 January, 1866 Dear Carlyle,--Is it too late to send a letter to your door to claim an old right to enter, and to scatter all your convictions that I had passed under the earth? You had not to learn what a sluggish pen mine is. Of course, the sluggishness grows on me, and even such a trumpet at my gate as a letter from you heralding-in noble books, whilst it gives me joy, cannot heal the paralysis. Yet your letter deeply interested me, with the account of your rest so well earned. You had fought your great battle, and might roll in the grass, or ride your pony, or shout to the Cumberland or Scotland echoes, with largest leave of men and gods. My lethargies have not dulled my delight in good books. I read these in the bright days of our new peace, which added a lustre to every genial work. Now first we had a right to read, for the very bookworms were driven out of doors whilst the war lasted. I found in the book no trace of age, which your letter so impressively claimed. In the book, the hand does not shake, the mind is ubiquitous. The treatment is so spontaneous, self-respecting, defiant,--liberties with your hero as if he were your client, or your son, and you were proud of him, and yet can check and chide him, and even put him in the corner when he is not a good boy, freedoms with kings, and reputations, and nations, yes, and with principles too,--that each reader, I suppose, feels complimented by the confidences with which he is honored by this free-tongued, masterful Hermes.--Who knows what the [Greek] will say next? This humor of telling the story in a gale,--bantering, scoffing, at the hero, at the enemy, at the learned reporters,--is a perpetual flattery to the admiring student,--the author abusing the whole world as mad dunces,--all but you and I, reader! Ellery Channing borrowed my Volumes V. and VI., worked slowly through them,--midway came to me for Volumes I., II., III., IV., which he had long already read, and at last returned all with this word, "If you write to Mr. Carlyle, you may say to him, that I _have_ read these books, and they have made it impossible for me to read any other books but his." 'T is a good proof of their penetrative force, the influence on the new Stirling, who writes "The Secret of Hegel." He is quite as much a student of Carlyle to learn treatment, as of Hegel for his matter, and plays the same game on his essence-dividing German, which he has learned of you on _Friedrich._ I have read a good deal in this book of Stirling's, and have not done with it. One or two errata I noticed in the last volumes of _Friedrich,_ though the books are now lent, and I cannot indicate the pages. Fort Pulaski, which is near Savannah, is set down as near Charleston. Charleston, South Carolina, your printer has twice called Charlestown, which is the name of the town in Massachusetts in which Bunker Hill stands.--Bancroft told me that the letters of Montcalm are spurious. We always write and say Ticonderoga. I am sorry that Jonathan looks so unamiable seen from your island. Yet I have too much respect for the writing profession to complain of it. It is a necessity of rhetoric that there should be shades, and, I suppose, geography and government always determine, even for the greatest wits, where they shall lay their shadows. But I have always 'the belief that a trip across the sea would have abated your despair of us. The world is laid out here in large lots, and the swing of natural laws is shared by the population, as it is not--or not as much--in your feudal Europe. My countrymen do not content me, but they are susceptible of inspirations. In the war it was humanity that showed itself to advantage,--the leaders were prompted and corrected by the intuitions of the people, they still demanding the more generous and decisive measure, and giving their sons and their estates as we had no example before. In this heat, they had sharper perceptions of policy, of the ways and means and the life of nations, and on every side we read or heard fate-words, in private letters, in railway cars, or in the journals. We were proud of the people and believed they would not go down from this height. But Peace came, and every one ran back into his shop again, and can hardly be won to patriotism more, even to the point of chasing away the thieves that are stealing not only the public gold, but the newly won rights of the slave, and the new muzzles we had contrived to keep the planter from sucking his blood. Very welcome to me were the photographs,--your own, and Jane Carlyle's. Hers, now seen here for the first time, was closely scanned, and confirmed the better accounts that had come of her improved health. Your earlier tidings of her had not been encouraging. I recognized still erect the wise, friendly presence first seen at Craigenputtock. Of your own--the hatted head is good, but more can be read in the head leaning on the hand, and the one in a cloak. At the end of much writing, I have little to tell you of myself. I am a bad subject for autobiography. As I adjourn letters, so I adjourn my best tasks.... My wife joins me in very kind regards to Mrs. Carlyle. Use your old magnanimity to me, and punish my stony ingratitudes by new letters from time to time. Ever affectionately and gratefully yours, R.W. Emerson CLXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 May, 1866 My Dear Carlyle,--I have just been shown a private letter from Moncure Conway to one of his friends here, giving some tidings of your sad return to an empty home. We had the first news last week. And so it is. The stroke long threatened has fallen at last, in the mildest form to its victim, and relieved to you by long and repeated reprieves. I must think her fortunate also in this gentle departure, as she had been in her serene and honored career. We would not for ourselves count covetously the descending steps after we have passed the top of the mount, or grudge to spare some of the days of decay. And you will have the peace of knowing her safe, and no longer a victim. I have found myself recalling an old verse which one utters to the parting soul,-- "For thou hast passed all chance of human life, And not again to thee shall beauty die." It is thirty-three years in July, I believe, since I first saw her, and her conversation and faultless manners gave assurance of a good and happy future. As I have not witnessed any decline, I can hardly believe in any, and still recall vividly the youthful wife, and her blithe account of her letters and homages from Goethe, and the details she gave of her intended visit to Weimar, and its disappointment. Her goodness to me and to my friends was ever perfect, and all Americans have agreed in her praise. Elizabeth Hoar remembers her with entire sympathy and regard. I could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. Your friends, I know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and I can believe that labor--all whose precious secrets you know--will prove a consoler,--though it cannot quite avail, for she was the rest that rewarded labor. It is good that you are strong, and built for endurance. Nor will you shun to consult the awful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. If to any, to you. I rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at Edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. It was a right manly speech to be so made, and is a voucher of unbroken strength,--and the surroundings, as I learn, were all the happiest,--with no hint of change. I pray you bear in mind your own counsels. Long years you must still achieve, and, I hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you "join the dim choir of the bards that have been," until you have written the book I wish and wait for,--the sincerest confessions of your best hours. My wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy and affection. Ever yours faithfully, R.W. Emerson CLXXV. Carlyle to Emerson Mentone, France, Alpes Maritimes 27 January, 1867 My Dear Emerson,--It is along time since I last wrote to you; and a long distance in space and in fortune,--from the shores of the Solway in summer 1865, to this niche of the Alps and Mediterranean today, after what has befallen me in the interim. A longer interval, I think, and surely by far a sadder, than ever occurred between us before, since we first met in the Scotch moors, some five and thirty years ago. You have written me various Notes, too, and Letters, all good and cheering to me,-- almost the only truly human speech I have heard from anybody living;--and still my stony silence could not be broken; not till now, though often looking forward to it, could I resolve on such a thing. You will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart;--and indeed I am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue _mute_ on _both_ sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me; and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. But the truth is, I was nearly killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich,--twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras;--nearly _killed,_ and had often thought I should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished! This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther. By the calamity of April last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a _home_ for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment,--as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been _quid plura?_ I should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this. All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of _worship;_ the only _devout_ time I had had for a great while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die:--but such continues still mainly my employment,--so many hours every forenoon; what I call the "work" of my day;--to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set about writing my own _Life_ would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow _me;_ for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the _canaille_ of mankind extant and to come. "Immortal glory," is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs and Literary Gazettes of our improved Epoch?--I did not leave London, except for fourteen days in August, to a fine and high old Lady- friend's in Kent; where, riding about the woods and by the sea- beaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, I felt sadder than ever, though a little less _miserably_ so, than in the intrusive babblements of London, which I could not quite lock out of doors. We read, at first, Tennyson's _Idyls,_ with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of _vacancy,_--and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's _English Traits;_ and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing Heaven that there were still Books for grown-up people too! That truly is a Book all full of thoughts like winged arrows (thanks to the Bowyer from us both):--my Lady-friend's name is Miss Davenport Bromley; it was at Wooton, in her Grandfather's House, in Staffordshire, that Rousseau took shelter in 1760; and one hundred and six years later she was reading Emerson to me with a recognition that would have pleased the man, had he seen it. About that same time my health and humors being evidently so, the Dowager Lady Ashburton (not the high Lady you saw, but a Successor of Mackenzie-Highland type), who wanders mostly about the Continent since her widowhood, for the sake of a child's health, began pressing and inviting me to spend the blade months of Winter here in her Villa with her;--all friends warmly seconding and urging; by one of whom I was at last snatched off, as if by the hair of the head, (in spite of my violent No, no!) on the eve of Christmas last, and have been here ever since,-- really with improved omens. The place is beautiful as a very picture, the climate superlative (today a sun and sky like very June); the _hospitality_ of usage beyond example. It is likely I shall be here another six weeks, or longer. If you please to write me, the address is on the margin; and I will answer. Adieu. --T. Carlyle CLXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 18 November, 1869 Dear Emerson,--It is near three years since I last wrote to you; from Mentone, under the Ligurian Olive and Orange trees, and their sombre foreign shadows, and still more sombre suggestings and promptings; the saddest, probably, of all living men. That you made no answer I know right well means only, "Alas, what can I say to him of consolatory that he does not himself know!" Far from a fault, or perhaps even a mistake on your part;--nor have I felt it otherwise. Sure enough, among the lights that have gone out for me, and are still going, one after one, under the inexorable Decree, in this now dusky and lonely world, I count with frequent regret that our Correspondence (not by absolute hest of Fate) should have fallen extinct, or into such abeyance: but I interpret it as you see; and my love and brotherhood to you remain alive, and will while I myself do. Enough of this. By lucky chance, as you perceive, you are again to get one written Letter from me, and I a reply from you, before the final Silence come. The case is this. For many years back, a thought, which I used to check again as fond and silly, has been occasionally present to me,--Of testifying my gratitude to New England (New England, acting mainly through one of her Sons called Waldo Emerson), _by bequeathing to it my poor Falstaf Regiment, latterly two Falstaf Regiments of Books,_ those I purchased and used in writing _Cromwell,_ and ditto those on _Friedrich the Great._ "This could be done," I often said to myself; "this _could_ perhaps; and this would be a real satisfaction to me. But who then would march through Coventry with such a set!" The extreme insignificance of the Gift, this and nothing else, always gave me pause. Last Summer, I was lucky enough to meet with your friend C.E. Norton, and renew many old Massachusetts recollections, in free talk with [him]....; to him I spoke of the affair; candidly describing it, especially the above questionable feature of it, so far as I could; and his answer, then, and more deliberately afterwards, was so hopeful, hearty, and decisive, that--in effect it has decided me; and I am this day writing to him that such is the poor fact, and that I need farther instructions on it so soon as you two have taken counsel together. To say more about the infinitesimally small value of the Books would be superfluous: nay, in truth, many or most of them are not without intrinsic value, one or two are even excellent as Books; and all of them, it may perhaps be said, have a kind of _symbolic_ or _biographic_ value; and testify (a thing not useless) _on what slender commissariat stores_ considerable campaigns, twelve years long or so, may be carried on in this world. Perhaps you already knew of me, what the _Cromwell_ and _Friedrich_ collection might itself intimate, that much _buying_ of Books was never a habit of mine,--far the reverse, even to this day! Well, my Friend, you will have a meeting with Norton so soon as handy; and let me know what is next to be done. And that, in your official capacity, is all I have to say to you at present. Unofficially there were much,--much that is mournful, but perhaps also something that is good and blessed, and though the saddest, also the highest, the lovingest and best; as beseems Time's sunset, now coming nigh. At present I will say only that, in bodily health, I am not to be called Ill, for a man who will be seventy-four next month; nor, on the spiritual side, has anything been laid upon me that is quite beyond my strength. More miserable I have often been; though as solitary, soft of heart, and sad, of course never. Publisher Chapman, when I question him whether you for certain _get_ your Monthly Volume of what they call "The Library Edition," assures me that "it is beyond doubt":--I confess I should still like to be _better_ assured. If all is _right,_ you should, by the time this Letter arrives, be receiving or have received your thirteenth Volume, last of the _Miscellanies._ Adieu, my Friend. Ever truly yours, T. Carlyle CLXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 4 January, 1870 Dear Emerson,--A month ago or more I wrote, by the same post, to you and to Norton about those Books for Harvard College; and in late days have been expecting your joint answer. From Norton yesternight I receive what is here copied for your perusal; it has come round by Florence as you see, and given me real pleasure and instruction. From you, who are possibly also away from home, I have yet nothing; but expect now soon to have a few words. There did arrive, one evening lately, your two pretty _volumes_ of _Collected Works,_ a pleasant salutation from you--which set me upon reading again what I thought I knew well before:--but the Letter is still to come. Norton's hints are such a complete instruction to me that I see my way straight through the business, and might, by Note of "Bequest" and memorandum for the Barings, finish it in half an hour: nevertheless I will wait for your Letter, and punctually do nothing till your directions too are before me. Pray write, therefore; all is lying ready here. Since you heard last, I have got two Catalogues made out, approximately correct; one is to lie here till the Bequest be executed; the other I thought of sending to you against the day? This is my own invention in regard to the affair since I wrote last. Approve of it, and you shall have your copy by Book-post at once. "_Approximately_ correct"; absolutely I cannot get it to be. But I need not doubt the Pious Purpose will be piously and even sacredly fulfilled;--and your Catalogue will be a kind of evidence that it is. Adieu, dear Emerson, till your Letter come. Yours ever, Thomas Carlyle CLXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 23 January, 1870* My Dear Carlyle,--'T is a sad apology that I have to offer for delays which no apology can retrieve. I received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned, and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate, and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed, for I only write by spasms, and these ever more rare,--and daemons that have no ears. Meantime the publication day was announced, and the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, _invita Minerva._ --------- * This letter is printed from an imperfect rough draft. --------- I could not write in my book, and I could not write a letter. Tomorrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs,--which always come when they should not. For one thing--I have just sold a house which I once built opposite my own. But I will leave the bad month, which I hope will not match itself in my lifetime. Only 't is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of yours, especially, a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile. Heartily I delight in your proposed disposition of the books. It has every charm of surprise, and nobleness, and large affection. The act will deeply gratify a multitude of good men, who will see in it your real sympathy with the welfare of the country. I hate that there should be a moment of delay in the completing of your provisions,--and that I of all men should be the cause! Norton's letter is perfect on his part, and needs no addition, I believe, from me. You had not in your first letter named _Cambridge,_ and I had been meditating that he would probably have divided your attention between Harvard and the Boston Public Library,--now the richest in the country, at first founded by the gifts of Joshua Bates (of London), and since enriched by the city and private donors, Theodore Parker among them. But after conversation with two or three friends, I had decided that Harvard College was the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers and readers in America, and because a College is a seat of sentiment and cosmical relations. The Library is outgrown by other libraries in the Country, counts only 119,000 bound volumes in 1868; the several departments of Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Natural Science in the University having special libraries, that together add some 40,000 more. The College is newly active (with its new President Eliot, a cousin of Norton's) and expansive in all directions. And the Library will be relieved through subscriptions now being collected among the Alumni with the special purpose of securing to it an adequate fund for annual increase. I shall then write to Norton at once that I concur with him in the destination of the books to Harvard College, and approve entirely his advices in regard to details. And so soon as you send me the Catalogue I shall, if you permit, communicate your design to President Eliot and the Corporation. One thing I shall add to the Catalogue now or later (perhaps only by bequest), your own prized gift to me, in 1848, of Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses,_ which I have lately had rebound, and in which every pen and pencil mark of yours is notable. The stately books of the New Edition have duly come from the unforgetting friend. I have _Sartor, Schiller, French Revolution,_ 3 vols., _Miscellanies,_ Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,--ten volumes in all, excellently printed and dressed, and full of memories and electricity. I have much to say, but of things not opportune at this moment, and in spite of my long contumacy dare believe that I shall quickly write again my proper letter to my friend, whose every word I watchfully read and remember. CLXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Melchet Court, Romsey, 14 February, 1870 Dear Emerson,--Three days ago I at last received your Letter; with very great pleasure and thankfulness, as you may suppose. Indeed, it is quite strangely interesting to see face to face my old Emerson again, not a feature of him changed, whom I have known all the best part of my life. I am very glad, withal, to find that you agree completely with Norton and myself in regard to that small Harvard matter. This is not Chelsea, as you perceive, this is a hospitable mansion in Hampshire; but I expect to be in Chelsea within about a week; once there, I shall immediately despatch to you one of the three Catalogues I have, with a more deliberate letter than I at present have the means of writing or dictating. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle CLXXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 24 February, 1870 Dear Emerson,--At length I have got home from those sumptuous tumults ("Melchet Court" is the Dowager Lady Ashburton's House, whose late Husband, an estimable friend of mine, and _half American,_ you may remember here); and I devote to ending of our small Harvard Business, small enough, but true and kindly,--the first quiet hour I have. Your Copy of the Catalogue, which accompanies by Book-Post of today, is the correctest I could manage to get done; all the Books mentioned in it I believe to be now here (and indeed, except five or six _tiny_ articles, have _seen_ them all, in one or other of the three rooms where my Books now stand, and where I believe the insignificant trifle of "tinies" to be): all these I can expect will be punctually attended to when the time comes, and proceeded with according to Norton's scheme and yours;--and if any more "tinies," which I could not even remember, should turn up (which I hardly think there will), these also will _class_ themselves (as _Cromwelliana_ or _Fredericana_), and be faith fully sent on with the others. For benefit of my _Survivors_ and _Representatives_ here, I retain an exact _Copy_ of the Catalogue now put into your keeping; so that everything may fall out square between them and you when the Time shall arrive. I mean to conform in every particular to the plan sketched out by Norton and you,--unless, in your next Letter, you have something other or farther to advise:--and so soon as I hear from you that Harvard accepts my poor widow's mite of a _Bequest,_ I will proceed to put it down in due form, and so finish this small matter, which for long years has hovered in my thoughts as a thing I should like to do. And so enough for this time. I meant to write a longish Letter, touching on many other points,--though you see I am reduced to _pencil,_ and "write" with such difficulty (never yet could learn to "dictate," though my little Niece here is promptitude itself, and is so swift and legible,--useful here as a cheerful rushlight in this now sombre element, sombre, sad, but also beautiful and tenderly solemn more and more, in which she bears me company, good little "Mary"!). But, in bar of all such purposes, Publisher Chapman has come in, with Cromwell Engravings and their hindrances, with money accounts, &c., &c.; and has not even left me a moment of time, were nothing else needed! Vol. XIV. (_Cromwell,_ I.) ought to be at Concord about as soon as this. In our Newspapers I notice your Book announced, "half of the Essays new,"--which I hope to get _quam primum,_ and illuminate some evenings with,--_so_ as nothing else can, in my present common mood. Adieu, dear old Friend. I am and remain yours always, --T. Carlyle CLXXXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 21 March, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--On receiving your letter and catalogue I wrote out a little history of the benefaction and carried it last Tuesday to President Eliot at Cambridge, who was heartily gratified, and saw everything rightly, and expressed an anxiety (most becoming in my eyes after my odious shortcomings) that there should be no moment of delay on our part. "The Corporation would not meet again for a fortnight:--but he would not wait,-- would call a special meeting this week to make the communication to them." He did so: the meeting was held on Saturday and I have received this (Monday) morning from him enclosed letter and record. It is very amiable and noble in you to have kept this surprise for us in your older days. Did you mean to show us that you could not be old, but immortally young? and having kept us all murmuring at your satires and sharp homilies, will now melt us with this manly and heart-warming embrace? Nobody could predict and none could better it. And you shall even go your own gait henceforward with a blessing from us all, and a trust exceptional and unique. I do not longer hesitate to talk to such good men as I see of this gift, and it has in every ear a gladdening effect. People like to see character in a gift, and from rare character the gift is more precious. I wish it may be twice blest in continuing to give you the comfort it will give us. I think I must mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. I doubt not I shall have much to tell you, could I overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as sixty-six (nearly sixty-seven) years enforce. I shall have to prate of my daughters;--Edith Forbes, with her two children at Milton; Ellen Emerson at home, herself a godsend to this house day by day; and my son Edward studying medicine in Boston,--whom I have ever meant and still mean to send that he may see your face when that professional curriculum winds up. I manage to read a few books and look into more. Herman Grimm sent me lately a good one, Goethe's _Unterhaltungen_ with Muller,--which set me on Varnhagen and others. My wife sends old regards, and her joy in this occasion. Yours ever, R.W. Emerson P.S. Mr. Eliot took my rough counting of Volumes as correct. When he sends me back the catalogue, I will make it exact.--I sent you last week a little book by book-post. CLXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 24 March, 1870 My Dear Emerson,--The day before yesterday, I heard incidentally of an unfortunate Mail Steamer, bound for America, which had lost its screw or some essential part of it; and so had, instead of carrying its Letters forward to America, been drifting about like a helpless log on the shores of Ireland till some three days ago, when its Letters and Passengers were taken out, and actually forwarded, thither. By industrious calculation, it appears probable to us here that my Letter to you may have been tumbling about in that helpless Steamer, instead of getting to Concord; where, if so, said Letter cannot now arrive till the lingering of it have created some astonishment there. I hastily write this, however, to say that a Letter was duly forwarded a few days after yours [of January 23] arrived,-- enclosing the _Harvard Catalogue,_ with all necessary _et ceteras;_ indorsing all your proposals; and signifying that the matter should be authentically completed the instant I should hear from you again. I may add now that the thing is essentially completed,--all signed and put on paper, or all but a word or two, which, for form's sake, waits the actual arrival of your Letter. I have never yet received your Book;* and, if it linger only a few days more, mean to provide myself with a copy such as the Sampson and Low people have on sale everywhere. I had from Norton, the other day, a very kind and friendly Letter. This is all of essential that I had to say. I write in utmost haste. But am always, dear Emerson, Yours sincerely, T. Carlyle -------- * "Society and Solitude." -------- CLXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 April, 1870 Dear Emerson,--The day before yesterday your welcome Letter came to hand, with the welcome news in it; yesterday I put into my poor Document here the few words still needed; locked everything into its still repository (your Letter, President Eliot's, Norton's, &c., &c.); and walked out into the sunshine, piously thankful that a poor little whim, which had long lain fondly in my heart, had realized itself with an emphasis I could never hope, and was become (thanks to generous enthusiasm on New England's part) a beautiful little fact, lying done there, so far as I had to do with it. Truly your account of matters threw a glow of _life_ into my thoughts which is very rare there now; altogether a gratifying little Transaction to me,--and I must add a surprising, for the enthusiasm of good-will is evidently great, and the occasion is almost infinitesimally small! Well, well; it is all finished off and completed,--(you can tell Mr. Eliot, with many thanks from me, that I did introduce the proper style, "President and Fellows," &c., and have forgotten nothing of what he said, or of what he _did_);--and so we will say only, _Faustum sit,_ as our last word on the subject;--and to me it will be, for some days yet, under these vernal skies, something that is itself connected with THE SPRING in a still higher sense; a little white and red-lipped bit of _Daisy_ pure and poor, scattered into TIME's Seedfield, and struggling above ground there, uttering _its_ bit of prophecy withal, among the ox-hoofs and big jungles that are everywhere about and not prophetic of much!-- One thing only I regret, that you _have_ spoken of the affair! For God's sake don't; and those kindly people to whom you have,- -swear them to silence for love of me! The poor little _Daisy_kin will get into the Newspapers, and become the nastiest of Cabbages:--silence, silence, I beg of you to the utmost stretch of your power! Or is the case already irremediable? I will hope not. Talk about such things, especially Penny Editor's talk, is like vile coal-smoke filling your poor little world; silence alone is azure, and has a _sky_ to it.--But, enough now. The "little Book" never came; and, I doubt, never will: it is a fate that seems to await three fourths of the Books that attempt to reach me by the American Post; owing to some _informality in wrapping_ (I have heard);--it never gave me any notable _regret_ till now. However, I had already bought myself an English copy, rather gaudy little volume (probably intended for the _railways,_ as if _it_ were a Book to be read there), but perfectly printed, ready to be read anywhere by the open eye and earnest mind;-- which I read here, accordingly, with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. It seems to me you are all your old self here, and something _more._ A calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful _epic_ humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but _notices_ only the huge new _opulences_ (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theologies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And then the "style," the treatment and expression,--yes, it is inimitable, best--Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, _soft_ enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as _silent electricity_ goes. You have done _very well;_ and many will know it ever better by degrees.--Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the "Over-Soul," the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of _friction_ and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, _unfathomable_ as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me.-- Let me not forget to thank you for that _fourth_ page of your Note; I should say it was almost the most interesting of all. News from yourself at first hand; a momentary glimpse into the actual Household at Concord, face to face, as in years of old! True, I get vague news of you from time to time; but what are these in comparison?--If you _will,_ at the eleventh hour, turn over a new leaf, and write me Letters again,--but I doubt _you won't._ And yet were it not worth while, think you? [Greek]-- will be here _anon._--My kindest regards to your wife. Adieu, my ever-kind Old Friend. Yours faithfully always, T. Carlyle CLXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 June, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--Two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or I shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition. You are of the Anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution. Well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of us, by charges of electricity. -------- * One seems to be missing. -------- Your letter of April came, as ever-more than ever, if possible-- full of kindness, and making much of our small doings and writings, and seemed to drive me to instant acknowledgment; but the oppressive engagement of writing and reading eighteen lectures on Philosophy to a class of graduates in the College, and these in six successive weeks, was a task a little more formidable in prospect and in practice than any foregoing one. Of course, it made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, and justice, and held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also. Well, it is now ended, and has no shining side but this one, that materials are collected and a possibility shown me how a repetition of the course next year--which is appointed--will enable me partly out of these materials, and partly by large rejection of these, and by large addition to them, to construct a fair report of what I have read and thought on the subject. I doubt the experts in Philosophy will not praise my discourses;-- but the topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations and experiences with the accepted masters, and also the lessons I have learned from the hidden great. I have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. To great results of thought and morals the steps are not many, and it is not the masters who spin the ostentatious continuity. I am glad to hear that the last sent book from me arrived safely. You were too tender and generous in your first notice of it, I fear. But with whatever deductions for your partiality, I know well the unique value of Carlyle's praise. Many things crowd to be said on this little paper. Though I could see no harm in the making known the bequest of books to Cambridge,--no harm, but sincere pleasure, and honor of the donor from all good men,--yet on receipt of your letter touching that, I went back to President Eliot, and told him your opinion on newspapers. He said it was necessarily communicated to the seven persons composing the Corporation, but otherwise he had been very cautious, and it would not go into print. You are sending me a book, and Chapman's Homer it is? Are you bound by your Arabian bounty to a largess whenever you think of your friend? And you decry the book too. 'T-is long since I read it, or in it, but the apotheosis of Homer, in the dedication to Prince Henry, "Thousands of years attending," &c., is one of my lasting inspirations. The book has not arrived yet, as the letter always travels faster, but shall be watched and received and announced. But since you are all bounty and care for me, where are the new volumes of the Library Edition of Carlyle? I received duly, as I wrote you in a former letter, nine Volumes,--_Sartor; Life of Schiller;_ five Vols. of _Miscellanies; French Revolution;_ these books oddly addressed to my name, but at _Cincinnati,_ Massachusetts. Whether they went to Ohio, and came back to Boston, I know not. Two volumes came later, duplicates of two already received, and were returned at my request by Fields & Co. with an explanation. But no following volume has come. I write all this because you said in one letter that Mr. Chapman assured you that every month a book was despatched to my address. But what do I read in our Boston Newspapers twice in the last three days? That "Thomas Carlyle is coming to America," and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point. Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. Was I not once promised a visit? This house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and dwell in it. My wife and Ellen and Edward E. are thoroughly acquainted with your greatness and your loveliness. And it is but ten days of healthy sea to pass. So wishes heartily and affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXXXV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 28 September, 1870 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, dated 15 June, never got to me till about ten days ago; when my little Niece and I returned out of Scotland, and a long, rather empty Visit there! It had missed me here only by two or three days; and my highly _in_felicitous Selectress of Letters to be forwarded had left _it_ carefully aside as undeserving that honor,--good faithful old Woman, one hopes she is greatly stronger on some sides than in this literary-selective one. Certainly no Letter was forwarded that had the hundredth part of the right to be so; certainly, of all the Letters that came to me, or were left waiting here, this was, in comparison, the one which might _not_ with propriety have been left to lie stranded forever, or to wander on the winds forever!-- One of my first journeys was to Chapman, with vehement _rebuke_ of this inconceivable "Cincinnati-Massachusetts" business. _Stupiditas stupiditatum;_ I never in my life, not even in that unpunctual House, fell in with anything that equaled it. Instant amendment was at once undertaken for, nay it seems had been already in part performed: "Ten volumes, following the nine you already had, were despatched in Field & Co.'s box above two months ago," so Chapman solemnly said and asseverated to me; so that by this time you ought actually to have in hand nineteen volumes; and the twentieth (first of _Friedrich_), which came out ten days ago, is to go in Field & Co.'s Box this week, and ought, not many days after the arrival of this Letter, to be in Boston waiting for you there. The _Chapman's Homer_ (two volumes) had gone with that first Field Packet; and would be handed to you along with the ten volumes which were overdue. All this was solemnly declared to me as on Affidavit; Chapman also took extract of the Massachusetts passage in your Letter, in order to pour it like ice-cold water on the head of his stupid old Chief-Clerk, the instant the poor creature got back from his rustication: alas, I am by no means certain that it will make a new man of him, nor, in fact, that the whole of this amendatory programme will get itself performed to equal satisfaction! But you must write to me at once if it is not so; and done it shall be in spite of human stupidity itself. Note, withal, these things: Chapman sends no Books to America _except_ through Field & Co.; he does not regularly send a Box at the middle of the month; but he does "almost monthly send one Bog"; so that if your monthly Volume do not start from London about the 15th, it is due by the very _next_ Chapman-Field box; and if it at any time don't come, I beg of you very much to make instant complaint through Field & Co., or what would be still more effectual, direct to myself. My malison on all Blockheadisms and torpid stupidities and infidelities; of which this world is full!-- Your Letter had been anxiously enough waited for, a month before my departure; but we will not mention the delay in presence of what you were engaged with then. _Faustum sit;_ that truly was and will be a Work worth doing your best upon; and I, if alive, can promise you at least one reader that will do his best upon your Work. I myself, often think of the Philosophies precisely in that manner. To say truth, they do not otherwise rise in esteem with me at all, but rather sink. The last thing I read of that kind was a piece by Hegel, in an excellent Translation by Stirling, right well translated, I could see, for every bit of it was intelligible to me; but my feeling at the end of it was, "Good Heavens, I have walked this road before many a good time; but never with a Cannon-ball at each ankle before!" Science also, Science falsely so called, is--But I will not enter upon that with you just now. The Visit to America, alas, alas, is pure Moonshine. Never had I, in late years, the least shadow of intention to undertake that adventure; and I am quite at a loss to understand how the rumor originated. One Boston Gentleman (a kind of universal Undertaker, or Lion's Provider of Lecturers I think) informed me that _"the Cable"_ had told him; and I had to remark, "And who the devil told the Cable?" Alas, no, I fear I shall never dare to undertake that big Voyage; which has so much of romance and of reality behind it to me; _zu spat, zu spat._ I do sometimes talk dreamily of a long Sea-Voyage, and the good the Sea has often done me,--in times when good was still possible. It may have been some vague folly of that kind that originated this rumor; for rumors are like dandelion-seeds; and _the Cable_ I dare say welcomes them all that have a guinea in their pocket. Thank you for blocking up that Harvard matter; provided it don't go into the Newspapers, all is right. Thank you a thousand times for that thrice-kind potential welcome, and flinging wide open your doors and your hearts to me at Concord. The gleam of it is like sunshine in a subterranean place. Ah me, Ah me! May God be with you all, dear Emerson. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 October, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--I am the ignoblest of all men in my perpetual short-comings to you. There is no example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble challenge. But "the strong hours conquer us," and I am the victim of miscellany,-- miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination. Already many days before your letter came, Fields sent me a package from you, which he said he had found a little late, because they were covered up in a box of printed sheets of other character, and this treasure was not at first discovered. They are,--_Life of Sterling; Latter Day Pamphlets; Past and Present; Heroes;_ 5 Vols. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ Unhappily, Vol. II. of _Cromwell_ is wanting, and there is a duplicate of Vol. V. instead of it. Now, two days ago came your letter, and tells me that the good old gods have also inspired you to send me Chapman's Homer! and that it came--heroes with heroes--in the same enchanted box. I went to Fields yesterday and demanded the book. He ignored all,--even to the books he had already sent me; called Osgood to council, and they agreed that it must be that all these came in a bog of sheets of Dickens from Chapman, which was sent to the Stereotypers at Cambridge; and the box shall be instantly explored. We will see what tomorrow shall find. As to the duplicates, I will say here, that I have received two: first, the above-mentioned Vol. II. of _Cromwell;_ and, second, long before, a second copy of _Sartor Resartus,_ apparently instead of the Vol. I. of the _French Revolution,_ which did not come. I proposed to Fields to send back to Chapman these two duplicates. But he said, "No, it will cost as much as the price of the books." I shall try to find in New York who represents Chapman and sells these books, and put them to his credit there, in exchange for the volumes I lack. Meantime, my serious thanks for all these treasures go to you,--steadily good to my youth and my age. Your letter was most welcome, and most in that I thought I read, in what you say of not making the long-promised visit hither, a little willingness to come. Think again, I pray you, of that Ocean Voyage, which is probably the best medicine and restorative which remains to us at your age and mine. Nine or ten days will bring you (and commonly with unexpected comfort and easements on the way) to Boston. Every reading person in America holds you in exceptional regard, and will rejoice in your arrival. They have forgotten your scarlet sins before or during the war. I have long ceased to apologize for or explain your savage sayings about American or other republics or publics, and am willing that anointed men bearing with them authentic charters shall be laws to themselves as Plato willed. Genius is but a large infusion of Deity, and so brings a prerogative all its own. It has a right and duty to affront and amaze men by carrying out its perceptions defiantly, knowing well that time and fate will verify and explain what time and fate have through them said. We must not suggest to Michel Angelo, or Machiavel, or Rabelais, or Voltaire, or John Brown of Osawatomie (a great man), or Carlyle, how they shall suppress their paradoxes and check their huge gait to keep accurate step with the procession on the street sidewalk. They are privileged persons, and may have their own swing for me. I did not mean to chatter so much, but I wish you would come out hither and read our possibilities now being daily disclosed, and our actualities which are not nothing. I shall like to show you my near neighbors, topographically or practically. A near neighbor and friend, E. Rockwood Hoar, whom you saw in his youth, is now an inestimable citizen in this State, and lately, in President Grant's Cabinet, Attorney-General of the United States. He lives in this town and carries it in his hand. Another is John M. Forbes, a strictly private citizen, of great executive ability, and noblest affections, a motive power and regulator essential to our City, refusing all office, but impossible to spare; and these are men whom to name the voice breaks and the eye is wet. A multitude of young men are growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty of my youth with the power on which these draw. The Lowell race, again, in our War yielded three or four martyrs so able and tender and true, that James Russell Lowell cannot allude to them in verse or prose but the public is melted anew. Well, all these know you well, have read and will read you, yes, and will prize and use your benefaction to the College; and I believe it would add hope, health, and strength to you to come and see them. In my much writing I believe I have left the chief things unsaid. But come! I and my house wait for you. Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXXXVIa. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 10 April, 1871 My Dear Friend,--I fear there is no pardon from you, none from myself, for this immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. Yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! Believe that the American climate is unmanning, or that one American whom you know is severely taxed by Lilliput labors. The last hot summer enfeebled me till my young people coaxed me to go with Edward to the White Hills, and we climbed or were dragged up Agiocochook, in August, and its sleet and snowy air nerved me again for the time. But the booksellers, whom I had long ago urged to reprint Plutarch's _Morals,_ claimed some forgotten promise, and set me on reading the old patriarch again, and writing a few pages about him, which no doubt cost me as much time and pottering as it would cost you to write a History. Then an "Oration" was due to the New England Society in New York, on the 250th anniversary of the Plymouth Landing,--as I thought myself familiar with the story, and holding also some opinions thereupon. But in the Libraries I found alcoves full of books and documents reckoned essential; and, at New York, after reading for an hour to the great assembly out of my massy manuscript, I refused to print a line until I could revise and complete my papers;--risking, of course, the nonsense of their newspaper reporters. This pill swallowed and forgotten, it was already time for my Second "Course on Philosophy" at Cambridge,--which I had accepted again that I might repair the faults of the last year. But here were eighteen lectures, each to be read sixteen miles away from my house, to go and come,--and the same work and journey twice in each week,--and I have just got through the doleful ordeal. I have abundance of good readings and some honest writing on the leading topics,--but in haste and confusion they are misplaced and spoiled. I hope the ruin of no young man's soul will here or hereafter be charged to me as having wasted his time or confounded his reason. Now I come to the raid of a London bookseller, Hotten, (of whom I believe I never told you,) on my forgotten papers in the old _Dials,_ and other pamphlets here. Conway wrote me that he could not be resisted,--would certainly steal good and bad,--but might be guided in the selection. I replied that the act was odious to me, and I promised to denounce the man and his theft to any friends I might have in England; but if, instead of printing then, he would wait a year, I would make my own selection, with the addition of some later critical papers, and permit the book. Mr. Ireland in Manchester, and Conway in London, took the affair kindly in hand, and Hotten acceded to my change. And that is the next task that threatens my imbecility. But now, ten days ago or less, my friend John M. Forbes has come to me with a proposition to carry me off to California, the Yosemite, the Mammoth trees, and the Pacific, and, after much resistance, I have surrendered for six weeks, and we set out tomorrow. And hence this sheet of confession,--that I may not drag a lengthening chain. Meantime, you have been monthly loading me with good for evil. I have just counted twenty-three volumes of Carlyle's Library Edition, in order on my shelves, besides two, or perhaps three, which Ellery Channing has borrowed. Add, that the precious Chapman's _Homer_ came safely, though not till months after you had told me of its departure, and shall be guarded henceforward with joy. _Wednesday, 13, Chicago._--Arrived here and can bring this little sheet to the post-office here. My daughter Edith Forbes, and her husband William H. Forbes, and three other friends, accompany me, and we shall overtake Mr. Forbes senior tomorrow at Burlington, Iowa. The widow of one of the noblest of our young martyrs in the War, Col. Lowell,* cousin [nephew] of James Russell Lowell, sends me word that she wishes me to give her a note of introduction to you, confiding to me that she has once written a letter to you which procured her the happiest reply from you, and I shall obey her, and you will see her and own her rights. Still continue to be magnanimous to your friend, --R.W. Emerson --------- * Charles Russell Lowell, to be remembered always with honor in company with his brother James Jackson Lowell and his cousin William Lowell Putnam,--a shining group among the youths who have died for their country. --------- CLXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 4 June, 1871 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter gave me great pleasure. A gleam of sunshine after a long tract of lowering weather. It is not you that are to blame for this sad gap in our correspondence; it is I, or rather it is my misfortunes, and miserable inabilities, broken resolutions, etc., etc. The truth is, the winter here was very unfriendly to me; broke ruinously into my sleep; and through that into every other department of my businesses, spiritual and temporal; so that from about New-Year's Day last I have been, in a manner, good for nothing,--nor am yet, though I do again feel as if the beautiful Summer weather might perhaps do something for me. This it was that choked every enterprise; and postponed your Letter, week after week, through so many months. Let us not speak of it farther! Note, meanwhile, I have no disease about me; nothing but the gradual decay of any poor digestive faculty I latterly had,--or indeed ever had since I was three and twenty years of age. Let us be quiet with it; accept it as a mode of exit, of which always there must be _some_ mode. I have got done with all my press-correctings, editionings, and paltry bother of that kind: Vol. 30 will embark for you about the middle of this month; there are then to follow ("uniform," as the printers call it, though in smaller type) a little volume called _General Index;_ and three more volumes of _Translations from the German;_ after which we two will reckon and count; and if there is any _lacuna_ on the Concord shelf, at once make it good. Enough, enough on that score. The Hotten who has got hold of you here is a dirty little pirate, who snatches at everybody grown fat enough to yield him a bite (paltry, unhanged creature); so that in fact he is a symbol to you of your visible rise in the world here; and, with Conway's vigilance to help, will do you good and not evil. Glad am I, in any case, to see so much new spiritual produce still ripening around you; and you ought to be glad, too. Pray Heaven you may long _keep your right hand_ steady: you, too, I can perceive, will never, any more than myself, learn to "write by dictation" in a manner that will be supportable to you. I rejoice, also, to hear of such a magnificent adventure as that you are now upon. Climbing the backbone of America; looking into the Pacific Ocean too, and the gigantic wonders going on there. I fear you won't see Brigham Young, however? He also to me is one of the products out there;--and indeed I may confess to you that the doings in that region are not only of a big character, but of a great;--and that in my occasional explosions against "Anarchy," and my inextinguishable hatred of _it,_ I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm, now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what is America's essential task at present faster or more completely than 'anarchic America' herself is now doing?" _Such_ "Anarchy" has a great deal to say for itself,--(would to Heaven ours of England had as much!)--and points towards grand _anti_-Anarchies in the future; in fact, I can already discern in it huge quantities of Anti-Anarchy in the "impalpable-powder" condition; and hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from it, in my private mind! Good Mrs. --- has never yet made her appearance; but shall be welcome whenever she does. Did you ever hear the name of an aged, or elderly, fantastic fellow-citizen of yours, called J. Lee Bliss, who designates himself O.F. and A.K., i.e. "Old Fogey" and "Amiable Kuss"? He sent me, the other night, a wonderful miscellany of symbolical shreds and patches; which considerably amused me; and withal indicated good-will on the man's part; who is not without humor, in sight, and serious intention or disposition. If you ever did hear of him, say a word on the subject next time you write. And above all things _write._ The instant you get home from California, or see this, let me hear from you what your adventures have been and what the next are to be. Adieu, dear Emerson. Yours ever affectionately, T. Carlyle Mrs. --- sends a note from Piccadilly this new morning (June 5th); _call_ to be made there today by Niece Mary, card left, etc., etc. Promises to be an agreeable Lady. Did you ever hear of such a thing as this suicidal Finis of the French "Copper Captaincy"; gratuitous Attack on Germany, and ditto Blowing-up of Paris by its own hand! An event with meanings unspeakable,--deep as the. _Abyss._-- If you ever write to C. Norton in Italy, send him my kind remembrances. --T. C. (with about the velocity of Engraving--on lead!)* --------- * The letter was dictated, but the postscript, from the first signature, was written in a tremulous hand by Carlyle himself. --------- CLXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 June, 1871 My Dear Carlyle,--'T is more than time that you should hear from me whose debts to you always accumulate. But my long journey to California ended in many distractions on my return home. I found Varioloid in my house... and I was not permitted to enter it for many days, and could only talk with wife, son, and daughter from the yard.... I had crowded and closed my Cambridge lectures in haste, and went to the land of Flowers invited by John M. Forbes, one of my most valued friends, father of my daughter Edith's husband. With him and his family and one or two chosen guests, the trip was made under the best conditions of safety, comfort, and company, I measuring for the first time one entire line of the Country. California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific sea; Steam brings the near neighborhood of Asia; and South America at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its six hundred miles of latitude producing all our Northern fruits, and also the fig, orange, and banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me. The Almanac said April; but the day said June;--and day after day for six weeks uninterrupted sunshine. November and December are the rainy months. The whole Country, was covered with flowers, and all of them unknown to us except in greenhouses. Every bird that I know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes. On the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, gophers,-- even elks, and one pair of wolves on the plains; the grizzly bear only in a cage. We crossed one region of the buffalo, but only saw one captive. We found Indians at every railroad station,--the squaws and papooses begging, and the "bucks," as they wickedly call them, lounging. On our way out, we left the Pacific Railroad for twenty-four hours to visit Salt Lake; called on Brigham Young--just seventy years old--who received us with quiet uncommitting courtesy, at first,--a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man with plain manners. He took early occasion to remark that "the one-man-power really meant all- men's-power." Our interview was peaceable enough, and rather mended my impression of the man; and, after our visit, I read in the Descret newspaper his Speech to his people on the previous Sunday. It avoided religion, but was full of Franklinian good sense. In one point, he says: "Your fear of the Indians is nonsense. The Indians like the white men's food. Feed them well, and they will surely die." He is clearly a sufficient ruler, and perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but I found that the San Franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive Brigham. I have been surprised--but it is months ago--by a letter from Lacy Garbett, the Architect, whom I do not know, but one of whose books, about "Design in Architecture," I have always valued. This letter, asking of me that Americans shall join Englishmen in a Petition to Parliament against pulling down Ancient Saxon buildings, is written in a way so wild as to suggest insanity, and I have not known how to answer it. At my "Saturday Club" in Boston I sat at dinner by an English lord,--whose name I have forgotten,--from whom I tried to learn what laws Parliament had passed for the repairs of old religious Foundations, that could make them the victims of covetous Architects. But he assured me there were none such, and that he himself was President of a Society in his own County for the protection of such buildings. So that I am left entirely in the dark in regard to the fact and Garbett's letter. He claims to speak both for Ruskin and himself. I grieve to hear no better account of your health than your last letter gives. The only contradiction of it, namely, the power of your pen in this reproduction of thirty books,--and such books,-- is very important and very consoling to me. A great work to be done is the best insurance, and I sleep quietly, notwithstanding these sad bulletins,--believing that you cannot be spared. Fare well, dear friend, R.W. Emerson CLXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 September, 1871 My Dear Carlyle,--I hope you will have returned safely from the Orkneys in time to let my son Edward W.E. see your face on his way through London to Germany, whither he goes to finish his medical studies,--no, not finish, but prosecute. Give him your blessing, and tell him what he should look for in his few days in London, and what in your Prussia. He is a good youth, and we can spare him only for this necessity. I should like well to accompany him as far as to your hearthstone, if only so I could persuade you that it is but a ten-days ride for you thence to mine,--a little farther than the Orkneys, and the outskirts of land as good, and bigger. I read gladly in your letters some relentings toward America,--deeper ones in your dealing with Harvard College; and I know you could not see without interest the immense and varied blossoming of our possibilities here,--of all nationalities, too, besides our own. I have heard from Mrs. --- twice lately, who exults in your kindness to her. Always affectionately, Yours, R.W. Emerson CXC. Emerson to Carlyle Baltimore, Md., 5 January, 1872 My Dear Carlyle,--I received from you through Mr. Chapman, just before Christmas, the last rich instalment of your Library Edition; viz. Vols. IV.-X. _Life of Friedrich;_ Vols. L-III. _Translations from German;_ one volume General Index; eleven volumes in all,--and now my stately collection is perfect. Perfect too is your Victory. But I clatter my chains with joy, as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts. Happy man you should be, to whom the Heaven has allowed such masterly completion. You shall wear your crown at the Pan-Saxon Games with no equal or approaching competitor in sight,--well earned by genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations for your pupils and praisers. I count it my eminent happiness to have been so nearly your contemporary, and your friend,--permitted to detect by its rare light the new star almost before the Easterners had seen it, and to have found no disappointment, but joyful confirmation rather, in coming close to its orb. Rest, rest, now for a time; I pray you, and be thankful. Meantime, I know well all your perversities, and give them a wide berth. They seriously annoy a great many worthy readers, nations of readers sometimes,--but I heap them all as style, and read them as I read Rabelais's gigantic humors which astonish in order to force attention, and by and by are seen to be the rhetoric of a highly virtuous gentleman who _swears._ I have been quite too busy with fast succeeding _jobs_ (I may well call them), in the last year, to have read much in these proud books; but I begin to see daylight coming through my fogs, and I have not lost in the least my appetite for reading,--resolve, with my old Harvard professor, "to retire and read the Authors." I am impatient to deserve your grand Volumes by reading in them with all the haughty airs that belong to seventy years which I shall count if I live till May, 1873. Meantime I see well that you have lost none of your power, and I wish that you would let in some good Eckermann to dine with you day by day, and competent to report your opinions,--for you can speak as well as you can write, and what the world to come should know... Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXCI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 2 April, 1872 Dear Emerson,--I am covered with confusion, astonishment, and shame to think of my long silence. You wrote me two beautiful letters; none friendlier, brighter, wiser could come to me from any quarter of the world; and I have not answered even by a sign. Promptly and punctually my poor heart did answer; but to do it outwardly,--as if there had lain some enchantment on me,-- was beyond my power. The one thing I can say in excuse or explanation is, that ever since Summer last, I have been in an unusually dyspeptic, peaking, pining, and dispirited condition; and have no right hand of my own for writing, nor, for several months, had any other that was altogether agreeable to me. But in fine I don't believe you lay any blame or anger on me at all; and I will say no more about it, but only try to repent and do better next time. Your letter from the Far West was charmingly vivid and free; one seemed to attend you personally, and see with one's own eyes the _notabilia,_ human and other, of those huge regions, in your swift flight through them to and from. I retain your little etching of Brigham Young as a bit of real likeness; I have often thought of your transit through Chicago since poor Chicago itself vanished out of the world on wings of fire. There is something huge, painful, and almost appalling to me in that wild Western World of yours;--and especially I wonder at the gold-nuggeting there, while plainly every gold-nuggeter is no other than a criminal to Human Society, and has to _steal_ the exact value of his gold nugget from the pockets of all the posterity of Adam, now and for some time to come, in this world. I conclude it is a bait used by All-wise Providence to attract your people out thither, there to build towns, make roads, fell forests (or plant forests), and make ready a Dwelling-place for new Nations, who will find themselves called to quite other than nugget-hunting. In the hideous stew of Anarchy, in which all English Populations present themselves to my dismal contemplation at this day, it is a solid consolation that there will verily, in another fifty years, be above a hundred million men and women on this Planet who can all read Shakespeare and the English Bible and the (also for a long time biblical and noble) history of their Mother Country,--and proceed again to do, unless the Devil be in them, as their Forebears did, or better, if they have the heart!-- Except that you are a thousand times too kind to me, your second Letter also was altogether charming.... Do you read Ruskin's _Fors Clavigera,_ which he cheerily tells me gets itself reprinted in America? If you don't, _do,_ I advise you. Also his _Munera Pulveris,_ Oxford-_Lectures_ on Art, and whatever else he is now writing,--if you can manage to get them (which is difficult here, owing to the ways he has towards the bibliopolic world!). There is nothing going on among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man; one might say a weak man rather; and has not the least prudence of management; though if he can hold out for another fifteen years or so, he may produce, even in this way, a great effect. God grant it, say I. Froude is coming to you in October. You will find him a most clear, friendly, ingenious, solid, and excellent man; and I am very glad to find you among those who are to take care of him when he comes to your new Country. Do your best and wisest towards him, for my sake, withal. He is the valuablest Friend I now have in England, nearly though not quite altogether the one man in talking with whom I can get any real profit or comfort. Alas, alas, here is the end of the paper, dear Emerson; and I had still a whole wilderness of things to say. Write to me, or even do not write, and I will surely write again. I remain as ever Your Affectionate Friend, T. Carlyle In November, 1872, Emerson went to England, and the two friends met again. After a short stay he proceeded to the Continent and Egypt, returning to London in the spring of 1873. For the last time Carlyle and he saw each other. In May, Emerson returned home. After this time no letters passed between him and Carlyle. They were both old men. Writing had become difficult to them; and little was left to say. Carlyle died, eighty-five years old, on the 5th of February, 1881. Emerson died, seventy-nine years old, on the 27th of April, 1882. ------------- 
2293	----	Project Gutenberg/Make a Difference Day Project 1999. A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY By LUCY LARCOM I dedicated this sketch To my girlfriends in general; And in particular To my namesake-niece, Lucy Larcom Spaulding. Happy those early days, when I Shined in my angel-infancy! --When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity:-- Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience by a sinful sound;-- But felt through all this fleshy dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. HENRY VAUGHAN The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction. WORDSWORTH PREFACE THE following sketch was written for the young, at the suggestion of friends. My audience is understood to be composed of girls of all ages, and of women who have not forgotten their girlhood. Such as have a friendly appreciation of girls--and of those who write for them--are also welcome to listen to as much of my narrative as they choose. All others are eavesdroppers, and, of course, have no right to criticise. To many, the word "autobiography" implies nothing but conceit and egotism. But these are not necessarily its characteristics. If an apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would be, still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were unfolded and its form developed. A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen go to the making up of every human being? The commonest personal history has its value when it is looked at as a part of the One Infinite Life. Our life--which is the very best thing we have--is ours only that we may share it with Our Father's family, at their need. If we have anything, within us worth giving away, to withhold it is ungenerous; and we cannot look honestly into ourselves without acknowledging with humility our debt to the lives around us for whatever of power or beauty has been poured into ours. None of us can think of ourselves as entirely separate beings. Even an autobiographer has to say "we" much oftener than "I." Indeed, there may be more egotism in withdrawing mysteriously into one's self, than in frankly unfolding one's life--story, for better or worse. There may be more vanity in covering, one's face with a veil, to be wondered at and guessed about, than in drawing it aside, and saying by that act, "There! you see that I am nothing remarkable." However, I do not know that I altogether approve of autobiography myself, when the subject is a person of so little importance as in the present instance. Still, it may have a reason for being, even in a case like this. Every one whose name is before the public at all must be aware of a common annoyance in the frequent requests which are made for personal facts, data for biographical paragraphs, and the like. To answer such requests and furnish the material asked for, were it desirable, would interfere seriously with the necessary work of almost any writer. The first impulse is to pay no attention to them, putting them aside as mere signs of the ill-bred, idle curiosity of the age we live in about people and their private affairs. It does not seem to be supposed possible that authors can have any natural shrinking from publicity, like other mortals. But while one would not willingly encourage an intrusive custom, there is another view of the matter. The most enjoyable thing about writing is that the relation between writer and reader may be and often does become that of mutual friendship; an friends naturally like to know each other in a neighborly way. We are all willing to gossip about ourselves, sometimes, with those who are really interested in us. Girls especially are fond of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who never lose it entirely. I should like far better to listen to my girl-readers' thoughts about life and themselves than to be writing out my own experiences. It is to my disadvantage that the confidences, in this case, must all be on one side. But I have known so many girls so well in my relation to them of schoolmate, workmate, and teacher, I feel sure of a fair share of their sympathy and attention. It is hardly possible for an author to write anything sincerely without making it something of an autobiography. Friends can always read a personal history, or guess at it, between the lines. So I sometimes think I have already written mine, in my verses. In them, I have found the most natural and free expression of myself. They have seemed to set my life to music for me, a life that has always had to be occupied with many things besides writing. Not, however, that I claim to have written much poetry: only perhaps some true rhymes: I do not see how there could be any pleasure in writing insincere ones. Whatever special interest this little narrative of mine may have is due to the social influences under which I was reared, and particularly to the prominent place held by both work and religion in New England half a century ago. The period of my growing-up had peculiarities which our future history can never repeat, although something far better is undoubtedly already resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the natural development of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry. The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky, than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart. There was life in it that can never be lost to the world. One thing we are at last beginning to understand, which our ancestors evidently had not learned; that it is far more needful for theologians to become as little children, than for little children to become theologians. They considered it a duty that they owed to the youngest of us, to teach us doctrines. And we believed in our instructors, if we could not always digest their instructions. We learned to reverence truth as they received it and lived it, and to feel that the search for truth was one chief end of our being. It was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard subjects so soon, and it was also a pity that we were set to hard work while so young. Yet these were both inevitable results of circumstances then existing; and perhaps the two belong together. Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought. Certainly, right thinking naturally impels people to work. We learned no theories about "the dignity of labor," but we were taught to work almost as if it were a religion; to keep at work, expecting nothing else. It was our inheritance, banded down from the outcasts of Eden. And for us, as for them, there was a blessing hidden in the curse. I am glad that I grew up under these wholesome Puritanic influences, as glad as I am that I was born a New Englander; and I surely should have chosen New England for my birthplace before any region under the sun. Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality. I believe it was Grotius who said, "Books are necessities of my life. Food and clothing I can do without, if I must." My "must-have" was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me. The children of old New England were always surrounded, it is true, with stubborn matter of fact,--the hand to hand struggle for existence. But that was no hindrance. Poetry must have prose to root itself in; the homelier its earth-spot, the lovelier, by contrast, its heaven-breathing flowers. To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue skies were poetry. God himself was poetry. As I grew up and lived on, friendship became to me the deepest and sweetest ideal of poetry. To live in other lives, to take their power and beauty into our own, that is poetry experienced, the most inspiring of all. Poetry embodied in persons, in lovely and lofty characters, more sacredly than all in the One Divine Person who has transfigured our human life with the glory of His sacrifice,--all the great lyrics and epics pale before that, and it is within the reach and comprehension of every human soul. To care for poetry in this way does not make one a poet, but it does make one feel blessedly rich, and quite indifferent to many things which are usually looked upon as desirable possessions. I am sincerely grateful that it was given to me, from childhood, to see life from this point of view. And it seems to me that every young girl would be happier for beginning her earthly journey with the thankful consciousness that her life does not consist in the abundance of things that she possesses. The highest possible poetic conception is that of a life consecrated to a noble ideal. It may be unable to find expression for itself except through humble, even menial services, or through unselfish devotion whose silent song is audible to God alone; yet such music as this might rise to heaven from every young girl's heart and character if she would set it free. In such ways it was meant that the world should be filled with the true poetry of womanhood. It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever. My childhood was by no means a cloudless one. It had its light and shade, each contributing a charm which makes it wholly delightful in the retrospect. I can see very distinctly the child that I was, and I know how the world looked to her, far off as she is now. She seems to me like my little sister, at play in a garden where I can at any time return and find her. I have enjoyed bringing her back, and letting her tell her story, almost as if she were somebody else. I like her better than I did when I was really a child, and I hope never to part company with her. I do not feel so much satisfaction in the older girl who comes between her and me, although she, too, is enough like me to be my sister, or even more like my young, undisciplined mother; for the girl is mother of the woman. But I have to acknowledge her faults and mistakes as my own, while I sometimes feel like reproving her severely for her carelessly performed tasks, her habit of lapsing into listless reveries, her cowardly shrinking from responsibility and vigorous endeavor, and many other faults that I have inherited from her. Still, she is myself, and I could not be quite happy without her comradeship. Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except in appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her silvery crescent, in rounding to her full. The woman is still both child and girl, in the completeness of womanly character. We have a right to our entire selves, through all the changes of this mortal state, a claim which we shall doubtless carry along with us into the unfolding mysteries of our eternal being. Perhaps in this thought lies hidden the secret of immortal youth; for a seer has said that "to grow old in heaven is to grow young." To take life as it is sent to us, to live it faithfully, looking and striving always towards better life, this was the lesson that came to me from my early teachers. It was not an easy lesson, but it was a healthful one; and I pass it on to younger pupils, trusting that they will learn it more thoroughly than I ever have. Young or old, we may all win inspiration to do our best, from the needs of a world to which the humblest life may be permitted to bring immeasurable blessings:-- "For no one doth know What he can bestow, What light, strength, and beauty may after him go: Thus onward we move, And, save God above, None guesseth how wondrous the journey will prove." L.L. BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS, October, 1889. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. UP AND DOWN THE LANE II. SCHOOLROOM AND MEETING-HOUSE III. THE HYMN-BOOK IV. NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES V. OLD NEW ENGLAND VI. GLIMPSES OF POETRY VII. BEGINNING TO WORK VIII. BY THE RIVER IX. MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS X. MILL-GIRLS' MAGAZINES XI. READING AND STUDYING XII. FROM THE MERRIMACK TO THE MISSISSIPPI A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD I. UP AND DOWN THE LANE. IT is strange that the spot of earth where we were born should make such a difference to us. People can live and grow anywhere, but people as well as plants have their habitat,--the place where they belong, and where they find their happiest, because their most natural life. If I had opened my eyes upon this planet elsewhere than in this northeastern corner of Massachusetts, elsewhere than on this green, rocky strip of shore between Beverly Bridge and the Misery Islands, it seems to me as if I must have been somebody else, and not myself. These gray ledges hold me by the roots, as they do the bayberry bushes, the sweet-fern, and the rock-saxifrage. When I look from my window over the tree-tops to the sea, I could almost fancy that from the deck of some one of those inward bound vessels the wistful eyes of the Lady Arbella might be turned towards this very hillside, and that mine were meeting hers in sympathy, across the graves of two hundred and fifty years. For Winthrop's fleet, led by the ship that bore her name, must have passed into harbor that way. Dear and gracious spirit! The memory of her brief sojourn here has left New England more truly consecrated ground. Sweetest of womanly pioneers! It is as if an angel in passing on to heaven just touched with her wings this rough coast of ours. In those primitive years, before any town but Salem had been named, this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side; and about ten years after Winthrop's arrival, my first ancestor's name appears among those of other hardy settlers of the neighborhood. No record has been found of his coming, but emigration by that time had grown so rapid that ships' lists were no longer carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple yeoman, a tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however, for he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his descendants--my own great-great-grandfather's family--planted in a romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray spaces of the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms." The situation was beautiful, and home attachments proved tenacious, the family claim to the farm having only been resigned within the last thirty or forty years. I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly proud to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for they were God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their faith long before they found their way either to Old or New England. The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from Wales and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Piedmont; a little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in what was probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a family shield in existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree, and a bird with spread wings above. It might symbolize flight in times of persecution, from the mountains to the forests, and thence to heaven, or to the free skies of this New World. But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both indifferent and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and accepted with sturdy dignity an inheritance of hard work and the privileges of poverty, leaving the same bequest to their descendants. And poverty has its privileges. When there is very little of the seen and temporal to intercept spiritual vision, unseen and eternal realities are, or may be, more clearly beheld. To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in God, is better than to have inherited material wealth of any kind. And to those serious-minded, reticent progenitors of mine, looking out from their lonely fields across the lonelier sea, their faith must have been everything. My father's parents both died years before my birth. My grandmother had been left a widow with a large family in my father's boyhood, and he, with the rest, had to toil early for a livelihood. She was an earnest Christian woman, of keen intelligence and unusual spiritual perception. She was supposed by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight"; and some remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events while they were occurring, or just before they took place. Her dignity of presence and character must have been noticeable. A relative of mine, who as a very little child, was taken by her mother to visit my grandmother, told me that she had always remembered the aged woman's solemnity of voice and bearing, and her mother's deferential attitude towards her: and she was so profoundly impressed by it all at the time, that when they had left the house, and were on their homeward path through the woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a whisper, "Mother, was that God?" I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not having been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place, as my father and uncles and aunts and some of my cousins had been. But perhaps I had more of the romantic and legendary charm of it than if I had been brought up there, for my father, in his communicative moods, never wearied of telling us about his childhood; and we felt that we still held a birthright claim upon that picturesque spot through him. Besides, it was only three or four miles away, and before the day of railroads, that was thought nothing of as a walk, by young or old. But, in fact, I first saw the light in the very middle of Beverly, in full view of the town clock and the Old South steeple. (I believe there is an "Old South" in nearly all these first-settled cities and villages of Eastern Massachusetts.) The town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity then, with its old-fashioned people and weather-worn houses; for I was born while my mother-century was still in her youth, just rounding the first quarter of her hundred years. Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during my childhood; they were kept up in these old towns longer than elsewhere. We used tallow candles and oil lamps, and sat by open fireplaces. There was always a tinder-box in some safe corner or other, and fire was kindled by striking flint and steel upon the tinder. What magic it seemed to me, when I was first allowed to strike that wonderful spark, and light the kitchen fire! The fireplace was deep, and there was a "settle" in the chimney corner, where three of us youngest girls could sit together and toast our toes on the andirons (two Continental soldiers in full uniform, marching one after the other), while we looked up the chimney into a square of blue sky, and sometimes caught a snowflake on our foreheads; or sometimes smirched our clean aprons (high-necked and long sleeved ones, known as "tiers"), against the swinging crane with its sooty pot-hooks and trammels. The coffee-pot was set for breakfast over hot coals, on a three-legged bit of iron called a "trivet." Potatoes were roasted in the ashes, and the Thanksgiving turkey in a "tin-kitchen," the business of turning the spit being usually delegate to some of us, small folk, who were only too willing to burn our faces in honor of the annual festival. There were brick ovens in the chimney corner, where the great bakings were done; but there was also an iron article called a "Dutch oven," in which delicious bread could be baked over the coals at short notice. And there was never was anything that tasted better than my mother's "firecake,"--a short-cake spread on a smooth piece of board, and set up with a flat-iron before the blaze, browned on one side, and then turned over to be browned on the other. (It required some sleight of hand to do that.) If I could only be allowed to blow the bellows--the very old people called them "belluses"--when the fire began to get low, I was a happy girl. Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy affairs, and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset. There is no such home-splendor now. When supper was finished, and the tea-kettle was pushed back on the crane, and the backlog had been reduced to a heap of fiery embers, then was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends. The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of those tales of eld since the gleam of red-hot coals died away from the hearthstone. The shutting up of the great fireplaces and the introduction of stoves marks an era; the abdication of shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant Commonplace--sometimes, alas! the opposite of elegant--at the New England fireside. Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense? It hardly seems as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a reflected illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's Saturday Night" have been, if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a stove instead of at his "Wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnilie?" New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in many of its ways of doing and thinking, that it almost seems as if that tender poem of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too. I can see the features of my father, who died when I was a little child, whenever I read the familiar verse:-- "The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face They round the ingle form a circle wide: The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride." A grave, thoughtful face his was, lifted up so grandly amid that blooming semicircle of boys and girls, all gathered silently in the glow of the ruddy firelight! The great family Bible had the look upon its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new, and we honored it the more for its apparent age. Its companion was the Westminster Assembly's and Shorter Catechism, out of which my father asked us questions on Sabbath afternoons, when the tea-table had been cleared. He ended the exercise with a prayer, standing up with his face turned toward the wall. My most vivid recollection of his living face is as I saw it reflected in a mirror while he stood thus praying. His closed eyes, the paleness and seriousness of his countenance, awed me. I never forgot that look. I saw it but once again, when, a child of six or seven years, I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin to gaze upon his face for the last time. It wore the same expression that it did in prayer; paler, but no longer care-worn; so peaceful, so noble! They left me standing there a long time, and I could not take my eyes away. I had never thought my father's face a beautiful one until then, but I believe it must have been so, always. I know that he was a studious man, fond of what was called "solid reading." He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many years the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European ports), in astronomical calculations and historical computations. A rhyming genius in the town, who undertook to hit off the peculiarities of well-known residents, characterized my father as "Philosophic Ben, Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!" His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a fund of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him; but my mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his. She was chatty and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright blue eyes and soft, dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up under her white lace cap-border. Not even the eldest child remembered her without her cap, and when some of us asked her why she never let her pretty curls be visible, she said,-- "Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we were married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always shall wear it, for the same reason." My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held sway with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew too overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from discouragement. Her father was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my time,--of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly polite, and very fond of us children, whom he was always treating to raisins and peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War,--the greatest distinction we could imagine. And he was also the sexton of the oldest church in town,--the Old South,--and had charge of the winding-up of the town clock, and the ringing of the bell on week-days and Sundays, and the tolling for funerals,--into which mysteries he sometimes allowed us youngsters a furtive glimpse. I did not believe that there was another grandfather so delightful as ours in all the world. Uncles, aunts, and cousins were plentiful in the family, but they did not live near enough for us to see them very often, excepting one aunt, my father's sister, for whom I was named. She was fair, with large, clear eyes that seemed to look far into one's heart, with an expression at once penetrating and benignant. To my childish imagination she was an embodiment of serene and lofty goodness. I wished and hoped that by bearing her baptismal name I might become like her; and when I found out its signification (I learned that "Lucy" means "with light"), I wished it more earnestly still. For her beautiful character was just such an illumination to my young life as I should most desire mine to be to the lives of others. My aunt, like my father, was always studying something. Some map or book always lay open before her, when I went to visit her, in her picturesque old house, with its sloping roof and tall well-sweep. And she always brought out some book or picture for me from her quaint old-fashioned chest of drawers. I still possess the "Children in the Wood," which she gave me, as a keepsake, when I was about ten years old. Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years. Those larger planets held our little one to its orbit, and lent it their brightness. Happy indeed is the infancy which is surrounded only by the loving and the good! Besides those who were of my kindred, I had several aunts by courtesy, or rather by the privilege of neighborhood, who seemed to belong to my babyhood. Indeed, the family hearthstone came near being the scene of a tragedy to me, through the blind fondness of one of these. The adjective is literal. This dear old lady, almost sightless, sitting in a low chair far in the chimney corner, where she had been placed on her first call to see the new baby, took me upon her lap, and--so they say--unconsciously let me slip off into the coals. I was rescued unsinged, however, and it was one of the earliest accomplishments of my infancy to thread my poor, half-blind Aunt Stanley's needles for her. We were close neighbors and gossips until my fourth year. Many an hour I sat by her side drawing a needle and thread through a bit of calico, under the delusion that I was sewing, while she repeated all sorts of juvenile singsongs of which her memory seemed full, for my entertainment. There used to be a legend current among my brothers and sisters that this aunt unwittingly taught me to use a reprehensible word. One of her ditties began with the lines:-- "Miss Lucy was a charming child; She never said, 'I won't.'" After bearing this once or twice, the willful negative was continually upon my lips; doubtless a symptom of what was dormant within--a will perhaps not quite so aggressive as it was obstinate. But she meant only to praise me and please me; and dearly I loved to stay with her in her cozy up-stairs room across the lane, that the sun looked into nearly all day. Another adopted aunt lived down-stairs in the same house. This one was a sober woman; life meant business to her, and she taught me to sew in earnest, with a knot in the end of my thread, although it was only upon clothing for my ragchildren--absurd creatures of my own invention, limbless and destitute of features, except as now and then one of my older sisters would, upon my earnest petition, outline a face for one of them, with pen and ink. I loved them, nevertheless, far better than I did the London doll that lay in waxen state in an upper drawer at home,--the fine lady that did not wish to be played with, but only to be looked at and admired. This latter aunt I regarded as a woman of great possessions. She owned the land beside us and opposite us. Her well was close to our door, a well of the coldest and clearest water I ever drank, and it abundantly supplied the whole neighborhood. The hill behind her house was our general playground; and I supposed she owned that, too, since through her dooryard, and over her stone wall, was our permitted thoroughfare thither. I imagined that those were her buttercups that we gathered when we got over the wall, and held under each other's chin, to see, by the reflection, who was fond of butter; and surely the yellow toadflax (we called it "lady's slipper") that grew in the rock-crevices was hers, for we found it nowhere else. The blue gill-over-the-ground unmistakably belonged to her, for it carpeted an unused triangular corner of her garden inclosed by a leaning fence gray and gold with sea-side lichens. Its blue was beautiful, but its pungent earthy odor--I can smell it now--repelled us from the damp corner where it grew. It made us think of graves and ghosts; and I think we were forbidden to go there. We much preferred to sit on the sunken curbstones, in the shade of the broad-leaved burdocks, and shape their spiny balls into chairs and cradles and sofas for our dollies, or to "play school" on the doorsteps, or to climb over the wall, and to feel the freedom of the hill. We were a neighborhood of large families, and most of us enjoyed the privilege of "a little wholesome neglect." Our tether was a long one, and when, grown a little older, we occasionally asked to have it lengthened, a maternal "I don't care" amounted to almost unlimited liberty. The hill itself was well-nigh boundless in its capacities for juvenile occupation. Besides its miniature precipices, that walled in some of the neighbors' gardens, and its slanting slides, worn smooth by the feet of many childish generations, there were partly quarried ledges, which had shaped themselves into rock-stairs, carpeted with lovely mosses, in various patterns. These were the winding ways up our castle-towers, with breakfast-rooms and boudoirs along the landings, where we set our tables for expected guests with bits of broken china, and left our numerous rag-children tucked in asleep under mullein blankets or plantain-coverlets, while we ascended to the topmost turret to watch for our ships coming in from sea. For leagues of ocean were visible from the tiptop of the ledge, a tiny cleft peak that held always little rain-pool for thirsty birds that now and then stopped as they flew over, to dip their beaks and glance shyly at us, as if they wished to share our games. We could see the steeples and smokes of Salem in the distance, and the bill, as it descended, lost itself in mowing fields that slid again into the river. Beyond that was Rial Side and Folly Hill, and they looked so very far off! They called it "over to Green's" across the river. I thought it was because of the thick growth of dark green junipers, that covered the cliff-side down to the water's edge; but they were only giving the name of the farmer who owned the land, Whenever there was an unusual barking of dogs in the distance, they said it was "over to Green's." That barking of dogs made the place seem very mysterious to me. Our lane ran parallel with the hill and the mowing fields, and down our lane we were always free to go. It was a genuine lane, all ups and downs, and too narrow for a street, although at last they have leveled it and widened it, and made a commonplace thoroughfare of it. I am glad that my baby life knew it in all its queer, original irregularities, for it seemed to have a character of its own, like many of its inhabitants, all the more charming because it was unlike anything but itself. The hill, too, is lost now, buried under houses. Our lane came to an end at some bars that let us into another lane,--or rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields and orchards. We were still on home ground, for my father's vegetable garden and orchard were here. After a long straight stretch, the path suddenly took an abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down wharf, and there was the river! An "arm of the sea" I was told that our river was, and it did seem to reach around the town and hold it in a liquid embrace. Twice a day the tide came in and filled its muddy bed with a sparkling flood. So it was a river only half the time, but at high tide it was a river indeed; all that a child could wish, with its boats and its sloops, and now and then that most available craft for a crew of children--a gundalow. We easily transformed the spelling into "gondola," and in fancy were afloat on Venetian waters, under some overhanging balcony, perhaps at the very Palace of the Doges,--willingly blind to the reality of a mudscow leaning against some rickety wharf posts, covered with barnacles. Sometimes a neighbor boy who was the fortunate owner of a boat would row us down the river a fearful, because a forbidden, joy. The widening waters made us tremble with dread and longing for what might be beyond; for when we had passed under the piers of the bridge, the estuary broadened into the harbor and the open sea. Then somebody on board would tell a story of children who had drifted away beyond the harbor-bar and the light-house, and were drowned; and our boyish helmsman would begin to look grave and anxious, and would turn his boat and row us back swiftly to the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf. The cars rush into the station now, right over our riverside playground. I can often hear the mirthful shout of boys and girls under the shriek of the steam whistle. No dream of a railroad had then come to the quiet old town, but it was a wild train of children that ran homeward in the twilight up the narrow lane, with wind-shod feet, and hair flying like the manes of young colts, and light hearts bounding to their own footsteps. How good and dear our plain, two-story dwelling-house looked to us as we came in sight of it, and what sweet odors stole out to meet us from the white-fenced inclosure of our small garden,--from peach-trees and lilac-bushes in bloom, from bergamot and balm and beds of camomile! Sometimes we would find the pathetic figure of white-haired Larkin Moore, the insane preacher, his two canes lain aside, waiting, in our dooryard for any audience that he could gather: boys and girls were as welcome as anybody. He would seat us in a row on the green slope, and give us a half hour or so of incoherent exhortation, to which we attended respectfully, if not reverently; for his whole manner showed that, though demented, he was deeply in earnest. He seemed there in the twilight like a dazed angel who had lost his way, and had half forgotten his errand, which yet he must try to tell to anybody who would listen. I have heard my mother say that sometimes he would ask if he might take her baby in his arms and sing to it; and that though she was half afraid herself, the baby--I like to fancy I was that baby--seemed to enjoy it, and played gleefully with the old man's flowing gray locks. Good Larkin Moore was well known through the two neighboring counties, Essex and Middlesex. We saw him afterward on the banks of the Merrimack. He always wore a loose calico tunic over his trousers; and, when the mood came upon him, he started off with two canes,--seeming to think he could travel faster as a quadruped than as a biped. He was entirely harmless; his only wish was to preach or to sing. A characteristic anecdote used to be told of him: that once, as a stage-coach containing, only a few passengers passed him on the road, he asked the favor of a seat on the top, and was refused. There were many miles between him and his destination. But he did not upbraid the ungracious driver; he only swung his two canes a little more briskly, and kept breast of the horses all the way, entering the town side by side with the inhospitable vehicles--a running reproach to the churl on the box. There was another wanderer, a blind woman, whom my mother treated with great respect on her annual pilgrimages. She brought with her some printed rhymes to sell, purporting to be composed by herself, and beginning with the verse:-- "I, Nancy Welsh, was born and bred In Essex County, Marblehead. And when I was an infant quite The Lord deprived me of my sight." I labored under the delusion that blindness was a sort of insanity, and I used to run away when this pilgrim came, for she was not talkative like Larkin Moore. I fancied she disliked children, and so I shrank from her. There were other odd estrays going about, who were either well known, or could account for them selves. The one human phenomenon that filled us little ones with mortal terror was an unknown "man with a pack on his back." I do not know what we thought he would do with us, but the sight of one always sent us breathless with fright to the shelter of the maternal wing. I did not at all like the picture of Christian on his way to the wicket-gate, in "Pilgrim's Progress," before I had read the book, because he had "a pack on his back." But there was really nothing to be afraid of in those simple, honest old times. I suppose we children would not have known how happy and safe we were, in our secluded lane, if we had not conjured up a few imaginary fears. Long as it is since the rural features of our lane were entirely obliterated, my feet often go back and press, in memory, its grass-grown borders, and in delight and liberty I am a child again. Its narrow limits were once my whole known world. Even then it seemed to me as if it might lead everywhere; and it was indeed but the beginning of a road which must lengthen and widen beneath my feet forever. II. SCHOOLROOM AND MEETING-HOUSE. THERE were only two or three houses between ours and the main street, and then our lane came out directly opposite the finest house in town, a three-story edifice of brick, painted white, the "Colonel's" residence. There was a spacious garden behind it, from which we caught glimpses and perfumes of unknown flowers. Over its high walls hung boughs of splendid great yellow sweet apples, which, when they fell on the outside, we children considered as our perquisites. When I first read about the apples of the Hesperides, my idea of them was that they were like the Colonel's "pumpkin-sweetings." Beyond the garden were wide green fields which reached eastward down to the beach. It was one of those large old estates which used to give to the very heart of our New England coast towns a delightful breeziness and roominess. A coach-and-pair was one of the appurtenances of this estate, with a coachman on the box; and when he took the family out for an airing we small children thought it was a sort of Cinderella spectacle, prepared expressly for us. It was not, however, quite so interesting as the Boston stage-coach, that rolled regularly every day past the head of our lane into and out of its headquarters, a big, unpainted stable close at hand. This stage-coach, in our minds, meant the city,--twenty miles off; an immeasurable distance to us then. Even our elders did not go there very often. In those early days, towns used to give each other nicknames, like schoolboys. Ours was called "Bean-town" not because it was especially devoted to the cultivation of this leguminous edible, but probably because it adhered a long time to the Puritanic custom of saving Sunday-work by baking beans on Saturday evening, leaving them in the oven over night. After a while, as families left off heating their ovens, the bean-pots were taken by the village baker on Saturday afternoon, who returned them to each house early on Sunday morning with the pan of brown bread that went with them. The jingling of the baker's bells made the matter a public one. The towns through which our stage-coach passed sometimes called it the "bean-pot." The Jehn who drove it was something of a wag. Once, coming through Charlestown, while waiting in the street for a resident passenger, he was hailed by another resident who thought him obstructing the passage, with the shout,-- "Halloo there! Get your old bean-pot out of the way!" "I will, when I have got my pork in," was the ready reply. What the sobriquet of Charlestown was, need not be explained. We had a good opportunity to watch both coaches, as my father's shop was just at the head of the lane, and we went to school upstairs in the same building. After he left off going to sea,--before my birth,--my father took a store for the sale of what used to be called "West India goods," and various other domestic commodities. The school was kept by a neighbor whom everybody called "Aunt Hannah." It took in all the little ones about us, no matter how young they were, provided they could walk and talk, and were considered capable of learning their letters. A ladder-like flight of stairs on the outside of the house led up to the schoolroom, and another flight, also outside, took us down into a bit of a garden, where grew tansy and spearmint and southernwood and wormwood, and, among other old-fashioned flowers, an abundance of many-tinted four o'clocks, whose regular afternoon-opening just at the close of school, was a daily wonder to us babies. From the schoolroom window we could watch the slow hands of the town clock and get a peep at what was going on in the street, although there was seldom anybody in sight except the Colonel's gardener or coachman, going into or out of the driveway directly opposite. It was a very still street; the front windows of the houses were generally closed, and a few military-looking Lombardy poplars stood like sentinels on guard before them. Another shop--a very small one--joined my father's, where three shoemakers, all of the same name--the name our lane went by--sat at their benches and plied their "waxed ends." One of them, an elderly man, tall and erect, used to come out regularly every day, and stand for a long time at the corner, motionless as a post, with his nose and chin pointing skyward, usually to the northeast. I watched his face with wonder, for it was said that "Uncle John" was "weatherwise," and knew all the secrets of the heavens. Aunt Hannah's schoolroom and "our shop" are a blended memory to me. As I was only a baby when I began to go to school, I was often sent down-stairs for a half hour's recreation not permitted to the older ones. I think I looked upon both school and shop entirely as places of entertainment for little children. The front shop-window was especially interesting to us children, for there were in it a few glass jars containing sticks of striped barley-candy, and red and white peppermint-drops, and that delectable achievement of the ancient confectioner's art, the "Salem gibraltar." One of my first recollections of my father is connected with that window. He had taken me into the shop with him after dinner,--I was perhaps two years old,--and I was playing beside him on the counter when one of his old sea-comrades came in, whom we knew as "Captain Cross." The Captain tried to make friends with me, and, to seal the bond, asked my father to take down from its place of exhibition a strip of red peppermints dropped on white paper, in a style I particularly admired, which he twisted around my neck, saying, "Now I've bought you! Now you are my girl. Come, go home with me!" His words sounded as if he meant them. I took it all in earnest, and ran, scared and screaming, to my father, dashing down the sugar-plums I wanted so much, and refusing even to bestow a glance upon my amused purchaser. My father pacified me by taking me on his shoulders and carrying me "pickaback" up and down the shop, and I clung to him in the happy consciousness that I belonged to him, and that he would not let anybody else have me; though I did not feel quite easy until Captain Cross disappeared. I suppose that this little incident has always remained in my memory because it then for the first time became a fact in my consciousness that my father really loved me as I loved him. He was not at all a demonstrative man, and any petting that he gave us children could not fail to make a permanent impression. I think that must have been also the last special attention I received from him, for a little sister appeared soon after, whose coming was announced to me with the accompaniment of certain mysterious hints about my nose being out of joint. I examined that feature carefully in the looking glass, but could not discover anything usual about it. It was quite beyond me to imagine that our innocent little baby could have anything to do with the possible disfigurement of my face, but she did absorb the fondness of the whole family, myself included, and she became my father's playmate and darling, the very apple of his eye. I used sometimes to wish I were a baby too, so that he would notice me, but gradually I accepted the situation. Aunt Hannah used her kitchen or her sitting room for a schoolroom, as best suited her convenience. We were delighted observers of her culinary operations and other employments. If a baby's head nodded, a little bed was made for it on a soft "comforter" in the corner, where it had its nap out undisturbed. But this did not often happen; there were so many interesting things going on that we seldom became sleepy. Aunt Hannah was very kind and motherly, but she kept us in fear of her ferule, which indicated to us a possibility of smarting palms. This ferule was shaped much like the stick with which she stirred her hasty pudding for dinner,--I thought it was the same,--and I found myself caught in a whirlwind of family laughter by reporting at home that "Aunt Hannah punished the scholars with the pudding-stick." There was one colored boy in school, who did not sit on a bench, like the rest, but on a block of wood that looked like a backlog turned endwise. Aunt Hannah often called him a "blockhead," and I supposed it was because he sat on that block. Sometimes, in his absence, a boy was made to sit in his place for punishment, for being a "blockhead" too, as I imagined. I hoped I should never be put there. Stupid little girls received a different treatment,--an occasional rap on the head with the teacher's thimble; accompanied with a half-whispered, impatient ejaculation, which sounded very much like "Numskull!" I think this was a rare occurrence, however, for she was a good-natured, much-enduring woman. One of our greatest school pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with her foot upon the treadle. A verse of one of her hymns, which I never heard anybody else sing, resounds in the farthest corner of my memory yet:"-- "Whither goest thou, pilgrim stranger, Wandering through this lowly vale? Knowest thou not 't is full of danger? And will not thy courage fail?" Then a little pause, and the refrain of the answer broke in with a change, quick and jubilant, the treadle moving more rapidly, also:-- "No, I'm bound for the kingdom! Will you go to glory with me? Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!" I began to go to school when I was about two years old, as other children about us did. The mothers of those large families had to resort to some means of keeping their little ones out of mischief, while they attended to their domestic duties. Not much more than that sort of temporary guardianship was expected of the good dame who had us in charge. But I learned my letters in a few days, standing at Aunt Hannah's knee while she pointed them out in the spelling-book with a pin, skipping over the "a b abs" into words of one and two syllables, thence taking a flying leap into the New Testament, in which there is concurrent family testimony that I was reading at the age of two years and a half. Certain it is that a few passages in the Bible, whenever I read them now, do not fail to bring before me a vision of Aunt Hannah's somewhat sternly smiling lips, with her spectacles just above them, far down on her nose, encouraging me to pronounce the hard words. I think she tried to choose for me the least difficult verses, or perhaps those of which she was herself especially fond. Those which I distinctly recall are the Beatitudes, the Twenty-third Psalm, parts of the first and fourteenth chapters of the Gospel of St. John, and the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. I liked to say over the "Blesseds,"--the shortest ones best,--about the meek and the pure in heart; and the two "In the beginnings," both in Genesis and John. Every child's earliest and proudest Scriptural conquest in school was, almost as a matter of course, the first verse in the Bible. But the passage which I learned first, and most delighted to repeat after Aunt Hannah,--I think it must have been her favorite too,--was, "Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father's house are many mansions." The Voice in the Book seemed so tender! Somebody was speaking who had a heart, and who knew that even a little child's heart was sometimes troubled. And it was a Voice that called us somewhere; to the Father's house, with its many mansions, so sunshiny and so large. It was a beautiful vision that came to me with the words,--I could see it best with my eyes shut,-a great, dim Door standing ajar, opening out of rosy morning mists, overhung with swaying vines and arching boughs that were full of birds; and from beyond the Door, the ripple of running waters, and the sound of many happy voices, and above them all the One Voice that was saying, "I go to prepare a place for you." The vision gave me a sense of freedom, fearless and infinite. What was there to be afraid of anywhere? Even we little children could see the open door of our Father's house. We were playing around its threshold now, and we need never wander out of sight of it. The feeling was a vague one, but it was like a remembrance. The spacious mansions were not far away. They were my home. I had known them, and should return to them again. This dim half-memory, which perhaps comes to all children, I had felt when younger still, almost before I could walk. Sitting on the floor in a square of sunshine made by an open window, the leaf-shadows from great boughs outside dancing and wavering around me, I seemed to be talking to them and they to me in unknown tongues, that left within me an ecstasy yet unforgotten. These shadows had brought a message to me from an unseen Somewhere, which my baby heart was to keep forever. The wonder of that moment often returns. Shadow-traceries of bough and leaf still seem to me like the hieroglyphics of a lost language. The stars brought me the same feeling. I remember the surprise they were to me, seen for the first time. One evening, just before I was put to bed, I was taken in somebody's arms--my sister's, I think--outside the door, and lifted up under the dark, still, clear sky, splendid with stars, thicker and nearer earth than they have ever seemed since. All my little being shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!" And then the exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child, as she was carried in, "Why, that is the roof of the house I live in." After that I always went to sleep happier for the feeling that the stars were outside there in the dark, though I could not see them. I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this; I had a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,--that this was not the place where we really belonged. Some of the family have told me that before I could talk plainly, I used to run about humming the sentence-- "My father and mother Shall come unto the land," sometimes varying it with, "My brothers and sisters Shall come unto the land;" Nobody knew where I had caught the words, but I chanted them so constantly that my brother wrote them down, with chalk, on the under side of a table, where they remained for years. My thought about that other land may have been only a baby's dream; but the dream was very real to me. I used to talk, in sober earnest, about what happened "before I was a little girl, and came here to live"; and it did seem to me as if I remembered. But I was hearty and robust, full of frolicsome health, and very fond of the matter-of-fact world I lived in. My sturdy little feet felt the solid earth beneath them. I grew with the sprouting grass, and enjoyed my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy theirs. It was only as if the bud and the bird and the dear warm earth knew, in the same dumb way that I did, that all their joy and sweetness came to them out of the sky. These recollections, that so distinctly belong the baby Myself, before she could speak her thoughts, though clear and vivid, are difficult to put into shape. But other grown-up children, in looking back, will doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory, that lighted their unconscious infancy from within and from beyond. I was quite as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of the New Testament, read at Aunt Hannah's knee. I was much taken with the sound of words, without any thought of their meaning--a habit not always outgrown with childhood. The "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," for instance, in the Epistle to the Corinthians, seemed to me things to be greatly desired. "Charity" was an abstract idea. I did not know what it meant. But "tinkling cymbals" one could make music with. I wished I could get hold of them. It never occurred to me that the Apostle meant to speak of their melody slightingly. At meeting, where I began to go also at two years of age, I made my own private interpretations of the Bible readings. They were absurd enough, but after getting laughed at a few times at home for making them public, I escaped mortification by forming a habit of great reserve as to my Sabbath-day thoughts. When the minister read, "Cut it down: why cumbereth it the ground?"? I thought he meant to say "cu-cumbereth." These vegetables grew on the ground, and I had heard that they were not very good for people to eat. I honestly supposed that the New Testament forbade the cultivation of cucumbers. And "Galilee" I understood as a mispronunciation of "gallery." "Going up into Galilee" I interpreted into clattering up the uncarpeted stairs in the meeting-house porch, as the boys did, with their squeaking brogans, looking as restless as imprisoned monkeys after they had got into those conspicuous seats, where they behaved as if they thought nobody could see their pranks. I did not think it could be at all nice to "go up into Galilee." I had an "Aunt Nancy," an uncle's wife, to whom I was sometimes sent for safe-keeping when house-cleaning or anything unusual was going on at home. She was a large-featured woman, with a very deep masculine voice, and she conducted family worship herself, kneeling at prayer, which was not the Orthodox custom. She always began by saying,-- "Oh Lord, Thou knowest that we are all groveling worms of the dust." I thought she meant that we all looked like wriggling red earthworms, and tried to make out the resemblance in my mind, but could not. I unburdened my difficulty at home, telling the family that "Aunt Nancy got down on the floor and said we were all grubbelin' worms," begging to know whether everybody did sometimes have to crawl about in the dust. A little later, I was much puzzled as to whether I was a Jew or Gentile. The Bible seemed to divide people into these two classes only. The Gentiles were not well spoken of: I did not want to be one of them. The talked about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the rest, away back to Adam, as if they were our forefathers (there was a time when I thought that Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were our four fathers); and yet I was very sure that I was not a Jew. When I ventured to ask, I was told that we were all Christians or heathen now. That did not help me for I thought that only grown-up persons could be Christians, from which it followed that all children must be heathen. Must I think of Myself as a heathen, then, until I should be old enough to be a Christian? It was a shocking conclusion, but I could see no other answer to my question, and I felt ashamed to ask again. My self-invented theory about the human race was that Adam and Eve were very tall people, taller than the tallest trees in the Garden of Eden, before they were sent out of it; but that they then began to dwindle; that their children had ever since been getting smaller and smaller, and that by and by the inhabitants of the world would be no bigger than babies. I was afraid I should stop growing while I was a child, and I used to stand on the footstool in the pew, and try to stretch myself up to my mother's height, to imagine how it would seem to be a woman. I hoped I should be a tall one. I did not wish to be a diminishing specimen of the race;--an anxiety which proved to be entirely groundless. The Sabbath mornings in those old times had a peculiar charm. They seemed so much cleaner than other mornings! The roads and the grassy footpaths seemed fresher, and the air itself purer and more wholesome than on week-days. Saturday afternoon and evening were regarded as part of the Sabbath (we were taught that it was heathenish to call the day Sunday); work and playthings were laid aside, and every body, as well as every thing, was subjected to a rigid renovation. Sabbath morning would not have seemed like itself without a clean house, a clean skin, and tidy and spotless clothing. The Saturday's baking was a great event, the brick oven being heated to receive the flour bread, the flour-and-Indian, and the rye-and-Indian bread, the traditional pot of beans, the Indian pudding, and the pies; for no further cooking was to be done until Monday. We smaller girls thought it a great privilege to be allowed to watch the oven till the roof of it should be "white-hot," so that the coals could be shoveled out. Then it was so still, both out of doors and within! We were not allowed to walk anywhere except in the yard or garden. I remember wondering whether it was never Sabbath-day over the fence, in the next field; whether the field was not a kind of heathen field, since we could only go into it on week-days. The wild flowers over there were perhaps Gentile blossoms. Only the flowers in the garden were well-behaved Christians. It was Sabbath in the house, and possibly even on the doorstep; but not much farther. The town itself was so quiet that it scarcely seemed to breathe. The sound of wheels was seldom heard in the streets on that day; if we heard it, we expected some unusual explanation. I liked to go to meeting,--not wholly oblivious to the fact that going there sometimes implied wearing a new bonnet and my best white dress and muslin "vandyke," of which adornments, if very new, I vainly supposed the whole congregation to be as admiringly aware as I was myself. But my Sabbath-day enjoyment was not wholly without drawbacks. It was so hard, sometimes, to stand up through the "long prayer," and to sit still through the "ninthlies," and "tenthlies," and "finallys" of the sermon! It was impressed upon me that good children were never restless in meeting, and never laughed or smiled, however their big brothers tempted them with winks or grimaces. And I did want to be good. I was not tall enough to see very far over the top of the pew. I think there were only three persons that came within range of my eyes. One was a dark man with black curly hair brushed down in "bangs" over his eyebrows, who sat behind a green baize curtain near the outside door, peeping out at me, as I thought. I had an impression that he was the "tidy-man," though that personage had become mythical long before my day. He had a dragonish look, to me; and I tried never to meet his glance. But I did sometimes gaze more earnestly than was polite at a dear, demure little lady who sat in the corner of the pew next ours, her downcast eyes shaded by a green calash, and her hidden right hand gently swaying a long-handled Chinese fan. She was the deacon's wife, and I felt greatly interested in her movements and in the expression of her face, because I thought she represented the people they called "saints," who were, as I supposed, about the same as first cousins to the angels. The third figure in sight was the minister. I did not think he ever saw me; he was talking to the older people,--usually telling them how wicked they were. He often said to them that there was not one good person among them; but I supposed he excepted himself. He seemed to me so very good that I was very much afraid of him. I was a little afraid of my father, but then he sometimes played with us children: and besides, my father was only a man. I thought the minister belonged to some different order of beings. Up there in the pulpit he seemed to me so far off--oh! a great deal farther off than God did. His distance made my reverence for him take the form of idolatry. The pulpit was his pedestal. If any one had told me that the minister ever did or thought anything that was wrong, I should have felt as if the foundations of the earth under me were shaken. I wondered if he ever did laugh. Perhaps it was wicked for a minister even to smile. One day, when I was very little, I met the minister in the street; and he, probably recognizing me as the child of one of his parishioners, actually bowed to me! His bows were always ministerially profound, and I was so overwhelmed with surprise and awe that I forgot to make the proper response of a "curtsey," but ran home as fast as I could go to proclaim the wonder. It would not have astonished me any more, if one of the tall Lombardy poplars that stood along the sidewalk had laid itself down at my feet. I do not remember anything that the preacher ever said, except some words which I thought sounded well,--such as "dispensations," "decrees," "ordinances," "covenants,"--although I attached no meaning to them. He seemed to be trying to explain the Bible by putting it into long words. I did not understand them at all. It was from Aunt Hannah that I received my first real glimpses of the beautiful New Testament revelation. In her unconscious wisdom she chose for me passages and chapters that were like openings into heaven. They contained the great, deep truths which are simple because they are great. It was not explanations of those grand words that I required, or that anybody requires. In reading them we are all children together, and need only to be led to the banks of the river of God, which is full of water, that we may look down into its pellucid depths for ourselves. Our minister was not unlike other ministers of the time, and his seeming distance from his congregation was doubtless owing to the deep reverence in which the ministerial office was universally held among our predecessors. My own graven-image worship of him was only a childish exaggeration of the general feeling of grown people around me. He seemed to us an inhabitant of a Sabbath-day sphere, while we belonged to the every-day world. I distinctly remember the day of my christening, when I was between three and four years old. My parents did not make a public profession of their faith until after the birth of all their children, eight of whom--I being my father's ninth child and seventh daughter--were baptized at one time. My two half-sisters were then grown-up young women. My mother had told us that the minister would be speaking directly to us, and that we must pay close attention to what he said. I felt that it was an important event, and I wished to do exactly what the minister desired of me. I listened eagerly while he read the chapter and the hymn. The latter was one of my favorites:-- "See Israel's gentle Shepherd stands;" and the chapter was the third of St. Matthew, containing the story of our Lord's baptism. I could not make out any special message for us, until he came to the words, "Whose fan is in his hand." That must be it! I looked anxiously at my sisters, to see if they had brought their fans. It was warm weather, and I had taken a little one of my own to meeting. Believing that I was following a direct instruction, I clasped my fan to my bosom and held it there as we walked up the aisle, and during the ceremony, wondering why the others did not do so, too. The baby in my mother's arms--Octavia, the eighth daughter--shocked me by crying a little, but I tried to behave the better on that account. It all seemed very solemn and mysterious to me. I knew from my father's and mother's absorbed manner then, and when we returned from church, that it was something exceedingly important to Them--something that they wished us neither to talk about nor to forget. I never did forget it. There remained within me a sweet, haunting feeling of having come near the "gentle Shepherd" of the hymn, who was calling the lambs to his side. The chapter had ended with the echo of a voice from heaven, and with the glimpse of a descending Dove. And the water-drops on my forehead, were they not from that "pure river of water of life, clear as crystal," that made music through those lovely verses in the last chapter of the good Book? I am glad that I have always remembered that day of family consecration. As I look back, it seems as if the horizons of heaven and earth met and were blended then. And who can tell whether the fragrance of that day's atmosphere may not enter into the freshness of some new childhood in the life which is to come? III. THE HYMN-BOOK. ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns. Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing. I followed my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts' and Select"), reading or repeating them to her, while she was busy with her baking or ironing, and she was always a willing listener. She was fond of devotional reading, but had little time for it, and it pleased her to know that so small a child as I really cared for the hymns she loved. I learned most of them at meeting. I was told to listen to the minister; but as I did not understand a word he was saying, I gave it up, and took refuge in the hymn-book, with the conscientious purpose of trying to sit still. I turned the leaves over as noiselessly as possible, to avoid the dreaded reproof of my mother's keen blue eyes; and sometimes I learned two or three hymns in a forenoon or an afternoon. Finding it so easy, I thought I would begin at the beginning, and learn the whole. There were about a thousand of them included in the Psalms, the First, Second, and Third Books, and the Select Hymns. But I had learned to read before I had any knowledge of counting up numbers, and so was blissfully ignorant of the magnitude of my undertaking. I did not, I think, change my resolution because there were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered that there were hymns and hymns. Some of them were so prosy that the words would not stay in my memory at all, so I concluded that I would learn only those I liked. I had various reasons for my preferences. With some, I was caught by a melodious echo, or a sonorous ring; with others by the hint of a picture, or a story, or by some sacred suggestion that attracted me, I knew not why. Of some I was fond just because I misunderstood them; and of these I made a free version in my mind, as I murmured them over. One of my first favorites was certainly rather a singular choice for a child of three or four years. I had no idea of its meaning, but made up a little story out of it, with myself as the heroine. It began with the words-- "Come, humble sinner, in whose breast A thousand thoughts revolve." The second stanza read thus:-- "I'll go to Jesus, though my sin Hath like a mountain rose." I did not know that this last line was bad grammar, but thought that the sin in question was something pretty, that looked "like a mountain rose." Mountains I had never seen; they were a glorious dream to me. And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of our red wild roses on the hill, sweet as they were. I would pluck that rose, and carry it up the mountain-side into the temple where the King sat, and would give it to Him; and then He would touch me with his sceptre, and let me through into a garden full of flowers. There was no garden in the hymn; I suppose the "rose" made me invent one. But it did read-- "I know his courts; I'll enter in, Whatever may oppose;" and so I fancied there would be lions in the way, as there were in the Pilgrim's, at the "House Beautiful"; but I should not be afraid of them; they would no doubt be chained. The last verse began with the lines,-- "I can but perish if I go: I am resolved to try:" and my heart beat a brave echo to the words, as I started off in fancy on a "Pilgrim's Progress" of my own, a happy little dreamer, telling nobody the secret of my imaginary journey, taken in sermon-time. Usually, the hymns for which I cared most suggested Nature in some way,--flowers, trees, skies, and stars. When I repeated,-- "There everlasting spring abides, And never-withering flowers,"-- I thought of the faintly flushed anemones and white and blue violets, the dear little short-lived children of our shivering spring. They also would surely be found in that heavenly land, blooming on through the cloudless, endless year. And I seemed to smell the spiciness of bay berry and sweet-fern and wild roses and meadow-sweet that grew in fragrant jungles up and down the hillside back of the meeting-house, in another verse which I dearly loved:-- "The hill of Zion yields A thousand sacred sweet, Before we reach the heavenly fields, Or walk the golden streets." We were allowed to take a little nosegay to meeting sometimes: a pink or two (pinks were pink then, not red, nor white, nor even double) and a sprig of camomile; and their blended perfume still seems to be a part of the June Sabbath mornings long passed away. When the choir sang of "Seas of heavenly rest," a breath of salt wind came in with the words through the open door, from the sheltered waters of the bay, so softly blue and so lovely, I always wondered how a world could be beautiful where "there was no more sea." I concluded that the hymn and the text could not really contradict other; that there must be something like the sea in heaven, after all. One stanza that I used to croon over, gave me the feeling of being rocked in a boat on a strange and beautiful ocean, from whose far-off shores the sunrise beckoned:-- "At anchor laid, remote from home, Toiling I cry, Sweet Spirit, come! Celestial breeze, no longer stay! But spread my sails, and speed my way!" Some of the chosen hymns of my infancy the world recognizes among its noblest treasures of sacred song. That one of Doddridge's, beginning with "Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell!" made me feel as if I had just been gazing in at some window of the "many mansions" above:-- "Ye stars are but the shining dust Of my divine abode-" Had I not known that, ever since I was a baby? But the light does not stream down even into a baby's soul with equal brightness all the time. Earth draws her dark curtains too soon over the windows of heaven, and the little children fall asleep in her dim rooms, and forget their visions. That majestic hymn of Cowper's,-- "God moves in a mysterious way," was one of my first and dearest. It reminded me of the rolling of thunder through the sky; and, understood as little as the thunder itself, which my mother told me was God's voice, so that I bent my ear and listened, expecting to hear it shaped into words, it still did give me an idea of the presence of One Infinite Being, that thrilled me with reverent awe. And this was one of the best lessons taught in the Puritan school,--the lesson of reverence, the certainty that life meant looking up to something, to Some One greater than ourselves, to a Life far above us, which yet enfolded ours. The thought of God, when He was first spoken of to me, seemed as natural as the thought of my father and mother. That He should be invisible did not seem strange, for I could not with my eyes see through the sky, beyond which I supposed he lived. But it was easy to believe that He could look down and see me, and that He knew all about me. We were taught very early to say "Thou, God, seest me"; and it was one of my favorite texts. Heaven seemed nearer, because somebody I loved was up there looking at me. A baby is not afraid of its father's eyes. The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud. Yet I was sure that I loved my father and mother, even when I was naughty, Was He harder to please than they? Then I heard of a dreadful dark Somewhere, the horror of which was that it was away from Him. What if I should wake some morning, and find myself there? Sometimes I did not dare to go to sleep for that dread. And the thought was too awful to speak of to anybody. Baby that I was, I shut my lips in a sort of reckless despair, and thought that if I could not be good, I might as well be naughty, and enjoy it. But somehow I could not enjoy it. I felt sorry and ashamed and degraded whenever I knew that I had been cross or selfish. I heard them talk about Jesus as if He were a dead man, one who died a great while ago, whose death made a great difference to us, I could not understand how. It seemed like a lovely story, the loveliest in the world, but it sounded as if it were only a story, even to those who repeated it to me; something that had happened far away in the past. But one day a strange minister came into the Sabbath-school in our little chapel, and spoke to us children about Him, oh! so differently! "Children," he said, "Jesus is not dead. He is alive: He loves you, and wants you to love Him! He is your best Friend, and He will show you how to be good." My heart beat fast. I could hardly keep back the tears. The New Testament, then, did really mean what it said! Jesus said He would come back again, and would always be with those who loved Him. "He is alive! He loves me! He will tell me how to be good!" I said it over to myself, but not to anybody else. I was sure that I loved Him. It was like a beautiful secret between us two. I felt Him so alive and so near! He wanted me to be good, and I could be, I would be, for his sake. That stranger never knew how his loving word had touched a child's heart. The doors of the Father's house were opened wide again, by the only hand that holds the key. The world was all bright and fresh once more. It was as if the May sun had suddenly wakened the flowers in an overshadowed wayside nook. I tried long afterward, thinking that it was my duty, to build up a wall of difficult doctrines over my spring blossoms, as if they needed protection. But the sweet light was never wholly stifled out, though I did not always keep my face turned towards it: and I know now, that just to let his lifegiving smile shine into the soul is better than any of the theories we can invent about Him; and that only so can young or old receive the kingdom of God as a little child. I believe that one great reason for a child's love of hymns, such as mine was, is that they are either addressed to a Person, to the Divine Person,--or they bring Him before the mind in some distinct way, instead of being written upon a subject, like a sermon. To make Him real is the only way to make our own spirits real to ourselves. I think more gratefully now of the verses I learned from the Bible and the Hymn-Book than of almost anything that came to me in that time of beginnings. The whole Hymn-Book was not for me then, any more than the whole Bible. I took from both only what really belonged to me. To be among those who found in the true sources of faith and adoration, was like breathing in my native air, though I could not tell anything about the land from which I had come. Much that was put in the way of us children to climb by, we could only stumble over; but around and above the roughnesses of the road, the pure atmosphere of worship was felt everywhere, the healthiest atmosphere for a child's soul to breathe in. I had learned a great many hymns before the family took any notice of it. When it came to the knowledge of my most motherly sister Emilie,--I like to call her that, for she was as fond of early rising as Chaucer's heroine:-- "Up rose the sun, and up rose Emilie;" and it is her own name, with a very slight change,--she undertook to see how many my small memory would contain. She promised me a new book, when I should have learned fifty; and that when I could repeat any one of a hundred hymns, she would teach me to write. I earned the book when I was about four years old. I think it was a collection of some of Jane Taylor's verses. "For Infant Minds," was part of the title. I did not care for it, however, nearly so much as I did for the old, thumb-worn "Watts' and Select Hymns." Before I was five I bad gone beyond the stipulated hundred. A proud and happy child I was, when I was permitted to dip a goose quill into an inkstand, and make written letters, instead of printing them with a pencil on a slate. My sister prepared a neat little writing-book for me, and told me not to make a mark in it except when she was near to tell me what to do. In my self-sufficient impatience to get out of "pothooks and trammels" into real letters and words I disobeyed her injunction, and disfigured the pages with numerous tell-tale blots. Then I hid the book away under the garret eaves, and refused to bring it to light again. I was not allowed to resume my studies in penmanship for some months, in consequence. But when I did learn to write, Emilie was my teacher, and she made me take great pains with my p's and q's. It is always a mistake to cram a juvenile mind. A precocious child is certainly as far as possible from being an interesting one. Children ought to be children, and nothing else. But I am not sorry that I learned to read when so young, because there were years of my childhood that came after, when I had very little time for reading anything. To learn hymns was not only a pastime, but a pleasure which it would have been almost cruel to deprive me of. It did not seem to me as if I learned them, but as if they just gave themselves to me while I read them over; as if they, and the unseen things they sang about, became a part of me. Some of the old hymns did seem to lend us wings, so full were they of aspiration and hope and courage. To a little child, reading them or hearing them sung was like being caught up in a strong man's arms, to gaze upon some wonderful landscape. These climbing and flying hymns,--how well I remember them, although they were among the first I learned! They are of the kind that can never wear out. We all know them by their first lines,-- "Awake, our souls! away, our fears!" "Up to the hills I lift mine eyes." "There is a land of pure delight." "Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace!" How the meeting-house rafters used to ring to that last hymn, sung to the tune of "Amsterdam!" Sometimes it seemed as if the very roof was lifted off,--nay, the roof of the sky itself--as if the music had burst an entrance for our souls into the heaven of heavens. I loved to learn the glad hymns, and there were scores of them. They come flocking back through the years, like birds that are full of the music of an immortal spring! "Come, let us join our cheerful songs With angels round the throne." "Love divine, all love excelling; Joy of heaven, to earth come down." "Joy to the world! the Lord is come!" "Hark! the song of jubilee, Loud as mighty thunders' roar, Or the fullness of the sea When it breaks upon the shore! "Hallelujah! for the Lord God Omnipotent shall reign! Hallelujah! let the word Echo round the earth and main." Ah, that word "Hallelujah!" It seemed to express all the joy of spring mornings and clear sunshine and bursting blossoms, blended with all that I guessed of the songs of angels, and with all that I had heard and believed, in my fledgling soul, of the glorious One who was born in a manger and died on a cross, that He might reign in human hearts as a king. I wondered why the people did not sing "Hallelujah" more. It seemed like a word sent straight down to us out of heaven. I did not like to learn the sorrowful hymns, though I did it when they were given to me as a task, such as-- "Hark, from the tombs," and "Lord, what a wretched land is this, That yields us no supply." I suppose that these mournful strains had their place, but sometimes the transition was too sudden, from the outside of the meeting-house to the inside; from the sunshine and bobolinks and buttercups of the merry May-day world, to the sad strains that chanted of "this barren land," this "vale of tears," this "wilderness" of distress and woe. It let us light-hearted children too quickly down from the higher key of mirth to which our careless thoughts were pitched. We knew that we were happy, and sorrow to us was unreal. But somehow we did often get the impression that it was our duty to try to be sorrowful; and that we could not be entirely good, without being rather miserable. And I am afraid that in my critical little mind I looked upon it as an affectation on the part of the older people to speak of life in this doleful way. I thought that they really knew better. It seemed to me that it must be delightful to grow up, and learn things, and do things, and be very good indeed,--better than children could possibly know how to be. I knew afterwards that my elders were sometimes, at least, sincere in their sadness; for with many of them life must have been a hard struggle. But when they shook their heads and said,--"Child, you will not be so happy by and by; you are seeing your best days now," I still doubted. I was born with the blessing of a cheerful temperament; and while that is not enough to sustain any of us through the inevitable sorrows that all must share, it would have been most unnatural and ungrateful in me to think of earth as a dismal place, when everything without and within was trying to tell me that this good and beautiful world belongs to God. I took exception to some verses in many of the hymns that I loved the most. I had my own mental reservations with regard even to that glorious chant of the ages,-- "Jerusalem, my happy home, Name ever dear to me." I always wanted to skip one half of the third stanza, as it stood in our Hymn-Book: "Where congregations ne'er break up, And Sabbaths have no end." I did not want it to be Sabbath-day always. I was conscious of a pleasure in the thought of games and frolics and coming week-day delights that would flit across my mind even when I was studying my hymns, or trying to listen to the minister. And I did want the congregation to break up some time. Indeed, in those bright spring days, the last hymn in the afternoon always sounded best, because with it came the opening of doors into the outside air, and the pouring in of a mingled scent of sea winds and apple blossoms, like an invitation out into the freedom of the beach, the hillsides, the fields and gardens and orchards. In all this I felt as if I were very wicked. I was afraid that I loved earth better than I did heaven. Nevertheless I always did welcome that last hymn, announced to be sung "with the Doxology," usually in "long metre," to the tune of "Old Hundred." There were certain mysterious preliminaries,--the rustling of singing-book leaves, the sliding of the short screen-curtains before the singers along by their clinking rings, and now and then a premonitory groan or squeak from bass-viol or violin, as if the instruments were clearing their throats; and finally the sudden uprising of that long row of heads in the "singing-seats." My tallest and prettiest grown-up sister, Louise, stood there among them, and of all those girlish, blooming faces I thought hers the very handsomest. But she did not open her lips wide enough to satisfy me. I could not see that she was singing at all. To stand up there and be one of the choir, seemed to me very little short of promotion to the ranks of cherubim and seraphim. I quite envied that tall, pretty sister of mine. I was sure that I should open my mouth wide, if I could only be in her place. Alas! the years proved that, much as I loved the hymns, there was no music in me to give them voice, except to very indulgent ears. Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing. But it is something to feel music, if we cannot make it. That, in itself, is a kind of unconscious singing. As I think back to my childhood, it seems to me as if the air was full of hymns, as it was of the fragrance of clover-blossoms, and the songs of bluebirds and robins, and the deep undertone of the sea. And the purity, the calmness, and the coolness of the dear old Sabbath days seems lingering yet in the words of those familiar hymns, whenever I bear them sung. Their melody penetrates deep into my life, assuming me that I have not left the green pastures and the still waters of my childhood very far behind me. There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the heart young that listens. It is like a breeze from the eternal hills; like the west wind of spring, never by a breath less balmy and clear for having poured life into the old generations of earth for thousands of years; a spiritual freshness, which has nothing to do with time or decay. IV. NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES. ALTHOUGH the children of an earlier time heard a great deal of theological discussion which meant little or nothing to them, there was one thing that was made clear and emphatic in all the Puritan training: that the heavens and earth stood upon firm foundations--upon the Moral Law as taught in the Old Testament and confirmed by the New. Whatever else we did not understand, we believed that to disobey our parents, to lie or steal, had been forbidden by a Voice which was not to be gainsaid. People who broke or evaded these commands did so willfully, and without excusing themselves, or being excused by others. I think most of us expected the fate of Ananias and Sapphira, if we told what we knew was a falsehood. There were reckless exceptions, however. A playmate, of whom I was quite fond, was once asked, in my presence, whether she had done something forbidden, which I knew she had been about only a little while before. She answered "No," and without any apparent hesitation. After the person who made the inquiry had gone, I exclaimed, with horrified wonder, "How could you?" Her reply was, "Oh, I only kind of said no." What a real lie was to her, if she understood a distinct denial of the truth as only "kind-of" lying, it perplexed me to imagine. The years proved that this lack of moral perception was characteristic, and nearly spoiled a nature full of beautiful gifts. I could not deliberately lie, but I had my own temptations, which I did not always successfully resist. I remember the very spot--in a footpath through a green field--where I first met the Eighth Commandment, and felt it looking me full in the face. I suppose I was five or six years old. I had begun to be trusted with errands; one of them was to go to a farmhouse for a quart of milk every morning, to purchase which I went always to the money-drawer in the shop and took out four cents. We were allowed to take a "small brown" biscuit, or a date, or a fig, or a "gibraltar," sometimes; but we well understood that we could not help ourselves to money. Now there was a little painted sugar equestrian in a shop-window down town, which I had seen and set my heart upon. I had learned that its price was two cents; and one morning as I passed around the counter with my tin pail I made up my mind to possess myself of that amount. My father's back was turned; he was busy at his desk with account-books and ledgers. I counted out four cents aloud, but took six, and started on my errand with a fascinating picture before me of that pink and green horseback rider as my very own. I cannot imagine what I meant to do with him. I knew that his paint was poisonous, and I could not have intended to eat him; there were much better candies in my father's window; he would not sell these dangerous painted toys to children. But the little man was pretty to look at, and I wanted him, and meant to have him. It was just a child's first temptation to get possession of what was not her own,--the same ugly temptation that produces the defaulter, the burglar, and the highway robber, and that made it necessary to declare to every human being the law, "Thou shalt not covet." As I left the shop, I was conscious of a certain pleasure in the success of my attempt, as any thief might be; and I walked off very fast, clattering the coppers in the tin pail. When I was fairly through the bars that led into the farmer's field, and nobody was in sight, I took out my purloined pennies, and looked at them as they lay in my palm. Then a strange thing happened. It was a bright morning, but it seemed to me as if the sky grew suddenly dark; and those two pennies began to burn through my hand, to scorch me, as if they were red hot, to my very soul. It was agony to hold them. I laid them down under a tuft of grass in the footpath, and ran as if I had left a demon behind me. I did my errand, and returning, I looked about in the grass for the two cents, wondering whether they could make me feel so badly again. But my good angel hid them from me; I never found them. I was too much of a coward to confess my fault to my father; I had already begun to think of him as "an austere man," like him in the parable of the talents. I should have been a much happier child if I bad confessed, for I had to carry about with me for weeks and months a heavy burden of shame. I thought of myself as a thief, and used to dream of being carried off to jail and condemned to the gallows for my offense: one of my story-books told about a boy who was hanged at Tyburn for stealing, and how was I better than he? Whatever naughtiness I was guilty of afterwards, I never again wanted to take what belonged to another, whether in the family or out of it. I hated the sight of the little sugar horseback rider from that day, and was thankful enough when some other child had bought him and left his place in the window vacant. About this time I used to lie awake nights a good deal, wondering what became of infants who were wicked. I had heard it said that all who died in infancy went to heaven, but it was also said that those who sinned could not possibly go to heaven. I understood, from talks I had listened to among older people, that infancy lasted until children were about twelve years of age. Yet here was I, an infant of less than six years, who had committed a sin. I did not know what to do with my own case. I doubted whether it would do any good for me to pray to be forgiven, but I did pray, because I could not help it, though not aloud. I believe I preferred thinking my prayers to saying them, almost always. Inwardly, I objected to the idea of being an infant; it seemed to me like being nothing in particular--neither a child nor a little girl, neither a baby nor a woman. Having discovered that I was capable of being wicked, I thought it would be better if I could grow up at once, and assume my own responsibilities. It quite demoralized me when people talked in my presence about "innocent little children." There was much questioning in those days as to whether fictitious reading was good for children. To "tell a story" was one equivalent expression for lying. But those who came nearest to my child-life recognized the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and left me in delightful freedom among my fairy-tale books. I think I saw a difference, from the first, between the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful as my own. I supposed that the beings of those imaginative tales had lived some time, somewhere; perhaps they still existed in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit our matter-of-fact neighborhood. I had never heard that any fairies or elves came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. But a little red-haired playmate with whom I became intimate used to take me off with her into the fields, where, sitting, on the edge of a disused cartway fringed with pussy-clover, she poured into my ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me; I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the last century did Defoe's account of "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal." She said that these subterranean people kept house, and that they invited her down to play with their children on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons; also that they sometimes left a plate of cakes and tarts for her at their door: she offered to show me the very spot where it was,--under a great apple-tree which my brothers called "the luncheon-tree," because we used to rest and refresh ourselves there, when we helped my father weed his vegetable-garden. But she guarded herself by informing me that it would be impossible for us to open the door ourselves; that it could only be unfastened from the inside. She told me these people's names--a "Mr. Pelican," and a "Mr. Apple-tree Manasseh," who had a very large family of little "Manassehs." She said that there was a still larger family, some of them probably living just under the spot where we sat, whose surname was "Hokes." (If either of us had been familiar with another word pronounced in the same way, though spelled differently, I should since have thought that she was all the time laughing in her sleeve at my easy belief.) These "Hokeses" were not good-natured people, she added, whispering to me that we must not speak about them aloud, as they had sharp ears, and might overhear us, and do us mischief. I think she was hoaxing herself as well as me; it was her way of being a heroine in her own eyes and mine, and she had always the manner of being entirely in earnest. But she became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant aristocratic-looking mansion, which we could see half-hidden by trees, across the river, she assured me was a haunted house, and that she had passed many a night there, seeing unaccountable sights, and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that she was to be married, some time, to a young man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was "Alonzo." Not long after I picked up a book which one of my sisters had borrowed, called "Alonzo and Melissa," and I discovered that she had been telling me page after page of "Melissa's" adventures, as if they were her own. The fading memory I have of the book is that it was a very silly one; and when I discovered that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related, not in that volume, were to be found in "The Children of the Abbey," I left off listening to her. I do not think I regarded her stories as lies; I only lost my interest in them after I knew that they were all of her own clumsy second-hand making-up, out of the most commonplace material. My two brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother Ben pointed up to the gilded weather-cock on the Old South steeple, and said to me with a very grave face,-- "Did you know that whenever that cock crows every rooster in town crows too?" I listened out at the window, and asked,-- "But when will he begin to crow?" "Oh, roosters crow in the night, sometimes, when you are asleep." Then my younger brother would break in with a shout of delight at my stupidity:-- "I'll tell you when, goosie!-- 'The next day after never; When the dead ducks fly over the river.'" But this must have been when I was very small; for I remember thinking that "the next day after never" would come some time, in millions of years, perhaps. And how queer it would be to see dead ducks flying through the air! Witches were seldom spoken of in the presence of us children. We sometimes overheard a snatch of a witch-story, told in whispers, by the flickering firelight, just as we were being sent off to bed. But, to the older people, those legends were too much like realities, and they preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was over our town that the last black shadow of the dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested. Mistress Hale's house was just across the burying-ground, and Gallows Hill was only two miles away, beyond the bridge. Yet I never really knew what the "Salem Witchcraft" was until Goodrich's "History of the United States" was put into my hands as a schoolbook, and I read about it there. Elves and gnomes and air-sprites and genii were no strangers to us, for my sister Emilie--she who heard me say my hymns, and taught me to write--was mistress of an almost limitless fund of imaginative lore. She was a very Scheherezade of story-tellers, so her younger sisters thought, who listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight, evening after evening, with fascinated wakefulness. Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar with,--Red Riding-Hood, the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the "Sleeping Beauty," and the rest,--she had picked up somewhere most of the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of Germany, which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales." Her choice was usually judicious; she omitted the ghosts and goblins that would have haunted our dreams; although I was now and then visited by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold, one by one, or else lose my head. But she blended the humorous with the romantic in her selections, so that we usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with a laugh. That old story of the fisherman who had done the "Man of the Sea" a favor, and was to be rewarded by having his wish granted, she told in so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it might all have happened on one of the islands out in Massachusetts Bay. The fisherman was foolish enough, it seemed, to let his wife do all his wishing for him; and she, unsatisfied still, though she had been made first an immensely rich woman, and then a great queen, at last sent her husband to ask that they two might be made rulers over the sun, moon, and stars. As my sister went on with the story, I could see the waves grow black, and could hear the wind mutter and growl, while the fisherman called for the first, second, and then reluctantly, for the third time:-- "O Man of the Sea, Come listen to me! For Alice my wife, The plague of my life, Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!" As his call died away on the sullen wind, the mysterious "Man of the Sea" rose in his wrath out of the billows, and said,-- "Go back to your old mud hut, and stay there with your wife Alice, and never come to trouble me again." I sympathized with the "Man of the Sea" in his righteous indignation at the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the moral of the story remained with me, as the story itself did. I think I understood dimly, even then, that mean avarice and self-seeking ambition always find their true level in muddy earth, never among the stars. So it proved that my dear mother-sister was preparing me for life when she did not know it, when she thought she was only amusing me. This sister, though only just entering her teens, was toughening herself by all sorts of unnecessary hardships for whatever might await her womanhood. She used frequently to sleep in the garret on a hard wooden sea-chest instead of in a bed. And she would get up before daylight and run over into the burying-ground, barefooted and white-robed (we lived for two or three years in another house than our own, where the oldest graveyard in town was only separated from us by our garden fence), "to see if there were any ghosts there," she told us. Returning noiselessly,--herself a smiling phantom, with long, golden-brown hair rippling over her shoulders,--she would drop a trophy upon her little sisters' pillow, in the shape of a big, yellow apple that had dropped from "the Colonel's" "pumpkin sweeting" tree into the graveyard, close to our fence. She was fond of giving me surprises, of watching my wonder at seeing anything beautiful or strange for the first time. Once, when I was very little, she made me supremely happy by rousing me before four o'clock in the morning, dressing me hurriedly, and taking me out with her for a walk across the graveyard and through the dewy fields. The birds were singing, and the sun was just rising, and we were walking toward the east, hand in hand, when suddenly there appeared before us what looked to me like an immense blue wall, stretching right and left as far as I could see. "Oh, what is it the wall of?" I cried. It was a revelation she had meant for me. "So you did not know it was the sea, little girl!" she said. It was a wonderful illusion to My unaccustomed eyes, and I took in at that moment for the first time something of the real grandeur of the ocean. Not a sail was in sight, and the blue expanse was scarcely disturbed by a ripple, for it was the high-tide calm. That morning's freshness, that vision of the sea, I know I can never lose. From our garret window--and the garret was my usual retreat when I wanted to get away by myself with my books or my dreams--we had the distant horizon-line of the bay, across a quarter of a mile of trees and mowing fields. We could see the white breakers dashing against the long narrow island just outside of the harbor, which I, with my childish misconstruction of names, called "Breakers' Island"; supposing that the grown people had made a mistake when they spoke of it as "Baker's." But that far-off, shining band of silver and blue seemed so different from the whole great sea, stretching out as if into eternity from the feet of the baby on the shore! The marvel was not lessened when I began to study geography, and comprehended that the world is round. Could it really be that we had that endless "Atlantic Ocean" to look at from our window, to dance along the edge of, to wade into or bathe in, if we chose? The map of the world became more interesting to me than any of the story-books. In my fanciful explorations I out-traveled Captain Cook, the only voyager around the world with whose name my childhood was familiar. The field-paths were safe, and I was allowed to wander off alone through them. I greatly enjoyed the freedom of a solitary explorer among the seashells and wild flowers. There were wonders everywhere. One day I picked up a star-fish on the beach (we called it a "five-finger"), and hung him on a tree to dry, not thinking of him as a living creature. When I went some time after to take him down he had clasped with two or three of his fingers the bough where I laid him, so that he could not be removed without breaking his hardened shell. My conscience smote me when I saw what an unhappy looking skeleton I had made of him. I overtook the horse-shoe crab on the sands, but I did not like to turn him over and make him "say his prayers," as some of the children did. I thought it must be wicked. And then he looked so uncomfortable, imploringly wriggling his claws while he lay upon his back! I believe I did, however, make a small collection of the shells of stranded horseshoe crabs deserted by their tenants. There were also pretty canary-colored cockle-shells and tiny purple mussels washed up by the tide. I gathered them into my apron, and carried them home, and only learned that they too held living inhabitants by seeing a dead snail protruding from every shell after they had been left to themselves for a day or two. This made me careful to pick up only the empty ones, and there were plenty of them. One we called a "butterboat"; it had something shaped like a seat across the end of it on the inside. And the curious sea-urchin, that looked as if he was made only for ornament, when he had once got rid of his spines, and the transparent jelly-fish, that seemed to have no more right to be alive than a ladleful of mucilage,--and the razor-shells, and the barnacles, and the knotted kelp, and the flabby green sea-aprons,--there was no end to the interesting things I found when I was trusted to go down to the edge of the tide alone. The tide itself was the greatest marvel, slipping away so noiselessly, and creeping back so softly over the flats, whispering as it reached the sands, and laughing aloud "I am coming!" as, dashing against the rocks, it drove me back to where the sea-lovage and purple beach-peas had dared to root themselves. I listened, and felt through all my little being that great, surging word of power, but had no guess of its meaning. I can think of it now as the eternal voice of Law, ever returning to the green, blossoming, beautiful verge of Gospel truth, to confirm its later revelation, and to say that Law and Gospel belong together. "The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands formed the dry land." And the dry land, the very dust of the earth, every day revealed to me some new miracle of a flower. Coming home from school one warm noon, I chanced to look down, and saw for the first time the dry roadside all starred with lavender-tinted flowers, scarcely larger than a pin-head; fairy-flowers, indeed; prettier than anything that grew in gardens. It was the red sand-wort; but why a purple flower should be called red, I do not know. I remember holding these little amethystine blossoms like jewels in the palm of my hand, and wondering whether people who walked along that road knew what beautiful things they were treading upon. I never found the flower open except at noonday, when the sun was hottest. The rest of the time it was nothing but an insignificant, dusty-leaved weed,--a weed that was transformed into a flower only for an hour or two every day. It seemed like magic. The busy people at home could tell me very little about the wild flowers, and when I found a new one I thought I was its discoverer. I can see myself now leaning in ecstasy over a small, rough-leaved purple aster in a lonely spot on the hill, and thinking that nobody else in all the world had ever beheld such a flower before, because I never had. I did not know then, that the flower-generations are older than the human race. The commonest blossoms were, after all, the dearest, because they were so familiar. Very few of us lived upon carpeted floors, but soft green grass stretched away from our door-steps, all golden with dandelions in spring. Those dandelion fields were like another heaven dropped down upon the earth, where our feet wandered at will among the stars. What need had we of luxurious upholstery, when we could step out into such splendor, from the humblest door? The dandelions could tell us secrets, too. We blew the fuzz off their gray beads, and made them answer our question, "Does my mother want me to come home?" Or we sat down together in the velvety grass, and wove chains for our necks and wrists of the dandelion-sterns, and "made believe" we were brides, or queens, or empresses. Then there was the white rock-saxifrage, that filled the crevices of the ledges with soft, tufty bloom like lingering snow-drifts, our May-flower, that brought us the first message of spring. There was an elusive sweetness in its almost imperceptible breath, which one could only get by smelling it in close bunches. Its companion was the tiny four-cleft innocence-flower, that drifted pale sky-tints across the chilly fields. Both came to us in crowds, and looked out with us, as they do with the small girls and boys of to-day, from the windy crest of Powder House Hill,--the one playground of my childhood which is left to the children and the cows just as it was then. We loved these little democratic blossoms, that gathered around us in mobs at our May Day rejoicings. It is doubtful whether we should have loved the trailing arbutus any better, had it strayed, as it never did, into our woods. Violets and anemones played at hide-and-seek with us in shady places. The gay columbine rooted herself among the bleak rocks, and laughed and nodded in the face of the east wind, coquettishly wasting the show of her finery on the frowning air. Bluebirds twittered over the dandelions in spring. In midsummer, goldfinches warbled among the thistle-tops; and, high above the bird-congregations, the song-sparrow sent forth her clear, warm, penetrating trill,--sunshine translated into music. We were not surfeited, in those days, with what is called pleasure; but we grew up happy and healthy, learning unconsciously the useful lesson of doing without. The birds and blossoms hardly won a gladder or more wholesome life from the air of our homely New England than we did. "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." The Beatitudes are the natural flowering-forth of the Ten Commandments. And the happiness of our lives was rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we lived among, drawing thence its bloom and song, and fragrance. There was granite in their character and beliefs, but it was granite that could smile in the sunshine and clothe itself with flowers. We little ones felt the firm rock beneath us, and were lifted up on it, to emulate their goodness, and to share their aspirations. V. OLD NEW ENGLAND. WHEN I first opened my eyes upon my native town, it was already nearly two hundred years old, counting from the time when it was part of the original Salem settlement,--old enough to have gained a character and an individuality of its own, as it certainly had. We children felt at once that we belonged to the town, as we did to our father or our mother. The sea was its nearest neighbor, and penetrated to every fireside, claiming close intimacy with every home and heart. The farmers up and down the shore were as much fishermen as farmers; they were as familiar with the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as they were with their own potato-fields. Every third man you met in the street, you might safely hail as "Shipmate," or "Skipper," or "Captain." My father's early seafaring experience gave him the latter title to the end of his life. It was hard to keep the boys from going off to sea before they were grown. No inland occupation attracted them. "Land-lubber" was one of the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips. The spirit of adventure developed in them a rough, breezy type of manliness, now almost extinct. Men talked about a voyage to Calcutta, or Hong-Kong, or "up the Straits,"--meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean,--as if it were not much more than going to the next village. It seemed as if our nearest neighbors lived over there across the water; we breathed the air of foreign countries, curiously interblended with our own. The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape shawls and Smyrna silks and Turk satins, for Sabbath-day wear, which somebody had brought home for them. Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and conch-shells, and with branches and fans of coral; and children had foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was one imported shell that we did not value much, it was so abundant--the freckled univalve they called a "prop." Yet it had a mysterious interest for us little ones. We held it to our ears, and listened for the sound of the waves, which we were told that, it still kept, and always would keep. I remember the time when I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within that narrow aperture. We were accustomed to seeing barrels full of cocoa-nuts rolled about; and there were jars of preserved tropical fruits, tamarinds, ginger-root, and other spicy appetizers, almost as common as barberries and cranberries, in the cupboards of most housekeepers. I wonder what has become of those many, many little red "guinea-peas" we had to play with! It never seemed as if they really belonged to the vegetable world, notwithstanding their name. We had foreign coins mixed in with our large copper cents,--all kinds, from the Russian "kopeck" to the "half-penny token" of Great Britain. Those were the days when we had half cents in circulation to make change with. For part of our currency was the old-fashioned "ninepence,"--twelve and a half cents, and the "four pence ha'penny,"--six cents and a quarter. There was a good deal of Old England about us still. And we had also many living reminders of strange lands across the sea. Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children long before the robins came. Now and then somebody's pet monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed-roofs, and try to hide from his boy-persecutors by dodging behind a chimney, or by slipping through an open scuttle, to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded. And there were wanderers from foreign countries domesticated in many families, whose swarthy complexions and un-Caucasian features became familiar in our streets,--Mongolians, Africans, and waifs from the Pacific islands, who always were known to us by distinguished names,--Hector and Scipio, and Julius Caesar and Christopher Columbus. Families of black people were scattered about the place, relics of a time when even New England had not freed her slaves. Some of them had belonged in my great-grandfather's family, and they hung about the old homestead at "The Farms" long after they were at liberty to go anywhere they pleased. There was a "Rose" and a "Phillis" among them, who came often to our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the Farms woods, or to do the household washing. They seemed pathetically out of place, although they lived among us on equal terms, respectable and respected. The pathos of the sea haunted the town, made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought the rote of the waves in from the islands across the harbor-bar, with a moaning like that we heard when we listened for it in the shell. Almost every house had its sea-tragedy. Somebody belonging to it had been shipwrecked, or had sailed away one day, and never returned. Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of near home, although the names of the two nearest--Great and Little Misery--are said to have originated with a shipwreck so far back in the history of the region that it was never recorded. But one such calamity happened in my infancy, spoken of always by those who knew its victims in subdued tones;--the wreck of the "Persia." The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean, and in a blinding snow-storm on a wild March night her captain probably mistook one of the Cape Ann light-houses for that on Baker's Island, and steered straight upon the rocks in a lonely cove just outside the cape. In the morning the bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with her cargo of paper-manufacturers' rags, among the breakers. Her captain and mate were Beverly men, and their funeral from the meeting-house the next Sabbath was an event which long left its solemnity hanging over the town. We were rather a young nation at this time. The History of the United States could only tell the story of the American Revolution, of the War of 1812, and of the administration of about half a dozen presidents. Our republicanism was fresh and wide-awake. The edge of George Washington's little hatchet had not yet been worn down to its latter-day dullness; it flashed keenly on our young eyes and ears in the reading books, and through Fourth of July speeches. The Father of his Country had been dead only a little more than a quarter of a century, and General Lafayette was still alive; he had, indeed, passed through our town but a few years before, and had been publicly welcomed under our own elms and lindens. Even babies echoed the names of our two heroes in their prattle. We had great "training days," when drum and fife took our ears by storm; When the militia and the Light Infantry mustered and marched through the streets to the Common with boys and girls at their heels,--such girls as could get their mother's consent, or the courage to run off without it.(We never could.)But we always managed to get a good look at the show in one way or another. "Old Election," "'Lection Day" we called it, a lost holiday now, was a general training day, and it came at our most delightful season, the last of May. Lilacs and tulips were in bloom, then; and it was a picturesque fashion of the time for little girls whose parents had no flower-gardens to go around begging a bunch of lilacs, or a tulip or two. My mother always made "'Lection cake" for us on that day. It was nothing but a kind of sweetened bread with a shine of egg-and-molasses on top; but we thought it delicious. The Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day were the only other holidays that we made much account of, and the former was a far more well behaved festival than it is in modern times. The bells rang without stint, and at morning and noon cannon were fired off. But torpedoes and fire-crackers did not make the highways dangerous;--perhaps they were thought too expensive an amusement. Somebody delivered an oration; there was a good deal said about "this universal Yankee nation"; some rockets went up from Salem in the evening; we watched them from the hill, and then went to bed, feeling that we had been good patriots. There was always a Fast Day, which I am afraid most of us younger ones regarded merely as a day when we were to eat unlimited quantities of molasses-gingerbread, instead of sitting down to our regular meals. When I read about Christmas in the English story-books, I wished we could have that beautiful holiday. But our Puritan fathers shook their heads at Christmas. Our Sabbath-school library books were nearly all English reprints, and many of the story-books were very interesting. I think that most of my favorites were by Mrs. Sherwood. Some of them were about life in India,--"Little Henry and his Bearer," and "Ayah and Lady." Then there were "The Hedge of Thorns;" "Theophilus and Sophia;" "Anna Ross," and a whole series of little English books that I took great delight in. I had begun to be rather introspective and somewhat unhealthily self-critical, contrasting myself meanwhile with my sister Lida, just a little older, who was my usual playmate, and whom I admired very much for what I could not help seeing,--her unusual sweetness of disposition. I read Mrs. Sherwood's "Infant's Progress," and I made a personal application of it, picturing myself as the naughty, willful "Playful," and my sister Lida as the saintly little "Peace." This book gave me a morbid, unhappy feeling, while yet it had something of the fascination of the "Pilgrim's Progress," of which it is an imitation. I fancied myself followed about by a fiend-like boy who haunted its pages, called "Inbred-Sin;" and the story implied that there was no such thing as getting rid of him. I began to dislike all boys on his account. There was one who tormented my sister and me--we only knew him by name--by jumping out at us from behind doorways or fences on our way to school, making horrid faces at us. "Inbred-Sin," I was certain, looked just like him; and the two, strangely blended in one hideous presence, were the worst nightmare of my dreams. There was too much reality about that "Inbreed-Sin." I felt that I was acquainted with him. He was the hateful hero of the little allegory, as Satan is of "Paradise Lost." I liked lessons that came to me through fables and fairy tales, although, in reading Aesop, I invariably skipped the "moral" pinned on at the end, and made one for myself, or else did without. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's story of "The Immortal Fountain," in the "Girl's Own Book,"--which it was the joy of my heart to read, although it preached a searching sermon to me,--I applied in the same way that I did the "Infant's Progress." I thought of Lida as the gentle, unselfish Rose, and myself as the ugly Marion. She was patient and obliging, and I felt that I was the reverse. She was considered pretty, and I knew that I was the reverse of that, too. I wondered if Lida really had bathed in the Immortal Fountain, and oh, how I wished I could find the way there! But I feared that trying to do so would be of no use; the fairies would cross their wands to keep me back, and their wings would darken at my approach. The book that I loved first and best, and lived upon in my childhood, was "Pilgrim's Progress." It was as a story that I cared for it, although I knew that it meant something more,--something that was already going on in my own heart and life. Oh, how I used to wish that I too could start off on a pilgrimage! It would be so much easier than the continual, discouraging struggle to be good! The lot I most envied was that of the contented Shepherd Boy in the Valley of Humiliation, singing his cheerful songs, and wearing "the herb called Heart's Ease in his bosom"; but all the glorious ups and downs of the "Progress" I would gladly have shared with Christiana and her children, never desiring to turn aside into any "By-Path Meadow" while Mr. Great-Heart led the way, and the Shining Ones came down to meet us along the road. It was one of the necessities of my nature, as a child, to have some one being, real or ideal, man or woman, before whom I inwardly bowed down and worshiped. Mr. Great-Heart was the perfect hero of my imagination. Nobody, in books or out of them, compared with him. I wondered if there were really any Mr. Great-Hearts to be met with among living men. I remember reading this beloved book once in a snow-storm, and looking up from it out among the white, wandering flakes, with a feeling that they had come down from heaven as its interpreters; that they were trying to tell me, in their airy up-and-down-flight, the story of innumerable souls. I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake, and to follow its course until it touched the earth. But I found that I could not. A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and return, to descend and then ascend again, as if hastening homeward to the sky, losing itself at last in the airy, infinite throng, and leaving me filled with thoughts of that "great multitude, which no man could number, clothed with white robes," crowding so gloriously into the closing pages of the Bible. Oh, if I could only be sure that I should some time be one of that invisible company! But the heavens were already beginning to look a great way off. I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,-- "Who are these in bright array?" and that seemed to bring them nearer again. The history of the early martyrs, the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch Covenanters, I read and re-read with longing emulation! Why could not I be a martyr, too? It would be so beautiful to die for the truth as they did, as Jesus did! I did not understand then that He lived and died to show us what life really means, and to give us true life, like His,--the life of love to God with all our hearts, of love to all His human children for His sake;--and that to live this life faithfully is greater even than to die a martyr's death. It puzzled me to know what some of the talk I heard about being a Christian could mean. I saw that it was something which only men and women could comprehend. And yet they taught me to say those dear words of the Master, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me!" Surely He meant what He said. He did not tell the children that they must receive the kingdom of God like grown people; He said that everybody must enter into it "as a little child." But our fathers were stalwart men, with many foes to encounter. If anybody ever needed a grown-up religion, they surely did; and it became them well. Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea. Miss Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation, and we knew "Harry and Lucy" and "Rosamond" almost as well as we did our own playmates. But we did not think those English children had so good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only. Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our baskets, expecting to find those English flowers in our own fields. How should children be wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of, on home ground? And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them, importations from the mother-country--clover, and dandelions, and ox-eye daisies. I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip, for I thought she meant that it was the genuine English cowslip, which I had read about. I was disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh-marigold. My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal: "Paul and Virginia;" "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia;" "Nina: an Icelandic Tale;" with the "Vicar of Wakefield;" the "Tour to the Hebrides;" "Gulliver's Travels;" the "Arabian Nights;" and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels. I read the "Scottish Chiefs"--my first novel when I was about five years old. So absorbed was I in the sorrows of Lady Helen Mar and Sir William Wallace, that I crept into a corner where nobody would notice me, and read on through sunset into moonlight, with eyes blurred with tears. I did not feel that I was doing anything wrong, for I had heard my father say he was willing his daughters should read that one novel. He probably did not intend the remark for the ears of his youngest, however. My appetite for reading was omnivorous, and I devoured a great many romances. My sisters took them from a circulating library, many more, perhaps, than came to my parents' knowledge; but it was not often that one escaped me, wherever it was hidden. I did not understand what I was reading, to be sure; and that was one of the best and worst things about it. The sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether unchildlike; but I did not take much of it in. It was the habit of running over pages and pages to get to the end of a story, the habit of reading without caring what I read, that I know to have been bad for my mind. To use a nautical expression, my brain was in danger of getting "water-logged." There are so many more books of fiction written nowadays, I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have any brains left for every-day use. One result of my infantile novel-reading was that I did not like to look at my own face in a mirror, because it was so unlike that of heroines, always pictured with "high white foreheads" and "cheeks of a perfect oval." Mine was round, ruddy, and laughing with health; and, though I practiced at the glass a good deal, I could not lengthen it by puckering down my lips. I quite envied the little girls who were pale and pensive-looking, as that was the only ladyfied standard in the romances. Of course, the chief pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with every new heroine. They began to call me a "bookworm" at home. I did not at all relish the title. It was fortunate for me that I liked to be out of doors a great deal, and that I had a brother, John, who was willing to have me for an occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went huckleberrying, up the rural Montserrat Road, through Cat Swamp, to the edge of Burnt Hills and Beaver Pond. He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me, making me understand that I had a guide who was familiar with every inch of the way. Then, charging me not to move until he came back, he would leave me sitting alone on a great craggy rock, while he went off and filled his basket out of sight among the bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move, it was all so new and fascinating. The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle myself. The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger even than that of the solemn-voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,--to visit the old homestead at "The Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years; and that road, in the old time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every season,--whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets, of wild roses, of coral-hung barberry-bushes, or of fallen leaves and snow-drifts. The wildness of the road, now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation, was its great charm to us. We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat-birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant of the waves, always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore. We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest woodpath to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farmhouse. We found children enough to play with there,--as numerous a family as our own. We were sometimes, I fancy, the added drop too much of already overflowing juvenility. Farther down the road, where the cousins were all grown-up men and women, Aunt Betsey's cordial, old-fashioned hospitality sometimes detained us a day or two. We watched the milking, and fed the chickens, and fared gloriously. Aunt Betsey could not have done more to entertain us, had we been the President's children. I have always cherished the memory of a certain pair of large-bowed spectacles that she wore, and of the green calash, held by a ribbon bridle, that sheltered her head, when she walked up from the shore to see us, as she often did. They announced to us the approach of inexhaustible kindliness and good cheer. We took in a home-feeling with the words "Aunt Betsey" then and always. She had just the husband that belonged to her in my Uncle David, an upright man, frank-faced, large-hearted, and spiritually minded. He was my father's favorite brother, and to our branch of the family "The Farms" meant "Uncle David and Aunt Betsey." My brother John's plans for my entertainment did not always harmonize entirely with my own ideas. He had an inventive mind, and wanted me to share his boyish sports. But I did not like to ride in a wheelbarrow, nor to walk on stilts, nor even to coast down the hill on his sled and I always got a tumble, if I tried, for I was rather a clumsy child; besides, I much preferred girls' quieter games. We were seldom permitted to play with any boys except our brothers. I drew the inference that our boys must be a great deal better than "the other boys." My brother John had some fine play-fellows, but he seemed to consider me in the way when they were his guests. Occasionally we would forget that the neighbor-boys were not girls, and would find ourselves all playing together in delightful unconsciousness; although possibly a thought, like that of the "Ettrick Shepherd," may now and then have flitted through the mind of some masculine juvenile:-- "Why the boys should drive away Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well,-- That Is the thing I never could tell." One day I thoughtlessly accepted an invitation to get through a gap in the garden-fence, to where the doctor's two boys were preparing to take an imaginary sleigh-ride in midsummer. The sleigh was stranded among tall weeds an cornstalks, but I was politely handed in by the elder boy, who sat down by my side and tucked his little brother in front at our feet, informing me that we were father and mother and little son, going to take a ride to Newburyport. He had found an old pair of reins and tied them to a saw-horse, that he switched and "Gee-up"-ed vigorously. The journey was as brief as delightful. I ran home feeling like the heroine of an elopement, asking myself meanwhile, "What would my brother John say if he knew I had been playing with boys?" He was very particular about his sisters' behavior. But I incautiously said to one sister in whom I did not usually confide, that I thought James was the nicest boy in the lane, and that I liked his little brother Charles, too. She laughed at me so unmercifully for making the remark, that I never dared look towards the gap in the fence again, beyond which I could hear the boys' voices around the old sleigh where they were playing, entirely forgetful of their former traveling companion. Still, I continued to think that my courteous cavalier, James, was the nicest boy in the lane. My brother's vigilant care of his two youngest sisters was once the occasion to them of a serious fright. My grandfather--the sexton--sometimes trusted him to toll the bell for a funeral. In those days the bell was tolled for everybody who died. John was social, and did not like to go up into the belfry and stay an hour or so alone, and as my grandfather positively forbade him to take any other boy up there, he one day got permission for us two little girls to go with him, for company. We had to climb up a great many stairs, and the last flight was inclosed by a rough door with a lock inside, which he was charged to fasten, so that no mischievous boys should follow. It was strange to be standing up there in the air, gazing over the balcony-railing down into the street, where the men and women looked so small, and across to the water and the ships in the east, and the clouds and hills in the west! But when he struck the tongue against the great bell, close to our ears, it was more than we were prepared for. The little sister, scarcely three years old, screamed and shrieked,-- "I shall be stunned-ded! I shall be stunned-ded!" I do not know where she had picked up that final syllable, but it made her terror much more emphatic. Still the great waves of solemn sound went eddying on, over the hills and over the sea, and we had to hear it all, though we stopped our ears with our fingers. It was an immense relief to us when the last stroke of the passing-bell was struck, and John said we could go down. He took the key from his pocket and was fitting it into the lock, when it slipped, beyond our reach. Now the little sister cried again, and would not be pacified; and when I looked up and caught John's blank, dismayed look, I began to feel like crying, too. The question went swiftly through my mind,--How many days can we stay up here without starving to death?--for I really thought we should never get down out of our prison in the air: never see our mother's face again. But my brother's wits returned to him. He led us back to the balcony, and shouted over the railing to a boy in the street, making him understand that he must go and inform my father that we were locked into the belfry. It was not long before we saw both him and my grandfather on their way to the church. They came up to the little door, and told us to push with our united strength against it. The rusty lock soon yielded, and how good it was to look into those two beloved human faces once more! But we little girls were not invited to join my brother again when he tolled the bell: if we had been, I think we should have promptly declined the invitation. Many of my childish misadventures came to me in connection with my little sister, who, having been much indulged, too it for granted that she could always have what she wanted. One day we two were allowed to take a walk together; I, as the older, being supposed to take care of her. Although we were going towards the Cove, over a secluded road, she insisted upon wearing a brand-new pair of red morocco boots. All went well until we came to a bog by the roadside, where sweet-flag and cat-tails grew. Out in the middle of the bog, where no venturesome boy had ever attempted their seizure, there were many tall, fine-looking brown cat-tails growing. She caught sight of them, and before I saw what she was doing, she had shot from my side like an arrow from the bow, and was far out on the black, quaking surface, that at first upheld her light weight. I stood petrified with horror. I knew all about that dangerous place. I had been told that nobody had ever found out how deep that mud was. I was uttered just one imploring "Come back!" when she turned to me with a shriek, throwing up her arms towards me. She was sinking! There was nobody in sight, and there was no time to think. I ran, or rather flew, across the bog, with just one thought in my mind, "I have got to get her out!" Some angel must have prevented me from making a misstep, and sinking with her. I felt the power of a giant suddenly taking possession of my small frame. Quicker than I could tell of it, I had given one tremendous pull (she had already sunk above her boot-tops), and had dragged her back to the road. It is a marvel to me now how I--a child of scarcely six years--succeeded in rescuing her. It did not seem to me as if I were doing it myself, but as if some unseen Power had taken possession of me for a moment, and made me do it. And I suppose that when we act from a sudden impulse to help another out of trouble, it never is ourself that does the good deed. The Highest Strength just takes us and uses us. I certainly felt equal to going straight through the earth to China after my little sister, if she had stink out of sight. We were two miserable looking children when we reached home, the sticky ooze having changed her feet into unmanageable lumps of mud, with which my own clothes also were soiled. I had to drag or carry her all the way, for she could not or would not walk a step. And alas for the morocco boots! They were never again red. I also received a scolding for not taking better care of my little sister, and I was not very soon allowed again to have her company in my rambles. We usually joined with other little neighbor girls in some out-of-door amusement near home. And our sports, as well as our books, had a spice of Merry Old England. They were full of kings and queens, and made sharp contrasts, as well as odd mixtures, with the homeliness of our everyday life. One of them, a sort of rhymed dialogue, began with the couplet:-- "Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sits in the sun, As fair as a lady, as white as a nun." If "Queen Anne" did not give a right guess as to which hand of the messenger held the king's letter to her, she was contemptuously informed that she was "as brown as a bun." In another name, four little girls joined hands across, in couples, chanting:-- "I wish my father were a king, I wish my mother were a queen, And I a little companion!" concluding with a close embrace in a dizzying whirl, breathlessly shouting all together,-- "A bundle of fagots! A bundle of fagots!" In a third, which may have begun with a juvenile reacting of the Colonial struggle for liberty, we ranged ourselves under two leaders, who made an archway over our heads of their lifted hands and arms, saying, as we passed beneath,-- "Lift up the gates as high as the sky, And let King George and his army pass by!" We were told to whisper "Oranges" or "Lemons" for a pass-word; and "Oranges" always won the larger enlistment, whether British or American. And then there was "Grandmother Gray," and the "Old woman from Newfoundland, With all her children in her hand;" and the "Knight from Spain Inquiring for your daughter Jane," and numberless others, nearly all of them bearing a distinct Old World flavor. One of our play-places was an unoccupied end of the burying-ground, overhung by the Colonel's apple-trees and close under his wall, so that we should not be too near the grave-stones. I do not think that death was at all a real thing to me or to my brothers and sisters at this time. We lived so near the graveyard that it seemed merely the extension of our garden. We wandered there at will, trying to decipher the moss-grown inscriptions, and wondering at the homely carvings of cross-bones and cherubs and willow-trees on the gray slate-stones. I did not associate those long green mounds with people who had once lived, though we were careful, having been so instructed, not to step on the graves. To ramble about there and puzzle ourselves with the names and dates, was like turning over the pages of a curious old book. We had not the least feeling of irreverence in taking the edge of the grave-yard for our playground. It was known as "the old burying-ground"; and we children regarded it with a sort of affectionate freedom, as we would a grandmother, because it was old. That, indeed, was one peculiar attraction of the town itself; it was old, and it seemed old, much older than it does now. There was only one main street, said to have been the first settlers' cowpath to Wenham, which might account for its zigzag picturesqueness. All the rest were courts or lanes. The town used to wear a delightful air of drowsiness, as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap, with her head towards her old mother, Salem, and her whole length reclining towards the sea, till she felt at her feet, through her green robes, the clip of the deep water at the Farms. All her elder children recognized in her quiet steady-going ways a maternal unity and strength of character, as of a town that understood her own plans, and had settled down to peaceful, permanent habits. Her spirit was that of most of our Massachusetts coast-towns. They were transplanted shoots of Old England. And it was the voice of a mother-country more ancient than their own, that little children heard crooning across the sea in their cradle-hymns and nursery-songs. VI. GLIMPSES OF POETRY. OUR close relationship to Old England was sometimes a little misleading to us juveniles. The conditions of our life were entirely different, but we read her descriptive stories and sang her songs as if they were true for us, too. One of the first things I learned to repeat--I think it was in the spelling-book--began with the verse:-- "I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth has smiled, And made me, in these latter days, A happy English child." And some lines of a very familiar hymn by Dr. Watts ran thus:-- "Whene'er I take my walks abroad, How many poor I see. . . . . . . . . . . . . "How many children in the street Half naked I behold; While I am clothed from head to feet, And sheltered from the cold." Now a ragged, half-clothed child, or one that could really be called poor, in the extreme sense of the word, was the rarest of all sights in a thrifty New England town fifty years ago. I used to look sharply for those children, but I never could see one. And a beggar! Oh, if a real beggar would come along, like the one described in "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man," what a wonderful event that would be! I believe I had more curiosity about a beggar, and more ignorance, too, than about a king. The poem read:-- "A pampered menial drove me from the door." What sort of creature could a "pampered menial" be? Nothing that had ever come under our observation corresponded to the words. Nor was it easy for us to attach any meaning to the word "servant." There were women who came in occasionally to do the washing, or to help about extra work. But they were decently clothed, and had homes of their own, more or less comfortable, and their quaint talk and free-and-easy ways were often as much of a lift to the household as the actual assistance they rendered. I settled down upon the conclusion that "rich" and "poor" were book-words only, describing something far off, and having nothing to do with our every-day experience. My mental definition of "rich people," from home observation, was something like this: People who live in three-story houses, and keep their green blinds closed, and hardly ever come out and talk with the folks in the street. There were a few such houses in Beverly, and a great many in Salem, where my mother sometimes took me for a shopping walk. But I did not suppose that any of the people who lived near us were very rich, like those in books. Everybody about us worked, and we expected to take hold of our part while young. I think we were rather eager to begin, for we believed that work would make men and women of us. I, however, was not naturally an industrious child, but quite the reverse. When my father sent us down to weed his vegetable-garden at the foot of the lane, I, the youngest of his weeders, liked to go with the rest, but not for the sake of the work or the pay. I generally gave it up before I had weeded half a bed. It made me so warm! and my back did ache so! I stole off into the shade of the great apple-trees, and let the west wind fan my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs, and listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to each other in a language of their own. What was it they were saying? and why could not I understand it? Perhaps I should, sometime. I had read of people who did, in fairy tales. When the others started homeward, I followed. I did not mind their calling me lazy, nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper cent, while Lida received two or three bright ones. I had had what I wanted most. I would rather sit under the apple-trees and hear the birds sing than have a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was well for my father and his garden that his other children were not like me. The work which I was born to, but had not begun to do, was sometimes a serious weight upon my small, forecasting brain. One of my hymns ended with the lines,-- "With books, and work, and healthful play, May my first years be passed, That I may give, for every day, Some good account at last." I knew all about the books and the play; but the work,--how should I ever learn to do it? My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all his children, girls as well as boys, should have some independent means of self-support by the labor of their hands; that every one should, as was the general custom, "learn a trade." Tailor's work--the finishing of men's outside garments--was the trade learned most frequently by women in those days, and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind. This thought came over me with a sudden dread one Sabbath morning when I was a toddling thing, led along by my sister, behind my father and mother. As they walked arm in arm before me, I lifted my eyes from my father's heels to his head, and mused: "How tall he is! and how long his coat looks! and how many thousand, thousand stitches there must be in his coat and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and have a husband, and put all those little stitches into his coats and pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!" A shiver of utter discouragement went through me. With that task before me, it hardly seemed to me as if life were worth living. I went on to meeting, and I suppose I forgot my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it was real. It was not the only time in my life that I have tired myself out with crossing bridges to which I never came. Another trial confronted me in the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best to begin mine early. So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction. I liked assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them. One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me. It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride and angel in One. I always saw her face before me when I unfolded this scrap,--a face with an expression truly heavenly in its loveliness. Heaven claimed her before my childhood was ended. Her beautiful form was laid to rest in mid-ocean, too deep to be pillowed among the soft sea-mosses. But she lived long enough to make a heaven of my childhood whenever she came home. One of the sweetest of our familiar hymns I always think of as belonging to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her spirit and mine. She had come back to us for a brief visit, soon after her marriage, with some deep, new experience of spiritual realities which I, a child of four or five years, felt in the very tones of her voice, and in the expression of her eyes. My mother told her of my fondness for the hymn-book, and she turned to me with a smile and said, "Won't you learn one hymn for me--one hymn that I love very much?" Would I not? She could not guess how happy she made me by wishing me to do anything for her sake. The hymn was,-- "Whilst Thee I seek, protecting Power." In a few minutes I repeated the whole to her and its own beauty, pervaded with the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at once indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it to her again, deepened with a lifetime's meaning, beyond the sea, and beyond the stars. I could dream over my patchwork, but I could not bring it into conventional shape. My sisters, whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing "gobblings." I grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces except the pretty sea-moss pattern, which I was not willing to see patched up with common calico. It was evident that I should never conquer fate with my needle. Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the saying that every girl must have a pillow-case full of stockings of her own knitting before she was married. Here was another mountain before me, for I took it for granted that marrying was inevitable--one of the things that everybody must do, like learning to read, or going to meeting. I began to knit my own stockings when I ways six or seven years old, and kept on, until home-made stockings went out of fashion. The pillow-case full, however, was never attempted, any more than the patchwork quilt. I heard somebody say one day that there must always be one "old maid" in every family of girls, and I accepted the prophecy of some of my elders, that I was to be that one. I was rather glad to know that freedom of choice in the matter was possible. One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my golden-haired and golden-hearted sister Emilie, teasing her with wondering questions about our future, she announced to us (she had reached the mature age of fifteen years) that she intended to be an old maid, and that we might all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her, but she said, "Why, if they fit themselves to be good, helpful, cheerful old maids, they will certainly be better wives, if they ever are married," and that maxim I laid by in my memory for future contingencies, for I believed in every word she ever uttered. She herself, however, did not carry out her girlish intention. "Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also; and he praiseth her." But the little sisters she used to fondle as her "babies" have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies. I regard it as a great privilege to have been one of a large family, and nearly the youngest. We had strong family resemblances, and yet no two seemed at all alike. It was like rehearsing in a small world each our own part in the great one awaiting us. If we little ones occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the petting and praising and loving, that was wholesome for us, and not at all to be regretted. Almost every one of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her fingers. One worked exquisite lace-embroidery; another had a knack at cutting and fitting her doll's clothing so perfectly that the wooden lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel doll-world; and another was an expert at fine stitching, so delicately done that it was a pleasure to see or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and sometimes tried to imitate, but my efforts usually ended in defeat and mortification. I did like to knit, however, and I could shape a stocking tolerably well. My fondness for this kind of work was chiefly because it did not require much thought. Except when there was "widening" or "narrowing" to be done, I did not need to keep my eyes upon it at all. So I took a book upon my lap and read, and read, while the needles clicked on, comforting me with the reminder that I was not absolutely unemployed, while yet I was having a good time reading. I began to know that I liked poetry, and to think a good deal about it at my childish work. Outside of the hymn-book, the first rhymes I committed to memory were in the "Old Farmer's Almanac," files of which hung in the chimney corner, and were an inexhaustible source of entertainment to us younger ones. My father kept his newspapers also carefully filed away in the garret, but we made sad havoc among the "Palladiums" and other journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures. We valued the anecdote column and the poet's corner only; these we clipped unsparingly for our scrap-books. A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versification which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old. My brother John proposed "writing poetry" as a rainy-day amusement, one afternoon when we two were sent up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family. He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I produced two stanzas, the first of which read thus:-- "One summer day, said little Jane, We were walking down a shady lane, When suddenly the wind blew high, And the red lightning flashed in the sky. The second stanza descended in a dreadfully abrupt anti-climax; but I was blissfully ignorant of rhetoricians' rules, and supposed that the rhyme was the only important thing. It may amuse my child-readers if I give them this verse too: "The peals of thunder, how they rolled! And I felt myself a little cooled; For I before had been quite warm; But now around me was a storm." My brother was surprised at my success, and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too. But I was rather sorry that I had written them, for I had to say them over to the family, and then they sounded silly. The habit was formed, however, and I went on writing little books of ballads, which I illustrated with colors from my toy paintbox, and then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor, for fear that somebody would find them. My fame crept out among the neighbors, nevertheless. I was even invited to write some verses in young lady's album; and Aunt Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her. I considered myself greatly honored by both requests. My fondness for books began very early. At the age of four I had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp, paper-covered picture-books, such as people give to babies; no! I wanted books with stiff covers, that could stand up side by side on a shelf, and maintain their own character as books. But I did not know how to make a beginning, for mine were all of the kind manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better fate than to be tossed about among my rag-babies and playthings. One day, however, I found among some rubbish in a corner a volume, with one good stiff cover; the other was missing. It did not look so very old, nor as if it had been much read; neither did it look very inviting to me as I turned its leaves. On its title-page I read "The Life of John Calvin." I did not know who he was, but a book was a book to me, and this would do as well as any to begin my library with. I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make sure of my claim, I took it down to my mother and timidly asked if I might have it for my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused "Yes," and I ran back happy, and began my library by setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the garret eaves, my "make-believe" book-case shelf. I was proud of my literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with a row of books, every one of which should have two stiff covers. But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or not. This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was bound up with it. Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale. There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with the words,-- "St. Peter sat at the celestial gate, And nodded o'er his keys." I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house reciting grandly,-- "St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate, And nodded o'er his keys." That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its mock-magnificence. John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other in their refusal to wear limp covers. It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one child's tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" and "Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day," with "Yankee Doodle" and the "Diverting History of John Gilpin;" and with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me, I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and butter,--sweeter than any has tasted since,--and would jump up towards the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wishing I too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee. After Dr. Watts's hymns the first poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the pages of the "American First Class Book," handed down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called "first-class" in another sense than that which was understood by its title. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a tear to my own. Bryant's "Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" were there also; and Neal's,-- "There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak," that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement:-- "Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, And the forests vanished before its path; And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,-- And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead." In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains--a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,--for something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly love them,--was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same "First Class Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many games and pastimes. But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it was to me like the thought of God and of truth. To leave out poetry would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places-- "Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?" And then the "Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound" gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart in its trance echoed the poet's invocation,-- "Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth! And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD!" I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in human possibilities,--like a white ideal beckoning me on. Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine. Hard work, however, has its own illumination--if done as duty which worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the poet's, whenever he most deeply moves our souls. Reason and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me also that it is great--poetry even the greatest--which the youngest crave, and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the "American First Class Book," and affirm it to have been one of the best of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in the grand, brief sentence,--"Socrates died like a philosopher; but Jesus Christ--like a God!" Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the few short words with which it began--"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"--to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I read-- "How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich--at least in Scotland!" For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque. After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed dreams of what it might soon mean for me to "earn my own living." VII. BEGINNING TO WORK. A CHILD does not easily comprehend even the plain fact of death. Though I had looked upon my father's still, pale face in his coffin, the impression it left upon me was of sleep; more peaceful and sacred than common slumber, yet only sleep. My dreams of him were for a long time so vivid that I would say to myself, "He was here yesterday; he will be here again to-morrow," with a feeling that amounted to expectation. We missed him, we children large and small who made up the yet untrained home crew, as a ship misses the man at the helm. His grave, clear perception of what was best for us, his brief words that decided, once for all, the course we were to take, had been far more to us than we knew. It was hardest of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to depend entirely upon him. Left with her eight children, the eldest a boy of eighteen years, and with no property except the roof that sheltered us and a small strip of land, her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones could not at all understand. To be fed like the ravens and clothed like the grass of the field seemed to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing, and I often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious. I knew that she believed in God, and in the promises of the Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness. I felt almost like preaching to her, but I was too small a child to do that, I well knew; so I did the next best thing I could think of--I sang hymns as if singing to myself, while I meant them for her. Sitting at the window with my book and my knitting, while she was preparing dinner or supper with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision to which she held been accustomed, I would go from hymn to hymn, selecting those which I thought would be most comforting to her, out of the many that my memory-book contained, and taking care to pronounce the words distinctly. I was glad to observe that she listened to "Come, ye disconsolate," and "How firm a foundation;" and that she grew more cheerful; though I did not feel sure that my singing cheered her so much as some happier thought that had come to her out of her own heart. Nobody but my mother, indeed, would have called my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased, I went on, a little more confidently, with some hymns that I loved for their starry suggestions,-- "When marshaled on the nightly plain," and "Brightest and best of the sons of the morning," and "Watchman, tell us of the night?" The most beautiful picture in the Bible to me, certainly the loveliest in the Old Testament, had always been that one painted by prophecy, of the time when wild and tame creatures should live together in peace, and children should be their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf Poverty would be pleasant and neighborly then, no doubt! A Little Child among them, leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness of the world. Oh, it would be so much better than the garden of Eden! Yes, and it would be a great deal better, I thought, to live in the millennium, than even to die and go to heaven, although so many people around me talked as if that were the most desirable thing of all. But I could never understand why, if God sent us here, we should be in haste to get away, even to go to a pleasanter place. I was perplexed by a good many matters besides. I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself, but I did venture to ask about the Ressurrection--how it was that those who had died and gone straight to heaven, and had been singing there for thousands of years, could have any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned. Were they not already as alive as they could be? I found that there were different ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox" people, even then. I was told however, that this was too deep a matter for me, and so I ceased asking questions. But I pondered the matter of death; what did it mean? The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the ministers did. And, as usual, a poem helped me. It was Pope's Ode, beginning with,-- "Vital spark of heavenly flame,"-- which I learned out of a reading-book. To die was to "languish into life." That was the meaning of it! and I loved to repeat to myself the words,-- "Hark! they whisper: angels say, 'Sister spirit, come away!'" "The world recedes; it disappears! Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears With sounds seraphic ring." A hymn that I learned a little later expressed to me the same satisfying thought: "For strangers into life we come, And dying is but going home." The Apostle's words, with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine, to my childish thoughts:-- "O grave, where is thy 'victory? O death, where is thy sting?" My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home, too. Meanwhile the millennium was coming, and some people thought it was very near. And what was the millennium? Why, the time when everybody on earth would live just as they do in heaven. Nobody would be selfish, nobody would be unkind; no! not so much as in a single thought. What a delightful world this would be to live in then! Heaven itself could scarcely be much better! Perhaps people would not die at all, but, when the right time came, would slip quietly away into heaven, just as Enoch did. My father had believed in the near millennium. His very last writing, in his sick-room, was a penciled computation, from the prophets, of the time when it would begin. The first minister who preached in our church, long before I was born, had studied the subject much, and had written books upon this, his favorite theme. The thought of it was continually breaking out, like bloom and sunshine, from the stern doctrines of the period. One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal. Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves, whether they wanted to or not? And what would be done with the bad ones, if there were any left? I did not like to think of their being killed off, and yet everybody must be good, or it would not be a true millennium. It certainly would not matter much who was rich, and who was poor, if goodness, and not money, was the thing everybody cared for. Oh, if the millennium would only begin now! I felt as if it were hardly fair to me that I should not be here during those happy thousand years, when I wanted to so much. But I had not lived even my short life in the world without leading something of my own faults and perversities; and when I saw that there was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart I had to conclude that it might be a great way off, after all. Yet the very thought of it brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day and by night. It was coming, some time! And the people who were in heaven would be as glad of it as those who remained on earth. That it was a hard world for my mother and her children to live in at present I could not help seeing. The older members of the family found occupations by which the domestic burdens were lifted a little; but, with only the three youngest to clothe and to keep at school, there was still much more outgo than income, and my mother's discouragement every day increased. My eldest brother had gone to sea with a relative who was master of a merchant vessel in the South American trade. His inclination led him that way; it seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable business, and my mother looked upon him as her future stay and support. One day she came in among us children looking strangely excited. I heard her tell some one afterwards that she had just been to hear Father Taylor preach, the sailors minister, whose coming to our town must have been a rare occurrence. His words had touched her personally, for he had spoken to mothers whose first-born had left them to venture upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands. He had even given to the wanderer he described the name of her own absent son--"Benjamin." As she left the church she met a neighbor who informed her that the brig "Mexican" had arrived at Salem, in trouble. It was the vessel in which my brother had sailed only a short time before, expecting to be absent for months. "Pirates" was the only word we children caught, as she hastened away from the house, not knowing whether her son was alive or not. Fortunately, the news hardly reached the town before my brother himself did. She met him in the street, and brought him home with her, forgetting all her anxieties in her joy at his safety. The "Mexican" had been attacked on the high seas by the piratical craft "Panda," robbed of twenty thousand dollars in specie, set on fire, and abandoned to her fate, with the crew fastened down in the hold. One small skylight had accidentally been overlooked by the freebooters. The captain discovered it, and making his way through it to the deck, succeeded in putting out the fire, else vessel and sailors would have sunk together, and their fate would never have been known. Breathlessly we listened whenever my brother would relate the story, which he did not at all enjoy doing, for a cutlass had been swung over his head, and his life threatened by the pirate's boatswain, demanding more money, after all had been taken. A Genoese messmate, Iachimo, shortened to plain "Jack" by the "Mexican's" crew, came to see my brother one day, and at the dinner table he went through the whole adventure in pantomime, which we children watched with wide-eyed terror and amusement. For there was some comedy mixed with what had been so nearly a tragedy, and Jack made us see the very whites of the black cook's eyes, who, favored by his color, had hidden himself--all except that dilated whiteness--between two great casks in the bold. Jack himself had fallen through a trap-door, was badly hurt, and could not extricate himself. It was very ludicrous. Jack crept under the table to show us how he and the cook made eyes at each other down there in the darkness, not daring to speak. The pantomime was necessary, for the Genoese had very little English at his command. When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial, my brother had the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the court-room the ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life. This boatswain and several others of the crew were executed in Boston. The boy found his brief sailor-experience quite enough for him, and afterward settled down quietly to the trade of a carpenter. Changes thickened in the air around us. Not the least among them was the burning of "our meeting-house," in which we had all been baptized. One Sunday morning we children were told, when we woke, that we could not go to meeting that day, because the church was a heap of smoking ruins. It seemed to me almost like the end of the world. During my father's life, a few years before my birth, his thoughts had been turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the banks of the Merrimack. He had once taken a journey there, with the possibility in his mind of making the place his home, his limited income furnishing no adequate promise of a maintenance for his large family of daughters. From the beginning, Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety, and all that was dear to the old-fashioned New Englander's heart. After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed the direction his had taken; and seeing no other opening for herself, she sold her small estate, and moved to Lowell, with the intention of taking a corporation-house for mill-girl boarders. Some of the family objected, for the Old World traditions about factory life were anything but attractive; and they were current in New England until the experiment at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably give their own character to their occupation. My mother had visited Lowell, and she was willing and glad, knowing all about the place, to make it our home. The change involved a great deal of work. "Boarders" signified a large house, many beds, and an indefinite number of people. Such piles of sewing accumulated before us! A sewing-bee, volunteered by the neighbors, reduced the quantity a little, and our child-fingers had to take their part. But the seams of those sheets did look to me as if they were miles long! My sister Lida and I had our "stint,"--so much to do every day. It was warm weather, and that made it the more tedious, for we wanted to be running about the fields we were so soon to leave. One day, in sheer desperation, we dragged a sheet up with us into an apple-tree in the yard, and sat and sewed there through the summer afternoon, beguiling the irksomeness of our task by telling stories and guessing riddles. It was hardest for me to leave the garret and the garden. In the old houses the garret was the children's castle. The rough rafters,--it was always ail unfinished room, otherwise not a true garret,--the music of the rain on the roof, the worn sea-chests with their miscellaneous treasures, the blue-roofed cradle that had sheltered ten blue-eyed babies, the tape-looms and reels and spinning wheels, the herby smells, and the delightful dream corners,--these could not be taken with us to the new home. Wonderful people had looked out upon us from under those garret-eaves. Sindbad the Sailor and Baron Munchausen had sometimes strayed in and told us their unbelievable stories; and we had there made acquaintance with the great Caliph Haroun Alraschid. To go away from the little garden was almost as bad. Its lilacs and peonies were beautiful to me, and in a corner of it was one tiny square of earth that I called my own, where I was at liberty to pull up my pinks and lady's delights every day, to see whether they had taken root, and where I could give my lazy morning-glory seeds a poke, morning after morning, to help them get up and begin their climb. Oh, I should miss the garden very much indeed! It did not take long to turn over the new leaf of our home experience. One sunny day three of us children, my youngest sister, my brother John, and I, took with my mother the first stage-coach journey of our lives, across Lynnfield plains and over Andover hills to the banks of the Merrimack. We were set down before an empty house in a yet unfinished brick block, where we watched for the big wagon that was to bring our household goods. It came at last; and the novelty of seeing our old furniture settled in new rooms kept us from being homesick. One after another they appeared,--bedsteads, chairs, tables, and, to me most welcome of all, the old mahogany secretary with brass-handled drawers, that had always stood in the "front room" at home. With it came the barrel full of books that had filled its shelves, and they took their places as naturally as if they had always lived in this strange town. There they all stood again side by side on their shelves, the dear, dull, good old volumes that all my life I had tried in vain to take a sincere Sabbath-day interest in,--Scott's Commentaries on the Bible, Hervey's "Meditations," Young's "Night Thoughts," "Edwards on the Affections," and the Writings of Baxter and Doddridge. Besides these, there were bound volumes of the "Repository Tracts," which I had read and re-read; and the delightfully miscellaneous "Evangelicana," containing an account of Gilbert Tennent's wonderful trance; also the "History of the Spanish Inquisition," with some painfully realistic illustrations; a German Dictionary, whose outlandish letters and words I liked to puzzle myself over; and a descriptive History of Hamburg, full of fine steel engravings--which last two or three volumes my father had brought with him from the countries to which he had sailed in his sea-faring days. A complete set of the "Missionary Herald", unbound, filled the upper shelves. Other familiar articles journeyed with us: the brass-headed shovel and tongs, that it had been my especial task to keep bright; the two card-tables (which were as unacquainted as ourselves with ace, face, and trump); the two china mugs, with their eighteenth-century lady and gentleman figurines curiosities brought from over the sea, and reverently laid away by my mother with her choicest relics in the secretary-desk; my father's miniature, painted in Antwerp, a treasure only shown occasionally to us children as a holiday treat; and my mother's easy-chair,--I should have felt as if I had lost her, had that been left behind. The earliest unexpressed ambition of my infancy had been to grow up and wear a cap, and sit in an easy-chair knitting and look comfortable just as my mother did. Filled up with these things, the little one-windowed sitting-room easily caught the home feeling, and gave it back to us. Inanimate Objects do gather into themselves something of the character of those who live among them, through association; and this alone makes heirlooms valuable. They are family treasures, because they are part of the family life, full of memories and inspirations. Bought or sold, they are nothing but old furniture. Nobody can buy the old associations; and nobody who has really felt how everything that has been in a home makes part of it, can willingly bargain away the old things. My mother never thought of disposing of her best furniture, whatever her need. It traveled with her in every change of her abiding-place, as long as she lived, so that to us children home seemed to accompany her wherever she went. And, remaining yet in the family, it often brings back to me pleasant reminders of my childhood. No other Bible seems quite so sacred to me as the old Family Bible, out of which my father used to read when we were all gathered around him for worship. To turn its leaves and look at its pictures was one of our few Sabbath-day indulgences; and I cannot touch it now except with feelings of profound reverence. For the first time in our lives, my little sister and I became pupils in a grammar school for both girls and boys, taught by a man. I was put with her into the sixth class, but was sent the very next day into the first. I did not belong in either, but somewhere between. And I was very uncomfortable in my promotion, for though the reading and spelling and grammar and geography were perfectly easy, I had never studied any thing but mental arithmetic, and did not know how to "do a sum." We had to show, when called up to recite, a slateful of sums, "done" and "proved." No explanations were ever asked of us. The girl who sat next to me saw my distress, and offered to do my sums for me. I accepted her proposal, feeling, however, that I was a miserable cheat. But I was afraid of the master, who was tall and gaunt, and used to stalk across the schoolroom, right over the desk-tops, to find out if there was any mischief going on. Once, having caught a boy annoying a seat-mate with a pin, he punished the offender by pursuing him around the schoolroom, sticking a pin into his shoulder whenever he could overtake him. And he had a fearful leather strap, which was sometimes used even upon the shrinking palm of a little girl. If he should find out that I was a pretender and deceiver, as I knew that I was, I could not guess what might happen to me. He never did, however. I was left unmolested in the ignorance which I deserved. But I never liked the girl who did my sums, and I fancied she had a decided contempt for me. There was a friendly looking boy always sitting at the master's desk; they called him "the monitor." It was his place to assist scholars who were in trouble about their lessons, but I was too bashful to speak to him, or to ask assistance of anybody. I think that nobody learned much under that regime, and the whole school system was soon after entirely reorganized. Our house was quickly filled with a large feminine family. As a child, the gulf between little girlhood and young womanhood had always looked to me very wide. I suppose we should get across it by some sudden jump, by and by. But among these new companions of all ages, from fifteen to thirty years, we slipped into womanhood without knowing when or how. Most of my mother's boarders were from New Hampshire and Vermont, and there was a fresh, breezy sociability about them which made them seem almost like a different race of beings from any we children had hitherto known. We helped a little about the housework, before and after school, making beds, trimming lamps, and washing dishes. The heaviest work was done by a strong Irish girl, my mother always attending to the cooking herself. She was, however, a better caterer than the circumstances required or permitted. She liked to make nice things for the table, and, having been accustomed to an abundant supply, could never learn to economize. At a dollar and a quarter a week for board,(the price allowed for mill-girls by the corporations) great care in expenditure was necessary. It was not in my mother's nature closely to calculate costs, and in this way there came to be a continually increasing leak in the family purse. The older members of the family did everything they could, but it was not enough. I heard it said one day, in a distressed tone, "The children will have to leave school and go into the mill." There were many pros and cons between my mother and sisters before this was positively decided. The mill-agent did not want to take us two little girls, but consented on condition we should be sure to attend school the full number of months prescribed each year. I, the younger one, was then between eleven and twelve years old. I listened to all that was said about it, very much fearing that I should not be permitted to do the coveted work. For the feeling had already frequently come to me, that I was the one too many in the overcrowded family nest. Once, before we left our old home, I had heard a neighbor condoling with my mother because there were so many of us, and her emphatic reply had been a great relief to my mind:-- "There is isn't one more than I want. I could not spare a single one of my children." But her difficulties were increasing, and I thought it would be a pleasure to feel that I was not a trouble or burden or expense to anybody. So I went to my first day's work in the mill with a light heart. The novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was not hard, just to change the bobbins on the spinning-frames every three quarters of an hour or so, with half a dozen other little girls who were doing the same thing. When I came back at night, the family began to pity me for my long, tiresome day's work, but I laughed and said,-- "Why, it is nothing but fun. It is just like play." And for a little while it was only a new amusement; I liked it better than going to school and "making believe" I was learning when I was not. And there was a great deal of play mixed with it. We were not occupied more than half the time. The intervals were spent frolicking around around the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with the games and stories in a corner, or exploring with the overseer's permission, the mysteries of the the carding-room, the dressing-room and the weaving-room. I never cared much for machinery. The buzzing and hissing and whizzing of pulleys and rollers and spindles and flyers around me often grew tiresome. I could not see into their complications, or feel interested in them. But in a room below us we were sometimes allowed to peer in through a sort of blind door at the great water-wheel that carried the works of the whole mill. It was so huge that we could only watch a few of its spokes at a time, and part of its dripping rim, moving with a slow, measured strength through the darkness that shut it in. It impressed me with something of the awe which comes to us in thinking of the great Power which keeps the mechanism of the universe in motion. Even now, the remembrance of its large, mysterious movement, in which every little motion of every noisy little wheel was involved, brings back to me a verse from one of my favorite hymns:-- "Our lives through various scenes are drawn, And vexed by trifling cares, While Thine eternal thought moves on Thy undisturbed affairs." There were compensations for being shut in to daily toil so early. The mill itself had its lessons for us. But it was not, and could not be, the right sort of life for a child, and we were happy in the knowledge that, at the longest, our employment was only to be temporary. When I took my next three months at the grammar school, everything there was changed, and I too was changed. The teachers were kind, and thorough in their instruction; and my mind seemed to have been ploughed up during that year of work, so that knowledge took root in it easily. It was a great delight to me to study, and at the end of the three months the master told me that I was prepared for the high school. But alas! I could not go. The little money I could earn--one dollar a week, besides the price of my board--was needed in the family, and I must return to the mill. It was a severe disappointment to me, though I did not say so at home. I did not at all accept the conclusion of a neighbor whom I heard talking about it with my mother. His daughter was going to the high school, and my mother was telling him how sorry she was that I could not. "Oh," he said, in a soothing tone, "my girl hasn't got any such head-piece as yours has. Your girl doesn't need to go." Of course I knew that whatever sort of a "head-piece" I had, I did need and want just that very opportunity to study. I think the solution was then formed, inwardly, that I would go to school again, some time, whatever happened. I went back to my work, but now without enthusiasm. I had looked through an open door that I was not willing to see shut upon me. I began to reflect upon life rather seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was I here for? What could I make of myself? Must I submit to be carried along with the current, and do just what everybody else did? No: I knew I should not do that, for there was a certain Myself who was always starting up with her own original plan or aspiration before me, and who was quite indifferent as to what people, generally thought. Well, I would find out what this Myself was good for, and that she should be! It was but the presumption of extreme youth. How gladly would I know now, after these long years, just why I was sent into the world, and whether I have in any degree fulfilled the purpose of my being! In the older times it was seldom said to little girls, as it always has been said to boys, that they ought to have some definite plan, while they were children, what to be and do when they were grown up. There was usually but one path open before them, to become good wives and housekeepers. And the ambition of most girls was to follow their mothers' footsteps in this direction; a natural and laudable ambition. But girls, as well as boys, must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities,--must have desired to cultivate and make use of their individual powers. When I was growing up, they had already begun to be encouraged to do so. We were often told that it was our duty to develop any talent we might possess, or at least to learn how to do some one thing which the world needed, or which would make it a pleasanter world. When I thought what I should best like to do, my first dream--almost a baby's dream--about it was that it would be a fine thing to be a schoolteacher, like Aunt Hannah. Afterward, when I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. A slate and pencil, to draw pictures, was my first request whenever a day's ailment kept me at home from school; and I rather enjoyed being a little ill, for the sake of amusing myself in that way. The wish grew up with me; but there were no good drawing-teachers in those days, and if there had been, the cost of instruction would have been beyond the family means. My sister Emilie, however, who saw my taste and shared it herself, did her best to assist me, furnishing me with pencil and paper and paint-box. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying. I did try a little, and very often. Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher. His sketches on the bedroom window-pane in cold mornings were my ideal studies of Swiss scenery, crags and peaks and chalets and fir-trees,--and graceful tracery of ferns, like those that grew in the woods where we went huckleberrying, all blended together by his touch of enchantment. I wondered whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely work. The taste has followed me all my life through, but I could never indulge it except as a recreation. I was not to be an artist, and I am rather glad that I was hindered, for I had even stronger inclinations in other directions; and art, really noble art, requires the entire devotion of a lifetime. I seldom thought seriously of becoming an author, although it seemed to me that anybody who had written a book would have a right to feel very proud. But I believed that a person must be exceedingly wise before presuming to attempt it: although now and then I thought I could feel ideas growing in my mind that it might be worth while to put into a book,--if I lived and studied until I was forty or fifty years old. I wrote my little verses, to be sure, but that was nothing; they just grew. They were the same as breathing or singing. I could not help writing them, and I thought and dreamed a great many that were ever put on paper. They seemed to fly into my mind and away again, like birds with a carol through the air. It seemed strange to me that people should notice them, or should think my writing verses anything peculiar; for I supposed that they were in everybody's mind, just as they were in mine, and that anybody could write them who chose. One day I heard a relative say to my mother,-- "Keep what she writes till she grows up, and perhaps she will get money for it. I have heard of somebody who earned a thousand dollars by writing poetry." It sounded so absurd to me. Money for writing verses! One dollar would be as ridiculous as a thousand. I should as soon have thought of being paid for thinking! My mother, fortunately, was sensible enough never to flatter me or let me be flattered about my scribbling. It never was allowed to hinder any work I had to do. I crept away into a corner to write what came into my head, just as I ran away to play; and I looked upon it only as my most agreeable amusement, never thinking of preserving anything which did not of itself stay in my memory. This too was well, for the time did lot come when I could afford to look upon verse-writing as an occupation. Through my life, it has only been permitted to me as an aside from other more pressing employments. Whether I should have written better verses had circumstances left me free to do what I chose, it is impossible now to know. All my thoughts about my future sent me back to Aunt Hannah and my first infantile idea of being a teacher. I foresaw that I should be that before I could be or do any thing else. It had been impressed upon me that I must make myself useful in the world, and certainly one could be useful who could "keep school" as Aunt Hannah did. I did not see anything else for a girl to do who wanted to use her brains as well as her hands. So the plan of preparing myself to be a teacher gradually and almost unconsciously shaped itself in my mind as the only practicable one. I could earn my living in that way,--all-important consideration. I liked the thought of self-support, but I would have chosen some artistic or beautiful work if I could. I had no especial aptitude for teaching, and no absorbing wish to be a teacher, but it seemed to me that I might succeed if I tried. What I did like about it was that one must know something first. I must acquire knowledge before I could impart it, and that was just what I wanted. I could be a student, wherever I was and whatever else I had to be or do, and I would! I knew I should write; I could not help doing that, for my hand seemed instinctively to move towards pen and paper in moments of leisure. But to write anything worth while, I must have mental cultivation; so, in preparing myself to teach, I could also be preparing myself to write. This was the plan that indefinitely shaped itself in my mind as I returned to my work in the spinning-room, and which I followed out, not without many breaks and hindrances and neglects, during the next six or seven years,--to learn all I could, so that I should be fit to teach or to write, as the way opened. And it turned out that fifteen or twenty of my best years were given to teaching. VIII. BY THE RIVER. IT did not take us younger ones long to get acquainted with our new home, and to love it. To live beside a river had been to me a child's dream of romance. Rivers, as I pictured them, came down from the mountains, and were born in the clouds. They were bordered by green meadows, and graceful trees leaned over to gaze into their bright mirrors. Our shallow tidal creek was the only river I had known, except as visioned on the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," and in the Book of Revelation. And the Merrimack was like a continuation of that dream. I soon made myself familiar with the rocky nooks along Pawtucket Falls, shaded with hemlocks and white birches. Strange new wild flowers grew beside the rushing waters,--among them Sir Walter Scott's own harebells, which I had never thought of except as blossoms of poetry; here they were, as real to me as to his Lady of the Lake! I loved the harebell, the first new flower the river gave me, as I had never loved a flower before. There was but one summers holiday for us who worked in the mills--the Fourth of July. We made a point of spending it out of doors, making excursions down the river to watch the meeting of the slow Concord and the swift Merrimack; or around by the old canal-path, to explore the mysteries of the Guard Locks; or across the bridge, clambering up Dracut Heights, to look away to the dim blue mountains. On that morning it was our custom to wake one another at four o'clock, and start off on a tramp together over some retired road whose chief charm was its unfamiliarity, returning to a very late breakfast, with draggled gowns and aprons full of dewy wild roses. No matter if we must get up at five the next morning and go back to our hum-drum toil, we should have the roses to take with us for company, and the sweet air of the woodland which lingered about them would scent our thoughts all day, and make us forget the oily smell of the machinery. We were children still, whether at school or at work, and Nature still held us close to her motherly heart. Nature came very close to the mill-gates, too, in those days. There was green grass all around them; violets and wild geraniums grew by the canals; and long stretches of open land between the corporation buildings and the street made the town seem country-like. The slope behind our mills (the "Lawrence" Mills) was a green lawn; and in front of some of them the overseers had gay flower-gardens; we passed in to our work through a splendor of dahlias and hollyhocks. The gray stone walls of St. Anne's church and rectory made a picturesque spot in the middle of the town, remaining still as a lasting monument to the religious purpose which animated the first manufacturers. The church arose close to the oldest corporation (the "Merrimack"), and seemed a part of it, and a part, also, of the original idea of the place itself, which was always a city of worshipers, although it came to be filled with a population which preferred meeting-houses to churches. I admired the church greatly. I had never before seen a real one; never anything but a plain frame meeting-house; and it and its benign, apostolic-looking rector were like a leaf out of an English story-book. And so, also, was the tiny white cottage nearly opposite, set in the middle of a pretty flower-garden that sloped down to the canal. In the garden there was almost always a sweet little girl in a pink gown and white sunbonnet gathering flowers when I passed that way, and I often went out of my path to do so. These relieved the monotony of the shanty-like shops which bordered the main street. The town had sprung up with a mushroom-rapidity, and there was no attempt at veiling the newness of its bricks and mortar, its boards and paint. But there were buildings that had their own individuality, and asserted it. One of these was a mud-cabin with a thatched roof, that looked as if it had emigrated bodily from the bogs of Ireland. It had settled itself down into a green hollow by the roadside, and it looked as much at home with the lilac-tinted crane's-bill and yellow buttercups as if it had never lost sight of the shamrocks of Erin. Now, too, my childish desire to see a real beggar was gratified. Straggling petitioners for "cold victuals" hung around our back yard, always of Hibernian extraction; and a slice of bread was rewarded with a shower of benedictions that lost itself upon us in the flood of its own incomprehensible brogue. Some time every summer a fleet of canoes would glide noiselessly up the river, and a company of Penobscot Indians would land at a green point almost in sight from our windows. Pawtucket Falls had always been one of their favorite camping-places. Their strange endeavors, to combine civilization with savagery were a great source of amusement to us; men and women clad alike in loose gowns, stove-pipe hats, and moccasons; grotesque relies of aboriginal forest-life. The sight of these uncouth-looking red men made the romance fade entirely out of the Indian stories we had heard. Still their wigwam camp was a show we would not willingly have missed. The transition from childhood to girlhood, when a little girl has had an almost unlimited freedom of out-of-door life, is practically the toning down of a mild sort of barbarianism, and is often attended by a painfully awkward self-consciousness. I had an innate dislike of conventionalities. I clung to the child's inalienable privilege of running half wild; and when I found that I really was growing up, I felt quite rebellious. I was as tall as a woman at thirteen, and my older sisters insisted upon lengthening my dresses, and putting up my mop of hair with a comb. I felt injured and almost outraged because my protestations against this treatment were unheeded and when the transformation in my visible appearance was effected, I went away by myself and had a good cry, which I would not for the world have had them know about, as that would have added humiliation to my distress. And the greatest pity about it was that I too soon became accustomed to the situation. I felt like a child, but considered it my duty to think and behave like a woman. I began to look upon it as a very serious thing to live. The untried burden seemed already to have touched my shoulders. For a time I was morbidly self-critical, and at the same time extremely reserved. The associates I chose were usually grave young women, ten or fifteen years older than myself; but I think I felt older and appeared older than they did. Childhood, however, is not easily defrauded of its birthright, and mine soon reasserted itself. At home I was among children of my own age, for some cousins and other acquaintances had come to live and work with us. We had our evening frolics and entertainments together, and we always made the most of our brief holiday hours. We had also with us now the sister Emilie of my fairy-tale memories, who had grown into a strong, earnest-hearted woman. We all looked up to her as our model, and the ideal of our heroine-worship; for our deference to her in every way did amount to that. She watched over us, gave us needed reproof and commendation, rarely cosseted us, but rather made us laugh at what many would have considered the hardships of our lot. She taught us not only to accept the circumstances in which we found ourselves, but to win from them courage and strength. When we came in shivering from our work, through a snowstorm, complaining of numb hands and feet, she would say cheerily, "But it doesn't make you any warmer to say you are cold;" and this was typical of the way she took life generally, and tried to have us take it. She was constantly denying herself for our sakes, without making us feel that she was doing so. But she did not let us get into the bad habit of pitying ourselves because we were not as "well off" as many other children. And indeed we considered ourselves pleasantly situated; but the best of it all was that we had her. Her theories for herself, and her practice, too, were rather severe; but we tried to follow them, according to our weaker abilities. Her custom was, for instance, to take a full cold bath every morning before she went to her work, even though the water was chiefly broken ice; and we did the same whenever we could be resolute enough. It required both nerve and will to do this at five o'clock on a zero morning, in a room without a fire; but it helped us to harden ourselves, while we formed a good habit. The working-day in winter began at the very earliest daylight, and ended at half-past seven in the evening. Another habit of hers was to keep always beside her at her daily work something to study or to think about. At first it was "Watts on the Improvement of the Mind," arranged as a textbook, with questions and answers, by the minister of Beverly who had made the thought of the millennium such a reality to his people. She quite wore this book out, carrying it about with her in her working-dress pocket. After that, "Locke on the Understanding" was used in the same way. She must have known both books through and through by heart. Then she read Combe and Abercrombie, and discussed their physics and metaphysics with our girl boarders, some of whom had remarkably acute and well-balanced minds. Her own seemed to have turned from its early bent toward the romantic, her taste being now for serious and practical, though sometimes abstruse, themes. I remember that Young and Pollock were her favorite poets. I could not keep up with her in her studies and readings, for many of the books she liked seemed to me very dry. I did not easily take to the argumentative or moralizing method, which I came to regard as a proof of the weakness of my own intellect in comparison with hers. I would gladly have kept pace with her if I could. Anything under the heading of "Didactick," like some of the pieces in the old "English Reader," used by school-children in the generation just before ours, always repelled me. But I though it necessary to discipline myself by reading such pieces, and my first attempt at prose composition, "On Friendship," was stiffly modeled after a certain "Didactick Essay" in that same English Reader. My sister, however, cared more to watch the natural development of our minds than to make us follow the direction of hers. She was really our teacher, although she never assumed that position. Certainly I learned more from her about my own capabilities, and how I might put them to use, than I could have done at any school we knew of, had it been possible for me to attend one. I think she was determined that we should not be mentally defrauded by the circumstances which had made it necessary for us to begin so early to win our daily bread. This remark applies especially to me, as my older sisters (only two or three of them had come to Lowell) soon drifted away from us into their own new homes or occupations, and she and I were left together amid the whir of spindles and wheels. One thing she planned for us, her younger housemates,--a dozen or so of cousins, friends, and sisters, some attending school, and some at work in the mill,--was a little fortnightly paper, to be filled with our original contributions, she herself acting as editor. I do not know where she got the idea, unless it was from Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's "Juvenile Miscellany," which had found its way to us some years before,--a most delightful guest, and, I think, the first magazine prepared for American children, who have had so many since then.(I have always been glad that I knew that sweet woman with the child's heart and the poet's soul, in her later years, and could tell her how happy she had helped to make my childhood.) Our little sheet was called "The Diving Bell," probably from the sea-associations of the name. We kept our secrets of authorship very close from everybody except the editor, who had to decipher the handwriting and copy the pieces. It was, indeed, an important part of the fun to guess who wrote particular pieces. After a little while, however, our mannerisms betrayed us. One of my cousins was known to be the chief story-teller, and I was recognized as the leading rhymer among the younger contributors; the editor-sister excelling in her versifying, as she did in almost everything. It was a cluster of very conscious-looking little girls that assembled one evening in the attic room, chosen on account of its remoteness from intruders (for we did not admit even the family as a public, the writers themselves were the only audience), to listen to the reading of our first paper. We took Saturday evening, because that was longer than the other workday evenings, the mills being closed earlier. Such guessing and wondering and admiring as we had! But nobody would acknowledge her own work, for that would have spoiled the pleasure. Only there were certain wise hints and maxims that we knew never came from any juvenile head among us, and those we set down as "editorials." Some of the stories contained rather remarkable incidents. One, written to illustrate a little girl's habit of carelessness about her own special belongings, told of her rising one morning, and after hunting around for her shoes half an hour or so, finding them in the book-case, where she had accidentally locked them up the night before! To convince myself that I could write something besides rhymes, I had attempted an essay of half a column on a very extensive subject, "MIND." It began loftily:-- "What a noble and beautiful thing is mind!" and it went on in the same high-flown strain to no particular end. But the editor praised it, after having declined the verdict of the audience that she was its author; and I felt sufficiently flattered by both judgments. I wrote more rhymes than anything else, because they came more easily. But I always felt that the ability to write good prose was far more desirable, and it seems so to me still. I will give my little girl readers a single specimen of my twelve-year-old "Diving Bell" verses, though I feel as if I ought to apologize even for that. It is on a common subject, "Life like a Rose":-- "Childhood's like a tender bud That's scarce been formed an hour, But which erelong will doubtless be A bright and lovely flower. "And youth is like a full-blown rose Which has not known decay; But which must soon, alas! too soon! Wither and fade away. "And age is like a withered rose, That bends beneath the blast; But though its beauty all is gone, Its fragrance yet may last." This, and other verses that I wrote then, serve to illustrate the child's usual inclination to look forward meditatively, rather than to think and write of the simple things that belong to children. Our small venture set some of us imagining what larger possibilities might be before us in the far future. We talked over the things we should like to do when we should be women out in the active world; and the author of the shoe-story horrified us by declaring that she meant to be distinguished when she grew up for something, even if it was for something bad! She did go so far in a bad way as to plagiarize a long poem in a subsequent number of the "Diving Bell" but the editor found her out, and we all thought that a reproof from Emilie was sufficient punishment. I do not know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for me that I had not, by nature, what is called literary ambition. I knew that I had a knack at rhyming, and I knew that I enjoyed nothing better than to try to put thoughts and words together, in any way. But I did it for the pleasure of rhyming and writing, indifferent as to what might come of it. For any one who could take hold of every-day, practical work, and carry it on successfully, I had a profound respect. To be what is called "capable" seemed to me better worth while than merely to have a taste or for writing, perhaps because I was conscious of my deficiencies in the former respect. But certainly the world needs deeds more than it needs words. I should never have been willing to be only a writer, without using my hands to some good purpose besides. My sister, however, told me that here was a talent which I had no right to neglect, and which I ought to make the most of. I believed in her; I thought she understood me better than I understood myself; and it was a comfort to be assured that my scribbling was not wholly a waste of time. So I used pencil and paper in every spare minute I could find. Our little home-journal went bravely on through twelve numbers. Its yellow manuscript pages occasionally meet my eyes when I am rummaging among my old papers, with the half-conscious look of a waif that knows it has no right to its escape from the waters of oblivion. While it was in progress my sister Emilie became acquainted with a family of bright girls, near neighbors of ours, who proposed that we should join with them, and form a little society for writing and discussion, to meet fortnightly at their house. We met,--I think I was the youngest of the group,--prepared a Constitution and By-Laws, and named ourselves "The Improvement Circle." If I remember rightly, my sister was our first president. The older ones talked and wrote on many subjects quite above me. I was shrinkingly bashful, as half-grown girls usually are, but I wrote my little essays and read them, and listened to the rest, and enjoyed it all exceedingly. Out of this little "Improvement Circle" grew the larger one whence issued the "Lowell Offering," a year or two later. At this time I had learned to do a spinner's work, and I obtained permission to tend some frames that stood directly in front of the river-windows, with only them and the wall behind me, extending half the length of the mill,--and one young woman beside me, at the farther end of the row. She was a sober, mature person, who scarcely thought it worth her while to speak often to a child like me; and I was, when with strangers, rather a reserved girl; so I kept myself occupied with the river, my work, and my thoughts. And the river and my thoughts flowed on together, the happiest of companions. Like a loitering pilgrim, it sparkled up to me in recognition as it glided along and bore away my little frets and fatigues on its bosom. When the work "went well," I sat in the window-seat, and let my fancies fly whither they would,--downward to the sea, or upward to the hills that hid the mountain-cradle of the Merrimack. The printed regulations forbade us to bring books into the mill, so I made my window-seat into a small library of poetry, pasting its side all over with newspaper clippings. In those days we had only weekly papers, and they had always a "poet's corner," where standard writers were well represented, with anonymous ones, also. I was not, of course, much of a critic. I chose my verses for their sentiment, and because I wanted to commit them to memory; sometimes it was a long poem, sometimes a hymn, sometimes only a stray verse. Mrs. Hemans sang with me,-- "Far away, o'er the blue hills far away;" and I learned and loved her "Better Land," and "If thou hast crushed a flower," and "Kindred Hearts." I wonder if Miss Landon really did write that fine poem to Mont Blanc which was printed in her volume, but which sounds so entirely unlike everything else she wrote! This was one of my window-gems. It ended with the appeal,-- "Alas for thy past mystery! For thine untrodden snow! Nurse of the tempest! hast thou none To guard thine outraged brow?" and it contained a stanza that I often now repeat to myself:-- "We know too much: scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves: Our only point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves." There was one anonymous waif in my collection that I was very fond of. I have never seen it since, nor ever had the least clue to its authorship. It stirred me and haunted me; and it often comes back to me now, in snatches like these:-- "The human mind! That lofty thing, The palace and the throne Where Reason sits, a sceptred king, And breathes his judgment-tone!" "The human soul! That startling thing, Mysterious and sublime; An angel sleeping on the wing, Worn by the scoffs of time. From heaven in tears to earth it stole-- That startling thing, the human soul." I was just beginning, in my questionings as to the meaning of life, to get glimpses of its true definition from the poets,--that it is love, service, the sacrifice of self for others' good. The lesson was slowly learned, but every hint of it went to my heart, and I kept in silent upon my window wall reminders like that of holy George Herbert:-- "Be useful where thou livest, that they may Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still. --Find out men's wants and will, And meet them there. All worldly joys go less To the one joy of doing kindnesses;" and that well-known passage from Talfourd,-- "The blessings which the weak and poor can scatter, Have their own season. It is a little thing to speak a phase Of common comfort, which, by daily use, Has almost lost its sense; yet on the ear Of him who thought to die unmourned 't will fall Like choicest music." A very familiar extract from Carlos Wilcox, almost the only quotation made nowadays from his poems, was often on my sister Emilie's lips, whose heart seemed always to be saying to itself:-- "Pour blessings round thee like a shower of gold!" I had that beside me, too, and I copy part of it here, for her sake, and because it will be good for my girl readers to keep in mind one of the noblest utterances of an almost forgotten American poet:-- "Rouse to some work of high and holy love, And thou an angel's happiness shalt know; Shalt bless the earth while in the world above. The good begun by thee shall onward flow. The pure, sweet stream shall deeper, wider grow. The seed that in these few and fleeting hours Thy hands, unsparing and unwearied sow, Shall deck thy grave with amaranthine flowers, And yield thee fruits divine in heaven's immortal bowers." One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through being brought together, away from their own homes, was that it taught them to go out of themselves, and enter into the lives of others. Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing. That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests. We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which we truly belong. To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each others' sympathies. And the stream beside which we toiled added to its own inspirations human suggestions drawn from our acquaintance with each other. It blended itself with the flow of our lives. Almost the first of my poemlets in the "Lowell Offering" was entitled "The River." These are some lines of it:-- "Gently flowed a river bright On its path of liquid light, Gleaming now soft banks between, Winding now through valleys green, Cheering with its presence mild Cultured fields and woodlands wild. "Is not such a pure one's life? Ever shunning pride and strife, Noiselessly along she goes, Known by gentle deeds she does; Often wandering far, to bless, And do others kindnesses. "Thus, by her own virtues shaded, While pure thoughts, like starbeams, lie Mirrored in her heart and eye, She, content to be unknown, All serenely moveth on, Till, released from Time's commotion, Self is lost in Love's wide ocean." There was many a young girl near me whose life was like the beautiful course of the river in my ideal of her. The Merrimack has blent its music with the onward song of many a lovely soul that, clad in plain working-clothes, moved heavenward beside its waters. One of the loveliest persons I ever knew was a young girl who worked opposite to me in the spinning-room. Our eyes made us friends long before we spoke to each other. She was an orphan, well-bred and well-educated, about twenty years old, and she had brought with her to her place of toil the orphan child of her sister, left to her as a death-bed legacy. They boarded with a relative. The factory boarding-houses were often managed by families of genuine refinement, as in this case, and the one comfort of Caroline's life was her beautiful little niece, to whom she could go home when the day's work was over. Her bereavements had given an appealing sadness to her whole expression; but she had accepted them and her changed circumstances with the submission of profound faith which everybody about her felt in everything she said and did. I think I first knew, through her, how character can teach, without words. To see her and her little niece together was almost like looking at a picture of the Madonna. Caroline afterwards became an inmate of my mother's family, and we were warm friends until her death a few years ago. Some of the girls could not believe that the Bible was meant to be counted among forbidden books. We all thought that the Scriptures had a right to go wherever we went, and that if we needed them anywhere, it was at our work. I evaded the law by carrying some leaves from a torn Testament in my pocket. The overseer, caring more for law than gospel, confiscated all he found. He had his desk full of Bibles. It sounded oddly to hear him say to the most religious girl in the room, when he took hers away, "I did think you had more conscience than to bring that book here." But we had some close ethical questions to settle in those days. It was a rigid code of morality under which we lived. Nobody complained of it, however, and we were doubtless better off for its strictness, in the end. The last window in the row behind me was filled with flourishing house-plants--fragrant leaved geraniums, the overseer's pets. They gave that corner a bowery look; the perfume and freshness tempted me there often. Standing before that window, I could look across the room and see girls moving backwards and forwards among the spinning-frames, sometimes stooping, sometimes reaching up their arms, as their work required, with easy and not ungraceful movements. On the whole, it was far from being a disagreeable place to stay in. The girls were bright-looking and neat, and everything was kept clean and shining. The effect of the whole was rather attractive to strangers. My grandfather came to see my mother once at about this time and visited the mills. When he had entered our room, and looked around for a moment, he took off his hat and made a low bow to the girls, first toward the right, and then toward the left. We were familiar with his courteous habits, partly due to his French descent; but we had never seen anybody bow to a room full of mill girls in that polite way, and some one of the family afterwards asked him why he did so. He looked a little surprised at the question, but answered promptly and with dignity, "I always take off my hat to ladies." His courtesy was genuine. Still, we did not call ourselves ladies. We did not forget that we were working-girls, wearing coarse aprons suitable to our work, and that there was some danger of our becoming drudges. I know that sometimes the confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me. In the sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside. Looking away to the hills, my whole stifled being would cry out "Oh, that I had wings!" Still I was there from choice, and "The prison unto which we doom ourselves, No prison is." And I was every day making discoveries about life, and about myself. I had naturally some elements of the recluse, and would never, of my own choice, have lived in a crowd. I loved quietness. The noise of machinery was particularly distasteful to me. But I found that the crowd was made up of single human lives, not one of them wholly uninteresting, when separately known. I learned also that there are many things which belong to the whole world of us together, that no one of us, nor any few of us, can claim or enjoy for ourselves alone. I discovered, too, that I could so accustom myself to the noise that it became like a silence to me. And I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough. Even the long hours, the early rising and the regularity enforced by the clangor of the bell were good discipline for one who was naturally inclined to dally and to dream, and who loved her own personal liberty with a willful rebellion against control. Perhaps I could have brought myself into the limitations of order and method in no other way. Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me most good. But when I was sincerest with myself, as also when I thought least about it, I know that I was glad to be alive, and to be just where I was. It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circumstances over which we have no control; but it is a greater victory when we can make those circumstances our helpers, when we can appreciate the good there is in them. It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me, looking me in the face, and saying, "Child, you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me, before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect." It was so with this disagreeable necessity of living among many people. There is nothing more miserable than to lose the feeling of our own distinctiveness, since that is our only clue to the Purpose behind us and the End before us. But when we have discovered that human beings are not a mere "mass," but an orderly Whole, of which we are a part, it is all so different! This we working-girls might have learned from the webs of cloth we saw woven around us. Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily. Left to itself, it would be only a loose, useless filament. Trying to wander in an independent or a disconnected way among the other threads, it would make of the whole web an inextricable snarl. Yet each little thread must be as firmly spun as if it were the only one, or the result would be a worthless fabric. That we are entirely separate, while yet we entirely belong to the Whole, is a truth that we learn to rejoice in, as we come to understand more and more of ourselves, and of this human life of ours, which seems so complicated, and yet is so simple. And when we once get a glimpse of the Divine Plan in it all, and know that to be just where we are, doing just what we are doing just at this hour because it is our appointed hour,--when we become aware that this is the very best thing possible for us in God's universe, the hard task grows easy, the tiresome employment welcome and delightful. Having fitted ourselves to our present work in such a way as this, we are usually prepared for better work, and are sent to take a better place. Perhaps this is one of the unfailing laws of progress in our being. Perhaps the Master of Life always rewards those who do their little faithfully by giving them some greater opportunity for faithfulness. Certainly, it is a comfort, wherever we are, to say to ourselves:-- "Thou camest not to thy place by accident, It is the very place God meant for thee." IX. MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS. THE pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates arose partly from their having come from great distances, regions unknown to us, as the northern districts of Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont were, in those days of stage-coach traveling, when rail-roads had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another. It seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody who had really seen mountains and lived among them. One of the younger girls, who worked beside me during my very first days in the mill, had come from far up near the sources of the Merrimack, and she told me a great deal about her home, and about farm-life among the hills. I listened almost with awe when she said that she lived in a valley where the sun set at four o'clock, and where the great snowstorms drifted in so that sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks. To have mountain-summits looking down upon one out of the clouds, summer and winter, by day and by night, seemed to me something both delightful and terrible. And yet here was this girl to whom it all appeared like the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that it was "awful cold, sometimes; the days were so short! and it grew dark so early!" Then she told me about the spinning, and the husking, and the sugar-making, while we sat in a corner together, waiting to replace the full spools by empty ones,--the work usually given to the little girls. I had a great admiration for this girl, because she had come from those wilderness-regions. The scent of pine-woods and checkerberry-leaves seemed to bang about her. I believe I liked her all the better because she said "daown" and "haow." It was part of the mountain-flavor. I tried, on my part, to impress her with stories of the sea; but I did not succeed very well. Her principal comment was, "They don't think much of sailors up aour way." And I received the impression, from her and others, and from my own imagination, that rural life was far more delightful than the life of towns. But there is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heartstrings. A town that still has a great deal of the country in it, one that is rich in beautiful scenery and ancestral associations, is almost like a living being, with a body and a soul. We speak of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother, and think of ourselves as her sons and daughters. So we felt, my sisters and I, about our dear native town of Beverly. Its miles of sea-border, almost every sunny cove and rocky headland of which was a part of some near relative's homestead, were only half a day's journey distant; and the misty ocean-spaces beyond still widened out on our imagination from the green inland landscape around us. But the hills sometimes shut us in, body and soul. To those who have been reared by the sea a wide horizon is a necessity, both for the mind and for the eye. We had many opportunities of escape towards our native shores, for the larger part of our large family still remained there, and there was a constant coming and going among us. The stagedriver looked upon us as his especial charge, and we had a sense of personal property in the Salem and Lowell stagecoach, which had once, like a fairy-godmother's coach, rumbled down into our own little lane, taken possession of us, and carried us off to a new home. My married sisters had families growing up about them, and they liked to have us younger ones come and help take care of their babies. One of them sent for me just when the close air and long days' work were beginning to tell upon my health, and it was decided that I had better go. The salt wind soon restored my strength, and those months of quiet family life were very good for me. Like most young girls, I had a motherly fondness for little children, and my two baby-nephews were my pride and delight. The older one had a delicate constitution, and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in his eyes, that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that he should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump, vigorous urchin, three or four months old, did, without doubt, "feel his life in every limb." He was my especial charge, for his brother's clinging weakness gave him, the first-born, the place nearest his mother's heart. The baby bore the family name, mine and his mother's; "our little Lark," we sometimes called him, for his wide-awakeness and his merry-heartedness.(Alas! neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be men! One page of my home-memories is sadly written over with their elegy, the "Graves of a Household." Father, mother, and four sons, an entire family, long since passed away from earthly sight.) The tie between my lovely baby-nephew and myself became very close. The first two years of a child's life are its most appealing years, and call out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which it leans for protection. I think I should have missed one of the best educating influences of my youth, if I had not had the care of that baby for a year or more just as I entered my teens. I was never so happy as when I held him in my arms, sleeping or waking; and he, happy anywhere, was always contented when he was with me. I was as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed to combine baby and book. Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop" was just then coming out in a Philadelphia weekly paper, and I read it with the baby playing at my feet, or lying across my lap, in an unfinished room given up to sea-chests and coffee-bags and spicy foreign odors. (My cherub's papa was a sea-captain, usually away on his African voyages.) Little Nell and her grandfather became as real to me as my darling charge, and if a tear from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as he slept, he was not saddened by it. When he awoke he was irrepressible; clutching at my hair with his stout pink fists, and driving all dream-people effectually out of my head. Like all babies, he was something of a tyrant; but that brief, sweet despotism ends only too soon. I put him gratefully down, dimpled, chubby, and imperious, upon the list of my girlhood's teachers. My sister had no domestic help besides mine, so I learned a good deal about general housework. A girl's preparation for life was, in those days, considered quite imperfect, who had no practical knowledge of that kind. We were taught, indeed, how to do everything that a woman might be called upon to do under any circumstances, for herself or for the household she lived in. It was one of the advantages of the old simple way of living, that the young daughters of the house were, as a matter of course, instructed in all these things. They acquired the habit of being ready for emergencies, and the family that required no outside assistance was delightfully independent. A young woman would have been considered a very inefficient being who could not make and mend and wash and iron her own clothing, and get three regular meals and clear them away every day, besides keeping the house tidy, and doing any other needed neighborly service, such as sitting all night by a sick-bed. To be "a good watcher" was considered one of the most important of womanly attainments. People who lived side by side exchanged such services without waiting to be asked, and they seemed to be happiest of whom such kindnesses were most expected. Every kind of work brings its own compensations and attractions. I really began to like plain sewing; I enjoyed sitting down for a whole afternoon of it, fingers flying and thoughts flying faster still,--the motion of the hands seeming to set the mind astir. Such afternoons used to bring me throngs of poetic suggestions, particularly if I sat by an open window and could hear the wind blowing and a bird or two singing. Nature is often very generous in opening her heart to those who must keep their hands employed. Perhaps it is because she is always quietly at work herself, and so sympathizes with her busy human friends. And possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it--whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day, and who will make us feel, at evening, that the day was well worth its fatigues. I found my practical experience of housekeeping and baby-tending very useful to me afterwards at the West, in my sister Emilie's family, when she was disabled by illness. I think, indeed, that every item of real knowledge I ever acquired has come into use somewhere or somehow in the course of the years. But these were not the things I had most wished to do. The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,--a world of which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses, and I did not like to feel the horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner as this. And the worst of it was that I was getting too easy and contented, too indifferent to the higher realities which my work and my thoughtful companions had kept keenly clear before me. I felt myself slipping into an inward apathy from which it was hard to rouse myself. I could not let it go on so. I must be where my life could expand. It was hard to leave the dear little fellow I had taught to walk and to talk, but I knew he would not be inconsolable. So I only said "I must go,"--and turned my back upon the sea, and my face to the banks of the Merrimack. When I returned I found that I enjoyed even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on. I liked to feel the people around me, even those whom I did not know, as a wave may like to feel the surrounding waves urging it forward, with or against its own will. I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out what. Something to do; it might be very little, but still it would be my own work. And then there was the better something which I had almost forgotten--to be! Underneath my dull thoughts the old aspirations were smouldering, the old ideals rose and beckoned to me through the rekindling light. It was always aspiration rather than ambition by which I felt myself stirred. I did not care to outstrip others, and become what is called "distinguished," were that a possibility, so much as I longed to answer the Voice that invited, ever receding, up to invisible heights, however unattainable they might seem. I was conscious of a desire that others should feel something coming to them out of my life like the breath of flowers, the whisper of the winds, the warmth of the sunshine, and the depth of the sky. That, I felt, did not require great gifts or a fine education. We might all be that to each other. And there was no opportunity for vanity or pride in receiving a beautiful influence, and giving it out again. I do not suppose that I definitely thought all this, though I find that the verses I wrote for our two mill magazines at about this time often expressed these and similar longings. They were vague, and they were too likely to dissipate themselves in mere dreams. But our aspirations come to us from a source far beyond ourselves. Happy are they who are "not disobedient unto the heavenly vision"! A girl of sixteen sees the world before her through rose-tinted mists, a blending of celestial colors and earthly exhalations, and she cannot separate their elements, if she would; they all belong to the landscape of her youth. It is the mystery of the meeting horizons,--the visible beauty seeking to lose and find itself in the Invisible. In returning to my daily toil among workmates from the hill-country, the scenery to which they belonged became also a part of my life. They brought the mountains with them, a new background and a new hope. We shared an uneven path and homely occupations; but above us hung glorious summits never wholly out of sight. Every blossom and every dewdrop at our feet was touched with some tint of that far-off splendor, and every pebble by the wayside was a messenger from the peak that our feet would stand upon by and by. The true climber knows the delight of trusting his path, of following it without seeing a step before him, or a glimpse of blue sky above him, sometimes only knowing that it is the right path because it is the only one, and because it leads upward. This our daily duty was to us. Though we did not always know it, the faithful plodder was sure to win the heights. Unconsciously we learned the lesson that only by humble Doing can any of us win the lofty possibilities of Being. For indeed, what we all want to find is not so much our place as our path. The path leads to the place, and the place, when we have found it, is only a clearing by the roadside, an opening into another path. And no comrades are so dear as those who have broken with us a pioneer road which it will be safe and good for others to follow; which will furnish a plain clue for all bewildered travelers hereafter. There is no more exhilarating human experience than this, and perhaps it is the highest angelic one. It may be that some such mutual work is to link us forever with one another in the Infinite Life. The girls who toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women. They practically said, by numbering themselves among factory girls, that in our country no real odium could be attached to any honest toil that any self-respecting woman might undertake. I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted to grow up among those active, interesting girls, whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives, but had principle and purpose distinctly their own. Their vigor of character was a natural development. The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred years before. Their grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life, had known the horrors of savage warfare when the beautiful valleys of the Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from Canada to the white settlements. Those young women did justice to their inheritance. They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was shamed into activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood. Often during the many summers and autumns that of late years I have spent among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the mountainsides, where I could listen to the first song of the little brooks setting out on their journey to join the very river that flowed at my feet when I was a working girl on its banks,--the Merrimack,--I have felt as if I could also hear the early music of my workmates' lives, those who were born among these glorious summits. Pure, strong, crystalline natures, carrying down with them the light of blue skies and the freshness of free winds to their place of toil, broadening and strengthening as they went on, who can tell how they have refreshed the world, how beautifully they have blended their being with the great ocean of results? A brook's life is like the life of a maiden. The rivers receive their strength from the rock-born hills, from the unfailing purity of the mountain-streams. A girl's place in the world is a very strong one: it is a pity that she does not always see it so. It is strongest through her natural impulse to steady herself by leaning upon the Eternal Life, the only Reality; and her weakness comes also from her inclination to lean against something,--upon an unworthy support, rather than none at all. She often lets her life get broken into fragments among the flimsy trellises of fashion and conventionality, when it might be a perfect thing in the upright beauty of its own consecrated freedom. Yet girlhood seldom appreciates itself. We often hear a girl wishing that she were a boy. That seems so strange! God made no mistake in her creation. He sent her into the world full of power and will to be a helper; and only He knows how much his world needs help. She is here to make this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place, without and within,--a true home for every one of his children. It matters not if she is poor, if she has to toil for her daily bread, or even if she is surrounded by coarseness and uncongeniality: nothing can deprive her of her natural instinct to help, of her birthright as a helper. These very hindrances may, with faith and patience, develop in her a nobler womanhood. No; let girls be as thankful that they are girls as that they are human beings; for they also, according to his own loving plan for them, were created in the image of God. Their real power, the divine dowry of womanhood, is that of receiving and giving inspiration. In this a girl often surpasses her brother; and it is for her to hold firmly and faithfully to her holiest instincts, so that when he lets his standard droop, she may, through her spiritual strength, be a standard bearer for him. Courage and self-reliance are now held to be virtues as womanly as they are manly; for the world has grown wise enough to see that nothing except a life can really help another life. It is strange that it should ever have held any other theory about woman. That was a true use of the word "help" that grew up so naturally in the rendering and receiving of womanly service in the old-fashioned New England household. A girl came into a family as one of the home-group, to share its burdens, to feel that they were her own. The woman who employed her, if her nature was at all generous, could not feel that money alone was an equivalent for a heart's service; she added to it her friendship, her gratitude and esteem. The domestic problem can never be rightly settled until the old idea of mutual help is in some way restored. This is a question for girls of the present generation to consider, and she who can bring about a practical solution of it will win the world's gratitude. We used sometimes to see it claimed, in public prints, that it would be better for all of us mill-girls to be working in families, at domestic service, than to be where we were. Perhaps the difficulties of modern housekeepers did begin with the opening of the Lowell factories. Country girls were naturally independent, and the feeling that at this new work the few hours they had of every-day leisure were entirely their own was a satisfaction to them. They preferred it to going out as "hired help." It was like a young man's pleasure in entering upon business for himself. Girls had never tried that experiment before, and they liked it. It brought out in them a dormant strength of character which the world did not previously see, but now fully acknowledges. Of course they had a right to continue at that freer kind of work as long as they chose, although their doing so increased the perplexities of the housekeeping problem for themselves even, since many of them were to become, and did become, American house-mistresses. It would be a step towards the settlement of this vexed and vexing question if girls would decline to classify each other by their occupations, which among us are usually only temporary, and are continually shifting from one pair of hands to another. Changes of fortune come so abruptly that the millionaire's daughter of to-day may be glad to earn her living by sewing or sweeping tomorrow. It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood. Let her ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or little sister spoken of as a shop-girl, or a factory-girl, or a servant-girl, if necessity had compelled her for a time to be employed in either of the ways indicated. If she would shrink from it a little, then she is a little inhuman when she puts her unknown human sisters who are so occupied into a class by themselves, feeling herself to be somewhat their superior. She is really the superior person who has accepted her work and is doing it faithfully, whatever it is. This designating others by their casual employments prevents one from making real distinctions, from knowing persons as persons. A false standard is set up in the minds of those who classify and of those who are classified. Perhaps it is chiefly the fault of ladies themselves that the word "lady" has nearly lost its original meaning (a noble one) indicating sympathy and service;--bread-giver to those who are in need. The idea that it means something external in dress or circumstances has been too generally adopted by rich and poor; and this, coupled with the sweeping notion that in our country one person is just as good as another, has led to ridiculous results, like that of saleswomen calling themselves "sales-ladies." I have even heard a chambermaid at a hotel introduce herself to guests as "the chamber-lady." I do not believe that any Lowell mill-girl was ever absurd enough to wish to be known as a "factory-lady," although most of them knew that "factory-girl" did not represent a high type of womanhood in the Old World. But they themselves belonged to the New World, not to the Old; and they were making their own traditions, to hand down to their Republican descendants--one of which was and is that honest work has no need to assert itself or to humble itself in a nation like ours, but simply to take its place as one of the foundation-stones of the Republic. The young women who worked at Lowell had the advantage of living in a community where character alone commanded respect. They never, at their work or away from it, heard themselves contemptuously spoken of on account of their occupation, except by the ignorant or weak-minded, whose comments they were of course to sensible to heed. We may as well acknowledge that one of the unworthy tendencies of womankind is towards petty estimates of other women. This classifying habit illustrates the fact. If we must classify our sisters, let us broaden ourselves by making large classifications. We might all place ourselves in one of two ranks--the women who do something and the women who do nothing; the first being of course the only creditable place to occupy. And if we would escape from our pettinesses, as we all may and should, the way to do it is to find the key to other lives, and live in their largeness, by sharing their outlook upon life. Even poorer people's windows will give us a new horizon, and people's windows will give us a new horizon, and often a far broader one than our own. X. MILL-GIRLS' MAGAZINES THERE was a passage from Cowper that my sister used to quote to us, because, she said, she often repeated it to herself, and found that it did her good:-- "In such a world, so thorny, and where none Finds happiness unblighted, or if found, Without some thistly sorrow at its side, It seems the part of wisdom, and no sin Against the law of love, to measure lots With less distinguished than ourselves, that thus We may with patience bear our moderate ills, And sympathize with others, suffering more." I think she made us feel--she certainly made me feel--that our lot was in many ways an unusually fortunate one, and full of responsibilities. She herself was always thinking what she could do for others, not only immediately about her, but in the farthest corners of the earth. She had her Sabbath-school class, and visited all the children in it: she sat up all night, very often, watching by a sick girl's bed, in the hospital or in some distant boarding-house; she gave money to send to missionaries, or to help build new churches in the city, when she was earning only eight or ten dollars a month clear of her board, and could afford herself but one "best dress," besides her working clothes. That best dress was often nothing but a Merrimack print. But she insisted that it was a great saving of trouble to have just this one, because she was not obliged to think what she should wear if she were invited out to spend an evening. And she kept track of all the great philanthropic movements of the day. She felt deeply the shame and wrong of American slavery, and tried to make her workmates see and feel it too.(Petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were circulated nearly every year among the mill-girls, and received thousands of signatures.) Whenever she was not occupied with her work or her reading, or with looking after us younger ones,--two or three hours a day was all the time she could call her own,--she was sure to be away on some errand of friendliness or mercy. Those who do most for others are always those who are called upon continually to do a little more, and who find a way to do it. People go to them as to a bank that never fails. And surely, they who have an abundance of life in themselves and who give their life out freely to others are the only really rich. Two dollars a week sounds very small, but in Emilie's hands it went farther than many a princely fortune of to-day, because she managed with it to make so many people happy. But then she wanted absolutely nothing for herself; nothing but the privilege of helping others. I seem to be eulogizing my sister, though I am simply relating matters of fact. I could not, however, illustrate my own early experience, except by the lives around me which most influenced mine. And it was true that our smaller and more self-centred natures in touching hers caught something of her spirit, the contagion of her warm heart and healthy energy. For health is more contagious than disease, and lives that exhale sweetness around them from the inner heaven of their souls keep the world wholesome. I tried to follow her in my faltering way, and was gratified when she would send me to look up one of her stray children, or would let me watch with her at night by a sick-bed. I think it was partly for the sake of keeping as close to her as I could--though not without a sincere desire to consecrate myself to the Best--that I became, at about thirteen, a member of the church which we attended. Our minister was a scholarly man, of refined tastes and a sensitive organization, fervently spiritual, and earnestly devoted to his work. It was all education to grow up under his influence. I shall never forget the effect left by the tones of his voice when he first spoke to me, a child of ten years, at a neighborhood prayer-meeting in my mother's sitting-room. He had been inviting his listeners to the friendship of Christ, and turning to my little sister and me, he said,-- "And these little children, too; won't they come?" The words, and his manner of saving them, brought the tears to my eyes. Once only before, far back in my earlier childhood--I have already mentioned the incident--had I heard that Name spoken so tenderly and familiarly, yet so reverently. It was as if he had been gazing into the face of an invisible Friend, and bad just turned from Him to look into ours, while he gave us his message, that He loved us. In that moment I again caught a glimpse of One whom I had always known, but had often forgotten,--One who claimed me as his Father's child, and would never let me go. It was a real Face that I saw, a real Voice that I heard, a real Person who was calling me. I could not mistake the Presence that had so often drawn near me and shone with sunlike eyes into my soul. The words, "Lord, lift Thou up the light of thy countenance upon us!" had always given me the feeling that a beautiful sunrise does. It is indeed a sunrise text, for is not He the Light of the World? And peaceful sunshine seemed pouring in at the windows of my life on the day when I stood in the aisle before the pulpit with a group, who, though young, were all much older than myself, and took with them the vows that bound us to his service. Of what was then said and read I scarcely remember more than the words of heavenly welcome in the Epistle, "Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners." It was like coming home, like stepping a little farther beyond the threshold in at the open door of our Father's house. Perhaps I was too young to assume those vows. Had I deferred it a few years there would have been serious intellectual hindrances. But it was not the Articles of Faith I was thinking of, although there was a long list of them, to which we all bowed assent, as was the custom. It was the homecoming to the "house not made with hands," the gladness of signifying that I belonged to God's spiritual family, and was being drawn closer to his heart, with whom none of us are held as "strangers and foreigners." I felt that I was taking up again the clue which had been put into my childish hand at baptism, and was being led on by it into the unfolding mysteries of life. Should I ever let it slip from me, and lose the way to the "many mansions" that now seemed so open and so near? I could not think so. It is well that we cannot foresee our falterings and failures. At least I could never forget that I had once felt my own and other lives bound together with the Eternal Life by an invisible thread. The vague, fitful desire I had felt from my childhood to be something to the world I lived in, to give it something of the the inexpressible sweetness that often seemed pouring through me, I knew not whence, now began to shape itself into a definite outreach towards the Source of all spiritual life. To draw near to the One All-Beautiful Being, Christ, to know Him as our spirits may know The Spirit, to receive the breath of his infinitely loving Life into mine, that I might breathe out that fragrance again into the lives around me--this was the longing wish that, half hidden from myself, lay deep beneath all other desires of my soul. This was what religion grew to mean to me, what it is still growing to mean, more simply and more clearly as the years go on. The heart must be very humble to which this heavenly approach is permitted. It knows that it has nothing in itself, nothing for others, which it has not received. The loving Voice of Him who gives his friends his errands to do whispers through them constantly, "Ye are not your own." There may be those who would think my narrative more entertaining, if I omitted these inner experiences, and related only lighter incidents. But one thing I was aware of, from the time I began to think and to wonder about my own life--that what I felt and thought was far more real to me than the things that happened. Circumstances are only the keys that unlock for us the secret of ourselves; and I learned very early that though there is much to enjoy in this beautiful outside world, there is much more to love, to believe in, and to seek, in the invisible world out of which it all grows. What has best revealed our true selves to ourselves must be most helpful to others, and one can willingly sacrifice some natural reserves to such an end. Besides, if we tell our own story at all, we naturally wish to tell the truest part of it. Work, study, and worship were interblended in our life. The church was really the home-centre to many, perhaps to most of us; and it was one of the mill regulations that everybody should go to church somewhere. There must have been an earnest group of ministers at Lowell, since nearly all the girls attended public worship from choice. Our minister joined us in our social gatherings, often inviting us to his own house, visiting us at our work, accompanying us on our picnics down the river-bank,--a walk of a mile or so took us into charmingly picturesque scenery, and we always walked,--suggesting books for our reading, and assisting us in our studies. The two magazines published by the mill-girls, the "Lowell Offering" and the "Operatives' Magazine," originated with literary meetings in the vestry of two religious societies, the first in the Universalist Church, the second in the First Congregational, to which my sister and I belonged. On account of our belonging there, our contributions were given to the "Operatives' Magazine," the first periodical for which I ever wrote, issued by the literary society of which our minister took charge. He met us on regular evenings, read aloud our poems and sketches, and made such critical suggestions as he thought desirable. This magazine was edited by two young women, both of whom had been employed in the mills, although at that time the were teachers in the public schools--a change which was often made by mill-girls after a few months' residence at Lowell. A great many of them were district-school teachers at their homes in the summer, spending only the winters at their work. The two magazines went on side by side for a year or two, and then were united in the "Lowell Offering" which had made the first experiment of the kind by publishing a trial number or two at irregular intervals. My sister had sent some verses of mine, on request, to be published in one of those specimen numbers. But we were not acquainted with the editor of the "Offering," and we knew only a few of its contributors. The Universalist Church, in the vestry of which they met, was in a distant part of the city. Socially, the place where we worshiped was the place where we naturally came together in other ways. The churches were all filled to overflowing, so that the grouping together of the girls by their denominational preferences was almost unavoidable. It was in some such way as this that two magazines were started instead of one. If the girls who enjoyed writing had not been so many and so scattered, they might have made the better arrangement of joining their forces from the beginning. I was too young a contributor to be at first of much value to either periodical. They began their regular issues, I think, while I was the nursemaid of my little nephews at Beverly. When I returned to Lowell, at about sixteen, I found my sister Emilie interested in the "Operatives' Magazine," and we both contributed to it regularly, until it was merged in the "Lowell Offering," to which we then transferred our writing efforts. It did not occur to us to call these efforts "literary." I know that I wrote just as I did for our little "Diving Bell,"--as a sort of pastime, and because my daily toil was mechanical, and furnished no occupation for my thoughts. Perhaps the fact that most of us wrote in this way accounted for the rather sketchy and fragmentary character of our "Magazine." It gave evidence that we thought, and that we thought upon solid and serious matters; but the criticism of one of our superintendents upon it, very kindly given, was undoubtedly just: "It has plenty of pith, but it lacks point." The "Offering" had always more of the literary spirit and touch. It was, indeed, for the first two years, edited by a gentleman of acknowledged literary ability. But people seemed to be more interested in it after it passed entirely into the bands of the girls themselves. The "Operatives' Magazine" had a decidedly religious tone. We who wrote for it were loyal to our Puritanic antecedents, and considered it all-important that our lightest actions should be moved by some earnest impulse from behind. We might write playfully, but there must be conscience and reverence somewhere within it all. We had been taught, and we believed, that idle words were a sin, whether spoken or written. This, no doubt, gave us a gravity of expression rather unnatural to youth. In looking over the bound volume of this magazine, I am amused at the grown-up style of thought assumed by myself, probably its very youngest contributor. I wrote a dissertation on "Fame," quoting from Pollok, Cowper, and Milton, and ending with Diedrich Knickerbocker's definition of immortal fame,--"Half a page of dirty paper." For other titles I had "Thoughts on Beauty;" "Gentility;" "Sympathy," etc. And in one longish poem, entitled "My Childhood" (written when I was about fifteen), I find verses like these, which would seem to have come out of a mature experience:-- My childhood! O those pleasant days, when everything seemed free, And in the broad and verdant fields I frolicked merrily; When joy came to my bounding heart with every wild bird's song, And Nature's music in my ears was ringing all day long! And yet I would not call them back, those blessed times of yore, For riper years are fraught with joys I dreamed not of before. The labyrinth of Science opes with wonders every day; And friendship hath full many a flower to cheer life's dreary way. And glancing through the pages of the "Lowell Offering" a year or two later, I see that I continued to dismalize myself at times, quite unnecessarily. The title of one sting of morbid verses is "The Complaint of a Nobody," in which I compare myself to a weed growing up in a garden; and the conclusion of it all is this stanza:-- "When the fierce storms are raging, I will not repine, Though I'm heedlessly crushed in the strife; For surely 't were better oblivion were mine Than a worthless, inglorious life. Now I do not suppose that I really considered myself a weed, though I did sometimes fancy that a different kind of cultivation would tend to make me a more useful plant. I am glad to remember that these discontented fits were only occasional, for certainly they were unreasonable. I was not unhappy; this was an affectation of unhappiness; and half conscious that it was, I hid it behind a different signature from my usual one. How truly Wordsworth describes this phase of undeveloped feeling:-- "In youth sad fancies we affect, In luxury of disrespect To our own prodigal excess Of too familiar happiness." It is a very youthful weakness to exaggerate passing moods into deep experiences, and if we put them down on paper, we get a fine opportunity of laughing at ourselves, if we live to outgrow them, as most of us do. I think I must have had a frequent fancy that I was not long for this world. Perhaps I thought an early death rather picturesque; many young people do. There is a certain kind of poetry that fosters this idea; that delights in imaginary youthful victims, and has, reciprocally, its youthful devotees. One of my blank verse poems in the "Offering" is entitled "The Early Doomed." It begins,-- And must I die? The world is bright to me, And everything that looks upon me, smiles. Another poem is headed "Memento Mori;" and another, entitled a "Song in June," which ought to be cheerful, goes off into the doleful request to somebody, or anybody, to Weave me a shroud in the month of June! I was, perhaps, healthier than the average girl, and had no predisposition to a premature decline; and in reviewing these absurdities of my pen, I feel like saying to any young girl who inclines to rhyme, "Don't sentimentalize! Write more of what you see than of what you feel, and let your feelings realize themselves to others in the shape of worthy actions. Then they will be natural, and will furnish you with something worth writing." It is fair to myself to explain, however, that many of these verses of mine were written chiefly as exercises in rhythmic expression. I remember this distinctly about one of my poems with a terrible title,--"The Murderer's Request,"--in which I made an imaginary criminal pose for me, telling where he would not and where he would like to be buried. I modeled my verses,-- "Bury ye me on some storm-rifted mountain, O'erhanging the depths of a yawning abyss,"-- upon Byron's, "Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;" and I was only trying to see how near I could approach to his exquisite metre. I do not think I felt at all murderous in writing it; but a more innocent subject would have been in better taste, and would have met the exigencies of the dactyl quite as well. It is also only fair to myself to say that my rhyming was usually of a more wholesome kind. I loved Nature as I knew her,--in our stern, blustering, stimulating New England,--and I chanted the praises of Winter, of snow-storms, and of March winds (I always took pride in my birth month, March), with hearty delight. Flowers had begun to bring me messages from their own world when I was a very small child, and they never withdrew their companionship from my thoughts, for there came summers when I could only look out of the mill window and dream about them. I had one pet window plant of my own, a red rosebush, almost a perpetual bloomer, that I kept beside me at my work for years. I parted with it only when I went away to the West, and then with regret, for it had been to me like a human little friend. But the wild flowers had my heart. I lived and breathed with them, out under the free winds of heaven; and when I could not see them, I wrote about them. Much that I contributed to those mill-magazine pages, they suggested,--my mute teachers, comforters, and inspirers. It seems to me that any one who does not care for wild flowers misses half the sweetness of this mortal life. Horace Smith's "Hymn to the Flowers" was a continual delight to me, after I made its acquaintance. It seemed as if all the wild blossoms of the woods had wandered in and were twining themselves around the whirring spindles, as I repeated it, verse after verse. Better still, they drew me out, in fancy, to their own forest-haunts under "cloistered boughs," where each swinging "floral bell" was ringing "a call to prayer," and making "Sabbath in the fields." Bryant's "Forest Hymn" did me an equally beautiful service. I knew every word of it. It seemed to me that Bryant understood the very heart and soul of the flowers as hardly anybody else did. He made me feel as if they were really related to us human beings. In fancy my feet pressed the turf where they grew, and I knew them as my little sisters, while my thoughts touched them, one by one, saying with him,-- "That delicate forest-flower, With scented breath, and look so like a smile, Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould, An emanation of the indwelling Life, A visible token of the upholding Love, That are the soul of this wide universe." I suppose that most of my readers will scarcely be older than I was when I wrote my sermonish little poems under the inspiration of the flowers at my factory work, and perhaps they will be interested in reading a specimen or two from the "Lowell Offering:"-- LIVE LIKE THE FLOWERS. Cheerfully wave they o'er valley and mountain, Gladden the desert, and smile by the fountain; Pale discontent in no young blossom lowers:-- Live like the flowers! Meekly their buds in the heavy rain bending, Softly their hues with the mellow light blending, Gratefully welcoming sunlight and showers:-- Live like the flowers! Freely their sweets on the wild breezes flinging, While in their depths are new odors upspringing:-- (Blessedness twofold of Love's holy dowers,) Live like the flowers! Gladly they heed Who their brightness has given: Blooming on earth, look they all up to heaven; Humbly look up from their loveliest bowers:-- Live like the flowers! Peacefully droop they when autumn is sighing; Breathing mild fragrance around them in dying, Sleep they in hope of Spring's freshening hours:-- Die like the flowers! The prose-poem that follows was put into a rhymed version by several unknown hands in periodicals of that day, so that at last I also wrote one, in self-defense, to claim my own waif. But it was a prose-poem that I intended it to be, and I think it is better so. "BRING BACK MY FLOWERS." On the bank of a rivulet sat a rosy child. Her lap was filled with flowers, and a garland of rose-buds was twined around her neck. Her face was as radiant as the sunshine that fell upon it, and her voice was as clear as that of the bird which warbled at her side. The little stream went singing on, and with every gush of its music the child lifted a flower in her dimpled hand, and, with a merry laugh, threw it upon the water. In her glee she forgot that her treasures were growing less, and with the swift motion of childhood, she flung them upon the sparkling tide, until every bud and blossom had disappeared. Then, seeing her loss, she sprang to her feet, and bursting into tears, called aloud to the stream, "Bring back my flowers!" But the stream danced along, regardless of her sorrow; and as it bore the blooming burden away, her words came back in a taunting echo, along its reedy margin. And long after, amid the wailing of the breeze and the fitful bursts of childish grief, was heard the fruitless cry, "Bring back my flowers!" Merry maiden, who art idly wasting the precious moments so bountifully bestowed upon thee, see in the thoughtless child an emblem of thyself! Each moment is a perfumed flower. Let its fragrance be diffused in blessings around thee, and ascend as sweet incense to the beneficent Giver! Else, when thou hast carelessly flung them from thee, and seest them receding on the swift waters of Time, thou wilt cry, in tones more sorrowful than those of the weeping child, "Bring back my flowers!" And thy only answer will be an echo from the shadowy Past,--"Bring back my flowers!" In the above, a reminiscence of my German studies comes back to me. I was an admirer of Jean Paul, and one of my earliest attempts at translation was his "New Year's Night of an Unhappy Man," with its yet haunting glimpse of "a fair long paradise beyond the mountains." I am not sure but the idea of trying my hand at a "prose-poem" came to me from Richter, though it may have been from Herder or Krummacher, whom I also enjoyed and attempted to translate. I have a manuscript-book still, filled with these youthful efforts. I even undertook to put German verse into English verse, not wincing at the greatest--Goethe and Schiller. These studies were pursued in the pleasant days of cloth-room leisure, when my work claimed me only seven or eight hours in a day. I suppose I should have tried to write,--perhaps I could not very well have helped attempting it,--under any circumstances. My early efforts would not, probably, have found their way into print, however, but for the coincident publication of the two mill-girls' magazines, just as I entered my teens. I fancy that almost everything any of us offered them was published, though I never was let in to editorial secrets. The editors of both magazines were my seniors, and I felt greatly honored by their approval of my contributions. One of the "Offering" editors was a Unitarian clergyman's daughter, and had received an excellent education. The other was a remarkably brilliant and original young woman, who wrote novels that were published by the Harpers of New York while she was employed at Lowell. The two had rooms together for a time, where the members of the "Improvement Circle," chiefly composed of "Offering" writers, were hospitably received. The "Operatives' Magazine" and the "Lowell Offering" were united in the year 1842, under the title of the "Lowell Offering and Magazine." (And--to correct a mistake which has crept into print--I will say that I never attained the honor of being editor of either of these magazines. I was only one of their youngest contributors. The "Lowell Offering" closed its existence when I was a little more than twenty years old. The only continuous editing I have ever been engaged in was upon "Our Young Folks." About twenty years ago I was editor-in-charge of that magazine for a year or more, and I had previously been its assistant-editor from its beginning. These explanatory items, however, do not quite belong to my narrative, and I return to our magazines.) We did not receive much criticism; perhaps it would have been better for us if we had. But then we did lot set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased, and seeing how it looked in print. It was good practice for us, and that was all that we desired. We were complimented and quoted. When a Philadelphia paper copied one of my little poems, suggesting some verbal improvements, and predicting recognition for me in the future, I felt for the first time that there might be such a thing as public opinion worth caring for, in addition to doing one's best for its own sake. Fame, indeed, never had much attraction for me, except as it took the form of friendly recognition and the sympathetic approval of worthy judges. I wished to do good and true things, but not such as would subject me to the stare of coldly curious eyes. I could never imagine a girl feeling any pleasure in placing herself "before the public." The privilege of seclusion must be the last one a woman can willingly sacrifice. And, indeed, what we wrote was not remarkable,--perhaps no more so than the usual school compositions of intelligent girls. It would hardly be worth while to refer to it particularly, had not the Lowell girls and their magazines been so frequently spoken of as something phenomenal. But it was a perfectly natural outgrowth of those girls' previous life. For what were we? Girls who were working in a factory for the time, to be sure; but none of us had the least idea of continuing at that kind of work permanently. Our composite photograph, had it been taken, would have been the representative New England girlhood of those days. We had all been fairly educated at public or private schools, and many of us were resolutely bent upon obtaining a better education. Very few were among us without some distinct plan for bettering the condition of themselves and those they loved. For the first time, our young women had come forth from their home retirement in a throng, each with her own individual purpose. For twenty years or so, Lowell might have been looked upon as a rather select industrial school for young people. The girls there were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young women's colleges to-day. They had come to work with their hands, but they could not hinder the working of their minds also. Their mental activity was overflowing at every possible outlet. Many of them were supporting themselves at schools like Bradford Academy or Ipswich Seminary half the year, by working in the mills the other half. Mount Holyoke Seminary broke upon the thoughts of many of them as a vision of hope,--I remember being dazzled by it myself for a while,--and Mary Lyon's name was honored nowhere more than among the Lowell mill-girls. Meanwhile they were improving themselves and preparing for their future in every possible way, by purchasing and reading standard books, by attending lectures, and evening classes of their own getting up, and by meeting each other for reading and conversation. That they should write was no more strange than that they should study, or read, or think. And yet there were those to whom it seemed incredible that a girl could, in the pauses of her work, put together words with her pen that it would do to print; and after a while the assertion was circulated, through some distant newspaper, that our magazine was not written by ourselves at all, but by "Lowell lawyers." This seemed almost too foolish a suggestion to contradict, but the editor of the "Offering" thought it best to give the name and occupation of some of the writers by way of refutation. It was for this reason (much against my own wish) that my real name was first attached to anything I wrote. I was then book-keeper in the cloth-room of the Lawrence Mills. We had all used any fanciful signature we chose, varying it as we pleased. After I began to read and love Wordsworth, my favorite nom de plume was "Rotha." In the later numbers of the magazine, the editor more frequently made us of my initials. One day I was surprised by seeing my name in full in Griswold's "Female Poet's;"--no great distinction, however, since there were a hundred names or so, besides. It seemed necessary to give these gossip items about myself; but the real interest of every separate life-story is involved in the larger life-history which is going on around it. We do not know ourselves without our companions and surroundings. I cannot narrate my workmates' separate experiences, but I know that because of having lived among them, and because of having felt the beauty and power of their lives, I am different from what I should otherwise have been, and it is my own fault if I am not better for my life with them. In recalling those years of my girlhood at Lowell, I often think that I knew then what real society is better perhaps than ever since. For in that large gathering together of young womanhood there were many choice natures---some of the choicest in all our excellent New England, and there were no false social standards to hold them apart. It is the best society when people meet sincerely, on the ground of their deepest sympathies and highest aspirations, without conventionality or cliques or affectation; and it was in that way that these young girls met and became acquainted with each other, almost of necessity. There were all varieties of woman-nature among them, all degrees of refinement and cultivation, and, of course, many sharp contrasts of agreeable and disagreeable. It was not always the most cultivated, however, who were the most companionable. There were gentle, untaught girls, as fresh and simple as wild flowers, whose unpretending goodness of heart was better to have than bookishness; girls who loved everybody, and were loved by everybody. Those are the girls that I remember best, and their memory is sweet as a breeze from the clover fields. As I recall the throngs of unknown girlish forms that used to pass and repass me on the familiar road to the mill-gates, and also the few that I knew so well, those with whom I worked, thought, read, wrote, studied, and worshiped, my thoughts send a heartfelt greeting to them all, wherever in God's beautiful, busy universe they may now be scattered:-- "I am glad I have lived in the world with you!" XI. READING AND STUDYING. My return to mill-work involved making acquaintance with a new kind of machinery. The spinning-room was the only one I had hitherto known anything about. Now my sister Emilie found a place for me in the dressing-room, beside herself. It was more airy, and fewer girls were in the room, for the dressing-frame itself was a large, clumsy affair, that occupied a great deal of space. Mine seemed to me as unmanageable as an overgrown spoilt child. It had to be watched in a dozen directions every minute, and even then it was always getting itself and me into trouble. I felt as if the half-live creature, with its great, groaning joints and whizzing fan, was aware of my incapacity to manage it, and had a fiendish spite against me. I contracted an unconquerable dislike to it; indeed, I had never liked, and never could learn to like, any kind of machinery. And this machine finally conquered me. It was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that there were some things I could not do, and I retired from the field, vanquished. The two things I had enjoyed in this room were that my sister was with me, and that our windows looked toward the west. When the work was running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to each other all the sunset-poetry we could remember. Our tastes did not quite agree. Her favorite description of the clouds was from Pollok:-- "They seemed like chariots of saints, By fiery coursers drawn; as brightly hued As if the glorious, bushy, golden locks Of thousand cherubim had been shorn off, And on the temples hung of morn and even." I liked better a translation from the German, beginning "Methinks it were no pain to die On such an eve, while such a sky O'ercanopies the west." And she generally had to hear the whole poem, for I was very fond of it; though the especial verse that I contrasted with hers was,-- "There's peace and welcome in yon sea Of endless blue tranquillity; Those clouds are living things; I trace their veins of liquid gold, And see them silently unfold Their soft and fleecy wings." Then she would tell me that my nature inclined to quietness and harmony, while hers asked for motion and splendor. I wondered whether it really were so. But that huge, creaking framework beside us would continually intrude upon our meditations and break up our discussions, and silence all poetry for us with its dull prose. Emilie found more profitable work elsewhere, and I found some that was less so, but far more satisfactory, as it would give me the openings of leisure which I craved. The paymaster asked, when I left, "Going where on can earn more money?" "No," I answered, "I am going where I can have more time." "Ah, yes!" he said sententiously, "time is money." But that was not my thought about it. "Time is education," I said to myself; for that was what I meant it should be to me. Perhaps I never gave the wage-earning element in work its due weight. It always seemed to me that the Apostle's idea about worldly possessions was the only sensible one,-- "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content." If I could earn enough to furnish that, and have time to study besides,--of course we always gave away a little, however little we had,--it seemed to me a sufficiency. At this time I was receiving two dollars a week, besides my board. Those who were earning much more, and were carefully "laying it up," did not appear to be any happier than I was. I never thought that the possession of money would make me feel rich: it often does seem to have an opposite effect. But then, I have never had the opportunity of knowing, by experience, how it does make one feel. It is something to have been spared the responsibility of taking charge of the Lord's silver and gold. Let us be thankful for what we have not, as well as for what we have! Freedom to live one's life truly is surely more desirable than any earthly acquisition or possession; and at my new work I had hours of freedom every day. I never went back again to the bondage of machinery and a working-day thirteen hours long. The daughter of one of our neighbors, who also went to the same church with us, told me of a vacant place in the cloth-room, where she was, which I gladly secured. This was a low brick building next the counting-room, and a little apart from the mills, where the cloth was folded, stamped, and baled for the market. There were only half a dozen girls of us, who measured the cloth, and kept an account of the pieces baled, and their length in yards. It pleased me much to have something to do which required the use of pen and ink, and I think there must be a good many scraps of verse buried among the blank pages of those old account-books of that found their way there during the frequent half-hours of waiting for the cloth to be brought in from the mills. The only machinery in the room was a hydraulic arrangement for pressing the cloth into bales, managed by two or three men, one of whom was quite a poet, and a fine singer also. His hymns were frequently in request, on public occasions. He lent me the first volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It was a small book, containing mostly Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one of them, fully to appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary to have been a working-girl in slave-labor times. New England Womanhood crowned Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's spirited response to the slaveholder:-- "O, could ye have seen her--that pride of our girls-- Arise and cast back the dark wealth of her curls, With a scorn in her eye that the gazer could feel, And a glance like the sunshine that flashes on steel! Go back, haughty Southron! Go back! for thy gold Is red with the blood of the hearts thou hast sold!" There was in this volume another poem which is not in any of the later editions, the impression of which, as it remains to me in broken snatches, is very beautiful. It began with the lines "Bind up thy tresses, thou beautiful one, Of brown in the shadow, and gold in the sun." It was a refreshment and an inspiration to look into this book between my long rows of figures, and read such poems as "The Angel of Patience," "Follen," "Raphael," and that wonderfully rendered "Hymn" from Lamartine, that used to whisper itself through me after I had read it, like the echo of a spirit's voice:-- "When the Breath Divine is flowing, Zephyr-like o'er all things going, And, as the touch of viewless fingers, Softly on my soul it lingers, Open to a breath the lightest, Conscious of a touch the slightest,-- Then, O Father, Thou alone, From the shadow of thy throne, To the sighing of my breast And its rapture answerest." I grew so familiar with this volume that I felt acquainted with the poet long before I met him. It remained in my desk-drawer for months. I thought it belonged to my poetic friend, the baler of cloth. But one day he informed me that it was a borrowed book; he thought, however, he should claim it for his own, now that he had kept it so long. Upon which remark I delivered it up to the custody of his own conscience, and saw it no more. One day, towards the last of my stay at Lowell (I never changed my work-room again), this same friendly fellow-toiler handed me a poem to read, which some one had sent in to us from the counting-room, with the penciled comment, "Singularly beautiful." It was Poe's "Raven," which had just made its first appearance in some magazine. It seemed like an apparition in literature, indeed; the sensation it created among the staid, measured lyrics of that day, with its flit of spectral wings, and its ghostly refrain of "Nevermore!" was very noticeable. Poe came to Lowell to live awhile, but it was after I had gone away. Our national poetry was at this time just beginning to be well known and appreciated. Bryant had published two volumes, and every school child was familiar with his "Death of the Flowers" and "God's First Temples." Some one lent me the "Voices of the Night," the only collection of Longfellow's verse then issued, I think. The "Footsteps of Angels" glided at once into my memory, and took possession of a permanent place there, with its tender melody. "The Last Leaf" and "Old Ironsides" were favorites with everybody who read poetry at all, but I do not think we Lowell girls had a volume of Dr. Holmes's poems at that time. "The Lady's Book" and "Graham's Magazine" were then the popular periodicals, and the mill-girls took them. I remember that the "nuggets" I used to pick out of one or the other of them when I was quite a child were labeled with the signature of Harriet E. Beecher. "Father Morris," and "Uncle Tim," and others of the delightful "May-Flower" snatches first appeared in this way. Irving's "Sketch-Book" all reading people were supposed to have read, and I recall the pleasure it was to me when one of my sisters came into possession of "Knickerbocker's History of New York." It was the first humorous book, as well as the first history, that I ever cared about. And I was pleased enough--for I was a little girl when my fondness for it began--to hear our minister say that he always read Diedrich Knickerbocker for his tired Monday's recreation. We were allowed to have books in the cloth-room. The absence of machinery permitted that privilege. Our superintendent, who was a man of culture and a Christian gentleman of the Puritan-school, dignified and reserved, used often to stop at my desk in his daily round to see what book I was reading. One day it was Mather's "Magnalia," which I had brought from the public library, with a desire to know something of the early history of New England. He looked a little surprised at the archaeological turn my mind had taken, but his only comment was, "A valuable old book that." It was a satisfaction to have a superintendent like him, whose granite principles, emphasized by his stately figure and bearing, made him a tower of strength in the church and in the community. He kept a silent, kindly, rigid watch over the corporation-life of which he was the head; and only those of us who were incidentally admitted to his confidence knew how carefully we were guarded. We had occasional glimpses into his own well-ordered home-life, at social gatherings. His little daughter was in my infant Sabbath-school class from her fourth to her seventh or eighth year. She sometimes visited me at my work, and we had our frolics among the heaps of cloth, as if we were both children. She had also the same love of hymns that I had as a child, and she would sit by my side and repeat to me one after another that she had learned, not as a task, but because of her delight in them. One of my sincerest griefs in going off to the West was that I should see my little pupil Mary as a child no more. When I came back, she was a grown-up young woman. My friend Anna, who had procured for me the place and work beside her which I liked so much, was not at all a bookish person, but we had perhaps a better time together than if she had been. She was one who found the happiness of her life in doing kindnesses for others, and in helping them bear their burdens. Family reverses had brought her, with her mother and sisters, to Lowell, and this was one strong point of sympathy between my own family and hers. It was, indeed, a bond of neighborly union between a great many households in the young manufacturing city. Anna's manners and language were those of a lady, though she had come from the wilds of Maine, somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Desert, the very name of which seemed in those days to carry one into a wilderness of mountains and waves. We chatted together at our work on all manner of subjects, and once she astonished me by saying confidentially, in a low tone, "Do you know, I am thirty years old!" She spoke as if she thought the fact implied something serious. My surprise was that she should have taken me into her intimate friendship when I was only seventeen. I should hardly have supposed her older than myself, if she had not volunteered the information. When I lifted my eyes from her tall, thin figure to her fair face and somewhat sad blue eyes, I saw that she looked a little worn; but I knew that it was from care for others, strangers as well as her own relatives; and it seemed to me as if those thirty loving years were her rose-garland. I became more attached to her than ever. What a foolish dread it is,--showing unripeness rather than youth,--the dread of growing old! For how can a life be beautified more than by its beautiful years? A living, loving, growing spirit can never be old. Emerson says: "Spring still makes spring in the mind, When sixty years are told;" and some of us are thankful to have lived long enough to bear witness with him to that truth. The few others who measured cloth with us were nice, bright girls, and some of them remarkably pretty. Our work and the room itself were so clean that in summer we could wear fresh muslin dresses, sometimes white ones, without fear of soiling them. This slight difference of apparel and our fewer work-hours seemed to give us a slight advantage over the toilers in the mills opposite, and we occasionally heard ourselves spoken of as "the cloth-room aristocracy." But that was only in fun. Most of us had served an apprenticeship in the mills, and many of our best friends were still there, preferring their work because it brought them more money than we could earn. For myself, no amount of money would have been a temptation, compared with my precious daytime freedom. Whole hours of sunshine for reading, for walking, for studying, for writing, for anything that I wanted to do! The days were so lovely and so long! and yet how fast they slipped away! I had not given up my dream of a better education, and as I could not go to school, I began to study by myself. I had received a pretty thorough drill in the common English branches at the grammar school, and at my employment I only needed a little simple arithmetic. A few of my friends were studying algebra in an evening class, but I had no fancy for mathematics. My first wish was to learn about English Literature, to go back to its very beginnings. It was not then studied even in the higher schools, and I knew no one who could give me any assistance in it, as a teacher. "Percy's Reliques" and "Chambers' Cyclopoedia of English Literature" were in the city library, and I used them, making extracts from Chaucer and Spenser, to fix their peculiarities in my memory, though there was only a taste of them to be had from the Cyclopaedia. Shakespeare I had read from childhood, in a fragmentary way. "The Tempest," and "Midsummer Night's Dream," and "King Lear," I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now I discovered that the historical plays, notably, "Julius Caesar" and "Coriolanus," had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind. But it was easy for me to forget that I was trying to be a literary student, and slip off from Belmont to Venice with Portia to witness the discomfiture of Shylock; although I did pity the miserable Jew, and thought he might at least have been allowed the comfort of his paltry ducats. I do not think that any of my studying at this time was very severe; it was pleasure rather than toil, for I undertook only the tasks I liked. But what I learned remained with me, nevertheless. With Milton I was more familiar than with any other poet, and from thirteen years of age to eighteen he was my preference. My friend Angeline and I (another of my cloth-room associates) made the "Paradise Lost" a language-study in an evening class, under one of the grammar school masters, and I never open to the majestic lines,-- "High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,"-- Without seeing Angeline's kindly, homely face out-lined through that magnificence, instead of the lineaments of the evil angel "by merit raised To that bad eminence." She, too, was much older than I, and a most excellent, energetic, and studious young woman. I wonder if she remembers how hard we tried to get "Beelzebub--than whom, Satan except, none higher sat," into the limits of our grammatical rules,--not altogether with success, I believe. I copied passages from Jeremy Taylor and the old theologians into my note-books, and have found them useful even recently, in preparing compilations. Dryden and the eighteenth century poets generally did not interest me, though I tried to read them from a sense of duty. Pope was an exception, however. Aphorisms from the "Essay on Man" were in as common use among us as those from the Book of Proverbs. Some of my choicest extracts were in the first volume of collected poetry I ever owned, a little red morocco book called "The Young Man's Book of Poetry." It was given me by one of my sisters when I was about a dozen years old, who rather apologized for the young man on the title-page, saying that the poetry was just as good as if he were not there. And, indeed, no young man could have valued it more than I did. It contained selections from standard poets, and choice ones from less familiar sources. One of the extracts was Wordsworth's "Sunset among the Mountains," from the "Excursion," to read which, however often, always lifted me into an ecstasy. That red morocco book was my treasure. It traveled with me to the West, and I meant to keep it as long as I lived. But alas! it was borrowed by a little girl out on the Illinois prairies, who never brought it back. I do not know that I have ever quite forgiven her. I have wished I could look into it again, often and often through the years. But perhaps I ought to be grateful to that little girl for teaching me to be careful about returning borrowed books myself. Only a lover of them can appreciate the loss of one which has been a possession from childhood. Young and Cowper were considered religious reading, and as such I had always known something of them. The songs of Burns were in the air. Through him I best learned to know poetry as song. I think that I heard the "Cotter's Saturday Night" and "A man's a man for a' that" more frequently quoted than any other poems familiar to my girlhood. Some of my work-folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to "Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster" and "Edinburgh" reviews, and they lent them to me. These, and Macaulay's "Essays," were a great help and delight. I had also the reading of the "Bibliotheca Sacra" and the "New Englander;" and sometimes of the "North American Review." By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and Coleridge in my readings of English poetry, I was enjoying it all so much that I could not any longer call it study. A gift from a friend of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of England" gave me my first knowledge of Tennyson. It was a great experience to read "Locksley Hall" for the first time while it was yet a new poem, and while one's own young life was stirred by the prophetic spirit of the age that gave it birth. I had a friend about my own age, and between us there was something very much like what is called a "school-girl friendship," a kind of intimacy supposed to be superficial, but often as deep and permanent as it is pleasant. Eliza and I managed to see each other every day; we exchanged confidences, laughed and cried together, read, wrote, walked, visited, and studied together. Her dress always had an airy touch which I admired, although I was rather indifferent as to what I wore myself. But she would endeavor to "fix me up" tastefully, while I would help her to put her compositions for the "Offering" into proper style. She had not begun to go to school at two years old, repeating the same routine of study every year of her childhood, as I had. When a child, I should have thought it almost as much of a disgrace to spell a word wrong, or make a mistake in the multiplication table, as to break one of the Ten Commandments. I was astonished to find that Eliza and other friends had not been as particularly dealt with in their early education. But she knew her deficiencies, and earned money enough to leave her work and attend a day-school part of the year. She was an ambitious scholar, and she persuaded me into studying the German language with her. A native professor had formed a class among young women connected with the mills, and we joined it. We met, six or eight of us, at the home of two of these young women,--a factory boarding-house,--in a neat little parlor which contained a piano. The professor was a music-teacher also, and he sometimes brought his guitar, and let us finish our recitation with a concert. More frequently he gave us the songs of Deutschland that we begged for. He sang the "Erl-King" in his own tongue admirably. We went through Follen's German Grammar and Reader:--what a choice collection of extracts that "Reader" was! We conquered the difficult gutturals, like those in the numeral "acht und achtzig" (the test of our pronouncing abilities) so completely that the professor told us a native really would understand us! At his request, I put some little German songs into English, which he published as sheet-music, with my name. To hear my words sung quite gave me the feeling of a successful translator. The professor had his own distinctive name for each of his pupils. Eliza was "Naivete," from her artless manners; and me he called "Etheria," probably on account of my star-gazing and verse-writing habits. Certainly there was never anything ethereal in my visible presence. A botany class was formed in town by a literary lady who was preparing a school text-book on the subject, and Eliza and I joined that also. The most I recall about that is the delightful flower-hunting rambles we took together. The Linnaean system, then in use, did not give us a very satisfactory key to the science. But we made the acquaintance of hitherto unfamiliar wild flowers that grew around us, and that was the opening to us of another door towards the Beautiful. Our minister offered to instruct the young people of his parish in ethics, and my sister Emilie and myself were among his pupils. We came to regard Wayland's "Moral Science" (our text-book) as most interesting reading, and it furnished us with many subjects for thought and for social discussion. Carlyle's "Hero-Worship" brought us a startling and keen enjoyment. It was lent me by a Dartmouth College student, the brother of one of my room-mates, soon after it was first published in this country. The young man did not seem to know exactly what to think of it, and wanted another reader's opinion. Few persons could have welcomed those early writings of Carlyle more enthusiastically than some of us working-girls did. The very ruggedness of the sentences had a fascination for us, like that of climbing over loose bowlders in a mountain scramble to get sight of a wonderful landscape. My room-mate, the student's sister, was the possessor of an electrifying new poem,--"Festus,"--that we sat up nights to read. It does not seem as if it could be more than forty years since Sarah and I looked up into each other's face from the page as the lamplight grew dim, and said, quoting from the poem,-- "Who can mistake great thoughts?" She gave me the volume afterwards, when we went West together, and I have it still. Its questions and conjectures were like a glimpse into the chaos of our own dimly developing inner life. The fascination of "Festus" was that of wonder, doubt, and dissent, with great outbursts of an overmastering faith sweeping over our minds as we read. Some of our friends thought it not quite safe reading; but we remember it as one of the inspirations of our workaday youth. We read books, also, that bore directly upon the condition of humanity in our time. "The Glory and Shame of England" was one of them, and it stirred us with a wonderful and painful interest. We followed travelers and explorers,--Layard to Nineveh, and Stephens to Yucatan. And we were as fond of good story-books as any girls that live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a character-picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days. It is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to modern girlhood,--Ware's "Zenobia." The Queen of Palmyra walked among us, and held a lofty place among our ideals of heroic womanhood, never yet obliterated from admiring remembrance. We had the delight of reading Frederika Bremer's "Home" and "Neighbors" when they were fresh from the fountains of her own heart; and some of us must not be blamed for feeling as if no tales of domestic life half so charming have been written since. Perhaps it is partly because the home-life of Sweden is in itself so delightfully unique. We read George Borrow's "Bible in Spain," and wandered with him among the gypsies to whom he seemed to belong. I have never forgotten a verse that this strange traveler picked up somewhere among the Zincali:-- "I'll joyfully labor, both night and day, To aid my unfortunate brothers; As a laundress tans her own face in the ray To cleanse the garments of others." It suggested a somewhat similar verse to my own mind. Why should not our washerwoman's work have its touch of poetry also?-- This thought flashed by like a ray of light That brightened my homely labor:-- The water is making my own hands white While I wash the robes of my neighbor. And how delighted we were with Mrs. Kirkland's "A New Home: Who'll Follow?" the first real Western book I ever read. Its genuine pioneer-flavor was delicious. And, moreover, it was a prophecy to Sarah, Emilie, and myself, who were one day thankful enough to find an "Aunty Parshall's dish-kettle" in a cabin on an Illinois prairie. So the pleasantly occupied years slipped on, I still nursing my purpose of a more systematic course of study, though I saw no near possibility of its fulfillment. It came in an unexpected way, as almost everything worth having does come. I could never have dreamed that I was going to meet my opportunity nearly or quite a thousand miles away, on the banks of the Mississippi. And yet, with that strange, delightful consciousness of growth into a comprehension of one's self and of one's life that most young persons must occasionally have experienced, I often vaguely felt heavens opening for my half-fledged wings to try themselves in. Things about me were good and enjoyable, but I could not quite rest in them; there was more for me to be, to know, and to do. I felt almost surer of the future than of the present. If the dream of the millennium which brightened the somewhat sombre close of the first ten years of my life had faded a little, out of the very roughnesses of the intervening road light had been kindled which made the end of the second ten years glow with enthusiastic hope. I had early been saved from a great mistake; for it is the greatest of mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so. What a world it would be, if there were no hills to climb! Our powers were given us that we might conquer obstacles, and clear obstructions from the overgrown human path, and grow strong by striving, led onward always by an Invisible Guide. Life to me, as I looked forward, was a bright blank of mystery, like the broad Western tracts of our continent, which in the atlases of those days bore the title of "Unexplored Regions." It was to be penetrated, struggled through; and its difficulties were not greatly dreaded, for I had not lost "The dream of Doing,-- The first bound in the pursuing." I knew that there was no joy like the joy of pressing forward. XII. FROM THE MERRIMACK TO THE MISSISSIPPI. THE years between 1835 and 1845, which nearly cover the time I lived at Lowell, seem to me, as I look back at them, singularly interesting years. People were guessing and experimenting and wondering and prophesying about a great many things,--about almost everything. We were only beginning to get accustomed to steamboats and railroads. To travel by either was scarcely less an adventure to us younger ones than going up in a balloon. Phrenology was much talked about; and numerous "professors" of it came around lecturing, and examining heads, and making charts of cranial "bumps." This was profitable business to them for a while, as almost everybody who invested in a "character" received a good one; while many very commonplace people were flattered into the belief that they were geniuses, or might be if they chose. Mesmerism followed close upon phrenology; and this too had its lecturers, who entertained the stronger portion of their audiences by showing them how easily the weaker ones could be brought under an uncanny influence. The most widespread delusion of the time was Millerism. A great many persons--and yet not so many that I knew even one of them--believed that the end of the world was coming in the year 1842; though the date was postponed from year to year, as the prophesy failed of fulfillment. The idea in itself was almost too serious to be jested about; and yet its advocates made it so literal a matter that it did look very ridiculous to unbelievers. An irreverent little workmate of mine in the spinning-room made a string of jingling couplets about it, like this:-- "Oh dear! oh dear! what shall we do In eighteen hundred and forty-two? "Oh dear! oh dear! where shall we be In eighteen hundred and forty-three? "Oh dear! oh dear! we shall be no more In eighteen hundred and forty-four, "Oh dear! oh dear! we sha'n't be alive In eighteen hundred and forty-five." I thought it audacious in her, since surely she and all of us were aware that the world would come to an end some time, in some way, for every one of us. I said to myself that I could not have "made up" those rhymes. Nevertheless we all laughed at them together. A comet appeared at about the time of the Miller excitement, and also a very unusual illumination of sky and earth by the Aurora Borealis. This latter occurred in midwinter. The whole heavens were of a deep rose-color--almost crimson--reddest at the zenith, and paling as it radiated towards the horizon. The snow was fresh on the ground, and that, too, was of a brilliant red. Cold as it was, windows were thrown up all around us for people to look out at the wonderful sight. I was gazing with the rest, and listening to exclamations of wonder from surrounding unseen beholders, when somebody shouted from far down the opposite block of buildings, with startling effect,-- "You can't stand the fire In that great day!" It was the refrain of a Millerite hymn. The Millerites believed that these signs in the sky were omens of the approaching catastrophe. And it was said that some of them did go so far as to put on white "ascension robes," and assemble somewhere, to wait for the expected hour. When daguerreotypes were first made, when we heard that the sun was going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed almost too great a marvel to be believed. While it was yet only a rumor that such a thing had been done, somewhere across the sea, I saw some verses about it which impressed me much, but which I only partly remember. These were the opening lines:-- "Oh, what if thus our evil deeds Are mirrored on the sky, And every line of our wild lives Daguerreotyped on high!" My sister and I considered it quite an event when we went to have our daguerreotypes taken just before we started for the West. The photograph was still an undeveloped mystery. Things that looked miraculous then are commonplace now. It almost seems as if the children of to-day could not have so good a time as we did, science has left them so little to wonder about. Our attitude--the attitude of the time--was that of children climbing their dooryard fence, to watch an approaching show, and to conjecture what more remarkable spectacle could be following behind. New England had kept to the quiet old-fashioned ways of living for the first fifty years of the Republic. Now all was expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were going to happen, nobody could guess what. Things have happened, and changes have come. The New England that has grown up with the last fifty years is not at all the New England that our fathers knew. We speak of having been reared under Puritanic influences, but the traditionary sternness of these was much modified, even in the childhood of the generation to which I belong. We did not recognize the grim features of the Puritan, as we used sometimes to read about him, in our parents or relatives. And yet we were children of the Puritans. Everything that was new or strange came to us at Lowell. And most of the remarkable people of the day came also. How strange it was to see Mar Yohannan, a Nestorian bishop, walking through the factory yard in his Oriental robes with more than a child's wonder on his face at the stir and rush of everything! He came from Boston by railroad, and was present at the wedding at the clergyman's house where he visited. The rapidity of the simple Congregational service astonished him. "What? Marry on railroad, too?" he asked. Dickens visited Lowell while I was there, and gave a good report of what he saw in his "American Notes." We did not leave work even to gaze at distinguished strangers, so I missed seeing him. But a friend who did see him sketched his profile in pencil for me as he passed along the street. He was then best known as "Boz." Many of the prominent men of the country were in the habit of giving Lyceum lectures, and the Lyceum lecture of that day was a means of education, conveying to the people the results of study and thought through the best minds. At Lowell it was more patronized by the mill-people than any mere entertainment. We had John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, John Pierpont, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among our lecturers, with numerous distinguished clergymen of the day. Daniel Webster was once in the city, trying a law case. Some of my girl friends went to the court-room and had a glimpse of his face, but I just missed seeing him. Sometimes an Englishman, who was studying our national institutions, would call and have a friendly talk with us at work. Sometimes it was a traveler from the South, who was interested in some way. I remember one, an editor and author from Georgia, who visited our Improvement Circle, and who sent some of us "Offering" contributors copies of his book after he had returned home. One of the pleasantest visitors that I recall was a young Quaker woman from Philadelphia, a school-teacher, who came to see for herself how the Lowell girls lived, of whom she had heard so much. A deep, quiet friendship grew up between us two. I wrote some verses for her when we parted, and she sent me one cordial, charmingly-written letter. In a few weeks I answered it; but the response was from another person, a near relative. She was dead. But she still remains a real person to me; I often recall her features and the tone of her voice. It was as if a beautiful spirit from an invisible world had slipped in among us, and quickly gone back again. It was an event to me, and to my immediate friends among the mill-girls, when the poet Whittier came to Lowell to stay awhile. I had not supposed that it would be my good fortune to meet him; but one evening when we assembled at the "Improvement Circle," he was there. The "Offering" editor, Miss Harriet Farley, had lived in the same town with him, and they were old acquaintances. It was a warm, summer evening. I recall the circumstance that a number of us wore white dresses; also that I shrank back into myself, and felt much abashed when some verses of mine were read by the editor,--with others so much better, however, that mine received little attention. I felt relieved; for I was not fond of having my productions spoken of, for good or ill. He commended quite highly a poem by another member of the Circle, on "Pentucket," the Indian name of his native place, Haverhill. My subject was "Sabbath Bells." As the Friends do not believe in "steeple-houses," I was at liberty to imagine that it was my theme, and not my verses, that failed to interest him. Various other papers were read,--stories, sketches, etc., and after the reading there was a little conversation, when he came and spoke to me. I let the friend who had accompanied me do my part of the talking for I was too much overawed by the presence of one whose poetry I had so long admired, to say a great deal. But from that evening we knew each other as friends; and, of course, the day has a white mark among memories of my Lowell life. Mr. Whittier's visit to Lowell had some political bearing upon the antislavery cause. It is strange now to think that a cause like that should not always have been our country's cause,--our country,--our own free nation! But antislavery sentiments were then regarded by many as traitorous heresies; and those who held them did not expect to win popularity. If the vote of the mill-girls had been taken, it would doubtless have been unanimous on the antislavery side. But those were also the days when a woman was not expected to give, or even to have, an opinion on subjects of public interest. Occasionally a young girl was attracted to the Lowell mills through her own idealization of the life there, as it had been reported to her. Margaret Foley, who afterwards became distinguished as a sculptor, was one of these. She did not remain many months at her occupation,--which I think was weaving,--soon changing it for that of teaching and studying art. Those who came as she did were usually disappointed. Instead of an Arcadia, they found a place of matter-of-fact toil, filled with a company of industrious, wide-awake girls, who were faithfully improving their opportunities, while looking through them into avenues Toward profit and usefulness, more desirable yet. It has always been the way of the steady-minded New Englander to accept the present situation--but to accept it without boundaries, taking in also the larger prospects--all the heavens above and the earth beneath--towards which it opens. The movement of New England girls toward Lowell was only an impulse of a larger movement which about that time sent so many people from the Eastern States into the West. The needs of the West were constantly kept before us in the churches. We were asked for contributions for Home Missions, which were willingly given; and some of us were appointed collectors of funds for the education of indigent young men to become Western Home Missionary preachers. There was something almost pathetic in the readiness with which this was done by young girls who were longing to fit themselves for teachers, but had not the means. Many a girl at Lowell was working to send her brother to college, who had far more talent and character than he; but a man could preach, and it was not "orthodox" to think that a woman could. And in her devotion to him, and her zeal for the spread of Christian truth, she was hardly conscious of her own sacrifice. Yet our ministers appreciated the intelligence and piety of their feminine parishioners. An agent who came from the West for school-teachers was told by our own pastor that five hundred could easily be furnished from among Lowell mill-girls. Many did go, and they made another New England in some of our Western States. The missionary spirit was strong among my companions. I never thought that I had the right qualifications for that work; but I had a desire to see the prairies and the great rivers of the West, and to get a taste of free, primitive life among pioneers. Before the year 1845, several of my friends had emigrated as teachers or missionaries. One of the editors of the "Operatives' Magazine" had gone to Arkansas with a mill-girl who had worked beside her among the looms. They were at an Indian mission--to the Cherokees and Choctaws. I seemed to breathe the air of that far Southwest, in a spray of yellow jessamine which one of those friends sent me, pressed in a letter. People wrote very long letters then, in those days of twenty-five cent postage. Rachel, at whose house our German class had been accustomed to meet, had also left her work, and had gone to western Virginia to take charge of a school. She wrote alluring letters to us about the scenery there; it was in the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge. My friend Angeline, with whom I used to read "Paradise Lost," went to Ohio as a teacher, and returned the following year, for a very brief visit, however,--and with a husband. Another acquaintance was in Wisconsin, teaching a pioneer school. Eliza, my intimate companion, was about to be married to a clergyman. She, too, eventually settled at the West. The event which brought most change into my own life was the marriage of my sister Emilie. It involved the breaking up of our own little family, of which she had really been the "houseband," the return of my mother to my sisters at Beverly, and my going to board among strangers, as other girls did. I found excellent quarters and kind friends, but the home-life was ended. My sister's husband was a grammar school master in the city, and their cottage, a mile or more out, among the open fields, was my frequent refuge from homesickness and the general clatter. Our partial separation showed me how much I had depended upon my sister. I had really let her do most of my thinking for me. Henceforth I was to trust to my own resources. I was no longer the "little sister" who could ask what to do, and do as she was told. It often brought me a feeling of dismay to find that I must make up my own mind about things small and great. And yet I was naturally self-reliant. I am not sure but self-reliance and dependence really belong together. They do seem to meet in the same character, like other extremes. The health of Emilie's husband failing, after a year or two, it was evident that he must change his employment and his residence. He decided to go with his brother to Illinois and settle upon a prairie farm. Of course his wife and baby boy must go too, and with the announcement of this decision came an invitation to me to accompany them. I had no difficulty as to my response. It was just what I wanted to do. I was to teach a district school; but what there was beyond that, I could not guess. I liked to feel that it was all as vague as the unexplored regions to which I was going. My friend and room-mate Sarah, who was preparing herself to be a teacher, was invited to join us, and she was glad to do so. It was all quickly settled, and early in the spring of 1846 we left New England. When I came to a realization of what I was leaving, when good-bys had to be said, I began to feel very sorrowful, and to wish it was not to be. I said positively that I should soon return, but underneath my protestations I was afraid that I might not. The West was very far off then, a full week's journey. It would be hard getting back. Those I loved might die; I might die myself. These thoughts passed through my mind, though not through my lips. My eyes would sometimes tell the story, however, and I fancy that my tearful farewells must have seemed ridiculous to many of my friends, since my going was of my own cheerful choice. The last meeting of the Improvement Circle before I went away was a kind of surprise party to me. Several original poems were read, addressed to me personally. I am afraid that I received it all in a dumb, undemonstrative way, for I could not make it seem real that I was the person meant, or that I was going away at all. But I treasured those tributes of sympathy afterwards, under the strange, spacious skies where I sometimes felt so alone. The editors of the "Offering" left with me a testimonial in money, accompanied by an acknowledgment of my contributions during several years; but I had never dreamed of pay, and did not know how to look upon it so. I took it gratefully, however, as a token of their appreciation, and twenty dollars was no small help toward my outfit. Friends brought me books and other keepsakes. Our minister, gave me D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation" as a parting gift. It was quite a circumstance to be "going out West." The exhilaration of starting off on one's first long journey, young, ignorant, buoyant, expectant, is unlike anything else, unless it be youth itself, the real beginning of the real journey--life. Annoyances are overlooked. Everything seems romantic and dreamlike. We went by a southerly route, on account of starting so early in the season there was snow on the ground the day we left. On the second day, after a moonlight night on Long Island Sound, we were floating down the Delaware, between shores misty-green with budding willows; then (most of us seasick, though I was not) we were tossed across Chesapeake Bay; then there was a railway ride to the Alleghanies, which gave us glimpses of the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, and of the lovely scenery around Harper's Ferry; then followed a stifling night on the mountains, when we were packed like sardines into a stagecoach, without a breath of air, and the passengers were cross because the baby cried, while I felt inwardly glad that one voice among us could give utterance to the general discomfort, my own part of which I could have borne if I could only have had an occasional peep out at the mountain-side. After that it was all river-voyaging, down the Monongahela into the Ohio, and up the Mississippi. As I recall this part of it, I should say that it was the perfection of a Western journey to travel in early spring by an Ohio River steamboat,--such steamboats as they had forty years ago, comfortable, roomy, and well ordered. The company was social, as Western emigrants were wont to be when there were not so very many of them, and the shores of the river, then only thinly populated, were a constantly shifting panorama of wilderness beauty. I have never since seen a combination of spring colors so delicate as those shown by the uplifted forests of the Ohio, where the pure white of the dogwood and the peach-bloom tint of the red-bud (Judas tree) were contrasted with soft shades of green, almost endlessly various, on the unfolding leafage. Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show but breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced at its level shores, edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood, and sent back a sigh towards the banks of the Merrimack. But we did not let each other know what the sigh was for, until long after. The breaking-up of our little company when the steamboat landed at Saint Louis was like the ending of a pleasant dream. We had to wake up to the fact that by striking due east thirty or forty miles across that monotonous Greenness, we should reach our destination, and must accept whatever we should find there, with such grace as we could. What we did find, and did not find, there is not room fully to relate here. Ours was at first the roughest kind of pioneering experience; such as persons brought up in our well-to-do New England could not be in the least prepared for, though they might imagine they were, as we did. We were dropped down finally upon a vast green expense, extending hundreds of miles north and south through the State of Illinois, then known as Looking-Glass Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away, and so small that at that distance it looked like a shingle set up endwise in the grass. Nothing else was in sight, not even a tree, although we could see miles and miles in every direction. There were only the hollow blue heavens above us and the level green prairie around us,--an immensity of intense loneliness. We seldom saw a cloud in the sky, and never a pebble beneath our feet. If we could have picked up the commonest one, we should have treasured it like a diamond. Nothing in nature now seemed so beautiful to us as rocks. We had never dreamed of a world without them; it seemed like living on a floor without walls or foundations. After a while we became accustomed to the vast sameness, and even liked it in a lukewarm way. And there were times when it filled us with emotions of grandeur. Boundlessness in itself is impressive; it makes us feel our littleness, and yet releases us from that littleness. The grass was always astir, blowing one way, like the waves of the sea; for there was a steady, almost an unvarying wind from the south. It was like the sea, and yet even more wonderful, for it was a sea of living and growing things. The Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the earth, and breathing everything into life. We were but specks on the great landscape. But God was above it all, penetrating it and us with his infinite warmth. The distance from human beings made the Invisible One seem so near! Only Nature and ourselves now, face to face with Him! We could scarcely have found in all the world a more complete contrast to the moving crowds and the whir and dust of the City of Spindles, than this unpeopled, silent prairie. For myself, I know that I was sent in upon my own thoughts deeper than I had ever been before. I began to question things which I had never before doubted. I must have reality. Nothing but transparent truth would bear the test of this great, solitary stillness. As the prairies lay open to the sunshine, my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the piercing eye of the All-Seeing. I may say with gratitude that only some superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away by this searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood, in its simplest elements, took firmer root as it found broader room to grow in. I had many peculiar experiences in my log-cabin school-teaching, which was seldom more than three months in one place. Only once I found myself among New England people, and there I remained a year or more, fairly reveling in a return to the familiar, thrifty ways that seem to me to shape a more comfortable style of living than any under the sun. "Vine Lodge" (so we named the cottage for its embowering honey-suckles), and its warm-hearted inmates, with my little white schoolhouse under the oaks, make one of the brightest of my Western memories. Only a mile or two away from this pretty retreat there was an edifice towards which I often looked with longing. It was a seminary for young women, probably at that time one of the best in the country, certainly second to none in the West. It had originated about a dozen years before, in a plan for Western collegiate education, organized by Yale College graduates. It was thought that women as well as men ought to share in the benefits of such a plan, and the result was Monticello Seminary. The good man whose wealth had made the institution a possibility lived in the neighborhood. Its trustees were of the best type of pioneer manhood, and its pupils came from all parts of the South and West. Its Principal--I wonder now that I could have lived so near her for a year without becoming acquainted with her,--but her high local reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe, and I was foolishly diffident. One day, however, upon the persuasion of my friends at Vine Lodge, who knew my wishes for a higher education, I went with them to call upon her. We talked about the matter which had been in my thoughts so long, and she gave me not only a cordial but an urgent invitation to come and enroll myself as a student. There were arrangements for those who could not incur the current expenses, to meet them by doing part of the domestic work, and of these I gladly availed myself. The stately limestone edifice, standing in the midst of an original growth of forest-trees, two or three miles from the Mississippi River, became my home--my student-home--for three years. The benefits of those three years I have been reaping ever since, I trust not altogether selfishly. It was always my desire and my ambition as a teacher, to help my pupils as my teachers had helped me. The course of study at Monticello Seminary was the broadest, the most college-like, that I have ever known; and I have had experience since in several institutions of the kind. The study of mediaeval and modern history, and of the history of modern philosophy, especially, opened new vistas to me. In these our Principal was also our teacher, and her method was to show us the tendencies of thought, to put our minds into the great current of human affairs, leaving us to collect details as we could, then or afterward. We came thus to feel that these were life-long studies, as indeed they are. The course was somewhat elective, but her advice to me was, not to omit anything because I did not like it. I had a natural distaste for mathematics, and my recollections of my struggles with trigonometry and conic sections are not altogether those of a conquering heroine. But my teacher told me that my mind had need of just that exact sort of discipline, and I think she was right. A habit of indiscriminate, unsystematized reading, such as I had fallen into, is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind. Attention is the secret of real acquirement; but it was months before I could command my own attention, even when I was interested in the subject I was examining. It seemed as if all the pages of all the books I had ever read were turning themselves over between me and this one page that I wanted to understand. I found that mere reading does not by any means make a student. It was more to me to come into communication with my wise teacher as a friend than even to receive the wisdom she had to impart. She was dignified and reticent, but beneath her reserve, as is often the case, was a sealed fountain of sympathy, which one who had the key could easily unlock. Thinking of her nobleness of character, her piety, her learning, her power, and her sweetness, it seems to me as if I had once had a Christian Zenobia or Hypatia for my teacher. We speak with awed tenderness of our unseen guardian angels, but have we not all had our guiding angels, who came to us in visible form, and, recognized or unknown, kept beside us on our difficult path until they had done for us all they could? It seems to me as if one had succeeded another by my side all through the years,--always some one whose influence made my heart stronger and my way clearer; though sometimes it has been only a little child that came and laid its hand into my hand as if I were its guide, instead of its being mine. My dear and honored Lady-Principal was surely one of my strong guiding angels, sent to meet me as I went to meet her upon my life-road, just at the point where I most needed her. For the one great thing she gave her pupils,--scope, often quite left out of woman's education,--I especially thank her. The true education is to go on forever. But how can there be any hopeful going on without outlook? And having an infinite outlook, how can progress ever cease? It was worth while for me to go to those Western prairies, if only for the broader mental view that opened upon me in my pupilage there. During my first year at the seminary I was appointed teacher of the Preparatory Department,--a separate school of thirty or forty girls,--with the opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time. It was a little hard, but I was very glad to do it, as I was unwilling to receive an education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not wish to incur a debt. I believe that the postponement of these maturer studies to my early womanhood, after I had worked and taught, was a benefit to me. I had found out some of my special ignorances, what the things were which I most needed to know. I had learned that the book-knowledge I so much craved was not itself education, was not even culture, but only a help, an adjunct to both. As I studied more earnestly, I cared for fewer books, but those few made themselves indispensable. It still seems to me that in the Lowell mills, and in my log-cabin schoolhouse on the Western prairies, I received the best part of my early education. The great advantage of a seminary course to me was that under my broad-minded Principal I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process an infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school. Returning from the West immediately after my graduation, I was for ten years or so a teacher of young girls in seminaries much like my own Alma Mater. The best result to me of that experience has been the friendship of my pupils,--a happiness which must last as long as life itself. A book must end somewhere, and the natural boundary of this narrative is drawn with my leaving New England for the West. I was to outline the story of my youth for the young, though I think many a one among them might tell a story far more interesting than mine. The most beautiful lives seldom find their way into print. Perhaps the most beautiful part of any life never does. I should like to flatter myself so. I could not stay at the West. It was never really home to me there, and my sojourn of six or seven years on the prairies only deepened my love and longing for the dear old State of Massachusetts. I came back in the summer of 1852, and the unwritten remainder of my sketch is chiefly that of a teacher's and writer's experience; regarding which latter I will add, for the gratification of those who have desired them, a few personal particulars. While a student and teacher at the West I was still writing, and much that I wrote was published. A poem printed in "Sartain's Magazine," sent there at the suggestion of the editor of the "Lowell Offering" was the first for which I received remuneration--five dollars. Several poems written for the manuscript school journal at Monticello Seminary are in the "Household" collection of my verses, among them those entitled "Eureka," "Hand in Hand with Angels," and "Psyche at School." These, and various others written soon after, were printed in the "National Era," in return for which a copy of the paper was sent me. Nothing further was asked or expected. The little song "Hannah Binding Shoes"--written immediately after my return from the West,--was a study from life--though not from any one life--in my native town. It was brought into notice in a peculiar way,--by my being accused of stealing it, by the editor of the magazine to which I had sent it with a request for the usual remuneration, if accepted. Accidentally or otherwise, this editor lost my note and signature, and then denounced me by name in a newspaper as a "literary thiefess;" having printed the verses with a nom de plume in his magazine without my knowledge. It was awkward to have to come to my own defense. But the curious incident gave the song a wide circulation. I did not attempt writing for money until it became a necessity, when my health failed at teaching, although I should long before then have liked to spend my whole time with my pen, could I have done so. But it was imperative that I should have an assured income, however small; and every one who has tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is, unless it has become very famous indeed. My life as a teacher, however, I regard as part of my best preparation for whatever I have since written. I do not know but I should recommend five or ten years of teaching as the most profitable apprenticeship for a young person who wished to become an author. To be a good teacher implies self-discipline, and a book written without something of that sort of personal preparation cannot be a very valuable one. Success in writing may mean many different things. I do not know that I have ever reached it, except in the sense of liking better and better to write, and of finding expression easier. It is something to have won the privilege of going on. Sympathy and recognition are worth a great deal; the power to touch human beings inwardly and nobly is worth far more. The hope of attaining to such results, if only occasionally, must be a writer's best inspiration. So far as successful publication goes, perhaps the first I considered so came when a poem of mine was accepted by the "Atlantic Monthly." Its title was "The Rose Enthroned," and as the poet Lowell was at that time editing the magazine I felt especially gratified. That and another poem, "The Loyal Woman's No," written early in the War of the Rebellion, were each attributed to a different person among our prominent poets, the "Atlantic" at that time not giving authors' signatures. Of course I knew the unlikeness; nevertheless, those who made the mistake paid me an unintentional compliment. Compliments, however, are very cheap, and by no means signify success. I have always regarded it as a better ambition to be a true woman than to become a successful writer. To be the second would never have seemed to me desirable, without also being the first. In concluding, let me say to you, dear girls, for whom these pages have been written, that if I have learned anything by living, it is this,--that the meaning of life is education; not through book-knowledge alone, sometimes entirely without it. Education is growth, the development of our best possibilities from within outward; and it cannot be carried on as it should be except in a school, just such a school as we all find ourselves in--this world of human beings by whom we are surrounded. The beauty of belonging to this school is that we cannot learn anything in it by ourselves alone, but for and with our fellow pupils, the wide earth over. We can never expect promotion here, except by taking our place among the lowest, and sharing their difficulties until they are removed, and we all become graduates together for a higher school. Humility, Sympathy, Helpfulness, and Faith are the best teachers in this great university, and none of us are well educated who do not accept their training. The real satisfaction of living is, and must forever be, the education of all for each, and of each for all. So let us all try together to be good and faithful women, and not care too much for what the world may think of us or of our abilities! My little story is not a remarkable one, for I have never attempted remarkable things. In the words of one of our honored elder writers, given in reply to a youthful aspirant who had asked for some points of her "literary career,"--"I never had a career." 
2512	----	</pre> <p>Transcribed from the Mills and Boon &ldquo;War Price&rdquo; edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p> <h1>THE CRUISE OF THE<br /> SNARK</h1> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br /> JACK LONDON</p> <p style="text-align: center">AUTHOR OF &ldquo;VALLEY OF THE MOON,&rdquo; &ldquo;JOHN BARLEYCORN&rdquo;<br /> &ldquo;MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE,&rdquo; ETC.</p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <blockquote><p>&ldquo;Yes have heard the beat of the offshore wind,<br /> And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;<br /> You have heard the song&mdash;how long! how long!<br /> Pull out on the trail again!&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center">MILLS &amp; BOON, LIMITED<br /> 49 RUPERT STREET<br /> LONDON, W.1</p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center"><i>Copyright in the United States of America</i> by <span class="smcap">The Macmillan Company</span></p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center">To<br /> CHARMIAN<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE MATE OF THE &ldquo;SNARK&rdquo;</span></p> <p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WHO TOOK THE WHEEL, NIGHT OR DAY,</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">WHEN ENTERING</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">OR LEAVING PORT OR RUNNING A PASSAGE,</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">WHO TOOK THE WHEEL IN EVERY EMERGENCY, AND</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">WHO WEPT</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">AFTER TWO YEARS OF SAILING, WHEN THE</span><br /> <span class="GutSmall">VOYAGE WAS DISCONTINUED</span></p> <h2>CONTENTS</h2> <table> <tr> <td><p><span class="GutSmall">CHAPTER</span></p> </td> <td><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">Foreword</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page13">13</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Inconceivable and Monstrous</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page27">27</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">Adventure</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page47">47</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">Finding One&rsquo;s Way About</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The First Landfall</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">A Royal Sport</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Lepers of Molokai</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page97">97</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The House of the Sun</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">A Pacific Traverse</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page134">134</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">Typee</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page156">156</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XI.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Nature Man</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page175">175</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XII.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The High Seat of Abundance</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page193">193</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XIII.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Stone-fishing of Bora Bora</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XIV.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Amateur Navigator</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page223">223</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XV.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">Cruising in the Solomons</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page244">244</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XVI.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">B&ecirc;che de Mer English</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page270">270</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p style="text-align: right">XVII.</p> </td> <td><p><span class="smcap">The Amateur M.D.</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page280">280</a></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">Backword</span></p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page303">303</a></span></p> </td> </tr> </table> <h2><a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>CHAPTER I<br /> <span class="GutSmall">FOREWORD</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">It</span> began in the swimming pool at Glen Ellen.&nbsp; Between swims it was our wont to come out and lie in the sand and let our skins breathe the warm air and soak in the sunshine.&nbsp; Roscoe was a yachtsman.&nbsp; I had followed the sea a bit.&nbsp; It was inevitable that we should talk about boats.&nbsp; We talked about small boats, and the seaworthiness of small boats.&nbsp; We instanced Captain Slocum and his three years&rsquo; voyage around the world in the <i>Spray</i>.</p> <p>We asserted that we were not afraid to go around the world in a small boat, say forty feet long.&nbsp; We asserted furthermore that we would like to do it.&nbsp; We asserted finally that there was nothing in this world we&rsquo;d like better than a chance to do it.</p> <p>&ldquo;Let us do it,&rdquo; we said . . . in fun.</p> <p>Then I asked Charmian privily if she&rsquo;d really care to do it, and she said that it was too good to be true.</p> <p>The next time we breathed our skins in the sand by the swimming pool I said to Roscoe, &ldquo;Let us do it.&rdquo;</p> <p>I was in earnest, and so was he, for he said:</p> <p>&ldquo;When shall we start?&rdquo;</p> <p>I had a house to build on the ranch, also an orchard, a vineyard, and several hedges to plant, and a number of other things to do.&nbsp; We thought we would start in four or five years.&nbsp; Then the lure of the adventure began to grip us.&nbsp; Why not start at once?&nbsp; We&rsquo;d never be younger, any of us.&nbsp; Let the orchard, vineyard, and hedges be growing up while we were away.&nbsp; When we came back, they would be ready for us, and we could live in the barn while we built the house.</p> <p>So the trip was decided upon, and the building of the <i>Snark</i> began.&nbsp; We named her the <i>Snark</i> because we could not think of any other name&mdash;this information is given for the benefit of those who otherwise might think there is something occult in the name.</p> <p>Our friends cannot understand why we make this voyage.&nbsp; They shudder, and moan, and raise their hands.&nbsp; No amount of explanation can make them comprehend that we are moving along the line of least resistance; that it is easier for us to go down to the sea in a small ship than to remain on dry land, just as it is easier for them to remain on dry land than to go down to the sea in the small ship.&nbsp; This state of mind comes of an undue prominence of the ego.&nbsp; They cannot get away from themselves.&nbsp; They cannot come out of themselves long enough to see that their line of least resistance is not necessarily everybody else&rsquo;s line of least resistance.&nbsp; They make of their own bundle of desires, likes, and dislikes a yardstick wherewith to measure the desires, likes, and dislikes of all creatures.&nbsp; This is unfair.&nbsp; I tell them so.&nbsp; But they cannot get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me.&nbsp; They think I am crazy.&nbsp; In return, I am sympathetic.&nbsp; It is a state of mind familiar to me.&nbsp; We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.</p> <p>The ultimate word is I <span class="GutSmall">LIKE</span>.&nbsp; It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life.&nbsp; When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, &ldquo;I <span class="GutSmall">LIKE</span>,&rdquo; and does something else, and philosophy goes glimmering.&nbsp; It is I <span class="GutSmall">LIKE</span> that makes the drunkard drink and the martyr wear a hair shirt; that makes one man a reveller and another man an anchorite; that makes one man pursue fame, another gold, another love, and another God.&nbsp; Philosophy is very often a man&rsquo;s way of explaining his own I <span class="GutSmall">LIKE</span>.</p> <p>But to return to the <i>Snark</i>, and why I, for one, want to journey in her around the world.&nbsp; The things I like constitute my set of values.&nbsp; The thing I like most of all is personal achievement&mdash;not achievement for the world&rsquo;s applause, but achievement for my own delight.&nbsp; It is the old &ldquo;I did it!&nbsp; I did it!&nbsp; With my own hands I did it!&rdquo;&nbsp; But personal achievement, with me, must be concrete.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d rather win a water-fight in the swimming pool, or remain astride a horse that is trying to get out from under me, than write the great American novel.&nbsp; Each man to his liking.&nbsp; Some other fellow would prefer writing the great American novel to winning the water-fight or mastering the horse.</p> <p>Possibly the proudest achievement of my life, my moment of highest living, occurred when I was seventeen.&nbsp; I was in a three-masted schooner off the coast of Japan.&nbsp; We were in a typhoon.&nbsp; All hands had been on deck most of the night.&nbsp; I was called from my bunk at seven in the morning to take the wheel.&nbsp; Not a stitch of canvas was set.&nbsp; We were running before it under bare poles, yet the schooner fairly tore along.&nbsp; The seas were all of an eighth of a mile apart, and the wind snatched the whitecaps from their summits, filling.&nbsp; The air so thick with driving spray that it was impossible to see more than two waves at a time.&nbsp; The schooner was almost unmanageable, rolling her rail under to starboard and to port, veering and yawing anywhere between south-east and south-west, and threatening, when the huge seas lifted under her quarter, to broach to.&nbsp; Had she broached to, she would ultimately have been reported lost with all hands and no tidings.</p> <p>I took the wheel.&nbsp; The sailing-master watched me for a space.&nbsp; He was afraid of my youth, feared that I lacked the strength and the nerve.&nbsp; But when he saw me successfully wrestle the schooner through several bouts, he went below to breakfast.&nbsp; Fore and aft, all hands were below at breakfast.&nbsp; Had she broached to, not one of them would ever have reached the deck.&nbsp; For forty minutes I stood there alone at the wheel, in my grasp the wildly careering schooner and the lives of twenty-two men.&nbsp; Once we were pooped.&nbsp; I saw it coming, and, half-drowned, with tons of water crushing me, I checked the schooner&rsquo;s rush to broach to.&nbsp; At the end of the hour, sweating and played out, I was relieved.&nbsp; But I had done it!&nbsp; With my own hands I had done my trick at the wheel and guided a hundred tons of wood and iron through a few million tons of wind and waves.</p> <p>My delight was in that I had done it&mdash;not in the fact that twenty-two men knew I had done it.&nbsp; Within the year over half of them were dead and gone, yet my pride in the thing performed was not diminished by half.&nbsp; I am willing to confess, however, that I do like a small audience.&nbsp; But it must be a very small audience, composed of those who love me and whom I love.&nbsp; When I then accomplish personal achievement, I have a feeling that I am justifying their love for me.&nbsp; But this is quite apart from the delight of the achievement itself.&nbsp; This delight is peculiarly my own and does not depend upon witnesses.&nbsp; When I have done some such thing, I am exalted.&nbsp; I glow all over.&nbsp; I am aware of a pride in myself that is mine, and mine alone.&nbsp; It is organic.&nbsp; Every fibre of me is thrilling with it.&nbsp; It is very natural.&nbsp; It is a mere matter of satisfaction at adjustment to environment.&nbsp; It is success.</p> <p>Life that lives is life successful, and success is the breath of its nostrils.&nbsp; The achievement of a difficult feat is successful adjustment to a sternly exacting environment.&nbsp; The more difficult the feat, the greater the satisfaction at its accomplishment.&nbsp; Thus it is with the man who leaps forward from the springboard, out over the swimming pool, and with a backward half-revolution of the body, enters the water head first.&nbsp; Once he leaves the springboard his environment becomes immediately savage, and savage the penalty it will exact should he fail and strike the water flat.&nbsp; Of course, the man does not have to run the risk of the penalty.&nbsp; He could remain on the bank in a sweet and placid environment of summer air, sunshine, and stability.&nbsp; Only he is not made that way.&nbsp; In that swift mid-air moment he lives as he could never live on the bank.</p> <p>As for myself, I&rsquo;d rather be that man than the fellows who sit on the bank and watch him.&nbsp; That is why I am building the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; I am so made.&nbsp; I like, that is all.&nbsp; The trip around the world means big moments of living.&nbsp; Bear with me a moment and look at it.&nbsp; Here am I, a little animal called a man&mdash;a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,&mdash;all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail.&nbsp; I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken.&nbsp; I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned.&nbsp; I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed.&nbsp; I am a creature of temperature.&nbsp; A few degrees one way, and my fingers and ears and toes blacken and drop off.&nbsp; A few degrees the other way, and my skin blisters and shrivels away from the raw, quivering flesh.&nbsp; A few additional degrees either way, and the life and the light in me go out.&nbsp; A drop of poison injected into my body from a snake, and I cease to move&mdash;for ever I cease to move.&nbsp; A splinter of lead from a rifle enters my head, and I am wrapped around in the eternal blackness.</p> <p>Fallible and frail, a bit of pulsating, jelly-like life&mdash;it is all I am.&nbsp; About me are the great natural forces&mdash;colossal menaces, Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot.&nbsp; They have no concern at all for me.&nbsp; They do not know me.&nbsp; They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral.&nbsp; They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and seas that leap aboard the largest crafts that float, crushing humans to pulp or licking them off into the sea and to death&mdash;and these insensate monsters do not know that tiny sensitive creature, all nerves and weaknesses, whom men call Jack London, and who himself thinks he is all right and quite a superior being.</p> <p>In the maze and chaos of the conflict of these vast and draughty Titans, it is for me to thread my precarious way.&nbsp; The bit of life that is I will exult over them.&nbsp; The bit of life that is I, in so far as it succeeds in baffling them or in bitting them to its service, will imagine that it is godlike.&nbsp; It is good to ride the tempest and feel godlike.&nbsp; I dare to assert that for a finite speck of pulsating jelly to feel godlike is a far more glorious feeling than for a god to feel godlike.</p> <p>Here is the sea, the wind, and the wave.&nbsp; Here are the seas, the winds, and the waves of all the world.&nbsp; Here is ferocious environment.&nbsp; And here is difficult adjustment, the achievement of which is delight to the small quivering vanity that is I.&nbsp; I like.&nbsp; I am so made.&nbsp; It is my own particular form of vanity, that is all.</p> <p>There is also another side to the voyage of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Being alive, I want to see, and all the world is a bigger thing to see than one small town or valley.&nbsp; We have done little outlining of the voyage.&nbsp; Only one thing is definite, and that is that our first port of call will be Honolulu.&nbsp; Beyond a few general ideas, we have no thought of our next port after Hawaii.&nbsp; We shall make up our minds as we get nearer, in a general way we know that we shall wander through the South Seas, take in Samoa, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra, and go on up through the Philippines to Japan.&nbsp; Then will come Korea, China, India, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.&nbsp; After that the voyage becomes too vague to describe, though we know a number of things we shall surely do, and we expect to spend from one to several months in every country in Europe.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> is to be sailed.&nbsp; There will be a gasolene engine on board, but it will be used only in case of emergency, such as in bad water among reefs and shoals, where a sudden calm in a swift current leaves a sailing-boat helpless.&nbsp; The rig of the <i>Snark</i> is to be what is called the &ldquo;ketch.&rdquo;&nbsp; The ketch rig is a compromise between the yawl and the schooner.&nbsp; Of late years the yawl rig has proved the best for cruising.&nbsp; The ketch retains the cruising virtues of the yawl, and in addition manages to embrace a few of the sailing virtues of the schooner.&nbsp; The foregoing must be taken with a pinch of salt.&nbsp; It is all theory in my head.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never sailed a ketch, nor even seen one.&nbsp; The theory commends itself to me.&nbsp; Wait till I get out on the ocean, then I&rsquo;ll be able to tell more about the cruising and sailing qualities of the ketch.</p> <p>As originally planned, the <i>Snark</i> was to be forty feet long on the water-line.&nbsp; But we discovered there was no space for a bath-room, and for that reason we have increased her length to forty-five feet.&nbsp; Her greatest beam is fifteen feet.&nbsp; She has no house and no hold.&nbsp; There is six feet of headroom, and the deck is unbroken save for two companionways and a hatch for&rsquo;ard.&nbsp; The fact that there is no house to break the strength of the deck will make us feel safer in case great seas thunder their tons of water down on board.&nbsp; A large and roomy cockpit, sunk beneath the deck, with high rail and self-bailing, will make our rough-weather days and nights more comfortable.</p> <p>There will be no crew.&nbsp; Or, rather, Charmian, Roscoe, and I are the crew.&nbsp; We are going to do the thing with our own hands.&nbsp; With our own hands we&rsquo;re going to circumnavigate the globe.&nbsp; Sail her or sink her, with our own hands we&rsquo;ll do it.&nbsp; Of course there will be a cook and a cabin-boy.&nbsp; Why should we stew over a stove, wash dishes, and set the table?&nbsp; We could stay on land if we wanted to do those things.&nbsp; Besides, we&rsquo;ve got to stand watch and work the ship.&nbsp; And also, I&rsquo;ve got to work at my trade of writing in order to feed us and to get new sails and tackle and keep the <i>Snark</i> in efficient working order.&nbsp; And then there&rsquo;s the ranch; I&rsquo;ve got to keep the vineyard, orchard, and hedges growing.</p> <p>When we increased the length of the <i>Snark</i> in order to get space for a bath-room, we found that all the space was not required by the bath-room.&nbsp; Because of this, we increased the size of the engine.&nbsp; Seventy horse-power our engine is, and since we expect it to drive us along at a nine-knot clip, we do not know the name of a river with a current swift enough to defy us.</p> <p>We expect to do a lot of inland work.&nbsp; The smallness of the <i>Snark</i> makes this possible.&nbsp; When we enter the land, out go the masts and on goes the engine.&nbsp; There are the canals of China, and the Yang-tse River.&nbsp; We shall spend months on them if we can get permission from the government.&nbsp; That will be the one obstacle to our inland voyaging&mdash;governmental permission.&nbsp; But if we can get that permission, there is scarcely a limit to the inland voyaging we can do.</p> <p>When we come to the Nile, why we can go up the Nile.&nbsp; We can go up the Danube to Vienna, up the Thames to London, and we can go up the Seine to Paris and moor opposite the Latin Quarter with a bow-line out to Notre Dame and a stern-line fast to the Morgue.&nbsp; We can leave the Mediterranean and go up the Rh&ocirc;ne to Lyons, there enter the Sa&ocirc;ne, cross from the Sa&ocirc;ne to the Maine through the Canal de Bourgogne, and from the Marne enter the Seine and go out the Seine at Havre.&nbsp; When we cross the Atlantic to the United States, we can go up the Hudson, pass through the Erie Canal, cross the Great Lakes, leave Lake Michigan at Chicago, gain the Mississippi by way of the Illinois River and the connecting canal, and go down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.&nbsp; And then there are the great rivers of South America.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll know something about geography when we get back to California.</p> <p>People that build houses are often sore perplexed; but if they enjoy the strain of it, I&rsquo;ll advise them to build a boat like the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Just consider, for a moment, the strain of detail.&nbsp; Take the engine.&nbsp; What is the best kind of engine&mdash;the two cycle? three cycle? four cycle?&nbsp; My lips are mutilated with all kinds of strange jargon, my mind is mutilated with still stranger ideas and is foot-sore and weary from travelling in new and rocky realms of thought.&mdash;Ignition methods; shall it be make-and-break or jump-spark?&nbsp; Shall dry cells or storage batteries be used?&nbsp; A storage battery commends itself, but it requires a dynamo.&nbsp; How powerful a dynamo?&nbsp; And when we have installed a dynamo and a storage battery, it is simply ridiculous not to light the boat with electricity.&nbsp; Then comes the discussion of how many lights and how many candle-power.&nbsp; It is a splendid idea.&nbsp; But electric lights will demand a more powerful storage battery, which, in turn, demands a more powerful dynamo.</p> <p>And now that we&rsquo;ve gone in for it, why not have a searchlight?&nbsp; It would be tremendously useful.&nbsp; But the searchlight needs so much electricity that when it runs it will put all the other lights out of commission.&nbsp; Again we travel the weary road in the quest after more power for storage battery and dynamo.&nbsp; And then, when it is finally solved, some one asks, &ldquo;What if the engine breaks down?&rdquo;&nbsp; And we collapse.&nbsp; There are the sidelights, the binnacle light, and the anchor light.&nbsp; Our very lives depend upon them.&nbsp; So we have to fit the boat throughout with oil lamps as well.</p> <p>But we are not done with that engine yet.&nbsp; The engine is powerful.&nbsp; We are two small men and a small woman.&nbsp; It will break our hearts and our backs to hoist anchor by hand.&nbsp; Let the engine do it.&nbsp; And then comes the problem of how to convey power for&rsquo;ard from the engine to the winch.&nbsp; And by the time all this is settled, we redistribute the allotments of space to the engine-room, galley, bath-room, state-rooms, and cabin, and begin all over again.&nbsp; And when we have shifted the engine, I send off a telegram of gibberish to its makers at New York, something like this: <i>Toggle-joint abandoned change thrust-bearing accordingly distance from forward side of flywheel to face of stern post sixteen feet six inches</i>.</p> <p>Just potter around in quest of the best steering gear, or try to decide whether you will set up your rigging with old-fashioned lanyards or with turnbuckles, if you want strain of detail.&nbsp; Shall the binnacle be located in front of the wheel in the centre of the beam, or shall it be located to one side in front of the wheel?&mdash;there&rsquo;s room right there for a library of sea-dog controversy.&nbsp; Then there&rsquo;s the problem of gasolene, fifteen hundred gallons of it&mdash;what are the safest ways to tank it and pipe it? and which is the best fire-extinguisher for a gasolene fire?&nbsp; Then there is the pretty problem of the life-boat and the stowage of the same.&nbsp; And when that is finished, come the cook and cabin-boy to confront one with nightmare possibilities.&nbsp; It is a small boat, and we&rsquo;ll be packed close together.&nbsp; The servant-girl problem of landsmen pales to insignificance.&nbsp; We did select one cabin-boy, and by that much were our troubles eased.&nbsp; And then the cabin-boy fell in love and resigned.</p> <p>And in the meanwhile how is a fellow to find time to study navigation&mdash;when he is divided between these problems and the earning of the money wherewith to settle the problems?&nbsp; Neither Roscoe nor I know anything about navigation, and the summer is gone, and we are about to start, and the problems are thicker than ever, and the treasury is stuffed with emptiness.&nbsp; Well, anyway, it takes years to learn seamanship, and both of us are seamen.&nbsp; If we don&rsquo;t find the time, we&rsquo;ll lay in the books and instruments and teach ourselves navigation on the ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.</p> <p>There is one unfortunate and perplexing phase of the voyage of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Roscoe, who is to be my co-navigator, is a follower of one, Cyrus R. Teed.&nbsp; Now Cyrus R. Teed has a different cosmology from the one generally accepted, and Roscoe shares his views.&nbsp; Wherefore Roscoe believes that the surface of the earth is concave and that we live on the inside of a hollow sphere.&nbsp; Thus, though we shall sail on the one boat, the <i>Snark</i>, Roscoe will journey around the world on the inside, while I shall journey around on the outside.&nbsp; But of this, more anon.&nbsp; We threaten to be of the one mind before the voyage is completed.&nbsp; I am confident that I shall convert him into making the journey on the outside, while he is equally confident that before we arrive back in San Francisco I shall be on the inside of the earth.&nbsp; How he is going to get me through the crust I don&rsquo;t know, but Roscoe is ay a masterful man.</p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p>P.S.&mdash;That engine!&nbsp; While we&rsquo;ve got it, and the dynamo, and the storage battery, why not have an ice-machine?&nbsp; Ice in the tropics!&nbsp; It is more necessary than bread.&nbsp; Here goes for the ice-machine!&nbsp; Now I am plunged into chemistry, and my lips hurt, and my mind hurts, and how am I ever to find the time to study navigation?</p> <h2><a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>CHAPTER II<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE INCONCEIVABLE AND MONSTROUS</span></h2> <p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Spare</span> no money,&rdquo; I said to Roscoe.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let everything on the <i>Snark</i> be of the best.&nbsp; And never mind decoration.&nbsp; Plain pine boards is good enough finishing for me.&nbsp; But put the money into the construction.&nbsp; Let the <i>Snark</i> be as staunch and strong as any boat afloat.&nbsp; Never mind what it costs to make her staunch and strong; you see that she is made staunch and strong, and I&rsquo;ll go on writing and earning the money to pay for it.&rdquo;</p> <p>And I did . . . as well as I could; for the <i>Snark</i> ate up money faster than I could earn it.&nbsp; In fact, every little while I had to borrow money with which to supplement my earnings.&nbsp; Now I borrowed one thousand dollars, now I borrowed two thousand dollars, and now I borrowed five thousand dollars.&nbsp; And all the time I went on working every day and sinking the earnings in the venture.&nbsp; I worked Sundays as well, and I took no holidays.&nbsp; But it was worth it.&nbsp; Every time I thought of the <i>Snark</i> I knew she was worth it.</p> <p>For know, gentle reader, the staunchness of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; She is forty-five feet long on the waterline.&nbsp; Her garboard strake is three inches thick; her planking two and one-half inches thick; her deck-planking two inches thick and in all her planking there are no butts.&nbsp; I know, for I ordered that planking especially from Puget Sound.&nbsp; Then the <i>Snark</i> has four water-tight compartments, which is to say that her length is broken by three water-tight bulkheads.&nbsp; Thus, no matter how large a leak the <i>Snark</i> may spring, Only one compartment can fill with water.&nbsp; The other three compartments will keep her afloat, anyway, and, besides, will enable us to mend the leak.&nbsp; There is another virtue in these bulkheads.&nbsp; The last compartment of all, in the very stern, contains six tanks that carry over one thousand gallons of gasolene.&nbsp; Now gasolene is a very dangerous article to carry in bulk on a small craft far out on the wide ocean.&nbsp; But when the six tanks that do not leak are themselves contained in a compartment hermetically sealed off from the rest of the boat, the danger will be seen to be very small indeed.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> is a sail-boat.&nbsp; She was built primarily to sail.&nbsp; But incidentally, as an auxiliary, a seventy-horse-power engine was installed.&nbsp; This is a good, strong engine.&nbsp; I ought to know.&nbsp; I paid for it to come out all the way from New York City.&nbsp; Then, on deck, above the engine, is a windlass.&nbsp; It is a magnificent affair.&nbsp; It weighs several hundred pounds and takes up no end of deck-room.&nbsp; You see, it is ridiculous to hoist up anchor by hand-power when there is a seventy-horse-power engine on board.&nbsp; So we installed the windlass, transmitting power to it from the engine by means of a gear and castings specially made in a San Francisco foundry.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> was made for comfort, and no expense was spared in this regard.&nbsp; There is the bath-room, for instance, small and compact, it is true, but containing all the conveniences of any bath-room upon land.&nbsp; The bath-room is a beautiful dream of schemes and devices, pumps, and levers, and sea-valves.&nbsp; Why, in the course of its building, I used to lie awake nights thinking about that bath-room.&nbsp; And next to the bath-room come the life-boat and the launch.&nbsp; They are carried on deck, and they take up what little space might have been left us for exercise.&nbsp; But then, they beat life insurance; and the prudent man, even if he has built as staunch and strong a craft as the <i>Snark</i>, will see to it that he has a good life-boat as well.&nbsp; And ours is a good one.&nbsp; It is a dandy.&nbsp; It was stipulated to cost one hundred and fifty dollars, and when I came to pay the bill, it turned out to be three hundred and ninety-five dollars.&nbsp; That shows how good a life-boat it is.</p> <p>I could go on at great length relating the various virtues and excellences of the <i>Snark</i>, but I refrain.&nbsp; I have bragged enough as it is, and I have bragged to a purpose, as will be seen before my tale is ended.&nbsp; And please remember its title, &ldquo;The Inconceivable and Monstrous.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was planned that the <i>Snark</i> should sail on October 1, 1906.&nbsp; That she did not so sail was inconceivable and monstrous.&nbsp; There was no valid reason for not sailing except that she was not ready to sail, and there was no conceivable reason why she was not ready.&nbsp; She was promised on November first, on November fifteenth, on December first; and yet she was never ready.&nbsp; On December first Charmian and I left the sweet, clean Sonoma country and came down to live in the stifling city&mdash;but not for long, oh, no, only for two weeks, for we would sail on December fifteenth.&nbsp; And I guess we ought to know, for Roscoe said so, and it was on his advice that we came to the city to stay two weeks.&nbsp; Alas, the two weeks went by, four weeks went by, six weeks went by, eight weeks went by, and we were farther away from sailing than ever.&nbsp; Explain it?&nbsp; Who?&mdash;me?&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t.&nbsp; It is the one thing in all my life that I have backed down on.&nbsp; There is no explaining it; if there were, I&rsquo;d do it.&nbsp; I, who am an artisan of speech, confess my inability to explain why the <i>Snark</i> was not ready.&nbsp; As I have said, and as I must repeat, it was inconceivable and monstrous.</p> <p>The eight weeks became sixteen weeks, and then, one day, Roscoe cheered us up by saying: &ldquo;If we don&rsquo;t sail before April first, you can use my head for a football.&rdquo;</p> <p>Two weeks later he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m getting my head in training for that match.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; Charmian and I said to each other; &ldquo;think of the wonderful boat it is going to be when it is completed.&rdquo;</p> <p>Whereat we would rehearse for our mutual encouragement the manifold virtues and excellences of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Also, I would borrow more money, and I would get down closer to my desk and write harder, and I refused heroically to take a Sunday off and go out into the hills with my friends.&nbsp; I was building a boat, and by the eternal it was going to be a boat, and a boat spelled out all in capitals&mdash;B&mdash;O&mdash;A&mdash;T; and no matter what it cost I didn&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; So long as it was a B O A T.</p> <p>And, oh, there is one other excellence of the <i>Snark</i>, upon which I must brag, namely, her bow.&nbsp; No sea could ever come over it.&nbsp; It laughs at the sea, that bow does; it challenges the sea; it snorts defiance at the sea.&nbsp; And withal it is a beautiful bow; the lines of it are dreamlike; I doubt if ever a boat was blessed with a more beautiful and at the same time a more capable bow.&nbsp; It was made to punch storms.&nbsp; To touch that bow is to rest one&rsquo;s hand on the cosmic nose of things.&nbsp; To look at it is to realize that expense cut no figure where it was concerned.&nbsp; And every time our sailing was delayed, or a new expense was tacked on, we thought of that wonderful bow and were content.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> is a small boat.&nbsp; When I figured seven thousand dollars as her generous cost, I was both generous and correct.&nbsp; I have built barns and houses, and I know the peculiar trait such things have of running past their estimated cost.&nbsp; This knowledge was mine, was already mine, when I estimated the probable cost of the building of the <i>Snark</i> at seven thousand dollars.&nbsp; Well, she cost thirty thousand.&nbsp; Now don&rsquo;t ask me, please.&nbsp; It is the truth.&nbsp; I signed the cheques and I raised the money.&nbsp; Of course there is no explaining it, inconceivable and monstrous is what it is, as you will agree, I know, ere my tale is done.</p> <p>Then there was the matter of delay.&nbsp; I dealt with forty-seven different kinds of union men and with one hundred and fifteen different firms.&nbsp; And not one union man and not one firm of all the union men and all the firms ever delivered anything at the time agreed upon, nor ever was on time for anything except pay-day and bill-collection.&nbsp; Men pledged me their immortal souls that they would deliver a certain thing on a certain date; as a rule, after such pledging, they rarely exceeded being three months late in delivery.&nbsp; And so it went, and Charmian and I consoled each other by saying what a splendid boat the <i>Snark</i> was, so staunch and strong; also, we would get into the small boat and row around the <i>Snark</i>, and gloat over her unbelievably wonderful bow.</p> <p>&ldquo;Think,&rdquo; I would say to Charmian, &ldquo;of a gale off the China coast, and of the <i>Snark</i> hove to, that splendid bow of hers driving into the storm.&nbsp; Not a drop will come over that bow.&nbsp; She&rsquo;ll be as dry as a feather, and we&rsquo;ll be all below playing whist while the gale howls.&rdquo;</p> <p>And Charmian would press my hand enthusiastically and exclaim: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s worth every bit of it&mdash;the delay, and expense, and worry, and all the rest.&nbsp; Oh, what a truly wonderful boat!&rdquo;</p> <p>Whenever I looked at the bow of the <i>Snark</i> or thought of her water-tight compartments, I was encouraged.&nbsp; Nobody else, however, was encouraged.&nbsp; My friends began to make bets against the various sailing dates of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Mr. Wiget, who was left behind in charge of our Sonoma ranch was the first to cash his bet.&nbsp; He collected on New Year&rsquo;s Day, 1907.&nbsp; After that the bets came fast and furious.&nbsp; My friends surrounded me like a gang of harpies, making bets against every sailing date I set.&nbsp; I was rash, and I was stubborn.&nbsp; I bet, and I bet, and I continued to bet; and I paid them all.&nbsp; Why, the women-kind of my friends grew so brave that those among them who never bet before began to bet with me.&nbsp; And I paid them, too.</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; said Charmian to me; &ldquo;just think of that bow and of being hove to on the China Seas.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; I said to my friends, when I paid the latest bunch of wagers, &ldquo;neither trouble nor cash is being spared in making the <i>Snark</i> the most seaworthy craft that ever sailed out through the Golden Gate&mdash;that is what causes all the delay.&rdquo;</p> <p>In the meantime editors and publishers with whom I had contracts pestered me with demands for explanations.&nbsp; But how could I explain to them, when I was unable to explain to myself, or when there was nobody, not even Roscoe, to explain to me?&nbsp; The newspapers began to laugh at me, and to publish rhymes anent the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> departure with refrains like, &ldquo;Not yet, but soon.&rdquo;&nbsp; And Charmian cheered me up by reminding me of the bow, and I went to a banker and borrowed five thousand more.&nbsp; There was one recompense for the delay, however.&nbsp; A friend of mine, who happens to be a critic, wrote a roast of me, of all I had done, and of all I ever was going to do; and he planned to have it published after I was out on the ocean.&nbsp; I was still on shore when it came out, and he has been busy explaining ever since.</p> <p>And the time continued to go by.&nbsp; One thing was becoming apparent, namely, that it was impossible to finish the <i>Snark</i> in San Francisco.&nbsp; She had been so long in the building that she was beginning to break down and wear out.&nbsp; In fact, she had reached the stage where she was breaking down faster than she could be repaired.&nbsp; She had become a joke.&nbsp; Nobody took her seriously; least of all the men who worked on her.&nbsp; I said we would sail just as she was and finish building her in Honolulu.&nbsp; Promptly she sprang a leak that had to be attended to before we could sail.&nbsp; I started her for the boat-ways.&nbsp; Before she got to them she was caught between two huge barges and received a vigorous crushing.&nbsp; We got her on the ways, and, part way along, the ways spread and dropped her through, stern-first, into the mud.</p> <p>It was a pretty tangle, a job for wreckers, not boat-builders.&nbsp; There are two high tides every twenty-four hours, and at every high tide, night and day, for a week, there were two steam tugs pulling and hauling on the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; There she was, stuck, fallen between the ways and standing on her stern.&nbsp; Next, and while still in that predicament, we started to use the gears and castings made in the local foundry whereby power was conveyed from the engine to the windlass.&nbsp; It was the first time we ever tried to use that windlass.&nbsp; The castings had flaws; they shattered asunder, the gears ground together, and the windlass was out of commission.&nbsp; Following upon that, the seventy-horse-power engine went out of commission.&nbsp; This engine came from New York; so did its bed-plate; there was a flaw in the bed-plate; there were a lot of flaws in the bed-plate; and the seventy-horse-power engine broke away from its shattered foundations, reared up in the air, smashed all connections and fastenings, and fell over on its side.&nbsp; And the <i>Snark</i> continued to stick between the spread ways, and the two tugs continued to haul vainly upon her.</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; said Charmian, &ldquo;think of what a staunch, strong boat she is.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;and of that beautiful bow.&rdquo;</p> <p>So we took heart and went at it again.&nbsp; The ruined engine was lashed down on its rotten foundation; the smashed castings and cogs of the power transmission were taken down and stored away&mdash;all for the purpose of taking them to Honolulu where repairs and new castings could be made.&nbsp; Somewhere in the dim past the <i>Snark</i> had received on the outside one coat of white paint.&nbsp; The intention of the colour was still evident, however, when one got it in the right light.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> had never received any paint on the inside.&nbsp; On the contrary, she was coated inches thick with the grease and tobacco-juice of the multitudinous mechanics who had toiled upon her.&nbsp; Never mind, we said; the grease and filth could be planed off, and later, when we fetched Honolulu, the <i>Snark</i> could be painted at the same time as she was being rebuilt.</p> <p>By main strength and sweat we dragged the <i>Snark</i> off from the wrecked ways and laid her alongside the Oakland City Wharf.&nbsp; The drays brought all the outfit from home, the books and blankets and personal luggage.&nbsp; Along with this, everything else came on board in a torrent of confusion&mdash;wood and coal, water and water-tanks, vegetables, provisions, oil, the life-boat and the launch, all our friends, all the friends of our friends and those who claimed to be their friends, to say nothing of some of the friends of the friends of the friends of our crew.&nbsp; Also there were reporters, and photographers, and strangers, and cranks, and finally, and over all, clouds of coal-dust from the wharf.</p> <p>We were to sail Sunday at eleven, and Saturday afternoon had arrived.&nbsp; The crowd on the wharf and the coal-dust were thicker than ever.&nbsp; In one pocket I carried a cheque-book, a fountain-pen, a dater, and a blotter; in another pocket I carried between one and two thousand dollars in paper money and gold.&nbsp; I was ready for the creditors, cash for the small ones and cheques for the large ones, and was waiting only for Roscoe to arrive with the balances of the accounts of the hundred and fifteen firms who had delayed me so many months.&nbsp; And then&mdash;</p> <p>And then the inconceivable and monstrous happened once more.&nbsp; Before Roscoe could arrive there arrived another man.&nbsp; He was a United States marshal.&nbsp; He tacked a notice on the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> brave mast so that all on the wharf could read that the <i>Snark</i> had been libelled for debt.&nbsp; The marshal left a little old man in charge of the <i>Snark</i>, and himself went away.&nbsp; I had no longer any control of the <i>Snark</i>, nor of her wonderful bow.&nbsp; The little old man was now her lord and master, and I learned that I was paying him three dollars a day for being lord and master.&nbsp; Also, I learned the name of the man who had libelled the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; It was Sellers; the debt was two hundred and thirty-two dollars; and the deed was no more than was to be expected from the possessor of such a name.&nbsp; Sellers!&nbsp; Ye gods!&nbsp; Sellers!</p> <p>But who under the sun was Sellers?&nbsp; I looked in my cheque-book and saw that two weeks before I had made him out a cheque for five hundred dollars.&nbsp; Other cheque-books showed me that during the many months of the building of the <i>Snark</i> I had paid him several thousand dollars.&nbsp; Then why in the name of common decency hadn&rsquo;t he tried to collect his miserable little balance instead of libelling the <i>Snark</i>?&nbsp; I thrust my hands into my pockets, and in one pocket encountered the cheque-hook and the dater and the pen, and in the other pocket the gold money and the paper money.&nbsp; There was the wherewithal to settle his pitiful account a few score of times and over&mdash;why hadn&rsquo;t he given me a chance?&nbsp; There was no explanation; it was merely the inconceivable and monstrous.</p> <p>To make the matter worse, the <i>Snark</i> had been libelled late Saturday afternoon; and though I sent lawyers and agents all over Oakland and San Francisco, neither United States judge, nor United States marshal, nor Mr. Sellers, nor Mr. Sellers&rsquo; attorney, nor anybody could be found.&nbsp; They were all out of town for the weekend.&nbsp; And so the <i>Snark</i> did not sail Sunday morning at eleven.&nbsp; The little old man was still in charge, and he said no.&nbsp; And Charmian and I walked out on an opposite wharf and took consolation in the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> wonderful bow and thought of all the gales and typhoons it would proudly punch.</p> <p>&ldquo;A bourgeois trick,&rdquo; I said to Charmian, speaking of Mr. Sellers and his libel; &ldquo;a petty trader&rsquo;s panic.&nbsp; But never mind; our troubles will cease when once we are away from this and out on the wide ocean.&rdquo;</p> <p>And in the end we sailed away, on Tuesday morning, April 23, 1907.&nbsp; We started rather lame, I confess.&nbsp; We had to hoist anchor by hand, because the power transmission was a wreck.&nbsp; Also, what remained of our seventy-horse-power engine was lashed down for ballast on the bottom of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; But what of such things?&nbsp; They could be fixed in Honolulu, and in the meantime think of the magnificent rest of the boat!&nbsp; It is true, the engine in the launch wouldn&rsquo;t run, and the life-boat leaked like a sieve; but then they weren&rsquo;t the <i>Snark</i>; they were mere appurtenances.&nbsp; The things that counted were the water-tight bulkheads, the solid planking without butts, the bath-room devices&mdash;they were the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; And then there was, greatest of all, that noble, wind-punching bow.</p> <p>We sailed out through the Golden Gate and set our course south toward that part of the Pacific where we could hope to pick up with the north-east trades.&nbsp; And right away things began to happen.&nbsp; I had calculated that youth was the stuff for a voyage like that of the <i>Snark</i>, and I had taken three youths&mdash;the engineer, the cook, and the cabin-boy.&nbsp; My calculation was only two-thirds <i>off</i>; I had forgotten to calculate on seasick youth, and I had two of them, the cook and the cabin boy.&nbsp; They immediately took to their bunks, and that was the end of their usefulness for a week to come.&nbsp; It will be understood, from the foregoing, that we did not have the hot meals we might have had, nor were things kept clean and orderly down below.&nbsp; But it did not matter very much anyway, for we quickly discovered that our box of oranges had at some time been frozen; that our box of apples was mushy and spoiling; that the crate of cabbages, spoiled before it was ever delivered to us, had to go overboard instanter; that kerosene had been spilled on the carrots, and that the turnips were woody and the beets rotten, while the kindling was dead wood that wouldn&rsquo;t burn, and the coal, delivered in rotten potato-sacks, had spilled all over the deck and was washing through the scuppers.</p> <p>But what did it matter?&nbsp; Such things were mere accessories.&nbsp; There was the boat&mdash;she was all right, wasn&rsquo;t she?&nbsp; I strolled along the deck and in one minute counted fourteen butts in the beautiful planking ordered specially from Puget Sound in order that there should be no butts in it.&nbsp; Also, that deck leaked, and it leaked badly.&nbsp; It drowned Roscoe out of his bunk and ruined the tools in the engine-room, to say nothing of the provisions it ruined in the galley.&nbsp; Also, the sides of the <i>Snark</i> leaked, and the bottom leaked, and we had to pump her every day to keep her afloat.&nbsp; The floor of the galley is a couple of feet above the inside bottom of the <i>Snark</i>; and yet I have stood on the floor of the galley, trying to snatch a cold bite, and been wet to the knees by the water churning around inside four hours after the last pumping.</p> <p>Then those magnificent water-tight compartments that cost so much time and money&mdash;well, they weren&rsquo;t water-tight after all.&nbsp; The water moved free as the air from one compartment to another; furthermore, a strong smell of gasolene from the after compartment leads me to suspect that some one or more of the half-dozen tanks there stored have sprung a leak.&nbsp; The tanks leak, and they are not hermetically sealed in their compartment.&nbsp; Then there was the bath-room with its pumps and levers and sea-valves&mdash;it went out of commission inside the first twenty hours.&nbsp; Powerful iron levers broke off short in one&rsquo;s hand when one tried to pump with them.&nbsp; The bath-room was the swiftest wreck of any portion of the <i>Snark</i>.</p> <p>And the iron-work on the <i>Snark</i>, no matter what its source, proved to be mush.&nbsp; For instance, the bed-plate of the engine came from New York, and it was mush; so were the casting and gears for the windlass that came from San Francisco.&nbsp; And finally, there was the wrought iron used in the rigging, that carried away in all directions when the first strains were put upon it.&nbsp; Wrought iron, mind you, and it snapped like macaroni.</p> <p>A gooseneck on the gaff of the mainsail broke short off.&nbsp; We replaced it with the gooseneck from the gaff of the storm trysail, and the second gooseneck broke short off inside fifteen minutes of use, and, mind you, it had been taken from the gaff of the storm trysail, upon which we would have depended in time of storm.&nbsp; At the present moment the <i>Snark</i> trails her mainsail like a broken wing, the gooseneck being replaced by a rough lashing.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll see if we can get honest iron in Honolulu.</p> <p>Man had betrayed us and sent us to sea in a sieve, but the Lord must have loved us, for we had calm weather in which to learn that we must pump every day in order to keep afloat, and that more trust could be placed in a wooden toothpick than in the most massive piece of iron to be found aboard.&nbsp; As the staunchness and the strength of the <i>Snark</i> went glimmering, Charmian and I pinned our faith more and more to the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> wonderful bow.&nbsp; There was nothing else left to pin to.&nbsp; It was all inconceivable and monstrous, we knew, but that bow, at least, was rational.&nbsp; And then, one evening, we started to heave to.</p> <p>How shall I describe it?&nbsp; First of all, for the benefit of the tyro, let me explain that heaving to is that sea man&oelig;uvre which, by means of short and balanced canvas, compels a vessel to ride bow-on to wind and sea.&nbsp; When the wind is too strong, or the sea is too high, a vessel of the size of the <i>Snark</i> can heave to with ease, whereupon there is no more work to do on deck.&nbsp; Nobody needs to steer.&nbsp; The lookout is superfluous.&nbsp; All hands can go below and sleep or play whist.</p> <p>Well, it was blowing half of a small summer gale, when I told Roscoe we&rsquo;d heave to.&nbsp; Night was coming on.&nbsp; I had been steering nearly all day, and all hands on deck (Roscoe and Bert and Charmian) were tired, while all hands below were seasick.&nbsp; It happened that we had already put two reefs in the big mainsail.&nbsp; The flying-jib and the jib were taken in, and a reef put in the fore-staysail.&nbsp; The mizzen was also taken in.&nbsp; About this time the flying jib-boom buried itself in a sea and broke short off.&nbsp; I started to put the wheel down in order to heave to.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> at the moment was rolling in the trough.&nbsp; She continued rolling in the trough.&nbsp; I put the spokes down harder and harder.&nbsp; She never budged from the trough.&nbsp; (The trough, gentle reader, is the most dangerous position all in which to lay a vessel.)&nbsp; I put the wheel hard down, and still the <i>Snark</i> rolled in the trough.&nbsp; Eight points was the nearest I could get her to the wind.&nbsp; I had Roscoe and Bert come in on the main-sheet.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> rolled on in the trough, now putting her rail under on one side and now under on the other side.</p> <p>Again the inconceivable and monstrous was showing its grizzly head.&nbsp; It was grotesque, impossible.&nbsp; I refused to believe it.&nbsp; Under double-reefed mainsail and single-reefed staysail the <i>Snark</i> refused to heave to.&nbsp; We flattened the mainsail down.&nbsp; It did not alter the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> course a tenth of a degree.&nbsp; We slacked the mainsail off with no more result.&nbsp; We set a storm trysail on the mizzen, and took in the mainsail.&nbsp; No change.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> roiled on in the trough.&nbsp; That beautiful bow of hers refused to come up and face the wind.</p> <p>Next we took in the reefed staysail.&nbsp; Thus, the only bit of canvas left on her was the storm trysail on the mizzen.&nbsp; If anything would bring her bow up to the wind, that would.&nbsp; Maybe you won&rsquo;t believe me when I say it failed, but I do say it failed.&nbsp; And I say it failed because I saw it fail, and not because I believe it failed.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe it did fail.&nbsp; It is unbelievable, and I am not telling you what I believe; I am telling you what I saw.</p> <p>Now, gentle reader, what would you do if you were on a small boat, rolling in the trough of the sea, a trysail on that small boat&rsquo;s stern that was unable to swing the bow up into the wind?&nbsp; Get out the sea-anchor.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s just what we did.&nbsp; We had a patent one, made to order and warranted not to dive.&nbsp; Imagine a hoop of steel that serves to keep open the mouth of a large, conical, canvas bag, and you have a sea-anchor.&nbsp; Well, we made a line fast to the sea-anchor and to the bow of the <i>Snark</i>, and then dropped the sea-anchor overboard.&nbsp; It promptly dived.&nbsp; We had a tripping line on it, so we tripped the sea-anchor and hauled it in.&nbsp; We attached a big timber as a float, and dropped the sea-anchor over again.&nbsp; This time it floated.&nbsp; The line to the bow grew taut.&nbsp; The trysail on the mizzen tended to swing the bow into the wind, but, in spite of this tendency, the <i>Snark</i> calmly took that sea-anchor in her teeth, and went on ahead, dragging it after her, still in the trough of the sea.&nbsp; And there you are.&nbsp; We even took in the trysail, hoisted the full mizzen in its place, and hauled the full mizzen down flat, and the <i>Snark</i> wallowed in the trough and dragged the sea-anchor behind her.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t believe me.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe it myself.&nbsp; I am merely telling you what I saw.</p> <p>Now I leave it to you.&nbsp; Who ever heard of a sailing-boat that wouldn&rsquo;t heave to?&mdash;that wouldn&rsquo;t heave to with a sea-anchor to help it?&nbsp; Out of my brief experience with boats I know I never did.&nbsp; And I stood on deck and looked on the naked face of the inconceivable and monstrous&mdash;the <i>Snark</i> that wouldn&rsquo;t heave to.&nbsp; A stormy night with broken moonlight had come on.&nbsp; There was a splash of wet in the air, and up to windward there was a promise of rain-squalls; and then there was the trough of the sea, cold and cruel in the moonlight, in which the <i>Snark</i> complacently rolled.&nbsp; And then we took in the sea-anchor and the mizzen, hoisted the reefed staysail, ran the <i>Snark</i> off before it, and went below&mdash;not to the hot meal that should have awaited us, but to skate across the slush and slime on the cabin floor, where cook and cabin-boy lay like dead men in their bunks, and to lie down in our own bunks, with our clothes on ready for a call, and to listen to the bilge-water spouting knee-high on the galley floor.</p> <p>In the Bohemian Club of San Francisco there are some crack sailors.&nbsp; I know, because I heard them pass judgment on the <i>Snark</i> during the process of her building.&nbsp; They found only one vital thing the matter with her, and on this they were all agreed, namely, that she could not run.&nbsp; She was all right in every particular, they said, except that I&rsquo;d never be able to run her before it in a stiff wind and sea.&nbsp; &ldquo;Her lines,&rdquo; they explained enigmatically, &ldquo;it is the fault of her lines.&nbsp; She simply cannot be made to run, that is all.&rdquo;&nbsp; Well, I wish I&rsquo;d only had those crack sailors of the Bohemian Club on board the <i>Snark</i> the other night for them to see for themselves their one, vital, unanimous judgment absolutely reversed.&nbsp; Run?&nbsp; It is the one thing the <i>Snark</i> does to perfection.&nbsp; Run?&nbsp; She ran with a sea-anchor fast for&rsquo;ard and a full mizzen flattened down aft.&nbsp; Run?&nbsp; At the present moment, as I write this, we are bowling along before it, at a six-knot clip, in the north-east trades.&nbsp; Quite a tidy bit of sea is running.&nbsp; There is nobody at the wheel, the wheel is not even lashed and is set over a half-spoke weather helm.&nbsp; To be precise, the wind is north-east; the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> mizzen is furled, her mainsail is over to starboard, her head-sheets are hauled flat: and the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> course is south-south-west.&nbsp; And yet there are men who have sailed the seas for forty years and who hold that no boat can run before it without being steered.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ll call me a liar when they read this; it&rsquo;s what they called Captain Slocum when he said the same of his <i>Spray</i>.</p> <p>As regards the future of the <i>Snark</i> I&rsquo;m all at sea.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; If I had the money or the credit, I&rsquo;d build another <i>Snark</i> that <i>would</i> heave to.&nbsp; But I am at the end of my resources.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve got to put up with the present <i>Snark</i> or quit&mdash;and I can&rsquo;t quit.&nbsp; So I guess I&rsquo;ll have to try to get along with heaving the <i>Snark</i> to stern first.&nbsp; I am waiting for the next gale to see how it will work.&nbsp; I think it can be done.&nbsp; It all depends on how her stern takes the seas.&nbsp; And who knows but that some wild morning on the China Sea, some gray-beard skipper will stare, rub his incredulous eyes and stare again, at the spectacle of a weird, small craft very much like the <i>Snark</i>, hove to stern-first and riding out the gale?</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; On my return to California after the voyage, I learned that the <i>Snark</i> was forty-three feet on the water-line instead of forty-five.&nbsp; This was due to the fact that the builder was not on speaking terms with the tape-line or two-foot rule.</p> <h2><a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>CHAPTER III<br /> <span class="GutSmall">ADVENTURE</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">No</span>, adventure is not dead, and in spite of the steam engine and of Thomas Cook &amp; Son.&nbsp; When the announcement of the contemplated voyage of the <i>Snark</i> was made, young men of &ldquo;roving disposition&rdquo; proved to be legion, and young women as well&mdash;to say nothing of the elderly men and women who volunteered for the voyage.&nbsp; Why, among my personal friends there were at least half a dozen who regretted their recent or imminent marriages; and there was one marriage I know of that almost failed to come off because of the <i>Snark</i>.</p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p>Every mail to me was burdened with the letters of applicants who were suffocating in the &ldquo;man-stifled towns,&rdquo; and it soon dawned upon me that a twentieth century Ulysses required a corps of stenographers to clear his correspondence before setting sail.&nbsp; No, adventure is certainly not dead&mdash;not while one receives letters that begin:</p> <p>&ldquo;There is no doubt that when you read this soul-plea from a female stranger in New York City,&rdquo; etc.; and wherein one learns, a little farther on, that this female stranger weighs only ninety pounds, wants to be cabin-boy, and &ldquo;yearns to see the countries of the world.&rdquo;</p> <p>The possession of a &ldquo;passionate fondness for geography,&rdquo; was the way one applicant expressed the wander-lust that was in him; while another wrote, &ldquo;I am cursed with an eternal yearning to be always on the move, consequently this letter to you.&rdquo;&nbsp; But best of all was the fellow who said he wanted to come because his feet itched.</p> <p>There were a few who wrote anonymously, suggesting names of friends and giving said friends&rsquo; qualifications; but to me there was a hint of something sinister in such proceedings, and I went no further in the matter.</p> <p>With two or three exceptions, all the hundreds that volunteered for my crew were very much in earnest.&nbsp; Many of them sent their photographs.&nbsp; Ninety per cent. offered to work in any capacity, and ninety-nine per cent. offered to work without salary.&nbsp; &ldquo;Contemplating your voyage on the <i>Snark</i>,&rdquo; said one, &ldquo;and notwithstanding its attendant dangers, to accompany you (in any capacity whatever) would be the climax of my ambitions.&rdquo;&nbsp; Which reminds me of the young fellow who was &ldquo;seventeen years old and ambicious,&rdquo; and who, at the end of his letter, earnestly requested &ldquo;but please do not let this git into the papers or magazines.&rdquo;&nbsp; Quite different was the one who said, &ldquo;I would be willing to work like hell and not demand pay.&rdquo;&nbsp; Almost all of them wanted me to telegraph, at their expense, my acceptance of their services; and quite a number offered to put up a bond to guarantee their appearance on sailing date.</p> <p>Some were rather vague in their own minds concerning the work to be done on the <i>Snark</i>; as, for instance, the one who wrote: &ldquo;I am taking the liberty of writing you this note to find out if there would be any possibility of my going with you as one of the crew of your boat to make sketches and illustrations.&rdquo;&nbsp; Several, unaware of the needful work on a small craft like the <i>Snark</i>, offered to serve, as one of them phrased it, &ldquo;as assistant in filing materials collected for books and novels.&rdquo;&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what one gets for being prolific.</p> <p>&ldquo;Let me give my qualifications for the job,&rdquo; wrote one.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am an orphan living with my uncle, who is a hot revolutionary socialist and who says a man without the red blood of adventure is an animated dish-rag.&rdquo;&nbsp; Said another: &ldquo;I can swim some, though I don&rsquo;t know any of the new strokes.&nbsp; But what is more important than strokes, the water is a friend of mine.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;If I was put alone in a sail-boat, I could get her anywhere I wanted to go,&rdquo; was the qualification of a third&mdash;and a better qualification than the one that follows, &ldquo;I have also watched the fish-boats unload.&rdquo;&nbsp; But possibly the prize should go to this one, who very subtly conveys his deep knowledge of the world and life by saying: &ldquo;My age, in years, is twenty-two.&rdquo;</p> <p>Then there were the simple straight-out, homely, and unadorned letters of young boys, lacking in the felicities of expression, it is true, but desiring greatly to make the voyage.&nbsp; These were the hardest of all to decline, and each time I declined one it seemed as if I had struck Youth a slap in the face.&nbsp; They were so earnest, these boys, they wanted so much to go.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am sixteen but large for my age,&rdquo; said one; and another, &ldquo;Seventeen but large and healthy.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;I am as strong at least as the average boy of my size,&rdquo; said an evident weakling.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not afraid of any kind of work,&rdquo; was what many said, while one in particular, to lure me no doubt by inexpensiveness, wrote: &ldquo;I can pay my way to the Pacific coast, so that part would probably be acceptable to you.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Going around the world is <i>the one thing</i> I want to do,&rdquo; said one, and it seemed to be the one thing that a few hundred wanted to do.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have no one who cares whether I go or not,&rdquo; was the pathetic note sounded by another.&nbsp; One had sent his photograph, and speaking of it, said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a homely-looking sort of a chap, but looks don&rsquo;t always count.&rdquo;&nbsp; And I am confident that the lad who wrote the following would have turned out all right: &ldquo;My age is 19 years, but I am rather small and consequently won&rsquo;t take up much room, but I&rsquo;m tough as the devil.&rdquo;&nbsp; And there was one thirteen-year-old applicant that Charmian and I fell in love with, and it nearly broke our hearts to refuse him.</p> <p>But it must not be imagined that most of my volunteers were boys; on the contrary, boys constituted a very small proportion.&nbsp; There were men and women from every walk in life.&nbsp; Physicians, surgeons, and dentists offered in large numbers to come along, and, like all the professional men, offered to come without pay, to serve in any capacity, and to pay, even, for the privilege of so serving.</p> <p>There was no end of compositors and reporters who wanted to come, to say nothing of experienced valets, chefs, and stewards.&nbsp; Civil engineers were keen on the voyage; &ldquo;lady&rdquo; companions galore cropped up for Charmian; while I was deluged with the applications of would-be private secretaries.&nbsp; Many high school and university students yearned for the voyage, and every trade in the working class developed a few applicants, the machinists, electricians, and engineers being especially strong on the trip.&nbsp; I was surprised at the number, who, in musty law offices, heard the call of adventure; and I was more than surprised by the number of elderly and retired sea captains who were still thralls to the sea.&nbsp; Several young fellows, with millions coming to them later on, were wild for the adventure, as were also several county superintendents of schools.</p> <p>Fathers and sons wanted to come, and many men with their wives, to say nothing of the young woman stenographer who wrote: &ldquo;Write immediately if you need me.&nbsp; I shall bring my typewriter on the first train.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the best of all is the following&mdash;observe the delicate way in which he worked in his wife: &ldquo;I thought I would drop you a line of inquiry as to the possibility of making the trip with you, am 24 years of age, married and broke, and a trip of that kind would be just what we are looking for.&rdquo;</p> <p>Come to think of it, for the average man it must be fairly difficult to write an honest letter of self-recommendation.&nbsp; One of my correspondents was so stumped that he began his letter with the words, &ldquo;This is a hard task&rdquo;; and, after vainly trying to describe his good points, he wound up with, &ldquo;It is a hard job writing about one&rsquo;s self.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nevertheless, there was one who gave himself a most glowing and lengthy character, and in conclusion stated that he had greatly enjoyed writing it.</p> <p>&ldquo;But suppose this: your cabin-boy could run your engine, could repair it when out of order.&nbsp; Suppose he could take his turn at the wheel, could do any carpenter or machinist work.&nbsp; Suppose he is strong, healthy, and willing to work.&nbsp; Would you not rather have him than a kid that gets seasick and can&rsquo;t do anything but wash dishes?&rdquo;&nbsp; It was letters of this sort that I hated to decline.&nbsp; The writer of it, self-taught in English, had been only two years in the United States, and, as he said, &ldquo;I am not wishing to go with you to earn my living, but I wish to learn and see.&rdquo;&nbsp; At the time of writing to me he was a designer for one of the big motor manufacturing companies; he had been to sea quite a bit, and had been used all his life to the handling of small boats.</p> <p>&ldquo;I have a good position, but it matters not so with me as I prefer travelling,&rdquo; wrote another.&nbsp; &ldquo;As to salary, look at me, and if I am worth a dollar or two, all right, and if I am not, nothing said.&nbsp; As to my honesty and character, I shall be pleased to show you my employers.&nbsp; Never drink, no tobacco, but to be honest, I myself, after a little more experience, want to do a little writing.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;I can assure you that I am eminently respectable, but find other respectable people tiresome.&rdquo;&nbsp; The man who wrote the foregoing certainly had me guessing, and I am still wondering whether or not he&rsquo;d have found me tiresome, or what the deuce he did mean.</p> <p>&ldquo;I have seen better days than what I am passing through to-day,&rdquo; wrote an old salt, &ldquo;but I have seen them a great deal worse also.&rdquo;</p> <p>But the willingness to sacrifice on the part of the man who wrote the following was so touching that I could not accept: &ldquo;I have a father, a mother, brothers and sisters, dear friends and a lucrative position, and yet I will sacrifice all to become one of your crew.&rdquo;</p> <p>Another volunteer I could never have accepted was the finicky young fellow who, to show me how necessary it was that I should give him a chance, pointed out that &ldquo;to go in the ordinary boat, be it schooner or steamer, would be impracticable, for I would have to mix among and live with the ordinary type of seamen, which as a rule is not a clean sort of life.&rdquo;</p> <p>Then there was the young fellow of twenty-six, who had &ldquo;run through the gamut of human emotions,&rdquo; and had &ldquo;done everything from cooking to attending Stanford University,&rdquo; and who, at the present writing, was &ldquo;A vaquero on a fifty-five-thousand-acre range.&rdquo;&nbsp; Quite in contrast was the modesty of the one who said, &ldquo;I am not aware of possessing any particular qualities that would be likely to recommend me to your consideration.&nbsp; But should you be impressed, you might consider it worth a few minutes&rsquo; time to answer.&nbsp; Otherwise, there&rsquo;s always work at the trade.&nbsp; Not expecting, but hoping, I remain, etc.&rdquo;</p> <p>But I have held my head in both my hands ever since, trying to figure out the intellectual kinship between myself and the one who wrote: &ldquo;Long before I knew of you, I had mixed political economy and history and deducted therefrom many of your conclusions in concrete.&rdquo;</p> <p>Here, in its way, is one of the best, as it is the briefest, that I received: &ldquo;If any of the present company signed on for cruise happens to get cold feet and you need one more who understands boating, engines, etc., would like to hear from you, etc.&rdquo;&nbsp; Here is another brief one: &ldquo;Point blank, would like to have the job of cabin-boy on your trip around the world, or any other job on board.&nbsp; Am nineteen years old, weigh one hundred and forty pounds, and am an American.&rdquo;</p> <p>And here is a good one from a man a &ldquo;little over five feet long&rdquo;: &ldquo;When I read about your manly plan of sailing around the world in a small boat with Mrs. London, I was so much rejoiced that I felt I was planning it myself, and I thought to write you about filling either position of cook or cabin-boy myself, but for some reason I did not do it, and I came to Denver from Oakland to join my friend&rsquo;s business last month, but everything is worse and unfavourable.&nbsp; But fortunately you have postponed your departure on account of the great earthquake, so I finally decided to propose you to let me fill either of the positions.&nbsp; I am not very strong, being a man of a little over five feet long, although I am of sound health and capability.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;I think I can add to your outfit an additional method of utilizing the power of the wind,&rdquo; wrote a well-wisher, &ldquo;which, while not interfering with ordinary sails in light breezes, will enable you to use the whole force of the wind in its mightiest blows, so that even when its force is so great that you may have to take in every inch of canvas used in the ordinary way, you may carry the fullest spread with my method.&nbsp; With my attachment your craft could not be UPSET.&rdquo;</p> <p>The foregoing letter was written in San Francisco under the date of April 16, 1906.&nbsp; And two days later, on April 18, came the Great Earthquake.&nbsp; And that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;ve got it in for that earthquake, for it made a refugee out of the man who wrote the letter, and prevented us from ever getting together.</p> <p>Many of my brother socialists objected to my making the cruise, of which the following is typical: &ldquo;The Socialist Cause and the millions of oppressed victims of Capitalism has a right and claim upon your life and services.&nbsp; If, however, you persist, then, when you swallow the last mouthful of salt chuck you can hold before sinking, remember that we at least protested.&rdquo;</p> <p>One wanderer over the world who &ldquo;could, if opportunity afforded, recount many unusual scenes and events,&rdquo; spent several pages ardently trying to get to the point of his letter, and at last achieved the following: &ldquo;Still I am neglecting the point I set out to write you about.&nbsp; So will say at once that it has been stated in print that you and one or two others are going to take a cruize around the world a little fifty- or sixty-foot boat.&nbsp; I therefore cannot get myself to think that a man of your attainments and experience would attempt such a proceeding, which is nothing less than courting death in that way.&nbsp; And even if you were to escape for some time, your whole Person, and those with you would be bruised from the ceaseless motion of a craft of the above size, even if she were padded, a thing not usual at sea.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thank you, kind friend, thank you for that qualification, &ldquo;a thing not usual at sea.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nor is this friend ignorant of the sea.&nbsp; As he says of himself, &ldquo;I am not a land-lubber, and I have sailed every sea and ocean.&rdquo;&nbsp; And he winds up his letter with: &ldquo;Although not wishing to offend, it would be madness to take any woman outside the bay even, in such a craft.&rdquo;</p> <p>And yet, at the moment of writing this, Charmian is in her state-room at the typewriter, Martin is cooking dinner, Tochigi is setting the table, Roscoe and Bert are caulking the deck, and the <i>Snark</i> is steering herself some five knots an hour in a rattling good sea&mdash;and the <i>Snark</i> is not padded, either.</p> <p>&ldquo;Seeing a piece in the paper about your intended trip, would like to know if you would like a good crew, as there is six of us boys all good sailor men, with good discharges from the Navy and Merchant Service, all true Americans, all between the ages of 20 and 22, and at present are employed as riggers at the Union Iron Works, and would like very much to sail with you.&rdquo;&mdash;It was letters like this that made me regret the boat was not larger.</p> <p>And here writes the one woman in all the world&mdash;outside of Charmian&mdash;for the cruise: &ldquo;If you have not succeeded in getting a cook I would like very much to take the trip in that capacity.&nbsp; I am a woman of fifty, healthy and capable, and can do the work for the small company that compose the crew of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; I am a very good cook and a very good sailor and something of a traveller, and the length of the voyage, if of ten years&rsquo; duration, would suit me better than one.&nbsp; References, etc.&rdquo;</p> <p>Some day, when I have made a lot of money, I&rsquo;m going to build a big ship, with room in it for a thousand volunteers.&nbsp; They will have to do all the work of navigating that boat around the world, or they&rsquo;ll stay at home.&nbsp; I believe that they&rsquo;ll work the boat around the world, for I know that Adventure is not dead.&nbsp; I know Adventure is not dead because I have had a long and intimate correspondence with Adventure.</p> <h2><a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>CHAPTER IV<br /> <span class="GutSmall">FINDING ONE&rsquo;S WAY ABOUT</span></h2> <p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">But</span>,&rdquo; our friends objected, &ldquo;how dare you go to sea without a navigator on board?&nbsp; You&rsquo;re not a navigator, are you?&rdquo;</p> <p>I had to confess that I was not a navigator, that I had never looked through a sextant in my life, and that I doubted if I could tell a sextant from a nautical almanac.&nbsp; And when they asked if Roscoe was a navigator, I shook my head.&nbsp; Roscoe resented this.&nbsp; He had glanced at the &ldquo;Epitome,&rdquo; bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation.&nbsp; But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist.&nbsp; When a young boy he came from Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and that was the only time in his life that he was out of sight of land.&nbsp; He had never gone to a school of navigation, nor passed an examination in the same; nor had he sailed the deep sea and learned the art from some other navigator.&nbsp; He was a San Francisco Bay yachtsman, where land is always only several miles away and the art of navigation is never employed.</p> <p>So the <i>Snark</i> started on her long voyage without a navigator.&nbsp; We beat through the Golden Gate on April 23, and headed for the Hawaiian Islands, twenty-one hundred sea-miles away as the gull flies.&nbsp; And the outcome was our justification.&nbsp; We arrived.&nbsp; And we arrived, furthermore, without any trouble, as you shall see; that is, without any trouble to amount to anything.&nbsp; To begin with, Roscoe tackled the navigating.&nbsp; He had the theory all right, but it was the first time he had ever applied it, as was evidenced by the erratic behaviour of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Not but what the <i>Snark</i> was perfectly steady on the sea; the pranks she cut were on the chart.&nbsp; On a day with a light breeze she would make a jump on the chart that advertised &ldquo;a wet sail and a flowing sheet,&rdquo; and on a day when she just raced over the ocean, she scarcely changed her position on the chart.&nbsp; Now when one&rsquo;s boat has logged six knots for twenty-four consecutive hours, it is incontestable that she has covered one hundred and forty-four miles of ocean.&nbsp; The ocean was all right, and so was the patent log; as for speed, one saw it with his own eyes.&nbsp; Therefore the thing that was not all right was the figuring that refused to boost the <i>Snark</i> along over the chart.&nbsp; Not that this happened every day, but that it did happen.&nbsp; And it was perfectly proper and no more than was to be expected from a first attempt at applying a theory.</p> <p>The acquisition of the knowledge of navigation has a strange effect on the minds of men.&nbsp; The average navigator speaks of navigation with deep respect.&nbsp; To the layman navigation is a deed and awful mystery, which feeling has been generated in him by the deep and awful respect for navigation that the layman has seen displayed by navigators.&nbsp; I have known frank, ingenuous, and modest young men, open as the day, to learn navigation and at once betray secretiveness, reserve, and self-importance as if they had achieved some tremendous intellectual attainment.&nbsp; The average navigator impresses the layman as a priest of some holy rite.&nbsp; With bated breath, the amateur yachtsman navigator invites one in to look at his chronometer.&nbsp; And so it was that our friends suffered such apprehension at our sailing without a navigator.</p> <p>During the building of the <i>Snark</i>, Roscoe and I had an agreement, something like this: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll furnish the books and instruments,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;and do you study up navigation now.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll be too busy to do any studying.&nbsp; Then, when we get to sea, you can teach me what you have learned.&rdquo;&nbsp; Roscoe was delighted.&nbsp; Furthermore, Roscoe was as frank and ingenuous and modest as the young men I have described.&nbsp; But when we got out to sea and he began to practise the holy rite, while I looked on admiringly, a change, subtle and distinctive, marked his bearing.&nbsp; When he shot the sun at noon, the glow of achievement wrapped him in lambent flame.&nbsp; When he went below, figured out his observation, and then returned on deck and announced our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his voice that was new to all of us.&nbsp; But that was not the worst of it.&nbsp; He became filled with incommunicable information.&nbsp; And the more he discovered the reasons for the erratic jumps of the <i>Snark</i> over the chart, and the less the <i>Snark</i> jumped, the more incommunicable and holy and awful became his information.&nbsp; My mild suggestions that it was about time that I began to learn, met with no hearty response, with no offers on his part to help me.&nbsp; He displayed not the slightest intention of living up to our agreement.</p> <p>Now this was not Roscoe&rsquo;s fault; he could not help it.&nbsp; He had merely gone the way of all the men who learned navigation before him.&nbsp; By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and experienced the possession of power that was like unto that of a god.&nbsp; All his life Roscoe had lived on land, and therefore in sight of land.&nbsp; Being constantly in sight of land, with landmarks to guide him, he had managed, with occasional difficulties, to steer his body around and about the earth.&nbsp; Now he found himself on the sea, wide-stretching, bounded only by the eternal circle of the sky.&nbsp; This circle looked always the same.&nbsp; There were no landmarks.&nbsp; The sun rose to the east and set to the west and the stars wheeled through the night.&nbsp; But who may look at the sun or the stars and say, &ldquo;My place on the face of the earth at the present moment is four and three-quarter miles to the west of Jones&rsquo;s Cash Store of Smithersville&rdquo;? or &ldquo;I know where I am now, for the Little Dipper informs me that Boston is three miles away on the second turning to the right&rdquo;?&nbsp; And yet that was precisely what Roscoe did.&nbsp; That he was astounded by the achievement, is putting it mildly.&nbsp; He stood in reverential awe of himself; he had performed a miraculous feat.&nbsp; The act of finding himself on the face of the waters became a rite, and he felt himself a superior being to the rest of us who knew not this rite and were dependent on him for being shepherded across the heaving and limitless waste, the briny highroad that connects the continents and whereon there are no mile-stones.&nbsp; So, with the sextant he made obeisance to the sun-god, he consulted ancient tomes and tables of magic characters, muttered prayers in a strange tongue that sounded like <i>Indexerrorparallaxrefraction</i>, made cabalistic signs on paper, added and carried one, and then, on a piece of holy script called the Grail&mdash;I mean the Chart&mdash;he placed his finger on a certain space conspicuous for its blankness and said, &ldquo;Here we are.&rdquo;&nbsp; When we looked at the blank space and asked, &ldquo;And where is that?&rdquo; he answered in the cipher-code of the higher priesthood, &ldquo;31-15-47 north, 133-5-30 west.&rdquo;&nbsp; And we said &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; and felt mighty small.</p> <p>So I aver, it was not Roscoe&rsquo;s fault.&nbsp; He was like unto a god, and he carried us in the hollow of his hand across the blank spaces on the chart.&nbsp; I experienced a great respect for Roscoe; this respect grew so profound that had he commanded, &ldquo;Kneel down and worship me,&rdquo; I know that I should have flopped down on the deck and yammered.&nbsp; But, one day, there came a still small thought to me that said: &ldquo;This is not a god; this is Roscoe, a mere man like myself.&nbsp; What he has done, I can do.&nbsp; Who taught him?&nbsp; Himself.&nbsp; Go you and do likewise&mdash;be your own teacher.&rdquo;&nbsp; And right there Roscoe crashed, and he was high priest of the <i>Snark</i> no longer.&nbsp; I invaded the sanctuary and demanded the ancient tomes and magic tables, also the prayer-wheel&mdash;the sextant, I mean.</p> <p>And now, in simple language.&nbsp; I shall describe how I taught myself navigation.&nbsp; One whole afternoon I sat in the cockpit, steering with one hand and studying logarithms with the other.&nbsp; Two afternoons, two hours each, I studied the general theory of navigation and the particular process of taking a meridian altitude.&nbsp; Then I took the sextant, worked out the index error, and shot the sun.&nbsp; The figuring from the data of this observation was child&rsquo;s play.&nbsp; In the &ldquo;Epitome&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Nautical Almanac&rdquo; were scores of cunning tables, all worked out by mathematicians and astronomers.&nbsp; It was like using interest tables and lightning-calculator tables such as you all know.&nbsp; The mystery was mystery no longer.&nbsp; I put my finger on the chart and announced that that was where we were.&nbsp; I was right too, or at least I was as right as Roscoe, who selected a spot a quarter of a mile away from mine.&nbsp; Even he was willing to split the distance with me.&nbsp; I had exploded the mystery, and yet, such was the miracle of it, I was conscious of new power in me, and I felt the thrill and tickle of pride.&nbsp; And when Martin asked me, in the same humble and respectful way I had previously asked Roscoe, as to where we were, it was with exaltation and spiritual chest-throwing that I answered in the cipher-code of the higher priesthood and heard Martin&rsquo;s self-abasing and worshipful &ldquo;Oh.&rdquo;&nbsp; As for Charmian, I felt that in a new way I had proved my right to her; and I was aware of another feeling, namely, that she was a most fortunate woman to have a man like me.</p> <p>I couldn&rsquo;t help it.&nbsp; I tell it as a vindication of Roscoe and all the other navigators.&nbsp; The poison of power was working in me.&nbsp; I was not as other men&mdash;most other men; I knew what they did not know,&mdash;the mystery of the heavens, that pointed out the way across the deep.&nbsp; And the taste of power I had received drove me on.&nbsp; I steered at the wheel long hours with one hand, and studied mystery with the other.&nbsp; By the end of the week, teaching myself, I was able to do divers things.&nbsp; For instance, I shot the North Star, at night, of course; got its altitude, corrected for index error, dip, etc., and found our latitude.&nbsp; And this latitude agreed with the latitude of the previous noon corrected by dead reckoning up to that moment.&nbsp; Proud?&nbsp; Well, I was even prouder with my next miracle.&nbsp; I was going to turn in at nine o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; I worked out the problem, self-instructed, and learned what star of the first magnitude would be passing the meridian around half-past eight.&nbsp; This star proved to be Alpha Crucis.&nbsp; I had never heard of the star before.&nbsp; I looked it up on the star map.&nbsp; It was one of the stars of the Southern Cross.&nbsp; What! thought I; have we been sailing with the Southern Cross in the sky of nights and never known it?&nbsp; Dolts that we are!&nbsp; Gudgeons and moles!&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t believe it.&nbsp; I went over the problem again, and verified it.&nbsp; Charmian had the wheel from eight till ten that evening.&nbsp; I told her to keep her eyes open and look due south for the Southern Cross.&nbsp; And when the stars came out, there shone the Southern Cross low on the horizon.&nbsp; Proud?&nbsp; No medicine man nor high priest was ever prouder.&nbsp; Furthermore, with the prayer-wheel I shot Alpha Crucis and from its altitude worked out our latitude.&nbsp; And still furthermore, I shot the North Star, too, and it agreed with what had been told me by the Southern Cross.&nbsp; Proud?&nbsp; Why, the language of the stars was mine, and I listened and heard them telling me my way over the deep.</p> <p>Proud?&nbsp; I was a worker of miracles.&nbsp; I forgot how easily I had taught myself from the printed page.&nbsp; I forgot that all the work (and a tremendous work, too) had been done by the masterminds before me, the astronomers and mathematicians, who had discovered and elaborated the whole science of navigation and made the tables in the &ldquo;Epitome.&rdquo;&nbsp; I remembered only the everlasting miracle of it&mdash;that I had listened to the voices of the stars and been told my place upon the highway of the sea.&nbsp; Charmian did not know, Martin did not know, Tochigi, the cabin-boy, did not know.&nbsp; But I told them.&nbsp; I was God&rsquo;s messenger.&nbsp; I stood between them and infinity.&nbsp; I translated the high celestial speech into terms of their ordinary understanding.&nbsp; We were heaven-directed, and it was I who could read the sign-post of the sky!&mdash;I!&nbsp; I!</p> <p>And now, in a cooler moment, I hasten to blab the whole simplicity of it, to blab on Roscoe and the other navigators and the rest of the priesthood, all for fear that I may become even as they, secretive, immodest, and inflated with self-esteem.&nbsp; And I want to say this now: any young fellow with ordinary gray matter, ordinary education, and with the slightest trace of the student-mind, can get the books, and charts, and instruments and teach himself navigation.&nbsp; Now I must not be misunderstood.&nbsp; Seamanship is an entirely different matter.&nbsp; It is not learned in a day, nor in many days; it requires years.&nbsp; Also, navigating by dead reckoning requires long study and practice.&nbsp; But navigating by observations of the sun, moon, and stars, thanks to the astronomers and mathematicians, is child&rsquo;s play.&nbsp; Any average young fellow can teach himself in a week.&nbsp; And yet again I must not be misunderstood.&nbsp; I do not mean to say that at the end of a week a young fellow could take charge of a fifteen-thousand-ton steamer, driving twenty knots an hour through the brine, racing from land to land, fair weather and foul, clear sky or cloudy, steering by degrees on the compass card and making landfalls with most amazing precision.&nbsp; But what I do mean is just this: the average young fellow I have described can get into a staunch sail-boat and put out across the ocean, without knowing anything about navigation, and at the end of the week he will know enough to know where he is on the chart.&nbsp; He will be able to take a meridian observation with fair accuracy, and from that observation, with ten minutes of figuring, work out his latitude and longitude.&nbsp; And, carrying neither freight nor passengers, being under no press to reach his destination, he can jog comfortably along, and if at any time he doubts his own navigation and fears an imminent landfall, he can heave to all night and proceed in the morning.</p> <p>Joshua Slocum sailed around the world a few years ago in a thirty-seven-foot boat all by himself.&nbsp; I shall never forget, in his narrative of the voyage, where he heartily indorsed the idea of young men, in similar small boats, making similar voyage.&nbsp; I promptly indorsed his idea, and so heartily that I took my wife along.&nbsp; While it certainly makes a Cook&rsquo;s tour look like thirty cents, on top of that, amid on top of the fun and pleasure, it is a splendid education for a young man&mdash;oh, not a mere education in the things of the world outside, of lands, and peoples, and climates, but an education in the world inside, an education in one&rsquo;s self, a chance to learn one&rsquo;s own self, to get on speaking terms with one&rsquo;s soul.&nbsp; Then there is the training and the disciplining of it.&nbsp; First, naturally, the young fellow will learn his limitations; and next, inevitably, he will proceed to press back those limitations.&nbsp; And he cannot escape returning from such a voyage a bigger and better man.&nbsp; And as for sport, it is a king&rsquo;s sport, taking one&rsquo;s self around the world, doing it with one&rsquo;s own hands, depending on no one but one&rsquo;s self, and at the end, back at the starting-point, contemplating with inner vision the planet rushing through space, and saying, &ldquo;I did it; with my own hands I did it.&nbsp; I went clear around that whirling sphere, and I can travel alone, without any nurse of a sea-captain to guide my steps across the seas.&nbsp; I may not fly to other stars, but of this star I myself am master.&rdquo;</p> <p>As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward.&nbsp; I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu.&nbsp; Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea.&nbsp; Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green.&nbsp; Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red.&nbsp; Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks.&nbsp; Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf.&nbsp; As I say, I lift my eyes to all this, and through the white crest of a breaker suddenly appears a dark figure, erect, a man-fish or a sea-god, on the very forward face of the crest where the top falls over and down, driving in toward shore, buried to his loins in smoking spray, caught up by the sea and flung landward, bodily, a quarter of a mile.&nbsp; It is a Kanaka on a surf-board.&nbsp; And I know that when I have finished these lines I shall be out in that riot of colour and pounding surf, trying to bit those breakers even as he, and failing as he never failed, but living life as the best of us may live it.&nbsp; And the picture of that coloured sea and that flying sea-god Kanaka becomes another reason for the young man to go west, and farther west, beyond the Baths of Sunset, and still west till he arrives home again.</p> <p>But to return.&nbsp; Please do not think that I already know it all.&nbsp; I know only the rudiments of navigation.&nbsp; There is a vast deal yet for me to learn.&nbsp; On the <i>Snark</i> there is a score of fascinating books on navigation waiting for me.&nbsp; There is the danger-angle of Lecky, there is the line of Sumner, which, when you know least of all where you are, shows most conclusively where you are, and where you are not.&nbsp; There are dozens and dozens of methods of finding one&rsquo;s location on the deep, and one can work years before he masters it all in all its fineness.</p> <p>Even in the little we did learn there were slips that accounted for the apparently antic behaviour of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; On Thursday, May 16, for instance, the trade wind failed us.&nbsp; During the twenty-four hours that ended Friday at noon, by dead reckoning we had not sailed twenty miles.&nbsp; Yet here are our positions, at noon, for the two days, worked out from our observations:</p> <table> <tr> <td><p>Thursday</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">20&deg;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">57&prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">9&Prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: center">N</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">152&deg;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">40&prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">30&Prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: center">W</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p>Friday</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">21&deg;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">15&prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">33&Prime;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: center">N</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">154&deg;</p> </td> <td><p style="text-align: right">12&prime;</p> </td> <td><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> <td><p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> </table> <p>The difference between the two positions was something like eighty miles.&nbsp; Yet we knew we had not travelled twenty miles.&nbsp; Now our figuring was all right.&nbsp; We went over it several times.&nbsp; What was wrong was the observations we had taken.&nbsp; To take a correct observation requires practice and skill, and especially so on a small craft like the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; The violently moving boat and the closeness of the observer&rsquo;s eye to the surface of the water are to blame.&nbsp; A big wave that lifts up a mile off is liable to steal the horizon away.</p> <p>But in our particular case there was another perturbing factor.&nbsp; The sun, in its annual march north through the heavens, was increasing its declination.&nbsp; On the 19th parallel of north latitude in the middle of May the sun is nearly overhead.&nbsp; The angle of arc was between eighty-eight and eighty-nine degrees.&nbsp; Had it been ninety degrees it would have been straight overhead.&nbsp; It was on another day that we learned a few things about taking the altitude of the almost perpendicular sun.&nbsp; Roscoe started in drawing the sun down to the eastern horizon, and he stayed by that point of the compass despite the fact that the sun would pass the meridian to the south.&nbsp; I, on the other hand, started in to draw the sun down to south-east and strayed away to the south-west.&nbsp; You see, we were teaching ourselves.&nbsp; As a result, at twenty-five minutes past twelve by the ship&rsquo;s time, I called twelve o&rsquo;clock by the sun.&nbsp; Now this signified that we had changed our location on the face of the world by twenty-five minutes, which was equal to something like six degrees of longitude, or three hundred and fifty miles.&nbsp; This showed the <i>Snark</i> had travelled fifteen knots per hour for twenty-four consecutive hours&mdash;and we had never noticed it!&nbsp; It was absurd and grotesque.&nbsp; But Roscoe, still looking east, averred that it was not yet twelve o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; He was bent on giving us a twenty-knot clip.&nbsp; Then we began to train our sextants rather wildly all around the horizon, and wherever we looked, there was the sun, puzzlingly close to the sky-line, sometimes above it and sometimes below it.&nbsp; In one direction the sun was proclaiming morning, in another direction it was proclaiming afternoon.&nbsp; The sun was all right&mdash;we knew that; therefore we were all wrong.&nbsp; And the rest of the afternoon we spent in the cockpit reading up the matter in the books and finding out what was wrong.&nbsp; We missed the observation that day, but we didn&rsquo;t the next.&nbsp; We had learned.</p> <p>And we learned well, better than for a while we thought we had.&nbsp; At the beginning of the second dog-watch one evening, Charmian and I sat down on the forecastle-head for a rubber of cribbage.&nbsp; Chancing to glance ahead, I saw cloud-capped mountains rising from the sea.&nbsp; We were rejoiced at the sight of land, but I was in despair over our navigation.&nbsp; I thought we had learned something, yet our position at noon, plus what we had run since, did not put us within a hundred miles of land.&nbsp; But there was the land, fading away before our eyes in the fires of sunset.&nbsp; The land was all right.&nbsp; There was no disputing it.&nbsp; Therefore our navigation was all wrong.&nbsp; But it wasn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; That land we saw was the summit of Haleakala, the House of the Sun, the greatest extinct volcano in the world.&nbsp; It towered ten thousand feet above the sea, and it was all of a hundred miles away.&nbsp; We sailed all night at a seven-knot clip, and in the morning the House of the Sun was still before us, and it took a few more hours of sailing to bring it abreast of us.&nbsp; &ldquo;That island is Maui,&rdquo; we said, verifying by the chart.&nbsp; &ldquo;That next island sticking out is Molokai, where the lepers are.&nbsp; And the island next to that is Oahu.&nbsp; There is Makapuu Head now.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll be in Honolulu to-morrow.&nbsp; Our navigation is all right.&rdquo;</p> <h2><a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 72</span>CHAPTER V<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE FIRST LANDFALL</span></h2> <p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">It</span> will not be so monotonous at sea,&rdquo; I promised my fellow-voyagers on the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;The sea is filled with life.&nbsp; It is so populous that every day something new is happening.&nbsp; Almost as soon as we pass through the Golden Gate and head south we&rsquo;ll pick up with the flying fish.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll be having them fried for breakfast.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll be catching bonita and dolphin, and spearing porpoises from the bowsprit.&nbsp; And then there are the sharks&mdash;sharks without end.&rdquo;</p> <p>We passed through the Golden Gate and headed south.&nbsp; We dropped the mountains of California beneath the horizon, and daily the surf grew warmer.&nbsp; But there were no flying fish, no bonita and dolphin.&nbsp; The ocean was bereft of life.&nbsp; Never had I sailed on so forsaken a sea.&nbsp; Always, before, in the same latitudes, had I encountered flying fish.</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Wait till we get off the coast of Southern California.&nbsp; Then we&rsquo;ll pick up the flying fish.&rdquo;</p> <p>We came abreast of Southern California, abreast of the Peninsula of Lower California, abreast of the coast of Mexico; and there were no flying fish.&nbsp; Nor was there anything else.&nbsp; No life moved.&nbsp; As the days went by the absence of life became almost uncanny.</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;When we do pick up with the flying fish we&rsquo;ll pick up with everything else.&nbsp; The flying fish is the staff of life for all the other breeds.&nbsp; Everything will come in a bunch when we find the flying fish.&rdquo;</p> <p>When I should have headed the <i>Snark</i> south-west for Hawaii, I still held her south.&nbsp; I was going to find those flying fish.&nbsp; Finally the time came when, if I wanted to go to Honolulu, I should have headed the <i>Snark</i> due west, instead of which I kept her south.&nbsp; Not until latitude 19&deg; did we encounter the first flying fish.&nbsp; He was very much alone.&nbsp; I saw him.&nbsp; Five other pairs of eager eyes scanned the sea all day, but never saw another.&nbsp; So sparse were the flying fish that nearly a week more elapsed before the last one on board saw his first flying fish.&nbsp; As for the dolphin, bonita, porpoise, and all the other hordes of life&mdash;there weren&rsquo;t any.</p> <p>Not even a shark broke surface with his ominous dorsal fin.&nbsp; Bert took a dip daily under the bowsprit, hanging on to the stays and dragging his body through the water.&nbsp; And daily he canvassed the project of letting go and having a decent swim.&nbsp; I did my best to dissuade him.&nbsp; But with him I had lost all standing as an authority on sea life.</p> <p>&ldquo;If there are sharks,&rdquo; he demanded, &ldquo;why don&rsquo;t they show up?&rdquo;</p> <p>I assured him that if he really did let go and have a swim the sharks would promptly appear.&nbsp; This was a bluff on my part.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t believe it.&nbsp; It lasted as a deterrent for two days.&nbsp; The third day the wind fell calm, and it was pretty hot.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> was moving a knot an hour.&nbsp; Bert dropped down under the bowsprit and let go.&nbsp; And now behold the perversity of things.&nbsp; We had sailed across two thousand miles and more of ocean and had met with no sharks.&nbsp; Within five minutes after Bert finished his swim, the fin of a shark was cutting the surface in circles around the <i>Snark</i>.</p> <p>There was something wrong about that shark.&nbsp; It bothered me.&nbsp; It had no right to be there in that deserted ocean.&nbsp; The more I thought about it, the more incomprehensible it became.&nbsp; But two hours later we sighted land and the mystery was cleared up.&nbsp; He had come to us from the land, and not from the uninhabited deep.&nbsp; He had presaged the landfall.&nbsp; He was the messenger of the land.</p> <p>Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco we arrived at the island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii.&nbsp; In the early morning we drifted around Diamond Head into full view of Honolulu; and then the ocean burst suddenly into life.&nbsp; Flying fish cleaved the air in glittering squadrons.&nbsp; In five minutes we saw more of them than during the whole voyage.&nbsp; Other fish, large ones, of various sorts, leaped into the air.&nbsp; There was life everywhere, on sea and shore.&nbsp; We could see the masts and funnels of the shipping in the harbour, the hotels and bathers along the beach at Waikiki, the smoke rising from the dwelling-houses high up on the volcanic slopes of the Punch Bowl and Tantalus.&nbsp; The custom-house tug was racing toward us and a big school of porpoises got under our bow and began cutting the most ridiculous capers.&nbsp; The port doctor&rsquo;s launch came charging out at us, and a big sea turtle broke the surface with his back and took a look at us.&nbsp; Never was there such a burgeoning of life.&nbsp; Strange faces were on our decks, strange voices were speaking, and copies of that very morning&rsquo;s newspaper, with cable reports from all the world, were thrust before our eyes.&nbsp; Incidentally, we read that the <i>Snark</i> and all hands had been lost at sea, and that she had been a very unseaworthy craft anyway.&nbsp; And while we read this information a wireless message was being received by the congressional party on the summit of Haleakala announcing the safe arrival of the <i>Snark</i>.</p> <p>It was the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> first landfall&mdash;and such a landfall!&nbsp; For twenty-seven days we had been on the deserted deep, and it was pretty hard to realize that there was so much life in the world.&nbsp; We were made dizzy by it.&nbsp; We could not take it all in at once.&nbsp; We were like awakened Rip Van Winkles, and it seemed to us that we were dreaming.&nbsp; On one side the azure sea lapped across the horizon into the azure sky; on the other side the sea lifted itself into great breakers of emerald that fell in a snowy smother upon a white coral beach.&nbsp; Beyond the beach, green plantations of sugar-cane undulated gently upward to steeper slopes, which, in turn, became jagged volcanic crests, drenched with tropic showers and capped by stupendous masses of trade-wind clouds.&nbsp; At any rate, it was a most beautiful dream.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> turned and headed directly in toward the emerald surf, till it lifted and thundered on either hand; and on either hand, scarce a biscuit-toss away, the reef showed its long teeth, pale green and menacing.</p> <p>Abruptly the land itself, in a riot of olive-greens of a thousand hues, reached out its arms and folded the <i>Snark</i> in.&nbsp; There was no perilous passage through the reef, no emerald surf and azure sea&mdash;nothing but a warm soft land, a motionless lagoon, and tiny beaches on which swam dark-skinned tropic children.&nbsp; The sea had disappeared.&nbsp; The <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> anchor rumbled the chain through the hawse-pipe, and we lay without movement on a &ldquo;lineless, level floor.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was all so beautiful and strange that we could not accept it as real.&nbsp; On the chart this place was called Pearl Harbour, but we called it Dream Harbour.</p> <p>A launch came off to us; in it were members of the Hawaiian Yacht Club, come to greet us and make us welcome, with true Hawaiian hospitality, to all they had.&nbsp; They were ordinary men, flesh and blood and all the rest; but they did not tend to break our dreaming.&nbsp; Our last memories of men were of United States marshals and of panicky little merchants with rusty dollars for souls, who, in a reeking atmosphere of soot and coal-dust, laid grimy hands upon the <i>Snark</i> and held her back from her world adventure.&nbsp; But these men who came to meet us were clean men.&nbsp; A healthy tan was on their cheeks, and their eyes were not dazzled and bespectacled from gazing overmuch at glittering dollar-heaps.&nbsp; No, they merely verified the dream.&nbsp; They clinched it with their unsmirched souls.</p> <p>So we went ashore with them across a level flashing sea to the wonderful green land.&nbsp; We landed on a tiny wharf, and the dream became more insistent; for know that for twenty-seven days we had been rocking across the ocean on the tiny <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Not once in all those twenty-seven days had we known a moment&rsquo;s rest, a moment&rsquo;s cessation from movement.&nbsp; This ceaseless movement had become ingrained.&nbsp; Body and brain we had rocked and rolled so long that when we climbed out on the tiny wharf kept on rocking and rolling.&nbsp; This, naturally, we attributed to the wharf.&nbsp; It was projected psychology.&nbsp; I spraddled along the wharf and nearly fell into the water.&nbsp; I glanced at Charmian, and the way she walked made me sad.&nbsp; The wharf had all the seeming of a ship&rsquo;s deck.&nbsp; It lifted, tilted, heaved and sank; and since there were no handrails on it, it kept Charmian and me busy avoiding falling in.&nbsp; I never saw such a preposterous little wharf.&nbsp; Whenever I watched it closely, it refused to roll; but as soon as I took my attention off from it, away it went, just like the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Once, I caught it in the act, just as it upended, and I looked down the length of it for two hundred feet, and for all the world it was like the deck of a ship ducking into a huge head-sea.</p> <p>At last, however, supported by our hosts, we negotiated the wharf and gained the land.&nbsp; But the land was no better.&nbsp; The very first thing it did was to tilt up on one side, and far as the eye could see I watched it tilt, clear to its jagged, volcanic backbone, and I saw the clouds above tilt, too.&nbsp; This was no stable, firm-founded land, else it would not cut such capers.&nbsp; It was like all the rest of our landfall, unreal.&nbsp; It was a dream.&nbsp; At any moment, like shifting vapour, it might dissolve away.&nbsp; The thought entered my head that perhaps it was my fault, that my head was swimming or that something I had eaten had disagreed with me.&nbsp; But I glanced at Charmian and her sad walk, and even as I glanced I saw her stagger and bump into the yachtsman by whose side she walked.&nbsp; I spoke to her, and she complained about the antic behaviour of the land.</p> <p>We walked across a spacious, wonderful lawn and down an avenue of royal palms, and across more wonderful lawn in the gracious shade of stately trees.&nbsp; The air was filled with the songs of birds and was heavy with rich warm fragrances&mdash;wafture from great lilies, and blazing blossoms of hibiscus, and other strange gorgeous tropic flowers.&nbsp; The dream was becoming almost impossibly beautiful to us who for so long had seen naught but the restless, salty sea.&nbsp; Charmian reached out her hand and clung to me&mdash;for support against the ineffable beauty of it, thought I.&nbsp; But no.&nbsp; As I supported her I braced my legs, while the flowers and lawns reeled and swung around me.&nbsp; It was like an earthquake, only it quickly passed without doing any harm.&nbsp; It was fairly difficult to catch the land playing these tricks.&nbsp; As long as I kept my mind on it, nothing happened.&nbsp; But as soon as my attention was distracted, away it went, the whole panorama, swinging and heaving and tilting at all sorts of angles.&nbsp; Once, however, I turned my head suddenly and caught that stately line of royal palms swinging in a great arc across the sky.&nbsp; But it stopped, just as soon as I caught it, and became a placid dream again.</p> <p>Next we came to a house of coolness, with great sweeping veranda, where lotus-eaters might dwell.&nbsp; Windows and doors were wide open to the breeze, and the songs and fragrances blew lazily in and out.&nbsp; The walls were hung with tapa-cloths.&nbsp; Couches with grass-woven covers invited everywhere, and there was a grand piano, that played, I was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies.&nbsp; Servants&mdash;Japanese maids in native costume&mdash;drifted around and about, noiselessly, like butterflies.&nbsp; Everything was preternaturally cool.&nbsp; Here was no blazing down of a tropic sun upon an unshrinking sea.&nbsp; It was too good to be true.&nbsp; But it was not real.&nbsp; It was a dream-dwelling.&nbsp; I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious corner of the room.&nbsp; I did not say anything, for just then we were being received by a gracious woman, a beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod with sandals, who greeted us as though she had known us always.</p> <p>We sat at table on the lotus-eating veranda, served by the butterfly maids, and ate strange foods and partook of a nectar called poi.&nbsp; But the dream threatened to dissolve.&nbsp; It shimmered and trembled like an iridescent bubble about to break.&nbsp; I was just glancing out at the green grass and stately trees and blossoms of hibiscus, when suddenly I felt the table move.&nbsp; The table, and the Madonna across from me, and the veranda of the lotus-eaters, the scarlet hibiscus, the greensward and the trees&mdash;all lifted and tilted before my eyes, and heaved and sank down into the trough of a monstrous sea.&nbsp; I gripped my chair convulsively and held on.&nbsp; I had a feeling that I was holding on to the dream as well as the chair.&nbsp; I should not have been surprised had the sea rushed in and drowned all that fairyland and had I found myself at the wheel of the <i>Snark</i> just looking up casually from the study of logarithms.&nbsp; But the dream persisted.&nbsp; I looked covertly at the Madonna and her husband.&nbsp; They evidenced no perturbation.&nbsp; The dishes had not moved upon the table.&nbsp; The hibiscus and trees and grass were still there.&nbsp; Nothing had changed.&nbsp; I partook of more nectar, and the dream was more real than ever.</p> <p>&ldquo;Will you have some iced tea?&rdquo; asked the Madonna; and then her side of the table sank down gently and I said yes to her at an angle of forty-five degrees.</p> <p>&ldquo;Speaking of sharks,&rdquo; said her husband, &ldquo;up at Niihau there was a man&mdash;&rdquo;&nbsp; And at that moment the table lifted and heaved, and I gazed upward at him at an angle of forty-five degrees.</p> <p>So the luncheon went on, and I was glad that I did not have to bear the affliction of watching Charmian walk.&nbsp; Suddenly, however, a mysterious word of fear broke from the lips of the lotus-eaters.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; thought I, &ldquo;now the dream goes glimmering.&rdquo;&nbsp; I clutched the chair desperately, resolved to drag back to the reality of the <i>Snark</i> some tangible vestige of this lotus land.&nbsp; I felt the whole dream lurching and pulling to be gone.&nbsp; Just then the mysterious word of fear was repeated.&nbsp; It sounded like <i>Reporters</i>.&nbsp; I looked and saw three of them coming across the lawn.&nbsp; Oh, blessed reporters!&nbsp; Then the dream was indisputably real after all.&nbsp; I glanced out across the shining water and saw the <i>Snark</i> at anchor, and I remembered that I had sailed in her from San Francisco to Hawaii, and that this was Pearl Harbour, and that even then I was acknowledging introductions and saying, in reply to the first question, &ldquo;Yes, we had delightful weather all the way down.&rdquo;</p> <h2><a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 82</span>CHAPTER VI<br /> <span class="GutSmall">A ROYAL SPORT</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">That</span> is what it is, a royal sport for the natural kings of earth.&nbsp; The grass grows right down to the water at Waikiki Beach, and within fifty feet of the everlasting sea.&nbsp; The trees also grow down to the salty edge of things, and one sits in their shade and looks seaward at a majestic surf thundering in on the beach to one&rsquo;s very feet.&nbsp; Half a mile out, where is the reef, the white-headed combers thrust suddenly skyward out of the placid turquoise-blue and come rolling in to shore.&nbsp; One after another they come, a mile long, with smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea.&nbsp; And one sits and listens to the perpetual roar, and watches the unending procession, and feels tiny and fragile before this tremendous force expressing itself in fury and foam and sound.&nbsp; Indeed, one feels microscopically small, and the thought that one may wrestle with this sea raises in one&rsquo;s imagination a thrill of apprehension, almost of fear.&nbsp; Why, they are a mile long, these bull-mouthed monsters, and they weigh a thousand tons, and they charge in to shore faster than a man can run.&nbsp; What chance?&nbsp; No chance at all, is the verdict of the shrinking ego; and one sits, and looks, and listens, and thinks the grass and the shade are a pretty good place in which to be.</p> <p>And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man.&nbsp; Swiftly he rises through the rushing white.&nbsp; His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs&mdash;all is abruptly projected on one&rsquo;s vision.&nbsp; Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands.&nbsp; He is a Mercury&mdash;a brown Mercury.&nbsp; His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.&nbsp; In truth, from out of the sea he has leaped upon the back of the sea, and he is riding the sea that roars and bellows and cannot shake him from its back.&nbsp; But no frantic outreaching and balancing is his.&nbsp; He is impassive, motionless as a statue carved suddenly by some miracle out of the sea&rsquo;s depth from which he rose.&nbsp; And straight on toward shore he flies on his winged heels and the white crest of the breaker.&nbsp; There is a wild burst of foam, a long tumultuous rushing sound as the breaker falls futile and spent on the beach at your feet; and there, at your feet steps calmly ashore a Kanaka, burnt, golden and brown by the tropic sun.&nbsp; Several minutes ago he was a speck a quarter of a mile away.&nbsp; He has &ldquo;bitted the bull-mouthed breaker&rdquo; and ridden it in, and the pride in the feat shows in the carriage of his magnificent body as he glances for a moment carelessly at you who sit in the shade of the shore.&nbsp; He is a Kanaka&mdash;and more, he is a man, a member of the kingly species that has mastered matter and the brutes and lorded it over creation.</p> <p>And one sits and thinks of Tristram&rsquo;s last wrestle with the sea on that fatal morning; and one thinks further, to the fact that that Kanaka has done what Tristram never did, and that he knows a joy of the sea that Tristram never knew.&nbsp; And still further one thinks.&nbsp; It is all very well, sitting here in cool shade of the beach, but you are a man, one of the kingly species, and what that Kanaka can do, you can do yourself.&nbsp; Go to.&nbsp; Strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime.&nbsp; Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you; bit the sea&rsquo;s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.</p> <p>And that is how it came about that I tackled surf-riding.&nbsp; And now that I have tackled it, more than ever do I hold it to be a royal sport.&nbsp; But first let me explain the physics of it.&nbsp; A wave is a communicated agitation.&nbsp; The water that composes the body of a wave does not move.&nbsp; If it did, when a stone is thrown into a pond and the ripples spread away in an ever widening circle, there would appear at the centre an ever increasing hole.&nbsp; No, the water that composes the body of a wave is stationary.&nbsp; Thus, you may watch a particular portion of the ocean&rsquo;s surface and you will see the same water rise and fall a thousand times to the agitation communicated by a thousand successive waves.&nbsp; Now imagine this communicated agitation moving shoreward.&nbsp; As the bottom shoals, the lower portion of the wave strikes land first and is stopped.&nbsp; But water is fluid, and the upper portion has not struck anything, wherefore it keeps on communicating its agitation, keeps on going.&nbsp; And when the top of the wave keeps on going, while the bottom of it lags behind, something is bound to happen.&nbsp; The bottom of the wave drops out from under and the top of the wave falls over, forward, and down, curling and cresting and roaring as it does so.&nbsp; It is the bottom of a wave striking against the top of the land that is the cause of all surfs.</p> <p>But the transformation from a smooth undulation to a breaker is not abrupt except where the bottom shoals abruptly.&nbsp; Say the bottom shoals gradually for from quarter of a mile to a mile, then an equal distance will be occupied by the transformation.&nbsp; Such a bottom is that off the beach of Waikiki, and it produces a splendid surf-riding surf.&nbsp; One leaps upon the back of a breaker just as it begins to break, and stays on it as it continues to break all the way in to shore.</p> <p>And now to the particular physics of surf-riding.&nbsp; Get out on a flat board, six feet long, two feet wide, and roughly oval in shape.&nbsp; Lie down upon it like a small boy on a coaster and paddle with your hands out to deep water, where the waves begin to crest.&nbsp; Lie out there quietly on the board.&nbsp; Sea after sea breaks before, behind, and under and over you, and rushes in to shore, leaving you behind.&nbsp; When a wave crests, it gets steeper.&nbsp; Imagine yourself, on your hoard, on the face of that steep slope.&nbsp; If it stood still, you would slide down just as a boy slides down a hill on his coaster.&nbsp; &ldquo;But,&rdquo; you object, &ldquo;the wave doesn&rsquo;t stand still.&rdquo;&nbsp; Very true, but the water composing the wave stands still, and there you have the secret.&nbsp; If ever you start sliding down the face of that wave, you&rsquo;ll keep on sliding and you&rsquo;ll never reach the bottom.&nbsp; Please don&rsquo;t laugh.&nbsp; The face of that wave may be only six feet, yet you can slide down it a quarter of a mile, or half a mile, and not reach the bottom.&nbsp; For, see, since a wave is only a communicated agitation or impetus, and since the water that composes a wave is changing every instant, new water is rising into the wave as fast as the wave travels.&nbsp; You slide down this new water, and yet remain in your old position on the wave, sliding down the still newer water that is rising and forming the wave.&nbsp; You slide precisely as fast as the wave travels.&nbsp; If it travels fifteen miles an hour, you slide fifteen miles an hour.&nbsp; Between you and shore stretches a quarter of mile of water.&nbsp; As the wave travels, this water obligingly heaps itself into the wave, gravity does the rest, and down you go, sliding the whole length of it.&nbsp; If you still cherish the notion, while sliding, that the water is moving with you, thrust your arms into it and attempt to paddle; you will find that you have to be remarkably quick to get a stroke, for that water is dropping astern just as fast as you are rushing ahead.</p> <p>And now for another phase of the physics of surf-riding.&nbsp; All rules have their exceptions.&nbsp; It is true that the water in a wave does not travel forward.&nbsp; But there is what may be called the send of the sea.&nbsp; The water in the overtoppling crest does move forward, as you will speedily realize if you are slapped in the face by it, or if you are caught under it and are pounded by one mighty blow down under the surface panting and gasping for half a minute.&nbsp; The water in the top of a wave rests upon the water in the bottom of the wave.&nbsp; But when the bottom of the wave strikes the land, it stops, while the top goes on.&nbsp; It no longer has the bottom of the wave to hold it up.&nbsp; Where was solid water beneath it, is now air, and for the first time it feels the grip of gravity, and down it falls, at the same time being torn asunder from the lagging bottom of the wave and flung forward.&nbsp; And it is because of this that riding a surf-board is something more than a mere placid sliding down a hill.&nbsp; In truth, one is caught up and hurled shoreward as by some Titan&rsquo;s hand.</p> <p>I deserted the cool shade, put on a swimming suit, and got hold of a surf-board.&nbsp; It was too small a board.&nbsp; But I didn&rsquo;t know, and nobody told me.&nbsp; I joined some little Kanaka boys in shallow water, where the breakers were well spent and small&mdash;a regular kindergarten school.&nbsp; I watched the little Kanaka boys.&nbsp; When a likely-looking breaker came along, they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and rode the breaker in to the beach.&nbsp; I tried to emulate them.&nbsp; I watched them, tried to do everything that they did, and failed utterly.&nbsp; The breaker swept past, and I was not on it.&nbsp; I tried again and again.&nbsp; I kicked twice as madly as they did, and failed.&nbsp; Half a dozen would be around.&nbsp; We would all leap on our boards in front of a good breaker.&nbsp; Away our feet would churn like the stern-wheels of river steamboats, and away the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgrace behind.</p> <p>I tried for a solid hour, and not one wave could I persuade to boost me shoreward.&nbsp; And then arrived a friend, Alexander Hume Ford, a globe trotter by profession, bent ever on the pursuit of sensation.&nbsp; And he had found it at Waikiki.&nbsp; Heading for Australia, he had stopped off for a week to find out if there were any thrills in surf-riding, and he had become wedded to it.&nbsp; He had been at it every day for a month and could not yet see any symptoms of the fascination lessening on him.&nbsp; He spoke with authority.</p> <p>&ldquo;Get off that board,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Chuck it away at once.&nbsp; Look at the way you&rsquo;re trying to ride it.&nbsp; If ever the nose of that board hits bottom, you&rsquo;ll be disembowelled.&nbsp; Here, take my board.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a man&rsquo;s size.&rdquo;</p> <p>I am always humble when confronted by knowledge.&nbsp; Ford knew.&nbsp; He showed me how properly to mount his board.&nbsp; Then he waited for a good breaker, gave me a shove at the right moment, and started me in.&nbsp; Ah, delicious moment when I felt that breaker grip and fling me.</p> <p>On I dashed, a hundred and fifty feet, and subsided with the breaker on the sand.&nbsp; From that moment I was lost.&nbsp; I waded back to Ford with his board.&nbsp; It was a large one, several inches thick, and weighed all of seventy-five pounds.&nbsp; He gave me advice, much of it.&nbsp; He had had no one to teach him, and all that he had laboriously learned in several weeks he communicated to me in half an hour.&nbsp; I really learned by proxy.&nbsp; And inside of half an hour I was able to start myself and ride in.&nbsp; I did it time after time, and Ford applauded and advised.&nbsp; For instance, he told me to get just so far forward on the board and no farther.&nbsp; But I must have got some farther, for as I came charging in to land, that miserable board poked its nose down to bottom, stopped abruptly, and turned a somersault, at the same time violently severing our relations.&nbsp; I was tossed through the air like a chip and buried ignominiously under the downfalling breaker.&nbsp; And I realized that if it hadn&rsquo;t been for Ford, I&rsquo;d have been disembowelled.&nbsp; That particular risk is part of the sport, Ford says.&nbsp; Maybe he&rsquo;ll have it happen to him before he leaves Waikiki, and then, I feel confident, his yearning for sensation will be satisfied for a time.</p> <p>When all is said and done, it is my steadfast belief that homicide is worse than suicide, especially if, in the former case, it is a woman.&nbsp; Ford saved me from being a homicide.&nbsp; &ldquo;Imagine your legs are a rudder,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hold them close together, and steer with them.&rdquo;&nbsp; A few minutes later I came charging in on a comber.&nbsp; As I neared the beach, there, in the water, up to her waist, dead in front of me, appeared a woman.&nbsp; How was I to stop that comber on whose back I was?&nbsp; It looked like a dead woman.&nbsp; The board weighed seventy-five pounds, I weighed a hundred and sixty-five.&nbsp; The added weight had a velocity of fifteen miles per hour.&nbsp; The board and I constituted a projectile.&nbsp; I leave it to the physicists to figure out the force of the impact upon that poor, tender woman.&nbsp; And then I remembered my guardian angel, Ford.&nbsp; &ldquo;Steer with your legs!&rdquo; rang through my brain.&nbsp; I steered with my legs, I steered sharply, abruptly, with all my legs and with all my might.&nbsp; The board sheered around broadside on the crest.&nbsp; Many things happened simultaneously.&nbsp; The wave gave me a passing buffet, a light tap as the taps of waves go, but a tap sufficient to knock me off the board and smash me down through the rushing water to bottom, with which I came in violent collision and upon which I was rolled over and over.&nbsp; I got my head out for a breath of air and then gained my feet.&nbsp; There stood the woman before me.&nbsp; I felt like a hero.&nbsp; I had saved her life.&nbsp; And she laughed at me.&nbsp; It was not hysteria.&nbsp; She had never dreamed of her danger.&nbsp; Anyway, I solaced myself, it was not I but Ford that saved her, and I didn&rsquo;t have to feel like a hero.&nbsp; And besides, that leg-steering was great.&nbsp; In a few minutes more of practice I was able to thread my way in and out past several bathers and to remain on top my breaker instead of going under it.</p> <p>&ldquo;To-morrow,&rdquo; Ford said, &ldquo;I am going to take you out into the blue water.&rdquo;</p> <p>I looked seaward where he pointed, and saw the great smoking combers that made the breakers I had been riding look like ripples.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what I might have said had I not recollected just then that I was one of a kingly species.&nbsp; So all that I did say was, &ldquo;All right, I&rsquo;ll tackle them to-morrow.&rdquo;</p> <p>The water that rolls in on Waikiki Beach is just the same as the water that laves the shores of all the Hawaiian Islands; and in ways, especially from the swimmer&rsquo;s standpoint, it is wonderful water.&nbsp; It is cool enough to be comfortable, while it is warm enough to permit a swimmer to stay in all day without experiencing a chill.&nbsp; Under the sun or the stars, at high noon or at midnight, in midwinter or in midsummer, it does not matter when, it is always the same temperature&mdash;not too warm, not too cold, just right.&nbsp; It is wonderful water, salt as old ocean itself, pure and crystal-clear.&nbsp; When the nature of the water is considered, it is not so remarkable after all that the Kanakas are one of the most expert of swimming races.</p> <p>So it was, next morning, when Ford came along, that I plunged into the wonderful water for a swim of indeterminate length.&nbsp; Astride of our surf-boards, or, rather, flat down upon them on our stomachs, we paddled out through the kindergarten where the little Kanaka boys were at play.&nbsp; Soon we were out in deep water where the big smokers came roaring in.&nbsp; The mere struggle with them, facing them and paddling seaward over them and through them, was sport enough in itself.&nbsp; One had to have his wits about him, for it was a battle in which mighty blows were struck, on one side, and in which cunning was used on the other side&mdash;a struggle between insensate force and intelligence.&nbsp; I soon learned a bit.&nbsp; When a breaker curled over my head, for a swift instant I could see the light of day through its emerald body; then down would go my head, and I would clutch the board with all my strength.&nbsp; Then would come the blow, and to the onlooker on shore I would be blotted out.&nbsp; In reality the board and I have passed through the crest and emerged in the respite of the other side.&nbsp; I should not recommend those smashing blows to an invalid or delicate person.&nbsp; There is weight behind them, and the impact of the driven water is like a sandblast.&nbsp; Sometimes one passes through half a dozen combers in quick succession, and it is just about that time that he is liable to discover new merits in the stable land and new reasons for being on shore.</p> <p>Out there in the midst of such a succession of big smoky ones, a third man was added to our party, one Freeth.&nbsp; Shaking the water from my eyes as I emerged from one wave and peered ahead to see what the next one looked like, I saw him tearing in on the back of it, standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.&nbsp; We went through the wave on the back of which he rode.&nbsp; Ford called to him.&nbsp; He turned an airspring from his wave, rescued his board from its maw, paddled over to us and joined Ford in showing me things.&nbsp; One thing in particular I learned from Freeth, namely, how to encounter the occasional breaker of exceptional size that rolled in.&nbsp; Such breakers were really ferocious, and it was unsafe to meet them on top of the board.&nbsp; But Freeth showed me, so that whenever I saw one of that calibre rolling down on me, I slid off the rear end of the board and dropped down beneath the surface, my arms over my head and holding the board.&nbsp; Thus, if the wave ripped the board out of my hands and tried to strike me with it (a common trick of such waves), there would be a cushion of water a foot or more in depth, between my head and the blow.&nbsp; When the wave passed, I climbed upon the board and paddled on.&nbsp; Many men have been terribly injured, I learn, by being struck by their boards.</p> <p>The whole method of surf-riding and surf-fighting, learned, is one of non-resistance.&nbsp; Dodge the blow that is struck at you.&nbsp; Dive through the wave that is trying to slap you in the face.&nbsp; Sink down, feet first, deep under the surface, and let the big smoker that is trying to smash you go by far overhead.&nbsp; Never be rigid.&nbsp; Relax.&nbsp; Yield yourself to the waters that are ripping and tearing at you.&nbsp; When the undertow catches you and drags you seaward along the bottom, don&rsquo;t struggle against it.&nbsp; If you do, you are liable to be drowned, for it is stronger than you.&nbsp; Yield yourself to that undertow.&nbsp; Swim with it, not against it, and you will find the pressure removed.&nbsp; And, swimming with it, fooling it so that it does not hold you, swim upward at the same time.&nbsp; It will be no trouble at all to reach the surface.</p> <p>The man who wants to learn surf-riding must be a strong swimmer, and he must be used to going under the water.&nbsp; After that, fair strength and common-sense are all that is required.&nbsp; The force of the big comber is rather unexpected.&nbsp; There are mix-ups in which board and rider are torn apart and separated by several hundred feet.&nbsp; The surf-rider must take care of himself.&nbsp; No matter how many riders swim out with him, he cannot depend upon any of them for aid.&nbsp; The fancied security I had in the presence of Ford and Freeth made me forget that it was my first swim out in deep water among the big ones.&nbsp; I recollected, however, and rather suddenly, for a big wave came in, and away went the two men on its back all the way to shore.&nbsp; I could have been drowned a dozen different ways before they got back to me.</p> <p>One slides down the face of a breaker on his surf-board, but he has to get started to sliding.&nbsp; Board and rider must be moving shoreward at a good rate before the wave overtakes them.&nbsp; When you see the wave coming that you want to ride in, you turn tail to it and paddle shoreward with all your strength, using what is called the windmill stroke.&nbsp; This is a sort of spurt performed immediately in front of the wave.&nbsp; If the board is going fast enough, the wave accelerates it, and the board begins its quarter-of-a-mile slide.</p> <p>I shall never forget the first big wave I caught out there in the deep water.&nbsp; I saw it coming, turned my back on it and paddled for dear life.&nbsp; Faster and faster my board went, till it seemed my arms would drop off.&nbsp; What was happening behind me I could not tell.&nbsp; One cannot look behind and paddle the windmill stroke.&nbsp; I heard the crest of the wave hissing and churning, and then my board was lifted and flung forward.&nbsp; I scarcely knew what happened the first half-minute.&nbsp; Though I kept my eyes open, I could not see anything, for I was buried in the rushing white of the crest.&nbsp; But I did not mind.&nbsp; I was chiefly conscious of ecstatic bliss at having caught the wave.&nbsp; At the end of the half-minute, however, I began to see things, and to breathe.&nbsp; I saw that three feet of the nose of my board was clear out of water and riding on the air.&nbsp; I shifted my weight forward, and made the nose come down.&nbsp; Then I lay, quite at rest in the midst of the wild movement, and watched the shore and the bathers on the beach grow distinct.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t cover quite a quarter of a mile on that wave, because, to prevent the board from diving, I shifted my weight back, but shifted it too far and fell down the rear slope of the wave.</p> <p>It was my second day at surf-riding, and I was quite proud of myself.&nbsp; I stayed out there four hours, and when it was over, I was resolved that on the morrow I&rsquo;d come in standing up.&nbsp; But that resolution paved a distant place.&nbsp; On the morrow I was in bed.&nbsp; I was not sick, but I was very unhappy, and I was in bed.&nbsp; When describing the wonderful water of Hawaii I forgot to describe the wonderful sun of Hawaii.&nbsp; It is a tropic sun, and, furthermore, in the first part of June, it is an overhead sun.&nbsp; It is also an insidious, deceitful sun.&nbsp; For the first time in my life I was sunburned unawares.&nbsp; My arms, shoulders, and back had been burned many times in the past and were tough; but not so my legs.&nbsp; And for four hours I had exposed the tender backs of my legs, at right-angles, to that perpendicular Hawaiian sun.&nbsp; It was not until after I got ashore that I discovered the sun had touched me.&nbsp; Sunburn at first is merely warm; after that it grows intense and the blisters come out.&nbsp; Also, the joints, where the skin wrinkles, refuse to bend.&nbsp; That is why I spent the next day in bed.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t walk.&nbsp; And that is why, to-day, I am writing this in bed.&nbsp; It is easier to than not to.&nbsp; But to-morrow, ah, to-morrow, I shall be out in that wonderful water, and I shall come in standing up, even as Ford and Freeth.&nbsp; And if I fail to-morrow, I shall do it the next day, or the next.&nbsp; Upon one thing I am resolved: the <i>Snark</i> shall not sail from Honolulu until I, too, wing my heels with the swiftness of the sea, and become a sun-burned, skin-peeling Mercury.</p> <h2><a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 97</span>CHAPTER VII<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE LEPERS OF MOLOKAI</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">When</span> the <i>Snark</i> sailed along the windward coast of Molokai, on her way to Honolulu, I looked at the chart, then pointed to a low-lying peninsula backed by a tremendous cliff varying from two to four thousand feet in height, and said: &ldquo;The pit of hell, the most cursed place on earth.&rdquo;&nbsp; I should have been shocked, if, at that moment, I could have caught a vision of myself a month later, ashore in the most cursed place on earth and having a disgracefully good time along with eight hundred of the lepers who were likewise having a good time.&nbsp; Their good time was not disgraceful; but mine was, for in the midst of so much misery it was not meet for me to have a good time.&nbsp; That is the way I felt about it, and my only excuse is that I couldn&rsquo;t help having a good time.</p> <p>For instance, in the afternoon of the Fourth of July all the lepers gathered at the race-track for the sports.&nbsp; I had wandered away from the Superintendent and the physicians in order to get a snapshot of the finish of one of the races.&nbsp; It was an interesting race, and partisanship ran high.&nbsp; Three horses were entered, one ridden by a Chinese, one by an Hawaiian, and one by a Portuguese boy.&nbsp; All three riders were lepers; so were the judges and the crowd.&nbsp; The race was twice around the track.&nbsp; The Chinese and the Hawaiian got away together and rode neck and neck, the Portuguese boy toiling along two hundred feet behind.&nbsp; Around they went in the same positions.&nbsp; Halfway around on the second and final lap the Chinese pulled away and got one length ahead of the Hawaiian.&nbsp; At the same time the Portuguese boy was beginning to crawl up.&nbsp; But it looked hopeless.&nbsp; The crowd went wild.&nbsp; All the lepers were passionate lovers of horseflesh.&nbsp; The Portuguese boy crawled nearer and nearer.&nbsp; I went wild, too.&nbsp; They were on the home stretch.&nbsp; The Portuguese boy passed the Hawaiian.&nbsp; There was a thunder of hoofs, a rush of the three horses bunched together, the jockeys plying their whips, and every last onlooker bursting his throat, or hers, with shouts and yells.&nbsp; Nearer, nearer, inch by inch, the Portuguese boy crept up, and passed, yes, passed, winning by a head from the Chinese.&nbsp; I came to myself in a group of lepers.&nbsp; They were yelling, tossing their hats, and dancing around like fiends.&nbsp; So was I.&nbsp; When I came to I was waving my hat and murmuring ecstatically: &ldquo;By golly, the boy wins!&nbsp; The boy wins!&rdquo;</p> <p>I tried to check myself.&nbsp; I assured myself that I was witnessing one of the horrors of Molokai, and that it was shameful for me, under such circumstances, to be so light-hearted and light-headed.&nbsp; But it was no use.&nbsp; The next event was a donkey-race, and it was just starting; so was the fun.&nbsp; The last donkey in was to win the race, and what complicated the affair was that no rider rode his own donkey.&nbsp; They rode one another&rsquo;s donkeys, the result of which was that each man strove to make the donkey he rode beat his own donkey ridden by some one else, Naturally, only men possessing very slow or extremely obstreperous donkeys had entered them for the race.&nbsp; One donkey had been trained to tuck in its legs and lie down whenever its rider touched its sides with his heels.&nbsp; Some donkeys strove to turn around and come back; others developed a penchant for the side of the track, where they stuck their heads over the railing and stopped; while all of them dawdled.&nbsp; Halfway around the track one donkey got into an argument with its rider.&nbsp; When all the rest of the donkeys had crossed the wire, that particular donkey was still arguing.&nbsp; He won the race, though his rider lost it and came in on foot.&nbsp; And all the while nearly a thousand lepers were laughing uproariously at the fun.&nbsp; Anybody in my place would have joined with them in having a good time.</p> <p>All the foregoing is by way of preamble to the statement that the horrors of Molokai, as they have been painted in the past, do not exist.&nbsp; The Settlement has been written up repeatedly by sensationalists, and usually by sensationalists who have never laid eyes on it.&nbsp; Of course, leprosy is leprosy, and it is a terrible thing; but so much that is lurid has been written about Molokai that neither the lepers, nor those who devote their lives to them, have received a fair deal.&nbsp; Here is a case in point.&nbsp; A newspaper writer, who, of course, had never been near the Settlement, vividly described Superintendent McVeigh, crouching in a grass hut and being besieged nightly by starving lepers on their knees, wailing for food.&nbsp; This hair-raising account was copied by the press all over the United States and was the cause of many indignant and protesting editorials.&nbsp; Well, I lived and slept for five days in Mr. McVeigh&rsquo;s &ldquo;grass hut&rdquo; (which was a comfortable wooden cottage, by the way; and there isn&rsquo;t a grass house in the whole Settlement), and I heard the lepers wailing for food&mdash;only the wailing was peculiarly harmonious and rhythmic, and it was accompanied by the music of stringed instruments, violins, guitars, <i>ukuleles</i>, and banjos.&nbsp; Also, the wailing was of various sorts.&nbsp; The leper brass band wailed, and two singing societies wailed, and lastly a quintet of excellent voices wailed.&nbsp; So much for a lie that should never have been printed.&nbsp; The wailing was the serenade which the glee clubs always give Mr. McVeigh when he returns from a trip to Honolulu.</p> <p>Leprosy is not so contagious as is imagined.&nbsp; I went for a week&rsquo;s visit to the Settlement, and I took my wife along&mdash;all of which would not have happened had we had any apprehension of contracting the disease.&nbsp; Nor did we wear long, gauntleted gloves and keep apart from the lepers.&nbsp; On the contrary, we mingled freely with them, and before we left, knew scores of them by sight and name.&nbsp; The precautions of simple cleanliness seem to be all that is necessary.&nbsp; On returning to their own houses, after having been among and handling lepers, the non-lepers, such as the physicians and the superintendent, merely wash their faces and hands with mildly antiseptic soap and change their coats.</p> <p>That a leper is unclean, however, should be insisted upon; and the segregation of lepers, from what little is known of the disease, should be rigidly maintained.&nbsp; On the other hand, the awful horror with which the leper has been regarded in the past, and the frightful treatment he has received, have been unnecessary and cruel.&nbsp; In order to dispel some of the popular misapprehensions of leprosy, I want to tell something of the relations between the lepers and non-lepers as I observed them at Molokai.&nbsp; On the morning after our arrival Charmian and I attended a shoot of the Kalaupapa Rifle Club, and caught our first glimpse of the democracy of affliction and alleviation that obtains.&nbsp; The club was just beginning a prize shoot for a cup put up by Mr. McVeigh, who is also a member of the club, as also are Dr. Goodhue and Dr. Hollmann, the resident physicians (who, by the way, live in the Settlement with their wives).&nbsp; All about us, in the shooting booth, were the lepers.&nbsp; Lepers and non-lepers were using the same guns, and all were rubbing shoulders in the confined space.&nbsp; The majority of the lepers were Hawaiians.&nbsp; Sitting beside me on a bench was a Norwegian.&nbsp; Directly in front of me, in the stand, was an American, a veteran of the Civil War, who had fought on the Confederate side.&nbsp; He was sixty-five years of age, but that did not prevent him from running up a good score.&nbsp; Strapping Hawaiian policemen, lepers, khaki-clad, were also shooting, as were Portuguese, Chinese, and kokuas&mdash;the latter are native helpers in the Settlement who are non-lepers.&nbsp; And on the afternoon that Charmian and I climbed the two-thousand-foot <i>pali</i> and looked our last upon the Settlement, the superintendent, the doctors, and the mixture of nationalities and of diseased and non-diseased were all engaged in an exciting baseball game.</p> <p>Not so was the leper and his greatly misunderstood and feared disease treated during the middle ages in Europe.&nbsp; At that time the leper was considered legally and politically dead.&nbsp; He was placed in a funeral procession and led to the church, where the burial service was read over him by the officiating clergyman.&nbsp; Then a spadeful of earth was dropped upon his chest and he was dead-living dead.&nbsp; While this rigorous treatment was largely unnecessary, nevertheless, one thing was learned by it.&nbsp; Leprosy was unknown in Europe until it was introduced by the returning Crusaders, whereupon it spread slowly until it had seized upon large numbers of the people.&nbsp; Obviously, it was a disease that could be contracted by contact.&nbsp; It was a contagion, and it was equally obvious that it could be eradicated by segregation.&nbsp; Terrible and monstrous as was the treatment of the leper in those days, the great lesson of segregation was learned.&nbsp; By its means leprosy was stamped out.</p> <p>And by the same means leprosy is even now decreasing in the Hawaiian Islands.&nbsp; But the segregation of the lepers on Molokai is not the horrible nightmare that has been so often exploited by <i>yellow</i> writers.&nbsp; In the first place, the leper is not torn ruthlessly from his family.&nbsp; When a suspect is discovered, he is invited by the Board of Health to come to the Kalihi receiving station at Honolulu.&nbsp; His fare and all expenses are paid for him.&nbsp; He is first passed upon by microscopical examination by the bacteriologist of the Board of Health.&nbsp; If the <i>bacillus lepr&aelig;</i> is found, the patient is examined by the Board of Examining Physicians, five in number.&nbsp; If found by them to be a leper, he is so declared, which finding is later officially confirmed by the Board of Health, and the leper is ordered straight to Molokai.&nbsp; Furthermore, during the thorough trial that is given his case, the patient has the right to be represented by a physician whom he can select and employ for himself.&nbsp; Nor, after having been declared a leper, is the patient immediately rushed off to Molokai.&nbsp; He is given ample time, weeks, and even months, sometimes, during which he stays at Kalihi and winds up or arranges all his business affairs.&nbsp; At Molokai, in turn, he may be visited by his relatives, business agents, etc., though they are not permitted to eat and sleep in his house.&nbsp; Visitors&rsquo; houses, kept &ldquo;clean,&rdquo; are maintained for this purpose.</p> <p>I saw an illustration of the thorough trial given the suspect, when I visited Kalihi with Mr. Pinkham, president of the Board of Health.&nbsp; The suspect was an Hawaiian, seventy years of age, who for thirty-four years had worked in Honolulu as a pressman in a printing office.&nbsp; The bacteriologist had decided that he was a leper, the Examining Board had been unable to make up its mind, and that day all had come out to Kalihi to make another examination.</p> <p>When at Molokai, the declared leper has the privilege of re-examination, and patients are continually coming back to Honolulu for that purpose.&nbsp; The steamer that took me to Molokai had on board two returning lepers, both young women, one of whom had come to Honolulu to settle up some property she owned, and the other had come to Honolulu to see her sick mother.&nbsp; Both had remained at Kalihi for a month.</p> <p>The Settlement of Molokai enjoys a far more delightful climate than even Honolulu, being situated on the windward side of the island in the path of the fresh north-east trades.&nbsp; The scenery is magnificent; on one side is the blue sea, on the other the wonderful wall of the <i>pali</i>, receding here and there into beautiful mountain valleys.&nbsp; Everywhere are grassy pastures over which roam the hundreds of horses which are owned by the lepers.&nbsp; Some of them have their own carts, rigs, and traps.&nbsp; In the little harbour of Kalaupapa lie fishing boats and a steam launch, all of which are privately owned and operated by lepers.&nbsp; Their bounds upon the sea are, of course, determined: otherwise no restriction is put upon their sea-faring.&nbsp; Their fish they sell to the Board of Health, and the money they receive is their own.&nbsp; While I was there, one night&rsquo;s catch was four thousand pounds.</p> <p>And as these men fish, others farm.&nbsp; All trades are followed.&nbsp; One leper, a pure Hawaiian, is the boss painter.&nbsp; He employs eight men, and takes contracts for painting buildings from the Board of Health.&nbsp; He is a member of the Kalaupapa Rifle Club, where I met him, and I must confess that he was far better dressed than I.&nbsp; Another man, similarly situated, is the boss carpenter.&nbsp; Then, in addition to the Board of Health store, there are little privately owned stores, where those with shopkeeper&rsquo;s souls may exercise their peculiar instincts.&nbsp; The Assistant Superintendent, Mr. Waiamau, a finely educated and able man, is a pure Hawaiian and a leper.&nbsp; Mr. Bartlett, who is the present storekeeper, is an American who was in business in Honolulu before he was struck down by the disease.&nbsp; All that these men earn is that much in their own pockets.&nbsp; If they do not work, they are taken care of anyway by the territory, given food, shelter, clothes, and medical attendance.&nbsp; The Board of Health carries on agriculture, stock-raising, and dairying, for local use, and employment at fair wages is furnished to all that wish to work.&nbsp; They are not compelled to work, however, for they are the wards of the territory.&nbsp; For the young, and the very old, and the helpless there are homes and hospitals.</p> <p>Major Lee, an American and long a marine engineer for the Inter Island Steamship Company, I met actively at work in the new steam laundry, where he was busy installing the machinery.&nbsp; I met him often, afterwards, and one day he said to me:</p> <p>&ldquo;Give us a good breeze about how we live here.&nbsp; For heaven&rsquo;s sake write us up straight.&nbsp; Put your foot down on this chamber-of-horrors rot and all the rest of it.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t like being misrepresented.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve got some feelings.&nbsp; Just tell the world how we really are in here.&rdquo;</p> <p>Man after man that I met in the Settlement, and woman after woman, in one way or another expressed the same sentiment.&nbsp; It was patent that they resented bitterly the sensational and untruthful way in which they have been exploited in the past.</p> <p>In spite of the fact that they are afflicted by disease, the lepers form a happy colony, divided into two villages and numerous country and seaside homes, of nearly a thousand souls.&nbsp; They have six churches, a Young Men&rsquo;s Christian Association building, several assembly halls, a band stand, a race-track, baseball grounds, shooting ranges, an athletic club, numerous glee clubs, and two brass bands.</p> <p>&ldquo;They are so contented down there,&rdquo; Mr. Pinkham told me, &ldquo;that you can&rsquo;t drive them away with a shot-gun.&rdquo;</p> <p>This I later verified for myself.&nbsp; In January of this year, eleven of the lepers, on whom the disease, after having committed certain ravages, showed no further signs of activity, were brought back to Honolulu for re-examination.&nbsp; They were loath to come; and, on being asked whether or not they wanted to go free if found clean of leprosy, one and all answered, &ldquo;Back to Molokai.&rdquo;</p> <p>In the old days, before the discovery of the leprosy bacillus, a small number of men and women, suffering from various and wholly different diseases, were adjudged lepers and sent to Molokai.&nbsp; Years afterward they suffered great consternation when the bacteriologists declared that they were not afflicted with leprosy and never had been.&nbsp; They fought against being sent away from Molokai, and in one way or another, as helpers and nurses, they got jobs from the Board of Health and remained.&nbsp; The present jailer is one of these men.&nbsp; Declared to be a non-leper, he accepted, on salary, the charge of the jail, in order to escape being sent away.</p> <p>At the present moment, in Honolulu, there is a bootblack.&nbsp; He is an American negro.&nbsp; Mr. McVeigh told me about him.&nbsp; Long ago, before the bacteriological tests, he was sent to Molokai as a leper.&nbsp; As a ward of the state he developed a superlative degree of independence and fomented much petty mischief.&nbsp; And then, one day, after having been for years a perennial source of minor annoyances, the bacteriological test was applied, and he was declared a non-leper.</p> <p>&ldquo;Ah, ha!&rdquo; chortled Mr. McVeigh.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ve got you!&nbsp; Out you go on the next steamer and good riddance!&rdquo;</p> <p>But the negro didn&rsquo;t want to go.&nbsp; Immediately he married an old woman, in the last stages of leprosy, and began petitioning the Board of Health for permission to remain and nurse his sick wife.&nbsp; There was no one, he said pathetically, who could take care of his poor wife as well as he could.&nbsp; But they saw through his game, and he was deported on the steamer and given the freedom of the world.&nbsp; But he preferred Molokai.&nbsp; Landing on the leeward side of Molokai, he sneaked down the <i>pali</i> one night and took up his abode in the Settlement.&nbsp; He was apprehended, tried and convicted of trespass, sentenced to pay a small fine, and again deported on the steamer with the warning that if he trespassed again, he would be fined one hundred dollars and be sent to prison in Honolulu.&nbsp; And now, when Mr. McVeigh comes up to Honolulu, the bootblack shines his shoes for him and says:</p> <p>&ldquo;Say, Boss, I lost a good home down there.&nbsp; Yes, sir, I lost a good home.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then his voice sinks to a confidential whisper as he says, &ldquo;Say, Boss, can&rsquo;t I go back?&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t you fix it for me so as I can go back?&rdquo;</p> <p>He had lived nine years on Molokai, and he had had a better time there than he has ever had, before and after, on the outside.</p> <p>As regards the fear of leprosy itself, nowhere in the Settlement among lepers, or non-lepers, did I see any sign of it.&nbsp; The chief horror of leprosy obtains in the minds of those who have never seen a leper and who do not know anything about the disease.&nbsp; At the hotel at Waikiki a lady expressed shuddering amazement at my having the hardihood to pay a visit to the Settlement.&nbsp; On talking with her I learned that she had been born in Honolulu, had lived there all her life, and had never laid eyes on a leper.&nbsp; That was more than I could say of myself in the United States, where the segregation of lepers is loosely enforced and where I have repeatedly seen lepers on the streets of large cities.</p> <p>Leprosy is terrible, there is no getting away from that; but from what little I know of the disease and its degree of contagiousness, I would by far prefer to spend the rest of my days in Molokai than in any tuberculosis sanatorium.&nbsp; In every city and county hospital for poor people in the United States, or in similar institutions in other countries, sights as terrible as those in Molokai can be witnessed, and the sum total of these sights is vastly more terrible.&nbsp; For that matter, if it were given me to choose between being compelled to live in Molokai for the rest of my life, or in the East End of London, the East Side of New York, or the Stockyards of Chicago, I would select Molokai without debate.&nbsp; I would prefer one year of life in Molokai to five years of life in the above-mentioned cesspools of human degradation and misery.</p> <p>In Molokai the people are happy.&nbsp; I shall never forget the celebration of the Fourth of July I witnessed there.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock in the morning the &ldquo;horribles&rdquo; were out, dressed fantastically, astride horses, mules, and donkeys (their own property), and cutting capers all over the Settlement.&nbsp; Two brass bands were out as well.&nbsp; Then there were the <i>pa-u</i> riders, thirty or forty of them, Hawaiian women all, superb horsewomen dressed gorgeously in the old, native riding costume, and dashing about in twos and threes and groups.&nbsp; In the afternoon Charmian and I stood in the judge&rsquo;s stand and awarded the prizes for horsemanship and costume to the <i>pa-u</i> riders.&nbsp; All about were the hundreds of lepers, with wreaths of flowers on heads and necks and shoulders, looking on and making merry.&nbsp; And always, over the brows of hills and across the grassy level stretches, appearing and disappearing, were the groups of men and women, gaily dressed, on galloping horses, horses and riders flower-bedecked and flower-garlanded, singing, and laughing, and riding like the wind.&nbsp; And as I stood in the judge&rsquo;s stand and looked at all this, there came to my recollection the lazar house of Havana, where I had once beheld some two hundred lepers, prisoners inside four restricted walls until they died.&nbsp; No, there are a few thousand places I wot of in this world over which I would select Molokai as a place of permanent residence.&nbsp; In the evening we went to one of the leper assembly halls, where, before a crowded audience, the singing societies contested for prizes, and where the night wound up with a dance.&nbsp; I have seen the Hawaiians living in the slums of Honolulu, and, having seen them, I can readily understand why the lepers, brought up from the Settlement for re-examination, shouted one and all, &ldquo;Back to Molokai!&rdquo;</p> <p>One thing is certain.&nbsp; The leper in the Settlement is far better off than the leper who lies in hiding outside.&nbsp; Such a leper is a lonely outcast, living in constant fear of discovery and slowly and surely rotting away.&nbsp; The action of leprosy is not steady.&nbsp; It lays hold of its victim, commits a ravage, and then lies dormant for an indeterminate period.&nbsp; It may not commit another ravage for five years, or ten years, or forty years, and the patient may enjoy uninterrupted good health.&nbsp; Rarely, however, do these first ravages cease of themselves.&nbsp; The skilled surgeon is required, and the skilled surgeon cannot be called in for the leper who is in hiding.&nbsp; For instance, the first ravage may take the form of a perforating ulcer in the sole of the foot.&nbsp; When the bone is reached, necrosis sets in.&nbsp; If the leper is in hiding, he cannot be operated upon, the necrosis will continue to eat its way up the bone of the leg, and in a brief and horrible time that leper will die of gangrene or some other terrible complication.&nbsp; On the other hand, if that same leper is in Molokai, the surgeon will operate upon the foot, remove the ulcer, cleanse the bone, and put a complete stop to that particular ravage of the disease.&nbsp; A month after the operation the leper will be out riding horseback, running foot races, swimming in the breakers, or climbing the giddy sides of the valleys for mountain apples.&nbsp; And as has been stated before, the disease, lying dormant, may not again attack him for five, ten, or forty years.</p> <p>The old horrors of leprosy go back to the conditions that obtained before the days of antiseptic surgery, and before the time when physicians like Dr. Goodhue and Dr. Hollmann went to live at the Settlement.&nbsp; Dr. Goodhue is the pioneer surgeon there, and too much praise cannot be given him for the noble work he has done.&nbsp; I spent one morning in the operating room with him and of the three operations he performed, two were on men, newcomers, who had arrived on the same steamer with me.&nbsp; In each case, the disease had attacked in one spot only.&nbsp; One had a perforating ulcer in the ankle, well advanced, and the other man was suffering from a similar affliction, well advanced, under his arm.&nbsp; Both cases were well advanced because the man had been on the outside and had not been treated.&nbsp; In each case.&nbsp; Dr. Goodhue put an immediate and complete stop to the ravage, and in four weeks those two men will be as well and able-bodied as they ever were in their lives.&nbsp; The only difference between them and you or me is that the disease is lying dormant in their bodies and may at any future time commit another ravage.</p> <p>Leprosy is as old as history.&nbsp; References to it are found in the earliest written records.&nbsp; And yet to-day practically nothing more is known about it than was known then.&nbsp; This much was known then, namely, that it was contagious and that those afflicted by it should be segregated.&nbsp; The difference between then and now is that to-day the leper is more rigidly segregated and more humanely treated.&nbsp; But leprosy itself still remains the same awful and profound mystery.&nbsp; A reading of the reports of the physicians and specialists of all countries reveals the baffling nature of the disease.&nbsp; These leprosy specialists are unanimous on no one phase of the disease.&nbsp; They do not know.&nbsp; In the past they rashly and dogmatically generalized.&nbsp; They generalize no longer.&nbsp; The one possible generalization that can be drawn from all the investigation that has been made is that leprosy is <i>feebly contagious</i>.&nbsp; But in what manner it is feebly contagious is not known.&nbsp; They have isolated the bacillus of leprosy.&nbsp; They can determine by bacteriological examination whether or not a person is a leper; but they are as far away as ever from knowing how that bacillus finds its entrance into the body of a non-leper.&nbsp; They do not know the length of time of incubation.&nbsp; They have tried to inoculate all sorts of animals with leprosy, and have failed.</p> <p>They are baffled in the discovery of a serum wherewith to fight the disease.&nbsp; And in all their work, as yet, they have found no clue, no cure.&nbsp; Sometimes there have been blazes of hope, theories of causation and much heralded cures, but every time the darkness of failure quenched the flame.&nbsp; A doctor insists that the cause of leprosy is a long-continued fish diet, and he proves his theory voluminously till a physician from the highlands of India demands why the natives of that district should therefore be afflicted by leprosy when they have never eaten fish, nor all the generations of their fathers before them.&nbsp; A man treats a leper with a certain kind of oil or drug, announces a cure, and five, ten, or forty years afterwards the disease breaks out again.&nbsp; It is this trick of leprosy lying dormant in the body for indeterminate periods that is responsible for many alleged cures.&nbsp; But this much is certain: <i>as yet there has been no authentic case of a cure</i>.</p> <p>Leprosy is <i>feebly contagious</i>, but how is it contagious?&nbsp; An Austrian physician has inoculated himself and his assistants with leprosy and failed to catch it.&nbsp; But this is not conclusive, for there is the famous case of the Hawaiian murderer who had his sentence of death commuted to life imprisonment on his agreeing to be inoculated with the <i>bacillus lepr&aelig;</i>.&nbsp; Some time after inoculation, leprosy made its appearance, and the man died a leper on Molokai.&nbsp; Nor was this conclusive, for it was discovered that at the time he was inoculated several members of his family were already suffering from the disease on Molokai.&nbsp; He may have contracted the disease from them, and it may have been well along in its mysterious period of incubation at the time he was officially inoculated.&nbsp; Then there is the case of that hero of the Church, Father Damien, who went to Molokai a clean man and died a leper.&nbsp; There have been many theories as to how he contracted leprosy, but nobody knows.&nbsp; He never knew himself.&nbsp; But every chance that he ran has certainly been run by a woman at present living in the Settlement; who has lived there many years; who has had five leper husbands, and had children by them; and who is to-day, as she always has been, free of the disease.</p> <p>As yet no light has been shed upon the mystery of leprosy.&nbsp; When more is learned about the disease, a cure for it may be expected.&nbsp; Once an efficacious serum is discovered, and leprosy, because it is so feebly contagious, will pass away swiftly from the earth.&nbsp; The battle waged with it will be short and sharp.&nbsp; In the meantime, how to discover that serum, or some other unguessed weapon?&nbsp; In the present it is a serious matter.&nbsp; It is estimated that there are half a million lepers, not segregated, in India alone.&nbsp; Carnegie libraries, Rockefeller universities, and many similar benefactions are all very well; but one cannot help thinking how far a few thousands of dollars would go, say in the leper Settlement of Molokai.&nbsp; The residents there are accidents of fate, scapegoats to some mysterious natural law of which man knows nothing, isolated for the welfare of their fellows who else might catch the dread disease, even as they have caught it, nobody knows how.&nbsp; Not for their sakes merely, but for the sake of future generations, a few thousands of dollars would go far in a legitimate and scientific search after a cure for leprosy, for a serum, or for some undreamed discovery that will enable the medical world to exterminate the <i>bacillus lepr&aelig;</i>.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s the place for your money, you philanthropists.</p> <h2><a name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 116</span>CHAPTER VIII<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE HOUSE OF THE SUN</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">There</span> are hosts of people who journey like restless spirits round and about this earth in search of seascapes and landscapes and the wonders and beauties of nature.&nbsp; They overrun Europe in armies; they can be met in droves and herds in Florida and the West Indies, at the Pyramids, and on the slopes and summits of the Canadian and American Rockies; but in the House of the Sun they are as rare as live and wriggling dinosaurs.&nbsp; Haleakala is the Hawaiian name for &ldquo;the House of the Sun.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is a noble dwelling, situated on the Island of Maui; but so few tourists have ever peeped into it, much less entered it, that their number may be practically reckoned as zero.&nbsp; Yet I venture to state that for natural beauty and wonder the nature-lover may see dissimilar things as great as Haleakala, but no greater, while he will never see elsewhere anything more beautiful or wonderful.&nbsp; Honolulu is six days&rsquo; steaming from San Francisco; Maui is a night&rsquo;s run on the steamer from Honolulu; and six hours more if he is in a hurry, can bring the traveller to Kolikoli, which is ten thousand and thirty-two feet above the sea and which stands hard by the entrance portal to the House of the Sun.&nbsp; Yet the tourist comes not, and Haleakala sleeps on in lonely and unseen grandeur.</p> <p>Not being tourists, we of the <i>Snark</i> went to Haleakala.&nbsp; On the slopes of that monster mountain there is a cattle ranch of some fifty thousand acres, where we spent the night at an altitude of two thousand feet.&nbsp; The next morning it was boots and saddles, and with cow-boys and packhorses we climbed to Ukulele, a mountain ranch-house, the altitude of which, fifty-five hundred feet, gives a severely temperate climate, compelling blankets at night and a roaring fireplace in the living-room.&nbsp; Ukulele, by the way, is the Hawaiian for &ldquo;jumping flea&rdquo; as it is also the Hawaiian for a certain musical instrument that may be likened to a young guitar.&nbsp; It is my opinion that the mountain ranch-house was named after the young guitar.&nbsp; We were not in a hurry, and we spent the day at Ukulele, learnedly discussing altitudes and barometers and shaking our particular barometer whenever any one&rsquo;s argument stood in need of demonstration.&nbsp; Our barometer was the most graciously acquiescent instrument I have ever seen.&nbsp; Also, we gathered mountain raspberries, large as hen&rsquo;s eggs and larger, gazed up the pasture-covered lava slopes to the summit of Haleakala, forty-five hundred feet above us, and looked down upon a mighty battle of the clouds that was being fought beneath us, ourselves in the bright sunshine.</p> <p>Every day and every day this unending battle goes on.&nbsp; Ukiukiu is the name of the trade-wind that comes raging down out of the north-east and hurls itself upon Haleakala.&nbsp; Now Haleakala is so bulky and tall that it turns the north-east trade-wind aside on either hand, so that in the lee of Haleakala no trade-wind blows at all.&nbsp; On the contrary, the wind blows in the counter direction, in the teeth of the north-east trade.&nbsp; This wind is called Naulu.&nbsp; And day and night and always Ukiukiu and Naulu strive with each other, advancing, retreating, flanking, curving, curling, and turning and twisting, the conflict made visible by the cloud-masses plucked from the heavens and hurled back and forth in squadrons, battalions, armies, and great mountain ranges.&nbsp; Once in a while, Ukiukiu, in mighty gusts, flings immense cloud-masses clear over the summit of Haleakala; whereupon Naulu craftily captures them, lines them up in new battle-formation, and with them smites back at his ancient and eternal antagonist.&nbsp; Then Ukiukiu sends a great cloud-army around the eastern-side of the mountain.&nbsp; It is a flanking movement, well executed.&nbsp; But Naulu, from his lair on the leeward side, gathers the flanking army in, pulling and twisting and dragging it, hammering it into shape, and sends it charging back against Ukiukiu around the western side of the mountain.&nbsp; And all the while, above and below the main battle-field, high up the slopes toward the sea, Ukiukiu and Naulu are continually sending out little wisps of cloud, in ragged skirmish line, that creep and crawl over the ground, among the trees and through the canyons, and that spring upon and capture one another in sudden ambuscades and sorties.&nbsp; And sometimes Ukiukiu or Naulu, abruptly sending out a heavy charging column, captures the ragged little skirmishers or drives them skyward, turning over and over, in vertical whirls, thousands of feet in the air.</p> <p>But it is on the western slopes of Haleakala that the main battle goes on.&nbsp; Here Naulu masses his heaviest formations and wins his greatest victories.&nbsp; Ukiukiu grows weak toward late afternoon, which is the way of all trade-winds, and is driven backward by Naulu.&nbsp; Naulu&rsquo;s generalship is excellent.&nbsp; All day he has been gathering and packing away immense reserves.&nbsp; As the afternoon draws on, he welds them into a solid column, sharp-pointed, miles in length, a mile in width, and hundreds of feet thick.&nbsp; This column he slowly thrusts forward into the broad battle-front of Ukiukiu, and slowly and surely Ukiukiu, weakening fast, is split asunder.&nbsp; But it is not all bloodless.&nbsp; At times Ukiukiu struggles wildly, and with fresh accessions of strength from the limitless north-east, smashes away half a mile at a time of Naulu&rsquo;s column and sweeps it off and away toward West Maui.&nbsp; Sometimes, when the two charging armies meet end-on, a tremendous perpendicular whirl results, the cloud-masses, locked together, mounting thousands of feet into the air and turning over and over.&nbsp; A favourite device of Ukiukiu is to send a low, squat formation, densely packed, forward along the ground and under Naulu.&nbsp; When Ukiukiu is under, he proceeds to buck.&nbsp; Naulu&rsquo;s mighty middle gives to the blow and bends upward, but usually he turns the attacking column back upon itself and sets it milling.&nbsp; And all the while the ragged little skirmishers, stray and detached, sneak through the trees and canyons, crawl along and through the grass, and surprise one another with unexpected leaps and rushes; while above, far above, serene and lonely in the rays of the setting sun, Haleakala looks down upon the conflict.&nbsp; And so, the night.&nbsp; But in the morning, after the fashion of trade-winds, Ukiukiu gathers strength and sends the hosts of Naulu rolling back in confusion and rout.&nbsp; And one day is like another day in the battle of the clouds, where Ukiukiu and Naulu strive eternally on the slopes of Haleakala.</p> <p>Again in the morning, it was boots and saddles, cow-boys, and packhorses, and the climb to the top began.&nbsp; One packhorse carried twenty gallons of water, slung in five-gallon bags on either side; for water is precious and rare in the crater itself, in spite of the fact that several miles to the north and east of the crater-rim more rain comes down than in any other place in the world.&nbsp; The way led upward across countless lava flows, without regard for trails, and never have I seen horses with such perfect footing as that of the thirteen that composed our outfit.&nbsp; They climbed or dropped down perpendicular places with the sureness and coolness of mountain goats, and never a horse fell or baulked.</p> <p>There is a familiar and strange illusion experienced by all who climb isolated mountains.&nbsp; The higher one climbs, the more of the earth&rsquo;s surface becomes visible, and the effect of this is that the horizon seems up-hill from the observer.&nbsp; This illusion is especially notable on Haleakala, for the old volcano rises directly from the sea without buttresses or connecting ranges.&nbsp; In consequence, as fast as we climbed up the grim slope of Haleakala, still faster did Haleakala, ourselves, and all about us, sink down into the centre of what appeared a profound abyss.&nbsp; Everywhere, far above us, towered the horizon.&nbsp; The ocean sloped down from the horizon to us.&nbsp; The higher we climbed, the deeper did we seem to sink down, the farther above us shone the horizon, and the steeper pitched the grade up to that horizontal line where sky and ocean met.&nbsp; It was weird and unreal, and vagrant thoughts of Simm&rsquo;s Hole and of the volcano through which Jules Verne journeyed to the centre of the earth flitted through one&rsquo;s mind.</p> <p>And then, when at last we reached the summit of that monster mountain, which summit was like the bottom of an inverted cone situated in the centre of an awful cosmic pit, we found that we were at neither top nor bottom.&nbsp; Far above us was the heaven-towering horizon, and far beneath us, where the top of the mountain should have been, was a deeper deep, the great crater, the House of the Sun.&nbsp; Twenty-three miles around stretched the dizzy walls of the crater.&nbsp; We stood on the edge of the nearly vertical western wall, and the floor of the crater lay nearly half a mile beneath.&nbsp; This floor, broken by lava-flows and cinder-cones, was as red and fresh and uneroded as if it were but yesterday that the fires went out.&nbsp; The cinder-cones, the smallest over four hundred feet in height and the largest over nine hundred, seemed no more than puny little sand-hills, so mighty was the magnitude of the setting.&nbsp; Two gaps, thousands of feet deep, broke the rim of the crater, and through these Ukiukiu vainly strove to drive his fleecy herds of trade-wind clouds.&nbsp; As fast as they advanced through the gaps, the heat of the crater dissipated them into thin air, and though they advanced always, they got nowhere.</p> <p>It was a scene of vast bleakness and desolation, stern, forbidding, fascinating.&nbsp; We gazed down upon a place of fire and earthquake.&nbsp; The tie-ribs of earth lay bare before us.&nbsp; It was a workshop of nature still cluttered with the raw beginnings of world-making.&nbsp; Here and there great dikes of primordial rock had thrust themselves up from the bowels of earth, straight through the molten surface-ferment that had evidently cooled only the other day.&nbsp; It was all unreal and unbelievable.&nbsp; Looking upward, far above us (in reality beneath us) floated the cloud-battle of Ukiukiu and Naulu.&nbsp; And higher up the slope of the seeming abyss, above the cloud-battle, in the air and sky, hung the islands of Lanai and Molokai.&nbsp; Across the crater, to the south-east, still apparently looking upward, we saw ascending, first, the turquoise sea, then the white surf-line of the shore of Hawaii; above that the belt of trade-clouds, and next, eighty miles away, rearing their stupendous hulks out of the azure sky, tipped with snow, wreathed with cloud, trembling like a mirage, the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa hung poised on the wall of heaven.</p> <p>It is told that long ago, one Maui, the son of Hina, lived on what is now known as West Maui.&nbsp; His mother, Hina, employed her time in the making of <i>kapas</i>.&nbsp; She must have made them at night, for her days were occupied in trying to dry the <i>kapas</i>.&nbsp; Each morning, and all morning, she toiled at spreading them out in the sun.&nbsp; But no sooner were they out, than she began taking them in, in order to have them all under shelter for the night.&nbsp; For know that the days were shorter then than now.&nbsp; Maui watched his mother&rsquo;s futile toil and felt sorry for her.&nbsp; He decided to do something&mdash;oh, no, not to help her hang out and take in the <i>kapas</i>.&nbsp; He was too clever for that.&nbsp; His idea was to make the sun go slower.&nbsp; Perhaps he was the first Hawaiian astronomer.&nbsp; At any rate, he took a series of observations of the sun from various parts of the island.&nbsp; His conclusion was that the sun&rsquo;s path was directly across Haleakala.&nbsp; Unlike Joshua, he stood in no need of divine assistance.&nbsp; He gathered a huge quantity of coconuts, from the fibre of which he braided a stout cord, and in one end of which he made a noose, even as the cow-boys of Haleakala do to this day.&nbsp; Next he climbed into the House of the Sun and laid in wait.&nbsp; When the sun came tearing along the path, bent on completing its journey in the shortest time possible, the valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the sun&rsquo;s largest and strongest beams.&nbsp; He made the sun slow down some; also, he broke the beam short off.&nbsp; And he kept on roping and breaking off beams till the sun said it was willing to listen to reason.&nbsp; Maui set forth his terms of peace, which the sun accepted, agreeing to go more slowly thereafter.&nbsp; Wherefore Hina had ample time in which to dry her <i>kapas</i>, and the days are longer than they used to be, which last is quite in accord with the teachings of modern astronomy.</p> <p>We had a lunch of jerked beef and hard <i>poi</i> in a stone corral, used of old time for the night-impounding of cattle being driven across the island.&nbsp; Then we skirted the rim for half a mile and began the descent into the crater.&nbsp; Twenty-five hundred feet beneath lay the floor, and down a steep slope of loose volcanic cinders we dropped, the sure-footed horses slipping and sliding, but always keeping their feet.&nbsp; The black surface of the cinders, when broken by the horses&rsquo; hoofs, turned to a yellow ochre dust, virulent in appearance and acid of taste, that arose in clouds.&nbsp; There was a gallop across a level stretch to the mouth of a convenient blow-hole, and then the descent continued in clouds of volcanic dust, winding in and out among cinder-cones, brick-red, old rose, and purplish black of colour.&nbsp; Above us, higher and higher, towered the crater-walls, while we journeyed on across innumerable lava-flows, turning and twisting a devious way among the adamantine billows of a petrified sea.&nbsp; Saw-toothed waves of lava vexed the surface of this weird ocean, while on either hand arose jagged crests and spiracles of fantastic shape.&nbsp; Our way led on past a bottomless pit and along and over the main stream of the latest lava-flow for seven miles.</p> <p>At the lower end of the crater was our camping spot, in a small grove of <i>olapa</i> and <i>kolea</i> trees, tucked away in a corner of the crater at the base of walls that rose perpendicularly fifteen hundred feet.&nbsp; Here was pasturage for the horses, but no water, and first we turned aside and picked our way across a mile of lava to a known water-hole in a crevice in the crater-wall.&nbsp; The water-hole was empty.&nbsp; But on climbing fifty feet up the crevice, a pool was found containing half a dozen barrels of water.&nbsp; A pail was carried up, and soon a steady stream of the precious liquid was running down the rock and filling the lower pool, while the cow-boys below were busy fighting the horses back, for there was room for one only to drink at a time.&nbsp; Then it was on to camp at the foot of the wall, up which herds of wild goats scrambled and blatted, while the tent arose to the sound of rifle-firing.&nbsp; Jerked beef, hard <i>poi</i>, and broiled kid were the menu.&nbsp; Over the crest of the crater, just above our heads, rolled a sea of clouds, driven on by Ukiukiu.&nbsp; Though this sea rolled over the crest unceasingly, it never blotted out nor dimmed the moon, for the heat of the crater dissolved the clouds as fast as they rolled in.&nbsp; Through the moonlight, attracted by the camp-fire, came the crater cattle to peer and challenge.&nbsp; They were rolling fat, though they rarely drank water, the morning dew on the grass taking its place.&nbsp; It was because of this dew that the tent made a welcome bedchamber, and we fell asleep to the chanting of <i>hulas</i> by the unwearied Hawaiian cow-boys, in whose veins, no doubt, ran the blood of Maui, their valiant forebear.</p> <p>The camera cannot do justice to the House of the Sun.&nbsp; The sublimated chemistry of photography may not lie, but it certainly does not tell all the truth.&nbsp; The Koolau Gap may be faithfully reproduced, just as it impinged on the retina of the camera, yet in the resulting picture the gigantic scale of things would be missing.&nbsp; Those walls that seem several hundred feet in height are almost as many thousand; that entering wedge of cloud is a mile and a half wide in the gap itself, while beyond the gap it is a veritable ocean; and that foreground of cinder-cone and volcanic ash, mushy and colourless in appearance, is in truth gorgeous-hued in brick-red, terra-cotta rose, yellow ochre, and purplish black.&nbsp; Also, words are a vain thing and drive to despair.&nbsp; To say that a crater-wall is two thousand feet high is to say just precisely that it is two thousand feet high; but there is a vast deal more to that crater-wall than a mere statistic.&nbsp; The sun is ninety-three millions of miles distant, but to mortal conception the adjoining county is farther away.&nbsp; This frailty of the human brain is hard on the sun.&nbsp; It is likewise hard on the House of the Sun.&nbsp; Haleakala has a message of beauty and wonder for the human soul that cannot be delivered by proxy.&nbsp; Kolikoli is six hours from Kahului; Kahului is a night&rsquo;s run from Honolulu; Honolulu is six days from San Francisco; and there you are.</p> <p>We climbed the crater-walls, put the horses over impossible places, rolled stones, and shot wild goats.&nbsp; I did not get any goats.&nbsp; I was too busy rolling stones.&nbsp; One spot in particular I remember, where we started a stone the size of a horse.&nbsp; It began the descent easy enough, rolling over, wobbling, and threatening to stop; but in a few minutes it was soaring through the air two hundred feet at a jump.&nbsp; It grew rapidly smaller until it struck a slight slope of volcanic sand, over which it darted like a startled jackrabbit, kicking up behind it a tiny trail of yellow dust.&nbsp; Stone and dust diminished in size, until some of the party said the stone had stopped.&nbsp; That was because they could not see it any longer.&nbsp; It had vanished into the distance beyond their ken.&nbsp; Others saw it rolling farther on&mdash;I know I did; and it is my firm conviction that that stone is still rolling.</p> <p>Our last day in the crater, Ukiukiu gave us a taste of his strength.&nbsp; He smashed Naulu back all along the line, filled the House of the Sun to overflowing with clouds, and drowned us out.&nbsp; Our rain-gauge was a pint cup under a tiny hole in the tent.&nbsp; That last night of storm and rain filled the cup, and there was no way of measuring the water that spilled over into the blankets.&nbsp; With the rain-gauge out of business there was no longer any reason for remaining; so we broke camp in the wet-gray of dawn, and plunged eastward across the lava to the Kaupo Gap.&nbsp; East Maui is nothing more or less than the vast lava stream that flowed long ago through the Kaupo Gap; and down this stream we picked our way from an altitude of six thousand five hundred feet to the sea.&nbsp; This was a day&rsquo;s work in itself for the horses; but never were there such horses.&nbsp; Safe in the bad places, never rushing, never losing their heads, as soon as they found a trail wide and smooth enough to run on, they ran.&nbsp; There was no stopping them until the trail became bad again, and then they stopped of themselves.&nbsp; Continuously, for days, they had performed the hardest kind of work, and fed most of the time on grass foraged by themselves at night while we slept, and yet that day they covered twenty-eight leg-breaking miles and galloped into Hana like a bunch of colts.&nbsp; Also, there were several of them, reared in the dry region on the leeward side of Haleakala, that had never worn shoes in all their lives.&nbsp; Day after day, and all day long, unshod, they had travelled over the sharp lava, with the extra weight of a man on their backs, and their hoofs were in better condition than those of the shod horses.</p> <p>The scenery between Vieiras&rsquo;s (where the Kaupo Gap empties into the sea) and Lana, which we covered in half a day, is well worth a week or month; but, wildly beautiful as it is, it becomes pale and small in comparison with the wonderland that lies beyond the rubber plantations between Hana and the Honomanu Gulch.&nbsp; Two days were required to cover this marvellous stretch, which lies on the windward side of Haleakala.&nbsp; The people who dwell there call it the &ldquo;ditch country,&rdquo; an unprepossessing name, but it has no other.&nbsp; Nobody else ever comes there.&nbsp; Nobody else knows anything about it.&nbsp; With the exception of a handful of men, whom business has brought there, nobody has heard of the ditch country of Maui.&nbsp; Now a ditch is a ditch, assumably muddy, and usually traversing uninteresting and monotonous landscapes.&nbsp; But the Nahiku Ditch is not an ordinary ditch.&nbsp; The windward side of Haleakala is serried by a thousand precipitous gorges, down which rush as many torrents, each torrent of which achieves a score of cascades and waterfalls before it reaches the sea.&nbsp; More rain comes down here than in any other region in the world.&nbsp; In 1904 the year&rsquo;s downpour was four hundred and twenty inches.&nbsp; Water means sugar, and sugar is the backbone of the territory of Hawaii, wherefore the Nahiku Ditch, which is not a ditch, but a chain of tunnels.&nbsp; The water travels underground, appearing only at intervals to leap a gorge, travelling high in the air on a giddy flume and plunging into and through the opposing mountain.&nbsp; This magnificent waterway is called a &ldquo;ditch,&rdquo; and with equal appropriateness can Cleopatra&rsquo;s barge be called a box-car.</p> <p>There are no carriage roads through the ditch country, and before the ditch was built, or bored, rather, there was no horse-trail.&nbsp; Hundreds of inches of rain annually, on fertile soil, under a tropic sun, means a steaming jungle of vegetation.&nbsp; A man, on foot, cutting his way through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a week he would be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if he wanted to get out before the vegetation overran the passage way he had cut.&nbsp; O&rsquo;Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail.&nbsp; He built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most remarkable water-farms in the world.&nbsp; Every little runlet and dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the main ditch.&nbsp; But so heavily does it rain at times that countless spillways let the surplus escape to the sea.</p> <p>The horse-trail is not very wide.&nbsp; Like the engineer who built it, it dares anything.&nbsp; Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it climbs over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the horse-trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the flume.&nbsp; That careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down the faces of precipices.&nbsp; It gouges its narrow way out of the wall, dodging around waterfalls or passing under them where they thunder down in white fury; while straight overhead the wall rises hundreds of feet, and straight beneath it sinks a thousand.&nbsp; And those marvellous mountain horses are as unconcerned as the trail.&nbsp; They fox-trot along it as a matter of course, though the footing is slippery with rain, and they will gallop with their hind feet slipping over the edge if you let them.&nbsp; I advise only those with steady nerves and cool heads to tackle the Nahiku Ditch trail.&nbsp; One of our cow-boys was noted as the strongest and bravest on the big ranch.&nbsp; He had ridden mountain horses all his life on the rugged western slopes of Haleakala.&nbsp; He was first in the horse-breaking; and when the others hung back, as a matter of course, he would go in to meet a wild bull in the cattle-pen.&nbsp; He had a reputation.&nbsp; But he had never ridden over the Nahiku Ditch.&nbsp; It was there he lost his reputation.&nbsp; When he faced the first flume, spanning a hair-raising gorge, narrow, without railings, with a bellowing waterfall above, another below, and directly beneath a wild cascade, the air filled with driving spray and rocking to the clamour and rush of sound and motion&mdash;well, that cow-boy dismounted from his horse, explained briefly that he had a wife and two children, and crossed over on foot, leading the horse behind him.</p> <p>The only relief from the flumes was the precipices; and the only relief from the precipices was the flumes, except where the ditch was far under ground, in which case we crossed one horse and rider at a time, on primitive log-bridges that swayed and teetered and threatened to carry away.&nbsp; I confess that at first I rode such places with my feet loose in the stirrups, and that on the sheer walls I saw to it, by a definite, conscious act of will, that the foot in the outside stirrup, overhanging the thousand feet of fall, was exceedingly loose.&nbsp; I say &ldquo;at first&rdquo;; for, as in the crater itself we quickly lost our conception of magnitude, so, on the Nahiku Ditch, we quickly lost our apprehension of depth.&nbsp; The ceaseless iteration of height and depth produced a state of consciousness in which height and depth were accepted as the ordinary conditions of existence; and from the horse&rsquo;s back to look sheer down four hundred or five hundred feet became quite commonplace and non-productive of thrills.&nbsp; And as carelessly as the trail and the horses, we swung along the dizzy heights and ducked around or through the waterfalls.</p> <p>And such a ride!&nbsp; Falling water was everywhere.&nbsp; We rode above the clouds, under the clouds, and through the clouds! and every now and then a shaft of sunshine penetrated like a search-light to the depths yawning beneath us, or flashed upon some pinnacle of the crater-rim thousands of feet above.&nbsp; At every turn of the trail a waterfall or a dozen waterfalls, leaping hundreds of feet through the air, burst upon our vision.&nbsp; At our first night&rsquo;s camp, in the Keanae Gulch, we counted thirty-two waterfalls from a single viewpoint.&nbsp; The vegetation ran riot over that wild land.&nbsp; There were forests of koa and kolea trees, and candlenut trees; and then there were the trees called ohia-ai, which bore red mountain apples, mellow and juicy and most excellent to eat.&nbsp; Wild bananas grew everywhere, clinging to the sides of the gorges, and, overborne by their great bunches of ripe fruit, falling across the trail and blocking the way.&nbsp; And over the forest surged a sea of green life, the climbers of a thousand varieties, some that floated airily, in lacelike filaments, from the tallest branches others that coiled and wound about the trees like huge serpents; and one, the ei-ei, that was for all the world like a climbing palm, swinging on a thick stem from branch to branch and tree to tree and throttling the supports whereby it climbed.&nbsp; Through the sea of green, lofty tree-ferns thrust their great delicate fronds, and the lehua flaunted its scarlet blossoms.&nbsp; Underneath the climbers, in no less profusion, grew the warm-coloured, strangely-marked plants that in the United States one is accustomed to seeing preciously conserved in hot-houses.&nbsp; In fact, the ditch country of Maui is nothing more nor less than a huge conservatory.&nbsp; Every familiar variety of fern flourishes, and more varieties that are unfamiliar, from the tiniest maidenhair to the gross and voracious staghorn, the latter the terror of the woodsmen, interlacing with itself in tangled masses five or six feet deep and covering acres.</p> <p>Never was there such a ride.&nbsp; For two days it lasted, when we emerged into rolling country, and, along an actual wagon-road, came home to the ranch at a gallop.&nbsp; I know it was cruel to gallop the horses after such a long, hard journey; but we blistered our hands in vain effort to hold them in.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the sort of horses they grow on Haleakala.&nbsp; At the ranch there was great festival of cattle-driving, branding, and horse-breaking.&nbsp; Overhead Ukiukiu and Naulu battled valiantly, and far above, in the sunshine, towered the mighty summit of Haleakala.</p> <h2><a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 134</span>CHAPTER IX<br /> <span class="GutSmall">A PACIFIC TRAVERSE</span></h2> <p><i>Sandwich Islands to Tahiti</i>.&mdash;<i>There is great difficulty in making this passage across the trades</i>.&nbsp; <i>The whalers and all others speak with great doubt of fetching Tahiti from the Sandwich islands</i>.&nbsp; <i>Capt. Bruce says that a vessel should keep to the northward until she gets a start of wind before bearing for her destination</i>.&nbsp; <i>In his passage between them in November</i>, 1837, <i>he had no variables near the line in coming south</i>, <i>and never could make easting on either tack</i>, <i>though he endeavoured by every means to do so</i>.</p> <p><span class="smcap">So</span> say the sailing directions for the South Pacific Ocean; and that is all they say.&nbsp; There is not a word more to help the weary voyager in making this long traverse&mdash;nor is there any word at all concerning the passage from Hawaii to the Marquesas, which lie some eight hundred miles to the northeast of Tahiti and which are the more difficult to reach by just that much.&nbsp; The reason for the lack of directions is, I imagine, that no voyager is supposed to make himself weary by attempting so impossible a traverse.&nbsp; But the impossible did not deter the <i>Snark</i>,&mdash;principally because of the fact that we did not read that particular little paragraph in the sailing directions until after we had started.&nbsp; We sailed from Hilo, Hawaii, on October 7, and arrived at Nuka-hiva, in the Marquesas, on December 6.&nbsp; The distance was two thousand miles as the crow flies, while we actually travelled at least four thousand miles to accomplish it, thus proving for once and for ever that the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line.&nbsp; Had we headed directly for the Marquesas, we might have travelled five or six thousand miles.</p> <p>Upon one thing we were resolved: we would not cross the Line west of 130&deg; west longitude.&nbsp; For here was the problem.&nbsp; To cross the Line to the west of that point, if the southeast trades were well around to the southeast, would throw us so far to leeward of the Marquesas that a head-beat would be maddeningly impossible.&nbsp; Also, we had to remember the equatorial current, which moves west at a rate of anywhere from twelve to seventy-five miles a day.&nbsp; A pretty pickle, indeed, to be to leeward of our destination with such a current in our teeth.&nbsp; No; not a minute, nor a second, west of 130&deg; west longitude would we cross the Line.&nbsp; But since the southeast trades were to be expected five or six degrees north of the Line (which, if they were well around to the southeast or south-southeast, would necessitate our sliding off toward south-southwest), we should have to hold to the eastward, north of the Line, and north of the southeast trades, until we gained at least 128&deg; west longitude.</p> <p>I have forgotten to mention that the seventy-horse-power gasolene engine, as usual, was not working, and that we could depend upon wind alone.&nbsp; Neither was the launch engine working.&nbsp; And while I am about it, I may as well confess that the five-horse-power, which ran the lights, fans, and pumps, was also on the sick-list.&nbsp; A striking title for a book haunts me, waking and sleeping.&nbsp; I should like to write that book some day and to call it &ldquo;Around the World with Three Gasolene Engines and a Wife.&rdquo;&nbsp; But I am afraid I shall not write it, for fear of hurting the feelings of some of the young gentlemen of San Francisco, Honolulu, and Hilo, who learned their trades at the expense of the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> engines.</p> <p>It looked easy on paper.&nbsp; Here was Hilo and there was our objective, 128&deg; west longitude.&nbsp; With the northeast trade blowing we could travel a straight line between the two points, and even slack our sheets off a goodly bit.&nbsp; But one of the chief troubles with the trades is that one never knows just where he will pick them up and just in what direction they will be blowing.&nbsp; We picked up the northeast trade right outside of Hilo harbour, but the miserable breeze was away around into the east.&nbsp; Then there was the north equatorial current setting westward like a mighty river.&nbsp; Furthermore, a small boat, by the wind and bucking into a big headsea, does not work to advantage.&nbsp; She jogs up and down and gets nowhere.&nbsp; Her sails are full and straining, every little while she presses her lee-rail under, she flounders, and bumps, and splashes, and that is all.&nbsp; Whenever she begins to gather way, she runs ker-chug into a big mountain of water and is brought to a standstill.&nbsp; So, with the <i>Snark</i>, the resultant of her smallness, of the trade around into the east, and of the strong equatorial current, was a long sag south.&nbsp; Oh, she did not go quite south.&nbsp; But the easting she made was distressing.&nbsp; On October 11, she made forty miles easting; October 12, fifteen miles; October 13, no easting; October 14, thirty miles; October 15, twenty-three miles; October 16, eleven miles; and on October 17, she actually went to the westward four miles.&nbsp; Thus, in a week she made one hundred and fifteen miles easting, which was equivalent to sixteen miles a day.&nbsp; But, between the longitude of Hilo and 128&deg; west longitude is a difference of twenty-seven degrees, or, roughly, sixteen hundred miles.&nbsp; At sixteen miles a day, one hundred days would be required to accomplish this distance.&nbsp; And even then, our objective, 128&deg; west longitude, was five degrees north of the Line, while Nuka-hiva, in the Marquesas, lay nine degrees south of the Line and twelve degrees to the west!</p> <p>There remained only one thing to do&mdash;to work south out of the trade and into the variables.&nbsp; It is true that Captain Bruce found no variables on his traverse, and that he &ldquo;never could make easting on either tack.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was the variables or nothing with us, and we prayed for better luck than he had had.&nbsp; The variables constitute the belt of ocean lying between the trades and the doldrums, and are conjectured to be the draughts of heated air which rise in the doldrums, flow high in the air counter to the trades, and gradually sink down till they fan the surface of the ocean where they are found.&nbsp; And they are found where they are found; for they are wedged between the trades and the doldrums, which same shift their territory from day to day and month to month.</p> <p>We found the variables in 11&deg; north latitude, and 11&deg; north latitude we hugged jealously.&nbsp; To the south lay the doldrums.&nbsp; To the north lay the northeast trade that refused to blow from the northeast.&nbsp; The days came and went, and always they found the <i>Snark</i> somewhere near the eleventh parallel.&nbsp; The variables were truly variable.&nbsp; A light head-wind would die away and leave us rolling in a calm for forty-eight hours.&nbsp; Then a light head-wind would spring up, blow for three hours, and leave us rolling in another calm for forty-eight hours.&nbsp; Then&mdash;hurrah!&mdash;the wind would come out of the west, fresh, beautifully fresh, and send the <i>Snark</i> along, wing and wing, her wake bubbling, the log-line straight astern.&nbsp; At the end of half an hour, while we were preparing to set the spinnaker, with a few sickly gasps the wind would die away.&nbsp; And so it went.&nbsp; We wagered optimistically on every favourable fan of air that lasted over five minutes; but it never did any good.&nbsp; The fans faded out just the same.</p> <p>But there were exceptions.&nbsp; In the variables, if you wait long enough, something is bound to happen, and we were so plentifully stocked with food and water that we could afford to wait.&nbsp; On October 26, we actually made one hundred and three miles of easting, and we talked about it for days afterwards.&nbsp; Once we caught a moderate gale from the south, which blew itself out in eight hours, but it helped us to seventy-one miles of easting in that particular twenty-four hours.&nbsp; And then, just as it was expiring, the wind came straight out from the north (the directly opposite quarter), and fanned us along over another degree of easting.</p> <p>In years and years no sailing vessel has attempted this traverse, and we found ourselves in the midst of one of the loneliest of the Pacific solitudes.&nbsp; In the sixty days we were crossing it we sighted no sail, lifted no steamer&rsquo;s smoke above the horizon.&nbsp; A disabled vessel could drift in this deserted expanse for a dozen generations, and there would be no rescue.&nbsp; The only chance of rescue would be from a vessel like the <i>Snark</i>, and the <i>Snark</i> happened to be there principally because of the fact that the traverse had been begun before the particular paragraph in the sailing directions had been read.&nbsp; Standing upright on deck, a straight line drawn from the eye to the horizon would measure three miles and a half.&nbsp; Thus, seven miles was the diameter of the circle of the sea in which we had our centre.&nbsp; Since we remained always in the centre, and since we constantly were moving in some direction, we looked upon many circles.&nbsp; But all circles looked alike.&nbsp; No tufted islets, gray headlands, nor glistening patches of white canvas ever marred the symmetry of that unbroken curve.&nbsp; Clouds came and went, rising up over the rim of the circle, flowing across the space of it, and spilling away and down across the opposite rim.</p> <p>The world faded as the procession of the weeks marched by.&nbsp; The world faded until at last there ceased to be any world except the little world of the <i>Snark</i>, freighted with her seven souls and floating on the expanse of the waters.&nbsp; Our memories of the world, the great world, became like dreams of former lives we had lived somewhere before we came to be born on the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; After we had been out of fresh vegetables for some time, we mentioned such things in much the same way I have heard my father mention the vanished apples of his boyhood.&nbsp; Man is a creature of habit, and we on the <i>Snark</i> had got the habit of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Everything about her and aboard her was as a matter of course, and anything different would have been an irritation and an offence.</p> <p>There was no way by which the great world could intrude.&nbsp; Our bell rang the hours, but no caller ever rang it.&nbsp; There were no guests to dinner, no telegrams, no insistent telephone jangles invading our privacy.&nbsp; We had no engagements to keep, no trains to catch, and there were no morning newspapers over which to waste time in learning what was happening to our fifteen hundred million other fellow-creatures.</p> <p>But it was not dull.&nbsp; The affairs of our little world had to be regulated, and, unlike the great world, our world had to be steered in its journey through space.&nbsp; Also, there were cosmic disturbances to be encountered and baffled, such as do not afflict the big earth in its frictionless orbit through the windless void.&nbsp; And we never knew, from moment to moment, what was going to happen next.&nbsp; There were spice and variety enough and to spare.&nbsp; Thus, at four in the morning, I relieve Hermann at the wheel.</p> <p>&ldquo;East-northeast,&rdquo; he gives me the course.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;s eight points off, but she ain&rsquo;t steering.&rdquo;</p> <p>Small wonder.&nbsp; The vessel does not exist that can be steered in so absolute a calm.</p> <p>&ldquo;I had a breeze a little while ago&mdash;maybe it will come back again,&rdquo; Hermann says hopefully, ere he starts forward to the cabin and his bunk.</p> <p>The mizzen is in and fast furled.&nbsp; In the night, what of the roll and the absence of wind, it had made life too hideous to be permitted to go on rasping at the mast, smashing at the tackles, and buffeting the empty air into hollow outbursts of sound.&nbsp; But the big mainsail is still on, and the staysail, jib, and flying-jib are snapping and slashing at their sheets with every roll.&nbsp; Every star is out.&nbsp; Just for luck I put the wheel hard over in the opposite direction to which it had been left by Hermann, and I lean back and gaze up at the stars.&nbsp; There is nothing else for me to do.&nbsp; There is nothing to be done with a sailing vessel rolling in a stark calm.</p> <p>Then I feel a fan on my cheek, faint, so faint, that I can just sense it ere it is gone.&nbsp; But another comes, and another, until a real and just perceptible breeze is blowing.&nbsp; How the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> sails manage to feel it is beyond me, but feel it they do, as she does as well, for the compass card begins slowly to revolve in the binnacle.&nbsp; In reality, it is not revolving at all.&nbsp; It is held by terrestrial magnetism in one place, and it is the <i>Snark</i> that is revolving, pivoted upon that delicate cardboard device that floats in a closed vessel of alcohol.</p> <p>So the <i>Snark</i> comes back on her course.&nbsp; The breath increases to a tiny puff.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> feels the weight of it and actually heels over a trifle.&nbsp; There is flying scud overhead, and I notice the stars being blotted out.&nbsp; Walls of darkness close in upon me, so that, when the last star is gone, the darkness is so near that it seems I can reach out and touch it on every side.&nbsp; When I lean toward it, I can feel it loom against my face.&nbsp; Puff follows puff, and I am glad the mizzen is furled.&nbsp; Phew! that was a stiff one!&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> goes over and down until her lee-rail is buried and the whole Pacific Ocean is pouring in.&nbsp; Four or five of these gusts make me wish that the jib and flying-jib were in.&nbsp; The sea is picking up, the gusts are growing stronger and more frequent, and there is a splatter of wet in the air.&nbsp; There is no use in attempting to gaze to windward.&nbsp; The wall of blackness is within arm&rsquo;s length.&nbsp; Yet I cannot help attempting to see and gauge the blows that are being struck at the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; There is something ominous and menacing up there to windward, and I have a feeling that if I look long enough and strong enough, I shall divine it.&nbsp; Futile feeling.&nbsp; Between two gusts I leave the wheel and run forward to the cabin companionway, where I light matches and consult the barometer.&nbsp; &ldquo;29-90&rdquo; it reads.&nbsp; That sensitive instrument refuses to take notice of the disturbance which is humming with a deep, throaty voice in the rigging.&nbsp; I get back to the wheel just in time to meet another gust, the strongest yet.&nbsp; Well, anyway, the wind is abeam and the <i>Snark</i> is on her course, eating up easting.&nbsp; That at least is well.</p> <p>The jib and flying-jib bother me, and I wish they were in.&nbsp; She would make easier weather of it, and less risky weather likewise.&nbsp; The wind snorts, and stray raindrops pelt like birdshot.&nbsp; I shall certainly have to call all hands, I conclude; then conclude the next instant to hang on a little longer.&nbsp; Maybe this is the end of it, and I shall have called them for nothing.&nbsp; It is better to let them sleep.&nbsp; I hold the <i>Snark</i> down to her task, and from out of the darkness, at right angles, comes a deluge of rain accompanied by shrieking wind.&nbsp; Then everything eases except the blackness, and I rejoice in that I have not called the men.</p> <p>No sooner does the wind ease than the sea picks up.&nbsp; The combers are breaking now, and the boat is tossing like a cork.&nbsp; Then out of the blackness the gusts come harder and faster than before.&nbsp; If only I knew what was up there to windward in the blackness!&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> is making heavy weather of it, and her lee-rail is buried oftener than not.&nbsp; More shrieks and snorts of wind.&nbsp; Now, if ever, is the time to call the men.&nbsp; I <i>will</i> call them, I resolve.&nbsp; Then there is a burst of rain, a slackening of the wind, and I do not call.&nbsp; But it is rather lonely, there at the wheel, steering a little world through howling blackness.&nbsp; It is quite a responsibility to be all alone on the surface of a little world in time of stress, doing the thinking for its sleeping inhabitants.&nbsp; I recoil from the responsibility as more gusts begin to strike and as a sea licks along the weather rail and splashes over into the cockpit.&nbsp; The salt water seems strangely warm to my body and is shot through with ghostly nodules of phosphorescent light.&nbsp; I shall surely call all hands to shorten sail.&nbsp; Why should they sleep?&nbsp; I am a fool to have any compunctions in the matter.&nbsp; My intellect is arrayed against my heart.&nbsp; It was my heart that said, &ldquo;Let them sleep.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yes, but it was my intellect that backed up my heart in that judgment.&nbsp; Let my intellect then reverse the judgment; and, while I am speculating as to what particular entity issued that command to my intellect, the gusts die away.&nbsp; Solicitude for mere bodily comfort has no place in practical seamanship, I conclude sagely; but study the feel of the next series of gusts and do not call the men.&nbsp; After all, it <i>is</i> my intellect, behind everything, procrastinating, measuring its knowledge of what the <i>Snark</i> can endure against the blows being struck at her, and waiting the call of all hands against the striking of still severer blows.</p> <p>Daylight, gray and violent, steals through the cloud-pall and shows a foaming sea that flattens under the weight of recurrent and increasing squalls.&nbsp; Then comes the rain, filling the windy valleys of the sea with milky smoke and further flattening the waves, which but wait for the easement of wind and rain to leap more wildly than before.&nbsp; Come the men on deck, their sleep out, and among them Hermann, his face on the broad grin in appreciation of the breeze of wind I have picked up.&nbsp; I turn the wheel over to Warren and start to go below, pausing on the way to rescue the galley stovepipe which has gone adrift.&nbsp; I am barefooted, and my toes have had an excellent education in the art of clinging; but, as the rail buries itself in a green sea, I suddenly sit down on the streaming deck.&nbsp; Hermann good-naturedly elects to question my selection of such a spot.&nbsp; Then comes the next roll, and he sits down, suddenly, and without premeditation.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> heels over and down, the rail takes it green, and Hermann and I, clutching the precious stove-pipe, are swept down into the lee-scuppers.&nbsp; After that I finish my journey below, and while changing my clothes grin with satisfaction&mdash;the <i>Snark</i> is making easting.</p> <p>No, it is not all monotony.&nbsp; When we had worried along our easting to 126&deg; west longitude, we left the variables and headed south through the doldrums, where was much calm weather and where, taking advantage of every fan of air, we were often glad to make a score of miles in as many hours.&nbsp; And yet, on such a day, we might pass through a dozen squalls and be surrounded by dozens more.&nbsp; And every squall was to be regarded as a bludgeon capable of crushing the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; We were struck sometimes by the centres and sometimes by the sides of these squalls, and we never knew just where or how we were to be hit.&nbsp; The squall that rose up, covering half the heavens, and swept down upon us, as likely as not split into two squalls which passed us harmlessly on either side while the tiny, innocent looking squall that appeared to carry no more than a hogshead of water and a pound of wind, would abruptly assume cyclopean proportions, deluging us with rain and overwhelming us with wind.&nbsp; Then there were treacherous squalls that went boldly astern and sneaked back upon us from a mile to leeward.&nbsp; Again, two squalls would tear along, one on each side of us, and we would get a fillip from each of them.&nbsp; Now a gale certainly grows tiresome after a few hours, but squalls never.&nbsp; The thousandth squall in one&rsquo;s experience is as interesting as the first one, and perhaps a bit more so.&nbsp; It is the tyro who has no apprehension of them.&nbsp; The man of a thousand squalls respects a squall.&nbsp; He knows what they are.</p> <p>It was in the doldrums that our most exciting event occurred.&nbsp; On November 20, we discovered that through an accident we had lost over one-half of the supply of fresh water that remained to us.&nbsp; Since we were at that time forty-three days out from Hilo, our supply of fresh water was not large.&nbsp; To lose over half of it was a catastrophe.&nbsp; On close allowance, the remnant of water we possessed would last twenty days.&nbsp; But we were in the doldrums; there was no telling where the southeast trades were, nor where we would pick them up.</p> <p>The handcuffs were promptly put upon the pump, and once a day the water was portioned out.&nbsp; Each of us received a quart for personal use, and eight quarts were given to the cook.&nbsp; Enters now the psychology of the situation.&nbsp; No sooner had the discovery of the water shortage been made than I, for one, was afflicted with a burning thirst.&nbsp; It seemed to me that I had never been so thirsty in my life.&nbsp; My little quart of water I could easily have drunk in one draught, and to refrain from doing so required a severe exertion of will.&nbsp; Nor was I alone in this.&nbsp; All of us talked water, thought water, and dreamed water when we slept.&nbsp; We examined the charts for possible islands to which to run in extremity, but there were no such islands.&nbsp; The Marquesas were the nearest, and they were the other side of the Line, and of the doldrums, too, which made it even worse.&nbsp; We were in 3&deg; north latitude, while the Marquesas were 9&deg; south latitude&mdash;a difference of over a thousand miles.&nbsp; Furthermore, the Marquesas lay some fourteen degrees to the west of our longitude.&nbsp; A pretty pickle for a handful of creatures sweltering on the ocean in the heat of tropic calms.</p> <p>We rigged lines on either side between the main and mizzen riggings.&nbsp; To these we laced the big deck awning, hoisting it up aft with a sailing pennant so that any rain it might collect would run forward where it could be caught.&nbsp; Here and there squalls passed across the circle of the sea.&nbsp; All day we watched them, now to port or starboard, and again ahead or astern.&nbsp; But never one came near enough to wet us.&nbsp; In the afternoon a big one bore down upon us.&nbsp; It spread out across the ocean as it approached, and we could see it emptying countless thousands of gallons into the salt sea.&nbsp; Extra attention was paid to the awning and then we waited.&nbsp; Warren, Martin, and Hermann made a vivid picture.&nbsp; Grouped together, holding on to the rigging, swaying to the roll, they were gazing intently at the squall.&nbsp; Strain, anxiety, and yearning were in every posture of their bodies.&nbsp; Beside them was the dry and empty awning.&nbsp; But they seemed to grow limp and to droop as the squall broke in half, one part passing on ahead, the other drawing astern and going to leeward.</p> <p>But that night came rain.&nbsp; Martin, whose psychological thirst had compelled him to drink his quart of water early, got his mouth down to the lip of the awning and drank the deepest draught I ever have seen drunk.&nbsp; The precious water came down in bucketfuls and tubfuls, and in two hours we caught and stored away in the tanks one hundred and twenty gallons.&nbsp; Strange to say, in all the rest of our voyage to the Marquesas not another drop of rain fell on board.&nbsp; If that squall had missed us, the handcuffs would have remained on the pump, and we would have busied ourselves with utilizing our surplus gasolene for distillation purposes.</p> <p>Then there was the fishing.&nbsp; One did not have to go in search of it, for it was there at the rail.&nbsp; A three-inch steel hook, on the end of a stout line, with a piece of white rag for bait, was all that was necessary to catch bonitas weighing from ten to twenty-five pounds.&nbsp; Bonitas feed on flying-fish, wherefore they are unaccustomed to nibbling at the hook.&nbsp; They strike as gamely as the gamest fish in the sea, and their first run is something that no man who has ever caught them will forget.&nbsp; Also, bonitas are the veriest cannibals.&nbsp; The instant one is hooked he is attacked by his fellows.&nbsp; Often and often we hauled them on board with fresh, clean-bitten holes in them the size of teacups.</p> <p>One school of bonitas, numbering many thousands, stayed with us day and night for more than three weeks.&nbsp; Aided by the <i>Snark</i>, it was great hunting; for they cut a swath of destruction through the ocean half a mile wide and fifteen hundred miles in length.&nbsp; They ranged along abreast of the <i>Snark</i> on either side, pouncing upon the flying-fish her forefoot scared up.&nbsp; Since they were continually pursuing astern the flying-fish that survived for several flights, they were always overtaking the <i>Snark</i>, and at any time one could glance astern and on the front of a breaking wave see scores of their silvery forms coasting down just under the surface.&nbsp; When they had eaten their fill, it was their delight to get in the shadow of the boat, or of her sails, and a hundred or so were always to be seen lazily sliding along and keeping cool.</p> <p>But the poor flying-fish!&nbsp; Pursued and eaten alive by the bonitas and dolphins, they sought flight in the air, where the swooping seabirds drove them back into the water.&nbsp; Under heaven there was no refuge for them.&nbsp; Flying-fish do not play when they essay the air.&nbsp; It is a life-and-death affair with them.&nbsp; A thousand times a day we could lift our eyes and see the tragedy played out.&nbsp; The swift, broken circling of a guny might attract one&rsquo;s attention.&nbsp; A glance beneath shows the back of a dolphin breaking the surface in a wild rush.&nbsp; Just in front of its nose a shimmering palpitant streak of silver shoots from the water into the air&mdash;a delicate, organic mechanism of flight, endowed with sensation, power of direction, and love of life.&nbsp; The guny swoops for it and misses, and the flying-fish, gaining its altitude by rising, kite-like, against the wind, turns in a half-circle and skims off to leeward, gliding on the bosom of the wind.&nbsp; Beneath it, the wake of the dolphin shows in churning foam.&nbsp; So he follows, gazing upward with large eyes at the flashing breakfast that navigates an element other than his own.&nbsp; He cannot rise to so lofty occasion, but he is a thorough-going empiricist, and he knows, sooner or later, if not gobbled up by the guny, that the flying-fish must return to the water.&nbsp; And then&mdash;breakfast.&nbsp; We used to pity the poor winged fish.&nbsp; It was sad to see such sordid and bloody slaughter.&nbsp; And then, in the night watches, when a forlorn little flying-fish struck the mainsail and fell gasping and splattering on the deck, we would rush for it just as eagerly, just as greedily, just as voraciously, as the dolphins and bonitas.&nbsp; For know that flying-fish are most toothsome for breakfast.&nbsp; It is always a wonder to me that such dainty meat does not build dainty tissue in the bodies of the devourers.&nbsp; Perhaps the dolphins and bonitas are coarser-fibred because of the high speed at which they drive their bodies in order to catch their prey.&nbsp; But then again, the flying-fish drive their bodies at high speed, too.</p> <p>Sharks we caught occasionally, on large hooks, with chain-swivels, bent on a length of small rope.&nbsp; And sharks meant pilot-fish, and remoras, and various sorts of parasitic creatures.&nbsp; Regular man-eaters some of the sharks proved, tiger-eyed and with twelve rows of teeth, razor-sharp.&nbsp; By the way, we of the <i>Snark</i> are agreed that we have eaten many fish that will not compare with baked shark smothered in tomato dressing.&nbsp; In the calms we occasionally caught a fish called &ldquo;hak&eacute;&rdquo; by the Japanese cook.&nbsp; And once, on a spoon-hook trolling a hundred yards astern, we caught a snake-like fish, over three feet in length and not more than three inches in diameter, with four fangs in his jaw.&nbsp; He proved the most delicious fish&mdash;delicious in meat and flavour&mdash;that we have ever eaten on board.</p> <p>The most welcome addition to our larder was a green sea-turtle, weighing a full hundred pounds and appearing on the table most appetizingly in steaks, soups, and stews, and finally in a wonderful curry which tempted all hands into eating more rice than was good for them.&nbsp; The turtle was sighted to windward, calmly sleeping on the surface in the midst of a huge school of curious dolphins.&nbsp; It was a deep-sea turtle of a surety, for the nearest land was a thousand miles away.&nbsp; We put the <i>Snark</i> about and went back for him, Hermann driving the granes into his head and neck.&nbsp; When hauled aboard, numerous remora were clinging to his shell, and out of the hollows at the roots of his flippers crawled several large crabs.&nbsp; It did not take the crew of the <i>Snark</i> longer than the next meal to reach the unanimous conclusion that it would willingly put the <i>Snark</i> about any time for a turtle.</p> <p>But it is the dolphin that is the king of deep-sea fishes.&nbsp; Never is his colour twice quite the same.&nbsp; Swimming in the sea, an ethereal creature of palest azure, he displays in that one guise a miracle of colour.&nbsp; But it is nothing compared with the displays of which he is capable.&nbsp; At one time he will appear green&mdash;pale green, deep green, phosphorescent green; at another time blue&mdash;deep blue, electric blue, all the spectrum of blue.&nbsp; Catch him on a hook, and he turns to gold, yellow gold, all gold.&nbsp; Haul him on deck, and he excels the spectrum, passing through inconceivable shades of blues, greens, and yellows, and then, suddenly, turning a ghostly white, in the midst of which are bright blue spots, and you suddenly discover that he is speckled like a trout.&nbsp; Then back from white he goes, through all the range of colours, finally turning to a mother-of-pearl.</p> <p>For those who are devoted to fishing, I can recommend no finer sport than catching dolphin.&nbsp; Of course, it must be done on a thin line with reel and pole.&nbsp; A No. 7, O&rsquo;Shaughnessy tarpon hook is just the thing, baited with an entire flying-fish.&nbsp; Like the bonita, the dolphin&rsquo;s fare consists of flying-fish, and he strikes like lightning at the bait.&nbsp; The first warning is when the reel screeches and you see the line smoking out at right angles to the boat.&nbsp; Before you have time to entertain anxiety concerning the length of your line, the fish rises into the air in a succession of leaps.&nbsp; Since he is quite certain to be four feet long or over, the sport of landing so gamey a fish can be realized.&nbsp; When hooked, he invariably turns golden.&nbsp; The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of the hook, and the man who has made the strike must be of iron or decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap.&nbsp; &rsquo;Ware slack!&nbsp; If you don&rsquo;t, on one of those leaps the hook will be flung out and twenty feet away.&nbsp; No slack, and away he will go on another run, culminating in another series of leaps.&nbsp; About this time one begins to worry over the line, and to wish that he had had nine hundred feet on the reel originally instead of six hundred.&nbsp; With careful playing the line can be saved, and after an hour of keen excitement the fish can be brought to gaff.&nbsp; One such dolphin I landed on the <i>Snark</i> measured four feet and seven inches.</p> <p>Hermann caught dolphins more prosaically.&nbsp; A hand-line and a chunk of shark-meat were all he needed.&nbsp; His hand-line was very thick, but on more than one occasion it parted and lost the fish.&nbsp; One day a dolphin got away with a lure of Hermann&rsquo;s manufacture, to which were lashed four O&rsquo;Shaughnessy hooks.&nbsp; Within an hour the same dolphin was landed with the rod, and on dissecting him the four hooks were recovered.&nbsp; The dolphins, which remained with us over a month, deserted us north of the line, and not one was seen during the remainder of the traverse.</p> <p>So the days passed.&nbsp; There was so much to be done that time never dragged.&nbsp; Had there been little to do, time could not have dragged with such wonderful seascapes and cloudscapes&mdash;dawns that were like burning imperial cities under rainbows that arched nearly to the zenith; sunsets that bathed the purple sea in rivers of rose-coloured light, flowing from a sun whose diverging, heaven-climbing rays were of the purest blue.&nbsp; Overside, in the heat of the day, the sea was an azure satiny fabric, in the depths of which the sunshine focussed in funnels of light.&nbsp; Astern, deep down, when there was a breeze, bubbled a procession of milky-turquoise ghosts&mdash;the foam flung down by the hull of the <i>Snark</i> each time she floundered against a sea.&nbsp; At night the wake was phosphorescent fire, where the medusa slime resented our passing bulk, while far down could be observed the unceasing flight of comets, with long, undulating, nebulous tails&mdash;caused by the passage of the bonitas through the resentful medusa slime.&nbsp; And now and again, from out of the darkness on either hand, just under the surface, larger phosphorescent organisms flashed up like electric lights, marking collisions with the careless bonitas skurrying ahead to the good hunting just beyond our bowsprit.</p> <p>We made our easting, worked down through the doldrums, and caught a fresh breeze out of south-by-west.&nbsp; Hauled up by the wind, on such a slant, we would fetch past the Marquesas far away to the westward.&nbsp; But the next day, on Tuesday, November 26, in the thick of a heavy squall, the wind shifted suddenly to the southeast.&nbsp; It was the trade at last.&nbsp; There were no more squalls, naught but fine weather, a fair wind, and a whirling log, with sheets slacked off and with spinnaker and mainsail swaying and bellying on either side.&nbsp; The trade backed more and more, until it blew out of the northeast, while we steered a steady course to the southwest.&nbsp; Ten days of this, and on the morning of December 6, at five o&rsquo;clock, we sighted land &ldquo;just where it ought to have been,&rdquo; dead ahead.&nbsp; We passed to leeward of Ua-huka, skirted the southern edge of Nuka-hiva, and that night, in driving squalls and inky darkness, fought our way in to an anchorage in the narrow bay of Taiohae.&nbsp; The anchor rumbled down to the blatting of wild goats on the cliffs, and the air we breathed was heavy with the perfume of flowers.&nbsp; The traverse was accomplished.&nbsp; Sixty days from land to land, across a lonely sea above whose horizons never rise the straining sails of ships.</p> <h2><a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 156</span>CHAPTER X<br /> <span class="GutSmall">TYPEE</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">To</span> the eastward Ua-huka was being blotted out by an evening rain-squall that was fast overtaking the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; But that little craft, her big spinnaker filled by the southeast trade, was making a good race of it.&nbsp; Cape Martin, the southeasternmost point of Nuku-hiva, was abeam, and Comptroller Bay was opening up as we fled past its wide entrance, where Sail Rock, for all the world like the spritsail of a Columbia River salmon-boat, was making brave weather of it in the smashing southeast swell.</p> <p>&ldquo;What do you make that out to be?&rdquo; I asked Hermann, at the wheel.</p> <p>&ldquo;A fishing-boat, sir,&rdquo; he answered after careful scrutiny.</p> <p>Yet on the chart it was plainly marked, &ldquo;Sail Rock.&rdquo;</p> <p>But we were more interested in the recesses of Comptroller Bay, where our eyes eagerly sought out the three bights of land and centred on the midmost one, where the gathering twilight showed the dim walls of a valley extending inland.&nbsp; How often we had pored over the chart and centred always on that midmost bight and on the valley it opened&mdash;the Valley of Typee.&nbsp; &ldquo;Taipi&rdquo; the chart spelled it, and spelled it correctly, but I prefer &ldquo;Typee,&rdquo; and I shall always spell it &ldquo;Typee.&rdquo;&nbsp; When I was a little boy, I read a book spelled in that manner&mdash;Herman Melville&rsquo;s &ldquo;Typee&rdquo;; and many long hours I dreamed over its pages.&nbsp; Nor was it all dreaming.&nbsp; I resolved there and then, mightily, come what would, that when I had gained strength and years, I, too, would voyage to Typee.&nbsp; For the wonder of the world was penetrating to my tiny consciousness&mdash;the wonder that was to lead me to many lands, and that leads and never pails.&nbsp; The years passed, but Typee was not forgotten.&nbsp; Returned to San Francisco from a seven months&rsquo; cruise in the North Pacific, I decided the time had come.&nbsp; The brig <i>Galilee</i> was sailing for the Marquesas, but her crew was complete and I, who was an able-seaman before the mast and young enough to be overweeningly proud of it, was willing to condescend to ship as cabin-boy in order to make the pilgrimage to Typee.&nbsp; Of course, the <i>Galilee</i> would have sailed from the Marquesas without me, for I was bent on finding another Fayaway and another Kory-Kory.&nbsp; I doubt that the captain read desertion in my eye.&nbsp; Perhaps even the berth of cabin-boy was already filled.&nbsp; At any rate, I did not get it.</p> <p>Then came the rush of years, filled brimming with projects, achievements, and failures; but Typee was not forgotten, and here I was now, gazing at its misty outlines till the squall swooped down and the <i>Snark</i> dashed on into the driving smother.&nbsp; Ahead, we caught a glimpse and took the compass bearing of Sentinel Rock, wreathed with pounding surf.&nbsp; Then it, too, was effaced by the rain and darkness.&nbsp; We steered straight for it, trusting to hear the sound of breakers in time to sheer clear.&nbsp; We had to steer for it.&nbsp; We had naught but a compass bearing with which to orientate ourselves, and if we missed Sentinel Rock, we missed Taiohae Bay, and we would have to throw the <i>Snark</i> up to the wind and lie off and on the whole night&mdash;no pleasant prospect for voyagers weary from a sixty days&rsquo; traverse of the vast Pacific solitude, and land-hungry, and fruit-hungry, and hungry with an appetite of years for the sweet vale of Typee.</p> <p>Abruptly, with a roar of sound, Sentinel Rock loomed through the rain dead ahead.&nbsp; We altered our course, and, with mainsail and spinnaker bellying to the squall, drove past.&nbsp; Under the lea of the rock the wind dropped us, and we rolled in an absolute calm.&nbsp; Then a puff of air struck us, right in our teeth, out of Taiohae Bay.&nbsp; It was in spinnaker, up mizzen, all sheets by the wind, and we were moving slowly ahead, heaving the lead and straining our eyes for the fixed red light on the ruined fort that would give us our bearings to anchorage.&nbsp; The air was light and baffling, now east, now west, now north, now south; while from either hand came the roar of unseen breakers.&nbsp; From the looming cliffs arose the blatting of wild goats, and overhead the first stars were peeping mistily through the ragged train of the passing squall.&nbsp; At the end of two hours, having come a mile into the bay, we dropped anchor in eleven fathoms.&nbsp; And so we came to Taiohae.</p> <p>In the morning we awoke in fairyland.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> rested in a placid harbour that nestled in a vast amphitheatre, the towering, vine-clad walls of which seemed to rise directly from the water.&nbsp; Far up, to the east, we glimpsed the thin line of a trail, visible in one place, where it scoured across the face of the wall.</p> <p>&ldquo;The path by which Toby escaped from Typee!&rdquo; we cried.</p> <p>We were not long in getting ashore and astride horses, though the consummation of our pilgrimage had to be deferred for a day.&nbsp; Two months at sea, bare-footed all the time, without space in which to exercise one&rsquo;s limbs, is not the best preliminary to leather shoes and walking.&nbsp; Besides, the land had to cease its nauseous rolling before we could feel fit for riding goat-like horses over giddy trails.&nbsp; So we took a short ride to break in, and crawled through thick jungle to make the acquaintance of a venerable moss-grown idol, where had foregathered a German trader and a Norwegian captain to estimate the weight of said idol, and to speculate upon depreciation in value caused by sawing him in half.&nbsp; They treated the old fellow sacrilegiously, digging their knives into him to see how hard he was and how deep his mossy mantle, and commanding him to rise up and save them trouble by walking down to the ship himself.&nbsp; In lieu of which, nineteen Kanakas slung him on a frame of timbers and toted him to the ship, where, battened down under hatches, even now he is cleaving the South Pacific Hornward and toward Europe&mdash;the ultimate abiding-place for all good heathen idols, save for the few in America and one in particular who grins beside me as I write, and who, barring shipwreck, will grin somewhere in my neighbourhood until I die.&nbsp; And he will win out.&nbsp; He will be grinning when I am dust.</p> <p>Also, as a preliminary, we attended a feast, where one Taiara Tamarii, the son of an Hawaiian sailor who deserted from a whaleship, commemorated the death of his Marquesan mother by roasting fourteen whole hogs and inviting in the village.&nbsp; So we came along, welcomed by a native herald, a young girl, who stood on a great rock and chanted the information that the banquet was made perfect by our presence&mdash;which information she extended impartially to every arrival.&nbsp; Scarcely were we seated, however, when she changed her tune, while the company manifested intense excitement.&nbsp; Her cries became eager and piercing.&nbsp; From a distance came answering cries, in men&rsquo;s voices, which blended into a wild, barbaric chant that sounded incredibly savage, smacking of blood and war.&nbsp; Then, through vistas of tropical foliage appeared a procession of savages, naked save for gaudy loin-cloths.&nbsp; They advanced slowly, uttering deep guttural cries of triumph and exaltation.&nbsp; Slung from young saplings carried on their shoulders were mysterious objects of considerable weight, hidden from view by wrappings of green leaves.</p> <p>Nothing but pigs, innocently fat and roasted to a turn, were inside those wrappings, but the men were carrying them into camp in imitation of old times when they carried in &ldquo;long-pig.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now long-pig is not pig.&nbsp; Long-pig is the Polynesian euphemism for human flesh; and these descendants of man-eaters, a king&rsquo;s son at their head, brought in the pigs to table as of old their grandfathers had brought in their slain enemies.&nbsp; Every now and then the procession halted in order that the bearers should have every advantage in uttering particularly ferocious shouts of victory, of contempt for their enemies, and of gustatory desire.&nbsp; So Melville, two generations ago, witnessed the bodies of slain Happar warriors, wrapped in palm-leaves, carried to banquet at the Ti.&nbsp; At another time, at the Ti, he &ldquo;observed a curiously carved vessel of wood,&rdquo; and on looking into it his eyes &ldquo;fell upon the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there.&rdquo;</p> <p>Cannibalism has often been regarded as a fairy story by ultracivilized men who dislike, perhaps, the notion that their own savage forebears have somewhere in the past been addicted to similar practices.&nbsp; Captain Cook was rather sceptical upon the subject, until, one day, in a harbour of New Zealand, he deliberately tested the matter.&nbsp; A native happened to have brought on board, for sale, a nice, sun-dried head.&nbsp; At Cook&rsquo;s orders strips of the flesh were cut away and handed to the native, who greedily devoured them.&nbsp; To say the least, Captain Cook was a rather thorough-going empiricist.&nbsp; At any rate, by that act he supplied one ascertained fact of which science had been badly in need.&nbsp; Little did he dream of the existence of a certain group of islands, thousands of miles away, where in subsequent days there would arise a curious suit at law, when an old chief of Maui would be charged with defamation of character because he persisted in asserting that his body was the living repository of Captain Cook&rsquo;s great toe.&nbsp; It is said that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the old chief was not the tomb of the navigator&rsquo;s great toe, and that the suit was dismissed.</p> <p>I suppose I shall not have the chance in these degenerate days to see any long-pig eaten, but at least I am already the possessor of a duly certified Marquesan calabash, oblong in shape, curiously carved, over a century old, from which has been drunk the blood of two shipmasters.&nbsp; One of those captains was a mean man.&nbsp; He sold a decrepit whale-boat, as good as new what of the fresh white paint, to a Marquesan chief.&nbsp; But no sooner had the captain sailed away than the whale-boat dropped to pieces.&nbsp; It was his fortune, some time afterwards, to be wrecked, of all places, on that particular island.&nbsp; The Marquesan chief was ignorant of rebates and discounts; but he had a primitive sense of equity and an equally primitive conception of the economy of nature, and he balanced the account by eating the man who had cheated him.</p> <p>We started in the cool dawn for Typee, astride ferocious little stallions that pawed and screamed and bit and fought one another quite oblivious of the fragile humans on their backs and of the slippery boulders, loose rocks, and yawning gorges.&nbsp; The way led up an ancient road through a jungle of <i>hau</i> trees.&nbsp; On every side were the vestiges of a one-time dense population.&nbsp; Wherever the eye could penetrate the thick growth, glimpses were caught of stone walls and of stone foundations, six to eight feet in height, built solidly throughout, and many yards in width and depth.&nbsp; They formed great stone platforms, upon which, at one time, there had been houses.&nbsp; But the houses and the people were gone, and huge trees sank their roots through the platforms and towered over the under-running jungle.&nbsp; These foundations are called <i>pae-paes</i>&mdash;the <i>pi-pis</i> of Melville, who spelled phonetically.</p> <p>The Marquesans of the present generation lack the energy to hoist and place such huge stones.&nbsp; Also, they lack incentive.&nbsp; There are plenty of <i>pae-paes</i> to go around, with a few thousand unoccupied ones left over.&nbsp; Once or twice, as we ascended the valley, we saw magnificent <i>pae-paes</i> bearing on their general surface pitiful little straw huts, the proportions being similar to a voting booth perched on the broad foundation of the Pyramid of Cheops.&nbsp; For the Marquesans are perishing, and, to judge from conditions at Taiohae, the one thing that retards their destruction is the infusion of fresh blood.&nbsp; A pure Marquesan is a rarity.&nbsp; They seem to be all half-breeds and strange conglomerations of dozens of different races.&nbsp; Nineteen able labourers are all the trader at Taiohae can muster for the loading of copra on shipboard, and in their veins runs the blood of English, American, Dane, German, French, Corsican, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Paumotan, Tahitian, and Easter Islander.&nbsp; There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best.&nbsp; Life faints and stumbles and gasps itself away.&nbsp; In this warm, equable clime&mdash;a truly terrestrial paradise&mdash;where are never extremes of temperature and where the air is like balm, kept ever pure by the ozone-laden southeast trade, asthma, phthisis, and tuberculosis flourish as luxuriantly as the vegetation.&nbsp; Everywhere, from the few grass huts, arises the racking cough or exhausted groan of wasted lungs.&nbsp; Other horrible diseases prosper as well, but the most deadly of all are those that attack the lungs.&nbsp; There is a form of consumption called &ldquo;galloping,&rdquo; which is especially dreaded.&nbsp; In two months&rsquo; time it reduces the strongest man to a skeleton under a grave-cloth.&nbsp; In valley after valley the last inhabitant has passed and the fertile soil has relapsed to jungle.&nbsp; In Melville&rsquo;s day the valley of Hapaa (spelled by him &ldquo;Happar&rdquo;) was peopled by a strong and warlike tribe.&nbsp; A generation later, it contained but two hundred persons.&nbsp; To-day it is an untenanted, howling, tropical wilderness.</p> <p>We climbed higher and higher in the valley, our unshod stallions picking their steps on the disintegrating trail, which led in and out through the abandoned <i>pae-paes</i> and insatiable jungle.&nbsp; The sight of red mountain apples, the <i>ohias</i>, familiar to us from Hawaii, caused a native to be sent climbing after them.&nbsp; And again he climbed for cocoa-nuts.&nbsp; I have drunk the cocoanuts of Jamaica and of Hawaii, but I never knew how delicious such draught could be till I drank it here in the Marquesas.&nbsp; Occasionally we rode under wild limes and oranges&mdash;great trees which had survived the wilderness longer than the motes of humans who had cultivated them.</p> <p>We rode through endless thickets of yellow-pollened cassi&mdash;if riding it could be called; for those fragrant thickets were inhabited by wasps.&nbsp; And such wasps!&nbsp; Great yellow fellows the size of small canary birds, darting through the air with behind them drifting a bunch of legs a couple of inches long.&nbsp; A stallion abruptly stands on his forelegs and thrusts his hind legs skyward.&nbsp; He withdraws them from the sky long enough to make one wild jump ahead, and then returns them to their index position.&nbsp; It is nothing.&nbsp; His thick hide has merely been punctured by a flaming lance of wasp virility.&nbsp; Then a second and a third stallion, and all the stallions, begin to cavort on their forelegs over the precipitous landscape.&nbsp; Swat!&nbsp; A white-hot poniard penetrates my cheek.&nbsp; Swat again!!&nbsp; I am stabbed in the neck.&nbsp; I am bringing up the rear and getting more than my share.&nbsp; There is no retreat, and the plunging horses ahead, on a precarious trail, promise little safety.&nbsp; My horse overruns Charmian&rsquo;s horse, and that sensitive creature, fresh-stung at the psychological moment, planks one of his hoofs into my horse and the other hoof into me.&nbsp; I thank my stars that he is not steel-shod, and half-arise from the saddle at the impact of another flaming dagger.&nbsp; I am certainly getting more than my share, and so is my poor horse, whose pain and panic are only exceeded by mine.</p> <p>&ldquo;Get out of the way!&nbsp; I&rsquo;m coming!&rdquo; I shout, frantically dashing my cap at the winged vipers around me.</p> <p>On one side of the trail the landscape rises straight up.&nbsp; On the other side it sinks straight down.&nbsp; The only way to get out of my way is to keep on going.&nbsp; How that string of horses kept their feet is a miracle; but they dashed ahead, over-running one another, galloping, trotting, stumbling, jumping, scrambling, and kicking methodically skyward every time a wasp landed on them.&nbsp; After a while we drew breath and counted our injuries.&nbsp; And this happened not once, nor twice, but time after time.&nbsp; Strange to say, it never grew monotonous.&nbsp; I know that I, for one, came through each brush with the undiminished zest of a man flying from sudden death.&nbsp; No; the pilgrim from Taiohae to Typee will never suffer from <i>ennui</i> on the way.</p> <p>At last we arose above the vexation of wasps.&nbsp; It was a matter of altitude, however, rather than of fortitude.&nbsp; All about us lay the jagged back-bones of ranges, as far as the eye could see, thrusting their pinnacles into the trade-wind clouds.&nbsp; Under us, from the way we had come, the <i>Snark</i> lay like a tiny toy on the calm water of Taiohae Bay.&nbsp; Ahead we could see the inshore indentation of Comptroller Bay.&nbsp; We dropped down a thousand feet, and Typee lay beneath us.&nbsp; &ldquo;Had a glimpse of the gardens of paradise been revealed to me I could scarcely have been more ravished with the sight&rdquo;&mdash;so said Melville on the moment of his first view of the valley.&nbsp; He saw a garden.&nbsp; We saw a wilderness.&nbsp; Where were the hundred groves of the breadfruit tree he saw?&nbsp; We saw jungle, nothing but jungle, with the exception of two grass huts and several clumps of cocoanuts breaking the primordial green mantle.&nbsp; Where was the <i>Ti</i> of Mehevi, the bachelors&rsquo; hall, the palace where women were taboo, and where he ruled with his lesser chieftains, keeping the half-dozen dusty and torpid ancients to remind them of the valorous past?&nbsp; From the swift stream no sounds arose of maids and matrons pounding <i>tapa</i>.&nbsp; And where was the hut that old Narheyo eternally builded?&nbsp; In vain I looked for him perched ninety feet from the ground in some tall cocoanut, taking his morning smoke.</p> <p>We went down a zigzag trail under overarching, matted jungle, where great butterflies drifted by in the silence.&nbsp; No tattooed savage with club and javelin guarded the path; and when we forded the stream, we were free to roam where we pleased.&nbsp; No longer did the taboo, sacred and merciless, reign in that sweet vale.&nbsp; Nay, the taboo still did reign, a new taboo, for when we approached too near the several wretched native women, the taboo was uttered warningly.&nbsp; And it was well.&nbsp; They were lepers.&nbsp; The man who warned us was afflicted horribly with elephantiasis.&nbsp; All were suffering from lung trouble.&nbsp; The valley of Typee was the abode of death, and the dozen survivors of the tribe were gasping feebly the last painful breaths of the race.</p> <p>Certainly the battle had not been to the strong, for once the Typeans were very strong, stronger than the Happars, stronger than the Taiohaeans, stronger than all the tribes of Nuku-hiva.&nbsp; The word &ldquo;typee,&rdquo; or, rather, &ldquo;taipi,&rdquo; originally signified an eater of human flesh.&nbsp; But since all the Marquesans were human-flesh eaters, to be so designated was the token that the Typeans were the human-flesh eaters par excellence.&nbsp; Not alone to Nuku-hiva did the Typean reputation for bravery and ferocity extend.&nbsp; In all the islands of the Marquesas the Typeans were named with dread.&nbsp; Man could not conquer them.&nbsp; Even the French fleet that took possession of the Marquesas left the Typeans alone.&nbsp; Captain Porter, of the frigate <i>Essex</i>, once invaded the valley.&nbsp; His sailors and marines were reinforced by two thousand warriors of Happar and Taiohae.&nbsp; They penetrated quite a distance into the valley, but met with so fierce a resistance that they were glad to retreat and get away in their flotilla of boats and war-canoes.</p> <p>Of all inhabitants of the South Seas, the Marquesans were adjudged the strongest and the most beautiful.&nbsp; Melville said of them: &ldquo;I was especially struck by the physical strength and beauty they displayed . . . In beauty of form they surpassed anything I had ever seen.&nbsp; Not a single instance of natural deformity was observable in all the throng attending the revels.&nbsp; Every individual appeared free from those blemishes which sometimes mar the effect of an otherwise perfect form.&nbsp; But their physical excellence did not merely consist in an exemption from these evils; nearly every individual of the number might have been taken for a sculptor&rsquo;s model.&rdquo;&nbsp; Menda&ntilde;a, the discoverer of the Marquesas, described the natives as wondrously beautiful to behold.&nbsp; Figueroa, the chronicler of his voyage, said of them: &ldquo;In complexion they were nearly white; of good stature and finely formed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Captain Cook called the Marquesans the most splendid islanders in the South Seas.&nbsp; The men were described, as &ldquo;in almost every instance of lofty stature, scarcely ever less than six feet in height.&rdquo;</p> <p>And now all this strength and beauty has departed, and the valley of Typee is the abode of some dozen wretched creatures, afflicted by leprosy, elephantiasis, and tuberculosis.&nbsp; Melville estimated the population at two thousand, not taking into consideration the small adjoining valley of Ho-o-u-mi.&nbsp; Life has rotted away in this wonderful garden spot, where the climate is as delightful and healthful as any to be found in the world.&nbsp; Not alone were the Typeans physically magnificent; they were pure.&nbsp; Their air did not contain the bacilli and germs and microbes of disease that fill our own air.&nbsp; And when the white men imported in their ships these various micro-organisms or disease, the Typeans crumpled up and went down before them.</p> <p>When one considers the situation, one is almost driven to the conclusion that the white race flourishes on impurity and corruption.&nbsp; Natural selection, however, gives the explanation.&nbsp; We of the white race are the survivors and the descendants of the thousands of generations of survivors in the war with the micro-organisms.&nbsp; Whenever one of us was born with a constitution peculiarly receptive to these minute enemies, such a one promptly died.&nbsp; Only those of us survived who could withstand them.&nbsp; We who are alive are the immune, the fit&mdash;the ones best constituted to live in a world of hostile micro-organisms.&nbsp; The poor Marquesans had undergone no such selection.&nbsp; They were not immune.&nbsp; And they, who had made a custom of eating their enemies, were now eaten by enemies so microscopic as to be invisible, and against whom no war of dart and javelin was possible.&nbsp; On the other hand, had there been a few hundred thousand Marquesans to begin with, there might have been sufficient survivors to lay the foundation for a new race&mdash;a regenerated race, if a plunge into a festering bath of organic poison can be called regeneration.</p> <p>We unsaddled our horses for lunch, and after we had fought the stallions apart&mdash;mine with several fresh chunks bitten out of his back&mdash;and after we had vainly fought the sand-flies, we ate bananas and tinned meats, washed down by generous draughts of cocoanut milk.&nbsp; There was little to be seen.&nbsp; The jungle had rushed back and engulfed the puny works of man.&nbsp; Here and there <i>pai-pais</i> were to be stumbled upon, but there were no inscriptions, no hieroglyphics, no clues to the past they attested&mdash;only dumb stones, builded and carved by hands that were forgotten dust.&nbsp; Out of the <i>pai-pais</i> grew great trees, jealous of the wrought work of man, splitting and scattering the stones back into the primeval chaos.</p> <p>We gave up the jungle and sought the stream with the idea of evading the sand-flies.&nbsp; Vain hope!&nbsp; To go in swimming one must take off his clothes.&nbsp; The sand-flies are aware of the fact, and they lurk by the river bank in countless myriads.&nbsp; In the native they are called the <i>nau-nau</i>, which is pronounced &ldquo;now-now.&rdquo;&nbsp; They are certainly well named, for they are the insistent present.&nbsp; There is no past nor future when they fasten upon one&rsquo;s epidermis, and I am willing to wager that Omer Khayy&aacute;m could never have written the Rub&aacute;iyat in the valley of Typee&mdash;it would have been psychologically impossible.&nbsp; I made the strategic mistake of undressing on the edge of a steep bank where I could dive in but could not climb out.&nbsp; When I was ready to dress, I had a hundred yards&rsquo; walk on the bank before I could reach my clothes.&nbsp; At the first step, fully ten thousand <i>nau-naus</i> landed upon me.&nbsp; At the second step I was walking in a cloud.&nbsp; By the third step the sun was dimmed in the sky.&nbsp; After that I don&rsquo;t know what happened.&nbsp; When I arrived at my clothes, I was a maniac.&nbsp; And here enters my grand tactical error.&nbsp; There is only one rule of conduct in dealing with <i>nau-naus</i>.&nbsp; Never swat them.&nbsp; Whatever you do, don&rsquo;t swat them.&nbsp; They are so vicious that in the instant of annihilation they eject their last atom of poison into your carcass.&nbsp; You must pluck them delicately, between thumb and forefinger, and persuade them gently to remove their proboscides from your quivering flesh.&nbsp; It is like pulling teeth.&nbsp; But the difficulty was that the teeth sprouted faster than I could pull them, so I swatted, and, so doing, filled myself full with their poison.&nbsp; This was a week ago.&nbsp; At the present moment I resemble a sadly neglected smallpox convalescent.</p> <p>Ho-o-u-mi is a small valley, separated from Typee by a low ridge, and thither we started when we had knocked our indomitable and insatiable riding-animals into submission.&nbsp; As it was, Warren&rsquo;s mount, after a mile run, selected the most dangerous part of the trail for an exhibition that kept us all on the anxious seat for fully five minutes.&nbsp; We rode by the mouth of Typee valley and gazed down upon the beach from which Melville escaped.&nbsp; There was where the whale-boat lay on its oars close in to the surf; and there was where Karakoee, the taboo Kanaka, stood in the water and trafficked for the sailor&rsquo;s life.&nbsp; There, surely, was where Melville gave Fayaway the parting embrace ere he dashed for the boat.&nbsp; And there was the point of land from which Mehevi and Mow-mow and their following swam off to intercept the boat, only to have their wrists gashed by sheath-knives when they laid hold of the gunwale, though it was reserved for Mow-mow to receive the boat-hook full in the throat from Melville&rsquo;s hands.</p> <p>We rode on to Ho-o-u-mi.&nbsp; So closely was Melville guarded that he never dreamed of the existence of this valley, though he must continually have met its inhabitants, for they belonged to Typee.&nbsp; We rode through the same abandoned <i>pae-paes</i>, but as we neared the sea we found a profusion of cocoanuts, breadfruit trees and taro patches, and fully a dozen grass dwellings.&nbsp; In one of these we arranged to pass the night, and preparations were immediately put on foot for a feast.&nbsp; A young pig was promptly despatched, and while he was being roasted among hot stones, and while chickens were stewing in cocoanut milk, I persuaded one of the cooks to climb an unusually tall cocoanut palm.&nbsp; The cluster of nuts at the top was fully one hundred and twenty-five feet from the ground, but that native strode up to the tree, seized it in both hands, jack-knived at the waist so that the soles of his feet rested flatly against the trunk, and then he walked right straight up without stopping.&nbsp; There were no notches in the tree.&nbsp; He had no ropes to help him.&nbsp; He merely walked up the tree, one hundred and twenty-five feet in the air, and cast down the nuts from the summit.&nbsp; Not every man there had the physical stamina for such a feat, or the lungs, rather, for most of them were coughing their lives away.&nbsp; Some of the women kept up a ceaseless moaning and groaning, so badly were their lungs wasted.&nbsp; Very few of either sex were full-blooded Marquesans.&nbsp; They were mostly half-breeds and three-quarter-breeds of French, English, Danish, and Chinese extraction.&nbsp; At the best, these infusions of fresh blood merely delayed the passing, and the results led one to wonder whether it was worth while.</p> <p>The feast was served on a broad <i>pae-pae</i>, the rear portion of which was occupied by the house in which we were to sleep.&nbsp; The first course was raw fish and <i>poi-poi</i>, the latter sharp and more acrid of taste than the <i>poi</i> of Hawaii, which is made from taro.&nbsp; The <i>poi-poi</i> of the Marquesas is made from breadfruit.&nbsp; The ripe fruit, after the core is removed, is placed in a calabash and pounded with a stone pestle into a stiff, sticky paste.&nbsp; In this stage of the process, wrapped in leaves, it can be buried in the ground, where it will keep for years.&nbsp; Before it can be eaten, however, further processes are necessary.&nbsp; A leaf-covered package is placed among hot stones, like the pig, and thoroughly baked.&nbsp; After that it is mixed with cold water and thinned out&mdash;not thin enough to run, but thin enough to be eaten by sticking one&rsquo;s first and second fingers into it.&nbsp; On close acquaintance it proves a pleasant and most healthful food.&nbsp; And breadfruit, ripe and well boiled or roasted!&nbsp; It is delicious.&nbsp; Breadfruit and taro are kingly vegetables, the pair of them, though the former is patently a misnomer and more resembles a sweet potato than anything else, though it is not mealy like a sweet potato, nor is it so sweet.</p> <p>The feast ended, we watched the moon rise over Typee.&nbsp; The air was like balm, faintly scented with the breath of flowers.&nbsp; It was a magic night, deathly still, without the slightest breeze to stir the foliage; and one caught one&rsquo;s breath and felt the pang that is almost hurt, so exquisite was the beauty of it.&nbsp; Faint and far could be heard the thin thunder of the surf upon the beach.&nbsp; There were no beds; and we drowsed and slept wherever we thought the floor softest.&nbsp; Near by, a woman panted and moaned in her sleep, and all about us the dying islanders coughed in the night.</p> <h2><a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 175</span>CHAPTER XI<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE NATURE MAN</span></h2> <p>I <span class="smcap">first</span> met him on Market Street in San Francisco.&nbsp; It was a wet and drizzly afternoon, and he was striding along, clad solely in a pair of abbreviated knee-trousers and an abbreviated shirt, his bare feet going slick-slick through the pavement-slush.&nbsp; At his heels trooped a score of excited gamins.&nbsp; Every head&mdash;and there were thousands&mdash;turned to glance curiously at him as he went by.&nbsp; And I turned, too.&nbsp; Never had I seen such lovely sunburn.&nbsp; He was all sunburn, of the sort a blond takes on when his skin does not peel.&nbsp; His long yellow hair was burnt, so was his beard, which sprang from a soil unploughed by any razor.&nbsp; He was a tawny man, a golden-tawny man, all glowing and radiant with the sun.&nbsp; Another prophet, thought I, come up to town with a message that will save the world.</p> <p>A few weeks later I was with some friends in their bungalow in the Piedmont hills overlooking San Francisco Bay.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve got him, we&rsquo;ve got him,&rdquo; they barked.&nbsp; &ldquo;We caught him up a tree; but he&rsquo;s all right now, he&rsquo;ll feed from the hand.&nbsp; Come on and see him.&rdquo;&nbsp; So I accompanied them up a dizzy hill, and in a rickety shack in the midst of a eucalyptus grove found my sunburned prophet of the city pavements.</p> <p>He hastened to meet us, arriving in the whirl and blur of a handspring.&nbsp; He did not shake hands with us; instead, his greeting took the form of stunts.&nbsp; He turned more handsprings.&nbsp; He twisted his body sinuously, like a snake, until, having sufficiently limbered up, he bent from the hips, and, with legs straight and knees touching, beat a tattoo on the ground with the palms of his hands.&nbsp; He whirligigged and pirouetted, dancing and cavorting round like an inebriated ape.&nbsp; All the sun-warmth of his ardent life beamed in his face.&nbsp; I am so happy, was the song without words he sang.</p> <p>He sang it all evening, ringing the changes on it with an endless variety of stunts.&nbsp; &ldquo;A fool! a fool!&nbsp; I met a fool in the forest!&rdquo; thought I, and a worthy fool he proved.&nbsp; Between handsprings and whirligigs he delivered his message that would save the world.&nbsp; It was twofold.&nbsp; First, let suffering humanity strip off its clothing and run wild in the mountains and valleys; and, second, let the very miserable world adopt phonetic spelling.&nbsp; I caught a glimpse of the great social problems being settled by the city populations swarming naked over the landscape, to the popping of shot-guns, the barking of ranch-dogs, and countless assaults with pitchforks wielded by irate farmers.</p> <p>The years passed, and, one sunny morning, the <i>Snark</i> poked her nose into a narrow opening in a reef that smoked with the crashing impact of the trade-wind swell, and beat slowly up Papeete harbour.&nbsp; Coming off to us was a boat, flying a yellow flag.&nbsp; We knew it contained the port doctor.&nbsp; But quite a distance off, in its wake, was a tiny out rigger canoe that puzzled us.&nbsp; It was flying a red flag.&nbsp; I studied it through the glasses, fearing that it marked some hidden danger to navigation, some recent wreck or some buoy or beacon that had been swept away.&nbsp; Then the doctor came on board.&nbsp; After he had examined the state of our health and been assured that we had no live rats hidden away in the <i>Snark</i>, I asked him the meaning of the red flag.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, that is Darling,&rdquo; was the answer.</p> <p>And then Darling, Ernest Darling flying the red flag that is indicative of the brotherhood of man, hailed us.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hello, Jack!&rdquo; he called.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hello, Charmian!&rdquo;&nbsp; He paddled swiftly nearer, and I saw that he was the tawny prophet of the Piedmont hills.&nbsp; He came over the side, a sun-god clad in a scarlet loin-cloth, with presents of Arcady and greeting in both his hands&mdash;a bottle of golden honey and a leaf-basket filled <i>with</i> great golden mangoes, golden bananas specked with freckles of deeper gold, golden pine-apples and golden limes, and juicy oranges minted from the same precious ore of sun and soil.&nbsp; And in this fashion under the southern sky, I met once more Darling, the Nature Man.</p> <p>Tahiti is one of the most beautiful spots in the world, inhabited by thieves and robbers and liars, also by several honest and truthful men and women.&nbsp; Wherefore, because of the blight cast upon Tahiti&rsquo;s wonderful beauty by the spidery human vermin that infest it, I am minded to write, not of Tahiti, but of the Nature Man.&nbsp; He, at least, is refreshing and wholesome.&nbsp; The spirit that emanates from him is so gentle and sweet that it would harm nothing, hurt nobody&rsquo;s feelings save the feelings of a predatory and plutocratic capitalist.</p> <p>&ldquo;What does this red flag mean?&rdquo; I asked.</p> <p>&ldquo;Socialism, of course.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Yes, yes, I know that,&rdquo; I went on; &ldquo;but what does it mean in your hands?&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Why, that I&rsquo;ve found my message.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;And that you are delivering it to Tahiti?&rdquo; I demanded incredulously.</p> <p>&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; he answered simply; and later on I found that he was, too.</p> <p>When we dropped anchor, lowered a small boat into the water, and started ashore, the Nature Man joined us.&nbsp; Now, thought I, I shall be pestered to death by this crank.&nbsp; Waking or sleeping I shall never be quit of him until I sail away from here.</p> <p>But never in my life was I more mistaken.&nbsp; I took a house and went to live and work in it, and the Nature Man never came near me.&nbsp; He was waiting for the invitation.&nbsp; In the meantime he went aboard the <i>Snark</i> and took possession of her library, delighted by the quantity of scientific books, and shocked, as I learned afterwards, by the inordinate amount of fiction.&nbsp; The Nature Man never wastes time on fiction.</p> <p>After a week or so, my conscience smote me, and I invited him to dinner at a downtown hotel.</p> <p>He arrived, looking unwontedly stiff and uncomfortable in a cotton jacket.&nbsp; When invited to peel it off, he beamed his gratitude and joy, and did so, revealing his sun-gold skin, from waist to shoulder, covered only by a piece of fish-net of coarse twine and large of mesh.&nbsp; A scarlet loin-cloth completed his costume.&nbsp; I began my acquaintance with him that night, and during my long stay in Tahiti that acquaintance ripened into friendship.</p> <p>&ldquo;So you write books,&rdquo; he said, one day when, tired and sweaty, I finished my morning&rsquo;s work.</p> <p>&ldquo;I, too, write books,&rdquo; he announced.</p> <p>Aha, thought I, now at last is he going to pester me with his literary efforts.&nbsp; My soul was in revolt.&nbsp; I had not come all the way to the South Seas to be a literary bureau.</p> <p>&ldquo;This is the book I write,&rdquo; he explained, smashing himself a resounding blow on the chest with his clenched fist.&nbsp; &ldquo;The gorilla in the African jungle pounds his chest till the noise of it can be heard half a mile away.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;A pretty good chest,&rdquo; quoth I, admiringly; &ldquo;it would even make a gorilla envious.&rdquo;</p> <p>And then, and later, I learned the details of the marvellous book Ernest Darling had written.&nbsp; Twelve years ago he lay close to death.&nbsp; He weighed but ninety pounds, and was too weak to speak.&nbsp; The doctors had given him up.&nbsp; His father, a practising physician, had given him up.&nbsp; Consultations with other physicians had been held upon him.&nbsp; There was no hope for him.&nbsp; Overstudy (as a school-teacher and as a university student) and two successive attacks of pneumonia were responsible for his breakdown.&nbsp; Day by day he was losing strength.&nbsp; He could extract no nutrition from the heavy foods they gave him; nor could pellets and powders help his stomach to do the work of digestion.&nbsp; Not only was he a physical wreck, but he was a mental wreck.&nbsp; His mind was overwrought.&nbsp; He was sick and tired of medicine, and he was sick and tired of persons.&nbsp; Human speech jarred upon him.&nbsp; Human attentions drove him frantic.&nbsp; The thought came to him that since he was going to die, he might as well die in the open, away from all the bother and irritation.&nbsp; And behind this idea lurked a sneaking idea that perhaps he would not die after all if only he could escape from the heavy foods, the medicines, and the well-intentioned persons who made him frantic.</p> <p>So Ernest Darling, a bag of bones and a death&rsquo;s-head, a perambulating corpse, with just the dimmest flutter of life in it to make it perambulate, turned his back upon men and the habitations of men and dragged himself for five miles through the brush, away from the city of Portland, Oregon.&nbsp; Of course he was crazy.&nbsp; Only a lunatic would drag himself out of his death-bed.</p> <p>But in the brush, Darling found what he was looking for&mdash;rest.&nbsp; Nobody bothered him with beefsteaks and pork.&nbsp; No physicians lacerated his tired nerves by feeling his pulse, nor tormented his tired stomach with pellets and powders.&nbsp; He began to feel soothed.&nbsp; The sun was shining warm, and he basked in it.&nbsp; He had the feeling that the sun shine was an elixir of health.&nbsp; Then it seemed to him that his whole wasted wreck of a body was crying for the sun.&nbsp; He stripped off his clothes and bathed in the sunshine.&nbsp; He felt better.&nbsp; It had done him good&mdash;the first relief in weary months of pain.</p> <p>As he grew better, he sat up and began to take notice.&nbsp; All about him were the birds fluttering and chirping, the squirrels chattering and playing.&nbsp; He envied them their health and spirits, their happy, care-free existence.&nbsp; That he should contrast their condition with his was inevitable; and that he should question why they were splendidly vigorous while he was a feeble, dying wraith of a man, was likewise inevitable.&nbsp; His conclusion was the very obvious one, namely, that they lived naturally, while he lived most unnaturally; therefore, if he intended to live, he must return to nature.</p> <p>Alone, there in the brush, he worked out his problem and began to apply it.&nbsp; He stripped off his clothing and leaped and gambolled about, running on all fours, climbing trees; in short, doing physical stunts,&mdash;and all the time soaking in the sunshine.&nbsp; He imitated the animals.&nbsp; He built a nest of dry leaves and grasses in which to sleep at night, covering it over with bark as a protection against the early fall rains.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here is a beautiful exercise,&rdquo; he told me, once, flapping his arms mightily against his sides; &ldquo;I learned it from watching the roosters crow.&rdquo;&nbsp; Another time I remarked the loud, sucking intake with which he drank cocoanut-milk.&nbsp; He explained that he had noticed the cows drinking that way and concluded there must be something in it.&nbsp; He tried it and found it good, and thereafter he drank only in that fashion.</p> <p>He noted that the squirrels lived on fruits and nuts.&nbsp; He started on a fruit-and-nut diet, helped out by bread, and he grew stronger and put on weight.&nbsp; For three months he continued his primordial existence in the brush, and then the heavy Oregon rains drove him back to the habitations of men.&nbsp; Not in three months could a ninety-pound survivor of two attacks of pneumonia develop sufficient ruggedness to live through an Oregon winter in the open.</p> <p>He had accomplished much, but he had been driven in.&nbsp; There was no place to go but back to his father&rsquo;s house, and there, living in close rooms with lungs that panted for all the air of the open sky, he was brought down by a third attack of pneumonia.&nbsp; He grew weaker even than before.&nbsp; In that tottering tabernacle of flesh, his brain collapsed.&nbsp; He lay like a corpse, too weak to stand the fatigue of speaking, too irritated and tired in his miserable brain to care to listen to the speech of others.&nbsp; The only act of will of which he was capable was to stick his fingers in his ears and resolutely to refuse to hear a single word that was spoken to him.&nbsp; They sent for the insanity experts.&nbsp; He was adjudged insane, and also the verdict was given that he would not live a month.</p> <p>By one such mental expert he was carted off to a sanatorium on Mt. Tabor.&nbsp; Here, when they learned that he was harmless, they gave him his own way.&nbsp; They no longer dictated as to the food he ate, so he resumed his fruits and nuts&mdash;olive oil, peanut butter, and bananas the chief articles of his diet.&nbsp; As he regained his strength he made up his mind to live thenceforth his own life.&nbsp; If he lived like others, according to social conventions, he would surely die.&nbsp; And he did not want to die.&nbsp; The fear of death was one of the strongest factors in the genesis of the Nature Man.&nbsp; To live, he must have a natural diet, the open air, and the blessed sunshine.</p> <p>Now an Oregon winter has no inducements for those who wish to return to Nature, so Darling started out in search of a climate.&nbsp; He mounted a bicycle and headed south for the sunlands.&nbsp; Stanford University claimed him for a year.&nbsp; Here he studied and worked his way, attending lectures in as scant garb as the authorities would allow and applying as much as possible the principles of living that he had learned in squirrel-town.&nbsp; His favourite method of study was to go off in the hills back of the University, and there to strip off his clothes and lie on the grass, soaking in sunshine and health at the same time that he soaked in knowledge.</p> <p>But Central California has her winters, and the quest for a Nature Man&rsquo;s climate drew him on.&nbsp; He tried Los Angeles and Southern California, being arrested a few times and brought before the insanity commissions because, forsooth, his mode of life was not modelled after the mode of life of his fellow-men.&nbsp; He tried Hawaii, where, unable to prove him insane, the authorities deported him.&nbsp; It was not exactly a deportation.&nbsp; He could have remained by serving a year in prison.&nbsp; They gave him his choice.&nbsp; Now prison is death to the Nature Man, who thrives only in the open air and in God&rsquo;s sunshine.&nbsp; The authorities of Hawaii are not to be blamed.&nbsp; Darling was an undesirable citizen.&nbsp; Any man is undesirable who disagrees with one.&nbsp; And that any man should disagree to the extent Darling did in his philosophy of the simple life is ample vindication of the Hawaiian authorities verdict of his undesirableness.</p> <p>So Darling went thence in search of a climate which would not only be desirable, but wherein he would not be undesirable.&nbsp; And he found it in Tahiti, the garden-spot of garden-spots.&nbsp; And so it was, according to the narrative as given, that he wrote the pages of his book.&nbsp; He wears only a loin-cloth and a sleeveless fish-net shirt.&nbsp; His stripped weight is one hundred and sixty-five pounds.&nbsp; His health is perfect.&nbsp; His eyesight, that at one time was considered ruined, is excellent.&nbsp; The lungs that were practically destroyed by three attacks of pneumonia have not only recovered, but are stronger than ever before.</p> <p>I shall never forget the first time, while talking to me, that he squashed a mosquito.&nbsp; The stinging pest had settled in the middle of his back between his shoulders.&nbsp; Without interrupting the flow of conversation, without dropping even a syllable, his clenched fist shot up in the air, curved backward, and smote his back between the shoulders, killing the mosquito and making his frame resound like a bass drum.&nbsp; It reminded me of nothing so much as of horses kicking the woodwork in their stalls.</p> <p>&ldquo;The gorilla in the African jungle pounds his chest until the noise of it can be heard half a mile away,&rdquo; he will announce suddenly, and thereat beat a hair-raising, devil&rsquo;s tattoo on his own chest.</p> <p>One day he noticed a set of boxing-gloves hanging on the wall, and promptly his eyes brightened.</p> <p>&ldquo;Do you box?&rdquo; I asked.</p> <p>&ldquo;I used to give lessons in boxing when I was at Stanford,&rdquo; was the reply.</p> <p>And there and then we stripped and put on the gloves.&nbsp; Bang! a long, gorilla arm flashed out, landing the gloved end on my nose.&nbsp; Biff! he caught me, in a duck, on the side of the head nearly knocking me over sidewise.&nbsp; I carried the lump raised by that blow for a week.&nbsp; I ducked under a straight left, and landed a straight right on his stomach.&nbsp; It was a fearful blow.&nbsp; The whole weight of my body was behind it, and his body had been met as it lunged forward.&nbsp; I looked for him to crumple up and go down.&nbsp; Instead of which his face beamed approval, and he said, &ldquo;That was beautiful.&rdquo;&nbsp; The next instant I was covering up and striving to protect myself from a hurricane of hooks, jolts, and uppercuts.&nbsp; Then I watched my chance and drove in for the solar plexus.&nbsp; I hit the mark.&nbsp; The Nature Man dropped his arms, gasped, and sat down suddenly.</p> <p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be all right,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just wait a moment.&rdquo;</p> <p>And inside thirty seconds he was on his feet&mdash;ay, and returning the compliment, for he hooked me in the solar plexus, and I gasped, dropped my hands, and sat down just a trifle more suddenly than he had.</p> <p>All of which I submit as evidence that the man I boxed with was a totally different man from the poor, ninety-pound weight of eight years before, who, given up by physicians and alienists, lay gasping his life away in a closed room in Portland, Oregon.&nbsp; The book that Ernest Darling has written is a good book, and the binding is good, too.</p> <p>Hawaii has wailed for years her need for desirable immigrants.&nbsp; She has spent much time, and thought, and money, in importing desirable citizens, and she has, as yet, nothing much to show for it.&nbsp; Yet Hawaii deported the Nature Man.&nbsp; She refused to give him a chance.&nbsp; So it is, to chasten Hawaii&rsquo;s proud spirit, that I take this opportunity to show her what she has lost in the Nature Man.&nbsp; When he arrived in Tahiti, he proceeded to seek out a piece of land on which to grow the food he ate.&nbsp; But land was difficult to find&mdash;that is, inexpensive land.&nbsp; The Nature Man was not rolling in wealth.&nbsp; He spent weeks in wandering over the steep hills, until, high up the mountain, where clustered several tiny canyons, he found eighty acres of brush-jungle which were apparently unrecorded as the property of any one.&nbsp; The government officials told him that if he would clear the land and till it for thirty years he would be given a title for it.</p> <p>Immediately he set to work.&nbsp; And never was there such work.&nbsp; Nobody farmed that high up.&nbsp; The land was covered with matted jungle and overrun by wild pigs and countless rats.&nbsp; The view of Papeete and the sea was magnificent, but the outlook was not encouraging.&nbsp; He spent weeks in building a road in order to make the plantation accessible.&nbsp; The pigs and the rats ate up whatever he planted as fast as it sprouted.&nbsp; He shot the pigs and trapped the rats.&nbsp; Of the latter, in two weeks he caught fifteen hundred.&nbsp; Everything had to be carried up on his back.&nbsp; He usually did his packhorse work at night.</p> <p>Gradually he began to win out.&nbsp; A grass-walled house was built.&nbsp; On the fertile, volcanic soil he had wrested from the jungle and jungle beasts were growing five hundred cocoanut trees, five hundred papaia trees, three hundred mango trees, many breadfruit trees and alligator-pear trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and vegetables.&nbsp; He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes.&nbsp; His narrow canyons became botanical gardens.&nbsp; The arid shoulders of the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and flowers.&nbsp; Not only had the Nature Man become self-supporting, but he was now a prosperous agriculturist with produce to sell to the city-dwellers of Papeete.</p> <p>Then it was discovered that his land, which the government officials had informed him was without an owner, really had an owner, and that deeds, descriptions, etc., were on record.&nbsp; All his work bade fare to be lost.&nbsp; The land had been valueless when he took it up, and the owner, a large landholder, was unaware of the extent to which the Nature Man had developed it.&nbsp; A just price was agreed upon, and Darling&rsquo;s deed was officially filed.</p> <p>Next came a more crushing blow.&nbsp; Darling&rsquo;s access to market was destroyed.&nbsp; The road he had built was fenced across by triple barb-wire fences.&nbsp; It was one of those jumbles in human affairs that is so common in this absurdest of social systems.&nbsp; Behind it was the fine hand of the same conservative element that haled the Nature Man before the Insanity Commission in Los Angeles and that deported him from Hawaii.&nbsp; It is so hard for self-satisfied men to understand any man whose satisfactions are fundamentally different.&nbsp; It seems clear that the officials have connived with the conservative element, for to this day the road the Nature Man built is closed; nothing has been done about it, while an adamant unwillingness to do anything about it is evidenced on every hand.&nbsp; But the Nature Man dances and sings along his way.&nbsp; He does not sit up nights thinking about the wrong which has been done him; he leaves the worrying to the doers of the wrong.&nbsp; He has no time for bitterness.&nbsp; He believes he is in the world for the purpose of being happy, and he has not a moment to waste in any other pursuit.</p> <p>The road to his plantation is blocked.&nbsp; He cannot build a new road, for there is no ground on which he can build it.&nbsp; The government has restricted him to a wild-pig trail which runs precipitously up the mountain.&nbsp; I climbed the trail with him, and we had to climb with hands and feet in order to get up.&nbsp; Nor can that wild-pig trail be made into a road by any amount of toil less than that of an engineer, a steam-engine, and a steel cable.&nbsp; But what does the Nature Man care?&nbsp; In his gentle ethics the evil men do him he requites with goodness.&nbsp; And who shall say he is not happier than they?</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind their pesky road,&rdquo; he said to me as we dragged ourselves up a shelf of rock and sat down, panting, to rest.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get an air machine soon and fool them.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m clearing a level space for a landing stage for the airships, and next time you come to Tahiti you will alight right at my door.&rdquo;</p> <p>Yes, the Nature Man has some strange ideas besides that of the gorilla pounding his chest in the African jungle.&nbsp; The Nature Man has ideas about levitation.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; he said to me, &ldquo;levitation is not impossible.&nbsp; And think of the glory of it&mdash;lifting one&rsquo;s self from the ground by an act of will.&nbsp; Think of it!&nbsp; The astronomers tell us that our whole solar system is dying; that, barring accidents, it will all be so cold that no life can live upon it.&nbsp; Very well.&nbsp; In that day all men will be accomplished levitationists, and they will leave this perishing planet and seek more hospitable worlds.&nbsp; How can levitation be accomplished?&nbsp; By progressive fasts.&nbsp; Yes, I have tried them, and toward the end I could feel myself actually getting lighter.&rdquo;</p> <p>The man is a maniac, thought I.</p> <p>&ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;these are only theories of mine.&nbsp; I like to speculate upon the glorious future of man.&nbsp; Levitation may not be possible, but I like to think of it as possible.&rdquo;</p> <p>One evening, when he yawned, I asked him how much sleep he allowed himself.</p> <p>&ldquo;Seven hours,&rdquo; was the answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;But in ten years I&rsquo;ll be sleeping only six hours, and in twenty years only five hours.&nbsp; You see, I shall cut off an hour&rsquo;s sleep every ten years.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Then when you are a hundred you won&rsquo;t be sleeping at all,&rdquo; I interjected.</p> <p>&ldquo;Just that.&nbsp; Exactly that.&nbsp; When I am a hundred I shall not require sleep.&nbsp; Also, I shall be living on air.&nbsp; There are plants that live on air, you know.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;But has any man ever succeeded in doing it?&rdquo;</p> <p>He shook his head.</p> <p>&ldquo;I never heard of him if he did.&nbsp; But it is only a theory of mine, this living on air.&nbsp; It would be fine, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; Of course it may be impossible&mdash;most likely it is.&nbsp; You see, I am not unpractical.&nbsp; I never forget the present.&nbsp; When I soar ahead into the future, I always leave a string by which to find my way back again.&rdquo;</p> <p>I fear me the Nature Man is a joker.&nbsp; At any rate he lives the simple life.&nbsp; His laundry bill cannot be large.&nbsp; Up on his plantation he lives on fruit the labour cost of which, in cash, he estimates at five cents a day.&nbsp; At present, because of his obstructed road and because he is head over heels in the propaganda of socialism, he is living in town, where his expenses, including rent, are twenty-five cents a day.&nbsp; In order to pay those expenses he is running a night school for Chinese.</p> <p>The Nature Man is not bigoted.&nbsp; When there is nothing better to eat than meat, he eats meat, as, for instance, when in jail or on shipboard and the nuts and fruits give out.&nbsp; Nor does he seem to crystallize into anything except sunburn.</p> <p>&ldquo;Drop anchor anywhere and the anchor will drag&mdash;that is, if your soul is a limitless, fathomless sea, and not dog-pound,&rdquo; he quoted to me, then added: &ldquo;You see, my anchor is always dragging.&nbsp; I live for human health and progress, and I strive to drag my anchor always in that direction.&nbsp; To me, the two are identical.&nbsp; Dragging anchor is what has saved me.&nbsp; My anchor did not hold me to my death-bed.&nbsp; I dragged anchor into the brush and fooled the doctors.&nbsp; When I recovered health and strength, I started, by preaching and by example, to teach the people to become nature men and nature women.&nbsp; But they had deaf ears.&nbsp; Then, on the steamer coming to Tahiti, a quarter-master expounded socialism to me.&nbsp; He showed me that an economic square deal was necessary before men and women could live naturally.&nbsp; So I dragged anchor once more, and now I am working for the co-operative commonwealth.&nbsp; When that arrives, it will be easy to bring about nature living.</p> <p>&ldquo;I had a dream last night,&rdquo; he went on thoughtfully, his face slowly breaking into a glow.&nbsp; &ldquo;It seemed that twenty-five nature men and nature women had just arrived on the steamer from California, and that I was starting to go with them up the wild-pig trail to the plantation.&rdquo;</p> <p>Ah, me, Ernest Darling, sun-worshipper and nature man, there are times when I am compelled to envy you and your carefree existence.&nbsp; I see you now, dancing up the steps and cutting antics on the veranda; your hair dripping from a plunge in the salt sea, your eyes sparkling, your sun-gilded body flashing, your chest resounding to the devil&rsquo;s own tattoo as you chant: &ldquo;The gorilla in the African jungle pounds his chest until the noise of it can be heard half a mile away.&rdquo;&nbsp; And I shall see you always as I saw you that last day, when the <i>Snark</i> poked her nose once more through the passage in the smoking reef, outward bound, and I waved good-bye to those on shore.&nbsp; Not least in goodwill and affection was the wave I gave to the golden sun-god in the scarlet loin-cloth, standing upright in his tiny outrigger canoe.</p> <h2><a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 193</span>CHAPTER XII<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE HIGH SEAT OF ABUNDANCE</span></h2> <blockquote><p>On the arrival of strangers, every man endeavoured to obtain one as a friend and carry him off to his own habitation, where he is treated with the greatest kindness by the inhabitants of the district; they place him on a high seat and feed him with abundance of the finest food.&mdash;<i>Polynesian Researches</i>.</p> </blockquote> <p><span class="smcap">The</span> <i>Snark</i> was lying at anchor at Raiatea, just off the village of Uturoa.&nbsp; She had arrived the night before, after dark, and we were preparing to pay our first visit ashore.&nbsp; Early in the morning I had noticed a tiny outrigger canoe, with an impossible spritsail, skimming the surface of the lagoon.&nbsp; The canoe itself was coffin-shaped, a mere dugout, fourteen feet long, a scant twelve inches wide, and maybe twenty-four inches deep.&nbsp; It had no lines, except in so far that it was sharp at both ends.&nbsp; Its sides were perpendicular.&nbsp; Shorn of the outrigger, it would have capsized of itself inside a tenth of a second.&nbsp; It was the outrigger that kept it right side up.</p> <p>I have said that the sail was impossible.&nbsp; It was.&nbsp; It was one of those things, not that you have to see to believe, but that you cannot believe after you have seen it.&nbsp; The hoist of it and the length of its boom were sufficiently appalling; but, not content with that, its artificer had given it a tremendous head.&nbsp; So large was the head that no common sprit could carry the strain of it in an ordinary breeze.&nbsp; So a spar had been lashed to the canoe, projecting aft over the water.&nbsp; To this had been made fast a sprit guy: thus, the foot of the sail was held by the main-sheet, and the peak by the guy to the sprit.</p> <p>It was not a mere boat, not a mere canoe, but a sailing machine.&nbsp; And the man in it sailed it by his weight and his nerve&mdash;principally by the latter.&nbsp; I watched the canoe beat up from leeward and run in toward the village, its sole occupant far out on the outrigger and luffing up and spilling the wind in the puffs.</p> <p>&ldquo;Well, I know one thing,&rdquo; I announced; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t leave Raiatea till I have a ride in that canoe.&rdquo;</p> <p>A few minutes later Warren called down the companionway, &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s that canoe you were talking about.&rdquo;</p> <p>Promptly I dashed on deck and gave greeting to its owner, a tall, slender Polynesian, ingenuous of face, and with clear, sparkling, intelligent eyes.&nbsp; He was clad in a scarlet loin-cloth and a straw hat.&nbsp; In his hands were presents&mdash;a fish, a bunch of greens, and several enormous yams.&nbsp; All of which acknowledged by smiles (which are coinage still in isolated spots of Polynesia) and by frequent repetitions of <i>mauruuru</i> (which is the Tahitian &ldquo;thank you&rdquo;), I proceeded to make signs that I desired to go for a sail in his canoe.</p> <p>His face lighted with pleasure and he uttered the single word, &ldquo;Tahaa,&rdquo; turning at the same time and pointing to the lofty, cloud-draped peaks of an island three miles away&mdash;the island of Tahaa.&nbsp; It was fair wind over, but a head-beat back.&nbsp; Now I did not want to go to Tahaa.&nbsp; I had letters to deliver in Raiatea, and officials to see, and there was Charmian down below getting ready to go ashore.&nbsp; By insistent signs I indicated that I desired no more than a short sail on the lagoon.&nbsp; Quick was the disappointment in his face, yet smiling was the acquiescence.</p> <p>&ldquo;Come on for a sail,&rdquo; I called below to Charmian.&nbsp; &ldquo;But put on your swimming suit.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s going to be wet.&rdquo;</p> <p>It wasn&rsquo;t real.&nbsp; It was a dream.&nbsp; That canoe slid over the water like a streak of silver.&nbsp; I climbed out on the outrigger and supplied the weight to hold her down, while Tehei (pronounced Tayhayee) supplied the nerve.&nbsp; He, too, in the puffs, climbed part way out on the outrigger, at the same time steering with both hands on a large paddle and holding the mainsheet with his foot.</p> <p>&ldquo;Ready about!&rdquo; he called.</p> <p>I carefully shifted my weight inboard in order to maintain the equilibrium as the sail emptied.</p> <p>&ldquo;Hard a-lee!&rdquo; he called, shooting her into the wind.</p> <p>I slid out on the opposite side over the water on a spar lashed across the canoe, and we were full and away on the other tack.</p> <p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Tehei.</p> <p>Those three phrases, &ldquo;Ready about,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hard a-lee,&rdquo; and &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; comprised Tehei&rsquo;s English vocabulary and led me to suspect that at some time he had been one of a Kanaka crew under an American captain.&nbsp; Between the puffs I made signs to him and repeatedly and interrogatively uttered the word <i>sailor</i>.&nbsp; Then I tried it in atrocious French.&nbsp; <i>Marin</i> conveyed no meaning to him; nor did <i>matelot</i>.&nbsp; Either my French was bad, or else he was not up in it.&nbsp; I have since concluded that both conjectures were correct.&nbsp; Finally, I began naming over the adjacent islands.&nbsp; He nodded that he had been to them.&nbsp; By the time my quest reached Tahiti, he caught my drift.&nbsp; His thought-processes were almost visible, and it was a joy to watch him think.&nbsp; He nodded his head vigorously.&nbsp; Yes, he had been to Tahiti, and he added himself names of islands such as Tikihau, Rangiroa, and Fakarava, thus proving that he had sailed as far as the Paumotus&mdash;undoubtedly one of the crew of a trading schooner.</p> <p>After our short sail, when he had returned on board, he by signs inquired the destination of the <i>Snark</i>, and when I had mentioned Samoa, Fiji, New Guinea, France, England, and California in their geographical sequence, he said &ldquo;Samoa,&rdquo; and by gestures intimated that he wanted to go along.&nbsp; Whereupon I was hard put to explain that there was no room for him.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Petit bateau</i>&rdquo; finally solved it, and again the disappointment in his face was accompanied by smiling acquiescence, and promptly came the renewed invitation to accompany him to Tahaa.</p> <p>Charmian and I looked at each other.&nbsp; The exhilaration of the ride we had taken was still upon us.&nbsp; Forgotten were the letters to Raiatea, the officials we had to visit.&nbsp; Shoes, a shirt, a pair of trousers, cigarettes, matches, and a book to read were hastily crammed into a biscuit tin and wrapped in a rubber blanket, and we were over the side and into the canoe.</p> <p>&ldquo;When shall we look for you?&rdquo; Warren called, as the wind filled the sail and sent Tehei and me scurrying out on the outrigger.</p> <p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; I answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;When we get back, as near as I can figure it.&rdquo;</p> <p>And away we went.&nbsp; The wind had increased, and with slacked sheets we ran off before it.&nbsp; The freeboard of the canoe was no more than two and a half inches, and the little waves continually lapped over the side.&nbsp; This required bailing.&nbsp; Now bailing is one of the principal functions of the vahine.&nbsp; Vahine is the Tahitian for woman, and Charmian being the only vahine aboard, the bailing fell appropriately to her.&nbsp; Tehei and I could not very well do it, the both of us being perched part way out on the outrigger and busied with keeping the canoe bottom-side down.&nbsp; So Charmian bailed, with a wooden scoop of primitive design, and so well did she do it that there were occasions when she could rest off almost half the time.</p> <p>Raiatea and Tahaa are unique in that they lie inside the same encircling reef.&nbsp; Both are volcanic islands, ragged of sky-line, with heaven-aspiring peaks and minarets.&nbsp; Since Raiatea is thirty miles in circumference, and Tahaa fifteen miles, some idea may be gained of the magnitude of the reef that encloses them.&nbsp; Between them and the reef stretches from one to two miles of water, forming a beautiful lagoon.&nbsp; The huge Pacific seas, extending in unbroken lines sometimes a mile or half as much again in length, hurl themselves upon the reef, overtowering and falling upon it with tremendous crashes, and yet the fragile coral structure withstands the shock and protects the land.&nbsp; Outside lies destruction to the mightiest ship afloat.&nbsp; Inside reigns the calm of untroubled water, whereon a canoe like ours can sail with no more than a couple of inches of free-board.</p> <p>We flew over the water.&nbsp; And such water!&mdash;clear as the clearest spring-water, and crystalline in its clearness, all intershot with a maddening pageant of colours and rainbow ribbons more magnificently gorgeous than any rainbow.&nbsp; Jade green alternated with turquoise, peacock blue with emerald, while now the canoe skimmed over reddish purple pools, and again over pools of dazzling, shimmering white where pounded coral sand lay beneath and upon which oozed monstrous sea-slugs.&nbsp; One moment we were above wonder-gardens of coral, wherein coloured fishes disported, fluttering like marine butterflies; the next moment we were dashing across the dark surface of deep channels, out of which schools of flying fish lifted their silvery flight; and a third moment we were above other gardens of living coral, each more wonderful than the last.&nbsp; And above all was the tropic, trade-wind sky with its fluffy clouds racing across the zenith and heaping the horizon with their soft masses.</p> <p>Before we were aware, we were close in to Tahaa (pronounced Tah-hah-ah, with equal accents), and Tehei was grinning approval of the vahine&rsquo;s proficiency at bailing.&nbsp; The canoe grounded on a shallow shore, twenty feet from land, and we waded out on a soft bottom where big slugs curled and writhed under our feet and where small octopuses advertised their existence by their superlative softness when stepped upon.&nbsp; Close to the beach, amid cocoanut palms and banana trees, erected on stilts, built of bamboo, with a grass-thatched roof, was Tehei&rsquo;s house.&nbsp; And out of the house came Tehei&rsquo;s vahine, a slender mite of a woman, kindly eyed and Mongolian of feature&mdash;when she was not North American Indian.&nbsp; &ldquo;Bihaura,&rdquo; Tehei called her, but he did not pronounce it according to English notions of spelling.&nbsp; Spelled &ldquo;Bihaura,&rdquo; it sounded like Bee-ah-oo-rah, with every syllable sharply emphasized.</p> <p>She took Charmian by the hand and led her into the house, leaving Tehei and me to follow.&nbsp; Here, by sign-language unmistakable, we were informed that all they possessed was ours.&nbsp; No hidalgo was ever more generous in the expression of giving, while I am sure that few hidalgos were ever as generous in the actual practice.&nbsp; We quickly discovered that we dare not admire their possessions, for whenever we did admire a particular object it was immediately presented to us.&nbsp; The two vahines, according to the way of vahines, got together in a discussion and examination of feminine fripperies, while Tehei and I, manlike, went over fishing-tackle and wild-pig-hunting, to say nothing of the device whereby bonitas are caught on forty-foot poles from double canoes.&nbsp; Charmian admired a sewing basket&mdash;the best example she had seen of Polynesian basketry; it was hers.&nbsp; I admired a bonita hook, carved in one piece from a pearl-shell; it was mine.&nbsp; Charmian was attracted by a fancy braid of straw sennit, thirty feet of it in a roll, sufficient to make a hat of any design one wished; the roll of sennit was hers.&nbsp; My gaze lingered upon a poi-pounder that dated back to the old stone days; it was mine.&nbsp; Charmian dwelt a moment too long on a wooden poi-bowl, canoe-shaped, with four legs, all carved in one piece of wood; it was hers.&nbsp; I glanced a second time at a gigantic cocoanut calabash; it was mine.&nbsp; Then Charmian and I held a conference in which we resolved to admire no more&mdash;not because it did not pay well enough, but because it paid too well.&nbsp; Also, we were already racking our brains over the contents of the <i>Snark</i> for suitable return presents.&nbsp; Christmas is an easy problem compared with a Polynesian giving-feast.</p> <p>We sat on the cool porch, on Bihaura&rsquo;s best mats while dinner was preparing, and at the same time met the villagers.&nbsp; In twos and threes and groups they strayed along, shaking hands and uttering the Tahitian word of greeting&mdash;Ioarana, pronounced yo-rah-nah.&nbsp; The men, big strapping fellows, were in loin-cloths, with here and there no shirt, while the women wore the universal <i>ahu</i>, a sort of adult pinafore that flows in graceful lines from the shoulders to the ground.&nbsp; Sad to see was the elephantiasis that afflicted some of them.&nbsp; Here would be a comely woman of magnificent proportions, with the port of a queen, yet marred by one arm four times&mdash;or a dozen times&mdash;the size of the other.&nbsp; Beside her might stand a six-foot man, erect, mighty-muscled, bronzed, with the body of a god, yet with feet and calves so swollen that they ran together, forming legs, shapeless, monstrous, that were for all the world like elephant legs.</p> <p>No one seems really to know the cause of the South Sea elephantiasis.&nbsp; One theory is that it is caused by the drinking of polluted water.&nbsp; Another theory attributes it to inoculation through mosquito bites.&nbsp; A third theory charges it to predisposition plus the process of acclimatization.&nbsp; On the other hand, no one that stands in finicky dread of it and similar diseases can afford to travel in the South Seas.&nbsp; There will be occasions when such a one must drink water.&nbsp; There may be also occasions when the mosquitoes let up biting.&nbsp; But every precaution of the finicky one will be useless.&nbsp; If he runs barefoot across the beach to have a swim, he will tread where an elephantiasis case trod a few minutes before.&nbsp; If he closets himself in his own house, yet every bit of fresh food on his table will have been subjected to the contamination, be it flesh, fish, fowl, or vegetable.&nbsp; In the public market at Papeete two known lepers run stalls, and heaven alone knows through what channels arrive at that market the daily supplies of fish, fruit, meat, and vegetables.&nbsp; The only happy way to go through the South Seas is with a careless poise, without apprehension, and with a Christian Science-like faith in the resplendent fortune of your own particular star.&nbsp; When you see a woman, afflicted with elephantiasis wringing out cream from cocoanut meat with her naked hands, drink and reflect how good is the cream, forgetting the hands that pressed it out.&nbsp; Also, remember that diseases such as elephantiasis and leprosy do not seem to be caught by contact.</p> <p>We watched a Raratongan woman, with swollen, distorted limbs, prepare our cocoanut cream, and then went out to the cook-shed where Tehei and Bihaura were cooking dinner.&nbsp; And then it was served to us on a dry-goods box in the house.&nbsp; Our hosts waited until we were done and then spread their table on the floor.&nbsp; But our table!&nbsp; We were certainly in the high seat of abundance.&nbsp; First, there was glorious raw fish, caught several hours before from the sea and steeped the intervening time in lime-juice diluted with water.&nbsp; Then came roast chicken.&nbsp; Two cocoanuts, sharply sweet, served for drink.&nbsp; There were bananas that tasted like strawberries and that melted in the mouth, and there was banana-poi that made one regret that his Yankee forebears ever attempted puddings.&nbsp; Then there was boiled yam, boiled taro, and roasted <i>feis</i>, which last are nothing more or less than large mealy, juicy, red-coloured cooking bananas.&nbsp; We marvelled at the abundance, and, even as we marvelled, a pig was brought on, a whole pig, a sucking pig, swathed in green leaves and roasted upon the hot stones of a native oven, the most honourable and triumphant dish in the Polynesian cuisine.&nbsp; And after that came coffee, black coffee, delicious coffee, native coffee grown on the hillsides of Tahaa.</p> <p>Tehei&rsquo;s fishing-tackle fascinated me, and after we arranged to go fishing, Charmian and I decided to remain all night.&nbsp; Again Tehei broached Samoa, and again my <i>petit bateau</i> brought the disappointment and the smile of acquiescence to his face.&nbsp; Bora Bora was my next port.&nbsp; It was not so far away but that cutters made the passage back and forth between it and Raiatea.&nbsp; So I invited Tehei to go that far with us on the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Then I learned that his wife had been born on Bora Bora and still owned a house there.&nbsp; She likewise was invited, and immediately came the counter invitation to stay with them in their house in Born Bora.&nbsp; It was Monday.&nbsp; Tuesday we would go fishing and return to Raiatea.&nbsp; Wednesday we would sail by Tahaa and off a certain point, a mile away, pick up Tehei and Bihaura and go on to Bora Bora.&nbsp; All this we arranged in detail, and talked over scores of other things as well, and yet Tehei knew three phrases in English, Charmian and I knew possibly a dozen Tahitian words, and among the four of us there were a dozen or so French words that all understood.&nbsp; Of course, such polyglot conversation was slow, but, eked out with a pad, a lead pencil, the face of a clock Charmian drew on the back of a pad, and with ten thousand and one gestures, we managed to get on very nicely.</p> <p>At the first moment we evidenced an inclination for bed the visiting natives, with soft <i>Iaoranas</i>, faded away, and Tehei and Bihaura likewise faded away.&nbsp; The house consisted of one large room, and it was given over to us, our hosts going elsewhere to sleep.&nbsp; In truth, their castle was ours.&nbsp; And right here, I want to say that of all the entertainment I have received in this world at the hands of all sorts of races in all sorts of places, I have never received entertainment that equalled this at the hands of this brown-skinned couple of Tahaa.&nbsp; I do not refer to the presents, the free-handed generousness, the high abundance, but to the fineness of courtesy and consideration and tact, and to the sympathy that was real sympathy in that it was understanding.&nbsp; They did nothing they thought ought to be done for us, according to their standards, but they did what they divined we wanted to be done for us, while their divination was most successful.&nbsp; It would be impossible to enumerate the hundreds of little acts of consideration they performed during the few days of our intercourse.&nbsp; Let it suffice for me to say that of all hospitality and entertainment I have known, in no case was theirs not only not excelled, but in no case was it quite equalled.&nbsp; Perhaps the most delightful feature of it was that it was due to no training, to no complex social ideals, but that it was the untutored and spontaneous outpouring from their hearts.</p> <p>The next morning we went fishing, that is, Tehei, Charmian, and I did, in the coffin-shaped canoe; but this time the enormous sail was left behind.&nbsp; There was no room for sailing and fishing at the same time in that tiny craft.&nbsp; Several miles away, inside the reef, in a channel twenty fathoms deep, Tehei dropped his baited hooks and rock-sinkers.&nbsp; The bait was chunks of octopus flesh, which he bit out of a live octopus that writhed in the bottom of the canoe.&nbsp; Nine of these lines he set, each line attached to one end of a short length of bamboo floating on the surface.&nbsp; When a fish was hooked, the end of the bamboo was drawn under the water.&nbsp; Naturally, the other end rose up in the air, bobbing and waving frantically for us to make haste.&nbsp; And make haste we did, with whoops and yells and driving paddles, from one signalling bamboo to another, hauling up from the depths great glistening beauties from two to three feet in length.</p> <p>Steadily, to the eastward, an ominous squall had been rising and blotting out the bright trade-wind sky.&nbsp; And we were three miles to leeward of home.&nbsp; We started as the first wind-gusts whitened the water.&nbsp; Then came the rain, such rain as only the tropics afford, where every tap and main in the sky is open wide, and when, to top it all, the very reservoir itself spills over in blinding deluge.&nbsp; Well, Charmian was in a swimming suit, I was in pyjamas, and Tehei wore only a loin-cloth.&nbsp; Bihaura was on the beach waiting for us, and she led Charmian into the house in much the same fashion that the mother leads in the naughty little girl who has been playing in mud-puddles.</p> <p>It was a change of clothes and a dry and quiet smoke while <i>kai-kai</i> was preparing.&nbsp; <i>Kai-kai</i>, by the way, is the Polynesian for &ldquo;food&rdquo; or &ldquo;to eat,&rdquo; or, rather, it is one form of the original root, whatever it may have been, that has been distributed far and wide over the vast area of the Pacific.&nbsp; It is <i>kai</i> in the Marquesas, Raratonga, Manahiki, Niu&euml;, Fakaafo, Tonga, New Zealand, and Vat&eacute;.&nbsp; In Tahiti &ldquo;to eat&rdquo; changes to <i>amu</i>, in Hawaii and Samoa to <i>ai</i>, in Ban to <i>kana</i>, in Nina to <i>kana</i>, in Nongone to <i>kaka</i>, and in New Caledonia to <i>ki</i>.&nbsp; But by whatsoever sound or symbol, it was welcome to our ears after that long paddle in the rain.&nbsp; Once more we sat in the high seat of abundance until we regretted that we had been made unlike the image of the giraffe and the camel.</p> <p>Again, when we were preparing to return to the <i>Snark</i>, the sky to windward turned black and another squall swooped down.&nbsp; But this time it was little rain and all wind.&nbsp; It blew hour after hour, moaning and screeching through the palms, tearing and wrenching and shaking the frail bamboo dwelling, while the outer reef set up a mighty thundering as it broke the force of the swinging seas.&nbsp; Inside the reef, the lagoon, sheltered though it was, was white with fury, and not even Tehei&rsquo;s seamanship could have enabled his slender canoe to live in such a welter.</p> <p>By sunset, the back of the squall had broken though it was still too rough for the canoe.&nbsp; So I had Tehei find a native who was willing to venture his cutter across to Raiatea for the outrageous sum of two dollars, Chili, which is equivalent in our money to ninety cents.&nbsp; Half the village was told off to carry presents, with which Tehei and Bihaura speeded their parting guests&mdash;captive chickens, fishes dressed and swathed in wrappings of green leaves, great golden bunches of bananas, leafy baskets spilling over with oranges and limes, alligator pears (the butter-fruit, also called the <i>avoca</i>), huge baskets of yams, bunches of taro and cocoanuts, and last of all, large branches and trunks of trees&mdash;firewood for the <i>Snark</i>.</p> <p>While on the way to the cutter we met the only white man on Tahaa, and of all men, George Lufkin, a native of New England!&nbsp; Eighty-six years of age he was, sixty-odd of which, he said, he had spent in the Society Islands, with occasional absences, such as the gold rush to Eldorado in &rsquo;forty-nine and a short period of ranching in California near Tulare.&nbsp; Given no more than three months by the doctors to live, he had returned to his South Seas and lived to eighty-six and to chuckle over the doctors aforesaid, who were all in their graves.&nbsp; <i>Fee-fee</i> he had, which is the native for elephantiasis and which is pronounced fay-fay.&nbsp; A quarter of a century before, the disease had fastened upon him, and it would remain with him until he died.&nbsp; We asked him about kith and kin.&nbsp; Beside him sat a sprightly damsel of sixty, his daughter.&nbsp; &ldquo;She is all I have,&rdquo; he murmured plaintively, &ldquo;and she has no children living.&rdquo;</p> <p>The cutter was a small, sloop-rigged affair, but large it seemed alongside Tehei&rsquo;s canoe.&nbsp; On the other hand, when we got out on the lagoon and were struck by another heavy wind-squall, the cutter became liliputian, while the <i>Snark</i>, in our imagination, seemed to promise all the stability and permanence of a continent.&nbsp; They were good boatmen.&nbsp; Tehei and Bihaura had come along to see us home, and the latter proved a good boatwoman herself.&nbsp; The cutter was well ballasted, and we met the squall under full sail.&nbsp; It was getting dark, the lagoon was full of coral patches, and we were carrying on.&nbsp; In the height of the squall we had to go about, in order to make a short leg to windward to pass around a patch of coral no more than a foot under the surface.&nbsp; As the cutter filled on the other tack, and while she was in that &ldquo;dead&rdquo; condition that precedes gathering way, she was knocked flat.&nbsp; Jib-sheet and main-sheet were let go, and she righted into the wind.&nbsp; Three times she was knocked down, and three times the sheets were flung loose, before she could get away on that tack.</p> <p>By the time we went about again, darkness had fallen.&nbsp; We were now to windward of the <i>Snark</i>, and the squall was howling.&nbsp; In came the jib, and down came the mainsail, all but a patch of it the size of a pillow-slip.&nbsp; By an accident we missed the <i>Snark</i>, which was riding it out to two anchors, and drove aground upon the inshore coral.&nbsp; Running the longest line on the <i>Snark</i> by means of the launch, and after an hour&rsquo;s hard work, we heaved the cutter off and had her lying safely astern.</p> <p>The day we sailed for Bora Bora the wind was light, and we crossed the lagoon under power to the point where Tehei and Bihaura were to meet us.&nbsp; As we made in to the land between the coral banks, we vainly scanned the shore for our friends.&nbsp; There was no sign of them.</p> <p>&ldquo;We can&rsquo;t wait,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;This breeze won&rsquo;t fetch us to Bora Bora by dark, and I don&rsquo;t want to use any more gasolene than I have to.&rdquo;</p> <p>You see, gasolene in the South Seas is a problem.&nbsp; One never knows when he will be able to replenish his supply.</p> <p>But just then Tehei appeared through the trees as he came down to the water.&nbsp; He had peeled off his shirt and was wildly waving it.&nbsp; Bihaura apparently was not ready.&nbsp; Once aboard, Tehei informed us by signs that we must proceed along the land till we got opposite to his house.&nbsp; He took the wheel and conned the <i>Snark</i> through the coral, around point after point till we cleared the last point of all.&nbsp; Cries of welcome went up from the beach, and Bihaura, assisted by several of the villagers, brought off two canoe-loads of abundance.&nbsp; There were yams, taro, <i>feis</i>, breadfruit, cocoanuts, oranges, limes, pineapples, watermelons, alligator pears, pomegranates, fish, chickens galore crowing and cackling and laying eggs on our decks, and a live pig that squealed infernally and all the time in apprehension of imminent slaughter.</p> <p>Under the rising moon we came in through the perilous passage of the reef of Bora Bora and dropped anchor off Vaitap&eacute; village.&nbsp; Bihaura, with housewifely anxiety, could not get ashore too quickly to her house to prepare more abundance for us.&nbsp; While the launch was taking her and Tehei to the little jetty, the sound of music and of singing drifted across the quiet lagoon.&nbsp; Throughout the Society Islands we had been continually informed that we would find the Bora Borans very jolly.&nbsp; Charmian and I went ashore to see, and on the village green, by forgotten graves on the beach, found the youths and maidens dancing, flower-garlanded and flower-bedecked, with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight.&nbsp; Farther along the beach we came upon a huge grass house, oval-shaped seventy feet in length, where the elders of the village were singing <i>himines</i>.&nbsp; They, too, were flower-garlanded and jolly, and they welcomed us into the fold as little lost sheep straying along from outer darkness.</p> <p>Early next morning Tehei was on board, with a string of fresh-caught fish and an invitation to dinner for that evening.&nbsp; On the way to dinner, we dropped in at the <i>himine</i> house.&nbsp; The same elders were singing, with here or there a youth or maiden that we had not seen the previous night.&nbsp; From all the signs, a feast was in preparation.&nbsp; Towering up from the floor was a mountain of fruits and vegetables, flanked on either side by numerous chickens tethered by cocoanut strips.&nbsp; After several <i>himines</i> had been sung, one of the men arose and made oration.&nbsp; The oration was made to us, and though it was Greek to us, we knew that in some way it connected us with that mountain of provender.</p> <p>&ldquo;Can it be that they are presenting us with all that?&rdquo; Charmian whispered.</p> <p>&ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; I muttered back.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why should they be giving it to us?&nbsp; Besides, there is no room on the <i>Snark</i> for it.&nbsp; We could not eat a tithe of it.&nbsp; The rest would spoil.&nbsp; Maybe they are inviting us to the feast.&nbsp; At any rate, that they should give all that to us is impossible.&rdquo;</p> <p>Nevertheless we found ourselves once more in the high seat of abundance.&nbsp; The orator, by gestures unmistakable, in detail presented every item in the mountain to us, and next he presented it to us <i>in toto</i>.&nbsp; It was an embarrassing moment.&nbsp; What would you do if you lived in a hall bedroom and a friend gave you a white elephant?&nbsp; Our <i>Snark</i> was no more than a hall bedroom, and already she was loaded down with the abundance of Tahaa.&nbsp; This new supply was too much.&nbsp; We blushed, and stammered, and <i>mauruuru&rsquo;d</i>.&nbsp; We <i>mauruuru&rsquo;d</i> with repeated <i>nui&rsquo;s</i> which conveyed the largeness and overwhelmingness of our thanks.&nbsp; At the same time, by signs, we committed the awful breach of etiquette of not accepting the present.&nbsp; The <i>himine</i> singers&rsquo; disappointment was plainly betrayed, and that evening, aided by Tehei, we compromised by accepting one chicken, one bunch of bananas, one bunch of taro, and so on down the list.</p> <p>But there was no escaping the abundance.&nbsp; I bought a dozen chickens from a native out in the country, and the following day he delivered thirteen chickens along with a canoe-load of fruit.&nbsp; The French storekeeper presented us with pomegranates and lent us his finest horse.&nbsp; The gendarme did likewise, lending us a horse that was the very apple of his eye.&nbsp; And everybody sent us flowers.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> was a fruit-stand and a greengrocer&rsquo;s shop masquerading under the guise of a conservatory.&nbsp; We went around flower-garlanded all the time.&nbsp; When the <i>himine</i> singers came on board to sing, the maidens kissed us welcome, and the crew, from captain to cabin-boy, lost its heart to the maidens of Bora Bora.&nbsp; Tehei got up a big fishing expedition in our honour, to which we went in a double canoe, paddled by a dozen strapping Amazons.&nbsp; We were relieved that no fish were caught, else the <i>Snark</i> would have sunk at her moorings.</p> <p>The days passed, but the abundance did not diminish.&nbsp; On the day of departure, canoe after canoe put off to us.&nbsp; Tehei brought cucumbers and a young <i>papaia</i> tree burdened with splendid fruit.&nbsp; Also, for me he brought a tiny, double canoe with fishing apparatus complete.&nbsp; Further, he brought fruits and vegetables with the same lavishness as at Tahaa.&nbsp; Bihaura brought various special presents for Charmian, such as silk-cotton pillows, fans, and fancy mats.&nbsp; The whole population brought fruits, flowers, and chickens.&nbsp; And Bihaura added a live sucking pig.&nbsp; Natives whom I did not remember ever having seen before strayed over the rail and presented me with such things as fish-poles, fish-lines, and fish-hooks carved from pearl-shell.</p> <p>As the <i>Snark</i> sailed out through the reef, she had a cutter in tow.&nbsp; This was the craft that was to take Bihaura back to Tahaa&mdash;but not Tehei.&nbsp; I had yielded at last, and he was one of the crew of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; When the cutter cast off and headed east, and the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> bow turned toward the west, Tehei knelt down by the cockpit and breathed a silent prayer, the tears flowing down his cheeks.&nbsp; A week later, when Martin got around to developing and printing, he showed Tehei some of the photographs.&nbsp; And that brown-skinned son of Polynesia, gazing on the pictured lineaments of his beloved Bihaura broke down in tears.</p> <p>But the abundance!&nbsp; There was so much of it.&nbsp; We could not work the <i>Snark</i> for the fruit that was in the way.&nbsp; She was festooned with fruit.&nbsp; The life-boat and launch were packed with it.&nbsp; The awning-guys groaned under their burdens.&nbsp; But once we struck the full trade-wind sea, the disburdening began.&nbsp; At every roll the <i>Snark</i> shook overboard a bunch or so of bananas and cocoanuts, or a basket of limes.&nbsp; A golden flood of limes washed about in the lee-scuppers.&nbsp; The big baskets of yams burst, and pineapples and pomegranates rolled back and forth.&nbsp; The chickens had got loose and were everywhere, roosting on the awnings, fluttering and squawking out on the jib-boom, and essaying the perilous feat of balancing on the spinnaker-boom.&nbsp; They were wild chickens, accustomed to flight.&nbsp; When attempts were made to catch them, they flew out over the ocean, circled about, and came back.&nbsp; Sometimes they did not come back.&nbsp; And in the confusion, unobserved, the little sucking pig got loose and slipped overboard.</p> <p>&ldquo;On the arrival of strangers, every man endeavoured to obtain one as a friend and carry him off to his own habitation, where he is treated with the greatest kindness by the inhabitants of the district: they place him on a high seat and feed him with abundance of the finest foods.&rdquo;</p> <h2><a name="page214"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 214</span>CHAPTER XIII<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE STONE-FISHING OF BORA BORA</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">At</span> five in the morning the conches began to blow.&nbsp; From all along the beach the eerie sounds arose, like the ancient voice of War, calling to the fishermen to arise and prepare to go forth.&nbsp; We on the <i>Snark</i> likewise arose, for there could be no sleep in that mad din of conches.&nbsp; Also, we were going stone-fishing, though our preparations were few.</p> <p><i>Tautai-taora</i> is the name for stone-fishing, <i>tautai</i> meaning a &ldquo;fishing instrument.&rdquo;&nbsp; And <i>taora</i> meaning &ldquo;thrown.&rdquo;&nbsp; But <i>tautai-taora</i>, in combination, means &ldquo;stone-fishing,&rdquo; for a stone is the instrument that is thrown.&nbsp; Stone-fishing is in reality a fish-drive, similar in principle to a rabbit-drive or a cattle-drive, though in the latter affairs drivers and driven operate in the same medium, while in the fish-drive the men must be in the air to breathe and the fish are driven through the water.&nbsp; It does not matter if the water is a hundred feet deep, the men, working on the surface, drive the fish just the same.</p> <p>This is the way it is done.&nbsp; The canoes form in line, one hundred to two hundred feet apart.&nbsp; In the bow of each canoe a man wields a stone, several pounds in weight, which is attached to a short rope.&nbsp; He merely smites the water with the stone, pulls up the stone, and smites again.&nbsp; He goes on smiting.&nbsp; In the stern of each canoe another man paddles, driving the canoe ahead and at the same time keeping it in the formation.&nbsp; The line of canoes advances to meet a second line a mile or two away, the ends of the lines hurrying together to form a circle, the far edge of which is the shore.&nbsp; The circle begins to contract upon the shore, where the women, standing in a long row out into the sea, form a fence of legs, which serves to break any rushes of the frantic fish.&nbsp; At the right moment when the circle is sufficiently small, a canoe dashes out from shore, dropping overboard a long screen of cocoanut leaves and encircling the circle, thus reinforcing the palisade of legs.&nbsp; Of course, the fishing is always done inside the reef in the lagoon.</p> <p>&ldquo;<i>Tr&egrave;s jolie</i>,&rdquo; the gendarme said, after explaining by signs and gestures that thousands of fish would be caught of all sizes from minnows to sharks, and that the captured fish would boil up and upon the very sand of the beach.</p> <p>It is a most successful method of fishing, while its nature is more that of an outing festival, rather than of a prosaic, food-getting task.&nbsp; Such fishing parties take place about once a month at Bora Bora, and it is a custom that has descended from old time.&nbsp; The man who originated it is not remembered.&nbsp; They always did this thing.&nbsp; But one cannot help wondering about that forgotten savage of the long ago, into whose mind first flashed this scheme of easy fishing, of catching huge quantities of fish without hook, or net, or spear.&nbsp; One thing about him we can know: he was a radical.&nbsp; And we can be sure that he was considered feather-brained and anarchistic by his conservative tribesmen.&nbsp; His difficulty was much greater than that of the modern inventor, who has to convince in advance only one or two capitalists.&nbsp; That early inventor had to convince his whole tribe in advance, for without the co-operation of the whole tribe the device could not be tested.&nbsp; One can well imagine the nightly pow-wow-ings in that primitive island world, when he called his comrades antiquated moss-backs, and they called him a fool, a freak, and a crank, and charged him with having come from Kansas.&nbsp; Heaven alone knows at what cost of grey hairs and expletives he must finally have succeeded in winning over a sufficient number to give his idea a trial.&nbsp; At any rate, the experiment succeeded.&nbsp; It stood the test of truth&mdash;it worked!&nbsp; And thereafter, we can be confident, there was no man to be found who did not know all along that it was going to work.</p> <p>Our good friends, Tehei and Bihaura, who were giving the fishing in our honour, had promised to come for us.&nbsp; We were down below when the call came from on deck that they were coming.&nbsp; We dashed up the companionway, to be overwhelmed by the sight of the Polynesian barge in which we were to ride.&nbsp; It was a long double canoe, the canoes lashed together by timbers with an interval of water between, and the whole decorated with flowers and golden grasses.&nbsp; A dozen flower-crowned Amazons were at the paddles, while at the stern of each canoe was a strapping steersman.&nbsp; All were garlanded with gold and crimson and orange flowers, while each wore about the hips a scarlet <i>pareu</i>.&nbsp; There were flowers everywhere, flowers, flowers, flowers, without end.&nbsp; The whole thing was an orgy of colour.&nbsp; On the platform forward resting on the bows of the canoes, Tehei and Bihaura were dancing.&nbsp; All voices were raised in a wild song or greeting.</p> <p>Three times they circled the <i>Snark</i> before coming alongside to take Charmian and me on board.&nbsp; Then it was away for the fishing-grounds, a five-mile paddle dead to windward.&nbsp; &ldquo;Everybody is jolly in Bora Bora,&rdquo; is the saying throughout the Society Islands, and we certainly found everybody jolly.&nbsp; Canoe songs, shark songs, and fishing songs were sung to the dipping of the paddles, all joining in on the swinging choruses.&nbsp; Once in a while the cry <i>Mao</i>! was raised, whereupon all strained like mad at the paddles.&nbsp; Mao is shark, and when the deep-sea tigers appear, the natives paddle for dear life for the shore, knowing full well the danger they run of having their frail canoes overturned and of being devoured.&nbsp; Of course, in our case there were no sharks, but the cry of <i>mao</i> was used to incite them to paddle with as much energy as if a shark were really after them.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ho&eacute;!&nbsp; Ho&eacute;!&rdquo; was another cry that made us foam through the water.</p> <p>On the platform Tehei and Bihaura danced, accompanied by songs and choruses or by rhythmic hand-clappings.&nbsp; At other times a musical knocking of the paddles against the sides of the canoes marked the accent.&nbsp; A young girl dropped her paddle, leaped to the platform, and danced a hula, in the midst of which, still dancing, she swayed and bent, and imprinted on our cheeks the kiss of welcome.&nbsp; Some of the songs, or <i>himines</i>, were religious, and they were especially beautiful, the deep basses of the men mingling with the altos and thin sopranos of the women and forming a combination of sound that irresistibly reminded one of an organ.&nbsp; In fact, &ldquo;kanaka organ&rdquo; is the scoffer&rsquo;s description of the <i>himine</i>.&nbsp; On the other hand, some of the chants or ballads were very barbaric, having come down from pre-Christian times.</p> <p>And so, singing, dancing, paddling, these joyous Polynesians took us to the fishing.&nbsp; The gendarme, who is the French ruler of Bora Bora, accompanied us with his family in a double canoe of his own, paddled by his prisoners; for not only is he gendarme and ruler, but he is jailer as well, and in this jolly land when anybody goes fishing, all go fishing.&nbsp; A score of single canoes, with outriggers, paddled along with us.&nbsp; Around a point a big sailing-canoe appeared, running beautifully before the wind as it bore down to greet us.&nbsp; Balancing precariously on the outrigger, three young men saluted us with a wild rolling of drums.</p> <p>The next point, half a mile farther on, brought us to the place of meeting.&nbsp; Here the launch, which had been brought along by Warren and Martin, attracted much attention.&nbsp; The Bora Borans could not see what made it go.&nbsp; The canoes were drawn upon the sand, and all hands went ashore to drink cocoanuts and sing and dance.&nbsp; Here our numbers were added to by many who arrived on foot from near-by dwellings, and a pretty sight it was to see the flower-crowned maidens, hand in hand and two by two, arriving along the sands.</p> <p>&ldquo;They usually make a big catch,&rdquo; Allicot, a half-caste trader, told us.&nbsp; &ldquo;At the finish the water is fairly alive with fish.&nbsp; It is lots of fun.&nbsp; Of course you know all the fish will be yours.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;All?&rdquo; I groaned, for already the <i>Snark</i> was loaded down with lavish presents, by the canoe-load, of fruits, vegetables, pigs, and chickens.</p> <p>&ldquo;Yes, every last fish,&rdquo; Allicot answered.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see, when the surround is completed, you, being the guest of honour, must take a harpoon and impale the first one.&nbsp; It is the custom.&nbsp; Then everybody goes in with their hands and throws the catch out on the sand.&nbsp; There will be a mountain of them.&nbsp; Then one of the chiefs will make a speech in which he presents you with the whole kit and boodle.&nbsp; But you don&rsquo;t have to take them all.&nbsp; You get up and make a speech, selecting what fish you want for yourself and presenting all the rest back again.&nbsp; Then everybody says you are very generous.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;But what would be the result if I kept the whole present?&rdquo; I asked.</p> <p>&ldquo;It has never happened,&rdquo; was the answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is the custom to give and give back again.&rdquo;</p> <p>The native minister started with a prayer for success in the fishing, and all heads were bared.&nbsp; Next, the chief fishermen told off the canoes and allotted them their places.&nbsp; Then it was into the canoes and away.&nbsp; No women, however, came along, with the exception of Bihaura and Charmian.&nbsp; In the old days even they would have been tabooed.&nbsp; The women remained behind to wade out into the water and form the palisade of legs.</p> <p>The big double canoe was left on the beach, and we went in the launch.&nbsp; Half the canoes paddled off to leeward, while we, with the other half, headed to windward a mile and a half, until the end of our line was in touch with the reef.&nbsp; The leader of the drive occupied a canoe midway in our line.&nbsp; He stood erect, a fine figure of an old man, holding a flag in his hand.&nbsp; He directed the taking of positions and the forming of the two lines by blowing on a conch.&nbsp; When all was ready, he waved his flag to the right.&nbsp; With a single splash the throwers in every canoe on that side struck the water with their stones.&nbsp; While they were hauling them back&mdash;a matter of a moment, for the stones scarcely sank beneath the surface&mdash;the flag waved to the left, and with admirable precision every stone on that side struck the water.&nbsp; So it went, back and forth, right and left; with every wave of the flag a long line of concussion smote the lagoon.&nbsp; At the same time the paddles drove the canoes forward and what was being done in our line was being done in the opposing line of canoes a mile and more away.</p> <p>On the bow of the launch, Tehei, with eyes fixed on the leader, worked his stone in unison with the others.&nbsp; Once, the stone slipped from the rope, and the same instant Tehei went overboard after it.&nbsp; I do not know whether or not that stone reached the bottom, but I do know that the next instant Tehei broke surface alongside with the stone in his hand.&nbsp; I noticed this same accident occur several times among the near-by canoes, but in each instance the thrower followed the stone and brought it back.</p> <p>The reef ends of our lines accelerated, the shore ends lagged, all under the watchful supervision of the leader, until at the reef the two lines joined, forming the circle.&nbsp; Then the contraction of the circle began, the poor frightened fish harried shoreward by the streaks of concussion that smote the water.&nbsp; In the same fashion elephants are driven through the jungle by motes of men who crouch in the long grasses or behind trees and make strange noises.&nbsp; Already the palisade of legs had been built.&nbsp; We could see the heads of the women, in a long line, dotting the placid surface of the lagoon.&nbsp; The tallest women went farthest out, thus, with the exception of those close inshore, nearly all were up to their necks in the water.</p> <p>Still the circle narrowed, till canoes were almost touching.&nbsp; There was a pause.&nbsp; A long canoe shot out from shore, following the line of the circle.&nbsp; It went as fast as paddles could drive.&nbsp; In the stern a man threw overboard the long, continuous screen of cocoanut leaves.&nbsp; The canoes were no longer needed, and overboard went the men to reinforce the palisade with their legs.&nbsp; For the screen was only a screen, and not a net, and the fish could dash through it if they tried.&nbsp; Hence the need for legs that ever agitated the screen, and for hands that splashed and throats that yelled.&nbsp; Pandemonium reigned as the trap tightened.</p> <p>But no fish broke surface or collided against the hidden legs.&nbsp; At last the chief fisherman entered the trap.&nbsp; He waded around everywhere, carefully.&nbsp; But there were no fish boiling up and out upon the sand.&nbsp; There was not a sardine, not a minnow, not a polly-wog.&nbsp; Something must have been wrong with that prayer; or else, and more likely, as one grizzled fellow put it, the wind was not in its usual quarter and the fish were elsewhere in the lagoon.&nbsp; In fact, there had been no fish to drive.</p> <p>&ldquo;About once in five these drives are failures,&rdquo; Allicot consoled us.</p> <p>Well, it was the stone-fishing that had brought us to Bora Bora, and it was our luck to draw the one chance in five.&nbsp; Had it been a raffle, it would have been the other way about.&nbsp; This is not pessimism.&nbsp; Nor is it an indictment of the plan of the universe.&nbsp; It is merely that feeling which is familiar to most fishermen at the empty end of a hard day.</p> <h2><a name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 223</span>CHAPTER XIV<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE AMATEUR NAVIGATOR</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">There</span> are captains and captains, and some mighty fine captains, I know; but the run of the captains on the <i>Snark</i> has been remarkably otherwise.&nbsp; My experience with them has been that it is harder to take care of one captain on a small boat than of two small babies.&nbsp; Of course, this is no more than is to be expected.&nbsp; The good men have positions, and are not likely to forsake their one-thousand-to-fifteen-thousand-ton billets for the <i>Snark</i> with her ten tons net.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> has had to cull her navigators from the beach, and the navigator on the beach is usually a congenital inefficient&mdash;the sort of man who beats about for a fortnight trying vainly to find an ocean isle and who returns with his schooner to report the island sunk with all on board, the sort of man whose temper or thirst for strong waters works him out of billets faster than he can work into them.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> has had three captains, and by the grace of God she shall have no more.&nbsp; The first captain was so senile as to be unable to give a measurement for a boom-jaw to a carpenter.&nbsp; So utterly agedly helpless was he, that he was unable to order a sailor to throw a few buckets of salt water on the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> deck.&nbsp; For twelve days, at anchor, under an overhead tropic sun, the deck lay dry.&nbsp; It was a new deck.&nbsp; It cost me one hundred and thirty-five dollars to recaulk it.&nbsp; The second captain was angry.&nbsp; He was born angry.&nbsp; &ldquo;Papa is always angry,&rdquo; was the description given him by his half-breed son.&nbsp; The third captain was so crooked that he couldn&rsquo;t hide behind a corkscrew.&nbsp; The truth was not in him, common honesty was not in him, and he was as far away from fair play and square-dealing as he was from his proper course when he nearly wrecked the <i>Snark</i> on the Ring-gold Isles.</p> <p>It was at Suva, in the Fijis, that I discharged my third and last captain and took up gain the r&ocirc;le of amateur navigator.&nbsp; I had essayed it once before, under my first captain, who, out of San Francisco, jumped the <i>Snark</i> so amazingly over the chart that I really had to find out what was doing.&nbsp; It was fairly easy to find out, for we had a run of twenty-one hundred miles before us.&nbsp; I knew nothing of navigation; but, after several hours of reading up and half an hour&rsquo;s practice with the sextant, I was able to find the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> latitude by meridian observation and her longitude by the simple method known as &ldquo;equal altitudes.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is not a correct method.&nbsp; It is not even a safe method, but my captain was attempting to navigate by it, and he was the only one on board who should have been able to tell me that it was a method to be eschewed.&nbsp; I brought the <i>Snark</i> to Hawaii, but the conditions favoured me.&nbsp; The sun was in northern declination and nearly overhead.&nbsp; The legitimate &ldquo;chronometer-sight&rdquo; method of ascertaining the longitude I had not heard of&mdash;yes, I had heard of it.&nbsp; My first captain mentioned it vaguely, but after one or two attempts at practice of it he mentioned it no more.</p> <p>I had time in the Fijis to compare my chronometer with two other chronometers.&nbsp; Two weeks previous, at Pago Pago, in Samoa, I had asked my captain to compare our chronometer with the chronometers on the American cruiser, the <i>Annapolis</i>.&nbsp; This he told me he had done&mdash;of course he had done nothing of the sort; and he told me that the difference he had ascertained was only a small fraction of a second.&nbsp; He told it to me with finely simulated joy and with words of praise for my splendid time-keeper.&nbsp; I repeat it now, with words of praise for his splendid and unblushing unveracity.&nbsp; For behold, fourteen days later, in Suva, I compared the chronometer with the one on the Atua, an Australian steamer, and found that mine was thirty-one seconds fast.&nbsp; Now thirty-one seconds of time, converted into arc, equals seven and one-quarter miles.&nbsp; That is to say, if I were sailing west, in the night-time, and my position, according to my dead reckoning from my afternoon chronometer sight, was shown to be seven miles off the land, why, at that very moment I would be crashing on the reef.&nbsp; Next I compared my chronometer with Captain Wooley&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Captain Wooley, the harbourmaster, gives the time to Suva, firing a gun signal at twelve, noon, three times a week.&nbsp; According to his chronometer mine was fifty-nine seconds fast, which is to say, that, sailing west, I should be crashing on the reef when I thought I was fifteen miles off from it.</p> <p>I compromised by subtracting thirty-one seconds from the total of my chronometer&rsquo;s losing error, and sailed away for Tanna, in the New Hebrides, resolved, when nosing around the land on dark nights, to bear in mind the other seven miles I might be out according to Captain Wooley&rsquo;s instrument.&nbsp; Tanna lay some six hundred miles west-southwest from the Fijis, and it was my belief that while covering that distance I could quite easily knock into my head sufficient navigation to get me there.&nbsp; Well, I got there, but listen first to my troubles.&nbsp; Navigation <i>is</i> easy, I shall always contend that; but when a man is taking three gasolene engines and a wife around the world and is writing hard every day to keep the engines supplied with gasolene and the wife with pearls and volcanoes, he hasn&rsquo;t much time left in which to study navigation.&nbsp; Also, it is bound to be easier to study said science ashore, where latitude and longitude are unchanging, in a house whose position never alters, than it is to study navigation on a boat that is rushing along day and night toward land that one is trying to find and which he is liable to find disastrously at a moment when he least expects it.</p> <p>To begin with, there are the compasses and the setting of the courses.&nbsp; We sailed from Suva on Saturday afternoon, June 6, 1908, and it took us till after dark to run the narrow, reef-ridden passage between the islands of Viti Levu and Mbengha.&nbsp; The open ocean lay before me.&nbsp; There was nothing in the way with the exception of Vatu Leile, a miserable little island that persisted in poking up through the sea some twenty miles to the west-southwest&mdash;just where I wanted to go.&nbsp; Of course, it seemed quite simple to avoid it by steering a course that would pass it eight or ten miles to the north.&nbsp; It was a black night, and we were running before the wind.&nbsp; The man at the wheel must be told what direction to steer in order to miss Vatu Leile.&nbsp; But what direction?&nbsp; I turned me to the navigation books.&nbsp; &ldquo;True Course&rdquo; I lighted upon.&nbsp; The very thing!&nbsp; What I wanted was the true course.&nbsp; I read eagerly on:</p> <p>&ldquo;The True Course is the angle made with the meridian by a straight line on the chart drawn to connect the ship&rsquo;s position with the place bound to.&rdquo;</p> <p>Just what I wanted.&nbsp; The <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> position was at the western entrance of the passage between Viti Levu and Mbengha.&nbsp; The immediate place she was bound to was a place on the chart ten miles north of Vatu Leile.&nbsp; I pricked that place off on the chart with my dividers, and with my parallel rulers found that west-by-south was the true course.&nbsp; I had but to give it to the man at the wheel and the <i>Snark</i> would win her way to the safety of the open sea.</p> <p>But alas and alack and lucky for me, I read on.&nbsp; I discovered that the compass, that trusty, everlasting friend of the mariner, was not given to pointing north.&nbsp; It varied.&nbsp; Sometimes it pointed east of north, sometimes west of north, and on occasion it even turned tail on north and pointed south.&nbsp; The variation at the particular spot on the globe occupied by the <i>Snark</i> was 9&deg; 40&prime; easterly.&nbsp; Well, that had to be taken into account before I gave the steering course to the man at the wheel.&nbsp; I read:</p> <p>&ldquo;The Correct Magnetic Course is derived from the True Course by applying to it the variation.&rdquo;</p> <p>Therefore, I reasoned, if the compass points 9&deg; 40&prime; eastward of north, and I wanted to sail due north, I should have to steer 9&deg; 40&prime; westward of the north indicated by the compass and which was not north at all.&nbsp; So I added 9&deg; 40&prime; to the left of my west-by-south course, thus getting my correct Magnetic Course, and was ready once more to run to open sea.</p> <p>Again alas and alack!&nbsp; The Correct Magnetic Course was not the Compass Course.&nbsp; There was another sly little devil lying in wait to trip me up and land me smashing on the reefs of Vatu Leile.&nbsp; This little devil went by the name of Deviation.&nbsp; I read:</p> <p>&ldquo;The Compass Course is the course to steer, and is derived from the Correct Magnetic Course by applying to it the Deviation.&rdquo;</p> <p>Now Deviation is the variation in the needle caused by the distribution of iron on board of ship.&nbsp; This purely local variation I derived from the deviation card of my standard compass and then applied to the Correct Magnetic Course.&nbsp; The result was the Compass Course.&nbsp; And yet, not yet.&nbsp; My standard compass was amidships on the companionway.&nbsp; My steering compass was aft, in the cockpit, near the wheel.&nbsp; When the steering compass pointed west-by-south three-quarters-south (the steering course), the standard compass pointed west-one-half-north, which was certainly not the steering course.&nbsp; I kept the <i>Snark</i> up till she was heading west-by-south-three-quarters-south on the standard compass, which gave, on the steering compass, south-west-by-west.</p> <p>The foregoing operations constitute the simple little matter of setting a course.&nbsp; And the worst of it is that one must perform every step correctly or else he will hear &ldquo;Breakers ahead!&rdquo; some pleasant night, a nice sea-bath, and be given the delightful diversion of fighting his way to the shore through a horde of man-eating sharks.</p> <p>Just as the compass is tricky and strives to fool the mariner by pointing in all directions except north, so does that guide post of the sky, the sun, persist in not being where it ought to be at a given time.&nbsp; This carelessness of the sun is the cause of more trouble&mdash;at least it caused trouble for me.&nbsp; To find out where one is on the earth&rsquo;s surface, he must know, at precisely the same time, where the sun is in the heavens.&nbsp; That is to say, the sun, which is the timekeeper for men, doesn&rsquo;t run on time.&nbsp; When I discovered this, I fell into deep gloom and all the Cosmos was filled with doubt.&nbsp; Immutable laws, such as gravitation and the conservation of energy, became wobbly, and I was prepared to witness their violation at any moment and to remain unastonished.&nbsp; For see, if the compass lied and the sun did not keep its engagements, why should not objects lose their mutual attraction and why should not a few bushel baskets of force be annihilated?&nbsp; Even perpetual motion became possible, and I was in a frame of mind prone to purchase Keeley-Motor stock from the first enterprising agent that landed on the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> deck.&nbsp; And when I discovered that the earth really rotated on its axis 366 times a year, while there were only 365 sunrises and sunsets, I was ready to doubt my own identity.</p> <p>This is the way of the sun.&nbsp; It is so irregular that it is impossible for man to devise a clock that will keep the sun&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; The sun accelerates and retards as no clock could be made to accelerate and retard.&nbsp; The sun is sometimes ahead of its schedule; at other times it is lagging behind; and at still other times it is breaking the speed limit in order to overtake itself, or, rather, to catch up with where it ought to be in the sky.&nbsp; In this last case it does not slow down quick enough, and, as a result, goes dashing ahead of where it ought to be.&nbsp; In fact, only four days in a year do the sun and the place where the sun ought to be happen to coincide.&nbsp; The remaining 361 days the sun is pothering around all over the shop.&nbsp; Man, being more perfect than the sun, makes a clock that keeps regular time.&nbsp; Also, he calculates how far the sun is ahead of its schedule or behind.&nbsp; The difference between the sun&rsquo;s position and the position where the sun ought to be if it were a decent, self-respecting sun, man calls the Equation of Time.&nbsp; Thus, the navigator endeavouring to find his ship&rsquo;s position on the sea, looks in his chronometer to see where precisely the sun ought to be according to the Greenwich custodian of the sun.&nbsp; Then to that location he applies the Equation of Time and finds out where the sun ought to be and isn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; This latter location, along with several other locations, enables him to find out what the man from Kansas demanded to know some years ago.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> sailed from Fiji on Saturday, June 6, and the next day, Sunday, on the wide ocean, out of sight of land, I proceeded to endeavour to find out my position by a chronometer sight for longitude and by a meridian observation for latitude.&nbsp; The chronometer sight was taken in the morning when the sun was some 21&deg; above the horizon.&nbsp; I looked in the Nautical Almanac and found that on that very day, June 7, the sun was behind time 1 minute and 26 seconds, and that it was catching up at a rate of 14.67 seconds per hour.&nbsp; The chronometer said that at the precise moment of taking the sun&rsquo;s altitude it was twenty-five minutes after eight o&rsquo;clock at Greenwich.&nbsp; From this date it would seem a schoolboy&rsquo;s task to correct the Equation of Time.&nbsp; Unfortunately, I was not a schoolboy.&nbsp; Obviously, at the middle of the day, at Greenwich, the sun was 1 minute and 26 seconds behind time.&nbsp; Equally obviously, if it were eleven o&rsquo;clock in the morning, the sun would be 1 minute and 26 seconds behind time plus 14.67 seconds.&nbsp; If it were ten o&rsquo;clock in the morning, twice 14.67 seconds would have to be added.&nbsp; And if it were 8: 25 in the morning, then 3&frac12; times 14.67 seconds would have to be added.&nbsp; Quite clearly, then, if, instead of being 8:25 <span class="GutSmall">A.M.</span>, it were 8:25 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>, then 8&frac12; times 14.67 seconds would have to be, not added, but <i>subtracted</i>; for, if, at noon, the sun were 1 minute and 26 seconds behind time, and if it were catching up with where it ought to be at the rate of 14.67 seconds per hour, then at 8.25 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span> it would be much nearer where it ought to be than it had been at noon.</p> <p>So far, so good.&nbsp; But was that 8:25 of the chronometer <span class="GutSmall">A.M.</span>, or <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>?&nbsp; I looked at the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> clock.&nbsp; It marked 8:9, and it was certainly <span class="GutSmall">A.M.</span> for I had just finished breakfast.&nbsp; Therefore, if it was eight in the morning on board the <i>Snark</i>, the eight o&rsquo;clock of the chronometer (which was the time of the day at Greenwich) must be a different eight o&rsquo;clock from the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> eight o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; But what eight o&rsquo;clock was it?&nbsp; It can&rsquo;t be the eight o&rsquo;clock of this morning, I reasoned; therefore, it must be either eight o&rsquo;clock this evening or eight o&rsquo;clock last night.</p> <p>It was at this juncture that I fell into the bottomless pit of intellectual chaos.&nbsp; We are in east longitude, I reasoned, therefore we are ahead of Greenwich.&nbsp; If we are behind Greenwich, then to-day is yesterday; if we are ahead of Greenwich, then yesterday is to-day, but if yesterday is to-day, what under the sun is to-day!&mdash;to-morrow?&nbsp; Absurd!&nbsp; Yet it must be correct.&nbsp; When I took the sun this morning at 8:25, the sun&rsquo;s custodians at Greenwich were just arising from dinner last night.</p> <p>&ldquo;Then correct the Equation of Time for yesterday,&rdquo; says my logical mind.</p> <p>&ldquo;But to-day is to-day,&rdquo; my literal mind insists.&nbsp; &ldquo;I must correct the sun for to-day and not for yesterday.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Yet to-day is yesterday,&rdquo; urges my logical mind.</p> <p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all very well,&rdquo; my literal mind continues, &ldquo;If I were in Greenwich I might be in yesterday.&nbsp; Strange things happen in Greenwich.&nbsp; But I know as sure as I am living that I am here, now, in to-day, June 7, and that I took the sun here, now, to-day, June 7.&nbsp; Therefore, I must correct the sun here, now, to-day, June 7.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Bosh!&rdquo; snaps my logical mind.&nbsp; &ldquo;Lecky says&mdash;&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Never mind what Lecky says,&rdquo; interrupts my literal mind.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let me tell you what the Nautical Almanac says.&nbsp; The Nautical Almanac says that to-day, June 7, the sun was 1 minute and 26 seconds behind time and catching up at the rate of 14.67 seconds per hour.&nbsp; It says that yesterday, June 6, the sun was 1 minute and 36 seconds behind time and catching up at the rate of 15.66 seconds per hour.&nbsp; You see, it is preposterous to think of correcting to-day&rsquo;s sun by yesterday&rsquo;s time-table.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Fool!&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Idiot!&rdquo;</p> <p>Back and forth they wrangle until my head is whirling around and I am ready to believe that I am in the day after the last week before next.</p> <p>I remembered a parting caution of the Suva harbour-master: &ldquo;<i>In east longitude take from the Nautical Almanac the elements for the preceding day</i>.&rdquo;</p> <p>Then a new thought came to me.&nbsp; I corrected the Equation of Time for Sunday and for Saturday, making two separate operations of it, and lo, when the results were compared, there was a difference only of four-tenths of a second.&nbsp; I was a changed man.&nbsp; I had found my way out of the crypt.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> was scarcely big enough to hold me and my experience.&nbsp; Four-tenths of a second would make a difference of only one-tenth of a mile&mdash;a cable-length!</p> <p>All went merrily for ten minutes, when I chanced upon the following rhyme for navigators:</p> <blockquote><p>&ldquo;Greenwich time least<br /> Longitude east;<br /> Greenwich best,<br /> Longitude west.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>Heavens!&nbsp; The <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> time was not as good as Greenwich time.&nbsp; When it was 8:25 at Greenwich, on board the <i>Snark</i> it was only 8:9.&nbsp; &ldquo;Greenwich time best, longitude west.&rdquo;&nbsp; There I was.&nbsp; In west longitude beyond a doubt.</p> <p>&ldquo;Silly!&rdquo; cries my literal mind.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are 8:9 <span class="GutSmall">A.M.</span> and Greenwich is 8:25 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; answers my logical mind.&nbsp; &ldquo;To be correct, 8.25 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span> is really twenty hours and twenty-five minutes, and that is certainly better than eight hours and nine minutes.&nbsp; No, there is no discussion; you are in west longitude.&rdquo;</p> <p>Then my literal mind triumphs.</p> <p>&ldquo;We sailed from Suva, in the Fijis, didn&rsquo;t we?&rdquo; it demands, and logical mind agrees.&nbsp; &ldquo;And Suva is in east longitude?&rdquo;&nbsp; Again logical mind agrees.&nbsp; &ldquo;And we sailed west (which would take us deeper into east longitude), didn&rsquo;t we?&nbsp; Therefore, and you can&rsquo;t escape it, we are in east longitude.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Greenwich time best, longitude west,&rdquo; chants my logical mind; &ldquo;and you must grant that twenty hours and twenty-five minutes is better than eight hours and nine minutes.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I break in upon the squabble; &ldquo;we&rsquo;ll work up the sight and then we&rsquo;ll see.&rdquo;</p> <p>And work it up I did, only to find that my longitude was 184&deg; west.</p> <p>&ldquo;I told you so,&rdquo; snorts my logical mind.</p> <p>I am dumbfounded.&nbsp; So is my literal mind, for several minutes.&nbsp; Then it enounces:</p> <p>&ldquo;But there is no 184&deg; west longitude, nor east longitude, nor any other longitude.&nbsp; The largest meridian is 180&deg; as you ought to know very well.&rdquo;</p> <p>Having got this far, literal mind collapses from the brain strain, logical mind is dumb flabbergasted; and as for me, I get a bleak and wintry look in my eyes and go around wondering whether I am sailing toward the China coast or the Gulf of Darien.</p> <p>Then a thin small voice, which I do not recognize, coming from nowhere in particular in my consciousness, says:</p> <p>&ldquo;The total number of degrees is 360.&nbsp; Subtract the 184&deg; west longitude from 360&deg;, and you will get 176&deg; east longitude.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;That is sheer speculation,&rdquo; objects literal mind; and logical mind remonstrates.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is no rule for it.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Darn the rules!&rdquo; I exclaim.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t I here?&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;The thing is self-evident,&rdquo; I continue.&nbsp; &ldquo;184&deg; west longitude means a lapping over in east longitude of four degrees.&nbsp; Besides I have been in east longitude all the time.&nbsp; I sailed from Fiji, and Fiji is in east longitude.&nbsp; Now I shall chart my position and prove it by dead reckoning.&rdquo;</p> <p>But other troubles and doubts awaited me.&nbsp; Here is a sample of one.&nbsp; In south latitude, when the sun is in northern declination, chronometer sights may be taken early in the morning.&nbsp; I took mine at eight o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; Now, one of the necessary elements in working up such a sight is latitude.&nbsp; But one gets latitude at twelve o&rsquo;clock, noon, by a meridian observation.&nbsp; It is clear that in order to work up my eight o&rsquo;clock chronometer sight I must have my eight o&rsquo;clock latitude.&nbsp; Of course, if the <i>Snark</i> were sailing due west at six knots per hour, for the intervening four hours her latitude would not change.&nbsp; But if she were sailing due south, her latitude would change to the tune of twenty-four miles.&nbsp; In which case a simple addition or subtraction would convert the twelve o&rsquo;clock latitude into eight o&rsquo;clock latitude.&nbsp; But suppose the <i>Snark</i> were sailing southwest.&nbsp; Then the traverse tables must be consulted.</p> <p>This is the illustration.&nbsp; At eight <span class="GutSmall">A.M.</span> I took my chronometer sight.&nbsp; At the same moment the distance recorded on the log was noted.&nbsp; At twelve <span class="GutSmall">M.</span>, when the sight for latitude was taken,&nbsp; I again noted the log, which showed me that since eight o&rsquo;clock the <i>Snark</i> had run 24 miles.&nbsp; Her true course had been west &frac34; south.&nbsp; I entered Table I, in the distance column, on the page for &frac34; point courses, and stopped at 24, the number of miles run.&nbsp; Opposite, in the next two columns, I found that the <i>Snark</i> had made 3.5 miles of southing or latitude, and that she had made 23.7 miles of westing.&nbsp; To find my eight o&rsquo;clock&rsquo; latitude was easy.&nbsp; I had but to subtract 3.5 miles from my noon latitude.&nbsp; All the elements being present, I worked up my longitude.</p> <p>But this was my eight o&rsquo;clock longitude.&nbsp; Since then, and up till noon, I had made 23.7 miles of westing.&nbsp; What was my noon longitude?&nbsp; I followed the rule, turning to Traverse Table No. II.&nbsp; Entering the table, according to rule, and going through every detail, according to rule, I found the difference of longitude for the four hours to be 25 miles.&nbsp; I was aghast.&nbsp; I entered the table again, according to rule; I entered the table half a dozen times, according to rule, and every time found that my difference of longitude was 25 miles.&nbsp; I leave it to you, gentle reader.&nbsp; Suppose you had sailed 24 miles and that you had covered 3.5 miles of latitude, then how could you have covered 25 miles of longitude?&nbsp; Even if you had sailed due west 24 miles, and not changed your latitude, how could you have changed your longitude 25 miles?&nbsp; In the name of human reason, how could you cover one mile more of longitude than the total number of miles you had sailed?</p> <p>It was a reputable traverse table, being none other than Bowditch&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The rule was simple (as navigators&rsquo; rules go); I had made no error.&nbsp; I spent an hour over it, and at the end still faced the glaring impossibility of having sailed 24 miles, in the course of which I changed my latitude 3.5 miles and my longitude 25 miles.&nbsp; The worst of it was that there was nobody to help me out.&nbsp; Neither Charmian nor Martin knew as much as I knew about navigation.&nbsp; And all the time the <i>Snark</i> was rushing madly along toward Tanna, in the New Hebrides.&nbsp; Something had to be done.</p> <p>How it came to me I know not&mdash;call it an inspiration if you will; but the thought arose in me: if southing is latitude, why isn&rsquo;t westing longitude?&nbsp; Why should I have to change westing into longitude?&nbsp; And then the whole beautiful situation dawned upon me.&nbsp; The meridians of longitude are 60 miles (nautical) apart at the equator.&nbsp; At the poles they run together.&nbsp; Thus, if I should travel up the 180&deg; meridian of longitude until I reached the North Pole, and if the astronomer at Greenwich travelled up the 0 meridian of longitude to the North Pole, then, at the North Pole, we could shake hands with each other, though before we started for the North Pole we had been some thousands of miles apart.&nbsp; Again: if a degree of longitude was 60 miles wide at the equator, and if the same degree, at the point of the Pole, had no width, then somewhere between the Pole and the equator that degree would be half a mile wide, and at other places a mile wide, two miles wide, ten miles wide, thirty miles wide, ay, and sixty miles wide.</p> <p>All was plain again.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> was in 19&deg; south latitude.&nbsp; The world wasn&rsquo;t as big around there as at the equator.&nbsp; Therefore, every mile of westing at 19&deg; south was more than a minute of longitude; for sixty miles were sixty miles, but sixty minutes are sixty miles only at the equator.&nbsp; George Francis Train broke Jules Verne&rsquo;s record of around the world.&nbsp; But any man that wants can break George Francis Train&rsquo;s record.&nbsp; Such a man would need only to go, in a fast steamer, to the latitude of Cape Horn, and sail due east all the way around.&nbsp; The world is very small in that latitude, and there is no land in the way to turn him out of his course.&nbsp; If his steamer maintained sixteen knots, he would circumnavigate the globe in just about forty days.</p> <p>But there are compensations.&nbsp; On Wednesday evening, June 10, I brought up my noon position by dead reckoning to eight <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>&nbsp; Then I projected the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> course and saw that she would strike Futuna, one of the easternmost of the New Hebrides, a volcanic cone two thousand feet high that rose out of the deep ocean.&nbsp; I altered the course so that the <i>Snark</i> would pass ten miles to the northward.&nbsp; Then I spoke to Wada, the cook, who had the wheel every morning from four to six.</p> <p>&ldquo;Wada San, to-morrow morning, your watch, you look sharp on weather-bow you see land.&rdquo;</p> <p>And then I went to bed.&nbsp; The die was cast.&nbsp; I had staked my reputation as a navigator.&nbsp; Suppose, just suppose, that at daybreak there was no land.&nbsp; Then, where would my navigation be?&nbsp; And where would we be?&nbsp; And how would we ever find ourselves? or find any land?&nbsp; I caught ghastly visions of the <i>Snark</i> sailing for months through ocean solitudes and seeking vainly for land while we consumed our provisions and sat down with haggard faces to stare cannibalism in the face.</p> <p>I confess my sleep was not</p> <blockquote><p>&ldquo; . . . like a summer sky<br /> That held the music of a lark.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>Rather did &ldquo;I waken to the voiceless dark,&rdquo; and listen to the creaking of the bulkheads and the rippling of the sea alongside as the <i>Snark</i> logged steadily her six knots an hour.&nbsp; I went over my calculations again and again, striving to find some mistake, until my brain was in such fever that it discovered dozens of mistakes.&nbsp; Suppose, instead of being sixty miles off Futuna, that my navigation was all wrong and that I was only six miles off?&nbsp; In which case my course would be wrong, too, and for all I knew the <i>Snark</i> might be running straight at Futuna.&nbsp; For all I knew the <i>Snark</i> might strike Futuna the next moment.&nbsp; I almost sprang from the bunk at that thought; and, though I restrained myself, I know that I lay for a moment, nervous and tense, waiting for the shock.</p> <p>My sleep was broken by miserable nightmares.&nbsp; Earthquake seemed the favourite affliction, though there was one man, with a bill, who persisted in dunning me throughout the night.&nbsp; Also, he wanted to fight; and Charmian continually persuaded me to let him alone.&nbsp; Finally, however, the man with the everlasting dun ventured into a dream from which Charmian was absent.&nbsp; It was my opportunity, and we went at it, gloriously, all over the sidewalk and street, until he cried enough.&nbsp; Then I said, &ldquo;Now how about that bill?&rdquo;&nbsp; Having conquered, I was willing to pay.&nbsp; But the man looked at me and groaned.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was all a mistake,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the bill is for the house next door.&rdquo;</p> <p>That settled him, for he worried my dreams no more; and it settled me, too, for I woke up chuckling at the episode.&nbsp; It was three in the morning.&nbsp; I went up on deck.&nbsp; Henry, the Rapa islander, was steering.&nbsp; I looked at the log.&nbsp; It recorded forty-two miles.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> had not abated her six-knot gait, and she had not struck Futuna yet.&nbsp; At half-past five I was again on deck.&nbsp; Wada, at the wheel, had seen no land.&nbsp; I sat on the cockpit rail, a prey to morbid doubt for a quarter of an hour.&nbsp; Then I saw land, a small, high piece of land, just where it ought to be, rising from the water on the weather-bow.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock I could clearly make it out to be the beautiful volcanic cone of Futuna.&nbsp; At eight o&rsquo;clock, when it was abreast, I took its distance by the sextant and found it to be 9.3 miles away.&nbsp; And I had elected to pass it 10 miles away!</p> <p>Then, to the south, Aneiteum rose out of the sea, to the north, Aniwa, and, dead ahead, Tanna.&nbsp; There was no mistaking Tanna, for the smoke of its volcano was towering high in the sky.&nbsp; It was forty miles away, and by afternoon, as we drew close, never ceasing to log our six knots, we saw that it was a mountainous, hazy land, with no apparent openings in its coast-line.&nbsp; I was looking for Port Resolution, though I was quite prepared to find that as an anchorage, it had been destroyed.&nbsp; Volcanic earthquakes had lifted its bottom during the last forty years, so that where once the largest ships rode at anchor there was now, by last reports, scarcely space and depth sufficient for the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; And why should not another convulsion, since the last report, have closed the harbour completely?</p> <p>I ran in close to the unbroken coast, fringed with rocks awash upon which the crashing trade-wind sea burst white and high.&nbsp; I searched with my glasses for miles, but could see no entrance.&nbsp; I took a compass bearing of Futuna, another of Aniwa, and laid them off on the chart.&nbsp; Where the two bearings crossed was bound to be the position of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; Then, with my parallel rulers, I laid down a course from the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> position to Port Resolution.&nbsp; Having corrected this course for variation and deviation, I went on deck, and lo, the course directed me towards that unbroken coast-line of bursting seas.&nbsp; To my Rapa islander&rsquo;s great concern, I held on till the rocks awash were an eighth of a mile away.</p> <p>&ldquo;No harbour this place,&rdquo; he announced, shaking his head ominously.</p> <p>But I altered the course and ran along parallel with the coast.&nbsp; Charmian was at the wheel.&nbsp; Martin was at the engine, ready to throw on the propeller.&nbsp; A narrow slit of an opening showed up suddenly.&nbsp; Through the glasses I could see the seas breaking clear across.&nbsp; Henry, the Rapa man, looked with troubled eyes; so did Tehei, the Tahaa man.</p> <p>&ldquo;No passage, there,&rdquo; said Henry.&nbsp; &ldquo;We go there, we finish quick, sure.&rdquo;</p> <p>I confess I thought so, too; but I ran on abreast, watching to see if the line of breakers from one side the entrance did not overlap the line from the other side.&nbsp; Sure enough, it did.&nbsp; A narrow place where the sea ran smooth appeared.&nbsp;&nbsp; Charmian put down the wheel and steadied for the entrance.&nbsp; Martin threw on the engine, while all hands and the cook sprang to take in sail.</p> <p>A trader&rsquo;s house showed up in the bight of the bay.&nbsp; A geyser, on the shore, a hundred yards away; spouted a column of steam.&nbsp; To port, as we rounded a tiny point, the mission station appeared.</p> <p>&ldquo;Three fathoms,&rdquo; cried Wada at the lead-line.&nbsp; &ldquo;Three fathoms,&rdquo; &ldquo;two fathoms,&rdquo; came in quick succession.</p> <p>Charmian put the wheel down, Martin stopped the engine, and the <i>Snark</i> rounded to and the anchor rumbled down in three fathoms.&nbsp; Before we could catch our breaths a swarm of black Tannese was alongside and aboard&mdash;grinning, apelike creatures, with kinky hair and troubled eyes, wearing safety-pins and clay-pipes in their slitted ears: and as for the rest, wearing nothing behind and less than that before.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t mind telling that that night, when everybody was asleep, I sneaked up on deck, looked out over the quiet scene, and gloated&mdash;yes, gloated&mdash;over my navigation.</p> <h2><a name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 244</span>CHAPTER XV<br /> <span class="GutSmall">CRUISING IN THE SOLOMONS</span></h2> <p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Why</span> not come along now?&rdquo; said Captain Jansen to us, at Penduffryn, on the island of Guadalcanar.</p> <p>Charmian and I looked at each other and debated silently for half a minute.&nbsp; Then we nodded our heads simultaneously.&nbsp; It is a way we have of making up our minds to do things; and a very good way it is when one has no temperamental tears to shed over the last tin-of condensed milk when it has capsized.&nbsp; (We are living on tinned goods these days, and since mind is rumoured to be an emanation of matter, our similes are naturally of the packing-house variety.)</p> <p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better bring your revolvers along, and a couple of rifles,&rdquo; said Captain Jansen.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got five rifles aboard, though the one Mauser is without ammunition.&nbsp; Have you a few rounds to spare?&rdquo;</p> <p>We brought our rifles on board, several handfuls of Mauser cartridges, and Wada and Nakata, the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> cook and cabin-boy respectively.&nbsp; Wada and Nakata were in a bit of a funk.&nbsp; To say the least, they were not enthusiastic, though never did Nakata show the white feather in the face of danger.&nbsp; The Solomon Islands had not dealt kindly with them.&nbsp; In the first place, both had suffered from Solomon sores.&nbsp; So had the rest of us (at the time, I was nursing two fresh ones on a diet of corrosive sublimate); but the two Japanese had had more than their share.&nbsp; And the sores are not nice.&nbsp; They may be described as excessively active ulcers.&nbsp; A mosquito bite, a cut, or the slightest abrasion, serves for lodgment of the poison with which the air seems to be filled.&nbsp; Immediately the ulcer commences to eat.&nbsp; It eats in every direction, consuming skin and muscle with astounding rapidity.&nbsp; The pin-point ulcer of the first day is the size of a dime by the second day, and by the end of the week a silver dollar will not cover it.</p> <p>Worse than the sores, the two Japanese had been afflicted with Solomon Island fever.&nbsp; Each had been down repeatedly with it, and in their weak, convalescent moments they were wont to huddle together on the portion of the <i>Snark</i> that happened to be nearest to faraway Japan, and to gaze yearningly in that direction.</p> <p>But worst of all, they were now brought on board the <i>Minota</i> for a recruiting cruise along the savage coast of Malaita.&nbsp; Wada, who had the worse funk, was sure that he would never see Japan again, and with bleak, lack-lustre eyes he watched our rifles and ammunition going on board the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; He knew about the <i>Minota</i> and her Malaita cruises.&nbsp; He knew that she had been captured six months before on the Malaita coast, that her captain had been chopped to pieces with tomahawks, and that, according to the barbarian sense of equity on that sweet isle, she owed two more heads.&nbsp; Also, a labourer on Penduffryn Plantation, a Malaita boy, had just died of dysentery, and Wada knew that Penduffryn had been put in the debt of Malaita by one more head.&nbsp; Furthermore, in stowing our luggage away in the skipper&rsquo;s tiny cabin, he saw the axe gashes on the door where the triumphant bushmen had cut their way in.&nbsp; And, finally, the galley stove was without a pipe&mdash;said pipe having been part of the loot.</p> <p>The <i>Minota</i> was a teak-built, Australian yacht, ketch-rigged, long and lean, with a deep fin-keel, and designed for harbour racing rather than for recruiting blacks.&nbsp; When Charmian and I came on board, we found her crowded.&nbsp; Her double boat&rsquo;s crew, including substitutes, was fifteen, and she had a score and more of &ldquo;return&rdquo; boys, whose time on the plantations was served and who were bound back to their bush villages.&nbsp; To look at, they were certainly true head-hunting cannibals.&nbsp; Their perforated nostrils were thrust through with bone and wooden bodkins the size of lead-pencils.&nbsp; Numbers of them had punctured the extreme meaty point of the nose, from which protruded, straight out, spikes of turtle-shell or of beads strung on stiff wire.&nbsp; A few had further punctured their noses with rows of holes following the curves of the nostrils from lip to point.&nbsp; Each ear of every man had from two to a dozen holes in it&mdash;holes large enough to carry wooden plugs three inches in diameter down to tiny holes in which were carried clay-pipes and similar trifles.&nbsp; In fact, so many holes did they possess that they lacked ornaments to fill them; and when, the following day, as we neared Malaita, we tried out our rifles to see that they were in working order, there was a general scramble for the empty cartridges, which were thrust forthwith into the many aching voids in our passengers&rsquo; ears.</p> <p>At the time we tried out our rifles we put up our barbed wire railings.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i>, crown-decked, without any house, and with a rail six inches high, was too accessible to boarders.&nbsp; So brass stanchions were screwed into the rail and a double row of barbed wire stretched around her from stem to stern and back again.&nbsp; Which was all very well as a protection from savages, but it was mighty uncomfortable to those on board when the <i>Minota</i> took to jumping and plunging in a sea-way.&nbsp; When one dislikes sliding down upon the lee-rail barbed wire, and when he dares not catch hold of the weather-rail barbed wire to save himself from sliding, and when, with these various disinclinations, he finds himself on a smooth flush-deck that is heeled over at an angle of forty-five degrees, some of the delights of Solomon Islands cruising may be comprehended.&nbsp; Also, it must be remembered, the penalty of a fall into the barbed wire is more than the mere scratches, for each scratch is practically certain to become a venomous ulcer.&nbsp; That caution will not save one from the wire was evidenced one fine morning when we were running along the Malaita coast with the breeze on our quarter.&nbsp; The wind was fresh, and a tidy sea was making.&nbsp; A black boy was at the wheel.&nbsp; Captain Jansen, Mr. Jacobsen (the mate), Charmian, and I had just sat down on deck to breakfast.&nbsp; Three unusually large seas caught us.&nbsp; The boy at the wheel lost his head.&nbsp; Three times the <i>Minota</i> was swept.&nbsp; The breakfast was rushed over the lee-rail.&nbsp; The knives and forks went through the scuppers; a boy aft went clean overboard and was dragged back; and our doughty skipper lay half inboard and half out, jammed in the barbed wire.&nbsp; After that, for the rest of the cruise, our joint use of the several remaining eating utensils was a splendid example of primitive communism.&nbsp; On the <i>Eugenie</i>, however, it was even worse, for we had but one teaspoon among four of us&mdash;but the <i>Eugenie</i> is another story.</p> <p>Our first port was Su&rsquo;u on the west coast of Malaita.&nbsp; The Solomon Islands are on the fringe of things.&nbsp; It is difficult enough sailing on dark nights through reef-spiked channels and across erratic currents where there are no lights to guide (from northwest to southeast the Solomons extend across a thousand miles of sea, and on all the thousands of miles of coasts there is not one lighthouse); but the difficulty is seriously enhanced by the fact that the land itself is not correctly charted.&nbsp; Su&rsquo;u is an example.&nbsp; On the Admiralty chart of Malaita the coast at this point runs a straight, unbroken line.&nbsp; Yet across this straight, unbroken line the <i>Minota</i> sailed in twenty fathoms of water.&nbsp; Where the land was alleged to be, was a deep indentation.&nbsp; Into this we sailed, the mangroves closing about us, till we dropped anchor in a mirrored pond.&nbsp; Captain Jansen did not like the anchorage.&nbsp; It was the first time he had been there, and Su&rsquo;u had a bad reputation.&nbsp; There was no wind with which to get away in case of attack, while the crew could be bushwhacked to a man if they attempted to tow out in the whale-boat.&nbsp; It was a pretty trap, if trouble blew up.</p> <p>&ldquo;Suppose the <i>Minota</i> went ashore&mdash;what would you do?&rdquo; I asked.</p> <p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s not going ashore,&rdquo; was Captain Jansen&rsquo;s answer.</p> <p>&ldquo;But just in case she did?&rdquo; I insisted.&nbsp; He considered for a moment and shifted his glance from the mate buckling on a revolver to the boat&rsquo;s crew climbing into the whale-boat each man with a rifle.</p> <p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;d get into the whale-boat, and get out of here as fast as God&rsquo;d let us,&rdquo; came the skipper&rsquo;s delayed reply.</p> <p>He explained at length that no white man was sure of his <i>Malaita</i> crew in a tight place; that the bushmen looked upon all wrecks as their personal property; that the bushmen possessed plenty of Snider rifles; and that he had on board a dozen &ldquo;return&rdquo; boys for Su&rsquo;u who were certain to join in with their friends and relatives ashore when it came to looting the <i>Minota</i>.</p> <p>The first work of the whale-boat was to take the &ldquo;return&rdquo; boys and their trade-boxes ashore.&nbsp; Thus one danger was removed.&nbsp; While this was being done, a canoe came alongside manned by three naked savages.&nbsp; And when I say naked, I mean naked.&nbsp; Not one vestige of clothing did they have on, unless nose-rings, ear-plugs, and shell armlets be accounted clothing.&nbsp; The head man in the canoe was an old chief, one-eyed, reputed to be friendly, and so dirty that a boat-scraper would have lost its edge on him.&nbsp; His mission was to warn the skipper against allowing any of his people to go ashore.&nbsp; The old fellow repeated the warning again that night.</p> <p>In vain did the whale-boat ply about the shores of the bay in quest of recruits.&nbsp; The bush was full of armed natives; all willing enough to talk with the recruiter, but not one would engage to sign on for three years&rsquo; plantation labour at six pounds per year.&nbsp; Yet they were anxious enough to get our people ashore.&nbsp; On the second day they raised a smoke on the beach at the head of the bay.&nbsp; This being the customary signal of men desiring to recruit, the boat was sent.&nbsp; But nothing resulted.&nbsp; No one recruited, nor were any of our men lured ashore.&nbsp; A little later we caught glimpses of a number of armed natives moving about on the beach.</p> <p>Outside of these rare glimpses, there was no telling how many might be lurking in the bush.&nbsp; There was no penetrating that primeval jungle with the eye.&nbsp; In the afternoon, Captain Jansen, Charmian, and I went dynamiting fish.&nbsp; Each one of the boat&rsquo;s crew carried a Lee-Enfield.&nbsp; &ldquo;Johnny,&rdquo; the native recruiter, had a Winchester beside him at the steering sweep.&nbsp; We rowed in close to a portion of the shore that looked deserted.&nbsp; Here the boat was turned around and backed in; in case of attack, the boat would be ready to dash away.&nbsp; In all the time I was on Malaita I never saw a boat land bow on.&nbsp; In fact, the recruiting vessels use two boats&mdash;one to go in on the beach, armed, of course, and the other to lie off several hundred feet and &ldquo;cover&rdquo; the first boat.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i>, however, being a small vessel, did not carry a covering boat.</p> <p>We were close in to the shore and working in closer, stern-first, when a school of fish was sighted.&nbsp; The fuse was ignited and the stick of dynamite thrown.&nbsp; With the explosion, the surface of the water was broken by the flash of leaping fish.&nbsp; At the same instant the woods broke into life.&nbsp; A score of naked savages, armed with bows and arrows, spears, and Sniders, burst out upon the shore.&nbsp; At the same moment our boat&rsquo;s crew lifted their rifles.&nbsp; And thus the opposing parties faced each other, while our extra boys dived over after the stunned fish.</p> <p>Three fruitless days were spent at Su&rsquo;u.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i> got no recruits from the bush, and the bushmen got no heads from the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; In fact, the only one who got anything was Wada, and his was a nice dose of fever.&nbsp; We towed out with the whale-boat, and ran along the coast to Langa Langa, a large village of salt-water people, built with prodigious labour on a lagoon sand-bank&mdash;literally <i>built</i> up, an artificial island reared as a refuge from the blood-thirsty bushmen.&nbsp; Here, also, on the shore side of the lagoon, was Binu, the place where the <i>Minota</i> was captured half a year previously and her captain killed by the bushmen.&nbsp; As we sailed in through the narrow entrance, a canoe came alongside with the news that the man-of-war had just left that morning after having burned three villages, killed some thirty pigs, and drowned a baby.&nbsp; This was the Cambrian, Captain Lewes commanding.&nbsp; He and I had first met in Korea during the Japanese-Russian War, and we had been crossing each other&rsquo;s trail ever since without ever a meeting.&nbsp; The day the <i>Snark</i> sailed into Suva, in the Fijis, we made out the <i>Cambrian</i> going out.&nbsp; At Vila, in the New Hebrides, we missed each other by one day.&nbsp; We passed each other in the night-time off the island of Santo.&nbsp; And the day the <i>Cambrian</i> arrived at Tulagi, we sailed from Penduffryn, a dozen miles away.&nbsp; And here at Langa Langa we had missed by several hours.</p> <p>The <i>Cambrian</i> had come to punish the murderers of the <i>Minota&rsquo;s</i> captain, but what she had succeeded in doing we did not learn until later in the day, when a Mr. Abbot, a missionary, came alongside in his whale-boat.&nbsp; The villages had been burned and the pigs killed.&nbsp; But the natives had escaped personal harm.&nbsp; The murderers had not been captured, though the <i>Minota&rsquo;s</i> flag and other of her gear had been recovered.&nbsp; The drowning of the baby had come about through a misunderstanding.&nbsp; Chief Johnny, of Binu, had declined to guide the landing party into the bush, nor could any of his men be induced to perform that office.&nbsp; Whereupon Captain Lewes, righteously indignant, had told Chief Johnny that he deserved to have his village burned.&nbsp; Johnny&rsquo;s <i>b&ecirc;che de mer</i> English did not include the word &ldquo;deserve.&rdquo;&nbsp; So his understanding of it was that his village was to be burned anyway.&nbsp; The immediate stampede of the inhabitants was so hurried that the baby was dropped into the water.&nbsp; In the meantime Chief Johnny hastened to Mr. Abbot.&nbsp; Into his hand he put fourteen sovereigns and requested him to go on board the <i>Cambrian</i> and buy Captain Lewes off.&nbsp; Johnny&rsquo;s village was not burned.&nbsp; Nor did Captain Lewes get the fourteen sovereigns, for I saw them later in Johnny&rsquo;s possession when he boarded the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; The excuse Johnny gave me for not guiding the landing party was a big boil which he proudly revealed.&nbsp; His real reason, however, and a perfectly valid one, though he did not state it, was fear of revenge on the part of the bushmen.&nbsp; Had he, or any of his men, guided the marines, he could have looked for bloody reprisals as soon as the <i>Cambrian</i> weighed anchor.</p> <p>As an illustration of conditions in the Solomons, Johnny&rsquo;s business on board was to turn over, for a tobacco consideration, the sprit, mainsail, and jib of a whale-boat.&nbsp; Later in the day, a Chief Billy came on board and turned over, for a tobacco consideration, the mast and boom.&nbsp; This gear belonged to a whale-boat which Captain Jansen had recovered the previous trip of the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; The whale-boat belonged to Meringe Plantation on the island of Ysabel.&nbsp; Eleven contract labourers, Malaita men and bushmen at that, had decided to run away.&nbsp; Being bushmen, they knew nothing of salt water nor of the way of a boat in the sea.&nbsp; So they persuaded two natives of San Cristoval, salt-water men, to run away with them.&nbsp; It served the San Cristoval men right.&nbsp; They should have known better.&nbsp; When they had safely navigated the stolen boat to Malaita, they had their heads hacked off for their pains.&nbsp; It was this boat and gear that Captain Jansen had recovered.</p> <p>Not for nothing have I journeyed all the way to the Solomons.&nbsp; At last I have seen Charmian&rsquo;s proud spirit humbled and her imperious queendom of femininity dragged in the dust.&nbsp; It happened at Langa Langa, ashore, on the manufactured island which one cannot see for the houses.&nbsp; Here, surrounded by hundreds of unblushing naked men, women, and children, we wandered about and saw the sights.&nbsp; We had our revolvers strapped on, and the boat&rsquo;s crew, fully armed, lay at the oars, stern in; but the lesson of the man-of-war was too recent for us to apprehend trouble.&nbsp; We walked about everywhere and saw everything until at last we approached a large tree trunk that served as a bridge across a shallow estuary.&nbsp; The blacks formed a wall in front of us and refused to let us pass.&nbsp; We wanted to know why we were stopped.&nbsp; The blacks said we could go on.&nbsp; We misunderstood, and started.&nbsp; Explanations became more definite.&nbsp; Captain Jansen and I, being men, could go on.&nbsp; But no Mary was allowed to wade around that bridge, much less cross it.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mary&rdquo; is b&ecirc;che de mer for woman.&nbsp; Charmian was a Mary.&nbsp; To her the bridge was tambo, which is the native for taboo.&nbsp; Ah, how my chest expanded!&nbsp; At last my manhood was vindicated.&nbsp; In truth I belonged to the lordly sex.&nbsp; Charmian could trapse along at our heels, but we were MEN, and we could go right over that bridge while she would have to go around by whale-boat.</p> <p>Now I should not care to be misunderstood by what follows; but it is a matter of common knowledge in the Solomons that attacks of fever are often brought on by shock.&nbsp; Inside half an hour after Charmian had been refused the right of way, she was being rushed aboard the <i>Minota</i>, packed in blankets, and dosed with quinine.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what kind of shock had happened to Wada and Nakata, but at any rate they were down with fever as well.&nbsp; The Solomons might be healthfuller.</p> <p>Also, during the attack of fever, Charmian developed a Solomon sore.&nbsp; It was the last straw.&nbsp; Every one on the <i>Snark</i> had been afflicted except her.&nbsp; I had thought that I was going to lose my foot at the ankle by one exceptionally malignant boring ulcer.&nbsp; Henry and Tehei, the Tahitian sailors, had had numbers of them.&nbsp; Wada had been able to count his by the score.&nbsp; Nakata had had single ones three inches in length.&nbsp; Martin had been quite certain that necrosis of his shinbone had set in from the roots of the amazing colony he elected to cultivate in that locality.&nbsp; But Charmian had escaped.&nbsp; Out of her long immunity had been bred contempt for the rest of us.&nbsp; Her ego was flattered to such an extent that one day she shyly informed me that it was all a matter of pureness of blood.&nbsp; Since all the rest of us cultivated the sores, and since she did not&mdash;well, anyway, hers was the size of a silver dollar, and the pureness of her blood enabled her to cure it after several weeks of strenuous nursing.&nbsp; She pins her faith to corrosive sublimate.&nbsp; Martin swears by iodoform.&nbsp; Henry uses lime-juice undiluted.&nbsp; And I believe that when corrosive sublimate is slow in taking hold, alternate dressings of peroxide of hydrogen are just the thing.&nbsp; There are white men in the Solomons who stake all upon boracic acid, and others who are prejudiced in favour of lysol.&nbsp; I also have the weakness of a panacea.&nbsp; It is California.&nbsp; I defy any man to get a Solomon Island sore in California.</p> <p>We ran down the lagoon from Langa Langa, between mangrove swamps, through passages scarcely wider than the <i>Minota</i>, and past the reef villages of Kaloka and Auki.&nbsp; Like the founders of Venice, these salt-water men were originally refugees from the mainland.&nbsp; Too weak to hold their own in the bush, survivors of village massacres, they fled to the sand-banks of the lagoon.&nbsp; These sand-banks they built up into islands.&nbsp; They were compelled to seek their provender from the sea, and in time they became salt-water men.&nbsp; They learned the ways of the fish and the shellfish, and they invented hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps.&nbsp; They developed canoe-bodies.&nbsp; Unable to walk about, spending all their time in the canoes, they became thick-armed and broad-shouldered, with narrow waists and frail spindly legs.&nbsp; Controlling the sea-coast, they became wealthy, trade with the interior passing largely through their hands.&nbsp; But perpetual enmity exists between them and the bushmen.&nbsp; Practically their only truces are on market-days, which occur at stated intervals, usually twice a week.&nbsp; The bushwomen and the salt-water women do the bartering.&nbsp; Back in the bush, a hundred yards away, fully armed, lurk the bushmen, while to seaward, in the canoes, are the salt-water men.&nbsp; There are very rare instances of the market-day truces being broken.&nbsp; The bushmen like their fish too well, while the salt-water men have an organic craving for the vegetables they cannot grow on their crowded islets.</p> <p>Thirty miles from Langa Langa brought us to the passage between Bassakanna Island and the mainland.&nbsp; Here, at nightfall, the wind left us, and all night, with the whale-boat towing ahead and the crew on board sweating at the sweeps, we strove to win through.&nbsp; But the tide was against us.&nbsp; At midnight, midway in the passage, we came up with the <i>Eugenie</i>, a big recruiting schooner, towing with two whale-boats.&nbsp; Her skipper, Captain Keller, a sturdy young German of twenty-two, came on board for a &ldquo;gam,&rdquo; and the latest news of Malaita was swapped back and forth.&nbsp; He had been in luck, having gathered in twenty recruits at the village of Fiu.&nbsp; While lying there, one of the customary courageous killings had taken place.&nbsp; The murdered boy was what is called a salt-water bushman&mdash;that is, a salt-water man who is half bushman and who lives by the sea but does not live on an islet.&nbsp; Three bushmen came down to this man where he was working in his garden.&nbsp; They behaved in friendly fashion, and after a time suggested <i>kai-kai</i>.&nbsp; <i>Kai-kai</i> means food.&nbsp; He built a fire and started to boil some taro.&nbsp; While bending over the pot, one of the bushmen shot him through the head.&nbsp; He fell into the flames, whereupon they thrust a spear through his stomach, turned it around, and broke it off.</p> <p>&ldquo;My word,&rdquo; said Captain Keller, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want ever to be shot with a Snider.&nbsp; Spread!&nbsp; You could drive a horse and carriage through that hole in his head.&rdquo;</p> <p>Another recent courageous killing I heard of on Malaita was that of an old man.&nbsp; A bush chief had died a natural death.&nbsp; Now the bushmen don&rsquo;t believe in natural deaths.&nbsp; No one was ever known to die a natural death.&nbsp; The only way to die is by bullet, tomahawk, or spear thrust.&nbsp; When a man dies in any other way, it is a clear case of having been charmed to death.&nbsp; When the bush chief died naturally, his tribe placed the guilt on a certain family.&nbsp; Since it did not matter which one of the family was killed, they selected this old man who lived by himself.&nbsp; This would make it easy.&nbsp; Furthermore, he possessed no Snider.&nbsp; Also, he was blind.&nbsp; The old fellow got an inkling of what was coming and laid in a large supply of arrows.&nbsp; Three brave warriors, each with a Snider, came down upon him in the night time.&nbsp; All night they fought valiantly with him.&nbsp; Whenever they moved in the bush and made a noise or a rustle, he discharged an arrow in that direction.&nbsp; In the morning, when his last arrow was gone, the three heroes crept up to him and blew his brains out.</p> <p>Morning found us still vainly toiling through the passage.&nbsp; At last, in despair, we turned tail, ran out to sea, and sailed clear round Bassakanna to our objective, Malu.&nbsp; The anchorage at Malu was very good, but it lay between the shore and an ugly reef, and while easy to enter, it was difficult to leave.&nbsp; The direction of the southeast trade necessitated a beat to windward; the point of the reef was widespread and shallow; while a current bore down at all times upon the point.</p> <p>Mr. Caulfeild, the missionary at Malu, arrived in his whale-boat from a trip down the coast.&nbsp; A slender, delicate man he was, enthusiastic in his work, level-headed and practical, a true twentieth-century soldier of the Lord.&nbsp; When he came down to this station on Malaita, as he said, he agreed to come for six months.&nbsp; He further agreed that if he were alive at the end of that time, he would continue on.&nbsp; Six years had passed and he was still continuing on.&nbsp; Nevertheless he was justified in his doubt as to living longer than six months.&nbsp; Three missionaries had preceded him on Malaita, and in less than that time two had died of fever and the third had gone home a wreck.</p> <p>&ldquo;What murder are you talking about?&rdquo; he asked suddenly, in the midst of a confused conversation with Captain Jansen.</p> <p>Captain Jansen explained.</p> <p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s not the one I have reference to,&rdquo; quoth Mr. Caulfeild.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s old already.&nbsp; It happened two weeks ago.&rdquo;</p> <p>It was here at Malu that I atoned for all the exulting and gloating I had been guilty of over the Solomon sore Charmian had collected at Langa Langa.&nbsp; Mr. Caulfeild was indirectly responsible for my atonement.&nbsp; He presented us with a chicken, which I pursued into the bush with a rifle.&nbsp; My intention was to clip off its head.&nbsp; I succeeded, but in doing so fell over a log and barked my shin.&nbsp; Result: three Solomon sores.&nbsp; This made five all together that were adorning my person.&nbsp; Also, Captain Jansen and Nakata had caught <i>gari-gari</i>.&nbsp; Literally translated, <i>gari-gari</i> is scratch-scratch.&nbsp; But translation was not necessary for the rest of us.&nbsp; The skipper&rsquo;s and Nakata&rsquo;s gymnastics served as a translation without words.</p> <p>(No, the Solomon Islands are not as healthy as they might be.&nbsp; I am writing this article on the island of Ysabel, where we have taken the <i>Snark</i> to careen and clean her cooper.&nbsp; I got over my last attack of fever this morning, and I have had only one free day between attacks.&nbsp; Charmian&rsquo;s are two weeks apart.&nbsp; Wada is a wreck from fever.&nbsp; Last night he showed all the symptoms of coming down with pneumonia.&nbsp; Henry, a strapping giant of a Tahitian, just up from his last dose of fever, is dragging around the deck like a last year&rsquo;s crab-apple.&nbsp; Both he and Tehei have accumulated a praiseworthy display of Solomon sores.&nbsp; Also, they have caught a new form of gari-gari, a sort of vegetable poisoning like poison oak or poison ivy.&nbsp; But they are not unique in this.&nbsp; A number of days ago Charmian, Martin, and I went pigeon-shooting on a small island, and we have had a foretaste of eternal torment ever since.&nbsp; Also, on that small island, Martin cut the soles of his feet to ribbons on the coral whilst chasing a shark&mdash;at least, so he says, but from the glimpse I caught of him I thought it was the other way about.&nbsp; The coral-cuts have all become Solomon sores.&nbsp; Before my last fever I knocked the skin off my knuckles while heaving on a line, and I now have three fresh sores.&nbsp; And poor Nakata!&nbsp; For three weeks he has been unable to sit down.&nbsp; He sat down yesterday for the first time, and managed to stay down for fifteen minutes.&nbsp; He says cheerfully that he expects to be cured of his gari-gari in another month.&nbsp; Furthermore, his gari-gari, from too enthusiastic scratch-scratching, has furnished footholds for countless Solomon sores.&nbsp; Still furthermore, he has just come down with his seventh attack of fever.&nbsp; If I were king, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.&nbsp; On second thought, king or no king, I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;d have the heart to do it.)</p> <p>Recruiting plantation labourers on a small, narrow yacht, built for harbour sailing, is not any too nice.&nbsp; The decks swarm with recruits and their families.&nbsp; The main cabin is packed with them.&nbsp; At night they sleep there.&nbsp; The only entrance to our tiny cabin is through the main cabin, and we jam our way through them or walk over them.&nbsp; Nor is this nice.&nbsp; One and all, they are afflicted with every form of malignant skin disease.&nbsp; Some have ringworm, others have <i>bukua</i>.&nbsp; This latter is caused by a vegetable parasite that invades the skin and eats it away.&nbsp; The itching is intolerable.&nbsp; The afflicted ones scratch until the air is filled with fine dry flakes.&nbsp; Then there are yaws and many other skin ulcerations.&nbsp; Men come aboard with Solomon sores in their feet so large that they can walk only on their toes, or with holes in their legs so terrible that a fist could be thrust in to the bone.&nbsp; Blood-poisoning is very frequent, and Captain Jansen, with sheath-knife and sail needle, operates lavishly on one and all.&nbsp; No matter how desperate the situation, after opening and cleansing, he claps on a poultice of sea-biscuit soaked in water.&nbsp; Whenever we see a particularly horrible case, we retire to a corner and deluge our own sores with corrosive sublimate.&nbsp; And so we live and eat and sleep on the <i>Minota</i>, taking our chance and &ldquo;pretending it is good.&rdquo;</p> <p>At Suava, another artificial island, I had a second crow over Charmian.&nbsp; A big fella marster belong Suava (which means the high chief of Suava) came on board.&nbsp; But first he sent an emissary to Captain Jansen for a fathom of calico with which to cover his royal nakedness.&nbsp; Meanwhile he lingered in the canoe alongside.&nbsp; The regal dirt on his chest I swear was half an inch thick, while it was a good wager that the underneath layers were anywhere from ten to twenty years of age.&nbsp; He sent his emissary on board again, who explained that the big fella marster belong Suava was condescendingly willing enough to shake hands with Captain Jansen and me and cadge a stick or so of trade tobacco, but that nevertheless his high-born soul was still at so lofty an altitude that it could not sink itself to such a depth of degradation as to shake hands with a mere female woman.&nbsp; Poor Charmian!&nbsp; Since her Malaita experiences she has become a changed woman.&nbsp; Her meekness and humbleness are appallingly becoming, and I should not be surprised, when we return to civilization and stroll along a sidewalk, to see her take her station, with bowed head, a yard in the rear.</p> <p>Nothing much happened at Suava.&nbsp; Bichu, the native cook, deserted.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i> dragged anchor.&nbsp; It blew heavy squalls of wind and rain.&nbsp; The mate, Mr. Jacobsen, and Wada were prostrated with fever.&nbsp; Our Solomon sores increased and multiplied.&nbsp; And the cockroaches on board held a combined Fourth of July and Coronation Parade.&nbsp; They selected midnight for the time, and our tiny cabin for the place.&nbsp; They were from two to three inches long; there were hundreds of them, and they walked all over us.&nbsp; When we attempted to pursue them, they left solid footing, rose up in the air, and fluttered about like humming-birds.&nbsp; They were much larger than ours on the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; But ours are young yet, and haven&rsquo;t had a chance to grow.&nbsp; Also, the <i>Snark</i> has centipedes, big ones, six inches long.&nbsp; We kill them occasionally, usually in Charmian&rsquo;s bunk.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been bitten twice by them, both times foully, while I was asleep.&nbsp; But poor Martin had worse luck.&nbsp; After being sick in bed for three weeks, the first day he sat up he sat down on one.&nbsp; Sometimes I think they are the wisest who never go to Carcassonne.</p> <p>Later on we returned to Malu, picked up seven recruits, hove up anchor, and started to beat out the treacherous entrance.&nbsp; The wind was chopping about, the current upon the ugly point of reef setting strong.&nbsp; Just as we were on the verge of clearing it and gaining open sea, the wind broke off four points.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i> attempted to go about, but missed stays.&nbsp; Two of her anchors had been lost at Tulagi.&nbsp; Her one remaining anchor was let go.&nbsp; Chain was let out to give it a hold on the coral.&nbsp; Her fin keel struck bottom, and her main topmast lurched and shivered as if about to come down upon our heads.&nbsp; She fetched up on the slack of the anchors at the moment a big comber smashed her shoreward.&nbsp; The chain parted.&nbsp; It was our only anchor.&nbsp; The <i>Minota</i> swung around on her heel and drove headlong into the breakers.</p> <p>Bedlam reigned.&nbsp; All the recruits below, bushmen and afraid of the sea, dashed panic-stricken on deck and got in everybody&rsquo;s way.&nbsp; At the same time the boat&rsquo;s crew made a rush for the rifles.&nbsp; They knew what going ashore on Malaita meant&mdash;one hand for the ship and the other hand to fight off the natives.&nbsp; What they held on with I don&rsquo;t know, and they needed to hold on as the <i>Minota</i> lifted, rolled, and pounded on the coral.&nbsp; The bushmen clung in the rigging, too witless to watch out for the topmast.&nbsp; The whale-boat was run out with a tow-line endeavouring in a puny way to prevent the <i>Minota</i> from being flung farther in toward the reef, while Captain Jansen and the mate, the latter pallid and weak with fever, were resurrecting a scrap-anchor from out the ballast and rigging up a stock for it.&nbsp; Mr. Caulfeild, with his mission boys, arrived in his whale-boat to help.</p> <p>When the <i>Minota</i> first struck, there was not a canoe in sight; but like vultures circling down out of the blue, canoes began to arrive from every quarter.&nbsp; The boat&rsquo;s crew, with rifles at the ready, kept them lined up a hundred feet away with a promise of death if they ventured nearer.&nbsp; And there they clung, a hundred feet away, black and ominous, crowded with men, holding their canoes with their paddles on the perilous edge of the breaking surf.&nbsp; In the meantime the bushmen were flocking down from the hills armed with spears, Sniders, arrows, and clubs, until the beach was massed with them.&nbsp; To complicate matters, at least ten of our recruits had been enlisted from the very bushmen ashore who were waiting hungrily for the loot of the tobacco and trade goods and all that we had on board.</p> <p>The <i>Minota</i> was honestly built, which is the first essential for any boat that is pounding on a reef.&nbsp; Some idea of what she endured may be gained from the fact that in the first twenty-four hours she parted two anchor-chains and eight hawsers.&nbsp; Our boat&rsquo;s crew was kept busy diving for the anchors and bending new lines.&nbsp; There were times when she parted the chains reinforced with hawsers.&nbsp; And yet she held together.&nbsp; Tree trunks were brought from ashore and worked under her to save her keel and bilges, but the trunks were gnawed and splintered and the ropes that held them frayed to fragments, and still she pounded and held together.&nbsp; But we were luckier than the <i>Ivanhoe</i>, a big recruiting schooner, which had gone ashore on Malaita several months previously and been promptly rushed by the natives.&nbsp; The captain and crew succeeded in getting away in the whale-boats, and the bushmen and salt-water men looted her clean of everything portable.</p> <p>Squall after squall, driving wind and blinding rain, smote the <i>Minota</i>, while a heavier sea was making.&nbsp; The <i>Eugenie</i> lay at anchor five miles to windward, but she was behind a point of land and could not know of our mishap.&nbsp; At Captain Jansen&rsquo;s suggestion, I wrote a note to Captain Keller, asking him to bring extra anchors and gear to our aid.&nbsp; But not a canoe could be persuaded to carry the letter.&nbsp; I offered half a case of tobacco, but the blacks grinned and held their canoes bow-on to the breaking seas.&nbsp; A half a case of tobacco was worth three pounds.&nbsp; In two hours, even against the strong wind and sea, a man could have carried the letter and received in payment what he would have laboured half a year for on a plantation.&nbsp; I managed to get into a canoe and paddle out to where Mr. Caulfeild was running an anchor with his whale-boat.&nbsp; My idea was that he would have more influence over the natives.&nbsp; He called the canoes up to him, and a score of them clustered around and heard the offer of half a case of tobacco.&nbsp; No one spoke.</p> <p>&ldquo;I know what you think,&rdquo; the missionary called out to them.&nbsp; &ldquo;You think plenty tobacco on the schooner and you&rsquo;re going to get it.&nbsp; I tell you plenty rifles on schooner.&nbsp; You no get tobacco, you get bullets.&rdquo;</p> <p>At last, one man, alone in a small canoe, took the letter and started.&nbsp; Waiting for relief, work went on steadily on the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; Her water-tanks were emptied, and spars, sails, and ballast started shoreward.&nbsp; There were lively times on board when the <i>Minota</i> rolled one bilge down and then the other, a score of men leaping for life and legs as the trade-boxes, booms, and eighty-pound pigs of iron ballast rushed across from rail to rail and back again.&nbsp; The poor pretty harbour yacht!&nbsp; Her decks and running rigging were a raffle.&nbsp; Down below everything was disrupted.&nbsp; The cabin floor had been torn up to get at the ballast, and rusty bilge-water swashed and splashed.&nbsp; A bushel of limes, in a mess of flour and water, charged about like so many sticky dumplings escaped from a half-cooked stew.&nbsp; In the inner cabin, Nakata kept guard over our rifles and ammunition.</p> <p>Three hours from the time our messenger started, a whale-boat, pressing along under a huge spread of canvas, broke through the thick of a shrieking squall to windward.&nbsp; It was Captain Keller, wet with rain and spray, a revolver in belt, his boat&rsquo;s crew fully armed, anchors and hawsers heaped high amidships, coming as fast as wind could drive&mdash;the white man, the inevitable white man, coming to a white man&rsquo;s rescue.</p> <p>The vulture line of canoes that had waited so long broke and disappeared as quickly as it had formed.&nbsp; The corpse was not dead after all.&nbsp; We now had three whale-boats, two plying steadily between the vessel and shore, the other kept busy running out anchors, rebending parted hawsers, and recovering the lost anchors.&nbsp; Later in the afternoon, after a consultation, in which we took into consideration that a number of our boat&rsquo;s crew, as well as ten of the recruits, belonged to this place, we disarmed the boat&rsquo;s crew.&nbsp; This, incidently, gave them both hands free to work for the vessel.&nbsp; The rifles were put in the charge of five of Mr. Caulfeild&rsquo;s mission boys.&nbsp; And down below in the wreck of the cabin the missionary and his converts prayed to God to save the <i>Minota</i>.&nbsp; It was an impressive scene! the unarmed man of God praying with cloudless faith, his savage followers leaning on their rifles and mumbling amens.&nbsp; The cabin walls reeled about them.&nbsp; The vessel lifted and smashed upon the coral with every sea.&nbsp; From on deck came the shouts of men heaving and toiling, praying, in another fashion, with purposeful will and strength of arm.</p> <p>That night Mr. Caulfeild brought off a warning.&nbsp; One of our recruits had a price on his head of fifty fathoms of shell-money and forty pigs.&nbsp; Baffled in their desire to capture the vessel, the bushmen decided to get the head of the man.&nbsp; When killing begins, there is no telling where it will end, so Captain Jansen armed a whale-boat and rowed in to the edge of the beach.&nbsp; Ugi, one of his boat&rsquo;s crew, stood up and orated for him.&nbsp; Ugi was excited.&nbsp; Captain Jansen&rsquo;s warning that any canoe sighted that night would be pumped full of lead, Ugi turned into a bellicose declaration of war, which wound up with a peroration somewhat to the following effect: &ldquo;You kill my captain, I drink his blood and die with him!&rdquo;</p> <p>The bushmen contented themselves with burning an unoccupied mission house, and sneaked back to the bush.&nbsp; The next day the <i>Eugenie</i> sailed in and dropped anchor.&nbsp; Three days and two nights the <i>Minota</i> pounded on the reef; but she held together, and the shell of her was pulled off at last and anchored in smooth water.&nbsp; There we said good-bye to her and all on board, and sailed away on the <i>Eugenie</i>, bound for Florida Island. <a name="citation268"></a><a href="#footnote268" class="citation">[268]</a></p> <h2><a name="page270"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 270</span>CHAPTER XVI<br /> <span class="GutSmall">B&Ecirc;CHE DE MER ENGLISH</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">Given</span> a number of white traders, a wide area of land, and scores of savage languages and dialects, the result will be that the traders will manufacture a totally new, unscientific, but perfectly adequate, language.&nbsp; This the traders did when they invented the Chinook lingo for use over British Columbia, Alaska, and the Northwest Territory.&nbsp; So with the lingo of the Kroo-boys of Africa, the pigeon English of the Far East, and the b&ecirc;che de mer of the westerly portion of the South Seas.&nbsp; This latter is often called pigeon English, but pigeon English it certainly is not.&nbsp; To show how totally different it is, mention need be made only of the fact that the classic piecee of China has no place in it.</p> <p>There was once a sea captain who needed a dusky potentate down in his cabin.&nbsp; The potentate was on deck.&nbsp; The captain&rsquo;s command to the Chinese steward was &ldquo;Hey, boy, you go top-side catchee one piecee king.&rdquo;&nbsp; Had the steward been a New Hebridean or a Solomon islander, the command would have been: &ldquo;Hey, you fella boy, go look &rsquo;m eye belong you along deck, bring &rsquo;m me fella one big fella marster belong black man.&rdquo;</p> <p>It was the first white men who ventured through Melanesia after the early explorers, who developed b&ecirc;che de mer English&mdash;men such as the b&ecirc;che de mer fishermen, the sandalwood traders, the pearl hunters, and the labour recruiters.&nbsp; In the Solomons, for instance, scores of languages and dialects are spoken.&nbsp; Unhappy the trader who tried to learn them all; for in the next group to which he might wander he would find scores of additional tongues.&nbsp; A common language was necessary&mdash;a language so simple that a child could learn it, with a vocabulary as limited as the intelligence of the savages upon whom it was to be used.&nbsp; The traders did not reason this out.&nbsp; B&ecirc;che de mer English was the product of conditions and circumstances.&nbsp; Function precedes organ; and the need for a universal Melanesian lingo preceded b&ecirc;che de mer English.&nbsp; B&ecirc;che de mer was purely fortuitous, but it was fortuitous in the deterministic way.&nbsp; Also, from the fact that out of the need the lingo arose, b&ecirc;che de mer English is a splendid argument for the Esperanto enthusiasts.</p> <p>A limited vocabulary means that each word shall be overworked.&nbsp; Thus, <i>fella</i>, in b&ecirc;che de mer, means all that <i>piecee</i> does and quite a bit more, and is used continually in every possible connection.&nbsp; Another overworked word is <i>belong</i>.&nbsp; Nothing stands alone.&nbsp; Everything is related.&nbsp; The thing desired is indicated by its relationship with other things.&nbsp; A primitive vocabulary means primitive expression, thus, the continuance of rain is expressed as <i>rain he stop</i>.&nbsp; <i>Sun he come up</i> cannot possibly be misunderstood, while the phrase-structure itself can be used without mental exertion in ten thousand different ways, as, for instance, a native who desires to tell you that there are fish in the water and who says <i>fish he stop</i>.&nbsp; It was while trading on Ysabel island that I learned the excellence of this usage.&nbsp; I wanted two or three pairs of the large clam-shells (measuring three feet across), but I did not want the meat inside.&nbsp; Also, I wanted the meat of some of the smaller clams to make a chowder.&nbsp; My instruction to the natives finally ripened into the following &ldquo;You fella bring me fella big fella clam&mdash;kai-kai he no stop, he walk about.&nbsp; You fella bring me fella small fella clam&mdash;kai-kai he stop.&rdquo;</p> <p>Kai-kai is the Polynesian for food, meat, eating, and to eat: but it would be hard to say whether it was introduced into Melanesia by the sandalwood traders or by the Polynesian westward drift.&nbsp; Walk about is a quaint phrase.&nbsp; Thus, if one orders a Solomon sailor to put a tackle on a boom, he will suggest, &ldquo;That fella boom he walk about too much.&rdquo;&nbsp; And if the said sailor asks for shore liberty, he will state that it is his desire to walk about.&nbsp; Or if said sailor be seasick, he will explain his condition by stating, &ldquo;Belly belong me walk about too much.&rdquo;</p> <p>Too much, by the way, does not indicate anything excessive.&nbsp; It is merely the simple superlative.&nbsp; Thus, if a native is asked the distance to a certain village, his answer will be one of these four: &ldquo;Close-up&rdquo;; &ldquo;long way little bit&rdquo;; &ldquo;long way big bit&rdquo;; or &ldquo;long way too much.&rdquo;&nbsp; Long way too much does not mean that one cannot walk to the village; it means that he will have to walk farther than if the village were a long way big bit.</p> <p><i>Gammon</i> is to lie, to exaggerate, to joke.&nbsp; <i>Mary</i> is a woman.&nbsp; Any woman is a Mary.&nbsp; All women are Marys.&nbsp; Doubtlessly the first dim white adventurer whimsically called a native woman Mary, and of similar birth must have been many other words in b&ecirc;che de mer.&nbsp; The white men were all seamen, and so capsize and sing out were introduced into the lingo.&nbsp; One would not tell a Melanesian cook to empty the dish-water, but he would tell him to capsize it.&nbsp; To sing out is to cry loudly, to call out, or merely to speak.&nbsp; Sing-sing is a song.&nbsp; The native Christian does not think of God calling for Adam in the Garden of Eden; in the native&rsquo;s mind, God sings out for Adam.</p> <p>Savvee or catchee are practically the only words which have been introduced straight from pigeon English.&nbsp; Of course, pickaninny has happened along, but some of its uses are delicious.&nbsp; Having bought a fowl from a native in a canoe, the native asked me if I wanted &ldquo;Pickaninny stop along him fella.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was not until he showed me a handful of hen&rsquo;s eggs that I understood his meaning.&nbsp; My word, as an exclamation with a thousand significances, could have arrived from nowhere else than Old England.&nbsp; A paddle, a sweep, or an oar, is called washee, and washee is also the verb.</p> <p>Here is a letter, dictated by one Peter, a native trader at Santa Anna, and addressed to his employer.&nbsp; Harry, the schooner captain, started to write the letter, but was stopped by Peter at the end of the second sentence.&nbsp; Thereafter the letter runs in Peter&rsquo;s own words, for Peter was afraid that Harry gammoned too much, and he wanted the straight story of his needs to go to headquarters.</p> <blockquote><p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Santa Anna</span></p> <p>&ldquo;Trader Peter has worked 12 months for your firm and has not received any pay yet.&nbsp; He hereby wants &pound;12.&rdquo;&nbsp; (At this point Peter began dictation).&nbsp;&nbsp; &ldquo;Harry he gammon along him all the time too much.&nbsp; I like him 6 tin biscuit, 4 bag rice, 24 tin bullamacow.&nbsp; Me like him 2 rifle, me savvee look out along boat, some place me go man he no good, he <i>kai-kai</i> along me.</p> <p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Peter</span>.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p><i>Bullamacow</i> means tinned beef.&nbsp; This word was corrupted from the English language by the Samoans, and from them learned by the traders, who carried it along with them into Melanesia.&nbsp; Captain Cook and the other early navigators made a practice of introducing seeds, plants, and domestic animals amongst the natives.&nbsp; It was at Samoa that one such navigator landed a bull and a cow.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is a bull and cow,&rdquo; said he to the Samoans.&nbsp; They thought he was giving the name of the breed, and from that day to this, beef on the hoof and beef in the tin is called <i>bullamacow</i>.</p> <p>A Solomon islander cannot say <i>fence</i>, so, in b&ecirc;che de mer, it becomes <i>fennis</i>; store is <i>sittore</i>, and box is <i>bokkis</i>.&nbsp; Just now the fashion in chests, which are known as boxes, is to have a bell-arrangement on the lock so that the box cannot be opened without sounding an alarm.&nbsp; A box so equipped is not spoken of as a mere box, but as the <i>bokkis belong bell</i>.</p> <p><i>Fright</i> is the b&ecirc;che de mer for fear.&nbsp; If a native appears timid and one asks him the cause, he is liable to hear in reply: &ldquo;Me fright along you too much.&rdquo;&nbsp; Or the native may be <i>fright</i> along storm, or wild bush, or haunted places.&nbsp; <i>Cross</i> covers every form of anger.&nbsp; A man may be cross at one when he is feeling only petulant; or he may be cross when he is seeking to chop off your head and make a stew out of you.&nbsp; A recruit, after having toiled three years on a plantation, was returned to his own village on Malaita.&nbsp; He was clad in all kinds of gay and sportive garments.&nbsp; On his head was a top-hat.&nbsp; He possessed a trade-box full of calico, beads, porpoise-teeth, and tobacco.&nbsp; Hardly was the anchor down, when the villagers were on board.&nbsp; The recruit looked anxiously for his own relatives, but none was to be seen.&nbsp; One of the natives took the pipe out of his mouth.&nbsp; Another confiscated the strings of beads from around his neck.&nbsp; A third relieved him of his gaudy loin-cloth, and a fourth tried on the top-hat and omitted to return it.&nbsp; Finally, one of them took his trade-box, which represented three years&rsquo; toil, and dropped it into a canoe alongside.&nbsp; &ldquo;That fella belong you?&rdquo; the captain asked the recruit, referring to the thief.&nbsp; &ldquo;No belong me,&rdquo; was the answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then why in Jericho do you let him take the box?&rdquo; the captain demanded indignantly.&nbsp; Quoth the recruit, &ldquo;Me speak along him, say bokkis he stop, that fella he cross along me&rdquo;&mdash;which was the recruit&rsquo;s way of saying that the other man would murder him.&nbsp; God&rsquo;s wrath, when He sent the Flood, was merely a case of being cross along mankind.</p> <p>What name? is the great interrogation of b&ecirc;che de mer.&nbsp; It all depends on how it is uttered.&nbsp; It may mean: What is your business?&nbsp; What do you mean by this outrageous conduct?&nbsp; What do you want?&nbsp; What is the thing you are after?&nbsp; You had best watch out; I demand an explanation; and a few hundred other things.&nbsp; Call a native out of his house in the middle of the night, and he is likely to demand, &ldquo;What name you sing out along me?&rdquo;</p> <p>Imagine the predicament of the Germans on the plantations of Bougainville Island, who are compelled to learn b&ecirc;che de mer English in order to handle the native labourers.&nbsp; It is to them an unscientific polyglot, and there are no text-books by which to study it.&nbsp; It is a source of unholy delight to the other white planters and traders to hear the German wrestling stolidly with the circumlocutions and short-cuts of a language that has no grammar and no dictionary.</p> <p>Some years ago large numbers of Solomon islanders were recruited to labour on the sugar plantations of Queensland.&nbsp; A missionary urged one of the labourers, who was a convert, to get up and preach a sermon to a shipload of Solomon islanders who had just arrived.&nbsp; He chose for his subject the Fall of Man, and the address he gave became a classic in all Australasia.&nbsp; It proceeded somewhat in the following manner:</p> <p>&ldquo;Altogether you boy belong Solomons you no savvee white man.&nbsp; Me fella me savvee him.&nbsp; Me fella me savvee talk along white man.</p> <p>&ldquo;Before long time altogether no place he stop.&nbsp; God big fella marster belong white man, him fella He make &rsquo;m altogether.&nbsp; God big fella marster belong white man, He make &rsquo;m big fella garden.&nbsp; He good fella too much.&nbsp; Along garden plenty yam he stop, plenty cocoanut, plenty taro, plenty <i>kumara</i> (sweet potatoes), altogether good fella kai-kai too much.</p> <p>&ldquo;Bimeby God big fella marster belong white man He make &rsquo;m one fella man and put &rsquo;m along garden belong Him.&nbsp; He call &rsquo;m this fella man Adam.&nbsp; He name belong him.&nbsp; He put him this fella man Adam along garden, and He speak, &lsquo;This fella garden he belong you.&rsquo;&nbsp; And He look &rsquo;m this fella Adam he walk about too much.&nbsp; Him fella Adam all the same sick; he no savvee kai-kai; he walk about all the time.&nbsp; And God He no savvee.&nbsp; God big fella marster belong white man, He scratch &rsquo;m head belong Him.&nbsp; God say: &lsquo;What name?&nbsp; Me no savvee what name this fella Adam he want.&rsquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Bimeby God He scratch &rsquo;m head belong Him too much, and speak: &lsquo;Me fella me savvee, him fella Adam him want &rsquo;m Mary.&rsquo;&nbsp; So He make Adam he go asleep, He take one fella bone belong him, and He make &rsquo;m one fella Mary along bone.&nbsp; He call him this fella Mary, Eve.&nbsp; He give &rsquo;m this fella Eve along Adam, and He speak along him fella Adam: &lsquo;Close up altogether along this fella garden belong you two fella.&nbsp; One fella tree he tambo (taboo) along you altogether.&nbsp; This fella tree belong apple.&rsquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;So Adam Eve two fella stop along garden, and they two fella have &rsquo;m good time too much.&nbsp; Bimeby, one day, Eve she come along Adam, and she speak, &lsquo;More good you me two fella we eat &rsquo;m this fella apple.&rsquo;&nbsp; Adam he speak, &lsquo;No,&rsquo; and Eve she speak, &lsquo;What name you no like &rsquo;m me?&rsquo;&nbsp; And Adam he speak, &lsquo;Me like &rsquo;m you too much, but me fright along God.&rsquo;&nbsp; And Eve she speak, &lsquo;Gammon!&nbsp; What name?&nbsp; God He no savvee look along us two fella all &rsquo;m time.&nbsp; God big fella marster, He gammon along you.&rsquo;&nbsp; But Adam he speak, &lsquo;No.&rsquo;&nbsp; But Eve she talk, talk, talk, allee time&mdash;allee same Mary she talk along boy along Queensland and make &rsquo;m trouble along boy.&nbsp; And bimeby Adam he tired too much, and he speak, &lsquo;All right.&rsquo;&nbsp; So these two fella they go eat &rsquo;m.&nbsp; When they finish eat &rsquo;m, my word, they fright like hell, and they go hide along scrub.</p> <p>&ldquo;And God He come walk about along garden, and He sing out, &lsquo;Adam!&rsquo;&nbsp; Adam he no speak.&nbsp; He too much fright.&nbsp; My word!&nbsp; And God He sing out, &lsquo;Adam!&rsquo;&nbsp; And Adam he speak, &lsquo;You call &rsquo;m me?&rsquo;&nbsp; God He speak, &lsquo;Me call &rsquo;m you too much.&rsquo;&nbsp; Adam he speak, &lsquo;Me sleep strong fella too much.&rsquo;&nbsp; And God He speak, &lsquo;You been eat &rsquo;m this fella apple.&rsquo;&nbsp; Adam he speak, &lsquo;No, me no been eat &rsquo;m.&rsquo;&nbsp; God He speak.&nbsp; &lsquo;What name you gammon along me?&nbsp; You been eat &rsquo;m.&rsquo;&nbsp; And Adam he speak, &lsquo;Yes, me been eat &rsquo;m.&rsquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;And God big fella marster He cross along Adam Eve two fella too much, and He speak, &lsquo;You two fella finish along me altogether.&nbsp; You go catch &rsquo;m bokkis (box) belong you, and get to hell along scrub.&rsquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;So Adam Eve these two fella go along scrub.&nbsp; And God He make &rsquo;m one big fennis (fence) all around garden and He put &rsquo;m one fella marster belong God along fennis.&nbsp; And He give this fella marster belong God one big fella musket, and He speak, &lsquo;S&rsquo;pose you look &rsquo;m these two fella Adam Eve, you shoot &rsquo;m plenty too much.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p> <h2><a name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 280</span>CHAPTER XVII<br /> <span class="GutSmall">THE AMATEUR M.D.</span></h2> <p><span class="smcap">When</span> we sailed from San Francisco on the <i>Snark</i> I knew as much about sickness as the Admiral of the Swiss Navy knows about salt water.&nbsp; And here, at the start, let me advise any one who meditates going to out-of-the-way tropic places.&nbsp; Go to a first-class druggist&mdash;the sort that have specialists on their salary list who know everything.&nbsp; Talk the matter over with such an one.&nbsp; Note carefully all that he says.&nbsp; Have a list made of all that he recommends.&nbsp; Write out a cheque for the total cost, and tear it up.</p> <p>I wish I had done the same.&nbsp; I should have been far wiser, I know now, if I had bought one of those ready-made, self-acting, fool-proof medicine chests such as are favoured by fourth-rate ship-masters.&nbsp; In such a chest each bottle has a number.&nbsp; On the inside of the lid is placed a simple table of directions: No. 1, toothache; No. 2, smallpox; No. 3, stomachache; No. 4, cholera; No. 5, rheumatism; and so on, through the list of human ills.&nbsp; And I might have used it as did a certain venerable skipper, who, when No. 3 was empty, mixed a dose from No. 1 and No. 2, or, when No. 7 was all gone, dosed his crew with 4 and 3 till 3 gave out, when he used 5 and 2.</p> <p>So far, with the exception of corrosive sublimate (which was recommended as an antiseptic in surgical operations, and which I have not yet used for that purpose), my medicine-chest has been useless.&nbsp; It has been worse than useless, for it has occupied much space which I could have used to advantage.</p> <p>With my surgical instruments it is different.&nbsp; While I have not yet had serious use for them, I do not regret the space they occupy.&nbsp; The thought of them makes me feel good.&nbsp; They are so much life insurance, only, fairer than that last grim game, one is not supposed to die in order to win.&nbsp; Of course, I don&rsquo;t know how to use them, and what I don&rsquo;t know about surgery would set up a dozen quacks in prosperous practice.&nbsp; But needs must when the devil drives, and we of the <i>Snark</i> have no warning when the devil may take it into his head to drive, ay, even a thousand miles from land and twenty days from the nearest port.</p> <p>I did not know anything about dentistry, but a friend fitted me out with forceps and similar weapons, and in Honolulu I picked up a book upon teeth.&nbsp; Also, in that sub-tropical city I managed to get hold of a skull, from which I extracted the teeth swiftly and painlessly.&nbsp; Thus equipped, I was ready, though not exactly eager, to tackle any tooth that get in my way.&nbsp; It was in Nuku-hiva, in the Marquesas, that my first case presented itself in the shape of a little, old Chinese.&nbsp; The first thing I did was to got the buck fever, and I leave it to any fair-minded person if buck fever, with its attendant heart-palpitations and arm-tremblings, is the right condition for a man to be in who is endeavouring to pose as an old hand at the business.&nbsp; I did not fool the aged Chinaman.&nbsp; He was as frightened as I and a bit more shaky.&nbsp; I almost forgot to be frightened in the fear that he would bolt.&nbsp; I swear, if he had tried to, that I would have tripped him up and sat on him until calmness and reason returned.</p> <p>I wanted that tooth.&nbsp; Also, Martin wanted a snap-shot of me getting it.&nbsp; Likewise Charmian got her camera.&nbsp; Then the procession started.&nbsp; We were stopping at what had been the club-house when Stevenson was in the Marquesas on the Casco.&nbsp; On the veranda, where he had passed so many pleasant hours, the light was not good&mdash;for snapshots, I mean.&nbsp; I led on into the garden, a chair in one hand, the other hand filled with forceps of various sorts, my knees knocking together disgracefully.&nbsp; The poor old Chinaman came second, and he was shaking, too.&nbsp; Charmian and Martin brought up the rear, armed with kodaks.&nbsp; We dived under the avocado trees, threaded our way through the cocoanut palms, and came on a spot that satisfied Martin&rsquo;s photographic eye.</p> <p>I looked at the tooth, and then discovered that I could not remember anything about the teeth I had pulled from the skull five months previously.&nbsp; Did it have one prong? two prongs? or three prongs?&nbsp; What was left of the part that showed appeared very crumbly, and I knew that I should have taken hold of the tooth deep down in the gum.&nbsp; It was very necessary that I should know how many prongs that tooth had.&nbsp; Back to the house I went for the book on teeth.&nbsp; The poor old victim looked like photographs I had seen of fellow-countrymen of his, criminals, on their knees, waiting the stroke of the beheading sword.</p> <p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let him get away,&rdquo; I cautioned to Martin.&nbsp; &ldquo;I want that tooth.&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;I sure won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he replied with enthusiasm, from behind his camera.&nbsp; &ldquo;I want that photograph.&rdquo;</p> <p>For the first time I felt sorry for the Chinaman.&nbsp; Though the book did not tell me anything about pulling teeth, it was all right, for on one page I found drawings of all the teeth, including their prongs and how they were set in the jaw.&nbsp; Then came the pursuit of the forceps.&nbsp; I had seven pairs, but was in doubt as to which pair I should use.&nbsp; I did not want any mistake.&nbsp; As I turned the hardware over with rattle and clang, the poor victim began to lose his grip and to turn a greenish yellow around the gills.&nbsp; He complained about the sun, but that was necessary for the photograph, and he had to stand it.&nbsp; I fitted the forceps around the tooth, and the patient shivered and began to wilt.</p> <p>&ldquo;Ready?&rdquo; I called to Martin.</p> <p>&ldquo;All ready,&rdquo; he answered.</p> <p>I gave a pull.&nbsp; Ye gods!&nbsp; The tooth was loose!&nbsp; Out it came on the instant.&nbsp; I was jubilant as I held it aloft in the forceps.</p> <p>&ldquo;Put it back, please, oh, put it back,&rdquo; Martin pleaded.&nbsp; &ldquo;You were too quick for me.&rdquo;</p> <p>And the poor old Chinaman sat there while I put the tooth back and pulled over.&nbsp; Martin snapped the camera.&nbsp; The deed was done.&nbsp; Elation?&nbsp; Pride?&nbsp; No hunter was ever prouder of his first pronged buck than I was of that three-pronged tooth.&nbsp; I did it!&nbsp; I did it!&nbsp; With my own hands and a pair of forceps I did it, to say nothing of the forgotten memories of the dead man&rsquo;s skull.</p> <p>My next case was a Tahitian sailor.&nbsp; He was a small man, in a state of collapse from long days and nights of jumping toothache.&nbsp; I lanced the gums first.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t know how to lance them, but I lanced them just the same.&nbsp; It was a long pull and a strong pull.&nbsp; The man was a hero.&nbsp; He groaned and moaned, and I thought he was going to faint.&nbsp; But he kept his mouth open and let me pull.&nbsp; And then it came.</p> <p>After that I was ready to meet all comers&mdash;just the proper state of mind for a Waterloo.&nbsp; And it came.&nbsp; Its name was Tomi.&nbsp; He was a strapping giant of a heathen with a bad reputation.&nbsp; He was addicted to deeds of violence.&nbsp; Among other things he had beaten two of his wives to death with his fists.&nbsp; His father and mother had been naked cannibals.&nbsp; When he sat down and I put the forceps into his mouth, he was nearly as tall as I was standing up.&nbsp; Big men, prone to violence, very often have a streak of fat in their make-up, so I was doubtful of him.&nbsp; Charmian grabbed one arm and Warren grabbed the other.&nbsp; Then the tug of war began.&nbsp; The instant the forceps closed down on the tooth, his jaws closed down on the forceps.&nbsp; Also, both his hands flew up and gripped my pulling hand.&nbsp; I held on, and he held on.&nbsp; Charmian and Warren held on.&nbsp; We wrestled all about the shop.</p> <p>It was three against one, and my hold on an aching tooth was certainly a foul one; but in spite of the handicap he got away with us.&nbsp; The forceps slipped off, banging and grinding along against his upper teeth with a nerve-scraping sound.&nbsp; Out of his month flew the forceps, and he rose up in the air with a blood-curdling yell.&nbsp; The three of us fell back.&nbsp; We expected to be massacred.&nbsp; But that howling savage of sanguinary reputation sank back in the chair.&nbsp; He held his head in both his hands, and groaned and groaned and groaned.&nbsp; Nor would he listen to reason.&nbsp; I was a quack.&nbsp; My painless tooth-extraction was a delusion and a snare and a low advertising dodge.&nbsp; I was so anxious to get that tooth that I was almost ready to bribe him.&nbsp; But that went against my professional pride and I let him depart with the tooth still intact, the only case on record up to date of failure on my part when once I had got a grip.&nbsp; Since then I have never let a tooth go by me.&nbsp; Only the other day I volunteered to beat up three days to windward to pull a woman missionary&rsquo;s tooth.&nbsp; I expect, before the voyage of the <i>Snark</i> is finished, to be doing bridge work and putting on gold crowns.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t know whether they are yaws or not&mdash;a physician in Fiji told me they were, and a missionary in the Solomons told me they were not; but at any rate I can vouch for the fact that they are most uncomfortable.&nbsp; It was my luck to ship in Tahiti a French-sailor, who, when we got to sea, proved to be afflicted with a vile skin disease.&nbsp; The <i>Snark</i> was too small and too much of a family party to permit retaining him on board; but perforce, until we could reach land and discharge him, it was up to me to doctor him.&nbsp; I read up the books and proceeded to treat him, taking care afterwards always to use a thorough antiseptic wash.&nbsp; When we reached Tutuila, far from getting rid of him, the port doctor declared a quarantine against him and refused to allow him ashore.&nbsp; But at Apia, Samoa, I managed to ship him off on a steamer to New Zealand.&nbsp; Here at Apia my ankles were badly bitten by mosquitoes, and I confess to having scratched the bites&mdash;as I had a thousand times before.&nbsp; By the time I reached the island of Savaii, a small sore had developed on the hollow of my instep.&nbsp; I thought it was due to chafe and to acid fumes from the hot lava over which I tramped.&nbsp; An application of salve would cure it&mdash;so I thought.&nbsp; The salve did heal it over, whereupon an astonishing inflammation set in, the new skin came off, and a larger sore was exposed.&nbsp; This was repeated many times.&nbsp; Each time new skin formed, an inflammation followed, and the circumference of the sore increased.&nbsp; I was puzzled and frightened.&nbsp; All my life my skin had been famous for its healing powers, yet here was something that would not heal.&nbsp; Instead, it was daily eating up more skin, while it had eaten down clear through the skin and was eating up the muscle itself.</p> <p>By this time the <i>Snark</i> was at sea on her way to Fiji.&nbsp; I remembered the French sailor, and for the first time became seriously alarmed.&nbsp; Four other similar sores had appeared&mdash;or ulcers, rather, and the pain of them kept me awake at night.&nbsp; All my plans were made to lay up the <i>Snark</i> in Fiji and get away on the first steamer to Australia and professional M.D.&rsquo;s.&nbsp; In the meantime, in my amateur M.D. way, I did my best.&nbsp; I read through all the medical works on board.&nbsp; Not a line nor a word could I find descriptive of my affliction.&nbsp; I brought common horse-sense to bear on the problem.&nbsp; Here were malignant and excessively active ulcers that were eating me up.&nbsp; There was an organic and corroding poison at work.&nbsp; Two things I concluded must be done.&nbsp; First, some agent must be found to destroy the poison.&nbsp; Secondly, the ulcers could not possibly heal from the outside in; they must heal from the inside out.&nbsp; I decided to fight the poison with corrosive sublimate.&nbsp; The very name of it struck me as vicious.&nbsp; Talk of fighting fire with fire!&nbsp; I was being consumed by a corrosive poison, and it appealed to my fancy to fight it with another corrosive poison.&nbsp; After several days I alternated dressings of corrosive sublimate with dressings of peroxide of hydrogen.&nbsp; And behold, by the time we reached Fiji four of the five ulcers were healed, while the remaining one was no bigger than a pea.</p> <p>I now felt fully qualified to treat yaws.&nbsp; Likewise I had a wholesome respect for them.&nbsp; Not so the rest of the crew of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; In their case, seeing was not believing.&nbsp; One and all, they had seen my dreadful predicament; and all of them, I am convinced, had a subconscious certitude that their own superb constitutions and glorious personalities would never allow lodgment of so vile a poison in their carcasses as my an&aelig;mic constitution and mediocre personality had allowed to lodge in mine.&nbsp; At Port Resolution, in the New Hebrides, Martin elected to walk barefooted in the bush and returned on board with many cuts and abrasions, especially on his shins.</p> <p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better be careful,&rdquo; I warned him.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll mix up some corrosive sublimate for you to wash those cuts with.&nbsp; An ounce of prevention, you know.&rdquo;</p> <p>But Martin smiled a superior smile.&nbsp; Though he did not say so,&nbsp; I nevertheless was given to understand that he was not as other men (I was the only man he could possibly have had reference to), and that in a couple of days his cuts would be healed.&nbsp; He also read me a dissertation upon the peculiar purity of his blood and his remarkable healing powers.&nbsp; I felt quite humble when he was done with me.&nbsp; Evidently I was different from other men in so far as purity of blood was concerned.</p> <p>Nakata, the cabin-boy, while ironing one day, mistook the calf of his leg for the ironing-block and accumulated a burn three inches in length and half an inch wide.&nbsp; He, too, smiled the superior smile when I offered him corrosive sublimate and reminded him of my own cruel experience.&nbsp; I was given to understand, with all due suavity and courtesy, that no matter what was the matter with my blood, his number-one, Japanese, Port-Arthur blood was all right and scornful of the festive microbe.</p> <p>Wada, the cook, took part in a disastrous landing of the launch, when he had to leap overboard and fend the launch off the beach in a smashing surf.&nbsp; By means of shells and coral he cut his legs and feet up beautifully.&nbsp; I offered him the corrosive sublimate bottle.&nbsp; Once again I suffered the superior smile and was given to understand that his blood was the same blood that had licked Russia and was going to lick the United States some day, and that if his blood wasn&rsquo;t able to cure a few trifling cuts, he&rsquo;d commit hari-kari in sheer disgrace.</p> <p>From all of which I concluded that an amateur M.D. is without honour on his own vessel, even if he has cured himself.&nbsp; The rest of the crew had begun to look upon me as a sort of mild mono-maniac on the question of sores and sublimate.&nbsp; Just because my blood was impure was no reason that I should think everybody else&rsquo;s was.&nbsp; I made no more overtures.&nbsp; Time and microbes were with me, and all I had to do was wait.</p> <p>&ldquo;I think there&rsquo;s some dirt in these cuts,&rdquo; Martin said tentatively, after several days.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll wash them out and then they&rsquo;ll be all right,&rdquo; he added, after I had refused to rise to the bait.</p> <p>Two more days passed, but the cuts did not pass, and I caught Martin soaking his feet and legs in a pail of hot water.</p> <p>&ldquo;Nothing like hot water,&rdquo; he proclaimed enthusiastically.&nbsp; &ldquo;It beats all the dope the doctors ever put up.&nbsp; These sores will be all right in the morning.&rdquo;</p> <p>But in the morning he wore a troubled look, and I knew that the hour of my triumph approached.</p> <p>&ldquo;I think I <i>will</i> try some of that medicine,&rdquo; he announced later on in the day.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not that I think it&rsquo;ll do much good,&rdquo; he qualified, &ldquo;but I&rsquo;ll just give it a try anyway.&rdquo;</p> <p>Next came the proud blood of Japan to beg medicine for its illustrious sores, while I heaped coals of fire on all their houses by explaining in minute and sympathetic detail the treatment that should be given.&nbsp; Nakata followed instructions implicitly, and day by day his sores grew smaller.&nbsp; Wada was apathetic, and cured less readily.&nbsp; But Martin still doubted, and because he did not cure immediately, he developed the theory that while doctor&rsquo;s dope was all right, it did not follow that the same kind of dope was efficacious with everybody.&nbsp; As for himself, corrosive sublimate had no effect.&nbsp; Besides, how did I know that it was the right stuff?&nbsp; I had had no experience.&nbsp; Just because I happened to get well while using it was not proof that it had played any part in the cure.&nbsp; There were such things as coincidences.&nbsp; Without doubt there was a dope that would cure the sores, and when he ran across a real doctor he would find what that dope was and get some of it.</p> <p>About this time we arrived in the Solomon Islands.&nbsp; No physician would ever recommend the group for invalids or sanitoriums.&nbsp; I spent but little time there ere I really and for the first time in my life comprehended how frail and unstable is human tissue.&nbsp; Our first anchorage was Port Mary, on the island of Santa Anna.&nbsp; The one lone white man, a trader, came alongside.&nbsp; Tom Butler was his name, and he was a beautiful example of what the Solomons can do to a strong man.&nbsp; He lay in his whale-boat with the helplessness of a dying man.&nbsp; No smile and little intelligence illumined his face.&nbsp; He was a sombre death&rsquo;s-head, too far gone to grin.&nbsp; He, too, had yaws, big ones.&nbsp; We were compelled to drag him over the rail of the <i>Snark</i>.&nbsp; He said that his health was good, that he had not had the fever for some time, and that with the exception of his arm he was all right and trim.&nbsp; His arm appeared to be paralysed.&nbsp; Paralysis he rejected with scorn.&nbsp; He had had it before, and recovered.&nbsp; It was a common native disease on Santa Anna, he said, as he was helped down the companion ladder, his dead arm dropping, bump-bump, from step to step.&nbsp; He was certainly the ghastliest guest we ever entertained, and we&rsquo;ve had not a few lepers and elephantiasis victims on board.</p> <p>Martin inquired about yaws, for here was a man who ought to know.&nbsp; He certainly did know, if we could judge by his scarred arms and legs and by the live ulcers that corroded in the midst of the scars.&nbsp; Oh, one got used to yaws, quoth Tom Butler.&nbsp; They were never really serious until they had eaten deep into the flesh.&nbsp; Then they attacked the walls of the arteries, the arteries burst, and there was a funeral.&nbsp; Several of the natives had recently died that way ashore.&nbsp; But what did it matter?&nbsp; If it wasn&rsquo;t yaws, it was something else in the Solomons.</p> <p>I noticed that from this moment Martin displayed a swiftly increasing interest in his own yaws.&nbsp; Dosings with corrosive sublimate were more frequent, while, in conversation, he began to revert with growing enthusiasm to the clean climate of Kansas and all other things Kansan.&nbsp; Charmian and I thought that California was a little bit of all right.&nbsp; Henry swore by Rapa, and Tehei staked all on Bora Bora for his own blood&rsquo;s sake; while Wada and Nakata sang the sanitary p&aelig;an of Japan.</p> <p>One evening, as the <i>Snark</i> worked around the southern end of the island of Ugi, looking for a reputed anchorage, a Church of England missionary, a Mr. Drew, bound in his whaleboat for the coast of San Cristoval, came alongside and stopped for dinner.&nbsp; Martin, his legs swathed in Red Cross bandages till they looked like a mummy&rsquo;s, turned the conversation upon yaws.&nbsp; Yes, said Mr. Drew, they were quite common in the Solomons.&nbsp; All white men caught them.</p> <p>&ldquo;And have you had them?&rdquo; Martin demanded, in the soul of him quite shocked that a Church of England missionary could possess so vulgar an affliction.</p> <p>Mr. Drew nodded his head and added that not only had he had them, but at that moment he was doctoring several.</p> <p>&ldquo;What do you use on them?&rdquo; Martin asked like a flash.</p> <p>My heart almost stood still waiting the answer.&nbsp; By that answer my professional medical prestige stood or fell.&nbsp; Martin, I could see, was quite sure it was going to fall.&nbsp; And then the answer&mdash;O blessed answer!</p> <p>&ldquo;Corrosive sublimate,&rdquo; said Mr. Drew.</p> <p>Martin gave in handsomely, I&rsquo;ll admit, and I am confident that at that moment, if I had asked permission to pull one of his teeth, he would not have denied me.</p> <p>All white men in the Solomons catch yaws, and every cut or abrasion practically means another yaw.&nbsp; Every man I met had had them, and nine out of ten had active ones.&nbsp; There was but one exception, a young fellow who had been in the islands five months, who had come down with fever ten days after he arrived, and who had since then been down so often with fever that he had had neither time nor opportunity for yaws.</p> <p>Every one on the <i>Snark</i> except Charmian came down with yaws.&nbsp; Hers was the same egotism that Japan and Kansas had displayed.&nbsp; She ascribed her immunity to the pureness of her blood, and as the days went by she ascribed it more often and more loudly to the pureness of her blood.&nbsp; Privately I ascribed her immunity to the fact that, being a woman, she escaped most of the cuts and abrasions to which we hard-working men were subject in the course of working the <i>Snark</i> around the world.&nbsp; I did not tell her so.&nbsp; You see, I did not wish to bruise her ego with brutal facts.&nbsp; Being an M.D., if only an amateur one, I knew more about the disease than she, and I knew that time was my ally.&nbsp; But alas, I abused my ally when it dealt a charming little yaw on the shin.&nbsp; So quickly did I apply antiseptic treatment, that the yaw was cured before she was convinced that she had one.&nbsp; Again, as an M.D., I was without honour on my own vessel; and, worse than that, I was charged with having tried to mislead her into the belief that she had had a yaw.&nbsp; The pureness of her blood was more rampant than ever, and I poked my nose into my navigation books and kept quiet.&nbsp; And then came the day.&nbsp; We were cruising along the coast of Malaita at the time.</p> <p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that abaft your ankle-bone?&rdquo; said I.</p> <p>&ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; said she.</p> <p>&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said I; &ldquo;but put some corrosive sublimate on it just the same.&nbsp; And some two or three weeks from now, when it is well and you have a scar that you will carry to your grave, just forget about the purity of your blood and your ancestral history and tell me what you think about yaws anyway.&rdquo;</p> <p>It was as large as a silver dollar, that yaw, and it took all of three weeks to heal.&nbsp; There were times when Charmian could not walk because of the hurt of it; and there were times upon times when she explained that abaft the ankle-bone was the most painful place to have a yaw.&nbsp; I explained, in turn, that, never having experienced a yaw in that locality, I was driven to conclude the hollow of the instep was the most painful place for yaw-culture.&nbsp; We left it to Martin, who disagreed with both of us and proclaimed passionately that the only truly painful place was the shin.&nbsp; No wonder horse-racing is so popular.</p> <p>But yaws lose their novelty after a time.&nbsp; At the present moment of writing I have five yaws on my hands and three more on my shin.&nbsp; Charmian has one on each side of her right instep.&nbsp; Tehei is frantic with his.&nbsp; Martin&rsquo;s latest shin-cultures have eclipsed his earlier ones.&nbsp; And Nakata has several score casually eating away at his tissue.&nbsp; But the history of the <i>Snark</i> in the Solomons has been the history of every ship since the early discoverers.&nbsp; From the &ldquo;Sailing Directions&rdquo; I quote the following:</p> <p>&ldquo;The crews of vessels remaining any considerable time in the Solomons find wounds and sores liable to change into malignant ulcers.&rdquo;</p> <p>Nor on the question of fever were the &ldquo;Sailing Directions&rdquo; any more encouraging, for in them I read:</p> <p>&ldquo;New arrivals are almost certain sooner or later to suffer from fever.&nbsp; The natives are also subject to it.&nbsp; The number of deaths among the whites in the year 1897 amounted to 9 among a population of 50.&rdquo;</p> <p>Some of these deaths, however, were accidental.</p> <p>Nakata was the first to come down with fever.&nbsp; This occurred at Penduffryn.&nbsp; Wada and Henry followed him.&nbsp; Charmian surrendered next.&nbsp; I managed to escape for a couple of months; but when I was bowled over, Martin sympathetically joined me several days later.&nbsp; Out of the seven of us all told Tehei is the only one who has escaped; but his sufferings from nostalgia are worse than fever.&nbsp; Nakata, as usual, followed instructions faithfully, so that by the end of his third attack he could take a two hours&rsquo; sweat, consume thirty or forty grains of quinine, and be weak but all right at the end of twenty-four hours.</p> <p>Wada and Henry, however, were tougher patients with which to deal.&nbsp; In the first place, Wada got in a bad funk.&nbsp; He was of the firm conviction that his star had set and that the Solomons would receive his bones.&nbsp; He saw that life about him was cheap.&nbsp; At Penduffryn he saw the ravages of dysentery, and, unfortunately for him, he saw one victim carried out on a strip of galvanized sheet-iron and dumped without coffin or funeral into a hole in the ground.&nbsp; Everybody had fever, everybody had dysentery, everybody had everything.&nbsp; Death was common.&nbsp; Here to-day and gone to-morrow&mdash;and Wada forgot all about to-day and made up his mind that to-morrow had come.</p> <p>He was careless of his ulcers, neglected to sublimate them, and by uncontrolled scratching spread them all over his body.&nbsp; Nor would he follow instructions with fever, and, as a result, would be down five days at a time, when a day would have been sufficient.&nbsp; Henry, who is a strapping giant of a man, was just as bad.&nbsp; He refused point blank to take quinine, on the ground that years before he had had fever and that the pills the doctor gave him were of different size and colour from the quinine tablets I offered him.&nbsp; So Henry joined Wada.</p> <p>But I fooled the pair of them, and dosed them with their own medicine, which was faith-cure.&nbsp; They had faith in their funk that they were going to die.&nbsp; I slammed a lot of quinine down their throats and took their temperature.&nbsp; It was the first time I had used my medicine-chest thermometer, and I quickly discovered that it was worthless, that it had been produced for profit and not for service.&nbsp; If I had let on to my two patients that the thermometer did not work, there would have been two funerals in short order.&nbsp; Their temperature I swear was 105&deg;.&nbsp; I solemnly made one and then the other smoke the thermometer, allowed an expression of satisfaction to irradiate my countenance, and joyfully told them that their temperature was 94&deg;.&nbsp; Then I slammed more quinine down their throats, told them that any sickness or weakness they might experience would be due to the quinine, and left them to get well.&nbsp; And they did get well, Wada in spite of himself.&nbsp; If a man can die through a misapprehension, is there any immorality in making him live through a misapprehension?</p> <p>Commend me the white race when it comes to grit and surviving.&nbsp; One of our two Japanese and both our Tahitians funked and had to be slapped on the back and cheered up and dragged along by main strength toward life.&nbsp; Charmian and Martin took their afflictions cheerfully, made the least of them, and moved with calm certitude along the way of life.&nbsp; When Wada and Henry were convinced that they were going to die, the funeral atmosphere was too much for Tehei, who prayed dolorously and cried for hours at a time.&nbsp; Martin, on the other hand, cursed and got well, and Charmian groaned and made plans for what she was going to do when she got well again.</p> <p>Charmian had been raised a vegetarian and a sanitarian.&nbsp; Her Aunt Netta, who brought her up and who lived in a healthful climate, did not believe in drugs.&nbsp; Neither did Charmian.&nbsp; Besides, drugs disagreed with her.&nbsp; Their effects were worse than the ills they were supposed to alleviate.&nbsp; But she listened to the argument in favour of quinine, accepted it as the lesser evil, and in consequence had shorter, less painful, and less frequent attacks of fever.&nbsp; We encountered a Mr. Caulfeild, a missionary, whose two predecessors had died after less than six months&rsquo; residence in the Solomons.&nbsp; Like them he had been a firm believer in homeopathy, until after his first fever, whereupon, unlike them, he made a grand slide back to allopathy and quinine, catching fever and carrying on his Gospel work.</p> <p>But poor Wada!&nbsp; The straw that broke the cook&rsquo;s back was when Charmian and I took him along on a cruise to the cannibal island of Malaita, in a small yacht, on the deck of which the captain had been murdered half a year before.&nbsp; <i>Kai-kai</i> means to eat, and Wada was sure he was going to be <i>kai-kai&rsquo;d</i>.&nbsp; We went about heavily armed, our vigilance was unremitting, and when we went for a bath in the mouth of a fresh-water stream, black boys, armed with rifles, did sentry duty about us.&nbsp; We encountered English war vessels burning and shelling villages in punishment for murders.&nbsp; Natives with prices on their heads sought shelter on board of us.&nbsp; Murder stalked abroad in the land.&nbsp; In out-of-the-way places we received warnings from friendly savages of impending attacks.&nbsp; Our vessel owed two heads to Malaita, which were liable to be collected any time.&nbsp; Then to cap it all, we were wrecked on a reef, and with rifles in one hand warned the canoes of wreckers off while with the other hand we toiled to save the ship.&nbsp; All of which was too much for Wada, who went daffy, and who finally quitted the <i>Snark</i> on the island of Ysabel, going ashore for good in a driving rain-storm, between two attacks of fever, while threatened with pneumonia.&nbsp; If he escapes being <i>kai-kai&rsquo;d</i>, and if he can survive sores and fever which are riotous ashore, he can expect, if he is reasonably lucky, to get away from that place to the adjacent island in anywhere from six to eight weeks.&nbsp; He never did think much of my medicine, despite the fact that I successfully and at the first trial pulled two aching teeth for him.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> has been a hospital for months, and I confess that we are getting used to it.&nbsp; At Meringe Lagoon, where we careened and cleaned the <i>Snark&rsquo;s</i> copper, there were times when only one man of us was able to go into the water, while the three white men on the plantation ashore were all down with fever.&nbsp; At the moment of writing this we are lost at sea somewhere northeast of Ysabel and trying vainly to find Lord Howe Island, which is an atoll that cannot be sighted unless one is on top of it.&nbsp; The chronometer has gone wrong.&nbsp; The sun does not shine anyway, nor can I get a star observation at night, and we have had nothing but squalls and rain for days and days.&nbsp; The cook is gone.&nbsp; Nakata, who has been trying to be both cook and cabin boy, is down on his back with fever.&nbsp; Martin is just up from fever, and going down again.&nbsp; Charmian, whose fever has become periodical, is looking up in her date book to find when the next attack will be.&nbsp; Henry has begun to eat quinine in an expectant mood.&nbsp; And, since my attacks hit me with the suddenness of bludgeon-blows I do not know from moment to moment when I shall be brought down.&nbsp; By a mistake we gave our last flour away to some white men who did not have any flour.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t know when we&rsquo;ll make land.&nbsp; Our Solomon sores are worse than ever, and more numerous.&nbsp; The corrosive sublimate was accidentally left ashore at Penduffryn; the peroxide of hydrogen is exhausted; and I am experimenting with boracic acid, lysol, and antiphlogystine.&nbsp; At any rate, if I fail in becoming a reputable M.D., it won&rsquo;t be from lack of practice.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; It is now two weeks since the foregoing was written, and Tehei, the only immune on board has been down ten days with far severer fever than any of us and is still down.&nbsp; His temperature has been repeatedly as high as 104, and his pulse 115.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; At sea, between Tasman atoll and Manning Straits.&nbsp; Tehei&rsquo;s attack developed into black water fever&mdash;the severest form of malarial fever, which, the doctor-book assures me, is due to some outside infection as well.&nbsp; Having pulled him through his fever, I am now at my wit&rsquo;s end, for he has lost his wits altogether.&nbsp; I am rather recent in practice to take up the cure of insanity.&nbsp; This makes the second lunacy case on this short voyage.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; Some day I shall write a book (for the profession), and entitle it, &ldquo;Around the World on the Hospital Ship <i>Snark</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Even our pets have not escaped.&nbsp; We sailed from Meringe Lagoon with two, an Irish terrier and a white cockatoo.&nbsp; The terrier fell down the cabin companionway and lamed its nigh hind leg, then repeated the man&oelig;uvre and lamed its off fore leg.&nbsp; At the present moment it has but two legs to walk on.&nbsp; Fortunately, they are on opposite sides and ends, so that she can still dot and carry two.&nbsp; The cockatoo was crushed under the cabin skylight and had to be killed.&nbsp; This was our first funeral&mdash;though for that matter, the several chickens we had, and which would have made welcome broth for the convalescents, flew overboard and were drowned.&nbsp; Only the cockroaches flourish.&nbsp; Neither illness nor accident ever befalls them, and they grow larger and more carnivorous day by day, gnawing our finger-nails and toe-nails while we sleep.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; Charmian is having another bout with fever.&nbsp; Martin, in despair, has taken to horse-doctoring his yaws with bluestone and to blessing the Solomons.&nbsp; As for me, in addition to navigating, doctoring, and writing short stories, I am far from well.&nbsp; With the exception of the insanity cases, I&rsquo;m the worst off on board.&nbsp; I shall catch the next steamer to Australia and go on the operating table.&nbsp; Among my minor afflictions, I may mention a new and mysterious one.&nbsp; For the past week my hands have been swelling as with dropsy.&nbsp; It is only by a painful effort that I can close them.&nbsp; A pull on a rope is excruciating.&nbsp; The sensations are like those that accompany severe chilblains.&nbsp; Also, the skin is peeling off both hands at an alarming rate, besides which the new skin underneath is growing hard and thick.&nbsp; The doctor-book fails to mention this disease.&nbsp; Nobody knows what it is.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; Well, anyway, I&rsquo;ve cured the chronometer.&nbsp; After knocking about the sea for eight squally, rainy days, most of the time hove to, I succeeded in catching a partial observation of the sun at midday.&nbsp; From this I worked up my latitude, then headed by log to the latitude of Lord Howe, and ran both that latitude and the island down together.&nbsp; Here I tested the chronometer by longitude sights and found it something like three minutes out.&nbsp; Since each minute is equivalent to fifteen miles, the total error can be appreciated.&nbsp; By repeated observations at Lord Howe I rated the chronometer, finding it to have a daily losing error of seven-tenths of a second.&nbsp; Now it happens that a year ago, when we sailed from Hawaii, that selfsame chronometer had that selfsame losing error of seven-tenths of a second.&nbsp; Since that error was faithfully added every day, and since that error, as proved by my observations at Lord Howe, has not changed, then what under the sun made that chronometer all of a sudden accelerate and catch up with itself three minutes?&nbsp; Can such things be?&nbsp; Expert watchmakers say no; but I say that they have never done any expert watch-making and watch-rating in the Solomons.&nbsp; That it is the climate is my only diagnosis.&nbsp; At any rate, I have successfully doctored the chronometer, even if I have failed with the lunacy cases and with Martin&rsquo;s yaws.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; Martin has just tried burnt alum, and is blessing the Solomons more fervently than ever.</p> <p>P.S.&nbsp; Between Manning Straits and Pavuvu Islands.</p> <p>Henry has developed rheumatism in his back, ten skins have peeled off my hands and the eleventh is now peeling, while Tehei is more lunatic than ever and day and night prays God not to kill him.&nbsp; Also, Nakata and I are slashing away at fever again.&nbsp; And finally up to date, Nakata last evening had an attack of ptomaine poisoning, and we spent half the night pulling him through.</p> <h2><a name="page303"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 303</span>BACKWORD</h2> <p><span class="smcap">The</span> <i>Snark</i> was forty-three feet on the water-line and fifty-five over all, with fifteen feet beam (tumble-home sides) and seven feet eight inches draught.&nbsp; She was ketch-rigged, carrying flying-jib, jib, fore-staysail, main-sail, mizzen, and spinnaker.&nbsp; There were six feet of head-room below, and she was crown-decked and flush-decked.&nbsp; There were four alleged <i>water-tight</i> compartments.&nbsp; A seventy-horse power auxiliary gas-engine sporadically furnished locomotion at an approximate cost of twenty dollars per mile.&nbsp; A five-horse power engine ran the pumps when it was in order, and on two occasions proved capable of furnishing juice for the search-light.&nbsp; The storage batteries worked four or five times in the course of two years.&nbsp; The fourteen-foot launch was rumoured to work at times, but it invariably broke down whenever I stepped on board.</p> <p>But the <i>Snark</i> sailed.&nbsp; It was the only way she could get anywhere.&nbsp; She sailed for two years, and never touched rock, reef, nor shoal.&nbsp; She had no inside ballast, her iron keel weighed five tons, but her deep draught and high freeboard made her very stiff.&nbsp; Caught under full sail in tropic squalls, she buried her rail and deck many times, but stubbornly refused to turn turtle.&nbsp; She steered easily, and she could run day and night, without steering, close-by, full-and-by, and with the wind abeam.&nbsp; With the wind on her quarter and the sails properly trimmed, she steered herself within two points, and with the wind almost astern she required scarcely three points for self-steering.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> was partly built in San Francisco.&nbsp; The morning her iron keel was to be cast was the morning of the great earthquake.&nbsp; Then came anarchy.&nbsp; Six months overdue in the building, I sailed the shell of her to Hawaii to be finished, the engine lashed to the bottom, building materials lashed on deck.&nbsp; Had I remained in San Francisco for completion, I&rsquo;d still be there.&nbsp; As it was, partly built, she cost four times what she ought to have cost.</p> <p>The <i>Snark</i> was born unfortunately.&nbsp; She was libelled in San Francisco, had her cheques protested as fraudulent in Hawaii, and was fined for breach of quarantine in the Solomons.&nbsp; To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her.&nbsp; When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp.&nbsp; When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp.&nbsp; In fact the only blow struck on the <i>Snark</i> was when the cook was manhandled by a captain who had shipped with me under false pretences, and whom I discharged in Fiji.&nbsp; Also, Charmian and I boxed for exercise; but neither of us was seriously maimed.</p> <p>The voyage was our idea of a good time.&nbsp; I built the <i>Snark</i> and paid for it, and for all expenses.&nbsp; I contracted to write thirty-five thousand words descriptive of the trip for a magazine which was to pay me the same rate I received for stories written at home.&nbsp; Promptly the magazine advertised that it was sending me especially around the world for itself.&nbsp; It was a wealthy magazine.&nbsp; And every man who had business dealings with the <i>Snark</i> charged three prices because forsooth the magazine could afford it.&nbsp; Down in the uttermost South Sea isle this myth obtained, and I paid accordingly.&nbsp; To this day everybody believes that the magazine paid for everything and that I made a fortune out of the voyage.&nbsp; It is hard, after such advertising, to hammer it into the human understanding that the whole voyage was done for the fun of it.</p> <p>I went to Australia to go into hospital, where I spent five weeks.&nbsp; I spent five months miserably sick in hotels.&nbsp; The mysterious malady that afflicted my hands was too much for the Australian specialists.&nbsp; It was unknown in the literature of medicine.&nbsp; No case like it had ever been reported.&nbsp; It extended from my hands to my feet so that at times I was as helpless as a child.&nbsp; On occasion my hands were twice their natural size, with seven dead and dying skins peeling off at the same time.&nbsp; There were times when my toe-nails, in twenty-four hours, grew as thick as they were long.&nbsp; After filing them off, inside another twenty-four hours they were as thick as before.</p> <p>The Australian specialists agreed that the malady was non-parasitic, and that, therefore, it must be nervous.&nbsp; It did not mend, and it was impossible for me to continue the voyage.&nbsp; The only way I could have continued it would have been by being lashed in my bunk, for in my helpless condition, unable to clutch with my hands, I could not have moved about on a small rolling boat.&nbsp; Also, I said to myself that while there were many boats and many voyages, I had but one pair of hands and one set of toe-nails.&nbsp; Still further, I reasoned that in my own climate of California I had always maintained a stable nervous equilibrium.&nbsp; So back I came.</p> <p>Since my return I have completely recovered.&nbsp; And I have found out what was the matter with me.&nbsp; I encountered a book by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles E. Woodruff of the United States Army entitled &ldquo;Effects of Tropical Light on White Men.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then I knew.&nbsp; Later, I met Colonel Woodruff, and learned that he had been similarly afflicted.&nbsp; Himself an Army surgeon, seventeen Army surgeons sat on his case in the Philippines, and, like the Australian specialists, confessed themselves beaten.&nbsp; In brief, I had a strong predisposition toward the tissue-destructiveness of tropical light.&nbsp; I was being torn to pieces by the ultra-violet rays just as many experimenters with the X-ray have been torn to pieces.</p> <p>In passing, I may mention that among the other afflictions that jointly compelled the abandonment of the voyage, was one that is variously called the healthy man&rsquo;s disease, European Leprosy, and Biblical Leprosy.&nbsp; Unlike True Leprosy, nothing is known of this mysterious malady.&nbsp; No doctor has ever claimed a cure for a case of it, though spontaneous cures are recorded.&nbsp; It comes, they know not how.&nbsp; It is, they know not what.&nbsp; It goes, they know not why.&nbsp; Without the use of drugs, merely by living in the wholesome California climate, my silvery skin vanished.&nbsp; The only hope the doctors had held out to me was a spontaneous cure, and such a cure was mine.</p> <p>A last word: the test of the voyage.&nbsp; It is easy enough for me or any man to say that it was enjoyable.&nbsp; But there is a better witness, the one woman who made it from beginning to end.&nbsp; In hospital when I broke the news to Charmian that I must go back to California, the tears welled into her eyes.&nbsp; For two days she was wrecked and broken by the knowledge that the happy, happy voyage was abandoned.</p> <p><span class="smcap">Glen Ellen</span>, <span class="smcap">California</span>,<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>April</i> 7, 1911.</p> <h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> <p><a name="footnote268"></a><a href="#citation268" class="footnote">[268]</a>&nbsp; To point out that we of the <i>Snark</i> are not a crowd of weaklings, which might be concluded from our divers afflictions, I quote the following, which I gleaned verbatim from the <i>Eugenie&rsquo;s</i> log and which may be considered as a sample of Solomon Islands cruising:</p> <p style="text-align: center">Ulava, Thursday, March 12, 1908.</p> <p>Boat went ashore in the morning.&nbsp; Got two loads ivory nut, 4000 copra.&nbsp; Skipper down with fever.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Ulava, Friday, March 13, 1908.</p> <p>Buying nuts from bushmen, 1&frac12; ton.&nbsp; Mate and skipper down with fever.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Ulava, Saturday, March 14, 1908.</p> <p>At noon hove up and proceeded with a very light E.N.E. wind for Ngora-Ngora.&nbsp; Anchored in 5 fathoms&mdash;shell and coral.&nbsp; Mate down with fever.</p> <p style="text-align: center">Ngora-Ngora, Sunday, March 15, 1908.</p> <p>At daybreak found that the boy Bagua had died during the night, on dysentery.&nbsp; He was about 14 days sick.&nbsp; At sunset, big N.W. squall.&nbsp; (Second anchor ready)&nbsp; Lasting one hour and 30 minutes.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Monday, March 16, 1908.</p> <p>Set course for Sikiana at 4 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>&nbsp; Wind broke off.&nbsp; Heavy squalls during the night.&nbsp; Skipper down on dysentery, also one man.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Tuesday, March 17, 1908.</p> <p>Skipper and 2 crew down on dysentery.&nbsp; Mate fever.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Wednesday, March 18, 1908.</p> <p>Big sea.&nbsp; Lee-rail under water all the time.&nbsp; Ship under reefed mainsail, staysail, and inner jib.&nbsp; Skipper and 3 men dysentery.&nbsp; Mate fever.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Thursday, March 19, 1908.</p> <p>Too thick to see anything.&nbsp; Blowing a gale all the time.&nbsp; Pump plugged up and bailing with buckets.&nbsp; Skipper and five boys down on dysentery.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Friday, March 20, 1908.</p> <p>During night squalls with hurricane force.&nbsp; Skipper and six men down on dysentery.</p> <p style="text-align: center">At sea, Saturday, March 21, 1908.</p> <p>Turned back from Sikiana.&nbsp; Squalls all day with heavy rain and sea.&nbsp; Skipper and best part of crew on dysentery.&nbsp; Mate fever.</p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p>And so, day by day, with the majority of all on board prostrated, the <i>Eugenie&rsquo;s</i> log goes on.&nbsp; The only variety occurred on March 31, when the mate came down with dysentery and the skipper was floored by fever.</p> 
19987	----	NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DXCVIII. SEPTEMBER 7, 1906 CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--I.[1] BY MARK TWAIN. PREFATORY NOTE.--Mr. Clemens began to write his autobiography many years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. It was his original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until after his death; but, after leaving "Pier No. 70," he concluded that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the public. It is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of words already written, which will appear in this REVIEW during the coming year. No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of the author.--EDITOR N. A. R. INTRODUCTION. I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method--a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals mainly in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous. Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system--only apparently systemless, for it is not really that. It is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble--a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive, for the reason that, if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time. He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library of it. I said that that was my design; but that, if I should live long enough, the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and that there would not be any multi-billionaire alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan. Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit, I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way. I. Back of the Virginia Clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors stretching back to Noah's time. According to tradition, some of them were pirates and slavers in Elizabeth's time. But this is no discredit to them, for so were Drake and Hawkins and the others. It was a respectable trade, then, and monarchs were partners in it. In my time I have had desires to be a pirate myself. The reader--if he will look deep down in his secret heart, will find--but never mind what he will find there; I am not writing his Autobiography, but mine. Later, according to tradition, one of the procession was Ambassador to Spain in the time of James I, or of Charles I, and married there and sent down a strain of Spanish blood to warm us up. Also, according to tradition, this one or another--Geoffrey Clement, by name--helped to sentence Charles to death. I have not examined into these traditions myself, partly because I was indolent, and partly because I was so busy polishing up this end of the line and trying to make it showy; but the other Clemenses claim that they have made the examination and that it stood the test. Therefore I have always taken for granted that I did help Charles out of his troubles, by ancestral proxy. My instincts have persuaded me, too. Whenever we have a strong and persistent and ineradicable instinct, we may be sure that it is not original with us, but inherited--inherited from away back, and hardened and perfected by the petrifying influence of time. Now I have been always and unchangingly bitter against Charles, and I am quite certain that this feeling trickled down to me through the veins of my forebears from the heart of that judge; for it is not my disposition to be bitter against people on my own personal account I am not bitter against Jeffreys. I ought to be, but I am not. It indicates that my ancestors of James II's time were indifferent to him; I do not know why; I never could make it out; but that is what it indicates. And I have always felt friendly toward Satan. Of course that is ancestral; it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it. ... And so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of Clemenses who said they had examined the records, I have always been obliged to believe that Geoffrey Clement the martyr-maker was an ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, and in fact pride. This has not had a good effect upon me, for it has made me vain, and that is a fault. It has made me set myself above people who were less fortunate in their ancestry than I, and has moved me to take them down a peg, upon occasion, and say things to them which hurt them before company. A case of the kind happened in Berlin several years ago. William Walter Phelps was our Minister at the Emperor's Court, then, and one evening he had me to dinner to meet Count S., a cabinet minister. This nobleman was of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose Phelps was in the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught, now and then--just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident, and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that tried Charles I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch hats, and below them three bare-headed secretaries seated at a table. Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three, and said with exulting indifference-- "An ancestor of mine." I put my finger on a judge, and retorted with scathing languidness-- "Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others." It was not noble in me to do it. I have always regretted it since. But it landed him. I wonder how he felt? However, it made no difference in our friendship, which shows that he was fine and high, notwithstanding the humbleness of his origin. And it was also creditable in me, too, that I could overlook it. I made no change in my bearing toward him, but always treated him as an equal. But it was a hard night for me in one way. Mr. Phelps thought I was the guest of honor, and so did Count S.; but I didn't, for there was nothing in my invitation to indicate it. It was just a friendly offhand note, on a card. By the time dinner was announced Phelps was himself in a state of doubt. Something had to be done; and it was not a handy time for explanations. He tried to get me to go out with him, but I held back; then he tried S., and he also declined. There was another guest, but there was no trouble about him. We finally went out in a pile. There was a decorous plunge for seats, and I got the one at Mr. Phelps's left, the Count captured the one facing Phelps, and the other guest had to take the place of honor, since he could not help himself. We returned to the drawing-room in the original disorder. I had new shoes on, and they were tight. At eleven I was privately crying; I couldn't help it, the pain was so cruel. Conversation had been dead for an hour. S. had been due at the bedside of a dying official ever since half past nine. At last we all rose by one blessed impulse and went down to the street door without explanations--in a pile, and no precedence; and so, parted. The evening had its defects; still, I got my ancestor in, and was satisfied. Among the Virginian Clemenses were Jere. (already mentioned), and Sherrard. Jere. Clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot, and once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers when they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and arguments. He was out stumping the State at the time. The drummers were grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the opposition to drum while he made his speech. When he was ready to begin, he got out his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft, silky way-- "I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play on them, don't stand behind them." Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia in the war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James Clemens branch lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. This was after the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a rebel; but by the time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily) a Republican. The Clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. I did not know what had become of Sherrard Clemens; but once I introduced Senator Hawley to a Republican mass meeting in New England, and then I got a bitter letter from Sherrard from St. Louis. He said that the Republicans of the North--no, the "mudsills of the North"--had swept away the old aristocracy of the South with fire and sword, and it ill became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. Did I forget that I was a Lambton? That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have already said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the American Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and married my father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years old and he twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property. She brought him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They removed to the remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I was of a later vintage I do not remember anything about it. I was postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown new State and needed attractions. I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret, and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have been others, but as to that I am not sure. It was a great lift for that little village to have my parents come there. It was hoped that they would stay, so that it would become a city. It was supposed that they would stay. And so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and prices went down, and it was many years before Jamestown got another start. I have written about Jamestown in the "Gilded Age," a book of mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. My father left a fine estate behind him in the region round about Jamestown--75,000 acres.[2] When he died in 1847 he had owned it about twenty years. The taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year for the whole), and he had always paid them regularly and kept his title perfect. He had always said that the land would not become valuable in his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children some day. It contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that in the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the property would be property in fact as well as in name. It also produced a wild grape of a promising sort. He had sent some samples to Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and Mr. Longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his Catawbas. The land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my father did not know that, and of course in those early days he would have cared nothing about it if he had known it. The oil was not discovered until about 1895. I wish I owned a couple of acres of the land now. In which case I would not be writing Autobiographies for a living. My father's dying charge was, "Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away from you." My mother's favorite cousin, James Lampton, who figures in the "Gilded Age" as "Colonel Sellers," always said of that land--and said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"There's millions in it--millions!" It is true that he always said that about everything--and was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right; which shows that a man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged; if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by. Many persons regarded "Colonel Sellers" as a fiction, an invention, an extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a "creation"; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was; he was not a person who could be exaggerated. The incidents which looked most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions of mine but were facts of his life; and I was present when they were developed. John T. Raymond's audiences used to come near to dying with laughter over the turnip-eating scene; but, extravagant as the scene was, it was faithful to the facts, in all its absurd details. The thing happened in Lampton's own house, and I was present. In fact I was myself the guest who ate the turnips. In the hands of a great actor that piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears, and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. But Raymond was great in humorous portrayal only. In that he was superb, he was wonderful--in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the pigmies. The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family worshipped. It is the right word. To them he was but little less than a god. The real Colonel Sellers was never on the stage. Only half of him was there. Raymond could not play the other half of him; it was above his level. That half was made up of qualities of which Raymond was wholly destitute. For Raymond was not a manly man, he was not an honorable man nor an honest one, he was empty and selfish and vulgar and ignorant and silly, and there was a vacancy in him where his heart should have been. There was only one man who could have played the whole of Colonel Sellers, and that was Frank Mayo.[3] It is a world of surprises. They fall, too, where one is least expecting them. When I introduced Sellers into the book, Charles Dudley Warner, who was writing the story with me, proposed a change of Seller's Christian name. Ten years before, in a remote corner of the West, he had come across a man named Eschol Sellers, and he thought that Eschol was just the right and fitting name for our Sellers, since it was odd and quaint and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn't happen; that he was doubtless dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn't live long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the right one and we couldn't do without it. So the change was made. Warner's man was a farmer in a cheap and humble way. When the book had been out a week, a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners and ducal upholstery arrived in Hartford in a sultry state of mind and with a libel suit in his eye, and _his_ name was Eschol Sellers! He had never heard of the other one, and had never been within a thousand miles of him. This damaged aristocrat's programme was quite definite and businesslike: the American Publishing Company must suppress the edition as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit for $10,000. He carried away the Company's promise and many apologies, and we changed the name back to Colonel Mulberry Sellers, in the plates. Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen. Even the existence of two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of Eschol Sellers is a possible thing. James Lampton floated, all his days, in a tinted mist of magnificent dreams, and died at last without seeing one of them realized. I saw him last in 1884, when it had been twenty-six years since I ate the basin of raw turnips and washed them down with a bucket of water in his house. He was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to myself, "I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him." I asked him to excuse me a moment, and ran into the next room, which was Cable's; Cable and I were stumping the Union on a reading tour. I said-- "I am going to leave your door open, so that you can listen. There is a man in there who is interesting." I went back and asked Lampton what he was doing now. He began to tell me of a "small venture" he had begun in New Mexico through his son; "only a little thing--a mere trifle--partly to amuse my leisure, partly to keep my capital from lying idle, but mainly to develop the boy--develop the boy; fortune's wheel is ever revolving, he may have to work for his living some day--as strange things have happened in this world. But it's only a little thing--a mere trifle, as I said." And so it was--as he began it. But under his deft hands it grew, and blossomed, and spread--oh, beyond imagination. At the end of half an hour he finished; finished with the remark, uttered in an adorably languid manner: "Yes, it is but a trifle, as things go nowadays--a bagatelle--but amusing. It passes the time. The boy thinks great things of it, but he is young, you know, and imaginative; lacks the experience which comes of handling large affairs, and which tempers the fancy and perfects the judgment. I suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, I think; still, for a boy, you know, just starting in life, it is not bad. I should not want him to make a fortune--let that come later. It could turn his head, at his time of life, and in many ways be a damage to him." Then he said something about his having left his pocketbook lying on the table in the main drawing-room at home, and about its being after banking hours, now, and-- I stopped him, there, and begged him to honor Cable and me by being our guest at the lecture--with as many friends as might be willing to do us the like honor. He accepted. And he thanked me as a prince might who had granted us a grace. The reason I stopped his speech about the tickets was because I saw that he was going to ask me to furnish them to him and let him pay next day; and I knew that if he made the debt he would pay it if he had to pawn his clothes. After a little further chat he shook hands heartily and affectionately, and took his leave. Cable put his head in at the door, and said-- "That was Colonel Sellers." MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTES: [1] Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved. [2] Correction. 1906: it was above 100,000, it appears. [3] Raymond was playing "Colonel Sellers" in 1876 and along there. About twenty years later Mayo dramatized "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and played the title role delightfully. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DXCIX. SEPTEMBER 21, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--II. BY MARK TWAIN. II. My experiences as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from San Francisco in the first month of that year and presently Charles H. Webb, whom I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on _The Bulletin_, and afterward editor of _The Californian_, suggested that I publish a volume of sketches. I had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the sketches together. I was loath to do it myself, for from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. ("Ought to was" is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.) Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic States, but I knew quite well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it rested upon the story of "The Jumping Frog." When Artemus Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the "Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it. It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. He did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, _The Saturday Press_. "The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated. It wasn't I. I was still an obscurity. Webb undertook to collate the sketches. He performed this office, then handed the result to me, and I went to Carleton's establishment with it. I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire into my needs; but when he found that I had come to sell a book and not to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees, and the old-gold intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an inch and my teeth fell out. I meekly asked the privilege of a word with Mr. Carleton, and was coldly informed that he was in his private office. Discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while I got by the frontier and entered the holy of holies. Ah, now I remember how I managed it! Webb had made an appointment for me with Carleton; otherwise I never should have gotten over that frontier. Carleton rose and said brusquely and aggressively, "Well, what can I do for you?" I reminded him that I was there by appointment to offer him my book for publication. He began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and for two or three minutes I couldn't see him for the rain. It was words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand, which comprehended the whole room and said, "Books--look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don't. Good morning." Twenty-one years elapsed before I saw Carleton again. I was then sojourning with my family at the Schweitzerhof, in Luzerne. He called on me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries, "I am substantially an obscure person, but I have at least one distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me to immortality--to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century." It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so, and said it was a long-delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again. I reported my adventure to Webb, and he bravely said that not all the Carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it himself on a ten per cent. royalty. And so he did. He brought it out in blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it, I think he named it "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," price $1.25. He made the plates and printed and bound the book through a job-printing house, and published it through the American News Company. In June I sailed in the _Quaker City_ Excursion. I returned in November, and in Washington found a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, offering me five per cent. royalty on a book which should recount the adventures of the Excursion. In lieu of the royalty, I was offered the alternative of ten thousand dollars cash upon delivery of the manuscript. I consulted A. D. Richardson and he said "take the royalty." I followed his advice and closed with Bliss. By my contract I was to deliver the manuscript in July of 1868. I wrote the book in San Francisco and delivered the manuscript within contract time. Bliss provided a multitude of illustrations for the book, and then stopped work on it. The contract date for the issue went by, and there was no explanation of this. Time drifted along and still there was no explanation. I was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty times a day, on an average, I was trying to answer this conundrum: "When is your book coming out?" I got tired of inventing new answers to that question, and by and by I got horribly tired of the question itself. Whoever asked it became my enemy at once, and I was usually almost eager to make that appear. As soon as I was free of the lecture-field I hastened to Hartford to make inquiries. Bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to publish the book but the directors of his Company were staid old fossils and were afraid of it. They had examined the book, and the majority of them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character. Bliss said the house had never published a book that had a suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid that a departure of this kind would seriously injure the house's reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to carry out his contract. One of the directors, a Mr. Drake--at least he was the remains of what had once been a Mr. Drake--invited me to take a ride with him in his buggy, and I went along. He was a pathetic old relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. He had a delicate purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. He explained the house's difficulty and distress, as Bliss had already explained it. Then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to take away "The Innocents Abroad" and release the concern from the contract. I said I wouldn't--and so ended the interview and the buggy excursion. Then I warned Bliss that he must get to work or I should make trouble. He acted upon the warning, and set up the book and I read the proofs. Then there was another long wait and no explanation. At last toward the end of July (1869, I think), I lost patience and telegraphed Bliss that if the book was not on sale in twenty-four hours I should bring suit for damages. That ended the trouble. Half a dozen copies were bound and placed on sale within the required time. Then the canvassing began, and went briskly forward. In nine months the book took the publishing house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy thousand dollars profit to the good. It was Bliss that told me this--but if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the truth in sixty-five years. He was born in 1804. III. ... This was in 1849. I was fourteen years old, then. We were still living in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, in the new "frame" house built by my father five years before. That is, some of us lived in the new part, the rest in the old part back of it--the "L." In the autumn my sister gave a party, and invited all the marriageable young people of the village. I was too young for this society, and was too bashful to mingle with young ladies, anyway, therefore I was not invited--at least not for the whole evening. Ten minutes of it was to be my whole share. I was to do the part of a bear in a small fairy play. I was to be disguised all over in a close-fitting brown hairy stuff proper for a bear. About half past ten I was told to go to my room and put on this disguise, and be ready in half an hour. I started, but changed my mind; for I wanted to practise a little, and that room was very small. I crossed over to the large unoccupied house on the corner of Main and Hill streets,[4] unaware that a dozen of the young people were also going there to dress for their parts. I took the little black slave boy, Sandy, with me, and we selected a roomy and empty chamber on the second floor. We entered it talking, and this gave a couple of half-dressed young ladies an opportunity to take refuge behind a screen undiscovered. Their gowns and things were hanging on hooks behind the door, but I did not see them; it was Sandy that shut the door, but all his heart was in the theatricals, and he was as unlikely to notice them as I was myself. That was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as I did not know there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should have died of shame. Untroubled by apprehensions, I stripped to the skin and began my practice. I was full of ambition; I was determined to make a hit; I was burning to establish a reputation as a bear and get further engagements; so I threw myself into my work with an abandon that promised great things. I capered back and forth from one end of the room to the other on all fours, Sandy applauding with enthusiasm; I walked upright and growled and snapped and snarled; I stood on my head, I flung handsprings, I danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent and my imaginary snout sniffing from side to side; I did everything a bear could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course I never suspected that I was making a spectacle of myself to any one but Sandy. At last, standing on my head, I paused in that attitude to take a minute's rest. There was a moment's silence, then Sandy spoke up with excited interest and said-- "Marse Sam, has you ever seen a smoked herring?" "No. What is that?" "It's a fish." "Well, what of it? Anything peculiar about it?" "Yes, suh, you bet you dey is. _Dey eats 'em guts and all!_" There was a smothered burst of feminine snickers from behind the screen! All the strength went out of me and I toppled forward like an undermined tower and brought the screen down with my weight, burying the young ladies under it. In their fright they discharged a couple of piercing screams--and possibly others, but I did not wait to count. I snatched my clothes and fled to the dark hall below, Sandy following. I was dressed in half a minute, and out the back way. I swore Sandy to eternal silence, then we went away and hid until the party was over. The ambition was all out of me. I could not have faced that giddy company after my adventure, for there would be two performers there who knew my secret, and would be privately laughing at me all the time. I was searched for but not found, and the bear had to be played by a young gentleman in his civilized clothes. The house was still and everybody asleep when I finally ventured home. I was very heavy-hearted, and full of a sense of disgrace. Pinned to my pillow I found a slip of paper which bore a line that did not lighten my heart, but only made my face burn. It was written in a laboriously disguised hand, and these were its mocking terms: "You probably couldn't have played _bear_, but you played _bare_ very well--oh, very very well!" We think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch him as with fire. I suffered miserably over that episode. I expected that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was not so. The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me. That was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from sufficient--the main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes, and it might as well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls' eyes of being the ones I so dreaded. During several weeks I could not look any young lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and I said to myself, "_That is one of them_," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign I was not bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal four years later, the secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls out, and was no longer expecting to do it. Nor wanting to, either. One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my mishap was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not her name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-bloomy and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and I stood in awe of her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay and rightfully unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like me. I probably never suspected her. But-- The scene changes. To Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896. I arrived there on my lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a divine vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian sunshine--the Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a startling thing. Before I could recover from the bewildering shock and speak to her she was gone. I thought maybe I had seen an apparition, but it was not so, she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other Mary, the original Mary. That Mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and presently sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young and was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears running down; and finally Mary said suddenly, and without any leading up-- "Tell me! What is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?" It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set me to musing--thinking--searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a sudden I knew! and far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur, "Dey eats 'em guts and all!" "At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?" But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me. FOOTNOTE: [4] That house still stands. IV. ... But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where I had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh, his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. His long face and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and focalize them upon Stevenson's special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smouldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful. * * * * * I said I thought he was right about the others, but mistaken as to Bret Harte; in substance I said that Harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talker; that he was always bright, but never brilliant; that in this matter he must not be classed with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, nor must any other man, ancient or modern; that Aldrich was always witty, always brilliant, if there was anybody present capable of striking his flint at the right angle; that Aldrich was as sure and prompt and unfailing as the red-hot iron on the blacksmith's anvil--you had only to hit it competently to make it deliver an explosion of sparks. I added-- "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings. None has equalled him, certainly none has surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of his fancy. Aldrich was always brilliant, he couldn't help it, he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking, you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes, he was always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell--you will see." Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, "I hope not." "Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset." * * * * * There on that bench we struck out a new phrase--one or the other of us, I don't remember which--"submerged renown." Variations were discussed: "submerged fame," "submerged reputation," and so on, and a choice was made; "submerged renown" was elected, I believe. This important matter rose out of an incident which had been happening to Stevenson in Albany. While in a book-shop or book-stall there he had noticed a long rank of small books, cheaply but neatly gotten up, and bearing such titles as "Davis's Selected Speeches," "Davis's Selected Poetry," Davis's this and Davis's that and Davis's the other thing; compilations, every one of them, each with a brief, compact, intelligent and useful introductory chapter by this same Davis, whose first name I have forgotten. Stevenson had begun the matter with this question: "Can you name the American author whose fame and acceptance stretch widest in the States?" I thought I could, but it did not seem to me that it would be modest to speak out, in the circumstances. So I diffidently said nothing. Stevenson noticed, and said-- "Save your delicacy for another time--you are not the one. For a shilling you can't name the American author of widest note and popularity in the States. But I can." Then he went on and told about that Albany incident. He had inquired of the shopman-- "Who is this Davis?" The answer was-- "An author whose books have to have freight-trains to carry them, not baskets. Apparently you have not heard of him?" Stevenson said no, this was the first time. The man said-- "Nobody has heard of Davis: you may ask all around and you will see. You never see his name mentioned in print, not even in advertisement; these things are of no use to Davis, not any more than they are to the wind and the sea. You never see one of Davis's books floating on top of the United States, but put on your diving armor and get yourself lowered away down and down and down till you strike the dense region, the sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages--there you'll find them by the million. The man that gets that market, his fortune is made, his bread and butter are safe, for those people will never go back on him. An author may have a reputation which is confined to the surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten, entirely forgotten--the frequent steps in a surface reputation. At surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable if you go at it right--with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not with the club and tomahawk. But it is a different matter with the submerged reputation--down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible." V. This is from this morning's paper: MARK TWAIN LETTER SOLD. _Written to Thomas Nast, it Proposed a Joint Tour._ A Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov. 12, 1877, and it addressed to Nast. It reads in part as follows: Hartford, _Nov. 12_. MY DEAR NAST: I did not think I should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say I die innocent. But the same old offers keep arriving that have arriven every year, and been every year declined--$500 for Louisville, $500 for St. Louis, $1,000 gold for two nights in Toronto, half gross proceeds for New York, Boston, Brooklyn, &c. I have declined them all just as usual, though sorely tempted as usual. Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but because (1) travelling alone is so heart-breakingly dreary, and (2) shouldering the whole show is such cheer-killing responsibility. Therefore I now propose to you what you proposed to me in November, 1867--ten years ago, (when I was unknown,) viz.; That you should stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to little ones) with you for company. The letter includes a schedule of cities and the number of appearances planned for each. This is as it should be. This is worthy of all praise. I say it myself lest other competent persons should forget to do it. It appears that four of my ancient letters were sold at auction, three of them at twenty-seven dollars, twenty-eight dollars, and twenty-nine dollars respectively, and the one above mentioned at forty-three dollars. There is one very gratifying circumstance about this, to wit: that my literature has more than held its own as regards money value through this stretch of thirty-six years. I judge that the forty-three-dollar letter must have gone at about ten cents a word, whereas if I had written it to-day its market rate would be thirty cents--so I have increased in value two or three hundred per cent. I note another gratifying circumstance--that a letter of General Grant's sold at something short of eighteen dollars. I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this nation, but it is a deep happiness to me to know that when it comes to epistolary literature he can't sit in the front seat along with me. This reminds me--nine years ago, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, a report was cabled to the American journals that I was dying. I was not the one. It was another Clemens, a cousin of mine,--Dr. J. Ross Clemens, now of St. Louis--who was due to die but presently escaped, by some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of Clemens. The London representatives of the American papers began to flock in, with American cables in their hands, to inquire into my condition. There was nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study and worth next to nothing as a text for transatlantic news. One of these men was a gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic Irishman, who hid his sorrow the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that his paper, the _Evening Sun_, had cabled him that it was reported in New York that I was dead. What should he cable in reply? I said-- "Say the report is greatly exaggerated." He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those words. The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to discount exaggerations. The next man was also an Irishman. He had his New York cablegram in his hand--from the New York _World_--and he was so evidently trying to get around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say. So when occasion offered I slipped it out of his hand. It said, "If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words. If dead send a thousand." Now that old letter of mine sold yesterday for forty-three dollars. When I am dead it will be worth eighty-six. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DC. OCTOBER 5, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--III. BY MARK TWAIN. VI. To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. My wife passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in Florence, Italy, after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months' duration. I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother Charley's stateroom in the steamer "Quaker City," in the Bay of Smyrna, in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her in the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December. She was slender and beautiful and girlish--and she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection. She was _always_ frail in body, and she lived upon her spirit, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible. Perfect truth, perfect honesty, perfect candor, were qualities of her character which were born with her. Her judgments of people and things were sure and accurate. Her intuitions almost never deceived her. In her judgments of the characters and acts of both friends and strangers, there was always room for charity, and this charity never failed. I have compared and contrasted her with hundreds of persons, and my conviction remains that hers was the most perfect character I have ever met. And I may add that she was the most winningly dignified person I have ever known. Her character and disposition were of the sort that not only invites worship, but commands it. No servant ever left her service who deserved to remain in it. And, as she could choose with a glance of her eye, the servants she selected did in almost all cases deserve to remain, and they _did_ remain. She was always cheerful; and she was always able to communicate her cheerfulness to others. During the nine years that we spent in poverty and debt, she was always able to reason me out of my despairs, and find a bright side to the clouds, and make me see it. In all that time, I never knew her to utter a word of regret concerning our altered circumstances, nor did I ever know her children to do the like. For she had taught them, and they drew their fortitude from her. The love which she bestowed upon those whom she loved took the form of worship, and in that form it was returned--returned by relatives, friends and the servants of her household. It was a strange combination which wrought into one individual, so to speak, by marriage--her disposition and character and mine. She poured out her prodigal affections in kisses and caresses, and in a vocabulary of endearments whose profusion was always an astonishment to me. I was born _reserved_ as to endearments of speech and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the summer waves break upon Gibraltar. I was reared in that atmosphere of reserve. As I have already said, in another chapter, I never knew a member of my father's family to kiss another member of it except once, and that at a death-bed. And our village was not a kissing community. The kissing and caressing ended with courtship--along with the deadly piano-playing of that day. She had the heart-free laugh of a girl. It came seldom, but when it broke upon the ear it was as inspiring as music. I heard it for the last time when she had been occupying her sickbed for more than a year, and I made a written note of it at the time--a note not to be repeated. To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary. We were married in her father's house in Elmira, New York, and went next day, by special train, to Buffalo, along with the whole Langdon family, and with the Beechers and the Twichells, who had solemnized the marriage. We were to live in Buffalo, where I was to be one of the editors of the Buffalo "Express," and a part owner of the paper. I knew nothing about Buffalo, but I had made my household arrangements there through a friend, by letter. I had instructed him to find a boarding-house of as respectable a character as my light salary as editor would command. We were received at about nine o'clock at the station in Buffalo, and were put into several sleighs and driven all over America, as it seemed to me--for, apparently, we turned all the corners in the town and followed all the streets there were--I scolding freely, and characterizing that friend of mine in very uncomplimentary words for securing a boarding-house that apparently had no definite locality. But there was a conspiracy--and my bride knew of it, but I was in ignorance. Her father, Jervis Langdon, had bought and furnished a new house for us in the fashionable street, Delaware Avenue, and had laid in a cook and housemaids, and a brisk and electric young coachman, an Irishman, Patrick McAleer--and we were being driven all over that city in order that one sleighful of those people could have time to go to the house, and see that the gas was lighted all over it, and a hot supper prepared for the crowd. We arrived at last, and when I entered that fairy place my indignation reached high-water mark, and without any reserve I delivered my opinion to that friend of mine for being so stupid as to put us into a boarding-house whose terms would be far out of my reach. Then Mr. Langdon brought forward a very pretty box and opened it, and took from it a deed of the house. So the comedy ended very pleasantly, and we sat down to supper. The company departed about midnight, and left us alone in our new quarters. Then Ellen, the cook, came in to get orders for the morning's marketing--and neither of us knew whether beefsteak was sold by the barrel or by the yard. We exposed our ignorance, and Ellen was fall of Irish delight over it. Patrick McAleer, that brisk young Irishman, came in to get his orders for next day--and that was our first glimpse of him.... Our first child, Langdon Clemens, was born the 7th of November, 1870, and lived twenty-two months. Susy was born the 19th of March, 1872, and passed from life in the Hartford home, the 18th of August, 1896. With her, when the end came, were Jean and Katy Leary, and John and Ellen (the gardener and his wife). Clara and her mother and I arrived in England from around the world on the 31st of July, and took a house in Guildford. A week later, when Susy, Katy and Jean should have been arriving from America, we got a letter instead. It explained that Susy was slightly ill--nothing of consequence. But we were disquieted, and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day, at noon. Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait for cablegram in the morning." This was not satisfactory--not reassuring. I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now closing. I waited in the post-office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. We sat silent at home till one in the morning, waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earliest morning train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said the recovery would be long, but certain. This was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind to search for a larger house in Guildford. That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day." It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss--that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an _essential_--there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster. The 18th of August brought me the awful tidings. The mother and the sister were out there in mid-Atlantic, ignorant of what was happening; flying to meet this incredible calamity. All that could be done to protect them from the full force of the shock was done by relatives and good friends. They went down the Bay and met the ship at night, but did not show themselves until morning, and then only to Clara. When she returned to the stateroom she did not speak, and did not need to. Her mother looked at her and said: "Susy is dead." At half past ten o'clock that night, Clara and her mother completed their circuit of the globe, and drew up at Elmira by the same train and in the same car which had borne them and me Westward from it one year, one month, and one week before. And again Susy was there--not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights, as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin, in the house where she was born. The last thirteen days of Susy's life were spent in our own house in Hartford, the home of her childhood, and always the dearest place in the earth to her. About her she had faithful old friends--her pastor, Mr. Twichell, who had known her from the cradle, and who had come a long journey to be with her; her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Crane; Patrick, the coachman; Katy, who had begun to serve us when Susy was a child of eight years; John and Ellen, who had been with us many years. Also Jean was there. At the hour when my wife and Clara set sail for America, Susy was in no danger. Three hours later there came a sudden change for the worse. Meningitis set in, and it was immediately apparent that she was death-struck. That was Saturday, the 15th of August. "That evening she took food for the last time," (Jean's letter to me). The next morning the brain-fever was raging. She walked the floor a little in her pain and delirium, then succumbed to weakness and returned to her bed. Previously she had found hanging in a closet a gown which she had seen her mother wear. She thought it was her mother, dead, and she kissed it, and cried. About noon she became blind (an effect of the disease) and bewailed it to her uncle. From Jean's letter I take this sentence, which needs no comment: "About one in the afternoon Susy spoke for the last time." It was only one word that she said when she spoke that last time, and it told of her longing. She groped with her hands and found Katy, and caressed her face, and said "Mamma." How gracious it was that, in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that beautiful illusion--that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear imagined presence. About two o'clock she composed herself as if for sleep, and never moved again. She fell into unconsciousness and so remained two days and five hours, until Tuesday evening at seven minutes past seven, when the release came. She was twenty-four years and five months old. On the 23d, her mother and her sisters saw her laid to rest--she that had been our wonder and our worship. In one of her own books I find some verses which I will copy here. Apparently, she always put borrowed matter in quotation marks. These verses lack those marks, and therefore I take them to be her own: Love came at dawn, when all the world was fair, When crimson glories' bloom and sun were rife; Love came at dawn, when hope's wings fanned the air, And murmured, "I am life." Love came at eve, and when the day was done, When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed; Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun, And whispered, "I am rest." The summer seasons of Susy's childhood were spent at Quarry Farm, on the hills east of Elmira, New York; the other seasons of the year at the home in Hartford. Like other children, she was blithe and happy, fond of play; unlike the average of children, she was at times much given to retiring within herself, and trying to search out the hidden meanings of the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence, and in all the ages have baffled the inquirer and mocked him. As a little child aged seven, she was oppressed and perplexed by the maddening repetition of the stock incidents of our race's fleeting sojourn here, just as the same thing has oppressed and perplexed maturer minds from the beginning of time. A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities; those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year; at length, ambition is dead, pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; there they have left no sign that they have existed--a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place, and copies all they did, and goes along the same profitless road, and vanishes as they vanished--to make room for another, and another, and a million other myriads, to follow the same arid path through the same desert, and accomplish what the first myriad, and all the myriads that came after it, accomplished--nothing! "Mamma, what is it all for?" asked Susy, preliminarily stating the above details in her own halting language, after long brooding over them alone in the privacy of the nursery. A year later, she was groping her way alone through another sunless bog, but this time she reached a rest for her feet. For a week, her mother had not been able to go to the nursery, evenings, at the child's prayer hour. She spoke of it--was sorry for it, and said she would come to-night, and hoped she could continue to come every night and hear Susy pray, as before. Noticing that the child wished to respond, but was evidently troubled as to how to word her answer, she asked what the difficulty was. Susy explained that Miss Foote (the governess) had been teaching her about the Indians and their religious beliefs, whereby it appeared that they had not only a God, but several. This had set Susy to thinking. As a result of this thinking, she had stopped praying. She qualified this statement--that is, she modified it--saying she did not now pray "in the same way" as she had formerly done. Her mother said: "Tell me about it, dear." "Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. By and by, it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there may be a God and a Heaven--or something better." I wrote down this pathetic prayer in its precise wording, at the time, in a record which we kept of the children's sayings, and my reverence for it has grown with the years that have passed over my head since then. Its untaught grace and simplicity are a child's, but the wisdom and the pathos of it are of all the ages that have come and gone since the race of man has lived, and longed, and hoped, and feared, and doubted. To go back a year--Susy aged seven. Several times her mother said to her: "There, there, Susy, you mustn't cry over little things." This furnished Susy a text for thought She had been breaking her heart over what had seemed vast disasters--a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat--and now came this strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason, these were not vast calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time, for two or three days--but it baffled her--defeated her. And at last she gave up and went to her mother for help. "Mamma, what is '_little_ things'?" It seemed a simple question--at first. And yet, before the answer could be put into words, unsuspected and unforeseen difficulties began to appear. They increased; they multiplied; they brought about another defeat. The effort to explain came to a standstill. Then Susy tried to help her mother out--with an instance, an example, an illustration. The mother was getting ready to go down-town, and one of her errands was to buy a long-promised toy-watch for Susy. "If you forgot the watch, mamma, would that be a little thing?" She was not concerned about the watch, for she knew it would not be forgotten. What she was hoping for was that the answer would unriddle the riddle, and bring rest and peace to her perplexed little mind. The hope was disappointed, of course--for the reason that the size of a misfortune is not determinate by an outsider's measurement of it, but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child, but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about. A verdict was reached, but it was based upon the above model, and Susy was granted leave to measure her disasters thereafter with her own tape-line. As a child, Susy had a passionate temper; and it cost her much remorse and many tears before she learned to govern it, but after that it was a wholesome salt, and her character was the stronger and healthier for its presence. It enabled her to be good with dignity; it preserved her not only from being good for vanity's sake, but from even the appearance of it. In looking back over the long vanished years, it seems but natural and excusable that I should dwell with longing affection and preference upon incidents of her young life which made it beautiful to us, and that I should let its few small offences go unsummoned and unreproached. In the summer of 1880, when Susy was just eight years of age, the family were at Quarry Farm, as usual at that season of the year. Hay-cutting time was approaching, and Susy and Clara were counting the hours, for the time was big with a great event for them; they had been promised that they might mount the wagon and ride home from the fields on the summit of the hay mountain. This perilous privilege, so dear to their age and species, had never been granted them before. Their excitement had no bounds. They could talk of nothing but this epoch-making adventure, now. But misfortune overtook Susy on the very morning of the important day. In a sudden outbreak of passion, she corrected Clara--with a shovel, or stick, or something of the sort. At any rate, the offence committed was of a gravity clearly beyond the limit allowed in the nursery. In accordance with the rule and custom of the house, Susy went to her mother to confess, and to help decide upon the size and character of the punishment due. It was quite understood that, as a punishment could have but one rational object and function--to act as a reminder, and warn the transgressor against transgressing in the same way again--the children would know about as well as any how to choose a penalty which would be rememberable and effective. Susy and her mother discussed various punishments, but none of them seemed adequate. This fault was an unusually serious one, and required the setting up of a danger-signal in the memory that would not blow out nor burn out, but remain a fixture there and furnish its saving warning indefinitely. Among the punishments mentioned was deprivation of the hay-wagon ride. It was noticeable that this one hit Susy hard. Finally, in the summing up, the mother named over the list and asked: "Which one do you think it ought to be, Susy?" Susy studied, shrank from her duty, and asked: "Which do you think, mamma?" "Well, Susy, I would rather leave it to you. _You_ make the choice yourself." It cost Susy a struggle, and much and deep thinking and weighing--but she came out where any one who knew her could have foretold she would. "Well, mamma, I'll make it the hay-wagon, because you know the other things might not make me remember not to do it again, but if I don't get to ride on the hay-wagon I can remember it easily." In this world the real penalty, the sharp one, the lasting one, never falls otherwise than on the wrong person. It was not _I_ that corrected Clara, but the remembrance of poor Susy's lost hay-ride still brings _me_ a pang--after twenty-six years. Apparently, Susy was born with humane feelings for the animals, and compassion for their troubles. This enabled her to see a new point in an old story, once, when she was only six years old--a point which had been overlooked by older, and perhaps duller, people for many ages. Her mother told her the moving story of the sale of Joseph by his brethren, the staining of his coat with the blood of the slaughtered kid, and the rest of it. She dwelt upon the inhumanity of the brothers; their cruelty toward their helpless young brother; and the unbrotherly treachery which they practised upon him; for she hoped to teach the child a lesson in gentle pity and mercifulness which she would remember. Apparently, her desire was accomplished, for the tears came into Susy's eyes and she was deeply moved. Then she said: "Poor little kid!" A child's frank envy of the privileges and distinctions of its elders is often a delicately flattering attention and the reverse of unwelcome, but sometimes the envy is not placed where the beneficiary is expecting it to be placed. Once, when Susy was seven, she sat breathlessly absorbed in watching a guest of ours adorn herself for a ball. The lady was charmed by this homage; this mute and gentle admiration; and was happy in it. And when her pretty labors were finished, and she stood at last perfect, unimprovable, clothed like Solomon in all his glory, she paused, confident and expectant, to receive from Susy's tongue the tribute that was burning in her eyes. Susy drew an envious little sigh and said: "I wish _I_ could have crooked teeth and spectacles!" Once, when Susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did something one day in the presence of company, which subjected her to criticism and reproof. Afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter. Then she set up what I think--and what the shade of Burns would think--was a quite good philosophical defence. "Well, mamma, you know I didn't see myself, and so I couldn't know how it looked." In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies. It is natural for them to pick up any words that fall in their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size. As a result, their talk is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows. Sometimes the child gets a wrong idea of a word which it has picked up by chance, and attaches to it a meaning which impairs its usefulness--but this does not happen as often as one might expect it would. Indeed, it happens with an infrequency which may be regarded as remarkable. As a child, Susy had good fortune with her large words, and she employed many of them. She made no more than her fair share of mistakes. Once when she thought something very funny was going to happen (but it didn't), she was racked and torn with laughter, by anticipation. But, apparently, she still felt sure of her position, for she said, "If it had happened, I should have been transformed [transported] with glee." And earlier, when she was a little maid of five years, she informed a visitor that she had been in a church only once, and that was the time when Clara was "crucified" [christened].... In Heidelberg, when Susy was six, she noticed that the Schloss gardens were populous with snails creeping all about everywhere. One day she found a new dish on her table and inquired concerning it, and learned that it was made of snails. She was awed and impressed, and said: "Wild ones, mamma?" She was thoughtful and considerate of others--an acquired quality, no doubt. No one seems to be born with it. One hot day, at home in Hartford, when she was a little child, her mother borrowed her fan several times (a Japanese one, value five cents), refreshed herself with it a moment or two, then handed it back with a word of thanks. Susy knew her mother would use the fan all the time if she could do it without putting a deprivation upon its owner. She also knew that her mother could not be persuaded to do that. A relief most be devised somehow; Susy devised it. She got five cents out of her money-box and carried it to Patrick, and asked him to take it down-town (a mile and a half) and buy a Japanese fan and bring it home. He did it--and thus thoughtfully and delicately was the exigency met and the mother's comfort secured. It is to the child's credit that she did not save herself expense by bringing down another and more costly kind of fan from up-stairs, but was content to act upon the impression that her mother desired the Japanese kind--content to accomplish the desire and stop with that, without troubling about the wisdom or unwisdom of it. Sometimes, while she was still a child, her speech fell into quaint and strikingly expressive forms. Once--aged nine or ten--she came to her mother's room, when her sister Jean was a baby, and said Jean was crying in the nursery, and asked if she might ring for the nurse. Her mother asked: "Is she crying hard?"--meaning cross, ugly. "Well, no, mamma. It is a weary, lonesome cry." It is a pleasure to me to recall various incidents which reveal the delicacies of feeling that were so considerable a part of her budding character. Such a revelation came once in a way which, while creditable to her heart, was defective in another direction. She was in her eleventh year then. Her mother had been making the Christmas purchases, and she allowed Susy to see the presents which were for Patrick's children. Among these was a handsome sled for Jimmy, on which a stag was painted; also, in gilt capitals, the word "Deer." Susy was excited and joyous over everything, until she came to this sled. Then she became sober and silent--yet the sled was the choicest of all the gifts. Her mother was surprised, and also disappointed, and said: "Why, Susy, doesn't it please you? Isn't it fine?" Susy hesitated, and it was plain that she did not want to say the thing that was in her mind. However, being urged, she brought it haltingly out: "Well, mamma, it _is_ fine, and of course it _did_ cost a good deal--but--but--why should that be mentioned?" Seeing that she was not understood, she reluctantly pointed to that word "Deer." It was her orthography that was at fault, not her heart. She had inherited both from her mother. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCI. OCTOBER 19, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--IV. BY MARK TWAIN. When Susy was thirteen, and was a slender little maid with plaited tails of copper-tinged brown hair down her back, and was perhaps the busiest bee in the household hive, by reason of the manifold studies, health exercises and recreations she had to attend to, she secretly, and of her own motion, and out of love, added another task to her labors--the writing of a biography of me. She did this work in her bedroom at night, and kept her record hidden. After a little, the mother discovered it and filched it, and let me see it; then told Susy what she had done, and how pleased I was, and how proud. I remember that time with a deep pleasure. I had had compliments before, but none that touched me like this; none that could approach it for value in my eyes. It has kept that place always since. I have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from any source, that was so precious to me as this one was and still is. As I read it _now_, after all these many years, it is still a king's message to me, and brings me the same dear surprise it brought me then--with the pathos added, of the thought that the eager and hasty hand that sketched it and scrawled it will not touch mine again--and I feel as the humble and unexpectant must feel when their eyes fall upon the edict that raises them to the ranks of the noble. Yesterday while I was rummaging in a pile of ancient note-books of mine which I had not seen for years, I came across a reference to that biography. It is quite evident that several times, at breakfast and dinner, in those long-past days, I was posing for the biography. In fact, I clearly remember that I _was_ doing that--and I also remember that Susy detected it. I remember saying a very smart thing, with a good deal of an air, at the breakfast-table one morning, and that Susy observed to her mother privately, a little later, that papa was doing that for the biography. I cannot bring myself to change any line or word in Susy's sketch of me, but will introduce passages from it now and then just as they came in their quaint simplicity out of her honest heart, which was the beautiful heart of a child. What comes from that source has a charm and grace of its own which may transgress all the recognized laws of literature, if it choose, and yet be literature still, and worthy of hospitality. I shall print the whole of this little biography, before I have done with it--every word, every sentence. The spelling is frequently desperate, but it was Susy's, and it shall stand. I love it, and cannot profane it. To me, it is gold. To correct it would alloy it, not refine it. It would spoil it. It would take from it its freedom and flexibility and make it stiff and formal. Even when it is most extravagant I am not shocked. It is Susy's spelling, and she was doing the best she could--and nothing could better it for me.... Susy began the biography in 1885, when I was in the fiftieth year of my age, and she just entering the fourteenth of hers. She begins in this way: We are a very happy family. We consist of Papa, Mamma, Jean, Clara and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a _very_ striking character. But wait a minute--I will return to Susy presently. In the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey's superior all the time. The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and slavishly adopt it. A generation ago, I found out that the latest review of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the _earliest_ review of it; that whatever the first reviewer found to praise or censure in the book would be repeated in the latest reviewer's report, with nothing fresh added. Therefore more than once I took the precaution of sending my book, in manuscript, to Mr. Howells, when he was editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," so that he could prepare a review of it at leisure. I knew he would say the truth about the book--I also knew that he would find more merit than demerit in it, because I already knew that that was the condition of the book. I allowed no copy of it to go out to the press until after Mr. Howells's notice of it had appeared. That book was always safe. There wasn't a man behind a pen in all America that had the courage to find anything in the book which Mr. Howells had not found--there wasn't a man behind a pen in America that had spirit enough to say a brave and original thing about the book on his own responsibility. I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value. When Charles Dudley Warner and I were about to bring out "The Gilded Age," the editor of the "Daily Graphic" persuaded me to let him have an advance copy, he giving me his word of honor that no notice of it would appear in his paper until after the "Atlantic Monthly" notice should have appeared. This reptile published a review of the book within three days afterward. I could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I ought to have required of him something substantial. I believe his notice did not deal mainly with the merit of the book, or the lack of it, but with my moral attitude toward the public. It was charged that I had used my reputation to play a swindle upon the public; that Mr. Warner had written as much as half of the book, and that I had used my name to float it and give it currency; a currency--so the critic averred--which it could not have acquired without my name, and that this conduct of mine was a grave fraud upon the people. The "Graphic" was not an authority upon any subject whatever. It had a sort of distinction, in that it was the first and only illustrated daily newspaper that the world had seen; but it was without character; it was poorly and cheaply edited; its opinion of a book or of any other work of art was of no consequence. Everybody knew this, yet all the critics in America, one after the other, copied the "Graphic's" criticism, merely changing the phraseology, and left me under that charge of dishonest conduct. Even the great Chicago "Tribune," the most important journal in the Middle West, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the humble "Daily Graphic," dishonesty-charge and all. However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that. What I have been travelling toward all this time is this: the first critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers, and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found who could look at me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy that lie. That lie began its course on the Pacific coast, in 1864, and it likened me in personal appearance to Petroleum V. Nasby, who had been out there lecturing. For twenty-five years afterward, no critic could furnish a description of me without fetching in Nasby to help out my portrait. I knew Nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life I have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart. I was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it. And it had long been a distress to my family--including Susy--that the critics should go on making this wearisome mistake, year after year, when there was no foundation for it. Even when a critic wanted to be particularly friendly and complimentary to me, he didn't dare to go beyond my clothes. He never ventured beyond that old safe frontier. When he had finished with my clothes he had said all the kind things, the pleasant things, the complimentary things he could risk. Then he dropped back on Nasby. Yesterday I found this clipping in the pocket of one of those ancient memorandum-books of mine. It is of the date of thirty-nine years ago, and both the paper and the ink are yellow with the bitterness that I felt in that old day when I clipped it out to preserve it and brood over it, and grieve about it. I will copy it here, to wit: A correspondent of the Philadelphia "Press," writing of one of Schuyler Colfax's receptions, says of our Washington correspondent: "Mark Twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as he deserves to be. Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for such purity and smoothness were never seen before. His lavender gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate were they in size; but more likely--anything else were more likely than that. In form and feature he bears some resemblance to the immortal Nasby; but whilst Petroleum is brunette to the core, Twain is golden, amber-hued, melting, blonde." Let us return to Susy's biography now, and get the opinion of one who is unbiassed: _From Susy's Biography._ Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly. He has beautiful gray hair, not any too thick or any too long, but just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features; kind blue eyes and a small mustache. He has a wonderfully shaped head and profile. He has a very good figure--in short, he is an extrodinarily fine looking man. All his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extrodinary teeth. His complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard. He is a very good man and a very funny one. He _has_ got a temper, but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw or ever hope to see--and oh, so absent-minded. He does tell perfectly delightful stories. Clara and I used to sit on each arm of his chair and listen while he told us stories about the pictures on the wall. I remember the story-telling days vividly. They were a difficult and exacting audience--those little creatures. Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the mantelpiece. On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various ornaments. At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life-size--called Emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-à-brac things already mentioned; also an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all that bric-à-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end-for-end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-à-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-à-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath, in their lives there was no peace; they knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time, the bric-à-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such tumultuous adventures in their romantic careers. As romancer to the children I had a hard time, even from the beginning. If they brought me a picture, in a magazine, and required me to build a story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. The stories had to come hot from the bat, always. They had to be absolutely original and fresh. Sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of crime. If they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or anything like that, I was pretty sure to have to deal with those things in the next romance. Once Clara required me to build a sudden tale out of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," and I had to do it. She didn't know what a boa-constrictor was, until he developed in the tale--then she was better satisfied with it than ever. _From Susy's Biography._ Papa's favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems to rest his head. He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant understand. Our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. At length he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would even if the alarm had been in order. Papa went despairingly upstairs and said to mamma, "Livy the mahogany-room won't go on. I have just opened the window to see." "Why, Youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of coarse the alarm will ring!" "That's what I've opened it for, why I just went down to see if it would ring!" Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he _mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make him believe an impossible thing true. This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days. Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling presently warms into anger. I cannot get far in the reading of the commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part," and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third part,"--before my temper is all gone. Ashcroft comes up here every day and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. It is pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and says, after one of his efforts, "Now you _do_ understand _that_, don't you?" I am always obliged to say, "I _don't_, Ashcroft. I wish I could understand it, but I don't. Send for the cat." In the days which Susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one day. F. G. Whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from town in his buggy. We drove by the _porte-cochère_ and toward the stable. Now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood of the stable. At the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and circumnavigated it, making a loop, which I have likened to the bowl of the spoon. As we neared the loop, I saw that Whitmore was laying his course to port, (I was sitting on the starboard side--the side the house was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand side. I said, "Don't do that, Whitmore; take the right-hand side. Then I shall be next to the house when we get to the door." He said, "_That_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn't make any difference which way I go around this flower-bed." I explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition, and I said, "Go on and try it, and see." He went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on the very side that he had said I would be. I was not able to believe it then, and I don't believe it yet. I said, "Whitmore, that is merely an accident. You can't do it again." He said he could--and he drove down into the street, fetched around, came back, and actually did it again. I was stupefied, paralyzed, petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. I didn't believe he could do it another time, but he did. He said he could do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. By that time my temper was gone, and I asked him to go home and apply to the Asylum and I would pay the expenses; I didn't want to see him any more for a week. I went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell Livy about it, expecting to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for Whitmore; but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my adventure went on, for her head was like Susy's: riddles and complexities had no terrors for it. Her mind and Susy's were analytical; I have tried to make it appear that mine was different. Many and many a time I have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that I would some time or other find somebody who would be on my side, but it has never happened. And I am never able to go glibly forward and state the circumstances of that buggy's progress without having to halt and consider, and call up in my mind the spoon-handle, the bowl of the spoon, the buggy and the horse, and my position in the buggy: and the minute I have got that far and try to turn it to the left it goes to ruin; I can't see how it is ever going to fetch me out right when we get to the door. Susy is right in her estimate. I can't understand things. That burglar-alarm which Susy mentions led a gay and careless life, and had no principles. It was generally out of order at one point or another; and there was plenty of opportunity, because all the windows and doors in the house, from the cellar up to the top floor, were connected with it. However, in its seasons of being out of order it could trouble us for only a very little while: we quickly found out that it was fooling us, and that it was buzzing its blood-curdling alarm merely for its own amusement. Then we would shut it off, and send to New York for the electrician--there not being one in all Hartford in those days. When the repairs were finished we would set the alarm again and reestablish our confidence in it. It never did any real business except upon one single occasion. All the rest of its expensive career was frivolous and without purpose. Just that one time it performed its duty, and its whole duty--gravely, seriously, admirably. It let fly about two o'clock one black and dreary March morning, and I turned out promptly, because I knew that it was not fooling, this time. The bath-room door was on my side of the bed. I stepped in there, turned up the gas, looked at the annunciator, and turned off the alarm--so far as the door indicated was concerned--thus stopping the racket. Then I came back to bed. Mrs. Clemens opened the debate: "What was it?" "It was the cellar door." "Was it a burglar, do you think?" "Yes," I said, "of course it was. Did you suppose it was a Sunday-school superintendent?" "No. What do you suppose he wants?" "I suppose he wants jewelry, but he is not acquainted with the house and he thinks it is in the cellar. I don't like to disappoint a burglar whom I am not acquainted with, and who has done me no harm, but if he had had common sagacity enough to inquire, I could have told him we kept nothing down there but coal and vegetables. Still it may be that he is acquainted with the place, and that what he really wants is coal and vegetables. On the whole, I think it is vegetables he is after." "Are you going down to see?" "No; I could not be of any assistance. Let him select for himself; I don't know where the things are." Then she said, "But suppose he comes up to the ground floor!" "That's all right. We shall know it the minute he opens a door on that floor. It will set off the alarm." Just then the terrific buzzing broke out again. I said, "He has arrived. I told you he would. I know all about burglars and their ways. They are systematic people." I went into the bath-room to see if I was right, and I was. I shut off the dining-room and stopped the buzzing, and came back to bed. My wife said, "What do you suppose he is after now?" I said, "I think he has got all the vegetables he wants and is coming up for napkin-rings and odds and ends for the wife and children. They all have families--burglars have--and they are always thoughtful of them, always take a few necessaries of life for themselves, and fill out with tokens of remembrance for the family. In taking them they do not forget us: those very things represent tokens of his remembrance of us, and also of our remembrance of him. We never get them again; the memory of the attention remains embalmed in our hearts." "Are you going down to see what it is he wants now?" "No," I said, "I am no more interested than I was before. They are experienced people,--burglars; _they_ know what they want; I should be no help to him. I _think_ he is after ceramics and bric-à-brac and such things. If he knows the house he knows that that is all that he can find on the dining-room floor." She said, with a strong interest perceptible in her tone, "Suppose he comes up here!" I said, "It is all right. He will give us notice." "What shall we do then then?" "Climb out of the window." She said, a little restively, "Well, what is the use of a burglar-alarm for us?" "You have seen, dear heart, that it has been useful up to the present moment, and I have explained to you how it will be continuously useful after he gets up here." That was the end of it. He didn't ring any more alarms. Presently I said, "He is disappointed, I think. He has gone off with the vegetables and the bric-à-brac, and I think he is dissatisfied." We went to sleep, and at a quarter before eight in the morning I was out, and hurrying, for I was to take the 8.29 train for New York. I found the gas burning brightly--full head--all over the first floor. My new overcoat was gone; my old umbrella was gone; my new patent-leather shoes, which I had never worn, were gone. The large window which opened into the _ombra_ at the rear of the house was standing wide. I passed out through it and tracked the burglar down the hill through the trees; tracked him without difficulty, because he had blazed his progress with imitation silver napkin-rings, and my umbrella, and various other things which he had disapproved of; and I went back in triumph and proved to my wife that he _was_ a disappointed burglar. I had suspected he would be, from the start, and from his not coming up to our floor to get human beings. Things happened to me that day in New York. I will tell about them another time. _From Susy's Biography._ Papa has a peculiar gait we like, it seems just to sute him, but most people do not; he always walks up and down the room while thinking and between each coarse at meals. A lady distantly related to us came to visit us once in those days. She came to stay a week, but all our efforts to make her happy failed, we could not imagine why, and she got up her anchor and sailed the next morning. We did much guessing, but could not solve the mystery. Later we found out what the trouble was. It was my tramping up and down between the courses. She conceived the idea that I could not stand her society. That word "Youth," as the reader has perhaps already guessed, was my wife's pet name for me. It was gently satirical, but also affectionate. I had certain mental and material peculiarities and customs proper to a much younger person than I was. _From Susy's Biography._ Papa is very fond of animals particularly of cats, we had a dear little gray kitten once that he named "Lazy" (papa always wears gray to match his hair and eyes) and he would carry him around on his shoulder, it was a mighty pretty sight! the gray cat sound asleep against papa's gray coat and hair. The names that he has given our different cats, are realy remarkably funny, they are namely Stray Kit, Abner, Motley, Fraeulein, Lazy, Bufalo Bill, Cleveland, Sour Mash, and Pestilence and Famine. At one time when the children were small, we had a very black mother-cat named Satan, and Satan had a small black offspring named Sin. Pronouns were a difficulty for the children. Little Clara came in one day, her black eyes snapping with indignation, and said, "Papa, Satan ought to be punished. She is out there at the greenhouse and there she stays and stays, and his kitten is down-stairs crying." _From Susy's Biography._ Papa uses very strong language, but I have an idea not nearly so strong as when he first maried mamma. A lady acquaintance of his is rather apt to interupt what one is saying, and papa told mamma that he thought he should say to the lady's husband "I am glad your wife wasn't present when the Deity said 'Let there be light.'" It is as I have said before. This is a frank historian. She doesn't cover up one's deficiencies, but gives them an equal showing with one's handsomer qualities. Of course I made the remark which she has quoted--and even at this distant day I am still as much as half persuaded that if that lady had been present when the Creator said, "Let there be light," she would have interrupted Him and we shouldn't ever have got it. _From Susy's Biography._ Papa said the other day, "I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out." (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) He doesn't like to go to church at all, why I never understood, until just now, he told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no dought it was founded on truth. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCII. NOVEMBER 2, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--V. BY MARK TWAIN. Susy's remark about my strong language troubles me, and I must go back to it. All through the first ten years of my married life I kept a constant and discreet watch upon my tongue while in the house, and went outside and to a distance when circumstances were too much for me and I was obliged to seek relief. I prized my wife's respect and approval above all the rest of the human race's respect and approval. I dreaded the day when she should discover that I was but a whited sepulchre partly freighted with suppressed language. I was so careful, during ten years, that I had not a doubt that my suppressions had been successful. Therefore I was quite as happy in my guilt as I could have been if I had been innocent. But at last an accident exposed me. I went into the bath-room one morning to make my toilet, and carelessly left the door two or three inches ajar. It was the first time that I had ever failed to take the precaution of closing it tightly. I knew the necessity of being particular about this, because shaving was always a trying ordeal for me, and I could seldom carry it through to a finish without verbal helps. Now this time I was unprotected, but did not suspect it. I had no extraordinary trouble with my razor on this occasion, and was able to worry through with mere mutterings and growlings of an improper sort, but with nothing noisy or emphatic about them--no snapping and barking. Then I put on a shirt. My shirts are an invention of my own. They open in the back, and are buttoned there--when there are buttons. This time the button was missing. My temper jumped up several degrees in a moment, and my remarks rose accordingly, both in loudness and vigor of expression. But I was not troubled, for the bath-room door was a solid one and I supposed it was firmly closed. I flung up the window and threw the shirt out. It fell upon the shrubbery where the people on their way to church could admire it if they wanted to; there was merely fifty feet of grass between the shirt and the passer-by. Still rumbling and thundering distantly, I put on another shirt. Again the button was absent. I augmented my language to meet the emergency, and threw that shirt out of the window. I was too angry--too insane--to examine the third shirt, but put it furiously on. Again the button was absent, and that shirt followed its comrades out of the window. Then I straightened up, gathered my reserves, and let myself go like a cavalry charge. In the midst of that great assault, my eye fell upon that gaping door, and I was paralyzed. It took me a good while to finish my toilet. I extended the time unnecessarily in trying to make up my mind as to what I would best do in the circumstances. I tried to hope that Mrs. Clemens was asleep, but I knew better. I could not escape by the window. It was narrow, and suited only to shirts. At last I made up my mind to boldly loaf through the bedroom with the air of a person who had not been doing anything. I made half the journey successfully. I did not turn my eyes in her direction, because that would not be safe. It is very difficult to look as if you have not been doing anything when the facts are the other way, and my confidence in my performance oozed steadily out of me as I went along. I was aiming for the left-hand door because it was furthest from my wife. It had never been opened from the day that the house was built, but it seemed a blessed refuge for me now. The bed was this one, wherein I am lying now, and dictating these histories morning after morning with so much serenity. It was this same old elaborately carved black Venetian bedstead--the most comfortable bedstead that ever was, with space enough in it for a family, and carved angels enough surmounting its twisted columns and its headboard and footboard to bring peace to the sleepers, and pleasant dreams. I had to stop in the middle of the room. I hadn't the strength to go on. I believed that I was under accusing eyes--that even the carved angels were inspecting me with an unfriendly gaze. You know how it is when you are convinced that somebody behind you is looking steadily at you. You _have_ to turn your face--you can't help it. I turned mine. The bed was placed as it is now, with the foot where the head ought to be. If it had been placed as it should have been, the high headboard would have sheltered me. But the footboard was no sufficient protection, for I could be seen over it. I was exposed. I was wholly without protection. I turned, because I couldn't help it--and my memory of what I saw is still vivid, after all these years. Against the white pillows I saw the black head--I saw that young and beautiful face; and I saw the gracious eyes with a something in them which I had never seen there before. They were snapping and flashing with indignation. I felt myself crumbling; I felt myself shrinking away to nothing under that accusing gaze. I stood silent under that desolating fire for as much as a minute, I should say--it seemed a very, very long time. Then my wife's lips parted, and from them issued--_my latest bath-room remark_. The language perfect, but the expression velvety, unpractical, apprenticelike, ignorant, inexperienced, comically inadequate, absurdly weak and unsuited to the great language. In my lifetime I had never heard anything so out of tune, so inharmonious, so incongruous, so ill-suited to each other as were those mighty words set to that feeble music. I tried to keep from laughing, for I was a guilty person in deep need of charity and mercy. I tried to keep from bursting, and I succeeded--until she gravely said, "There, now you know how it sounds." Then I exploded; the air was filled with my fragments, and you could hear them whiz. I said, "Oh Livy, if it sounds like _that_ I will never do it again!" Then she had to laugh herself. Both of us broke into convulsions, and went on laughing until we were physically exhausted and spiritually reconciled. The children were present at breakfast--Clara aged six and Susy eight--and the mother made a guarded remark about strong language; guarded because she did not wish the children to suspect anything--a guarded remark which censured strong language. Both children broke out in one voice with this comment, "Why, mamma, papa uses it!" I was astonished. I had supposed that that secret was safe in my own breast, and that its presence had never been suspected. I asked, "How did you know, you little rascals?" "Oh," they said, "we often listen over the balusters when you are in the hall explaining things to George." _From Susy's Biography._ One of papa's latest books is "The Prince and the Pauper" and it is unquestionably the best book he has ever written, some people want him to keep to his old style, some gentleman wrote him, "I enjoyed Huckleberry Finn immensely and am glad to see that you have returned to your old style." That enoyed me that enoyed me greatly, because it trobles me [Susy was troubled by that word, and uncertain; she wrote a u above it in the proper place, but reconsidered the matter and struck it out] to have so few people know papa, I mean realy know him, they think of Mark Twain as a humorist joking at everything; "And with a mop of reddish brown hair which sorely needs the barbars brush a roman nose, short stubby mustache, a sad care-worn face, with maney crow's feet" etc. That is the way people picture papa, I have wanted papa to write a book that would reveal something of his kind sympathetic nature, and "The Prince and the Pauper" partly does it. The book is full of lovely charming ideas, and oh the language! It is _perfect_. I think that one of the most touching scenes in it, is where the pauper is riding on horseback with his nobles in the "recognition procession" and he sees his mother oh and then what followed! How she runs to his side, when she sees him throw up his hand palm outward, and is rudely pushed off by one of the King's officers, and then how the little pauper's consceince troubles him when he remembers the shameful words that were falling from his lips, when she was turned from his side "I know you not woman" and how his grandeurs were stricken valueless, and his pride consumed to ashes. It is a wonderfully beautiful and touching little scene, and papa has described it so wonderfully. I never saw a man with so much variety of feeling as papa has; now the "Prince and the Pauper" is full of touching places; but there is most always a streak of humor in them somewhere. Now in the coronation--in the stirring coronation, just after the little king has got his crown back again papa brings that in about the Seal, where the pauper says he used the Seal "to crack nuts with." Oh it is so funny and nice! Papa very seldom writes a passage without some humor in it somewhere, and I dont think he ever will. The children always helped their mother to edit my books in manuscript. She would sit on the porch at the farm and read aloud, with her pencil in her hand, and the children would keep an alert and suspicious eye upon her right along, for the belief was well grounded in them that whenever she came across a particularly satisfactory passage she would strike it out. Their suspicions were well founded. The passages which were so satisfactory to them always had an element of strength in them which sorely needed modification or expurgation, and were always sure to get it at their mother's hand. For my own entertainment, and to enjoy the protests of the children, I often abused my editor's innocent confidence. I often interlarded remarks of a studied and felicitously atrocious character purposely to achieve the children's brief delight, and then see the remorseless pencil do its fatal work. I often joined my supplications to the children's for mercy, and strung the argument out and pretended to be in earnest. They were deceived, and so was their mother. It was three against one, and most unfair. But it was very delightful, and I could not resist the temptation. Now and then we gained the victory and there was much rejoicing. Then I privately struck the passage out myself. It had served its purpose. It had furnished three of us with good entertainment, and in being removed from the book by me it was only suffering the fate originally intended for it. _From Susy's Biography._ Papa was born in Missouri. His mother is Grandma Clemens (Jane Lampton Clemens) of Kentucky. Grandpa Clemens was of the F.F.V's of Virginia. Without doubt it was I that gave Susy that impression. I cannot imagine why, because I was never in my life much impressed by grandeurs which proceed from the accident of birth. I did not get this indifference from my mother. She was always strongly interested in the ancestry of the house. She traced her own line back to the Lambtons of Durham, England--a family which had been occupying broad lands there since Saxon times. I am not sure, but I think that those Lambtons got along without titles of nobility for eight or nine hundred years, then produced a great man, three-quarters of a century ago, and broke into the peerage. My mother knew all about the Clemenses of Virginia, and loved to aggrandize them to me, but she has long been dead. There has been no one to keep those details fresh in my memory, and they have grown dim. There was a Jere. Clemens who was a United States Senator, and in his day enjoyed the usual Senatorial fame--a fame which perishes whether it spring from four years' service or forty. After Jere. Clemens's fame as a Senator passed away, he was still remembered for many years on account of another service which he performed. He shot old John Brown's Governor Wise in the hind leg in a duel. However, I am not very clear about this. It may be that Governor Wise shot _him_ in the hind leg. However, I don't think it is important. I think that the only thing that is really important is that one of them got shot in the hind leg. It would have been better and nobler and more historical and satisfactory if both of them had got shot in the hind leg--but it is of no use for me to try to recollect history. I never had a historical mind. Let it go. Whichever way it happened I am glad of it, and that is as much enthusiasm as I can get up for a person bearing my name. But I am forgetting the first Clemens--the one that stands furthest back toward the really original _first_ Clemens, which was Adam. _From Susy's Biography._ Clara and I are sure that papa played the trick on Grandma, about the whipping, that is related in "The Adventures of Tom Sayer": "Hand me that switch." The switch hovered in the air, the peril was desperate--"My, look behind you Aunt!" The old lady whirled around and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambling up the high board fence and dissapeared over it. Susy and Clara were quite right about that. Then Susy says: And we know papa played "Hookey" all the time. And how readily would papa pretend to be dying so as not to have to go to school! These revelations and exposures are searching, but they are just If I am as transparent to other people as I was to Susy, I have wasted much effort in this life. Grandma couldn't make papa go to school, no she let him go into a printing-office to learn the trade. He did so, and gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who were more studious in early life. It is noticeable that Susy does not get overheated when she is complimenting me, but maintains a proper judicial and biographical calm. It is noticeable, also, and it is to her credit as a biographer, that she distributes compliment and criticism with a fair and even hand. My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. I was a tonic. I was valuable to her. I never thought of it before, but now I see it. I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward any one else--but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily. It was his duty to report me, when I needed reporting and neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that duty. He is "Sid" in "Tom Sawyer." But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was. It was Henry who called my mother's attention to the fact that the thread with which she had sewed my collar together to keep me from going in swimming, had changed color. My mother would not have discovered it but for that, and she was manifestly piqued when she recognized that that prominent bit of circumstantial evidence had escaped her sharp eye. That detail probably added a detail to my punishment. It is human. We generally visit our shortcomings on somebody else when there is a possible excuse for it--but no matter, I took it out of Henry. There is always compensation for such as are unjustly used. I often took it out of him--sometimes as an advance payment for something which I hadn't yet done. These were occasions when the opportunity was too strong a temptation, and I had to draw on the future. I did not need to copy this idea from my mother, and probably didn't. Still she wrought upon that principle upon occasion. If the incident of the broken sugar-bowl is in "Tom Sawyer"--I don't remember whether it is or not--that is an example of it. Henry never stole sugar. He took it openly from the bowl. His mother knew he wouldn't take sugar when she wasn't looking, but she had her doubts about me. Not exactly doubts, either. She knew very well I _would._ One day when she was not present, Henry took sugar from her prized and precious old English sugar-bowl, which was an heirloom in the family--and he managed to break the bowl. It was the first time I had ever had a chance to tell anything on him, and I was inexpressibly glad. I told him I was going to tell on him, but he was not disturbed. When my mother came in and saw the bowl lying on the floor in fragments, she was speechless for a minute. I allowed that silence to work; I judged it would increase the effect. I was waiting for her to ask "Who did that?"--so that I could fetch out my news. But it was an error of calculation. When she got through with her silence she didn't ask anything about it--she merely gave me a crack on the skull with her thimble that I felt all the way down to my heels. Then I broke out with my injured innocence, expecting to make her very sorry that she had punished the wrong one. I expected her to do something remorseful and pathetic. I told her that I was not the one--it was Henry. But there was no upheaval. She said, without emotion, "It's all right. It isn't any matter. You deserve it for something you've done that I didn't know about; and if you haven't done it, why then you deserve it for something that you are going to do, that I sha'n't hear about." There was a stairway outside the house, which led up to the rear part of the second story. One day Henry was sent on an errand, and he took a tin bucket along. I knew he would have to ascend those stairs, so I went up and locked the door on the inside, and came down into the garden, which had been newly ploughed and was rich in choice firm clods of black mold. I gathered a generous equipment of these, and ambushed him. I waited till he had climbed the stairs and was near the landing and couldn't escape. Then I bombarded him with clods, which he warded off with his tin bucket the best he could, but without much success, for I was a good marksman. The clods smashing against the weather-boarding fetched my mother out to see what was the matter, and I tried to explain that I was amusing Henry. Both of them were after me in a minute, but I knew the way over that high board fence and escaped for that time. After an hour or two, when I ventured back, there was no one around and I thought the incident was closed. But it was not. Henry was ambushing me. With an unusually competent aim for him, he landed a stone on the side of my head which raised a bump there that felt like the Matterhorn. I carried it to my mother straightway for sympathy, but she was not strongly moved. It seemed to be her idea that incidents like this would eventually reform me if I harvested enough of them. So the matter was only educational. I had had a sterner view of it than that, before. It was not right to give the cat the "Pain-Killer"; I realize it now. I would not repeat it in these days. But in those "Tom Sawyer" days it was a great and sincere satisfaction to me to see Peter perform under its influence--and if actions _do_ speak as loud as words, he took as much interest in it as I did. It was a most detestable medicine, Perry Davis's Pain-Killer. Mr. Pavey's negro man, who was a person of good judgment and considerable curiosity, wanted to sample it, and I let him. It was his opinion that it was made of hell-fire. Those were the cholera days of '49. The people along the Mississippi were paralyzed with fright. Those who could run away, did it. And many died of fright in the flight. Fright killed three persons where the cholera killed one. Those who couldn't flee kept themselves drenched with cholera preventives, and my mother chose Perry Davis's Pain-Killer for me. She was not distressed about herself. She avoided that kind of preventive. But she made me promise to take a teaspoonful of Pain-Killer every day. Originally it was my intention to keep the promise, but at that time I didn't know as much about Pain-Killer as I knew after my first experiment with it. She didn't watch Henry's bottle--she could trust Henry. But she marked my bottle with a pencil, on the label, every day, and examined it to see if the teaspoonful had been removed. The floor was not carpeted. It had cracks in it, and I fed the Pain-Killer to the cracks with very good results--no cholera occurred down below. It was upon one of these occasions that that friendly cat came waving his tail and supplicating for Pain-Killer--which he got--and then went into those hysterics which ended with his colliding with all the furniture in the room and finally going out of the open window and carrying the flower-pots with him, just in time for my mother to arrive and look over her glasses in petrified astonishment and say, "What in the world is the matter with Peter?" I don't remember what my explanation was, but if it is recorded in that book it may not be the right one. Whenever my conduct was of such exaggerated impropriety that my mother's extemporary punishments were inadequate, she saved the matter up for Sunday, and made me go to church Sunday night--which was a penalty sometimes bearable, perhaps, but as a rule it was not, and I avoided it for the sake of my constitution. She would never believe that I had been to church until she had applied her test: she made me tell her what the text was. That was a simple matter, and caused me no trouble. I didn't have to go to church to get a text. I selected one for myself. This worked very well until one time when my text and the one furnished by a neighbor, who had been to church, didn't tally. After that my mother took other methods. I don't know what they were now. In those days men and boys wore rather long cloaks in the winter-time. They were black, and were lined with very bright and showy Scotch plaids. One winter's night when I was starting to church to square a crime of some kind committed during the week, I hid my cloak near the gate and went off and played with the other boys until church was over. Then I returned home. But in the dark I put the cloak on wrong side out, entered the room, threw the cloak aside, and then stood the usual examination. I got along very well until the temperature of the church was mentioned. My mother said, "It must have been impossible to keep warm there on such a night." I didn't see the art of that remark, and was foolish enough to explain that I wore my cloak all the time that I was in church. She asked if I kept it on from church home, too. I didn't see the bearing of that remark. I said that that was what I had done. She said, "You wore it in church with that red Scotch plaid outside and glaring? Didn't that attract any attention?" Of course to continue such a dialogue would have been tedious and unprofitable, and I let it go, and took the consequences. That was about 1849. Tom Nash was a boy of my own age--the postmaster's son. The Mississippi was frozen across, and he and I went skating one night, probably without permission. I cannot see why we should go skating in the night unless without permission, for there could be no considerable amusement to be gotten out of skating at night if nobody was going to object to it. About midnight, when we were more than half a mile out toward the Illinois shore, we heard some ominous rumbling and grinding and crashing going on between us and the home side of the river, and we knew what it meant--the ice was breaking up. We started for home, pretty badly scared. We flew along at full speed whenever the moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was ice and which was water. In the pauses we waited; started again whenever there was a good bridge of ice; paused again when we came to naked water and waited in distress until a floating vast cake should bridge that place. It took us an hour to make the trip--a trip which we made in a misery of apprehension all the time. But at last we arrived within a very brief distance of the shore. We waited again; there was another place that needed bridging. All about us the ice was plunging and grinding along and piling itself up in mountains on the shore, and the dangers were increasing, not diminishing. We grew very impatient to get to solid ground, so we started too early and went springing from cake to cake. Tom made a miscalculation, and fell short. He got a bitter bath, but he was so close to shore that he only had to swim a stroke or two--then his feet struck hard bottom and he crawled out. I arrived a little later, without accident. We had been in a drenching perspiration, and Tom's bath was a disaster for him. He took to his bed sick, and had a procession of diseases. The closing one was scarlet-fever, and he came out of it stone deaf. Within a year or two speech departed, of course. But some years later he was taught to talk, after a fashion--one couldn't always make out what it was he was trying to say. Of course he could not modulate his voice, since he couldn't hear himself talk. When he supposed he was talking low and confidentially, you could hear him in Illinois. Four years ago (1902) I was invited by the University of Missouri to come out there and receive the honorary degree of LL.D. I took that opportunity to spend a week in Hannibal--a city now, a village in my day. It had been fifty-three years since Tom Nash and I had had that adventure. When I was at the railway station ready to leave Hannibal, there was a crowd of citizens there. I saw Tom Nash approaching me across a vacant space, and I walked toward him, for I recognized him at once. He was old and white-headed, but the boy of fifteen was still visible in him. He came up to me, made a trumpet of his hands at my ear, nodded his head toward the citizens and said confidentially--in a yell like a fog-horn-- "Same damned fools, Sam!" _From Susy's Biography._ Papa was about twenty years old when he went on the Mississippi as a pilot. Just before he started on his tripp Grandma Clemens asked him to promise her on the Bible not to touch intoxicating liquors or swear, and he said "Yes, mother, I will," and he kept that promise seven years when Grandma released him from it. Under the inspiring influence of that remark, what a garden of forgotten reforms rises upon my sight! MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCIII. NOVEMBER 16, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VI. BY MARK TWAIN. _From Susy's Biography_. Papa made arrangements to read at Vassar College the 1st of May, and I went with him. We went by way of New York City. Mamma went with us to New York and stayed two days to do some shopping. We started Tuesday, at 1/2 past two o'clock in the afternoon, and reached New York about 1/4 past six. Papa went right up to General Grants from the station and mamma and I went to the Everett House. Aunt Clara came to supper with us up in our room.... We and Aunt Clara were going were going to the theatre right after supper, and we expected papa to take us there and to come home as early as he could. But we got through dinner and he didn't come, and didn't come, and mamma got more perplexed and worried, but at last we thought we would have to go without him. So we put on our things and started down stairs but before we'd goten half down we met papa coming up with a great bunch of roses in his hand. He explained that the reason he was so late was that his watch stopped and he didn't notice and kept thinking it an hour earlier than it really was. The roses he carried were some Col. Fred Grant sent to mamma. We went to the theatre and enjoyed "Adonis" [word illegible] acted very much. We reached home about 1/2 past eleven o'clock and went right to bed. Wednesday morning we got up rather late and had breakfast about 1/2 past nine o'clock. After breakfast mamma went out shopping and papa and I went to see papa's agent about some business matters. After papa had gotten through talking to Cousin Charlie, [Webster] papa's agent, we went to get a friend of papa's, Major Pond, to go and see a Dog Show with us. Then we went to see the dogs with Major Pond and we had a delightful time seeing so many dogs together; when we got through seeing the dogs papa thought he would go and see General Grant and I went with him--this was April 29, 1885. Papa went up into General Grant's room and he took me with him, I felt greatly honored and delighted when papa took me into General Grant's room and let me see the General and Col. Grant, for General Grant is a man I shall be glad all my life that I have seen. Papa and General Grant had a long talk together and papa has written an account of his talk and visit with General Grant for me to put into this biography. Susy has inserted in this place that account of mine--as follows: April 29, 1885. I called on General Grant and took Susy with me. The General was looking and feeling far better than he had looked or felt for some months. He had ventured to work again on his book that morning--the first time he had done any work for perhaps a month. This morning's work was his first attempt at dictating, and it was a thorough success, to his great delight. He had always said that it would be impossible for him to dictate anything, but I had said that he was noted for clearness of statement, and as a narrative was simply a statement of consecutive facts, he was consequently peculiarly qualified and equipped for dictation. This turned out to be true. For he had dictated two hours that morning to a shorthand writer, had never hesitated for words, had not repeated himself, and the manuscript when finished needed no revision. The two hours' work was an account of Appomattox--and this was such an extremely important feature that his book would necessarily have been severely lame without it. Therefore I had taken a shorthand writer there before, to see if I could not get him to write at least a few lines about Appomattox.[5] But he was at that time not well enough to undertake it. I was aware that of all the hundred versions of Appomattox, not one was really correct. Therefore I was extremely anxious that he should leave behind him the truth. His throat was not distressing him, and his voice was much better and stronger than usual. He was so delighted to have gotten Appomattox accomplished once more in his life--to have gotten the matter off his mind--that he was as talkative as his old self. He received Susy very pleasantly, and then fell to talking about certain matters which he hoped to be able to dictate next day; and he said in substance that, among other things, he wanted to settle once for all a question that had been bandied about from mouth to mouth and from newspaper to newspaper. That question was, "With whom originated the idea of the march to the sea? Was it Grant's, or was it Sherman's idea?" Whether I, or some one else (being anxious to get the important fact settled) asked him with whom the idea originated, I don't remember. But I remember his answer. I shall always remember his answer. General Grant said: "Neither of us originated the idea of Sherman's march to the sea. The enemy did it." He went on to say that the enemy, however, necessarily originated a great many of the plans that the general on the opposite side gets the credit for; at the same time that the enemy is doing that, he is laying open other moves which the opposing general sees and takes advantage of. In this case, Sherman had a plan all thought out, of course. He meant to destroy the two remaining railroads in that part of the country, and that would finish up that region. But General Hood did not play the military part that he was expected to play. On the contrary, General Hood made a dive at Chattanooga. This left the march to the sea open to Sherman, and so after sending part of his army to defend and hold what he had acquired in the Chattanooga region, he was perfectly free to proceed, with the rest of it, through Georgia. He saw the opportunity, and he would not have been fit for his place if he had not seized it. "He wrote me" (the General is speaking) "what his plan was, and I sent him word to go ahead. My staff were opposed to the movement." (I think the General said they tried to persuade him to stop Sherman. The chief of his staff, the General said, even went so far as to go to Washington without the General's knowledge and get the ear of the authorities, and he succeeded in arousing their fears to such an extent that they telegraphed General Grant to stop Sherman.) Then General Grant said, "Out of deference to the Government, I telegraphed Sherman and stopped him twenty-four hours; and then considering that that was deference enough to the Government, I telegraphed him to go ahead again." I have not tried to give the General's language, but only the general idea of what he said. The thing that mainly struck me was his terse remark that the enemy originated the idea of the march to the sea. It struck me because it was so suggestive of the General's epigrammatic fashion--saying a great deal in a single crisp sentence. (This is my account, and signed "Mark Twain.") _Susy Resumes._ After papa and General Grant had had their talk, we went back to the hotel where mamma was, and papa told mamma all about his interview with General Grant. Mamma and I had a nice quiet afternoon together. That pair of devoted comrades were always shutting themselves up together when there was opportunity to have what Susy called "a cozy time." From Susy's nursery days to the end of her life, she and her mother were close friends; intimate friends, passionate adorers of each other. Susy's was a beautiful mind, and it made her an interesting comrade. And with the fine mind she had a heart like her mother's. Susy never had an interest or an occupation which she was not glad to put aside for that something which was in all cases more precious to her--a visit with her mother. Susy died at the right time, the fortunate time of life; the happy age--twenty-four years. At twenty-four, such a girl has seen the best of life--life as a happy dream. After that age the risks begin; responsibility comes, and with it the cares, the sorrows, and the inevitable tragedy. For her mother's sake I would have brought her back from the grave if I could, but I would not have done it for my own. _From Susy's Biography_. Then papa went to read in public; there were a great many authors that read, that Thursday afternoon, beside papa; I would have liked to have gone and heard papa read, but papa said he was going to read in Vassar just what he was planning to read in New York, so I stayed at home with mamma. The next day mamma planned to take the four o'clock car back to Hartford. We rose quite early that morning and went to the Vienna Bakery and took breakfast there. From there we went to a German bookstore and bought some German books for Clara's birthday. Dear me, the power of association to snatch mouldy dead memories out of their graves and make them walk! That remark about buying foreign books throws a sudden white glare upon the distant past; and I see the long stretch of a New York street with an unearthly vividness, and John Hay walking down it, grave and remorseful. I was walking down it too, that morning, and I overtook Hay and asked him what the trouble was. He turned a lustreless eye upon me and said: "My case is beyond cure. In the most innocent way in the world I have committed a crime which will never be forgiven by the sufferers, for they will never believe--oh, well, no, I was going to say they would never believe that I did the thing innocently. The truth is they will know that I acted innocently, because they are rational people; but what of that? I never can look them in the face again--nor they me, perhaps." Hay was a young bachelor, and at that time was on the "Tribune" staff. He explained his trouble in these words, substantially: "When I was passing along here yesterday morning on my way down-town to the office, I stepped into a bookstore where I am acquainted, and asked if they had anything new from the other side. They handed me a French novel, in the usual yellow paper cover, and I carried it away. I didn't even look at the title of it. It was for recreation reading, and I was on my way to my work. I went mooning and dreaming along, and I think I hadn't gone more than fifty yards when I heard my name called. I stopped, and a private carriage drew up at the sidewalk and I shook hands with the inmates--mother and young daughter, excellent people. They were on their way to the steamer to sail for Paris. The mother said, "'I saw that book in your hand and I judged by the look of it that it was a French novel. Is it?' "I said it was. "She said, 'Do let me have it, so that my daughter can practise her French on it on the way over.' "Of course I handed her the book, and we parted. Ten minutes ago I was passing that bookstore again, and I stepped in and fetched away another copy of that book. Here it is. Read the first page of it. That is enough. You will know what the rest is like. I think it must be the foulest book in the French language--one of the foulest, anyway. I would be ashamed to offer it to a harlot--but, oh dear, I gave it to that sweet young girl without shame. Take my advice; don't give away a book until you have examined it." _From Susy's Biography._ Then mamma and I went to do some shopping and papa went to see General Grant. After we had finnished doing our shopping we went home to the hotel together. When we entered our rooms in the hotel we saw on the table a vase full of exquisett red roses. Mamma who is very fond of flowers exclaimed "Oh I wonder who could have sent them." We both looked at the card in the midst of the roses and saw that it was written on in papa's handwriting, it was written in German. 'Liebes Geshchenk on die mamma.' [I am sure I didn't say "on"--that is Susy's spelling, not mine; also I am sure I didn't spell Geschenk so liberally as all that.--S. L. C.] Mamma was delighted. Papa came home and gave mamma her ticket; and after visiting a while with her went to see Major Pond and mamma and I sat down to our lunch. After lunch most of our time was taken up with packing, and at about three o'clock we went to escort mamma to the train. We got on board the train with her and stayed with her about five minutes and then we said good-bye to her and the train started for Hartford. It was the first time I had ever beene away from home without mamma in my life, although I was 13 yrs. old. Papa and I drove back to the hotel and got Major Pond and then went to see the Brooklyn Bridge we went across it to Brooklyn on the cars and then walked back across it from Brooklyn to New York. We enjoyed looking at the beautiful scenery and we could see the bridge moove under the intense heat of the sun. We had a perfectly delightful time, but weer pretty tired when we got back to the hotel. The next morning we rose early, took our breakfast and took an early train to Poughkeepsie. We had a very pleasant journey to Poughkeepsie. The Hudson was magnificent--shrouded with beautiful mist. When we arived at Poughkeepsie it was raining quite hard; which fact greatly dissapointed me because I very much wanted to see the outside of the buildings of Vassar College and as it rained that would be impossible. It was quite a long drive from the station to Vasser College and papa and I had a nice long time to discuss and laugh over German profanity. One of the German phrases papa particularly enjoys is "O heilige maria Mutter Jesus!" Jean has a German nurse, and this was one of her phrases, there was a time when Jean exclaimed "Ach Gott!" to every trifle, but when mamma found it out she was shocked and instantly put a stop to it. It brings that pretty little German girl vividly before me--a sweet and innocent and plump little creature with peachy cheeks; a clear-souled little maiden and without offence, notwithstanding her profanities, and she was loaded to the eyebrows with them. She was a mere child. She was not fifteen yet. She was just from Germany, and knew no English. She was always scattering her profanities around, and they were such a satisfaction to me that I never dreamed of such a thing as modifying her. For my own sake, I had no disposition to tell on her. Indeed I took pains to keep her from being found out. I told her to confine her religious exercises to the children's quarters, and urged her to remember that Mrs. Clemens was prejudiced against pieties on week-days. To the children, the little maid's profanities sounded natural and proper and right, because they had been used to that kind of talk in Germany, and they attached no evil importance to it. It grieves me that I have forgotten those vigorous remarks. I long hoarded them in my memory as a treasure. But I remember one of them still, because I heard it so many times. The trial of that little creature's life was the children's hair. She would tug and strain with her comb, accompanying her work with her misplaced pieties. And when finally she was through with her triple job she always fired up and exploded her thanks toward the sky, where they belonged, in this form: "_Gott sei Dank ich bin fertig mit'm Gott verdammtes Haar!_" (I believe I am not quite brave enough to translate it.) _From Susy's Biography_. We at length reached Vassar College and she looked very finely, her buildings and her grounds being very beautiful. We went to the front doore and range the bell. The young girl who came to the doore wished to know who we wanted to see. Evidently we were not expected. Papa told her who we wanted to see and she showed us to the parlor. We waited, no one came; and waited, no one came, still no one came. It was beginning to seem pretty awkward, "Oh well this is a pretty piece of business," papa exclaimed. At length we heard footsteps coming down the long corridor and Miss C, (the lady who had invited papa) came into the room. She greeted papa very pleasantly and they had a nice little chatt together. Soon the lady principal also entered and she was very pleasant and agreable. She showed us to our rooms and said she would send for us when dinner was ready. We went into our rooms, but we had nothing to do for half an hour exept to watch the rain drops as they fell upon the window panes. At last we were called to dinner, and I went down without papa as he never eats anything in the middle of the day. I sat at the table with the lady principal and enjoyed very much seeing all the young girls trooping into the dining-room. After dinner I went around the College with the young ladies and papa stayed in his room and smoked. When it was supper time papa went down and ate supper with us and we had a very delightful supper. After supper the young ladies went to their rooms to dress for the evening. Papa went to his room and I went with the lady principal. At length the guests began to arive, but papa still remained in his room until called for. Papa read in the chapell. It was the first time I had ever heard him read in my life--that is in public. When he came out on to the stage I remember the people behind me exclaimed "Oh how queer he is! Isn't he funny!" I thought papa was very funny, although I did not think him queer. He read "A Trying Situation" and "The Golden Arm," a ghost story that he heard down South when he was a little boy. "The Golden Arm" papa had told me before, but he had startled me so that I did not much wish to hear it again. But I had resolved this time to be prepared and not to let myself be startled, but still papa did, and very very much; he startled the whole roomful of people and they jumped as one man. The other story was also very funny and interesting and I enjoyed the evening inexpressibly much. After papa had finished reading we all went down to the collation in the dining-room and after that there was dancing and singing. Then the guests went away and papa and I went to bed. The next morning we rose early, took an early train for Hartford and reached Hartford at 1/2 past 2 o'clock. We were very glad to get back. How charitably she treats that ghastly experience! It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. Susy had that disposition, and it was one of the jewels of her character that had come to her straight from her mother. It is a feature that was left out of me at birth. And, at seventy, I have not yet acquired it. I did not go to Vassar College professionally, but as a guest--as a guest, and gratis. Aunt Clara (now Mrs. John B. Stanchfield) was a graduate of Vassar and it was to please her that I inflicted that journey upon Susy and myself. The invitation had come to me from both the lady mentioned by Susy and the President of the College--a sour old saint who has probably been gathered to his fathers long ago; and I hope they enjoy him; I hope they value his society. I think I can get along without it, in either end of the next world. We arrived at the College in that soaking rain, and Susy has described, with just a suggestion of dissatisfaction, the sort of reception we got. Susy had to sit in her damp clothes half an hour while we waited in the parlor; then she was taken to a fireless room and left to wait there again, as she has stated. I do not remember that President's name, and I am sorry. He did not put in an appearance until it was time for me to step upon the platform in front of that great garden of young and lovely blossoms. He caught up with me and advanced upon the platform with me and was going to introduce me. I said in substance: "You have allowed me to get along without your help thus far, and if you will retire from the platform I will try to do the rest without it." I did not see him any more, but I detest his memory. Of course my resentment did not extend to the students, and so I had an unforgettable good time talking to them. And I think they had a good time too, for they responded "as one man," to use Susy's unimprovable phrase. Girls are charming creatures. I shall have to be twice seventy years old before I change my mind as to that. I am to talk to a crowd of them this afternoon, students of Barnard College (the sex's annex to Columbia University), and I think I shall have as pleasant a time with those lasses as I had with the Vassar girls twenty-one years ago. _From Susy's Biography._ I stopped in the middle of mamma's early history to tell about our tripp to Vassar because I was afraid I would forget about it, now I will go on where I left off. Some time after Miss Emma Nigh died papa took mamma and little Langdon to Elmira for the summer. When in Elmira Langdon began to fail but I think mamma did not know just what was the matter with him. I was the cause of the child's illness. His mother trusted him to my care and I took him a long drive in an open barouche for an airing. It was a raw, cold morning, but he was well wrapped about with furs and, in the hands of a careful person, no harm would have come to him. But I soon dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge. The furs fell away and exposed his bare legs. By and by the coachman noticed this, and I arranged the wraps again, but it was too late. The child was almost frozen. I hurried home with him. I was aghast at what I had done, and I feared the consequences. I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning's work and have not allowed myself to think of it when I could help it. I doubt if I had the courage to make confession at that time. I think it most likely that I have never confessed until now. _From Susy's Biography._ At last it was time for papa to return to Hartford, and Langdon was real sick at that time, but still mamma decided to go with him, thinking the journey might do him good. But after they reached Hartford he became very sick, and his trouble prooved to be diptheeria. He died about a week after mamma and papa reached Hartford. He was burried by the side of grandpa at Elmira, New York. [Susy rests there with them.--S. L. C.] After that, mamma became very very ill, so ill that there seemed great danger of death, but with a great deal of good care she recovered. Some months afterward mamma and papa [and Susy, who was perhaps fourteen or fifteen months old at the time.--S. L. C.] went to Europe and stayed for a time in Scotland and England. In Scotland mamma and papa became very well equanted with Dr. John Brown, the author of "Rab and His Friends," and he mett, but was not so well equanted with, Mr. Charles Kingsley, Mr. Henry M. Stanley, Sir Thomas Hardy grandson of the Captain Hardy to whom Nellson said "Kiss me Hardy," when dying on shipboard, Mr. Henry Irving, Robert Browning, Sir Charles Dilke, Mr. Charles Reade, Mr. William Black, Lord Houghton, Frank Buckland, Mr. Tom Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Tom Hood, son of the poet--and mamma and papa were quite well equanted with Dr. Macdonald and family, and papa met Harrison Ainsworth. I remember all these men very well indeed, except the last one. I do not recall Ainsworth. By my count, Susy mentions fourteen men. They are all dead except Sir Charles Dilke. We met a great many other interesting people, among them Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice"--but he was only interesting to look at, for he was the stillest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except "Uncle Remus." Dr. Macdonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all the while except that now and then he answered a question. His answers were brief. I do not remember that he elaborated any of them. At a dinner at Smalley's we met Herbert Spencer. At a large luncheon party at Lord Houghton's we met Sir Arthur Helps, who was a celebrity of world-wide fame at the time, but is quite forgotten now. Lord Elcho, a large vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. He was talking earnestly about Godalming. It was a deep and flowing and unarticulated rumble, but I got the Godalming pretty clearly every time it broke free of the rumble, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on her right and on her left in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I have an engagement," and without further ceremony she went off to meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [5] I was his publisher. I was putting his "Personal Memoirs" to press at the time.--S. L. C. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCIV. DECEMBER 7, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VII. BY MARK TWAIN. I was always heedless. I was born heedless; and therefore I was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me but didn't, because I didn't know anything had happened. But Livy knew; and so the humiliations fell to her share, poor child, who had not earned them and did not deserve them. She always said I was the most difficult child she had. She was very sensitive about me. It distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism, and so she was always watchful and alert to protect me from the kind of transgressions which I have been speaking of. When I was leaving Hartford for Washington, upon the occasion referred to, she said: "I have written a small warning and put it in a pocket of your dress-vest. When you are dressing to go to the Authors' Reception at the White House you will naturally put your fingers in your vest pockets, according to your custom, and you will find that little note there. Read it carefully, and do as it tells you. I cannot be with you, and so I delegate my sentry duties to this little note. If I should give you the warning by word of mouth, now, it would pass from your head and be forgotten in a few minutes." It was President Cleveland's first term. I had never seen his wife--the young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the fascinating. Sure enough, just as I had finished dressing to go to the White House I found that little note, which I had long ago forgotten. It was a grave little note, a serious little note, like its writer, but it made me laugh. Livy's gentle gravities often produced that effect upon me, where the expert humorist's best joke would have failed, for I do not laugh easily. When we reached the White House and I was shaking hands with the President, he started to say something, but I interrupted him and said: "If your Excellency will excuse me, I will come back in a moment; but now I have a very important matter to attend to, and it must be attended to at once." I turned to Mrs. Cleveland, the young, the beautiful, the fascinating, and gave her my card, on the back of which I had written "_He didn't_"--and I asked her to sign her name below those words. She said: "He didn't? He didn't what?" "Oh," I said, "never mind. We cannot stop to discuss that now. This is urgent. Won't you please sign your name?" (I handed her a fountain-pen.) "Why," she said, "I cannot commit myself in that way. Who is it that didn't?--and what is it that he didn't?" "Oh," I said, "time is flying, flying, flying. Won't you take me out of my distress and sign your name to it? It's all right. I give you my word it's all right." She looked nonplussed; but hesitatingly and mechanically she took the pen and said: "I will sign it. I will take the risk. But you must tell me all about it, right afterward, so that you can be arrested before you get out of the house in case there should be anything criminal about this." Then she signed; and I handed her Mrs. Clements's note, which was very brief, very simple, and to the point. It said: "_Don't wear your arctics in the White House._" It made her shout; and at my request she summoned a messenger and we sent that card at once to the mail on its way to Mrs. Clemens in Hartford. When the little Ruth was about a year or a year and a half old, Mason, an old and valued friend of mine, was consul-general at Frankfort-on-the-Main. I had known him well in 1867, '68 and '69, in America, and I and mine had spent a good deal of time with him and his family in Frankfort in '78. He was a thoroughly competent, diligent, and conscientious official. Indeed he possessed these qualities in so large a degree that among American consuls he might fairly be said to be monumental, for at that time our consular service was largely--and I think I may say mainly--in the hands of ignorant, vulgar, and incapable men who had been political heelers in America, and had been taken care of by transference to consulates where they could be supported at the Government's expense instead of being transferred to the poor house, which would have been cheaper and more patriotic. Mason, in '78, had been consul-general in Frankfort several years--four, I think. He had come from Marseilles with a great record. He had been consul there during thirteen years, and one part of his record was heroic. There had been a desolating cholera epidemic, and Mason was the only representative of any foreign country who stayed at his post and saw it through. And during that time he not only represented his own country, but he represented all the other countries in Christendom and did their work, and did it well and was praised for it by them in words of no uncertain sound. This great record of Mason's had saved him from official decapitation straight along while Republican Presidents occupied the chair, but now it was occupied by a Democrat. Mr. Cleveland was not seated in it--he was not yet inaugurated--before he was deluged with applications from Democratic politicians desiring the appointment of a thousand or so politically useful Democrats to Mason's place. A year or two later Mason wrote me and asked me if I couldn't do something to save him from destruction. I was very anxious to keep him in his place, but at first I could not think of any way to help him, for I was a mugwump. We, the mugwumps, a little company made up of the unenslaved of both parties, the very best men to be found in the two great parties--that was our idea of it--voted sixty thousand strong for Mr. Cleveland in New York and elected him. Our principles were high, and very definite. We were not a party; we had no candidates; we had no axes to grind. Our vote laid upon the man we cast it for no obligation of any kind. By our rule we could not ask for office; we could not accept office. When voting, it was our duty to vote for the best man, regardless of his party name. We had no other creed. Vote for the best man--that was creed enough. Such being my situation, I was puzzled to know how to try to help Mason, and, at the same time, save my mugwump purity undefiled. It was a delicate place. But presently, out of the ruck of confusions in my mind, rose a sane thought, clear and bright--to wit: since it was a mugwump's duty to do his best to put the beet man in office, necessarily it must be a mugwump's duty to try to _keep_ the best man in when he was already there. My course was easy now. It might not be quite delicate for a mugwump to approach the President directly, but I could approach him indirectly, with all delicacy, since in that case not even courtesy would require him to take notice of an application which no one could prove had ever reached him. Yes, it was easy and simple sailing now. I could lay the matter before Ruth, in her cradle, and wait for results. I wrote the little child, and said to her all that I have just been saying about mugwump principles and the limitations which they put upon me. I explained that it would not be proper for me to apply to her father in Mr. Mason's behalf, but I detailed to her Mr. Mason's high and honorable record and suggested that she take the matter in her own hands and do a patriotic work which I felt some delicacy about venturing upon myself. I asked her to forget that her father was only President of the United States, and her subject and servant; I asked her not to put her application in the form of a command, but to modify it, and give it the fictitious and pleasanter form of a mere request--that it would be no harm to let him gratify himself with the superstition that he was independent and could do as he pleased in the matter. I begged her to put stress, and plenty of it, upon the proposition that to keep Mason in his place would be a benefaction to the nation; to enlarge upon that, and keep still about all other considerations. In due time I received a letter from the President, written with his own hand, signed by his own hand, acknowledging Ruth's intervention and thanking me for enabling him to save to the country the services of so good and well-tried a servant as Mason, and thanking me, also, for the detailed fulness of Mason's record, which could leave no doubt in any one's mind that Mason was in his right place and ought to be kept there. Mason has remained in the service ever since, and is now consul-general at Paris. During the time that we were living in Buffalo in '70-'71, Mr. Cleveland was sheriff, but I never happened to make his acquaintance, or even see him. In fact, I suppose I was not even aware of his existence. Fourteen years later, he was become the greatest man in the State. I was not living in the State at the time. He was Governor, and was about to step into the post of President of the United States. At that time I was on the public highway in company with another bandit, George W. Cable. We were robbing the public with readings from our works during four months--and in the course of time we went to Albany to levy tribute, and I said, "We ought to go and pay our respects to the Governor." So Cable and I went to that majestic Capitol building and stated our errand. We were shown into the Governor's private office, and I saw Mr. Cleveland for the first time. We three stood chatting together. I was born lazy, and I comforted myself by turning the corner of a table into a sort of seat. Presently the Governor said: "Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many months, a good while ago, and during those months you burst suddenly into a mighty fame, out of a previous long-continued and no doubt proper obscurity--but I was a nobody, and you wouldn't notice me nor have anything to do with me. But now that I have become somebody, you have changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be sociable. How do you explain this kind of conduct?" "Oh," I said, "it is very simple, your Excellency. In Buffalo you were nothing but a sheriff. I was in society. I couldn't afford to associate with sheriffs. But you are a Governor now, and you are on your way to the Presidency. It is a great difference, and it makes you worth while." There appeared to be about sixteen doors to that spacious room. From each door a young man now emerged, and the sixteen lined up and moved forward and stood in front of the Governor with an aspect of respectful expectancy in their attitude. No one spoke for a moment. Then the Governor said: "You are dismissed, gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr. Clemens is sitting on the bells." There was a cluster of sixteen bell buttons on the corner of the table; my proportions at that end of me were just right to enable me to cover the whole of that nest, and that is how I came to hatch out those sixteen clerks. In accordance with the suggestion made in Gilder's letter recently received I have written the following note to ex-President Cleveland upon his sixty-ninth birthday: HONORED SIR:-- Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington's. The verdict is unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in a man's favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand. S. L. CLEMENS. As of date March 18, 1906.... In a diary which Mrs. Clemens kept for a little while, a great many years ago, I find various mentions of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. And in those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own, in pleasant weather. Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irishwoman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war-whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect. Her husband, old Professor Stowe, was a picturesque figure. He wore a broad slouch hat. He was a large man, and solemn. His beard was white and thick and hung far down on his breast. The first time our little Susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said, "Santa Claus has got loose!" Which reminds me of Rev. Charley Stowe's little boy--a little boy of seven years. I met Rev. Charley crossing his mother's grounds one morning and he told me this little tale. He had been out to Chicago to attend a Convention of Congregational clergymen, and had taken his little boy with him. During the trip he reminded the little chap, every now and then, that he must be on his very best behavior there in Chicago. He said: "We shall be the guests of a clergyman, there will be other guests--clergymen and their wives--and you must be careful to let those people see by your walk and conversation that you are of a godly household. Be very careful about this." The admonition bore fruit. At the first breakfast which they ate in the Chicago clergyman's house he heard his little son say in the meekest and most reverent way to the lady opposite him, "Please, won't you, for Christ's sake, pass the butter?" MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCV. DECEMBER 21, 1906. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--VIII. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1864.)] [_Dictated in 1906._] In those early days duelling suddenly became a fashion in the new Territory of Nevada, and by 1864 everybody was anxious to have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself. At that time I had been serving as city editor on Mr. Goodman's Virginia City "Enterprise" for a matter of two years. I was twenty-nine years old. I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a duel; I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable, but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself; the rest of the staff were ashamed of me--but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. I bore it very well. Plunkett was on the staff; R. M. Daggett was on the staff. These had tried to get into duels, but for the present had failed, and were waiting. Goodman was the only one of us who had done anything to shed credit upon the paper. The rival paper was the Virginia "Union." Its editor for a little while was Tom Fitch, called the "silver-tongued orator of Wisconsin"--that was where he came from. He tuned up his oratory in the editorial columns of the "Union," and Mr. Goodman invited him out and modified him with a bullet. I remember the joy of the staff when Goodman's challenge was accepted by Fitch. We ran late that night, and made much of Joe Goodman. He was only twenty-four years old; he lacked the wisdom which a person has at twenty-nine, and he was as glad of being _it_ as I was that I wasn't. He chose Major Graves for his second (that name is not right, but it's close enough; I don't remember the Major's name). Graves came over to instruct Joe in the duelling art. He had been a Major under Walker, the "gray-eyed man of destiny," and had fought all through that remarkable man's filibustering campaign in Central America. That fact gauges the Major. To say that a man was a Major under Walker, and came out of that struggle ennobled by Walker's praise, is to say that the Major was not merely a brave man but that he was brave to the very utmost limit of that word. All of Walker's men were like that. I knew the Gillis family intimately. The father made the campaign under Walker, and with him one son. They were in the memorable Plaza fight, and stood it out to the last against overwhelming odds, as did also all of the Walker men. The son was killed at the father's side. The father received a bullet through the eye. The old man--for he was an old man at the time--wore spectacles, and the bullet and one of the glasses went into his skull and remained there. There were some other sons: Steve, George, and Jim, very young chaps--the merest lads--who wanted to be in the Walker expedition, for they had their father's dauntless spirit. But Walker wouldn't have them; he said it was a serious expedition, and no place for children. The Major was a majestic creature, with a most stately and dignified and impressive military bearing, and he was by nature and training courteous, polite, graceful, winning; and he had that quality which I think I have encountered in only one other man--Bob Howland--a mysterious quality which resides in the eye; and when that eye is turned upon an individual or a squad, in warning, that is enough. The man that has that eye doesn't need to go armed; he can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him prisoner without saying a single word. I saw Bob Howland do that, once--a slender, good-natured, amiable, gentle, kindly little skeleton of a man, with a sweet blue eye that would win your heart when it smiled upon you, or turn cold and freeze it, according to the nature of the occasion. The Major stood Joe up straight; stood Steve Gillis up fifteen paces away; made Joe turn right side towards Steve, cock his navy six-shooter--that prodigious weapon--and hold it straight down against his leg; told him that _that_ was the correct position for the gun--that the position ordinarily in use at Virginia City (that is to say, the gun straight up in the air, then brought slowly down to your man) was all wrong. At the word "_One_," you must raise the gun slowly and steadily to the place on the other man's body that you desire to convince. Then, after a pause, "_two, three--fire--Stop!_" At the word "stop," you may fire--but not earlier. You may give yourself as much time as you please _after_ that word. Then, when you fire, you may advance and go on firing at your leisure and pleasure, if you can get any pleasure out of it. And, in the meantime, the other man, if he has been properly instructed and is alive to his privileges, is advancing on _you_, and firing--and it is always likely that more or less trouble will result. Naturally, when Joe's revolver had risen to a level it was pointing at Steve's breast, but the Major said "No, that is not wise. Take all the risks of getting murdered yourself, but don't run any risk of murdering the other man. If you survive a duel you want to survive it in such a way that the memory of it will not linger along with you through the rest of your life and interfere with your sleep. Aim at your man's leg; not at the knee, not above the knee; for those are dangerous spots. Aim below the knee; cripple him, but leave the rest of him to his mother." By grace of these truly wise and excellent instructions, Joe tumbled Fitch down next morning with a bullet through his lower leg, which furnished him a permanent limp. And Joe lost nothing but a lock of hair, which he could spare better then than he could now. For when I saw him here in New York a year ago, his crop was gone: he had nothing much left but a fringe, with a dome rising above. [Sidenote: (1864.)] About a year later I got _my_ chance. But I was not hunting for it. Goodman went off to San Francisco for a week's holiday, and left me to be chief editor. I had supposed that that was an easy berth, there being nothing to do but write one editorial per day; but I was disappointed in that superstition. I couldn't find anything to write an article about, the first day. Then it occurred to me that inasmuch as it was the 22nd of April, 1864, the next morning would be the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birthday--and what better theme could I want than that? I got the Cyclopædia and examined it, and found out who Shakespeare was and what he had done, and I borrowed all that and laid it before a community that couldn't have been better prepared for instruction about Shakespeare than if they had been prepared by art. There wasn't enough of what Shakespeare had done to make an editorial of the necessary length, but I filled it out with what he hadn't done--which in many respects was more important and striking and readable than the handsomest things he had really accomplished. But next day I was in trouble again. There were no more Shakespeares to work up. There was nothing in past history, or in the world's future possibilities, to make an editorial out of, suitable to that community; so there was but one theme left. That theme was Mr. Laird, proprietor of the Virginia "Union." _His_ editor had gone off to San Francisco too, and Laird was trying his hand at editing. I woke up Mr. Laird with some courtesies of the kind that were fashionable among newspaper editors in that region, and he came back at me the next day in a most vitriolic way. He was hurt by something I had said about him--some little thing--I don't remember what it was now--probably called him a horse-thief, or one of those little phrases customarily used to describe another editor. They were no doubt just, and accurate, but Laird was a very sensitive creature, and he didn't like it. So we expected a challenge from Mr. Laird, because according to the rules--according to the etiquette of duelling as reconstructed and reorganized and improved by the duellists of that region--whenever you said a thing about another person that he didn't like, it wasn't sufficient for him to talk back in the same offensive spirit: etiquette required him to send a challenge; so we waited for a challenge--waited all day. It didn't come. And as the day wore along, hour after hour, and no challenge came, the boys grew depressed. They lost heart. But I was cheerful; I felt better and better all the time. They couldn't understand it, but _I_ could understand it. It was my _make_ that enabled me to be cheerful when other people were despondent. So then it became necessary for us to waive etiquette and challenge Mr. Laird. When we reached that decision, they began to cheer up, but I began to lose some of my animation. However, in enterprises of this kind you are in the hands of your friends; there is nothing for you to do but to abide by what they consider to be the best course. Daggett wrote a challenge for me, for Daggett had the language--the right language--the convincing language--and I lacked it. Daggett poured out a stream of unsavory epithets upon Mr. Laird, charged with a vigor and venom of a strength calculated to persuade him; and Steve Gillis, my second, carried the challenge and came back to wait for the return. It didn't come. The boys were exasperated, but I kept my temper. Steve carried another challenge, hotter than the other, and we waited again. Nothing came of it. I began to feel quite comfortable. I began to take an interest in the challenges myself. I had not felt any before; but it seemed to me that I was accumulating a great and valuable reputation at no expense, and my delight in this grew and grew, as challenge after challenge was declined, until by midnight I was beginning to think that there was nothing in the world so much to be desired as a chance to fight a duel. So I hurried Daggett up; made him keep on sending challenge after challenge. Oh, well, I overdid it; Laird accepted. I might have known that that would happen--Laird was a man you couldn't depend on. The boys were jubilant beyond expression. They helped me make my will, which was another discomfort--and I already had enough. Then they took me home. I didn't sleep any--didn't want to sleep. I had plenty of things to think about, and less than four hours to do it in,--because five o'clock was the hour appointed for the tragedy, and I should have to use up one hour--beginning at four--in practising with the revolver and finding out which end of it to level at the adversary. At four we went down into a little gorge, about a mile from town, and borrowed a barn door for a mark--borrowed it of a man who was over in California on a visit--and we set the barn door up and stood a fence-rail up against the middle of it, to represent Mr. Laird. But the rail was no proper representative of him, for he was longer than a rail and thinner. Nothing would ever fetch him but a line shot, and then as like as not he would split the bullet--the worst material for duelling purposes that could be imagined. I began on the rail. I couldn't hit the rail; then I tried the barn door; but I couldn't hit the barn door. There was nobody in danger except stragglers around on the flanks of that mark. I was thoroughly discouraged, and I didn't cheer up any when we presently heard pistol-shots over in the next little ravine. I knew what that was--that was Laird's gang out practising him. They would hear my shots, and of course they would come up over the ridge to see what kind of a record I was making--see what their chances were against me. Well, I hadn't any record; and I knew that if Laird came over that ridge and saw my barn door without a scratch on it, he would be as anxious to fight as I was--or as I had been at midnight, before that disastrous acceptance came. Now just at this moment, a little bird, no bigger than a sparrow, flew along by and lit on a sage-bush about thirty yards away. Steve whipped out his revolver and shot its head off. Oh, he was a marksman--much better than I was. We ran down there to pick up the bird, and just then, sure enough, Mr. Laird and his people came over the ridge, and they joined us. And when Laird's second saw that bird, with its head shot off, he lost color, he faded, and you could see that he was interested. He said: "Who did that?" Before I could answer, Steve spoke up and said quite calmly, and in a matter-of-fact way, "Clemens did it." The second said, "Why, that is wonderful. How far off was that bird?" Steve said, "Oh, not far--about thirty yards." The second said, "Well, that is astonishing shooting. How often can he do that?" Steve said languidly, "Oh, about four times out of five." I knew the little rascal was lying, but I didn't say anything. The second said, "Why, that is _amazing_ shooting; I supposed he couldn't hit a church." He was supposing very sagaciously, but I didn't say anything. Well, they said good morning. The second took Mr. Laird home, a little tottery on his legs, and Laird sent back a note in his own hand declining to fight a duel with me on any terms whatever. Well, my life was saved--saved by that accident. I don't know what the bird thought about that interposition of Providence, but I felt very, very comfortable over it--satisfied and content. Now, we found out, later, that Laird had _hit_ his mark four times out of six, right along. If the duel had come off, he would have so filled my skin with bullet-holes that it wouldn't have held my principles. By breakfast-time the news was all over town that I had sent a challenge and Steve Gillis had carried it. Now that would entitle us to two years apiece in the penitentiary, according to the brand-new law. Judge North sent us no message as coming from himself, but a message _came_ from a close friend of his. He said it would be a good idea for us to leave the territory by the first stage-coach. This would sail next morning, at four o'clock--and in the meantime we would be searched for, but not with avidity; and if we were in the Territory after that stage-coach left, we would be the first victims of the new law. Judge North was anxious to have some object-lessons for that law, and he would absolutely keep us in the prison the full two years. Well, it seemed to me that our society was no longer desirable in Nevada; so we stayed in our quarters and observed proper caution all day--except that once Steve went over to the hotel to attend to another customer of mine. That was a Mr. Cutler. You see Laird was not the only person whom I had tried to reform during my occupancy of the editorial chair. I had looked around and selected several other people, and delivered a new zest of life into them through warm criticism and disapproval--so that when I laid down my editorial pen I had four horse-whippings and two duels owing to me. We didn't care for the horse-whippings; there was no glory in them; they were not worth the trouble of collecting. But honor required that some notice should be taken of that other duel. Mr. Cutler had come up from Carson City, and had sent a man over with a challenge from the hotel. Steve went over to pacify him. Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds, but it was well known throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might. Steve was a Gillis, and when a Gillis confronted a man and had a proposition to make, the proposition always contained business. When Cutler found that Steve was my second he cooled down; he became calm and rational, and was ready to listen. Steve gave him fifteen minutes to get out of the hotel, and half an hour to get out of town or there would be results. So _that_ duel went off successfully, because Mr. Cutler immediately left for Carson a convinced and reformed man. I have never had anything to do with duels since. I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise, and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now, I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot, and _kill_ him. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCVI. JANUARY 4, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--IX. BY MARK TWAIN. [_Dictated December 13, 1906._] As regards the coming American monarchy. It was before the Secretary of State had been heard from that the chairman of the banquet said: "In this time of unrest it is of great satisfaction that such a man as you, Mr. Root, is chief adviser of the President." Mr. Root then got up and in the most quiet and orderly manner touched off the successor to the San Francisco earthquake. As a result, the several State governments were well shaken up and considerably weakened. Mr. Root was prophesying. He was prophesying, and it seems to me that no shrewder and surer forecasting has been done in this country for a good many years. He did not say, in so many words, that we are proceeding, in a steady march, toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the republic by monarchy; but I suppose he was aware that that is the case. He notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all the ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority; but he stops there, and doesn't add up the sum. He is not unaware that heretofore the sum has been ultimate monarchy, and that the same figures can fairly be depended upon to furnish the same sum whenever and wherever they can be produced, so long as human nature shall remain as it is; but it was not needful that he do the adding, since any one can do it; neither would it have been gracious in him to do it. In observing the changed conditions which in the course of time have made certain and sure the eventual seizure by the Washington government of a number of State duties and prerogatives which have been betrayed and neglected by the several States, he does not attribute those changes and the vast results which are to flow from them to any thought-out policy of any party or of any body of dreamers or schemers, but properly and rightly attributes them to that stupendous power--_Circumstance_-- which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final, and must be obeyed by all--and will be. The railway is a Circumstance, the steamship is a Circumstance, the telegraph is a Circumstance. They were mere happenings; and to the whole world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial, wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. No man, and no party, and no thought-out policy said, "Behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, in spite of anything that anybody can do to prevent it." The changed conditions have come, and Circumstance knows what is following, and will follow. So does Mr. Root. His language is not unclear, it is crystal: "Our whole life has swung away from the old State centres, and is crystallizing about national centres." " ... The old barriers which kept the States as separate communities are completely lost from sight." " ... That [State] power of regulation and control is gradually passing into the hands of the national government." "Sometimes by an assertion of the inter-State commerce power, sometimes by an assertion of the taxing power, the national government is taking up the performance of duties which under the changed conditions the separate States are no longer capable of adequately performing." "We are urging forward in a development of business and social life which tends more and more to the obliteration of State lines and the decrease of State power as compared with national power." "It is useless for the advocates of State rights to inveigh against ... the extension of national authority in the fields of necessary control where the States themselves fail in the performance of their duty." He is not announcing a policy; he is not forecasting what a party of planners will bring about; he is merely telling what the people will require and compel. And he could have added--which would be perfectly true--that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and cogitation and planning, but by _Circumstance_--that power which arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the slightest control. _"The end is not yet."_ It is a true word. We are on the march, but at present we are only just getting started. If the States continue to fail to do their duty as required by the people-- " ... _constructions of the Constitution will be found_ to vest the power where it will be exercised--in the national government." I do not know whether that has a sinister meaning or not, and so I will not enlarge upon it lest I should chance to be in the wrong. It sounds like ship-money come again, but it may not be so intended. Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our nature: we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone, and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power. We have to worship these things and their possessors, we are all born so, and we cannot help it. We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter. Sometimes we get a good man and worth the price, but we are ready to take him anyway, whether he be ripe or rotten, whether he be clean and decent, or merely a basket of noble and sacred and long-descended offal. And when we get him the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs--and privately envies; and also is proud of the honor which has been conferred upon us. We run over our list of titled purchases every now and then, in the newspapers, and discuss them and caress them, and are thankful and happy. Like all the other nations, we worship money and the possessors of it--they being our aristocracy, and we have to have one. We like to read about rich people in the papers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed. They even leave out a football bull-fight now and then to get room for all the particulars of how--according to the display heading--"Rich Woman Fell Down Cellar--Not Hurt." The falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the woman is not rich, but no rich woman can fall down cellar and we not yearn to know all about it and wish it was us. In a monarchy the people willingly and rejoicingly revere and take pride in their nobilities, and are not humiliated by the reflection that this humble and hearty homage gets no return but contempt. Contempt does not shame them, they are used to it, and they recognize that it is their proper due. We are all made like that. In Europe we easily and quickly learn to take that attitude toward the sovereigns and the aristocracies; moreover, it has been observed that when we get the attitude we go on and exaggerate it, presently becoming more servile than the natives, and vainer of it. The next step is to rail and scoff at republics and democracies. All of which is natural, for we have not ceased to be human beings by becoming Americans, and the human race was always intended to be governed by kingship, not by popular vote. I suppose we must expect that unavoidable and irresistible Circumstances will gradually take away the powers of the States and concentrate them in the central government, and that the republic will then repeat the history of all time and become a monarchy; but I believe that if we obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them the monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet. [Sidenote: (1849-'51.)] [_Dictated December 1, 1906._] An exciting event in our village (Hannibal) was the arrival of the mesmerizer. I think the year was 1850. As to that I am not sure, but I know the month--it was May; that detail has survived the wear of fifty-five years. A pair of connected little incidents of that month have served to keep the memory of it green for me all this time; incidents of no consequence, and not worth embalming, yet my memory has preserved them carefully and flung away things of real value to give them space and make them comfortable. The truth is, a person's memory has no more sense than his conscience, and no appreciation whatever of values and proportions. However, never mind those trifling incidents; my subject is the mesmerizer, now. He advertised his show, and promised marvels. Admission as usual: 25 cents, children and negroes half price. The village had heard of mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet. Not many people attended, the first night, but next day they had so many wonders to tell that everybody's curiosity was fired, and after that for a fortnight the magician had prosperous times. I was fourteen or fifteen years old--the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things, short of death by fire, if thereby he may be conspicuous and show off before the public; and so, when I saw the "subjects" perform their foolish antics on the platform and make the people laugh and shout and admire, I had a burning desire to be a subject myself. Every night, for three nights, I sat in the row of candidates on the platform, and held the magic disk in the palm of my hand, and gazed at it and tried to get sleepy, but it was a failure; I remained wide awake, and had to retire defeated, like the majority. Also, I had to sit there and be gnawed with envy of Hicks, our journeyman; I had to sit there and see him scamper and jump when Simmons the enchanter exclaimed, "See the snake! see the snake!" and hear him say, "My, how beautiful!" in response to the suggestion that he was observing a splendid sunset; and so on--the whole insane business. I couldn't laugh, I couldn't applaud; it filled me with bitterness to have others do it, and to have people make a hero of Hicks, and crowd around him when the show was over, and ask him for more and more particulars of the wonders he had seen in his visions, and manifest in many ways that they were proud to be acquainted with him. Hicks--the idea! I couldn't stand it; I was getting boiled to death in my own bile. On the fourth night temptation came, and I was not strong enough to resist. When I had gazed at the disk awhile I pretended to be sleepy, and began to nod. Straightway came the professor and made passes over my head and down my body and legs and arms, finishing each pass with a snap of his fingers in the air, to discharge the surplus electricity; then he began to "draw" me with the disk, holding it in his fingers and telling me I could not take my eyes off it, try as I might; so I rose slowly, bent and gazing, and followed that disk all over the place, just as I had seen the others do. Then I was put through the other paces. Upon suggestion I fled from snakes; passed buckets at a fire; became excited over hot steamboat-races; made love to imaginary girls and kissed them; fished from the platform and landed mud-cats that outweighed me--and so on, all the customary marvels. But not in the customary way. I was cautious at first, and watchful, being afraid the professor would discover that I was an impostor and drive me from the platform in disgrace; but as soon as I realized that I was not in danger, I set myself the task of terminating Hicks's usefulness as a subject, and of usurping his place. It was a sufficiently easy task. Hicks was born honest; I, without that incumbrance--so some people said. Hicks saw what he saw, and reported accordingly; I saw more than was visible, and added to it such details as could help. Hicks had no imagination, I had a double supply. He was born calm, I was born excited. No vision could start a rapture in him, and he was constipated as to language, anyway; but if I saw a vision I emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my mind into the bargain. At the end of my first half-hour Hicks was a thing of the past, a fallen hero, a broken idol, and I knew it and was glad, and said in my heart, Success to crime! Hicks could never have been mesmerized to the point where he could kiss an imaginary girl in public, or a real one either, but I was competent. Whatever Hicks had failed in, I made it a point to succeed in, let the cost be what it might, physically or morally. He had shown several bad defects, and I had made a note of them. For instance, if the magician asked, "What do you see?" and left him to invent a vision for himself, Hicks was dumb and blind, he couldn't see a thing nor say a word, whereas the magician soon found that when it came to seeing visions of a stunning and marketable sort I could get along better without his help than with it. Then there was another thing: Hicks wasn't worth a tallow dip on mute mental suggestion. Whenever Simmons stood behind him and gazed at the back of his skull and tried to drive a mental suggestion into it, Hicks sat with vacant face, and never suspected. If he had been noticing, he could have seen by the rapt faces of the audience that something was going on behind his back that required a response. Inasmuch as I was an impostor I dreaded to have this test put upon me, for I knew the professor would be "willing" me to do something, and as I couldn't know what it was, I should be exposed and denounced. However, when my time came, I took my chance. I perceived by the tense and expectant faces of the people that Simmons was behind me willing me with all his might. I tried my best to imagine what he wanted, but nothing suggested itself. I felt ashamed and miserable, then. I believed that the hour of my disgrace was come, and that in another moment I should go out of that place disgraced. I ought to be ashamed to confess it, but my next thought was, not how I could win the compassion of kindly hearts by going out humbly and in sorrow for my misdoings, but how I could go out most sensationally and spectacularly. There was a rusty and empty old revolver lying on the table, among the "properties" employed in the performances. On May-day, two or three weeks before, there had been a celebration by the schools, and I had had a quarrel with a big boy who was the school-bully, and I had not come out of it with credit. That boy was now seated in the middle of the house, half-way down the main aisle. I crept stealthily and impressively toward the table, with a dark and murderous scowl on my face, copied from a popular romance, seized the revolver suddenly, flourished it, shouted the bully's name, jumped off the platform, and made a rush for him and chased him out of the house before the paralyzed people could interfere to save him. There was a storm of applause, and the magician, addressing the house, said, most impressively-- "That you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully developed a subject we have in this boy, I assure you that without a single spoken word to guide him he has carried out what I mentally commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. I could have stopped him at a moment in his vengeful career by a mere exertion of my will, therefore the poor fellow who has escaped was at no time in danger." So I was not in disgrace. I returned to the platform a hero, and happier than I have ever been in this world since. As regards mental suggestion, my fears of it were gone. I judged that in case I failed to guess what the professor might be willing me to do, I could count on putting up something that would answer just as well. I was right, and exhibitions of unspoken suggestion became a favorite with the public. Whenever I perceived that I was being willed to do something I got up and did something--anything that occurred to me--and the magician, not being a fool, always ratified it. When people asked me, "How _can_ you tell what he is willing you to do?" I said, "It's just as easy," and they always said, admiringly, "Well it beats _me_ how you can do it." Hicks was weak in another detail. When the professor made passes over him and said "his whole body is without sensation now--come forward and test him, ladies and gentlemen," the ladies and gentlemen always complied eagerly, and stuck pins into Hicks, and if they went deep Hicks was sure to wince, then that poor professor would have to explain that Hicks "wasn't sufficiently under the influence." But I didn't wince; I only suffered, and shed tears on the inside. The miseries that a conceited boy will endure to keep up his "reputation"! And so will a conceited man; I know it in my own person, and have seen it in a hundred thousand others. That professor ought to have protected me, and I often hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn't. It may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though I did not believe it nor think it possible. Those were dear good people, but they must have carried simplicity and credulity to the limit. They would stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its length in, and then be lost in wonder that by a mere exercise of will-power the professor could turn my arm to iron and make it insensible to pain. Whereas it was not insensible at all; I was suffering agonies of pain. After that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, I was the only subject. Simmons invited no more candidates to the platform. I performed alone, every night, the rest of the fortnight. In the beginning of the second week I conquered the last doubters. Up to that time a dozen wise old heads, the intellectual aristocracy of the town, had held out, as implacable unbelievers. I was as hurt by this as if I were engaged in some honest occupation. There is nothing surprising about this. Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it. That handful of overwise old gentlemen kept on shaking their heads all the first week, and saying they had seen no marvels there that could not have been produced by collusion; and they were pretty vain of their unbelief, too, and liked to show it and air it, and be superior to the ignorant and the gullible. Particularly old Dr. Peake, who was the ringleader of the irreconcilables, and very formidable; for he was an F.F.V., he was learned, white-haired and venerable, nobly and richly clad in the fashions of an earlier and a courtlier day, he was large and stately, and he not only seemed wise, but was what he seemed, in that regard. He had great influence, and his opinion upon any matter was worth much more than that of any other person in the community. When I conquered him, at last, I knew I was undisputed master of the field; and now, after more than fifty years, I acknowledge, with a few dry old tears, that I rejoiced without shame. [Sidenote: (1847.)] [_Dictated December 2, 1906._] In 1847 we were living in a large white house on the corner of Hill and Main Streets--a house that still stands, but isn't large now, although it hasn't lost a plank; I saw it a year ago and noticed that shrinkage. My father died in it in March of the year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some months afterward. Ours was not the only family in the house, there was another--Dr. Grant's. One day Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a matter on the street with sword-canes, and Grant was brought home multifariously punctured. Old Dr. Peake calked the leaks, and came every day for a while, to look after him. The Grants were Virginians, like Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligible quantity. Two of the group--Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant's mother--had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy. These were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red, I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me yet, and can never fade. In due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the Peakes, with its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends I picked up a clearly defined idea of the place. I was strongly interested, for I had not before heard of such palatial things from the lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes. One detail, casually dropped, hit my imagination hard. In the wall, by the great front door, there was a round hole as big as a saucer--a British cannon-ball had made it, in the war of the Revolution. It was breath-taking; it made history real; history had never been real to me before. Very well, three or four years later, as already mentioned, I was king-bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning of the second week; the performance was half over; just then the majestic Dr. Peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his gold-headed cane, entered, and a deferential citizen vacated his seat beside the Grants and made the great chief take it. This happened while I was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision, in response to the professor's remark-- "Concentrate your powers. Look--look attentively. There--don't you see something? Concentrate--concentrate. Now then--describe it." Without suspecting it, Dr. Peake, by entering the place, had reminded me of the talk of three years before. He had also furnished me capital and was become my confederate, an accomplice in my frauds. I began on a vision, a vague and dim one (that was part of the game at the beginning of a vision; it isn't best to see it too clearly at first, it might look as if you had come loaded with it). The vision developed, by degrees, and gathered swing, momentum, energy. It was the Richmond fire. Dr. Peake was cold, at first, and his fine face had a trace of polite scorn in it; but when he began to recognize that fire, that expression changed, and his eyes began to light up. As soon as I saw that, I threw the valves wide open and turned on all the steam, and gave those people a supper of fire and horrors that was calculated to last them one while! They couldn't gasp, when I got through--they were petrified. Dr. Peake had risen, and was standing,--and breathing hard. He said, in a great voice-- "My doubts are ended. No collusion could produce that miracle. It was totally impossible for him to know those details, yet he has described them with the clarity of an eye-witness--and with what unassailable truthfulness God knows I know!" I saved the colonial mansion for the last night, and solidified and perpetuated Dr. Peake's conversion with the cannon-ball hole. He explained to the house that I could never have heard of that small detail, which differentiated this mansion from all other Virginian mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven that I had _seen_ it in my vision. Lawks! It is curious. When the magician's engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years. This was because I never would examine them, in after life. I couldn't. The subject revolted me. Perhaps because it brought back to me a passage in my life which for pride's sake I wished to forget; though I thought--or persuaded myself I thought--I should never come across a "proof" which wasn't thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud like me behind it. The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs. Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it. I am well aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how General Sherman used to rage and swear over "When we were Marching through Georgia," which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went; still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable. How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years; and being moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, I thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I gathered my resolution together and made the confession. To my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no George Washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me, and said so! I was not merely disappointed, I was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in this placid and confident way when I was expecting to get a profit out of it. I asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that every single thing I had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew better, I put up my hand and _swore_ to it--adding a triumphant "_Now_ what do you say?" It did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an inch from her position. If this was hard for me to endure, it did not begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my sworn oath out of court with _arguments_ to prove that I was under a delusion and did not know what I was talking about. Arguments! Arguments to show that a person on a man's outside can know better what is on his inside than he does himself! I had cherished some contempt for arguments before, I have not enlarged my respect for them since. She refused to believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it. She cited the Richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were quite beyond my capacities. Then I saw my chance! I said she was right--I didn't invent those, I got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great shot did no damage. She said Dr. Peake's evidence was better than mine, and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled! I realised, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable one. I played it--and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated know not mercy. I played that matter card. It was the pin-sticking. I said, solemnly-- "I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me cruel pain." She only said-- "It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, _now_, but I was there, and I know better. You never winced." She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic. "Oh, my goodness!" I said, "let me _show_ you that I am speaking the truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it--drive it to the head--I shall not wince." She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction-- "You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then, and could not have done it." And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCVII. JANUARY 18, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--X. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1825.)] [Sidenote: (1837.)] [_Dictated March 28, 1906._] Orion Clemens was born in Jamestown, Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1825. He was the family's first-born, and antedated me ten years. Between him and me came a sister, Margaret, who died, aged ten, in 1837, in that village of Florida, Missouri, where I was born; and Pamela, mother of Samuel E. Moffett, who was an invalid all her life and died in the neighborhood of New York a year ago, aged about seventy-five. Her character was without blemish, and she was of a most kindly and gentle disposition. Also there was a brother, Benjamin, who died in 1848 aged ten or twelve. [Sidenote: (1843.)] Orion's boyhood was spent in that wee little log hamlet of Jamestown up there among the "knobs"--so called--of East Tennessee. The family migrated to Florida, Missouri, then moved to Hannibal, Missouri, when Orion was twelve and a half years old. When he was fifteen or sixteen he was sent to St. Louis and there he learned the printer's trade. One of his characteristics was eagerness. He woke with an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed him all day; it perished in the night and he was on fire with a fresh new interest next morning before he could get his clothes on. He exploited in this way three hundred and sixty-five red-hot new eagernesses every year of his life. But I am forgetting another characteristic, a very pronounced one. That was his deep glooms, his despondencies, his despairs; these had their place in each and every day along with the eagernesses. Thus his day was divided--no, not divided, mottled--from sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. Every day he was the most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, I think, and also every day he was the most miserable man that ever was. While he was in his apprenticeship in St. Louis, he got well acquainted with Edward Bates, who was afterwards in Mr. Lincoln's first cabinet. Bates was a very fine man, an honorable and upright man, and a distinguished lawyer. He patiently allowed Orion to bring to him each new project; he discussed it with him and extinguished it by argument and irresistible logic--at first. But after a few weeks he found that this labor was not necessary; that he could leave the new project alone and it would extinguish itself the same night. Orion thought he would like to become a lawyer. Mr. Bates encouraged him, and he studied law nearly a week, then of course laid it aside to try something new. He wanted to become an orator. Mr. Bates gave him lessons. Mr. Bates walked the floor reading from an English book aloud and rapidly turning the English into French, and he recommended this exercise to Orion. But as Orion knew no French, he took up that study and wrought at it like a volcano for two or three days; then gave it up. During his apprenticeship in St. Louis he joined a number of churches, one after another, and taught in their Sunday-schools--changing his Sunday-school every time he changed his religion. He was correspondingly erratic in his politics--Whig to-day, Democrat next week, and anything fresh that he could find in the political market the week after. I may remark here that throughout his long life he was always trading religions and enjoying the change of scenery. I will also remark that his sincerity was never doubted; his truthfulness was never doubted; and in matters of business and money his honesty was never questioned. Notwithstanding his forever-recurring caprices and changes, his principles were high, always high, and absolutely unshakable. He was the strangest compound that ever got mixed in a human mould. Such a person as that is given to acting upon impulse and without reflection; that was Orion's way. Everything he did he did with conviction and enthusiasm and with a vainglorious pride in the thing he was doing--and no matter what that thing was, whether good, bad or indifferent, he repented of it every time in sackcloth and ashes before twenty-four hours had sped. Pessimists are born, not made. Optimists are born, not made. But I think he was the only person I have ever known in whom pessimism and optimism were lodged in exactly equal proportions. Except in the matter of grounded principle, he was as unstable as water. You could dash his spirits with a single word; you could raise them into the sky again with another one. You could break his heart with a word of disapproval; you could make him as happy as an angel with a word of approval. And there was no occasion to put any sense or any vestige of mentality of any kind into these miracles; anything you might say would answer. He had another conspicuous characteristic, and it was the father of those which I have just spoken of. This was an intense lust for approval. He was so eager to be approved, so girlishly anxious to be approved by anybody and everybody, without discrimination, that he was commonly ready to forsake his notions, opinions and convictions at a moment's notice in order to get the approval of any person who disagreed with them. I wish to be understood as reserving his fundamental principles all the time. He never forsook those to please anybody. Born and reared among slaves and slaveholders, he was yet an abolitionist from his boyhood to his death. He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable. But in light matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat. He was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth, and this characteristic got him into trouble now and then. Once when he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and was become a journeyman, he conceived the romantic idea of coming to Hannibal without giving us notice, in order that he might furnish to the family a pleasant surprise. If he had given notice, he would have been informed that we had changed our residence and that that gruff old bass-voiced sailorman, Dr. G., our family physician, was living in the house which we had formerly occupied and that Orion's former room in that house was now occupied by Dr. G.'s two middle-aged maiden sisters. Orion arrived at Hannibal per steamboat in the middle of the night, and started with his customary eagerness on his excursion, his mind all on fire with his romantic project and building and enjoying his surprise in advance. He was always enjoying things in advance; it was the make of him. He never could wait for the event, but must build it out of dream-stuff and enjoy it beforehand--consequently sometimes when the event happened he saw that it was not as good as the one he had invented in his imagination, and so he had lost profit by not keeping the imaginary one and letting the reality go. When he arrived at the house he went around to the back door and slipped off his boots and crept up-stairs and arrived at the room of those elderly ladies without having wakened any sleepers. He undressed in the dark and got into bed and snuggled up against somebody. He was a little surprised, but not much--for he thought it was our brother Ben. It was winter, and the bed was comfortable, and the supposed Ben added to the comfort--and so he was dropping off to sleep very well satisfied with his progress so far and full of happy dreams of what was going to happen in the morning. But something else was going to happen sooner than that, and it happened now. The maid that was being crowded fumed and fretted and struggled and presently came to a half-waking condition and protested against the crowding. That voice paralyzed Orion. He couldn't move a limb; he couldn't get his breath; and the crowded one discovered his new whiskers and began to scream. This removed the paralysis, and Orion was out of bed and clawing round in the dark for his clothes in a fraction of a second. Both maids began to scream then, so Orion did not wait to get his whole wardrobe. He started with such parts of it as he could grab. He flew to the head of the stairs and started down, and was paralyzed again at that point, because he saw the faint yellow flame of a candle soaring up the stairs from below and he judged that Dr. G. was behind it, and he was. He had no clothes on to speak of, but no matter, he was well enough fixed for an occasion like this, because he had a butcher-knife in his hand. Orion shouted to him, and this saved his life, for the Doctor recognized his voice. Then in those deep-sea-going bass tones of his that I used to admire so much when I was a little boy, he explained to Orion the change that had been made, told him where to find the Clemens family, and closed with some quite unnecessary advice about posting himself before he undertook another adventure like that--advice which Orion probably never needed again as long as he lived. One bitter December night, Orion sat up reading until three o'clock in the morning and then, without looking at a clock, sallied forth to call on a young lady. He hammered and hammered at the door; couldn't get any response; didn't understand it. Anybody else would have regarded that as an indication of some kind or other and would have drawn inferences and gone home. But Orion didn't draw inferences, he merely hammered and hammered, and finally the father of the girl appeared at the door in a dressing-gown. He had a candle in his hand and the dressing-gown was all the clothing he had on--except an expression of unwelcome which was so thick and so large that it extended all down his front to his instep and nearly obliterated the dressing-gown. But Orion didn't notice that this was an unpleasant expression. He merely walked in. The old gentleman took him into the parlor, set the candle on a table, and stood. Orion made the usual remarks about the weather, and sat down--sat down and talked and talked and went on talking--that old man looking at him vindictively and waiting for his chance--waiting treacherously and malignantly for his chance. Orion had not asked for the young lady. It was not customary. It was understood that a young fellow came to see the girl of the house, not the founder of it. At last Orion got up and made some remark to the effect that probably the young lady was busy and he would go now and call again. That was the old man's chance, and he said with fervency "Why good land, aren't you going to stop to breakfast?" Orion did not come to Hannibal until two or three years after my father's death. Meantime he remained in St Louis. He was a journeyman printer and earning wages. Out of his wage he supported my mother and my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I. My sister Pamela helped in this support by taking piano pupils. Thus we got along, but it was pretty hard sledding. I was not one of the burdens, because I was taken from school at once, upon my father's death, and placed in the office of the Hannibal "Courier," as printer's apprentice, and Mr. S., the editor and proprietor of the paper, allowed me the usual emolument of the office of apprentice--that is to say board and clothes, but no money. The clothes consisted of two suits a year, but one of the suits always failed to materialize and the other suit was not purchased so long as Mr. S.'s old clothes held out. I was only about half as big as Mr. S., consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough. There were two other apprentices. One was Steve Wilkins, seventeen or eighteen years old and a giant. When he was in Mr. S.'s clothes they fitted him as the candle-mould fits the candle--thus he was generally in a suffocated condition, particularly in the summer-time. He was a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company. At first we three apprentices had to feed in the kitchen with the old slave cook and her very handsome and bright and well-behaved young mulatto daughter. For his own amusement--for he was not generally laboring for other people's amusement--Steve was constantly and persistently and loudly and elaborately making love to that mulatto girl and distressing the life out of her and worrying the old mother to death. She would say, "Now, Marse Steve, Marse Steve, can't you behave yourself?" With encouragement like that, Steve would naturally renew his attentions and emphasize them. It was killingly funny to Ralph and me. And, to speak truly, the old mother's distress about it was merely a pretence. She quite well understood that by the customs of slaveholding communities it was Steve's right to make love to that girl if he wanted to. But the girl's distress was very real. She had a refined nature, and she took all Steve's extravagant love-making in resentful earnest. We got but little variety in the way of food at that kitchen table, and there wasn't enough of it anyway. So we apprentices used to keep alive by arts of our own--that is to say, we crept into the cellar nearly every night, by a private entrance which we had discovered, and we robbed the cellar of potatoes and onions and such things, and carried them down-town to the printing-office, where we slept on pallets on the floor, and cooked them at the stove and had very good times. As I have indicated, Mr. S.'s economies were of a pretty close and rigid kind. By and by, when we apprentices were promoted from the basement to the ground floor and allowed to sit at the family table, along with the one journeyman, Harry H., the economies continued. Mrs. S. was a bride. She had attained to that distinction very recently, after waiting a good part of a lifetime for it, and she was the right woman in the right place, according to the economics of the place, for she did not trust the sugar-bowl to us, but sweetened our coffee herself. That is, she went through the motions. She didn't really sweeten it. She seemed to put one heaping teaspoonful of brown sugar into each cup, but, according to Steve, that was a deceit. He said she dipped the spoon in the coffee first to make the sugar stick, and then scooped the sugar out of the bowl with the spoon upside down, so that the effect to the eye was a heaped-up spoon, whereas the sugar on it was nothing but a layer. This all seems perfectly true to me, and yet that thing would be so difficult to perform that I suppose it really didn't happen, but was one of Steve's lies. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCVIII. FEBRUARY 1, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XI. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1850.)] [_Dictated March 28th, 1906._] About 1849 or 1850 Orion severed his connection with the printing-house in St. Louis and came up to Hannibal, and bought a weekly paper called the Hannibal "Journal," together with its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash. He borrowed the cash at ten per cent. interest, from an old farmer named Johnson who lived five miles out of town. Then he reduced the subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar. He reduced the rates for advertising in about the same proportion, and thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty--to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. He took me out of the "Courier" office and engaged my services in his own at three dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but Orion was always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself. It cost him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a penny as long as I was with him. By the end of the first year he found he must make some economies. The office rent was cheap, but it was not cheap enough. He could not afford to pay rent of any kind, so he moved the whole plant into the house we lived in, and it cramped the dwelling-place cruelly. He kept that paper alive during four years, but I have at this time no idea how he accomplished it. Toward the end of each year he had to turn out and scrape and scratch for the fifty dollars of interest due Mr. Johnson, and that fifty dollars was about the only cash he ever received or paid out, I suppose, while he was proprietor of that newspaper, except for ink and printing-paper. The paper was a dead failure. It had to be that from the start. Finally he handed it over to Mr. Johnson, and went up to Muscatine, Iowa, and acquired a small interest in a weekly newspaper there. It was not a sort of property to marry on--but no matter. He came across a winning and pretty girl who lived in Quincy, Illinois, a few miles below Keokuk, and they became engaged. He was always falling in love with girls, but by some accident or other he had never gone so far as engagement before. And now he achieved nothing but misfortune by it, because he straightway fell in love with a Keokuk girl. He married the Keokuk girl and they began a struggle for life which turned out to be a difficult enterprise, and very unpromising. To gain a living in Muscatine was plainly impossible, so Orion and his new wife went to Keokuk to live, for she wanted to be near her relatives. He bought a little bit of a job-printing plant--on credit, of course--and at once put prices down to where not even the apprentices could get a living out of it, and this sort of thing went on. [Sidenote: (1853.)] I had not joined the Muscatine migration. Just before that happened (which I think was in 1853) I disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis. There I worked in the composing-room of the "Evening News" for a time, and then started on my travels to see the world. The world was New York City, and there was a little World's Fair there. It had just been opened where the great reservoir afterward was, and where the sumptuous public library is now being built--Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. I arrived in New York with two or three dollars in pocket change and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the lining of my coat. I got work at villainous wages in the establishment of John A. Gray and Green in Cliff Street, and I found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics' boarding-house in Duane Street. The firm paid my wages in wildcat money at its face value, and my week's wage merely sufficed to pay board and lodging. By and by I went to Philadelphia and worked there some months as a "sub" on the "Inquirer" and the "Public Ledger." Finally I made a flying trip to Washington to see the sights there, and in 1854 I went back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for Muscatine. I fell asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didn't wake again for thirty-six hours. [Sidenote: (1854.)] ... I worked in that little job-office in Keokuk as much as two years, I should say, without ever collecting a cent of wages, for Orion was never able to pay anything--but Dick Higham and I had good times. I don't know what Dick got, but it was probably only uncashable promises. [Sidenote: (1856.)] One day in the midwinter of 1856 or 1857--I think it was 1856--I was coming along the main street of Keokuk in the middle of the forenoon. It was bitter weather--so bitter that that street was deserted, almost. A light dry snow was blowing here and there on the ground and on the pavement, swirling this way and that way and making all sorts of beautiful figures, but very chilly to look at. The wind blew a piece of paper past me and it lodged against a wall of a house. Something about the look of it attracted my attention and I gathered it in. It was a fifty-dollar bill, the only one I had ever seen, and the largest assemblage of money I had ever encountered in one spot. I advertised it in the papers and suffered more than a thousand dollars' worth of solicitude and fear and distress during the next few days lest the owner should see the advertisement and come and take my fortune away. As many as four days went by without an applicant; then I could endure this kind of misery no longer. I felt sure that another four could not go by in this safe and secure way. I felt that I must take that money out of danger. So I bought a ticket for Cincinnati and went to that city. I worked there several months in the printing-office of Wrightson and Company. I had been reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations of the Amazon and had been mightily attracted by what he said of coca. I made up my mind that I would go to the head waters of the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune. I left for New Orleans in the steamer "Paul Jones" with this great idea filling my mind. One of the pilots of that boat was Horace Bixby. Little by little I got acquainted with him, and pretty soon I was doing a lot of steering for him in his daylight watches. When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for Pará and discovered that there weren't any, and learned that there probably wouldn't be any during that century. It had not occurred to me to inquire about those particulars before leaving Cincinnati, so there I was. I couldn't get to the Amazon. I had no friends in New Orleans and no money to speak of. I went to Horace Bixby and asked him to make a pilot out of me. He said he would do it for a hundred dollars cash in advance. So I steered for him up to St. Louis, borrowed the money from my brother-in-law and closed the bargain. I had acquired this brother-in-law several years before. This was Mr. William A. Moffett, a merchant, a Virginian--a fine man in every way. He had married my sister Pamela, and the Samuel E. Moffett of whom I have been speaking was their son. Within eighteen months I became a competent pilot, and I served that office until the Mississippi River traffic was brought to a standstill by the breaking out of the civil war. ... Meantime Orion had gone down the river and established his little job-printing-office in Keokuk. On account of charging next to nothing for the work done in his job-office, he had almost nothing to do there. He was never able to comprehend that work done on a profitless basis deteriorates and is presently not worth anything, and that customers are then obliged to go where they can get better work, even if they must pay better prices for it. He had plenty of time, and he took up Blackstone again. He also put up a sign which offered his services to the public as a lawyer. He never got a case, in those days, nor even an applicant, although he was quite willing to transact law business for nothing and furnish the stationery himself. He was always liberal that way. [Sidenote: (1861.)] Presently he moved to a wee little hamlet called Alexandria, two or three miles down the river, and he put up that sign there. He got no custom. He was by this time very hard aground. But by this time I was beginning to earn a wage of two hundred and fifty dollars a month as pilot, and so I supported him thenceforth until 1861, when his ancient friend, Edward Bates, then a member of Mr. Lincoln's first cabinet, got him the place of Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and Orion and I cleared for that country in the overland stage-coach, I paying the fares, which were pretty heavy, and carrying with me what money I had been able to save--this was eight hundred dollars, I should say--and it was all in silver coin and a good deal of a nuisance because of its weight. And we had another nuisance, which was an Unabridged Dictionary. It weighed about a thousand pounds, and was a ruinous expense, because the stage-coach Company charged for extra baggage by the ounce. We could have kept a family for a time on what that dictionary cost in the way of extra freight--and it wasn't a good dictionary anyway--didn't have any modern words in it--only had obsolete ones that they used to use when Noah Webster was a child. The Government of the new Territory of Nevada was an interesting menagerie. Governor Nye was an old and seasoned politician from New York--politician, not statesman. He had white hair; he was in fine physical condition; he had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every feeling, every passion, every emotion. His eyes could outtalk his tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump. He was a shrewd man; he generally saw through surfaces and perceived what was going on inside without being suspected of having an eye on the matter. When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory. I do not take pleasure in exposing this fact, for I liked those people; but what I am saying is true. I wish I could say a kindlier thing about them instead--that they were burglars, or hat-rack thieves, or something like that, that wouldn't be utterly uncomplimentary. I would prefer it, but I can't say those things, they would not be true. These people were practical jokers, and I will not try to disguise it. In other respects they were plenty good-enough people; honest people; reputable and likable. They played practical jokes upon each other with success, and got the admiration and applause and also the envy of the rest of the community. Naturally they were eager to try their arts on big game, and that was what the Governor was. But they were not able to score. They made several efforts, but the Governor defeated these efforts without any trouble and went on smiling his pleasant smile as if nothing had happened. Finally the joker chiefs of Carson City and Virginia City conspired together to see if their combined talent couldn't win a victory, for the jokers were getting into a very uncomfortable place: the people were laughing at them, instead of at their proposed victim. They banded themselves together to the number of ten and invited the Governor to what was a most extraordinary attention in those days--pickled oyster stew and champagne--luxuries very seldom seen in that region, and existing rather as fabrics of the imagination than as facts. The Governor took me with him. He said disparagingly, "It's a poor invention. It doesn't deceive. Their idea is to get me drunk and leave me under the table, and from their standpoint this will be very funny. But they don't know me. I am familiar with champagne and have no prejudices against it." The fate of the joke was not decided until two o'clock in the morning. At that hour the Governor was serene, genial, comfortable, contented, happy and sober, although he was so full that he couldn't laugh without shedding champagne tears. Also, at that hour the last joker joined his comrades under the table, drunk to the last perfection. The Governor remarked, "This is a dry place, Sam, let's go and get something to drink and go to bed." The Governor's official menagerie had been drawn from the humblest ranks of his constituents at home--harmless good fellows who had helped in his campaigns, and now they had their reward in petty salaries payable in greenbacks that were worth next to nothing. Those boys had a hard time to make both ends meet. Orion's salary was eighteen hundred dollars a year, and he wouldn't even support his dictionary on it. But the Irishwoman who had come out on the Governor's staff charged the menagerie only ten dollars a week apiece for board and lodging. Orion and I were of her boarders and lodgers; and so, on these cheap terms the silver I had brought from home held out very well. [Sidenote: ('62 or '63)] At first I roamed about the country seeking silver, but at the end of '62 or the beginning of '63 when I came up from Aurora to begin a journalistic life on the Virginia City "Enterprise," I was presently sent down to Carson City to report the legislative session. Orion was soon very popular with the members of the legislature, because they found that whereas they couldn't usually trust each other, nor anybody else, they could trust him. He easily held the belt for honesty in that country, but it didn't do him any good in a pecuniary way, because he had no talent for either persuading or scaring legislators. But I was differently situated. I was there every day in the legislature to distribute compliment and censure with evenly balanced justice and spread the same over half a page of the "Enterprise" every morning, consequently I was an influence. I got the legislature to pass a wise and very necessary law requiring every corporation doing business in the Territory to record its charter in full, without skipping a word, in a record to be kept by the Secretary of the Territory--my brother. All the charters were framed in exactly the same words. For this record-service he was authorized to charge forty cents a folio of one hundred words for making the record; also five dollars for furnishing a certificate of each record, and so on. Everybody had a toll-road franchise, but no toll-road. But the franchise had to be recorded and paid for. Everybody was a mining corporation, and had to have himself recorded and pay for it. Very well, we prospered. The record-service paid an average of a thousand dollars a month, in gold. Governor Nye was often absent from the Territory. He liked to run down to San Francisco every little while and enjoy a rest from Territorial civilization. Nobody complained, for he was prodigiously popular, he had been a stage-driver in his early days in New York or New England, and had acquired the habit of remembering names and faces, and of making himself agreeable to his passengers. As a politician this had been valuable to him, and he kept his arts in good condition by practice. By the time he had been Governor a year, he had shaken hands with every human being in the Territory of Nevada, and after that he always knew these people instantly at sight and could call them by name. The whole population, of 20,000 persons, were his personal friends, and he could do anything he chose to do and count upon their being contented with it. Whenever he was absent from the Territory--which was generally--Orion served his office in his place, as Acting Governor, a title which was soon and easily shortened to "Governor." He recklessly built and furnished a house at a cost of twelve thousand dollars, and there was no other house in the sage-brush capital that could approach this property for style and cost. When Governor Nye's four-year term was drawing to a close, the mystery of why he had ever consented to leave the great State of New York and help inhabit that jack-rabbit desert was solved: he had gone out there in order to become a United States Senator. All that was now necessary was to turn the Territory into a State. He did it without any difficulty. That undeveloped country and that sparse population were not well fitted for the heavy burden of a State Government, but no matter, the people were willing to have the change, and so the Governor's game was made. Orion's game was made too, apparently, for he was as popular because of his honesty as the Governor was for more substantial reasons; but at the critical moment the inborn capriciousness of his character rose up without warning, and disaster followed. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCIX. FEBRUARY 15, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XII. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1864-5.)] _Orion Clemens--resumed._ [_Dictated April 5, 1906._] There were several candidates for all the offices in the gift of the new State of Nevada save two--United States Senator, and Secretary of State. Nye was certain to get a Senatorship, and Orion was so sure to get the Secretaryship that no one but him was named for that office. But he was hit with one of his spasms of virtue on the very day that the Republican party was to make its nominations in the Convention, and refused to go near the Convention. He was urged, but all persuasions failed. He said his presence there would be an unfair and improper influence and that if he was to be nominated the compliment must come to him as a free and unspotted gift. This attitude would have settled his case for him without further effort, but he had another attack of virtue on the same day, that made it absolutely sure. It had been his habit for a great many years to change his religion with his shirt, and his ideas about temperance at the same time. He would be a teetotaler for a while and the champion of the cause; then he would change to the other side for a time. On nomination day he suddenly changed from a friendly attitude toward whiskey--which was the popular attitude--to uncompromising teetotalism, and went absolutely dry. His friends besought and implored, but all in vain. He could not be persuaded to cross the threshold of a saloon. The paper next morning contained the list of chosen nominees. His name was not in it. He had not received a vote. His rich income ceased when the State government came into power. He was without an occupation. Something had to be done. He put up his sign as attorney-at-law, but he got no clients. It was strange. It was difficult to account for. I cannot account for it--but if I were going to guess at a solution I should guess that by the make of him he would examine both sides of a case so diligently and so conscientiously that when he got through with his argument neither he nor a jury would know which side he was on. I think that his client would find out his make in laying his case before him, and would take warning and withdraw it in time to save himself from probable disaster. I had taken up my residence in San Francisco about a year before the time I have just been speaking of. One day I got a tip from Mr. Camp, a bold man who was always making big fortunes in ingenious speculations and losing them again in the course of six months by other speculative ingenuities. Camp told me to buy some shares in the Hale and Norcross. I bought fifty shares at three hundred dollars a share. I bought on a margin, and put up twenty per cent. It exhausted my funds. I wrote Orion and offered him half, and asked him to send his share of the money. I waited and waited. He wrote and said he was going to attend to it. The stock went along up pretty briskly. It went higher and higher. It reached a thousand dollars a share. It climbed to two thousand, then to three thousand; then to twice that figure. The money did not come, but I was not disturbed. By and by that stock took a turn and began to gallop down. Then I wrote urgently. Orion answered that he had sent the money long ago--said he had sent it to the Occidental Hotel. I inquired for it. They said it was not there. To cut a long story short, that stock went on down until it fell below the price I had paid for it. Then it began to eat up the margin, and when at last I got out I was very badly crippled. When it was too late, I found out what had become of Orion's money. Any other human being would have sent a check, but he sent gold. The hotel clerk put it in the safe and went on vacation, and there it had reposed all this time enjoying its fatal work, no doubt. Another man might have thought to tell me that the money was not in a letter, but was in an express package, but it never occurred to Orion to do that. Later, Mr. Camp gave me another chance. He agreed to buy our Tennessee land for two hundred thousand dollars, pay a part of the amount in cash and give long notes for the rest. His scheme was to import foreigners from grape-growing and wine-making districts in Europe, settle them on the land, and turn it into a wine-growing country. He knew what Mr. Longworth thought of those Tennessee grapes, and was satisfied. I sent the contracts and things to Orion for his signature, he being one of the three heirs. But they arrived at a bad time--in a doubly bad time, in fact. The temperance virtue was temporarily upon him in strong force, and he wrote and said that he would not be a party to debauching the country with wine. Also he said how could he know whether Mr. Camp was going to deal fairly and honestly with those poor people from Europe or not?--and so, without waiting to find out, he quashed the whole trade, and there it fell, never to be brought to life again. The land, from being suddenly worth two hundred thousand dollars, became as suddenly worth what it was before--nothing, and taxes to pay. I had paid the taxes and the other expenses for some years, but I dropped the Tennessee land there, and have never taken any interest in it since, pecuniarily or otherwise, until yesterday. I had supposed, until yesterday, that Orion had frittered away the last acre, and indeed that was his own impression. But a gentleman arrived yesterday from Tennessee and brought a map showing that by a correction of the ancient surveys we still own a thousand acres, in a coal district, out of the hundred thousand acres which my father left us when he died in 1847. The gentleman brought a proposition; also he brought a reputable and well-to-do citizen of New York. The proposition was that the Tennesseean gentleman should sell that land; that the New York gentleman should pay all the expenses and fight all the lawsuits, in case any should turn up, and that of such profit as might eventuate the Tennesseean gentleman should take a third, the New-Yorker a third, and Sam Moffett and his sister and I--who are surviving heirs--the remaining third. This time I hope we shall get rid of the Tennessee land for good and all and never hear of it again. [Sidenote: (1867.)] [Sidenote: (1871.)] I came East in January, 1867. Orion remained in Carson City perhaps a year longer. Then he sold his twelve-thousand-dollar house and its furniture for thirty-five hundred in greenbacks at about sixty per cent. discount. He and his wife took passage in the steamer for home in Keokuk. About 1871 or '72 they came to New York. Orion had been trying to make a living in the law ever since he had arrived from the Pacific Coast, but he had secured only two cases. Those he was to try free of charge--but the possible result will never be known, because the parties settled the cases out of court without his help. Orion got a job as proof-reader on the New York "Evening Post" at ten dollars a week. By and by he came to Hartford and wanted me to get him a place as reporter on a Hartford paper. Here was a chance to try my scheme again, and I did it. I made him go to the Hartford "Evening Post," without any letter of introduction, and propose to scrub and sweep and do all sorts of things for nothing, on the plea that he didn't need money but only needed work, and that that was what he was pining for. Within six weeks he was on the editorial staff of that paper at twenty dollars a week, and he was worth the money. He was presently called for by some other paper at better wages, but I made him go to the "Post" people and tell them about it. They stood the raise and kept him. It was the pleasantest berth he had ever had in his life. It was an easy berth. He was in every way comfortable. But ill-luck came. It was bound to come. A new Republican daily was to be started in a New England city by a stock company of well-to-do politicians, and they offered him the chief editorship at three thousand a year. He was eager to accept. My beseechings and reasonings went for nothing. I said, "You are as weak as water. Those people will find it out right away. They will easily see that you have no backbone; that they can deal with you as they would deal with a slave. You may last six months, but not longer. Then they will not dismiss you as they would dismiss a gentleman: they will fling you out as they would fling out an intruding tramp." It happened just so. Then he and his wife migrated to Keokuk once more. Orion wrote from there that he was not resuming the law; that he thought that what his health needed was the open air, in some sort of outdoor occupation; that his father-in-law had a strip of ground on the river border a mile above Keokuk with some sort of a house on it, and his idea was to buy that place and start a chicken-farm and provide Keokuk with chickens and eggs, and perhaps butter--but I don't know whether you can raise butter on a chicken-farm or not. He said the place could be had for three thousand dollars cash, and I sent the money. He began to raise chickens, and he made a detailed monthly report to me, whereby it appeared that he was able to work off his chickens on the Keokuk people at a dollar and a quarter a pair. But it also appeared that it cost a dollar and sixty cents to raise the pair. This did not seem to discourage Orion, and so I let it go. Meantime he was borrowing a hundred dollars per month of me regularly, month by month. Now to show Orion's stern and rigid business ways--and he really prided himself on his large business capacities--the moment he received the advance of a hundred dollars at the beginning of each month, he always sent me his note for the amount, and with it he sent, _out of that money, three months' interest_ on the hundred dollars at six per cent. per annum, these notes being always for three months. As I say, he always sent a detailed statement of the month's profit and loss on the chickens--at least the month's loss on the chickens--and this detailed statement included the various items of expense--corn for the chickens, boots for himself, and so on; even car fares, and the weekly contribution of ten cents to help out the missionaries who were trying to damn the Chinese after a plan not satisfactory to those people. I think the poultry experiment lasted about a year, possibly two years. It had then cost me six thousand dollars. Orion returned to the law business, and I suppose he remained in that harness off and on for the succeeding quarter of a century, but so far as my knowledge goes he was only a lawyer in name, and had no clients. [Sidenote: (1890.)] My mother died, in her eighty-eighth year, in the summer of 1890. She had saved some money, and she left it to me, because it had come from me. I gave it to Orion and he said, with thanks, that I had supported him long enough and now he was going to relieve me of that burden, and would also hope to pay back some of that expense, and maybe the whole of it. Accordingly, he proceeded to use up that money in building a considerable addition to the house, with the idea of taking boarders and getting rich. We need not dwell upon this venture. It was another of his failures. His wife tried hard to make the scheme succeed, and if anybody could have made it succeed she would have done it. She was a good woman, and was greatly liked. She had a practical side, and she would have made that boarding-house lucrative if circumstances had not been against her. Orion had other projects for recouping me, but as they always required capital I stayed out of them, and they did not materialize. Once he wanted to start a newspaper. It was a ghastly idea, and I squelched it with a promptness that was almost rude. Then he invented a wood-sawing machine and patched it together himself, and he really sawed wood with it. It was ingenious; it was capable; and it would have made a comfortable little fortune for him; but just at the wrong time Providence interfered again. Orion applied for a patent and found that the same machine had already been patented and had gone into business and was thriving. Presently the State of New York offered a fifty-thousand-dollar prize for a practical method of navigating the Erie Canal with steam canal-boats. Orion worked at that thing for two or three years, invented and completed a method, and was once more ready to reach out and seize upon imminent wealth when somebody pointed out a defect: his steam canal-boat could not be used in the winter-time; and in the summer-time the commotion its wheels would make in the water would wash away the State of New York on both sides. Innumerable were Orion's projects for acquiring the means to pay off the debt to me. These projects extended straight through the succeeding thirty years, but in every case they failed. During all those thirty years his well-established honesty kept him in offices of trust where other people's money had to be taken care of, but where no salary was paid. He was treasurer of all the benevolent institutions; he took care of the money and other property of widows and orphans; he never lost a cent for anybody, and never made one for himself. Every time he changed his religion the church of his new faith was glad to get him; made him treasurer at once, and at once he stopped the graft and the leaks in that church. He exhibited a facility in changing his political complexion that was a marvel to the whole community. Once the following curious thing happened, and he wrote me all about it himself. One morning he was a Republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a campaign speech at the Republican mass-meeting that night. He prepared the speech. After luncheon he became a Democrat and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He wrote these shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present. He was a most strange creature--but in spite of his eccentricities he was beloved, all his life, in whatsoever community he lived. And he was also held in high esteem, for at bottom he was a sterling man. About twenty-five years ago--along there somewhere--I suggested to Orion that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to tell the straight truth in it; to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively, and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them. I said that this had never been done, and that if he could do it his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. I said I was offering him a job which I could not duplicate in my own case, but I would cherish the hope that he might succeed with it. I recognise now that I was trying to saddle upon him an impossibility. I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book. Orion wrote his autobiography and sent it to me. But great was my disappointment; and my vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a hero of himself, exactly as I should have done and am doing now, and he was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an unheroic light. I knew several incidents of his life which were distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside out, and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography. But in what remains there are passages which are interesting, and I shall quote from them here and there and now and then, as I go along. [Sidenote: (1898.)] While we were living in Vienna in 1898 a cablegram came from Keokuk announcing Orion's death. He was seventy-two years old. He had gone down to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter December morning; he had built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper in the middle of an unfinished word--an indication that his release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life was mercifully swift and painless. [_Dictated in 1904._] A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay at Whitelaw Reid's house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few months while Reid was absent on a holiday in Europe. Temporarily also, Hay was editing Reid's paper, the New York "Tribune." I remember two incidents of that Sunday visit particularly well. I had known John Hay a good many years, I had known him when he was an obscure young editorial writer on the "Tribune" in Horace Greely's time, earning three or four times the salary he got, considering the high character of the work which came from his pen. In those earlier days he was a picture to look at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and movement. He had a charm about him of a sort quite unusual to my Western ignorance and inexperience--a charm of manner, intonation, apparently native and unstudied elocution, and all that--the groundwork of it native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it, acquired in Europe where he had been Chargé d'Affaires some time at the Court of Vienna. He was joyous and cordial, a most pleasant comrade. One of the two incidents above referred to as marking that visit was this: In trading remarks concerning our ages I confessed to forty-two and Hay to forty. Then he asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn't. He said that I ought to begin at once, and that I had already lost two years. Then he said in substance this: "At forty a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling the truth about himself as he can. And he _will_ tell the truth in spite of himself, for his facts and his fictions will work loyally together for the protection of the reader; each fact and each fiction will be a dab of paint, each will fall in its right place, and together they will paint his portrait; not the portrait _he_ thinks they are painting, but his real portrait, the inside of him, the soul of him, his character. Without intending to lie he will lie all the time; not bluntly, consciously, not dully unconsciously, but half-consciously-- consciousness in twilight; a soft and gentle and merciful twilight which makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences and projections discernible and his ungracious ones in shadow. His truths will be recognizable as truths, his modifications of facts which would tell against him will go for nothing, the reader will see the fact through the film and know his man. "There is a subtle devilish something or other about autobiographical composition that defeats all the writer's attempts to paint his portrait _his_ way." Hay meant that he and I were ordinary average commonplace people, and I did not resent my share of the verdict, but nursed my wound in silence. His idea that we had finished our work in life, passed the summit and were westward bound down-hill, with me two years ahead of him and neither of us with anything further to do as benefactors to mankind, was all a mistake. I had written four books then, possibly five. I have been drowning the world in literary wisdom ever since, volume after volume; since that day's sun went down he has been the historian of Mr. Lincoln, and his book will never perish; he has been ambassador, brilliant orator, competent and admirable Secretary of State. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCX. MARCH 1, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XIII. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1847.)] ... As I have said, that vast plot of Tennessee land[6] was held by my father twenty years--intact. When he died in 1847, we began to manage it ourselves. Forty years afterward, we had managed it all away except 10,000 acres, and gotten nothing to remember the sales by. About 1887--possibly it was earlier--the 10,000 went. My brother found a chance to trade it for a house and lot in the town of Corry, in the oil regions of Pennsylvania. About 1894 he sold this property for $250. That ended the Tennessee Land. If any penny of cash ever came out of my father's wise investment but that, I have no recollection of it. No, I am overlooking a detail. It furnished me a field for Sellers and a book. Out of my half of the book I got $15,000 or $20,000; out of the play I got $75,000 or $80,000--just about a dollar an acre. It is curious: I was not alive when my father made the investment, therefore he was not intending any partiality; yet I was the only member of the family that ever profited by it. I shall have occasion to mention this land again, now and then, as I go along, for it influenced our life in one way or another during more than a generation. Whenever things grew dark it rose and put out its hopeful Sellers hand and cheered us up, and said "Do not be afraid--trust in me--wait." It kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years, and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us--dreamers and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year--no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich--these are wholesome; but to begin it _prospectively_ rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. My parents removed to Missouri in the early thirties; I do not remember just when, for I was not born then, and cared nothing for such things. It was a long journey in those days, and must have been a rough and tiresome one. The home was made in the wee village of Florida, in Monroe county, and I was born there in 1835. The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town. It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much--not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place--even London, I suppose. Recently some one in Missouri has sent me a picture of the house I was born in. Heretofore I have always stated that it was a palace, but I shall be more guarded, now. I remember only one circumstance connected with my life in it. I remember it very well, though I was but two and a half years old at the time. The family packed up everything and started in wagons for Hannibal, on the Mississippi, thirty miles away. Toward night, when they camped and counted up the children, one was missing. I was the one. I had been left behind. Parents ought always to count the children before they start. I was having a good enough time playing by myself until I found that the doors were fastened and that there was a grisly deep silence brooding over the place. I knew, then, that the family were gone, and that they had forgotten me. I was well frightened, and I made all the noise I could, but no one was near and it did no good. I spent the afternoon in captivity and was not rescued until the gloaming had fallen and the place was alive with ghosts. My brother Henry was six months old at that time. I used to remember his walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that, which occurred when I was so young. And it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion, for thirty years, that I _did_ remember it--for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. If I had stopped to reflect, I should not have burdened my memory with that impossible rubbish so long. It is believed by many people that an impression deposited in a child's memory within the first two years of its life cannot remain there five years, but that is an error. The incident of Benvenuto Cellini and the salamander must be accepted as authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable instance in the experience of Helen Keller--however, I will speak of that at another time. For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it. My uncle, John A. Quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the country four miles from Florida. He had eight children, and fifteen or twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways. Particularly in his character. I have not come across a better man than he was. I was his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old. I have never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In "Huck Finn" and in "Tom Sawyer Detective" I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six hundred miles, but it was no trouble, it was not a very large farm; five hundred acres, perhaps, but I could have done it if it had been twice as large. And as for the morality of it, I cared nothing for that; I would move a State if the exigencies of literature required it. It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me cry to think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber"; watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking. In Europe it is imagined that the custom of serving various kinds of bread blazing hot is "American," but that is too broad a spread; it is custom in the South, but is much less than that in the North. In the North and in Europe hot bread is considered unhealthy. This is probably another fussy superstition, like the European superstition that ice-water is unhealthy. Europe does not need ice-water, and does not drink it; and yet, notwithstanding this, its word for it is better than ours, because it describes it, whereas ours doesn't. Europe calls it "iced" water. Our word describes water made from melted ice--a drink which we have but little acquaintance with. It seem a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome. I doubt if God has given us any refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes. Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry. The farmhouse stood in the middle of a very large yard, and the yard was fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings; against these stood the smokehouse; beyond the palings was the orchard; beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields. The front yard was entered over a stile, made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights; I do not remember any gate. In a corner of the front yard were a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the nutting season riches were to be gathered there. Down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns, the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a limpid brook which sang along over its gravelly bed and curved and frisked in and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging foliage and vines--a divine place for wading, and it had swimming-pools, too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us. For we were little Christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit. In the little log cabin lived a bedridden white-headed slave woman whom we visited daily, and looked upon with awe, for we believed she was upwards of a thousand years old and had talked with Moses. The younger negroes credited these statistics, and had furnished them to us in good faith. We accommodated all the details which came to us about her; and so we believed that she had lost her health in the long desert trip coming out of Egypt, and had never been able to get it back again. She had a round bald place on the crown of her head, and we used to creep around and gaze at it in reverent silence, and reflect that it was caused by fright through seeing Pharaoh drowned. We called her "Aunt" Hannah, Southern fashion. She was superstitious like the other negroes; also, like them, she was deeply religious. Like them, she had great faith in prayer, and employed it in all ordinary exigencies, but not in cases where a dead certainty of result was urgent. Whenever witches were around she tied up the remnant of her wool in little tufts, with white thread, and this promptly made the witches impotent. All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible. We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in "Uncle Dan'l," a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as "Jim," and carted him all around--to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon--and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then. In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind--and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing. In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never. There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing--it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and _wouldn't_ she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this-- "Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad." It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last--especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit. She has come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer's "Aunt Polly." I fitted her out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any. I used Sandy once, also; it was in "Tom Sawyer"; I tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. I do not remember what name I called him by in the book. I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness. I can see all its belongings, all its details; the family room of the house, with a "trundle" bed in one corner and a spinning-wheel in another--a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead: the vast fireplace, piled high, on winter nights, with flaming hickory logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs and blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner knitting, my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the dancing flame-tongues and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; "split"-bottomed chairs here and there, some with rockers; a cradle--out of service, but waiting, with confidence; in the early cold mornings a snuggle of children, in shirts and chemises, occupying the hearthstone and procrastinating--they could not bear to leave that comfortable place and go out on the wind-swept floor-space between the house and kitchen where the general tin basin stood, and wash. Along outside of the front fence ran the country road; dusty in the summer-time, and a good place for snakes--they liked to lie in it and sun themselves; when they were rattlesnakes or puff adders, we killed them: when they were black snakes, or racers, or belonged to the fabled "hoop" breed, we fled, without shame; when they were "house snakes" or "garters" we carried them home and put them in Aunt Patsy's work-basket for a surprise; for she was prejudiced against snakes, and always when she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it it disordered her mind. She never could seem to get used to them; her opportunities went for nothing. And she was always cold toward bats, too, and could not bear them; and yet I think a bat is as friendly a bird as there is. My mother was Aunt Patsy's sister, and had the same wild superstitions. A bat is beautifully soft and silky: I do not know any creature that is pleasanter to the touch, or is more grateful for caressings, if offered in the right spirit. I know all about these coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below Hannibal, was multitudinously stocked with them, and often I brought them home to amuse my mother with. It was easy to manage if it was a school day, because then I had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats. She was not a suspicious person, but full of trust and confidence; and when I said "There's something in my coat pocket for you," she would put her hand in. But she always took it out again, herself; I didn't have to tell her. It was remarkable, the way she couldn't learn to like private bats. I think she was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went there. Many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and down the river to visit the cave. It was miles in extent, and was a tangled wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages. It was an easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats. I got lost in it myself, along with a lady, and our last candle burned down to almost nothing before we glimpsed the search-party's lights winding about in the distance. "Injun Joe" the half-breed got lost in there once, and would have starved to death if the bats had run short. But there was no chance of that; there were myriads of them. He told me all his story. In the book called "Tom Sawyer" I starved him entirely to death in the cave, but that was in the interest of art; it never happened. "General" Gaines, who was our first town drunkard before Jimmy Finn got the place, was lost in there for the space of a week, and finally pushed his handkerchief out of a hole in a hilltop near Saverton, several miles down the river from the cave's mouth, and somebody saw it and dug him out. There is nothing the matter with his statistics except the handkerchief. I knew him for years, and he hadn't any. But it could have been his nose. That would attract attention. Beyond the road where the snakes sunned themselves was a dense young thicket, and through it a dim-lighted path led a quarter of a mile; then out of the dimness one emerged abruptly upon a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry-plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests. The strawberries were fragrant and fine, and in the season we were generally there in the crisp freshness of the early morning, while the dew-beads still sparkled upon the grass and the woods were ringing with the first songs of the birds. Down the forest slopes to the left were the swings. They were made of bark stripped from hickory saplings. When they became dry they were dangerous. They usually broke when a child was forty feet in the air, and this was why so many bones had to be mended every year. I had no ill-luck myself, but none of my cousins escaped. There were eight of them, and at one time and another they broke fourteen arms among them. But it cost next to nothing, for the doctor worked by the year--$25 for the whole family. I remember two of the Florida doctors, Chowning and Meredith. They not only tended an entire family for $25 a year, but furnished the medicines themselves. Good measure, too. Only the largest persons could hold a whole dose. Castor-oil was the principal beverage. The dose was half a dipperful, with half a dipperful of New Orleans molasses added to help it down and make it taste good, which it never did. The next standby was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next, jalap. Then they bled the patient, and put mustard-plasters on him. It was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy. The calomel was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth. There were no dentists. When teeth became touched with decay or were otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do: he fetched his tongs and dragged them out. If the jaw remained, it was not his fault. Doctors were not called, in cases of ordinary illness; the family's grandmother attended to those. Every old woman was a doctor, and gathered her own medicines in the woods, and knew how to compound doses that would stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog. And then there was the "Indian doctor"; a grave savage, remnant of his tribe, deeply read in the mysteries of nature and the secret properties of herbs; and most backwoodsmen had high faith in his powers and could tell of wonderful cures achieved by him. In Mauritius, away off yonder in the solitudes of the Indian Ocean, there is a person who answers to our Indian doctor of the old times. He is a negro, and has had no teaching as a doctor, yet there is one disease which he is master of and can cure, and the doctors can't. They send for him when they have a case. It is a child's disease of a strange and deadly sort, and the negro cures it with a herb medicine which he makes, himself, from a prescription which has come down to him from his father and grandfather. He will not let any one see it. He keeps the secret of its components to himself, and it is feared that he will die without divulging it; then there will be consternation in Mauritius. I was told these things by the people there, in 1896. We had the "faith doctor," too, in those early days--a woman. Her specialty was toothache. She was a farmer's old wife, and lived five miles from Hannibal. She would lay her hand on the patient's jaw and say "Believe!" and the cure was prompt. Mrs. Utterback. I remember her very well. Twice I rode out there behind my mother, horseback, and saw the cure performed. My mother was the patient. Dr. Meredith removed to Hannibal, by and by, and was our family physician there, and saved my life several times. Still, he was a good man and meant well. Let it go. I was always told that I was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child, and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the first seven years of my life. I asked my mother about this, in her old age--she was in her 88th year--and said: "I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?" "Yes, the whole time." "Afraid I wouldn't live?" After a reflective pause--ostensibly to think out the facts-- "No--afraid you would." It sounds like a plagiarism, but it probably wasn't. The country schoolhouse was three miles from my uncle's farm. It stood in a clearing in the woods, and would hold about twenty-five boys and girls. We attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the morning by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought their dinners in baskets--corn-dodger, buttermilk and other good things--and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is the part of my education which I look back upon with the most satisfaction. My first visit to the school was when I was seven. A strapping girl of fifteen, in the customary sunbonnet and calico dress, asked me if I "used tobacco"--meaning did I chew it. I said, no. It roused her scorn. She reported me to all the crowd, and said-- "Here is a boy seven years old who can't chaw tobacco." By the looks and comments which this produced, I realized that I was a degraded object; I was cruelly ashamed of myself. I determined to reform. But I only made myself sick; I was not able to learn to chew tobacco. I learned to smoke fairly well, but that did not conciliate anybody, and I remained a poor thing, and characterless. I longed to be respected, but I never was able to rise. Children have but little charity for each other's defects. As I have said, I spent some part of every year at the farm until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass,--I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumacs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we ploughed through them. I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory-nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down. I know the stain of blackberries, and how pretty it is; and I know the stain of walnut hulls, and how little it minds soap and water; also what grudged experience it had of either of them. I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made; also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will. I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin-vines and "simblins"; I know how to tell when it is ripe without "plugging" it; I know how inviting it looks when it is cooling itself in a tub of water under the bed, waiting; I know how it looks when it lies on the table in the sheltered great floor-space between house and kitchen, and the children gathered for the sacrifice and their mouths watering; I know the crackling sound it makes when the carving-knife enters its end, and I can see the split fly along in front of the blade as the knife cleaves its way to the other end; I can see its halves fall apart and display the rich red meat and the black seeds, and the heart standing up, a luxury fit for the elect; I know how a boy looks, behind a yard-long slice of that melon, and I know how he feels; for I have been there. I know the taste of the watermelon which has been honestly come by, and I know the taste of the watermelon which has been acquired by art. Both taste good, but the experienced know which tastes best. I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. I know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid their colors. I know how a frozen apple looks, in a barrel down cellar in the winter-time, and how hard it is to bite, and how the frost makes the teeth ache, and yet how good it is, notwithstanding. I know the disposition of elderly people to select the specked apples for the children, and I once knew ways to beat the game. I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream. I know the delicate art and mystery of so cracking hickory-nuts and walnuts on a flatiron with a hammer that the kernels will be delivered whole, and I know how the nuts, taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting, and juggle an evening away before you know what went with the time. I know the look of Uncle Dan'l's kitchen as it was on privileged nights when I was a child, and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Dan'l telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to gather into his books and charm the world with, by and by; and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost-story of the "Golden Arm" was reached--and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening, and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed. I can remember the bare wooden stairway in my uncle's house, and the turn to the left above the landing, and the rafters and the slanting roof over my bed, and the squares of moonlight on the floor, and the white cold world of snow outside, seen through the curtainless window. I can remember the howling of the wind and the quaking of the house on stormy nights, and how snug and cozy one felt, under the blankets, listening, and how the powdery snow used to sift in, around the sashes, and lie in little ridges on the floor, and make the place look chilly in the morning, and curb the wild desire to get up--in case there was any. I can remember how very dark that room was, in the dark of the moon, and how packed it was with ghostly stillness when one woke up by accident away in the night, and forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of the memory and wanted a hearing; and how ill chosen the time seemed for this kind of business; and how dismal was the hoo-hooing of the owl and the wailing of the wolf, sent mourning by on the night wind. I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights, and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it, and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder. It was a very satisfactory room; and there was a lightning-rod which was reachable from the window, an adorable and skittish thing to climb up and down, summer nights, when there were duties on hand of a sort to make privacy desirable. I remember the 'coon and 'possum hunts, nights, with the negroes, and the long marches through the black gloom of the woods, and the excitement which fired everybody when the distant bay of an experienced dog announced that the game was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briars and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare--I remember it all well, and the delight that every one got out of it, except the 'coon. I remember the pigeon seasons, when the birds would come in millions, and cover the trees, and by their weight break down the branches. They were clubbed to death with sticks; guns were not necessary, and were not used. I remember the squirrel hunts, and the prairie-chicken hunts, and the wild-turkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go. A toot on a tin horn brought twice as many dogs as were needed, and in their happiness they raced and scampered about, and knocked small people down, and made no end of unnecessary noise. At the word, they vanished away toward the woods, and we drifted silently after them in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [6] 100,000 acres. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXI. MARCH 15, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XIV. BY MARK TWAIN. [_Dictated Thursday, December 6, 1906._] _From Susy's Biography of Me._ _Feb. 27, Sunday._ Clara's reputation as a baby was always a fine one, mine exactly the contrary. One often related story concerning her braveness as a baby and her own opinion of this quality of hers is this. Clara and I often got slivers in our hands and when mama took them out with a much dreaded needle, Clara was always very brave, and I very cowardly. One day Clara got one of these slivers in her hand, a very bad one, and while mama was taking it out, Clara stood perfectly still without even wincing: I saw how brave she was and turning to mamma said "Mamma isn't she a brave little thing!" presently mamma had to give the little hand quite a dig with the needle and noticing how perfectly quiet Clara was about it she exclaimed, Why Clara! you are a brave little thing! Clara responded "No bodys braver but God!"-- Clara's pious remark is the main detail, and Susy has accurately remembered its phrasing. The three-year-older's wound was of a formidable sort, and not one which the mother's surgery would have been equal to. The flesh of the finger had been burst by a cruel accident. It was the doctor that sewed it up, and to all appearances it was he, and the other independent witnesses, that did the main part of the suffering; each stitch that he took made Clara wince slightly, but it shrivelled the others. I take pride in Clara's remark, because it shows that although she was only three years old, her fireside teachings were already making her a thinker--a thinker and also an observer of proportions. I am not claiming any credit for this. I furnished to the children worldly knowledge and wisdom, but was not competent to go higher, and so I left their spiritual education in the hands of the mother. A result of this modesty of mine was made manifest to me in a very striking way, some years afterward, when Jean was nine years old. We had recently arrived in Berlin, at the time, and had begun housekeeping in a furnished apartment. One morning at breakfast a vast card arrived--an invitation. To be precise, it was a command from the Emperor of Germany to come to dinner. During several months I had encountered socially, on the Continent, men bearing lofty titles; and all this while Jean was becoming more and more impressed, and awed, and subdued, by these imposing events, for she had not been abroad before, and they were new to her--wonders out of dreamland turned into realities. The imperial card was passed from hand to hand, around the table, and examined with interest; when it reached Jean she exhibited excitement and emotion, but for a time was quite speechless; then she said, "Why, papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but God." It was not complimentary to think I was not acquainted in that quarter, but she was young, and the young jump to conclusions without reflection. Necessarily, I did myself the honor to obey the command of the Emperor Wilhelm II. Prince Heinrich, and six or eight other guests were present. The Emperor did most of the talking, and he talked well, and in faultless English. In both of these conspicuousnesses I was gratified to recognize a resemblance to myself--a very exact resemblance; no, almost exact, but not quite that--a modified exactness, with the advantage in favor of the Emperor. My English, like his, is nearly faultless; like him I talk well; and when I have guests at dinner I prefer to do all the talking myself. It is the best way, and the pleasantest. Also the most profitable for the others. I was greatly pleased to perceive that his Majesty was familiar with my books, and that his attitude toward them was not uncomplimentary. In the course of his talk he said that my best and most valuable book was "Old Times on the Mississippi." I will refer to that remark again, presently. An official who was well up in the Foreign Office at that time, and had served under Bismarck for fourteen years, was still occupying his old place under Chancellor Caprivi. Smith, I will call him of whom I am speaking, though that is not his name. He was a special friend of mine, and I greatly enjoyed his society, although in order to have it it was necessary for me to seek it as late as midnight, and not earlier. This was because Government officials of his rank had to work all day, after nine in the morning, and then attend official banquets in the evening; wherefore they were usually unable to get life-restoring fresh air and exercise for their jaded minds and bodies earlier than midnight; then they turned out, in groups of two or three, and gratefully and violently tramped the deserted streets until two in the morning. Smith had been in the Government service, at home and abroad, for more than thirty years, and he was now sixty years old, or close upon it. He could not remember a year in which he had had a vacation of more than a fortnight's length; he was weary all through to the bones and the marrow, now, and was yearning for a holiday of a whole three months--yearning so longingly and so poignantly that he had at last made up his mind to make a desperate cast for it and stand the consequences, whatever they might be. It was against all rules to _ask_ for a vacation--quite against all etiquette; the shock of it would paralyze the Chancellery; stem etiquette and usage required another form: the applicant was not privileged to ask for a vacation, he must send in his _resignation_. The chancellor would know that the applicant was not really trying to resign, and didn't want to resign, but was merely trying in this left-handed way to get a vacation. The night before the Emperor's dinner I helped Smith take his exercise, after midnight, and he was full of his project. He had sent in his resignation that day, and was trembling for the result; and naturally, because it might possibly be that the chancellor would be happy to fill his place with somebody else, in which case he could accept the resignation without comment and without offence. Smith was in a very anxious frame of mind; not that he feared that Caprivi was dissatisfied with him, for he had no such fear; it was the Emperor that he was afraid of; he did not know how he stood with the Emperor. He said that while apparently it was Caprivi who would decide his case, it was in reality the Emperor who would perform that service; that the Emperor kept personal watch upon everything, and that no official sparrow could fall to the ground without his privity and consent; that the resignation would be laid before his Majesty, who would accept it or decline to accept it, according to his pleasure, and that then his pleasure in the matter would be communicated by Caprivi. Smith said he would know his fate the next evening, after the imperial dinner; that when I should escort his Majesty into the large salon contiguous to the dining-room, I would find there about thirty men--Cabinet ministers, admirals, generals and other great officials of the Empire--and that these men would be standing talking together in little separate groups of two or three persons; that the Emperor would move from group to group and say a word to each, sometimes two words, sometimes ten words; and that the length of his speech, whether brief or not so brief, would indicate the exact standing in the Emperor's regard, of the man accosted; and that by observing this thermometer an expert could tell, to half a degree, the state of the imperial weather in each case; that in Berlin, as in the imperial days of Rome, the Emperor was the sun, and that his smile or his frown meant good fortune or disaster to the man upon whom it should fall. Smith suggested that I watch the thermometer while the Emperor went his rounds of the groups; and added that if his Majesty talked four minutes with any person there present, it meant high favor, and that the sun was in the zenith, and cloudless, for that man. I mentally recorded that four-minute altitude, and resolved to see if any man there on that night stood in sufficient favor to achieve it. Very well. After the dinner I watched the Emperor while he passed from group to group, and privately I timed him with a watch. Two or three times he came near to reaching the four-minute altitude, but always he fell short a little. The last man he came to was Smith. He put his hand on Smith's shoulder and began to talk to him; and when he finished, the thermometer had scored seven minutes! The company then moved toward the smoking-room, where cigars, beer and anecdotes would be in brisk service until midnight, and as Smith passed me he whispered, "That settles it. The chancellor will ask me how much of a vacation I want, and I sha'n't be afraid to raise the limit. I shall call for six months." [Sidenote: (1891)] [Sidenote: (1899)] Smith's dream had been to spend his three months' vacation--in case he got a vacation instead of the other thing--in one of the great capitals of the Continent--a capital whose name I shall suppress, at present. The next day the chancellor asked him how much of a vacation he wanted, and where he desired to spend it. Smith told him. His prayer was granted, and rather more than granted. The chancellor augmented his salary and attached him to the German Embassy of that selected capital, giving him a place of high dignity bearing an imposing title, and with nothing to do except attend banquets of an extraordinary character at the Embassy, once or twice a year. The term of his vacation was not specified; he was to continue it until requested to come back to his work in the Foreign Office. This was in 1891. Eight years later Smith was passing through Vienna, and he called upon me. There had been no interruption of his vacation, as yet, and there was no likelihood that an interruption of it would occur while he should still be among the living. [_Dictated Monday, December 17, 1906._] As I have already remarked, "Old Times on the Mississippi" got the Kaiser's best praise. It was after midnight when I reached home; I was usually out until toward midnight, and the pleasure of being out late was poisoned, every night, by the dread of what I must meet at my front door--an indignant face, a resentful face, the face of the _portier_. The _portier_ was a tow-headed young German, twenty-two or three years old; and it had been for some time apparent to me that he did not enjoy being hammered out of his sleep, nights, to let me in. He never had a kind word for me, nor a pleasant look. I couldn't understand it, since it was his business to be on watch and let the occupants of the several flats in at any and all hours of the night. I could not see why he so distinctly failed to get reconciled to it. The fact is, I was ignorantly violating, every night, a custom in which he was commercially interested. I did not suspect this. No one had told me of the custom, and if I had been left to guess it, it would have taken me a very long time to make a success of it. It was a custom which was so well established and so universally recognized, that it had all the force and dignity of law. By authority of this custom, whosoever entered a Berlin house after ten at night must pay a trifling toll to the _portier_ for breaking his sleep to let him in. This tax was either two and a half cents or five cents, I don't remember which; but I had never paid it, and didn't know I owed it, and as I had been residing in Berlin several weeks, I was so far in arrears that my presence in the German capital was getting to be a serious disaster to that young fellow. I arrived from the imperial dinner sorrowful and anxious, made my presence known and prepared myself to wait in patience the tedious minute or two which the _portier_ usually allowed himself to keep me tarrying--as a punishment. But this time there was no stage-wait; the door was instantly unlocked, unbolted, unchained and flung wide; and in it appeared the strange and welcome apparition of the _portier's_ round face all sunshine and smiles and welcome, in place of the black frowns and hostility that I was expecting. Plainly he had not come out of his bed: he had been waiting for me, watching for me. He began to pour out upon me in the most enthusiastic and energetic way a generous stream of German welcome and homage, meanwhile dragging me excitedly to his small bedroom beside the front door; there he made me bend down over a row of German translations of my books and said, "There--you wrote them! I have found it out! By God, I did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons! That one there, the 'Old Times on the Mississippi,' is the best book you ever wrote!" The usual number of those curious accidents which we call coincidences have fallen to my share in this life, but for picturesqueness this one puts all the others in the shade: that a crowned head and a _portier_, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should pass the very same criticism and deliver the very same verdict upon a book of mine--and almost in the same hour and the same breath--is a coincidence which out-coincidences any coincidence which I could have imagined with such powers of imagination as I have been favored with; and I have not been accustomed to regard them as being small or of an inferior quality. It is always a satisfaction to me to remember that whereas I do not know, for sure, what any other nation thinks of any one of my twenty-three volumes, I do at least know for a certainty what one nation of fifty millions thinks of one of them, at any rate; for if the mutual verdict of the top of an empire and the bottom of it does not establish for good and all the judgment of the entire nation concerning that book, then the axiom that we can get a sure estimate of a thing by arriving at a general average of all the opinions involved, is a fallacy. [_Dictated Monday, February 10, 1907._] Two months ago (December 6) I was dictating a brief account of a private dinner in Berlin, where the Emperor of Germany was host and I the chief guest. Something happened day before yesterday which moves me to take up that matter again. At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me, or to some other individual of the guests. When the reply had been delivered, he resumed his talk. I noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests: that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. If I had been in the Emperor's chair and he in mine, I should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, and should have done a world of talking, and done it well; but I was guest now, and consequently I felt less at home. From old experience, I was familiar with the rules of the game, and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammelled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little strange and out of place. But there was no animosity--no, the Emperor was host, therefore according to my own rule he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements, except upon invitation; and of course it could be _my_ turn some day: some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him a rest, and a remarkably quiet time. In one way there was a difference between his table and mine--for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only human, although I regret it. When a guest answered a question he did it with deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. The Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books,--and I will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another. In that other chapter I mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book, "Old Times on the Mississippi," but there were others; among them some gratifying praise of my description in "A Tramp Abroad" of certain striking phases of German student life. I mention these things here because I shall have occasion to hark back to them presently. [_Dictated Tuesday, February 12, 1907._] * * * * * Those stars indicate the long chapter which I dictated yesterday, a chapter which is much too long for magazine purposes, and therefore must wait until this Autobiography shall appear in book form, five years hence, when I am dead: five years according to my calculation, twenty-seven years according to the prediction furnished me a week ago by the latest and most confident of all the palmists who have ever read my future in my hand. The Emperor's dinner, and its beer-and-anecdote appendix, covered six hours of diligent industry, and this accounts for the extraordinary length of that chapter. A couple of days ago a gentleman called upon me with a message. He had just arrived from Berlin, where he had been acting for our Government in a matter concerning tariff revision, he being a member of the commission appointed by our Government to conduct our share of the affair. Upon the completion of the commission's labors, the Emperor invited the members of it to an audience, and in the course of the conversation he made a reference to me; continuing, he spoke of my chapter on the German language in "A Tramp Abroad," and characterized it by an adjective which is too complimentary for me to repeat here without bringing my modesty under suspicion. Then he paid some compliments to "The Innocents Abroad," and followed these with the remark that my account in one of my books of certain striking phases of German student life was the best and truest that had ever been written. By this I perceive that he remembers that dinner of sixteen years ago, for he said the same thing to me about the student-chapter at that time. Next he said he wished this gentleman to convey two messages to America from him and deliver them--one to the President, the other to me. The wording of the message to me was: "Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards. Ask him if he remembers that dinner, and ask him why he didn't do any talking." Why, how could I talk when he was talking? He "held the age," as the poker-clergy say, and two can't talk at the same time with good effect. It reminds me of the man who was reproached by a friend, who said, "I think it a shame that you have not spoken to your wife for fifteen years. How do you explain it? How do you justify it?" That poor man said, "I didn't want to interrupt her." If the Emperor had been at my table, he would not have suffered from my silence, he would only have suffered from the sorrows of his own solitude. If I were not too old to travel, I would go to Berlin and introduce the etiquette of my own table, which tallies with the etiquette observable at other royal tables. I would say, "Invite me again, your Majesty, and give me a chance"; then I would courteously waive rank and do all the talking myself. I thank his Majesty for his kind message, and am proud to have it and glad to express my sincere reciprocation of its sentiments. [_Dictated January 17, 1906._] ... Rev. Joseph T. Harris and I have been visiting General Sickles. Once, twenty or twenty-five years ago, just as Harris was coming out of his gate Sunday morning to walk to his church and preach, a telegram was put into his hand. He read it immediately, and then, in a manner, collapsed. It said: "General Sickles died last night at midnight." [He had been a chaplain under Sickles through the war.] [Sidenote: (1880.)] It wasn't so. But no matter--it was so to Harris at the time. He walked along--walked to the church--but his mind was far away. All his affection and homage and worship of his General had come to the fore. His heart was full of these emotions. He hardly knew where he was. In his pulpit, he stood up and began the service, but with a voice over which he had almost no command. The congregation had never seen him thus moved, before, in his pulpit. They sat there and gazed at him and wondered what was the matter; because he was now reading, in this broken voice and with occasional tears trickling down his face, what to them seemed a quite unemotional chapter--that one about Moses begat Aaron, and Aaron begat Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy begat St. Peter, and St. Peter begat Cain, and Cain begat Abel--and he was going along with this, and half crying--his voice continually breaking. The congregation left the church that morning without being able to account for this most extraordinary thing--as it seemed to them. That a man who had been a soldier for more than four years, and who had preached in that pulpit so many, many times on really moving subjects, without even the quiver of a lip, should break all down over the Begats, they couldn't understand. But there it is--any one can see how such a mystery as that would arouse the curiosity of those people to the boiling-point. Harris has had many adventures. He has more adventures in a year than anybody else has in five. One Saturday night he noticed a bottle on his uncle's dressing-bureau. He thought the label said "Hair Restorer," and he took it in his room and gave his head a good drenching and sousing with it and carried it back and thought no more about it. Next morning when he got up his head was a bright green! He sent around everywhere and couldn't get a substitute preacher, so he had to go to his church himself and preach--and he did it. He hadn't a sermon in his barrel--as it happened--of any lightsome character, so he had to preach a very grave one--a very serious one--and it made the matter worse. The gravity of the sermon did not harmonize with the gayety of his head, and the people sat all through it with handkerchiefs stuffed in their mouths to try to keep down their joy. And Harris told me that he was sure he never had seen his congregation--the whole body of his congregation--the _entire_ body of his congregation--absorbed in interest in his sermon, from beginning to end, before. Always there had been an aspect of indifference, here and there, or wandering, somewhere; but this time there was nothing of the kind. Those people sat there as if they thought, "Good for this day and train only: we must have all there is of this show, not waste any of it." And he said that when he came down out of the pulpit more people waited to shake him by the hand and tell him what a good sermon it was, than ever before. And it seemed a pity that these people should do these fictions in such a place--right in the church--when it was quite plain they were not interested in the sermon at all; they only wanted to get a near view of his head. Well, Harris said--no, Harris didn't say, _I_ say, that as the days went on and Sunday followed Sunday, the interest in Harris's hair grew and grew; because it didn't stay merely and monotonously green, it took on deeper and deeper shades of green; and then it would change and become reddish, and would go from that to some other color--purplish, yellowish, bluish, and so on--but it was never a solid color. It was always mottled. And each Sunday it was a little more interesting than it was the Sunday before--and Harris's head became famous, and people came from New York, and Boston, and South Carolina, and Japan, and so on, to look. There wasn't seating-capacity for all the people that came while his head was undergoing these various and fascinating mottlings. And it was a good thing in several ways, because the business had been languishing a little, and now a lot of people joined the church so that they could have the show, and it was the beginning of a prosperity for that church which has never diminished in all these years. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXII. APRIL 5, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XV. BY MARK TWAIN. [_Dictated October 8, 1906._] _From Susy's Biography of Me._ Papa says that if the collera comes here he will take Sour Mash to the mountains. [Sidenote: (1885.)] This remark about the cat is followed by various entries, covering a month, in which Jean, General Grant, the sculptor Gerhardt, Mrs. Candace Wheeler, Miss Dora Wheeler, Mr. Frank Stockton, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, and the widow of General Custer appear and drift in procession across the page, then vanish forever from the Biography; then Susy drops this remark in the wake of the vanished procession: Sour Mash is a constant source of anxiety, care, and pleasure to papa. I did, in truth, think a great deal of that old tortoise-shell harlot; but I haven't a doubt that in order to impress Susy I was pretending agonies of solicitude which I didn't honestly feel. Sour Mash never gave me any real anxiety; she was always able to take care of herself, and she was ostentatiously vain of the fact; vain of it to a degree which often made me ashamed of her, much as I esteemed her. Many persons would like to have the society of cats during the summer vacation in the country, but they deny themselves this pleasure because they think they must either take the cats along when they return to the city, where they would be a trouble and an encumbrance, or leave them in the country, houseless and homeless. These people have no ingenuity, no invention, no wisdom; or it would occur to them to do as I do: rent cats by the month for the summer and return them to their good homes at the end of it. Early last May I rented a kitten of a farmer's wife, by the month; then I got a discount by taking three. They have been good company for about five months now, and are still kittens--at least they have not grown much, and to all intents and purposes are still kittens, and as full of romping energy and enthusiasm as they were in the beginning. This is remarkable. I am an expert in cats, but I have not seen a kitten keep its kittenhood nearly so long before. These are beautiful creatures--these triplets. Two of them wear the blackest and shiniest and thickest of sealskin vestments all over their bodies except the lower half of their faces and the terminations of their paws. The black masks reach down below the eyes, therefore when the eyes are closed they are not visible; the rest of the face, and the gloves and stockings, are snow white. These markings are just the same on both cats--so exactly the same that when you call one the other is likely to answer, because they cannot tell each other apart. Since the cats are precisely alike, and can't be told apart by any of us, they do not need two names, so they have but one between them. We call both of them Sackcloth, and we call the gray one Ashes. I believe I have never seen such intelligent cats as these before. They are full of the nicest discriminations. When I read German aloud they weep; you can see the tears run down. It shows what pathos there is in the German tongue. I had not noticed before that all German is pathetic, no matter what the subject is nor how it is treated. It was these humble observers that brought the knowledge to me. I have tried all kinds of German on these cats; romance, poetry, philosophy, theology, market reports; and the result has always been the same--the cats sob, and let the tears run down, which shows that all German is pathetic. French is not a familiar tongue to me, and the pronunciation is difficult, and comes out of me encumbered with a Missouri accent; but the cats like it, and when I make impassioned speeches in that language they sit in a row and put up their paws, palm to palm, and frantically give thanks. Hardly any cats are affected by music, but these are; when I sing they go reverently away, showing how deeply they feel it. Sour Mash never cared for these things. She had many noble qualities, but at bottom she was not refined, and cared little or nothing for theology and the arts. It is a pity to say it, but these cats are not above the grade of human beings, for I know by certain signs that they are not sincere in their exhibitions of emotion, but exhibit them merely to show off and attract attention--conduct which is distinctly human, yet with a difference: they do not know enough to conceal their desire to show off, but the grown human being does. What is ambition? It is only the desire to be conspicuous. The desire for fame is only the desire to be continuously conspicuous and attract attention and be talked about. These cats are like human beings in another way: when Ashes began to work his fictitious emotions, and show off, the other members of the firm followed suit, in order to be in the fashion. That is the way with human beings; they are afraid to be outside; whatever the fashion happens to be, they conform to it, whether it be a pleasant fashion or the reverse, they lacking the courage to ignore it and go their own way. All human beings would like to dress in loose and comfortable and highly colored and showy garments, and they had their desire until a century ago, when a king, or some other influential ass, introduced sombre hues and discomfort and ugly designs into masculine clothing. The meek public surrendered to the outrage, and by consequence we are in that odious captivity to-day, and are likely to remain in it for a long time to come. Fortunately the women were not included in the disaster, and so their graces and their beauty still have the enhancing help of delicate fabrics and varied and beautiful colors. Their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and the spirit, a Garden of Eden for charm and color. The men, clothed in dismal black, are scattered here and there and everywhere over the Garden, like so many charred stumps, and they damage the effect, but cannot annihilate it. In summer we poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the winter--the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up--we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others do it, and not because he wants to. They are really no sincerer than Sackcloth and Ashes. At bottom the Sackcloths do not care to exhibit their emotions when I am performing before them, they only do it because Ashes started it. I would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and so would every sane man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. There is such a thing as carrying conspicuousness to the point of discomfort; and if I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning, at church-time, clothed as I would like to be clothed, the churches would be vacant, and I should have all the congregations tagging after me, to look, and secretly envy, and publicly scoff. It is the way human beings are made; they are always keeping their real feelings shut up inside, and publicly exploiting their fictitious ones. Next after fine colors, I like plain white. One of my sorrows, when the summer ends, is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the shapeless and degrading black ones. It is mid-October now, and the weather is growing cold up here in the New Hampshire hills, but it will not succeed in freezing me out of these white garments, for here the neighbors are few, and it is only of crowds that I am afraid. I made a brave experiment, the other night, to see how it would feel to shock a crowd with these unseasonable clothes, and also to see how long it might take the crowd to reconcile itself to them and stop looking astonished and outraged. On a stormy evening I made a talk before a full house, in the village, clothed like a ghost, and looking as conspicuously, all solitary and alone on that platform, as any ghost could have looked; and I found, to my gratification, that it took the house less than ten minutes to forget about the ghost and give its attention to the tidings I had brought. I am nearly seventy-one, and I recognize that my age has given me a good many privileges; valuable privileges; privileges which are not granted to younger persons. Little by little I hope to get together courage enough to wear white clothes all through the winter, in New York. It will be a great satisfaction to me to show off in this way; and perhaps the largest of all the satisfactions will be the knowledge that every scoffer, of my sex, will secretly envy me and wish he dared to follow my lead. That mention that I have acquired new and great privileges by grace of my age, is not an uncalculated remark. When I passed the seventieth mile-stone, ten months ago, I instantly realized that I had entered a new country and a new atmosphere. To all the public I was become recognizably old, undeniably old; and from that moment everybody assumed a new attitude toward me--the reverent attitude granted by custom to age--and straightway the stream of generous new privileges began to flow in upon me and refresh my life. Since then, I have lived an ideal existence; and I now believe what Choate said last March, and which at the time I didn't credit: that the best of life begins at seventy; for then your work is done; you know that you have done your best, let the quality of the work be what it may; that you have earned your holiday--a holiday of peace and contentment--and that thenceforth, to the setting of your sun, nothing will break it, nothing interrupt it. [_Dictated January 22, 1907._] In an earlier chapter I inserted some verses beginning "Love Came at Dawn" which had been found among Susy's papers after her death. I was not able to say that they were hers, but I judged that they might be, for the reason that she had not enclosed them in quotation marks according to her habit when storing up treasures gathered from other people. Stedman was not able to determine the authorship for me, as the verses were new to him, but the authorship has now been traced. The verses were written by William Wilfred Campbell, a Canadian poet, and they form a part of the contents of his book called "Beyond the Hills of Dream." The authorship of the beautiful lines which my wife and I inscribed upon Susy's gravestone was untraceable for a time. We had found them in a book in India, but had lost the book and with it the author's name. But in time an application to the editor of "Notes and Queries" furnished me the author's name,[7] and it has been added to the verses upon the gravestone. Last night, at a dinner-party where I was present, Mr. Peter Dunne Dooley handed to the host several dollars, in satisfaction of a lost bet. I seemed to see an opportunity to better my condition, and I invited Dooley, apparently disinterestedly, to come to my house Friday and play billiards. He accepted, and I judge that there is going to be a deficit in the Dooley treasury as a result. In great qualities of the heart and brain, Dooley is gifted beyond all propriety. He is brilliant; he is an expert with his pen, and he easily stands at the head of all the satirists of this generation--but he is going to walk in darkness Friday afternoon. It will be a fraternal kindness to teach him that with all his light and culture, he does not know all the valuable things; and it will also be a fraternal kindness to him to complete his education for him--and I shall do this on Friday, and send him home in that perfected condition. I possess a billiard secret which can be valuable to the Dooley sept, after I shall have conferred it upon Dooley--for a consideration. It is a discovery which I made by accident, thirty-eight years ago, in my father-in-law's house in Elmira. There was a scarred and battered and ancient billiard-table in the garret, and along with it a peck of checked and chipped balls, and a rackful of crooked and headless cues. I played solitaire up there every day with that difficult outfit. The table was not level, but slanted sharply to the southeast; there wasn't a ball that was round, or would complete the journey you started it on, but would always get tired and stop half-way and settle, with a jolty wabble, to a standstill on its chipped side. I tried making counts with four balls, but found it difficult and discouraging, so I added a fifth ball, then a sixth, then a seventh, and kept on adding until at last I had twelve balls on the table and a thirteenth to play with. My game was caroms--caroms solely--caroms plain, or caroms with cushion to help--anything that could furnish a count. In the course of time I found to my astonishment that I was never able to run fifteen, under any circumstances. By huddling the balls advantageously in the beginning, I could now and then coax fourteen out of them, but I couldn't reach fifteen by either luck or skill. Sometimes the balls would get scattered into difficult positions and defeat me in that way; sometimes if I managed to keep them together, I would freeze; and always when I froze, and had to play away from the contact, there was sure to be nothing to play at but a wide and uninhabited vacancy. One day Mr. Dalton called on my brother-in-law, on a matter of business, and I was asked if I could entertain him awhile, until my brother-in-law should finish an engagement with another gentleman. I said I could, and took him up to the billiard-table. I had played with him many times at the club, and knew that he could play billiards tolerably well--only tolerably well--but not any better than I could. He and I were just a match. He didn't know our table; he didn't know those balls; he didn't know those warped and headless cues; he didn't know the southeastern slant of the table, and how to allow for it. I judged it would be safe and profitable to offer him a bet on my scheme. I emptied the avalanche of thirteen balls on the table and said: "Take a ball and begin, Mr. Dalton. How many can you run with an outlay like that?" He said, with the half-affronted air of a mathematician who has been asked how much of the multiplication table he can recite without a break: "I suppose a million--eight hundred thousand, anyway." I said "You shall hove the privilege of placing the balls to suit yourself, and I want to bet you a dollar that you can't run fifteen." I will not dwell upon the sequel. At the end of an hour his face was red, and wet with perspiration; his outer garments lay scattered here and there over the place; he was the angriest man in the State, and there wasn't a rag or remnant of an injurious adjective left in him anywhere--and I had all his small change. When the summer was over, we went home to Hartford, and one day Mr. George Robertson arrived from Boston with two or three hours to spare between then and the return train, and as he was a young gentleman to whom we were in debt for much social pleasure, it was my duty, and a welcome duty, to make his two or three hours interesting for him. So I took him up-stairs and set up my billiard scheme for his comfort. Mine was a good table, in perfect repair; the cues were in perfect condition; the balls were ivory, and flawless--but I knew that Mr. Robertson was my prey, just the same, for by exhaustive tests with this outfit I had found that my limit was thirty-one. I had proved to my satisfaction that whereas I could not fairly expect to get more than six or eight or a dozen caroms out of a run, I could now and then reach twenty and twenty-five, and after a long procession of failures finally achieve a run of thirty-one; but in no case had I ever got beyond thirty-one. Robertson's game, as I knew, was a little better than mine, so I resolved to require him to make thirty-two. I believed it would entertain him. He was one of these brisk and hearty and cheery and self-satisfied young fellows who are brimful of confidence, and who plunge with grateful eagerness into any enterprise that offers a showy test of their abilities. I emptied the balls on the table and said, "Take a cue and a ball, George, and begin. How many caroms do you think you can make out of that layout?" He laughed the laugh of the gay and the care-free, as became his youth and inexperience, and said, "I can punch caroms out of that bunch a week without a break." I said "Place the balls to suit yourself, and begin." Confidence is a necessary thing in billiards, but overconfidence is bad. George went at his task with much too much lightsomeness of spirit and disrespect for the situation. On his first shot he scored three caroms; on his second shot he scored four caroms; and on his third shot he missed as simple a carom as could be devised. He was very much astonished, and said he would not have supposed that careful play could be needed with an acre of bunched balls in front of a person. He began again, and played more carefully, but still with too much lightsomeness; he couldn't seem to learn to take the situation seriously. He made about a dozen caroms and broke down. He was irritated with himself now, and he thought he caught me laughing. He didn't. I do not laugh publicly at my client when this game is going on; I only do it inside--or save it for after the exhibition is over. But he thought he had caught me laughing, and it increased his irritation. Of course I knew he thought I was laughing privately--for I was experienced; they all think that, and it has a good effect; it sharpens their annoyance and debilitates their play. He made another trial and failed. Once more he was astonished; once more he was humiliated--and as for his anger, it rose to summer-heat. He arranged the balls again, grouping them carefully, and said he would win this time, or die. When a client reaches this condition, it is a good time to damage his nerve further, and this can always be done by saying some little mocking thing or other that has the outside appearance of a friendly remark--so I employed this art. I suggested that a bet might tauten his nerves, and that I would offer one, but that as I did not want it to be an expense to him, but only a help, I would make it small--a cigar, if he were willing--a cigar that he would fail again; not an expensive one, but a cheap native one, of the Crown Jewel breed, such as is manufactured in Hartford for the clergy. It set him afire all over! I could see the blue flame issue from his eyes. He said, "Make it a hundred!--and no Connecticut cabbage-leaf product, but Havana, $25 the box!" I took him up, but said I was sorry to see him do this, because it did not seem to me right or fair for me to rob him under our own roof, when he had been so kind to us. He said, with energy and acrimony: "You take care of your own pocket, if you'll be so good, and leave me to take care of mine." And he plunged at the congress of balls with a vindictiveness which was infinitely contenting to me. He scored a failure--and began to undress. I knew it would come to that, for he was in the condition now that Mr. Dooley will be in at about that stage of the contest on Friday afternoon. A clothes-rack will be provided for Mr. Dooley to hang his things on as fast as he shall from time to time shed them. George raised his voice four degrees and flung out the challenge-- "Double or quits!" "Done," I responded, in the gentle and compassionate voice of one who is apparently getting sorrier and sorrier. There was an hour and a half of straight disaster after that, and if it was a sin to enjoy it, it is no matter--I did enjoy it. It is half a lifetime ago, but I enjoy it yet, every time I think of it George made failure after failure. His fury increased with each failure as he scored it. With each defeat he flung off one or another rag of his raiment, and every time he started on a fresh inning he made it "double or quits" once more. Twice he reached thirty and broke down; once he reached thirty-one and broke down. These "nears" made him frantic, and I believe I was never so happy in my life, except the time, a few years later, when the Rev. J. H. Twichell and I walked to Boston and he had the celebrated conversation with the hostler at the Inn at Ashford, Connecticut. At last, when we were notified that Patrick was at the door to drive him to his train, George owed me five thousand cigars at twenty-five cents apiece, and I was so sorry I could have hugged him. But he shouted, "Give me ten minutes more!" and added stormily, "it's double or quits again, and I'll win out free of debt or owe you ten thousand cigars, and you'll pay the funeral expenses." He began on his final effort, and I believe that in all my experience among both amateurs and experts, I have never seen a cue so carefully handled in my lifetime as George handled his upon this intensely interesting occasion. He got safely up to twenty-five, and then ceased to breathe. So did I. He labored along, and added a point, another point, still another point, and finally reached thirty-one. He stopped there, and we took a breath. By this time the balls were scattered all down the cushions, about a foot or two apart, and there wasn't a shot in sight anywhere that any man might hope to make. In a burst of anger and confessed defeat, he sent his ball flying around the table at random, and it crotched a ball that was packed against the cushion and sprang across to a ball against the bank on the opposite side, and counted! His luck had set him free, and he didn't owe me anything. He had used up all his spare time, but we carried his clothes to the carriage, and he dressed on his way to the station, greatly wondered at and admired by the ladies, as he drove along--but he got his train. I am very fond of Mr. Dooley, and shall await his coming with affectionate and pecuniary interest. _P.S. Saturday._ He has been here. Let us not talk about it. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [7] Robert Richardson, deceased, of Australia. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXIII. APRIL 19, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XVI. BY MARK TWAIN. [_Dictated January 12th, 1905._] ... But I am used to having my statements discounted. My mother began it before I was seven years old. Yet all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and therefore they were not without preciousness. Any person who is familiar with me knows how to strike my average, and therefore knows how to get at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix. My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight, or ten, or twelve years old--along there--a neighbor said to her, "Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?" My mother said, "He is the well-spring of truth, but you can't bring up the whole well with one bucket"--and she added, "I know his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him thirty per cent. for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere." Now to make a jump of forty years, without breaking the connection: that word "embroidery" was used again in my presence and concerning me, when I was fifty years old, one night at Rev. Frank Goodwin's house in Hartford, at a meeting of the Monday Evening Club. The Monday Evening Club still exists. It was founded about forty-five years ago by that theological giant, Rev. Dr. Bushnell, and some comrades of his, men of large intellectual calibre and more or less distinction, local or national. I was admitted to membership in it in the fall of 1871 and was an active member thenceforth until I left Hartford in the summer of 1891. The membership was restricted, in those days, to eighteen-- possibly twenty. The meetings began about the 1st of October and were held in the private houses of the members every fortnight thereafter throughout the cold months until the 1st of May. Usually there were a dozen members present--sometimes as many as fifteen. There was an essay and a discussion. The essayists followed each other in alphabetical order through the season. The essayist could choose his own subject and talk twenty minutes on it, from MS. or orally, according to his preference. Then the discussion followed, and each member present was allowed ten minutes in which to express his views. The wives of these people were always present. It was their privilege. It was also their privilege to keep still; they were not allowed to throw any light upon the discussion. After the discussion there was a supper, and talk, and cigars. This supper began at ten o'clock promptly, and the company broke up and went away at midnight. At least they did except upon one occasion. In my recent Birthday speech I remarked upon the fact that I have always bought cheap cigars, and that is true. I have never bought costly ones. Well, that night at the Club meeting--as I was saying--George, our colored butler, came to me when the supper was nearly over, and I noticed that he was pale. Normally his complexion was a clear black, and very handsome, but now it had modified to old amber. He said: "Mr. Clemens, what are we going to do? There is not a cigar in the house but those old Wheeling long nines. Can't nobody smoke them but you. They kill at thirty yards. It is too late to telephone--we couldn't get any cigars out from town--what can we do? Ain't it best to say nothing, and let on that we didn't think?" "No," I said, "that would not be honest. Fetch out the long nines"--which he did. I had just come across those "long nines" a few days or a week before. I hadn't seen a long nine for years. When I was a cub pilot on the Mississippi in the late '50's, I had had a great affection for them, because they were not only--to my mind--perfect, but you could get a basketful of them for a cent--or a dime, they didn't use cents out there in those days. So when I saw them advertised in Hartford I sent for a thousand at once. They came out to me in badly battered and disreputable-looking old square pasteboard boxes, two hundred in a box. George brought a box, which was caved in on all sides, looking the worst it could, and began to pass them around. The conversation had been brilliantly animated up to that moment--but now a frost fell upon the company. That is to say, not all of a sudden, but the frost fell upon each man as he took up a cigar and held it poised in the air--and there, in the middle, his sentence broke off. That kind of thing went on all around the table, until when George had completed his crime the whole place was full of a thick solemnity and silence. Those men began to light the cigars. Rev. Dr. Parker was the first man to light. He took three or four heroic whiffs--then gave it up. He got up with the remark that he had to go to the bedside of a sick parishioner. He started out. Rev. Dr. Burton was the next man. He took only one whiff, and followed Parker. He furnished a pretext, and you could see by the sound of his voice that he didn't think much of the pretext, and was vexed with Parker for getting in ahead with a fictitious ailing client. Rev. Mr. Twichell followed, and said he had to go now because he must take the midnight train for Boston. Boston was the first place that occurred to him, I suppose. It was only a quarter to eleven when they began to distribute pretexts. At ten minutes to eleven all those people were out of the house. When nobody was left but George and me I was cheerful--I had no compunctions of conscience, no griefs of any kind. But George was beyond speech, because he held the honor and credit of the family above his own, and he was ashamed that this smirch had been put upon it. I told him to go to bed and try to sleep it off. I went to bed myself. At breakfast in the morning when George was passing a cup of coffee, I saw it tremble in his hand. I knew by that sign that there was something on his mind. He brought the cup to me and asked impressively, "Mr. Clemens, how far is it from the front door to the upper gate?" I said, "It is a hundred and twenty-five steps." He said, "Mr. Clemens, you can start at the front door and you can go plumb to the upper gate and tread on one of them cigars every time." It wasn't true in detail, but in essentials it was. The subject under discussion on the night in question was Dreams. The talk passed from mouth to mouth in the usual serene way. I do not now remember what form my views concerning dreams took at the time. I don't remember now what my notion about dreams was then, but I do remember telling a dream by way of illustrating some detail of my speech, and I also remember that when I had finished it Rev. Dr. Burton made that doubting remark which contained that word I have already spoken of as having been uttered by my mother, in some such connection, forty or fifty years before. I was probably engaged in trying to make those people believe that now and then, by some accident, or otherwise, a dream which was prophetic turned up in the dreamer's mind. The date of my memorable dream was about the beginning of May, 1858. It was a remarkable dream, and I had been telling it several times every year for more than fifteen years--and now I was telling it again, here in the club. In 1858 I was a steersman on board the swift and popular New Orleans and St. Louis packet, "Pennsylvania," Captain Kleinfelter. I had been lent to Mr. Brown, one of the pilots of the "Pennsylvania," by my owner, Mr. Horace E. Bixby, and I had been steering for Brown about eighteen months, I think. Then in the early days of May, 1858, came a tragic trip--the last trip of that fleet and famous steamboat. I have told all about it in one of my books called "Old Times on the Mississippi." But it is not likely that I told the dream in that book. It is impossible that I can ever have published it, I think, because I never wanted my mother to know about the dream, and she lived several years after I published that volume. I had found a place on the "Pennsylvania" for my brother Henry, who was two years my junior. It was not a place of profit, it was only a place of promise. He was "mud" clerk. Mud clerks received no salary, but they were in the line of promotion. They could become, presently, third clerk and second clerk, then chief clerk--that is to say, purser. The dream begins when Henry had been mud clerk about three months. We were lying in port at St. Louis. Pilots and steersmen had nothing to do during the three days that the boat lay in port in St. Louis and New Orleans, but the mud clerk had to begin his labors at dawn and continue them into the night, by the light of pine-knot torches. Henry and I, moneyless and unsalaried, had billeted ourselves upon our brother-in-law, Mr. Moffet, as night lodgers while in port. We took our meals on board the boat. No, I mean _I_ lodged at the house, not Henry. He spent the _evenings_ at the house, from nine until eleven, then went to the boat to be ready for his early duties. On the night of the dream he started away at eleven, shaking hands with the family, and said good-by according to custom. I may mention that hand-shaking as a good-by was not merely the custom of that family, but the custom of the region--the custom of Missouri, I may say. In all my life, up to that time, I had never seen one member of the Clemens family kiss another one--except once. When my father lay dying in our home in Hannibal--the 24th of March, 1847--he put his arm around my sister's neck and drew her down and kissed her, saying "Let me die." I remember that, and I remember the death rattle which swiftly followed those words, which were his last. These good-bys of Henry's were always executed in the family sitting-room on the second floor, and Henry went from that room and down-stairs without further ceremony. But this time my mother went with him to the head of the stairs and said good-by _again_. As I remember it she was moved to this by something in Henry's manner, and she remained at the head of the stairs while he descended. When he reached the door he hesitated, and climbed the stairs and shook hands good-by once more. In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial-case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre. The casket stood upon a couple of chairs. I dressed, and moved toward that door, thinking I would go in there and look at it, but I changed my mind. I thought I could not yet bear to meet my mother. I thought I would wait awhile and make some preparation for that ordeal. The house was in Locust Street, a little above 13th, and I walked to 14th, and to the middle of the block beyond, before it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this--it was only a dream. I can still feel something of the grateful upheaval of joy of that moment, and I can also still feel the remnant of doubt, the suspicion that maybe it _was_ real, after all. I returned to the house almost on a run, flew up the stairs two or three steps at a jump, and rushed into that sitting-room--and was made glad again, for there was no casket there. We made the usual eventless trip to New Orleans--no, it was not eventless, for it was on the way down that I had the fight with Mr. Brown[8] which resulted in his requiring that I be left ashore at New Orleans. In New Orleans I always had a job. It was my privilege to watch the freight-piles from seven in the evening until seven in the morning, and get three dollars for it. It was a three-night job and occurred every thirty-five days. Henry always joined my watch about nine in the evening, when his own duties were ended, and we often walked my rounds and chatted together until midnight. This time we were to part, and so the night before the boat sailed I gave Henry some advice. I said, "In case of disaster to the boat, don't lose your head--leave that unwisdom to the passengers--they are competent--they'll attend to it. But you rush for the hurricane-deck, and astern to one of the life-boats lashed aft the wheel-house, and obey the mate's orders--thus you will be useful. When the boat is launched, give such help as you can in getting the women and children into it, and be sure you don't try to get into it yourself. It is summer weather, the river is only a mile wide, as a rule, and you can swim that without any trouble." Two or three days afterward the boat's boilers exploded at Ship Island, below Memphis, early one morning--and what happened afterward I have already told in "Old Times on the Mississippi." As related there, I followed the "Pennsylvania" about a day later, on another boat, and we began to get news of the disaster at every port we touched at, and so by the time we reached Memphis we knew all about it. I found Henry stretched upon a mattress on the floor of a great building, along with thirty or forty other scalded and wounded persons, and was promptly informed, by some indiscreet person, that he had inhaled steam; that his body was badly scalded, and that he would live but a little while; also, I was told that the physicians and nurses were giving their whole attention to persons who had a chance of being saved. They were short-handed in the matter of physicians and nurses; and Henry and such others as were considered to be fatally hurt were receiving only such attention as could be spared, from time to time, from the more urgent cases. But Dr. Peyton, a fine and large-hearted old physician of great reputation in the community, gave me his sympathy and took vigorous hold of the case, and in about a week he had brought Henry around. Dr. Peyton never committed himself with prognostications which might not materialize, but at eleven o'clock one night he told me that Henry was out of danger, and would get well. Then he said, "At midnight these poor fellows lying here and there all over this place will begin to mourn and mutter and lament and make outcries, and if this commotion should disturb Henry it will be bad for him; therefore ask the physician on watch to give him an eighth of a grain of morphine, but this is not to be done unless Henry shall show signs that he is being disturbed." Oh well, never mind the rest of it. The physicians on watch were young fellows hardly out of the medical college, and they made a mistake--they had no way of measuring the eighth of a grain of morphine, so they guessed at it and gave him a vast quantity heaped on the end of a knife-blade, and the fatal effects were soon apparent. I think he died about dawn, I don't remember as to that. He was carried to the dead-room and I went away for a while to a citizen's house and slept off some of my accumulated fatigue--and meantime something was happening. The coffins provided for the dead were of unpainted white pine, but in this instance some of the ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought a metallic case, and when I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went--and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast. I told the dream there in the Club that night just as I have told it here. Rev. Dr. Burton swung his leonine head around, focussed me with his eye, and said: "When was it that this happened?" "In June, '58." "It is a good many years ago. Have you told it several times since?" "Yes, I have, a good many times." "How many?" "Why, I don't know how many." "Well, strike an average. How many times a year do you think you have told it?" "Well, I have told it as many as six times a year, possibly oftener." "Very well, then you've told it, we'll say, seventy or eighty times since it happened?" "Yes," I said, "that's a conservative estimate." "Now then, Mark, a very extraordinary thing happened to me a great many years ago, and I used to tell it a number of times--a good many times--every year, for it was so wonderful that it always astonished the hearer, and that astonishment gave me a distinct pleasure every time. I never suspected that that tale was acquiring any auxiliary advantages through repetition until one day after I had been telling it ten or fifteen years it struck me that either I was getting old, and slow in delivery, or that the tale was longer than it was when it was born. Mark, I diligently and prayerfully examined that tale with this result: that I found that its proportions were now, as nearly as I could make oat, one part fact, straight fact, fact pure and undiluted, golden fact, and twenty-four parts embroidery. I never told that tale afterwards--I was never able to tell it again, for I had lost confidence in it, and so the pleasure of telling it was gone, and gone permanently. How much of this tale of yours is embroidery?" "Well," I said, "I don't know. I don't think any of it is embroidery. I think it is all just as I have stated it, detail by detail." "Very well," he said, "then it is all right, but I wouldn't tell it any more; because if you keep on, it will begin to collect embroidery sure. The safest thing is to stop now." That was a great many years ago. And to-day is the first time that I have told that dream since Dr. Burton scared me into fatal doubts about it. No, I don't believe I can say that. I don't believe that I ever really had any doubts whatever concerning the salient points of the dream, for those points are of such a nature that they are _pictures_, and pictures can be remembered, when they are vivid, much better than one can remember remarks and unconcreted facts. Although it has been so many years since I have told that dream, I can see those pictures now just as clearly defined as if they were before me in this room. I have not told the entire dream. There was a good deal more of it. I mean I have not told all that happened in the dream's fulfilment. After the incident in the death-room I may mention one detail, and that is this. When I arrived in St. Louis with the casket it was about eight o'clock in the morning, and I ran to my brother-in-law's place of business, hoping to find him there, but I missed him, for while I was on the way to his office he was on his way from the house to the boat. When I got back to the boat the casket was gone. He had conveyed it out to his house. I hastened thither, and when I arrived the men were just removing the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. I stopped that procedure, for I did not want my mother to see the dead face, because one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. When I went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs--placed to receive the coffin--just as I had seen them in my dream; and if I had arrived two or three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them, precisely as in my dream of several weeks before. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [8] See "Old Times on the Mississippi." NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXIV. MAY 3, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XVII. BY MARK TWAIN. _From Susy's Biography of Me._ _Sept. 9, '85._--Mamma is teaching Jean a little natural history and is making a little collection of insects for her. But mamma does not allow Jean to kill any insects she only collects those insects that are found dead. Mamma has told us all, perticularly Jean, to bring her all the little dead insects that she finds. The other day as we were all sitting at supper Jean broke into the room and ran triumfantly up to Mamma and presented her with a plate full of dead flies. Mamma thanked Jean vary enthusiastically although she with difficulty concealed her amusement. Just then Soar Mash entered the room and Jean believing her hungry asked Mamma for permission to give her the flies. Mamma laughingly consented and the flies almost immediately dissapeared. [_Monday, October 15, 1906._] Sour Hash's presence indicates that this adventure occurred at Quarry Farm. Susy's Biography interests itself pretty exclusively with historical facts; where they happen is not a matter of much concern to her. When other historians refer to the Bunker Hill Monument they know it is not necessary to mention that that monument is in Boston. Susy recognizes that when she mentions Sour Mash it is not necessary to localize her. To Susy, Sour Mash is the Bunker Hill Monument of Quarry Farm. Ordinary cats have some partiality for living flies, but none for dead ones; but Susy does not trouble herself to apologize for Sour Mash's eccentricities of taste. This Biography was for _us_, and Susy knew that nothing that Sour Mash might do could startle us or need explanation, we being aware that she was not an ordinary cat, but moving upon a plane far above the prejudices and superstitions which are law to common catdom. Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George[9] a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. They supposed that their mother merely wanted to accumulate dead flies, for some æsthetic or scientific reason or other, and they judged that the more flies she could get the happier she would be; so they went into business with George on a commission. Straightway the dead flies began to arrive in such quantities that Mrs. Clemens was pleased beyond words with the success of her idea. Next, she was astonished that one house could furnish so many. She was paying an extravagantly high bounty, and it presently began to look as if by this addition to our expenses we were now probably living beyond our income. After a few days there was peace and comfort; not a fly was discoverable in the house: there wasn't a straggler left. Still, to Mrs. Clement's surprise, the dead flies continued to arrive by the plateful, and the bounty expense was as crushing as ever. Then she made inquiry, and found that our innocent little rascals had established a Fly Trust, and had hired all the children in the neighborhood to collect flies on a cheap and unburdensome commission. Mrs. Clemens's experience in this matter was a new one for her, but the governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded it, every half-century since man was created. Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them. _From Susy's Biography of Me._ _Sept. 10, '85._--The other evening Clara and I brought down our new soap bubble water and we all blew soap bubles. Papa blew his soap bubles and filled them with tobacco smoke and as the light shone on then they took very beautiful opaline colors. Papa would hold them and then let us catch them in our hand and they felt delightful to the touch the mixture of the smoke and water had a singularly pleasant effect. It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making. I remember those days of twenty-one years ago, and a certain pathos clings about them. Susy, with her manifold young charms and her iridescent mind, was as lovely a bubble as any we made that day--and as transitory. She passed, as they passed, in her youth and beauty, and nothing of her is left but a heartbreak and a memory. That long-vanished day came vividly back to me a few weeks ago when, for the first time in twenty-one years, I found myself again amusing a child with smoke-charged soap-bubbles. [Sidenote: (1885.)] Susy's next date is November 29th, 1885, the eve of my fiftieth birthday. It seems a good while ago. I must have been rather young for my age then, for I was trying to tame an old-fashioned bicycle nine feet high. It is to me almost unbelievable, at my present stage of life, that there have really been people willing to trust themselves upon a dizzy and unstable altitude like that, and that I was one of them. Twichell and I took lessons every day. He succeeded, and became a master of the art of riding that wild vehicle, but I had no gift in that direction and was never able to stay on mine long enough to get any satisfactory view of the planet. Every time I tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and I went over the front of it and struck the ground on my head or my back before I had time to realise that something was happening. I didn't always go over the front way; I had other ways, and practised them all; but no matter which way was chosen for me there was always one monotonous result--the bicycle skinned my leg and leaped up into the air and came down on top of me. Sometimes its wires were so sprung by this violent performance that it had the collapsed look of an umbrella that had had a misunderstanding with a cyclone. After each day's practice I arrived at home with my skin hanging in ribbons, from my knees down. I plastered the ribbons on where they belonged, and bound them there with handkerchiefs steeped in Pond's Extract, and was ready for more adventures next day. It was always a surprise to me that I had so much skin, and that it held out so well. There was always plenty, and I soon came to understand that the supply was going to remain sufficient for all my needs. It turned out that I had nine skins, in layers, one on top of the other like the leaves of a book, and some of the doctors said it was quite remarkable. I was full of enthusiasm over this insane amusement. My teacher was a young German from the bicycle factory, a gentle, kindly, patient creature, with a pathetically grave face. He never smiled; he never made a remark; he always gathered me tenderly up when I plunged off, and helped me on again without a word. When he had been teaching me twice a day for three weeks I introduced a new gymnastic--one that he had never seen before--and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing which I had been risking my life for days to achieve. He gathered me up and said mournfully: "Mr. Clemens, you can fall off a bicycle in more different ways than any person I ever saw before." [Sidenote: (1849.)] A boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. The drunken tramp--mentioned in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn"--who was burned up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams--dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him--a face which seemed to say to me, "If you had not give me the matches, this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death." I was _not_ responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches; but no matter, mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience, and knew but the one duty--to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions; particularly when there was no sense or reason in it. The tramp--who was to blame--suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months. The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street[10] at noonday supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture--the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. We are curiously made. In all the throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism, and swifter in its atrocious work. In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night. All within the space of a couple of years we had two or three other tragedies, and I had the ill-luck to be too near by on each occasion. There was the slave man who was struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offence; I saw him die. And the young California emigrant who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life gush from his breast. And the case of the rowdy young Hyde brothers and their harmless old uncle: one of them held the old man down with his knees on his breast while the other one tried repeatedly to kill him with an Allen revolver which wouldn't go off. I happened along just then, of course. Then there was the case of the young California emigrant who got drunk and proposed to raid the "Welshman's house" all alone one dark and threatening night.[11] This house stood half-way up Holliday's Hill ("Cardiff" Hill), and its sole occupants were a poor but quite respectable widow and her young and blameless daughter. The invading ruffian woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse challenges and obscenities. I went up there with a comrade--John Briggs, I think--to look and listen. The figure of the man was dimly risible; the women were on their porch, but not visible in the deep shadow of its roof, but we heard the elder woman's voice. She had loaded an old musket with slugs, and she warned the man that if he stayed where he was while she counted ten it would cost him his life. She began to count, slowly: he began to laugh. He stopped laughing at "six"; then through the deep stillness, in a steady voice, followed the rest of the tale: "seven ... eight ... nine"--a long pause, we holding our breath--"ten!" A red spout of flame gushed out into the night, and the man dropped, with his breast riddled to rags. Then the rain and the thunder burst loose and the waiting town swarmed up the hill in the glare of the lightning like an invasion of ants. Those people saw the rest; I had had my share and was satisfied. I went home to dream, and was not disappointed. My teaching and training enabled me to see deeper into these tragedies than an ignorant person could have done. I knew what they were for. I tried to disguise it from myself, but down in the secret deeps of my heart I knew--and I _knew_ that I knew. They were inventions of Providence to beguile me to a better life. It sounds curiously innocent and conceited, now, but to me there was nothing strange about it; it was quite in accordance with the thoughtful and judicious ways of Providence as I understood them. It would not have surprised me, nor even over-flattered me, if Providence had killed off that whole community in trying to save an asset like me. Educated as I had been, it would have seemed just the thing, and well worth the expense. _Why_ Providence should take such an anxious interest in such a property--that idea never entered my head, and there was no one in that simple hamlet who would have dreamed of putting it there. For one thing, no one was equipped with it. It is quite true I took all the tragedies to myself; and tallied them off, in turn as they happened, saying to myself in each case, with a sigh, "Another one gone--and on my account; this ought to bring me to repentance; His patience will not always endure." And yet privately I believed it would. That is, I believed it in the daytime; but not in the night. With the going down of the sun my faith failed, and the clammy fears gathered about my heart. It was then that I repented. Those were awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with the bitterness of death. After each tragedy I recognized the warning and repented; repented and begged; begged like a coward, begged like a dog; and not in the interest of those poor people who had been extinguished for my sake, but only in my own interest. It seems selfish, when I look back on it now. My repentances were very real, very earnest; and after each tragedy they happened every night for a long time. But as a rule they could not stand the daylight. They faded out and shredded away and disappeared in the glad splendor of the sun. They were the creatures of fear and darkness, and they could not live out of their own place. The day gave me cheer and peace, and at night I repented again. In all my boyhood life I am not sure that I ever tried to lead a better life in the daytime--or wanted to. In my age I should never think of wishing to do such a thing. But in my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race--never quite sane in the night. When "Injun Joe" died.[12] ... But never mind: in another chapter I have already described what a raging hell of repentance I passed through then. I believe that for months I was as pure as the driven snow. After dark. It was back in those far-distant days--1848 or '9--that Jim Wolf came to us. He was from Shelbyville, a hamlet thirty or forty miles back in the country, and he brought all his native sweetnesses and gentlenesses and simplicities with him. He was approaching seventeen, a grave and slender lad, trustful, honest, a creature to love and cling to. And he was incredibly bashful. It is to this kind that untoward things happen. My sister gave a "candy-pull" on a winter's night. I was too young to be of the company, and Jim was too diffident. I was sent up to bed early, and Jim followed of his own motion. His room was in the new part of the house, and his window looked out on the roof of the L annex. That roof was six inches deep in snow, and the snow had an ice-crust upon it which was as slick as glass. Out of the comb of the roof projected a short chimney, a common resort for sentimental cats on moonlight nights--and this was a moonlight night. Down at the eaves, below the chimney, a canopy of dead vines spread away to some posts, making a cozy shelter, and after an hour or two the rollicking crowd of young ladies and gentlemen grouped themselves in its shade, with their saucers of liquid and piping-hot candy disposed about them on the frozen ground to cool. There was joyous chaffing and joking and laughter--peal upon peal of it. About this time a couple of old disreputable tom-cats got up on the chimney and started a heated argument about something; also about this time I gave up trying to get to sleep, and went visiting to Jim's room. He was awake and fuming about the cats and their intolerable yowling. I asked him, mockingly, why he didn't climb out and drive them away. He was nettled, and said over-boldly that for two cents he _would_. It was a rash remark, and was probably repented of before it was fairly out of his mouth. But it was too late--he was committed. I knew him; and I knew he would rather break his neck than back down, if I egged him on judiciously. "Oh, of course you would! Who's doubting it?" It galled him, and he burst out, with sharp irritation-- "Maybe _you_ doubt it!" "I? Oh no, I shouldn't think of such a thing. You are always doing wonderful things. With your mouth." He was in a passion, now. He snatched on his yarn socks and began to raise the window, saying in a voice unsteady with anger-- "_You_ think I dasn't--_you_ do! Think what you blame please--_I_ don't care what you think. I'll show you!" The window made him rage; it wouldn't stay up. I said-- "Never mind, I'll hold it." Indeed, I would have done anything to help. I was only a boy, and was already in a radiant heaven of anticipation. He climbed carefully out, clung to the window-sill until his feet were safely placed, then began to pick his perilous way on all fours along the glassy comb, a foot and a hand on each side of it. I believe I enjoy it now as much as I did then: yet it is a good deal over fifty years ago. The frosty breeze flapped his short shirt about his lean legs; the crystal roof shone like polished marble in the intense glory of the moon; the unconscious cats sat erect upon the chimney, alertly watching each other, lashing their tails and pouring out their hollow grievances; and slowly and cautiously Jim crept on, flapping as he went, the gay and frolicsome young creatures under the vine-canopy unaware, and outraging these solemnities with their misplaced laughter. Every time Jim slipped I had a hope; but always on he crept and disappointed it. At last he was within reaching distance. He paused, raised himself carefully up, measured his distance deliberately, then made a frantic grab at the nearest cat--and missed. Of course he lost his balance. His heels flew up, he struck on his back, and like a rocket he darted down the roof feet first, crashed through the dead vines and landed in a sitting posture in fourteen saucers of red-hot candy, in the midst of all that party--and dressed as _he_ was: this lad who could not look a girl in the face with his clothes on. There was a wild scramble and a storm of shrieks, and Jim fled up the stairs, dripping broken crockery all the way. [Sidenote: (1867.)] The incident was ended. But I was not done with it yet, though I supposed I was. Eighteen or twenty years later I arrived in New York from California, and by that time I had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it. This was early in 1867. I was offered a large sum to write something for the "Sunday Mercury," and I answered with the tale of "Jim Wolf and the Cats." I also collected the money for it--twenty-five dollars. It seemed over-pay, but I did not say anything about that, for I was not so scrupulous then as I am now. A year or two later "Jim Wolf and the Cats" appeared in a Tennessee paper in a new dress--as to spelling; spelling borrowed from Artemus Ward. The appropriator of the tale had a wide reputation in the West, and was exceedingly popular. Deservedly so, I think. He wrote some of the breeziest and funniest things I have ever read, and did his work with distinguished ease and fluency. His name has passed out of my memory. A couple of years went by; then the original story--my own version--cropped up again and went floating around in the spelling, and with my name to it. Soon first one paper and then another fell upon me rigorously for "stealing" Jim Wolf and the Cats from the Tennessee man. I got a merciless beating, but I did not mind it. It's all in the game. Besides, I had learned, a good while before that, that it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence. [Sidenote: (1873.)] [Sidenote: (1900.)] But I was not done with Jim and the Cats yet. In 1873 I was lecturing in London, in the Queen's Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, and was living at the Langham Hotel, Portland place. I had no domestic household, and no official household except George Dolby, lecture-agent, and Charles Warren Stoddard, the California poet, now (1900) Professor of English Literature in the Roman Catholic University, Washington. Ostensibly Stoddard was my private secretary; in reality he was merely my comrade--I hired him in order to have his company. As secretary there was nothing for him to do except to scrap-book the daily reports of the great trial of the Tichborne Claimant for perjury. But he made a sufficient job out of that, for the reports filled six columns a day and he usually postponed the scrap-booking until Sunday; then he had 36 columns to cut out and paste in--a proper labor for Hercules. He did his work well, but if he had been older and feebler it would have killed him once a week. Without doubt he does his literary lectures well, but also without doubt he prepares them fifteen minutes before he is due on his platform and thus gets into them a freshness and sparkle which they might lack if they underwent the staling process of overstudy. He was good company when he was awake. He was refined, sensitive, charming, gentle, generous, honest himself and unsuspicious of other people's honesty, and I think he was the purest male I have known, in mind and speech. George Dolby was something of a contrast to him, but the two were very friendly and sociable together, nevertheless. Dolby was large and ruddy, full of life and strength and spirits, a tireless and energetic talker, and always overflowing with good-nature and bursting with jollity. It was a choice and satisfactory menagerie, this pensive poet and this gladsome gorilla. An indelicate story was a sharp distress to Stoddard; Dolby told him twenty-five a day. Dolby always came home with us after the lecture, and entertained Stoddard till midnight. Me too. After he left, I walked the floor and talked, and Stoddard went to sleep on the sofa. I hired him for company. Dolby had been agent for concerts, and theatres, and Charles Dickens and all sorts of shows and "attractions" for many years; he had known the human being in many aspects, and he didn't much believe in him. But the poet did. The waifs and estrays found a friend in Stoddard: Dolby tried to persuade him that he was dispensing his charities unworthily, but he was never able to succeed. One night a young American got access to Stoddard at the Concert Rooms and told him a moving tale. He said he was living on the Surrey side, and for some strange reason his remittances had failed to arrive from home; he had no money, he was out of employment, and friendless; his girl-wife and his new baby were actually suffering for food; for the love of heaven could he lend him a sovereign until his remittances should resume? Stoddard was deeply touched, and gave him a sovereign on my account. Dolby scoffed, but Stoddard stood his ground. Each told me his story later in the evening, and I backed Stoddard's judgment. Dolby said we were women in disguise, and not a sane kind of women, either. The next week the young man came again. His wife was ill with the pleurisy, the baby had the bots, or something, I am not sure of the name of the disease; the doctor and the drugs had eaten up the money, the poor little family was starving. If Stoddard "in the kindness of his heart could only spare him another sovereign," etc., etc. Stoddard was much moved, and spared him a sovereign for me. Dolby was outraged. He spoke up and said to the customer-- "Now, young man, you are going to the hotel with us and state your case to the other member of the family. If you don't make him believe in you I sha'n't honor this poet's drafts in your interest any longer, for I don't believe in you myself." The young man was quite willing. I found no fault in him. On the contrary, I believed in him at once, and was solicitous to heal the wounds inflicted by Dolby's too frank incredulity; therefore I did everything I could think of to cheer him up and entertain him and make him feel at home and comfortable. I spun many yarns; among others the tale of Jim Wolf and the Cats. Learning that he had done something in a small way in literature, I offered to try to find a market for him in that line. His face lighted joyfully at that, and he said that if I could only sell a small manuscript to Tom Hood's Annual for him it would be the happiest event of his sad life and he would hold me in grateful remembrance always. That was a most pleasant night for three of us, but Dolby was disgusted and sarcastic. Next week the baby died. Meantime I had spoken to Tom Hood and gained his sympathy. The young man had sent his manuscript to him, and the very day the child died the money for the MS. came--three guineas. The young man came with a poor little strip of crape around his arm and thanked me, and said that nothing could have been more timely than that money, and that his poor little wife was grateful beyond words for the service I had rendered. He wept, and in fact Stoddard and I wept with him, which was but natural. Also Dolby wept. At least he wiped his eyes and wrung out his handkerchief, and sobbed stertorously and made other exaggerated shows of grief. Stoddard and I were ashamed of Dolby, and tried to make the young man understand that he meant no harm, it was only his way. The young man said sadly that he was not minding it, his grief was too deep for other hurts; that he was only thinking of the funeral, and the heavy expenses which-- We cut that short and told him not to trouble about it, leave it all to us; send the bills to Mr. Dolby and-- "Yes," said Dolby, with a mock tremor in his voice, "send them to me, and I will pay them. What, are you going? You must not go alone in your worn and broken condition; Mr. Stoddard and I will go with you. Come, Stoddard. We will comfort the bereaved mamma and get a lock of the baby's hair." It was shocking. We were ashamed of him again, and said so. But he was not disturbed. He said-- "Oh, I know this kind, the woods are full of them. I'll make this offer: if he will show me his family I will give him twenty pounds. Come!" The young man said he would not remain to be insulted; and he said good-night and took his hat. But Dolby said he would go with him, and stay by him until he found the family. Stoddard went along to soothe the young man and modify Dolby. They drove across the river and all over Southwark, but did not find the family. At last the young man confessed there wasn't any. The thing he sold to Tom Hood's Annual was "Jim and the Cats." And he did not put my name to it. So that small tale was sold three times. I am selling it again, now. It is one of the best properties I have come across. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTES: [9] The colored butler. [10] See "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." [11] Used in "Huck Finn," I think. [12] Used in "Tom Sawyer." NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXV. MAY 17, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XVIII. BY MARK TWAIN. [_Dictated December 21, 1906._] I wish to insert here some pages of Susy's Biography of me in which the biographer does not scatter, according to her custom, but sticks pretty steadily to a single subject until she has fought it to a finish: _Feb. 27, '86._--Last summer while we were in Elmira an article came out in the "Christian Union" by name "What ought he to have done" treating of the government of children, or rather giving an account of a fathers battle with his little baby boy, by the mother of the child and put in the form of a question as to whether the father disciplined the child corectly or not, different people wrote their opinions of the fathers behavior, and told what they thought he should have done. Mamma had long known how to disciplin children, for in fact the bringing up of children had been one of her specialties for many years. She had a great many theories, but one of them was, that if a child was big enough to be nauty, it was big enough to be whipped and here we all agreed with her. I remember one morning when Dr. ---- came up to the farm he had a long discussion with mamma, upon the following topic. Mamma gave _this_ as illustrative of one important rule for punishing a child. She said we will suppose the boy has thrown a handkerchief onto the floor, I tell him to pick it up, he refuses. I tell him again, he refuses. Then I say you must either pick up the handkerchief or have a whipping. My theory is never to make a child have a whipping and pick up the handkerchief too. I say "If you do not pick it up, I must punish you," if he doesn't he gets the whipping, but _I_ pick up the handkerchief, if he does he gets no punishment. I tell him to do a thing if he disobeys me he is punished for so doing, but not forced to obey me afterwards. When Clara and I had been very nauty or were being very nauty, the nurse would go and call Mamma and she would appear suddenly and look at us (she had a way of looking at us when she was displeased as if she could see right through us) till we were ready to sink through the floor from embarasment, and total absence of knowing what to say. This look was usually followed with "Clara" or "Susy what do you mean by this? do you want to come to the bath-room with me?" Then followed the climax for Clara and I both new only too well what going to the bath-room meant. But mamma's first and foremost object was to make the child understand that he is being punished for _his_ sake, and because the mother so loves him that she cannot allow him to do wrong; also that it is as hard for her to punish him as for him to be punished and even harder. Mamma never allowed herself to punish us when she was angry with us she never struck us because she was enoyed at us and felt like striking us if we had been nauty and had enoyed her, so that she thought she felt or would show the least bit of temper toward us while punnishing us, she always postponed the punishment until _she_ was no more chafed by our behavior. She never humored herself by striking or punishing us because or while she was the least bit enoyed with us. Our very worst nautinesses were punished by being taken to the bath-room and being whipped by the paper cutter. But after the whipping was over, mamma did not allow us to leave her until we were perfectly happy, and perfectly understood why we had been whipped. I never remember having felt the least bit bitterly toward mamma for punishing me. I always felt I had deserved my punishment, and was much happier for having received it. For after mamma had punished us and shown her displeasure, she showed no signs of further displeasure, but acted as if we had not displeased her in any way. Ordinary punishments answered very well for Susy. She was a thinker, and would reason out the purpose of them, apply the lesson, and achieve the reform required. But it was much less easy to devise punishments that would reform Clara. This was because she was a philosopher who was always turning her attention to finding something good and satisfactory and entertaining in everything that came her way; consequently it was sometimes pretty discouraging to the troubled mother to find that after all her pains and thought in inventing what she meant to be a severe and reform-compelling punishment, the child had entirely missed the severities through her native disposition to get interest and pleasure out of them as novelties. The mother, in her anxiety to find a penalty that would take sharp hold and do its work effectively, at last resorted, with a sore heart, and with a reproachful conscience, to that punishment which the incorrigible criminal in the penitentiary dreads above all the other punitive miseries which the warden inflicts upon him for his good--solitary confinement in the dark chamber. The grieved and worried mother shut Clara up in a very small clothes-closet and went away and left her there--for fifteen minutes--it was all that the mother-heart could endure. Then she came softly back and listened--listened for the sobs, but there weren't any; there were muffled and inarticulate sounds, but they could not be construed into sobs. The mother waited half an hour longer; by that time she was suffering so intensely with sorrow and compassion for the little prisoner that she was not able to wait any longer for the distressed sounds which she had counted upon to inform her when there had been punishment enough and the reform accomplished. She opened the closet to set the prisoner free and take her back into her loving favor and forgiveness, but the result was not the one expected. The captive had manufactured a fairy cavern out of the closet, and friendly fairies out of the clothes hanging from the hooks, and was having a most sinful and unrepentant good time, and requested permission to spend the rest of the day there! _From Susy's Biography of Me._ But Mamma's oppinions and ideas upon the subject of bringing up children has always been more or less of a joke in our family, perticularly since Papa's article in the "Christian Union," and I am sure Clara and I have related the history of our old family paper-cutter, our punishments and privations with rather more pride and triumph than any other sentiment, because of Mamma's way of rearing us. When the article "What ought he to have done?" came out Mamma read it, and was very much interested in it. And when papa heard that she had read it he went to work and secretly wrote his opinion of what the father ought to have done. He told Aunt Susy, Clara and I, about it but mamma was not to see it or hear any thing about it till it came out. He gave it to Aunt Susy to read, and after Clara and I had gone up to get ready for bed he brought it up for us to read. He told what he thought the father ought to have done by telling what mamma would have done. The article was a beautiful tribute to mamma and every word in it true. But still in writing about mamma he partly forgot that the article was going to be published, I think, and expressed himself more fully than he would do the second time he wrote it; I think the article has done and will do a great deal of good, and I think it would have been perfect for the family and friend's enjoyment, but a little bit too private to have been published as it was. And Papa felt so too, because the very next day or a few days after, he went down to New York to see if he couldn't get it back before it was published but it was too late, and he had to return without it. When the Christian Union reached the farm and papa's article in it all ready and waiting to be read to mamma papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't but he might have let it go and never let her see it, but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told Clara and I we could take it to her, which we did, with tardiness, and we all stood around mamma while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. She was too much surprised, (and pleased privately, too) to say much at first, but as we all expected publicly, (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the Christian Union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. Clara and I had great fun the night papa gave it to us to read and then hide, so mamma couldn't see it, for just as we were in the midst of reading it mamma appeared, papa following anxiously and asked why we were not in bed? then a scuffle ensued for we told her it was a secret and tried to hide it; but she chased us wherever we went, till she thought it was time for us to go to bed, then she surendered and left us to tuck it under Clara's matress. A little while after the article was published letters began to come in to papa crittisizing it, there were some very pleasant ones but a few very disagreable. One of these, the very worst, mamma got hold of and read, to papa's great regret, it was full of the most disagreble things, and so very enoying to papa that he for a time felt he must do something to show the author of it his great displeasure at being so insulted. But he finally decided not to, because he felt the man had some cause for feeling enoyed at, for papa had spoken of him, (he was the baby's father) rather slightingly in his Christian Union Article. After all this, papa and mamma both wished I think they might never hear or be spoken to on the subject of the Christian Union article, and whenever any has spoken to me and told me "How much they did enjoy my father's article in the Christian Union" I almost laughed in their faces when I remembered what a great variety of oppinions had been expressed upon the subject of the Christian Union article of papa's. The article was written in July or August and just the other day papa received quite a bright letter from a gentleman who has read the C. U. article and gave his opinion of it in these words. It is missing. She probably put the letter between the leaves of the Biography and it got lost out. She threw away the hostile letters, but tried to keep the pleasantest one for her book; surely there has been no kindlier biographer than this one. Yet to a quite creditable degree she is loyal to the responsibilities of her position as historian--not eulogist--and honorably gives me a quiet prod now and then. But how many, many, many she has withheld that I deserved! I could prize them now; there would be no acid in her words, and it is loss to me that she did not set them all down. Oh, Susy, you sweet little biographer, you break my old heart with your gentle charities! I think a great deal of her work. Her canvases are on their easels, and her brush flies about in a care-free and random way, delivering a dash here, a dash there and another yonder, and one might suppose that there would be no definite result; on the contrary I think that an intelligent reader of her little book must find that by the time he has finished it he has somehow accumulated a pretty clear and nicely shaded idea of the several members of this family--including Susy herself--and that the random dashes on the canvases have developed into portraits. I feel that my own portrait, with some of the defects fined down and others left out, is here; and I am sure that any who knew the mother will recognize her without difficulty, and will say that the lines are drawn with a just judgment and a sure hand. Little creature though Susy was, the penetration which was born in her finds its way to the surface more than once in these pages. Before Susy began the Biography she let fall a remark now and then concerning my character which showed that she had it under observation. In the Record which we kept of the children's sayings there is an instance of this. She was twelve years old at the time. We had established a rule that each member of the family must bring a fact to breakfast--a fact drawn from a book or from any other source; any fact would answer. Susy's first contribution was in substance as follows. Two great exiles and former opponents in war met in Ephesus--Scipio and Hannibal. Scipio asked Hannibal to name the greatest general the world had produced. "Alexander"--and he explained why. "And the next greatest?" "Pyrrhus"--and he explained why. "But where do you place yourself, then?" "If I had conquered you I would place myself before the others." Susy's grave comment was-- "That _attracted_ me, it was just like papa--he is so frank about his books." So frank in admiring them, she meant. [_Thursday, March 28, 1907._] Some months ago I commented upon a chapter of Susy's Biography wherein she very elaborately discussed an article about the training and disciplining of children, which I had published in the "Christian Union" (this was twenty-one years ago), an article which was full of worshipful praises of Mrs. Clemens as a mother, and which little Clara, and Susy, and I had been hiding from this lovely and admirable mother because we knew she would disapprove of public and printed praises of herself. At the time that I was dictating these comments, several months ago, I was trying to call back to my memory some of the details of that article, but I was not able to do it, and I wished I had a copy of the article so that I could see what there was about it which gave it such large interest for Susy. Yesterday afternoon I elected to walk home from the luncheon at the St. Regis, which is in 56th Street and Fifth Avenue, for it was a fine spring day and I hadn't had a walk for a year or two, and felt the need of exercise. As I walked along down Fifth Avenue the desire to see that "Christian Union" article came into my head again. I had just reached the corner of 42nd Street then, and there was the usual jam of wagons, carriages, and automobiles there. I stopped to let it thin out before trying to cross the street, but a stranger, who didn't require as much room as I do, came racing by and darted into a crack among the vehicles and made the crossing. But on his way past me he thrust a couple of ancient newspaper clippings into my hand, and said, "There, you don't know me, but I have saved them in my scrap-book for twenty years, and it occurred to me this morning that perhaps you would like to see them, so I was carrying them down-town to mail them, I not expecting to run across you in this accidental way, of course; but I will give them into your own hands now. Good-by!"--and he disappeared among the wagons. Those scraps which he had put into my hand were ancient newspaper copies of that "Christian Union" article! It is a handsome instance of mental telegraphy--or if it isn't that, it is a handsome case of coincidence. _From the Biography._ _March 14th, '86._--Mr. Laurence Barrette and Mr. and Mrs. Hutton were here a little while ago, and we had a very interesting visit from them. Papa said Mr. Barette never had acted so well before when he had seen him, as he did the first night he was staying with us. And Mrs. ---- said she never had seen an actor on the stage, whom she more wanted to speak with. Papa has been very much interested of late, in the "Mind Cure" theory. And in fact so have we all. A young lady in town has worked wonders by using the "Mind Cure" upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples deseases in this way--and curing her own even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. A little while past, papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. This starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. Now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the mind cure connected with the starving. I shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in Mind Cure. The next time papa has a cold, I haven't a doubt, he will send for Miss H---- the young lady who is doctoring in the "Mind Cure" theory, to cure him of it. Mamma was over at Mrs. George Warners to lunch the other day, and Miss H---- was there too. Mamma asked if anything as natural as near sightedness could be cured she said oh yes just as well as other deseases. When mamma came home, she took me into her room, and told me that perhaps my near-sightedness could be cured by the "Mind Cure" and that she was going to have me try the treatment any way, there could be no harm in it, and there might be great good. If her plan succeeds there certainly will be a great deal in "Mind Cure" to my oppinion, for I am very near sighted and so is mamma, and I never expected there could be any more cure for it than for blindness, but now I dont know but what theres a cure for _that_. It was a disappointment; her near-sightedness remained with her to the end. She was born with it, no doubt; yet, strangely enough, she must have been four years old, and possibly five, before we knew of its existence. It is not easy to understand how that could have happened. I discovered the defect by accident. I was half-way up the hall stairs one day at home, and was leading her by the hand, when I glanced back through the open door of the dining-room and saw what I thought she would recognise as a pretty picture. It was "Stray Kit," the slender, the graceful, the sociable, the beautiful, the incomparable, the cat of cats, the tortoise-shell, curled up as round as a wheel and sound asleep on the fire-red cover of the dining-table, with a brilliant stream of sunlight falling across her. I exclaimed about it, but Susy said she could see nothing there, neither cat nor table-cloth. The distance was so slight--not more than twenty feet, perhaps--that if it had been any other child I should not have credited the statement. _From the Biography._ _March 14th, '86._--Clara sprained her ankle, a little while ago, by running into a tree, when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. While Clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much, he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little, then Jean took it up, and at last _mamma_, even played it ocasionally; Jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now Jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mamma help her play, and before dinner is at an end, papa has gotten a separate pack of cards, and is playing alone, with great interest. Mamma and Clara next are made subject to the contagious solatair, and there are four solotaireans at the table; while you hear nothing but "Fill up the place" etc. It is dreadful! after supper Clara goes into the library, and gets a little red mahogany table, and placing it under the gas fixture seats herself and begins to play again, then papa follows with another table of the same discription, and they play solatair till bedtime. We have just had our Prince and Pauper pictures taken; two groups and some little single ones. The groups (the Interview and Lady Jane Grey scene) were pretty good, the lady Jane scene was perfect, just as pretty as it could be, the Interview was not so good; and two of the little single pictures were very good indeed, but one was very bad. Yet on the whole we think they were a success. Papa has done a great deal in his life I think, that is good, and very remarkable, but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way for other peoples pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done _more_ than he has and a great deal more even. He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. He has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. He has been through a great many of the funny adventures related in "Tom Sawyer" and in "Huckleberry Finn," _himself_ and he lived among just such boys, and in just such villages all the days of his early life. His "Prince and Pauper" is his most orriginal, and best production; it shows the most of any of his books what kind of pictures are in his mind, usually. Not that the pictures of England in the 16th Century and the adventures of a little prince and pauper are the kind of things he mainly thinks about; but that _that_ book, and those pictures represent the train of thought and imagination he would be likely to be thinking of to-day, to-morrow, or next day, more nearly than those given in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn."[13] Papa can make exceedingly bright jokes, and he enjoys funny things, and when he is with people he jokes and laughs a great deal, but still he is more interested in earnest books and earnest subjects to talk upon, than in humorous ones.[14] When we are all alone at home, nine times out of ten, he talks about some very earnest subjects, (with an ocasional joke thrown in) and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much of a Pholosopher as anything I think. I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. Thus at fourteen she had made up her mind about me, and in no timorous or uncertain terms had set down her reasons for her opinion. Fifteen years were to pass before any other critic--except Mr. Howells, I think--was to reutter that daring opinion and print it. Right or wrong, it was a brave position for that little analyser to take. She never withdrew it afterward, nor modified it. She has spoken of herself as lacking physical courage, and has evinced her admiration of Clara's; but she had moral courage, which is the rarest of human qualities, and she kept it functionable by exercising it. I think that in questions of morals and politics she was usually on my side; but when she was not she had her reasons and maintained her ground. Two years after she passed out of my life I wrote a Philosophy. Of the three persons who have seen the manuscript only one understood it, and all three condemned it. If she could have read it, she also would have condemned it, possibly,--probably, in fact--but she would have understood it. It would have had no difficulties for her on that score; also she would have found a tireless pleasure in analyzing and discussing its problems. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTES: [13] It is so yet--M. T. [14] She has said it well and correctly. Humor is a subject which has never had much interest for me. This is why I have never examined it, nor written about it nor used it as a topic for a speech. A hundred times it has been offered me as a topic in these past forty years, but in no case has it attracted me.--M. T. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXVI. JUNE 7, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XIX. BY MARK TWAIN. _From Susy's Biography of Me._ _March 23, '86._--The other day was my birthday, and I had a little birthday party in the evening and papa acted some very funny charades with Mr. Gherhardt, Mr. Jesse Grant (who had come up from New York and was spending the evening with us) and Mr. Frank Warner. One of them was "on his knees" honys-sneeze. There were a good many other funny ones, all of which I dont remember. Mr. Grant was very pleasant, and began playing the charades in the most delightful way. Susy's spelling has defeated me, this time. I cannot make out what "honys-sneeze" stands for. Impromptu charades were almost a nightly pastime of ours, from the children's earliest days--they played in them with me when they were only five or six years old. As they increased in years and practice their love for the sport almost amounted to a passion, and they acted their parts with a steadily increasing ability. At first they required much drilling; but later they were generally ready as soon as the parts were assigned, and they acted them according to their own devices. Their stage facility and absence of constraint and self-consciousness in the "Prince and Pauper" was a result of their charading practice. At ten and twelve Susy wrote plays, and she and Daisy Warner and Clara played them in the library or up-stairs in the school-room, with only themselves and the servants for audience. They were of a tragic and tremendous sort, and were performed with great energy and earnestness. They were dramatized (freely) from English history, and in them Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth had few holidays. The clothes were borrowed from the mother's wardrobe and the gowns were longer than necessary, but that was not regarded as a defect. In one of these plays Jean (three years old, perhaps) was Sir Francis Bacon. She was not dressed for the part, and did not have to say anything, but sat silent and decorous at a tiny table and was kept busy signing death-warrants. It was a really important office, for few entered those plays and got out of them alive. _March 26._--Mamma and Papa have been in New York for two or three days, and Miss Corey has been staying with us. They are coming home to-day at two o'clock. Papa has just begun to play chess, and he is very fond of it, so he has engaged to play with Mrs. Charles Warner every morning from 10 to 12, he came down to supper last night, full of this pleasant prospect, but evidently with something on his mind. Finally he said to mamma in an appologetical tone, Susy Warner and I have a plan. "Well" mamma said "what now, I wonder?" Papa said that Susy Warner and he were going to name the chess after some of the old bible heroes, and then play chess on Sunday. _April 18, '86._--Mamma and papa Clara and Daisy have gone to New York to see the "Mikado." They are coming home to-night at half past seven. Last winter when Mr. Cable was lecturing with papa, he wrote this letter to him just before he came to visit us. DEAR UNCLE,--That's one nice thing about me, I never bother any one, to offer me a good thing twice. You dont ask me to stay over Sunday, but then you dont ask me to leave Saturday night, and knowing the nobility of your nature as I do--thank you, I'll stay till Monday morning.[15] Your's and the dear familie's GEORGE W. CABLE. [_December 22, 1906._] It seems a prodigious while ago! Two or three nights ago I dined at a friend's house with a score of other men, and at my side was Cable--actually almost an old man, really almost an old man, that once so young chap! 62 years old, frost on his head, seven grandchildren in stock, and a brand-new wife to re-begin life with! [_Dictated Nov. 19, 1906._] Ever since papa and mamma were married, papa has written his books and then taken them to mamma in manuscript and she has expergated them. Papa read "Huckleberry Finn" to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that Clara and I used to delight in, and oh with what dispair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. But we gradually came to feel as mamma did. It would be a pity to replace the vivacity and quaintness and felicity of Susy's innocent free spelling with the dull and petrified uniformities of the spelling-book. Nearly all the grimness it taken out of the "expergating" of my books by the subtle mollification accidentally infused into the word by Susy's modification of the spelling of it. I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that specially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the "exper-gator" alive. It is possible, for I had that custom. Susy's quaint and effective spelling falls quite opportunely into to-day's atmosphere, which is heavy with the rumblings and grumblings and mutterings of the Simplified Spelling Reform. Andrew Carnegie started this storm, a couple of years ago, by moving a simplifying of English orthography, and establishing a fund for the prosecution and maintenance of the crusade. He began gently. He addressed a circular to some hundreds of his friends, asking them to simplify the spelling of a dozen of our badly spelt words--I think they were only words which end with the superfluous _ugh_. He asked that these friends use the suggested spellings in their private correspondence. By this, one perceives that the beginning was sufficiently quiet and unaggressive. Next stage: a small committee was appointed, with Brander Matthews for managing director and spokesman. It issued a list of three hundred words, of average silliness as to spelling, and proposed new and sane spellings for these words. The President of the United States, unsolicited, adopted these simplified three hundred officially, and ordered that they be used in the official documents of the Government. It was now remarked, by all the educated and the thoughtful except the clergy that Sheol was to pay. This was most justly and comprehensively descriptive. The indignant British lion rose, with a roar that was heard across the Atlantic, and stood there on his little isle, gazing, red-eyed, out over the glooming seas, snow-flecked with driving spindrift, and lathing his tail--a most scary spectacle to see. The lion was outraged because we, a nation of children, without any grown-up people among us, with no property in the language, but using it merely by courtesy of its owner the English nation, were trying to defile the sacredness of it by removing from it peculiarities which had been its ornament and which had made it holy and beautiful for ages. In truth there is a certain sardonic propriety in preserving our orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime. Why is it that I have intruded into this turmoil and manifested a desire to get our orthography purged of its asininities? Indeed I do not know why I should manifest any interest in the matter, for at bottom I disrespect our orthography most heartily, and as heartily disrespect everything that has been said by anybody in defence of it. Nothing professing to be a defence of our ludicrous spellings has had any basis, so far as my observation goes, except sentimentality. In these "arguments" the term venerable is used instead of mouldy, and hallowed instead of devilish; whereas there is nothing properly venerable or antique about a language which is not yet four hundred years old, and about a jumble of imbecile spellings which were grotesque in the beginning, and which grow more and more grotesque with the flight of the years. [_Dictated Monday, November 30, 1906._] Jean and Papa were walking out past the barn the other day when Jean saw some little newly born baby ducks, she exclaimed as she perceived them "I dont see why God gives us so much ducks when Patrick kills them so." Susy is mistaken as to the origin of the ducks. They were not a gift, I bought them. I am not finding fault with her, for that would be most unfair. She is remarkably accurate in her statements as a historian, as a rule, and it would not be just to make much of this small slip of hers; besides I think it was a quite natural slip, for by heredity and habit ours was a religious household, and it was a common thing with us whenever anybody did a handsome thing, to give the credit of it to Providence, without examining into the matter. This may be called automatic religion--in fact that is what it is; it is so used to its work that it can do it without your help or even your privity; out of all the facts and statistics that may be placed before it, it will always get the one result, since it has never been taught to seek any other. It is thus the unreflecting cause of much injustice. As we have seen, it betrayed Susy into an injustice toward me. It had to be automatic, for she would have been far from doing me an injustice when in her right mind. It was a dear little biographer, and she meant me no harm, and I am not censuring her now, but am only desirous of correcting in advance an erroneous impression which her words would be sure to convey to a reader's mind. No elaboration of this matter is necessary; it is sufficient to say _I_ provided the ducks. It was in Hartford. The greensward sloped down-hill from the house to the sluggish little river that flowed through the grounds, and Patrick, who was fertile in good ideas, had early conceived the idea of having home-made ducks for our table. Every morning he drove them from the stable down to the river, and the children were always there to see and admire the waddling white procession; they were there again at sunset to see Patrick conduct the procession back to its lodgings in the stable. But this was not always a gay and happy holiday show, with joy in it for the witnesses; no, too frequently there was a tragedy connected with it, and then there were tears and pain for the children. There was a stranded log or two in the river, and on these certain families of snapping-turtles used to congregate and drowse in the sun and give thanks, in their dumb way, to Providence for benevolence extended to them. It was but another instance of misplaced credit; it was the young ducks that those pious reptiles were so thankful for--whereas they were _my_ ducks. I bought the ducks. When a crop of young ducks, not yet quite old enough for the table but approaching that age, began to join the procession, and paddle around in the sluggish water, and give thanks--not to me--for that privilege, the snapping-turtles would suspend their songs of praise and slide off the logs and paddle along under the water and chew the feet of the young ducks. Presently Patrick would notice that two or three of those little creatures were not moving about, but were apparently at anchor, and were not looking as thankful as they had been looking a short time before. He early found out what that sign meant--a submerged snapping-turtle was taking his breakfast, and silently singing his gratitude. Every day or two Patrick would rescue and fetch up a little duck with incomplete legs to stand upon--nothing left of their extremities but gnawed and bleeding stumps. Then the children said pitying things and wept--and at dinner we finished the tragedy which the turtles had begun. Thus, as will be seen--out of season, at least--it was really the turtles that gave us so much ducks. At my expense. Papa has written a new version of "There is a happy land" it is-- "There is a boarding-house Far, far away, Where they have ham and eggs, Three times a day. Oh dont those boarders yell When they hear the dinner-bell, They give that land-lord rats Three times a day." Again Susy has made a small error. It was not I that wrote the song. I heard Billy Rice sing it in the negro minstrel show, and I brought it home and sang it--with great spirit--for the elevation of the household. The children admired it to the limit, and made me sing it with burdensome frequency. To their minds it was superior to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. How many years ago that was! Where now is Billy Rice? He was a joy to me, and so were the other stars of the nigger-show--Billy Birch, David Wambold, Backus, and a delightful dozen of their brethren, who made life a pleasure to me forty years ago, and later. Birch, Wambold, and Backus are gone years ago; and with them departed to return no more forever, I suppose, the real nigger-show--the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show,--the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience. We have the grand opera; and I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide. But if I could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera. It seems to me that to the elevated mind and the sensitive spirit the hand-organ and the nigger-show are a standard and a summit to whose rarefied altitude the other forms of musical art may not hope to reach. [_Dictated September 5, 1906._] It is years since I have examined "The Children's Record." I have turned over a few of its pages this morning. This book is a record in which Mrs. Clemens and I registered some of the sayings and doings of the children, in the long ago, when they were little chaps. Of course, we wrote these things down at the time because they were of momentary interest--things of the passing hour, and of no permanent value--but at this distant day I find that they still possess an interest for me and also a value, because it turns out that they were _registrations of character_. The qualities then revealed by fitful glimpses, in childish acts and speeches, remained as a permanency in the children's characters in the drift of the years, and were always afterwards clearly and definitely recognizable. There is a masterful streak in Jean that now and then moves her to set my authority aside for a moment and end a losing argument in that prompt and effective fashion. And here in this old book I find evidence that she was just like that before she was quite four years old. _From The Children's Record. Quarry Farm, July 7, 1884._--Yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshipped by Jean from the shed for an hour,) wandered off down into the pasture, and left her bereft. I thought I was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. Jean knew of some more cows, in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. When we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, I saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so I began to argue against continuing the expedition, and Jean began to argue in favor of it--she using English for light skirmishing, and German for "business." I kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till I judged I had her about cornered. She hesitated a moment, then answered up sharply: "_Wir werden nichts mehr darüber sprechen!_" (We won't talk any more about it!) It nearly took my breath away; though I thought I might possibly have misunderstood. I said: "Why, you little rascal! _Was hast du gesagt?_" But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. I suppose I ought to have been outraged; but I wasn't, I was charmed. And I suppose I ought to have spanked her; but I didn't, I fraternized with the enemy, and we went on and spent half an hour with the cows. That incident is followed in the "Record" by the following paragraph, which is another instance of a juvenile characteristic maintaining itself into mature age. Susy was persistently and conscientiously truthful throughout her life with the exception of one interruption covering several months, and perhaps a year. This was while she was still a little child. Suddenly--not gradually--she began to lie; not furtively, but frankly, openly, and on a scale quite disproportioned to her size. Her mother was so stunned, so nearly paralyzed for a day or two, that she did not know what to do with the emergency. Reasonings, persuasions, beseechings, all went for nothing; they produced no effect; the lying went tranquilly on. Other remedies were tried, but they failed. There is a tradition that success was finally accomplished by whipping. I think the Record says so, but if it does it is because the Record is incomplete. Whipping was indeed tried, and was faithfully kept up during two or three weeks, but the results were merely temporary; the reforms achieved were discouragingly brief. Fortunately for Susy, an incident presently occurred which put a complete stop to all the mother's efforts in the direction of reform. This incident was the chance discovery in Darwin of a passage which said that when a child exhibits a sudden and unaccountable disposition to forsake the truth and restrict itself to lying, the explanation must be sought away back in the past; that an ancestor of the child had had the same disease, at the same tender age; that it was irremovable by persuasion or punishment, and that it had ceased as suddenly and as mysteriously as it had come, when it had run its appointed course. I think Mr. Darwin said that nothing was necessary but to leave the matter alone and let the malady have its way and perish by the statute of limitations. We had confidence in Darwin, and after that day Susy was relieved of our reformatory persecutions. She went on lying without let or hindrance during several months, or a year; then the lying suddenly ceased, and she became as conscientiously and exactingly truthful as she had been before the attack, and she remained so to the end of her life. The paragraph in the Record to which I have been leading up is in my handwriting, and is of a date so long posterior to the time of the lying malady that she had evidently forgotten that truth-speaking had ever had any difficulties for her. Mama was speaking of a servant who had been pretty unveracious, but was now "trying to tell the truth." Susy was a good deal surprised, and said she shouldn't think anybody would have to _try_ to tell the truth. In the Record the children's acts and speeches quite definitely define their characters. Susy's indicated the presence of mentality-- thought--and they were generally marked by gravity. She was timid, on her physical side, but had an abundance of moral courage. Clara was sturdy, independent, orderly, practical, persistent, plucky--just a little animal, and very satisfactory. Charles Dudley Warner said Susy was made of mind, and Clara of matter. When Motley, the kitten, died, some one said that the thoughts of the two children need not be inquired into, they could be divined: that Susy was wondering if this was the _end_ of Motley, and had his life been worth while; whereas Clara was merely interested in seeing to it that there should be a creditable funeral. In those days Susy was a dreamer, a thinker, a poet and philosopher, and Clara--well, Clara wasn't. In after-years a passion for music developed the latent spirituality and intellectuality in Clara, and her practicality took second and, in fact, even third place. Jean was from the beginning orderly, steady, diligent, persistent; and remains so. She picked up languages easily, and kept them. _Susy aged eleven, Jean three._--Susy said the other day when she saw Jean bringing a cat to me of her own motion, "Jean has found out already that mamma loves morals and papa loves cats." It is another of Susy's remorselessly sound verdicts. As a child, Jean neglected my books. When she was nine years old Will Gillette invited her and the rest of us to a dinner at the Murray Hill Hotel in New York, in order that we might get acquainted with Mrs. Leslie and her daughters. Elsie Leslie was nine years old, and was a great celebrity on the stage. Jean was astonished and awed to see that little slip of a thing sit up at table and take part in the conversation of the grown people, capably and with ease and tranquillity. Poor Jean was obliged to keep still, for the subjects discussed never happened to hit her level, but at last the talk fell within her limit and she had her chance to contribute to it. "Tom Sawyer" was mentioned. Jean spoke gratefully up and said, "I know who wrote that book--Harriet Beecher Stowe!" One evening Susy had prayed, Clara was curled up for sleep; she was reminded that it was her turn to pray now. She laid "Oh! one's enough," and dropped off to slumber. _Clara five years old._--We were in Germany. The nurse, Rosa, was not allowed to speak to the children otherwise than in German. Clara grew very tired of it; by and by the little creature's patience was exhausted, and she said "Aunt Clara, I wish God had made Rosa in English." _Clara four years old, Susy six._--This morning when Clara discovered that this is my birthday, she was greatly troubled because she had provided no gift for me, and repeated her sorrow several times. Finally she went musing to the nursery and presently returned with her newest and dearest treasure, a large toy horse, and said, "You shall have this horse for your birthday, papa." I accepted it with many thanks. After an hour she was racing up and down the room with the horse, when Susy said, "Why Clara, you gave that horse to papa, and now you've tooken it again." _Clara._--"I never give it to him for always; I give it to him for his birthday." In Geneva, in September, I lay abed late one morning, and as Clara was passing through the room I took her on my bed a moment. Then the child went to Clara Spaulding and said, "Aunt Clara, papa is a good deal of trouble to me." "Is he? Why?" "Well, he wants me to get in bed with him, and I can't do that with jelmuls [gentlemen]--I don't like jelmuls anyway." "What, you don't like gentlemen! Don't you like Uncle Theodore Crane?" "Oh yes, but he's not a jelmul, he's a friend." MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [15] Cable never travelled Sundays. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXVIII. JULY 5, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XX. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1868.)] [_Notes on "Innocents Abroad." Dictated in Florence, Italy, April, 1904._]--I will begin with a note upon the dedication. I wrote the book in the months of March and April, 1868, in San Francisco. It was published in August, 1869. Three years afterward Mr. Goodman, of Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before, came East, and we were walking down Broadway one day when he said: "How did you come to steal Oliver Wendell Holmes's dedication and put it in your book?" I made a careless and inconsequential answer, for I supposed he was joking. But he assured me that he was in earnest. He said: "I'm not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't--for that is a question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to--I am only asking you _how_ you came to steal it, for that is where my curiosity is focalized." I couldn't accommodate him with this information, as I hadn't it in stock. I could have made oath that I had not stolen anything, therefore my vanity was not hurt nor my spirit troubled. At bottom I supposed that he had mistaken another book for mine, and was now getting himself into an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me. We entered a bookstore and he asked for "The Innocents Abroad" and for the dainty little blue and gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's poems. He opened the books, exposed their dedications and said: "Read them. It is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one, isn't it?" I was very much ashamed, and unspeakably astonished. We continued our walk, but I was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original question of his. I could not remember ever having seen Dr. Holmes's dedication. I knew the poems, but the dedication was new to me. I did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterward, then it came in a curious way, and yet it was a natural way; for the natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten event for its resurrection. [Sidenote: (1866.)] I received a letter from the Rev. Dr. Rising, who had been rector of the Episcopal church in Virginia City in my time, in which letter Dr. Rising made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the Sandwich Islands six years before; among things he made casual mention of the Honolulu Hotel's poverty in the matter of literature. At first I did not see the bearing of the remark, it called nothing to my mind. But presently it did--with a flash! There was but one book in Mr. Kirchhof's hotel, and that was the first volume of Dr. Holmes's blue and gold series. I had had a fortnight's chance to get well acquainted with its contents, for I had ridden around the big island (Hawaii) on horseback and had brought back so many saddle boils that if there had been a duty on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it. They kept me in my room, unclothed, and in persistent pain for two weeks, with no company but cigars and the little volume of poems. Of course I read them almost constantly; I read them from beginning to end, then read them backwards, then began in the middle and read them both ways, then read them wrong end first and upside down. In a word, I read the book to rags, and was infinitely grateful to the hand that wrote it. Here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do, when persisted in daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in the course of years dries all the juice out of a familiar verse of Scripture, leaving nothing but a sapless husk behind. In that case you at least know the origin of the husk, but in the case in point I apparently preserved the husk but presently forgot whence it came. It lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two, then came forward when I needed a dedication, and was promptly mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy. I was new, I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair, implored him in impassioned language to believe that I had never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost his answer, I could better have afforded to lose an uncle. Of these I had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was beyond price, beyond uncledom, and unsparable. In it Dr. Holmes laughed the kindest and healingest laugh over the whole matter, and at considerable length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it every day, that he committed it every day, that every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth; that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings; that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us, there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations; that this slight change differentiates it from another man's manner of saying it, stamps it with our special style, and makes it our own for the time being; all the rest of it being old, moldy, antique, and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have passed it over their teeth before! In the thirty-odd years which have come and gone since then, I have satisfied myself that what Dr. Holmes said was true. I wish to make a note upon the preface of the "Innocents." In the last paragraph of that brief preface, I speak of the proprietors of the "Daily Alta California" having "waived their rights" in certain letters which I wrote for that journal while absent on the "Quaker City" trip. I was young then, I am white-headed now, but the insult of that word rankles yet, now that I am reading that paragraph for the first time in many years, reading it for the first time since it was written, perhaps. There were rights, it is true--such rights as the strong are able to acquire over the weak and the absent. Early in '66 George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco "Morning Call," and for some months thereafter I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the "Sacramento Union," a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known honest man on the Pacific Coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor of several theatres, said that now was the time to make my fortune--strike while the iron was hot!--break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark, "Admission one dollar; doors open at half-past 7, the trouble begins at 8." A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at 8, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death, the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired from the field rich--for me--and laid out a plan to sail Westward from San Francisco, and go around the world. The proprietors of the "Alta" engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper--fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about two thousand words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letter. I went East to St. Louis to say good-bye to my mother, and then I was bitten by the prospectus of Captain Duncan of the "Quaker City" excursion, and I ended by joining it. During the trip I wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried, and I wrote six new ones to complete my contract. Then I put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary profit, then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: I had been entirely forgotten, I never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! I inquired into this curious condition of things and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich "Alta" newspaper had _copyrighted_ all those poor little twenty-dollar letters, and had threatened with prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them! And there I was! I had contracted to furnish a large book, concerning the excursion, to the American Publishing Co. of Hartford, and I supposed I should need all those letters to fill it out with. I was in an uncomfortable situation--that is, if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters. That is just what they did; Mr. Mac--something--I have forgotten the rest of his name--said his firm were going to make a book out of the letters in order to get back the thousand dollars which they had paid for them. I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture-skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the "Alta" had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me ten per cent. royalty on it. The compromise did not appeal to me, and I said so. I was now quite unknown outside of San Francisco, the book's sale would be confined to that city, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months; whereas my Eastern contract, if carried out, could be profitable to me, for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic seaboard acquired through the publication of six excursion-letters in the New York "Tribune" and one or two in the "Herald." In the end Mr. Mac agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the "Alta" for waiving "rights" and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the "Alta" for bankrupting my lecture-raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out. [Sidenote: (1902.)] [Sidenote: (1904.)] [Sidenote: (1897.)] Noah Brooks was the editor of the "Alta" at the time, a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential. In biographical sketches of me written many years afterward (1902), he was quite eloquent in praises of the generosity of the "Alta" people in giving to me without compensation a book which, as history had afterward shown, was worth a fortune. After all the fuss, I did not levy heavily upon the "Alta" letters. I found that they were newspaper matter, not book matter. They had been written here and there and yonder, as opportunity had given me a chance working-moment or two during our feverish flight around about Europe or in the furnace-heat of my stateroom on board the "Quaker City," therefore they were loosely constructed, and needed to have some of the wind and water squeezed out of them. I used several of them--ten or twelve, perhaps. I wrote the rest of "The Innocents Abroad" in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight's labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvellously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did two hundred thousand words in the sixty days, the average was more than three thousand words a day--nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called "Following the Equator" my average was eighteen hundred words a day; here in Florence (1904), my average seems to be fourteen hundred words per sitting of four or five hours.[16] I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily in these thirty-six years, but I perceive that my statistics have a defect: three thousand words in the spring of 1868 when I was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." [_Dictated, January 23, 1907._]--The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know it because I have tested it. It did not protect George through the most of his campaign, but it saved him in his last inning, and the veracity of the proverb stood confirmed. [Sidenote: (1865.)] I have several times been saved by this mysterious interposition, when I was manifestly in extreme peril. It has been common, all my life, for smart people to perceive in me an easy prey for selfish designs, and I have walked without suspicion into the trap set for me, yet have often come out unscathed, against all the likelihoods. More than forty years ago, in San Francisco, the office staff adjourned, upon conclusion of its work at two o'clock in the morning, to a great bowling establishment where there were twelve alleys. I was invited, rather perfunctorily, and as a matter of etiquette--by which I mean that I was invited politely, but not urgently. But when I diffidently declined, with thanks, and explained that I knew nothing about the game, those lively young fellows became at once eager and anxious and urgent to have my society. This flattered me, for I perceived no trap, and I innocently and gratefully accepted their invitation. I was given an alley all to myself. The boys explained the game to me, and they also explained to me that there would be an hour's play, and that the player who scored the fewest ten-strikes in the hour would have to provide oysters and beer for the combination. This disturbed me very seriously, since it promised me bankruptcy, and I was sorry that this detail had been overlooked in the beginning. But my pride would not allow me to back out now, so I stayed in, and did what I could to look satisfied and glad I had come. It is not likely that I looked as contented as I wanted to, but the others looked glad enough to make up for it, for they were quite unable to hide their evil joy. They showed me how to stand, and how to stoop, and how to aim the ball, and how to let fly; and then the game began. The results were astonishing. In my ignorance I delivered the balls in apparently every way except the right one; but no matter--during half an hour I never started a ball down the alley that didn't score a ten-strike, every time, at the other end. The others lost their grip early, and their joy along with it. Now and then one of them got a ten-strike, but the occurrence was so rare that it made no show alongside of my giant score. The boys surrendered at the end of the half-hour, and put on their coats and gathered around me and in courteous, but sufficiently definite, language expressed their opinion of an experience-worn and seasoned expert who would stoop to lying and deception in order to rob kind and well-meaning friends who had put their trust in him under the delusion that he was an honest and honorable person. I was not able to convince them that I had not lied, for now my character was gone, and they refused to attach any value to anything I said. The proprietor of the place stood by for a while saying nothing, then he came to my defence. He said: "It looks like a mystery, gentlemen, but it isn't a mystery after it's explained. That is a _grooved_ alley; you've only to start a ball down it any way you please and the groove will do the rest; it will slam the ball against the northeast curve of the head pin every time, and nothing can save the ten from going down." It was true. The boys made the experiment and they found that there was no art that could send a ball down that alley and fail to score a ten-strike with it. When I had told those boys that I knew nothing about that game I was speaking only the truth; but it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it. [Sidenote: (1873.)] A quarter of a century ago I arrived in London to lecture a few weeks under the management of George Dolby, who had conducted the Dickens readings in America five or six years before. He took me to the Albemarle and fed me, and in the course of the dinner he enlarged a good deal, and with great satisfaction, upon his reputation as a player of fifteen-ball pool, and when he learned by my testimony that I had never seen the game played, and knew nothing of the art of pocketing balls, he enlarged more and more, and still more, and kept on enlarging, until I recognized that I was either in the presence of the very father of fifteen-ball pool or in the presence of his most immediate descendant. At the end of the dinner Dolby was eager to introduce me to the game and show me what he could do. We adjourned to the billiard-room and he framed the balls in a flat pyramid and told me to fire at the apex ball and then go on and do what I could toward pocketing the fifteen, after which he would take the cue and show me what a past-master of the game could do with those balls. I did as required. I began with the diffidence proper to my ignorant estate, and when I had finished my inning all the balls were in the pockets and Dolby was burying me under a volcanic irruption of acid sarcasms. So I was a liar in Dolby's belief. He thought he had been sold, and at a cheap rate; but he divided his sarcasms quite fairly and quite equally between the two of us. He was full of ironical admiration of his childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and scandalous American load him up with deceptions of so transparent a character that they ought not to have deceived the house cat. On the other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than he could empty into a basket in a day. In the matter of fifteen-ball pool I never got Dolby's confidence wholly back, though I got it in other ways, and kept it until his death. I have played that game a number of times since, but that first time was the only time in my life that I have ever pocketed all the fifteen in a single inning. [Sidenote: (1876.)] My unsuspicious nature has made it necessary for Providence to save me from traps a number of times. Thirty years ago, a couple of Elmira bankers invited me to play the game of "Quaker" with them. I had never heard of the game before, and said that if it required intellect, I should not be able to entertain them. But they said it was merely a game of chance, and required no mentality--so I agreed to make a trial of it. They appointed four in the afternoon for the sacrifice. As the place, they chose a ground-floor room with a large window in it. Then they went treacherously around and advertised the "sell" which they were going to play upon me. I arrived on time, and we began the game--with a large and eager free-list to superintend it. These superintendents were outside, with their noses pressed against the window-pane. The bankers described the game to me. So far as I recollect, the pattern of it was this: they had a pile of Mexican dollars on the table; twelve of them were of even date, fifty of them were of odd dates. The bankers were to separate a coin from the pile and hide it under a hand, and I must guess "odd" or "even." If I guessed correctly, the coin would be mine; if incorrectly, I lost a dollar. The first guess I made was "even," and was right. I guessed again, "even," and took the money. They fed me another one and I guessed "even" again, and took the money. I guessed "even" the fourth time, and took the money. It seemed to me that "even" was a good guess, and I might as well stay by it, which I did. I guessed "even" twelve times, and took the twelve dollars. I was doing as they secretly desired. Their experience of human nature had convinced them that any human being as innocent as my face proclaimed me to be, would repeat his first guess if it won, and would go on repeating it if it should continue to win. It was their belief that an innocent would be almost sure at the beginning to guess "even," and not "odd," and that if an innocent should guess "even" twelve times in succession and win every time, he would go on guessing "even" to the end--so it was their purpose to let me win those twelve even dates and then advance the odd dates, one by one, until I should lose fifty dollars, and furnish those superintendents something to laugh about for a week to come. But it did not come out in that way; for by the time I had won the twelfth dollar and last even date, I withdrew from the game because it was so one-sided that it was monotonous, and did not entertain me. There was a burst of laughter from the superintendents at the window when I came out of the place, but I did not know what they were laughing at nor whom they were laughing at, and it was a matter of no interest to me anyway. Through that incident I acquired an enviable reputation for smartness and penetration, but it was not my due, for I had not penetrated anything that the cow could not have penetrated. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [16] With the pen, I mean. This Autobiography is dictated, not written. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXX. AUGUST 2, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXI. BY MARK TWAIN. _From Susy's Biography of Me._ _Feb. 12, '86._ Mamma and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa since he has been publishing Gen. Grant's book has seemed to forget his own books and work entirely, and the other evening as papa and I were promonading up and down the library he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything, he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe down stairs, not yet published.[17] But this intended future of course will never do, and although papa usually holds to his own opinions and intents with outsiders, when mamma realy desires anything and says that it must be, papa allways gives up his plans (at least so far) and does as she says is right (and she is usually right, if she dissagrees with him at all). It was because he knew his great tendency to being convinced by her, that he published without her knowledge that article in the "Christian Union" concerning the government of children. So judging by the proofs of past years, I think that we will be able to persuade papa to go back to work as before, and not leave off writing with the end of his next story. Mamma says that she sometimes feels, and I do too, that she would rather have papa depend on his writing for a living than to have him think of giving it up. [_Dictated, November 8, 1906._] I have a defect of a sort which I think is not common; certainly I hope it isn't: it is rare that I can call before my mind's eye the form and face of either friend or enemy. If I should make a list, now, of persons whom I know in America and abroad--say to the number of even an entire thousand--it is quite unlikely that I could reproduce five of them in my mind's eye. Of my dearest and most intimate friends, I could name eight whom I have seen and talked with four days ago, but when I try to call them before me they are formless shadows. Jean has been absent, this past eight or ten days, in the country, and I wish I could reproduce her in the mirror of my mind, but I can't do it. It may be that this defect is not constitutional, but a result of lifelong absence of mind and indolent and inadequate observation. Once or twice in my life it has been an embarrassment to me. Twenty years ago, in the days of Susy's Biography of Me, there was a dispute one morning at the breakfast-table about the color of a neighbor's eyes. I was asked for a verdict, but had to confess that if that valued neighbor and old friend had eyes I was not sure that I had ever seen them. It was then mockingly suggested that perhaps I didn't even know the color of the eyes of my own family, and I was required to shut my own at once and testify. I was able to name the color of Mrs. Clemens's eyes, but was not able to even suggest a color for Jean's, or Clara's, or Susy's. All this talk is suggested by Susy's remark: "The other evening as papa and I were promenading up and down the library." Down to the bottom of my heart I am thankful that I can see _that_ picture! And it is not dim, but stands out clear in the unfaded light of twenty-one years ago. In those days Susy and I used to "promonade" daily up and down the library, with our arms about each other's waists, and deal in intimate communion concerning affairs of State, or the deep questions of human life, or our small personal affairs. It was quite natural that I should think I had written myself out when I was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been smitten with that superstition at about that age. Not even yet have I really written myself out. I have merely stopped writing because dictating is pleasanter work, and because dictating has given me a strong aversion to the pen, and because two hours of talking per day is enough, and because--But I am only damaging my mind with this digging around in it for pretexts where no pretext is needed, and where the simple truth is for this one time better than any invention, in this small emergency. I shall never finish my five or six unfinished books, for the reason that by forty years of slavery to the pen I have earned my freedom. I detest the pen and I wouldn't use it again to sign the death warrant of my dearest enemy. [_Dictated, March 8, 1906._] For thirty years, I have received an average of a dozen letters a year from strangers who remember me, or whose fathers remember me as boy and young man. But these letters are almost always disappointing. I have not known these strangers nor their fathers. I have not heard of the names they mention; the reminiscences to which they call attention have had no part in my experience; all of which means that these strangers have been mistaking me for somebody else. But at last I have the refreshment, this morning, of a letter from a man who deals in names that were familiar to me in my boyhood. The writer encloses a newspaper clipping which has been wandering through the press for four or five weeks, and he wants to know if Capt Tonkray, lately deceased, was (as stated in the clipping) the original of "Huckleberry Finn." I have replied that "Huckleberry Finn" was Frank F. As this inquirer evidently knew the Hannibal of the forties, he will easily recall Frank. Frank's father was at one time Town Drunkard, an exceedingly well-defined and unofficial office of those days. He succeeded "General" Gaines, and for a time he was sole and only incumbent of the office; but afterward Jimmy Finn proved competency and disputed the place with him, so we had two town drunkards at one time--and it made as much trouble in that village as Christendom experienced in the fourteenth century when there were two Popes at the same time. In "Huckleberry Finn" I have drawn Frank exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person--boy or man--in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy's. I heard, four years ago, that he was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in the State of ----, and was a good citizen and was greatly respected. During Jimmy Finn's term he (Jimmy) was not exclusive; he was not finical; he was not hypercritical; he was largely and handsomely democratic--and slept in the deserted tan-yard with the hogs. My father tried to reform him once, but did not succeed. My father was not a professional reformer. In him the spirit of reform was spasmodic. It only broke out now and then, with considerable intervals between. Once he tried to reform Injun Joe. That also was a failure. It was a failure, and we boys were glad. For Injun Joe, drunk, was interesting and a benefaction to us, but Injun Joe, sober, was a dreary spectacle. We watched my father's experiments upon him with a good deal of anxiety, but it came out all right and we were satisfied. Injun Joe got drunk oftener than before, and became intolerably interesting. I think that in "Tom Sawyer" I starved Injun Joe to death in the cave. But that may have been to meet the exigencies of romantic literature. I can't remember now whether the real Injun Joe died in the cave or out of it, but I do remember that the news of his death reached me at a most unhappy time--that is to say, just at bedtime on a summer night when a prodigious storm of thunder and lightning accompanied by a deluging rain that turned the streets and lanes into rivers, caused me to repent and resolve to lead a better life. I can remember those awful thunder-bursts and the white glare of the lightning yet, and the wild lashing of the rain against the window-panes. By my teachings I perfectly well knew what all that wild riot was for--Satan had come to get Injun Joe. I had no shadow of doubt about it. It was the proper thing when a person like Injun Joe was required in the under world, and I should have thought it strange and unaccountable if Satan had come for him in a less impressive way. With every glare of lightning I shrivelled and shrunk together in mortal terror, and in the interval of black darkness that followed I poured out my lamentings over my lost condition, and my supplications for just one more chance, with an energy and feeling and sincerity quite foreign to my nature. But in the morning I saw that it was a false alarm and concluded to resume business at the old stand and wait for another reminder. The axiom says "History repeats itself." A week or two ago Mr. Blank-Blank dined with us. At dinner he mentioned a circumstance which flashed me back over about sixty years and landed me in that little bedroom on that tempestuous night, and brought to my mind how creditable to me was my conduct through the whole night, and how barren it was of moral spot or fleck during that entire period: he said Mr. X was sexton, or something, of the Episcopal church in his town, and had been for many years the competent superintendent of all the church's worldly affairs, and was regarded by the whole congregation as a stay, a blessing, a priceless treasure. But he had a couple of defects--not large defects, but they seemed large when flung against the background of his profoundly religious character: he drank a good deal, and he could outswear a brakeman. A movement arose to persuade him to lay aside these vices, and after consulting with his pal, who occupied the same position as himself in the other Episcopal church, and whose defects were duplicates of his own and had inspired regret in the congregation he was serving, they concluded to try for reform--not wholesale, but half at a time. They took the liquor pledge and waited for results. During nine days the results were entirely satisfactory, and they were recipients of many compliments and much congratulation. Then on New-year's eve they had business a mile and a half out of town, just beyond the State line. Everything went well with them that evening in the barroom of the inn--but at last the celebration of the occasion by those villagers came to be of a burdensome nature. It was a bitter cold night and the multitudinous hot toddies that were circulating began by and by to exert a powerful influence upon the new prohibitionists. At last X's friend remarked, "X, does it occur to you that we are _outside the diocese_?" That ended reform No. 1. Then they took a chance in reform No. 2. For a while that one prospered, and they got much applause. I now reach the incident which sent me back a matter of sixty years, as I have remarked a while ago. One morning Mr. Blank-Blank met X on the street and said, "You have made a gallant struggle against those defects of yours. I am aware that you failed on No. 1, but I am also aware that you are having better luck with No. 2." "Yes," X said; "No. 2 is all right and sound up to date, and we are full of hope." Blank-Blank said, "X, of course you have your troubles like other people, but they never show on the outside. I have never seen you when you were not cheerful. Are you always cheerful? Really always cheerful?" "Well, no," he said, "no, I can't say that I am always cheerful, but--well, you know that kind of a night that comes: _say_--you wake up 'way in the night and the whole world is sunk in gloom and there are storms and earthquakes and all sorts of disasters in the air threatening, and you get cold and clammy; and when that happens to me I recognize how sinful I am and it all goes clear to my heart and wrings it and I have such terrors and terrors!--oh, they are indescribable, those terrors that assail me, and I slip out of bed and get on my knees and pray and pray and promise that I will be good, if I can only have another chance. And then, you know, in the morning the sun shines out so lovely, and the birds sing and the whole world is so beautiful, and--_b' God, I rally!_" Now I will quote a brief paragraph from this letter which I have a minute ago spoken of. The writer says: You no doubt are at a loss to know who I am. I will tell you. In my younger days I was a resident of Hannibal, Mo., and you and I were schoolmates attending Mr. Dawson's school along with Sam and Will Bowen and Andy Fuqua and others whose names I have forgotten. I was then about the smallest boy in school, for my age, and they called me little Aleck for short. I only dimly remember him, but I knew those other people as well as I knew the town drunkards. I remember Dawson's schoolhouse perfectly. If I wanted to describe it I could save myself the trouble by conveying the description of it to these pages from "Tom Sawyer." I can remember the drowsy and inviting summer sounds that used to float in through the open windows from that distant boy-Paradise, Cardiff Hill (Holliday's Hill), and mingle with the murmurs of the studying pupils and make them the more dreary by the contrast. I remember Andy Fuqua, the oldest pupil--a man of twenty-five. I remember the youngest pupil, Nannie Owsley, a child of seven. I remember George Robards, eighteen or twenty years old, the only pupil who studied Latin. I remember--in some cases vividly, in others vaguely--the rest of the twenty-five boys and girls. I remember Mr. Dawson very well. I remember his boy, Theodore, who was as good as he could be. In fact, he was inordinately good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good--and he had pop-eyes--and I would have drowned him if I had had a chance. In that school we were all about on an equality, and, so far as I remember, the passion of envy had no place in our hearts, except in the case of Arch Fuqua--the other one's brother. Of course we all went barefoot in the summer-time. Arch Fuqua was about my own age--ten or eleven. In the winter we could stand him, because he wore shoes then, and his great gift was hidden from our sight and we were enabled to forget it. But in the summer-time he was a bitterness to us. He was our envy, for he could double back his big toe and let it fly and you could hear it snap thirty yards. There was not another boy in the school that could approach this feat. He had not a rival as regards a physical distinction--except in Theodore Eddy, who could work his ears like a horse. But he was no real rival, because you couldn't hear him work his ears; so all the advantage lay with Arch Fuqua. I am not done with Dawson's school; I will return to it in a later chapter. [_Dictated at Hamilton, Bermuda, January 6, 1907._] "That reminds me." In conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never noticing how large a significance it bears. It stands for a curious and interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking, the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly, almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of incidents and episodes of our past. A man can never know what a large traffic this commerce of association carries on in our minds until he sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event, large or small, in his past experience. Quite naturally these remarks remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any other process known to your mental equipment. Yesterday we had an instance of this. Rev. Joseph H. Twichell is with me on this flying trip to Bermuda. He was with me on my last visit to Bermuda, and to-day we were trying to remember when it was. We thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get at the date. Twichell said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us the date, and we must look her up. We wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her blooming daughter of eighteen were the only persons whose acquaintance we had made at that time, for we were travelling under fictitious names, and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and bringing themselves under suspicion. But at this point in our talk we encountered an obstruction: we could not recall the landlady's name. We hunted all around through our minds for that name, using all the customary methods of research, but without success; the name was gone from us, apparently permanently. We finally gave the matter up, and fell to talking about something else. The talk wandered from one subject to another, and finally arrived at Twichell's school-days in Hartford--the Hartford of something more than half a century ago--and he mentioned several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the peculiarities of an aged one named Olney. He remarked that Olney, humble village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in America in their day. I said I remembered those books, and had studied Olney's Geography in school when I was a boy. Then Twichell said, "That reminds me--our landlady's name was a name that was associated with school-books of some kind or other fifty or sixty years ago. I wonder what it was. I believe it began with K." Association did the rest, and did it instantly. I said, "Kirkham's Grammar!" That settled it. Kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the owner of it. There was no trouble about that, for Bermuda is not large, and is like the earlier Garden of Eden, in that everybody in it knows everybody else, just as it was in the serpent's headquarters in Adam's time. We easily found Miss Kirkham--she that had been the blooming girl of a generation before--and she was still keeping boarders; but her mother had passed from this life. She settled the date for us, and did it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events of that ancient time. She said we had sailed from Bermuda on the 24th of May, 1877, which was the day on which her only nephew was born--and he is now thirty years of age. The other unusual circumstance--she called it an unusual circumstance, and I didn't say anything--was that on that day the Rev. Mr. Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) had made a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. I remembered the circumstance very well. We had bidden the young girl good-by and had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when Twichell said he had forgotten something (I doubted it) and must go back. When he rejoined me he was silent, and this alarmed me, because I had not seen an example of it before. He seemed quite uncomfortable, and I asked him what the trouble was. He said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so had gone back and said to her-- "That young fellow's name is not Wilkinson--that's Mark Twain." She did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit any excitement at all, but said quite simply, quite tranquilly, "Tell it to the marines, Mr. Peters--if that should happen to be _your_ name." It was very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight. I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like nearly everything else that drifts into a person's head, asleep or awake. On board ship, on the passage down, Twichell was talking about the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted those striking verses of Tennyson's which forecast a future when air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnight ago--statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000 miles of railway we annually kill 10,000 persons outright and injure 80,000. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It was an admirable dream, what there was of it. In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpentlike, through a level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000 cripples, and was bearing its own year's 10,000 mutilated corpses to the grave: in the aggregate 800,000 cripples and 100,000 dead, drenched in blood! MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTE: [17] It isn't yet. Title of it, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."--S. L. C. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXII. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1890.)] [_Dictated, October 10, 1906._] Susy has named a number of the friends who were assembled at Onteora at the time of our visit, but there were others--among them Laurence Hutton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Carroll Beckwith, and their wives. It was a bright and jolly company. Some of those choice spirits are still with us; the others have passed from this life: Mrs. Clemens, Susy, Mr. Warner, Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton, Dean Sage--peace to their ashes! Susy is in error in thinking Mrs. Dodge was not there at that time; we were her guests. We arrived at nightfall, dreary from a tiresome journey; but the dreariness did not last. Mrs. Dodge had provided a home-made banquet, and the happy company sat down to it, twenty strong, or more. Then the thing happened which always happens at large dinners, and is always exasperating: everybody talked to his elbow-mates and all talked at once, and gradually raised their voices higher, and higher, and higher, in the desperate effort to be heard. It was like a riot, an insurrection; it was an intolerable volume of noise. Presently I said to the lady next me-- "I will subdue this riot, I will silence this racket. There is only one way to do it, but I know the art. You must tilt your head toward mine and seem to be deeply interested in what I am saying; I will talk in a low voice; then, just because our neighbors won't be able to hear me, they will _want_ to hear me. If I mumble long enough--say two minutes--you will see that the dialogues will one after another come to a standstill, and there will be silence, not a sound anywhere but my mumbling." Then in a very low voice I began: "When I went out to Chicago, eleven years ago, to witness the Grant festivities, there was a great banquet on the first night, with six hundred ex-soldiers present. The gentleman who sat next me was Mr. X. X. He was very hard of hearing, and he had a habit common to deaf people of shouting his remarks instead of delivering them in an ordinary voice. He would handle his knife and fork in reflective silence for five or six minutes at a time and then suddenly fetch out a shout that would make you jump out of the United States." By this time the insurrection at Mrs. Dodge's table--at least that part of it in my immediate neighborhood--had died down, and the silence was spreading, couple by couple, down the long table. I went on in a lower and still lower mumble, and most impressively-- "During one of Mr. X. X.'s mute intervals, a man opposite us approached the end of a story which he had been telling his elbow-neighbor. He was speaking in a low voice--there was much noise--I was deeply interested, and straining my ears to catch his words, stretching my neck, holding my breath, to hear, unconscious of everything but the fascinating tale. I heard him say, 'At this point he seized her by her long hair--she shrieking and begging--bent her neck across his knee, and with one awful sweep of the razor--' "HOW DO YOU LIKE CHICA-A-AGO?!!!" That was X. X.'s interruption, hearable at thirty miles. By the time I had reached that place in my mumblings Mrs. Dodge's dining-room was so silent, so breathlessly still, that if you had dropped a thought anywhere in it you could have heard it smack the floor.[18] When I delivered that yell the entire dinner company jumped as one person, and punched their heads through the ceiling, damaging it, for it was only lath and plaster, and it all came down on us, and much of it went into the victuals and made them gritty, but no one was hurt. Then I explained why it was that I had played that game, and begged them to take the moral of it home to their hearts and be rational and merciful thenceforth, and cease from screaming in mass, and agree to let one person talk at a time and the rest listen in grateful and unvexed peace. They granted my prayer, and we had a happy time all the rest of the evening; I do not think I have ever had a better time in my life. This was largely because the new terms enabled me to keep the floor--now that I had it--and do all the talking myself. I do like to hear myself talk. Susy has exposed this in her Biography of me. Dean Sage was a delightful man, yet in one way a terror to his friends, for he loved them so well that he could not refrain from playing practical jokes on them. We have to be pretty deeply in love with a person before we can do him the honor of joking familiarly with him. Dean Sage was the best citizen I have known in America. It takes courage to be a good citizen, and he had plenty of it. He allowed no individual and no corporation to infringe his smallest right and escape unpunished. He was very rich, and very generous, and benevolent, and he gave away his money with a prodigal hand; but if an individual or corporation infringed a right of his, to the value of ten cents, he would spend thousands of dollars' worth of time and labor and money and persistence on the matter, and would not lower his flag until he had won his battle or lost it. He and Rev. Mr. Harris had been classmates in college, and to the day of Sage's death they were as fond of each other as an engaged pair. It follows, without saying, that whenever Sage found an opportunity to play a joke upon Harris, Harris was sure to suffer. Along about 1873 Sage fell a victim to an illness which reduced him to a skeleton, and defied all the efforts of the physicians to cure it. He went to the Adirondacks and took Harris with him. Sage had always been an active man, and he couldn't idle any day wholly away in inanition, but walked every day to the limit of his strength. One day, toward nightfall, the pair came upon a humble log cabin which bore these words painted upon a shingle: "Entertainment for Man and Beast." They were obliged to stop there for the night, Sage's strength being exhausted. They entered the cabin and found its owner and sole occupant there, a rugged and sturdy and simple-hearted man of middle age. He cooked supper and placed it before the travellers--salt junk, boiled beans, corn bread and black coffee. Sage's stomach could abide nothing but the most delicate food, therefore this banquet revolted him, and he sat at the table unemployed, while Harris fed ravenously, limitlessly, gratefully; for he had been chaplain in a fighting regiment all through the war, and had kept in perfection the grand and uncritical appetite and splendid physical vigor which those four years of tough fare and activity had furnished him. Sage went supperless to bed, and tossed and writhed all night upon a shuck mattress that was full of attentive and interested corn-cobs. In the morning Harris was ravenous again, and devoured the odious breakfast as contentedly and as delightedly as he had devoured its twin the night before. Sage sat upon the porch, empty, and contemplated the performance and meditated revenge. Presently he beckoned to the landlord and took him aside and had a confidential talk with him. He said, "I am the paymaster. What is the bill?" "Two suppers, fifty cents; two beds, thirty cents; two breakfasts, fifty cents--total, a dollar and thirty cents." Sage said, "Go back and make out the bill and fetch it to me here on the porch. Make it thirteen dollars." "Thirteen dollars! Why, it's impossible! I am no robber. I am charging you what I charge everybody. It's a dollar and thirty cents, and that's all it is." "My man, I've got something to say about this as well as you. It's thirteen dollars. You'll make out your bill for that, and you'll _take_ it, too, or you'll not get a cent." The man was troubled, and said, "I don't understand this. I can't make it out." "Well, I understand it. I know what I am about. It's thirteen dollars, and I want the bill made out for that. There's no other terms. Get it ready and bring it out here. I will examine it and be outraged. You understand? I will dispute the bill. You must stand to it. You must refuse to take less. I will begin to lose my temper; you must begin to lose yours. I will call you hard names; you must answer with harder ones. I will raise my voice; you must raise yours. You must go into a rage--foam at the mouth, if you can; insert some soap to help it along. Now go along and follow your instructions." The man played his assigned part, and played it well. He brought the bill and stood waiting for results. Sage's face began to cloud up, his eyes to snap, and his nostrils to inflate like a horse's; then he broke out with-- "_Thirteen dollars!_ You mean to say that you charge thirteen dollars for these damned inhuman hospitalities of yours? Are you a professional buccaneer? Is it your custom to--" The man burst in with spirit: "Now, I don't want any more out of you--that's a plenty. The bill is thirteen dollars and you'll _pay_ it--that's all; a couple of characterless adventurers bilking their way through this country and attempting to dictate terms to a gentleman! a gentleman who received you supposing you were gentlemen yourselves, whereas in my opinion hell's full of--" Sage broke in-- "Not another word of that!--I won't have it. I regard you as the lowest-down thief that ever--" "Don't you use that word again! By ----, I'll take you by the neck and--" Harris came rushing out, and just as the two were about to grapple he pushed himself between them and began to implore-- "Oh, Dean, don't, _don't_--now, Mr. Smith, control yourself! Oh, think of your family, Dean!--think what a scandal--" But they burst out with maledictions, imprecations and all the hard names they could dig out of the rich accumulations of their educated memories, and in the midst of it the man shouted-- "When _gentlemen_ come to this house, I treat them _as_ gentlemen. When people come to this house with the ordinary appetites of gentlemen, I charge them a dollar and thirty cents for what I furnished you; but when a man brings a hell-fired Famine here that gorges a barrel of pork and four barrels of beans at two sittings--" Sage broke in, in a voice that was eloquent with remorse and self-reproach, "I never thought of that, and I ask your pardon; I am ashamed of myself and of my friend. Here's your thirteen dollars, and my apologies along with it." [_Dictated March 12, 1906._] I have always taken a great interest in other people's duels. One always feels an abiding interest in any heroic thing which has entered into his own experience. [Sidenote: (1878.)] In 1878, fourteen years after my unmaterialized duel, Messieurs Fortu and Gambetta fought a duel which made heroes of both of them in France, but made them rather ridiculous throughout the rest of the world. I was living in Munich that fall and winter, and I was so interested in that funny tragedy that I wrote a long account of it, and it is in one of my books, somewhere--an account which had some inaccuracies in it, but as an exhibition of the _spirit_ of that duel, I think it was correct and trustworthy. And when I was living in Vienna, thirty-four years after my ineffectual duel, my interest in that kind of incident was still strong; and I find here among my Autobiographical manuscripts of that day a chapter which I began concerning it, but did not finish. I wanted to finish it, but held it open in the hope that the Italian ambassador, M. Nigra, would find time to furnish me the _full_ history of Señor Cavalotti's adventures in that line. But he was a busy man; there was always an interruption before he could get well started; so my hope was never fulfilled. The following is the unfinished chapter: [Sidenote: (1898.)] As concerns duelling. This pastime is as common in Austria to-day as it is in France. But with this difference, that here in the Austrian States the duel is dangerous, while in France it is not. Here it is tragedy, in France it in comedy; here it is a solemnity, there it is monkey-shines; here the duellist risks his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with pistol or sabre, in France with a hairpin--a blunt one. Here the desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music. At the end of a French duel the pair hug and kiss and cry, and praise each other's valor; then the surgeons make an examination and pick out the scratched one, and the other one helps him on to the litter and pays his fare; and in return the scratched one treats to champagne and oysters in the evening, and then "the incident is closed," as the French say. It is all polite, and gracious, and pretty, and impressive. At the end of an Austrian duel the antagonist that is alive gravely offers his hand to the other man, utters some phrases of courteous regret, then bids him good-by and goes his way, and that incident also is closed. The French duellist is painstakingly protected from danger, by the rules of the game. His antagonist's weapon cannot reach so far as his body; if he get a scratch it will not be above his elbow. But in Austria the rules of the game do not provide against danger, they carefully provide _for_ it, usually. Commonly the combat must be kept up until one of the men is disabled; a non-disabling slash or stab does not retire him. For a matter of three months I watched the Viennese journals, and whenever a duel was reported in their telegraphic columns I scrap-booked it. By this record I find that duelling in Austria is not confined to journalists and old maids, as in France, but is indulged in by military men, journalists, students, physicians, lawyers, members of the legislature, and even the Cabinet, the Bench and the police. Duelling is forbidden by law; and so it seems odd to see the makers and administrators of the laws dancing on their work in this way. Some months ago Count Bodeni, at that time Chief of the Government, fought a pistol-duel here in the capital city of the Empire with representative Wolf, and both of those distinguished Christians came near getting turned out of the Church--for the Church as well as the State forbids duelling. In one case, lately, in Hungary, the police interfered and stopped a duel after the first innings. This was a sabre-duel between the chief of police and the city attorney. Unkind things were said about it by the newspapers. They said the police remembered their duty uncommonly well when their own officials were the parties concerned in duels. But I think the underlings showed good bread-and-butter judgment. If their superiors had carved each other well, the public would have asked, Where were the police? and their places would have been endangered; but custom does not require them to be around where mere unofficial citizens are explaining a thing with sabres. There was another duel--a double duel--going on in the immediate neighborhood at the time, and in this case the police obeyed custom and did not disturb it. Their bread and butter was not at stake there. In this duel a physician fought a couple of surgeons, and wounded both--one of them lightly, the other seriously. An undertaker wanted to keep people from interfering, but that was quite natural again. Selecting at random from my record, I next find a duel at Tarnopol between military men. An officer of the Tenth Dragoons charged an officer of the Ninth Dragoons with an offence against the laws of the card-table. There was a defect or a doubt somewhere in the matter, and this had to be examined and passed upon by a Court of Honor. So the case was sent up to Lemberg for this purpose. One would like to know what the defect was, but the newspaper does not say. A man here who has fought many duels and has a graveyard, says that probably the matter in question was as to whether the accusation was true or not; that if the charge was a very grave one--cheating, for instance--proof of its truth would rule the guilty officer out of the field of honor; the Court would not allow a gentleman to fight with such a person. You see what a solemn thing it is; you see how particular they are; any little careless act can lose you your privilege of getting yourself shot, here. The Court seems to have gone into the matter in a searching and careful fashion, for several months elapsed before it reached a decision. It then sanctioned a duel and the accused killed his accuser. Next I find a duel between a prince and a major; first with pistols--no result satisfactory to either party; then with sabres, and the major badly hurt. Next, a sabre-duel between journalists--the one a strong man, the other feeble and in poor health. It was brief; the strong one drove his sword through the weak one, and death was immediate. Next, a duel between a lieutenant and a student of medicine. According to the newspaper report these are the details. The student was in a restaurant one evening: passing along, he halted at a table to speak with some friends; near by sat a dozen military men; the student conceived that one of these was "staring" at him; he asked the officer to step outside and explain. This officer and another one gathered up their caps and sabres and went out with the student. Outside--this is the student's account--the student introduced himself to the offending officer and said, "You seemed to stare at me"; for answer, the officer struck at the student with his fist; the student parried the blow; both officers drew their sabres and attacked the young fellow, and one of them gave him a wound on the left arm; then they withdrew. This was Saturday night. The duel followed on Monday, in the military riding-school--the customary duelling-ground all over Austria, apparently. The weapons were pistols. The duelling terms were somewhat beyond custom in the matter of severity, if I may gather that from the statement that the combat was fought "_unter sehr schweren Bedingungen_"--to wit, "Distance, 15 steps--with 3 steps advance." There was but one exchange of shots. The student was hit. "He put his hand on his breast, his body began to bend slowly forward, then collapsed in death and sank to the ground." It is pathetic. There are other duels in my list, but I find in each and all of them one and the same ever-recurring defect--the _principals_ are never present, but only their sham representatives. The _real_ principals in any duel are not the duellists themselves, but their families. They do the mourning, the suffering, theirs is the loss and theirs the misery. They stake all that, the duellist stakes nothing but his life, and that is a trivial thing compared with what his death must cost those whom he leaves behind him. Challenges should not mention the duellist; he has nothing much at stake, and the real vengeance cannot reach him. The challenge should summon the offender's old gray mother, and his young wife and his little children,--these, or any to whom he is a dear and worshipped possession--and should say, "You have done me no harm, but I am the meek slave of a custom which requires me to crush the happiness out of your hearts and condemn you to years of pain and grief, in order that I may wash clean with your tears a stain which has been put upon me by another person." The logic of it is admirable: a person has robbed me of a penny; I must beggar ten innocent persons to make good my loss. Surely nobody's "honor" is worth all that. Since the duellist's family are the real principals in a duel, the State ought to compel them to be present at it. Custom, also, ought to be so amended as to require it; and without it no duel ought to be allowed to go on. If that student's unoffending mother had been present and watching the officer through her tears as he raised his pistol, he--why, he would have fired in the air. We know that. For we know how we are all made. Laws ought to be based upon the ascertained facts of our nature. It would be a simple thing to make a duelling law which would stop duelling. As things are now, the mother is never invited. She submits to this; and without outward complaint, for she, too, is the vassal of custom, and custom requires her to conceal her pain when she learns the disastrous news that her son must go to the duelling-field, and by the powerful force that is lodged in habit and custom she is enabled to obey this trying requirement--a requirement which exacts a miracle of her, and gets it. Last January a neighbor of ours who has a young son in the army was wakened by this youth at three o'clock one morning, and she sat up in bed and listened to his message: "I have come to tell you something, mother, which will distress you, but you must be good and brave, and bear it. I have been affronted by a fellow officer, and we fight at three this afternoon. Lie down and sleep, now, and think no more about it." She kissed him good night and lay down paralyzed with grief and fear, but said nothing. But she did not sleep; she prayed and mourned till the first streak of dawn, then fled to the nearest church and implored the Virgin for help; and from that church she went to another and another and another; church after church, and still church after church, and so spent all the day until three o'clock on her knees in agony and tears; then dragged herself home and sat down comfortless and desolate, to count the minutes, and wait, with an outward show of calm, for what had been ordained for her--happiness, or endless misery. Presently she heard the clank of a sabre--she had not known before what music was in that sound!--and her son put his head in and said: "X was in the wrong, and he apologized." So that incident was closed; and for the rest of her life the mother will always find something pleasant about the clank of a sabre, no doubt. In one of my listed duels--however, let it go, there is nothing particularly striking about it except that the seconds interfered. And prematurely, too, for neither man was dead. This was certainly irregular. Neither of the men liked it. It was a duel with cavalry sabres, between an editor and a lieutenant. The editor walked to the hospital, the lieutenant was carried. In this country an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm. The following very recent telegram shows that also in France duels are humanely stopped as soon as they approach the (French) danger-point: "_Reuter's Telegram._--PARIS, _March 5_.--The duel between Colonels Henry and Picquart took place this morning in the Riding School of the Ecole Militaire, the doors of which were strictly guarded in order to prevent intrusion. The combatants, who fought with swords, were in position at ten o'clock. "At the first reengagement Lieutenant-Colonel Henry was slightly scratched in the fore arm, and just at the same moment his own blade appeared to touch his adversary's neck. Senator Ranc, who was Colonel Picquart's second, stopped the fight, but as it was found that his principal had not been touched, the combat continued. A very sharp encounter ensued, in which Colonel Henry was wounded in the elbow, and the duel terminated." After which, the stretcher and the band. In lurid contrast with this delicate flirtation, we have this fatal duel of day before yesterday in Italy, where the earnest Austrian duel is in vogue. I knew Cavalotti slightly, and this gives me a sort of personal interest in his duel. I first saw him in Rome several years ago. He was sitting on a block of stone in the Forum, and was writing something in his note-book--a poem or a challenge, or something like that--and the friend who pointed him out to me said, "That is Cavalotti--he has fought thirty duels; do not disturb him." I did not disturb him. [_May 13, 1907._] It is a long time ago. Cavalotti--poet, orator, satirist, statesman, patriot--was a great man, and his death was deeply lamented by his countrymen: many monuments to his memory testify to this. In his duels he killed several of his antagonists and disabled the rest. By nature he was a little irascible. Once when the officials of the library of Bologna threw out his books the gentle poet went up there and challenged the whole fifteen! His parliamentary duties were exacting, but he proposed to keep coming up and fighting duels between trains until all those officials had been retired from the activities of life. Although he always chose the sword to fight with, he had never had a lesson with that weapon. When game was called he waited for nothing, but always plunged at his opponent and rained such a storm of wild and original thrusts and whacks upon him that the man was dead or crippled before he could bring his science to bear. But his latest antagonist discarded science, and won. He held his sword straight forward like a lance when Cavalotti made his plunge--with the result that he impaled himself upon it. It entered his mouth and passed out at the back of his neck. Death was instantaneous. [_Dictated December 20, 1906._] Six months ago, when I was recalling early days in San Francisco, I broke off at a place where I was about to tell about Captain Osborn's odd adventure at the "What Cheer," or perhaps it was at another cheap feeding-place--the "Miners' Restaurant." It was a place where one could get good food on the cheapest possible terms, and its popularity was great among the multitudes whose purses were light It was a good place to go to, to observe mixed humanity. Captain Osborn and Bret Harte went there one day and took a meal, and in the course of it Osborn fished up an interesting reminiscence of a dozen years before and told about it. It was to this effect: He was a midshipman in the navy when the Californian gold craze burst upon the world and set it wild with excitement. His ship made the long journey around the Horn and was approaching her goal, the Golden Gate, when an accident happened. "It happened to me," said Osborn. "I fell overboard. There was a heavy sea running, but no one was much alarmed about me, because we had on board a newly patented life-saving device which was believed to be competent to rescue anything that could fall overboard, from a midshipman to an anchor. Ours was the only ship that had this device; we were very proud of it, and had been anxious to give its powers a practical test. This thing was lashed to the garboard-strake of the main-to'gallant mizzen-yard amidships,[19] and there was nothing to do but cut the lashings and heave it over; it would do the rest. One day the cry of 'Man overboard!' brought all hands on deck. Instantly the lashings were cut and the machine flung joyously over. Damnation, it went to the bottom like an anvil! By the time that the ship was brought to and a boat manned, I was become but a bobbing speck on the waves half a mile astern and losing my strength very fast; but by good luck there was a common seaman on board who had practical ideas in his head and hadn't waited to see what the patent machine was going to do, but had run aft and sprung over after me the moment the alarm was cried through the ship. I had a good deal of a start of him, and the seas made his progress slow and difficult, but he stuck to his work and fought his way to me, and just in the nick of time he put his saving arms about me when I was about to go down. He held me up until the boat reached us and rescued us. By that time I was unconscious, and I was still unconscious when we arrived at the ship. A dangerous fever followed, and I was delirious for three days; then I come to myself and at once inquired for my benefactor, of course. He was gone. We were lying at anchor in the Bay and every man had deserted to the gold-mines except the commissioned officers. I found out nothing about my benefactor but his name--Burton Sanders--a name which I have held in grateful memory ever since. Every time I have been on the Coast, these twelve or thirteen years, I have tried to get track of him, but have never succeeded. I wish I could find him and make him understand that his brave act has never been forgotten by me. Harte, I would rather see him and take him by the hand than any other man on the planet." At this stage or a little later there was an interruption. A waiter near by said to another waiter, pointing, "Take a look at that tramp that's coming in. Ain't that the one that bilked the house, last week, out of ten cents?" "I believe it is. Let him alone--don't pay any attention to him; wait till we can get a good look at him." The tramp approached timidly and hesitatingly, with the air of one unsure and apprehensive. The waiters watched him furtively. When he was passing behind Harte's chair one of them said, "He's the one!"--and they pounced upon him and proposed to turn him over to the police as a bilk. He begged piteously. He confessed his guilt, but said he had been driven to his crime by necessity--that when he had eaten the plate of beans and flipped out without paying for it, it was because he was starving, and hadn't the ten cents to pay for it with. But the waiters would listen to no explanations, no palliations; he must be placed in custody. He brushed his hand across his eyes and said meekly that he would submit, being friendless. Each waiter took him by an arm and faced him about to conduct him away. Then his melancholy eyes fell upon Captain Osborn, and a light of glad and eager recognition flashed from them. He said, "Weren't you a midshipman once, sir, in the old 'Lancaster'?" "Yes," said Osborn. "Why?" "Didn't you fall overboard?" "Yes, I did. How do you come to know about it?" "Wasn't there a new patent machine aboard, and didn't they throw it over to save you?" "Why, yes," said Osborn, laughing gently, "but it didn't do it." "No, sir, it was a sailor that done it." "It certainly was. Look here, my man, you are getting distinctly interesting. Were you of our crew?" "Yes, sir, I was." "I reckon you may be right. You do certainly know a good deal about that incident. What is your name?" "Burton Sanders." The Captain sprang up, excited, and said, "Give me your hand! Give me both your hands! I'd rather shake them than inherit a fortune!"--and then he cried to the waiters, "Let him go!--take your hands off! He is my guest, and can have anything and everything this house is able to furnish. I am responsible." There was a love-feast, then. Captain Osborn ordered it regardless of expense, and he and Harte sat there and listened while the man told stirring adventures of his life and fed himself up to the eyebrows. Then Osborn wanted to be benefactor in his turn, and pay back some of his debt. The man said it could all be paid with ten dollars--that it had been so long since he had owned that amount of money that it would seem a fortune to him, and he should be grateful beyond words if the Captain could spare him that amount. The Captain spared him ten broad twenty-dollar gold pieces, and made him take them in spite of his modest protestations, and gave him his address and said he must never fail to give him notice when he needed grateful service. Several months later Harte stumbled upon the man in the street. He was most comfortably drunk, and pleasant and chatty. Harte remarked upon the splendidly and movingly dramatic incident of the restaurant, and said, "How curious and fortunate and happy and interesting it was that you two should come together, after that long separation, and at exactly the right moment to save you from disaster and turn your defeat by the waiters into a victory. A preacher could make a great sermon out of that, for it does look as if the hand of Providence was in it." The hero's face assumed a sweetly genial expression, and he said, "Well now, it wasn't Providence this time. I was running the arrangements myself." "How do you mean?" "Oh, I hadn't ever seen the gentleman before. I was at the next table, with my back to you the whole time he was telling about it. I saw my chance, and slipped out and fetched the two waiters with me and offered to give them a commission out of what I could get out of the Captain if they would do a quarrel act with me and give me an opening. So, then, after a minute or two I straggled back, and you know the rest of it as well as I do." MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) FOOTNOTES: [18] This was tried. I well remember it.--M. T., _October, '06_. [19] Can this be correct? I think there must be some mistake.--M. T. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXXIII. OCTOBER, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXIII. BY MARK TWAIN. [Sidenote: (1845.)] [_Dictated March 9, 1906._] ... I am talking of a time sixty years ago, and upwards. I remember the names of some of those schoolmates, and, by fitful glimpses, even their faces rise dimly before me for a moment--only just long enough to be recognized; then they vanish. I catch glimpses of George Robards, the Latin pupil--slender, pale, studious, bending over his book and absorbed in it, his long straight black hair hanging down below his jaws like a pair of curtains on the sides of his face. I can see him give his head a toss and flirt one of the curtains back around his head--to get it out of his way, apparently; really to show off. In that day it was a great thing among the boys to have hair of so flexible a sort that it could be flung back in that way, with a flirt of the head. George Robards was the envy of us all. For there was no hair among us that was so competent for this exhibition as his--except, perhaps, the yellow locks of Will Bowen and John Robards. My hair was a dense ruck of short curls, and so was my brother Henry's. We tried all kinds of devices to get these crooks straightened out so that they would flirt, but we never succeeded. Sometimes, by soaking our heads and then combing and brushing our hair down tight and flat to our skulls, we could get it straight, temporarily, and this gave us a comforting moment of joy; but the first time we gave it a flirt it all shrivelled into curls again and our happiness was gone. John Robards was the little brother of George; he was a wee chap with silky golden curtains to his face which dangled to his shoulders and below, and could be flung back ravishingly. When he was twelve years old he crossed the plains with his father amidst the rush of the gold-seekers of '49; and I remember the departure of the cavalcade when it spurred westward. We were all there to see and to envy. And I can still see that proud little chap sailing by on a great horse, with his long locks streaming out behind. We were all on hand to gaze and envy when he returned, two years later, in unimaginable glory--_for he had travelled_! None of us had ever been forty miles from home. But he had crossed the Continent. He had been in the gold-mines, that fairyland of our imagination. And he had done a still more wonderful thing. He had been in ships--in ships on the actual ocean; in ships on three actual oceans. For he had sailed down the Pacific and around the Horn among icebergs and through snow-storms and wild wintry gales, and had sailed on and turned the corner and flown northward in the trades and up through the blistering equatorial waters--and there in his brown face were the proofs of what he had been through. We would have sold our souls to Satan for the privilege of trading places with him. I saw him when I was out on that Missouri trip four years ago. He was old then--though not quite so old as I--and the burden of life was upon him. He said his granddaughter, twelve years old, had read my books and would like to see me. It was a pathetic time, for she was a prisoner in her room and marked for death. And John knew that she was passing swiftly away. Twelve years old--just her grandfather's age when he rode away on that great journey with his yellow hair flapping behind him. In her I seemed to see that boy again. It was as if he had come back out of that remote past and was present before me in his golden youth. Her malady was heart disease, and her brief life came to a close a few days later. Another of those schoolboys was John Garth. He became a prosperous banker and a prominent and valued citizen; and a few years ago he died, rich and honored. _He died._ It is what I have to say about so many of those boys and girls. The widow still lives, and there are grandchildren. In her pantalette days and my barefoot days she was a schoolmate of mine. I saw John's tomb when I made that Missouri visit. Her father, Mr. Kercheval, had an apprentice in the early days when I was nine years old, and he had also a slave woman who had many merits. But I can't feel very kindly or forgivingly toward either that good apprentice boy or that good slave woman, for they saved my life. One day when I was playing on a loose log which I supposed was attached to a raft--but it wasn't--it tilted me into Bear Creek. And when I had been under water twice and was coming up to make the third and fatal descent my fingers appeared above the water and that slave woman seized them and pulled me out. Within a week I was in again, and that apprentice had to come along just at the wrong time, and he plunged in and dived, pawed around on the bottom and found me, and dragged me out and emptied the water out of me, and I was saved again. I was drowned seven times after that before I learned to swim--once in Bear Creek and six times in the Mississippi. I do not now know who the people were who interfered with the intentions of a Providence wiser than themselves, but I hold a grudge against them yet. When I told the tale of these remarkable happenings to Rev. Dr. Burton of Hartford, he said he did not believe it. _He slipped on the ice the very next year and sprained his ankle._ Will Bowen was another schoolmate, and so was his brother, Sam, who was his junior by a couple of years. Before the Civil War broke out, both became St. Louis and New Orleans pilots. Both are dead, long ago. [Sidenote: (1845.)] [_Dictated March 16, 1906._] We will return to those schoolchildren of sixty years ago. I recall Mary Miller. She was not my first sweetheart, but I think she was the first one that furnished me a broken heart. I fell in love with her when she was eighteen and I was nine, but she scorned me, and I recognized that this was a cold world. I had not noticed that temperature before. I believe I was as miserable as even a grown man could be. But I think that this sorrow did not remain with me long. As I remember it, I soon transferred my worship to Artimisia Briggs, who was a year older than Mary Miller. When I revealed my passion to her she did not scoff at it. She did not make fun of it. She was very kind and gentle about it. But she was also firm, and said she did not want to be pestered by children. And there was Mary Lacy. She was a schoolmate. But she also was out of my class because of her advanced age. She was pretty wild and determined and independent. But she married, and at once settled down and became in all ways a model matron and was as highly respected as any matron in the town. Four years ago she was still living, and had been married fifty years. Jimmie McDaniel was another schoolmate. His age and mine about tallied. His father kept the candy-shop and he was the most envied little chap in the town--after Tom Blankenship ("Huck Finn")--for although we never saw him eating candy, we supposed that it was, nevertheless, his ordinary diet. He pretended that he never ate it, and didn't care for it because there was nothing forbidden about it--there was plenty of it and he could have as much of it as he wanted. He was the first human being to whom I ever told a humorous story, so far as I can remember. This was about Jim Wolfe and the cats; and I gave him that tale the morning after that memorable episode. I thought he would laugh his teeth out. I had never been so proud and happy before, and have seldom been so proud and happy since. I saw him four years ago when I was out there. He wore a beard, gray and venerable, that came half-way down to his knees, and yet it was not difficult for me to recognize him. He had been married fifty-four years. He had many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and also even posterity, they all said-- thousands--yet the boy to whom I had told the cat story when we were callow juveniles was still present in that cheerful little old man. Artimisia Briggs got married not long after refusing me. She married Richmond, the stone mason, who was my Methodist Sunday-school teacher in the earliest days, and he had one distinction which I envied him: at some time or other he had hit his thumb with his hammer and the result was a thumb nail which remained permanently twisted and distorted and curved and pointed, like a parrot's beak. I should not consider it an ornament now, I suppose, but it had a fascination for me then, and a vast value, because it was the only one in the town. He was a very kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. In that school they had slender oblong pasteboard blue tickets, each with a verse from the Testament printed on it, and you could get a blue ticket by reciting two verses. By reciting five verses you could get three blue tickets, and you could trade these at the bookcase and borrow a book for a week. I was under Mr. Richmond's spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me. I always recited the same five verses every Sunday. He was always satisfied with the performance. He never seemed to notice that these were the same five foolish virgins that he had been hearing about every Sunday for months. I always got my tickets and exchanged them for a book. They were pretty dreary books, for there was not a bad boy in the entire bookcase. They were _all_ good boys and good girls and drearily uninteresting, but they were better society than none, and I was glad to have their company and disapprove of it. [Sidenote: (1849.)] Twenty years ago Mr. Richmond had become possessed of Tom Sawyer's cave in the hills three miles from town, and had made a tourist-resort of it. In 1849 when the gold-seekers were streaming through our little town of Hannibal, many of our grown men got the gold fever, and I think that all the boys had it. On the Saturday holidays in summer-time we used to borrow skiffs whose owners were not present and go down the river three miles to the cave hollow (Missourian for "valley"), and there we staked out claims and pretended to dig gold, panning out half a dollar a day at first; two or three times as much, later, and by and by whole fortunes, as our imaginations became inured to the work. Stupid and unprophetic lads! We were doing this in play and never suspecting. Why, that cave hollow and all the adjacent hills were made of gold! But we did not know it. We took it for dirt. We left its rich secret in its own peaceful possession and grew up in poverty and went wandering about the world struggling for bread--and this because we had not the gift of prophecy. That region was all dirt and rocks to us, yet all it needed was to be ground up and scientifically handled and it was gold. That is to say, the whole region was a cement-mine--and they make the finest kind of Portland cement there now, five thousand barrels a day, with a plant that cost $2,000,000. For a little while Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours. He was an elderly pupil; he was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Then came the Mexican War and he volunteered. A company of infantry was raised in our town and Mr. Hickman, a tall, straight, handsome athlete of twenty-five, was made captain of it and had a sword by his side and a broad yellow stripe down the leg of his gray pants. And when that company marched back and forth through the streets in its smart uniform--which it did several times a day for drill--its evolutions were attended by all the boys whenever the school hours permitted. I can see that marching company yet, and I can almost feel again the consuming desire that I had to join it. But they had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away. I saw the splendid Hickman in his old age. He seemed about the oldest man I had ever seen--an amazing and melancholy contrast with the showy young captain I had seen preparing his warriors for carnage so many, many years before. Hickman is dead--it is the old story. As Susy said, "What is it all for?" Reuel Gridley went away to the wars and we heard of him no more for fifteen or sixteen years. Then one day in Carson City while I was having a difficulty with an editor on the sidewalk--an editor better built for war than I was--I heard a voice say, "Give him the best you've got, Sam, I'm at your back." It was Reuel Gridley. He said he had not recognized me by my face but by my drawling style of speech. He went down to the Reese River mines about that time and presently he lost an election bet in his mining camp, and by the terms of it he was obliged to buy a fifty-pound sack of self-raising flour and carry it through the town, preceded by music, and deliver it to the winner of the bet. Of course the whole camp was present and full of fluid and enthusiasm. The winner of the bet put up the sack at auction for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Fund, and sold it. The excitement grew and grew. The sack was sold over and over again for the benefit of the Fund. The news of it came to Virginia City by telegraph. It produced great enthusiasm, and Reuel Gridley was begged by telegraph to bring the sack and have an auction in Virginia City. He brought it. An open barouche was provided, also a brass band. The sack was sold over and over again at Gold Hill, then was brought up to Virginia City toward night and sold--and sold again, and again, and still again, netting twenty or thirty thousand dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Gridley carried it across California and sold it at various towns. He sold it for large sums in Sacramento and in San Francisco. He brought it East, sold it in New York and in various other cities, then carried it out to a great Fair at St. Louis, and went on selling it; and finally made it up into small cakes and sold those at a dollar apiece. First and last, the sack of flour which had originally cost ten dollars, perhaps, netted more than two hundred thousand dollars for the Sanitary Fund. Reuel Gridley has been dead these many, many years--it is the old story. In that school were the first Jews I had ever seen. It took me a good while to get over the awe of it. To my fancy they were clothed invisibly in the damp and cobwebby mould of antiquity. They carried me back to Egypt, and in imagination I moved among the Pharaohs and all the shadowy celebrities of that remote age. The name of the boys was Levin. We had a collective name for them which was the only really large and handsome witticism that was ever born in that Congressional district. We called them "Twenty-two"--and even when the joke was old and had been worn threadbare we always followed it with the explanation, to make sure that it would be understood, "Twice Levin--twenty-two." There were other boys whose names remain with me. Irving Ayres--but no matter, he is dead. Then there was George Butler, whom I remember as a child of seven wearing a blue leather belt with a brass buckle, and hated and envied by all the boys on account of it. He was a nephew of General Ben Butler and fought gallantly at Ball's Bluff and in several other actions of the Civil War. He is dead, long and long ago. Will Bowen (dead long ago), Ed Stevens (dead long ago) and John Briggs were special mates of mine. John is still living. [Sidenote: (1845.)] In 1845, when I was ten years old, there was an epidemic of measles in the town and it made a most alarming slaughter among the little people. There was a funeral almost daily, and the mothers of the town were nearly demented with fright. My mother was greatly troubled. She worried over Pamela and Henry and me, and took constant and extraordinary pains to keep us from coming into contact with the contagion. But upon reflection I believed that her judgment was at fault. It seemed to me that I could improve upon it if left to my own devices. I cannot remember now whether I was frightened about the measles or not, but I clearly remember that I grew very tired of the suspense I suffered on account of being continually under the threat of death. I remember that I got so weary of it and so anxious to have the matter settled one way or the other, and promptly, that this anxiety spoiled my days and my nights. I had no pleasure in them. I made up my mind to end this suspense and be done with it. Will Bowen was dangerously ill with the measles and I thought I would go down there and catch them. I entered the house by the front way and slipped along through rooms and halls, keeping sharp watch against discovery, and at last I reached Will's bed-chamber in the rear of the house on the second floor and got into it uncaptured. But that was as far as my victory reached. His mother caught me there a moment later and snatched me out of the house and gave me a most competent scolding and drove me away. She was so scared that she could hardly get her words out, and her face was white. I saw that I must manage better next time, and I did. I hung about the lane at the rear of the house and watched through cracks in the fence until I was convinced that the conditions were favorable; then I slipped through the back yard and up the back way and got into the room and into the bed with Will Bowen without being observed. I don't know how long I was in the bed. I only remember that Will Bowen, as society, had no value for me, for he was too sick to even notice that I was there. When I heard his mother coming I covered up my head, but that device was a failure. It was dead summer-time--the cover was nothing more than a limp blanket or sheet, and anybody could see that there were two of us under it. It didn't remain two very long. Mrs. Bowen snatched me out of the bed and conducted me home herself, with a grip on my collar which she never loosened until she delivered me into my mother's hands along with her opinion of that kind of a boy. It was a good case of measles that resulted. It brought me within a shade of death's door. It brought me to where I no longer took any interest in anything, but, on the contrary, felt a total absence of interest--which was most placid and enchanting. I have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time. I _was_, in effect, dying. The word had been passed and the family notified to assemble around the bed and see me off. I knew them all. There was no doubtfulness in my vision. They were all crying, but that did not affect me. I took but the vaguest interest in it, and that merely because I was the centre of all this emotional attention and was gratified by it and vain of it. When Dr. Cunningham had made up his mind that nothing more could be done for me he put bags of hot ashes all over me. He put them on my breast, on my wrists, on my ankles; and so, very much to his astonishment--and doubtless to my regret--he dragged me back into this world and set me going again. [_Dictated July 26, 1907._] In an article entitled "England's Ovation to Mark Twain," Sydney Brooks--but never mind that, now. I was in Oxford by seven o'clock that evening (June 25, 1907), and trying on the scarlet gown which the tailor had been constructing, and found it right--right and surpassingly becoming. At half past ten the next morning we assembled at All Souls College and marched thence, gowned, mortar-boarded and in double file, down a long street to the Sheldonian Theatre, between solid walls of the populace, very much hurrah'd and limitlessly kodak'd. We made a procession of considerable length and distinction and picturesqueness, with the Chancellor, Lord Curzon, late Viceroy of India, in his rich robe of black and gold, in the lead, followed by a pair of trim little boy train-bearers, and the train-bearers followed by the young Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was to be made a D.C.L. The detachment of D.C.L.'s were followed by the Doctors of Science, and these by the Doctors of Literature, and these in turn by the Doctors of Music. Sidney Colvin marched in front of me; I was coupled with Sidney Lee, and Kipling followed us; General Booth, of the Salvation Army, was in the squadron of D.C.L.'s. Our journey ended, we were halted in a fine old hall whence we could see, through a corridor of some length, the massed audience in the theatre. Here for a little time we moved about and chatted and made acquaintanceships; then the D.C.L.'s were summoned, and they marched through that corridor and the shouting began in the theatre. It would be some time before the Doctors of Literature and of Science would be called for, because each of those D.C.L.'s had to have a couple of Latin speeches made over him before his promotion would be complete--one by the Regius Professor of Civil Law, the other by the Chancellor. After a while I asked Sir William Ramsay if a person might smoke here and not get shot. He said, "Yes," but that whoever did it and got caught would be fined a guinea, and perhaps hanged later. He said he knew of a place where we could accomplish at least as much as half of a smoke before any informers would be likely to chance upon us, and he was ready to show the way to any who might be willing to risk the guinea and the hanging. By request he led the way, and Kipling, Sir Norman Lockyer and I followed. We crossed an unpopulated quadrangle and stood under one of its exits--an archway of massive masonry--and there we lit up and began to take comfort. The photographers soon arrived, but they were courteous and friendly and gave us no trouble, and we gave them none. They grouped us in all sorts of ways and photographed us at their diligent leisure, while we smoked and talked. We were there more than an hour; then we returned to headquarters, happy, content, and greatly refreshed. Presently we filed into the theatre, under a very satisfactory hurrah, and waited in a crimson column, dividing the crowded pit through the middle, until each of us in his turn should be called to stand before the Chancellor and hear our merits set forth in sonorous Latin. Meantime, Kipling and I wrote autographs until some good kind soul interfered in our behalf and procured for us a rest. I will now save what is left of my modesty by quoting a paragraph from Sydney Brooks's "Ovation." * * * * * Let those stars take the place of it for the present. Sydney Brooks has done it well. It makes me proud to read it; as proud as I was in that old day, sixty-two years ago, when I lay dying, the centre of attraction, with one eye piously closed upon the fleeting vanities of this life--an excellent effect--and the other open a crack to observe the tears, the sorrow, the admiration--all for me--all for me! Ah, that was the proudest moment of my long life--until Oxford! * * * * * Most Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been for generations lacking. These details began to appear at mid-afternoon on the 27th. At that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in the Pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. Soon the lanes were thronged with costumes which Oxford had from time to time seen and been familiar with in bygone centuries--fashions of dress which marked off centuries as by dates, and mile-stoned them back, and back, and back, until history faded into legend and tradition, when Arthur was a fact and the Round Table a reality. In this rich commingling of quaint and strange and brilliantly colored fashions in dress the dress-changes of Oxford for twelve centuries stood livid and realized to the eye; Oxford as a dream of the Middle Ages was complete now as it had never, in our day, before been complete; at last there was no discord; the mouldering old buildings, and the picturesque throngs drifting past them, were in harmony; soon--astonishingly soon!--the only persons that seemed out of place, and grotesquely and offensively and criminally out of place were such persons as came intruding along clothed in the ugly and odious fashions of the twentieth century; they were a bitterness to the feelings, an insult to the eye. The make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them. Also, I was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. The first corner I turned brought me suddenly face to face with Henry VIII, a person whom I had been implacably disliking for sixty years; but when he put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, "Welcome, well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my realm," my old prejudices vanished away and I forgave him. I think now that Henry the Eighth has been over-abused, and that most of us, if we had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up with. I feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. Personal contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. If I had a child I would name it Henry the Eighth, regardless of sex. Do you remember Charles the First?--and his broad slouch with the plume in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet doublet with lace sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at his side and his spurs on his heels? I encountered him at the next corner, and knew him in a moment--knew him as perfectly and as vividly as I should know the Grand Chain in the Mississippi if I should see it from the pilot-house after all these years. He bent his body and gave his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and gave me a welcome that went to my heart. This king has been much maligned; I shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him more than I have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years. He did some things in his time, which might better have been left undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name--we all know that, we all concede it--but our error has been in regarding them as crimes and in calling them by that name, whereas I perceive now that they were only indiscretions. At every few steps I met persons of deathless name whom I had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. I had hand-shakes with Henry the Second, who had not been seen in the Oxford streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the Fair Rosamond, whom I now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although I had thought differently about it before; and with Shakespeare, one of the pleasantest foreigners I have ever gotten acquainted with; and with Roger Bacon; and with Queen Elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never swore once--a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her and moved me to forgive her for beheading the Scottish Mary, if she really did it, which I now doubt; and with the quaintly and anciently clad young King Harold Harefoot, of near nine hundred years ago, who came flying by on a bicycle and smoking a pipe, but at once checked up and got off to shake with me; and also I met a bishop who had lost his way because this was the first time he had been inside the walls of Oxford for as much as twelve hundred years or thereabouts. By this time I had grown so used to the obliterated ages and their best-known people that if I had met Adam I should not have been either surprised or embarrassed; and if he had come in a racing automobile and a cloud of dust, with nothing on but his fig-leaf, it would have seemed to me all right and harmonious. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXIV. BY MARK TWAIN. _From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6]. Mamma and papa have returned from Onteora and they have had a delightful visit. Mr. Frank Stockton was down in Virginia and could not reach Onteora in time, so they did not see him, and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge was ill and couldn't go to Onteora, but Mrs. General Custer was there, and mamma said that she was a very attractive, sweet appearing woman. [_Dictated October 9, 1906._] Onteora was situated high up in the Catskill Mountains, in the centre of a far-reaching solitude. I do not mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were farmhouses here and there, at generous distances apart. Their occupants were descendants of ancestors who had built the houses in Rip Van Winkle's time, or earlier; and those ancestors were not more primitive than were this posterity of theirs. The city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant summer-resorters. The resorters were a puzzle to them, their ways were so strange and their interests so trivial. They drove the resorters over the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their bursts of enthusiasm over the scenery. The farmers had had that scenery on exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never noticed anything remarkable about it. By way of an incident: a pair of these primitives were overheard chatting about the resorters, one day, and in the course of their talk this remark was dropped: "I was a-drivin' a passel of 'em round about yisterday evenin', quiet ones, you know, still and solemn, and all to wunst they busted out to make your hair lift and I judged hell was to pay. Now what do you reckon it was? It wa'n't anything but jest one of them common damned yaller sunsets." In those days-- [_Tuesday, October 16, 1906._] ... Warner is gone. Stockton is gone. I attended both funerals. Warner was a near neighbor, from the autumn of '71 until his death, nineteen years afterward. It is not the privilege of the most of us to have many intimate friends--a dozen is our aggregate--but I think he could count his by the score. It is seldom that a man is so beloved by both sexes and all ages as Warner was. There was a charm about his spirit, and his ways, and his words, that won all that came within the sphere of its influence. Our children adopted him while they were little creatures, and thenceforth, to the end, he was "Cousin Charley" to them. He was "Uncle Charley" to the children of more than one other friend. Mrs. Clemens was very fond of him, and he always called her by her first name--shortened. Warner died, as she died, and as I would die--without premonition, without a moment's warning. Uncle Remus still lives, and must be over a thousand years old. Indeed, I know that this must be so, because I have seen a new photograph of him in the public prints within the last month or so, and in that picture his aspects are distinctly and strikingly geological, and one can see he is thinking about the mastodons and plesiosaurians that he used to play with when he was young. It is just a quarter of a century since I have seen Uncle Remus. He visited us in our home in Hartford and was reverently devoured by the big eyes of Susy and Clara, for I made a deep and awful impression upon the little creatures--who knew his book by heart through my nightly declamation of its tales to them--by revealing to them privately that he was the real Uncle Remus whitewashed so that he could come into people's houses the front way. He was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met. When there were people about he stayed silent, and seemed to suffer until they were gone. But he was lovely, nevertheless; for the sweetness and benignity of the immortal Remus looked out from his eyes, and the graces and sincerities of his character shone in his face. It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems possible, yet as I look back fifty-six years and consider Jim Wolf, I am almost persuaded that he was. He was our long slim apprentice in my brother's printing-office in Hannibal. He was seventeen, and yet he was as much as four times as bashful as I was, though I was only fourteen. He boarded and slept in the house, but he was always tongue-tied in the presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he could not answer save in frightened monosyllables. He would not enter a room where a girl was; nothing could persuade him to do such a thing. Once when he was in our small parlor alone, two majestic old maids entered and seated themselves in such a way that Jim could not escape without passing by them. He would as soon have thought of passing by one of Harris's plesiosaurians ninety feet long. I came in presently, was charmed with the situation, and sat down in a corner to watch Jim suffer, and enjoy it. My mother followed a minute later and sat down with the visitors and began to talk. Jim sat upright in his chair, and during a quarter of an hour he did not change his position by a shade--neither General Grant nor a bronze image could have maintained that immovable pose more successfully. I mean as to body and limbs; with the face there was a difference. By fleeting revealments of the face I saw that something was happening--something out of the common. There would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace. These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was happening to Jim. I mean if something _was_ happening to him, and I knew perfectly well that that was the case. At last a pair of tears began to swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the twitchings, but Jim sat still and let them run; then I saw his right hand steal along his thigh until half-way to his knee, then take a vigorous grip upon the cloth. That was a _wasp_ that he was grabbing! A colony of them were climbing up his legs and prospecting around, and every time he winced they stabbed him to the hilt--so for a quarter of an hour one group of excursionists after another climbed up Jim's legs and resented even the slightest wince or squirm that he indulged himself with, in his misery. When the entertainment had become nearly unbearable, he conceived the idea of gripping them between his fingers and putting them out of commission. He succeeded with many of them, but at great cost, for, as he couldn't see the wasp, he was as likely to take hold of the wrong end of him as he was the right; then the dying wasp gave him a punch to remember the incident by. If those ladies had stayed all day, and if all the wasps in Missouri had come and climbed up Jim's legs, nobody there would ever have known it but Jim and the wasps and me. There he would have sat until the ladies left. When they finally went away we went up-stairs and he took his clothes off, and his legs were a picture to look at. They looked as if they were mailed all over with shirt buttons, each with a single red hole in the centre. The pain was intolerable--no, would have been intolerable, but the pain of the presence of those ladies had been so much harder to bear that the pain of the wasps' stings was quite pleasant and enjoyable by comparison. Jim never could enjoy wasps. I remember once-- _From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6]. Mamma has given me a very pleasant little newspaper scrap about papa, to copy. I will put it in here. [_Thursday, October 11, 1906._] It was a rather strong compliment; I think I will leave it out. It was from James Redpath. The chief ingredients of Redpath's make-up were honesty, sincerity, kindliness, and pluck. He wasn't afraid. He was one of Ossawatomie Brown's right-hand men in the bleeding Kansas days; he was all through that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to another it wasn't worth the price of a night's lodging. He had a small body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by the "jayhawkers," who were proslavery Missourians, guerillas, modern free lances. [_Friday, October 12, 1906._] ... I can't think of the name of that daredevil guerilla who led the jayhawkers and chased Redpath up and down the country, and, in turn, was chased by Redpath. By grace of the chances of war, the two men never met in the field, though they several times came within an ace of it. Ten or twelve years later, Redpath was earning his living in Boston as chief of the lecture business in the United States. Fifteen or sixteen years after his Kansas adventures I became a public lecturer, and he was my agent. Along there somewhere was a press dinner, one November night, at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, and I attended it. I sat near the head of the table, with Redpath between me and the chairman; a stranger sat on my other side. I tried several times to talk with the stranger, but he seemed to be out of words and I presently ceased from troubling him. He was manifestly a very shy man, and, moreover, he might have been losing sleep the night before. The first man called up was Redpath. At the mention of the name the stranger started, and showed interest. He fixed a fascinated eye on Redpath, and lost not a word of his speech. Redpath told some stirring incidents of his career in Kansas, and said, among other things: "Three times I came near capturing the gallant jayhawker chief, and once he actually captured _me_, but didn't know me and let me go, because he said he was hot on Redpath's trail and couldn't afford to waste time and rope on inconsequential small fry." My stranger was called up next, and when Redpath heard his name he, in turn, showed a startled interest. The stranger said, bending a caressing glance upon Redpath and speaking gently--I may even say sweetly: "You realize that I was that jayhawker chief. I am glad to know you now and take you to my heart and call you friend"--then he added, in a voice that was pathetic with regret, "but if I had only known you then, what tumultuous happiness I should have had in your society!--while it lasted." The last quarter of a century of my life has been pretty constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of the human race--that is to say, the study of myself, for, in my individual person, I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that then is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way. When it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. In my contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result, my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of my estimate of myself. I am not proposing to discuss all of the peculiarities of the human race, at this time; I only wish to touch lightly upon one or two of them. To begin with, I wonder why a man should prefer a good billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind. I wonder at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. One of the essentials is amusement. Very well, if there is any more amusement to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are in favor of the bad outfit. The bad outfit will always furnish thirty per cent. more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the good outfit. Another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill, and display it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. Very well, the bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. It is a difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped balls and a slanting table, and make the right allowance for them and secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the satisfactory result. Another essential of the game is that it shall add to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet. Very well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad one. I know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the best one; that an outfit that couldn't be sold at auction for seven dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an outfit that is worth a thousand. I acquired some of this learning in Jackass Gulch, California, more than forty years ago. Jackass Gulch had once been a rich and thriving surface-mining camp. By and by its gold deposits were exhausted; then the people began to go away, and the town began to decay, and rapidly; in my time it had disappeared. Where the bank, and the city hall, and the church, and the gambling-dens, and the newspaper office, and the streets of brick blocks had been, was nothing now but a wide and beautiful expanse of green grass, a peaceful and charming solitude. Half a dozen scattered dwellings were still inhabited, and there was still one saloon of a ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but doomed. In its bar was a billiard outfit that was the counterpart of the one in my father-in-law's garret. The balls were chipped, the cloth was darned and patched, the table's surface was undulating, and the cues were headless and had the curve of a parenthesis--but the forlorn remnant of marooned miners played games there, and those games were more entertaining to look at than a circus and a grand opera combined. Nothing but a quite extraordinary skill could score a carom on that table--a skill that required the nicest estimate of force, distance, and how much to allow for the various slants of the table and the other formidable peculiarities and idiosyncrasies furnished by the contradictions of the outfit. Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before. Once I saw Texas Tom make a string of seven points on a single inning!--all calculated shots, and not a fluke or a scratch among them. I often saw him make runs of four, but when he made his great string of seven, the boys went wild with enthusiasm and admiration. The joy and the noise exceeded that which the great gathering at Madison Square produced when Sutton scored five hundred points at the eighteen-inch game, on a world-famous night last winter. With practice, that champion could score nineteen or twenty on the Jackass Gulch table; but to start with, Texas Tom would show him miracles that would astonish him; also it might have another handsome result: it might persuade the great experts to discard their own trifling game and bring the Jackass Gulch outfit here and exhibit their skill in a game worth a hundred of the discarded one, for profound and breathless interest, and for displays of almost superhuman skill. In my experience, games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match. Twenty-seven years ago my budding little family spent the summer at Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island. It was a comfortable boarding-place, well stocked with sweet mothers and little children, but the male sex was scarce; however, there was another young fellow besides myself, and he and I had good times--Higgins was his name, but that was not his fault. He was a very pleasant and companionable person. On the premises there was what had once been a bowling-alley. It was a single alley, and it was estimated that it had been out of repair for sixty years--but not the balls, the balls were in good condition; there were forty-one of them, and they ranged in size from a grapefruit up to a lignum-vitæ sphere that you could hardly lift. Higgins and I played on that alley day after day. At first, one of us located himself at the bottom end to set up the pins in case anything should happen to them, but nothing happened. The surface of that alley consisted of a rolling stretch of elevations and depressions, and neither of us could, by any art known to us, persuade a ball to stay on the alley until it should accomplish something. Little balls and big, the same thing always happened--the ball left the alley before it was half-way home and went thundering down alongside of it the rest of the way and made the gamekeeper climb out and take care of himself. No matter, we persevered, and were rewarded. We examined the alley, noted and located a lot of its peculiarities, and little by little we learned how to deliver a ball in such a way that it would travel home and knock down a pin or two. By and by we succeeded in improving our game to a point where we were able to get all of the pins with thirty-five balls--so we made it a thirty-five-ball game. If the player did not succeed with thirty-five, he had lost the game. I suppose that all the balls, taken together, weighed five hundred pounds, or maybe a ton--or along there somewhere--but anyway it was hot weather, and by the time that a player had sent thirty-five of them home he was in a drench of perspiration, and physically exhausted. Next, we started cocked hat--that is to say, a triangle of three pins, the other seven being discarded. In this game we used the three smallest balls and kept on delivering them until we got the three pins down. After a day or two of practice we were able to get the chief pin with an output of four balls, but it cost us a great many deliveries to get the other two; but by and by we succeeded in perfecting our art--at least we perfected it to our limit. We reached a scientific excellence where we could get the three pins down with twelve deliveries of the three small balls, making thirty-six shots to conquer the cocked hat. Having reached our limit for daylight work, we set up a couple of candles and played at night. As the alley was fifty or sixty feet long, we couldn't see the pins, but the candles indicated their locality. We continued this game until we were able to knock down the invisible pins with thirty-six shots. Having now reached the limit of the candle game, we changed and played it left-handed. We continued the left-handed game until we conquered its limit, which was fifty-four shots. Sometimes we sent down a succession of fifteen balls without getting anything at all. We easily got out of that old alley five times the fun that anybody could have gotten out of the best alley in New York. One blazing hot day, a modest and courteous officer of the regular army appeared in our den and introduced himself. He was about thirty-five years old, well built and militarily erect and straight, and he was hermetically sealed up in the uniform of that ignorant old day--a uniform made of heavy material, and much properer for January than July. When he saw the venerable alley, and glanced from that to the long procession of shining balls in the trough, his eye lit with desire, and we judged that he was our meat. We politely invited him to take a hand, and he could not conceal his gratitude; though his breeding, and the etiquette of his profession, made him try. We explained the game to him, and said that there were forty-one balls, and that the player was privileged to extend his inning and keep on playing until he had used them all up--repeatedly--and that for every ten-strike he got a prize. We didn't name the prize--it wasn't necessary, as no prize would ever be needed or called for. He started a sarcastic smile, but quenched it, according to the etiquette of his profession. He merely remarked that he would like to select a couple of medium balls and one small one, adding that he didn't think he would need the rest. Then he began, and he was an astonished man. He couldn't get a ball to stay on the alley. When he had fired about fifteen balls and hadn't yet reached the cluster of pins, his annoyance began to show out through his clothes. He wouldn't let it show in his face; but after another fifteen balls he was not able to control his face; he didn't utter a word, but he exuded mute blasphemy from every pore. He asked permission to take off his coat, which was granted; then he turned himself loose, with bitter determination, and although he was only an infantry officer he could have been mistaken for a battery, he got up such a volleying thunder with those balls. Presently he removed his cravat; after a little he took off his vest; and still he went bravely on. Higgins was suffocating. My condition was the same, but it would not be courteous to laugh; it would be better to burst, and we came near it. That officer was good pluck. He stood to his work without uttering a word, and kept the balls going until he had expended the outfit four times, making four times forty-one shots; then he had to give it up, and he did; for he was no longer able to stand without wobbling. He put on his clothes, bade us a courteous good-by, invited us to call at the Fort, and started away. Then he came back, and said, "What is the prize for the ten-strike?" We had to confess that we had not selected it yet. He said, gravely, that he thought there was no occasion for hurry about it. I believe Bateman's alley was a better one than any other in America, in the matter of the essentials of the game. It compelled skill; it provided opportunity for bets; and if you could get a stranger to do the bowling for you, there was more and wholesomer and delightfuler entertainment to be gotten out of his industries than out of the finest game by the best expert, and played upon the best alley elsewhere in existence. MARK TWAIN. (_To be Continued._) NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DCXXV. DECEMBER, 1907. CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--XXV. BY MARK TWAIN. _January 11, 1906._ Answer to a letter received this morning: DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that curious passage in my life. During the first year or two after it happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled, established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse, vulgar and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you and your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy of it. It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy. Address of Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain") From a report of the dinner given by the Publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in the BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT, December 18, 1877 Mr. Chairman--This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiawards. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my _nom de guerre._ I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. When he heard my _nom de guerre_ he looked more dejected than before. He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're the fourth--I'm going to move." "The fourth what!" said I. "The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move." "You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others!" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!" You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he-- "They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole, and says he-- "'Through the deep cares of thought I hear a voice that sings, Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!' "Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says-- "'Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes.' "Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he, "'Honor be to Mudjekeewis! You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--' "But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells-- "'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine! For I would drink to other days.' "By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to _standing_ on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.' Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says-- "'I am the doubter and the doubt--' and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout. Says he-- "'They reckon ill who leave me out; They know not well the subtle ways I keep. I pass and deal _again_!' Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! O, he was a cool one! Well, in about a minute, things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says-- "'I tire of globes and aces!-- Too long the game is played!' --and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says-- "'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught,' --and blamed if he didn't down with _another_ right bower! Emerson claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him!' All quiet on the Potomac, you bet! "They were pretty how-come-you-so, by now, and they begun to blow. Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was Barbara Frietchie.' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my Biglow Papers.' Says Holmes, 'My Thanatopsis lays over 'em both.' They mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more company--and Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says-- "'Is yonder squalid peasant all That this proud nursery could breed?' He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' till I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at seven, they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with _them_! He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em; because-- "'Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime; And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.' As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere." I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, _these_ were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors." The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "Ah! impostors, were they? Are _you_? I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled on my _nom de guerre_ enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. What I have said to Mrs. H. is true. I did suffer during a year or two from the deep humiliations of that episode. But at last, in 1888, in Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs. A. P. C., of Concord, Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing but death terminates. The C.'s were very bright people and in every way charming and companionable. We were together a month or two in Venice and several months in Rome, afterwards, and one day that lamented break of mine was mentioned. And when I was on the point of lathering those people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C.'s were indignant about the way that my performance had been received in Boston. They poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about the Boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the matter. That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief, beyond imagination. Very well, I had accepted that as a fact for a year or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of it--which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought of it I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy a thing. Well, the C.'s comforted me, but they did not persuade me to continue to think about the unhappy episode. I resisted that. I tried to get it out of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded. Until Mrs. H.'s letter came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought of that matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if possibly she might be right. At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and I wrote to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth. I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forever more. I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what _he_ would call still, but what would be more or lees motion to other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctness across this abyss of time. One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years dramatic editor of the "New York Tribune," and still occupying that high post in his old age) was there. He was much younger then than he is now, and he showed it. It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter at a banquet. During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a charming poem written for the occasion. He did it this time, and it was up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen to as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of heart and brain. Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the Boston paper. I had written it all out the day before and had perfectly memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests, that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened, as did everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: 'The old miner said, "You are the fourth, I'm going to move." "The fourth what?" said I. He answered, "The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours. I am going to move." "Why, you don't tell me," said I. "Who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--"' Now then the house's _attention_ continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty--I struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always hoping--but with a gradually perishing hope--that somebody would laugh, or that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know enough to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the Trinity; there is no milder way in which to describe the petrified condition and the ghastly expression of those people. When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat. I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I shall never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp. There was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put into Cellini's autobiography. There was a frightful pause. There was an awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," a place which would make any novel respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest, consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands ready to applaud when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for the first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had spoken several times before, and that in the reason why I was able to go on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop had had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man hadn't strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied, paralyzed, it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try. Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. Howells mournfully, and without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of the room. It was very kind--he was most generous. He towed us tottering away into some room in that building, and we sat down there. I don't know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it. It was the kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help your case. But Howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "That is, for _you_--and consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you deserve to have all you are going to get. But here is an innocent man. Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him. He can never hold his head up again. The world can never look upon Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse." That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two whenever it forced its way into my mind. Now, then, I take that speech up and examine it. As I said, it arrived this morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all over that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with _me_, it is not in the speech at all. [_Dictated October 3, 1907._] In some ways, I was always honest; even from my earliest years I could never bring myself to use money which I had acquired in questionable ways; many a time I tried, but principle was always stronger than desire. Six or eight months ago, Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles was given a great dinner-party in New York, and when he and I were chatting together in the drawing-room before going out to dinner he said, "I've known you as much as thirty years, isn't it?" I said, "Yes, that's about it, I think." He mused a moment or two and then said, "I wonder we didn't meet in Washington in 1867; you were there at that time, weren't you?" I said, "Yes, but there was a difference; I was not known then; I had not begun to bud--I was an obscurity; but you had been adding to your fine Civil War record; you had just come back from your brilliant Indian campaign in the Far West, and had been rewarded with a brigadier-generalship in the regular army, and everybody was talking about you and praising you. If you had met me, you wouldn't be able to remember it now--unless some unusual circumstance of the meeting had burnt it into your memory. It is forty years ago, and people don't remember nobodies over a stretch of time like that." I didn't wish to continue the conversation along that line, so I changed the subject. I could have proven to him, without any trouble, that we did meet in Washington in 1867, but I thought it might embarrass one or the other of us, so I didn't do it. I remember the incident very well. This was the way of it: I had just come back from the Quaker City Excursion, and had made a contract with Bliss of Hartford to write "The Innocents Abroad." I was out of money, and I went down to Washington to see if I could earn enough there to keep me in bread and butter while I should write the book. I came across William Clinton, brother of the astronomer, and together we invented a scheme for our mutual sustenance; we became the fathers and originators of what is a common feature in the newspaper world now--the syndicate. We became the old original first Newspaper Syndicate on the planet; it was on a small scale, but that is usual with untried new enterprises. We had twelve journals on our list; they were all weeklies, all obscure and poor, and all scattered far away among the back settlements. It was a proud thing for those little newspapers to have a Washington correspondence, and a fortunate thing for us that they felt in that way about it. Each of the twelve took two letters a week from us, at a dollar per letter; each of us wrote one letter per week and sent off six duplicates of it to these benefactors, thus acquiring twenty-four dollars a week to live on--which was all we needed, in our cheap and humble quarters. Clinton was one of the dearest and loveliest human beings I have ever known, and we led a charmed existence together, in a contentment which knew no bounds. Clinton was refined by nature and breeding; he was a gentleman by nature and breeding; he was highly educated; he was of a beautiful spirit; he was pure in heart and speech. He was a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian; a Presbyterian of the old and genuine school, being honest and sincere in his religion, and loving it, and finding serenity and peace in it. He hadn't a vice--unless a large and grateful sympathy with Scotch whiskey may be called by that name. I didn't regard it as a vice, because he was a Scotchman, and Scotch whiskey to a Scotchman is as innocent as milk is to the rest of the human race. In Clinton's case it was a virtue, and not an economical one. Twenty-four dollars a week would really have been riches to us if we hadn't had to support that jug; because of the jug we were always sailing pretty close to the wind, and any tardiness in the arrival of any part of our income was sure to cause us some inconvenience. I remember a time when a shortage occurred; we had to have three dollars, and we had to have it before the close of the day. I don't know now how we happened to want all that money at one time; I only know we had to have it. Clinton told me to go out and find it--and he said he would also go out and see what he could do. He didn't seem to have any doubt that we would succeed, but I knew that that was his religion working in him; I hadn't the same confidence; I hadn't any idea where to turn to raise all that bullion, and I said so. I think he was ashamed of me, privately, because of my weak faith. He told me to give myself no uneasiness, no concern; and said in a simple, confident, and unquestioning way, "the Lord will provide." I saw that he fully believed the Lord would provide, but it seemed to me that if he had had my experience-- But never mind that; before he was done with me his strong faith had had its influence, and I went forth from the place almost convinced that the Lord really would provide. I wandered around the streets for an hour, trying to think up some way to get that money, but nothing suggested itself. At last I lounged into the big lobby of the Ebbitt House, which was then a new hotel, and sat down. Presently a dog came loafing along. He paused, glanced up at me and said, with his eyes, "Are you friendly?" I answered, with my eyes, that I was. He gave his tail a grateful little wag and came forward and rested his jaw on my knee and lifted his brown eyes to my face in a winningly affectionate way. He was a lovely creature--as beautiful as a girl, and he was made all of silk and velvet. I stroked his smooth brown head and fondled his drooping ears, and we were a pair of lovers right away. Pretty soon Brigadier-General Miles, the hero of the land, came strolling by in his blue and gold splendors, with everybody's admiring gaze upon him. He saw the dog and stopped, and there was a light in his eye which showed that he had a warm place in his heart for dogs like this gracious creature; then he came forward and patted the dog and said, "He is very fine--he is a wonder; would you sell him?" I was greatly moved; it seemed a marvellous thing to me, the way Clinton's prediction had come true. I said, "Yes." The General said, "What do you ask for him?" "Three dollars." The General was manifestly surprised. He said, "Three dollars? Only three dollars? Why, that dog is a most uncommon dog; he can't possibly be worth leas than fifty. If he were mine, I wouldn't take a hundred for him. I'm afraid you are not aware of his value. Reconsider your price if you like, I don't wish to wrong you." But if he had known me he would have known that I was no more capable of wronging him than he was of wronging me. I responded with the same quiet decision as before, "No--three dollars. That is his price." "Very well, since you insist upon it," said the General, and he gave me three dollars and led the dog away, and disappeared up-stairs. In about ten minutes a gentle-faced middle-aged gentleman came along, and began to look around here and there and under tables and everywhere, and I said to him, "Is it a dog you are looking for?" His face was sad, before, and troubled; but it lit up gladly now, and he answered, "Yes--have you seen him?" "Yes," I said, "he was here a minute ago, and I saw him follow a gentleman away. I think I could find him for you if you would like me to try." I have seldom seen a person look so grateful--and there was gratitude in his voice, too, when he conceded that he would like me to try. I said I would do it with great pleasure, but that as it might take a little time I hoped he would not mind paying me something for my trouble. He said he would do it most gladly--repeating that phrase "most gladly"--and asked me how much. I said-- "Three dollars." He looked surprised, and said, "Dear me, it is nothing! I will pay you ten, quite willingly." But I said, "No, three is the price"--and I started for the stairs without waiting for any further argument, for Clinton had said that that was the amount that the Lord would provide, and it seemed to me that it would be sacrilegious to take a penny more than was promised. I got the number of the General's room from the office-clerk, as I passed by his wicket, and when I reached the room I found the General there caressing his dog, and quite happy. I said, "I am sorry, but I have to take the dog again." He seemed very much surprised, and said, "Take him again? Why, he is my dog; you sold him to me, and at your own price." "Yes," I said, "it is true--but I have to have him, because the man wants him again." "What man?" "The man that owns him; he wasn't my dog." The General looked even more surprised than before, and for a moment he couldn't seem to find his voice; then he said, "Do you mean to tell me that you were selling another man's dog--and knew it?" "Yes, I knew it wasn't my dog." "Then why did you sell him?" I said, "Well, that is a curious question to ask. I sold him because you wanted him. You offered to buy the dog; you can't deny that I was not anxious to sell him--I had not even thought of selling him, but it seemed to me that if it could be any accommodation to you--" He broke me off in the middle, and said, "_Accommodation_ to me? It is the most extraordinary spirit of accommodation I have ever heard of--the idea of your selling a dog that didn't belong to you--" I broke him off there, and said, "There is no relevancy about this kind of argument; you said yourself that the dog was probably worth a hundred dollars, I only asked you three; was there anything unfair about that? You offered to pay more, you know you did. I only asked you three; you can't deny it." "Oh, what in the world has that to do with it! The crux of the matter is that you didn't own the dog--can't you see that? You seem to think that there is no impropriety in selling property that isn't yours provided you sell it cheap. Now, then--" I said, "Please don't argue about it any more. You can't get around the fact that the price was perfectly fair, perfectly reasonable--considering that I didn't own the dog--and so arguing about it is only a waste of words. I have to have him back again because the man wants him; don't you see that I haven't any choice in the matter? Put yourself in my place. Suppose you had sold a dog that didn't belong to you; suppose you--" "Oh," he said, "don't muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! Take him along, and give me a rest." So I paid back the three dollars and led the dog down-stairs and passed him over to his owner, and collected three for my trouble. I went away then with a good conscience, because I had acted honorably; I never could have used the three that I sold the dog for, because it was not rightly my own, but the three I got for restoring him to his rightful owner was righteously and properly mine, because I had earned it. That man might never have gotten that dog back at all, if it hadn't been for me. My principles have remained to this day what they were then. I was always honest; I know I can never be otherwise. It is as I said in the beginning--I was never able to persuade myself to use money which I had acquired in questionable ways. Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true. MARK TWAIN. 
28635	----	********************************************************************** * Transcriber's Note: * * * * Obvious typographical errors were corrected and the use of hyphens * * was made consistent throughout. All other spelling and punctuation * * was retained as it appeared in the original text. * ********************************************************************** MY LIFE: Or The Adventures of Geo. Thompson. Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. Why rove in _Fiction's_ shadowy land, And seek for treasures there, When _Truth's_ domain, so near at hand, Is filled with things most rare-- When every day brings something new, Some great, stupendous change, Something exciting, wild and _true_, Most wonderful and strange! [ORIGINAL.] {First published 1854} [Illustration: Yellow Cover of Thompson's _My Life_. Original size 6 x 9-1/8". Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.] INTRODUCTION _In which the author defineth his position._ It having become the fashion of distinguished novelists to write their own lives--or, in other words, to blow their own trumpets,--the author of these pages is induced, at the solicitation of numerous friends, whose bumps of inquisitiveness are strongly developed, to present his auto-biography to the public--in so doing which, he but follows the example of Alexandre Dumas, the brilliant French novelist, and of the world-renowned Dickens, both of whom are understood to be preparing their personal histories for the press. Now, in comparing myself with the above great worthies, who are so deservedly distinguished in the world of literature, I shall be accused of unpardonable presumption and ridiculous egotism--but I care not what may be said of me, inasmuch as a total independence of the opinions, feelings and prejudices of the world, has always been a prominent characteristic of mine--and that portion of the world and the "rest of mankind" which does not like me, has my full permission to go to the devil as soon as it can make all the necessary arrangements for the journey. I shall be true and candid, in these pages. I shall not seek to conceal one of my numerous faults which I acknowledge and deplore; and, if I imagine that I possess one solitary merit, I shall not be backward in making that merit known. Those who know me personally, will never accuse me of entertaining one single atom of that despicable quality, self-conceit; those who do not know me, are at liberty to think what they please.--Heaven knows that had I possessed a higher estimation of myself, a more complete reliance upon my own powers, and some of that universal commodity known as "cheek," I should at this present moment have been far better off in fame and fortune. But I have been unobtrusive, unambitious, retiring--and my friends have blamed me for this a thousand times. I have seen writers of no talent at all--petty scribblers, wasters of ink and spoilers of paper, who could not write six consecutive lines of English grammar, and whose short paragraphs for the newspapers invariably had to undergo revision and correction--I have seen such fellows causing themselves to be invited to public banquets and other festivals, and forcing their unwelcome presence into the society of the most distinguished men of the day. I have spoken of my friends--now a word or two in regard to my enemies. Like most men who have figured before the public, in whatever capacity, I have secured the hatred of many persons, who, jealous of my humble fame, have lost no opportunity of spitting out their malice and opposing my progress. The friendship of such persons is a misfortune--their enmity is a blessing. I assure them that their hatred will never cause me to lose a fraction of my appetite, or my nightly rest. They may consider themselves very fortunate, if, in the following pages, they do not find themselves immortalized by my notice, although they are certainly unworthy of so great a distinction. I enjoy the friendship of men of letters, and am therefore not to be put down by the opposition of a parcel of senseless blockheads, without brain, or heart, or soul. I shall doubtless find it necessary to make allusions to local places, persons, incidents, &c. Those will add greatly to the interest of the narrative. Many portraits will be readily recognized, especially those whose originals reside in Boston, where the greater portion of my literary career has been passed. _The life of an author_, must necessarily be one of peculiar and absorbing interest, for he dwells in a world of his own creation, and his tastes, habits, and feelings are different from those of other people. How little is he understood--how imperfectly is he appreciated, by a cold, unsympathising world! his eccentricities are ridiculed--his excesses are condemned by unthinking persons, who cannot comprehend the fact that a writer, whose mind is weary, naturally longs for physical excitement of some kind of other, and too often seeks for a temporary mental oblivion in the intoxicating bowl. Under any and every circumstance, the author is certainly deserving of some degree of charitable consideration, because he labors hard for the public entertainment, and draws heavily on the treasures of his imagination, in order to supply the continual demands of the reading community. When the author has led a life of stirring adventure, his history becomes one of extraordinary and thrilling interest. I flatter myself that this narrative will be found worthy of the reader's perusal. And now a few words concerning my personal identity. Many have insanely supposed me to be George Thompson, the celebrated English abolitionist and member of the British Parliament, but such cannot be the case, that individual having returned to his own country. Again--others have taken me for George Thompson, the pugilist; but by far the greater part of the performers in this interesting "Comedy of Errors" have imagined me to be no less a personage than the celebrated "_One-eyed Thompson_," and they long continued in this belief, even after that talented but most unfortunate man had committed suicide in New York, and in spite of the fact that his name was William H., and not George. Two circumstances, however, seemed to justify the belief before the man's death:--he, like myself, had the great misfortune to be deprived of an eye. How the misfortune happened to _me_, I shall relate in the proper place. I have written many works of fiction, but I have passed through adventures quite as extraordinary as any which I have drawn from the imagination. In order to establish my claim to the title of "author," I will enumerate a few of the works which I have written:-- Gay Girls of New York, Dissipation, The Housekeeper, Venus in Boston, Jack Harold, Criminal, Outlaw, Road to Ruin, Brazen Star, Kate Castleton, Redcliff, The Libertine, City Crimes, The Gay Deceiver, Twin Brothers, Demon of Gold, Dashington, Lady's Garter, Harry Glindon, Catharine and Clara. In addition to these works--which have all met with a rapid sale and most extensive circulation--I have written a sufficient quantity of tales, sketches, poetry, essays and other literary stock of every description, to constitute half a dozen cart loads. My adventures, however, and not my productions must employ my pen; and begging the reader's pardon for this rather lengthy, but very necessary, introduction, I begin my task. CHAPTER I _In which I begin to Acquire a Knowledge of the World._ I have always thought, and still think, that it matters very little where or when a man is born--it is sufficient for him to know that he is _here_, and that he had better adapt himself, as far as possible, to the circumstances by which he is surrounded, provided that he wishes to toddle through the world with comfort and credit to himself and to the approbation of others. But still, in order to please all classes of readers, I will state that some thirty years ago a young stranger struggled into existence in the city of New York; and I will just merely hint that the twenty-eighth day of August, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three, should be inserted in the next (comic) almanac as having been the birth-day of a great man--for when an individual attains a bodily weight of two hundred pounds and over, may he not be styled _great_? My parents were certainly respectable people, but they both inconsiderately died at a very early period of my life, leaving me a few hundred dollars and a thickheaded uncle, to whom was attached an objectionable aunt, the proprietress of a long nose and a shrewish temper. The nose was adapted to the consumption of snuff, and the temper was effective in the destruction of my happiness and peace of mind. The worthy couple, with a prophetic eye, saw that I was destined to become, in future years, somewhat of a _gourmand_, unless care should be taken to prevent such a melancholy fate; therefore, actuated by the best motives, and in order to teach me the luxury of abstinence, they began by slow but sure degrees to starve me. Good people, how I reverence their memory! One night I committed burglary upon a closet, and feloniously carried off a chunk of bread and meat, which I devoured in the cellar. "Oh, my prophetic soul--_my uncle_!" That excellent man caught me in the act of eating the provender, and--my bones ache at this very moment as I think of the licking I got! I forgot to mention that I had a rather insignificant brother, four years older than myself, who became my uncle's apprentice, and who joined that gentleman in his persecutions against me. My kind relatives were rather blissful people in the way of ignorance, and they hated me because they imagined that I regarded myself as their superior--a belief that was founded on the fact that I shunned their society and passed the greater portion of my time in reading and writing. I lived at that time in Thomas street, very near the famous brothel of Rosina Townsend, in whose house that dreadful murder was committed which the New York public will still remember with a thrill of horror. I allude to the murder of the celebrated courtezan Ellen Jewett. Her lover, Richard P. Robinson, was tried and acquitted of the murder, through the eloquence of his talented counsel, Ogden Hoffman, Esq. The facts of the case are briefly these:--Robinson was a clerk in a wholesale store, and was the paramour of Ellen, who was strongly attached to him. Often have I seen them walking together, both dressed in the height of fashion, the beautiful Ellen leaning upon the arm of the dashing Dick, while their elegant appearance attracted universal attention and admiration. But all this soon came to a bloody termination. Dick was engaged to be married to a young lady of the highest respectability, the heiress of wealth and the possessor of surpassing loveliness. He informed Ellen that his connection with her must cease in consequence of his matrimonial arrangements, whereupon Ellen threatened to expose him to his "intended" if he abandoned her. Embarrassed by the critical nature of his situation, Dick, then, in an evil hour, resolved to kill the courtezan who threatened to destroy his anticipated happiness. One Saturday night he visited her as usual; and after a splendid supper, they returned to her chamber. Upon that occasion, as was afterwards proved on the trial, Dick wore an ample cloak, and several persons noticed that he seemed to have something concealed beneath it. His manner towards Ellen and also his words, were that night unusually caressing and affectionate. What passed in that chamber, and who perpetrated that murder the Almighty knows--_and, perhaps, Dick Robinson, if he is still alive, also knows_![A] The next morning (Sunday,) at a very early hour, smoke was seen to proceed from Ellen's chamber, and the curtains of her bed were found to have been set on fire. The flames were with difficulty extinguished, and there in the half consumed bed, was found the mangled corpse of Ellen Jewett, having on the side of her head an awful wound, which had evidently been inflicted by a hatchet. Dick Robinson was nowhere to be found, but in the garden, near a fence, were discovered his cloak and a bloody hatchet. With many others, I entered the room in which lay the body of Ellen, and never shall I forget the horrid spectacle that met my gaze! There, upon that couch of sin, which had been scathed by fire, lay blackened the half-burned remains of a once-beautiful woman, whose head exhibited the dreadful wound which had caused her death. It had plainly been the murderer's intention to burn down the house in order to destroy the ghastly evidence of his crime; but fate ordained that the fire should be discovered and extinguished before the _fatal wound_ became obliterated. Robinson, as I said before, was tried and pronounced guiltless of the crime, through the ingenuity of his counsel, who termed him an "_innocent boy_." The public, however, firmly believed in his guilt; and the question arises--"If Dick Robinson did not kill Ellen Jewett, _who did_?" I do not believe that ever before was presented so shameful an instance of perverted justice, or so striking an illustration of the "glorious uncertainty of the law." It is rather singular that Furlong, a grocer, who swore to an _alibi_ in favor of Robinson, and who was the chief instrument employed to effect the acquittal of that young man, some time afterwards committed suicide by drowning, having first declared that his conscience reproached him for the part which he played at the trial! The Sabbath upon which this murder was brought to light was a dark, stormy day, and I have reason to remember it well, for, in the afternoon, that good old pilgrim--my uncle, of course,--discovered that I had played truant from Sunday School in the morning, and for that atrocious crime, he, in his holy zeal for my spiritual and temporal welfare, resolved to bestow upon me a wholesome and severe flogging, being aided and abetted in the formation of that laudable resolution by my religious aunt and my sanctimonious brother, the latter of whom had turned _informer_ against me. Sweet relatives? how I love to think of them--and never do I fail to remember them in my prayers. Well, I was lugged up into the garret, which was intended to be the scene of my punishment. If I recollect rightly, I was then about twelve years of age, and rather a stout youth considering my years. I determined to rebel against the authority of my beloved kindred, assert my independence, and defend myself to the best of my ability. "I have suffered enough;" said I to myself, "and now I'm _going in_." "Sabbath-breaker, strip off your jacket," mildly remarked by dear uncle as he savagely flourished a cowhide of most formidable aspect and alarming suppleness. My reply was brief, but expressive: "I'll see you d----d first," said I. My uncle turned pale, my aunt screamed, and my brother rolled up the white of his eyes and groaned. "What, what did you say?" demanded my uncle, who could not believe the evidence of his own senses, for up to that moment I had always tamely submitted to the good man's amiable treatment of me, and he found it impossible to imagine that I was capable of resisting him. Well, if there ever _was_ an angel on earth, that uncle of mine was that particular angel. Saints in general are provided with pinched noses, green eyes, and voices like unto the wailings of a small pig, which is suffering the agonies of death beneath a cart-wheel. And, if there ever was a cherub, my brother _was_ certainly that individual cherub, although, in truth, my pious recollections do not furnish me with the statement that cherubs are remarkable for swelled heads and bandy legs. "I say," was my reply to my uncle's astonished inquiry, "that I ain't going to stand any more abuse and beatings. I've stood bad treatment long enough from the whole pack of you. I'm almost starved, and I'm kicked about like a dog. Let any of you three tyrants touch me, and I'll show you what is to get desperate. I disown you all as relatives, and hereafter I'm going to live where I please, and do as I please." Furious with rage, my sweet-tempered uncle raised the cowhide and with it struck me across the face. I immediately pitched into that portion of his person where he was accustomed to stow away his Sabbath beans, and the excellent man fell head over heels down the garret stairs, landing securely at the bottom and failing to pick himself up, for the simple reason that he had broken his leg. What a pity it would have been, and what a loss society would have sustained, if, instead of his leg, the holy man had broken his _neck_! My dear brother, accompanied by my affectionate aunt, now choked me, but I was not to be conquered just then, for "thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just." The lady I landed in a tub of impure water that happened to be standing near; and she presented quite an interesting appearance, kicking up her heels and squalling like a cat in difficulties. My other assailant I hurled into a heap of ashes, and the way he blubbered was a caution to a Nantucket whaleman. Rushing down the stairs, I passed over the prostrate form of my crippled uncle, who requested me to come back, so that he might kick me with his serviceable foot; but, brute that I was, I disregarded him--requested him to go to a place which shall be nameless--and then left the house as expeditiously as possible, fully determined never to return, whatever might be the consequences. "I am now old enough, and big enough," I mentally reflected, "to take care of myself; and to-morrow I'll look for work, and try to get a chance to learn a trade. Where shall I sleep to-night? It's easy enough to ask that question, but deuced hard to answer it. I wish to-day wasn't Sunday!" Rather an impious wish, but quite natural under the circumstances. I felt in my pockets, to see if I was the proprietor of any loose change; my search was magnificently successful, for I discovered that I had a sixpence! Yes, reader, a new silver sixpence, that glittered in my hand like a bright star of hope, urging me on to enterprise--to exertions. So fearful was I of losing the precious coin, that I continued to grasp it tightly in my hand. I never had been allowed any pocket money, even on the Fourth of July; and this large sum had come into my possession through the munificence of a neighbor, as a reward for performing an errand. Not knowing where else to go, I went down on the Battery, and sheltered myself under a tree from the rain, which fell in torrents. Rather an interesting situation for a youth of twelve--homeless, friendless, almost penniless! I was wet through to the skin, and as night came on, I became desperately hungry, for I had eaten no dinner that day, and even my breakfast had been of the _phantom_ order--something like the pasteboard meals which are displayed upon the stage of the theatre. However, I did not despair, for I was young and active, full of the hope so natural to a youth ere rough contact with the world has crushed his spirit. I was well aware of the fact that I was no fool, although I had often been called one by my hostile and unappreciating relatives, whose opinions I had ever held in most supreme contempt. As I stood under that tree to shelter myself from the rain, I felt quite happy, for a feeling of independence had arisen within me. I was now my own master, and the consciousness that I must solely rely upon myself, was to me a source of gratification and pride. I had not the slightest doubt of being able to dig my way through the world in some way or other. Night came on at last, black as the brow of a Congo nigger, and starless as a company of travelling actors. I could not remain under the tree all night, that was certain; and so I left it, although I could scarcely see my hand before me. That hand, by the way, still tenaciously grasped the invaluable sixpence. Groping my way out of the Battery, and guided by a light, I entered the bar-room of a respectable hotel, where a large number of well-dressed gentlemen were assembled, who were seeking shelter from the storm, and at the same time indulging their convivial propensities. Much noise and confusion prevailed; and two gentlemen, who, as I afterwards learned, were officers belonging to a Spanish vessel then in port, fell into a dispute and got into a fight, during which one of them stabbed the other with a dirk-knife, inflicting a mortal wound. Officers were sent for, the murderer and his victim were removed, and comparative quiet prevailed. I was seated in an obscure corner of the bar-room, wondering how I should get through the night, when I was unceremoniously accosted by a lad of about my own age. He was a rakish looking youth, quite handsome withal, dressed in the height of fashion, and was smoking a cigar with great vigor and apparent relish. It will be seen hereafter that I have reason to remember this individual to the very last day of my life. Would to heaven that I had never met him! This youth slapped me familiarly on the shoulder, and said-- "Hallo, bub! why, you're wet as a drowned rat! Come and take a brandy cocktail--it will warm you up!" I had never drank a drop of liquor in my life, and I hadn't the faintest idea of what a brandy cocktail was, and so I told my new friend, who laughed immoderately as he exclaimed-- "How jolly green you are, to be sure; why, you're a regular _greenhorn_, and I'm going to call you by that name hereafter. Have you got any tin?" I knew that he meant money, and so I told him that I had but a sixpence in the world. "Bah!" cried my friend, as he drew his cigar from his mouth and salivated in the most fashionable manner, "who are you, what are you and what are you doing here? Come, tell me all about yourself, and it may perhaps be in my power to do you a service." His frank, off-hand manner won my confidence. I told him my whole story, without any reserve; and he laughed uproariously when I told him how I had pitched my tyrannical uncle down stairs. "It served the old chap right," said he approvingly--"you are a fellow of some spirit, and I like you. Come take a drink, and we can afterwards talk over what is best to be done." I objected to drink, because I had formed a strong prejudice against ardent spirits, having often been a witness of its deplorable effects in depriving men--and women, too--of their reason, and reducing them to the condition of brute beasts. So, in declining my friend's invitation, I told him my reasons for so doing, whereupon he laughed louder than ever, as he remarked-- "Why, _Greenhorn_, you'd make an excellent temperance lecturer. But perhaps you think I haven't got any money to pay the rum. Look here--what do you think of _that_?" He displayed a large roll of bank bills, and flourished them triumphantly. I had never before seen so much money, except in the broker's windows; and my friend was immediately established in my mind as a _millionaire_, whose wealth was inexhaustible. I suddenly conceived for him the most profound respect, and would not have offended him for the world. How could I persist in refusing to drink with a young gentleman of such wealth, and (as a necessary consequence) such distinction? Besides, I suddenly felt quite a curiosity to drink some liquor, just to see how it tasted. After all, it was only very low people who got drunk and wallowed in the mire. _Gentlemen_ (I thought) never get drunk, and they always seem so happy and joyous after they have been drinking! How they shake hands, and swear eternal friendship, and seem generously willing to lend or give away all they have in the world! So thought I, as my mind was made up to accept the invitation of my friend. It is singular that I had forgotten all about the murder which had just taken place in that bar-room, and which had been directly produced by intemperance. "The fact is, my dear _Greenhorn_," said my friend, impressively, as he flourished his hand after the manner of some aged, experienced and eloquent orator, "the fact is, the _use_ of liquor, and its _abuse_, are two very different things. A man (here he drew himself up) can drink like a gentleman, or he can swill like a loafer, or a beast. Now _I_ prefer the gentlemanly portion of the argument, and therefore we'll go up and take a gentlemanly drink. I shall be happy, young man, to initiate you into the divine joys and mysteries of Bacchus--ahem!" I looked at my friend with increased wonder, for he displayed an assurance, a self-possession, an elegant _nonchalance_, that were far beyond his years, for he was only about twelve years old--my own age exactly. And then what language he used--so refined, glowing, and indicative of a knowledge of the world! I longed to be like him--to equal him in his many perfections--to sport as much money as he did, and to wear as good "_harness_." I forgot to mention that he carried a splendid gold watch, and that several glittering rings adorned his fingers. "Who can he be?" was the question which I asked myself; and of course, I could not find an answer. "Felix," said my friend, addressing the bar-keeper in a style of patronizing condescension, as we approached the bar, "Felix, my good fellow, just mix us a couple of brandy cocktails, will you, and make them _strong_, d'ye hear, for the night is wet, and I and my verdant friend here, are about to travel in search of amusement, even as the Caliph and his Vizier used to perambulate the streets of Baghdad. Come, hurry up!" The bar-keeper grinned, mixed the liquor, and handed us the tumblers. My friend knocked his glass against mine, and remarked "here's luck," a ceremony and an observation which both somewhat surprised me at the time, although I have long since become thoroughly acquainted with what was then a mystery. Many of my readers--indeed, I may say the greater portion of them--will require no explanation of this matter; and as for those who are in ignorance of it, I will simply say, long may they keep so! My friend tossed off his cocktail with the air of one who is used to it, and rather liked it than otherwise; but I was not quite so successful, for being wholly unacquainted with the science of drinking, the strength of the liquor nearly choked me, to the intense amusement of my more experienced friend, who advised me to try again. I _did_ try again, and more successfully, the liquor went the way of all rum, and soon produced the usual effects. Of course its influence on me was exceedingly powerful, I being entirely unaccustomed to its use. A very agreeable feeling of exhilaration stole over me--I thought I was worth just one hundred thousand dollars--I embraced my friend and swore he was a "trump"--I then noticed, with mild surprise, that he had been multiplied into two individuals--there were two barkeepers now, although just before I drank, there was but one--an additional chandelier had just stepped in to visit the solitary one which had lighted the room--to speak plainly, I saw double; and to sum the whole matter up in a few words, I was, for the first time in my life, most decidedly and incontestably _drunk_. As nearly as I can remember, my friend linked his arm within mine, and we passed out into the street--he partially supporting me, and keeping me from falling. Two precious youths, of twelve years of age, we certainly were--one staggering and trying to fall down, and the other laughing, and holding him up! The rain had ceased falling, and the stars were shining as if nothing had happened. The cool air sobered me, and my friend congratulated me on my recovery from a state of inebriety. "After a little practice at the bar," said he--"it will take a good many _tods_ to _floor_ you. Let me give you a few hints as regards drinking. Never mix your liquor--always stick to one kind. After every glass, eat a cracker--or, what is better, a pickle. Plain drinks are always the best--far preferable to fancy drinks, which contain sugar, and lemons, and mint, and other trash; although a mixed drink may be taken on a stormy night, such as this has been. Drink ale, or beer, sparingly, and only after dinner--for, taken in large quantities, it is apt to bloat a person, and it plays the very devil with his internal arrangements. Besides, it is filthy stuff, at best, being made of the most repulsive materials and in the dirtiest manner. Always drink _good liquor_, which will not hurt you, while the vile stuff which is sold in the different bar-rooms will soon send you to your grave. If you pass a day or two in drinking freely, do not miss eating a single meal, and if you do not feel inclined to eat, _force_ yourself to do it; for, if you neglect your food, that terrible fiend, _Delirium Tremens_, will have you in his savage grasp before you know it. Every morning after a _spree_, take a good stiff horn of brandy, and soon afterwards a glass of plain soda, which will cool you off. Never drink gin--it is vulgar stuff, not fit to be used by gentlemen.--When you desire to reform from drinking, never break off abruptly, which is dangerous; but _taper off_ gradually--three glasses to-day, two to-morrow, and one the next day. Never drink with low people, under any circumstances, for it brings you down to their level. When you go to a drinking party, or to a fashionable dinner, sit with your back toward the sun--confine yourself to one kind of liquor--take an occasional sip of vinegar--and the very devil himself cannot drink you under the table! Now do you understand me, my dear _greenhorn_?" Such language and advice, emanating from a boy of twelve, astonished me, and hurried me to the conclusion that he must be a very "_fast_" youth indeed. I took a more particular survey of my new friend. He was not remarkable handsome, but his face was flushing not with health, but with drinking. A rosy tint suffused his full cheeks, and a delicate vermillion colored the top of his well-formed nose. His form was somewhat slighter than mine, but he looked vigorous and active. His closely buttoned jacket developed a full breast, and a pair of muscular arms. His small feet were encased in patent-leather boots. Upon his head was a jaunty cloth cap, from beneath which flowed a quantity of fine, curly hair. I really envied him his good looks, as also his mental endowments. He saw that I admired him; and he liked me for it. Such was _Jack Slack_, I may as well give his name at once, for I hate the trickery of authors who keep the curiosity of their readers painfully excited to the end of their narratives for the purpose of producing an _effect_. My professional habits as a writer prompt me to do the same; but I must not forget that I am writing my own history, and not an effusion of my imagination, which seems to be a prolific mother, for it hath produced many children, and (if I live) may produce many more. While I now write, the Sabbath bells are ringing in sweet harmony, and through my open window comes the cool but mild breath of an autumnal morning. Yes, it is Sunday, and all the holy associations of the sacred day crowd upon me. I can almost see the village church, and the throng of worshippers within it, listening to the fervent remarks and exhortations of their pastor. Then I can fancy the gorgeous cathedral, with its stained windows, its elaborate carvings, its pealing organs, and its fashionable assembly of superficial worshippers. While others are praying, pleasuring and sleeping, I am rushing my iron pen over the spotless paper, and wishing that my penmanship could keep pace with my thought.--This is a digression; but the reader will pardon it. There is _one_ dear creature, I know, who, when her eyes scan these pages, will understand me. But she, alas! is far away. Where was I? Oh, speaking of Jack Slack. How well do I remember the night upon which first I met him! I can see him now, with his mischievous smiles, his eyes full of deviltry--his scornful lips--I can almost hear his mocking laugh. Yes, although eighteen years have passed since then, the remembrance of that night is fresh within me, as if its occurrence were but things of yesterday. May perdition seize the circumstances which led me to encounter him! He was the foundation of my misfortunes in life. But for him, I might have led a happy, tranquil life; unknown, it is true, but still happy. But, poor fellow! he is dead now. He died by my hand, and I do not regret the act, nor would I recall it, had I the power. But of this the reader shall know hereafter. That was my first night of dissipation--that was the occasion of my initiation into the mysteries of debauchery. I had previously led a necessarily regular and abstemious life--to bed at eight, up at six, at school by nine, and so on. (By the way, I never learned any thing at school--the master pronounced me the most stupid rascal in the concern; and flogged me accordingly--good old man! All I ever learned was acquired in a _printing office_.) Well, here was I at the age of twelve, fairly launched upon the sea of city life, without a guide, protector, or friend. What wonder is it that I became a reckless, dissipated individual, careless of myself, my interests, my fame and fortune? Jack Slack and I, arm-in-arm, entered Broadway, and proceeded at a leisurely pace up that noble avenue. Many a courtezan did we meet, and many a watchman did we salute with the compliments of the season. (There were no _Brazen Stars_,[B] nor _M.P.'s_, then.) One lady of the pave, whom my companion addressed in terms of complimentary gallantry, said--"Little boy, go home to your mother and tell her she wants you!" I am now about to make a humiliating confession, but I must not shrink from it, inasmuch as I sat down with the determination of writing "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I allowed Jack to persuade me to accompany him on a visit to a celebrated establishment in Leonard street--a house occupied by accommodating ladies of great personal attractions, who were not especially virtuous. That was of course my first visit to a house of ill-fame; and without exactly comprehending the nature of the place and its arrangements, I was deeply impressed with the strangeness and novelty of everything that surrounded me. The costly and elegant furniture--the brilliant chandeliers--the magnificent but rather _loose_ French prints and paintings--the universal luxury that prevailed--the voluptuous ladies, with their bare shoulders, painted cheeks, and free-and-easy manners--the buxom, bustling landlady, who was dressed with almost regal splendor and wore a profusion of jewelry--the crowd of half-drunken gentlemen who were drinking wine and laughing uproariously--all these things astonished and bewildered me. My friend Jack appeared to be well known to the inmates of the house, with whom he seemed to be an immense favorite. Having--much to my dissatisfaction and disgust--introduced me to a lady, he took possession of another one, and called for a couple of bottles of wine. Jack and his lady were evidently upon the most intimate and affectionate terms, while my female companion seemed inclined to be very loving, but I did not appreciate her advances, being altogether unaccustomed to such things. The champagne was brought, and I was persuaded to drink freely of it. The consequence was that I soon became helplessly intoxicated. I can indistinctly remember the dancing lights, the popping of champagne corks--the noise, the confusion, the thrumming of a piano, and the boisterous laughter--and then I fell into a condition of complete insensibility. When I awoke, I was astonished at my situation and naturally enough, for I was in a strange apartment and snugly stowed away in a strange but decidedly luxuriant bed. The room was handsomely furnished, but to my additional surprise, many female garments were scattered about, indicating that the regular inhabitant of the place was a lady. This mystery was soon solved, for I was not the only inmate of the couch. My companion was the lady to whom I had been introduced by Jack Slack. Pitying my helpless condition--and, doubtless, prompted by the mischievous Jack--she had carried me to bed, and had also retired herself, being actuated by a benevolent anxiety for my safety. What a delicate situation for a modest youth to be placed in! Having, to my no small satisfaction, ascertained that the lady was fast asleep, I arose so carefully and noiselessly as not to awaken her. In truth, I was disgusted with the whole concern, and determined to leave it as speedily as possible. A light was fortunately burning in the room, which enabled me to move about with safety. A gold watch which lay upon the table informed me that it was nearly midnight.--Leaving the chamber and its sleeping inmate, I crept down stairs, and, on passing the door of the principal sitting-room, the voice of Jack Slack, who was singing a comic song amid the most enthusiastic applause, convinced me that my interesting friend was still rendering himself a source of amusement and an object of admiration. Without stopping to compliment him upon the excellence of his performance, I approached the front door, turned the key which was in the lock, unfastened the chain, and passed out into the street, just as the clock of a neighboring steeple was proclaiming the hour of twelve. My head ached terribly after the champagne which I had so profusely drank, and besides, I felt heavy and sleepy to an extraordinary degree. Unable to resist the overpowering influence of my feelings, I sat down upon the steps of a house and was fast asleep in less than a minute. Then I dreamed of being seized in the powerful grasp of some gigantic demon, and hurried away to the bottomless pit. I certainly felt conscious of being moved about, but my oblivious condition would not admit of arriving at any definite understanding of what was happening to me. When I finally awoke, I found myself in an apartment that was far different in its aspect from the luxurious chamber I had just quitted. The floor, walls and ceiling of the apartment were of stone; there were no windows, but a narrow aperture, high up in the wall, admitted the feeble glimmer of daylight. There was an iron door, and a water-pipe, and platform on which I lay, and on which reposed several gentlemen of seedy raiment and unwholesome appearance. The place and the company, as dimly revealed by the uncertain morning light, inspired me with emotions of horror; and in my inexperience and ignorance, I said to myself-- "I must leave this place at once. How I came here is a mystery, but it is certain that I cannot remain." I arose from my hard couch, and approached the iron door with the confident expectation of being able to pass out without any difficulty, for I imagined that I had fallen into one of those cheap and wretched lodging houses with which the city abounds. (By the way, I may hereafter have something to say with reference to these cheap lodging-houses. Some rich development may be made, which will rather astonish the unsophisticated reader.) To my surprise, I found that the door could not be opened; and then one of my fellow-lodgers, who had been observing my movements, exclaimed: "Are you going to leave us, my lad? Then leave us your card, or a lock of your hair to remember you by." "Will you be kind enough to tell me what place this is?" said I. The man laughed loudly, as he replied-- "Why, don't you know? What an innocent youth you are, to be sure! How the devil could you come here, without knowing anything about it? But I suppose that you were drunk, which is a great pity for a boy like you. Well, not to keep you in suspense, I must inform you that you are in the _watch-house of the Tombs_!" This information appalled me. To be in confinement--to be a prisoner--to be associated with a company of outcasts, thieves and perhaps murderers--was to me the height of horror. I looked particularly at the man with whom I had been conversing. He was a savage-looking individual, with a beard like that of a pirate, and an eye that spoke of blood and outrage. He was roughly dressed, in a garb that announced him to be a mariner. In the course of a conversation that we fell into, he informed me that he had committed a murder on the preceding evening, and that he expected to be hung. "We quarrelled at cards," said he, "and he gave me the lie--whereupon I drew my death-knife and stabbed him to the heart. He died instantly; the police rushed in, and here I am. My neck will be stretched, but I don't care. What matters it how a man dies? When my time comes, I shall go forth as readily and as cheerfully as if I were going to take a drink." (I will here remark that I afterwards saw this man hung in the yard of the _Tombs_. His history is in my possession, and I shall hereafter write it.)[C] At nine o'clock I was taken before the magistrate, who, after severely reprimanding me for my misconduct, discharged me from custody, with the remark that if I were brought there again he would be obliged to commit me to the Tombs for the term of five days. Delighted at having obtained my liberty, I posted out of the court room and found myself in Centre street. My debauch of the preceding night had not spoiled my appetite, by any means; and, as I still had in my possession the sixpence alluded to before, I resolved to produce some breakfast forthwith. Aware that my limited finances would not admit of my obtaining a very sumptuous repast, and fully appreciating the necessity of economy, I entered the shop of a baker and purchased three rolls at the rate of one cent per copy. Thus provided, I repaired to a neighboring street pump, and made a light but wholesome breakfast. It was thus, reader, that your humble servant began to acquire a knowledge of the world. FOOTNOTES: [A] The last that was heard of Robinson, he was in Texas, and it was reported that he was married and wealthy, his right arm he had lost in some battle, the name of which I do not remember. [B] I have just written a story under this title, full of fact and fun, and containing more truth than poetry. The reader can have it by applying to the publisher of this work. It is well worthy of perusal. [C] This work is now in active course of preparation. To the lovers of exciting tales, this story will be one of particular attraction. It will be issued by the publisher of this narrative. CHAPTER II _In which I become a Printer, and am introduced into certain mysteries of connubial life._ Having breakfasted to my entire satisfaction and also to my great bodily refreshment, I entered the Park, seated myself upon the steps of the City Hall, and thought "what is best to be done?"--It was Monday morning, and the weather was excellently fine. It was an excellent time to search for employment. A sign on an old building in Chatham street attracted my notice; upon it were inscribed the words, "Book and Job Printing." "Good!" was my muttered exclamation, as I left the Park and crossed over towards the old building in question--"I'll be a printer! Franklin was one, and he, like myself, was fond of rolls, because he entered Philadelphia with one under each arm. Yes, I'll be a printer." Entering the printing office, I found it to be a very small concern, containing but one press and a rather limited assortment of type. The proprietor of the office, whom I shall call Mr. Romaine, was a rather intellectual looking man, of middle age. Being very industrious, he did the principal portion of his work himself, occasionally, however, hiring a journeyman when work was unusually abundant. As I entered he looked up from his case and inquired, with an air of benevolence-- "Well, my lad, what can I do for _you_ this morning?" "If you please, sir, I want to learn to be a printer," replied I, boldly. "Ah, indeed! Well, I was just thinking of taking an apprentice. But give an account of yourself--how old are you, and who are you?" I frankly communicated to Mr. Romaine all that he desired to know concerning me, and he expressed himself as being perfectly satisfied. He immediately set me to "learning the boxes" of a case of type; and in half an hour I had accomplished the task, which was not very difficult, it being merely an effort of memory. It having been arranged that I should take up my abode in the house of Mr. Romaine, I accompanied that gentleman home to dinner. He lived in William street and his wife kept a fashionable boarding-house for merchants, professional men, &c. Several of these gentlemen were married men and had their wives with them. Mrs. Romaine, the wife of my employer, was one of the finest-looking women I ever saw--tall, voluptuous, and truly beautiful. She was about twenty-five years of age, and her manners were peculiarly fascinating and agreeable. She was always dressed in a style of great elegance, and was admirably adapted to the station which she filled as landlady of an establishment like that. I will remark that although she had been the wife of Mr. Romaine for a number of years, she had not been blessed with offspring, which was doubtless to her a source of great disappointment, to say nothing of the _chagrin_ which a married woman naturally feels when she fails in due time to add to the population of her country. Accustomed as I had been to the economical scantiness of my uncle's table, I was both surprised and delighted with the luxurious abundance that greeted me on sitting down to dinner at Mrs. Romaine's. I was equally well pleased with the sprightliness, intelligence and good-humor of the conversation in which the ladies and gentlemen engaged, and also with their refined and courteous bearing towards each other. I congratulated myself on having succeeded in getting not only into business, but also into good society. "If my dearly-beloved relatives," thought I, "could see me now, they might not be well pleased at my situation and prospects. Let them go to Beelzebub! I will get on in the world, in spite of them!" In a few days I began to be very useful about the printing office, for I had learned to set type and to _roll_ behind the press; I also performed all the multifarious duties of _devil_, and was so fortunate as to secure the good will of my employer, who generously purchased for me a fine new suit of clothes, and seemed anxious to make me as comfortable as possible. His wife, also, treated me very kindly; but there was something mysterious about this lady, which for a time, puzzled me extremely. One discovery which I made rather astonished me, young as I was, and caused me to do a "devil of a thinking." Mr. Romaine and his wife occupied separate sleeping apartments, and there seemed to be an aversion between them, although they treated each other with the most formal and scrupulous politeness. But my readers will agree with me that mere _politeness_ is not the only sentiment which should exist between a husband and his wife. There was evidently something "rotten in Denmark" between Mr. and Mrs. Romaine, and I determined, if possible, to penetrate the mystery. Mr. Romaine, who was professedly a pious man, was particularly in favor of "remembering the Sabbath day to keep it holy," and he therefore directed me to be very punctual in attendance at church and Sunday school, and I obeyed his praiseworthy request until visions of literary greatness and renown began to dawn upon me, whereupon, prompted by gingerbread and ambition, and being moreover aided and abetted by another printer's devil of tender years and literary aspirations, I, one Sunday morning, entered the printing office, (of which I kept the key,) and assisted by my companion, set up and worked off one hundred copies of a diminutive periodical just six inches square, containing a _very_ brief abstract of the news of the day, a _very_ indifferent political leader, and a few _rather_ partial theatrical criticisms. This extensive newspaper we issued on three successive Sundays, circulating it among our juvenile friends at the moderate rate of one cent a copy. On the fourth Sunday we were caught in the act of printing our journal by Mr. Romaine himself, who, although he with difficulty refrained from laughing at the fun of the thing, gave us a long lecture on the crime of Sabbath-breaking, and then made us distribute the type, forgetting that we were breaking the Sabbath as much by taking our form to pieces as by putting it together. Mr. Romaine was also strongly opposed to theatres, but, nevertheless, I visited the "little Frankin" four or five times every week, to see John and Bill Sefton in the "Golden Farmer," and other thrilling melo-dramas, a convenient ally, a garden and a shed enabled me to enter my chamber at any hour during the night, without my employer's becoming aware of my absence from home. One night after having been to my favorite place of amusement, I returned home about midnight. On entering the garden, I discovered to my surprise a light streaming from the kitchen windows--a very unusual occurrence. I crept softly up to one of the windows, and looking into the kitchen, a scene met my gaze that filled me with astonishment. Mrs. Romaine, arrayed in her night-dress only, was seated at a table, and at her side was a young gentleman named Anderson, who boarded in the house, and who was a prosperous merchant. His arm was around the lady's waist, and her head rested affectionately upon his shoulder. She looked uncommonly beautiful and voluptuous that night, I thought, young as I was, I wondered not at the look of passionate admiration with which Anderson regarded his fair companion, upon whose sensual countenance there rested an expression of gratified love. Upon the table were the remains of a supper of which they had evidently partaken; there were also a bottle of wine and two glasses, partially filled. Mrs. Romaine sipped her wine occasionally, as well as her paramour; and the guilty pair seemed to be enjoying themselves highly. It was plain that the lady was resolved to lose nothing by her estrangement from her husband; it was equally plain that between her and Mr. Romaine there existed not the smallest particle of love. I now ceased to wonder why the wedded pair occupied separate apartments; and I came to the conclusion that disappointment in the matter of children was the cause of their mutual aversion. If I were writing a romance instead of a narrative of facts, I would here introduce an imaginary tender conversation between the pair. But as no such conversation took place I have none to describe. "Well," said I to myself--"this is a pretty state of affairs, truly. I guess that if Mr. Romaine suspected any thing of this kind, there would be the very devil to pay, and no mistake. But it's no business of mine; and so I'll climb into my window and go to bed." My employer was a very good sort of a man, and I sincerely pitied him on account of his unhappy connubial situation. I turned away from the kitchen window, and began to mount the shed in order to reach my chamber. I had nearly gained the roof of the shed, when a board gave way and I was precipitated to the ground, a distance of about ten feet. Fortunately I sustained no injury; but the noise aroused and alarmed the loving couple in the kitchen. Mrs. Romaine, in her terror and dread of discovery, gave utterance to a slight scream; while Mr. Anderson rushed forth and seized me in a rather powerful grasp. I struggled, and kicked, and strove to extricate myself, but it was all of no use. With many a muttered imprecation Anderson dragged me into the kitchen, and swore that if I did not remain quiet he would stab me to the heart with a dirk-knife that he produced from his pocket. "You young rascal," said he "who employed you to play the part of a spy? Did Mr. Romaine direct you to watch us? Is he lurking outside, in the garden? If so, let him beware, for I am a desperate man, one not to be trifled with!" I explained everything to the entire satisfaction of both the gentleman and lady, whose countenances brightened when they found that matters were far from being as bad as they expected. "Now, my boy," said Anderson, "just do keep perfectly dark about this business, and I'll make your fortune. You shall never want a dollar while I live. As an earnest of what I may hereafter do for you, accept this trifle, which will enable you to gratify your theatre-going propensities to your heart's content." The "trifle" was a ten dollar gold piece. I had never before possessed so much money; and no millionaire ever felt richer than I did at that moment. Delightful visions of dramatic treats arose before me, and I was happy. Mr. Anderson made me drink a couple of glasses of wine, which tasted very good, and caused me to feel quite elevated. Then he told me that I had better go to bed, and I fully agreed with him. So, bidding the enamoured couple a patronizing good night and facetiously wishing them a pleasant time together--the wine had made me bold and saucy--I left the kitchen and began to ascend the stairs towards my own room with all the silence and caution of which I was capable. I was destined that night to make another astonishing discovery. Being quite tipsy, I was deprived of my usual judgement, and suffered myself to stumble against a table that stood upon one of the landings opposite the chamber door of a young and particularly pretty widow named Mrs. Raymond, who boarded in the house. She possessed a snug independent fortune, and led a life of elegant leisure. Although demure in her looks and reverend in her deportment, there was a whole troop of dancing devils in her eyes that proclaimed the fact that her nature was not exactly as cold as ice. My collision with the table caused me to recoil, and I fell violently against Mrs. Raymond's door, which burst open, and down I landed in the very centre of the apartment. I heard a scream, and then a curse. The scream was the performance of the fair widow; the curse was the production of Mr. Romaine, my pious, Sabbath-venerating and theatre-opposing employer, who, springing up from the sofa upon which he had been seated by the side of the widow, seized me by the throat and demanded how the devil I came there? My wits had not entirely deserted me, and I managed to tell quite a plausible story. I candidly confessed that I had been to the theatre and stated that I had got into the house through the kitchen window. Of course I said nothing about Anderson and Mrs. Romaine. "You have been drinking," said Mr. Romaine, in a tone that was by no means severe, "but I forgive you for that, and also for having disobeyed me by going to the theatre. Be a good boy in future, and you shall never want a friend while I live." While he was speaking, I looked about the room. It was exquisitely furnished with the most refined and elegant taste. Mrs. Raymond, who still sat upon the sofa, blushed deeply as her eyes encountered mine. She was _en deshabille_, and looked charming. I could not help admiring the divine perfections of her form, as _revealed_ by the deliciously careless attire which she wore. I did not wonder that my respected presence confused her, for she had always held herself up as the very pink and pattern of female propriety, and besides, she often lectured me severely upon the enormity of some of my juvenile offences, which came to her knowledge. Mr. Romaine continued to address me, thus: "If you will solemnly promise to say nothing about having seen me in this room, I will reward you handsomely." I readily gave the required promise, whereupon my pious employer presented me with a five-dollar bill, which I received with all the nonchalance in the world. I then withdrew, and reached my own room without encountering any more adventures. Sleep did not visit me that night, for my thoughts were too busily engaged with the discoveries which I had made; and besides, the blissful consciousness of being the possessor of the princely sum of fifteen dollars, would have kept me awake, independent of anything else. A day or two after these occurrences, while looking over one of the morning newspapers, I saw an advertisement signed by my uncle, in which that worthy man offered a reward for my apprehension. The notice contained a minute description of my personal appearance and the clothes which I had on when I "ran away." Although my garments had been entirely changed, I was fearful that some one might recognize my person, and carry me back to my uncle's house, where I had every reason to expect far worse treatment than I had ever received before. But Mr. Romaine, to whom I showed the advertisement, told me not to be at all alarmed, as he would protect me at any risk. This assurance made me feel much easier. I was never molested in consequence of that advertisement. After the night on which I had detected the intrigue of my employer and his wife, I began to live emphatically "in clover," and accumulated money tolerably fast. All the parties concerned treated me with the utmost consideration and respect. Mr. Romaine suffered me to do pretty much as I pleased in the printing office, and so I enjoyed a very agreeable and leisurely time of it, doing as much Sunday printing on my own account as I desired, and going to the theatre as often as I wished. Mr. Anderson would occasionally slip a five dollar note into my hand, at the same time enjoining me to "keep mum;" Mrs. Romaine, with her own fair hands, made me a dozen superb shirts, supplied me with handkerchiefs, stockings and fancy cravats innumerable, and so arranged it that when I returned from the theatre at night, a nice little supper awaited me in the kitchen. These repasts she would sometimes share with me, for, like a sensible woman, she was fond of all the good things of this life, including good eating and drinking. Anderson would join us occasionally, and a snug, cosy little party we made. Mrs. Raymond, the pretty widow, was not backward in testifying to me how grateful she was for my silence with reference to her frailty. She made me frequent presents of money, and gave me an elegant and valuable ring, which I wore until the "intervention of unfortunate circumstance" compelled me to consign it to the custody of "my uncle"--not my beloved relative of Thomas street, (peace to his memory, for he has gone the way of all pork,)--but that accommodating uncle of mine and everybody else, Mr. Simpson, who dwelleth in the _Rue de Chatham_, and whose mansion is decorated with three gilded balls. Kind, convenient Uncle Simpson! Ah! those were my halcyon days, when not a single care cast its shadow o'er my soul. As I think of that season of unalloyed happiness, I involuntarily exclaim, in the words of a fine popular song-- "I would I were a boy again!" Three years passed away, unmarked by the occurrence of any event of sufficient importance to merit a place in this narrative. When I reached my fifteenth year, the fashionable boarding-house of Mrs. Romaine became the scene of a tragedy so bloody, so awful and so appalling, that even now, while I think and write about it, my blood runs cold in my veins. That terrible affair can no more be obliterated from my memory than can the sun be effaced from the arch of heaven; and to my dying day, its recollection will continue to haunt me like a hideous spectre. But I must devote a separate chapter to the details of that sanguinary event. I would gladly escape from the task of describing it; but, of course, were I to omit it, this narrative would be incomplete. Therefore the unwelcome duty must be performed. CHAPTER III _In which is enacted a bloody tragedy._ I began to observe with considerable uneasiness, that Mr. Romaine stealthily regarded his wife with looks of intense hatred and malignant ferocity; then he would transfer his gaze from her to Mr. Anderson, who was altogether unconscious of the scrutiny. My employer was usually a very quiet man, but I knew that his passions were very violent, and that, when once thoroughly aroused, he was capable of perpetrating almost any act of savage vengeance. I began to fear that he suspected the intimacy which existed between his adulterous wife and her paramour. By the way it may be as well to remark that I had never told either Anderson or Mrs. Romaine of the intrigue between Mr. Romaine and the widow, Mrs. Raymond; and it is scarcely necessary to observe that I was equally discreet in withholding from my employer and his "ladye love" all knowledge of the state of affairs between the other parties. I communicated my fears to Mr. Anderson, but he laughed at them saying-- "Nonsense, my dear boy--why should Romaine suspect anything of the kind? I and Harriet (Mrs. Romaine) have always been very discreet and careful. Our intimacy began three or four years ago; and as it has lasted that length of time without discovery, it is scarcely likely to be detected _now_. You are quite sure that you have given Romaine no hint of the affair?" "Do you think me capable of such base treachery?" I demanded, with an offended air. "Forgive me," said Anderson, "I did wrong to doubt you. Believe me, your fears are groundless; however, I thank you for the caution, and shall hereafter exercise additional care, so as to prevent the possibility of discovery. Here is a ticket for the opera to-night; when you return, which will be about midnight, come to Harriet's room, and we three will sup like two kings and a queen." Having dressed myself with unusual care, I went to the opera. While listening to the divine strains of a celebrated _prima donna_, my attention was attracted by a group occupying one of the most conspicuous boxes. This group consisted of a youth apparently about my own age, and two showy looking females whose dresses were cut so low as to reveal much more of their busts than decency could sanction, even among an opera audience. There could be no doubt as to the character of these two women. I examined their youthful cavalier with attention; and soon recognized my _quondum_ friend and pitcher--JACK SLACK. Jack was magnificently dressed, and his appearance was truly superb. The most fastidious Parisian exquisite--even the great Count D'Orsay himself might have envied him the arrangement of his hair, the tie of his cravat, the spotlessness of his white kids. He flourished a glittering, jeweled _lorgnette_, and the way the fellow put on "French airs" must have been a caution to the proudest scion of aristocracy in the house. After a little while Jack saw me; and, having taken a good long stare at me through his opera-glass, he beckoned me to come to him, at the same time pointing significantly at one of his "lady" companions, as if to intimate that she was entirely at my disposal. But I shook my head, and did not stir, for I had no desire to resume my acquaintance with that fascinating but mysterious youth. Perhaps I entertained a presentiment that he was destined to become, to both of us, the cause of a great misfortune. Jack looked angry and disappointed, at my refusal to accept of his hospitable invitation. He directed the attention of his women towards me, and I saw that they were attempting to titter and sneer at my expense;--but the effort was a total failure, for there was not a better-dressed person in the house than I was. Having honored the envious party with a smile of scorn,--which, I flattered myself, was perfectly successful,--I turned towards the stage, and did not indulge in another look at Jack or his friends during the remainder of the opera. I am convinced that from that hour, Jack Slack became my mortal foe. At the conclusion of the performances, I left the house and saw Jack getting into a carriage with the two courtezans. He observed me, and uttered a decisive shout, to which I paid no attention, but hurried home, anxious to make one of the little party in the apartment of Mrs. Romaine, and quite ready to partake of the delicacies which, I knew, would be provided. On my arrival home, I immediately repaired to Mrs. Romaine's private room, where I found that good lady in company with Mr. Anderson. We three sat down to supper in the highest possible spirits. Alas! how little did we anticipate the terrible catastrophe that was so soon to follow! The more substantial portion of the banquet having been disposed of, the sparkling wine-cup was circulated freely, and we became very gay and jovial. Unrestrained by my presence, and exhilarated by the rosy beverage of jolly Bacchus, the lovers indulged in many little acts of tender dalliance. Always making it a point to mind my own business, I applied myself diligently to the bottle, for the wine was excellent and the sardines had made me thirsty. I had just lighted a cigar, and was resigning myself to the luxurious and deliciously soothing influence of the weed, when the door was thrown violently open, and Mr. Romaine rushed into the room. His appearance was frightful! his face was dreadfully pale, and his eyes glared with the combined fires of jealousy and rage. Intense excitement caused him to quiver in every limb. In one hand he grasped a pistol, and in the other a bowie knife of the largest and most formidable kind. It was but too evident that my fears had been well founded, and that Mr. Romaine had discovered the intimacy between Anderson and his wife. The reader will agree with me that the "injured husband" was equally culpable on account of his intrigue with the young and handsome widow, Mrs. Raymond.--How prone are many people to lose sight of their own imperfections while they censure and severely punish the failings of those who are not a whit more guilty than themselves! The swinish glutton condemns the drunkard--the villainous seducer reproves the frequenter of brothels--the arch hypocrite takes to task the open, undisguised sinner--and the rich, miserly old reprobate, whose wealth places him above the possibility of ever coming to want, who would sooner "hang the guiltless than eat his mutton cold," and who would not bestow a cent upon a poor devil to keep him from starving--that old rascal, perhaps, in his capacity as a magistrate, sentences to jail an unfortunate man whom hunger has driven into the "crime" of stealing a loaf of bread! Bah! ladies and gentlemen, take the _beams_ out of your own eyes before you allude to the _motes_ in the optics of your fellow beings. That's _my_ advice, free of charge. On seeing her husband enter in that furious and threatening manner, Mrs. Romaine, overcome with fear and shame--for she well knew that her guilt had been detected--fell to the floor insensible. Anderson, confused and not knowing what to say, sat motionless as a statue;--while I awaited, with almost trembling anxiety, the issue of this most extraordinary state of affairs. Romaine was the first to break the silence, and he spoke in a tone of voice that was singularly calm considering his physical agitation. "Well, sir," said he, addressing Anderson--"you are enjoying yourself finely--drinking my wine, devouring my provisions, and making love to my wife in her own bed-chamber. Anderson, for some time past I have suspected you and Harriet of being guilty of criminal intimacy. I have noticed your secret signs, and have read and interpreted the language of your eyes, whenever you and she have exchanged glances in my presence. You both took me to be a weak fool, too blind and imbecile to detect your adulterous intercourse; but I have now come to convince you that I am a man capable of avenging his ruined conjugal honor!" Anderson, recovering some degree of his usual self-possession, remarked, "Your accusation, sir, is unjust. Your wife and myself are friends, and nothing more. She invited me to sup with her here to-night and that is all about it. If our intentions were criminal, would we have courted the presence of a third party?" With these words, Anderson pointed towards me, but Romaine, without observing me at all, continued to address the paramour of his wife. "Anderson, you are a liar, and the falsehoods which you have uttered, only serve to increase your guilt, and confirm me in my resolution to sacrifice both you and that guilty woman who lies yonder. Can I disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes? Must I go into particulars, and say that last night, at about this hour, in the kitchen--ha! you turn pale--you tremble--your guilt is confessed. I would have killed you last night, Anderson, but I had not the weapons. This knife and pistol I purchased to-day, _and I shall use them_! "Try and revive that _harlot_, for I would speak with her ere she dies!" Anderson mechanically obeyed. Placing the insensible form of Mrs. Romaine upon a sofa, he sprinkled water upon her face, and she was soon restored to a state of consciousness. For a few moments she gazed about her wildly; and then, when her eyes settled upon her husband, and she saw the terrible weapons with which he was armed, she covered her face with her hands and trembled in an agony of terror, for she knew that her life was in the greatest possible danger. Romaine now addressed his wife in a tone of calmness which was, under the circumstances, far more terrible than the most violent outburst of passion: "Harriet," said he--"I now fully comprehend your reasons for requesting to be allowed to occupy a separate apartment. You desired an opportunity to gratify your licentious propensities without any restraint. Woman, why have you used me thus? Have I deserved this infamous treatment? Have I ever used you unkindly, or spoken a harsh word to you? Do you think that I will tamely wear the horns which you and your paramour have planted upon my brow? Do you think that I will suffer myself to be made an object of scorn, and allow myself to be pointed at and ridiculed by a sneering community?" "Forgive me," murmured the unhappy wife--"I will not offend again. I acknowledge that I have committed a grievous sin; but Heaven only knows how sincerely I repent of it!" "Your repentance comes too late," said Romaine, hoarsely--"Heaven may forgive you, but _I_ shall not! You say that you will not offend again. Having forever destroyed my happiness, my peace of mind, and my honor, _you will not offend again_! You shall not have the opportunity, wretched woman. You shall no longer survive your infamy. You and the partner of your guilt must die!" With these words, Romaine cocked his pistol and approached his wife, saying, in a low, savage tone that evinced the desperate purpose of his heart-- "Take your choice, madam; do you prefer to die by _lead_ or by _steel_?" The miserable woman threw herself upon her knees, exclaiming-- "Mercy, husband--mercy! Do not kill me, for I am not prepared to die!" "You call me husband _now_--you, who have so long refused to receive me as a husband. Come--I am impatient to shed your blood, and that of your paramour. Breathe a short prayer to Heaven, for mercy and forgiveness, and then resign your body to death and your soul to eternity!" So saying the desperate and half-crazy man raised on high the glittering knife. Poor Mrs. Romaine uttered a shriek, and, before she could repeat it, the knife descended with the swiftness of lightning, and penetrated her heart. Her blood spouted all over her white dress, and she sank down at the murderer's feet, a lifeless corpse! Paralyzed with horror, I could neither move nor speak. Anderson also stood motionless, like a bird which is subjected to the fascinating gaze of a serpent. Notwithstanding the terrible danger in which he was placed, he seemed to be rooted to the spot and incapable of making a single effort to save himself by either resistance or flight. The scene was most extraordinary, thrilling and awful. The luxurious chamber--the failing lamp--the murderer, holding in his hand the bloody knife--the doomed Anderson, whose soul was quivering on the brink of the dread abyss of eternity; all these combined to form a spectacle of the most strange and appalling character. Romaine now raised his pistol and took deliberate aim at Anderson, saying, "My work is but half done; it is _your_ turn now! Are you ready?" "Do not shoot me like a dog," implored the unfortunate young man, who, to do him justice, possessed a considerable amount of courage--"give me, at least, _some_ chance for my life. If I have wronged you, and I candidly confess that I have, I am ready to give you the satisfaction of a gentleman. Give me a pistol, place me upon an equal footing with yourself, and we will settle the matter as becomes men of honor. This boy, here, will be a witness of the affair." To this proposition, Romaine scornfully replied, "I admire your assurance, sir.--After seducing the wife, you want a chance to shoot the husband. Well, as I am an accommodating man, it shall be as you say, for I am sick of life and care not if I am killed. But I have no other pistol. Stay!--suppose we _toss up_ a coin, and thus decide which of us shall have this weapon, with the privilege of using it. Here is a quarter of a dollar; I will throw it up in the air, and when it falls upon the floor, if the _head_ is uppermost, the pistol is _mine_; but if the _tail_ is uppermost, the pistol shall be _yours_. I warn you that if I win, I shall show you no mercy; and, if you win, I shall expect none from you. Do you agree to this?" "I do," replied Anderson, firmly, "and I thank you for your fairness." Romaine threw up the coin, which spun around in the air and landed upon the carpet. How strange that it should have become the province of that insignificant coin to decide which of those two men must die! Romaine calmly took the dim lamp from the table, and knelt down upon the carpet in a pool of his wife's blood. "Watch me closely, and see that I do not touch the coin," said he, as he bent eagerly over the life-deciding quarter of a dollar. How my heart beat at that moment, and what must have been the sensation of poor Anderson! "_The head is uppermost, and I have won!_" said Romaine, in a hoarse whisper--"come and see for yourself." "I am satisfied, your word is sufficient," said Anderson, with a shudder, as he folded his arms across his breast and seemed to abandon himself to profound despair. Romaine's pale face assumed an expression of savage delight, as he raised the pistol and pointed it at the head of his intended victim, saying-- "Then, sir, nothing remains but for me to avail myself of the favor which fortune has conferred upon me. Young man, in five seconds I shall fire!" "Hold!" cried Anderson, "I have a favor to ask, which I am sure you will not refuse to grant me. Before I die, let me write a couple of letters, and make a few notes of the manner in which I wish my property to be disposed of. It is the last request of a dying man." "It is granted," said Romaine, "there, upon that _escritoire_, are writing materials. But make haste, for I am impatient to finish this disagreeable business." Anderson sat down, and began to write rapidly. I longed to rush out and give the alarm, so that the impending tragedy might be averted; but I feared that any movement on my part might result in the passage of a bullet through my brain, and therefore I remained quiet, for which I am sure, no sensible reader will blame me. Poor Anderson! tears gushed from his eyes and streamed down his cheeks while he was writing one of the letters, which, as I afterwards ascertained, was addressed to a young lady to whom he was engaged to be married. He wrote two letters, folded, sealed and directed them; these he handed to me, saying-- "Have the kindness to deliver these letters to the persons to whom they are addressed. Will you faithfully promise to do this?" I promised, of course; he shook hands with me, and bade me farewell; then, calmly turning towards Romaine, he announced his readiness to die. Up to that moment, I had tried to persuade myself that Anderson's life would be spared, thinking that Romaine must have had enough of blood after slaying his wife in that barbarous manner. But I was doomed to be terribly disappointed. Scarcely had Anderson muttered the words, "I am ready to die," when Romaine pulled the trigger of the upraised pistol, and the young merchant fell dead upon the floor, the bullet having penetrated his brain. "Now I am satisfied, for I have had my revenge," said the murderer, coolly, as he wiped the perspiration from his pallid brow. "Blood-thirsty villain!" exclaimed I, unable longer to restrain my indignation--"you will swing upon the gallows for this night's work!" "Not so," rejoined Romaine, calmly, "for I do not intend to survive this wholesale butchery, and did not, from the first. I was determined that Anderson should die, at all events. _He won the pistol_, for the coin fell with the tail uppermost. Had he stooped to examine it, I would have blown out his brains, just the same. But hark! the boarders and inmates of the house have been aroused by the report of the pistol, and they are hastening here. The gallows--no, no, I must avoid _that_! They shall not take me alive. Now, may heaven have mercy upon my guilty soul!" With these words the unhappy man seized the Bowie knife and plunged it into his heart, thus adding the crime of suicide to the two atrocious murders which he had just committed. Scarcely had this crowning point of the fearful tragedy been enacted, when a crowd of people, half-dressed and excited, rushed into the room. Among them was the beautiful widow, Mrs. Raymond. On seeing the bleeding corpse of Romaine stretched upon the floor, she gave utterance to a piercing scream and fell down insensible. In the horror and confusion that prevailed, I was unnoticed. I determined to leave the house, never to return, for I dreaded being brought before the public, as a witness, being a great hater of notoriety in any shape. (The reader may smile at this last remark; but I assure him, or her, that my frequent appearance before the public as a writer, has been the result of necessity--not of inclination.) Accordingly, I left the house unobserved, and took lodgings for the remainder of the night at a hotel. But sleep visited me not, for my mind was too deeply engrossed with the bloody scenes which I had witnessed, to suffer the approach of "tired nature's sweet restorer." In the morning I arose early, and investigated the condition of my finances. The result of this examination was highly satisfactory, for I found that I was the possessor of a considerable sum of money. I walked about the city until noon, uncertain how to act. I felt a strong disposition to travel, and see the world;--but I could not make up my mind in what direction to go. After a sumptuous dinner at Sandy Welch's "Terrapin Lunch,"--one of the most famous _restaurants_ of the day--I indulged in a contemplative walk up Broadway. Such thoughts as these ran through my mind:--"I cannot help contrasting my present situation with the position I was in, three years ago. Then I was almost penniless, and gladly breakfasted on dry bread at a street pump; now I have three hundred dollars in my pocket, and have just dined like an epicurean prince. Then I was clad in garments that were coarse and cheap; now I am dressed in the finest raiment that money could procure. Then I had no trade; now I have a profession which will be to me an unfailing means of support. But, alas! then I was comparatively innocent, and ignorant of the wicked ways of the world; now, although only fifteen years of age, I am too thoroughly posted up on all the mysteries of city follies and vices. No matter: there's nothing like experience, after all." Comforting myself with this philosophical reflection, I strolled on. A newsboy came along, bawling out, at the top of his voice--"Here's the extra _Sun_, with a full account of the two murders and suicide in William street last night--only one cent!" Of course I purchased a copy; and, upon perusing the account, I could not help smiling at the ludicrous and absurd exaggerations which it contained. It was a perfect modern tragedy of _Othello_, with Romaine as the Moor, Mrs. Romaine as Desdemona, and Anderson as a sort of cross between Iago and Michael Cassio. I was not alluded to in any way whatever, which caused me to rejoice exceedingly.[D] Suddenly remembering the two letters which had been confided to my care by the unfortunate Anderson, I resolved to deliver them immediately. One was directed to a Mr. Sargent, in Pine street. I soon found the place, which was a large mercantile establishment. Over the door was the sign "_Anderson & Sargent_." This had been poor Anderson's place of business, and Sargent had been his partner. I entered, found Mr. Sargent in the counting-room, and delivered to him the letter. He opened it, read it through coolly, shrugged his shoulders, and said-- "I have already been made acquainted with the full particulars of this melancholy affair. Anderson was a clever fellow, and I'm sorry he's gone, although his death will certainly promote my interests. He gives me, in this letter, every necessary instruction as to the disposition of his property, and he also directs me to present you with the sum of two hundred dollars, both as an acknowledgement of your services and as a token of his friendship. I will fill out a check for the amount immediately." This instance of Anderson's kindness and generosity, almost at the very moment of his death, deeply affected me; and, at the same time, I could not help feeling disgusted with the heartlessness displayed by Sargent, who regarded the tragical death of his partner merely as an event calculated to advance his own interests. Having received the check, I withdrew from the august presence of Mr. Sargent, who was a tall, thin, hook-nosed personage, of unwholesome aspect and abrupt manners. I drew the money at the bank, and then hastened to deliver the other letter, which was addressed to Miss Grace Arlington, whose residence was designated as being situated in one of the fashionable squares up-town. I had no difficulty in finding the house, which was of the most elegant and aristocratic appearance. My appeal to the doorbell was responded to by a smart-looking female domestic, who, on learning my errand, ushered me into the presence of her mistress. Miss Grace Arlington was a very lovely and delicate young lady, whose soft eyes beamed with tenderness and sensibility, whose voice was as sweet as the music of an angel's harp, while her step was as light as the tread of a fairy whose tiny feet will not crush the leaves of a rose. When I handed her the letter, and she recognized the well known handwriting, she bestowed upon me a winning and grateful smile which I shall never forget. My heart misgave me as she opened the missive, for I could well divine its contents; and I almost reproached myself for being the messenger of such evil tidings. I watched her closely as she read. She was naturally somewhat pale, but I saw her face grow ghastly white before she had read two lines. When she had finished the perusal of the fatal letter, she pressed her hand upon her breast, murmured "Oh God!" and would have fallen to the floor if I had not caught her in my arms. "Curses on my stupidity!" I muttered, as I placed her insensible form upon a sofa--"I ought to have prepared her gradually for the terrible announcement which I knew that letter to contain!" I rang the bell furiously, and the almost deafening summons was answered by half-a-dozen female servants, who, on seeing the condition of their young Mistress, set up a loud chorus of screams. The uproar brought Mr. Arlington, the father of the young lady, to the scene. He was a fine-looking old gentleman, a retired merchant and a _millionaire_. I hastened to explain to him all that had occurred, and Anderson's letter, which lay upon the floor, confirmed my statements. Mr. Arlington was horror-struck, for he, as well as his daughter, had until that moment been in happy ignorance of the bloody affair. The old gentleman had first established Anderson in business, and he had always cherished for that unfortunate young man the warmest friendship. No wonder, then, that he was overpowered when he became aware of the tragical end of him whom he had expected so shortly to become his son-in-law. A celebrated physician, who resided next door, was sent for. He happened to be at home, and arrived almost instantly. He knelt down beside the broken-hearted girl, and, as his fingers touched her wrist, a look of profound grief settled upon his benevolent face. "Well, Doctor," exclaimed Mr. Arlington, breathlessly, "what is the matter with my child? She will recover soon, will she not? It is merely a fainting fit produced by the reception of unwelcome news." "Alas, sir!" replied the Doctor, in a tone of deep sympathy, as he brushed away the tears from his eyes--"I may as well tell you the melancholy truth at once. The sudden shock caused by the unwelcome news you speak of, has proved fatal; your daughter is dead!" Poor old Arlington staggered to a seat, covered his face with his hands, and moaned in the agony of his spirits. Notwithstanding all his wealth, how I pitied him! Seeing that I could be of no service whatever, I left the house of mourning and walked down town in a very thoughtful mood. I had already begun to enter upon an experience such as few youths of fifteen are ever called upon to encounter; and I wondered what the dim, uncertain Future had in store for me. However, as the reader will see in the next chapter, I did not long suffer my mind to be intruded upon by melancholy reflections. FOOTNOTES: [D] Many of my New York readers will remember the "William Street Tragedy," to which I have alluded. The bloody event created the most intense excitement at the time of its occurrence. Having witnessed the horrible affair, I have truly related all the facts concerning it. CHAPTER IV _In which I set forth upon my travels, and met with a great misfortune._ Having plenty of means at my disposal, I determined to enjoy myself to the full extent of my physical and intellectual capacity, for I remembered the graceful words of the charming poet who sung-- "Go it while you're young: For, when you get old, you can't!" Behold me, at the age of fifteen, fairly launched upon all the dissipations of a corrupt and licentious city! It is not without a feeling of shame that I make these confessions; but truth compels me to do so. I soon became thoroughly initiated into all the mysteries of high and low life in New York. In my daily and nightly peregrinations I frequently encountered my old friend Jack Slack; we never spoke, but on the contrary regarded each other with looks of enmity and defiance. Stronger and stronger within me grew the presentiment that this mysterious youth was destined to become my evil genius and the cause of a great misfortune. Therefore, whenever I met him, I could not help shuddering with dread. Three years passed away in this manner, and I had reached the age of eighteen, with an unimpaired constitution and a firm belief that I was destined to exist for ever. I had lived luxuriously upon the earnings of my pen, for I was a regular contributor to the Knickerbroker Magazine and other popular periodicals. Having accumulated considerable money, notwithstanding my extravagance, I resolved to take a Southern tour, visiting Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities of note. Accordingly, one fine day, I found myself established in comfortable quarters, at the most fashionable hotel in the "city of brotherly love." I became a regular frequenter of the theatres and other places of amusement, and formed the acquaintance of many actors and literary people. It was here that I had the honor of being introduced to Booth, the great tragedian, now dead; to "Ned Forrest," the American favorite; to "Uncle" J.R. Scott, as fine a man as ever drank a noggin of ale or ate a "dozen raw," and to Major Richardson, the author of "Wacousta," and the "Monk Knight of St. John," the latter being one of the most voluptuous works ever written. Poor Major! his was a melancholy end. He was formerly a Major in the British army, and was a gentleman by birth, education and principle. Possessing a fine person, a generous heart and the most winning manners, he was a general favorite with his associates. He became the victim of rapacious publishers, and grew poor. Too proud to accept of assistance from his friends, he retired to obscure lodgings and there endeavored to support himself by the productions of his pen. But his spirit was broken and his intellect crushed by the base ingratitude of those who should have been his warmest friends. Often have I visited him in his garret--for he actually occupied one; and, with a bottle of whiskey before us, we have condemned the world as being full of selfishness, ingratitude and villainy. Winter came on, and the Major had no fuel, nor the means of procuring any. I have repeatedly called upon him and found him sitting in the intensely cold atmosphere of his miserable apartment, wrapped in a blanket and busily engaged in writing with a hand that was blue and trembled with the cold. He firmly refused to receive aid, in any shape, from his friends; and they were obliged to witness his gradual decay with sad hearts. The gallant Major always persisted in denying that he needed anything; he swore his garret was the most comfortable place in the world, and that the introduction of a fire would have been preposterous; he always affirmed with a round military oath, that he "lived like a fighting-cock," and was never without his bottle of wine at dinner; yet I once came upon him rather unexpectedly, and found him dining upon a crust of bread and a red herring. Sometimes, but rarely, he appeared at the theatres, and, upon such occasions, he was always scrupulously well-dressed, for Major Richardson would never appear abroad otherwise than as a gentleman. Want, privation and disappointment finally conquered him; he grew thin, and haggard, and melancholy, and reserved, and discouraged the visits of his friends who used to love to assemble at his humble lodgings and avail themselves of his splendid conversational powers, or listen to his personal reminiscences and racy anecdotes of military life. One morning he was found dead in his bed; and his death caused the most profound grief in the breasts of all who knew him as he deserved to be known, and who respected him for his many excellent qualities of head and heart. His remains received a handsome and appropriate burial; and many a tear was shed o'er the grave of him who had been a gallant soldier and a celebrated author, but a truly wronged and most unfortunate man. The reader will, I am sure, pardon this digression, for I was anxious to do justice to the memory of a much-valued friend and literary brother. I now resume the direct course of my narrative, and come to the darkest portion of my career. One night, in a billiard room, I had a very unpleasant encounter with an old acquaintance. I observed, at one of the tables, a young man whose countenance seemed strangely familiar to me, although I did not immediately recognize him. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion, and his upper lip was darkened by an incipient moustache--the result, doubtless, of many months of industrious cultivation. A cigar was in his mouth, and a billiard-cue was in his hand; and he profusely adorned his conversation with the most extravagant oaths. Altogether, he seemed to be a very "fast" young man; and I puzzled my brain in endeavoring to remember where I had met him before. Suddenly, he raised his eyes, and their gaze encountered mine; then I wondered that I had not before recognized "my old friend," Jack Slack! "This fellow is my evil genius; he follows me everywhere," thought I, turning to leave the saloon. Would to heaven that I had never entered it! But regrets are useless now. Jack stepped after me, and detained me. I instantly saw that trouble was about to come. "Greenhorn," said Jack, with an air of angry reproach, as he laid his hand upon my shoulder--"why do you so continually avoid me? What in the devil's name have I ever done to deserve this treatment? Have I ever injured you in any way? Damn it, we are equal in age, and in disposition--let us be friends. I can put you in a way, in this city, to enjoy the tallest kind of sport. Give me your hand, and let's go up to the bar and take a social drink." "Jack," said I, seriously and very calmly--"I will shake hands with you in friendship, but I candidly confess that I do not like you; and I believe that it will be better for us both not to associate together at all. Observe me!--I have no hard feelings against you;--you are a clever fellow, and generous to a fault; but something whispers to me that we must not be companions, and I therefore respectfully desire you not to speak to me again. Good night."[E] I turned to go, but Jack placed himself directly in my path, and said, in a voice that was hoarse with passion-- "Stay and hear me. We must not part in this way. Do you think that I will tamely submit to be _cut_ in a manner so disgraceful? Do you think that I am going to remain the object of an unfounded and ridiculous prejudice? Explain yourself, and apologize, or by G----, it will be the worse for you!" "Explain myself--apologize!" I scornfully repeated--"you are a fool, and don't know to whom you are talking. Let me go." "No!" passionately screamed my enraged antagonist, who was somewhat intoxicated--"you must stay and hear me out. I may as well throw off the mask at once. Know, then, that I hate you like hell-fire, and that, the very first time I saw you, I resolved to make you as bad as myself. Therefore did I induce you to drink, and visit disreputable places. The cool contempt with which you have always treated me, had increased my hatred ten-fold. I thirst for vengeance, and _I'll fix you yet_!" "Do your worst," said I, contemptuously; and again did I essay to take my departure. Meanwhile, during the quarrel, the frequents of the saloon had gathered around and appeared to enjoy the scene highly. "If he has given you any cause of offence, Jack, why don't you pitch into him?" suggested a half-drunken fellow who bore the enviable reputation of being a most expert pickpocket. Jack unfortunately adopted the suggestion, and struck me with all his force. I of course returned the blow, with very tolerable effect.--Had the row commenced and terminated in mere _fisticuffs_ all would have been well, and I should not now be called upon to write down the details of a bloody tragedy. Drawing a dirk-knife from his breast, Jack attacked me with the utmost fury. I then did what any other person, situated as I was, would have done--I acted in my own defence. "Self-defence" is universally acknowledged to be the "first law of nature." There was I, a stranger, savagely attacked by a young man armed with a dangerous weapon, and surrounded by his friends and associates--a desperate set, who seemed disposed to assist in the task of demolishing me. I quickly drew from my pocket a pistol, without which, at that time, I never travelled. Before, however, I could cock and level it, my infuriated enemy dashed his dirk-knife into my face, and the point entered my right eye. It was fortunate that the weapon did not penetrate the brain, and cause my instant death. Maddened by the horrible pain which I suffered, and believing myself to be mortally wounded, I raised the pistol and discharged it. Jack Slack fell to the floor, a corpse, his head being shattered to pieces. _I never regretted the act._ A cry of horror and dismay burst from the lips of all present, on witnessing this dreadful but justifiable deed of retribution. "Gentlemen," said I, as the blood was trickling down my face--"I call upon you all to witness that I slew this young man in self-defence. He drove me to commit the deed, and I could not avoid it. I am willing and anxious to abide the decision of a jury of my countrymen; therefore, send for an officer, and I will voluntarily surrender myself into his custody." Scarcely had I uttered these words, when the excruciating torment which I suffered caused me to faint away. When I recovered, I found myself in a prison-cell, with a bandage over my damaged optic, and a physician feeling my pulse. "Ah!" said I, looking around, "I am in _limbo_, I see. Well, I do not fear the result. But, doctor, am I seriously injured--am I likely to kick the bucket?" "Not at all," was the doctor's encouraging reply--"but you have lost the sight of your eye." "Oh, is _that_ all?" said I with a laugh--"well, I believe that it is said in the Bible somewhere, that it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven with one eye than to go to the devil with two." The physician departed for his home, and I departed for the land of dreams. The pain of my wound had considerably mitigated, and I slept quite comfortably. I have always been somewhat of a philosopher in the way of enduring the ills of life, and I tried to reconcile myself to my misfortune and situation with as good a grace as possible. In this I succeeded much better than might have been expected. When a person loses an eye and is at the same time imprisoned for killing another individual, it is certainly natural for that unfortunate person to yield to despair; but, seeing the uselessness of grief, I resolved to "face the music" with all the courage of which I was possessed. Two or three days passed away, and I became almost well--for, to use a common expression, I owned the constitution of a horse. The newspapers which I was allowed to send out and purchase, made me acquainted with something that rather surprised me, for they communicated to me the information that Jack Slack, the young gentleman to whom I had presented a ticket of admission to the other world, was a person whose _real_ name was John Shaffer, _alias_ Slippery Jack, _alias_ Jack Slack. His profession was that of a pickpocket, in which avocation he had always been singularly expert. He was well known to the police, and had been frequently imprisoned. I was gratified to see that the newspapers all justified me in what I had done, and predicted my honorable discharge from custody. That prediction proved correct; for, after I had been in confinement a week, the Grand Jury failed to bring a bill of indictment against me, and I was consequently set at liberty. Tired of Philadelphia, I went to Washington. A New York member of Congress, with whom I was well acquainted, volunteered to show me the "lions;" and I had the honor of a personal introduction to Mr. Van Buren and other distinguished official personages. Some people would be surprised if they did but know of the splendid dissipation that prevails among the "dignitaries of the nation" at Washington. I have seen more than one member of the United States Senate staggering through the streets, from what cause the reader will have no difficulty in judging. I have seen a great statesman, since deceased, carried from an after-dinner table to his chamber. I have seen the honorable Secretary of one of the National departments engaged in a brawl in a brothel. I have seen Representatives fighting in a bar-room like so many rowdies, and I have heard them use language that would disgrace a beggar in his drink. I need not allude to the many outrageous scenes which have been enacted in the councils of the nation; for the newspapers have already given them sufficient publicity. Leaving Washington, I journeyed South, and, after many adventures which the limits of this work will not permit me to describe, I arrived in the City of New Orleans. I had no difficulty in procuring a lucrative situation as reporter on a popular daily newspaper; and enjoyed free access to all the theatres and other places of amusement.--I remained in New Orleans just one year; but, not liking the climate,--and finding, moreover, that I was living too "_fast_," and accumulating no money,--I resolved to "pull up stakes" and start in a Northerly direction. Accordingly, I returned to Philadelphia. It would have been much better for me had I remained in New Orleans, for the hardest kind of times prevailed in the "Quaker City," on my arrival there. It was almost impossible to obtain employment of any description; and many actors, authors and artists, as well as mechanics, were most confoundedly "hard up." I soon exhausted the contents of my purse; and, like the Prodigal Son, "began to be in want." One fine day, in a very disconsolate mood, I was wandering through an obscure street, when I encountered a former lady acquaintance, whom, I trust, the reader has not forgotten. But the particulars of that unexpected encounter, and the details of what subsequently transpired, are worthy of a separate chapter. FOOTNOTES: [E] It is singular, but it is true, that a few nights prior to the tragical occurrences which I am about to relate, I saw, in a dream, a perfect and exact fore-shadow of the whole melancholy affair! Who can explain this mystery? CHAPTER V _I encountered a lady acquaintance, and, like a knight errant of old, became the champion of beauty._ A musical voice pronounced my name; and looking up, I saw a very handsome woman seated at the window of a rather humble wooden tenement, the first floor of which was occupied as a cheap grocery. I immediately recognised my old acquaintance, Mrs. Raymond, the pretty widow of the fashionable boarding-house in William street, New York--she who had carried on an intrigue with Mr. Romaine. I have, in a former chapter, described the terrible affair in which Romaine slew his wife and Anderson her paramour--and then killed himself. I need scarcely say that this encounter with Mrs. Raymond, under such peculiar circumstances, rather astonished me. I had known her as a lady of wealth, and the most elegant and fastidious tastes; and yet here I found her living in an obscure and disreputable portion of the city, and occupying a house which none but the victims of poverty would ever have consented to dwell in. "Wait until I come down and conduct you up stairs," said Mrs. Raymond; and she disappeared from the window. In a few moments she opened the door leading to the upper part of the house; and having warmly shaken hands with me, she desired me to follow her. I complied, and was shown into an apartment on the second floor. "This is my room, and my only one; don't laugh at it," said Mrs. Raymond, with a melancholy smile. I looked around me. The room was small, but scrupulously clean; and, notwithstanding the scantiness and humility of the furniture, a certain air of refinement prevailed. I have often remarked that it is impossible for a person who has been accustomed to the elegancies of life, to become so low, in fortune or character, as to entirely lose every trace of former superiority. "You may break, you may ruin the vase, if you will, But the scent of the roses will cling 'round it still!" Mrs. Raymond's apartment merely contained a fine table, two or three common chairs, a closet, a bed, and a harp--the relic of better and happier days. The uncarpeted floor was almost as white as snow--and certainly no snow could be purer or whiter than the drapery of her unpretending couch. We sat down--I and my beautiful hostess--and entered into earnest conversation. I examined the lady with attention. She had lost none of her former radiant beauty, and I fancied that a shade of melancholy rather enhanced her charms. Her dress was coarse and plain, but very neat, like everything else around her. Never before, in the course of my rather extensive experience, had I beheld a more interesting and fascinating woman; and never shall I forget that day, as we sat together in her little room, with the soft sunlight of a delightful May afternoon pouring in through the windows. "It haunts me still, though many a year has fled, Like some wild melody." "My dear friend," said Mrs. Raymond, accompanying her words with a look of the deepest sympathy, "I see that you have met with a great misfortune. Pardon me, if--" "You shall know all," said I; and then I proceeded to make her acquainted with all that had happened to me since the occurrence of the William street tragedy. Of course, I did not omit to give her the full particulars of my fatal affray with Jack Slack, as that accounted for the "great misfortune" to which she had alluded. When I had finished my narration, the lady sighed deeply and said-- "Ah, my friend, we have both been made the victims of cruel misfortune. You see me to-day penniless and destitute; I, formerly so rich, courted and admired. Have you the time and patience to listen to my melancholy story?" I eagerly answered in the affirmative; and Mrs. Raymond spoke as follows:-- "After that terrible affair in William street--the recollection of which still curdles my blood with horror--I took up my abode in a private family at the lower end of Broadway. I soon formed the acquaintance of a gentleman of fine appearance, and agreeable address, named Livingston, who enjoyed the enviable reputation of being a person of wealth and a man of honor. I was pleased with him, and noticing my partiality, he made violent love to me. Tired of living the life of a single woman--desirous of securing a protection, and wishing to become an honorable wife instead of a mistress--I did not reject him, for he moved in the very highest circles, and seemed to be in every way unobjectionable. I will not weary you with the details of our courtship; suffice it to say that we were married. We took an elegant house in one of the up-town avenues; and, for a time, all went well. After a while, I discovered that my husband had no fortune whatever; but I loved him too well to reproach him--and besides, he had never represented himself to me as being a man of wealth; it was the circle in which he moved which had bestowed upon him that reputation. Also, I considered that my fortune was sufficient for us both. Therefore, the discovery of his poverty did not in the least diminish my regard for him. It was not long before the extensive demands which he kept constantly making upon my purse, alarmed me; I feared that he had fallen into habits of gambling; and I ventured to remonstrate with him upon his extravagance. He confessed his fault, entreated my forgiveness, and promised amendment. Of course, I forgave him; for a loving wife can forgive anything in her husband but _infidelity_. But he did _not_ reform; he continued his ruinous career; and my fortune melted away like snow beneath the rays of the sun. The man possessed such an irresistible influence over me, that I never could refuse an application on his part for money. I believed that he sincerely loved me, and that was enough for me--I asked for no more. I entertained romantic notions of 'love in a cottage.' "At length my fortune was all gone--irrevocably gone. 'No matter,' I thought--'I have still my dear husband left; nothing can ever take him away from me. I will share poverty with him, and we shall be happy together.' We gave up our splendid mansion, and sold our magnificent furniture, and rented a small but respectable house. And now my blood boils to relate how that villain Livingston served me--for he was a villain, a cool, deliberate, black-hearted one. He deserted me, carrying off with him what little money and the few jewels I still possessed, thus leaving me entirely destitute. But what added to my affliction,--nay, I should rather say my maddening rage, was a note which the base scoundrel had written and left behind him, in which he mockingly begged to be excused for his absence, and stated that he had other wives to attend to in other cities. 'I never loved you,' he wrote in that infamous letter, every word of which is branded upon my heart as with a pen of fire--'I never loved you, and my only object in marrying you was to enjoy your fortune; I have no further use for you. It may console you to know that the principal portion of the large sums of money which you gave me from time to time, was applied, not as you imagined to the payment of gambling debts, but to the support of two voluptuous mistresses of mine, whom I kept in separate establishments that were furnished with almost regal splendor. Thus did you unconsciously contribute to the existence of two rivals, who received a greater share of my attentions than you did. In conclusion, as you are now without resources, I would advise you to sell your charms to the highest bidder. There are many wealthy and amorous gentlemen in New York, who will pay you handsomely for your smiles and kisses. I shall not be jealous of their attentions to my _sixth wife_! I intend to marry six more within the next six months. Yours truly, LIVINGSTON.' Thus wrote the accursed wretch, for whom I had sacrificed everything--fortune, position in society, and friends; for who among my fashionable acquaintances, would associate with an impoverished and deserted wife? Not one. Furious at Livingston's treatment of me, I resolved to follow him, even unto the end of the earth, in order to avenge my wrongs. By careful inquiry, I learned that he had taken his departure for the western part of the state of Pennsylvania. You will hardly credit it, but it is God's truth, that being without money to pay travelling expenses, I actually set out _on foot_, and travelled through New Jersey until I reached this city. I subsisted on the road by soliciting the hospitality of the farmers, which was in most cases grudgingly and scantily bestowed, for _benevolence_ is not a prominent characteristic of the New Jersey people,[F] and besides, there was certainly something rather suspicious in the idea of a well-dressed woman travelling on foot, and alone. On my arrival here in Philadelphia, I found myself worn out and exhausted by the fatiguing journey which I had performed. Having called upon some kind Quaker ladies of whose goodness I had often heard, I told them my sad history, which aroused their warmest sympathies. They placed me in this apartment, paid a month's rent in advance, purchased for me the articles of furniture which you see, and obtained for me some light employment. I worked industriously, and almost cheerfully, my object being to earn money enough to carry me to Pittsburg, in Western Pennsylvania, where, I have reason to believe, the villain has located himself. "In my moments of leisure, I longed for some means of recreation; for I saw no company, and was very lonesome. So I wrote on to New York, and through the agency of a kind friend, had my harp sent out to me here, the rest of my poor furniture being presented to that friend. Then did the divine charm of music lighten the burden of my sorrows. One circumstance rather discouraged me: I found that with the utmost industry I could not earn more than sufficient to pay my rent and other necessary expenses, although I lived frugally, almost on bread and water, except on Sundays, when I would manage to treat myself to a cup of tea. You may smile at these trifling details, my dear friend, but I mention them to show you the hardships and privations to which poor women are often exposed. My landlady, who keeps the grocery store down stairs, is a coarse, vulgar, hard-hearted woman; and, when I was thrown out of employment in consequence of the hardness of the times, and could not pay her rent, she not only abused me dreadfully, but annoyed me by making the most infamous suggestions, proposing that I should embrace a life of prostitution, and offering to procure me plenty of 'patrons.' I, of course, indignantly repelled the horrible proposals--but, would you believe it? she actually introduced into my apartment an old, gray-haired and well-dressed libertine, for a purpose which you can easily imagine. The old villain, however, decamped when I displayed a small dagger, and declared that I would kill myself rather than become his victim. This conduct of mine still further incensed my landlady against me; and I expect every moment to be turned out into the street. It is true that I might raise a small sum of money by the sale of my harp, which is a very superior instrument, but as it was the gift of my first husband, I cannot endure the thought of parting with it, for there are associated with it some of the fondest recollections of my life. I am sure that if those kind Quaker ladies had known the character of this house and the neighborhood around it, they would not have placed me here. Heaven only knows what I have suffered, and still suffer. I live in constant dread that some ruffian, instigated by my landlady, who wishes to gratify both her avarice and malignity, may break in upon me some time when I am off my guard, and make me the victim of a brutal outrage. This fear keeps me awake nights, and makes my days miserable. Nor is this all; I have not tasted food since the day before yesterday." "Good God!" I exclaimed--"is it possible? Oh, accursed be the circumstances which have made us both so misfortunate; and doubly accursed be that scoundrel Livingston, the author of all your sorrows. By heavens! I will seek him out, and terribly punish him for his base conduct towards you. Yes, my dear Mrs. Raymond--for such I shall continue to call you, notwithstanding your marriage to that monster Livingston--rest assured that your wrongs shall be avenged.--The villain shall rue the day when he made a play-thing of a woman's heart, robbed her of her fortune, and then left her to poverty and despair!" [This language of mine may seem rather theatrical and romantic; but the reader will please to remember that I was only nineteen years of age at the time of its utterance--a period of life not remarkable for sobriety of language or discretion of conduct. Were that interview to take place _to-day_, I should probably thus express myself:--"My dear Mrs. Raymond, I advise you to forget the d----d rascal and put on the tea-kettle, while I rush out and negotiate for some _grub_!"] Mrs. Raymond gratefully pressed my hand, and said-- "I thank you for thus espousing my cause;--but, my dear friend, _mine_ must be the task of punishing the villain. No other hand but _mine_ shall strike the blow that will send his black, polluted soul into eternity!" These fierce words, which were pronounced with the strongest emphasis, caused me to look at my fair hostess with some degree of astonishment; and no wonder--for the quiet, elegant lady had been suddenly transferred into the enraged and revenge-thirsting woman. She looked superbly beautiful at that moment;--her cheeks glowed, her eyes sparkled, and her bosom heaved like the waves of a stormy sea. "Well," said I--"we will discuss that matter hereafter. Have the goodness to excuse my absence for a few minutes. I have a little errand to perform." She smiled, for she knew the nature of my errand. I went down stairs and walked up the street, in the greatest perplexity; for--let me whisper it into your ear, reader, I had not a sufficient amount of the current coin of the realm in my pockets to create a gingle upon a tomb-stone. "What the devil shall I do?" said I to myself--"here I have constituted myself the champion and protector of a hungry lady, and haven't enough money to purchase a salt herring! Shall I _show up_ my satin waistcoat? No, d----n it, that won't do, for I _must_ keep up appearances. Can't I borrow a trifle from some of my friends? No, curse them, they are all as poverty-stricken as I am! I have it!--I'll test the benevolence of some _gospel-wrestler_, and borrow the devil's impudence for the occasion." I walked rapidly into a more fashionable quarter of the city, looking attentively at every door-plate. At last I saw the name, "_Reverend Phineas Porkley_."[G] That was enough. Without a moment's hesitation I mounted the steps and rang the bell savagely. The door was opened by a fat old flunkey with a red nose of an alarming aspect. I rushed by him into the hall, dashed my hat recklessly upon the table, and shouted-- "Where's Brother Porkley? Show me to him instantly! Don't dare say he's out, for I know that he's at home! It's a matter of life and death! Woman dying--children starving--and the devil to pay generally. Wake Snakes, you fat porpoise, and conduct me to your master!" The flunkey's red nose grew pale with astonishment and fear; yet he managed to stammer out-- "'Pon my life, sir--really, sir--Mr. Porkley, sir--he's at home, certainly, sir--in his library, sir--writing his next Sunday's sermons, sir--can't see any one, sir--" "Catiff, conduct me to his presence!" I exclaimed, in a deep voice, after the manner of the dissatisfied brigand who desires to "mub" the false duke in his own ancestral halls. Not daring to disobey, the trembling flunkey led the way up one flight of stairs and pointed to a door, which I abruptly opened. There, in his library, sat Brother Porkley, a monstrously fat man with a pale, oily face that contained about as much expression as the surface of a cheese. But how was Brother Porkley engaged when I intruded upon him? Was he writing a sermon, or attentively perusing some good theological work? Neither. Oh, then perhaps the excellent man was at prayer. Wrong again. He was merely smoking a short pipe and sipping a glass of brandy and water, like a sensible man--for is it not better to take one's comfort than to play the part of a hypocrite? _I_ think so. "My dear Brother Porkley," cried I, rushing forward and grasping the astonished parson by the hand, which I shook with tremendous violence, "I come on a mission of Charity and Love! I come as a messenger of Benevolence! I come as a dove of Peace with the olive branch in my claw! Porkley, greatest philanthropist of the age, _come down_, for suffering humanity requires your assistance!" "What do you mean, sir?" demanded the reverend Falstaff, as he vainly strove to extricate his hand from my affectionate grasp, "who are you and what do you want?" "Brother," said I, in a broken voice, as I dashed an imaginary tear from the tip end of my nose, "in the next street there dwells a poor but pious family, consisting of a widow woman and her twelve small children. They live in a cellar, sir, one hundred feet below the surface of the earth, in the midst of darkness, horror and bull-frogs, which animals they are compelled to eat in a raw state, in order to exist. Yes _sir_!" "But what is all this to me?" "Much, sir, you are a Christian--a clergyman--and a trump. If you do not assist that distressed family, your reputation for benevolence will not be worth the first red cent. Those children are howling for food--bull-frogs being scarce--and that fond mother is dying of small-pox." "Small-pox!" "Yes _sir_! I have attended her during the last five nights, and fear that I am infected with the disease; but I am willing to lose my life in the holy cause of charity." "Good God, sir! You will communicate the disease to _me_! Let go my hand, sir, and leave this house before you load the air with pestilence!" "No, _sir_! I couldn't think of leaving until you have done something for the relief of that distressed widow and her twelve small children." "D----n the distressed widow and--bless my soul! what am I saying? My good young man, what will satisfy you?" "Five dollars, reverend sir." "Here, then, here is the money. Now go, go quickly. Every moment that you remain here is pregnant with evil. Pray make haste!" "But won't you come and pray with the distressed widow and her--" "No! If I do may I be--blessed! _Will_ you go!" "I'm off, old Porkhead!" With these words I bolted out of the library, stumbled over a corpulent cat that was quietly reposing on the landing, descended the stairs in two leaps, upset the fat flunkey in the hall, and gained the street in safety with my booty--a five dollar city bill. I hastened back towards the residence of Mrs. Raymond, but stopped at an eating-saloon on the way and loaded myself with provisions ready cooked. I did not forget to purchase two bottles of excellent wine. Thus provided, I entered the apartment of Mrs. Raymond, who received me with a smile of gratitude and joy which I shall never forget. We sat down to the table with sharp appetites, and did full justice to the repast, which was really most excellent. The wine raised our spirits, and, forgetting our misfortunes, merrily did we chat about old times in New York, carefully omitting the slightest allusion to the bloody affair in William street. When we had finished one bottle, Mrs. Raymond favored me with an air upon her harp, which she played with exquisite skill. After executing a brilliant Italian waltz, she played and sang that plaintive song: "The light of other days have faded, And all their glory's past." Just as the song was finished, there came a loud knocking at the door. "It is my landlady," said Mrs. Raymond, in a low tone, "conceal yourself, and you will see how she treats me." I stepped into the closet; but through a crevice in the door I could see all that transpired. A fat, vulgar-looking woman entered with a consequential air, and a face inflamed by drink, gave her a peculiarly repulsive appearance. Of course she was utterly unconscious of my presence in the house. Taking up her position in the middle of the apartment, she placed her hands upon her hips, and said, in a hoarse and angry voice-- "Come up out o' that! _You're_ a pretty one to be playing and singing, when you owe me for two months' rent. You have been feasting, too, I see. Where did you get the money? Why didn't you pay it to _me_? Have you any money left?" "No I have not." "Come up out o' that! Why the devil don't you sell that humstrum of yours, that harp, I mean, and raise the wind? It will bring a good ten dollars, I'll be sworn. And why don't you take my advice and earn money as other women do? You are handsome, the men would run after you like mad. That nice, rich old gentleman, Mr. Letcher, that I brought to see you, would have given you any amount of money if you had only treated him kindly--but you frightened him away. Come up out o' that! Now, what do you mean to do? I can't let you stay here any longer unless you raise some money. This evening I'll fetch another nice gentleman here; and if you cut up any of your _tantrums_ with _him_, I'll bundle you out into the street this very night." "If you bring any man here to molest me," said Mrs. Raymond, spiritedly--"I will stab him to the heart, and then kill myself." "Come out o' that," screamed the landlady, approaching Mrs. Raymond with a threatening look, "don't think to frighten me with your tragical airs. I must have my money, and so I'll take this harp and sell it, in spite of you!" She seized upon the instrument and was about to carry it off, when I rushed forth from my place of concealment, exclaiming-- "Come up out o' that! Drop that instrument, you old harridan, or I'll drop _you_! Do not imagine that this lady is entirely friendless. I am here to protect her." The astounded landlady put down the harp and began to mutter many apologies, for I was extremely well dressed, and she probably believed me to be some person of consequence who had become the protector and patron of Mrs. Raymond. "Oh, sir--I'm sure, sir--I didn't mean, sir--if I had known, sir--I beg a thousand pardons, sir--" "Come up out o' that!" cried I, "leave the room, instantly." The landlady vanished with a celerity that was rather remarkable, considering her extreme corpulence. After a short pause, Mrs. Raymond said to me-- "You see to what abuse my circumstances subject me." "Would to God my circumstances were such as to render you that assistance you so much need; would that I could raise you from such unendurable misery! But to speak without equivocation, my condition is as penniless as your own." "Then you can, indeed, sympathize with my distress." "Most sincerely; but you must not go alone in quest of that villainous husband;--and money will be necessary." "This harp will--" "Oh, no--you can never part with it." "I must." "Then let it be but temporarily. There is a pawnbroker's shop on the next square, there we can redeem it--if you can for a time endure to have it removed from your sight." "No matter," said my heroine, undauntedly, "a wronged woman can endure anything when she is in pursuit of vengeance. The weather is delicious; we will travel leisurely, and have a very pleasant time. Should our money become exhausted, we will solicit the hospitality of the good old Pennsylvania farmers, who are renowned for their kindness to travellers, and who will not refuse a bite and a sup, or a night's shelter, to two poor wanderers. If you refuse to accompany me, I will go alone." "I will go with you to the end of the earth!" I exclaimed, with enthusiasm, for I could not help admiring the noble courage of that beautiful woman, whose splendid countenance now glowed with all the animation of anticipated vengeance. She pressed my hand warmly, in acknowledgement of my devotion; and then, having put on her bonnet and shawl, she announced herself as being in readiness to set out. "I have no valuables of any kind," said she, "and the landlady is welcome to this furniture, which will discharge my indebtedness to her. I shall return to this house no more." I shouldered the harp, and we left the house without encountering the amiable landlady. To reach the nearest pawnbroker's, it was necessary to pass through one of the principal streets. To my dismay a crowd of actors, reporters and others were assembled upon the steps of a hotel. The rascals spied me out before I could cross over; and so, putting on as bold a front as possible, I walked on pretending not to notice them, while a "running commentary," something like the following, was kept up until I was out of hearing: "_Stag his knibbs_,"[H] said the "heavy man" of the Arch street theatre. "Thompson, give us a tune!" bawled out a miserable wretch of a light comedian, or "walking gentleman." "Jem Baggs, the _Wandering Minstrel_, by G----!" yelled a pitiful demon of a newspaper reporter. "Who is that magnificent woman accompanying him?" inquired a dandy editor, raising his eye-glass and surveying my fair companion with an admiring gaze. "Egad! she's a beauty!" cried all the fellows, in a chorus. Mrs. Raymond blushed and smiled. It was evident that these expressions of admiration were not displeasing to her. "Excuse those gentlemen," said I to her, apologetically--"they are all particular friends of mine." "I am not offended; indeed they are very complimentary," responded the lady, with a gay laugh. She had the most musical laugh in the world, and the most beautiful one to _look at_, for it displayed her fine, pearly teeth to the most charming advantage. We reached the pawnbroker's and I went boldly in while Mrs. Raymond waited for me outside the door, for I did not wish her to be exposed to the mortification of being stared at by those who might be in the shop. The pawnbroker was a gentleman of Jewish persuasion, and possessed a nose like the beak of an eagle. He took the instrument and examined it carefully, "Vat is dish?" said he, "a harp? Oh, dat is no use. We have tousands such tings offered every day. Dere is no shecurity in mushical instruments. Vat do you want for it?" "Ten dollars," I replied, in a tone of decision. "Can't give it," said the Israelite--"it ish too moosh. Give you eight." "No," said I, taking up the harp and preparing to depart. "Here, den," said _my uncle_, "I will give you ten, but only shust to _oblishe_ you--mind dat." I duly thanked him for his willingness to _oblige_ me. Uncle Moses gave me the ticket and money; and I left the shop and rejoined Mrs. Raymond, to whom I handed over the duplicate and the X. "I will take the ticket," said she, smiling--"but you shall keep the money, for I appoint you my cashier." At the suggestion of my fair friend we now sought out a cheap second-hand clothing establishment, which, fortunately, was kept by a woman, who, when matters were confidentially explained to her, readily entered into our plan. Mrs. Raymond and the woman retired into a rear apartment, while I remained in the shop. Half or three-quarters of an hour passed away. At last the door of the inner apartment was opened and there entered the shop a young person whom I did not immediately recognize. This person seemed to be a very beautiful boy, neatly dressed in a cloth jacket and cap, and possessing a form of the most exquisite symmetry. This pretty and interesting lad approached me, and tapping me playfully upon the cheek, said-- "My dear fellow, how do you like me now? Have I not made a change for the better? How queenly I feel in this strange rig!" It was of course Mrs. Raymond who addressed me. Her disguise was perfect; never before had I seen so complete a transformation, even upon the stage. No one would have suspected her to be otherwise than what she seemed, a singularly delicate and handsome boy, apparently about sixteen years of age. I congratulated the lady upon the admirable appearance which she made in her newly adopted costume, but expressed my regret that she should have been compelled to part with her magnificent hair. "There was no help for it," said she, laughing. "I confess that I experienced some regret when I felt my hair tumbling from my shoulders; but the loss was unavoidable, for those tresses would have betrayed my sex. This good woman, here, proved to be a very expert barber." Reflecting that a coarse suit of clothes would be just as good and better, for a dusty road, than a fine suit of broadcloth, I made a bargain with the proprietress of the shop to exchange my garments for coarse ones of fustian, she giving me a reasonable sum to counter-balance the great superiority of my wardrobe. This arrangement was speedily completed, and I found myself suddenly transformed into a rustic looking individual, who, in appearance, certainly deserved the title of a perfect "greenhorn." All parties being satisfied, I and my fair companion departed. In the evening, having supped, we went to the theatre, where I revenged myself upon the "heavy man," and the "light comedian," who had in the afternoon made merry at my expense for carrying the harp, by getting up a hiss for the former gentleman, who knew not one single word of his part, and by hitting the latter individual upon the nose with an apple, for which latter feat (as the actor was a great favorite,) I was hounded out of the theatre, and narrowly escaped being carried to the watch-house. I and my fair friend then took lodgings for the night at a neighboring hotel. FOOTNOTES: [F] Some people imagine that New Jersey belongs to the United States. That opinion I hold to be erroneous. [G] In this, as in several other cases, I have used a fictitious name, inasmuch as a number of the persons alluded to in this narrative are still living. [H] It is not generally known among "outsiders," that circus people and actors are in the habit of using among themselves a sort of flash language which enables them to converse about professional and other affairs without being understood by outside listeners. If I had room, I could relate many amusing anecdotes under this head. "_Stag his knibbs_" signifies "_Look at him_." CHAPTER VI _In which is introduced a celebrated Comedian from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London._ The next morning, bright and early, "two travellers might have been seen" crossing one of the ponderous bridges that lead over the Schuylkill from Philadelphia to the opposite shore. The one was a stout young cavalier, arrayed in fustian brown; the other was a pretty youth, attired in broadcloth blue, and brilliant was his flashing eye, and coal-black was his hair. By my troth, good masters, a fairer youth ne'er touched the light guitar within the boudoir of my lady. "Now, by my knightly oath," quoth he in fustian brown, "my soul expands in the soft beauty of this rosy morn, my blood dances merrily through every vein, and I feel like eating a thundering good breakfast at the next hostelrie.--What sayest _thou_, fair youth?" "Of a truth, Sir George," quoth he in broadcloth blue, in a voice of liquid melody, "I am hungered, and would gladly sit me down before a flagon of coffee, and a goodly platter of ham and eggs." "Bravely spoken," quoth the stout young cavalier, with watering mouth; and then, relapsing into silence, the train journeyed onward. Soon they paused before a goodly hostelrie, which bore upon its swinging signboard the device of "The Pig and the Snuffers." "What ho, within there! House, house, I say!" hastily roared the youth in fustian brown, as he vigorously applied his cowhide boot to the door of the inn. Forth came mine host of the Pig and Snuffers--a jovial knave and a right merry one, I ween, with mighty paunch and nose of ruby red. Now, by the rood! a funnier knight than this same Rupert Harmon, ne'er drew a foaming tankard of nut-brown ale, or blew a cloud from a short pipe in a chimney corner. "Welcome, my masters--a right good welcome," quoth the fat host of the Pig and Snuffers. "Bestir thyself, knave," quoth the cove in fustian brown, as he entered the inn followed by the pretty youth in broadcloth blue--"beshrew me, I am devilish hungry, and athirst likewise. Knave, a stoup of sack, and then let ham, eggs and coffee smoke upon the festive board!" "To hear is to obey," said he of the Pig and Snuffers, as he waddled out of the room in order to give the necessary instructions for breakfast. It came! Ha, ha! Shall I attempt to describe that breakfast? Nay--my powers are inadequate to the task. But, dropping the style of my friend, G.P.R. James, the great English novelist, I shall continue my narrative in my own humble way. We breakfasted, and cheerfully set out upon our journey. The weather was delightful; the odor of spring flowers perfumed the air, and the soft breeze made music amid the branches of the trees. On every side of us were the evidences of agricultural prosperity--fine, spacious farm-houses, immense barns, vast orchards, and myriads of thriving domestic animals. Sturdy old Dutch farmers, jogging leisurely along in their great wagons to and from the city, saluted us with a hearty "good morrow;" and one jolly old fellow who was returning home after having disposed of a quantity of produce, insisted upon giving us a "lift" in his wagon. So we got in, and about dark reached the farmer's home--a substantial and comfortable mansion that indicated its owner to be a man of considerable wealth. I was surprised at the powers of endurance exhibited by my fair friend, who after a pretty hard day's journey, exhibited not the slightest symptom of fatigue. She kept up a most exuberant flow of spirits, and seemed delighted with the novelty of the journey which we had commenced. She was truly a charming companion, full of wit, sentiment and intelligence; and I look back upon those days with a sigh of regret--for such unalloyed happiness I shall never see again. The good old farmer, with characteristic hospitality, declared that we should go not further that night; and we gladly availed ourselves of his kindness. He introduced us to his wife--a fine old lady, and a famous knitter of stockings--and also to his only daughter, a plump, rosy, girl about eighteen years old. This damsel surveyed my disguised companion with a look of the most intense admiration; and I saw at once that she had actually fallen in love with Mrs. Raymond! "There will be some fun here," said I to myself--"I must keep dark and watch the movements. The idea of a woman falling love with one of her own sex, is rather rich!" After a capital supper--ye gods, what German sausages!--I accepted the old farmer's invitation to inspect his barn, cattle, &c. My fair friend was taken possession of by the amorous Dutch damsel, who seemed to be particularly anxious to display the beauties of her _dairy_, which is always the pride of a farmer's daughter. I could not help laughing at the look of comical embarrassment which poor Mrs. Raymond assumed, when the buxom young lady seized her and dragged her off. I of course praised the farmer's barn and stock with the air of a judge of such matters, and we returned to the house, where I applied myself to the task of entertaining the old lady, and in this I succeeded so well, that she presented me with a nice pair of stockings of her own knitting. After a while, my fair friend and the farmer's daughter returned;--and I noticed that Mrs. Raymond looked exceedingly annoyed and perplexed, while the countenance of the Dutch damsel exhibited anger and disappointment. I could easily guess how matters stood; but, of course, I said nothing. During the evening, my fair friend had an opportunity of speaking to me in private; and she said to me, with a deep blush, although she could not help smiling as she spoke-- "I have something to tell you which is really very awkward and ridiculous, yet you can't think how it vexes me. Now don't laugh at me in that provoking manner, but listen. That great, silly Dutch girl, after showing me her dairy, which is really a very pretty affair and well worth seeing, suddenly made the most furious love to me--supposing me, of course, to be what I seem, a boy. I was terribly confused and frightened, and knew not what to say, nor how to act. Throwing her fat arms around me, she declared that I was so handsome that she could not resist me, and that I must become her lover. I told her that I was too young to know anything about love; and then the creature volunteered to teach me all about it. Then I intimated that I could not think of marrying at present, as I was too poor to support a wife; but she laughed at the idea of matrimony, and said that she only wanted me to be her little lover. Finally I effected my release by promising to meet her about midnight, in the orchard by the gate. Now, is not all this very dreadful--to be persecuted by a big, unrelenting Dutch girl in this manner?" I roared with laughter. It was rude and ungallant, I confess; but how could I help it? Mrs. Raymond made a desperate effort to become angry; but so ludicrous was the whole affair, that she could not resist the contagious influence of my mirth; and she, too, almost screamed with laughter. When our mirth had somewhat subsided, I inquired-- "Well, are you going to keep an appointment with the Dutch Venus?" "What an absurd question! Of course not! She may wait by the orchard gate all night, for what _I_ care--the great, lubbery fool!" "What do you say to _my_ meeting her at the appointed time and place? I will act as your representative, and make every satisfactory explanation." "You shall do no such thing. How dare you make such a proposition? I am perfectly astonished at your impudence!" The next morning, after breakfast, we prepared to depart. I saw that the farmer's daughter regarded my fair friend with a ferocious look. The damsel had probably passed two or three hours in the night air, waiting for her "faithless swain." Having thanked the good old farmer for his hospitality, and received his blessing in return, we departed. It is not my intention to weary the reader with the details of each day's travel; indeed, my limited space would not admit of such particularity. I shall, however, as briefly as possible, relate such incidents of the journey as I may deem especially worthy of mention. When we reached Lancaster, we discovered that our funds had entirely given out, for we had lived expensively at taverns on the way, instead of exercising a judicious economy. How to raise a fresh supply of money was now the question, and one most difficult to be answered. But an unexpected stroke of good fortune was in store for us. Strolling into the bar-room of the principal hotel, I saw a play-bill stuck up on the wall. This I read with avidity; and then, to my great satisfaction, I became aware of the fact that an old friend of mine, one Bill Pratt, a travelling actor and manager, had "just arrived in Lancaster with a talented company of comedians, who would that evening have the honor of appearing before the ladies and gentlemen of the above named place in a series of entertainments at once Moral, Chaste, Instructive and Classical, at the Town Hall. Admission--twelve-and-a-half cents." So read the play-bill. I and my fair friend immediately posted to the Town Hall, and there I found Brother Pratt busily engaged in arranging his stage, putting up his scenery, &c. He was prodigiously glad to see me.[I] Among his company I recognized several old acquaintances. I introduced my travelling companion to the ladies and gentlemen of the profession; and I do not think that any of them suspected her true sex. We all dined together at the hotel; and a merry party we certainly were, "within the limits of becoming mirth." Wit sparkled, conundrums puzzled, bad puns checked, and rich jokes awoke the laughing echoes of the old dining-hall. Happy people are those travelling actors--happy because they are careless, and, in the enjoyment of to-day, think not of the morrow. Are they not true philosophers? "Oh, what's the use of sighing, Since time is on the wing-- To-morrow we'll be dying, So merrily, merrily sing-- Tra, la, la!" After dining in company with Brother Pratt I seated myself upon the piazza; and, while we smoked our cheroots, we recalled the past, dwelt upon the present, and anticipated the future. After a considerable amount of desultory conversation, the Brother suddenly asked me-- "Who is that handsome little fellow with whom you are travelling?" "Oh, he ran away from home in order to see something of the world, as well as to avoid being apprenticed to a laborious trade," was my reply, for I did not consider it at all necessary to let my friend into the secret. "He's a lad of spirit, and I like him," rejoined the Brother. "If he went upon the stage, what a splendid court page he'd make! But where are you going? Tell me all about it." I told the Brother all that was necessary for him to know. "And so," said he, reflectively, "you are entirely out of funds. That's bad. We must raise you some cash, in some way or other. I will immediately cause bills to be printed, announcing that 'the manager has the pleasure of informing his numerous patrons that he has, at enormous expense, succeeded in effecting a brief engagement with Mr. George Thompson, the celebrated comedian from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, who will make his first appearance in his celebrated character of Robert Macaire, in the great drama of that name, as performed by him upwards of two hundred nights before crowded and fashionable audiences including the royalty, nobility and gentry of England, who greeted him with the most terrific and enthusiastic yells of applause, and Her Majesty the Queen was so delighted with the masterly and brilliant representation, that she presented Mr. Thompson with a magnificent diamond ring valued at five thousand pounds sterling, which ring will be exhibited to the audience at the conclusion of the performance.' How will _that_ do, my boy? We'll raise the price of admission to twenty-five cents on account of the extra attraction. I'll play Jaques Strop, the house will be crammed, and you will go on your way rejoicing, with a full pocket." "I say, old fellow," I gravely remarked--"are you not laying it on a _little too thick_?" "Not at all," coolly replied the brother as he carefully knocked the ashes off the end of his cigar, "not at all. Humbug is the order of the day. I'll get a flashy ring to represent the one presented to you by the queen. You know enough about stage business to play the part of Robert Macaire very respectably and you also know that I am not very slow in Jaques Strop. You'll make a hit, depend on it. I'll get you the book, and you can look over the part. What you don't learn you can gag.[J] I'll announce you for to-morrow night. Leave all to me; I'll arrange everything. Let's go in and drink!" I was soon master of the part; and, at the end of the next day's rehearsal, I was found to be "dead letter perfect." The manager and the members of his company congratulated me on the success which I was sure to meet with. Meanwhile, the town had been flooded with bills, which made the same extravagant announcement that Brother Pratt had suggested to me. Public expectation and curiosity were worked up to the highest pitch; and a crowd of excited people assembled in front of the principal hotel, in anticipation of the sudden arrival of the "distinguished comedian" in a splendid coach drawn by four superb white horses, and attended by a retinue of servants in magnificent livery. Evening came, and the large hall was crowded almost to suffocation, although the price of tickets had been doubled. I was full of confidence, having fortified myself by imbibing several glasses of brandy and water. Just before going on the stage Brother Pratt was, to use a common expression, "pretty well over the bay." Well, to make a long story as short as possible, I went on at the proper time, followed by Jaques Strop. My appearance was greeted with a perfect whirlwind of applause, which lasted four or five minutes. Taking off my dilapidated beaver, I gracefully bowed my thanks and then began the part which commences thus: "Come along, comrade, put your best leg foremost. What are you afraid of? We are out of danger now, and shall soon reach the frontier." I may say without egotism, that I got through the part remarkably well, and I certainly kept the audience in a continual roar of laughter. Mrs. Raymond occupied a front seat;--and her encouraging smile sustained me throughout the play. When the piece was over, I was loudly called for. "Now, my boy," said Brother Pratt to me, "go in front of the curtain and make a rip-staving speech--I know you can do it. Say that at the urgent solicitation of the manager, you have consented to appear to-morrow night as Jem Baggs, in the Wandering Minstrel." "Very good," said I, "but these people will now want to see the ring which Queen Victoria presented to me. How shall I manage that?" "Easy enough," replied the Brother, as he drew from his pocket and handed me a big brass ring ornamented with a piece of common glass about the size of a hen's egg. Out I stepped in front of the curtain. A bouquet as large as a cabbage struck me in the face, and fell at my feet. The giver of this delicate compliment was an ancient female very youthfully dressed. I picked up the bouquet, and pressed it to my heart. This was affecting, it melted the audience to tears. Silence having been obtained, I made a bombastic speech, which Brother Pratt afterwards declared to be the best he had ever heard delivered in front of the "green baize." I spoke of being a stranger in a strange land, of the warm welcome which I received, of eternal gratitude, of bearing with me beyond the ocean the remembrance of their kindness, admitted that I was closely allied to the British aristocracy, but declared that my sentiments were purely republican and in favor of the "Star-Spangled Banner." Here there was a tempest of applause and when it had subsided, the orchestra, consisting of a fiddle and a bass-drum, struck up the favorite national air which my words had suggested. Then I exhibited the diamond ring which had been presented to me by the Queen of England; and, as the spectators viewed the royal gift, the most profound silence prevailed among them. When I had sufficiently gratified them by displaying the lump of brass and glass, I remarked that I would appear on the next evening as Jem Baggs in the Wandering Minstrel. This announcement was received with shouts of approbation; and bowing almost to the foot-lights, I withdrew. The next night, the audience was equally large and enthusiastic, and my "farewell speech" was so deeply affecting, that there was not a dry eye in the house. Brother Pratt urged me to become a regular member of his company; but, although he offered me a good salary, and glowingly depicted the pleasant life of a strolling player, I declined, not having any ambition in that way. Besides, it was my duty to get on to Pittsburg with Mrs. Raymond, without any unnecessary delay. Having received nearly fifty dollars as my share of the proceeds, I took my leave of Brother Pratt and his company; and, accompanied, of course, by my fair friend, resumed my journey. I wish I had sufficient time and space to describe all the adventures through which we passed, prior to our arrival in Pittsburg. But such details would occupy too much room, and I must make the most of the few pages that are left for me to occupy. We crossed the Alleghanies, and, taking the canal at Johnstown, soon reached Pittsburg. Here we made some essential improvements in our garments, and put up at a respectable hotel, Mrs. Raymond still sustaining her masculine character. By diligent inquiry, we learned that the villain, Livingston, was in the city; and my fair friend prepared to avenge the base wrongs which he had inflicted upon her. FOOTNOTES: [I] All who have the good fortune to know Bill Pratt _alias_ "The Original Beader," will acknowledge that a wittier, funnier or better man never breathed. [J] This word, in theatrical parlance, signifies "to employ language which the author of the play never wrote." CHAPTER VII _A deed of blood and horror._ We had no difficulty in ascertaining the place of Livingston's abode; for he was well known in the city. He resided in a handsome house situated on one of the principal streets; and we discovered that the lawless rascal was actually engaged in the practice of the law! "My dear friend," said Mrs. Raymond to me one day, as we were strolling along the banks of the river, "I will not suffer you to involve yourself in any trouble on my account. You must have nothing to do with this Livingston. You must remain entirely in the back-ground. To me belongs the task of punishing him. I tell you frankly that I shall kill the man. He is not fit to live, and he must not be permitted to continue his career of villainy. Whatever may be my fate, do not, I entreat you, by unhappy on my account. When I have shed the heart's blood of Livingston, I shall be willing to die upon the scaffold. To the very last moment of my life, I shall cherish for you a sentiment of the most affectionate gratitude; you sacrificed all your own plans in order to accompany me here, and, throughout the entire long journey, you have treated me with a degree of kindness and attention, which I can never forget while life remains. But a truce to melancholy; let us change the subject." "With all my heart," said I; and leaving the river side, we walked up into the centre of the city. We passed an elegant dwelling-house on the door of which was a silver plate bearing the name "Livingston." This was the residence of the villain who ruined Mrs. Raymond. A carriage drove up before the door, and from it leaped a tall, fine-looking man, dressed in the height of fashion. He assisted a beautiful and elegantly attired lady to alight from the vehicle, and conducted her into the house. "That man is Livingston, and that woman must be _one of his wives_," said Mrs. Raymond, with a bitter smile, as she placed her hand in her bosom, where, I knew, she carried a dirk-knife. "My friend," resumed she, after a pause, "leave me; I may as well perform my bloody task now, as at any other time. I will invent some pretext for requesting an interview with Livingston, and then, without uttering a single word, I will stab him to the heart. Farewell, forget me, and be happy!" "Stay," said I--"you must not leave me thus. Let me persuade you to abandon, at least for the present, your terrible design with reference to Livingston. You are agitated, excited; wait until you are cool, and capable of sober reflections." Mrs. Raymond regarded me with a look of anger, as she said, passionately-- "And was it for the purpose of giving me such advice as _this_, that you accompanied me from Philadelphia to this city? You knew, all the while, the object of my journey, and yet now, in the eleventh hour, when an excellent opportunity presents itself for the accomplishment of that object, you seek to dissuade me from my purpose. Have I entirely mistaken your character? Are you really as weak-minded, and as devoid of courage and spirit, as your language would seem to indicate? When that young ruffian mutilated you in Philadelphia, didn't you consider that you acted perfectly right? Well, this Livingston has destroyed the happiness of my life, and transformed me from a lady of wealth into a penniless beggar. Say does he not deserve to _die_?" "Why--yes," was my reluctant reply--"but then it seems too terrible to go about the horrible business deliberately, and in cold blood." "He coolly and deliberately planned and effected the ruin of my peace, happiness and fortune," rejoined Mrs. Raymond, in a tone of fixed determination--"and it is therefore but just that he should be coolly and deliberately slain. Once more, farewell; by everything sacred, I swear that you shall not turn me from my purpose. My regard for you is great--but, if you seek to detain me by force, your heart shall be made acquainted with the point of my knife!" "I have no idea of using force," said I, reproachfully--"but, if I _had_, no such threat as the one which you have just now made, would deter me. Go, my friend, go--do as you will; but I will go with you, for I swear that I will not leave you." This announcement deeply affected Mrs. Raymond, who embraced me and begged my pardon for the language which she had used. "Forgive me, my best, my only friend," said she--"the loyalty and devotion which you have always manifested towards me should have prompted different expressions.--If you are _determined_ to accompany me, and see me through this business, _follow me_." I obeyed, hoping to be able to prevent the perpetration of the terrible deed which she meditated. She rang the bell at the door, which was opened by a servant. "I wish to see your master, instantly, on particular business," said the disguised woman. "What name, sir?" demanded the servant. "It matters not. Say to Mr. Livingston that two gentlemen wish to see him on business of the greatest importance." The servant disappeared, but soon returned, saying that she would conduct us to her master. We followed her into a handsomely furnished library, where Mr. Livingston was seated, looking over some letters. He glanced at us carelessly, and said-- "Well, young gentlemen, what can I do for you to-day? Do you wish to consult me on any matter of law? I am entirely at your service." It was evident that the villain did not recognize the woman whom he had so basely wronged. Mrs. Raymond uttered not one single word, but, thrusting her hand into her bosom, she slowly approached the author of her ruin, who still continued to peruse his letters in entire unconsciousness of the terrible danger that hung over him. I watched Mrs. Raymond with the closest attention, fully determined to spring forward at the critical moment and prevent the desperate woman from accomplishing her deadly purpose. It was a deeply interesting and thrilling scene, and one which I shall never forget. There sat the intended victim, whose soul was hovering on the awful precincts of an endless eternity; there stood the avenger of her own wrongs, her right hand nervously grasping the hilt of the weapon in her bosom, her face deadly pale, and her eyes flashing with wild excitement. And there I stood, trembling with agitation, and ready to spring forward at the proper time to prevent the consummation of a bloody tragedy. Mr. Livingston suddenly looked up from his letters, and started when he beheld the pale and wrathful countenance of Mrs. Raymond, whose eyes were fixed upon him with an expression of the most deadly hatred. "Your face seems strongly familiar to me; have we not met before?" asked Livingston. "Yes," calmly replied Mrs. Raymond--"we _have_ met before." "That voice!" cried the doomed villain--"surely I know it. Who are you, and what want you with me?" "I am the victim of your treacherous villainy, and I want revenge!" screamed Mrs. Raymond, as, with the quickness of lightning, and before I could prevent her, she drew her weapon and plunged it into the heart of Livingston, who fell from his chair to the floor and died instantly. "Now I am satisfied," said the woman, as she coolly wiped the blood from the blade of her knife. Language cannot depict the horror which the contemplation of this bloody deed caused within me. True, I had myself slain a human being--but then it was done in self-defence, and amid all the heat and excitement of a personal contest. _This_ deed, on the contrary, had been committed, coolly and deliberately; and, although Mrs. Raymond's wrongs were undoubtedly very great, I really could not find it in my heart to justify her in what she had done. How bitterly I reproached myself for not having adopted some effectual means of hindering the performance of that appalling deed, even at the risk of incurring Mrs. Raymond's severe and eternal displeasure! I felt myself to be in some measure an accessory to the crime; and I feared the law would, at all events, consider me as such. "What is done cannot be helped now," said I to Mrs. Raymond, who stood calmly surveying the body of her victim--"come let us leave the house and seek safety in flight. We may possibly escape the consequence of this bloody act." "No," said the woman--"_I_ shall not stir an inch. I have relieved the world of a monster, and now I am ready to receive my reward, even if it be the scaffold. But go, my friend--go, and secure your own safety." "No, I will not leave you, even if I have to share your fate," was my reply. That was a very foolish determination, I admit; for how could my remaining with her, do her any good? I was merely placing myself in a position of the utmost peril. But I thought it wrong to desert Mrs. Raymond in that dark and trying hour; and therefore, as she refused to escape, I resolved to remain with her. Some one softly opened the door, and a female voice said-- "My dear, are you particularly engaged? May I come in?" Hearing no reply, the fair speaker entered with a smile on her rosy lips. This lady was the newly-made wife of Livingston. She had been, of course, in happy ignorance of his true character, and of the fact that he was already the husband of several wives. On seeing us, she evinced surprise, for she knew not of her husband having visitors. Suddenly, her eyes fell upon Livingston's bleeding corpse, which lay upon the floor. On seeing this horrid spectacle, she gave utterance to a piercing scream, and fell down insensible. That shrill, agonizing scream penetrated every part of the house, and brought all the inmates to the library, to see what had happened. Horror took possession of the group, as they gazed upon the awful scene. For a few minutes, there reigned the most profound silence. This was at last broken by one of the male servants, who demanded-- "Who has done this?" "I did it," replied Mrs. Raymond, calmly, "I alone am guilty. Here is the weapon with which I did the deed. This young man here is entirely innocent; he tried to prevent the act, but I was too quick for him. Let me be conveyed at once to prison." Officers being sent for, soon arrived and took us both into custody, notwithstanding the passionate protestations of Mrs. Raymond that I had no hand whatever in the affair. "That must be shown to the satisfaction of higher authorities than we are," said one of the officers. "At all events, it is our duty to secure this young man as a witness. If he is innocent, he will doubtless be able to prove it." Half an hour afterwards, I was an inmate of the Pittsburg jail, in an apartment adjoining that occupied by Mrs. Raymond, whose real sex still remained undiscovered. CHAPTER VIII _An Escape, and a Triumph._ After a few weeks' incarceration, Mrs. Raymond, in accordance with my advice, made known the secret of her sex to the chief officer of the prison, to whom she also communicated the great wrongs which she had suffered at the hand of Livingston. The officer, who was a good and humane man, was deeply affected by this narrative. He immediately placed Mrs. Raymond in a more comfortable room and caused her to be provided with an abundance of female garments, which she now resumed. Her story, of course, was given in all the newspapers; and it excited the deepest sympathy in her behalf. One editor boldly asserted that no jury could be found to convict the fair prisoner under the circumstances. As regarded my case, the propriety of my immediate discharge from custody was strongly urged, an opinion in which I fully concurred. I shall dwell upon these matters as briefly as possible. I was first brought to trial, and the jury acquitted me without leaving their seats; Mrs. Raymond was merely convicted of manslaughter in the fourth degree, so great was the sympathy that existed in her behalf, and the judge sentenced her to be imprisoned during the term of two years. Although I considered her particularly fortunate in receiving a punishment so comparatively light, I resolved to effect her liberation in some way or other. I may as well here remark that the last wife and victim of Livingston never survived the blow. She soon died of a broken heart. My first step was to repair to Harrisburg, the capitol city of the State, in order to solicit Mrs. Raymond's pardon from Governor Porter, who was renowned, and by some parties strongly condemned, for his constant willingness to bestow executive clemency upon prisoners convicted of the most serious offences.[K] I easily obtained an interview with his Excellency, whom I found to be a very clever sort of personage. Having made known my errand, and related all the particulars of Mrs. Raymond's case, I urged her claims to mercy with all the eloquence of which I was master. The Governor listened to me with attention; and, when I had concluded, he said-- "My inclination strongly prompts me to pardon this most unfortunate lady; but I have recently pardoned so many convicted prisoners, that the press and the people generally are down on me, and I really dare not grant any more pardons at present. I will, however, commute the lady's sentence from two years to one." With this partial concession I was obliged to be contented. The necessary documents were made out, and with them I posted back to Pittsburg. When I entered the cell of my fair friend and told her what I had effected in her behalf, she burst into tears of gratitude and joy. One long year taken off her sentence, was certainly something worth considering. "Courage, my friend!" said I, "even if you are obliged to serve out the remnant of your sentence, which I trust will not be the case, a year will soon pass away. I shall not leave Pittsburg until you are free. You will see me often; and I will take care that you are abundantly provided with everything that can contribute to your comfort. Keep up a good heart; you have at least one friend who will never desert you." Three months passed away, during which time I gained an excellent subsistence by writing for various newspapers and magazines. Three times every week I had an interview with Mrs. Raymond, whom I caused to be supplied with every comfort and luxury as allowed by the rules of the prison. She had just nine months to serve, when one day I was unexpectedly enabled to effect her liberation in the following manner. I had called upon her, as usual. After an interview of about half an hour's duration, I bade her adieu and left her apartment. To gain the street, it was necessary to pass through the office of the prison. In that office were generally seated three or four turnkeys, one of whom always went and locked Mrs. Raymond's door after my leaving her. Upon entering the office on the occasion to which I now refer, I found but one turnkey there, and he was _fast asleep_. I instantly resolved to take advantage of the lucky circumstance which good fortune had thrown in my way. Hastening back to Mrs. Raymond's cell, I briefly told her the state of affairs and bade her follow me. She obeyed, as might be supposed, without much reluctance. We passed through the office and out into the street; but, before departing, I transferred the key from the inside to the outside of the door and locked the sleeping turnkey in, so that there could be no possibility of his immediately pursuing us, when he should awaken and discover the flight of his prisoner. I was tolerably well furnished with cash, and my fair friend, at my suggestion, purchased an elegant bonnet and shawl--for, it will be remembered, she had resumed the garments appropriate to the female sex. As for myself, I was exceedingly well dressed, and no alteration in my costume was necessary, in order to present a respectable appearance. I entertained no serious apprehensions of any great effort being made to capture the fugitive, she having had but nine months to serve, and being therefore a person of but little importance when viewed as a prisoner. Moreover, I hoped that the kind-hearted chief officer of the prison would charitably refrain from making any extraordinary exertions in the matter. But these considerations did not prevent me from exercising a reasonable degree of caution. We left Pittsburg that evening, for Philadelphia, where we arrived in due season. I immediately sought and procured employment as a writer, at a liberal salary. A few days after our arrival in Philadelphia, Mrs. Raymond said to me-- "My dear friend, I am not going to remain a burden to you. Listen to the plan which I have to propose. I think of going upon the stage." "What, and becoming an actress?" "Yes. I flatter myself that my voice and figure are both passable; and I really think that I possess some talent for the theatrical profession. A respectable actress always receives a good salary. If the plan meets with your approbation, I shall place myself under the tuition of some competent teacher; and my _debut_ shall be made as soon as advisable." I did not attempt to dissuade Mrs. Raymond from carrying out this plan, which I thought, in fact, to be a very excellent idea. Once successfully brought out upon the stage, she would have a profession which would be to her an unfailing means of support. According to the best of my judgment, she possessed every mental and physical qualification necessary to constitute a good actress. Beautiful and sprightly, talented and accomplished--possessing, too, the most exquisite taste and skill as a vocalist and musician, I saw no reason why she should not succeed upon the stage as well, and far better, than many women a thousand times less talented. Therefore, encouraged by my cordial approbation of her plan, and acting in accordance with my recommendation, the fair aspirant to dramatic honors placed herself under the instructions of a popular and well-known actor, who was fully capable of the task which he had undertaken. A few months passed away, and my fair friend announced herself as being nearly in readiness to make her first appearance. I was delighted with the rapid and satisfactory progress which she had made. The recitations with which she occasionally favored me, were delivered in the highest style of the elocutionary art, and convinced me that she was destined to meet with the most unbounded success. She proposed making her _debut_ as _Beatrice_, in Shakespeare's glorious comedy, "Much Ado About Nothing,"--a character well calculated to display her arch vivacity and charming sprightliness. I saw her rehearse the part, and was satisfied that she _must_ achieve a brilliant triumph,--an opinion that was fully concurred in by her gratified instructor, and also by the manager and several of the leading actors and actresses of the theatre. The eventful evening came at last, and the house was crowded in every part. Seating myself in a private box in company with the actor who had instructed Mrs. Raymond, I awaited her appearance with the utmost confidence. The curtain arose, and the play commenced. When _Beatrice_ came on, a perfect storm of applause saluted her. Her appearance, in her elegant and costly stage costume, was really superb. Perfectly self-possessed, and undaunted by the sea of faces spread out before her, she went on with her part, and was frequently interrupted by deafening shouts of approval. The _Benedict_ of the evening being a very fine actor, and the _Dogberry_ being as funny a dog as ever created a broad grin or a hearty laugh--the entire comedy passed off in the most admirable manner; and, at its conclusion, my fair friend being loudly called for, she was led out in front of the curtain by _Benedict_. A shower of bouquets now saluted her; and, having gracefully acknowledged the kindness of the audience, she retired. This decided success caused the manager to engage Mrs. Raymond at a liberal salary. She subsequently appeared with equal success in a round of the best characters; and the press, and every tongue, became eloquent in her praise. She was now in a fair way to acquire a fortune as great as the one which she had lost through the villainy of Livingston. Thinking her worthy of a higher position than that of a mere stock actress, I advised her, after a year's sojourn in Philadelphia, to travel as a _star_. To this she eagerly assented, and accordingly I accompanied her to New York, where she was immediately engaged by the late Thomas S. Hamblin, of the Bowery Theatre.[L] Her success at this popular establishment was unprecedented in the annals of dramatic triumphs. Night after night was she greeted by crowded, enthusiastic and enraptured audiences. In short, she became one of the most celebrated actresses of the day. FOOTNOTES: [K] It is related of Governor Porter as an illustration of his pardoning propensities, that once, after his term of office had expired, a gentleman accidentally ran against him in the street. "I beg your pardon," said the gentleman. "I cannot grant it," said Mr. Porter, "for I am no longer Governor." [L] I have not, for reasons that will be easily understood, given the name which Mrs. Raymond assumed, after her adoption of the dramatic profession. CHAPTER IX _An accident--a suicide--and a change of residence._ A dreadful accident abruptly terminated Mrs. Raymond's brilliant professional career. One night, while she was dressing in her private room at the theatre, a camphene lamp exploded and her face was shockingly burned. Her beauty was destroyed forever, and her career upon the stage was ended. Thus was the public deprived of a most delightful source of entertainment, and thus was a popular actress thrown out of the profession just as she had reached the pinnacle of fame, and just as she was in a fair way to acquire a handsome fortune. It would be impossible for me to describe the grief, consternation and horror of the unfortunate lady, on account of this melancholy accident. In vain did I attempt to console her, she refused to be comforted. She abandoned herself to despair; and I caused her to be closely and constantly watched, fearing that she might attempt to commit suicide. The play-going public soon found a new idol, and poor Mrs. Raymond was forgotten. Her face was terribly disfigured, and it was very fortunate that her sight was not destroyed. When she became well enough, she endeavored to gain a situation as a teacher of music; but she was unceremoniously rejected by every person to whom she applied, on account of the repulsiveness of her countenance. This of course, still further increased the dark despair that overshadowed her soul. "My friend," said she to me one day, "I shall not long survive this terrible misfortune. My heart is breaking, and death will ere long put an end to my sufferings." "Come, come," said I, "where is your philosophy? Have you not passed through trials as great as this? While there is life, there is hope; and you will be happy yet." I uttered these commonplace expressions because I knew not what else to say. Mrs. Raymond replied, with a mournful smile-- "Ah! with all your knowledge of the world, you know not how a woman feels when she has been suddenly deprived of her beauty. The miser who loses his wealth--the fond mother from whom death snatches away her darling child; these bereaved ones do not feel their losses more acutely than does a once lovely woman feel the loss of her charms. Do not talk to me of philosophy, for such language is mockery." I visited my unfortunate and no longer fair friend very often, but all my attempts to cheer her up signally failed. She persisted in declaring that she was not long for this world; and I began to believe so myself, for she failed rapidly. I saw that she was provided with every comfort; but alas! happiness was beyond her reach forever. One evening I set out to pay her a visit. On my arrival at the house in which she had taken apartments, the landlady informed me that she had not seen Mrs. Raymond during the whole of that day. "It is very singular," remarked the woman, "I knocked five or six times at the door of her chamber, but she gave me no answer, although I know she has not gone out." These words caused a dreadful misgiving to seize me. Fearing that something terrible had happened, I rushed up stairs, and knocked loudly upon the door of Mrs. Raymond's chamber. No answer being returned, I burst open the door, and my worst fears were realized, for there, upon the floor lay the lifeless form of that most unfortunate woman. She had committed suicide by taking arsenic. This dreadful event afflicted me more deeply than any other occurrence of my life. I had become attached to Mrs. Raymond on account of a certain congeniality of disposition between us. We had travelled far together, and shared great dangers. That was another link to bind us together. Besides I admired her for her talent, and more particularly for her heroic resolution. She was, altogether, a most extraordinary woman, and, under the circumstances, it was no wonder that her tragical end should have caused within me a feeling of the most profound sorrow. Having followed her remains to their last resting-place, I did something that I was very accustomed to do--I sat down to indulge in a little serious reflection, the result of which was that I determined to go to Boston, for New York had become wearisome to me. Besides, I knew that Boston was the grand storehouse of American literature--the "Athens of America," and I doubted not my ability to achieve both fame and money there. To Boston I accordingly went. On the first day of my arrival, I crossed over to Charlestown for the purpose of viewing the Bunker Hill Monument. Having satisfied my curiosity, I strolled into a printing office, fell into conversation with the proprietor, and the result was that I found myself engaged at a moderate salary to edit and take the entire charge of a long-established weekly newspaper of limited circulation, entitled the "Bunker Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror." This journal soon began to increase both in reputation and circulation, for I filled it with good original tales and with sprightly editorials. Yet no credit was awarded to me, for my name never appeared in connection with my productions, and people imagined that W----, the proprietor, was the author of the improvements which had taken place. "Egad!" the subscribers to the _Aurora_ would say--"old W---- has waked up at last. His paper is now full of tip-top reading, whereas it was formerly not worth house-room!" How many instances of this kind have I seen--of writers toiling with their pens and brains for the benefit and credit of ungrateful wretches without intellect, or soul, or honor, or common humanity! Charlestown is probably the meanest and most contemptible place in the whole universe--totally unfit to be the dwelling-place of any man who calls himself _white_. The inhabitants all belong to the _Paul Pry_ family. A stranger goes among them, and forthwith inquisitive whispers concerning him begin to float about like feathers in the air. "Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? What's his business? _Has he got any money?_ (Great emphasis is laid on this question.) Is he married, or single? What are his habits? Is he a temperance man? Does he smoke--does he drink--does he chew? Does he go to meeting on Sundays? What religious denomination does he belong to? What are his politics? Does he use profane language? What time does he go to bed--and what time does he get up? Wonder what he had for dinner to-day?" &c., &c., &c. During my residence in Charlestown, where I lived three years, I became acquainted with the celebrated editor and wit, Corporal Streeter, who was my next-door neighbor. I dwelt, by the way, in an old-fashioned house situated on Wood street. Two ancient pear trees sadly waved their branches in front of the house, and they are still there, unless some despoiling hand has cut them down--which Heaven forbid! If ever I re-visit that place, I shall gaze with reverence at the old house--for in it I passed some of the happiest days of my life. The antique edifice I christened "The Hermitage." The squalling cats of that neighborhood afforded me a fine opportunity for pistol practice. At the end of three years, I had a slight "misunderstanding" with Mr. W----, the proprietor of the Aurora, one of the most stupendously mean men it was ever my misfortune to encounter. He was worthy of being the owner of the only newspaper in Charlestown, alias, "Hogtown." Having civilly requested Mr. W---- to go to the devil at his earliest convenience, I left him and his rookery in disgust, and shifted my quarters over to Boston. Here I engaged largely in literary pursuits, and began to write a series of novels. These were well received by the public, as every Bostonian will recollect. In my next chapter, I shall tell the reader how a gentleman got into difficulties. CHAPTER X _Six weeks in Leverett Street Jail._ A popular actor who was a personal friend of mine[M] took a farewell benefit at the National Theatre. At his invitation, and just before the close of the evening's performances, I attempted to enter the stage door for his purpose of seeing him in his dressing-room, as he intended to sup with me and several friends. A half-drunken Irishman attached to the stage department in some menial capacity, stopped me and insolently ordered me out. I treated the Greek, of course, with the contempt which he merited, whereupon he called another overgrown bog-trotter to his assistance, and the twain forthwith attacked me with great fury. Finding myself in danger of receiving rather rough treatment, I drew a small pocket pistol and aimed at their shins, being determined that one of them, at least, should hobble around upon crutches for a short time. The cap on the pistol, however, refused to explode, and the two vagabonds immediately caused me to be arrested, charging me with "assault and battery with the intent to kill!" I was forthwith accommodated with a private apartment in Leverett Street jail, where I remained six weeks, during which time I enjoyed myself tolerably well, being amply provided with good dinners, not prison fare, but from the outside, candles, newspapers, books, writing materials, &c. During my imprisonment, I wrote "The Gay Deceiver," and "Venus in Boston." My next door neighbor was no less a personage than Dr. John W. Webster, who was afterwards executed for the murder of Dr. Parkman. Webster was a great glutton, and thought of nothing but his stomach, even up to the very hour of his death. On account of his "position in society," (!) every officer of the prison became his waiter; and a certain ruffianly turnkey, who was in the habit of abusing poor prisoners in the most outrageous manner, would fawn to the Doctor like a hungry dog to a benevolent butcher. Webster was very polite to me, frequently sending me books and newspapers--favors which I as often reciprocated. He once sent me a jar of preserves, a box of sardines and a bottle of wine. The latter gift I highly appreciated, wines and liquors of every kind being prohibited luxuries. That night I became very happy and jovial; but I did not leave the house. Dr. Webster was confident of being acquitted; but the result proved how terribly he was mistaken. Probably, in the annals of criminal jurisprudence, there never was seen a more striking instance of equal and exact justice, than was afforded by the trial, conviction and execution of John W. Webster. Money, influential friends, able counsel, prayers, petitions, the _prestige_ of a scientific reputation failed to save him from that fate which he merited as well as if he had been the most obscure individual in existence. After six weeks imprisonment, I was brought to trial before Chief Justice Wells. I was defended by a very tolerable lawyer, to whom I paid twenty-five dollars in consideration of his conversing five minutes with a jury of my peers, the said jury consisting of twelve hungry individuals who wanted to go out to dinner. When my legal adviser had made a few well-meaning remarks, the jury retired to talk the matter over among themselves; and, after about fifteen minutes absence, they returned and expressed their opinion that I was "not guilty." This opinion induced me to believe that they were very sensible fellows indeed. Not for a moment did I think of demanding a new trial; that would have been impertinent, as doubting the sagacity of the jury. My two Irish prosecutors left the court-room in a rage; and two more chop-fallen disappointed and mortified Greeks were never seen. The Judge took his departure, the spectators dispersed, and I crossed the street and dined sumptuously at Parker's, with a large party of friends. Very many of my Boston readers will remember a long series of articles which I wrote and published about that time, in the columns of one of the newspapers, entitled "Mysteries of Leverett Street Jail." In those sketches I gave the arrangements of the Jail, and its officers, "particular fits;" and the manner in which the fellows writhed under the inflictions, was a caution to petty tyrants generally. The startling revelations which I made created great excitement throughout the whole community; and I have good reason to believe that those exposures were the means of producing a far better state of affairs in the interior of the "stone jug." I have thus, very briefly, given the extent of my experience with reference to the old Leverett Street Jail. Unlawful ladies and gentlemen are now accommodated in an elegant establishment in Cambridge street, for the old Jail has been levelled to the ground to make room for "modern improvements."--I visited it just before the commencement of its destruction, and gazed at my old apartment "more in sorrow than in anger." There were my name and a few verses, which I had written upon the wall. There was the rude table, upon which I had penned two novels, which, from their tone, seem rather to have emanated from a gilded _boudoir_. There, too, in the grated window, was a little flower-pot in which I had cultivated a solitary plant. That poor plant had withered and died long ago, for the prisoners who succeeded me probably had no taste for such "trash." I took and carefully preserved the dead remains of my floral favorite--"for," said I to myself--"they will serve to remind me of a dark spot in my existence." And now, with the reader's permission, I will turn to matters of a more cheerful character. FOOTNOTES: [M] I allude to Mr. W.G. Jones, now deceased. CHAPTER XI "_The Uncles and Nephews._" Ring up the curtain! Room there for the Boston Players. Let them approach our presence, not as they appear upon the stage, in rouge, and spangles, and wigs, and calves and cotton pad; but as they look in broad daylight, or in the bar-room when the play is over, arrayed in garments of a modern date, wearing their own personal faces, swearing their own private oaths, and drinking real malt out of honest pewter, instead of imbibing dusty atmosphere from pasteboard goblets. Room, I say! There is an intimate connection between the press and the stage, that is a congeniality of character, habit, taste, feeling and disposition, between the writer and the actor. The press and the stage are, in a measure, dependent on each other. The newspaper looks to the theatre for light, racy and readable items, with which to adorn its columns, like festoons of flowers gracefully hung around columns of marble. The theatre looks to the newspaper for impartial criticisms and laudatory notices. Show me a convivial party of actors, and I will swear there are at least two or three professional writers among them. I know many actors who are practical printers, fellows who can wield a composing-stick as deftly as a fighting sword. Long life and prosperity to the whole of them, say I; and bless them for a careless, happy, pleasure-loving, bill-hating and beer-imbibing race of men. Amen. There is one point of resemblance between the hero of the sock and buskin and the Knight of the quill. The former dresses up his person and adopts the language of another, in order to represent a certain character; the latter clothes his ideas in an appropriate garb of words, and puts sentiments in the mouths of his characters which are not always his own. But I was speaking of the Boston Players. Admitting the foregoing argument to be correct, it is not to be wondered at that I became extensively acquainted among the members of the theatrical profession. My name was upon the free list of every theatre in the city; and every night I visited one or more of the houses--not to see the play, but to chat in the saloons with the actors and literary people who in those places most did congregate. After the play was over, we all used to assemble in an ale-house near the principal theatre; and daylight would often surprise us in the midst of our "devotions." A curious mixed-up set we were to be sure! I will try to recollect the most prominent members of our club. First of all there was the argumentative and positive Jim Prior, who might properly be regarded as President of the club. Then came H.W. Fenno, Esq., the gentlemanly Treasurer of the National. He, however, seldom tarried after having once "put the party through." The eccentric "Old Spear" was generally present, seated in an obscure corner smoking a solitary cigar. Comical S.D. Johnson and his hopeful son George were usually on hand to enliven the scene; and so was Jim Ring, alias J. Henry, the best negro performer, next to Daddy Rice, in the United States. Chunkey Monroe, who did the villains at the National; and, towering above him might be seen his cousin, Lengthy Monroe, who enacted the hard old codgers at the same establishment. That fine fellow, Ned Sandford, must not be forgotten; neither must Sam Lake, the clever little dancer. Rube Meer was invariably to be found in company with a pot of malt; and he was usually assisted by P. Jones, a personage who never allowed himself to be funny until he had consumed four pints. Charley Saunders, the comedian and dramatist, the author of "Rosina Meadows" and many other popular plays--kept the "table in a roar," by his wit and also by his excruciatingly bad puns. Bird, of "Pea-nut Palace" notoriety, held forth in nasal accents to Bill Colwell, the husband of the pretty and accomplished Anna Cruise. Big Sam Johnson, a heavy actor, a gallant Hibernian and a splendid fellow, discussed old Jamaica with his friend and boon companion, Sam Palmer, alias "Chucks." The mysterious Frank Whitman captures his brother-actor at the Museum, Jack Adams, and imprisoning him in a corner from which there was no escape, imparts to him the most tremendous secrets. Ned Wilkings--one of the best reporters in the city--tells the last "funny thing" to John Young; while Joe Bradley, proprietor of the Mail, touches glasses with Jim McKinney. Meanwhile, the two waiters, Handiboe and Abbott, circulate around with the greatest activity, fetching on the liquors and removing the dirty glasses, from which they slyly contrive to drain a few drops now and then, for their bodily refreshment. As an instance of the "base uses" to which genius may "come at last," I will state that Handiboe, whom we now find in such a menial position, was once quite a literary character; while poor Abbott, to whom I now throw a few small coins in charity, was a setter of type. The rest of the party is made up of Pete Cunningham, Sam Glenn, Bill Dimond, Jim Brand, Bill Donaldson, Dan Townsend, Jack Weaver, Cal Smith, and a host of others whom it would puzzle the very devil himself to remember. Such was the "Uncle and Nephew Club," of which I had the honor to be a prominent member. Almost every man belonging to it was a wit, a punster or a humorist of some kind; and I will venture to say, that had some industrious individual taken the pains to preserve and publish one-half the good things that were said at our meetings, a large volume might be formed that would be no contemptible specimen of genius. Whenever a member had the audacity to perpetrate some shocking bad pun, and such enormities were frequent, the offender was sentenced to undergo some ludicrous punishment; and the utmost good-humor and hilarity always prevailed. I will now relate a rather amusing adventure in which I participated with others of the "Uncles and Nephews." One night we were assembled, as usual, at our head-quarters. The Fourth of July was to "come off" the next day, and we determined to have some fun. Accordingly, a couple of stout messengers were despatched to the theatre, armed with the necessary authority and keys, and they soon returned laden with dresses from the wardrobe. These garments the party proceeded to assume; and we were quickly transformed into as picturesque-looking a crowd as any that ever figured at a masquerade ball. As for myself, I made a very tolerable representation of Falstaff; while Richard, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Shylock, and other gentlemen of Shakespeare's creation, gave variety to the procession. Then there was a clown in full circus costume, accompanied by Harlequin in his glittering shape-dress. We sadly longed for a sprightly Columbine; but then we consoled ourselves with Pantaloon, admirably rendered by P. Jones. Our "music" consisted of a bass-drum, which was tortured by the clown; a fish-horn beautifully played upon by Sam Palmer; a dinner-bell whose din was extracted by Jack Adams. Having formed the procession on the side-walk, the music struck up, and we marched. Our first halting-place was at the saloon of Peter Brigham, at the head of Hanover street. Here we filed in, and great excitement did our extraordinary appearance create. A mob soon collected before the door, attracted by our grotesque costumes as well as by the infernal noise of our "musical" instruments, upon which we continued to perform with undiminished vigor. Peter Brigham was in agonies, and rushed about the saloon like an insane fly in a tar barrel. The frightened waiters abandoned their posts and fled. The mob outside cheered vociferously; and Harlequin began to belabor poor Pantaloon with his gilded lath to the immense amusement of the spectators. Peter Brigham at length mounted a chair, and said-- "Gentlemen, will you hear me? (Hoarse growl from the bass-drum.) I cannot suffer this noise and racket to go on in my house. (Blast of defiance from the fish-horn.) You know I have always tried to keep a decent and respectable place. (Peal of sarcastic laughter from the dinner bell.) I have a proposition to make.--(Hear! hear!) If you will promise to leave the house quietly, I will treat you all to as much champagne as you can drink." (Yell of acceptance from the bass-drum, fish-horn and dinner-bell! Great excitement generally.) The wine was produced, and the facility with which it was disposed of, caused Mr. Brigham to stare. He endured its consumption, however, with the most philosophical fortitude, until we began to drink toasts, make speeches, and exhibit other indications of a design on our part to "tarry yet awhile." Peter then reminded us of our promise; and, as gentlemen of honor, we fulfilled the same by immediately falling into procession and marching out of the saloon. Away we went down Hanover street, followed by the admiring and hooting crowd. We entered the establishment of Theodore Johnson, and were hospitably received by the prince of good fellows, who, assisted by Chris Anderson, "did the honors" with the utmost liberality. Sam Palmer and P. Jones, here favored the company with a broad-sword combat; after which I, as Falstaff, gave a few recitations--the performances concluded with Abbott as _Jocks_, the Brazilian ape. Our next visit was to the Pemberton House, then under the control of Uriah W. Carr, a very small man, both physically and morally. Uriah received us very churlishly, and peremptorily refused to "come down" with the hospitality of the season. He was particularly down on me for having once written and published some verses concerning him. The following is all that I can recollect of that interesting production:-- "Tis comical, indeed it is To see him mix a punch-- He puts two drops of liquor in, And then he eyes the _lunch_; He struts about most pompously, Then stands before the fire, Just like a little bantam-cock, This comical Uriah!" Inasmuch as Uriah refused to bring on the "bush" for either love or money, we determined to help ourselves. Therefore, every man appointed himself a bar-keeper _pro tem_. Wines, liquors and cigars were disposed of with marvelous celerity, and poor little Uriah danced about and tore his hair in the agony of his spirits. Meanwhile, a large number of actors and others, boarding at the Pemberton, joined us, being ushered in by Charles Dibden Pitt, a performer of great elegance and power, then playing a brilliant star engagement--at the Museum. This gentleman is decidedly "one of the boys," and goes in for a "good time." At his suggestion, a committee was appointed to descend to the kitchen and bring up provisions. Ned Abbot and Bill Ball performed this duty in the most admirable and satisfactory manner. They departed for the lower regions, and soon returned laden both with substantials and delicacies. Then, such a feast!--or, rather, such a banquet! Champagne flowed like water, for we had discovered a closet filled with baskets of the foaming beverage. The whole company was of course soon in a state of glorious elevation. The song and jest went round unceasingly, and peals of jovial laughter trooped away like merry elves upon the midnight air. We were in excellent humor to adopt the prayer of the following who said-- "Oh, let us linger late to-night, Nor part while wit and song are bright; And, Joshua, make the sun stand still, That we of joy may have our fill!" There was one gentleman who refused to participate in the festivities of the occasion. This was little Uriah, the landlord, who gazed upon the progress of the banquet with a troubled brow; yet he did not dare to openly remonstrate, through fear of offending Mr. Pitt, and other valuable boarders. Unfortunately for the harmony of the festival, a party of drunken students from Cambridge dropped in, and I instantly saw that a row was inevitable. After unceremoniously helping themselves to drink, the students gazed at our strange-looking company superciliously, and one of them remarked with a sneer-- "What fools are these, dressed up in this absurd manner? Oh, they must be monkies, the property of some enterprising organ-grinder. Let them dance before me, for my soul is heavy, and I would be gay!" Here little Billy Eaton, the writer, who was one of our party, fired up and obligingly offered to fight and whip the man with the heavy soul, for and in consideration of the trifling sum of one cent. This handsome offer was accepted; but, before the gentlemen could strip for the combat, a general collision took place between all the hostile parties. Chairs were brandished, canes were flourished and decanters were hurled, to the great destruction of mirrors and other fragile property. The bar was overturned, and the din of battle was awful to hear. Notwithstanding the uproar and confusion that prevailed, I could not help noticing poor Uriah, who, in the dimly-lighted hall, was quietly dancing an insane polka, accompanying his movements by low howls of despair. The little man had temporarily lost his few wits, that was plain. The combat raged with undiminished fury. Our clown attacked a student with his bass-drum, one end of which burst in, imprisoning the representative of the seat of learning, who found it impossible to extricate himself from his musical predicament. Sam Palmer, with his fish-horn, did tremendous execution; while Jack Adams was equally effective with his dinner-bell which, at every blow, sounded forth a note of warning. The heroic P. Jones performed prodigies of valor, and covered himself with glory. This wonderful young man, having planted himself behind a rampart of chairs, placed himself in the position of a pugilistic frog, and boldly defied his enemies to "come on and be punched." At the commencement of the fight, Abbott coiled himself up under the table, and was seen no more; while Handiboe fled for safety to the cole-hole. The battle was at its height, and the bird of victory seemed about to perch upon the banner of the "Uncles and Nephews," when some reckless, hardened individual turned off the gas, thus producing total darkness. This made matters ten times worse than ever, for it was impossible to distinguish friends from foes. Suddenly, in rushed a posse of watchmen, headed by the renowned Marshal Tukey, and bearing torches. Many of the combatants were arrested, and but few contrived to make their escape. I had the honor of figuring among the unlucky ones; and, with my companions passed the night in durance vile. In the morning, when day light feebly penetrated our gloomy dungeon, what a strange-looking spectacle presented itself! Stretched upon the floor in every imaginable picturesque attitude, were about a score of men, the majority of them arrayed in the soiled and torn theatrical dresses. These unhappy individuals afforded a most melancholy sight, as many of them had black eyes, bruised noses and battered visages. "D----d pretty fools we've made of ourselves," said Macbeth, one of whose optics had been highly discolored. "Yes," groaned Othello, whose black eyes were only partially concealed by the yellow color which he had smeared over his face--"and here we are in the jug, where we shall be compelled to remain all day, and lose all the fun of the Fourth of July." "That isn't the worst of it," sighed Hamlet, whose royal frontispiece had received severe damage--"I am on the bills to play twice this afternoon and once this evening, and my being absent will cause me to be _forfeited_, if not discharged. D----n those college students! What the devil became of them? They all got clear, I suppose." "No," said I--"they are in a separate apartment. Of course the officers would not put them in with us, for that would be encouraging a renewal of the fight." "My head aches horribly," remarked Richard, Duke of Gloster--"I would give my kingdom for a drink!" "And I," observed Shylock--"would like a pound of flesh, providing it were beefsteak, for I am almost famished." "Hah! what a hog!" growled Cardinal Richelieu, one side of whose face had been "cove in" most dreadfully--"to think of _eating_ at such a time as this!" "Hark," said Claude Melnott, whose handsome countenance had been knocked completely out of shape, and who looked as if he had just returned from the wars rather the worse for wear; "hark! Don't you hear the sound of artillery, and of music? The ceremonies and festivities of the glorious day have commenced. Would to Heaven that I were with Pauline, in our palace on the lake of Como!" "Dry up, you fool!" angrily exclaimed the aged and venerable King Lear, whose nasal organ exhibited signs of its having sustained a violent contusion--"I haven't closed an eye during the whole night, and now you keep me awake with your infernal jabbering. Shut up, I say!" "Oh, shut up be blowed!" said P. Jones--"how can a man shut up when he thinks of the good _budge_ (rum) he loses by being shut up here? Rube Meer, isn't this too bad?" "Worse than the time when I sent on a fishing excursion with Jim Morse," groaned poor Rube, as he fumbled in his pocket for a match with which to light his pipe, "has anybody got a rope with which a fellow could contrive to hang himself?" "I say, Jack Adams," said Sam Palmer, who was dressed as Don Caesar de Bezas, "what will Harry Smith and old Kimball say, when we don't make our appearance to-day, the busiest day in the whole year?" "I care not," replied Jack, as he fondly pressed the portrait of his Katy to his lips, "so long as this blessed consolation is left me, the world may do its worst! Frown on, ye fiends of misfortune! I defy ye all, so long as my Katy Darling remains but true!" "That's the one!" shouted the bold Dick Brown, as "usher" at the National Theatre, "let us have the song of Katy Darling, and all join in the chorus." This was done; and from the depths of that gloomy dungeon rolled forth the words, in tones of thunder-- "Did they tell thee I was false, Katy Darling?" Suddenly, to our great joy, the ponderous iron door of the dungeon was unlocked and thrown open, and an officer announced that he had orders to release us all, provided that we would engage to satisfy the landlord of the Pemberton House for the damage he had sustained. This we of course agreed to do, it being understood that the college students should be compelled to pay one-half the amount, which was certainly no more than right, as they had perpetrated half the damage, and had commenced the row in the first place. The landlord having received sufficient security that his damages would be made whole, we were all set at liberty, to our most intense delight, for we had anticipated being imprisoned during the whole of that glorious day. We left the house of bondage, and, as we passed through the already crowded streets, our fantastic dresses and strange appearance generally, collected a mob at our heels, which, in broad daylight, was certainly rather annoying. However, we soon reached the theatre, and resumed our own proper habiliments. It was announced upon the bills of the theatre that a certain actor would that evening deliver an original Fourth of July poem. That poem I had engaged to write, yet not a single line had I committed to paper. The actor was in a terrible quandary, and swore that his failure to recite the poem, as announced, would render him unpopular with the public and ruin him forever. Telling him to keep cool and call again in two hours, I sat down to my writing-desk and dashed off a poem of considerable length. My pen flew with the rapidity of lightning, words and ideas crowded upon me in overwhelming numbers, and in three-quarters of an hour my work was done! I sent for the actor who was astonished at the brief space of time in which I had performed the task. Having heard me read the poem, he declared himself to be delighted with it; and, with all due humility and modesty, I must say that the production did possess considerable merit. I had avoided the usual stereotyped allusions to the "star spangled banner," to the "Ameri-eagle," to the "blood of our forefathers," &c.;--and had dwelt principally upon the sublime moral spectacle afforded by an oppressed people arising in their might to throw off the yoke of bondage and assert their independence as a nation. The actor soon committed the poem to memory; and, having rehearsed it over to me and found himself perfect, he departed. That night he recited it from the stage to a dense audience; and, during its delivery and at its conclusion, I had the satisfaction of listening to the most delicious music that an author's ears can ever know, the clapping of hands, and deafening peals of applause. CONCLUSION _My Parting Bow._ Several years have passed since the date of the events last narrated. Those years have been crowded with adventures full as extraordinary as those already detailed; but alas! neither time nor space will at present, admit of my giving them to the public. Perhaps, at some future time, I may make up for this deficiency, if my life is spared. The reader may rest assured of one thing:--that _not one single word of fiction or exaggeration has been introduced into these pages_. Why should I wander in the realms of romance, when there are more startling facts at my command than I can possibly make use of? Is not truth stranger than fiction? Every day's experience proves such to be the case. I cannot close up these pages without availing myself of the opportunity to return my thanks in this public manner, to several gentlemen from whom I have received courtesies and acts of kindness. First and foremost, there is Jerry Etheridge, a man of great political influence and historical learning. To this distinguished gentleman I am indebted for an act of generosity that rescued me from a serious embarrassment. I am not the only recipient of his bounty, for I know many others who have applied to him in times of need, and who have left him, encouraged by his cheering words and relieved by his liberality. He is one of those true philanthropists who never publish their good deeds to others. I consider that when one man befriends another and then tells of it, all obligation ceases to exist between the parties, and no gratitude is due the one who confers the benefit, which he bestows, perhaps just on purpose to acquire a reputation for whole-souled benevolence, and not out of any particular good-will to the other. I am also under obligation to Mr. W.R. GOODALL, the promising young American actor, who will one day, I predict, occupy a most elevated position in the profession which he has adopted, and for which he is peculiarly qualified. Who that ever heard his famous imitations, as Jeremiah Clip, will hesitate to admit that he is a young man of the most extraordinary talent? NED SANDFORD and JIM LANERGAN, both of whom are now while I write this, playing at the Broadway Theatre, I return my most sincere thanks for favors received; and I trust that they will pardon me for making this public allusion to them. Finally, to every person who has, through disinterested motive, treated me with kindness and consideration, I would say--friends, your goodness shall never be forgotten while life remains. I have many bitter enemies, and they will, I presume, continue to snarl at my heels like mongrel curs. Their miserable attempts to injure me will only rebound back upon themselves. I am above the reach of their malignity, and shall pursue my own independent course regardless of their spleen. Nearly one year has now elapsed since I left Boston--a place that I cannot but regard with some degree of affectionate remembrance; for, with all its faults, I like it still. It is possible that I may hereafter continue to write tales for the public amusement. Should I conclude to continue in my business as a writer, I shall always, as heretofore, labor to produce that which is interesting, exciting and founded on truth, and entirely unobjectionable in a moral point of view. Unlike many so-called writers who throw off a quantity of trash and care not how it fills up space, I am always willing to bestow time and toil upon my work, for the sake of my own credit, for the purpose of securing the rapid and extensive sale of the book--and in order to give the public perfect satisfaction. Reader, fare thee well! We may never meet again; but I thank thee for accompanying me from the beginning to THE END 
26910	----	* * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * [Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER From a portrait in Occleve's Poems in the British Museum] Stories of Authors _British and American_ BY EDWIN WATTS CHUBB Professor of English Literature in the Ohio University. _ILLUSTRATED_ New York STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY 1910 _All rights reserved_ Copyright, 1910 BY STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910 Reprinted May, 1910 PREFACE The purpose of this book is to help in making literature and the makers of literature alive and interesting. Few schools have libraries including the bound volumes of the magazines of the past quarter of a century. But what an aid such a collection is to the appreciation of literature! The dignified and abbreviated history of literature cannot indulge in such delightful gossip as is found in the freer essay and fuller biography. To show the excellences of the art and the lovableness of the artist rather than to hunt for defects is the duty and the delight of the teacher of literature. This does not mean, however, that one dare never see the weaker side, the foibles and eccentricities of the man of genius. I like Macaulay none the less because his cock-sureness and loquacity came dangerously near to making him a bore; Dr. Johnson grows in interest when I learn that he found it a continual and almost hopeless struggle to become an early riser, that he feared death, and could drink tea as long as the housekeeper could brew it; that Tennyson was a slave to tobacco and acted like a yokel when the newly-wedded Müllers entertained him at breakfast does not detract from my enjoyment of the exquisite pathos of _Tears, Idle Tears_; that the marriage of the Brownings was a runaway romance is a whole commentary of explanation when I read their poems of romantic love; that Longfellow is said to have declined an invitation to the Adirondacks because he was told that Emerson was to carry a gun is really far more delightful, and I may add valuable, information than to know the exact date of the birth of either. Of knowledge such as this is the kingdom of literary interest. It is not well to place our literary lights upon a pedestal so lofty that the radiating warmth and light never reach our hearts. While many of the articles may be somewhat gossipy in tone, the serious phase has not been overlooked. The sketches have been gathered from many sources. Some have been written by myself, others have been gathered from magazines and books. I wish to acknowledge the kindness of _Scribners' Magazine_, of the _Bookman_, and of the _New England Magazine_ in permitting me to use articles originally appearing in these respective magazines. To all who have wittingly or unwittingly made it possible for me to gather my material I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness. Every article has been written, selected, or adapted because of some special value. In these pages the reader may find what Lamb earned during the years of his famous clerkship, or the exciting details of Shelley's death. How many times have we heard of Sir Philip Sidney's immortal act of chivalry as he _lay_ on the field at Zutphen! But definite information has it otherwise. To learn of the prodigious industry of the youthful Mill, the perseverance of Darwin, the heroic struggle of Scott, the gentleness of Stevenson, the modesty of Browning, the lifelong consecration of Motley,--is not the leaven of inspiration made of knowledge such as this? I have an unshaken conviction that the highest art of the teacher is manifested in the awakening of such an interest that the pupil shall forever after be an eager learner. Am I wrong in hoping that no one, though with but a meager knowledge of literature, can read these sketches without a desire to know more of the men and women who are the glory of England and America? Here is but a taste of a more sumptuous feast. Dreams, books are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow. EDWIN WATTS CHUBB. CONTENTS ENGLISH WRITERS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Ancient Tabard Inn 1 II. Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen 4 III. About Shakspere 9 IV. John Milton 17 V. Charles Lamb, the Clerk of the India House 24 VI. Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb 28 VII. The Death of Dr. Johnson 33 VIII. Gray Writes the Elegy 37 IX. Cowper as a Letter Writer 42 X. Gibbon and His Visit to Rome 46 XI. Burns Falls in Love 50 XII. Burns' First Book of Poems 54 XIII. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in School and College 59 XIV. Byron as Swimmer and Feaster 64 XV. Shelley as a Freshman 71 XVI. The Death of Shelley 76 XVII. The School-days of John Keats 82 XVIII. The Heroism of Sir Walter Scott 88 XIX. Walter Savage Landor 93 XX. Leigh Hunt's Business Ability 100 XXI. De Quincey Runs Away 102 XXII. Macaulay's Childhood 108 XXIII. Macaulay Becomes Famous 114 XXIV. Dickens Writes the Pickwick Papers 119 XXV. Charles Dickens as Reader 123 XXVI. On the Death of Dickens 126 XXVII. Ruskin's Childhood 130 XXVIII. The Marriage of the Brownings 135 XXIX. Robert Browning 140 XXX. Knight's Reminiscences of Tennyson 145 XXXI. Emerson on Carlyle and Tennyson 150 XXXII. Literary Recollections of Max Müller 156 XXXIII. The Early Education of John Stuart Mill 162 XXXIV. Carlyle Goes to the University 167 XXXV. Carlyle and His Wife 170 XXXVI. Carlyle as Lecturer 175 XXXVII. Carlyle on Wordsworth and Browning 180 XXXVIII. The Author of "Jane Eyre" 184 XXXIX. Thackery in America 189 XL. George Eliot Becomes a Writer of Fiction 194 XLI. The Author of "Alice in WonderLand" 200 XLII. About Darwin 203 XLIII. Anecdotes of Huxley 209 XLIV. Stevenson at Vailima 214 XLV. Kipling in India 221 AMERICAN WRITERS XLVI. Benjamin Franklin Runs Away 226 XLVII. Washington Irving 234 XLVIII. Cooper and "The Spy" 242 XLIX. John Lothrop Motley and Bismarck 249 L. The Youth of George Ticknor 254 LI. Fitz-Greene Halleck 259 LII. The Author of Thanatopsis 262 LIII. Curtis and Hawthorne at the Brook Farm 266 LIV. Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter 270 LV. Max Müller's Recollections of Emerson, Lowell and Holmes 279 LVI. Howells Calls on Emerson, and Describes Longfellow 284 LVII. Longfellow, the Universal Poet 290 LVIII. Henry David Thoreau 297 LIX. The Last Days of Edgar Allan Poe 303 LX. Artemus Ward 313 LXI. Edmund Gosse Visits Whittier 317 LXII. Personal Recollections of Whittier 320 LXIII. Henry Ward Beecher 329 LXIV. The London "Times" on Lowell 333 LXV. The Writing of "America" 338 LXVI. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her First Story 340 LXVII. Sidney Lanier 344 LXVIII. The Story of Mark Twain's Debts 349 LXIX. Hamlin Garland's Literary Beginning 358 LXX. Stephen Crane: A "Wonderful Boy" 361 LXXI. Eugene Field 364 ILLUSTRATIONS Geoffrey Chaucer _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE The Old Tabard Inn 2 William Shakspere 8 John Milton 16 Robert Burns 50 Lord Byron 64 Percy Bysshe Shelley 70 Charles Dickens 122 Robert Browning 134 Alfred Tennyson 144 Ralph Waldo Emerson 150 Thomas Carlyle 175 Benjamin Franklin 226 William Cullen Bryant 262 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 290 John Greenleaf Whittier 320 STORIES OF AUTHORS I THE ANCIENT TABARD INN The picture we see here is that of an inn whose fame is as widespread as the love of English poetry, for it is at the Tabard Inn that Chaucer more than five hundred years ago assembled his nine and twenty pilgrims who were preparing to visit the tomb of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. The witchery of the springtime had stirred the blood of these Londoners who, perhaps, were enticed from home more by the soft April showers and the melody of the birds than by their need of spiritual consolation. This, at least, is the impression we receive as in imagination we join these immortal pilgrims at the Tabard. Our guide is Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still,-- and as he moves among his motley group, let us take a glance at the Tabard. The picture we have is that of the typical old English inn. "As late as 1870 the ruins of the famous Tabard could be found. It was near St. Saviour in the Borough High Street. Turning from the street into one of those courtyards which abound in the east of London, the visitor comes upon the ruins of the once famous inn the very name of which has been transformed by time. It is now known as the '_Talbot_,' but the inscription above the doorway contradicts the modern signboard and proclaims the house to be '_The Ancient Tabard Inn_.' The whole yard is redolent of dilapidation. Facing the visitor on entering is an interesting block of old buildings, forming part of the left side, and the bottom of what once was an ample courtyard. This part of the building contains not improbably the shell of the corresponding portion of the original inn. The doors of the first floor all open into one of the wide balustraded galleries or verandas so common in the genuine old English hostelry. Until recently the landlord of the _Talbot_, then a small public-house, and still forming part of the modern mass of brick building that blocks up the right side and part of the center of the courtyard, rented the rooms by which this balustraded gallery was, and still is, surrounded. They were then let as bedrooms, and kept in good repair; and are supposed to occupy the site of the very rooms once tenanted by the Canterbury pilgrims; the gallery probably differing but little in appearance from what it was when Chaucer frequented it in search of good wine. The landlord eventually became insolvent; the paltry tavern was shut up, and the bedrooms were dismantled. In that plight they might be seen some years ago, may still possibly be seen--empty, dusty, dreary--ranged above ground-floor premises which do duty as a parcels' conveyance office, and abutting on a mean, ill-kept yard. Until within the last few years the coigne of the old balustraded gallery was connected on the right with the modern brick mass by an ancient wood-work bridge, coeval at least with the oldest portion of the building as it stands. But the bridge is gone, and the lust of gold and the pride of life have so destroyed that spirit of reverence and refined superstitious love for the venerable which should characterize an advanced civilization, that it is greatly to be feared the rest of the structure will soon follow. Yet it was in this courtyard, and before this very inn, that Chaucer and his nine-and-twenty pilgrims stood in picturesque confusion in the early dawn of that spring morning, long, long ago; and agreed for their common amusement on the road each one of them should tell at least one tale in going to, and another in returning from Canterbury; the best story teller to be treated to a supper by his fellow travelers on their return to the Tabard Inn. The company comprises representatives from all classes of society except the two extremes; there is neither a prince nor a beggar. The characters are taken from middle-class life, of which they may be accepted as fair and truthful types; being described with a vigorous fidelity which has never been surpassed in the whole range of art. Every figure stands out from the canvas sharp and clear like pictures seen through a stereoscope. Not a touch, not a line is wanting; each trick of speech and peculiarity of feature or of dress, is photographed with Preraphaelite fidelity." [Illustration: THE OLD TABARD INN From a drawing by Herbert Railton] II SIR PHILIP SIDNEY AT ZUTPHEN Whenever the name of Sir Philip Sidney is mentioned one involuntarily thinks of noble generosity and knightly gentleness and self-sacrifice. And here is the story of the act that forever united his name with the highest ideals of chivalry: In August, 1586, Leicester assembled his troops at Arnheim, which he made his headquarters. After reducing Doesburg, he prepared to besiege Zutphen, an important town on the Yssel. The garrison was in sore need of provisions, which Parma, before marching to its relief, determined to supply. A convoy of corn, meat, and other necessaries, sufficient to victual the place for three months, was accordingly collected, and on the twenty-second of September left the Spanish camp. So high was Parma's estimate of the importance of preserving Zutphen, that the escort despatched with the convoy numbered twenty-nine hundred foot and six hundred horse. Leicester was informed of the enemy's movement, but not of the force which protected it. An ambuscade of five hundred men, under Sir John Norris, was held sufficient to intercept the convoy. About fifty young officers volunteered to add their services. This gallant band was composed of the flower of the English army.... It was indeed "an incredible extravagance to send a handful of such heroes against such an army," but Leicester can scarcely be blamed for failing to restrain the impulsive ardor which animated his entire staff. Sidney's characteristic magnanimity betrayed him that day into a fatal excess. He had risen at the first sound of the trumpet and left his tent completely armed, but observing that Sir William Pelham, an older soldier, had not protected his legs with cuishes, returned and threw off his own. The morning was cold and densely foggy, as the little company galloped forth to join their comrades in ambush. Just as they came up, Sir John Norris had caught the first sounds of the approaching convoy. Almost at the same moment the fog cleared off and revealed at what terrible odds the battle was to be fought that day. Mounted arquebusiers, pikemen and musketeers on foot, Spaniards, Italians, and even, it is said, Albanians, to the number of thirty-five hundred, guarded the wagons before and behind. The English were but five hundred and fifty men. Yet among them all, the historian has the right of blood to say with confidence, "There was no thought of retreat." The indomitable national spirit embodied itself in the war-cry of young Essex: "Follow me, good fellows, for the honor of England and England's queen!" At the word a hundred horsemen, Sidney in the midst, with lance in hand and curtel-axe at saddle-bow, spurred to the charge. The enemy's cavalry broke, but the musketeers in the rear fired a deadly volley, under cover of which it formed anew. A second charge re-broke it. In the onset Sidney's horse was killed, but he remounted and rode forward. Lord Willoughby, after unhorsing and capturing the Albanian leader, lost his own horse. Attacked on all sides, he must have fallen and yielded, when Sidney came to the rescue and struck down his assailants. Individual valor, however, proved unavailing against the might of numbers. After nearly two hours' desperate opposition, the convoy still made way. Charge succeeded charge in the vain effort to prevent its effecting a junction with the garrison, two thousand of whom were waiting for the right moment to sally forth. In the last of these onsets, Sir Philip's impetuosity carried him within musket-shot of the camp. A bullet struck his unprotected leg, just above the knee, and shattered the bone. He endeavored to remain on the field, but his horse became unmanageable, and in agonies of pain and thirst he rode back to the English quarters, a mile and a half distant. An incident of that ride, as told in the quaint language of Lord Brooke, retains the immortal charm of pathos which commands our tears, how often soever repeated: In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him, but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along who had eaten his last at that same feast, ghastly, casting up his eyes at the bottle, which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words, "Thy necessity is greater than mine." And when he had pledged this poor soldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim. The golden chain of heroic actions, Christian and pagan, may contain examples of self-denial sublimer and more absolute than this; but in the blended grace and tenderness of its knightly courtesy, we know not where to find its parallel. Leicester met his nephew as he was borne back to the camp, and burst into a genuine passion of sorrow. Many a rough soldier among those who, in returning from the failure of their impossible enterprise, now came up with their comrade, was unmanned for the first time that day. Sir William Russell, as tender-hearted as he was daring, embraced him weeping, and kissed his hand amid broken words of admiration and sympathy. But Sidney needed no consolation. "I would," said Leicester, in a letter to Sir Thomas Heneage, "you had stood by to hear his most loyal speeches to her Majesty, his constant mind to the cause, his loving care over me, and his most resolute determination for death; not one jot appalled for his blow, which is the most grievous that ever I saw with such a bullet." The English surgeons at first gave hopes of his speedy restoration to health, and the favorable news was sent to England. Lady Sidney, who had followed him to Flushing some months before, at once hastened to him, but with no idea of his danger. The nation at large thought him convalescent. He himself, however, never expected to recover, although submitting with fortitude to whatever systems of treatment were proposed. Nothing was left untried that affection could suggest or the imperfect science of the age effect. His wife tenderly nursed him, and his two younger brothers were constantly at his side. His quondam foe, Count Hohenlo, though himself dangerously wounded, sent off his own physician, Adrian Van den Spiegel, to his aid. After examining the injuries Adrian pronounced them mortal, and then hastened back to the Count, whose case was not so desperate. "Away, villain!" cried the generous soldier in a transport of wrath; "never see my face again till thou bring better news of that man's recovery, for whose redemption many such as I were happily lost!" From the first to the last moment of his suffering Sir Philip's temper was calm and cheerful. During the three weeks that he lingered at Arnheim he occupied himself with the thoughts befitting a death-bed.... On the 17th of October he felt himself dying, and summoned his friends to say farewell. His latest words were addressed to his brother Robert: "Love my memory; cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But, above all things, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator; in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities." When powerless to speak, he replied to the entreaty of friends, who desired some token of his trust in God, by clasping his hands in the attitude of prayer, and a few moments afterwards had ceased to breathe. --Adapted from the _Edinburgh Review_. [Illustration: WILLIAM SHAKSPERE From the portrait by Martin Droeshout] III ABOUT SHAKSPERE What would we not give to be able to relate a half-dozen good anecdotes about Shakspere? It is true there are traditions, the best known of which is the story that he poached deer in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. Men have discussed the pros and cons of this deer-stealing tradition with a gravity and fulness worthy of a weightier cause. Suppose he did engage in the exciting sport of worrying a nobleman who had a game preserve. Does that fact blacken the youth's character? It is said the students at Oxford were the most notorious poachers in the kingdom, although expulsion was the penalty. Dr. Forman relates how a student who afterwards became a bishop was more given to poaching than to study. What do we know about the life of Shakspere? We know that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, that he died there in 1616, April 23. Some years ago I stood in the house which is reputed to be the place of his birth; over 20,000 pilgrims from all lands each year pay their shilling for the privilege of going through that house; the town corporation has purchased the property and controls it; the place has been photographed until the reading world is familiar with the picture,--and yet we do not positively know that Shakspere was born in that house. For Shakspere's father owned two houses at the time of the son's birth; in which of the two he lived at this time we can but guess. We suppose he lived in the Henley Street house, for it was the better of the two houses and the Shakspere family was prospering when William was born. The house itself has been remodeled. I think it is Sidney Lee who says that the only thing that remains as it was in Shakspere's time is the cellar. We do not know the day of Shakspere's birth. In Holy Trinity Church one may look into the book containing the baptismal record of the babe, William. He was baptized on April 26 and as children were usually baptized three days after their birth we infer he was born April 23. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior; that in early manhood he went to London; that he became an actor, dramatist, manager of a theater; that in 1597 he bought New Place, the stateliest residence in Stratford; that he lived in Stratford during the last years of his life as a highly esteemed and worthy man, and that he died in 1616 and was buried in Trinity Church. These are the facts in the records of Shakspere's life. They, however, are not the important facts. The main fact in his life is his work, the matchless collection of literary masterpieces that bear the imprint of his genius. It is also well to keep in mind that our paucity of definite documentary records is not characteristic of Shakspere alone. We may know little of Shakspere, but we know less of Marlowe, his most brilliant competitor. It is because we know so little of fact in the life of Shakspere that we delight to let fancy paint its charming pictures. We are led into the old Grammar School which Shakspere in all probability attended. Tradition points out the desk at which he used to sit. We can infer what he studied. The name of the Latin grammar then used we can deduce from his quoting a Latin sentence just as it was misquoted in Lilly's grammar. Artists have painted from imagination the picture of the boy Shakspere. Poets have wandered over the Warwickshire region and in their mind's eye have seen the youthful bard as he walked over the same picturesque region. In _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ we read I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.-- and we see the young Shakspere, keen-eyed, observant, reveling in the beauty of nature. In _Macbeth_ we read This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.-- and we recall that Kenilworth and Warwick Castles are near Stratford and we see the boyish Shakspere as he walks about these magnificent testimonies to the might and power of feudal England, or perhaps mingling with the crowd when Royalty has come to Kenilworth to be entertained by the lavish Leicester. So, too, when we find in _Much Ado About Nothing_ The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish Cut with her golden oars the silver stream, And greedily devour the treacherous bait,-- we have a picture before us of the boy standing on the banks of the placid Avon, enjoying the sports of boyhood and unconsciously receiving impressions that shall later be reproduced to adorn with freshest imagery the poetry of the world's greatest genius. After years of labor the scholars of the world have scraped together enough definite information to make the Life of Shakspere, as Mr. Raleigh puts it, "assume the appearance of a scrap-heap of respectable size." But to us the great fact in the life of Shakspere is that he has given us his masterpieces. Perhaps it is just as well that we know so little about the facts in his life. We have all the more time to study his works. About their quality there is little of disagreement. Three hundred years ago Ben Jonson wrote ... I confess thy writings to be such As neither man nor muse can praise too much,-- and the critic of to-day is saying the same thing, only he uses two volumes instead of two lines to say it. It is true an occasional voice, like that of Tolstoy's, will be heard in protest, but the protest and the critic are both likely to be forgotten before the consensus of three centuries shall be set aside. Shakspere lives and shall live as long as the human race shall delight in the study of the human heart, not because of the chastity and clearness of his diction, not because of the supremacy of his imagination, nor because of the variety of his melodious verse,--not even because of the matchless combination of all these charms; but the Bard of Stratford lives and shall live because his sanity enabled him to see the "God of things as they are," and his passion penetrated into the deepest sorrows and rose to the highest aspirations of the human heart,--and throughout all this sympathizing with goodness and while despising the depraved yet pitying with a heart of love. No system-maker or formula-builder can account for Shakspere. Genius is ever a miracle. However, we can study the environment in which genius moves and has its being. When we ask ourselves how does it happen that the plays of Shakspere breathe such a wholesome and vigorous morality, we are led to two conclusions,--first, that the England of Shakspere's time was a wholesome and vigorous England; second, that the man Shakspere was sound to the core. The close of the sixteenth century is one of the most remarkable periods in the history of the world. Indeed, so striking is the intellectual activity of this age that lately an eminent scientist advanced the hypothesis that some electric influence, some magnetic current must have let itself loose to work upon the destinies of the world in the production of great men. For in that period in Italy we find Tasso, the greatest of modern epic poets; then too lived Galileo and Kepler, the astronomers; in France we find the philosophic essayist, Montaigne; in Spain the world-renowned Cervantes, the author of the immortal Don Quixote; in England both Bacon and Shakspere, beside a host of other writers, generals, admirals and artists. This same age is the most flourishing period in Mahometan India; so, too, in China, in Japan, and even in far away Persia we find an unusual degree of intellectual activity. The England of Shakspere! The phrase suggests a train of associations that kindle the imagination. The age of literature, war, conquest, adventure, and achievement. The era of Edmund Spenser, "called from faeryland to struggle 'gainst dark ways;" of Sir Philip Sidney, the scholar, the courtier, the gentleman; of Sir Walter Raleigh, author, knight, and explorer; of Bacon, "the wisest, meanest, brightest of mankind." It is the time when in the _Golden Hind_ Drake is circumnavigating the globe; when Hawkins is exploring the Indies, and Frobisher is becoming the hero of the Northwest passage; the age of marvelous tales told by intrepid explorers and adventurers returning from America, a land whose fountains renewed youth and whose rivers flowed over sands of gold. It is the era of English sea-dogs pillaging Spanish provinces in spite of imperial manifestos,--above all, it is the age of the Spanish Armada. To recall what this means it is necessary to remember that Spain was the great dominating empire of the sixteenth century. Philip II, the Duke of Alva, the horrors of the Spanish inquisition, condemn Spain's power in this period. But one midsummer morn all England awoke to the glorious news that the Invincible Armada lay at the bottom of the sea. England had triumphed, and now for the first time national life dreamed of the possibility of leadership in the great game of world-politics. The atmosphere was electric with new life. In rural England along lanes flanked with green hedges Englishmen walked with bosoms swelling with new pride, in bustling London vigorous burghers strode the city's streets with hearts pulsating with new warmth, and everywhere the eyes of all Englishmen flashed with new fire. Could a soul so sensitive as Shakspere's live in such an atmosphere and not be influenced by it? Listen to him as he pays his beautiful, patriotic tribute to England's national glory: This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself, This precious stone set in the silver sea, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world. And the second cause, we say, is the personality of the man himself. Shakspere wrote pure and lofty poetry because his was a pure and lofty nature. I know the disparagers of Shakspere and the advocates of the Baconian theory make much of the traditional wildness of Shakspere's youth. The common argument is that a man who is charged with the poaching of deer in his youth is too bad to write good poetry, therefore Bacon wrote Shakspere. Was Bacon an angel? By the same process of reasoning Burns could not have written the Cotter's Saturday Night. But I deny that Shakspere was profligate, and in making this denial I need not prove the impeccability of Shakspere. But his life was essentially pure, his heart good, because the influence of the life is sane and wholesome. Not alone the greatest intellect of his time, of all times, but also the greatest heart, was that possessed by this Warwickshire poet. As a man thinketh in his heart so he is. As Shakspere was, so he wrote. This crystalline wholesome water dashing over this rocky cliff did not have its origin in yonder pool. Pure water does not flow from a mud-puddle. Here is a man who in twenty years writes in round numbers forty productions--the task of Hercules. The product of the man attests the nobility of his soul. No man can labor for twenty years without putting his stamp upon his work. Shakspere was no bar-room brawler, no prodigal spender of time and substance in riotous living. He lived to the mature age of fifty-two and died a well-to-do man. The prodigals of the world do not retire with a competency. I repeat that Shakspere was not impeccable; he was no Puritan; but we cannot think of the creator of Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia, Portia, Rosalind, Miranda, and Prospero as other than a man of a contrite spirit and a pure heart. As he surpassed his contemporaries in breadth and loftiness of intellect, so too he surpassed them in the reach and vigor of his moral feeling. We cannot believe that this man who penetrated deeper than others into the mystery of life missed the meaning of his own life. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter--the power that moves the world is not brilliancy of intellect; it is purity of heart. Nobility of character is the essence of powerful personality. Lincoln is greater than Webster, Washington than Jefferson, not through greater mental grasp, but because of a purer spiritual essence. The world without takes its meaning and color from the world within. Shakspere saw a world of pure passion and wholesome sanity because his world within was pure and sane. [Illustration: JOHN MILTON From a miniature by Faithorne, painted in 1667] IV JOHN MILTON In 1623, when Milton was a boy of fifteen, John Heminge and Henry Condell, "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakspere," had given to the world the folio edition of Shakspere's works, very anxious that the said folio might commend itself to "the most noble and incomparable pair of brethern," William, Earl of this, and Philip, Earl of that, and exceedingly unconscious that, next to the production of the works themselves, they were doing the most important thing done, or likely to be done, in the literary history of the world. Milton read Shakspere, and in the lines which he wrote upon him in 1630, there seems to be the due throb of transcendent admiration.... As Shakspere is the supreme name in this order of poets, the men of sympathy and of humor, Milton stands first in that other great order which is too didactic for humor, and of which Schiller is the best recent representative. He was called the lady of his college not only for his beautiful face, but because of the vestal purity and austerity of his virtue. The men of the former class are intuitive, passionate, impulsive; not steadily conscious of their powers; fitful, unsystematic. Their love is ecstasy; their errors are the intoxication of joy; their sorrows are the pangs of death.... Milton, the poet of Puritanism, stands out in bold contrast to these imperfect characters. From his infancy there was nothing unregulated in his life. His father, clearly a superior man, of keen Protestantism, successful in business, well skilled in music, soon perceived that one of the race of immortals had been born in his house. He began, apparently with the conscious and delighted assent of his son, to give the young Apollo such an education as Plato might have prescribed. An eminently good education it proved to be; only not so good, with a view to the production of a world-poet, as that which nature, jealous of the Platos and pedagogues, and apt to tumble them and their grammatical appurtenances out of the window when she has one of her miraculous children in hand, had provided for that Stratford lad who came to London broken in character and probably almost broken in heart, some forty years earlier, to be a hanger-on of the theaters and to mount the intellectual throne of the world. No deer-stealing expeditions late o' nights when the moon silvered the elms of Charlecote chase; no passionate love affairs and wild boy-marriage. Milton, carefully grounded in the tongues, went in due course to Cambridge University, and during those years when the youthful mind is in its stage of richest recipiency, lived among the kind of men who haunt seats of learning,--on the whole, the most uninteresting men in existence, whose very knowledge is a learned ignorance; not bees of industry, who have hoarded information by experience, but book-_worms_.... It is important, also, that Milton was never to any distracting extent in love. If Shakspere had been a distinguished university man, would he have told us of a catch that could "draw three souls out of one weaver?" And if the boy of eighteen had not been in a fine frenzy about Anne Hathaway, could he have known how Juliet and Romeo, Othello and Desdemona, loved? ... It is a proof of the fiery and inextinguishable nature of Milton's genius that it triumphed over the artificiality of his training; that there is the pulse of a true poetical life in his most highly wrought poems, and that the whole mountain of his learning glows with the strong internal flame. His inspiration was from within, the inspiration of a profound enthusiasm for beauty and an impassioned devotion to virtue. The district in which he lived during much of his most elaborate self-education is not marked enough to have disturbed, by strong impressions from without, the development of his genius from within. Horton lies where the dead flat of southeastern Buckingham meets the dead flat of southwestern Middlesex. Egham Hill, not quite so high as Hampstead, and the chalk knoll on which Windsor Castle fails to be sublime, are the loftiest ground in the immediate neighborhood. Staines, the Pontes of the Romans, and Runnymede with its associations, are near the parish church of Horton, in which Milton worshiped for five or six years, and in which his mother is buried, has one of the Norman porches common in the district, but is drearily heavy in its general structure, and forms a notable contrast to that fine example of the old English church in which, by the willows of Avon, lie Shakspere's bones. The river Colne breaks itself, a few miles to the north, into a leash of streams, the most considerable of which flows by Horton. The abounding watercourses are veiled with willows, but the tree does not seem to have attracted Milton's attention. It was reserved for the poet-painter of the _Liber Studiorum_ to show what depths of homely pathos, and what exquisite picturesqueness of gnarled and knotted line, could be found in a pollard willow, and for Tennyson to reveal the poetic expressiveness of the tree as denoting a solemn and pensive landscape, such as that amid whose "willowy hills and fields" rose the carol ... mournful, holy, Chaunted loudly, chaunted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly, of the Lady of Shalott.... Milton's bodily appearance at this time was in brilliant correspondence with the ideal which imagination might form of a youthful poet. Perfect in all bodily proportions, an accomplished fencer, with delicate flowing hair, and beautiful features through which genius, still half in slumber, shed its mystic glow, he was all that the imagination of Greece saw in the young Hyperion or Apollo. ... His three daughters, Anne, Deborah, and Mary, were the children of his first wife. He was twice married after her death in 1653, but had no more children. So early as 1644 his sight began to fail, and when his little girls were left motherless, they could be known to him, as Professor Masson touchingly says, "only as tiny voices of complaint going about in the darkness." The tiny voices did not move him to love or pity. His impatient and imperious nature had doubtless undergone exquisite misery from the moaning discontent of his wife; the daughters took the mother's part so soon as they were able to understand her sorrows; and the grave Puritan displeasure with which Milton regards the mother seems to have been transferred to the children. His austerity as a Puritan and a pedagogue, and the worse than old Hebrew meanness of his estimate of women, appear to the greatest disadvantage in connection with his daughters. Had they been sons, he would have thrown all his ardor into the enterprise of their education. The training of boys was one of his enthusiasms; but his daughters were taught nothing except to read, and were ordered to read aloud to him in languages of which they did not understand a word. Naturally they never loved him; his fame, which they were not able to appreciate, cast on them no ray of comforting light; and they thought probably in sad and scared bewilderment of the relations between their unhappy wraith-like mother, and their Titan father. How different the warm and tender relations between Shakspere and his children! In that instance it was the daughter, the pet Judith, that was the demure sweet Puritan, yet with a touch of her father's wit in her, and able to enjoy all the depth of his smile when he would ask her whether cakes and ale were to be _quite_ abolished when the reign of the saints came in. ... To the man himself we turn, for one brief glance before laying down the pen. In the evil times of the Restoration, in the land of the Philistines, Agonistes but unconquerable, the Puritan Samson ended his days. Serene and strong; conscious that the ambition of his youth had been achieved, he begins the day with the Hebrew Bible, listens reverently to words in which Moses or David or Isaiah spake of God. But he attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of worship in his family; notable circumstances which we may refer, in part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that. His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form. Though the most Puritan of the Puritan, he had never stopped long in the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth he loved the night; in his old age he loves the sunlight of early morning as it glimmers on his sightless eyes. The music which had been his delight since childhood has still its charm, and he either sings or plays on the organ or bass-violin every day. In his gray coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, he sits on clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly genial old man, with sharp satiric touches in his talk, the untunable fiber in him to the last. Eminent foreigners come to see him; friends approach reverently, drawn by the splendor of his discourse. It would range, one can well imagine, in glittering freedom, like "arabesques of lightning," over all ages and all literatures. He was the prince of scholars; a memory of superlative power waiting, as submissive handmaid, on the queenliest imagination. The whole spectacle of ancient civilization, its cities, its camps, its landscapes, was before him. There he sat in his gray coat, like a statue cut in granite. England had made a sordid failure, but he had not failed. His soul's fellowship was with the great Republicans of Greece and Rome, and with the Psalmist and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell. --From Peter Bayne in the _Contemporary Review_. V CHARLES LAMB, THE CLERK OF THE INDIA HOUSE The author of the _Essays of Elia_ and _Tales Founded on the Plays of Shakspere_ worked for the greater part of his life in the employ of the Honorable East India Company. He received his appointment in 1792, the year of the birth of Shelley. He had been trained at Christ's Hospital for a university career; this gave him a good classical education but not especially good preparation for his new work. Had he been obliged to pass a civil service examination he would hardly have received the appointment. Of geography and arithmetic he knew little. The schoolboy of to-day will be surprised to learn that a boy a hundred and more years ago might reach the age of fifteen in a good grammar school of that period and yet not be able to use the multiplication table. As late as 1823 Lamb writes: "I think I lose a hundred pounds a year owing solely to my want of neatness in making up accounts: how I puzzle 'em out at last is the wonder!" There is no evidence, however, to show that Lamb did not overcome his lack of preparation. The contrary impression sometimes prevails, due, perhaps, to his supposed apology for his late arrival by his representation that he made up for it by a correspondingly early departure. His industry must have been appreciated, for his salary rose from nothing to a fair figure. The modern young man, desirous of earning a good salary at once, will be surprised at the statement that Lamb worked for nothing at first. He will be still more surprised to learn that in those days a clerk in the employ of the great India Company worked three years for nothing. This period evidently was considered as the apprenticeship. It is true a gratuity of 30 pounds was given, and by extra work one might earn small sums. In April, 1795, three years having ended, he received a salary of 40 pounds a year. The next year it rose to 70. By 1799 it had advanced to 90, and from then on to 1814 he received an increment of ten pounds every two years. He also received a gratuity each year. The gratuity by 1814 had amounted to 80 pounds. After a reorganization of the company in 1815 Lamb seems to have progressed in salary, for he then received 480 pounds, and in 1821 it was 700; and at the time of his retirement it was 730. On the whole, one can say that Lamb's lot was not a hard one. No doubt, many of his fellow-authors had reason to envy him his assured income. His work was hard and not always pleasant, but he knew, with all his half-pretended grumbling, that it would not be wise to rely on his pen for a livelihood. He once remonstrated with the poetical Quaker, Bernard Barton, who proposed to give up a bank-clerkship, in this wise: "Trust not the public; I bless every star that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me down on the stable foundation of Leadenhall.... Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employments; look upon them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk that makes me live! a little grumbling is a wholesome medicine for the spleen; but in my inner heart do I improve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life." That his work was no sinecure can be gathered from this letter of about 1815: "On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner excepted) to eleven at night; last night till nine. My business and office business in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days and some five days besides, which I used to dub nature's holidays.... I had formerly little to do.... Hard work and thinking about it taints even the leisure hours--stains Sunday with workday contemplations." After thirty-three years of service he was granted by his company a pension of 450 pounds. On the minutes of the Court of Directors can be found the following resolution: "that the resignation of Mr. Charles Lamb, of the accountant-general's office, on account of certified ill-health be accepted, and it appearing that he has served the company faithfully for thirty-three years ... he be allowed a pension of 450 pounds annually." When the resolution was communicated to him he went home to enjoy one long holiday of leisure and literary study and authorship. "I am Retired Leisure.... I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself." But his day did not last many years. "Lamb was but fifty when he quitted the service of the company; yet less than ten years of life were left to him. Not only so, but the happiness he had expected to find proved more and more elusive. The increasing frequency of his sister's aberration was a heavy burden for a back which grew daily less able to bear the strain. The leisure to which he had looked forward so eagerly was spent in listening to incoherent babblings, that rambling chat which was to him 'better than the sense and sanity of this world.' In her lucid intervals they played picquet together, or talked gravely but firmly of the inevitable separation looming nearer and nearer. In 1830 Hazlitt died. Four years later that 'great and dear spirit,' Coleridge, passed away after long suffering. The blow to Lamb was stunning in its severity; and the loss of this earliest and best-loved friend possibly accelerated his own decease. Towards the close of the year a fall while walking caused a trifling wound. No harm was expected to result; but the general feebleness of his health brought on erysipelas, and upon Saturday, January 3, 1835, he was borne to his rest in a quiet corner of Edmonton Church-yard, there to await the coming, twelve years later, of the sister who had been throughout his life at once his greatest joy and his chiefest care." VI DR. JOHNSON AND CHARLES LAMB Between Johnson and Lamb there would seem to be little in common. The ponderous old philosopher, "tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans," presents a picture very dissimilar to that of the stammering Lamb whom Coleridge has well called the "gentle-hearted Lamb." And yet there are many points of similarity. Perhaps the most striking resemblance is in respect to their generosity. The unfailing testimony of all their friends is that neither could restrain the impulse to give. The celebrated De Quincey is led to characterize Lamb's munificence as _princely_, while Procter, one of his younger friends, simply says, "he gave away greatly." On the other hand, the testimony in regard to the generosity of Johnson is equally strong. He was so open-hearted that he could not trust himself to go upon the street with much money in his purse. Neither Lamb nor Johnson believed in the modern methods of attending to charitable giving through the mediation of boards and committees. Each violated the commonest precepts of a coldblooded political economy. If want and suffering were depicted upon the face of the mendicant, that was enough to call for the open purse. What if the beggar did look like a thief or drunkard? He might spend the money for gin or tobacco, but what of that? "Why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?" was Johnson's indulgent plea. This stern moralist so much enjoyed giving that he doubtless would have regretted the passing of laws prohibiting the beggar from plying his vocation in public. So too would the genial Elia, who obeyed his own precept of "give and ask no questions." While returning to his lodgings after midnight Johnson would often drop pennies into the hands of poor children sleeping on the thresholds and stalls, to furnish them with the means for a breakfast. This was done at a time when he was living on pennies himself. "Reader," pleads Elia in his _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_, "if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny--it is better to give him a twopence." And then Lamb describes the choice and fragrant drink, _Saloop_, the delight of the sweep, a basin of which together with a slice of delicate bread and butter will cost but a twopence. As we read the description we have no hesitancy in believing that the "unpennied sweep" frequently became a pennied sweep after the gentle Elia had passed by. Goldsmith once remarked that to be miserable was enough to insure the protection of Johnson. This generous quality of mind filled the house of Johnson with a queer assortment of pensioners. Had Lamb's home life permitted, equally full of the needy and homeless would it have been. In 1796 occurred the terrible tragedy that we may permit Lamb himself to describe in his letter to Coleridge,--"White, or some of my friends, or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.... God Almighty have us well in his keeping!" Lamb assumed the tender care of his sister, and his watchfulness and loving care are more beautiful than the most charming essay he ever wrote. But this condition at home prevented that generous open-hearted hospitality so characteristic of Johnson. As it was he contributed to the support of several. For a long period he gave thirty pounds a year to his old schoolmistress. Telfourd relates that when Lamb saw the nurse who had waited on Coleridge during his last illness, he forced five guineas on her. Equally impulsive was his manner toward Procter, whom he one time noticed to be in low spirits and imagined the cause to be lack of money. "My dear boy," said he suddenly turning toward his friend, "I have a quantity of useless things, I have now in my desk a--a hundred pounds--that I don't _know_ what to do with. Take it." Some years ago when comparing these two men a Mr. Roose wrote in concluding his paper: "We are all familiar with Johnson's huge, ungainly form, arrayed in brown suit more or less dilapidated, singed, bushy wig, black stockings, and mean old shoes. A quaint little figure, Lamb comes before our vision, in costume uncontemporary and as queer as himself, consisting of a suit of black cloth (they both affected dark colors), rusty silk stockings shown from the knees, thick shoes a mile too large, shirt with a wide, ill-plaited frill, and tiny white neckcloth tied in a minute bow." It is pleasant to fancy these two originals being brought into personal contact. Nor is it hard, for all the tokens to the contrary, to imagine Elia taking the grand, humane old doctor into his embrace (a huger armful than his beloved folios), sitting up with him o' nights, as he did with them, delighting in the humor of his conversation, which was said by a contemporary to be unequaled except by the old comedians, in whom Lamb's spirit found diversion; piercing to heights and depths in his nature which Boswell never revealed to him; while Johnson, it may safely be inferred, would have loved this "poor Charles," in whom Carlyle could perceive but so slender a strain of worth. But had they met at all, it would have been on equal terms. Goldsmith maintained with difficulty, though he did maintain, his attitude of independence towards the colossus of his age. Charles Lamb, without any difficulty and without the show of assertiveness, would have maintained it better. Lamb, who from earliest manhood refused to knock under to the threatening intellectual arrogance of Coleridge; who shook Wordsworth by the nose instead of by the hand with the greeting, "How d'ye do, old Lake Poet!"--his stammering voice might have broken with impunity on the doctor's weightiest utterances with the absurdest quips and twists of speech of which even he was capable. Yet both were of wayward nature, and had they met might not have coalesced. Lamb would have understood Johnson better than Johnson would have understood the whimsicalities of the witty clerk. At one time while discussing authors with friends Lamb said,--"There is Dr. Johnson: I have no curiosity; no strange uncertainty about him." Johnson's restraint in the use of alcoholic drinks is in contrast with Lamb's indulgence. But Johnson's intemperate tea-drinking makes him one with Lamb in his struggle with tobacco. In writing to Coleridge for advice on smoking, Lamb asks: "What do you think of smoking? I want your sober _average noon opinion_ of it.... May be the truth is, that _one_ pipe is wholesome, _two_ pipes toothsome, _three_ pipes noisome, _four_ pipes fulsome, _five_ pipes quarrelsome; and that's the _sum_ on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason." And Telfourd tells us that when Parr saw Lamb puffing like some furious enchanter, he asked how he had acquired the power of smoking at such a rate. Lamb replied, "I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue." VII THE DEATH OF DR. JOHNSON By common consent Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ takes first place as a biography. Some critics go so far as to say that the excellence of the biography is to be accounted for by the deficiency in the character of Boswell; that Boswell was such a blind and whole-souled worshiper of Johnson that he exposed the faults of his subject with the same zeal with which he published the virtues. This may be true. Whether true or not, it is not an altogether bad quality. Many of us think that the biographies of our modern men of letters would have more vivacity and lifelikeness were they to contain an occasional glimpse of the hero when he is not on the parade ground. The biography of Tennyson by his son, Lord Hallam, would be far more convincing had the son given us occasional pictures of the poet when he was not at his best. But, perhaps, it is too much to hope that a reverent and admiring son can give the world a vital, impartial, and comprehensive life of his father. Boswell has given us a full account of Johnson's last days. The gruff old lexicographer had lived a robust life; he had faced many temptations, and had not always retired from the conflict victorious. On the whole, however, he had lived an exemplary life, but like many another good man he had a dread of dying; he feared he might not meet the last foe as worthily as a man of his character and reputation should. But this was a groundless fear. For when the last illness was upon him, he asked his physician to tell him plainly whether there was any hope of his recovery. The doctor first asked his patient whether he could hear the whole truth, whatever it might be. Upon hearing an affirmative reply, the physician declared that in his opinion nothing short of a miracle would restore health. "Then," said Johnson, "I will take no more physic, not even my opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul unclouded." A brother of Boswell's wrote the following letter concerning the last hours of Johnson: "The Doctor, from the time that he was certain his death was near, appeared to be perfectly resigned, was seldom or never fretful or out of temper, and often said to his faithful servant, who gave me this account, 'Attend, Francis, to the salvation of your soul, which is the object of greatest importance:' he also explained to him passages in the Scripture, and seemed to have pleasure in talking upon religious subjects. "On Monday, the 13th of December, the day on which he died, a Miss Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his, called, and said to Francis, that she begged to be permitted to see the doctor, that she might earnestly request him to give her his blessing. Francis went into the room, followed by the young lady, and delivered the message. The doctor turned himself in the bed, and said, 'God bless you, my dear!' These were the last words he spoke. His difficulty of breathing increased till about seven o'clock in the evening, when Mr. Barber and Mrs. Desmoulins, who were sitting in the room, observed that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found he was dead." This account, together with several others given by various friends, assures us that the death of Johnson was trustful and tranquil. It is another illustration of that beautiful dispensation of nature which, as a rule, makes death a mere slipping away, a falling asleep. The Francis who is mentioned in the letter is the faithful negro servant whom Johnson so generously provided for in his will. In making his will the doctor had asked a friend how much of an annuity gentlemen usually gave to a favorite servant, and was told that in the case of a nobleman fifty pounds a year was considered an adequate reward for many years of faithful service: "Then," said Johnson, "shall I be _nobilissimus_, for I mean to leave Frank seventy pounds a year, and I desire you to tell him so." This generosity was too much for the equanimity of Sir John Hawkins, one of the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his kindness in remembering a faithful and deserving servant. Johnson's refusal to take either wine or opiates recalls that in an age in which the use of alcoholic drinks was very common he was an uncompromising foe to wine, and that he was, in his latter years, loud in his praise of water. "As we drove back to Ashbourne," says Boswell, "Dr. Johnson recommended to me, as he had often done, to drink water only. 'For,' said he, 'you are then sure not to get drunk; whereas if you drink wine, you are never sure.'" And this was not the only matter in which he was in advance of his contemporaries, and of most of ours too. Johnson liked satisfying food, such as a leg of pork, or veal pie well stuffed, with plum pie and sugar, and he devoured enormous quantities of fruit, especially peaches. His inordinate love of tea has almost passed into a proverb,--he has actually been credited with twenty-five cups at a sitting, and he would keep Mrs. Thrale brewing it for him till four o'clock in the morning. The following impromptu, spoken to Miss Reynolds, points its own moral: For hear, alas, the dreadful truth, Nor hear it with a frown: Thou can'st not make the tea so fast As I can gulp it down. VIII GRAY WRITES THE ELEGY Recently I was conversing with a practical man of affairs who had just returned from his first visit to Europe. Art galleries had proved tiresome and Westminster Abbey had bored him. But there was one place that he had determined to see and see it he did. "What place was that?" I asked. "Stoke Pogis," was the reply. Is not this answer indicative of the attitude of thousands who can never forget the exquisite charm cast over their youth by the melancholy beauty of the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_? If fame was the end of General Wolfe's ambition, he was wise in saying that he would rather have written the _Elegy_ than be able to take Quebec on the morrow; for of all English poems the _Elegy_ is the most popular and widely known; it is the flower of the "literature of melancholy." The _Elegy_ is the glorification of the obscure; therein lies its popularity. The most of us are obscure. The _Elegy_ flatters us by suggesting that we might have swayed the rod of empire or "waked to ecstasy the living lyre," if we had had the chance,--or, what we think is more likely the explanation, if we had not had a saner insight into the values of life than the Miltons and Cromwells. Stoke Pogis is always associated with the name of Gray. It is a village, if such it may be called, between London and Windsor Castle. The church is "on a little level space about four miles north of the Thames at Eton. From the neighborhood of the church no vestige of hamlet or village is visible, and the aspect of the place is slightly artificial, like a rustic church in a park on a stage. The traveler almost expects to see the grateful peasantry of an opera, cheerfully habited, make their appearance, dancing on the greensward." Gray and his mother, the father having died in 1741, went to Stoke Pogis in 1742. At West End House, a simple farmhouse of two stories, Gray lived for many years. In the autumn of 1742 was begun the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_. The common impression is that the whole poem was written at Stoke Pogis, but this is not the truth. It is better to say that it was begun in October or November at Stoke Pogis, continued seven years later at the same place and at Cambridge, and finished at Stoke Pogis on June 12th, 1750. It is interesting to note that in each case an impetus was given to the composition of the poem by the death of a friend. Several months before the poem was begun in 1742, West, a friend whose death made a very deep impression upon the sensitive nature of Gray, had passed away; and on October 31 Jonathan Rogers, an uncle of Gray's, died at Stoke Pogis; and when the poem was next taken up Gray was mourning the death of his aunt. In commenting on this subject Mr. Gosse writes,--"He was a man who had a very slender hold on life himself, who walked habitually in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and whose periods of greatest vitality were those in which bereavement proved to him that, melancholy as he was, even he had something to lose and to regret." On the 12th of June, 1750, Gray wrote to his friend, Horace Walpole,--"Having put an end to a thing whose beginning you have seen long ago, I immediately send it to you. You will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing with an end to it: a merit that most of my writings have wanted, and are like to want." Walpole was naturally delighted with the poem--so delighted, in fact, that he handed it about from friend to friend and even made manuscript copies of it. This caused some embarrassment to the poet. In February, 1751, he was annoyed to find that the publisher of the _Magazine of Magazines_ was actually printing his _Elegy_ in his periodical. So Gray immediately wrote to Walpole: "As I am not at all disposed to be either so indulgent or so correspondent as they desire, I have but one bad way to escape the honor they would inflict upon me: and therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than a week's time) from your copy, but without my name, in what form is most convenient for him, but on his best paper and character; he must correct the press himself, and print it without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in some places continued without them." On the 16th of February, only five days after this letter was received, _An Elegy wrote in a Country Church-yard_ appeared as a large quarto pamphlet, anonymous, price sixpence. From the very first it achieved great popularity. Magazine after magazine published it without giving the author any compensation. Gray was soon hit upon as the author. Unfortunately, the success of the poem gave no increased income to the poet. Dodsley, the publisher, is said to have made about a thousand pounds from the various poems of Gray, but Gray had the impractical idea that it was not dignified for a poet to make money from poetry. In view of this lack of compensation for his poetic writings, it is very gratifying to know that during the latter days of his life Gray enjoyed the emolument arising from his holding the chair of Modern Literature and Modern Languages at Cambridge. This paid him 400 pounds a year, and did not require much work, as the office was a sinecure. One of the biographers points out that this promotion was brought about inadvertently through the riotous living of Gray's great enemy, Lord Sandwich. Professor Lawrence Brockett, the incumbent of the chair of Literature at Cambridge, dined with Lord Sandwich at Hinchinbroke. He became so drunk that in riding home to Cambridge he fell from his horse and broke his neck. At once five obscure dons made brisk application for the vacant place, and Gray, sensitive and lacking the arts of the politician, did not expect the place. But the author of the _Elegy_ was no longer to be neglected. He soon received a letter highly complimenting his work and offering him the professorship. Gray accepted and was summoned to court to kiss the hand of the monarch, George III. The king made several complimentary remarks to Gray. Afterwards when the poet's friends asked Gray to tell them what the king had said he replied that the room was so hot and he so embarrassed that he really did not know what the king had said. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere; Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to misery--all he had--a tear, He gained from Heaven--'twas all he wished--a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,-- There they alike in trembling hope repose,-- The bosom of his father and his God. IX COWPER AS A LETTER WRITER William Cowper is well known as a poet, having written one of the most popular hymns in the English language, and he is also one of the best of letter writers. It is commonly said that we have lost the gentle art of writing a good letter. When a man can send a postal card from Boston to San Francisco for one cent and one from New York to Paris for two cents, he is not likely to be so choice in his use of language as when he paid a shilling for the privilege of getting a letter. In the first letter which is here quoted we find Cowper writing an urgent invitation to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, to visit him at Olney. "And now, my dear, let me tell you once more that your kindness in promising us a visit has charmed us both. I shall see you again. I shall hear your voice. We shall take walks together. I will show you my prospects, the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse and its banks, everything that I have described. Talk not of an inn! Mention it not for your life! We have never had so many visitors but we could accommodate them all, though we have received Unwin and his wife, and his sister, and his son, all at once. My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May, or beginning of June, because before that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with mats, and spread the floor with mats; and there you shall sit with a bed of mignonette at your side, and a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day. Sooner than the time I mention the country will not be in complete beauty; and I will tell you what you shall find at your first entrance. Imprimis, as soon as you have entered the vestibule, if you cast a look on either side of you, you shall see on the right hand a box of my making. It is the box in which have been lodged all my hares, and in which lodges Puss (Cowper's pet hare) at present. But he, poor fellow, is worn out with age and promises to die before you can see him. On the right hand stands a cupboard, the work of the same author; it was once a dove-cage, but I transformed it. Opposite to you stands a table, which I also made. But a merciless servant having scrubbed it till it became paralytic, it serves no purpose now but of ornament, and all my clean shoes stand under it. On the left hand, at the farther end of this superb vestibule, you will find the door of the parlor, into which I will conduct you, and where I will introduce you to Mrs. Unwin, unless we should meet her before, and where we will be as happy as the day is long. Order yourself, my cousin, to the _Swan_ at Newport and there you shall find me ready to conduct you to Olney. My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine. He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask to eternity. So if the god is content with it, we must even wonder at his taste, and be so too.--Adieu! my dearest, dearest cousin,--W.C." Cowper's letters are not interesting because they treat of the great men and important affairs of his day. They are interesting because he lived a quiet life and was able in his own way to paint a picture treating of the common doings of an apparently unimportant life. Here is a picture of an election in the country, or rather of the candidates' methods in the old days: "We were sitting yesterday after dinner, the two ladies and myself, very composedly, and without the least apprehension of any such intrusion, in our snug parlor, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted, when, to our unspeakable surprise, a mob appeared before the window, a smart rap was heard at the door, the boys halloed, and the maid announced Mr. Grenville. Puss was unfortunately let out of her box, so that the candidate, with all his good friends at his heels, was refused entrance at the grand entry, and referred to the back door, as the only possible way of approach. Candidates are creatures not very susceptible to affronts, and would rather, I suppose, climb in at a window than be absolutely excluded. In a minute the yard, the kitchen, and the parlor were filled. Mr. Grenville, advancing toward me, shook me by the hand with a degree of cordiality that was extremely seducing. As soon as he and as many more as could find chairs were seated, he began to open the intent of his visit. I told him I had no vote, for which he readily gave me credit. I assured him I had no influence, which he was not equally inclined to believe, and the less, no doubt, because Mr. Ashburner, the drapier, addressing himself to me at that moment, informed me that I had a great deal. Supposing that I could not be possessed of such a treasure without knowing it, I ventured to confirm my first assertion by saying that if I had any I was utterly at a loss to imagine where it could be, or wherein it consisted. Thus ended the conference. Mr. Grenville squeezed me by the hand again, kissed the ladies, and withdrew. He kissed likewise the maid in the kitchen, and seemed upon the whole a most loving, kissing, kind-hearted gentleman." X GIBBON AND HIS VISIT TO ROME In that celebrated literary club founded by Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few men achieve fame by their brilliant versatility; some, as in the case of Samuel Johnson, by their commanding personal force; Gibbon has won a permanent place in literary history by spending his life in doing one thing. That one thing he did so well that E.A. Freeman, one of the prominent historians of the nineteenth century, has truthfully said,--"He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." In his memoirs Gibbon reveals himself as a man with little dignity or heroism. There is a droll story that is apt to suggest itself when one thinks of Gibbon. At one time, when asking a dignified lady for her hand in marriage, he fell upon his knees in proper lover-like manner. Unfortunately Gibbon was so stout that upon her refusal he found himself in the embarrassing need of calling in a servant to help him to his feet again. Memories such as these, however, cannot blind us to the essential worth in the character of the great historian. In the light of his consecration to a worthy purpose his life is not without its heroism. To write _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ is a monumental achievement. To bend every energy to the fulfilling of a high resolve is heroic. From 1764 to 1787 his one aim in life was to write a scholarly history that should cover the vast field that he had chosen. He may lack that spiritual insight which enables one to estimate world movements in the upper regions of religion, but he did not lack unfaltering devotion to his purpose. So well did he do his work that his six volumes can be found in the library of every student of the past. The story is told of a great German who learned English in order to read Gibbon in the original. In the following extract from his Autobiography is found his own explanation of the circumstances under which he conceived his vast project "amid the ruins of the Capitol," in 1764: "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm which I do not feel, I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Cæsar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation. My guide was Mr. Byers, a Scotch antiquary of experience and taste; but in the daily labor of eighteen weeks, the powers of attention were sometimes fatigued, till I was myself qualified, in a last review, to select and study the capital works of ancient and modern art. Six weeks were borrowed for my tour of Naples, the most populous of cities, relative to its size, whose luxurious inhabitants seem to dwell on the confines of paradise and hell-fire. I was presented to the boy-king by our new envoy, Sir William Hamilton, who, wisely diverting his correspondence from the Secretary of State to the Royal Society and British Museum, has elucidated a country of such inestimable value to the naturalist and antiquarian. On my return, I fondly embraced, for the last time, the miracles of Rome.... In my pilgrimage from Rome to Loretto I again crossed the Apennine; from the coast of the Adriatic I traversed a fruitful and populous country, which could alone disprove the paradox of Montesquieu, that modern Italy is a desert.... "The use of foreign travel has been often debated as a general question; but the conclusion must be finally applied to the character and circumstances of each individual. With the education of boys, where or how they may pass over some juvenile years with the least mischief to themselves or others, I have no concern. But after supposing the previous and indispensable requisites of age, judgment, a competent knowledge of men and books, and a freedom from domestic prejudices, I will briefly describe the qualifications which I deem most essential to a traveler. He should be endowed with an active, indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can seize every mode of conveyance, and support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the road, the weather, or the inn. The benefits of foreign travel will correspond with the degrees of these qualifications; but, in this sketch, those to whom I am known will not accuse me of framing my own panegyric. It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind." XI BURNS FALLS IN LOVE When Robert Burns and his brother were working hard on the Mount Oliphant farm, Robert fell in love. This experience, alas, in after years became too frequent an occurrence to occasion much comment, for the ease with which the poet fell in and out of love was the chief fault in a faulty life. But when this episode occurred the boy was still an innocent country lad in his fifteenth year, a lad perhaps somewhat rude and clownish, at least such is an unfounded tradition. Out of the monotony of this life of prosaic toil and drudgery, Burns is lifted by the romance which fortunately he has himself described. "You know," he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointment, gin-house prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell.... Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Æolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry." [Illustration: ROBERT BURNS From the portrait by Nasmyth] The song that was due to this boyish passion is called "Handsome Nell," and is said to be the first he wrote. It can be found in any complete edition of the poet's work. In after years he himself calls it puerile and silly, but, while lacking the exquisite perfection of Burns' later lyrics, it is far superior to the usual first attempts of poets. The last two stanzas run thus: A gaudy dress and gentle air May slightly touch the heart; But it's Innocence and Modesty That polishes the dart. 'Tis this in Nelly pleases me, 'Tis this enchants my soul! For absolutely in my breast She reigns without control. "I composed it," says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance." Poor Burns! How much happier he would have been had all his loves been as innocent as this first experience! In one of Tennyson's most vigorous passages in the _Idylls_ we read, ... for indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden passion for a maid, Not only to keep down the base in man, But teach high thoughts, and amiable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes a man. Perhaps, if Burns in a later love affair had been successful in his suit, his life and reputation would not have suffered as they have, for the most culpable trait in the character of the famous Scotch poet is the ease with which he abandoned one lover for another. He was forever falling in love, and there is some evidence to the effect that he loved two or three at the same time. There is only too much truth in Burns' own lines, Where'er I gaed, where'er I rade, A mistress still I had aye. But perhaps all this would have been different had Ellison Begbie, the daughter of a small farmer, smiled favorably upon the advances of the young farmer from Lochlea. She is said to have been a young woman of great charm and liveliness of mind, though not a beauty. In after years Burns always spoke of her with the greatest of respect and as the one woman, of the many upon whom he had lavished his fickle affection, who most likely would have made a pleasant partner for life. His love affair with this young lady took place near the close of his twenty-second year. Her refusal seems to have had a malign influence upon the career of our poet. Up to this time his love affairs, although numerous, were innocent. As his brother Gilbert says, they were "governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty." But henceforth there is a change in the character of Burns. Shortly after the fair Ellison had turned a deaf ear to the letters and love-songs of the importunate wooer, Robert and his brother Gilbert went to Irvine, hoping that in this flax-dressing center they could increase their income by dressing the flax raised on their own farm. Here Burns, always very susceptible to new influences,--he would not be the poet he is had he not been keenly alive and susceptible,--fell under the malignant charm of a wild sailor-lad whose habits were loose and irregular. "He was," says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who was a greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. _Here his friendship did me a mischief._" XII BURNS' FIRST BOOK OF POEMS Burns was in trouble; he had failed as a farmer, and as a young man he had wounded the sensibilities of his family. It seemed best to try a new life in a new land, so he promised a Mr. Douglas to go to Jamaica and become a bookkeeper on his estate there. But where should he get the money to pay his passage? There were the poems lying in his table-drawer--might they not be published and money be raised by the sale? His friends encouraged him to publish them, and what is more to the point, they subscribed in advance for a number of the copies. John Wilson of Kilmarnock was to do the printing. During May, June, and July of 1786 the printer was doing his work. At the end of July the volume appeared, and soon the fame of the Ayrshire Plowman was established. Let us hear Burns himself give his account of the venture: "I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what little preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving my native country forever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a poor negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone to the world of spirits! I can truly say that _pauvre inconnu_ as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in their favor.... "I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money, to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for 'Hungry ruin had me in the wind.' "I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, '_The gloomy night is gathering fast_,' when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects to my poetic ambition." The success of the first edition of his poems was so pronounced that Burns soon gave up the idea of going away to Jamaica. Ayrshire was flattered to discover that within its borders lived a genuine poet. Robert Heron, a young literary man living in that neighborhood, gives us an account of the reception of the little book of poems: "Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even plowboys and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might procure the works of Burns." When Burns wished a second edition of his poems, he had a very poor offer from his printer. So he went to Edinburgh to see whether he could not make a more advantageous bargain in the Scottish capital. He reached that famous city on the 28th of November, 1786. Here he was feted and banqueted, admired and criticised. In April, 1787, the second edition appeared. The volume was a handsome octavo. The Scottish public had subscribed very liberally, and eventually Burns received 500 pounds, but Creech, his publisher, was so slow in making payments that Burns had to wait a long time before he received his due. Walter Scott was among the many who met Burns during his stay in Edinburgh. Scott was but a boy of fifteen, but he never forgot the glance of approval bestowed upon him by the poet. We are especially fortunate in having Scott's own account of the incident: "As for Burns, I may truly say, '_Virgilium vidi tantum_.' I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened. The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns' manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side--on the other his widow, with her child in her arms. These lines were written beneath: Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain-- Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery baptized in tears. "Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of _The Justice of Peace_. I whispered my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, I then received with very great pleasure. His person was strong and robust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school--the _douce gudeman_ who held his own plow. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally, glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." XIII SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE The following affecting narrative, written in Coleridge's person by the tender-hearted Elia, gives the best view possible of Coleridge's scanty and suffering commencement of life. At that time, it may be premised, the dietary of Christ's Hospital was of the lowest: breakfast consisting of a "quarter of penny loaf, moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from," and the weekly rule giving "three banyan-days to four meat days." "I was a poor, friendless boy; my parents, and those who should have cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, whom they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough. One after another they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. Oh the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years!... The warm, long days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those _whole days' leave_, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the livelong day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River which Lamb recalls with so much relish, better, I think, than he can--for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care much for such water-parties. How we would sally forth into the fields, and strip under the first warmth of the sun, and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting appetites for the noon; which those of us that were penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying--while the cattle and the birds and the fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very beauty of the day and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half rejoicing, half reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had expired! "It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless, shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times-repeated visit (where our individual faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose _levée_, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission." This melancholy and harsh life was, however, ameliorated by some curious personal incidents. Once, for example, the solitary boy, moving along the crowded streets, fancied, in the strange vividness of his waking dream, that he was Leander swimming across the Hellespont. His hand "came in contact with a gentleman's pocket" as he pursued this visionary amusement, and for two or three minutes Coleridge was in danger of being taken into custody as a pickpocket. On finding out how matters really stood, however, this stranger--genial, nameless soul--immediately gave to the strange boy the advantage of a subscription to a library close by, thus setting him up, as it were, in life. On another occasion, one of the higher boys, a "deputy-Grecian," found him seated in a corner reading Virgil. "Are you studying your lesson?" he asked. "No, I am reading for pleasure," said the boy, who was not sufficiently advanced to read Virgil in school. This introduced him to the favorable notice of the head-master Bowyer, and made of the elder scholar, Middleton by name, a steady friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and solitary, careless of play as play, and already full of that consuming spiritual curiosity which never left him, Coleridge's devotion to the indiscriminate stores of the circulating library gave the last aggravation to all the unwholesome particulars of his life. "Conceive what I must have been at fourteen," he exclaims. "I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger, and fancy!" ... A droll incident occurred about this period of his life, which shows ... his absolute want of ambition. The friendless boy had made acquaintance with a shoemaker and his wife, who had a shop near the school, and who were kind to him; and thereupon he conceived the extraordinary idea of getting himself apprenticed to his friend, whom he persuaded to go to the head-master to make this wonderful proposal. "Od's, my life, man, what d'ye mean?" cried the master, with not unnatural indignation mingling with his amazement; and notwithstanding Coleridge's support of the application, the shoemaker was turned out of the place, and the would-be apprentice chosen, "against my will," he says, "as one of those destined for the university." The same irascible yet excellent master flogged the boy severely on hearing that he boasted of being an infidel.... His next stage in life was not a shoemaker's shop in Newgate Street, but Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1791 at the age of nineteen--the object of many high prophecies and hopes on the part of his school and schoolfellows, who had unanimously determined that he was to be great and do them honor. The first thing he did, however, was alas! too common an incident: he got into debt, though not, it would appear, for an overwhelming sum, or in any discreditable way. So long as his friend of Christ's Hospital, Middleton, remained in Cambridge, Coleridge pursued his studies with a great deal of regularity and in his first year won the prize for a Greek ode. But after awhile his industry slackened, and a kind of dreamy idleness--implying no languor of the soul or common reluctance to mental work, but rather, it would seem, a disinclination to work in the usual grooves, and do what was expected of him--took possession of the young scholar. "He was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious," writes a fellow-student. "He was ready at any time to shed his mind in conversation, and for the sake of this his rooms were a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. What evenings I have spent in these rooms! What little suppers, or _sizings_, as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus and Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us; Coleridge had read it in the morning and in the evening he would repeat whole pages _verbatim_." --Adapted from _Blackwood's Magazine_. XIV BYRON AS SWIMMER AND FEASTER In 1858 Trelawney published his _Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron_. In many ways this is a remarkable book. It is the one source of information as to the last days of Shelley; concerning Byron's, others have furnished material. Trelawney is suspected of mingling some fiction with his truth, but the general tendency nowadays is to place confidence in these _Recollections_. He may not always give us a literal report, but he has likely reproduced the spirit. He is much more sympathetic in his treatment of Shelley than he is in his account of Byron. Trelawney himself was a remarkable character. He lived far into the time of a new generation, dying in his eighty-ninth year in 1881. Mary Shelley, in a letter to Maria Gisborne, February, 1822, describes him as "A kind of half-Arab Englishman.... He is clever: for his moral qualities I am yet in the dark. He is a strange web which I am endeavoring to unravel." In the _Recollections_ occurs this interesting account of Byron: Byron has been accused of drinking deeply. Our universities, certainly, did turn out more famous drinkers than scholars. In the good old times, to drink lustily was the characteristic of all Englishmen, just as tuft-hunting is now. Eternal swilling, and the rank habits and braggadocio manners which it engendered, came to a climax in George IV's reign. Since then, excessive drinking has gone out of fashion, but an elaborate style of gastronomy has come in to fill the void; so there is not much gained. Byron used to boast of the quantity of wine he had drunk. He said, "We young Whigs imbibed claret, and so saved our constitutions: the Tories stuck to port, and destroyed theirs and their country's." [Illustration: LORD BYRON From the portrait by T. Phillips] He bragged, too, of his prowess in riding, boxing, fencing, and even walking; but to excel in these things feet are as necessary as hands. It was difficult to avoid smiling at his boasting and self-glorification. In the water a fin is better than a foot, and in that element he did well; he was built for floating,--with a flexible body, open chest, broad beam, and round limbs. If the sea was smooth and warm, he would stay in it for hours; but as he seldom indulged in this sport, and when he did, over-exerted himself, he suffered severely; which observing, and knowing how deeply he would be mortified at being beaten, I had the magnanimity when contending with him to give in. He had a misgiving in his mind that I was trifling with him; and one day as we were on the shore, and the _Bolivar_ at anchor, about three miles off, he insisted on our trying conclusions; we were to swim to the yacht, dine in the sea alongside of her, treading water the while, and then to return to the shore. It was calm and hot, and seeing he would not be fobbed off, we started. I reached the boat a long time before he did; ordered the edibles to be ready, and floated until he arrived. We ate our fare leisurely, from off a grating that floated alongside, drank a bottle of ale, and I smoked a cigar, which he tried to extinguish,--as he never smoked. We then put about, and struck off towards the shore. We had not got a hundred yards on our passage, when he retched violently, and, as that is often followed by cramp, I urged him to put his hand on my shoulder that I might tow him back to the schooner. "Keep off, you villain, don't touch me. I'll drown ere I give in." I answered as Iago did to Roderigo: "'A fig for drowning! drown cats and blind puppies.' I shall go on board and try the effects of a glass of grog to stay my stomach." "Come on," he shouted, "I am always better after vomiting." With difficulty I deluded him back; I went on board, and he sat on the steps of the accommodation-ladder, with his feet in the water. I handed him a wineglass of brandy, and screened him from the burning sun. He was in a sullen mood, but after a time resumed his usual tone. Nothing could induce him to be landed in the schooner's boat, though I protested I had had enough of the water. "You may do as you like," he called out, and plumped in, and we swam on shore. He never afterwards alluded to this event, nor to his prowess in swimming, to me, except in the past tense. He was ill, and kept to his bed for two days afterwards. To return to his drinking propensities, after this digression about his gymnastic prowess: I must say, that of all his vauntings, it was, luckily for him, the emptiest--that is, after he left England and his boon companions, as I know nothing of what he did there. From all that I heard or witnessed of his habits abroad, he was and had been exceedingly abstemious in eating and drinking. When alone, he drank a glass or two of small claret or hock, and when utterly exhausted at night, a single glass of grog; which when I mixed it for him I lowered to what sailors call "water bewitched," and he never made any remark. I once, to try him, omitted the alcohol; he then said, "Tre, have you not forgotten the creature comfort?" I then put in two spoonfuls, and he was satisfied. This does not look like an habitual toper. His English acquaintances in Italy were, he said in derision, all milksops. On the rare occasion of any of his former friends visiting him, he would urge them to have a carouse with him, but they had grown wiser. He used to say that little Tommy Moore was the only man he knew who stuck to the bottle and put him on his mettle, adding, "But he is a native of the damp isle, where men subsist by suction." Byron had not damaged his body by strong drinks, but his terror of getting fat was so great that he reduced his diet to the point of absolute starvation. He was of that soft, lymphatic temperament which it is almost impossible to keep within moderate compass, particularly as in his case his lameness prevented his taking exercise. When he added to his weight, even standing was painful, so he resolved to keep down to eleven stone, or shoot himself. He said everything he swallowed was instantly converted into tallow and deposited on his ribs. He was the only human being I ever met with who had sufficient self-restraint and resolution to resist this proneness to fatten: he did so, and at Genoa, where he was last weighed, he was ten stone and nine pounds, and looked much less. This was not from vanity about his personal appearance, but from a better motive; and as, like Justice Greedy, he was always hungry, his merit was the greater. Occasionally he relaxed his vigilance, when he swelled apace. I remember one of his old friends saying, "Byron, how well you are looking!" If he had stopped there it had been well, but when he added, "You are getting fat," Byron's brow reddened, and his eyes flashed--"Do you call getting fat looking well, as if I were a hog?" and, turning to me, he muttered, "The beast, I can hardly keep my hands off him." The man who thus offended him was the husband of the lady addressed as "Genevra," and the original of his "Zuleika," in the _Bride of Abydos_. I don't think he had much appetite for his dinner that day, or for many days, and never forgave the man who, so far from wishing to offend, intended to pay him a compliment. Byron said he had tried all sorts of experiments to stay his hunger, without adding to his bulk. "I swelled," he said, "at one time to fourteen stone, so I clapped the muzzle to my jaws, and, like the hibernating animals, consumed my own fat." He would exist on biscuits and soda-water for days together, then, to allay the eternal hunger gnawing at his vitals, he would make up a horrid mess of cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens, deluged in vinegar, and gobble it up like a famished dog. On either of these unsavory dishes, with a biscuit and a glass or two of Rhine wine, he cared not how sour, he called feasting sumptuously. Upon my observing he might as well have fresh fish and vegetables, instead of stale, he laughed and answered: "I have an advantage over you, I have no palate; one thing is as good as another to me." "Nothing," I said, "disagrees with the natural man; he fasts and gorges, his nerves and brain don't bother him; but if you wish to live?-- "Who wants to live?" he replied, "not I. The Byrons are a short-lived race on both sides, father and mother; longevity is hereditary: I am nearly at the end of my tether. I don't care for death a ----; it is her sting! I can't bear pain." His habits and want of exercise damaged him, not drink. It must be borne in mind, moreover, that his brain was always working at high pressure. The consequences resulting from his way of life were low or intermittent fevers; these last had fastened on him in his early travels in the Levant; and there is this peculiarity in malarial fevers, that if you have once had them, you are ever afterwards susceptible to a renewal of their attacks if within their reach, and Byron was hardly ever out of it. Venice and Ravenna are belted in with swamps, and fevers are rife in the autumn. By starving his body Byron kept his brains clear; no man had brighter eyes or a clearer voice; and his resolute bearing and prompt replies, when excited, gave to his body an appearance of muscular power that imposed on strangers. I never doubted, for he was indifferent to life, and prouder than Lucifer, that if he had drawn his sword in Greece, or elsewhere, he would have thrown away the scabbard. [Illustration: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY From a chalk drawing after the original painting by Miss Curran] XV SHELLEY AS A FRESHMAN If one were to name ten of the greatest English poets beginning with Chaucer and ending with Tennyson, the name of Shelley would be included, although he died before he was thirty years old. Hogg, a friend of Shelley's, has given us an interesting account of their meeting when both were freshmen at Oxford. "At the commencement of Michaelmas Term," writes Hogg, "that is, at the end of October in the year 1801, I happened one day to sit next a freshman at dinner; it was his first appearance in hall. His figure was slight, and his aspect remarkably youthful, even at our table, where all were very young. He seemed thoughtful and absent. He ate little and had no acquaintance with any one. I know not how we fell into conversation, for such familiarity was unusual, and, strange to say, much reserve prevailed in a society where there could not possibly be occasion for any." This conversation led into a heated discussion of the merits of German and Italian literature. When the time for leaving the dining hall had come, Hogg invited his new acquaintance over to his rooms. During the transit the thread of the argument was lost, and while Hogg was lighting the candles Shelley frankly said that he was not competent to argue the point, as he had little knowledge of either German or Italian literature. Then Hogg with equal ingenuousness confessed that he knew but little of Italian and nothing of German literature. So the talk went merrily on. Shelley said it made little difference whether Italian or German literature were the more worthy, for all literature, what was it but vain trifling? What is the study of language but the study of words, of phrases, of the names of things? How much better and wiser to study things themselves! "I inquired," says Hogg, "a little bewildered, how this was to be effected. He answered, 'Through the physical sciences, and especially through chemistry,' and raising his voice, his face flushing as he spoke, he discoursed, with a degree of animation that far outshone his zeal in defense of the Germans, of chemistry and chemical analysis." While this is going on Hogg studies the youthful speaker. What manner of man is this brilliant guest? "It was a sum of many contradictions. His figure was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature. His clothes were expensive and made after the most approved mode of the day; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was delicate and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting. His features, his whole face and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small, yet the last appeared of a remarkable bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of absence, and in the agonies (if I may use the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration that characterizes the best works, and chiefly the frescoes of the great masters of Florence and Rome." The next day Hogg pays a visit to Shelley's rooms. The furniture was new and the walls were freshly papered, but everything in the room was in confusion. "Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were scattered on the floor in every place, as if the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Upon the table by his side were some books lying open, several letters, a bundle of new pens, and a bottle of japan ink, that served as an ink-stand, a piece of deal, lately part of the lid of a box, with many chips, and a handsome razor that had been used as a knife. There were bottles of soda-water, sugar, pieces of lemon, and the traces of an effervescent beverage. Two piles of books supported the tongs, and these upheld a small glass retort above an argand lamp. I had not been seated many minutes before the liquor in the vessel boiled over, adding fresh stains to the table, and rising in fumes with a disagreeable odor. Shelley snatched the glass quickly, and dashing it in pieces among ashes under the grate, increased the unpleasant and penetrating effluvium." Hogg and Shelley soon became fast friends and met every evening. "I was enabled," writes Hogg, "to continue my studies in the evening in consequence of a very remarkable peculiarity. My young and energetic friend was then overcome by extreme drowsiness, which speedily and completely vanquished him; he would sleep from two to four hours, often so soundly that his slumbers resembled a deep lethargy; he lay occasionally upon the sofa, but more commonly stretched upon the rug before a large fire, like a cat, and his little round head was exposed to such fierce heat, that I used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes I have interposed some shelter, but rarely with any permanent effect, for the sleeper usually contrived to turn himself, and to roll again into the spot where the fire glowed the brightest. His torpor was generally profound, but he would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long while in his sleep. At six he would suddenly compose himself, even in the midst of an animated narrative or of earnest discussion, and he would lie buried in entire forgetfulness, in a sweet and mighty oblivion, until ten, when he would suddenly start up, and rubbing his eyes with great violence, and passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, would enter at once into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses, either of his own composition or from the works of others, with a rapidity and an energy that were often quite painful. During the period of his occultation I took tea, and read or wrote without interruption. He would sometimes sleep for a shorter time, for about two hours, postponing for the like period the commencement of his retreat to the rug, and rising with tolerable punctuality at ten, and sometimes, though rarely, he was able entirely to forego the accustomed refreshment." After supper, which Shelley would take upon awaking at ten, the two friends would talk and read together until two o'clock. XVI THE DEATH OF SHELLEY In the Protestant cemetery at Rome one can find in an obscure place a plain stone bearing record of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and these lines from Shakspere's Tempest: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. And this is the story of how Shelley happens to have a memorial in the Roman cemetery: Shelley was a revolutionist in religion and politics, and revolutionists are seldom popular at home. Shelley's lyric poetry is unsurpassed, but his theories in some respects will never meet with the approval of common-sense humanity. England proved uncomfortable and so he left his country to live in other lands. In 1822 we find him with his family and a Mr. and Mrs. Williams in Casa Magni, a Roman villa in a cove on the bay of Spezzia. Here the poet and his friends became very fond of sailing in a boat which had been made for them. The boat, which they called the Ariel, was twenty-eight feet long and eight feet broad, and this with the assistance of a lad they learned to manage fairly well. To Shelley, whose health had been failing, the out-of-door life gave renewed vigor. On the eighth of July, Shelley and Williams, accompanied by a sailor-lad, left the harbor of Leghorn to go home to their wives, from whom they had been absent for several days. They had gone to Pisa to welcome Leigh Hunt to Italy, to meet other friends (among the number was Byron), and to do some business. Neither Shelley, Williams, nor the lad, was ever seen alive after that day. As we are indebted to Hogg for the best pen-pictures of the boy Shelley, so we are indebted to Trelawney for the best description of the closing scene. So we shall follow Trelawney's account in the main. Trelawney was in Leghorn and intended to accompany his friends out of the harbor in a separate boat, but owing to the refusal of the health officer of the harbor he was not allowed to go. As from his own vessel he watched the Ariel, containing the small party happy in the thought that in seven short hours they should be at home with their loved ones, his Genoese mate turned to him and said: "They are standing too much in-shore; the current will set them there." "They will soon have the land-breeze," replied Trelawney. "Maybe," said the mate, "she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board." Then he added as he pointed to the southwest, "Look at those black lines and dirty rags hanging on them out of the sky; look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief." "Although the sun was obscured by mists," Trelawney writes, "it was oppressively sultry. There was not a breath of air in the harbor. The heaviness of the atmosphere and an unwonted stillness benumbed my senses. I went down into the cabin and sank into a slumber. I was roused up by a noise overhead, and went on deck. The men were getting up another chain-cable to let go another anchor. There was a general stir amongst the shipping; shifting berths, getting down yards and masts, veering out cables, hauling in of hawsers, letting go anchors, hailing from the ships and quays, boats sculling rapidly to and fro. It was almost dusk, although only half-past six o'clock. The sea was of the color and looked as solid and smooth as a sheet of lead, and covered with an oily scum. Gusts of wind swept over without ruffling it, and big drops of rain fell on its surface, rebounding, as if they could not penetrate it. There was a commotion in the air, made up of many threatening sounds, coming upon us from the sea. Fishing craft and coasting vessels, under bare poles, rushed by us in shoals, running foul of the ships in the harbor. As yet the din and hubbub was that made by men, but their shrill pipings were suddenly silenced by the crashing voice of a thunder-squall that burst right over our heads. For some time no other sounds were to be heard than the thunder, wind, and rain. When the fury of the storm, which did not last for more than twenty minutes, had abated and the horizon was in some degree cleared, I looked to sea anxiously, in the hope of descrying Shelley's boat amongst the many small craft scattered about. I watched every speck that loomed on the horizon, thinking that they would have borne up on their return to the port, as all the other boats that had gone out in the same direction had done." Then followed a period of painful suspense. Were they safe or had they gone down? On the third day Trelawney went to Pisa to ascertain whether any one had heard anything of Shelley. "I told my fears to Hunt," he writes, "and then went upstairs to Byron. When I told him his lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned me." And what of the wives at Casa Magni awaiting the return of their husbands? Let one of the two tell the story. Mary is the wife of Shelley, and Jane is Mrs. Williams. "Yet I thought when he, when my Shelley returns, I shall be happy--he will comfort me; if my boy be ill, he will restore him and encourage me.... Thus a week passed. On Monday, 8th, Jane had a letter from Edward dated Saturday; he said that he waited at Leghorn for Shelley, who was at Pisa; that Shelley's return was certain; 'but,' he continued, 'if I should not come by Monday, I will come in a felucca, and you may expect me on Thursday evening at furthest.' "This was Monday, the fatal Monday, but with us it was stormy all day, and we did not at all suppose that they could put to sea. At twelve at night we had a thunder-storm. Tuesday it rained all day and was calm--the sky wept on their graves. On Wednesday, the wind was fair from Leghorn, and in the evening several feluccas arrived thence. One brought word they had sailed Monday, but we did not believe them. Thursday was another day of fair wind, and when twelve at night came, and we did not see the tall sails of the little boat double the promontory before us, we began to fear, not the truth, but some illness, some disagreeable news for their detention." "Jane got so uneasy that she determined to proceed the next day to Leghorn in a boat to see what was the matter. Friday came and with it a heavy sea and bad wind. Jane, however, resolved to be rowed to Leghorn, since no boat could sail, and busied herself in preparation. I wished her to wait for letters, since Friday was letter-day. She would not, but the sea detained her; the swell rose so that no boat would endure out. At twelve at noon our letters came; there was one from Hunt to Shelley; it said, 'Pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed on Monday and we are anxious.' The paper fell from me. I trembled all over. Jane read it. 'Then it is all over,' she said. 'No, my dear Jane,' I cried, 'it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful. Come with me--we will go to Leghorn, we will post, to be swift and learn our fate.' "We crossed to Lerici ... we posted to Pisa. It must have been fearful to see us--two poor, wild, aghast creatures, driving (like Matilda) towards the sea to learn if we were to be forever doomed to misery. I knew that Hunt was at Pisa, at Lord Byron's house, but I thought that Lord Byron was at Leghorn. I settled that we should drive to Casa Lanfranchi, that I should get out and ask the fearful question of Hunt, 'Do you know anything of Shelley?' On entering Pisa, the idea of seeing Hunt for the first time for four years under such circumstances and asking him such a question was so terrific to me that it was with difficulty that I prevented myself from going into convulsions. My struggles were dreadful. They knocked at the door and some one called out, 'Chi e?' It was the Guiccioli's maid. Lord Byron was in Pisa. Hunt was in bed, so I was to see Lord Byron instead of him. This was a great relief to me. I staggered upstairs; the Guicciola came to meet me smiling, while I could hardly say, 'Where is he--Sapete alcuna cosa di Shelley?' They knew nothing; he had left Pisa on Sunday; on Monday he had sailed; there had been bad weather Monday afternoon; more they knew not." XVII THE SCHOOL-DAYS OF JOHN KEATS In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the North Road from London, my father, John Clarke, says Charles Cowden Clarke in _The Gentleman's Magazine_, kept a school. The house had been built by a West India merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of the domestic architecture of that period, the whole front being of the purest red brick, wrought by means of molds into rich designs of flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over niches in the center of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect finish of the structure were such as to procure its protection when a branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to Enfield.... Here it was that John Keats all but commenced, and did complete, his school education. He was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1795, and he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from the child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will be readily conceived that it is difficult to recall from the "dark backward and abysm" of seventy-odd years the general acts of perhaps the youngest individual in a corporation of between seventy and eighty youngsters; and very little more of Keats's child-life can I remember than that he had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite with all, particularly my mother.... Keats's father was the principal servant at the Swan and Hoop stables--a man of so remarkably fine a common-sense, and native respectability, that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanor used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been to visit his boys. John was the only one resembling him in person and feature, with brown hair and dark hazel eyes. The father was killed by a fall from his horse in returning from a visit to the school. This detail may be deemed requisite when we see in the last memoir of the poet the statement that "John Keats was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1795, in the upper rank of the middle class." His two brothers--George, older, and Thomas, younger than himself--were like the mother, who was tall, of good figure, with large oval face and sensible deportment. The last of the family was a sister--Fanny, I think, much younger than all,--and I hope still living (in 1874)--of whom I remember, when once walking in the garden with her brothers, my mother speaking of her with much fondness for her pretty and simple manners.... In the early part of his school-life John gave no extraordinary indications of intellectual character; but it was remembered of him afterwards, that there was ever present a determined and steady spirit in all his undertakings: I never knew it misdirected in his required pursuit of study. He was a most orderly scholar. The future ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed, which was greedily drinking in the moisture which made it afterwards burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty. My father was in the habit, at each half-year's vacation, of bestowing prizes upon those pupils who had performed the greatest quantity of voluntary work; and such was Keats's indefatigable energy for the last two or three successive half-years of his remaining at school, that, upon each occasion he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school hour began, and that was at seven o'clock, almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted, and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he would be in the school--almost the only one--at his Latin or French translation, and so unconscious and regardless was he of the consequences of so close and persevering an application that he never would have taken the necessary exercise had he not been sometimes driven out for the purpose by one of his masters. It has just been said that he was a favorite with all. Not the less beloved was he for having a highly pugnacious spirit, which, when roused, was one of the most picturesque exhibitions--off the stage--I ever saw. One of the transports of that marvelous actor, Edmund Kean--whom, by the way, he idolized--was its nearest resemblance; and the two were not very dissimilar in face and figure. Upon one occasion, when an usher, on account of some impertinent behavior, had boxed his brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself in the received posture of offense, and, it was said, struck the usher--who could, so to say, have put him into his pocket. His passion at times was almost ungovernable, and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was in "one of his moods," and was endeavoring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw conflagration, for he had an intensely tender affection for his brothers and proved it upon the most trying occasions. He was not merely the "favorite of all," like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, superior or equal, who had known him. In the latter part of the time--perhaps eighteen months--that he remained at school, he occupied the hours during meals in reading. Thus, his whole time was engrossed. He had a tolerably retentive memory, and the quantity that he read was surprising. He must in those last months have exhausted the school library, which consisted principally of abridgments of all the voyages and travels of any note; Mavor's collection, also his _Universal History_; Robertson's histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's productions, together with many other works equally well calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly recurring sources of attraction were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lemprière's _Classical Dictionary_, which he appeared to _learn_, and Spence's _Polymetis_. This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology; here was he "suckled in that creed outworn;" for his amount of classical attainment extended no farther than the _Æneid_, with which epic, indeed, he was so fascinated that before leaving school he had _voluntarily_ translated in writing a considerable portion. And yet I remember that at that early age--mayhap under fourteen--notwithstanding, and through all its incidental attractiveness, he hazarded the opinion to me (and the expression riveted my surprise), that there was feebleness in the structure of the work. He must have gone through all the better publications in the school library, for he asked me to lend him some of my books, and, in my "mind's eye" I now see him at supper (we had our meals in the school-room), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's _History of His Own Time_ between himself and the table, eating his meal from beyond it. This work, and Leigh Hunt's _Examiner_--which my father took in, and I used to lend to Keats--no doubt laid the foundation of his love of civil and religious liberty. He once told me, smiling, that one of his guardians, being informed what books I had lent him to read, declared that if he had fifty children he would not send one of them to that school. Bless his patriot head! When he left Enfield at fourteen years of age, he was apprenticed to Mr. Thomas Hammond, a medical man, residing in Church Street, Edmonton, and exactly two miles from Enfield. This arrangement evidently gave him satisfaction, and I fear it was the most placid period of his painful life; for now, with the exception of the duty he had to perform in the surgery--by no means an onerous one--his whole leisure hours were employed in indulging his passion for reading and translating. During his apprenticeship he finished the _Æneid_. The distance between our residences being so short, I gladly encouraged his inclination to come over when he could claim a leisure hour; and in consequence I saw him about five or six times a month on my own leisure afternoons. He rarely came empty-handed; either he had a book to read, or brought one to be exchanged. When the weather permitted, we always sat in an arbor at the end of a spacious garden, and--in Boswellian dialect--"we had a good talk." ... XVIII THE HEROISM OF SIR WALTER SCOTT When Carlyle wrote and lectured on _Heroes and Hero Worship_, he would have made no mistake in selecting one of his contemporary countrymen as a fine example of the man of letters as hero. But it is one of the characteristics of human nature to see the heroic in the remote in time and place rather than in the near. Carlyle, had he closely examined the life of his Scotch neighbor, would have been forced to acknowledge that no knight battling with chivalric valor in the fiction of Sir Walter ever displayed more nobility of soul than that displayed by Walter Scott in his adversity. Critics may find flaws in Scott's style, but as time reveals more fully the character of the man they are unable to find fault with the man himself. Some years ago was published Scott's journal. Parts of this had been published before, but, owing to the nature of some of the information, much of this had been suppressed until sixty years after the death of the writer. To quote from this journal is, perhaps, the best method of giving a first-hand impression of the real man. He is his own revealer. Scott called the big book in which he from time to time records for several years his thoughts his "Gurnal," because his daughter Sophia had once spelled the word in that way. This book could be closed with a lock and key. On the title-page was written: As I walked by myself, I talked to myself, And thus myself said to me. (Old Song.) Scott's poems and novels brought him much revenue. This he spent in purchasing land. He became a Scotch "laird" owning many acres, and a most beautiful home, Abbotsford. But unfortunately he formed a bad business partnership. When the firm through mismanagement and speculation, in which Scott had no part, went down in ruin, Scott found to his surprise that he owed a vast sum. In his "Gurnal" of September 5, 1827, he wrote: "The debts for which I am legally responsible, though no party to this contraction, amount to £30,000." But although his legal responsibility was for so great a sum, he felt that morally he was responsible for a far greater amount. When the printing house of James Ballantyne & Co., the publishing house of Constable, and Hunt and Robinson, failed, they failed for upwards of half a million pounds. Of this enormous total, Scott could be held morally responsible for one hundred and thirty thousand pounds. For several weeks after intimations of failure had reached Scott, he lived in a state of uncertainty. On the 18th of December, 1825, he wrote a long account in his journal. It was published lately for the first time, appearing in the _Quarterly Review_. What a revelation of the man it is! "Ballantyne called on me this morning. _Venit illa suprema dies._ My extremity is come. Cadell has received letters from London which all but positively announce the failure of Hurst and Robinson, so that Constable and Co. must follow, and I must go with poor James Ballantyne for company. I suppose it will involve my all.... I have been rash in anticipating funds to buy lands, but then I made from £5,000 to £10,000 a year, and land was my temptation. I think nobody can lose a penny--that is my one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall makes them higher, or seems so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. This news will make sad hearts at Darnick, and in the cottages of Abbotsford, which I do not cherish the least hope of preserving. It has been my Delilah, and so I have often termed it; and now the recollection of the extensive woods I planted, and the walks I have formed, from which strangers must derive both the pleasure and profit, will excite feelings likely to sober my gayest moments. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest? How live a poor indebted man where I was once the wealthy, and honored? My children are provided [for]; thank God for that! I was to have gone there in joy and prosperity to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must get them kind masters; there may be yet those who loving me may love my dog because it has been mine. I must end this, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I find my dogs' feet on my knees. I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere--this is nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things are. Poor Will Laidlaw! Poor Tom Purdie! this will be news to wring your heart, and many a poor fellow's besides to whom my prosperity was daily bread." After touching on some other matters he comes back to Abbotsford,--"Yet to save Abbotsford I would attempt all that was possible. My heart clings to the place I have created. There is scarce a tree on it that does not owe its being to me, and the pain of leaving it is greater than I can bear." A Mr. Skene, in whose gardens Scott while in Edinburgh about a month later took a walk, has left a record of a conversation with Scott. He wrote immediately after the walk so as to record the conversation. This is what Scott said: "Do you know I experience a sort of determined pleasure in confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse--in standing, as it were, in the breach that has overthrown my fortunes, and saying, Here I stand, at least, an honest man. And God knows if I have enemies, this I may at least with truth say, that I have never wittingly given cause of enmity in the whole course of my life, for even the burnings of political hate seemed to find nothing in my nature to feed the flame. I am not conscious of having borne a grudge towards any man, and at this moment of my overthrow, so help me God, I wish well and feel kindly to every one. And if I thought that any of my works contained a sentence hurtful to any one's feelings, I would burn it." Scott worked so assiduously that by January, 1828, he had reduced his debt $200,000. On the 17th of December, 1830, more than the half of his debt had been paid. On that day his creditors had a meeting during which the following resolutions were passed: "That Sir Walter Scott be requested to accept of his furniture, plate, linen, paintings, library, and curiosities of every description as the best means the creditors have of expressing their very high sense of his most honorable conduct, and in grateful acknowledgment for the unparalleled and most successful exertions he has made, and continues to make, for them." That the creditors of Scott would be glad to show their gratitude is easy to believe when one learns that while Scott was paying pound for pound the other members of the firm paid their creditors less than three shillings to the pound. That Scott did his herculean task at great sacrifice is known. How much of pain and worry he endured is not so well known. At one time he writes: "After all, I have fagged through six pages, and made poor Wurmser lay down his sword on the glacis of Mantua--and my head aches--my eyes ache--my back aches--so does my breast--and I am sure my heart aches--what can duty want more?" XIX WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Walter Savage Landor, whose course of life ran from 1775 to 1864, in his old age confessed, "I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so." This is the exaggeration of an old man who has been impressed by the frailty of human endeavor. Nevertheless, Landor is a striking illustration of the artistic temperament. He was impractical. Landor could not make a good fist. Even when angry, a frame of mind in which he found himself very frequently, he did not clench his fists without leaving his thumbs in relaxation--a sure sign, it is said, of the lack of tenacity of purpose and tact in practical dealings. He would adjust his spectacles on his forehead, and then, forgetting what he had done, would overturn everything in his wild search for them. When he started out on a trip he would take the greatest pains to remember the key of his portmanteau, and then forget to take the portmanteau; and then on discovering the absence of the portmanteau he would launch out into the most vehement denunciation of the carelessness and depravity of the railroad officials, heaping objurgations upon them, their fathers, and their grandfathers. Then after he had exhausted his vocabulary of invective and eased his soul, the humor of the situation would appeal to him and he would begin to laugh, quietly at first, and then in louder and louder strains until his merriment seemed more formidable than his wrath. When Landor says that he never did a wise thing but has written many, one is led to think of his marriage. No one wrote about marriage more seriously than Landor, no one entered upon marriage more recklessly. "Death itself," he once wrote, "to the reflecting mind is less serious than marriage. The elder plant is cut down that the younger may have room to nourish; a few tears drop into the loosened soil, and buds and blossoms spring over it. Death is not even a blow, it is not even a pulsation; it is a pause. But marriage unrolls the awful lot of numberless generations." The man who could write thus impressively about marriage one spring evening at Bath attended a ball. There he met a beautiful young lady whom he admired. As soon as he set eyes on her he exclaimed, "By heaven! that's the nicest girl in the room, and I'll marry her." He married her and was ever after unhappy. "God forbid," once growled Landor, "that I should do otherwise than declare that she always _was_ agreeable--to every one but _me_." Landor was not in the habit of talking about his domestic troubles, but at one time when he was contrasting other and more agreeable marriages he was heard to say that he "unfortunately was taken by a pretty face." Kenyon related to a friend an incident of the Landor honeymoon that is significant. On one occasion, it seems, the newly married couple were sitting side by side; Landor was reading some of his own verses to his bride--and who could read more exquisitely?--when all at once the lady, releasing herself from his arm, jumped up, saying, "Oh, do stop, Walter, there's that dear delightful Punch performing in the street. I must look out of the window." Exit poetry forever. It would have been difficult for any woman to live amicably with Landor. In his youth he was suspended from college, and when he was a very old man he was fined $5,000 for writing a libelous article. Between these two periods his life was made up of many fits of passion. His rustication, or suspension from Trinity College, Cambridge, came about in the following manner: One evening Landor invited his friends to wine. His gun, powder, and shot were in the next room, as he had been out hunting in the morning of that day. In a room opposite to Landor's lived a young man whom Landor disliked. The two parties exchanged taunts. Finally in a spirit of bravado Landor took his gun and fired a shot through the closed shutters of the enemy. Quite naturally this bit of pleasantry was not appreciated by the owner of the shutters and complaint was lodged. When the investigation was made the president tried to be as lenient as he possibly could, but his conciliatory manner was stubbornly met by the youthful culprit. When rustication was pronounced it was hoped that Landor would return to the college to honor it and himself by an earnest devotion to his studies. But he never returned. When Landor was living in Florence the Italians thought him the ideally mad Englishman. He lived for a time in the Medici palace, but his friendly relations with the landlord, a nobleman bearing the distinguished name of the palace, had an abrupt termination. Landor imagined that the marquis had unfairly coaxed away his coachman, and he wrote a letter of complaint. The next day in comes the strutting marquis with his hat on in the presence of Mrs. Landor and some visitors. One of the visitors describes the scene: "He had scarcely advanced three steps from the door, when Landor walked up to him quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own anger when it was all over; inextinguishable laughter, which none of us could resist." This reminds one of the story Milnes told to Emerson, that Landor once became so enraged at his Italian cook that he picked him up and threw him out of the window, and then exclaimed, "Good God, I never thought of those violets!" Quite in strong contrast to the irascible side of his nature was his tender love for his children, of which he had four, the last born in 1825. In them he took constant delight. In their games _Babbo_, as he was affectionately termed, was the most gleeful and frolicsome of them all. When he was separated from them he was in continual anxiety. On one of his trips he received the first childish letter from his son Arnold. In his reply the concluding lines reveal the intense affection of the father: I shall never be quite happy until I see you again and put my cheek upon your head. Tell my sweet Julia that if I see twenty little girls I will not romp with any of them before I romp with her, and kiss your two dear brothers for me. You must always love them as much as I love you, and you must teach them how to be good boys, which I cannot do so well as you can. God preserve and bless you, my own Arnold. My heart beats as if it would fly to you, my own fierce creature. We shall very soon meet. Love your, BABBO. In literature Landor will be remembered as the author of _Imaginary Conversations_, composed during his years of retirement at Florence. In these _Conversations_ we hear the great men and women of the past who converse as Landor imagined they might have talked. Landor's prose style is admired, because of its simplicity and classic purity. After the publication of the first two volumes of this work Landor was visited as a man of genius by Englishmen and Americans. One day Hogg, the friend of Shelley, was announced while Hare, a well-known Englishman, was sitting in the room. Landor said, as he considered the names of his two visitors, that he felt like La Fontaine with all the better company of the beasts about him. Hazlitt was one of his frequent visitors. One of their reported conversations is about Wordsworth. Upon Landor's saying that he had never seen the famous Lake poet, Hazlitt asked, "But you have seen a horse, I suppose?" and on receiving an affirmative answer, continued, "Well, sir, if you have seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, you may say you have seen Wordsworth, sir." Emerson was desirous of seeing Landor. One of the motives that led him to take his first trip abroad was the desire to see five distinguished men. These men were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, DeQuincey, and Carlyle. "On the 15th May," writes Emerson in his _English Traits_, "I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts." Landor used to say somewhat loftily, "I do not remember that resentment has ever made me commit an injustice." And in this connection he related to a friend an incident of his early married life, when he was living at Como, where he had for his next-door neighbor the Princess of Wales. Landor and his royal neighbor had a quarrel arising from trespassing by the domestics of the Princess. "The insolence of her domestics," said Landor, "was only equaled by the intolerable discourtesy of her Royal Highness when she was appealed to in the matter." Some years later when the Milan Commission was carrying on its "delicate investigation" concerning the character of the Queen, about whom there had been rumors detrimental to her character, Landor was asked to give confidential testimony against Queen Caroline. This made Landor indignant and he replied,--"Her Royal Highness is my enemy; she has deeply injured me, therefore I can say nothing against her, and I never will." It is significant that shortly before this application for testimony was made, George IV took an opportunity to ask Landor to dinner. "I declined the honor," said the old lion, "on the plea that I had an attack of quinsy. I always have quinsy when royal people ask me to dinner," he added, laughing immoderately. Ah, what avails the sceptered race, Ah, what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace!-- Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee. XX LEIGH HUNT'S BUSINESS ABILITY Sir George Murray Smith, leading member of the famous publishing house of Smith, Elder and Company, was well acquainted with the leading literary men of England during an active career of sixty years. The following account of Leigh Hunt is especially entertaining: "Business was by no means Leigh Hunt's strong point. In this respect, but not otherwise, he may have suggested Skimpole to Charles Dickens. On one of my visits I found him trying to puzzle out the abstruse question of how he should deduct some such sum as thirteen shillings and ninepence from a sovereign. On another occasion I had to pay him a sum of money, £100 or £200, and I wrote him a check for the amount. 'Well,' he said, 'what am I to do with this little bit of paper?' I told him that if he presented it at the bank they would pay him cash for it, but I added, 'I will save you that trouble.' I sent to the bank and cashed the check for him. He took the notes away carefully inclosed in an envelope. Two days afterward Leigh Hunt came in a state of great agitation to tell me that his wife had burned them. He had thrown the envelope, with the bank notes inside, carelessly down, and his wife had flung it into the fire. Leigh Hunt's agitation while on his way to bring this news had not prevented him from purchasing on the road a little statuette of Psyche which he carried, without any paper round it, in his hand. I told him I thought something might be done in the matter; I sent to the bankers and got the numbers of the notes, and then in company with Leigh Hunt went off to the Bank of England. I explained our business, and we were shown into a room where three old gentlemen were sitting at tables. They kept us waiting some time, and Leigh Hunt, who had meantime been staring all round the room, at last got up, walked up to one of the staid officials, and addressing him said in wondering tones: 'And this is the Bank of England! And do you sit here all day, and never see the green woods and the trees and flowers and the charming country?' Then in tones of remonstrance he demanded, 'Are you contented with such a life?' All this time he was holding the little naked Psyche in one hand, and with his long hair and flashing eyes made a surprising figure. I fancy I can still see the astonished faces of the three officials; they would have made a most delightful picture. I said, 'Come away, Mr. Hunt, these gentlemen are very busy.' I succeeded in carrying Leigh Hunt off, and, after entering into certain formalities, we were told that the value of the notes would be paid in twelve months. I gave Leigh Hunt the money at once, and he went away rejoicing." XXI DE QUINCEY RUNS AWAY My father died when I was about seven years old, says the author of the _Confessions of an Opium-Eater_, and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small, and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease, and at fifteen my command of that language was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric meters, but would converse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment--an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in my case, was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish _extempore_; for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of things, etc., gave me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, etc. "That boy," said one of my masters, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one." He who honored me with this eulogy was a scholar, "and a ripe and good one," and of all my tutors, was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man's great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance; and, finally, to that of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by ---- College, Oxford, and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men whom I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favorite master; and, besides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice the poverty and meagerness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be, and know himself, far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or power of mind. This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only, for the two boys who jointly with myself composed the first form were better Grecians than the head-master, though not more elegant scholars.... I who had a small patrimonial property, the income of which was sufficient to support me at college, wished to be sent thither immediately. I made earnest representations on the subject to my guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who was more reasonable, and had more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived at a distance; two of the other three resigned all their authority into the hands of the fourth, and this fourth, with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, in his way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all opposition to his will. After a certain number of letters and personal interviews, I found that I had nothing to hope for, not even a compromise of the matter, from my guardian: unconditional submission was what he demanded, and I prepared myself, therefore, for other measures. Summer was now coming on with hasty steps, and my seventeenth birthday was fast approaching, after which day I had sworn within myself that I would no longer be numbered among schoolboys. Money being what I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman of high rank, who, though young herself, had known me from a child, and had latterly treated me with great distinction, requesting that she would "lend" me five guineas. For upward of a week no answer came, and I was beginning to despond, when at length a servant put into my hands a double letter, with a coronet on the seal. The letter was kind and obliging; the fair writer was on the sea-coast, and in that way the delay had arisen; she inclosed double of what I had asked, and good-naturedly hinted that if I should _never_ repay her, it would not absolutely ruin her. Now, then, I was prepared for my scheme: ten guineas, added to about two that I had remaining from my pocket-money, seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length of time, and at that happy age, if no _definite_ boundary can be assigned to one's power, the spirit of hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite. It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and, what cannot often be said of his remarks, it is a very feeling one) that we never do anything consciously for the last time (of things, that is, which we have long been in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart. This truth I felt deeply when I came to leave ----, a place which I did not love, and where I had not been happy. On the evening before I left ---- forever, I grieved when the ancient and lofty schoolroom resounded with the evening service, performed for the last time in my hearing; and at night, when the muster-roll of names was called over, and mine (as usual) was called first, I stepped forward, and passing the head-master, who was standing by, I bowed to him, and looked earnestly in his face, thinking to myself, "He is old and infirm, and in this world I shall not see him again." I was right; I never _did_ see him again, nor never shall. He looked at me complacently, smiled good-naturedly, returned my salutation (or rather my valediction), and we parted (though he knew it not) forever. I could not reverence him intellectually, but he had been uniformly kind to me, and had allowed me many indulgences, and I grieved at the thought of the mortification I should inflict upon him. The morning came which was to launch me into the world, and from which my whole succeeding life has, in many important points, taken its coloring. I lodged in the head-master's house, and had been allowed, from my first entrance, the indulgence of a private room, which I used both as a sleeping-room and as a study. At half after three I rose, and gazed with deep emotion at the ancient towers of ----, "drest in earliest light," and beginning to crimson with the radiant luster of a cloudless July morning. I was firm and immovable in my purpose, but yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger and troubles; and if I could have foreseen the hurricane, and perfect hail-storm of affliction, which soon fell upon me, well might I have been agitated. To this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, and in some degree a medicine. The silence was more profound than that of midnight, and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence, because, the light being broad and strong as that of noonday at other seasons of the year, it seems to differ from perfect day chiefly because man is not yet abroad, and thus, the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures of God, seem to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man, and his restless and unquiet spirit, are not there to trouble its sanctity. I dressed myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the room. For the last year and a half this room had been my "pensive citadel:" here I had read and studied through all the hours of the night, and, though true it was that, for the latter part of this time, I, who was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my gayety and happiness, during the strife and fever of contention with my guardian, yet, on the other hand, as a boy so passionately fond of books, and dedicated to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection. I wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing too certainly that I looked upon them for the last time. While I write this, it is eighteen years ago, and yet, at this moment, I see distinctly, as if it were yesterday, the lineaments and expressions of the object on which I fixed my parting gaze: it was a picture of the lovely ----, which hung over the mantelpiece, the eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with benignity and divine tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to gather consolation from it, as a devotee from his patron saint. While I was yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of ---- clock proclaimed that it was four o'clock. I went up to the picture, kissed it, and then gently walked out and closed the door forever! XXII MACAULAY'S CHILDHOOD Macaulay is one of the brilliant lights of the first half of the last century. Trevelyan's _Life and Letters_ of Macaulay gives us an interesting glimpse of his childhood. When his parents moved from the heart of London into a less crowded district, Macaulay, baby though he was, kept the early impressions of the place. "He remembered," says his biographer, "standing up at the nursery window by his father's side, looking at a cloud of black smoke pouring out of a tall chimney. He asked if that was hell: an inquiry that was received with great displeasure which at the time he could not understand. The kindly father must have been pained almost against his own will at finding what feature of his stern creed it was that had embodied itself in so very material a shape before his little son's imagination. When in after days, Mrs. Macaulay was questioned as to how soon she began to detect in the child a promise of the future, she used to say that his sensibilities and affections were remarkably developed at an age which to her hearers appeared next to incredible. He would cry for joy on seeing her after a few hours' absence, and (till her husband put a stop to it) her power of exciting his feelings was often made an exhibition to her friends. She did not regard this precocity as a proof of cleverness, but, like a foolish young mother, only thought that so tender a nature was marked for early death. "The new residence was in the High Street of Clapham, a more commodious part of London than that which they had just left. "It was a roomy, comfortable dwelling, with a very small garden behind, and in front a very small one indeed, which has entirely disappeared beneath a large shop thrown out toward the roadway by the present occupier, who bears the name of Heywood. Here the boy passed a quiet and most happy childhood. From the time that he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire, with his book on the floor, and a piece of bread and butter in his hand. A very clever woman who then lived in the house as parlor-maid told how he used to sit in his nankeen frock, perched on the table by her as she was cleaning the plate, and expounding to her out of a volume as big as himself. He did not care for toys, but was very fond of taking his walk, when he would hold forth to his companion, whether nurse or mother, telling interminable stories, out of his own head, or repeating what he had been reading in language far above his years. His memory retained without effort the phraseology of the book which he had been last engaged on, and he talked, as the maid said, 'quite printed words,' which produced an effect that appeared formal, and often, no doubt, exceedingly droll. Mrs. Hannah More was fond of relating how she called at Mr. Macaulay's, and was met by a fair, pretty, slight child, with abundance of light hair, about four years of age, who came to the front door to receive her, and tell her that his parents were out, but that if she would be good enough to come in he would bring her a glass of old spirits, a proposition which greatly startled the old lady, who had never aspired beyond cowslip-wine. When questioned as to what he knew about old spirits he could only say that Robinson Crusoe often had some. About this period his father took him on a visit to Lady Waldegrave at Strawberry Hill, and was much pleased to exhibit to his old friend the fair, bright boy, dressed in a green coat with red collar and cuffs, a frill at the throat, and white trousers. After some time had been spent among the wonders of the Orford Collection, of which he ever after carried a catalogue in his head, a servant who was waiting on the company in the great gallery spilled some hot coffee over his legs. The hostess was all kindness and compassion, and when, after a while, she asked him how he was feeling, the little fellow looked up in her face, and replied, 'Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.' "But it must not be supposed his quaint manners proceeded from affectation or conceit, for all testimony declares that a more simple and natural child never lived, or a more lively and merry one. He had at his command the resources of the Common; to this day the most unchanged spot within ten miles of St. Paul's, and which to all appearance will ere long hold that pleasant pre-eminence within ten leagues. That delightful wilderness of gorse bushes, and poplar groves and gravel pits, and ponds great and small, was to little Tom Macaulay a region of inexhaustible romance and mystery. He explored its recesses; he composed, and almost believed, its legends; he invented for its different features a nomenclature which has been faithfully preserved by two generations of children. A slight ridge intersected by deep ditches toward the west of the Common, the very existence of which no one above eight years old would notice, was dignified with the title of the Alps; while the elevated island, covered with shrubs, that gives a name to the Mount pond, was regarded with infinite awe, as being the nearest approach within the circuit of his observation to a conception of the majesty of Sinai. Indeed, at this period his infant fancy was much exercised with the threats and terrors of the Law. He had a little plot of ground at the back of the house, marked out as his own by a row of oyster shells, which a maid one day threw away as rubbish. He went straight to the drawing-room, where his mother was entertaining some visitors, walked into the circle and said, very solemnly, 'Cursed be Sally; for it is written, cursed be he that removeth his neighbor's landmark.' "When still the merest child, he was sent as a day-scholar to Mr. Greaves, a shrewd Yorkshireman with a turn for science, who had been brought originally to the neighborhood in order to educate a number of African youths sent over to imbibe Western civilization at the fountain-head. The poor fellows had found as much difficulty in keeping alive at Clapham as Englishmen experience at Sierra Leone; and, in the end, their tutor set up a school for boys of his own color, and one time had charge of almost the entire rising generation of the Common. Mrs. Macaulay explained to Tom that he must learn to study without the solace of bread-and-butter, to which he replied, 'Yes, Mama, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter.' But, as a matter of fact, no one ever crept more unwillingly to school. Each several afternoon he made piteous entreaties to be excused returning after dinner, and was met by the unvarying formula, 'No, Tom, if it rains cats and dogs, you shall go.' "His reluctance to leave home had more than one side to it. Not only did his heart stay behind, but the regular lessons of the class took him away from occupations which in his eyes were infinitely more delightful and important; for these were probably the years of his greatest literary activity. As an author he never again had more facility, or anything like so wide a range. In September, 1808, his mother writes: 'My dear Tom continues to show marks of uncommon genius. He gets on wonderfully in all branches of his education, and the extent of his reading, and of the knowledge he derived from it, are truly astonishing in a boy not yet eight years old. He is at the same time as playful as a kitten. To give you some idea of the activity of his mind I will mention a few circumstances that may interest you and Colin. You will believe that to him we never appear to regard anything he does as anything more than a schoolboy's amusement. He took it into his head to write a compendium of universal history about a year ago, and he really contrived to give a tolerably connected view of the leading events from the creation to the present time, filling about a quire of paper. He told me one day that he had been writing a paper which Henry Daly was to translate into Malabar, to persuade the people of Travancore to embrace the Christian religion. On reading it, I found it to contain a very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. He was so fired with reading Scott's _Lay_ and _Marmion_, the former of which he got entirely, and the latter almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in reading them, that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos which he called _The Battle of Cheviot_.'" XXIII MACAULAY BECOMES FAMOUS In 1848 Macaulay was a famous man. He had served in India and had written the first part of his _History of England_. In this year after a lapse of nine years he again keeps a diary. From this diary we quote extracts showing how he became famous. "Dec. 4th, 1848.--I have felt to-day somewhat anxious about the fate of my book. The sale has surpassed expectation: but that proves only that people have formed a high idea of what they are to have. The disappointment, if there is disappointment, will be great. All that I hear is laudatory. But who can trust to praise that is poured into his own ear? At all events, I have aimed high; I have tried to do something that may be remembered; I have had the year 2000, or even 3000, often in my mind; I have sacrificed nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style; and if I fail, my failure will be more honorable than nine-tenths of the successes that I have witnessed." "Dec. 12th, 1848.--Longman called. A new edition of three thousand copies is preparing as fast as they can work. I have reason to be pleased. Of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ two thousand two hundred and fifty copies were sold in the first year; of _Marmion_ two thousand copies in the first month; of my book three thousand copies in ten days. Black says that there has been no such sale since the days of _Waverley_. The success is in every way complete beyond all hope and is the more agreeable to me because expectation had been wound up so high that disappointment was almost inevitable. I think, though with some misgivings, that the book will live." "January 11th, 1849.--I am glad to find how well my book continues to sell. The second edition of three thousand was out of print almost as soon as it appeared, and one thousand two hundred and fifty of the third edition are already bespoken. I hope all this will not make me a coxcomb. I feel no intoxicating effect; but a man may be drunk without knowing it. If my abilities do not fail me, I shall be a rich man, as rich, that is to say, as I wish to be. But that I am already, if it were not for my dear ones. I am content, and should have been so with less. On the whole, I remember no success so complete, and I remember all Byron's poems and all Scott's novels." "Saturday, January 27th.--Longman has written to say that only sixteen hundred copies are left of the third edition of five thousand, and that two thousand more copies must be immediately printed, still to be called the third edition.... Of such a run I had never dreamed. But I had thought that the book would have a permanent place in our literature, and I see no reason to alter that opinion." "February 2d.--Mahon sent me a letter from Arbuthnot, saying that the Duke of Wellington was enthusiastic in admiration of my book. Though I am almost callous to praise now, this praise made me happy for two minutes. A fine old fellow!" The above selections are from Macaulay's diary, as was said. Now come several from letters to a Mr. Ellis, to whom Macaulay sent many. "March 8th, 1849. "At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a book-seller's window with the following label: 'Only £2 2s. Hume's _History of England_, in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay.' I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman. Alas for poor David! As for me, only one height of renown remains to be attained. I am not yet in Madam Tussaud's wax-works. I live, however, in hope of seeing one day an advertisement of a new group of figures--Mr. Macaulay, in one of his own coats, conversing with Mr. Silk Buckingham in Oriental costume, and Mr. Robert Montgomery in full canonicals." "March 9th, 1850. "I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake, and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God. But you must hear of my triumphs. Thackeray swears that he was eye-witness and ear-witness of the proudest event of my life. Two damsels were about to pass that doorway which we, on Monday, in vain attempted to enter, when I was pointed out to them. 'Mr. Macaulay,' cried the lovely pair. 'Is that Mr. Macaulay? Never mind the hippopotamus.' And having paid a shilling to see Behemoth, they left him in the very moment at which he was about to display himself to them in order to see--but spare my modesty. I can wish for nothing more on earth, now that Madam Tussaud, in whose Parthenon I once hoped for a place, is dead." In his diary of June 30th, 1849, we find: "Today my yearly account with Longman is wound up. I may now say that my book has run the gauntlet of criticism pretty thoroughly. The most savage and dishonest assailant has not been able to deny me merit as a writer. All critics who have the least pretense to impartiality have given me praise which I may be glad to think that I at all deserve.... I received a note from Prince Albert. He wants to see me at Buckingham Palace at three to-morrow. I answered like a courtier; yet what am I to say to him? For, of course, he wants to consult me about the Cambridge professorship. How can I be just at once to Stephen and to Kemble?" "Saturday, July 1st--To the Palace. The Prince, to my extreme astonishment, offered me the professorship, and very earnestly and with many flattering expressions, pressed me to accept it. I was resolute, and gratefully and respectfully declined. I should have declined, indeed, if only in order to give no ground to anybody to accuse me of foul play, for I have had difficulty enough in steering my course so as to deal properly both by Stephen and Kemble, and if I had marched off with the prize, I could not have been astonished if both had entertained a very unjust suspicion of me. But, in truth, my temper is that of the wolf in the fable, I cannot bear the collar, and I have got rid of much finer and richer collars than this. It would be strange if, having sacrificed for liberty, a seat in the Cabinet and twenty-five hundred pounds a year, I should now sacrifice liberty for a chair at Cambridge and four hundred pounds a year. Besides, I never could do two things at once. If I lectured well, my _History_ must be given up, and to give up my _History_ would be to give up much more than the emoluments of the professorship--if emolument were my chief object, which it is not now, nor ever was. The prince, when he found me determined, asked me about the other candidates." XXIV DICKENS WRITES THE PICKWICK PAPERS We are always interested in the beginnings of a successful career, for humanity with all its selfishness takes a generous pleasure in the advancement of those who have made an honest fight for fame or wealth. The first success of Dickens came with the publication of the _Pickwick Papers_, by the publication of which the publishers, it is said, made $100,000,--much to their astonishment. We all know the early career of the famous novelist: How he passed a boyhood of poverty; how he became a stenographer, a good one, for said a Mr. Beard, "There never was such a shorthand writer," at the time Dickens entered the gallery as a Parliament reporter; how he later became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. In the December number of the _Old Monthly Magazine_ his first published story saw the light. This was in 1833, when Dickens was twenty-one. The story first went under the name of _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, but it afterwards was changed to _Mr. Mims and his Cousin_. Then came _Sketches by Boz_ in 1835, and in 1836 _Pickwick_ appeared in serial form, the book coming out a year later. An amusing and striking illustration of the widespread interest in the story of _Pickwick_, if we may call so rambling an account as _Pickwick_ a story, is related by Carlyle: "An archdeacon with his own venerable lips repeated to me the other night a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days any way!'--this is dreadful." We are always interested in knowing whether the author received adequate remuneration for his work. Literature is not a commercial venture. The man who says, "Go to, now I shall make money by my pen!" is not the one who achieves a masterpiece. Nevertheless we are glad to know that genius is rewarded. It is more comforting to learn that Pope received $45,000 for his translations of Homer than that Milton got $25 for his _Paradise Lost_; that Scott received over $40,000 for _Woodstock_, a novel written in three months, than that the author of the _Canterbury Tales_ two years before his death was obliged to petition the king, "for God's sake and as a work of charity," for the grant of a hogshead of wine yearly at the port of London. Did Dickens receive anything for his _Pickwick_? Mr. Chapman, one of the publishers, told Mr. Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens, that there was but a verbal agreement. The publishers were to pay 15 guineas for each number and as there were twenty numbers it is not hard to estimate his receipts on such a basis. The publishers, however, were to add to this compensation according to the sale. Mr. Chapman thinks that his firm paid about 3,000 pounds for _Pickwick_, but Mr. Forster thinks the sum was about 2,500 pounds. While this sum bears but a small proportion to what Dickens would have received had he made a good bargain with his publishers, it is yet a large sum to one beginning his literary career, and must have been deeply appreciated by Dickens, who had been so poor that he was paid 30 pounds in advance for the first two numbers, so that he might "go and get married." _Pickwick_ was soon followed by _Oliver Twist_, and then came _Nicholas Nickleby_, and the long series of successful novels that brought the author both fame and money. For when Dickens died he had a fortune of £93,000. Some of this was made in America, where his "readings" were attended by great crowds. On his second tour to America, after he had given thirty-seven readings, about one-half the entire number, he sent home a check for £10,000. Some evenings he took in $2,000. One reason why Dickens is a popular novelist is that he understands the common emotions of humanity. He may be "stagey," be lacking in plot, given to exaggeration, indulge in cheap pathos, but in spite of all these defects his abounding vitality, his sympathy with the common lot, his imagination, are of such transcendent power that his world of readers adores the name of Dickens. Dickens was a good man. While not closely following the forms of religion, his life was better than that of many who follow the letter but break the spirit. As an illustration of his Christian belief I quote an extract from his letter to his youngest son, who was about to go to Australia: September, 1868. Never take a mean advantage of any one in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the world; and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature, who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be guided.... You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities--I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to have opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it.... Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS] XXV CHARLES DICKENS AS READER My first sight of Dickens, writes Herman Merivale in a gossipy article in an English magazine, was characteristic enough. I was in the second or third row of seats with some friends, at one of his readings of _Oliver Twist_. As Thackeray was a gossip on the platform, so Dickens was an actor. Like all speakers and actors, he longed for sympathy somewhere; an unanswering audience kills us, on whichever side the fault may lie. In the days of my political measles I have harangued a London audience for an hour and twenty minutes when I have meant to speak for a quarter of an hour; and in an out-of-the-way Hampshire district, where I had gone on purpose to address the rurals for a set hour, I have sate down, covered with confusion, in ten minutes, not being able to hit on anything that interested them at all. I saw too plainly, in all their good-natured faces, that they regarded me as the greatest ass they had ever seen, or as an odd kind of cow gone wrong, and of no use to the three acres. Dickens's audience that night was dull, and he became so, too. I was disappointed. His characters were not lifelike, and his acting was not good, and got worse as he went on. It was the inevitable law of reaction. His audience bored him, and he began to bore me, amongst the rest. He was not "in touch" with us, that is all; and his eyes wandered as hopelessly in search of some sympathetic eye to catch them, as the gladiators of old, for mercy in the circus. Then suddenly, at one point of his reading, he had to introduce the passing character of a nameless individual in a London crowd, a choleric old gentleman who has only one short sentence to fire off. This he gave so spontaneously, so inimitably, that the puppet became an absolute reality in a second. I saw him, crowd, street, man, temper, and all. For I am, I may say, what is called a very good audience. I like what I like, and I hate what I hate; and on one occasion growled at the theater so audibly at what I thought some very bad acting that I began to hear ominous cries of "Turn him out!" It was the first night of one of my own plays, Dickens's electric flash bowled me over so completely and instantly that I broke into a peal of laughter, and as we sometimes do when hard hit, kept on laughing internally, which is half tears, and half hiccough, for some time afterwards. Upon my word, I am laughing now, as I recall it. It was so funny. The audience of course glared at me with the well-known look of rebuke. "How _dare_ you express your feelings out loud, and disturb us!" But Dickens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the street had to appear for one passing instant more, and fire off one more passing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good heavens! what an actor Dickens was. When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did that most expressive of all human features, the eye, thank a boy more expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise must repel. Dickens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened. ... Dickens is perhaps best described as to my immense amusement, and by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of Charles Dickens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some personal experiences of his stage passion, at the end of his life, I ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he! XXVI ON THE DEATH OF DICKENS When Charles Dickens died the English papers and magazines were filled with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be interesting to glance at a few extracts from these: From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a larger number of men and women than those of any other living writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived. About six o'clock on that summer evening, having done his day's work with habitual assiduity, Charles Dickens sat down to dinner with some members of his family. He had complained of headache, but neither he nor any one felt the least apprehension. The pain increased, the head drooped forward, and he never spoke again. Breathing went on for four-and-twenty hours, and then there was nothing left but ... dismay and sorrow. When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear friend.... Anthony Trollope in _St. Paul's_.--It seems to have been but the other day that, sitting where I now sit, in the same chair, at the same table, with the same familiar things around me, I wrote for the _Cornhill Magazine_ a few lines in remembrance of Thackeray, who had then been taken from us, and when those lines appeared they were preceded by others, very full of feeling, from his much older friend, Charles Dickens. Now I take up my pen again because Charles Dickens has also gone, and because it is not fit that this publication should go forth without a word spoken to his honor. It is singular that two men in age so nearly equal, in career so nearly allied, friends so old, and rivals so close, should each have left us so suddenly, without any of that notice, first doubting and then assured, which illness gives; so that in the case of the one as of the other, the tidings of death's dealings have struck us a hard and startling blow, inflicting not only sorrow, but for a while that positive, physical pain which comes from evil tidings which are totally unexpected. It was but a week or two since that I was discussing at the club that vexed question of American copyright with Mr. Dickens, and while differing from him somewhat, was wondering at the youthful vitality of the man who seemed to have done his forty years of work without having a trace of it left upon him to lessen his energy, or rob his feelings of their freshness. It was but the other day that he spoke at the Academy dinner, and those who heard him then heard him at his best; and those who did not hear him, but only read his words, felt how fortunate it was that there should be such a man to speak for literature on such an occasion. When he took farewell of the public as a public reader, a few months since, the public wondered that a man in the very prime of his capacity should retire from such a career. But though there was to be an end to his readings, there was not, therefore, to be an end of his labors. He was to resume, and did resume, his old work, and when the first number of _Edwin Drood's Mystery_ was bought up with unprecedented avidity by the lovers of Dickens's stories, it was feared, probably, by none but one that he might not live to finish his chronicle. He was a man, as we all thought, to live to be a hundred. He looked to be full of health, he walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed like a man in the full vigor of his life.... He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how he read. Most readers of these lines, though they may never have seen him act,--as I never did,--still know that his acting was excellent. As an actor he would have been at the top of his profession. And he had another gift,--had it so wonderfully, that it may almost be said that he has left no equal behind him. He spoke so well, that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair,--had its compensating twenty minutes of pleasure, even if he were called upon to propose a toast, or to thank the company for drinking his health. For myself, I never could tell how far his speeches were ordinarily prepared:--but I can declare that I have heard him speak admirably when he has had to do so with no moment of preparation. A great man has gone from us--such a one that we may surely say of him that we shall not look upon his like again. As years roll on, we shall learn to appreciate his loss. He now rests in the spot consecrated to the memory of our greatest and noblest; and Englishmen would certainly not have been contented had he been laid elsewhere. XXVII RUSKIN'S CHILDHOOD We are fortunate in having Ruskin's own account of how he passed his childhood days. In _Præterita_ we have his autobiography. His description of his early days runs as follows: "I am and my father was before me a violent Tory of the old school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's); I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the _Iliad_ (Pope's translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on weekdays; on Sunday their effect was tempered by _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Pilgrim's Progress_, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than her mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly diminished the influence of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the end of the matter was, that I got all of the imaginative teachings of De Foe and Bunyan, and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman. "I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week. "Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were reading of my own election, but my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart, as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis, to the Apocalypse, about once a year: and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or Gibbon's, as types of language; but once knowing the 32d of Deuteronomy, or the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with; myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the affectation of trying to write like Hooker or George Herbert was the most innocent I could have fallen into." * * * * * "As years went on, and I came to be four or five years old he (the father) could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the house, his own traveler); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front (for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked), I saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where every other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the _Abbot_ at Kinross, and the _Monastery_ at Glen Farg, which I used to confuse with 'Glendearg,' and thought that the White Lady had as certainly lived by the streamlet in the glen of the Ochlis, as the Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven. "To my farther benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick castle down." * * * * * "Contented, by reason of these occasional glimpses of the rivers of Paradise, I lived until I was more than four years old in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air, by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at 'Mrs. Ridley's,' the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother's general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger, and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful or troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first allowed, and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother's resolution by splendor of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in the Soho bazaar, as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them, but afterward quietly told me it was not right that I should have them, and I never saw them again. "Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled, as I grew older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion, and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet; examining the knots in the wood of the floor or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet." [Illustration: ROBERT BROWNING From the portrait by Field Talfourd] XXVIII THE MARRIAGE OF THE BROWNINGS When Wordsworth heard of the marriage of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, he is reported to have said, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else would." When Wordsworth said this he was an old man and like most old men unable to appreciate the new. Compared with the simplicity of much of Wordsworth's poetry a poem like _A Death in the Desert_ might seem unintelligible; but surely the same objection cannot be urged against the poetry of Mrs. Browning. The marriage of Robert Browning to Miss Barrett is the one dramatic event in his quiet life. To one who has read his passionate and at times fiery, unconventional poetry, the runaway, unconventional marriage is not unaccountable, but altogether consistent. The manner of it was thus: In her youth Miss Barrett became an invalid through an injury to her spine, an accident occurring while she was fixing the saddle of her riding horse. As she grew older she was confined to her room. To move from a bed to a sofa seemed a perilous adventure requiring a family discussion. Her father was a strange unaccountable man, selfish and obstinate, and passionately jealous of the affection of his children. In the meantime Miss Barrett had written poetry that attracted the attention of a kindred spirit. Robert Browning in 1845 wrote to her saying that he had once nearly met her and that his sensations then were those of one who had come to the outside of a chapel of marvelous illumination and found the door barred against him. A little later he suggested that he would like to call on her. This commonplace and altogether natural suggestion threw the invalid into a state of tremulous disapproval. With robust insistence Robert replied, "If my truest heart's wishes avail, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do." Miss Barrett replied, "There is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me. I never learned to talk as you do in London, although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colors. The rest of me is nothing but a root fit for the ground and dark." A reply such as this would be construed by any gentleman as a challenge. The substance of Browning's reply was, "I will call at two on Tuesday." On May 20, 1845, they met. In September, 1846, Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, was married in a church, and afterwards returned to her father's house as though nothing had happened. Between the marriage and the elopement Robert Browning did not call at the Barrett house on Wimpole Street. One of his biographers says that this absence was due to an inability of Browning to ask the maid at the door for Miss Barrett when there no longer was a Miss Barrett whom he wished to see. In passing judgment upon the elopement of this remarkable couple one must remember that they were no longer giddy and rash youth. Browning was thirty-four and the romantic Juliet was three years older. Again it must be remembered that the objecting father was a most unreasonable and selfish man. The climax of his selfishness was reached when in opposition to the advice of the physicians Mr. Barrett refused to allow his daughter to go to Italy. "In the summer of 1846," writes Mr. Chesterton, "Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to see a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on to what she calls 'an inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars.'" Miss Mitford, the literary gossip of the period, writes a letter to Charles Bonar, in which she gives expression to an opinion concerning Browning's poetry which is not dissimilar to the one we quoted from Wordsworth. Miss Mitford was an intimate friend of Elizabeth Barrett: "The great news of the season is the marriage of my beloved friend Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning. I have seen him once only, many years ago. He is, I hear from all quarters, a man of immense attainment and great conversational power. As a poet I think him overrated.... Those things on which his reputation rests, _Paracelsus_ and _Bells and Pomegranates_, are to me as so many riddles." In a later letter she writes to the same correspondent: "I at Miss Barrett's wedding! Ah, dearest Mr. Bonar, it was a runaway match. Never was I so much astonished. He prevailed on her to meet him at church with only the two necessary witnesses. They went to Paris. There they stayed a week. Happening to meet with Mrs. Jameson, she joined them in their journey to Pisa; and accordingly they traveled by diligence, by Rhone boat,--anyhow,--to Marseilles, thence took shipping to Leghorn, and then settled themselves at Pisa for six months. She says she is very happy. God grant it continue! I felt just exactly as if I had heard that Dr. Chambers had given her over when I got the letter announcing her marriage, and found that she was about to cross to France. I never had an idea of her reaching Pisa alive. She took her own maid and her (dog) Flush. I saw Mr. Browning once. Many of his friends and mine, William Harness, John Kenyon, and Henry Chorley, speak very highly of him. I suppose he is an accomplished man, and if he makes his angelic wife happy, I shall of course learn to like him." The runaway match proved to be a most happy one. This is in disproof of the common thought that a poet is of so sensitive and irritable a disposition that no woman should expect a calm life with a poet. But in this case we have two distinguished poets joining hands. They lived in great happiness, nor was this peace and harmony purchased at the price of servitude and humility of the one. Each respected the other. Their romantic passion was based on a spiritual affinity. The love letters of the Brownings may have some degree of obscurity, but it should be said that the obscurity is one of expression, not the obscurity of misunderstanding in the sense in which some of the Carlyle letters are obscure. The list of literary men whose marriages have proved unhappy is not so long and distinguished as is commonly supposed. Milton, Landor, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Ruskin are conspicuous examples of men who made shipwreck of marriage, but in contrast shine forth the names of Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Shakspere, for there is no evidence against the belief that Shakspere's marriage was a happy one; then add to these the American names, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Holmes, and the list is still incomplete. In verse Mrs. Browning has most exquisitely expressed the power of love to transform the gloom of her sick-room into the wholesome sunshine of life,-- I saw in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turn had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, "Guess now who holds thee?"--"Death!" I said. But, there, The silver answer rang. "Not Death, but Love." XXIX ROBERT BROWNING Shortly after Browning's death a young man published his recollections of the poet in an English magazine. The extracts from that article will help one to appreciate the kindliness of the great poet. "My first meeting with Browning came about in this wise. I was sitting in the studio of a famous sculptor, who, kindly forgetful of my provincial rawness, was entertaining me with anecdotes of his great contemporaries; amongst them, Browning. To name him was to undo the flood-gates of my young enthusiasm. Would my sculptor friend help me to meet the poet, whose teaching had been my only dogma? 'Oh,' said my friend, 'that's easy. Write to him--he is the most amiable fellow in the world--and tell him about yourself, and tell him how much you want to know him. Say, if you like, that you are a friend of mine.' The advice seemed simple but useless. I felt that not even the portfolio of unpublished poems which the imaginative eye might have beheld palpable under my arm could so fortify my modesty. But my friend assured me that Browning would not be offended, so, after waiting some weeks for my crescent courage, I wrote.... "I was taken up to his study and shown in. The first thing that struck me was that he had built up a barrier of books around his table, perhaps because he feared a too practical enthusiasm. Huge heaps of books lay on the floor, the chairs, the table, and at first I thought the room otherwise unoccupied. But suddenly a dapper little figure emerged from a huge armchair by the fire, and stepped briskly across the room. For a moment I was bewildered. The poet's face was familiar in photographs, but I had somehow imagined him a tall, gaunt man. I recovered myself to find him standing before me, holding both my hands and saying, 'Now this is really very kind of you, to come so far just to see an old man like me.' Then he dragged up a companion chair and forced me into it, standing for some moments by my side, with his hand on my shoulder. Then he sat down and said, 'Well, tell me all about yourself. Have you not brought some of your poems to show me?' Of course I had not. I wanted to see him and talk of his work. But for a while he would not let me do so. 'We'll talk about me later, if you like, though I'm rather tired of the subject,' he said, and proceeded to question me pretty closely about my aim and work. Then he sat and thought awhile, then came across to me and said, 'Do you know that I was nearly fifty before I made any money out of my writings? That's the truth, and you will understand my reluctance to advise any one to embark on such a cruel career. But--if you really mean to go in for it--I would do anything I could to shorten your time of waiting. So you must just send me some of your work, that I may give you my candid opinion, if you think it's worth having. And now come and see my books.' ... "We went down to lunch, and I was introduced to the poet's sister, who is, I was instantly ready to aver, the most charming little lady in the world. I don't remember much of the talk at lunch--except that it turned on Ruskin and his art views, with which latter, it seemed to me, Browning had not much sympathy. He told me two anecdotes designed to prove Ruskin's technical inaccuracy; one relating to Michael Angelo, the other to Browning's own exquisite poem, _Andrea del Sarto_. 'But never mind,' said Browning, 'he writes like an angel.' "Lunch was finished, and my host apologized for having to turn me out, as he was obliged to attend some 'preposterous meeting,' he said. I was standing in the hall, saying good-by, when suddenly he turned and ran up-stairs. Presently he returned, bringing with him a copy of his wife's poems. 'Will you take this as a record of what I hope is only the first of many meetings?' he said. 'I can't find any of my own in that muddle upstairs, but I would rather you would have this than any of mine.' Yes, I took it, as proud as a boy could be who receives such an honor from his chief idol; prouder than I shall ever be again as I read the inscription: 'With the best wishes and regards of Robert Browning.' And I went away after he had made me promise--as though it were a thing I might be unwilling to do--to let him know when I should be next in town. ... "I called again at the beautiful house in De Vere Gardens. The poet had just come in, he told me, from a meeting of the committee for the memorial to Matthew Arnold, and he was evidently very depressed by the sad thoughts which had come upon him of his 'dear old friend, Mat.' 'I have been thinking all the way home,' he said, 'of his hardships. He told me once, when I asked him why he had written no poetry lately, that he could not afford to do it; but that, when he had saved enough, he intended to give up all other work, and go back to poetry. I wonder if he has gone back to it _now_.' Here Browning's voice shook, and he was altogether more deeply moved than I had ever seen him. 'It's very hard, isn't it?' he went on, 'that a useless fellow like me should have been able to give up all his life to it--for, as I think I told you, my father helped me to publish my early books--while a splendid poet like Arnold actually could not afford to write the poetry we wanted of him.' ... "The last visit I paid to Browning was short enough, but since it _was_ the last, and was marked by one of the most graceful acts ever done to me, I may record it as the conclusion of these memories. He had written inviting me to call soon, but without naming a day or hour. 'If I should happen to be engaged,' he had said, 'I know that your kindness will understand and forgive me.' So I called on the first morning when I was free for an hour. He came across the room with his accustomed heartiness of voice and hand. 'But, my dear boy, why did you come to-day? In ten minutes I have an important business appointment which I _must_ keep.' The ten minutes went all too soon, and I took my hat to go. He was profuse, but plainly sincere, in his apologies for turning me out, and made me promise to come again at a specified hour. I had hardly left the door, when I heard the scurry of footsteps and his voice calling me. I turned and saw him, hatless, at the foot of the steps. 'One moment,' he cried; 'I can't let you go till you tell me again that you are not offended, and I shan't believe _that_ till you promise once again to come. Now, promise'--holding both my hands. Of course I promised, wondering how many smaller men would have shown the same courtesy. For some reason on my part, which I now forget, that appointment was never kept, and I saw him no more. "As I stood in Poet's Corner that bitter day of last January, and saw him put to rest, I could not but think of him as I had seen him last, with the sunlight on his white hair, and I felt his warm hands, and heard his kindly voice saying, 'Now, promise!' and I could but think of that meeting as a tryst not broken, but deferred. And as I thought again of that life, so rich, so vivid, so complete; of that strong soul which looked ever forth, and saw promise of clear awaking to something nobler than the sweetest dream, I knew that here, at least, was one to whom death could do no wrong." --Adapted from _Littell's Living Age_. [Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON From a photograph from life] XXX KNIGHT'S REMINISCENCE OF TENNYSON William Knight, a celebrated Scotch professor and the great expounder of the life and poetry of Wordsworth, in 1890 spent two days with Tennyson at Farringford. In an English magazine he has published his reminiscence of that visit. After relating the feelings of respect and the reverential sentiment with which he approached the place he says: "In the avenue leading to the house, the spreading trees just opening into leaf, with spring flowers around and beneath--yellow cowslips and blue forget-me-nots--and the song of birds in the branches overhead, seemed a fitting prelude to all that followed. Shortly after I was seated in the ante-room, the poet's son appeared, and, as his father was engaged, he said, 'Come and see my mother.' We went into the drawing-room, where the old lady was reclining on a couch. Immediately the lines beginning 'Such age, how beautiful' came into mind. No one could ever forget his first sight of Lady Tennyson, her graciousness, and the radiant though fragile beauty of old age. Both her eye and her voice had an inexpressible charm. She inquired with much interest for the widow of one of my colleagues at the University, who used formerly to live in the island, close to Farringford, and whose family were friends as well as near neighbors. Soon afterwards Tennyson entered, and almost at once proposed that we should go out of doors. After a short stroll on the lawn under the cedars, we went into the 'careless ordered garden,' walked round it, and then sat down in the small summer-house. It is a quaint rectangular garden, sloping to the west, where nature and art blend happily,--orchard trees, and old-fashioned flower-beds, with stately pines around, giving to it a sense of perfect rest. This garden is truly a 'haunt of ancient peace.' Left there alone with the bard for some time, I felt that I sat in the presence of one of the Kings of Men. His aged look impressed me. There was the keen eagle eye, and, although the glow of youth was gone, the strength of age was in its place. The lines in his face were like the furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-tree, but his whole bearing disclosed a latent strength and nobility, a reserve of power, combined with a most courteous grace of manner. I was also struck by the negligé air of the man, so different from that of Browning or Arnold or Lowell.... "We talked much of the sonnet. He thought the best in the language were Milton's, Shakspere's, and Wordsworth's; after these three those by his own brother Charles. He said, 'I at least like my brother's next to those by the "three immortals."' ... "He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed him in different ways in all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,--these seven,--were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found.... "Just at this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson, Mrs. Douglas Freshfield, and her daughter came up the garden-walk to the summer-house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an artificial flower, a lilac-branch. It at once caught Tennyson's eye. There was a lilac-tree in bloom close at hand, and he said, 'What is that you are wearing? It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity.' He asked how she could wear such a thing in the month of May! We rose from the bower, and all went down the garden-walk to see the fig-tree at the foot of it, and sundry other things at the western entrance-door, where Miss Kate Greenaway was painting. We returned along a twisting alley under the rich green foliage of elms and ilexes.... "Listening to the wind in the trees and the sound of running water--although it was the very tiniest of rillets--led us away from philosophy, and he talked of Sir Walter Scott, characterizing him as the greatest novelist of all time. He said, 'What a gift it was that Scotland gave to the world in him. And your Burns! He is supreme amongst your poets.' He praised Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, as one of the finest of biographies; and my happening to mention an anecdote of Scott from that book led to our spending the greater part of the rest of our walk in the telling of stories. Tennyson was an admirable storyteller. He asked me for some good Scotch anecdotes, and I gave him some, but he was able to cap each of them with a better one of his own--all of which he told with arch humor and simplicity. "He then told some anecdotes of a visit to Scotland. After he had left an inn in the island of Skye, the landlord was asked, 'Did he know who had been staying in his house? It was the poet Tennyson.' He replied, 'Lor', to think o' that! and sure I thoucht he was a shentleman!' Near Stirling the same remark was made to the keeper of the hotel where he had stayed. 'Do you ken who you had wi' you t' other night?' 'Naa, but he was a pleesant shentleman.' 'It was Tennyson, the poet.' 'An' what may _he_ be?' 'Oh, he is the writer o' verses such as you see i' the papers.' 'Noo, to think o' that, jest a pooblic writer, an' I gied him ma best bedroom!' Of Mrs. Tennyson, however, the landlord remarked, 'Oh, but _she_ was an angel!' "I have said that the conversational power of Tennyson struck me quite as much as his poetry had done for forty years. To explain this I must compare it with that of some of his contemporaries. It was not like the meteoric flashes and fireworks of Carlyle's talk, which sometimes dazzled as much as it instructed, and it had not that torrent-rush in which Carlyle so often indulged. It was far more restrained. It had neither the continuousness nor the range of Browning's many-sided conversation, nor did it possess the charm of the ethereal visionariness of Newman's. It lacked the fullness and consummate sweep of Mr. Buskin's talk, and it had neither the historic range and brilliance of Dean Stanley's, nor the fascinating subtlety--the elevation and the depth combined--of that of the late F.D. Maurice. _But_ it was clear as crystal, and calm as well as clear. It was terse and exact, precise and luminous. Not a word was wasted and every phrase was suggestive. Tennyson did not monopolize conversation. He wished to know what other people thought, and therefore to hear them state it, that he might understand their position and ideas. But in all his talk on great problems, he at once got to their essence, sounding their depths with ease, or, to change the illustration, he seized the kernel, and let the shell and fragments alone. There was a wonderful simplicity allied to his clear vision and his strength. He was more child-like than the majority of his contemporaries, and along with this there was--what I have already mentioned--_a great reserve of power_. His appreciation of other workers belonging to his time was remarkable. Neither he nor Browning disparaged their contemporaries, as Carlyle so often did, when he spotted their weaknesses, and put them in the pillory. From first to last, Tennyson seemed to look sympathetically on all good works, and he had a special veneration for the strong silent thinkers and workers. "Tennyson appreciated the work of Darwin and Spencer far more than Carlyle did, and many of the ideas and conclusions of modern science are to be found in his poetry. Nevertheless he knew the limitation of science, and he held that it was the noble office of poetry, philosophy, and religion combined to supplement and finally to transcend it." XXXI EMERSON ON CARLYLE AND TENNYSON On Christmas day, 1832, Emerson sailed out of Boston harbor to pay a visit to Europe. His health needed a change of work and scene. His wife had died, he had separated from his congregation, he manifestly was in need of some recreation, and so his friends had advised him to take a trip abroad. On the 2d of February he landed at Malta. From there he traveled through Italy and finally entered England, ready to make the acquaintance of English celebrities whom he had long admired. He writes in his journal: "Carlisle in Cumberland, Aug. 26. I am just arrived in merry Carlisle from Dumfries. A white day in my years. I found the youth I sought in Scotland, and good and wise and pleasant he seems to me, and his wife a most accomplished, agreeable woman. Truth and peace and faith dwell with them and beautify them. I never saw more amiableness than is in his countenance." This passage, of course, refers to his visit to Carlyle, to visit whom Emerson had driven over from Dumfries to Craigenputtock, where Carlyle had been living for the last five years. In this connection it is interesting to read what the man visited had to say about his visitor: "That man," Carlyle said to Lord Houghton, "came to see me. I don't know what brought him, and we kept him one night, and then he left us. I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel." [Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON From a wood engraving of a life photograph] In writing of this interview, Mr. Cabot, one of the biographers of Emerson, says: "To Emerson the interview was a happy one, and gratified the chief wish he had in coming to England, though he did not find all that he had sought. He had been looking for a master, but in the deepest matters Carlyle, he found, had nothing to teach him. 'My own feeling,' he says in a letter to Mr. Ireland a few days afterwards, 'was that I had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth.' But he had come close to the affectionate nature and the nobility of soul that lay behind the cloud of whim and dyspepsia, and he kept to that, and for the rest, confined his expectations thenceforth to what Carlyle had to give. 'The greatest power of Carlyle,' he afterwards wrote, 'like that of Burke, seems to me to reside in the form. Neither of them is a poet, born to announce the will of the god, but each has a splendid rhetoric to clothe the truth.'" During this first visit Emerson dined with Lafayette and a hundred Americans. By the time he made his second visit Emerson was a far more distinguished man than during his first trip. His second visit was made in 1847. This time he was a lion among men. He again calls on the Carlyles. This time the door is opened by Jane. "They were very little changed (he writes) from their old selves of fourteen years ago, when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said Carlyle, 'here we are, shoveled together again.' The flood-gates of his talk are quickly opened and the river is a great and constant stream. We had large communication that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning it began again. At noon or later we went together, Carlyle and I, to Hyde Park and the palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand--Carlyle melting all Westminster and London down into his talk and laughter as he walked. We came back to dinner at five or later, then Dr. Carlyle came in and spent the evening, which again was long by the clock, but had no other measure. Here in this house we breakfast about nine; Carlyle is very apt, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker he is, and altogether as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing--I think even more so. You will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. I find my few hours' discourse with him in Scotland, long since, gave me not enough knowledge of him, and I have now at last been taken by surprise.... Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful terms. Nothing could be more engaging than their ways, and in her book-case all his books are inscribed to her, as they came, from year to year, each with some significant lines." In another place he writes: "I had good talk with Carlyle last night. He says over and over for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice, and he too says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about _Kunst_ (art) also, in Germans, or English, or Americans.... His sneers and scoffs are thrown in every direction. He breaks every sentence with a scoffing laugh--'windbag,' 'monkey,' 'donkey,' 'bladder;' and let him describe whom he will, it is always 'poor fellow.' I said 'What a fine fellow you are to bespatter the whole world with this oil of vitriol!' 'No man,' he replied, 'speaks truth to me.' I said, 'See what a crowd of friends listen to and admire you.' 'Yes, they come to hear me, and they read what I write; but not one of them has the smallest intention of doing these things.'" While Emerson was in London he was elected to membership in the Athenæum Club, during his stay in England. Here he had the opportunity of meeting many famous men. He writes: "Milnes and other good men are always to be found there. Milnes is the most good-natured man in England, made of sugar; he is everywhere and knows everything. He told of Landor that one day, in a towering passion, he threw his cook out of the window, and then presently exclaimed, 'Good God, I never thought of those violets!' The last time he saw Landor he found him expatiating on our custom of eating in company, which he esteems very barbarous. He eats alone, with half-closed windows, because the light interferes with the taste. He has lately heard of some tribe in Crim Tartary who have the practice of eating alone, and these he extols as much superior to the English.... Macaulay is the king of diners-out. I do not know when I have seen such wonderful vivacity. He has the strength of ten men, immense memory, fun, fire, learning, politics, manners, and pride, and talks all the time in a steady torrent. You would say he was the best type of England." Of Tennyson he writes: "I saw Tennyson, first at the house of Coventry Patmore, where we dined together. I was contented with him at once. He is tall and scholastic looking, no dandy, but a great deal of plain strength about him, and though cultivated, quite unaffected. Quiet, sluggish sense and thought; refined, as all English are, and good-humored. There is in him an air of great superiority that is very satisfactory. He lives with his college set, ... and has the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness, and let him talk easily and fast, and you would have a pretty good Tennyson. I told him that his friends and I were persuaded that it was important to his health to make an instant visit to Paris, and that I was to go on Monday if he was ready. He was very good-humored, and affected to think that I should never come back alive from France; it was death to go. But he had been looking for two years for somebody to go to Italy with, and was ready to set out at once, if I would go there.... He gave me a cordial invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Palace), where I promised to visit him before I went away.... I found him at home in his lodgings, but with him was a clergyman whose name I did not know, and there was no conversation. He was sure again that he was taking a final farewell of me, as I was going among the French bullets, but promised to be in the same lodgings if I should escape alive.... Carlyle thinks him the best man in England to smoke a pipe with, and used to see him much; had a place in his little garden, on the wall, where Tennyson's pipe was laid up." XXXII LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS OF MAX MUELLER Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty school-boys and school-girls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed. What a pity it was that his friends--and he had many--could find no better place for him. Most of his contemporaries rose to high position in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may be said that like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by potboilers of various kinds. But there was something nobler and refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not think that he possessed the talent for novels. His saying that "no Arnold can ever write a novel" is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronizing way he would generally end by, "Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!" This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him.... Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and as uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things.... He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where no one else saw it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaus, bags, tugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up his sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art.... And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful, and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation.... Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a poet laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o'clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our unexpected guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out by finding the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being a poet laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast, we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived, to see him whip off the cover of a hot dish, and to hear the exclamation, "Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England." However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the immortals. He was full of interest and inquiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems to have been, who would probably have answered my question by "You are a fool, sir; use your own judgment," while Tennyson made the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory.... It was generally after dinner ... that Tennyson began to thaw, and to take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost indispensable to him, and I remember one time when I and several friends were staying at his house, the question of tobacco turned up. I confessed that for years I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so that I could neither read nor write a line without smoking, but that at last I had rebelled against the slavery, and had entirely given up tobacco. Some of his friends taunted Tennyson that he could never give up tobacco. "Anybody can do that," he said, "if he chooses to do it." When his friends still continued to doubt and to tease him, "Well," he said, "I shall give up smoking from to-night." The very same evening I was told that he threw his tobacco and his pipes out of the window of his bedroom. The next day he was most charming, though somewhat self-righteous. The second day he became very moody and captious, the third day no one knew what to do with him. But after a disturbed night I was told that he got out of bed in the morning, went quietly into the garden, picked up one of his broken pipes, stuffed it with the remains of the tobacco scattered about, and then having had a few puffs, came to breakfast, all right again. He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight. "But mind," he said, "you will be watched from morning till evening." This was, in fact, his great grievance, that he could not go out without being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home, simply because he had descried two strangers coming towards us. I was told that he once complained to the queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson not seeing what she meant, replied, "No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either." It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sight-seers, particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet. Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him, "Now, are you the real Tennyson?" This, no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some useless downs near his house, simply in order to escape from the attentions of admiring travelers. XXXIII THE EARLY EDUCATION OF JOHN STUART MILL At an age when most children are playing with a Noah's Ark or a doll, John Stuart Mill was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek language. "I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek," writes Mill, "I have been told that it was when I was three years old." Latin was not begun until his eighth year. By that time he had read in Greek,--Æsop, the Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, the Cyropædia, the Memorabilia, parts of Diogenes Laertius, and of Lucian, Isocrates; also six dialogues of Plato. An equipment like this suggests the satiric lines of Hudibras: Besides, 'tis known he could speak Greek As naturally as pigs squeak. In considering the difficulties that this child--shall we say babe?--had to overcome one must remember that the aids to learning Greek were not then what they are now. In 1820 the Greek lexicon was a ponderous thing, almost as big and heavy as the infant student himself. Worse than this, the definitions were not in English, but in Greek and Latin, and as the boy had not yet learned Latin he had to ask his father for the meaning of every new word. The immense task placed thus upon the child makes one feel indignant and wish that some organization for the prevention of cruelty to infants had interfered with the ambition of the learned father. But we must admire the patience of the father, however we may question his good sense. "What he himself was willing to undergo for the sake of my instruction," says the son in describing his father's teaching, "may be judged from the fact, that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing.... I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his History and all else that he had to write during those years." But this does not tell the whole story. Fearing that the Greek might be too heavy and concentrated a food for the tender intellect of his child, the considerate father added a diet of English history and biography. The boy carefully studied and made notes upon Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson, Hooke, Langhorne's _Plutarch_, Burnet's _History of His Own Time_, Millar's _Historical View of the English Government_, Mosheim's _Ecclesiastical History_. In biography and travel he read the life of Knox, the histories of the Quakers, Beaver's _Africa_, Collin's _New South Wales_, Anson's _Voyages_, and Hawkesworth's _Voyages Round the World_. "Of children's books, any more than of playthings, I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance.... It was no part, however, of my father's system to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me; those which I remember are the _Arabian Nights_, Cazotte's _Arabian Tales_, _Don Quixote_, Miss Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, and a book of some reputation in its day, Brooke's _Fool of Quality_." All this, it is to be remembered, was done by a boy who was not beyond his eighth year. In his eighth year he began Latin, not only as a learner but as a teacher. It was his duty to teach the younger children of the family what he had learned. This practice he does not recommend. "The teaching, I am sure, is very inefficient as teaching, and I well know that the relation between teacher and taught is not a good moral discipline to either." By the time this prodigy of intellect and industry reached the age of fourteen he had studied the following formidable list: Virgil, Horace, Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust, the Metamorphoses, Terence, Cicero, Homer, Thucydides, the Hellenica, Demosthenes, Æschines, Lysias, Theocritus, Anacreon, Aristotle's Rhetoric; Euclid, Algebra, the higher mathematics, Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, and various treatises on Chemistry; and in addition to all this he had read parts of other Greek and Latin authors, and much of English poetry and history. A boy with so heavy a burden of learning is very prone to an equal amount of self-conceit. But the father tried to overcome this danger by holding up a very high standard of comparison,--"not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do." He succeeded so well that the boy was not aware that his attainments were extraordinary. "I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly; I did not estimate myself at all. If I thought anything about myself, it was that I was rather backward in my studies, since I always found myself so, in comparison of what my father expected of me." To this assertion Mr. Mill very candidly adds: "I assert this with confidence, though it was not the impression of various persons who saw me in my childhood. They, as I have since found, thought me greatly and disagreeably self-conceited; probably because I was disputatious, and did not scruple to give direct contradictions to things which I heard said." A boy who is kept at his studies as assiduously as was young Mill has little time for play or association with other boys. This lack of contact with companions is a grave defect in the education of Mill. "I constantly remained long," writes Mill, "and in a less degree have always remained, inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity; my mind, as well as my hands, did its work very lamely when it was applied, or ought to have been applied, to the practical details which, as they are the chief interest of life to the majority of men, are also the things in which whatever mental capacity they have, chiefly shows itself." On the whole we feel that the childhood of Mill could hardly have been a happy one. The joy of physical achievement, the free-hearted abandonment of the young barbarian at his play, the power to do as well as to know--these are the birthright of every child. But while we may pity him for his lack of these joys, we dare not forget that to have lived the life or done the work of John Stuart Mill is no small thing. And perhaps this life could not have been lived had his education been other than it was. XXXIV CARLYLE GOES TO THE UNIVERSITY One of the most tender pictures in the history of English literature is that of Carlyle as he starts for his University career. Just a boy, a child not yet fourteen! It is early morning in November at Ecclefechan--and Edinburgh with its famous University is a hundred miles away. The father and mother have risen early to get Thomas ready--not for the cab to take him to the "purple luxury and plush repose" of the Pullman on the Limited Express. No, Tom is going to walk,--his only companion a boy two or three years older. These rugged, poor, and godly parents had long discussed the sending of Tommy to the great University. James Bell, one of the wise men of the community, had said: "Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents," but they knew that depended on the boy. "Thou hast not done so; God be thanked," said James Carlyle to his son in after years. But let us come back to our picture. In our mind's eye we see the Scotch lad starting out on his hundred-mile trip in the mist of a foggy November morning. Almost three-score years after, Carlyle himself beautifully describes the event: "How strangely vivid, how remote and wonderful, tinged with the views of far-off love and sadness, is that journey to me now after fifty-seven years of time! My mother and father walking with me in the dark frosty November morning through the village to set us on our way; my dear and loving mother, her tremulous affection, etc." That's the picture of an unknown boy going to the University to become what every pious Scotch mother wants her boy to be--a minister of the gospel. Here is another picture, taken about sixty years later. In a somewhat plainly furnished room in a house on a quiet street in Chelsea, a part of London, an old man "worn, and tired, and bent, with deep-lined features, a firm under-jaw, tufted gray hair, and tufted gray and white beard, and sunken and unutterably sad eyes, is returning from the fireplace, where with trembling fingers he had been lighting his long clay pipe, and now he resumes his place at a reading desk." Let us enter this room with Theodore L. Cuyler, who in his _Recollections of a Long Life_ tells us: "Thirty years afterwards, in June, 1872, I felt an irrepressible desire to see the grand old man once more, and I accordingly addressed him a note, requesting him the favor of a few minutes' interview.... After we had waited some time, a feeble, stooping figure, attired in a long blue flannel gown, moved slowly into the room. His gray hair was unkempt, his blue eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his own amusement as for ours." Between these two pictures,--the one showing us the boy trudging away in the mist of the November morning, the other revealing an old man whose home in Chelsea had become the Mecca of the lovers of English literature,--what has occurred? The young boy has finished his studies at the University; has concluded not to enter the ministry; has studied law; served as tutor; translated a masterpiece of German into English, and finally dedicated his powers to becoming a notability in English literature: wrote _Sartor Resartus_, the _History of the French Revolution_, a _Life of Cromwell_, a _Life of Frederick the Great_, and has become world-renowned as one of the great figures of the Nineteenth Century. XXXV CARLYLE AND HIS WIFE In 1826 occurred what Saintsbury calls the most important event in the life of Carlyle,--his marriage with Jane Welsh, a young woman who traced her ancestry back to John Knox, the rugged Scotch reformer. Jane was a keen, active, high-strung, sensitive soul. There has arisen a formidable mass of literature discussing the relationship between Thomas and Jane. Were they happy or were they miserable? Jane Welsh was a Scotch lady whose family was socially superior to that of Carlyle's. Her father had been a physician, while Carlyle's was but a rude stone-mason,--and yet a great man. It is said she married Thomas because she was ambitious and wanted to be the wife of a famous man, and she had discovered in the unknown Thomas the marks of genius. In after years she is reported to have said: "I married for ambition. Carlyle had exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined for him; _and I am miserable_." Jeannie had what she had bargained for and yet she was unhappy,--why? Carlyle was a big-hearted, hard-working, gruff, but kind-hearted individual. I have not a doubt that he loved his Jeannie. But he took no pains to show his love in those tender though trivial devotions that mean so much to the sensitive wife. During the first few years of their married life, they lived in a lonely place and had but a scant income. We have a very interesting picture of their life at Craigenputtock. Thomas could not eat bakers' bread, so Jeannie baked. The one servant they had was not competent. It may have been this same servant that was responsible for Thomas' finding, altogether unexpectedly, of course, a dead mouse at the bottom of his dish of oatmeal. As to the bread-baking Jean has given us a very graphic account: "Further we were very poor, and further and worst, being an only child, and brought up to 'great prospects,' I was sublimely ignorant of every branch of useful knowledge, though a capital Latin scholar, and very fair mathematician! It behooved me in these astonishing circumstances to learn to sew! Husbands, I was shocked to find, wore their stockings into holes, and were always losing buttons, and I was expected 'to look to all that;' also it behooved me to learn to _cook_! no capable servant choosing to live at such an out-of-the-way place, and my husband having bad digestion, which complicated my difficulties dreadfully. The bread, above all, bought at Dumfries, 'soured on his stomach' (Oh heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at home. So I sent for Cobbett's _Cottage Economy_, and fell to work at a loaf of bread. But knowing nothing about the process of fermentation or the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at the time that myself ought to have been put into bed; and I remained the only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock struck, and then two, and then three, and still I was sitting there in an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart aching with a sense of forlornness and _degradation_. That I who had been so petted at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the house, and who had never been required to _do_ anything, but _cultivate my mind_, should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching _a loaf of bread_, which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts maddened me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud. It was then that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf of bread, so that each be the thing that one's hand has found to do?' ... If he had been a woman living at Craigenputtock, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would have come out more fitly in a _good_ loaf of bread. "I cannot express what consolation this germ of an idea spread over my uncongenial life during the years we lived at that savage place, where my two immediate predecessors had gone _mad_, and the third had taken to drink." While enjoying the description which Mrs. Carlyle has painted in such an entertaining manner, it is well to observe that she does not blame her husband. She seems to be writing the account while she is silently laughing at the absurd preparation her life had had for the duties of the wife of a poor man. But Mr. T.P. O'Connor, who writes in 1895, is outspoken: "I do not want to speak disrespectfully of poor Carlyle, but in spirit it is somewhat hard to keep one's hand off him, as we reconstruct those scenes in the gaunt house at Craigenputtock. There is a little detail in one scene which adds a deeper horror. I have said that Mrs. Carlyle had to scrub the floors, and as she scrubbed them Carlyle would look on smoking--drawing in from tobacco pleasant comfortableness and easy dreams--while his poor drudge panted and sighed over the hard work, which she had never done before. Do you not feel that you would like to break the pipe in his mouth, and shake him off the chair, and pitch him on to the floor, to take a share of the physical burden which his shoulders were so much more able to bear?" Another anecdote is that at a dinner while Carlyle was monopolizing the conversation, talking as only he could talk, he, the irritable, turned upon his wife with "Jeanie, don't breathe so hard!" And still again, we hear it said that Tennyson once remarked it was well the Carlyles had married each other for if each had married another there would have been _four_ instead of _two_ unhappy people. But I think the truer remark was made when Tennyson said to his son, Hallam: "Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle on the whole enjoy life together, or else they would not have chaffed one another so heartily." The _Century_ of some years ago contained this witty skit from the pen of Bessie Chandler: And I sit here, thinking, thinking, How your life was one long winking At Thomas' faults and failings, and his undue share of bile! Won't you own, dear, just between us, That this living with a genius Isn't, after all, so pleasant,--is it, Jeannie Welsh Carlyle? However, with all that may be said to the contrary, I do not think we dare say that the marriage of Thomas and Jeannie was an unhappy one. After reading fifteen hundred pages of biography and hundreds of letters passing to and fro, I am of the belief of Mr. Tennyson, that on the whole their union was a happy one. Shortly after Carlyle had been elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, Jean died suddenly. While out driving one afternoon by Hyde Park, she jumped out to pick up her little dog, over whose foot a carriage had passed. She was never again seen alive. In her carriage she was found dead with her hands folded on her lap. When Carlyle heard of it he was away at Scotsbrig. Later in describing his feelings he wrote: "It had a kind of _stunning_ effect on me. Not for above two days could I estimate the immeasurable depth of it, or the infinite sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and a moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin." And Froude tells us that in Carlyle's old age--he lived to be eighty-five--he often broke forth in these passionate words of Burns: Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met and never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. [Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE From a photograph from life] XXXVI CARLYLE AS LECTURER In 1834, the year of the death of Coleridge, we find Carlyle, like many another Scotchman, leaving Scotland to enter the great Babylon, London. The previous six years he had passed with his wife at Craigenputtock. He was almost forty years of age. His wife had great confidence in his ability, which up to this time the world had not recognized. So she urged him to struggle for influence and power in the great heart of the modern world. Number 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, is the house they selected. There for the remaining forty-seven years of his life he worked and loved and stormed. Their neighborhood was one famous in association with the names of many _literati_. Near by Smollett wrote _Count Fathom_; in the same locality More had entertained the great scholar, Erasmus; there too had once lived Bolingbroke, and earlier, the Count de Grammont; and last but not least the author of Abou Ben Adhem, Leigh Hunt. When Emerson once suggested to Carlyle that he come over to America to lecture, Carlyle took kindly to the idea. He kept it in mind as a possibility for years, but he never carried it into effect. But he did lecture in London. His literary work was not bringing him the money he needed. His friends were struck with his ability. Why should he not lecture? This, if well managed, would bring him immediate remuneration. His friends set diligently to work, issued a prospectus, tickets at a guinea a course, and invited persons of influence to attend. Spedding wrote this letter to Monckton Milnes: "I take the opportunity of writing to make you know, if you do not know already, that Carlyle lectures on German literature next month; the particulars you will find in the inclosed syllabus, which, if it should convey as much knowledge to you as it does ignorance to me, will be edifying. Of course, you will be here to attend the said lectures, but I want you to come up a little before they begin, that you may assist in procuring the attendance of others. The list of subscribers is at present not large, and you are just the man to make it grow. As it is Carlyle's first essay in this kind, it is important that there should be a respectable number of hearers. Some name of decided piety is, I believe, rather wanted. Learning, taste, and nobility are represented by Hallam, Rogers, and Lord Lansdowne. H. Taylor has provided a large proportion of family, wit, and beauty, and I have assisted them to a little Apostlehood. We want your name to represent the great body of Tories, Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, metaphysicians, poets, and Savage Landor. Come!" Carlyle was busy with his _French Revolution_ and so did not make as careful preparation as he might have made. Yet he was so full of his subject that if he could overcome the difficulties of public speaking, he was bound to be interesting. As the day approached both he and his wife grew nervous. For diversion he drew up a humorous ending: "Good Christians, it has become entirely impossible for me to talk to you about German or any literature or terrestrial thing; one request only I have to make, that you would be kind enough to cover me under a tub for the next six weeks and to go your ways with all my blessing." This fortunately he did not need to use. Mrs. Carlyle worried lest he would be late, but by dint of close attention she felt she could have him "at the place of execution" at the appointed hour. How to get him to stop at "four precisely" was another problem. One humorous suggestion was that a lighted cigar might be laid on the table before him when the clock struck the hour. "May the First, 1837," says Professor MacMechan, "was a notable day. In the afternoon, Carlyle lectured at Almack's, and in the evening Macready produced young Mr. Browning's _Strafford_, for the first time, at Covent Garden. Hallam, of the _Middle Ages_,--'a broad, old, positive man, with laughing eyes,'--was chairman and brought the lecturer face to face with his first audience, the two hundred holders of guinea tickets. It was made up of the elements referred to in Spedding's letter. Learning, taste, nobility, family, wit, and beauty were all represented in that assembly; 'composed of mere quality and notabilities,' says Carlyle. It is easy to figure the scene; the men all clean-shaven, in the clumsy coats, high collars, and enormous neck-cloths of the period, the ladies, and there were naturally more ladies than men, following the vagaries of fashion in 'bishop' sleeves and the 'pretty church-and-state bonnets,' that seemed to Hunt at times, 'to think through all their ribbons.' We call that kind of bonnet 'coal-scuttle' now, but Maclise's portrait of Lady Morgan trying hers on before a glass justifies Hunt's epithet. The lecturer was the lean, wiry type of Scot, within an inch of six feet. In face, he was not the bearded, broken-down Carlyle of the Fry photograph, but the younger Carlyle of the Emerson portrait. Clean-shaven, as was then the fashion, the determination of the lower jaw lying bare, the thick black hair brushed carelessly and coming down on the bony, jutting forehead, violet-blue eyes, deep-set, and alert, the whole face shows the Scot and the peasant in every line. It was a striking face, the union of black hair, blue eyes, and, usually, ruddy color on the high cheek bones, 'as if painted ... at the plow's tail,' Lady Eastlake remarked, and she was an artist. Harriet Martineau remarks that he was as 'yellow as a guinea,' but this would be due to some temporary gastric disturbance. He was very nervous, as was most natural, and stood with downcast eyes, his fingers picking at the desk before him. At the beginning his speech was broken, and his throat was dry, drink as he would; but his desperate determination not to break down carried him through. The society people were 'very humane' to him, and the lecturer had a message for them; his matter was new, his manner was interesting; he knew his subject. The rugged Scottish accent came like a welcome draught of caller air from the moorlands of Galloway, to the dwellers in London drawing-rooms, and 'they were not a little astonished when the wild Annandale voice grew high and earnest.'" From this first venture which was so successful--he cleared one hundred and thirty-five guineas after all the expenses had been paid--Carlyle was induced to give other series in the next few years. One of the most popular books by Carlyle is _Heroes and Hero Worship_; this first was given in a course of lectures. When "The Hero as Man of Letters" was given, Caroline Fox, an ardent admirer of the Scot, was in attendance. She has left a vivid description of the man: "Carlyle soon appeared, and looked as if he felt a well-dressed London audience scarcely the arena for him to figure in as a popular lecturer. He is a tall, robust-looking man; rugged simplicity and indomitable strength are in his face, and such a glow of genius in it--not always smoldering there, but flashing from his beautiful gray eyes, from the remoteness of their deep setting under that massive brow. His manner is very quiet, but he speaks as one tremendously convinced of what he utters, and who had much, very much, in him that was quite unutterable, quite unfit to be uttered to the uninitiated ear; and when the Englishman's sense of beauty or truth exhibited itself in vociferous cheers, he would impatiently, almost contemptuously, wave his hand, as if that were not the kind of homage which truth demanded. He began in a rather low and nervous voice, with a broad Scotch accent, but it soon grew firm, and shrank not abashed from its great task." XXXVII CARLYLE ON WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING On our first day's journey, wrote Mr. Duffy in the _Contemporary Review_, the casual mention of Edmund Burke induced me to ask Carlyle who was the best talker he had met among notable people in London. He said that when he met Wordsworth first he had been assured that he talked better than any man in England. It was his habit to talk whatever was in his mind at the time, with total indifference to the impression it produced on his hearers. On this occasion he kept discoursing how far you could get carried out of London on this side and on that for sixpence. One was disappointed,--perhaps,--but, after all, this was the only healthy way of talking, to say what is actually in your mind, and let sane creatures who listen to make what they can of it. Whether they understood or not, Wordsworth maintained a stern composure, and went his way, content that the world went quite another road. When he knew him better, he found that no man gave you so faithful and vivid a picture of any person or thing which he had seen with his own eyes. I inquired if Wordsworth came up to this description he had heard of him as the best talker in England. "Well," he replied, "it was true you could get more meaning out of what Wordsworth had to say than from anybody else. Leigh Hunt would emit more pretty, pleasant, ingenious flashes in an hour than Wordsworth in a day. But in the end you would find, if well considered, that you had been drinking perfumed water in one case, and in the other you got the sense of a deep, earnest man, who had thought silently and painfully on many things. There was one exception to your satisfaction with the man. When he spoke of poetry he harangued about meters, cadences, rhythms, and so forth, and one could not be at the pains of listening to him. But on all other subjects he had more sense in him of a sound and instructive sort than any other literary man in England." I suggested that Wordsworth might naturally like to speak of the instrumental part of his art, and consider what he had to say very instructive, as by modifying the instrument, he had wrought a revolution in English poetry. He taught it to speak in unsophisticated language and of the humbler and more familiar interests of life. Carlyle said, "No, not so; all he had got to say in that way was like a few driblets from the great ocean of German speculation on kindred subjects by Goethe and others. Coleridge, who had been in Germany, brought it over with him, and they translated Teutonic thought into a poor, disjointed, whitey-brown sort of English, and that was nearly all. But Wordsworth, after all, was the man of most practical mind of any of the persons connected with literature whom he had encountered; though his pastoral pipings were far from being of the importance his admirers imagined. He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual work of some sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him as he looked out of his stern blue eyes, superior to men and circumstances." I said I had expected to hear of a man of softer mood, more sympathetic and less taciturn. Carlyle said, "No, not at all; he was a man quite other than that; a man of an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a mold designed for prodigious work." "I begged him," continued Mr. Duffy, in writing of conversations with Carlyle, "to tell me something of the author of a serial I had come across lately, called _Bells and Pomegranates_, printed in painfully small type, on inferior paper, but in which I took great delight. There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little tragedy, _The Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, which, though not over-disposed to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears. The heroine's excuse for the sin which left a blot in a 'scutcheon stainless for a thousand years, was, in the circumstances of the case, as touching a line as I could recall in English poetry: I had no mother, and we were so young." He said Robert Browning had a powerful intellect, and among the men engaged in literature in England just now was one of the few from whom it was possible to expect something. He was somewhat uncertain about his career, and he himself (Carlyle) had perhaps contributed to the trouble by assuring him that poetry was no longer a field where any true or worthy success could be won or deserved. If a man had anything to say entitled to the attention of rational creatures, all mortals would come to recognize after a little that there was a more effectual way of saying it than in metrical numbers. Poetry used to be regarded as the natural, and even the essential language of feeling, but it was not at all so; there was not a sentiment in the gamut of human passion which could not be adequately expressed in prose. Browning's earliest works had been loudly applauded by undiscerning people, but he was now heartily ashamed of them, and hoped in the end to do something altogether different from _Sordello_ and _Paracelsus_. He had strong ambition and great confidence in himself, and was considering his future course just now. When he first met young Browning, he was a youth living with his parents, people of respectable position among the Dissenters, but not wealthy neither, and the little room in which he kept his books was in that sort of trim that showed that he was the apple of their eyes. He was about six and thirty at present, and a little time before had married Miss Barrett. She had long been confined to a sofa by a spinal disease, and seemed destined to end there very speedily, but the ending was to be quite otherwise, as it proved. Browning made his way to her in a strange manner, and they fell mutually in love. She rose up from her sick-bed with recovered strength and agility, and was now, it was understood, tolerably well. They married and were living together in Italy, like the hero and heroine of a mediæval romance. XXXVIII THE AUTHOR OF "JANE EYRE" Charlotte Brontë was born in Yorkshire in 1816. A generation ago everybody was reading and talking about _Jane Eyre_, her most popular novel. The life of the author was not a happy one. She was compelled to teach for a living, and her position as governess was at times humiliating to her proud spirit. Her two sisters, whom she tenderly loved, died young; her brother was no credit to the family, and the life surrounding the parsonage--she was the daughter of a clergyman--was not particularly cheery, yet her many trials but enriched a rare and beautiful character. While living at the parsonage she would occasionally receive a box of books from her publisher. The following letter is self-explanatory: "Do not ask me to mention what books I should like to read. Half the pleasure of receiving a parcel from Cornhill consists in having its contents chosen for us. We like to discover, too, by the leaves cut here and there that the ground has been traveled before us. I took up Leigh Hunt's book, _The Town_, with the impression that it would be interesting only to Londoners, and I was surprised, ere I had read many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy style, varied knowledge, just views, and kindly spirit. There is something peculiarly anti-melancholic in Leigh Hunt's writings, and yet they are never boisterous--they resemble sunshine, being at once bright and tranquil. I like Carlyle better and better. His style I do _not_ like, nor do I always concur in his opinions, nor quite fall in with his hero-worship; but there is a manly love of truth, an honest recognition and fearless vindication of intrinsic greatness, of intellectual and moral worth considered apart from birth, rank, or wealth, which commands my sincere admiration. Carlyle would never do for a contributor to the _Quarterly_. I have not read his _French Revolution_. Carlyle is a great man, but I always wish he would write plain English. Emerson's _Essays_ I read with much interest and often with admiration, but they are of mixed gold and clay,--deep, invigorating truth, dreary and depressing fallacy, seem to me combined therein. Scott's _Suggestions on Female Education_ I read with unalloyed pleasure; it is justly, clearly, and felicitously expressed. The girls of this generation have great advantages--it seems to me that they receive much encouragement in the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of their minds. In these days women may be thoughtful and well read, without being stigmatized as "blues" or pedants. I have lately been reading _Modern Painters_, and have derived from the work much genuine pleasure, and I hope, some edification; at any rate it has made me feel how ignorant I had previously been on the subjects which it treats. Hitherto I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art; I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold--this book seems to give me eyes. I _do_ wish I had pictures within reach by which to test the new sense. Who can read these glowing descriptions of Turner's works without longing to see them! However eloquent and convincing the language in which another's opinion is placed before you, you still wish to judge for yourself. I like this author's style much; there is both energy and beauty in it. I like himself too, because he is such a hearty admirer. He does not give half measure of praise or veneration. He eulogizes, he reverences with his whole soul. One can sympathize with that sort of devout, serious admiration (for he is no rhapsodist), one can respect it. Yet, possibly, many people would laugh at it. I am truly obliged to Mr. Smith for giving me this book, not often having met with one that has pleased me more. I congratulate you on the approaching publication of Mr. Ruskin's new work. If the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ resemble their predecessor, _Modern Painters_, they will be no lamps at all, but a new constellation--seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world ought to be anxiously agaze. I am beginning to read Eckermann's _Goethe_--it promised to be a most interesting work. Honest, simple, single-minded Eckermann! Great, powerful, giant-souled, but also profoundly egotistical old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe! He _was_ a mighty egotist. He thought no more of swallowing up poor Eckermann's existence in his own, than the whale thought of swallowing Jonah. The worst of reading graphic accounts of such men, of seeing graphic pictures of the scenes, the society in which they moved, is that it excites a too tormenting longing to look on the reality; but does such reality now exist? Amidst all the troubled waters of European society, does such a vast, strong, selfish old leviathan now roll ponderous? I suppose not. * * * * * I often wish to say something on the "condition-of-women" question, but it is one on which so much cant has been talked, that one feels a sort of reluctance to approach it. I have always been accustomed to think that the necessity of earning one's living is not, in itself, an evil; though I feel it may become a heavy evil if health fails, if employment lacks, if the demand upon our efforts, made by the weakness of others dependent upon us becomes greater than our strength. Both sons and daughters should early be inured to habits of independence and industry. A governess' lot is frequently, indeed, bitter, but its results are precious. The mind, feelings, and temper are subjected to a discipline equally painful and priceless. I have known many who were unhappy as governesses, but scarcely one who, having undergone the ordeal, was not ultimately strengthened and improved--made more enduring for her own afflictions, more considerate for the afflictions of others. The great curse of a single female life is its dependency; daughters, as well as sons, should aim at making their way through life. Teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid, and despised; but the girl who stays at home _doing nothing_ is worse off than the worse-paid drudge of a school; the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade her nature. Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career, perseverance to plead through two long weary years with publishers till they admitted me? How should I be, with youth passed, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single resident family? In that case I should have no world at all. The raven weary of surveying the deluge, and with no ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope and motive sustain me still. I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive. Alas! I fear there are many old maids who have neither. --Adapted from _Littell's Living Age_. XXXIX THACKERAY IN AMERICA Thackeray, like many other Englishmen of note, came to America to lecture in order to make money. He had delivered lectures in London and in other towns in England on the _English Humorists_. Why not use his popularity in America as a means of acquiring a little fortune for the sake of his wife and two girls. "I must and will go," he wrote to his eldest daughter, "not because I like it, but because it is right I should secure some money against my death for your mother and you two girls. And I think, if I have luck, I may secure nearly a third of the sum that I think I ought to leave behind me by a six months' tour in the States." Let us, in order to get a first-hand impression, read from letters that he wrote from America: "The passage is nothing, now it is over; I am rather ashamed of gloom and disquietude about such a trifling journey. I have made scores of new acquaintances and lighted on my feet as usual. I didn't expect to like people as I do, but am agreeably disappointed and find many most pleasant companions, natural and good; natural and well read and well bred too, and I suppose am none the worse pleased because everybody has read all my books and praises my lectures (I preach in a Unitarian Church, and the parson comes to hear me. His name is Mr. Bellows, it isn't a pretty name), and there are 2,000 people nearly who come, and the lectures are so well liked that it is probable I shall do them over again. So really there is a chance of making a pretty little sum of money for old age, imbecility, and those young ladies afterwards.... Broadway is miles upon miles long, a rush of life such as I have never seen; not so full as the Strand, but so rapid. The houses are always being torn down and built up again, the railroad cars drive slap into the midst of the city. There are barricades and scaffoldings banging everywhere. I have not been into a house, except the fat country one, but something new is being done to it, and the hammerings are clattering in the passage, or a wall or steps are down, or the family is going to move. Nobody is quiet here, nor am I. The rush and restlessness please me, and I like, for a little, the dash of the stream. I am not received as a god, which I like too. There is one paper which goes on every morning saying I am a snob, and I don't say no. Six people were reading it at breakfast this morning, and the man opposite me this morning popped it under the table-cloth. But the other papers roar with approbation." In this letter, of which we have read a fragment, Mr. Thackeray inclosed a clipping from the New York _Evening Post_. This is what the newspaper had to say: "The building was crowded.... Every one who saw Mr. Thackeray last evening for the first time seemed to have had their impressions of his appearance and manner of speech corrected. Few expected to see so large a man; he is gigantic; six feet four at least; few expected to see so old a person; his hair appears to have kept silvery record over fifty years; and then there was a notion in the minds of many that there must be something dashing and 'fast' in his appearance, whereas his costume was perfectly plain; the expression of his face grave and earnest; his address perfectly unaffected, and such as we might expect to meet with, in a well-bred man somewhat advanced in years. His elocution also surprised those who had derived their impressions from the English journals. His voice is a superb tenor, and possesses that pathetic tremble which is so effective in what is called emotive eloquence, while his delivery was as well suited to the communication he had to make as could well have been imagined. "His enunciation is perfect. Every word he uttered might have been heard in the remotest quarters of the room, yet he scarcely lifted his voice above a colloquial tone. The most striking feature in his whole manner was the utter absence of affectation of any kind. He did not permit himself to appear conscious that he was an object of peculiar interest in the audience, neither was he guilty of the greater error of not appearing to care whether they were interested in him or not. In other words, he inspired his audience with a respect for him, as a man proportioned to the admiration, which his books have inspired for him as an author." From Philadelphia Thackeray writes: "Oh, I am tired of shaking hands with people, and acting the lion business night after night. Everybody is introduced and shakes hands. I know thousands of colonels, professors, editors, and what not, and walk the streets guiltily, knowing that I don't know 'em, and trembling lest the man opposite to me is one of my friends of the day before. I believe I am popular, except at Boston among the newspaper men who fired into me, but a great favorite with the _monde_ there and elsewhere. Here in Philadelphia it is all praise and kindness. Do you know there are 500,000 people in Philadelphia? I daresay you had no idea thereof, and smile at the idea of there being a _monde_ here and at Boston and New York.... I am writing this with a new gold pen, in such a fine gold case. An old gentleman gave it to me yesterday, a white-headed old philosopher and political economist, there's something simple in the way these kind folks regard a man; they read our books as if we were Fielding, and so forth. The other night men were talking of Dickens and Bulwer as if they were equal to Shakespeare, and I was pleased to find myself pleased at hearing them praised. The prettiest girl in Philadelphia, poor soul, has read _Vanity Fair_ twelve times. I paid her a great big compliment yesterday, about her good looks of course, and she turned round delighted to her friend and said, '_Ai most tallut_,' that is something like the pronunciation." In another letter: "Now I have seen three great cities, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, I think I like them all mighty well. They seem to me not so civilized as our London, but more so than Manchester and Liverpool. At Boston is very good literate company indeed; it is like Edinburgh for that,--a vast amount of toryism and donnishness everywhere. That of New York the simplest and least pretentious; it suffices that a man should keep fine house, give parties, and have a daughter, to get all the world to him." XL GEORGE ELIOT BECOMES A WRITER OF FICTION As one is ready to call Elizabeth Barrett the greatest poetess of the nineteenth century, so there is little hesitation in pronouncing George Eliot the foremost of the many women who have written fiction. The literary critics sometimes dispute her supremacy by urging the claims of Jane Austen, who is said to have Shaksperean power in the delineation of character. But the name of Jane Austen is unknown to the general public. For every reader of _Pride and Prejudice_ there are a score of readers of _Adam Bede_. George Eliot is the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans. She took the name of _George_ because it was the first name of Mr. Lewes, and Eliot "was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word." George Eliot was almost thirty-seven years old before she began to write fiction; in this respect reminding us of Scott, who had first achieved fame as a poet before he began in his maturity to write fiction. We are happy in having from the pen of George Eliot herself the account of how she began to write fiction: "September, 1856, made a new era in my life, for it was then I began to write fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel; and my shadowy conception of what the novel was to be, varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to another. But I never went further toward the actual writing of the novel than an introductory chapter describing a Staffordshire village and the life of the neighboring farm-houses; and as the years passed on I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel." Mr. Lewes encouraged George Eliot by admiring her introductory chapter. He first read it when they were together in Germany. When they had returned to England and she was more successful in her essay writing than he had expected, he continued to urge her to try to write a story. "He began to say very positively, 'You must try and write a story,' and when we were at Tenby he urged me to begin at once. I deferred it, however, after my usual fashion with work that does not present itself as an absolute duty. But one morning, as I was thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story, of which the title was _The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton_. I was soon wide awake again and told G. (Mr. Lewes). He said 'Oh, what a capital title!' and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story. George used to say, 'It may be a failure--it may be that you are unable to write fiction. Or, perhaps, it may be just good enough to warrant your trying again.' Again, 'You may write a _chef-d'oeuvre_ at once--there's no telling.' But his prevalent impression was, that though I could hardly write a _poor_ novel, my effort would want the highest quality of fiction--dramatic presentation. He used to say, 'You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the production of a novel. It is worth while for you to try the experiment.'" When she had finished the first part of _Amos Barton_, Mr. Lewes was no longer skeptical about her ability to write dialogue. The next question was whether she had the power of pathos. This was to be determined by the way in which the death of Milly was to be treated. "One night G. went to town on purpose to leave me a quiet evening for writing it. I wrote the chapter from the news brought by the shepherd to Mrs. Hackit, to the moment when Amos is dragged from the bedside, and I read it to G. when he came home. We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, 'I think your pathos is better than your fun.'" The first part of _Amos Barton_ appeared in the January number of _Blackwood_. The publisher paid the author fifty guineas. Afterwards, when the series of stories dealing with clerical life was published in book form, she was paid £120; later, when the publishing firm decided to issue a thousand copies instead of seven hundred and fifty, £60 was added to the original sum. George Eliot expressed herself as sensitive to the merits of checks for fifty guineas, but the success of her later writings was so pronounced that a check for fifty guineas would have made little impression, except a feeling of disdain. _Amos Barton_ was followed by _Mr. Gilfil's Love Story_, and _Janet's Repentance_. The three comprise _Scenes from Clerical Life_. The stories are based upon events which happened in the early life of the writer when she lived in Warwickshire. The village of Milby is really Nuneaton. When the villagers and country people read the _Scenes from Clerical Life_ there was great excitement. Who could this _George Eliot_ be? Some one who had lived among them and heard all the gossip of the neighborhood. But they could not recall any man with enough literary ability to do what had been done. Finally they did remember that a man, Liggins by name, had written poetry. The poetry was rather weak stuff, but perhaps his strength lay in fiction. Liggins was flattered by the suspicions of his neighbors. His own doubt was gradually changed to belief. Yes, he was the author of this new fiction, because every one said he was. The voice of the people is the voice of God. He was invited to write for a theological magazine. Finally George Eliot was obliged to reveal her identity when the public was about to subscribe a sum of money for the pseudo-literary Liggins who was so fastidious as to refuse money for the product of his genius. Here ends the career of Liggins, the liar. One reason the villagers had for believing one of their own number was the author was based on the conversations in the _Scenes from Clerical Life_. Not only were they true to life, but they were conversations that had actually taken place. How did George Eliot hear them? Had she loitered in the public room of the village tavern? Mr. C.S. Olcott writes in the _Outlook_,--"The real conversations which were so cleverly reported were actually heard by Robert Evans, the father of George Eliot, who doubtless often visited the Bull in company with his neighbors. He repeated them to his wife, not realizing that the little daughter who listened so attentively was gifted with a marvelous memory, or that she possessed a genius that could transform a simple tale into a novel of dramatic power. Mary Ann Evans had moved to Coventry sixteen years before, and was therefore scarcely known in Nuneaton at the time the stories appeared. She then had no literary fame, and was no more likely to be thought of in this connection than any one of a hundred other school-girls." In her journal she records on October 22, 1857,--"Began my new novel, _Adam Bede_." For it her publishers offered her £800 for the copyright for four years; later they added £400, and still later Blackwoods, finding a ready sale for their numerous editions, proposed to pay £800 above the original price. And for the appearance of _Romola_ in the _Cornhill Magazine_, Mr. George Smith offered £10,000, but £7000 was accepted. For _Middlemarch_, which appeared in separate publication, that is, independent of a magazine, she received a still larger amount. Middlemarch is considered by many critics her best work. It was very popular from the first. In a letter to John Blackwood, November, 1873, George Eliot writes,--"I had a letter from Mr. Bancroft (the American ambassador at Berlin) the other day, in which he says that everybody in Berlin reads _Middlemarch_. He had to buy two copies for his house, and he found the rector of the university, a stupendous mathematician, occupied with it in the solid part of the day." The public may prefer _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_ but it is reported that George Eliot herself preferred _Silas Marner_. This is the report of Justin McCarthy, who was a frequent visitor on Sunday afternoons at the Priory, the home of George Eliot, where many distinguished visitors, such as Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, and Huxley, loved to gather. "There is a legend," writes Mr. McCarthy, "that George Eliot never liked to talk about her novels. I can only say that she started the subject with me one day. It was, to be sure, about a picture some painter had sent her, representing a scene in _Silas Marner_, and she called my attention to it, and said that of all her novels _Silas Marner_ was her favorite. I ventured to disagree with her, and to say that the _Mill on the Floss_ was my favorite. She entered into the discussion quite genially, just as if she were talking of the works of some stranger, which I think is the very perfection of the manner authors ought to adopt in talking about their books." XLI THE AUTHOR OF "ALICE IN WONDERLAND" It is said that when Victoria, late queen of England, had read _Alice in Wonderland_ she was so pleased that she asked for more of the author's books. They brought her a treatise on logarithms by the Rev. C.L. Dodgson. Lewis Carroll and the Rev. C.L. Dodgson were one and the same person, although they were two dissimilar characters. The one was a popular author of nonsense that delighted children by the hundreds of thousands and the other was a scholarly mathematician. C.L. Dodgson came of good Northern-England stock. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were clergymen--a contradiction, says his biographer, Mr. Collingwood, of the scandalous theory that three generations of parsons end in a fool. As a boy he kept all sorts of odd and unlikely pets. From Rugby he entered Oxford. In 1856 he was made college lecturer in mathematics, a position which he filled for a quarter of a century. That he had thoughts of lighter material than mathematics is evidenced by a short poem that appeared about this time in a college paper called _College Rhymes_. Two of the stanzas run like this: She has the bear's ethereal grace The bland hyena's laugh, The footsteps of the elephant, The neck of the giraffe; I love her still, believe me, Though my heart its passion hides, She is all my fancy painted her, But oh! how much besides. The year 1862 saw the beginning of the world-famous _Alice_. He told the story to Dean Liddell's three daughters. "Alice," the second of the three (now Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves) thus tells the story: "I believe the beginning of _Alice_ was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, and which was under a new-made hay-rick. Here from all three came the old petition of 'Tell us a story,' and so began the ever delightful tale. Sometimes to tease us--and perhaps being really tired--Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, 'And that's all till next time.' 'Oh! but it is next time,' would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day perhaps the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the midst of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to fall fast asleep, to our great dismay." ... "Many of Lewis Carroll's friendships with children began in a railway carriage. Once when he was traveling, a lady, whose little daughter had been reading _Alice_, startled him by exclaiming: 'Isn't it sad about poor Mr. Lewis Carroll? He's gone mad, you know.... I have it on the best authority.'" Lewis Carroll, or rather Mr. Dodgson, did not wish his acquaintances to speak of him as the author of _Alice_. In his every-day work he wanted to be known as the serious mathematician. He was conservative in his ideas and did not look with favor upon the movement to overthrow Euclid. In 1870 he published a book entitled _Euclid and his Modern Rivals_. The London _Spectator_ speaks of this as probably the most humorous contribution ever devoted to the subject of mathematics. In an academical discussion held at Oxford he once published three rules to be followed in debate. This is one of the three: "Let it be granted that any one may speak at any length on a subject at any distance from that subject." XLII ABOUT DARWIN When a prominent literary journal at the close of the last century asked a number of distinguished Americans and Englishmen to name the ten most influential books of the century, it was interesting to note that Darwin's _Origin of Species_ received more frequent mention than any other book. Five years after Charles Darwin had been buried (he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey in 1882), his son published the _Life and Letters of Darwin_, which included an autobiographical chapter. From this work we can gather enough to show some aspects of this remarkable man. Men of genius are often in childhood very imaginative. It is sometimes pretty difficult to distinguish between playful imagination and lying. Let us give Darwin the benefit of the doubt in this instance: "One little event during this year (1817) has fixed itself very firmly in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience having been afterwards sorely troubled by it; it is curious as showing that apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants! I told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me." Darwin's school experiences were not always profitable. He says: "I had many friends, and got together a good collection of old verses, which by patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject. Much attention was paid to learning by heart the lessons of the previous day. This I could effect with great facility, learning forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer whilst I was in morning chapel. But this exercise was utterly useless, for every verse was forgotten in forty-eight hours. I was not idle, and with the exception of versification, generally worked conscientiously at my classics, not using cribs. The sole pleasure I ever received from such studies, was from some of the odes of Horace, which I admired greatly." Of his years at Cambridge he writes: "During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school. I attempted mathematics, and even went, during the summer of 1828, with a private tutor (a very dull man) to Barmouth, but I got on very slowly. The work was repugnant to me chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the very early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.... In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was also necessary to get up Paley's _Evidences of Christianity_, and his _Moral Philosophy_. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the _Evidences_ with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his _Natural Theology_, gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley's premises, and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation." One of the great opportunities of Darwin's life came to him when, some time after he had finished his course at Cambridge, he was offered a place as naturalist on the _Beagle_, a ship sent by the English government on a survey. At first Darwin thought he could not go because his father was opposed to the plan. Finally the father said he would consent if any man of common sense should advise his son to go. This common sense man "was found in the person of his uncle, a Josiah Wedgwood, who advised the father to permit his son to go. The voyage has been described by Darwin, and thousands have been interested and profited by the reading. Some of the letters that he wrote to his friends during his trip are also very interesting. Here is one he sent to his cousin, Fox: "My mind has been, since leaving England, in a perfect _hurricane_ of delight and astonishment, and to this hour scarcely a minute has passed in idleness.... Geology carries the day; it is like the pleasure of gambling. Speculating, on first arrival, what the rocks may be, I often mentally cry out, three to one tertiary against primitive; but the latter has hitherto won all the bets.... My life, when at sea, is so quiet, that to a person who can employ himself, nothing can be pleasanter; the beauty of the sky and brilliancy of the ocean together make a picture. But when on shore, and wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand. If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt. At our ancient snug breakfasts, at Cambridge, I little thought that the wide Atlantic would ever separate us; but it is a rare privilege that with the body, the feelings and memory are not divided. On the contrary, the pleasantest scenes of my life, many of which have been at Cambridge, rise from the contrast of the present the more vividly in my imagination." From Valparaiso, after he had been two years on the voyage, he writes to a friend: "That this voyage must come to a conclusion my reason tells me, otherwise I see no end to it. It is impossible not bitterly to regret the friends and other sources of pleasure one leaves behind in England; in place of it there is much solid enjoyment, some present, but more in anticipation, when the ideas gained during the voyage can be compared with fresh ones. I find in Geology a never-failing interest, as it has been remarked, it creates the same grand ideas respecting the world which astronomy does for the universe. We have seen much fine scenery; that of the tropics in its glory and luxuriance exceeds even the language of Humboldt to describe. A Persian writer could alone do justice to it, and if he succeeded he would in England be called the 'Grandfather of all liars.'" No one can read the life of Darwin without feeling great respect for his perseverance. His faithful devotion to his work can teach us all a useful lesson. Says his son: "No one except my mother, knows the full amount of suffering he endured, or the full amount of his wonderful patience. For all the latter years of his life she never left him for a night, and her days were so planned that all his resting hours might be shared with her. She shielded him from every possible annoyance, and omitted nothing that might save him trouble, or prevent his becoming overtired, or that might alleviate the many discomforts of his ill-health. I hesitate to speak thus freely of a thing so sacred as the life-long devotion which prompted this constant and tender care. But it is, I repeat, a principal feature of his life, that for nearly forty years he never knew one day of the health of ordinary men, and that thus his life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness. And this cannot be told without speaking of the one condition which enabled him to bear the strain and fight out the struggle to the end." That Darwin himself appreciated the goodness of his wife can be seen from the following tribute which has appeared in _More Letters of Charles Darwin_. It does not appear in the _Autobiography_ because Mrs. Darwin was living at the time of its publication. Where in all literature can a more tender and beautiful appreciation be found?-- "You all know your mother, and what a good mother she has been to all of you. She has been my greatest blessing, and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word I would rather have been unsaid. She has never failed in kindest sympathy towards me, and has borne with the utmost patience my frequent complaints of ill-health and discomfort. I do not believe she has ever missed an opportunity of doing a kind action to any one near her. I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my wife. She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter throughout life, which without her would have been during a very long period a miserable one from ill-health. She has earned the love of every soul near her." XLIII ANECDOTES OF HUXLEY Huxley was more than one of the greatest scientists of the last century; he was a man of literary ability. By his popular lectures and clear expositions he probably did more than any other man of the century to popularize the many and important discoveries of the scientific world. At first there was much opposition to him, owing to a lack of information on the part of the public as to the import of the doctrine of evolution. Ex-President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University tells what a storm of protest was raised in America when Huxley was invited to deliver the opening address at the founding of the new university. Huxley is not even now regarded as an orthodox man, but much of the former prejudice has given way. John Fiske, who in so many ways can be regarded as the American Huxley, has published a magazine article giving his impressions of Huxley. In this article he gives two versions of a famous Huxley anecdote. Here is one: "It was at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, soon after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making book, and while people in general were wagging their heads at it, that the subject came up before a hostile and fashionable audience. Samuel Wilberforce, the plausible and self-complacent Bishop of Oxford, commonly known as 'Soapy Sam,' launched out in a rash speech, conspicuous for its ignorant mis-statements, and highly seasoned with appeals to the prejudices of the audience, upon whose lack of intelligence the speaker relied. Near him sat Huxley, already known as a man of science, and known to look favorably upon Darwinism, but more or less youthful withal, only five-and-thirty, so that the bishop anticipated sport in badgering him. At the close of his speech he suddenly turned upon Huxley and begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was really willing to be regarded as the descendant of a monkey. Eager self-confidence had blinded the bishop to the tactical blunder in thus inviting a retort. Huxley was instantly upon his feet with a speech demolishing the bishop's card house of mistakes; and at the close he observed that since a question of personal preferences had been very improperly brought into a discussion of a scientific theory, he felt free to confess that if the alternatives were descent, on the one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a bishop of the English church who would stoop to such misrepresentations and sophisms as the audience had lately listened to, he would declare in favor of the monkey!... It is curious to read that in the ensuing buzz of excitement a lady fainted, and had to be carried from the room; but the audience were in general quite alive to the bishop's blunder in manners and tactics, and, with the genuine English love of fair play, they loudly applauded Huxley. From that time forth it was recognized that he was not the sort of man to be browbeaten. As for Bishop Wilberforce, he carried with him from the affray no bitterness, but was always afterwards most courteous to his castigator." Huxley was a great reader of history, poetry, metaphysics, and fiction, but this is not what made him a great scientist. Original men make books, they do not need to read them. Yet Huxley loved to read. He even in his old age studied Greek to read Aristotle and the New Testament in the original. But Huxley loved things even more than books. He had little respect for mere bookish knowledge. "A rash clergyman once, without further equipment in natural science than desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in some sundry magazine articles, in which he made himself uncommonly merry at Huxley's expense. This was intended to draw the great man's fire, and as the batteries remained silent the author proceeded to write to Huxley, calling his attention to the articles, and at the same time, with mock modesty, asking advice as to the further study of these deep questions. Huxley's answer was brief and to the point: 'Take a cockroach and dissect it.'" Huxley was fond of children and their ways. His son, Leonard, tells us that Julian, the grandchild of Huxley was a child made up of a combination of cherub and pickle. Huxley had been in his garden watering with a hose. The little four-year-old was with him. Huxley came in and said: "I like that chap! I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you. I told him not to go on the wet grass again. He just looked up boldly straight at me, as much as to say, 'What do _you_ mean by ordering me about?' and deliberately walked on to the grass." In the spring the approval was not so decided. "I like that chap; he looks you straight in the face. But there's a falling off in one respect since last August--he now does what he is told." When Julian, the grandchild, was learning to read and write, he became interested in _Water-Babies_, a story that has delighted so many children. In it he found a reference to his grandfather as one who knew much about water-babies. So he wrote to his grandfather: Dear Grandpater, have you seen a water baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your loving JULIAN. This is the answer to the letter: March 24, 1892. MY DEAR JULIAN: I never could make out about that water-baby. I have seen babies in water and babies in bottles; but the baby in the water was not in the bottle and the baby in the bottle was not in the water. Ever your loving GRANDPATER. Huxley was also fond of cats and dogs and pets of all kind. His son tells us that once he found his father in an uncomfortable seat, while the cat had the best chair. He defended himself by saying that he could not turn the beast away. In 1893 a man, who was writing on the _Pets of Celebrities_, wrote to him for information concerning his personal likings. Huxley sent him this letter: A long series of cats has reigned over my household for the last forty years or thereabouts; but I am sorry to say that I have no pictorial or other record of their physical and moral excellencies. The present occupant of the throne is a large young gray tabby, Oliver by name. Not that in any sense he is a protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and trust that the germ of courage thus manifest may develop, with age, into efficient mousing. As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the warmest place and the softest cushion in the room is infallible, his punctuality at meal-time is admirable, and his pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders till they give him some of the best of what is going indicates great firmness. XLIV STEVENSON AT VAILIMA Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer of _Treasure Island_ and many other exciting romances, was an exile from home during the last few years of his life. The state of his health demanded a sunny clime and so he was forced to live in Samoa, a group of islands in the South Pacific. About three miles behind Apia, on a slight plateau seven hundred feet above the level of the sea, he cleared the forest and made a house. "I have chosen the land to be my land, the people to be my people, to live and die with," said Stevenson in his speech to the Samoan chiefs. Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, his step-son, thus describes their abode: "Unbroken forest covered Vailima when first we saw it; not the forest of the temperate zone with its varied glades and open spaces, but the thick tangle of the tropics, dense, dark, and cold in even the hottest day, where one must walk cutlass in hand to slash the lianas and the red-edged stinging leaves of a certain tree that continually bar one's path. The murmur of streams and cascades fell sometimes upon our ears as we wandered in the deep shade, and mingled with the cooing of wild doves and the mysterious, haunting sound of a native woodpecker at work. Our Chinaman, who was with us on our first survey, busied himself with taking samples of the soil, and grew almost incoherent with the richness of what he called the 'dirty.' We, for our part, were no less enchanted with what we saw, and could realize, as we forced our way through the thickets and skirted the deep ravines, what a noble labor lay before our axes, what exquisite views and glorious gardens could be carved out of the broken mountain side and the sullen forest." As Stevenson was afraid that villas might be made to intervene between him and the sea, he bought much land that his view might be forever unobstructed. He entered into the work of clearing the forest with vigorous delight. For months he lived in pioneer confusion. Gangs of native workmen worked from morning to night. "The new house was built," says Mr. Osbourne; "I arrived from England with the furniture, the library, and other effects of our old home; the phase of hard work and short commons passed gradually away, and a form of hollow comfort dawned upon us. I say hollow comfort, for though we began to accumulate cows, horses, and the general apparatus of civilized life, the question of service became a vexing one. An expensive German cooked our meals and quarreled with the white house-maid; the white overseer said 'that manual labor was the one thing that never agreed with him,' and that it was an unwholesome thing for a man to be awakened in the early morning, 'for one ought to wake up natural-like,' he explained. The white carter 'couldn't bear with niggers,' and though he did his work well and faithfully, he helped to demoralize the place and loosen discipline. Everything was at sixes and sevens, when, on the occasion of Mrs. Stevenson's going to Fiji for a few months' rest, my sister and I took charge of affairs. The expensive German was bidden to depart; Mr. Stevenson discharged the carter; the white overseer (who was tied to us by contract) was bought off in cold coin, to sleep out his 'natural sleep' under a kindlier star and to engage himself (presumably) in intellectual labors elsewhere. There are two sides to 'white slavery'--that cherished expression of the labor agitator--and with the departure of our tyrants we began again to raise our diminished heads. My sister and I threw ourselves into the kitchen, and took up the labor of cooking with zeal and determination; the domestic boundaries proved too narrow for our new-found energies, and we overflowed into the province of entertainment, with decorated menus, silver plate and finger-bowls! The aristocracy of Apia was pressed to lunch with us, to commend our independence and to eat our biscuits. It was a French Revolution in miniature; we danced the carmagnole in the kitchen and were prepared to conquer the Samoan social world. One morning, before the ardor and zest of it all had time to be dulled by custom, I happened to discover a young and very handsome Samoan on our back veranda. He was quite a dandified youngster, with a red flower behind his ear and his hair limed in the latest fashion. I liked his open, attractive face and his unembarrassed manner, and inquired what propitious fate had brought him to sit upon our ice-chest and radiate good nature on our back porch. It seemed that Simele, the overseer, owed him two Chile dollars, and that he was here, bland, friendly, but insistent, to collect the debt in person. That Simele would not be back for hours in no way daunted him, and he seemed prepared to swing his brown legs and show his white teeth for a whole eternity. "'Chief,' I said, a sudden thought striking me, 'you are he that I have been looking for so long. You are going to stay in Vailima and be our cook!' "'But I don't know how to cook,' he replied. "'That is no matter,' I said. 'Two months ago I was as you; to-day I am a splendid cook. I will teach you my skill.' "'But I don't want to learn,' he said, and brought back the conversation to Chile dollars. "'There is no good making excuses,' I said. 'This is a psychological moment in the history of Vailima. You are the Man of Destiny.' "'But I haven't my box,' he expostulated. "'I will send for it,' I returned. 'I would not lose you for twenty boxes. If you need clothes, why there stands my own chest; flowers grow in profusion and the oil-bottle rests never empty beside my humble bed; and in the hot hours of the afternoon there is the beautifulest pool where one can bathe and wash one's lovely hair. Moreover, so generous are the regulations of Tusitala's (Stevenson's) government that his children receive weekly large sums of money, and they are allowed on Sundays to call their friends to this elegant house and entertain them with salt beef and biscuit.' "Thus was Taalolo introduced into the Vailima kitchen, never to leave it for four years save when the war-drum called him to the front with a six-shooter and a 'death-tooth'--the Samoan war-cutlass or head-knife. He became in time not only an admirable chef, but the nucleus of the whole native establishment and the loyalest of our whole Samoan family. His coming was the turning-point in the history of the house. We had achieved independence of our white masters, and their discontented white faces had disappeared one by one. Honest brown ones now took their places and we gained more than good servants by the change." The following incident illustrates the high regard in which Stevenson was held by the native Samoans. When Mataafa, a claimant for the throne of Upolo, was imprisoned by the European powers, Stevenson visited him in prison and gave him tobacco and other gifts to cheer the disconsolate chief. He also visited other prisoners who had sided in the affairs of Mataafa. When they were released they wished to show their gratitude in some tangible way. So they built a fine wide road to the home of the famous writer, a work which they disliked but which their love for Stevenson enabled them to accomplish. They called it "The Road of the Loving-Heart." Once when his favorite body-servant, Sosimo, had anticipated some of his master's wants and Stevenson had complimented him with, "Great is the wisdom!" "Nay," replied Sosimo with truer insight, "Great is the Love!" Stevenson's manner of life at Vailima was somewhat like this: At six o'clock or earlier he arose and began the day's work. By dawn the rest of the household were up, and at about eight his wife's daughter began to take his dictation, working from then until noon. The afternoons were usually spent in some form of recreation--riding was a favorite pastime. He was fond of strolling through the tropical forest, and of taking part in any of the numerous outdoor sports. However, when he was in the height of literary inspiration, he stayed at his desk all day long. On Sunday evening the household was always called together for prayers; a chapter was read from the Samoan Bible, Samoan hymns were sung and one of Stevenson's own beautiful prayers, one usually written for the occasion, was read, concluding with the Lord's Prayer in the tongue of the natives. In the dominant note of these prayers, the call for courage and cheerfulness, one can hear the cry of the dying Stevenson's need: "The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry.... Give us health, food, bright weather, and light hearts.... As the sun lightens the world, so let our loving-kindness make bright the house of our habitation." Stevenson died as he wished--in the midst of his work. After a day spent in writing his _Weir of Hermiston_, a day full of life and gayety, he suddenly fainted and died a short time afterwards. In the prayer offered the evening before had been this sentence,--"When the day returns, return to us our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion--and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it." On the following morning a group of powerful Samoans bore the coffin upon their shoulders to the summit of Mount Vaea, where it was the wish of Mr. Stevenson that he should rest. One of the inscriptions upon the tomb is his own noble _Requiem_: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill. XLV KIPLING IN INDIA In four lines of oft-quoted poetry Pope has declared that with words the same rule holds that applies to fashion,--"Alike fantastic if too new or old." Fashion changes, not only the fashions of millinery but of literature also. When the world is tired of the brilliant wit of Byron, it turns in relief to the contemplative verse of Wordsworth; when Longfellow and Tennyson have had their artistic day and a thousand imitators have produced romantic poetry, because Most can raise the flowers now For all have got the seed,-- then this same world turns with delight to the robust poetry of Kipling. He has brought a new dish to the banquet of life, or at least a new flavor has been given to the old. Kipling is a man's poet, robust and virile. As a preface to one of his stories he wrote: Go stalk the red deer o'er the heather, Ride, follow the fox, if you can! But for pleasure and profit together Allow me the hunting of man;-- and this joy in the hunting of man is what has made Kipling so acceptable to men. Kipling has the defects of his virtues. There is a certain brutality in his point of view. His beautiful _Recessional_ is not the greater part of Kipling. His voice "is still for war." His critics charge him with "Jingoism." One of the most brilliant parodies of recent times is Watson's Best by remembering God, say some, We keep our high imperial lot-- Fortune, I think, has mainly come When we forgot, when we forgot! The greater influence of Kipling, both in his prose and poetry, is contrary to the humanitarian spirit of the age. Le Gallienne has said,--"As a writer Mr. Kipling is a delight; as an influence a danger." Mr. Kipling sprang into public notice because he had genius and because he had a new world to reveal to a jaded public. Mr. E. Kay Robinson was a friend and associate of Kipling when both were in the land of mysteries, India. Mr. Robinson went to India in 1884 and soon began to write verses over the signature of "K.R." Kipling was writing ballads under the initials "R.K." The similarity of the signatures attracted Kipling and he wrote to Robinson. They were afterwards associated in newspaper work and became close friends. Robinson has written about Kipling in India: "My first sight of Kipling was at an uninteresting stage, when he was a short, square, dark youth, who unfortunately wore spectacles instead of eyeglasses and had an unlucky eye for color in the selection of his clothes. He had a weakness apparently for brown cloth with just that suggestion of ruddiness or purple in it which makes some browns so curiously conspicuous. The charm of his manner, however, made you forget what he looked like in half a minute.... "Among Kipling's early journalistic experiences was his involuntary assumption 'for this occasion only' of the rôle of the fighting editor. He was essentially a man of peace, and would always prefer making an angry man laugh to fighting with him; but one day there called at the office a very furious photographer. What the paper may have said about him or his photographs has been forgotten, but never will those who witnessed it forget the rough-and-tumble all over the floor in which he and Kipling indulged. The libel, or whatever it was, which had infuriated the photographer was not Kipling's work, but the quarrel was forced upon him, and although he was handicapped by his spectacles and smaller stature he made a very fine draw of it, and then the photographer--who, it may be remarked, was very drunk--was ejected. And Kipling wiped his glasses and buttoned his collar. "That trick of wiping his spectacles is one which Kipling indulged more frequently than any man I have ever met, for the simple reason that he was always laughing; and when you laugh till you nearly cry your spectacles get misty. Kipling, shaking all over with laughter, and wiping his spectacles at the same time with his handkerchief, is the picture which always comes to mind as most characteristic of him in the old days." With regard to Kipling's minute and exact knowledge of details Mr. Robinson has this to say: "To learn to write as soldiers think, he spent long hours loafing with the genuine article. He watched them at work and at play and at prayer from the points of view of all his confidants--the combatant officer, the doctor, the chaplain, the drill sergeant, and the private himself. With the navy, with every branch of sport, and with natural history, he has never wearied in seeking to learn all that man may learn at first-hand, or the very best second-hand, at any rate.... But most wonderful was his insight into the strangely mixed manners of life and thought of the natives of India. He knew them all through their horizontal divisions of rank and their vertical sections of caste; their ramifications of race and blood; their antagonisms and blendings of creed; their hereditary strains of calling or handicraft. Show him a native, and he would tell you his rank, caste, race, origin, habitat, creed, and calling. He would speak to the man in his own fashion, using familiar, homely figures, which brightened the other's surprised eyes with recognition of brotherhood and opened a straight way into his confidence. In two minutes the man--perhaps a wild hawk from the Afghan hills--would be pouring out into the ear of this sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity, which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious mendicants, would open their mouths freely. "By the road thick with the dust of camels and thousands of cattle and goats, which winds from Lahore Fort to the River Ravi, there are walled caravanserais the distant smell of which more than suffices for most of the Europeans who pass, but sitting with the travelers in the reeking inside Kipling heard weird tales and gathered much knowledge. Under a spreading peepul tree overhanging a well by the same road squatted daily a ring of almost naked fakirs, smeared with ashes, who scowled at the European driving by; but for Kipling there was, when he wished it, an opening in the squatting circle and much to be learned from the unsavory talkers. That is how Kipling's finished word-pictures take the lifelike aspect of instantaneous photographs." XLVI BENJAMIN FRANKLIN RUNS AWAY Benjamin Franklin had so many strong qualities, was eminent in so many lines of endeavor, that we do not always include him among the literary men of America. However, his _Autobiography_ is a masterpiece. In sincerity and simplicity it is unsurpassed. This is all the more remarkable because it was written at a time when ornate writing was the fashion. A man's style is the outgrowth of his nature, and it is a striking comment upon the robust quality of Franklin's mind that his style has the simplicity of the Bible, or _Pilgrim's Progress_. The following account, taken from his _Autobiography_, begins just after he has landed in New York, a boy of seventeen who has run away from home because he felt that his brother was not treating him fairly: My inclinations for the sea were by this time worn out, or I might now have gratified them. But, having a trade, and supposing myself a pretty good workman, I offered my service to the printer in the place, old Mr. William Bradford, who had been the first printer in Pennsylvania, but removed from thence upon the quarrel of George Keith. He could give me no employment, having little to do and help enough already; but, says he, "My son at Philadelphia has lately lost his principal hand, Aquilla Rose, by death; if you go thither I believe he may employ you." Philadelphia was a hundred miles farther; I set out, however, in a boat for Amboy, leaving my chest and things to follow me round by sea. [Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN From a portrait by Duplessis] In crossing the bay we met with a squall that tore our rotten sails to pieces, prevented our getting into the Kill, and drove us upon Long Island. In our way, a drunken Dutchman, who was a passenger too, fell overboard. When he was sinking, I reached through the water to his shock pate, and drew him up so that we got him in again. His ducking sobered him a little, and he went to sleep, taking first out of his pocket a book, which he desired I would dry for him. It proved to be my old favorite author, Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, in Dutch, finely printed on good paper, with copper cuts, a dress better than I had ever seen it wear in its own language. I have since found that it has been translated into most of the languages of Europe, and suppose it has been more generally than any other book, except, perhaps, the Bible. Honest John was the first that I know of who mixed narration and dialogue; a method of writing very engaging to the reader, who in the most interesting parts finds himself, as it were, brought into the company and present at the discourse. Defoe in his _Crusoe_, his _Moll Flanders_, _Religious Courtship_, _Family Instructor_, and other pieces, has imitated it with success, and Richardson has done the same in his _Pamela_, etc. When we drew near the island we found it was at a place where there could be no landing, there being a great surf on the stony beach. So we dropped anchor, and swung round toward the shore. Some people came down to the water edge and hallooed to us, as we did to them; but the wind was so high and the surf so loud that we could not hear so as to understand each other. There were canoes on the shore, and we made signs, and hallooed that they should fetch us, but they either did not understand us or thought it impracticable, so they went away, and night coming on, we had no remedy but to wait till the wind should abate. In the meantime, the boatman and I concluded to sleep if we could, and so crowded into the scuttle with the Dutchman, who was still wet, and the spray beating over the head of our boat leaked through to us, so that we were almost as wet as he. In this manner we lay all night, with very little rest; but the wind abating the next day, we made a shift to reach Amboy before night, having been thirty hours on the water, without victuals, or any drink but a bottle of filthy rum, the water we sailed on being salt. In the evening I found myself very feverish, and went in to bed; but, having read somewhere that cold water, drunk plentifully, was good for a fever, I followed the prescription, sweat plentifully most of the night, my fever left me, and in the morning, crossing the ferry, I proceeded on my journey on foot, having fifty miles to Burlington, where I was told I should find boats that would carry me the rest of the way to Philadelphia. It rained very hard all the day. I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon a good deal tired, so I stopped at a poor inn, where I stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left home. I cut so miserable a figure, too, that I found, by the questions asked me, I was suspected to be some runaway servant and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion. However, I proceeded the next day, and got in the evening to an inn, within eight or ten miles of Burlington, kept by one Dr. Brown. He entered into conversation with me while I took some refreshment, and finding I had read a little, became very sociable and friendly. Our acquaintance continued as long as he lived. He had been, I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if his work had been published; but it never was. At his house I lay that night, and the next morning reached Burlington, but had the mortification to find that the regular boats were gone a little before my coming, and no other expected to go before Tuesday, this being Saturday; wherefore I returned to an old woman in the town of whom I had bought gingerbread to eat on the water, and asked her advice. She invited me to lodge at her house till a passage by water should offer; and, being tired with my foot traveling, I accepted the invitation. She, understanding I was a printer, would have had me stay at that town and follow my business, being ignorant of the stock necessary to begin with. She was very hospitable, gave me a dinner of ox cheek with great good will, accepting only of a pot of ale in return; and I thought myself fixed till Tuesday should come. However, walking in the evening by the side of the river, a boat came by, which I found was going toward Philadelphia, with several people in her. They took me in, and, as there was no wind, we rowed all the way, and about midnight, not having yet seen the city, some of the company were confident we must have passed it, and would row no farther. The others knew not where we were, so we put toward the shore, got into a creek, and landed near an old fence, with the rails of which we made a fire, the night being cold, in October, and there we remained till daylight. Then one of the company knew the place to be Cooper's Creek, a little above Philadelphia, which we saw as soon as we got out of the creek, and arrived there about eight or nine o'clock on the Sunday morning, and landed at the Market Street wharf. I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there. I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest; I was very hungry, and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people of the boat for my passage, who at first refused it, on account of my rowing; but I insisted on their taking it, a man being sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little. Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, in Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a threepenny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money and the greater cheapness, nor the names of his bread, I bade him give me threepenny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surprised at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walked off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way, and, coming round, found myself again on Market Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to which I went for a draught of the river water; and, being filled with one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her child that came down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther. Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I joined them, and was thereby led into the great meetinghouse of the Quakers near the market. I sat down among them, and, after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labor and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and continued so till the meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me. This was, therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, in Philadelphia. Walking down again toward the river, and looking in the faces of people, I met a young Quaker man, whose countenance I liked, and, accosting him, requested he would tell me where a stranger could get lodging. We were then near the sign of the Three Mariners. "Here," says he, "is one place that entertains strangers, but it is not a reputable house; if thee wilt walk with me I'll show thee a better." He brought me to the Crooked Billet, in Water Street. Here I got a dinner, and while I was eating it several sly questions were asked me, as it seemed to be suspected from my youth and appearance that I might be some runaway. After dinner my sleepiness returned, and, being shown to a bed, I lay down without undressing and slept till six in the evening, was called to supper, went to bed again very early, and slept soundly till next morning. Then I made myself as tidy as I could, and went to Andrew Bradford the printer's. I found in the shop the old man, his father, whom I had seen in New York, and who, traveling on horseback, had got to Philadelphia before me. He introduced me to his son, who received me civilly, and gave me a breakfast, but told me he did not at present want a hand, being lately supplied with one; but there was another printer in town, lately set up, one Keimer, who, perhaps, might employ me; if not, I should be welcome to lodge at his house, and he would give me a little work to do now and then till fuller business should offer. XLVII WASHINGTON IRVING Washington Irving may be called the father of American literature. It is true he is not the first writer who flourished on American soil, but in point of accomplishment he is the first literary man to impress himself upon the readers of the two continents. And what a sweet, beautiful soul he is! The only rival he has is Franklin, and Franklin is not a literary man, though he produced a literary masterpiece in his _Autobiography_. The test of a great piece of literature is, In a hundred years can it be bought in a new edition for ten cents? The New Testament can be bought for ten cents, so can the _Autobiography_, and the _Sketch Book_. These emerge from the sea of mediocrity of early American life. They abide while the works of the Michael Wigglesworths and Anne Bradstreets can be found only in the collections of the fortunate book-lover. The early settlers believed in the virtue of large families. It is well, for otherwise Franklin and Irving would have been lost to American life. Franklin was the youngest son in a family of seventeen children, there were two girls younger (Benjamin was the eighth child of the second wife), and Irving was the eighth son and last child in a family of eleven children. It is not hard to account for Irving's first name. Nowadays when you meet a boy named Dewey or Garfield it is not difficult to guess the boy's age. Irving was born in 1783; the air was laden with the praises of the great American leader. "Washington's work is ended," said the mother, "and the child shall be named after him." Several years after this when Washington, as President, was in New York, Lizzie, the Scotch servant of the Irving family, followed the great man into a shop and said, "Please, your honor, here's a bairn was named after you." Washington placed his hand on the lad's head and gave him a fatherly blessing. Like Lowell and Bryant, Irving was first devoted to the law, but his devotion was not of the quality that consumes. He soon strayed into pleasanter paths. In January, 1807, appeared the first number of _Salmagundi_, a humorous periodical which caused a great deal of curiosity as to the authors, whose witty articles appeared anonymously. Two years later came the droll _History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker_, a book in which according to Scott were to be seen traces of the wit of Swift. Scott said that he used to read it aloud to his wife and guests until "our sides were absolutely sore with laughing." Before this work had appeared, Irving lost in three consecutive years three persons who would have rejoiced the most in his success,--his father, "the tenderest and best of sisters, a woman of whom a brother might be proud," and his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman. She was a rare and beautiful maiden who had kindled in the heart of Irving a passion which survived her death until he himself passed away an old man. When he died his friends found her miniature and a lock of fair hair, together with the part of a manuscript written for a lady who had asked Irving why he had never married. Describing Miss Hoffman he says: "The more I saw her, the more I had reason to admire her. Her mind seemed to unfold itself leaf by leaf, and every time to discover new sweetness. Nobody knew her so well as I, for she was generally silent.... Never did I meet with more intuitive rectitude of mind, more delicacy, more exquisite propriety in word, thought, and action than in this young creature. Her brilliant little sister used to say that 'people began by admiring her, but ended by loving Matilda.' For my part I idolized her." Irving then continues by giving a long account of his efforts to succeed in his literary and legal work with a view of earning a place in life so as to enable him to marry. "In the midst of this struggle and anxiety she fell into a consumption. I cannot tell you what I suffered.... I saw her fade rapidly away, beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelic to the very last. I was often by her bedside, and when her mind wandered she would talk to me with a sweet, natural, and affecting eloquence that was overpowering. I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that delirious state than I ever had before.... I was by her when she died, and was the last she ever looked upon.... She was but seventeen." So poignant was the grief of Irving that for thirty years after her death he did not like any one to mention her name to him. One day he was visiting her father when one of her nieces, taking some music from a drawer, brought with it a piece of embroidery. "Washington," said Mr. Hoffman, "this was poor Matilda's work." The effect was instantaneous. The light-hearted conversationalist of a moment before became silent and soon left the house. When in _Bracebridge Hall_ he writes,--"I have loved as I never again shall love in this world--I have been loved as I shall never again be loved,"--is he not thinking of the fair Matilda? And in a note-book we find,--"She died in the beauty of her youth, and in my memory she will ever be young and beautiful." In May, 1815, Irving went abroad for the second time. His purpose was to stay a few months; he remained seventeen years. The first sight that greeted the newly arrived American in Liverpool was the mail-coach bringing the news of the battle of Waterloo. Irving's sympathies were with Napoleon. "In spite of all his misdeeds he is a noble fellow, and I am confident will eclipse in the eyes of posterity all the crowned wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy." In the year 1818 the Irving brothers went into bankruptcy. Washington's interest in the business was that of a younger brother who had little responsibility. But of late years he had been much harassed by the accumulating troubles. With the end of the business anxieties he turns to literature with a whole-souled devotion. His home friends tried to secure for him the position of Secretary of the Legation in London; his brother William wrote that Commodore Decatur was keeping open for his acceptance the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department; but Irving turned the offers aside. Irving is usually imaged as a sunshiny, genial, easy-going gentleman into whose blood little of the iron of firmness had been infused. The fact that he not only refused these offers but also rejected offers from Scott and Murray shows that he had will enough to keep to the bent of his genius at a time when he needed money and influence. Murray offered him a salary of £1000 a year to be the editor of a periodical. The first number of the _Sketch Book_ appeared in May, 1819, and consisted mainly in point of merit of two papers, _The Wife_ and _Rip Van Winkle_. The series was finished in 1820. The work was highly successful in America, and Irving was deeply moved by the cordial expressions of praise that reached him. His manly nature is revealed in a letter to a friend in which he says,--"I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind reception I have met to an author's vanity. I am sure it proceeds from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen. I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these sudden rays of sunshine agitate me more than they revive me. I hope--I hope I may yet do something more worthy of the appreciation lavished on me." Irving had not intended to publish the _Sketch Book_ in England, but owing to reprints by others he was obliged to take the matter in his own hands. Murray refused to undertake the work. Then Irving became his own publisher. But the work sold so well that Murray bought the copyright for two hundred pounds. In 1826 we find Irving in Spain. To the American reader the name of Spain is forever associated with that of Irving, for _The Alhambra_, _The Conquest of Granada_, and _The Life of Columbus_ are the rich evidences of his absorption of the spirit of Spain. The _Life of Columbus_ was written with great care. Irving wanted to produce something that would do credit to the scholarship of his loved America. Murray paid about fifteen thousand dollars for the English copyright. For the _Conquest of Granada_ he received ten thousand dollars, and for _The Alhambra_ a Mr. Bentley paid five thousand. While Irving was in Madrid one of his most welcome visitors was Longfellow, then a young man of twenty, fresh from college. Writing to his father Longfellow says,--"Mr. Rich's family is very agreeable, and Washington Irving always makes one there in the evening. This is altogether delightful, for he is one of those men who put you at ease with them in a moment. He makes no ceremony whatever with one, and of course is a very fine man in society, all mirth and good humor. He has a most beautiful countenance, and a very intellectual one, but he has some halting and hesitating in his conversation, and says very pleasant, agreeable things in a husky, weak, peculiar voice. He has a dark complexion, dark hair, whiskers already a little gray. This is a very offhand portrait of so illustrious a man." It is interesting to compare this sketch with one that Longfellow drew from memory many years later,--"I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Irving in Spain, and found the author, whom I had loved, repeated in the man. The same playful humor, the same touches of sentiment, the same poetic atmosphere; and what I admired still more, the entire absence of all literary jealousy, of all that mean avarice of fame which counts what is given to another as so much taken from one's self.... Passing his house at the early hour of six one summer morning, I saw his study window already wide open. On my mentioning it to him afterwards he said, 'Yes, I am always at work by six.' Since then I have often remembered that sunny morning and that open window, so suggestive of his sunny temperament and his open heart, and equally so of his patient and persistent toil." Irving's career is usually looked upon as ideal. In many ways it was singularly blessed. Friends, influence, fame, and wealth were his. When an American publisher undertook the issuing of a new edition of Irving's works in 1848, there was much uncertainty as to the success of the venture, but the author received eighty-eight thousand dollars from 1848 to 1859. He also had the satisfaction of working to the last, although the last year was one of suffering. "I am rather fatigued, my dear, by my night's rest," he replied to the anxious inquiry of a niece. He had been hard at work upon his _Life of Washington_, and he sometimes feared he might have overtaxed his brain. "I do not fear death," he said, "but I would like to go down with all sails set." This modest prayer was granted. To the day of his death he was able to receive visitors, talk intelligently, read for his own pleasure, and take short drives. The day before he died he attended church, and on coming home he remarked that he must "get a dispensation to allow whist on Sunday evenings," because he dreaded the long, lonely nights. On Monday he went to bed, and as he turned to arrange the pillows he gave a slight exclamation and instantly expired. By his mother's side they laid him, in a cemetery overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy Hollow, a region made forever famous by the genial pen of Irving. "I could not but remember his last words to me," writes a friend who made a pilgrimage to the spot on the day of the funeral, "when his book was finished and his health was failing: 'I am getting ready to go. I am shutting up my doors and windows.' And I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the light of eternal morning." XLVIII COOPER AND "THE SPY" James Fenimore Cooper is one of the most interesting characters in the history of American authorship. Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Hawthorne early in life showed their literary bent, and lived academic and peaceful careers. They were also popular. Cooper was thirty years old before he thought of writing, and his life was embittered by the consciousness that he was the target of the most bitter criticism, both at home and abroad. Yet not one of the distinguished authors I have named is more widely known to-day than Cooper. Matthew Arnold has said somewhere that an author's place in the future is to be determined by his contemporaneous ranking in foreign lands. If that is true the names of Mark Twain, Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Poe will rank high in the annals of posterity, for their European fame is said to be the most general of any of the American writers. There is an appealing fascination about the boyhood days of Cooper. When James was a babe of fourteen months his father moved to the headwaters of the Susquehanna. The family consisted of fifteen persons; James, the future novelist, was the eleventh of twelve children. Their home was in the midst of the forest. Near by was the charming lake, Otsego. The father owned several thousand acres, and was, probably, the most prominent man in that sparsely-settled region. What boy would want a finer opportunity to indulge all the wild propensities that lurk in the untamed heart of every healthy youngster? To roam in the untracked forest, to sail the lake, to hunt, to fish, to dream of the great unknown world lying just beyond the sun-tipped trees,--what can the schools give in exchange for this? Is it surprising that the wholesomeness of the forest and the charm and freshness of God's out-of-doors found their way into the man's novels, when so many delightful boyhood experiences must have found their way into the boy's heart? As I said, Cooper was thirty years old before he began to write. He had studied under an Episcopal rector, and was intending to enter the junior class at Yale; the rector died and Cooper entered the second term of the freshman class; for some frolic in which he was engaged he was dismissed; he then entered the navy, where he gathered valuable experience which he worked afterwards into literature; he married; resigned, and lived the quiet life of a country gentleman. One day he threw down an English novel he had been reading and said to his wife, "I believe I could write a better story myself." Now this is a feeling that many of us have had, but few of us are put to the test. Cooper's wife fortunately told him to make the trial. He did so, and _Precaution_ was the result. This was published in 1820. As a novel it is a failure; as a literary document it is highly interesting. _Precaution_ is a story of English life. Why should Cooper write of American life when all Americans seemed to consider American life dull and prosaic? Politically we were free; intellectually we were slaves. The English lark sang in American poetry and English lords talked in American novels. It was not until 1837 that Emerson gave that famous address, _The American Scholar_, an event which Lowell calls "without any former parallel in our literary annals," and which Holmes declared to be "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." _Precaution_ has been called a failure, but it was not so much of a failure that Cooper's friends discouraged him from trying again. No, it was a first attempt and gave promise of something better. Why not write about American scenes and events? The very neighborhood in which he lived had been the scene of many stirring adventures during the Revolutionary conflict. "Years before, while at the residence of John Jay, his host had given him, one summer afternoon, the account of a spy that had been in his service during the war. The coolness, shrewdness, fearlessness, but above all the unselfish patriotism of the man had profoundly impressed the Revolutionary leader who had employed him. The story made an equally deep impression upon Cooper at the time. He now resolved to take it as the foundation of the tale he had been persuaded to write." Near the close of 1821 _The Spy_ appeared. In March of the following year a third edition was on the market. The work soon appeared in England, published by Miller, the same publisher that had first ventured to bring Irving's _Sketch Book_ before the English public. In England the book was at once successful. This meant much to the American estimate of the author's ability, for American critics were afraid to praise a work that had not yet been applauded by England. In this same year, 1822, a French translation appeared. In France the work was enthusiastically received. This was the first of many translations into many European languages. Its influence in teaching patriotism cannot be estimated, nor can its value as an effective retort to the sneer "Who reads an American book?" ever be overlooked. About the early life of Cooper there are unfortunately but few anecdotes. One reason for this lack of _personalia_ about a man who had a most vigorous personality is due to his dying request. He enjoined upon his family that they permit no authorized biography to appear. Because of this we have lost much that would be valuable in estimating the character of Cooper. There is a story that when he was a young man he engaged in a foot-race for a prize of a basket of fruit. "While Cooper and his competitor were preparing to start, a little girl stood by full of eagerness for the exciting event. Cooper quickly turned and picked her up in his arms. 'I'll carry her and beat you!' he exclaimed, and away they went, Cooper with his laughing burden, the other runner untrammeled. It is almost needless to add that Cooper won the race, else why should the story have been preserved?" One cannot help speculating about the size of the girl and the speed of the rival runner, if this story is true. A more satisfying story is that told of Cooper's meeting with Scott. In 1826 Cooper went to Europe. With a family of ten persons he moved about for seven years. Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and England were visited. When in Paris the two romancers met. "Est ce Monsieur Cooper que j'ai l'honneur de voir?" "Monsieur je m'appelle Cooper." "Eh bien, donc, je suis Walter Scott." After a minute or two of French Sir Walter suddenly recollected himself and said: "Well, here have I been _parley vooing_ to you in a way to surprise you, no doubt, but these Frenchmen have got my tongue so set to their lingo that I have half forgotten my own language." I have said that Cooper was not popular. This is not putting it strong enough. He was more than unpopular; he was hated by his neighbors, and slandered by the press at home and abroad. This lamentable condition of affairs was not due to any despicable qualities in the man, for Cooper was a kind father, an affectionate husband, a good citizen, and an honest, truth-loving man. These seem admirable qualities. Of few of us can much higher praise be spoken. Why then did the citizens of Cooper's home village hold a mass meeting and pass resolutions to the effect that Cooper had rendered "himself odious to a greater portion of the citizens of this community," and why should _Fraser's Magazine_, three thousand miles away, call Cooper "a liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a reptile"? The cause is not far to seek. Cooper was the most disputatious man in the history of American literature. Cooper used to tell the story of the man who in an argument was met with: "Why it is as plain as that two and two make four." "But I deny that too," was the retort, "for two and two make twenty two." Cooper was himself that sort of a man. He always had a quarrel on his hands. The more pugnacious a man is, the more militant he will find society. He instituted libel suits against the most prominent editors in the country, among them Horace Greeley and Thurlow Weed. And what is more to the point,--he won his cases. But this did not make him any more popular with the press. When we remember that Billingsgate was an important part of the literary equipment of the critic of Cooper's time, we need not be surprised that Cooper's pugnacity evoked such sweet disinterestedness as Park Benjamin indulged in when he called Cooper "a superlative dolt, and a common mark of scorn and contempt of every well-informed American." In addition to this denunciation of Cooper as a man, there have in recent years arisen severe criticisms on Cooper as a writer. "There are nineteen rules," writes Mark Twain, "governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. In _Deerslayer_ Cooper violated eighteen of them." And then Mark Twain gives us the detailed specifications. It is very cleverly put, this criticism of Mark Twain's. But the astounding fact remains that the one rule Cooper did not violate seems to secure him a place in the Pantheon of authors. Along with Poe, and Whitman, and Mark himself, Cooper is found in various editions on the shelves of the bookdealers and in the libraries of the book-lovers from the Thames to the Volga. If Cooper had observed only one or two more of the rules of literary art, where would he stand? One is reminded of the Dutchman who was told that this clock would run eight days without winding. "Ach, Himmel, what would she do if she was woundt?" The one literary sin that Cooper does not commit is dulness. He is interesting. Of course there are some of Cooper's works that no one cares to read now. But he is to be judged by his best, not by his worst. Balzac is something of a novelist himself, and has a right to be heard. "If Cooper," says Balzac in a passage quoted by every writer who touches upon Cooper, "had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art." This is no mean praise. Cooper is read because he is interesting. He shall continue to be read for another reason. He is wholesome and vigorous. The air we breathe is the air of the pine forest and the salt sea. Youth is forever attracted by the mystery and adventure of primitive life. As America becomes more and more densely settled the imagination will turn back to the early times when the bear and the deer, the settler and Indian were tracking the trail through the forest and along the shore. For this reason Cooper is likely to remain an abiding force in American literature. XLIX JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY AND BISMARCK John Lothrop Motley, the American historian, a writer who in his _The Rise of the Dutch Republic_ produced a history as fascinating as a romance and a work that was immediately in Europe translated into three different languages, was, after graduation from Harvard, a student at Goettingen. Here he studied German so well that in after years he was asked by the emperor of Austria whether he were not a German. Here too he became acquainted with Bismarck. That they were great friends is evident from letters by Bismarck himself. "I never pass by old Logier's House, in the Friedrichstrasse--wrote Bismarck in 1863--without looking up at the windows that used to be ornamented by a pair of red slippers sustained on the wall by the feet of a gentleman sitting in the Yankee way, his head below and out of sight. I then gratify my memory with remembrance of 'good old colony times when we were roguish chaps.'" And here is another part of a letter which illustrates that even dignitaries like to unbend and become like boys again. This letter was written by the minister of foreign affairs to the minister of the United States at the court of Vienna: Berlin, May 23d, 1864. Jack my Dear,-- ... what do you do that you never write a line to me? I am working from morn to night like a nigger, and you have nothing to do at all--you might as well tip me a line as well as looking at your feet tilted against the wall of God knows what a dreary color. I cannot entertain a regular correspondence; it happens to me that during five days I do not find a quarter of an hour for a walk; but you, lazy old chap, what keeps you from thinking of your old friends? When just going to bed in this moment my eye met with yours on your portrait, and I curtailed the sweet restorer, sleep, in order to remind you of Auld Lang Syne. Why do you never come to Berlin? It is not a quarter of an American's holiday from Vienna, and my wife and me should be so happy to see you once more in this sullen life. When can you come, and when will you? I swear that I will make out the time to look with you on old Logier's quarters, ... and at Gerolt's, where they once would not allow you to put your slender legs upon a chair. Let politics be hanged and come to see me. I promise that the Union Jack shall wave over our house, and conversation and the best old hock shall pour damnation upon the rebels. Do not forget old friends, neither their wives, as mine wishes nearly as ardently as myself to see you, or at least to see as quickly as possible a word of your handwriting. Sei gut und komm oder schreibe. Dein, V. BISMARCK. In a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1878, Bismarck in answer to an inquiry tells how the two became friends. "I met Motley at Goettingen in 1832, I am not sure if at the beginning of the Easter term or Michaelmas term. He kept company with German students, though more addicted to study than we members of the fighting clubs. Although not having mastered yet the German language he exercised a marked attraction by a conversation sparkling with wit, humor, and originality. In autumn of 1833, having both of us emigrated from Goettingen to Berlin for the prosecution of our studies, we became fellow lodgers in the house No. 161 Friedrichstrasse. There we lived in the closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise. Motley by that time had arrived at talking fluently: he occupied himself not only in translating Goethe's poem, _Faust_, but tried his hand even in composing German verses. Enthusiastic admirer of Shakspere, Byron, Goethe, he used to spice his conversation abundantly with quotations from these his favorite authors. A pertinacious arguer, so much so that sometimes he watched my awakening in order to continue a discussion on some topic of science, poetry, or practical life cut short by the chime of the small hours, he never lost his mild and amiable temper.... The most striking feature of his handsome and delicate appearance was uncommonly large and beautiful eyes. He never entered a drawing-room without exciting the curiosity and sympathy of the ladies." While the sheets of Motley's history were passing through the press in 1856, he paid a visit to Bismarck at Frankfort: "When I called," says Motley, "Bismarck was at dinner, so I left my card, and said I would come back in half an hour. As soon as my card had been carried to him (as I learned afterwards) he sent a servant after me to the hotel, but I had gone another way. When I came back I was received with open arms. I can't express to you how cordially he received me. If I had been his brother, instead of an old friend, he could not have shown more warmth and affectionate delight in seeing me. I find I like him better even than I thought I did, and you know how high an opinion I always expressed of his talents and disposition. He is a man of very noble character, and of very great powers of mind. The prominent place which he now occupies as a statesman sought _him_. He did not seek it or any other office. The stand which he took in the Assembly from conviction, on the occasion of the outbreak of 1848, marked him at once to all parties as one of the leading characters of Prussia.... "In the summer of 1851, he told me that the minister, Manteuffel, asked him one day abruptly, if he would accept the post of ambassador at Frankfort, to which (although the proposition was as unexpected a one to him as if I should hear by the next mail that I had been chosen governor of Massachusetts) he answered after a moment's deliberation, yes, without another word. The king, the same day, sent for him, and asked him if he would accept the place, to which he made the same brief answer, 'Ja.' His majesty expressed a little surprise that he made no inquiries or conditions, when Bismarck replied that anything which the king felt strong enough to propose to him, he felt strong enough to accept. I only write these details that you may have an idea of the man. Strict integrity and courage of character, a high sense of honor, a firm religious belief, united with remarkable talents, make up necessarily a combination which cannot be found any day in any court; and I have no doubt that he is destined to be prime minister, unless his obstinate truthfulness, which is apt to be a stumbling-block for politicians, stands in his way.... "Well, he accepted the post and wrote to his wife next day, who was preparing for a summer's residence in a small house they had taken on the sea-coast, that he could not come because he was already established in Frankfort as minister. The result, he said, was three days of tears on her part. He had previously been leading the life of a plain country squire with a moderate income, had never held any position in the government or in diplomacy, and had hardly ever been to court." L THE YOUTH OF GEORGE TICKNOR George Ticknor was born in 1791. His father, he says, fitted him for college. He never went to a regular school. President Wheelock, Professor Woodward, and others connected with Dartmouth College, who were in the habit of making his father's house their home in the long winter vacations, took much notice of him; and the professor, after examining him in Cicero _Orations_ and the Greek Testament, gave him a certificate of admission before he was ten years old. "Of course," he adds, "I knew very little, and the whole thing was a form, perhaps a farce. There was no thought of my going to college then, and I did not go till I was fourteen, but I was twice examined at the college (where I went with my father and mother every summer) for advanced standing, and was finally admitted as a junior, and went to reside there from Commencement, August, 1805." He learned very little at college. "The instructors generally were not as good teachers as my father had been, and I knew it." He consequently took no great interest in study, although he liked reading Horace, and had mathematics enough to enjoy calculating the great eclipse of 1806, and making a projection of it which turned out nearly right. To supply the deficiency in classical acquirements with which he left college, he was placed under Dr. John Gardiner, of Trinity Church, who was reputed a good scholar, having been bred in the mother country under Dr. Parr. "I prepared at home what he prescribed, and the rest of my time occupied myself according to my tastes. I read with him parts of Livy, the _Annals_ of Tacitus, the whole of Juvenal and Persius, the _Satires_ of Horace, and portions of other Latin classics which I do not remember. I wrote Latin prose and verse. In Greek I read some books of the _Odyssey_, I don't remember how many; the _Alcestis_; and two or three other plays of Euripides; the _Prometheus Vinctus_ of Æschylus; portions of Herodotus, and parts of Thucydides,--of which last I only remember how I was tormented by the account of the plague at Athens. This was the work of between two and three years." After a year's experience in law, he decides to give up his profession and goes to Europe in order to study at Goettingen. On reaching Liverpool his first introduction is to Roscoe, and then on his way to London he stops at Hatton to visit Dr. Parr, who astonished him not a little by observing, "Sir, I would not think I had done my duty if I went to bed any night without praying for the success of Napoleon Bonaparte." In London Mr. Ticknor formed a friendship with Lord Byron; two men more unlike in every respect can hardly be conceived of, and it is amusing to think of Byron impressing his visitor as being "simple and unaffected," or of his speaking "of his early follies with sincerity," and of his own works "with modesty." It is amusing, too, to hear that as Lady Byron is going out for a drive, "Lord Byron's manner to her was affectionate; he followed her to the door, and shook hands with her, as if he were not to see her for a month." The following curious anecdote shows that Byron was no less unpatriotic in his views than Dr. Parr himself. Mr. Ticknor is calling upon him, and Byron is praising Scott as the first man of his time, and saying of Gifford that no one could have a better disposition, when,-- "Sir James Bland Burgess, who had something to do in negotiating Jay's Treaty, came suddenly into the room, and said abruptly, 'My lord, my lord, a great battle has been fought in the Low Countries, and Bonaparte is entirely defeated.' 'But is it true?' said Lord Byron, 'is it true?' 'Yes, my lord, it is certainly true; and an aid-de-camp arrived in town last night, he has been in Downing Street this morning, and I have just seen him as he was going to Lady Wellington's. He says he thinks Bonaparte is in full retreat towards Paris.' After a moment's pause, Lord Byron replied, 'I am sorry for it;' and then, after another slight pause, he added, 'I didn't know but I might live to see Lord Castlereagh's head on a pole. But I suppose I sha'n't now.' And this was the first impression produced on his imperious nature by the news of the battle of Waterloo." But Byron is not Mr. Ticknor's only London friend, for we read of a breakfast with Sir Humphry Davy, a "genuine bookseller's dinner" with Murray, and a visit to the author of _Gertrude of Wyoming_. Goettingen, however, is the object of his journey, and at Goettingen he remains for the next year and a half. If he does not learn to scorn the delights of society, he has at least the resolution to live the laborious days of the earnest student. He studies five languages, and works twelve hours in the twenty-four. Greek, German, theology, and natural history seem chiefly to claim his attention, but he is also busy with French, Italian, and Latin, and manages at the same time to keep up his English reading. He is much amused with the German professors, and describes them with no little humor. There is Michaelis, who asks one of his scholars for some silver shoe-buckles, in lieu of a fee. There is Schultze, who "looks as if he had fasted six months on Greek prosody and the Pindaric meters." There is Blumenbach, who has a sharp discussion at a dinner-table, and next day sends down three huge quartos all marked to show his authorities and justify his statements. Here is another interesting anecdote given in Ticknor's _Memoirs_: "When I was in Goettingen, in 1816, I saw Wolf, the most distinguished Greek scholar of the time. He could also lecture extemporaneously in Latin. He was curious about this country, and questioned me about our scholars and the amount of our scholarship. I told him what I could,--amongst other things, of a fashionable, dashing preacher of New York having told me that he took great pleasure in reading the choruses of Æschylus, and that he read them without a dictionary! I was walking with Wolf at the time, and, on hearing this, he stopped, squared round, and said, 'He told you that, did he?' 'Yes,' I answered. 'Very well; the next time you hear him say it, do you tell him he lies, and that I say so.'" During a six weeks' vacation there is a pleasant tour through Germany, and at Weimar Mr. Ticknor makes the acquaintance of Goethe, who talked about Byron, and "his great knowledge of human nature." And now in the November of 1816, there comes an intimation that Harvard College wishes to recall Mr. Ticknor to his old home, and give him the professorship of French and Spanish literature. It was a matter of difficulty for him to make a final decision, and a year passes before he determined to accept the charge, and a year and a half more before he enters upon its duties. Meanwhile he leaves Goettingen, visits Paris, Geneva, and Rome, and then goes on to Spain.... When in Spain, Mr. Ticknor is busy learning Spanish and collecting Spanish books, and here he lays the groundwork for that special literary distinction for which he is now so widely known.--Adapted from the _Athenaeum_ and _Quarterly Review_. LI FITZ-GREENE HALLECK Fitz-Greene Halleck died at a ripe old age in 1867. On the evening of February 2d, 1869, Bryant delivered an address on the life and writings of Halleck. The address was given before the New York Historical Society and was printed the next day in the _New York Evening Post_. Here is an interesting extract from the address: "When I look back upon Halleck's literary life I cannot help thinking that if his death had happened forty years earlier, his life would have been regarded as a bright morning prematurely overcast. Yet Halleck's literary career may be said to have ended then. All that will hand down his name to future years had already been produced. Who shall say to what cause his subsequent literary inaction was owing? It was not the decline of his powers; his brilliant conversation showed that it was not. Was it, then, indifference to fame? Was it because he had put an humble estimate on what he had written, and therefore resolved to write no more? Was it because he feared lest what he might write would be unworthy of the reputation he had been so fortunate to acquire? "I have my own way of accounting for his literary silence in the latter half of his life. One of the resemblances which he bore to Horace consisted in the length of time for which he kept his poems by him that he might give them the last and happiest touches. He had a tenacious verbal memory, and having composed his poems without committing them to paper, he revised them in the same manner, murmuring them to himself in his solitary moments, recovering the enthusiasm with which they were first received, and in this state heightening the beauty of the thought or of the expression. I remember that once in crossing Washington Park I saw Halleck before me and quickened my pace to overtake him. As I drew near I heard him crooning to himself what seemed to be lines of verse, and as he threw back his hands in walking I perceived that they quivered with the feeling of the passage he was reciting. I instantly checked my pace and fell back, out of reverence for the mood of inspiration which seemed to be upon him, and fearful lest I should intercept the birth of a poem destined to be the delight of thousands of readers. "In this way I suppose Halleck to have attained the gracefulness of his diction, and the airy melody of his numbers. In this way I believe he wrought up his verses to that transparent clearness of expression which causes the thought to be seen through them without any interposing dimness, so that the thought and the phrase seem one, and the thought enters the mind like a beam of light. I suppose that Halleck's time being taken up by the tasks of his vocation, he naturally lost by degrees the habit of composing in this manner, and that he found it so necessary to the perfection of what he wrote that he adopted no other in its place. "Whatever was the reason that Halleck ceased so early to write, let us congratulate ourselves that he wrote at all. Great authors often overlay and almost smother their own fame by the voluminousness of their writings. So great is their multitude, and so rich is the literature of our language, that for frequent readings we are obliged to content ourselves with mere selections from the works of best and most beloved of our poets, even those who have not written much. It is only a few of their works that dwell and live in the general mind. Gray, for example, wrote little, and of that little one short poem, his _Elegy_, can be fairly said to survive in the public admiration, and that poem I have sometimes heard called the most popular in our language." LII THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS Thanatopsis may be said to be the most remarkable poem written by an American youth. "The unfailing wonder of it is," writes an American critic in a magazine article, "that a boy of seventeen could have written it; not merely that he could have made verse of such structural beauty and dignity, but that the thoughts of which it is compacted could have been a boy's thoughts. The poem seems to have been written while he was at his father's house in Cummington, in the summer of 1811, before he had definitely begun the study of law. Fond as he had been of showing his earlier effusions to his father and others, the consciousness of having done something different and greater must have come upon him at this time, for it was only by accident, six years after the writing of _Thanatopsis_, that his father chanced to find it and the poem now called _An Inscription Upon the Entrance to a Wood_, among some papers in a desk the boy had used while at home. Dr. Bryant read them with amazement and delight, hurried at once to the house of a neighbor, a lady of whose sympathy he felt sure, thrust them into her hands, and, with the tears running down his cheeks, said, 'Read them; they are Cullen's.' [Illustration: WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT From a photograph from life] "Now it had happened only a short time before, that Dr. Bryant had been asked in Boston to urge his son to contribute to the newly established _North American Review_, and had written him a letter on the editor's behalf. Here was the opportunity of a proud father. Without telling his son of his discovery or his purpose, he left the poems one day, together with some translations from _Horace_ by the same hand, at the office of _The North American_. The little package was addressed to his editorial friend, Mr. Willard Phillips, of whom tradition tells us that as soon as he read the poems he betook himself in hot haste to Cambridge to display his treasures to his associates, Richard H. Dana and Edward T. Channing. 'Ah, Phillips,' said Dana, when he had heard the poems read, 'you have been imposed upon. No one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verse.' But Phillips, believing Dr. Bryant to be responsible for it, declared that he knew the writer, and that Dana could see him at once if he would go to the State House in Boston. Accordingly the young men posted into town, and Dana, unconvinced after looking long and carefully at Dr. Bryant in his seat in the Senate, said, 'It is a good head, but I do not see _Thanatopsis_ in it.'" Bryant is never thought of as a humorist, and his poetry is devoid of playfulness. But in this letter to his mother, in which he announces his marriage with Frances Fairchild, we have evidence that Bryant had a strong sense of humor. DEAR MOTHER: I hasten to send you the melancholy intelligence of what has lately happened to me. Early on the evening of the eleventh day of the present month I was at a neighboring house in this village. Several people of both sexes were assembled in one of the apartments, and three or four others, with myself, were in another. At last came in a little elderly gentleman, pale, thin, with a solemn countenance, pleuritic voice, hooked nose, and hollow eyes. It was not long before we were summoned to attend in the apartment where he and the rest of the company were gathered. We went in and took our seats; the little elderly gentleman with the hooked nose prayed, and we all stood up. When he had finished most of us sat down. The gentleman with the hooked nose then muttered certain cabalistic expressions, which I was too much frightened to remember, but I recollect that at the conclusion I was given to understand that I was married to a young lady by the name of Frances Fairchild, whom I perceived standing by my side, and I hope in the course of few months to have the pleasure of introducing to you as your daughter-in-law, which is a matter of some interest to the poor girl, who has neither father or mother in the world. Next to _Thanatopsis_ the most widely-known and admired of Bryant's work is _To a Waterfowl_. There are two very interesting stories pertaining to this much quoted poem, one relating to the origin of the poem, the other recording its effect on two fastidious young Englishmen, Hartley Coleridge and Matthew Arnold. Bryant was a young man with no assurance as to what the future might have in store for him. He was journeying over the hills to Plainfield to see whether there might possibly be an opening for a young lawyer. It was the 15th of December, 1816, and we can imagine that the gloom of the gathering twilight helped to deepen the youth's despondency. But before the glimmering light of evening had given place entirely to the dark of night, the sky was transfigured with the bright rays of the setting sun. The New England sky was flooded for a moment with seas of chrysolite and opal. While young Bryant stopped to enjoy the brilliant scene, a solitary bird made its way across the sky. He watched it until it was lost in the distant horizon, and then went on with new courage as he thought the thoughts so beautifully expressed in the poem which he wrote after he reached the house where he was to stay for the night. The incident in regard to Matthew Arnold is related by Godwin in a letter to Bigelow: "Once when the late Matthew Arnold, with his family, was visiting the ever-hospitable country home of Mr. Charles Butler, I happened to spend an evening there. In the course of it Mr. Arnold took up a volume of Mr. Bryant's poems from the table and turning to me said, 'This is the American poet, _facile princeps_'; and after a pause, he continued: 'When I first heard of him, Hartley Coleridge (we were both lads then) came into my father's house one afternoon considerably excited and exclaimed, 'Matt, do you want to hear the best short poem in the English language?' 'Faith, Hartley, I do,' was my reply. He then read a poem _To a Waterfowl_ in his best manner. And he was a good reader. As soon as he had done he asked, 'What do you think of that?' 'I am not sure but you are right, Hartley, is it your father's?' was my reply. 'No,' he rejoined, 'father has written nothing like that.' Some days after he might be heard muttering to himself, The desert and illimitable air, Lone wandering but not lost." LIII CURTIS AND HAWTHORNE AT THE BROOK FARM The social experiment known as the Brook Farm enterprise is one of the most interesting episodes in American literature. Mrs. Ora G. Sedgwick is one of the many writers who have written about the place and its inhabitants. She went there in June, 1841, and lived for some time at the Hive, the principal community edifice. She was then but a girl of sixteen, but the impressions on her youthful mind were strong enough to enable her recently to describe her life there. As to Curtis she has this to say: "The arrival of George William Curtis, then a youth of eighteen, and his brother Burrill, two years his senior, was a noteworthy event in the annals of Brook Farm, at least in the estimation of the younger members. I shall never forget the flutter of excitement caused by Mr. Ripley's announcing their expected coming in these words: 'Now we're going to have two young Greek gods among us.' ... On a bright morning in May, 1842, soon after Mr. Ripley's announcement, as I was coming down from the Eyrie to the Hive, I saw Charles A. Dana with two strange young men approaching my 'magic gate' from the direction of the Hive. Arriving at the gate before me, Mr. Dana threw it open with the flourish peculiar to his manner, and stood holding it back. His companions stood beside him, and all three waited for me to pass through. I saw at a glance that these must be 'the two young Greek gods.' They stood disclosed, not like Virgil's Venus, by their step, but by their beauty and bearing. Burrill Curtis was at that time the more beautiful. He had a Greek face, of great purity of expression, and curling hair. George too was very handsome--not so remarkably as in later life, but already with a man's virile expression. "About George William Curtis there was a peculiar personal elegance and an air of great deference in listening to one whom he admired or looked up to. There was a certain remoteness (at times almost amounting to indifference) about him, but he was always courteous. His friends were all older than himself, and he appeared much older in manners and conversation than he was in years; more like a man of twenty-five than a youth of eighteen." Mrs. Sedgwick also gives us a charming glimpse at the great American novelist, Hawthorne: "I do not recollect Hawthorne's talking much at the table. Indeed, he was a very taciturn man. One day, tired of seeing him sitting immovable on the sofa in the hall, as I was learning some verses to recite at the evening class for recitation formed by Charles A. Dana, I daringly took my book, pushed it into his hands, and said, 'Will you hear my poetry, Mr. Hawthorne?' He gave me a sidelong glance from his very shy eyes, took the book, and most kindly heard me. After that he was on the sofa every week to hear me recite. "One evening he was alone in the hall, sitting on a chair at the farther end, when my room mate, Ellen Slade, and myself were going upstairs. She whispered to me, 'Let's throw the sofa pillows at Mr. Hawthorne.' Reaching over the bannisters, we each took a cushion and threw it. Quick as a flash he put out his hand, seized a broom that was hanging near him, warded off our cushions, and threw them back with sure aim. As fast as we could throw them at him he returned them with effect, hitting us every time, while we could hit only the broom. He must have been very quick in his movements. Through it all not a word was spoken. We laughed and laughed, and his eyes shone and twinkled like stars. Wonderful eyes they were, and when anything witty was said I always looked quickly at Mr. Hawthorne; for his dark eyes lighted up as if flames were suddenly kindled behind them, and then the smile came down to his lips and over his grave face. "My memories of Mr. Hawthorne are among the pleasantest of my Brook Farm recollections. His manners to children were charming and kind. I saw him one day walking, as was his custom, with his hands behind his back, head bent forward, the two little Bancrofts and other children following him with pleased faces, and stooping every now and then with broad smiles, after which they would rise and run on again behind him. Puzzled at these maneuvers, I watched closely, and found that although he hardly moved a muscle except to walk, yet from time to time he dropped a penny, for which the children scrambled." LIV HAWTHORNE AND THE SCARLET LETTER On June 8, 1849, Hawthorne walked out of the Salem Custom House--a man without a job. Taylor's Whig administration had come in, so our Democratic friend, Mr. Hawthorne, walked out. The job he left was not in our modern eyes a very lucrative one, it was worth $1,200 a year and Hawthorne had had it for three years. But he went out "mad," for he knew he had not meddled in politics and he thought that as an author--even if he was the "most obscure man of letters in America"--he was entitled to some consideration. And then there were the wife and children! As he walked home to tell them the doleful news, he was much depressed by thoughts of them. He had paid his old debts; but he had saved nothing. He seemed to lack money, friends, and influence. He had written to a friend in Boston,--"I shall not stand upon my dignity; that must take care of itself.... Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to me. The intelligence has just reached me, and Sophia has not yet heard it. She will bear it like a woman,--that is to say better than a man." What a noble tribute to woman's fortitude! Hawthorne's belief in the sustaining love of his wife reminds us of a tradition which says that he never read a letter from his wife without first washing his hands. To him the act was sacred, and like a priest of old before handling the symbols of love he performed the rites of purification. His son tells us how the wife met the news with which he greeted her on his arrival at home, "that he had left his head behind." She exclaimed, "Oh, then you can write your book!" And when he with the prudence of a practical man wanted to know where the bread and rice were to come from while he was writing the book, she like all good wives--of olden times, at least--brought forth a "pile of gold" which she had saved from the household weekly expenses. When the pile of gold had been subjected to mathematical accuracy it dwindled to $150, but it was enough to tide over immediate wants. It was in the early winter that James T. Fields, the publisher who plays such a prominent part in the early history of American literature, descended upon the quiet Salem household like the "godmother in a fairy story." Fields has told the story of his visit: "I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling; and as the day was cold, he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood. 'Now,' said I, 'is the time for you to publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got something ready for the press.' 'Nonsense,' said he, 'what heart had I to write anything, when my publishers have been so many years trying to sell a small edition of the _Twice-told Tales_.' I still pressed upon him the good chances he would have now with something new. 'Who would risk publishing a book for me, the most unpopular writer in America?' 'I would,' said I, 'and would start with an edition of 2,000 copies of anything you would write.' 'What madness!' he exclaimed. 'Your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment.' 'No, no!' he continued, 'I have no money to indemnify a publisher's losses on my account.' I looked at my watch, and found that the train would be soon starting for Boston, and I knew that there was not much time to lose in trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he had been writing. He shook his head and gave me to understand that he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me that hidden in that article of furniture was a story or stories by the author of _Twice-told Tales_; and I became so positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of MS. in his hands, he said: 'How in heaven's name did you know this thing was there? As you found me out, take what was written, and tell me, after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is either very good or very bad--I don't know which!' On my way to Boston I read the germ of _The Scarlet Letter_." Hawthorne's original plan was to write a number of stories, of which this particular one was to be the longest. He was going to call his book of tales, _Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal_,--a title which Woodberry calls "ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his genius." Fields urged that the tale be made longer and fuller and that it be published by itself. So the original plan was changed, as was also the title. This was wise, for the cumbersome original title would have killed any book, but the present title is nothing short of a stroke of genius. About this time Hawthorne's friends, under the leading of Hillard, sent a kind letter and a considerable sum of money. Hawthorne replied,--"I read your letter in the vestibule of the Post Office; and it drew--what my troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the sharply-cold west wind that blew into them as I came homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared." After saying it was sweet to be remembered, but bitter to need their aid, he concludes,--"The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come. The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement to his utmost exertion, so that he may not need their help again. I shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall find to do, if thereby I may win bread." Four days after this letter was written, on February 3, 1850, he finished _The Scarlet Letter_. He writes to a friend saying he read the last scene to his wife, or rather tried to read it, "for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm." Mrs. Hawthorne told a friend that her husband seemed depressed all during that winter. "There was a knot in his forehead all the time," said his wife. One day he told her he had a story that he wished to read to her. He read part of the work one evening. The next evening he continued. His wife followed the story with intense interest. Her excitement arose until when he was reading near the end of the book, where Arthur and Hester and the child meet in the forest, Mrs. Hawthorne sank from her low stool to the floor and said she could endure no more. Hawthorne stopped and said in wonder,--"Do you really feel it so much? Then there must be something in it." Mrs. Hawthorne relates that on the day after the MS. was delivered to Fields, this publisher returned and when admitted to the house caught up her boy in his arms and said,--"You splendid little fellow, do you know what a father you have?" Then he ran upstairs to talk to Hawthorne, calling to her as he went that he had sat up all night to read the story. Soon her husband came down and walked about the room with a new light in his eyes. Early in April the book was issued in an edition of 5,000 copies; this was soon exhausted, and Hawthorne was well started on that career of literary fame which led Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, a hundred years after the birth of Hawthorne, to call him "the foremost literary artist of America." _The Scarlet Letter_, as Hawthorne himself tells us, is a story of "human frailty and sorrow." It is the story of one who has brooded long and faithfully upon the problem of evil. In it we read that man is the master of his fate. The great difference between ancient and modern literature is this: the old dramatists seem to believe that somewhere there is a power above and beyond the control of man, a blind, unreasoning force that seems to play with man as the football of chance. Whatever may be done by man will prove unavailing if Fate or Destiny has decreed otherwise. Out of such a philosophy of life comes the story of OEdipus. The modern conception is that expressed by Shakspere: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Still later Henley in his one great poem has expressed the thought with vigor,-- Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods there be For my unconquerable soul! With unfaltering aim Hawthorne shows that each character works out its own destiny. That man is helpless, the sport of gods, the football of Fate, is disproved by the patient transformation in the character of Hester. Some one has well characterized _The Scarlet Letter_ as "a drama of the spirit." It is a story such as only one who had brooded deeply on the problem of evil could write. Hawthorne was a "solitary brooder upon life." Every one who knew him testified to this impression. When William Dean Howells, a young man from Ohio, knocked at the door of the Wayside Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and brooding--the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted and forever evaded Hawthorne." Hawthorne impressed all who met him with his reserve and shyness. Many stories are told to illustrate this quality. Hawthorne was once a visitor at a club where a number of literary men had gathered. The taciturnity of Hawthorne was more impressive than the loquacity of the witty Holmes. After Hawthorne had left Emerson said, "Hawthorne rides his dark horse well." George William Curtis relates this anecdote: "...I recall the silent and preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone, but who with every stroke neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he would have struggled until he fell senseless rather than to ask his friend to desist. His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it is quite useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man understands or not." Hawthorne's father was a man of the sea, a man of few words, and it is sometimes said that the romancer inherited his shy and reserved disposition from his father. But his mother was not behind the father in reserve. After her husband's death she shut herself up in Hindoo-like seclusion and lived the life of a hermit for more than forty years. Hawthorne gives us an interesting account of his boyhood in an autobiographical note to his friend Stoddard. "When I was eight or nine years old, my mother, with her three children, took up her residence on the banks of the Sebago Lake, in Maine, where the family owned a large tract of land; and here I ran quite wild ... fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal too, on the rainy days, especially in _Shakspere_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_." More pertinent as to his habits of loneliness is the following account of how he lived for nine or ten years after his graduation from Bowdoin. "I had always," he writes, "a natural tendency (it appears to have been on the paternal side) toward seclusion; and this I now indulged to the utmost, so that, for months together, I scarcely held human intercourse outside of my own family, seldom going out except at twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient solitude, which was oftenest the seashore.... Having spent so much of my boyhood and youth from my native place, I had very few acquaintances in Salem, and during the nine or ten years that I spent there, in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people in the town were aware of my existence." Such was the solitariness of the youthful Hawthorne. Is it surprising that in the fiction of the mature man there should be a pervading sense of remoteness, of silences that fascinate, of mysteries that charm? LV MAX MÜLLER'S RECOLLECTIONS OF EMERSON, LOWELL, AND HOLMES Living at Oxford, writes Max Müller, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely they feel at home in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions forever.... I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had nothing to say to his (Emerson's) essays because they did not seem to advance their favorite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times. What Emerson's personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime.... And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I can still remember the time when even experienced judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other.... Another eminent American who often honored my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a long time United States minister in England. He was a professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled _Among my Books_. Lowell's conversation was inexhaustible, his information astonishing. Pleasant as he was, even as an antagonist, he would occasionally lose his temper and use very emphatic language. I was once sitting next to him when I heard him stagger his neighbor, a young lady, by bursting out with, "But, madam, I do not accept your major premise!" Poor thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, and not acquainted with that terrible term. She collapsed, evidently quite at a loss as to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to accept. Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living.... I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our university, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father's poems. I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man. There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the autocrat of the breakfast table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he should have been able to stand all the fatigue of the journey and the constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvelous. I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and say about every one. When we came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word of envy or disappointment. I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to a great many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor's warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had him several days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling remarks to pour out. I remember one conversation while we were sitting at an old wainscoted room at All Souls', ornamented with the arms of former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then one of the fellows' rooms, and lastly a lecture room. We were deep in the old question of the true relation between the divine and human in man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what he said to me when we parted: "I have had much talk with people in England; with you I have had a real conversation." We understood each other and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right. With him again good-by was good-by for life, and at such moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the wisdom that pervades the whole universe, we need not know. LVI HOWELLS CALLS ON EMERSON, AND DESCRIBES LONGFELLOW In 1860 William Dean Howells, now one of the foremost literary influences in the English-speaking world, was a young man writing for the _Ohio State Journal_ of Columbus. Several of his poems had been kindly received and published by the _Atlantic Monthly_, so that the young lady from New England who screamed with surprise at seeing the _Atlantic_ on a western table and cried, "Why, have you got the _Atlantic Monthly out here_?" could be met with, "There are several contributors to the _Atlantic_ in Columbus." The several were Howells and J.J. Piatt. But to be an accepted contributor to the _Atlantic_ was not enough. Howells must see the literary celebrities of New England. Emerson and Bayard Taylor he had seen and heard in Columbus, but Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier were the literary saints at whose shrine he wished to burn the sacred incense of his adoring soul. From Hawthorne he received a card introducing him to Emerson. Emerson was then about sixty, although nothing about him suggested an old man. After some conversation on general topics, Emerson began to talk of Hawthorne, praising Hawthorne's fine personal qualities. "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is mere mush." This criticism related to the _Marble Faun_. Of course, such a comment shocked Howells, whose sense of literary values was much keener than Emerson's. "Emerson had, in fact," writes Howells, "a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy." Then Emerson made some inquiry about a Michigan young man who had been sending some of his poetry to Emerson. Howells was embarrassed to be obliged to say that he knew nothing of the Michigan poet. Later Emerson asked whether he had become acquainted with the poems of Mr. William Henry Channing. Howells replied that he knew them only through the criticism of Poe. "Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson. "Poe's," replied Howells. "Oh," Emerson cried after a thoughtful moment, "you mean _the jingle man_!" This was a moment of confusion and embarrassment for Howells. Had the vituperative pen of Poe ever thrown off more stinging criticism than that? "_The jingle man!_" Emerson turned the conversation to Howells himself and asked him what he had written for the _Atlantic_. Howells replied, and Emerson took down the bound volumes and carefully affixed Howells' initials to the poems. "He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then." This was a shock to Howells. "A pleasant hour!" Howells was intending to consecrate all time and eternity to it, and here is the Sage of Concord coolly speaking of poetry as though it were some trifling diversion, like billiards or whist. Later in life when Howells resided in Cambridge he had abundant opportunity to become acquainted with Longfellow, whom in _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_ he calls the "White Mr. Longfellow." "He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York. You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same provision-man as he, for Longfellow remained as constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer himself, and we often found ourselves together at the University Press, where _The Atlantic Monthly_ used to be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the last he no longer sent the poems to the magazines in his own hand, but they were always signed in autograph. "I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat and overshoes.... "He was patient, as I said of all things, and gentle beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm, and of course, it was braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some things said of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times; he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their company if they continued to assail him. "But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with, on their human side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from our environments. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it and inhaled its wild new fragrance." LVII LONGFELLOW, THE UNIVERSAL POET We have passed the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Longfellow, and he still remains the favorite American poet. Not that Longfellow is one of the great world poets; Longfellow himself would have been offended with that eulogistic extravagance which would place him among the few immortals. He is not a Homer, nor a Dante, nor a Shakspere. No, he is not even a Wordsworth in philosophic insight into nature, nor a Shelley in power to snatch the soul into the starry empyrean, nor a Tennyson in variety and passion, nor a Milton in grandeur of poetic expression. He is--only Longfellow. But that means he has his own peculiar charm. It is idle to detract from the fame of one man because he is not some one else. Roast beef may be more nutritious than strawberries, but that is no criticism upon the flavor of the strawberry. Longfellow is not Milton, but then neither is Milton Longfellow: If I cannot carry forests on my back Neither can you crack a nut. Of late years the critics have been finding fault with Longfellow. They have said that really Longfellow is no poet. Frederic Harrison calls Evangeline "goody, goody dribble!" and Quiller-Couch in his anthology gives three pages to Longfellow and seven to Wilfred Scawen Blunt--but who is Blunt? When I was in Berlin I found in a German history of English and American Literature one-half a page devoted to Longfellow and ten pages to Poe. Perhaps some of this criticism is but the natural reaction following the extreme praise that ensued after the death of Longfellow in 1882. [Illustration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW From a wood engraving of a life photograph] But Longfellow is surviving all derogatory criticism. He is still the poet with the universal appeal. It is altogether probable that he is more widely read to-day than any other American poet. Even foreigners still express their affection for this poet of the domestic affections. In 1907 Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the English Ambassador to the United States, made an address in which he made graceful acknowledgement of his debt to this American poet: "I owe much of the pleasure of my life to American writers of every shade of thought.... But I owe to one American writer much more than pleasure. Tastes differ and fashions change, and I am told that the poetry of Longfellow is not read as it used to be. Men in my own country have asked me whether the rivers of Damascus were not better than all the waters of Israel, whether Shakspere, and Milton, and Shelley, and Keats were not enough for me, that I need go to Longfellow. And Americans have seemed surprised that I did not speak rather of Lowell and Bryant and others. Far be it from me to say a word against any of them. I have loved them all from my youth up, every one of them in his own way, and Shakspere as the master and compendium of them all. No one, I suppose, would place Longfellow as a poet quite on the same level with some of them. But the fact remains that, for one reason or another, perhaps in part from early associations, Longfellow has always spoken to my heart. Many a time, in lands far away from the land he loved so well, I have sought for sympathy in happiness and in sorrow-- Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of time-- but from that pure and gentle and untroubled spirit." Professor E.A. Grosvenor, of Amherst, years ago published an article on Longfellow that was widely copied. It is an interesting account of a conversation in 1879 on board the Messageries steamer _Donai_, bound from Constantinople to Marseilles. On board many nationalities were represented. The story is a fine illustration of the wide-spread popularity of the American poet. "One evening, as we were quitting the Straits of Bonifacio, some one remarked at dinner that, though Victor Hugo was born in Paris, the earliest impressions of his life were received in Corsica, close to which we were passing. Ten or twelve of us lingered after the meal was finished to talk of the great French poet. One of the party spoke of him as embodying, more than any other writer, the humanistic tendencies of the nineteenth century and as the exponent of what is best in humanity. "We had been talking in French, when the Russian lady exclaimed in English to the gentleman who had last spoken, 'How can you, an American, give to him the place that is occupied by your own Longfellow? Longfellow is the universal poet. He is better known, too, among foreigners than any one except their own poets! Then she commenced repeating in rich, mellow tones: I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose over the city Behind the dark church tower. I recall how her voice trembled over the words: And the burden laid upon me Seemed greater than I could bear. and how it swelled out in the concluding lines: As the symbol of love in Heaven, And its wavering image here. It was dramatic and never to be forgotten. Then she added, 'I long to visit Boston that I may stand on the Bridge.' "In the company was an English captain returning from the Zulu war. He was the son of that member of Parliament' who had been the chief supporter of the claimant in the famous Tichborne case, and who had poured out his money like water in behalf of the man whom he considered cruelly wronged. The captain was a typical British soldier, with every characteristic of his class. Joining our steamer at Genoa, he had so far talked only of the Zulus and, with bitter indignation, of the manner in which the Prince Imperial had been deserted by British soldiers to be slain by savages. As soon as the Russian lady had concluded he said: 'I can give you something better than that,' and began in a voice like a trumpet: Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream. His recitation of the entire poem was marked by the common English upheaval and down-letting of the voice in each line; but it was evident that he loved what he was repeating. "Then a tall, lank, gray-haired Scotchman, who knew no French, who had hardly mingled with the other passengers, and who seemed always communing with himself, suddenly commenced: There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there. He repeated only a few stanzas, but could apparently have given the whole poem, had he wished. "For myself, I know that my contribution was _My Lost Youth_, beginning Often I think of the beautiful town, That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town And my youth comes back to me. Never did the distance from an early home seem so great to one, New England born, as in that strange company, gathered from many lands, each with words upon the lip which the American had first heard in childhood. "A handsome, olive-cheeked young man, a Greek from Manchester, educated and living in England, said, 'How do you like this?' Then he began to sing: Stars of the summer night, Far in yon azure deeps, Hide, hide your golden light! She sleeps! My lady sleeps! Sleeps! So he rendered the whole of that exquisite serenade--dear to American college students--with a freedom and a fire which hinted that he had sung it at least once before on some more appropriate occasion. Perhaps to some dark-eyed maiden of that elegant Greek colony of Manchester it had come as a revelation, and perhaps she had first heard it sung in front of her father's mansion and had looked down, appreciative but unseen, from above. "The captain of the _Donai_ was not her regular commander, but an officer of the national French navy, who was in charge only for a few voyages. A thorough Frenchman, no one would have accused him of knowing a word of any tongue, save his own. Versatile, overflowing with wit and _bons mots_, it must have wearied him to be silent so long. To our astonishment, in accents so Gallic that one discerned with difficulty that he was attempting English, he intoned: Zee seds of neet fair valeeng fast, Ven t'rough an Alpeen veelage past A yout, who bore meed snow and eece A bannair veed dees strange deveece Excelsiorr! "'_Eh, voila_,' he exclaimed with satisfaction, '_J'ai appris cela a l'école. C'est tout l'anglais que je sais._' "'_Mais, commandant_,' said the Russian lady, '_ce n'est pas l'anglais du tout ce que vous venez de dire là._' "'_Ah, oui, madame, ça vient de votre Longfellow._' "None of the other passengers contributed, but already six nationalities had spoken--Scotch, Russian, Greek, French, English, and American. As we arose from the table and went up on deck to watch the lights glimmering in Napoleon's birthplace, Ajaccio, the Russian lady said: 'Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, from whom so many of us could have quoted? Not one. Not even Shakspere or Victor Hugo or Homer.'" LVIII HENRY DAVID THOREAU During his lifetime Thoreau published but two books,--_Walden_, and the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_,--and these had but limited sale while the author was living. Over seven hundred copies of the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ were returned, to Thoreau by his publisher. Thoreau must have had a helpful sense of humor, for after lugging the burden upstairs he complacently remarks,--"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." In recent times a costly edition of all Thoreau's writings has been published. He is one of the rare spirits whose fame increases with the years. But of all his voluminous writings _Walden_, so it seems to me, is the most readable, the freshest, the most stimulating. Higginson says that it is, perhaps, the only book yet written in America that can bear an annual reading. _Walden_ is a record of Thoreau's sojourn for about two years in the woods by Walden Pond. He went about two miles from his mother's door, built a little house or hut, and there lived, reading his favorite books, philosophizing, studying nature, and to a great extent avoiding society. Some people have condemned him as selfish, others have defended him. His best defense is his work. If anything so fresh and readable as _Walden_ be the result, we might be willing to deny ourselves the society of some of our urban friends, without charging them with selfishness. Thoreau is sometimes called a "wild man"; in a sense, he is untamed. He himself confessed,--"There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness." Yet he was a true lover of men. He hated slavery and went to jail rather than pay his taxes, because he disbelieved in supporting a government that upheld slavery. When his friend, the philosophic Emerson, peered into the prison cell and said,--"Henry, why are you here?" the quick retort was,--"Why are you not here?" It must be remembered that Thoreau lived in a time of social experiment. Hawthorne had thrown in his lot for a brief time with the Brook Farm idealists. Why should not Thoreau make an experiment of his own? Why not live the simple life before Wagner wrote about it? He was tired of the conventionalities of society, of the incessant interruptions to steady thought. Society is naught but a conspiracy to compel imitation. "The head monkey of Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." So Thoreau moves out into the woods by the side of Walden Pond. Before he can live there he must build his house: "Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it." His house, when finished, was ten feet wide and fifteen long. The exact cost was twenty-eight dollars, twelve and one-half cents. In _Walden_ he gives an itemized account of the cost. And then he adds, with a twinkle of his eye, I think,--"I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one." Thoreau also finds some satisfaction that his house cost him less than the year's rent of a college room at Harvard; for there the mere rent of a student's room, "which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof." In this book he gives a very interesting account of what his food cost him during the eight months from July 4 to March 1. Here is his list: Rice $1.73-½ Molasses 1.73 Rye meal 1.04-¾ Indian meal .99-¾ Pork .22 Flour .88 Sugar .80 Lard .65 Apples .25 Dried apple .22 Sweet potatoes .10 One pumpkin .06 One watermelon .02 Salt .03 "Yes," says he, "I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print." In this connection one may call to mind a reported saying of Mrs. Emerson's to the effect that Henry never got very far away from the sound of the dinner horn. It is not hard to imagine that the hospitable Emerson often invited the kindred-spirited Thoreau into his house for a warm and abundant dinner. Another writer recently has advanced also this thought: Thoreau was not so much of a selfish hermit as it might appear. He went into the woods to make his house or hut a station on the underground railroad. If this be true, a new and different light is thrown upon Thoreau's conduct. Thoreau was a great lover of nature and the things of nature loved him. Dr. Channing gives us this glimpse of the man: "Thoreau named all the birds without a gun, a weapon he never used in mature years. He neither killed nor imprisoned any animal, unless driven by acute needs. He brought home a flying squirrel, to study its mode of flight, but quickly carried it back to the wood. He possessed true instincts of topography, and could conceal choice things in the bush and find them again.... If Thoreau needed a box in his walk, he would strip a piece of birch bark off the tree, fold it, when cut straightly, together, and put his tender lichen or brittle creature therein." Emerson supplements this picture with the following account of a visit he once made to Walden: "The naturalist waded into the pool for the water plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. On this day he looked for the menyanthes and detected it across the wide pool; and, on examination of the floret, declared that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket a diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom that day, whereof he kept account as a banker does when his notes are due.... He could pace rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his way in the woods at night better by his feet than by his eyes. He knew every track in the snow and on the ground, and what creature had taken the path in the snow before him." Thoreau could write the most beautiful descriptions when he was so inclined. Here is an exquisite description of a snowstorm. "Did you ever admire the steady, silent, windless fall of the snow, in some lead-colored sky, silent save the little ticking of the flakes as they touched the twigs? It is chased silver, molded over the pines and oak leaves. Soft shades hang like curtains along the closely-draped wood-paths. Frozen apples become little cider-vats. The old crooked apple-trees, frozen stiff in the pale, shivering sunlight, that appears to be dying of consumption, gleam forth like the heroes of one of Dante's cold hells; we would mind any change in the mercury of the dream. The snow crunches under the feet; the chopper's axe rings funereally through the tragic air. At early morn the frost on button-bushes and willows was silvery and every stem and minutest twig and filamentary weed came up a silver thing, while the cottage smoke rose salmon-colored into that oblique day. At the base of ditches were shooting crystals, like the blades of an ivory-handled penknife, the rosettes and favors fretted of silver on the flat ice. The little cascades in the brook were ornamented with transparent shields, and long candelabrums and spermaceti-colored fools'-caps and plated jellies and white globes, with the black water whirling along transparently underneath. The sun comes out, and all at a glance, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds start into intense life on the angles of the snow crystals." LIX THE LAST DAYS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE There has been great difference of opinion concerning the genius of Poe. His life also has been the subject of much controversy. By some Poe is painted as a fiend incarnate, by others as a man more sinned against than sinning. When Howells visited Emerson he was surprised to hear the Concord Sage refer to Poe as the "jingle man," but then Emerson himself had been treated rather contemptuously by Poe, and that, together with Emerson's lack of appreciation of melody, may account for the "jingle man" expression. It is not strange that Poe has been the subject of bitter criticism. He himself was bitter and unjust in his criticisms of others. He once wrote: "Bryant is not _all_ a fool. Mr. Willis is not _quite_ an ass. Mr. Longfellow _will_ steal, but, perhaps, he cannot help it." The man who will write like that must expect similar vituperation in return. To have friends, a man must be friendly. Poe was lacking in those warm human sympathies that attract our fellow-men. The human touch lacking in his art is also lacking in his life. "Except the wife who idolized him," writes Mr. Woodberry in his excellent Life of Poe, "and the mother who cared for him, no one touched his heart in the years of his manhood, and at no time was love so strong in him as to rule his life; as he was self-indulgent, he was self-absorbed, and outside of his family no kind act, no noble affection, no generous sacrifice is recorded of him." In _Scribner's Magazine_, 1878, Mrs. Susan T. Weiss in writing of the _Last Days of Edgar Allan Poe_, one of the most accurate accounts of this period of the poet's life, gives us a more pleasing impression. We quote the following extracts: It was a day or two after his arrival that Poe, accompanied by his sister, called on us.... The remembrance of that first meeting with the poet is still as vividly impressed upon my mind as though it had been but yesterday. A shy and dreamy girl, scarcely more than a child, I had all my life taken an interest in those strange stories and poems of Edgar Poe; and now, with my old childish impression of their author scarcely worn off, I regarded the meeting with an eager, yet shrinking anticipation. As I entered the parlor, Poe was seated near the window, quietly conversing. His attitude was easy and graceful, with one arm lightly resting on the back of his chair. His dark curling hair was thrown back from his broad forehead--a style in which he habitually wore it. At sight of him, the impression produced upon me was of a refined, highbred, and chivalrous gentleman. I use this word "chivalrous" as exactly descriptive of something in his whole _personnel_, distinct from either polish or high-breeding, and which, though instantly apparent, was yet an effect too subtle to be described. He rose on my entrance, and, other visitors being present, stood with one hand on the back of his chair, awaiting my greeting. So dignified was his manner, so reserved his expression, that I experienced an involuntary recoil, until I turned to him and saw his eyes suddenly brighten as I offered my hand; a barrier seemed to melt between us, and I felt that we were no longer strangers.... While upon this subject, I venture, though with great hesitation, to say a word in relation to Poe's own marriage with his cousin, Virginia Clemm. I am aware that there exists with the public but one view of this union, and that so lovely and touching in itself, that to mar the picture with even a shadow inspires almost a feeling of remorse. Yet since in the biography of a distinguished man of genius truth is above all things desirable, and since in this instance the facts do not redound to the discredit of any party concerned, I may be allowed to state what I have been assured is truth. Poets are proverbial for uncongenial marriages, and to this Poe can scarcely be classed as an exception. From the time when as a youth of nineteen he became a tutor to his sweet and gentle little cousin of six years old, he loved her with the protective tenderness of an elder brother. As years passed he became the subject of successive fancies or passions for various charming women; but she gradually budding into early womanhood experienced but one attachment--an absorbing devotion to her handsome, talented, and fascinating cousin. So intense was this passion that her health and spirits became seriously affected, and her mother, aroused to painful solicitude, spoke to Edgar about it. This was just as he was preparing to leave her house, which had been for some years his home, and enter the world of business. The idea of this separation was insupportable to Virginia. The result was that Poe, at that time a young man of twenty-eight, married his little, penniless, and delicate child-cousin of fourteen or fifteen, and thus unselfishly secured her own and her mother's happiness. In his wife he had ever the most tender and devoted of companions; but it was his own declaration that he ever missed in her a certain intellectual and spiritual sympathy necessary to perfect happiness in such an union.... He was never a deliberately unkind husband, and toward the close of Mrs. Poe's life he was assiduous in his tender care and attention. Yet his own declaration to an intimate friend of his youth was that his marriage "had not been a congenial one;" and I repeatedly heard the match ascribed to Mrs. Clemm, by those who were well acquainted with the family and the circumstances. In thus alluding to a subject so delicate, I have not lightly done so, or unadvisedly made a statement which seems refuted by the testimony of so many who have written of the "passionate idolatry" with which the poet regarded his wife. I have heard the subject often and freely discussed by Poe's most intimate friends, including his sisters, and upon this authority I speak. Lovely in person, sweet and gentle in disposition, his young wife deserved, doubtless, all the love that it was in his nature to bestow. Of his unvarying filial affection for Mrs. Clemm, and of her almost angelic devotion to himself and his interests, there can be no question. Once in discussing _The Raven_, Poe observed that he had never heard it correctly delivered by even the best readers--that is, not as he desired that it should be read. That evening, a number of visitors being present, he was requested to recite the poem, and complied. His impressive delivery held the company spell-bound, but in the midst of it, I, happening to glance toward the open window above the level roof of the greenhouse, beheld a group of sable faces the whites of whose eyes shone in strong relief against the surrounding darkness. These were a number of our family servants, who having heard much talk about "Mr. Poe, the poet," and having but an imperfect idea of what a poet was, had requested permission of my brother to witness the recital. As the speaker became more impassioned and excited, more conspicuous grew the circle of white eyes, until when at length he turned suddenly toward the window, and, extending his arm, cried, with awful vehemence, "Get thee back into the tempest, and the night's Plutonian shore!" there was a sudden disappearance of the sable visages, a scuttling of feet, and the gallery audience was gone. Ludicrous as was the incident, the final touch was given when at that moment Miss Poe, who was an extraordinary character in her way, sleepily entered the room, and with a dull and drowsy deliberation seated herself on her brother's knee. He had subsided from his excitement into a gloomy despair, and now, fixing his eyes upon his sister, he concluded: And the raven never flitting, still is sitting, _still_ is sitting, On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door; And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming-- The effect was irresistible; and as the final "nevermore" was solemnly uttered the half-suppressed titter of two very young persons in a corner was responded to by a general laugh. Poe remarked quietly that on his next delivery of a public lecture "he would take Rose along, to act the part of the raven, in which she seemed born to excel." ... It is with feelings of deep sadness, even after the lapse of so many years, that I approach the close of these reminiscences. Poe one day told me that it was necessary that he should go to New York. He must make certain preparations for establishing his magazine, the _Stylus_, but he should in less than two weeks return to Richmond, where he proposed henceforth to reside. He looked forward to this arrangement with great pleasure. "I mean to turn over a new leaf; I shall begin to lead a new life," he said, confidently. He had often spoken to me of his books,--"few, but _recherché_,"--and he now proposed to send certain of these by express, for my perusal. "You must annotate them extensively," he said. "A book wherein the minds of the author and the reader are thus brought in contact is to me a hundredfold increased in interest. It is like flint and steel." One of the books which he desired me to read was Mrs. Browning's poems, and another one of Hawthorne's works. I remember his saying of the latter that he was "indisputably the best prose writer in America;" that "Irving and the rest were mere commonplace beside him;" and that "there was more inspiration of true genius in Hawthorne's prose than in all Longfellow's poetry." This may serve to give an idea of his own opinion of what constitutes genius, though some of Longfellow's poems he pronounced "perfect of their kind." The evening of the day previous to that appointed for his departure from Richmond, Poe spent at my mother's. He declined to enter the parlors, where a number of visitors were assembled, saying he preferred the more quiet sitting-room; and here I had a long and almost uninterrupted conversation with him. He spoke of his future, seeming to anticipate it with an eager delight, like that of youth. He declared that the last few weeks in the society of his old and new friends had been the happiest that he had known for many years, and that when he again left New York he should there leave behind all the trouble and vexation of his past life.... In speaking of his own writings Poe expressed his conviction that he had written his best poems, but that in prose he might yet surpass what he had already accomplished.... He was the last of the party to leave the house. We were standing on the portico, and after going a few steps he paused, turned, and again lifted his hat, in a last adieu. At the moment, a brilliant meteor appeared in the sky directly over his head, and vanished in the east. We commented laughingly upon the incident; but I remembered it sadly afterward. That night he spent at Duncan's lodge; and as his friend said, sat late at his window, meditatively smoking, and seemingly disinclined for conversation. On the following morning he went into the city, accompanied by his friends Dr. Gibbon Carter and Dr. Mackenzie. The day was passed with them and others of his intimate friends. Late in the evening he entered the office of Dr. John Carter, and spent an hour in looking over the day's papers; then taking Dr. Carter's cane he went out, remarking that he would step across to Saddler's (a fashionable restaurant) and get supper. From the circumstance of his taking the cane, leaving his own in its place, it is probable that he had intended to return; but at the restaurant he met with some acquaintances who detained him until late, and then accompanied him to the Baltimore boat. According to their account he was quite sober and cheerful to the last, remarking, as he took leave of them, that he would soon be in Richmond again. ... Three days after, a friend came to me with the day's issue of the _Richmond Dispatch_. Without a word she pointed to a particular paragraph, where I read,--"Death of Edgar A. Poe, in Baltimore." Poe had made himself popular in Richmond, people had become interested in him, and his death cast a universal gloom over the city. His old friends, and even those more recently formed, and whom he had strangely attached to himself, deeply regretted him. Mr. Sully came to consult with me about a picture of _The Raven_ which he intended to make; and in the course of the conversation expressed himself in regard to his lost friend with a warmth of feeling and appreciation not usual to him. The two had been schoolmates; and the artist said: "Poe was one of the most warm-hearted and generous of men. In his youth and prosperity, when admired and looked up to by all his companions, he invariably stood by me and took my part. I was a dull boy at learning, and Edgar never grudged time or pains in assisting me." In further speaking, he said, with a decision and earnestness which impressed me, "It was Mr. Allan's cruelty in casting him upon the world, a beggar, which ruined Poe. Some who had envied him took advantage of his change of fortune to slight and insult him. He was sensitive and proud, and felt the change keenly. It was this which embittered him. By nature no person was less inclined to reserve or bitterness, and as a boy he was frank and generous to a fault." In speaking of his poems, Mr. Sully remarked: "He has an eye for dramatic, but not for scenic or artistic effect. Except in _The Raven_, I can nowhere in his poems find a subject for a picture." In closing these reminiscences, I may be allowed to make a few remarks founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know; and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,--half maniac, half demon,--I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful, warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,--his careworn face all aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which he was so little accustomed. His faults were sufficiently apparent; but for these a more than ordinary allowance should be made, in consideration of the unfavorable influences surrounding him from his very birth. He was ever the sport of an adverse fortune. Born in penury, reared in affluence, treated at one time with pernicious indulgence and then literally turned into the streets, a beggar and an outcast, deserted by those who had formerly courted him, maliciously calumniated, smarting always under a sense of wrong and injustice,--what wonder that his bright, warm, and naturally generous and genial nature should have become embittered? What wonder that his keenly sensitive and susceptible poetic temperament should have become jarred, out of tune, and into harsh discord with himself and mankind? Let the just and the generous pause before they judge; and upon their lips the breath of condemnation will soften into a sigh of sympathy and regret. LX ARTEMUS WARD Poor Artemus! says Haweis in his lecture on the American humorist, I shall not see his like again, as he appeared for a few short weeks before an English audience at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. Sometimes, as to looks, profoundly dejected, at others shy or reproachful; nervously anxious to please (apparently), yet with a certain twinkle at the back of his eye which convinced you of his perfect _sang froid_, and one thing always--full, unescapably full, of fun.... When Artemus arrived here in 1866 he was a dying man. I can see him now, as he came on the narrow platform in front of his inferior panorama, and stole a glance at the densely packed room and then at his panorama. His tall, gaunt, though slender figure, his curly light hair and large aquiline nose, which always reminded me of a macaw; his thin face flushed with consumption, his little cough, which seemed to shake him to pieces, and which he said "was wearing him out," at which we all laughed irresistibly, and then felt ashamed of ourselves, as well we might; but he himself seemed to enjoy his cough. It was all part of that odd, topsy-turvy mind in which everything appeared most natural upside down! On first entering he would seem profoundly unconscious that anything was expected of him, but after looking at the audience, then at his own clothes, and then apologetically at his panorama, he began to explain its merits. The fact is Artemus intended having the finest scenes that could be painted, but he gave that up on account of the expense, and then determined to get the worst as the next best thing for his purpose. When anything very bad came up he would pause and gaze admiringly at the canvas, and then look round a little reproachfully at the company. "This picture," he would say, "is a great work of art; it is an oil painting done in petroleum. It is by the Old Masters. It was the last thing they did before dying. They did this, and then they expired. I wish you were nearer to it so you could see it better. I wish I could take it to your residences and let you see it by daylight. Some of the greatest artists in London come here every morning before daylight with lanterns to look at it. They say they never saw anything like it before, and they hope they never shall again!" Certain curious brown splotches appearing in the foreground, Artemus pointed gravely to them, and said: "These are intended for horses; I know they are, because the artist told me so. After two years, he came to me one morning and said, 'Mr. Ward, I cannot conceal it from you any longer; they are horses.'" Apropos of nothing he observed: "I really don't care for money; I only travel around to show my clothes." This was a favorite joke of his. He would look with a piteous expression of discomfort and almost misery at his black trousers and swallowtail coat, a costume in which he said he was always most wretched. "These clothes I have on," he continued, "were a great success in America." And then quite irrelevantly and rather hastily, "How often do large fortunes ruin young men! I should like to be ruined, but I can get on very well as I am!" So the lecture dribbled on with little fragments of impertinent biography, mere pegs for slender witticisms like this: "When quite a child I used to draw on wood. I drew a small cartload of raw material over a wooden bridge, the people of the village noticed me, I drew their attention, they said I had a future before me; up to that time I had an idea it was behind me." Or this: "I became a man. I have always been mixed up with art. I have an uncle who takes photographs, and I have a servant who takes anything he can set his hands on." With one more example from his life among the Mormons, which, perhaps, though brief, includes a greater variety of wit and humor than any single passage I could select, I must conclude my memorial glimpses of this incomparable and lamented humorist. "I regret to say that efforts were made to make a Mormon of me while I was in Utah. "It was leap year when I was there, and seventeen young widows--the wives of a deceased Mormon (he died by request)--offered me their hearts and hands. I called upon them one day, and taking their soft, white hands in mine--which made eighteen hands altogether--I found them in tears. And I said 'Why is this thus?--what is the reason of this thusness?' "They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said-- "'Oh, soon thou wilt be gonested away!' "I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I usually wentested. They said--'Doth not like us?' "I said, 'I doth, I doth!' I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone child and my parents are far, far away!' "They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?' "I said, 'Oh no, it cannot was.' "Again they asked me to marry them, and again I declined. When they cried-- "'Oh, cruel man: this is too much--oh, too much!' "I told them it was on account of the muchness that I declined." LXI EDMUND GOSSE VISITS WHITTIER In December of 1884, Mr. Edmund Gosse, one of the most distinguished of English critics, visited Whittier at a house called Oak Knoll, in Massachusetts, where he was then staying with friends. We quote brief extracts from a report of that visit as published in _Good Words_, an English magazine: "Doubtless in leafy season Oak Knoll may have its charms, but it was distinctly sinister that December morning. We rang, and after a long pause the front door opened slightly, and a very unprepossessing dog emerged, and shut the door (if I may say so) behind him. We were face to face with this animal, which presented none of the features identified in one's mind with the idea of Mr. Whittier. It sniffed unpleasantly, but we spoke to it most blandly and it became assured that we were not tramps. The dog sat down, and looked at us; we had nowhere to sit down, but we looked at the dog. Then, after many blandishments, but feeling very uncomfortable, I ventured to hold the dog in conversation while I rang again. After another pause the door was slightly opened, and a voice of no agreeable timbre asked what we wanted. We explained, across the dog, that we had come by appointment to see Mr. Whittier. The door was closed a second time, and, if our carriage had still been waiting, we should certainly have driven back to Danvers. But at length a hard-featured woman grudgingly admitted us, and showed us, growling as she did it, into a parlor. "Our troubles were then over, for Mr. Whittier, himself appeared, with all that report had ever told of a gentle sweetness and dignified cordial courtesy. He was then seventy-seven years old, and, although he spoke of age and feebleness, he showed few signs of either; he was, in fact, to live eight years more. Perhaps because the room was low, he seemed surprisingly tall; he must, in fact, have been a little less than six feet high. The peculiarity of his face rested in the extraordinary large and luminous black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with thick black eye-lashes curiously curved inward.... "His generosity to those much younger and less gifted than himself is well known, and I shall not dwell on the good-natured things which he proceeded to say to his English visitor. He made no profession, at any time, of being a critic, and his formula was that such and such verse or prose had given him pleasure--'I am grateful to thee for all that enjoyment' was his charming way of being kind.... He spoke with great emotion of Emerson--'the noblest human being I have known,' and of Longfellow, 'perhaps the sweetest. But you will see Holmes,' he added. I said that it was my great privilege to be seeing Dr. Holmes every day, and that the night before he had sent all sorts of affectionate messages by me to Mr. Whittier. The latter expressed great curiosity to see Holmes's short _Life of Emerson_ which, in fact, was published five or six days later.... Mr. Whittier greatly surprised me by confessing that he was quite color-blind. He exemplified his condition by saying that if I came to Amesbury I should be scandalized by one of his carpets. It appeared that he was never permitted, by the guardian goddess of his hearth, to go 'shopping' for himself, but that once, being in Boston, and needing a carpet, he had ventured to go to a store and buy what he thought to be a very nice, quiet article, precisely suited to adorn a Quaker home. When it arrived at Amesbury there was a universal shout of horror, for what had struck Mr. Whittier as a particularly soft combination of browns and grays proved, to normal eyes, to be a loud pattern of bright red roses on a field of the crudest cabbage-green." LXII PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF WHITTIER In the _New England Magazine_ Charlotte Forten Grimke writes entertainingly of Whittier. From this article we are permitted to quote the following extracts: "And so it happened that, one lovely summer day, my friend and I found ourselves on the train, rapidly whirling eastward, through the pleasant old town of Newburyport, across the 'shining Merrimac,' on our way to the poet's home in Amesbury. Arriving at the station, we found Mr. Whittier awaiting us, and a walk of a few minutes brought us to his house on Friend Street. Amesbury, a busy manufacturing town, pleasantly situated on the Merrimac, impressed me at first as hardly retired enough for a poet's home; for fresh in my recollection were Longfellow's historic house, guarded by stately poplars, standing back from the quiet Cambridge street, and Lowell's old mansion, completely buried in its noble elms; and each of these had quite realized my ideal of the home of a poet. But the little house looked very quiet and homelike; and when we entered it and received the warm welcome of the poet's sister, we felt, as all felt who entered that hospitable door, the very spirit of peace descending upon us. The house was then white (it was afterwards painted a pale yellow), with green blinds, and a little vine-wreathed piazza on one side, upon which opened the glass door of 'the garden room,' the poet's favorite sitting-room and study. The windows of this room looked out upon a pleasant, old-fashioned garden. The walls on both sides of the fireplace were covered with books. The other walls were hung with pictures, among which we noticed 'The Barefoot Boy,' a painting of Mr. Whittier's birthplace in Haverhill, a copy of that lovely picture, 'The Motherless,' under which were written some exquisite lines by Mrs. Stowe, and a beautiful little sea-view, painted by a friend of the poet. Vases of fresh, bright flowers stood upon the mantelpiece. After we had rested we went into the little parlor, where hung the portrait of the loved and cherished mother, who some years before had passed away to the 'Better Land.' Hers was one of those sweet, aged faces which one often sees among the Friends,--full of repose, breathing a benediction upon all around. There were other pictures and books, and upon a table in the corner stood Rogers' 'Wounded Scout.' [Illustration: JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER From a photograph] "At the head of the staircase hung a great cluster of pansies, purple and white and gold. Mr. Whittier called our attention to their wonderful resemblance to human faces,--a resemblance which we so often see in pansies, and which was brought out with really startling distinctness in this picture. "In the cool, pleasant chamber assigned to us, pervaded by an air of Quaker serenity and purity, was a large painting of the poet in his youth. This was the realization of my girlish dreams. There were the clustering curls, the brilliant dark eyes, the firm, resolute mouth. He looked like a youthful Bayard, 'without fear and without reproach,' ready to throw himself unflinchingly into the most stirring scenes of the battle of life. "We were at once greatly interested in Miss Whittier, and impressed by the simplicity and kindness of her manner. We saw the soul's beauty shining in her soft, dark eyes, and in the smile which, like her brother's, was very winning, and we felt it in the music, of her gentle voice and the warm pressure of her hand. There was a refreshing atmosphere of unworldliness about her. She had rarely been away from her home, and although her brother's fame obliged her to receive many strangers, she had never, as she told us, been able to overcome a shyness of disposition, except in the case of a very few friends. She was naturally witty and original, and when she did shake off her shyness, had a childlike way of saying bright things which was very charming. She and her brother had lived together, alone since their mother's death, and in their mutual devotion have been well compared to Charles Lamb and his sister. "We spent a delightful evening in the garden-room in quiet, cheerful talk. In society Mr. Whittier had the reputation of being very shy, and he was so among strangers; but at times, in the companionship of his friends, no one could be more genial. He had even a boyish frankness of manner, a natural love of fun, a keen appreciation of the humorous, which the sorrows and poor health of many years failed to subdue. That night he talked to us freely of his childhood, of the life on the old farm in Haverhill, which he has so vividly described in _Snow-Bound_, and showed us a venerable book, _Davideis_, being a history of David written in rhyme, the quaintest and most amusing rhyme, by Thomas Ellwood, a friend of Milton. It was the first book of 'poetry,' he told us, that he read when a boy. He entertained us with stories of people who came to see him. He had many very interesting and charming visitors, of course, but there were also many exceedingly queer ones, and these, he said with a queer smile, generally 'brought their carpet bags!' He said he was thankful to live in such a place as Amesbury, where people did not speak to him about his poems, nor think of him as a poet. Sometimes he had amused himself by tracking the most persistent of the lion-hunters, and found that the same individuals went to Emerson and Longfellow and other authors, and made precisely the same speeches. Emerson was not much annoyed by them; he enjoyed studying character in all its phases. "Begging letters and begging visits were also very frequent, and his sister told us that her brother had frequently been victimized in his desire to help those whose pitiful stories he believed. One day he received a letter from a man in a neighboring town, asking him for a loan of ten dollars, and assuring him that he should blow his brains out if Mr. Whittier did not send him the money. The tone of the letter made him doubt the sincerity of the writer, and he did not send the money, comforting himself, he said, with the thought that the man really had no brains to blow out. 'I must confess, however,' he added, 'I looked rather anxiously at the newspapers for the next few days, but seeing no news of a suicide in the neighboring town, I was relieved.' "His sister once told us of an incident which occurred during the war, which pleased them very much. One night, at a late hour, the door-bell rang, and her brother, on answering it, found a young man in an officer's uniform standing at the door. 'Is this Mr. Whittier?' he asked. 'Yes.' 'Well, sir,' was the quick reply, 'I only wanted to have the pleasure of shaking hands with you.' And with that he seized the poet's hand, shook it warmly, and rushed away, before Mr. Whittier had recovered from his surprise. "In subsequent visits to Mr. Whittier, he was sometimes induced to talk about his poems, although that was a subject on which he rarely spoke. On my friend's once warmly praising _Maud Muller_, he said decidedly that he did not like the poem, because it was too sad; it ministered to the spirit of unrest and dissatisfaction which was only too prevalent. With _My Psalm_ he felt much better satisfied, because it was more hopeful. His favorite poets were Wordsworth and Burns. He once showed us an autograph letter of Burns, which he prized very highly, and a number of beautiful photographs of Scotch scenery, the gift of a sturdy old Scotchman, a neighbor of his and also an ardent, admirer of Burns. "Our conversation occasionally touched on the subject of marriage, and I remember his asking us if we could imagine why there should be so much unhappiness among married people, even among those who seemed to have everything calculated to make them happy, and who really loved each other. He said he had pondered over the subject a good deal, and had finally concluded that it was because they saw too much of each other. He did not believe it was well for any two human beings to have too much of each other's society. We told him that, being a much-to-be-commiserated bachelor, he was not competent authority on that subject. "Among the most intimate of his friends were Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, Colonel Higginson, Charles Sumner, and Bayard Taylor. To the two latter, and also to Emerson, he has alluded very beautifully in one of his most characteristic poems, _The Last Walk in Autumn_. "On visiting the poet after my return from the South, for a vacation, I found a new inmate of the house, a gray and scarlet parrot, named Charlie, a great pet of the poet and his sister, and far-famed for his wit and wisdom. He could say many things with great distinctness, and although at first refusing rather spitefully to make my acquaintance, when I invited him to come into the kitchen and get his supper he at once hopped upon my hand and behaved in the most amicable manner. It was very comical to see him dance to a tune of Mr. Whittier's whistling. His master told us that he would climb toilsomely up the spout, pausing at every step or two to say, in a tone of the deepest self-pity, 'Poor Charlie!' and when he reached the roof screaming impertinently at the passers-by. The Irish children said that he called them 'Paddies,' and threatened him with dire vengeance. Mr. Whittier said he did not know; he 'could believe anything of that bird.' Charlie's favorite amusement was shaking the unripe pears from the trees in the garden; and when he saw Miss Whittier approaching, he would steal away with drooping head, like a child caught in a naughty action. This gifted bird afterwards died, and was much missed by the poet, who alluded to him in the poem entitled _The Common Question_. "Mr. Whittier showed me a couple of stuffed birds which had been sent to him by the Emperor of Brazil, after reading his _Cry of a Lost Soul_, in allusion to the bird in South American forests which has so intensely mournful a note that the Indians give it a name which signifies a lost soul. The first birds which were sent did not reach him, and the Emperor on hearing it sent two more. The bird is larger than a mocking bird, and has sober gray plumage, very unlike the bright-hued creatures usually seen in tropical forests. "The Emperor was a warm admirer of Mr. Whittier, and one of the first persons for whom he inquired on reaching Boston was the poet. There was some delay about their meeting and Dom Pedro became very impatient. At last they met in a house in Boston. Dom Pedro expressed great delight at meeting the poet, and talked with him a long time, paying very little attention to any one else. On leaving, he asked Mr. Whittier to accompany him downstairs, and before entering his carriage threw his arms around the astonished poet and embraced him warmly. "Rare and beautiful were the qualities which met in Mr. Whittier: a singularly unworldly and sweet disposition, and unwavering love of truth and justice, a keen sense of humor, the highest type of courage, and a firm faith in God's goodness, which no amount of suffering ever shook. For years he was an invalid, a martyr to severe headaches. He once told me that he had not for a long time written anything without suffering. The nearest and dearest of his earthly ties had been severed by death. But he never rebelled. His life exemplified the spirit of resignation which is breathed throughout so many of his poems. All as God wills, who wisely heeds To give or to withhold, And knoweth more of all my needs Than all my prayers have told. "My husband and I made our last visit to him two years ago, at Oak Knoll. He gave us his customary warm greeting and, although in extremely feeble health, was as sweet and genial in spirit and as entertaining in conversation as ever. He took us into his cosey little library, and talked about his books and pictures and old friends, and promised to send us his latest photograph,--which he afterwards did. Fearing to weary him, we stayed but a short time. So frail he looked, that in parting from him our hearts were saddened by the thought that we might not look upon that dear face again. And so it proved. I shall ever remember him as I saw him then, in his beautiful country home, surrounded by devoted friends, awaiting calmly the summons to enter into rest--in that serene and lovely old age which comes only to those gifted ones whose lives are the embodiment of all that is noblest and best and sweetest in their poetry. "Farewell, beloved, revered friend! Thou art gone to join the loved ones who beckoned to thee from those blessed shores of Peace. To thee, how great the gain! To us, how infinite the loss! But thy influence shall remain with us. Still shalt thou ... be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty-- Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense. LXIII HENRY WARD BEECHER It would be no compliment to call Henry Ward Beecher the American Spurgeon. He may be that, but he is more. If we can imagine Mr. Spurgeon and Mr. John Bright with a cautious touch of Professor Maurice and a strong tincture of the late F.W. Robertson--if, I say, it is possible to imagine such a compound being brought up in New England and at last securely fixed in a New York pulpit, we shall get a product not unlike Henry Ward Beecher.... Mr. Beecher was brought up in the country. His novel, _Norwood_--not very readable, by the way, although full of charming passages--abounds in woods and streams, hills and dales, and flowers. "The willows," he tells us somewhere, "had thrown off their silky catkins, and were in leaf; the elm was covered with chocolate-colored blossoms, the soft maple drew bees to its crimson tassels." Would that all preachers and writers used no more offensive and superfluous flowers of speech than such as these.... When he wants to illustrate the comfort of a powerful, unseen, though protective love, he tells us how, as a boy, he woke up one midsummer night and listened, with a sense of half-uneasy awe, to the wild cry of the marsh birds, whilst the moonlight streamed full into his room; and then, as he grew more and more disturbed, he suddenly heard his father clear his throat "a-hem," in the next room, and instantly that familiar sound restored his equanimity. The illustration is simple, but it hits the mark and goes home. His affectionate tributes to his father and mother are constantly breaking forth in spite of himself. "I thank God," he says, "for two things. First, that I was born and bred in the country, of parents that gave me a sound constitution and a noble example. I never can pay back what I got from my parents. Next I am thankful that I was brought up in circumstances where I never became acquainted with wickedness." How delightful it is to think of a man who, without a taint of conscious insincerity, but simply out of the fulness of his heart, can get up before four thousand people, and say: "I never was sullied in act, nor in thought when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman. And I cannot express to God the thanks which I owe to my mother, and to my father, and to the great household of sisters and brothers among whom I lived. And the secondary knowledge of those wicked things which I have gained in later life in a professional way, I gained under such guards that it was not harmful to me." ... He has a wonderful way of importing his leisure hours into the pulpit, and making the great cooped-up multitude feel something of the joy and freshness of his own exhilaration. One golden day above others seems to have dwelt in his mind. He refers to it again and again. "When I walked one day on the top of Mt. Washington--glorious day of memory! Such another day I think I shall not experience till I stand on the battlements of the New Jerusalem--how I was discharged of all imperfections; the wide far-spreading country which lay beneath me in beauteous light, how heavenly it looked, and I communed with God. I had sweet tokens that he loved me. My very being rose right up into his nature. I walked with him, and the cities far and near of New York, and all the cities and villages which lay between it and me, with their thunder, the wrangling of human passions below me, were to me as if they were not." Some of his sermons are full of vacation-rambles. He passes through woods and gardens and plucks flowers and fragrant leaves, which will all have to do service in Brooklyn Church; he watches the crowded flight of pigeons from the treetops, and thinks of men's riches that so make themselves wings and fly away. As he scales the mountains and sees the summer storms sweep through the valleys beneath him, he thinks of the storms in the human heart--"many, many storms there are that lie low and hug the ground, and the way to escape them is to go up the mountain sides and get higher than they are." Mr. Beecher's travels in Europe were not thrown away upon his ardent and artistic temperament. He has stood before the great pictures to some purpose, and has not failed to read their open secret. "Have you ever stood in Dresden to watch that matchless picture of Raphael's, the 'Madonna di San Siste'? Engravings of it are all through the world; but no engraving has ever reproduced the mother's face. The Infant Christ that she holds is far more nearly represented than the mother. In her face there is a mist. It is wonder, it is love, it is adoration, it is awe--it is all these mingled, as if she held in her hands her babe, and yet it was God! That picture means nothing to me as it does to the Roman Church; but it means everything to me, because I believe that every mother should love the God that is in her child, and that every mother's heart should be watching to discern and see in the child, which is more than flesh and blood, something that takes hold of immortality and glory." --Selected from the _Contemporary Review_. LXIV THE LONDON "TIMES" ON LOWELL The London _Times_, sometimes nicknamed the _Thunderer_, was for many years the most influential paper in the world. Emerson in his _English Traits_ says, "No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed." In view of the high position of this paper it is a matter of interest to our American students of literature to read what this paper had to say on the death of Lowell. Here follows the larger part of the editorial from the _Times_: The death of Mr. Lowell will probably be more keenly and widely felt in England than would be that of any other American, or, indeed, of any other man who was not a fellow-countryman of our own. To very many in England it will be counted as a grave personal loss; and thousands more will miss in him one whom through his writings they had admired, felt with, laughed with, as with a friend. For a long time past, in fact ever since he quitted the Legation, his long annual visits to London have been regarded by a wide circle as one of the events of the year, and he himself as one of the most valued guests. We had hoped that this last June would again see him in his old London haunts, bright, genial, interesting as ever; but a cruel fate decided that this was not to be, and neither the Old World nor the New should know him more. Never a strong man, he has succumbed, at a ripe age, it is true, but prematurely, as all will think who knew how fresh his intelligence and his sympathies were to the last. With him there passes away one of the very few Americans who were the equals of any son of the Old World--of any Frenchman or any Englishman--in that indefinable mixture of qualities, which we sum up for want of a better word, under the name of culture. How did he arrive at it? The answer is, by natural gifts, by constant play of mind with mind in talk, and by reading. On those who casually met Mr. Lowell in society, he certainly did not make the impression of a book-worm, or of a man to whom books were indispensable; but none the less is it true that whenever official business was not too heavy, he invariably read for a _minimum_ of four hours a day. This did not include the time that he gave to ephemeral literature; it was the time that he spent in the serious reading of books, generally old books. How many of us, not professed students, can show a record as good, or half as good? He read quickly, too, in various languages, his favorites being the English of the Elizabethans, Spanish, old French, and modern French. His excellent memory and wonderful assimilative power built up this reading into the mental endowments that all the world admired. When Mr. Lowell came to England as the representative of the United States under the last Republican administration, London felt a sympathetic curiosity as to the author of the famous _Biglow Papers_ and of so much excellent prose criticism. In a very short time the feeling warmed into admiration and friendship. The official world spoke well of the way in which the new minister performed his duties--generally not very heavy, but always demanding tact and prudence--of his position as minister. Menacing sounds, indeed, began to be heard from across the ocean, when the Irish Fenians, who control so much of the press of the United States, began to raise the cry that Mr. Lowell sacrificed the interests of their dynamitard friends to a brutal British government; but, as the Washington officials took no notice, nobody here paid much attention to the matter. In social life, the new minister began to be a power. He went everywhere--to the houses of the great, to the houses of the men of letters, and to places where such people most do congregate. His talk was excellent give-and-take. He was neither a professional anecdotist, like another famous American talker, Mr. Chauncey Depew, nor a man on the watch for something to disagree with, like Mr. Blaine, nor even, as was his admirable successor, Mr. Phelps, a man of long silences broken by flashes of humor. Mr. Lowell seemed to know everything and have his knowledge always to hand; he was quick in repartee; he mixed anecdote with reflection in the happiest manner; he laughed at others' jests, and they laughed at his. Still, one had to be a little careful with him, for there were points on which he was extremely sensitive. Nobody, for example, must talk in his presence of _Americanisms_, or hint that the standard of language and literature observed in America showed any deflection from the best standard of the race.... On one occasion Mr. Lowell was sorely tempted to make his permanent home here. Just about the time of his ceasing to be minister, he was seriously sounded as to his willingness to be nominated to the new post of professor of English language and literature at Oxford. Had he consented to stand, not even a board determined to sink literature in philology could have passed over his claims. But he declined, for two reasons. There were claims of family, over in Massachusetts, and, greatly as he loved the mental atmosphere of England, he thought it his duty not to accept a definitely English post. And the sense of duty is strong in that old Puritan stock from which he sprang. ... But the distinguishing feature of Mr. Lowell was his adding to these high literary gifts the strong practical side which made of him a social power and a diplomatist. Naturally, such a man made a mark by his speeches, and happy was the audience, at the unveiling of a monument or at a literary dinner, that had the privilege of listening to Mr. Lowell. Seldom in England, where this kind of speaking is not cultivated as an art, have we witnessed such a perfect union of self-possession, sense, and salt. The speech on Henry Fielding, the speech in which he compared the sound of London to "the roaring loom of time," the address on Democracy--to mention but a few--will not be easily forgotten. Nor will those who had the privilege of experiencing it, in however slight a degree, forget the sweet affectionateness which, in spite of an occasional irritability and over-sensitiveness, was at the root of Mr. Lowell's character. Corrupt politicians disliked him and feared the barbed arrows of his indignant wit; but he goes to the grave mourned by all that is best in America, and he takes with him the heart-felt regard as well as the admiration, of this elder branch of our common English race. LXV THE WRITING OF "AMERICA" The Rev. Dr. Samuel F. Smith, author of _America_, died in Boston in 1895. On April 3, of the same year, he had received a grand public testimonial in Music Hall in recognition of his authorship of _America_. In the souvenir of that occasion Dr. Smith tells how he came to write the poem that made him famous. "In the year 1831 William C. Woodbridge, of New York, a noted educator, was deputed to visit Germany and inspect the system of the public schools, that if he should find in them any features of interest unknown to our public schools here they might be adopted in the schools of the United States. He found that in the German schools much attention was given to music; he also found many books containing music and songs for children. Returning home, he brought several of these music-books, and placed them in the hands of Mr. Lowell Mason, then a noted composer, organist, and choir leader. Having himself no knowledge of the German language he brought them to me at Andover, where I was then studying theology, requesting me, as I should find time, to furnish him translations of the German words, or to write new hymns and songs adapted to the German music. "On a dismal day in February, 1832, looking over one of these books, my attention was drawn to a tune which attracted me by its simple and natural movement and its fitness for children's choirs. Glancing at the German words at the foot of the page, I saw that they were patriotic, and I was instantly inspired to write a patriotic hymn of my own. "Seizing a scrap of waste paper, I began to write, and in half an hour I think the words stood upon it substantially as they are sung to-day. I did not know at the time that the tune was the British _God Save the King_. I do not share the regrets of those who deem it an evil that the national tune of Britain and America is the same. On the contrary, I deem it a new and beautiful tie of union between the mother and the daughter, one furnishing the music (if, indeed, it is really English), and the other the words. "I did not propose to write a national hymn. I did not think that I had done so. I laid the song aside, and nearly forgot that I had made it. Some weeks later I sent it to Mr. Mason, and on the following Fourth of July, much to my surprise, he brought it out at a children's celebration in the Park Street Church, in Boston, where it was first sung in public." LXVI ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS AND HER FIRST STORY Some years ago the author of _Gates Ajar_ told in an American magazine how she began her literary career. From this account we quote: "The town of Lawrence was three miles and a half from Andover. Up to the year 1860 we had considered Lawrence chiefly in the light of a place to drive to.... Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the hands pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient, throng, used in those days, to standing eleven hours and quarter--women and girls--at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence, and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.... "...One January evening, we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror that no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will forget. "At five o'clock the Pemberton Mills, all hands being at the time on duty, without a tremor of warning, sank to the ground. "At the erection of the factory a pillar with a defective core had passed careless inspectors. In technical language the core had 'floated' an eighth of an inch from its position. The weak spot in the too thin wall of the pillar had bided its time, and yielded. The roof, the walls, the machinery fell upon seven hundred and fifty living men and women, and buried them. Most of these were rescued, but eighty-eight were killed. As the night came on, those watchers on Andover Hill who could not join the rescuing parties, saw a strange and fearful light at the north. "Where we were used to watching the beautiful belt of the lighted mills blaze--a zone of laughing fire from east to west, upon the horizon bar--a red and awful glare went up. The mill had taken fire. A lantern, overturned in the hands of a man who was groping to save an imprisoned life, had flashed to the cotton, or the wool, or the oil with which the ruins were saturated. One of the historic conflagrations of New England resulted. "With blanching cheeks we listened to the whispers that told us how the mill-girls, caught in the ruins beyond hope of escape, began to sing. They were used to singing, poor things, at their looms--mill-girls always are--and their young souls took courage from the familiar sound of one another's voices. They sang the hymns and songs which they had learned in the schools and churches. No classical strains, no 'music for music's sake,' ascended from that furnace; no ditty of love or frolic, but the plain, religious outcries of the people: _Heaven is my Home_, _Jesus, Lover of my Soul_, and _Shall we Gather at the River?_ Voice after voice dropped. The fire raced on. A few brave girls still sang: Shall we gather at the river, There to walk and worship ever? "But the startled Merrimac rolled by, red as blood beneath the glare of the burning mills, and it was left to the fire and the river to finish the chorus. "At the time this tragedy occurred, I felt my share of its horror, like other people; but no more than that. My brother, being of the privileged sex, was sent over to see the scene, but I was not allowed to go. "Years after, I cannot say just how many, the half-effaced negative came back to form under the chemical of some new perception of the significance of human tragedy. "It occurred to me to use the event as the basis of a story. To this end I set forth to study the subject. I had heard nothing in those days about 'material,' and conscience in the use of it, and little enough about art. We did not talk about realism then. Of critical phraseology I knew nothing, and of critical standards only what I had observed by reading the best fiction. Poor novels and stories I did not read. I do not remember being forbidden them; but, by that parental art finer than denial, they were absent from my convenience. "It needed no instruction in the canons of art, however, to teach me that to do a good thing, one must work hard for it. So I gave the best part of a month to the study of the Pemberton Mill tragedy, driving to Lawrence, and investigating every possible avenue of information left at that too long remove of time which might give the data. I visited the rebuilt mills, and studied the machinery. I consulted engineers and officials and physicians, newspaper men, and persons who had been in the mill at the time of its fall. I scoured the files of old local papers, and from these I took certain portions of names, actually involved in the catastrophe, though, of course, fictitiously used. When there was nothing left for me to learn on the subject, I came home and wrote a little story called "The Tenth of January,' and sent it to the _Atlantic Monthly_, where it appeared in due time. "This story is of more interest to its author than it can possibly be now to any reader, because it distinctly marked for me the first recognition which I received from literary people." LXVII SIDNEY LANIER Next to Poe, Sidney Lanier ranks as the foremost of the poets of the South. In character Lanier is one of the rarest and purest of souls. His life was so chaste, his ideals so high, his devotion to his art so unselfish that he has been called "the Sir Galahad among American poets." Dr. Gilman, who in his capacity as president of Johns Hopkins University had frequent opportunities to observe Lanier, who was an instructor in this institution, has made the following comment,--"The appearance of Lanier was striking. There was nothing eccentric or odd about him, but his words, manners, ways of speech, were distinguished. I have heard a lady say that if he took his place in a crowded horse-car, an exhilarating atmosphere seemed to be introduced by his breezy ways." He was born in Georgia in 1842. After graduation from a small college in his native state and then serving as tutor for a short time, he entered the Confederate army. During his war experiences, whether in the field or in prison, he studied poetry and played the flute. These two arts were his passions for life. While yet in his college days he had acquired a fine reputation as a flute-player. At eighteen he was said to be the best flute-player in Georgia. One of his college friends at the time made record of his admiration in writing,--"Tutor Lanier is the finest flute-player you or I ever saw. It is perfectly splendid--his playing. He is far-famed for it. His flute cost fifty dollars, and he runs the notes as easily as any one on the piano." The passionate love of his sensitive soul is revealed in this poetic description of a visit to the opera: "I have just come in from the _Tempest_ at the Grand Opera House ... and my heart is so full.... In one interlude between the scenes we had a violin solo, adagio, with soft accompaniment by orchestra. As the fair tender notes came, they opened like flower-buds expanding into flowers under the sweet rain of the accompaniment. Kind heavens! My head fell on the seat in front, I was weighed down with great loves and great ideas and divine inflowings and devout outflowings, and as each note grew and budded, and became a bud again and died into a fresh birth in the next bud tone, I also lived these flower-tone lives, and grew and expanded, and folded back and died and was born again, and partook of the unfathomable mysteries of flowers and tones." And at another time he writes in the same vein,--"'Twas opening night of Theodore Thomas' orchestra at Central Park Garden, and I could not resist the temptation to go and bathe in the sweet amber seas of this fine orchestra, and so I went, and tugged me through a vast crowd, and, after standing some while, found a seat, and the baton waved, and I plunged into the sea, and lay and floated. Ah! the dear flutes and oboes and horns drifted me hither and thither, and the great violins and small violins swayed me upon waves, and overflowed me with strong lavations, and sprinkled glistening foam in my face, and in among the clarinetti, as among waving water-lilies with plexile stems, pushed my easy way, and so, even lying in the music waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." Who has ever written more expressively of that ecstasy that lays hold of the sensuous soul of the lover of fine music? Lanier is one of the heroic souls of song. Like Stevenson he was cheery enough to jest about his poverty. His contest with the demon of Want seems to have been fiercer even than was the warfare waged by the gay romancer. Lanier wishes to meet Charlotte Cushman, but he is not sure that he can; he must sell a poem or two to get the price of a suitable new dress coat. "Alas," he writes to the lady herself, in that gay spirit of humor which is the strong defense of some sensitive souls, "with what unspeakable care I would have brushed this present garment of mine in days gone by, if I had dreamed that the time would come when so great a thing as a visit to _you_ might hang upon the little length of its nap! Behold, it is not only in man's breast that pathos lies, and the very coat lapel that covers it may be a tragedy." The poetic temperament is commonly supposed to be at variance with domestic tranquillity. The domestic life of Lanier is a contradiction to that popular belief. He ends one of his letters to his wife with this petition,--"Let us lead them (the children) to love everything in the world, above the world, and under the world adequately; that is the sum and substance of a perfect life. And so God's divine rest be upon every head under the roof that covers thine this night, prayeth thy husband." In his letter to Gibson Peacock, January 6, 1878, we have a charming picture of the delight of a man who has at last found a place to nest his family, after some years of forlorn wanderings and uncertainties: "...I have also moved my family into our new home, have had a Christmas tree for the youngsters, have looked up a cheap school for Harry and Sidney, have discharged my daily duties as first flute of the Peabody Orchestra, have written a couple of poems and part of an essay on Beethoven and Bismarck, have accomplished at least a hundred thousand miscellaneous nothings.... We are in a state of supreme content with our new home; it really seems to me as incredible that myriads of people have been living in their own homes heretofore; as to the young couple with a first baby it seems impossible that a great many other couples have had similar prodigies. Good heavens! how I wish that the whole world had a home. "I confess that I am a little nervous about the gas bills, which must come in, in the course of time; and there are the water rates, and several sorts of imposts and taxes; but then the dignity of being liable to such things is a very supporting consideration. No man is a Bohemian who has to pay a water tax and a street tax. Every day when I sit down in my dining-room--_my_ dining-room! I find the wish growing stronger that each poor soul in Baltimore, whether saint or sinner, could come and dine with me. How I would carve out the merry-thoughts for the old hags! How I would stuff the big wan-eyed rascals till their rags ripped again! There was a knight of old times who built the dining-hall of his castle across the highway, so that every wayfarer must perforce pass through; there the traveler, rich or poor, found always a trencher and wherewithal to fill it. Three times a day in my own chair at my own table, do I envy that knight and wish that I might do as he did." LXVIII THE STORY OF MARK TWAIN'S DEBTS The story of "Mark Twain's Debts" is told in _The Bookman_ by Frederick A. King. We are permitted to tell the story in Mr. King's own words: An anecdote is recorded of Mark Twain and General Grant, who, in company with William D. Howells, once sat together at luncheon, spread in the General's private office in the purlieus of Wall Street, in the days when war and statesmanship had been laid aside, and the hero of battles and civic life was endeavoring to retrieve his scattered fortunes by a trial of business. "Why don't you write your memoirs?" asked Mark Twain, mindful of how much there was to record, and how eager would be the readers of such a work. But the General with characteristic modesty demurred, and the point was not pressed. This was several years before the failure of the firm of Ward and Grant, which swept away the General's private fortune, leaving him an old man, broken in health, and filled with anxiety about the provision for his family after he should be gone. When the evil days at last came, some memory of the suggestion dropped by his friend, the humorist--who could be immensely serious, too, when need be--may have led to the task that, in added contention with pain and suffering, constituted the last battle that the General should fight. Whatever the influence moving General Grant to the final decision to compose his memoirs, it happened, to his great fortune, that Mark Twain again called, and found that the work he had long ago suggested was at last in progress; but also that the inexperienced writer, modestly underestimating the commercial value of his forthcoming work, was about to sign away the putative profits. Fifty thousand dollars offered for his copyright seemed a generous sum to the unliterary General Grant, and it took the vehement persuasion of one who was himself a publisher to convince him that his prospective publishers would not hesitate at quadrupling that sum rather than lose the chance of publishing the book. When the conjecture was proven true, the General with characteristic generosity, withdrew the contract from his prospective publishers and placed it in the hands of the firm that Mark Twain headed. All the provisions were amply fulfilled; for when Mark Twain paid his last visit to the stricken author at the place of sojourn on Mount McGregor, he brought to the now speechless sufferer the smile of happiness and satisfaction by saying: "General, there is in the bank now royalties on advanced sales aggregating nearly $300,000. It is at Mrs. Grant's order." The anecdote is given at this length because, taken in connection with subsequent events dealing with General Grant's benefactor, it points a forceful illustration of the irony of fortune. There came a day when the very instrument by which Mark Twain was enabled to provide a peaceful close to the life of a brave warrior, and to guarantee affluence for his family, delivered himself a stroke that dissipated his own fortune at a time when age is supposed to have absorbed the vigor for a new grapple with destinies. In 1884 the publishing firm of C.L. Webster and Company was organized to publish the works of Mark Twain. Of this firm Mark Twain was president; but he took little active part in the management of its affairs. Able to conceive in broad outlines successful policies, he was singularly deficient in the power to handle the details of their execution. On April 18, 1894, the firm whose business enterprises had always figured in large sums through the immense popularity of the author-publisher's own works, the _Memoirs of General Grant_, and the _Life of Pope Leo_, made an assignment for the benefit of its creditors. The bankrupt firm acknowledged liabilities approximating $80,000. What in the ordinary view of commercial affairs would have furnished but one item in the list of failures which record the misfortunes of ninety per cent who engage in business, became in this instance a notable case through the eminence of the chief actor. What might he have done? The law could lay claim upon his personal assets. To surrender these possessions proved no act of self-sacrifice, considering his wife's fortune, upon which the law had no claim. His wife, however, joined him in the act of renunciation, and they stood together penniless. Beyond this point there could be no legal, and, to many minds, no moral responsibility for the debts of his firm. One can speculate upon the force of the temptation to take advantage of the position. Mark Twain was sixty years old, and ill at that. Having sacrificed all he possessed to meet the demands of his creditors, he might justly claim the benefit of what remained of capacity for wealth-producing labor. His own words in reply to a slander which insinuated that he had set to work again for his own benefit are splendid for inspiration and honesty: "The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency, and start free again for himself; but I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar." ... The great parallel case to the one here under examination is that of Sir Walter Scott, who lost his all through the failure of his printers, the Ballantynes, and between January, 1826, and January, 1828, earned for his creditors nearly £40,000. In the early stages of this trial he suffered acutely from the attitude of his friends, and he records in his diary how some would smile as if to say: "Think nothing about it, my lad; it is quite out of our thoughts;" how others adopted an affected gravity "such as one sees and despises at a funeral," while the best bred "just shook hands and went on." How the world treated Mark Twain we learn from the speech at the banquet given by the Lotus Club on his return from his arduous journey around the world: "There were ninety-six creditors in all, and not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time." "'Don't you worry, and don't you hurry,' was what they said." With the courage of a man buffeted, but not beaten, he gathered himself up for "one more last try for fortune and fair fame." In the latter part of 1895 he started out on a tour of the English-speaking countries of the world to give lectures and readings from his own works. There were misgivings, of course, as to the success of the venture. Here was a field not absolutely untried, but not hitherto cultivated to the point of assured success. In 1873 he had made a lecture tour in England and in 1885 had given platform readings in company with George W. Cable. But age had sapped the zest for public appearance, and he was skeptical of his power to move people with interest in his books. Moreover, there was a further thing to be considered, a possible impediment to success among the English colonies which he proposed to visit. His popularity with Englishmen had never been great, owing to the liberties he had taken with that nation's people in _Innocents Abroad_. The latter apprehension was the more remote, however, for, starting from New York, he had a continent to traverse before embarking for the shores that held for him an uncertain welcome. To test his ability to interest an audience, to "try it on the dog," as they say in theatrical parlance, he subjected himself to the severest test possible, crossed to Randall's Island and read before a company of boys. Unsophisticated by the lecturer's reputation as a humorist, the boys proved to be the organs of sincerest testimony to the permanence of the old power to amuse, and the first public appearance in Cleveland, Ohio, was undertaken with fewer misgivings. From Vancouver, Mark Twain sailed for Sidney and gave readings before the English-speaking communities of Australia; then continued on to Tasmania, New Zealand, Ceylon, India and South Africa. His fears as to his welcome among Englishmen were proved to be groundless. In Australia, great as was his success as a lecturer, his personal success outweighed even that, and the market on his books was exhausted. We cannot follow him on this trip of mingled arduous labor and personal satisfaction. The humorous reactions of his homely vision upon the quaint, the bizarre, the pretentious, aspects of life in remote parts of the world may be read in his own record of this journey, _Following the Equator_. There are few things to record of this great effort to pay his debts. In India he was taken ill, but the disease was not severe. In June, 1897, when he had circled the globe and had settled for a time in London, cablegrams came from that city announcing his mental and physical collapse. The English-speaking world was stricken with sympathy, and the New York _Herald_ at once began a subscription fund for his relief. The report was contradicted at once, but admiration for the author's strenuous effort seemed to grow, and the _Herald_ fund was assuming generous proportions when the following characteristic message declining to accept the relief came from the proposed beneficiary: I was glad when you instituted that movement, for I was tired of the fact and worry of debt, but I recognized that it is not permissible for a man whose case is not hopeless to shift his burden to other men's shoulders. In November of the same year a report was circulated that he was out of debt, but from Vienna, whither he had gone to live, came a laconic cablegram nailing the optimistic impeachment: Lie. Wrote no such letters. Still deeply in debt. Nearly half of the original indebtedness needed to be paid, and here, with scarcely an opposing voice in judgment, he might have waived the claim upon himself for his firm's responsibilities, but he avowed that he would pay dollar for dollar. The time of accomplishment was not long in coming. When the undertaking was begun, it was with the resolution to clear up the debt in three years. Allowing for the unexpected, it was feared it would take four, then at the age of sixty-four a new start in life would be open to the author, who might point to a considerable occupancy of space on library shelves and regard a life work accomplished. It took but two years and a half to pay the debt. He began the effort the latter part of 1895 and finished it in the early part of 1898. His return to America and his home in 1900 was, in the unromantic procedure of our self-conscious days, of the nature of a triumph. He was formally welcomed by the Lotus Club, and, of course, as delicately as might be, he was praised for his honesty. His reply to compliment was a generous recognition of social virtue, which renders easier such an effort as he made. Said he: Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weighted with. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I wanted. To speak of those debts--you all knew what he meant when he referred to it, and to the poor bankrupt firm of C.L. Webster and Company. No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-six creditors in all, and not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated me well; they treated me handsomely. I never knew I owed them anything; not a sign came from them. The story is one of simple elements, and suits the prosaic character of our age. It does not match Sir Walter's for romance. There was no such brain-racking work; no forcing of the phantasmal multitude of the poet's brain to dance to pay the expenses of the funeral; no mediæval castle to sacrifice; no tragic failure of the ultimate goal. What there is of real romance seems obscured by the facts of more or less safe speculation upon assured futures. It was a safe business venture. The hero was not unworthy of the praises which his peers at the Lotus dinner were glad to lavish. Said St. Clair McKelway: "He has enough excess and versatility to be a genius. He has enough quality and quantity of virtues to be a saint. But he has honorably transmuted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm fellowship to cool perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are content to wait for him." LXIX HAMLIN GARLAND'S LITERARY BEGINNING Hamlin Garland is one of the writers whose name suggests the great Northwest. He was born in Wisconsin in 1860, went to Iowa and later to Dakota, striving at an early age to wrest a living from the soil. At ten years of age he plowed seventy acres of land. His vivid descriptions of Western farm-life are not the results of reading and casual observation, supplemented by a vivid imagination; they are the products of actual experiences. In a personal interview with Mr. Garland, Frank G. Carpenter gives us the following interesting particulars: "The conversation here turned to Mr. Garland's literary work, and he told me how he was first led to write by reading Hawthorne's _Mosses from an Old Manse_. This book so delighted him that he wanted to write essays like it for a living, and he practised at this during the intervals of his school-teaching and studying for years. It was not until he was older that he attempted fiction or poetry. The story of his first published article is a curious one. Said he: "'My first literary success was a poem which I wrote for _Harper's Weekly_, entitled 'Lost in the Norther.' It was a poem describing a blizzard and the feelings of a man lost in it. I received twenty-five dollars for it.' "'That must have been a good deal of money to you then, Mr. Garland?' "'It was,' was the reply. 'It was my first money in literature, and I spent it upon my father and mother. I paid five dollars for a copy of Grant's _Memoirs_, which I sent father, and with the remaining twenty dollars I bought a silk dress for my mother. It was the first silk dress she had ever had.' "'When did you write your first fiction?' "'My mother got half of the money I received for that,' replied Mr. Garland, 'as it was due to her that I wrote it. I had been studying in Boston for several years, when I went out to Dakota to visit my parents. The night after I arrived I was talking with mother about old times and old friends. She told me how one family had gone back to New York for a visit, and had returned very happy, in getting back to their Western home. As she told the story, the pathos of it struck me. I went into another room and began to write. The story was one of the best chapters of my book _Main-Traveled Roads_. I read it to mother, and she liked it, and upon telling her that I thought it was worth at least seventy-five dollars, she replied: "Well, if that is so, I think you ought to _divvy_ with me, for I gave you the story." "I will," said I, and so, when I got my seventy-five dollars, I sent her a check for thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. I got many other good suggestions during that trip to Dakota. I wrote poems and stories. Some of the stories were published in _The Century_, and I remember that I received six hundred dollars within two weeks from its editors. It was perhaps a year later before I published my first book. It had a good sale, and I have been writing from that day to this.' "Hamlin Garland spends a part of every year in the West. He has bought the old home place where he was born in Wisconsin, and he has there a little farm of four acres, upon which he raises asparagus, strawberries, onions, and bushels of other things. His mother lives with him. During my talk with him the other night he said: 'I like the West and the Western people. I have been brought up with them, and I expect to devote my life to writing about them. I spend a portion of each summer on the Rocky Mountains, camping out. I like to go where I can sleep in the open air and have elbow-room away from the crowded city.'" LXX STEPHEN CRANE: A "WONDERFUL BOY" In 1900, Stephen Crane, while yet barely thirty, died. His early passing away was widely regarded as a loss to American literature. In England he was especially admired as a vigorous writer. His _The Red Badge of Courage_ won him wide recognition as a keen analyst. Old soldiers who read the story could not believe that it was written by a boy who was born after the war had ended. By many critics his stories of boyhood are considered the writings that shall be longest remembered. Shortly before his death Mr. Crane wrote the following letter to the editor of a Rochester daily: "My father was a Methodist minister, author of numerous works of theology, and an editor of various periodicals of the church. He was a graduate of Princeton, and he was a great, fine, simple mind. As for myself, I went to Lafayette College, but did not graduate. I found mining-engineering not at all to my taste. I preferred base-ball. Later I attended Syracuse University, where I attempted to study literature, but found base-ball again much more to my taste. My first work in fiction was for the New York _Tribune_, when I was eighteen years old. During this time, one story of the series went into the _Cosmopolitan_. At the age of twenty I wrote my first novel--_Maggie_. It never really got on the market, but it made for me the friendship of William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, and since that time I have never been conscious for an instant that those friendships have at all diminished. After completing _Maggie_, I wrote mainly for the New York _Press_ and for _The Arena_. In the latter part of my twenty-first year I began _The Red Badge of Courage_, and completed it early in my twenty-second year. The year following I wrote the poems contained in the volume known as _The Black Riders_. On the first day of last November I was precisely twenty-nine years old and had finished my fifth novel, _Active Service_. I have only one pride, and that is that the English edition of _The Red Badge of Courage_ has been received with great praise by the English reviewers. I am proud of this simply because the remoter people would seem more just and harder to win." In another letter to the same editor he writes about his literary sincerity: "The one thing that deeply pleases me is the fact that men of sense invariably believe me to be sincere. I know that my work does not amount to a string of dried beans--I always calmly admit it--but I also know that I do the best that is in me without regard to praise or blame. When I was the mark for every humorist in the country, I went ahead; and now when I am the mark for only fifty per cent of the humorists of the country, I go ahead; for I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision--he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition." LXXI EUGENE FIELD The general public will always remember Eugene Field as the author of _Little Boy Blue_, the many friends of Field, in addition to their memory of him as the charming poet of childhood, will always think of him as the irrepressible prince of merry-makers. To perpetrate a joke Field spared neither labor nor his friends. Many of his pranks were mere whimsicalities, innocent pleasantries that hurt no one. He would spend three hours in illustrating a letter to a friend, filling the letter with gossipy trivialities and using six different kinds of ink to make it look grotesque. During the last years of Field's too brief life he was importuned so frequently for the facts concerning his career that he printed a brief biography or _Auto-Analysis_, as he called it. This contains a generous portion of fiction mingled with some fact. He begins his autobiography with: "I was born in St. Louis, Mo., September 3, 1850.... Upon the death of my mother (1856), I was put in the care of my (paternal) cousin, Miss Mary Field French, at Amherst, Mass. "In 1865 I entered the private school of Rev. James Tufts, Monson, Mass., and there fitted for Williams College, which institution I entered as a freshman in 1868. Upon my father's death, in 1869, I entered the sophomore class of Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., my guardian, John W. Burgess, now of Columbia College, being then a professor in that institution. But in 1870 I went to Columbia, Mo., and entered the State University there, and completed my junior year with my brother. In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and Italy. In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening Journal_. In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Comstock (born in Chenango Co., N.Y.), of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight children--three daughters and five sons." This is not all of the autobiography. There are about a thousand words more. The reason Field attended three collegiate institutions is that his mischievous pranks made him _persona non grata_ to the college authorities. In after years the old historian of Knox College wrote: "He was prolific of harmless pranks and his school life was a big joke." The gay irresponsibility of Field is early illustrated in the reckless manner in which he spent "six months and his patrimony" in Europe. In 1872 Field received $8,000, the first portion of his patrimony. He proposed to a young friend, Comstock, the brother of Julia, whom he later married, that they go to Europe. Field offered to bear all the expenses of the trip. They went and for six months they had a glorious time. Soon the money was gone; he telegraphed for more; was obliged to sell the odd curios he had gathered to pay his way home. This expenditure of his money in a trip abroad is not so unprofitable a venture as it appears. The elder Field had left a fortune valued at $60,000; Eugene's share was to be about $25,000. In two years he spent about $20,000. His brother Roswell, more prudent, lived for several years on his share but finally, owing to the depreciation of real estate values, saw his fortune dwindle away. He is said to have envied the shrewdness of Eugene in spending his money when he had it. Field had the highest respect for womankind. In his _Auto-Analysis_ he writes: "I am fond of companionship of women, and I have no unconquerable prejudice against feminine beauty. I recall with pride that in twenty-two years of active journalism I have always written in reverential praise of womankind." This respect for womankind, however, did not prevent him from playing pranks upon his wife. On their wedding journey he delighted to tease his young Julia by ordering at Delmonico's "boiled pig's feet à la St. Jo." A few years later a quartet was accustomed to meet at Eugene's home. Field did not sing with the quartet but as a fifth member acted as reader or reciter in their little entertainments. Eugene delighted to tease his wife by walking into the parlor when the quartet was practicing at his home and saying: "Well, boys, let us take off our coats and take it easy; it's too hot." When this was done, Eugene would blaze forth in the brilliancy of a red flannel undershirt, with white cuffs and collar pinned to his shirt. When Carl Schurz was making his senatorial campaign in Missouri, Field was sent with the party to report the meetings. Field, although greatly admiring Schurz, took great delight in misreporting Schurz, whose only comment would be: "Field, why will you lie so outrageously?" One evening when a group of German serenaders had assembled in front of the hotel to do honor to Schurz, Field rushed out and pretending to be Schurz, addressed them in broken English. At another time, at a political meeting, Field suddenly stepped out to the front and began: "Ladies and Shentlemen: I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg to-night, but I haf die bleasure to introduce to you my brilliant chournalistic friendt Euchene Fielt, who will spoke you in my blace." While in Denver Field worked upon the _Tribune_. Over his desk hung,--"This is my busy day," and on the wall,--"God bless our proofreader, He can't call for him too soon." In his office he kept an old bottomless black-walnut chair. Across its yawning chasm he would carelessly thrown old newspapers. As it was the only unoccupied chair in the room, the casual visitor would drop unsuspectingly into the trap. The angry subscriber who had come to wreak vengeance upon the writer of irritating personalities could not withstand the apparently sincere apologies which Field lavished upon his victim. It was so humiliating to a man of Field's sensibilities to be obliged to receive such important visitors in an office whose very furniture indicated the poverty of the newspaper. In 1883 Field moved to Chicago, where the rest of his life was passed. Mr. Stone, one of the proprietors of _The News_, had gone to Denver to have a personal interview with Field, whose work had attracted attention in the newspaper world. Field stipulated that he was to have a column a day for his own use. The Chicago public soon was attracted by the brilliant versatility of the writer of "Sharps and Flats," the title of the column written by Field. Some months after Field had moved to Chicago he concluded that the general public ought to know that he had arrived. It was a cold morning in December. "So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the _Daily News_ office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke." Field had execrable taste in dress and he knew it. Consequently he enjoyed presenting neckties to his friends. His biographer, Slason Thompson, who worked in the same newspaper office, separated only by a low thin partition, relates that in the afternoon about two o'clock Field would stick his head above the partition and say,--"Come along, Nompy, and I'll buy you a new necktie," and when Thompson would decline the offer, Field would mildly respond, "Very well, if you won't let me buy you a necktie, you must buy me a lunch," and off to the coffee-house they would march, where the bill would be paid by Thompson, for Field was indeed through life the gay knight he styled himself, _sans peur and sans monnaie_. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | Page x: Thackery replaced with Thackeray | | Page 10: 'he became actor' replaced with | | 'he became an actor' | | Page 350: conconstituted replaced with constituted | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * 
29314	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 29314-h.htm or 29314-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h/29314-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed between plus signs was in bold face in the original (example: +bold+). The oe-ligature is represented by [oe]. A few typographical errors have been corrected; they are listed at the end of the text. OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND * * * * * BOOKS BY HENRY VAN DYKE PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS +THE RULING PASSION.+ Illustrated in color. $1.50 +THE BLUE FLOWER.+ Illustrated in color. $1.50 * * * * * +OUTDOORS IN THE HOLY LAND.+ Illustrated in color _net_ $1.50 +DAYS OFF.+ Illustrated in color. $1.50 +LITTLE RIVERS.+ Illustrated in color. $1.50 +FISHERMAN'S LUCK.+ Illustrated in color. $1.50 * * * * * +THE BUILDERS, AND OTHER POEMS.+ $1.00 +MUSIC, AND OTHER POEMS.+ _net_ $1.00 +THE TOILING OF FELIX, AND OTHER POEMS.+ $1.00 * * * * * [Illustration: The Gate of David, Jerusalem.] OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit by HENRY VAN DYKE Illustrated New York Charles Scribner's Sons MDCCCCVIII Copyright, 1908, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published November, 1908 To HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER MASTER OF MERWICK PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHÆOLOGY WHO WAS A FRIEND TO THIS JOURNEY THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY HIS FRIEND THE AUTHOR PREFACE For a long time, in the hopefulness and confidence of youth, I dreamed of going to Palestine. But that dream was denied, for want of money and leisure. Then, for a long time, in the hardening strain of early manhood, I was afraid to go to Palestine, lest the journey should prove a disenchantment, and some of my religious beliefs be rudely shaken, perhaps destroyed. But that fear was removed by a little voyage to the gates of death, where it was made clear to me that no belief is worth keeping unless it can bear the touch of reality. In that year of pain and sorrow, through a full surrender to the Divine Will, the hopefulness and confidence of youth came back to me. Since then it has been possible once more to wake in the morning with the feeling that the day might bring something new and wonderful and welcome, and to travel into the future with a whole and happy heart. This is what I call growing younger; though the years increase, yet the burden of them is lessened, and the fear that life will some day lead into an empty prison-house has been cast out by the incoming of the Perfect Love. So it came to pass that when a friend offered me, at last, the opportunity of going to Palestine if I would give him my impressions of travel for his magazine, I was glad to go. Partly because there was a piece of work,--a drama whose scene lies in Damascus and among the mountains of Samaria,--that I wanted to finish there; partly because of the expectancy that on such a journey any of the days might indeed bring something new and wonderful and welcome; but most of all because I greatly desired to live for a little while in the country of Jesus, hoping to learn more of the meaning of His life in the land where it was spent, and lost, and forever saved. Here, then, you have the history of this little book, reader: and if it pleases you to look further into its pages, you can see for yourself how far my dreams and hopes were realised. It is the record of a long journey in the spirit and a short voyage in the body. If you find here impressions that are lighter, mingled with those that are deeper, that is because life itself is really woven of such contrasted threads. Even on a pilgrimage small adventures happen. Of the elders of Israel on Sinai it is written, "They saw God and did eat and drink"; and the Apostle Paul was not too much engrossed with his mission to send for the cloak and books and parchments that he left behind at Troas. If what you read here makes you wish to go to the Holy Land, I shall be glad; and if you go in the right way, you surely will not be disappointed. But there are two things in the book which I would not have you miss. The first is the new conviction,--new at least to me,--that Christianity is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem (where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no room for them in the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors. Except the discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, all of its great words, from the sermon on the mount to the last commission to the disciples, were spoken in the open air. How shall we understand it unless we carry it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature? The second thing that I would have you find here is the deepened sense that Jesus Himself is the great, the imperishable miracle. His words are spirit and life. His character is the revelation of the Perfect Love. This was the something new and wonderful and welcome that came to me in Palestine: a simpler, clearer, surer view of the human life of God. HENRY VAN DYKE. Avalon, June 10, 1908. CONTENTS I. _Travellers' Joy_ 1 II. _Going up to Jerusalem_ 23 III. _The Gates of Zion_ 45 IV. _Mizpah and the Mount of Olives_ 67 V. _An Excursion to Bethlehem and Hebron_ 83 VI. _The Temple and the Sepulchre_ 105 VII. _Jericho and Jordan_ 125 VIII. _A Journey to Jerash_ 151 IX. _The Mountains of Samaria_ 191 X. _Galilee and the Lake_ 217 XI. _The Springs of Jordan_ 259 XII. _The Road to Damascus_ 291 ILLUSTRATIONS _The Gate of David, Jerusalem_ Frontispiece _Jaffa_ Facing page 14 _The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams from Lebanon for the building of the Temple_ _The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh_ 28 _A Street in Jerusalem_ 60 _A Street in Bethlehem_ 86 _The Market-place, Bethlehem_ 90 _Great Monastery of St. George_ 136 _Ruins of Jerash, Looking West_ 184 _Propyl[oe]um and Temple terrace_ _The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth_ 232 _The Approach to Bâniyâs_ 276 _Bridge Over the River Lîtânî_ 282 _A Small Bazaar in Damascus_ 316 I TRAVELLERS' JOY I INVITATION Who would not go to Palestine? To look upon that little stage where the drama of humanity has centred in such unforgetable scenes; to trace the rugged paths and ancient highways along which so many heroic and pathetic figures have travelled; above all, to see with the eyes as well as with the heart "Those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessed feet Which, nineteen hundred years ago, were nail'd For our advantage on the bitter cross"-- for the sake of these things who would not travel far and endure many hardships? It is easy to find Palestine. It lies in the south-east corner of the Mediterranean coast, where the "sea in the midst of the nations," makes a great elbow between Asia Minor and Egypt. A tiny land, about a hundred and fifty miles long and sixty miles wide, stretching in a fourfold band from the foot of snowy Hermon and the Lebanons to the fulvous crags of Sinai: a green strip of fertile plain beside the sea, a blue strip of lofty and broken highlands, a gray-and-yellow strip of sunken river-valley, a purple strip of high mountains rolling away to the Arabian desert. There are a dozen lines of steamships to carry you thither; a score of well-equipped agencies to conduct you on what they call "a _de luxe_ religious expedition to Palestine." But how to find the Holy Land--ah, that is another question. Fierce and mighty nations, hundreds of human tribes, have trampled through that coveted corner of the earth, contending for its possession: and the fury of their fighting has swept the fields as with fire. Temples and palaces have vanished like tents from the hillside. The ploughshare of havoc has been driven through the gardens of luxury. Cities have risen and crumbled upon the ruins of older cities. Crust after crust of pious legend has formed over the deep valleys; and tradition has set up its altars "upon every high hill and under every green tree." The rival claims of sacred places are fiercely disputed by churchmen and scholars. It is a poor prophet that has but one birthplace and one tomb. And now, to complete the confusion, the hurried, nervous, comfort-loving spirit of modern curiosity has broken into Palestine, with railways from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirût to Damascus,--with macadamized roads to Shechem and Nazareth and Tiberias,--with hotels at all the "principal points of interest,"--and with every facility for doing Palestine in ten days, without getting away from the market-reports, the gossip of the _table d'hôte_, and all that queer little complex of distracting habits which we call civilization. But the Holy Land which I desire to see can be found only by escaping from these things. I want to get away from them; to return into the long past, which is also the hidden present, and to lose myself a little there, to the end that I may find myself again. I want to make acquaintance with the soul of that land where so much that is strange and memorable and for ever beautiful has come to pass: to walk quietly and humbly, without much disputation or talk, in fellowship with the spirit that haunts those hills and vales, under the influence of that deep and lucent sky. I want to feel that ineffable charm which breathes from its mountains, meadows and streams: that charm which made the children of Israel in the desert long for it as a land flowing with milk and honey; and the great Prince Joseph in Egypt require an oath of his brethren that they would lay his bones in the quiet vale of Shechem where he had fed his father's sheep; and the daughters of Jacob beside the rivers of Babylon mingle tears with their music when they remembered Zion. There was something in that land, surely, some personal and indefinable spirit of place, which was known and loved by prophet and psalmist, and most of all by Him who spread His table on the green grass, and taught His disciples while they walked the narrow paths waist-deep in rustling wheat, and spoke His messages of love from a little boat rocking on the lake, and found His asylum of prayer high on the mountainside, and kept His parting-hour with His friends in the moon-silvered quiet of the garden of olives. That spirit of place, that soul of the Holy Land, is what I fain would meet on my pilgrimage,--for the sake of Him who interprets it in love. And I know well where to find it,--out-of-doors. I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine, but nightly pitch my wandering tent beside some fountain, in some grove or garden, on some vacant threshing-floor, beneath the Syrian stars. I will not join myself to any company of labelled tourists hurrying with much discussion on their appointed itinerary, but take into fellowship three tried and trusty comrades, that we may enjoy solitude together. I will not seek to make any archæological discovery, nor to prove any theological theory, but simply to ride through the highlands of Judea, and the valley of Jordan, and the mountains of Gilead, and the rich plains of Samaria, and the grassy hills of Galilee, looking upon the faces and the ways of the common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, the vigils of the shepherd on the hillside, the games of the children in the market-place, and reaping "The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart." Four things, I know, are unchanged amid all the changes that have passed over the troubled and bewildered land. The cities have sunken into dust: the trees of the forest have fallen: the nations have dissolved. But the mountains keep their immutable outline: the liquid stars shine with the same light, move on the same pathways: and between the mountains and the stars, two other changeless things, frail and imperishable,--the flowers that flood the earth in every springtide, and the human heart where hopes and longings and affections and desires blossom immortally. Chiefly of these things, and of Him who gave them a new meaning, I will speak to you, reader, if you care to go with me out-of-doors in the Holy Land. II MOVING PICTURES Of the voyage, made with all the swiftness and directness of one who seeks the shortest distance between two points, little remains in memory except a few moving pictures, vivid and half-real, as in a kinematograph. First comes a long, swift ship, the _Deutschland_, quivering and rolling over the dull March waves of the Atlantic. Then the morning sunlight streams on the jagged rocks of the Lizard, where two wrecked steamships are hanging, and on the green headlands and gray fortresses of Plymouth. Then a soft, rosy sunset over the mole, the dingy houses, the tiled roofs, the cliffs, the misty-budded trees of Cherbourg. Then Paris at two in the morning: the lower quarters still stirring with somnambulistic life, the lines of lights twinkling placidly on the empty boulevards. Then a whirl through the _Bois_ in a motor-car, a breakfast at Versailles with a merry little party of friends, a lazy walk through miles of picture-galleries without a guide-book or a care. Then the night express for Italy, a glimpse of the Alps at sunrise, snow all around us, the thick darkness of the Mount Cenis tunnel, the bright sunshine of Italian spring, terraced hillsides, clipped and pollarded trees, waking vineyards and gardens, Turin, Genoa, Rome, arches of ruined aqueducts, snow upon the Southern Apennines, the blooming fields of Capua, umbrella-pines and silvery poplars, and at last, from my balcony at the hotel, the glorious curving panorama of the bay of Naples, Vesuvius without a cloud, and Capri like an azure lion couchant on the broad shield of the sea. So ends the first series of films, ten days from home. * * * * * After an intermission of twenty-four hours, the second series begins on the white ship _Oceana_, an immense yacht, ploughing through the tranquil, sapphire Mediterranean, with ten passengers on board, and the band playing three times a day just as usual. Then comes the low line of the African coast, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the top of Pompey's Pillar showing over the white, modern city. Half a dozen little rowboats meet us, well out at sea, buffeted and tossed by the waves: they are fishing: see! one of the men has a strike, he pulls in his trolling-line, hand over hand, very slowly, it seems, as the steamship rushes by. I lean over the side, run to the stern of the ship to watch,--hurrah, he pulls in a silvery fish nearly three feet long. Good luck to you, my Egyptian brother of the angle! Now a glimpse of the crowded, busy harbour of Alexandria, (recalling memories of fourteen years ago,) and a leisurely trans-shipment to the little Khedivial steamer, _Prince Abbas_, with her Scotch officers, Italian stewards, Maltese doctor, Turkish sailors, and freight-handlers who come from whatever places it has pleased Heaven they should be born in. The freight is variegated, and the third-class passengers are a motley crowd. A glance at the forward main-deck shows Egyptians in white cotton, and Turks in the red fez, and Arabs in white and brown, and coal-black Soudanese, and nondescript Levantines, and Russians in fur coats and lamb's-wool caps, and Greeks in blue embroidered jackets, and women in baggy trousers and black veils, and babies, and cats, and parrots. Here is a tall, venerable grandfather, with spectacles and a long gray beard, dressed in a black robe with a hood and a yellow scarf; grave, patriarchal, imperturbable: his little granddaughter, a pretty elf of a child, with flower-like face and shining eyes, dances hither and yon among the chaos of freight and luggage; but as the chill of evening descends she takes shelter between his knees, under the folds of his long robe, and, while he feeds her with bread and sweetmeats, keeps up a running comment of remarks and laughter at all around her, and the unspeakable solemnity of old Father Abraham's face is lit up, now and then, with the flicker of a resistless smile. Here are two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills of Bashan. A child dies in the night, on the voyage; in the morning, at anchor in the mouth of the Suez Canal, we hear the carpenter hammering together a little pine coffin. All day Sunday the indescribable traffic of Port Saïd passes around us; ships of all nations coming and going; a big German Lloyd boat just home from India crowded with troops in khâki, band playing, flags flying; huge dredgers, sombre, oxlike-looking things, with lines of incredibly dirty men in fluttering rags running up the gang-planks with bags of coal on their backs; rowboats shuttling to and fro between the ships and the huddled, transient, modern town, which is made up of curiosity shops, hotels, business houses and dens of iniquity; a row of Egyptian sail boats, with high prows, low sides, long lateen yards, ranged along the entrance to the canal. At sunset we steam past the big statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, standing far out on the break-water and pointing back with a dramatic gesture to his world-transforming ditch. Then we go dancing over the yellow waves into the full moonlight toward Palestine. * * * * * In the early morning I clamber on deck into a thunderstorm: wild west wind, rolling billows, flying gusts of rain, low clouds hanging over the sand-hills of the coast: a harbourless shore, far as eye can see, a land that makes no concession to the ocean with bay or inlet, but cries, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." There are the flat-roofed houses, and the orange groves, and the minaret, and the lighthouse of Jaffa, crowning its rounded hill of rock. We are tossing at anchor a mile from the shore. Will the boats come out to meet us in this storm, or must we go on to Haifâ, fifty miles beyond? Rumour says that the police have refused to permit the boats to put out. But look, here they come, half a dozen open whale-boats, each manned by a dozen lusty, bare-legged, brown rowers, buffeting their way between the scattered rocks, leaping high on the crested waves. The chiefs of the crews scramble on board the steamer, identify the passengers consigned to the different tourist-agencies, sort out the baggage and lower it into the boats. * * * * * [Illustration: Jaffa. The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams from Lebanon for the building of the Temple.] My tickets, thus far, have been provided by the great Cook, and I fall to the charge of his head boatman, a dusky demon of energy. A slippery climb down the swaying ladder, a leap into the arms of two sturdy rowers, a stumble over the wet thwarts, and I find myself in the stern sheets of the boat. A young Dutchman follows with stolid suddenness. Two Italian gentlemen, weeping, refuse to descend more than half-way, climb back, and are carried on to Haifâ. A German lady with a parrot in a cage comes next, and her anxiety for the parrot makes her forget to be afraid. Then comes a little Polish lady, evidently a bride; she shuts her eyes tight and drops into the boat, pale, silent, resolved that she will not scream: her husband follows, equally pale, and she clings indifferently to his hand and to mine, her eyes still shut, a pretty image of white courage. The boat pushes off; the rowers smite the waves with their long oars and sing "Halli--yallah--yah hallah"; the steersman high in the stern shouts unintelligible (and, I fear, profane) directions; we are swept along on the tops of the waves, between the foaming rocks, drenched by spray and flying showers: at last we bump alongside the little quay, and climb out on the wet, gliddery stones. The kinematograph pictures are ended, for I am in Palestine, on the first of April, just fifteen days from home. III RENDEZVOUS Will my friends be here to meet me, I wonder? This is the question which presses upon me more closely than anything else, I must confess, as I set foot for the first time upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I know that this is not as it should be. All the conventions of travel require the pilgrim to experience a strange curiosity and excitement, a profound emotion, "a supreme anguish," as an Italian writer describes it, "in approaching this land long dreamed about, long waited for, and almost despaired of." But the conventions of travel do not always correspond to the realities of the heart. Your first sight of a place may not be your first perception of it: that may come afterward, in some quiet, unexpected moment. Emotions do not follow a time-table; and I propose to tell no lies in this book. My strongest feeling as I enter Jaffa is the desire to know whether my chosen comrades have come to the rendezvous at the appointed time, to begin our long ride together. It is a remote and uncertain combination, I grant you. The Patriarch, a tall, slender youth of seventy years, whose home is beside the Golden Gate of California, was wandering among the ruins of Sicily when I last heard from him. The Pastor and his wife, the Lady of Walla Walla, who live on the shores of Puget Sound, were riding camels across the peninsula of Sinai and steamboating up the Nile. Have the letters, the cablegrams that were sent to them been safely delivered? Have the hundreds of unknown elements upon which our combination depended been working secretly together for its success? Has our proposal been according to the supreme disposal, and have all the roads been kept clear by which we were hastening from three continents to meet on the first day of April at the _Hotel du Parc_ in Jaffa? Yes, here are my three friends, in the quaint little garden of the hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar meeting-place lends a singular intimacy and joy to the meeting. There is a surprise in it, no matter how long and carefully it has been planned. There are a thousand things to talk of, but at first nothing will come except the wonder of getting together. The sight of the desired faces, unchanged beneath their new coats of tan, is a happy assurance that personality is not a dream. The touch of warm hands is a sudden proof that friendship is a reality. Presently it begins to dawn upon us that there is something wonderful in the place of our conjunction, and we realise dimly,--very dimly, I am sure, and yet with a certain vague emotion of reverence,--where we are. "We came yesterday," says the Lady, "and in the afternoon we went to see the House of Simon the Tanner, where they say the Apostle Peter lodged." "Did it look like the real house?" "Ah," she answers smilingly, "how do I know? They say there are two of them. But what do I care? It is certain that we are here. And I think that St. Peter was here once, too, whether the house he lived in is standing yet, or not." Yes, that is reasonably certain; and this is the place where he had his strange vision of a religion meant for all sorts and conditions of men. It is certain, also, that this is the port where Solomon landed his beams of cedar from Lebanon for the building of the Temple, and that the Emperor Vespasian sacked the town, and that Richard Lionheart planted the banner of the crusade upon its citadel. But how far away and dreamlike it all seems, on this spring morning, when the wind is tossing the fronds of the palm-trees, and the gleams of sunshine are flying across the garden, and the last clouds of the broken thunderstorm are racing westward through the blue toward the highlands of Judea. Here is our new friend, the dragoman George Cavalcanty, known as "Telhami," the Bethlehemite, standing beside us in the shelter of the orange-trees: a trim, alert figure, in his belted suit of khâki and his riding-boots of brown leather. "Is everything ready for the journey, George?" "Everything is prepared, according to the instructions you sent from Avalon. The tents are pitched a little beyond Latrûn, twenty miles away. The horses are waiting at Ramleh. After you have had your mid-day breakfast, we will drive there in carriages, and get into the saddle, and ride to our own camp before the night falls." _A PSALM OF THE DISTANT ROAD_ _Happy is the man that seeth the face of a friend in a far country: The darkness of his heart is melted in the rising of an inward joy._ _It is like the sound of music heard long ago and half forgotten: It is like the coming back of birds to a wood that winter hath made bare._ _I knew not the sweetness of the fountain till I found it flowing in the desert: Nor the value of a friend till the meeting in a lonely land._ _The multitude of mankind had bewildered me and oppressed me: And I said to God, Why hast thou made the world so wide?_ _But when my friend came the wideness of the world had no more terror: Because we were glad together among men who knew us not._ _I was slowly reading a book that was written in a strange language: And suddenly I came upon a page in mine own familiar tongue._ _This was the heart of my friend that quietly understood me: The open heart whose meaning was clear without a word._ _O my God whose love followeth all thy pilgrims and strangers: I praise thee for the comfort of comrades on a distant road._ II GOING UP TO JERUSALEM I "THE EXCELLENCY OF SHARON" You understand that what we had before us in this first stage of our journey was a very simple proposition. The distance from Jaffa to Jerusalem is fifty miles by railway and forty miles by carriage-road. Thousands of pilgrims and tourists travel it every year; and most of them now go by the train in about four hours, with advertised stoppages of three minutes at Lydda, eight minutes at Ramleh, ten minutes at Sejed, and unadvertised delays at the convenience of the engine. But we did not wish to get our earliest glimpse of Palestine from a car-window, nor to begin our travels in a mechanical way. The first taste of a journey often flavours it to the very end. The old highroad, which is now much less frequented than formerly, is very fair as far as Ramleh; and beyond that it is still navigable for vehicles, though somewhat broken and billowy. Our plan, therefore, was to drive the first ten miles, where the road was flat and uninteresting, and then ride the rest of the way. This would enable us to avoid the advertised rapidity and the uncertain delays of the railway, and bring us quietly through the hills, about the close of the second day, to the gates of Jerusalem. The two victorias rattled through the streets of Jaffa, past the low, flat-topped Oriental houses, the queer little open shops, the orange-groves in full bloom, the palm-trees waving their plumes over garden-walls, and rolled out upon the broad highroad across the fertile, gently undulating Plain of Sharon. On each side were the neat, well-cultivated fields and vegetable-gardens of the German colonists belonging to the sect of the Templers. They are a people of antique theology and modern agriculture. Believing that the real Christianity is to be found in the Old Testament rather than in the New, they propose to begin the social and religious reformation of the world by a return to the programme of the Minor Prophets. But meantime they conduct their farming operations in a very profitable way. Their grain-fields, their fruit-orchards, their vegetable-gardens are trim and orderly, and they make an excellent wine, which they call "The Treasure of Zion." Their effect upon the landscape, however, is conventional. But in spite of the presence and prosperity of the Templers, the spirit of the scene through which we passed was essentially Oriental. The straggling hedges of enormous cactus, the rows of plumy eucalyptus-trees, the budding figs and mulberries, gave it a semi-tropical touch and along the highway we encountered fragments of the leisurely, dishevelled, dignified East: grotesque camels, pensive donkeys carrying incredible loads, flocks of fat-tailed sheep and lop-eared goats, bronzed peasants in flowing garments, and white-robed women with veiled faces. Beneath the tall tower of the forty martyrs at Ramleh (Mohammedan or Christian, their names are forgotten) we left the carriages, loaded our luggage on the three pack-mules, mounted our saddle-horses, and rode on across the plain, one of the fruitful gardens and historic battle-fields of the world. Here the hosts of the Israelites and the Philistines, the Egyptians and the Romans, the Persians and the Arabs, the Crusaders and the Saracens, have marched and contended. But as we passed through the sun-showers and rain-showers of an April afternoon, all was tranquillity and beauty on every side. The rolling fields were embroidered with innumerable flowers. The narcissus, the "rose of Sharon," had faded. But the little blue "lilies-of-the-valley" were there, and the pink and saffron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold of the genesta, and the orange-red of the pimpernel, and, most beautiful of all, the glowing scarlet of the numberless anemones. Wide acres of young wheat and barley glistened in the light, as the wind-waves rippled through their short, silken blades. There were few trees, except now and then an olive-orchard or a round-topped carob with its withered pods. [Illustration: The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh.] The highlands of Judea lay stretched out along the eastern horizon, a line of azure and amethystine heights, changing colour and seeming almost to breathe and move as the cloud shadows fleeted over them, and reaching away northward and southward as far as eye could see. Rugged and treeless, save for a clump of oaks or terebinths planted here or there around some Mohammedan saint's tomb, they would have seemed forbidding but that their slopes were clothed with the tender herbage of spring, their outlines varied with deep valleys and blue gorges, and all their mighty bulwarks jewelled right royally with the opalescence of sunset. In a hollow of the green plain to the left we could see the white houses and the yellow church tower of Lydda, the supposed burial-place of Saint George of Cappadocia, who killed the dragon and became the patron saint of England. On a conical hill to the right shone the tents of the Scotch explorer who is excavating the ancient city of Gezer, which was the dowry of Pharaoh's daughter when she married King Solomon. City, did I say? At least four cities are packed one upon another in that grassy mound, the oldest going back to the flint age; and yet if you should examine their site and measure their ruins, you would feel sure that none of them could ever have amounted to anything more than what we should call a poor little town. It came upon us gently but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,--as a book written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery, the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, literal, scientific. We had been imagining the Philistines as a mighty nation, and their land as a vast territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western war-correspondent, careful to verify all his statistics and meticulous in the exact description of all his events. This view of things melted from us with a gradual surprise as we realised that the more deeply we entered into the poetry, the closer we should come to the truth, of the narrative. Its moral and religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the mountains round about Jerusalem; but even as those mountains rose before us glorified, uplifted, and bejewelled by the vague splendours of the sunset, so the form of the history was enlarged and its colours irradiated by the figurative spirit of the East. There at our feet, bathed in the beauty of the evening air, lay the Valley of Aijalon, where Joshua fought with the "five kings of the Amorites," and broke them and chased them. The "kings" were head-men of scattered villages, chiefs of fierce and ragged tribes. But the fighting was hard, and as Joshua led his wild clansmen down upon them from the ascent of Beth-horon, he feared the day might be too short to win the victory. So he cheered the hearts of his men with an old war-song from the Book of Jasher. "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; And thou, moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies." Does any one suppose that this is intended to teach us that the sun moves and that on this day his course was arrested? Must we believe that the whole solar system was dislocated for the sake of this battle? To understand the story thus is to misunderstand its vital spirit. It is poetry, imagination, heroism. By the new courage that came into the hearts of Israel with their leader's song, the Lord shortened the conflict to fit the day, and the sunset and the moonrise saw the Valley of Aijalon swept clean of Israel's foes. As we passed through the wretched, mud-built village of Latrûn (said to be the birthplace of the Penitent Thief), a dozen long-robed Arabs were earnestly discussing some question of municipal interest in the grassy market-place. They were as grave as the storks, in their solemn plumage of black and white, which were parading philosophically along the edge of a marsh to our right. A couple of jackals slunk furtively across the road ahead of us in the dusk. A _kafila_ of long-necked camels undulated over the plain. The shadows fell more heavily over cactus-hedge and olive-orchard as we turned down the hill. In the valley night had come. The large, trembling stars were strewn through the vault above us, and rested on the dim ridges of the mountains, and shone reflected in the puddles of the long road like fallen jewels. The lights of Latrûn, if it had any, were already out of sight behind us. Our horses were weary and began to stumble. Where was the camp? Look, there is a light, bobbing along the road toward us. It is Youssouf, our faithful major-domo, come out with a lantern to meet us. A few rods farther through the mud, and we turn a corner beside an acacia hedge and the ruined arch of an ancient well. There, in a little field of flowers, close to the tiniest of brooks, our tents are waiting for us with open doors. The candles are burning on the table. The rugs are spread and the beds are made. The dinner-table is laid for four, and there is a bright bunch of flowers in the middle of it. We have seen the excellency of Sharon and the moon is shining for us on the Valley of Aijalon. II "THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS" It is no hardship to rise early in camp. At the windows of a house the daylight often knocks as an unwelcome messenger, rousing the sleeper with a sudden call. But through the roof and the sides of a tent it enters gently and irresistibly, embracing you with soft arms, laying rosy touches on your eyelids; and while your dream fades you know that you are awake and it is already day. As we lift the canvas curtains and come out of our pavilions, the sun is just topping the eastern hills, and all the field around us glittering with immense drops of dew. On the top of the ruined arch beside the camp our Arab watchman, hired from the village of Latrûn as we passed, is still perched motionless, wrapped in his flowing rags, holding his long gun across his knees. "_Salâm 'aleikum, yâ ghafîr!_" I say, and though my Arabic is doubtless astonishingly bad, he knows my meaning; for he answers gravely, "_'Aleikum essalâm!_--And with you be peace!" It is indeed a peaceful day in which our journey to Jerusalem is completed. Leaving the tents and impedimenta in charge of Youssouf and Shukari the cook, and the muleteers, we are in the saddle by seven o'clock, and riding into the narrow entrance of the Wâdi 'Ali. It is a long, steep valley leading into the heart of the hills. The sides are ribbed with rocks, among which the cyclamens grow in profusion. A few olives are scattered along the bottom of the vale, and at the tomb of the Imâm 'Ali there is a grove of large trees. At the summit of the pass we rest for half an hour, to give our horses a breathing-space, and to refresh our eyes with the glorious view westward over the tumbled country of the Shephelah, the opalescent Plain of Sharon, the sand-hills of the coast, and the broad blue of the Mediterranean. Northward and southward and eastward the rocky summits and ridges of Judea roll away. Now we understand what the Psalmist means by ascribing "the strength of the hills" to Jehovah; and a new light comes into the song: "As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, So Jehovah is round about his people." These natural walls and terraces of gray limestone have the air of antique fortifications and watch-towers of the border. They are truly "munitions of rocks." Chariots and horsemen could find no field for their man[oe]uvres in this broken and perpendicular country. Entangled in these deep and winding valleys by which they must climb up from the plain, the invaders would be at the mercy of the light infantry of the highlands, who would roll great stones upon them as they passed through the narrow defiles, and break their ranks by fierce and sudden downward rushes as they toiled panting up the steep hillsides. It was this strength of the hills that the children of Israel used for the defence of Jerusalem, and by this they were able to resist and defy the Philistines, whom they could never wholly conquer. Yonder on the hillside, as we ride onward, we see a reminder of that old tribal warfare between the people of the highlands and the people of the plains. That gray village, perched upon a rocky ridge above thick olive-orchards and a deliciously green valley, is the ancient Kirjath-Jearim, where the Ark of Jehovah was hidden for twenty years, after the Philistines had sent back this perilous trophy of their victory over the sons of Eli, being terrified by the pestilence and disaster that followed its possession. The men of Beth-shemesh, to whom it was first returned, were afraid to keep it, because they also had been smitten with death when they dared to peep into this dreadful box. But the men of Kirjath-Jearim were at once bolder and wiser, so they "came and fetched up the Ark of Jehovah, and brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and set apart Eleazar, his son, to keep the Ark of Jehovah." What strange vigils in that little hilltop cottage where the young man watches over this precious, dangerous, gilded coffer, while Saul is winning and losing his kingdom in a turmoil of blood and sorrow and madness, forgetful of Israel's covenant with the Most High! At last comes King David, from his newly won stronghold of Zion, seeking eagerly for this lost symbol of the people's faith. "Lo, we heard of it at Ephratah; we found it in the field of the wood." So the gray stone cottage on the hilltop gave up its sacred treasure, and David carried it away with festal music and dancing. But was Eleazar glad, I wonder, or sorry, that his long vigil was ended? To part from a care is sometimes like losing a friend. I confess that it is difficult to make these ancient stories of peril and adventure, (or even the modern history of Abu Ghôsh the robber-chief of this village a hundred years ago), seem real to us to-day. Everything around us is so safe and tranquil, and, in spite of its novelty, so familiar. The road descends steeply with long curves and windings into the Wâdi Beit Hanîna. We meet and greet many travellers, on horseback, in carriages and afoot, natives and pilgrims, German colonists, French priests, Italian monks, English tourists and explorers. It is a pleasant game to guess from an approaching pilgrim's looks whether you should salute him with "_Guten Morgen_," or "_Buon' Giorno_," or "_Bon jour_, _m'sieur_." The country people answer your salutation with a pretty phrase: "_Nehârak saîd umubârak_--May your day be happy and blessed." At Kalôniyeh, in the bottom of the valley, there is a prosperous settlement of German Jews; and the gardens and orchards are flourishing. There is also a little wayside inn, a rude stone building, with a terrace around it; and there, with apricots and plums blossoming beside us, we eat our lunch _al fresco_, and watch our long pack-train, with the camp and baggage, come winding down the hill and go tinkling past us toward Jerusalem. The place is very friendly; we are in no haste to leave it. A few miles to the southward, sheltered in the lap of a rounding hill, we can see the tall cypress-trees and quiet gardens of 'Ain Karîm, the village where John the Baptist was born. It has a singular air of attraction, seen from a distance, and one of the sweetest stories in the world is associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,--you remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,--and the joy of coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome His coming with her song? "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Does not the advent of a higher manhood always wait for the hope and longing of a nobler womanhood? The chiming of the bells of St. John floats faintly and silverly across the valley as we leave the shelter of the wayside rest-house and mount for the last stage of our upward journey. The road ascends steeply. Nestled in the ravine to our left is the grizzled and dilapidated village of Liftâ, a town with an evil reputation. "These people sold all their land," says George the dragoman, "twenty years ago, sold all the fields, gardens, olive-groves. Now they are dirty and lazy in that village,--all thieves!" Over the crest of the hill the red-tiled roofs of the first houses of Jerusalem are beginning to appear. They are houses of mercy, it seems: one an asylum for the insane, the other a home for the aged poor. Passing them, we come upon schools and hospital buildings and other evidences of the charity of the Rothschilds toward their own people. All around us are villas and consulates, and rows of freshly built houses for Jewish colonists. This is not at all the way that we had imagined to ourselves the first sight of the Holy City. All here is half-European, unromantic, not very picturesque. It may not be "the New Jerusalem," but it is certainly a modern Jerusalem. Here, in these comfortably commonplace dwellings, is almost half the present population of the city; and rows of new houses are rising on every side. But look down the southward-sloping road. There is the sight that you have imagined and longed to see: the brown battlements, the white-washed houses, the flat roofs, the slender minarets, the many-coloured domes of the ancient city of David, and Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Herod, and Omar, and Godfrey, and Saladin,--but never of Christ. That great black dome is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The one beyond it is the Mosque of Omar. Those golden bulbs and pinnacles beyond the city are the Greek Church of Saint Mary Magdalen on the side of the Mount of Olives; and on the top of the lofty ridge rises the great pointed tower of the Russians from which a huge bell booms out a deep-toned note of welcome. On every side we see the hospices and convents and churches and palaces of the different sects of Christendom. The streets are full of people and carriages and beasts of burden. The dust rises around us. We are tired with the trab, trab, trab of our horses' feet upon the hard highroad. Let us not go into the confusion of the city, but ride quietly down to the left into a great olive-grove, outside the Damascus Gate. Here our white tents are pitched among the trees, with the dear flag of our home flying over them. Here we shall find leisure and peace to unite our hearts, and bring our thoughts into tranquil harmony, before we go into the bewildering city. Here the big stars will look kindly down upon us through the silvery leaves, and the sounds of human turmoil and contention will not trouble us. The distant booming of the bell on the Mount of Olives will mark the night-hours for us, and the long-drawn plaintive call of the muezzin from the minaret of the little mosque at the edge of the grove will wake us to the sunrise. _A PSALM OF THE WELCOME TENT_ _This is the thanksgiving of the weary: The song of him that is ready to rest._ _It is good to be glad when the day is declining: And the setting of the sun is like a word of peace._ _The stars look kindly on the close of a journey: The tent says welcome when the day's march is done._ _For now is the time of the laying down of burdens: And the cool hour cometh to them that have borne the heat._ _I have rejoiced greatly in labour and adventure: My heart hath been enlarged in the spending of my strength._ _Now it is all gone yet I am not impoverished: For thus only may I inherit the treasure of repose._ _Blessed be the Lord that teacheth my hands to unclose and my fingers to loosen: He also giveth comfort to the feet that are washed from the dust of the way._ _Blessed be the Lord that maketh my meat at nightfall savoury: And filleth my evening cup with the wine of good cheer._ _Blessed be the Lord that maketh me happy to be quiet: Even as a child that cometh softly to his mother's lap._ _O God thou faintest not neither is thy strength worn away with labour: But it is good for us to be weary that we may obtain thy gift of rest._ III THE GATES OF ZION I A CITY THAT IS SET ON A HILL Out of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river; no harbour; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud self-reliance. "Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north The city of the great King." Thus sang the Hebrew poet; and his song, like all true poetry, has the accuracy of the clearest vision. For this is precisely the one beauty that crowns Jerusalem: the beauty of a high place and all that belongs to it: clear sky, refreshing air, a fine outlook, and that indefinable sense of exultation that comes into the heart of man when he climbs a little nearer to the stars. Twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea is not a great height; but I can think of no other ancient and world-famous city that stands as high. Along the mountainous plateau of Judea, between the sea-coast plain of Philistia and the sunken valley of the Jordan, there is a line of sacred sites,--Beërsheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Bethel, Shiloh, Shechem. Each of them marks the place where a town grew up around an altar. The central link in this chain of shrine-cities is Jerusalem. Her form and outline, her relation to the landscape and to the land, are unchanged from the days of her greatest glory. The splendours of her Temple and her palaces, the glitter of her armies, the rich colour and glow of her abounding wealth, have vanished. But though her garments are frayed and weather-worn, though she is an impoverished and dusty queen, she still keeps her proud position and bearing; and as you approach her by the ancient road along the ridges of Judea you see substantially what Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman Titus must have seen. "The sides of the north" slope gently down to the huge gray wall of the city, with its many towers and gates. Within those bulwarks, which are thirty-eight feet high and two and a half miles in circumference, "Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together," covering with her huddled houses and crooked, narrow streets, the two or three rounded hills and shallow depressions in which the northern plateau terminates. South and east and west, the valley of the Brook Kidron and the Valley of Himmon surround the city wall with a dry moat three or four hundred feet deep. Imagine the knuckles of a clenched fist, extended toward the south: that is the site of Jerusalem, impregnable, (at least in ancient warfare), from all sides except the north, where the wrist joins it to the higher tableland. This northern approach, open to Assyria, and Babylon, and Damascus, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome, has always been the weak point of Jerusalem. She was no unassailable fortress of natural strength, but a city lifted up, a lofty shrine, whose refuge and salvation were in Jehovah,--in the faith, the loyalty, the courage which flowed into the heart of her people from their religion. When these failed, she fell. Jerusalem is no longer, and never again will be, the capital of an earthly kingdom. But she is still one of the high places of the world, exalted in the imagination and the memory of Jews and Christians and Mohammedans, a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and devotions. Hither come the innumerable companies of foot-weary pilgrims, climbing the steep roads from the sea-coast, from the Jordan, from Bethlehem,--pilgrims who seek the place of the Crucifixion, pilgrims who would weep beside the walls of their vanished Temple, pilgrims who desire to pray where Mohammed prayed. Century after century these human throngs have assembled from far countries and toiled upward to this open, lofty plateau, where the ancient city rests upon the top of the closed hand, and where the ever-changing winds from the desert and the sea sweep and shift over the rocky hilltops, the mute, gray battlements, and the domes crowned with the cross, the crescent, and the star. "The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." The mystery of the heart of mankind, the spiritual airs that breathe through it, the desires and aspirations that impel men in their journeyings, the common hopes that bind them together in companies, the fears and hatreds that array them in warring hosts,--there is no place in the world to-day where you can feel all this so deeply, so inevitably, so overwhelmingly, as at the Gates of Zion. It is a feeling of confusion, at first: a bewildering sense of something vast and old and secret, speaking many tongues, taking many forms, yet never fully revealing its source and its meaning. The Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians who flock to those gates are alike in their sincerity, in their devotion, in the spirit of sacrifice that leads them on their pilgrimage. Among them all there are hypocrites and bigots, doubtless, but there are also earnest and devout souls, seeking something that is higher than themselves, "a city set upon a hill." Why do they not understand one another? Why do they fight and curse one another? Do they not all come to humble themselves, to pray, to seek the light? Dark walls that embrace so many tear-stained, blood-stained, holy and dishonoured shrines! And you, narrow and gloomy gates, through whose portals so many myriads of mankind have passed with their swords, their staves, their burdens and their palm-branches! What songs of triumph you have heard, what yells of battle-rage, what moanings of despair, what murmurs of hopes and gratitude, what cries of anguish, what bursts of careless, happy laughter,--all borne upon the wind that bloweth where it will across these bare and rugged heights. We will not seek to enter yet into the mysteries that you hide. We will tarry here for a while in the open sunlight, where the cool breeze of April stirs the olive-groves outside the Damascus Gate. We will tranquillize our thoughts,--perhaps we may even find them growing clearer and surer,--among the simple cares and pleasures that belong to the life of every day; the life which must have food when it is hungry, and rest when it is weary, and a shelter from the storm and the night; the life of those who are all strangers and sojourners upon the earth, and whose richest houses and strongest cities are, after all, but a little longer-lasting tents and camps. II THE CAMP IN THE OLIVE-GROVE The place of our encampment is peaceful and friendly, without being remote or secluded. The grove is large and free from all undergrowth: the trunks of the ancient olive-trees are gnarled and massive, the foliage soft and tremulous. The corner that George has chosen for us is raised above the road by a kind of terrace, so that it is not too easily accessible to the curious passer-by. Across the road we see a gray stone wall, and above it the roof of the Anglican Bishop's house, and the schools, from which a sound of shrill young voices shouting in play or chanting in unison rises at intervals through the day. The ground on which we stand is slightly furrowed with the little ridges of last year's ploughing: but it has not yet been broken this spring, and it is covered with millions of infinitesimal flowers, blue and purple and yellow and white, like tiny pansies run wild. The four tents, each circular and about fifteen feet in diameter, are arranged in a crescent. The one nearest to the road is for the kitchen and service; there Shukari, our Maronite _chef_, in his white cap and apron, turns out an admirable six-course dinner on a portable charcoal range not three feet square. Around the door of this tent there is much coming and going: edibles of all kinds are brought for sale; visitors squat in sociable conversation; curious children hang about, watching the proceedings, or waiting for the favours which a good cook can bestow. The next tent is the dining-room; the huge wooden chests of the canteen, full of glass and china and table-linen and new Britannia-ware, which shines like silver, are placed one on each side of the entrance; behind the central tent-pole stands the dining-table, with two chairs at the back and one at each end, so that we can all enjoy the view through the open door. The tent is lofty and lined with many-coloured cotton cloth, arranged in elaborate patterns, scarlet and green and yellow and blue. When the four candles are lighted on the well-spread table, and Youssouf the Greek, in his embroidered jacket and baggy blue breeches, comes in to serve the dinner, it is quite an Oriental scene. His assistant, Little Youssouf, the Copt, squats outside of the tent, at one side of the door, to wash up the dishes and polish the Britannia-ware. The two other tents are of the same pattern and the same gaudy colours within: each of them contains two little iron bedsteads, two Turkish rugs, two washstands, one dressing-table, and such baggage as we had imagined necessary for our comfort, piled around the tent-pole,--this by way of precaution, lest some misguided hand should be tempted to slip under the canvas at night and abstract an unconsidered trifle lying near the edge of the tent. Of our own men I must say that we never had a suspicion, either of their honesty or of their good-humour. Not only the four who had most immediately to do with us, but also the two chief muleteers, Mohammed 'Ali and Moûsa, and the songful boy, Mohammed el Nâsan, who warbled an interminable Arabian ditty all day long, and Fâris and the two other assistants, were models of fidelity and willing service. They did not quarrel (except once, over the division of the mule-loads, in the mountains of Gilead); they got us into no difficulties and subjected us to no blackmail from humbugging Bedouin chiefs. They are of a picturesque motley in costume and of a bewildering variety in creed--Anglican, Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, Mohammedan, and one of whom the others say that "he belongs to no religion, but sings beautiful Persian songs." Yet, so far as we are concerned, they all do the things they ought to do and leave undone the things they ought not to do, and their way with us is peace. Much of this, no doubt, is due to the wisdom, tact, and firmness of George the Bethlehemite, the best of dragomans. We have many visitors at the camp, but none unwelcome. The American Consul, a genial scholar who knows Palestine by heart and has made valuable contributions to the archæology of Jerusalem, comes with his wife to dine with us in the open air. George's gentle wife and his two bright little boys, Howard and Robert, are with us often. Missionaries come to tell us of their labours and trials. An Arab hunter, with his long flintlock musket, brings us beautiful gray partridges which he has shot among the near-by hills. The stable-master comes day after day with strings of horses galloping through the grove; for our first mounts were not to our liking, and we are determined not to start on our longer ride until we have found steeds that suit us. Peasants from the country round about bring all sorts of things to sell--vegetables, and lambs, and pigeons, and old coins, and embroidered caps. There are two men ploughing in a vineyard behind the camp, beyond the edge of the grove. The plough is a crooked stick of wood which scratches the surface of the earth. The vines are lying flat on the ground, still leafless, closely pruned: they look like big black snakes. Women of the city, dressed in black and blue silks, with black mantles over their heads, come out in the afternoon to picnic among the trees. They sit in little circles on the grass, smoking cigarettes and eating sweetmeats. If they see us looking at them they draw the corners of their mantles across the lower part of their faces; but when they think themselves unobserved they drop their veils and regard us curiously with lustrous brown eyes. One morning a procession of rustic women and girls, singing with shrill voices, pass the camp on their way to the city to buy the bride's clothes for a wedding. At nightfall they return singing yet more loudly, and accompanied by men and boys firing guns into the air and shouting. Another day a crowd of villagers go by. Their old Sheikh rides in the midst of them, with his white-and-gold turban, his long gray beard, his flowing robes of rich silk. He is mounted on a splendid white Arab horse, with arched neck and flaunting tail; and a beautiful, gaily dressed little boy rides behind him with both arms clasped around the old man's waist. They are going up to the city for the Mohammedan rite of circumcision. Later in the day a Jewish funeral comes hurrying through the grove: some twenty or thirty men in flat caps trimmed with fur and gabardines of cotton velvet, purple, or yellow, or pink, chanting psalms as they march, with the body of the dead man wrapped in linen cloth and carried on a rude bier on their shoulders. They seem in haste, (because the hour is late and the burial must be made before sunset), perhaps a little indifferent, or almost joyful. Certainly there is no sign of grief in their looks or their voices; for among them it is counted a fortunate thing to die in the Holy City and to be buried on the southern slope of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where Gabriel is to blow his trumpet for the resurrection. III IN THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM Outside the gates we ride, for the roads which encircle the city wall and lead off to the north and south and east and west, are fairly broad and smooth. But within the gates we walk, for the streets are narrow, steep and slippery, and to attempt them on horseback is to travel with an anxious mind. Through the Jaffa Gate, indeed, you may easily ride, or even drive in your carriage: not through the gateway itself, which is a close and crooked alley, but through the great gap in the wall beside it, made for the German Emperor to pass through at the time of his famous imperial scouting-expedition in Syria in 1898. Thus following the track of the great William you come to the entrance of the Grand New Hotel, among curiosity-shops and tourist-agencies, where a multitude of bootblacks assure you that you need "a shine," and _valets de place_ press their services upon you, and ingratiating young merchants try to allure you into their establishments to purchase photographs or embroidered scarves or olive-wood souvenirs of the Holy Land. [Illustration: A Street in Jerusalem.] Come over to Cook's office, where we get our letters, and stand for a while on the little terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown and white, pale-faced Jews with velvet gabardines and curly ear-locks, Moslem women in many-coloured silken garments and half-transparent veils, British tourists with cork helmets and white umbrellas, camels, donkeys, goats, and sheep, jostle together in picturesque confusion. There is a water-carrier with his shiny, dripping, bulbous goat-skin on his shoulders. There is an Arab of the wilderness with a young gazelle in his arms. Now let us go down the greasy, gliddery steps of David Street, between the diminutive dusky shops with open fronts where all kinds of queer things to eat and to wear are sold, and all sorts of craftsmen are at work making shoes, and tin pans, and copper pots, and wooden seats, and little tables, and clothes of strange pattern. A turn to the left brings us into Christian Street and the New Bazaar of the Greeks, with its modern stores. A turn to the right and a long descent under dark archways and through dirty, shadowy alleys brings us to the Place of Lamentations, beside the ancient foundation wall of the Temple, where the Jews come in the afternoon of Fridays and festival-days to lean their heads against the huge stones and murmur forth their wailings over the downfall of Jerusalem. "For the majesty that is departed," cries the leader, and the others answer: "We sit in solitude and mourn." "We pray Thee have mercy on Zion," cries the leader, and the others answer: "Gather the children of Jerusalem." With most of them it seems a perfunctory mourning; but there are two or three old men with the tears running down their faces as they kiss the smooth-worn stones. We enter convents and churches, mosques and tombs. We trace the course of the traditional _Via Dolorosa_, and try to reconstruct in our imagination the probable path of that grievous journey from the judgment-hall of injustice to the Calvary of cruelty--a path which now lies buried far below the present level of the city. One impression deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curiosity, the self-interest, the clashing prejudices, the inaccessibility of the idle and busy multitudes were the same in His day that they are now. It was not here that Jesus found the men and women who believed in Him and loved Him, but in the quiet villages, among the green fields, by the peaceful lake-shores. And it is not here that we shall find the clearest traces, the most intimate visions of Him, but away in the big out-of-doors, where the sky opens free above us, and the landscapes roll away to far horizons. As we loiter about the city, now alone, now under the discreet and unhampering escort of the Bethlehemite; watching the Mussulmans at their dinner in some dingy little restaurant, where kitchen, store-room and banquet-hall are all in the same apartment, level and open to the street; pausing to bargain with an impassive Arab for a leather belt or with an ingratiating Greek for a string of amber beads; looking in through the unshuttered windows of the Jewish houses where the families are gathered in festal array for the household rites of Passover week; turning over the chaplets, and rosaries, and anklets, and bracelets of coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, and variegated stones, and curious beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child; listening to long disputes between buyers and sellers in that resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath, while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant, interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm. There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, or to find the consoling presence of Him who spake the words of the eternal life. _A PSALM OF GREAT CITIES_ _How wonderful are the cities that man hath builded: Their walls are compacted of heavy stones, And their lofty towers rise above the tree-tops._ _Rome, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus,-- Venice, Constantinople, Moscow, Pekin,-- London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Vienna,--_ _These are the names of mighty enchantments: They have called to the ends of the earth, They have secretly summoned an host of servants._ _They shine from far sitting beside great waters: They are proudly enthroned upon high hills, They spread out their splendour along the rivers._ _Yet are they all the work of small patient fingers: Their strength is in the hand of man, He hath woven his flesh and blood into their glory._ _The cities are scattered over the world like ant-hills: Every one of them is full of trouble and toil, And their makers run to and fro within them._ _Abundance of riches is laid up in their store-houses: Yet they are tormented with the fear of want, The cry of the poor in their streets is exceeding bitter._ _Their inhabitants are driven by blind perturbations: They whirl sadly in the fever of haste, Seeking they know not what, they pursue it fiercely._ _The air is heavy-laden with their breathing: The sound of their coming and going is never still, Even in the night I hear them whispering and crying._ _Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching: This is the ant-lion Death, He thrusteth forth his tongue and the people perish._ _O God of wisdom thou hast made the country: Why hast thou suffered man to make the town?_ _Then God answered, Surely I am the maker of man: And in the heart of man I have set the city._ IV MIZPAH AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES I THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF SAMUEL Mizpah of Benjamin stands to the northwest: the sharpest peak in the Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque. We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring flowers were abloom. It was a stiff scramble up the conical hill to the little hamlet at the top, built out of and among ruins. The mosque, evidently an old Christian church remodelled, was bare, but fairly clean, cool, and tranquil. We peered through a grated window, tied with many-coloured scraps of rags by the Mohammedan pilgrims, into a whitewashed room containing a huge sarcophagus said to be the tomb of Samuel. Then we climbed the minaret and lingered on the tiny railed balcony, feeding on the view. The peak on which we stood was isolated by deep ravines from the other hills of desolate gray and scanty green. Beyond the western range lay the Valley of Aijalon, and beyond that the rich Plain of Sharon with iridescent hues of green and blue and silver, and beyond that the yellow line of the sand-dunes broken by the white spot of Jaffa, and beyond that the azure breadth of the Mediterranean. Northward, at our feet, on the summit of a lower conical hill, ringed with gray rock, lay the village of El-Jib, the ancient Geba of Benjamin, one of the cities which Joshua gave to the Levites. This was the place from which Jonathan and his armour-bearer set out, without Saul's knowledge, on their daring, perilous scouting expedition against the Philistines. What fighting there was in olden days over that tumbled country of hills and gorges, stretching away north to the blue mountains of Samaria and the summits of Ebal and Gerizim on the horizon! There on the rocky backbone of Benjamin and Ephraim, was Ramallah (where we had spent Sunday in the sweet orderliness of the Friends' Mission School), and Beëroth, and Bethel, and Gilgal, and Shiloh. Eastward, behind the hills, we could trace the long, vast trench of the Jordan valley running due north and south, filled with thin violet haze and terminating in a glint of the Dead Sea. Beyond that deep line of division rose the mountains of Gilead and Moab, a lofty, unbroken barrier. To the south-east we could see the red roofs of the new Jerusalem, and a few domes and minarets of the ancient city. Beyond them, in the south, was the truncated cone of the Frank Mountain, where the crusaders made their last stand against the Saracens; and the hills around Bethlehem; and a glimpse, nearer at hand, of the tall cypresses and peaceful gardens of 'Ain Karîm. This terrestrial paradise of vision encircled us with jewel-hues and clear, exquisite outlines. Below us were the flat roofs of Nebi Samwîl, with a dog barking on every roof; the filthy courtyards and dark doorways, with a woman in one of them making bread; the ruined archways and broken cisterns with a pool of green water stagnating in one corner; peasants ploughing their stony little fields, and a string of donkeys winding up the steep path to the hill. Here, centuries ago, Samuel called all Israel to Mizpah, and offered sacrifice before Jehovah, and judged the people. Here he inspired them with new courage and sent them down to discomfit the Philistines. Hither he came as judge and ruler of Israel, making his annual circuit between Gilgal and Bethel and Mizpah. Here he assembled the tribes again, when they were tired of his rule, and gave them a King according to their desire, even the tall warrior Saul, the son of Kish. Do the bones of the prophet rest here or at Ramah? I do not know. But here, on this commanding peak, he began and ended his judgeship; from this aerie he looked forth upon the inheritance of the turbulent sons of Jacob; and here, if you like, today, a pale, clever young Mohammedan will show you what he calls the coffin of Samuel. II THE HILL THAT JESUS LOVED We had seen from Mizpah the sharp ridge of the Mount of Olives, rising beyond Jerusalem. Our road thither from the camp led us around the city, past the Damascus Gate, and the royal grottoes, and Herod's Gate, and the Tower of the Storks, and St. Stephen's Gate, down into the Valley of the Brook Kidron. Here, on the west, rises the precipitous Temple Hill crowned with the wall of the city, and on the east the long ridge of Olivet. There are several buildings on the side of the steep hill, marking supposed holy places or sacred events--the Church of the Tomb of the Virgin, the Latin Chapel of the Agony, the Greek Church of St. Mary Magdalen. On top of the ridge are the Russian Buildings, with the Chapel of the Ascension, and the Latin Buildings, with the Church of the Creed, the Church of the Paternoster, and a Carmelite Nunnery. Among the walls of these inclosures we wound our way, and at last tied our horses outside of the Russian garden. We climbed the two hundred and fourteen steps of the lofty Belvidere Tower, and found ourselves in possession of one of the great views of the world. There is Jerusalem, across the Kidron, spread out like a raised map below us. The mountains of Judah roll away north and south and east and west--the clean-cut pinnacle of Mizpah, the lofty plain of Rephaïm, the dark hills toward Hebron, the rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman legions, the flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible; but there is the tiny village of Bethphage, and the first roof of Bethany peeping over the ridge, and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in a red cut of the long serpentine road to Jericho. The dark range of Gilead and Moab seems like a huge wall of lapis-lazuli beyond the furrowed, wrinkled, yellowish clay-hills and the wide gray trench of the Jordan Valley, wherein the river marks its crooked path with a line of deep green. The hundreds of ridges that slope steeply down to that immense depression are touched with a thousand hues of amethystine light, and the ravines between them filled with a thousand tones of azure shadow. At the end of the valley glitter the blue waters of the Dead Sea, fifteen miles away, four thousand feet below us, yet seeming so near that we almost expect to hear the sound of its waves on the rocky shores of the Wilderness of Tekoa. On this mount Jesus of Nazareth often walked with His disciples. On this widespread landscape His eyes rested as He spoke divinely of the invisible kingdom of peace and love and joy that shall never pass away. Over this walled city, sleeping in the sunshine, full of earthly dreams and disappointments, battlemented hearts and whited sepulchres of the spirit, He wept, and cried: "O Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her own brood under her wings, and ye would not!" III THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE Come down, now, from the mount of vision to the grove of olive-trees, the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus used to take refuge with His friends. It lies on the eastern slope of Olivet, not far above the Valley of Kidron, over against that city-gate which was called the Beautiful, or the Golden, but which is now walled up. The grove probably belonged to some friend of Jesus or of one of His disciples, who permitted them to make use of it for their quiet meetings. At that time, no doubt, the whole hillside was covered with olive-trees, but most of these have now disappeared. The eight aged trees that still cling to life in Gethsemane have been inclosed with a low wall and an iron railing, and the little garden that blooms around them is cared for by Franciscan monks from Italy. The gentle, friendly Fra Giovanni, in bare sandaled feet, coarse brown robe, and broad-brimmed straw hat, is walking among the flowers. He opens the gate for us and courteously invites us in, telling us in broken French that we may pick what flowers we like. Presently I fall into discourse with him in broken Italian, telling him of my visit years ago to the cradle of his Order at Assisi, and to its most beautiful shrine at La Verna, high above the Val d'Arno. His old eyes soften into youthful brightness as he speaks of Italy. It was most beautiful, he said, _bellisima!_ But he is happier here, caring for this garden, it is most holy, _santissima!_ The bronzed Mohammedan gardener, silent, patient, absorbed in his task, moves with his watering-pot among the beds, quietly refreshing the thirsty blossoms. There are wall-flowers, stocks, pansies, baby's breath, pinks, anemones of all colours, rosemary, rue, poppies--all sorts of sweet old-fashioned flowers. Among them stand the scattered venerable trees, with enormous trunks, wrinkled and contorted, eaten away by age, patched and built up with stones, protected and tended with pious care, as if they were very old people whose life must be tenderly nursed and sheltered. Their boles hardly seem to be of wood; so dark, so twisted, so furrowed are they, of an aspect so enduring that they appear to be cast in bronze or carved out of black granite. Above each of them spreads a crown of fresh foliage, delicate, abundant, shimmering softly in the sunlight and the breeze, with silken turnings of the under side of the innumerable leaves. In the centre of the garden is a kind of open flower house with a fountain of flowing water, erected in memory of a young American girl. At each corner a pair of slender cypresses lift their black-green spires against the blanched azure of the sky. It is a place of refuge, of ineffable tranquillity, of unforgetful tenderness. The inclosure does not offend. How else could this sacred shrine of the out-of-doors be preserved? And what more fitting guardian for it than the Order of that loving Saint Francis, who called the sun and the moon his brother and his sister and preached to a joyous congregation of birds as his "little brothers of the air"? The flowers do not offend. Their antique fragrance, gracious order, familiar looks, are a symbol of what faithful memory does with the sorrows and sufferings of those who have loved us best--she treasures and transmutes them into something beautiful, she grows her sweetest flowers in the ground that tears have made holy. It is here, in this quaint and carefully tended garden, this precious place which has been saved alike from the oblivious trampling of the crowd and from the needless imprisonment of four walls and a roof, it is here in the open air, in the calm glow of the afternoon, under the shadow of Mount Zion, that we find for the first time that which we have come so far to seek,--the soul of the Holy Land, the inward sense of the real presence of Jesus. It is as clear and vivid as any outward experience. Why should I not speak of it as simply and candidly? Nothing that we have yet seen in Palestine, no vision of wide-spread landscape, no sight of ancient ruin or famous building or treasured relic, comes as close to our hearts as this little garden sleeping in the sun. Nothing that we have read from our Bibles in the new light of this journey has been for us so suddenly illumined, so deeply and tenderly brought home to us, as the story of Gethsemane. Here, indeed, in the moonlit shadow of these olives--if not of these very branches, yet of others sprung from the same immemorial stems--was endured the deepest suffering ever borne for man, the most profound sorrow of the greatest Soul that loved all human souls. It was not in the temptation in the wilderness, as Milton imagined, that the crisis of the Divine life was enacted and Paradise was regained. It was in the agony in the garden. Here the love of life wrestled in the heart of Jesus with the purpose of sacrifice, and the anguish of that wrestling wrung the drops of blood from Him like sweat. Here, for the only time, He found the cup of sorrow and shame too bitter, and prayed the Father to take it from His lips if it were possible--possible without breaking faith, without surrendering love. For that He would not do, though His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Here He learned the frailty of human friendship, the narrowness and dulness and coldness of the very hearts for whom He had done and suffered most, who could not even watch with Him one hour. What infinite sense of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity, the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer shadows, in the times when love seems vain, and sacrifice futile, and friendship meaningless, and life a failure, and death intolerable. Jesus met the spirit of despair in the Garden of Gethsemane; and after that meeting, the cross had no terrors for Him, because He had already endured them; the grave no fear, because He had already conquered it. How calm and gentle was the voice with which He wakened His disciples, how firm the step with which He went to meet Judas! The bitterness of death was behind Him in the shadow of the olive-trees. The peace of Heaven shone above Him in the silent stars. _A PSALM OF SURRENDER_ _Mine enemies have prevailed against me, O God: Thou hast led me deep into their ambush._ _They surround me with a hedge of spears: And the sword in my hand is broken._ _My friends also have forsaken my side: From a safe place they look upon me with pity._ _My heart is like water poured upon the ground: I have come alone to the place of surrender._ _To thee, to thee only will I give up my sword: The sword which was broken in thy service._ _Thou hast required me to suffer for thy cause: By my defeat thy will is victorious._ _O my King show me thy face shining in the dark: While I drink the loving-cup of death to thy glory._ V AN EXCURSION TO BETHLEHEM AND HEBRON I BETHLEHEM A sparkling morning followed a showery night, and all the little red and white and yellow flowers were lifting glad faces to the sun as we took the highroad to Bethlehem. Leaving the Jaffa Gate on the left, we crossed the head of the deep Valley of Hinnom, below the dirty Pool of the Sultan, and rode up the hill on the opposite side of the vale. There was much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good. Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine. Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor souls that the will of Allah or Jehovah in this matter ought not to be accepted until after it has been questioned. But the light of true and humane religion is spreading a little. We rejoiced to see the reception-room of the hospital filled with all sorts and conditions of men, women and children waiting for the good physicians who save and restore sight in the name of Jesus. To the right, a little below us, lay the ugly railway station; before us, rising gently southward, extended the elevated Plain of Rephaïm where David smote the host of the Philistines after he had heard "the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." The red soil was cultivated in little farms and gardens. The almond-trees were in leaf; the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender green. [Illustration: A Street in Bethlehem.] A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mâr Elyâs, and the so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on to Bethlehem. Certain it is that they must have taken this road; and certain it is that both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, hidden from each other by the rising ground, are clearly visible to one who stands in the saddle of this hill. There were fine views down the valleys to the east, with blue glimpses of the Dead Sea at the end of them. The supposed tomb of Rachel, a dingy little building with a white dome, interested us less than the broad lake of olive-orchards around the distant village of Beit Jâlâ, and the green fields, pastures and gardens encircling the double hill of Bethlehem, the ancient "House of Bread." There was an aspect of fertility and friendliness about the place that seemed in harmony with its name and its poetic memories. In a walled kitchen-garden at the entrance of the town was David's Well. We felt no assurance, of course, as we looked down into it, that this was the veritable place. But at all events it served to bring back to us one of the prettiest bits of romance in the Old Testament. When the bold son of Jesse had become a chieftain of outlaws and was besieged by the Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a draught from his father's well, whose sweetness he had known as a boy. And when his three mighty men went up secretly at the risk of their lives, and broke through the host of their enemies, and brought their captain a vessel of this water, "he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto Jehovah." There was a division of opinion in our party in regard to this act. "It was sheer foolishness," said the Patriarch, "to waste anything that had cost so much to get. What must the three mighty men have thought when they saw that for which they had risked their lives poured out upon the ground?" "Ah, no," said the Lady. "It was the highest gratitude, because it was touched with poetry. It was the best compliment that David could have given to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right. Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts, dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their faces. Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of stiff, embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the front of this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a dress, no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil, friendly looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of beauty shining from a secret source within. A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and camels and sheep made our passage through the town slow, and gave us occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity. The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the clerestory, dimly glittering. But the general effect of the whitewashed walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the large, empty space, was one of extreme simplicity. When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps, slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin): marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid; a never-ceasing stream of poor pilgrims, who come kneeling, and kissing the star and the stones and the altar for Christ's sake. [Illustration: The Market-place, Bethlehem.] We paused for a while, after we had come up, to ask ourselves whether what we had seen was in any way credible. Yes, credible, but not convincing. No doubt the ancient Khân of Bethlehem must have been somewhere near this spot, in the vicinity of the market-place of the town. No doubt it was the custom, when there were natural hollows or artificial grottos in the rock near such an inn, to use them as shelters and stalls for the cattle. It is quite possible, it is even probable, that this may have been one of the shallow caverns used for such a purpose. If so, there is no reason to deny that this may be the place of the wondrous birth, where, as the old French _Noel_ has it: "_Dieu parmy les pastoreaux, Sous la crêche des toreaux, Dans les champs a voulu naistre; Et non parmy les arroys Des grands princes et des roys,-- Lui des plus grands roys le maistre._" But to the eye, at least, there is no reminder of the scene of the Nativity in this close and stifling chapel, hung with costly silks and embroideries, glittering with rich lamps, filled with the smoke of incense and waxen tapers. And to the heart there is little suggestion of the lonely night when Joseph found a humble refuge here for his young bride to wait in darkness, pain and hope for her hour to come. In the church above, the Latins and Armenians and Greeks guard their privileges and prerogatives jealously. There have been fights here about the driving of a nail, the hanging of a picture, the sweeping of a bit of the floor. The Crimean War began in a quarrel between the Greeks and the Latins, and a mob-struggle in the Church of the Nativity. Underneath the floor, to the north of the Grotto of the Nativity, is the cave in which Saint Jerome lived peaceably for many years, translating the Bible into Latin. That was better than fighting. II ON THE ROAD TO HEBRON We ate our lunch at Bethlehem in a curiosity-shop. The table was spread at the back of the room by the open window. All around us were hanging innumerable chaplets and rosaries of mother-of-pearl, of carnelian, of carved olive-stones, of glass beads; trinkets and souvenirs of all imaginable kinds, tiny sheep-bells and inlaid boxes and carved fans filled the cases and cabinets. Through the window came the noise of people busy at Bethlehem's chief industry, the cutting and polishing of mother-of-pearl for mementoes. The jingling bells of our pack-train, passing the open door, reminded us that our camp was to be pitched miles away on the road to Hebron. We called for the horses and rode on through the town. Very beautiful and peaceful was the view from the southern hill, looking down upon the pastures of Bethlehem where "shepherds watched their flocks by night," and the field of Boaz where Ruth followed the reapers among the corn. Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys. Then out over the wilder, rockier heights; and past the great empty Pools of Solomon, lying at the head of the Wâdi Artâs, watched by a square ruined castle; and up the winding road and along the lofty flower-sprinkled ridges; and at last we came to our tents, pitched in the wide, green Wâdi el-'Arrûb, beside the bridge. Springs gushed out of the hillside here and ran down in a little laughing brook through lawns full of tiny pink and white daisies, and broad fields of tangled weeds and flowers, red anemones, blue iris, purple mallows, scarlet adonis, with here and there a strip of cultivated ground shimmering with silky leeks or dotted with young cucumbers. There was a broken aqueduct cut in the rock at the side of the valley, and the brook slipped by a large ruined reservoir. "George," said I to the Bethlehemite, as he sat meditating on the edge of the dry pool, "what do you think of this valley?" "I think," said George, "that if I had a few thousand dollars to buy the land, with all this runaway water I could make it blossom like a peach-tree." The cold, green sunset behind the western hills darkened into night. The air grew chilly, dropping nearly to the point of frost. We missed the blazing camp-fire of the Canadian forests, and went to bed early, tucking in the hot-water bags at our feet and piling on the blankets and rugs. All through the night we could hear the passers-by shouting and singing along the Hebron road. There was one unknown traveller whose high-pitched, quavering Arab song rose far away, and grew louder as he approached, and passed us in a whirlwind of lugubrious music, and tapered slowly off into distance and silence--a chant a mile long. The morning broke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather, no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and took the road again. The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low, straight flight over the bushes. Flocks of black and brown goats, with pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges, standing up on their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak shrubs, or showing themselves off in a butting-match on top of a big rock. Marching on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering along soberly with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a fierce-looking tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in his bosom--as tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an illustration of a picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which the infant church of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love, the breadth of her hope: "On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-- And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid." As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground, but in some they were propped up on sticks, like old men leaning on crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The mulberries, the olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were ploughing the fields with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron point. When a man puts his hand to such a plough he dares not look back, else it will surely go aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a man in the hospital at Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through by one of these dagger-like iron plough points.) Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their heavy-laden animals along the road, and cameleers led their deliberate strings of ungainly beasts by a rope or a light chain reaching from one nodding head to another. A camel's load never looks as large as a donkey's, but no doubt he often finds it heavy, and he always looks displeased with it. There is something about the droop of a camel's lower lip which seems to express unalterable disgust with the universe. But the rest of the world around Hebron appeared to be reasonably happy. In spite of weather and poverty and hard work the ploughmen sang in the fields, the children skipped and whistled at their tasks, the passers-by on the road shouted greetings to the labourers in the gardens and vineyards. Somewhere round about here is supposed to lie the Valley of Eshcol from which the Hebrew spies brought back the monstrous bunch of grapes, a cluster that reached from the height of a man's shoulder to the ground. III THE TENTING-GROUND OF ABRAHAM Hebron lies three thousand feet above the sea, and is one of the ancient market-places and shrines of the world. From time immemorial it has been a holy town, a busy town, and a turbulent town. The Hittites and the Amorites dwelt here, and Abraham, a nomadic shepherd whose tents followed his flocks over the land of Canaan, bought here his only piece of real estate, the field and cave of Machpelah. He bought it for a tomb,--even a nomad wishes to rest quietly in death,--and here he and his wife Sarah, and his children Isaac and Rebekah, and his grandchildren Jacob and Leah were buried. The modern town has about twenty thousand inhabitants, chiefly Mohammedans of a fanatical temper, and is incredibly dirty. We passed the muddy pool by which King David, when he was reigning here, hanged the murderers of Ishbosheth. We climbed the crooked streets to the Mosque which covers the supposed site of the cave of Machpelah. But we did not see the tomb of Abraham, for no "infidel" is allowed to pass beyond the seventh step in the flight of stairs which leads up to the doorway. As we went down through the narrow, dark, crowded Bazaar a violent storm of hail broke over the city, pelting into the little open shops and covering the streets half an inch deep with snowy sand and pebbles of ice. The tempest was a rude joke, which seemed to surprise the surly crowd into a good humour. We laughed with the Moslems as we took shelter together from our common misery under a stone archway. After the storm had passed we ate our midday meal on a housetop, which a friend of the dragoman put at our disposal, and rode out in the afternoon to the Oak of Abraham on the hill of Mamre. The tree is an immense, battered veteran, with a trunk ten feet in diameter, and wide-flung, knotted arms which still bear a few leaves and acorns. It has been inclosed with a railing, patched up with masonry, partially protected by a roof. The Russian monks who live near by have given it pious care, yet its inevitable end is surely near. The death of a great sheltering tree has a kind of dumb pathos. It seems like the passing away of something beneficent and helpless, something that was able to shield others but not itself. On this hill, under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham's tents were pitched many a year, and here he entertained the three angels unawares, and Sarah made pancakes for them, and listened behind the tent-flap while they were talking with her husband, and laughed at what they said. This may not be the very tree that flung its shadow over the tent, but no doubt it is a son or a grandson of that tree, and the acorns that still fall from it may be the seeds of other oaks to shelter future generations of pilgrims; and so throughout the world, the ancient covenant of friendship is unbroken, and man remains a grateful lover of the big, kind trees. We got home to our camp in the green meadow of the springs late in the afternoon, and on the third day we rode back to Jerusalem, and pitched the tents in a new place, on a hill opposite the Jaffa Gate, with a splendid view of the Valley of Hinnom, the Tower of David, and the western wall of the city. _A PSALM OF FRIENDLY TREES_ _I will sing of the bounty of the big trees, They are the green tents of the Almighty, He hath set them up for comfort and for shelter._ _Their cords hath he knotted in the earth, He hath driven their stakes securely, Their roots take hold of the rocks like iron._ _He sendeth into their bodies the sap of life, They lift themselves lightly towards the heavens. They rejoice in the broadening of their branches._ _Their leaves drink in the sunlight and the air, They talk softly together when the breeze bloweth, Their shadow in the noonday is full of coolness._ _The tall palm-trees of the plain are rich in fruit, While the fruit ripeneth the flower unfoldeth, The beauty of their crown is renewed on high forever._ _The cedars of Lebanon are fed by the snow, Afar on the mountain they grow like giants, In their layers of shade a thousand years are sighing._ _How fair are the trees that befriend the home of man, The oak, and the terebinth, and the sycamore, The fruitful fig-tree and the silvery olive._ _In them the Lord is loving to his little birds,-- The linnets and the finches and the nightingales,-- They people his pavilions with nests and with music._ _The cattle are very glad of a great tree, They chew the cud beneath it while the sun is burning, There also the panting sheep lie down around their shepherd._ _He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, He provideth a kindness for many generations, And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him._ _Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee, At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried, That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches._ VI THE TEMPLE AND THE SEPULCHRE I THE DOME OF THE ROCK There is an upward impulse in man that draws him to a hilltop for his place of devotion and sanctuary of ascending thoughts. The purer air, the wider outlook, the sense of freedom and elevation, help to release his spirit from the weight that bends his forehead to the dust. A traveller in Palestine, if he had wings, could easily pass through the whole land by short flights from the summit of one holy hill to another, and look down from a series of mountain-altars upon the wrinkled map of sacred history without once descending into the valley or toiling over the plain. But since there are no wings provided in the human outfit, our journey from shrine to shrine must follow the common way of men,--which is also a symbol,--the path of up-and-down, and many windings, and weary steps. The oldest of the shrines of Jerusalem is the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, which David bought from him in order that it might be made the site of the Temple of Jehovah. No doubt the King knew of the traditions which connected the place with ancient and famous rites of worship. But I think he was moved also by the commanding beauty of the situation, on the very summit of Mount Moriah, looking down into the deep Valley of the Kidron. Our way to this venerable and sacred hill leads through the crooked duskiness of David Street, and across the half-filled depression of the Tyrop[oe]on Valley which divides the city, and up through the dim, deserted Bazaar of the Cotton Merchants, and so through the central western gate of the Haram-esh-Sherîf, "the Noble Sanctuary." This is a great inclosure, clean, spacious, airy, a place of refuge from the foul confusion of the city streets. The wall that shuts us in is almost a mile long, and within this open space, which makes an immediate effect of breadth and tranquil order, are some of the most sacred buildings of Islam and some of the most significant landmarks of Christianity. Slender and graceful arcades are outlined against the clear, blue sky: little domes are poised over praying-places and fountains of ablution: wide and easy flights of steps lead from one level to another, in this park of prayer. At the southern end, beyond the tall cypresses and the plashing fountain fed from Solomon's Pools, stands the long Mosque el-Aksa: to Mohammedans, the place to which Allah brought their prophet from Mecca in one night; to Christians, the Basilica which the Emperor Justinian erected in honor of the Virgin Mary. At the northern end rises the ancient wall of the Castle of Antonia, from whose steps Saint Paul, protected by the Roman captain, spoke his defence to the Jerusalem mob. The steps, hewn partly in the solid rock, are still visible; but the site of the castle is occupied by the Turkish barracks, beside which the tallest minaret of the Haram lifts its covered gallery high above the corner of the great wall. Yonder to the east is the Golden Gate, above the steep Valley of Jehoshaphat. It is closed with great stones; because the Moslem tradition says that some Friday a Christian conqueror will enter Jerusalem by that gate. Not far away we see the column in the wall from which the Mohammedans believe a slender rope, or perhaps a naked sword, will be stretched, in the judgment day, to the Mount of Olives opposite. This, according to them, will be the bridge over which all human souls must walk, while Christ sits at one end, Mohammed at the other, watching and judging. The righteous, upheld by angels, will pass safely; the wicked, heavy with unbalanced sins, will fall. Dominating all these wide-spread relics and shrines, in the centre of the inclosure, on a raised platform approached through delicate arcades, stands the great Dome of the Rock, built by Abd-el-Melik in 688 A.D., on the site of the Jewish Temple. The exterior of the vast octagon, with its lower half cased in marble and its upper half incrusted with Persian tiles of blue and green, its broad, round lantern and swelling black dome surmounted by a glittering crescent, is bathed in full sunlight; serene, proud, eloquent of a certain splendid simplicity. Within, the light filters dimly through windows of stained glass and falls on marble columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock over which the Dome is built. This is the real thing,--a plain gray limestone rock, level and fairly smooth, the unchanged summit of Mount Moriah. Here the priest-king Melchizedek offered sacrifice. Here Abraham, in the cruel fervour of his faith, was about to slay his only son Isaac because he thought it would please Jehovah. Here Araunah the Jebusite threshed his corn on the smooth rock and winnowed it in the winds of the hilltop, until King David stepped over from Mount Zion, and bought the threshing-floor and the oxen of him for fifty shekels of silver, and built in this place an altar to the Lord. Here Solomon erected his splendid Temple and the Chaldeans burned it. Here Zerubbabel built the second Temple after the return of the Jews from exile, and Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated it, and Herod burned part of it and pulled down the rest. Here Herod built the third Temple, larger and more magnificent than the first, and the soldiers of the Emperor Titus burned it. Here the Emperor Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter and himself, and some one, perhaps the Christians, burned it. Here Mohammed came to pray, declaring that one prayer here was worth a thousand elsewhere. Here the Caliph Omar built a little wooden mosque, and the Caliph Abd-el-Melik replaced it with this great one of marble, and the Crusaders changed it into a Christian temple, and Saladin changed it back again into a mosque. This Haram-esh-Sherîf is the second holiest place in the Moslem world. Hither come the Mohammedan pilgrims by thousands, for the sake of Mohammed. Hither come the Christian pilgrims by thousands, for the sake of Him who said: "Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father." Hither the Jewish pilgrims never come, for fear their feet may unwittingly tread upon "the Holy of Holies," and defile it; but they creep outside of the great inclosure, in the gloomy trench beside the foundation stones of the wall, mourning and lamenting for the majesty that is departed and the Temple that is ground to powder. But amid all these changes and perturbations, here stands the good old limestone rock, the threshing-floor of Araunah, the capstone of the hill, waiting for the sun to shine and the dews to fall on it once more, as they did when the foundations of the earth were laid. The legend says that you can hear the waters of the flood roaring in an abyss underneath the rock. I laid my ear against the rugged stone and listened. What sound? Was it the voice of turbulent centuries and the lapsing tides of men? II GOLGOTHA "We ought to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine. The motley crowd in the paved quadrangle in front of the double-arched doorway were buying and selling, bickering and chaffering and chattering as usual. Within the portal, on a slightly raised platform to the left, the Turkish guardians of the holy places and keepers of the peace between Christians were seated among their rugs and cushions, impassive, indolent, dignified, drinking their coffee or smoking their tobacco, conversing gravely or counting the amber beads of their comboloios. The Sultan owns the Holy Sepulchre; but he is a liberal host and permits all factions of Christendom to visit it and celebrate their rites in turn, provided only they do not beat or kill one another in their devotions. We saw his silent sentinels of tolerance scattered in every part of the vast, confused edifice. The interior was dim and shadowy. Opposite the entrance was the Stone of Unction, a marble slab on which it is said the body of Christ was anointed when it was taken down from the cross. Pilgrim after pilgrim came kneeling to this stone, and bending to kiss it, beneath the Latin, Greek, Armenian and Coptic lamps which hang above it by silver chains. The Chapel of the Crucifixion was on our right, above us, in the second story of the church. We climbed the steep flight of stairs and stood in a little room, close, obscure, crowded with lamps and icons and candelabra, incrusted with ornaments of gold and silver, full of strange odours and glimmerings of mystic light. There, they told us, in front of that rich altar was the silver star which marked the place in the rock where the Holy Cross stood. And on either side of it were the sockets which received the crosses of the two thieves. And a few feet away, covered by a brass slide, was the cleft in the rock which was made by the earthquake. It was lined with slabs of reddish marble and looked nearly a foot deep. Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us. Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and the icons. Underneath us, though we were supposed to stand on the hill called Golgotha, were the offices of the Greek clergy and the Chapel of Adam. We went around from chapel to chapel; into the opulent Greek cathedral where they show the "Centre of the World"; into the bare little Chapel of the Syrians where they show the tombs of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathæa; into the Chapel of the Apparition where the Franciscans say that Christ appeared to His mother after the resurrection. There was sweet singing in this chapel and a fragrant smell of incense. We went into the Chapel of Saint Helena, underground, which belongs to the Greeks; into the Chapel of the Parting of the Raiment which belongs to the Armenians. We were impartial in our visitation, but we did not have time to see the Abyssinian Chapel, the Coptic Chapel of Saint Michael, nor the Church of Abraham where the Anglicans are allowed to celebrate the eucharist twice a month. The centre of all this maze of creeds, ceremonies and devotions is the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a little edifice of precious marbles, carved and gilded, standing beneath the great dome of the church, in the middle of a rotunda surrounded by marble pillars. We bought and lighted our waxen tapers and waited for a lull in the stream of pilgrims to enter the shrine. First we stood in the vestibule with its tall candelabra; then in the Angels' Chapel, with its fifteen swinging lamps, making darkness visible; then, stooping through a low doorway, we came into the tiny chamber, six feet square, which is said to contain the rock-hewn tomb in which the Saviour of the World was buried. Mass is celebrated here daily by different Christian sects. Pilgrims, rich and poor, come hither from all parts of the habitable globe. They kneel beneath the three-and-forty pendent lamps of gold and silver. They kiss the worn slab of marble which covers the tombstone, some of them smiling with joy, some of them weeping bitterly, some of them with quiet, business-like devotion as if they were performing a duty. The priest of their faith blesses them, sprinkles the relics which they lay on the altar with holy water, and one by one the pilgrims retire backward through the low portal. I saw a Russian peasant, sad-eyed, wrinkled, bent with many sorrows, lay his cheek silently on the tombstone with a look on his face as if he were a child leaning against his mother's breast. I saw a little barefoot boy of Jerusalem, with big, serious eyes, come quickly in, and try to kiss the stone; but it was too high for him, so he kissed his hand and laid it upon the altar. I saw a young nun, hardly more than a girl, slender, pale, dark-eyed, with a noble Italian face, shaken with sobs, the tears running down her cheeks, as she bent to touch her lips to the resting-place of the Friend of Sinners. This, then, is the way in which the craving for penitence, for reverence, for devotion, for some utterance of the nameless thirst and passion of the soul leads these pilgrims. This is the form in which the divine mystery of sacrificial sorrow and death appeals to them, speaks to their hearts and comforts them. Could any Christian of whatever creed, could any son of woman with a heart to feel the trouble and longing of humanity, turn his back upon that altar? Must I not go away from that mysterious little room as the others had gone, with my face toward the stone of remembrance, stooping through the lowly door? And yet--and yet in my deepest heart I was thirsty for the open air, the blue sky, the pure sunlight, the tranquillity of large and silent spaces. The Lady went with me across the crowded quadrangle into the cool, clean, quiet German Church of the Redeemer. We climbed to the top of the lofty bell tower. Jerusalem lay at our feet, with its network of streets and lanes, archways and convent walls, domes small and great--the black Dome of the Rock in the centre of its wide inclosure, the red dome and the green dome of the Jewish synagogues on Mount Zion, the seven gilded domes of the Russian Church of Saint Mary Magdalen, a hundred tiny domes of dwelling-houses, and right in front of us the yellow dome of the Greek "Centre of the World" and the black dome of the Holy Sepulchre. The quadrangle was still full of people buying and selling, but the murmur of their voices was faint and far away, less loud than the twittering of the thousands of swallows that soared and circled, with glistening of innumerable blue-black wings and soft sheen of white breasts, in the tender light of sunset above the façade of the gray old church. Westward the long ridge of Olivet was bathed in the rays of the declining sun. Northward, beyond the city-gate, the light fell softly on a little rocky hill, shaped like a skull, the ancient place of stoning for those whom the cruel city had despised and rejected and cast out. At the foot of that eminence there is a quiet garden and a tomb hewn in the rock. Rosemary and rue grow there, roses and lilies; birds sing among the trees. Is not that little rounded hill, still touched with the free light of heaven, still commanding a clear outlook over the city to the Mount of Olives--is not that the true Golgotha, where Christ was lifted up? As we were thinking of this we saw a man come out on the roof of the Greek "Centre of the World," and climb by a ladder up the side of the huge dome. He went slowly and carefully, yet with confidence, as if the task were familiar. He carried a lantern in one hand. He was going to the top of the dome to light up the great cross for the night. We spoke no word, but each knew the thought that was in the other's heart. Wherever the crucifixion took place, it was surely in the open air, beneath the wide sky, and the cross that stood on Golgotha has become the light at the centre of the world's night. _A PSALM OF THE UNSEEN ALTAR_ _Man the maker of cities is also a builder of altars: Among his habitations he setteth tables for his god._ _He bringeth the beauty of the rocks to enrich them: Marble and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and jade._ _He cometh with costly gifts to offer an oblation: He would buy favour with the fairest of his flock._ _Around the many altars I hear strange music arising: Loud lamentations and shouting and singing and sighs._ _I perceive also the pain and terror of their sacrifices: I see the white marble wet with tears and with blood._ _Then I said, These are the altars of ignorance: Yet they are built by thy children, O God, who know thee not._ _Surely thou wilt have pity upon them and lead them: Hast thou not prepared for them a table of peace?_ _Then the Lord mercifully sent his angel forth to lead me: He led me through the temples, the holy place that is hidden._ _Lo, there are multitudes kneeling in the silence of the spirit: They are kneeling at the unseen altar of the lowly heart._ _Here is plentiful forgiveness for the souls that are forgiving: And the joy of life is given unto all who long to give._ _Here a Father's hand upholdeth all who bear each other's burdens: And the benediction falleth upon all who pray in love._ _Surely this is the altar where the penitent find pardon: And the priest who hath blessed it forever is the Holy One of God._ VII JERICHO AND JORDAN I "GOING DOWN TO JERICHO" In the memory of every visitor to Jerusalem the excursion to Jericho is a vivid point. For this is the one trip which everybody makes, and it is a convention of the route to regard it as a perilous and exciting adventure. Perhaps it is partly this flavour of a not-too-dangerous danger, this shivering charm of a hazard to be taken without too much risk, that attracts the average tourist, prudently romantic, to make the journey to the lowest inhabited town in the world. Jericho has always had an ill name. Weak walls, weak hearts, weak morals were its early marks. Sweltering on the rich plain of the lower Jordan, eight hundred feet below the sea, at the entrance of the two chief passes into the Judean highlands, it was too indolent or cowardly to maintain its own importance. Stanley called it "the key of Palestine"; but it was only a latch which any bold invader could lift. The people of Jericho were famous for light fingers and lively feet, great robbers and runners-away. Joshua blotted the city out with a curse; five centuries later Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt it with the bloody sacrifice of his two sons. Antony gave it to Cleopatra, and Herod bought it from her for a winter palace, where he died. Nothing fine or brave, so far as I can remember, is written of any of its inhabitants, except the good deed of Rahab, a harlot, and the honest conduct of Zacchæus, a publican. To this day, at the _tables d'hôte_ of Jerusalem the name of Jericho stirs up a little whirlwind of bad stories and warnings. Last night we were dining with friends at one of the hotels, and the usual topic came up for discussion. Imagine what followed. "That Jericho road is positively frightful," says a British female tourist in lace cap, lilac ribbons and a maroon poplin dress, "the heat is most extr'ordinary!" "No food fit to eat at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy, bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly little hole!" "A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most perilous, I assure you," says a little Frenchman with a forked beard. "But I rejoice myself of the adventure, of the romance accomplished." "I want to know," piped a lady in a green shirt-waist from Andover, Mass., "is there really and truly any danger?" "I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of old weapons." "Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut, became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarrassingly denuded condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly shocking?" (The clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But, after all," he resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural, you know, quite like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!" "Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers. "But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?" "I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid--and then follows a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road thither, which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with the forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite fears and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious wink with the gentleman from Colorado. Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly represents the _Jericho-motif_ as you may hear it played almost any night in the Jerusalem hotels. It sounded to us partly like an echo of ancient legends kept alive by dragomans and officials for purposes of revenue, and partly like an outcrop of the hysterical habit in people who travel in flocks and do nothing without much palaver. In our quiet camp, George the Bethlehemite assured us that the sheikhs were "humbugs," and an escort of soldiers a nuisance. So we placidly made our preparations to ride on the morrow, with no other safeguards than our friendly dispositions and a couple of excellent American revolvers. But it was no brief _Ausflug_ to Jericho and return that we had before us: it was the beginning of a long and steady ride, weeks in the saddle, from six to nine hours a day. Imagine us then, morning after morning, mounting somewhere between six and eight o'clock, according to the weather and the length of the journey, and jingling out of camp, followed at a discreet distance by Youssouf on his white pony with the luncheon, and Paris on his tiny donkey, Tiddly-winks. About noon, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, the white pony catches up with us, and the tent and the rugs are spread for the midday meal and the _siesta_. It may be in our dreams, or while the Lady is reading from some pleasant book, or while the smoke of the afternoon pipe of peace is ascending, that we hear the musical bells of our long baggage-train go by us on the way to our night-quarters. The evening ride is always shorter than the morning, sometimes only an hour or two in the saddle; and at the end of it there is the surprise of a new camp ground, the comfortable tents, the refreshing bath tub, the quiet dinner by sunset-glow or candle-light. Then a bit of friendly talk over the walnuts and the "Treasure of Zion"; a cup of fragrant Turkish coffee; and George enters the door of the tent to report on the condition of things in general, and to discuss the plan of the next day's journey. II THE GOOD SAMARITAN'S ROAD It is strange how every day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field, the shimmering olive-groves, the brown villages, the crumbling ruins, the deep-blue sky, subdue us to themselves and speak to us "rememberable things." We pass down the Valley of the Brook Kidron, where no water ever flows; and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown here as sacred sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward, the luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky slopes,--these are unchanged. Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,--Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside. "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy." Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl, ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats. As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease. "I think I never saw Such starved, ignoble nature; nothing throve; For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!" We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan." The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the glen the priest and the Levite could "pass by on the other side," discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their selfish duties. And in some such wayside khân as this, standing like a lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom he had rescued, provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance. We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we look down into the Wâdi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls. Tradition calls this the Brook Cherith, where Elijah hid himself from Ahab, and was fed by Arabs of a tribe called "the Ravens." But the prophet's hiding-place was certainly on the other side of the Jordan, and this Wâdi is probably the Valley of Achor, spoken of in the Book of Joshua. On the opposite side of the cañon, half-way down the face of the precipice, clings the monastery of Saint George, one of the pious penitentiaries to which the Greek Church assigns unruly and criminal monks. [Illustration: Great Monastery of St. George.] As we emerge from the narrow valley a great view opens before us: to the right, the blue waters of the Dead Sea, like a mirror of burnished steel; in front, the immense plain of the Jordan, with the dark-green ribbon of the river-jungle winding through its length and the purple mountains of Gilead and Moab towering beyond it; to the left, the furrowed gray and yellow ridges and peaks of the northern "wilderness" of Judea, the wild country into which Jesus retired alone after the baptism by John in the Jordan. One of these peaks, the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis, down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the palaces, baths and theatres of Herod the Great,--a visible image of what Christ might have won for Himself if He had yielded to the temptation and turned from the pathway of spiritual light to follow the shadows of earthly power and glory. Herod's Jericho has vanished; there is nothing left of it but the outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a copious fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's Spring, is the site of the oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. The spring, which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II Kings ii: 19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate a group of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery bamboos and rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great mound of earth, which the German _Palästina-Verein_ is now excavating. As we come up to the mound I pull out my little camera and prepare to take a picture of the hundred or so dusty Arabs--men, women and children--who are at work in the trenches. A German _gelehrter_ in a very excited state rushes up to me and calls upon me to halt, in the name of the Emperor. The taking of pictures by persons not imperially authorised is _streng verboten_. He is evidently prepared to be abusive, if not actually violent, until I assure him, in the best German that I can command, that I have no political or archæological intentions, and that if the photographing of his picturesque work-people to him displeasing is, I will my camera immediately in its pocket put. This mollifies him, and he politely shows us what he is doing. A number of ruined houses, and a sort of central temple, with a rude flight of steps leading up to it, have been discovered. A portion of what seems to be the city-wall has just been laid bare. If there are any inscriptions or relics of any value they are kept secret; but there is plenty of broken pottery of a common kind. It is all very poor and beggarly looking; no carving nor even any hewn stones. The buildings seem to be of rubble, and "the walls of Jericho" are little better than the stone fences on a Connecticut farm. No wonder they fell down at the blast of Joshua's rams' horns and the rush of his fierce tribesmen. We ride past the gardens and through the shady lanes to our camp, on the outskirts of the modern village. The air is heavy and languid, full of relaxing influence, an air of sloth and luxury, seeming to belong to some strange region below the level of human duty and effort as far as it is below the level of the sea. The fragrance of the orange-blossoms, like a subtle incense of indulgence, floats on the evening breeze. Veiled figures pass us in the lanes, showing lustrous eyes. A sound of Oriental music and laughter and clapping hands comes from one of the houses in an inclosure hedged with acacia-trees. We sit in the door of our tent at sundown and dream of the vanished palm-groves, the gardens of Cleopatra, the palaces of Herod, the soft, ignoble history of that region of fertility and indolence, rich in harvests, poor in manhood. Then it seems as if some one were saying, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." There they stand, all about us: eastward, the great purple ranges of Gad and Reuben, from which Elijah the Tishbite descended to rebuke and warn Israel; westward, against the saffron sky, the ridges and peaks of Judea, among which Amos and Jeremiah saw their lofty visions; northward, the clear-cut pinnacle of Sartoba, and far away beyond it the dim outlines of the Galilean hills from which Jesus of Nazareth came down to open blind eyes and to shepherd wandering souls. With the fading of the sunset glow a deep blue comes upon all the mountains, a blue which strangely seems to grow paler as the sky above them darkens, sinking down upon them through infinite gradations of azure into something mysterious and indescribable, not a color, not a shadow, not a light, but a secret hyaline illumination which transforms them into aerial battlements and ramparts, on whose edge the great stars rest and flame, the watch-fires of the Eternal. III "PASSING OVER JORDAN" I have often wondered why the Jordan, which plays such an important part in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no tender and beautiful words to describe it; no record of the longing of exiled Jews to return to the banks of their own river and hear again the voice of its waters. At this strange silence I have wondered much, not knowing the reason of it. Now I know. The Jordan is not a little river to be loved: it is a barrier to be passed over. From its beginning in the marshes of Huleh to its end in the Dead Sea, (excepting only the lovely interval of the Lake of Galilee), this river offers nothing to man but danger and difficulty, perplexity and trouble. Fierce and sullen and intractable, it flows through a long depression, at the bottom of which it has dug for itself a still deeper crooked ditch, along the Eastern border of Galilee and Samaria and Judea, as if it wished to cut them off completely. There are no pleasant places along its course, no breezy forelands where a man might build a house with a fair outlook over flowing water, no rich and tranquil coves where the cattle would love to graze, or stand knee-deep in the quiet stream. There is no sense of leisure, of refreshment, of kind companionship and friendly music about the Jordan. It is in a hurry and a secret rage. Yet there is something powerful, self-reliant, inevitable about it. In thousands of years it has changed less than any river in the world. It is a flowing, everlasting symbol of division, of separation: a river of solemn meetings and partings like that of Elijah and Elisha, of Jesus and John the Baptist: a type of the narrow stream of death. It seems to say to man, "Cross me if you will, if you can; and then go your way." The road that leads us from Jericho toward the river is pleasant enough, at first, for the early sunlight is gentle and caressing, and there is a cool breeze moving across the plain. It is hard to believe that we are eight hundred feet below the sea this morning, and still travelling downward. The lush fields of barley, watered by many channels from the brook Kelt, are waving and glistening around us. Quails are running along the edge of the road, appearing and disappearing among the thick grain-stalks. The bulbuls warble from the thorn-bushes, and a crested hoopoo croons in a jujube-tree. Larks are on the wing, scattering music. We are on the upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which reaches from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which the Arabs call _El-Ghôr_, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to fourteen miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below, at the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from each side toward the middle, and the soil is of an inexhaustible fertility, yielding abundant crops wherever it is patiently irrigated from the streams which flow out of the mountains east and west, but elsewhere lying baked and arid under the heavy, close, feverous air. No strong race has ever inhabited this trench as a home; no great cities have ever grown here, and its civilization, such as it had, was a hot-bed product, soon ripe and quickly rotten. We have passed beyond the region of greenness already; the little water-brooks have ceased to gleam through the grain: the wild grasses and weeds have a parched and yellow look: the freshness of the early morning has vanished, and we are descending through a desolate land of sour and leprous hills of clay and marl, eroded by the floods into fantastic shapes, furrowed and scarred and scabbed with mineral refuse. The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on them like a curse. Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling, yellow flood. It has torn and desolated its own shores with sudden spates. The feet of the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous, with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing scourge" shall sweep away. No, it was not because the Jordan was beautiful that John the Baptist chose it as the scene of his preaching and ministry, but because it was wild and rude, an emblem of violent and sudden change, of irrevocable parting, of death itself, and because in its one gift of copious and unfailing water, he found the necessary element for his deep baptism of repentance, in which the sinful past of the crowd who followed him was to be symbolically immersed and buried and washed away. At the place where we reach the water there is an open bit of ground; a miserable hovel gives shelter to two or three Turkish soldiers; an ungainly latticed bridge, stilted on piles of wood, straddles the river with a single span. The toll is three piastres, (about twelve cents,) for a man and horse. The only place from which I can take a photograph of the river is the bridge itself, so I thrust the camera through one of the diamond-shaped openings on the lattice-work and try to make a truthful record of the lower Jordan at its best. Imagine the dull green of the tangled thickets, the ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely and fruitful rivers of Damascus. _A PSALM OF RIVERS_ _The rivers of God are full of water: They are wonderful in the renewal of their strength: He poureth them out from a hidden fountain._ _They are born among the hills in the high places: Their cradle is in the bosom of the rocks: The mountain is their mother and the forest is their father._ _They are nourished among the long grasses: They receive the tribute of a thousand springs: The rain and the snow are a heritage for them._ _They are glad to be gone from their birthplace: With a joyful noise they hasten away: They are going forever and never departed._ _The courses of the rivers are all appointed: They roar loudly but they follow the road: The finger of God hath marked their pathway._ _The rivers of Damascus rejoice among their gardens: The great river of Egypt is proud of his ships: The Jordan is lost in the Lake of Bitterness._ _Surely the Lord guideth them every one in his wisdom: In the end he gathereth all their drops on high: He sendeth them forth again in the clouds of mercy._ _O my God, my life runneth away like a river: Guide me, I beseech thee, in a pathway of good: Let me flow in blessing to my rest in thee._ VIII A JOURNEY TO JERASH I THROUGH THE LAND OF GILEAD I never heard of Jerash until my friend the Archæologist told me about it, one night when we were sitting beside my study fire at Avalon. "It is the site of the old city of Gerasa," said he. "The most satisfactory ruins that I have ever seen." There was something suggestive and potent in that phrase, "satisfactory ruins." For what is it that weaves the charm of ruins? What do we ask of them to make their magic complete and satisfying? There must be an element of picturesqueness, certainly, to take the eye with pleasure in the contrast between the frailty of man's works and the imperishable loveliness of nature. There must also be an element of age; for new ruins are painful, disquieting, intolerable; they speak of violence and disorder; it is not until the bloom of antiquity gathers upon them that the relics of vast and splendid edifices attract us and subdue us with a spell, breathing tranquillity and noble thoughts. There must also be an element of magnificence in decay, of symmetry broken but not destroyed, a touch of delicate art and workmanship, to quicken the imagination and evoke the ghost of beauty haunting her ancient habitations. And beyond these things I think there must be two more qualities in a ruin that satisfies us: a clear connection with the greatness and glory of the past, with some fine human achievement, with some heroism of men dead and gone; and last of all, a spirit of mystery, the secret of some unexplained catastrophe, the lost link of a story never to be fully told. This, or something like it, was what the Archæologist's phrase seemed to promise me as we watched the glowing embers on the hearth of Avalon. And it is this promise that has drawn me, with my three friends, on this April day into the Land of Gilead, riding to Jerash. The grotesque and rickety bridge by which we have crossed the Jordan soon disappears behind us, as we trot along the winding bridle-path through the river-jungle, in the stifling heat. Coming out on the open plain, which rises gently toward the east, we startle great flocks of storks into the air, and they swing away in languid circles, dappling the blaze of morning with their black-tipped wings. Grotesque, ungainly, gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to the Orient, but rather to have drifted hither out of some quaint, familiar fairy tale of the North; and indeed they are only transient visitors here, and will soon be on their way to build their nests on the roofs of German villages and clapper their long, yellow bills over the joy of houses full of little children. The rains of spring have spread a thin bloom of green over the plain. Tender herbs and light grasses partly veil the gray and stony ground. There is a month of scattered feeding for the flocks and herds. Away to the south, where the foot-hills begin to roll up suddenly from the Jordan, we can see a black line of Bedouin tents quivering through the heat. Now the trail divides, and we take the northern fork, turning soon into the open mouth of the Wâdi Shaîb, a broad, grassy valley between high and treeless hills. The watercourse that winds down the middle of it is dry: nothing but a tumbled bed of gray rocks,--the bare bones of a little river. But as we ascend slowly the flowers increase; wild hollyhocks, and morning-glories, and clumps of blue anchusa, and scarlet adonis, and tall wands of white asphodel. The morning grows hotter and hotter as we plod along. Presently we come up with three mounted Arabs, riding leisurely. Salutations are exchanged with gravity. Then the Arabs whisper something to each other and spur away at a great pace ahead of us--laughing. Why did they laugh? Ah, now we know. For here is a lofty cliff on one side of the valley, hanging over just far enough to make a strip of cool shade at its base, with ferns and deep grass and a glimmer of dripping water. And here our wise Arabs are sitting at their ease to eat their mid-day meal under "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Vainly we search the valley for another rock like that. It is the only one; and the Arabs laughed because they knew it. We must content ourselves with this little hill where a few hawthorn bushes offer us tiny islets of shade, beset with thorns, and separated by straits of intolerable glare. Here we eat a little, but without comfort; and sleep a little, but without refreshment; and talk a little, but restlessly. As soon as we dare, we get into the saddle again and toil up through the valley, now narrowing into a rugged gorge, crammed with ardent heat. The sprinkling of trees and bushes, the multitude of flowers, assure us that there must be moisture underground, along the bed of the stream; but above ground there is not a drop, and not a breath of wind to break the dead calm of the smothering air. Why did we come into this heat-trap? But presently the ravine leads us, by steep stairs of rock, up to a high, green table-land. A heavenly breeze from the west is blowing here. The fields are full of flowers--red anemones, white and yellow daisies, pink flax, little blue bell-flowers--a hundred kinds. One knoll is covered with cyclamens; another with splendid purple iris, immense blossoms, so dark that they look almost black against the grass; but hold them up to the sun and you will see the imperial colour. We have never found such wild flowers, not even on the Plain of Sharon; the hills around Jerusalem were but sparsely adorned in comparison with these highlands of bloom. And here are oak-trees, broad-limbed and friendly, clothed in glistening green. Let us rest for a while in this cool shade and forget the misery of the blazing noon. Below us lies the gray Jordan valley and the steel-blue mirror of the Dead Sea; and across that gulf we see the furrowed mountains of Judea and Samaria, and far to the north the peaks of Galilee. Around us is the Land of Gilead, a rolling hill-country, with long ridges and broad summits, a rounded land, a verdurous land, a land of rich pasturage. There are deep valleys that cut into it and divide it up. But the main bulk of it is lifted high in the air, and spread out nobly to the visitations of the wind. And see--far away there, to the south, across the Wádi Nimrîn, a mountainside covered with wild trees, a real woodland, almost a forest! Now we must travel on, for it is still a long way to our night-quarters at Es Salt. We pass several Bedouin camps, the only kind of villages in this part of the world. The tents of goat's-hair are swarming with life. A score of ragged Arab boys are playing hockey on the green with an old donkey's hoof for a ball. They yell with refreshing vigour, just like universal human boys. The trail grows steeper and more rocky, ascending apparently impossible places, and winding perilously along the cliffs above little vineyards and cultivated fields where men are ploughing. Travel and traffic increase along this rude path, which is the only highway: evidently we are coming near to some place of importance. But where is Es Salt? For nine hours we have been in the saddle, riding steadily toward that mysterious metropolis of the Belka, the only living city in the Land of Gilead; and yet there is no trace of it in sight. Have we missed the trail? The mule-train with our tents and baggage passed us in the valley while we were sweltering under the hawthorns. It seems as if it must have vanished into the pastoral wilderness and left us travelling an endless road to nowhere. At last we top a rugged ridge and look down upon the solution of the mystery. Es Salt is a city that can be hid; for it is not set upon a hill, but tucked away in a valley that curves around three sides of a rocky eminence, and is sheltered from the view by higher ranges. Who can tell how this city came here, hidden in this hollow place almost three thousand feet above the sea? Who was its founder? What was its ancient name? It is a place without traditions, without antiquities, without a shrine of any kind; just a living town, thriving and prospering in its own dirty and dishevelled way, in the midst of a country of nomads, growing in the last twenty years from six thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants, driving a busy trade with the surrounding country, exporting famous raisins and dye-stuff made from sumach, the seat of the Turkish Government of the Belka, with a garrison and a telegraph office--decidedly a thriving town of to-day; yet without a road by which a carriage can approach it; and old, unmistakably old! The castle that crowns the eminence in the centre is a ruin of unknown date. The copious spring that gushes from the castle-hill must have invited men for many centuries to build their habitations around it. The gray houses seem to have slipped and settled down into the curving valley, and to have crowded one another up the opposite slopes, as if hundreds of generations had found here a hiding-place and a city of refuge. We ride through a Mohammedan graveyard--unfenced, broken, neglected--and down a steep, rain-gulleyed hillside, into the filthy, narrow street. The people all have an Arab look, a touch of the wildness of the desert in their eyes and their free bearing. There are many fine figures and handsome faces, some with auburn hair and a reddish hue showing through the bronze of their cheeks. They stare at us with undisguised curiosity and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity here--perhaps an intrusion to be resented. We inquire whether our baggage-train has been seen, where our camp is pitched. No one knows, no one cares; until at last a ragged, smiling urchin, one of those blessed, ubiquitous boys who always know everything that happens in a town, offers to guide us. He trots ahead, full of importance, dodging through the narrow alleys, making the complete circuit of the castle-hill and leading us to the upper end of the eastern valley. Here, among a few olive-trees beside the road, our white tents are standing, so close to an encampment of wandering gypsies that the tent-ropes cross. Directly opposite rises a quarter of the town, tier upon tier of flat-roofed houses, every roof-top covered with people. A wild-looking crowd of visitors have gathered in the road. Two soldiers, with the appearance of partially reformed brigands, are acting as our guard, and keeping the inquisitive spectators at a respectful distance. Our mules and donkeys and horses are munching their supper in a row, tethered to a long rope in front of the tents. Shukari, the cook, in his white cap and apron, is gravely intent upon the operation of his little charcoal range. Youssouf, the major-domo, is setting the table with flowers and lighted candles in the dining-tent. After a while he comes to the door of our sleeping-tents to inform us, with due ceremony, that dinner is served; and we sit down to our repast in the midst of the swarming Edomites and the wandering Zingari as peacefully and properly as if we were dining at the Savoy. The night darkens around us. Lights twinkle, one above another, up the steep hillside of houses; above them are the tranquil stars, the lit windows of unknown habitations; and on the hill-top one great planet burns in liquid flame. The crowd melts away, chattering down the road; it forms again, from another quarter, and again dissolves. Meaningless shouts and cries and songs resound from the hidden city. In the gypsy camp beside us insomnia reigns. A little forge is clinking and clanking. Donkeys raise their antiphonal lament. Dogs salute the stars in chorus. First a leader, far away, lifts a wailing, howling, shrieking note; then the mysterious unrest that torments the bosom of Oriental dogdom breaks loose in a hundred, a thousand answering voices, swelling into a yapping, growling, barking, yelling discord. A sudden silence cuts the tumult short, until once more the unknown misery, (or is it the secret joy), of the canine heart bursts out in long-drawn dissonance. From the road and from the tents of the gypsies various human voices are sounding close around us all the night. Through our confused dreams and broken sleep we strangely seem to catch fragments of familiar speech, phrases of English or French or German. Then, waking and listening, we hear men muttering and disputing, women complaining or soothing their babies, children quarrelling or calling to each other, in Arabic, or Romany--not a word that we can understand--voices that tell us only that we are in a strange land, and very far away from home, camping in the heart of a wild city. II OVER THE BROOK JABBOK After such a night the morning is welcome, as it breaks over the eastern hill behind us, with rosy light creeping slowly down the opposite slope of houses. Before the sunbeams have fairly reached the bottom of the valley we are in the saddle, ready to leave Es Salt without further exploration. There is a general monotony about this riding through Palestine which yet leaves room for a particular variety of the most entrancing kind. Every day is like every other in its main outline, but the details are infinitely uncertain--always there is something new, some touch of a distinct and memorable charm. To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the prevailing impression of this day: and the symbol of it is the thin, quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we go, drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown shepherd or goatherd is minding his flock with music. What quaint and rustic melodies are these! Wild and unfamiliar to our ears; yet doubtless the same wandering airs that were played by the sons and servants of Jacob when he returned from his twenty years of profitable exile in Haran with his rich wages of sheep and goats and cattle and wives and maid-servants, the fruit of his hard labour and shrewd bargaining with his father-in-law Laban, and passed cautiously through Gilead on his way to the Promised Land. On the highland to the east of Es Salt we see a fine herd of horses, brood-mares and foals. A little farther on, we come to a muddy pond or tank at which a drove of asses are drinking. A steep and winding path, full of loose stones, leads us down into a grassy, oval plain, a great cup of green, eight or ten miles long and five or six miles wide, rimmed with bare hills from five to eight hundred feet high. This, we conjecture, is the fertile basin of El Buchaia, or Bekaa. Bedouin farmers are ploughing the rich, reddish soil. Their black tent-villages are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills. The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his lop-eared flock. In one place we pass through a breeding-herd of camels, browsing on the short grass. The old ones are in the process of the spring moulting; their thick, matted hair is peeling off in large flakes, like fragments of a ragged, moth-eaten coat. The young ones are covered with pearl-gray wool, soft and almost downy, like gigantic goslings with four legs. (What is the word for a young camel, I wonder; is it camelet or camelot?) But young and old have a family resemblance of ugliness. The camel is the most ungainly and stupid of God's useful beasts--an awkward necessity--the humpbacked ship of the desert. The Arabs have a story which runs thus: "What did Allah say when He had finished making the camel? He couldn't say anything; He just looked at the camel, and laughed, and laughed!" But in spite of his ridiculous appearance the camel seems satisfied with himself; in fact there is an expression of supreme contempt in his face when he droops his pendulous lower lip and wrinkles his nose, which has led the Arabs to tell another story about him: "Why does the camel despise his master? Because man knows only the ninety-nine common names of Allah; but the hundredth name, the wonderful name, the beautiful name, is a secret revealed to the camel alone. Therefore he scorns the whole race of men." The cattle that feed around the edges of this peaceful plain are small and nimble, as if they were used to long, rough journeys. The prevailing colour is black, or rusty brown. They are evidently of a degenerate and played-out stock. Even the heifers are used for ploughing, and they look but little larger than the donkeys which are often yoked beside them. They come around the grassy knoll when our luncheon-tent is pitched, and stare at us very much as the people stared in Es Salt. In the afternoon we pass over the rim of the broad vale and descend a narrower ravine, where oaks and terebinths, laurels and balsams, pistachios and almonds are growing. The grass springs thick and lush, tall weeds and trailing vines appear, a murmur of flowing water is heard under the tangled herbage at the bottom of the wâdi. Presently we are following a bright little brook, crossing and recrossing it as it leads us toward our camp-ground. There are the tents, standing in a line on the flowery bank of the brook, across the water from the trail. A few steps lower down there is a well-built stone basin with a copious spring gushing into it from the hillside under an arched roof. Here the people of the village, (which is somewhere near us on the mountain, but out of sight), come to fill their pitchers and water-skins, and to let their cattle and donkeys drink. All through the late afternoon they are coming and going, plashing through the shallow ford below us, enjoying the cool, clear water, disappearing along the foot-paths that lead among the hills. These are very different cattle from the herds we saw among the Bedouins a couple of hours ago; fine large creatures, well bred and well fed, some cream-coloured, some red, some belted with white. And these men who follow them, on foot or on horseback, truculent looking fellows with blue eyes and light hair and broad faces, clad in long, close-fitting tunics, with belts around their waists and small black caps of fur, some of them with high boots--who are they? They are some of the Circassian immigrants who were driven out of Russia by the Czar after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and deported again after the Bulgarian atrocities, and whom the Turkish Government has colonized through eastern Palestine on land given by the Sultan. Nobody really knows to whom the land belongs, I suppose; but the Bedouins have had the habit, for many centuries, of claiming and using it as they pleased for their roaming flocks and herds. Now these northern invaders are taking and holding the most fertile places, the best springs, the fields that are well watered through the year. Therefore the Arab hates the Circassian, though he be of the same religion, far more than he hates the Christian, almost as much as he hates the Turk. But the Circassian can take care of himself; he is a fierce and hardy fighter; and in his rude way he understands how to make farming and stock-raising pay. Indeed, this Land of Gilead is a region in which twenty times the present population, if they were industrious and intelligent and had good government, might prosper. No wonder that the tribe of Gad and Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh, on the way to Canaan, "when they saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, that, behold, the place was a place for cattle," (Numbers xxxii) fell in love with it, and besought Moses that they might have their inheritance there, and not westward of the Jordan. No wonder that they recrossed the river after they had helped Joshua to conquer the Canaanites, and settled in this high country, so much fairer and more fertile than Judea, or even than Samaria. It was here, in 1880, that Laurence Oliphant, the gifted English traveller and mystic, proposed to establish his fine scheme for the beginning of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. A territory extending from the brook of Jabbok on the north to the brook of Arnon on the south, from the Jordan Valley on the west to the Arabian desert on the east; railways running up from the sea at Haifâ, and down from Damascus, and southward to the Gulf of Akabah, and across to Ismailia on the Suez Canal; a government of local autonomy guaranteed and protected by the Sublime Porte; sufficient capital supplied by the Jewish bankers of London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna; and the outcasts of Israel gathered from all the countries where they are oppressed, to dwell together in peace and plenty, tending sheep and cattle, raising fruit and grain, pressing out wine and oil, and supplying the world with the balm of Gilead--such was Oliphant's beautiful dream. But it did not come true; because Russia did not like it, because Turkey was afraid of it, because the rest of Europe did not care for it,--and perhaps because the Jews themselves were not generally enthusiastic over it. Perhaps the majority of them would rather stay where they are. Perhaps they do not yearn passionately for Palestine and the simple life. But it is not of these things that we are thinking, I must confess, as the ruddy sun slowly drops toward the heights of Pennel, and we stroll out in the evening glow, along the edge of the wild ravine into which our little stream plunges, and look down into the deep, grand valley of the Brook Jabbok. Yonder, on the other side of the great gulf of heliotrope shadow, stretches the long bulk of the Jebel Ajlûn, shaggy with oak-trees. It was somewhere on the slopes of that wooded mountain that one of the most tragic battles of the world was fought. For there the army of Absalom went out to meet the army of his father David. "And the battle was spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword devoured." It was there that the young man Absalom rode furiously upon his mule, "and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between heaven and earth." And a man came and told Joab, the captain of David's host, "Behold I saw Absalom hanging in the midst of an oak." Then Joab made haste; "and he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak." And when the news came to David, sitting in the gate of the city of Mahanaim, he went up into the chamber over the gate and wept bitterly, crying, "Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!" (II Samuel xviii.) To remember a story like that is to feel the pathos with which man has touched the face of nature. But there is another story, more mystical, more beautiful, which belongs to the scene upon which we are looking. Down in the purple valley, where the smooth meadows spread so fair, and the little river curves and gleams through the thickets of oleander, somewhere along that flashing stream is the place where Jacob sent his wives and his children, his servants and his cattle, across the water in the darkness, and there remained all night long alone, for "there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day." Who was this "man" with whom the patriarch contended at midnight, and to whom he cried, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me"? On the morrow Jacob was to meet his fierce and powerful brother Esau, whom he had wronged and outwitted, from whom he had stolen the birthright blessing twenty years before. Was it the prospect of this dreaded meeting that brought upon Jacob the night of lonely struggle by the Brook Jabbok? Was it the promise of reconciliation with his brother that made him say at dawn, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is saved"? Was it the unexpected friendliness and gentleness of that brother in the encounter of the morning that inspired Jacob's cry, "I have seen _thy face as one seeth the face of God_, and thou wast pleased with me"? Yes, that _is_ what the old story means, in its Oriental imagery. The midnight wrestling is the pressure of human enmity and strife. The morning peace is the assurance of human forgiveness and love. The face of God seen in the face of human kindness--that is the sunrise vision of the Brook Jabbok. Such are the thoughts with which we fall asleep in our tents beside the murmuring brook of Er Rumman. Early the next morning we go down, and down, and down, by ledge and terrace and grassy slope, into the Vale of Jabbok. It is sixty miles long, beginning on the edge of the mountain of Moab, and curving eastward, northward, westward, south-westward, between Gilead and Ajlûn, until it opens into the Jordan Valley. Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue water--Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it--dashing and swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around them in showers which glitter in the sunshine. Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes--and by many another brook too. III THE RUINS OF GERASA We are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the conquests of Alexander the Great. They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so, converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey restored their civic liberties, B.C. 65, and caused them to be rebuilt and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government, under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire. The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy for mutual defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos, Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Cæsar. Their soldiers followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were Roman. Here in this narrow wâdi through which we are climbing up from the Vale of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast, incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa. They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and arches and vaults and amphitheatres and temples, suddenly appearing in the bare and lonely landscape as if by enchantment. How came these monuments of splendour and permanence into this country of simplicity and transience, this land of shifting shepherds and drovers, this empire of the black tent, this immemorial region that has slept away the centuries under the spell of the pastoral pipe? What magical music of another kind, strong, stately and sonorous, music of brazen trumpets and shawms, of silver harps and cymbals, evoked this proud and potent city on the border of the desert, and maintained for centuries, amid the sweeping, turbulent floods of untamable tribes of rebels and robbers, this lofty landmark of "the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome"? What sudden storm of discord and disaster shook it all down again, loosened the sinews of majesty and power, stripped away the garments of beauty and luxury, dissolved the lovely body of living joy, and left this skeleton of dead splendour diffused upon the solitary ground? Who can solve these mysteries? It is all unaccountable, unbelievable,--the ghost of the dream of a dream,--yet here it is, surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon, neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of Gerasa the Golden. Let us go up into the wrecked city. This triumphal arch, with its three gates and its lofty Corinthian columns, stands outside of the city walls: a structure which has no other use or meaning than the expression of Imperial pride: thus the Roman conquerors adorn and approach their vassal-town. Behind the arch a broad, paved road leads to the southern gate, perhaps a thousand feet away. Beside the road, between the arch and the gate, lie two buildings of curious interest. The first is a great pool of stone, seven hundred feet long by three hundred feet wide. This is the Naumachia, which is filled with water by conduits from the neighbouring stream, in order that the Greeks may hold their mimic naval combats and regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a seafaring people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of stone seats and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial combats. The city walls have almost entirely disappeared and the South Gate is in ruins. Entering and turning to the left, we ascend a little hill and find the Temple (perhaps dedicated to Artemis), and close beside it the great South Theatre. There is hardly a break in the semicircular stone benches, thirty-two rows of seats rising tier above tier, divided into an upper and a lower section by a broader row of "boxes" or stalls, richly carved, and reserved, no doubt, for magnates of the city and persons of importance. The stage, over a hundred feet wide, is backed by a straight wall adorned with Corinthian columns and decorated niches. The theatre faces due north; and the spectator sitting here, if the play wearies him, can lift his eyes and look off beyond the proscenium over the length and breadth of Gerasa. "But he looked upon the city, every side, Far and wide, All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades Colonnades, All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then, All the men!" In the hollow northward from this theatre is the Forum, or the Market-place, or the Hippodrome--I cannot tell what it is, but a splendid oval of Ionic pillars incloses an open space of more than three hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty feet in width, where the Gerasenes may barter or bicker or bet, as they will. From the Forum to the North Gate runs the main street, more than half a mile long, lined with a double row of columns, from twenty to thirty feet high, with smooth shafts and acanthus capitals. At the intersection of the cross-streets there are tetrapylons, with domes, and pedestals for statues. The pavement of the roadway is worn into ruts by the chariot wheels. Under the arcades behind the columns run the sidewalks for foot-passengers. Turn to the right from the main street and you come to the Public Baths, an immense building like a palace, supplied with hot and cold water, adorned with marble and mosaic. On the left lies the Tribuna, with its richly decorated façade and its fountain of flowing water. A few yards farther north is the Propylæum of the Great Temple; a superb gateway, decorated with columns and garlands and shell niches, opening to a wide flight of steps by which we ascend to the temple-area, a terrace nearly twice the size of Madison Square Garden, surrounded by two hundred and sixty columns, and standing clear above the level of the encircling city. The Temple of the Sun rises at the western end of this terrace, facing the dawn. The huge columns of the portico, forty-five feet high and five feet in diameter, with rich Corinthian capitals, are of rosy-yellow limestone, which seems to be saturated with the sunshine of a thousand years. Behind them are the walls of the Cella, or inner shrine, with its vaulted apse for the image of the god, and its secret stairs and passages in the rear wall for the coming and going of the priests, and the ascent to the roof for the first salutation of the sunrise over the eastern hills. Spreading our cloth between two pillars of the portico we celebrate the feast of noontide, and looking out over the wrecked magnificence of the city we try to reconstruct the past. [Illustration: Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylæum and Temple terrace.] It was in the days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Græco-Roman civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century the pagan worship was dying out, and the Bishop of Gerasa had a seat in the Council of Chalcedon. It was no longer with the comparative merits of Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves. They were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia and Homoöusia, with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians, with the conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as Dioscurus of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued brisk, and the city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh century an Arabian chronicler named it among the great towns of Palestine, and a poet praised its fertile territory and its copious spring. Then what happened? Earthquake, pestilence, conflagration, pillage, devastation--who knows? A Mohammedan writer of the thirteenth century merely mentions it as "a great city of ruins"; and so it lay, deserted and forgotten, until a German traveller visited it in 1806; and so it lies to-day, with all its dwellings and its walls shattered and dissolved beside its flowing stream in the centre of its green valley, and only the relics of its temples, its theatres, its colonnades, and its triumphal arch remaining to tell us how brave and rich and gay it was in the days of old. Do you believe it? Does it seem at all real or possible to you? Look up at this tall pillar above us. See how the wild marjoram has thrust its roots between the joints and hangs like "the hyssop that springeth out of the wall." See how the weather has worn deep holes and crevices in the topmost drum, and how the sparrows have made their nests there. Lean your back against the pillar; feel it vibrate like "a reed shaken with the wind"; watch that huge capital of acanthus leaves swaying slowly to and fro and trembling upon its stalk "as a flower of the field." * * * * * All the afternoon and all the next morning we wander through the ruins, taking photographs, deciphering inscriptions, discovering new points of view to survey the city. We sit on the arch of the old Roman bridge which spans the stream, and look down into the valley filled with gardens and orchards; tall poplars shiver in the breeze; peaches, plums, and cherries are in bloom; almonds clad in pale-green foliage; figs putting forth their verdant shoots; pomegranates covered with ruddy young leaves. We go up to see the beautiful spring which bursts from the hillside above the town and supplies it with water. Then we go back again to roam aimlessly and dreamily, like folk bewitched, among the tumbled heaps of hewn stones, the broken capitals, and the tall, rosy columns, soaked with sunbeams. The Arabs of Jerash have a bad reputation as robbers and extortionists; and in truth they are rather a dangerous-looking lot of fellows, with bold, handsome brown faces and inscrutable dark eyes. But although we have paid no tribute to them, they do not molest us. They seem to regard us with a contemptuous pity, as harmless idiots who loaf among the fallen stones and do not even attempt to make excavations. Our camp is in the inclosure of the North Theatre, a smaller building than that which stands beside the South Gate, but large enough to hold an audience of two or three thousand. The semicircle of seats is still unbroken; the arrangements of the stage, the stairways, the entries of the building can all be easily traced. There were gay times in the city when these two theatres were filled with people. What comedies of Plautus or Terence or Aristophanes or Menander; what tragedies of Seneca, or of the seven dramatists of Alexandria who were called the "Pleias," were presented here? Look up along those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight. Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause? What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does the stage reveal to them? We shall never know. The play at Gerasa is ended. _A PSALM AMONG THE RUINS_ _The lizard rested on the rock while I sat among the ruins; And the pride of man was like a vision of the night._ _Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness; The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work._ _There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments; The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured._ _Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings; Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil._ _All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment; The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand._ _Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins; These broken arches have taught generations to build._ _Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered; Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die._ _This is the glory that is stronger than the desert; For God hath given eternity to the thought of man._ IX THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA I JORDAN FERRY Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful, squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was never to enter. "Could we but climb where Moses stood, And view the landscape o'er, Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood, Should fright us from the shore." Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched with a few silvery gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea; those scarred and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted brow of Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of Mizpeh, the long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of the highlands round the Lake of Galilee. Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange difference between our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts of the ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true. Gerasa was as really a part of God's big world as Shechem or Jezreel or Sychar. It stood in His sight, and He must have regarded the human souls that lived there. He must have cared for them, and watched over them, and judged them equitably, dividing the just from the unjust, the children of love from the children of hate, even as He did with men on the other side of the Jordan, even as He does with all men everywhere to-day. If faith in a God who is the Father and Lord of all mankind means anything it means this: equal care, equal justice, equal mercy for all the world. Gerasa has been forgotten of men, but God never forgot it. What, then, is the difference? Just this: in the little land between the Jordan and the sea, things came to pass which have a more enduring significance than the wars and splendours, the wealth and culture of the Decapolis. Conflicts were fought there in which the eternal issues of good and evil were clearly manifest. Ideas were worked out there which have a permanent value to the spiritual life of man. Revelations were made there which have become the guiding stars of succeeding generations. This is why that country of the Bible seems more real to us: because its history is more significant, because it is Divinely inspired with a meaning for our faith and hope. Do you agree with this? I do not know. But at least if you were with us on this glorious morning, riding down from the heights of Jebel Osha you would feel the vivid beauty, the subduing grandeur of the scene. You would rejoice in the life-renewing air that blows softly around us and invites us to breathe deep,--in the pure morning faces of the flowers opening among the rocks,--in the light waving of silken grasses along the slopes by which we steeply descend. There is a young Gileadite running beside us, a fine fellow about eighteen years old, with his white robe girded up about his loins, leaving his brown legs bare. His head-dress is encircled with the black _'agâl_ of camel's hair like a rustic crown. A long gun is slung over his back; a wicked-looking curved knife with a brass sheath sticks in his belt; his silver powder-horn and leather bullet-pouch hang at his waist. He strides along with a free, noble step, or springs lightly from rock to rock like a gazelle. His story is a short one, and simple,--if true. His younger brother has run away from the family tent among the pastures of Gilead, seeking his fortune in the wide world. And now this elder brother has come out to look for the prodigal, at Nablûs, at Jaffa, at Jerusalem,--Allah knows how far the quest may lead! But he is afraid of robbers if he crosses the Jordan Valley alone. May he keep company with us and make the perilous transit under our august protection? Yes, surely, my brown son of Esau; and we will not inquire too closely whether you are really running after your brother or running away yourself. There may be a thousand robbers concealed along the river-bed, but we can see none of them. The valley is heat and emptiness. Even the jackal that slinks across the trail in front of us, droops and drags his tail in visible exhaustion. His lolling, red tongue is a signal of distress. In a climate like this one expects nothing from man or beast. Life degenerates, shrivels, stifles; and in the glaring open spaces a sullen madness lurks invisible. We are coming to the ancient fording-place of the river, called Adamah, where an event once happened which was of great consequence to the Israelites and which has often been misunderstood. They were encamped on the east side, opposite Jericho, nearly thirty miles below this point, waiting for their first opportunity to cross the Jordan. Then, says the record, "the waters which came down from above stopped, and were piled up in a heap, a great way off, at Adam, ... and the people passed over right against Jericho." (Joshua iii: 14-16.) Look at these great clay-banks overhanging the river, and you will understand what it was that opened a dry path for Israel into Canaan. One of these huge masses of clay was undermined, and slipped, and fell across the river, heaping up the waters behind a temporary natural dam, and cutting off the supply of the lower stream. It may have taken three or four days for the river to carve its way through or around that obstruction, and meantime any one could march across to Jericho without wetting his feet. I have seen precisely the same thing happen on a salmon river in Canada quite as large as the Jordan. The river is more open at this place, and there is a curious six-cornered ferry-boat, pulled to and fro with ropes by a half-dozen bare-legged Arabs. If it had been a New England river, the practical Western mind would have built a long boat with a flat board at each side, and rigged a couple of running wheels on a single rope. Then the ferryman would have had nothing to do but let the stern of his craft swing down at an angle with the stream, and the swift current would have pushed him from one side to the other at his will. But these Orientals have been running their ferry in their own way, no doubt, for many centuries; and who are we to break in upon their laborious indolence with new ideas? It is enough that they bring us over safely, with our cattle and our stuff, in several bands, with much tugging at the ropes and shouting and singing. We look in vain on the shore of the Jordan for a pleasant place to eat our luncheon. The big trees stand with their feet in the river, and the smaller shrubs are scraggly and spiny. At last we find a little patch of shade on a steep bank above the yellow stream, and here we make ourselves as comfortable as we can, with the thermometer at 110°, and the hungry gnats and mosquitoes swarming around us. Early in the afternoon we desperately resolve to brave the sun, and ride up from the river-bed into the open plain on the west. Here we catch our first clear view of Mount Hermon, with its mantle of glistening snow, hanging like a cloud on the northern horizon, ninety miles away, beyond the Lake of Galilee and the Waters of Merom; a vision of distance and coolness and grandeur. The fields, watered by the full streams descending from the Wâdi Fârah, are green with wheat and barley. Along our path are balsam-trees and thorny jujubes, from whose branches we pluck the sweet, insipid fruit as we ride beneath them. Herds of cattle are pasturing on the plain, and long rows of black Bedouin tents are stretched at the foot of the mountains. We cross a dozen murmuring watercourses embowered in the dark, glistening foliage of the oleanders glowing with great soft flames of rosy bloom. At the Serâi on the hill which watches over this Jiftlîk, or domain of the Sultan, there are some Turkish soldiers saddling their horses for an expedition; perhaps to collect taxes or to chase robbers. The peasants are returning, by the paths among the cornfields, to their huts. The lines of camp-fires begin to gleam from the transient Bedouin villages. Our white tents are pitched in a flowery meadow, beside a low-voiced stream, and as we fall asleep the night air is trembling with the shrill, innumerable _brek-ek-ek-coäx-coäx_ of the frog chorus. II MOUNT EPHRAIM AND JACOB'S WELL Samaria is a mountain land, but its characteristic features, as distinguished from Judea, are the easiness of approach through open gateways among the hills, and the fertility of the broad vales and level plains which lie between them. The Kingdom of Israel, in its brief season of prosperity, was richer, more luxurious, and weaker than the Kingdom of Judah. The poet Isaiah touched the keynote of the northern kingdom when he sang of "the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim," and "the fading flower of his glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley." (Isaiah xxviii: 1-6.) We turn aside from the open but roundabout way of the well-tilled Wâdi Fârah and take a shorter, steeper path toward Shechem, through a deep, narrow mountain gorge. The day is hot and hazy, for the Sherkîyeh is blowing from the desert across the Jordan Valley: the breath of Jehovah's displeasure with His people, "a dry wind of the high places of the wilderness toward the daughter of my people, neither to fan nor to cleanse." At times the walls of rock come so close together that we have to wind through a passage not more than ten feet wide. The air is parched as in an oven. Our horses scramble wearily up the stony gallery and the rough stairways. One of our company faints under the fervent heat, and falls from his horse. But fortunately no bones are broken; a half-hour's rest in the shadow of a great rock revives him and we ride on. The wonderful flowers are blooming wherever they can find a foothold among the stones. Now and then we cross the mouth of some little lonely side-valley, full of mignonette and cyclamens and tall spires of pink hollyhock. Under the huge, dark sides of Eagle's Crag--bare and rugged as Ben Nevis--we pass into the fruitful plain of Makhna, where the silken grainfields rustle far and wide, and the rich olive-orchards on the hill-slopes offer us a shelter for our midday meal and siesta. Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim now rise before us in their naked bulk; and, as we mount toward the valley which lies between them, we stay for a while to rest at Jacob's Well. There is a mystery about this ancient cistern on the side of the mountain. Why was it dug here, a hundred feet deep, although there are springs and streams of living water flowing down the valley, close at hand? Whence came the tradition of the Samaritans that Jacob gave them this well, although the Old Testament says nothing about it? Why did the Samaritan woman, in Jesus' time, come hither to draw water when there was a brook, not fifty yards away, which she must cross to get to the well? Who can tell? Certainly there must have been some use and reason for such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for other purposes, while the water of the well was free. It makes no difference whether a solution of the problem is ever found. Its very existence adds to the touch of truth in the narrative of St. John's Gospel. Certainly this well was here in Jesus' day, close beside the road which He would be most likely to take in going from Jerusalem to Galilee. Here He sat, alone and weary, while the disciples went on to the village to buy food. And here, while He waited and thirsted, He spoke to an unknown, unfriendly, unhappy woman the words which have been a spring of living water to the weary and fevered heart of the world: "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." III NABLÛS AND SEBASTE About a mile from Jacob's Well, the city of Nablûs lies in the hollow between Mount Gerizim on the south and Mount Ebal on the north. The side of Gerizim is precipitous and jagged; Ebal rises more smoothly, but very steeply, and is covered with plantations of thornless cactus, (_Opuntia cochinillifera_), cultivated for the sake of the cochineal insects which live upon the plant and from which a red dye is made. The valley is well watered, and is about a quarter of a mile wide. A little east of the city there are two natural bays or amphitheatres opposite to each other in the mountains. Here the tribes of Israel may have been gathered while the priests chanted the curses of the law from Ebal and the blessings from Gerizim. (Joshua viii: 30-35.) The cliffs were sounding-boards and sent the loud voices of blessing and cursing out over the multitude so that all could hear. It seems as if it were mainly the echo of the cursing of Ebal that greets us as we ride around the fierce little Mohammedan city of Nablûs on Friday afternoon, passing through the open and dilapidated cemeteries where the veiled women are walking and gossiping away their holiday. The looks of the inhabitants are surly and hostile. The children shout mocking ditties at us, reviling the "Nazarenes." We will not ask our dragoman to translate the words that we catch now and then; it is easy to guess that they are not "fit to print." Our camp is close beside a cemetery, near the eastern gate of the town. The spectators who watch us from a distance while we dine are numerous; and no doubt they are passing unfavourable criticisms on our table manners, and on the Frankish custom of permitting one unveiled lady to travel with three husbands. The population of Nablûs is about twenty-five thousand. It has a Turkish governor, a garrison, several soap factories, and a million dogs which howl all night. At half-past six the next morning we set out on foot to climb Mount Ebal, which is three thousand feet high. The view from the rocky summit sweeps over all Palestine, from snowy Hermon to the mountains round about Jerusalem, from Carmel to Nebo, from the sapphire expanse of the Mediterranean to the violet valley of the Jordan and the garnet wall of Moab and Gilead beyond. For us the view is veiled in mystery by the haze of the south wind. The ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablûs is buried in the gulf. On the summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan _wêli_, shining like a flake of mica, marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns, Asîret, Tallûza, Yasîd, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of Samaria, which Cæsar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of his wife Augusta. If she could see the village of Sebastiyeh now she would not be proud of her namesake town. It is there that we are going to make our midday camp. King Omri acted as a wise man when he moved the capital of Israel from Shechem, an indefensible site, commanded by overhanging mountains and approached by two easy vales, to Shomron, the "watch-hill" which stands in the centre of the broad Vale of Barley. As we ride across the smiling corn-fields toward the isolated eminence, we see its strength as well as its beauty. It rises steeply from the valley to a height of more than three hundred feet. The encircling mountains are too far away to dominate it under the ancient conditions of warfare without cannons, and a good wall must have made it, as its name implied, an impregnable "stronghold," watching over a region of immense fertility. What pomps and splendours, what revels and massacres, what joys of victory and horrors of defeat, that round hill rising from the Vale of Barley has seen. Now there is nothing left of its crown of pride, but the broken pillars of the marble colonnade a mile long with which Herod the Great girdled the hill, and a few indistinguishable ruins of the temple which he built in honour of the divine Augustus and of the hippodrome which he erected for the people. We climb the terraces and ride through the olive-groves and ploughed fields where the street of columns once ran. A few of them are standing upright; others leaning or fallen, half sunken in the ground; fragments of others built into the stone walls which divide the fields. There are many hewn and carven stones imbedded in the miserable little modern village which crouches on the north end of the hill, and the mosque into which the Crusaders' Church of Saint John has been transformed is said to contain the tombs of Elisha, Obadiah and John the Baptist. This rumour does not concern us deeply and we will leave its truth uninvestigated. Let us tie our horses among Herod's pillars, and spread the rugs for our noontide rest by the ruined south gate of the city. At our feet lies the wide, level, green valley where the mighty host of Ben-hadad, King of Damascus, once besieged the starving city and waited for its surrender. (II Kings vii.) There in the twilight of long ago a panic terror whispered through the camp, and the Syrians rose and fled, leaving their tents and their gear behind them. And there four nameless lepers of Israel, wandering in their despair, found the vast encampment deserted, and entered in, and ate and drank, and picked up gold and silver, until their conscience smote them. Then they climbed up to this gate with the good news that the enemy had vanished, and the city was saved. IV DÔTHÂN AND THE GOODNESS OF THE SAMARITAN Over the steep mountains that fence Samaria to the north, down through terraced vales abloom with hawthorns and blood-red poppies, across hill-circled plains where the long, silvery wind-waves roll over the sea of grain from shore to shore, past little gray towns sleeping on the sunny heights, by paths that lead us near flowing springs where the village girls fill their pitchers, and down stony slopes where the goatherds in bright-coloured raiment tend their flocks, and over broad, moist fields where the path has been obliterated by the plough, and around the edge of marshes where the storks rise heavily on long flapping wings, we come galloping at sunset to our camp beside the little green hill of Dôthân. Behind it are the mountains, swelling and softly rounded like breasts. It was among them that the servant of Elisha saw the vision of horses and chariots of fire protecting his master. (II Kings vi: 14-19.) North and east of Dôthân the plain extends smooth and gently sloping, full of young harvest. There the chariot of Naaman rolled when he came down from Damascus to be healed by the prophet of Israel. (II Kings v: 9.) On top of the hill is a spreading terebinth-tree, with some traces of excavation and rude ruins beneath it. There Joseph's envious brethren cast him into one of the dry pits, from which they drew him up again to sell him to a caravan of merchants, winding across the plain on their way from Midian into Egypt. (Genesis xxxvii.) Truly, many and wonderful things came to pass of old around this little green hill. And now, at the foot of it, there is a well-watered garden, with figs, oranges, almonds, vines, and tall, trembling poplars, surrounded by a hedge of prickly pear. Outside of the hedge a big, round spring of crystal water is flowing steadily over the rim of its basin of stones. There the flocks and herds are gathered, morning and evening, to drink. There the children of the tiny hamlet on the hillside come to paddle their feet in the running stream. There a caravan of Greek pilgrims, on their way from Damascus to Jerusalem for Easter, halt in front of our camp, to refresh themselves with a draught of the cool water. As we watch them from our tents there is a sudden commotion among them, a cry of pain, and then voices of dismay. George and two or three of our men run out to see what is the matter, and come hurrying back to get some cotton cloth and oil and wine. One of the pilgrims, an old woman of seventy, has fallen from her horse on the sharp stones beside the spring, breaking her wrist and cutting her head. I do not know whether the way in which they bound up that poor old stranger's wounds was surgically wise, but I know that it was humanly kind and tender. I do not know which of our various churches were represented among her helpers, but there must have been at least three, and the muleteer from Bagdad who "had no religion but sang beautiful Persian songs" was also there, and ready to help with the others. And so the parable which lighted our dusty way going down to Jericho is interpreted in our pleasant camp at Dôthân. The paths of the Creeds are many and winding; they cross and diverge; but on all of them the Good Samaritan is welcome, and I think he travels to a happy place. _A PSALM OF THE HELPERS_ _The ways of the world are full of haste and turmoil: I will sing of the tribe of helpers who travel in peace._ _He that turneth from the road to rescue another, Turneth toward his goal: He shall arrive in due time by the foot-path of mercy, God will be his guide._ _He that taketh up the burden of the fainting, Lighteneth his own load: The Almighty will put his arms underneath him, He shall lean upon the Lord._ _He that speaketh comfortable words to mourners, Healeth his own heart: In his time of grief they will return to remembrance, God will use them for balm._ _He that careth for the sick and wounded, Watcheth not alone: There are three in the darkness together, And the third is the Lord._ _Blessed is the way of the helpers: The companions of the Christ._ X GALILEE AND THE LAKE I THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON Going from Samaria into Galilee is like passing from the Old Testament into the New. There is indeed little difference in the outward landscape: the same bare lines of rolling mountains, green and gray near by, blue or purple far away; the same fertile valleys and emerald plains embosomed among the hills; the same orchards of olive-trees, not quite so large, nor so many, but always softening and shading the outlook with their touches of silvery verdure. It is the spirit of the landscape that changes; the inward view; the atmosphere of memories and associations through which we travel. We have been riding with fierce warriors and proud kings and fiery prophets of Israel, passing the sites of royal splendour and fields of ancient havoc, retracing the warpaths of the Twelve Tribes. But when we enter Galilee the keynote of our thoughts is modulated into peace. Issachar and Zebulon and Asher and Naphtali have left no trace or message for us on the plains and hills where they once lived and fought. We journey with Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of publicans and sinners, the shepherd of the lost sheep, the human embodiment of the Divine Love. This transition in our journey is marked outwardly by the crossing of the great Plain of Esdraelon, which we enter by the gateway of Jenîn. There are a few palm-trees lending a little grace to the disconsolate village, and the Turkish captain of the military post, a grizzled veteran of Plevna, invites us into the guard-room to drink coffee with him, while we wait for a dilatory telegraph operator to send a message. Then we push out upon the green sea to a brown island: the village of Zer'în, the ancient Jezreel. The wretched hamlet of adobe huts, with mud beehives plastered against the walls, stands on the lowest bench of the foothills of Mount Gilboa, opposite the equally wretched hamlet of Sûlem in a corresponding position at the base of a mountain called Little Hermon. The widespread, opulent view is haunted with old stories of battle, murder and sudden death. Down to the east we see the line of brighter green creeping out from the flanks of Mount Gilboa, marking the spring where Gideon sifted his band of warriors for the night-attack on the camp of Midian. (Judges vii: 4-23.) Under the brow of the hill are the ancient wine-presses, cut in the rock, which belonged to the vineyard of Naboth, whom Jezebel assassinated. (I Kings xxi: 1-16.) From some window of her favourite palace on this eminence, that hard, old, painted queen looked down the broad valley of Jezreel, and saw Jehu in his chariot driving furiously from Gilead to bring vengeance upon her. On those dark ridges to the south the brave Jonathan was slain by the Philistines and the desperate Saul fell upon his own sword. (I Samuel xxxi: 1-6.) Through that open valley, which slopes so gently down to the Jordan at Bethshan, the hordes of Midian and the hosts of Damascus marched against Israel. By the pass of Jenîn, Holofernes led his army in triumph until he met Judith of Bethulia and lost his head. Yonder in the corner to the northward, at the base of Mount Tabor, Deborah and Barak gathered the tribes against the Canaanites under Sisera. (Judges iv: 4-22.) Away to the westward, in the notch of Megiddo, Pharaoh-Necho's archers pierced King Josiah, and there was great mourning for him in Hadad-rimmon. (II Chronicles xxxv: 24-25; Zechariah xii: 11.) Farther still, where the mountain spurs of Galilee approach the long ridge of Carmel, Elijah put the priests of Baal to death by the Brook Kishon. (I Kings xviii: 20-40.) All over that great prairie, which makes a broad break between the highlands of Galilee and the highlands of Samaria and Judea, and opens an easy pathway rising no more than three hundred feet between the Jordan and the Mediterranean--all over that fertile, blooming area and around the edges of it are sown the legends "Of old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago." But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon, everything is tranquil and joyous. The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery _kirsenneh_, camel-provender. The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich, red-brown soil for the late crop of _doura_. The newly built railway from Haifâ to Damascus lies like a yellow string across the prairie from west to east; and from north to south a single file of two hundred camels, with merchandise for Egypt, undulate along the ancient road of the caravans, turning their ungainly heads to look at the puffing engine which creeps toward them from the distance. Larks singing in the air, storks parading beside the watercourses, falcons poising overhead, poppies and pink gladioluses and blue corn-cockles blooming through the grain,--a little village on a swell of rising ground, built for their farm hands by the rich Greeks who have bought the land and brought it under cultivation,--an air so pure and soft that it is like a caress,--all seems to speak a language of peace and promise, as if one of the old prophets were telling of the day when Jehovah shall have compassion on His people Israel and restore them. "They that dwell under His shadow shall return; they shall revive as the grain, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon." It is, indeed, not impossible that wise methods of colonization, better agriculture and gardening, the development of fruit-orchards and vineyards, and above all, more rational government and equitable taxation may one day give back to Palestine something of her old prosperity and population. If the Jews really want it no doubt they can have it. Their rich men have the money and the influence; and there are enough of their poorer folk scattered through Europe to make any land blossom like the rose, if they have the will and the patience for the slow toil of the husbandman and the vine-dresser and the shepherd and the herdsman. But the proud kingdom of David and Solomon will never be restored; not even the tributary kingdom of Herod. For the land will never again stand at the crossroads, the four-corners of the civilized world. The Suez Canal to the south, and the railways through the Lebanon and Asia Minor to the north, have settled that. They have left Palestine in a corner, off the main-travelled roads. The best that she can hope for is a restoration to quiet fruitfulness, to placid and humble industry, to olive-crowned and vine-girdled felicity, never again to power. And if that lowly re-coronation comes to her, it will not be on the stony heights around Jerusalem: it will be in the Plain of Sharon, in the outgoings of Mount Ephraim, in the green pastures of Gilead, in the lovely region of "Galilee of the Gentiles." It will not be by the sword of Gideon nor by the sceptre of Solomon, but by the sign of peace on earth and good-will among men. With thoughts like these we make our way across the verdurous inland sea of Esdraelon, out of the Old Testament into the New. Landmarks of the country of the Gospel begin to appear: the wooded dome of Mount Tabor, the little village of Nain where Jesus restored the widow's only son. (Luke vii: 11-16.) But these lie far to our right. The beacon which guides us is a glimpse of white walls and red roofs, high on a shoulder of the Galilean hills: the outlying houses of Nazareth, where the boy Jesus dwelt with His parents after their return from the flight into Egypt, and was obedient to them, and grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men. II THEIR OWN CITY NAZARETH Our camp in Nazareth is on a terrace among the olive-trees, on the eastern side of a small valley, facing the Mohammedan quarter of the town. This is distinctly the most attractive little city that we have seen in Palestine. The houses are spread out over a wider area than is usual in the East, covering three sides of a gentle depression high on the side of the Jebel es-Sikh, and creeping up the hill-slopes as if to seek a larger view and a purer air. Some of them have gardens, fair white walls, red-tiled roofs, balconies of stone or wrought iron. Even in the more closely built portion of the town the streets seem cleaner, the bazaars lighter and less malodorous, the interior courtyards into which we glance in passing more neat and homelike. Many of the doorways and living-rooms of the humbler houses are freshly whitewashed with a light-blue tint which gives them an immaculate air of cleanliness. The Nazarene women are generally good looking, and free and dignified in their bearing. The children, fairer in complexion than is common in Syria, are almost all charming with the beauty of youth, and among them are some very lovely faces of boys and girls. I do not mean to say that Nazareth appears to us an earthly paradise; only that it shines by contrast with places like Hebron and Jericho and Nablûs, even with Bethlehem, and that we find here far less of human squalor and misery to sadden us with thoughts of "What man has made of man." The population of the town is about eleven or twelve thousand, a quarter of them Mussulmans, and the rest Christians of various sects, including two or three hundred Protestants. The people used to have rather a bad reputation for turbulence; but we see no signs of it, either in the appearance of the city or in the demeanour of the inhabitants. The children and the townsfolk whom we meet in the streets, and of whom we ask our way now and then, are civil and friendly. The man who comes to the camp to sell us antique coins and lovely vases of iridescent glass dug from the tombs of Tyre and Sidon, may be an inveterate humbug, but his manners are good and his prices are low. The soft-voiced women and lustrous-eyed girls who hang about the Lady's tent, persuading her to buy their small embroideries and lace-work and trinkets, are gentle and ingratiating, though persistent. I am honestly of the opinion that Christian mission-schools and hospitals have done a great deal for Nazareth. We go this morning to visit the schools of the English Church Missionary Society, where Miss Newton is conducting an admirable and most successful work for the girls of Nazareth. She is away on a visit to some of her outlying stations; but the dark-eyed, happy-looking Syrian teacher shows us all the classes. There are five of them, and every room is full and bright and orderly. On the Christian side, the older girls sing a hymn for us, in their high voices and quaint English accent, about Jesus stilling the storm on Galilee, and the intermediate girls and the tiny co-educated boys and girls in the kindergarten go through various pretty performances. Then the teacher leads us across the street to the two Moslem classes, and we cannot tell the difference between them and the Christian children, except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and the recitation of "The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one blind girl who recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about ten years carries her baby-brother in her arms. Two little laggards, (they were among the group at our camp early in the morning), arrive late, weeping out their excuses to the teacher. She hears them with a kind, humorous look on her face, gives them a soft rebuke and a task, and sends them to their seats, their tears suddenly transformed to smiles. From the schools we go to the hospital of the British Medical Mission, a little higher up the hill. We find young Doctor Scrimgeour, who has lately come out from Edinburgh University, and his white-uniformed, cheerful, busy nurses, tasked to the limit of their strength by the pressure of their work, but cordial and simple in their welcome. As I walk with the doctor on his rounds I see every ward full, and all kinds of calamity and suffering waiting for the relief and help of his kind, skilful knife. Here are hernia, and tuberculous glands, and cataract, and stone, and bone tuberculosis, and a score of other miseries; and there, on the table, with pale, dark face and mysterious eyes, lies a man whose knee has been shattered by a ball from a Martini rifle in an affray with robbers. "Was he one of the robbers," I ask, "or one of the robbed?" "I really don't know," says the doctor, "but in a few minutes I am going to do my best for him." Is not this Christ's work that is still doing in Christ's town, this teaching of the children, this helping of the sick and wounded, for His sake, and in His name? Yet there are silly folk who say they do not believe in missions. There are a few so-called sacred places and shrines in Nazareth--the supposed scene of the Annunciation; the traditional Workshop of Joseph; the alleged _Mensa Christi_, a flat stone which He is said to have used as a table when He ate with His disciples; and so on. But all these uncertain relics and memorials, as usual, are inclosed in chapels, belit with lamps, and encircled with ceremonial. The very spring at which the Virgin Mary must have often filled her pitcher, (for it is the only flowing fountain in the town), now rises beneath the Greek Church of Saint Gabriel, and is conducted past the altar in a channel of stone where the pilgrims bathe their eyes and faces. To us, who are seeking our Holy Land out-of-doors, these shut-in shrines and altared memorials are less significant than what we find in the open, among the streets and on the surrounding hillsides. The Virgin's Fountain, issuing from the church, flows into a big, stone basin under a round arch. Here, as often as we pass, we see the maidens and the mothers of Nazareth, with great earthern vessels poised upon their shapely heads, coming with merry talk and laughter, to draw water. Even so the mother of Jesus must have come to this fountain many a time, perhaps with her wondrous boy running beside her, clasping her hand or a fold of her bright-coloured garment. Perhaps, when the child was little she carried Him on her shoulder, as the women carry their children to-day. Passing through a street, we look into the interior of a carpenter-shop, with its simple tools, its little pile of new lumber, its floor littered with chips and shavings, and its air full of the pleasant smell of freshly cut wood. There are a few articles of furniture which the carpenter has made: a couple of chairs, a table, a stool: and he himself, with his leg stretched out and his piece of wood held firmly by his naked toes, is working busily at a tiny bed which needs only a pair of rockers to become a cradle. Outside the door of the shop a boy of ten or twelve is cutting some boards and slats, and putting them neatly together. We ask him what he is making. "A box," he answers, "a box for some doves"--and then bends his head over his absorbing task. Even so Jesus must have worked at the shop of Joseph, the carpenter, and learned His handicraft. [Illustration: The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth.] Let us walk up, at eventide, to the top of the hill behind the town. Here is one of the loveliest views in all Palestine. The sun is setting and the clear-obscure of twilight already rests over the streets and houses, the minarets and spires, the slender cypresses and round olive-trees and grotesque hedges of cactus. But on the heights the warm radiance from the west pours its full flood, lighting up all the flowerets of delicate pink flax and golden chrysanthemum and blue campanula with which the grass is broidered. Far and wide that roseate illumination spreads itself; changing the snowy mantle of distant Hermon, the great Sheikh of Mountains, from ermine to flamingo feathers; making the high hills of Naphtali and the excellency of Carmel glow as if with soft, transfiguring, inward fire; touching the little town of Saffûriyeh below us, where they say that the Virgin Mary was born, and the city of Safed, thirty miles away on the lofty shoulder of Jebel Jermak; suffusing the haze that fills the Valley of the Jordan, and the long bulwarks of the Other-Side, with hues of mauve and purple; and bathing the wide expanse of the western sea with indescribable splendours, over which the flaming sun poises for a moment beneath the edge of a low-hung cloud. On this hilltop, I doubt not, the boy Jesus often filled His hands with flowers. Here He could watch the creeping caravans of Arabian merchants, and the glittering legions of Roman soldiers, and the slow files of Jewish pilgrims, coming up from the Valley of Jezreel and stretching out across the Plain of Esdraelon. Hither, at the evening hour, He came as a youth to find the blessing of wide and tranquil thought. Here, when the burden of manhood pressed upon Him, He rested after the day's work, free from that sadness which often touches us in the vision of earth's transient beauty, because He saw far beyond the horizon into the spirit-world, where there is no night, nor weariness, nor sin, nor death. For nearly thirty years He must have lived within sight of this hilltop. And then, one day, He came back from a journey to the Jordan and Jerusalem, and entered into the little synagogue at the foot of this hill, and began to preach to His townsfolk His glad tidings of spiritual liberty and brotherhood and eternal life. But they were filled with scorn and wrath. His words rebuked them, stung them, inflamed them with hatred. They laid violent hands on Him, and led Him out to the brow of the hill,--perhaps it was yonder on that steep, rocky peak to the south of the town, looking back toward the country of the Old Testament,--to cast Him down headlong. Yet I think there must have been a few friends and lovers of His in that disdainful and ignorant crowd; for He passed through the midst of them unharmed, and went His way to the home of Peter and Andrew and John and Philip, beside the Sea of Galilee, never to come back to Nazareth. III A WEDDING IN CANA OF GALILEE We thought to save a little time on our journey, and perhaps to spare ourselves a little jolting on the hard high-road, by sending the saddle-horses ahead with the caravan, and taking a carriage for the sixteen-mile drive to Tiberias. When we came to the old sarcophagus which serves as a drinking trough at the spring outside the village of Cana, a strange thing befell us. We had halted for a moment to refresh the horses. Suddenly there was a sound of furious galloping on the road behind us. A score of cavaliers in Bedouin dress, with guns and swords, came after us in hot haste. The leaders dashed across the open space beside the spring, wheeled their foaming horses and dashed back again. "Is this our affair with robbers, at last?" we asked George. He laughed a little. "No," said he, "this is the beginning of a wedding in Kafr Kennâ. The bridegroom and his friends come over from some other village where they live, to show off a bit of _fantasia_ to the bride and her friends. They carry her back with them after the marriage. We wait a while and see how they ride." The horses were gayly caparisoned with ribbons and tassels and embroidered saddle-cloths. The riders were handsome, swarthy fellows with haughty faces. Their eyes glanced sideways at us to see whether we were admiring them, as they shouted their challenges to one another and raced wildly up and down the rock-strewn course, with their robes flying and their horses' sides bloody with spurring. One of the men was a huge coal-black Nubian who brandished a naked sword as he rode. Others whirled their long muskets in the air and yelled furiously. The riding was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on the headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly, the rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of the heel sent him flying back over the course. Presently there was a sound of singing and clapping hands behind the high cactus-hedges to our left, and from a little lane the bridal procession walked up to take the high-road to the village. There were a dozen men in front, firing guns and shouting, then came the women, with light veils of gauze over their faces, singing shrilly, and in the midst of them, in gay attire, but half-concealed with long, dark mantles, the bride and "the virgins, her companions, in raiment of needlework." As they saw the photographic camera pointed at them they laughed, and crowded closer together, and drew the ends of their dark mantles over their heads. So they passed up the road, their shrill song broken a little by their laughter; and the company of horsemen, the bridegroom and his friends, wheeled into line, two by two, and trotted after them into the village. This was all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kennâ--just a vivid, mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other, and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were guests at a wedding long ago. IV TIBERIAS It is one of the ironies of fate that the lake which saw the greater part of the ministry of Jesus, should take its modern name from a city built by Herod Antipas, and called after one of the most infamous of the Roman Emperors,--"the Sea of Tiberias." Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers--rich, monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and water-plantains seem to be more important. The landscape saddens around us, under the deepening haze of the desert-wind, the sombre Sherkîyeh. There are no golden sunbeams, no cool cloud-shadows, only a gray and melancholy illumination growing ever fainter and more nebulous as the day declines, and the outlines of the hills fade away from the dim, silent, forsaken plain through which we move. We are crossing the battlefield where the soldiers of Napoleon, under the brave Junot, fought desperately against the overwhelming forces of the Turks. Yonder, away to the left, in the mysterious haze, the double "Horns of Hattin" rise like a shadowy exhalation. That is said to be the mountain where Jesus gathered the multitude around Him and spoke His new beatitudes on the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure in heart. It is certainly the place where the hosts of the Crusaders met the army of Saladin, in the fierce heat of a July day, seven hundred years ago, and while the burning grass and weeds and brush flamed around them, were cut to pieces and trampled and utterly consumed. There the new Kingdom of Jerusalem,--the last that was won with the sword,--went down in ruin around the relics of "the true cross," which its soldiers carried as their talisman; and Guy de Lusignan, their King, was captured. The noble prisoners were invited by Saladin to his tent, and he offered them sherbets, cooled with snow from Hermon, to slake their feverish thirst. When they were refreshed, the conqueror ordered them to be led out and put to the sword,--just yonder at the foot of the Mount of Beatitudes. From terrace to terrace of the falling moor we roll along the winding road through the brumous twilight, until we come within sight of the black, ruined walls, the gloomy towers, the huddled houses of the worn-out city of Tiberias. She is like an ancient beggar sitting on a rocky cape beside the lake and bathing her feet in the invisible water. The gathering dusk lends a sullen and forlorn aspect to the place. Behind us rise the shattered volcanic crags and cliffs of basalt; before us glimmer pallid and ghostly touches of light from the hidden waves; a few lamps twinkle here and there in the dormant town. This was the city which Herod Antipas built for the capital of his Province of Galilee. He laid its foundations in an ancient graveyard, and stretched its walls three miles along the lake, adorning it with a palace, a forum, a race-course, and a large synagogue. But to strict Jews the place was unclean, because it was defiled with Roman idols, and because its builders had polluted themselves by digging up the bones of the dead. Herod could get few Jews to live in his city, and it became a catch-all for the off-scourings of the land, people of all creeds and none, aliens, mongrels, soldiers of fortune, and citizens of the high-road. It was the strongest fortress and probably the richest town of Galilee in Christ's day, but so far as we know He never entered it. After the fall of Jerusalem, strangely enough, the Jews made it their favourite city, the seat of their Sanhedrim and the centre of rabbinical learning. Here the famous Rabbis Jehuda and Akîba and the philosopher Maimonides taught. Here the Mishna and the Gemara were written. And here, to-day, two-thirds of the five thousand inhabitants are Jews, many of them living on the charity of their kindred in Europe, and spending their time in the study of the Talmud while they wait for the Messiah who shall restore the kingdom to Israel. You may see their flat fur caps, dingy gabardines, long beards and melancholy faces on every street in the drowsy little city, dreaming (among fleas and fevers) of I know not what impossible glories to come. You may see, also, on the hill near the Serâi, the splendid Mission Hospital of the United Free Church of Scotland, where for twenty-three years Doctor Torrance has been ministering to the body and soul of Tiberias in the name of Jesus. Do you find the building too large and fine, the lovely garden too beautiful with flowers, the homes of the doctors, and teachers, and helpers of the sick and wounded, too clean and healthful and orderly? Do you say "To what purpose is this waste?" Then I know not how to measure your ignorance. For you have failed to see that this is the embassy of the only King who still cares for the true welfare of this forsaken, bedraggled, broken-down Tiberias. On the evening of our arrival, however, all these things are hidden from us in the dusk. We drive past the ruined gate of the city, a mile along the southern road toward the famous Hot Baths. Here, on a little terrace above the lake, between the road and the black basalt cliffs, our camp is pitched, and through the darkness 'We hear the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds.' In the freshness of the early morning the sunrise pours across the lake into our tents. There is a light, cool breeze blowing from the north, rippling the clear, green water, (of a hue like the stone called _aqua marina_), with a thousand flaws and wrinkles, which catch the flashing light and reflect the deep blue sky, and change beneath the shadow of floating clouds to innumerable colours of lapis lazuli, and violet, and purple, and peacock blue. The old comparison of the shape of the lake to a lute, or a harp, is not clear to us from the point at which we stand: for the northwestward sweep of the bay of Gennesaret, which reaches a breadth of nearly eight miles from the eastern shore, is hidden from us by a promontory, where the dark walls and white houses of Tiberias slope to the water. But we can see the full length of the lake, from the depression of the Jordan Valley at the southern end, to the shores of Bethsaida and Capernaum at the foot of the northern hills, beyond which the dazzling whiteness of Hermon is visible. Opposite rise the eastern heights of the Jaulân, with almost level top and steep flanks, furrowed by rocky ravines, descending precipitously to a strip of smooth, green shore. Behind us the mountains are more broken and varied in form, lifted into sharper peaks and sloped into broader valleys. The whole aspect of the scene is like a view in the English Lake country, say on Windermere or Ullswater; only there are no forests or thickets to shade and soften it. Every edge of the hills is like a silhouette against the sky; every curve of the shore clear and distinct. Of the nine rich cities which once surrounded the lake, none is left except this ragged old Tiberias. Of the hundreds of fishing boats and passenger vessels which once crossed its waters, all have vanished except half a dozen little pleasure skiffs kept for the use of tourists. Of the armies and caravans which once travelled these shores, all have passed by into the eternal far-away, except the motley string of visitors to the Hot Springs, who were coming up to bathe in the medicinal waters in the days of Joshua when the place was called Hammath, and in the time of the Greeks when it was named Emmaus, and who are still trotting along the road in front of our camp toward the big, white dome and dirty bath-houses of Hummam. They come from all parts of Syria, from Damascus and the sea-coast, from Judea and the Haurân; Greeks and Arabs and Turks and Maronites and Jews; on foot, on donkey-back, and in litters. Now, it is a cavalcade of Druses from the Lebanon, men, women and children, riding on tired horses. Now, it is a procession of Hebrews walking with a silken canopy over the sacred books of their law. In the morning we visit Tiberias, buy some bread and fish in the market, and go through the Mission Hospital, where one of the gentle nurses binds up a foolish little wound on my wrist. In the afternoon we sail on the southern part of the lake. The boatmen laugh at my fruitless fishing with artificial flies, and catch a few small fish for us with their nets in the shallow, muddy places along the shore. The wind is strange and variable, now sweeping down in violent gusts that bend the long arm of the lateen sail, now dying away to a dead calm through which we row lazily home. I remember a small purple kingfisher poising in the air over a shoal, his head bent downward, his wings vibrating swiftly. He drops like a shot and comes up out of the water with a fish held crosswise in his bill. With measured wing-strokes he flits to the top of a rock to eat his supper, and a robber-gull flaps after him to take it away. But the industrious kingfisher is too quick to be robbed. He bolts his fish with a single gulp. We eat ours in more leisurely fashion, by the light of the candles in our peaceful tent. V MEMORIES OF THE LAKE A hundred little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to make them visible or significant in the bare words of description? Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the lake; the single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of Magdala; the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum and Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from the lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back into the western mountains. The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and in memory they have a mystical meaning and beauty, because they belong to the country where Jesus walked with His fishermen-disciples, and took the little children in His arms, and healed the sick, and opened blind eyes to behold ineffable things. Every touch that brings that country nearer to us in our humanity and makes it more real, more simple, more vivid, is precious. For the one irreparable loss that could befall us in religion,--a loss that is often threatened by our abstract and theoretical ways of thinking and speaking about Him,--would be to lose Jesus out of the lowly and familiar ways of our mortal life. He entered these lowly ways as the Son of Man in order to make us sure that we are the children of God. Therefore I am glad of every hour spent by the Lake of Galilee. * * * * * I remember, when we came across in our boat to Tell Hûm, where the ancient city of Capernaum stood, the sun was shining with a fervent heat and the air of the lake, six hundred and eighty feet below the level of the sea, was soft and languid. The gray-bearded German monk who came to meet us at the landing and admitted us to the inclosure of his little monastery where he was conducting the excavation of the ruins, wore a cork helmet and spectacles. He had been heated, even above the ninety degrees Fahrenheit which the thermometer marked, by the rudeness of a couple of tourists who had just tried to steal a photograph of his work. He had foiled them by opening their camera and blotting the film with sunlight, and had then sent them away with fervent words. But as he walked with us among his roses and Pride of India trees, his spirit cooled within him, and he showed himself a learned and accomplished man. He told us how he had been working there for two or three years, keeping records and drawings and photographs of everything that was found; going back to the Franciscan convent at Jerusalem for his short vacation in the heat of mid-summer; putting his notes in order, reading and studying, making ready to write his book on Capernaum. He showed us the portable miniature railway which he had made; and the little iron cars to carry away the great piles of rubbish and earth; and the rich columns, carved lintels, marble steps and shell-niches of the splendid building which his workmen had uncovered. The outline was clear and perfect. We could see how the edifice of fine, white limestone had been erected upon an older foundation of basalt, and how an earthquake had twisted it and shaken down its pillars. It was undoubtedly a synagogue, perhaps the very same which the rich Roman centurion built for the Jews in Capernaum (Luke vii: 5), and where Jesus healed the man who had an unclean spirit. (Luke iv: 31-37.) Of all the splendours of that proud city of the lake, once spreading along a mile of the shore, nothing remained but these tumbled ruins in a lonely, fragrant garden, where the patient father was digging with his Arab workmen and getting ready to write his book. "_Weh dir, Capernaum_" I quoted. The _padre_ nodded his head gravely. "_Ja, ja,_" said he, "_es ist buchstäblich erfüllt!_" * * * * * I remember the cool bath in the lake, at a point between Bethsaida and Capernaum, where a tangle of briony and honeysuckle made a shelter around a shell-strewn beach, and the rosy oleanders bloomed beside an inflowing stream. I swam out a little way and floated, looking up into the deep sky, while the waves plashed gently and caressingly around my face. * * * * * I remember the old Arab fisherman, who was camped with his family in a black tent on a meadow where several lively brooks came in (one of them large enough to turn a mill). I persuaded him by gestures to wade out into the shallow part of the lake and cast his bell-net for fish. He gathered the net in his hand, and whirled it around his head. The leaden weights around the bottom spread out in a wide circle and splashed into the water. He drew the net toward him by the cord, the ring of sinkers sweeping the bottom, and lifted it slowly, carefully--but no fish! Then I rigged up my pocket fly-rod with a gossamer leader and two tiny trout-flies, a Royal Coach-man and a Queen of the Water, and began to cast along the crystal pools and rapids of the larger stream. How merrily the fish rose there, and in the ripples where the brooks ran out into the lake. There were half a dozen different kinds of fish, but I did not know the name of any of them. There was one that looked like a black bass, and others like white perch and sunfish; and one kind was very much like a grayling. But they were not really of the _salmo_ family, I knew, for none of them had the soft fin in front of the tail. How surprised the old fisherman was when he saw the fish jumping at those tiny hooks with feathers; and how round the eyes of his children were as they looked on; and how pleased they were with the _bakhshîsh_ which they received, including a couple of baithooks for the eldest boy! * * * * * I remember the place where we ate our lunch in a small grove of eucalyptus-trees, with sweet-smelling yellow acacias blossoming around us. It was near the site which some identify with the ancient Bethsaida, but others say that it was farther to the east, and others again say that Capernaum was really located here. The whole problem of these lake cities, where they stood, how they supported such large populations (not less than fifteen thousand people in each), is difficult and may never be solved. But it did not trouble us deeply. We were content to be beside the same waters, among the same hills, that Jesus knew and loved. It was here, along this shore, that He found Simon and his brother Andrew casting their net, and James and his brother John mending theirs, and called them to come with Him. These fishermen, with their frank and free hearts unspoiled by the sophistries of the Pharisees, with their minds unhampered by social and political ambitions, followers of a vocation which kept them out of doors and reminded them daily of their dependence on the bounty of God,--these children of nature, and others like them, were the men whom He chose for His disciples, the listeners who had ears to hear His marvellous gospel. It was here, on these pale, green waves, that He sat in a little boat, near the shore, and spoke to the multitude who had gathered to hear Him. He spoke of the deep and tranquil confidence that man may learn from nature, from the birds and the flowers. He spoke of the infinite peace of the heart that knows the true meaning of love, which is giving and blessing, and the true secret of courage, which is loyalty to the truth. He spoke of the God whom we can trust as a child trusts its father, and of the Heaven which waits for all who do good to their fellowmen. He spoke of the wisdom whose fruit is not pride but humility, of the honour whose crown is not authority but service, of the purity which is not outward but inward, and of the joy which lasts forever. He spoke of forgiveness for the guilty, of compassion for the weak, of hope for the desperate. He told these poor and lowly folk that their souls were unspeakably precious, and that He had come to save them and make them inheritors of an eternal kingdom. He told them that He had brought this message from God, their Father and His Father. He spoke with the simplicity of one who knows, with the assurance of one who has seen, with the certainty and clearness of one for whom doubt does not exist. He offered Himself, in His stainless purity, in His supreme love, as the proof and evidence of His gospel, the bread of Heaven, the water of life, the Saviour of sinners, the light of the world. "Come unto Me," He said, "and I will give you rest." This was the heavenly music that came into the world by the Lake of Galilee. And its voice has spread through the centuries, comforting the sorrowful, restoring the penitent, cheering the despondent, and telling all who will believe it, that our human life is worth living, because it gives each one of us the opportunity to share in the Love which is sovereign and immortal. _A PSALM OF THE GOOD TEACHER_ _The Lord is my teacher: I shall not lose the way to wisdom._ _He leadeth me in the lowly path of learning, He prepareth a lesson for me every day; He findeth the clear fountains of instruction, Little by little he showeth me the beauty of the truth._ _The world is a great book that he hath written, He turneth the leaves for me slowly; They are all inscribed with images and letters, His face poureth light on the pictures and the words._ _Then am I glad when I perceive his meaning, He taketh me by the hand to the hill-top of vision; In the valley also he walketh beside me, And in the dark places he whispereth to my heart._ _Yea, though my lesson be hard it is not hopeless, For the Lord is very patient with his slow scholar; He will wait awhile for my weakness, He will help me to read the truth through tears._ _Surely thou wilt enlighten me daily by joy and by sorrow: And lead me at last, O Lord, to the perfect knowledge of thee._ XI THE SPRINGS OF JORDAN I THE HILL-COUNTRY OF NAPHTALI Naphtali was the northernmost of the tribes of Israel, a bold and free highland clan, inhabiting a country of rugged hills and steep mountainsides, with fertile vales and little plains between. "Naphtali is a hind let loose," said the old song of the Sons of Jacob (Genesis xlix: 21); and as we ride up from the Lake of Galilee on our way northward, we feel the meaning of the poet's words. A people dwelling among these rock-strewn heights, building their fortress-towns on sharp pinnacles, and climbing these steep paths to the open fields of tillage or of war, would be like wild deer in their spirit of liberty, and they would need to be as nimble and sure-footed. Our good little horses are shod with round plates of iron, and they clatter noisily among the loose stones and slip on the rocky ledges, as we strike over the hills from Capernaum, without a path, to join the main trail at Khân Yubb Yûsuf. We are skirting fields of waving wheat and barley, but there are no houses to be seen. Far and wide the sea of verdure rolls around us, broken only by ridges of grayish rock and scarped cliffs of reddish basalt. We wade saddle-deep in herbage; broad-leaved fennel and trembling reeds; wild asparagus and artichokes; a hundred kinds of flowering weeds; acres of last year's thistles, standing blanched and ghostlike in the summer sunshine. The phantom city of Safed gleams white from its far-away hilltop,--the latest and perhaps the last of the famous seats of rabbinical learning. It is one of the sacred places of modern Judaism. No Hebrew pilgrim fails to visit it. Here, they say, the Messiah will one day reveal himself, and after establishing His kingdom, will set out to conquer the world. But it is not to the city, shining like a flake of mica from the greenness of the distant mountain, that our looks and thoughts are turning. It is backward to the lucent sapphire of the Lake of Galilee, upon whose shores our hearts have seen the secret vision, heard the inward message of the Man of Nazareth. Ridge after ridge reveals new outlooks toward its tranquil loveliness. Turn after turn, our winding way leads us to what we think must be the parting view. Sleeping in still, forsaken beauty among the sheltering hills, and open to the cloudless sky which makes its water like a little heaven, it seems to silently return our farewell looks with pleading for remembrance. Now, after one more round among the inclosing ridges, another vista opens, the widest and the most serene of all. Farewell, dear Lake of Jesus! Our eyes may never rest on thee again; but surely they will not forget thee. For now, as often we come to some fair water in the Western mountains, or unfold the tent by some lone lakeside in the forests of the North, the lapping of thy waves will murmur through our thoughts; thy peaceful brightness will arise before us; we shall see the rose-flush of thy oleanders, and the waving of thy reeds; the sweet, faint smell of thy gold-flowered acacias will return to us from purple orchids and white lilies. Let the blessing that is thine go with us everywhere in God's great out-of-doors, and our hearts never lose the comradeship of Him who made thee holiest among all the waters of the world! * * * * * The Khân of Joseph's Pit is a ruin; a huge and broken building deserted by the caravans which used to throng this highway from Damascus to the cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels, horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts of burden; that only a few hours to the southward there was once a ring of splendid, thriving, bustling towns around the shores of Galilee, out of which and into which the multitudes were forever journeying. Now they are all gone from the road, and the vast wayside caravanserai is sleeping into decay--a dormitory for bats and serpents. What is it that makes the wreck of an inn more lonely and forbidding than any other ruin? A few miles more of riding along the flanks of the mountains bring us to a place where we turn a corner suddenly, and come upon the full view of the upper basin of the Jordan; a vast oval green cup, with the little Lake of Huleh lying in it like a blue jewel, and the giant bulk of Mount Hermon towering beyond it, crowned and cloaked with silver snows. Up the steep and slippery village street of Rosh Pinnah, a modern Jewish colony founded by the Rothschilds in 1882, we scramble wearily to our camping-ground for the night. Above us on a hilltop is the old Arab village of Jaûneh, brown, picturesque, and filthy. Around us are the colonists' new houses, with their red-tiled roofs and white walls. Two straight streets running in parallel lines up the hillside are roughly paved with cobble-stones and lined with trees; mulberries, white-flowered acacias, eucalyptus, feathery pepper-trees, and rose-bushes. Water runs down through pipes from a copious spring on the mountain, and flows abundantly into every house, plashing into covered reservoirs and open stone basins for watering the cattle. Below us the long avenues of eucalyptus, the broad vineyards filled with low, bushy vines, the immense orchards of pale-green almond-trees, the smiling wheat-fields, slope to the lake and encircle its lower end. The children who come to visit our camp on the terrace wear shoes and stockings, carry school-books in their bags, and bring us offerings of little bunches of sweet-smelling garden roses and pendulous locust-blooms. We are a thousand years away from the Khân of Joseph's Pit; but we can still see the old mud village on the height against the sunset, and the camp-fires gleaming in front of the black Bedouin tents far below, along the edge of the marshes. We are perched between the old and the new, between the nomad and the civilized man, and the unchanging white head of Hermon looks down upon us all. In the morning, on the way down, I stop at the door of a house and fall into talk with an intelligent, schoolmasterish sort of man, a Roumanian, who speaks a little weird German. Is the colony prospering? Yes, but not so fast that it makes them giddy. What are they raising? Wheat and barley, a few vegetables, a great deal of almonds and grapes. Good harvests? Some years good, some years bad; the Arabs bad every year, terrible thieves; but the crops are plentiful most of the time. Are the colonists happy, contented? A thin smile wrinkles around the man's lips as he answers with the statement of a world-wide truth, "_Ach, Herr, der Ackerbauer ist nie zufrieden._" ("Ah, Sir, the farmer is never contented.") II THE WATERS OF MEROM All day we ride along the hills skirting the marshy plain of Huleh. Here the springs and parent streams of Jordan are gathered, behind the mountains of Naphtali and at the foot of Hermon, as in a great green basin about the level of the ocean, for the long, swift rush down the sunken trench which leads to the deep, sterile bitterness of the Dead Sea. Was there ever a river that began so fair and ended in such waste and desolation? Here in this broad, level, well-watered valley, along the borders of these vast beds of papyrus and rushes intersected by winding, hidden streams, Joshua and his fierce clans of fighting men met the Kings of the north with their horses and chariots, "at the waters of Merom," in the last great battle for the possession of the Promised Land. It was a furious conflict, the hordes of footmen against the squadrons of horsemen; but the shrewd command that came from Joshua decided it: "Hough their horses and burn their chariots with fire." The Canaanites and the Amorites and the Hittites and the Hivites were swept from the field, driven over the western mountains, and the Israelites held the Jordan from Jericho to Hermon. (Joshua xi:1-15.) The springs that burst from the hills to the left of our path and run down to the sluggish channels of the marsh on our right are abundant and beautiful. Here is 'Ain Mellâha, a crystal pool a hundred yards wide, with wild mint and watercress growing around it, white and yellow lilies floating on its surface, and great fish showing themselves in the transparent open spaces among the weeds, where the water bubbles up from the bottom through dancing hillocks of clean, white sand and shining pebbles. Here is 'Ain el-Belâta, a copious stream breaking forth from the rocks beneath a spreading terebinth-tree, and rippling down with merry rapids toward the jungle of rustling reeds and plumed papyrus. While luncheon is preparing in the shade of the terebinth, I wade into the brook and cast my fly along the ripples. A couple of ragged, laughing, bare-legged Bedouin boys follow close behind me, watching the new sport with wonder. The fish are here, as lively and gamesome as brook trout, plump, golden-sided fellows ten or twelve inches long. The feathered hooks tempt them, and they rise freely to the lure. My tattered pages are greatly excited, and make impromptu pouches in the breast of their robes, stuffing in the fish until they look quite fat. The catch is enough for a good supper for their whole family, and a dozen more for a delicious fish-salad at our camp that night. What kind of fish are they? I do not know: doubtless something Scriptural and Oriental. But they taste good; and so far as there is any record, they are the first fish ever taken with the artificial fly in the sources of the Jordan. The plain of Huleh is full of life. Flocks of waterfowl and solemn companies of storks circle over the swamps. The wet meadows are covered with herds of black buffaloes, wallowing in the ditches, or staring at us sullenly under their drooping horns. Little bunches of horses, and brood mares followed by their long-legged, awkward foals, gallop beside our cavalcade, whinnying and kicking up their heels in the joy of freedom. Flocks of black goats clamber up the rocky hillsides, following the goatherd who plays upon his rustic pipe quavering and fantastic music, softened by distance into a wild sweetness. Small black cattle with white faces march in long files across the pastures, or wander through the thickets of bulrushes and papyrus and giant fennel, appearing and disappearing as the screen of broad leaves and trembling plumes close behind them. A few groups of huts made out of wattled reeds stand beside the sluggish watercourses, just as they did when Macgregor in his Rob Roy canoe attempted to explore this impenetrable morass forty years ago. Along the higher ground are lines of black Bedouin tents, arranged in transitory villages. These flitting habitations of the nomads, who come down from the hills and lofty deserts to fatten their flocks and herds among unfailing pasturage, are all of one pattern. The low, flat roof of black goats' hair is lifted by the sticks which support it, into half a dozen little peaks, perhaps five or six feet from the ground. Between these peaks the cloth sags down, and is made fast along the edges by intricate and confusing guy-ropes. The tent is shallow, not more than six feet deep, and from twelve to thirty feet long, according to the wealth of the owner and the size of his family,--two things which usually correspond. The sides and the partitions are sometimes made of woven reeds, like coarse matting. Within there is an apartment (if you can call it so) for the family, a pen for the chickens, and room for dogs, cats, calves and other creatures to find shelter. The fireplace of flat stones is in the centre, and the smoke oozes out through the roof and sides. The Bedouin men, in flowing _burnous_ and _keffiyeh_, with the _'agâl_ of dark twisted camel's hair like a crown upon their heads, are almost all handsome: clean-cut, haughty faces, bold in youth and dignified in old age. The women look weatherbeaten and withered beside them. Even when you see a fine face in the dark blue mantle or under the white head-dress, it is almost always disfigured by purplish tattooing around the lips and chin. Some of the younger girls are beautiful, and most of the children are entrancing. They play games in a ring, with songs and clapping hands; the boys charge up and down among the tents with wild shouts, driving a round bone or a donkey's hoof with their shinny-sticks; the girls chase one another and hide among the bushes in some primeval form of "tag" or "hide-and-seek." A merry little mob pursues us as we ride through each encampment, with outstretched hands and half-jesting, half-plaintive cries of "_Bakhshîsh! bakhshîsh!_" They do not really expect anything. It is only a part of the game. And when the Lady holds out her open hand to them and smiles as she repeats, "_Bakhshîsh! bakhshîsh!_" they take the joke quickly, and run away, laughing, to their sports. At one village, in the dusk, there is an open-air wedding: a row of men dancing; a ring of women and girls looking on; musicians playing the shepherd's pipe and the drum; maidens running beside us to beg a present for the invisible bride: a rude charcoal sketch of human society, primitive, irrepressible, confident, encamped for a moment on the shadowy border of the fecund and unconquerable marsh. Thus we traverse the strange country of Bedouinia, travelling all day in the presence of the Great Sheikh of Mountains, and sleep at night on the edge of a little village whose name we shall never know. A dozen times we ask George for the real name of that place, and a dozen times he repeats it for us with painstaking courtesy; it sounds like a compromise between a cough and a sneeze. III WHERE JORDAN RISES The Jordan is assembled in the northern end of the basin of Huleh under a mysterious curtain of tall, tangled water-plants. Into that ancient and impenetrable place of hiding and blending enter many little springs and brooks, but the main sources of the river are three. The first and the longest is the Hasbâni, a strong, foaming stream that comes down with a roar from the western slope of Hermon. We cross it by the double arch of a dilapidated Saracen bridge, looking down upon thickets of oleander, willow, tamarisk and woodbine. The second and largest source springs from the rounded hill of Tel el-Kâdi, the supposed site of the ancient city of Dan, the northern border of Israel. Here the wandering, landless Danites, finding a country to their taste, put the too fortunate inhabitants of Leshem to the sword and took possession. And here King Jereboam set up one of his idols of the golden calf. There is no vestige of the city, no trace of the idolatrous shrine, on the huge mound which rises thirty or forty feet above the plain. But it is thickly covered with trees: poplars and oaks and wild figs and acacias and wild olives. A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our heads. After lunch, instead of sleeping, two of us wander into the dense grove that spreads over the mound. Tiny streams of water trickle through it: blackberry-vines and wild grapes are twisted in the undergrowth; ferns and flowery nettles and mint grow waist-high. The main spring is at the western base of the mound. The water comes bubbling and whirling out from under a screen of wild figs and vines, forming a pool of palest, clearest blue, a hundred feet in diameter. Out of this pool the new-born river rushes, foaming and shouting down the hillside, through lines of flowering styrax and hawthorn and willows trembling over its wild joy. The third and most impressive of the sources of Jordan is at Bâniyâs, on one of the foothills of Hermon. Our path thither leads us up from Dan, through high green meadows, shaded by oak-trees, sprinkled with innumerable blossoming shrubs and bushes, and looking down upon the lower fields blue with lupins and vetches, or golden with yellow chrysanthemums beneath which the red glow of the clover is dimly burning like a secret fire. Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters. [Illustration: The Approach to Bâniyâs.] An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the brink of its downward leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the town of Bâniyâs, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets, pass into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy limestone, with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark cavern gaping in the centre. A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From this slope of débris, sixty or seventy feet long, a line of springs gush forth in singing foam. Under the shadow of trembling poplars and broad-boughed sycamores, amid the lush greenery of wild figs and grapes, bracken and briony and morning-glory, drooping maidenhair and flower-laden styrax, the hundred rills swiftly run together and flow away with one impulse, a full-grown little river. There is an immemorial charm about the place. Mysteries of grove and fountain, of cave and hilltop, bewitch it with the magic of Nature's life, ever springing and passing, flowering and fading, basking in the open sunlight and hiding in the secret places of the earth. It is such a place as Claude Lorraine might have imagined and painted as the scene of one of his mythical visions of Arcadia; such a place as antique fancy might have chosen and decked with altars for the worship of unseen dryads and nymphs, oreads and naiads. And so, indeed, it was chosen, and so it was decked. Here, in all probability, was Baal-Gad, where the Canaanites paid their reverence to the waters that spring from underground. Here, certainly, was Paneas of the Greeks, where the rites of Pan and all the nymphs were celebrated. Here Herod the Great built a marble temple to Augustus the Tolerant, on this terrace of rock above the cave. Here, no doubt, the statue of the Emperor looked down upon a strange confusion of revelries and wild offerings in honour of the unknown powers of Nature. All these things have withered, crumbled, vanished. There are no more statues, altars, priests, revels and sacrifices at Bâniyâs--only the fragment of an inscription around one of the votive niches carved on the cliff, which records the fact that the niche was made by a certain person who at that time was "Priest of Pan." _But the name of this_ _person who wished to be remembered is precisely the part of the carving which is illegible._ Ironical inscription! Still the fountains gush from the rocks, the poplars tremble in the breeze, the sweet incense rises from the orange-flowered styrax, the birds chant the joy of living, the sunlight and the moonlight fall upon the sparkling waters, and the liquid starlight drips through the glistening leaves. But the Priest of Pan is forgotten, and all that old interpretation and adoration of Nature, sensuous, passionate, full of mingled cruelty and ecstasy, has melted like a mist from her face, and left her serene and pure and lovely as ever. Here at Paneas, after the city had been rebuilt by Philip the Tetrarch and renamed after him and his Imperial master, there came one day a Peasant of Galilee who taught His disciples to draw near to Nature, not with fierce revelry and superstitious awe, but with tranquil confidence and calm joy. The goatfoot god, the god of panic, the great god Pan, reigns no more beside the upper springs of Jordan. The name that we remember here, the name that makes the message of flowing stream and sheltering tree and singing bird more clear and cool and sweet to our hearts, is the name of Jesus of Nazareth. IV CÆSAREA PHILIPPI Yes, this little Mohammedan town of Bâniyâs, with its twoscore wretched houses built of stones from the ancient ruins and huddled within the broken walls of the citadel, is the ancient site of Cæsarea Philippi. In the happy days that we spend here, rejoicing in the most beautiful of all our camps in the Holy Land, and yielding ourselves to the full charm of the out-of-doors more perfectly expressed than we had ever thought to find it in Palestine,--in this little paradise of friendly trees and fragrant flowers, "at snowy Hermon's foot, Amid the music of his waterfalls,"-- the thought of Jesus is like the presence of a comrade, while the memories of human grandeur and transience, of man's long toil, unceasing conflict, vain pride and futile despair, visit us only as flickering ghosts. * * * * * We climb to the top of the peaked hill, a thousand feet above the town, and explore the great Crusaders' Castle of Subeibeh, a ruin vaster in extent and nobler in situation than the famous _Schloss_ of Heidelberg. It not only crowns but completely covers the summit of the steep ridge with the huge drafted stones of its foundations. The immense round towers, the double-vaulted gateways, are still standing. Long flights of steps lead down to subterranean reservoirs of water. Spacious courtyards, where the knights and men-at-arms once exercised, are transformed into vegetable gardens, and the passageways between the north citadel and the south citadel are travelled by flocks of lop-eared goats. From room to room we clamber by slopes of crumbling stone, discovering now a guard-chamber with loopholes for the archers, and now an arched chapel with the plaster intact and faint touches of colour still showing upon it. Perched on the high battlements we look across the valley of Huleh and the springs of Jordan to Kal'at Hûnîn on the mountains of Naphtali, and to Kal'at esh-Shakîf above the gorge of the River Lîtânî. From these three great fortresses, in the time of the Crusaders, flashed and answered the signal-fires of the chivalry of Europe fighting for possession of Palestine. What noble companies of knights and ladies inhabited these castles, what rich festivals were celebrated within these walls, what desperate struggles defended them, until at last the swarthy hordes of Saracens stormed the gates and poured over the defences and planted the standard of the crescent on the towers and lit the signal-fires of Islam from citadel to citadel. All the fires have gone out now. The yellow whin blazes upon the hillsides. The wild fig-tree splits the masonry. The scorpion lodges in the deserted chambers. On the fallen stone of the Crusaders' gate, where the Moslem victor has carved his Arabic inscription, a green-gray lizard poises motionless, like a bronze figure on a paper-weight. * * * * * [Illustration: Bridge Over the River Lîtânî.] We pass through the southern entrance of the village of Bâniyâs, a massive square portal, rebuilt by some Arab ruler, and go out on the old Roman bridge which spans the ravine. The aqueduct carried by the bridge is still full of flowing water, and the drops which fall from it in a fine mist make a little rainbow as the afternoon sun shines through the archway draped with maidenhair fern. On the stone pavement of the bridge we trace the ruts worn two thousand years ago by the chariots of the men who conquered the world. The chariots have all rolled by. On the broken edge of the tower above the gateway sits a ragged Bedouin boy, making shrill, plaintive music with his pipe of reeds. * * * * * We repose in front of our tents among the olive-trees at the close of the day. The cool sound of running streams and rustling poplars is on the moving air, and the orange-golden sunset enchants the orchard with mystical light. All the swift visions of striving Saracens and Crusaders, of conquering Greeks and Romans, fade away from us, and we see the figure of the Man of Nazareth with His little company of friends and disciples coming up from Galilee. It was here that Jesus retreated with His few faithful followers from the opposition of the Scribes and Pharisees. This was the northernmost spot of earth ever trodden by His feet, the longest distance from Jerusalem that He ever travelled. Here in this exquisite garden of Nature, in a region of the Gentiles, within sight of the shrines devoted to those Greek and Roman rites which were so luxurious and so tolerant, four of the most beautiful and significant events of His life and ministry took place. He asked His disciples plainly to tell their secret thought of Him--whom they believed their Master to be. And when Peter answered simply: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus blessed him for the answer, and declared that He would build His church upon that rock. Then He took Peter and James and John with Him and climbed one of the high and lonely slopes of Hermon. There He was transfigured before them, His face shining like the sun and His garments glistening like the snow on the mountain-peaks. But when they begged to stay there with Him, He led them down to the valley again, among the sinning and suffering children of men. At the foot of the mount of transfiguration He healed the demoniac boy whom his father had brought to the other disciples, but for whom they had been unable to do anything; and He taught them that the power to help men comes from faith and prayer. And then, at last, He turned His steps from this safe and lovely refuge, (where He might surely have lived in peace, or from which He might have gone out unmolested into the wide Gentile world), backward to His own country, His own people, the great, turbulent, hard-hearted Jewish city, and the fate which was not to be evaded by One who loved sinners and came to save them. He went down into Galilee, down through Samaria and Perea, down to Jerusalem, down to Gethsemane and to Golgotha,--fearless, calm,--sustained and nourished by that secret food which satisfied His heart in doing the will of God. * * * * * It was in the quest of this Jesus, in the hope of somehow drawing nearer to Him, that we made our pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And now, in the cool of the evening at Cæsarea Philippi, we ask ourselves whether our desire has been granted, our hope fulfilled? Yes, more richly, more wonderfully than we dared to dream. For we have found a new vision of Christ, simpler, clearer, more satisfying, in the freedom and reality of God's out-of-doors. Not through the mists and shadows of an infinite regret, the sadness of sweet, faded dreams and hopes that must be resigned, as Pierre Loti saw the phantom of a Christ whose irrevocable disappearance has left the world darker than ever! Not amid strange portents and mysterious rites, crowned with I know not what aureole of traditionary splendours, founder of elaborate ceremonies and centre of lamplit shrines, as Matilde Serao saw the image of that Christ whom the legends of men have honoured and obscured! The Jesus whom we have found is the Child of Nazareth playing among the flowers; the Man of Galilee walking beside the lake, healing the sick, comforting the sorrowful, cheering the lonely and despondent; the well-beloved Son of God transfigured in the sunset glow of snowy Hermon, weeping by the sepulchre in Bethany, agonizing in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane, giving His life for those who did not understand Him, though they loved Him, and for those who did not love Him because they did not understand Him, and rising at last triumphant over death,--such a Saviour as all men need and as no man could ever have imagined if He had not been real. His message has not died away, nor will it ever die. For confidence and calm joy He tells us to turn to Nature. For love and sacrifice He bids us live close to our fellowmen. For comfort and immortal hope He asks us to believe in Him and in our Father, God. That is all. But the bringing of that heavenly message made the country to which it came the Holy Land. And the believing of that message, to-day, will lead any child of man into the kingdom of heaven. And the keeping of that faith, the following of that Life, will transfigure any country beneath the blue sky into a holy land. _THE PSALM OF A SOJOURNER_ _Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God: Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter: Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest._ _Naked and poor I arrived at the door before sunset: Thou hast refreshed me with beautiful bowls of milk: As a great chief thou hast set forth food in abundance._ _I have loved the daily delights of thy dwelling: Thy moon and thy stars have lighted me to my bed: In the morning I have found joy with thy servants._ _Surely thou wilt not send me away in the darkness? There the enemy Death is lying in wait for my soul: Thou art the host of my life and I claim thy protection._ _Then the Lord of the tent of the world made answer: The right of a guest endureth but for an appointed time: After three days and three nights cometh the day of departure._ _Yet hearken to me since thou fearest the foe in the dark: I will make with thee a new covenant of everlasting hospitality: Behold I will come unto thee as a stranger and be thy guest._ _Poor and needy will I come that thou mayest entertain me: Meek and lowly will I come that thou mayest find a friend: With mercy and with truth will I come to give thee comfort._ _Therefore open the door of thy heart and bid me welcome: In this tent of the world I will be thy brother of the bread: And when thou farest forth I will be thy companion forever._ _Then my soul rested in the word of the Lord: And I saw that the curtains of the world were shaken, But I looked beyond them to the eternal camp-fires of my friend._ XII THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS I THROUGH THE LAND OF THE DRUSES You may go to Damascus now by rail, if you like, and have a choice between two rival routes, one under government ownership, the other built and managed by a corporation. But to us encamped among the silvery olives at Bâniyâs, beside the springs of Jordan, it seemed a happy circumstance that both railways were so far away that it would have taken longer to reach them than to ride our horses straight into the city. We were delivered from the modern folly of trying to save time by travelling in a conveyance more speedy than picturesque, and left free to pursue our journey in a leisurely, independent fashion and by the road that would give us most pleasure. So we chose the longer way, the northern path around Mount Hermon, through the country of the Druses, instead of the more frequented road to the east by Kafr Hawar. How delightful is the morning of such a journey! The fresh face of the world bathed in sparkling dew; the greetings from tent to tent as we four friends make our rendezvous from the far countries of sleep; the relish of breakfast in the open air; the stir of the camp in preparation for a flitting; canvas sinking to the ground, bales and boxes heaped together, mule-bells tinkling through the grove, horses refreshed by their long rest whinnying and nipping at each other in play--all these are charming variations and accompaniments to the old tune of "Boots and Saddles." The immediate effect of such a setting out for a day's ride is to renew in the heart those "vital feelings of delight" which make one simply and inexplicably glad to be alive. We are delivered from those morbid questionings and exorbitant demands by which we are so often possessed and plagued as by some strange inward malady. We feel a sense of health and harmony diffused through body and mind as we ride over the beautiful terrace which slopes down from Bâniyâs to Tel-el Kâdi. We are glad of the green valonia oaks that spread their shade over us, and of the blossoming hawthorns that scatter their flower-snow on the hillside. We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling from the grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their small merry music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats that shift their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and of the cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the splendid bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds as we climb the rocky hill toward the north. We are glad of the broom in golden flower, and of the pink and white rock-roses, and of the spicy fragrance of mint and pennyroyal that our horses trample out as they splash through the spring holes and little brooks. We are glad of the long, wide views westward over the treeless mountains of Naphtali and the southern ridges of the Lebanon, and of the glimpses of the ruined castles of the Crusaders, Kal'at esh-Shakîf and Hûnîn, perched like dilapidated eagles on their distant crags. Everything seems to us like a personal gift. We have the feeling of ownership for this day of all the world's beauty. We could not explain or justify it to any sad philosopher who might reproach us for unreasoning felicity. We should be defenceless before his arguments and indifferent to his scorn. We should simply ride on into the morning, reflecting in our hearts something of the brightness of the birds' plumage, the cheerfulness of the brooks' song, the undimmed hyaline of the sky, and so, perhaps, fulfilling the Divine Intention of Nature as well as if we chose to becloud our mirror with melancholy thoughts. * * * * * We are following up the valley of the longest and highest, but not the largest, of the sources of the Jordan: the little River Hâsbânî, a strong and lovely stream, which rises somewhere in the northern end of the Wâdi et-Teim, and flows along the western base of Mount Hermon, receiving the tribute of torrents which burst out in foaming springs far up the ravines, and are fed underground by the melting of the perpetual snow of the great mountain. Now and then we have to cross one of these torrents, by a rude stone bridge or by wading. All along the way Hermon looks down upon us from his throne, nine thousand feet in air. His head is wrapped in a turban of spotless white, like a Druse chieftain, and his snowy winter cloak still hangs down over his shoulders, though its lower edges are already fringed and its seams opened by the warm suns of April. Presently we cross a bridge to the west bank of the Hâsbânî, and ride up the delightful vale where poplars and mulberries, olives, almonds, vines and figs, grow abundantly along the course of the river. There are low weirs across the stream for purposes of irrigation, and a larger dam supplies a mill with power. To the left is the sharp barren ridge of the Jebel ez-Zohr separating us from the gorge of the River Lîtânî. Groups of labourers are at work on the watercourses among the groves and gardens. Vine-dressers are busy in the vineyards. Ploughmen are driving their shallow furrows through the stony fields on the hillside. The little river, here in its friendliest mood, winds merrily among the plantations and orchards which it nourishes, making a cheerful noise over beds of pebbles, and humming a deeper note where the clear green water plunges over a weir. We have now been in the saddle five hours; the sun is ardent; the temperature is above eighty-five degrees in the shade, and along the bridle-path there is no shade. We are hungry, thirsty, and tired. As we cross the river again, splashing through a ford, our horses drink eagerly and attempt to lie down in the cool water. We have to use strong persuasion not only with them, but also with our own spirits, to pass by the green grass and the sheltering olive-trees on the east bank and push on up the narrow, rocky defile in which Hâsbeiyâ is hidden. The bridle-path is partly paved with rough cobblestones, hard and slippery, which make the going weariful. The heat presses on us like a burden. Things that would have delighted us in the morning now give us no pleasure. We have made the greedy traveller's mistake of measuring our march by the extent of our endurance instead of by the limit of our enjoyment. Hâsbeiyâ proves to be a rather thriving and picturesque town built around the steep sides of a bay or opening in the valley. The amphitheatre of hills is terraced with olive-orchards and vineyards. There are also many mulberry-trees cultivated for the silkworms, and the ever-present figs and almonds are not wanting. The stone houses of the town rise, on winding paths, one above the other, many of them having arched porticoes, red-tiled roofs, and green-latticed windows. It is a place of about five thousand population, now more than half Christian, but formerly one of the strongholds and capitals of the mysterious Druse religion. Our tents are pitched at the western end of the town, on a low terrace where olive-trees are growing. When we arrive we find the camp surrounded and filled with curious, laughing children. The boys are a little troublesome at first, but a word from an old man who seems to be in charge brings them to order, and at least fifty of them, big and little, squat in a semicircle on the grass below the terrace, watching us with their lustrous brown eyes. They look full of fun, those young Druses and Maronites and Greeks and Mohammedans, so I try a mild joke on them, by pretending that they are a class and that I am teaching them a lesson. "A, B, C," I chant, and wait for them to repeat after me. They promptly take the lesson out of my hands and recite the entire English alphabet in chorus, winding up with shouts of "Goot mornin'! How you do?" and merry laughter. They are all pupils from the mission schools which have been established since the great Massacre of 1860, and which are helping, I hope, to make another forever impossible. One of our objects in coming to Hâsbeiyâ was to ascend Mount Hermon. We send for the Druse guide and the Christian guide; both of them assure us that the adventure is impossible on account of the deep snow, which has increased during the last fortnight. We can not get within a mile of the summit. The snow will be waist-deep in the hollows. The mountain is inaccessible until June. So, after exchanging visits with the missionaries and seeing something of their good work, we ride on our way the next morning. II RÂSHEIYÂ AND ITS AMERICANISM The journey to Râsheiyâ is like that of the preceding day, except that the bridle-paths are rougher and more precipitous, and the views wider and more splendid. We have crossed the Hâsbânî again, and leaving the Druses' valley, the Wâdi et-Teim, behind us, have climbed the high table-land to the west. We did not know why George Cavalcanty led us away from the path marked in our Baedeker, but we took it for granted that he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us, when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal clearness in all its infinitely varied forms, and the enchantment of gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting and playing in hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden brown and bright green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast of a dove, breathing softly in the sunlight. As we climb toward Râsheiyâ we find ourselves going back a month or more into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant. The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost dazzling green. The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight; snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles; and the little lake of Kafr Kûk makes a spot of blue light in the foreground. We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below the town; and there the Râsheiyan gilded youth come riding their blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth turf and showing off their horsemanship for our benefit. There is something very attractive about these Arabian horses as you see them in their own country. They are spirited, fearless, sure-footed, and yet, as a rule, so docile that they may be ridden with a halter. They are good for a long journey, or a swift run, or a _fantasia_. The prevailing colour among them is gray, but you see many bays and sorrels and a few splendid blacks. An Arabian stallion satisfies the romantic ideal of how a horse ought to look. His arched neck, small head, large eyes wide apart, short body, round flanks, delicate pasterns, and little feet; the way he tosses his mane and cocks his flowing tail when he is on parade; the swiftness and spring of his gallop, the dainty grace of his walk--when you see these things you recognise at once the real, original horse which the painters used to depict in their "Portraits of General X on his Favourite Charger." I asked Calvalcanty what one of these fine creatures would cost. "A good horse, two or three hundred dollars; an extra-good one, four hundred; a fancy one, who knows?" We find Râsheiyâ full of Americanism. We walk out to take photographs, and at almost every street corner some young man who has been in the United States or Canada salutes us with: "How are you to-day? You fellows come from America? What's the news there? Is Bryan elected yet? I voted for McKinley. I got a store in Kankakee. I got one in Jackson, Miss." A beautiful dark-eyed girl, in a dreadful department-store dress, smiles at us from an open door and says: "Take my picture? I been at America." One talkative and friendly fellow joins us in our walk; in fact he takes possession of us, guiding us up the crooked alleys and out on the housetops which command the best views, and showing us off to his friends,--an old gentleman who is spinning goats' hair for the coarse black tents (St. Paul's trade), and two ladies who are grinding corn in a hand-mill, one pushing and the other pulling. Our self-elected guide has spent seven years in Illinois and Indiana, peddling and store-keeping. He has returned to Râsheiyâ as a successful adventurer and built a stone house with a red roof and an arched portico. Is he going to settle down there for life? "I not know," says he. "Guess I want sell my house now. This country beautiful; I like look at her. But America free--good government--good place to live. Gee whiz! I go back quick, you bet." III ANTI-LEBANON AND THE RIVER ABANA Our path the next day leads up to the east over the ridges of the slight depression which lies between Mount Hermon and the rest of the Anti-Lebanon range. We pass the disconsolate village and lake of Kafr Kûk. The water which shone so blue in the distance now confesses itself a turbid, stagnant pool, locked in among the hills, and breeding fevers for those who live beside it. The landscape grows wild and sullen as we ascend; the hills are strewn with shattered fragments of rock, or worn into battered and fantastic crags; the bottoms of the ravines are soaked and barren as if the winter floods had just left them. Presently we are riding among great snowdrifts. It is the first day of May. We walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of the mules, and pelt each other with snowballs. We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts. The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges, beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of light and life and love swiftly begins to rise. From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin tents; the beginning of April at Khân Meithelûn, on the post-road, where there are springs, and poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with lemonade cooled by the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where we find our tents pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace of clay looking down upon the flat roofs of the village. Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at El-Hâmi the road drops into the valley of the Baradâ, the far-famed River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise. Tall trees arch above the road; white balconies gleam through the foliage; the murmur and the laughter of flowing streams surround us. The railroad and the carriage-road meet and cross each other down the vale. Country houses and cafés, some dingy and dilapidated, others new and trim, are half hidden among the groves or perched close beside the highway. Poplars and willows, plane-trees and lindens, walnuts and mulberries, apricots and almonds, twisted fig-trees and climbing roses, grow joyfully wherever the parcelled water flows in its many channels. Above this line, on the sides of the vale, everything is bare and brown and dry. But the depth of the valley is an embroidered sash of bloom laid across the sackcloth of the desert. And in the centre of this long verdure runs the parent river, a flood of clear green; rushing, leaping, curling into white foam; filling its channel of thirty or forty feet from bank to bank, and making the silver-leafed willows and poplars, that stand with their feet in the stream, tremble with the swiftness of its cool, strong current. Truly Naaman the Syrian was right in his boasting to the prophet Elisha: Abana, the river of Damascus, is better than all the waters of Israel. The vale narrows as we descend along the stream, until suddenly we pass through a gateway of steep cliffs and emerge upon an open plain beset with mountains on three sides. The river, parting into seven branches, goes out to water a hundred and fifty square miles of groves and gardens, and we follow the road through the labyrinth of rich and luscious green. There are orchards of apricots enclosed with high mud walls; and open gates through which we catch glimpses of crimson rose-trees and scarlet pomegranates and little fields of wheat glowing with blood-red poppies; and hedges of white hawthorn and wild brier; and trees, trees, trees, everywhere embowering us and shutting us in. Presently we see, above the leafy tops, a sharp-pointed minaret with a golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main current of the Baradâ, running swift and merry in a walled channel straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafés, a couple of hotel signs. The river dives under a bridge and disappears by a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the western entrance of Damascus. IV THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER MADE I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and unilluminating. The point about the Baradâ is that it springs full-born from the barren sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert. The point about Damascus is that she flourishes on a secluded plain, the Ghûtah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet above it, with no _hinterland_ and no sustaining provinces, no political leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the empires and kingdoms which conquered her,--Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria, Greece, Egypt--their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the currents of the multitudinous folk That do inhabit her and make her great. She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or San Francisco is of the Occident: the open port on the edge of the desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in the heart of the blossoming bower,--the wonderful child of a little river and an immemorial Spirit of Place. Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled rooms in the good Hôtel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments." It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo. The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders," and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come around the next day, pulled the driver from his perch, and stuck a number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.) The crowd itself is of the most indescribable and engaging variety and vivacity. The Turkish soldiers in dark uniform and red fez; the cheerful, grinning water-carriers with their dripping, bulbous goatskins on their backs; the white-turbaned Druses with their bold, clean-cut faces; the bronzed, impassive sons of the desert, with their flowing mantles and bright head-cloths held on by thick, dark rolls of camel's hair; the rich merchants in their silken robes of many colours; the picturesquely ragged beggars; the Moslem pilgrims washing their heads and feet, with much splashing, at the pools in the marble courtyards of the mosques; the merry children, running on errands or playing with the water that gushes from many a spout at the corner of a street or on the wall of a house; the veiled Mohammedan women slipping silently through the throng, or bending over the trinkets or fabrics in some open-fronted shop, lifting the veil for a moment to show an olive-tinted cheek and a pair of long, liquid brown eyes; the bearded Greek priests in their black robes and cylinder hats; the Christian women wrapped in their long white sheets, but with their pretty faces uncovered, and a red rose or a white jasmine stuck among their smooth, shining black tresses; the seller of lemonade with his gaily decorated glass vessel on his back and his clinking brass cups in his hand, shouting, "_A remedy for the heat_,"--"_Cheer up your hearts_,"--"_Take care of your teeth_;" the boy peddling bread, with an immense tray of thin, flat loaves on his head, crying continually to Allah to send him customers; the seller of turnip-pickle with a huge pink globe upon his shoulder looking like the inside of a pale watermelon; the donkeys pattering along between fat burdens of grass or charcoal; a much-bedizened horseman with embroidered saddle-cloth and glittering bridle, riding silent and haughty through the crowd as if it did not exist; a victoria dashing along the street at a trot, with whip cracking like a pack of firecrackers, and shouts of, "_O boy! Look out for your back! your foot! your side!_"--all these figures are mingled in a passing show of which we never grow weary. The long bazaars, covered with a round, wooden archway rising from the second story of the houses, are filled with a rich brown hue like a well-coloured meerschaum pipe; and through this mellow, brumous atmosphere beams of golden sunlight slant vividly from holes in the roof. An immense number of shops, small and great, shelter themselves in these bazaars, for the most part opening, without any reserve of a front wall or a door, in frank invitation to the street. On the earthen pavement, beaten hard as cement, camels are kneeling, while the merchants let down their corded bales and display their Persian carpets or striped silks. The cook-shops show their wares and their processes, and send up an appetising smell of lamb _kibâbs_ and fried fish and stuffed cucumbers and stewed beans and okra, and many other dainties preparing on diminutive charcoal grills. In the larger and richer shops, arranged in semi-European fashion, there are splendid rugs, and embroideries old and new, and delicately chiselled brasswork, and furniture of strange patterns lavishly inlaid with mother-of-pearl; and there I go with the Lady to study the art of bargaining as practised between the trained skill of the Levant and the native genius of Walla Walla, Washington. In the smaller and poorer bazaars the high, arched roofs give place to tattered awnings, and sometimes to branches of trees; the brown air changes to an atmosphere of brilliant stripes and patches; the tiny shops, (hardly more than open booths), are packed and festooned with all kinds of goods, garments and ornaments: the chafferers conduct their negotiations from the street, (sidewalk there is none), or squat beside the proprietor on the little platform of his stall. [Illustration: A Small Bazaar in Damascus.] The custom of massing the various trades and manufactures adds to the picturesque joy of shopping or dawdling in Damascus. It is like passing through rows of different kinds of strange fruits. There is a region of dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured, decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying on the ground or hung on wooden supports, like big, fantastic melons. In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists. Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems; only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims. This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank. Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs, railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion! The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young children, with beautiful and seeming-merry faces, are hammering and filing and cutting out the designs traced by the draughtsmen who sit at their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with rows of marble columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs, and files of men, sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in front of them, making their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly interiors of private houses which outwardly show bare white-washed walls, but within welcome the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee, and sweetmeats, in stately rooms ornamented with rich tiles and precious marbles, looking upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming orange-trees and musical with tinkling fountains; tombs of Moslem warriors and saints,--Saladin, the Sultan Beibars, the Sheikh Arslân, the philosopher Ibn-el-Arabi, great fighters now quiet, and restless thinkers finally satisfied; public gardens full of rose-bushes, traversed by clear, swift streams, where groups of women sit gossiping in the shade of the trees or in little kiosques, the Mohammedans with their light veils not altogether hiding their olive faces and languid eyes, the Christians and Jewesses with bare heads, heavy necklaces of amber, flowers behind their ears, silken dresses of soft and varied shades; cafés by the river, where grave and important Turks pose for hours on red velvet divans, smoking the successive cigarette or the continuous nargileh. Out of these memory-pictures of Damascus I choose three. * * * * * The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer. As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above, the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions. "_Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!_" The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the top of the minaret. For a few moments we can see little; but when the first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet. The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green, covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud, and indomitable. * * * * * An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of the Mosque. We walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below, know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest inscription in the world: "_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations._" * * * * * From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses, columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I see the poor people coming in a steady stream to the neat, orderly dispensary; the sweet, clean wards with their spotless beds; the merciful candour and completeness of the operating-room; the patient, cheerful, vigorous, healing ways of the great Scotch doctor, who limps around on his broken leg to minister to the needs of other folk. I see the little group of nurses and physicians gathered on Sunday evening in the doctor's parlour for an hour of serious, friendly talk, hopeful and happy. And there, amid the murmur of Abana's rills, and close to the confused and glittering mystery of the Orient, I hear the music of a simple hymn: "Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways! Reclothe us in our rightful mind, In purer lives thy service find, In deeper reverence, praise. "O Sabbath rest by Galilee! O calm of hills above, Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee The silence of eternity Interpreted by love! "Drop thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace." * * * * * Corrections made to printed original. p. 6, 'Eygpt' corrected to 'Egypt'. p. 167, 'is is camelet' corrected to 'is it camelet'. p. 182, 'acqueducts' corrected to 'aqueducts'. p. 190, added a period after 'generations to build'. p. 277, added a period after 'immemorial charm about the place'. Where accented and non-accented versions of the same place-names exist the non-accented were converted to accented: Bakhshîsh ...... Bakhshish Bâniyâs ........ Baniyas Haifâ .......... Haifa Lîtânî ......... Litani and Litâni Serâi .......... Serai Nablûs ......... Nablus 
31814	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 31814-h.htm or 31814-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31814/31814-h/31814-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31814/31814-h.zip) LITERARY NEW YORK Its Landmarks and Associations by CHARLES HEMSTREET With 65 Illustrations [Illustration] G.P. Putnam's Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1903 Copyright, 1903 by Charles Hemstreet Published, November, 1903 The Knickerbocker Press, New York [Illustration: The "Half-Moon" on the Hudson--1609. From the painting by L.W. SEAVEY.] Contents CHAPTER PAGE I. WRITERS OF NEW AMSTERDAM 1 II. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 25 III. THE POET OF THE REVOLUTION 45 IV. IN THE DAYS OF THOMAS PAINE 67 V. THE CITY THAT IRVING KNEW 87 VI. WITH PAULDING, DRAKE, AND HALLECK 106 VII. COOPER AND HIS FRIENDS 125 VIII. THOSE WHO GATHERED ABOUT POE 145 IX. AT THE CLOSE OF THE KNICKERBOCKER DAYS 167 X. HALF A CENTURY AGO 189 XI. TWO FAMOUS MEETING-PLACES 209 XII. SOME OF THE WRITERS OF TO-DAY 230 Full-Page Illustrations PAGE THE "HALF MOON" ON THE HUDSON, 1609 _Frontispiece_ From the painting by L.W. Seavey. THE STADT HUYS 8 BROAD STREET, 1642 30 KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773 42 THE DEBTORS' PRISON 48 WILLIAM SMITH } PETER STUYVESANT } PHILIP FRENEAU } 60 THOMAS PAINE } JOEL BARLOW } THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND SPRUCE STREETS 70 MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827 76 JAMES KIRKE PAULDING } PHILIP HONE } WASHINGTON IRVING } 100 JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE } FITZ-GREENE HALLECK } J. FENIMORE COOPER } THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831 136 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD } JOHN JAMES AUDUBON } WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT } 150 BAYARD TAYLOR } EDGAR ALLAN POE } ROBERT FULTON } POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM 158 From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission. Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles. THE BATTERY IN 1830 164 From a drawing by C. Burton. THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830 170 VIEW OF OLD BUILDINGS IN WILLIAM STREET, LOOKING TOWARDS MAIDEN LANE, 1800 182 W.D. HOWELLS } J.G. HOLLAND } RICHARD GRANT WHITE } 200 BRANDER MATTHEWS } WILLIAM WINTER } From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of W.E. Benjamin. Illustrations in the Text PAGE SEAL OF NEW AMSTERDAM 1 EARLY DUTCH HOUSES 2 THE WALL AND GATE 5 AN OLD FAMILY BIBLE 6 STUYVESANT'S "WHITEHALL" 8 ALONG THE STRAND 9 DE SILLE'S HOUSE 14 A WOMAN'S COSTUME, NEW AMSTERDAM 16 STUYVESANT'S BOUWERIE HOUSE 20 THE CHURCH IN THE FORT 21 CAPTAIN KIDD'S HOUSE 23 THE CHURCH CALLED TRINITY 34 "THE NEW-YORK GAZETTE" 39 THE COLLECT 48 THE BRITISH PRISON-SHIP 53 THE MIDDLE DUTCH CHURCH 55 FRAUNCES' TAVERN 62 BROAD STREET AND FEDERAL HALL 63 RICHMOND HILL 64 THE CORNER STONE OF THE PARK THEATRE 69 THE POST OFFICE, WILLIAM STREET 78 GOLDEN HILL INN 88 ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, BEEKMAN ST. 89 THE CITY HOTEL 101 THE HOUSE OF ASTOR, WHERE IRVING WROTE "ASTORIA" 102 WHERE IRVING LIVED, 17TH STREET AND IRVING PLACE 104 THE SHAKESPEARE TAVERN 120 THE JUMEL MANSION 123 WASHINGTON HALL 132 ON BLOOMINGDALE ROAD, NEAR 75TH STREET, IN POE'S TIME 147 THE HOUSE IN CARMINE STREET 149 WHERE POE WROTE "THE RAVEN" 157 MUSEUM AT THE NORTH END OF THE PARK, 1825 170 NIBLO'S GARDEN 171 AUDUBON'S HOME, 156TH STREET AND NORTH RIVER 193 CLEMENT C. MOORE'S HOUSE, CHELSEA 196 THE UNIVERSITY BUILDING 219 THE STUDIO BUILDING IN WEST 10TH STREET 221 53 EAST 20TH STREET 223 10 WEST STREET 232 WHERE "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES" WAS WRITTEN 237 146 MACDOUGAL STREET 239 108 WAVERLY PLACE 240 RICHARD GRANT WHITE'S HOME 241 WHERE RICHARD HENRY STODDARD DIED 243 WHERE THE AUTHORS' CLUB WAS ORGANIZED 244 HORACE GREELEY'S HOME 245 THE BEEKMAN MANSION 249 LAWRENCE HUTTON'S HOUSE 252 DE KAY'S HOUSE, LONDON TERRACE 254 Literary New York Chapter I Writers of New Amsterdam [Illustration: Seal of New Amsterdam] There is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed with an iron hand over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that was one day to be New York, but which in his time was called New Amsterdam. [Illustration: Early Dutch Houses] It was a tiny town then; picturesque, too, for the houses were low, irregular, with sloping roofs and gable ends to the street. They were built of wood--that is, all except the church, the Stadt Huys, the Governor's house, and some few dwellings of colonists who had brought much wealth with them from Holland. These were for the most part of stone. It was usual in them all--there were scarcely more than a hundred,--whether of wood or stone, to have chimneys outside the walls, thus making less the danger of fire, and if any part of the house were of brick it was sure to be the chimney. All the brick had then to be brought from Holland, so it was an expensive building material and but sparingly used. At this time when Stuyvesant held full sway there were two industrious colonists who held the idea that their short-cut to immense wealth lay in the way of making bricks at home and supplying them to their fellow colonists. So it came about, after long and slow deliberation, that the first brickyard was started. To be sure the venturesome fortune-hunters soon found that they were not to succeed all at once, for, owing to their lack of knowledge, they ruined so many of their bricks that the profits of the business were like to be consumed in the black-burned material that they threw aside as worthless. But just at this time an odd thing happened. This was no less than the appearance of a colonist who agreed to buy--at a low price to be sure, but still to buy--all the black-burned and apparently useless brick. The brickmakers wondered very much at this, and without doubt thought the man a trifle unsound in his mind, but they agreed, and very soon the buyer had built himself a house, which when it was completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect. All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New Amsterdam. [Illustration: The Wall and Gate] And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and on the land side by a wall of wood and soil which served to keep the Indians out--a wall stretching straight across the island quite from river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow streets--winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be irregular and vacillating. [Illustration: An Old Family Bible] While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling. [Illustration: Stuyvesant's "Whitehall"] The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep Pasture,--the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard, near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept. [Illustration: THE STADT HUYS.] [Illustration: Along the Strand] Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight, while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it was the first street to be paved with stone. In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town, the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses--the first verses ever penned in the colony, and called variously _The Praise of New Netherland_, _The Complaint of New Amsterdam_, _The Thistle Finch_, and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the townspeople his memory and his verse. But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of "society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing years into the distinctions of to-day. The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard, the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother, and when left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons; there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans, and others. It was to this well-to-do-set that Nicasius De Sille belonged, and after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came, when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth. But with not one word of his being a poet--yet only by reason of his poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been seen. For he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers. [Illustration: De Sille's House] And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church inside the fort--on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair, and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her girdle by links of gold--not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver, with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women, for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet, silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians,--all made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the good Dominie Megapolensis. [Illustration: A Woman's Costume New Amsterdam] But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only recommendation that could be made was that the property should be divided equally and they go their several ways,--which they did. But the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by side through the remainder of their lives. [Illustration: Stuyvesant's Bouwerie House] All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village, which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet. It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing which survives is the work of a Dutch minister. In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the fearfulness of the after-life. [Illustration: The Church in the Fort] For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery, through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the village church he preached of an afternoon,--the church which Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,--the church which was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found standing in the core of a great metropolis. [Illustration: Capt. Kidd's House] Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship _Adventure Galley_, with never a thought that a few years more would see him executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the Dutch had well-nigh ended. Chapter II Before the Revolution When William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so large that it must needs have a night-watch--four men who each carried a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night (whether for the benefit of the night-watch or for some other the records say not), by placing on a pole projecting from each seventh house a lantern with a candle in it. Pilgrims who year after year seek out the shrines that are connected in one way or another with the literature of the city have worn a path plain to be seen along the stone pavement about Trinity Church, a path leading straight to a bit of greensward where, beside a gravel walk, is the tomb of William Bradford. Although Bradford made slight pretence of being a man of letters, he is remembered as one who loved to foster literature. And, there being little enough left to recall the writings of the seventeenth century, this tombstone has its many visitors. The pilgrims who find their way to it have but half completed their journey. If they leave the churchyard and stray on, not going by way of crowded Wall Street, which would be the direct course, but taking one of the more winding and narrow streets to the south, they will come after a time to a thoroughfare where the structure of the Elevated Road forms a bridge to convey heavy trains that hurry past, stirring the air with constant vibration. In this street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder of William Bradford,--a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up the first printing-press in the colony, and that here he did the public printing, as well as such books and psalms, tracts and almanacs, and such like things as he had time for. These were all queer, rough-lettered, black-lined pamphlets, and none was more quaint than John Clapp's _Almanac_, the first which came from the press and the first written in the city. John Clapp had time without end to write this almanac, and yet no one ever knew just when he did it. He was the keeper of the inn in the Bouwerie Village, and, having more idle moments than busy ones, he spent most of his time on the broad stoop of the inn, pipe in mouth, looking first at the house where Peter Stuyvesant had lived, then at the dusty road leading away up country towards the King's Bridge in one direction, and down country towards the town. But write it he did, and Bradford printed it, and John Clapp was shrewd enough to advertise himself well by writing in his Table of Contents concerning his tavern: It is two miles from the city, and is generally the baiting place where gentlemen take leave of their friends, and where a parting glass or two of generous wine If well applied makes dull horses feel One spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Again, in a Chronological Table, under the June date, he made the interesting announcement: The 24th of this month is celebrated the feast of St. John the Baptist, in commemoration of which (and to keep up a happy union and lasting friendship by the sweet harmony of good society) a feast is held by the _Johns_ of this city, at John Clapp's in the Bouwerie, where any gentleman whose name is John may find a hearty welcome to join in concert with his namesakes. In response to this there came such a large gathering as would make it seem that all the townsmen had been baptized by one name. It was by an odd slip that the only important book planned and partly written in these last years of the seventeenth century was not printed by Bradford. More than once had the Episcopal minister, the Rev. John Miller, talked with this first printer of his plan for a history of the colony which he was then writing. This would have been carried out, beyond all doubt, if the clergyman had not just then decided to go to England to settle some troublesome Church matters, taking his history with him. As ill-fortune would have it, the ship in which he sailed was captured by the French,--France then being at war with England,--and rather than have the slightest bit of information conveyed to the enemy through his means, the clergyman tossed the precious pages into the sea. In the course of time, released by the French, he reached England, and there rewrote the history from memory, and drew for it a quaint map of the town as he had known it. Having done so much he died, leaving his work to lie for more than a century and a quarter unpublished, until, in 1843, a London bookseller put it into print. The original, being sold again passed through several hands until it finally found a resting-place in the British Museum, where it is now preserved. [Illustration: BROAD STREET, 1642.] The early days of the eighteenth century saw the fitting out of the first library to which the townsmen had general access--a library that in the next fifty years was to change from the private property of the Rev. John Sharpe into the Corporation Library, and later be chartered as the Society Library, under which title it was to live to grow richer and richer in literary treasures until it came to be called the oldest library in America in the days when the city had grown far beyond any bounds then thought of. In the first days of its existence, the library occupied tiny quarters, quite large enough for all the books it contained, in a room in the City Hall. This was not in the old Stadt Huys of the Dutch by the waterside, for that was gone now, but in a pretentious building facing the "broad street" that had been made by the filling up of the Heere Graft of old. Other buildings were set up at this same time. There was the new French Huguenot church which had been in Petticoat Lane and was now rebuilt in the newly laid-out street below the Maiden's Lane, called Pine Street from the pine-trees there. Then there was the church called Trinity. Though it, too, was a new church, the ground on which it stood had a history that harked back to the very earliest Dutch times. For it was upon the lower edge of the Annetje Jans Farm, the strip of land above the city to the west which had been given to the husband of Annetje Jans far back in the year 1635; that had been linked with another farm by Governor Lovelace to make the Duke's Farm; and had become the King's Farm when the duke after whom it was named became a king. And then, it having become the Queen's Farm (and Queen Anne graciously presenting it in the year 1703 to Trinity Church for all time), it took the last name that it was to have and became the Church Farm--a name that was to cling to it after every vestige of country green had disappeared from its surface, and when houses had been set upon it as thick as the stalks of grain that once ripened upon its rolling bosom. [Illustration: "The Church called Trinity"] The library in the City Hall was yet quite a new thing, the church called Trinity had stood on the historic ground but a few years, the French church was barely completed, and the town was so sprightly and full of activity that 't is small wonder Madame Sarah Knight, coming at such a time, should find much to wonder at and to write about. Her coming marks another advance in literary New York, for Madame Knight was a bookish woman come from far-off Boston town, and was a teacher well versed in the "art of composition." She found all quite different as compared with her own Massachusetts, where her father had been sentenced to stand for two hours in the stocks, his conduct having been found "lewd and unseemly" when, on a Sabbath day, after an absence of three years, he had kissed his wife when she met him at his own door-step! No wonder Madame Knight thought New York society quite gay and reckless, for at this time Lord Cornbury governed, and he had an odd fancy for wearing women's clothing indoors for his own delectation and to the amusement of the citizens as he walked the walls of the fort. Though Madame Knight met many persons of quality and witnessed many interesting scenes, had her visit in the city been extended, say for half a dozen years, until the coming of Governor Robert Hunter, she would have met a man truly in full accord with her ideas and tastes. Had Governor Hunter's hopes been fulfilled there might have been a far different writing of literary history. He came from England in the summer of 1710, from the midst of a busy and troublous life, seeing before him in imagination quiet and peaceful years with the wife he cherished, and a career which should be helped on by his correspondence with his English friends, Dean Swift, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and some others. It would be an ideal life; he had planned it well. But the repose he sought he scarce for an hour realized. Undreamed-of turmoil kept him in a whirl of unsettledness. And though the wife of his heart stood by his side, and he gained comfort from knowing that nothing could turn her away, differences with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians--these things and others left him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea: This is the finest air to live upon in the universe, and if our trees and birds could speak and our Assemblymen be silent, the finest conversation also. The soil bears all things, but not for me.... In a word, and to be serious, I have spent my time here in such torment and vexation that nothing hereafter in life can ever make amends for it. Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a play, the one called _Androborus_--The Man-eater,--in which he wrote in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor. Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle," where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to live and struggle for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life. At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor. And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the leader of literary New York. Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised Bradford when that first printer of New York published the _New York Gazette_, in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival. In the first ten years that Colden lived in New York he wrote diligently, and published his _History of the Five Nations_, an exhaustive work telling of the powerful Indian tribes, of their forms of government, and their wars. This was one of the earliest books of importance, and he was planning a second part of this same history when, in the year 1732, Cosby came to be Governor. In after years Colden told how his studies and his writings were interrupted by the coming of the new and lively Governor. [Illustration: Numb. 425 THE New-York Gazette, From _December_ 10, to Monday, _December_ 17, 1733.] And now it seemed as though there were to be dissensions in the city. There was trouble with the Governor; trouble with Peter Zenger, who wished to print what the king's representatives did not want printed; trouble about who should be Chief Justice. But when these were straightened out there began a season of festivity, and during one entire winter there were entertainments at which the culture, the refinement, and the wit of the province gathered. These were days of splendor, when women wore gay brocades and arranged their hair in a variety of bewildering, towering, and fantastic shapes; when wide skirts were in the heyday of their fashion; when tight-lacing was in vogue; when men wore enormous wigs, and attired themselves in many colors, adorning themselves with buttons of silver--large, and decorated with the initials of the wearer. In the height of this brilliant season there came from England, to visit the Governor's family, Lord Augustus Fitzroy, son of that Duke of Grafton who was Chamberlain to King George II. He was received with all the ceremony due to his rank. The Mayor, the Recorder, and some other city officials met, and presented to him the freedom of the city in a box of burnished gold. Soon Lord Augustus had made himself so vastly agreeable to one of the daughters of Governor Cosby that there was talk of a marriage. But everybody agreed that this could not be, for the match was beneath him, according to the ideas of English society. Still, the young man was determined, the young woman was inclined, and the Governor's wife was a strategist. So one mild summer's night the young nobleman, resplendent in gay clothes, with a couple of his friends, assisted Dominie Campbell over the fort wall, where they found the young woman waiting, and there in the silence and the darkness the marriage occurred. There was some stern talk of what ought to be done to Dominie Campbell, and wonderment as to what the Duke of Grafton would say, but nothing serious came of it, although the romantic wedding was the talk of the town for many a year. Cadwallader Colden lived down by the waterside near the fort wall over which Dominie Campbell was dragged. And in his house there, when Cosby's rule quieted down, Colden got to his studies again. He lived until the days of the Revolution were at hand; lived to exercise the duties of Governor in a stormy period; lived to see the town rent by turmoil and political rancor; lived to be hated by many people for loyalty to a king they would no longer serve. Quite to the end of his life he remained a leader, and, dying, left writings on history, medicine, geology, botany, metaphysics, and other learned subjects. [Illustration: KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773.] It was in this midway time between the days of Cosby and the period of the Revolution that William Smith lived and wrote. Not so marked a figure in literature as Colden, nor so profound a student; not one to leave so strong and lasting an imprint, but well to be remembered as a writer whose birthplace was New York. Born in the year after Colden published his _History of the Five Nations_, he attained a high place as a lawyer, giving his attention to the political and legal records. When still a young man he was one of those who spoke at the ceremony of the laying of the corner-stone of King's College--which was to be in existence a century and a half later as Columbia University. For many years he lived close by Colden and intercourse would have led to mutual good, but the two were not friendly after Smith wrote a history of the city and Colden criticised it. Although William Smith was one of the earliest writers to own New York as his birthplace, he would not join in a revolt against the king whom he had served all his life. So he accepted the post of Chief Justice of Canada, leaving others to become the writers of the Revolution. Chapter III The Poet of the Revolution In the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and bustle and disorder--that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year 1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside, and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty. The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots. There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America, and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came to be called the Poet of the Revolution. Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey, where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after the old homestead in La Rochelle. Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and the title of the first poetess of New York. [Illustration: The Collect] In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of patriots--the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, she was taken on excursions to the shores of a pleasant lake, called the Collect, quite a journey from the city. It was there that John Fitch's boat sailed years before Fulton's successful boat was launched into the Hudson. When the city outgrew its early bounds, the lake was drained and solid ground made, and the Tombs Prison rose in gloomy majesty where the deep waters had been. [Illustration: THE DEBTORS' PRISON.] Eliza Schuyler preserved a lively memory of playing about a little square frame building on the Common, and though she never spoke of it by name it was the first Poor House of the city. She wrote, too, of a certain day when she went to the Common with her father--he was an important man that day and served on a committee--to see laid the first stone of another building. It was only a Debtors' Prison, but it was looked upon as the most beautiful structure in the city for many a day. For it was in the main patterned after the temple of Diana of Ephesus. The townsmen of those early days admired the building, and would have grieved if they could have foreseen that the day would come when city officials would forget that the old prison had been copied from so perfect a model; would forget that it had been a military prison when the British held possession of the city; would forget that many a brave officer of the Continental Army and many a true patriot soldier had passed bitter days there, and dying had left memories of sentiment and poetry and historic interest hovering about the old place. Still, though it could not be foretold, the day did come when it was no longer a prison but had become the Hall of Records, when it was called an ugly and unsightly structure which obstructed the view of newer and taller ones--buildings that Tammany architects considered the perfection of beauty perhaps on account of their costliness. So it must be torn down. At the age between girlhood and womanhood, Eliza Schuyler left New York to live in the village of Tomhannock, and when news of her again reached her friends in the city she was the wife of John J. Bleecker. Only twice after that did she revisit the scenes of her early life, and it was not until her death that the writings of this first poetess of New York became well known and popular. The short and peaceful life of Eliza Bleecker was nearing an end before--his college days being over--Philip Freneau again trod the streets of New York. Already his tireless pen was at work, the pen that was to aid the cause of the Revolution. But when it looked to him as though his country would not be able to throw off the kingly yoke, he decided on a journey. He passed two years in the West Indies writing of the _Beauties of Santa Cruz_ and the _House of Night_. Then a longing for the home from which he received scant word came upon him. He started homeward, only to be lured from his course by the beauties of Bermuda, where he fell in love with the Governor's daughter, remembered in his verse as the "Fair Amanda." He was still writing, lolling his time away beneath tropical skies, when tardy news came that the colonies had declared themselves free. Swiftly he threw off the languor of repose, of love, of romance, and returned home. The charm of the sea life was on him then, so taking out letters of reprisal from the Continental Congress, Freneau the poet sailed over the sea, actively aiding his country's cause by capturing British merchantmen and sinking British ships for a year, until in 1780 he had a ship of his own built. But on her first voyage disaster befell her, and almost within sight of land the _Aurora_ was captured. When Philip Freneau next saw New York it was as a prisoner on the hulk _Scorpion_, as she lay anchored alongside another notorious prison-ship, the _Jersey_, close by the Battery shore. There never was such an energetic prisoner. Each moment was employed for his country, if not with his sword at least with his pen, which was quite as powerful a weapon. [Illustration: The British Prison-Ship] In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out his best-remembered poem, _The British Prison-Ship_ and many another line which in the later days of the Revolution was to rouse American feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British. New York, in this time that the poet Freneau lay a prisoner, was not as it had been in his college days. The battle of Long Island had been fought, and Washington and his army had been driven from New York. And on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried. The British soldiers were quartered in the public buildings; the British officers had taken possession of the houses deserted by wealthy patriots; the Middle Dutch Church, which had been the architectural pride of the city, had become a riding school for troopers. [Illustration: The Middle Dutch Church] There was a red-painted wooden building in John Street, a few feet from Broadway, the only theatre in the city. The actors had closed it, and fled at the coming of the British. But the house was open again now, and the British officers played at mimic war between the intervals of real battles. No one threw himself more heartily into these performances than Major John André, who was so soon to give up his life for his country. He even wrote some of the speeches used by the actors, and one of the poems he wrote for Rivington's _Gazetteer_ was printed while he was away on his last mission, conferring with Benedict Arnold on the banks of the Hudson. After the treason was discovered, Arnold sought a safe retreat within the British lines at New York, and lived for a time in a solid, picturesque little house by the Bowling Green. It stood on a grassy slope that stretched down to the water's edge a few boat lengths from where the _Scorpion_ lay with the poet prisoner on board. There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the selfsame day. When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which slowly recovered from the ravages of war. Hanover Square was a favorite haunt of his. He has left the record that he loved to linger in that open space, where might be seen a mingling of business and home life. Freneau liked it, for there books were printed and sold, and, too, it was the "Newspaper Row" of the town. This open space had been at first Van Brugh Street, taking its name from Johannes Pietersen Van Brugh, a wealthy Hollander whose home faced the square for close upon half a century. It bore his name until in 1714, when with the accession of George I. of Hanover it took the name of Hanover Square. In a house facing this square, Bradford printed the first newspaper, and though in Freneau's time it was still standing, a more stately building was to take its place and bear a tablet telling of the old one. It was here that the other early newspapers came into existence: Parker's _Weekly Post-Boy_, in 1742; Weyman's _New York Gazette_, in 1759; Holt's _New York Journal_, in 1766. It was here, too, that was prominently displayed the "Sign of the Bible and Crown," before the house of Hugh Gaine. Freneau had flayed this man in his verse many a time. Gaine was an Irishman who published the _New York Mercury_, and changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost--Whig to-day, Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles. Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's _New York Gazetteer_. This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London, planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory newspaper, the _New York Gazetteer_, and had it wrecked by patriots, who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau. Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of a name he knew so well, stared at the enemy he had never seen: "Is your name Freneau?" he asked. And the poet answered: "Yes, Philip Freneau." For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said: "I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington a lasting reputation." It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British. The friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened, but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his famous grammar for a young ladies' school. [Illustration: 1. WILLIAM SMITH. 2. PETER STUYVESANT. 3. PHILIP FRENEAU. 4. THOMAS PAINE. 5. JOEL BARLOW.] Even in the lifetime of Freneau, changes came to Hanover Square. For more than half a century it was the "Newspaper Row," then it gradually became the dry-goods district, then settled down to a general centre for wholesale houses. At one corner of the square lived for a time Jean Victor Moreau, the French General, after he had been banished for supposed participation in the plot of Cadoudal and Pichegru against the life of the First Consul. [Illustration: Fraunces' Tavern] In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing of the _Federalist_ papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived, and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore. [Illustration: Broad St. and Federal Hall] In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the _National Gazette_, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a time. [Illustration: Richmond Hill] In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of _The Minerva_, a paper at that time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration. His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the _Commercial Advertiser_ (that lived and throve even in the twentieth century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed dictionary. The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life of restless energy, and lived far into another century and long after many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of New York. Chapter IV In the Days of Thomas Paine When the eighteenth century was within two years of its close, a group of men, perhaps half a dozen in all, made up the writers of New York. The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park began, Broadway dwindled from a street to a lane, but with a strong branch thoroughfare to the east which, with the advent of years, was to become Park Row. It was not a new thoroughfare by any means, since, as far back as the days of the Dutch Governors, it had been the one road that led up through the forested island. There faced the road, and so quite of necessity faced the park as well, a square building, its front so taken up with windows and doors as to cause wonder that there should be any pretence whatsoever of a front wall. Not an attractive building, with these many windows always staring, like eyes, across the road into the park, but one to be remembered because, for one reason or another, it could well be called the literary centre of the town. Here it stood, the first Park Theatre, towering above its neighbors, glistening in its newness. [Illustration: The Corner Stone of the Park Theatre The corner stone of this Theatre was laid on the 5th day of May AD 1795 Jacob Morton } Wm. Henderson } Commissioners Carlile Pollock } Lewis Hallem } John Hodgkinson } managers] It was rare in the days when the Park Theatre was new, just as it is rare nowadays, for writers to be of a practical turn of mind. But in this little group, oddly enough, there was one man of business. He was the proprietor of the theatre, and although he wrote plays, and painted pictures, and wrote books, William Dunlap was a man of affairs. His home was around the corner in quiet Ann Street, which in another hundred years came to be a very noisy street indeed, crowded with venders of every sort of odds and ends that can be imagined. A block away, around another corner in Beekman Street, on the south side below Nassau, was Dunlap's home when he had given up the theatre, settled down to literature, and got to writing his important books, the _American Theatre_ and the _History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States_. While he was yet managing the theatre, Dunlap's favorite strolling-place was up along the parkside, past the Brick Church, and so on a few steps across Nassau Street to where Spruce Street has its start. On any pleasant afternoon he could be found standing on that corner, for a time at least, before the door of Martling's Tavern, where the Tammany Society had its first home. Looking at that first Wigwam after this lapse of time, it seems picturesque enough, and it must in truth have been so, for the enemies of the Tammany Society were in the habit of referring to it as the "Pig-pen." A frame building, low, rough, and unpainted, with a bar-room at one end, a kitchen at the other, and between the two a "long room," some steps lower than the general floor,--that was Martling's. [Illustration: THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND SPRUCE STREETS.] In the tap-room at Martling's, after an evening in which the untimely death of George Frederick Cooke had been discussed, Dunlap announced his intention of writing a life of his actor-friend, who then lay in a new-made grave in St. Paul's Churchyard. The book was written, and though few remember the volume now, it was widely read and served to keep alive the actor's memory. Since that time the grave has been cared for, and the marble tombstone, later erected by Edmund Kean, still stands amid the bushes close by the entrance door of the Chapel. It was in the year 1810 that Cooke played at the Park Theatre, the first foreign "star" to come to the city and to attract the townspeople in such wise that they almost mobbed the playhouse in their efforts to see him. It was this same Cooke, who, hearing many speak of a young actor who had played there the year before, said, "I should have liked to have seen this Payne of yours." Cooke saw him the next year, and they appeared together in this same Park Theatre, Payne playing Edgar to Cooke's Lear. The name of John Howard Payne did not then have the significance that it came to have later. For he was known only as a youth who had acted Norval in the tragedy of _Douglas_ with such fiery earnestness as to be proclaimed the "Young American Roscius." Who could have foreseen that adventurous "boy actor" grown to manhood, and writing a song that was to live and be known the world over by reason of its appeal to all hearts? In Pearl Street, scarce a foot of which is left untrod by the footsteps of the writers of the city, Payne was born. Around the modest house that bore the number 33, near to Whitehall Street, he first toddled with baby steps, and the nearby "broad" street, where the canal had been, was his first journey when he could walk. His parents moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, so early in his childhood, and so many of his childish days were passed in the fields there while his father taught school in the Clinton Academy, that East Hampton is often spoken of as the place of his birth. But for all that the "lowly thatched cottage" of his song was there, and for all that much of his later life was passed in foreign countries, Payne loved the city of his birth and took occasion many times to say so. In London, when ill-luck bore hardest upon him, he wrote _Clari, the Maid of Milan_, and gave _Home, Sweet Home_ to the heroine as her principal song. He received the honors of New York when he returned for a brief period, twenty-two years after his boyish triumph at the Park Theatre, and was so affectionately remembered that when, a decade later, he died in far-away Tunis, it was felt that he should not be left in a foreign land. But, although this sentiment was strong, it was not until 1883 that his body was brought to America. Then, for a day, the coffin lay in state in the City Hall, in the Governor's Room, close by a window from which a view could be had of where the old Park Theatre had stood, just across the stretch of green sward. And the people, in honor of the man whose one song had thrilled an entire world, filed past the sealed coffin by the thousands, and shed many a tear that day. One of the tortuous streets springing from Broadway, starting close by Trinity Church, winding away to the east, and mingling with other streets until brought to an abrupt halt by the river, was called, and is still called, Pine Street. In the first days of the nineteenth century it bore no suggestion, save in name, of a forest that once stretched above the city. In those good old days when the Dutch held full sway, Cornelius van Tienhoven was the bookkeeper of the West India Company, and when he married the step-daughter of Jan Jansen Damen, the bride brought him as dower a slice of this forest. When, later, a clearing was cut through the wood it was called Tienhoven's Street. But such a name rang too strongly Dutch for those who served an English king, and when the English came they quickly called it King Street. And so it remained until after the Revolution, when, in remembrance of the Dutch forest, the name was changed to Pine Street. Now, whether it was pure accident or whether he searched and found the prettiest street in all the town, it is nevertheless a fact that here Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith had fixed his home, scarce more than a block from Trinity Church, and here he wrote much of his verse. Here, too, in his house, on many a Tuesday evening, met the Friendly Club, and at these meetings, following the custom of the club from the time that Washington lived in the city, each member in turn read a passage from some favorite author, thus giving impetus to the conversation. In Dr. Smith's parlor, joining in these discussions, sat William Dunlap, Charles Brockden Brown, James Kent, Joseph Dennie, and all the writers of the circle. It was Dr. Smith who wrote the prologue for the Park Theatre upon its opening, and not a member of the Friendly Club but attended the first performance. [Illustration: MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827.] It is small wonder that Charles Brockden Brown was the foremost member of the club. He had just claim. Thrusting aside criticism and advice, ignoring the fact that he was an invalid facing the hardship that must be overcome, he stood forth as the first writer in America to support himself by his pen alone. The Bar, even though there was ever so fair a prospect of his earning a living by it, could not attract him against his natural desire. The writings of this determined genius could not but be successful. Seeking no friends, but having many, preferring the single companionship of Dr. Smith, with whom he lived, Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel, _Wieland_, and followed it in the next three years with _Ormond_, _Edgar Huntley_, _Arthur Mervyn_, _Jane Talbot_, and _Clara Howard_. Many a man of the pen, in admiration of the iron will of this first American novelist, finds a delight in thinking of him and in following his footsteps along Pine Street and the lower end of Broadway to the Battery. [Illustration: The Post Office William St.] In the days of bereavement following the death of Dr. Smith, the companion of Brown's solitude was Joseph Dennie. Often in the intervals of work they wandered through the quiet park, and many a time they knelt together in the Brick Church, a square beyond the Park Theatre, with the memory of their dead companion strong upon them. The shadow of their friend's death was still over them when they parted, and Joseph Dennie went to Philadelphia to start his magazine, _The Portfolio_, which was to cause the name of "The Lay Preacher" to ring through the land. He was in Philadelphia when Brown, in 1803, started _The Literary Magazine and American Register_. But the next year he was in New York again, occasionally joining in a literary partnership in which there was a third member now, for Brown had married the daughter of Dr. Linn, the Presbyterian minister. The years rolled on, and Brown sought to fight off death by terrific work. But death only clutched him the tighter. The strolls with Elizabeth, his gentle-hearted wife, grew shorter and shorter and less frequent, until they ceased altogether six years after his marriage, and another landmark in the literary history of the city had gone down. There was one stately and studious member of the Friendly Club who, it is recorded, could seldom be persuaded to go to the Park Theatre except on the "great nights." James Kent, then a Professor of Law at Columbia College, when not at work (those were rare moments indeed), loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory lives in his _Commentaries on American Law_. Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little country place that had been an Indian village before the settling of New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes, and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from New York for all the likeness it bore to it. On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by writing _Common Sense_, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing _The Age of Reason_, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread name--Tom Paine. There he lived with Madame Bonneville and her two sons, the only companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement. It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street, and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is made into a store, as though it made an effort to keep up with the business character of the street. Two brick structures rise above it on each side and seem to have forced the roof to a frightful angle, so different is it from its new neighbors. Once Joel Barlow went to see Paine there, and the two spent almost an entire day beside a front window, talking of many things. Paine recalled the troublous days of the French Revolution, when he had written his _Age of Reason_ in the prison of the Luxembourg, and had given it to Barlow to find a publisher. The author of the _Columbiad_ often spoke of the visit later. The dusty road where the house stood, even though it was little travelled, came to be too noisy a place for Paine, for in his illness even the chance passer-by irritated him. So he moved away to a house in a nearby field, so far from the road that he found absolute quiet. In after days Grove Street swept this home away, and another building, numbered 59, is pointed out as the place where Paine died shortly after his removal. The hatred of many people followed Thomas Paine even after death, and there could be no rest for an advocate of infidel opinions in a town where dwelt descendants of stern Huguenots. His body was taken to New Rochelle, and there, refused burial in hallowed ground, was finally laid to rest outside the town, in a corner of the farm given to him by the State in recognition of his services in the cause of the colonies against the mother country. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the English Radical, an ardent admirer of Paine, visited New Rochelle, and, seeing the neglected grave by the wayside, had the bones dug up one night and spirited away to England. In another twenty years the followers of Thomas Paine had grown in number, and the Paine Historical Society erected a monument over the empty grave by the roadside. But on this spot, where no rest had been permitted him in life or in death, it seems rather to mock than to bless his grave. Chapter V The City that Irving Knew Stretching from Broadway towards the east, starting from the ivy-covered walls of the Chapel of St. Paul--here lay the scenes of Washington Irving's childhood. Golden Hill was the name given to this district, long before Irving was born; called so because of its golden appearance in the autumn days. It was a wondrously beautiful place, and set squarely upon the hill-top was an inn that, in the days of the Revolution, came to be a meeting-place for patriots. Even now, when the glories of Golden Hill seem quite forgotten, there are those who love to walk its crowded ways, and who firmly believe that it came by its name in prophecy of the golden flower of literature one day to be born close by it. [Illustration: Golden Hill Inn] The lane that once had its course up the grain-covered hill is there yet; now, a crowded, dismal thoroughfare bearing the name of William Street. It is well to start with this old lane, partly because it is the oldest street in the Golden Hill district, and partly because the Golden Hill inn of old still stands upon it: a squatty building built of narrow bricks that were brought from Holland, with a tall chimney like none of its neighbors; a venerable house full of cracks and crevices, carved mantels, open fireplaces, wide doorways; made over to conform to modern business ideas, but not conforming to these very well; painted and patched up to look new, but looking quite its age to any one with half an eye for architecture. Almost opposite this inn of Golden Hill, midway of the block between Fulton and John streets, there stood in the year 1783 a quaint little two-storied dwelling with high-backed roof. One morning the patrons of the inn had a bit to gossip about. It was a year for gossip anyway, for the War of the Revolution was near its close. The talk was of a child that had been born to the Irving family over the way, and who was to be called Washington in honor of the man so well named the "Father of his Country." Before another year the Irving family moved into a house next to the inn on the north and separated from it only by a garden. In this house Washington Irving spent his youth. Close by he was baptized, in the Chapel of St. George. The Chapel is gone now, but where Beekman Street crosses Cliff, on the front of a building appear in raised letters the words "St. George Building," that show the spot where it once stood. Not far off is the place where the John Street Theatre was, where Irving went with his friend James K. Paulding, who was himself to make a name in the literature of the city. Irving's parents were not given to theatre-going, but Irving, when the family prayers had been said and he had been sent to bed, ofttimes crept out of the gable window, slid down the slanting roof, dropped to the ground, and stole away. He went, just as now following in his footsteps you can go, past the old inn, around the next corner where, on a house wall, is a tablet reciting the departed glories of Golden Hill, then on a few steps until you reach, close by Broadway, a dreary arcade. Walk through the arcade and you will find it heavy with the sounds of workmen and machines. The arcade was a covered way leading to the playhouse, and is all that remains of the theatre. [Illustration: St. George's Chapel Beekman St.] Two minutes' walk away in Ann Street was Mrs. Ann Kilmaster's school, where Irving studied. Ann Street is only three blocks long and far from an inviting spot at any point, but here, in the last block of its length, it dwindles to half the width it had in starting. A score of steps from the school, at the northwest corner of Ann Street and William, Irving lived with his mother after his father's death. The house is no longer there, but there is one just like it five houses farther along William Street, that stood there in Irving's time. In the Ann Street house, when he was a law clerk, he did his first writing, the sketches signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and published in the _Morning Chronicle_, which was conducted by his brother Peter. From this house, while still a lad, he loved to wander down the streets that stretched over the eastern slope of Golden Hill, and spent hours on the piers watching the ships loading and unloading, dreaming of the foreign ports where they had touched, hoping that he might one day see the shores of those far-away lands. For even in his boyhood the longing for travel was strong upon him. He was still a law clerk, and still living in this Ann Street house, when he sat in an upper room with his brother William and James K. Paulding, and they planned a magazine of their own. They went to see David Longworth, the printer, in his shop beside the Park Theatre,--"Dusky Davie" they called him, after a song that was popular at the time,--and after many conferences and much secret doing the three stripling writers started the sparkling _Salmagundi_ on its way, with the avowed purpose "to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age." Paulding was the "Launcelot Langstaff" of the publication, and William Irving was "Pindar Cockloft" the poet. To the west of Golden Hill, Cortlandt Street extends to the river. In a house on that street close by Broadway, the three writers of _Salmagundi_ spent much time at the home of the Fairlie sisters. There lived Mary Fairlie, known to _Salmagundi_ readers as "Sophia Sparkle," and who married Cooper the tragic actor. In the Ann Street house most of the _Knickerbocker History of New York_ was written. Washington Irving and his brother Peter were to write it as an extravagant burlesque on Dr. Samuel Mitchill's _Picture of New York_, then a very popular and learned work. But Peter Irving was forced to Europe by ill health in 1808, and Washington settled down to the history, changing its plan and scope. Ten minutes' walk to the north of where Irving lived in Ann Street is a little park--a green spot that has taken the place of the squalid Mulberry Bend slum. In Mulberry Street opposite the park was the location of the imaginary Independent Columbian Hotel where Dietrich Knickerbocker was supposed to have lived, and left his manuscript in payment of his board bill. But by far the most important house connected with this part of Irving's life is gone now. This was in Broadway where Leonard Street now crosses. A square house of many rooms, indeed it was a mansion in the city of 1809. Here lived Josiah Ogden Hoffman, the protector of the youthful author, in whose office Irving came by his law training. In the Hoffman mansion, Irving courted Matilda Hoffman, the lawyer's fair daughter; here he saw her sicken and grow more feeble day by day; here she died, and so ended the romance of his life. He never mentioned her name in after days and could not bear to hear it spoken. But she lived in his memory, and he never married. In the depths of his seclusion, during the first months of his sorrow, he finished the _History_. But his heart was not in the laughter of the book, and he made joy for others out of his own sorrow. Two years after this, Irving was living beside the Bowling Green, at 16 Broadway, with his friend, Henry Brevoort, at the house of Mrs. Ryckman. While here he edited the _Analectic Magazine_. From here he often strolled up Broadway as far as Cortlandt Street, to dine at the house of Jane Renwick, then passing her widowhood in the city. Her son became the Professor James Renwick of Columbia College. It was she of whom Burns sang as _The Blue-Eyed Lassie_. Still another house knew the Irving of early days, the boarding-house of Mrs. Brandish, at Greenwich and Rector streets, where he went from Bowling Green. It was a pretty brick building on a quiet street then, but it is a gloomy-enough place to look upon now, darkened by the Elevated Railroad and overrun with hoards of noisy children and tenement dwellers; a strange spot to look for memories of the gentle-hearted Irving. When Irving left New York in 1815, it was with no intention of remaining away any length of time. In England he wrote _Rip Van Winkle_, though he had never been in the Catskills, where the scene of his classic lay. In Paris he met John Howard Payne, and the two worked together, in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English representation--but this partnership came to little. He went to Spain and there, while writing the _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, he met a young man then fitting himself by travel to enter on the duties of Professor of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College. This was Henry W. Longfellow, unknown then as a poet. While in Spain, Irving occupied the Governor's quarters in the Alhambra, an otherwise deserted palace, abiding there in a kind of Oriental dream, and living over in imagination the _Conquest of Granada_. Back in London again as Secretary of the Legation to the Court of St. James, he arranged his material for the _Voyages of the Companions of Columbus_, and half a dozen other works. Then, after seventeen years of wandering, he returned to his native city. Although he tells us that his heart throbbed at sight of New York, and that in all his travels he had seen no place that caused such a thrill of joy, it was no longer the city of his youth. He had left a town of one hundred thousand people and found a city of two hundred thousand. The companions of his youth had grown to be men, and many of them were renowned in literature and business life. He found streets grown long out of all remembrance, houses tall beyond all knowing, strangers who knew him simply as a name. He found many silent graves where he had left blooming youth. But for all this there were many ready and anxious to do him honor. A few steps beyond Trinity Churchyard on Broadway is a narrow thoroughfare called Thames Street. It is easy to be found, and beside it is a tall building on which is a tablet relating how the Burns's Coffee-House once stood on the spot. This had been a mansion built by �tienne De Lancey, a Huguenot noble, and Thames Street was the carriage-way that led to the door. In this coffee-house the merchants of the city signed the Non-Importation Agreement in the days before the Revolution. When Irving returned to the city the coffee-house was gone, and on its site was the City Hotel, the main hostelry of the city. Here the chief citizens gathered and a banquet was held and all honor paid to the "illustrious guest, thrice welcome to his native city." [Illustration: The City Hotel] From the site of this old house, it is a pleasant walk down Broadway, past the Bowling Green to Bridge Street, where, at No. 3, Irving, after his return, went to live with his brother Ebenezer, who had been the Captain Greatheart of "Cockloft Hall." Here, in this home, Irving spent many happy days. It was called by him "the family hive," for it was always filled to overflowing with relatives. [Illustration: 1. JAMES KIRKE PAULDING. 2. PHILIP HONE. 3. WASHINGTON IRVING. 4. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE. 5. FITZ GREENE HALLECK. 6. J. FENIMORE COOPER.] But one place above all others in New York is filled with the memory of Irving. This is a bit of ground on the east side of the city, a point of land stretching out into the river. Here of all places the spirit of Irving still lingers, for here of all places it is less changed in appearance since his feet trod the ground. In Irving's day it was a stretch of countryside with summer houses of the wealthy at long distances facing the river. Now, though the city has encompassed it, there is still left the one green spot by the riverside beyond Eighty-eighth Street. The East River Park they call it, and there are rough stone steps leading to the waterside, winding paths and overhanging trees--the trees that Irving stood beneath. And there, across the stretch of water, is Hell Gate, its tempestuous waters tamed by the hand of man, but nevertheless the same Hell Gate that Irving looked upon and that Irving wrote about. Part of this park were the grounds of John Jacob Astor, the friend of Irving. His house stood beyond the park, where Eighty-eighth Street now touches East End Avenue,--a square two-story frame dwelling of colonial type, painted white, with deep veranda, wide halls, and spacious rooms; set high upon a hill, backed by a forest of towering trees, and fronted by a vast lawn stretching by gentle slope to the cliff at the riverside. Here Irving was a guest, and wrote _Astoria_, telling of Astor's settlement on the Columbia River and of scenes beyond the Rockies; here he met Captain Bonneville and his friends, and the journals of the one and thrilling tales of the other gave material for the _Adventures of Captain Bonneville_. The house of Astor is gone now, but within the limits of this park still stands the home of Gracie, the merchant, where Irving was a constant visitor, and where, in the rooms given over to stranger hands, still linger memories of Paulding and Halleck, Bancroft and Drake, and a host of others. [Illustration: The House of Astor where Irving wrote "Astoria"] It was while working on _Astoria_ that Irving began the building of Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel house of the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, on that delightful spot on the Hudson which in the first days of Irving's residence there was called Dearman. In after time the name was changed to Irvington, in his honor, and Wolfert's Roost, in honor of the glorious country, became Sunnyside. It is Sunnyside to this day, altered by additions made in the intervening years, but still the house of Irving; and the ivy clinging to its walls has sprung from a root taken from the ruins of Scott's "fair Melrose" and planted where it now grows by the friendly hand of Jane Renwick. [Illustration: Where Irving lived--17th St. and Irving Place] On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place (a thoroughfare to which his memory gave a name), late in life, Irving lived betimes. Here was once the home of John T. Irving, a nephew of the author. It is a sturdy house still, and looks as youthful as its neighbors that were built many a day after it. Then it stood quite alone in a stretch of country. From the windows of the large room on the ground floor, Irving could see the waters of the East River. In this room he wrote portions of _Oliver Goldsmith_, parts, too, of the _Life of Mahomet_, and arranged the notes of what was to be his last book--the _Life of Washington_. But his real home was Sunnyside, and there, in the year 1859, when he was seventy-six years old, he died. Chapter VI With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck In the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number 43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should get a start in the ways and work of the city. William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses, and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view of the park with its three buildings--the Bridewell, the Almshouse, and the Prison,--and across the park could see the Park Theatre and the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past rude farmhouses and quaint inns. The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him in contact with the other members of the family--young Washington Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving published his newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, Paulding wrote bits of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street house and the opportunities afforded by the _Morning Chronicle_ that led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession. Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was opened; and Fulton's _Clermont_ sailed up the Hudson, the first successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on, the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting way. Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter, and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was located _Salmagundi's_ Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called "The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club, Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of _Salmagundi_. Paulding wrote his share of _Salmagundi_ on the upper floor of the Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar Cockloft, conducted by William Irving. From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's, the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a long career with the founders of _Salmagundi_ as a foundation for the memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over, years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same spot. Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the _Analectic Magazine_, edited by Washington Irving from his home little more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, _The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_. Here, too, replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, _The United States and England_, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison, who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote _The Backwoodsman_ his longest poem and the one which he liked best of all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series of _Salmagundi_; and _Koningsmarke_. Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his most successful book, _The Dutchman's Fireside_, also _John Bull in America_, _Tales of the Good Woman_, and _Westward Ho!_ In the evening he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett, the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him _The Lion of the West_, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy. Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street, then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth. At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other, Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street, not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the Orestes and Pylades of American poets. Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck walked from there to the green that since has been called the City Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia, which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway below Trinity Church--then the fashionable promenade,--and so on to the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past where Paulding was then living. The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery, just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well. One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby Trinity Churchyard. The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block brings you to Temple Street--a thoroughfare leading nowhere in particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived nearby. Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing, every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was like "in Drake's time." Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires in verse, printed in the _Evening Post_, in which the poets sailed into the public characters of the day. This was the house where Halleck went to read his _Fanny_ to Drake, and made some corrections at his friend's suggestion before he gave it to the world. [Illustration: The Shakespeare Tavern] Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, a double house of brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the _Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_. On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment. And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame chiefly rests, _The Culprit Fay_--a poetic fantasy illumining the Highlands of the Hudson. In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines: Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days; None knew thee but to love thee, None named thee but to praise. And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of relic-hunting vandals. Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his inspiration. [Illustration: The Jumel Mansion] Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it can be seen from afar--white in the sunlight. This is the Morris house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the footsteps of _littérateurs_ of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote _Marco Bozzaris_. Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well, his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the Bronx with his friend. Chapter VII Cooper and His Friends In that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,--in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness--a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic proportions. In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper. His first book, _Precaution_, had failed utterly. His second book, _The Spy_, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St. John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown, studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then, doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another that destined him evermore to a literary life. This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach Street house. In this home he wrote _The Pioneers_, first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, _The Pilot_. In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day, the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A. Hillhouse, who, though he had already written _The Judgment_ and was recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said: "I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem--a hint that within the hour took the form of _The Old Oaken Bucket_, a pastoral poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many an operetta, and even the historical romance, _The Champion of Freedom_, have faded from memory. At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and Morris held the first discussions of the plans for _The Mirror_, which was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon retired. On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry Dana, a founder of the _North American Review_ and the friend of Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from Wiley's shop _The Idle Man_, that literary publication which scarcely lived long enough to include his novels, _Tom Thornton_ and _Paul Felton_, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant. Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off, but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in Washington Hall--afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against it. [Illustration: Washington Hall] As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street. Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the _Talisman_ magazine, which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands discussed plans for the _Atlantic Monthly_, which Sands established the next year. But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. There were scholars and professional men, and often there were statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished work on _The Last of the Mohicans_. In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette Theatre, when _The Spy_ was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St. Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous ovation. Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles _Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St. Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote _Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home. At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet. His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet. [Illustration: THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831.] If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre (literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his centring point. The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one. It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk. In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers, until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_, which continued for more than half a century. From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night dreaming over his _Elixir of Moonshine_, or, with the memory of his afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring, soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown tombstones. On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung oftener than any other American hymn. The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on up Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte. This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas, _Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da Ponte's hopes. If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but had attained his ambition at last. For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's, acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died. Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury, whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is the grave of The Mad Poet. Chapter VIII Those Who Gathered about Poe When New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and go spreading over another island to the sea,--long before the time when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville, and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost before they knew it. [Illustration: On Bloomingdale Road near 75th St. in Poe's time] In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it; quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern. It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St. John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the accumulated tombstones of more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what is below the surface. The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet, restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms. He had but just given up the editorship of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ at Richmond, a position he had secured through the friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing _Swallow Barn_. Afterwards Kennedy wrote _Horseshoe Robinson_ and other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time, becoming Secretary of the Navy. [Illustration: The House in Carmine Street] So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Nassau Street; and there Poe did work for the _New York Quarterly Review_; there also he finished _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_. In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for a short time, but long enough to write _The Fall of the House of Usher_ and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to _The Gentleman's Magazine_, edited by William E. Burton, the famous comedian. Oddly enough, when Burton died years afterwards, he found a resting place in the obscure St. John's Burying-Ground. [Illustration: 1. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. 2. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON. 3. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 4. BAYARD TAYLOR. 5. EDGAR ALLAN POE. 6. ROBERT FULTON.] It was not until 1844 that Poe returned to New York, and during the years of his absence several writers with whom he was to become acquainted on his return had forged their literary way. There was Seba Smith, more generally known as "Major Jack Downing," from the humorous papers which he wrote under that name, and who about this time was writing the romance in verse called _Powhatan_. There was William Ross Wallace, the lawyer and magazine writer, who in after years was to be known through his poem of _The Liberty Bell_. There was the Congregational clergyman George B. Cheever making his way, having resigned his first pastorate, at Salem, Massachusetts, where he had been imprisoned for libel on account of his temperance sketch _Deacon Giles's Distillery_. There was Robert H. Messinger, known through his Horatian ode, _Give Me the Old_, his fame daily expanding in fashionable and literary circles. There was Edward Robinson, Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, just returned from a tour of exploration in Palestine with Rev. Eli Smith, publishing _Biblical Researches in Palestine_. And there was Isaac McLelland, whose verse was as good as his sportsmanship. These were some few of the men who were first to recognize the genius of the poet. Poe returned to New York the wiser for his experience with _The Gentleman's Magazine_ and with _Graham's Magazine_, but having failed to establish _The Stylus_, a proposed publication of his own, which during all his life was to be a vision of Tantalus, just beyond his grasp. He returned rich in experience, strong in adversity, poor in pocket. There was no glorious opening for him, and finally he accepted a sub-editorship on the _Evening Mirror_, grinding out copy for several hard-working hours each day. The _Evening Mirror_ was a newly started publication, but its interests were so entwined with others that its history stretched back something more than twenty years from the day when Poe first occupied a desk in the office. Going back these one and twenty years, the better to understand the atmosphere in which Poe worked, to the spring of 1823, the time is reached when George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth joined forces and opened an office for the publication of the _New York Mirror_ at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of songs--a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend. The eight years which followed the starting of the _New York Mirror_ saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a writer of songs; saw him publishing the memorable _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, that was to make his name known over the land; saw Woodworth withdraw from the _Mirror_, and that publication strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live out most of his life. N.P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his association with Morris. He had given up the _American Monthly Magazine_ at Boston to devote his energies to the _New York Mirror_. In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and struggling, he managed to introduce himself into the fashionable set at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work under the smooth outside. His letters to the _Mirror_ and other papers did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly, for the manners of the times. He was in America again in 1836, bringing with him an English lady as a bride,--the Mary for whom the country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his delightful _Letters from under a Bridge_. He was again in Europe in 1839, soon starting _The Corsair_, and back to America in 1844, to join his friend Morris (the _Mirror_ by this time being defunct) in the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the _Evening Mirror_. From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life, singing of Broadway with the same facileness as he sang of country scenes. He came to be a grave and patient invalid, living happily with his second wife as he had with his first, and ending his days at Idlewild,--his home on the Hudson. It was with the newly started _Evening Mirror_ that Poe became connected on his return from Philadelphia, and it would seem that if he ever had prospects bright to look forward to it was with the fair-minded, business-like Morris and the gentle-hearted Willis. But when Poe had continued with them a brief six months even that gentle restraint proved too much. The _Evening Mirror_ did not last long after his going, though this had little to do with its failure. Then the indefatigable Morris, with Willis, started the _Home Journal_ at 107 Fulton Street, which continued into the twentieth century, and is now known under its changed title of _Town and Country_. [Illustration: Where Poe wrote "The Raven"] While Poe was working on the _Mirror_ he lived with his frail wife Virginia and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, in Bloomingdale Village. It was a village indeed then, and about the scattered houses were broad roads and shaded lanes and clustering trees. The house in which Poe lived was on a high bluff beside a country road which is now Eighty-fourth Street, the house standing (as the thoroughfares run now) between Broadway and West End Avenue. It was a plain, square, frame dwelling with brick chimneys reaching high above the pointed roof, kept by Mrs. Mary Brennan, and Poe rented rooms of her. Two windows faced towards the Hudson, and he could sit and looking through the trees catch a silvery glimpse of the river. Here he wrote _The Raven_ and _The Imp of the Perverse_. From here he sent _The Raven_ to the _American Review_ at 118 Nassau Street, where it was published over the pen name of "Quarles"; and he was still living here when the poem was reprinted in the _Evening Mirror_, for the first time over his own name. [Illustration: POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM. (From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.) Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.] It had come to be the summer of 1845 when Poe left the _Evening Mirror_ for the long black desk in lower Nassau Street where he helped Charles F. Briggs conduct the _Broadway Journal_. Briggs was the matter-of-fact "Harry Franco," a journalist of great ability who in another ten years was to edit _Putnam's Magazine_ from 10 Park Place. More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well. In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into Clinton Hall. But the _Broadway Journal_ under the management of Poe was less of a success than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the poet retired from it in the first month of 1846. This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the name have arisen in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in 1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the Forrest-Macready riots. The present building, tall and heavy-looking, is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830, when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a _History of England_ as a nucleus for the library. About the time when Poe was with the _Broadway Journal_ he moved into a house not a great many steps from Broadway, in Amity Street, since renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes. Here he penned the _Philosophy of Composition_, by which he would make it appear that _The Raven_ was not a product of inspiration, but the work of calm reason and artistic construction,--a theory which no one seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote _The Literati of New York_, a series of papers that appeared in _Godey's Lady's Book_, and were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and he was promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843, had been asked by N.P. Willis to write a poem for the _New Mirror_. The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it, and though the writer came to be known as a poet, author, physician, lawyer, and statesman, the best known of his achievements were these verses of _Ben Bolt_. In the spring of 1846, when the poet's wife grew more feeble, her brilliant eyes more brilliant, and her pallid look more unearthly, Poe moved out into the country to a little village called Fordham in Westchester County. This was then far out from the city, a secluded spot with rocky heights from which a view could be had of country lanes and broad sweeps of meadow where farmers worked in the fields. Since then the open landscape has given way to the regularity of city streets and buildings. Not a great distance from the railroad station still stands the house where Poe lived; such a plain, low wooden building that those that have grown up around it seem to be shouldering it out of the way, and the widening and improving of streets have pushed it somewhat aside from its original position. But there the dingy little house still stands with its veranda, where Poe walked in the night just outside the sitting-room windows,--walked and dreamed out his _Eureka_. There are the door and the dwarf hallway. Inside, to the right, is the room, with its meagre furniture, much of which was purchased with the proceeds of the suit against Thomas Dunn English, where Poe received the friends who remembered him in his hours of illness, of poverty, and distress. In a room towards the front lay the dying wife on her straw bed, covered with the poet's coat and clasping the tortoise-shell cat closely to her wasted form. Up the stairs is the attic chamber, with its slanting roof, where Poe worked, with the cat at his elbow; where after his wife's death he penned a dirge for her in the exquisite _Annabel Lee_; where he wrote the first draught of _The Bells_, which he was to revise and complete while on his lecture trip to Lowell. Next to it is the room where slept Mrs. Clemm, his more than mother. So many memories cling to this home of Poe that those who search for substantial literary reminders have made it a visiting shrine, much to the dismay of landowners who hold to the strong belief that historic old houses are well enough as curiosities, but are inconvenient things when they stand in the way of money-making improvements. [Illustration: THE BATTERY IN 1830. (From a drawing by C. Burton.)] After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong upon you, walk away along the street remembering that in Poe's time it was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems of _The Universe_. After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,--this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic _Ulalume_. In the little wooden house at Fordham Poe lived, weak and lonely and poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her nearby grave,--the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead. Chapter IX At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days A bustling, energetic, but provincial city was New York between the years 1830 and 1840, the last days of the Knickerbockers. After 1840 it changed greatly, speeding rapidly on in the making of a metropolis. Looking back now it is plain that the progress of enlargement went steadily on year by year, but then the changes came on imperceptibly enough. To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century, it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where merchants and jobbers most did congregate, and that the business part of the city (and that really meant all the town in those times) lay all below Canal Street. Beyond that was the country, crossed by sand hills, watered by many rivulets, traversed by roads that led to the country places of the wealthy or to popular wayside taverns. The main thoroughfares looked wider than they do now, for they were far less crowded, although there were busses, and coaches, and drays, and many other vehicles of a variety that would look quite odd on the streets of this day, and in fact anywhere except in old prints, for they became extinct many a day ago. There were no surface roads, no elevated roads, no clanging electric cars, no bicycles, no motor carriages, no thousand and one conveniences of comfort and confusion that inventive genius and modern methods have called forth. To be sure the first street railroad in the world had just been projected and the cars were about to run through the streets, but this was not as yet established. The architectural appearance of the city was more meagre, more uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses, squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner, a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the metropolis. [Illustration: Museum at the north end of the Park 1825] The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a stranger, are all memories now, and it is a difficult matter to say even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town, and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell sounding over the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking. [Illustration: THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830.] [Illustration: Niblo's Garden] It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just been introduced,--indeed, it was close upon the year 1840,--when the Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he arranged the greater part of his _Dictionary of Americanisms_, by which his name is remembered far better than by his historical records,--remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known. One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed, spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song, _Sparkling and Bright_, was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose early death shadowed his whole life. Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor of the _American_ as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he founded the _Knickerbocker_ magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S. Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in the same field of writing. All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's shop; and more, too, for he had worked with N.P. Willis on the _Mirror_, and had travelled far in the wild West despite an accident in his youth which had crushed his leg between a boat and the wharf, leaving him a life-long cripple. In this western journeying he gathered material for _A Winter in the West_ and _Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie_. He had already written _Vanderlyn_, and now in the book-shop was daily discussing his plans for _Grayslaer_. No hint came to the minds of those who listened to his witty talk in idle hours at the book-shop that in another ten years he would be taken from his last city home in Greene Street to live out the remaining thirty-four years of his life in the asylum at Harrisburg, Pa., a mental wreck. It was Hoffman who introduced Lewis Gaylord Clark to the book-shop. Clark had been associated with him on the _Knickerbocker_ magazine, and it was Clark who continued that publication for many years in the office on Broadway, just south of Cortlandt Street. To the office very often went his twin brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Philadelphia _Gazette_, who contributed his now long-forgotten verse to his brother's magazine almost to the day of his death. It was quite natural that John L. Stephens should make Bartlett's book-shop a headquarters while he was in town, for Bartlett and he were firm friends of years' standing, and their minds ran along in very much the same historical groove. Many a story the famous traveller recounted to his friend and to the others who were gathered there, and his presence was eagerly looked for. He had been to Egypt and had written from there letters that were published in the _Knickerbocker_ when Hoffman was at its head. He had been to Arabia, to Poland, and to half a dozen other countries, and had written of his travels with a straightforward directness that was very much like his clear ringing talk. His visits to the book-shop happened years before he became interested in the Panama Railroad, for when this project came to his hand he devoted so much of himself to the building of the road across the Isthmus that he gave little time to writing. Another man who lingered in the book-shop more than any of the others was a sort of _protégé_ of Clark's, since Clark had in a great measure discovered him. His name was Frederick S. Cozzens, a wine merchant, and almost every afternoon he walked from his place around the next corner in Vesey Street, the second block below Broadway. It was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then a great deal talked about as the author of the _Sparrowgrass Papers_. This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of books and opinions, _Arcturus_, for Evert A. Duyckinck was one of the _habitués_ there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his brother George was to start the publication of _The Literary World_; and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this publication collected material and wrote their _Encyclopædia of American Literature_, which gave them fame long after both were dead. The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of 1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself, heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made. James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous business for a writer's career, projected his _Literary Gazette_, in which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he transferred his _New England Magazine_ to New York under the title of the _American Monthly Magazine_, the same year established _Our New World_. He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at Bartlett's place thought much of the author of _The Old Sexton_. William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen, so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work. In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these memories start. At that corner, in a building long gone now, when Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the _New York Review and Athenæum_, in which his own poem, _Death of the Flowers_, was published, and in which Halleck's _Marco Bozzaris_ first appeared. In his office there Bryant often talked with Percival and with Hillhouse, and there he discussed with Verplanck and Sands what manner of verse he would contribute to the newly started _Talisman_ magazine. Up Broadway a little farther, at the Fulton Street corner, is the publication office of the _Evening Post_, a building which more than any other in New York should call forth thoughts of Bryant, for he was the editor of that newspaper for two-and-fifty years. When he joined the staff in 1826, in two years succeeding Coleman as editor and remaining so until his death, the _Evening Post_ had its office in William Street, near Pine. But Bryant spent many years of his editorial life in the Broadway building, and one of its attractions, now pointed out to all visitors, is the poet's window on an upper floor where he sat at his desk, that was always stacked high and negligently with all manner of useless papers and rejected manuscripts, and looked over the city to the south as he worked. [Illustration: VIEW OF OLD BUILDINGS IN WILLIAM STREET, LOOKING TOWARDS MAIDEN LANE, 1800.] Standing beside this window there are memories of other men than Bryant to be called up, for here remembrance of many of his associates comes vividly to mind. There was William Leggett, the poet's friend and business companion, the brilliant journalist who wrote _Tales of a Country Schoolmaster_, and who worked beside Bryant from 1829 to 1836. With thoughts of him come those of Parke Godwin, who joined the _Evening Post_ staff the year after Leggett left it, who as long as the poet lived was his close friend, and who, marrying Bryant's daughter Fanny, wove closer year by year the relations that bound them. There are memories, too, of John Bigelow, who occupied an editorial chair on the _Post_ for a dozen years after 1849. Going still farther up Broadway in search of Bryant reminders, you walk past the Post-Office and over the stretch of pavement made historic by the personal encounter between the poet and William L. Stone. This happened in 1831, and Stone, then editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_, was not at all friendly to Bryant. The two met there on the parkside, just opposite where Philip Hone lived, and Hone, looking from his window, saw the encounter. Sitting down he immediately wrote of it in the diary which is such a perfect reflection of the city's history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Those were the days when Stone was collecting his information concerning the Indians which he afterwards utilized to such advantage in _The Life of Joseph Brant_, _The Life of Red Jacket_, and kindred books. Keeping on up Broadway to Leonard Street, thence over across town three blocks west to 92 Hudson Street, the stroller comes to a warehouse that has been reared above the home where Bryant lived when he became editor of the _Evening Post_ and from which he often walked around the corner to 345 Greenwich Street to make an evening call on his near neighbor and friend J. Fenimore Cooper. On a little farther, up Varick Street this time, past the old Chapel of St. John's, lingering in its stately age quiet and dignified amid the unwholesome neighbors that have grown up around it. On the very next block, close by Canal Street, there is a red brick house with stone steps, and here Bryant lived after his removal from Hudson Street. This same Varick Street leads straight north for half a mile until it touches Carmine Street, and in the second block of that thoroughfare is the house of age-worn brick that was the poet's "home in Carmine Street," of which he spoke so often and so affectionately. From this point, a walk due east straight across town to the Bowery is as direct a route as could be found to the house where Bryant boarded in Fourth Street near the Bowery. It was here he entertained the friendly Unitarian clergyman, Orville Dewey, and discussed poetry with him. Here too he began the acquaintance with his fellow-lodger, Parke Godwin, without a thought that Godwin would one day be his son-in-law, without a thought that they would walk side by side through a literary life for close upon half a century. Still on up-town, this time to Union Square. Between that green spot and Irving Place in Fifteenth Street, you come upon the home of the Century Club in its early days, when it was the chief place in America for the entertainment of men of letters. This club, founded by Bryant, was presided over at various times by Bancroft, Verplanck, and men whose names are equally well remembered. Bryant was the president when he died. The club now has a sumptuous home in Forty-third Street near Fifth Avenue. Last home of all of Bryant in New York is the brownstone house next to the College of St. Francis Xavier, in Sixteenth Street. Here he lived during the last years of his life when he was not passing the long spring and summer months at his well-beloved Cedarmere at Roslyn, Long Island, which had been his favorite abiding place since 1843. It was in this Sixteenth Street house that he wrote his last lines of verse--on the birthday of Washington; it was here that he died. One more structure not a great distance away calls up strongly the memory of Bryant. In Fourth Avenue at Twentieth Street is picturesque All Souls' Church, which has been there since 1855. Built of brick trimmed with Caen stone, planned in the form of a Greek cross, it was the first example of the Byzantine style of architecture in America. It was to have a tall, square, tower-like steeple, but this was never built. To this church the body of Bryant was taken, and there in the presence of all literary New York, and while the whole city mourned, Dr. Bellows, who had been his long-time friend, preached his funeral sermon. Chapter X Half a Century Ago Like many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the scene in days agone--Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a square ornamental structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it as it was half a century ago. Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married Aaron Burr. To the south was the square frame building, close by a clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where his widow stayed on after his death. Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art studies in Paris under the master David; as a man at his father's country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality, a man so bound within the circle of his own thoughts that he had little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was moving. [Illustration: Audubon's Home 156th St. and N. River] Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the Hudson, built the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him. With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive. The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The peacefulness of Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life, and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch over him. [Illustration: Clement C. Moore's House Chelsea] While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C. Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village, now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea Square. Clement C. Moore inherited from his father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned books or his philanthropy that his name is best recalled, but by a poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic of _The Visit of St. Nicholas_, begins with "'T was the night before Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will endure to please many more to come. All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and went. This was the first near approach to a _salon_ in this country. In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off Washington Square. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too, went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors, the _Handbook of Universal Literature_, was written when she lived in Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue. In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirkland, who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice before she published _Forest Life_, which was the second of her descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years, indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the Civil War. Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting the _National Anti-Slavery Standard_. She had been a writer since her youth, having published her first book, _Hobomok_, in 1821. Her works had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the title _An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans_. She ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland, Massachusetts. Very often Edgar Allan Poe attended the Lynch receptions, taking with him his delicate wife, who seemed to get better for the moment when she saw her husband the centre of a notable gathering. For even here Poe had quite a following of his own. It was on one of these evenings that he gave it as his opinion that _The Sinless Child_ was one of the strongest long poems ever produced in America. This poem was just then making a great stir and on this special evening had been the subject of much discussion. The author was present, as she usually was where writers congregated, for the beautiful and witty Elizabeth Oakes Smith carried enthusiasm and inspiration wherever she went. She found time to form part of many a circle, even though her days were well filled, for she assisted her husband, "Major Jack Downing," in his editorial work. For many a year before she finally retired to Hollywood, South Carolina, she held her place as the first and only woman lecturer in America. [Illustration: 1. W.D. HOWELLS. 2. J.G. HOLLAND. 3. RICHARD GRANT WHITE. 4. BRANDER MATTHEWS. 5. WILLIAM WINTER. From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of Mr. W.E. Benjamin.] Another dear friend of Poe's might usually be found at these receptions. "Estella" Lewis, the poet, lived in Brooklyn and held there quite a court of clever people. The time came when she was, indeed, a friend in need to Poe in his time of dire necessity at Fordham. It was at her Brooklyn home that he read _The Raven_ before it was published, and Estella Lewis was the last friend he visited before he left New York on the journey south which ended in his death. On the "Poe nights," too, Ann S. Stephens was usually to be found at Miss Lynch's. She became a much-read novelist, writing _Fashion and Famine_ and _Mary Derwent_. On these nights, too, might be seen Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist. She had left her Massachusetts home to take her place with Horace Greeley as literary editor of the _Tribune_, and between whiles devoted herself to charitable work in an effort to better the social condition of the poor of the metropolis. During most of her stay she lived in a locality much changed since her time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A picturesque spot it was, overlooking the green stretches of Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in 1850, a passenger in the merchantman _Elizabeth_, when the ship was wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it. To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While, somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer, expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunity offered. He, on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her. There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first volume of poems, _Footnotes_, had just been published. At Miss Lynch's house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor. Taylor had already travelled on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels in _Views Afoot_, and was then working under Greeley on the _Tribune_, as one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote the _Tribune's_ book criticisms. _Views Afoot_ was the most popular book of the day when Stoddard walked into the _Tribune_ office and introduced himself to the author, finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only broken in upon by death. A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway. Charles Fenno Hoffman, who occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for his services on the _Tribune_, as Greeley did not believe in high salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wrote _Kubleh_ and _Ariel in the Cloven Pine_, and, too, the song that won for him a prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W. Griswold, author of _Poets and Poetry of America_, _Prose Writers of America_, and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made one of the party at this time, when his tragedy, _Calaynos_, was being acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England. Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then enthusiastically putting the finishing touches to _St. Leger_. These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's career. Many other places in the city are associated with him, one a house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote among other things the _Poems of the Orient_. His last city home was at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wrote _Deukalion_, and from there he started out, after being dined and fêted, on his mission as United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in Berlin. Chapter XI Two Famous Meeting-Places Looking backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways. There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half on the land, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to how it ever came by the flowery half of its name. Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town--beyond the town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis. But of all the points of interest none comes fresher to the mind than Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day, with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homes or a business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and respect. They were gifted men with great power of intellect, who spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew with most of them, they gathered there. It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the tradition runs, soon after he started the _Saturday Press_ in 1858, that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die, and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that the members of the staff of the _Saturday Press_ did more than any one else to give it a name that has lived through the years. It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you will be disappointed, for there is nothing to locate--just a conventional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's." This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote regularly for the columns of _Vanity Fair_. He has himself said that some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q. K. Philander Doesticks," and a score of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was well known to all the habitués. They all knew his life's story; they had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written his historical romance _Cromwell_, and how he had mapped out some of the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the name of "Frank Forester," produced such books as _American Game in its Season_, _The Horse and Horsemanship in North America_, and become famous by novel-writing. He was the first to introduce sports of the field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that "Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green, not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early days in New York, he had taught school. Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had made the country ring with the name of the lively but illiterate showman, and was in New York trying to carry _Vanity Fair_ to success--a task which he could not accomplish. Another of the Pfaff company was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This was at a time when he had editorial charge of the _Saturday Press_ after he had come from Portsmouth and served three years at his desk in the commission house of his rich uncle. Working over the books of the firm, his mind was often busy with themes outside of the commission house, all tending towards a literary career. Another lounger at Pfaff's whose name has become famous in the world of letters was William Winter, who was sometimes a visitor. Howells went there on his first visit to New York and dined with Walt Whitman, and there were others--Bayard Taylor and Stedman among them. [Illustration: The University Building] It was only a few minutes' walk from Pfaff's to Washington Square, and there could be found the substantial-appearing University building, where Theodore Winthrop had his office and where he wrote _Cecil Dreeme_ and _John Brent_. From that gloomy building he was called to the war, and to his home there friends brought the details of his death--shot through the heart while rallying his men in an attack which he had helped to plan at the action of Big Bethel in June, 1861. At the time of his death he was scarcely known as a writer, and it was not until the publication of _Cecil Dreeme_ that the world realized that it had lost an entertaining story-teller as well as a brave soldier when Winthrop fell. Among others who served in the Seventh Regiment of New York, of which Theodore Winthrop was a member, was Fitz-James O'Brien, the erratic and brilliant journalist, whose tale of _The Diamond Lens_ was his best contribution to the literature of the day. The only literary man of the Seventh to return to New York was O'Brien's friend, Charles Graham Halpine, who resigned, and lived to make his name famous by his humorous sketches of army life supposed to have been penned by "Private Miles O'Reilly." The name of Winthrop naturally suggests the name of Dr. John W. Draper, who was associated with the University of New York for more than thirty years. His technical writings made his name known over the world, and he spent many years of his life in the dingy old University building working on a _History of Intellectual Development in Europe_. [Illustration: The Studio Building in West 70th St.] Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room on the second floor where O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing _The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things_. In this large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings to entertain his literary friends. Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years was that of Alice and Phoebe Cary. This house, one of the few residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the room above, where Phoebe worked--when she found time; for in the joint housekeeping of the sisters Phoebe often said that she had to be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made her name famous and well-beloved, _Nearer My Home_. [Illustration: 53 EAST 20th St.] There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street, she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In this room, too, she died. To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall all the writers in the city at that time, and to mention all those prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging the material for his _Life of Horace Greeley_, material gathered from those who had known the great editor during his early days in New Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and also another member of the _Tribune_ staff, Richard Hildreth, the writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston _Atlas_ and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste. Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time when he was at work on his _Battle Pieces_, and could look back on years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in his successful _Typee_. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man, he died. Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and with them she talked over a great many details of her _History of the City of New York_, which she was at that time energetically engaged upon. And there this future editor of _Harper's Bazar_ met Martha J. Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her _History of New York_, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of the _Magazine of American History_. Mary L. Booth used to tell very amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as "Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death. That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia, where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great distance away, and often came to talk with Phoebe Cary about that institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, _I Would Not Live Alway_. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on Cathedral Heights. Chapter XII Some of the Writers of To-Day There is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace surroundings with more than passing interest. In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached library shelf. To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the _Amateur Emigrant_. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10--a meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the struggle and making rents in the house-front. [Illustration: No. 10 West St.] Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the first few chapters of Bunner's _Story of a New York House_. Around the corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing the name of Marketfield Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in which Julia Ward Howe was born. Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close upon twenty years. Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, on the third floor, is found the old home of the _Commercial Advertiser_, where Jesse Lynch Williams worked, and wrote _A City Editor's Conscience_, and other stories. A little way farther on is the _Tribune_ building, where William Winter has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller conducted a newspaper syndicate before _Eben Holden_ was thought of. Then on again a few steps to the _Sun_ building and into the room, little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend worked, and wrote about _Chimmie Fadden_. There is a winding staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the rooms of the _Evening Sun_, where Richard Harding Davis "reported," and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly across the street is the _World_ office, and looking from the windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village, you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten years she was getting inspiration for the _Tales of a City Room_. Down narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home of _Harper's Magazine_, where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean Howells. Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in the neighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street. From this far East Side to Washington Square is quite a distance, but stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters' offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most of _How the Other Half Lives_, and from which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the city poor--carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called him New York's most useful citizen. [Illustration: Where "How The Other Half Lives" was written] In Washington Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary associations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction. [Illustration: 146 Macdougal St.] From the square, stroll in any direction for definite reminders. Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made the Garibaldi of his _Bohemia Invaded_. Walk towards the east, past the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street corner, at No. 21 Washington Place, where Henry James was born. Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he wrote _Behind Time_, and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wrote _Along the Shore_. An historic site this house stands on, for it is where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is old-time Clinton Place, which now, for modern convenience, recking not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote _Ivar the Viking_, and to the right the house opposite, covered from basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard Watson Gilder. [Illustration: 108 Waverly Place] It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in this district many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as "The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wrote _The Morgensons_, and here Stoddard himself wrote _The King's Bell_, _Melodies and Madrigals_, and other poems. Not more than a block away, in the house numbered 118, Richard Grant White had his home when he wrote _The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin_. [Illustration: Richard Grant White's Home] Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland, that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend Bayard Taylor, and here the _Life of Humboldt_ came from Stoddard's pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when he wrote _The Land of the Midnight Sun_; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness. In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died, the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry Stoddard, in 1903. Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No. 330 was another interesting landmark until, quite lately, it was swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote the _French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_. H.C. Bunner had quarters there when he wrote _A Woman of Honor_ and other stories of that period, and Richard Grant White was a long dweller there. [Illustration: Where Richard Henry Stoddard Died] Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who fifty years and more ago assisted William Cullen Bryant in the editorial conduct of the _Evening Post_. Only a few steps away, in historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton Harrison wrote _Sweet Bells out of Tune_, and on another block farther to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given over to commercial uses. [Illustration: Where the Author's Club was organized] In the short stretch of Fifteenth Street that leads from Irving Place to Union Square are two points closely associated with the literature of the city. One is midway the distance, the prosaic office of a brewer now, but once the home of the Century Club when Bancroft the historian was its president. The other is nearer to the square, with a tall iron fence, and a gateway not at all in keeping with the modern appearance of the street. Behind the tall fence is a bit of greensward, and beyond that a house quaintly unusual in appearance, seeming to shrink from sight in the shadows cast about it. This is where Richard Watson Gilder at one time lived, where Charles De Kay organized the Authors' Club, and where the Society of American Artists was formed. [Illustration: Horace Greeley's Home] Beyond Union Square there is in Eighteenth Street the house numbered 121 where Brander Matthews lived for fourteen or more years, where he wrote many of his books, and where was held the first meeting to organize the American Copyright League. It was Professor Matthews who gave the dinner at which the unique society known as the Kinsmen came into being, at the Florence on the same street at number 105,--an apartment house in which Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bisland, and Edgar Saltus have made their homes, and in which the widow of Herman Melville is now living. In nearby Nineteenth Street is still standing No. 35, a house where Horace Greeley lived, with William Allen Butler, the author of _Nothing to Wear_, for a next-door neighbor. Three blocks farther on is the big office building where Dr. Josiah Strong wrote most of _Our Country_, and where Hamilton W. Mabie has a study in the editorial rooms of _The Outlook_. A few steps farther in Twenty-second Street, at No. 33, Stephen Crane wrote part of _The Red Badge of Courage_ and worked on the daily newspapers. Close by in Fifth Avenue is the publishing house where the critic and essayist, William Crary Brownell, author of _French Traits_, and other works, spends his business hours. Around the corner in Twenty-third Street, on the top floor of another publishing house is the den of the energetic author, editor, and critic, Jeannette L. Gilder. Across Madison Square, at the Twenty-fifth Street corner, Edgar Saltus had apartments for some time, and just off Broadway in Twenty-seventh Street, at No. 26, Edgar Fawcett wrote _A Mild Barbarian_. On up Madison Avenue past Twenty-eighth Street is a brownstone dwelling with a luxuriantly blooming window garden, where James Lane Allen lives when he is in town and revises his writings. A few steps into the next thoroughfare the Little Church Around the Corner nestles in a populous district, and in the next block, just beyond the Woman's Hotel, Mrs. Burton Harrison has written many of her books. Two blocks away, in the _Life_ building, John A. Mitchell, founder of the paper, spends several working hours of each day. Going farther up-town in Park Avenue just beyond Thirty-sixth Street is a substantial building where Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland wrote and where he died. In nearby Thirty-seventh Street hover memories of Parke Godwin, who married the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, and whose business and literary interests were closely entwined with those of his father-in-law. A few steps westward is the solemnly quiet Brick Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Henry van Dyke preached before he was called to Princeton. Turning into Forty-sixth Street, note a house distinguished from its neighbors by a doorway of wrought-iron, where John A. Mitchell did much of the writing of _Amos Judd_. [Illustration: The Beekman Mansion near 52nd St. [Transcriber's Note: should be 51st St.] East River] Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in the Beekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it then--see the waves splashing on a rocky shore, with neither docks nor wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough shore. Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is the mammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150, Kate Douglas Wiggin evolved _Penelope's Experiences_. Still on up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful death. Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street, almost upon the shores of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful homes, Brander Matthews, author of _Vignettes of Manhattan_ and _A Confident To-morrow_, lives and works. Returning down-town on the westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street before a house, colonial as to its doors and windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin, author and encyclopædist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house, and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park, Edgar Fawcett conceived _A Romance of Old New York_, before going to Europe for an indefinite stay. [Illustration: Lawrence Hutton's House] In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until 1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he kept his assortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his friends, authors, actors, men of different callings. [Illustration: De Kay's House--London Terrace] Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists to-day long after the village has ceased to have an identity. One house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely and historically, carrying as its literary association the name of Charles De Kay, critic and author--a name of to-day and of the past as well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake. Index A _Adventures of Captain Bonneville, The_, 102 _Afara_, 139 _Age of Reason, The_, 32, 84 Aldrich, James, 179 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 218 Allen, James Lane, 247 All Souls' Church, 188 _Along the Shore_, 238 _Amateur Emigrant_, 231 _American_, 174 American Copyright League, 245 _American Game in its Season_, 216 _American Monthly Magazine_, 154, 180 _American Review_, 158 _American Theatre, The_, 70 _Amos Judd_, 249 _Analectic Magazine_, 96, 112 _An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans_, 200 "Ancient Club of New York," 110 André, Major John, 55, 56 _Androborus_, 37 _Annabel Lee_, 164 Apollo dancing rooms, 170 _Arcturus_, 178 _Ariel in the Cloven Pine_, 206 Arnold, Benedict, House of, 56 Arnold, George, 215, 216 _Arthur Mervyn_, 78 Astor House, 172 Astor, John Jacob, 102, 123 Astor Place Opera House, 160 _Astoria_, 102 _Atlantic Monthly_, 133 Audubon, John James, 189-195 Authors' Club, 245 B Bacheller, Irving, 234 _Backwoodsman, The_, 113 Bancroft, George, 103, 186 Barlow, Joel, 84 Barstow, Elizabeth, 204 Bartlett, John R., 172-180 Bartlett's Book Shop, 172-180 _Battle Pieces_, 224 _Beauties of Santa Cruz_, 52 Beekman House, The, 249 _Behind Time_, 238 _Bells, The_, 164 _Ben Bolt_, 162 Benjamin, Park, 175, 179, 180 _Biblical Researches in Palestine_, 151 Bigelow, John, 183, 243 Bisland, Elizabeth, 246 Bleecker, Eliza, 47-51 Bleecker Street, 83 Bloomingdale Village, 145, 157 _Bohemia Invaded_, 238 Boker, George H., 207 Bonneville, Captain, 102 Bonneville, Madame, 82, 83 Books of New Amsterdam, 7 Booth, Mary L., 227 Botta, Mrs., 197, 199, 200 Botta, Vincenzo, 198 Bouwerie Village, 19, 22 Bowling Green, 8 Bradford's printing press, 27 Bradford, William, 38, 57 Bradford, William, tomb of, 25-29 _Bravo, The_, 134 Bread-and-Cheese Club, 131-133 Brevoort, Henry, 110 Brickmaking in New Amsterdam, 3 Briggs, Charles F., 159, 160 _British Prison Ship, The_, 53 Broad Street, 7, 13, 31 Broadway, 67 _Broadway Journal_, 159 Brook Farm, 205 Brown, Charles Brockden, 77, 78-80 Browne, George Farrar, 217 Brownell, William Crary, 247 Bryant, William Cullen, 132, 133, 174, 180-188 Bunner, H.C., 243 Burns's Coffee House, 99 Burr, Aaron, 63, 190 Burton, William E., 150 Butler, William Allen, 246 C _Calaynos_, 207 Cary, Alice, 222-228 Cary, Phoebe, 222-228 _Cecil Dreeme_, 219 Century Club, 186, 244 _Champion of Freedom, The_, 130 Champlin, John Denison, 252 Cheever, George B, 151 Chelsea Square, 195, 196 Chelsea Village, 145, 195, 196 Child, Lydia M., 199, 200 _Chimmie Fadden_, 234 Church Farm, 33 Church in the Fort, 15, 20 Church of the Holy Communion, 229 _City Editor's Conscience, A_, 234 City Hall, First, 8 City Hall in Wall Street, 31 City Hall Park, 48, 67, 108 City Hall (Present), 75, 109 City Hotel, 100, 128 City Plan Commission, 109, 110 Clapp, Henry, 213 Clapp's _Almanac_, John, 27-29 _Clara Howard_, 78 _Clari, the Maid of Milan_, 74 Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 175-178 Clark, Willis Gaylord, 176 Clarke, McDonald, 136-144 _Clermont, The_, 109 Clinton Hall, 159, 160 Cobbett, William, 85 Colden, Cadwallader, 38, 39, 42, 43 Collect Pond, 22, 48 Columbia College, 81, 116, 174 Columbia University, 43 _Columbiad_, 84 _Commentaries on American Law_, 81 _Commercial Advertiser_, 65, 183 _Common Sense_, 82 Common, The, 48, 49, 67 _Complaint of New Netherland, The_, 10 _Confident To-morrow, A_, 251 _Conquest of Grenada_, 97 Contoit's Garden, 170 Cooke, George Frederick, 71, 72 Cooper, James Fenimore, 125-136, 184 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 127 Cornbury, Lord, 34, 35 Corporation Library, 31 _Corsair, The_, 155 Cosby, Governor, 39-43 Cozzens, Frederick S., 175, 178 Crane, Stephen, 246 _Criterion, The_, 222 "Croaker Papers," 119 Croegers, Tryntie, 15 _Cromwell_, 216 _Culprit Fay, The_, 121 Curtis, George William, 235 D Dana, Charles A., 234 Dana, Richard Henry, 130, 131 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 141, 142 Davis, Richard Harding, 234, 238 _Deacon Giles's Distillery_, 151 Dearman, 104 _Death of the Flowers_, 181 Debtors' Prison, 49-51 DeKay, Charles, 245, 254 De Lancey, �tienne, 99 Dennie, Joseph, 77, 79, 80 De Sille, Anna, 18 De Sille, Nicasius, 11-19 _Deukalion_, 208 Dewey, Orville, 185 _Diamond Lens, The_, 220 _Dictionary of Americanisms_, 172 _Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_, 112 _Don Giovanni_, 141 Downing, Major Jack, 150, 201 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 103, 115-124 Draper, Dr. John W., 220, 221 Du Chaillu, Paul, 239, 241, 252 Duke's Farm, 32 Dunlap, William, 70, 71, 77 _Dutchman's Fireside, The_, 113 Duyckinck, Evert A., 175, 178, 179 Duyckinck, George, 179 Dyde's, 111 E East River Park, 101 _Eben Holden_, 234 _Edgar Huntley_, 78 Elgin Botanical Garden, 81 _Elixir of Moonshine_, 139 Embury, Emma C., 144 _Encyclopædia of American Literature_, 179 English, Thomas Dunn, 162, 164 _Eureka_, 163 _Evening Mirror_, 152, 156-159 _Evening Post_, 181, 182 Exchange Street, 13 F Fairlie, Mary, 94 _Fall of the House of Usher_, 150 _Fanny_, 118 _Fashion and Famine_, 202 Fawcett, Edgar, 247, 253 Fay, Theodore S., 154 Federal Hall, 62 _Federalist_, 62 Fire of 1776, 54 First almanac printed, 27-29 First City Hall, 8 First free school, 109 First library, 31 First museum, 171 First newspaper, 38, 57 First newspaper row, 57 First night watch, 25 First poet of New Amsterdam, 4-10 First Poorhouse, 49 First printing press, 27 First street lighting, 25 First Tammany Hall, 71 First telegraphic message, 194 Fitzroy, Lord Augustus, 41, 42 _Footnotes_, 204 Fordham, 162-166 Ford, James L., 238 Ford, Paul Leicester, 251 Forester, Frank, 216 _Forest Life_, 199 Forrest-Macready Riots, 160 Francis, Dr. J.W., 132 Frankfort Street, 45, 46 _French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_, 243 _French Traits_, 247 Freneau, Philip, 47, 51-66 Friendly Club, 77 Fuller, Margaret, 202, 203 G Gaine, Hugh, 58-60 _Gazetteer_, Rivington's, 56 General Theological Seminary, 195, 196 _Gentleman's Magazine, The_, 150, 152 Gilder, Jeannette L., 247 Gilder, Richard Watson, 239, 245 _Give Me the Old_, 151 Glasgow, Ellen, 246 _Gleanings in Europe_, 135 _Glimpses of Home Life_, 143 _Godey's Lady's Book_, 161 Godwin, Parke, 182, 183, 186, 248 Golden Hill, 48, 87, 88 Golden Hill Inn, 88 Goodrich, Samuel G., 227 Gowans, William, 149 Gracie's house, 103 _Graham's Magazine_, 152 _Grayslaer_, 175 Greeley, Horace, 202, 205, 206, 224, 246 Greenwich Village, 81-83, 145, 146 Griswold, Rufus W., 207 Grove Street, 84 H Hackett, James H., 114 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 103, 115-124, 132, 138, 142 Hall of Records, 49-51 Halpine, Charles Graham, 220 Hamilton, Alexander, 62, 191 Hamilton Grange, 62 _Handbook of Universal Literature_, 198 Hanover Square, 57-59, 61 Harland, Henry, 250 Harlem, 145 Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 244, 248 "Harry Franco," 159, 174 Haven, Alice, 228 Hell Gate, 101 Herbert, Henry W., 216, 217 Hildreth, Richard, 224 Hillhouse, James A., 128, 181 _History of Intellectual Development in Europe_, 221 _History of New York_, 227 _History of the City of New York_, 227 _History of the Five Nations_, 39 _History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States_, 70 _Hobomok_, 199 Hodgkinson, Thomas Hawkins, 120 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 173-176, 206 Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 95 Hoffman, Matilda, 95, 174 Holland, Dr. Josiah Gilbert, 248 _Home Journal_, 157 _Home, Sweet Home_, 74 _Homeward Bound_, 136 Hone, Philip, 132, 183 Hoogh Street, 10 _Horse and Horsemanship in North America, The_, 216 _Horseshoe Robinson_, 149 Hosack, Dr. David, 81 _House of Night, The_, 52 Houses of New Amsterdam, 2, 3 Howe, Julia Ward, 233 Howells, William Dean, 218, 235, 251 _How the Other Half Lives_, 236 Hudson Park, 146-148 Huguenot Church, 32 Hunter, Governor Robert, 35-38 Hutton, Lawrence, 253 I _Idle Man, The_, 131 Idlewild, 156 _Imp of the Perverse, The_, 158 Independent Columbian Hotel, 94 Irving, Ebenezer, 100 Irving, John T., 104 Irving, Peter, 92, 94, 109, 110 Irvington, 104 Irving, Washington, 87-105, 109-112, 115, 174 Irving, Washington, birthplace of, 89 Irving, William, 93, 107, 108, 110-112, 231 Italian Opera House, 141 _Ivar the Viking_, 239 _I Would Not Live Alway_, 228 J James, Henry, 238 _Jane Talbot_, 78 Jans Farm, Annetje, 32, 33 _Jersey_, The prison ship, 53 _John Brent_, 219 _John Bull in America_, 114 John Street Theatre, 55, 56, 90, 91 Jordan, Elizabeth, 235 _Judgment, The_, 128 Jumel, Madame, 190 Jumel Mansion, 190 K Kean, Edmund, 137 Kemble, Gouverneur, 110, 111, 113 Kennedy, John P., 148, 149 Kent, James, 77, 80, 81 Kidd, Captain William, 24 Kilmaster's School, 91 Kimball, Richard, 207 _King's Bell_, 240 King's College, 43 King's Farm, 32 Kinsmen, The, 246 Kip, Hendrick, 12, 18 Kirkland, Caroline M., 198, 199 Kissing Bridge, 22 Knickerbocker Days, Close of the, 167-172 _Knickerbocker History of New York_, 94 _Knickerbocker_ Magazine, 174, 176, 177 Knight, Madame Sarah, 33-35 _Koningsmarke_, 113 _Kubleh_, 206 L Lafayette Theatre, 134 Lamb, Martha J., 227 La Montagne, Dr., 12 _Land of the Midnight Sun, The_, 242 _Last of the Mohicans, The_, 134 Lathrop, George Parsons, 238 Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, 236, 238 Lawson, James, 120 "Lay Preacher, The," 79 _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, 103 Leggett, William, 182 Leisler, Jacob, 46 _Letters from under a Bridge_, 155 Lewis, Estella, 201, 202 _Liberty Bell, The_, 151 _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, 97 _Life of Horace Greeley_, 224 _Life of Humboldt_, 241 _Life of Joseph Brant, The_, 184 _Life of Mahomet_, 105 _Life of Red Jacket, The_, 184 _Life of Washington_, 105 _Lion of the West, The_, 114 _Literary Gazette_, 179 _Literary Magazine and American Register, The_, 80 _Literary World, The_, 179 _Literati of New York, The_, 161 London Terrace, 253 Longfellow, Henry W., 97 Longworth, David, 93 Loockermans, Govert, 12 Ludlow, Fitz-Hugh, 215 Luska, Sidney, 250 Lynch, Anne C., 197-204 M Mabie, Hamilton W., 246 Mad Poet, The, 136-144 _Magazine of American History_, 227 Mahan, Captain A.T., 252 "Major Jack Downing," 150, 201 _Marco Bozzaris_, 124, 181 Martling's Tavern, 71 _Mary Derwent_, 202 Masonic Hall, 170 Matthews, Brander, 238, 243, 245, 246, 251 McLelland, Isaac, 152 _Melodies and Madrigals_, 240 Melville, Herman, 224-226 Mercantile Library, 160 Messinger, Robert H., 151 Middle Dutch Church, 55, 171 _Mild Barbarian, A_, 247 Miller, John, 29, 30 _Minerva, The_, 65 Minniesland, 189, 194 _Mirror, The_, 130 Mitchell, John A., 248, 249 Mitchill, Dr. Samuel, 94 Moore, Bishop Benjamin, 196 Moore, Clement C., 195, 196 Moreau, Jean Victor, 61 _Morgensons, The_, 240 _Morning Chronicle_, 92, 109 Morris, George P., 130, 138, 153, 154, 156, 157 Morris House, 123, 190 Morse, Samuel F.B., 194 Muhlenberg, Dr. William Augustus, 228 Murray Hill, 60 Murray, Lindley, 60, 61 Murray, Mrs., 60 _My Faith Looks up to Thee_, 140 N _Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 150 _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 199 _National Gazette_, 64 _Nearer My Home_, 223 New Amsterdam, 2-6 _New England Magazine_, 179 _New Gospel of Peace, The_, 241 _New Mirror_, 162 Newspaper, First, 38, 57 Newspaper Row, The first, 57 New York before the Civil War, 209-212 _New York Gazette_, 38, 58 _New York Gazetteer_, 58 New York in 1830, 167-172 _New York Journal_, 58 _New York Mercury_, 58 _New York Mirror_, 153-156 _New York Quarterly Review_, 149 _New York Review and Athenæum_, 181 Niblo's Garden, 171 Night watch, The first, 25 Noah, Mordecai M., 138 _Nothing to Wear_, 246 _Nozze di Figaro_, 141 O O'Brien, Fitz-James, 220, 221 Odellville, 145 _Old Oaken Bucket, The_, 130 _Old Sexton, The_, 180 "Old Tom's," 118, 119 _Oliver Goldsmith_, 105 O'Reilly, Miles, 220 _Ormond_, 78 Osgood, Frances Sargent, 203, 204 _Our Country_, 246 _Our New World_, 180 _Outlook, The_, 246 P Paine, Thomas, 82-86 Paine, Thomas, Grave of, 85, 86 Paine, Thomas, House of, 83, 84 Palmer, Ray, 139, 140 Park Row, 68 Park Theatre, 68, 72, 75, 77, 171 Parton, James, 224 Paulding, James Kirke, 90, 93, 103, 107-114 _Paul Felton_, 131 Payne, John Howard, 72-75, 97 _Penelope's Experiences_, 251 Percival, James G., 132, 181 "Peter Parley," 227 Petticoat Lane, 233 Pfaff's, 213-218 _Philosophy of Composition_, 161 _Picture of New York_, 94 _Pilot, The_, 128 Pine Street, 32, 75, 76 _Pioneers, The_, 128 Poe, Edgar Allan, 145-166, 200-204 Poe, Virginia, 149, 157, 162, 164 _Poems of the Orient_, 208 Poet, First, of New Netherland, 4-10 _Poets and Poetry of America_, 207 Poorhouse, First, 49 _Portfolio, The_, 79 _Powhatan_, 151 _Prairie, The_, 134 _Praise of New Netherland, The_, 10 _Precaution_, 126 _Prose Writers of America_, 207 _Putnam's Magazine_, 159 Q Queen's Farm, 32 R _Raven, The_, 158, 161, 202 _Red Badge of Courage, The_, 246 _Red Rover, The_, 134 Renwick, Jane, 96, 104 Renwick, Professor James, 96, 132 Revolution, New York during the, 54-56 Reynold's Ale House, 117-119 Richmond Hill, 63 Riis, Jacob A., 236 Ripley, George, 205 _Rip Van Winkle_, 97 Rivington, James, 58, 59 Robinson, Edward, 151 _Romance of Old New York, A_, 253 S St. George's Chapel, 90 St. John's Burying-Ground, 147, 148, 150 St. John's Park, 125, 126 _St. Leger_, 207 St. Luke's Hospital, 228, 229 St. Mark's Church, 22, 23 St. Patrick's Church, 142 St. Paul's Chapel, 62, 108 _Salmagundi_, 41, 93 _Salmagundi's_ Cockloft Hall, 111 Saltus, Edgar, 246, 247 Sands, Robert C, 133, 181 _Saturday Press_, 214, 218 Schurz, Carl, 251 Scudder's Museum, 171 Second City Hall, 12 Selyns, Henricus, 20-24 Shakespeare Tavern, 120 "Sign of the Bible and Crown," 58 _Sinless Child, The_, 200 _Sketches in Switzerland_, 135 Smith, Rev. Eli, 151 Smith, Dr. Elihu Hubbard, 76-79 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 201 Smith, Seba, 150 Smith, William, 43, 44 Society Library, 31 Society of American Artists, 245 _Southern Literary Messenger_, 148 _Sparkling and Bright_, 173 _Sparrowgrass Papers_, 178 _Spy, The_, 126, 134 Stadt Huys, 8 Stedman, Edmund C., 218, 233, 253 Steendam, Jacob, 4-10 Stephens, Ann S., 202 Stephens, John L., 175-177 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 230, 231 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 204-207, 233, 236, 238, 240-242 Stoddard, Mrs. Richard Henry, 240, 242 Stone Street, 9 Stone, William L., 175, 183, 184 _Story of a New York House, The_, 232 Streets first lighted, 25 Strong, Dr. Josiah, 246 Stuyvesant, Judith, 11 Stuyvesant, Peter, 1, 11, 12, 19 _Stylus, The_, 152 _Sunday Times and Messenger_, 138 Sunnyside, 104 _Swallow Barn_, 149 _Sweet Bells Out of Tune_, 244 T _Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_, 120 _Tales of a City Room_, 235 _Tales of a Country Schoolmaster_, 182 _Tales of the Good Woman_, 114 _Talisman_ Magazine, 181 _Talisman, The_, 133 Tammany Hall, First, 71 Taylor, Bayard, 198, 204-208, 218, 238, 241 Temple, Charlotte, 118 Temple Street, 118 Thames Street, 99 _Thistle Finch, The_, 10 Thomson, Mortimer, 215 Tienhoven's Street, 76 _Tom Thornton_, 131 _Town and Country_, 157 Townsend, Edward W., 234 Trinity Church, 26, 32 Tuckerman, Henry T., 221, 222 _Typee_, 226 U _Ulalume_, 165 _United States and England_, 112 _Universe, The_, 165 V Van Brugh Street, 57 Van Cortlandt, Oloff, 12 _Vanderlyn_, 175 Van Dyke, Henry, 248 _Vanity Fair_, 215, 218 Van Tassel house, 103 Vauxhall, 171 Verplanck, Gulian C., 133, 142, 181, 186 _Views Afoot_, 205 _Vignettes of Manhattan_, 251 _Visit of St. Nicholas_, 197 _Voyages of the Companions of Columbus_, 98 W Wallace, William Ross, 151 Wall Street, 6 Wall, The city, 5 Ward, Artemus, 217 Washington, George, 62, 64 Washington Hall, 131 _Water Witch, The_, 134 Webster, Noah, 65 _Weekly Post-Boy_, 58 _Westward Ho!_, 114 Whitehall, 8 White, Richard Grant, 241, 243 Whitman, Walt, 218 _Wieland_, 78 Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 251 _Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie_, 175 Wiley, the publisher, 130 Williams, Jesse Lynch, 234 William Street, 88 Willis, Nathaniel P., 138, 154-157, 162 Windust's, 111, 137, 138 _Winter in the West, A_, 175 Winter, William, 218, 234 Winthrop, Theodore, 219, 220 _Wolfert's Roost_, 103, 104 _Woman of Honor, The_, 243 _Woodman, Spare that Tree_, 154 Woodworth, Samuel, 129, 130, 142, 153, 154 Y Yorkville, 145 "Young American Roscius," 73 Z Zenger, Peter, 38, 40 _BELLES-LETTRES_ Browning, Poet and Man A Survey. By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis," "William Morris," etc. _8o. With 25 illustrations in photogravure and some text illustrations. Net, $3.50._ _LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations in half-tone. $2.50._ "It is written with taste and judgment.... The book is exactly what it ought to be, and will lead many to an appreciation of Browning who have hitherto looked at the bulk of his writings with disgust.... It is beautifully illustrated, and the paper and typography are superb. It is an edition that every admirer of Browning should possess, being worthy in every way of the poet."--_Chicago Evening Post._ Tennyson, His Homes, his Friends, and his Work. By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis," "William Morris," etc. _8o. With 18 illustrations in photogravure and some text illustrations. Net, $3.50._ _LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations in half-tone, $2.50._ "The multitude of admirers of Tennyson in the United States will mark this beautiful volume as very satisfactory. The text is clear, terse, and intelligent, and the matter admirably arranged, while the mechanical work is faultless, with art work especially marked for excellence."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._ _G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS_ _New York_ _London_ _BELLES-LETTRES_ William Morris, Poet, Craftsman, Socialist By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis," "Robert Browning," "Tennyson," etc. _8o. Fully illustrated, uniform with "The Rossettis," "Browning," etc. Net, $3.50. By mail, $3.75._ William Morris, of active, varied, and interesting life, has been the subject of several biographies, written from different points of view. Nevertheless, there is need for an account that gathers together the chief facts of the life in a condensed form, and connects them with comment and criticism of an informing character. Miss Cary has emphasized the essential unity of purpose underlying the numerous and diverse pursuits in which Morris was engaged, and has sought to distinguish the peculiar and enduring qualities by which his genius was marked. The Rossettis, Dante Gabriel and Christina By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY _With 27 illustrations in photogravure and some text illustrations. Net, $3.50._ _LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations in half-tone, $2.50._ "The story of this life has been told by Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. William Sharp, Mr. Watts-Dunton, and Mr. William Rossetti, his brother, but never quite so well as by Miss Cary, who, thoroughly conversant with all the material which their writings furnish, has turned it to better advantage than they were capable of from their personal relation to its perplexing subject."--_Mail and Express._ _G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS_ _New York_ _London_ 
2982	----	MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE VOLUME I, Part 1: 1835-1866 TO CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE TO WRITE HISTORY RATHER THAN EULOGY AS THE STORY OF HER FATHER'S LIFE AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT Dear William Dean Howells, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Joseph T. Goodman, and other old friends of Mark Twain: I cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their making. First, I want to confess how I have envied you your association with Mark Twain in those days when you and he "went gipsying, a long time ago." Next, I want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who follow him. And, lastly, I want to tell you that I do not envy you so much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your grace, I have gone gipsying with you all. Neither do I wonder now, for I have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory would have contented your hearts. My gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed to the story. Only, I seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words. Albert Bigelow Paine. PREFATORY NOTE Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of Mr. Clemens himself. Mark Twain's spirit was built of the very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance--seeking, as he said, "only to tell a good story"--while in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made history difficult, even when, as in his so-called "Autobiography," his effort was in the direction of fact. "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not," he once said, quaintly, "but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter." The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items. MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY I ANCESTORS On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide repute "for his want of energy," and in a marginal note he has written: "I guess this is where our line starts." It was like him to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in his work. Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry. The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in Rome. There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and again in the annals of the Middle Ages. More lately there was a Gregory Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. Afterward he was tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall. Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall Clemens, the father of Mark Twain. Perhaps the line could be traced, and its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be written. Of Mark Twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be said. His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man of culture and literary taste. In 1797 he married a Virginia girl, Pamela Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born August 11, 1798, was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. The family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work. As a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at Lynchburg, and doubtless studied at night. At all events, he acquired an education, but injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother and the younger children, removed to Adair County, Kentucky, where the widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock, a good man. In due course, John Clemens was sent to Columbia, the countyseat, to study law. When the living heirs became of age he administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the Clemens effects to this day. This was in 1821. John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three, never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and a heart full of hope and dreams. Sober, industrious, and unswervingly upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. That he was likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then regarded as a misfortune. It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a Casey --a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons) of Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all Kentucky. The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had been Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. The Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery County somewhat farther east. As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom in the English family, and there were claimants even then in the American branch. All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it was rare Jane Lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his feet almost at the moment of their meeting. Many of the characteristics that made Mark Twain famous were inherited from his mother. His sense of humor, his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her contribution to his fame. Speaking of her in a later day, he once said: "She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not knowing it to be humorous." She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion; her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and perfect setting. It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and John Marshall Clemens. All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband, and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness. She stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and on May 6, 1823, they were married. She was then twenty; her husband twenty-five. More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old Settlers' Convention, because among the names of those attending she had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. She meant to humble herself to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. She arrived too late; the convention was over, and he was gone. Mark Twain once spoke of this, and added: "It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime." II THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived. About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him Orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown, Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court. It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500. The great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown. Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over the "Knob" of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he said: "Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. I may not live to see these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will." Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the "Tennessee land," which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of phantom riches, The Gilded Age. Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true he was in no wise to blame. The land is priceless now, and a corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some survey. Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to present needs. He built himself a house, unusual in its style and elegance. It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen before. He was regarded as an aristocrat. He wore a swallow-tail coat of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. The blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time. His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls--there were continuous balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful dancers. Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. It attained almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log houses --and stopped there. The country, too, was sparsely settled; law practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to court was very bad for one of his physique. John Clemens saw his reserve of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. He built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. These he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and other produce of the country, which he took to Louisville every spring and fall in six-horse wagons. In the mean time he would seem to have sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. There was a second baby now--a little girl, Pamela,--born in September, 1827. Three years later, May 1830, another little girl, Margaret, came. By this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were declining. About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf. The Tennessee land was safe, of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard. He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where a post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as postmaster, usually addressed as "Squire" or "Judge." A store was run in connection with the postoffice. At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another boy, Benjamin, was born. The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have Mark Twain's picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader may look it up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not wonder that Jane Clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment --was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away. A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called "sunpain," an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community. He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through. Absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. It is told of John Clemens, at Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community. For some reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it. At the close of the service Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father's legacies. The arrival of a letter from "Colonel Sellers" inviting the Hawkins family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister, Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is likely to last as long as American history. III A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St. Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines of any consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to the world outside. In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural, too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set down the number at fifty-four. Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter ends: "Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!" The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away. The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family "flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee." They had a two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their earlier fortunes. The barouche held the parents and the three younger children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin. There were also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the house-girl, a slave, rode. This was early in the spring of 1835. They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a visit to relatives. At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for St. Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into what was then the Far West, the promised land. They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in appearance that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with John Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. The great Mississippi was less than fifty miles away. Salt River, with a system of locks and dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with Florida as its head of navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely character in The Gilded Age. That was another relative--James Lampton, a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial dreams. John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was prospering in a small way. He had also acquired a good farm, which he worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading citizen of the community. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. Furthermore, he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. Thus far, at least, the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could not be worse than they had been in Tennessee. In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane Clemens established their household. It was a humble one-story affair, with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for its size, and comparatively new. It is still standing and occupied when these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as a shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost American-born author--the man most characteristically American in every thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king. It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the domain he was to conquer. Long, afterward, one of those who knew him best said: "He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never quite of this race or kind." He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. But nobody thought of this, then. He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his coming. Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. One Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[This honor has been claimed also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell. Probably all were present and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then. It was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. Still, John Clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear Virginia friend, Langhorne. The family fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen. With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room was badly needed, and he began building without delay. The result was not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. The rooms were larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and dining-room uses. This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the Clemens family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was often in later days pointed out as Mark Twain's birthplace. It missed that distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having sheltered his early childhood.--[This house is no longer standing. When it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and manufactured into souvenirs. Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: "No, it is too stylish, it is not my birthplace."] IV BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY It was not a robust childhood. The new baby managed to go through the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. Added strength came, but slowly; "Little Sam," as they called him, was always delicate during those early years. It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. He looked after their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave advice on occasion. He bought a book now and then--sometimes a picture-book --and subscribed for Peter Parley's Magazine, a marvel of delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements, and he rarely, or never, laughed. Mark Twain did not remember ever having seen or heard his father laugh. The problem of supplying food was a somber one to John Clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. Jane Clemens was busy, too. Her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments. Little Sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret at intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little lad whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother, three years his junior. But in addition to these associations, there were the still more potent influences Of that day and section, the intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of the slaves. All the children of that time were fond of the negroes and confided in them. They would, in fact, have been lost without such protection and company. It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all work --apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. Wonderful entertainment it was. That was a time of visions and dreams, small. gossip and superstitions. Old tales were repeated over and over, with adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. At evening the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with "Once 'pon a time," and one of them was the story of the "Golden Arm" which the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider audiences in many lands. Briefly it ran as follows: "Once 'Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she was his wife; and she says: "W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my g-o-l-den arm?" As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms before him. The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting each time for a reply. The culmination came with a pounce on one of the group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of: "YOU'VE got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!" And the children would shout "Lordy!" and look furtively over their shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods. "Once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and he come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and a-rattlin' and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and got under his stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his stirrup till he got plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say: 'My Gord, dat's devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive it away." "How big was it, Uncle Ned?" "Oh, 'bout as big as your head, and I 'spect it's likely to come down dis yere chimney 'most any time." Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs, all learned of their negro guardians. But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. The greatest real dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. A runaway slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when caught. Once the children saw one brought into Florida by six men who took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound him with ropes. His groans were loud and frequent. Such things made an impression that would last a lifetime. Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. Jennie especially was often saucy and obstreperous. Jane Clemens, with more strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand. John Clemens was sent for in haste. He came at once, tied Jennie's wrists together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the shoulders with a cowhide. These were things all calculated to impress a sensitive child. In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine, picking the petals from daisies to the formula "Love me-love me not," always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their small darky followers. Shoes were taken off the first of April. For a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. One of their dreads was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. They knew what lockjaw was--Uncle John Quarles's black man, Dan, was subject to it. Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh lifted an ox. Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of never-ending delight. Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these things were never apparent. There was a halo about anything that belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. To visit at his house was for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. When the children came for eggs he would say: "Your hens won't lay, eh? Tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and drive 'em uphill," and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his small hearers. Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. He would make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but never executed any of them. When they were out fishing and returned late he would say: "You--if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like a burnt horn!" Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children, with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar savor. Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam had--at least it seems so to us now. Doubtless it was commonplace enough for that time and locality. V THE WAY OF FORTUNE Perhaps John Quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general conduct did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens's more taciturn business methods. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of dreams, Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in order. He had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and confusion, which very likely were the chief features of John Quarles's storekeeping. At all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of two or three years, and Clemens opened business for himself across the street. He also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of "Judge." He needed some one to assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth, Orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with no taste for commerce. Then a partnership was formed with a man who developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in the end. The modest tide of success which had come with John Clemens's establishment at Florida had begun to wane. Another boy, Henry, born in July, 1838, added one more responsibility to his burdens. There still remained a promise of better things. There seemed at least a good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was likely to become operative. With even small boats (bateaux) running as high as the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an emporium of trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap a harvest. An act of the Legislature was passed incorporating the navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its president. Congress was petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. So confident was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual construction of a bateau; but a Democratic Congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of it, said: "I don't doubt a word they say. In Scotland, it often happens that when people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-glass. That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat." But John Quarles, who was present, laughed: "If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were," he said. "They were the Democratic candidates at the last election. They killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them. Their ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat." It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled far, was the origin of the term "Going up Salt River," as applied to defeated political candidates.--[The dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles's witty comment.] No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River. Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such thought. Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and dams. Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and became mere scenery. Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day. Perhaps such close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain. VI A NEW HOME The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same day, when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down. She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and diagnosed the case "bilious fever." One evening, about nine o'clock, Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled at the bedding near Margaret's shoulder for some time before he woke. Next day the little girl was "picking at the coverlet," and it was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks, black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little Sam's first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery, exactly as it happened. Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land. It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill. "When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right," was the refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days. Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress. When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. When conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was always refused after a little consideration. "We will struggle along somehow, Jane," he would say. "We will not throw away the children's fortune." There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens's favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always had "millions in it"--everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as "our kindred," casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the "present earl." Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words "Tennessee land," with their golden promise, became his earliest remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to mean mockery. One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered. Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some autobiographical chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said: "If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations." What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which, though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day. He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly. He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason, his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion. "The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'" This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused with another, in Mark Twain's mind. In an autobiographical chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four, behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author's purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.] VII THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL Hannibal in 1839 was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning, . . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along; . . . the dense forest away on the other side." The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way of setting. The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by; steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away. Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on airs accordingly. It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and the town drunkards ("General" Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats, ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families constituted the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had pleasant homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said, accessible to the builders of those days. Most of them, also, had means --slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their professional earnings. They lived in such style as was considered fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable. It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not begin actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. A little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the Hannibal Journal, at his father's suggestion. Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies, unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a life is bound to be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and despair. In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men. Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it keenly. A gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land, he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade. Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby, was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed little beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep, too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days. Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black, deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed to see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. Without doubt the "measles" incident occurred when he was very young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort. "You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she said to him once, in her old age. "I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested, in his tranquil fashion. She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty years. "No; afraid you would," she said. But that was only her joke, for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John Quarles's farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive, leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning. The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy, and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm. Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam. "Why," said the judge, aghast, "I never once thought of him after I left him asleep." Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked, deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and lent a coloring to his later years. VIII THE FARM We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle John Quarles's farm. To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver. With his small cousin, Tabitha,--[Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs. Greening, of Palmyra, Missouri, has supplied most of the material for this chapter.] --just his own age (they called her Puss), he wandered over that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere. A slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes, indeed, it was necessary for her to threaten to tell "Miss Patsey" or "Miss Jane," when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom. The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in the pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and then took her turn and "balanced" herself so high that their one wish was to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those watermelons, and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to die forthwith. Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned. "Sammy will pull through," she said; "he wasn't born to die that way." It is the slender constitution that bears the strain. "Sammy" did pull through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure. There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat. This last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would pretend not to see. Then in the evening when the black woman came along, going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows running and jingling their bells--especially Little Sam, for he was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the grass. His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health, and the encouragement of John Quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves. The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. In one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a thousand years old and to have talked with Moses. The negroes believed this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was caused by fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned. She also knew how to avert spells and ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. Uncle Dan'l was a favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men. Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that scene: I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low- spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle --out of service, but waiting with confidence. One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal everywhere in his work in the years to come. For him it was education of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from books. IX SCHOOL-DAYS Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little Sam was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other children put together. "He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house," she used to say; "and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead." He did, in fact, achieve the first of his "nine narrow escapes from drowning" about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. When with mullein tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: "I guess there wasn't much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water." She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. Perhaps this is a good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer's "Aunt Polly," and her portrait as presented in that book is considered perfect. Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes severe, she was regarded as a "character" by her friends, and beloved by them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. Her sense of pity was abnormal. She refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. She, would drown the young kittens, when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. On coming to Hannibal, she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of that clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell and Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. Her children she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and growing in grace except Little Sam. Even baby Henry at two was lisping the prayers that Sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded. His sister Pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle care earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom Sawyer. He would say his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister Pamela, but he much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. They did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. Neighbors hearing of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with Mrs. Clemens. "You don't believe anything that child says, I hope." "Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is pure gold." At another time she said: "Sammy is a well of truth, but you can't bring it all up in one bucket." This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat later. A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him mentally and morally in the mean time. Her school was then in a log house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of spelling. Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in that school. Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to a Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now the Public Square. Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with explanations, and the rules of conduct. Then the A B C class was called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no preparation. The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He calculated how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and still avoid disaster. He made a miscalculation during the forenoon and received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. He did not mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned Miss Horr yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a stick for his own correction. This was certainly disturbing. It was sudden, and then he did not know much about the selection of sticks. Jane Clemens had usually used her hand. It required a second command to get him headed in the right direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. He had the forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. Everything looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a wiry, discouraging look. Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many shavings outside. One had blown across and lay just in front of him. It was an inspiration. He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room, meekly handed it to Miss Herr. Perhaps Miss Horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. "Samuel Langhorne Clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), "I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go and bring a switch for Sammy." And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch was of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for school. He informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown such people as Miss Horr. Down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him in hand. He returned to school, but he never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of liberty. A School was ruled with a rod in those days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended. Of the smaller boys Little Sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend with his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair, as he had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures. When the days of early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the purple distance beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a Webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human nature could bear. Among the records preserved from that far-off day there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is inscribed: MISS PAMELA CLEMENS Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. E. Horr, Teacher. If any such testimonial was ever awarded to Little Sam, diligent search has failed to reveal it. If he won the love of his teacher and playmates it was probably for other reasons. Yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was soon regarded as a good speller for his years. His spelling came as a natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later. It has already been mentioned that Miss Horr opened her school with prayer and Scriptural readings. Little Sam did not especially delight in these things, but he respected them. Not to do so was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. He also respected Miss Horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text "Ask and ye shall receive" and assured them that whoever prayed for a thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it. A small schoolmate, the balker's daughter, brought gingerbread to school every morning, and Little Sam was just "honing" for some of it. He wanted a piece of that baker's gingerbread more than anything else in the world, and he decided to pray for it. The little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had kept the gingerbread out of sight. Now, however, when he finished his prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front of him. Perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look in his eyes. Possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved Holliday's Hill. He decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result. Grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. His mother said: "What's the matter, Sammy; are you sick?" "No," he said, "but I don't believe in saying prayers any more, and I'm never going to do it again." "Why, Sammy, what in the world has happened?" she asked, anxiously. Then he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. Jane Clemens gathered him to her heart and comforted him. "I'll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that," she said, "and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to Uncle John's farm." And so passed and ended Little Sam's first school-days. X EARLY VICISSITUDE AND SORROW Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household. The year 1840 brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return; law practice was not much more remunerative. Judge Clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent. By the end of the year it became necessary to part with Jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as "her family." She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price. A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his home farther South. As the steamboat moved away from the landing the child's mother stood at the water's edge, shrieking her anguish. We are prone to consider these things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam. One could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. Mark Twain once said of his mother: "Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for." Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit. After Jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far from family and friends. He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy. All day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became monotonous, maddening. One day Little Sam said: "Ma--[that was the Southern term]--make Sandy stop singing all the time. It's awful." Tears suddenly came into his mother's eyes. "Poor thing! He is sold away from his home. When he sings it shows maybe he is not remembering. When he's still I am afraid he is thinking, and I can't bear it." Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was held in abhorrence. An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone out of the community. The children held the name in horror, as belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail. The money received for the sale of Jennie made judge Clemens easier for a time. Business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive piece of real estate on Hill and Main streets. This property, acquired in November, 1839, meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. It was well rented, but the tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent of creditors --and John: Clemens at forty-four found himself without business and without means. He offered everything--his cow, his household furniture, even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who protested that he must not strip himself. They assured him that they admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business; but when he went to St. Louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met, and the venture came to nothing. He now made a trip to Tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts and to raise money on the Tennessee land. He took along a negro man named Charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to make something through his disposal in a better market. The trip was another failure. The man who owed him a considerable sum of money was solvent, but pleaded hard times: It seems so very hard upon him--[John Clemens wrote home]--to pay such a sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it. . . I still have Charlie. The highest price I had offered for him in New Orleans was $50, in Vicksburg $40. After performing the journey to Tennessee, I expect to sell him for whatever he will bring. I do not know what I can commence for a business in the spring. My brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can't relieve myself of it. The future, taking its completion from the state of my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over- shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. I want bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first place; and, in the next place, I want to be paid for it, if possible. This letter is dated January 7, 1842. He returned without any financial success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the levee. The proprietor found some fault one day, and Judge Clemens walked out of the premises. On his way home he stopped in a general store, kept by a man named Sehns, to make some purchases. When he asked that these be placed on account, Selms hesitated. Judge Clemens laid down a five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took the goods, and never entered the place again. When Jane Clemens reproached him for having made the trip to Tennessee, at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best. "I am not able to dig in the streets," he added, and Orion, who records this, adds: "I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face." During a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into the Clemens home. It came again now. Little Benjamin, a sensitive, amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, May 12, 1842. He was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. Little Sam long remembered the picture of his parents' grief; and Orion recalls that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown. Judge Clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. Mrs. Clemens decided to take a few boarders. Orion, by this time seventeen and a very good journeyman printer, obtained a place in St. Louis to aid in the family support. The tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle stage of improvement set in. Times grew better in Hannibal after those first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent. Within another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to build a modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St. Louis cousin, James Clemens, had preserved for him. It was the house which is known today as the "Mark Twain Home."--['This house, in 1911, was bought by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mahan, and presented to Hannibal for a memorial museum.]--Near it, toward the corner of Main Street, was his office, and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it did not bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the entire community. One example will serve: Next to his office was a stone-cutter's shop. One day the proprietor, Dave Atkinson, got into a muss with one "Fighting" MacDonald, and there was a tremendous racket. Judge Clemens ran out and found the men down, punishing each other on the pavement. "I command the peace!" he shouted, as he came up to them. No one paid the least attention. "I command the peace!" he shouted again, still louder, but with no result. A stone-cutter's mallet lay there, handy. Judge Clemens seized it and, leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, MacDonald, a smart blow on the head. "I command the peace!" he said, for the third time, and struck a considerably smarter blow. That settled it. The second blow was of the sort that made MacDonald roll over, and peace ensued. Judge Clemens haled both men into his court, fined them, and collected his fee. Such enterprise in the cause of justice deserved prompt reward. XI DAYS OF EDUCATION The Clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in Hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period of occupation of each can no longer be established. Mark Twain once said: "In 1843 my father caught me in a lie. It is not this fact that gives me the date, but the house we lived in. We were there only a year." We may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. When he did, it was a thorough and satisfactory performance. It was about the period of moving into the new house (1844) that the Tom Sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of Samuel Clemens--may be said to have begun. Up to that time he was just Little Sam, a child--wild, and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. Now, at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger child to claim a mother's protecting care. So "Sam," as they now called him, "grew up" at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years. Not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not acquired at school. They were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. Once Little Sam--he was still Little Sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at noonday. He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family Bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. He though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old dying man would not breathe so heavily. He saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "Welshman's" house one dark threatening night--he saw that, too. A widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. Sam Clemens and a boon companion, John Briggs, went up there to look and listen. The man was at the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the dark porch. The boys heard the elder woman's voice warning the man that she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where he was. He replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. She began slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. At six he grew silent, but he did not go. She counted on: seven--eight--nine--The boys watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop. There was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. The man dropped, his breast riddled. At the same instant the thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. The boys fled wildly, believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. And there were events incident to slavery. He saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. He saw an abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: "I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the saddest faces I ever saw." It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge amid such happenings as these. They were wild, disturbing things. They got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican--a common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious citizens got out of her way, but Jane Clemens opened her door wide to the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. The man swore and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She stood there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. Any one who could do that must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought. In the fearsome darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life in the morning. He detested Sunday-school as much as day-school, and once Orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got louder Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday without being invited. Fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. There were picnics sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. Once there was a great Fourth-of-July celebration at which it was said a real Revolutionary soldier was to be present. Some one had discovered him living alone seven or eight miles in the country. But this feature proved a disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought in he turned out to be a Hessian, and was allowed to walk home. The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed almost at will were never disappointing. There was the cave with its marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had learned to swim. It had cost him heavily to learn to swim. He had seen two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a slaveman--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. In the end he had conquered; he could swim better than any boy in town of his age. It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm was permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world. The river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the sea! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water. He learned to know all its moods and phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way he may have known it as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea. His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. To be even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to be a god. "You can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never to take a trip on them." He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no longer. One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then it began to rain--a terrific downpour. He crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. So he was taken down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town of Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home. Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way. These were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night. Sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast. So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer "Little Sam," but Sam Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men and things and a variety of accomplishments. He had even learned to smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing, though that was a failure. He had been stung to this effort by a big girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly attended. "Do you use terbacker?" the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it. "No," he said, abashed at the confession. "Haw!" she cried to the other scholars; "here's a boy that can't chaw terbacker." Degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made him very ill; and he did not try again. He had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. He had an impression that she would "skin him alive" if she heard him swear. His education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom. He was not a particularly attractive lad. He was not tall for his years, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. He had a "great ruck" of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling; keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. Still, he had a fair, delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. He did not speak much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever he was doing and listened. Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. Whatever it was, they considered it worth while. His mother always referred to his slow fashion of speaking as "Sammy's long talk." Her own speech was still more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it. Henry--a much handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising--did not have it. He was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous Sam took delight in teasing. For this and other reasons the latter's punishments were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved. Sometimes he charged his mother with partiality. He would say: "Yes, no matter what it is, I am always the one to get punished"; and his mother would answer: "Well, Sam, if you didn't deserve it for that, you did for something else." Henry Clemens became the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though Henry was in every way a finer character than Sid. His brother Sam always loved him, and fought for him oftener than with him. With the death of Benjamin Clemens, Henry and Sam were naturally drawn much closer together, though Sam could seldom resist the temptation of tormenting Henry. A schoolmate, George Butler (he was a nephew of General Butler and afterward fought bravely in the Civil War), had a little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all. Mrs. Clemens finally made Sam and Henry suits of blue cotton velvet, and the next Sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the woods. They walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead Sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse took a running leap over it. There were splinters on the stump where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. Henry wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared him. He kept daring him until Henry was goaded to the attempt. He cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way. He escaped injury, but the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair. Sam, with a boy's heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at Henry's appearance. "Cotton-tail rabbit!" he shouted. "Cotton-tail rabbit!" while Henry, weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. Let us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper locality. These two brothers were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and the room swept clean. The home incidents in 'Tom Sawyer', most of them, really happened. Sam Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat. There was a cholera scare that year, and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. Sam had been ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be safeguarded. As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to the conditions. In the introduction to Tom Sawyer Mark Twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its characters. "Huck Finn was drawn from life," he tells us. "Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." The three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs and Will Bowen. John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper in that book. As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship, neither elaborated nor qualified. There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father, who had succeeded "General" Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to say, Huck--who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to any living soul. He could came and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys longed to do and were forbidden. He represented to them the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion. The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm. The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom--a fame founded on irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the Bowen boys, Will Pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. They were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the comforts and the rights of others. XII TOM SAWYER'S BAND They ranged from Holliday's Hill on the north to the Cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods about. They navigated the river from Turtle Island to Glasscock's Island (now Pearl, or Tom Sawyer's Island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the Illinois shore. They could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon patch was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that they did not sooner or later elude it. They borrowed boats when their owners were not present. Once when they found this too much trouble, they decided to own a boat, and one Sunday gave a certain borrowed craft a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for a season up Bear Creek. They borrowed the paint also, and the brush, though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall, so the painter could have them Monday morning. Tom Blankenship rigged up a sail for the new craft, and Sam Clemens named it Cecilia, after which they didn't need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did; and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his. Some of their expeditions were innocent enough. They often cruised up to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day feasting. You could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. Fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for adventure. Where the railroad-bridge now ends on the Missouri side was their favorite swimming-hole--that and along Bear Creek, a secluded limpid water with special interests of its own. Sometimes at evening they swam across to Glasscock's Island--the rendezvous of Tom Sawyer's "Black Avengers" and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim; then, when they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile, breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or fear. They could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless young scamps. Once--though this was considerably later, when he was sixteen --Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, and then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles, as he had to go. He was seized with a cramp on the return trip. His legs became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. It was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes. One of their Sunday pastimes was to climb Holliday's Hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church. Holliday's Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. The boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give it a start. Dropping down behind the bushes, they would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was Homeric sport, but they carried it too far. Stones that had a habit of getting loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited suspicion, and the "Patterollers" (river patrol--a kind of police of those days) were put on the watch. So the boys found other diversions until the Patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. A rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good position to go down hill, once, started. They decided it would be a glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded church-goer. Quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left their picks and shovels over Sundays. The boys borrowed these, and went to work to undermine the big stone. It was a heavier job than they had counted on, but they worked faithfully, Sunday after Sunday. If their parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. Finally one Sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and started down. They were not quite ready for it. Nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. It was not quite wasted, however. They had planned for a thrilling result; and there was thrill enough while it lasted. In the first place, the stone nearly caught Will Bowen when it started. John Briggs had just that moment quit digging and handed Will the pick. Will was about to step into the excavation when Sam Clemens, who was already there, leaped out with a yell: "Look out, boys, she's coming!" She came. The huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. This turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to whip up his horse. It was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the road. The boys watched it with growing interest. It made longer leaps with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would fly. They were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the cooper-shop. The shop was empty, it being Sunday, but the rest of the catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. They wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. It was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get directly in its path. They stood holding their breath, their mouths open. Then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it. Half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. It was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. They began to suspect that the sport was not altogether safe. Sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those days. On one occasion of this sort, Tom Blankenship had the skin of a coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd. At Selms's store on Wild Cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents, but that was not enough. They arranged a plan which would make it pay a good deal more than that. Selins's window was open, it being summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. Huck--that is to say, Tom--went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to Selms, who tossed it back on the pile. Tom came back with the money and after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in, got the coonskin, and sold it to Selms again. He did this several times that afternoon; then John Pierce, Selins's clerk, said: "Look here, Selms, there is something wrong about this. That boy has been selling us coonskins all the afternoon." Selms went to his pile of pelts. There were several sheepskins and some cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought. Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke. Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain's reputation to say that the boy Sam Clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would be less than historic. If the band had a leader, it was he. They were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that --and to follow his projects. They looked to him for ideas and organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe. When they played "Bandit" or "Pirate" or "Indian," Sam Clemens was always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less distinguished. Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership. When the Christian Sons of Temperance came along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude. Then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage. He looked up Tom Blankenship and said: "Say, Tom, I'm blamed tired of this! Let's go somewhere and smoke!" Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a precious thing. Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown. He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law. The river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for those other things. The cave was an enduring and substantial joy. It was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth's black silences, even below the river, some said. For Sam Clemens the cave had a fascination that never faded. Other localities and diversions might pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. With its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band, it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for. In Tom Sawyer Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in real life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found him. He was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there came up a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home and in bed was certain that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's wicked soul. He covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the fear that the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him along, too. The treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact. There was a tradition concerning some French trappers who long before had established a trading-post two miles above Hannibal, on what is called the "bay." It is said that, while one of these trappers was out hunting, Indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others. The hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the Indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. He left it there, swam across to Illinois, and made his way to St. Louis, where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. Then he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and died. Later some men came up from St. Louis looking for the chest. They did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good many people tried to find the gold. Tom Blankenship one morning came to Sam Clemens and John Briggs and said he was going to dig up the treasure. He said he had dreamed just where it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide up. The boys had great faith in dreams, especially Tom's dreams. Tom's unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. The dreams of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. They followed Tom to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to dig. Then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders. They dug nearly all day. Now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to wonder a little why Tom didn't dig some himself; but, of course, he had done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share. They did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground until they struck something hard. Then they would dig down to see what it was, but it never turned out to be money. That night the boys declared they would not dig any more. But Tom had another dream. He dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. This sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. It was hot weather too, August, and that night they were nearly dead. Even Tom gave it up, then. He said there was something about the way they dug, but he never offered to do any digging himself. This differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original of Huckleberry Finn.--[Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished to the writer by John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.]--Tom Blankenship's brother, Ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at least so far as one important phase of Huck's character is concerned. He was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than Tom. He was inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out, and they had no deep love for him. But somewhere in Ben Blankenship there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided Mark Twain with that immortal episode in the story of Huck Finn--in sheltering the Nigger Jim. This is the real story: A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river into Illinois. Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. It was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. Besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged outcast Ben Blankenship. That money and the honor he could acquire must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro would fish and Ben would carry him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, it leaked out. Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him to what was called "Bird Slough." There trying to cross a drift he was drowned. In the book, the author makes Huck's struggle a psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other. With Ben Blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably between sympathy and cupidity. He would care very little for conscience and still less for law. His sympathy with the runaway, however, would be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure of that reward. There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out of the water. He had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had released him. The boys did not stop to investigate. They thought he was after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached human habitation. How many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early days! In 'The Innocents Abroad' Mark Twain tells of the murdered man he saw one night in his father's office. The man's name was McFarlane. He had been stabbed that day in the old Hudson-McFarlane feud and carried in there to die. Sam Clemens and John Briggs had run away from school and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair. Sam decided that his father's office was safer for him than to face his mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. He tells us how he lay on the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly stabbed breast. "I went out of there," he says. "I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went; that is sufficient. I went out of the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated." He was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy reached that age. Certainly these were disturbing, haunting things. Then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. Sam Clemens spent some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of Lucifer matches--a brand new invention then, scarce and high. The tramp started a fire with the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it. For weeks the boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened. Remorse was always Samuel Clemens's surest punishment. To his last days on earth he never outgrew its pangs. What a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! It is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of Sam Clemens and his scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad doings. They were an unpromising lot. Ministers and other sober-minded citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and considered them hardly worth praying for. They must have proven a disappointing lot to those prophets. The Bowen boys became fine river-pilots; Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank director; John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer; even Huck Finn--that is to say, Tom Blankenship--is reputed to have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western town. But in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little respect for order and even less for ordinance. XIII THE GENTLER SIDE His associations were not all of that lawless breed. At his school (he had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross's on the Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically better playmates. There was George Robards, the Latin scholar, and John, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying in the wind. And there was Jimmy McDaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy and cake to school. Also there was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John Meredith, the doctor's son, and John Garth, who was one day to marry little Helen Kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old school. Furthermore, there were a good many girls. Tom Sawyer had an impressionable heart, and Sam Clemens no less so. There was Bettie Ormsley, and Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady; also Mary Miller, who was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart. "I believe I was as miserable as a grown man could be," he said once, remembering. Tom Sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions at such times were the emotions of Sam Clemens, say at the age of ten. But, as Tom Sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. They were one and the same. Becky Thatcher in the book was Laura Hawkins in reality. The acquaintance of these two had begun when the Hawkins family moved into the Virginia house on the corner of Hill and Main streets.--[The Hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that name in The Gilded Age. Judge Hawkins of The Gilded Age, as already noted, was John Clemens. Mark Twain used the name Hawkins, also the name of his boyhood sweetheart, Laura, merely for old times' sake, and because in portraying the childhood of Laura Hawkins he had a picture of the real Laura in his mind.]--The Clemens family was then in the new home across the way, and the children were soon acquainted. The boy could be tender and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex. They visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. So they played "keeping house," and if they did not always agree well, since the beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in Arcady. Once when they were building a house--and there may have been some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened to let a brick fall on the little girl's finger. If there had been any disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. He tried to comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most of the two, no doubt. So, you see, he was just a little boy, after all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the "Black Avengers of the Spanish Main." He was always a tender-hearted lad. He would never abuse an animal, unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away with him. He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. When he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. His sympathy included inanimate things as well. He loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend. He pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another spring. His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill. That his observation of all nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation of sympathetic love. We are wandering away from his school-days. They were brief enough and came rapidly to an end. They will not hold us long. Undoubtedly Tom Sawyer's distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home--usually some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the boyhood of Sam Clemens. His mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately. He detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to church. "Church ain't worth shucks," said Tom Sawyer, but it was better than school. As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now the Square in Hannibal. The Square was only a grove then, grown up with plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children. At recess and the noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-vine swings. There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for Sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. He could hold the floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown. This was spectacular and showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. One day Sam Clemens wrote on his slate: Cross by name and cross by nature Cross jumped over an Irish potato. He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius. He urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet's ambition did not go so far. "Oh, pshaw!" said John. "I wouldn't be afraid to do it. "I dare you to do it," said Sam. John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. When the teacher returned and "books" were called he looked steadily at John Briggs. He had recognized the penmanship. "Did you do that?" he asked, ominously. It was a time for truth. "Yes, sir," said John. "Come here!" And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius heavily. Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for "author," but for some reason the investigation ended there. It was unusual for him to escape. His back generally kept fairly warm from one "frailing" to the next. His rewards were not all of a punitive nature. There were two medals in the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. They were awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. John Robards--he of the golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while Sam Clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. Sometimes they traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the week. Once Sam Clemens lost the medal by leaving the first "r" out of February. He could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but Laura Hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. The picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and longing only for freedom. It was a boon which would come to him sooner even than he had dreamed. XIV THE PASSING OF JOHN CLEMENS Judge Clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of achieving disaster. He endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute, and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything vanished again. The St. Louis cousin took over the home and agreed to let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and Pamela's piano --all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the street into a portion of the Virginia house, then occupied by a Dr. Grant. The Grants proposed that the Clemens family move over and board them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time. Judge Clemens had still a hope left. The clerkship of the Surrogate Court was soon to be filled by election. It was an important remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for the position. His disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his nomination and election were considered sure. He took no chances; he made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to overcome. He was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he could hold the office as long as he chose. There seemed no further need of worry. As soon as he was installed in office they would live in style becoming their social position. About the end of February he rode to Palmyra to be sworn in. Returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and sleet, arriving at last half frozen. His system was in no condition to resist such a shock. Pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief. Orion returned from St. Louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew daily weaker. Now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the Tennessee land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last. He uttered no regrets, no complaints. Once only he said: "I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee I might have been worth twenty thousand dollars to-day." On the morning of the 24th of March, 1847, it was evident that he could not live many hours. He was very weak. When he spoke, now and then, it was of the land. He said it would soon make them all rich and happy. "Cling to the land," he whispered. "Cling to the land, and wait. Let nothing beguile it away from you." A little later he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. "Let me die," he said. He never spoke after that. A little more, and the sad, weary life that had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: A dreamer and a moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier. He ended life with less than he had begun. XV A YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN For a third time death had entered the Clemens home: not only had it brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the very threshold. The disaster seemed complete. The children were dazed. Judge Clemens had been a distant, reserved man, but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his uprightness and nobility of purpose. Mrs. Clemens confided to a neighbor that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted, with a deep affection for his family. They remembered that he had never returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however trifling. Orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old Abram Kurtz, and heard him laugh. He wondered how anybody could still laugh. The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. "It is all right, Sammy," she said. "What's done is done, and it does not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to promise me----" He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her arms. "I will promise anything," he sobbed, "if you won't make me go to school! Anything!" His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said: "No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart." So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A thought struck Mrs. Clemens: "Sam!" she said. He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in succession after that. Then he slept more soundly. Orion returned to St. Louis. He was a very good book and job printer by this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family. Pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and guitar, went to the town of Paris, in Monroe County, about fifty miles away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. It was a hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she was resolute and patient, and won success. Pamela Clemens was a noble character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this work. Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to Hannibal and bought a weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier. The apprentice terms were not over-liberal. They were the usual thing for that time: board and clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," Mark Twain used to say. "I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but I didn't get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough." There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. Ament's clothes were too small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales McCormick together, fitted out with Ament's clothes, must have been a picturesque pair. There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory of him has become dim. The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's "devils" made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table, where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one journeyman, Pet McMurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. What those young scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them. Sam Clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood. He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office stove. Wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate never forgot. It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of Sam Clemens at this period. But we may imagine him from a letter which, long years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain. He said: If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy--[The color of Mark Twain's hair in early life has been variously referred to as red, black, and brown. It was, in fact, as stated by McMurry, "sandy" in boyhood, deepening later to that rich, mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside: "If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I kin." . . . Do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that diminutive creature Wales McCormick--how you used to call upon me to hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him? This is good testimony, without doubt. When he had been with Ament little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief standby. Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to Sam Clemens. He could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as Pet McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than Pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of "Annie Laurie" or "Along the Beach at Rockaway," without missing a stroke or losing a finger. Sometimes, at odd moments, he would "set up" one of the popular songs or some favorite poem like "The Blackberry Girl," and of these he sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to Puss Quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. He had charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers. During the last year of the Mexican War, when a telegraph-wire found its way across the Mississippi to Hannibal--a long sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and success. He became a sort of subeditor. When the forms of the paper were ready to close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw literature in the making. It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry; to drift up and down the world in Pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the first negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his performance. In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree, but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never could be. Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely "showing off" and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he concluded to stick to printing as a trade. We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament's he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with Laura Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the river, Lover's Leap. He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where old-fashioned games--Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the like--were regarded as rare amusements. He was a favorite with girls of his own age. He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them, too, and was often a severe trial. He was with Laura Hawkins more than the others, usually her escort. On Saturday afternoons in winter he carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on. After which they skated "partners," holding hands tightly, and were a likely pair of children, no doubt. In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at twelve is pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest." The author had the real Laura of his childhood in his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance to her life. They were never really sweethearts, those two. They were good friends and comrades. Sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the printing--office--Godey's and others. These were a treat, for such things were scarce enough. He cared little for reading, himself, beyond a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for general knowledge. It needed only to be awakened. XVI THE TURNING-POINT There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal proportions. He was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. He caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history of Joan of Arc. The "maid" was described in the cage at Rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes. There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches and their ribald replies. He had never heard of the subject before. He had never read any history. When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl. The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained with him until his very last day on earth. From the moment when that fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's mentally elect was assured. It gave him his cue--the first word of a part in the human drama. It crystallized suddenly within him sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for the divine rights of kings. A few months before he died he wrote a paper on "The Turning-point of My Life." For some reason he did not mention this incident. Yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal when a stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands. He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French wars, and to Joan in particular. He acquired an appetite for history in general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a student. Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and German. There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to teach his native tongue. Sam Clemens got a friend--very likely it was John Briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for lessons. The shoemaker had little or no English. They had no German. It would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a "word-book," and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence: "De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer." "Dere!" he said, triumphantly; "you know dose vord?" The students looked at each other helplessly. The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he asked if they recognized it. Then in despair he showed them the book. It was an English primer, and the sentence was: "The hen, it flies up in the air." They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn, not English--not under the circumstances. Later, Sam made an attempt at Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying: "No, that language is not for me. I'll do well enough to learn English." A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar. His prejudice against oppression he put into practice. Boys who were being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. Sometimes, watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way: "You mustn't cheat that boy." And the cheating stopped. When it didn't, there was a combat, with consequences. XVII THE HANNIBAL "JOURNAL" Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight; there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward display of affection was new to him. The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least a semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always, he had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy has it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons. "It was the most earnest ambition I ever had," Mark Twain once remarked, thoughtfully. "Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job." A periodical ambition of Orion's was to own and conduct a paper in Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which would secure ownership. Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete, and Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven was taken out of school to learn typesetting. Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and independence. "I followed all the advice I received," he says in his record. "If two or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the last." He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help: wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote afterward: I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty proofs. Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became still more exacting. It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter's night when with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and they set out for home forthwith. It was moonlight, and they could tell the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. They were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came to a broad space of water. The ice was lifting and falling and crunching all around them. They waited as long as they dared and decided to leap from cake to cake. Sam made the crossing without accident, but his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. He was a good swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. He was taken very ill. One disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever and deafness. There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him, tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied. They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping at night and left him "holding the bag" in the old traditional fashion while they slipped off home and went to bed. But Jim Wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela Clemens. Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could hear the candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the roof from somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing to throw at them, but he said: "For two cents I'd get out there and knock their heads off." "You wouldn't dare to do it," Sam said, purringly. This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit. "I would too," he said, "and I will if you say that again." "Why, Jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. You might catch cold." "You wait and see," said Jim Wolfe. He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow, but Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze. Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats were on the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his way in that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was doing well enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was nearly solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing yielded. A second later Jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there with their pans of cooling taffy. There were wild shrieks and a general flight. Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but Jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam was in an agony of laughter. "You did it splendidly, Jim," he drawled, when he could speak. "Nobody could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did you ever think of it?" It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete. An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story Mark Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy McDaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success. XVIII THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE Orion's paper continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. Then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. A publisher must lead his subscription list, not follow it. "I was walking backward," he said, "not seeing where I stepped." In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in charge of the office. It was a journey without financial results; yet it bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain's literary career. Sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. He had never done any writing--not for print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. His local items were of a kind known as "spicy"; his personals brought prompt demand for satisfaction. The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. Sam gave a picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the affair. Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water. When this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large. The press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. The satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more. The embryo Mark Twain also wrote a poem. It was addressed "To Mary in Hannibal," but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a dash, with a startling result. Such were the early flickerings of a smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. He reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his mistake. "I could have distanced all competitors even then," he said, "if I had recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons." Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had got his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted--without payment, of course, in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851. "Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since," he said, nearly sixty years later. Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post. Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved. High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is likely to be. He was not especially precocious--not in literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain's sketch "My First Literary Venture" he has set down with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.] Those were hard financial days. Orion could pay nothing on his mortgage --barely the interest. He had promised Sam three dollars and a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes --"poor, shabby clothes," he says in his record. "My mother and sister did the housekeeping. My mother was cook. She used the provisions I supplied her. We therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee." Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up teaching for a time, organized another music class. Orion became despondent. One night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two composition rollers. Orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand. Another disaster quickly followed. Fire broke out in the office, and the loss was considerable. An insurance company paid one hundred and fifty dollars. With it Orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the Clemens dwelling. He raised the one-story part of the building to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along. It was the fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe sketch. In it he stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan. In the meantime Pamela Clemens married. Her husband was a well-to-do merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St. Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home. Orion tried the experiment of a serial story. He wrote to a number of well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. Finally he obtained a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was five dollars. It did not save the sinking ship, however. He made the experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. He noticed that even his mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news. This was a final blow. "I sat down in the dark," he says, "the moon glinting in at the open door. I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float." He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to dispose of it on those terms. This was in 1853. His brother Samuel was no longer with him. Several months before, in June, Sam decided he would go out into the world. He was in his eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had grown restless in unrewarded service. Beyond his mastery of the trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. Once when he had asked Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion, exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking of such extravagance. Soon afterward Sam confided to his mother that he was going away; that he believed Orion hated him; that there was no longer a place for him at home. He said he would go to St. Louis, where Pamela was. There would be work for him in St. Louis, and he could send money home. His intention was to go farther than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her. His mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little Testament: "I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam," she said, "and make me a promise." If one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. Mother and son, they were of the same metal and the same mold. "I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words," Jane Clemens said. "I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone." He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him. "Remember that, Sam, and write to us," she said. "And so," Orion records, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment." XIX IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News. He remained on the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world. The "world" was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then going on. The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not traveled on it. It had not many comforts; several days and nights were required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful experience. He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done anything to surpass it. He arrived in New York with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat. New York was a great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World's Fair building, the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. A portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing specimen of his composition. The fragment concludes what was doubtless an exhaustive description. From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1 o'clock). It would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and I was only in a little over two hours to-night. I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the population of Hannibal. The price of admission being 50 cents, they take in about $3,000. The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace --from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New York. From the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred barrels of water per day! I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion's going to? Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the spring--I shall save money for this. Tell Jim (Wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news .... (It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose, with a free printer's library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? Write soon. Truly your brother, SAM P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is. It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing statistics. Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line. The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away. He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have "hot-bread" or biscuits, but ate "light-bread," which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853, and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked. Among other things he says: I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly, because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I shall get off Tuesday, though. Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The play was the "Gladiator." I did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last act, where the "Gladiator" (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play "Damon and Pythias" --the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night. I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a "Journal" the other day, in which I see the office has been sold . . . . If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid, however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall be) as "independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.". . . Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than that in the summer. "I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York" is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty years later. He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work "subbing" on a daily paper,'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print. "My efforts were not received with approval," was all he ever said of it afterward. There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had "held a case" in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he went away the "office devils" would hang a line over his case, with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air: "Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in the northwestern part of the city?" or "There go the fire-bells again!" and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens had his share in it. He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there, for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to Orion --whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October 26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and "to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia." Further along he adds: Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it. There is only one thing that gets my "dander" up--and that is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me "it's no use to get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work here than you can do!" "Downhearted," the devil! I have not had a particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four months ago. I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from home. He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its inscription "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin," and one is sharply reminded of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in review. A fine residence about completed impressed him: It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful, ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front windows . . . . To see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia. There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further along: I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--"For Wissahickon and Manayunk 25 cents." Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon . . . . There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady's money for her. Yesterday I sat in the front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord! a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare. There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th, to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th. Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says: I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18 for a few weeks, and gets on a grand "bender" and spends every cent of it. How do you like "free soil"?--I would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned negro. My love to all. Truly your brother, SAM In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick. "I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes," is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those "not written as they should be." "One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend," he says, and in conclusion, "I don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all." He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed: "An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain." He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American. Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period. His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His 'Wanderjahr' had lasted nearly fifteen months. He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long time that missing day confused his calculations. When he reached Orion's house the family sat at breakfast. He came in carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him. "You wouldn't let me buy a gun," he said, "so I bought one myself, and I am going to use it, now, in self-defense." "You, Sam! You, Sam!" cried Jane Clemens. "Behave yourself," for she was wary of a gun. Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms. XX KEOKUK DAYS Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year. He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli. Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time. Clemens wrote: MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is what I was at 19-20. Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. He tells it himself; he says: At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage for Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, "Miss, do you go by this stage?" I said, "Oh, I forgot!" and sprang out and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her. Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street, in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor. These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher, Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken; seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the way. Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said: "I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it is yourself. You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won't you please stop it? It bothers my pupils." Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise. "Does it?" he said, very deliberately. "Why didn't you mention it before? To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies." They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class. They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a "fool"--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella Patterson (related through Orion's wife and generally known as "Ick"), and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late, sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use. But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked his head in at the door. "What will you have, Sam?" he asked. "Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to light my pipe." "Why don't you get up and light it yourself?" Brownell asked. "I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me." Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it. "What are you reading, Sam?" he asked. "Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I'll write a funnier book than that, myself." Brownell laughed. "No, you won't, Sam," he said. "You are too lazy ever to write a book." A good many years later when the name "Mark Twain" had begun to stand for American humor the owner of it gave his "Sandwich Island" lecture in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: "The king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell." The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain's life was neither very long nor very actively important. It extended over a period of less than two years --two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they were not years of startling occurrence. Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the floor. Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German apprentice music. "There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song beginning: "Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine, Turkey came along and yanked him from behind." The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word "yanked" the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained. Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water. The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as "an antiquarian" a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost. Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856. I don't like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry and Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory, --[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably the second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can't work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job- work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind . . . The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. In the "Turning-point" article already mentioned he refers to this. He says: That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think. In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence. Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St. Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South America. He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear. I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South American books: They have Herndon's report now. Ward and the Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the office. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company. He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means. Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities. As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be having a pleasant dream. The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find. "I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger." In the "Turning-point" article he says: "I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day," a statement which we may accept with a literary discount. As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the unseen--who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed. XXI SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.] This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve. I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought, but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and shakin' out the contents, consisting of "guides" to Chicago, and "guides" to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich books, not excepting a "guide to heaven," which last aint much use to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin' --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they got her off. This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The letters were signed "Snodgrass," and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands. From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return. He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot. He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended. Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened. What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define. Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race. They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life. XXII THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams. The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard. "Spring fever" and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time. Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he "ran away," vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old "permanent ambition" of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint. Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say: "Good morning." Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man. "Good morning, sir," he said, briskly, without looking around. As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This one presently came up and stood a little behind him. "How would you like a young man to learn the river?" he said. The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair. "I wouldn't like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. A great deal more trouble than profit." The applicant was not discouraged. "I am a printer by trade," he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. "It doesn't agree with me. I thought I'd go to South America." Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice. "What makes you pull your words that way?" ("pulling" being the river term for drawling), he asked. The young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench. "You'll have to ask my mother," he said, more slowly than ever. "She pulls hers, too." Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance. "Do you know the Bowen boys?" he asked--"pilots in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade?" "I know them well--all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart." "Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my chums." "Come over and stand by the side of me," he said. "What is your name?" The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water. "Do you drink?" "No." "Do you gamble?" "No, Sir." "Do you swear?" "Not for amusement; only under pressure." "Do you chew?" "No, sir, never; but I must smoke." "Did you ever do any steering?" was Bixby's next question. "I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess." "Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag." Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said: "There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money." "What do you charge?" "Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever." In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging. "I haven't got five hundred dollars in money," Sam said; "I've got a lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I'll give you two thousand acres of that." Bixby dissented. "No; I don't want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already." Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela's husband without straining his credit. "Well, then, I'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I earn it." Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart. His slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot's wages. During Mr. Bixby's daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs. From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St. Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain--a "sumptuous temple"--his happiness seemed complete. XXIII THE SUPREME SCIENCE In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession. Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. His statement that he "supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river" is not to be accepted literally. Still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that --not until afterward. Horace Bixby was a "lightning" pilot with a method of instruction as direct and forcible as it was effective. He was a small man, hot and quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off. After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of imparting and acquiring information he said: "My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C." So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it "fairly bristled" with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set down; for, as the "watches" were four hours off and four hours on, there were long gaps during which he had slept. The little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black water-proof covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that first trip. Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily deciphered now. Here and there is an easier line: MERIWEATHER'S BEND 1/4 less 3--[Depth of water. One-quarter less than three fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in willows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year. One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. It would take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such statistics. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-ache is still in them. He got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and laid this one away. There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world knew as Mark Twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast, the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting. It lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. Wherever he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him. In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days with Huck and Nigger Jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly "smell" the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days. So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil. Horace Bixby has more than once declared: "Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him." Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the size of its appalling task. It can only be presented in his own words. In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had begun to take on airs. His chief was a constant menace at such moments: One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler: "What is the shape of Walnut Bend?" He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.... I waited. By and by he said: "My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime." "How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?" "How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it." "Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?" "On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house." "I wish I was dead!" "Now, I don't want to discourage you, but----" "Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time." "You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. You see----" "Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered." "No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes." "Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend on it? Will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?" Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, and he said: "Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point about 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore snag now." So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion: "How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The- Wall, trip before last?" I considered this an outrage. I said: "Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?" "My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate." When I came to myself again, I said: "When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches." "Now drop that! When I say I'll learn a man the river I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him." We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows better than could any other combination of words something of what is required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any means--Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles. XXIV THE RIVER CURRICULUM He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others. Navigation in the West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in everything. Steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less barbaric. But these things were mainly "above stairs." You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. It was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. That Samuel Clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men. He acquired a vast knowledge of human character. He says: In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well- drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known him before--met him on the river. Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort that in Europe are known as "American" and in America are known as "Western." Let us be thankful that Mark Twain's school was no less than it was--and no more. The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot, but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J. Roe. The Roe was a freight-boat, "as slow as an island and as comfortable as a farm." In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam Clemens thought if John Quarles's farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed. It was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a "love of a steamboat" nevertheless. The Roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen "family guests" aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. The young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the "grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine," or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem: Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem, A long time ago. There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels. He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. Bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named Brown. Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement. But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious. In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview with Brown, also his last one. For good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct. Brown had an offensive manner. His first greeting was a surly question. "Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?" "Bixby" was usually pronounced "Bigsby" on the river, but Brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious. His subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly. It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification of slaying Brown. Time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own. I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed. Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment. Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in "seventeen different ways--all of them new." He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use. Brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him. "Here," he would shout, "where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull her down! Don't you hear me? Dod-derned mud-cat!" His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even took occasion now and then to stir him up. One day they were steaming up the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward some unusual point. "Here, where are you heading for now?" he yelled. "What in nation are you steerin' at, anyway? Deyned numskull!" "Why," said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, "I didn't see much else I could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank." "Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!" yelled Brown. "You ain't fit to become no pilot!" Which was what Sam wanted. Any temporary relief from the carping tyranny of Brown was welcome. He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. There had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. The Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or two of idle time at either end. The young pilot found that he could get night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch. Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six dollars he accounted himself rich. "It was a desolate experience," he said, long afterward, "watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another." Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book came out of those long night-watches. It was a good time to think of such things. XXV LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow. At either end of the trip there was respite and recreation. In St. Louis, at Pamela's there was likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of course. At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the John J. Roe, where he was generously welcomed. One such visit on the Roe he never forgot. A young girl was among the boat's guests that trip --another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. They met, and were mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance, love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued. "I was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for the next three days." Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft shouting: "The Pennsylvania is backing out." A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. He wrote her, but received no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. She had not received his letter. Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests. A letter dated March 9, 1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice. Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (George Ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. This time we found the channel in less than half an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came along and took us off. The next day was colder still. I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us.... We sounded Hat Island, warped up around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have been impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out in the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock- candy statuary. This was the sort of thing he loved in those days. We feel the writer's evident joy and pride in it. In the same letter he says: "I can't correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is not allowed to do or think about anything else." Then he mentions his brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which, though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself responsible. Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent him to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles, counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. He may go down with us again. Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. He did go on the next trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of promotion. It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to have Henry along. The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other pilot, George Ealer, who "was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't," and quoted Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and inspiring audience. These were things worth while. The young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching across the path ahead. Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. One night, when the Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister's house and had this vivid dream: He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-room, supported on two chairs. On his breast lay a bouquet of flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center. When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he believed it real. Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at his dead brother. Instead, he went out on the street in the early morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly flashed upon him that it was only a dream. He bounded back, rushed to the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he found it really empty. He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his mind as quickly as he could. The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans. A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with Brown, already mentioned. It is recorded in the Mississippi book, but cannot be omitted here. Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle Bend) Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. Brown was somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. He may not have understood the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead. He disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. They were passing the landing when Captain Klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding: "Didn't Henry tell you to land here?" "No, sir." Captain. Klinefelter turned to Sam: "Didn't you hear him?" "Yes, sir." Brown said: "Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind." By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. Brown set upon him in his ugliest manner. "Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?" he demanded. Henry was always polite, always gentle. "I did tell you, Mr. Brown." "It's a lie." Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He said: "You lie yourself. He did tell you." Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted: "I'll attend to your case in half a minute!" and ordered Henry out of the pilot-house. The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and struck him in the face.--[In the Mississippi book the writer states that Brown started to strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he says: "Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared him --turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. I was wild from that moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and the captain said I was right."]--Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. Then all the bitterness and indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon Brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength and fury gave out. Brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got into trouble. Seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon. "Get out of this here pilot-house," he raged. But his subordinate was not afraid of him now. "You should leave out the 'here,'" he drawled, critically. "It is understood, and not considered good English form." "Don't you give me none of your airs," yelled Brown. "I ain't going to stand nothing more from you." "You should say, 'Don't give me any of your airs,'" Sam said, sweetly, "and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction." A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. Clemens went below, where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. The officer took him into his private room and closed the door. At first he looked at the culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries: "Did you strike him first?" Captain Klinefelter asked. "Yes, sir." "What with?" "A stool, sir." "Hard?" "Middling, sir." "Did it knock him down?" "He--he fell, sir." "Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?" "Yes, sir." "What did you do?" "Pounded him, sir." "Pounded him?" "Yes, sir." "Did you pound him much--that is, severely?" "One might call it that, sir, maybe." "I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing; do you hear? I'll pay the expenses."--["Life on the Mississippi."] Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip "an emancipated slave" listening to George Ealer's flute and his readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years--that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat. Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis. He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision. It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. Finally he said: "In case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don't get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough." It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow. XXVI THE TRAGEDY OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA" Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey, which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted: "The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fifty lives lost!" Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens's name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up the river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they knew most of the details: At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the Mississippi a river of death and tears. Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was considered hopeless. Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known. His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. He sent word of the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in Henry's case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through. But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion Clemens's wife has been preserved. MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858. DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you my poor Henry--my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me "lucky" because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know not what they say. I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours. There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, "May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!" The ladies have done well, too. Our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle "God bless you, Miss," and he burst into tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it. Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother. Your unfortunate brother, SAML. L. CLEMENS. P. S.--I got here two days after Henry. But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel Clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident --the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to write it. He was never known to speak of it but twice. Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He said: "I believe he is out of danger and will get well. He is likely to be restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will disturb him. If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine." The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining of the other sufferers. His brother told the young medical student in charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. But morphine was a new drug then; the student hesitated, saying: "I have no way of measuring. I don't know how much an eighth of a grain would be." Henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless. His brother was half beside himself with the torture of it. He went to the medical student. "If you have studied drugs," he said, "you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of morphine." The young man's courage was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it. He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end overcame him. A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and surrender. It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he dressed and went to where Henry lay. The coffin provided for the dead were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry Clemens had aroused a special interest. The ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. Samuel Clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a single red rose. Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home. The death of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[For a fine characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred to a letter written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood. See Appendix A, at the end of the last volume.] From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela's home in St. Louis. There one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the floor of his room. By and by Sam came in to where Orion was. He could endure it no longer, he said; he must, "tell somebody." Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. It has been set down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. It magnified his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane of the human being as a divine invention. Two of Mark Twain's chief characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt for it. In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry's death. He never really looked young again. Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did not disappear. His face took on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always had in repose. At twenty-three he looked thirty. At thirty he looked nearer forty. After that the discrepancy in age and looks became less notable. In vigor, complexion, and temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks. XXVII THE PILOT The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi River pilot.--[In Life on the Mississippi he gives his period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as Mr. Bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months]--Bixby had returned by this time, and they were again together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new boat called the New Falls City. Clemens was still a steersman when Bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (September 9, 1858) his old chief took him as full partner. He was a pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United States. Boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens's head, or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world. "Not only was he a pilot, but a good one." These are Horace Bixby's words, and he added: "It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam's piloting. Men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was never much of a pilot. Most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all. As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty." He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it. He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice. From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions. Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort: What is a government without energy?--[he says]--. And what is a man without energy? Nothing--nothing at all. What is the grandest thing in "Paradise Lost"--the Arch-Fiend's terrible energy! What was the greatest feature in Napoleon's character? His unconquerable energy! Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it! I want a man to--I want you to--take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil. Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity. His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council. Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry's death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. In the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval. He not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom. Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I was about to "round to" for a storm, but concluded that I could find a smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The storm came, passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. We couldn't have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado. And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages--for that is a secondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat. I can "bank" in the neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they say, "Why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?" And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to "blow my horn," for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a "stern joy" in it. We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings. And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell. He was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it must have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that. Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. He may have written them himself. Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens tell: We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always talking of such things; then he said: "Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders weren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I threw the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down." This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for Horace Bixby remembers that "Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel." But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later--with one exception. The exception was not intended for publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain. That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers--a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them "Mark Twain." They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: "My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans," and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as 1811. Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed "Sergeant Fathom," with an introduction which referred to the said Fathom as "one of the oldest cub pilots on the river." The letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer "the old first Jubilee" with a "Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew." It is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.] The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens's pilot partner on the Edward J. Gay at the time. He insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it. Clemens was reluctant, but consented. It appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed. It broke Captain Sellers's literary heart. He never contributed another paragraph. Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded. If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved --immortality. XXVIII PILOTING AND PROPHECY Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the Association Rooms. He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty dollars. The student was provided with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. With his unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present French would do. He did not return to the school, but kept his cards and bought text-books. He must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the Dialogues of Voltaire. This old note-book is interesting for other things. The notes are no longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of "2d high-water trip--Jan., 1861--Alonzo Child," we have the story of a rising river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the circumstance and uncertainty of change. Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank --could have gone up shore above General Taylor's--too much drift.... Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8 ft. bank on main shore Ozark Chute.... And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers, picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of steering. "Steering is a very high, art," he says; "one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river fast." He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the dark, he recalled it. He said: "There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness. "I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it. I had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify that for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. It was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height --all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position and was generally pretty useless. "I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard. I was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a squirrel. "'Sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this place since you have.' "I didn't argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never forgotten it." The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy--the romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time a great comet blazed in the heavens, a "wonderful sheaf of light" that glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of phrase. Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered. In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as a sort of creed. It is an interesting little document--a prophetic one, the reader may concede: HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. The old note-book contains no record of disasters. Horace Bixby, who should know, has declared: "Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and then." Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and a letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two enjoyed at a "French restaurant" in New Orleans--"dissipating on a ten-dollar dinner--tell it not to Ma!"--where they had sheepshead fish, oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, "after which the day was too far gone to do anything." So it appears that he was not always reading Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend. Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in St. Louis where was being exhibited Church's "Heart of the Andes." He describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm. "I have seen it several times," he concludes, "but it is always a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you saw the first." Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his cousin Ella Creel and another--for a trip down the river to New Orleans. Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the 'schottische' as performed by Miss Castle and myself. She was perfectly willing for me to dance until 12 o'clock at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the 'schottische'. I took Ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of New Orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and, although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. To use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were "hell-bent" on stealing some of the luscious- looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but I restrained them. In another letter of this period we get a hint of the future Mark Twain. It was written to John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J. Roe. What a fool old Adam was. Had everything his own way; had succeeded in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood, but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable little apple. Ah, John, if you had been in his place you would not have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any exertion. I have noticed that you shun exertion. There comes in the difference between us. I court exertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment. Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long. There remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious document. There was in those days a famous New Orleans clairvoyant known as Madame Caprell. Some of the young pilot's friends had visited her and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. From time to time they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he concluded to make the experiment. As soon as he came away he wrote to Orion in detail. She's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28--say 5 feet 2 1/4--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I do. She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age. Then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. Something after this style: 'Madame.' Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then I can almost promise you 86, when you will surely die; otherwise, look out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a long- lived race, that is, on your father's side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself.... In some respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house.... You never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated. 'S. L. C.' Which proves nothing. 'Madame.' Don't interrupt. When you sought your present occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. To do all this requires the qualities which I have named. 'S. L. C.' You flatter well, Madame. 'Madame.' Don't interrupt. Up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances --for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning-point in your life occurred in 1840-7-8. 'S. L. C.' Which was? 'Madame.' A death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did. You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now.... What is your brother's age? 23--and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do --tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character.... The land he has now will be very valuable after a while---- 'S. L. C.' Say 250 years hence, or thereabouts, Madame---- 'Madame.' No--less time--but never mind the land, that is a secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices under Government.... After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary --try the law--you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, I will answer without reserve--without reserve. I asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller's was just as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more --ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. Now isn't she the devil? That is to say, isn't she a right smart little woman? When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and Pamela are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till I get back, I reckon. SAM. In the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that Madame Caprell was "indeed a right smart little woman." She made mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of his father's death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read. minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother Orion's; that she outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly had knowledge of Orion's legal bent and his connection with the Tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course, she had no material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know certainly about such things. XXIX THE END OF PILOTING It is curious, however, that Madame Caprell, with clairvoyant vision, should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two months distant: the breaking-out of the Civil War, with the closing of the river and the end of Mark Twain's career as a pilot. Perhaps these things were so near as to be "this side" the range of second sight. There had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that war was really coming. Traveling that great commercial highway, the river, with intercourse both of North and South, they did not believe that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the nation's trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. True, several States, including Louisiana, had declared the Union a failure and seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a State had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of secession might be. Comparatively few believed it meant war. Samuel Clemens had no such belief. His Madame Caprell letter bears date of February 6, 1861, yet contains no mention of war or of any special excitement in New Orleans --no forebodings as to national conditions. Such things came soon enough: President Lincoln was inaugurated on the 4th of March, and six weeks later Fort Sumter was fired upon. Men began to speak out then and to take sides. It was a momentous time in the Association Rooms. There were pilots who would go with the Union; there were others who would go with the Confederacy. Horace Bixby was one of the former, and in due time became chief of the Union River Service. Another pilot named Montgomery (Samuel Clemens had once steered for him) declared for the South, and later commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet. They were all good friends, and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but they took sides. A good many were not very clear as to their opinions. Living both North and South as they did, they saw various phases of the question and divided their sympathies. Some were of one conviction one day and of another the next. Samuel Clemens was of the less radical element. He knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he was not then bloodthirsty. A pilot-house with its elevated position and transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. "I'll think about it," he said. "I'm not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I'll go home and reflect on the matter." He did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. It is rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with his future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--"mark twain," and should end with the words "no lead." He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the Uncle Sam. Zeb Leavenworth was one of the pilots, and Sam Clemens usually stood watch with him. They heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations, but they were not molested, though at Memphis they basely escaped the blockade. At Cairo, Illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by Grant. The Uncle Sam came steaming up toward St. Louis, those on board congratulating themselves on having come through unscathed. They were not quite through, however. Abreast of Jefferson Barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl of smoke drifting in their direction. They did not realize that it was a signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on. Less than a minute later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of the upper decoration. Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a yell. "Good Lord Almighty! Sam;" he said, "what do they mean by that?" Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. "I guess they want us to wait a minute, Zeb," he said. They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the trip from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain's pilot-days were over. He would have grieved had he known this fact. "I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," he long afterward declared, "and I took a measureless pride in it." The dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. A sovereign and an autocrat, the pilot's word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a crown. As long as he lived Samuel Clemens would return to those old days with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more. XXX THE SOLDIER Clemens spent a few days in St. Louis (in retirement, for there was a pressing war demand for Mississippi pilots), then went up to Hannibal to visit old friends. They were glad enough to see him, and invited him to join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to "help Gov. 'Claib' Jackson repel the invader." A good many companies were forming in and about Hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting and badly mixed. Some of the volunteers did not know for a time which invader they intended to drive from Missouri soil, and more than one company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might eventually espouse. --[The military organizations of Hannibal and Palmyra, in 1861, were as follows: The Marion Artillery; the Silver Grays; Palmyra Guards; the W. E. Dennis company, and one or two others. Most of them were small private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half Union and Confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the regular service according as they developed convictions. The general idea of these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good time. One such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements. They saw the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.] Samuel Clemens had by this time decided, like Lee, that he would go with his State and lead battalions to victory. The "battalion" in this instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age, mostly pilots and schoolmates, including Sam Bowen, Ed Stevens, and Ab Grimes, about a dozen, all told. They organized secretly, for the Union militia was likely to come over from Illinois any time and look up any suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. An army might lose enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose. So they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill, just as Tom Sawyer's red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing "War," instead of "Indian" and "Pirate" and "Bandit" with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches. Then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily called on their sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others pretended sweethearts for the occasion--and when it was dark and mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would never see them again. And as always happens in such a case, some of them were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped away that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves. The "two Sams"--Sam Bowen and Sam Clemens--called on Patty Gore and Julia Willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls to "walk through the pickets" with them, which they did as far as Bear Creek Hill. The girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn't be back to begin picketing for some time. So the girls stood there and watched the soldiers march up Bear Creek Hill and disappear among the trees. The army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush and vines toward New London, though this sort of thing grew rather monotonous by morning. When they took a look at themselves by daylight, with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing about it all which appealed to one's sense of humor rather than to his patriotism. Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, however, received them cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some encouraging words. He was authorized to administer the oath of office, he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to Col. Bill Splawn, Farmer Nuck Matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands and perhaps ought to do something for it. This brought in a number of contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it possible for it to move on to the front without further delay. Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, Paint Brush, upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade. The proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it. They went over on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters. Somebody suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as barber. They were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance. The army then elected its officers. William Ely was chosen captain, with Asa Glasscock as first lieutenant. Samuel Clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies. There were only three privates when the election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their deportment. There was scarcely any discipline in this army. Then it set in to rain. It rained by day and it rained by night. Salt River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. Twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over. Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk. The rank and file did not care for picket duty. Sam Bowen--ordered by Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. Sam went finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun. These things began to tell on patriotism. Presently Lieutenant Clemens developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war and the fools that invented it. Then word came that "General" Tom Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land. That settled it. Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his neglect of them as perfidy. They broke camp without further ceremony. Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the little mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to Paint Brush's neck. Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it was necessary for Paint Brush to follow. Arriving at the farther bank, Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view. He spurred up the bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears of Paint Brush appeared. "Ah," said Clemens, as he mopped his face, "do you know that little devil waded all the way across?" A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them back to camp. They admonished him to "go there himself." They said they had been in that camp and knew all about it. They were going now where there was food--real food and plenty of it. Then he begged them, but it was no use. By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. A tall, bony woman came to the door: "You're secesh, ain't you?" They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they wanted to buy provisions. The request seemed to inflame her. "Provisions!" she screamed. "Provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the Union Army. You get out of here!" She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army moved on. When they arrived at Col. Bill Splawn's that night Colonel Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb them. The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. Presently somebody yelled "Fire!" One of the boys had been smoking and started the hay. Lieutenant Clemens suddenly wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barnyard below. The rest of the army, startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his disabilities. Literally and figuratively this was the final straw. With a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war. The others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing. Whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the Confederacy, and of the human race at large. They helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. Next morning, when Colonel Splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out for New London. But Lieutenant Clemens never got any farther than Nuck Matson's farm-house. His ankle was so painful by that time that Mrs. Matson had him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the injury and stress of war. A little negro boy was kept on watch for Union detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. When he was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the Confederacy. He decided to visit Orion in Keokuk. Orion was a Union abolitionist and might lead him to mend his doctrines. As for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field. Its members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. Sam Bowen is said to have been caught by the Federal troops and put to sawing wood in the stockade at Hannibal. Ab (A. C.) Grimes became a noted Confederate spy and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set down. Properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have made as brave soldiers as any. Military effectiveness is a matter of leaders and tactics. Mark Twain's own Private History of a 'Campaign that Failed' is, of course, built on this episode. He gives us a delicious account, even if it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. The story might have been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier in the dark. The incident was invented, of course, to present the real horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and, to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention. --[In a book recently published, Mark Twain's "nephew" is quoted as authority for the statement that Mark Twain was detailed for river duty, captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-warehouse in St. Louis, etc. Mark Twain had but one nephew: Samuel E. Moffett, whose Biographical Sketch (vol. xxii, Mark Twain's Works) contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.] XXXI OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY When Madame Caprell prophesied that Orion Clemens would hold office under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. The inauguration of Abraham Lincoln brought Edward Bates into his Cabinet, and Bates was Orion's friend. Orion applied for something, and got it. James W. Nye had been appointed Territorial governor of Nevada, and Orion was made Territorial secretary. You could strain a point and refer to the office as "secretary of state," which was an imposing title. Furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor's absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. When Lieutenant Clemens arrived in Keokuk, Orion was in the first flush of his triumph and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor. The late lieutenant C. S. A. had accumulated money out of his pilot salary, and there was no comfortable place just then in the active Middle West for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the service. He agreed that if Orion would overlook his recent brief defection from the Union and appoint him now as his (Orion's) secretary, he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer. The offer was a boon to Orion. He was always eager to forgive, and the money was vitally necessary. In the briefest possible time he had packed his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the brothers were on their way to St. Louis for final leave-taking before setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the Pacific West. From St. Louis they took the boat for St. Jo, whence the Overland stage started, and for six days "plodded" up the shallow, muddy, snaggy Missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the Father of Waters. In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was some "shear" and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.'--['Roughing It'.]-- At St. Jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad Rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo and Carson City (including a two-day halt in Salt Lake City) in nineteen glorious days. What an inspiration in such a trip! In 'Roughing It' he tells it all, and says: "Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine Overland mornings." The nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not mind. All things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail- bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. And finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. Youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. And sometimes the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at five dollars apiece and making the Overland trip in eight days; just a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and the even, swinging gallop of the mules. Sometimes they got a glimpse of the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by. And every morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, Mormonism. They spent two wonderful days at Salt Lake City, that mysterious and remote capital of the great American monarchy, who still flaunts her lawless, orthodox creed the religion of David and Solomon--and thrives. An obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in 'Roughing It' by and by. The Overland travelers set out refreshed from Salt Lake City, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while. The author of 'Roughing It' assures us of this: Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down-grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. But one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. It was a trip so well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and rereading to-day. We can only read of it now. The Overland stage long ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. Even if it did, the life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same. XXXII THE PIONEER It was a hot, dusty August 14th that the stage reached Carson City and drew up before the Ormsby Hotel. It was known that the Territorial secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception, with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned. Governor Nye, formerly police commissioner in New York City, had arrived a short time before, and with his party of retainers ("heelers" we would call them now), had made an imposing entrance. Perhaps something of the sort was expected with the advent of the secretary of state. Instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother: Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. Soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome. Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a "wooden town," with a population of two thousand souls. Its main street consisted of a few blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. In 'Roughing It' the author writes: In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a "Plaza," which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large, unfenced, level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the Plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering. One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to populate it. The mineral excitement was at its height in those days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. The sidewalks and streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a motley aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze upon. Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as it was --"no better and no worse." Well--[he says]--, "Gold Hill" sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; "Wild Cat" isn't worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was "the d---dest country under the sun," and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage- brush," ventures to grow. . . . I said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert--true. And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the insignificant village of Carson, in that instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it. As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but, like that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe "they don't run her now." Carson has been through several phases of change since this was written --for better and for worse. It is a thriving place in these later days, and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout. But it was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. Gold and silver hunting and mine speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder were the diversions--of the Nevada capital. Politics developed in due course, though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time. The Clemens brothers took lodging with a genial Irishwoman, Mrs. Murphy, a New York retainer of Governor Nye, who boarded the camp-followers. --[The Mrs. O'Flannigan of 'Roughing It'.]--This retinue had come in the hope of Territorial pickings and mine adventure--soldiers of fortune they were, and a good-natured lot all together. One of them, Bob Howland, a nephew of the governor, attracted Samuel Clemens by his clean-cut manner and commanding eye. "The man who has that eye doesn't need to go armed," he wrote later. "He can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner without saying a single word." It was the same Bob Howland who would be known by and by as the most fearless man in the Territory; who, as city marshal of Aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with general massacre, sent the famous message to Governor Nye: "All quiet in Aurora. Five men will be hung in an hour." And it was quiet, and the programme was carried out. But this is a digression and somewhat premature. Orion Clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position, devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under frontier conditions. Sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would build a fire in the office stove, and, with Bob Howland and a few other choice members of the "Brigade" gathered around, would tell river yarns in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his days. His river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling to convey. His hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not likely ever to set the world afire. They did not happen to think that the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud would one day win for him the attention of all mankind. Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was never known as otherwise than "Sam" among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on the Carson streets. His great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to look a second time and then inquire as to his identity. He had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. Lately a river sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots Always something of a barbarian in love with the loose habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray. The more energetic citizens of Carson did not prophesy much for his future among them. Orion Clemens, with the stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of King and Carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying, lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of employment like that? Samuel Clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. The mere coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. His chief purpose was to see the world beyond the Rockies, to derive from it such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. The war would end, by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. He was already not far from homesick for the "States" and his associations there. He closed one letter: I heard a military band play "What Are the Wild Waves Saying" the other night, and it brought Ella Creel and Belle (Stotts) across the desert in an instant, for they sang the song in Orion's yard the first time I ever heard it. It was like meeting an old friend. I tell you I could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them. His friends contracted the mining mania; Bob Howland and Raish Phillips went down to Aurora and acquired "feet" in mini-claims and wrote him enthusiastic letters. With Captain Nye, the governor's brother, he visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished. He was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those concealed under it. He had heard that the timber around Lake Bigler (Tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. The lake itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the dream of art. He decided to locate a timber claim on its shores. He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the account of this trip as set down in 'Roughing It' is one of the best things in the book. The lake proved all they had expected--more than they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. They staked out a timber claim and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea. They did not sleep in their house, he says: "It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it." They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation. His picture in 'Roughing It' of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. The reader may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to Pamela at the time. The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive. Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, "Superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the Lord God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we'll never live till morning!" This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of phrasing which would develop later. The fire ended their first excursion to Tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in which the "folks at home," Mr. Moffett, James Lampton, and others, were included. It was the same James Lampton who would one day serve as a model for Colonel Sellers. Evidently Samuel Clemens had a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes: This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in. I don't believe it would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000 to commence with. I suppose he can't leave his family, though. Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller's optimism develops. Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that if the war lets us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble. This letter bears date of October 25th, and from it we gather that a certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed. We have got about 1,650 feet of mining ground, and, if it proves good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in, and if not I can get "feet" for him in the spring. You see, Pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with after you get it. He refers to Pamela's two little children, his niece Annie and Baby Sam, --[Samuel E. Moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.] --and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims probably--for he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines. That was a long time ago. Tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents. Those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit of precious ores. XXXIII THE PROSPECTOR It was not until early winter that Samuel Clemens got the real mining infection. Everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not fallen an earlier victim. The wildest stories of sudden fortune were in the air, some of them undoubtedly true. Men had gone to bed paupers, on the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires. Others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be fairly stuffed with precious ores. Cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold--daily drove through the streets. In the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened Humboldt region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. The papers declared that Humboldt County "was the richest mineral region on God's footstool." The mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold and silver. A correspondent of the daily Territorial Enterprise fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the measureless wealth of the Humboldt mines. No wonder those not already mad speedily became so. No wonder Samuel Clemens, with his natural tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as "frenzied as the craziest." The air to him suddenly began to shimmer; all his thoughts were of "leads" and "ledges" and "veins"; all his clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. He joined an expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having started earlier. Hurry was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put 1,800 pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon. In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of killikinick, Watts's Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the "Carmina Sacra." The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in 'Roughing It'), and W. H. Clagget. Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a law student in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association. Both Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in time. The blacksmith's name was Tillou (Ballou), a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. There were also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed mongrel, Curney, the property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound. The combination seemed a strong one. It proved a weak one in the matter of horses. Oliver and Clemens had furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. It was two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The horses could not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. Then they found it necessary to push. Not because we were fond of it, Ma--oh, no! but on Bunker's account. Bunker was the "near" horse on the larboard side, named after the attorney-general of this Territory. My horse--and I am sorry you do not know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my horse--I was going to say, was the "off" horse on the starboard side. But it was on Bunker's account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon. In fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to Humboldt.--[S. L. C. to his mother. Published in the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.]-- So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never know want or fatigue any more. There were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food satisfying. They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their discomforts. Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent letter to the writer of this history, says: He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two. One day a pack of wolves chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead. Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: This was disturbing enough. Then they came to that desolation of desolations, the Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water. They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless waste to reach camp on the other side. It was three o'clock in the morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. Judge Oliver in his letter tells what happened then: The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of Piute warriors. We were upon our feet in an instant. The pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were in our minds. Our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: "Boys, they have left us our scalps. Let's give them all the flour and sugar they ask for." And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful. They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other. They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. Stones used to roll down on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock--specifically of a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last "an entire cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of everything."--['The Innocents Abroad.'] Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. He says there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver's name will go down with it to posterity. In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they found in Unionville. "National" there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per ton at the mint in San Francisco. And the "Alda Nueva," "Peru," "Delirio," "Congress," "Independent," and others were immensely rich leads. And moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get "feet" enough to make us all rich one of these days. "I confess with shame," says the author of 'Roughing It', "that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground." And he adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. His account in 'Roughing It' of the Humboldt mining experience is sufficiently good history to make detail here unnecessary. Tillou instructed them in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim. They went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and blasting-powder. Then they gave it up. "One week of this satisfied me. I resigned." They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. It was pleasanter to prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. The golden reports of Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were mainly delirium and insanity. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel, though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately die. Billy Clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and Gus Oliver put out his as probate judge. Sam Clemens and Tillou, with a fat-witted, arrogant Prussian named Pfersdoff (Ollendorf) set out for Carson City. It is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs. The Carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the Carson River (the scene of the "Arkansas" sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot. Pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. The author of 'Roughing It' tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. He further tells us how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and, deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: It was the 29th of January when they reached Carson City. They had been gone not quite two months, one of which had been spent in travel. It was a brief period, but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years. XXXIV TERRITORIAL CHARACTERISTICS Meantime, the Territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching the ship of state. There was no legislative hall in Carson City; and if Abram Curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated Gould and Curry mine--"Curry--old Curry--old Abe Curry," as he called himself--had not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would have been obliged to "sit in the desert." Furthermore, Orion had met with certain acute troubles of his own. The government at Washington had not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing and various other services-prices fixed according to Eastern standards. These prices did not obtain in Nevada, and when Orion, confident that because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. With a man of less conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official deficit. With Orion Clemens such a remedy was not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was, Orion's integrity was a rock. Governor Nye was among those who presently made this discovery. Old politician that he was--former police commissioner of New York City--Nye took care of his own problems in the customary manner. To him, politics was simply a game--to be played to win. He was a popular, jovial man, well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as Orion did, planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges out of his salary. To him Nevada was simply a doorway to the United States Senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official recognition and perquisites. The governor found Orion Clemens an impediment to this policy. Orion could not be brought to a proper political understanding of "special bills and accounts," and relations between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained. It was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the pilot-house of a Mississippi River steamer returned from Humboldt. He was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family integrity. When he had heard Orion's troubled story, he called on Governor Nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. In his former employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient to his needs. We may regret that no stenographic report was made of the interview. It would be priceless now. But it is lost; we only know that Orion's rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough Governor Nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for his brother. Samuel Clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in Carson City--only long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. He did not confess his Humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to Humboldt after a brief investigation of the Esmeralda mines. He had been paying heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining gained at Unionville, he felt that his personal attention at Aurora might be important. As a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for company. His earlier praises of the wonders and climate of Tahoe had inspired his sister Pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving land. Perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too highly. "By George, Pamela," he said, "I begin to fear that I have invoked a spirit of some kind or other, which I will find more than difficult to allay." He proceeds to recommend California as a residence for any or all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning Nevada. Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to hell again .... Why, I have had my whiskers and mustaches so full of alkali dust that you'd have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel. But then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. How could he, with a fortune so plainly in view? It was already in his grasp in imagination; he was on the way home with it. I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don't say that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I expect to--you bet. I came down here from Humboldt, in order to look after our Esmeralda interests. Yesterday, Bob Howland arrived here, and I have had a talk with him. He owns with me in the "Horatio and Derby" ledge. He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a "big thing" by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a mill. Now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to 50 or 100 inches, we wouldn't care whether school kept or not. If the ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift. But, you see, the ledge will not prove to be worthless. We have located, near by, a fine site for a mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill- site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. Then we sha'n't care whether we have capital or not. Mill folks will build us a mill, and wait for their pay. If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in June--and if we do, I'll be home in July, you know. He pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic and crystal-clear. So, just keep your clothes on, Pamela, until I come. Don't you know that undemonstrated human calculations won't do to bet on? Don't you know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? Don't you know that I have expended money in this country but have made none myself? Don't you know that I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? Don't you know that it's all talk and no cider so far? Don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of Hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with 40-horse microscopic power? But-but In the bright lexicon of youth, There is no such word as Fail-- and I'll prove it! Whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt: By George, if I just had a thousand dollars I'd be all right! Now there's the "Horatio," for instance. There are five or six shareholders in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and they are pressed for money, but I am hard up myself, and can't buy --and in June they'll strike the ledge, and then "good-by canary." I can't get it for love or money. Twenty dollars a foot! Think of it! For ground that is proven to be rich. Twenty dollars, Madam- and we wouldn't part with a foot of our 75 for five times the sum. So it will be in Humboldt next summer. The boys will get pushed and sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune. But I am at the helm now. I have convinced Orion that he hasn't business talent enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not connected with the secretary's office. So, you see, if mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me--and me only. I'm the "firm," you know. There are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and plans. Ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and another-of gold-mines of one form or another. He closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother. Ma says: "It looks like a man can't hold public office and be honest." Why, certainly not, Madam. A man can't hold public office and be honest. Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose. And I don't remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in Nevada. He even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, Ma, but I wasn't brought up in that way, you know. You showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised me, Madam. But then you ought to have raised me first, so that Orion could have had the benefit of my example. Do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an 8-stamp quartz-mill one night, and brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room? XXXV THE MINER He had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary that Orion should become the financier. The brothers owned their Esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that Orion, out of his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would go actively into the field and develop their riches. Neither had the slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks. It was February when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in Aurora, that rough, turbulent camp of the Esmeralda district lying about one hundred miles south of Carson City, on the edge of California, in the Sierra slopes. Everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for "feet" in this ledge and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. The new arrival camped with Horatio Phillips (Raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof (the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together and combined their resources in a common fund. Bob Howland joined them presently, and later an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie (Cal), one day to be immortalized in the story of 'Roughing It' and in the dedication of that book. Around the cabin stove they would gather, and paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and "horn" spoon, after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective wealth. Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all the rivers ran gold. Bob Howland declared later that they used to go out at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of affluence and high living. When they lacked for other employment and were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would "ride the bunk" and smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills. At other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. They thought he was writing letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during this period. It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. One or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a Keokuk paper --the 'Gate City'. Copies containing them had gone back to Orion, who had shown them to a representative of the Territorial Enterprise, a young man named Barstow, who thought them amusing. The Enterprise reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution direct to that paper over the pen-name "Josh." He did not care to sign his own name. He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp scribbler. He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. They were sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of humor that belongs to the frontier. They were not especially promising efforts. One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of preliminary study for "Oahu," of the Sandwich Islands, or "Baalbec" and "Jericho," of Syria. If any one had told him, or had told any reader of this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to doubt. Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed. A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. The saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. Our Aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. Once there was a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and Sam Clemens is said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous enjoyment of the tripping harmony. Cal Higbie, who was present, writes: In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his surroundings. Sometimes he would act as though there was no use in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. It was all as natural as a child's play. By the second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with laughter. What a child he always was--always, to the very end? With the first break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies, and assailed the hills. There came then a period of madness, beside which the Humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. Higbie says: It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific coast. In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack- drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club together and send agents representing all the way from $5,000 to $500,000 or more to buy mines. They would buy anything. in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not. The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. An extract from a letter of April is a fair exhibit: Work not yet begun on the "Horatio and Derby"--haven't seen it yet. It is still in the snow. Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks --strike the ledge in July: Guess it is good--worth from $30 to $50 a foot in California.... Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on Last Chance Hill. Expect he will die. These mills here are not worth a d--n--except Clayton's--and it is not in full working trim yet. Send me $40 or $50--by mail-immediately. I go to work to-morrow with pick and shovel. Something's got to come, by G--, before I let go here. By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. On the 28th he writes: I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of our new claims--"Dashaway"--which I don't think a great deal of, but which I am willing to try. We are down, now, 10 or 12 a feet. We are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out. If we get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth anything or not. It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the cold; and the "Dashaway" would seem to have proven a disappointment, for there is no promising mention of it again. Instead, we hear of the "Flyaway;" and "Annipolitan" and the "Live Yankee" and of a dozen others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and then passes from notice forever. In May it is the "Monitor" that is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as immediate. To use a French expression, I have "got my d---d satisfy" at last. Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything. Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but just lie still and put up with privation for six months. Perhaps 3 months will "let us out." Then, if government refuses to pay the rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will come there is no shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty. I own one-eighth of the new "Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company," and money can't buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our fortune. The ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it.... When you and I came out here we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have accepted it gladly. Now, it is made. I am willing, now, that "Neary's tunnel" or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed. Some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate. I would hate to swap chances with any member of the tribe . . . . It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it, share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype. He adds: But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but those which I can superintend myself. I am a citizen here now, and I am satisfied, although Ratio and I are "strapped" and we haven't three days' rations in the house.... I shall work the "Monitor" and the other claims with my own hands. I prospected 3/4 of a pound of "Monitor" yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got about 10 or 12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get.... I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling "Monitor" which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all splintered up, and I send you the scraps. I call that "choice"--any d---d fool would. Don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't. It don't need it. It is simply able to speak for itself. It is six feet wide on top, and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth. What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the invincible bomb-proof "Monitor"? There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending with demands for money. The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and the help eat it up faster than Orion's salary can grow. "Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel." The letters are full of such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother, is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. He is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane protests from Aurora. "The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now," the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. "My back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day." But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later. He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day. "But--if we strike it rich--I've lost my guess, that's all." Then he adds: "Couldn't go on the hill to-day. It snowed. It always snows here, I expect"; and the final heart-sick line, "Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?" This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels the dreary uselessness of the quest. Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words. In 'Roughing It' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling "as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week." This statement requires modification. It was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing "riffles" and "screening tailings." The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. It is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. That he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement. He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, "working in the quicksilver and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money." As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour, prospecting for the traditional "Cement Mine," a lost claim where, in a deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins in a fruitcake. They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono Lake --that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in 'Roughing It' he has so vividly pictured. It was good to get away from the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. They made a walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever visited at all. Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. Amid mountain-peaks and giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind. XXXVI LAST MINING DAYS It was late in July when he wrote: If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from Wide West ledge a while ago. Raish and I have secured 200 out of a company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a spur from the W. W.--our shaft is about 100 ft. from the W. W. shaft. In order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft. We have sublet to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening tools. This was the "Blind Lead" claim of Roughing It, but the episode as set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. It is quite true that he visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the "Cement" 'ignus fatuus' and that the "Wide West" holdings were forfeited through neglect. But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the letters fail to show it. It is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not the claim was ever of any value. A well-known California author--[Ella Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc]--declares: No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire through the "Wide West" mine, for the writer, as a child, played over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk thousands and thousands, that they never recovered. The "Blind Lead" episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. It is vividly true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any liberties he may have taken for art's sake. In reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender. The "Josh" letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest, and Orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made for similar material. Orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. A letter from the Aurora miner written near the end of July presents the situation very fully. An extract or two will be sufficient: My debts are greater than I thought for--I bought $25 worth of clothing and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings. I owe about $45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in the h--l I am going to live on something over $100 until October or November is singular. The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too.... Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or to Marsh, and tell them I'll write as many letters a week as they want for $10 a week. My board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent and other papers--and the Enterprise. If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? I'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present for the 'Age', for $5 per week. Now it has been a long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year. Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of the Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the "Josh" letters to their local staff. Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the Pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them had "something in him." Two of the sketches in particular he thought promising. One of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as "Professor Personal Pronoun." It closed by stating that it was "impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out of capital I's." But it was the other sketch which settled Goodman's decision. It was also a burlesque report, this time of a Fourth-of-July oration. It opened, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam." This was followed by a string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged. But it was the opening itself that won Goodman's heart. "That is the sort of thing we want," he said. "Write to him, Barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here." Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum. This was at the end of July, 1862. In 'Roughing It' we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the "call." To Orion he wrote Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail, if possible. There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. On August 7th he wrote again to Orion. He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they thought he might be needed. He was playing for time to consider. Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally "slow." But do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you. So he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. But eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. In a letter to Pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in San Francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects --nor to the mines, for that matter. Phillips, Howland, and Higbie would seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with Dan Twing and a dog, a combination amusingly described. It is a pleasant enough letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in: I did think for a while of going home this fall--but when I found that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. This country suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no. He was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase the old form of Christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean, in another sphere, "a brighter resurrection" than even his rainbow imagination could paint? XXXVII THE NEW ESTATE It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day when a worn, travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the Virginia City Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. He had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, Denis E. McCarthy, signified that the caller might state his errand. The wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently and with deliberation: "My starboard leg seems to be unshipped. I'd like about one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he added: "I want to see Mr. Barstow, or Mr. Goodman. My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom: William Wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the Coast as Dan de Quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival. He was going on a trip to the States soon; it was mainly on this account that the new man had been engaged. The "Josh" letters were very good, in Dan's opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him around to his boarding-place. It was the beginning of an association that continued during Samuel Clemens's stay in Virginia City and of a friendship that lasted many years. The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers ever published. Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper policy. Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge. His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows: "Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and say it is so and so. In the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public confidence." Goodman was not new to the West. He had come to California as a boy and had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. Early in '61, when the Comstock Lode--[Named for its discoverer, Henry T. P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his stupendous find.]--was new and Virginia in the first flush of its monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars and bought the paper. It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast. It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless, picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. Goodman himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett (afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative of Enterprise men.--[The Comstock of that day became famous for its journalism. Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W. J. Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen, and Sam Davis--a great array indeed for a new Territory.]--Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He added the fresh, rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more lavish, more overwhelming scale. There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world. The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold. Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. The town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. Everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. The Enterprise, "Comstock to the backbone," did what it could to help things along. It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. Goodman let the boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any subject. Often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.--[The indifference to 'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully unconscious. Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: "Arthur McEwen"]--It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that. He was peculiarly fitted for the position. Unspoiled humanity appealed to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape forms. Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune. His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. Remembering marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news. He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error. He was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics --measurements and figures--were concerned. These he gave "a lick and a promise," according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of their associations. De Quille says further: Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent to work up. However, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance. Never was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together. De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time took on the semblance "of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a thousand rays." The author of 'Roughing It' has given us a better picture of the Virginia City of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write. He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how "feet" in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the market. He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days. The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece--is a complete epitome of the social frontier. It would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive presentation of Comstock conditions. We may only hope to add a few details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from the drift of years. XXXVIII ONE OF THE "STAFF" The new reporter found acquaintance easy. The office force was like one family among which there was no line of caste. Proprietors, editors, and printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none at all outside of the office.--["The paper went to press at two in the morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-songs of the day until dawn."--S. L. C., in 1908.]--Samuel Clemens immediately became "Sam," or "Josh," to his associates, just as De Quille was "Dan" and Goodman "Joe." He found that he disliked the name of Josh, and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. The office, and Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his originality and measured speech. Enterprise readers began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice. True to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction. It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast. With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of these literary pranks and of their results. They were usually intended as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive web. Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set down something concerning the first of these, "The Petrified Man," and of another, "My Bloody Massacre," but in neither case has he told it all. "The Petrified Man" hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, "with that delicacy so characteristic of him," Sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position. The account further stated that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word "sold." But the description was a shade too ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with Sewall. He did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. As a matter of fact, no one saw the "sell" and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified man as a genuine discovery. This was a surprise, and a momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better than he knew. He gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to Sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the United States. The papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists would. Some of them did, and Sewall's days became unhappy because of letters received asking further information. As literature, the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the Coast exchanges and press generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet unnamed, acquired prestige. Inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in Virginia that did these things. The papers became wary and read Enterprise items twice before clipping them. Clemens turned his attention to other matters to lull suspicion. The great "Dutch Nick Massacre" did not follow until a year later. Reference has already been made to the Comstock's delight in humor of a positive sort. The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia. One might protest and swear, but he must take it. An example of Comstock humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of Leslie Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about town. They were coming down C Street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a fruit-stand at the International Hotel corner. Watermelons were rare and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars apiece. Blackburn said: "Pat, let's get one of those watermelons. You engage that fellow in conversation while I stand at the corner, where I can step around out of sight easily. When you have got him interested, point to something on the back shelf and pitch me a melon." This appealed to Holland, and he carried out his part of the plan perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon Blackburn simply put his hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon a fearful disaster on the pavement. It was almost impossible for Pat to explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along C Street. Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock. It appealed to his vigorous, elemental nature. He seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim. Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E. Gillis (Steve, of course--one of the "fighting Gillises"), a small, fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-points. "Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds," Mark Twain once wrote of him, "but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might." Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first. The two became closely associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he "resist the temptation of making Sam swear," claiming that his profanity was grander than any music. A word hereabout Mark Twain's profanity. Born with a matchless gift of phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in a rare perfection. To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. Every characterization seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. And somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. It was not mere idle swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. His selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might be from the Bible or the gutter. Some one has defined dirt as misplaced matter. It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered. It is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering Mark Twain's profanity. For it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not often offend. It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine. When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender. Once following an outburst he said, placidly: "In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer." It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and clear intent. Led by Steve Gillis, the Enterprise force used to devise tricks to set him going. One of these was to hide articles from his desk. He detested the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a candle. To hide "Sam's candle" was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous return. He would look for it a little; then he would begin a slow, circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the pilot-house --and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great orchestration of wrong. By and by the office boy, supposedly innocent, would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. He made a placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the candle were gone. Now, amoung his Virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a Mr. Rising, "the fragile, gentle new fledgling" of the Buck Fanshaw episode. Clemens greatly admired Mr. Rising's evident sincerity, and the young minister had quickly recognized the new reporter's superiority of mind. Now and then he came to the office to call on him. Unfortunately, he happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the latest theft of his property, Samuel Clemens was engaged in his rotary denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance. Mr. Rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and at last his friend became dimly aware of him. He did not halt in his scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech: "I know, Mr. Rising, I know it's wicked to talk like this; I know it is wrong. I know I shall certainly go to hell for it. But if you had a candle, Mr. Rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night, I know that you would say, just as I say, Mr. Rising, G-d d--n their impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years." The little clergyman caught his breath. "Maybe I should, Mr. Clemens," he replied, "but I should try to say, 'Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.'" "Oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that alters the case, as I am one of that class myself. Come in and we'll try to forgive them and forget about it." Mark Twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. He was always fond of them, and they often sought him out. Once, long afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung a number of times without getting any response. Presently, he thought he heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. He flung open the door, and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily. Clemens grabbed him by the collar. "Look here," he said, "I've been waiting and ringing here for half an hour. Now I want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick. Do you hear?" The slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: "I would, Mr. Clemens, I would indeed, sir, if I could. But I'm a minister of the Gospel, and I'm not prepared for such work." XXXIX PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY There was a side to Samuel Clemens that in those days few of his associates saw. This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative side. Joseph Goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its exhibition. It is rather curious that with all his literary penetration Goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for Clemens. He afterward said: "If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or Sam, would become distinguished, I should have said De Quille. Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam's gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should have prophesied fame for him then." Goodman, like MacFarlane in Cincinnati, half a dozen years before, though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein. Often the two, dining together in a French restaurant, discussed life, subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history, remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment. "The Burial of Moses," with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed strongly to Clemens, and he recited it with great power. The first stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as well. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines. By Nebo's lonely mountain, On this side Jordan's wave, In a vale in the land of Moab, There lies a lonely grave. And no man knows that sepulchre, And no man saw it e'er, For the angels of God, upturned the sod, And laid the dead man there. Another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning: And had he not high honor --The hill-side for a pall, To lie in state while angels wait With stars for tapers tall, And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, Over his bier to wave, And God's own hand in that lonely land, To lay him in the grave? Without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem, for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it copied into his notebook in full. It would seem to have become to him a sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time "he made use of the purest English of any modern writer." These are Goodman's words, though William Dean Howells has said them, also, in substance, and Brander Matthews, and many others who know about such things. Goodman adds, "The simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a parallel, except in the common version of the Bible," which is also true. One is reminded of what Macaulay said of Milton: "There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead." One drifts ahead, remembering these things. The triumph of words, the mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are writing now. He was twenty-seven. At that age Rudyard Kipling had reached his meridian. Samuel Clemens was still in the classroom. Everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination; nothing escaped unvalued. The poetic phase of things particularly impressed him. Once at a dinner with Goodman, when the lamp-light from the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically "Look, Joe," he said, "the angry tint of wine." It was at one of these private sessions, late in '62, that Clemens proposed to report the coming meeting of the Carson legislature. He knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary proceedings. Formerly it had been done by a man named Gillespie, but Gillespie was now clerk of the house. Goodman hesitated; then, remembering that whether Clemens got the reports right or not, he would at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work. XL "MARK TWAIN" The early Nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. All State legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. No attempt can be made to describe it. It was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor, and plenty of brains. How fortunate Mask Twain was in his schooling, to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind! Sometimes, in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training. Well for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight. For the study of human nature the Nevada assembly was a veritable lecture-room. In it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his self-assuredness grew like Jack's bean-stalk, which in time was ready to break through into a land above the sky. He made some curious blunders in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early letters became their chief charm. Gillespie coached him on parliamentary matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as artistically good. Clemens in return christened Gillespie "Young, Jefferson's Manual," a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for many years. Another "entitlement" growing out of those early reports, and possibly less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to Clement T. Rice, of the Virginia City Union. Rice knew the legislative work perfectly and concluded to poke fun at the Enterprise letters. But this was a mistake. Clemens in his next letter declared that Rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and even crime. He avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the author of them "The Unreliable," and in future letters never referred to him by any other term. Carson and the Comstock and the papers of the Coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and Rice was "The Unreliable" for life. Rice and Clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of friends, and there was never any real animosity between them. Clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters, with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general friendship. Jack Simmons, speaker of the house, and Billy Clagget, the Humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside of the political machine. Clagget had remained in Unionville after the mining venture, warned his Keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into politics and law. In due time he would become a leading light and go to Congress. He was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and tousled, unkempt hair. Simmons, Clagget, and Clemens were easily the three conspicuous figures of the session. It must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come back to Carson City a person of consequence, where less than a year before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow, a figure to smile at, but unimportant. There is a photograph extant of Clemens and his friends Clagget and Simmons in a group, and we gather from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a starched shirt, and polished boots. Once more he had become the glass of fashion that he had been on the river. He made his residence with Orion, whose wife and little daughter Jennie had by this time come out from the States. "Sister Mollie," as wife of the acting governor, was presently social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its chief ornament. His merriment and songs and good nature made him a favorite guest. His lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford to smile at the hard Esmeralda days. He was not altogether satisfied. His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned. They were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the 'nom de plume' was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. Just then--this was early in 1863--news came to him that the old pilot he had wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead. At once the pen-name of Captain Sellers recurred to him. That was it; that was the sort of name he wanted. It was not trivial; it had all the qualities--Sellers would never need it again. Clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and new association in this far-away land. He went up to Virginia City. "Joe," he said, to Goodman, "I want to sign my articles. I want to be identified to a wider audience." "All right, Sam. What name do you want to use 'Josh'?" "No, I want to sign them 'Mark Twain.' It is an old river term, a leads-man's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. It has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe water." He did not then mention that Captain Isaiah Sellers had used and dropped the name. He was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense was still too recent for confession. Goodman considered a moment: "Very well, Sam," he said, "that sounds like a good name." It was indeed a good name. In all the nomenclature of the world no more forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the man for whom they stood. The name Mark Twain is as infinite, as fundamental as that of John Smith, without the latter's wasting distribution of strength. If all the prestige in the name of John Smith were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it the carrying power of Mark Twain. Let this be as it may, it has proven the greatest 'nom de plume' ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with the man, his work, and his career. It is not surprising that Goodman did not recognize this at the moment. We should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. We should have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result. It was first signed to a Carson letter bearing date of February 2, 1863, and from that time was attached to all Samuel Clemens's work. The work was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired identification and special interest. Members of the legislature and friends in Virginia and Carson immediately began to address him as "Mark." The papers of the Coast took it up, and within a period to be measured by weeks he was no longer "Sam" or "Clemens" or "that bright chap on the Enterprise," but "Mark"--"Mark Twain." No 'nom de plume' was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. De Quille, returning from the East after an absence of several months, found his room and deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame. It is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that period there is no mention of his new title and its success. In fact, the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and prospective values. However, many of the letters are undoubtedly missing. Such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of his abounding joy of life and good nature. Also they bear evidence of the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between. XLI THE CREAM OF COMSTOCK HUMOR With the adjournment of the legislature, Samuel Clemens returned to Virginia City distinctly a notability--Mark Twain. He was regarded as leading man on the Enterprise--which in itself was high distinction on the Comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect. When visitors of note came along--well-known actors, lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as one of the Comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the Ophir and Gould and Curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill. He was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several collections had been taken up in the Enterprise office to present various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to him. He mentioned this apparent slight to Steve Gillis: "Nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe," he said, plaintively. "Don't I deserve one yet?" Unhappy day! To that remorseless creature, Steve Gillis, this was a golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. This is the story, precisely as Gillis himself told it to the writer of these annals more than a generation later: "There was a German kept a cigar store in Virginia City and always had a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. These pipes usually cost anywhere from forty to seventy-five dollars. "One day Denis McCarthy and I were walking by the old German's place, and stopped to look in at the display in the window. Among other things there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long stem, marked a dollar and a half. "I decided that that would be just the pipe for Sam. We went in and bought it, also a very much longer stem. I think the stem alone cost three dollars. Then we had a little German-silver plate engraved with Mark's name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the presentation. Charlie Pope--[afterward proprietor of Pope's Theater, St. Louis]--was playing at the Opera House at the time, and we engaged him to make the presentation speech. "Then we let in Dan de Quille, Mark's closest friend, to act the part of Judas--to tell Mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to Pope's. It was awful low-down in Dan. We arranged to have the affair come off in the saloon beneath the Opera House after the play was over. "Everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for Sam took it in such sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches I ever heard him make. Pope's presentation, too, was beautifully done. He told Sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. But Sam's reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with applause. I never felt so sorry for anybody. "Still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. After Sam's speech was finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling Moselle. Then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to drown our sorrow. "Well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. It wouldn't color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was. Sam would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn't seem to taste right, and that it wouldn't color. Finally Denis said to him one day: "'Oh, Sam, don't you know that's just a damned old egg-shell, and that the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for a joke?' "Then Sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on Dan de Quille. He had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the Local Room, where Dan was. He went in and closed the door behind him, and locked it, and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign. Dan was there alone, writing at his table. "Sam said, 'Dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech, that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?' "There was no way for Dan to escape, and he confessed. Sam walked up and down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay Dan. Finally he said: "'Oh, Dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little money I had, and how hard I would work to prepare a speech that would show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the Judas, to betray me with a kiss! Dan, I never want to look on your face again. You knew I would spend every dollar I had on those pirates when I couldn't afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.' "Of course Dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one, this time. But Sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few days later, I went in with the pipe and said, 'Sam, here's the pipe the boys meant to give you all the time,' and tried to apologize, he looked around a little coldly, and said: "'Is that another of those bogus old pipes?' "He accepted it, though, and general peace was restored. One day, soon after, he said to me: "'Steve, do you know that I think that that bogus pipe smokes about as well as the good one?'" Many years later (this was in his home at Hartford, and Joe Goodman was present) Mark Twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe. "Joe," he said, "that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me; but, for the feeling I had during the moment when they presented me with that pipe and when Charlie Pope was making his speech and I was making my reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more precious to me than any pipe in the world!" Eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the Comstock. Every mine was working full blast. Every mill was roaring and crunching, turning out streams of silver and gold. A little while ago an old resident wrote: When I close my eyes I hear again the respirations of hoisting- engines and the roar of stamps; I can see the "camels" after midnight packing in salt; I can see again the jam of teams on C Street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert. Those were lively times. In the midst of one of his letters home Mark Twain interrupts himself to say: "I have just heard five pistol-shots down the street--as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it," and in a postscript added a few hours later: 5 A.M. The pistol-shot did its work well. One man, a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. The murderer's name is John Campbell. "Mark and I had our hands full," says De Quille, "and no grass grew under our feet." In answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they printed a sort of editorial manifesto: Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay-wagons, and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper. It is easy to recognize Mark Twain's hand in that compendium of labor, which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction. It may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not Mark Twain's habit to strive for humor. He saw facts at curious angles and phrased them accordingly. In Virginia City he mingled with the turmoil of the Comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech. The Comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements. On the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and missed its purpose. We have already recalled the instance of the "Petrified Man" hoax, which was taken seriously; but the "Empire City Massacre" burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered serious for a time. It is remembered to-day in Virginia City as the chief incident of Mark Twain's Comstock career. This literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the San Francisco Bulletin for its persistent attacks on Washoe interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant attention to a certain Carson saloon, the Magnolia, which was supposed to dispense whisky of the "forty rod" brand--that is, a liquor warranted to kill at that range. It was the Bulletin that was to be made especially. ridiculous. This paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the "dividend-cooking" system of certain of the Comstock mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments in California stocks. Samuel Clemens, with "half a trunkful" of Comstock shares, had cultivated a distaste for California things in general: In a letter of that time he says: "How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!" With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that Nazareth. To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, "cooked" a dividend of its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. This afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. With Goodman's consent he planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. He believed the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the result would show he was not mistaken. There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City, known as "Dutch Nick's," and also as Empire City, the two being identical. There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush. In the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. Everybody in Virginia and Carson, of course, knew these things. Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one Phillip Hopkins, living "just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and 'Dutch Nick's'," had suddenly gone insane and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. The wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might recover. The murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into Carson City, dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon, the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. The article further stated that the cause of Mr. Hopkins's insanity was pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe Comstock investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, invested them in the Spring Valley Water Company. This absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the Enterprise, in its issue of October 28, 1863. It was not expected that any one in Virginia City or Carson City would for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was it that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance. Even when these things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess themselves sold. As for the Bulletin and other California papers, they were taken-in completely, and were furious. Many of them wrote and demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they would never copy another line from the Enterprise, or exchange with it, or have further relations with a paper that had Mark Twain on its staff. Citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions. The joker was in despair. "Oh, Joe," he said, "I have ruined your business, and the only reparation I can make is to resign. You can never recover from this blow while I am on the paper." "Nonsense," replied Goodman. "We can furnish the people with news, but we can't supply them with sense. Only time can do that. The flurry will pass. You just go ahead. We'll win out in the long run." But the offender was in torture; he could not sleep. "Dan, Dan," he said, "I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains." "Mark," said Dan. "It will all blow over. This item of yours will be remembered and talked about when the rest of your Enterprise work is forgotten." Both Goodman and De Quille were right. In a month papers and people had forgotten their humiliation and laughed. "The Dutch Nick Massacre" gave to its perpetrator and to the Enterprise an added vogue. --[For full text of the "Dutch Nick" hoax see Appendix C, at the end of last volume: also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made by Alf. Doten and Mark Twain.]-- XLII REPORTORIAL DAYS. Reference has already been made to the fashion among Virginia City papers of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule of one another. This custom was especially in vogue during the period when Dan de Quille and Mark Twain and The Unreliable were the shining journalistic lights of the Comstock. Scarcely a week went by that some apparently venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not appear either in the Union or the Enterprise, with one of those jokers as its author and another as its target. In one of his "home" letters of that year Mark Twain says: I have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and giving The Unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct himself in church. The advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with The Unreliable in San Francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother. We fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without rocking every night. When I go down Montgomery Street shaking hands with Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is just like being on Main Street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back to Washoe. We take trips across the bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro and Alameda, and we go out to the Willows and Hayes Park and Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific coast. Rice says: "Oh no--we are not having any fun, Mark --oh no--I reckon it's somebody else--it's probably the gentleman in the wagon" (popular slang phrase), and when I invite Rice to the Lick House to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. The Unreliable says our caliber is too light--we can't stand it to be noticed. Three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully "to the snows and the deserts of Washoe," but that he has "lived like a lord to make up for two years of privation." Twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a bribe to Jane Clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. But apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he complains that his mother is "slinging insinuations" at him again, such as "where did you get that money" and "the company I kept in San Francisco." He explains: Why, I sold Wild Cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit was always good at the bank for $2,000 or $3,000, and I never gamble in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this place. As for company, I went in the very best company to be found in San Francisco. I always move in the best society in Virginia and have a reputation to preserve. He closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and that she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid. Then he cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life: "Put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to live." De Quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade's absence to payoff some old scores. At the end of the editorial column of the Enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent one and his "protege," The Unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of the day. It is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, Dan himself]--. The diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no doubt highly regarded by the Enterprise readers. What revenge Mark Twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to The Unreliable. It was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local work in the hands of that properly named person a little later. Clemens was laid up with a cold, and Rice assured him on his sacred honor that he would attend faithfully to the Enterprise locals, along with his own Union items. He did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long. What was Mark Twain's amazement on looking over the Enterprise next morning to find under the heading "Apologetic" a statement over his own nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to the various injured ones. To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters, Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us. To "Young Wilson" and The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them. Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality. We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. We will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days. This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold. He was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer. We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras. We have done. These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism. Once in a boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape. He went out of town for a few days, during which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain's ever supposing himself to be a boxer. De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written. Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably. This was Mark's opportunity. He gave an account of Dan's disaster; then, commenting, he said: The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a newspaper man. The author of 'Roughing It' tells of a literary periodical called the Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F. This was the silver-tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the Coast. Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture. Clemens said: "You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h--l!" Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue. It was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--"The Aged Pilot Man"--which were thereby saved for 'Roughing It.' Visiting Virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could have happened there. The Comstock has become little more than a memory; Virginia and Gold Hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute scarcely an echo of the past. The International Hotel, that once so splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now. One may wander at will through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day. Those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up and down the stair and billowed up C Street, an ebullient tide of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals known in national affairs. William M. Stewart who would one day become a United States Senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and John Mackay and James G. Fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor enough then--Fair with a pick on his shoulder and Mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent. Once in those days Mark Twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with Mackay. "No," Mackay said, "I can't trade. My business is not worth as much as yours. I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now." Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose statues to their memory. Such things came out of the Comstock; such things spring out of every turbulent frontier. XLIII ARTEMUS WARD Madame Caprell's warning concerning Mark Twain's health at twenty-eight would seem to have been justified. High-strung and neurotic, the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him. As in later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel. He contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form than any of his previous work. "Curing a Cold" is a more or less exaggerated account of his ills. [Included in Sketches New and Old. "Information for the Million," and "Advice to Good Little Girls," included in the "Jumping Frog" Collection, 1867, but omitted from the Sketches, are also believed to belong to this period.] A portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs, still exists. You have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me "if I work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place on a big San Francisco daily some day." There's a comment on human vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I don't want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my place on the Enterprise is worth. If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account. I lead an easy life, though, and I don't care a cent whether school keeps or not. Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory. You think that picture looks old? Well, I can't help it--in reality I'm not as old as I was when I was eighteen. Which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was concerned. At eighteen, in New York and Philadelphia, his letters had been grave, reflective, advisory. Now they were mostly banter and froth, lightly indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps only pretendedly so, for the picture did look old. From the shock and circumstance of his brother's death he--had never recovered. He was barely twenty-eight. From the picture he might have been a man of forty. It was that year that Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) came to Virginia City. There was a fine opera-house in Virginia, and any attraction that billed San Francisco did not fail to play to the Comstock. Ward intended staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the Comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks. He made the Enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in the company he found there. He and Mark Twain became boon companions. Each recognized in the other a kindred spirit. With Goodman, De Quille, and McCarthy, also E. E. Hingston--Ward's agent, a companionable fellow--they usually dined at Chaumond's, Virginia's high-toned French restaurant. Those were three memorable weeks in Mark Twain's life. Artemus Ward was in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found brother-humorist and prophesied great things of him. Clemens, on his side, measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start. If he had lacked ambition before Ward's visit, the latter's unqualified approval inspired him with that priceless article of equipment. He put his soul into entertaining the visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their associates that he was at least Ward's equal in mental stature and originality. Goodman and the others began to realize that for Mark Twain the rewards of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and ability to hold out. On Christmas Eve Artemus lectured in Silver City and afterward came to the Enterprise office to give the boys a farewell dinner. The Enterprise always published a Christmas carol, and Goodman sat at his desk writing it. He was just finishing as Ward came in: "Slave, slave," said Artemus. "Come out and let me banish care from you." They got the boys and all went over to Chaumond's, where Ward commanded Goodman to order the dinner. When the cocktails came on, Artemus lifted his glass and said: "I give you Upper Canada." The company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then Goodman said: "Of course, Artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us Upper Canada?" "Because I don't want it myself," said Ward, gravely. Then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the world to-day. Mark Twain had awakened to a fuller power; Artemus Ward was in his prime. They were giants of a race that became extinct when Mark Twain died. The youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life, the tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a dazzling, scintillating whirl. All gone--as evanescent, as forgotten, as the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and entertainment only a trifling morsel remains. Ward now and then asked Goodman why he did not join in the banter. Goodman said: "I'm preparing a joke, Artemus, but I'm keeping it for the present." It was near daybreak when Ward at last called for the bill. It was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. "What"' exclaimed Artemus. "That's my joke." said Goodman. "But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," returned Ward. He paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air. It was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly. Artemus threw his face up to the sky and said: "I feel glorious. I feel like walking on the roofs." Virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the houses almost touched the ground behind them. "There is your chance, Artemus," Goodman said, pointing to a row of these houses all about of a height. Artemus grabbed Mark Twain, and they stepped out upon the long string of roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm. Presently the others noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim in their direction. Goodman called to him: "Wait a minute. What are you going to do?" "I'm going to shoot those burglars," he said. "Don't for your life. Those are not burglars. That's Mark Twain and Artemus Ward." The roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a corner across from the International Hotel. A saloon was there with a barrel lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign. Artemus climbed astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his hand. Virginia City looks out over the Eastward Desert. Morning was just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the sunrise beams across the plain of Memnon. The city was not yet awake. The only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners, with Artemus Ward, as King Gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise. That was the beginning of a week of glory. The farewell dinner became a series. At the close of one convivial session Artemus went to a concert-hall, the "Melodeon," blacked his face, and delivered a speech. He got away from Virginia about the close of the year. A day or two later he wrote from Austin, Nevada, to his new-found comrade as "My dearest Love," recalling the happiness of his stay: "I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were." Then reflectively he adds: "Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor." Rare Artemus Ward and rare Mark Twain! If there lies somewhere a place of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those closing days of '63. XLIV GOVERNOR OF THE "THIRD HOUSE" With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Clemens began to think of extending his audience eastward. The New York Sunday Mercury published literary matter. Ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write a special letter to the editors, introducing Mark Twain and his work. Clemens prepared a sketch of the Comstock variety, scarcely refined in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the present-day reader. Its general subject was children; it contained some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend Zeb Leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured soul as for profit or reputation. "I wrote it especially for Beck Jolly's use," the author declares, in a letter to his mother, "so he could pester Zeb with it." We cannot know to-day whether Zeb was pestered or not. A faded clipping is all that remains of the incident. As literature the article, properly enough, is lost to the world at large. It is only worth remembering as his metropolitan beginning. Yet he must have thought rather highly of it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter above quoted he adds: I cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper. And if Fitzhugh Ludlow (author of the 'Hasheesh Eater') comes your way, treat him well. He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain (the same being eminently just and truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority I ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. But I preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly and brilliantly, so I concluded to remain here. He was in Carson City when this was written, preparing for the opening of the next legislature. He was beyond question now the most conspicuous figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his influence had become very large. It was said that he could control more votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, Simmons and Clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered. The Enterprise was a powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and Mark Twain had become its chief tribune. That he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible, without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session. He reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it. He got a bill passed, largely increasing Orion's official fees, but this was a crying need and was so recognized. He made no secret promises, none at all that he did not intend to fulfill. "Sam's word was as fixed as fate," Orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as fearless. The two Houses of the last territorial legislature of Nevada assembled January 12, 1864.--[Nevada became a State October 31, 1864.]--A few days later a "Third House" was organized--an institution quite in keeping with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a burlesque organization, and Mark Twain was selected as its "Governor." The new House prepared to make a public occasion of this first session, and its Governor was required to furnish a message. Then it was decided to make it a church benefit. The letters exchanged concerning this proposition still exist; they explain themselves: CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864. GOV. MARK TWAIN, Understanding from certain members of the Third House of the territorial Legislature that that body will have effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready for the reception of your Third Annual Message,--[ There had been no former message. This was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire to ask your permission, and that of the Third House, to turn the affair to the benefit of the Church by charging toll-roads, franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of listening to your communication. S. PIXLEY, G. A. SEARS, Trustees. CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864. GENTLEMEN,--Certainly. If the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing they should pay that amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty Christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. You can charge what you please; I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable amount of instruction. I am responsible to the Third House only, and I hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the Church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not. Respectfully, MARK TWAIN. Mark Twain's reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and thought. It might have been written by him at almost any subsequent period. Perhaps his association with Artemus Ward had awakened a new perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of understatement. He forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more. His address as Governor of the Third House has not been preserved, but those who attended always afterward referred to it as the "greatest effort of his life." Perhaps for that audience and that time this verdict was justified. It was his first great public opportunity. On the stage about him sat the membership of the Third House; the building itself was packed, the aisles full. He knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire, and he did. He was unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens. From the beginning to the end of his address the audience was in a storm of laughter and applause. With the exception of the dinner speech made to the printers in Keokuk, it was his first public utterance --the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs. Only one thing marred his success. Little Carrie Pixley, daughter of one of the "trustees," had promised to be present and sit in a box next the stage. It was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to send a carriage for her. Often during his address he glanced toward the box; but it remained empty. When the affair was ended, he drove home with her father to inquire the reason. They found the little girl, in all her finery, weeping on the bed. Then he remembered he had forgotten to send the carriage; and that was like him, too. For his Third House address Judge A. W. (Sandy) Baldwin and Theodore Winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to "Governor Mark Twain." He was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was regarded as complete without him. His doings were related daily and his sayings repeated on the streets. Most of these things have passed away now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. Once, when conundrums were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one. "Well," he sand, "why am I like the Pacific Ocean?" Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. Finally all gave it up. "Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?" "I don't know," he drawled. "I was just asking for information." At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, "I'm going home, I'm going home, I'm going home tomorrow," Mark Twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly: "For God's sake go to-night." But he was also fond of quieter society. Sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp's school and listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry--"old Curry, old Abe Curry"--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran. He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest and refreshment. "Mrs. Curry," he said once, "I have seen tireder men than I am, and lazier men, but they were dead men." He liked the home feeling there --the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred. Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken, who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell. Dan de Quille and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride. I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's wife. She is a literary cuss herself. She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus: "My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript." But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in San Francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been allayed. XLV A COMSTOCK DUEL The success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form. Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It was just at the time of the "Flour Sack Sanitary Fund," the story of which is related at length in 'Roughing It'. In the general hilarity of this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle. Very soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between Mark Twain and the Chronicle editor, then a Mr. Laird. A point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two papers. Men were killed every week for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other. Joe Goodman himself, not so long before, had fought a duel with a Union editor--Tom Fitch--and shot him in the leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. In Joe's absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained. Mark Twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of course, Steve Gillis. The account is from Mr. Gillis's own hand: When Joe went away, he left Sam in editorial charge of the paper. That was a dangerous thing to do. Nobody could ever tell what Sam was going to write. Something he said stirred up Mr. Laird, of the Chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. He said some things that we told Mark could only be wiped out with blood. Those were the days when almost every man in Virginia City had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. I had been in several, but then mine didn't count. Most of them were of the impromptu kind. Mark hadn't had any yet, and we thought it about time that his baptism took place. He was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally prevailed upon him to send Laird a challenge, and when Laird did not send a reply at once we insisted on Mark sending him another challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. Laird concluded to fight, at last. I helped Mark get up some of the letters, and a man who would not fight after such letters did not belong in Virginia City--in those days. Laird's acceptance of Mark's challenge came along about midnight, I think, after the papers had gone to press. The meeting was to take place next morning at sunrise. Of course I was selected as Mark's second, and at daybreak I had him up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting Laird. I didn't have to wake him. He had not been asleep. We had been talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. I had been telling him of the different duels in which I had taken part, either as principal or second, and how many men I had helped to kill and bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not much to leave. It always looked well, I told him, and seemed to be a proper thing to do before going into a duel. So Mark made a will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting- place, and I set up a board for him to shoot at. He would step out, raise that big pistol, and when I would count three he would shut his eyes and pull the trigger. Of course he didn't hit anything; he did not come anywhere near hitting anything. Just then we heard somebody shooting over in the next ravine. Sam said: "What's that, Steve?" "Why," I said, "that's Laud. His seconds are practising him over there." It didn't make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go off every few seconds over there. Just then I saw a little mud-hen light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away. "Mark," I said, "let me have that pistol. I'll show you how to shoot." He handed it to me, and I let go at the bird and shot its head off, clean. About that time Laird and his second came over the ridge to meet us. I saw them coming and handed Mark back the pistol. We were looking at the bird when they came up. "Who did that?" asked Laird's second. "Sam," I said. "How far off was it?" "Oh, about thirty yards." "Can he do it again?" "Of course," I said; "every time. He could do it twice that far." Laud's second turned to his principal. "Laird," he said, "you don't want to fight that man. It's just like suicide. You'd better settle this thing, now." So there was a settlement. Laird took back all he had said; Mark said he really had nothing against Laird--the discussion had been purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. He said that both he and Laird were probably the victims of their friends. I remember one of the things Laird said when his second told him he had better not fight. "Fight! H--l, no! I am not going to be murdered by that d--d desperado." Sam had sent another challenge to a man named Cutler, who had been somehow mixed up with the muss and had written Sam an insulting letter; but Cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got back we had received word from Jerry Driscoll, foreman of the Grand jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be the first examples to test the new law. We concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for San Francisco we were on the outside seat. Joe Goodman had returned by this time and agreed to accompany us as far as Henness Pass. We were all in good spirits and glad we were alive, so Joe did not stop when he got to Henness Pass, but kept on. Now and then he would say, "Well, I had better be going back pretty soon," but he didn't go, and in the end he did not go back at all, but went with us clear to San Francisco, and we had a royal good time all the way. I never knew any series of duels to close so happily. So ended Mark Twain's career on the Comstock. He had come to it a weary pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive. XLVI GETTING SETTLED IN SAN FRANCISCO This was near the end of May, 1864. The intention of both Gillis and Clemens was to return to the States; but once in San Francisco both presently accepted places, Clemens as reporter and Gillis as compositor, on the 'Morning Call'. From 'Roughing It' the reader gathers that Mark Twain now entered into a life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be derived from the "half a trunkful of mining stocks," and that presently, when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper. But a good many liberties have been taken with the history of this period. Undoubtedly he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was disappointed, particularly in an investment in Hale and Norcross shares, held too long for the large profit which could have been made by selling at the proper time. The fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in "butterfly idleness," at the Lick House before he was hard at work on the 'Call', living modestly with Steve Gillis in the quietest place they could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and cats and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the mornings hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted to rest. They went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable elegance; but their recreations were more likely to consist of private midnight orgies, after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations in whatever they could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of beer, and perhaps a game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort. A printer by the name of Ward--"Little Ward,"--[L. P. Ward; well known as an athlete in San Francisco. He lost his mind and fatally shot himself in 1903.] --they called him--often went with them for these refreshments. Ward and Gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. Clemens never cared for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but Ward and Gillis were for war. "They never assisted each other. If one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends."--[S. L. C., 1906.]--Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping Mark Twain's career. Of course, the more strenuous nights were not frequent. Their home-going was usually tame enough and they were glad enough to get there. Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. Knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed. Pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and lift it gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor, maddening to a nervous man. Clemens would listen a moment and say: "What in the nation is that noise" Gillis's pretended sleep and the ticking would continue. Clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently. "Steve, what is that d--d noise?" he would say. Steve would pretend to rouse sleepily. "What's the matter, Sam? What noise? Oh, I guess that is one of those death-ticks; they don't like the light. Maybe it will stop in a minute." It usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. But no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick, tick, tick. With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. Sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel Steve slept like the criminal that he was. At last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught. His tortured room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put him to shame. It was curious, but they always loved each other, those two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last days Mark Twain never could speak of Steve Gillis without tenderness. They moved a great many times in San Francisco. Their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on California Street. Their windows looked down on a lot of Chinese houses--"tin-can houses," they were called--small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. Steve and Mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. The Chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out Chinese vituperation. By and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle. This was their Sunday amusement. At a place on Minna Street they lived with a private family. At first Clemens was delighted. "Just look at it, Steve," he said. "What a nice, quiet place. Not a thing to disturb us." But next morning a dog began to howl. Gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement. "Came here, Steve," he said. "Come here and kill him. I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead on him." "Sam," said Steve, "don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily kill him at that range with your profanity." Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a Mexican hairless dog. We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. A home letter of September 25, 1864, says: We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. We are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family . . . . But I need change and must move again. This was the Minna Street place--the place of the dog. In the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each. XLVII BOHEMIAN DAYS Mark Twain's position on the 'Call' was uncongenial from the start. San Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. He once set down his own memories of it: At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights in the week. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we "wrote up" those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man. On the Enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to license. He could write what he wished, and was personally responsible to the readers. On the Call he was simply a part of a news-machine; restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater machine --politics. Once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an unoffending Chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest. He wrote an indignant article criticizing the city government and raking the police. In Virginia City this would have been a welcome delight; in San Francisco it did not appear. At another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat. Going to a near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. It would be wasted effort to make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own fashion. He stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large crowd collected. When he thought it was large enough he went away. Next day the joke was all over the city. Only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office. The management of this place one day refused information to a Call reporter, and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his firm. It began, "Those body-snatchers" and continued through half a column of such scorching strictures as only Mark Twain could devise. The Call's policy of suppression evidently did not include criticisms of deputy coroners. Such liberty, however, was too rare for Mark Twain, and he lost interest. He confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy, and that George E. Barnes, one of the publishers of the Call, at last allowed him an assistant. He selected from the counting-room a big, hulking youth by the name of McGlooral, with the acquired prefix of "Smiggy." Clemens had taken a fancy to Smiggy McGlooral--on account of his name and size perhaps--and Smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked like a slave gathering news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all of which was demoralizing to a man who had small appetite for his place anyway. It was only a question of time when Smiggy alone would be sufficient for the job. There were other and pleasanter things in San Francisco. The personal and literary associations were worth while. At his right hand in the Call office sat Frank Soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who believed himself a poet. Mark Twain deferred to Frank Soule in those days. He thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of praise from Soule gave him happiness. In a luxurious office up-stairs was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four, who was secretary of the Mint, and who presently became editor of a new literary weekly, the Californian, which Charles Henry Webb had founded. This young man's name was Francis Bret Harte, originally from Albany, later a miner and school-teacher on the Stanislaus, still later a compositor, finally a contributor, on the Golden Era. His fame scarcely reached beyond San Francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of writing folk that clustered about the Era office his rank was high. Mark Twain fraternized with Bret Harte and the Era group generally. He felt that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of Bohemia, that Ultima Thule of every young literary dream. San Francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and a literature of its own. Its coterie of writers had drifted from here and there, but they had merged themselves into a California body-poetic, quite as individual as that of Cambridge, even if less famous, less fortunate in emoluments than the Boston group. Joseph E. Lawrence, familiarly known as "Joe" Lawrence, was editor of the Golden Era,--[The Golden Era, California's first literary publication, was founded by Rollin M. Daggett and J. McDonough Foard in 1852.]--and his kindness and hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary acknowledgments were modest enough. He had a handsome office, and the literati, local and visiting, used to gather there. Names that would be well known later were included in that little band. Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time. The Era office would seem to have been a sort of Mount Olympus, or Parnassus, perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to the dignity of gods. Miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the place. The Era rooms were elegant--[he says]--the most grandly carpeted and most gorgeously furnished that I have ever seen. Even now in my memory they seem to have been simply palatial. I have seen the world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as I turn to look back. More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years. They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more. They felt that they were creating literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters mustered there. Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group. They were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he would be remembered later. They were a good deal together, and it was when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. The Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a heavier financial backing. With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first of San Francisco periodicals. A number of the sketches collected by Webb later, in Mark Twain's first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog, Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865. They were smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of the day. Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches. They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. "The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history of its own, as we shall see a little further along. The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. Even the great San Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'Call'. He had lost interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as he was concerned. His conclusion of service with the Call was certain, and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. The connection had become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. They had a heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that Mark Twain was free. He used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been variously told. George Barnes himself has declared that Clemens resigned with great willingness. It is very likely that the paragraph at the end of Chapter LVIII in 'Roughing It' presents the situation with fair accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for himself as possible: "At last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal." As an extreme contrast with the supposititious "butterfly idleness" of his beginning in San Francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. "I became an adept at slinking," he says. "I slunk from back street to back street.... I slunk to my bed. I had pawned everything but the clothes I had on." This is pure fiction. That he occasionally found himself short of funds is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he ever clung to a single "silver ten-cent piece," as he tells us, and became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an artistic need. Almost immediately following his separation from the 'Call' he arranged with Goodman to write a daily letter for the Enterprise, reporting San Francisco matters after his own notion with a free hand. His payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he had an additional return from his literary sketches. The arrangement was an improvement both as to labor and income. Real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a liberal offer for the Tennessee land. But alas! it was from a wine-grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and Orion had a prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made. Orion further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be obliged to import horticultural labor from Europe, and that those people might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far eastern Tennessee mountains. Such was Orion's way. XLVIII THE REFUGE OF THE HILLS Those who remember Mark Twain's Enterprise letters (they are no longer obtainable)--[Many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple Web search. D.W.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily philippics ever written. However this may be, it is certain that they made a stir. Goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased upon any subject. San Francisco was fairly weltering in corruption, official and private. He assailed whatever came first to hand with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained. Quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and penetration that as soon as copies of the Enterprise came from Virginia the City Hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble. Martin G. Burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the Enterprise, prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as soon as the stage brought them. Mark Twain really let himself go then. He wrote a letter that on the outside was marked, "Be sure and let Joe see this before it goes in." He even doubted himself whether Goodman would dare to print it, after reading. It was a letter describing the city's corrupt morals under the existing police government. It began, "The air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery," and continued in a strain which made even the Enterprise printers aghast. "You can never afford to publish that," the foreman said to, Goodman. "Let it all go in, every word," Goodman answered. "If Mark can stand it, I can!" It seemed unfortunate (at the time) that Steve Gillis should select this particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself and Clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to punish. Passing a saloon one night alone, Gillis heard an altercation going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it. Including the barkeeper, there were three against two. Steve ranged himself on the weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the fight was over, was ready for the hospital. It turned out that he was one of Chief Burke's minions, and Gillis was presently indicted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. He knew some of the officials in a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into temporary retirement. Clemens, of course, went his bail, and Steve set out for Virginia City, until the storm blew over. This was Burke's opportunity. When the case was called and Gillis did not appear, Burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman, with an execution against his loose property. The watch that had been given him as Governor of the Third House came near being thus sacrificed in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation. Now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that Steve Gillis's brother, James N. Gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the halcyon Tuolumne district--the Truthful James of Bret Harte--happened to be in San Francisco at this time, and invited Clemens to return with him to the far seclusion of his cabin on Jackass Hill. In that peaceful retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more than one weary writer besides Bret Harte had found shelter there. James Gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the Arcadian life, the companionship of his books, the occasional Bohemian pilgrim who found refuge in his retreat. It is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. One could mine there if he wished to do so; Jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside. He regularly shared his cabin with one Dick Stoker (Dick Baker, of 'Roughing It'), another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this forgotten land, also with Dick's cat, Tom Quartz; but there was always room for guests. In 'Roughing It', and in a later story, "The Californian's Tale," Mark Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills. Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life --the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast bleaching drift, literally the "picked bones of the land." At one place stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to Sacramento, a possible State capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a ruined church. It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim Gillis's cabin. He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass. It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors. A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that the family numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat. On rainy days they would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. He had a startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place. His stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, Dick Stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. He always pretended that these extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly true; and Stoker--"forty-six and gray as a rat"--earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word. What did it matter to him? He had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there; his affairs all had ended long ago. A number of the stories used in Mark Twain's books were first told by Jim Gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass Hill. The story of Dick Baker's cat was one of these; the jaybird and Acorn story of 'A Tramp Abroad' was another; also the story of the "Burning Shame," and there are others. Mark Twain had little to add to these stories; in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when Jim Gillis had told them. James Gillis's imagination sometimes led him into difficulties. Once a feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green plums. Stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody eating it, which set Gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights, all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon Stoker told him if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. There was no escape after that; Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the luscious health-giving joys of the "Californian plums." Jackass Hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were neighbors. Another pocket-miner; named Carrington, had a cabin not far away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of pretty daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called the "Chapparal Quails." Young men from far and near paid court to them, and on Sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front fence as to suggest an afternoon service there. Young "Billy" Gillis knew them, and one Sunday morning took his brother's friend, Sam Clemens, over for a call. They went early, with forethought, and promptly took the girls for a walk. They took a long walk, and went wandering over the hills, toward Sandy Bar and the Stanislaus--through that reposeful land which Bret Harte would one day light with idyllic romance--and toward evening found themselves a long way from home. They must return by the nearest way to arrive before dark. One of the young ladies suggested a short cut through the Chemisal, and they started. But they were lost, presently, and it was late, very late, when at last they reached the ranch. The mother of the "Quails" was sitting up for them, and she had something to say. She let go a perfect storm of general denunciation, then narrowed the attack to Samuel Clemens as the oldest of the party. He remained mildly serene. "It wasn't my fault," he ventured at last; "it was Billy Gillis's fault." "No such thing. You know better. Mr. Gillis has been here often. It was you." "But do you realize, ma'am, how tired and hungry we are? Haven't you got a bite for us to eat?" "No, sir, not a bite--for such as you." The offender's eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a corner. "Isn't that a guitar over there?" he asked. "Yes, sir, it is; what of it?" The culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little and struck the chords. Then he began to sing. He began very softly and sang "Fly Away, Pretty Moth," then "Araby's Daughter." He could sing very well in those days, following with the simpler chords. Perhaps the mother "Quail" had known those songs herself back in the States, for her manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes. When he had finished she was the first to ask him to go on. "I suppose you are just like all young folks," she said. "I was young myself once. While you sing I'll get some supper." She left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked whatever she could find for the belated party. XLIX THE JUMPING FROG It was the rainy season, the winter of 1864 and 1865, but there were many pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and Samuel Clemens soon added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other acquirements. Sometimes he worked with Dick Stoker, sometimes with one of the Gillis boys. He did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he only laid its corner-stone. In the old note-book he kept of that sojourn we find that, with Jim Gillis, he made a trip over into Calaveras County soon after Christmas and remained there until after New Year's, probably prospecting; and he records that on New Year's night, at Vallecito, he saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain. A lunax rainbow is one of the things people seldom see. He thought it an omen of good-fortune. They returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the they crossed over into Calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far from Angel's Camp. The note-book records that the bill of fare at the Camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name of coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy. January 27. Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back. They had what they believed to be a good claim. Jim Gillis declared the indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work it, they were sure of rich returns. For himself, he would have been willing to work, rain or shine. Clemens, however, had different views on the subject. His part was carrying water for washing out the pans of dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not very fascinating work. Dick Stoker came over before long to help. Things went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in the bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp, enjoying the company of a former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon,--[This name has been variously given as "Ros Coon," "Coon Drayton," etc. It is given here as set down in Mark Twain's notes, made on the spot. Coon was not (as has been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a Frenchman), but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or application. Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. To Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a delight. It was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. Even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. One dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. The story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named Samuel Seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis had ever happened to hear it before. They thought the tale in itself amusing, and the "spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd." When Coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other: "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," and perhaps the other would answer: "I ain't got no frog, but if I had a frog I'd bet you." Out on the claim, between pails of water, Clemens, as he watched Jim Gillis or Dick Stoker "washing," would be apt to say, "I don't see no p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt," and so they kept it up. Then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. One afternoon, when Clemens and Gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long slope, the chill downpour set in. Gillis, as usual, was washing, and Clemens carrying water. The "color" was getting better with every pan, and Jim Gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to be rewarded. Possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of everything. Clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each pail of water was his last. His teeth were chattering and he was wet through. Finally he said, in his deliberate way: "Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable." Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. "Bring one more pail, Sam," he pleaded. "Oh, hell, Jim, I won't do it; I'm freezing!" "Just one more pail, Sam," he pleaded. "No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan." Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel's Camp. It kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. A few days later a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San Francisco. With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--"the first I ever saw in California," he says in his notes. In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and, observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice posted by Jim Gillis should expire. They did not mind the rain--not with all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket. Mark Twain missed it by one pail of water. Still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of Angel's Camp--the Jumping Frog. Jim Gillis always declared, "If Sam had got that pocket he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me." In Mark Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a mere casual entry of its main features: Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no frog, and C. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled C.'s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won. It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that. L BACK TO THE TUMULT FROM the note-book: February 25. Arrived in Stockton 5 p.m. Home again home again at the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco--find letters from Artemus Ward asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory Travels which is soon to come out. Too late--ought to have got the letters three months ago. They are dated early in November. He was sorry not to oblige Ward, sorry also not to have representation in his book. He wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story of his absence. Steve Gillis, meantime, had returned to San Francisco, and settled his difficulties there. The friends again took up residence together. Mark Twain resumed his daily letters to the Enterprise, without further annoyance from official sources. Perhaps there was a temporary truce in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic, private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing for himself the title of the "Moralist of the Main." The letters were reprinted in San Francisco and widely read. Now and then some one had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a discreet silence. In one of these letters he told of the Mexican oyster, a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. It was a mistake, however, for him to attack an Alta journalist by the name of Evans. Evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended: Gone, gone, gone --Gone to his endeavor; Gone, gone, gone, Forever and forever. In the Enterprise letter following its publication Mark Twain referred to this poem. He parodied the refrain and added, "If there is any criticism to make on it I should say there is a little too much 'gone' and not enough 'forever.'" It was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous quotable flavor, and it made Evans mad. In a squib in the Alta he retaliated: Mark Twain has killed the Mexican oyster. We only regret that the act was not inspired by a worthier motive. Mark Twain's sole reason for attacking the Mexican oyster was because the restaurant that sold them refused him credit. A deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. To deny or recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. One could only sweat and breathe vengeance. "Joe," he said to Goodman, who had come over for a visit, "my one object in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and murder Evans." He wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his Enterprise letters with jingles. One of these concerned Tom Maguire, the autocrat manager of San Francisco theaters. It details Maguire's assault on one of his actors. Tom Maguire, Roused to ire, Lighted on McDougal; Tore his coat, Clutched his throat, And split him in the bugle. For shame! oh, fie! Maguire, why Will you thus skyugle? Why curse and swear, And rip and tear The innocent McDougal? Of bones bereft, Almost, you've left Vestvali, gentle Jew gal; And now you've smashed And almost hashed The form of poor McDougall Goodman remembers that Clemens and Gillis were together again on California Street at this time, and of hearing them sing, "The Doleful Ballad of the Rejected Lover," another of Mark Twain's compositions. It was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which Mark and Steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists, did not render it less objectionable. Such memories as these are set down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest and most tender of all characterizations, the 'Recollections of JOAN of ARC'. LI THE CORNER-STONE Along with his Enterprise work, Clemens continued to write occasionally for the Californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of the jumping frog. For one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary material. He knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form. By and by Artemus Ward turned up in San Francisco, and one night Mark Twain told him his experiences with Jim Gillis, and in Angel's Camp; also of Ben Coon and his tale of the Calaveras frog. Ward was delighted. "Write it," he said. "There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York."--[This is in accordance with Mr. Clemens's recollection of the matter. The author can find no positive evidence that Ward was on the Pacific coast again in 1865. It seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--Clemens promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the time the sketch reached Carleton, Ward's book was about ready for the press. It did not seem worth while to Carleton to make any change of plans that would include the frog story. The publisher handed it over to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press, a perishing sheet, saying: "Here, Clapp, here's something you can use in your paper." Clapp took it thankfully enough, we may believe. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"--[This was the original title.] --appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865, and was immediately copied and quoted far and near. It brought the name of Mark Twain across the mountains, bore it up and down the Atlantic coast, and out over the prairies of the Middle West. Away from the Pacific slope only a reader here and there had known the name before. Now every one who took a newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful Calaveras frog, and received a mental impress of the author's signature. The name Mark Twain became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong bid for national acceptance. As for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a considerable time. The telegraph did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book. But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta: "Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the 'Californian' afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press." The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book. It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day. It has the intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop's Fables.--[The resemblance of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof. Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book, Greek Prose Composition. Through this originated the impression that the story was of Athenian root. Mark Twain himself was deceived, until in 1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek version was the translation and Mark Twain's the original; that he had thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. See The Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]--It contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. Whether the story of "Jim Smiley's Frog," offered for the first time today, would capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is another matter. That the author himself underrated it is certain. That the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment, may have overrated it is by no means impossible. In any case, it does not matter now. The stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice. As such it is immortal. In the letter already quoted, Clemens speaks of both Bret Harte and himself as having quit the 'Californian' in future expecting to write for Eastern papers. He adds: Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest. He wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book. I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. But I want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first. However, he has written to a New York publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume for the press. Nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes these two had then in mind. Neither of them would seem to have been optimistic as to their future place in American literature; certainly in their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of letters--the two most talked-of men in America. LII A COMMISSION TO THE SANDWICH ISLANDS Whatever his first emotions concerning the success of "Jim Smiley's Frog" may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into American literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as in distant parts. Those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute accordingly. Special honors began to be shown to him. A fine new steamer, the Ajax, built for the Sandwich Island trade, carried on its initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make one. He did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward. If the Ajax were back I would go quick, and throw up my correspondence. She had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the town--gentlemen and ladies, and a splendid brass band. I could not accept because there would be no one to write my correspondence while I was gone. In fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous. He was restless, and the Ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more dissatisfied. An idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands was a matter of great commercial interest to California, while the life and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general reader. He was on excellent terms with James Anthony and Paul Morrill, of the Sacramento Union; he proposed to them that they send him as their special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of letters, life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands. To his vast delight, they gave him the commission. He wrote home joyously now: I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they pay as much money as I would get if I stayed at home. He adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the continent by way of the Columbia River, the Pend Oreille Lakes, through Montana and down the Missouri River. "Only two hundred miles of land travel from San Francisco to New Orleans." So it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on. He sailed by the Ajax on her next trip, March 7 (1866), beginning his first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge of navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information passengers and sailors could furnish. It was a happy, stormy voyage altogether. In 'Roughing It' he has given us some account of it. It was the 18th of March when he arrived at Honolulu, and his first impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always. In fact, his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of golden sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past. The letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which had preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality. Officials and private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and he fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft repose. Oh, islands there are on the face of the deep Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep, he quotes in his note-book, and adds: Went with Mr. Damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment. God, what a contrast with California and the Washoe! And in another place: They live in the S. I.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more of business till next day. D--n San F. style of wearing out life. He fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for business, and he lost not much time. He found there a number of friends from Washoe, including the Rev. Mr. Rising, whose health had failed from overwork. By their direction, and under official guidance, he set out on Oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print, and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its various battle-fields, returning to Honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but triumphant. His letters home, better even than his Union correspondence, reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms. I have got a lot of human bones which I took from one of these battle-fields. I guess I will bring you some of them. I went with the American Minister and took dinner this evening with the King's Grand Chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though darker than a mulatto he has an excellent English education, and in manners is an accomplished gentleman. He is to call for me in the morning; we will visit the King in the palace, After dinner they called in the "singing girls," and we had some beautiful music, sung in the native tongue. It was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he should air it a little. In the same letter he states: "I will sail in a day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months." 'In Roughing It' he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands, their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders. He was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one. The very name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to be off. No discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him. With a single daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death. By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life. I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge down 1,000 feet. I thought Boo would answer for me, and was about to say so, when Marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. They made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a veritable lake of fire. They had risked their lives for that scene, but it seemed worth while. His open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared Samuel Clemens for adventurous hardships. He was thirty years old, with his full account of mental and physical capital. His growth had been slow, but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for conquest of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power. LIII ANSON BURLINGAME AND THE "HORNET" DISASTER It was near the end of June when he returned to Honolulu from a tour of all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils. He expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have a part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career. The Ajax had just come in, bringing his Excellency Anson Burlingame, then returning to his post as minister to China; also General Van Valkenburg, minister to Japan; Colonel Rumsey and Minister Burlingame's son, Edward, --[Edward L. Burlingame, now for many years editor of Scribner's Magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen. Young Burlingame had read "The Jumping Frog," and was enthusiastic about Mark Twain and his work. Learning that he was in Honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the party sent word that they would call on him next morning. Clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well. He crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible, and drove to the American minister's, where the party was staying. They had a hilariously good time. When he returned to his hotel he sent them, by request, whatever he had on hand of his work. General Van Valkenburg had said to him: "California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people will be, too, no doubt." There has seldom been a more accurate prophecy. But a still greater event was imminent. On that very day (June 21, 1866) there came word of the arrival at Sanpahoe, on the island of Hawaii, of an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days! A vessel, the Hornet, from New York, had taken fire and burned "on the line," and since early in May, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land. A few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital. Mark Twain recognized the great news importance of the event. It would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to his paper. There was no cable in those days; a vessel for San Francisco would sail next morning. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he must not miss it. Bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his strength. But just at this time the Burlingame party descended on him, and almost before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted by the heads of the joint legations of China and Japan. Once there, Anson Burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their long privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three distempered days and four thousand miles of sea. All that Mark Twain had to do was to listen and make the notes. He put in the night-writing against time. Next morning, just as the vessel for the States was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived his great beat was sure. It did arrive, and the three-column story on the front page of the Sacramento Union, in its issue of July 19th, gave the public the first detailed history of the terrible Hornet disaster and the rescue of those starving men. Such a story occupied a wider place in the public interest than it would in these crowded days. The telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. Mark Twain always adored the name and memory of Anson Burlingame. In his letter home he tells of Burlingame's magnanimity in "throwing away an invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries" to help him. "You know I appreciate that kind of thing," he says; which was a true statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying an instalment on his debt of gratitude. It was proper that he should do so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted in obtaining the tale of the Hornet disaster. It was the debt which one owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice. Anson Burlingame said to Samuel Clemens: "You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." Clemens never forgot that advice. He did not always observe it, but he rarely failed to realize its gospel. Burlingame urged him to travel. "Come to Pekin next winter," he said, "and visit me. Make my house your home. I will give you letters and introduce you. You will have facilities for acquiring information about China." It is not surprising then that Mark Twain never felt his debt to Anson Burlingame entirely paid. Burlingame came more than once to the hotel, for Clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future betterment. He promised, of course, to visit China, and when he was alone put in a good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include the great capitals. When not otherwise employed he read; though there was only one book in the hotel, a "blue and gold" edition of Dr. Holmes's Songs in Many Keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from title-page to finis. He was soon up and about. No one could remain ill long in those happy islands. Young Burlingame came, and suggested walks. Once, when Clemens hesitated, the young man said: "But there is a Scriptural command for you to go." "If you can quote one I'll obey it," said Clemens. "Very well. The Bible says, 'If any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him, Twain.'" The command was regarded as sufficient. Clemens quoted the witticism later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years, ascribed to Warner, Ward, and a dozen others. Its origin was as here set down. Under date of July 4 (1866), Mark Twain's Sandwich Island note-book says: Went to a ball 8.30 P.M.--danced till 12.30; stopped at General Van Valkenburg's room and talked with him and Mr. Burlingame and Ed Burlingame until 3 A.M. From which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered. A few days later the legation party had sailed for China and Japan, and on the 19th Clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to San Francisco. They were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage. Captain Mitchell and others of the wrecked Hornet were aboard, and he put in a good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world. The vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a regular playground at sea. Sundays they had services and Mark Twain led the choir. "I hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than I have down here," he says in his notes. "If they don't, a thunderbolt will knock this vessel endways." It is perhaps worthy of mention that on the night of the 27th of July he records having seen another "splendidly colored, lunar rainbow." That he regarded this as an indication of future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the previous year. It was August 13th when he reached San Francisco, and the note-book entry of that day says: Home again. No--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again! There were compensations, however. He went over to Sacramento, and was abundantly welcomed. It was agreed that, in addition to the twenty dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the Hornet report. "How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?" James Anthony asked. "Oh, I'm a modest man; I don't want the whole Union office. Call it $100 a column." There was a general laugh. The bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the business office for payment. "The cashier didn't faint," he wrote, many years later, "but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it. It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a newspaper."--["My Debut as a Literary Person."--Collected works.]--Though inferior to the descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame, the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his prestige on the Pacific coast. They were convincing, informing; tersely--even eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience. Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity. They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present the general idea: The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, The turf with their bayonets turning, And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold, And our lanterns dimly burning. Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich Island chapters of 'Roughing It', five years later. They do, however, reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the Comstock and the mellowness of his later style. He was learning to see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. It is not difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame. 
22329	----	Transcriber's Note This book in this edition won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Literature in the "Biography or Autobiography" category. As such, every attempt has been made to reproduce it exactly as it was printed and as it won the award. In particular, inconsistent hyphenation of compound words is pervasive in this text and has been retained. Unconventional punctuation--for example using a comma to splice two sentences--has also been retained exactly as printed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ----------------------------------------------------------------------- By HAMLIN GARLAND A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ULYSSES S. GRANT, HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: Isabel McClintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border.] [Illustration: Zulime Taft: "The New Daughter."] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER BY HAMLIN GARLAND Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 All rights reserved ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright, 1921, By HAMLIN GARLAND. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1921. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To my wife Zulime Taft, who for more than twenty years has shared my toil and borne with my shortcomings, I dedicate this story of a household on the vanishing Middle Border, with an ever-deepening sense of her fortitude and serenity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgments are made to Florence Huber Schott, Edward Foley and Arthur Dudley for the use of the photographs which illustrate this volume. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- FOREWORD I _To My New Readers_ In the summer of 1893, after nine years of hard but happy literary life in Boston and New York, I decided to surrender my residence in the East and reëstablish my home in the West, a decision which seemed to be--as it was--a most important event in my career. This change of headquarters was due not to a diminishing love for New England, but to a deepening desire to be near my aging parents, whom I had persuaded, after much argument, to join in the purchase of a family homestead, in West Salem, Wisconsin, the little village from which we had all adventured some thirty years before. My father, a typical pioneer, who had grown gray in opening new farms, one after another on the wind-swept prairies of Iowa and Dakota, was not entirely content with my plan but my mother, enfeebled by the hardships of a farmer's life, and grateful for my care, was glad of the arrangement I had brought about. In truth, she realized that her days of pioneering were over and the thought of ending her days among her friends and relatives was a comfort to her. That I had rescued her from a premature grave on the barren Dakota plain was certain, and the hope of being able to provide for her comfort was the strongest element in my plan. After ten years of separation we were agreed upon a project which would enable us as a family to spend our summers together; for my brother, Franklin, an actor in New York City, had promised to take his vacation in the home which we had purchased. As this homestead (which was only eight hours by rail from Chicago) is to be one of the chief characters in this story, I shall begin by describing it minutely. It was not the building in which my life began--I should like to say it was, but it was not. My birthplace was a cabin--part logs and part lumber--on the opposite side of the town. Originally a squatter's cabin, it was now empty and forlorn, a dreary monument of the pioneer days, which I did not take the trouble to enter. The house which I had selected for the final Garland homestead, was entirely without any direct associations with my family. It was only an old frame cottage, such as a rural carpenter might build when left to his own devices, rude, angular, ugly of line and drab in coloring, but it stood in the midst of a four-acre field, just on the edge of the farmland. Sheltered by noble elms and stately maples, its windows fronted on a low range of wooded hills, whose skyline (deeply woven into my childish memories) had for me the charm of things remembered, and for my mother a placid beauty which (after her long stay on the treeless levels of Dakota) was almost miraculous in effect. Entirely without architectural dignity, our new home was spacious and suggested the comfort of the region round about. My father, a man of sixty-five, though still actively concerned with a wide wheat farm in South Dakota, had agreed to aid me in maintaining this common dwelling place in Wisconsin provided he could return to Dakota during seeding and again at harvest. He was an eagle-eyed, tireless man of sixty-five years of age, New England by origin, tall, alert, quick-spoken and resolute, the kind of natural pioneer who prides himself on never taking the back trail. In truth he had yielded most reluctantly to my plan, influenced almost wholly by the failing health of my mother, to whom the work of a farm household had become an intolerable burden. As I had gained possession of the premises early in November we were able to eat our Thanksgiving Dinner in our new home, happy in the companionship of old friends and neighbors. My mother and my Aunt Susan were entirely content. The Garlands seemed anchored at last. II To the Readers of "A Son of the Middle Border" In taking up and carrying forward the theme of "A Son of the Middle Border" I am fully aware of my task's increasing difficulties, realizing that I must count on the clear understanding and continuing good will of my readers. First of all, you must grant that the glamor of childhood, the glories of the Civil War, the period of prairie conquest which were the chief claims to interest in the first volume of my chronicle can not be restated in these pages. The action of this book moves forward into the light of manhood, into the region of middle age. Furthermore, its theme is more personal. Its scenes are less epic. It is a study of individuals and their relationships rather than of settlements and migrations. In short, "A Daughter of the Middle Border" is the complement of "A Son of the Middle Border," a continuation, not a repetition, in which I attempt to answer the many questions which readers of the first volume have persistently put to me. "Did your mother get her new daughter?" "How long did she live to enjoy the peace of her Homestead?" "What became of David and Burton?" "Did your father live to see his grandchildren?" These and many other queries, literary as well as personal, are--I trust--satisfactorily answered in this book. Like the sequel to a novel, it attempts to account for its leading characters and to satisfy the persistent interest which my correspondents have so cordially expressed. It remains to say that the tale is as true as my memory will permit--it is constructed only by leaving things out. If it reads, as some say, like fiction, that result is due not to invention but to the actual lives of the characters involved. Finally this closes my story of the Garlands and McClintocks and the part they took in a marvelous era in American settlement. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS BOOK I CHAPTER PAGE I. MY FIRST WINTER IN CHICAGO 1 II. I RETURN TO THE SADDLE 13 III. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GENERAL GRANT 24 IV. RED MEN AND BUFFALO 38 V. THE TELEGRAPH TRAIL 53 VI. THE RETURN OF THE ARTIST 70 VII. LONDON AND EVENING DRESS 86 VIII. THE CHOICE OF THE NEW DAUGHTER 97 IX. A JUDICIAL WEDDING 122 X. THE NEW DAUGHTER AND THANKSGIVING 140 XI. MY FATHER'S INHERITANCE 153 XII. WE TOUR THE OKLAHOMA PRAIRIE 171 XIII. STANDING ROCK AND LAKE MCDONALD 184 XIV. THE EMPTY ROOM 204 BOOK II XV. A SUMMER IN THE HIGH COUNTRY 219 XVI. THE WHITE HOUSE MUSICAL 237 XVII. SIGNS OF CHANGE 247 XVIII. THE OLD PIONEER TAKES THE BACK TRAIL 262 XIX. NEW LIFE IN THE OLD HOUSE 271 XX. MARY ISABEL'S CHIMNEY 289 XXI. THE FAIRY WORLD OF CHILDHOOD 307 XXII. THE OLD SOLDIER GAINS A GRANDDAUGHTER 326 XXIII. "CAVANAGH" AND THE "WINDS OF DESTINY" 341 XXIV. THE OLD HOMESTEAD SUFFERS DISASTER 355 XXV. DARKNESS JUST BEFORE THE DAWN 369 XXVI. SPRAY OF WILD ROSES 381 XXVII. A SOLDIER OF THE UNION MUSTERED OUT 389 AFTERWORD 400 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ILLUSTRATIONS Isabel Clintock Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border Frontispiece Zulime Taft: The New Daughter Frontispiece FACING PAGE Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper for the colony 104 At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife--lovely as a Madonna--out into the sunshine 287 The old soldier loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire 304 Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonderful giant, I paid tribute to her in song and story 322 That night as my daughters "dressed up" as princesses, danced in the light of our restored hearth, I forgot all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me 368 The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter Constance 400 To Mary Isabel who as a girl of eighteen still loves to impersonate the majesty of princesses 402 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER BOOK I CHAPTER ONE My First Winter in Chicago "Well, Mother," I said as I took my seat at the breakfast table the second day after our Thanksgiving dinner, "I must return to Chicago. I have some lectures to deliver and besides I must get back to my writing." She made no objection to my announcement but her eyes lost something of their happy light. "When will you come again?" she asked after a pause. "Almost any minute," I replied assuringly. "You must remember that I'm only a few hours away now. I can visit you often. I shall certainly come up for Christmas. If you need me at any time send me word in the afternoon and I'll be with you at breakfast." That night at six o'clock I was in my city home, a lodging quite as humble in character as my fortunes. In a large chamber on the north side of a house on Elm Street and only three doors from Lake Michigan, I had assembled my meager library and a few pitiful mementoes of my life in Boston. My desk stood near a narrow side window and as I mused I could look out upon the shoreless expanse of blue-green water fading mistily into the north-east sky, and, at night, when the wind was in the East the crushing thunder of the breakers along the concrete wall formed a noble accompaniment to my writing, filling me with vaguely ambitious literary plans. Exalted by the sound of this mighty orchestra I felt entirely content with the present and serenely confident of the future. "This is where I belong," I said. "Here in the great Midland metropolis with this room for my pivot, I shall continue my study of the plains and the mountains." I had burned no bridges between me and the Island of Manhattan, however! Realizing all too well that I must still look to the East for most of my income, I carefully retained my connections with _Harper's_, the _Century_ and other periodicals. Chicago, rich and powerful as it had become, could not establish--or had not established--a paying magazine, and its publishing firms were mostly experimental and not very successful; although the Columbian Exposition which was just closing, had left upon the city's clubs and societies (and especially on its young men) an esthetic stimulation which bade fair to carry on to other and more enduring enterprises. Nevertheless in the belief that it was to become the second great literary center of America I was resolved to throw myself into the task of hurrying it forward on the road to new and more resplendent achievement. My first formal introduction to the literary and artistic circle in which I was destined to work and war for many years, took place through the medium of an address on _Impressionism in Art_ which I delivered in the library of Franklin Head, a banker whose home had become one of the best-known intellectual meeting places on the North Side. This lecture, considered very radical at the time, was the direct outcome of several years of study and battle in Boston in support of the open-air school of painting, a school which was astonishing the West with its defiant play of reds and yellows, and the flame of its purple shadows. As a missionary in the interest of the New Art, I rejoiced in this opportunity to advance its inspiring heresies. While uttering my shocking doctrines (entrenched behind a broad, book-laden desk), my eyes were attracted to the face of a slender black-bearded young man whose shining eyes and occasional smiling nod indicated a joyous agreement with the main points of my harangue. I had never seen him before, but I at once recognized in him a fellow conspirator against "The Old Hat" forces of conservatism in painting. At the close of my lecture he drew near and putting out his hand, said, "My name is Taft--Lorado Taft. I am a sculptor, but now and again I talk on painting. Impressionism is all very new here in the West, but like yourself I am an advocate of it, I am doing my best to popularize a knowledge of it, and I hope you will call upon me at my studio some afternoon--any afternoon and discuss these isms with me." Young Lorado Taft interested me, and I instantly accepted his invitation to call, and in this way (notwithstanding a wide difference in training and temperament), a friendship was established which has never been strained even in the fiercest of our esthetic controversies. Many others of the men and women I met that night became my co-workers in the building of the "greater Chicago," which was even then coming into being--the menace of the hyphenate American had no place in our thoughts. In less than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as that in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o'clock until noon, confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked like a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other as I felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise and recreation. It soon became my habit to spend an hour or two in Taft's studio (I fear to his serious detriment), and in this way I soon came to know most of the "Bunnies" of "the Rabbit-Warren" as Henry B. Fuller characterized this studio building--and it well deserved the name! Art was young and timid in Cook County. Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely statuettes of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys, Oliver Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill, all young artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm became my valued associates and friends. We were all equally poor and equally confident of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as cloud shadows, our hopes had the wings of eagles. As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place of meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft's studio became, naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all discouragement. A group of us often lunched in what Taft called "the Beanery"--a noisy, sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs. However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty cents each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors further west; and when now and then some good "lay brother" like Melville Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a "royal gorge" at Kinsley's or to a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union League, we went like minstrels to the baron's ball. None of us possessed evening suits and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail coats as "undemocratic." I was one of these. This "artistic gang" also contained several writers who kept a little apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups to the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and Taft and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we called _The Little Room_, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne's story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England homestead. For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter's studio, and on the theory that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was non-existent during all the other days of the week, we called it "the Little Room." Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson's studio in the Fine Arts Building--where it still flourishes. The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum except as a hair tonic--and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I was considered a dull and profitless companion even in "the Little Room," but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though they both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most certainly, never achieved. Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith, and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry which was astounding. Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself, two very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie with his "Prince Albert" coat (as I have been accused of doing), he displayed something of the professor's zeal in his platform addresses. I would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession--I had such a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus clearly defined. Taft's studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenæum Building on Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the reason that it was littered with plaster duplicates of busts, arms, and hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County's most illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become artists of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No doubt they will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord's cast-off handiwork. Taft was an "easy mark" in those times, a shining hope to all the indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of the Columbian Exposition. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty. For several years Clarkson and I had him on our minds because of this gentle and yielding disposition until at last we discovered that in one way or another, in spite of a reckless prodigality, he prospered. The bread which he cheerfully cast upon these unknown waters, almost always returned (sometimes from another direction) in loaves at least as large as biscuits. His fame steadily increased with his charity. I did not understand the principle of his manner of life then, and I do not now. By all the laws of my experience he should at this moment be in the poorhouse, but he isn't--he is rich and honored and loved. In sculpture he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my demand for "A native art" kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by one as the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he most stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely expressed by the Ancient, that America might sometime grow to the dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit. Henry B. Fuller, who in _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani_ had shown himself to be the finest literary craftsman in the West, became (a little later) a leader in our group and a keen delight to us all. He was at this time a small, brown-bearded man of thirty-five, whose quick humor, keen insight and unfailing interest in all things literary made him a caustic corrective of the bombast to which our local reviewers were sadly liable. Although a merciless critic of Chicago, he was a native of the city, and his comment on its life had to be confronted with such equanimity as our self-elected social hierarchy could assume. Elusive if not austere with strangers, Henry's laugh (a musical "ha ha") was often heard among his friends. His face could be impassive not to say repellent when approached by those in whom he took no interest, and there were large numbers of his fellow citizens for whom the author of _Pensieri-Vani_ had only contempt. Strange to say, he became my most intimate friend and confidant--antithetic pair! Eugene Field, his direct opposite, and the most distinguished member of "the journalistic gang," took very little interest in the doings of "the Bunnies" and few of them knew him, but I often visited him in his home on the North Side, and greatly enjoyed his solemn-faced humor. He was a singular character, as improvident as Lorado but in a far different way. I recall meeting him one day on the street wearing, as usual, a long, gray plaid ulster with enormous pockets at the sides. Confronting me with coldly solemn visage, he thrust his right hand into his pocket and lifted a heavy brass candlestick to the light. "Look," he said. I looked. Dropping this he dipped his left hand into the opposite pocket and displayed another similar piece, then with a faint smile lifting the corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth, he gravely boomed, "Brother Garland--you see before you--a man--who lately--had ten dollars." Thereupon he went his way, leaving me to wonder whether his wife would be equally amused with his latest purchase. His library was filled with all kinds of curious objects--worthless junk they seemed to me--clocks, snuffers, butterflies, and the like but he also possessed many autographed books and photographs whose value I granted. His cottage which was not large, swarmed with growing boys and noisy dogs; and Mrs. Field, a sweet and patient soul, seemed sadly out of key with her husband's habit of buying collections of rare moths, door-knockers, and candle molds with money which should have gone to buy chairs and carpets or trousers for the boys. Eugene was one of the first "Colyumists" in the country, and to fill his "Sharps and Flats" levied pitilessly upon his friends. From time to time we all figured as subjects for his humorous paragraphs; but each new victim understood and smiled. For example, in his column I read one morning these words: "La Crosse, a small city in Wisconsin, famous for the fact that all its trains back into town, and as the home of Hamlin Garland." He was one of the most popular of Western writers, and his home of a Sunday was usually crowded with visitors, many of whom were actors. I recall meeting Francis Wilson there--also E. S. Willard and Bram Stoker--but I do not remember to have seen Fuller there, although, later, Roswell, Eugene's brother, became Fuller's intimate friend. George Ade, a thin, pale, bright-eyed young Hoosier, was a frequent visitor at Field's. George had just begun to make a place for himself as the author of a column in the _News_ called "Stories of the Street and of the Town"; and John T. McCutcheon, another Hoosier of the same lean type was his illustrator. I believed in them both and took a kind of elder brother interest in their work. In the companionship of men like Field and Browne and Taft, I was happy. My writing went well, and if I regretted Boston, I had the pleasant sense of being so near West Salem that I could go to bed in a train at ten at night, and breakfast with my mother in the morning, and just to prove that this was true I ran up to the Homestead at Christmas time and delivered my presents in person--keenly enjoying the smile of delight with which my mother received them. West Salem was like a scene on the stage that day--a setting for a rural mid-winter drama. The men in their gayly-colored Mackinac jackets, the sleighbells jingling pleasantly along the lanes, the cottage roofs laden with snow, and the sidewalks, walled with drifts, were almost arctic in their suggestion, and yet, my parents in the shelter of the friendly hills, were at peace. The cold was not being driven against them by the wind of the plain, and a plentiful supply of food and fuel made their fireside comfortable and secure. During this vacation I seized the opportunity to go a little farther and spend a few days in the Pineries which I had never seen. Out of this experience I gained some beautiful pictures of the snowy forest, and a suggestion for a story or two. A few days later, on a commission from _McClure's_, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system which could so work and so house its men. The grimy hovels in which the toilers lived made my own homestead a poem. More than ever convinced that our social order was unjust and impermanent, I sent in my "story," in some doubt about its being accepted. It was printed with illustrations by Orson Lowell and was widely quoted at the time. Soon after this I made a trip to Memphis, thus gaining my first impression of the South. Like most northern visitors, I was immediately and intensely absorbed in the negroes. Their singing entranced me, and my hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Judah, hired a trio of black minstrels to come in and perform for me. Their songs so moved me, and I became so interested in one old negro's curious chants that I fairly wore them out with demands for their most characteristic spirituals. Some of the hymns were of such sacred character that one of the men would not sing them. "I ain't got no right to sing dem songs," he said. In Atlanta I met Joel Chandler Harris, who had done so much to portray the negro's inner kindliness, as well as his singularly poetic outlook. Harris was one of the editors of the _Atlanta Constitution_, and there I found him in a bare, prosaic office, a short, shy, red-haired man whom I liked at once. Two nights later I was dining with James A. Herne and William Dean Howells in New York City, and the day following I read some of my verses for the Nineteenth Century Club. At the end of March I was again at my desk in Chicago. These sudden changes of scene, these dramatic meetings, so typical of my life for many years, took away all sense of drudgery, all routine weariness. Seldom remaining in any one place long enough to become bored I had little chance to bore others. Literary clubs welcomed my readings and lectures; and, being vigorous and of good digestion, I accepted travel as a diversion as well as a business. As a student of American life, I was resolved to know every phase of it. Among my pleasant jobs I recall the putting into shape of a "Real Conversation" with James Whitcomb Riley, the material for which had been gained in a visit to Greenfield, Riley's native town, during August of the previous year. My first meeting with Riley had been in Boston at a time when I was a penniless student and he the shining, highly-paid lecturer; and I still suffered a feeling of wonder that a poet--any poet--could demand such pay. I did not resent it--I only marveled at it--for in our conversation he had made his philosophy plain. "Tell of the things just like they was, they don't need no excuse," one of his characters said. "Don't tech 'em up as the poets does till they're all too fine fer use," and in his talk with me Riley quaintly added, "Nature is good enough for God, it's good enough for me." In this article which I wrote for _McClure's_, I made comment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace country, flat, unkempt and without a line of beauty, and yet from these rude fields and simple gardens the singer had drawn the sweetest honey of song, song with a tang in it, like the odor of ripe buckwheat and the taste of frost-bit persimmons. It reinforced my resolution that the mid-land was about to blossom into art. In travel and in work such as this and in pleasant intercourse with the painters, sculptors, and writers of Chicago my first winter in the desolate, drab, and tumultuous city passed swiftly and on the whole profitably, I no longer looked backward to Boston, but as the first warm spring-winds began to blow, my thoughts turned towards my newly-acquired homestead and the old mother who was awaiting me there. Eager to start certain improvements which should tend to make the house more nearly the kind of dwelling place I had promised myself it should become, hungry for the soil, rejoicing in the thought of once more planting and building, I took the train for the North with all my summer ward-robe and most of my manuscripts, with no intention of reëntering the city till October at the earliest. CHAPTER TWO I Return to the Saddle To pass from the crowds, the smoke and the iron clangor of Chicago into the clear April air of West Salem was a celestial change for me. For many years the clock of my seasons had been stilled. The coming of the birds, the budding of the leaves, the serial blossoming of spring had not touched me, and as I walked up the street that exquisite morning, a reminiscent ecstasy filled my heart. The laughter of the robins, the shrill ki-ki-ki of the golden-wing woodpeckers, and the wistful whistle of the lark, brought back my youth, my happiest youth, and when my mother met me at the door it seemed that all my cares and all my years of city life had fallen from me. "Well, here I am!" I called, "ready for the spring's work." With a silent laugh, as preface, she replied, "You'll get a-plenty. Your father is all packed, impatient to leave for Ordway." The old soldier, who came in from the barn a few moments later, confirmed this. "I'm no truck farmer," he explained with humorous contempt. "I turn this onion patch over to you. It's no place for me. In two days I'll be broad-casting wheat on a thousand-acre farm. That's my size"--a fact which I admitted. As we sat at breakfast he went on to say that he found Wisconsin woefully unprogressive. "These fellows back here are all stuck in the mud. They've got to wake up to the reform movements. I'll be glad to get back to Dakota where people are alive." With the spirit of the seed-sower swelling within him he took the noon train, handing over to me the management of the Homestead. An hour later mother and I went out to inspect the garden and to plan the seeding. The pie-plant leaves were unfolding and slender asparagus spears were pointing from the mold. The smell of burning leaves brought back to us both, with magic power, memories of the other springs and other plantings on the plain. It was glorious, it was medicinal! "This is the life!" I exultantly proclaimed. "Work is just what I need. I shall set to it at once. Aren't you glad you are here in this lovely valley and not out on the bleak Dakota plain?" Mother's face sobered. "Yes, I like it here--it seems more like home than any other place--and yet I miss the prairie and my Ordway friends." As I went about the village I came to a partial understanding of her feeling. The small dark shops, the uneven sidewalks, the rickety wooden awnings were closely in character with the easy-going citizens who moved leisurely and contentedly about their small affairs. It came to me (with a sense of amusement) that these coatless shopkeepers who dealt out sugar and kerosene while wearing their derby hats on the backs of their heads, were not only my neighbors, but members of the Board of Education. Though still primitive to my city eyes, they no longer appeared remote. Something in their names and voices touched me nearly. They were American. Their militant social democracy was at once comical and corrective. O, the peace, the sweetness of those days! To be awakened by the valiant challenge of early-rising roosters; to hear the chuckle of dawn-light worm-hunting robins brought a return of boy-hood's exultation. Not only did my muscles harden to the spade and the hoe, my soul rejoiced in a new and delightful sense of establishment. I had returned to citizenship. I was a proprietor. The clock of the seasons had resumed its beat. Hiring a gardener, I bought a hand-book on Horticulture and announced my intent to make those four fat acres feed my little flock. I was now a land enthusiast. My feet laid hold upon the earth. I almost took root! With what secret satisfaction I planned to widen the front porch and build a two-story bay-window on the north end of the sitting room--an enterprise of such audacity that I kept it strictly to myself! It meant the extravagant outlay of nearly two hundred dollars--but above and beyond that, it involved cutting a hole in the wall and cluttering up the yard; therefore I thought it best to keep my plot hidden from my mother till mid-summer gave more leisure to us all. My notebook of that spring is crowded with descriptions, almost lyrical, of the glory of sunsets and the beauty of bird-song and budding trees--even the loud-voiced, cheerful democracy of the village was grateful to me. "Yesterday I was deep in the tumult of Chicago," runs the entry, "to-day, I am hoeing in my sun-lit garden, hearing the mourning-dove coo and the cat-birds cry. Last night as the sun went down the hill-tops to the west became vividly purple with a subtle illusive deep-crimson glow beneath, while the sky above their tops, a saffron dome rose almost to the zenith. These mystical things are here joined: The trill of black-birds near at hand, the cackle of barn-yard fowls, the sound of hammers, a plowman talking to his team, the pungent smoke of burning leaves, the cool, sweet, spring wind and the glowing down-pouring sunshine--all marvelous and satisfying to me and mine. _This is home!_" On the twelfth of April, however, a most dramatic reversal to winter took place. "The day remained beautifully springlike till about two o'clock when a gray haze came rushing downward from the north-west. Big black clouds developed with portentous rapidity. Thunder arose, and an icy wind, furious and swift as a tornado roared among the trees. The rain, chilled almost into hail, drummed on the shingles. The birds fell silent, the hens scurried to shelter. In ten minutes the cutting blast died out. A dead calm succeeded. Then out burst the sun, flooding the land with laughter! The black-birds resumed their piping, the fowls ventured forth, and the whole valley again lay beaming and blossoming under a perfect sky." The following night I was in the city watching a noble performance of "Tristan and Isolde!" I took enormous satisfaction in the fact that I could plant peas in my garden till noon and hear a concert in Chicago on the same day. The arrangement seemed ideal. On May 9th I was again at home, "the first whippoorwill sang to-night--trees are in full leaf," I note. In a big square room in the eastern end of the house, I set up a handmade walnut desk which I had found in LaCrosse, and on this I began to write in the inspiration of morning sun-shine and bird-song. For four hours I bent above my pen, and each afternoon I sturdily flourished spade and hoe, while mother hobbled about with cane in hand to see that I did it right. "You need watching," she laughingly said. With a cook and a housemaid, a man to work the garden, and a horse to plow out my corn and potatoes, I began to wear the composed dignity of an earl. I pruned trees, shifted flower beds and established berry patches with the large-handed authority of a southern planter. It was comical, it was delightful! To eat home-cooked meals after years of dreadful restaurants gave me especial satisfaction, but alas! there was a flaw in my lute. We had to eat in our living room; and when I said "Mother, one of these days I'm going to move the kitchen to the south and build a real sure-enough dining room in between," she turned upon me with startled gaze. "You'd better think a long time about that," she warningly replied. "We're perfectly comfortable the way we are." "Comfortable? Yes, but we must begin to think of being luxurious. There's nothing too good for you, mother." Early in July my brother Franklin joined me in the garden work, and then my mother's cup of contentment fairly overflowed its brim. So far as we knew she had no care, no regret. Day by day she sat in an easy chair under the trees, watching us as we played ball on the lawn, or cut weeds in the garden; and each time we looked at her, we both acknowledged a profound sense of satisfaction, of relief. Never again would she burn in the suns of the arid plains, or cower before the winds of a desolate winter. She was secure. "You need never work again," I assured her. "You can get up when you please and go to bed when you please. Your only job is to sit in the shade and boss the rest of us," and to this she answered only with a silent, characteristic chuckle of delight. "The Junior," as I called my brother, enjoyed the homestead quite as much as I. Together we painted the porch, picked berries, hoed potatoes, and trimmed trees. Everything we did, everything we saw, recovered for us some part of our distant boyhood. The noble lines of the hills to the west, the weeds of the road-side, the dusty weather-beaten, covered-bridges, the workmen in the fields, the voices of our neighbors, the gossip of the village--all these sights and sounds awakened deep-laid, associated tender memories. The cadence of every song, the quality of every resounding jest made us at home, once and for all. Our twenty-five-year stay on the level lands of Iowa and Dakota seemed only an unsuccessful family exploration--our life in the city merely a business, winter adventure. To visit among the farmers--to help at haying or harvesting, brought back minute touches of the olden, wondrous prairie world. We went swimming in the river just as we used to do when lads, rejoicing in the caress of the wind, the sting of the cool water, and on such expeditions we often thought of Burton and others of our play-mates faraway, and of Uncle David, in his California exile. "I wish he, too, could enjoy this sweet and tranquil world," I said, and in this desire my brother joined. We wore the rudest and simplest clothing, and hoed (when we hoed) with furious strokes; but as the sun grew hot we usually fled to the shade of the great maples which filled the back yard, and there, at ease, recounted the fierce toil of the Iowa harvest fields, recalling the names of the men who shared it with us,--and so, while all around us green things valorously expanded, and ripening apples turned to scarlet and gold in their coverts of green, we burrowed deep in the soil like the badger which is the symbol of our native state. After so many years of bleak and treeless farm-lands, it seemed that our mother could not get enough of the luxuriant foliage, the bloom and the odorous sweetness of this lovely valley. Hour by hour, day by day, she sat on the porch, or out under the trees, watching the cloud shadows slide across the hills, hearing the whistle of the orioles and the love songs of the cat-bird, happy in the realization that both her sons were, at last, within the sound of her voice. She had but one unsatisfied desire (a desire which she shyly reiterated), and that was her longing for a daughter, but neither Frank nor I, at the moment, had any well-defined hope of being able to fulfill that demand. My life had not been one to bring about intimate relationships with women. I had been too poor and too busy in Boston to form any connections other than just good friendships, and even now, my means would not permit a definite thought of marriage. "Where can I keep a wife? My two little rooms in Chicago are all the urban home I can afford, and to bring a daughter of the city to live in West Salem would be dangerous." Nevertheless, I promised mother that on my return to Chicago, I would look around and see what I could find. For three months--that is to say during May, June and July, I remained concerned with potato bugs, currant worms, purslane and other important garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had far-reaching effects. Though still at work upon _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, I was beginning to meditate on themes connected with Colorado, and as the heat of July intensified in the low country, I fell to dreaming of the swift mountain streams whose bright waters I had seen in a previous trip, and so despite all my protestations, I found myself in Colorado Springs one August day, a guest of Louis Ehrich, a New Yorker and fellow reformer, in exile for his health. It was at his table that I met Professor Fernow, chief of the National Bureau of Forestry, who was in the west on a tour of the Federal Forests, and full of enthusiasm for his science. His talk interested me enormously. I forecast, dimly, something of the elemental change which scientific control was about to bring into the mountain west, and when (sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not accompany me on my round?" I accepted instantly, and my good friends, the Ehrichs out-fitted me for the enterprise. We left next day for Glenwood Springs, at which point Fernow hired horses and a guide who knew the streams and camps of the White River Plateau, and early on the second morning we set out on a trail which, in a literary sense, carried me a long way and into a new world. From the plain I ascended to the peaks. From the barbed-wire lanes of Iowa and Kansas I entered the thread-like paths of the cliffs, and (most important of all) I returned to the saddle. I became once more the horseman in a region of horsemen. For the first time in nearly twenty years I swung to the saddle, and by that act recovered a power and a joy which only verse could express. I found myself among men of such endurance and hardihood that I was ashamed to complain of my aching bones and overstrained muscles--men to whom dark nights, precipitous trails, noxious insects, mud and storms were all "a part of the game." In those few days I absorbed the essential outlines of a new world. My note-book of the time is proof of it--and "The Prairie in the Sky," which was the title of the article I wrote for _Harper's Weekly_, is further evidence of it. How beautiful it all was! As I look back upon it I see green parks lit with larkspur and painter's brush. I taste the marvelous freshness of the air. The ptarmigan scuttles away among the rocks, the marmot whistles, the conies utter their slender wistful cries. That trail led me back to the hunter's cabin, to the miner's shack on whose rough-hewn walls the fire-light flickered in a kind of silent music. It set me once again in the atmosphere of daring and filled me with the spirit of pioneer adventure. In a physical sense I ended my exploration ten days later, but in imagination I continued to ride "The High Country." I had entered a fresh scene--discovered a new enthusiasm. By this I do not mean to imply that I at once set about the composition of a Wild West novel, but for those who may be interested in the literary side of this chronicle, I will admit that this splendid trip into high Colorado, marks the beginning of my career as a fictionist of the Mountain West. Thereafter neither the coulee country nor the prairie served exclusively as material for my books. From the plains, which were becoming each year more crowded, more prosaic, I fled in imagination as in fact to the looming silver-and-purple summits of the Continental Divide, while in my mind an ambition to embody, as no one at that time had done, the spirit and the purpose of the Rocky Mountain trailer was vaguely forming in my mind. To my home in Wisconsin I carried back a fragment of rock, whose gray mass, beautifully touched with gold and amber and orange-colored lichens formed a part of the narrow causeway which divides the White River from the Bear. It was a talisman of the land whose rushing waters, majestic forests and exquisite Alpine meadows I desired to hold in memory, and with this stone on my desk I wrote. It aided me in recalling the scenes and the characters I had so keenly admired. * * * * * In calling upon Lorado one afternoon soon after my return to Chicago I was surprised and a little disconcerted to find two strange young ladies making themselves very much at home in his studio. In greeting me he remarked in a mood of sly mischief, "You will not approve of these girls--they are on their way to Paris to study sculpture, but I want you to know them. They are Janet Scudder and my sister Zulime." Up to this time, notwithstanding our growing friendship, I was not aware that he had a sister, but I greeted Miss Taft with something like fraternal interest. She was a handsome rather pale girl with fine, serious gray-blue eyes, and a composed and graceful manner. Her profile was particularly good and as she was not greatly interested in looking at me I had an excellent chance to study her. Lorado explained "My sister has been in Kansas visiting mother and father and is now on her way to New York to take a steamer for France.... She intends to remain abroad for two years," he added. Knowing that I was at that moment in the midst of writing a series of essays on _The National Spirit in American Art_, he expected this to draw my fire--and it did. "Why go abroad," I demanded bluntly. "Why not stay right here and study modeling with your brother? Paris is no place for an American artist." With an amused glance at her friend, Miss Scudder, Miss Taft replied in a tone of tolerant contempt for my ignorance, "One doesn't get very far in art without Paris." Somewhat nettled by her calm inflection and her supercilious glance I hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can acquire all the technic you require, right here in Chicago. If you are in earnest, and are really in search of instruction you can certainly get it in Boston or New York. Stay in your own country whatever you do. This sending students at their most impressionable age to the Old World to absorb Old World conventions and prejudices is all wrong. It makes of them something which is neither American nor European. Suppose France did that? No nation has an art worth speaking of unless it has a national spirit." Of course this is only a brief report of my harangue which might just as well have remained unspoken, so far as Miss Taft was concerned, and when her brother came to her aid I retired worsted. The two pilgrims went their way leaving me to hammer Lorado at my leisure. I wish I could truthfully say that this brief meeting with Zulime Taft filled me with a deep desire to see her again but I cannot do so. On the contrary, my recollection is that I considered her a coldly-haughty young person running away from her native land, not to study art but to have a pleasant time in Paris--while she (no doubt) regarded me as a rude, forth-putting anarch--which I was. At this point our acquaintance and our controversy rested. As the months and years passed I heard of her only through some incidental remark of her brother. Having no slightest premonition of the part she was to play in my after life, I made no inquiries concerning her. She, however, followed me--as I afterward learned, by means of my essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite uninterested (so far as I know) in the personality of their author. CHAPTER THREE In the Footsteps of General Grant Among the new esthetic and literary enterprises which the Exposition had brought to Chicago was the high-spirited publishing firm of Stone and Kimball, which started out valiantly in the spring of '94. The head of the house, a youth just out of Harvard, was Herbert Stone, son of my friend Melville Stone, manager of the Associated Press. Kimball was Herbert's classmate. Almost before he had opened his office, Herbert came to me to get a manuscript. "Eugene Field has given us one," he urged, "and we want one from you. We are starting a real publishing house in Chicago and we need your support." There was no resisting such an appeal. Having cast in my lot with Chicago, it was inevitable that I should ally myself with its newest literary enterprise, a business which expressed something of my faith in the west. Not only did I turn over to Stone the rights to _Main Traveled Roads_, together with a volume of verse--I promised him a book of essays--and a novel. These aspiring young collegians were joined in '95 by another Harvard man, a tall, dark, smooth-faced youth named Harrison Rhodes, and when, of an afternoon these three missionaries of culture each in a long frock coat, tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves and shining silk hats, paced side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had the effect of an esthetic invasion, but their crowning audacity was a printed circular which announced that tea would be served in their office in the Caxton Building on Saturday afternoons! Finally as if to convince the city of their utter madness, this intrepid trio adventured the founding of a literary magazine to be called _The Chap Book!_ Culture on the Middle Border had at last begun to hum! Despite the smiles of elderly scoffers, the larger number of my esthetic associates felt deeply grateful to these devoted literary pioneers, whose taste, enterprise and humor were all sorely needed "in our midst." If not precisely cosmopolitan they were at least in touch with London. Early in '94 they brought out a lovely edition of _Main Traveled Roads_ and a new book called _Prairie Songs_. Neither of these volumes sold--the firm had no special facilities for selling books, but their print and binding delighted me, and in the autumn of the same year I gladly let them publish a collection of essays called _Crumbling Idols_, a small screed which aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the _Forum_, in which one of the key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were written upon my main thesis. In truth the attention which this iconoclastic declaration of faith received at the hands of critics was out of all proportion to its size. Its explosive power was amazing. As I read it over now, with the clamor of "Cubism," "Imagism" and "Futurism" in my ears, it seems a harmless and on the whole rather reasonable plea for National Spirit and the freedom of youth, but in those days all of my books had mysterious power for arousing opposition, and most reviews of my work were so savage that I made a point of not reading them for the reason that they either embittered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I hated contention, therefore I left consideration of these assaults entirely to my publishers. (I learned afterwards that Miss Taft was greatly interested in _Crumbling Idols_. Perhaps she assumed that I was writing at her.) Meanwhile in _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, the manuscript of which I had carried about with me on many of my lecturing trips, I was attempting to embody something of Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult. After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed depressingly drab and bleak, and my only hope lay in representing it not as I saw it, but as it appeared to my Wisconsin heroine who came to it from Madison and who perceived in it the mystery and the beauty which I had lost. To Rose, fresh from the farm, it was a great capital, and the lake a majestic sea. As in _A Spoil of Office_, I had tried to maintain the point of view of a countryman, so now I attempted to embody in _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, a picture of Chicago as an ambitious young girl from the Wisconsin farm would see it. In my story Rose Dutcher made her way from Bluff Siding to the State University, and from Madison to a fellowship in the artistic and literary Chicago, of which I was a part. Her progress was intended to be typical. I said, "I will depict the life of a girl who has ambitious desires, and works toward her goal as blindly and as determinedly as a boy." It was a new thesis so far as Western girls were concerned, and I worked long and carefully on the problem, carrying the manuscript back and forth with me for two years. As spring came on, I again put "Rose" in my trunk and hastened back to West Salem in order to build the two-story bay-window which I had minutely planned, which was, indeed, almost as important as my story and much more exciting. To begin the foundation of that extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was extravagant--reckless--nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical enthusiasm. Mother watched us tear out and rebuild with uneasy glance but when the windows were in and a new carpet with an entire "parlor suite" to match, arrived from the city, her alarm became vocal. "You mustn't spend your money for things like these. We can't afford such luxuries." "Don't you worry about my money," I replied, "There's more where I found this. There's nothing too good for you, mother." How sweet and sane and peaceful and afar off those blessed days seem to me as I muse over this page. At the village shops sirloin steak was ten cents a pound, chickens fifty cents a pair and as for eggs--I couldn't give ours away, at least in the early summer,--and all about us were gardens laden with fruit and vegetables, more than we could eat or sell or feed to the pigs. Wars were all in the past and life a simple matter of working out one's own individual problems. Never again shall I feel that confidence in the future, that joy in the present. I had no doubts--none that I can recall. My brother came again in June and joyfully aided me in my esthetic pioneering. We amazed the town by seeding down a potato patch and laying out a tennis court thereon, the first play-ground of its kind in Hamilton township, and often as we played of an afternoon, farmers on their way to market with loads of grain or hogs, paused to watch our game and make audible comment on our folly. We also bought a lawn-mower, the second in the town, and shaved our front yard. We took down the old picket fence in front of the house and we planted trees and flowers, until at last some of the elderly folk disgustedly exclaimed, "What won't them Garland boys do next!" Without doubt we "started something" in the sleepy village. Others following our example went so far as to take down their own fences and to buy lawn-mowers. That we were planning waterworks and a bath-room remained a secret--this was too revolutionary to be spoken of for the present. We were forced to make progress slowly. _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, published during this year, was attacked quite as savagely as _Main Traveled Roads_ had been, and this criticism saddened and depressed me. With a foolish notion that the Middle West should take a moderate degree of pride in me, I resented this condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of historical record of the west that Whittier and Holmes secured for New England?" I asked my friends. "Am I not worthy of an occasional friendly word, a message of encouragement?" Of course I should have risen superior to these local misjudgments, and in fact I did keep to my work although only a faint voice here and there was raised in my defence. Even after _Rose_ had been introduced to London by William Stead, and Henry James and Israel Zangwill and James Barrie had all written in praise of her, the editors of the western papers still maintained a consistently militant attitude. Perhaps I should have taken comfort from the fact that they considered me worth assaulting, but that kind of comfort is rather bleak at its best, especially when the sales of your book are so small as to be confirmatory of the critic. Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal depreciation of my stories of the plains had something to do with intensifying the joy with which I returned to the mountain world and its heroic types, at any rate I spent July and August of that year in Colorado and New Mexico, making many observations, which turned out to have incalculable value to me in later days. From a roundup in the Current Creek country I sauntered down through Salida, Ouray, Telluride, Durango and the Ute Reservation, a circuit which filled my mind with noble suggestions for stories and poems, a tour which profoundly influenced my life as well as my writing. The little morocco-covered notebook in which I set down some of my impressions is before me as I write. It still vibrates with the ecstasy of that enthusiasm. Sentences like these are frequent. "From the dry hot plains, across the blazing purple of the mesa's edge, I look away to where the white clouds soar in majesty above the serrate crest of Uncomphagre. Oh, the splendor and mystery of those cloud-hid regions!... A coyote, brown and dry and hot as any tuft of desert grass drifts by.... Into the coolness and sweetness and cloud-glory of this marvelous land.... Gorgeous shadows are in motion on White House Peak.... Along the trail as though walking a taut wire, a caravan of burros streams, driven by a wide-hatted graceful horseman.... Twelve thousand feet! I am brother to the eagles now! The matchless streams, the vivid orange-colored meadows. The deep surf-like roar of the firs, the wailing sigh of the wind in the grass--a passionate longing wind." Such are my jottings. In these pages I can now detect the beginnings of a dozen of my stories, a score of my poems. No other of my trips was ever so inspirational. Not content with the wonders of Colorado I drifted down to Santa Fé and Isleta, with Charles Francis Browne and Hermon MacNeill, and got finally to Holbrook, where we outfitted and rode away across the desert, bound for the Snake Dance at Walpi. It would seem that we had decided to share all there was of romance in the South West. They were as insatiate as I. For a week we lived on the mesa at Walpi in the house of Heli. Aided by Dr. Fewkes of Washington, we saw most of the phases of the snake ceremonies. The doctor and his own men were camped at the foot of the mesa, making a special study of the Hopi and their history. Remote, incredibly remote it all seemed even at that time, and some of that charm I put into an account of it which _Harper's_ published--one of the earliest popular accounts of the Snake Dance. One night as I was standing on the edge of the cliff looking out over the sand to the west, I saw a train of pack horses moving toward Walpi like a jointed, canvas-colored worm. It was the outfit of another party of "tourists" coming to the dance, and half an hour later a tall, lean, brown and smiling man of middle life rode up the eastern trail at the head of his train. Greeting me pleasantly he asked, "Has the ceremony begun?" "The snakes are in process of being gathered," I replied, "but you are in time for the most interesting part of the festival." In response to a question he explained, "I've been studying the Cliff-Dwellings of the Mesa Verde. My name is Pruden. I am from New York." It was evident that "The Doctor" (as his guides called him) was not only a man of wide experience on the trail, but a scientist as well, and I found him most congenial. We spent the evening together, and together we witnessed the mysterious snake dance which the natives of Walpi give every other year--a ceremony so incredibly primitive that it carried me back into the stone age, and three days later (leaving Browne and MacNeill to paint and sculpture the Hopi) we went to Zuni and Acoma and at last to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, a trip which laid upon my mind a thousand glorious impressions of the desert and its life. It was so beautiful, so marvelous that sand and flies and hunger and thirst were forgotten. Aside from its esthetic delight, this summer turned out to be the most profitable season of my whole career. It marks a complete 'bout face in my march. Coming just after _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, it dates the close of my prairie tales and the beginning of a long series of mountain stories. Cripple Creek and the Current Creek country suggested _The Eagle's Heart_, _Witches' Gold_, _Money Magic_, and a dozen shorter romances. In truth every page of my work thereafter was colored by the experiences of this glorious savage splendid summer. The reasons are easy to define. All my emotional relationships with the "High Country" were pleasant, my sense of responsibility was less keen, hence the notes of resentment, of opposition to unjust social conditions which had made my other books an offense to my readers were almost entirely absent in my studies of the mountaineers. My pity was less challenged in their case. Lonely as their lives were, it was not a sordid loneliness. The cattle rancher was at least not a drudge. Careless, slovenly and wasteful as I knew him to be, he was not mean. He had something of the Centaur in his bearing. Marvelous horsemanship dignified his lean figure and lent a notable grace to his gestures. His speech was picturesque and his observations covered a wide area. Self-reliant, fearless, instant of action in emergency, his character appealed to me with ever-increasing power. I will not say that I consciously and deliberately cut myself off from my prairie material, the desertion came about naturally. Swiftly, inevitably, the unplowed valleys, the waterless foothills and the high peaks, inspired me, filled me with desire to embody them in some form of prose, of verse. Laden with a myriad impressions of Indians, mountaineers and miners, I returned to my home as a bee to its hive, and there, during October, in my quiet chamber worked fast and fervently to transform my rough notes into fiction. Making no attempt to depict the West as some one else had seen it, or might thereafter see it, I wrote of it precisely as it appeared to me, verifying every experience, for, although I had not lingered long in any one place--a few weeks at most--I had observed closely and my impressions were clearly and deeply graved. In fear of losing that freshness of delight, that emotion which gave me inspiration, I had made copious notes while in the field and although I seldom referred to them after I reached my desk, the very act of putting them down had helped to organize and fix them in my mind. All of September and October was spent at the Homestead. Each morning I worked at my writing, and in the afternoon I drove my mother about the country or wrought some improvement to the place. * * * * * In the midst of these new literary enthusiasms I received a message which had a most disturbing effect on my plans. It was a letter from Sam McClure whose new little magazine was beginning to show astonishing vitality. "I want you to write for me a life of Ulysses Grant. I want it to follow Ida Tarbell's _Lincoln_ which is now nearing an end. Come to New York and talk it over." This request arrested me in my fictional progress. I was tempted to accept this commission, not merely because of the editor's generous terms of payment but for the deeper reason that _Grant_ was a word of epic significance in my mind. From the time when I was three years of age, this great name had rung in my ears like the sound of a mellow bell. I knew I could write Grant's story--but--I hesitated. "It is a mighty theme," I replied, "and yet I am not sure that I ought to give so much of my time at this, the most creative period of my life. It may change the whole current of my imagination." My father, whose attitude toward the great Commander held much of hero-worship and who had influenced my childish thinking, influenced me now, but aside from his instruction I had come to consider Grant's career more marvelous than that of any other American both by reason of its wide arc of experience and its violent dramatic contrasts. It lent itself to epic treatment. With a feeling that if I could put this deeply significant and distinctively American story into a readable volume, I should be adding something to American literature as well as to my own life, I consented. Dropping my fictional plans for the time I became the historian. In order to make the biography a study from first-hand material I planned a series of inspirational trips which filled in a large part of '96. Beginning at Georgetown, Ohio, where I found several of Grant's boyhood playmates, I visited Ripley, where he went to school, and then at the Academy at West Point I spent several days examining the records. In addition, I went to each of the barracks at which young Grant had been stationed. Sacketts Harbor, Detroit and St. Louis yielded their traditions. A month in Mexico enabled me to trace out on foot not only the battle grounds of Monterey, but that of Vera Cruz, Puebla and Molina del Rey. No spot on which Grant had lived long enough to leave a definite impression was neglected. In this work I had the support of William Dean Howells who insisted on my doing the book bravely. In pursuit of material concerning Grant's later life I interviewed scores of his old neighbors in Springfield and Galena, and in pursuit of his classmates, men like Buckner and Longstreet and Wright and Franklin, I took long journeys. In short I spared no pains to give my material a first-hand quality, and in doing this I traveled nearly thirty thousand miles, making many interesting acquaintances, in more than half the states of the Union. During all these activities, however, the old Wisconsin farmhouse remained my pivot. In my intervals of rest I returned to my study and made notes of the vividly contrasting scenes through which I had passed. Orizaba and Jalapa, Perote with its snowy mountains rising above hot, cactus-covered plains, and Mexico City became almost dream-like by contrast with the placid beauty of Neshonoc. Some of my experiences, like "the Passion Play at Coyocan," for example, took on a medieval quality, so incredibly remote was its scene,--and yet, despite all this travel, notwithstanding my study of cities and soldiers and battle maps, I could not forget to lay out my garden. I kept my mother supplied with all the necessaries and a few of the luxuries of life. In my note book of that time I find these lines: "I have a feeling of swift change in art and literature here in America. This latest trip to New York has shocked and saddened me. To watch the struggle, to feel the bitterness and intolerance of the various groups--to find one clique of artists set against another, to know that most of those who come here will fail and die--is appalling. The City is filled with strugglers, students of art, ambitious poets, journalists, novelists, writers of all kinds--I meet them at the clubs--some of them will be the large figures of 1900, most of them will have fallen under the wheel--This bitter war of Realists and Romanticists will be the jest of those who come after us, and they in their turn will be full of battle ardor with other cries and other banners. How is it possible to make much account of the cries and banners of to-day when I know they will be forgotten of all but the students of literary history?" My contract with _McClure's_ called for an advance of fifty dollars a week (more money than I had ever hoped to earn) and with this in prospect I purchased a new set of dinner china and a piano, which filled my mother's heart with delight. As I thought of her living long weeks in the old homestead with only my invalid aunt for company my conscience troubled me, and as it was necessary for me to go to Washington to complete my history, I attempted to mitigate her loneliness by buying a talking machine, through which I was able send her messages and songs. She considered these wax cylinders a poor substitute for my actual voice, but she got some entertainment from them by setting the machine going for the amazement of her callers. November saw me settled in Washington, hard at work on my history, but all the time my mind was working, almost unconsciously, on my new fictional problems, "After all, I am a novelist," I wrote to Fuller, and I found time even in the midst of my historical study to compose an occasional short story of Colorado or Mexico. Magazine editors were entirely hospitable to me now, for my tales of the Indian and the miner had created a friendlier spirit among their readers. My later themes were, happily, quite outside the controversial belt. Concerned less with the hopeless drudgery, and more with the epic side of western life, I found myself almost popular. My critics, once off their guard, were able to praise, cautiously it is true, but to praise. Some of them assured me with paternal gravity that I might, by following their suggestions become a happy and moderately successful writer, and this prosperity, you may be sure, was reflected to some degree in the dining room of the old Homestead. My father, though glad of the shelter of the Wisconsin hills in winter, was too vigorous,--far too vigorous--to be confined to the limits of a four-acre garden patch, and when I urged him to join me in buying one of the fine level farms in our valley he agreed, but added "I must sell my Dakota land first." With this I was forced to be content. Though sixty years old he still steered the six-horse header in harvest time, tireless and unsubdued. Times were improving slowly, very slowly in Dakota but opportunities for selling his land were still remote. He was not willing to make the necessary sacrifices. "I will not give it away," he grimly declared. My return to the Homestead during the winter holidays brought many unforgettable experiences. Memories of those winter mornings come back to me--sunrises with steel-blue shadows lying along the drifts, whilst every weed, every shrub, feathered with frost, is lit with subtlest fire and the hills rise out of the mist, domes of brilliant-blue and burning silver. Splashes of red-gold fill all the fields, and small birds, flying amid the rimy foliage, shake sparkles of fire from their careless wings. It was the antithesis of Indian summer, and yet it had something of the same dream-like quality. Its beauty was more poignant. The rounded tops of the red-oaks seemed to float in the sparkling air in which millions of sun-lit frost flakes glittered. All forms and lines were softened by this falling veil, and the world so adorned, so transfigured, filled the heart with a keen regret, a sense of pity that such a world should pass. At such times I was glad of my new home, and my mother found in me only the confident and hopeful son. My doubts of the future, my discouragements of the present I carefully concealed. CHAPTER FOUR Red Men and Buffalo Although my _Ulysses Grant, His Life and Character_ absorbed most of my time and the larger part of my energy during two years, I continued to dream (in my hours of leisure), of the "High Country" whose splendors of cloud and peak, combined with the broad-cast doings of the cattleman and miner, had aroused my enthusiasm. The heroic types, both white and red, which the trail has fashioned to its needs continued to allure me, and when in June, '97, my brother, on his vacation, met me again at West Salem, I outlined a tour which should begin with a study of the Sioux at Standing Rock and end with Seattle and the Pacific Ocean. "I must know the North-west," I said to him. In order to report properly to any army post, I had in my pocket a letter from General Miles which commended me to all agents and officers, and with this as passport I was in the middle of getting my equipment in order when Ernest Thompson Seton and his wife surprised me by dropping off the train one morning late in the month. They too, were on their way to the Rockies, and in radiant holiday humor. My first meeting with Seton had been in New York at a luncheon given for James Barrie only a few months before, but we had formed one of those instantaneous friendships which spring from the possession of many identical interests. His skill as an illustrator and his knowledge of wild animals had gained my admiration but I now learned that he knew certain phases of the West better than I, for though of English birth he had lived in Manitoba for several years. We were of the same age also, and this was another bond of sympathy. He asked me to accompany him on his tour of the Yellowstone but as I had already arranged for a study of the Sioux, and as his own plans were equally definite, we reluctantly gave up all idea of camping together, but agreed to meet in New York City in October to compare notes. The following week, on the first day of July, my brother and I were in Bismark, North Dakota, on our way to the Standing Rock Reservation to witness the "White Men's Big Sunday," as the red people were accustomed to call the Fourth of July. It chanced to be a cool, sweet, jocund morning, and as we drove away, in an open buggy, over the treeless prairie swells toward the agency some sixty miles to the south, I experienced a sense of elation, a joy of life, a thrill of expectancy, which promised well for fiction. I knew the signs. There was little settlement of any kind for twenty miles, but after we crossed the Cannonball River we entered upon the unviolated, primeval sod of the red hunter. Conical lodges were grouped along the streams. Horsemen with floating feathers and beaded buck-skin shirts over-took us riding like scouts, and when on the second morning we topped the final hill and saw the agency out-spread below us on the river bank, with hundreds of canvas tepees set in a wide circle behind it, our satisfaction was complete. Thousands of Sioux, men, women, and children could be seen moving about the teepees, while platoons of mounted warriors swept like scouting war parties across the plain. I congratulated myself on having reached this famous agency while yet its festival held something tribal and primitive. After reporting to the Commander at Fort Yates, and calling upon the Agent in his office, we took lodgings at a little half-breed boarding house near the store, and ate our dinner at a table where full-bloods, half-bloods and squaw men were the other guests. Every waking hour thereafter we spent in observation of the people. With an interpreter to aid me I conversed with the head men and inquired into their history. The sign-talkers, sitting in the shade of a lodge or wagon-top, depicting with silent grace the stirring tales of their youth, were absorbingly interesting. I spent hours watching the play of their expressive hands. The nonchalant cow-boys riding about the camp, the somber squaw-men (attended by their blanketed wives and groups of wistful half-breed children), and the ragged old medicine men all in their several ways made up a marvelous scene, rich with survivals of pioneer life. The Gall and the Sitting Bull were both dead, but Rain-in-the-Face (made famous by Longfellow) was alive, very much alive, though a cripple. We met him several times riding at ease (his crutch tied to his saddle), a genial, handsome, dark-complexioned man of middle age, with whom it was hard to associate the acts of ferocity with which he was charged. My letter of introduction from General Miles not only made me welcome at the Fort, it authorized me to examine the early records of the Agency, and these I carefully read in search of material concerning the Sitting Bull. In those dingy, brief, bald lines of record, I discovered official evidence of this chief's supremacy long before the Custer battle. As early as 1870 he was set down as one of the "irreconcilables," and in 1874 the Sioux most dreaded by the whites was "Sitting Bull's Band." To Sitting Bull all couriers were sent, and the brief official accounts of their meetings with him were highly dramatic and sometimes humorous. He was a red man, and proud of it. He believed in remaining as he was created. "The great spirit made me red, and red I am satisfied to remain," he declared. "All my people ask is to be let alone, to hunt the buffalo, and to live the life of our fathers"--and in this he had the sympathy of many white men even of his day. (In the final count this chieftain, for the reason that he kept the red man's point of view, will outlive the opportunists who truckled to the white man's power. He will stand as a typical Sioux.) Our days at the Agency passed so swiftly, so pleasantly that we would have lingered on indefinitely had not the report of an "outbreak" among the northern Cheyennes aroused a more intense interest. In the hope of seeing something of this uprising I insisted on hurriedly returning to Bismark, where we took the earliest possible train for Custer City, Montana. At that strange little cow-town my brother hired a man to drive us to Fort Custer, some forty or fifty miles to the south, a ride which carried us deep into a wild and beautiful land, a country almost untouched of man, and when, toward sun-set, we came in sight of the high bluff which stands at the confluence of the Big Horn and the Little Big Horn rivers, the fort, the ferry, the stream were a picture by Catlin or a glorious illustration in a romance of the Border. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in the stirring days of Sitting Bull and Roman Nose. The commander of the Garrison, Colonel Anderson, a fine soldierly figure, welcomed us courteously and turned us over to Lieutenant Aherne, a hospitable young Irishman who invited us to spend the night in his quarters. It happened most opportunely that he was serving as Inspector of the meat issue at the Crow Agency, and on the following day we accompanied him on his detail, a deeply instructive experience, for, at night we attended a ceremonial social dance given by the Crows in honor of Chief Two Moon, a visiting Cheyenne. Two Moon, a handsome broad-shouldered man of fifty, met us at the door of the Dance Lodge, welcomed us with courtly grace, and gave us seats beside him on the honor side of the circle. It appeared that he was master of ceremonies, and under his direction the dancing proceeded with such dramatic grace and skill that we needed very little help to understand its action. In groups of eight, in perfect order, the young men rose from their seats, advanced to the center of the circle, and there reënacted by means of signs, attitudes and groupings, various notable personal or tribal achievements of the past. With stealthy, silent stride this one delineated the exploit of some ancestral chief, who had darted forth alone on a solitary scouting expedition. Others depicted the enemy, representing his detection and his capture. A third band arose, and trailing the hero spy, swiftly, silently, discovered the captors, attacked and defeated them and with triumphant shouts released the captive and brought him to camp--all in perfect unison with the singers at the drum whose varying rhythm set the pace for each especial episode, almost as precisely as a Chinese orchestra augments or diminishes the action on the stage. To me this was a thrilling glimpse into prehistoric America, for these young men, stripped of their tainted white-man rags, were wholly admirable, painted lithe-limbed warriors, rejoicing once again in the light of their ancestral moons. On every face was a look like that of a captive leopard, dreaming of far-seen, familiar sands. The present was forgot, the past was momentarily restored. At midnight we went away but the strangely-moving beat of that barbaric drum was still throbbing in my ears as I fell asleep. * * * * * Early the following morning, eager to reach the scene of the Cheyenne outbreak we hired saddle horses and rode away directly across the Custer battle field on our way toward Lame Deer, where we were told the troops were still in camp to protect the agency. What a ride that was! Our trail led us beyond the plow and the wagon wheel, far into the midst of hills where herds of cattle were feeding as the bison had fed for countless ages. Every valley had its story, for here the last battles of the Cheyennes had taken place. I had overtaken the passing world of the red nomad. We stopped that night at a ranch about half way across the range, and in its cabin I listened while the cattlemen expressed their hatred of the Cheyenne. The violence of their antagonism, their shameless greed for the red man's land revealed to me once and for all the fomenting spirit of each of the Indian Wars which had accompanied the exterminating, century-long march of our invading race. In a single sentence these men expressed the ruthless creed of the land-seeker. "We intend to wipe these red sons-of-dogs from the face of the earth." Here was displayed shamelessly the seamy side of western settlement. At about ten o'clock next morning we topped the scantily-timbered ridge which walls in the Lame Deer Agency, and looked down upon the tents of the troops. A company of cavalry drilling on the open field to the north gave evidence of active service, and as I studied the mingled huts and tepees of the village, I realized that I had arrived in time to witness some part of the latest staging of the red man's final stand. Reporting at once to the agent, Major George Stouch, I found him to be a veteran officer of the regular army "On Special Duty," a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man of unassuming dignity whose crooked wrist (caused by a bullet in the Civil War) gave him a touch of awkwardness; but his eyes were keen, and his voice clear and decisive. "The plans of the cattlemen have been momentarily checked," he said, "but they are still bitter, and a single pistol-shot may bring renewed trouble. The Cheyennes, as you know, are warriors." He introduced me to Captain Cooper, in command of the troopers, and to Captain Reed, Commander of the Infantry, who invited us to join his mess, an invitation which we gladly accepted. Cooper was a soldier of wide experience, a veteran of the Civil War, and an Indian fighter of distinction. But his Lieutenant, a handsome young West Pointer named Livermore, interested me still more keenly, for he was a student of the sign language and had been at one time in command of an experimental troop of red "rookies." Like Major Stouch he was a broad-minded friend of all primitive peoples, and his experiences and stories were of the greatest value to me. With the aid of Major Stouch I won the confidence of White Bull, Two Moon, Porcupine, American Horse and other of the principal Cheyennes, and one of the Agency policemen, a fine fellow called Wolf Voice, became my interpreter. Though half-Cheyenne and half-Assiniboin, he spoke English well, and manifested a marked sense of humor. He had served one summer as guide to Frederick Remington, and had some capital stories concerning him. "Remington fat man--too heavy on pony. Him 'fraid Injuns sure catch him," he said with a chuckle. "Him all-time carry box--take pictures. Him no warrior." For two weeks I absorbed "material" at every pore, careless of other duties, thinking only of this world, avid for the truth, yet selecting my facts as every artist must, until, at last, measurably content I announced my intention to return to the railway. "We have tickets to Seattle," I said to Stouch, "and we must make use of them." "I'm sorry to have you go," he replied, "but if you must go I'll send Wolf Voice with you as far as Custer." We had no real need of a guide but I was glad to have Wolf Voice riding with me, for I had grown to like him and welcomed any opportunity for conversing with him. He was one of the few full-bloods who could speak English well enough to enjoy a joke. As we were passing his little cabin, just at the edge of the Agency, he said, "Wait, I get you somesing." In a few moments he returned, carrying a long eagle feather in his hand. This he handed to me, saying, "My little boy--him dead. Him carry in dance dis fedder. You my friend. You take him." Major Stouch had told me of this boy, a handsome little fellow of only five years of age, who used to join most soberly and cunningly with the men in their ceremonial dances; and so when Wolf Voice said, "I give you dis fedder--you my friend. You Indian's friend," I was deeply moved. "Wolf Voice, I shall keep this as a sign, a sign that we are friends." He pointed toward a woman crouching over a fire in the corral, "You see him--my wife? Him cry--all time cry since him son die. Him no sleep in house. Sleep all time in tepee. Me no sleep in house. Spirit come, cry, _woo-oo-oo_ in chimney. My boy spirit come,--cry--me 'fraid! My heart very sore." The bronze face of the big man was quivering with emotion as he spoke, and not knowing what to say to comfort him I pretended to haste. "Let us go. You can tell me about it while we ride." As we set forth he recovered his smile, for he was naturally of a cheerful disposition, and in our long, leisurely journey I obtained many curious glimpses into his psychology--the psychology of the red man. He led us to certain shrines or "medicine" rocks and his remarks concerning the offerings of cartridges, calico, tobacco and food which we found deposited beside a twisted piece of lava on the side of a low hill were most revealing. "Wolf Voice, do you believe the dead come back to get these presents," I asked. "No," he soberly replied. "Spirit no eat tobacco, spirit eat spirit of tobacco." His reply was essentially Oriental in its philosophy. It was the _essence_ of the offering, the _invisible_ part which was taken by the invisible dead. Many other of his remarks were almost equally revelatory. "White soldier heap fool," he said. "Stand up in rows to be shot at. Injun fight running--in bush--behind trees." We stopped again at The Half-Way Ranch, and the manner in which the cattlemen treated Wolf Voice angered me. He was much more admirable than they, and yet they would not allow him to sleep in the house. He rode all the way back to Fort Custer with us and when we parted I said, "Wolf Voice, I hope we meet again," and I meant it. His spirit is in all that I have since written of the red men. He, Two Moon, American Horse, and Porcupine were of incalculable value to me in composing _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, which was based upon this little war. From Billings we went almost directly to the Flat Head Reservation. We had heard that a herd of buffalo was to be seen in its native pastures just west of Flat Head Lake and as I put more value on seeing that herd than upon any other "sight" in the state of Montana, we made it our next objective. Outfitting at Jocko we rode across the divide to the St. Ignacio Mission. Less wild than the Cheyenne reservation the Flat Head country was much more beautiful, and we were entirely happy in our camp beside the rushing stream which came down from the Jocko Lakes. "Yes, there is such a herd," the trader said. "It is owned by Michel Pablo and consists of about two hundred, old and young. They can be reached by riding straight north for some twenty miles and then turning to the west. You will have to hunt them, however; they are not in a corral. They are feeding just as they used to do. They come and go as they happen to feel the need of food or water." With these stimulating directions we set forth one morning to "hunt a herd of buffalo," excited as a couple of boys, eager as hunters yet with only the desire to see the wild kine. After we left the road and turned westward our way led athwart low hills and snake-like ravines and along deep-worn cattle paths leading to water holes. All was magnificently primeval. No mark of plow or spade, no planted stake or post assailed our eyes. We were deep in the land of the bison at last. Finally, as we topped a long, low swell, my brother shouted, "Buffalo!" and looking where he pointed, I detected through the heated haze of the midday plain, certain vague, unfamiliar forms which hinted at the prehistoric past. They were not cows or horses, that was evident. Here and there purple-black bodies loomed, while close beside them other smaller objects gave off a singular and striking contrast. There was no mistaking the character of these animals. They were bison. To ride down upon them thus, in the silence and heat of that uninhabited valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion which had burned in the hearts of our pioneer ancestors. As we drew nearer, clouds of dust arose like lazy smoke from smoldering fires, curtains which concealed some mighty bull tossing the powdery earth with giant hoof. The cows seeing our approach, began to shift and change. The bulls did not hurry, on the contrary, they fell to the rear and grimly halted our advance. Towers of alkali dust, hot and white, lingering smoke-like in the air shielded us like a screen, and so--slowly riding--we drew near enough to perceive the calves and hear the mutter of the cows as they reënacted for us the life of the vanished millions of their kind. Here lay a calf beside its dam. Yonder a solitary ancient and shaggy bull stood apart, sullen and brooding. Nearer a colossal chieftain, glossy, black, and weighing two thousand pounds moved from group to group, restless and combative, wrinkling his ridiculously small nose, and uttering a deep, menacing, muttering roar. His rivals, though they slunk away, gave utterance to similar sinister snarls, as if voicing bitter resentment. They did not bellow, they _growled_, low down in their cavernous throats, like angry lions. Nothing that I had ever heard or read of buffaloes had given me the quality of this majestic clamor. Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way, reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like elephants--clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity. It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America, for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and the customs of the past. As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of our presence. It was as if, unobserved, and yet close beside them, we were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America, America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day. * * * * * On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway--the way we came out--means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June." It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I could go." "But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September." Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my classmate Burton Babcock, who was living in a village on Puget Sound. The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word "Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls. Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes, Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom. This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock was expecting me to visit him, and this I did. Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin, camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor. Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man. By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner of two small houses on a ragged street--these and a timber claim on the Skagit River formed his entire fortune. Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too, often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such outfit as he could carry on his back. "What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?" With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's beautiful up there." Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in the Klondike." "It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I finish my history of Grant and I'll go in with you." With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems, short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work. Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota were moving on into these more splendid spaces, so now I resolved to follow them and be their chronicler. This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana. CHAPTER FIVE The Telegraph Trail The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed I could not make another trip to the Northwest. The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room, turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled. I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness. It is impossible, even in Wyoming, to get fifty miles from settlement. I long to undertake a journey which demands hardihood, and so, after careful investigation, I have decided to go into the Yukon Valley by pack train over the British Columbian Mountains, a route which offers a fine and characteristic New World adventure." To prepare myself for this expedition I ran up to Ottawa in February to study maps and to talk with Canadian officials concerning the various trails which were being surveyed and blazed. "No one knows much about that country," said Dawson with a smile. I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a path which followed an abandoned telegraph survey from Quesnelle on the Fraser River to the Stickeen, a distance estimated at about eight hundred miles, and I quote these lines as indicating my mind at the time: The way is long and cold and lone-- But I go! It leads where pines forever moan Their weight of snow-- But I go! There are voices in the wind which call There are shapes which beckon to the plain I must journey where the peaks are tall, And lonely herons clamor in the rain. One of my most valued friends in Washington at this time was young Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Police Commissioner in New York City to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His life on a Dakota ranch had not only filled him with a love for western trails and sympathy with western men, but had created in him a special interest in western writers. No doubt it was this regard for the historians of the West which led him to invite me to his house; for during the winter I occasionally lunched or dined with him. He also gave me the run of his office, and there I sometimes saw him in action, steering the department toward efficiency. Though nominally Assistant Secretary he was in fact the Head of the Navy, boldly pushing plans to increase its fighting power. This I know, for one day as I sat in his office I heard him giving orders for gun practice and discussing the higher armament of certain ships. I remember his words as he showed me a sheet on which was indicated the relative strength of the world's navies. "We must raise all our guns to a higher power," he said with characteristic emphasis. John Hay, Senator Lodge, Major Powell and Edward Eggleston were among my most distinguished hosts during this winter and I have many pleasant memories of these highly distinctive personalities. Major Powell appealed to me with especial power by reason of his heroic past. He had been an engineer under Grant at Vicksburg and was very helpful to me in stating the methods of the siege, but his experiences after the war were still more romantic. Though a small man and with but one arm, he had nevertheless led a fleet of canoes through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado--the first successful attempt at navigating that savage and sullen river, and his laconic account of it enormously impressed me. He was, at this time, the well-known head of the Ethnological Bureau, and I frequently saw him at the Cosmos Club, grouped with Langley, Merriam, Howard and other of my scientific friends. He was a somber, silent, and rather unkempt figure, with the look of a dreaming lion on his face. It was hard to relate him with the man who had conquered the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. His direct antithesis was Edward Eggleston, whose residence was a small brick house just back of the Congressional Library. Eggleston, humorous, ready of speech, was usually surrounded by an attentive circle of delighted listeners and I often drew near to share his monologue. He was a handsome man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full beard, and was especially learned in American early history. "Edward loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but to me his talk was always interesting. We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie, which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minnesota had minutely explored. I told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of _The Hoosier School-master_, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of explanation on the fly leaf of a copy which I still own and value highly, for I regard him now, as I did then, as one of the brave pioneers of distinctive Middle Border fiction. Roosevelt considered me something of a Populist, (as I was), and I well remember a dinner in Senator Lodge's house where he and Henry Adams heckled me for an hour or more in order to obtain a statement of what I thought "ailed" Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. They all held the notion that I understood these farmer folk well enough to reflect their secret antagonisms, which I certainly did. I recall getting pretty hot in my plea, but Roosevelt seemed rather proud of me as I warmly defended my former neighbor. "The man on the rented farm who is raising corn at fifteen cents per bushel to pay interest on a mortgage is apt to be bitter," I argued. However, this evening was an exception. Generally we talked of the West, of cattle ranching, of trailing and of the splendid types of pioneers who were about to vanish from the earth. One night as we sat at dinner in his house, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said with a smile "I can't tell you how I enjoy having a man at my table who knows the difference between a _parfleche_ and an _aparejo_." Although I loved the trail I had given up shooting. I no longer carried a gun even in the hills--although, I will admit, I permitted my companions to do so. Roosevelt differed from me in this. He loved "the song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he explained. I recall quoting to him one of his own vividly beautiful descriptions of dawn among the hills, a story which led up to the stalking and the death of a noble elk. "It was fine, all fine and true and poetic," I declared, "but I should have listened with gratitude to the voice of the elk and watched him go his appointed way in peace." "I understand your position perfectly," he replied, "but it is illogical. You must remember every wild animal dies a violent death. Elk and deer and pheasants are periodically destroyed by snows and storms of sleet--and what about the butcher killing lambs and chickens for your table? I notice you accept my roast duck." He was greatly interested in my proposed trip into the Yukon. "By George, I wish I could go with you," he said, and I had no doubt of his sincerity. Then his tone changed. "We are in for trouble with Spain and I must be on the job." To this I replied, "If I really knew that war was coming, I'd give up my trip, but I can't believe the Spaniards intend to fight, and this is my last and best chance to see the Northwest." In my notebook I find this entry: "Jan., 1898. Dined again last night with Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a man who is likely to be much in the public eye during his life. A man of great energy, of noble impulses, and of undoubted ability." I do not put this forward as evidence of singular perception on my part, for I imagine thousands were saying precisely the same thing. I merely include it to prove that I was not entirely lacking in penetration. Henry B. Fuller, who came along one day in January, proved a joy and comfort to me. His attitude toward Washington amused me. Assuming the air of a Cook tourist, he methodically, and meticulously explored the city, bringing to me each night a detailed report of what he had seen. His concise, humorous and self-derisive comment was literature of a most delightful quality, and I repeatedly urged him to write of the capital as he talked of it to me, but he professed to have lost his desire to write, and though I did not believe this, I hated to hear him say it, for I valued his satiric humor and his wide knowledge of life. He was amazed when I told him of my plan to start, in April, for the Yukon, and in answer to his question I said, "I need an expedition of heroic sort to complete my education, and to wash the library dust out of my brain." In response to a cordial note, I called upon John Hay one morning. He received me in a little room off the main hall of his house, whose spaciousness made him seem diminutive. He struck me as a dapper man, noticeably, but not offensively, self-satisfied. His fine black beard was streaked with white, but his complexion was youthfully clear. Though undersized he was compact and sturdy, and his voice was crisp, musical, and decisive. We talked of Grant, of whom he had many pleasing personal recollections, and when a little later we went for a walk, he grew curiously wistful and spoke of his youth in the West and of the simple life of his early days in Washington with tenderness. It appeared that wealth and honor had not made him happy. Doubtless this was only a mood, for in parting he reassumed his smiling official pose. A few days later as I entered my Hotel I confronted the tall figure and somber, introspective face of General Longstreet whom I had visited a year before at his home in Gainesville, Georgia. We conversed a few moments, then shook hands and parted, but as he passed into the street I followed him. From the door-step I watched him slowly making his cautious way through throngs of lesser men (who gave no special heed to him), and as I thought of the days when his dread name was second only to Lee's in the fear and admiration of the North, I marveled at the change in twenty years. Now he was a deaf, hesitant old man, sorrowful of aspect, poor, dim-eyed, neglected, and alone. "Swift are the changes of life, and especially of American life," I made note. "Most people think of Longstreet as a dead man, yet there he walks, the gray ghost of the Confederacy, silent, alone." As spring came on and the end of my history of Grant drew near, my longing for the open air, the forest and the trail, made proof-reading a punishment. My eyes (weary of newspaper files and manuscripts) filled with mountain pictures. Visioning my plunge into the wilderness with keenest longing, I collected a kit of cooking utensils, a sleeping bag and some pack saddles (which my friend, A. A. Anderson, had invented), together with all information concerning British Columbia and the proper time for hitting The Long Trail. In showing my maps to Howells in New York, I casually remarked, "I shall go in _here_, and come out _there_--over a thousand miles of Trail," and as he looked at me in wonder, I had a sudden realization of what that remark meant. A vision of myself, a minute, almost indistinguishable insect--creeping hardily through an illimitable forest filled my imagination, and a momentary awe fell upon me. "How easy it would be to break a leg, or go down with my horse in an icy river!" I thought. Nevertheless, I proceeded with my explanations, gayly assuring Howells that it was only a magnificent outing, quoting to him from certain circulars, passages of tempting descriptions in which "splendid savannahs" and "herds of deer and caribou" were used with fine effect. In my secret heart I hoped to recapture some part of that Spirit of the Sunset which my father had found and loved in Central Minnesota in Fifty-eight. Deeper still, I had a hope of reënacting, in helpful degree, the epic days of Forty-nine, when men found their painful way up the Platte Cañon, and over the Continental Divide to Oregon. "It is my last chance to do a bit of real mountaineering, of going to school to the valiant wilderness," I said, "and I can not afford to miss the opportunity of winning a master's degree in hardihood." That I suffered occasional moments of depression and doubt, the pages of my diary bear witness. At a time when my stories were listed in half the leading magazines, I gravely set down the facts of my situation. "In far away Dakota my father is living alone on a bleak farm, cooking his own food and caring for a dozen head of horses, while my mother, with failing eyes and shortening steps, waits for him and for me in West Salem with only an invalid sister-in-law to keep her company. In a very real sense they are all depending upon me for help and guidance. I am now the head of the house, and yet--here I sit planning a dangerous adventure into Alaska at a time when I should be at home." My throat ached with pity whenever I received a letter from my mother, for she never failed to express a growing longing for her sons, neither of whom could be with her. To do our chosen work a residence in the city was necessary, and so it came about that all my victories, all my small successes were shadowed by my mother's failing health and loneliness. * * * * * It remains to say that during all this time I had heard very little of Miss Zulime Taft. No letters had passed between us, but I now learned through her brother that she was planning to come home during the summer, a fact which should have given me a thrill, but as more than four years had passed since our meeting in Chicago, I merely wondered whether her stay in Paris had greatly changed her character for the better. "She will probably be more French than American when she returns," I said to Lorado, when he spoke of her. "Her letters do not sound that way," he answered. "She seems eager to return, and says that she intends to work with me here in Chicago." Early in March, I notified Babcock to meet me at Ashcroft in British Columbia on April 15th. "We'll outfit there, and go in by way of Quesnelle," I added, and with a mind filled with visions of splendid streams, grassy valleys and glorious camps among eagle-haunted peaks, I finished the final pages of my proof and started West, boyishly eager to set forth upon the mighty circuit of my projected exploration. "This is the end of my historical writing," I notified McClure. "I'm going back to my fiction of the Middle Border." On a radiant April morning I reached the homestead finding mother fairly well, but greatly disturbed over my plan. "I don't like to have you go exploring," she said. "It's dangerous. Why do you do it?" Her voice, the look of her face, took away the spirit of my adventure. I felt like giving it up, but with all arrangements definitely made I could do nothing but go on. The weather was clear and warm, with an odorous south wind drawing forth the leaves, and as I fell to work, raking up the yard, the smell of unfolding blooms, the call of exultant "high-holders" and the chirp of cheerful robins brought back with a rush, all the sweet, associated memories of other springs and other gardens, making my gold-seeking expedition seem not only chimerical, but traitorous to my duties. The hens were singing their cheerful, changeless song below the stable wall; calves were bawling from the neighboring farm-yards and on the mellow soil the shining, broadcast seeders were clattering to their work, while over the greening hills a faint mist wavered, delicate as a bride's veil. Was it not a kind of madness to exchange the security, the peace, the comfort of this homestead, for the hardships of a trail whose circuit could not be less than ten thousand miles, a journey which offered possible injury and certain deprivation? The thought which gave me most uneasiness was not my danger but the knowledge that in leaving my mother to silently brood over the perils which she naturally exaggerated, I was recreant to my pledge. Expression was always elliptical with her; and I shall never know how keenly she suffered during those days of preparation. Instead of acquiring a new daughter, she seemed on the point of losing a son. She grudged every moment of the hours which I spent in my study. There was so little for her to do! She kept her chair during her waking hours either on the porch overlooking the garden or in the kitchen supervising the women at their work. Every slightest event was pitifully important in her life. The passing of the railway trains, the milking of the cow, the watering of the horses, the gathering of the eggs--these were important events in her diary. My incessant journeyings, my distant destinations lay far beyond her utmost imagining. To her my comings and goings were as mysterious, as incalculable as the orbits of the moon, and I think she must have sometimes questioned whether Hamlin Garland, the historian, could possibly be the son for whom she had once knit mittens and repaired kites. If I had not been under contract, if I had not gone so far in preparation and announcement that to quit would have been disgraceful, I would have given up my trip on her account. "I am ashamed to turn back. I must go on," I said. "I won't be gone long. I'll come out by way of the Stickeen." When the time came to say good-bye, she broke down utterly and I went away with a painful constriction in my own throat, a lump which lasted for hours. Not till on the second day as I saw droves of Canadian antelope racing with the train, whilst flights of geese overhead gave certain sign of the wilderness, did I regain my desire to explore the valleys of the North. That lonely old woman on the porch of the Homestead was never absent from my mind. Promptly on the afternoon of my arrival at Ashcroft on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Burton Babcock, wearing a sombrero and a suit of corduroy, dropped from the eastbound train, a duffel bag in his right hand, and a newly-invented camp-stove in the other. "Well, here I am," he said, with his characteristic chuckle. Ready for the road, and with no regrets, no hesitancies, no fears, he set to work getting our outfit together leaving me to gather what information I could concerning the route which we had elected to traverse. It was hard for me to realize that this bent, bearded, grizzled mountaineer was Burt Babcock, the slim companion of my Dry Run Prairie boyhood--it was only in peculiar ways of laughter, and in a certain familiar pucker of wrinkles about his eyes, that I traced the connecting link. I must assume that he found in me something quite as alien--perhaps more so, for my life in Boston and New York had given to me habits of speech and of thought which obscured, no doubt, most of my youthful characteristics. As I talked with some of the more thoughtful and conscientious citizens of the town, I found them taking a very serious view of the trip we were about to undertake. "It is a mighty long, hard road," they said, "and a lot of men are going to find it a test of endurance. Nobody knows anything about the trail after you leave Quesnelle. You want to go with a good outfit, prepared for two months of hardship." In view of this warning I was especially slow about buying ponies. "I want the best and gentlest beasts obtainable," I said to Burton. "I am especially desirous of a trustworthy riding horse." That evening, as I was standing on the hotel porch, my attention was attracted to a man mounted on a spirited gray horse, riding up the street toward the hotel. There was something so noble in the proud arch of this horse's neck, something so powerful in the fling of his hooves that I exclaimed to the landlord, "_There_ is the kind of saddle-horse I am looking for! I wonder if by any chance he is for sale?" The landlord smiled. "He is. I sent word to the owner and he has come on purpose to see you. You can have the animal if you want him bad enough." The rider drew rein and the landlord introduced me as the man who was in need of a mount. Each moment my desire to own the horse deepened, but I was afraid to show even approval. "How much do you want for him?" I asked indifferently. "Well, stranger, I must have fifty dollars for this horse. There is a strain of Arabian in him, and he is a trained cow-pony besides." Fifty dollars for an animal like that! It was like giving him away. I was at once suspicious. "There must be some trick about him. He is locoed or something," I remarked to my partner. We could find nothing wrong, however, and at last I passed over a fifty dollar bill and led the horse away. Each moment increased my joy and pride in that dapple-gray gelding. Undoubtedly there was Arabian blood in his veins. He had a thoroughbred look. He listened to every word I spoke to him. He followed me as cheerfully and as readily as a dog. He let me feel his ears (which a locoed horse will not do) and at a touch of my hand made room for me in his stall. In all ways he seemed exactly the horse I had been looking for, and I began to think of my long ride over the mountains with confidence. To put the final touch to my security, the owner as he was leaving the hotel said to me, with a note of sadness in his voice, "I hate to see that horse take the long trail. Treat him well, partner." Three days later, mounted on my stately gray "Ladrone," I led my little pack-train out of Ashcroft, bound for Teslin Lake, some twelve hundred miles to the Northwest. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and as I rode I made some rhymes to express my feeling of exultation. I mount and mount toward the sky, The eagle's heart is mine. I ride to put the clouds below Where silver lakelets shine. The roaring streams wax white with snow, The granite peaks draw near, The blue sky widens, violets grow, The air is frosty clear. And so from cliff to cliff I rise, The eagle's heart is mine; Above me, ever-broadening skies-- Below, the river's shine. The next day as we were going down a steep slope, one of the pack horses bolted and ran round Ladrone entangling me in the lead rope. When I came to myself I was under my horse, saddle and all, and Ladrone was looking down at me in wonder. The tremendous strain on the rope had pulled me saddle and all under his belly, and had he been the ordinary cayuse he would have kicked me to shreds. To my astonishment and deep gratitude he remained perfectly quiet while I scrambled out from under his feet and put the saddle in place. My partner, white with excitement, drew near. "I thought you were a goner," he said, huskily. "That horse of yours is a wonder." As I thought of the look in that gray pony's brown eyes whilst I lay, helpless beneath him, my heart warmed with gratitude and affection. "Old boy," I said, as I patted his neck, "I will never leave _you_ to starve and freeze in the far north. If you carry me through to Telegraph Creek, I will see that you are comfortable for the remaining years of your life." I mention this incident for the reason that it had far-reaching consequences--as the reader will discover. In _The Trail of the Goldseekers_, I have told in detail my story of our expedition. Suffice it to say, at this point, that we were seventy-nine days in the wilderness, that we were eaten by flies and mosquitoes, that we traveled in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our saddles in the rain. We toiled through marshes, slopped across miles of tundra, swam our horses through roaring glacial streams and dug them out of bog-holes. For more than two hundred miles we walked in order to lighten the loads of our weakened animals, and when we reached Glenora we were both past-masters of the art of camping through a wilderness. No one could tell us anything about packing, bushing in a slough or managing a pack-train. We were master-trailers! Burton, though a year or two older than I, proved an invincible explorer, tireless, uncomplaining and imperturbable. In all our harsh experiences, throughout all our eighty days of struggle with mud, rocks, insects, rain, hunger and cold, he never for one moment lost his courage. Kind to our beasts, defiant of the weather, undismayed by any hardship, he kept the trail. He never once lifted his voice in anger. His endurance of my moods was heroic. Assuming more than half of the physical labor he loyally said, "You are the boss, the historian of this expedition. You are the proprietor. I am only the hired-man." Such service could not be bought. It sprang from a friendship which had begun twenty-eight years before, an attachment deep as our lives which could not be broken. On the seventy-ninth day, ragged, swarthy, bearded like Forty-niners, with only a handful of flour and a lump of bacon left in our kit we came down to the Third Fork of the Stickeen River, without a flake of gold to show for our "panning" the sands along our way. My diaries state that for more than thirty days of this journey it rained, and as I look back upon our three weeks in the Skeena valley I shiver with a kind of retrospective terror. At one time it looked as though we must leave all our horses in that gloomy forest. Ladrone lost the proud arch of his neck and the light lift of his small feet. He could no longer carry me up the steeps and his ribs showed pitifully. At Glenora, in beautiful sunny weather, we camped for two weeks in blissful leisure while our horses recovered their strength and courage. We were all hungry for the sun. For hours we lay on the grass soaking our hides full of light and heat, discussing gravely but at our ease, the situation. Our plan had been to pack through to Teslin Lake, build a raft there and float down the Hotalinqua into the Yukon and so on to Dawson City, but at Glenora I found a letter from my mother waiting for me, a pitiful plea for me to "hurry back," and as we were belated a month or more, and as winter comes early in those latitudes, I decided to turn over the entire outfit to Babcock and start homeward by way of Fort Wrangell. "I can't afford to spend the winter on the Yukon," I said to Burton. "My mother is not well and is asking for me. I will keep Ladrone--I am going to take him home with me--but the remainder of the outfit is yours. If you decide to go on to Teslin--which I advise against--you will need a thousand pounds of food and this I will purchase for you.--It is hard to quit the trail. I feel as if running a pack-train were the main business of my life and that I am deserting my job in going out, but that is what I must do." The last Hudson Bay trading steamer was due at about this time and I decided to take passage to Fort Wrangell with Ladrone, who was almost as fat and handsome as ever. Two weeks of delicious grass had done wonders for him. I knew that every horse driven through to Teslin Lake would be turned out to freeze and starve at the end of the trail, and I could not think of abandoning my brave pony to such a fate. He had borne me over mud, rocks and streams. He had starved and shivered for me, and now he was to travel with me back to a more amiable climate at least. "I could never look my readers in the face if I left him up here," I explained to my partners who knew that I intended to make a book of my experiences. * * * * * It was a sad moment for my partner as for me when I led my horse down to the steamer. Ladrone seemed to realize that he was leaving his comrades of the trail for he called to them anxiously, again and again. He had led them for the last time. When the cry "HYak KILpy" came next day he would not be there! Having seen him safely stowed below deck I returned to the trail for a final word with Burton. There he stood, on the dock, brown with camp-fire smoke, worn and weather beaten, his tireless hands folded behind his back, a remote, dreaming, melancholy look in his fearless eyes. His limp sombrero rested grotesquely awry upon his shaggy head, his trousers bulged awkwardly at the knees--but he was a warrior! Thin and worn and lame he was about to set forth single-handedly on a journey whose circuit would carry him far within the Arctic Circle. The boat began to move. "Good luck, Old Man," I called. "Good Luck!" he huskily responded. "My love to the folks." I never saw him again. I went to Wrangell, and while camped there waiting for a boat to take me back to the States I heard of a "strike" at Atlin, somewhere back of Skaguay. I decided to join this rush, and so, leaving my horse to pasture in the lush grass of the hill-side, I took steamer for the north. Again I outfitted, this time at Skaguay. I crossed the famous White Pass. I reached Atlin City. I took a claim. A month later I returned to Wrangell, picked up Ladrone, shipped with him to Seattle and so ceased to be a goldseeker. In Seattle my wonder and affection for Ladrone increased. He had never seen a big town before, or heard a street car, or met a switching engine, and yet he followed me through the city like a trustworthy dog, his nose pressed against my shoulder as if he knew I would protect him. At the door of the freight car which I had chartered, he hesitated, but only for an instant. At the word of command he walked the narrow plank into the dark interior and there I left him with food and water, billed for St. Paul where I expected to meet him and transfer him to a car for West Salem. It all seemed very foolish to some people and my only explanation was suggested by a brake-man who said, "He's a runnin' horse, ain't he?" "Yes, he's valuable. Take good care of him. He is Arabian." CHAPTER SIX The Return of the Artist After an absence of five months I returned to La Crosse just in time to eat Old Settlers Dinner with my mother at the County Fair, quite as I used to do in the "early days" of Iowa. It was the customary annual round-up of the pioneers, a time of haunting, sweetly-sad recollections, and all the speeches were filled with allusions to the days when deer on the hills and grouse in the meadows gave zest to life upon the farms. How peaceful, how secure, how abundant my native valley appeared to me, after those gloomy toilsome months in the cold, green forests of British Columbia--and how incredible my story must have seemed to my mother as I told her of my journey eastward by boat and train, bringing my saddle horse across four thousand miles of wood and wave, in order that he might spend his final years with me in the oat-filled, sheltered valley of Neshonoc. "His courage and faithfulness made it impossible for me to leave him up there," I explained. He had arrived on the train which preceded me, and was still in the car. At the urgent request of my Uncle Frank I unloaded him, saddled him, and rode him down to the fair-ground, wearing my travel-scarred sombrero, my faded trailer's suit and my leggings, a mild exhibition of vanity which I trust the reader will overlook, for in doing this I not only gave keen joy to my relatives, but furnished another "Feature" to the show. My friend, Samuel McKee, the Presbyterian minister in the village, being from Kentucky, came nearer to understanding the value of my horse than any other spectator. "I don't wonder you brought him back," he said, after careful study. "He is a beauty. There's a strain of Arabian in him." My mother's joy over my safe return was quite as wordless as her sorrow at our parting (in April) had been. To have me close beside her, to lay her hand upon my arm, filled her with inexpressible content. She could not imagine the hundredth part of the hardships I had endured, and I made no special effort to enlighten her--I merely said, "You needn't worry, mother, one such experience is enough. I shall never leave you for so many months again," and I meant it. With a shy smile and a hesitant voice, she reverted to a subject which was of increasing interest to her. "What about my new daughter? When am I to see her? I hope now you'll begin to think of a wife. First thing you know you'll be too old." My reply was vaguely jocular. "Be patient a little while longer. I shall seriously set to work and see what I can find for you by way of a daughter-in-law." "Choose a nice one," she persisted. "One that will like the old house--and me. Don't get one who will be too stylish to live here with us." In this enterprise I was not as confident as I appeared, for the problem was not simple. "The girl who can consent to be my wife must needs have a generous heart and a broad mind, to understand (and share) the humble conditions of my life, and to tolerate the simple, old-fashioned notions of my people. It will not be easy," I acknowledged. "I can not afford to make a mistake--one that will bring grief and not happiness to the homestead and its mistress." However, I decided to let that worry stand over. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," was a saying which my father often repeated--and yet I was nearing the dead line! I was thirty-eight. That first night of my return to the valley was of such rich and tender beauty that all the suffering, the hardships of my exploration were forgotten. The moon was at its full, and while the crickets and the katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind, reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opulence of it all, was at rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all seemed events of another and more austere planet. On the day following the fair, just as I was stripping my coat and rolling my sleeves to help my father fence in a pasture for Ladrone, a neighbor came along bringing a package from the post office. It was a book, a copy of my _Life of Grant_, the first I had seen; and, as I opened it I laughed, for I bore little resemblance to a cloistered historian at the moment. My face was the color of a worn saddle; my fingers resembled hooks of bronze, and my feet carried huge, hob-nail shoes. "What would Dr. Brander Matthews, Colonel Church and Howells, who had warmly commended the book, think of me at this moment?" I asked myself. Father was interested, of course, but he was not one to permit a literary interest to interfere with a very important job. "Bring that spade," commanded he, and putting my history on top of a post, I set to work, digging another hole, rejoicing in my strength, for at that time I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. So much the trail had done for me. I had broadened my palms to the cinch and the axe--I had laid my breast to the rain. Nothing physical appalled me, and no labor really wearied me. Oh, the wealth of that day's sunlight, the opulence of those nearby fields--the beauty of those warmly-misted hills! In the evening, as I mounted Ladrone and rode him down the lane, I had no desire to share Burton's perilous journey down the Hotalinqua. As my mother's excitement over my return passed away, her condition was disturbing to me. She was walking less and less and I began at once to consider a course of treatment which might help her. At my aunt's suggestion I wrote to a physician in Madison whose sanitarium she had found helpful, and as my brother chanced to be playing in Milwaukee, I induced mother to go with me to visit him. She consented quite readily for she was eager to see him in a real theater and a real play. We took lodging in one of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid to her and that night she saw Franklin on the stage as one of "the three Dromios" in a farce called "Incog," a piece which made her laugh till she was almost breathless. Next day we took her shopping. That is to say she went along with us a helpless victim, while we purchased for her a hat and cloak, at an expense which seemed to her almost criminal. They were in truth very plain garments, and comparatively inexpensive, but her tender heart overflowed with pride of her sons and a guilty joy in their extravagance. Many times afterward I experienced, as I do at this moment, a sharp pang of regret that I did not insist on a better cloak, a more beautiful hat. I only hope she understood! In this way, or some other way, I bribed her to go with me to Madison, to the Sanitarium. "You must not run home," I said to her. "Make a fair trial of the Institution." To this she uttered no reply and as she did not appear homesick or depressed, I prepared to leave, with a feeling that she was in good hands, and that her health would be greatly benefited by the regimen. "I must go to the city and look up that new daughter," I said to her in excuse for deserting her, and this made her entirely willing to let me go. Chicago brilliantly illuminated, was filled with the spirit of the Peace Jubilee, as I entered it. State Street, grandly impressive under the sweep of a raw east wind, was gay with banners and sparkling with looping thousands of electric lights, but I hurried at once to my study on Elm Street. In half an hour I was deep in my correspondence. The Telegraph Trail was a million miles away, New York and its publishers claimed my full attention once again. * * * * * At two o'clock next day I entered Taft's studio, where I received many cordial congratulations on my return. "I can't understand why you went," Lorado said, and when, at the close of the afternoon, Browne, his brother-in-law, invited me to dinner, saying, "You'll find Miss Zulime Taft there," I accepted. Although in some doubt about Miss Taft's desire to meet me, I was curious to know what four years of Paris had done for her. Browne explained that she was going to take up some sort of work in Chicago. "She's had enough of the Old World for the present." As he let us into the hall of his West Side apartment, I caught a momentary glimpse of a young woman seated in the living room, busily sewing. She rose calmly, though a little surprised at our invasion, and with her rising, spools of thread and bits of cloth fell away from her with comic effect, although her expression remained loftily serene. "Hello, sister Zuhl," called Browne. "Here is an old-time friend of yours." As she greeted me with entire self-possession I hardly recognized her relationship to the pale, self-possessed art-student, with whom I had held unprofitable argument some four years before. She was much more mature and in better health than when I last saw her. She carried herself with dignity, and her gown, graceful of line and rich in color, fitted her beautifully. With no allusion to our former differences she was kind enough to say that she had been a delighted reader of my stories in the magazines, and that she approved of America. "I've come back to stay," she said, and we all applauded her statement. As the evening deepened I perceived that her long stay in England and in France had done a great deal for Zulime Taft. She was not only well informed in art matters, she conversed easily and tactfully, and her accent was refined without being affected. As we settled into our seats around the dinner table, I was glad to find her opposite me. She had met many interesting and distinguished people, both in London and on the Continent, and she brought to our little circle that night the latest word in French art. Indeed, her comment was so entertaining, and so valuable, that I was quite converted to her brother's judgment concerning her term of exile: "Whether you go on with your sculpture or not," he said, "those four years of Europe have done more for you than a college course." She represented everything antithetic to the trail and the farm. She knew little of New England and nothing of the Mountain West. In many ways she was entirely alien to my life and yet--or rather because of that--she interested me. Filled with theories concerning art--enthusiasms with which the "American Colony" in Paris was aflame, she stated them clearly, forcibly and with humor. Her temper in argument was admirable and no man had occasion to talk down at her--as Browne, who was a good deal of a conservative, openly acknowledged. She was all for "technique," it appeared. "What America needs more than subject is skill, knowledge of how to paint," she declared. "Anything can be made beautiful by the artist's brush." At the close of a most delightful evening Fuller and I took our departure together, and we were hardly out of the door before he began to express open, almost unrestrained admiration of Zulime Taft. "She's a very remarkable girl," he said. "She will prove a most valuable addition to our circle." "Yes," I admitted with judicial poise, "she is very intelligent." "Intelligent!" he indignantly retorted. "She's a beauty. She's a prize. Go in and win." Although I did not decide at that moment to go in and win, I was profoundly affected by his words. Without knowing anything more about her than these two meetings gave me, I took it for granted--quite without warrant, that Fuller had learned from Lorado that she was not committed to any one. It was fatuous in me but on this assumption I acted. By reference to letters and other records I find that I dined at the Browne's on the slightest provocation. I suspect I did so without any invitation at all, for while Miss Taft did not betray keen interest in me she did not precisely discourage me. I sought her company as often as possible without calling especial attention to my action, and as she gave no hint of being friendlier with any other man, I went cheerily, blindly along. One afternoon as I was taking tea at one of the great houses of the Lake Shore Drive, she came into the room with the easy grace of one habituated to meeting people of wealth and distinction. Neither arrogant nor humble, her self-respecting composure fairly sealed her conquest so far as I was concerned. The group of artists surrounding Taft had formed an informal Saturday night club, which met in a "Camp Supper," and in these jolly, intimate evenings Miss Taft and her sister, Mrs. Browne, were guiding spirits. Being included in this group I acknowledged these parties to be the most delightful events of my life in Chicago. They appeared a bit of Bohemia, "transmogrified" to suit our conditions, and they made the city seem less like a drab expanse of desolate materialism. Sometimes a great geologist would help to make the coffee, while an architect carved the turkey; and sometimes banker Hutchinson was permitted to aid in distributing plates and spoons, but always Zulime Taft was one of the hostesses, and no one added more to the distinction and the charm of the company. She was never out of character, never at a loss in an effort to entertain her guests, and yet she did this so effectively that her absence was instantly felt--I, at least, always resented the action of those wealthy guests who occasionally hurried away with her to the Thomas Concert at eight-fifteen. My mood was all the more bitter for the reason that I could not afford to take her there myself. To ask her to sit in the gallery was disgraceful, and seats in the balcony were not only expensive, but almost impossible to get. They were all sold, in advance, for the season. For all these reasons I frequently watched her departure with a sense of defeat. Israel Zangwill, who came to town at about this time to lecture, was brought to one of our suppers and proved to be of the true artist spirit. During his stay in the city Taft made a quick sketch of him, catching most admirably the characteristics of his homely face! He was a quaint yet powerful personality, witty and wise, and genial, and made friends wherever he went. Meanwhile, notwithstanding many pleasant meetings with Miss Taft--perhaps because of them--I had my moments of gloomy introspection wherein I cast up accounts in order to determine what I had gained by my six months' vacation in the wilderness. First of all I had become a master trailer--so much was assured, but this acquirement did not promise to be of any practical benefit to me except possibly in the way of a lecture tour. Broadening my hand to the cinch and the axe did not make me any more attractive as a suitor and certainly did not add anything to my capital. My outing had cost me twice what I had calculated upon, and, thus far, I had only syndicated a few letters and a handful of poems. The book which I had in mind to write was still a mass of notes. My horse, whose transportation and tariff had cost me a thousand dollars, was of little use to me, although I hoped to get back a part of his cost by means of a story. My lecture on "The Joys of the Trail" promised to be moderately successful, and yet with all these things conjoined I did not see myself earning enough to warrant me in asking Zulime Taft or any woman to be the daughter which my mother was so eagerly awaiting. It was a time of halting, of transition for me. For six years--even while writing my story of Ulysses Grant I had been absorbing the mountain west in the growing desire to put it into fiction, and now with a burden of Klondike material to be disposed of, I was subconsciously at work upon a story of the plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. In short, as a cattleman would say, I was "milling" in the midst of a wide landscape. I should have gone on to New York at once, but with the alluring associations of Taft's studio, I lingered on through November and December, excusing myself by saying that I could work out my problem better in my own room on Elm Street than in a hotel in New York, and as a matter of fact I did succeed in writing several chapters of the Colorado novel which I called _The Eagle's Heart_. At last, late in December, I bundled my manuscripts together and set out for the East. Perhaps this decision was hastened by some editorial suggestion--at any rate I arrived, for I find in my diary the record of a luncheon with Brander Matthews who said he liked my Grant book,--a verdict which heartened me wonderfully. I believed it to be a good book then, as I do now, but it was not selling as well as we had confidently expected it to do and my publishers had lost interest in it. The reason for the failure of this book was simple. The war with Spain had thrust between the readers of my generation and the Civil War, new commanders, new slogans and new heroes. To this later younger public "General Grant" meant _Frederick_ Grant, and all hats were off to Dewey, Wood and Roosevelt. "You are precisely two years late with your story of the Great Commander," I was told, and this I was free to acknowledge. There is an old proverb which had several times exactly described my situation and which described it then. "It is always darkest just before dawn," proved to be true of this particular period of discouragement, for one day while at The Players, Brett, the head of Macmillans, came up to me and said, "Why don't you let me take over your _Main Traveled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_? I will do this provided you will write two new books for me, one to be called _Boy Life on the Prairie_ and the other a Klondike book based on your experiences in the North." This offer cleared my sky. It not only gave direction to my pen--it roused my hopes of having a home of my own, for Brett's offer involved the advance of several thousand dollars in royalty. I began to think of marriage in a more definite way. My case was not so hopeless after all. Perhaps Zulime Taft---- Taking a room on Twenty-fifth street I set to work with eager intensity to get these five books in shape for the Macmillan press, and in two weeks I had carefully revised _Rose_ and was hard at work on the record of my story of the Northwest which I called _The Trail of the Gold Seekers_. I was done with "milling." I was headed straight for a home. In calling upon Howells soon after my arrival I referred to our last meeting wherein I had lightly remarked (putting my finger on the map), "I shall go in here at Quesnelle and come out there, on the Stickeen," and said, "I am now able to report. I did it. In spite of all the chances for failure I carried out my program." He asked about the dangers I had undergone, and I replied by saying, "A trailer meets his dangers and difficulties one by one. In the mass they are appalling but singly they are surmountable. We took each mile as it came." "What do you intend to do with your experiences?" he asked. "I don't know, but I _think_ they will take the form of a chronicle, a kind of diary, wherein each chapter will be called a camp. Camp One, Camp Two, and the like." "That sounds original and promising," he said, and with his encouragement I set to work. Israel Zangwill was often in the city and we met frequently during January and February. I recall taking him to see Howells whom he greatly admired but had never met. They made a singularly interesting contrast of East and West. Howells was serious, almost sad for some reason, unassuming, self-unconscious and yet masterly in every word. Zangwill on the contrary overflowed with humor, emitting a shower of epigrams concerning America and the things he liked and disliked, and soon had Howells smiling with pleased interest. As we were leaving the house Zangwill remarked in a musing tone, "What fine humility, or rather modesty. I can't imagine any other man of Howells' eminence taking that tone." Kipling had just returned to America, and I went at once to call upon him. I had not seen him since the dinner which he gave to Riley and me in the early Nineties, and I was in doubt as to his attitude toward the States. I found him in a very happy mood, surrounded by callers. In the years of his absence the American public had learned to place a very high value on his work and thousands of his readers were eager to do him honor. "They come in a perfect stream," he said, and there was a note of surprise as well as of pleasure in his voice. He inquired of Riley and Howells and other of our mutual friends, making it plain that he held us all in his affections. I mention his youth, his happiness, his joy with special emphasis for he was stricken with pneumonia a few days later and came so near death that only the most skillful nursing was able to bring him back to health. For two nights his life was despaired of, and when he recovered consciousness it was only to learn that one of his children had died while he himself was at lowest ebb. It was a most tragic reversal of fortune but it had this compensation, it called forth such a flood of sympathy on the part of his public that the daily press carried hourly bulletins of his conditions. It was as if a great ruler were in danger. On Saturday the eleventh of February, I attended a meeting (the first meeting) of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Charles Dudley Warner presided, but Howells was the chief figure. Owen Wister, Robert Underwood Johnson, Augustus Thomas and Bronson Howard took an active part. Warner appointed Thomas and me as a committee to outline a Constitution and By-laws, and I set down in my diary this comment, "Only a few men were out and these few were chilled by a cold room but nevertheless, this meeting is likely to have far-reaching consequences." In these months of my stay in New York I had a very busy and profitable time with Howells, Burroughs, Stedman, Matthews, Herne and their like as neighbors but after all, my home was in the West, and many times each day my mind went back to my mother waiting in the snow-covered little village thirteen hundred miles away. As I had established her in Wisconsin to be near me, it seemed a little like desertion to be spending the winter in the East. My thoughts often returned to the friendly circle in Taft's studio, and late in February I was keenly interested in a letter from Lorado in which he informed me that Wallace Heckman, Attorney for The Art Institute, had offered to give the land to found a summer colony of artists and literary folk on the East bank of Rock River about one hundred miles west of Chicago. "You are to be one of the trustees," Lorado wrote, "and as soon as you get back, Mr. Heckman wants to take us all out to look at the site for the proposed camp." My return to Chicago on the first day of March landed me in the midst of a bleak period of raw winds, filthy slush and all-pervading grime--but with hopes which my new contract with Macmillans had inspired I defied the weather. I rejoined Lorado's circle at once in the expectation of meeting his sister, and in this I was not disappointed. Lorado referred at once to Heckman's offer to deed to our group a tract of land. "He wants you to be one of the trustees and has invited us all to go out at once and inspect the site." Upon learning that Miss Taft was to be one of the members of the colony I accepted the trusteeship very readily. With three thousand dollars advance royalty in sight, I began to imagine myself establishing a little home somewhere in or near Chicago, and the idea of an inexpensive summer camp such as my artist friends had in mind, appealed to me strongly. Alas for my secret hopes!--Whether on this tour of inspection or a few days later I cannot now be sure, but certainly close upon this date Lorado (moved by some confiding remark concerning my interest in his sister Zulime) explained to me with an air of embarrassment that I must not travel any farther in that direction. "Sister Zuhl came back from Paris not to paint or model but to be married. She is definitely committed to another man." He finally, bluntly said. This was a bitter defeat. Although one takes such blows better at thirty-nine than at nineteen, one doesn't lightly say "Oh, well--such is life!" I was in truth disheartened. All my domestic plans fell with a crash. My interest in the colony cooled. The camp suppers lost their charm. It is only fair to me to say that Miss Taft had never indicated in any way that she was mortgaged to another, and no one--so far as I could see, was more in her favor than I, hence I was not entirely to blame in the case. My inferences were logical. So far as her words and actions were concerned I was justified in my hope that she might consent. However, regarding Lorado's warning as final I turned to another and wholly different investment of the cash with which my new contract had embarrassed me. I decided to go to England. For several years my friends in London had been suggesting that I visit them and I had a longing to do so. I wanted to see Barrie, Shaw, Hardy, Besant, and other of my kindly correspondents and this seemed my best time to make the journey. _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_ had won for me many English friends. Henry James had reviewed it, Barrie had written to me in praise of it and Stead had republished it in a cheap edition which had gained a wide circle of readers. "In going abroad now I shall be going among friends," I said to Fuller who was my confidant, as usual. Henry James in a long and intimate letter had said, "It is high time for you to visit England. I shall take great pleasure in having you for a week-end here at Old Rye"--and a re-reading of this letter tipped the scale. I took the train for Wisconsin to see my mother and prepare her for my immediate trip to London. Dear soul! She was doubly deeply disappointed, for I not only failed to bring assurance of a new daughter, I came with an avowal of desertion in my mouth. Pathetically counting on my spending the summer with her, she must now be told that I was about to sail for the Old World! It was not a happy home-coming. I acknowledged myself to be a base, unfilial, selfish wretch, "and yet--if I am ever to see London now is my time. Each year my mother will be older, feebler. The sooner I make the crossing the safer for us all. Furthermore I am no longer young--and just now with Barrie, Shaw, Zangwill, Doyle and Henry James, England will be hospitable to me. The London Macmillans are to bring out my books and so----" Mother consented at last, tearfully, begging me not to stay long and to write often, to which I replied, "You may count on me in July. I shall only be gone three months--four at the outside. I shall send Frank to stay with you--and I shall write every day." Just before coming to West Salem (with a feeling of guilt in my heart) I had purchased a mechanical piano in the hope that it would cheer her lonely hours, and as this instrument had arrived I unboxed it and set it up in the music room, eager to please the old folks to whom it was an amazing contrivance. It was on Sunday and Uncle Will came in together with several of the neighbors, and while I manipulated the stops and worked the pedals, they all sat in silence, marveling at the cunning of the mechanism rather than enjoying "The Ride of the Valkyries." However as I played some simpler things, a song of MacDowells, a study by Grieg, my Uncle's head bowed, and on his face came that somber brooding look which recalled to me the moods of David, his younger brother, whose violin had meant so much to me when as a boy, I lay before the fire and listened with sweet Celtic melancholy to the wailing of its strings. Something in these northern melodies sank deep into my mother's inherited memories, also, and her eyes were wide and still with inward vision, but my Aunt Susan said, "That's a fine invention, but I'd rather hear you sing," and in this judgment Maria concurred. "It's grand," she admitted, "but 'tain't like the human voice." In the end I put the machine back in the corner and sang for them, some of the familiar songs. The instrument was surprising and new and wonderful but it did not touch the hearts of my auditors like "Minnie Minturn" and "The Palace of the King." On the day following I set the date of my departure and at the end of my announcement mother sat in silence, her face clouded with pain, her eyes looking away into space. She had nothing to say in opposition, not a word--she only said, "If you're going I guess the quicker you start the better." CHAPTER SEVEN London and Evening Dress Confession must now be made on a personal matter of capital importance. Up to my thirty-ninth year I had never worn a swallow-tail evening coat, and the question of conforming to a growing sartorial custom was becoming, each day, of more acute concern to my friends as well as to myself. My first realization of the differences which the lack of evening dress can make in a man's career, came upon me clearly during the social stir of the Columbian Exposition, for throughout my ten years' stay in Boston I had accepted (with serene unconsciousness of the incongruity of my action) the paradoxical theory that a "Prince Albert frock coat" was the proper holiday or ceremonial garment of an American democrat. The claw-hammer suit was to me, as to my fellow artist, "the livery of privilege" worn only by monopolistic brigands and the poor parasites who fawned upon and served them, whereas the double-breasted black coat, royal, as its name denoted, was associated in my mind with judges, professors, senators and doctors of divinity. It was, moreover, a dignified and logical garment. It clothed with equal charity a man's stomach and his stern. Generous of its skirts, which went far to conceal wrinkled trousers, it could be worn with a light tie at a formal dinner or with a dark tie at a studio tea, and was equally appropriate at a funeral or a wedding. For all these several reasons it remained the uniform of professional men throughout the Middle Border. From my earliest childhood it had been my ideal of manly elegance. Even in New York I had kept pretty close to the social level where it was still accepted. The World's Fair in '93, however, had not only brought to Chicago many of the discriminating social customs of the East, but also many distinguished guests from the old world to whom dress was a formal, almost sacred routine. To meet these noble aliens, we, the artists and writers of the city, were occasionally invited; and the question "Shall we conform" became ever more pressing in its demand for final settlement. One by one my fellows had deserted from the ranks and were reported as rubbing shoulders with plutocrats in their great dining-rooms or escorting ladies into gilded reception parlors, wearing garments which had no relationship to learning, or art, or law, as I had been taught to believe. Lorado Taft, Oliver Dennett Grover, and even Henry Fuller had gone over to the shining majority, leaving me almost alone in stubborn support of the cylindrical coat. To surrender was made very difficult for me by Eugene Field, who had publicly celebrated me as "the sturdy opponent of the swallow-tail suit," and yet he himself,--though still outwardly faithful--had been heard to say, "I may be forced to wear the damned thing _yet_." In all this I felt the wind of social change. That I stood at the parting of the ways was plain to me. To continue on my present line of march would be to have as exemplars Walt Whitman, Joaquin Miller, John Burroughs and other illustrious non-conformists to whom long beards, easy collars, and short coats were natural and becoming. To take the other road was to follow Lowell and Stedman and Howells. To shorten my beard--or remove it altogether,--to wear a standing collar, and attached cuffs--to abandon my western wide-rimmed hat--these and many other "reforms" were involved in my decision. Do you wonder that I hesitated? That I was being left out of many delightful dinners and receptions had been painfully evident to me for several years, but the consideration which had most weight with me, at this time, was expressed by one of my friends who bluntly declared that all the desirable young women of my acquaintance not only adored men in evening dress but ridiculed those of us who went about at all hours of the day and night in "solemn, shiny, black frocks." I perceived that unless I paid a little more attention to tailors and barbers and haberdashers my chances for bringing a new daughter to my mother were dishearteningly remote. Secretly alarmed and meditating a shameful surrender, I was held in check by the thought of the highly involved system of buttons, ties, gloves, hats, and shoes with which I would be called upon to wrestle. Zangwill, to whom I confided my perplexity, bluntly advised me to conform. "In truth," said he, "the steel pen suit is the most democratic of garments. It renders the poor author indistinguishable from the millionaire." As usual I referred the problem to Howells. After explaining that I had in mind a plan to visit England I said, "Every one but John Burroughs says I must get into the swallow-tail coat; and I will confess that even here in New York I am often embarrassed by finding myself the only man in a frock suit at a dinner." Howells smiled and with delightful humor and that precision of phrase which made him my joy and my despair, answered, "My dear fellow, why don't you make your proposed visit to England, buy your evening suit there and on your return to Chicago plead the inexorability of English social usages?" He had pointed the way out. "By George, I'll do just that," I declared, vastly elated. In this account of my hesitations I am _still_ the historian. In stating my case I am stating the perplexities of thousands of my fellow citizens of the Middle Border. It has its humorous phases--this reversal of social habit in me, but it also has wide significance. My surrender was coincident with similar changes of thought in millions of other young men throughout the West. It was but another indication that the customs of the Border were fading to a memory, and that Western society, which had long been dominated by the stately figures of the minister and the judge, was on its way to adopt the manners and customs of the openly-derided but secretly admired "four hundred." Having decided on my sailing date I asked Howells for a few letters of introduction to English authors. He surprised me by saying, "I have very few acquaintances in England but I will do what I can for you." At the moment of embarkation I disappointed myself by remaining quite calm. Even when the great ship began to heave and snort and slide away from the wharf I experienced no thrill--it was not till an hour or two later, as I stood on the forward deck, watching the sun go down over the tumbling spread of water, which had something of the majesty I had known in the prairies, that I became exalted. The vast expanse seemed strangely like an appalling desert and lifting my eyes to the cloudy horizon line I could almost imagine myself back on the rocks of Walpi overlooking the Navajo reservation. In a letter to my mother I gave the story of my trip. "Feeling a bit queer along about nine o'clock I went to my state room.--When I came on deck the next time, my eyes rested upon the green hills of Ireland!--I am certain the ship's restaurant realized the highest possible profit in my case for I remember but two meals, one as we were leaving Sandy Hook, the other as we signaled Queenstown. It may be that I imbibed a bowl of soup in the interim,--I certainly swallowed a great many doses of several kinds of medicine. The ship's doctor declared me to be the worst sailor he had even known in all his thirty years' experience,--so much of distinction I may definitely claim." In the dark hours of that interminable week, I went over my trail into the Skeena Valley during the previous May, with retrospective delight. In contrast to these endless days of lonely misery in my ship bed those weeks of rain and mud and mosquitoes became a joyous outing. So far from giving any thought to problems of dress or social intercourse I was only interested in reaching land--any land. "In two minutes after I landed at Liverpool I was perfectly well," I wrote to my mother. "The touch of solid earth under my feet instantly restored my sanity. My desire to live returned. In an hour I was aboard one of the quaint little coaches of the Midland Express and on my way to London. "Lush meadows, flecked with fat red cattle feeding beside slow streams; broad lawns rising to wooded hills, on which many-towered gray buildings rose; sudden thick-walled towns; factories, winding streams, noble trees, and finally a yellow mist and London! "I am at a small inn, near the Terminal Hotel. I ate my dinner last night surrounded by English people. With brain still pulsing with the motion of the sea, I went to my bed, rejoicing to feel around me the solid stone walls of this small but ancient hotel." After a long walk in search of my publishers I was repaid by finding several letters awaiting me, and among them was one from Zangwill, who wrote, "Come at once to my house. I have a message for you." His address was almost as quaint in my ear as that of Sir Walter Besant, which was Frognals End--or something like it, but I found it at last on the way to 'Ampstead 'Eath. The house was a modest one but his study was made cheery by a real fire of "coals," and many books. He greeted me heartily and said, "I have an invitation for you to the Authors' Society Dinner which comes next week. It will be what you would call 'a big round-up' and you can't afford to miss it. You must go at once and order that evening suit." The idea of the dinner allured me but I shuffled, "Can't I go as I am?" "Certainly not. It is a full-dress affair." I argued, "But George Bernard Shaw is reported to be without the dress suit." "Yes," admitted Zangwill, "Shaw goes everywhere in tweeds, but then he is Shaw, and can afford to do as he pleases. You will not see him at this dinner. He seldom goes to such functions." With a shudder I plunged. "I'll do it! If I must surrender, let it be on a grand occasion like this. I am in your hands." Zangwill was highly amused. "We will go at once. That suit must be ready for the dinner which comes on Thursday. There's not a moment to spare. The cow-boy must be tamed." My hesitation may seem comical to my reader as it did to Zangwill, but I really stood in deep dread of the change. The thought of bulging shirt fronts, standing collars, varnished shoes and white ties appalled me. With especial hatred and timidity I approached the cylindrical hat, which was so wide a departure from my sombrero.--Nevertheless decision had been taken out of my hands! With wry face I followed my guide. In most unholy glee Zangwill stood looking on whilst I was being measured. "This is the beginning of your moral debacle," said he. "What will they say of you in Wisconsin, when they hear of your appearance at an English dinner wearing 'the livery of the oppressor'?" I made no reply to these questions, but I felt like the traitor he reported me to be. However, being in so far I decided to go clean through. I bought a white tie, some high collars, two pairs of gloves and a folding opera hat. I could not bring myself to the point of wearing a high hat in the day time (that was almost too much of a change from my broad brim), although my Prince Albert Frock, which I wore morning, noon, and night, was in conformity with English custom. Even the clerks were so attired. Meanwhile, Zangwill's study was the only warm place in London--so far as I knew. His glowing fire of hard coal was a powerful lure, and I was often there, reacting to the warmth of his rug like a chilled insect. On his hearth I thawed into something like good humor, and with his knowledge of American steam heat he was fitted to understand my vocal delight. From my Strand hotel I set out each morning, riding about the city on the tops of buses and in this way soon got "the lay of the land." I was able to find Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of Parliament, and a few other landmarks of this character. I spent a week or more, roaming about the old city, searching out, as most Americans do, the literary, the historic. I wanted to see the Tower, "The Cheshire Cheese," and the Law Courts of the Temple. The modern London, which was almost as ugly as Chicago, did not interest me at all. Between "try-ons" of the new suit I began to meet the men I was most interested in. I lunched with James Barrie and called upon Bret Harte, Sir Walter Besant and Thomas Hardy. Bernard Shaw wrote asking me to Hindhead for a week-end, and Conan Doyle invited me to see a cricket match with him--but all these events were subordinate to the authors' dinner and the accursed suit in which I was about to lose my identity. "My shirt will 'buckle,' my shoes will hurt my feet, my tie will slip up over my collar--I shall take cold in my chest----" (As a hardened diner-out I look back with wonder and a certain incredulity on that uneasy week.) These were a few of the fears I entertained, but on the fateful night--an hour before the time to start out, I assumed the whole "outfit" and viewed myself as best I could in my half-length mirror and was gratified to note that I resembled almost any other brown-bearded man of forty. I couldn't see my feet and legs in the glass, but my patent leather shoes were illustrious. I began to think I might pull through without accident. Zangwill with a mischievous grin on his face, met me at the door of the hotel at seven, and conducted me to the reception hall which was already filled with a throng of most distinguished guests running from Sir Walter Besant, the president of the Authors' Society, to Lord Rosebery, who was to be one of the speakers. Zangwill, who seemed to be known of everybody, kept me in hand, introducing me to many of the writers, and kind Sir Walter said, "As an American over-seas member your seat is at the speakers' table"--an honor which I accepted with a swift realization that it was made possible by the new coat and vest I presented to the world. Zangwill parted with me, smilingly. "I am but one of lower orders," said he, "but I shall have an eye to you during dinner." My left-hand neighbor at the table was a short, gray, gloomy individual whose name I failed to catch, but the man on my right was Henry Norman, of the _London Chronicle_, and after we had established friendly relations I leaned to him and whispered, "Who is the self-absorbed, gloomy chieftain on my left?" "That," said he, "is Henry M. Stanley." "What!" I exclaimed, "not Henry M. Stanley of Africa?" "Yes, Stanley of Uganda." It seemed a pity to sit in silence beside this great explorer, who had been one of my boyish heroes, and I decided to break the ice of his reserve in some way. Turning to him suddenly I asked, "Sir Henry, how do you pronounce the name of that poisonous African fly--is it Teetsie or Tettsie?" He brightened up at once. I was not so great a bore as he feared. After he had given me a great deal of information about this fly, and the sleeping sickness, I asked him what he thought of the future of the continent, to which he responded with growing geniality. We were off! After a proper interval I volunteered some valuable data concerning the mosquitoes and flies I had encountered on my recent trip into the wilderness of British Columbia. He became interested in me. "Oh! You've been to the Klondike!" This quite broke down his wall. Thereafter he listened respectfully to all that I could tell him of the black flies, the huge caribou flies, the orange-colored flies, and the mosquitoes who worked in two shifts (the little gray ones in hot sunlight, the big black ones at night), and by the time the speaking began we were on the friendliest terms. "What a bore these orators are!" I said, and in this judgment he instantly agreed. Sitting there in the faces of hundreds of English authors, I achieved a peaceful satisfaction with my outfit. A sense of being entirely inconspicuous, a realization that I was committed to convention, produced in me an air of perfect ease. By conforming I had become as much a part of the scene as Sir Walter or the waiter who shifted my plates and filled my glass. "Zangwill is right," I said, "the clawhammer coat is in truth the most democratic of garments." It pleased me also to dwell upon the fact that the moment of my capitulation had been made glorious by a meeting with Stanley and Hardy and Barrie, and that the dinner which marked this most important change in lifelong habits of dress was appropriately notable. That several hundred of the best known men and women of England had witnessed my fall softened the shock, and when--on the way out--Zangwill nudged my elbow and said, "Cow-boy, you wore 'em to the manner born," I smiled in lofty disregard of future comment. I faced Chicago and New York with serene and confident composure. Although I carried this suit with me to Bernard Shaw's (on a week-end visit), I was not called upon to wear it, for he met me in snuff-colored knickerbockers and did not change to any other suit during my stay. Sunday dinner at Conan Doyle's was a midday meal, and Barrie and Hardy and other of my literary friends I met at teas or luncheons. I took my newly-acquired uniform to Paris but as my meetings with my French friends were either teas or lunches, it so happened that--eager as I was to display it I did not put this suit on till after I reached home. My first appearance in it was in the nature of a masquerade, my second was by way of a joke to please my mother. Knowing that she had never seen a man in evening dress I arrayed myself, one night, as if for a banquet, and suddenly descended upon her with intent to surprise and amuse her. I surprised her but I did not make her laugh in the way I had expected. On the contrary she surveyed me with a look of pride and then quietly remarked, "I like you in it. I wouldn't mind if you dressed that way every day." This finished my opposition to the swallow-tail coat. If my mother, the daughter of a pioneer, a woman of the farm, accepted it as something appropriate to her son, its ultimate acceptance by all America was inevitable. Thereafter I lay in wait for an opportunity to display myself in all my London finery. * * * * * Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Reception, I met two of my fellow republicans in Prince Albert Frock suits. At sight of me they started with surprise--surprise and sorrow--exclaiming, "Look at Hamlin Garland!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes, I have conformed. In London one _must_ conform, you know.--The English are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand." Howells, when I saw him next, smilingly listened to my tale and heartily approved of my action, but Burroughs regarded it as a weak surrender. "A silk hat and steel-pen coat on a Whitman Democrat," he said, "seems like a make-believe," which, in a sense, it was. CHAPTER EIGHT The Choice of the New Daughter Although my mother met me each morning with a happy smile, she walked with slower movement, and in studying her closely, after three months' absence, I perceived unwelcome change. She was not as alert mentally or physically as when I went away. A mysterious veil had fallen between her wistful spirit and the outer world. Her vision was dimmer and her spirit at times withdrawn, remote. She laughed in response to my jesting, but there was an absent-minded sweetness in her smile, a tremulous quality in her voice which disturbed me. Her joy in my return, so accusing in its tenderness, led me to declare that I would never again leave her, not even for a month. "You may count on me hereafter," I said to her. "I'm going to quit traveling and settle down near you." "I hope you mean it this time," she replied soberly, and her words stung for I recalled the many times I had disappointed her. With a mass of work and correspondence waiting my hand I went from my breakfast to my study. My forenoons thereafter were spent at my desk, but with the understanding that if she got lonesome, mother was privileged to interrupt, and it often happened that along about eleven I would hear a softly-opened stair-door and then a call,--a timid call as if she feared to disturb me--"Haven't you done enough? Can't you come now?" There was no resisting this appeal. Dropping my pen, I went below and gave the rest of my day to her. We possessed an ancient low-hung "Surrey," a vehicle admirably fitted for an invalid, and in this conveyance with a stout mare as motive power we often drove away into the country of a pleasant afternoon, sometimes into Gill's Coulee, sometimes to Onalaska. On these excursions my mother rode in silence, busied with the past. Each hill, each stream had its tender association. Once as we were crossing the Kinney Hill she said, "We used to pick plums along that creek." Or again as we were driving toward Mindora, she said, "When McEldowney built that house we thought it a palace." She loved to visit her brother William's farm, and to ride past the old McClintock house in which my father had courted her. Her expression at such times was sweetly sorrowful. The past appeared so happy, so secure, her present so precarious, so full of pain. She sensed the mystery, the tragedy of human life, but was unable to express her conceptions,--and I was of no value as a comforter. I could only jest with a bitter sense of helplessness. On other days, when she was not well enough to drive, I pushed her about the village in a wheeled chair, which I had bought at the World's Fair. In this way she was able to make return calls upon such of her neighbors as were adjacent to side-walks. She was always in my thought,--only when Franklin took her in charge was it possible for me to concentrate on the story which I had begun before going abroad, and in which I hoped to embody some of the experiences of my trip. _Boy Life on the Prairie_ was also still incomplete, and occasionally I put aside _The Hustler_, as I called my fiction, in order to recover and record some farm custom, some pioneer incident which my mother or my brother brought to my mind as we talked of early days in Iowa. The story (which Gilder afterward called _Her Mountain Lover_) galloped along quite in the spirit of humorous extravaganza with which it had been conceived, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it for the reason that in it I was able to relive some of the noblest moments of my explorations of Colorado's peaks and streams. It was an expression of my indebtedness to the High Country. I made the mistake, however, of not using the actual names of localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow, whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impossible even for a resident to follow me. In _The Eagle's Heart_ I was equally elusive, but as only part of that book referred to the High Country the lack of definite nomenclature did not greatly matter. Personally I like _Her Mountain Lover_, which is still in print, and for the benefit of the possible reader of it, I will explain that the "Wagon Wheel Gap" of the story is Ouray, and that the Grizzly Bear Trail leads off the stage road to Red Mountain. Our red raspberries were just coming into fruit, and a few strawberries remained on the vines, therefore it happened that during the season we had a short-cake with cream and sugar almost every night for supper,--and such short-cakes!--piping hot, buttered, smothered in berries. I fear they were not very healthful either for my mother or for her sons, but as short-cakes were an immemorial delicacy in our home I could not bring myself to forbid them. Mother insisted on them all the more firmly when I told her that the English knew nothing of short-cake or our kind of pies, and then, more to amuse her than for any other reason, I told of a visit to my English publisher and of my bragging about her short-cake so shamelessly that he had finally declared: "I am coming to Chicago next year, and I shall journey all the way to West Salem just to test your mother's short-cake." This made her chuckle. "Let him come," she said confidently. "We'll feed him on it." Notwithstanding her reaction to my jesting, my anxiety concerning her deepened. The long periods of silence into which she fell alarmed me, and at times, as she sat alone, I detected on her face an expression of pain which was like that of one in despair. When I questioned her, she could not define the cause of her distress, but I feared it came from some weakening of her heart. She was failing,--that was all too evident to me--failing faster than her years warranted, and then (just as I was becoming a little reassured) she came to me one morning, with both her hands outstretched, as if feeling her way, her face white, her eyes wide and deep and dark with terror. "I can't see! I can't see!" she wailed. With a sense of impending tragedy I took her in my arms and led her to a chair. "Don't worry, mother!" was all I could say. "It will pass soon. Keep perfectly quiet." Under the influence of my words she gradually lost her fear, and by the time the doctor arrived she was quite calm and could see--a little--though in a strange way. In answer to his question she replied with a pitiful little smile, "Yes, I can see you, but only in pieces. I can only see a part of your face,--the rest of you is all black." This reply seemed to relieve the doctor's mind. His face lighted up. "I understand! Don't worry a mite. You will be all right in a few minutes. It is only a temporary nerve disturbance." This proved to be true, and as her lips resumed their placid sweetness my courage came back. In a few hours she was able to see quite clearly, or at least as clearly as was normal to her age. Nevertheless I accepted this attack as a distinct and sinister warning. It not only emphasized her dependence upon me, it made me very definitely aware of what would happen to our household if she were to become a helpless invalid. Her need of a larger bed-chamber, with a connecting bathroom was imperative. "I know you will both suffer from the noise and confusion of the building," I said to my aunt, "but I am going to enlarge mother's room and put in water and plumbing. If she should be sick in that small bedroom it would be horrible." Up to this time our homestead had remained simply a roomy farmhouse on the edge of a village. I now decided that it should have the conveniences of a suburban cottage, and to this end I made plans for a new dining-room, a new porch, and a bath-room. Mother was appalled at the audacity of my designs. She wanted the larger chamber, of course, but my scheme for putting in running water appealed to her as something almost criminally extravagant. She was troubled, too, by the thought of the noise, the dirt, the change which were necessary accompaniments of the plan. I did my best to reassure her. "It won't take long, mother, and as for the expense, you just let _me_ walk the floor." She said no more, realizing, no doubt, that I could not be turned aside from my purpose. There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899--the plumber was still the tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come, easy go!" Something unaccountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was illogical, if not actually illegal. "How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a 'sport,'--that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered only with a silent laugh. The carpenters came, together with a crew of stonemasons, and the old kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with material and tools, and the frame-work was enclosed. My mother, in her anxiety to justify the enormous outlay said, "Well, anyhow, these improvements are not entirely for me, they will make the house all the nicer for my New Daughter when she comes." "That's true," I answered, "I hadn't thought of that." "It's _time_ you thought of it. You're almost forty years old," she replied with humorous emphasis, then she added, "I begin to think I never _will_ see your wife." "Just you wait," I jestingly replied. "The case is not so hopeless as you think--I have just received a letter which gives me a 'prospect.'" I said this merely to divert her, but she seized upon my remark with alarming seriousness. "Read me the letter. Where does she live?--Tell me all about her." Being in so far I thought it could do no harm to go a little farther. I described (still in bantering mood) my first meeting with Zulime Taft more than five years before. I pictured her as she looked to me then, and as she afterward appeared when I met her a second time in the home of her sister in Chicago. "I admit that I was greatly impressed by her," I went on, "but just when I had begun to hope for a better understanding, her brother Lorado chilled me with the information that she was about to be claimed by another man. To be honest about it, mother, I am not sure that she is interested in me even now; although one of her friends has just written me to say that Lorado was mistaken, and that Zulime is not engaged to any one. I am going down to visit some friends at the camp to test the truth of this; but don't say a word about it, for my information may be wrong." My warning went for nothing! My confession was too exciting to be kept a secret, and soon several of mother's most intimate friends had heard of my expedition, and in their minds, as in hers, my early marriage was assured. Did not the proof of it lie in the fact that I was pushing my building with desperate haste? Was this not done in order to make room for my bride?--No other reason was sufficient to account for the astounding improvements which I had planned, and which were going forward with magical rapidity. Of course no one could convince my mother that her son's "attractions" might not prove sufficiently strong to make his "prospect" a possibility, for to her I was not only a distinguished author, but a "Good provider," something which outweighed literary attainment in a home like ours. She could not or would not speak of the girl as "Miss Taft," but insisted upon calling her "Zuleema," and her mind was filled with plans for making her at home. Privately I was more concerned than I cared to show, and I would be giving a false impression if I made light of my feeling at this time. I spoke to mother jestingly in order to prevent her from building her hopes on an unstable foundation. In the midst of my busiest day I received a letter from my good friends, Wallace and Tillie Heckman, and though I was but a clumsy farmer in all affairs of the heart, I perceived enough of hidden meaning in their invitation to visit Eagle's Nest, to give me pause even in the welter of my plumbing. I replied at once accepting their hospitality, and on Saturday took the train for Oregon to stay over Sunday at least. Squire Heckman was good enough to meet me at the train, and as he drove me up the hill to "Ganymede," which was his summer home, he said, "You will breakfast with us, and as it is our custom to dine at the Camp on Sunday we will take you with us and introduce you to the campers, although most of them are known to you." Mrs. Heckman, who was cordial in her welcome, informed me at breakfast that Miss Taft was the volunteer stewardess of the Camp. "She is expecting us to bring you to dinner to-day." "As one of the Trustees of the Foundation, a tour of inspection is a duty," I replied. There was a faint smile on Mrs. Heckman's demure lips, but Wallace, astute lawyer that he was, presented the bland face of a poker player. Without a direct word being spoken I was made to understand that Miss Taft was not indifferent to my coming, and when at half-past eleven we started for Eagle's Nest I had a sense of committing myself to a perilous campaign. A walk of half a mile through a thick grove of oaks brought us out upon a lovely, grassy knoll, which rose two hundred feet or more above the Rock River, and from which a pleasing view of the valley opened to the north as well as to the south. The camp consisted of a small kitchen cabin, a dining tent, a group of cabins, and one or two rude studios to which the joyous off-hand manners of the Fine Arts Building had been transferred. It was in fact a sylvan settlement of city dwellers--a colony of artists, writers and teachers out for a summer vacation. [Illustration: Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper for the colony, had charge of the long rude table under the tent-fly to which the campers assembled with the appetites of harvest hands and the gayety of uncalculating youth.] In holiday mood Browne, Taft, and Clarkson greeted me warmly, upbraiding me, however, for having so long neglected my official duties as trustee. "We need your counsel." Mrs. Heckman, laconic, quizzical, walked about "the reservation" with me, and in her smiling eyes I detected a kind of gentle amusement with her unconventional neighbors. She said nothing then (or at any time) which could be interpreted as criticism, but a merry little quirk in the corner of her lip instructed me. Miss Taft was not visible. "As house-keeper she is busy with preparations for dinner," Mrs. Heckman explained, and so I concealed my disappointment as best I could. At last at one o'clock, Lorado, as Chief of the tribe, gave the signal for the feast by striking a huge iron bar with a hammer, a sound which brought the campers from every direction, clamoring for food, and when all were seated at the dining table beneath a strip of canvas, some one asked, "Where's Zuhl?" Browne answered with blunt humor, "Primping! She's gone to smooth her ruffled plumage." A cry arose, "Here she comes!" and Spencer Fiske the classical scholar of the camp with fervent admiration exclaimed "By Jove--a veritable Diana!" Browne started the Toreador's song, and all began to beat upon the tables with their spoons in rhythmical clamor. Turning my head I perceived the handsome figure of a girl moving with calm and stately dignity across the little lawn toward the table. She was bareheaded, and wore a short-sleeved, collarless gown of summer design, but she carried herself with a leisurely and careless grace which made evident the fact that she was accustomed to these moments of uproar. As she neared the tent, however, I detected a faint flicker of amusement in the lines about her mouth. This entrance so dramatic and so lovely was precisely the kind of picture to produce on my mind a deeply influencing impression. I thought her at the moment one of the most gracious and admirable women of my world, a union of European culture and the homely grace of the prairie. She greeted me with a pleasant word, and took a seat opposite, making no reply to the jocular comment of her boarders. It was evident that she was not only accustomed to demonstrations of this sort, but considered them a necessary part of her stewardship, an office which was entirely without salary--and scantily repaid in honor. No complaints about the scarcity of butter, or questions concerning the proportions of milk in the cream jug, had power to draw her into defensive explanation. At last her tormentors unable to stampede her by noise, or plague her by petitions, subsided into silence or turned to other matters, and we all settled down to an abundant and very jolly dinner. It was because the camp loved Zulime Taft that they could carry on in this way. It was all studio _blague_, and she knew it and offered no defense of her economies. Most of the artists and writers in the camp were already known to me. They were all of small income, some of them were almost as poor as I, and welcomed a method by which they were able to spend a summer comfortably and inexpensively. A common kitchen, and an old white horse and wagon also owned collectively, made it possible to offer board at four dollars per week! The Heckman home, which the campers called "the Castle," or "The Manor House," a long, two-story building of stone which stood on the southern end of the Bluff, overlooked what had once been Black Hawk's Happy Hunting Ground. It was not in any sense a château, but it pleased Wallace Heckman's artist-tenants to call it so, and by contrast with their cook-house it did, indeed, possess something like grandeur. Furthermore "the Lord of the Manor" added to the majesty of his position by owning and driving a coach (this was before the day of the automobile), and at times those of his tenants most highly in favor, were invited to a seat on this stately vehicle. "Lady" Heckman possessed a piano, another evidence of wealth, and the pleasantest part of my recollections of this particular visit concerns the evenings I spent with her in singing "Belle Mahone" and "Lily Dale," while Lorado and his sisters sat in the corner and listened--at least I infer that they listened--now that I grow more clear in my mind I recall that Tillie Heckman did not sing, she only played for me; and my conviction is that I sang very well. I may be mistaken in this for (at times) I detected Wallace Heckman addressing a jocose remark to Miss Taft when he should have been giving his undivided attention to my song. Miss Taft was accused of having a keen relish for the fare at Castle Heckman, and in this relish I shared so frankly that when Tillie invited me to stay on indefinitely, and Wallace suggested that I might make the little pavilion on the lawn serve as my study, I yielded. "Work on the homestead must wait," I wrote to my mother. "Important business here demands my attention." Zulime Taft appeared pleased when I announced my acceptance of the Heckman hospitality, and Wallace immediately offered me the use of his saddle horses and his carriage, and when he said, "Miss Taft loves to ride," I was convinced not only of his friendly interest but of his hearty coöperation. Furthermore as Mrs. Heckman often kept Miss Taft for supper, I had the pleasant task of walking back to camp with her. In some way (I never understood precisely how) the campers, one and all, obtained the notion that I was significantly interested in Miss Taft; but, as I was proceeding with extraordinary caution, wearing the bland expression of a Cheyenne chieftain, I could not imagine any one discovering in my action anything more than a frank liking, a natural friendship between the sister of my artist comrade and myself. It is true I could not entirely conceal the fact that I preferred her company to that of any other of the girls, but there was nothing remarkable in that--nevertheless, the whole camp, as I learned afterward (long afterward), was not only aware of my intentions but, behind my back, almost under my nose, was betting on my chances. Wagers were being offered and taken, day by day, as to whether I would win or lose! Fortunately, nothing of this disgraceful business reached me. I was serenely unconscious of it all. Demure as Tillie Heckman looked, slyly humorous as she occasionally showed herself to be, she was a woman of understanding, and from her I derived distinct encouragement. She not only indicated her sympathy; she conveyed to me her belief that I had a fair chance to win. I am not sure, but I think it was from her that I received the final statement that Miss Taft was entirely free. However, this did not clear me from other alarms, for on Friday night the train brought Henry Fuller and several young men visitors who were all quite willing to walk and talk with Miss Taft. It was only during the midweek that I, as the only unmarried man in camp, felt entirely secure. Henry Fuller stayed on after the others went back to the city, and I would have been deeply disturbed by Zulime's keen interest in him, had I not been fully informed of their relationship, which was entirely that of intellectual camaraderie. Fuller was not merely a resolved bachelor; he was joyously and openly opposed to any form of domesticity. He loved his freedom beyond all else. The Stewardess knew this and revelled in his wit, sharing my delight in his bitter ironies. His verbal inhumanities gave her joy, because she didn't believe in them. They were all "literature" to her. The weather was glorious September, and as my writing was going forward, my companionship ideal, and my mother's letters most cheerful, I abandoned myself, as I had not done in twenty years, to a complete enjoyment of life. Golden days! Halcyon days! Far and sweet and serene they seem as I look back upon them from the present--days to review with wistful regret that I did not more fully employ them in the way of youth, for alas! my mornings were spent in writing when they should have been given to walking with my sweetheart; yet even as I worked I had a sense of her nearness, and the knowledge that the shimmering summer landscape was waiting for me just outside my door, comforted me. However, I was not wholly neglectful of my opportunities. My afternoons were given over to walking or riding with her, and our evenings were spent in long and quiet excursions on the river or sitting with the artists in the light of a bonfire on the edge of the bluff, talking and singing. The more I knew of Miss Taft the more her versatility amazed me. She could paint, she could model, she could cook and she could sew. As Stewardess, she took charge of the marketing, and when the kitchen fell into a flutter, her masterly taste and skill brought order--and a delicious dinner--out of chaos. It remains to say that, in addition to all these, her intellectual activities, she held her own in the fierce discussions (concerning Art) which broke out at the table or raged like whirlwinds on the moonlit bluff--discussions which centered around such questions as these: "Can a blue shadow painting ever be restful?" "Is Local Color essential to fiction?" I particularly admired the Stewardess in these moments of controversy, for she never lost her temper or her point of view. Incredibly sweet and peaceful that week appears as I view it across the gulf which the World War has thrust between that year and this. We had no fear of hunger in those days, no dread of social unrest, no expectation of any sudden change. All wars were over--in our opinion. The world was at last definitely at peace, and we in America, like the world in general, had nothing to do but to go on getting richer and happier, so happy that we could be just. We were all young--not one of us had gray hair. Life, for each of us as for the Nation, moved futureward on tranquil, shining course, as a river slips southward to the sea, confident, effortless, and serene. Heavenly skies, how happy we were! That I was aware in some degree of the idyllic, evanescent charm of those days is made certain in a note which I find in my diary, the record of a walk in the woods with Zulime. Her delight in the tender loveliness of leaf and vine, in the dapple of sunlight on the path, I fully shared. Another page tells of a horseback excursion which we made across the river. She rode well, very well, indeed, and her elation, her joy in the motion of the horse, as well as her keen delight in the landscape, added to my own pleasure. We stayed to supper at the Heckmans' that night, and walked back to the camp at nine, loitering through the most magical light of the Harvest Moon. As she manifested a delightful interest in what I was writing, I fell into the habit of reading to her some pages out of my new manuscript, in order that I might have the value of her comment on it. Of course I expected comment to be favorable, and it was. That this was an unfair advantage to take of a nice girl, I was aware, even then, but as she seemed willing to listen I was in a mood to be encouraged by her smiles and her words of praise. My growing confidence led to an enlargement of my plans concerning the homestead. "You are right," I wrote to my mother. "A new daughter will make other improvements in the house absolutely necessary. Not merely a new dining-room, but an extra story must be added to the wing--" And in the glow of this design I reluctantly cut short my visit and returned to West Salem, to apprise the carpenters of the radical changes in my design. Jestingly, and more by way of reconciling my mother to the renewed noise and confusion of the building, I described the walks and rides I had taken with Zulime, warning her at the same time not to enlarge upon these facts. "Miss Taft's interest may be only friendliness," I added. My words had precisely an opposite effect: thereafter she spoke of my hopes as if they were certainties, and insisted on knowing all about "Zuleema," as she persisted in calling Miss Taft. "Now, Mother," I again protested, "you must not talk that way to _any_ of your callers, for if you do you'll get me into a most embarrassing situation. You'll make it very hard for me to explain in case of failure." "You mustn't fail," she responded wistfully. "I can't afford to wait much longer." It was incredible to her that any sane girl would reject such an alliance, but I was very far from her proud confidence. In this doubt of success, I was entirely honest. I had never presumed on any manly charm, I made no claim to beauty--on the contrary, I had always been keenly aware of my rude frame and clumsy hands. I realized also my lack of nice courtesy and genial humor. Power I had (and relied upon), but of the lover's grace--nothing. That I was a bear was quite as evident to me as to my friends. "If I win this girl it must be on some other score than that of beauty," I admitted. In the midst of the bustle and cheer of this week another swift and sinister cloud descended upon me. One evening, as mother and I were sitting together, she fell into a terrifying death-like trance from which I could not rouse her, a condition which alarmed me so deeply that I telegraphed to my father in Dakota and to my brother in Chicago, telling them to come at once. It seemed to me that the final moment of our parting was at hand. All through that night, one of the longest I had ever known (a time of agony and remorse as well as of fear), I blamed myself for bringing on the wild disorder of the building. "If I had not gone away, if I had not enlarged my plan, the house would now be in order," was the thought which tortured me. The sufferer's speech had failed, and her pitiful attempts to make her wishes known wrung my heart with helpless pity. Her eyes, wide, dark and beautiful, pleaded with me for help, and yet I could only kneel by her side and press her hand and repeat the doctor's words of comfort. "It will pass away, mother, just as your other attacks have done. I am sure of it. Don't try to talk. Don't worry." As the night deepened, dark and sultry, distant flashes of silent lightning added to the lurid character of my midnight vigil. It seemed that all my plans and all my hopes had gone awry. Helpless, longing for light, I wore out the lagging hours beside my mother's bed, with very little change in her condition to relieve the strain of my anxiety. "Will she ever speak again? Have I heard her voice for the last time?" These questions came again and again to my mind. Dawn crept into the room at last, and Franklin came on the early train. With his coming, mother regained some part of her lost courage. She grew rapidly stronger before night came again, and was able to falter a few words in greeting and to ask for father. During the following day she steadily improved, and in the afternoon was able to sit up in her bed. One of the first of her interests was a desire to show my brother a new bonnet which I had recently purchased for her in the city, and at her request I put it into her hands. Her love and gratitude moved us both to tears. Her action had the intolerable pathos of a child's weakness united with a kind of delirium. To watch her feeble hands exhibiting a head-dress which I feared she would never again wear--displaying it with a pitiful smile of pride and joy--was almost more than I could bear. Her face shone with happiness as she strove to tell my brother of the building I was doing to make her more comfortable. "Zuleema is coming," she said. "My new daughter--is coming." When Franklin and I were alone for a moment, I said: "She must not die. _I won't let her die._ She must live a little longer to enjoy the new rooms I am building for her." It would appear that the intensity of my desire, the power of my resolve to bring her back to life, strengthened her, wrought upon her with inexplicable magic, for by the time my father arrived she was able to speak and to sit once more in her wheeled chair. She even joked with me about "Zuleema." "You'd better hurry," she said, and then the shadow came back upon me with bitter chill. How insecure her hold on life had become! Haste on the building was now imperative--so much, at least, I could control. With one crew of carpenters, another of painters, and a third of tinners, all working at the same time, I rushed the construction forward. At times my action presented itself to me as a race against death, or at least with death's messenger. What I feared, most of all, was a sudden decline to helpless invalidism on my mother's part, a condition in which a trained nurse would be absolutely necessary. To get the rooms in order while yet our invalid was able to move about the house, was now my all-absorbing interest. With no time to dream of love, with no thought of writing, I toiled like a slave, wet with perspiration, dusty and unkempt. With my shirt open at the throat and my sleeves rolled to the elbow, I passed from one phase of the job to another, lending a hand here and a shoulder there. In order that I might hasten the tearing down and clearing away, I plunged into the hardest and dirtiest tasks, but at night, after the men were gone, dark moods of deep depression came over me, moments in which the essential futility of my powers overwhelmed me with something like despair. "What right have you to ask that bright and happy girl--any girl--to share the uncertainties, the parsimony, the ineludible struggle of your disappointing life?" I demanded of myself, and to this there was but one answer: "I have no right. I have only a need." Nevertheless, I wrote her each day a short account of my doings, and her friendly replies were a source of encouragement, of comfort. She did not know (I was careful to conceal them) the torturing anxieties through which I was passing, and her pages were, for the most part, a pleasant reflection of the uneventful, care-free routine of the camp. In spite of her caution she conveyed to me, beneath her elliptical phrases, the fact that she missed me and that my return would not be displeasing to her. "When shall we see you?" she asked. In one of her letters she mentioned--casually--that on Monday she was going to Chicago with her sister, but would return to the camp at the end of the week. Something in this letter led me to a sudden change of plan. As mother was now quite comfortable again I said to her, "Zuleema has gone to Chicago to do some shopping. I think I'll run down and meet her and ask her to help me select the curtains and wall-paper for your new room. What do you say to that?" "Go along!" she said instantly, "but I expect you to bring her home with you." "Oh, I can't do that," I protested. "I haven't any right to do that--yet!" The mere idea of involving the girl in my household problem seemed exciting enough, and on my way down to the city I became a bit less confident. I decided to approach the matter of my shopping diplomatically. She might be alarmed at my precipitancy. She was not alarmed--on the contrary her pleased surprise and her keen interest in my mother's new chamber gave me confidence. "I want you to help me buy the furnishings for the new rooms," I said almost at once. "I shall be glad to help," she replied in the most natural way. Evidently, _she_ saw nothing especially significant in my request, but to me it was a subtle stratagem. To have her take part in my bargain-hunting was almost as exciting as though we were furnishing OUR home, but I dared not assume that she was thinking along these dangerous lines. That she was genuinely interested in my household problems was evident, but I was not justified in asking anything further. She was distinctly closer to me that day, more tenderly intimate than she had ever been before, and her womanly understanding of my task--the deep sympathy she expressed when I told her of my mother's recent illness--all combined to give me comfort--and hope! A few days later we rode back to Eagle's Nest Camp together, and all through those three hours on the train a silent, subconscious, wordless adjustment went on between us. That she was secretly debating the question of accepting me was certain, and there was nothing in her manner to dishearten me; on the contrary, she seemed to enjoy playing round the perilous suggestion. We dined at "the Castle" as usual, and late that night, as we walked slowly over to the camp through the odorous woods, hearing the whippoorwill's cry and the owlets hoot from their dark coverts, I was made aware that my day's work had drawn her closer into my life. I had made her aware of my need. The day which followed our return to camp was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I celebrated it by taking a long walk and talk with her. She took some sewing with her, and as we rested under a great oak tree, we spoke of many intimate, personal things, always with the weight of our unsolved problem on our mind. At last, in approaching my plea for help, I stated the worst of my case. "I am poor and shall always remain poor," I said. "My talent is small and my work has only a very limited appeal. I see no great improvement in my fortunes. I have done an enormous amount of work this year (I've written three volumes), but all of them conjoined will not bring in as much cash as a good stone-mason can earn. But that isn't the worst of it! The hopeless part of it is--I _like_ my job. I wouldn't change to a more profitable one if I could. I have only one other way of earning money, and that is by physical labor. If the worst comes to the worst, I can farm or do carpenter work." Her reply to all this was not entirely disheartening. "To make money is not the most important thing in the world," she said, and then told me of her own childhood in Illinois, of the rigid economies which had always been necessary in the Taft home. "My father's salary as a professor of geology was small, and with six people to feed and clothe, and four children to be educated, my poor little mother had a very busy and anxious time of it. I know by personal experience what it is to lack money for food and clothes. The length of my stay in Paris was dependent on rigid daily economy. I hadn't an extra franc to spare." This confession of her own lifelong poverty should have turned me aside from my fell purpose, but it did not--it merely encouraged me to go on. In place of saying, "My dear girl, as compensation for all those years of care and humiliating poverty you deserve a spacious home, with servants and a carriage. Realizing that I can offer you only continued poverty and added anxiety, I here and now relinquish my design. I withdraw in favor of a better and richer man"--instead of uttering these noble words, what did I do? I did the exact opposite! I proceeded to press my selfish, remorseless, unwarranted demand! It is customary for elderly men to refer either flippantly or with gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our eyes and thinned our blood, but I shall permit neither of these unworthy moods to color my report of this day's emotion. I shall not deny the alternating moments of hope and doubt, of bitterness and content, which made that afternoon both sweet and sad. The thing I was about to do was tragically destructive--I knew that. To put out a hand, to arrest this happy and tranquil girl, saying, "Come, be my wife. Come, suffer with me, starve with me," was a deed whose consequences scared me while they allured me. I felt the essential injustice of such a marriage, and I foresaw some of its accompanying perplexities, but I did not turn aside as I should have done. With no dependable source of income, with an invalid mother to care for, I asked this artist, so urban, so native to the studio, so closely knit to her joyous companions in the city, to go with me into exile, into a country town, to be the housekeeper of a commonplace cottage filled with aged people! "It is monstrous selfishness; it is wrong," I said, "but I want you." My philosophy, even at that time, was essentially individualistic. I believed in the largest opportunity to every human soul. Equal rights _meant_ Equal rights in my creed. I had no intention of asking Zulime Taft to sink her individuality in mine. I wanted her to remain herself. Marriage, as I contemplated it, was to be not a condition where the woman was a subordinate but an equal partner, and yet how unequal the sacrifice! "I ask you to join your future with mine. It's a frightful risk, but I am selfish enough to wish it." Under no illusion about my own character, I admitted that there is no special charm in a just man. To have a sense of honor is fine, but to have a joyous and lovely disposition makes a man a great deal easier to live with. I was perfectly well aware that as a husband I would prove neither lovely nor joyous. My temper was not habitually cheerful. Like most writers, I was self-absorbed, filled with a sense of the importance of my literary designs. To be "just" was easy, but to be charming and considerate--these were the points on which I was sure to fail, and I knew it. Did that deter me? Not at all! Bitterly unwilling to surrender Zulime to the richer and kindlier man who was, undoubtedly, waiting at that moment to receive her and cherish her, I pleaded with her to share my poverty and my hope of future fame. Shaken by my appeal, she asked for time in which to consider this problem. "I ought to talk with Lorado," she said. The mere fact that she could not decide against me at the moment gave me confidence. "Very well," I said. "Mother wants me--I shall go home for a week. Let me know when I can come again. I hope it will not be more than a week." In this arrangement we rested, and as we walked back to camp I cared nothing for the sly words or glances of our fellow artists. I believed I had won my case. My mother's demand for my presence did not arise--I soon learned--from any return of her malady, but from a desire for news of my courtship. "Where's my new daughter? Why didn't you bring her?" she demanded. "She couldn't come this time. The question is still unsettled." "Go right back and settle it," she urged. "Go quick, before some one else gets her. Write to her. Tell her to come right up. Send her a telegram. Seems as though I can't wait another week." Her urgency made me laugh, even while I perceived the pathos of it. "I can't bring her to you, mother, till she is willing to come as a bride--but she's thinking about it, and I am going back next week to get my answer. Be patient a little while longer. I promise you the whole question will be settled soon, and I _hope_ it will be settled our way. Zulime seems to like me." Dear old mother! Her stammering, tremulous utterance made me smile and it made me weep. She was growing old prematurely, and the need of haste was urgent. "If I can possibly persuade her to come," I added very gravely, "I'll fetch her home to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you." My tone, rather than my words, silenced her, and gave her a measure of content, although she was childishly impatient of even a day's delay. All that week I alternately hoped and doubted, assembling all the items on the credit side of my ledger, and at last a letter came in which Zulime indicated that she wished to see me. "I am still undecided," she said, "but you may come." I left at once for the camp, feeling that her confession of indecision was in my favor. Lorado was not markedly favorable to me as a brother-in-law. He liked me and respected me as a friend, but as a suitor for the hand of his sister--well, that was another and far more serious matter. The camp "Equipage" met me at the station, and I consented to ride in it as far as the Heckman gate, hoping that Zulime would be there to welcome me. In this I was not disappointed, and something in her face and the firm clasp of her hand reassured me. For nearly a week, in the midst of the most glorious October landscape, surrounded by the scarlet and gold and crimson branches of the maples and the deep-reds and bronze-greens of the oaks, she and I walked and rode and boated in almost constant companionship. Idyllic days! Days of a quality I had lost all hope of ever again reliving. Days of quiet happiness and almost perfect content, for on an afternoon of dreamlike beauty, in a glade radiant with hazy golden sunshine and odorous with the ripening leaves, she spoke the all-important words which joined her future life with mine. We were seated at the moment on our favorite bank, under a tall oak tree, gorgeous as a sunset cloud, and as silent. I had been reading to her, and she was busy with some delicate embroidery. The crickets were chirping sleepily in the grass at our feet, and the jays calling harshly seemed warning us of the passing of summer and the coming on of frost. "Let the wedding day be soon," I pleaded as we rose to return to camp. "I am nearing the dead-line. I am almost forty years old--I can't afford to wait. I want you to come to me now--at once. The old folks are waiting for you. They want you for Thanksgiving Day. Your presence would make them happier than any other good fortune in this world." She understood my way of putting the argument. She knew that I was veiling my own eagerness under my mother's need, and after a little reflection she said, "I am going out to my father's home in Kansas. You may come for me there on the twenty-third of November. That is--if you still want me at that time." The end of the camp season was at hand; everybody was packing up, and so my girl and I turned with deep regret from the golden halls of our sylvan meeting-place. "This is my Indian summer," I said to her, "and that you may never have cause to regret the decision which this day has brought to you, is my earnest hope." More than twenty years have gone over our heads, and as I write these lines our silver wedding is not far off. Our lives have not been all sunshine, but Zulime has met all storms with a brave sweetness, which I cannot overpraise. If she has regrets, she does not permit me to know them. My poverty--which persists--has not embittered her or caused her, so far as I know, a single mood of self-commiseration. CHAPTER NINE A Judicial Wedding On reaching my Elm Street home the next day, I was surprised and deeply gratified to find on my desk a letter from William Dean Howells, in which he said: "I am at the Palmer House. I hope you will come to see me soon, for I start for Kansas on a lecture trip in a few days." Although I had long been urging that he should come to Chicago, he had steadfastly declined to accept a lecture engagement west of Ohio, and I could not quite understand what had led him so far afield as Kansas. I hastened to call upon him, and, at the first appropriate pause in the conversation, I spoke to him of my engagement. "Miss Taft loves your books and would keenly appreciate the honor of meeting you." With instant perception of my wish to have him know my future wife, he replied, "My dear fellow, I am eager to meet _her_. Perhaps my gray hairs will excuse your bringing her to call upon me." "At your convenience," I replied eagerly. "I want you to know her. She is very much worth while." "I am sure of that," he smilingly retorted. He was billed to speak that night, and as he was leaving for Rock Island the following day he arranged that I should bring Zulime to the hotel just before he started for his lecture. After telling her of his wish to see her, I explained the significance of it. "You must understand that Mr. Howells is a kind of literary father confessor to me. He is a man of most delicate courtesy. Once you have seen him, once you have looked into his face, you will love him." She was as ready as I was to take her, and promptly on the minute we sent up our names and took seats in the Ladies' Parlor. It had been years since I had entered the Palmer House, and as we waited we compared memories of its old-time splendor. "My father still regards it as the grandest hotel in the West, and it is probable that Mr. Howells knew of no other. So far as I know he has never been in Chicago before, unless possibly for a few days during the World's Fair." Zulime was much excited at the thought of meeting the great novelist, but when he came, she took his hand with graceful composure, expressing just the right mingling of reserve and pleasure. I was proud of her, and the fact that Howells instantly and plainly approved of her, added to my satisfaction. "I congratulate you both," he said as we were leaving. "You see," he added, addressing himself to Zulime, "your husband-elect is one of my boys. I am particularly concerned with his good fortune. I like his bringing you to see me, and I hope we shall see you both in New York." In a literary sense this was my paternal blessing, for "Mr. Howells" had been a kind of spiritual progenitor and guide ever since my first meeting with him in '87. His wisdom, his humor, his exquisite art, had been of incalculable assistance to me, as they had been to Clemens, Burroughs, and many others of my fellow-craftsmen, and his commendation of me to my intended wife almost convinced me, for the moment, of my worthiness. How delightful he was! How delicate--how understanding! We both went away, rich in the honor of his approval of our prospective union. Rich in his friendship, I was but poorly furnished in other respects. I recall with shame the shopping tour which I made along State Street, searching for an engagement ring, a gauge which Zulime, knowing my poverty, stoutly insisted that she did not need--a statement which I was simple enough to believe until her sister enlightened me. "That's only Zuhl's way. Of course she wants a ring--every girl does. Don't fail to get her one--a nice one!" I found one at last that Zulime thought I could afford. It was a small gold band with five opals, surrounded by several very minute diamonds, all of which could be had for the sum of thirty-eight dollars. As I bought this ring Zulime's girlish delight in it touched as well as instructed me. Each time she held her finger up for me to see (she had a beautiful hand) I regretted that I had not purchased a better ring. Why did I take a ring at thirty-eight dollars! Why not fifty dollars? But what could be expected of a man who never before had spent so much as one dollar on a piece of jewelry, a man whose chief way of earning money was to save it? Whenever I look at that poor little jewel now I experience a curious mingling of shame and regret. I had so little money at that time, and the future was so uncertain! Zulime was living with her sister, and there I spent most of my evenings and some of my afternoons during the following week, scarcely able to realize my change of fortune except when alone with her, discussing our future. She agreed at last to a date for the wedding which would enable us to spend Thanksgiving at West Salem, and then for some reason, not clear to me now, I suddenly took the train for Gallup, New Mexico, with the Navajo Indian Agency for final destination. Just why I should have chosen to visit Ganado at this precise time is inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person in some ways, I know when I am bumped. Three days after Fuller's luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north of the Santa Fé railway. For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and France--to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be cheated--then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting. Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a horror to my bride-elect. One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to the north. In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant, dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high, treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf piñon trees and surrounded by naked children and savage dogs. At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home. Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us, riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out, cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco. There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on. Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose _hogan_ was in that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail. He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful. Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of Navajo girls gathering piñon nuts, laughing and singing in happy abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the dust of the trail. "Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine," and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot. At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley--stream. On left white man's house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words. As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power. Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds, like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool spring. Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and barren of streams for irrigation. An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building, and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-aged man with piercing gray eyes and sturdy, upright figure. This was Lorenzo Hubbell, one of the best-known citizens of New Mexico, living here alone, a day's ride from a white settler. Though hairy and spectacled he was a comparatively young man, but his mixed blood had already given him a singular power over his dark-skinned neighbors of the territory. His wife and children were spending the summer in Albuquerque, and in the intimacy of our long days together I spoke of my approaching marriage. "I want to buy some native blankets and some Navajo silver for our new home." His interest was quick. "Let me send your wife a wedding present. How would she like some Hopi jars?" The off-hand way in which he used the words, "your wife," startled me--reminded me that in less than two weeks I was due at Professor Taft's home to claim my bride. I accepted his offer of the vases and began to collect silver and turquoise ornaments, in order that I might carry back to Zulime some part of the poetry of this land and its people. "The more I think about it," I wrote to her, "the more I want you to share my knowledge of 'the High Country.' Why not put our wedding a week earlier and let me take you into the mountains? If you will advance the date to the eighteenth of November, we can have an eight-day trip in Colorado and still reach mother and the Homestead in time for Thanksgiving. I want to show you my best beloved valleys and peaks." Though addressing the letter to her Chicago home, I knew that she was about to leave for Kansas; therefore I added a postscript: "I am planning to meet you in your father's house about the eighteenth of the month, and I hope you will approve my scheme." In the glow of my plan for a splendid Colorado wedding journey, I lost interest in Ganado and its Indians. Making arrangements for the shipment of my treasures, I saddled my horse one morning, waved Hubbell a joyous farewell, and started back toward the Agency in the hope of finding there a letter from my girl. In this I was not disappointed. She wrote: "I shall leave for Kansas on the Burlington, Sunday night. You can write me at Hanover." It was plain she had not received my latest word. I began to figure. "If I leave here to-morrow forenoon, and catch the express at Gallup to-morrow night, I can make the close connection at Topeka, and arrive in St. Joseph just half an hour before Zulime's train comes in on Monday morning. I shall surprise her--and delight myself--by having breakfast with her!" However, I could not get away till morning, and with an evening to wear away I accepted the Agent's invitation to witness a native dance which had been announced to him by one of the young Navajo policemen. I had never seen a Navajo dance, and gladly accepted the opportunity to do so. It was a clear, crisp November evening as we started out, the clerk, his sister, one of the teachers and myself riding in a two-seated open wagon, drawn by a pair of spirited horses. The native village was some ten miles to the north, and all the way up hill, so that before we came in sight of it darkness had fallen, and in the light of a bonfire the dancers were assembling. Of the village, if there was a village, I could see little, but a tall old man (the town crier) was chanting an invitation or command of some sort, and dark forms were moving to and fro among the shadows of the piñon trees. How remote it all was from the white man's world, how self-sufficing and peaceful--how idyllic! The master of ceremonies met us and gave us seats, and for three hours we sat in the glow of the fire, watching the youthful, tireless dancers circle and leap in monotonous yet graceful evolutions. Here was love and courtship, and jealousy and faithful friendship, just as among the white dancers of Neshonoc. Roguish black eyes gleamed in the light of the fire, small feet beat the earth in joyous rhythm, and the calm faces of the old men lent dignity and a kind of religious significance to the scene. They were dreaming of the past, when no white man had entered their world. The young people were almost equally indifferent to us, and as the night deepened we who were white merged more and more indistinguishably with the crowd of dusky onlookers. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in the sixteenth century, looking upon this scene from the wondering viewpoint of the Spanish explorers. Whence came these people, these dances, these ceremonials? At last the time came for us to set forth upon our long ride back to the Agency, and so, silently, we rose and slipped away into the darkness, leaving the dancers to end their immemorial festival without the aliens' presence. They had no need of us, no care for us. At a little distance I turned and looked back. The songs, interrupted by shrill, wolfish howlings and owl-like hootings, rang through the night with singular savage charm, a chant out of the past, a chorus which was carrying forward into an individualistic white man's world the voices of the indeterminate tribal past. The sky was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the narrow cañon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk, who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly to the horses to find their way. It was bitter cold in the cañon, and my cramped right leg became lame--so lame that I could hardly get out of the wagon after we reached the Agency. Excruciating pain developed in the sciatic nerve, and though I passed a sleepless night I was determined to leave next morning. "I shall go if I have to be carried to my horse," I said grimly to the clerk, who begged me to stay in bed. Fortunately, the trader was going to the railway and kindly offered to take me with him; and so, laden with Navajo silver (bracelets, buckles and rings), I started out, so lame that I dragged one leg with a groan, hoping that with the warmth of the sun my pain would pass away. Reaching Gallup at noon, I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun, waiting for the train. At six o'clock it came, and soon I was washed and shaved and eating dinner on the dining-car of the Continental Limited. All that night and all the next day and far into the second night I rode, my fear of missing connection at Topeka uniting with my rheumatism to make the hours seem of interminable length. It seemed at times a long, long "shot"--but I made it! I reached the station at Topeka just in time to catch the connecting train, and I was on the platform at St. Joseph at sun-rise a full half-hour before the Burlington coaches from Chicago were due. As I walked up and down, I smiled with anticipation of the surprise I had in store. "If she keeps her schedule I shall see her step from the Pullman car without the slightest suspicion that I am within six hundred miles of her," I thought, doing my best to walk the kink out of my leg, which was still painful. "She is coming! My wife is coming!" I repeated, incredulous of the fact. At eight o'clock the engine came nosing in, and while watching the line of passengers descend, I lost hope. It was too much to expect! She was there! I saw her as she stepped down from the rear Pullman, and just as she was about to take her valise from the porter, I touched her on the shoulder and said, "I'll take charge of that." She started and turned with a look of alarm, a look which changed to amazement, to delight. "Oh!" she gasped. "Where did _you_ come from?" "From the Navajo reservation," I replied calmly. "But how did you _get here_?" "By train, like yourself." "But when--how long ago?" "About thirty minutes," I laughed. "I'm a wizard at making close connections." Then, seeing that she must know all about it at once, I added, "Come into the station restaurant, and while we are eating breakfast I will tell you where I have been and what brought me back so soon." While waiting for our coffee I took from my valise a bracelet of silver, a broad band shaped and ornamented by some Navajo silversmith. "Hold out your arm," I commanded. She obeyed, and I clasped the barbaric gyve about her wrist. "That is a sign of your slavery," I said gravely. Smilingly, meditatively, she fingered it, realizing dimly the grim truth which ran beneath my jesting. She was about to take on a relationship which must inevitably bring work and worry as well as joy. (That silver band has never left her wrist for a moment. For twenty-two years she has worn it, keeping it bright with service for me, for her children and for her friends. There is something symbolic in the fact that it has never lost its clear luster and that it has never tarnished the arm it adorns.) Her joy in this present, her astonishment at my unexpected appearance on the railway platform, amused and delighted me. I could scarcely convince her that at six o'clock on Saturday night I was in a New Mexico town, waiting for the eastern express. It was all a piece of miraculous adventure on my part, but her evident pleasure in its successful working out made me rich--and very humble. "What did you do it for?" she asked; then, with a look of dismay, she added, "What am I going to do with you in Hanover?" "I think I can find something to do," I answered, and entered upon a detailed statement of my plan. "I want you to see the mountains. We'll set our wedding day for the eighteenth--that will give us a week in Colorado, and enable us to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the old folks at the homestead. You say you have never seen a real mountain--well, here's your chance! Say the word, and I'll take you into the heart of the San Juan Range. I'll show you the splendors of Ouray and the Uncompagre." Holding the floor, in order that she might not have a chance to protest, I spread an alluring panorama of peaks and valleys before her eyes, with an eloquence which I intended should overcome every objection. That she was giving way to my appeal was evident. Her negatives, when they came, were rather feeble. "I can't do it. It would be lovely, but--oh, it is impossible!" "It is done--it is arranged!" I replied. "I have already sent for the railway tickets. They will be at your home to-morrow night. All is settled. We are to be married on the eighteenth, and----" "But our cards are all in Chicago and printed for the twenty-third!" "What of that? Get some more--or, better still, forget 'em! We don't need cards." "But--my sewing?" "Never mind your sewing. Would you let a gown come between you and a chance to see the Needle Peak? I am determined that you shall see Ouray, Red Mountain, and the San Juan Divide." At last she said, "I'll think about it." She was obliged to think about it. All the forenoon, as the train ambled over the plain toward the village in which Professor Taft had established his bank, I kept it in her mind. "It may be a long time before we have another chance to visit Colorado. It will be glorious winter up there. Think of Marshall Pass, think of Uncompagre, think of the Toltec Gorge!" My enthusiasm mounted. "Ouray will be like a town in the Andes. We must plan to stay there at least two days." She fell into silence, a dazed yet smiling silence, but when at last I said, "Every hour in the low country is a loss--let's be married to-morrow," she shook her head. I had gone too far. She confessed that a stay in Hanover was in the nature of a punishment. "I never liked it here, and neither did my little mother," she said, and then she described her mother's life in Hanover. "I was called home to nurse her in the last days of her illness," she explained. "Poor little mamma! She came out here unwillingly in the first place, and I always resented her living so far away from the city. After her death I seldom came here. Father does not care. He is so absorbed in his business and in his books that it doesn't matter where he lives." Professor Taft and his son, Florizel, were both at the train to meet Zulime, and both were properly amazed when I appeared. As a totally unexpected guest I was a calamity--but they greeted me cordially. What Zulime said in explanation of my presence I do not know, but the family accepted me as an inevitable complication. My lameness, which dated from that ride down the Navajo cañon, persisted, which was another worriment; for Zulime was too busy with sewing-women to give much time to me and walking was very painful, hence I spent most of my day down at the bank, talking with my prospective father-in-law, who interested me much more than the sordid little village and its empty landscape. He was a sturdy, slow-moving man with long, gray beard, a powerful and strongly individual thinker, almost as alien to his surroundings as a Hindoo Yoghi would have been. With the bland air of a kindly teacher he met his customers in the outer office and genially discoursed to them of whatever happened to be in his own mind--what they were thinking about was of small account to him. As a deeply-studied philosopher of the old-fashioned sort, his words, even when addressed to a German farmer, were deliberately chosen, and his sentences stately, sonorous and precise. Regarding me as a man of books, he permitted himself to roam widely over the fields of medieval history, and to wander amid the gardens of ancient faiths and dimly remembered thrones. Although enormously learned, his knowledge was expressed in terms of the past. His quotations, I soon discovered, were almost entirely confined to books whose covers were of a faded brown. His scientists, his historians were all of the Victorian age or antecedent thereto. Breasted and Ferrero did not concern him. His biologists were of the time of Darwin, his poets of an age still earlier, and yet, in spite of his musty citations, he was a master mind. He knew what he knew (he guessed at nothing), and, sitting there in that bare little bank, I listened in silence what time he marched from Zoroaster down to Charlemagne, and from Rome to Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than so many Comanches. It is probable that the lonely old scholar rejoiced in me as a comprehending, or at least a sympathetic, listener, for he talked on and on, a steady, slow-moving stream. I was content to listen. That I allowed him to think of me as a fellow-student, I confess, but in my failure to undeceive him I was only adding to the comfort which he took in my company. It would have been a cruelty to have confessed my ignorance. It was after all only a negative deception, one which did neither of us any harm. Furthermore, I was aware that he was in a sense "trying me out." He not only wanted to measure my understanding--he was especially eager to know what my "religion" was. He dreaded to find me a sectarian, and when he discovered that I, too, was a student of Darwin and a disciple of Herbert Spencer, he frankly expressed his pleasure. He rejoiced, also, in the fact that I was earning my own living, and to him I seemed to be in possession of a noble income. With all his love of scholarship he remained the thrifty son of New England. Here again I fear I permitted him to assume too much, but when one's prospective father-in-law is asking how one expects to support a wife, one is tempted to give a slightly more favorable report than the conditions will warrant. I explained my contract with Macmillans, and named the prices I obtained for my stories, and with these he was properly impressed. It was absurd yet gratifying to have a son-in-law who could sell "lies" for hard cash, and his respect for me increased. As we walked homeward that night, I expressed my wish to have the marriage a judicial ceremony. "I make no objection to having the service read by a clergyman," I explained, "but I prefer to employ the highest legal authority in the county--a judge, if possible. However, I will leave it all to Zulime. As an individualist I consider her a full and equal partner in all phases of this enterprise. I do not expect her to even promise to obey me, but I hope she will always find my requests reasonable--if she does not, she has the right to ignore them. Her signature shall be as good as mine at the bank." This statement startled the banker, for he held rather old-fashioned ideas concerning women and money; but Zulime was his favorite child, and he hastened to assure me that she would not waste my substance. "I think we can induce the district judge to come over and perform the ceremony," he concluded. If my notion to employ a judge of the district shocked my bride, she artfully deceived me, for she cheerfully consented, and a day or two later, with her brother Florizel for a guide, I drove over to the county town and laid my request before Judge Sturgis of the District Court. The judge knew Don Carlos and (as a reader of the magazines) had some knowledge of me; therefore he at once declared his willingness to assist. "It will be an honor," he added heartily; "I'll adjourn court if necessary. You may depend on me." He also agreed to meet our wishes as to the character of the ceremony. "I'll make it as short as you like," he said. "I'll reduce it to its lowest legal terms," and with this understanding I procured my license and returned to Hanover. In spite of all these practical details the whole adventure seemed curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been concerned as witness, and I suspect that Zulime was almost equally unconvinced of its reality. Poor girl! It was all as far from the wedding of her girlish dreams as her bridegroom fell short of the silver-clad knight of romance, but I promised her that she would find something grandiose and colorful in our wedding journey. "Our wedding will be prosaic, but wait until you see the sunset light on the Crestones! Our week in the High Country shall be a poem." This was a characteristic attitude with me. I was always saying, "Wait! These flowers _are_ lovely, but those just ahead of us are more beautiful still." Zulime's attitude, as I soon discovered, was precisely opposite: "Let us make the most of the flowers at our hand," was her motto. The Taft home had something of the same unesthetic quality which marked Neshonoc. It was simple, comfortable, and entirely New England. Throughout the stern vicissitudes of his life on the Middle Border, Don Carlos Taft had carried the memories and the accents of his New Hampshire town. His beginnings had been as laboriously difficult as those of my father. In many ways they were alike; that is to say, they were both Yankee in training and tradition. At last the epoch-marking day came marching across the eastern plain. The inevitable bustle began with the dawn. I packed my trunk and dispatched it to the station in confident expectation of our mid-afternoon departure, and Zulime did the same, although it must have seemed more illusory to her than to me. The Judge arrived precisely at noon, and at half-past twelve the family solemnly gathered in the living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of sorrow and regret. The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn tones, pronounced us man and wife. Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty, while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast" was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles. If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the campaigns of Cyrus--or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee. At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!" CHAPTER TEN The New Daughter and Thanksgiving At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What do you think of it?" Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine. "Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath. It _was_ beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their gleaming drifts of snow, with the dry, grassy foothills through which we were winding our way, was like that of deep winter set opposite to early September. However, I would not permit Zulime to exhaust her vocabulary of admiration. "Keep some of your adjectives till we reach Ouray," I said with significant gravity. Before the train came to a stop at the platform of Colorado Springs, I caught sight of the red, good-humored face of Gustave, coachman for Louis Ehrich, one of my Colorado friends. Gustave was standing beside the road wagon in which I had so often ridden, and when he saw me alight he motioned to me. "You are to come with me," he explained as I approached. "I have orders to bring you at once to the house--breakfast is waiting for you." I had written to the Ehrichs, saying that my wife would be with me in the Springs for a few days, and that I wanted them to meet her--but I did not expect to be met or to receive an invitation to breakfast. Zulime hesitated till I assured her that the Ehrichs were old friends and not the kind of people who say one thing and mean another. "They will never permit us to go to the hotel--I know them." With that she consented, and fifteen minutes later Louis and Henriette met us at their threshold and took Zulime to their hearts, as though they had known her for years. The house stood on the bank of a stream, and, from the windows of the room they gave us, the Lord of the Range loomed in distant majesty directly above the Garden of the Gods, and our first day of married life was filled with splendor. Each hour of that day had for us its own magical color, its own drama of flying cloud and resisting rock. From the commonplace Kansas village we had been transported as if by an enchanted carpet to a land of beauty and romance, of changeful charm, a region of which I was even then beginning to write with joyous inspiration. That my bride and I would forever recall this day and this house with gratitude and delight I was even then aware. "This compensates for the humble scene of our wedding, doesn't it?" I demanded. "It is more than I dreamed of having," she replied. In truth no blood relations could have been more sympathetic, more generous, more considerate than the Ehrichs. They rejoiced in us. Skilled and happy hosts, they did their utmost to make our honeymoon an unforgettable experience. Each hour of our stay was arranged with kindness. We drove, we ate, we listened to music, with a grateful wonder at our good fortune. They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel." That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and the splendors of the Continental Divide. At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors, and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible, so violently dramatic was the land. "From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting. As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter, surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the antithesis of Kansas. Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her regard. When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west, wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous--what it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only faintly divine. At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride, a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs! Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial. For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be dark by the time we reach the hotel." Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a sense of actual relief that we reëntered our apartment. Our eyes ached with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds, gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel. To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic, extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future. "We'll go East after our visit to the old folks," I declared. "This is only the first half of our wedding journey; the other part shall include Washington, Boston, and New York." Zulime looked somewhat incredulous (she didn't know me yet), but her eyes glowed with pleasure at the thought of the capital, of which she knew nothing, and of New York, which she knew only as a seaport. "I thought you were poor," she said. "So I am," I replied, "but I intend to educate you in American geography." The railway enters the Ouray amphitheater from the west and stops--for the very good reason that it can go no farther!--but from the railway station a stage road climbs the precipitous eastern wall and leads on to Red Mountain, as through an Alpine pass. Over this divide I now planned to drive to Silverton, and thence to Durango by way of Las Animas Cañon. Zulime, with an unquestioning faith in me--a faith which I now think of with wonder--agreed to this crazy plan. Her ignorance of the cold, the danger involved, made her girlishly eager to set forth. She was like a child in her reliance on my sagacity and skill. We left Ouray, at eight of a bitter morning, in a rude sleigh with only a couple of cotton quilts to defend us from the cold, and when, after a long climb up a wall of stupendous cliffs with roaring streams shouting from their icy beds upon our right, we entered an aisle of frosty pines edging an enormous ledge, where frozen rills hung in motionless cascades, Zulime, enraptured by the radiant avenues which opened out at every turn of our icy upward trail, became blind to all danger. The flaming, golden light flinging violet shadows, vivid as stains of ink along the crusted slopes, dazzled her, caused her to forget the icy wind or, at any rate, to patiently endure it. At Red Mountain, a mournful, half-buried, deserted mining town, we left our sleigh and stumbled into the dingy little railway station, so chilled, so cramped, that we could scarcely walk, and yet we did not regret our ride. However, we were glad of the warmth of the dirty little coach into which we climbed a few minutes later. It seemed delightfully safe to Zulime, and I was careful not to let her know that from this town the train descended of its own weight all the way to Silverton! Fortunately, nothing happened, and at Silverton we changed to a real train, with a real engine, and as we dropped into Las Animas Cañon we left December behind. At six o'clock we emerged from the cañon at Durango into genial September--or so it seemed after our day of midwinter in the heights. Next day we returned to Colorado Springs. Our stay in the mountains was at an end, but the memory of those burnished domes, those dark-hued forests, and the sound of those foaming streams, remain with us to this day.--All the way down the long slope to the Mississippi River, we reverted to this "circuit," recalling its most impressive moments, its noblest vistas. It had been for my bride a procession of wonders, a colossal pageant--to me it was a double satisfaction because of her delight. With a feeling that I had in some degree atoned for my parsimony in the matter of an engagement ring and for the drab prose of our marriage ceremony, I brought the first half of our wedding journey to a close in Chicago. I now looked forward to the meeting between my mother and her new daughter. This was, after all, the important part of my venture. Would my humble home content my artist bride? In preparation I began to sing small. "Don't expect too much of the Garland Homestead," I repeated. "It is only an angular, slate-colored farm-house without a particle of charm outside or in. It is very far from being the home I should like you to be mistress of, and my people you must bear in mind, are pioneers, survivals of the Border. They are remote from all things urban." To this the New Daughter responded loyally, "I am sure I shall like your home and I _know_ I shall love your mother." As women of her race have done from the most immemorial times, she had left her own tribe and was about to enter the camp of her captor, but she pretended to happiness, resolute to make the best of whatever came. Our friends in Chicago smiled when I told them where we had been. Lorado said, "A Honeymoon in the heart of the Rockies is just like you"--but I cared nothing for his gibes so long as Zulime was content, and I had but to over-hear her account of her trip to be reassured. To her it had been a noble exploration into a marvelous country. This was the day before Thanksgiving, and with a knowledge that the old folks were counting the hours which intervened, I wrested Zulime from her friends, and hurried her to the train. "Dear old mother! I know just how she is waiting and watching for you. We must not fail her." * * * * * It was just daylight as we stepped down from the Pullman at West Salem, but father was there! Seated in our "canopy-top surrey" and holding restless ramping Black Dolly to her place, he was too busy to glance at us, but I could tell, by the set of his head, that he was emotionally intense. "There's your new father," I said, pointing him out to Zulime, "and that is your family coach." Father couldn't even shake hands, for Dolly was still pawing and plunging but he smiled as we approached and called out in reference to Dolly, "She'll quiet down in a minute." While the train was pulling out I explained to Zulime that Dolly's fury was all assumed, "She'll soon be stolid as a stump." It wasn't in the least the tender meeting I had expected to enjoy, but when at last my father was able to reach his hand down to Zulime, he said, "I'm glad to meet you, my daughter," and the tenderness in his vibrant voice touched me. "We were afraid you weren't coming," he added, and a little later I saw him wipe the tears from his eyes. The fact that he used a bandanna for this purpose, did not destroy the moving quality of his emotion. The village looked woefully drab and desolate under that misty November sky. The elm trees, stripped of every leaf, the gardens weedy, ragged and forlorn, together with the ugly little houses suggested the sordid reality of the life to which I had brought my bride. It was all a far cry from the towering cliffs and colorful cañons of Colorado. The Homestead shared in the general ugliness of that rain-swept dawn. Its maples were gaunt skeletons, its garden a sodden field over which the chickens were wandering in sad and aimless fashion. To my city-bred wife this home-coming must have been a cruel shock, but it was the best I could do, and whatever the girl felt, she concealed with a smile, resolute to make the best of me and mine. Mother was waiting for us on the porch, tremulous with excitement, too eager to remain in doors, and as I took her in my arms, and kissed her, I said, "Mother, I've brought your new daughter." For just a moment she hesitated (the grace and dignity of the tall girl awed her, confused her), then Zulime went to her, and the two women, so diverse, yet so dear to me, met in an embrace of mutual love and confidence. Isabel Garland entered into possession of the daughter she had so long hoped for, and Zulime Taft became a member of the household of which Richard Garland was the head. Breakfast was waiting for us, a noble meal, a sumptuous wedding breakfast, for mother and her two helpers (daughters of a neighboring farmer), had been up since five o'clock and while it was a good deal like a farmer's Sunday dinner, Zulime thanked the girls when father presented them to her, but was a bit startled when one of them took her seat at the table with us. She was not accustomed to this democratic custom of the village. My aunt, Susan Bailey, a gentle, frail little body also joined our circle, adding one more pair of eyes to those whose scrutiny must have been somewhat trying to the bride. To meet these blunt, forthright folk at such a table without betraying amusement or surprise, required tact, but the New Daughter succeeded in winning them all, even Mary, the cook, who was decidedly difficult. Almost immediately after taking his seat my father began: "Well now, daughter, you are the captain. Right here I abdicate. Anything you want done shall be done. What you say about things in the kitchen shall be law. I will furnish the raw materials--you and the girls must do the rest. We like to be bossed, don't we, Belle?" He ended addressing mother. In her concise, simple fashion, she replied: "Yes, the house is yours. I turn it all over to you." It was evident that all this had been discussed many times for they seemed in haste to get its statement off their minds, and I could not check them or turn them aside. Zulime made light of it. "I'd rather not _be_ captain," she laughingly protested. "I'd rather be passenger for a while." Father was firm. "No, we need a commanding officer, and you must take charge. Now I've got a turkey out there--and cranberries--" He was off! He told just what he had laid in for the dinner, and ended by saying, "If there's anything I've forgot, you just let me know, and I'll go right up town and get it." As he talked, the tones of his resonant voice, the motions of his hands, the poise of his head, brought back to me a boyish feeling of subordination. I laughed, but I submitted to his domination, entirely willing that he should play the part of the commander for the last time. It was amusing, but it had its pathetic side for my mother's silence was significant of her weakness. She said nothing--not a word, but with Zulime sitting beside her, she was content, so happy she could not find words in which to express her satisfaction. Her waiting was at an end! My father made a handsome picture. His abundant white hair, his shapely beard, and his keen profile pleased me. Though a little stooped, he was still alert and graceful, and his voice rang like a trumpet as he entered upon an account of his pioneer experiences. "I've always lived on the Border," he explained, "and I don't know much about the ways of city folks, so you must excuse me when I do the wrong thing. My will is the best in the world, and I'll do anything I can to please you." That breakfast was the exact opposite of a "Continental Breakfast." Steak, doughnuts, buckwheat cakes, cookies, apple sauce made me groan but Zulime smiled. She understood the care which had gone into its making. When at last she and I were alone in my study I began, "Well, how do you like West Salem and the Garlands?" "Your mother is a dear!" she replied, and her voice was convincing--"and I like your father. He's very good looking. And the breakfast was--well it was like one of your stories--Do you _always_ have steak and doughnuts for breakfast?" "No," I replied, "not always, but breakfast is a real meal with us." The sky darkened and a sleety rain set in during the forenoon, but mother did not mind the gloom outside, for within she had her daughter. Upon our return to the sitting room, she led Zulime out into the kitchen to take account of all that was going on for dinner, and while the maids, with excited faces stood about waiting for orders from their new boss, Zulime laughingly protested that she had no wish to interfere. "Go on in your own way," she said. To me, on her return to the sitting room, she exclaimed: "You should see the food in preparation out there! Enough to feed all the Eagle's Nest campers.--How many are coming to dinner?" "No one but the McClintocks--and only a few of them," I soberly replied. "Uncle William and Aunt Maria, Frank and Lorette--and Deborah, all old people now. I don't know of any one else." In fact, we had less than this number, for Maria was not well enough to come out in the rain. Our circle was small, but the spirit of Thanksgiving was over it, and when I saw my stately city wife sitting among my rough-hewn relations, listening to the quaint stories of Uncle Frank, or laughing at the humorous sallies of Aunt Lorette, I wondered what they thought of her. She made a lovely picture, and all--even caustic Deborah--capitulated to her kindliness and charm. If she had failed of complete comprehension and sympathy I could not have blamed her, but to have her perfectly at home among these men and women of the vanishing Border displayed her in a new and noble guise. If anything was lacking--any least quality of adaptation, it was supplied when, that evening, my uncles and my father discovered that Zulime could not only read music, but that she could play all the old songs which they loved to have me sing. This accomplishment completed their conquest, for under her deft hands the piano revived the wistful melodies of _Minnie Minturn_, _Maggie_, and _Nellie Wildwood_, and when my mother's voice, sweet as ever, but weak and hesitant, joined with mine in singing for our guests, I was both glad and sad, glad of my young wife, sad with a realization of my mother's weakness and age. She did not reproach me for not bringing the daughter sooner. She had but one regret. "I wish Frank was here," she said, her thought going out to her other son. How far away, how remote, how tender that evening seems to me after more than twenty years work and travel! To Zulime it unrolled like a scene from one of my novels, to me it was the closing, fading picture of an era, the end of an epoch, the passing of a race, for the Garlands and McClintocks, warriors of the western conquest, representatives of a heroic generation were even then basking in the light of a dying camp-fire, recounting the deeds of brave days gone. When we were again alone in my study, Zulime said, "I'm going to enjoy it here. I like your people, and I hope they liked me." * * * * * It was in this humble fashion that I brought to my mother the new daughter for whom she had longed, and it was in this homely way that the Garlands and McClintocks received my wife. Amid surroundings which were without grace of art or touch of poetry, the informal and very plain ceremony took place, but the words were sincere, and the forms and features of the speakers deeply significant of the past. No matter what my mother's storms and sorrows had been, she was now at peace. With a smiling face she confronted the future. CHAPTER ELEVEN My Father's Inheritance At half-past six on the morning following our arrival at the Homestead, my father opened the stairway door and shouted, just as he had been wont to do in the days when I was a boy on the farm--"Hamlin! Time to get up!" and with a wry grin I called to Zulime and explained, "In our family, breakfast is a full and regular meal at which every member of the household is expected promptly at seven." It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies, doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with indigestion. The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of the kitchen was celestial." My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done at four o'clock." "O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days." During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her comment to me was a different matter. That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle." Uncle William, notwithstanding a liking for me, remarked with feeling, "She's a wonder! I don't see how you got her." To which I replied, "Neither do I." In setting down these derogatory comments I do not wish to imply that I was positively detested but that I was not a beloved county institution was soon evident to my wife. Delegations of school children did not call upon me, and very few of my fellow citizens pointed out my house to travelers--at that time. In truth little of New England's regard for authorship existed in the valley and my head possessed no literary aureole. The fact that I could--and did--send away bundles of manuscript and get in return perfectly good checks for them, was a miracle of doubtful virtue to my relatives as well as to my neighbors. My money came as if by magic, unasked and unwarranted, like the gold of sunset. "I don't see how you do it," my Uncle Frank said to me one day, and his tone implied that he considered my authorship a questionable kind of legerdemain, as if I were, somehow, getting money under false pretenses. Rightly or wrongly, I had never pretended to a keen concern in the "social doings" of my village. Coming to the valley out of regard for my father and mother and not from personal choice, the only folk who engaged my attention were the men and women of the elder generation, rugged pioneer folk who brought down to me something of the humor, the poetry, and the stark heroism of the Border in the days when the Civil War was a looming cloud, and the "Pineries" a limitless wilderness on the north. Men like Sam McKinley, William Fletcher, and Wilbur Dudley retained my friendship and my respect, but the affairs of the younger generation did not greatly concern me. In short, I considered the relationship between them and myself fortuitous. Absorbed in my writing I was seldom in the mood during my visits to entertain curious neighbors, in fact I had met few people outside my relatives. All this was very ungracious, no doubt, but such had been my attitude for seven years. I came there to work and I worked. Even now, in the midst of my honeymoon, I wrote busily. Each morning immediately after breakfast I returned to my study, where the manuscript of a novel (_Her Mountain Lover_) was slowly growing into final shape, but in the afternoons Zulime and I occasionally went sleighing with Dolly and the cutter, or we worked about the house. It was a peaceful time, with only one thought to stir the pool of my content. I began to realize that the longer we stayed, the harder it would be for my mother to let us go. She could hardly permit her New Daughter to leave the room. She wanted her to sit beside her or to be in the range of her vision all day long. So far from resenting her loss of household authority she welcomed it, luxuriating in the freedom from care which the young wife brought. This growing reliance upon Zulime made me uneasy. "I cannot, even for mother's sake, ask my city-bred wife to spend the winter in this small snow-buried hamlet," I wrote to my brother, "and, besides, I have planned a wedding trip to Washington and New York." In announcing to my mother the date of our departure, I said, "We won't be gone long. We'll be back early in the spring." "See that you do," she replied, but her eyes were deep and dark with instant sadness. She had hoped with childish trust that we would stay all winter with her. It was beautiful in Neshonoc at this time. Deep, dazzling snows blanketed the hills, and covered the fields, and frequently at sunset or later, after the old people were asleep, Zulime and I went for a swift walk far out into the silent country, rejoicing in the crisp clear air, and in the sparkle of moonbeams on the crusted drifts. At such times the satin sheen of sled-tracks in the road, the squeal of dry flakes under my heel (united with the sound of distant sleigh bells) brought back to me sadly-sweet memories of boyish games, spelling school, and the voices of girls whose laughter had long since died away into silence. The blurred outlines of the hills, the barking of sentinel dogs at farm-yard gates, and the light from snow-laden cottage windows filled my heart with a dull illogical ache, an emotion which was at once a pleasure and a pain. O, witchery of the winter night, (With broad moon shouldering to the west), Before my feet the rustling deeps Of untracked snows, in shimmering heaps, Lie cold and desolate and white. I hear glad girlish voices ring Clear as some softly-stricken string-- (The moon is sailing toward the west), The sleigh-bells clash in homeward flight, With frost each horse's breast is white-- (The moon is falling toward the west)-- "Good night, Lettie!" "Good night, Ben!" (The moon is sinking at the west)-- "Good night, my sweetheart,"--Once again The parting kiss, while comrades wait Impatient at the roadside gate, And the red moon sinks _beyond_ the west! Such moments as these were meeting places of the old and the new, the boy and the man. The wistful, haunting dreams of the past, contended with the warm and glowing fulfillment of the present. For the past a song, for the present the woman at my side! Whether Zulime had similar memories of her girlhood or not I do not know. She was not given to emotional expression, but she several times declared herself entirely content with our orderly easeful life and professed herself willing to remain in the homestead until spring. "I like it here," she repeated, but I was certain that she liked the city and her own kind, better, and that a longer stay would prove a deprivation and a danger. After all, she was an alien in the Valley,--a gracious and kindly alien, but an alien nevertheless. Her natural habitat was among the studios of Chicago or New York, and my sense of justice would not permit me to take advantage of her loyalty and her womanly self-sacrifice. "Pack your trunk," I said to her one December day, with an air of high authority. "We are going East in continuation of our wedding trip." Two days after making this decision we were in Washington, at a grand hotel, surrounded by suave waiters who had abundant leisure to serve us, for the reason that Congress was not in session, and the city was empty of its lobbyists and its law-makers. The weather was like October and for several days we walked about the streets without thinking of outside wraps. We went at once to the Capitol from whose beautiful terraces we could look across the city, back and upward along our trail, above the snows of Illinois soaring on and up into the far cañons of the San Juan Divide, retracing in memory the first half of our wedding journey with a sense of satisfaction, a joy which now took on double value by reason of its contrast to the marble terrace on which we stood. From the luxury of our city surroundings the flaming splendors of the Needle Range appeared almost mystical. We ate our Christmas dinner in royal isolation, attended by negroes whose dusky countenances shone with holiday desire to make us happy. With no visitors and no duties we gave ourselves to the business of seeing the Capitol and enjoying the gorgeous sunlight. Zulime, who looked at everything in the spirit of a youthful tourist, was enchanted and I played guide with such enthusiasm as a man of forty could bring to bear. It was a new and pleasant schooling for me, a time which I look back upon with wistful satisfaction, after more than twenty years. Philadelphia, our next stop, had an especial significance to me (something quite apart from its historical significance). Outwardly professing a keen interest in the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and other objects which enthralled my young wife, I was secretly planning to offer Lorimer of _The Post_, the serial rights of my novel _The Eagle's Heart_, and I had an engagement to talk with Edward Bok about a novelette. Bok, a friend of several years' standing, received us most cordially, and Mrs. Bok, who came in next day to meet us, not only instantly and heartily approved of my wife, but quite openly said so, a fact which added another quality to the triumphal character of our progress. I was certain that all of my other Eastern friends would find her admirable. We reached New York on New Year's Eve, and the streets were roaring with the customary riot of youth, but in our rooms at the Westminster we were as remote from the tumult as if we had been at the bottom of a Colorado mine. We would have heard nothing of the horns and hootings of the throngs had not Zulime expressed a wish to go forth and mix with them. With a feeling of disgust of the hoodlums who filled Broadway, I took her as far north as Forty-second Street, but she soon tired of the rude men and their senseless clamor, and gladly returned to our hotel willing to forget it all. In my diary I find these words, "I am beginning the New Year with two thousand dollars in the bank, and a pending sale which will bring in as much more. I feel pretty confident of a living during the year 1900." Evidently the disposal of my serial to Lorimer, the results of my deal with Brett, and the growing interest of other publishers in my work had engendered a confidence in the future which I had never before attained--and yet I must admit that most of my prosperity was expected rather than secured, a promise, rather than a fulfillment, and the fact that I permitted Zulime to settle upon a three-room suite in an obscure Hotel on Fifteenth Street, is proof of my secret doubts. Eighteen dollars per week seemed a good deal of money to pay for an apartment. As I think back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet, at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy of us both, on the contrary she went ahead with shining face. One extravagance I did commit, one that I linger upon with satisfaction--I forced her to choose a handsome coat instead of a plain one. It was a long graceful garment of a rich brown color, an "Individual model" the saleslady called it. It was very becoming to my wife--at any rate I found it so--but the price was sixty-five dollars--"marked down from eighty-five" the saleslady said. Neither of us had ever worn a coat costing more than twenty-five dollars and to pay almost three times as much even for a beautiful "creation" like this was out of the question--and my considerate young wife decided against it with a sigh. I was in reckless mood. "We will take it," I said to the saleswoman. "Oh no! We can't afford it!" protested Zulime in high agitation. "It is impossible!" She looked scared and weak. "You may do up the old coat," I went on in exalted tone. "My wife will wear the new one." In a tremor of girlish joy and gratitude Zulime walked out upon the street wearing the new garment, and the expression of her face filled me with desire to go on amazing her. She had owned so few pretty things in her life that I took a keen pleasure in scaring her with sudden presents. I bought a crescent-shaped brooch set with small diamonds which cost one hundred dollars--Oh, I was coming on! [She is wearing these jewels yet and she says she loves them--but as I think back to that brown cloak I am not so sure that her approval was without misgiving. It may be that she secretly hated that coat for it was an unusual color, and while its lines were graceful in my eyes it may have been "all out of style."--What became of it, finally, I am unable to say. No matter, it expressed for me a noble sentiment and it shall have a place on this page with the Oriental brooch and the amethyst necklace.] Humble as our quarters were we rejoiced in distinguished visitors. William Dean Howells called upon us almost immediately and so did Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, and many other of my valued, old-time friends. Furthermore, with a courage at which I now marvel at, Zulime announced that we would be "at home" every afternoon, and thereafter our tiny sitting-room was often crowded with her friends--for she had begun to find out many of her artist acquaintances. In fact, we were forever discovering people she had known in Paris. It seemed to me that she had met the entire American Colony during her four years in France. My social and domestic interests quite cut me off from my club, and we joked about this. "I am now one of the newly-weds," I admitted, "and my absence from the club is expected. Members invariably desert the club during the first year or two of their married life, but they all come back!--Sooner or later, they drop in for lunch or while wifey is away, and at last are indistinguishable from the bachelors." Mrs. James A. Herne, who had meant so much to me in my Boston days, was one of our very first callers, and no one among all my friends established herself more quickly in my wife's regard. Katharine's flame-like enthusiasm, her never-failing Irish humor, and her quick intelligence, made her a joyous inspiration, and whilst she and Zulime compared experiences like a couple of college girls, I sat and smiled with a kind of proprietary pride in both of them. Fortunately my wife approved of my associates. "You have a delightful circle," she said one night as we were on our way home from a dinner with a group of distinguished literary folk. Her remark comforted me. Having no money with which to hire cabs or purchase opera tickets, I could at least share with her the good friendships I had won, confidently, believing that she would gain approval,--which she did. Not all of my associates were as poor as I (some of them, indeed, lived in houses of their own), but they were mostly concerned with the arts in some form, and with such people Zulime was entirely at ease. With a lecture to deliver in Boston I asked her to go with me. "I cannot forego the pleasure of showing you about 'the Hub,'" I urged. "I want Hurd and other of my faithful friends of former days to know you. We'll take rooms at the Parker House which used to fill me with silent awe. I want to play the part, for a day or two, of the successful author." As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary Editor of the _Transcript_, came at once to call, and so did Flower of the _Arena_, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends. By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres" and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty propaganda! To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr. Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain, were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to imagine it wider than it was. Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the unimportant events of the past. Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing _The Atlantic Monthly_, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New York, I confessed to a feeling of sadness, of definite loss. Naturally, inevitably the Boston of my early twenties had vanished. My youthful worship of the city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was no escape from the conclusion. "Little that is new is coming out of Boston," I sadly remarked to Zulime. "Her illustrious poets of the Civil War period are not being replaced by others of National appeal. Her writers, her artists, like those of Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, are coming to New York. New England is being drained of talent in order that Manhattan shall be supreme." While we were away on this trip my friends Grace and Ernest Thompson-Seton had sent out cards for a party "in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin Garland," but when, a few nights later, a throng of writers, artists and musicians filled the Seton studio, I was confirmed in a growing suspicion that I was only the lesser half of a fortunate combination. A long list of invitations to dinner or to luncheon testified to the fact that while they tolerated me, they liked my wife, and in this judgment I concurred. One day while calling on a charming friend and fellow-fictionist, Juliet Wilbur Tompkins, we met for the first time Frank Norris, another California novelist, who captivated us both, not merely because of his handsome face and figure, but by reason of his keen and joyous spirit. He had been employed for some time in the office of Doubleday and Page, and though I had often passed him at his desk, I had never before spoken with him. We struck up an immediate friendship and thereafter often dined together. He told me of his plan to embody modern California in a series of novels, and at my request read some of his manuscript to me. Zulime, although she greatly admired Norris, still maintained that Edward MacDowell was the handsomest man of her circle, and in this I supported her, for he was then in the noble prime of his glorious manhood, gay of spirit, swift of wit and delightfully humorous of speech. As a dinner companion he was unexcelled and my wife quite lost her heart to him. Between Frank Norris and Edward MacDowell I appeared but a rusty-coat. I sang small. Fortunately for me they were both not only loyal friends but devoted husbands. I remembered saying to Zulime as we came away: "America need not despair of her art so long as she has two such personalities as Edward MacDowell and Frank Norris." Edwin Booth's daughter, Mrs. Grossman, who was living at this time in a handsome apartment on Eighteenth Street, was one of those who liked my wife, and an invitation to take tea with her produced in me a singular and sudden reversal to boyish timidity, for to me she had almost the quality of royalty. I thought of her as she had looked to me, fifteen years before, when on the occasion of Edwin Booth's last performance of _Macbeth_ in Boston, she sat in the stage-box with her handsome young husband, and applauded her illustrious father. "An enormous audience was present," I explained to Zulime, "and most of us were deeply interested in the radiant figure of that happy girl. To me she was a princess, and I observed that as the curtain rose after each act and the great tragedian came forth to bow, his eyes sought his daughter's glowing face. Each time the curtain fell his final glance was upon her. Her small hands seemed the only ones whose sound had value in his ears." How remote, how royal, how unattainable she had appeared to me that night! Now here she was a kindly, charming hostess, the mother of a family who regarded me as "a distinguished author." To make that radiant girl in the stage box and my lovely hostess coalesce was difficult, but as I studied her profile and noted the line of her expressive lips I was able to relate her to the princely player whose genius I had worshiped from the gallery. It will be evident to the reader that life in New York pleased me better than life in West Salem or even in Chicago, and I would gladly have stayed on till spring, but Zulime decided to go back to Chicago, and this we did about the first of February. The last of the many notable entertainments in which my wife shared was an open meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which I had helped to found), where she met many of the leading writers and artists of the city. Howells, who presided over the program, was especially fine, restrained, tactful yet quietly authoritative, and when I told him that our wedding journey was nearly over he expressed a regret which was highly flattering to us both. At one o'clock on the day following this historic meeting we entered a car headed for the west, acknowledging with a sigh, yet with a comfortable sense of having accomplished our purpose, that it would be profitable to go into retirement and ruminate for a month or two. The glories of New York had been almost too exciting for Zulime, "I am ready to go home," she said. Home! There was my problem. The only city residence I possessed was my bachelor apartment on Elm Street, and at the moment I had no intention of asking my wife to share its narrow space except as a temporary lodging, and to take her back into that snow-covered little Wisconsin village, back to a shabby farm house filled with ailing elderly folk would amount to crime. From the high splendor of our stay in New York we now fell to earth with a thump. My duties as a son, my cares as the head of a household returned upon me, and my essential homelessness took away all that assurance of literary success which my Eastern friends had helped me attain. Of the elation in which I had moved while in New York I retained but a shred. Once more the hard-working fictionist and the responsible head of a family, I began to worry about the future. My honeymoon was over. The basic realities of my poverty again cropped out in a letter from my mother who wrote that my aunt was very ill and that she needed me. To Zulime I said, "You stay here with your sister and your friends while I go up to the Homestead and see what I can do for our old people." This she refused to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you," and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable to meet us. Her sweet spirit was about to leave its frail body, that was evident to me as I looked down at her, but she knew me and whispered, "I'm glad to have you at home." She showed no fear of death, in fact she appeared unconscious of her grave condition. She was a beautiful character and to see her lying there beneath her old-fashioned quilt, so small and helpless, so patient, lonely and sad, made speech difficult for me. She had meant much in my life. The serene dignity with which she and her mother had carried the best New England traditions into the rough front rank of the Border, was still written in the lines of her face. I had never seen her angry or bitter, and I had never heard her utter an unkind word. Zulime took charge of the work about the house with a cheerfulness which amazed me. My mother with pathetic confidence leaned upon her daughter's strong young shoulders and the music of my stern old father's voice as he said, "Well, daughter, I'm glad you're here," was a revelation to me. He already loved her as if she were his very own, and she responded to his affection in a way which put me still more deeply in her debt. It would have been disheartening, but not at all surprising, had she found the village and my home intolerable, but she did not--she appeared content, sustained we will say, by her sense of duty. Her situation was difficult. Imprisoned in the snowy silences of the little valley, dependent on her neighbors for entertainment, and confronted with the care of two invalids and a fretful husband, she was put to a rigid test. Beside our base-burning stove she sat night after night playing cinch or dominoes to amuse my father, while creaking footsteps went by on the frosty board-walks and in a distant room my aunt lay waiting for the soft step of the Grim Intruder. It must have seemed a gray outlook for my bride but she never by word or look displayed uneasiness. Without putting our conviction into words, we all realized that my aunt's departure was but a matter of a few days. "There is nothing to do," the doctor said. "She will go like a person falling asleep. All you can do is wait--" And so the days passed. We went to bed each night at ten and quite as regularly rose at half-past six. Dinner came exactly at noon, supper precisely at six. Although my upstairs study was a kind of retreat, we spent less time in it than we had planned to do, for mother was so appealingly wistful to have us near her that neither of us had the heart to deny her. She could not endure to have us both absent. Careful not to interrupt my writing, she considered Zulime's case in different light. "You can read, or sew or knit down here just as well as up there," she said. "It is a comfort for me just to have you sit where I can look at you." She loved to hear me read aloud, and this I often did in the evening while she sat beside Zulime and watched her fingers fly about her sewing. These were blissful hours for her, and in these after years I take a measure of comfort in remembering the part I had in making them possible. Slowly but steadily Susan Garland's vital forces died out, and at last there came a morning when her breath faltered on her lips. She had gone away, as she had lived, with quiet dignity. Notwithstanding her almost constant suffering she had always been a calmly cheerful soul and her passing, while it left us serious did not sadden us. Her life came to its end without struggle and her face was peaceful. She was the last of my father's immediate family, and to him was transmitted in due course of law, the estate with which her husband had left her, a dower, which though small had enabled her to live independently of her relatives and in simple comfort. It was a matter of but a few thousand dollars, but its possession now made the most fundamental change in my father's way of life. The effect of this certain income upon his character was almost magical. He took on a sense of security, a feeling of independence, a freedom from worry such as he had been trying for over sixty years, without success, to attain. _It released him from the tyranny of the skies._ All his life he had been menaced by the "weather." Clouds, snows, winds, had been his unrelenting antagonists. Hardly an hour of his past had been free from a fear of disaster. The glare of the sun, the direction of the wind, the assembling of clouds at sunset,--all the minute signs of change, of storm, of destruction had been his incessant minute study. For over fifty years he had been enslaved to the seasons. His sister's blessing liberated him. He agonized no more about the fall of frost, the slash of hail, the threat of tempest. Neither chinch bugs nor drought nor army worms could break his rest. He slept in comfort and rose in confidence. He retained a general interest in crops, of course, but he no longer ate his bread in fear, and just in proportion as he realized his release from these corroding, long-endured cares, did he take on mellowness and humor. He became another man altogether. He ceased to worry and hurry. His tone, his manner became those of a citizen of substance, of genial leisure. He began to speak of travel! Definitely abandoning all intention of farming, he put his Dakota land on sale and bought several small cottages in West Salem. As a landlord in a modest way, he rejoiced in the fact that his income was almost entirely free from the results of harvest. It irked him (when he thought of it) to admit that all his pioneering had been a failure, that all his early rising, and his ceaseless labor had availed so little, but the respect in which he was now held as householder, and as President of the village, compensated him in such degree that he was able to ignore his ill success as a wheat raiser. "This legacy proves once again the magic of money," I remarked to Zulime. "Father can now grow old with dignity and confidence. His living is assured." It remains to say that this inheritance also lifted indirectly a part of my own burden. It took from me something of the financial responsibility concerning the household whose upkeep I had shared for ten years or more. Mother was still my care, but not in the same sense as before, for my father with vast pride volunteered to pay all the household expenses. He even insisted upon paying for an extra maid and gardener. Now that he no longer needed the cash returns from the garden, he began to express a pleasure in it. He was content with making it an esthetic or at most a household enterprise. CHAPTER TWELVE We Tour the Oklahoma Prairie One of the disadvantages of being a fictionist lies in the fact that the history of one's imaginary people halts just in proportion as one's mind is burdened with the sorrowful realities of one's own life. A troubled bank clerk can (I believe) cast up a column of figures, an actor can declaim while his heart is breaking, but a novelist can't--or at any rate I can't--write stories while some friend or relative is in pain and calling for relief. Composition is dependent in my case upon a delicately adjusted mood, and a very small pebble is sufficient to turn the currents of my mind into a dry channel. My aunt's death was a sad shock to my mother and until she regained something of her cheerful temper, I was unable to take up and continue the action of my novel. I kept up the habit of going to my study, but for a week or more I could not write anything but letters. By the tenth of March we were all longing with deepest hunger for the coming of spring. According to the old almanac's saying we had a right to expect on the twenty-first a relenting of the rigors of the north, but it did not come. "March the twenty-first is spring and little birds begin to sing" was not true of the Valley this year. For two weeks longer, the icy winds continued to sweep with Arctic severity across the crests of the hills, and clouds of snow almost daily sifted down through the bare branches of the elms. At times the landscape, mockingly beautiful, was white and bleak as January. Drafts filled the lanes and sleigh-bells jingled mockingly. At last came grateful change. The wind shifted to the South. At mid-day the eaves began to drip, and the hens, lifting their voices in jocund song, scratched and burrowed, careening in the dusty earth which appeared on the sunward side of the barn. Green grass enlivened the banks of the garden, and on the southern slopes of the hills warmly colored patches appeared, and then came bird-song and budding branches!--so dramatic are the changes in our northern country. No sooner was spring really at hand than Zulime and I, eager to share in the art life which was so congenial to us both, returned to my former lodging in Chicago; and a little later we went so far as to give a party--our first party since our marriage. Fuller, who came early and stayed late, appeared especially amused at our make-shifts. "This isn't Chicago," he exclaimed as he looked around our rooms. "This is a lodging in London!" It was at this party that I heard the first word of the criticism under which I had expected to suffer. One of our guests, an old and privileged friend, remarked with a sigh, "Well, now that Zuhl has married a writer, I suppose her own artistic career is at an end." "Not at all!" I retorted, somewhat nettled. "I am an individualist in this as in other things. I do not believe in the subordination of a wife to her husband. Zulime has all the rights I claim for myself--no more, no less. If she fails to go on with her painting or sculpture the fault will not be mine. Our partnership is an equal one." I meant this. Although dimly aware that mutual concessions must be made, it was my fixed intention to allow my wife the fullest freedom of action. Proud of her skill as an artist, I went so far as to insist on her going back into her brother's studio to resume her modeling. "You are not my house-keeper--you are a member of a firm. I prefer to have you an artist." Smiling, evasive, she replied, "I haven't at the present moment the slightest 'call' to be an artist. Perhaps I shall--after a while; but at present I'd rather keep house." "But consider _me_!" I insisted. "Here am I, a public advocate of the rights of women, already denounced as your 'tyrant husband,' 'a selfish egotistic brute!'--I'll be accused--I am already accused--of cutting short your career as a sculptor. Consider the injustice you are doing _me_!" She refused to take my protest or her friends' comment seriously; and so we drifted along in pleasant round of parties till the suns of May, brooding over the land lured us back to the Homestead, in which Zulime could house-keep all day long if she wished to do so, and she did! Full of plans for refurnishing and redecorating, she was busy as a bumble-bee. As the mistress of a big garden and a real kitchen she invited all her Chicago friends to come and share her good fortune. She was filled with the spirit of ownership and exulted over the four-acre patch as if it were a noble estate in Surrey. It chanced that Lorado on his way to St. Paul was able to stop off, and Zulime not only cooked a special dinner for him, but proudly showed him all about the garden, talking gaily of the number of jars of berries and glasses of jelly she was planning to put up. "Well, Zuhl," he said resignedly, "I suppose it's all for the best, but I don't quite see the connection between your years of training in sculpture and the business of canning fruit." It was a perfect spring day, and the Homestead was at its best. The entire demesne was without a weed, and the blooming berry patches, the sprouting asparagus beds and the budding grape vines all come in for the eminent sculptor's enforced inspection, until at last with a yawn of unconcealed boredom he turned away. "You _seem_ to _like_ your slavery," he remarked to Zulime, a note of comical accusation in his voice. On the station platform when about to say good-bye to me, he became quite serious. "This marriage appears to be working out," he admitted, musingly. "I confess I was a little in doubt about it at first, but Zuhl seems to be satisfied with her choice and so--well, I've decided to let matters drift. Whether she ever comes back to sculpture or not is unimportant, so long as she is happy." Knowing that Zulime had always been his intellectual comrade, and realizing how deeply he felt the separation which her growing interest in my affairs had brought about, I gave him my hand in silent renewal of a friendship into which something new and deeply significant had come. "I hope she will never regret it," was all I could say. Zulime was not deceived as to my income. My property, up to this time, consisted of a small, a very small library, a dozen Navajo rugs, several paintings, a share in four acres of land and my book rights (which were of negligible value so far as furnishing a living was concerned), and my wife perceived very clearly that our margin above necessity was narrow, but this did not disturb her faith in the future, or if it did, she gave no sign of it--her face was nearly always smiling. Nevertheless I had no intention of keeping her in West Salem all summer. I could not afford to wear out her interest in it. One day, shortly after Lorado's visit, I received a letter from Major Stouch, the Indian Agent with whom I had campaigned at Lamedeer in '97. He wrote: "I have just been detailed to take charge of the Cheyenne Agency at Darlington, Oklahoma. Mrs. Stouch and I are about to start on a survey of my new reservation and I should like to have you and your wife come down and accompany us on our circuit. We shall hold a number of councils with the Indians, and there will be dances and pow-wows. It will all be material for your pen." This invitation appealed to me with especial force for I had long desired to study the Southern Cheyennes, and a tour with Stouch promised a rich harvest of fictional themes, for me. Furthermore it offered a most romantic experience for Zulime--just the kind of enlightenment I had promised her. With no time to lose, we packed our trunks and took train for Kansas City enroute for Indian Territory, the scene of many of the most exciting romances of my youth, the stronghold of bank robbers, and the hiding place of military renegades. On our way to Oklahoma, we visited Professor Taft in Hanover and I find this note recorded: "All day the wind blew, the persistent, mournful crying wind of the plain. The saddest, the most appealing sound in my world. It came with a familiar soft rush, a crowding presence, uttering a sighing roar--a vague sound out of which voices of lonely children and forgotten women broke. To the solitary farmer's wife such a wind brings tears or madness. I am tense with desire to escape. This bare little town on the ridge is appalling to me. Think of living here with the litany of this wind forever in one's ears." By contrast West Salem, with its green, embracing hills, seemed a garden, a place of sweet content, a summer resort, and yet in this Kansas town Zulime had spent part of her girlhood. In this sun-smit cottage she had left her mother to find a place in the outside world just as I had left my mother in Dakota. From this town she had gone almost directly to Paris! It would be difficult to imagine a more amazing translation--and yet, now that she was back in the midst of it, she gave no sign of the disheartenment she must have felt. She met all her old friends and neighbors with unaffected interest and gayety. Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie, across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the immemorial American drama,--only the stations on the railway broke the spell of the past with a modern word. Swarms of bearded, slouchy, broad-hatted men filled the train and crowded the platforms of the villages. Cow-boys, Indians in white men's clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee mountaineers made up this amazing population--a population in which libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central West in the forties. How these scenes affected my young wife I will not undertake to say; but I remember that she kept pretty close to my elbow whenever we mingled with the crowd, and the deeper we got into this raw world the more uneasy she became. "Where shall we spend the night?" she asked. Had I been alone I would not have worried about a hotel, but with a young wife who knew nothing of roughing it, I became worried. To the conductor I put an anxious question, "Is there a decent hotel in Reno?" His answer was a bit contemptuous, "Sure," he exclaimed. "What do you think you're doing--exploring?" This was precisely what I feared we _were_ doing. I said no more about it, although I hadn't much confidence in his notions of a first class hotel. There was nothing for it but to rest upon his assurance and go hopefully forward to the end of the line. It must have been about ten of a dark warm night as we came to a final halt beside a low station marked "Reno," and at the suggestion of the brakeman I called for "the Palace Hotel Bus," although none of the waiting carriages or drivers seemed even remotely related to a palace. My wife, filled with a high sense of our adventure, took her seat in the muddy and smelly carriage, with touching trust in me. The Palace Hotel, with its doorway brightly lighted with electricity, proved a pleasant surprise. It looked clean and bright and new, and the proprietor, a cheerful and self-respecting citizen, was equally reassuring. We went to our rooms with restored confidence in Oklahoma. The next morning, before we had finished our breakfast, a messenger from the Agency came in to say that a carryall was at the door, and soon we were on our way toward the Fort. The roads were muddy, but the plain was vividly, brilliantly green, and the sky radiantly blue. The wind, filled with delicious spring odors, came out of the west; larks were whistling and wild ducks were in flight. To my wife it was as strange as it was beautiful. It was the prairie at its best--like the Jim River in 1881. Fort Reno (a cluster of frame barracks), occupied a low hill which overlooked the valley of the Canadian, on whose green meadows piebald cattle were scattered like bits of topaz. Flowers starred the southern slopes, and beside the stream near the willows (in which mocking birds were singing), stood clusters of the conical tents of the Cheyennes, lodges of canvas made in the ancient form. Our way led to the Agency through one of these villages, and as we passed we saw women at their work, and children in their play, all happy and quite indifferent to the white man and his comment. The Stouchs met us at the door of the big frame cottage which was the agent's house, and while Mrs. Stouch took charge of Zulime the Major led me at once to his office, in order that I might lose no time in getting acquainted with his wards. In ten minutes I found myself deep in another world, a world of captive, aboriginal warriors, sorrowfully concerned with the problem of "walking the white man's trail." All that day and each day thereafter, files of white-topped wagons forded the river, keeping their westward march quite in the traditional American fashion, to disappear like weary beetles over the long, low ridge past the fort which stood like a guidon to the promised land. Here were all the elements of Western settlement, the Indians, the soldiers, the glorious sweeping wind and the flowering sod, and in addition to all these the resolute white men seeking their fortunes beneath the sunset sky, just as of old, remorselessly carrying their women and children into hardship and solitude. Without effort I was able to imagine myself back in the day of Sam Houston and Satanka. Our trip around the reservation with the Agent began a few days later with an exultant drive across the prairie to the South Fork of the Canadian River. It was glorious summer here. Mocking birds were singing in each swale, and exquisite flowers starred the sod beneath our wheels. Through a land untouched by the white man's plow, we rode on a trail which carried me back to my childhood, to the Iowa Prairie over which I had ridden with my parents thirty years before. This land, this sky, this mournful, sighing wind laid hold of something very sweet, almost sacred in my brain. By great good fortune I had succeeded in overtaking the vanishing prairie. The arrival of the Agent at each sub-agency was the signal for an assembly of all the red men round-about and Zulime had the pleasure of seeing several old fashioned Councils carried on quite in the traditional fashion, the chiefs in full native costume, their head dresses presenting suggestions of the war-like past. The attitudes of the men in the circle were at all times serious and dignified, and the gestures of the orators instinct with natural grace. One of the Cheyenne camps in which we lingered was especially charming. Set amid the nodding flowers and waving grasses of a small meadow in the elbow of a river, its lodges were filled with happy children, and under sun-shades constructed of green branches, chattering women were at work. Paths led from tent to tent, and in the deep shade of ancient walnut trees, on the banks of the stream, old men were smoking in reminiscent dream of other days. As night fell and sunset clouds flamed overhead, primroses yearned upward from the sward, and the teepees, lighted from within, glowed like jewels, pearl-white cones with hearts of flame. Shouts of boys, laughter of girls, and the murmur of mothers' voices suggested the care-free life of the Algonquin in days before the invading conqueror enforced new conditions and created new desires. * * * * * For two weeks we drove amid scenes like these, scenes which were of inspirational value to me and of constant delight to Zulime. My notebook filled itself with hints for poems and outlines for stories. In all my tales of the Cheyennes, I kept in mind Major Powell's significant remark, "The scalp dance no more represents the red man's daily life than the bayonet-charge represents the white man's civilization." Having no patience with the writers who regarded the Indian as a wild beast, I based my interpretation on the experiences of men like Stouch and Seger who, by twenty years' experience, had proved the red man's fine qualities. As leading actors in the great tragedy of Western settlement I resolved to present the Ogallallah and the Ute as I saw them. At one of these informal councils between the Agent and some of the Cheyenne headmen, I caught a phrase which gave me the title of a story and at the same time pointed the moral of a volume of short stories. White Shield, one of John Seger's friends, in telling of his experiences, sadly remarked, "I find it hard to make a home among the white men." Instantly my mind grasped the reverse side of the problem. I took for the title of my story these words: _White Eagle, the Red Pioneer_, and presented the point of view of a nomad who turns his back on the wilderness which he loves, and sets himself the task of leading his band in settlement among the plowmen. In a collection of tales, some of which have not been published even in magazines, I have grouped studies of red individuals with intent to show that a village of Cheyennes has many kinds of people just like any other village. "Hippy, the Dare Devil," "White Weasel, the Dandy," "Rising Wolf, the Ghost Dancer," are some of the titles in this volume. Whether it will get itself printed in my lifetime or not is a problem, for publishers are loath to issue a book of short stories, any kind of short stories. "Stories about Indians are no longer in demand," they say. Nevertheless, some day I hope these stories may get into print as a volume complementary to _Main Traveled Roads_, and _They of the High Trails_. Among the most unforgettable of all our Oklahoma experiences was a dinner which we had with the Jesuit Missionary priest at "Chickashay" on the last day of our stay. It had been raining in torrents for several hours, and as the Mission was four miles out I would have despaired of getting there at all had it not been for the Agency Clerk who was a man of resource and used to Oklahoma "showers." Commandeering for us the Agency "hack," a kind of canvas-covered delivery wagon, he succeeded in reaching the priest's house without shipwreck, although the road was a river. The priest, a short, jolly Alsatian, met us with shining face quite unlike any other missionary I had ever seen. He was at once a delight and an astonishment to Zulime. His laugh was a bugle note and his hospitality a glow of good will. The dinner was abundant and well served, the wine excellent, and our host's talk of absorbing interest. We were waited upon by a Sister of severe mien, who, between courses, stood against the wall with folded arms eyeing us with disapproving countenance. It was plain that she was serving under compulsion, but Father Ambrose paying no attention to her frowns, urged us to take a second helping, telling us meanwhile of his first exploration of Oklahoma, a story which filled us with laughter at his "greenness." Chuckling with delight of the fool he was, he could not conceal the heroic part he had played, for the hardships in those days were very real to a young man just out of a monastery. "I was so green the cows would have eaten me," he said. The whole incident was like a chapter in a story of some other land than ours. The Sisters, the little brown children, the book-walled sitting room, the sturdy little priest recounting his struggles with a strange people and a strange climate,--all these presented a charming picture of the noble side of missionary life. Nothing broke the charm of that dinner except an occasional peal of thunder which made us wonder whether we would be able to navigate the hack back to the hotel or not. What a waste the plain presented as we started on our return at ten o'clock! The lightning, almost incessant, showed from time to time what appeared to be a vast lake, shorelessly extending on every side of us, a shallow sea through which the horses slopped, waded and all but swam while Carroll, the Clerk, as pilot, did his best to reassure my wife. "I know the high spots," he said, whereat I fervently (though secretly) replied, "I hope you do," and when we swung to anchor in front of our little hotel, I shook his hand in congratulations over his skill--and good luck! On our return to Chicago I found Lorado in his studio, modeling a more or less conventional female form, and my resentment took words. "If you will come with me, down among the Cheyennes, I will show you men who can be nude without being naked. In White Eagle's camp you can study warriors who have the dignity of Roman Senators and the grace of Athenian athletes." To illustrate one of my points, I caught up a piece of gray canvas and showed him how the chiefs of various tribes managed their blankets. Something in these motions or in the long gray lines of the robe which I used fired his imagination. For the first time in our acquaintanceship, I succeeded in interesting him in the Indian. He was especially excited by the gesture of covering the mouth to express awe, and a few days later he showed me several small figures which he had sketched, suggestions which afterwards became the splendid monuments of Silmee and Blackhawk. He never lost the effect of the noble gestures which I had reproduced for him. The nude red man was a hackneyed subject, but Brown Bear with his robe, afforded precisely the stimulus of which he stood in need. This trip to Indian Territory turned out to be a very important event in my life. First of all it enabled me to complete the writing of _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, and started me on a long series of short stories depicting the life of the red man. It gave me an enormous amount of valuable material and confirmed me in my conviction that the Indian needed an interpreter, but beyond all these literary gains, I went back to Wisconsin filled with a fierce desire to own some of that beautiful prairie over which we had ridden. This revived hunger for land generated in me a plan for establishing a wide ranch down there, an estate to which we could retire in February and March. "We can meet the spring half-way," I explained to my father. "I want a place where I can keep saddle horses and cattle. You must go with me and see it sometime. It is as lovely as Mitchell County was in 1870." To this end I wrote to my brother in Mexico. "Leave the rubber business and come to Oklahoma. I am going to buy a ranch there and need you as superintendent." CHAPTER THIRTEEN Standing Rock and Lake McDonald It was full summer when we got back to Wisconsin, and The Old Homestead was at its best. The garden was red with ripening fruit, the trees thick with shining leaves, and the thrushes and catbirds were singing in quiet joy. In the fields the growing corn was showing its ordered spears, and the wheat was beginning to wave in the gentle wind. No land could be more hospitable, more abounding or more peaceful than our valley. With her New Daughter again beside her life seemed very complete and satisfying to my mother, and I was quite at ease until one night, as she and I were sitting alone in the dusk, she confided to me, for the first time, her conviction that she had but a short time to live. Her tone, as well as her words, shocked me, for she had not hitherto been subject to dark moods. She gave no reason for her belief, but that she was suffering from some serious inner malady was evident,--I feared it might concern the action of her heart--and I was greatly disturbed by it. Of course I made light of her premonition, but thereafter I watched her with minute care, and called on the doctor at the slightest sign of change. We sang to her, we read to her, and Zulime spent long hours reading to her or sitting beside her. She was entirely happy except when, at intervals, her mysterious malady,--something she could not describe,--filled her eyes with terror. She loved to sit in the kitchen and watch her new daughter presiding over its activities, and submitted, with pathetic pride, to any change which Zulime proposed. "I am perfectly contented," she said to me, "except----" "Except what, mother?" "The grandchild. I want to see my grandchild." One of our regular excursions for several years had been a drive (usually on Sunday) over the ridge to Lewis Valley, where Frank McClintock still lived. Among my earliest memories is a terror of this road, for it led up a long, wooded hill, which seemed to me, as a child, a dangerous mountain pass. Many, many times since then I had made the climb, sometimes in the spring, sometimes in midsummer, but now my plans included my wife. Mother was eager to go. "I can stand the ride if you will drive and be careful going down hill," she said to me--and so, although I was a little in doubt about the effect upon her heart, I hired a team, and early of a clear June morning we started for Mindoro. It was like riding back into the hopeful, happy past, for both the old people. Father was full of wistful reminiscences of "the early days," but mother, who sat beside Zulime, made no comment, although her face shone with inward joy of the scene, the talk--until we came to the steep descent which scared her. Clinging to her seat with pitiful intensity she saw nothing but dangerous abysses until we reached the level road on the opposite side of the ridge. It was glorious June, and in this I now rejoice, for it proved to be the last time that we made the crossing of the long hill together. I was glad to have her visit her brother's home once more. Change was coming to him as well as to her. His prodigious muscles and his boyish gayety were fading away together. Though still delightfully jolly and hospitable, his temper was distinctly less buoyant. He still played the fiddle; but like his brother, David, he found less and less joy in it, for his stiffened fingers refused to do his bidding. The strings which once sang clear and sweet, failed of their proper pitch, and these discords irritated and saddened him. Aunt Lorette, his handsome, rosy-cheeked wife, was beginning to complain smilingly, of being lame and "no account," but she provided a beautiful chicken dinner, gayly "visiting" while she did it, with mother sitting by to watch her at the job as she had done so many times before. Lorette, like all the rest of us, felt under the necessity of putting her best foot forward in order that "Zuleema" should not be disappointed in any way, and to Zulime she was like a character in a novel; indeed, they all tried to live up to her notion of them. For her, father told his best stories of bears and Indians, for her, Uncle Frank fiddled his liveliest tunes, and for her Aunt Lorette recounted some of the comedies which the valley had from time to time developed, and which (as she explained) "had gone into one of Hamlin's books. Of course he fixed 'em up a little," she added, "you couldn't expect him to be satisfied with a yarn just as I told it, but all the same he got the idea of at least two of his stories from me." Valiant Aunt Lorette! Her face was always sunny, no matter how deep the shadow in her heart; and her capacity for work was prodigious. She was an almost perfect example of the happy, hard-working farmer's wife, for her superb physical endowment and her serene temperament had survived the strain of thirty years of unremitting toil. Her life had been, thus far, a cheerful pilgrimage. She did not mind the loneliness of the valley. The high hill which lay between her door and the village could not wall her spirit in. She rejoiced in the stream of pure water which flowed from the hillside spring to the tank at her kitchen door, and she took pride in the chickens and cows and pigs which provided her table with abundant food. "Oh, yes, I like to go to town--once in a while," she replied, in answer to Zulime's question. "But I'd hate to live there. I don't see how people get along on a tucked up fifty-foot lot where they have to buy every blessed thing they eat." How good that dinner was! Hot biscuit, chicken, shortcake, coffee and the most delicious butter and cream. At the moment it did seem a most satisfactory way to live. We forgot that the dishes had to be washed three times each day, and that the mud and rain and wind and snow often shut the homestead in for weeks at a stretch. Seeing the valley at its loveliest, under the glamor of a summer afternoon, we found it perfect. After dinner we men-folks (leaving the women, in the "good old way," to clear away the dinner dishes) went out on the grass under the trees, and as I talked of my mountaineering Uncle Frank said, with a wistful note in his voice, "I've always wanted to go out into that country with you. Chasing a deer through a Wisconsin swamp don't satisfy me--I'd like to get into the grizzly bear country--but now I'm too old." Thereupon father stated his desires. "There are just two trips I want to make--I'd like to go by a steamboat from Duluth to Detroit, and I want to see Yellowstone Park." "Well, why don't you do it?" demanded my Uncle. "You can afford it now." Father's face became thoughtful. "I believe I will. Lottridge and Shane are planning that boat trip. I could go with them." "Sail ahead," said I, "and if you get back in time I'll take you through Yellowstone Park. Zulime and I are going to Montana in July." Neither of them had the slightest desire to see London or Paris or Rome, but they both longed for a fuller knowledge of the West. They were still pioneers, still explorers over whose imagination the trackless waste exercised a deathless dominion. To my uncle I said, "If I could afford it, I would take you with me on one of my trailing expeditions and show you some real wilderness." "I wish you would," he answered quickly. "I'd tend horses, cook, or anything else in order to go along." Of course this wistful longing was only a mood on his part, for he was naturally of a cheerful disposition, but music and the wilderness always stirred him to his deeps. Ten minutes later he was joking with Zulime, giving a fine exhibition of the contented husbandman. As the time came to leave, my mother glanced about her with an emotion which she brokenly expressed when she said, "I don't suppose I shall ever get over here again. You must come and see me, after this." "Oh, you'll be comin' over oftener than ever, now that you've got a daughter to lean on," retorted Lorette with easy grace. On our way home, at the crest of the hill, I drew rein in order that we might all look away over the familiar valley, stretching mistily toward the sun, and I, too, had the feeling--which I was careful not to express even by a look or tone--that mother and I would never again ride this road or look out upon this lovely scene together, and something in her eyes and the melancholy sweetness of her lips told me that she was bidding the landscape a long farewell. We rode the remaining portion of our way in somber mood, although we all agreed that it was a colorful finish of a perfect day--a day to be recalled in after years with a tender heart-ache. [It is all changed now. Aunt Lorette has gone to her reward. Uncle Frank, old and lonely, is living on the village side of the ridge and strangers are in the old house!] That night, Zulime and I talked over the agreement I had made with father, and we planned a way to carry it out. Almost as excited about the Yellowstone as he, she was quite ready to camp through as I suggested. "We will hire a team at Livingston, and with our own outfit, will be independent of stages and hotels--but first I must show you some Indians. We will visit Standing Rock and see the Sioux in their 'Big Sunday.' Father can meet us at Bismark after we come out." With the confidence of a child she accepted my arrangement and on the first day of July we were in the stage ambling across the hot, dry prairie which lay between Bismark and Fort Yates. Empty, arid and illimitable the rolling treeless landscape oppressed us both, and yet there was a stern majesty in its sweep, and the racing purple shadows of the dazzling clouds lent it color and movement. To me it was all familiar, but when, after an all-day ride, we came down into the valley of the Muddy Missouri, the sheen of its oily red current was quite as grateful to me as to my weary wife. Our only means of reaching the Agency was a small rowboat which seemed a frail ferry even to me. How it appeared to Zulime, I dared not ask--but she unhesitatingly stepped in and took her seat beside me. I think she accepted it as a part of the strange and hardy world in which her husband was at home. We were both silent on that crossing, for our slender craft struggled anxiously with the boiling, silent, turbid current, and when we landed, the tense look on Zulime's face gave place to a smile.--Half an hour later we were sitting at supper in a fly-specked boarding house, surrounded by squaw-men and half-breed Sioux, who were enjoying the luxury of a white man's table as a part of their Fourth of July celebration. My artist wife was being educated swiftly! The tribe was again encamped in a wide circle just west of the Fort, precisely as when my brother and I had visited it three years before, while the store and the Agency swarmed with native men and women, many in mixed costume of cloth and skin. Zulime's artistic joy in them filled me with complacent satisfaction. I had the air of a showman rejoicing in his exhibition hall. With keen interest we watched the young warriors as they came whirling in on their swift ponies, each in his gayest garments, the tail of his horse decorated with rosettes and ribbons. Possessing the swiftness and the grace of Centaurs, coming and going like sudden whirlwinds, they were superb embodiments of a race which was passing. Some of the older men remembered me, and greeted me as one friendly to their cause--but for the most part the younger folk eyed us with indifference. That night a singular and savage change in the weather took place. The wind shifted to the southeast and took on the heat of a furnace. By ten o'clock next morning dirt was blowing in clouds and to walk the street was an ordeal. All day Zulime remained in her room virtually a prisoner. Night fell with the blast still roaring, and the dust rising from the river banks like smoke, presented a strange and sinister picture of wrath. It was as though the water, itself, had taken fire from the lightning which plunged in branching streams across the sky. Thunder muttered incessantly all through that singular and solemn night, a night which somehow foreshadowed the doom which was about to overtake the Sioux. The following day, however, was clear and cool, and we spent most of it in walking about the camp, visiting the teepees of which there were several hundreds set in a huge ellipse, all furnished in primitive fashion--some of them very neatly. Over four thousand Sioux were said to be in this circle, and their coming and going, their camp fires and feasting groups composed a scene well worth the long journey we had endured. Strange as this life seemed to my wife it was quite familiar to me. To me these people were not savages, they were folks--and in their festivity I perceived something of the spirit of a county fair in Wisconsin. Our guide about the camp, the half-breed son of a St. Louis trader, was a big, fine-featured, intelligent man of about my own age, whose pleasant lips, and deep brown eyes attracted me. He knew everybody, both white and red, and as soon as he understood my wish to write fairly of his people, he gave himself unreservedly to our service. Taking us from lodge to lodge, he introduced us to the men whose characters were of the most value in my study and told them of my wish to report them with sympathy and truth. One of the games that day was a rough, outdoor drama, in which mimic war parties sallied forth, scouts were captured and captives rescued in stirring pantomime. As I stood watching the play I observed that one man (no longer young) was serving as "the enemy," alternately captured or slain. His role was not only arduous--it was dangerous--dangerous and thankless, and as I saw him cheerfully volunteering to be "killed" I handed Primeau a dollar and said: "Give this to that old fellow, and tell him he should have many dollars for his hard, rough work." Primeau gave him the coin, but before he had time to know who gave it, he was called back into the field. At the Agency store I met a French-Canadian named Carignan who was a most valuable witness, for he had been among the red men for many years, first as a school teacher and later as trader. From him I secured much intimate history of the Sioux. He had known the Sitting Bull well, and gave me a very kindly account of him. "I taught the school in Rock Creek near the Sitting Bull's camp, and he was often at my table," he explained. "I saw no harm in him. I liked him and respected him. He was an Indian but he was a thinker." Vaguely holding in my brain a tale in which the Sitting Bull should be protagonist, I talked with many who had known him, and a few days later I accepted Primeau's invitation to visit the valley in which the chief had lived, and which was the scene of the Ghost Dance, and the place of the chief's death. I suggested to Zulime that she would be more comfortable at the Agency but she replied, "I'd rather go with you. I don't like being left here alone." "You'll find the ride tiresome and the lodging rough, I fear." "I don't care," she retorted firmly, "I'm going with you." Primeau was a very intelligent man and a good talker, and as we rode along he gave us in detail the history of the rise of the Ghost Dance, so far as the Sioux were concerned. "There was nothing war-like about it," he insisted. "It was a religious appeal. It was a prayer to the Great Spirit to take pity on the red man and bring back the world of the buffalo. They carried no weapons, in fact they carried nothing which the white man had brought to them. They even took the metal fringes off their shirts. They believed that if they gave up all signs of the whites the Great Spirit would turn his face upon them again." "Did Sitting Bull take part in this?" I asked. "He encouraged the meeting at his camp and gave his cattle to feed the people, but he was never able to dream like the rest. He never really believed in it. He wanted to but he couldn't. He was too deep a thinker. He often talked with me about it." At a point about twenty miles from The Fort, Primeau left us to visit a ranchman with whom he had some business and left us to drive on with a guide to his cattle-ranch where we were to stay all night. The ranch house turned out to be a rude low shack, and here Zulime had her first touch of genuine cowboy life. The foreman had not been expecting ladies for supper and the food he had prepared was of the usual camp sort. He explained that he and his men had finished their meal, and then, leading the way to the kitchen, showed us the food and said heartily, "Help yourself." On the back of the stove was a pot half filled with a mixture of boiled rice and prunes. In the oven was some soggy bread, and on the hearth some cold bacon. A can half filled with pale brown coffee added the finishing touch to a layout perfectly familiar to me. I thanked the cook and proceeded to dish out some of the rice whose grayish color aroused Zulime's distrust. She refused to even taste it. "It looks as if it were filled with dirt--or ashes." "That's its natural complexion," I explained. "This is the unpolished kind of rice. It is much more nutritious than the other kind." She could not eat any of the bread, and when she tried the coffee she was utterly discouraged. Nevertheless her kindliness of heart led her to conceal her disgust. She emptied her rice into the stove and threw her cup of coffee from the window in order that the cook might think that she had eaten her share of the supper. The foreman who came in a few minutes later to see that we were getting fed politely inquired, "Is there anything else I can get you, miss?" She really needed something to eat and yet she was puzzled to know what to ask for. At last, in the belief that she was asking for the simplest possible thing, she smiled sweetly and said, "I should like a glass of milk." The foreman permitted no expression of surprise or displeasure to cross his face, he merely turned to a tall young man in the doorway and quietly remarked, "Mell, the lady would like some milk." A glint of amusement was in the eyes of Mell, but he made no reply, just quietly "sifted out," and a few moments later, while the foreman was in the midst of a story, a most appalling tumult broke upon our ears. Calves bawled, bulls bellowed, galloping hooves thundered, men shouted and laughed--in a most amazing uproar. Rushing to the door in search of the cause of this clamor, I found it to be related to my wife's innocent request. Tied near the cabin was a leaping, blatting, badly frightened calf while inside the corral, a cow evidently its dam, was charging up and down the fence, her eyes literally blazing with fury, pursued by Mell on a swift pony, a rope swinging in his hand. On the top rails of the enclosure a row of delighted loafers laughed and cheered and shouted good advice to the roper. "What is he doing?" asked my amazed wife, as Mell brought the cow to earth in a cloud of dust. "Milking the cow," replied the boss with calmly hospitable inflection. "If you'll be patient jest a few minutes----" The insane animal, strong as a lioness, in some way freed herself from the rope and charged her enemy--Mell's pony fled. "O, don't let him hurt her," pleaded Zulime. "I don't want any milk. I didn't know you had to do that." "It's the only way to milk a range cow," I explained. "Don't worry, Miss," the foreman added reassuringly. "It's all in the day's work for Mell." Again the cow went to earth and Zulime, horrified at the sight, begged them to restore the calf to its dam. At last this was done, and a grateful peace settled over the scene. The cowboys were highly delighted and I was amused, but Zulime was too shocked to see any humor in Mell's defeat. "Do they really milk their cows in that way?" she asked me. "Yes, when they milk them at all," I replied, inwardly filled with laughter. "As a matter of fact they get all their cream out of cans. Milking that cow was a new departure for Mell, I think he was a little disappointed at not being allowed to go through with it." "I'm glad he didn't. I'll never mention milk again--in this country." We slept in the bed of our wagon-box that night while the crew rode away to fight a prairie fire. We heard them come quietly in toward dawn, and when we awoke and looked out of our cover we saw them lying all about us on the ground each rolled up in his tarpaulin like a boulder. Altogether it was a stirring glimpse of ranch life for my city-bred wife. Primeau's home ranch and store which we reached about eleven the next forenoon was an almost equally sorry place for a delicate woman, a sad spot in which to spend even a single night. Flies swarmed in the kitchen like bees, and the air of our bedroom was hot and stagnant, and mosquitoes made sleep impossible. Zulime became ill, and I bitterly regretted my action in bringing her into this God forsaken land. "We shall return at once to the fort," I promised her. It was an iron soil. The valley was a furnace, the sky a brazen shield. No green thing was in sight, and the curling leaves of the dying corn brought back to me those desolate days in Dakota when my mother tried so hard to maintain a garden. Deeply pitying the captive red hunters, who were expected to become farmers under these desolate conditions, I was able to understand how they had turned to the Great Spirit in a last despairing plea for pity and relief. "Think of this place in winter," I said to Zulime. One of the men whom Primeau especially wished me to meet was Slohan, the annalist of his tribe, one of the "Silent Eaters," a kind of bodyguard to Sitting Bull. "He lives only a few miles up the valley," Primeau explained, and so to find him we set off in a light wagon next morning drawn by a couple of fleet ponies. As we rode, Primeau told me more of "The Silent Eaters." "They were a small band of young warriors organized for defense and council, and were closely associated with Sitting Bull all his life. Slohan, the man we are to see to-day, is one of those who stood nearest the chief. No man living knows more about him. He can tell you just what you want to know." An hour later as we were riding along close to the bank of the creek, Primeau stopped his team. "There he is now!" he exclaimed. Looking where he pointed I discovered on a mound above the stream an old man sitting motionless as a statue, with bowed head, and lax hands. There was something strange, almost tragic in his attitude, and this impression deepened as we approached him. He was wrinkled with age and clad in ragged white man's clothing, but his profile was fine, fine as that of a Roman Senator, and the lines of his face were infinitely sad. In one fallen hand lay a coiled rope. He did not look up as we drew near, did not appear to hear Primeau's respectful greeting. Dejected, motionless, he endured the hot sunshine like an Oriental Yoghi or a man deadened by some narcotic drug. Gently, almost timidly, Primeau addressed him. "Slohan, this white man has come a long way to see you. He wishes to talk with you about the Sitting Bull and of the days of the buffalo." At last the old man turned and lifted his bloodshot eyes and uttered in a husky whisper, a few words which changed Primeau's whole expression. He drew back. "Come away!" he said to me. While we were walking toward our team he explained. "Slohan is mourning the death of his little grandson. Long time he has been there wailing. His voice is gone. He can cry no more. His heart is empty. He will not talk with us." What a revelation of the soul of a red warrior! Hopeless, tragic, inconsolable, he was the type of all paternity throughout the world. Primeau went on, "I told him of you and I think his mind is turned to other things. I asked him to come to see you this afternoon. Perhaps he will. Perhaps I have lifted his mind from his sorrow." All the way down the valley I pondered on the picture that grandsire had made there in the midst of that desolate valley. Primeau told me of his grandson. "He was a handsome little fellow. I can't blame the old man for weeping over his loss." Slohan was a redoubtable warrior. He had been the leader of Sitting Bull's bodyguard, he was accounted a savage, and yet for forty-eight hours he had been sitting ceaselessly mourning for a child, crying till his voice was only a husky whisper. Nothing that I had ever seen typed the bitterness of barbaric grief more powerfully than this bent and voiceless old man. * * * * * Late in the afternoon the mourner came in view, riding on a pony, without a saddle, his face still very sad, but not entirely despairing. His mind, in working backward to the splendid world of the past, the world in which his chief had played such heroic and stirring parts, his heart had been comforted--or at any rate lightened. Although clothed in the customary rags of the mourner, his hair was neatly brushed and braided, and he met my wife with gentle grace. There was something tragic in his dim glance, something admirable in his low words of greeting. We gave him food and drink, and then while we all sat on the earth in the scant shade thrown by Primeau's building, he began to talk, slowly, hesitantly of the part his chief had taken in the wars against the white man. He had the dignity and the eloquence of a fine New England judge. A notable sweetness and a lofty poetry were blended in his expression; and as he used the sign language in emphasizing his words (gestures finely expressive and nobly rhythmical) he became, to my perception, the native bard reciting the story of his clan. I was able to follow the broad lines of his discourse and when at the close of the afternoon he rose to go, I said to him, "I shall tell of the Sitting Bull as you have spoken," and we parted in the glow of mutual esteem. Zulime was feeling much better, and the air being cooler, I asked permission to stay another day, in order that I might meet Looking Stag, another of the warriors who had known the Sitting Bull. Looking Stag's home was a few miles down the valley, and we found him in his commodious lodge, entertaining a couple of headmen from Cheyenne River. He was seated on a low bed opposite the door, and his guests were placed on either hand of him. He glanced up at us, spoke a curt word to Primeau and went on with his story. His cold greeting, and the evident preoccupation of his manner made me feel like an intruder, which I was, and this feeling was deepened when I perceived that my guide was distinctly ill at ease. After all, he was only a half-breed trader, while these men were red chieftains. The Looking Stag was not contemptuous of me--he was merely indifferent. Busied with honored guests he regarded the coming of a strange white man to his lodge as something of a nuisance. He went on cutting tobacco, and afterward ground it between his palms whilst his visitors talked on quite oblivious to me. Our host looked familiar, but as he was painted and wore a bonnet of eagle feathers I could not remember where I had seen him. At last, in a pause of the talk, Primeau said something to him which caused him to break into a smile and thrust his open hand toward me. "How! How! my friend," he called heartily. Then I recognized him. He was the man who had so unweariedly taken the part of "The Enemy" in the games at Standing Rock. Primeau had told him that I was the man who had given him the money, and he now accepted me as a friend. He then told his visitors the story of my gift and message. They also laughed and shook hands with me. Thereafter we were all on terms of high respect and mutual confidence. I put my questions freely and they replied with an air of candor. As they approached the Custer fight, however, they paused, pondered, checked up one another's statements, and at last produced what I believed to be the truth regarding the share in that battle--and the truth is incredible. They recreated the whole scene for me as Two Moons had done. They corroborated all that I had obtained from the northern Cheyennes. I forgot the plow and the reaper while sitting there in conference with those men for they were thinkers as well as warriors. Within the walls of that lodge they were not despised outcasts, they were leaders, councillors, men of weight. They had reëntered a world which caused their faces to shine just as my father's face shone when he told of Grant at Vicksburg or recounted the days of his youth on The Old Wisconse. For a little while I inhabited their world, and when I left them I carried with me a deepened sense of their essential manliness. Alas! Zulime was less enthusiastic. The flies, the heat, the dust, the bad food--so commonplace to me--were horrifying to her, and so for her sake I cut short my historical studies and hurried her back to the Fort, back to the wholesome fare of the officers' mess. With no consuming literary interest to sustain her she found even the Agency a weariness; and as the date for meeting my father was near, we took the stage back to Bismark, she with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of regret that I had not been able to push my investigations deeper. There was a big theme here, but I had small faith in my ability to handle it. It required an epic poet, rather than a realistic novelist. Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight." "All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine, and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert' eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your mother could be here with us." This was the only shadow at our feast and we put it aside, taking comfort in the thought that she was happy in a tree-embowered home, surrounded by the abundance of a prolific garden. "Her days of travel are over," I said, and turned to the task of making my father's outing a shining success. For ten days we camped with him in Yellowstone Park, moving from place to place, in our own wagon and tent, and when we came out and he started on his homeward way, he expressed complete satisfaction. "It has been up to the bills," he conceded, and I could see that he was eager to get back to Johnson's drug store, where he could discuss with Stevens and McEldowney the action of geysers and the habits of grizzly bears, on terms of equal information. If he was satisfied, I was not. Insisting on showing Zulime the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean, I kept on to the West. Together we viewed Tacoma and Seattle, and from the boat on Puget Sound discovered the Olympic Mountains springing superbly from the sea. For us Rainier disclosed his dome above the clouds, and Lake McDonald offered its most gorgeous sunset. One of the points which I had found of most interest in '97 was the Blackfoot Agency, and as we sat in our tent on the Northern shore of Lake McDonald I gained Zulime's consent to go in there for a few days. "The train lands us there late at night," I said, "and there is no hotel at the station or the Agency, but we can set up our tent in a few moments and be comfortable till morning." To this she agreed--or perhaps I should say to this she submitted, and at eleven o'clock the following night we found ourselves unloaded on the platform of a lonely little station on the plain. It was a starlit night, fortunately, and dragging our tent and bedding out on the crisp, dry sod, we set to work. In ten minutes we had a house and bed in which we slept comfortably till a freight train thundered by along about dawn. Truly my artist wife was being schooled in the tactics of the trail! At the Agency we hired a wagon and drove to the St. Mary's Lake. With a Piegan (old Four Horns) for a guide we camped on the lower Lake, and Zulime caught two enormous pike. At Upper St. Mary's, we set our tent just below the dike. A "Chalet" on this spot now welcomes the tourist, but in those days St. Mary's was a lone, and stormful mountain water with not even a forest ranger's cabin to offer shelter. We lived in our own tent and cooked our own food--a glorious experience to me, but to Zulime (as I learned afterward) the trip was not an unmixed delight. We visited several other Indian reservations on our way home, and all along the way my mind was busy with the splendid literary problems here suggested. Deep down in my brain a plan was forming to picture these conditions. "First I must put together a volume of short stories to be called _The Red Pioneer_; then I shall complete a prose poem of the Sitting Bull to be called _The Silent Eaters_, and third, and most important of all, I must do a novel of reservation life, with an army officer as the agent." In these volumes I planned to put the results of all my studies of the Northwest during my many explorations of the wild. In this way I would be doing my part in delineating the swiftly changing conditions of the red man and the mountaineer. Everywhere I went I studied soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders and squaw-men with insatiable interest. My mind was like a sponge, absorbing not facts, but impressions, pictures which were necessary to make my stories seem like the truth. While in camp and on the train, I took notes busily and actually formulated several tales while riding my horse along the trail. Perfectly happy in this work, I believed my wife to be equally content, for she bravely declared that to tumble off a pullman in the middle of a moonless night, and help me set up a tent on the prairie grass was fun. She pretended to _enjoy_ cooking our food at a smoking camp fire in a drizzle of rain; but I now know that she was longing for the comforts, the conveniences, the repose of West Salem. "Oh, but it is good to be home," she said as we reached the old house, and I too was ready for its freedom from care and its opportunity for work, happy in the belief that I had bestowed on my wife some part of the store of heroic and splendid experiences, which made up so large a section of my own life, experiences which were to serve as the basis for all my future work. The flame of my ambition burned brightly at the close of these weeks of inspirational exploration. "With nothing to distract or weaken me I ought now, at least to justify the faith which Howells and other of my literary friends and advisers had been kind enough to declare." Seizing my pen with new resolution I bent to the task of putting into fiction certain phases of the great Northwest which (up to this year) had not been successfully portrayed. CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Empty Room My father was a loyal G. A. R. man. To him, naturally, the literature, the ceremonies and the comradeship of the Grand Army of the Republic were of heroic significance for, notwithstanding all other events of his stirring life, his two years as a soldier remained his most moving, most poetic experience. On all special occasions he wore the regulation blue coat with the bronze button of the Legion in its lapel, and faithfully attended all the local meetings of his "Post," but he had not been able to take part in the National Conventions for the double reason that they were always too far away from his Dakota home and invariably came at the time when his presence was most needed on the farm. With a feeling of mingled envy and sadness he had seen his comrades, year after year, jubilantly set out for Washington or Boston or San Francisco whilst he remained at work. Now the case was different. He had the money, he had the leisure and the Grand Review was about to take place in Chicago. "Hamlin," said he, on the morning after my return from Montana, "I want you to go with me to the G. A. R. meeting in Chicago." Although I did not say so, I was sadly averse to making this trip. Aching to write, impatient to get my new conceptions down on paper, I could hardly restrain an expression of reluctance, but I did, for the old soldier, more afraid of towns than of mountains, needed me in the city. "All right, father," I said, and put my notes away. He made a handsome figure in his new suit, and his broad-rimmed hat with its gold cord. He was as excited as a boy when we set out for the station and commented with a tone of satisfaction on the number of his comrades to be seen on the train. He was not in need of me during this part of his excursion for he hailed every old soldier as "Comrade" and made a dozen new friendships before we reached Madison. No one resented his fraternal interest. Occasionally he brought one of his acquaintances over to my seat, explaining with perfectly obvious pride that I had written a history of General Grant and that I lived in Chicago. "I'm taking him along to be my scout," he declared, at the close of each introduction. At my lodgings on Elm Street he made himself so beloved that I feared for his digestion. The landlady and the cook were determined that he should eat hot biscuit and jam and pie in addition to roast chicken and gravy, and I was obliged to insist on his going to bed early in order to be up and in good condition for the parade next day. "I've no desire to march in the ranks," he said. "I'm perfectly content to sit on the fence and see the columns pass." "You needn't sit on the fence," I replied. "I've got two of the best seats in the Grand Stand. You can rest there in comfort all through the parade." He didn't know how much I paid for our chairs, but a knowledge that he was in the seats of the extravagant pleased him while it troubled him. He was never quite at ease while enjoying luxury. It didn't seem natural, someway, for him to be wholly comfortable. We were in our places hours before the start (he was like a boy on Circus Day--afraid of missing something), but that he was enjoying in high degree his comfortable outlook, made me almost equally content. At last with blare of bugle and throb of drum, that grand and melancholy procession of time-scarred veterans came to view, and their tattered flags and faded guidons brought quick tears to my father's eyes. Few of them stepped out with a swing, many of them limped pitifully--all were white-haired--an army on its downward slope, marching toward its final, silent bivouac. None of them were gay and yet each took a poignant pleasure in sharing the rhythm of the column, and my father voiced this emotion when he murmured, "I ought to be down there with my company." To touch elbows just once more, to be a part of the file would have been at once profoundly sad and sadly sweet, and he wiped the tears from his cheeks in a silence which was more expressive than any words could have been. To me each passing phalanx was composed of piteous old men--to my sire they were fragments of a colossal dream--an epic of song and steel. "In ten years he and they will all be at rest in 'fame's eternal camping ground,'" I thought with a benumbing realization of the swift, inexorable rush of time--a tragedy which no fluttering of bright flags, no flare of brave bugles could lighten or conceal. It was not an army in review, it was an epoch passing to its grave. * * * * * After the parade was over, as we were going home in the car, tired, silent and sad, I perceived my father as others saw him, a white-haired veteran whose days of marching, of exploration were over. His powerful figure, so resilient and so brave was stooping to its end. His restless feet were weary. However, this was only a mood with him. A night's sleep brought back his courage, and his energy to a most amazing degree, and I was again called upon to show him the "sights" of the city--that is to say, we once more viewed the Stock Yards, the Masonic Temple and Lincoln Park. He also asked me to go with him for a sail across the Lake, but at this point I rebelled. "I am willing to climb tall buildings or visit the Zoo, but I draw the line at a trip to Muskegon." With guilty conscience I watched him start off for the dock alone, but this sentiment on my part was wasted. A score of "comrades" on the boat more than made up for my absence, and at sunset he returned beaming, triumphant, perfectly satisfied with his day's sail. "Now, I'm ready to go home," he announced. After putting him on the train next day I opened my desk in my quiet room on Elm Street, with a feeling of being half-in and half-out of the state of matrimony. In some ways I liked being alone. A greater power of concentration resulted. With no disturbing household influences, no distracting interests, I wrote all the morning, but at night, when my work was done, my mind went out toward my young wife. To have her moving about the room would have been pleasant. To walk with her to the studio would have been a joy. As a novelist, I bitterly resented all the minute domestic worries, but as a human being I rejoiced in my new relationship. "Can I combine the two activities? Will being a husband and a householder cramp and defeat me as a novelist?" These questions every writer who is ambitious to excel, must answer for himself. So far as I was concerned, the decision had been made. Having elected myself into the ranks of those who were carrying forward the immemorial traditions of the race, there was no turning back for me. I ended the week by going out to Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime met me to renew the delight of our days of courtship. Even here, I did not neglect my task. Wallace Heckman gave me a desk in the attic and there each morning I hammered away, eager to get my material "roughed out" while it was hot in my memory. I often wrote four thousand words between breakfast and luncheon. One story took shape as a brief prose epic of the Sioux, a special pleading from the standpoint of a young educated red man, to whom Sitting Bull was a kind of Themistocles. Though based on accurate information, I intended it to be not so much a history as an interpretation. It interested me at the time and so--I wasted a week! Life at camp was very pleasant, but as my brother wrote me that he must return to New York I felt it my duty to go home and see that my mother "attended" the County Fair, which was a most important event to her. "Mother's life retains so few interests," I explained to Zulime, "that to miss the Fair would be to her a great deprivation. You can stay here but I must go home and take her down to the old settlers' picnic in Floral Hall." Zulime understood. Loyally cutting short her pleasant companionship with her fellow artists she returned with me to West Salem a few days before the fair opened. Fuller, who timed his visit to be with us during the exhibition, professed a keen interest in every department of it. His attitude was comically that of a serious-minded European tourist. He not only purchased a catalogue, he treated it precisely as if it were the hand-book of the Autumn Salon in Paris. Carrying it in his hand, he spent busy hours minutely studying "Spatter Work," and carefully inspecting decorated bedspreads. He tasted the prize bread, sampled the honey, and twirled the contesting apples. Nothing escaped his notice. He was as alert, and (apparently) as vitally concerned as any of the "judges," but I, knowing his highly-critical mind, could only smile at his reports. He was a constant joy, not only to Zulime and to me, but to our friends, the Eastons. One day as we were digging potatoes he gave me a lecture on my duty as a Wisconsin novelist. "You should do for this country what Thomas Hardy has done for Wessex," he said. "You have made a good start in _Main Traveled Roads_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, but you should do more with it. It is a noble background." "Why not do something with it yourself?" I retorted. "You are almost as much a part of Wisconsin as I am. I've done my part and moved on. My keenest interests now are in the Mountain West--a larger field. There's no use saying 'Make more of this material!' I can only do what I feel. Just now I am full of Montana. Why don't you celebrate Eagle's Nest? If you weren't so myopic you'd perceive in that little artist colony something quite as literary as the life which Hawthorne lived at Brook Farm." "I'm no Hawthorne," he replied. "I'm not even Margaret Fuller. I don't want to write about Camp--in fact I don't want to write about anything. I'd rather drive nails or superintend a tinner." In this way our discussion usually ended--with each of us going his own gait. In this instance his way led back to Chicago. "I must return to my plumbing," he protested. "I've got some renters who are complaining of their furnaces," and that was the end of his visit. We knew better than to argue for delay. He was as inflexible as New England granite. His going left a gap. We both liked to have him about. Never in the way, never interfering with my work, he was always a stimulant. His judgment (second only to Howells' in my estimation) kept me to my highest level. He was the only man with whom I could discuss all my perplexities and be enlightened. As October came on my mother's condition called for increasing care. She could not walk across the road and her outings were all taken in a wheeled chair, which I pushed about the village each afternoon. She was very happy when we were at home, but as she could neither sew nor read she was piteously dependent upon the members of her household for diversion. Life's walls were narrowing for her, that was sorrowfully evident to me; and yet I did not--I would not consider the possibility of her early passing. I thought of her as living on for many years longer. It was her growing inability to employ her time which troubled me and I gave the most of my afternoons to her amusement. As my father wrote from Dakota early in October setting November 1st as the date for his return, I began to plan another trip to New York, feeling that it was better to go in the early autumn than to wait till winter. "Winters are very hard on old folks in our valley," I remarked to Zulime. To mother I said, "Our absence will not be long. We'll be back in time for Thanksgiving," I assured her. She dreaded our going. Clinging to us both as though she feared we might never return she pleadingly said, "Wait till your father comes," and her distress of mind caused me to put off our departure until father could arrive. These moods of depression, these periods of suffering which she could not explain, were usually transitory, and this one soon passed. In a day or two she was free from pain, and quite cheerful. "You may go," she said at last, but warningly added, "Don't stay away too long!" In spite of her smiling face, I kissed her good-by with a sense of uneasiness, almost of guilt. "It seems a selfish act to leave her at this time," I confessed to Zulime, "and yet if we are to get away at all, it is safer to go now." In order to save time for our eastern trip, we went through Chicago almost without stopping, and upon reaching New York, took the same suite of rooms on Fifteenth Street in which we had lived the previous year. In an hour we were settled. My brother, who was playing an engagement in the city, came at once to inquire about the old folks and I gave a good report. "Mother has her ups and downs," I explained, "but she is very comfortable in her new rooms. Of course she misses her sons and her new daughter--I am not sure, but she misses the new daughter more than she misses you and me, but we shall soon return to her." _The Eagle's Heart_, which had been running with favor as a serial, was just being published in book form, and we were in high hopes of it. At the same time the Century Company was preparing to issue _Her Mountain Lover_, which had already been printed in the magazine. Altogether my presence in New York seemed opportune, if not actually necessary, a fact which I made much of in writing to the old folks in the West. Gilder, who met me on the street soon after our arrival in New York, spoke to me in praise of _Her Mountain Lover_. "I predict a great success for it. It has beauty----" here he smiled. "I am always preaching 'beauty' to you, but you need it! You should remember that the writing which is beautiful is the writing which lasts." He was looking thin and bent and gray, and I experienced a keen pang of fear. "Gilder is growing old," I thought, and this feeling of change was deepened a few days later by the death of Charles Dudley Warner. "The older literary men, the Writers who have been my guides and my exemplars, are dropping away! I am no longer 'a young and promising novelist.' It is time I delivered my message--if I have any," I reminded myself, with a realization that I was now in the mid-ranks, pushed on by younger and more vigorous authors. Frank Norris and Stewart Edward White were crowding close upon my lagging heels. With this in my thought I got out my manuscript and set to work. I would have been entirely happy in the midst of many delightful meetings with my fellow craftsmen had it not been for a growing sense of anxiety concerning my mother's condition. Father's brief notes were not reassuring. "Your mother needs you," he said, in effect, and I began to plan our return. "We have a few engagements," I wrote, "but you may expect us for our usual Thanksgiving Dinner." I will not say that I had a definite premonition of trouble, I was just uneasy. I felt inclined to drop all our social engagements and start for home but I did not carry out the impulse. On Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, after a delightful dinner with Augustus Thomas in his home at New Rochelle, Zulime and I returned to our apartment in happiest humor, to be met by a telegram which went to my heart like the thrust of a bayonet. It was from my father. "_Your mother is very low. Come at once._" For a few moments I remained standing, like a man stunned by a savage blow. Then I awoke to the need of haste in getting away to the West. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the last train which would enable us to connect with the Milwaukee train from Chicago to West Salem, left at half-past six. "We must make that train," I said to Zulime with a desperate realization of the need of haste. The rush of packing, the excitement of getting to the station kept me from the sinking of spirit, the agony of self-accusation which set in the moment we were safely in the sleeping car, and speeding on our homeward way. "If only we can reach her before it is too late," was my prayer. "I shall never forgive myself for leaving her. I knew she was not well," I confessed to Zulime, whose serene optimism comforted me, or at least dulled the edge of my self-reproach. Again I telegraphed that we were coming, giving the name and number of our train, hoping to have an encouraging reply from father or the doctor during the evening, but none came. The long agonizing hours wore on. A hundred times I accused myself, "I should not have left her." At all points where I attacked myself, my wife defended me, excused me, and yet I could not clear myself--could not rest. In imagination I pictured that dear, sweet face turned toward the door, and heard that faint voice asking for me. It is true I had done many considerate things for her, but I had not done enough. Money I had given her, and a home, but I had not given her as much of my time, my service, as I might have done,--as I should have done. My going away to the city at the very moment when my presence was most necessary seemed base desertion. While she had been suffering, longing and lonely, I had been feasting. All my honors, all my writing, seemed at this moment too slight, too trivial to counter-balance my mother's need, my mother's love. Midnight came without a message, and I went to bed, slightly comforted, hoping that a turn for the better had taken place. I slept fitfully, waking again and again to the bleak possibilities of the day. A persistent vision of a gray-haired mother watching and waiting for her sons filled my brain. That she was also longing for Zulime I knew, for she loved her, and thought of her as a daughter. In this agony of remorse and fear I wore out the night, and as no word came in the morning, I ate my breakfast in half-recovered tranquillity. "It must be that she is better," Zulime said, but at nine o'clock a telegram from the doctor destroyed all hope. "Your mother is unconscious. Do not hope to find her alive," was his desolating message. Every devoted son who reads this line will shiver as I shivered. That warning came like a wind from the dark spaces of a bleak, uncharted deep. It changed my world. For twenty years my mother had been my chief care. My daily thought ran to her. Only when deeply absorbed in my work had she been absent from my conscious mind. For her I had planned, for her I had saved, for her I had built, and now----! That day was the longest, bitterest, I had ever known, for the reason that, mixed with my grief, my sense of remorse, was a feeling of utter helplessness. In desperate desire for haste I could only lumpishly wait. Another day of agony, another interminable night of pain must pass before I could reach the shadowed Homestead. Nothing could shorten the interval. Then, too, I realized that she whom I would comfort had already gone beyond my aid, beyond any comfort I could send. Over and over I repeated, "If only we had started a few days sooner!" The truth is I had failed of a son's duty just when that duty was most needed, and this conviction brought an almost intolerable ache into my throat. Nothing that Zulime could do or say removed that pain. I could not eat, and I could not rest. We reached Chicago in time to catch the night train at ten o'clock, and in almost utter mental exhaustion I fell asleep about midnight, and slept till nearly daylight. * * * * * Father met us at the train, as he had so often done before, but this time there was something in the pinched gray look of his face, something in the filmed light of his eagle eyes which denoted, movingly, the tragic experiences through which he had just passed. Before he spoke I knew that mother had passed beyond my reach. As he gripped my hand I perceived that he was smitten but unbowed. He was taking his orders like a soldier, without complaint or question.--Only when Zulime kissed him did he give way. As we entered the gate I perceived with a pang of dread the wheeled chair, standing empty on the porch, pathetic witness of the one who had no further need of it. Within doors, the house showed the disorder, the desolate confusion, the terror which death had brought. The furniture was disarranged--the floor muddy, and in the midst of the chill little parlor rested a sinister, flower-strewn box. In this was all that remained of Isabel McClintock, my mother. For a few minutes I stood looking about me, a scalding blur in my eyes, a choking in my throat. The south room, _her_ room, was empty, intolerably, accusingly empty. The gentle, gray-haired figure was no longer in its place before the window. The smiling lips which had so often touched my cheek on my return were cold. The sweet, hesitant voice was forever silent. Her dear face I did not see. I refused to look upon her in her coffin. I wanted to remember her as she appeared when I said good-by to her that bright October evening, her white hair gleaming in the light of the lamp, while soft curves about her lips suggested a beautiful serenity. How patient and loving she had been! Even though she feared that she might never see us again she had sent us away in cheerful self-sacrifice. Father was composed but tense. He went about his duties with solemn resignation, and, an hour or two later, he said to me, "You and I must go down and select a burial lot, a place for your mother and me." It was a desolate November morning, raw and gloomy, but the gray sky and the patient, bare-limbed elms were curiously medicinal to my sore heart. In some strange way they comforted me. Snow was in the air and father mechanically weather-wise, said, without thinking of the bitter irony of his words--"Regular Thanksgiving weather." Thanksgiving weather! Yes, but what Thanksgiving could there be for him or for me, now? * * * * * The day of the funeral was still more savagely cold and bleak, and I resented its pitiless gloom. The wind which blew over the open grave of my dead mother was sinister as hate, and the snow which fell, intolerably stern. I turned away. I could not see that box lowered into the merciless soil. My mother's spirit was not there--I knew that--and yet I could not bear to think of those tender lips, those loving hands going into the dark. It was a harsh bed for one so gentle and so dear. Back to the Homestead we drove--back to an empty shell. The place in which Isabel Garland's wish had been law for so many years was now desolate and drear, and return would have been impossible for me had it not been for the presence of my wife, whose serene soul was my comfort and my stay. "You have done all that a son could do," she insisted, and it was a comfort to have her say this even though I knew that it was not true, her faith in me and her youth and beauty partly redeemed me from the awful emptiness of that home. Without her (and all that she represented) my father and I would have been victims of a black despair. I had never possessed a definite belief in immortality and yet, as we gathered about our table that night, I could not rid myself of a feeling that my mother was in her room, and that she might at any moment cough, or stir, or call to me. Realizing with appalling force that so far as my philosophy went our separation was eternal, I nevertheless hoped that her spirit was with us at that moment, I did not know it--I desired it. In the sense which would have made belief a solace and relief, I was agnostic. "How strange it all seems!" my father exclaimed, and on his face lay such lines of dismay as I had never seen written there before. "It seems as though I ought to go and wheel her in to dinner." I marvel now, as I marveled then, at the buoyant helpfulness, the brave patience of my wife in the presence of her stricken and bewildered household. She sorrowed but she kept her calm judgment, and set about restoring the interrupted routine of our lives. Putting away all signs of the gray intruder whose hands had scattered the ashes of ruin across our floor, she called on me to aid in uniting our broken circle. Under her influence I soon regained a certain composure. With a realization that it was not fair that she should bear all the burden of the family reorganization, I turned from death and faced the future with her. On her depended the continuation of our family. She was its hope and its saving grace. BOOK II CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Summer in the High Country My first morning in the old Homestead without my mother was so poignant with its sense of loss, so rich with memories both sweet and sorrowful, that I shut myself in my study and began a little tribute to her, a sketch which I called _The Wife of a Pioneer_. Into this I poured the love I had felt but failed to express as fully as I should have done while she was alive. To make this her memorial was my definite purpose. As I went on I found myself deep in her life on the farm in Iowa, and the cheerful heroism of her daily treadmill came back to me with such appeal that I could scarcely see the words in which I was recording her history. Visioning the long years of her drudgery, I recalled her early rising, and suffered with her the never-ending round of dish-washing, churning, sewing, and cooking, realizing more fully than ever before that in all of this slavery she was but one of a million martyrs. All our neighbors' wives walked the same round. On such as they rests the heavier part of the home and city building in the West. The wives of the farm are the unnamed, unrewarded heroines of the border. For nearly a week I lingered upon this writing, and having completed it I was moved to print it, in order that it might remind some other son of his duty to his ageing parents sitting in the light of their lonely hearth, and in doing this I again vaguely forecast the composition of an autobiographic manuscript--one which should embody minutely and simply the homely daily toil of my father's family, although I could not, at the moment, define the precise form into which the story would fall. The completion of the memorial to my mother eased my heart of its bitter self-accusation, and a little later I returned to my accustomed routine, realizing that in my wife now lay my present incentive and my future support. She became the center of my world. In her rested my hope of happiness. My mother was a memory. To remain longer in the old home was painful, for to me everything suggested the one for whom it had been established. The piano I had bought for her, the chair in which she had loved to sit, her spectacles on the stand--all these mute witnesses of her absence benumbed me as I walked about her room. Only in my work-shop was I able to find even momentary relief from my sense of irreparable and eternal loss. Father, as though bewildered by the sudden change in his life, turned to Zulime with a pathetic weakness which she met with a daughter's tender patience and a woman's intuitive understanding. He talked to her of his first meeting with "Belle" and his tone was that of a lover, one who had loved long and deeply, and this I believe was true. In spite of unavoidable occasional moments of friction, he and Isabel McClintock had lived in harmony. They had been spiritually married, and now, in looking back over the long road he and she had traveled together, he recalled only its pleasant places. His memories were all of the sunlit meadows and starry nights along the way. Prairie pinks and wild roses hid the thorns and the thistles of the wayside. His joy in the songs she had sung came back, intensified now by tender association with her face and voice. The knowledge that she who had voiced them so often, could voice them no more, gave to some of the words an almost overpowering pathos, and when he asked me to sing them, I could not immediately comply. To him they brought grateful tears and a consoling sadness, to me they came with tragic significance. "But that mother she is gone Calm she sleeps beneath the stone" was not a song but a reality. More and more he dwelt upon the time when she was young, and as the weeks went by his sorrow took on a wistful, vague longing for the past. Through the gate of memory he reëntered the world of his youth and walked once more with William and David and Luke. The mists which filled his eyes had nothing hot or withering in their touch--they comforted him. Whether he hoped to meet his love in some other world or not I do not know--but I think he did. In the midst of these deep emotional personal experiences, I began to write (almost as if in self-defense), a novel which I called _The Gray Horse Troop_, a story which had been slowly forming in my mind ever since my visit to Lame Deer in 1897. This was my first actual start upon its composition and I was soon in full drive again, and just in proportion as I took on these fictional troubles did my own lose their power. To Zulime, with a feeling of confidence in myself, I now said, "You need not remain here any longer. Go down to Chicago and wait for me. I'll come as soon as father feels like letting me go. I am all right now. I am at work." She smiled but replied with firm decision, "I shall stay right here until you can go with me. Father needs me more than he needs you." This was true. She would have been deserting two men instead of one--and so she stayed while I worked away at my story, finding comfort in the realization of her presence. At last my father said, "You mustn't stay here on my account; I can take care of myself." Here spoke the stark spirit of the man. Accustomed to provide for himself in camp and on the trail, he saw no reason why he should not contrive to live here in the sheltered village, surrounded by his friends; but Zulime insisted upon his retaining our housekeeper, and to this he consented, although he argued against it. "I've been keeping house alone for six years out there in Dakota; I guess I can do as well here." "All right, father," I said, "we'll go, but if you need me let me know." A return to the city did not interrupt my writing. My new novel now had entire possession of me. So far as my mornings were concerned I was forgetful of everything else--and yet, often, as I put aside my work for the day, I caught myself saying, "_Now I must write to mother_,"--and a painful clutch came into my throat as I realized, once again, that I no longer had a mother waiting for a letter. For twenty years no matter where I had been or what I had been doing I had written to her an almost daily message and now she was no longer in my reach!--Was she near me on some other plane? The good friendship of the Eagles' Nest Campers was of the highest value to me at this time. Without them Chicago would have been a desert. Henry Fuller's gay spirit, Lorado's swift wit and the good fraternal companionship of Charles Francis Browne were of daily comfort; but above all others I depended upon my wife whose serenely optimistic spirit carried me over many a deep slough of despond. How I leaned upon her! Her patience with me was angelic. A writer, like an artist, is apt to be a selfish brute, tending to ignore everything which does not make for the progress of his beloved manuscript. He resents every interruption every hindering distraction, as a hellish contrivance, maliciously designed to worry or obstruct him--At least I am that way. That I was a burden, an intolerable burden to my wife, at times--many times--I must admit--but she understood and was charitable. She defended me as best she could from interruption and smoothed my daily course with deft hand. Slowly my novel began to take shape and as I drew farther away from the remorseful days which made my work seem selfish and vain, I recovered an illogical cheerfulness. We saw very few Chicago people and in contrast with our previous "season" in New York our daily walk was uneventful, almost rural, in its quiet round. Christmas came to us without special meaning but 1900 went out with _The Eagle's Heart_ on the market, and _Her Mountain Lover_ going to press. Aside from my sense of bereavement, and a certain anxiety concerning my lonely old father, I was at peace and Zulime seemed happy and confident. There was no escaping my filial responsibility, however, for in the midst of this serene season, a sudden call for help came from West Salem. "Your father is ill and needs you," wrote the doctor and I went at once to his aid. It was a cheerless home-coming,--one that I could hardly endure the thought of, and yet I was glad that I had not followed my first impulse to delay it, for as I entered the door of the desolate lonely house I found the old soldier stretched out on a couch, piteously depressed in mind and flushed with fever. I had not arrived a minute too soon. What a change had come over the Homestead! It was but a shell, a mansion from which the spirit for whom it had been built was fled. Its empty, dusty rooms, so cold and silent and dead--were dreadful to me, but I did my best to fill them with cheer for my father's sake. As the day wore on I said to him, "It seems like Sunday to me. I have a feeling that mother and Zulime are away at church and that they may, at any moment, come in together." "I wish Zuleema would come," my father said, and as if in answer to his wish, she surprised us by a telegram. "I am coming home," she wired, "meet me at the station to-morrow morning," and this message made my father so happy that it troubled me, for it revealed to me how deeply he had missed her, and made plain to me also how difficult it would be for me to take her away from him thereafter. Her coming put such life in the house that I decided to invite a number of my father's friends and neighbors to spend the evening with us, and the thought of this party quite restored him to his natural optimism. His confidence in his new daughter's ability had become fixed. He accepted her judgments almost instantly. He bragged of her skill as a cook, as an artist and as a musician, quite shamelessly; but as this only amused her I saw no reason for interfering--I even permitted him to boast of my singing. He believed me to be one of the most remarkable ballad singers in the world, and to hear me sing "The Ninety and Nine" with all the dramatic modulations of a professional evangelist afforded him the highest satisfaction. At his urging we made elaborate preparations for feeding our guests, and Zulime arranged a definite program of entertainment. When conversation slackened I was to sing while she played my accompaniment, and to fill out the program I volunteered to read one of my short stories. The outcome of the evening was amusingly destructive of all our kindly plans. Before the women had fairly removed their wraps, Lottridge drew a box of dominoes from his pocket, saying, "I didn't know but you'd be a little short on 'bones,'" and Shane called out, "Well, now, Richard, what about tables?" In five minutes they were all--every mother's son and daughter of them--bent above a row of dominoes! No entertainment on the part of host or hostess was necessary till the time came to serve supper. All our literary and musical preparations went for naught!--At ten o'clock they rose as one man, thanked us for a pleasant evening and went home! Zulime laughed merrily over the wreck of our self-sacrificing program when we were alone. "Well, we'll know exactly what to do next time. All we need to do is to furnish dominoes and tables, our guests will do the rest." My young wife's presence in the Homestead almost redeemed it from its gloom, and yet I was not content. The complications in the situation defied adjustment. My father needed us, but the city was essential to me. As a writer, I should have been remorselessly selfish. I should have taken my wife back to Chicago at once, but my New England conscience would not let me forget how lonely that old man would be in this empty house, silent, yet filled with voices of the moaning, swaying branches of its bleak midwinter elms. My problem was, in fact, only another characteristic cruel phase of American family history. In a new land like ours, the rising generation finds itself, necessarily, almost cruelly, negligent of its progenitors. Youth moves on, away and up from the farm and the village. Age remains below and behind. The tragedy of this situation lies in the fact that there is no happy solution of the problem. Youth can not be shackled, age can not be transplanted. In my case, I foresaw that the situation would inevitably become more and more difficult year by year. My father could not live in any city, and for me to give up my life in Chicago and New York in order to establish a permanent home in West Salem, involved a sacrifice which I was not willing to make,--either on my own account or Zulime's. I had no right to demand such devotion from her. Like thousands of other men of my age I was snared in circumstances--forced to do that which appeared unfilial and neglectful. In the midst of these perplexities I was confronted by a new and surprising problem--I had money to invest! For the serial use of _The Eagle's Heart_ and _Her Mountain Lover_ I had received thirty-five hundred dollars, and as each of these books had also brought in an additional five hundred dollars advance royalty, I was for the moment embarrassed with cash. In this extremity I turned, naturally, toward Oklahoma. I recalled the beautiful prairies I had crossed on my way to the Washitay. "Another visit to Darlington will not only furnish new material for my book of Indian stories, but enable me to survey and purchase a half-section of land," I explained to my father. "Like Henry George we both understand the value of unearned increment." In this plan he agreed and two days after making this decision I was at Colony, Oklahoma, where I spent nearly the entire month of May, and when I returned I was the owner of three hundred and twenty acres of land. My return to the Homestead found Zulime deep in the rush of the berry season. As mistress of a garden her interest in its produce was almost comical. She thought less of art, she neither modeled nor painted. She cared less and less for the Camp at Eagle's Nest, exulting more and more in the spacious rooms of her home, and in the abundance of her soil. Her love of the Homestead delighted me, but I was a little disappointed by the coolness with which she received my gift of a deed to a quarter section of Oklahoma land. She smiled and handed it back to me as if it were a make-believe deed. It chanced that July came in unusually dry and hot, and in the midst of a dreadful week, she fell ill, so ill that she was confined to her bed for nearly three weeks, and as I watched beside her during those cloudless days and sultry nights, my mind turned with keenest longing toward the snow-lined crests of the Colorado mountains, and especially to the glorious forests of the White River Plateau. The roar of snowy Uncompagre, the rush of the deep-flowing Gunnison, and the serrate line of The Needle Peaks, called us both, and when at last, she was strong enough to travel, we packed our trunks and fled the low country, hurrying in almost desperate desire to reach the high, cool valleys of Colorado. O, that torturing journey! As we neared Omaha the thermometer rose to 105 in the Pullman car, and remained there nearly all day. For twelve hours we steamed, sitting rigidly erect in our chairs, dreading to move, sweltering in silence, waiting with passionate intensity for the cool wind which we knew was certain to meet us somewhere on our upward course. The sun went down in murky flame and the very shadows were hot, but deep in the night I was roused by a delicious puff of mountain air, and calling to Zulime, suffering in her berth, I said, "Worry no longer about the heat. From this hour on, every moment will be joy. You can forget the weather in Colorado." What exquisite relief came with that change of air! What sweetness of promise! What buoyancy of expectation!--We went to sleep with the wind blowing in upon us, and when we woke the mountains were in sight. At the station in the Springs, our good friend Louis Ehrich again met us, and in half an hour we stood in the same room which we had occupied on our wedding trip, a room whose windows faced directly upon the Rampart range, already deep purple with the shadow of the clouds. By contrast with our torrid railway car this was Paradise itself--so clean, so cool, so sweet, so tonic was the air, and when at noon a storm hid the peaks, and lightning crashed above the foot hills, the arid burning plain over which we came was forgotten--or remembered only to make our enjoyment of the mountain air more complete. The splendor of that mighty wall, the kiss of that wind, the memory of that majestic peak looming amid the stars, comes back to me as I write, filling me with an almost intolerable longing to recover the magic of that summer, a summer which has receded with the speed of an eagle. Each day we breakfasted and lunched and dined on a vine-clad porch in full view of the mountains. Each afternoon we drove or rode horseback or loitered on the lawn. Never in all my life had I come so near to flawless content, and Zulime, equally joyous, swiftly returned to perfect health. Her restoration was magical. Louis Ehrich, one of the gentlest men I have ever known, rejoiced in our presence. He lived but to fill our days with pleasure. He and I had been friends for ten years, and his family now took my wife into favor--I was about to say into equal favor, but that would not be true. They very properly put her above me in the scale of their affection, and to this subordination I submitted without complaint, or even question. It chanced that on the second day of our stay the Ehrichs were due at a garden party in "Glen Eyrie," General Palmer's palatial home in the foot hills, and kindly obtained permission to bring us with them. That drive across the mesa was like a journey into some far country--passage to a land which was neither America nor England, neither East nor West. To reach the Castle we entered a gate at the mouth of a narrow, wooded cañon and drove for nearly a mile toward the west through a most beautiful garden in which all the native shrubs and wild flowers had been assembled and planted with exquisite art. People were streaming in over the mountain roads, some on horseback, some on bicycles, some in glittering, gayly-painted wagons, and when we reached the lawn before the great stone mansion, we found a very curious and interesting throng of guests, and in the midst of them, the General, tall, soldierly, clothed in immaculate linen and wearing a broad white western hat, was receiving his friends, assisted by his three pretty young daughters. The house was a veritable chateau--the garden a wonderland of Colorado plants and flowers, skilfully disposed among the native ledges and scattered along the bases of the cliffs whose rugged sides enclosed the mansion grounds. The towers (of gray stone) were English, but the plants and blooms were native to the Rampart foot hills. In a very real fashion "Glen Eyrie" bodied forth the singular and powerful character of its owner, who was at once an English squire, a Pennsylvania civil war veteran, and a western railway engineer. Food and drink and ices of various kinds were being served under the trees with lavish hospitality, and groups of young people were wandering about the spacious grounds--grounds so beautiful by reason of nature's adjustment, as well as by way of the landscape gardener's art, that they made the senses ache with a knowledge of their exquisite impermanency. It was a kind of poem expressed in green and gold and scarlet. Zulime greatly interested the Palmer girls, and the General, who remembered me pleasantly, was most amiable to us both. "You must come again," he said, and to me he added, "You must come over some day and ride my trails with me." As I mingled with that throng of joyous folk, I lost myself. I became an actor in a prodigious and picturesque American social comedy. For stage we had the lawn, banks of flowers, and the massive towers of the castle. For background rose the rugged hills!--Nothing could have been farther from our home in Neshonoc. Glowing with esthetic delight in the remote and singular beauty of the place, Zulime took an artist's keen interest in alien loveliness. It threw our life into commonplace drab. And yet it was factitious. It had the transient quality of a dream in which we were but masqueraders. Two days later, at the invitation of General Palmer, we joined his party in a trip over the short-line railway to Cripple Creek, traveling in his private car, and the luxury of this novel experience made my wife's eyes shine with girlish delight.--I professed alarm, "I don't know where all this glory is going to land us," I warned, "after this Aladdin's-lamp luxury and leisure, how can I get you back into washing dishes and canning fruit in West Salem?" She laughed at this, as she did at most of my fears. Serene acceptance of what came was her dominant characteristic. Her faith in the future was so perfect that she was willing to make the fullest use of the present. The day was gloriously clear, with great white clouds piled high above the peaks, and as the train crept steadily upward, feeling its way across the mountain's shoulder, we were able to look back and down and far out upon the plain which was a shoreless sea of liquid opal. At ten thousand feet the foot hills (flat as a rug) were so rich in color, so alluring in their spread that we could scarcely believe them to be composed of rocks and earth. After a day of sight-seeing we returned, at sunset, to the Springs, with all of the pomp of railway magnates _en tour_, and as we were about to part at the railway station, the General in curt, off-hand way, asked, "Why not join my camping party at Sierra Blanca? We're going down there for a week or two, and I shall be very glad to have you with us. Come, and stay as long as you can. We shall probably move on to Wagon Wheel Gap later. Wagon Wheel ought to interest you." He said this with a quizzical smile, for he had been reading my novel of Colorado, and recognized in my scene the splendors of the San Juan country. "Your friend Ehrich is coming," he added, "and I expect Sterling Morton for a day or two. Why not all come down together?" "Would you like me to bring my bed and tent?" I asked. "As you please, although I have plenty of room in my own outfit." * * * * * It happened that Colorado Springs was holding a Quarto-Centenary, a kind of Carnival and Wild-West Pageant, to which Vice-President Roosevelt was coming as the chief guest of honor, and as soon as he arrived I called upon him at his hotel. Almost at once he asked, "Where is your wife? I want to see her. Is she here?" "Yes, she is staying with some friends," I replied. "I am very glad to know it. I shall call upon her tomorrow afternoon as soon as my duties at the carnival are ended." The thought of having the Vice-President of the United States go out of his way to make a call upon my wife gave me a great deal of pleasure for I realized how much it would mean to Zulime, but I replied, "We shall be very glad to call upon _you_." "No," he replied in his decisive fashion--"I shall call to-morrow at four o'clock--if that is convenient to you. Meanwhile I want you and Mr. Ehrich to breakfast with me here, at the hotel. I shall have some hunters and rough riders at my table whom you will be interested to meet." Of course I accepted this invitation instantly, and hurried home to tell my wife that "royalty" was about to call upon her. The Vice-President's breakfast party turned out to be a very curious collection of mutually repellent, but highly-developed individualities. There was John Goff, well known as guide and hunter in western Colorado, and Marshall Davidson, a rough-rider from New Mexico, Lieutenant Llewellyn of the Rough Riders, Sterling Morton (former Secretary of Agriculture), a big impassive Nebraska pioneer; Louis Ehrich (humanist and art lover), and myself--I cannot say that I in any way reduced the high average of singularity, but I was at least in the picture--Morton and Ehrich were not; they remained curious rather than sympathetic listeners. While no longer a hunter I was a trailer and was able to understand and keenly enjoy the spirit of these hardy men of the open. True to his word, Roosevelt called at the Ehrich's that afternoon, and no one could have been more charming, more neighborly than he. He told of our first meeting, smilingly called me "a Henry George crank," and referred to other differences which existed between us. "Differences which do not in the least interfere with our friendship," he assured Zulime. "Your husband, for example, doesn't believe in hunting, and has always stood out against my shooting," here he became quite serious--"However, I've given up shooting deer and elk. I kill only 'varmints' now." After half an hour of lively conversation, he rose to go and as I went with him to the gate, where his carriage was waiting, he said with earnest emphasis, "I congratulate you most heartily, my dear fellow. Your wife is fine! fine!" As Morton and Ehrich had accepted General Palmer's invitation to camp with him, we all took train for Fort Garland, a mysterious little town in Southern Colorado, near which the General was encamped. This expedition particularly pleased me for it carried me into the shadow of Sierra Blanca, one of the noblest of Colorado's peaks, and also into the edge of the Mexican settlement. It all seemed very remote and splendid to me that day. We were met at the station by one of the General's retainers and ten minutes later found ourselves in a mountain wagon and on our way toward Old Baldy, the mountain which stands just north of Sierra Blanca, which forms the majestic southern bastion of the Crestones. Mexican huts lined the way, and dark-skinned farmers working in the fields and about the corrals, gave evidence of the fact that this "land grant" had been, at one time, a part of Old Mexico. "It contains nearly seven hundred thousand acres," Ehrich explained, "and is the property of General Palmer." This statement aroused a sense of wonder in my mind. "Think of being proprietor of one-half of Sierra Blanca?" I said to Morton. "Has any individual a right to such a privilege?" In a lovely grove on the bank of a rushing glorious stream, we found the Lord of this Demesne and his three daughters encamped, attended by a platoon of cooks, valets, maids, and hostlers. A "camp" which highly amused Sterling Morton, although he had moments of resenting its luxury. "Now this is the kind of 'roughing it' I believe in," he declared with a smile. "It is suited to elderly old parties like Ehrich and myself, but you, Garland, a youngster, a trailer--should have no part in it. It's too corrupting." Our luncheon, which contained five courses, came on with the plenitude and precision of a meal at Glen Eyrie. The rusticity of the function was altogether confined to the benches on which we sat and the tables from which we ate--the butlering was for the most part urban. "Why didn't Mrs. Garland come?" asked the General. "She had an engagement or two that prevented her." "Oh! She must come down," commanded the General. "Telegraph her at once and ask her when she can get away. I'll send my car for her." This he did. The private Pullman, with a maid and a steward in charge, went back that night and on the second morning Zulime came down the line in lonely state. I met her at the station, and for ten days we lived the most idyllic, yet luxurious life beside that singing stream. We rode the trails, we fished, we gathered wild flowers. Sometimes of an afternoon we visited the ranches or mining towns round about, feasting at night on turtle soup, and steak and mushrooms, drinking champagne out of tin cups with reckless disregard of camp traditions, utterly without care or responsibility--in truth we were all under military discipline! The General was a soldier even in his recreations. Each day's program was laid out in "orders" issued in due form by the head of the expedition--and these arrangements held! No one thought of changing them. Our duty was to obey--and enjoy. Never before in all my life had anything like this freedom from responsibility, from expense, come to me. So carefree, so beautiful was our life, that I woke each morning with a start of surprise to find its magic a reality. It was like the hospitality of oriental kings in the fairy stories of my childhood. For four weeks we lived this incredible life of mingled luxury and mountaineering, attended by troops of servants and squadrons of horses, threading the high forests, exploring deep mines, crossing Alpine passes, and feasting on the borders of icy lakes--always with the faithful "Nomad," the General's private Pullman car, waiting in the offing ready in case of accident--and then, at last, after riding through Slumgullion Gulch back to Wagon Wheel, Zulime and I took leave of these good friends and started toward Arizona. I had not yet displayed to her the Grand Cañon of the Colorado! Five years before, on a stage drawn by four wild-eyed bronchos I had ridden from Flagstaff to Hance's Cabin in the glorious, exultant old-time fashion, but now a train ran from Williams to the edge of the abyss, and while I mourned over the prosaic change, I think Zulime welcomed it, and when we had set up our little tent on a point of the rim which commanded a view (toward the Southwest) of miles and miles of purple pagodas, violet towers and golden peaks we were content. Nothing could change the illimitable majesty of this view. Day by day we watched the colorful play of sun-light and shadow along those mighty walls, and one night we camped in the deeps, a dramatic experience, for a mountain lion yowling from the cliffs gave voice to the savage grandeur of the scene. Then at last, surfeited with splendor, weary with magnificence, we turned our faces homeward. With only a stop at Laguna to watch the Indian Corn Dance, we slid down to Kansas City and at last to West Salem and home. What a vacation it had been! Pike's Peak, Cripple Creek, Glen Eyrie, our camp beside the singing stream at Baldy, Sierra Blanca, Wagon Wheel Gap, Creede, Red Mountain, Lake City, Slumgullion, Tennessee Pass, noble dinners on the car, trail-side lunches of goose-liver and sandwiches and jam, iced watermelon and champagne in hot camps on the mesas--all these scenes and experiences came back accompanied by memories of the good talk, the cosmopolitan humor, of the Palmers and their guests. From this royal ease, this incessant shift of scene and personality, we returned to our shabby old homestead brooding patiently beneath its maples, reflecting upon the glittering panorama which our magic lamp and flying carpet had wrought so potently to display. As I had started out to educate my wife in Western Life, it must be admitted that this summer had been singularly successful in bringing to her a knowledge of the splendors of Colorado and a perception of the varied character of its population.--Best of all she returned in perfect health and happy as a girl. "This being married to a poor novelist isn't so bad after all," I remarked with an air of self-congratulation. "True, our rewards come without reason, but they sometimes rhyme with joy and pride." Strange to say, I got nothing out of this summer, in a literary way, except the story which I called _The Steadfast Widow Delaney_, a conception which came to me on my solitary ascent of Sierra Blanca. All the beauty and drama, all the humor and contrast of the trip with the Palmers, had no direct fictional value to me. It is hard to explain why, but so it was. I did not so much as write a poem based on that gorgeous experience. CHAPTER SIXTEEN The White House Musicale The Homestead on the day of our return, was not only a violent contrast to the castle in Glen Eyrie, but its eaves were dripping with water and its rooms damp and musty. It was sodden with loneliness. Father was in Dakota and mother was away never to return, and the situation would have been quite disheartening to me had it not been for Zulime who did not share my melancholy, or if she did she concealed it under that smiling stoicism which she derived from her deeply philosophic father. She pretended to be glad of the peace of our plain reality. Life with her was not lacking in variety. From the splendors of Colorado and the luxury of private cars and palatial chambers, she now dropped, with a suddenness which should have been disconcerting, to the level of scouring pots and cooking her own meals. It was several days before we succeeded in finding a cook. "This is what it means to be the wife of an unpopular novelist," I said to her. "I'm not complaining. It's fun," she replied. The house was soon in order and when my brother arrived later in the week, she greeted him with the composure of a leisured hostess. In such wise she met every demand upon her. It was Franklin's first night at home since mother went away, and I labored to cheer him with the fiction that she was "on a visit" to some of her old friends and would soon return. The Junior as I called him, was in a serious mood for another reason. After more than twelve years of life as an actor, he had decided to quit the stage, something the player is traditionally supposed to be incapable of doing, and he had come to me for aid and encouragement. "I have a good opportunity to go into the management of a rubber plantation," he explained, "and I'd like to have you buy out my share in the Homestead in order to give me a little money to work on." To this I agreed, although I had grave doubts of the rubber business. To have him give up the stage I considered a gain, for while he was a capable player of middle-aged character parts, I saw no lasting success ahead of him--on the contrary I imagined him getting into a more and more precarious condition. Nothing is more hopeless than an elderly actor out of a job and subject to the curt dismissals of contemptuous managers. Frank had always been gayly unconcerned about the future and he was not greatly troubled now; he was merely desirous of a fixed home and a place to vote. With the promise of my cash for his share of the Homestead, and my support in his Mexican venture, he cheered up markedly and went away almost as carefree as a boy. In the quiet of the days which followed I worked each morning, sometimes on _The Steadfast Widow Delaney_, and sometimes on a revision of the novel which I had variously and from time to time called _On Special Duty_, and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_. Having been accepted by Lorimer, this story was about to be printed under this latter title as a serial in the _Post_. Each afternoon I saddled my Klondike horse who was in need of exercise, and galloped about over the hills for an hour or two. We were familiar figures by this time, and the farmers when they saw me leaping a pasture fence or climbing a hill, would smile (I assume that they smiled), and say, there goes that literary cuss, or words to that general effect. I took a boyish delight in showing that Ladrone would walk a log or leap a ditch at the mere touch of my heel. Occasionally I went to LaCrosse with Zulime to visit our good friends the Eastons, and it was on one of these visits that I had my first long ride in an automobile. Incredible as it may seem now, there were very few motor cars in the county in 1901, and Easton's machine would excite laughter to-day. It was dumpy of form and noisy and uncertain of temper, but it made the trip to Winona and _almost_ home again. It broke down helplessly in the last mile, a treachery which caused its owner the deepest chagrin, although it gave me the final touch for a humorous story of our outing, a sketch which I sold to _Harper's Weekly_. The editor had a fine illustration made for it, one which gave further force to my description of the terrific speed with which we whirled through the landscape. As I recall it we rose to nearly seventeen miles an hour! As _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, actually began to appear in _The Post_, I became sharply concerned with the question of preparing it for book publication. I decided to go to New York and look the ground over very carefully before making selection of another publisher. My life in the Homestead was comfortable, almost too comfortable. It lacked stimulus. Riding my horse, gathering hickory nuts, and playing tennis or "rummy," were all very well in their way, but they left me dissatisfied, and after the cold winds began to blow and my afternoons were confined to the house, I stagnated. Like Prudden, Grinnell and other of my trailer friends, I was disposed to pitch my winter camp somewhere on Manhattan Island. The Rocky Mountains for four months in summer and the rest of the year in New York City appeared an ideal division of my life for a western novelist. I had some reason to think this arrangement was also satisfactory to my wife. To her the Wilderness was a strange and wonderful place in which to try her powers of endurance, but the trail had none of the charms of association which it possessed for me. She was quite ready to accompany me to the city although she professed to be content with Neshonoc. She was entirely urban whereas I was an absurd mixture of pioneer and trailer, fictionist and farmer. We left West Salem in late October and in less than three days were settled in the little hotel in Fifteenth Street where we had lived during two previous winters. My confidence in my new novel was not sufficient to warrant me in paying more than twenty dollars per week for our little apartment, and as for Zulime--she professed to wonder how I dared to pay as much as seventeen. One by one and two by two our faithful friends called, Burroughs, Gilder, Howells, Marion and Edward MacDowell, the Pages, Juliet Tompkins--no one appeared to think ill of us because we returned to our shabby little suite. We dined at Katherine Herne's, finding James A., "away," and with Frank Norris and his wife who were (like ourselves), just beginning to feel a little more secure of a living, while from Seton and Bacheller who were passing from glory to glory, we had kindly invitations to visit their new houses, for both of them were building, Bacheller at Sound Beach and Seton at Coscob. Seton admitted to me that he had already acquired five times the amount he had once named as the summit of his hopes, and Bacheller awed me by the quiet ease of his way of life. In the opulent presence of these men, I sang a very meek and slender song. I hated to admit my poverty, but what was the use of making any concealment? It remains to say that neither Bacheller nor Seton expressed in the slightest degree the sense of superiority which their larger royalties might have warranted. I am quite sure they never went so far as to feel sorry for me although they very naturally rejoiced in their own triumphant progress. In some ways I envied them, but I begrudged them nothing. It chanced that the Setons were far enough along with their building to announce a House Warming, and on New Year's Day, Zulime and I were fortunate enough to be included in the list of their guests. On the Saturday train we found Lloyd Osbourne, Richard Le Gallienne and several others whom we knew and on arrival at the new house on its rocky ledge above the lake, we found that the party also included Mary Fanton, Carl Lumholz, Emery Pottle and Gertrude Lynch. Seton and I spent part of the afternoon fixing up a teepee which we constructed out of an old Sibley tent, while the other guests skated on the pond. What a dinner we enjoyed that night! What youthful spirits we brought to it! Afterward we sang and danced--we all danced, even Zulime danced for the first time in her life--so she said. No one had gray hair, no one doubted the future, no one acknowledged impending cloud. We toasted the longevity of "Wyndygoul" and the continued success of its builder. We pledged eternal allegiance to our hostess, and so without a care of the future, watched the New Year dawn. At two in the morning when I crept away to my bed, the tom-tom and the piano were both sounding out with almost undiminished vigor. It was a night to remember and I do remember it with the pleasure an old man has in the days of his early manhood--not so very early either for I was on the hither side of forty! Upon our return to the city I found a letter from Bok with a check for eight hundred dollars in it. This was in response to a note of mine respecting an offer of seven hundred and fifty. "Better make it eight hundred," I wrote, and so, in my triumph, I led Zulime to Vantine's and there purchased for her a carved gold ring set with three rose diamonds, the handsomest present I had ever dared to buy for her. "This is to make amends for the measly little engagement ring you were forced to accept," I remarked by way of explanation. She protested at my reckless waste of money (as she had done with regard to the brown cloak), but to no avail, and thereafter if she occasionally brought the conversation round to Oriental jewelry, I am sure she is not to be blamed. She is still wearing that ring, though she no longer finds the same girlish pleasure in displaying it. The actual making of my serial into book form began soon after New Years, for I find records of my contract with Harper and Bros., and the arrival of bundles of proof. By the end of February the book was substantially made and ready for distribution, and a handsome book it was--to me. Whatever it had started out to be, it had ended as a fictional study of the red man in his attempt to walk the white man's road, and as a concept of his tragic outlook I still think it worth while. The three men in control of the reorganized firm of Harper and Bros., George Harvey, Frederick Duneka and Frank Leigh, all professed a firm belief in _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, and promised me such a boost as I had never had. This promise they set about to fulfill. As the day of publication came on they took generous squares of space in the daily papers, and whole pages in the magazines. They astonished and somewhat daunted me by putting an almost life-size portrait on the bill boards of all the elevated roads, and then to the consternation of my wife, _The Weekly_ published a full page reproduction of her photograph, a portrait which they had obtained from me to use, as I supposed, in the ordinary way in the literary column of the Sunday papers. I had no idea of its being a full page illustration. I was troubled and uneasy about this for a day or two, but realizing that the firm was doing its best to make my book known to the public, I could not with justice complain. In truth the use of the portrait seemed not to make any difference one way or the other. It certainly did Zulime no harm. At my request the firm made up a very handsome special copy of the novel which I sent to President Roosevelt, with a word of explanation concerning the purpose which underlaid the writing of the tale. Early in March the book appeared with everything in its favor. True there was opportunity for controversy in its delineation of aggressive cattlemen, but those who had so bitterly criticized my pictures of the prairie life in _Main Traveled Roads_, were off their guard with respect of the mountains. My reviewers quite generally accepted the novel as a truthful presentation of life on an Indian reservation in the nineties. Furthermore my sympathetic interpretation of the Army's attitude toward the red men caused the story to be quite generally commended by the officers. This surprised and delighted me, but I was especially gratified by Roosevelt's hearty praise of it. "It is your best work so far," he wrote me, "and I am in full sympathy with your position." Requests for stories, interviews, articles and biographical notes, flowed in upon me. It really looked like a late second arrival of Hamlin Garland. Not since the excitement of putting _Main Traveled Roads_ on the market had I been so hopeful and in the midst of my other honors came a note from the President, inviting me to visit him, and with it a card to a musicale at the White House. Life in the East as the reader can see, was very alluring to Zulime as well as to me, and though as April came on, we both felt the call of the West, I am not sure whether we would have wrought our courage to the point of deserting our little apartment on Fifteenth Street, had it not been for the President's invitation, which was in effect a command, an honor as well as a pleasure, which we did not think of disregarding. As I had not voted the Republican ticket and had no political standing with the Administration, this invitation was personal. It came from Roosevelt as a friend and fellow-trailer--a fact which enhanced its value to me. We began at once to plan our return to Chicago in such wise that it would include a week in Washington, which we had not visited since our wedding journey. It must have been about this time that the Annual Meeting of the Institute took place. I recall Howells presiding with timidity and very evident embarrassment when it came to the duty of putting certain resolutions to vote. He seemed sad and old that night--indeed as I looked around the table, I was startled to find how many of the men I had considered "among the younger writers" were gray and haggard. Mabie, Page, Hopkinson Smith, Gilder and Stedman--all were older than I had remembered them. Edward MacDowell, who was sitting beside me, remarked upon the change, and I replied, "Yes, you and I are young only by contrast. To Frank Norris and Stewart White, we are already veterans." [That was twenty years ago, and I am three score years and more, and most of those who dined with me that night are in their graves, only Page, of all the group, is left. Another generation altogether is on the stage whilst I and Stewart White are grouped together as "older men." I am seeing literary history made whether I am credited with making any of it, myself, or not. At times I have an appalling sense of the onward sweep of the years. Are they carrying us to higher grounds in fiction and in other arts, or are they descending to lower levels of motive and workmanship?] * * * * * It was glorious spring when we reached Washington, and in the glow of my momentary sense of triumph we went to one of the best hotels and enjoyed for the moment the sense of being successful and luxurious folk. In calling on the President the following day I was a little taken aback by his frankness in speaking of my changing point of view. "You have pictured the reverse side of the pioneer," he said with a gleam of mischief in his eyes. "In your study of the Indian's case you have discovered the fact that the borderer is often the aggressor and sometimes the thief." He repeated his praise of the book and then said, "I shall make use of your knowledge of the conditions on the Western reservations. You and George Bird Grinnell know what is going on out there and I intend to use you both--unofficially." To this I agreed, and when he gave me a card to the Secretary of the Interior and told me to take up with the Commissioner certain reforms which I had suggested, I put the card in my pocket and set about the task. It was only a small card, a visiting card, and when, in my ignorance of official life, I walked in on the Secretary with that tiny slip of pasteboard in my hand, I had no idea of its explosive power. The Secretary who was lounging at his desk like a tired and discouraged old man, did not think me important enough to warrant a rise out of his chair, until he read the card which I handed to him. After that I owned the office! That card made me the personal representative of the President--for the moment. On the following day Roosevelt allowed me to sit in at some of the meetings in the Executive Chamber, and it was at one of these that I met for the first time the most engaging Chief of the Forestry Bureau, Gifford Pinchot. At night Zulime and I dined with William Dudley Foulke and at nine o'clock we went to the White House Musicale. That musicale at the White House is one of the starry nights in Zulime's life, as well as in my own, for not only did we meet the President and Mrs. Roosevelt and many of the best known figures in American art, letters, politics, and statesmanship, we also heard Paderewski play as we had never heard him play before. We were seated close to the piano and when that potent, shock-haired Pole spread his great hands above the keys I fancied something of the tiger in the lithe grace of his body, and in his face a singular and sultry solemnity was expressed. Inspired no doubt by the realization that he was playing before a mighty ruler--a ruler by the divine right of brain power,--he played with magnetic intensity. Something mysterious, something grandly moving went out from his fingers. No other living musician could, at that moment have equaled him. For a few hours Zulime and I enjoyed the white light which beat upon two of the great personalities of that day--one the world's greatest piano player, the other the most powerful and the most popular man in all America--and when we retired to the obscurity of our hotel we were silent with satisfaction. For the moment it seemed that fortune was about to empty her golden horn at my feet. I was happily married, my latest book was a hit, and I had the friendship and the favor of the President. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Signs of Change As a matter of record, and for the benefit of young readers who may be contemplating authorship, I here set down the fact that notwithstanding my increasing royalties, my gross income for 1901 was precisely $3,100. Out of this we saved five hundred dollars. Neither my wife nor I had any great hopes of the future. Neither of us felt justified in any unusual expenditures, and as for speculation--nothing could induce me to buy a share of stock--or even a bond (gilt-edged or otherwise), for I owned a prejudice, my father's prejudice, against all forms of intangible wealth. Evidences of wealth did not appeal to me. I wanted the real thing, I wanted the earth. Nothing but land gave me the needed sense of security. In my most exalted moments I began to dream of using my income from _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ in the purchase of more Oklahoma land. In imagination I saw myself in a wide-rimmed hat and white linen suit sitting at ease on the porch of a broad-roofed house (built in the Mexican style with a patio) looking out over my thousand acres--I had decided to have just a thousand acres, it made such a mouth-filling announcement to one's friends. I did not go so far as to think of a life without labor (I expected to work in the North till February, then rest and ride horse-back for three months in the South), but I did hope to relieve Zulime of some of her drudgery. Now that I think back to it, I am not at all sure that my wife rejoiced over my plan to go to Weatherford to purchase another farm. It is probable that I overcame her objections by telling her that I wanted more material for my book of Indian tales; anyhow I left her in Chicago almost as soon as we arrived there, and went again to Darlington and Colony to see Major Stouch and John Seger, and to make certain observations for President Roosevelt. Seger, unskilled as he was with the pen, could talk with humor and pictorial quality, and some of his stories had so stimulated my imagination that I was eager to have more time with him among his wards. Without precisely following his narratives I had found myself able to reproduce the spirit of them in my own diction. His ability as a sign-talker was of especial service to me for, as he signed to his visitors, he muttered aloud, for my benefit, what he was expressing in gesture, and also what the red man signed in reply. In this way I got at the psychology of the Cheyenne to a degree which I could not possibly compass through an interpreter. While looking for farms during the day, I drew from Seger night by night, the amazing story of his career among the Southern Cheyennes. It was a rough and disjointed narrative, but it was stirring and valuable as authentic record of the Southwest. "The Red Pioneer," "Lone Wolf's Old Guard," and many more of my tales of red people were secured on this trip. Several dealing with the Blackfeet and Northern Cheyennes, like "the Faith of His Fathers" and "White Weasel" I gained from Stouch. None of them are true in the sense of being precisely the way they were told, for I took very few notes. They are rather free transcripts of the incidents which chanced to follow my liking--but they reflect the spirit of the original narratives and are bound together by one underlying motive which is to show the Indian as a human being, a neighbor. "We have had plenty of the 'wily redskin' kind of thing," I said to Stouch. "I am going to tell of the red man as you and Seger have known him, as a man of the polished stone age trying to adapt himself to steam and electricity." It happened that plenteous rains had made Oklahoma very green and beautiful, and as I galloped about over the wide swells of the Caddo country, I was disposed to buy all the land that joined me. Imagining myself the lord of a thousand acres, I achieved a profound joy of living. It was good to glow in the sunlight, to face the sweet southern wind, and to feel once more beneath my knees the swelling muscles of a powerful horse. In a very vivid sense I relived the days when, as a lad of twelve, I rode with Burton and my sister Harriet along the prairie swells of the Cedar Valley some thirty years before. "Washitay," at such moments was not only the land of the past but the hope of the future. My red neighbors interested me. The whole problem of their future was being worked out almost within sight of my door. Here the men of the Polished Stone Age and the men of gasoline engines and electrical telephones met and mingled in a daily adjustment which offered material of surpassing value to the novelist who could use it. Humor and pathos, tragic bitterness and religious exaltation were all within reach of my hand. The spring nights which came to me there at Colony were of a quality quite new to me. The breeze, amiable and moist, was Southern, and the moonlight falling from the sky like a silent, all-enveloping cataract of silver, lay along the ground so mystically real that I could feel it with my hand. The air was at once tropic and Western, and this subtle blending of the North and the South, the strange and the familiar, appealed to me with such power that I wrote Zulime a statement of my belief that in becoming a part-owner in this land, I had assured for us both a happy and prosperous future. "I shall come here every spring," I declared, and in the glow of this enthusiasm, I purchased another farm of two hundred and forty acres and arranged with Seger for its management. Alas, for my piece of mind! On my way homeward, at Reno, I encountered a simoon of most appalling power. An equatorial wind which pressed against the car and screamed at the window--a hot, unending pitiless blast withering the grain and tearing the heart out of young gardens--a storm which brought back to me the dreadful blizzard of dust which swept over our Iowa farm in the spring of '72. There was something grand as well as sorrowful in this unexpected display of desert ferocity. My dream of a thousand-acre ranch shriveled with the plants. The prairie abandoning its youthful, buoyant air, took on a sinister and savage grandeur. To escape from the ashes of these ruined fields was now a passionate desire. The value of my land in Washitay fell almost to the vanishing point. Illinois became a green and pleasant pasture toward which I drove with gratitude and relief. [I insert a line to say that this was only a mood. I went on with my purchase of lands till I had my thousand acres, but these acres were in scattered plots and the house with the patio and the porch was never built.] At the Agency just before I left for the North I had hired some Cheyenne women to make for me a large council teepee which I had in mind to set up as my dwelling at Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime and I had agreed to spend the summer. Boyishly eager to reproduce as well as I could a Cheyenne house, I assembled all my blankets, parfleches, willow beds and other furnishings and raised my lodge on poles on the edge of the wood just inside the Camp's entrance. It made a singularly appropriate addition to the reservation, to my thinking, at least, and I took inordinate pride in its ownership. Trim and white and graceful it stood against the forest wall, its crossed poles sprangling from its top with poetic suggestion of aboriginal life, and when, with elaborate ceremony, I laid the fuel for its first fire, calling upon our patron, Wallace Heckman, to touch a match to the tinder, I experienced a sense of satisfaction. To my artist friends it was a "picturesque accessory"--to me it was a talisman of things passing. The smoke of the hickory faggots filling that conical roof-tree brought back to me a cloud of memories of the prairies of the Sioux, the lakes of the Chippewa, and the hills of the Cheyenne. Thin as were its walls, they shut out (for me) the commonplace present, helping me to reconstruct the world of Blackhawk and the Sitting Bull, and when I walked past it, especially at night, my mind took joy in its form, and a pleasant stir within my blood made manifest of its power. Browne acknowledged its charm and painted a moonlight sketch of it, and Seton, who came by one day, helped me dedicate its firehole. In the light of its embers, he and I renewed our youth while smoking the beautiful Pipe of Meditation, which a young Cheyenne chief had given me in token of his friendship. It happened that I was scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on _The Outdoor Literature of America_, and with a delightful feeling of propriety in the fact I set to work to write these addresses in my canvas lodge, surrounded by all its primitive furnishings. It made an admirable study, but at night as I lay on my willow couch, I found the moonlight so intense and the converging lines of the lodge poles so suggestive of other folk and other times that slumber was fitful. The wistful ghosts of Blackhawk and his kind seemed all about me. Not till the moon set or the shadows of the forest covered me, was I able to compose myself to sleep. For several weeks I wrote at ease upon my theme and then, into the carefree atmosphere of my Lodge of Dreams came the melancholy news that William McClintock, my giant uncle, had been stricken by the same mysterious malady which had broken my mother's heart, and that he was lying motionless on his bed in the narrow space of his chamber. The "stroke" (so my aunt wrote) had come upon him (as upon my mother) without the slightest warning, and with no discoverable cause. On my return to the Homestead I went at once to see him. He was sitting in my mother's wheeled chair, quite helpless, yet cheerful and confident of ultimate recovery. He had always been a man of dignity, and singularly abstemious of habit, and these qualities were strongly accentuated by his sudden helplessness. He was very gentle, very patient, and the sight of him lying there made speaking very difficult for me. When the doctor would permit, he loved to lie in his chair on the porch of his little cottage where he could look out upon the hills, his eyes reflecting his beloved landscape like those of a dreaming cage-weary lion. Inarticulate, like my mother, he was nevertheless the poet, and never failed to respond--at least with a meaning glance--to any imaginative word in my discourse. How much he had meant to me in all the days of my boyhood! As the master of the threshing machine forty years agone, he had filled my childish heart with worship. As the swift-footed deer trailer, the patient bee-hunter, the silent lover of the forest, he had held my regard and though he had never quite risen to the high place which my Uncle David occupied in my boyhood's worship, he had always been to me a picturesque and kindly figure. Year by year I had watched his giant form stoop, and his black beard wax thin and white, and now, here he sat almost at the end of his trail, unable to move, yet expressing a kind of elemental bravery, a philosophic patience which moved me as no words of lamentation could have done. Strange malady! He who had never met his match in stark strength could not now by the exercise of all his will, lift that limp arm from his side and as I sat beside him I recalled my last sad meeting with Major Powell, the man who first guided a canoe through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and in my mind arose a conception of what these two men, each in his kind represented in the story of American pioneering. One the far-famed explorer, the other the unknown rifleman behind the plow. With William McClintock--with my father, with Major Powell, a whole world, a splendid and heroic world was passing never to return, and when I took my uncle's hand in parting I was almost certain that I should never see him again. Once he was king of forest men. To him a snow-capped mountain range Was but a line, a place of mark, A view-point on the trail. Then He had no dread of dark, No fear of change. Now an uprolled rug upon the floor Appalls his feet. His withered arm Shakes at the menace of a door, And every wind-waft does him harm. God! 'Tis a piteous thing to see This ranger of the hills confined To the small compass of his room Like a chained eagle on a tree, Lax-winged and gray and blind. Only in dreams he sees the bloom On far hills where the red deer run. Only in memory guides the light canoe Or stalks the bear with dog and polished gun. In him behold the story of the West, The chronicle of rifleman behind the plow, Typing the life of those who knew No barrier but the sunset in their quest. On his bent head and grizzled hair Is set the crown of those who shew New cunning to the wolf, new courage to the bear. Another evidence of melancholy change came to me in the failing powers of Ladrone, my mountain horse, who had come through the winter very badly. I found him standing in the pasture, weak and inactive, taking no interest in the rich grasses under his feet. In the belief that exercise would do him good, I saddled him and started to ride about the square, but soon drew rein. He had not the strength to carry me! Sadly dismounting I led him back to the stable. It was evident that he would never again career with me across the hills. Bowed and dejected he resumed his place in the paddock. Standing thus, with hanging head, he appeared to be dreaming of the days when as a part of the round-up, in the far Northwest, he had carried his master over the range and through the herd with joyous zeal. Each time I looked at him I felt a twinge of pain. Everything I could do for him was done, every remedial measure was tried, but he grew steadily worse, and at last, I called a neighbor to my aid and said, "Oliver, my horse is very sick. I fear his days are numbered. Study him, do what you can for him, and if you find he cannot be cured, put him away. Don't tell me when it is done or how it is done--I don't want to know. You understand?" He understood, and one morning, a few days later, as I looked in the pasture for the gray pony, he was nowhere to be seen. In the dust of the driveway, I detected the marks of his small feet. The toes of his shoes pointed toward the gate, and there were no returning foot-prints. He had gone away on the long trail which leads to the River of Darkness and The Wide Lands Beyond It. His bridle and saddle were hanging in the barn (they are still there), silent memorials of the explorations in which he and I had played a resolute part. Something grips me by the throat as I remember his eyes, "Brown, clear and calm, with color down deep, Where his brave, proud soul seemed to lie." I recall the first days we spent together, beautiful days in the Frazer Valley, when jubilant cranes bugled from the skies, and humming birds moved in myriads along the river's banks--memories of those desperate days in the Skeena forests, amid dank and poisonous plants--of marches on the tundra along the high Stickeen Divide--all these come back. I see him crowding close to my fire, thin and weak. I relive once more that bitter night on the wharf in Glenora when (chilled by the cold wind), he first began to cough. I am thinking of his journey on the boat with me to Wrangell; of the day when I left him there (the only horse on the coast); of my return; of our long trip to Seattle; of his trust in me as he faced the strange monsters of the city; of his long dark ride to St. Paul; of the joyous day when I opened his prison door and finding him safe and well, rode him forth to the admiration of my uncles at the county fair. A vast section of my life faded with the passing of that small gray horse. "Lost my Ladrone, gone the wild living. I dream, but my dreaming is vain." My sense of uneasiness was deepened by another warning, a third sign of decay. One morning my father while apparently in his usual health, suddenly grew dizzy and fell and as I bent above him he gazed up at me with an expression which I had never before seen in his face, a humble, helpless, appealing look. It seemed that he was going as William had gone. Happily I was mistaken. His indomitable soul reasserted itself. He refused to surrender. He rallied. "I'm all right," he said at last, a grim line coming back into his mouth. "It's passing off. I can move," and lifting his arm he opened and shut his hand in proof of it. "I'm better than a dozen dead men yet." He was distinctly stronger next day, and when, looking from my window I saw him going about his work in the garden, bareheaded as was his habit, resolute and unsubdued, I was reassured, but never again did he move with the same vigor as before. For the first time he acknowledged his age. During all these melancholy experiences so significant of the dying border, I had the comfort of my undaunted wife whose happy spirit refused to be clouded by what she recognized as merely the natural decay of the preceding generation. Her mind was set on the future, our future. She refused to yield her youthful right to happiness, and under the influence of her serene philosophy I went back to my writing, or at least to the serious consideration of another mountain theme, which was taking shape in my brain. With a mere love-story I had never been content. For me a sociological background was necessary in order to make fiction worth while, and I was minded to base my next novel on a study of the "war" which had just taken place, at Cripple Creek, between the Free Miner, the Union Miner and the Operator or Capitalist. The suggestion for this theme had come to me during a call on some friends in New York City, where I had been amused and somewhat embarrassed, by the ecstatic and outspoken admiration of a boy of fourteen, who was (as his mother put it) "quite crazy over miners, Indians and cowboys. His dream is to go West and illustrate your books," she had said to me. This lad's enthusiasm for the West and his ambition to be an illustrator of western stories had started me on a tale in which a fine but rather spoiled New York girl was to be carried to Colorado by the enthusiasm of her youthful brother, and there plunged (against her will) into the warfare of mountaineers and miners, a turbulence which her beloved brother would insist on sharing. Such a girl might conceivably find herself in the storm center of a contest such as that which had taken place on Bull Hill in the late nineties. I called this study _Hesper, or the Cowboy Patrol_ for the reason that in "the Cripple Creek War," cattlemen had acted as outposts for the union miners, and in this fact I perceived something picturesque and new and telling, something which would give me just the imaginative impulse I required. Some of my friendly critics were still occasionally writing to me to ask, "Why don't you give us more _Main Traveled Roads_ stories," and it was not easy to make plain to them that I had moved away from that mood, and that my life and farm life had both greatly altered in thirty years. To repeat the tone of that book would have been false not only to my art, but to the country as well. Furthermore, I had done that work. I had put together in _Main Traveled Roads_ and its companion volumes a group of thirty short stories (written between 1887 and 1891), in which I had expressed all I had to say on that especial phase of western life. To attempt to recover the spirit of my youth would not only have been a failure but a bore--even to those who were urging me to the task. It was my business to keep moving--to accompany my characters as they migrated into the happier, more hopeful West. Like them I was "Campin' through, podner, just a campin' through." As in _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, I had dealt with the three-cornered fight of the cattlemen, the Indian, and the soldier, so now, in 1902, I returned to the mountain West, to picture another conflict, equally stirring and possessing a still finer setting and back-ground. In _Hesper_ I was concerned with a war, in which most of the action had taken place among the clouds, on the hilltops nearly two miles above sea-level. There was something grandly pictorial in this drama; but, after writing a few chapters of it, I felt the need of revisiting the scene. Zulime again accompanied me and as our train slid down the familiar road leading to Colorado Springs and we could see the lightning flashing among the high summits on which I had laid the scenes of my story, Zulime glowed with joy and I took on a renewed sense of power. For an hour I felt equal to my task, to be historian of the free miner seemed to me a worthy office. The Ehrichs were again our hosts and they (as well as Russell Wray, the Editor of the _Gazette_) took the keenest interest in my design. From Wray and his friends I began at once to derive an understanding of the part which "Little London" (as the miners called the Springs) had taken in the war. I relied on a visit to Bull Hill and Victor to furnish the Sky-town or "Red-neck" point of view. Wray was especially valuable to me, for he had taken part in the famous expedition of the "Yaller Legs" and his experiences as a reporter and his sense of humor had enabled him to report both sides of the controversy. He had many friends in the camp, to whom he gave me letters. The character which interested me most, in all the warring factions, was the free miner, the prospector, the man of the trail. Him I clearly understood. He had been companion in most of my trips into the wild. He was blood brother to my father, and cousin to my heroic uncles. He represented the finest phases of pioneering. "Matt Kelley," "Rob Raymond" and "Jack Munroe," I knew and loved, and their presence in this labor war redeemed it from the sordid, uninspired struggle which such contests usually turn out to be. In my design these three characters filled heroic place. Zulime (with no literary problems to distract her) had another easeful, idyllic summer. The Ehrichs, the Wrays and the Palmers welcomed her as an old friend, and in their companionship she rode and camped and dined in easeful leisure, but I was on the move. I visited a ranch on the plains of Eastern Colorado, joined a round-up in the Sierra Blanca country, explored the gambling-houses and mines of Cripple Creek and Victor, and spent two weeks reëxploring the White River Plateau, this time with Walter Wykoff, of Princeton. For a week or two, Wykoff, Miss Ehrich and Zulime and I camped high on the shoulder of Pike's Peak. Vast and splendid scenes of storm and sun were printed on my mind, and, while the actual writing of my novel halted, I felt certain that I was doing just the right thing. I felt sure of finishing it in the proper spirit of enthusiasm. The trip not only enabled me to finish _Hesper_--it suggested several of the stories which went into _They of the High Trails_ and gave me the plan of _The Forester's Daughter_. I returned to West Salem, brown as an Indian and bursting with energy, and for several weeks toiled with desperate haste to put my impressions, imaginings in form. Each morning of those peaceful days I took to mother's room, on the sunward side of the old Homestead, and there wrought into final shape the materials I had gathered. I had only to shut my eyes to see again the clouds circling the walls of Shavano. In imagination I rode once more with Matt Kelley up Bull Hill, or, sitting opposite the chief of the Miners' Union, reënjoyed his graphic account of the coming of the Federal troops. The bawling roar of the round-up on the meadow came back to fill my eyes with pictures of the Sierra Blanca foothills. In truth I had no need of notes. I was embarrassed with material. I threw my note-books into a drawer and forgot them. Letters from my publishers informed me that _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ was marching on, but that they hoped I was at work on something to follow it. To this I replied: "Yes, I am in the midst of a story which I hope will be as good as _The Captain_, but don't hurry me!" Whilst I, busied with my fiction, kept to my study, Zulime was ecstatically rearranging furniture. During our absence in Colorado, father had moved to another house, relinquishing all claim on the Homestead, and for the first time in our lives my wife and I were authentic householders in full possession of every room. We had a door-bell, and our clock was our own. Our meal-times conformed to our will, and not to another's. We went to bed when we pleased, and rose when we got ready. Zulime's joy of ownership was almost comical. Leading me from room to room she repeated, "This is _our_ house. Don't you like our house? Isn't it fun to have it all to ourselves?" Her rapture instructed me. I perceived that the old Homestead had not yet served its purpose. So far as my father was concerned it was a story told, a drama almost ended, but as the undivided home of my young wife it developed new meaning. Another soul was coming into being; another tenant was about to take its place beneath our roof. Small feet would soon be dancing through those silent rooms, careless of the men and women whose gray heads and gaunt limbs had been carried out over their thresholds to a final resting-place beneath the sod. A new interest, a new phase of life, was coming to Zulime, and to me. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Old Pioneer Takes the Back Trail In the midst of this period of hard work on _Hesper_, news of the death of Frank Norris came to me. Frank Norris the most valiant, the happiest, the handsomest of all my fellow craftsmen. Nothing more shocking, more insensate than the destruction of this glorious young fictionist had come to my literary circle, for he was aglow with a husband's happiness, gay with the pride of paternity, and in the full spring-tide of his powers. His going left us all poorer and took from American literature one of its strongest young writers. The papers at once wired me for tributes, and these I gave, gladly, and later when one of the magazines paid me for an article, I used the money in the purchase of a tall clock to serve as a memorial. This time-piece stands in the hall of my city home and every time I pass it I am reminded of the fine free spirit of Frank Norris. In my small corner of the world he remains a vital memory. All through October I wrote on my novel, but as the dark days of autumn came on, I began as usual to dwell upon my interests in the city and not even Zulime's companionship could keep me from a feeling of restlessness. I longed for literary comradeship. Theoretically my native village was an ideal place in which to write, actually it sapped me and after a few weeks depressed me. With no literary "atmosphere," damnable word, I looked away to New York for stimulus. I did not go so far as one of my friends who declined to have anything to do with his relatives simply because he did not like them, but I clearly recognized that my friends in the city meant more to me than any of my Wisconsin neighbors and it became more and more evident that to make and keep an arbitrary residence in a region which did not in itself stimulate or satisfy me, was a mistake. There was nothing to do in West Salem but write. Above all other considerations, however, I had a feeling, perhaps it was a mistaken one,--that my powers grew in proportion as I went Eastward. In West Salem I was merely an amateur gardener, living a life which approached the vegetable,--so far as external action went. In Chicago I was a perversity, a man of mis-directed energy. In New York I was, at least respected as a writer. In short New York allured me as London allures the writers of England, and as Paris attracts the artists of Europe. It was my literary capital. Theoretically I belonged to Wisconsin, as Hardy belonged to Wessex or Barrie to Scotland, actually my happiest home was adjacent to Madison Square. Only as I neared the publishing centers did I feel the slightest confidence in the future. This increased sense of importance may have been based upon an illusion but it was a very real emotion nevertheless. Why should I not feel this? From my village home, from digging potatoes and doing carpenter work, I went (almost directly) to a luncheon at the White House, and the following night I attended a dinner given to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday with William Dean Howells, Thomas B. Reed, Wayne McVeagh, Brander Matthews, H. H. Rogers, George Harvey, Pierpont Morgan, Hamilton Wright Mabie and a dozen others who were leaders in their chosen work, as my table mates. Perhaps I was not deserving of these honors--I'm not urging that point--I am merely stating the facts which made my home in West Salem seem remote and lonely to me. Acknowledging myself a weak mortal I could not entirely forego the honors which the East seemed willing to bestow, and as father was in good health with a household of his own, I felt free to spend the entire winter in New York. For the first time in many years, I felt relieved of anxiety for those left behind. New York was in the worst of its subway upheaval when we landed there, but having secured a small furnished apartment in a new but obscure hotel on Forty-seventh street, Zulime and I settled down for the winter. Our tiny three-room suite (a lovely nest for a woman) was not in the least like a home for an old trailer and corn-husker like myself. Its gas log and gimcrack mantel, its "Mission" furniture and its "new art" rugs were all of hopeless artificiality, but our sitting-room (on the quiet side of the building) received the sun, and there on the lid of a small desk I took up and carried forward the story of _Hesper_ which my publishers had asked me to prepare for the spring trade. Before we had time to unpack, a note came from President Roosevelt asking me to return to Washington to confer on a phase of the Indian service with which I was familiar, and I went at once--glad to be of any service--especially an unofficial service. It was always a pleasure as well as an honor to meet Roosevelt. He was our first literary president. His esthetic interests were not only keen, but discriminating. He knew what each of us had published, and valued each of us for the particular contributions we were making to American literature. Each of us gave him something--in my case it was a knowledge of the West. Notwithstanding the multiple duties of his office, he put aside a part of each day for reading and when he read, he concentrated upon his page with such intensity that he remembered all that was important in the writing. He knew the masters in the other arts also. If he had a problem in architecture or medaling or painting to decide, he went to Mead or St. Gaudens, or Blashfield. Under his administration the White House had resumed its fine colonial character. At his direction Mead and McKim had restored it to the noble simplicity of Madison's time. They had cleared out the business offices and removed the absurd mixture of political machinery and household furniture which had accumulated under the rule of his predecessors, most of whom (coming from small inland towns) knew nothing of any art but government, and in some cases not too much of that. On this particular visit I recall the fact that repairs were going on, for the President invited me to take luncheon with his family, and we ate in a small room on the front of the house for the reason that the dining-room was in process of being restored and the howl of the floor polisher was resounding through the hall. It may interest the reader to know that while my wife and I occasionally lunched or dined with "the choice ones of the earth," we prudently practiced "light housekeeping" between our splendid feasts. Like a brown-bearded Santa Claus I often ran the gauntlet of the elevator boy with pockets bulging bottles of milk, hunks of cheese, hot muffins, and pats of butter, and frequently, when the weather was bad, or when some one had neglected to invite us out, we supped in our room. Once when I entered laden in this fashion I was sharply taken aback by the presence of several belated callers, very grand ladies, and only the most skilful manoeuvering enabled me to slide into the closet and out of my overcoat without betraying my cargo. My predicament highly amused Zulime, while at the same time she inwardly trembled for fear of a smash. I mention this incident in order to reveal the reverse side of our splendid social progress. We were in no danger of becoming "spoiled" with feasting, so long as we kept to our Latin Quarter methods of lunching. We had many notable dinners that winter, but our long anticipated visit to Mark Twain's house in Riverdale stands out above them all. We reached the house about seven o'clock, by way of an ancient hack which met us at the depot and carried us up the hill, into the yard of an old-fashioned mansion sheltered by great trees. Mark came running lightly down the broad stairs to meet us in the hall, seemingly in excellent health, although his spirits were not at all as boyish as his step. "I'm glad to see you," he said cordially, "but you'll find the house a hospital. The girls have both been miserable and Mrs. Clemens, I'm sorry to say, is still too ill to see you. I bring her greetings to you and her apology." Thereupon he related with invincible humor and vivid phraseology, the elaborate scheme of deception to which they had been forced during Jean's illness. Mrs. Clemens was very weak, so low that the slightest excitement--so the doctor warned us--might prove fatal; hence we were obliged to pretend that Jean was well but busy doing this or doing that, in order that her mother might not suspect the truth of the situation. "I was protected by the doctor's orders, which forbade me from spending more than two minutes in Mrs. Clemens' room, but Clara, who was allowed to nurse her mother, was forced to enter upon a season of unveracity which taxed her imagination to the uttermost. She had to pretend that Jean was away on a visit, or that she was in town shopping or away at a dinner. Together we invented all kinds of social engagements for her and that involved the description of new gowns and a list of the guests of each entertainment. Oh, it was dreadful. Fortunately Clara had a good reputation with her mother, and was able to carry conviction, whereas I had a very hard time. I kept getting into shoal water." He was very funny--I can only report the substance of his tale--and yet there was a tone in his voice which enabled me to understand the tragic situation. Mrs. Clemens' illness was hopeless. All through the dinner he talked on in the same enthralling fashion, picturesque, humorous, tragic. He dealt with June bugs, alcohol, Christian Science, the Philippine outrage and a dozen other apparently unrelated subjects. He imitated a horse-fly. He swore. He quoted poetry. We laughed till our sides ached--and yet, all the while, beneath it all, he had in mind (as we had in mind)--that sweetly-patient invalid waiting upstairs for his good-night caress. As a bitter agnostic as well as a tender humorist Mark Twain loomed larger in my horizon after that night. The warmly human side of him was revealed to me as never before, and thereafter I knew him and I felt that he knew me. That remote glance from beneath those shaggy eyebrows no longer deceived me. He was a tender and loyal husband. Later when I came to read the marvelous story of his life as related by Albert Bigelow Paine, I found a part of my intuitions recorded as facts. He was an elemental western American--with many of the faults and all of the excellencies of the border. Meanwhile I was at work. In my diary of this date I find these words, "This is living! The sunlight floods our tiny sitting-room whose windows look out on a blue-and-white mountainous 'scape of city roofs. We have dined and the steam is singing in our gilded radiator. The noise and bustle of the city is far away.--I foresee that I shall be able to do a great deal of work on my novel." In that last sentence I was reckoning without the effect of my wife's popularity. Invitations to luncheons, dinners, and theater parties began to pile up, and I could not ask Zulime to deny herself these pleasures, although I tried to keep my forenoons sacred to my pen. I returned to the manuscript of _Hesper_ and succeeded in writing at least a thousand words each day; on fortunate mornings I was able to turn off a full chapter. It was a gay and satisfying season. We met all our old friends and made many new ones, finding ourselves more and more at home in the city. We rode to grand receptions in the street cars--as usual--and while we ate our luncheons at inexpensive cafés, we often dined with our more prosperous fellow-craftsmen. In spite of many interruptions I managed to complete my novel. By the first of March _Hesper_ was ready for the printer and I turned it over to Duneka. On Zulime's birthday as I was putting the last chapter in final shape, I received a letter from father which said, "I am coming East. Meet me in Washington on the 21st." To this request there was but one answer: "I'll be there." It was the first time that the old pioneer had taken "the back trail" since leaving Boston, nearly fifty years before, and I rejoiced in his decision. The thought of leading him into the halls of Congress and pointing out for him the orators whose doings had been so long his chief concern, was pleasureable to me. From my earliest childhood I had heard him comment on the weekly record of Congressional debates. He loved oratory. He was a hero-worshiper. With him the Capitol meant Lincoln and Grant and Blaine and Sherman. It was not a city, it was a shrine. When he stepped from the train in Washington the following week, I was there to meet him, and for several days I led him from splendor to splendor. With me he saw Mount Vernon, the White House, Congress, the library, and his patriotism intensified as the glories of his country's capital unrolled before his eyes. He said little, only looked, and when he had harvested as much of Washington as he could carry I took him to Philadelphia, in order that he might breathe the air of Continental Hall and gaze upon its sacred Liberty Bell. His patriotism had few reservations. All these relics were of high solemnity to him. At last as a climax we approached New York, whose glittering bays, innumerable ships and monstrous buildings awed him and saddened him. It was a picture at once incredible and familiar, resembling illustrations he had seen in the magazines, only mightier more magnificent than he had imagined any of it to be. It overwhelmed him, wearied him, disheartened him, and so it came about that the quiet dinners he took with me at my club were his most enduring pleasures, for there he rested, there he saw me at home. He acquired an understanding of my endurance of the vast and terrible town. Up to this time the story of my doings in the East had been to him like those of characters in highly-colored romance. He had believed me (in a sense) when, in West Salem, I had spoken of meetings with Roosevelt and Howells and other famous men, and yet, till now, he had never been able to realize the fact that I _belonged_ in New York, and that men of large affairs were actually my friends. He comprehended now (in some degree) my good fortune, and it gratified him while it daunted him. He understood why I could not live in West Salem. If he was proud to acknowledge me as a son, I, on my part, was proud to acknowledge him as my father, for as he sat with me in the dining-room of the club or walked about the Library to examine the relics and portraits of Booth (for whom he had a passionate admiration) he was altogether admirable. At the end of our third day, I suggested Boston. To this he replied, "No, I've had enough," and there was a tired droop in his voice. "I'm ready to go home. I'm all tired out with 'seeing things,' and besides it's time to be getting back to my garden." To urge him to remain longer would have been a mistake. Boston would have disturbed and bewildered him. Not only would he have failed to find the city of his youth, he would have been saddened by the changes. His loss of power to remember troubled me. He retained but few of his impressions of Washington, and with sorrow I acknowledged that it no longer mattered whether he saw Boston or not. He had waited too long for his great excursion. He was old and timid and longing for rest. As he went to his train (surfeited with strange glories, crowds and exhibitions) he repeated that his dinners with me at the club remained his keenest pleasures. In tasting a few of my comforts he understood why I loved the great city. He saw me also in an established position, and this he considered a gain. His faith in my future was now complete. * * * * * For years he had talked of this expedition, planned for it, calculated upon its expense, and now it was accomplished. He went back to his garden with a sense of pride, of satisfaction which he would share with his cronies as they met in Johnson's Drug Store or Anderson's Meat Market. What he said of me I do not know, but I fear he reported me as living in unimaginable luxury and consorting on terms of equality with the great ones of New York. CHAPTER NINETEEN New Life in the Old House Meanwhile, Chicago rushing toward its two million mark, had not, alas! lived up to its literary promise of '94. In music, in painting, in sculpture and architecture it was no longer negligible, but each year its authors appeared more and more like a group of esthetic pioneers heroically maintaining themselves in the midst of an increasing tumult of material upbuilding. One by one its hopeful young publishing houses had failed, and one by one its aspiring periodicals had withered in the keen wind of Eastern competition. _The Dial_ alone held on, pathetically solitary, one might almost say alien and solitary. Against all this misfortune even my besotted optimism could not prevail. My pioneering spirit, subdued by years of penury and rough usage, yielded more and more to the honor and the intellectual companionship which the East offered. To Fuller I privately remarked: "As soon as I can afford it I intend to establish a home in New York." "I'd go further," he replied. "I would live in Italy if I could." It was a very significant fact that Chicago contained in 1903 but a handful of writers, while St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Kansas City had fewer yet. "What is the reason for this literary sterility?" I asked of my companions. "Why should not these powerful cities produce authors? Boston, when she had less than three hundred thousands citizens had Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes." The answer was (and still is), "Because there are few supporters of workers in the fine arts. Western men do not think in terms of art. There are no literary periodicals in these cities to invite (and pay for) the work of the author and the illustrator, and there is moreover a tendency on the part of our builders to give the eastern sculptor, painter or architect the jobs which might be done by local men. Until Chicago has at least one magazine founded like a university, and publishing houses like Scribners and Macmillans our authors and artists must go to New York." Of course none of these answers succeeded in clearing up the mystery, but they were helpful. Some of the writers in the Little Room were outspokenly envious of my ability to spend half my winters in the East, but Lorado Taft stoutly declared that the West inspired him, satisfied him. "Chicago suits me," he asserted, "and besides I can't afford to run away from my job. You should be the last man to admit defeat, _you_ who have been preaching local color and local patriotism all your days." In truth Taft was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me to dinner even if they did not read my books. The claims of Chicago upon me had been strengthened by the presence of Professor Taft who had given up his home in Kansas and was now settled not far from his son and near the University. He had brought all his books and other treasures with intent to spend the remaining years of his life in the neighborhood of his illustrious son and his two daughters, a fact which I could not overlook in any plans for changing my own residence. Don Carlos Taft was a singular and powerful figure, as I have already indicated, a stoic, of Oriental serenity, one who could smile in the midst of excruciating pain. With his eyes against a blank wall he was able to endlessly amuse himself by calling up the deep-laid concepts of his earlier years of study. Though affected with some obscure spinal disorder which made every movement a punishment, he concealed his suffering, no matter how intense it might be, and always answered, "Fine, fine!" when any of us asked "How are you to-day?" He lived in Woodlawn as he had lived in Kansas, like a man in a diving bell. His capacious brain filled with "knowledges" of the days when Gladstone was king and Darwin an outlaw, had little room for the scientific theories of Bergson and his like. He remained the old-fashioned New England theologian converted to militant agnosticism. Although at this time over seventy years of age his mind was notably clear, orderly and active, and his talk (usually a carefully constructed monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters, music possessed no interest for him. He had read, I believe, one or two of my books but never alluded to them, although he manifested a growing respect for my ability to earn money, and especially delighted in my faculty for living within my means. He watched the slow growth of my income with approving eyes. To him as to my father, earning money was a struggle, saving it a virtue, and wasting it a crime. In almost every other characteristic he was my father's direct antithesis--my father, whose faith approximated that of a Sioux warrior. "I take things as they come," was one of his sayings. He was not concerned with the theories of Evolution, the Pragmatic Philosophy or any other formal system of learning or ethics. With him the present was filled with duties, the remote past or the distant future was of indifferent concern. To deal justly and to leave the world a little better than he found it, was his creed. The one point of contact between these widely divergent pioneers was their love of Zulime, for my father was almost as fond of her as Don Carlos himself, and distinctly more expressive of his love--for Father Taft held affection to be something not quite decorous when openly declared. He never offered a caress or spoke an affectionate word so far as I know. There was something pathetic in his situation in these days. Full of learning and eager to share it with youth he could find no one willing to listen to him--not even his children. In the midst of a vast city he was sadly solitary. None of his children appeared interested in his allusions to Hammurabi or Charlemagne, on the contrary, monologues of any kind were taboo in the artistic circles where Lorado reigned. We was too busy, we were all too busy with our small plans and daily struggles, to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or played cinch with the men at the village drugstore. Nevertheless, with full knowledge of these fundamental divergencies in the lives of our sires, I urged Zulime to invite Professor Taft to spend a few weeks in West Salem. "He and father will disagree, but the one is a philosopher accustomed to pioneer types and the other a man of reason and I am willing to risk their coming together if you are." Don Carlos seemed pleased by this invitation and promised to come "one of these days." Our return to Wisconsin in April was a return to winter. On looking from our car windows at dawn, we found the ground white with snow, and flakes of frost driving through the budding branches of the trees. Every bird was mute, as if with horror and the tender amber-and-green leaves of the maples shone through the rime with a singular and pathetic beauty. Happily this was only a cold wave. Toward noon the sun came out, the icy cover sank into the earth and the robins began to sing again as if to reassure themselves as well as us. We came back to the Homestead now with a full sense of our proprietorship. It was entirely ours and it was waiting for us. Father was at the gate, it is true, but he was there this time merely as care-taker, as supervisor of the garden--our garden. His greeting of Zulime had a deeper note of tenderness than he had ever used hitherto, for he was aware of our hope, and shared our joyous expectancy. "I'm glad you've come," he said simply. "I hate to see the house standing here cold and empty. It don't seem natural or right." His first act was to lead us out to the garden where orderly beds of springing vegetables testified to his care. "I didn't do anything about the flowers," he confessed rather shamefacedly. "I'm no good at that kind of work." As the days went by I discovered that father's heart clung to the old place. He loved to spend his days upon it. He was comfortable in his own little cottage, but it seemed too small and too "slick" for him. He liked our trees and lawn and barn, and I was glad to have him continue his supervision of them. They gave him something to think about, something to do. The curse of the "tired farmers" of the village was their enforced idleness. There was almost nothing for them to exercise upon. He spent most of each day tinkering around the barn, overseeing the garden or resting on the back porch where mother used to sit and look out on the valley. On Sunday he came in to supper, and afterward called for "The Sweet Story of Old" and "The Palace of the King." He listened in silence, a blur in his dreaming eyes, for the past returned on the wings of these songs. Nobly considerate in his attitude toward Zulime he seemed to understand, perfectly, her almost childish joy in the possession of a nest of her own. He never came to a meal without invitation, though he was seldom without the invitation, for Zulime was fond of him and had only one point of contention with him: "I wish you wouldn't wear your working clothes about the street," she said--and artfully added, "You are so handsome when you are in your Sunday suit, I wish you would wear it all the time." He smiled with pleasure, but replied: "I'd look fine hoeing potatoes in my Sunday suit, wouldn't I!" Nevertheless he was mindful of her request and always came to dinner in, at worst, his second best. Each day the gardens about us took on charm. The plum and cherry trees flung out banners of bloom and later the apple trees flowered in pink-and-white radiance. Wonder-working sap seemed to spout into the air through every minute branch. Showers of rain alternated with vivid sunshine, and through the air, heavy with perfume, the mourning dove sang with sad insistence as if to remind us of the impermanency of May's ineffable loveliness. Butterflies suddenly appeared in the grass, and the bees toiled like harvesters, so eager, so busy that they tumbled over one another in their haste. Nature was at her sweetest and loveliest, and in the midst of it walked my young wife, in quiet anticipation of motherhood. Commonplace to others our rude homestead grew in beauty and significance to us. Day by day we sat on our front porch, and watched the clouds of blossoms thicken. If we walked in our garden we felt the creative loam throbbing beneath our feet. Each bird seemed as proud of the place as we. Each insect was in a transport of activity. Into the radiant white of the cherry blossoms, impetuous green shoots (new generations) appeared as if in feverish haste, unwilling to await the passing of the flowers. The hills to the south were soaring bubbles of exquisite green vapor dashed with amber and pink and red. Each morning the shade of the maple trees deepened, and on the lawn the dandelions opened, sowing with pieces of gold the velvet of the sward. The songs of the robin, the catbird and the thrush became more confident, more prolix until, at last, the drab and angular little village was transfigured into celestial beauty by the heavenly light and melody of completed spring. In a certain sense here was the wealth I had been struggling to secure. Here were--seemingly--all the elements of man's content, a broad roof, a generous garden, spreading trees, blossoming shrubs, a familiar horizon line, a lovely wife--and the promise of a child! Truly, I should have been happy, and in my sour, big-fisted way I was happy. I tried, honestly, to grasp and hold the ecstasy which these days offered. I who had lived for twelve years on railway trains, in camp, on horse-back or in wretched little city hotels, was now a portly householder, a pampered husband and a prospective parent. And yet--such is my perverse temperament--I could not overlook the fact that this tranquil village like thousands of others scattered over the West, was but a half-way house, a pleasant hospital into which many of the crippled, worn-out and white-haired farmers and their wives had come to rest for a little while on their way to the grave. As I walked the shaded street, perceiving these veterans of the hoe and plow, digging feebly in the earth of their small gardens, or sitting a-dream on the narrow porches of their tiny cottages my joy was embittered. Age, age was everywhere. Here in the midst of the flowering trees the men of the Middle Border were withering into dust. In the city one does not come into anything like this close relationship with a dying generation. The tragedy is obscured. Here Zulime and I, young and strong, were living in the midst of an almost universal senility and decay. There was no escape from these grim facts. Looked at from a distance there was comfort in the thought of these pioneers, released from the grind of their farm routine, dozing at ease beneath the maple trees, but closely studied they became sorrowful. I knew too much about them. Several of them had been my father's companions in those glorious days in fifty-five. Yonder white-haired invalid, sitting in the sun silently watching his bees, had been a famous pilot on the river, and that bushy-haired giant, halting by on a stick, was the wreck of a mighty hunter. The wives of these men equally worn, equally rheumatic and even more querulous, had been the rosy, laughing, dancing companions of Isabel McClintock in the days when Richard Garland came a-courting. All, all were camping in lonely cottages while their sons and daughters, in distant cities or far-off mountain valleys, adventuring in their turn, were taking up the discipline and the duties of a new border, a new world. As a novelist I could not fail to observe these melancholy features of a life which on its surface seemed idyllic. In New York, in Chicago I was concerned mainly with happy, busy people of my own age or younger,--here I was brought into close contact daily--almost hourly--with the passing of my father's generation and, also, I was made aware of the coming in of an alien, uninspiring race. The farms of the Dudleys, the McKinleys, the Coburns were being taken by the Smeckpeffers, the Heffelfingers, and the Bergmans! Already the pages of the village newspaper were peppered with such names, and a powerful Congregation was building a German church on the site of the old-time Methodist meeting house of my boyhood. My strain was dying out--a new and to my mind less admirable America was coming on. As June deepened my father (who realized something of the changes going on) proposed a trip to the town in Iowa near which we had lived for twelve years, and to this I consented, feeling that this visit could not safely be postponed another year. He had never been back to our prairie farm in Mitchell County since leaving it, over twenty years before, and now (with money and leisure) he was eager to go, and as my old Seminary associates had asked me to speak at their Commencement, we rode away one lovely June day up along the Mississippi to Winona, thence by way of a winding coulee, to the level lands, and so across to Mitchell County, our old home. The railroad, which was new to us, ran across Dry Run prairie within half a mile of our school-house, but so flat and monotonous did the whole country now appear, we could not distinguish any familiar landmarks. The "hills" along the creek were barely noticeable from the car, and all the farm-steads were hidden by groves of trees. We passed our former home without recognizing it! Osage, we soon discovered, was almost as much of an asylum for the aged as West Salem. It, too, was filled with worn-out farmers, men with whom my father had subdued the sod in the early days. Osmond Button, William Frazer, Oliver Cole, David Babcock were all living "in town" on narrow village lots, "taking it easy" as they called it, but they were by no means as contented as they seemed to the casual onlooker. Freed from the hard daily demands of the farm, many of them acknowledged a sense of uselessness, a fear of decay. As fast as they learned of our presence, scores of loyal friends swarmed about us expressing a sincere regard for my father, and a kind of wondering respect for me. Some of them clung to my father's hand as though in hope of recovering through him some gleam of the beauty, some part of the magic of the brave days gone--days when the land was new and they were young. "You must come home with me," each man insisted, "the women folks all want to see you." Twenty years had wrought great changes in the men as well as in the county, and my father was bewildered and saddened by the tale. One by one he called the names of those who had been his one-time friends and neighbors. Some were dead, others had moved away--only one or two remained where he had left them, and it was in the hope of seeing these men and at the same time to visit the farm and school-house on Dry Run, and the church at Burr Oak, that I hired a carriage and drove my father out along the well-remembered lane to the north and east--I say "well-remembered" although the growth of the trees and the presence of new buildings made its appeal mixed and unsatisfactory to us both. We found our house almost hid in the trees which we had planted on the bare prairie thirty years before. As we stood in the yard I spoke of the silver wedding which took place there. The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many years presented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. Our stay was short. Strangers were in all of the other houses along the way--we found but two of our former neighbors at home, and the farther we drove the more melancholy we both became. One of the places which I wished especially to revisit was the school-house at Burr Oak, the room which had been our social center in the early eighties. In it we had listened to church service in summer, and there in winter our Grange Suppers and Friday Lyceums had been held. It was there, too, that I had worshiped at the shrine of Hattie's girlish beauty, when as a shock-haired lad I forgot, for a day, the loneliness of my prairie home. Alas! the tall oaks which in those days had given dignity and charm to the yard had all been cut down, and the building, once glorified by the waving shadows of the leaves, now stood bare as a bone beside the road. An alien lived where Betty once reigned, and the white cottage from which Agnes was wont to issue in her exquisite Sunday frock, was untenanted and falling into decay. How lovely those girls had seemed to me as I watched them approach, walking so daintily the path beside the fence! What rich, alluring color flamed in Bettie's cheek, what fire flashed in Aggie's dark and roguish eyes! To a stranger, Burr Oak--my Burr Oak--even in Seventy-two was only a pleasant meeting place of prairie lanes on the margin of a forest, but to me it had been a temple of magic. I had but to shut my eyes to desolating changes, turning my vision inward, in order to see myself (a stocky awkward boy in a Sunday suit with a torturing collar) standing on the porch waiting to see those white-clad maidens pass into the vestibule. Too shy in those days to meet their eyes, too worshipful to ever hope for word or smile, I remained their silent adorer. Here and now I set down the tribute which I could not then express: O maids to whom I never spoke, to whom My dreaming ran in lonely field, Because of you I saw the bloom Of Maytime more abundantly revealed. From you each bud new magic caught. When you were near, my skies Were brighter, for your beauty brought A poet's rapture to my eyes. Men tell me you are bent and gray, And worn with toil and pain; And so I pray the Wheel of Chance May never set us face to face again. Better that I should think of you As you then were, strong and sweet, Walking your joyous sunlit way Between the wheat and roses of the lane-- _Pass on, O weary women of today--_ _Remain forever 'mid the roses and the wheat,_ _O girls with laughing lips and dancing feet!_ That ride and the people I met closed a gate for me. I accomplished a painful relinquishment. That noon-day sun divided my past from my present as with the stroke of a flaming sword. Up to this moment I had retained, in formless fashion, a belief that I could some time and somehow reach out and regain, at least in part, the substance of the life I had once lived here in this scene. Now I confessed that not only was my youth gone but that the friends and the place of my youth had vanished. My heart, wrung with a measureless regret filled my throat with pain, and as I looked in my father's face I perceived that he, too, was feeling the force of Time's inexorable decree. We started homeward in silence, speaking only now and then when some object made itself recognizable to us. "I shall never ride this lane again," I said as we were nearing the town. "It has been a sad experience. The world of my boyhood--the world we both knew--is utterly gone. It exists only in your memory and mine. I want to get away--back to Zulime and the present." "I'm ready to go," replied my father. "I thought I'd enjoy visiting the old place and seeing old neighbors, but I haven't. It's all too melancholy. I'm ready to go back to the LaCrosse Valley and stay there what little time I've got left to me." That night, at the Seminary, I met the Alumni and spoke to them on some subject connected with the early history of the school, and in doing so I obtained once again a perception of the barrier which had risen between my classmates and myself. They were not only serious, they were piteously solemn. No one laughed, no one took a light and airy view of life. Once or twice I tried to jest or ventured a humorous remark, but these attempts to lighten the gloom were met with chilling silence. No one whispered or smiled or turned aside. It was like a prayer meeting in the face of famine. Part of this was due no doubt to their habit of listening to sermons, but some of it arose I am sure from a feeling of poignant regret similar to that which burdened my own heart. As usual in such reunions the absent ones were named and the faces of the dead recalled. In all our songs the rustling of withered leaves could be heard. All felt the pitiless march of time and I respected them for their perception of life's essential enigma. After the "Services" were finished, several of the women came up to me and introduced themselves. One handsome gray-haired woman said: "I am Rosa Clinton," and it shocked me to be unable to find in her the girl I once knew. Another matron whom I recognized at once, retained something inescapably girlish in both face and voice. It hurt me to detect in her withered lips the quaint twist which had once been so charming to me--but then she undoubtedly discovered in me equally distressing reminders of decay. Not all my philosophy could prevent me from falling into profound melancholy. I went back to my hotel thinking of these men and women as they were when, as a youth of twenty, I trod with them the worn plank walks beneath the magical murmuring maple trees. The bitter facts of their lives gave rise to question. What was it all about? What was the value of their efforts or my own? Has the life of man any more significance than that of an insect? Just before leaving for the train next day we called on Osmond Button, who clung to my father with piteous intensity. "Stay another day," he pleaded, but father would not listen to any postponement. This old neighbor went to the train with us, knowing full well that he and my father would never meet again. Thus it happened--curiously, yet most naturally--that the last man we saw as we left Osage was our first neighbor on Dry Run prairie in the autumn of Seventy-one. From this melancholy review of the bent forms of ancient friends and neighbors, dreaming of the past, I returned to my wife, who was concerned entirely with the future. What had she to do with elderly folk? Life to her was sweet and promiseful. Intently toiling over the adornment of tiny caps, socks and gowns, joyful as a girl of seven making dresses for a doll, she insisted on displaying to me all of that lilliputian wardrobe. A dozen times each day she called on me to admire this or that garment, and I was greatly relieved to find that the growing wonder of the experience through which she was about to pass, prevented her from giving way to fear of it. Over me, at times, an icy shadow fell. Suppose--suppose----! One night she dreamed that a babe had come to us, and that the nurse had carelessly allowed it to chill and die, but I had no such disturbing premonitions. Contrary to the statements of sentimental novelists and poets I almost never dreamed of my wife. I more often dreamed of Howells or Roosevelt or some of my editorial friends, indeed I often had highly technical literary dreams wherein I prepared manuscripts for the press or composed speeches or poems, and sometimes my mother or Jessie came back to me--but Zulime had never up to this time entered my sleep. One afternoon during this period of waiting and just after I had finished the writing of _Hesper_ we joined our good friends the Eastons on an excursion up the Mississippi on their house-boat, a glorious outing which I mention because it was the farthest removed from my boyhood life on Dry Run prairie whose scenes had just been vividly brought to mind. Here was the flawless poetry of recreation, the perfection of travel. To sit in a reclining chair on the screened-in forward deck of a beautiful boat, what time it was being propelled by some invisible silent machinery, up a shining river, reflecting wooded bluffs, was like taking flight on the magic carpet of my boyhood's story book. The purple head-lands projecting majestically into the still flood took on once more the poetry and the mystery of the prehistoric. One by one those royal pyramids ordered and adorned themselves for our inspection while the narrow valleys opening their gates, displayed all their tranquil pastoral charm. Our meals, delicately cooked and perfectly served, appeared as if by conjury, on a table in the dining-room amidships, and as we ate we watched the glory deepen on the clouds, while the waters, soundless as oil, rolled past our open doors. It was all a passage to the Land of the Lotos to me. How had I, whose youth had been so full of penury and toil, earned a share in such leisure, such luxury? Was it right for me to give myself up to the enjoyment of it? For Zulime's sake I rejoiced in it, knowing that her days were long with waiting and suspense. Without knowing much of the bitter anguish of the ordeal, I held maternity to be (as the great poets had taught me to hold it) a noble heroism. "If mankind is worth continuing on this earth," I had written, "then the mother is entitled to the highest honor, the tenderest care. Science should do its best to lessen her pain, to make her birth-bed honorable." In spite of my wife's brave smile I sensed in her a subconscious dread of what was coming, and this anxiety I shared so fully that I ceased to write and gave all my time to her. Together we walked the garden or drove about the country in the low-hung, easy-riding old surrey, tracing the wooded ways we loved the best, or climbing to where a wide view of the valley offered. I understood her laughing stoicism much better now, and it no longer deceived me. She made light of her own fears in order that I might not worry. The fact that she was past her first youth was my torment, for I had read that the danger increased with every year beyond twenty-five and the thought that we might never ride these lanes again came into my mind and would not be exorcised. At such moments as I could snatch I worked on a series of lectures which I was scheduled to deliver at the University of Chicago--lectures on Edwin Booth which brought back my Boston days. At last the dreaded day came!--I shall not dwell upon the long hours of the mother's pain, or on the sleepless anxiety of my household, for I have no desire to relive them. I would rather make statement of my relief and gratitude when after many, many hours of suffering, Edward Evans of LaCrosse, a scientific, deft and powerful surgeon, came to the mother's rescue. He was a master--the man who knew! [Illustration: At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife--lovely as a Madonna--out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.] He saved both mother and child, and when the nurse laid in my arms a little babe, who looked up at me with grave, accusing blue eyes,--the eyes of her mother,--I wondered whether society had a right to put any woman to this cruel test--whether the race was worth maintaining at such a price. Our loyal friend, Mary Easton (mother of five children), who was present to help us through our stern trial, assured me that maternity had its joys as well as its agonies, and after she had peered into the face of my small daughter she remarked to me with a delightful note of admiration, "Why, she is already a _person_!" So indeed she was. Her head, large and shapely and her eyes wide, dark and curiously reflective, were like her mother's. True, she hadn't much nose, but her hair was abundant and her fingers exquisite. She lay in my big paws with what seemed to me to be tranquil confidence, and though her legs were comically rudimentary, her glance manifested an unassailable dignity. My father insisted she resembled her grandmother. * * * * * At last came the blessed day when the nurse permitted me to wheel the convalescent out upon the porch. The morning was lovely, with just a hint of autumn in its coolness, and to Zulime it was heavenly sweet, for it seemed that she had emerged from a long dark night of agony and doubt. As she sat with the babe in her lap looking over the familiar hills, she was more beautiful than she had ever been before. She was a being glorified. Later in the day, as the sun was going down in a welter of gold and crimson, she came out again and in its splendor I chose to read the promise of a noble future for Mary Isabel. It gave me joy to know that she had taken up her life beneath the same roof and almost in the same room in which Isabel Garland had laid her burden down. Yes, the Homestead had a new claimant. In the midst of my father's decaying world a new and vigorous life had miraculously appeared. Beneath the moldering leaves of the leaning oaks a tender yet tenacious shoot was springing from the soil. CHAPTER TWENTY Mary Isabel's Chimney No one who reads the lives of writers attentively can fail of perceiving the periods of depression--almost of despair--into which we are all liable to fall--days when nothing that we have done seems worth while--moods of groping indecision during which we groan and most unworthily complain. I am no exception. For several months after the publication of _Hesper_ I experienced a despairing emptiness, a sense of unworthiness, a feeling of weakness which I am certain made me a burden to my long-suffering wife. "What shall I do now?" I asked myself. From my standpoint as a novelist of The Great Northwest, there remained another subject of study, the red man--The Sioux and the Algonquin loomed large in the prairie landscape. They were, in fact, quite as significant in the history of the border as the pioneer himself, for they were his antagonists. Not content with using the Indian as an actor in stories like _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, I had done something more direct and worthy through a manuscript which I called _The Silent Eaters_, a story in which I tried to put the Sitting Bull's case as one of his partisans might have depicted it. I had failed for lack of detailed knowledge, and the manuscript lay in my desk untouched. It was in this period of doubt and disheartenment that I turned to my little daughter with gratitude and a deep sense of the mystery of her coming. The never-ending surprise of her presence filled me with delight. Like billions of other Daddies I forgot my worries as I looked into her tranquil eyes. To protect and educate her seemed at the moment my chiefest care. During the mother's period of convalescence I acted--in my hours of leisure--as nurse-maid quite indifferent to the smiles of spectators, who made question of my method. I became an expert in holding the babe so that her spine should not be over-taxed, and I think she liked to feel the grip of my big fingers. That she appreciated the lullabies I sang to her I am certain, for even my Aunt Deborah was forced to admit that my control of my daughter's slumber period was remarkably efficient. The coming of this child changed the universe for me. She brought into my life a new element, a new consideration. The insoluble mystery of sex, the heroism of maternity, the measureless wrongs of womankind and the selfish cruelty of man rose into my thinking with such power that I began to write of them, although they had held but academic interest hitherto. With that tiny woman in my arms I looked into the faces of my fellow men with a sudden realization that the world as it stands to-day is essentially a male world--a world in which the female is but a subservient partner. "It is changing, but it will still be a man's world when you are grown," I said to Mary Isabel. My devotion, my slavery to this ten-pound daughter greatly amused my friends and neighbors. To see "the grim Klondiker," in meek attendance on a midget sovereign was highly diverting--so I was told by Mary Easton, and I rather think she was right. However, I was undisturbed so long as Mary Isabel did not complain. She was happy with me. She rode unnumbered joyous miles upon my left elbow and cantered away into dreamland by way of the ancient walnut rocker in which her grandmother had been wont to sit and dream. Deep in her baby brain-cells I planted vague memories of "Down the River," "Over the Hills in Legions," and "Nellie Wildwood," for I sang to her almost every evening of her infant life. "Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green. Papa's a nobleman--mother's a queen," was one of her most admired lullabys. It was a marvelous time for me--the happiest I had known since boyhood. Not even my days of courtship have greater charm to me now. The old soldier was almost as completely subordinated as I. Several times each day he came into the house to say, "Well, how is my granddaughter getting on?" and upon seeing her, invariably remarked, "She's the very image of Belle,"--and indeed she did resemble my mother. He expressed the wish which was alive in my own heart, when he said, "If only Belle could have lived to see her granddaughter." My new daughter was all important, but the new book could not be neglected. _Hesper_ was scheduled for publication in October and copy must go to the printer in August, therefore I was forced to leave my wife and babe and go East to attend to the proof-reading and other matters incidental to the birth of another novel. Some lectures in Chicago and Chautauqua took up nearly two weeks of my time and when I arrived in New York, huge bundles of galley-proof were awaiting me. My publishers were confident that the new book would equal _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ in popularity, but I was less sanguine. For several weeks I toiled on this job, and at last on the eleventh of September, a day of sweltering heat, I got away on the evening train for the West. In spite of my poverty and notwithstanding the tender age of my daughter, I had decided to fetch my family to New York. On November tenth, we found ourselves settled in a small apartment overlooking Morningside Park, which seemed a very desirable playground for Mary Isabel. Relying on my books (which were selling with gratifying persistency) we permitted ourselves a seven-room apartment with a full-sized kitchen and a maid--whom we had brought on from West Salem. We even went so far as to give dinner parties to such of our friends as could be trusted to overlook our lack of plate, and to remain kindly unobservant of the fact that Dora, the baby's nurse, doubled as waitress after cooking the steak. In this unassuming fashion we fed the Hernes, the Severances, and other of our most valued friends who devoured the puddings which Zulime "tossed up," with a gusto highly flattering to her skill, while the sight of me as baby-tender proved singularly amusing--to some of our guests. It will be seen that we were not cutting entirely loose from the principles of economy in which we had been so carefully schooled--our hospitalities had very distinct (enforced) limits. Our wedding anniversary came while we were getting settled and my present to Zulime that year was a set of silver which I had purchased with the check for an article called "A Pioneer Wife"--the paper which I had written as a memorial to my mother. In explanation of the fact that all these silver pieces bore the initials I. G., I said, "You are to think of them as a gift from my mother. Imagine that I gave them to her long ago, and that they now come to you, from her, as heirlooms. Let us call them 'The family silver' and hand them down to Mary Isabel in her turn." Zulime, who always rose to a sentiment of this kind, gratefully accepted this vicarious inheritance and thereafter I was pleased to observe that whenever Mary Isabel wished to break a plate she invariably reached for one of her grandmother's solid silver spoons--they were so much more effective than the plated ones! Christmas came to us this year with new and tender significance, for "Santy Claus" (who found us at home in New York, rejoicing in our first baby) brought to us our first tree, and the conjunction of these happy events produced in my wife almost perfect happiness. Furthermore, Mary Isabel achieved her first laugh. I am sure of this fact, for I put it down in my notebook, with these words, "She has a lovely smile and a chuckle like her grandmother's. She robs us of solitude, and system, and order, but our world would now be desolate without her." Only when I thought of what her grandfather was missing did I have a sense of regret. At our feast our daughter sat in the high chair which Katherine Herne had given her, and looked upon the tiny, decorated tree with eyes of rapture, deep, dark-blue eyes in which a seraphic light shone. Her life was beginning far, very far, from the bleak prairie lands in which her Daddy's winter holidays had been spent, and while the silver spoon in her mouth was not of my giving, the one with which she bruised her chair-arm, was veritably one of my rewards. In order to continue my practice as an Author, I managed to sandwich the writing of an occasional article between spells of minding the baby--and working on club committees. I recall going to Princeton to tell Henry Van Dyke's Club about "The Joys of the Trail," and it pleased me to be introduced as a "Representative of the West." West Point received me in this capacity, and I also read at one of Lounsbury's "Smokers" at Yale, but I was kept from any undue self-congratulation by recognition of the fact that my income was still considerably below the standard of a railway engineer--as perhaps it should be. My "arriving" was always in an accommodation train fifty minutes late. Evidence of my literary success, if you look at it that way, may have lain in an invitation to dine at Andrew Carnegie's, but a suspicion that I was being patronized made me hesitate. It was only after I learned that Burroughs and Gilder were going that I decided to accept, although I could not see why the ironmaster should include me in his list. I had never met him and was not eager for his recognition. The guests (nearly all known to me) were most distinguished and it was pleasant to meet with them, even in this palace. We marched into the dining-room keeping step to the music of a bagpipe. The speaking which followed the dinner was admirable. Hamilton Wright Mabie and John Finley were especially adroit and graceful, and Carnegie, who had been furnished with elaborate notes by his secretary, introduced his speakers with tact and humor, although it was evident that in some cases he would have been helpless without his literary furnishing--to which in my case he referred with especial care. He was an amazement to me. I could not imagine him in the rôle of "Iron King," on the contrary he appeared more like a genial Scotch school-master, one genuinely interested in learning. Had it not been for his air of labored appreciation, and the glamour of his enormous wealth, the dinner would have been wholly enjoyable. One charming human touch saved the situation. The tablecloth (a magnificent piece of linen) was worked here and there with silken reproductions of the signatures of former distinguished guests. "Mrs. Carnegie," our host explained, "works these signatures into the cloth with her own hands." Each of us was given a soft pencil and requested to add his name. It happened that Gilder, Seton, Burroughs and myself went away together, and the doorman showed a mild surprise in the fact that no carriage awaited us. Gilder with comic intonation said, "Some of you fellows ought to have saved this situation by ordering a cab." "As the only man with a stovepipe hat the job was yours," I retorted. This struck the rest of the party as funny. In truth, each of us except Gilder wore some sort of soft hat, and all together we formed a sinister group. "I don't care what _Andrew_ thinks of us," Gilder explained, "but I hate to have his butler get such a low conception of American authorship." On this point we all agreed--and took the Madison Avenue street car. Meanwhile, I was secretly dreaming of getting rich myself. Every American, with a dollar to spare, at some time in his life takes a shot at a gold mine. It comes early in some lives and late in others, but it comes! In my case it came after the publication of _Hesper_ just as I was verging on forty-five, and was the result of my brother's connections in Mexico. Impatient of getting money by growing trees he had resigned his position on a rubber farm and was digging gold in Northern Mexico. Our mine, situated about twenty miles from Camacho, was at the usual critical stage where more capital is needed, therefore in April I persuaded Irving Bacheller and Archer Brown to go down with me and take a look at the property. Of course I had a lump of ore to show them--and it was beautiful! I recall that when this sample came to me by express, I had my first and only conviction that my financial worries were over. Even Zulime was impressed with my brother's smelter reports which gave the proportion of gold to the ton, precisely set down in bold black figures. All we had to do was to ship a sufficient number of car lots for the year and our income would rival that of Carnegie's. We decided to break up our little home, and while I went to Mexico, Zulime planned to visit Chicago and await my return. I was loth to dismantle our apartment, and when at the station I said good-by to my little daughter and her mother, I was almost persuaded that nothing was worth the pain of parting from that small shining face and those seeking, clinging hands. She had grown deep into my heart during those winter months. I felt very poor and lonely as I went to my bed at the club that first night after our separation, and when next day Bacheller invited me out to his new home at Sound Beach, I gratefully accepted, although I was in the middle of getting a new book through the press--a job which my publishers had urged upon me against my better judgment. I felt that I was being hurried. Bacheller, highly prosperous, was living at this time in a handsome waterside bungalow, with a big sitting-room in which a generous fire glowed. It happened that he was entertaining General Henderson of Iowa, and when in some way it developed that we were all famous singers, a spirited contest arose as to which of us could beat the others. Henderson sang Scotch lyrics very well, and Bacheller was full of tunes from his North Country, whilst I--well if I didn't keep my whiffletree off the wheel, it was not for lack of effort. I sang "Maggie" and "Lily Dale" and "Rosalie the Prairie Flower," all of which made a powerful impression on Henderson; but it was not till I sang "The Rolling Stone," that I fully countered. Irving asked me to repeat this song, but I refused. "You might catch the tune," I explained. The general's face shone with pleasure but a wistful cadence was in his voice. "Your tunes carry me back to my boyhood," he said, "I heard my mother sing some of them." He was near the end of his life, although none of us realized it that night, and we all went our ways in the glow of a tender friendship--a friendship deepened by this reminiscent song. Three days later Bacheller and I were entering Mexico on our way to my mine. Although Bacheller declined to go into partnership with me we had a gorgeous trip, and that was the main object so far as the other fellows were concerned, and as I wrote an article on the caverns of Cacawamilpa which paid my expenses I was content. In returning to the North by way of El Paso and the Rock Island road, I encountered a sandstorm, whose ferocity dimmed the memory of the one in which my father's wheat was uprooted. It was frightful. From this I passed almost at once to the bloom, the green serenity, and the abundance of my native valley. It was a kind of paradise by contrast to the South-west and to take my little daughter to my bosom, to look into her eyes, to feel her little palms patting my cheeks, was a pleasure such as I had never expected to own. Every father who reads this line will understand me when I declare that she had "developed wonderfully" in the month of my absence. To me every change in my first born was thrilling--and a little sad--for the fairy of to-day was continually displacing the fairy of yesterday. Believing that this had ended my travels for the summer, I began to work on a novel which should depict the life of a girl, condemned against her will to be a spiritualistic medium,--forced by her parents to serve as a "connecting wire between the world of matter and the world of spirit." This theme, which lay outside my plan to depict the West, had long demanded to be written, and I now set about it with vigor. As a matter of fact, I knew a great deal about mediums, for at one time I had been a member of the Council of the American Psychical Society, and as a special committee on slate writing and other psychical phenomena had conducted many experiments. I had in my mind (and in my notebooks) a mass of material which formed the background of my story, _The Tyranny of the Dark_. It made a creditable serial and a fairly successful book, but it will probably not count as largely in my record as "Martha's Fireplace," a short story which I wrote at about the same time. I do not regret having done this novel, because at the moment it seemed very much worth while, but I was fully aware, even then, that it had a much narrower appeal than either _Hesper_ or _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_. In the midst of my work on this book our good friends, Mary and Fred Easton, invited us to go with them, in their houseboat, on a trip to the World's Fair in St. Louis. Mrs. Easton offered to take Mary Isabel and her nurse into her own lovely home during our absence, and as Zulime needed the outing we joined the party. It was a beautiful experience, a kind of dream journey, luxurious, effortless, silent and suggestive,--suggestive of the great river as it was in the time of Dubuque. Sometimes for an hour or more we lost sight of the railway, and the primitive loneliness of the stream awed and humbled us. For ten days we sailed in such luxury as I had never known before; and when we reached home again it was the splendor of the stream and not the marvels of the Fair which had permanently enriched me. I have forgotten almost every feature of the exhibition, but the sunset light falling athwart the valleys and lighting the sand-bars into burning gold fills my memory to this day. Here I must make another confession. Up to this time our big living-room had no fireplace. I had thrown out bay-windows, tacked on porches, and constructed bathrooms; but the most vital of all the requisites of a homestead was still lacking. We had no hearth and no outside chimney. A fireplace was one of the possessions which I really envied my friends. I had never said, "I wish I had Bacheller's house," but I longed to duplicate his fireplace. Like most of my generation in the West I had been raised beside a stove, with only one early memory of a fireplace, that in my Uncle David's home, in the glow of which, nearly forty years before, I had lain one Thanksgiving night to hear him play the violin--a memory of sweetest quality to me even now. Zulime's childhood had been almost equally bare. She had hung her Christmas stockings before a radiator, as I had strung mine on the wall, behind the kitchen stove. Now suddenly with a small daughter to think of, we both began to long for a fireplace with a desire which led at last toward action--on my part, Zulime was hesitant. "As our stay in the Old Homestead comes always during the summer, it seems a wilful extravagance to put our hard-earned dollars into an improvement which a renter would consider a nuisance," she argued. "Nevertheless I'm going to build a fireplace," I replied. "You mustn't think of it," she protested. "Consider what a comfort it would be on a rainy day in June," I rejoined. "Think what it would do for the baby on dark mornings." This had its effect, but even then she would not agree to have it built. Another deterrent lay in the inexperience of our carpenters and masons, not one of whom had even built a chimney. Everybody had fireplaces in pioneer days, in the days of the Kentucky rifle, the broad-axe and the tallow-dip; but as the era of frame houses came on, the arches had been walled up, and iron stoves of varying ugliness had taken their places. In all the country-side (outside of LaCrosse) there was not a hearthstone of the old-fashioned kind, and though some of the workmen remembered them, not one of them could tell how they were constructed, and the idea of an outside chimney was comically absurd. All these forces working against me had, thus far, prevented me from experimenting, and perhaps even now the towering base-burner would have remained our family shrine had not Mary Isabel put in a wordless plea. Less than four hundred days old, she was, nevertheless wise in fireplaces. She had begun to burble in the light of the Severances' hearth in Minnesota, and her eyes had reflected the flame and shadow of a noble open fire in Katharine Herne's homestead on Peconic Bay. Her cheeks had reddened like apples in the glory of that hickory flame, and when she came to our small apartment in New York City she had seemed surprised and sadly disappointed by the gas pipes and asbestos mat, which made up a hollow show under a gimcrack mantel. Now here, in her own home, was she to remain without the witchery of crackling flame? As the cold winds of September began to blow my resolution was taken. "That fireplace must be built. My daughter shall not be cheated of beamed ceilings and the glory of the blazing log." Zulime, in alarm, again cried out as mother used to do: "Consider the expense!" "Hang the expense! Consider the comfort, the beauty of the embers. Think of Mary Isabel with her eyes reflecting their light. Imagine the old soldier sitting on the hearth holding his granddaughter----" She smiled in timorous surrender. "I can see you are bound to do it," she said, "but where can it be built?" Alas! there was only one available space, a narrow wall between the two west windows. "We'll cut the windows down, or move them," I said, with calm resolution. "I hate a _little_ fireplace," protested Zulime. "It can't be huge," I admitted, "but it can be real. It can be as _deep_ as we want it." Having decided upon the enterprise I hurried forth to engage the hands to do the work. I could not endure a day's delay. The first carpenter with whom I spoke knew nothing about such things. The next one had helped to put in one small "hard-coal, wall pocket," and the third man had seen fireplaces in Norway, but remembered little about their construction. After studying Zulime's sketch of what we wanted, he gloomily remarked, "I don't believe I can make that thing _gee_." Zulime was disheartened by all this, but Mary Isabel climbed to my knee as if to say, "Boppa, where is my fireplace?" My courage returned. "It shall be built if I have to import a mason from Chicago," I declared, and returned to the campaign. "Can't you build a thing like this?" I asked a plasterer, showing him a magazine picture of a fireplace. He studied it with care, turning it from side to side. "A rough pile o' brick like that?" "Just like that." "Common red brick?" "Yes, just the kind you use for outside walls." "If you'll get a carpenter to lay it out maybe I can do it," he answered, but would fix no date for beginning the work. Three days later when I met him on the street he looked a little shame-faced. "I hoped you'd forgot about that fireplace," he said. "I don't know about that job. I don't just see my way to it. However, if you'll stand by and take all the responsibility, I'll try it." "When can you come?" "To-morrow," he said. "I'll expect you." I hastened home. I climbed to the top of the old chimney, hammer in hand, and began the work of demolition. The whole household became involved in the campaign. While the gardener and my father chipped the mortar from the bricks which I threw down, Zulime drew another plan for the arch and the hearth, and Mary Isabel sat on the lawn, and shouted at her busy father, high in the sky. A most distressing clutter developed. The carpenters attacked the house like savage animals, chipping and chiseling till they opened a huge gap from window to window, filling the room with mortar, dust and flies. Zulime was especially appalled by the flies. "I didn't know you had to slash into the house like that," she said. "It's like murder." Our neighbors hitherto vastly entertained by our urban eccentricities expressed an intense interest in our plan for an open fire. "Do you expect it to heat the house?" asked Mrs. Dutcher, and Aunt Maria said: "An open fire is nice to look at, but expensive to keep going." Sam McKinley heartily applauded. "I'm glad to hear you're going back to the old-fashioned fireplace. They were good things to sit by. I'd like one myself, but I never'd get my wife to consent. She says they are too much trouble to keep in order." At last the mason came, and together he and I laid out the ground plan of the structure. By means of bricks disposed on the lawn I indicated the size of the box, and then, while the carpenter crawled out through the crevasse in the side of the house, we laid a deep foundation of stone. We had just brought the base to the level of the sill when--the annual County Fair broke out! All work ceased. The workmen went to the ball game and to the cattle show and to the races, leaving our living-room open to the elements, and our lawn desolate with plaster. For three days we suffered this mutilation. At last the master mason returned, but without his tender. "No matter," I said to him. "I can mix mortar and sand," and I did. I also carried brick, splashing myself with lime and skinning my hands,--but the chimney grew! Painfully, with some doubt and hesitancy, but with assuring skill, Otto laid the actual firebox, and when the dark-red, delightfully rude piers of the arch began to rise from the floor within the room, the entire family gathered to admire the structure and to cheer the workmen on their way. The little inequalities which came into the brickwork delighted us. These "accidentals" as the painters say were quite as we wished them to be. Privately, our bricklayer considered us--"Crazy." The idea of putting common rough brick on the _inside_ of a house! The library floor was splotched with mortar, the dining-room was cold and buzzing with impertinent flies, but what of that--the tower of brick was climbing. The mason called insatiably for more brick, more mortar, and the chimney (the only outside chimney in Hamilton township) rose grandly, alarmingly above the roof--whilst I gained a reputation for princely expenditure which it will take me a long time to live down. Suddenly discovering that we had no fire-clay for the lining of the firebox, I ordered it by express (another ruinous extravagance), and the work went on. It was almost done when a cold rain began, driving the workmen indoors. Zulime fairly ached with eagerness to have an end of the mess, and the mason catching the spirit of our unrest worked on in the rain. One by one the bricks slipped into place. "Oh, how beautiful the fire would be on a day like this!" exclaimed Zulime. "Do you think it will ever be finished? I can't believe it. It's all a dream. It won't draw--or something. It's too good to be true." "It will be done to-night--and it will draw," I stoutly replied. At noon, the inside being done, Otto went outside to complete the top, toiling heroically in the drizzle. At last, for the fourth time we cleaned the room of all but a few chips of the sill, which I intended to use for our first blaze. Then, at my command, Zulime took one end of the thick, rough mantel and together we swung it into place above the arch. Our fireplace was complete! Breathlessly we waited the signal to apply the match. At five o'clock the mason from the chimney top cheerily called, "_Let 'er go!_" Striking a match I handed it to Zulime. She touched it to the shavings. Our chimney took life. It drew! It roared!! Pulling the curtains close, to shut out the waning daylight, we drew our chairs about our hearth whereon the golden firelight was playing. We forgot our troubles, and Mary Isabel pointing her pink, inch-long forefinger at it, laughed with glee. Never again would she sit above a black hole in the floor to warm her toes. Out of the corners of the room the mystic ancestral shadows leapt, to play for her sake upon the walls. "She will now acquire the poet's fund of sweet subconscious memories," I declared. "The color of all New England home-life is in that fire. Centuries of history are involved in its flickering shadows. We have put ourselves in touch with our Anglo-Saxon ancestors at last." "It already looks as ancient as the house," Zulime remarked, and so indeed it did, for its rude inner walls had blackened almost instantly, and its rough, broad, brick hearth fitted harmoniously into the brown floor. The thick plank mantle (stained a smoky-green) seemed already clouded with age. Its expression was perfect--to us, and when father "happened in" and drawing his armchair forward took Mary Isabel in his arms, the firelight playing over his gray hair and on the chubby cheeks of the child, he made a picture immemorial in its suggestion, typifying all the hearths and all the grandsires and fair-skinned babes of New England history. [Illustration: The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past. In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly passing web.] The grim old house had a soul. It was now in the fullest sense a hearth and a home. Oh, Mother and David, were you with us at that moment? Did you look upon us from the dusky corners, adding your faint voices to the chorus of our songs? I hope so. I try to believe so. * * * * * That night when Mary Isabel was asleep and I sat alone beside the hearth, another and widely different magic came from those embers. Their tongues of flame, subtly interfused with smoke, called back to memory the many camp-fires I had builded beside the streams, beneath the pines of the mountain west. Each of my tenting places drew near. At one moment, far in the Skeena Valley, I sat watching the brave fire beat back the darkness and the rain--hearing a glacial river roaring from the night. At another I was encamped in the shelter of a mighty cliff, listening in awe while along its lofty shelves the lions prowled and in the cedars, amid the ruins of prehistoric cities, the wind chanted a solemn rune filled with the voices of those whose bones had long since been mingled with the dust. Oh, the good days on the trail! I cannot lose you--I will not! Here in the amber of my song I hold you. Here where neither time nor change Can do you wrong. I sweep you together, The harvest of a continent. The gold Of a thousand days of quest. So, when I am old, Like a chained eagle I can sit And dream and dream Of splendid spaces, The gleam of rivers, And the smell of prairie flowers. So, when I have quite forgot The heritage of books, I still shall know The splendor of the mountains, and the glow Of sunset on the vanished plain. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Fairy World of Childhood One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all came,--Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic associations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath its magic light. Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the practical, they each and all passed to minute and loving descriptions of just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven, Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but every man of them covertly longed for it, dimly perceiving its value as an altar of memory, unconsciously acknowledging its poignant youthful associations. The beauty of vanished faces, the forms of the buried past drew near, and in the golden light of reminiscent dream, each grizzled head took on a softer, nobler outline. The prosaic was forgot. The poetry of their lives was restored. Father was at his best, hospitable, reminiscent, jocund. His pride in me was expressed in his faith in my ability to keep this fire going. "Hamlin don't mind a little expense like this chimney," he said. "He put it in just to amuse the baby,--so he says and I believe him. He can afford it--so I'm not saying a word, in fact I like an open fire so well I'm thinking of putting one into my own house." To this several replied by saying, "We'd have a riot in our house if we put in such an extravagance." Others declared, "It's all a question of dirt. Our wives would never stand the ashes." We had provided apples and nuts, doughnuts, cider and other characteristic refreshments of the older day, but alas! most of our guests no longer took coffee at night, and only one or two had teeth for popcorn or stomach for doughnuts. As a feast our evening was a failure. "I used to eat anything at any time," Lottridge explained, "probably that is the reason why I can't do it now. In those days we didn't know anything about 'calories' or 'balanced rations.' We et what was set before us and darn glad to get it." Shane with quiet humor recalled the days when buckwheat cakes and sausages swimming in pork fat and covered with maple syrup, formed his notion of a good breakfast. "Just one such meal would finish me now," he added with a rueful smile. These were the men who had been the tireless reapers, the skilled wood-choppers, the husky threshers of the olden time, and as they talked, each of them reverting to significant events in those heroic days, I sobered with a sense of irreparable loss. Pathos and humor mingled in their talk of those far days! Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?" To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there under that oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock." It all came back as they talked,--that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these lusty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old." "Old! There _weren't_ any old people in those days," asserted Lottridge. Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past. My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the noble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the attitude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a sturdy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew. Like Eugene Ware they could say-- "Standing by life's river, deep and broad, I take my chances, ignorant but unawed." As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again recalled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age. A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with none to do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire. As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters." He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light. He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor. I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends, prepared _The Tyranny of the Dark_ for serial publication, attended a dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in the election which founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a fairly full program as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my noble companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my laggard coach and home. At times I realized the danger which lay in building so much of my content on the life of one small creature, but for the most part I rejoiced in the fact that she was in my world, even though I had a growing sense of its illusory and generally unsatisfactory character. I found comfort in the knowledge that billions of other men had preceded me and billions more would follow me, and that the only real things in my world were the human relationships. To make my wife and child happy, to leave the world a little better than I found it, these formed my creed. It was cold, crisp, clear winter when I returned to West Salem and the village again suggested a Christmas card illustration as I walked up the street. The snow cried out under my shoe soles with shrill familiar squeal, carrying me back to the radiant mornings in Iowa when I trod the boardwalks of Osage on my way to the Seminary Chapel, my books under my arm and the courage of youth in my heart. Now a wife and daughter awaited me. A fire was crackling in the new chimney, and in the light of it, at her mother's feet, sat Mary Isabel. In a moment New York and Chicago were remote, almost mythic places. With my child in my arms, listening to Zulime's gossip of the town wherein the simple old-fashioned joys of life still persisted with wholesome effect, I asked myself, "Why struggle? Why travel, when your wife, your babe, and your hearthstone are here?" "Once I threatened the world with fire, And thrust my fist in the face of wrong, Making my heart a sounding lyre-- Accusing the rulers of earth in song. Now, counting the world of creeds well lost And recking the greatest book no prize-- Withdrawn from the press and free from the cost Of fame and war--in my baby's eyes-- In the touch of her tiny, slender palm, I find the ease of a warrior's calm." Calm! Did I say calm? It was the calm of abject slavery. At command of that minute despot I began to toil frenziedly. At her word I read over and over, and over once again, the Rhymes of _Mother Goose_ and the Tales of _Peter Wabbitt_. The _Tin Tan Book_ was her litany, and _Red Riding Hood_ her sweet terror. Her interest in books was insatiate. She loved all verses, all melodies, even those whose words were wholly beyond her understanding, and her rapt eyes, deep and dark, as my mother's had been, gave me such happiness that to write of it fills me with a pang of regret--for that baby is now a woman. It will not avail my reader to say, "You were but re-enacting the experiences of innumerable other daddies," for this was _my_ child, these were _my_ home and _my_ fire. Without a shred of shame I rejoiced in my subjection then, as I long to recover its contentment now. Life for me was fulfilled. I was doing that which nature and the world required. Here enters an incongruous fact,--something which I must record with the particularity it deserves. My wife who was accounted a genius, was in truth amazingly "clever" with brush and pencil. Not only had she spent five years in Paris, she had enjoyed several other years of study with her sculptor brother. She could model, she could paint and she could draw,--but--to whom did Mary Isabel turn when she wanted a picture? To her artist mother? Not at all! To me,--to her corn-husker daddy--of course. I was her artist as well as her reader. To her my hand was a wonder-worker. She was always pleased with what I did. Hour after hour I drew (in amazing outlines) dogs and cows and pigs (pictographs as primitive as those which line the walls of cave dwellings in Arizona) on which she gazed in ecstasy, silent till she suddenly discovered that this effigy meant a cow, then she cried out, "tee dee moomo!" with a joy which afforded me more satisfaction than any acceptance of a story on the part of an editor had ever conveyed. Each scrawl was to her a fresh revelation of the omniscience, the magic of her father--therefore I drew and drew while her recreant mother sat on the other side of the fire and watched us, a wicked smile of amusement--and relief--on her lips. My daughter was preternaturally interested in magazines,--that is to say she was (at a very early age) vitally concerned with the advertising columns, and forced me to spend a great deal of time turning the pages while she discovered and admired the images of shoes, chairs, tables and babies,--especially babies. It rejoiced her to discover in a book the portrait of a desk which was actually standing in the room, and in matching the fact with the artistic reproduction of the fact, she was, no doubt, laying the foundation of an esthetic appreciation of the universe, but I suffered. Only when she was hungry or sleepy did she permit me, her art instructor, to take a vacation. In the peaceful intervals when she was in her bed, her mother and I discussed the question, "Where shall we make our winter home?" My plan to take another apartment in New York seemed of a reckless extravagance to Zulime, who argued for Chicago, and in the end we compromised--on Chicago--where her father and brother and sister lived. November found us settled in a furnished apartment on Jackson Park Avenue, and our Christmas tree was set up there instead of in the Homestead, which was the natural place for it. Another phase of being Daddy now set in. To me, as a father, the City by the Lake assumed a new and terrifying aspect. Its dirt, its chill winds, its smoke appeared a pitiless league of forces assaulting the tender form of my daughter. My interest in civic reforms augmented. The problems of street cleaning and sanitary milk delivery approached me from an entirely different angle. My sense of social justice was quickened. In other ways I admitted a change. Something had gone out of my world, or rather something unexpected had come into it. I was no longer whole-hearted in my enjoyment of my Club. My study hours were no longer sacred. My cherub daughter allured. Sometimes as I was dozing in my sleeping car, I heard her chirping voice, "Bappa, come here. I need you." The memory of her small soft body, her trusting eyes, the arch of her brows, made me impatient of my lecture tours. She was my incentive, my chief reason for living and working, and from each of my predatory sorties, I returned to her with a thankfulness which was almost maudlin--in Fuller's eyes. To have her joyous face lifted to mine, to hear her clear voice repeating my mother's songs, restored my faith in the logic of human life. True she interrupted my work and divided my interest, but she also defended me from bitterness and kept me from a darkening outlook on the future. My right to have her could be questioned but my care of her, now that I had her, was a joyous task. It would not be quite honest in me if I did not admit that this intensity of interest in my daughter took away something from my attitude as a husband, just as Zulime's mother love affected her relationship to me. A new law was at work in both our cases, and I do not question its necessity or its direction. Three is a larger number than two, and if the third number brings something unforeseen into the problem it must be accepted. Mary Isabel strengthened the bond between Zulime and myself, but it altered its character. Whatever it lost in one way it gained in another. Dear little daughter, how she possessed me! Each day she presented some new trait, some new accomplishment. She had begun to understand that Daddy was a writer and that he must not be disturbed during the morning, but in spite of her best resolutions she often tip-toed to my door to inquire brightly, "Poppie, can I come in? Don't you want me?" Of course I wanted her, and so frequently my work gave place to a romp with her. In the afternoons I often took her for a walk or to coast on her new sled rejoicing in the picture she made in her red cloak and hood. In her presence my somber conceptions of life were forgotten. Joyous and vital, knowing nothing of my worries, she comforted me. She was no longer the "baby" she was "Wenona," my first born, and in spirit we were comrades. More and more she absorbed my thought. "Poppie, I love you better than anything," she often said, and the music of her voice misted my eyes and put a lump into my throat. When summer came and we went back to the Homestead, I taught her to drive Old Smoker, Uncle William's horse. Under my direction she studied the birds and animals. In city and country alike we came together at nightfall, to read or sing or "play circus." I sang to her all the songs my mother had taught me, I danced with her as she grew older, with Zulime playing the tunes for us, "Money Musk" and "The Campbells are Coming." As we walked the streets the trusting cling of her tiny fingers was inexpressibly sweet. "Poppie, I'm so happy!" she often said to me after she was three, and the ecstasy which showed in her big blue eyes scared me with its intensity for I knew all too well that it could not last. This was her magical time. She was enraptured of the wind and sky and the grass. Every fact in nature was a revelation to her. "Why, Poppie? What does it? What was that noise?" The dandelions, the dead bird, a snake--these were miracles to her--as they once were to me. She believed in fairies with devotional fervor and I did nothing to shake her faith, on the contrary I would gladly have shared her credence if I could. Once as we were entering a deep, dark wood, she cautioned me to walk very softly and to speak in a whisper in order that we might catch the Forest Folk at play, and as we trod a specially beautiful forest aisle she cried out, "I _saw_ one, Poppie! Didn't you see that little shining thing?" I could only say, "Yes, it _must_ have been a fairy." I would not destroy her illusion. She inhabited a world of ineffable beauty, a universe in which minute exquisite winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief actors in her dreams. I am aware that many educators consider such reading foolish and harmful, but I care nothing for wire-drawn pedagogic theories. That I did nothing to mar the mystical beauty of the world in which my daughter then dwelt, is my present satisfaction, and I shamelessly acknowledge that I experienced keen pangs of regret as her tender illusions, one after another faded into the chill white light of later day. Without actually deceiving her, I permitted her to believe that I too, heard the wondrous voices of Titania and her elves in convention behind the rose bush, or the whispers of gnomes hiding among the cornrows. Good republican that I was, I listened without reproof to her adoring fealty to Kings and Queens. Her love of Knights and tournaments was openly fostered at my hand. "If she should die out of this, her glorious imaginary world, she shall die happy," was my thought, "and if she lives to look back upon it with a woman's eyes, she shall remember it as a shining world in which her Daddy was a rough but kindly councillor, a mortal of whom no fairy need have fear." The circus was my daughter's royal tournament, an assemblage of all the kings and queens, knights and fairies of her story books. She hated the clowns but the parade of the warriors and their sovereign exalted her. The helmeted spearmen, the lithe charioteers, the hooded drivers sitting astride the heads of vast elephants were characters of the Arabian Nights, passing veritably before her eyes. The winged dancers of the spectacle came straight from the castle of Queen Mab, the pale acrobats were brothers to Hector and Achilles. As she watched them pass she gripped my hand as if to keep touch with reality, her little heart swollen with almost intolerable delight. "It makes me shiver," she whispered, and I understood. As the last horseman of the procession was passing, she asked faintly--"Will it come again, Poppie?" "Yes, it will come once more," I replied, recalling my own sense of loss when the Grand Entry was over. As the queen, haughty of glance, superb in her robe of silver once more neared us, indolently swaying to the movement of the elephant, who bore his housings of purple and gold with stately solemnity, my daughter's tiny body quivered with ecstasy and her beautiful eyes dilated with an intensity of admiration, of worship which made me sad as well as happy, and then just as the resplendent princess was passing for the last time, Mary Isabel rose in her place and waving a kiss to her liege lady cried out in tones of poignant love and despair, "Good-by, dear Queen!" and I, holding her tender palpitant figure in my arms, heard in that slender silver-sweet cry the lament of childhood, childhood whose dreams were passing never to return. * * * * * Chicago did not offer much by way of magnificence but Mary Isabel made the most of what we took her to see. The gold room of the hotel was a part of her imaginary kingdom, conceivably the home of royalty. Standing timidly at the door, she surveyed the golden chairs, the gorgeous ceiling and the deep-toned pictures with a gaze which absorbed every detail. At last she whispered, "Is this the Queen's room?" "Yes," I replied. "If the Queen should come to Chicago she would live here," and I comforted myself by saying, "You shall have your hour of wonder and romance, even at the expense of a prevarication." With a sigh she turned away, or rather permitted me to lead her away. "I'm glad I saw it," she said. "Will the Queen ever come to Chicago again?" "Yes, next spring she will come again," I answered, thus feeding her illusion without a moment's hesitation or a particle of remorse. Her love of royal robes, gold chariots and Queens' houses did not prevent her from listening with deep delight while I read _Jock Johnstone, the Tinkler Lad_, or sang _O'er the Hills In Legions, Boys_. She loved most of the songs I was accustomed to sing but certain of the lines vaguely distressed her. She could not endure the pathos of Nellie Gray. "Oh, my poor Nellie Gray They have taken you away And I'll never see my darling any more" put her into deepest anguish. "_Why_ did they take her away?" she sobbed. "Didn't they _ever_ see her any more?" Only after I explained that they met "down the river" and were very happy ever afterward, would she permit me to finish the ballad. She was similarly troubled by the words, "I can hear the children calling I can see their sad tears falling." "_Why_ are the children calling?" she demanded. She had a curious horror of anything abnormal. Once I took her to see "Alice in Wonderland" thinking that this would be an enchanting experience for her. Not only was it intolerably repellent to her, it was terrifying, and when the bodies of the characters suddenly lengthened, she sought refuge under the seat. All deformities, grotesqueries were to her horrible, appalling. She refused to look at the actors and at last I took her away. One afternoon as we were in the garden together she called to me. "Poppie, see the dead birdie!" On looking I saw a little dead song sparrow. "It's been here all the night and all the day, Poppie. It fell out of the tree when Eddie shooted it. Put it up in the tree again, Poppie." She seemed to think that if it were put back into its home it would go on living and singing. I don't know why this should have moved me as it did, but it blurred my eyes for a moment. My little daughter was face to face with the great mystery. O those magical days! Knowing all too well that they could not last and that to lose any part of them was to be forever cheated, I gave my time to her. Over and over again as I met her deep serene glance, I asked (as other parents have done), "Whence came you? From what dusky night rose your starry eyes? Out of what unillumined void flowered your fairy face? Can it be, as some have said, that you are only an automaton, a physical reaction?" She was the future, my father the past. Birth and death, equally inexplicable, were expressed to me in these two beings, so vital to me, so dependent upon me, and beside me, suffering, joying with me, walked the mother with unfaltering steps. I was in the midst of a novel at this time, another story of Colorado, which I called _Money Magic_, and without doubt all this distraction and travel weakened it, although Howells spoke well of it. "It is one of your best books," he said, when we next met. [Mary Isabel reads the book at intervals and places it next to _Hesper_ and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_.] Marriage, paternity, householding, during these years unquestionably put the brakes on my work as a writer, but I had no desire to return to bachelorhood. Undoubtedly I had lost something, but I had gained more. As a human being I was enriched beyond my deserving by a wife and a child. Perhaps I would have gone farther and mounted higher as a selfish solitary bachelor, but that did not trouble me then, and does not now. Concerned with the problem of providing a comfortable winter home for my family, and happy in maintaining the old house in West Salem as a monument to the memory of my mother, I wrote, committed carpentry and lectured. My frequent absences from home soon made a deep impression on my daughter's mind, and whenever she was naughty I had but to say, "If you do that again Papa will go away to New York," and she would instantly say, "I'm doodie now papa, I'm doodie----" and yet my mention of going to New York could not have been altogether a punishment for I always brought to her some toy or book. Nothing afforded me keener joy than the moment when I showed her the presents I had brought. The fact that she loved to have her heavy-handed old Daddy near her, was a kind of miracle, a concession for which I could not be too grateful. "You shall have a happy childhood," I vowed, "no matter what comes later, you shall remember these days with unalloyed delight. They shall be your heaven, your fairyland." Each month I set down in my diary some new phrase, some development, some significant event in her life, and when she found this out she loved to have me read what she had said, "When I was a little baby." She listened gravely, contrasting her ignorance at two with her wisdom at five. "Was I cute, Daddy? Did you like me then?" she would ask. She early learned the meaning of Decoration Day, which she called "Flag Day," and took pride in the fact that her grand-sire was a soldier. Each year she called for her flag and asked to be taken to the cemetery to see the decorations and to hear the bugles blow above the graves, and I always complied; although to me, each year, a more poignant pathos quavered in the wailing cadence of "Lights out," and the passing of the veterans, thinning so rapidly--was like the march of men toward their open graves. Happily my daughter did not realize any part of this tragic concept. For her it was natural that a soldier should be old and bent. Waving her little flag and shouting with silver-sweet voice she saluted with vague admiration those who were about to die--an age about to die--and in her eyes flamed the spirit of her grand-sire, the love of country which will carry the Republic through every storm no matter from which quarter the wind may spring. So far as I could, I taught her to take up the traditions which were about to slip from the hands of Richard Garland and his sons, "She shall be our representative, the custodian of our faith." For four years she remained our only child, and yet I can not say that she was either spoiled or exacting, on the contrary she was a constant, joyous pupil and a lovely appealing teacher. Through her I rediscovered the wonder of the sunrise and the stars. In the study of her face the lost beauty of the rainbow returned to me, in her presence I felt once more the mystic charm of dusk. I reaccepted the universe, putting aside the measureless horror of its recorded wars. I grew strangely selfish. My interests narrowed to my own country, my own home, to my fireside. Counting upon the world well lost, I built upon my daughter's love. That my wife was equally happy in her parentage was obvious for at times she treated Mary Isabel as if she were a doll, spending many hours of many days designing dainty gowns and hoods for her delight. She could hardly be separated from the child, even for a night and it was in her battles with croup and other nocturnal enemies that her maternal love was tested to the full. I do not assume to know what she felt as a wife, but of her devotion as a mother I am able to write with certainty. On her fell the burden of those hours of sickness in the city, and when the time came for us to go back to the birds and trees of our beloved valley she rejoiced as openly as her daughter. "Now we shall be free of colds and fever," she said. [Illustration: Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonder-working giant, I paid tribute to her in song, in story, and in frankincense and myrrh. Led by her trusting little hand I re- discovered the haunts of fairies and explored once more the land beneath the rainbow.] For the most part this was true. For several summers our daughter lived and throve at her birthplace, free of pain and in idyllic security--and then suddenly, one September day, like the chill shadow from an Autumn stormcloud, misfortune fell upon us. Our daughter became sick, how sick I did not realize until on the eighth day as I took her in my arms I discovered in her a horrifying weakness. Her little body, thinned with fever, hung so laxly, so lightly on my knee that my blood chilled with sudden terror. With a conviction that I dared not even admit to myself, I put her back into her mother's keeping and hurried to the telephone. In ten minutes I had called to her aid the best medical men of the region. Especially did I appeal to Doctor Evans, who had helped to bring her into the world. "You must come," I said to him. "It is life or death." He came, swiftly, but in a few moments after his arrival he gravely announced the dreadful truth. "Your child is in the last stages of diphtheria. I will do what I can for her but she should have had the antitoxin five days ago." For forty-eight hours our baby's life was despaired of, yet fought for by a heroic nurse who refused to leave her for a single hour. Oh, the suspense, the agony of those days and nights, when her mother and I, helpless to serve, were shut away from her, not even permitted to look at her. We could do nothing--nothing but wait through the interminable hours, tortured by the thought that she might be calling for us. During one entire dreadful night we writhed under one doctor's sentence, "The child can not live," and in these hours I discovered that it is the sweetest love that casts the blackest shadow. My joy in my daughter was an agony of fear and remorse--why had I not acted sooner? As I imagined my world without that radiant face, that bird-like voice, I fell into black despair. My only hope was in the nurse, who refused to give her up. I could not talk or write or think of any other thing. The child's sufferings filled my mind with an intolerable ache of apprehension. I had possessed her only a few years and yet she was already woven into the innermost fibers of my heart. That night, which I dare not dwell upon, put my youth definitely behind me. When the blessed word came that she would live, and I was permitted to look upon her small wasted face, I was a care-worn middle-aged man--willing to give up any part of my life to win that tiny sufferer back to health and happiness. Pitiful little Mary Isabel, pale wraith of my sturdy comrade! When she lifted her beseeching eyes to me and faintly, fleetingly smiled--unable to even whisper my name, I, forbidden to speak, could only touch her cheek with my lips and leave her alone with her devoted nurse--for, so weak was she that a breath might have blown her away, back into the endless shadow and silence of the grave. At that moment I asked myself, "What right have men and women to bring exquisite souls like this into a world of disease and death? Why maintain the race? What purpose is subserved by keeping the endless chain of human misery lengthening on?" In times like these I was weaker than my wife. I grant her marvelous fortitude, sustained by something which I did not possess and could not acquire. She met every crisis. I leaned upon her serenity, her courage, her faith in the future which was in no sense a religious creed. It was only a womanly inheritance, something which came down the long line of her maternal Anglo-Saxon ancestors. At last the day came when the nurse permitted me to take my daughter again in my arms and carry her out to the easy chair before the fire. The moment was perfect. The veil of snow falling without, the leaping firelight on the hearth, and the presence of my wife and father, united to fill me with happiness. I became the fond optimist again--the world was not so black--our year was worthy of Thanksgiving after all. Nevertheless I was aware that a bitter ineradicable dusk had gathered in the corners and crannies of the old house. Something depressing, repellent, was in the air. My sense of joy, my feeling of comfort in its seclusion were gone. "Never again will this be a restful home for you or for me," I declared to my daughter. "Its shadow is now an enemy, its isolation a menace." To my wife I said, "Let us go back to the city where the highest type of medical science is at the end of the telephone wire." She consented, and taking the child in my arms, I left the village with no intention of ever returning to it. The fire on my family altar seemed dead, never again to be rekindled. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Old Soldier Gains a New Granddaughter For nearly two years I did not even see the Homestead. My aversion to it remained almost a hatred. The memory of those desolate weeks of quarantine when my little daughter suffered all the agonies of death, still lingered over its walls, a poisonous shadow which time alone could remove. "I shall never live in it again," I repeated to my friends, and when some one wanted to rent it for the summer I consented--with a twinge of pain I must confess, for to open it to strangers even for a few weeks seemed an act of disloyalty to the memory of my mother. Meanwhile I remained a moderately happy and very busy citizen of Chicago. Not content with esthetic conditions and in the belief that my home for years to come must be somewhere in the city's confines, I had resolved to establish a Club which should be (like the Players in New York) a meeting place for artists and writers, a rallying point for Midland Arts. Feeling very keenly the lack of such a rendezvous I said to Lorado, "I believe the time has come when a successful literary and artistic club can be established and maintained." The more I pondered on the situation, the greater the discrepancy between the Chicago of my day and the Boston of my father's day became. "Why was it that the Boston of 1860, a city of three hundred thousand people, should have been so productive of great writers, while this vast inland metropolis of over two million of people remains almost negligible in the world of Art and Letters?" Fuller, who refused, characteristically, to endorse my plan, was openly discouraging. To him the town was a pestilential slough in which he, at any rate, was inextricably mired, and though he was not quite so definite with me, he said to others, "Garland's idea is sure to fail." Clarkson, Browne and Taft, however, heartily joined my committee, and the "Cliff Dwellers," a union of workers in the fine arts, resulted. As president of the organization, I set to work on plans for housing the club, and for months I was absorbed in this work. On the eighteenth of June, 1908, in the midst of my work on the club affairs, another daughter was born to us, a vigorous and shapely babe, with delicate limbs, gray eyes, and a lively disposition, and while my wife, who came through this ordeal much better than before, was debating a choice of names for her, Mary Isabel gravely announced that she had decided to call her sister "Marjorie Christmas," for the reason, as she explained, that these were the nicest names she knew. Trusting first born!--she did not realize the difference which this new-found playmate was about to make in her life, and her joy in being permitted to hold the tiny stranger in her arms was pathetic. My own attitude toward "Marjorie Christmas" was not indifferent but I did not receive her with the same intensity of interest with which I had welcomed my first child. Her place was not waiting for her as was the case of Mary Isabel. She was a lovely infant and perhaps I would have taken her to my arms with keen paternal pride had it not been for the realization that in doing so I was neglecting her sister whose comradeship with me had been so close (so full of exquisite moments) that it could not be transferred to another daughter, no matter how alluring. A second child is--a second child. To further complicate our problem, Constance (as we finally called her), passed under the care of a nursemaid, and for two years I had very little to do with her. I seldom sang this child to sleep as I had done countless times with Mary Isabel. She did not ride on the crook of my elbow, or climb on my back, or look at picture books with me, until she was nearly three years old. We regained her, but we could not regain the hours of companionship we had sacrificed. This experience enables me to understand the unhappiness which comes to so many homes, in which the children are only boarders, foundlings in the care of nurses and governesses. My poverty, my small dwelling have given me the most precious memories of my daughters in their childish innocence. [Connie, who is now as tall as her mother and signs her drawings "Constance Hamlin Garland" is looking over my shoulder at this moment with a sly smile. It has long been known to her that she was, for several years, very much "in the discard" but she does not hold it against me. She knows that it would be hard for me to make a choice between my two jewels to-day--I allude to them as mine because I am writing this book. My wife has a different angle of vision concerning them.] My father came down from West Salem to see this second granddaughter, and on the whole, approved of her, although his tenderest interest, like mine, remained with Mary Isabel, who was now old enough to walk and talk with him. To watch her trotting along the street with that white-haired warrior, her small hand linked with his, was to gain a deeply moving sense of the continuity of life. How slender the link between the generations appears in such a case! Nothing, not even the birth of a new grandchild, could divert my father from his accustomed round of city sight-seeing. As in other times, so now he again demanded to be shown the Stockyards, the Wheat Pit, the Masonic Temple and Lincoln Park. I groaned but I consented. It happened that Ira Morris, one of the owners of the Stockyards, was an acquaintance, and the courtesy and attentions which were shown us gave the old farmer immense satisfaction--and when he found that Frank Logan, of "Logan & Bryan," (a Commission firm to which he had been wont to send his wheat) was also my friend, he began to find in my Chicago life certain compensating particulars, especially as in his presence I assumed a prosperity I did not possess. On paper I sounded fairly well. I was one of the vice-presidents of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. I had a "Town house" as well as a "country place," and under cover of the fact that very few of my friends had ever inspected both properties, I was able in some degree to camouflage my situation. In the city I alluded casually to "my Wisconsin Homestead," and when in West Salem I referred with quiet affluence to "my residence in Woodlawn." Explaining that it was a three story house I passed lightly over the fact that it was only eighteen feet wide! Similarly, in speaking of "our country home" I did not explain to all my friends that it was merely an ugly old farmhouse on the edge of a commonplace village. I stated the truth in each case but not the whole truth. If my city friend, Charles Hutchinson, imagined me spending my summers in a noble mansion on the bank of a shining river it was not my duty to shock him by declaring that there was no water in sight and that my garden was only a truck patch. On the other hand, if my neighbors in West Salem thought of me as living in a handsome brick mansion in Chicago, and writing my stories in a spacious study walled with books, I was not obliged to undeceive them. Fuller, alas! knew all the facts in both cases, and so did Ernest Seton, who had visited us in the country as well as in our city home. Fuller not only knew the ins and outs of my houses; he was also aware that my royalties were dwindling and that my wife was forced to get along with one servant and that we used the street cars habitually. Being president of the Cliff Dwellers was an honor, but the distinction carried with it something of the responsibility of a hotel-keeper as well as the duties of a lecture agent, for one of our methods in building up attendance at the Club, was to announce special luncheons in honor of distinguished visitors from abroad, and the task of arranging these meetings fell usually to me. In truth, the activities of the club took a large part of my time and carried a serious distraction from my work, but I welcomed the diversion, and was more content in my Chicago residence than I had been for several years. Whenever I spoke to Zulime of my failure as a money-getter she loyally declared herself rich in what I had given her, although she still rode to grand dinners in the elevated trains, carrying her slippers in a bag. It was her patient industry, her cheerful acceptance of endless household drudgery which kept me clear of self-conceit. I began to suspect that I would never be able to furnish her with a better home than that which we already owned, and this suspicion sometimes robbed me of rest. This may seem to some of my readers an unworthy admission on the part of a man of letters but it is a perfectly natural and in a sense, logical result of my close associations with several of the most successful writers and artists of my day. It was inevitable that while contrasting my home with theirs, I should occasionally fall into moods of self-disparagement, almost of despair. To see my wife (whom everybody admired) wearing thread-bare cloaks and home-made gowns, to watch her making the best of our crowded little dining-room with its pitiful furniture and its sparse silver, were constant humiliations, an accusation which embittered me especially as I saw no prospect of ever providing anything more worthy of her care. For a woman of taste, wearing made-over gowns is a very real hardship, but Zulime bore her deprivations with heroic cheerfulness, taking a never-failing delight in our narrow home. She made our table a notable meeting place, for, if we had few dollars we owned many friends who found their way to us, and often from our commonplace little portal we plodded away in the rain or snow to dine in the stately palaces of the rich,--kings of commerce and finance. Apparently we were everywhere welcome, and that this was due almost entirely to the winning personality of my wife, I freely acknowledge. That she had scores of devoted admirers was only too evident, for the telephone bell rang almost continuously of a morning. Always ready to give her time, her skill and her abounding sympathy to those who made piteous demands upon her, she permitted these incessant telephone interruptions, although I charged her with being foolishly prodigal in this regard. If she felt resentful of the narrow walls in which I had confined her, she did not complain. Whatever my wife's state of mind may have been these were restless years for me. As an officer of several organizations and as lecturer, I was traveling much of the time, mostly on the trail between New York City and Chicago. Even when at home I had only three morning hours for writing--but that was not the worst of it. My convictions concerning my literary mission were in process of disintegration. My children, my manifold duties as theatrical up-lifter and club promoter, together with a swift letting down of my mental and physical powers, caused me to question the value of all my writing. I went so far as to say, "As a writer I have failed. Perhaps I can be of service as a citizen," with my Oklahoma farms bringing in a small annual income, the scrape of my pen became a weariness. That I was passing from robust manhood to middle age was also evident to me and I didn't like that. I resented deepening wrinkles, whitening hairs and the sense of weariness which came over me at the end of my morning's work. My power of concentration was lessening. Noises irritated me and little things distracted me. I could no longer bend to my desk for five hours in complete absorption. How my wife endured me during those years I can not explain. The chirp of my babies' voices, the ring of the telephone, the rattle of the garbage cart, the whistle of the postman--each annoyance chopped into my composition, and as my afternoons and evenings had no value in a literary way, I was often completely defeated for the day. Altogether and inevitably my work as a fictionist sank into an unimportant place. I was on the down-grade, that was evident. Writing was a tiresome habit. I was in a rut and longing to get out--to be forced out. The annual dinner of the Institute of Arts and Letters that year was not cheering. With the loss of four members, Stedman, Aldrich, MacDowell and St. Gaudens, I realized as never before the swift changes at work in American letters. It was my duty and my privilege to speak that night in memory of MacDowell who had so often been my seat-mate, and as I looked around that small circle of familiar faces, a scene of loss, a perception of decay came over me like a keen wind from out a desolate landscape. On every head the snows had thickened, on every face a shadow rested. All--all were hastening to be history. * * * * * From that circle of my elders in the East, I returned to my children in the West with a sense of returning to the future. The radiant joy of Mary Isabel's face as I displayed her presents, a ring and a story book, restored me to something like a normal faith in the world. "Wead to me, wead to me!" was now her insistent plea, and putting aside all other concerns I turned the pages of her new book, realizing that to her the universe was still a great and never-ending fairy tale, and her Daddy a wonder-working magician, an amiable ogre. Her eager voice, her raptured attention enabled me to recover, for a moment, a wholesome faith and joy in my world--a world which was growing gray and wan and cold with terrifying swiftness. "Your childhood shall be as happy as my powers will permit," I vowed once again as I looked into her uplifted face. "You shall have only pleasant memories of me," and in this spirit I gave her the best of myself. I taught her to read, I told her stories which linked her mind with that of her pioneer grandmother, filling her brain with traditions of the middle border. Dear little daughter, her daddy was veritably a nobleman, her mother a queen--in those days! My wife says that for ten years I was always either on the point of going somewhere, or just returning, and as I turn the pages of my diaries, I find this to be true, but also I find frequent mention of meetings with John Burroughs, Bacheller, Gilder, Alexander, Madame Modjeska, William Vaughn Moody and many others of my friends distinguished in the arts. All my publishing interests and most of my literary friends were in New York (my support came from there), hence my frequent coming and going. Whether this constant change, these sudden and violent contrasts in my way of life strengthened my fictional faculty or weakened it, I can not say, but I do know that as the head of a family I found concentrated effort increasingly difficult and at times very nearly impossible. Constance was ailing for a year, and was a source of care, of pain to me, as to her mother. At times, many times, her sufferings filled me with a passionate pity, a sense of rage, of helplessness. Indeed both children were subject to throat and lung disorders, especially when in the city. Oh, those cruel coughing spells, those nights of burning fever, those alarming hours of stupor or of terrifying delirium! "Can science find no check upon these recurrent forms of disease?" I demanded of our doctor. "Must humanity forever suffer the agonies of diphtheria and pneumonia? If so why bring children into the world?" We always knew when these disorders had set in, we knew all the signs but no medicine availed to stop their progress. Each attack ran its course in spite of nurse and drug whilst I raged helplessly and Zulime grew hollow-eyed with anxious midnight vigil. Death was a never-absent hovering shadow when those bitter winter winds were blowing, and realizing this I came to hate the great desolate city in which we lived, and to long with the most passionate ardor for the coming of April's sun. One of the first signs of spring (so far as Mary Isabel was concerned) was the opening of the "White City," a pleasure park near us, and the second event quite as conclusive and much more exciting was the coming of the circus. These were the red letter days in her vernal calendar, and were inescapable outings, for her memory was tenacious. Each May she demanded to be taken to the "Fite City" and later "the Kings and Queens" and "the fairies" of the circus claimed her worship. Together we saw these glorious sights, which filled her little soul with rapture. For two years my estrangement from the old Homestead was complete, but when one April day I found myself passing it on my way to St. Paul, I was constrained to stop off just to see how my father and the garden were coming on. This was late April, and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of the Homestead's loveliest associations came back to soften my mood, to regain my love. Wrought upon by the ever-returning youth of the world--a world to which my daughters were akin, I relented, "We will come back. Cruel as some of its memories are, this is home, I belong here, and so does Mary Isabel." The sunlight streaming into my mother's chamber lay like a fairy carpet on the floor, waiting for the dancing feet of her grandchildren. Her spirit filled the room, calling to me, consoling me, convincing me. All day I worked at trimming vines, and planting flowers while the robins chuckled from the lawn, and the maples expanded overhead. How spacious and wide and safe the yard appeared, a natural playground for the use of children. And so it came about that on June seventeenth, just before Constance's second birthday, Mary Isabel and I took the night train for West Salem, leaving Zulime and the nurse to follow next morning. Greatly excited at the prospect of going to sleep on the cars my daughter went to her bed. "I kick for joy," she said, her eyes shining with elfin delight. She loved the "little house" as she called her berth, and for an hour she lay peering out at the moon. "It follows us!" she cried out in pleased surprise. "Yes, it is a kindly moon. It will keep right along overhead all the way to West Salem. But you must go to sleep now. I shall call you early in the morning to meet Grandfather." She was a reasonable soul, entirely confident of my care, and so, putting her head on my arm, she went away to dreamland. At such times my literary ambitions and failures were of no account. [To wish myself back there with that tiny form beside me is folly--but I do--I do!] In the cool lusciousness of the June morning we met Grandpa, and as we entered the gate of the Homestead (which Mary Isabel only dimly remembered), I said, "This is your home, daughter, you belong here." "Can I pick the flowers? Can I walk on the grass?" she asked quickly. "Yes, pick all you want. You can _roll_ on the grass if you wish." Too excited to eat any breakfast, she ran from posy bed to posy bed, and from tree to tree, indefatigable as a bee or humming-bird. At five in the afternoon Zulime and Constance came. In the weeks which followed I renewed my childhood. To Mary Isabel as to me at her age, the cornfield was a vast mysterious forest, and the rainbow an overpowering miracle. "Don't they have rainbows in the city?" she asked one evening as we were watching a glorious arch fade out of the sky above the hills. "Not such big beautiful double ones," I replied. "They haven't room for them in the city." She took the same delight in the flame and flare of the Fourth of July which I once owned. She loved to walk in the fields. Snakes, bugs, worms and spiders enthralled her. Each hour brought its vivid message, its wonder and its delight, and when now and again she was allowed to explore the garden with me at night, the murk and the stars, and the stealthily moving winds in the corn, scared, awed her. At such moments the universe was a delicious mystery. Keeping close hold upon my hand she whispered with excitement, "What was that, Poppie? What was that noise? Was it a gnome?" For her I built a "House" high in the big maple, and there she often climbed, spending many happy hours singing to her dollies or conning over her picture books. Her face shone down upon me radiant with life's ecstasy. Baby Constance was to her a toy, a doll, I was her companion, her playmate. The garden seemed fashioned for her uses, and whenever I saw her among the flowers or sitting on the lawn, I forgot my writing, realizing that these were golden days for me as well as for her,--days that would pass like waves of light across the wheat. Together with Zulime I received the house back into my affection. Once more I thought of it as something permanent, a sure refuge in time of trouble. It gave us both a comforting sense of security to know that we could, at need, come back to it and live in comfort. With no hope of attaining a larger income, saving money was earning money for us both. In this spirit I put in another bathroom, and enlarged the dining-room--doing much of the work with my own hands. Nothing could be more idyllic than our daily routine that summer. Our diversions, dependent on a love of odorous fields, colorful hills and fruitful vines, were of arcadian content. Our wealth expressed in nuts and apples and berries was ample. With Mary Isabel I assumed that wild grapes were enormously important articles of food. "Without them we might grow hungry this winter," I warned her. In this spirit we harvested, intent as chipmunks. After the nurse left us the two children slept together on an upstairs screened-in porch, and every night, just before they went to sleep, it was my habit to visit them. Lying down between them with a small head on each arm, I told them stories or answered the questions which were suggested by the trees and the sky. "What are stars? What makes the moon spotted? What does iron come from? How do people make wall paper?" and many others equally elemental. It was a tender hour for me and a delicious one for them. Gradually as they grew older, they fell into the habit of saying, "Now tell us about when you were a little boy," and so I was led to freshen up on _A Son of the Middle Border_, which I had begun to rewrite. They could never get enough of these reminiscences and when, at nine o'clock, I said, "Daughties, you must go to sleep," they pleaded for "Just one more," and from this interest I derived a foolish hope that the book, if it should ever get published, would be successful. It was sweet to hear those soft voices demanding an explanation of the universe whose wonders they were rediscovering in their turn. Every changing season, every expanding leaf was magical to them. A bat skittering about the chimney, the rustle of a breeze in the maples, were of sinister significance requiring explanation, and when at last I went away and they began to softly sing their wistful little evening prayer, one which Mary Isabel had composed, life seemed worthwhile even to me. I forgot the irrevocable past and confronted old age with composure. Meanwhile my father's mind was becoming more and more reminiscent. His stories once so vivid and so full of detail had narrowed down to a few familiar phrases. "Just then Sherman and his staff came riding along," or "When I was camped on the upper waters of the Wisconsin." His memory was failing and so was his sense of hearing. He seldom quoted from a book, but he still cited Blaine's speeches or referred to Lincoln's anecdotes, and certain of Grant's phrases were often on his lips. In all his interests he remained objective, concerned with the world of action not with the library, and while he made no effort to talk down to Mary Isabel, he contrived to win her adoration, perhaps because she detected in his voice his adoring love for her. In the mist of his glance was the tender worship of youth on the part of age. Always of a Sunday we sang for him and sometimes Uncle Frank, the last of the McClintocks, gray haired and lean and bent, came in with his fiddle and played while the children danced in the light of our fire, so lithe, so happy, so fairy-like in their loveliness that he and Lorette sat in silence, a silence which was at once tender and tragic. There was something alien as well as marvelous in the dramatic movements of those small forms. Witnessing such scenes, moved by something elemental in their decay, I continued to brood over the manuscript which was to be a kind of autobiography, the blended story of the vicissitudes of the Garlands and the McClintocks. At times I worked upon it to the exclusion of all else, and when I read a part of the tale to Mary Isabel and found that she understood it and liked it, I was heartened. Consider this! I now had a daughter to whom I could read my manuscript! Where did that personality come from? Was her soul merely the automatic reaction of a material organism against a material environment? Was her spirit dependent on the life of its little body or could it live on independent of the flesh? Acknowledging the benumbing, hopeless mystery of it all, I continued to live for my children, finding in them my comfort and my justification. I have never known anything more perfect than some of those mid-August days when on some woodland slope, we gathered the luscious musky fruit of wild blackberry vines and at our camp fire broiled our steak and made our coffee for our evening, open-air meal. There were no flies, no mosquitoes, no snakes, and the hillsides were abloom with luscious shining berries, berries so ripe they fell into our hands with the slightest touch, and so tender that they melted in our mouths. The wind filled with the odor of yellowing corn, and the smell of nuts and leaves, carried our songs to the mist-filled valley below us, and the children playing on the smooth sward found our world a paradise. As the cool dusk began to cover the farms below us, we sang "Juanita" and "Kentucky Home" and told our last stories while the children lay at our feet, silent with rapture as I used to be, in similar circumstances, forty years before. And then when the fire had died down and sleepy babies were ready to turn their faces bedward, we drove slowly down the winding lane to the dust-covered bridge, past the small cemetery where mother was sleeping, back to where the broad-roofed old house was waiting for us like some huge, faithful creature yearning to receive us once again beneath its wings. It was commonplace to our neighbors and without special significance to the world, but to my children it was noble and beautiful and poetic--it was home. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE "Cavanagh" and the "Winds of Destiny" No doubt the reader has come to the conclusion, at this point, that my habits as an author were not in the least like those of Burroughs or Howells. There has never been anything cloistered about my life, on the contrary my study has always been a point of departure rather than a cell of meditation. From Elm Street, from the Homestead, I frequently darted away to the plains or the Rocky Mountains, keenly aware of the fact that the miner and cattleman, the trapper and the trailer were being pushed into ever remoter valleys by the men of the hoe and the spade, and that the customs and habits which the mountaineer had established were about to pass, precisely as the blossoming prairies had long since been broken and fenced and made commonplace by the plow. That the destruction of the eagle and the mountain lion marked another stage of that remorseless march which is called civilization I fully recognized and--in a certain sense--approved, although the raising of billions of hens and pigs admittedly useful, was not to me an inspiring employment of human energy. The long-horn white-faced steer was more picturesque than a "Mooly" cow. Doubtless a dairyman is a more valuable citizen in the long run than a prospector or miner, but he does not so easily appeal to the imagination. To wade irrigating ditches, hoe in hand, is not incompatible with the noblest manhood, but it is none the less true that men riding the trail or exploring ledges of quartz are more alluring characters to the novelist--at least that was the way I felt in 1909 when I began to shape another book concerning the great drama which was going on in the forests of the High Country. For more than fifteen years, while trailing among the mountains of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, I had seen the Forest Service, under Gifford Pinchot's leadership, gradually getting into effect. I had seen the silver miner disappear and the army of forest rangers grow from a handful of hardy cowboys and "lonesome men" into a disciplined force of over two thousand young foresters who represented in some degree the science and the patriotism of their chief. As in _Hesper_ and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_ I had attempted to depict certain types of the red men, miners and ranchers. I now began to study the mountain vedettes from the point of view of the Forest Ranger, a federal officer who represented our newly acquired ideals of Conservation, and whose duty it was to act as custodian of the National Forests. I decided to write a novel which should, in some degree, delineate the heroic side of this warden's solitary life as I had seen it and shared it in a half-dozen forests in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. In this writing I put myself at the opposite pole from the scenes of _The Shadow World_, a study of psychic phenomena with which I had been deeply involved for a year or more. From dark cabinets in murky seance chambers, from contact with morbid, death-fearing, light-avoiding residents of crowded apartments, I now found myself riding once again ten thousand feet above sea level with men who "took chances" almost every hour of their lives--not from any reckless defiance of death but merely by way of duty, men who lived alone and rode alone, men in whose ears the mountain streams as they fell from the white silences of the snows, uttered songs of exultation. In the presence of these hardy trailers the doings of darkened seance rooms seemed morbid, if not actually insane. The stark heroism of these forest guards, their loyalty to a far-off chieftain (whom they knew only by name) appealed to me with increasing power. Their problem became my problem. More than this they kindled my admiration, for many of them possessed the cowboy's masterful skill with bronchos, his deft handling of rope and gun and the grace which had made him the most admired figure in our literature,--but in addition to all this, they had something finer, something which the cowboy often lacked. At their best they manifested the loyalty of soldiers. Heedful of the Federal Government, they strove to dispense justice over the lands which had been allotted to their care, and their flags--the Stars and Stripes--as I came upon them fluttering from the peaks of their cabins were to me the guidons of a new and valiant skirmish line. They were of the Border in a new and noble sense. In short the Federal Ranger was a hero made to my hand. Not all the soldiers in the service were of this large mold, I admit, but many of those I had met did possess precisely the qualities I have outlined. Ready, cheerful, undaunted in the face of danger, some of them had the capacity for lonely action which rendered them as admirable in their way as any of the long line of frontiersmen who had made the winning of the West an epic of singular hardihood. To fight cold and snow and loneliness during long months, with no one looking on, calls for stern resolution. Such work is directly antithetic to that of the city fireman who goes to his duties with a crowd looking on. The ranger has only his own conscience as spectator. For many weeks he does not even see his supervisor. To the writing of _Cavanagh_ I came, therefore, in the spirit of one who had discovered not only a new hero but the reverse side of the squatter's shield. Just as in my studies for _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, I had come upon the seamy side of the cattleman's activity, so now I perceived that many of the men who had settled on the national forests were merely adventurers trying to get something for nothing. To filch Uncle Sam's gold, to pasture on his grass, to dig his coal and seize his water-power--these were the real designs of the claim-holders, while the ranger was in effect a federal policeman, the guardian of a domain whose wealth was the heritage of us all. He was the prophet of a new order, the evangel of a new faith. The actual composition of _Cavanagh_ began as I was riding the glorious trails around Cloud Peak in the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming in the summer of 1908, one of the most beautiful of all my outings, for while the Big Horns are low and tame compared to the Wind River Range, yet the play of their lights and shadows, their clouds, and their mist was as romantic as anything I had ever encountered. I recall riding alone down the eastern slope one afternoon, while prodigious rivers of cloud--white as wool and soundless as light--descended the cañon on my right and spread above the foothills, forming a level sea out of which the high dark peaks rose like rocky islands. This flood came so swiftly, flowed so marvelously and enveloped my world so silently that the granite ledges appeared to melt beneath my horse's feet. At times the vapor closed densely round me, shutting out even the rocks of the trail and as I cautiously descended, I almost bumped astonished steers whose heads burst from the mist as if through a covered hoop. The high granite crags on the opposite side of the ravine took on the shapes of ruined castles seated on sloping shores by foaming seas, their smooth lawns reaching to the foam. At one point, as I came out upon a ledge which overlooked the valley, I perceived my horse's shadow floating on the phantom ocean far below me, a dark equestrian statue encircled with a triple-ringed halo of fire. In all my mountain experiences I had never seen anything so marvelous. At another time while riding up the trail, I perceived above my head a far-stretching roof of seamless cloud. As I rose, coming closer and closer to it, it seemed a ceiling just above my reach, then my head merged in it. A kind of dry mist surrounded me--and for ten or fifteen minutes I mounted through this luminous, strangely shrouding, all pervasive, mountain cloud. My horse, feeling his way with cautious care, steadily mounted and soon we burst out into the clear sunlight above. While still the mist curled about my horse's hoofs, I looked across a shoreless ocean with only Cloud Peak and its granite crags looming above its surface. I describe these two spectacular effects out of many others merely to suggest the splendors which inspired me, and which, as I imagined, enriched the daily walk of the forest guard. "To get into my story some part of this glory, my hero must be something of a nature lover--as many rangers are," I argued, and this was true. Before a man will consent to ride the lonely road which leads to his cabin high in the forest, he must not only have a heart which thrills to the wonder of the lonely places, he must be self-sufficing and fearless. I rode with several such men and out of my experiences with them I composed the character of _Ross Cavanagh_. The actual writing of this novel was begun on my forty-ninth birthday at my desk in the old Homestead, and I started off with enthusiasm notwithstanding the fact that Fuller, who was visiting me at the time, expressed only a tepid interest in my "theme." "Why concern yourself with forestry?" he asked. "No one wants to read about the ranger and his problems. Grapple with Chicago--or New York. That's the only way to do a 'best seller.'" Henry always amused me but never so much as when tolerating rural joys. He was the exact opposite of my _Cavanagh_. Everything pastoral wearied him or irritated him. The "yelping" of the robins, the "drone" of the katydids, the "eternal twitter" of the sparrows infuriated him. The "accursed roosters" unseasonably wakened him in the morning, the "silly cackle" of the chickens prevented him from writing. Flowers bored him and the weather was always too cold or too hot, too damp or too dusty. Butterflies filled him with pessimistic forebodings of generations of cabbage worms. Moths suggested ruined coat collars--only at night, before our fire, with nature safely and firmly shut out, did he regain his customary and charming humor. He belonged to the brick pavement, the electric-car line. He did not mind being awakened by the "twitter" of a milk cart. The "yelp" of the ice man, the snort of a six o'clock switch engine and the "cackle" of a laundry wagon formed for him a pleasant morning symphony. The clatter of an elevated train was with him the normal accompaniment of dawn, but the poetry of the pastoral--well, it didn't exist, that's all--except in "maudlin verses of lying sentimentalists." "I'm like George Ade's clerk: I never enjoy my vacation till I get back to the city." To all such diatribes Zulime and I gave delighted ear. We rejoiced in his comment, for we did not believe a word of it, it was all a part of Henry's delightful perversity. For six consecutive weeks I bent to the work of writing my novel undisturbed. A peaceful season which I shall long remember, for almost every afternoon, when the weather permitted, we joined the Dudleys and McKees and drove to some lovely spot on the river bank or sought out some half-hidden spring at the far end of a coulee and there, while the children picked nuts or apples and the women read magazines or stitched, George Dudley and I lighted our fire and broiled our steak. Nothing could be simpler, homelier, more wholesome, than this life, and I was able to do nearly half my story before a return to Chicago became necessary. Practically all of the spring months of 1910 were given to revising and proof-reading _Cavanagh, Forest Ranger_, which had genuinely interested me and which should have been as important in my scheme of delineating the West as _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, but it wasn't. It was too controversial, and besides I did not give it time enough. I should have taken another year to it--but I didn't. I permitted myself to be hurried by Duneka, who was (like most publishers) enslaved to a program. By April it was off my hands. After the last page of this proof was returned to the printer a sense of weakness, of age, a feeling altogether new to me, led me to say to Fuller, "I shall never do another book. I have finished what I started out to do, I have pictured certain broad phases of the West as I know it, and I'm done. I am out of commission." Fuller, who had been of this mood for several years, was not content to have me assume a despairing attitude. "You're just tired, that's all," he insisted. "You'll come to a new theme soon." * * * * * Movement is swift on the Border. Nothing endures for more than a generation. No family really takes root. Every man is on his way. Cities come and builders go. Unfinished edifices are left behind in order that something new and grander may be started. Some other field is better than the one we are reaping. I do not condemn this, I believe in it. It is America's genius. We are all experimenters, pioneers, progressives. For years I had in mind to write a book to be called _The Winds of Destiny_, in which I should take up one by one the differing careers of my classmates and friends who had found our little prairie town too narrow and too poor to afford them fullest action. I never got to it, but from time to time I found some new material for it--material which, alas! I can not now find imagination enough to vitalize. For example: One morning during a stay in New York, I found among my letters a note from an almost forgotten school-fellow, inviting me to dine with himself and wife at the Ritzdorf. The name on this note-head developed on the negative plate of my memory, the picture of two shock-headed, slender-legged schoolboys pacing solemnly, regularly, morning after morning, into the campus of the Seminary in Osage, Iowa. Their arms were always laden with books, their big brows bulging with thought. Invariably marching side by side like a faithful team of horses, turning aside neither to fight nor to play, they provoked laughter. They were the sons of a farmer (a man of small means, who lived a mile or two from the village), and although they were familiar figures in the school they could hardly be said to be a part of it. Their poverty, their homespun trousers which were usually too short and too tight, and their poverty together with a natural shyness, kept them out of school affairs, although they were always at the top of their classes. To me they were worthy--though a bit grotesque. My letter of invitation was from the younger of these boys, and having accepted his invitation, I was a bit in doubt as to what I should wear, for he had written, "with Mrs. Roberts and myself," and something in the tone of the letter had decided me to play safe. I put on evening dress, and it was well I did, for Ben met me in irreproachable dinner coat and presented his wife, a handsome and beautifully gowned woman, quite in the manner of a city-bred host. No one looking at us as we sat at our flower-decked table would have imagined that he or I had ever been plow-boys of the Middle Border. As the dinner went on I lost all my conviction that the preternaturally solemn, heavy-footed lad of 1880 was in any way connected with this rich middle-aged inventor, but then he was probably having the same difficulty relating me with the beardless senior of 1881. On the surface our dinner was a pleasant and rather conventional meeting, and yet the more it is dwelt upon the more significant it becomes. Starting from almost the same point, with somewhat similar handicaps, we two had "arrived," though at widely separated goals. Each of our courses was characteristically American, and each was in demonstration--for the millionth time--of the magic power of the open lands. In the free air of the Middle Border, this man's genius for inventing had full power of expansion, and in result he was in possession of a fortune, whilst I, in my literary way, had won what my kindest critics called success--by another kind of service. My position though less secure and far less remunerative, was none the less honorable--that I shall insist on saying even though I must admit that in the eyes of my Seminary classmates the inventor made the handsomer showing. As the owner of a patent bringing in many thousands of dollars per year in royalty he had certain very definite claims to respect which I lacked. My home in contrast with his would have seemed very humble. Measured by material things, his imagination had proved enormously more potent than mine. This meeting not only led me to re-value my own achievement, it brought up to me with peculiar pathos the career of another classmate, my comrade Burton Babcock, whom I (in 1898) had left standing on the bank of the Stickeen River in Alaska. He, too, was characteristically American. He had carried out his plan. After leading his pack train across the divide to the upper waters of the Yukon, he had built a raft and floated down the Hotalinqua. He had been frozen in, and had spent the winter in a windowless hut in the deep snow of an arctic landscape--and when, after incredible hardships, he had reached the Klondike, he had found himself almost as far from a gold claim as ever. All the mines were monopolized. For the next four years he had alternately worked for wages and prospected for himself. One year he had "mushed" in the Copper River Country and later in the Tanana. In these explorations he went alone, and once he sledged far within the Arctic circle with only two dogs to keep him company. He became one of the most daring and persistent prospectors and yet he had always been just a little too late. He had never shared in any of the big strikes. At last, after five years of this disheartening life, he had succeeded in breaking away from the fatal lure of the North. Returning to Anacortes on Puget Sound, he had taken up the threads of his life at the point where he had dropped them, to meet me, at Ashcroft, in '98, and on my little daughter's wrist was a bracelet, a string of nuggets, which represented all that he had been able to win from the desolate North. He left his youth in Alaska. He was an old and broken man when he landed in Seattle, a silent, gray and introspective philosopher. Seeking out the cabin he had built on the Skagit River, he resumed his residence there, solitary and somber. In winter he cooked for a nearby lumber camp, in summer he served as watchman for an electric power company, patient, faithful, brooding over his books, austere, taciturn, mystical. He read much on occult subjects, and corresponded ceaselessly with a certain school of esoteric philosophy, reaching at last a lofty serenity which approached content. He wrote me that the men of the lumber camp spoke of him as a "queer old cuss," but that disturbed him not at all. To me, however, he uttered his mind freely, and as I followed him thus, in imagination, remembering him as he once was, my graceful companion on the bright Iowa prairie, my sense of something futile in his whole life was deepened into pain. His letters contained no complaint. He dwelt mainly upon his trips into the forest (occasional vacations from repulsive labor), but I was able to infer from a word here and there, his detestation of the coarse jests and senseless arguments of his "Siwash" companions. His philosophy prevented repining; but he could not entirely conceal his moods of loneliness, of defeat. My heart ached as I thought of him, wearing his life away in the solitude of the forest, or in waiting on a crowd of unthinking lumber jacks, but I could do little to aid him. I had sent him books and loaned him money whenever he would accept it (which was seldom), and I had offered each year to bring him back to the Middle West and put him on a farm; but to all these suggestions he continued to repeat, "I can't bring myself to it. I can't return, a defeated explorer." Like my uncle David, he preferred to walk the path he had chosen, no matter to what depth it might descend. Not long after this meeting with Ben and while I was still absorbed in youthful memories, dreaming of my prairie comrades, a letter came to me from Blanche Babcock, telling me that her brother Burton, my boyhood chum, my companion on The Long Trail to the Yukon, had crossed the Wide Dark River, and with this news, a sense of heavy loss darkened my day. It was as if a part, and no small part, of my life had slipped away from me, irrecoverably, into a soundless abyss. For more than forty years this singular soul had been a subject of my care (at times he had been closer to me than my own brother), and now he had vanished from the tangible realities of his mountain home into the unmapped region whose blind trails we had so often manfully discussed. By all the laws which his family recognized, his life was a failure. To Ben Roberts he was a derelict--and yet to me a kind of elemental dignity lay in the attitude he had maintained when surrounded by coarse and ignorant workmen. He remained unmoved, uncontaminated. His mind inhabited a calm inner region beyond the reach of any coarse word or mocking phrase. Growing ever more mystical as he grew older he had gone his lonely way bent and gray and silent, a student of the forest and the stream. So far as I know he never uttered a bitter or despairing word, and when the final great boundary river confronted him he entered it with the same courage with which he ferried the Yukon or crossed the ice fields of Iskoot. It happened that on the day this news came to me one of my Chicago friends sent their beautiful motor car to fetch Zulime and me to the opera, and as the children saw us in our evening dress, they cried out, "Oh papa, mama is a queen and you look like a king!" Thus it happened that I rode away in a luxury which I had not earned at the very moment when my faithful trail-mate, after toiling all his life, was passing to his grave wifeless, childless and unknown. "I wish I could have shared just a little of my good fortune with him," I said to Zulime, who really was as stately as a queen. But the best of all my possessions I would not, could not, share with any one--I mean the adoration of my little daughters to whom I possessed the majesty of an emperor. "Here his trail ends. Here by the landing I wait the same oar--the slow, silent one. We each go alone--no man with another, Each into the gloom of the swift, black flood. Burt, it is hard, but here we must sever. The gray boatman waits, and you--you go first. All is dark over there where the dim boat is rocking, But that is no matter--no trailer need fear, For clearly we're told, the powers which lead us, Will govern the game till the end of the day. Good-by!--Here the trail ends!" * * * * * Christmas came this year with special significance. Two pairs of eager eyes now peered at all bundles which came into the house. The faith and love and eager hope of my daughters made amends for the world's lack of interest in my writings. They and their mother were my wealth, their love compensated me for the slender dribble of my royalties. "Our Christmas shall be as happy as that of any millionaire," was the thought which actuated me in the purchase and decoration of our tree. Wealth was highly desirable, but absurd as it may seem I had no desire to change places with any merchant or banker. The foolish notion that something historical in my work made it worth while, supported me in my toil. It was a hazy kind of comfort, I will concede, but I wrapped myself in it, and stole away out into the street to buy and sneak a Christmas tree up the back stairs. It was a noble tree, warranted to reach the ceiling of our library. Father came down from Wisconsin and Franklin came up from Oklahoma to help me decorate it, and when, on Christmas morning, they both rose with me, and went down to light the candles, they were almost as gleeful as I. Mary Isabel was awake and piping from the top of the stairs, "Is it time, papa? Can we come now, papa?" and at last when the tower of glory was alight I called back, "Yes, now you may all come." Slowly she descended step by step, clinging to her mother, who was carrying Constance. Very slowly the procession approached, for the little voluptuary in front was loath as well as eager--avid to enjoy yet hesitating to devour. Suddenly she saw, and into her face flamed an expression of wonder, of awe, of adoration, a look such as a cherub angel might wear while confronting The Great White Throne, a kind of rapture, humble yet exultant. Silently she crept toward the center of the room, turning her eyes from this and to that unearthly splendor, yet always bringing them back to rest upon the faces of the dollies, sitting so still and so radiant beneath the glittering boughs. At last with a little gasping cry of joy she seized the largest and most splendid of these wondrous beings and clasped it to her breast, while Constance sat silent with her awe. Their Christmas was complete. Another shining mark had been set in the upward slope of their happy march! Nothing, not even Death himself, can rob me of that precious memory. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Old Homestead Suffers Disaster The summer of 1912, so stormy in a political sense was singularly serene and happy for us. The old house had been received back into favor. It was beloved by us all but especially was it dear to my children. To Mary Isabel it possessed a value which it could not have to any of us, for it was her birth-place and she knew every stick and stone of it. To her it had all the glamor of a childhood home in summer time. On Sunday, October 6, we began to plan our return to the city, and as we sat about our fire that night the big room never looked so warm, so homelike, so permanent. The deep fireplace was ablaze with light, and the walls packed with books and hung with pictures spoke of a realized ideal. On the tall settee (which I had built myself), lay a richly-colored balletta Navajo blanket, one that I had bought of a Flathead Indian in St. Ignatius. Others from Zuni and Ganado covered the floor. Over the piano "Apple Blossom Time," a wedding present from John Ennecking glowed like a jewel in the light of the quaint electric candles which had been set in the sockets of hammered brass sconces. In short, the place had the mellow charm of a completed home, and I said to Zulime "There isn't much more to do to it. It is rude and queer, a mixture of Paris, Boston, and the Wild West; but it belongs to us." It was in truth a union of what we both represented, including our poverty, for it was all cheap and humble. My father, white-haired, eighty-two years of age was living with us again, basking in the light of our fire and smiling at his grandchildren, who with lithe limbs and sweet young voices were singing and circling before him. I was glad to have him back in mother's room, and to him and to those who were to be his care-takers for the winter I gravely repeated, "I want everything kept just as it is. I want to feel that we can come back to it at any time and find every object in place, including the fire." To which father replied, "I don't want to change it. It suits me." The children, darting out of the music-room (which was the "dressing-room" of their stage), swung their Japanese lanterns, enacting once again their pretty little play, and then our guests rose two by two and went away. Zulime led the march to bed, the lights were turned out and the clear, crisp, odorous October night closed over our scene. As I was about to leave the low-ceiled library, I took another look at it saying to myself, "It seems absurd to abandon this roomy, human habitation for a cramped little dwelling on a city lot." But with a sense of what the city offered by way of compensation, I climbed the old-fashioned, crooked, narrow stairway to my bed in the chamber over the music-room, content to say good-by for the winter.... It was dusky dawn when I awoke, with a sense of alarm, unable to tell what had awakened me. For several seconds I lay in confusion and vague suspense. Then a cry, a strange cry--a woman's scream--arose, followed by a rush of feet. Other cries, and the shrieks of children succeeded close, one upon the other. My first thought was, "Constance has fallen." I sprang from my bed and was standing in the middle of the room when I heard Zulime cross the floor beneath me, and a moment later she called up the stairway, "Hamlin, _Fan has set the house on fire_!" My heart was gripped as if by an icy hand for I knew how inflammable the whole building was, and without stopping to put on coat or slippers, I ran swiftly down the stairs. As I entered the sitting-room so silent, so peaceful, so undisturbed, it seemed that my alarm was only a part of a dream till the sobbing of my daughters and my wife's voice at the telephone calling for help, convinced me of the frightful reality. I heard, too, the ominous crackling of flames in the kitchen. Pushing open the swinging door I confronted a wall of smoke. One-half of the floor was already consumed, and along the linoleum a sharply-defined line of fire told that it rose from burning oil--and yet I could not quite believe it, even then. It was like a scene in a motion picture play. My first thought was to check, to hold back the flames, till help came. The garden hose was lying out under a tree (I had put it there the day before) and with desperate haste I hurried to attach it to the water pipes. I saw father in the yard, but he uttered no word. We were each thinking the same thought--"_The old homestead is doomed. Our life here is ended._" The hose was heavy and sanely perverse, and it seemed an age before I had the water turned on. Catching up the nozzle I approached the kitchen door. The thin stream had no effect, and the heat was so intense I could not face it. Throwing down the hose I reëntered the house. The children, hysterical with fright, were just leaving by the east door and Zulime was upstairs. Opening the front door I stepped out upon the porch to call for help. The beauty of the morning, its stillness, its serenity, its odorous opulence, struck upon my senses with a kind of ironic benignancy, as if to say, "Why agonize over so small a thing?" I shouted "Fire!" and my voice went ringing far up the street. I cried out again, a third time, a fourth, but no one answered, no one appeared, and behind me the crackling roar of the flames increased. In despair I turned back into the sitting-room. It had been arranged between Zulime and myself that in case of fire (once the children were safe), she was to secure the silverware and her jewelry whilst I flew to collect my manuscripts. With this thought in my mind, and believing that I had but a few minutes in which to work, I ran up the stairs to my study and began gathering such of my manuscripts as had no duplicates. As I thought of the hundreds of letters from my literary friends, of the many family records, of the innumerable notes, pictures, keepsakes, souvenirs and mementoes which had been assembling there for a quarter of a century, I became confused, indecisive. It was so hard to choose. At last I caught up a sheaf of unpublished stories which filled one drawer, and beating off the screen of the north window threw the manuscripts out upon the grass. A neighbor's wife, quick to understand the meaning of my anxiety about these sheets, ran to her home across the way and bringing a valise, began to stuff them into it. Having cleared my desk of its most valuable papers I hurried to my dressing-room to secure shoes and trousers; but by this time the hall was full of the most nauseating smoke. The fire having swept entirely through the library, was burning the front porch. My escape by way of the stairway was cut off. Blinded and gasping I gave up the search for clothes and turned back into my study. I was not in the least scared; on the contrary, I was filled with a kind of fatalistic rage. In imagination I saw the old house, with all that it meant to me, in ruins. I saw the great elms and maples scorched, dead, the tall black locust burned to a ship's mast. As I peered from the window, a neighbor called earnestly, "You'd better get off there; the whole house is going." From the window I could see the villagers rapidly assembling, and not knowing how far advanced the flames might be I yielded to the advice of my friend, and swinging myself from the window dropped to the ground. My next care was for the children. I could hear them crying frantically for "papa!" and I hurried to where they stood cowering in the door of the barn. "O, papa, put it out. I don't want it to burn. _Put it out!_" moaned Mary Isabel with passionate intensity. Her faith in her father had an infinite pathos at the moment. She loved the house. It was a part of her very brain and blood. To have it burn was a kind of outrage. Little Connie, five years old, with chattering teeth, joined her pleading cry, "_Can't_ you put it out, papa?" she asked piteously. "No," I answered sadly. "Papa can not put it out. Nobody can. You must say good-by to our dear old home." Wrapping a quilt about her I started across the road toward my neighbor's porch. The yard was full of my fellow-citizens, and young men were heroically dragging out smoking furniture from the lower floor, while over in the Sander's yard piles of books, bedding and furniture were accumulating. It was all curiously familiar and typical. In the full belief that the homestead would soon be a heap of charcoal, we took the children back into our friend's dining-room. "Pull down the curtain," entreated Zulime, "we don't want to see the old place go." Helpless for lack of street clothing, with my children on my knees, I sat in silence, noting the flickering glare of the light on the walls, and hearing the shouts of the firemen and the sound of their axes. Huldah, our neighbor's daughter, entered. "They're checking it!" she exclaimed. "It is under control." This seemed incredible, but it was confirmed by George Dudley, who came in bringing my shoes and a suit of my clothing. When at last I was fully clothed and could go out into the street I was amazed to find a part of the house standing. Most of the east wing seemed quite untouched, except of smoke and water. The west wing and front porch were in black disarray, but the roof held its place and the trees seemed scarcely scorched. A few firemen, among them the village plumber, the young banker, and a dentist, were on guard, watchfully intent that the flames should not break out again. The sun was rising gloriously over the hills. The fire, my fire, was over. No doubt this event appeared most trivial to the travelers in a passing train. From the car windows it was only a column of smoke in the edge of a small village. Our disaster offered, indeed, only a mild sensation to the occupants of an early automobile party, but to my father, to Zulime and to the children, it was a desolate and appalling ruin. They had grown to love this old house foolishly, illogically, for it was neither beautiful nor historic, nor spacious. It was only a commonplace frame cottage, inwrought with memories and associations, but it was home--all we had. The yard was piled with furniture, half-burned, soaked and malodorous, but none of my manuscripts were in sight. I had expected to find them scattered like feathers across the garden or trampled into the muddy sward. In reply to my question my friend Dudley replied, "They're all safe. I had the boys carry them down in blankets. You'll find them in the barn." As I moved about silently, studying the ruins, the kindliest of my neighbors said, "You'll have to entirely rebuild." And to this a carpenter, a skilled and honest workman, agreed. "The cheapest thing to do is to tear it all down and start from the foundation." Slowly, minutely, I studied the ruin. Surely here was gruesome change! Black, ill-smelling, smoking debris lay where our pretty dining-room had been. The library with all my best books (many of them autographed) was equally desolate, heaped with steaming, charred masses of tables, chairs, rugs and fallen plaster. I thought of it as it had been the night before, with the soft lights of the candles falling upon my children dancing with swinging lanterns. I recalled Ennecking's radiant spring painting, and Steele's "Bloom of the Grape," which glowed above the mantle, and my heart almost failed me--"Is this the end of my life in Wisconsin?" For twenty years this little village had been the place of my family altar, not because it was remarkable in any way, but because since 1850 it had been the habitat of my mother's people and because it was filled with my father's pioneer friends. "Is it worth while to rebuild?" I asked myself. For the time I lost direction. I had no plan. The sight of my white-haired father wandering about the yard, dazed, bewildered, his eyes filled with a look of despair at last decided me. Realizing that this was his true home; that no other roof could have the same appeal, and he could not be transplanted, I resolved to cover his head; to make it possible for him to live out his few remaining years under this roof with his granddaughters. "For his sake and the children's sake," I announced to Zulime, "I shall begin at once to clear away and restore. Before the winter comes you shall all be back in the old House. Perhaps we can eat our Thanksgiving dinner in the restored dining-room." Whether she fully shared my desire to rebuild or whether she believed in my ability to carry out my plan so quickly I can not say. In such matters she was not decisive--she rested on my stubborn will. The day came on--glorious, odorous, golden--but we saw little of its beauty. Engaged in digging the family silver out of the embers, and collecting my scattered books and papers I had no time to look at the sky. Occasionally, as I looked up from my work I saw my little daughters playing with childish intentness among the fallen leaves in my neighbor's yard, and in mistaken confidence I remarked what a blessing it is that childhood can so easily forget disaster. I did not realize then, nor till many months after, how profound the shock had been to them. For years after the event they started at every unusual sound and woke at night screaming of fire. All that day and all the days of the week which followed they played with the same singular insect-like absorption and at last I began to get some notion of their horror. They refused to enter the yard. "I don't want to see it," Mary Isabel wailed. Then she asked, "Will it ever be home for us again?" "Yes," I answered with final determination. "I'll put it back just as it was before the fire came. It shall be nicer than ever when I am done." Before night I had engaged a crew of men to clear away. Thereafter I lived like a man in a tunnel. I saw almost nothing of the opulent, golden sunshine, nothing of the exquisite foliage, nothing of the far hills, purple with Indian summer haze. Busily sorting my burned books or spreading out my treasured rugs, I toiled as long as light lasted. There were a few pleasant surprises. From one charred frame the face of Frank Norris, miraculously fresh and handsome and smiling, looked out through smoked and broken glass. In one corner of the sideboard (decorated by Thompson-Seton), a part of the silver bearing my mother's initials lay quite unharmed, though all of the pieces on the top were melted into a flat mass of bullion. Autographed books from Howells, Riley, Gilbert Parker, Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, fell to pieces in my hand, or showed so deep a stain of smoke as to make their rebinding impossible. My best Navajo rug, a fine example of the ancient weaving, was a frail cinder on the back of the charred settee, and a Hopi ceremonial dress which hung upon the wall was a blackened shred. All these things had small money value, and to many men, would have represented no interest whatsoever, but to me they were precious. They were a part of my life. To burn them was to char a section of my brain. Pitiful possessions! Worthless rags! And yet they were the best I could show after thirty years of labor with the pen! My father's condition troubled me most. To have him rendered homeless at eighty-two with winter coming on seemed to me an intolerable cruelty, and so with a driving haste I set to work with my own hands to clear away and restore. Wielding the wrecking bar and the spade each day, I toiled like a hired man--even after the carpenters were gone at night I scraped paint and shoveled rubbish. Let no one pity me! A curious pleasure came with all this, for it seemed to advance the reconstruction with double swiftness. At the end of the week I sent my wife and the children back to their city home, and thereafter I had but one interest, one diversion--to plan and execute my rebuilding. To close the walls, to make the rooms secure against wind and rain was imperative. The insurance inspector came pleasantly to the rescue, and with a small balance in the bank I hired roofers, plumbers, carpenters, masons, till the street resounded with their clamor. In a week I had the rooms cleared, the doors and windows closed, and my father living in one corner of the house, whilst I camped down in my study. Water-soaked, ill-smelling, but inhabitable, the old house again possessed a light and a hearth. "The children and their grandsire shall eat Thanksgiving dinner in the rebuilt dining-room," was my secret sentimental resolution. "To do that will turn a wail into a song--a disaster into a poem." All very foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,--I was renewing my youth. I was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms broadened, my appetite became prodigious. I lost all fear of indigestion and ate anything which my friend Dudley was good enough to provide. I even drank coffee at every opportunity, and went so far as to eat doughnuts and pancakes at breakfast! To be deliciously hungry as of old was heartening. The weather continued merciful. Each day the sun rose red and genial, and at noon the warm haze of Indian summer trailed along the hills--though I had little time in which to enjoy it. Each sunset marked a new stanza in my poem, a completed phrase, a recovered figure. "Our small affairs have shut out the light of the sun," I said to father, "the political situation has lost all interest for me." Bare, clean and sweet, the library and music-room at last were ready for furniture. All these must be replaced. A hurried trip to the city, three days of determined shopping with Zulime, and a stream of new goods (necessary to refurnish), began to set toward the threshold. The draymen plied busily between the station and the gate. By November first my father and I were camping in the library and cooking our own food in the dining-room. We rose each day before dawn and ate our bacon and coffee while yet the stars twinkled in the west, and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm, when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight. My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my mind refused to compose even letters--but the pen was not needed. "My poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked to Dudley. At last the yard was cleared of its charred rubbish, the porch restored to its old foundation, and the new metal roof, broad-spreading and hospitable, gleamed like snow in dusk and dawn, and from the uncurtained windows our relighted lamps called to the world that the Garland household was about to reassemble and the author permitted himself to straighten up. Changing to my city garments I took the train for Chicago, promising to bring the children with me when our Thanksgiving turkey was fatted for the fire. My daughters listened eagerly to my tale of the new house, but expressed a fear of sleeping in it. This fear I determined to expel. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving I rejoined my workmen, finding the house in a worse state of disarray than when I had last seen it. The floors were littered with dust and shavings, and in the dining-room my father, deeply discouraged, was gloomily cooking his breakfast on an oil stove set in the middle of the floor. "It'll take another month to finish the job," he said. "Oh, no it won't," I replied. "It won't take a week." Fortunately the stain on the floor was dry and with the aid of two good men I finished the woodwork and beat the rugs. In a couple of days the lower house was livable. On Wednesday at five o'clock I went to the train, leaving the electric lights all ablaze and the fire snapping in the chimney. It looked amazingly comfortable, restored, settled, and I was confident the children would respond to its cheer. "Is it all made new?" they asked wistfully. "Wait and see!" I confidently replied. The night was cold and dark but as they neared the old house its windows winked a cheery welcome. "Why, it looks just as it used to!" exclaimed Mary Isabel. "There are lights in our room!" exclaimed Constance. "Run ahead, and knock," I urged. She hung back. "I'm afraid," she said. "So am I," echoed Connie. The new metal roof gleaming like frost interested them as they entered the gate. "Why, the porch is all here!" shouted Constance. "But the screens are off," commented Mary Isabel. "Knock!" I commanded. Reaching up to the shining old brass knocker she banged it sharply. The house awoke! White-haired old father came to the door and, first of all, the children sprang to his arms. Then as they looked around they shouted with joy. "Why, it's just as it was--only nicer," was their verdict. While Zulime looked keenly and smilingly around, Connie ran from settee to bookcase. "Everything is here--our books, the fireplace." "Isn't it wonderful!" Mary Isabel exclaimed. After greeting father Zulime surveyed the result of my six weeks' toil with critical but approving eyes. "I like it. It's much better than I expected. It _is_ wonderful. But we must have new curtains for the windows," she added, with the housewife's attention to details. The children danced through the brilliantly lighted rooms, but declined to go into the dining-room or to open the door to the kitchen which they remembered only as a mass of black embers and steaming ashes. I did not urge them to do so. On the contrary, I gathered them round me on the restored hearth and talked of the Thanksgiving dinner of the morrow. As the hour for bedtime came Connie's eyes grew big and dark, and every small unusual sound startled her. Daddy's presence at last reassured them both and they went to sleep and, with only one or two restless intervals, slumbered till daylight. Two of our neighbors--two capable women, came in next morning to help, and in a few hours the windows were curtained, the linen laid out and the turkey in the oven. Under Zulime's hands the rooms bloomed into homeliness. The kitchen things fell into orderly array. Pictures took their places on the walls, little knick-knacks which had been brought from the city were set on the mantels and bookcases, and when our guests arrived they each and all exclaimed, "No one would ever know you'd _had_ a fire!" At one o'clock the cooks, the children and Zulime all agreed that the fowl was ready for the carver and so we all assembled in the new and larger dining-room. No formal Thanksgiving was spoken, but vaguely forming in my mind was a poem which should express our joy and gratitude. My brother's seat was empty and so were those of other loved ones, but we did not dwell upon these sad things. I was living, working and planning now for the vivid souls of my daughters whose glowing cheeks and laughing eyes repaid me for all my toil. For them I had rebuilt this house--for them and their grandsire--whose trail was almost at its end. How happy he was in their presence! They, too, were happy because they were young, the sun was shining and their home was magically restored. The happiest time of all was at night, when the evening shadows closed round the friendly walls, and the trees sighed in the chill wind--for beside the fire we gathered, the Garlands and McClintocks, in the good old fashion, while our neighbors came in to congratulate and rejoice. All the black terror of the dismantled house, all the toil and worry of the months which lay between, were forgotten as the children, without a care, sang and danced in the light of our new and broadened hearth. [Illustration: That night as my daughters, "dressed up" as princesses, danced like fairies in the light of our restored and broadened hearth, I forgot all the toil, all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me. To them the re-built homestead was only another evidence of their Daddy's magic power. His lamp was not less potent than Aladdin's.] CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Darkness Just Before the Dawn In going back over the records of the years 1912 and 1913, I can see that my life was lacking in "drive." It is true I wrote two fairly successful novels which were well spoken of by my reviewers and in addition I continued to conduct the Cliff Dwellers' Club and to act as one of the Vice Presidents of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, but I was very far from a feeling of satisfaction with my position. My life seemed dwindling into futility. I was in physical pain much of the time and tortured by a fear of the future. Naturally and inevitably the burden of my increasing discontent, worse health, fell with sad reiteration upon my wife, who was not only called upon to endure poverty, but to bear with a sick and disheartened husband. The bravery of her smile served to increase my sense of unworthiness. Her very sweetness, her cheerful acceptance of never-ending household drudgery, was an accusation. She no longer touched brush or clay, although I strongly urged her to sketch or model the children. She had no time, even if she had retained the will, to continue her work as an artist. With a faculty for entertaining handsomely and largely, with hosts of friends who would have clustered about her with loyal admiration, she remained the mistress of a narrow home and one more or less incompetent housemaid. All these considerations added to my sense of weakness and made the particular manuscript upon which I was spending most of my time, a piece of selfish folly. For ten years I had been working, from time to time, on an autobiographical manuscript which I had called by various names, but which had finally solidified into _A Son of the Middle Border_. Even in my days of deepest discouragement I turned most of my energy to its revision. In the belief that it was my final story and with small hope of its finding favor in any form, I toiled away, year after year, finding in the aroused memories of my youthful world a respite from the dull grind of my present. My duties as head of the Cliff Dwellers and as Secretary of The Theater Society tended to keep me in Chicago. My lecture engagements became fewer and I dropped out or Eastern Club life, retaining only long distance connection with the world of Arts and Letters. In losing touch with my fellows something vital had gone out of me. In spite of all my former protestations, the city began to take on the color of Henry Fuller's pessimism. My youthful faith in Chicago's future as a great literary center had faded into middle-aged doubt. One by one its writers were slipping away to Manhattan. The Midland seemed farther away from publishers than ever, "The current is all against us," declared Fuller. As a man of fifty-two I found myself more and more discordant with my surroundings. With sadness I conceded that not in my time would any marked change for the better take place. "Such as Chicago now is, so it will remain during my life," I admitted to Fuller. "Yes, if it doesn't get worse," was his sad reply. I would have put my Woodlawn house on sale in 1912 had it not been for my father's instant protest. "Don't take Zulime and the children so far away," he pleaded. "If you move to New York I shall never see any of you again. Stay where you are. Wait till I am 'mustered out'--it won't be long now." There was no resisting this appeal. With a profound sense of what Zulime and the children meant to him, I gave up all thought of going East and settled back into my groove. "We will remain where we are so long as father lives," I declared to my friends. My wife, who had perceived with alarm my growing discontent with Chicago, was greatly relieved by this decision. To her the thought of migration even to the North Side was disturbing, for it would break her close connection with the circle whose center was in her brother's studio. I am not seeking to excuse my recreancy to The Middle West; I am merely stating it as a phase of literary history, for my case is undoubtedly typical of many other writers who turned their faces eastward. The plain truth is I had reached an age where I no longer cared to pioneer even in a literary sense. Desirous of the acceptances proper to a writer with gray hair and a string of creditable books, I wished to go where honor waited. I craved a place as a man of letters. That my powers were deteriorating in the well-worn rut of my life in Woodlawn I knew too well, and my need of contact with my fellow craftsmen in the East sharpened. The support and inspiration which come naturally to authors in contact with their kind were being denied me. Age was bringing me no "harvest home." In short, at the very time when I should have been most honored, most recompensed, in my work, I found myself living meanly in a mean street and going about like a man of mean concerns, having little influence on my art or among my fellows. That Chicago was still on the border in a literary sense was sharply emphasized when the National Institute of Arts and Letters decided (after much debate), to hold its Annual Meeting for 1913 in the midland metropolis. "It is a long way out to Chicago," its Secretary wrote, "and I don't know how many members we can assemble, but I think we shall be able to bring twenty-five at least. You have been appointed chairman of the Committee of Arrangements, with full powers to go ahead." The honor and responsibility of this appointment spurred me to action. I decided to accept and make the meeting a literary milestone in western history. My first thought was to make the Cliff Dwellers' Club the host of the occasion, but on further consideration, I reckoned that the City's welcome would have greater weight if all its literary and artistic forces could be in some way combined. To bring this about I directed letters to the heads of seventeen clubs and educational organizations, asking them to meet with me and form a joint Reception Committee. This they did, and in a most harmonious session elected Hobart Chatfield-Taylor chairman. To this Committee I then said, "If we are to have any considerable number of our distinguished eastern authors and artists at this dinner we must make it very easy for them to travel. We should have a special train for them or at least special sleeping cars so that they can come as if in a moving club." In this plan I had instant support. The sturdy group of men who had been so ready to aid me in building up the Cliff Dwellers (men like Hutchinson, Logan, Glessner, Ryerson, Aldis, and Heckmen), all took vital interest in the arrangements for the reception and dinner. The necessary funds were immediately subscribed, and my report to the Institute Council created a fine feeling of enthusiasm in the ranks of both organizations. The success of the meeting was assured. Some of the oldest members wrote, "It is a long way out there but we are coming." The press of the city responded generously and some of its editors perceived and stated the historical significance of this pilgrimage of poets, artists, and historians to "the sparsely settled Border of Esthetic Culture." A trainload of men who painted, sculptured and composed, men who were entirely concerned with the critical or esthetic side of life, an academy of arts and letters rolling westward, was a new and wondrous phase of national exploration. The invasion was also capable of comic interpretation and a few graceless wags did allude to it as "a missionary expedition to Darkest Illinois." To Fuller, to Chatfield-Taylor and to me, this joke was not altogether pleasant. We knew all too well the feeling of some of the writers who were coming. Several of them were seeing "the West" for the first time in their lives, others had not been in Chicago since the World's Fair in '93. All were conscious of the effort involved in reaching the arid and unknown frontier. The entire Middle West had only ten resident members of the Institute although a large proportion of its membership was drawn from the Southern and Central Western States, "All trails lead to New York and there are no returning footsteps," commented Fuller. "Once a writer or painter or illustrator pulls his stakes and sets out for Manhattan, Chicago sees him no more." All this was disheartening to those of us who, twenty years before, had visioned Chicago as a shining center of American art, but we went forward with our preparations, hoping that a fairly representative delegation could be induced to come. Some thirty-five arrived safely, and the Dinner of Welcome in Sculpture Hall not only set a milestone in the progress of the city, but was in itself a beautiful and distinctive event. The whole panorama of western settlement and its city building unrolled before me, as Charles L. Hutchinson, President of the Art Institute, rose in his place, and in the name of the most aspiring of Chicago's men and women, welcomed the members of the American Academy and the National Institute as representatives of American Art and American Literature. Once again and for the moment our city became a capital in something like the character of Boston a generation before. This conception was illusory, of course, but we permitted ourselves the illusion and accepted the praise which our visitors showered upon us with a belief that we had gained, at last, a recognized place in the Nation's esthetic history. During the weeks of preparation for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London for England so there is only one New York for America." All through the autumn of 1913 I ground away at my story of the Middle Border, conscious of the fact that--in a commercial sense--I was wasting my time, for several of my editorial friends had assured me of that fact--but each morning as I climbed to my study I forgot my drab surroundings. Closing the door of the bitter present and turning my back on the stormy future I relived my audacious youth and dreamed of the brave days of old. Thanksgiving Day in West Salem was misty, dark and still, but the children--bless their shining faces--regarded it as just the right kind of weather for our festival. They were up early and running of errands for their mother who was chief cook. Our only guests were three lonely old women, and it gave me a pang of pity for the children who were forced thus to tolerate a group of gray-heads to whom life was a closing, mournful dirge. Happily, my daughters had the flame of invincible youth in their blood and danced and sang as if the world were new and wholly beautiful, which it was, to them. Dear little daughters! They didn't know that Daddy was worried about his future and theirs, and no sooner were we back in our Chicago home than they began to look away toward Christmas. "Poppie!"--Mary Isabel would repeat--"only three weeks till--you know what! Remember!" I remembered. Once again their stockings were stuffed to the hem, and their tree, a marvel of light, touched the ceiling with its pliant tip on which sparkled a golden star. To them I was still a wonder-worker. For a week I put aside my dark musings and rejoiced with them in their fairy world. Now it chanced that the University Club of Pittsburg had booked me for a lecture early in January and in taking account of this, I planned to invade Manhattan once again, in a desperate attempt to dispose of my rewritten _Son of the Middle Border_, and to offer, also, one or two short stories which I had lately put into clean copy. Humbly, sadly, unwillingly I left my home that cold, bleak, dirty day, staggering under the weight of my valises, for I was not in good health and my mood was irresolute. Change was in my world and change of an ominous kind was in my brain. Subjects which once interested me had lost their savor, and several tales in which I had put my best effort had failed to meet my own approval and had been thrown aside. No mechanic, no clerk, would have envied me as I boarded a filthy street car on my way to the Englewood station. That I had reached a fork in my trail was all too evident. The things for which I had labored all my days were as ashes in my hand. I walked with a stoop and the bag containing my manuscript dragged at my shoulder like a fifty-pound weight as I painfully climbed the steps leading to the waiting-room of the grimy, noisy, train station. I was a million miles from being a "distinguished man of letters" at that moment, and with a sense of my poverty and declining health, took a seat in the crowded day coach and rode all day in gloomy silence. At noon I dined on a sandwich. Dollars looked as large as dinner plates that day. "Your only way to earn money is to save it," I accused myself. At the University Club in Pittsburg I recovered slightly. The lecture having been announced to take place in the dining-room could not be staged till nine o'clock--a fact which worried me for I had arranged to take the night train for the East--and this alarm, this fear of losing my train led me to begin by address while my audience was assembling, and my hurried utterance led to weariness on the part of my hearers. My performance was a failure, and to complete my disheartenment I reached the station about five minutes after the last eastern train had pulled out. Dismayed by this mishap, I took a seat in a corner and darkly ruminated. "What shall I do now? Shall I go back to Chicago? Or shall I go on?" Decision was in reality taken out of my hands by the baggageman who said in response to inquiry, "I put your trunk on the 8:40 train. It is well on its way to New York." Accepting this as a mandate to go on, I returned to my room in the University Club and went to bed, but not to sleep. For hours I tossed and turned in self-questioning, self-accusing fury. "What a fool you have been to waste years of labor on a book which nobody wants and which has put you--temporarily at least--out of conceit with fiction. Why go on? Why spend more time and money on a vain attempt to dispose of this manuscript?" Falling asleep at last, I regained a part of my courage, and at breakfast a faint glow of hope crept into my thinking. At nine o'clock I took the day train and in silence rode for nearly twelve hours, retracing the thirty years which lay between my first view of Manhattan and this my hundredth reëntrance. With no thrill of excitement I crossed the ferry and having registered at a small hotel on Thirty-fourth Street, went to bed at nine o'clock completely worn out with my journey. A long night's sleep and a pot of delicious coffee for breakfast put so much sunshine into my world that I set out for Franklin Square with a gambler's countenance, resolute to conceal my dismay from my friends and especially from my publisher. There was something in the very air of Broadway which generated confidence. Harpers' editors were genial, respectful, but by no means enthusiastic concerning my autobiographic manuscript, although I assured Duneka that I had vastly improved it since he had read it a year before. "That may be," he granted, "but it is not fiction and nothing serializes but fiction. We'll be glad to schedule it as a book, but I don't see any place for it in our magazine." And then--more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he added, "You might see _Collier's_. Mark Sullivan is the editor up there now; it might be that he could use something of yours." Duneka's indifference even more than his shunting my precious manuscript into the street brought back my cloud of doubt, for it indicated a loss of faith in me. To him I was a squeezed lemon. Nevertheless I took his hint. Sullivan, I knew and liked, and while I had small hope of interesting him in _The Middle Border_, I did think he might buy one or two of my short stories. The _Collier's_ plant humming with speed, prosperous and commercial, was not reassuring to me, but I kept on through the maze until I reached Sullivan's handsome room, where I was given an easy chair and told to wait, "the editor will see you in a few minutes." Alert, kindly, cordial, Mark greeted me and taking a seat, fixed his keen blue, kindly eyes upon me. "I'm glad to see you," he said, and I believed he meant it. He went on, "This is the psychological moment for us both. I am looking for American material and I want something of yours. What have you to show me?" Thus encouraged I told him of _A Son of the Middle Border_. He was interested. "Where is the manuscript? Is it complete?" "It is. I have it with me at the hotel." "Send it down to me," he said quickly, "I'll read it and give you a verdict at once." In an illogical glow of hope I hastened to fetch the manuscript, and in less than two hours it was in his hands. I speak of my hope as "illogical" for if the literary monthly of my own publishers could not find a place for it, how could I reasonably expect a hustling, bustling popular weekly like _Collier's_ to use it? Nevertheless something in Sullivan's voice and manner restored my confidence, and when I called on the editor of the _Century_ I was able to assume the tone of successful authorship. The closer I got to my market the more assured I became. I counted for something in New York. My thirty years of effort were remembered in my favor. On Tuesday Sullivan, who had been called to the West, wired me from Chicago that _A Son of the Middle Border_ would make an admirable serial and that his assistants would take the matter up with me. "I predict a great success for it." That night I sent a message to my wife in which I exultantly said, "Rejoice! I've sold _The Middle Border_ to _Collier's Weekly_. Our troubles are over for a year at least." Two days later _Collier's_ took a short story at four hundred dollars and the _Century_ gave me three hundred for an article on James A. Herne, and when I boarded the train for Chicago the following week I was not only four thousand dollars better off than when I came--I had regained my faith in the future. My task was clearly outlined. For the seventh time I set to work revising _A Son of the Middle Border_, preparing it for serial publication. * * * * * My father, who knew that I had been writing upon this story for years, stared at me in silent amazement when I told him of its sale. That the editor of a great periodical should be interested in a record of the migrations and failures of the McClintocks and Garlands was incredible. Nevertheless he was eager to see it in print--and when in March the first installment appeared, he read it with absorbed attention and mixed emotions. "Aren't you a little hard on me?" he asked with a light in his eyes which was half-humorous, half-resentful. "I don't think so, Father," I replied. "You must admit you were a stern disciplinarian in those days." "Well maybe I was--but I didn't realize it." My first understanding of the depths this serial sounded came to me in the letters which were written to the editor by those who could not find words in which to express their longing for the bright world gone--the world when they were young and glad. "You have written my life," each one said--and by this they meant that the facts of my family history, and my own emotional experiences were so nearly theirs that my lines awoke an almost intolerable regret in their hearts--an ache which is in my own heart to-day--the world-old hunger of the gray-haired man dwelling upon the hope and illusions of youth. These responses which indicated a wider and more lasting effect than I had hoped to produce, led me to plan for the publication of the book close on the heels of the concluding installment of the serial but in this I was disappointed. The Mexican war suddenly thrust new and tremendously exciting news articles into the magazine, separating and delaying the printing of my story. Had it not been for the loyalty of Mark Sullivan it would have been completely side-tracked, but he would not have it so; on the contrary he began to talk with me about printing six more installments, and this necessarily put off the question of finding a publisher for the book. Nevertheless I returned to my desk in the expectation that the Mexican excitement was only a flurry and that the magazine would be able to complete the publication of the manuscript within the year. My harvest was not destroyed; it was only delayed. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX A Spray of Wild Roses Although for several years my wife and children had spent four months of each year in West Salem, and notwithstanding the fact that my father was free to come down to visit us at any time, I suffered a feeling of uneasiness (almost of guilt), whenever I thought of him camping alone for the larger part of the year in that big, silent house. His love for the children and for Zulime made every day of his lonely life a reproach to me, and yet there seemed no way in which I could justly grant him more of our time. The welfare of my wife and the education of the children must be considered. He was nearing his eighty-fourth birthday, and a realization that every week in which he did not see his granddaughters was an irreparable loss, gave me uneasiness. It was a comfort to think of him sitting in an easy chair in the blaze of a fireplace which he loved and found a solace and yet he was a lonely old man--that could not be denied. He made no complaint in his short infrequent letters although as spring came on he once or twice asked, "Why don't you come up? The best place for the children is on the lawn under the maples." In one note to me he said, "My old legs are giving out. I don't enjoy walking any more. I don't stand the work of the garden as well as I did last year. You'd better come up and help me put in the seed." This confession produced in me a keen pang. He who had marched so tirelessly under the lead of Grant and Thomas; he who had fearlessly cruised the pine forests of Wisconsin, and joyously explored the prairies of Iowa and Minnesota, was now uncertain of his footing. Alarmed more than I cared to confess, I hurried up to help him, and to tell him of the success of _The Middle Border_, which was in truth as much his story as mine. The air was thick with bird songs as I walked up the street, for it was late April, and I came upon him at work in the garden, bareheaded as usual, his white hair gleaming in the sunlight like a silver crown. Outwardly serene, without a trace of bitterness in his voice, he spoke of his growing weakness. "Oh, the old machine is wearing out, that's all." Aware of his decline he accepted it as something in the natural course of human life and was content. Several of his comrades had dropped away during the winter and he was aware that all of his generation were nearing their end. "There's only one more migration left for us," he said composedly, yet with a note of regret. Not on the strength of any particular religious creed but by reason of a manly faith in the universe he faced death. He was a kind of primitive warrior, who, having lived honorably, was prepared to meet what was to come. "I've no complaint to make," he said, "I've had a long life and on the whole a happy life. I'm ready for the bugle." This was the faith of a pathfinder, a philosophy born of the open spaces, courage generated by the sun and the wind. "I find it hard to keep warm on dark days," he explained. "I guess my old heart is getting tired," and as he spoke I thought of the strain which that brave heart had undergone in its eighty years of action, on the battlefield, along the river, in the logging camps, and throughout all the stern, unceasing years of labor on the farm. His tireless energy and his indomitable spirit came back, filling my mind with pictures of his swift and graceful use of axe and scythe, and when I spoke of the early days, he found it difficult to reply--they were so beautiful in retrospect. The next day was Sunday, and Sunday afternoon was for him a period of musing, an hour of dream, and as night began to fall he turned to me and with familiar accent called out, "Come, Hamlin, sing some of the songs your mother used to love," and I complied, although I could play but a crude accompaniment to my voice. First of all I sang "Rise and Shine" and "The Sweet Story of Old" in acknowledgment of the Sabbath, then passed to "The Old Musician and His Harp," ending with "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," in which I discerned a darker significance--a deeper pathos than ever before. It had now a personal, poignant application. Tears misted his eyes as I uttered the line, "But now we are aged and gray, Maggie, the trials of life are nearly done," and at the close he was silent with emotion. He, too, was aged and gray, his trials of life nearly done, and the one who had been his solace and his stay had passed beyond recall. To me, came the insistent thought, "Soon he must go to join Mother in the little plot under the pines beyond Neshonoc." In spite of my philosophy, I imagined their reunion somehow, somewhere. Tender and sweet were the scenes which the words of my songs evoked--pictures which had nothing to do with the music except by association, forms and faces of far-off days, of Dry Run Prairie and its neighbors, and of the still farther and dimmer and more magical experiences of Green's Coulee, before the call to war. I sang the song my uncle Bailey loved. A song which took him back to his boyhood's home in Maine. "The river's running just the same, The willows on its side Are larger than they were, dear Tom, The stream appears less wide, And stooping down to take a drink, Dear Heart, I started so, To see how sadly I was changed Since forty years ago!" His songs, his friends, his thoughts were all of the past except when they dwelt on his grandchildren--and they, after six months' absence, were shadowy, fairy-like forms in his memory. He found it difficult to recall them precisely. He longed for them but his longing was for something vaguely bright and cheerful and tender. David and William and Susan and Belle were much more vividly real to him than Constance or Mary Isabel. * * * * * On Monday morning he was up early. "Now let's get to work," he said. "I can't hoe as I used to do, and the weeds are getting the start of me." To him the garden was a battlefield, a contest with purslane and he hated to be worsted. "Don't worry about the garden," I said. "It is not very important. What does it matter if the 'pussley' does cover the ground?" He would not have this. "It matters a good deal," he replied with hot resentment, "and it won't happen so long as I can stand up and shove a hoe." To relieve his anxiety and to be sure that he did not overwork, I hired Uncle Frank McClintock to come down for two or three days a week to help kill the weeds. "The crop is not important to me," I said to him privately, "but it _is_ important that you should keep a close watch on Father while I am away. He is getting feeble and forgetful. See him every day, and wire me if he is in need of anything. I must go back to the city for a few weeks. If you need me send word and I'll come at once." He understood, and I went away feeling more at ease. I relied on Uncle Frank's interest in him. Now, it chanced that just before the date of our return to the Homestead, Lily Morris, wife of the newly-appointed ambassador to Sweden, invited my wife and children to accompany her on a trip to the Big Horn Mountains and we were all torn between opposing duties and desires. Eager to see "Papa's Mountains," yet loath to lose anything of dear old West Salem, Mary Isabel was pathetically perplexed. Connie was all for West Salem but Zulime who knew the charm of the West decided to go, and again I visited Father to tell him the news and to explain that we would all be with him in August. The fear of disappointing him was the only cloud on the happy prospect. With a feeling of guilt I met him with the news of our change of plan, softening the blow as best I could. He bore it composedly, though sadly, while I explained that I could not possibly have shown the children the mountains of my own accord. "I have some lectures in Colorado," I explained, "but I shall not be gone long." "I had counted on seeing Zulime and the children next week," was all he said. Just before my return to the city, he sent for a team, and together we drove down to the little Neshonoc burying ground. "I want to inspect your mother's grave," he explained. On the way, as we were passing a clump of wild roses, he asked me to stop and cut some of them. "Your mother was fond of wild roses," he said, "I'd like to put a handful on her grave." The penetrating odor of those exquisite blooms brought to my mind vistas of the glorious sunlit, odorous prairies of Iowa, and to gather and put into his hand a spray of them, was like taking part in a poem--a poignant threnody of age, for he received them in silence, and held them with tender care, his mind far away in the past. Silently we entered the gate of the burial ground, and slowly approached the mound under which my mother's body rested, and as I studied the thin form and bending head of my intrepid sire, I realized that he was in very truth treading the edge of his own grave. My eyes grew dim with tears and my throat ached with a sense of impending loss, and a pity for him which I could conceal only by looking away at the hills. Nevertheless, he was calmer than I. "Here is where I want to lie," he said quietly and stooping, softly spread his sprays of roses above the mound. "She loved all the prairie flowers," he said, "but she specially liked wild roses. I always used to bring them to her from the fields. We had oceans of them in Dakota in those days." It was a commonplace little burial ground with a few trees and here and there a bed of lilies or phlox, yet it had charm. It was a sunny and friendly place, a silent acre whose name and history went back to the beginning of the first white settlement in the valley. On its monuments were chiseled the familiar names of pioneers, and it was characteristic of the time and deeply characteristic of the McClintocks, to be told, by my father, that in some way the exact location of my grandmother's grave had been lost and that no stone marked the spot where my grandfather was buried. We wandered around among the graves for half an hour while Father spoke of the men and women whose names were on the low and leaning stones. "They were American," he said. "These German neighbors of ours are all right in their way, but it isn't our way. They are good citizens as far as they know how to be, but they don't think in our words. Soon there won't be any of the old families left. My world is just about gone, and so I don't mind going myself, only I want to go quick. I don't want to be bedridden for months as Vance McKinley was. If I could have my wish, I'd go out like a candle in a puff of wind,--and I believe that's the way I shall go." It was a radiant June afternoon and as we drove back along the familiar lane toward the hills softened by the mist, we looked away over a valley throbbing with life and rich with the shining abundance of growing grain--a rich and peaceful and lovely valley to me--but how much more it all meant to my father! Every hill had its memories, every turn in the road opened a vista into the past. The mill, the covered bridge, the lonely pine by the river's bank,--all, all spoke to him of those he had loved and lost. With guilty reluctance I confessed that the return of the children had again been postponed. "Mrs. Morris cannot tell just when she will return--I fear not before the first of September. It is a wonderful opportunity for the children to see the mountains. I could not afford to take them on such a trip--much as I should like to do so--and there is no telling when such another opportunity will offer. Mary Isabel is just at the right age to remember all she sees and a summer in the mountains will mean much to her in after life. Even Constance will be profoundly changed by it. Zulime is sorry to disappoint you but she feels that it would be wrong to refuse such an opportunity." He made no complaint, offered no further opposition, he only said gently and sadly, "Don't let them stay away too long. I want them here part of the summer. I miss them terribly--and you must remember my time on earth is nearly ended." "We shall all be here in August," I assured him, "and I may return late in July." This was the twelfth of June and as I left the house for the train the picture of that lonely, white-haired man, sitting at the window, took away all the anticipation of pleasure with which our expedition had filled my mind. I was minded to decline the wondrous opportunity and send the children to the old Homestead and their grandsire. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN A Soldier of the Union Mustered Out On my return to Chicago, I made good report of Father's condition and said nothing of his forebodings, for I wanted Zulime to start on her vacation in entire freedom from care. Had it not been for my lecture engagements I might not have gone with them, but as certain dates were fixed, I bought tickets for myself on the same train which Mrs. Morris had taken, and announced my intention to travel with the party at least as far as Sheridan. "I want to watch the children's faces and hear their words of delight when they see the mountains," I explained to Mrs. Morris. "My lectures at the Colorado Normal School do not begin till the second week in July--so that I can be with you part of the time." My decision gave the final touch to the children's happiness. They liked their shaggy father--I don't know why, but they did--and during the days of preparation their voices were filled with bird-like music. They were palpitant with joy. On the day appointed the Morris automobile called for us and took us to the train, and when the children found that they were to travel in a private pullman and that the stateroom was to be their own little house they were transported with pride. Thereafter they knew nothing of heat or dust or weariness. Their meals came regularly, and they went to bed in their berths with warbles of satisfaction. The plains of the second day's travel absorbed them. The prairie dogs, the herds of cattle, the cactus blooms all came in for joyous recognition. They had read about them: now here they were in actuality. "Are those the mountains?" asked Mary Isabel as we came in sight of the buttes of Eastern Wyoming. "No, only hills," I replied. Then, at last, came the Big Horns deep blue and lined with snow. Mary Isabel's eyes expanded with awe. "Oh, they are so much finer than I expected them to be," she said, and from that moment, she gave them her adoration. They were papa's mountains and hence not to be feared. "Are we really going up there?" she asked. "Yes," I replied pointing out Cloud Peak, "we shall go up almost directly toward that highest mountain of all." At a camp just above Big Horn City we spent a month of just the sort of riding, trailing and camping which I was eager to have my children know, and in a few days under my instruction, they both learned to sit a horse in fearless confidence. Mary Isabel, who was eleven, accompanied me on a ride to Cloud Peak Lake, a matter of twenty miles over a rough trail, and came into camp almost unwearied. She was a chip of the old block in this regard, and as I listened to her cheery voice and looked down into her shining face I was a picture of shameless parental pride. For several weeks I was able to remain with them and then at last set forth for Colorado on my lecture tour. Meanwhile, unsuspected by Americans, colossal armies were secretly mobilizing in Europe, and on August first, whilst we were on our way home, the sound of cannon proclaimed to the world the end of one era and the beginning of another. Germany announced to the rulers of the Eastern Hemisphere that she intended to dominate not merely the land but the seas, and in my quiet hotel in a Colorado college town this proclamation found amazed readers. I, for one, could not believe it--even after my return to Chicago in August, while the papers were shouting "War! War!" I remained unconvinced. Germany's program seemed monstrous, impossible. The children and their mother arrived two days later and to Zulime I said "Father is patiently waiting for us and in the present state of things West Salem seems a haven, of rest. We must go to him at once." She was willing and on August six, two days after England declared war, the old soldier met us, looking thin and white but so happy in our coming that his health seemed miraculously restored. With joyous outcry the children sprang to his embrace and Zulime kissed him with such sincerity of regard that he gave her a convulsive hug. "Oh, but I'm glad to see you!" he exclaimed while tears of joy glistened on his cheeks. "Well, Father, what do you think about the European situation?" I asked. "I don't know what to think," he gravely answered. "It starts in like a big war, the biggest the world has ever seen. If you can believe what the papers say, the Germans have decided to eat up France." Although physically weaker, he was mentally alert and read his _Tribune_ with a kind of religious zeal. The vastness of the German armies, the enormous weight and power of their cannons, and especially the tremendous problem of their commissariat staggered his imagination. "I don't see how they are going to maintain all those troops," he repeated. "How can they shelter and clothe and feed three million men?" To him, one of Sherman's soldiers, who had lived for days on parched corn stolen from the feedboxes of the mules, the description of wheeled ovens, and hot soup wagons appeared mere fiction. Although appalled by the rush of the Prussian line, he was confident that the Allies would check the invasion. Sharply resenting the half-veiled pro-Germanism of some of his neighbors, he declared hotly: "They claim to be loyal to America, but they are hoping the Kaiser will win. I will not trade with such men." How far away it all seemed on those lovely nights when with my daughters beside me I lay on their broad bed out on the upper porch and heard the crickets sleepily chirping and the wind playing with the leaves in the maples. To Connie's sensitive ears the rustle suggested stealthy feet and passing wings--but to me came visions of endless rivers of helmeted soldiers flowing steadily remorselessly through Belgium, and Mary Isabel said, "Papa, don't you think of going to war. I won't let you." "They wouldn't take me anyway," I replied, "I'm too old. You needn't worry." I could not conceal from myself the fact that my father's work was almost done. That he was failing was sorrowfully evident. He weeded the garden no more. Content to sit in a chair on the back porch or to lie in a hammock under the maples, he spent long hours with me or with Zulime, recalling the battles of the Civil War, or relating incidents of the early history of the valley. He still went to his club each night after supper, but the walk was getting to be more and more of a task, and he rejoiced when we found time to organize a game of cinch at home. This we very often did, and sometimes, even in the middle of the afternoon I called him in to play with me; for with a great deal of time on his hands he was restless. "I can't read all the time," he said, "and most of the fellows are busy during the middle of the day." Each morning regular as the clock he went to the post-office to get his paper, and at lunch he was ready to discuss the news of the battles which had taken place. After his meal he went for a little work in the garden, for his hatred of weeds was bitter. He could not endure to have them overrun his crops. They were his Huns, his menacing invaders. In this fashion he approached his eighty-fourth birthday. His manner was tranquil, but I knew that he was a little troubled by some outstanding notes which he had signed in order to purchase a house for my brother in Oklahoma, and to cure this I bought up these papers, canceled them and put them under his breakfast plate. "I want him to start his eighty-fifth year absolutely clear of debt," I said to Zulime. He was much affected by the discovery of these papers. It pleased him to think that I had the money to spare. It was another evidence of my prosperity. Nearly half of _A Son of the Middle Border_ had now been printed and while he had read it he was shy about discussing it. Something almost sacred colored the pictures which my story called up. Its songs and sayings vibrated deep, searching the foundation chords of his life. They told of a bright world vanished, a landscape so beautiful that it hurt to have some parts of it revealed to aliens--and yet he was glad of it and talked of it to his comrades. Zulime made a birthday cake for him and the children decorated it, and when Mary Isabel brought it in with all its candles lighted, and we lifted our triumphant song, he was overwhelmed with happiness and pride. "I never had a birthday cake or a birthday celebration before in all my life," he said, and we hardly knew whether to laugh or to cry at that confession. We ended the day by singing for him--that was the best of it all; for both the children could now join with me in voicing the tunes which he loved. They knew his enthusiasms and were already faithful heirs of his traditions. Singers of the future, they loved to hear him recount the past. All through the month of September as we walked our peaceful way in Wisconsin the Germans were pounding at the gates of Paris. It comforts me at this moment to recall how peaceful my father was. He heard of the war only as of a far-off storm. He had us all, all but Franklin, and there was no bitterness in his voice as he spoke of his increasing uselessness. "I'm only a passenger now," he said. "I've finished my work." As the Interstate Fair came on, he quietly engaged a neighbor to take us all down to La Crosse in an automobile. "This is my treat," he said, and knowing how much it meant to him I gladly accepted. With a fine sense of being up-to-date he reverted to the early days as we went whirling down the turnpike, and told tales of hauling hay and grain over these long hills. He pointed out the trail and spoke of its mud and sand. "It took us six hours then. Now, see, it's just like a city street." He was greatly pleased to find an aëroplane flying above the grounds as we drew near. "They say the Germans are making use of these machines for scouting--and they are building others to fight with. I can't understand how they make a ton of iron fly." Once inside the gates we let him play the host. He bought candy for the children, paid for our dinners at the restaurant and took us to the side-shows. It wearied him, however, and about three o'clock he said "Let's go home by way of Onalaska. I want to visit the cemetery and see if Father's lot is properly cared for." It seemed a rather melancholy finish to our day, but I agreed and as we were crossing the sandy stretch of road over which I limped as a child, I remarked "How short the distance seems." He smiled like a conqueror, "This is next thing to flying," he said. This lonely little burial ground, hardly more impressive than the one at Neshonoc, contained the graves of all the Garlands who had lived in that region. "There is a place here for me," he said, "but I want you to put me in Neshonoc beside your mother." On the way home he recovered his cheerfulness with an almost boyish resiliency. The flight of the car up the long hill which used to be such a terror to his sweating team, gave a satisfaction which broke out in speech. "It beats all how a motor can spin right along up a grade like this--and the flies can't sting it either," he added in remembering the tortured cattle of the past. When I told him of an invitation to attend a "Home Coming of Iowa Authors" which I was considering, he expressed his pleasure and urged me to accept. Des Moines was a real city to him. It possessed the glamour of a capital and to have me claimed by the State of Iowa pleased him more than any recognition in New York. The following day he watched while the carpenter and I worked at putting my study into shape. Ever since the fire two years before its ceiling had needed repair, and even now I was but half-hearted in its restoration. As I looked around the square, bare, ugly room and thought of the spacious libraries of Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, I realized my almost hopeless situation. I was only a literary camper after all. My life was not here--it couldn't be here so far from all that makes a writer's life worth while. "Soon for the sake of the children I must take them from this pleasant rut," I said to Zulime. "It is true an author can make himself felt from any place, but why do it at a disadvantage? If it were not for Father, I would establish our winter home in New York, which has the effect of increasing my power as well as my happiness." On the twentieth of October Father called me to his room. "I'm getting near the end of my trail," he said, "and I want to talk to you about my will. I want you two boys to share equally in all I've got and I'd like to have you keep this property just as it is, then you'll be safe, you'll always have a home. I'm ready to go--any time, only I don't like to leave the children--" His voice failed him for a moment, then he added, "I know I can't last long." Though refusing to take a serious view of his premonition I realized that his hold on life was loosening and I answered, "Your wishes shall be carried out." He did not feel like going up to the club that night, and so we played cards with him. Wilson Irvine, a landscape painter, who was visiting us chose Constance as a partner against Mary Isabel and her grandsire. Luck was all in Constance's favor, she and Irvine won, much to the veteran's chagrin. "You little witch," he said, "what do you mean by beating your granddad?" He was very proud of her skill, for she was only six years old. To end the evening to his liking, we all united in singing some old war songs and he went away to his bed in better spirits than he had shown for a week or more. He was at the breakfast table with me next morning, but seemed not quite awake. He replied when I spoke to him, but not alertly, not as he should, and a few minutes later rose with effort. This disturbed me a little, but a few minutes later he left the house as if to do some work at the barn, and I went to my writing with a feeling that he was quite all right. It was a glorious October morning and from my desk as I looked into the yard I could see him standing in the gate, waiting for the man and team. He appeared perfectly well and exhibited his customary impatience with dilatory workmen. He was standing alertly erect with the sunshine falling over him and the poise of his head expressed his characteristic energy. He made a handsome figure. My eyes fell again to my manuscript and I was deep in my imaginary world when I heard the voice of my uncle Frank calling to me up the stairs: "Hamlin! Come quick. Something has happened. Come, quick, quick!" There was a note in his voice which sent a chill through my blood, and my first glance into his eyes told me that he had looked upon the elemental. "Your father is lying out on the floor of the barn. I'm afraid he's gone!" He was right. There on the rough planking of the carriage way lay the old pioneer, motionless, just as he had fallen not five minutes before. The hat upon his head and his right hand in his pocket told that he had fallen while standing in the door waiting for the drayman. His eyes were closed as if in sleep, and no sign of injury could be seen. Kneeling by his side I laid my hand on his breast. It was still! His heart invincible through so many years had ceased to beat. His breath was gone and his empty left hand, gracefully lax, lay at his side. The veteran pioneer had passed to that farther West from whose vague savannahs no adventurer has ever returned. "He must have died on his feet," said my uncle gravely, tenderly. "Yes, he went the way he wished to go," I replied with a painful stress in my throat. Together we took him up and bore him to the house, and placed him on the couch whereon he had been wont to rest during the day. I moved like a man in a dream. It was all incredible, benumbing. Tenderly I disposed his head on its pillow and drew his hands across his breast. "Here is the end of a good man," I said. "Another soldier of the Union mustered out." His hands, strong, yet singularly refined, appealed to me with poignant suggestion. What stern tasks they had accomplished. What brave deeds they had dared. In spite of the hazards of battle, notwithstanding the perils of the forests, the raft, the river, after all the hardships of the farm, they remained unscarred and shapely. The evidence of good blood was in their slender whiteness. Honorable, skilful, indefatigable hands,--now forever at rest. My uncle slipped away to notify the coroner, leaving me there, alone, with the still and silent form, which had been a dominant figure in my world. For more than half a century those gray eyes and stern lips had influenced my daily life. In spite of my growing authority, in spite of his age he had been a force to reckon with up to the very moment of his death. He was not a person to be ignored. All his mistakes, his weaknesses, faded from my mind, I remembered only his heroic side. His dignity, his manly grace were never more apparent than now as he lay quietly, as though taking his midday rest. A breath of pathos rose from the open book upon his table. His hat, his shoes, his gloves all spoke of his unconquerable energy. I thought of the many impatient words I had spoken to him, and they would have filled me with a wave of remorse had I not known that our last day together had been one of perfect understanding. His final night with us had been entirely happy, and he had gone away as he had wished to go, in the manner of a warrior killed in action. His unbending soul had kept his body upright to the end. All that day I went about the house with my children like one whose world had suddenly begun to crumble. The head of my house was gone. Over and over again I stole softly into his room unable to think of him as utterly cold and still. For seventy years he had faced the open lands. Starting from the hills of Maine when a lad, he had kept moving, each time farther west, farther from his native valley. His life, measured by the inventions he had witnessed, the progress he had shared, covered an enormous span. "He died like a soldier," I said to the awed children, "and he shall have the funeral of a soldier. We will not mourn, and we will not whisper or walk tip-toe in the presence of his body." In this spirit we called his friends together. In place of flowers we covered his coffin with the folds of a flag, and when his few remaining comrades came to take a last look at him, my wife and I greeted them cordially in ordinary voice as if they had come to spend an evening with him and with us. My final look at him in the casket filled my mind with love and admiration. His snowy hair and beard, his fair skin and shapely features, as well as a certain firm sweetness in the line of his lips raised him to a grave dignity which made me proud of him. Representing an era in American settlement as he did I rejoiced that nothing but the noblest lines of his epic career were written on his face. This is my consolation. His last days were spent in calm content with his granddaughters to delight and comfort him. In their young lives his spirit is going forward. They remember and love him as the serene, white-haired veteran of many battles who taught them to revere the banner he so passionately adored. [Illustration: The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned (against my wish) after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter Constance who, at fourteen, signs herself C. Hamlin Garland, Artist.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- AFTERWORD ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: To Mary Isabel, who, as a girl of eighteen, still loves to impersonate the majesty of princesses, I entrust the future literary history of Neshonoc.] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Afterword At this point I make an end of this chronicle, the story of two families whose wanderings and vicissitudes (as I conceive them) are typical of thousands of other families who took part in the upbuilding of the Middle Western States during that period which lies between the close of the Civil War and the Great War of Nineteen Fourteen. With the ending of the two principal life-lines which bind these pages together my book naturally closes. In these two volumes over which I have brooded for more than ten years, I have shadowed forth, imperfectly, yet with high intent, the experiences of Isabel McClintock and Richard Garland, and the lives of other settlers closely connected with them. For a full understanding of the drama--for it is a drama, a colossal and colorful drama--I must depend upon the memory or the imagination of my readers. No writer can record it all or even suggest the major part of it. At the end of four years of writing I go to press with reluctance, but realizing that my public, like myself, is growing gray, I have consented to publish my manuscript with its many imperfections and omissions. My Neshonoc is gone. The community which seemed so stable to me thirty years ago, has vanished like a wisp of sunrise fog. The McClintocks, the Dudleys, the Baileys, pioneers of my father's generation, have entered upon their final migration to another darkly mysterious frontier. My sunset World--all of it--is in process of change, of disintegration, of dissolution. My beloved trails are grass-grown. I have put away my saddle and my tent-cloth, realizing that at sixty-one my explorations of the wilderness are at an end. Like a captive wolf I walk a narrow round in a city square. With my father's death I ceased to regard the La Crosse Valley even as my summer home. I decided to make my permanent residence in the East, and my wife and daughters whose affections were so deeply inwound with the Midland, loyally consented to follow, although it was a sad surrender for them. As my mother, Isabel McClintock, had given up her home and friends in the Valley to follow Richard Garland into the new lands of the West, so now Zulime Taft, A Daughter of the Middle Border, surrendered all she had gained in Illinois and Wisconsin to follow me into the crowded and dangerous East. It was a tearing wrench, but she did it. She sold our house in Woodlawn, packed up our belongings and joined me in a small apartment seven stories above the pavement in the heart of Manhattan. The children came East with a high sense of adventure, with no realization that they were leaving their childhood's home never to return to it. They still talk of going back to West Salem, and they have named our summer cabin in the Catskills "Neshonoc" in memory of the little pioneer village whose graveyard holds all that is material of their paternal grandparents. The colors of the old Homestead are growing dim, and yet they will not permit me to deed it to others. We still own it and shall continue to do so. It has too many memories both sweet and sacred,--it seems that by clinging to its material forms we may still retain its soul. We think of it often, and when around our rude fireplace in Camp Neshonoc in a room almost as rough as a frontier cabin, we sit and sing the songs which are at once a tribute to our forebears and a bond of union with the past, the shadows of the heroic past emerge. David and Luke, Richard and Walter, and with them Susan and Lorette--all--all the ones I loved and honored----. My daughters are true granddaughters of the Middle Border. Constance at fourteen, Mary Isabel at eighteen, are carrying forward, each in her distinctive way, the traditions of the Border, with the sturdy spirit of their forebears in the West. To them I am about to entrust the work which I have only partially completed. Too young at first to understand the reasons for my decision, they are now in agreement with me that we can never again live in the Homestead. They love every tree, every shrub on the old place. The towering elms, the crow's nest in the maples, the wall of growing woodbine, the gaunt, wide-spreading butternut branches,--all these are very dear to them, for they are involved with their earliest memories, touched with the glamour which the imagination of youth flings over the humblest scenes of human life. To them the Fern Road, The Bubbling Spring, and the Apple Tree Glen, scenes of many camping places, are all a part of childhood's fairy kingdom. The thought of never again walking beneath those familiar trees or sitting in those familiar rooms, is painful to them, and yet I am certain that their Neshonoc, like my own, is a realm remembered, a region to which they can return only on the wings of memory or of dream. Happily the allurement of art, the stimulus of ambition and the promise of love and honor already partly compensate them for their losses. Their faces are set to the future. On them I rest my hopes. By means of them and their like, Life weaves her endless web. 
2984	----	MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY By Albert Bigelow Paine VOLUME II, Part 1: 1875-1886 CV MARK TWAIN AT FORTY In conversation with John Hay, Hay said to Clemens: "A man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. From that time forward he begins to descend. If you have any great undertaking ahead, begin it now. You will never be so capable again." Of course this was only a theory of Hay's, a rule where rules do not apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of individualities. John Hay did as great work after forty as ever before, so did Mark Twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and public honor to the very end. Yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and achievement. His name was on every lip; in whatever environment observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark Twain. "As Mark Twain says," or, "You know that story of Mark Twain's," were universal and daily commonplaces. It was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure of immortality. He was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal ingenuity can invent. His ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous exhibition of the human species on undress parade. True, there were hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually unwarranted, often impertinent. Politicians, public speakers, aspiring writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to their abilities and projects. Young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand puns, and invited Mark Twain to father this terrific progeny in book form for a share of the returns. But the list is endless. He said once: "The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it." Even P. T. Barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was perpetually trying to grind it on Mark Twain's reputation; in other words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize "The Greatest Show on Earth." There were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be and genuine. A bright man in Duluth sent him an old Allen "pepper-box" revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine Allen which Bemis had lost on that memorable Overland buffalo-hunt. Mark Twain enjoyed that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. There were letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description; curious letters even from friends. Reginald Cholmondeley, that lovely eccentric of Condover Hall, where Mr. and Mrs. Clemens had spent some halcyon days in 1873, wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to meet him. Cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to improve his collection. Once he wrote Clemens asking him to collect for him two hundred and five American specimens, naming the varieties and the amount which he was to pay for each. Clemens was to catch these birds and bring them over to England, arriving at Condover on a certain day, when there would be friends to meet him, of course. Then there was a report which came now and then from another English castle--the minutes of a certain "Mark Twain Club," all neatly and elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another eccentric; for there was no Mark Twain Club, the reports being just the mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[In Following the Equator Clemens combined these two pleasant characters in one story, with elaborations.] Letters came queerly addressed. There is one envelope still in existence which bears Clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette likeness, the work of some talented artist. "Mark Twain, United States," was a common address; "Mark Twain, The World," was also used; "Mark Twain, Somewhere," mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and "Mark Twain, Anywhere," found its way to Hartford in due season. Then there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time), mailed by Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson, addressed, "Mark Twain, God Knows Where." It found him after traveling half around the world on its errand, and in his answer he said, "He did." Then some one sent a letter addressed, "The Devil Knows Where." Which also reached him, and he answered, "He did, too." Surely this was the farthest horizon of fame. Countless Mark Twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period, and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of his generation remains alive. For seventy years longer, perhaps, there will be those who will relate "personal recollections" of Mark Twain. Many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them will become history at last. It is too soon to make history of much of this drift now. It is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples. It happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least elaborated. It is the one about his call on Mrs. Stowe. Twichell's journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it: Mrs. Stowe was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran over early to say good-by. On his return Mrs. Clemens regarded him disapprovingly: "Why, Youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie." He said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line: "Herewith receive a call from the rest of me." Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments, and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat, and boots and be otherwise excused. Col. Henry Watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the Brevoort House, where Murat Halstead, Mark Twain, and himself were present. A reporter sent in a card for Colonel Watterson, who was about to deny himself when Clemens said: "Give it to me; I'll fix it." And left the table. He came back in a moment and beckoned to Watterson. "He is young and as innocent as a lamb," he said. "I represented myself as your secretary. I said that you were not here, but if Mr. Halstead would do as well I would fetch him out. I'll introduce you as Halstead, and we'll have some fun." Now, while Watterson and Halstead were always good friends, they were political enemies. It was a political season and the reporter wanted that kind of an interview. Watterson gave it to him, repudiating every principle that Halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed opinion. Halstead was for hard money and given to flying the "bloody shirt" of sectional prejudice; Watterson lowered the bloody shirt and declared for greenbacks in Halstead's name. Then he and Clemens returned to the table and told frankly what they had done. Of course, nobody believed it. The report passed the World night-editor, and appeared, next morning. Halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the World, denying the interview throughout. The World printed his note with the added line: "When Mr. Halstead saw our reporter he had dined." It required John Hay (then on the Tribune) to place the joke where it belonged. There is a Lotos Club anecdote of Mark Twain that carries the internal evidence of truth. Saturday evening at the Lotos always brought a gathering of the "wits," and on certain evenings--"Hens and chickens" nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. On one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a very long poem. One by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted away, until no one remained but Mark Twain. Perhaps he saw the earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. He may have remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive auditor. At all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line. Douglas Taylor, one of the faithful Saturday-night members, said to him later: "Mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?" "Well," he said, "that young man thought he had a divine message to deliver, and I thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so I stayed with him." We may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to sacrifice all the others. One might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. But anecdotes are not all of history. These are set down because they reflect a phase of the man and an aspect of his life at this period. For at the most we can only present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting each reader from his fancy construct the rest. CVI HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE Once that winter the Monday Evening Club met at Mark Twain's home, and instead of the usual essay he read them a story: "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut." It was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of "William Wilson" idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the tale, though the allegory is always present. The club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. One of its ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next Sunday if Mark Twain would deliver it to his congregation. Howells welcomed it for the Atlantic, and published it in June. It was immensely successful at the time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered to-day. Now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm. Howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded Clemens to let Osgood bring it out, with "A True Story," in dainty, booklet form. If the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again. Meantime Tom Sawyer remained unpublished. "Get Bliss to hurry it up!" wrote Howells. "That boy is going to make a prodigious hit." But Clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the Canadian pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were clamoring at the Atlantic because there was no more to steal. Moncure D. Conway was in America, and agreed to take the manuscript of Sawyer to London and arrange for its publication and copyright. In Conway's Memoirs he speaks of Mark Twain's beautiful home, comparing it and its surroundings with the homes of Surrey, England. He tells of an entertainment given to Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sort of animated jarley wax-works. Clemens and Conway went over as if to pay a call, when presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed. figures. Clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful fashion. He began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an aside, "Bring along that tinshop," and went on to tell the romance of the knight's achievements. Conway read Tom Sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it. Later, in London, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its publication with Chatto & Windus, thus establishing a friendly business relation with that firm which Mark Twain continued during his lifetime. Clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year, and on the 26th of April, 1876, made his first public appearance on the dramatic stage. It was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. There was genuine dramatic talent in Hartford, and the old play of the "Loan of the Lover," with Mark Twain as Peter Spuyk and Miss Helen Smith--[Now Mrs. William W. Ellsworth.]--as Gertrude, with a support sufficient for their needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. Mark Twain had in him the making of a great actor. Henry Irving once said to him: "You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a greater actor than a writer." Yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage. He had too many original literary ideas. He would never have been satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night from week to month, and from month to year. He could not stick to the author's lines even for one night. In his performance of the easy-going, thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it delighted the audience beyond measure. No such impersonation of that. character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. It was repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter, and it could have been put on for a long run. Augustin Daly wrote immediately, offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a "benefit" performance, and again, a few days later, urging acceptance. "Not for one night, but for many." Clemens was tempted, no doubt. Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would today have had one more claim on immortality. CVII HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND "GEORGE" Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just then. Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich, Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext or another. No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to play the part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. His dinners were elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and sometimes their wives) gathered. They were happy reunions, those fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich, Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow one seems never to find any more. On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took his son John, then a small boy, with him. John was about six years old at the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other Arabian fancies. On the way over his father said to him: "Now, John, you will see a perfect palace." They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash off the dust of travel. There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap. "Why," he said, "they've even got their soap painted!" Next morning he woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor --and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the dining-room, he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal George--setting the breakfast-table. He hurriedly tiptoed back and whispered to his father: "Come quick! The slave is setting the table!" This being the second mention of George, it seems proper here that he should be formally presented. Clemens used to say that George came one day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. He was precisely the sort of character that Mark Twain loved. He had formerly been the body-servant of an army general and was typically racially Southern, with those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go with the best type of negro character. The children loved him no less than did their father. Mrs. Clemens likewise had a weakness for George, though she did not approve of him. George's morals were defective. He was an inveterate gambler. He would bet on anything, though prudently and with knowledge. He would investigate before he invested. If he placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. If he invested in an election, he knew all about the candidates. He had agents among his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with information. He kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at ruinous interest. He buttonholed Mark Twain's callers while he was removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked George and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities. Mrs. Clemens's disapproval of George reached the point, now and then, where she declared he could not remain. She even discharged him once, but next morning George was at the breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. Mrs. Clemens looked at him gravely: "George," she said, "didn't I discharge you yesterday?" "Yes, Mis' Clemens, but I knew you couldn't get along without me, so I thought I'd better stay a while." In one of the letters to Howells, Clemens wrote: When George first came he was one of the most religious of men. He had but one fault--young George Washington's. But I have trained him; and now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front door and lie to an unwelcome visitor. George was a fine diplomat. He would come up to the billiard-room with a card or message from some one waiting below, and Clemens would fling his soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge before it reached the front door. The "slave" must have been setting the table in good season, for the Clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. They usually came along about nine o'clock, by which time Howells and John were fairly clawing with hunger. Clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good one. Breakfast and dinner were his important meals. He seldom ate at all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating, talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. Sometimes Mrs. Clemens would say: "Oh, Youth, do come and sit down with us. We can listen so much better." But he seldom did. At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could never quite equal with his pen. It's the opinion of most people who knew Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius. When Clemens came to Boston the Howells household was regulated, or rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. Mark Twain's personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general attendance of any household. The reader may recall Josh Billings's remark on the subject. Howells tells how they kept their guest to themselves when he visited their home in Cambridge, permitting him to indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how Clemens would take a room at the Parker House, leaving the gas burning day and night, and perhaps arrive at Cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went for a walk. Also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house, smoked during every waking moment, and how Howells, mindful of his insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after he was asleep. Clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. Once, when he arrived in Boston, Howells said: "Clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you." But he answered: "Oh, that's no good any more. Beer's the thing." So Howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm. He invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he stretched himself on the bath-room floor. He was a perpetual joy to the Howells family when he was there, even though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone. Mildred Howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. Miss Howells declares that while Mark Twain was their guest she nearly starved because it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and Mrs. Howells, after one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said: "Well, it 'most kills me, but it pays," a remark which Clemens vastly enjoyed. Howells himself once wrote: Your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping and longing to have you back again.... CVIII SUMMER LABORS AT QUARRY FARM They went to Elmira, that summer of '76, to be "hermits and eschew caves and live in the sun," as Clemens wrote in a letter to Dr. Brown. They returned to the place as to Paradise: Clemens to his study and the books which he always called for, Mrs. Clemens to a blessed relief from social obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends. Susy was really growing up. She had had several birthdays, quite grand affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. She was a strange, thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of infinity, for she was religiously taught. Down in the city, one night, there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and Susy was ordered to bed. She said, thoughtfully: "I wish I could sit up all night, as God does." The baby, whom they still called "Bay," was a tiny, brown creature who liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song. Clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing Bay in her carriage. Once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it started downhill, gaining speed rapidly. He awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. Before he could overtake the runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. Bay was lying among the stones and her head was bleeding. Hastily binding the wound with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the house, calling for restoratives as he came. It was no serious matter. The little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction. The children were unlike: Susy was all contemplation and nerves; Bay serene and practical. It was said, when a pet cat died--this was some years later--that Susy deeply reflected as to its life here and hereafter, while Bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral. Susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark. Once they bought her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. She was not in the best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her mother said, "Now, Susy, put your thoughts on God," she answered, "Mama, I can't with those shoes." Clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. He had given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken another long manuscript. By the middle of August he had written several hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of Tam Sawyer --The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, here is a curious phase of genius. The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale, he says: "I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done"--this of the story which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. He did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years. He wrote one short tale, "The Canvasser's Story," a burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of "blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last, of inherent misconstruction. The title was to be, "A Murder and a Marriage." Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day. The Atlantic started its "Contributors' Club," and Howells wrote to Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject, assuring him that he could "spit his spite" out at somebody or something as if it were a passage from a letter. That was a fairly large permission to give Mark Twain. The paragraph he sent was the sort of thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of Howells's necessity of rejecting it. In the accompanying note he said: Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? I suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so. He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. Yet they were constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water gem. Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and again, and finally said: "I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted." In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary, that captivating old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. He had been reading diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of the period. The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601. The "conversation," recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's "Elizabethan breadth of parlance," and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which Clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." "I could not bear to burn them," he declares, "and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them." In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field. It was written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs. Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a Sunday at Elmira. Gray said: "Print it and put your name to it, Mark. You have never done a greater piece of work than that." John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a "most exquisite bit of old English morality." Hay surreptitiously permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated privately, though sparingly, ever since. At one time a special font of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-made paper. They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day. 1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.--[In a note-book of a later period Clemens himself wrote: "It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not. I once wrote a conversation between Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk. "There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years younger than the boy Beaumont. I built a conversation which could have happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601. I sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender! But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, 'O that we had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one."] Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year--the year of the Hayes-Tilden campaign. Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life. Before his return to Hartford he announced himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes's letter of acceptance, which, he said, "expresses my own political convictions." His politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden and Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising. He wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added: "You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr. Tilden's Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag." He wrote Howells: "If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells's bad place." Howells was writing a campaign biography of Hayes, which he hoped would have a large sale, and Clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save the country. Howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged Clemens to take the field in the cause. Returning to Hartford, Clemens presided at a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the campaign. All papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy. Yet conditions did not improve. When Howells's book had been out a reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand copies. "There's success for you," he said. "It makes me despair of the Republic, I can tell you." Clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for Hayes and damning Tilden till the final vote was cast. In later life he changed his mind about Tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. Sympathy could make--Mark Twain change his mind any time. He stood for the right, but, above all, for justice. He stood for the wronged, regardless of all other things. CIX THE PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF "TOM SAWYER" Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and could not leave home. As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent admiration of the whole family. Millet was young, handsome, and lively; Clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the "Holy Family," Clemens called it. Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. She was afraid of losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. Millet went to the city. for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him. While Millet was doing his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. He left word with a clerk to tell Millet that he had gone across the street. By and by the artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a success. He tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness, but it never satisfied Millet. The 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' appeared late in December (1876), and immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life, a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. We have already considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain's own boyhood. It is only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in literary form. From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart Tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to "fear God and dread the Sunday-school," as Howells puts it in his review. As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance, would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this: They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage and the festooning vines. There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island. Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook. No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it: The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr. Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written: Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of the sea-shore. Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy's story it has not been equaled. Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It. Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember. --[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote: "I have just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It is immense! I read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of honorable and pious people. Once I had to get to one side and have a cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no end to it.... The 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck and Aunt Polly--makes a cross between Dickens's skill and Thackeray's nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original."] CX MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE WRITE A PLAY It was the fall and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive invention. He also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor that Mark Twain could furnish. Furthermore, he believed that a play backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages. Clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made. Speaking of their method of working, Clemens once said: "Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect." Which is hardly a fair statement of the case. They both worked on the play, and worked hard. During the period of its construction Harte had an order for a story which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. It must be delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting at it without a moment's delay. Still he seemed in no haste to begin. The evening passed; bedtime came. Then he asked that an open fire might be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed. something to keep him awake. George attended to these matters, and nothing more was heard of Harte until very early next morning, when he rang for George and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of whisky. At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the announcement that his story was complete. That forenoon the Saturday Morning Club met at the Clemens home. It was a young women's club, of which Mark Twain was a sort of honorary member --a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the order of the Monday Evening Club of men, except that the papers read before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in some field of intellectual progress. Bret Harte had agreed to read to them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the story just finished, "Thankful Blossom," a tale which Mark Twain always regarded as one of Harte's very best. The new play, "Ah Sin," by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, was put on at Washington, at the National Theater, on the evening of May 7, 1877. It had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors insured a crowded opening. Clemens was unable to go over on account of a sudden attack of bronchitis. Parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the presence of Harte does not seem to have added to his happiness. "I am not very well myself," he wrote to Clemens. "The excitement of the first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I have is too much for a new beginner." Nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with Parsloe as Ah Sin --a Chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and entertaining Ah Sin. It was not a great play. It was neither very coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. At the end of each act not only Parsloe, but also the principal members of the company, were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments. When it was over there was a general call for Ah Sin, who came before the curtain and read a telegram. CHARLES T. PARSLOE,--I am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to Washington; but I have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of failure of the play, and the other if successful. Please tell me which I shall send. May be better to put it to vote. MARK TWAIN. The house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than true. J. I. Ford, of the theater management, wrote to Clemens, next morning after the first performance, urging him to come to Washington in person and "wet nurse" the play until "it could do for itself." Ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and concludes: I inclose notices. Come if you can. "Your presence will be worth ten thousand men. The king's name is a tower of strength." I have urged the President to come to-night. The play made no money in Washington, but Augustin Daly decided to put it on in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theater, with a company which included, besides Parsloe, Edmund Collier, P. A. Anderson, Dora Goldthwaite, Henry Crisp, and Mrs. Wells, a very worthy group of players indeed. Clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at the end of the third act. "Ah Sin" did not excite much enthusiasm among New York dramatic critics. The houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. It set out on its provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it was heard of no more. Just why "Ah Sin" did not prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. Poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. A touch somewhere, a pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved "Ali Sin," but the pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. Perhaps it still lies in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. Who knows? Or it may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no returning. As between Harte and Clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. In the course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time friendship disappeared. CXI A BERMUDA HOLIDAY On the 16th of May, 1877, Mark Twain set out on what, in his note-book, he declared to be "the first actual pleasure-trip" he had ever taken, meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other than that of mere enjoyment. He took with him his, friend and pastor, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and they sailed for Bermuda, an island resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day. They did not go to a hotel. Under assumed names they took up quarters in a boarding-house, with a Mrs. Kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether happy in their wanderings through four golden days. Mark Twain could not resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character and incident, just as he had always done. He was impressed with the cheapness of property and living in the Bermuda of that period. He makes special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: "All as beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty dollars each." To Twichell he remarked: "Joe, this place is like Heaven, and I'm going to make the most of it." "Mark," said Twichell, "that's right; make the most of a place that is like Heaven while you have a chance." In one of the entries--the final one--Clemens says: "Bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways, telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. I propose to spend next year here and no more." When they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, Twichell made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark Twain. "Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?" asked Twichell. The daughter answered. "Yes," she said, "until I'm tired of the name. I know a young man who never talks of anything else." "Well," said Twichell, "that gentleman with me is Mark Twain." The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep sorrow that they had not known it earlier. Twichell promised that he and Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead. On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks, trying to get to New York. She had no cargo and was pretty helpless. Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford paper, telling the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew, on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a "pleasure-excursion!" Clemens dwelt on this fancy: I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn solitudes of the ocean. Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time; one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out. That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To Twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made: Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four. There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens denounced him for his absence: If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. Clemens would not fail to write about his trip. He could not help doing that, and he began "Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion" as soon as he landed in Hartford. They were quite what the name would signify --leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. They are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of Bermuda. Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them delightful enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him. The story of "Isaac and the Prophets of Baal" was one that Capt. Ned Wakeman had told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to Aspinwall with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the "Rambling Notes" Wakeman appears as Captain Hurricane Jones, probably a step in the evolution of the later name of Stormfield. The best feature of the series (there were four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the brightest ripple of humor is the reference to Bermuda's mahogany-tree: There was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. I know this to be reliable because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a haze lip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. Such men are all too few. Clemens cared less for these papers than did Howells. He had serious doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with Howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let them all go in. They did not especially advance his reputation, but perhaps they did it no harm. CXII A NEW PLAY AND A NEW TALE He wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the first time. "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton" employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a reality--long-distance communication. His work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one of which he completed without delay. He still had the dramatic ambition, and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely from his own resources. To Howells, in June, he wrote: To-day I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal character an old detective. I skeletoned the first act and wrote the second to-day, and am dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of MS. in seven hours. Seven days later, the Fourth of July, he said: I have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. The first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. To-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. Never had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest and delight. And just think! I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie. He was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. Even Howells caught his enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it contained told for the Atlantic. But in the end it proved a mistake. Dion Boucicault, when he read the manuscript, pronounced it better than "Ah Sin," but that was only qualified praise. Actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have Mark Twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't "go." John Brougham wrote: There is an absolute "embarrassment of riches" in your "Detective" most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable form. The quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the necessary manipulation to extract the gold. In narrative structure the story would be full of life, character, and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its present condition for dramatic representation, and I confess I do not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if I had the time, which on reflection I find I have not) to undertake what, under different circumstances, would be a "labor of love." Yours sincerely, JOHN BROUGHAM. That was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly. "Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective," had plenty of good material in it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play, and the situations wouldn't act. Clemens realized that perhaps the drama was not, after all, his forte; he dropped "Simon Wheeler," lost his interest in "Ah Sin," even leased "Colonel Sellers" for the coming season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his mind. He had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. One day he picked up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an English story of the thirteenth century by Charlotte M. Yonge, entitled, The Prince and the Page. It was a story of Edward I. and his cousins, Richard and Henry de Montfort; in part it told of the submerged personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as a blind beggar for a period of years. It was a story of a sort and with a setting that Mark Twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative idea. Not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as a prince. He would have them change places in the world, and each learn the burdens of the other's life.--[There is no point of resemblance between the Prince and the Pauper and the tale that inspired it. No one would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other, and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.] The plot presented physical difficulties. He still had some lurking thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince. The old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in Pudd'nhead Wilson) presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had in mind. Finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and personality of Tom Canty, of Offal Court, for those of the son of Henry VIII., little Edward Tudor, more lately sixth English king of that name. This little prince was not his first selection for the part. His original idea had been to use the late King Edward VII. (then Prince of Wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose a prince among the slums of modern London, and have his proud estate denied and jeered at by a modern mob. He felt that he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the proper time and prince, till he came to little Edward, who was too young --but no matter, he would do. He decided to begin his new venture in story form. He could dramatize it later. The situation appealed to him immensely. The idea seemed a brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and detail of that delightful old time. He put away all thought of cheap, modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most entertaining and instructive tales of old English life. He decided to be quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old London very carefully. He bought a pocket-map which he studied in the minutest detail. He wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer; then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. It was a long wait, as usual. He did not touch it again for more than three years. CXIII TWO DOMESTIC DRAMAS Some unusual happenings took place that summer of 1877. John T. Lewis (colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of Auntie Cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of Mrs. Clemens's sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles ("Charley") Langdon, her little daughter Julia, and her nurse-maid. They were in a buggy, and their runaway horse was flying down East Hill toward Elmira to certain destruction, when Lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon, saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill. The Clemens and Crane families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe. Everybody contributed in rewarding Lewis. He received money ($1,500) and various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also, what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold watch. Clemens, writing a full account to Dr. Brown of the watch, says: And if any scoffer shall say, "behold this thing is out of character," there is an inscription within which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. In another paragraph he says: When Lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives by a feat which I think is the most marvelous I can call to mind, when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too, and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past seven years that he has occupied this farm. Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of rare native loftiness: But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed. Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and Langdon households, for twenty-nine years. When he was too old to work there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers. So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace. Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death: He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told stories, and was able to eat almost everything. Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite impossible to give in his home. He died on his way there. Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his great deed. A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford. There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and no longer wished to marry her. The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time being. He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway. Finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. He asked Twichell to procure a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room. He arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with Lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. He had already made an appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a "matter of business," and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt, that it was something which would lead to profitable employment. When he came in Clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her; how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (Clemens) was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life. But the young man was not enthusiastic. He was a Swede and slow of action. He resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and in the end refused to do so. Then came the dramatic moment. Clemens quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. There was a brief discussion of this point. Finally Clemens gave him five minutes to make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting, and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge. The young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for him to get a license and a preacher. But Clemens stepped to the door of the bath-room, opened it, and let out Twichell, who had been sweltering there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being August. The delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the scene, dressed for the occasion. Behind her ranged the rest of the servants and a few invited guests. Before the young man knew it he had a wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. It ended with a gay supper and festivities. Then Clemens started them handsomely by giving each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and prosperously ever after. Some years later Mark Twain based a story on this episode, but it was never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished. CXIV THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G. Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Clemens had attended a number of the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had provided a part of the entertainment. It is only fair to say that his after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. But on this particular occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual, startling, something altogether unheard of. When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. This time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. It was a sort of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. It was an imaginary presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had imposed themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory fashion. At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. A feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did not show his effort to any one beforehand. He wanted its full beauty to burst upon the entire company as a surprise. It did that. Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost contributors and dearest friends. Here, he said, was "a humorist who never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke." Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to deliver his speech. I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures, sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good- fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctiness across this abyss of time. William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme. "And then," to quote Howells, "the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us." After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end. And somehow he did it, while "there fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy." Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that Bishop didn't last long. It was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up. Howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom: "Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow." He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford in a writhing agony of spirit. He believed that he was ruined forever, so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake could never be wholly repaired. The fact that certain papers quoted the speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. But perhaps his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon Howells. He put his heart into a brief letter: MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances. I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages now. So it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion? It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it. The whole matter is a dreadful subject. Let me drop it here--at least on paper. Penitently yours, MARK So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. But Howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope. "It was a fatality," Howells said. "One of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why." Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. Howells declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain's work from the Atlantic. You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world. Especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well. I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this thing happened than I could before. It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them. Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. Emerson had not been offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so completely shut him away. Longfellow's letter made light of the whole matter. The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief. A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another. One needs the lamplight and the scenery. These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious aspect. I do not believe that anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not, and Holmes tells me that he was not. So I think you may dismiss the matter from your mind, without further remorse. It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very much. Holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle. It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name. I have heard some mild questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open question. Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly defended it against the charge of impropriety. More than this, one of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly delighted with it. Miss Emerson's letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England fashion did much to lift the gloom. DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,--At New Year's our family always meets, to spend two days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with him Mr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sister said, "Oh, let father write!" but my mother said, "No, don't wait for him. Go now; don't stop to pick that up. Go this minute and write. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so." First let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr. Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when she read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you will want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We were disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seen over Mark Twain's signature. It has made us like the man, and we have delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeat certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to enjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seem good or funny, and he said, "No, it was unfortunate. Still some of those quotations were very good"; and he gave them with relish and my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he couldn't understand them like his children. My mother read it lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my father it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think it doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much- liked author, and restores our former feeling about him. ELLEN T. EMERSON. The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas Clemens wrote to Howells: I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I'm going to try to-morrow. How could I ever---- Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all his work must be contemplated with respect. So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said: "I find it gross, coarse--well, I needn't go on with particulars. I don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don't know." But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: --[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in the volume of "Speeches." (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last volume.)--I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.] It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied. Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The speech was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation. CXV HARTFORD AND BILLIARDS Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study. "Magnanimous Incident Literature" (for the Atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with the "Visit to Heaven," and after one reconstruction Howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The story continued to lie in seclusion. Clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. Dan Slote's firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn. Slote issued another little book for him soon after Punch, Brothers, Punch!--which, besides that lively sketch, contained the "Random Notes" and seven other selections. Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant. Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and Clemens, recalling Nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive. He wrote characteristically: MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say, "I die innocent." But the same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten years ago (when I was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones), with you for company. My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, "absorb these." For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities to be visited]. The letter continues: Call the gross receipts $100,00 for four months and a half, and the profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them). I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks, to see how the thing would go. I was charmed. Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should have some fun. Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. So Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort. The children were at an age "to be entertaining, and to be entertained." In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write. They had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. They sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. They would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay. Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. If they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration. Once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," but he was equal to it. On one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures. At one end was the head of a girl, that they called "Emeline," and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat. When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with "Emeline." This was the unvarying program. He was not allowed to begin with "Emeline" and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room. He could vary the story as much as he liked. In fact, he was required to do that. The trend of its chapters, from the cat to "Emeline," was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way. He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration. The billiard-room became his headquarters. He received his callers there and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. Every Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship. Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. It amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. S. C. Dunham was among those who belonged to the "Friday Evening Club," as they called it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G. Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. Clemens quoted to them sometimes: Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring Your winter garment of repentance fling; The bird of time has but a little way To flutter, and the bird is on the wing. Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene "eat, drink, and be merry" philosophy, in Fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early converts. Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited: For some we loved, the loveliest and best That from his vintage rolling time has prest, Have drunk their cup a round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the dust descend; Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie, Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans End.' --[The 'Rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichell immediately wrote Clemens a card: "Read (if you haven't) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page of this morning's Courant. I think we'll have to get the book. I never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so. adequately. And it's only a translation. Read it, and we'll talk it over. There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought. "Surely this Omar was a great poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning. "Hoping that you are better, J. H. T." Twichell's "only a translation" has acquired a certain humor with time. CXVI OFF FOR GERMANY The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home during the early months of 1878. The Clemenses had long looked forward to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of travel furnished an added reason for their going. They planned for the spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making their headquarters in Germany. So they entered into the study of the language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. There was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the household presently became lingually Teutonic. It amused Mark Twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined English and German words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. Necessarily the new study would infect his literature. He conceived a plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying district. They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip, persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them. They wrote to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come to Hartford for a good-by visit. Howells and his wife came. The Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell calls. The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home made ready for closing. They were to have pleasant company on the ship. Bayard Taylor, then recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to sail on the same vessel; Murat Halstead's wife and daughter were listed among the passengers. Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor's "farewell dinner." The "Mark Twain" party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss Spaulding, little Susy and Clara ("Bay"), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom no program had been made. There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. As the weather began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word of good-by. When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself, was willing to lend him. Halstead was accused of having intentionally allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious look; but in any event they were glad to have him along. In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit. And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much. In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which to some extent has gone now forever. He cannot entirely escape the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all encumbering cares of life. Among the first note-book entries Mark Twain wrote: To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--"I am no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much consequence when I am with ye and of ye. I know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of reach and cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the dead." It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within. Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions. Taylor had a large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. He would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show them the music and construction of it. He sang German folk-lore songs for them, and the "Lorelei," then comparatively unknown in America. Such was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. He was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he did not fill it long. Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have heart trouble. Halstead, however, survived many years. Taylor died December 19, 1878. CXVII GERMANY AND GERMAN From the note-book: It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the bull's-eye in a fog--as we did. When the fog fell on us the captain said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen hours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearing so and so, and about so many miles away. Hove the lead and got forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were. Another idea. For ages man probably did not know why God carpeted the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so on. But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the soundings. They reached Hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. They rested a few days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg early in May. They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others at an inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments. Chance or direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany. He did not go back after his party. He sent a message telling them to take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to enjoy the view. Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat in welcome. He led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed to the view. They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle, densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled valley of the Rhine. By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the hilltop, he said: "I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over there; the one with the gable in the roof. Mine is the middle room on the third floor." Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his room. Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and referred to it as his office. They amused themselves by watching his "people" and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, "Moblirte Wohnung zu Vermiethen." A day or two later he was established in the very room he had selected, it being the only room but one vacant. In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg environment. To Howells he wrote: Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in these. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them . . . . It must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song.... I have waited for a "call" to go to work--I knew it would come. Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move my manuscripts over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided at last. So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I'll go to work again (perhaps in Munich). The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left Hartford. Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible. Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings. I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. I labor with my felicities. How I shall get to sleep to-night I don't know, though I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. Oh, my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morning deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another degree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her being left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me. SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon your shoes. Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that department. Meantime, the struggle with the "awful German language" went on. It was a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down to little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of nightmare. Once in his note-book he says: "Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and wished they had gone to the other place"; and a little farther along, "I wish I could hear myself talk German." To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles: Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "Oh, there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!" Then Livy takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her pillow murmuring, "Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after midnight she wakes me up and says, "I do so hate to disturb you, but is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?" And Mrs. Clemens wrote: Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving these days. I am just interested in German. Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German, though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she said, pathetically: "Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English." Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue: I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods that we see. Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a letter in German, though he hastened to add, "Or do you prefer English by this time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least possible personal inconvenience." Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the "outrageous and impossible German grammar," and abandoned it altogether. In his note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured: "Gott im Himmel!" He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his own lack of them. In the notes he comments: Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately the person tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when I stop him. They naturally despise such an ignoramus. Our doctor here speaks as pure English, as I. On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift. The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family, and he was a great delight to them. He practised his German on them, and interested himself in their daily affairs. Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the Atlantic. "I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular demand," he said. "People are constantly asking when you are going to begin." Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were persistently enterprising. I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now--separatable stuff, that is--but I shall have by and by. It is very gratifying to hear that it is wanted by anybody. I stand always prepared to hear the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long. Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes. The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways. The children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music. Clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. Art and opera did not appeal to him. The note-book says: I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of "Trovatore" and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have made entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delighted enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But oh, how far between they are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching "between-times" of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down. Sunday night, 11th. Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play the "Fremersberg." I suppose it is very low-grade music--I know it must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting. The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, but with all my heart. What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives me wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the higher music because the higher and better like it. But you see I want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the thing the necessary amount of time and attention. The natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie--we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives to opera what support it has in America. And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner's "Slave Ship" is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to see water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes swimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the "Slave Ship" reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'. He confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner, though perhaps never of the "Slave Ship" picture. In fact, Mark Twain was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an "artistic" kind. CXVIII TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL Twichell arrived on time, August 1st. Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp through the Black Forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. They did not always walk, but they often did. At least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and Clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him. But they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened along. They did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. They crossed on into Switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of the Alps. The family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their wanderings. Mark Twain found an immunity from attention in Switzerland, which for years he had not known elsewhere. His face was not so well known and his pen-name was carefully concealed. It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. In one of his letters home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially delighted with Mark Twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity. "I could not forbear telling him who Mark was," he says, "and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so." They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his comrade a chance to rest. Then away again to Interlaken, where the Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemini Pass, with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger that directs mankind to God. This was true Alpine wandering--sweet vagabondage. The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words. Clemens records in his notes: Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon, last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage which has thus far hit me with force--Tito compromising with his conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best thing. Joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later --and without prelude said, "I read that book you've got there six years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing." This is Joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty- four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. He said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came and that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in another room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment. Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112, Tauchnitz edition. And again: The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. This evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the Matterhorn. Then Joe said, "We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and inquire for Livy's telegram." If he had been but one instant later I should have said those words instead of him. Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, "And there's the man!" Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling. Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom. The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making "Harris" (Twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story: Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in certain directions. Then generalizing, Twichell adds: He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finely regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to pass another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedingly timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask a question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals. When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day, when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, Mark said, "The fellow's got the notion that we are in a hurry." He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of everything--or most things. The days were not all sunshine. Sometimes it rained and they took shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote--a good while sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead. After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home: Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. He scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens and wanted more room. So I stopped the guide and got out my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel advertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like, and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose admirably. He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box and sent it by mail to Livy. A strange Mark he is, full of contradictions. I spoke last night of his sensitive to others' feelings. To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. Mark paused, went aside and busied himself a minute picking a flower. In the halt the guide got by and resumed his place in front. Mark threw the flower away, saying, "I didn't want that. I only wanted to give the old man a chance to go on without seeming to pass us." Mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish you might have heard him to-day. His vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw. In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another pretty incident of their travels. They had been toiling up the Gorner Grat. As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him. On the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at a very gradual rate. It was a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy over it all the rest of the day. The matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their discussions. It was Twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every night at the hotels, and Clemens was willing to join in the observances. Once Twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. Clemens listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. A day or two later, as they were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out. "Joe," he said, "I'm going to make a confession. I don't believe in your religion at all. I've been living a lie right straight along whenever I pretended to. For a moment, sometimes, I have been almost a believer, but it immediately drifts away from me again. I don't believe one word of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book. I believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement and all. The problem of life and death and eternity and the true conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in that book." So the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was never afterward reopened. They joined Mrs. Clemens and the others at Lausanne at last, and their Swiss holiday was over. Twichell set out for home by way of England, and Clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings. Then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade: DEAR OLD JOE, It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's. It is justifiable to do this; for why should I let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps? Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. But you are, and we cannot get around it. So take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both. MARK. CXIX ITALIAN DAYS The Clemens party wandered down into Italy--to the lakes, Venice, Florence, Rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the Hartford home. In Venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old Venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. It was a furniture with a long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. It would become a stately institution in the Clemens household. The cupids on the posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with. It was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years. They spent three weeks in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then a week in Florence and a fortnight in Rome. --[From the note-book: "BAY--When the waiter brought my breakfast this morning I spoke to him in Italian. "MAMA--What did you say? "B.--I said, 'Polly-vo fransay.' "M.--What does it mean? "B.--I don't know. What does it mean, Susy? "S.--It means, 'Polly wants a cracker.'"] Clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat concerning the old masters. He no longer found the bright, new copies an improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake his enthusiasm. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding spent long hours wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not always willingly. He wrote his sorrow to Twichell: I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me. Rome interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which the average tourist feels an interest in. There are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. Once when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. "Youth," said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, "if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others"; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: "Now, you've been spoke to!" He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. He realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of general sight-seeing. One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the story of travel. Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he said: I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me. Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem to have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later attempt: "Am a shining success as a courier," he records, "by the use of francs. Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with confidence." He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. When, after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery. And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a private place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south of France. The rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their proprietress, Fraulein Dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her ability to make them happy. It was a faith that was justified. Next morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. Fraulein Dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. She arranged larger rooms and better conveniences for them. Their location was central and there was a near-by park. They had no wish to change. Clemens, in his letter to Howells, boasts that he brought the party through from Rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he commented, "Probably a lie." He secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not find his Swiss note-book. He wrote Twichell that he had lost it, and that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels. But the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. For a time it went badly. He wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside. He had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive narrative. He had become, as it seemed, too didactic. He thought his description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured. These impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it enthusiasm and confidence. In a letter to Twichell he reported his progress: I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work, tore up a great part of the MS. written in Heidelberg--wrote and tore up, continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! Since then I'm glad that Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss notebook than I did. Further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer to that voice of the Alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent: O Switzerland! The further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it grow. Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. And what a voice it was! And how real! Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! That stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so! How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of the mountains! Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. I wonder what the secret of it is. Well, time and time and again it has seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more. It is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. That is the word. We must go again, Joe. CXX IN MUNICH That winter in Munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in after-years. His work went well enough--always a chief source of gratification. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding found interest in the galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that beautiful old Bavarian town. The children also liked Munich. It was easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom. The German Christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial delight. The German language they seemed fairly to absorb. Writing to his mother Clemens said: I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do English. Susy often translates Livy's orders to the servants. I cannot work and study German at the same time; so I have dropped the latter and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. In Munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many callers. Most Americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on Mark Twain. It was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. Mrs. Clemens, in a letter written from Venice, where they had received even more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost wished she might never see a visitor again. Originally there was a good deal about Munich in the new book, and some of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. They were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the French chapters. Only a few Italian memories were left to follow the Switzerland wanderings. The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to Heilsbronn. It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the vast bedroom. It may interest the reader to compare what really happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written for publication: Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself for two interminable hours I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch-dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment --all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand. Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it up. At first I only said to myself, "Blame that sock," but that soon ceased to answer. My expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article. I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. Livy screamed, then said, "Who is it? What is the matter?" I said, "There ain't anything the matter. I'm hunting for my sock." She said, "Are you hunting for it with a club?" I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the magazine now and then: the "Gambetta Duel" burlesque, which would make a chapter in the book later, and the story of "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn."--[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume. The "Pitcairn" and "Elephant" tales were originally chapters in 'A Tramp Abroad'; also the unpleasant "Coffin-box" yarn, which Howells rejected for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a favorite with its author.] Howells's novel, 'The Lady of the Aroostook', was then running through the 'Atlantic', and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general deep satisfaction of his household in that tale: If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph . . . . Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years --it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day I shall be in the encyclopedias too, thus: "Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells." Though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. Clemens always regarded with awe William Dean Howells's ability to dissect and photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain's ability to light, with a single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon. CXXI PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe, arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy, uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their rooms. A paragraph will serve: Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same --uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty white and the rest a faded red. How those hideous chairs do swear at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I have seen in Europe. Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is! It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l'Echelle. But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. It was one of those French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is distressingly foggy and chill between times. Clemens received a bad impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from which he never entirely recovered. In his note-book he wrote: "France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country." The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no great love for the French as a nation. Conversely, the French as a nation did not care greatly for Mark Twain. There were many individual Frenchmen that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who admired the work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side was there the warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout Europe he invited and returned. His book was not yet finished. In Paris he worked on it daily, but without enthusiasm. The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. His note-book says: May 7th. I wish this terrible winter would come to an end. Have had rain almost without intermission for two months and one week. May 28th. This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and interminable winter. It was not all gloom and discomfort. There was congenial company in Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. Aldrich the scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: "When Aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other side." Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing. The Parisian note-book has this memorandum: "Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]--was there, also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife, Hjalinar Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, artist people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy. Turgenieff, as in London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly born philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his own. Tauchnitz had early published the 'Innocents', following it with other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all. He traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects to him. "A mighty nice old gentleman," Clemens found him. Richard Whiteing was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young American painters whom it was good to know. They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose purpose was indicated by its name. Mark Twain occasionally attended its sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there, speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. Mark Twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its way into published literature. Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party. He could go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather kept the others housed in. He did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. They were all studying French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to France. Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of that lovely character. The Reign of Terror interested him. He reread Carlyle's Revolution, a book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'A Tale of Two Cities'. When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of that grim period. In his note-book he comments: "The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the people were savages. Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they each figure in due proportion to their crafts." And again: "For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre; every now and then a big massacre or a little one. The spirit is peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had it. In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese. Their chief traits--love of glory and massacre." Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of quittance: "You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourists' custom. When I see a man jump from the Vendome Column I say, 'They like to do that in Paris.'" Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn doubtless from Parisian reading and observation: "Childish race and great." "I'm for cremation." "I disfavor capital punishment." "Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with their hands. There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade. "They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy." "Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good." A curious thing happened one day in Paris. Boyesen; in great excitement, came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments. He was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. He asked immediately if his wife had come to their rooms. On learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. She had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before. He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her. Clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly: "I will." "Where will you go first," Boyesen demanded. Still in the same even voice Clemens said: "To the elevator." He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall. The elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out. She had been delayed by a breakdown and a blockade. Clemens said afterward that he had a positive conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. It was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are privileged to do so. Paris, June 1, 1879. Still this vindictive winter continues. Had a raw, cold rain to-day. To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire. They stood it for another month, and then on the 10th of July, when it was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for Brussels, which he calls "a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town." Two days in Brussels, then to Antwerp, where they dined on the Trenton with Admiral Roan, then to Rotterdam, Dresden, Amsterdam, and London, arriving there the 29th of July, which was rainy and cold, in keeping with all Europe that year. Had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all day. A remarkable summer, truly! London meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs, too far away to recall. A letter written by Mrs. Clemens at the time preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom. Clara [Spaulding] went in to dinner with Mr. Henry James; she enjoyed him very much. I had a little chat with him before dinner, and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. I had expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by him and criticized. Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract me. Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart, who was Washington Irving's love, and she is said to have been his only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave. --[Mrs. Clemens was misinformed. Irving's only "love" was a Miss Hoffman.]--She was also an intimate friend of Madame Bonaparte. You would judge Mrs. Stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone, before the gentlemen came up. It was lovely to see such a sweet old age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible; you had not the least sense that she was aged. She quoted French in her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such a kindly, lovely way. When she entered the room, before dinner, Mr. James, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said, "Good evening, you wonderful lady." After she had passed . . . he said, "She is the youngest person in London. She has the youngest feelings and the youngest interests . . . . She is always interested." It was a perfect delight to hear her and see her. For more than two years they had had an invitation from Reginald Cholmondeley to pay him another visit. So they went for a week to Condover, where many friends were gathered, including Millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of Ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. It was one of the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[Moncure D. Conway, who was in London at the time, recalls, in his Autobiography, a visit which he made with Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Stratford-on-Avon. "Mrs. Clemens was an ardent Shakespearian, and Mark Twain determined to give her a surprise. He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not to meet us himself, but send his carriage. On arrival at the station we directed the driver to take us straight to the church. When we entered, and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare's grave, 'Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am I?' Mark received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady enjoy a visit more than that to Avonbank. Mrs. Charles Flower (nee Martineau) took Mrs. Clemens to her heart, and contrived that every social or other attraction of that region should surround her."] From the note-book: Sunday, August 17,'79. Raw and cold, and a drenching rain. Went to hear Mr. Spurgeon. House three-quarters full-say three thousand people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him. A wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in their salvation an important matter. Tuesday, August 19th. Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer. Talked with the great Darwin. They had planned to visit Dr. Brown in Scotland. Mrs. Clemens, in particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. Clemens in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which there was no real excuse. There is documentary evidence against this harsh conclusion. They were, in fact, delayed here and there by misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching Liverpool in time for their sailing date, August 23d. Unquestionably he was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. Time would magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his conscience with the entire burden of blame. Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different from a day rainbow. It is not given to many persons in this world to see even one of these phenomena. After each previous vision there had come to him a period of good-fortune. Perhaps this also boded well for him. CXXII AN INTERLUDE The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879. A report of his arrival, in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence; that only his drawl seemed natural. His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia, was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. He looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned quite gray. It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens, anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the baggage. But the official was dubious. Clemens argued eloquently, and a higher authority was consulted. Again Clemens stated his case and presented his arguments. A still higher chief of inspection was summoned, evidently from his bed. He listened sleepily to the preamble, then suddenly said: "Oh, chalk his baggage, of course! Don't you know it's Mark Twain and that he'll talk all night?" They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had been longing through all their days of absence. Mrs. Clemens, in her letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop. From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell: "You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place that was so divine as the farm. Why don't you come here and take a foretaste of Heaven?" Clemens declared he would roam no more forever, and settled down to the happy farm routine. He took up his work, which had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed. In the letter to Twichell he said: I am revising my MS. I did not expect to like it, but I do. I have been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. Day before yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them, reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. I believe it will be a readable book of travels. I cannot see that it lacks anything but information. Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. Yet she had enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his. Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond all counting. She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. One day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed, timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her orthodox views. She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul. The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change. Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower, dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life and love. Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. It was a sweet day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of both so long as life lasted. Certainly it was the larger faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. Long afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, Clemens once said to his wife, "Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the Christian faith do so," and she answered, "I can't, Youth. I haven't any." And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then, all his days. CXXIII THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879 If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and December of that year. The first of these was delivered at Chicago, on the occasion of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the Tennessee, on the evening of November 73, 1879. Grant had just returned from his splendid tour of the world. His progress from San Francisco eastward had been such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty. Clemens received an invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at first moved to decline. He prepared a letter in which he made "business" his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see and hear the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee at the moment when their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak. "Besides," he said, "I wanted to see the General again anyway and renew the acquaintance. He would remember me, because I was the person who did not ask him for an office." He did not send the letter. Reconsidering, it seemed to him that there was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a Confederate soldier who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through Ralls and Monroe counties, Missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to his old imaginary pursuer. It was in the nature of an imperative command, which he could not refuse to obey. He accepted and agreed to speak. They had asked him to respond to the toast of "The Ladies," but for him the subject was worn out. He had already responded to that toast at least twice. He telegraphed that there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take that class for a toast: the babies. Necessarily they agreed, and he prepared himself accordingly. He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome. Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had been built out from the second story of the Palmer House. Clemens had not seen the General since the "embarrassing" introduction in Washington, twelve years before. Their meeting was characteristic enough. Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped over to Clemens, and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented. Grant also came forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying: "General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as yourself." They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant said, looking at him gravely: "Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?" So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. It was a conspicuous performance. The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men. Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at Haverly's Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him. Clemens, writing of it that evening to Mrs. Clemens, said: I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on. What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair. You note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent. But Grant! He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and congratulation; but as true as I'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. This was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut, and Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G. Ingersoll and Mark Twain. Chicago has never known a greater event than that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there. To Howells Clemens wrote: Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up "When we were marching through Georgia." Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. I sha'n't ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. I ever looked upon! Grand times, my boy, grand times! Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that night which he would remember as long as he lived. One of them was by Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a flame. The Howells letter continues: I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll's music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. "They fought, that a mother might own her child." The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me! he borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only test! People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. Clemens's own speech came last. He had been placed at the end to hold the house. He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary speech had made them unresponsive. They gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in front of him--a tribute to his name. Then he began the opening words of that memorable, delightful fancy. "We haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies--we stand on common ground--" The tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first half of the sentence. He made one of his effective pauses on the word "babies," and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, "we stand on common ground," they let go a storm of applause. There was no weariness and inattention after that. At the end of each sentence, he had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. When he reached the beginning of the final paragraph, "Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are," the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. Step by step he led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would be his way. Then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the opening of his final sentence: "And now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect) the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some fifty-six years ago." He paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. After all, he seemed likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. No one ever knew better than Mark Twain the value of a pause. He waited now long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was painful, then wheeling to Grant himself he said, with all the dramatic power of which he was master: "And if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded!" The house came down with a crash. The linking of their hero's great military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. Even Grant's iron serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his cheeks. They swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their efforts to seize his hand. He was borne up and down the great dining-hall. Grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments. "It tore me all to pieces," he said; and Sherman exclaimed, "Lord bless you, my boy! I don't know how you do it!" The little speech has been in "cold type" so many years since then that the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of response it kindled so long ago. But that was another day--and another nation--and Mark Twain, like Robert Ingersoll, knew always his period and his people. CXXIV ANOTHER "ATLANTIC" SPEECH The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr. Holmes. Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first impulse had been to decline. It would be something of an ordeal; for though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify. Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on condition that he be allowed to speak. If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. But you may read what I say beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. Howells advised against any sort of explanation. Clemens accepted this as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of honor. It was a noble gathering. Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner were present, and this time there were ladies. Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John Bigelow, old even then.--[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.] Howells was conservative in his introduction this time. It was better taste to be so. He said simply: "We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark Twain." Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural manner. It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he really felt. Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. It seems fitting that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not elsewhere recorded. This is the speech in full: MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN,--I would have traveled a much greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. You never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you. Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new a friend of mine said, "The dedication is very neat." Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said, "I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad." I naturally said, "What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?" "Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes's dedication to his Songs in Many Keys." Of course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a book-store. and he did prove it. I had stolen that dedication almost word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing out and solved the mystery. Some years before I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr. Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously took it. Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along, right from the start.--[Holmes in his letter had said: "I rather think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in Many Keys. . . You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than you will borrow from other people."] I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said--However, I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can truthfully say, "He is growing old." Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. So the year for him closed prosperously. The rainbow of promise was justified. CXXV THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. His days and his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world. The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of peace. Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood circles. Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were likely to be brilliant affairs. The best minds, the brightest wits, gathered around Mark Twain's table. Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan, Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. There was always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain fireside. Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual World, in a letter of this time, said: I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday . . . . Called on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace Bushnell. I was wishing A----had been at the Mark Twain interview. He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the poor and struggling.--[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam Smith.] The quieter evenings were no less delightful. Clemens did not often go out. He loved his own home best. The children were old enough now to take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial pleasure-acting charades. These he invented for them, and costumed the little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John Quarles's farm. The Warner and Twichell children were often there and took part in the gay amusements. The children of that neighborhood played their impromptu parts well and naturally. They were in a dramatic atmosphere, and had been from infancy. There was never any preparation for the charades. A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer. Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or interference. Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist joining in these. At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the children joining in these moving melodies. He loved to read aloud to them. It was his habit to read his manuscript to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to include them in his critical audience. It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe that this custom was inaugurated, for 'The Prince and the Pauper' manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on this tale. Each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the result. The children were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation. Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from 'A Tramp Abroad', which had become a veritable nightmare. He had thought it finished when he left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to complete its bulk. It seemed to him that he had been given a life-sentence. He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two hundred and eighty-eight. He was about to destroy these and begin again, when Mrs. Clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to Elmira, though it was then midwinter. To Howells he wrote: I said, "if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I get it if I don't do that thing." So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600 pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and last). I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has been roosting more than a year and a half. They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed work on 'The Prince and the Pauper'. He reported to Howells that if he never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no diminution. A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased: I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547. He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely accounts for the unity of the tale. Then he adds: My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished Edward VI.'s reign from those that precede it and follow it. Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir. He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance. CXXVI "A TRAMP ABROAD" 'A Tramp Abroad' came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880. It had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five thousand copies. It was of the same general size and outward character as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its publishers as a satisfactory book. It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close examination. Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. A few drawings by True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens himself had a value of their own. The book would have profited had there been more of what the author calls his "works of art." Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception. But Howells wrote: Well, you are a blessing. You ought to believe in God's goodness, since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as yours to lighten its troubles. Clemens replied: Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest. Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done. A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added satisfaction. To be in a Tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of the book's merit. To Twichell, Clemens presented a special copy of the Tramp with a personal inscription, which must not be omitted here: MY DEAR "HARRIS"--NO, I MEAN MY DEAR JOE,--Just imagine it for a moment: I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains! Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material. You have saved me an intolerable whole world of hated labor, and I'll not forget it, my boy. You'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where they were invented. You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded. That horse-student is on page 192. The "Fremersberg" is neighboring. The Black Forest novel is on page 211. I remember when and where we projected that: in the leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen. There's the "new member," page 213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at 281 is "Harris," and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an equally familiar one. This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have shed the credit of it upon him. Well, you'll find more reminders of things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been printed, in many books. All the "legends of the Neckar," which I invented for that unstoried region, are here; one is in the Appendix. The steel portrait of me is just about perfect. We had a mighty good time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never. With love, Yours, MARK. Hartford, March 16, 1880. Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public generally was a great comfort. When the Howells letter was read to him he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals: "Howells said that, did he? Old Howells said that!" There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary merits of 'A Tramp Abroad'. Human tastes differ, and a "mixed" book of this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. The word "uneven" pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special application to this one. Written under great stress and uncertainty of mind, it could hardly be uniform. It presents Mark Twain at his best, and at his worst. Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain at his worst: Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable. It is inevitable that 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'The Innocents Abroad' should be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. The books are as different as was their author at the periods when they were written. 'A Tramp Abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. The Innocents Abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young sight-seers could find along the way. The note-books of that trip fairly glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and denunciation. In the 'Innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a sense of humor. In the 'Tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. In the 'Innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. In the 'Tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to smash them. Very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all, but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. In later life his gentler laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return, but just now he was in that middle period, when the "damned human race" amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (It seems proper to explain that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.) Reading the 'Innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults, it is literature from beginning to end. Reading the 'Tramp', the suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its percentage of literature is not large. Yet, as noted in an earlier volume, so eminent a critic as Brander Matthews has pronounced in its favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; Howells expressed. his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. He reviewed 'A Tramp Abroad' adequately and finely in the Atlantic, and justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not overpraise it. 'A Tramp Abroad' had an "Introduction" in the manuscript, a pleasant word to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted. Fortunately the appendix remained. Beyond question it contains some of the very best things in the book. The descriptions of the German Portier and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful German language is one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of humor. It is Mark Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival, the field of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. The present Emperor of Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when all other amusements fail. It is delicious beyond words to express; it is unique. In the body of the book there are also many delights. The description of the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm. Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken: There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile; now they had no desire to break them. Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of God. Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. The reader's chief regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. The main difficulty with the humor is that it seems overdone. It is likely to be carried too far, and continued too long. The ascent of Riffelberg is an example. Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to say, exaggeration. Without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a fuller enjoyment in 'A Tramp Abroad' than in the 'Innocents'; only, the burden of the world's opinion lies the other way. The world has a weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more. It answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque. The Innocents Abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic; more sentimental, if you will. The Tramp contains better English usage, without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of romance. The heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book in fewer numbers.--[The sales of the Innocents during the earlier years more than doubled those of the Tramp during a similar period. The later ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. It has been repeatedly stated that in England the Tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion not sustained by the publisher's accountings.] CXXVII LETTERS, TALES, AND PLANS The reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which Samuel Clemens wrote to his friend William Dean Howells; yet comparatively few can even be mentioned. He was always writing to Howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind --business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to Howells. Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might carry comfort.--["Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages:" (My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells.)] Whatever of picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for Howells's entertainment. Some of these domestic incidents carry the flavor of his best humor. Once he wrote: Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory." So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat). About three in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe I hear that cat in the drawing-room. What did you do with him?" I answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said, "I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar." Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. But the sense of what she said was, "He couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you I should have admired, but not have been astonished, because I should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself is what I cannot understand." So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.... I knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence. So I am writing to you, not because I have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon. The rightful earl has---- Friday, 7th. Well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow money. I never knew an American earl that didn't. After a trip to Boston, during which Mrs. Clemens did some bric-a-brac shopping, he wrote: Mrs. Clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons which she collected and your dinner. It is hard to tell which she admires the most. Sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the other; but I lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because I can appreciate that, whereas I am no prophet in andirons. There has been a procession of Adams Express wagons filing before the door all day delivering andirons. In a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist Ole Bull and his wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that gentle-hearted pair. Clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way into the Atlantic. "Edward Mills and George Benton," one of the contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal. It brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular criminals. That fashion has gone out, largely. Mark Twain wrote frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this particular instance. "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" was another Atlantic story, a companion piece to "Mrs. McWilliams's Experience with the Membranous Croup," and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which Mark Twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not so far removed in character from that in the "cat" letter just quoted: something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened, approximately as set down. Rose Terry Cooke wrote: Horrid man, how did you know the way I behave in a thunderstorm? Have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof? I hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating levity. I really hate you, but you are funny. In addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for Orion. Clemens himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. He had found it an impossible task. He confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he believed Orion equal to the task. He knew how rigidly honest he was, how ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some literary occupation. It was Mark Twain's belief that if Orion would record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human documents such as have been left by Benvenuto Cellini, Cazenova, and Rousseau. "Simply tell your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and all hampering things." Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a variety of other enterprises. He had prospected insurance, mining, journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his law shingle between each of these seizures. Aside from business, too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. He had changed his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more. Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for them the day before. Finally, after delivering a series of infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by the Presbyterian Church. He was therefore ripe for any new diversion, and the Autobiography appealed to him. He set about it with splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for inspection. They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected. He forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers. But Howells's taste for realism had its limitations. He found the story interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising strongly against its publication, returned it. Onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now, forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the fires warm. Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally desperate. He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the end. This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end. And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. But he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked human interest. In old age Mark Twain once referred to Orion's autobiography in print and his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to Orion's having departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. A quantity of Orion's manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain to show its fidelity to the original plan. It is just one long record of fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. It is the story of a life of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to surrender.--[Howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters, said that they would some day make good material. Fortunately the earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.] Whatever may have been Mark Twain's later impression of his brother's manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite action at the time. Several years before, in Hartford, Orion had urged him to make his publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the royalty plan. Clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an arrangement for the publication of 'A Tramp Abroad', and when his first statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to his advantage. He remembered Orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing. Out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this result, to wit: that I shall within the twelve months get $40,000 out of this Tramp, instead of $20,000. $20,000, after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a month, so I shall tell Mr. Perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your check that amount per month hereafter.... This ends the loan business, and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. From that time forward Orion Clemens was worth substantially twenty thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow. Far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands. CXXVIII MARK TWAIN's ABSENT-MINDEDNESS. A number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported concerning Mark Twain's dim perception of certain physical surroundings, and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say. It was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing seemed not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness. By no means was Mark Twain's absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength. Especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut most of the world away. Soon after his return from Europe, when he was still struggling with 'A Tramp Abroad', he wearily put the manuscript aside, one day, and set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house, a stone's-throw away, was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it. It was unchanged, but its outlines had left no impress upon his mind. He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned and got the coachman, Patrick McAleer, to show him the way. The second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this period. One day, when he was playing billiards with Whitmore, George, the butler, came up with a card. "Who is he, George?" Clemens asked, without looking at the card. "I don't know, suh, but he's a gentleman, Mr. Clemens." "Now, George, how many times have I told you I don't want to see strangers when I'm playing billiards! This is just some book agent, or insurance man, or somebody with something to sell. I don't want to see him, and I'm not going to." "Oh, but this is a gentleman, I'm sure, Mr. Clemens. Just look at his card, suh." "Yes, of course, I see--nice engraved card--but I don't know him, and if it was St. Peter himself I wouldn't buy the key of salvation! You tell him so--tell him--oh, well, I suppose I've got to go and get rid of him myself. I'll be back in a minute, Whitmore." He ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed water-color pictures on the floor near his feet. "Ah, ha!" he thought, "I see. A picture agent. I'll soon get rid of him." He went in with his best, "Well, what can I do for you?" air, which he, as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough, but not encouraging. The gentleman rose and extended his hand. "How are you, Mr. Clemens?" he said. Of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or goods to sell. Clemens did not extend a very cordial hand. He merely raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand. "And how is Mrs. Clemens?" asked the uninvited guest. So this was his game. He would show an interest in the family and ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children next. "Well--Mrs. Clemens is about as usual--I believe." "And the children--Miss Susie and little Clara?" This was a bit startling. He knew their names! Still, that was easy to find out. He was a smart agent, wonderfully smart. He must be got rid of. "The children are well, quite well," and (pointing down at the pictures) --"We've got plenty like these. We don't want any more. No, we don't care for any more," skilfully working his visitor toward the door as he talked. The man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be talked into the hall and toward the front door. Here he paused a moment: "Mr. Clemens, will you tell me where Mr. Charles Dudley Warner lives?" This was the chance! He would work him off on Charlie Warner. Perhaps Warner needed pictures. "Oh, certainly, certainly! Right across the yard. I'll show you. There's a walk right through. You don't need to go around the front way at all. You'll find him at home, too, I'm pretty sure"; all the time working his caller out and down the step and in the right direction. The visitor again extended his hand. "Please remember me to Mrs. Clemens and the children." "Oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure. Good day. Yes, that's the house Good-by." On the way back to the billiard-room Mrs. Clemens called to him. She was ill that day. "Youth!" "Yes, Livy." He went in for a word. "George brought me Mr. B----'s card. I hope you were very nice to him; the B----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.", "The B----s--Why, Livy----" "Yes, of course, and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to Hartford." He gazed at her helplessly. "Well, he's been here." "Oh, Youth, have you done anything?" "Yes, of course I have. He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I sent him over to Warner's. I noticed he didn't take them with him. Land sakes, Livy, what can I do?" "Which way did he go, Youth?" "Why, I sent him to Charlie Warner's. I thought----" "Go right after him. Go quick! Tell him what you have done." He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. Warner and B----were in cheerful and friendly converse. They had met before. Clemens entered gaily: "Oh Yes, I see! You found him all right. Charlie, we met Mr. B----and his wife in Europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us. I wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just then. Livy isn't very well, but she seems a good deal better, so I just followed along to have a good talk, all together." He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B----'s mind faded long before the hour ended. Returning home Clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. "George," he said, "what pictures are those that gentleman left?" "Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures. I've been straightening up the room a little, and Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. The gentleman was looking at them while he was waiting for you to come down." CXXIX FURTHER AFFAIRS AT THE FARM It was at Elmira, in July (1880), that the third little girl came--Jane Lampton, for her grandmother, but always called Jean. She was a large, lovely baby, robust and happy. When she had been with them a little more than a month Clemens, writing to Twichell, said: DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he "didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," I should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer. She is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the Bay and Susy were her size. I will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in Hartford, where I have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the Affection Board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. Four weeks ago the children still put Mama at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. But now: Jean Mama Motley |cats Fraulein | Papa That is the way it stands now. Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped from No. 4, and am become No. 5. Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats "developed" I didn't stand any more show. Been reading Daniel Webster's Private Correspondence. Have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, "eloquent," bathotic (or bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he was a student. And Lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the world's eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? Why, the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. Well, we are all getting along here first-rate. Livy gains strength daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----But no more of this. Somebody may be reading this letter eighty years hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960), save yourself the trouble of looking further. I know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh! MARK. It is the ageless story. He too had written his youthful letters, and later had climbed the Alps of fame and was still outlined against the sun. Happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age. Mrs. Clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to his: "We are all going so fast. Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred years." Clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'The Prince and the Pauper' and on the story about 'Huck Finn', which he had begun four years earlier. He read the latter over and found in it a new interest. It did not fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales. He always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly, and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the long stair that led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his audience, would read to them the result of his industry; that is to say, he proceeded with the story of the Prince. Apparently he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to friends. The reference (in the letter to Twichell) to the cats at the farm introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort. There were always cats at the farm. Mark Twain himself dearly loved cats, and the children inherited this passion. Susy once said: "The difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and papa loves cats." The cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always welcomed and adored. They were commendable cats, with such names as Fraulein, Blatherskite, Sour Mash, Stray Kit, Sin, and Satan, and when, as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies. Naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories, which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams. One of these stories, as remembered and set down later, began: Once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was Catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn't have any surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and didn't need one. It is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even dishonorable, in a manx. Well, Catasaqua had a beautiful family of cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their characters. Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. He was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and eat with the king. And so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end could wait. There was less enthusiasm over dogs at Quarry Farm. Mark Twain himself had no great love for the canine breed. To a woman who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part: By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again. He was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them. There was once at the farm a gentle hound, named Bones, that for some reason even won his way into his affections. Bones was always a welcome companion, and when the end of summer came, and Clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. Clemens stooped down, put his arms around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. He always recalled Bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm. CXXX COPYRIGHT AND OTHER FANCIES The continued assault of Canadian pirates on his books kept Mark Twain's interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform. He invented one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject, and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger number of voters. There were too few authors to be of much value at the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally concerned. For the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection. Bliss suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing. Clemens wrote to his old friend Rollin M. Daggett, who by this time was a Congressman. Daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill that the authors might agree upon, and Clemens made at least one trip to Washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end. It was a Presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year. Any legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign. Clemens's idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one. Somewhat later, when an international treaty which would include protection for authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change. He wrote, asking Howells: Will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against Canadian piracy? Because, if it doesn't, there is not a single argument in favor of international copyright which a rational American Senate could entertain for a moment. My notions have mightily changed lately. I can buy Macaulay's History, three vols.; bound, for $1.25; Chambers's Cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for $7.25 (we paid $60), and other English copyrights in proportion; I can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from three cents to thirty cents apiece. These things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country. A generation of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and the best-read nation in the world. International copyright must becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel reading. Morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right. For it is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out simply for their own. International copyright would benefit a few English authors and a lot of American publishers, and be a profound detriment to twenty million Americans; it would benefit a dozen American authors a few dollars a year, and there an end. The real advantages all go to English authors and American publishers. And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $5,000 a year, I'm down on it anyway, and I'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty. It is a characteristic expression. Mark Twain might be first to grab for the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity in greater need. He could damn the human race competently, but in the final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his heart. Mention has been made in an earlier chapter of Clemens's enthusiasms or "rages" for this thing and that which should benefit humankind. He was seldom entirely without them. Whether it was copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental easement for his species. Howells tells how once he was going to save the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor saving proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all. The fountain-pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about the same time, and Clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own one. For a while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon since the invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or suddenly deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the outer darkness. After which, the stylo-graphic pen. He tried one, and wrote severally to Dr. Brown, to Howells, and to Twichell, urging its adoption. Even in a letter to Mrs. Howells he could not forget his new possession: And speaking of Howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won't --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what a nice, clean, uniform MS. it makes. And at the same time to Twichell: I am writing with a stylographic pen. It takes a royal amount of cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the stylographic a genuine God's blessing. I carry one in each breeches pocket, and both loaded. I'd give you one of them if I had you where I could teach you how to use it--not otherwise. For the average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the lack lieth in himself, God of his mercy damn him. It was not easy to withstand Mark Twain's enthusiasm. Howells, Twichell, and Dr. Brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively) over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in their conquest. But in the midst of one letter, at last, Howells broke down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: "No white man ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!" Then, with the more ancient implement, continued in a calmer spirit. It was only a little later that Clemens himself wrote: You see I am trying a new pen. I stood the stylograph as long as I could, and then retired to the pencil. The thing I am trying now is that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate itself to any kind of pen. So I selected an ordinary gold pen--a limber one--and sent it to New York and had it cut and fitted to this thing. It goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the devil will be in it by tomorrow. Mark Twain's schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion. He was likely at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the time of which we are writing he proposed what was called the "Modest" Club. He wrote to Howells, about it: At present I am the only member, and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. I do not know that we can find any others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner, Twichell, Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more, together with Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the sex. I have long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind. He appends the by-laws, the main ones being: The object of the club shall be to eat and talk. Qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty, unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence, unassailable character. There shall be no officers except a president, and any member who has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president for the time being. Any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at what cost, and call the police. Any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and have the first chance to talk about it. It was one of his whimsical fancies, and Howells replied that he would like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to confess that he was modest enough for membership. He added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to Hay, but doubted his modesty. He said: "He will think he has a right to belong as much as you or I." Howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems never to have gone any further. Perhaps the requirements of membership were too severe. CXXXI WORKING FOR GARFIELD Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year. General Garfield was nominated on the Republican ticket (against General Hancock), and Clemens found him satisfactory. Garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote Howells]. I prefer him to Grant's friends. The Presidency can't add anything to Grant; he will shine on without it. It is ephemeral; he is eternal. That was the year when the Republican party became panicky over the disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of Grant in the convention, and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated Platt and Conkling and brought them into the field. General Grant also was induced to save the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that purpose. He arrived in Hartford with his family on the 16th of October, and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous event. A vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere houses and grounds were decorated. To Mrs. Clemens, still in Elmira, Clemens wrote: I found Mr. Beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations. With a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged; thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds. Against each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate, stands a knight in complete armor. Piles of still-bundled flags clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes in big letters. I broke Mr. Beals's heart by persistently and inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, "The Home of Mark Twain," in letters as big as your head. Oh, we're going to be decorated sufficient, don't you worry about that, madam. Clemens was one of those delegated to receive Grant and to make a speech of welcome. It was a short speech but an effective one, for it made Grant laugh. He began: "I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built." He seemed to be at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to Grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on Grant's achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished: "I nearly forgot that part of my speech," which evoked roars of laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from Grant. He spoke of Grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities closed against him, and added, "But your country will reward you, never fear." Then he closed: When Wellington won Waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one of a dozen of your victories, sordid England tried to pay him for that service with wealth and grandeurs. She made him a duke and gave him $4,000,000. If you had done and suffered for any other country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have been affronted in the same sordid way. But, thank God! this vast and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy which will forever preserve her from so degrading you. Your country loves you--your country's proud of you--your country is grateful to you. Her applauses, which have been many, thundering in your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the flag you saved continues to wave. Your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable--inexpensive way. Welcome to Hartford, great soldier, honored statesman, unselfish citizen. Grant's grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and when Clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him in "every conceivable--inexpensive way" his composure broke up completely and he "nearly laughed his entire head off," according to later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval. Grant's son, Col. Fred Grant,--[Maj.-Gen'l, U. S. Army, 1906. Died April, 1912.]--dined at the Clemens home that night, and Rev. Joseph Twichell and Henry C. Robinson. Twichell's invitation was in the form of a telegram. It said: I want you to dine with us Saturday half past five and meet Col. Fred Grant. No ceremony. Wear the same shirt you always wear. The campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of October 26th there was a grand Republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry C. Robinson, and Mark Twain. It was an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their audience. The place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and the gallery railings full. Hundreds who came as late as the hour announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had been thronged long before. Mark Twain's speech that night is still remembered in Hartford as the greatest effort of his life. It was hardly that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment, the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the political tide. The roaring delight of the audience showed that to them at least it was convincing. Howells wrote that he had read it twice, and that he could not put it out of his mind. Whatever its general effect was need not now be considered. Garfield was elected, and perhaps Grant's visit to Hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed contributed their mite to that result. Clemens saw General Grant again that year, but not on political business. The Educational Mission, which China had established in Hartford--a thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened now by certain Chinese authorities with abolishment. Yung Wing (a Yale graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the Rev. Joseph Twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal one. Yung Wing declared that if influence could be brought upon Li Hung Chang, then the most influential of Chinese counselors, the mission might be saved. Twichell, remembering the great honors which Li Hung Chang had paid to General Grant in China, also Grant's admiration of Mark Twain, went to the latter without delay. Necessarily Clemens would be enthusiastic, and act promptly. He wrote to Grant, and Grant replied by telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in New York. They met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Grant was in fine spirits, and by no means the "silent man" of his repute. He launched at once into as free and flowing talk as I have ever heard [says Twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of China, her wants, disadvantages, etc. Now and then he asked a question, but kept the lead of the conversation. At last he proposed, of his own accord, to write a letter to Li Hung Chang, advising the continuance of the Mission, asking only that I would prepare him some notes, giving him points to go by. Thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations, thanks, very largely, to Clemens's assistance. Clemens wrote Howells of the interview, detailing at some length Twichell's comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given time to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come loaded. It was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case. CXXXII A NEW PUBLISHER It was near the end of the year that Clemens wrote to his mother: I have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy says they're not, and by George! she ought to know. She says they're going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine too. I anticipate that publisher's melancholy surprise when he calls here Tuesday. However, let him suffer; it is his own fault. People who fix up agreements with me without first finding out what Livy's plans are take their fate into their own hands. I said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three months' work on it yet. I shall tackle it Wednesday or Thursday; that is, if Livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book, which I hope she won't. The reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded story--was 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The other tale--the unfinished and less considered one was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Nobody appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the publisher. The publisher was not the American Company. Elisha Bliss, after long ill health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to listen to offers from other makers of books. The revelation made by the "half-profit" returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile. To Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters stood he would sever the long connection. It seemed a pity, later, that he did this, but the break was bound to come. Clemens was not a business man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist. He was, in fact, a shrewd, capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most bitterly against him--that of 'Roughing It'--had been made in good faith and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. In most of the later contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in human nature--business human nature--for Bliss to encourage the size of these percentages. If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded it and then to lose him by the result. Perhaps that would be also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the urgency of demand. Never mind. Mark Twain revised 'The Prince and the Pauper', sent it to Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or manufacture should be spared. It was to be a sort of partnership arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were anticipated. Among the many letters which Clemens was just then writing to Howells one was dated "Xmas Eve." It closes with the customary pleasantries and the final line: "But it is growing dark. Merry Christmas to all of you!" That last was a line of large significance. It meant that the air was filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with the mystery of preparation. Christmas was an important season in the Clemens home. Almost the entire day before, Patrick was out with the sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the home preparations were no less busy. There was always a tree--a large one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when Elmira and Fredonia had delivered their contributions, and Orion and his wife in Keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of this later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been gathered, and the dusk of Christmas Eve had hurried the children off to bed, it was Mrs. Clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her husband assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill, and with a boy's anticipation in the surprise of it next morning. Then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and little plays, with the Warner and Twichell children. To the Clemens home the Christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile happiness--the spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the merrymaking, the gladness and tenderness and mystery that belong to no other season, and have been handed down through all the ages since shepherds watched on the plains of Bethlehem. CXXXIII THE THREE FIRES--SOME BENEFACTIONS The tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the Clemens household that winter. On each of three successive days flames started that might have led to ghastly results. The children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little Clara's bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy. Rosa, the nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started. She did not lose her presence of mind,--[Rosa was not the kind to lose her head. Once, in Europe, when Bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade, and was hanging out over destruction, Rosa, discovering her, did not scream but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw the burning bedding on the lawn. The child was only slightly scorched, but the escape was narrow enough. Next day little Jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the crib's lace covering. Jean's nurse, Julia, arrived to find the lace a gust of flame and the fire spreading. She grabbed the sleeping Jean and screamed. Rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes. Clemens himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire. On the third morning, just before breakfast-time, Susy was practising at the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery. At one end of the room a fire of large logs was burning. Susy was at the other end of the room, her back to the fire. A log burned in two and fell, scattering coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. Just as the blaze was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens's hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on. He stepped into the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the flames. This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as the "three days of fire." Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. He said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property. He did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. He was willing to rest with the event. Logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but only that things were. Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in their improvement. Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too, was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been minutely embodied there. In that charming volume, 'My Mark Twain', Howells tells us of Clemens's consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to repair the wrong done by his nation. Mark Twain's writings are full of similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the humbler race. He would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand. He would read for a negro church when he would have refused a cathedral. Howells mentions the colored student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial reparation "due from every white man to every black man."--[Mark Twain paid two colored students through college. One of them, educated in a Southern institution, became a minister of the gospel. The other graduated from the Yale Law School.]--This incident belongs just to the period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough, indicates the same tendency. Garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that Frederick Douglass might lose his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia. Clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence with the Administration, and in every case had refused. Douglass had made no such, application. Clemens, learning that the old negro's place was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord. He closed his letter to General Garfield: A simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the matter of recommendation to office, and so I beg permission to hope that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his present office of Marshal of the District of Columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your Administration. I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point; his history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them, too. Douglass wrote to Clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he said: I think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting it. I mean to ask, and I will use your letter as a part of my petition. It will put the President-elect in a good humor, in any case, and that is very important. With great respect, Gratefully yours, FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Mark Twain's benefactions were not all for the colored race. One morning in February of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast, George came in to announce "a lady waiting to see Mr. Clemens in the drawing-room." Clemens growled. "George," he said, "it's a book agent. I won't see her. I'll die, in my tracks first." He went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature of the intruder's business. Then he saw that she was very young and modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a chance to speak. She told him that a young man employed in Pratt & Whitney's machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to have Mark Twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of future achievement. His name, she said, was Karl Gerhardt, and he was her husband. Clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the young woman's manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a child) won him. He wavered, and finally promised that he would come the first chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the next week. On her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he specified Monday, "without fail." When she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came upon him. He said to himself: "Why didn't I go now? Why didn't I go with her now?" She went from Clemens's over to Warner's. Warner also resisted, but, tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at once. When he returned he urged Clemens to go without fail, and, true to promise, Clemens took Patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place. Clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed, and was struck by its evident merit. Mrs. Gerhardt told him the story of her husband's struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop his talent. He had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have lessons what might he not accomplish? Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding called next day, and were equally carried away with Karl Gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to win his way in art. Clemens and Warner made up their minds to interest themselves personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter J. Wells Champney to come over from New York and go with them to the Gerhardts' humble habitation, to see his work. Champney approved of it. He thought it well worth while, he said, for the people of Hartford to go to the expense of Gerhardt's art education. He added that it would be better to get the judgment of a sculptor. So they brought over John Quincy Adams Ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with these young people and their struggles for the sake of art. Ward said: "If any stranger had told me that this 'prentice did not model that thing from plaster-casts I should not have believed it. It's full of crudities, but it's full of genius, too. Hartford must send him to Paris for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three more." When he was gone Mrs. Clemens said: "Youth, we won't wait for Hartford to do it. It would take too long. Let us send the Gerhardts to Paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to any one else." So the Gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would enable them to live for five years in Paris if necessary, were started across the sea without further delay. Clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort. There was seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man or woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for development in some special field of industry. CXXXIV LITERARY PROJECTS AND A MONUMENT TO ADAM Mark Twain's literary work languished during this period. He had a world of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or conclusion. "A Curious Experience," which relates a circumstance told to him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed manuscripts of this period. Of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of etiquette would seem to have been the most promising. Howells had faith in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting: AT BILLIARDS If your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the count. AT THE DOG-FIGHT If it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers desiring a view, particularly ladies. Avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the feelings of the other one. Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one--this is business. AT POKER If you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the conflict. If you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived. If you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse yourself; let him call again another time. WALL STREET If you live in the country, buy at 80, sell at 40. Avoid all forms of eccentricity. IN THE RESTAURANT When you wish to get the waiter's attention, do not sing out "Say!" Simply say "Szt!" His old abandoned notion of "Hamlet" with an added burlesque character came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even Howells manifested deep interest in the matter. One reflects how young Howells must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now. Clemens proposed almost as many things to Howells as his brother Orion proposed to him. There was scarcely a letter that didn't contain some new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation. Now it was some book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something that he wanted Howells to write. Once he urged Howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of Orion. At another time he suggested as material the "Rightful Earl of Durham." He is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put on the market. You must get his entire biography out of him and have it ready for Osgood's magazine. Even if it isn't worth printing, you must have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or in a play. It was this notion about 'The American Claimant' which somewhat later would lead to a collaboration with Howells on a drama, and eventually to a story of that title. But Clemens's chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather than in writing. His association with Osgood inspired him to devise new ventures of profit. He planned a 'Library of American Humor', which Howells (soon to leave the Atlantic) and "Charley" Clark--[Charles Hopkins Clark, managing editor of the Hartford Courant.]--were to edit, and which Osgood would publish, for subscription sale. Without realizing it, Clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher. His contract with Osgood for 'The Prince and the Pauper' made him essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the money for the making of the book, and to pay Osgood a royalty of seven and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions. The contract for the Library of Humor was to be a similar one, though in this case Osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share proportionately in the expense and risk. Mark Twain was entering into a field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only disaster and regret. One curious project came to an end in 1881--the plan for a monument to Adam. In a sketch written a great many years later Mark Twain tells of the memorial which the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher and himself once proposed to erect to our great common ancestor. The story is based on a real incident. Clemens, in Elmira one day (it was October, 1879), heard of a jesting proposal made by F. G. Hall to erect a monument in Elmira to Adam. The idea promptly caught Mark Twain's fancy. He observed to Beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by Darwin's simian, not to pay him the tribute of a single monument. Mankind, he said, would probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of Adam would be forgotten. He declared Mr. Hall's suggestion to be a sound idea. Beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be erected to Adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the purpose. Certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large sums in the interest of the enterprise. Then it was agreed that Congress should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to Elmira, prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere. A document to this effect was prepared, headed by F. G. Hall, and signed by other leading citizens of Elmira, including Beecher himself. General Joe Hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour. Clemens introduced him, and Hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in Congress. What had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable look. But alas! in the end Hawley's courage had failed him. He began to hate his undertaking. He was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse, the jeers of the newspapers. It was certain to leak out that Mark Twain was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that it was one of his colossal jokes. Now and then, in the privacy of his own room at night, Hawley would hunt up the Adam petition and read it and feel the cold sweat breaking out. He postponed the matter from one session to another till the summer of 1881, when he was about to sail for Europe. Then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to Clemens, and ignominiously fled. [For text of the petition in full, etc., see Appendix P, at the end of last volume.] Mark Twain's introduction of Hawley at Elmira contained this pleasantry: "General Hawley was president of the Centennial Commission. Was a gallant soldier in the war. He has been Governor of Connecticut, member of Congress, and was president of the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln." General Hawley: "That nominated Grant." Twain: "He says it was Grant, but I know better. He is a member of my church at Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he will deny that. But I am only here to give him a character from his last place. As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden joins mine, why--why, I watch him. That's nothing; we all do that with any neighbor. General Hawley keeps his promises, not only in private, but in public. He is an editor who believes what he writes in his own paper. As the author of 'Beautiful Snow' he added a new pang to winter. He is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and religious responsibilities. Whenever the contribution-box was passed I never knew him to take out a cent." CXXXV A TRIP WITH SHERMAN AND AN INTERVIEW WITH GRANT. The Army of the Potomac gave a dinner in Hartford on the 8th of June, 1881. But little memory remains of it now beyond Mark Twain's speech and a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered authors, such as Johnson, Milton, and Carlyle. A pleasant incident followed, however, which Clemens himself used to relate. General Sherman attended the banquet, and Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln. Next morning Clemens and Twichell were leaving for West Point, where they were to address the military students, guests on the same special train on which Lincoln and Sherman had their private car. This car was at the end of the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, Sherman and Lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude. Clemens and Twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them. As the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was under good headway before they came in. Sherman came up to Clemens, who sat smoking unconcernedly. "Well," he said, "who told you you could go in this car?" "Nobody," said Clemens. "Do you expect to pay extra fare?" asked Sherman. "No," said Clemens. "I don't expect to pay any fare." "Oh, you don't. Then you'll work your way." Sherman took off his coat and military hat and made Clemens put them on. "Now," said he, "whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and represent me and make a speech." It was not long before the train stopped, and Clemens, according to orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd. There was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform. Then the cheer waned, became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion. Presently somebody said: "Say, that ain't Sherman, that's Mark Twain," which brought another cheer. Then Sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke. They kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes Lincoln came out with them. When there was time all three spoke, much to the satisfaction of their audiences. President Garfield was shot that summer--July 2, 1881.--[On the day that President Garfield was shot Mrs. Clemens received from their friend Reginald Cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband in Australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting than otherwise, for the reason that the "Mark Twain" who had died in Australia was a very persistent impostor. Clemens wrote Cholmondeley: "Being dead I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that kind of a corpse. May I never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a far land." Out of this incident grew a feature of an anecdote related in Following the Equator the joke played by the man from Bendigo.]--He died September 19th, and Arthur came into power. There was a great feeling of uncertainty as to what he would do. He was regarded as "an excellent gentleman with a weakness for his friends." Incumbents holding appointive offices were in a state of dread. Howells's father was consul at Toronto, and, believing his place to be in danger, he appealed to his son. In his book Howells tells how, in turn, he appealed to Clemens, remembering his friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. He asked Clemens to write to Grant, but Clemens would hear of nothing less than a call on the General, during which the matter would be presented to him in person. Howells relates how the three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of the office, on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by restaurant: The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain. Clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting details: "I asked Grant if he wouldn't write a word on a card which Howells could carry to Washington and hand to the President. But, as usual, General Grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do a great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do. He said he was going to Washington in a couple of days to dine with the President, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it a personal matter. Grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time. It was baked beans, but how 'he sits and towers,' Howells said, quoting Dame. Grant remembered 'Squibob' Derby (John Phoenix) at West Point very well. He said that Derby was always drawing caricatures of the professors and playing jokes on every body. He told a thing which I had heard before but had never seen in print. A professor questioning a class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, 'Suppose a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. Now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed?' "Derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question. He said, 'I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days I would change places with him.' "I tried hard, during that interview, to get General Grant to agree to write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn't listen to the suggestion. His inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an author. He had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style. He was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would be a humility too. I argued that the book would have an enormous sale, and that out of my experience I could save him from making unwise contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such a way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity for any addition to his income. Of course he could not foresee that he was camping on a volcano; that as Ward's partner he was a ruined man even then, and of course I had no suspicion that in four years from that time I would become his publisher. He would not agree to write his memoirs. He only said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into a book they could do so. We came away then. He fulfilled his promise entirely concerning Howells's father, who held his office until he resigned of his own accord." CXXXVI "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" During the summer absence alterations were made in the Hartford home, with extensive decorations by Tiffany. The work was not completed when the family returned. Clemens wrote to Charles Warren Stoddard, then in the Sandwich Islands, that the place was full of carpenters and decorators, whereas what they really needed was "an incendiary." If the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more. They had acquired more ground. One morning in the spring Mark Twain had looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to cut down a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his neighbor. He had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether too close to him for comfort and privacy. Leaning out of the window he called sonorously, "Woodman, spare that tree!" Then he hurried down, obtained a stay of proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from the next-door neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet of extra ground and a greenhouse which occupied it. It was a costly purchase; the owner knew he could demand his own price; he asked and received twelve thousand dollars for the strip. In November, Clemens found that he must make another trip to Canada. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was ready for issue, and to insure Canadian copyright the author must cross the line in person. He did not enjoy the prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt Howells to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading Osgood, who would do anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant company and junket. It was by no means an unhappy fortnight. Clemens took a note-book, and there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion. He found the Canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now and then to see a plain one. On another page he tells how one night in the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and hunted for it, hoping to destroy it. He made a rebus picture for the children of this incident in a letter home. We get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as literary material--human material--an example from which some literary aspect or lesson may be drawn. Following the mouse adventure we find it thus dramatized: Trace Father Brebeuf all through this trip, and when I am in a rage and can't endure the mouse be reading of Brebeuf's marvelous endurances and be shamed. And finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway I read Brebeuf's magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering. By and by the thought occurs to me, Brebeuf, with his good, great heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so will I--I will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two minutes dead. They gave him a dinner in Montreal. Louis Frechette, the Canadian poet, was there and Clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made to the speech of welcome. From that moment Frechette never ceased to adore Mark Twain, and visited him soon after the return to Hartford. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was published in England, Canada, Germany, and America early in December, 1881. There had been no stint of money, and it was an extremely handsome book. The pen-and-ink drawings were really charming, and they were lavish as to number. It was an attractive volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated "To those good-mannered and agreeable children, Susy and Clara Clemens." The story itself was totally unlike anything that Mark Twain had done before. Enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here. The story of the wandering prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the realm of pure romance. Unlike its great successor, the 'Yankee at King Arthur's Court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. Only here and there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of some ultra-modern phrase or word. Mark Twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes in 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The picture of Old London Bridge; the scene in the vagabond's retreat, with its presentation to the little king of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of the jail where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of the splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle of England acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a beggar, is one which only genius could create. One might quote here, but to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the story's charm. How breathlessly interesting is the tale of it! We may imagine that first little audience at Mark Twain's fireside hanging expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more. Of all Mark Twain's longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as to plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to workmanship. This is not to say that it is his greatest story. Probably time will not give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly constructed story, and it has an imperishable charm. It was well received, though not always understood by the public. The reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in Mark Twain's work, that he found it hard to estimate this new product. Some even went so far as to refer to it as one of Mark Twain's big jokes, meaning probably that he had created a chapter in English history with no foundation beyond his fancy. Of course these things pained the author of the book. At one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having done so. Yet there were many gratifying notices. The New York Herald reviewer gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation. In part he said: To those who have followed the career of Mark Twain, his appearance as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant building material and ample training at command. Of his capacity they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which they felt he was able to take. Through all his publications may be traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height. His humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy purpose. His work has been characterized by a manly love of truth, a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. A genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic and finished. And in closing: The characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction. CXXXVII CERTAIN ATTACKS AND REPRISALS Beyond the publication of The Prince and the Pauper Clemens was sparingly represented in print in '81. A chapter originally intended for the book, the "Whipping Boy's Story," he gave to the Bazaar Budget, a little special-edition sheet printed in Hartford. It was the story of the 'Bull and the Bees' which he later adapted for use in Joan of Arc, the episode in which Joan's father rides a bull to a funeral. Howells found that it interfered with the action in the story of the Prince, and we might have spared it from the story of Joan, though hardly without regret. The military story "A Curious Episode" was published in the Century Magazine for November. The fact that Clemens had heard, and not invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, a "Captious Reader" thought it necessary to write to a New York publication concerning its origin: I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Mark Twain, and consequently, when I saw the table of contents of the November number of the Century, I bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his name, and entitled, "A Curious Episode." When I began to read it, it struck me as strangely familiar, and I soon recognized the story as a true one, told me in the summer of 1878 by an officer of the United States artillery. Query: Did Mr. Twain expect the public to credit this narrative to his clever brain? The editor, seeing a chance for Mark Twain "copy," forwarded a clipping to Clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter. Clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something to say, not for print, but for the editor's private ear. The newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think it justifiable. Your correspondent is not stupid, I judge, but purely and simply malicious. He knew there was not the shadow of a suggestion, from the beginning to the end of "A Curious Episode," that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for trying to persuade the public that I had stolen the narrative and was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it before the public. I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. As to publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of bandying words in public with any other prostitute. The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. He had not looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the communication. "Your letter has taught me a lesson," he said. "The blame belongs to me for not hunting up the proofs. Please accept my apology." Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos. Not always. Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly indifferent. Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to any comment of the press. His strong sense of humor, and still stronger sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and plan violence. Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel suits with heavy damages. Sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which Mrs. Clemens would not let him print. At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. Clemens had heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper; friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause general remark. This was enough. He promptly began to collect data--damaging data --relating to that editor's past history. He even set a man to work in England collecting information concerning his victim. One of his notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was to be the onslaught. When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in the interest of science. No matter if it is an unpleasant animal. This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be written up. He is the polecat of our species . . . . He is purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out . . . . Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him. But never mind the rest. When he had got thoroughly interested in his project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just what had been said of him. So he subscribed for the paper himself and set a man to work on the back numbers. We will let him tell the conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells: The result arrived from my New York man this morning. Oh, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults for two months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. There, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! Can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? Boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it). One jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper . . . . Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work has got to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. Howells refers to this episode, and concludes: So the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. CXXXVIII MANY UNDERTAKINGS To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to defy perusal. Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject, but the reader. He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything relating to him was regarded as news. Daily and hourly he mingled with important matters or spoke concerning them. A bare list of the interesting events of Mark Twain's life would fill a large volume. He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every human aspect. He read the papers through, and there was always enough to arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve himself. His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly with the idea of reform. There were many public and private abuses, and he wanted to correct them all. He covered reams of paper with lurid heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no hope of publication. Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Past-office Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes seemed to him unwarranted. He assailed it, and directly the nation was being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the Postmaster-General's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field. At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which began: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear. On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious collection of human documents. Many of them could be printed to-day, without distress to any one. The conditions that invited them are changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. He may have had some thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote: Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the result. I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech there, and no harm to the family. It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as literature. He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it. He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr. Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for Tennyson's "Bugle Song," outlining an attractive scheme for it which the order of his fancy had formulated. Dr. Parker replied that the "Bugle Song," often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians. He was interested in business affairs. Already, before the European trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the like. He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the American Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and deserves to be remembered for that reason. Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a permanent good-by. Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars from his bank account in a period of sixteen months. By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand dollars being the price of this adventure. A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment. Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an accident insurance company, and such was Jones's confidence in the venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss. Mark Twain's only profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance author of repute. Jones was paying back the money presently, and about that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. At almost any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture that he refused to respond to the happy "hello" call of fortune. In some memoranda made thirty years later he said: I declined. I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcat speculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I said I didn't want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I take five hundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later. About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world. That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage. He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or "chalk-plate" process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface. This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. It was Clemens's notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. Howells tells how, at one time, Clemens thought the "damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. This was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. The process was doomed, in any case. It was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. The kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. Clemens brought his niece's husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. Webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. The history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor. Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that. Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story. Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises. She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not encourage them. She did not see their need. Their home was beautiful; they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. She knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers. She was willing to let well enough alone. Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. In the midst of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother: Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. It comes mainly from business responsibilities and annoyances. He had no moral right to be connected with business at all. He had a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its requirements--its difficulties and details. He was the soul of honor, but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child. During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset. Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith in speculative ventures. Human traits are sometimes modified, but never eliminated. The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to victimize him. The man who believes in himself as an investor will uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has money to back his judgments. CXXXIX FINANCIAL AND LITERARY By a statement made on the 1st of January, 1882, of Mark Twain's disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve months. It is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. It would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for Mark Twain. It required all that the books could earn, all the income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. There is a good deal of biography in the statement. Of the amount expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the "ventures" from whose bourne no dollar would ever return. Also, a large sum had been spent for the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and securities could earn. It was with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with "millions in it." Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. His natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company. He had the Southern hospitality. Much company appealed to a very large element in his strangely compounded nature. For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there. In one of her letters she says: The house has been full of company, and I have been "whirled around." How can a body help it? Oh, I cannot help sighing for the peace and quiet of the farm. This is my work, and I know that I do very wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right about it? Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive me mad. I am all wrong; if I would simply accept the fact that this is my work and let other things go, I know I should not be so fretted; but I want so much to do other things, to study and do things with the children, and I cannot. I have the best French teacher that I ever had, and if I could give any time to it I could not help learning French. When we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. But that was not possible. The game was of far larger proportions than any that could be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life. Mark Twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established in a cottage. It is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame Mark Twain was still not regarded by certain American arbiters of reputations as a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of important meaning and serious purport. In Boston, at that time still the Athens of America, he was enjoyed, delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect. Howells tells us that: In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. Even at the Atlantic dinners his place was "below the salt"--a place of honor, but not of the greatest honor. He did not sit on the dais with Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Howells, and Aldrich. We of a later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target of every eye-find it hard to realize the Cambridge conservatism that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne itself. Howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners had ventured heresy. Now in 1882 he seems to have determined to declare himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of Mark Twain. He prepared for the Century Magazine a biographical appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that Mark Twain's work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance indeed. Whether or not Howells then realized the "inspired knowledge of the multitude," and that most of the nation outside of the counties of Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material. Very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. His Century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular Atlantic contributor. In the open field of the Century Magazine Howells ventured to declare: Mark Twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. When I think how purely and wholly American it is I am a little puzzled at its universal acceptance . . . . Why, in fine, should an English chief-justice keep Mark Twain's books always at hand? Why should Darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at midnight, when spent with scientific research? I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists in the universal qualities. He deals very little with the pathetic, which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize it only as something satirized. There is always the touch of nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd. Elsewhere I have tried to persuade the reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustly to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some joke is always intended. This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes has pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. There was a paper of Mark Twain's printed in the Atlantic Monthly some years ago and called, "The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," which ought to have won popular recognition of the ethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course, funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human conscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist; though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain. Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and the strength of understatement. To him Mark Twain was already the moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the reader should take his time to realize these things. The article, with his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for September, 1882. If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already established in their hearts. CXL DOWN THE RIVER Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--The Stolen White Elephant. It was not an especially important volume, though some of the features, such as "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" and the "Carnival of Crime," are among the best of their sort, while the "Elephant" story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called the spectacular detective. The interview between Inspector Blunt and the owner of the elephant is typical. The inspector asks: "Now what does this elephant eat, and how much?" "Well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything. He will eat a man, he will eat a Bible; he will eat anything between a man and a Bible." "Good-very good, indeed, but too general. Details are necessary; details are the only valuable thing in our trade. Very well, as to men. At one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men will he eat if fresh?" "He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal he would eat five ordinary men." "Very good; five men. We will put that down. What nationalities would he prefer?" "He is indifferent about nationalities. He prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced against strangers." "Very good. Now, as to Bibles. How many Bibles would he eat at a meal?" "He would eat an entire edition." Clemens and Osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand. The long-deferred completion of the Mississippi book was to be accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken. Howells was going abroad, but the charming Osgood was willing to make the excursion, and a young man named Roswell Phelps, of Hartford, was engaged as a stenographer to take the notes. Clemens made a farewell trip to Boston to see Howells before his departure, and together they went to Concord to call on Emerson; a fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. They went again in the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at his house. This was in April. Longfellow had died in March. The fact that Howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad. Just what breach Clemens committed during this visit is not remembered now, and it does not matter; but his letter to Howells, after his return to Hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the time. Half-way in it he breaks out: But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me, because there is no cure, no cure. If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I could conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the earth down to his chin. When he merely supposed he was being entertaining. Next day he was off with Osgood and the stenographer for St. Louis, where they took the steamer Gold Dust down the river. He intended to travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the Southern Hotel and on the boat. In 'Life on the Mississippi' he has given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily remembered him. "I did not write that story in the book quite as it happened," he reflected once, many years later. "We went on board at night. Next morning I was up bright and early and out on deck to see if I could recognize any of the old landmarks. I could not remember any. I did not know where we were at all. It was a new river to me entirely. I climbed up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel. I said 'Good morning.' He answered pleasantly enough. His face was entirely strange to me. Then I sat down on the high seat back of the wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such as a landsman would ask. He began, in the old way, to fill me up with the old lies, and I enjoyed letting him do it. Then suddenly he turned round to me and said: "'I want to get a cup of coffee. You hold her, will you, till I come back?' And before I could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door and down the steps. It all came so suddenly that I sprang to the wheel, of course, as I would have done twenty years before. Then in a moment I realized my position. Here I was with a great big steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, without any further knowledge than that fact, and the pilot out of sight. I settled my mind on three conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he had recognized me and thought I knew the river; third, that we were in a perfectly safe place, where I could not possibly kill the steamboat. But that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely doubtful one. I knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were standing by the greenhorn's side. Of course, by force of habit, when I grabbed the wheel, I had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and I made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but I could feel myself getting old and gray. Then all at once I recognized where we were; we were in what is called the Grand Chain--a succession of hidden rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. There were two rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly between them or wreck the boat. There was a time when I could have done it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now. I would have given any reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. I think I was about ready to drop dead when I heard a step on the pilothouse stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth, and took the wheel, and I crawled weakly back to the seat. He said: "'You thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you? You thought I didn't know who you were. Why, I recognized that drawl of yours as soon as you opened your mouth.' "I said, 'Who the h--l are you? I don't remember you.' "'Well,' he said, 'perhaps you don't, but I was a cub pilot on the river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and I couldn't get a license when I was qualified for one, because the Pilots' Association was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they wanted to, and the law was that I had to be examined by two licensed pilots, and for a good while I could not get any one to make that examination. But one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application for a license. I had never seen you before, and I have never seen you since until now, but I recognized you.' "'All right,' I said. 'But if I had gone half a mile farther with that steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.' "We got to be good friends, of course, and I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." From the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house. He was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and truly enough the years had slipped away. He was the young fellow in his twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortune in the stars. To heighten the illusion, he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. --[It will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of Life on the Mississippi, and consider Mark Twain's word-picture of the river sunrise.] The majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever before, especially its solitude. It had been so full of life in his time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the loneliness of God. At one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle. Once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out to be the Mark Twain. There had been varied changes in twenty-one years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. To Bixby afterward he wrote: "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in my life. How do you run Plum Point?" He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was captain now on a splendid new Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge. The Anchor Line steamers were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. They were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat travel. Mark Twain made his trip down the river just in time. In New Orleans he met George W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old French Quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. He made a trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will. Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and beloved Dr. Brown. Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge. Bixby had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself, so that with "Sam Clemens" in the pilot-house with him, it was wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the fifties. "Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did," said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time. "I was sorry I had to stay at the wheel so much. I wanted to have more time with Sam without thinking of the river at all. Sam was sorry, too, from what he wrote after he got home." Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. It was a tender, heart-spoken letter: I didn't see half enough of you. It was a sore disappointment. Osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--I expected to have you with me all the time. Altogether, the most pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St. Louis, and you were your old natural self again. Twenty years have not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your loveliness. Said Bixby: "When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters' Hotel; to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had a couple of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. After he returned to New York he sent for my picture. He wanted to use it in his book." At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the Mississippi toward St. Paul. Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal. Delightful days [he wrote home]. Loitering around all day long, examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates. That world which I knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again. He had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying. His note-book says: The bluffs all along up above St. Paul are exquisitely beautiful where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky above the steep, verdant slopes. They are inexpressibly rich and mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very tints to make an artist worship. In a final entry he wrote: The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboat man is no longer the god. CXLI LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own account. Not only did he contract to supply funds for the Mississippi book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to swear at, he had his niece's husband, Webster, installed as Osgood's New York subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. There was no delay in this move. Webster must get well familiarized with the work before the Mississippi book's publication. He had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort. Even at the farm he worked without making much headway. At the end of October he wrote Howells: The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still lacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the thing is done or break down at it. The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day (mainly stolen from books though credit given), 9,500 words, so I reduced my burden by one-third in one day. It was five days' work in one. I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. It is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finished in five. He had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'A Tramp Abroad', that he would never limit himself as to time again. But he had forgotten that vow, and was suffering accordingly. Howells wrote from London urging him to drop everything and come over to Europe for refreshment. We have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made of; but I would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in London. Clemens answered: Yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter season. This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. He declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait. I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably--write when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer . . . I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said: Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his faculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the floor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with "Life on the Mississippi" as his subject. Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to Osgood has not been preserved. Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday Evening Club on "What is Happiness?" presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his "gospel," and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'What is Man'? It is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort: "Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community." It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. He made a birthday aphorism on the subject: "The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little." He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. In practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable Colonel Sellers to the end of his days. CXLII "LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI" The Mississippi book was completed at last and placed in Osgood's hands for publication. Clemens was immensely fond of Osgood. Osgood would come down to Hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards, which to Mark Twain's mind was the proper way to conduct business. Besides, there was Webster, who by this time, or a very little later, had the word "publisher" printed in his letter-heads, and was truly that, so far as the new book was concerned. Osgood had become little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. It should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. He was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. His taste ran to the artistic, expensive product. "That book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make," Clemens once declared. "Bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. But Osgood was a lovely fellow." Life on the Mississippi was issued about the middle of May. It was a handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. It was experimental, and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the final result. Among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. The artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately discovered photographic processes was used. Furthermore, the latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of Clemens himself to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work. Webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books. As literature, the Mississippi book will rank with Mark Twain's best--so far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. Earlier in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. They constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself. Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature, but of a different class. The difference is about the same as that between 'A Tramp Abroad' and the 'Innocents'. It is the difference between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature and journalism. But the last is hardly fair. It is journalism, but it is literary journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary, and not journalistic at all. There would always be those in any book of travel he might write. The story of the river revisited is an interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less that is otherwise valuable. 'Life on the Mississippi' has been always popular in Germany. The Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the author's lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor's opinion. Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview at the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of his countrymen in its author. When he was asked, "But have not the Germans been offended by Mark Twain's strictures on their customs and language in his 'Tramp Abroad'" he replied, "We know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the foremost humorist of the age." Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau's final sentiment echoed elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already highly regarded as a serious writer. Thomas Hardy said to Howells one night at dinner: "Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great humorist? He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way." The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that, wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twain; also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his reputation for veracity. That the Mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign opinion of Mark Twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men. CXLIII A GUEST OF ROYALTY For purposes of copyright another trip to Canada was necessary, and when the newspapers announced (May, 1883) that Mark Twain was about to cross the border there came one morning the following telegram: Meeting of Literary and Scientific Society at Ottawa from 22d to 26th. It would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my guest during that time. LORNE. The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise. The invitation was therefore in the nature of a command. Clemens obeyed it graciously enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. He had been honored by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--English royalty--paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen. They had invited him because they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home. Mark Twain was democratic. A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not a good king. But there was something national in this tribute; and, besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it. It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of America's foremost men of letters. The honor was no greater than many others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of Canon Kingsley and Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind. Clemens enjoyed his visit. Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. Once they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience. It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist: "Your Highness," he said, "I have had other compliments paid to me, but none equal to this one. I have never before had a salute fired in my honor." Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written an introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood ('83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: "Its delicious, unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare's sublimities." An extract, the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his meaning: "We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him, and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly."] CXLIV A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for stories of many lengths and varieties. His note-book of that time is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether humorous or otherwise. It seems worth while setting down one or more of these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind. Here is a fair example of many: Two men starving on a raft. The pauper has a Boston cracker, resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire agrees. Pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later asks him a million for the cracker. Millionaire agrees. Pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker; backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered $100,000,000, every cent he has in the world. Pauper accepts. Millionaire: "Now give it to me." Pauper: "No; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of the transaction and make an oath to pay." While pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship. When pauper says, "Sign and take the cracker," millionaire smiles a smile, declines, and points to the ship. Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very good story indeed. IDEA FOR "STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN" In modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures him is the means of making the righteous comfortable. Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as "Lockjaw Harris," "Influenza Smith," "Sinapism Davis," and a dozen or two more, a perfect outbreak of disorders. Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game. An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night, in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the Sultan to death. That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from Scheherazade's prolixity." "On the whole," he said, "it is not your best, nor your second best; but all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in." And that was the truth. So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to seclusion, and there remains to this day. Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary, but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates. He wrote Twichell: Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left the study, but I couldn't hold in--had to do something; so I spent eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which shall fill the children's heads with dates without study. I give each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the children call the stake by the king's name. You can stand in the door and take a bird's-eye view of English monarchy, from the Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye view the rest of it to 1883. You can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the varying distances of the stakes apart. You can see Richard II., two feet; Oliver Cromwell, two feet; James II., three feet, and so on --and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty, fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward III., Henry III., and George III.). By the way, third's a lucky number for length of days, isn't it? Yes, sir; by my scheme you get a realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns. The reason it took me eight hours was because, with little Jean's interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the end of Henry VI. three times over, and besides I had to whittle out all those pegs. I did a full day's work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of my game after I went to bed trying to fit it for indoors. So I didn't get to sleep till pretty late; but when I did go off I had contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board. We may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair start like that. He decided to save the human race that year with a history game. When he had got the children fairly going and interested in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology. He would have a game not only of the English kings, but of the kings of every other nation; likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities in every line. He would prepare a book to accompany these games. Each game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain eight thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia. He would organize clubs throughout the United States for playing the game; prizes were to be given. Experts would take it up. He foresaw a department in every newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and whist and other useless diversions. He wrote to Orion, and set him to work gathering facts and dates by the bushel. He wrote to Webster, sent him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay. Patents must also be applied for abroad. With all nations playing this great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so, in the true Sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and larger, until finally it blew up. The game on paper had become so large, so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it. Yet the first idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up the hillside of Quarry Farm. The children enjoyed it, and played it through many sweet summer afternoons. Once, in the days when he had grown old, he wrote, remembering: Among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and that they compelled brisk exercise. The peg of William the Conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the Conqueror and have all English history skeletonized and landmarked and mile-posted under his eye . . . . The eye has a good memory. Many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but I still see them and each in its place; and no king's name falls upon my ear without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet of space he takes up along the road. It turned out an important literary year after all. In the Mississippi book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from time to time for a number of years, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp and fresh, his inspiration renewed. The trip down the river had revived it. The interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to finish the story at a dead heat. To Howells, August 22 (1883), he wrote: I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn't name the number of days; I shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. I used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days in the week, but this time I have wrought from breakfast till 5.15 P.M. six days in the week, and once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly. He refers to the game, though rather indifferently. When I wrote you I thought I had it; whereas I was merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn't be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done. Notwithstanding the fact that he was working at Huck with enthusiasm, he seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a serial or as a book. But the fact that he persevered until Huck Finn at last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for congratulation. CXLV HOWELLS AND CLEMENS WRITE A PLAY Before Howells went abroad Clemens had written: Now I think that the play for you to write would be one entitled, "Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Age" (75), with Lafayette Hawkins (at 50) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him "My lord." He [Sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various ways. Your refined people and purity of speech would make the best possible background, and when you are done, I could take your manuscript and rewrite the Colonel's speeches, and make him properly extravagant, and I would let the play go to Raymond, and bind him up with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read it. Shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense? Howells, returned and settled in Boston once more, had revived an interest in the play idea. He corresponded with Clemens concerning it and agreed that the American Claimant, Leathers, should furnish the initial impulse of the drama. They decided to revive Colonel Sellers and make him the heir; Colonel Sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes, new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind. Howells came down to Hartford from Boston full of enthusiasm. He found Clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme of action. Howells, telling of it, says: I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. Howells, in turn, proposed a plan which Clemens approved, and they set to work. Howells could imitate Clemens's literary manner, and they had a riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors. Howells has told about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this memoir. He said: "Clemens took one scene and I another. We had loads and loads of fun about it. We cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along. We thought it mighty good, and I think to this day that it was mighty good. We called the play 'Colonel Sellers.' We revived him. Clemens had a notion of Sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of Sellers leading a women's temperance crusade. We conceived the idea of Sellers wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who had fallen, through drink. Sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew performance on the stage. He always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher, one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency, he could give proof of its effectiveness." In connection with the extinguisher, Howells provided Sellers with a pair of wings, which Sellers declared would enable him to float around in any altitude where the flames might break out. The extinguisher, was not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with Greek fire, on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be inoculated with Greek fire against the ordinary conflagration. Of course the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of the scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not wholly warranted by the previous character of Sellers, unless, indeed, he had gone stark mad. It is, in fact, Sellers caricatured. The gentle, tender side of Sellers--the best side--the side which Clemens and Howells themselves cared for most, is not there. Chapter III of Mark Twain's novel, The American Claimant, contains a scene between Colonel Sellers and Washington Hawkins which presents the extravagance of the Colonel's materialization scheme. It is a modified version of one of the scenes in the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any. The authors' rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors in particular, were waiting. Howells went back to Boston tired out, but elate in the prospect of imminent fortune. CXLVI DISTINGUISHED VISITORS Meantime, while Howells had been in Hartford working at the play with Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston. On inquiring for Howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain. Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not accepted Mark Twain at his larger value. He seemed surprised and said: "Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" To which Mrs. Howells replied: "He likes Mr. Clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew." Arnold proceeded to Hartford to lecture, and one night Howells and Clemens went to meet him at a reception. Says Howells: While his hand laxly held mine in greeting I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. "Who--who in the world is that?" I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish; but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house. He came there to dine with the Twichells and the Rev. Dr. Edwin P. Parker. Dr. Parker and Arnold left together, and, walking quietly homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just left. Clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best. He had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment and anecdote of a kind which Twichell once declared the world had never before seen and would never see again. Arnold seemed dazed by it, unable to come out from under its influence. He repeated some of the things Mark Twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic. Then he asked solemnly: "And is he never serious?" And Dr. Parker as solemnly answered: "Mr. Arnold, he is the most serious man in the world." Dr. Parker, recalling this incident, remembered also that Protap Chunder Mazoomdar, a Hindoo Christian prelate of high rank, visited Hartford in 1883, and that his one desire was to meet Mark Twain. In some memoranda of this visit Dr. Parker has written: I said that Mark Twain was a friend of mine, and we would immediately go to his house. He was all eagerness, and I perceived that I had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated gentleman's estimation. Arriving at Mr. Clemens's residence, I promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they were introduced and spent a long while together. In due time Mazoomdar came forth with Mark's likeness and autograph, and as we walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with Simeon of old, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!" CXLVII THE FORTUNES OF A PLAY Howells is of the impression that the "Claimant" play had been offered to other actors before Raymond was made aware of it; but there are letters (to Webster) which indicate that Raymond was to see the play first, though Clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he hopes Raymond will not take it. Then he says: Why do I offer him the play at all? For these reasons: he plays that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of right. Therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice. Let us have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business. I decline to have any correspondence with R. myself in any way. This was at the end of November, 1883, while the play was still being revised. Negotiations with Raymond had already begun, though he does not appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it to be strictly a Raymond play. The thing was hanging fire for nearly a year, altogether, while they were waiting on Raymond, who had a profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of Sellers. Howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to Raymond, whom he found "in a mood of sweet reasonableness" at one of Osgood's luncheons. Raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like it for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it. In due time Raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far as the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization feature and to Sellers as claimant for the English earldom. He asked that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, Clemens and Howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while. Raymond finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger towns --Howells thinks in Buffalo. A week later the manuscript came back to Webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as indeed he had of all Mark Twain's affairs at this time, and with it a brief line: DEAR SIR,--I have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced that in its present form it would not prove successful. I return the manuscript by express to your address. Thanking you for your courtesy, I am, Yours truly, JOHN T. RAYMOND. P.S.--If the play is altered and made longer I will be pleased to read it again. In his former letter Raymond had declared that "Sellers, while a very sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for a moment imagine that he had done such a work" (meaning the materialization). Clearly Raymond wanted a more serious presentation, something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly blame him. But the authors had faith in their performance as it stood, and agreed they would make no change. Finally a well-known elocutionist, named Burbank, conceived the notion of impersonating Raymond as well as Sellers, making of it a sort of double burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms. Burbank came to Hartford and showed what he could do. Howells and Clemens agreed to give him the play, and they hired the old Lyceum Theater for a week, at seven hundred dollars, for its trial presentation. Daniel Frohman promoted it. Clemens and Howells went over the play and made some changes, but they were not as hilarious over it or as full of enthusiasm as they had been in the beginning. Howells put in a night of suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: "Here's a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools." Clemens hurried over to Boston to consult with Howells, and in the end they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the play off and give Burbank his freedom. But Clemens's faith in it did not immediately die. Howells relinquished all right and title in it, and Clemens started it out with Burbank and a traveling company, doing one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own expense. It never reached New York. "And yet," says Howells, "I think now that if it had come it would have been successful. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist die."--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells's faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. In one letter he wrote: "It is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might amuse, I'm afraid that in three he would simply bore." And again: "As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace to have it succeed."] CXLVIII CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent impetuosity than ever. Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he wrote: Now let's write a tragedy. The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read the incident in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work. If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey? It's right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big, picturesque power, and all that. Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn't Florence want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure here. It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which he would later make his story, "The Death Disc." Howells was too tired and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so Clemens went steaming ahead alone. My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized. And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale's leper business. When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize 'The Prince and the Pauper' and 'Tom Sawyer', and was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs. Mark Twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea. It is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain. The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home. Henry Irving was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable. Cable had now permanently left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford. Clemens took Cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes. Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles. He suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one. It required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through. In the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. At one of these gatherings, Cable produced a curious book, which he said had been lent to him by Prof. Francis Bacon, of New Haven, as a great rarity. It was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a Southern youth, named S. Watson Wolston, a Yale student of 1845, and was an absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, "Love Triumphant, or the Enemy Conquered." Its heroine's name was Ambulinia, and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations delighted Clemens beyond measure. He begged Cable to lend it to him, to read at the Saturday Morning Club, declaring that he certainly must own the book, at whatever cost. Henry C. Robinson, who was present, remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and Twichell thought he recalled such a book on sale in New Haven during his college days. Twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat later, being in New Haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author. Twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still be obtained. "Well," was the answer, "I undertook to put my cellar in order the other day, and found about a cord of them down there. I think I can supply you." Twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their first spring walk to Talcott's Tower casually mentioned to Clemens the quest for the rare Ambulinia. But Clemens had given up the pursuit. New York dealers had reported no success in the matter. The book was no longer in existence. "What would you give for a copy?" asked. Twichell. Clemens became excited. "It isn't a question of price," he said; "that would be for the owner to set if I could find him." Twichell drew a little package from his pocket. "Well, Mark," he said, "here are six copies of that book, to begin with. If that isn't enough, I can get you a wagon-load." It was enough. But it did not deter Clemens in his purpose, which was to immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms. He did this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in one of his own volumes. Clemens and Twichell did not always walk that spring. The early form of bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each got one and attempted its conquest. They practised in the early morning hours on Farmington Avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an instructor, a young German, who, after a morning or two, regarded Mark Twain helplessly and said: "Mr. Clemens, it's remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more different ways than the man that invented it." They were curious things, those old high-wheel machines. You were perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with damaging results. Frequently that is what happened. The word "header" seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period. Perhaps Mark Twain invented it. He had enough experience to do it. He always declared afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that has since come into general use. Once he wrote: There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true; but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practise. They all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog. He conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and Twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as Wethersfield or to the tower. It was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one; but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with Mark Twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the "safety" came along. He had his machine sent out to Elmira, but there were too many hills in Chemung County, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and pushing his wheel, and did not try it again. To return to Cable. When the 1st of April (1884) approached he concluded it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his recent entertainment in the Clemens's home. He went to work at it systematically. He had a "private and confidential" circular letter printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's literary friends in Boston, Hartford, Springfield, New York, Brooklyn, Washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that their letters would reach him simultaneously April 1st, asking for his autograph. No stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was requested that "no stranger to Mr. Clemens and no minor" should take part. Mrs. Clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to it that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames unopened. It would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have responded to it, for on the morning of April 1st a stupefying mass of letters was unloaded on Mark Twain's table. He did not know what to make of it, and Mrs. Clemens stood off to watch the results. The first one he opened was from Dean Sage, a friend whom he valued highly. Sage wrote from Brooklyn: DEAR CLEMENS,--I have recently been asked by a young lady who unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance. In enumerating them to her, after mentioning the names of Geo. Shepard Page, Joe Michell, Capt. Isaiah Ryndus, Mr. Willard, Dan Mace, and J. L. Sullivan, I came to yours. "Oh!" said she, "I have read all his works--Little Breeches, The Heathen Chinee, and the rest--and think them delightful. Do oblige me by asking him for his autograph, preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it is not too short." Of course I promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some little thing addressed to Miss Oakes. We are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has been among us for the past fortnight. With regards to Mrs. Clemens and the children, in which my wife joins, Yours truly, DEAN SAGE. It amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but when he picked up a letter from Brander Matthews, asking, in some absurd fashion, for his signature, and another from Ellen Terry, and from Irving, and from Stedman, and from Warner, and Waring, and H. C. Bunner, and Sarony, and Laurence Hutton, and John Hay, and R. U. Johnson, and Modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. He was delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way, and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. Some of them asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. Henry Irving said: I have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very tired--but there will be no rest till I get your autograph. Some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from The Innocents Abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. Others requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size. John Hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's "Night Thoughts," and an equal amount of Pollak's "Course of Time." I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your handwriting. Altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his admiration for Cable grew accordingly. Cable, too, was pleased with the success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing again. A newspaper of the time reports him as saying: I never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the 1st of April. I was afraid the letters would reach Mark when he was in affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying to make it up to him. When I visited Mark we used to open our budgets of letters together at breakfast. We used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph- hunter. I think the idea came from that. The first person I spoke to about it was Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century. My most enthusiastic ally was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. We never thought it would get into the papers. I never played a practical joke before. I never will again, certainly. Mark Twain in those days did not encourage the regular autograph-collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests for his signature. He changed all this in later years, and kept a supply always on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he had no patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly pleasing application to obtain his signature. CXLIX MARK TWAIN IN BUSINESS Samuel Clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing business. Webster had a complete office with assistants at 658 Broadway, and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge of subscription publishing. He was a busy, industrious young man, tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means unnecessary to commercial success. He placed this mental and physical capital against Mark Twain's inspiration and financial backing, and the combination of Charles L. Webster & Co. seemed likely to be a strong one. Already, in the spring of 1884., Webster had the new Mark Twain book, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', well in hand, and was on the watch for promising subscription books by other authors. Clemens, with his usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. Certain plays he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. To Howells he wrote: My days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for I am reading the 'Huck Finn' proofs. They don't make a very great many mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man swear his teeth loose. Whereupon Howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the Huck Finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story. Clemens, among other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by Howells's father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for the heavy obligation. That it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent acknowledgment: It took my breath away, and I haven't recovered it yet, entirely--I mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck Finn. Now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in God's name, and be by me forever blessed. I can't conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself. But if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on. The proof-reading of 'The Prince and the Pauper' cost me the last rags of my religion. Clemens decided to have the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his own ideas. He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. In the pages of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc. The style and the spirit of these things amused him. He instructed Webster to look up the artist, who proved to be a young man, E. W. Kemble by name, later one of our foremost cartoonists. Webster engaged Kemble and put the manuscript in his hands. Through the publication of certain chapters of Huck Finn in the Century Magazine, Kemble was brought to the notice of its editors, who wrote Clemens that they were profoundly indebted to him for unearthing "such a gem of an illustrator." Clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of patience was light and the details were many. His early business period resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in Esmeralda, his letters to Webster being not unlike those to Orion in that former day. They are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane. It required effort for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence. A criticism of one of Webster's assistants will serve as an example of his less quiet method: Charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but blind; and not only blind, but partly dead. Of course, one must regard many of Mark Twain's business aspects humorously. To consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light altogether. He wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing. There were few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener, than himself. It is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which he sometimes manifested. He had observed the methods of Bliss and Osgood, and had drawn his conclusions. In the beginning of the Huck Finn canvass he wrote Webster: Keep it diligently in mind that we don't issue till we have made a big sale. Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with an intent and purpose of issuing on the 10th or 15th of next December (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the trade); but if we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them. It is a plain, simple policy, and would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed. [That is to say, 'The Prince and the Pauper' and the Mississippi book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the initial canvass.] CL FARM PICTURES Gerhardt returned from Paris that summer, after three years of study, a qualified sculptor. He was prepared to take commissions, and came to Elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. The work was finished after four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but Gerhardt, attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely. The family gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a fine likeness. It was decided that a cut of it should be used as a frontispiece for the new book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the Huck Finn pages, a labor in which Mrs. Clemens and the children materially assisted. In the childish biography which Susy began of her father, a year later, she says: Ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated --[Susy's spelling is preserved]--them. Papa read Huckleberry Finn to us in manuscript,--[Probably meaning proof.]--just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate, while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so terrible, that Clara and I used to delight in and oh, with what despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would almost be ruined without it. But we gradually came to think as mama did. Commenting on this phase of Huck's evolution Mark Twain has since written: I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the "expergator" alive. It is possible, for I had that custom. Little Jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary arbitration. She was four, and had more interest in cows. In some memoranda which her father kept of that period--the "Children's Book"--he says: She goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six o'clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can express her feeling for them. She sits rapt and contented while David milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about the cows. The time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant, but not for her. She could stand a week of it. When the milking is finished, and "Blanche," "Jean," and "the cross cow" are turned into the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set Jean on a shed in that lot, and stay by her half an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse, comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "Ain't this a sweet little garden?" Yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by Jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture and left her bereft. I thought I was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. Jean knew of some more cows in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. When we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, I saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so I began to argue against continuing the expedition, and Jean began to argue in favor of it, she using English for light skirmishing and German for "business." I kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till I judged I had her about cornered. She hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply: "Wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!" (We won't talk any more about it.) It nearly took my breath away, though I thought I might possibly have misunderstood. I said: "Why, you little rascal! Was hast du gesagt?" But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. I suppose I ought to have been outraged, but I wasn't; I was charmed. His own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. There was an excitement, just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda says: I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature whom God concerns himself about and not us. And there is another which says: People, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the myriads of stars. We sha'n't need that. We could use up two eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished, and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. He records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to Howells: Before I forget it I must tell you that Mrs. Clemens has said a bright thing. A drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here for a church debt. I began to rage over the exceedingly cool wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said: "I think I know that church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know how to write a polished letter. How should he?" My manner changed so suddenly and so radically that Mrs. C. said: "I will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: 'Consider every man colored till he is proved white.'" It is dern good, I think. One of the note-books contains these entries: Talking last night about home matters, I said, "I wish I had said to George when we were leaving home, 'Now, George, I wish you would take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while I am away----'" "To learn to let my matches alone," interrupted Livy. The very words I was going to use. Yet George had not been mentioned before, nor his peculiarities. Several years ago I said: "Suppose I should live to be ninety-two, and just as I was dying a messenger should enter and say----" "You are become Earl of Durham," interrupted Livy. The very words I was going to utter. Yet there had not been a word said about the earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation calculated to suggest any such subject. CLI MARK TWAIN MUGWUMPS The Republican Presidential nomination of James G. Blaine resulted in a political revolt such as the nation had not known. Blaine was immensely popular, but he had many enemies in his own party. There were strong suspicions of his being connected with doubtful financiering-enterprises, more or less sensitive to official influence, and while these scandals had become quieted a very large portion of the Republican constituency refused to believe them unjustified. What might be termed the intellectual element of Republicanism was against Blame: George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, James Russell Lowell, Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Nast, the firm of Harper & Brothers, Joseph W. Hawley, Joseph Twichell, Mark Twain--in fact the majority of thinking men who held principle above party in their choice. On the day of the Chicago nomination, Henry C. Robinson, Charles E. Perkins, Edward M. Bunce, F. G. Whitmore, and Samuel C. Dunham were collected with Mark Twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game and discussing the political situation, with George, the colored butler, at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in. As fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town, it was telephoned up to the house and George reported it through the speaking-tube. The opposition to Blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of the assembled players seriously expected his nomination. What was their amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon George suddenly announced through the speaking-tube that Blaine was the nominee. The butts of the billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the players were speechless. Then Henry Robinson said: "It's hard luck to have to vote for that man." Clemens looked at him under his heavy brows. "But--we don't--have to vote for him," he said. "Do you mean to say that you're not going to vote for him?" "Yes, that is what I mean to say. I am not going to vote for him." There was a general protest. Most of those assembled declared that when a party's representatives chose a man one must stand by him. They might choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained. Clemens said: "No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote. If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism." There was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of those there present remained loyal to Blaine. General Hawley and his paper stood by Blaine. Warner withdrew from his editorship of the Courant and remained neutral. Twichell stood with Clemens and came near losing his pulpit by it. Open letters were published in the newspapers about him. It was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families, and congregations. If we except the Civil War period, there never had been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the parties of James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland in 1884. That Howells remained true to Blaine was a grief to Clemens. He had gone to the farm with Howells on his political conscience and had written fervent and imploring letters on the subject. As late as September 17th, he said: Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for Blaine. I believe you said something about the country and the party. Certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first. I don't ask you to vote at all. I only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for Blaine.... Don't be offended; I mean no offense. I am not concerned about the rest of the nation, but well, good-by. Yours ever, MARK. Beyond his prayerful letters to Howells, Clemens did not greatly concern himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to Hartford, he went vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties, and were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper's convictions. It was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his remarks, a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so loudly as to drown his voice. He waited till the band got by, but by the time he was well under way again another band passed, and once more he was obliged to wait till the music died away in the distance. Then he said, quite serenely: "You will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper." In introducing Carl Schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at Hartford, October 20, 1884., he remarked that he [Clemens] was the only legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great favor by acting as vice-presidents. Then he said: As far as my own political change of heart is concerned, I have not been convinced by any Democratic means. The opinion I hold of Mr. Blaine is due to the comments of the Republican press before the nomination. Not that they have said bitter or scandalous things, because Republican papers are above that, but the things they said did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply editorial disapproval of Mr. Blame and the belief that he was not qualified to be President of the United States. It is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest newspaper in Colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has recently nominated me for President. It is hardly fit for me to preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with a Presidential madness. If I had realized that this canvass was to turn on the candidate's private character I would have started that Colorado paper sooner. I know the crimes that can be imputed and proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands. This cannot be said of any other Presidential candidate in the field. Inasmuch as the Blaine-Cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded. Mark Twain voted for Grover Cleveland, though up to the very eve of election he was ready to support a Republican nominee in whom he had faith, preferably Edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by which Edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the country. It was probably Dr. Burchard's ill-advised utterance concerning the three alleged R's of Democracy, "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," that defeated Blaine, and by some strange, occult means Mark Twain's butler George got wind of this damning speech before it became news on the streets of Hartford. George had gone with his party, and had a considerable sum of money wagered on Blaine's election; but he knew it was likely to be very close, and he had an instant and deep conviction that these three fatal words and Blaine's failure to repudiate them meant the candidate's downfall. He immediately abandoned everything in the shape of household duties, and within the briefest possible time had changed enough money to make him safe, and leave him a good margin of winnings besides, in the event of Blame's defeat. This was evening. A very little later the news of Blaine's blunder, announced from the opera-house stage, was like the explosion of a bomb. But it was no news to George, who went home rejoicing with his enemies. CLII PLATFORMING WITH CABLE The drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing house had told heavily on Clemens's finances. It became desirable to earn a large sum of money with as much expedition as possible. Authors' readings had become popular, and Clemens had read in Philadelphia and Boston with satisfactory results. He now conceived the idea of a grand tour of authors as a commercial enterprise. He proposed to Aldrich, Howells, and Cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest. He offered to be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day apiece as their net return from the "circus," as he called it. Howells and Aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing prospect, but only Cable was willing to realize it. He had been scouring the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces with Mark Twain. Clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already stated, the need of much money had become important. He arranged with J. B. Pond for the business side of the expedition, though in reality he was its proprietor. The private-car idea was given up, but he employed Cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week and expenses, and he paid Pond a commission. Perhaps, without going any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and yielded a large return of the needed funds. Clemens and Cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for the absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there would have been little to regret. They were a curiously associated pair. Cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to Sunday-school, Bible reading, and church affairs in general. Clemens--well, Clemens was different. On the first evening of their tour, when the latter was comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, Cable appeared with his Bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud. Clemens made no comment, and this went on for an evening or two more. Then he said: "See here, Cable, we'll have to cut this part of the program out. You can read the Bible as much as you please so long as you don't read it to me." Cable retired courteously. He had a keen sense of humor, and most things that Mark Twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him. Cable did not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car. One day Clemens sand to him: "Cable, why do you sit in here? You don't smoke, and you know I always smoke, and sometimes swear." Cable said, "I know, Mark, I don't do these things, but I can't help admiring the way you do them." When Sunday came it was Mark Twain's great happiness to stay in bed all day, resting after his week of labor; but Cable would rise, bright and chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the various churches and Sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief address at each, being always invited to do so. It seems worth while to include one of the Clemens-Cable programs here --a most satisfactory one. They varied it on occasion, and when they were two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here given was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its worth: PROGRAM Richling's visit to Kate Riley GEO. W. CABLE King Sollermun MARK TWAIN (a) Kate Riley and Ristofolo (b) Narcisse in mourning for "Lady Byron" (c) Mary's Night Ride GEO. W. CABLE (a) Tragic Tale of the Fishwife (b) A Trying Situation (c) A Ghost Story MARK TWAIN At a Mark Twain memorial meeting (November 30, 1910), where the few who were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories, George Cable recalled their reading days together and told of Mark Twain's conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself, regardless of all other concerns. He told how when they had been traveling for a while Clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they would forget before they had left the entertainment hall. Cable said that up to that time he had supposed Clemens's chief thought was the entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was satisfied. He told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against the footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his colleague to be glorying in that triumph. What was his surprise, then, on the way to the hotel in the carriage, when Clemens groaned and seemed writhing in spirit and said: "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer." Cable added that all that night and the next day Mark Twain devoted himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified not only as humor, but as literature and art. A good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour. Many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain memoranda have been preserved. Grover Cleveland had been elected when they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in Albany as Governor of New York. When they reached Albany Cable and Clemens decided to call on him. They drove to the Capitol and were shown into the Governor's private office. Cleveland made them welcome, and, after greetings, said to Clemens: "Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow-citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many months some years ago, but you never called on me then. How do you explain this?" Clemens said: "Oh, that is very simple to answer, your Excellency. In Buffalo you were a sheriff. I kept away from the sheriff as much as possible, but you're Governor now, and on the way to the Presidency. It's worth while coming to see you." Clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the Executive desk. He leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if waiting for orders. No one spoke for a moment; then the Governor said to this collection of attendants: "You are dismissed, young gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr. Clemens is sitting on the bells." In Buffalo, when Clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered the audience for a moment; then he said: "I miss a good many faces. They have gone--gone to the tomb, to the gallows, or to the White House. All of us are entitled to at least one of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for all." On Thanksgiving Eve the readers were in Morristown, New Jersey, where they were entertained by Thomas Nast. The cartoonist prepared a quiet supper for them and they remained overnight in the Nast home. They were to leave next morning by an early train, and Mrs. Nast had agreed to see that they were up in due season. When she woke next morning there seemed a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious. Going to the servants' room, she found them sleeping soundly. The alarm-clock in the back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired. The studio clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises had retired from business. Clemens had found that the clocks interfered with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early trains and reading engagements. On being accused of duplicity he said: "Well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway. They will feel much better for a night's rest." A few days later Nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which showed Mark Twain getting rid of the offending clocks. At Christmas-time they took a fortnight's holiday and Clemens went home to Hartford. A surprise was awaiting him there. Mrs. Clemens had made an adaptation of 'The Prince and the Pauper' play, and the children of the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special delectation. He knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across the grounds to George Warner's home, into the large room there where it was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage. Gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general construction of scenery and effects. The result was really imposing; but presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what it was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was deeply moved and supremely gratified. There was but one hitch in the performance. There is a place where the Prince says, "Fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll's temper." This was Susy's part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to remember its literal appropriateness. There was a moment's silence, then a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the little actors joined. They did not see the humor and were disturbed and grieved. Curiously enough, Mrs Clemens herself, in arranging and casting the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect. The parts were all daintily played. The children wore their assumed personalities as if native to them. Daisy Warner played the part of Tom Canty, Clara Clemens was Lady Jane Grey. It was only the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper productions. The play was repeated, Clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself playing the role of Miles Hendon. In her childish biography Susy says: Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure that he could do it. The scene that he acted in was the scene between Miles Hendon and the Prince, the "Prithee, pour the water" scene. I was the Prince and papa and I rehearsed together two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. He was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait! Papa made the Miles Hendon scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene, and papa too. We had great fun with our "Prince and Pauper," and I think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it. He certainly could have been an actor as well as an author. The holidays over, Cable and Clemens were off on the circuit again. At Rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of Mark Twain's important books, 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'. Clemens and Cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of finding something to read. Pulling over some volumes on one of the tables, Clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book, and after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and with increasing interest. "Cable," he said, "do you know anything about this book, the Arthurian legends of Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Arthure?" Cable answered: "Mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the world. Let me buy it for you. You will love it more than any book you ever read." So Clemens came to know the old chronicler's version of the rare Round Table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last days of his life seldom let the book go far from him. He read and reread those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day. Sir Ector's lament he regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in the English tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most ridiculous absurdities in romance. Presently he conceived the idea of linking that day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the progress of the present, or carrying back into that age of magicians and armor and superstition and cruelties a brisk American of progressive ideas who would institute reforms. His note-book began to be filled with memoranda of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind. These were vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time before the story would become a fact. This was the first entry: Dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the Middle Ages. Have the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can't scratch. Cold in the head and can't blow. Can't get a handkerchief; can't use iron sleeve; iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can't dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down and can't get up. Twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said: "As I read those quaint and curious old legends I suppose I naturally contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century down into the sixth century and observe the consequences." The reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year and carried them as far west as Chicago. They read in Hannibal and Keokuk, and Clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now living with Orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time force of character. Mark Twain, arranging for her Keokuk residence, had written: Ma wants to board with you, and pay her board. She will pay you $20 a month (she wouldn't pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content I will add $25 a month to the sum Perkins already sends you. Jane Clemens attended the Keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one tripped as lightly as a girl. It was the last time that Mark Twain ever saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a part of her personality. Clemens saw another relative on that trip; in St. Louis, James Lampton, the original of Colonel Sellers, called. He was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to myself: "I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him." Clemens opened the door into Cable's room and allowed the golden dream-talk to float in. It was of a "small venture" which the caller had undertaken through his son. "Only a little thing--a mere trifle--a bagatelle. I suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, I think; still, for a boy, you know----" It was the same old Cousin Jim. Later, when he had royally accepted some tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, Cable put his head in at the door. "That was Colonel Sellers," he said. CLIII HUCK FINN COMES INTO HIS OWN In the December Century (1884) appeared a chapter from 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', "The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud," a piece of writing which Edmund Clarence Stederian, Brander Matthews, and others promptly ranked as among Mark Twain's very best; when this was followed, in the January number, by "King Sollermun," a chapter which in its way delighted quite as many readers, the success of the new book was accounted certain. --[Stedman, writing to Clemens of this instalment, said: "To my mind it is not only the most finished and condensed thing you have done but as dramatic and powerful an episode as I know in modern literature."] 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was officially published in England and America in December, 1884, but the book was not in the canvassers' hands for delivery until February. By this time the orders were approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased to fifty thousand a few weeks later. Webster's first publication venture was in the nature of a triumph. Clemens wrote to him March 16th: "Your news is splendid. Huck certainly is a success." He felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and Webster had proved his efficiency as an executive. He had no further need of an outside publisher. The story of Huck Finn will probably stand as the best of Mark Twain's purely fictional writings. A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is greater than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate interest for the juvenile reader. In fact, the books are so different that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success of the later one. Sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in Huckleberry Finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything. The tale of Huck and Nigger Jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language. It has been ranked greater than Gil Blas, greater even than Don Quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, "It is a book I have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow." It is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough. The illusion of Huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the "four dialects" are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale's reality. We are inclined to resent this. We never wish to feel that Huck is anything but a real character. We want him always the Huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary, rather than sacrifice Nigger Jim; the Huck who watched the river through long nights, and, without caring to explain why, felt his soul go out to the sunrise. Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there --sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by- and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers.... And next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! This is the Huck we want, and this is the Huck we usually have, and that the world has long been thankful for. Take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique pictures. The cabin in the swamp which Huck and his father used together in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with Jim on the wrecked steamboat; Huck's night among the towheads; the Grangerford-Shepherdson battle; the killing of Boggs--to name a few of the many vivid presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion and will never lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity itself does not change. The terse, unadorned Grangerford-Shepherdson episode--built out of the Darnell--Watson feuds--[See Life on the Mississippi, chap. xxvi. Mark Twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near witnessing the battle he describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid casualness, and the same may be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative. It is the way things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which Huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in literary art. To Huck, apparently, the killing of Boggs and Colonel Sherburn's defiance of the mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents of the day's travel. When Colonel Sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse Huck says: The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a staid if I'd a wanted to, but I didn't want to. I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. That is all. No reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed, all without a single moral comment. And when the Shepherdsons had got done killing the Grangerfords, and Huck had tugged the two bodies ashore and covered Buck Grangerford's face with a handkerchief, crying a little because Buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up Jim and the raft and sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and greens: There ain't nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right; and while I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. It was Huck Finn's morality that caused the book to be excluded from the Concord Library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day. The orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature could not condone Huck's looseness in the matter of statement and property rights, and in spite of New England traditions, Massachusetts librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that, after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of abolition, he had decided that he'd go to hell rather than give Jim over to slavery. Poor vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode of an immortal book. Able critics have declared that the psychology of Huck Finn is the book's large feature: Huck's moral point of view--the struggle between his heart and his conscience concerning the sin of Jim's concealment, and his final decision of self-sacrifice. Time may show that as an epic of the river, the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater. The problems of conscience we have always with us, but periods once passed are gone forever. Certainly Huck's loyalty to that lovely soul Nigger Jim was beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard for Huck, who could be loyal to anything. Huck was loyal to his father, loyal to Tom Sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps and frauds, the King and the Duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to Mary Wilks. The King and the Duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction. The Duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer Clemens had known in Virginia City, but the King was created out of refuse from the whole human family--"all tears and flapdoodle," the very ultimate of disrepute and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love, him. "Hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?" he asks in a critical moment--a remark which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. We are full of pity at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a rail, and feel some of Huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful truth of his comment: "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another." The "poor old king" Huck calls him, and confesses how he felt "ornery and humble and to blame, somehow," for the old scamp's misfortunes. "A person's conscience ain't got no sense," he says, and Huck is never more real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. Huck is what he is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. He is a boy throughout--such a boy as Mark Twain had known and in some degree had been. One may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's construction if so minded, but the moral character of Huck himself is not open to criticism. And indeed any criticism of this the greatest of Mark Twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the granite of an imperishable structure. Huck Finn is a monument that no puny pecking will destroy. It is built of indestructible blocks of human nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not always agree, we need not fear. Time will blur the incongruities and moss over the mistakes. The edifice will grow more beautiful with the years. CLIV THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL GRANT The success of Huck Finn, though sufficiently important in itself, prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it dwindled to small proportions. One night (it was early in November, 1884), when Cable and Clemens had finished a reading at Chickering Hall, Clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear Richard Watson Gilder's voice say to some unseen companion: "Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them. He has said so to-day, in so many words." Of course Clemens was immediately interested. It was the thing he had proposed to Grant some three years previously, during his call that day with Howells concerning the Toronto consulship. With Mrs. Clemens, he promptly overtook Gilder and accompanied him to his house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars. Gilder said that the Century Editors had endeavored to get Grant to contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial disaster, as a member of the firm of Grant & Ward, had he been willing to consider the matter. He said that Grant now welcomed the idea of contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment of five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart and relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[Somewhat later the Century Company, voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.] Gilder added that General Grant seemed now determined to continue his work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a prospect. Clemens was in the habit of calling on Grant, now and then, to smoke a cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication. He found the General and his son, Colonel Fred Grant, discussing some memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the Century Company for the book publication of his memoirs. Clemens asked to be allowed to look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said: "General, it is clear that the Century people do not realize the importance--the commercial magnitude of your book. It is not strange that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have had little or no experience with books of this class. The terms they propose indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies. A book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum. It should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the royalty here proposed. I do not believe it is to your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation. Write to the American Publishing Company at Hartford and see what they will do for you." But Grant demurred. He said that, while no arrangements had been made with the Century Company, he thought it only fair and right that they should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater than he could obtain elsewhere. He said that, all things being equal, the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him. Clemens spoke up: "General, if that is so, it belongs to me." Grant did not understand until Clemens recalled to him how he had urged him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him, agreeing to superintend the book's publication. Then he said: "General, I am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready it is quite possible that I shall have the best equipped subscription establishment in the country. If you will place your book with my firm --and I feel that I have at least an equal right in the consideration--I will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if you prefer, I will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and I will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent." General Grant was really grieved at this proposal. It seemed to him that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted. He intimated that he had asked the Century Company president, Roswell Smith, a careful-headed business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as Sherman's, which the Scribners had published at a profit to Sherman of twenty-five thousand dollars, and that Smith had been unwilling to guarantee that amount to the author.--[Mark Twain's note-book, under date of March, 1885, contains this memorandum: "Roswell Smith said to me: 'I'm glad you got the book, Mr. Clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough to take it, under the circumstances. What do you think the General wanted to require of me?' "'He wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his book. I wouldn't risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever published.'" Yet Roswell Smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his views of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully invested a million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the fact that the market was already thought to be supplied.] Clemens said: "General, I have my check-book with me. I will draw you a check now for twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs, and will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this amount has been reached." Colonel Fred Grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed, at least until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of publishing could be made. Clemens left then, and set out on his trip with Cable, turning the whole matter over to Webster and Colonel Fred for settlement. Meantime, the word that General Grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers and various publishing propositions came to him. In the end the General sent over to Philadelphia for his old friend, George W. Childs, and laid the whole matter before him. Childs said later it was plain that General Grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly wished to give the book to Mark Twain. It seemed not to be a question of how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely. Webster's complete success with Huck Finn being now demonstrated, Colonel Fred Grant agreed that he believed Clemens and Webster could handle the book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation Childs was of the same opinion. The decision was that the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the contract were made. General Grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms. He thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a proportion of the profits. He wrote to Clemens, asking him which of his two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy per cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around. Clemens sent Webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement. Whereupon Grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, Clemens would not be obliged to pay him anything. He could not consent to the thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss. Meantime, Grant had developed a serious illness. The humiliation of his business failure had undermined his health. The papers announced his malady as cancer of the tongue. In a memorandum which Clemens made, February 26, 1885, he states that on the 21st he called at the Grant home, 3 East 66th Street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak the General looked. He was astonished because the newspaper, in a second report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the cancer alarm was a false one. I took for granted the report, and said I had been glad to see that news. He smiled and said, "Yes--if it had only been true." One of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the General's condition was the opposite of encouraging. Then the talk drifted to business, and the General presently said: "I mean you shall have the book--I have about made up my mind to that--but I wish to write to Mr. Roswell Smith first, and tell him I have so decided. I think this is due him." From the beginning the General has shown a fine delicacy toward those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the man who put into the Appomattox terms of surrender the words, "Officers may retain their side-arms," to save General Lee the humiliation of giving up his sword. [Note-book.] The physician present was Dr. Douglas, and upon Clemens assuming that the General's trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a warning to those who smoked to excess, himself included, Dr. Douglas said that General Grant's affliction could not be attributed altogether to smoking, but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long depression of spirit, the grief of his financial disaster. Dr. Douglas's remark started General Grant upon the subject of his connection with Ward, which he discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of mind. Never at any time did he betray any resentment toward Ward, but characterized him as one might an offending child. He spoke as a man who has been deeply wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a venomous expression or one with revengeful nature. Clemens confessed in his notes that all the time he himself was "inwardly boiling--scalping Ward--flaying him alive --breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a jelly." While he was talking Colonel Grant said: "Father is letting you see that the Grant family are a pack of fools, Mr. Clemens." The General objected to this statement. He said that the facts could be produced which would show that when Ward laid siege to a man he was pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the Grant family. He said that nobody could call the president of the Erie Railroad a fool, yet Ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand dollars, robbed him of every cent of it. He cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in Ward to the extent of half a million. He went on to recall many such cases. He told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of departure for Europe and handed Ward a check for fifty thousand dollars, saying: "I have no use for it at present. See what you can do with it for me." By and by this investor, returning from Europe, dropped in and said: "Well, did anything happen?" Ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over, with the casual remark: "Well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon." The man stared at the check, then thrust it back into Ward's hand. "That's all right. It's plenty good enough for me. Set that hen again," and left the place. Of course Ward made no investments. His was the first playing on a colossal scale of the now worn-out "get rich quick" confidence game. Such dividends as were made came out of the principal. Ward was the Napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not. Clemens agreed that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they would undoubtedly have trusted Ward. Colonel Grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the first volume was complete and fully half the second. Three days later the formal contract was closed, and Webster & Co. promptly advanced. General Grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome arrangement, for Grant's debts and expenses were many, and his available resources restricted to the Century payments for his articles. Immediately the office of Webster & Co. was warm with affairs. Reporters were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which Mark Twain was to publish the life of General Grant. No publishing enterprise of such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no publishing event, before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper comment. The names of General Grant and Mark Twain associated would command columns, whatever the event, and that Mark Twain was to become the publisher of Grant's own story of his battles was of unprecedented importance. The partners were sufficiently occupied. Estimates and prices for vast quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the Grant book. Clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution. Webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign. Applications for agencies poured in. In those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the country into districts, and the heads of these agencies Webster summoned to New York and laid down the law to them concerning the new book. It was not a time for small dealings, and Webster rose to the occasion. By the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the Grant Memoirs, and this estimate they believed to be conservative. Webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters. He took a store-room at 42 East 14th Street, Union Square, and surrounded himself with a capable force of assistants. He had become, all at once, the most conspicuous publisher in the world. CLV DAYS WITH A DYING HERO The contract for the publication of the Grant Life was officially closed February 27, 1885. Five days later, on the last day and at the last hour of President Arthur's administration, and of the Congress then sitting, a bill was passed placing Grant as full General, with full pay, on the retired army list. The bill providing for this somewhat tardy acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said that the Congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. Clemens was with General Grant when the news of this action was read to him. Grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to him than to any one present, yet Clemens in his notes records: Every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one --General Grant's. He read the telegram, but not a shade or suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance. The volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression of it and make no sign. Grant's calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days astonished even those most familiar with his noble character. One night Gerhardt came into the library at Hartford with the announcement that he wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of General Grant. Clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic. He declared it was the first likeness he had ever seen of General Grant that approached reality. He agreed that the Grant family ought to see it, and that he would take Gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within reach in case they had any suggestions. They went to New York next morning, and called at the Grant home during the afternoon. From the note-book: Friday, March 20, 1885. Gerhardt and I arrived at General Grant's about 2.30 P.m. and I asked if the family would look at a small clay bust of the General which Gerhardt had made from a photograph. Colonel Fred and Jesse were absent to receive their sister, Mrs. Sartoris, who would arrive from Europe about 4.30; but the three Mrs. Grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it, and also great gratification that Mr. Gerhardt had undertaken it. Mrs. Jesse Grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in Huck Finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the same artist to make one of General Grant. The ladies examined the bust critically and pointed out defects, while Gerhardt made the necessary corrections. Presently Mrs. General Grant suggested that Gerhardt step in and look at the General. I had been in there talking with the General, but had never thought of asking him to let a stranger come in. So Gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and the inspection and cross-fire began: "There, I was sure his nose was so and so," and, "I was sure his forehead was so and so," and, "Don't you think his head is so and so?" And so everybody walked around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely as if he were used to being served so. One marked feature of General Grant's character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness, sweetness. Every time I have been in his presence--lately and formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature. I wonder it has not been more spoken of. Presently he said, let Gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if Gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude. Of course we were glad. A table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies left the room; I got a book; Gerhardt went to work; and for an hour there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day the General got a good, sound, peaceful nap. General Badeau came in, and probably interrupted that nap. He spoke out as strongly as the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness. He had some sheets of MS. in his hand, and said, "I've been reading what you wrote this morning, General, and it is of the utmost value; it solves a riddle that has puzzled men's brains all these years and makes the thing clear and rational." I asked what the puzzle was, and he said, "It was why Grant did not immediately lay siege to Vicksburg after capturing Port Hudson" (at least that is my recollection, now toward midnight, of General Badeau's answer). The little bust of Grant which Gerhardt worked on that day was widely reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most nearly correct likeness of Grant. The original is in possession of the family. General Grant worked industriously on his book. He had a superb memory and worked rapidly. Webster & Co. offered to supply him with a stenographer, and this proved a great relief. Sometimes he dictated ten thousand words at a sitting. It was reported at the time, and it has been stated since, that Grant did not write the Memoirs himself, but only made notes, which were expanded by others. But this is not true. General Grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then had the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions. He wrote against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal. Fortunately the lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though the last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be finished by another hand. Early in April General Grant's condition became very alarming, and on the night of the 3d it was believed he could not live until morning. But he was not yet ready to surrender. He rallied and renewed his task; feebly at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. Now and then he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. Once Colonel Fred Grant suggested to Clemens that if he could encourage the General a little it might be worth while. Clemens had felt always such a reverence and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting his literature. "I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating." He did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience. Grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity, with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and therefore the best of all literary methods. It happened that Clemens had been comparing some of Grant's chapters with Caesar's Commentaries, and was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. "I placed the two books side by side upon the same level," he said, "and I still think that they belong there. I learned afterward that General Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author." Within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the Grant Memoirs--which is to say by the 1st of May, 1885--orders for sixty thousand sets had been received, and on that day Mark Twain, in his note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each. Then he says: If these chickens should really hatch according to my account, General Grant's royalties will' amount to $420,000, and will make the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history. Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on his History of England, L20,000. If I pay the General in silver coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons. Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see by and by in how far this calculation was justified. Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. On the 26th of May he makes this memorandum: It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that cancer. He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages--not a bad fault. A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of being enough. To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great Missouri campaign in 1861. He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher. Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by the very announcement that Grant was coming. Some word of this got to the Century editors, who immediately proposed that Mark Twain contribute to the magazine War Series the story of his share in the Rebellion, and particularly of his war relations with General Grant. So the "Private History of a Campaign that Failed" was prepared as Mark Twain's side-light on the history of the Rebellion; and if it was not important history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in Mark Twain's inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful those last sad days of his ancient enemy. During one of their talks General Grant spoke of the question as to whether he or Sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea. Grant said: "Neither of us originated the idea of that march. The enemy did it." Reports were circulated of estrangements between General Grant and the Century Company, and between Mark Twain and the Century Company, as a result of the book decision. Certain newspapers exploited and magnified these rumors--some went so far as to accuse Mark Twain of duplicity, and to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the expense of General Grant and his family. All of which was the merest nonsense. The Century Company, Webster & Co., General Grant, and Mark Twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the most cordial relations and understanding prevailed. As to the charge of unfair dealing on the part of Mark Twain, this was too absurd, even then, to attract more than momentary attention. Webster & Co., somewhat later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that General Grant had been unable to complete his work. CLVI THE CLOSE OF A GREAT CAREER The Clemens household did not go to Elmira that year until the 27th of June. Meantime General Grant had been taken to Mount McGregor, near the Adirondacks. The day after Clemens reached Elmira there came a summons saying that the General had asked to see him. He went immediately, and remained several days. The resolute old commander was very feeble by this time. It was three months since he had been believed to be dying, yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak. He was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript, writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words each. His conversation was carried on in the same way. Mark Twain brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them are still preserved. The writing is perfectly legible, and shows no indication of a trembling hand. On one of these slips is written: There is much more that I could do if I was a well man. I do not write quite as clearly as I could if well. If I could read it over myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest themselves to me. On another: Have you seen any portion of the second volume? It is up to the end, or nearly so. As much more work as I have done to-day will finish it. I have worked faster than if I had been well. I have used my three boys and a stenographer. And on still another: If I could have two weeks of strength I could improve it very much. As I am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to make a point clear here and there. Certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart. As long as his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task. Once he asked if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his family from the publication. Clemens's prompt reply, that more than one hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort. Clemens told him that the country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year. Grant made no further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any one. When Clemens left, General Grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a shawl about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him. It was a picture that would never fade from the memory. In a later memorandum he says: I then believed he would live several months. He was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. He was entirely through a few days later. Since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. I think his book kept him alive several months. He was a very great man and superlatively good. This note was made July 23, 1885, at 10 A.M., on receipt of the news that General Grant was dead. To Henry Ward Beecher, Clemens wrote: One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. It can be truly said that all the nation mourned. General Grant had no enemies, political or sectional, in those last days. The old soldier battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was a figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity remained to utter a single word that was not kind. Memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other. Those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory. Twichell, from the mountains of Vermont, wrote: I suppose I have said to Harmony forty times since I got up here, "How I wish I could see Mark!" My notion is that between us we could get ourselves expressed. I have never known any one who could help me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many a time, dear old fellow. I'd give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon, while we twined a wreath together for Launcelot's grave, than to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips. The death of Grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for his Memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in time for the delivery, which had been promised for December 1st. J. J. Little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract. In the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid to Mrs. Grant. The first check of two hundred thousand dollars, drawn February 27, 1886, remains the largest single royalty check in history. Mark Twain's prophecy had been almost exactly verified. CLVII MINOR MATTERS OF A GREAT YEAR The Grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally overshadowed other events of 1885. Mark Twain was so deeply absorbed in this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy in other directions. Yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember. Howells has told something of the Authors' Reading given for the Longfellow Memorial, an entertainment managed by George Parsons Lathrop, though Howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of admission at five dollars. Then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the attractions. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. Howells tells of Mark Twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter at the time he wrote: "You simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it." Howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. This was early in May. Of literary work, beyond the war paper, the "Private History of a Campaign that Failed" (published December, 1885), Clemens appears to have done very little. His thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military Memoir to follow literary ventures of his own. At one time he was impelled to dictate an autobiography--Grant's difficulties in his dying hour suggesting this --and he arranged with Redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent and understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work. He dictated a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to continue. Also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the result unsatisfactory. Two open communications from Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as--"to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of doors that won't shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints, glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc." The letter was signed X. Y. Z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world. None of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in Kansas City a business was founded on the idea, adopting "The Universal Tinker" as its firm name. The other letter mentioned was written to the 'Christian Union', inspired by a tale entitled, "What Ought We to Have Done?" It was a tale concerning the government of children; especially concerning the government of one child--John Junior--a child who, as it would appear from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own notion. The performance of John junior, and of his parents in trying to manage him, stirred Mark Twain considerably--it being "enough to make a body's blood boil," as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to John Junior as a member of the Clemens household. He did not dare to show the communication to Mrs. Clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well what its fate would be in that case. So he took chances and printed it without her knowledge. The letter was published July 16, 1885. It is too long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be altogether omitted. After relating, in considerable detail, Mrs. Clemens's method of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet firmness of her discipline--he concludes: The mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch of her hand has made sacred. They know her for the best and truest friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing. In a word, they know her, and I know her, for the best and dearest mother that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest.... In all my life I have never made a single reference to my wife in print before, as far as I can remember, except once in the dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence, perhaps I may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or indelicacy. I will institute one other novelty: I will send this manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her to edit it. This will save it from getting edited into the stove. Susy's biography refers to this incident at considerable length. She states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the Christian Union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found it too late. She sets down some comments of her own on her mother's government, then tells us of the appearance of the article: When the Christian Union reached the farm and papa's article in it, all ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't, but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told Clara and I we could take it to her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood around mama while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. She was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the Christian Union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. Susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort. One of the latter fell into her mother's hands, after which there was general regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer discussed at Quarry Farm. Susy's biography is a unique record. It was a sort of combined memoir and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight. She used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in its quaint entries. It is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of Mark Twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune. Susy's beginning has a special value here:--[Susy's' spelling and punctuation are preserved.] We are a very happy family! We consist of papa, mama, Jean, Clara and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too thick, or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man. All his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extraordinary teeth. His complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard: He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded! That this is a fair statement of the Clemens home, and the truest picture of Mark Twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be doubted. His hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the auburn tints everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would mantle it like a silver crown. He did not look young for his years, but he was still young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and bodily vigor. Susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the children, filling the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play with the cats, and come clear down from his study on the hill to see how "Sour Mash," then a kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem for Jean's donkey, Cadichon (which they made Kiditchin): She quotes the poem: KIDITCHIN O du lieb' Kiditchin Du bist ganz bewitchin, Waw- - - -he! In summer days Kiditchin Thou'rt dear from nose to britchin Waw----he! No dought thoult get a switchin When for mischief thou'rt itchin' Waw- - - -he! But when you're good Kiditchin You shall feast in James's kitchin Waw- - - -he! O now lift up thy song Thy noble note prolong Thou living Chinese gong! Waw---he! waw---he waw Sweetest donkey man ever saw. Clemens undertook to ride Kiditchin one day, to show the children how it should be done, but Kiditchin resented this interference and promptly flung him over her head. He thought she might have been listening to the poem he had written of her. Susy's discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown by the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not entirely unconscious: Papa said the other day, "I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out." (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) He doesn't like to go to church at all, why I never understood, until just now. He told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no doubt it was founded on truth. Susy's picture of life at Quarry Farm at this period is realistic and valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography: There are eleven cats at the farm here now. Papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named "Sour Mash," and a little spotted one "Fannie." It is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. Old Minniecat headed, (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt Susie, then Clara on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and Jean hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and I made up the audience. Our varius occupations are as follows. Papa rises about 1/2 past 7 in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with Clara and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius things in P.M., and in the evening plays tennis with Clara and me and amuses Jean and the donkey. Mama rises about 1/4 to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches Jean German reading from 9-10; reads German with me from 10-11. Then she reads studdies or visits with aunt Susie for a while, and then she reads to Clara and I till lunch time things connected with English history (for we hope to go to England next summer) while we sew. Then we have lunch. She studdies for about half an hour or visits with aunt Susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies writes reads and rests till supper time. After supper she sits out on the porch and works till eight o'clock, from eight o'clock to bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she reads and studdies German for a while. Clara and I do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and playing tag. While Jean's time is spent in asking mama what she can have to eat. It is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant to the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and girlhood which they spent there. It was the paradise, the dreamland they looked forward to during all the rest of the year. Through the long, happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the joy of life. Their cousins Julia, Jervis, and Ida Langdon ranged about their own ages and were almost their daily companions. Their games were mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures were their playground. Susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. One afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a rare hiding-place. She ran breathlessly to her aunt: "Can I have it? Can Clara and I have it all for our own?" The petition was granted, of course, and the place was named Helen's Bower, for they were reading Thaddeus of Warsaw and the name appealed to Susy's poetic fancy. Then Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of building a house for the children just beyond the bower. It was a complete little cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by friends and members of the family. There was a stove--a tiny affair, but practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom. The little house was named Ellerslie, out of Grace Aguilar's Days of Robert Bruce, and became one of the children's most beloved possessions. But alas for Helen's Bower! A workman was sent to clear away the debris after the builders, and being a practical man, he cut away Helen's Bower--destroyed it utterly. Susy first discovered the vandalism, and came rushing to the house in a torrent of sorrow. For her the joy of life seemed ended, and it was long before she could be comforted. But Ellerslie in time satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around which the children's summer happiness centered. To their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. Once to Orion's wife Clemens wrote: This is a superb Sunday . . . . The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas- curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest) point; the cats are loafing over at Ellerslie, which is the children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie Crane), a hundred yards from the study, among the clover and young oaks and willows. Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods, Susie and Clara horseback and Jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and assistant at need. It is a perfect day indeed. The ending of each year's summer brought only regret. Clemens would never take away all his things. He had an old superstition that to leave some article insured return. Mrs. Clemens also left something--her heart's content. The children went around bidding various objects good-by and kissed the gates of Ellerslie too. CLVIII MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events of that year. There was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly messages, and The Critic, then conducted by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder, made a feature of it. Miss Gilder wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes and invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent, though in his accompanying note he said: "I had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all marked immediate, when your note came." Dr. Holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit: TO MARK TWAIN (On his fiftieth birthday) Ah, Clemens, when I saw thee last, We both of us were younger; How fondly mumbling o'er the past Is Memory's toothless hunger! So fifty years have fled, they say, Since first you took to drinking; I mean in Nature's milky way Of course no ill I'm thinking. But while on life's uneven road Your track you've been pursuing, What fountains from your wit have flowed What drinks you have been brewing! I know whence all your magic came, Your secret I've discovered, The source that fed your inward flame, The dreams that round you hovered. Before you learned to bite or munch, Still kicking in your cradle, The Muses mixed a bowl of punch And Hebe seized the ladle. Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day Your ripe half-century rounded, Your books the precious draught betray The laughing Nine compounded. So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, Each finds its faults amended, The virtues that to each belong In happiest union blended. And what the flavor can surpass Of sugar, spirit, lemons? So while one health fills every glass Mark Twain for Baby Clemens! OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris sent pleasing letters. Warner said: You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it's not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. Many wrote letters privately, of course, and Andrew Lang, like Holmes, sent a poem that has a special charm. FOR MARK TWAIN To brave Mark Twain, across the sea, The years have brought his jubilee. One hears it, half in pain, That fifty years have passed and gone Since danced the merry star that shone Above the babe Mark Twain. We turn his pages and we see The Mississippi flowing free; We turn again and grin O'er all Tom Sawyer did and planned With him of the ensanguined hand, With Huckleberry Finn! Spirit of Mirth, whose chime of bells Shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells Across the Atlantic main, Grant that Mark's laughter never die, That men through many a century May chuckle o'er Mark Twain! Assuredly Mark Twain was made happy by these attentions; to Dr. Holmes he wrote: DEAR DR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. And then the family: If I could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. I knew what that poem would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise should come. Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. With reverence and affection, Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. So Samuel Clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint. If he was not yet the foremost American man of letters, he was at least the most widely known he sat upon the highest mountain-top. Furthermore, it seemed to him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap. His unfortunate investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him to larger successes. As a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield incalculable wealth. His connection with the Grant family had associated him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf. Charles A. Dana, of the Sun, had put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the Pope, Leo XIII, officially authorized by the Pope himself, and this he regarded as a certain fortune. Now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune from almost any venture. The Grant book, even on the liberal terms allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers. Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more. The sales of his other books had considerably increased. Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. If there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. If there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. So sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend at his home one night he said: "I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold." CLIX THE LIFE OF THE POPE As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed. There were two chief ventures--the business of Charles L. Webster & Co. and the promotion of the Paige type-setting machine. They were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story. The success of the Grant Life had given the Webster business an immense prestige. It was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for publication. They came uninvited. Other war generals preparing their memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander. McClellan's Own Story was arranged for without difficulty. A Genesis of the Civil War, by Gen. Samuel Wylie Crawford, was offered and accepted. General Sheridan's Memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with Webster & Co. for their appearance were not delayed. Probably neither Webster nor Clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would approach those of the Grant Life, but they expected them to be large, for the Grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature, and anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was considered literary legal-tender. Moreover, these features, and even the Grant book itself, seemed likely to dwindle in importance by the side of The Life of Pope Leo XIII., who in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of a memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[By Bernard O'Reilly, D.D., LL.D. "Written with the Encouragement, Approbation, and Blessings of His Holiness the Pope."]--Clemens and Webster--every one, in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book, with the exception of the Holy Scripture itself or the Koran, would have a wider acceptance than the biography of the Pope. It was agreed by good judges--and they included Howells and Twichell and even the shrewd general agents throughout the country--that every good Catholic would regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary to his salvation. Howells, recalling Clemens's emotions of this time, writes: He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe. The formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in Rome in April, 1886, and Webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with his Holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview. It was decided to carry a handsome present to the Pope in the form of a specially made edition of the Grant Memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was Clemens's idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this to be done by Tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand dollars. In the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the handsomest that could be designed of less precious and more appropriate materials. Webster sailed toward the end of June, and was warmly received and highly honored in Rome. The great figures of the Grant success had astonished Europe even more than America, where spectacular achievements were more common. That any single publication should pay a profit to author and publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing which belonged with the wonders of Aladdin's garden. It was natural, therefore, that Webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result, who was Mark Twain's partner, and who had now traveled across the seas to confer with the Pope himself, should be received with royal honors. In letters written at the time, Webster relates how he found it necessary to have an imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the dignity of his mission, and how, after various impressive formalities, he was granted a private audience, a very special honor indeed. Webster's letter gives us a picture of his Holiness which is worth preserving. We--[Mrs. Webster, who, the reader will remember, was Annie Moffett, a daughter of Pamela Clemens, was included in the invitation to the Presence Chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material. Against the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven snow. His head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered slippers with a design of a cross. A golden chain was about his neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious stones. Upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter. His countenance was smiling, and beamed with benevolence. His face at once impressed us as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good. This was the Pope of Rome, and as we advanced, making the three genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us. We advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his ring. He took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience and made us perfectly at our ease. They remained as much as half an hour in the Presence; and the Pope conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of General Grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book. The figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when Webster assured him that already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished. "We in Italy cannot comprehend such things," he said. "I know you do great work in America; I know you have done a great and noble work in regard to General Grant's book, but that my Life should have such a sale seems impossible." He asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him. Then he gave them his final blessing and the audience closed. We each again kissed the seal on his ring. As Annie was about to kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, "And will you, a little Protestant, kiss the Pope's ring?" As he said this, his face was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it. He immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring. We now withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before. Just as we reached the door he called to Dr. O'Reilly, "Now don't praise me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth." CLX A GREAT PUBLISHER AT HOME Men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even harsh. Success made Samuel Clemens merely elate, more kindly, more humanly generous. Every day almost he wrote to Webster, suggesting some new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to suggestions from other points of view. Once, when it seemed to him that matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from Webster showed him that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that he did not understand. Whereupon he wrote: DEAR CHARLEY,--Good--it's all good news. Everything is on the pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so. I blame myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have prevented all trouble. I mean to stand to my duty better now. At another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that Webster was not entirely well, he sent a warning from Mrs. Clemens against overwork. He added: Your letter shows that you need such a warning. So I warn you myself to look after that. Overwork killed Mr. Langdon and it can kill you. Clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied. His connection with the firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or wrote him personal letters concerning them. Furthermore, he was beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom. His affairs became so numerous at length that he employed a business agent, F. G. Whitmore, to relieve him of a part of his burden. Whitmore lived close by, and was a good billiard-player. Almost anything from the morning mail served as an excuse to send for Whitmore. Clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous. It is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of fortune than just at this time. Certainly his home life was never happier. Katie Leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set down some impressions of that pleasant period. Mr. Clemens was a very affectionate father. He seldom left the house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children until bedtime, afterward to Mrs. Clemens. He usually read Browning to her. They were very fond of it. The children played charades a great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped them. They were very fond of private theatricals. Every Saturday of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room and we all had to help. Gerhardt painted the scenery. They frequently played the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" and several plays they wrote themselves. Now and then we had a big general performance of "The Prince and the Pauper." That would be in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open. The place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back against the conservatory. The children were crazy about acting and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who was the best actor of all. I had a part, too, and George. I have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years. Mr. Clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing or playing billiards. One day when I went in, and he was shooting the balls around the tables, I noticed smoke coming up from the hearth. I called Patrick, and John O'Neill, the gardener, and we began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter. Mr. Clemens kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what we were doing. Finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame and smoke came out into the room. The house was on fire. Mr. Clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers. He took one down and threw it into the flames. This put them out a good deal, and he took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the balls around again as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Clemens came in just then and said, "Why, the house is afire!" "Yes, I know it," he said, but went on playing. We had a telephone and it didn't work very well. It annoyed him a good deal and sometimes he'd say: "I'll tear it out." One day he tried to call up Mrs. Dr. Tafft. He could not hear plainly and thought he was talking to central. "Send down and take this d---thing out of here," he said; "I'm tired of it." He was mad, and using a good deal of bad language. All at once he heard Mrs. Dr. Tafft say, "Oh, Mr. Clemens, good morning." He said, "Why, Mrs. Tafft, I have just come to the telephone. George, our butler, was here before me and I heard him swearing as I came up. I shall have to talk to him about it." Mrs. Tafft often told it on him.--[ Mark Twain once wrote to the telephone management: "The time is coming very soon when the telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably as he would if that man were in San Francisco."] Mrs. Clemens, before I went there, took care of his desk, but little by little I began to look after it when she was busy at other things. Finally I took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it for a long time. One morning he caught me at it. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "Dusting, Mr. Clemens," I said. "You have no business here," he said, very mad. "I've been doing it for a year, Mr. Clemens," I said. "Mrs. Clemens told me to do it." After that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he would ring for me. "Katie," he would say, "you have lost that manuscript." "Oh, Mr. Clemens,", I would say, "I am sure I didn't touch it." "Yes, you did touch it, Katie. You put it in the fire. It is gone." He would scold then, and fume a great deal. Then he would go over and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which I was never to cross. "Katie," he would say, "you are never to go nearer to my desk than that line. That is the dead-line." Often after he had scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where I was dressing Mrs. Clemens to go out and say, "Katie, I found that manuscript." And I would say, "Mr. Clemens, I felt so bad this morning that I wanted to go away." He had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. It was an awful old dirty one, and I didn't know that he ever used it. I took it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it away as far as I could throw it. Next day he asked, "Katie, did you see my pipe-cleaner? You did see it; I can tell by your looks." I said, "Yes, Mr. Clemens, I threw it away." "Well," he said, "it was worth a thousand dollars," and it seemed so to me, too, before he got done scolding about it. It is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. One would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings alone. They remained always fresh in Mark Twain's memory. Once he wrote of them: We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us. CLXI HISTORY: MAINLY BY SUSY Suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes: Mama and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promonading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published. The book locked in the safe was Captain Stormfield, and the one he expected to write was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of 1886, and once wrote of it to Webster: I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition; I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work. If I peg away for some weeks without a break I am safe. But he could not peg away. He had too many irons in the fire for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English," and said: There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.--[Address to Army and Navy Club. For full text see Appendix] Clemens worked at the Yankee now and then, and Howells, when some of the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its continuance. Howells was often in Hartford at this time. Webster & Co. were planning to publish The Library of Humor, which Howells and "Charley" Clark had edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable. Howells tells us that, after he and Clark had been at great trouble to get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, Clemens pulled it all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the average reader's mind; and Howells admits that this was probably the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction of the reader. One of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on a delicious little book by Caroline B. Le Row--English as She Is Taught --being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by pupils in our public schools. Mark Twain was amused by such definitions as: "Aborigines, system of mountains"; "Alias--a good man in the Bible"; "Ammonia--the food of the gods," and so on down the alphabet. Susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read to them a little article which he had just written, entitled "Luck," and that they thought it very good. It was a story which Twichell had heard and told to Clemens, who set it down about as it came to him. It was supposed to be true, yet Clemens seemed to think it too improbable for literature and laid it away for a number of years. We shall hear of it again by and by. From Susy's memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be healed of all evils and sorrows through "mind cure." Papa has been very much interested of late in the "mind-cure" theory. And, in fact, so have we all. A young lady in town has worked wonders by using the "mind cure" upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples' diseases in this way--and curing her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. A little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. This starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. Now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the "mind cure" connected with the starving. I shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in "mind cure." The next time papa has a cold I haven't a doubt he will send for Miss Holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the "mind-cure" theory, to cure him of it. Again, a month later, she writes: April 19, 1886. Yes, the "mind cure" does seem to be working wonderfully. Papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a year, has laid them off entirely. And my near-sightedness is really getting better. It seems marvelous. When Jean has stomack-ache Clara and I have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her side and try "mind cure." The novelty of it has made her willing to try it, and then Clara and I would exclaim about how wonderful it was she was getting better. And she would think it realy was finally, and stop crying, to our delight. The other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the sofa with her back toward the door. She said, "Why, Jean, what's the matter? Don't you feel well?" Jean said that she had a little stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down. Mama said, "Why don't you try 'mind cure'?" "I am," Jean answered. Howells and Twichell were invited to try the "mind cure," as were all other friends who happened along. To the end of his days Clemens would always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress. It was a good trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity. The "mind cure" did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he always allowed for it a wide efficacy. Once, in later years, commenting on Susy's record, he said: The mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the help of physician or surgeon. Susy records another burning interest of this time: Clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. While Clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then Jean took it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; Jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now Jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is playing alone, with great interest. Mama and Clara next are made subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but "Fill up the place," etc. It is dreadful! But a little further along Susy presents her chief subject more seriously. He is not altogether absorbed with "mind cure" and solitaire, or even with making humorous tales. Papa has done a great deal in his life I think that is good and very remarkable, but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples' pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even. He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. He has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. And again: When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I think. I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. It was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that Susy estimated, and there is little to add to her valuation. Susy's biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a visit which they all made to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens. They went by way of the Lakes and down the Mississippi from St. Paul. A pleasant incident happened that first evening on the river. Soon after nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. Clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads. Then came the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. Presently the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call of "Mark Twain, Mark Twain" floated up to him like a summons from the past. All at once a little figure came running down the deck, and Clara confronted him, reprovingly: "Papa," she said, "I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don't you know they are calling for you?" They remained in Keokuk a week, and Susy starts to tell something of their visit there. She begins: "We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant----" The sentence remains unfinished. We cannot know what was the interruption or what new interest kept her from her task. We can only regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant history. Years later, when Susy had passed from among the things we know, her father, commenting, said: When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. But that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a longing, not a mental product; the same that lured Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his daughter. 
2985	----	MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY By Albert Bigelow Paine VOLUME II, Part 2: 1886-1900 CLXII BROWNING, MEREDITH, AND MEISTERSCHAFT The Browning readings must have begun about this time. Just what kindled Mark Twain's interest in the poetry of Robert Browning is not remembered, but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to do with it. Whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of 1886 and 1887, studiously, even violently, interested in Browning's verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the Payleyings--"With Bernard de Mandeville," "Daniel Bartoli," or "Christopher Smart." Members of the Saturday Morning Club were among his listeners and others-friends of the family. They were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which Mark Twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures. They did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose. No student of Browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's intent--in such poems as "Sordello," for instance--than Mark Twain. Just what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it is difficult to know. Once, at a class-meeting, after finishing "Easter Day," he made a remark which the class requested him to "write down." It is recorded on the fly-leaf of Dramatis Personae as follows: One's glimpses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with your hand, not clock-work). You toil across dark spaces which are (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars & suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. Feb. 23, 1887. In another note he speaks of the "vague dim flash of splendid hamming-birds through a fog." Whatever mental treasures he may or may not have laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification in the discovery of those splendors of "stars and suns" and the flashing "humming-birds," as there must also have been in pointing out those wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. It all seemed so worth while. It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite. There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation. The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain. He read but few novels at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator. Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he was likely to say: "It doesn't seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation. The author keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana's smart utterances." He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care for, and he never learned to care for Meredith. He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of view. He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the farm, and to Howells he wrote: How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps! When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences. People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. Well, that's loss. To have house & Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets & comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into the field. Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi. I haven't got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning. In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at regular intervals at the Clemens home to study "der, die, and das" and the "gehabt habens" out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as Professor Schleutter could provide. They had monthly conversation days, when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary. Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors. Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play "Meisterschaft"--a literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor. It seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. No one but Mark Twain could have written it. It was given twice by the class with enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century Magazine (January, 1888). It is included to-day in his "Complete Works," but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight of it.--[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote: "There is some tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece. It is attributable to the proof-reader." Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it out, for it does not appear as published.] Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. The Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the salvation of oppressed humanity. He wrote a vehement and convincing paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form, and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. Howells wrote that he had read the essay "with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction," and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. The essay closed: He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. He is the greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have known. You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. He has before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand of man to do; and he will do it. Yes, he is here; and the question is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken dam this time--he is the Flood! It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense, even if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the species. He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he noticed the sign, PROFESSOR LOISETTE SCHOOL OF MEMORY The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting Clemens went inside. When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette's literature on "predicating correlation," and for the next several days was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere diversion. It was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the Mississippi River in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering a boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, and it is fair to say that, for the time he gave it, he achieved a like success. He was so enthusiastic over this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was sending out a printed letter recommending Loisette to the public at large. Here is an extract: . . . I had no SYSTEM--and some sort of rational order of procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. Well, Loisette furnished me a system. I cannot undertake to say it is the best, or the worst, because I don't know what the other systems are. Loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or meaning--there are perhaps 500 of these words, arranged in maniacal lines of 6 to 8 or 9 words in each line--71 lines in all. Of course your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four hours you find to your surprise that you've GOT them and can deliver them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. Now, don't you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed? --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to trust with the Latin motto of the U. S. lest it mislay it and the country suffer. Loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories that already exist. Isn't that valuable? Indeed it is to me. Whenever hereafter I shall choose to pack away a thing properly in that refrigerator I sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; I shall know I'm going to find it sound and sweet when I go for it again. Loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the public with Mark Twain testimonials. But presently Clemens decided that after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at large. He recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon Loisette to suppress his circulars. Later he decided that the whole system was a humbug. CLXIII LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND It was one day in 1887 that Clemens received evidence that his reputation as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices. A formidable envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers and a very large printed document all about the income tax which the Queen's officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of a report that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was to become an English resident. The matter amused and interested him. To Chatto & Windus he wrote: I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake. I was not in England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why . . . But we won't resist. We'll pay as if I were really a resident. The country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me. Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it. He conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire herself. He began: HARTFORD, November 6, 2887. MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr. Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers, for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that I write your Majesty. The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of an omnibus. He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat. "I remember him," he said, "as easily as I would a comet." He explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he was taxed. There was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was taxed under "Schedule D, section 14." He had turned to that place and found these three things: "Trades, Offices, Gas Works." He did not regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not consider that he was taxable under "Schedule D, section 14." The letter concludes: Having thus shown your Majesty that I am not taxable, but am the victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your justice, annul my letter that I spoke of, so that my publisher can keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration caused by the Document, I ordered him to pay. You will not miss the sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures I do not suppose your Majesty ever saw such a dull season. With always great and ever-increasing respect, I beg to sign myself your Majesty's servant to command, MARK TWAIN. Her Majesty the Queen, London. The letter, or "petition," as it was called, was published in the Harper's Magazine "Drawer" (December, 1889), and is now included in the "Complete Works." Taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of Mark Twain's minor humors. What other humorist could have refrained from hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious "Gas Works"? Yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore that detail. The little skit was widely copied and reached the Queen herself in due time, and her son, Prince Edward, who never forgot its humor. Clemens read a notable paper that year before the Monday Evening Club. Its subject was "Consistency"--political consistency--and in it he took occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the Blaine-Cleveland campaign. It was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years, before, had denounced Twichell and himself for standing by their convictions.--[ Characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found under Appendix R, at the end of last volume.] CLXIV SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO. Flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of Charles L. Webster & Co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its beginning. Most of the books published--the early ones at least-were profitable. McClellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series. Even The Life of Pope Leo XIII. paid. What a statement to make, after all their magnificent dreams and preparations! It was published simultaneously in six languages. It was exploited in every conceivable fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the general agents had promised for their first orders. It was amazing, it was incredible, but, alas! it was true. The prospective Catholic purchaser had decided that the Pope's Life was not necessary to his salvation or even to his entertainment. Howells explains it, to his own satisfaction at least, when he says: We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often, when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish to read The Life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with sanction from the Vatican. Howells, of course, is referring to the laboring Catholic of that day. There are no Catholics of this day--no American Catholics, at least--who do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. Perhaps had the Pope's Life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its success might have been less sadly told. A variety of books followed. Henry Ward Beecher agreed to write an autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return. A book of Sandwich Islands tales and legends, by his Hawaiian Majesty King Kalakaua, edited by Clemens's old friend, Rollin M. Daggett, who had become United States minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by General Hancock was still less fortunate. The running expenses of the business were heavy. On the strength of the Grant success Webster had moved into still larger quarters at No. 3 East Fifteenth Street, and had a ground floor for a salesroom. The force had become numerous and costly. It was necessary that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious establishment. A number of books were published at a heavy loss. Never mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and returned but a trifling sum. By the end of 1887 there were three works in prospect on which great hopes were founded--'The Library of Humor', which Howells and Clark had edited; a personal memoir of General Sheridan's, and a Library of American Literature in ten volumes, compiled by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. It was believed these would restore the fortunes and the prestige of the firm. They were all excellent, attractive features. The Library of Humor was ably selected and contained two hundred choice drawings by Kemble. The Sheridan Memoir was finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general. The Library of American Literature was a collection of the best American writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every American reading-home. It was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books, for the profit made from the Grant Life and less fortunate ventures was pretty well exhausted. Clemens presently found a little drift of his notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time, and it was costing a pretty sum. Meantime, Webster was no longer active in the management. In two years he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time. Its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, Fred J. Hall, a willing, capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and experience. Hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to success. He explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just why its profits would be greater during the next. Webster finally retired from the business altogether, and Hall was given a small partnership in the firm. He reduced expenses, worked desperately, pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat. The Library of Humor, the Life of Sheridan, and The Library of American Literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the sales yielded a fair profit. It was thought that if Clemens himself would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something of its original standing. We may believe that Clemens had not been always patient, not always gentle, during this process of decline. He had differed with Webster, and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own notions. Once he wrote to Orion that he had suddenly awakened to find that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a nurse. "But," he added, "I have spent a good deal of time there since, and reduced everything to exact order and system." Just what were the new features of order instituted it would be interesting to know. That the financial pressure was beginning to be felt even in the Clemens home is shown by a Christmas letter to Mrs. Moffett. HARTFORD, December 18, 1887. DEAR PAMELA,--Will you take this $15 & buy some candy or other trifle for yourself & Sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you? If we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter I'd send a check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like that. However, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at $3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the first 17 months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, & promised to take a thousand years. We'll be through now in 3 or 4 months, I reckon, & then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether success ensues or failure. Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to blame. All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your prosperity. Affectionately, SAM. CLXV LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting. America, were entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens's son, with his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual. Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like to retire. Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible, and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their talk could not have been preserved. Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work. He said that during a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn. In one of Stevenson's letters to Clemens he wrote: My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: "I am frightened. It cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much." What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said: . . . You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure; 3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3; everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with trouble. When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always wrongs one--yourself. You have grown weary of wronging yourself and repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die. But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time --your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. You give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say it over again to make you understand. This kind of thing goes on all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything; you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. You go to bed at last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were in the beginning. Thus we see what you have been doing for nine hours--on the outside. But what were you doing on the inside? You were writing letters--in your mind. And enjoying it, that is quite true; that is not to be denied. You have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then--doing it all over again. For nine hours. It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this insanity on paper and mailing it. Yes, you know that, and confess it--but what were you to do? Where was your remedy? Will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed? No, he cannot; that is certainly true. Well, then, what is he to do? I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph. During the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters--in his mind. If he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides. He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano: imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief. Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. He degenerates into good-nature from that point. Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there. He pigeonholes these and then does one of two things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it. To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more frequently telegram--two or three times a year. But that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago. Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them. They ought not to be thrown away. Such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. It makes him feel small and shabby, but--well, that wears off. Any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway. An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing. The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. One specimen will suffice. It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee. DEAR SIR,--If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get behind something and blush. According to your report, "the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support" of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. And do your "people" propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow. Oh, come, these are not "people"--they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni. If you are not misreporting those "people" you are just in the right business passing the mendicant hat for them. Dear sir, communities where anything like citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we have one proposing to get up a great "exposition" of its dishonor and advertise it all it can. It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those graveyards called a "Fair paper," and so I have doubtless lost the knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you. This was from a burning heart and well deserved. One may almost regret that he did not send it. Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New York, announcing that the said Clements's pension had been allowed. But this was amusing. When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at Washington: DEAR SIR,--I have not applied for a pension. I have often wanted a pension--often--ever so often--I may say, but in as much as the only military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it. However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel strengthened. I haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but I can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures, dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard "rheumatism and sore eyes" as mere recreation and refreshment after the serious occupations of his day. If you grant me the pension, dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States Senator--I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. He thinks I've already got the pension, whereas I've only got the rheumatism; but didn't want that--I had that before. I wish it were catching. I know a man that I would load up with it pretty early. Lord, but we all feel that way sometimes. I've seen the day when but never mind that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley--the certificate, you understand, is not transferable. Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the President to obtain this or that favor. He always declined, though once--a few years later, in Europe--when he learned that Frank Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens, of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it. MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a Republican and a Democrat wants his place. He went on to recall Mason's high and honorable record, suggesting that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands. Then he said: I can't send any message to the President, but the next time you have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so treats its efficient officials. Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington, inclosing this note in President Cleveland's handwriting: Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain's letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information, and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the Frankfort Consulate. The President also desires Miss Cleveland to say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his earliest convenience. Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing, warning him about his deportment. Being presented to Mrs. Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written "He didn't," and asked her to sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested that she couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately afterward all about it. She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's note, which was very brief. It said: "Don't wear your arctics in the White House." Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford. He was not always so well provided against disaster. Once, without consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. In his letter he said: I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. He explained his position, and added: I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it out. CLVXI A "PLAYER" AND A MASTER OF ARTS One morning early in January Clemens received the following note: DALY'S THEATER, NEW YORK, January 2, 1888. Mr. Augustin Daly will be very much pleased to have Mr. S. L. Clemens meet Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Palmer and a few friends at lunch on Friday next, January 6th (at one o'clock in Delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is thought will claim your (sic) interest. R. S. V. P. There were already in New York a variety of literary and artistic societies, such as The Kinsmen and Tile clubs, with which Clemens was more or less associated. It was proposed now to form a more comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the various associated arts. The conception of this new club, which was to be called The Players, had grown out of a desire on the part of Edwin Booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession. It had been discussed during a summer cruise on Mr. E. C. Benedict's steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of Booth himself, Aldrich, Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, and Laurence Hutton. Booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors' home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best plan. Some one proposed a club, and Aldrich, with never-failing inspiration, suggested its name, The Players, which immediately impressed Booth and the others. It was then decided that members of all the kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and perfected at the Daly luncheon. The guests became charter members, and The Players became an incorporated fact early in January, 1888. --[Besides Mr. Booth himself, the charter members were: Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, Samuel L. Clemens, Augustin Daly, Joseph F. Daly, John Drew, Henry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, Joseph Jefferson, John A. Lane, James Lewis, Brander Matthews, Stephen H. Olin, A. M. Palmer, and William T. Sherman.]--Booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at 16 Gramercy Park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of Stanford White to adapt it for club purposes. He bore the entire cost, furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his rare collections of every sort. Laurence Hutton, writing of it afterward, said: And on the first Founder's Night, the 31st of December, 1888, he transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely without parallel in its way. The pleasure it gave to Booth during the few remaining years of his life was very great. He made it his home. Next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and consolation. He nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and honored him. He died in it. And it is certainly his greatest monument. There is no other club quite like The Players. The personality of Edwin Booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long establishment. Mark Twain was always fond of The Players, and more than once made it his home. It is a true home, and its members are a genuine brotherhood. It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Samuel Clemens the degree of Master of Arts. It was his first honor of this kind, and he was proud of it. To Charles Hopkins ("Charley") Clark, who had been appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote: I felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact I could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain of it. And why shouldn't I be? I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as far as I know. To which Clark answered: MY DEAR FRIEND, You are "the only literary animal of your particular subspecies" in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the fact. Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and "don't you forget it." C. H. C. Clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at Elmira and unable to get away, but in an address he made at Yale College later in the year he thus freely expressed himself: I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by this great and venerable University, and I would have come last June to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that privilege. Along at first, say for the first month or so, I, did not quite know hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but after that I consulted some students of Trinity--in Hartford--and they made everything clear to me. It was through them that I found out that my title made me head of the Governing Body of the University, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible powers. I was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time, and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off till I could make a better showing; for indeed I have been so pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty that it would be difficult to prove that the University is really in any better shape now than it was when I first took charge. By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of Greek- written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. Let us draw the curtain there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. I ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was I couldn't understand it, and I didn't want things going on in the college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. I told him to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions; we didn't want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles of the earth's surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties?--I said you just let that thing alone; it's plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway. His reception of these instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that I felt obliged to take his number and report him. I found the astronomer of the University gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty plainly that we couldn't have that. I told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock. At bottom I don't really mind comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids. There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn't sit up nights the way that man does if I could get a basketful of them. He said it was the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae, and trade the nebula to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets. I felt obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn't have the University turned into an astronomical junk shop. And while I was at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval, I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law students in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable, also cheaper. It is true he cannot be intrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his hand in. I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the nature of surprises I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at this time. Very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing body, that he wrote one morning to Clark advising him as to the misuse of a word in the Courant, though he thought it best to sign the communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it weight with the public, as he afterward explained. SIR,--The word "patricide" in your issue of this morning (telegrams) was an error. You meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you should have used "parricide" instead. Patricide merely means the killing of an Irishman--any Irishman, male or female. Respectfully, J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL. N. J. BURTON. J. H. TWICHELL. CLXVII NOTES AND LITERARY MATTERS Clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders. Aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing and trying to catch them. Man who lost his false teeth over Brooklyn Bridge when he was on his way to propose to a widow. One believes St. Simon and Benvenuto and partly believes the Margravine of Bayreuth. There are things in the confession of Rousseau which one must believe. What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is romance? Adorned biography. Adorn it less and it will be better than it is. If God is what people say there can be none in the universe so unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might well say "as unhappy as God." In spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. He was deeply interested in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress at the moment, and from photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized in the moving picture. Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart, etc., & the other Bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--Valley of the Shadow of Death; to other effective places & photo them along with the scenery; to Paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the Arc de l'Etoile & photo them with the crowd-Vanity Fair; to Cairo, Venice, Jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume. Take them to Zululand. It would take two or three years to do the photographing & cost $10,000; but this stereopticon panorama of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would clear a fortune in a year. By & by I will do this. If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of buying Christopher Columbus's bones & burying them under the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World I will give the idea to somebody who is rich enough. Incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. Early in the year, with Brander Matthews, he instructed and entertained the public with a copyright controversy in the Princeton Review. Matthews would appear to have criticized the English copyright protection, or rather the lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with American conditions. Clemens, who had been amply protected in Great Britain, replied that America was in no position to criticize England; that if American authors suffered in England they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble and precautions required by the English law, that is to say, "previous publication" on English soil. He declared that his own books had been as safe in England as at home since he had undertaken to comply with English requirements, and that Professor Matthews was altogether mistaken, both as to premise and conclusion. "You are the very wrong-headedest person in America," he said; "and you are injudicious." And of the article: "I read it to the cat--well, I never saw a cat carry on so before . . . . The American author can go to Canada, spend three days there and come home with an English and American copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad iron." Matthews replied that not every one could go to Canada, any more than to Corinth. He said: "It is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in Florida or Texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to Canada." Clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his reply. It was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. Perhaps he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. In his heart he loved Matthews. He laid the deadly thing away and maintained a dignified reserve. Clemens often felt called upon to criticize American institutions, but he was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an alien. When Matthew Arnold offered some strictures on America. Clemens covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. He even defended American newspapers, which he had himself more than once violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky British institution, touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. He did not print--not then--[An article on the American press, probably the best of those prepared at this time, was used, in part, in The American Claimant, as the paper read before the Mechanics' Club, by "Parker," assistant editor of the 'Democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success, however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. He was at Quarry Farm and he plunged into his neglected story--A Yankee in King Arthur's Court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his doctrines. He worked with an inspiration and energy born of his ferocity. To Whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote: I've got 16 working-days left yet, and in that time I will add another 120,000 words to my book if I have luck. In his memoranda of this time he says: There was never a throne which did not represent a crime. There is no throne to-day which does not represent a crime .... Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he doesn't do it. But his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the Yankee in the sixteen days as planned. He brought the manuscript back to Hartford, but found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. He went over to Twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. They gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. From a letter written to Theodore Crane we gather that it was not altogether quiet. Friday, October 5, 1888. DEAR THEO, I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of the children and an army of carpenters to help: Of course they don't help, but neither do they hinder. It's like a boiler factory for racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it. I began here Monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. I was so tired last night that I thought I would lie abed and rest to-day; but I couldn't resist. I mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if I do. I want to finish the day the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss fire as usual. The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to furnish the money--a dollar and a half. Jean discouraged the idea. She said, "We haven't got any money. Children, if you would think, you would remember the machine isn't done." It's billiards to-night. I wish you were here. With love to you both, S. L. C. P. S. I got it all wrong. It wasn't the children, it was Marie. She wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. Jean reproved her and said, "Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now. The machine isn't done." Neither the Yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. The financial pinch was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax. A memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to Charles and Susan Warner in their own home. The guests assembled at the Clemens home, the Twichells among them, and slipped across to Warner's, entering through a window. Dinner was then announced to the Warners, who were sitting by their library fire. They came across the hall and opened the dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted and an array of guests already seated. CLXVIII INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY AND OTHERS It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley entertainment combination set out on its travels. Mark Twain introduced them to their first Boston audience. Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them. Pond happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that nothing would do but he must introduce them. In his book of memories which he published later Pond wrote: He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined that he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. He consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier poet to the platform. Mark's presence was a surprise to the audience, and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as impressive as the noise had been. He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins. "I saw them first," he sand, "a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best hold then, but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff." He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of mind, when he had finished, to welcome the "Twins of Genius" who were to entertain them: Pond says: It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. Bostonians will not have another such treat in this generation. Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley. He wrote: I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley's time and give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston. Let it be announced that you will introduce the "Twins of Genius." Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. I will take one-third of the profits and you two-thirds. I can tell you it will be the biggest thing that can be brought before the American public. But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this temptation behind him. His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous appearances. He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as a benefaction. That he was beginning to need the money may have added a zest to the joy of his giving. He did not respond to all invitations; he could have been traveling constantly had he done so. He consulted with Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. In January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore. Page's wife fell ill and died, and Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in Page's place. Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens, who promptly wired that he would come. They read to a packed house, and when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. Clemens pushed his share over to Johnston, saying: "That's yours, Colonel. I'm not reading for money these days." Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but he only said: "Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little favor. You can pass it on some day." As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. The type-setting machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the offing. However, we shall come to this later. Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of institutions and on many special occasions. He usually gave chapters from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning with the Yankee's impression of the curious country and its people, ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his fifty-four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand dead men lying about them. He gave this at West Point, including the chapter where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King Arthur's reign. In April, '89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich Islands. He was on familiar ground there. His heart was in his words. He began: I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude, and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another. And these boys have played baseball there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries! He told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him: Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the inextinguishable vision of their beauty. No alien land in all the earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. CLXIX THE COMING OF KIPLING It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal, The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was at General Langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad, and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries. Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling's visit. Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it an additional value in Susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon. Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said: "He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest." He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known. From that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first-class--by cable. About a year after Kipling's visit in Elmira George Warner came into our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, "No." He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the United States. According to this sketch he had passed through Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from India, attracted my attention--also Susy's. She went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified. Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording it he says: You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward. A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying: "Well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me so. That's what I call squaring a debt handsomely." "Piff!" from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior. The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute's thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk--this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away. Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. The meeting of those two men made the summer of '89 memorable in later years. But it was recalled sadly, too. Theodore Crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died July 3d. It was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings. CLXX "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" ON THE STAGE There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn. Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized 'The Prince and the Pauper', and Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role of the Prince and Tom Canty. The rehearsals were going on, and the Clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome. Susy Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty Greek fancy, called "The Triumph of Music," and when it was given on Thanksgiving night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner, it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of Arcady. Clemens was proud of Susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it. He insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year. Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household. She was very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions and romped together in the hay-loft. She was also a favorite of William Gillette. One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. They agreed to embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. Writing to her of it, Mark Twain said: Either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. In fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other one. It shows how wonderful the human mind is.... Gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and splendor, but I have been a long time pulling through with mine. You see, it was my very first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly get the hang of it along at first. And then I was so busy that I couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. They didn't like the light that flared into my eye when I had an inspiration. And even the most fair-minded people doubted me when I explained what it was I was making--especially brakemen. Brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people do about art. They wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper; they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of disease. He went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how Dr. Root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell Mrs. Clemens what had been happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a "subject" with a scalp-wound, working with a "lovely surgical stitch," never hesitating a moment in his talk except to say "Ouch!" when he stuck himself with the needle. Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear; for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood. I've got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have; and you would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself to art. Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you. Merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many, many people who think all the world of you is your friend, MARK TWAIN. The play of "The Prince and the Pauper," dramatized by Mrs. Richardson and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve. It was a success, but not a lavish one. The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty. The strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played both Tom Canty and the little Prince. The play came to New York--to the Broadway Theater--and was well received. On the opening night there Mark Twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of "The Prince and the Pauper" realized a dream which fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art. It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed. Edward House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction. By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince were separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable "twin" interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper being its only drawback. CLXXI "A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT" From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'Yankee in King Arthur's Court' an important and pretentious publication. It was Mark Twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a waiting public. It was determined to spare no expense on the manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate and, indeed, to elaborate the text. Clemens had admired some pictures made by Daniel Carter ("Dan") Beard for a Chinese story in the Cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that Beard was the man for the Yankee. The manuscript was sent to Beard, who met Clemens a little later in the office of Webster & Co. to discuss the matter. Clemens said: "Mr. Beard, I do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but I wish you would read the book before you make the pictures." Beard replied that he had already read it twice. "Very good," Clemens said; "but I wasn't led to suppose that that was the usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results I have seen. You know," he went on, "this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless. I am not going to tell you what to draw. If a man comes to me and says, 'Mr. Clemens, I want you to write me a story,' I'll write it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write I'll say, 'Go hire a typewriter.'" To Hall a few days later he wrote: Tell Beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it serious. I want his genius to be wholly unhampered. I sha'n't have any fear as to results. Without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court justified the author's faith in the artist of his selection. They are far and away Dan Beard's best work. The socialism of the text strongly appealed to him. Beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. Clemens examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write: My pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. I do not know of any quality they lack. Grace, dignity, poetry, spirit, imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful; and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept under, masterly, and delicious. He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings were complete he wrote again: Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you! There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and caught a meteor. Live forever! This was not too much praise. Beard realized the last shade of the author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss. Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling her so that she could not read for herself. Stedman suggested certain eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book. Howells was enthusiastic. It appealed to him as it had appealed to Beard. Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that could be said on those subjects. When he had partly finished it he wrote: It's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. It seems that God didn't forget to put a soul in you. He shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely. A few days later he wrote again: The book is glorious-simply noble. What masses of virgin truth never touched in print before! And when he had finished it: Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole book, it's titanic. Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells: I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics, and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded . . . . Well, my book is written--let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell. In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote: When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of the nation." He was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and human privileges. That is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be more than that. It is a pity that he should have been beset by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the strength to bring it under control. There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain's work than his introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande. There is nothing more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's worth, that her baby might have bread. Such things as these must save the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. As an example of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks supreme. It is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. In the midst of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner purpose. Howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant. This is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the artistic worthiness of its construction. One must believe in a story like that to be convinced of its logic. To lose faith in it--in its narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. The Yankee in King Arthur's Court not only offended the English nation, but much of it offended the better taste of Mark Twain's own countrymen, and in time it must have offended even Mark Twain himself. Reading it, one can visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth, trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. Howells likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain's chivalry away. The comparison was hardly justified. It was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain, who loved Sir Thomas Malory to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had written 'The Prince and the Pauper', and would one day write that divine tale of the 'Maid of Orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out of romance. And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking the Yankee among Mark Twain's highest achievements in the way of "a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale." It is of that class, beyond doubt. Howells goes further: Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and about him. The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens is illimitable. Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. Howells, summarizing Mark Twain's gifts (1901), has written: He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the small, and I blame him that he does not rule his fancy better. All of which applies precisely to the writing of the Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice --man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but, more than any other of Mark Twain's pretentious works, it needs editing --trimming by a fond but relentless hard. CLXXII THE "YANKEE" IN ENGLAND The London publishers of the Yankee were keenly anxious to revise the text for their English readers. Clemens wrote that he had already revised the Yankee twice, that Stedman had critically read it, and that Mrs. Clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others. He added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where Englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. Then he said: Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word. We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is you who are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate. Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands. I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can. I want you to read it carefully. If you can publish it without altering a single word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense. This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn. So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English editions. The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as they were frank. It was referred to as a "lamentable failure" and as an "audacious sacrilege" and in terms still less polite. Not all of the English critics were violent. The Daily Telegraph gave it something more than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time at least, spared neither the author nor his work. Strictures on the Yankee extended to his earlier books. After all, Mark Twain's work was not for the cultivated class. These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting Lang to stand as his advocate before the English public. In part he said: The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable . . . The critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army . . . . If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it. It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath! That mass will never see the old masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a cleaner life. . . . I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere . . . . My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure. He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for them might be judged. "No voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind," he said, "or carry greater weight of authority." There was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest. Lang's response was an article published in the Illustrated London News on the art of Mark Twain. He began by gently ridiculing hyperculture --the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn. It seems worth while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself. I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion, and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of Paradise was Camelot. To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this quite seriously, but "we, too, have played" at it, and know all about it. Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture. I can talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien Rops; I could rhyme "Ballades" when they were "in," and knew what a "pantoom" was . . . . And yet I have not culture. My works are but tinkling brass because I have not culture. For culture has got into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse, I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the ban of culture. He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel like one of those Liberal politicians who are always "sitting on the fence," and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey. He further confesses that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling. This is not the worst of it. Culture has hardly a new idol but I long to hurl things at it. Culture can scarcely burn anything, but I am impelled to sacrifice to that same. I am coming to suspect that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses; who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest artistic fashion; who prate about "style," without the faintest acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or English; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the original. Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. Take, for example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--Mark Twain. [Here follow some observations concerning the Yankee, which Lang confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading because----]. Here Mark Twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper point of view. He has not the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the ideals of the Middle Ages. An Arthurian Knight in New York or in Washington would find as much to blame, and justly, as a Yankee at Camelot. Of Mark Twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion: Mark Twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. But his art is not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. I have no hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest contemporary makers of fiction . . . . I can never forget or be ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time years ago. I read it again last night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I had finished it. I perused several passages more than once, and rose from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever. What is it that we want in a novel? We want a vivid and original picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action; and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that adventure possible and plausible, I so far differ from the newest school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for gratitude. If, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in the narrator we have a masterpiece, and Huckleberry Finn is, nothing less. He reviews Huck sympathetically in detail, and closes: There are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of humor. The world appreciates it, no doubt, but "cultured critics" are probably unaware of its singular value. The great American novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet swim into their ken. And will Mark Twain never write such another? One is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not enough for our desire. In the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of Andrew Lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of Mark Twain's work as was ever written. W. T. Stead, of the Review of Reviews, was about the only prominent English editor to approve of the Yankee and to exploit its merits. Stead brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected with this heresy. The Yankee in King Arthur's Court was dramatized in America by Howard Taylor, one of the Enterprise compositors, whom Clemens had known in the old Comstock days. Taylor had become a playwright of considerable success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his plays. The Yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems not to have reached the point of production. CLXXIII A SUMMER AT ONTEORA With the exception of one article--"A Majestic Literary Fossil" --[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the "Complete Works."] --Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. This article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at the farm. A sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians --was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new Paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought to be complete. There seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story, but at the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came. Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder, which made writing difficult. Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the malady. They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up the idea. There were too many business complications; also the health of Clemens's mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet. It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades, in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews remembers that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite of the colony. Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season. At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way. It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest at his side. She was in her eighty-eighth year. The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own mother, in Elmira. Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken suddenly ill he returned to Hartford. Watching by the little girl's bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a birthday letter, telling of Jean's improved condition and sending other good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. But it proved a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and beautiful soul went out from among them. The foreboding she had felt at the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified. She had a dread that the harvest of death was not yet ended. Matters in general were going badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America, and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. Clemens, near the end of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said: Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself before I die. The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn Mawr. Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long idleness, was hard. A diversion was another portrait of himself, this time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg. Clemens rather enjoyed portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing. "Never mind the apology," said Clemens. "The compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out." When Flagg's portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane came to the studio to look at it. Mrs. Clemens complained only that the necktie was crooked. "But it's always crooked," said Flagg, "and I have a great fancy for the line it makes." She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked again. Clemens said: "If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'Good portrait, but there is something the matter with it. I don't know where it is.'" The tie was left unchanged. CLXXIV THE MACHINE The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain's finances were in a critical condition. The publishing business had managed to weather along. It was still profitable, and could have been made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine. The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting type by hand. In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later, when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some account of the matter. This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old. Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt's Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock. I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing, for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not "justify" the lines. This was done by the operator's assistant. I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work. William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It is here that the music begins. It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W. Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute perfection --a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so. Clemens' used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike. He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that later. Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says of him: "He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel." It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize them. Paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market. By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by hand. Several contracts had been made with Paige, and several new attachments had been added to the machine. It seemed to require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man. Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the extra man's wage was unimportant. He must have his machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away. Clemens, in his memoranda, says: End of 1885. Paige arrives at my house unheralded. I had seen little or nothing of him for a year or two. He said: "What will you complete the machine for?" "What will it cost?" "Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000." "What will you give?" "I'll give you half." Clemens was "flush" at this time. His reading tour with Cable, the great sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities. He said: "I'll do it, but the limit must be $30,000." They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had already invested and for legal advice. Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the Fourth Estate. By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens's business affairs, and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. Among other things, it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine, but promote it, capitalize it commercially. Whitmore said: "Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you." Clemens answered: "Never mind that, Whitmore; I've considered that. I can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can get a perfect machine." He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett, visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by. Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive. It was an undertaking for a millionaire. Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of completion and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in particular, was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. The moment their machine was complete all other machines would disappear. Even the fact that the Tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them. Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently. It was too bad people would waste their money so. In January, 1888, Paige promised that the machine would be done by the 1st of April. On the 1st of April he promised it for September, but in October he acknowledged there were still eighty-five days' work to be done on it. In November Clemens wrote to Orion: The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be. By the end of '88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs. Clemens's Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable securities. The whole household interest by this time centered in the machine. What the Tennessee land had been to John and Jane Clemens and their children, the machine had now become to Samuel Clemens and his family. "When the machine is finished everything will be all right again" afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, "When the Tennessee land is sold." They would have everything they wanted then. Mrs. Clemens planned benefactions, as was her wont. Once she said to her sister: "How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost." Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! In his notebook on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum: EUREKA! Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done. Present: J. W. Paige, the inventor; Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants Earll | & mechanical Graham | experts Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens. This record is made immediately after the prodigious event. Two days later he made another note: Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m. The first proper name ever set by this new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; & I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either misspelled it then or I've misspelled it now. The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam & separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space. It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. He wrote overflowing letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims, to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America and Europe. One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example. The machine is finished! An hour and forty minutes ago a line of movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first time in the history of the world. And I was there to see. That was the final function. I had before seen the machine set type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. So now I have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it. This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of massive steel, and will last a century. She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men that ever stood at a case. The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified. And automatically, mind you. There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types. Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have used if the dirt had been absent. But when I send you the details you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in the world put together. His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end he said: All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned. All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing- machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and far in the land of human inventions. In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a "cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived." That was a profound truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of James Paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and added something on its own account. It was discovered presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops did not cease. In February the machine was again setting and justifying type "to a hair," and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the world. His speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. No type-setter invented to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing point. It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear, and Paige would discover other needed corrections. Once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added. But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? The steady expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. Still he struggled on. It was the old mining fascination--"a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold." He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends, were to be represented. He never for a moment lost faith in the final outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. Pratt & Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. With their own factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated entirely to the production of type-setters. Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and labored with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during the following year, through which that "cunning devil," the machine, consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and savings of the Clemens family resources. With all of Mark Twain's fame and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one. It was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare. Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was passing through, reported that Mark Twain's success in life had made him crusty and sour. Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear Mark Twain's voice calling: "Joe, are you awake?" "Yes, Mark, what is it?" "Oh, nothing, only I can't sleep. Won't you talk awhile? I know it's wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can't help it." Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in millions until breakfast-time. Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines. Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business twenty million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince the capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to be postponed. Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had "sicklied over the bloom" of Jones's original enthusiasm. Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote: Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died. He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was handled on the instalment plan. The collections from this source were deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years. CLXXV "THE CLAIMANT"--LEAVING HARTFORD For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this time he reviewed his stock in trade-- . . . I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see. Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction. And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision. And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them exteriorly. And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like other folk. And I was for some years a traveling "jour" printer, and wandered from city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly. And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets --and so I know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience. And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming. And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General Grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen --aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year. And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55. Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade. I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books. This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. Mark Twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. It is true that he was no longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and his energy had not waned. His need was imminent and he lost no time. He dug out from his pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled, "Mental Telegraphy," written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it, in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as a joke. He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of Harper's Magazine. Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded. The article was accepted promptly! --[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as Telepathy. A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of Mark Twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.] --The old sketch, "Luck," also found its way to Harper's Magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal. Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit. Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest. Within a week after the collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the transmigration of the old "Claimant" play into a novel. Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of Henry George as the central idea. Letters from every direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious purpose for the Claimant book. A motif in which there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to America and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by readings of 'Progress and Poverty' and 'Looking Backward' address their brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while. Clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and abandoned Colonel Sellers's materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate. But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be resisted. The result was incongruous enough. The author, however, admired it amazingly at the time. He sent Howells stirring reports of his progress. He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, "not a single one short of that." Then suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five thousand words. I don't want to erase any of them. My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell. I write 2,000 words a day. I think I can dictate twice as many. But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead and do it all the same. Howells replied encouragingly. He had talked a letter into a phonograph and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly written out. If a man had the "cheek" to dictate his story into a phonograph, Howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy. Clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. It was only a partial success. He said he couldn't write literature with it because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the devil--a poor audience. I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then I found I could have said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. Then I resigned. He did not immediately give it up. To relieve his aching arm he alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly. Early in May he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the McClure Syndicate, who placed it with a number of papers in America and with the Idler Magazine in England. W. M. Laffan, of the Sun, an old and tried friend, combined with McClure in the arrangement. Laffan also proposed to join with McClure in paying Mark Twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six European letters. This was toward the end of May, 1891, when Clemens had already decided upon a long European sojourn. There were several reasons why this was desirable. Neither Clemens nor his wife was in good health. Both of them were troubled with rheumatism, and a council of physicians had agreed that Mrs. Clemens had some disturbance of the heart. The death of Charles L. Webster in April--the fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings. Susy, who had been at Bryn Mawr, had returned far from well. The European baths and the change of travel it was believed would be beneficial to the family health. Furthermore, the maintenance of the Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective income. The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years must be closed. A great period had ended. They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to help in breaking the news to the servants. John and Ellen O'Neill (the gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for George and Patrick. Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family. It was a sad dissolution. The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. Mrs. Clemens did not come immediately. She was looking into the rooms, bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its memories. Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer drove them together for the last time. They were going on a long journey. They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be home to them again. CLXXVI A EUROPEAN SUMMER They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained about a week. From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys, of the Churchman, had fallen through. "Therefore," he said, "you will have to modify your instalment system to meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it." The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health. Clemens began writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of observations at that "paradise of rheumatics." This letter is really a careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular drift of humor in it. He tells how in his own case the baths at first developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. "I've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away now," he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy. At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object of your trip--Lake Annecy. It is a revelation. It is a miracle. It brings the tears to a body's eyes. It is so enchanting. That is to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. He was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard. From Bayreuth he wrote "At the Shrine of St. Wagner," one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness. This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always during service I feel like a heretic in heaven. He tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected; but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were not real music at all. Then he says: Well, I ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money back on those two operas. His third letter was from Marienbad, in Bohemia, another "health-factory," as he calls it, and is of the same general character as those preceding. In his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge of the family fortunes and became courier from Aix to Bayreuth. It is a very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued or exaggerated in its details. It is included now in the "Complete Works," as fresh and delightful as ever. They returned to Germany at the end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the "city of exquisite glimpses," and to Heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the Rhine. They remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally resting at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake Leman. Clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from Interlaken, its subject, "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty." He wrote to Hall that it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year or two to collect the material. The Century editors were after him for a series after the style of Innocents Abroad. He considered this suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to Hall that he intended to write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters. He said: To write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six detached chapters. Each of these letters requires the same variety of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself. He suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped. At Ouchy Clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature. He engaged Joseph Very, a courier used during their earlier European travels, and highly recommended in the Tramp Abroad. He sent Joseph over to Lake Bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down the river Rhone. For five dollars Joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. A few days later--September 19--Clemens followed. They stopped overnight on an island in Lake Bourget, and in his notes Clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of Chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. They started on their drift next morning. To Mrs. Clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said: The lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining. Our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning. 11.20. We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. Shall presently be in the Rhone. Noon. Nearly down to the Rhone, passing the village of Chanaz. Sunday, 3.15 P.M. We have been in the Rhone three hours. It is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. No rowing or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8 miles an hour--the swiftest current I've ever boated in. We have the entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind. Pleasant it must have been in the warm September days to go swinging down that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of Switzerland into France, fed from a thousand glaciers. He sent almost daily memoranda of his progress. Half-way to Arles he wrote: It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness. Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where we stayed last night! I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or I believe I should have fainted. Little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted white pine table--void the furniture! Had a good firm bed, solid as a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster. These six hours have been entirely delightful. I want to do all the rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather. Still further along he described one of their shore accommodations. Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows & calves, also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas. Neither fleas nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of tobacco.]--The latter had a ball & I was the ballroom; but they were very friendly and didn't bite. The peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their best to make us comfortable. This morning I breakfasted on the shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. Clean cloth, napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught. Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally dirty house. An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no harm. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat management I ever saw. Our admiral knew his business. We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry, although we have had many heavy showers this morning. Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he adds: "I'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight." The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as literary material. Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages with his notes of it, then gave it up. Traveling alone with no one but Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. He tried to rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters, such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris, from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and Mark Twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction, found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon. It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while. They were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later as a soul-stirring shock. Pointing to the outline of the distant range he said to the courier: "Name it. Who is it?" The courier said, "Napoleon." Clemens assented. The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of the great commander himself. They watched and discussed the phenomenon until they reached the village. Next morning Clemens was up for a first daybreak glimpse of his discovery. Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens: I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& I saw it all, from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the final explosion of glory. But it had an interest private to itself & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which I had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire--& now this prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun. It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty & beauty. He made a pencil-sketch of the Napoleon head in his note-book, and stated that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of Beauchastel; but in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above Arles, and named it the "Lost Napoleon," because those who set out to find it did not succeed. He even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he urged tourists to take steamer from Arles and make a short trip upstream, keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering the natural wonder. Fortunately this sketch was not published. It would have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers. One of Mark Twain's friends, Mr. Theodore Stanton, made a persistent effort to find the Napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed. It required ten days to float to Arles. Then the current gave out and Clemens ended the excursion and returned to Lausanne by rail. He said: "It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and somebody would have to row. That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it." To Twichell in America he wrote: You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily, & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn't begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements & extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. In fact, there's nothing that's so lovely. But it's all over. I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles & am loafing along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy, Lausanne, where the tribe are staying at the Beau Rivage and are well and prosperous. CLXXVII KORNERSTRASSE,7 They had decided to spend the winter in Berlin, and in October Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent, went up to that city to engage an apartment. The elevator had not reached the European apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on Mrs. Clemens's account, to have a ground floor. The sisters searched a good while without success, and at last reached Kornerstrasse, a short, secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. The apartment they examined in Kornerstrasse was Number 7, and they were so much pleased with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not notice closely its, general social environment. The agent supplied an assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled in the attractive, roomy place. Clemens and the children, arriving somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied. Their contentment was somewhat premature. When they began to go out socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location, they noticed that the address produced a curious effect. Semi-acquaintances said, "Ah, yes, Kornerstrasse"; acquaintances said, "Dear me, do you like it?" An old friend exclaimed, "Good gracious! How in the world did you ever come to locate there?" Then they began to notice what they had not at first seen. Kornerstrasse was not disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. There were rag warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to gossip. The street itself was thronged with children. They played on a sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. It was eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters. The family began to be sensitive on the subject of their address. Clemens, of course, made humor out of it. He wrote a newspaper letter on the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him not to print. But the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its humor may be preserved. He takes upon himself the renting of the place, and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant. He was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and lovingly: "Ah, Korner Street, Korner Street, why did I not think of you before! A place fit for the gods, dear sir. Quiet?--notice how still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. It is but one block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. And----" "This building is handsome, but I don't think much of the others. They look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of Berlin." "Dear! dear! have you noticed that? It is just an affectation of the nobility. What they want----" "The nobility? Do they live in----" "In this street? That is good! very good, indeed! I wish the Duke of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that. When the Duke first moved in here he----" "Does he live in this street?" "Him! Well, I should say so! Do you see the big, plain house over there with the placard in the third floor window? That's his house." "The placard that says 'Furnished rooms to let'? Does he keep boarders?" "What an idea! Him! With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand marks a year? Oh, positively this is too good." "Well, what does he have that sign up for?" The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light beaming in his eye: "Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by your innocent questions. Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities, eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board there is one of them. They all hang them out. And it's regulated by an unwritten law. A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count five, a duke fifteen----" "Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup----" "Every one of them. Now the old Duke of Backofenhofenschwartz not the present Duke, but the last but one, he----" "Does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?" "No, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is chewing the door-mat----" "But all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats." "Yes, but I mean the eighteenth one. Count. No, never mind; there's a lot more come. I'll get you another mark. Let me see---" They could not remain permanently in Komerstrasse, but they stuck it out till the end of December--about two months. Then they made such settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome apartment at the Hotel Royal, Unter den Linden. There was no need to be ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in Berlin. As for Komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. It is still not aristocratic, but it is eminently respectable. There is a new post-office that takes in Number 7, where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the Fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by uniformed officials, who have all heard of Mark Twain, but have no knowledge of his former occupation of their premises. CLXXVIII A WINTER IN BERLIN Clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. Closing a letter to Hall, he said: "I must stop-my arm is howling." He put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books, pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. These projects appear never to have been really undertaken, Hall very likely fearing that a flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. It seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and Clemens was willing enough to agree with this view. Clemens had still another letter to write for Laffan and McClure, and he made a pretty careful study of Berlin with that end in view. But his arm kept him from any regular work. He made notes, however. Once he wrote: The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only gospel of any monarchy, should be Rebellion--against Church and State. And again: I wrote a chapter on this language 13 years ago and tried my level best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the result--a word of thirty-nine letters. It merely concentrates the alphabet with a shovel. It hurts me to know that that chapter is not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the university. Socially, that winter in Berlin was eventful enough. William Walter Phelps, of New Jersey (Clemens had known him in America), was United States minister at the German capital, while at the Emperor's court there was a cousin, Frau von Versen, nee Clemens, one of the St. Louis family. She had married a young German officer who had risen to the rank of a full general. Mark Twain and his family were welcome guests at all the diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished men and women from every circle of achievement. Labouchere of 'Truth' was there, De Blowitz of the 'Times', and authors, ambassadors, and scientists of rank. Clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at these assemblies. His popularity in Germany was openly manifested. At any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him honor. He was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the historian Mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features. His books were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them was issued at a few cents per copy. Captain Bingham (later General Bingham, Commissioner of Police in New York City) and John Jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them popular with the public in general, and especially so with the Clemens family. Susy Clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence, tells of a party at Mrs. Jackson's, and especially refers to Captain Bingham in the most complimentary terms. "He never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind, but always came cordially to the rescue. My gratitude toward him was absolutely limitless." She adds that Mrs. Bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most attractive lady present. Berlin was Susy's first real taste of society, and she was reveling in it. In her letter she refers to Minister Phelps by the rather disrespectful nickname of "Yaas," a term conferred because of his pronounciation of that affirmative. The Clemens children were not entirely happy in the company of the minister. They were fond of him, but he was a great tease. They were quite young enough, but it seemed always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. In the letter above quoted Susy says: When I saw Mr. Phelps I put out my hand enthusiastically and said, "Oh, Mr. Phelps, good evening," whereat he drew back and said, so all could hear, "What, you here! why, you're too young. Do you think you know how to behave?" As there were two or three young gentlemen near by to whom I hadn't been introduced I wasn't exactly overjoyed at this greeting. We may imagine that the nickname "Yaas" had been invented by Susy in secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he was kindness itself at heart. In one of his later dictations Clemens related an anecdote concerning a dinner with Phelps, when he (Clemens) had been invited to meet Count S----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. Clemens, and Phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose Phelps was in the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught now and then just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that tried Charles I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table. Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with exulting indifference: "An ancestor of mine." I put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness: "Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others." Clemens was sincerely fond of Phelps and spent a good deal of time at the legation headquarters. Sometimes he wrote there. An American journalist, Henry W. Fischer, remembers seeing him there several times scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one occasion he delivered an address to a German and English audience on the "Awful German Tongue." This was probably the lecture that brought Clemens to bed with pneumonia. With Mrs. Clemens he had been down to Ilsenburg, in the Hartz Mountains, for a week of change. It was pleasant there, and they would have remained longer but for the Berlin lecture engagement. As it was, they found Berlin very cold and the lecture-room crowded and hot. When the lecture was over they stopped at General von Versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. Clemens awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. He remained in bed, a very sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. It was unpleasant enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. He could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers. Fischer brought him Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, always a favorite. --[Clemens was deeply interested in the Margravine, and at one time began a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. He gave it up, probably feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the Margravine's own story.]--The Emperor sent Frau von Versen with an invitation for him to attend the consecration of some flags in the palace. When she returned, conveying thanks and excuses, his Majesty commanded her to prepare a dinner at her home for Mark Twain and himself and a few special guests, the date to be arranged when Clemens's physician should pronounce him well enough to attend. Members of the Clemens household were impressed by this royal attention. Little Jean was especially awed. She said: "I wish I could be in papa's clothes"; then, after reflection, "but that wouldn't be any use. I reckon the Emperor wouldn't recognize me." And a little later, when she had been considering all the notables and nobilities of her father's recent association, she added: "Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but God," which Mark Twain decided was not quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed. It was during the period of his convalescence that Clemens prepared his sixth letter for the New York Sun and McClure's syndicate, "The German Chicago," a finely descriptive article on Berlin, and German customs and institutions generally. Perhaps the best part of it is where he describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in honor of Professor Virchow's seventieth birthday.--[Rudolph Virchow, an eminent German pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of the most prominent figures of the German Reichstag. He died in 1902.] --He tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of Professor Helmholtz--[Herman von Helmholtz, an eminent German physicist, one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. He died in 1894.]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a mighty 'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand German students. This letter has been published in Mark Twain's "Complete Works," and is well worth reading to-day. His place had been at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, Virchow and Helmholtz, a place where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely impressed at the honor which Germany paid to her men of science. The climax came when Mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), an eminent German historian and archeologist, a powerful factor in all liberal movements. From 1874-1895 permanent secretary of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences.] There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle. Three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing the way and conducting the guest down to his place. The songs were stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs, the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of excitement. It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit, that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift devisable for me. When apparently the last eminent guest had long ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. Who might this late comer be? Nobody was interested to inquire. Still, indolent eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the remote crowds. Then we saw that end of the house rising to its feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave. This supreme honor had been offered to no one before. There was an excited whisper at our table--"Mommsen!"--and the whole house rose --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs. Just simply a storm! Then the little man with his long hair and Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hand--Mommsen!--think of it! This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations. During his convalescent days, Clemens had plenty of time to reflect and to look out of the window. His notebook preserves some of his reflections. In one place he says: The Emperor passes in a modest open carriage. Next that happy 12-year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up & so proud! How fast they drive-nothing like it but in London. And the horses seem to be of very fine breed, though I am not an expert in horses & do not speak with assurance. I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary. The "Court Gazette" of a German paper can be covered with a playing- card. In an English paper the movements of titled people take up about three times that room. In the papers of Republican France from six to sixteen times as much. There, if a Duke's dog should catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and cry about it. In Germany they respect titles, in England they revere them, in France they adore them. That is, the French newspapers do. Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different. On February 14th he records that Professor Helmholtz called, but unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. He was quite recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the severe weather. In the final entry he says: Thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself. Don't know what a 'Schelgesetzentwurf' is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it was my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world. Especially now that I've lost the 'offentliche Militargericht circus'. I read all the debates on that question with a never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple of days ago & did something by a vote of 100 to 143, but I couldn't find out what it was. CLXXIX A DINNER WITH WILLIAM II. The dinner with Emperor William II. at General von Versen's was set for the 20th of February. A few days before, Mark Twain entered in his note-book: In that day the Imperial lion and the Democratic lamb shall sit down together, and a little General shall feed them. Mark Twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the Emperor's right hand. The Emperor's brother, Prince Heinrich, sat opposite; Prince Radolin farther along. Rudolf Lindau, of the Foreign Office, was also present. There were fourteen at the table, all told. In his memorandum made at the time, Clemens gave no account of the dinner beyond the above details, only adding: After dinner 6 or 8 officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the big room out of the smoking-room and held a "smoking parliament" after the style of the ancient Potsdam one, till midnight, when the Emperor shook hands and left. It was not until fourteen years later that Mark Twain related some special matters pertaining to that evening. He may have expanded then somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. He told it as here given, premising: "This may appear in print after I am dead, but not before. "From 1891 until day before yesterday I had never mentioned the matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any way--not even to my wife, to whom I was accustomed to tell everything that happened to me. "At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests. When the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. I noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. If I had been in the Emperor's chair and he in mine I should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, but I was guest now, and consequently felt less at home. From old experience I was familiar with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammeled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little strange and out of place. But there was no animosity--no, the Emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him a rest and a quiet time. "In one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only human, although I regret it. When a guest answered a question he did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. The Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books--and I will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another. I once mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book 'Old Times on the Mississippi'; but there were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'A Tramp Abroad' of certain striking phases of German student life. "Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then, without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich. The Prince replied, endorsing the Emperor's view of the matter. Then I followed with my own view of it. I said that in the beginning our government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate and was a danger besides. I think that that was about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. I seemed to perceive this quite plainly. I had committed an indiscretion. Possibly it was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion promulgated by his Majesty. I do not know which it was, but I quite clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting prevailed until about midnight. I am sure that the Emperor's good night was the only thing he said to me in all that time. "Was this rebuke studied and intentional? I don't know, but I regarded it in that way. I can't be absolutely sure of it because of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances. For example: the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from my books." It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later recalled to him this curious circumstance. A gentleman whom Clemens knew went on a diplomatic mission to Germany. Upon being presented to Emperor William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his work. He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language as wonderful; then he said: "Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that dinner at Von Versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at that dinner." It seemed a mysterious message. Clemens thought it might have been meant to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant that Mark Twain's breach and the Emperor's coolness on that occasion were purely imaginary, and that the Emperor had really expected him to talk far more than he did. Returning to the Royal Hotel after the Von Versen dinner, Mark Twain received his second high compliment that day on the Mississippi book. The portier, a tow-headed young German, must have been comparatively new at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually present in the flesh. Clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late an admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and smiles. The young German then poured out a stream of welcome and compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, German translations of Mark Twain. "There," he said; "you wrote them. I've found it out. Lieber Gott! I did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons. That one there, Old Times on the Mississippi, is the best you ever wrote." The note-book records only one social event following the Emperor's dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. The note says: At the Emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered. Tonight I went in a black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. Just my luck. The Berlin activities came to an end then. He was still physically far from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or to go to a warmer climate. This was March 1st. Clemens and his wife took Joseph Very, and, leaving the others for the time in Berlin, set out for Mentone, in the south of France. CLXXX MANY WANDERINGS Mentone was warm and quiet, and Clemens worked when his arm permitted. He was alone there with Mrs. Clemens, and they wandered about a good deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon. Clemens wrote to Susy: Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but I noticed she didn't take the plug out, as a rule. When she did she took nine pictures on top of each other--composites. They remained a month in Mentone, then went over to Pisa, and sent Joseph to bring the rest of the party to Rome. In Rome they spent another month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to Clemens pretty profitless. "I do not expect to be able to write any literature this year," he said in a letter to Hall near the end of April. "The moment I take up my pen my rheumatism returns." Still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in the course of weeks. From Rome to Florence, at the end of April, and so pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter. They inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through Prof. Willard Fiske, were directed to the Villa Viviani, near Settignano, on a hill to the eastward of Florence, with vineyard and olive-grove sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace. They closed the arrangement for Viviani, and about the middle of May went up to Venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back to Germany. William Gedney Bunce, the Hartford artist, was in Venice, and Sarah Orne Jewett and other home friends. From Venice, by way of Lake Como and "a tangled route" (his note-book says) to Lucerne, and so northward to Berlin and on to Bad Nauheim, where they had planned to spend the summer. Clemens for some weeks had contemplated a trip to America, for matters there seemed to demand his personal attention. Summer arrangements for the family being now concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the Havel for New York. To Jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may believe, than he felt. BREMEN, 7.45 A.M., June 14, 1892. DEAR JEAN CLEMENS,--I am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel mighty fine, & am going down to show off before I put on the rest of my clothes. Perhaps mama & Mrs. Hague can persuade the Hauswirth to do right; but if he don't you go down & kill his dog. I wish you would invite the Consul-General and his ladies down to take one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the Government. Clemens felt that his presence in America, was demanded by two things. Hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual statements were less encouraging. The Library of Literature and some of the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy one. Clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the Library or an interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing. The uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a nightmare which interfered with his sleep. It seemed hard enough to earn a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care. The second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the machine. Clemens had left the matter in Paige's hands, and Paige, with persuasive eloquence, had interested Chicago capital to a point where a company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city. Paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a sort of general "consulting omniscient" at five thousand dollars a month. Clemens, who had been negotiating again with the Mallorys for the disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just what was going on. He remained in America less than two weeks, during which he made a flying trip to Chicago and found that Paige's company really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines. It was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but Clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the negotiations with the Mallorys which had promised considerable cash in hand. He had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with Hall for some reason had seemed comforting. The business had been expanding; they would now "concentrate." He returned on the Lahn, and he must have been in better health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the passage. He told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court was convened to try him on the charge of "inordinate and unscientific lying." Many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench. He was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period every day until the steamer should reach port. It is said that he faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the Seamen's Fund. Clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare time during the trip writing an article on "All Sorts and Conditions of Ships," from Noah's Ark down to the fine new Havel, then the latest word in ship-construction. It was an article written in a happy vein and is profitable reading to-day. The description of Columbus as he appeared on the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing: If the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. If the weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings, clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings; deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank; rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires. CLXXXI NAUHEIM AND THE PRINCE OF WALES Clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in Nauheim and turned off a quantity of copy. He completed several short articles and stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'Tom Sawyer Abroad' and 'Those Extraordinary Twins'--the latter being the original form of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. As early as August 4th he wrote to Hall that he had finished forty thousand words of the "Tom Sawyer" story, and that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, Harper's Young People or St. Nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative method was altogether wrong. To Hall on the 10th he wrote: I have dropped that novel I wrote you about because I saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, & somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional) way. I have written 12,000 words of this new narrative, & find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so I shall go along and make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words. It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any boy between 8 years & 80. When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas, wrote and offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for boys 50,000 words long. I wrote back and declined, for I had other matter in my mind then. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. Now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine --it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a syndicate. I don't swear it, but I think so. Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of the Extraordinary Twins: By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel entitled, 'Those Extraordinary Twins'. It's the howling farce I told you I had begun awhile back. I laid it aside to ferment while I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now. I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the common order--it is a fresh idea--I don't think it resembles anything in literature. He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to literature would eventually grow out of it. In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then consul-general at Frankfort, he refers to "that happy summer at Nauheim." Mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of the summer was justified. For one thing, Clemens himself was in better health and spirits and able to continue his work. But an even greater happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced Mrs. Clemens free from any organic ills. To Orion, Clemens wrote: We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles and will soon be well again. That was worth going to Europe to find out. It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and financial worries were less considered. Another letter to Orion relates history: The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with them. Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort, Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales. I found him a most unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman. Twichell has reported Mark Twain's meeting with the Prince (later Edward VII) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through the British ambassador. "The meeting," he says, "was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince, solid, erect, and soldierlike, Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most scandalous description." When they parted Clemens said: "It has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your Royal Highness." The Prince answered: "And it is a pleasure, Mr. Clemens, to have met you--again." Clemens was puzzled to reply. "Why," he said, "have we met before?" The Prince smiled happily. "Oh yes," he said; "don't you remember that day on the Strand when you were on the top of a bus and I was heading a procession and you had on your new overcoat with flap-pockets?"--[See chap. clxiii, "A Letter to the Queen of England."] It was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he had read, and had remembered all those years. Clemens expressed to Twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the Prince's sister, Louise, in Ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a dinner next day. Later the Prince had him to supper and they passed an entire evening together. There was a certain uneasiness in the Nauheim atmosphere that year, for the cholera had broken out at Hamburg, and its victims were dying at a terrific rate. It was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the spread of the epidemic, for the German papers were curiously conservative in their reports. Clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded not to print it. A paragraph will convey its tenor. What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be if the stage were in China. We sit "in front," & the audience is in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into history as the disaster without a history. He closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says "gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there." For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four dead ones. CLXXXII THE VILLA VIVIANI 'The American Claimant', published in May l (1892), did not bring a very satisfactory return. For one thing, the book-trade was light, and then the Claimant was not up to his usual standard. It had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings. The conditions at Nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until well into September. To Mrs. Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens wrote on the 18th, from Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy: We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left four or five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days. Hard trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7 minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. It took us 3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours. We shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible. Next day we shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day, Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk. Phelps came to Frankfort and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons, supper at our inn--Livy not in it. She was merely allowed a glimpse, no more. Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending to be ill; was never looking so well & fine. A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of its correspondents with cholera. A man said yesterday he wished to God they would inoculate all of them. Yes, the interest is quite general and strong & much hope is felt. Livy says I have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves & shut up. Which I do--and shut up. They lingered at Lucerne until Mrs. Clemens was rested and better able to continue the journey, arriving at last in Florence, September 26th. They drove out to the Villa Viviani in the afternoon and found everything in readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and on the table. Clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds: It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in it. Some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest which gives reality and charm. The 'contadino' brought up their trunks from the station, and Clemens wrote: The 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely independent without making any offensive show of it. He charged too much for the trunks, I was told. My informer explained that this was customary. September 27. The rest of the trunks brought up this morning. He charged too much again, but I was told that this was also customary. It's all right, then. I do not wish to violate the customs. Hired landau, horses, & coachman. Terms, 480 francs a month & a pourboire to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but nothing else. The landau has seen better days & weighs 30 tons. The horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion. This causes delay. But it entertains the people along the road. They came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets & discussed the matter with each other. I was told that they said that a 30-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what they needed was a wheelbarrow. His description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then, for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in the centuries since it was built. It is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light yellow & has green window-shutters. It stands in a commanding position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is walled around with masonry. From the walls the vineyards & olive orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. There are several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of breeds not familiar to me. Roses overflow the retaining-walls, & the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters. The house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls--all brick covered with plaster--are about 3 feet thick. I have several times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities baffle me. There seem to be 28. There are plenty of windows & worlds of sunlight. The floors are sleek & shiny & full of reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. The curious feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious & lofty vacuum which occupies the center of the house. All the rest of the house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. The sense of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your eyes around it & aloft. There are divans distributed along its walls. They make little or no show, though their aggregate length is 57 feet. A piano in it is a lost object. We have tried to reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things, but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. Whatever stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled. He describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it), dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors, Florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners of the estate. The date of one of them is 1305--middle-aged, then, & a judge--he could have known, as a youth, the very greatest Italian artists, & he could have walked & talked with Dante, & probably did. The date of another is 1343--he could have known Boccaccio & spent his afternoons wandering in Fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking Florence & listening to that man's improper tales, & he probably did. The date of another is 1463--he could have met Columbus & he knew the magnificent Lorenzo, of course. These are all Cerretanis --or Cerretani-Twains, as I may say, for I have adopted myself into their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been heretofore too recent to suit me. We are considering the details of Viviani at some length, for it was in this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most important work of this later time--in some respects his most important of any time--the 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc'. If the reader loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration. The outdoor picture of Viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere. Clemens added it to his notes several months later, but it belongs here. The situation of this villa is perfect. It is three miles from Florence, on the side of a hill. Beyond some hill-spurs is Fiesole perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the imposing mass of the Ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant plain lies Florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, & flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel & on the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; all around the horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with innumerable villas. After nine months of familiarity with this panorama I still think, as I thought in the beginning, that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim & faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy. The Clemens household at Florence consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Susy, and Jean. Clara had soon returned to Berlin to attend Mrs. Willard's school and for piano instruction. Mrs. Clemens improved in the balmy autumn air of Florence and in the peaceful life of their well-ordered villa. In a memorandum of October 27th Clemens wrote: The first month is finished. We are wonted now. This carefree life at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence. The weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. Late in the afternoons friends come out from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon Florence & the daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look. It is not a time for talk. No wonder he could work in that environment. He finished 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', also a short story, 'The L 1,000,000 Bank-Note' (planned many years before), discovered the literary mistake of the 'Extraordinary Twins' and began converting it into the worthier tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', soon completed and on its way to America. With this work out of his hands, Clemens was ready for his great new undertaking. A seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was ready to bloom. He would write the story of Joan of Arc. CLXXXIII THE SIEUR DE CONTE AND JOAN In a note which he made many years later Mark Twain declared that he was fourteen years at work on Joan of Arc; that he had been twelve years preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it. There is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that he contemplated the story of Joan as early as the eighties; but there is a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled for him not much later than 1880, for the latest published work of the list bears that date. He was then too busy with his inventions and publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf from that tragic life into his own. Joan of Arc, by Janet Tuckey, was apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still exists, is filled with his marginal notes. He did not speak of this volume in discussing the matter in after-years. He may have forgotten it. He dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug out and put into modern French by Quicherat; the 'Jeanne d'Arc' of J. Michelet, and the splendid 'Life of the Maid' of Lord Ronald Gower, these being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[The book of Janet Tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are credited as "authorities examined in verification" on a front page of his published book. In a letter written at the conclusion of "Joan" in 1895, the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one French and one English authority, while in the last third he had constantly drawn from five French and five English sources.] "I could not get the Quicherat and some of the other books in English," he said, "and I had to dig them out of the French. I began the story five times." None of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they were wisely put aside, for no story of the Maid could begin more charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by Sieur Louis de Conte, secretary of Joan of Arc, and translated by Jean Francois Alden for the world to read. The impulse which had once prompted Mark Twain to offer The Prince and the Pauper anonymously now prevailed. He felt that the Prince had missed a certain appreciation by being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion piece (he so regarded Joan) should be accepted on its merits and without prejudice. Walking the floor one day at Viviani, smoking vigorously, he said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy: "I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. People always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. This is to be a serious book. It means more to me than anything I have ever undertaken. I shall write it anonymously." So it was that that gentle, quaint Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and the tale of Joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling. He wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material arranged. The reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not merely as reading, but as fact. Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he remained in that still garden with Joan as his companion--the old Sieur de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic tale. At the end of each day he would read to the others what he had written, to their enjoyment and wonder. How rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to Hall in February, in which he said: I am writing a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper', which is half done & will make 200,000 words. That is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign source. He had always, more or less, kept up his study of the French, begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead now. Still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along the margin of his French authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness and the magnitude of his toil. No previous work had ever required so much of him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely commanded his interest. He would have been willing to remain shut away from visitors, to have been released altogether from social obligations; and he did avoid most of them. Not all, for he could not always escape, and perhaps did not always really wish to. Florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people--some of them his old friends. There were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress somewhere, and not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed author who was no longer himself, but sad old Sieur de Conte, following again the banner of the Maid of Orleans, marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. CLXXXIV NEW HOPE IN THE MACHINE If all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to America. But it was necessary for him to go. Even Hall was no longer optimistic. His letters provided only the barest shreds of hope. Times were hard and there was every reason to believe they would be worse. The World's Fair year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest financial periods this country has ever seen. Chicago could hardly have selected a more profitless time for her great exposition. Clemens wrote urging Hall to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do anything, indeed, that would avoid the necessity of further liability and increased dread. Every payment that could be spared from the sales of his manuscript was left in Hall's hands, and such moneys as still came to Mrs. Clemens from her Elmira interests were flung into the general fund. The latter were no longer large, for Langdon & Co. were suffering heavily in the general depression, barely hoping to weather the financial storm. It is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a tempering influence on Mark Twain's nature. Instead of becoming harsh and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly. He wrote often to Hall, always considerately, even tenderly. Once, when something in Hall's letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote: Mrs. Clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something. But most assuredly that cannot be. I tell her that although I am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit likely to write such things to you. I can't believe I have done anything so ungrateful. If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head for I deserve it. You have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor. He was fond of Hall. He realized how honest and resolute and industrious he had been. In another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had been able to "keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down"; and he added: "Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power." The type-setter situation seemed to promise something. In fact, the machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation. The new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: About the middle of March Clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to Hall, in the hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a week later, March 22, 1893, he sailed from Genoa on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, a fine, new boat. One of the manuscripts was 'The Californian's Tale' and the other was 'Adam's Diary'.--[It seems curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines. "The Californian's Tale" was published in the Liber Scriptorum, an Authors' Club book, edited by Arthur Stedman. The 'Diary' was disposed of to the Niagara Book, a souvenir of Niagara Falls, which contained sketches by Howells, Clemens, and others. Harper's Magazine republished both these stories in later years--the Diary especially with great success.] Some joke was likely to be played on Mark Twain during these ocean journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned. They knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with dutiable goods and held up in the Custom House, and they planned for this effect. A few days before arriving in New York one passenger after another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or a dozen very choice boxes of smoking material. He took them all with gratitude and innocence. He had never declared any dutiable baggage, entering New York alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need to do so now. His trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the North German Lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of Customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion. They had not calculated well; the Custom-House official came along presently with the usual "Open your baggage, please," then suddenly recognizing the owner of it he said: "Oh, Mr. Clemens, excuse me. We have orders to extend to you the courtesies of the port. No examination of your effects is necessary." It was the evening of Monday, April 3d, when he landed in New York and went to the Hotel Glenham. In his notes he tells of having a two-hour talk with Howells on the following night. They had not seen each other for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off. It was a happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies. They had reached an age where some one they loved died every year. Writing to Mrs. Crane, Clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says: I dreamed I was born & grew up & was a pilot on the Mississippi & a miner & a journalist in Nevada & a pilgrim in the Quaker City & had a wife & children & went to live in a villa at Florence--& this dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real. He was made handsomely welcome in New York. His note-book says: Wednesday. Dined with Mary Mapes Dodge, Howells, Rudyard Kipling & wife, Clarke,--[ William Fayal Clarke, now editor of St. Nicholas Magazine.]--Jamie Dodge & wife. Thursday, 6th. Dined with Andrew Carnegie, Prof. Goldwin Smith, John Cameron, Mr. Glenn. Creation of league for absorbing Canada into our Union. Carnegie also wants to add Great Britain & Ireland. It was on this occasion that Carnegie made his celebrated maxim about the basket and the eggs. Clemens was suggesting that Carnegie take an interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should not put all of his eggs into one basket. Carnegie regarded him through half-closed lids, as was his custom, and answered: "That's a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that basket." He had not come to America merely for entertainment. He was at the New York office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to be good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken care of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place him far beyond the fear of want. He forwarded this good news to Italy, where it was sorely needed, for Mrs. Clemens found her courage not easy to sustain in his absence. That he had made his letter glowing enough, we may gather from her answer. It does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to spend. I think I will jump around and spend money just for fun, and give a little away, if we really get some. What should we do and how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet how many people are situated in that way? He decided to make another trip to Chicago to verify, with his own eyes, the manufacturing reports, and to see Paige, who would appear to have become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied. He took Hall with him, and wrote Orion to meet him at the Great Northern Hotel. This would give him a chance to see Orion and would give Orion a chance to see the great Fair. He was in Chicago eleven days, and in bed with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time. Paige came to see him at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full of protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled in, they would share and share alike. The note-book says: Paige shed even more tears than usual. What a talker he is! He could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he is present I always believe him; I can't help it. Clemens returned to New York as soon as he was able to travel. Going down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing violently. Clemens, leaning over to Hall, with his hand to his mouth, and in a whisper audible to every one, said: "Bishop of Chicago." The man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and subsided. On May 13th Clemens took the Kaiser Wilhelm II. for Genoa. He had accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine. If only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a moment! Night and day it was always with him. Hall presently wrote that the condition of the money-market was "something beyond description. You cannot get money on anything short of government bonds." The Mount Morris Bank would no longer handle their paper. The Clemens household resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money would come from. She reported that her husband got up in the night and walked the floor in his distress. He wrote again to Hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and responsibilities at whatever sacrifice: I am terribly tired of business. I am by nature and disposition unfit for it, & I want to get out of it. I am standing on the Mount Morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--& doubtless a long way further off than the Connecticut company imagine. Get me out of business! He knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and he had little faith in any near relief from that source. He wrote again go Hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties. They should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market there was no sale for anything. Clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany for the baths. Clara, who had graduated from Mrs. Willard's school in Berlin, joined them in Munich, and somewhat later Susy also joined them, for Madame Marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her. In spite of his disturbed state of mind Clemens must have completed some literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter to Hall, of his immortal defense of Harriet Shelley, a piece of writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its performance. Characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which Arthur Stedman or his father will edit, and the Webster company will publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded. But we hear no more of this project. But by August he was half beside himself with anxiety. On the 6th he wrote Hall: Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can do that--but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly. I have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months' supply & can't see any sure daylight beyond. The bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much better for a long time to come; for when the "three weeks" are up, there will be three months' tinkering to follow, I guess. That is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen the light. And three days later: Great Scott, but it's a long year--for you & me! I never knew the almanac to drag so. At least not since I was finishing that other machine. I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the telegram saying the machine's finished--but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into "three weeks sure" I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much. W----don't know what sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out. And finally, on the 4th: I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to see any daylight ahead. To me none is visible. I strongly advise that every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. I may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course open. We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders --none to Clemenses. In very prosperous times we might regard our stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up & quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present condition of things. What I am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. If they come into danger I hope you will cable me so that I can come over & try to save them, for if they go I am a beggar. I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family & help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors. A few days later he could stand it no longer, and on August 29 (1893) sailed, the second time that year, for New York. CLXXXV AN INTRODUCTION TO H. H. ROGERS Clemens took a room at The Players--"a cheap room," he wrote, "at $1.50 per day." It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long half-year, during which Mark Twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak Esmeralda hills. Then he had no one but him self and was young. Now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down with a vast burden of debt. The liabilities of Charles L. Webster & Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers in various publishing materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very doubtful indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not even send cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to promise concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players, reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what. Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said: "Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an admirer of your books." Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt among his kind. "Mr. Clemens," said Mr. Rogers, "I was one of your early admirers. I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain was a man who had been there. I didn't suppose I'd have any difficulty getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of yours since that I could get hold of." They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories. Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. When at last he rose to go the author and the financier were as old friends. Mr. Rogers urged him to visit him at his home. He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said, who was also his warm admirer. It was only a little while after this that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire: "Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens's finances a little: I am afraid they are a good deal confused." This would be near the end of September, 1893. On October 18 Clemens wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John Brisben Walker, of the 'Cosmopolitan', and added: I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type- setter. He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and yesterday he said to me: "I find the machine to be all you represent it. I have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and all about its inventor's character. I know that the New York company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle." Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said: "If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money they need. In the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'." Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again. Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. There was hope that the worst was over. Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor, and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. He must not return to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from conclusion. On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by the Lotos Club in its new building. Introducing him, President Frank Lawrence said: "What name is there in literature that can be likened to his? Perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I know of none. Himself his only parallel, it seems to me. He is all our own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil." CLXXXVI "THE BELLE OF NEW YORK" Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. He was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; "Jamie" Dodge conferred upon him the appropriate title: of "The Belle of New York." In his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. He attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. Henry Rogers had taken his load upon him. "It rests me," Rogers said, "to experiment with the affairs of a friend when I am tired of my own. You enjoy yourself. Let me work at the puzzle a little." And Clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he wrote: He is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. I did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster & Co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & I was ashamed that I went. It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I got the money and was by it saved. And then--while still a stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. He gave time to me --time, which could not be bought by any man at $100,000 a month--no, nor for three times the money. He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual. I wanted to say the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat & blood to save me & mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not. But I didn't say that. I said I didn't want any book; I wanted to get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here for that purpose & would accomplish it if I could. He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked: "Don't you ever get tired?" And he answered: "I don't know what it is to get tired. I wish I did." He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James J. Corbett. Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and Edward Simmons, from The Players. They had five seats in a box, and Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion's dressing-room. Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the world. I said: "You have whipped Mitchell & maybe you will whip Jackson in June --but you are not done then. You will have to tackle me." He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in earnest: "No, I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one. You have got fame enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me." Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank, in San Francisco. There were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd; then at last Corbett appeared in the ring & the 8,000 people present went mad with enthusiasm. My two artists went mad about his form. They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equalling its perfection except Greek statues, & they didn't surpass it. Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a perfect mash of humanity. When we reached the street I found I had left my arctics in the box. I had to have them, so Simmons said he would go back & get them, & I didn't dissuade him. I wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full 50 yards. He was back with the shoes in 3 minutes! How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? By saying: "Way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch Mr. Corbett's overshoes." The word flew from mouth to mouth, the Red Sea divided, & Simmons walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod. This is Fire-escape Simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: Exit--in case of Simmons. I had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to The Players for 10.30; I was there by 10.45. Thirty cultivated & very musical ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them personal friends of mine. That wonderful Hungarian band was there (they charge $500 for an evening). Conversation and band until midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly grouped before me & I told them about Dr. B. E. Martin & the etchings, & followed it with the Scotch-Irish christening. My, but the Martin is a darling story! Next, the head tenor from the Opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch accompanying on the piano. Just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of weird and tremendous dance-music, a Hungarian celebrity & his wife took the floor; I followed--I couldn't help it; the others drifted in, one by one, & it was Onteora over again. By half past 4. I had danced all those people down--& yet was not tired; merely breathless. I was in bed at 5 & asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 & presently at work on this letter to you. I think I wrote until 2 or half past. Then I walked leisurely out to Mr. Rogers's (it is called 3 miles, but is short of it), arriving at 3.30, but he was out--to return at 5.30--so I didn't stay, but dropped over and chatted with Howells until five. --[Two Mark Twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at The Players: Just before Christmas a member named Scott said one day: "Mr. Clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. I've got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard. I'd like to wear it." The coat was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and what not. "Scott," he said, "if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that coat you may wear it." An hour or two later Clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a package for him was in the office. He called for it and found a neat bundle, which somehow had a Christmas look. He carried it up to the reading-room with a showy, air. "Now, boys," he said, "you may make all the fun of Christmas you like, but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered." They gathered around and he undid the package. It was filled with the pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat. Scott had taken special precautions against losing them. Mark Twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled: "Well--, d---n Scott. I hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!" The second anecdote concerns The Player egg-cups. They easily hold two eggs, but not three. One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast order. Clemens said: "Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me." By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. Clemens looked at the egg portion and asked: "Boy, what was my order?" "Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens." "And you've filled that order, have you?" "Yes, Mr. Clemens." "Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I've been trying all winter to get three eggs into that cup."] In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John Mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous moments, thirty years before. "The guests were old gray Pacific coasters," he said, "whom I knew when they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went gipsying-along time ago--thirty years." Indeed, it was a talk of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked & the harum-scarum things they did & said. For there were no cares in that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. Of the midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but me, the victim. Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime. In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at Robert Reid's studio. There were present, he says: Coquelin; Richard Harding Davis; Harrison, the great outdoor painter; Wm. H. Chase, the artist; Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph; Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about him in Jan. or Feb. Century. John Drew, actor; James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him! Smedley, the artist; Zorn, " " Zogbaum, " " Reinhart, " " Metcalf, " " Ancona, head tenor at the Opera; Oh, & a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something & was in his way famous. Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it. I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast fascinating (for what reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems, "On the Road to Mandalay," sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper & charmed me more than the Deever. Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all danced about an hour. There couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was. Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is. In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty. He refers to Susy's recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens's own poor state of health. Dear, dear Susy! My strength reproaches me when I think of her and you. It is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, I've got to stick right where I am till I find out whether we are rich or whether the poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody's kitchen is better off than we are. . I stand on the land-end of a springboard, with the family clustered on the other end; if I take my foot---- He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote: The ship is in sight now .... When the anchor is down then I shall say: "Farewell--a long farewell--to business! I will never touch it again!" I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will swim in ink! 'Joan of Arc'--but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet. Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. Mrs. Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said: Mr. Clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me word that Paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no despatch comes . . . . On the 5th of this month I received a cable, "Expect good news in ten days." On the 15th I receive a cable, "Look out for good news." On the 19th a cable, "Nearing success." It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. She added: They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved "Colonel." Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and with Clemens made a trip to Chicago. All agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded--Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms. Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that Paige had agreed to terms. On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book: This is a great date in my history. Yesterday we were paupers with but 3 months' rations of cash left and $160,000 in debt, my wife & I, but this telegram makes us wealthy. But it was not until a fortnight later that Paige did actually sign. This was on the 1st of February, '94, and Clemens that night cabled to Paris, so that Mrs. Clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the morning of their anniversary: "Wedding news. Our ship is safe in port. I sail the moment Rogers can spare me." So this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance again--the grand hope. He was as concerned with it as if it had been an actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that farce, that nightmare. One longs to go back through the years and face him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all. CLXXXVII SOME LITERARY MATTERS Clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and Major Pond did his best to persuade him; but Rogers agreed that his presence in New York was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence. He went once to Boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure in the experience was a sufficient reward. On the evening before the lecture Mrs. James T. Fields had him to her house to dine with Dr. Holmes, then not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[He died that same year, October, 1894.] Clemens wrote to Paris of their evening together: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes never goes out (he is in his 84th year), but he came out this time--said he wanted to "have a time" once more with me. Mrs. Fields said Aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because she wouldn't let him. She allowed only her family (Sarah Orne Jewett & sister) to be present, because much company would overtax Dr. Holmes. Well, he was just delightful! He did as brilliant and beautiful talking (& listening) as he ever did in his life, I guess. Fields and Jewett said he hadn't been in such splendid form for years. He had ordered his carriage for 9. The coachman sent in for him at 9, but he said, "Oh, nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? Tell him to go away & come in an hour!" At 10 he was called for again, & Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. Twice more Mrs. Fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past 10--an unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. He was prodigiously complimentary about some of my books, & is having Pudd'nhead read to him. I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the loveletters, & it pleased him. One other address Clemens delivered that winter, at Fair Haven, on the opening of the Millicent Library, a present to the town from Mrs. Rogers. Mrs. Rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps Mr. Clemens would be willing to say a few words there. Mr. Rogers had replied, "Oh, Clemens is in trouble. I don't like to ask him," but a day or two later told him of Mrs. Rogers's wish, adding: "Don't feel at all that you need to do it. I know just how you are feeling, how worried you are." Clemens answered, "Mr. Rogers, do you think there is anything I could do for you that I wouldn't do?" It was on this occasion that he told for the first time the "stolen watermelon" story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its place. In spite of his cares and diversions Clemens's literary activities of this time were considerable. He wrote an article for the Youth's Companion--"How to Tell a Story"--and another for the North American Review on Fenimore Cooper's "Literary Offenses." Mark Twain had not much respect for Cooper as a literary artist. Cooper's stilted artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the Deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. Clemens had also promised some stories to Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his Christmas number, "Traveling with a Reformer," which had grown out of some incidents of that long-ago journey with Osgood to Chicago, supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to that city with Hall. This story had already appeared when Clemens and Rogers had made their Chicago trip. Rogers had written for passes over the Pennsylvania road, and the president, replying, said: "No, I won't give Mark Twain a pass over our road. I've been reading his 'Traveling with a Reformer,' in which he abuses our road. I wouldn't let him ride over it again if I could help it. The only way I'll agree to let him go over it at all is in my private car. I have stocked it with everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there is anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get it." "Pudd'nhead Wilson" was appearing in the Century during this period, and "Tom Sawyer Abroad" in the St. Nicholas. The Century had issued a tiny calendar of the Pudd'nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy, the very gems of Mark Twain mental riches, were in everybody's mouth. With all this going on, and with his appearance at various social events, he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever before. From the note-book: The Haunted Looking-glass. The guest (at midnight a dim light burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have looked into the glass during 3 centuries. Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. No man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash--that one is the cat. Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. CLXXXVIII FAILURE It was the first week in March before it was thought to be safe for Clemens to return to France, even for a brief visit to his family. He hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time, a bare three weeks, and was back again in New York by the middle of April. The Webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage. Mr. Rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the 16th of April, 1894, Hall arrived at Clemens's room at The Players in a panic. The Mount Morris Bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes of five thousand dollars each in a few days when due. Mr. Rogers was immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and advise them next day. He did not believe that the bank would really push them to the wall. The next day was spent in seeing what could be done, and by evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was raised a voluntary assignment was the proper course. The end of the long struggle had come. Clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife's account. He knew that to her the word failure would be associated with disgrace. She had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the business afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this final disaster. Mr. Rogers said: "Mr. Clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of disgrace in making this assignment. By doing it you will relieve yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay everything and stand clear before the world. If you don't do it you will probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and Mrs. Clemens both. If there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance for their claims. Most of them will be glad enough to help you." It was on the afternoon of the next day, April 18, 1894, that the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. executed assignment papers and closed its doors. A meeting of the creditors was called, at which H. H. Rogers was present, representing Clemens. For the most part the creditors were liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. But there were a few who were grumpy and fussy. They declared that Mark Twain should turn over his copyrights, his Hartford home, and whatever other odds and ends could be discovered. Mr. Rogers, discussing the matter in 1908, said: "They were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking the bones afterward, as Clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they should do. I was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently I got on my feet and said, 'Gentlemen, you are not going to have this thing all your way. I have something to say about Mr. Clemens's affairs. Mrs. Clemens is the chief creditor of this firm. Out of her own personal fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars. She will be a preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until her claim is paid in full. As for the home in Hartford, it is hers already.' "There was a good deal of complaint, but I refused to budge. I insisted that Mrs. Clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to tell the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year the sale of books was small enough. Besides Mrs. Clemens's claim the debts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must be a definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that Clemens should pay fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized upon, and receive a quittance. Clemens himself declared that sooner or later he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though I believe there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who believed he would ever be able to do it. Clemens himself got discouraged sometimes, and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in years--nearly sixty--and he was in poor health. Once when we found the debt, after the Webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy thousand dollars, he said, 'I need not dream of paying it. I never could manage it.' But he stuck to it. He was at my house a good deal at first. We gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. The worry told upon him. He became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange how brilliant he was, how cheerful." The business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade before had dwindled to its end. The last book it had in hand was 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', just ready for issue. It curiously happened that on the day of the failure copies of it were filed in Washington for copyright. Frank Bliss came over from Hartford, and Clemens arranged with him for the publication of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', thereby renewing the old relationship with the American Publishing Company after a break of a dozen years. Naturally, the failure of Mark Twain's publishing firm made a public stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready they were with sympathy and help of a more material kind. Those who understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement. Poultney Bigelow, Douglas Taylor, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Dudley Warner, and others extended financial help, Bigelow and Taylor each inclosing him a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities. He was touched by these things, but the checks were returned. Many of his creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was to forget his obligation to them completely until such time as the remembering would cost him no uneasiness. Clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote bright letters home. In one he said: Mr. Rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come. And again: Now & then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with me & says, "Cheer up-don't be downhearted," and some other friend says, "I'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how bravely you stand it," & none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me & how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. For in the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. You only seem to see rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--& we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, "Sho, Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair." Which didn't convince me. Olivia Clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said: The hideous news of Webster & Co.'s failure reached me by cable on Thursday, and Friday morning Galignani's Messenger had a squib about it. Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope that it would be in some way averted. Mr. Rogers was so sure there was no way out but failure that I suppose it was true. But I have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it always will mean that to me. We have put a great deal of money into the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep putting it in and losing it. We certainly now have not much to lose. We might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing I could think of to do. Mr. Clemens felt that there would never be any end, and perhaps he was right. At any rate, I know that he was convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so if only on account of my sentiment in the matter. Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year. I have wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I should at once desire to live. Clemens now hurried back to Paris, arriving about the middle of May, his second trip in two months. Scarcely had he got the family settled at La Bourboule-les-Bains, a quiet watering-place in the southern part of France, when a cable from Mr. Rogers, stating that the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to America to assist in securing the new fortune. He did not go, however. Rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the Times-Herald office, Chicago, for a long and thorough trial. There would be plenty of time, and Clemens concluded to rest with his family at La Bourboule-les-Bains. Later in the summer they went to Etretat, where he settled down to work. CLXXXIX AN EVENTFUL YEAR ENDS That summer (July, '94.) the 'North American Review' published "In Defense of Harriet Shelley," a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife. It had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for Shelley's behavior. A Shelley biography by Professor Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating. In the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. There were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. He pursued no such method in this instance. The paper on Harriet Shelley is a brief as direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human wrong. By no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm. The characterization of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley as a "literary cake-walk" is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the "Defense of Harriet Shelly," with those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; "Was it Heaven or Hell?"; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in his final days. The summer of 1894 found Mark Twain in the proper frame of mind for literary work. He was no longer in a state of dread. At Etretat, a watering-place on the French coast, he returned eagerly to the long-neglected tale of Joan--"a book which writes itself," he wrote Mr. Rogers"--a tale which tells itself; I merely have to hold the pen." Etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day, and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means. Clemens worked steadily at Etretat for more than a month, finishing the second part of his story, then went over to Rouen to visit the hallowed precincts where Joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to the stake. Susy Clemens was taken ill at Rouen, and they lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets, which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories. They returned to Paris at length--to the Brighton; their quarters of the previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of the artist Pomroy at 169 rue de l'Universite, beyond the Seine. Mark Twain wrote of it once: It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. The studio was coziness itself. With us it served as a drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it for everything. We couldn't get enough of it. It is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and 30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle, and a musicians' gallery at one end. Mrs. Clemens had hoped to return to America, to their Hartford home. That was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. Her letters were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an eternity. In its way, the Pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had found. Its belongings were of the kind she loved. Susy had better health, and her husband was happy in his work. They had much delightful and distinguished company. Her letters tell of these attractive things, and of their economies to make their income reach. It was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the machine--came finally to a conclusion. Reports from the test had been hopeful during the summer. Early in October Clemens, receiving a copy of the Times-Herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: "The Herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. It affects me like Columbus sighting land." And again on the 28th: It seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago than they are. There's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. The others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines will be perfect; then they won't stop at all. But that was about the end of the good news. The stoppages became worse and worse. The type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it was too delicately adjusted--too complicated. "Great guns, what is the matter with it?" wrote Clemens in November when he received a detailed account of its misconduct. Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago to investigate. They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the type-setter in action. Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters. He said: "Certainly it was a marvelous invention. It was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. It had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. I took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. We watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical--that to me was clear." It had failed to stand the test. The Times-Herald would have no more of it. Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain. His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story. 169 rue de l'Universite, PARIS, December 22, 1894. DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. It hit me like a thunder-clap. It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. Have you ever been like that? Not so much, I reckon. There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it die. That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk. So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling, and walked over to the rue Scribe--4 p.m.--and asked a question or two and was told I should be running a big risk if I took the 9 p.m. train for London and Southampton; "better come right along at 6.52 per Havre special and step aboard the New York all easy and comfortable." Very! and I about two miles from home and no packing done. Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made available unless at least a month's time could be secured. So I cabled you, and said to myself that I would take the French steamer to-morrow (which will be Sunday). By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long. So I went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once an hour--until dawn this morning. Result--a sane resolution; no matter what your answer to my cable might be I would hold still and not sail until I should get an answer to this present letter which I am now writing or a cable answer from you saying "Come" or "Remain." I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment of my 70,000 projects to be of this character: He follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using brass type, etc., and concludes: Don't say I'm wild. For really I'm sane again this morning. I am going right along with Joan now, and wait untroubled till I hear from you. If you think I can be of the least use cable me "Come." I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time. Also I could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe Joan, time being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here, cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in America. The second letter followed five days later: 169 rue de l'Universite, PARIS, December 27, 1894. DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is "old and hard" you make a body choke up. I know you "mean every word you say" and I do take it "in the same spirit in which you tender it." I shall keep your regard while we two live--that I know; for I shall always remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it. It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. I put in the rest of that day till 7 P.m. plenty comfortably enough writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking Clara along, and we had a good time. I have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in keeping them out--through watchfulness. I have done a good week's work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great Trial [of Joan], which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most thought and carefulness. I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but I am on the road. I am creeping surely toward it. "Why not leave them all to me?" My business brothers? I take you by the hand! I jump at the chance! I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet I do jump at the chance in spite of it. I don't want to write Irving and I don't want to write Stoker. It doesn't seem as if I could. But I can suggest something for you to write them; and then if you see that I am unwise you can write them something quite different. Now this is my idea: 1. To return Stoker's $100 to him and keep his stock. 2. And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make good to him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him of his $500. [P. S. Madam says No, I must face the music. So I inclose my effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.] We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy matter, for it costs heavily to live in. We can never live in it again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could believe it. Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her --which is the reason I haven't drowned myself. I got the Xmas journals which you sent and I thank you for that Xmas remembrance. We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of yours and a Happy New Year! S. L. CLEMENS. --[Brain Stoker and Sir Henry Irving had each taken a small interest in the machine. The inclosure for Stoker ran as follows:] MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this, because it is not to be mailed at present. When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the aspect of a dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me --I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet--that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him the rest. I'm not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home. Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker. I gave up that London lecture-project entirely. Had to--there's never been a chance since to find the time. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject: Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn't seem to be any other wise course. There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, "Born lucky, always lucky." It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. When the Pennsylvania blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother "it means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half--he was born lucky." Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn't shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck. Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck --the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss. I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ashore. So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever. Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family. It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied: DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions. Send them by express. Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. The collapse of the "great hope" meant to the Clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a (1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister: As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr. Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying: "It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present." It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that twenty-five years had brought. Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly. The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality. As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would say, "Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake," meaning that the book was finished. Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story: And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and greater consummations. She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech. From her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift: Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket- like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of colored fire. We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that winter. She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, "departed this life." Both Susy and her father cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens wrote: "Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it. Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has happened. Do you know that shock? The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter & confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home- like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through & send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist there, as may happen; & that I will do. CXC STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid illustrations by Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been issued by the American Publishing Company. It proved not one of Mark Twain's great books, but only one of his good books. From first to last it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely written. The character of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. There are not many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells his mother down the river into slavery. The negro character is well drawn, of course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books --in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom, Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. But it is chiefly Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter, that will stick in the memory of men. Perhaps the book would live without these, but with them it is certainly immortal. Such aphorisms as: "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits"; "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example"; "When angry count four, and when very angry swear," cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of Following the Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for all time.--[The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized by Frank Mayo, who played it successfully as long as he lived. It is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates.] Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters there. They were a good deal confused. The Harpers had arranged for the serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the Webster contracts. Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American Company at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. It was time that Clemens was on the scene of action. He sailed on the New York on the end of February, and a little more than a month later returned by the Paris --that is, at the end of March. By this time he had altogether a new thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in 1872 and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds. Loathing the platform as he did, he was going back to it. Major Pond had proposed a lecture tour soon after his failure. "The loss of a fortune is tough," wrote Pond, "but there are other resources for another fortune. You and I will make the tour together." Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not contemplated. He would go platforming around the world! He would take Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the Pacific. He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning such a tour. Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and how Smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own. He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves once more at beautiful Quarry Farm. We may imagine how happy they were to reach that peaceful haven. Mrs. Clemens had written: "It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open our house. But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our friends." Little at the farm was changed. There were more vines on the home--the study was overgrown--that was all. Even Ellerslie remained as the children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place. Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane were missing. The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places. Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone which she had found, knowing Mark Twain's interest in geology. Later, when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages should solve their problems. He wrote it in verse: If you prove right and I prove wrong, A million years from now, In language plain and frank and strong My error I'll avow To your dear waking face. If I prove right, by God His grace, Full sorry I shall be, For in that solitude no trace There'll be of you and me. A million years, O patient stone, You've waited for this message. Deliver it a million hence; (Survivor pays expressage.) MARK TWAIN Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895. Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged. Clemens decided to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to start without much delay. He dreaded the prospect of setting out on that long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to consent to such a plan. It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm. Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop. She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to go. Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver. They left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July. When the train pulled away their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. CXCI Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in that fierce summer heat. He was fearful of failure. "I sha'n't be able to stand on a platform," he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along steadily with few delays. They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly, with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time. It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and "ocean" of wheat. There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to it, and so not intruding. The scattering, far-off homesteads, with trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring world, so reposeful and enticing. The most distant and faintest under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea. The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of the latter. Entering Port Huron he wrote: The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far- reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging. It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. No doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. Everywhere they were entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were always waiting. It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large. From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers: At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go, but they said "go on," and I did. He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against his debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a month's travel in that deadly season. At no more than two places were the houses less than crowded. One of these was Anaconda, then a small place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager to have him. He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken "all he had" Clemens said: "And you took the last cent that poor fellow had. Send him one hundred dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me. I'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my commercial value. I don't want to get money that way." "I sent the money," said Pond afterward, "and was glad of the privilege of standing my share." Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. He had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. But in a presentation copy of 'Roughing It', given to Pond as a souvenir, he wrote: "Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made." There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke everywhere. The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th, went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. While they were waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and Lady Aberdeen and their little son in the audience. His note-book says: They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that time the late-comers are all in. Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver. In one of them to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that his name might now be printed as the author of "Joan," which had begun serially in the April Magazine. He thought it might, help his lecturing tour and keep his name alive. But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens's help, he had reconsidered, and wrote: My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to the "Joan of Arc" so soon. She thinks it might go counter to your plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the matter. All right-so be it. I wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers. As a matter of fact the authorship of "Joan" had been pretty generally guessed by the second or third issue. Certain of its phrasing and humor could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain's. The authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of the book, the following May. Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India. This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great compliment some day. I shall arrive next January & you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty. To the press he gave this parting statement: It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit. This is an error. I intend the lectures as well as the property for the creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never outlaw. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and unincumbered start in life. I am going to Australia, India, and South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great cities of the United States. I meant, when I began, to give my creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than theirs. There was one creditor, whose name need, not be "handed down to infamy," who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for all. But this was momentary. He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers to "pay Shylock in full," and to assure any others that he would pay them, too, in the end. But none of the others annoyed him. It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at last. Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by as long as they could see the vessel. The far voyage which was to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had begun. CXCII "FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR" Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great a master. We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch here and there, perhaps, from another point of view. They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and many were dying daily. They could not land. It was a double disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of his youth. There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. In his book he says: We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. The silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. I recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting. In his note-book he wrote: "If I might, I would go ashore and never leave." This was the 31 st of August. Two days later they were off again, sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia. They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara kodaked it. A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern horizon. Then presently they were among the islands of the southern Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group. They had twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with only one rough day. A ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip of that length and character. They mingle in all sorts of diversions to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many years. On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: "Like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream past like a meteor." They were in Sydney next morning, September 16, 1895, and landed in a pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. Clemens announced that he had brought Australia good-fortune, and should expect something in return. Mr. Smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to work. All Australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that faraway Pacific continent. Crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more than two weeks after arrival Clemens was able to send back another two thousand dollars to apply on his debts. But he had hard luck, too, for another carbuncle developed at Melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly a week. When he was able to go before an audience again he said: "The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man. Well, that may be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don't take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet." In his book Clemens has told us his joy in Australia, his interest in the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. The climate he thought superb; "a darling climate," he says in a note-book entry. Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment. His readings were mainly from his earlier books, 'Roughing It' and 'Innocents Abroad'. The story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often told, and the "Mexican Plug" and his "Meeting with Artemus Ward" and the story of Jim Blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'Huck Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer'. He was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the "Golden Arm." But he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam's Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city. Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came: They enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art. One story, the "Golden Arm," had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value. Somewhere before we have stated that no one better than Mark Twain knew the value of a pause. Mrs. Clemens and Clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience. From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: "The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary."]--and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell: I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city. Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here--land, but it would be fine! Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark. "I do not like it one single bit," she wrote to her sister. "Fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on." And Clemens wrote: Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (underworld time) & tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60--no thanks for it! From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to Ceylon. Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races. Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions. The papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in India until the time of the great heat. He was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself. He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling, to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi--old cities of romance--and to Jeypore --through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story. One railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. In his book he says: That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty- five miles of it, instead of five hundred. Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more. "INDIA THE MARVELOUS" he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote: So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. "Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime. It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest. There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated. DEAR KUMAR SAHIB,--It would be hard for me to put into words how much my family & I enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house. It was our first glimpse of the home of an Eastern Prince, & the charm of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel & Oriental tales. We shall not forget that happy experience, nor your kind courtesies to us, nor those of her Highness to my wife & daughter. We shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them again, & how welcome they will be! We make our salutation to your Highness & to all members of your family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little sprite of a Princess--& I beg to sign myself Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. BENARES, February 5, 1896. They had been entertained in truly royal fashion by Prince Kumar, who, after refreshments, had ordered in "bales of rich stuffs" in the true Arabian Nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and allow his guests to select for themselves. With the possible exception of General Grant's long trip in '78 and '79 there has hardly been a more royal progress than Mark Twain's trip around the world. Everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and invitations, and their gifts became so many that Mrs. Clemens wrote she did not see how they were going to carry them all. In a sense, it was like the Grant trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not only to a beloved personality, but to the American character and people. The story of that East Indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and Mark Twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume of Following the Equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story of Indian travel. Clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less profitable than in Australia, because in India the houses were not built for such audiences as he could command. He had to lecture three times in Calcutta, and then many people were turned away. At one place, however, his hall was large enough. This was in the great Hall of the Palace, where durbars are held, at Bombay. Altogether they were two months in India, and then about the middle of March an English physician at Jeypore warned them to fly for Calcutta and get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in. They sailed toward the end of March, touched at Madras and again at Ceylon, remaining a day or two at Colombo, and then away to sea again, across the Indian Ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless, tropic voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears the whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream. From the note-book: Here in the wastes of the Indian Ocean just under the equator the sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game- playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish. I would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue forever. The Injian Ocean sits and smiles So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue, There aren't a wave for miles an' miles Excep' the jiggle of the screw. --KIP. How curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going English are--I believe I haven't told an anecdote or heard one since I left America, but Americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as they get a little acquainted. Preserve your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but not live. Swore off from profanity early this morning--I was on deck in the peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn. Went down, dressed, bathed, put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no profanity. Then started to breakfast. Remembered my tonic--first time in 3 months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass, held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth --reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of fragments, but the bottom hunk whole. Picked it up to throw out of the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then I released my voice. Mrs. Clemens behind me in the door. "Don't reform any more. It is not an improvement." This is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep. It invites to dreams, to study, to reflection. Seventeen days ago this ship sailed out of Calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in Ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea & a cloudless blue sky. All down the Bay of Bengal it was so. It is still so in the vast solitudes of the Indian Ocean--17 days of heaven. In 11 more it will end. There will be one passenger who will be sorry. One reads all day long in this delicious air. Today I have been storing up knowledge from Sir John Lubbock about the ant. The thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is the ant's extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his friend's person. I will quote something which he says about Formica fusca. Formica fusca is not something to eat; it's the name of a breed of ants. He does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his book. In another note he says: In the past year have read Vicar of Wakefield and some of Jane Austen--thoroughly artificial. Have begun Children of the Abbey. It begins with this "Impromptu" from the sentimental heroine: "Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! Content and innocence reside beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it renders . . . . Here unmolested may I wait till the rude storm of sorrow is overblown and my father's arms are again extended to receive me." Has the ear-marks of preparation. They were at the island of Mauritius by the middle of April, that curious bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of Paul and Virginia, a story supposed by some in Mauritius to be "a part of the Bible." They rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for South Africa on the ship Arundel Castle, which he tells us is the finest boat he has seen in those waters. It was the end of the first week in May when they reached Durban and felt that they were nearing home. One more voyage and they would be in England, where they had planned for Susy and Jean to join them. Mrs. Clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not finding one from Susy. The reports from Quarry Farm had been cheerful, and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting, but her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that Susy did not send letters. She had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had come to Susy which made her loath to write. Susy was, in fact, far from well, though no one, not even Susy herself, suspected how serious was her condition. Mrs. Clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is often depressed. Mr. Clemens has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old. Naturally I combat that thought all I can, trying to make him rejoice that he is not seventy . . . . He does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must all our lives live in poverty. He says he never wants to go back to America. I cannot think that things are as black as he paints them, and I trust that if I get him settled down for work in some quiet English village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact, I believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is the work that he loves: The platform he likes for the two hours that he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says he is ashamed of what he is doing. Still, in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. People are so nice, and with people Mr. Clemens seems cheerful. Then the ocean trips are a great rest to him. Mrs. Clemens and Clara remained at the hotel in Durban while Clemens made his platform trip to the South African cities. It was just at the time when the Transvaal invasion had been put down--when the Jameson raid had come to grief and John Hares Hammond, chief of the reformers, and fifty or more supporters were lying in the jail at Pretoria under various sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, Hammond himself having received the latter award. Mrs. Hammond was a fellow-Missourian; Clemens had known her in America. He went with her now to see the prisoners, who seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be pardoned presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a joke. Clemens, writing of it to Twichell, said: A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous & polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) & wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the ground--the "deathline," one of the prisoners called it. Not in earnest, though, I think. I found that I had met Hammond once when he was a Yale senior & a guest of General Franklin's. I also found that I had known Captain Mein intimately 32 years ago. One of the English prisoners had heard me lecture in London 23 years ago.... These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & I believe they are all educated men. They are well off; some of them are wealthy. They have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech--sitting down. It just happened so. I don't prefer that attitude. Still, it has one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech . . . . I advised them at considerable length to stay where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; & I promised to go and see the President & do what I could to get him to double their jail terms.... We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &. a little over & we outsiders had to go. I went again to-day, but the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly Boer named Du Plessis, explained that his orders wouldn't allow him to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday. Du Plessis descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200 years ago--but he hasn't any French left in him now--all Dutch. Clemens did visit President Kruger a few days later, but not for the purpose explained. John Hayes Hammond, in a speech not long ago (1911), told how Mark Twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the jail, and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated Clemens had replied that he didn't think so, adding: "As a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the West." Said Hammond in his speech: "The result of this was that the interview was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning's issue protesting against such lenience. The privations, already severe enough, were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three or four days' search on the part of some of our friends who were already outside of jail to get hold of Mark Twain and have him go and explain to Kruger that it was all a joke." Clemens made as good a plea to "Oom Paul" as he could, and in some degree may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the shortened terms of the unlucky reformers. They did not hurry away from South Africa. Clemens gave many readings and paid a visit to the Kimberley mines. His note-book recalls how poor Riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey. It was the 14th of July, 1896, a year to a day since they left Elmira, that they sailed by the steamer Norman for England, arriving at Southampton the 31st. It was from Southampton that they had sailed for America fourteen months before. They had completed the circuit of the globe. CXCII THE PASSING OF SUSY It had been arranged that Katie Leary should bring Jean and Susy to England. It was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than the 12th, by which time the others would be established. The travelers proceeded immediately to London and engaged for the summer a house in Guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though Mark Twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself free. Altogether, the trip had been prosperous. Now that it was behind him, his health and spirits had improved. The outlook was brighter. August 12th came, but it did not bring Katie and the children. A letter came instead. Clemens long afterward wrote: It explained that Susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. But we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day at noon. Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait for cablegram in the morning." This was not satisfactory--not reassuring. I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now closing. I waited in the post- office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. We sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earlier morning train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said the recovery would be long but certain. This was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind to search for another and larger house in Guildford. That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-day." Some of those who in later years wondered at Mark Twain's occasional attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his logic of gloom. For years he and his had been fighting various impending disasters. In the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. Now, just when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of supreme triumph had come the message that Susy's lovely and blameless life was ended. There are not many greater dramas in fiction or in history than this. The wonder is not that Mark Twain so often preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact. Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. This time none of the elements were lacking--not the smallest detail. The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would never see it again. The blow had found him alone absolutely alone among strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to comfort them. Clemens sought no comfort for himself. Just as nearly forty years before he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother, and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so now he crucified himself as the slayer of Susy. To Mrs. Clemens he poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their downfall, the separation from Susy, and this final incredible disaster. Only a human being, he said, could have done these things. Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home. She had been well for a time at Quarry Farm, well and happy, but during the summer of '96 she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. Her health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. Clemens had great faith in mind over matter, and Mrs. Clemens also believed that Susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit from a serene and confident mental attitude. From Bombay, in January, she wrote Mrs. Crane: I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. Last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter. Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. Like Stevenson, she had "a soul of flame in a body of gauze," a body to be guarded through the spirit. She worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. Early in the year she went over to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing. Her health did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her. "Miss Susy; you are sick," she said. "You must have the doctor come." Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for. He thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork. He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. It was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to England. Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also Charles Langdon. Mr. Twichell was notified and came down from his summer place in the Adirondacks. Susy did not improve. She became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. This was on the 15th of August--that hot, terrible August of 1896. Susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. She lay down at last, and once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie's face and said, "mama." She did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame went out forever. To Twichell Clemens wrote of it: Ah, well, Susy died at home. She had that privilege. Her dying eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon things which they had known & loved always & which had made her young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & & John & Ellen. This was happy fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her. If she had died in another house--well, I think I could not have borne that. To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. And could we now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod. A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twichell, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and Clara on board. It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to Clara. There had been little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. Susy already had been taken to Elmira, and at half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world. And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born. They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia: Warm summer sun shine kindly here; Warm southern wind blow softly here; Green sod above lie light, lie light Good night, dear heart, good night, good night. --[These lines at first were generally attributed to Clemens himself. When this was reported to him he ordered the name of the Australian poet, Robert Richardson, cut beneath them. The word "southern" in the original read "northern," as in Australia, the warm wind is from the north. Richardson died in England in 1901.] CXCIV WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England without delay. Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter. They did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known except to a few of their closest friends. They wanted to be alone with their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. Perhaps not a dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was ignorant of it altogether. It was through this that a wild report started that Mark Twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. This report--exploited in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period received wide attention. James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von Versen, was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto & Windus, begging Mark Twain to command his relative's purse. The reply to this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and "Young Doctor Jim," as he was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. The general impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and the New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his debts. The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account, and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts. Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for October 24, 1896, says: "Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'Around the World'." He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual heresies. His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death of Susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things in general and the human race in particular. "Man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to," was one of his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature subject to such afflictions and for a Providence that could invent them. Even Mrs. Clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. "Poor, poor human nature," she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter. Many of Mark Twain's notes refer to Susy. In one he says: "I did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in Hartford a month or two before the end." Notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the hopelessness of it all. In one place he records her accomplishment of speech, adding: "And I felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my sorrow I remember it now. But I come of an undemonstrative race." He wrote to Twichell: But I have this consolation: that dull as I was I always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if Livy had done it herself--& I took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had greatness in her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it. And now she is dead--& I can never tell her. And closing a letter to Howells: Good-by. Will healing ever come, or life have value again? And shall we see Susy? Without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again. On November 26th, Thanksgiving, occurs this note: "We did not celebrate it. Seven years ago Susy gave her play for the first time." And on Christmas: London, 11.30 Xmas morning. The Square & adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are dead. There is not a sound. At intervals a Sunday-looking person passes along. The family have been to breakfast. We three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned. It was in our minds, but we said nothing. And a little later: Since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with us. Our cook's sweetheart was healthy. He is rushing for the grave now. Emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the other is in danger. Wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case. We began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the Bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. Next Wilson got his skull fractured. January 23, 1897. I wish the Lord would disguise Himself in citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings of the poor in London. He would be moved & would do something for them Himself. CXCV "PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC". Meantime certain publishing events had occurred. During his long voyage a number of Mark Twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among them "Mental Telegraphy Again," in Harpers, and in the North American Review that scorching reply to Paul Bourget's reflections upon America. Clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would hardly be patient under the strictures of a Frenchman, especially upon American women. There had been book publication also during this period. The Harpers had issued an edition of 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', which included another Tom and Huck story 'Tom Sawyer, Detective', written in Paris, and the contents of the old White Elephant book. But there had been a much more important book event. The chapters of his story of Joan having run their course in Harper's Magazine had been issued as a volume. As already mentioned, Joan had been early recognized as Mark Twain's work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page. It is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing. Those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. Some who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain's, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. When the book itself appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. The early sales were disappointing. Nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. Perhaps they did not read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a sort of general verdict that, in attempting 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain had gone out of his proper field. Furthermore, there were a number of Joan books published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which Joan was pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything else--never being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life, to be a human being, in fact, at all. But this is just the very wonder of Mark Twain's Joan. She is a saint; she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a human being besides. Considered from every point of view, Joan of Arc is Mark Twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work. It is so from the first word of its beginning, that wonderful "Translator's Preface," to the last word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of Joan with the martyr's crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through all time. The idyllic picture of Joan's childhood with her playmates around the fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to recall it here would disturb its bloom. The little poem, "L'Arbre fee de Bourlemont," Mark Twain's own composition, is a perfect note, and that curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong. Joan's girlhood, the picture of her father's humble cottage, the singing there by the wandering soldier of the great song of Roland which stirred her deepest soul with the love of France, Joan's heroism among her playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only Mark Twain could give? And the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first appearance before the wavering king. And then the great coronation scene at Rheims, and the dramatic moment when Joan commands the march on Paris --the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day of execution, what can surpass these? Nor must we forget those charming, brighter moments where Joan is shown just as a human being, laughing until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home prattle of her aged father and uncle. Only here and there does one find a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the burlesque note which was so likely to be Mark Twain's undoing. It seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these chapters without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of Joan was a book such as had not before been written. Let any one who read it then and doubted, go back and consider it now. A surprise will await him, and it will be worth while. He will know the true personality of Joan of Arc more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved her, for "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have produced." The tale is matchless in its workmanship. The quaint phrasing of the old Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on Joan's tomb. Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away. We are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for Joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. It is all bathed in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to no particular class or school--a creation apart. Not all of Mark Twain's tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his Joan that we doubt. We believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened, for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant wavers. Aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. The fight before Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than these. Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in Joan herself. But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as final. Five years later he wrote: "She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past have been realized in fiction." As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan's warfare. It is from the attack on the Tourelles: Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard. Joan rode straight to the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress. Presently he said: "It touches." "Now, then," said Joan to the waiting battalions, "the place is yours--enter in! Bugles, sound the assault! Now, then--all together--go!" And go it was. You never saw anything like it. We swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our property. Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again.... We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the Tourelles from that side. A fireboat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that. "God pity them!" said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle. She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender. That was their leader, Sir William Glasdale, a most valorous knight. He was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no more. We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans from friends and supplies. Before the sun was quite down Joan's forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of Orleans! England had resented the Yankee, but it welcomed Joan. Andrew Lang adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book, 'The Maid of France', to Mark Twain.'--[His letter proposing this dedication, received in 1909, appears to have been put aside and forgotten by Mr. Clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing health.] Brander Matthews ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is understandable. His literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is pure magic. Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West--the character of that section and the Mississippi River, especially of an older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing things. Joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a far-vanished life and time. To reincarnate, as in a living body of the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more. It is the apotheosis of history. Throughout his life Joan of Arc had been Mark Twain's favorite character in the world's history. His love for her was a beautiful and a sacred thing. He adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character, and he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed. The combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an individuality and of a career like hers. It is fitting that in his old age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written this marvelously beautiful thing. He could not have written it at an earlier time. It had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement of feeling, necessary to the achievement. It was the only book of all he had written that Mark Twain considered worthy of this dedication: 1870 To MY WIFE 1895 OLIVIA LANGDON CLEMENS THIS BOOK is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor. THE AUTHOR The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was a book not understood in the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in the end, has reversed its earlier verdict. The demand for Joan has multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year. Its author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it, for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his glory in the tale of Joan never died. On his seventy-third birthday, when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict: Nov. 30, 1908 I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation & a years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none. MARK TWAIN. CXCVI MR. ROGERS AND HELEN KELLER It was during the winter of '96, in London, that Clemens took an active interest in the education of Helen Keller and enlisted the most valuable adherent in that cause, that is to say, Henry H. Rogers. It was to Mrs. Rogers that he wrote, heading his letter: For & in behalf of Helen Keller, Stone blind & deaf, & formerly dumb. DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his wife. If she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other people to try. Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at Lawrence Hutton's house when she was fourteen years old. Last July, in Boston, when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for admission to Radcliffe College. She passed without a single condition. She was allowed only the same amount of time that is granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. Yet she scored an average of 90, as against an average of 78 on the part of the other applicants. It won't do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. Along her special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages. There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college degree for lack of support for herself & for Miss Sullivan (the teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will remember her). Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich Englishmen in her case, & I would gladly try, but my secluded life will not permit it. I see nobody. Nobody knows my address. Nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in time. So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband & get him to interest himself and Messrs. John D. & William Rockefeller & the other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen's case; get them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years, until she has completed her college course. I'm not trying to limit their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that Standard Oil Helen Keller College Fund as high as they please; they have my consent. Mrs. Hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon which shall support Helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear of want. I sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that miraculous girl? No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to plead with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & I think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer. "Here!" when its name is called in this one. There--I don't need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal that I am making; I know you too well for that: Good-by, with love to all of you, S. L. CLEMENS. The result of this letter was that Mr. Rogers personally took charge of Helen Keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen. Mr. Rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to him from Mrs. Hutton on the same morning that Mrs. Rogers had received hers from Tedworth Square. Clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to Mrs. Rogers. DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb! And I am beyond measure grateful to you both. I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl, & that Mr. Rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; & I was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you have gone far & away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall in pleasant places here, & Hereafter for it! The Huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & I am glad for their sakes as well as for Helen's. I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself on the same old cross between Bliss & Harper; & goodness knows I hope he will come to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has about it the elements of stability & permanency. However, at any time that he says sign we're going to do it. Ever sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CXCVII FINISHING THE BOOK OF TRAVEL One reading the Equator book to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. The author himself wondered at it, and to Howells wrote: I don't mean that I am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent. Indifferent to nearly everything but work. I like that; I enjoy it, & stick to it. I do it without purpose & without ambition; merely for the love of it. Indeed, I am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. It is the law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it. He saw little company. Now and, then a good friend, J.Y.W. MacAlister, came in for a smoke with him. Once Clemens sent this line: You speak a language which I understand. I would like to see you. Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine, but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome. Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. He dined with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who wrote, "Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again"; with the Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a government official he had met in India. But in all such affairs he was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the public. Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point of death. A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square with cabled instructions from his paper. He was a young man, and innocently enough exhibited his credentials. His orders read: "If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one thousand." Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable. "You don't need as much as that," he said. "Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated." The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was nearly to his office that he saw the joke. Then, of course, it was flashed all over the world. Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large volume--larger than he had ever written before. To MacAlister, April 6, 1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation: Ah, but I mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through. I am up at work now--4 o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me through. You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a working-man to strike & go to tea. And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli. When I saw her last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me. On April 13th he makes a note-book entry: "I finished my book to-day," and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript: I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last part is indelicate. Now, there's a nice distinction for you--& correctly stated, too, & perfectly true. It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark Twain's "editor" dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this particular book remain as examples. That he was not always entirely tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously, is clearly shown. In one of her comments Mrs. Clemens wrote: Page 597. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the aboriginals. I felt it in the boomerang-throwing. And Clemens just below has written: Boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, I've turned it into "Appendix." Will that answer? Page 1002. I don't like the "shady-principled cat that has a family in every port." Then I'll modify him just a little. Page 1020. 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty often. But can't I get it in anywhere? You've knocked it out every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, good word. Page 1038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy. It's out, and my father is whitewashed. Page 1050. 2d line from the bottom. Change breech-clout. It's a word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and "offal" out of the language. You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. Page 1095. Perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the Prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth. They were superb emeralds. Those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over Bombay. All right, I'll make them emeralds, but it loses force. Green rubies is a fresh thing. And besides it was one of the Prince's own staff liars that told me. That the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of April 13th, is shown by another note which followed something more than a month later: May 18, 1897. Finished the book again--addition of 30,000 words. And to MacAlister he wrote: I have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this time. Now I am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. What night will you come down & smoke? His book finished, Clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening allowed MacAlister to take him around to the Savage Club. There happened to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion Mark Twain was elected an honorary life member. There were but three others on whom this distinction had been conferred--Stanley, Nansen, and the Prince of Wales. When they told Mark Twain this he said: "Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine."--[In a volume of Savage Club anecdotes the date of Mark Twain's election to honorary membership is given as 1899. Clemens's notebook gives it in 1897.] He did not intend to rest; in another entry we find: May 23, 1897. Wrote first chapter of above story to-day. The "above story" is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. In this particular form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into a doze. The smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period of years following. Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. Clemens tried the psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought none of them to conclusion. Perhaps the most weird of these attempts, and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has become a vast tempestuous sea. Mark Twain had the imagination for these undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his literary ventures to the rocks. CXCVIII A SUMMER IN SWITZERLAND The Queen's Jubilee came along--June 22, 1897, being the day chosen to celebrate the sixty-year reign. Clemens had been asked to write about it for the American papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating some of his material with pictures of his own selection. The selections were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination. Under his portrait of Henry V. (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and overcoat) he wrote: In the original the King has a crown on. That is no kind of a thing for the King to wear when he has come home on business. He ought to wear something he can collect taxes in. You will find this represenation of Henry V. active, full of feeling, full of sublimity. I have pictured him looking out over the battle of Agincourt and studying up where to begin. Mark Twain's account of the Jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but James Tufts, then managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, had a rather matter-of-fact Englishman on the staff, who, after reading the report, said: "Well, Jim Tufts, I hope you are satisfied with that Mark Twain cable." "Why, yes," said Tufts; "aren't you?" "I should say not. Just look what he says about the number of soldiers. He says, 'I never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of a theater.' Why, Tufts, don't you know that the soldiers in the theater are the same old soldiers marching around and around? There aren't more than a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage." It was decided to vacate the house in Tedworth Square and go to Switzerland for the summer. Mrs. Crane and Charles Langdon's daughter, Julia, joined them early in July, and they set out for Switzerland a few days later. Just before leaving, Clemens received an offer from Pond of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the platform in America. It was too great a temptation to resist at once, and they took it under advisement. Clemens was willing to accept, but Mrs. Clemens opposed the plan. She thought his health no longer equal to steady travel. She believed that with continued economy they would be able to manage their problem without this sum. In the end the offer was declined. They journeyed to Switzerland by way of Holland and Germany, the general destination being Lucerne. They did not remain there, however. They found a pretty little village farther up the lake--Weggis, at the foot of the Rigi--where, in the Villa Buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at very moderate rates indeed. Weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across the blue water to Mount Pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white villages. Down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure, and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where Clemens often sat to rest and smoke. The fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded. A small tablet has engraved upon it "Mark Twain Ruhe." Farther along the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study. It was a sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily. To Twichell he wrote: This is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and new inventions. We shall always come here for the summers if we can. The others have climbed the Rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if Twichell will come and climb it with him. They had climbed it together during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before. He was full of enthusiasm over his work. To F. H. Skrine, in London, he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed to write. But of the books begun that summer at Weggis none appears to have been completed. There still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about Tom and Huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there is the tale already mentioned, the "dream" story; and another tale with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning title of "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss"--a story of Hannibal life--and some short stories. Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction. Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention. He realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them. The fact that proofs of the big book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty. As was his habit, Clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and daily affairs. They were usually proud and glad of these attentions, quick to see the humor of his remarks. But there was an old watchmaker-an 'Uhrmacher' who remained indifferent. He would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled. Clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs. "Be very careful of this watch," he said. "It is a fine one." The old man merely glared at him. "It is not a valuable watch. It is a worthless watch." "But I gave six francs for it in Paris." "Still, it is a cheap watch," was the unsmiling answer. Defeat waits somewhere for every conqueror. Which recalls another instance, though of a different sort. On one of his many voyages to America, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair when two little girls stopped before him. One of them said, hesitatingly: "Are you Mr. Mark Twain?" "Why, yes, dear, they call me that." "Won't you please say something funny?" And for the life of him he couldn't make the required remark. In one of his letters to Twichell of that summer, Clemens wrote of the arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his, and of his great delight in them. We went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of German & Swiss men & women sat grouped around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted & disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the jubilees in a row. The singers got up & stood--the talking & glass- jingling went on. Then rose & swelled out above those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house. It was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of it. No one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished the camp was theirs. It was a triumph. It reminded me of Lancelot riding in Sir Kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who thought they had struck a soft thing. The jubilees sang a lot of pieces. Arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. Away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; & that early notion is emphasized now. It is entirely beautiful to me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the jubilees & their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages; & I wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly crazy over it. Now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it were native. It is true they praise God, but that is merely a formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no foreigner. As the first anniversary of Susy's death drew near the tension became very great. A gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint. On the morning of the 18th Clemens went early to his study. Somewhat later Mrs. Clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the house. The others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no inquiries as to her destination. They guessed that she would take the little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore. This she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would leave it. One of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day in reading Susy's letters. It was evening when she returned, and her husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing. He had put in the day writing the beautiful poem, "In Memoriam," a strain lofty, tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in form.--[Now included in the Uniform Edition.] CXCIX WINTER IN VIENNA They remained two months in Weggis--until toward the end of September; thence to Vienna, by way of Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, "where the mountains seem more approachable than in Switzerland." Clara Clemens wished to study the piano under Leschetizky, and this would take them to Austria for the winter. Arriving at Vienna, they settled in the Hotel Metropole, on the banks of the Danube. Their rooms, a corner suite, looked out on a pretty green square, the Merzimplatz, and down on the Franz Josef quay. A little bridge crosses the river there, over which all kinds of life are continually passing. On pleasant days Clemens liked to stand on this bridge and watch the interesting phases of the Austrian capital. The Vienna humorist, Poetzl, quickly formed his acquaintance, and they sometimes stood there together. Once while Clemens was making some notes, Poetzl interested the various passers by asking each one--the errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender, cabmen, and others--to guess who the stranger was and what he wanted. Most of them recognized him when their attention was called, for the newspapers had proudly heralded his arrival and his picture was widely circulated. Clemens had scarcely arrived in Vienna, in fact, before he was pursued by photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters. The Viennese were his fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him they were determined not to be outdone. The 'Neues Viener Tageblatt', a fortnight after his arrival, said: It is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception in Vienna as that accorded to Mark Twain, who not only has the reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized. world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar interest on account of the genuine American character which sways it. He was the guest of honor at the Concordia Club soon after his arrival, and the great ones of Vienna assembled to do him honor. Charlemagne Tower, then American minister, was also one of the guests. Writers, diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in Vienna that was worth while, was there. Clemens gave them a surprise, for when Ferdinand Gross, Concordia president, introduced him first in English, then in German, Mark Twain made his reply wholly in the latter language. The paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that old 'Festkneipe' when it says: At 9 o'clock Mark Twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of applause took his seat at the head of the table. His characteristic shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance attracted the attention at once of all present. After a few formal convivial commonplaces the president of the Concordia, Mr. Ferdinand Gross, delivered an excellent address in English, which he wound up with a few German sentences. Then Mr. Tower was heard in praise of his august countryman. In the course of his remarks he said he could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the presence of the popular American. Then followed the greatest attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by Mark Twain in the German language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent. He had entitled his speech, "Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache" (the terrors of the German language). At times he would interrupt himself in English and ask, with a stuttering smile, "How do you call this word in German" or "I only know that in mother-tongue." The Festkneipe lasted far into the morning hours. It was not long after their arrival in Vienna that the friction among the unamalgamated Austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the Austrian Reichsrath, or Imperial Parliament. We need not consider just what the trouble was. Any one wishing to know can learn from Mark Twain's article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there than elsewhere. It is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly between the Hungarian and German wings of the house; and in the midst of it Dr. Otto Lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces. Clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with its riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--["When that house is legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice." From Mark Twain's report, "Stirring Times in Austria," in Literary Essays,]--He was intensely interested. Nothing would appeal to him more than that, unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change. He was also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge. It was a very great occasion, a "tremendous episode," he says. The memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day. In the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes imposing place among the world's unforgetable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once. Wild reports were sent to the American press; among them one that Mark Twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his handkerchief and shouted "Hoch die Deutschen!" he had been struck by an officer of the law. Of course nothing of the kind happened. The sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend who suggested that Clemens be allowed to remain: "Oh, I know him very well. I recognize him by his pictures, and I should be very glad to let him stay, but I haven't any choice because of the strictness of the order." Clemens, however, immediately ran across a London Times correspondent, who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit. Mark Twain's report of the Austrian troubles, published in Harper's Magazine the following March and now included with the Literary Essays, will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history. It was during these exciting political times in Vienna that a representative of a New York paper wrote, asking for a Mark Twain interview. Clemens replied, giving him permission to call. When the reporter arrived Clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his habit. At the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to enter. The door was ajar and he heard Mrs. Clemens say: "Youth, don't you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your being in bed?" And he heard Mark Twain's easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply: "Why, Livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for him." Clemens became a privileged character in Vienna. Official rules were modified for his benefit. Everything was made easy for him. Once, on a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge suddenly rode up: "Let him pass," he commanded. "Lieber Gott! Don't you see it's Herr Mark Twain?" The Clemens apartments at the Metropole were like a court, where with those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists, diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of Europe, and therefore of the world. A sister of the Emperor of Germany lived at the Metropole that winter and was especially cordial. Mark Twain's daily movements were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as usual, invitations and various special permissions poured in. A Vienna paper announced: He has been feted and dined from morn till eve. The homes of the aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter. Deaths never came singly in the Clemens family. It was on the 11th of December, 1897, something more than a year after the death of Susy, that Orion Clemens died, at the age of seventy-two. Orion had remained the same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother's doings, his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat; loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood his gentle nature. He had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother's success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering enthusiastically into some literary plans which Mark Twain then had in prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed. I would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the Tennessee mountaineers predicted, that I would grow up to be a great man and go to Congress. I did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man like Andy Johnson. I wouldn't give a pinch of snuff, little as I needed it, to be anybody, less than Napoleon. So when a farmer took my father's offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day I said to myself, "Would Napoleon Bonaparte have taken under advisement till the next day an offer to sell him some chickens?" To his last day and hour Orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan. It was one morning early that he died. He had seated himself at a table with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new hope. There came also, just then, news of the death of their old Hartford butler, George. It saddened them as if it had been a member of the household. Jean, especially, wept bitterly. CC MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS 'Following the Equator'--[In England, More Tramps Abroad.]--had come from the press in November and had been well received. It was a large, elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic in appearance. Clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young Harry Rogers: "With recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the author." Following the Equator was Mark Twain's last book of travel, and it did not greatly resemble its predecessors. It was graver than the Innocents Abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the Tramp. It was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest, but only his eager, first enthusiasm. It is a gentler book than the Tramp Abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one. It is better history and more informing. Its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less likely to be forced and overdone. The holy Hindoo pilgrim's "itinerary of salvation" is one of the richest of all Mark Twain's fancies, and is about the best thing in the book. The revised philosophies of Pudd'nhead Wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily speech. That some of Mark Twain's admirers were disappointed with the new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it enough. James Whitcomb Riley wrote: DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a solid week-night sessions--I have been glorying in your last book-and if you've ever done anything better, stronger, or of wholesomer uplift I can't recall it. So here's my heart and here's my hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest countryman! It's just a hail I'm sending you across the spaces--not to call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you. As gratefully as delightedly, Your abiding friend, JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. Notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes had about ended, Bliss did well with the new book. Thirty or forty thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated royalties paid into Mr. Rogers's hands. The burden of debt had become a nightmare. Clemens wrote: Let us begin on those debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer. It totally unfits me for work. This was November 10, 1897. December 29th he wrote: Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it in. To Howells, January 3d, Clemens wrote that they had "turned the corner," and a month later: We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash. There are only two claims which I dispute & which I mean to look into personally before I pay them. But they are small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3 years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning. By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. At the time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to clear himself of the heavy obligation. He had achieved that result in less than three. The world heralded it as a splendid triumph. Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers's secretary, who had been in charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom: "I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter." Miss Harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made the most of it. Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just himself. One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. Within a month after the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor, Szczepanik, and his business manager for the American rights of a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. He records in his note-book that a certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he would sell his option. I declined, and got away from the subject. I was afraid he would offer me $500,000 for it. I should have been obliged to take it, but I was born with a speculative instinct & I did not want that temptation put in my way. He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test of Mr. Rogers's scrutiny, and is heard of no more. Szczepanik had invented the 'Fernseher', or Telelectroscope, the machine by which one sees at a distance. Clemens would have invested heavily in this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the 'Fernseher' was already controlled for the Paris Exposition; so he could only employ Szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: "The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again" and "From the London Times of 1904"--magazine articles published in the Century later in the year. He was fond of Szczepanik and Szczepanik's backer, Mr. Kleinburg. In one of his note-book entries he says: Szczepanik is not a Paige. He is a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinburg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens--that is to say, he is not an ass. Clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, Rogers, any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, Twichell, or his literary adviser, Howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective provinces. Somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an interest in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which the human race was going to be healed of most of its ills. When Clemens heard that Virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of which was plasmon, he promptly provided MacAlister with five thousand pounds to invest in a company then organizing in London. It should be added that this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it paid very good dividends for several years. We shall hear of it again. For the most part Clemens was content to let Henry Rogers do his financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, Rogers put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently had some fifty thousand dollars to Mark Twain's credit, a very comfortable balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt only a few years before. It has been asserted most strenuously, by those in a position to know least about the matter, that Henry Rogers lent, and even gave, Mark Twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make heavily by speculation. No one of these statements is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money for investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. He invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by Clemens himself. What he did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--boons that Mark Twain could accept without humiliation. He did accept them and was unceasingly grateful.--[Mark Twain never lost an opportunity for showing his gratitude to Henry Rogers. The reader is referred to Appendix T, at the end of the last volume, for a brief tribute which Clemens prepared in 1902. Mr. Rogers would not consent to its publication.] CCI SOCIAL LIFE IN VIENNA Clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light. I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. Work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer. He was the lion of the Austrian capital, and it was natural that he should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute. Mrs. Clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description: Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc. I find so far, without exception, that the high-up aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable. When Clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive rank. Once a royal introduction led to an adventure. He had been giving a charity reading in Vienna, and at the end of it was introduced, with Mrs. Clemens, to her Highness, Countess Bardi, a princess of the Portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the Austrian Archduchess Maria Theresa. They realized that something was required after such an introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or two and pay their respects by writing their names in the visitors' book, kept in a sort of anteroom of the royal establishment. A few days later, about noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to the royal anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they wished to write their names in the visitors' book. The portier did not produce the book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and directed him to take them up-stairs, remarking that her Royal Highness was out, but would be in presently. They protested that her Royal Highness was not looking for them, that they were not calling, but had merely come to sign the visitors' book, but he said: "You are Americans, are you not?" "Yes, we are Americans." "Then you are expected. Please go up-stairs." Mrs. Clemens said: "Oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake. Please let us sign the book and we will go away." But it was no use. He insisted that her Royal Highness would be back in a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they must wait. They were shown up-stairs, Clemens going willingly enough, for he scented an adventure; but Mrs. Clemens was far from happy. They were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her last stand, refusing to enter. She declared that there was certainly some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and go, without parleying. It was no use. Their conductor insisted that they remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--Mrs. Clemens miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation. Writing of it to Twichell that night he said: I was hoping and praying that the Princess would come and catch us up there, & that those other Americans who were expected would arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely. Livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically ridiculous & that I would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that I would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she tried to make me promise. "Promise what?" I said. "To be quiet about this." "Indeed I won't; it's the best thing ever happened. I'll tell it and add to it & I wish Joe & Howells were here to make it perfect; I can't make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this. I would just like to see Howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his futile & inventionless subterfuges when that Princess comes raging in here & wanting to know." But Livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be funny. We were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it --Just then the door spread wide & our Princess & 4 more & 3 little Princes flowed in! Our Princess & her sister, the Archduchess Maria Theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl Archduchesses present, & aunt to the 3 little Princes), & we shook hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel. We were invited for a o'clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half. Wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation? Seems a kind of pity we were the right ones. It would have been such nuts to see the right ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors. Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Crane: Of course I know that I should have courtesied to her Imperial Majesty & not quite so deep to her Royal Highness, and that Mr. Clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected that I had no time to prepare, and if I had had I should not have been there; I only went in to help Mr. C. with my bad German. When our minister's wife is going to be presented to the Archduchess she practises her courtesying beforehand. They had met royalty in simple American fashion and no disaster had followed. We have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered in the Clemens apartments at the Hotel Metropole. They were of many nations and ranks. It was the winter in London of twenty-five years before over again. Only Mark Twain was not the same. Then he had been unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and princes, authors and ambassadors and kings. Such famous ones were there as Vereshchagin, Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai, with diplomats of many nations. A list of foreign names may mean little to the American reader, but among them were Neigra, of Italy; Paraty, of Portugal; Lowenhaupt, of Sweden; and Ghiki, of Rumania. The Queen of Rumania, Carmen Sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm admirer of Mark Twain. The Princess Metternich, and Madame de Laschowska, of Poland, were among those who came, and there were Nansen and his wife, and Campbell-Bannerman, who was afterward British Premier. Also there was Spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of Clara Clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is too long. Those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in Vienna today. They were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in the air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely expressed. Clemens and his family, as Americans, did not always have a happy time of it. It was the eve of the Spanish American War and most of continental Europe sided with Spain. Austria, in particular, was friendly to its related nation; and from every side the Clemenses heard how America was about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker nation for the sole purpose of annexing Cuba. Charles Langdon and his son Jervis happened to arrive in Vienna about this time, bringing straight from America the comforting assurance that the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense of the weak. Mrs. Clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides some American students, were Mark Hambourg, Gabrilowitsch, and the great Leschetizky himself. Leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took this occasion to inform the American visitors that their country was only shamming, that Cuba would soon be an American dependency. No one not born to the language could argue with Leschetizky. Clemens once wrote of him: He is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, I think. What life, energy, fire in a man past 70! & how he does play! He is easily the greatest pianist in the world. He is just as great & just as capable today as ever he was. Last Sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for 3 hours, and everybody was glad to let him. He told his experiences as a revolutionist 50 years ago in '48, & his battle-pictures were magnificently worded. Poetzl had never met him before. He is a talker himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the blood come & go in his face & never said a word. Whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the Cuban War, Mark Twain, by the end of May, had made up his mind as to its justice. When Theodore Stanton invited him to the Decoration Day banquet to be held in Paris, he replied: I thank you very much for your invitation and I would accept if I were foot-free. For I should value the privilege of helping you do honor to the men who rewelded our broken Union and consecrated their great work with their lives; and also I should like to be there to do, homage to our soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most righteous war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive work of it and leave Cuba free and fed when they face for home again. And finally I should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth-flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together. That is to say, the flags of England and America. To an Austrian friend he emphasized this thought: The war has brought England and America close together--and to my mind that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid. If this feeling is ever to grow cold again I do not wish to live to see it. And to Twichell, whose son David had enlisted: You are living your war-days over again in Dave & it must be strong pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension . . . . I have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as I am enjoying this one, for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. It is a worthy thing to fight for one's own country. It is another sight finer to fight for another man's. And I think this is the first time it has been done. But it was a sad day for him when he found that the United States really meant to annex the Philippines, and his indignation flamed up. He said: "When the United States sent word to Spain that the Cuban atrocities must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the Almighty made the earth. But when she snatched the Philippines she stained the flag." CCII LITERARY WORK IN VIENNA One must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how Clemens could find time to write as much as he did during those Vienna days. He piled up a great heap of manuscript of every sort. He wrote Twichell: There may be idle people in the world, but I am not one of them. And to Howells: I couldn't get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours--8 & 9 on a stretch sometimes. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died. He projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels, autobiography, even plays; he covered the whole literary round. Among these activities are some that represent Mark Twain's choicest work. "Concerning the Jews," which followed the publication of his "Stirring Times in Austria" (grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best presentation of the Jewish character and racial situation. Mark Twain was always an ardent admirer of the Jewish race, and its oppression naturally invited his sympathy. Once he wrote to Twichell: The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose. Yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his summary of Hebrew character. It was a reply to a letter written to him by a lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically, categorically, conclusively. The result pleased him. To Mr. Rogers he wrote: The Jew article is my "gem of the ocean." I have taken a world of pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it. Neither Jew nor Christian will approve of it, but people who are neither Jews nor Christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they see it. Clemens was not given to race distinctions. In his article he says: I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can't be any worse. We gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars is the French, and this, just then, mainly because of the Dreyfus agitations. He also states in this article: I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way on account of his not having a fair show. Clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward Satan (at least, as he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters to him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. A good deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print. An interview with Satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and some further comment on Austrian politics, are among the condemned manuscripts. Mark Twain's interest in Satan would seem later to have extended to his relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which he has attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one "Young Satan," a nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and promoted some astonishing adventures in Austria several centuries ago. The idea of a mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit the earth and perform mighty wonders, was always one which Mark Twain loved to play with, and a nephew of Satan's seemed to him properly qualified to carry out his intention. His idea was that this celestial visitant was not wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and suffering, having no personal knowledge of any of these things. Clemens tried the experiment in various ways, and portions of the manuscript are absorbingly interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked out--other portions being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of reality vanishes. Among the published work of the Vienna period is an article about a morality play, the "Master of Palmyra,"--[About play-acting, Forum, October, 1898.]--by Adolf Wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting Death, the all-powerful, as the principal part. The Cosmopolitan Magazine for August published "At the Appetite-Cure," in which Mark Twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in October the same magazine published his first article on "Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy." As we have seen, Clemens had been always deeply interested in mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through the imagination work physical benefits: "Within the last quarter of a century," he says, "in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines." Clemens was willing to admit that Mrs. Eddy and her book had benefited humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of her formulas and her phrasing invited. The delightful humor of the Cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout Christian Scientists were inclined to join.--[It was so popular that John Brisben Walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--Nothing that he ever did exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame rests. But there is another story of this period that will live when most of those others mentioned are but little remembered. It is the story of "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg." This is a tale that in its own way takes its place with the half-dozen great English short stories of the world-with such stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Poe; "The Luck of Roaring Camp," by Harte; "The Man Who Would be King," by Kipling; and "The Man Without a Country," by Hale. As a study of the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties, it outranks all the rest. In it Mark Twain's pessimistic philosophy concerning the "human animal" found a free and moral vent. Whatever his contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we can imagine him a gigantic Pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin, throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its pitiful antics. The temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community--of making its "nineteen leading citizens" ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world. And it is all wonderfully done. The mechanism of the story is perfect, the drama of it is complete. The exposure of the nineteen citizens in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man they have discredited, completing the carefully prepared revenge of the injured stranger, is supreme in its artistic triumph. "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" is one of the mightiest sermons against self-righteousness ever preached. Its philosophy, that every man is strong until his price is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things blaze out in a way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them. It is Mark Twain's greatest short story. It is fine that it should be that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a story-teller. He had become more than ever a moralist and a sage. Having seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at its hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing show and recording his philosophies. CCIII AN IMPERIAL TRAGEDY For the summer they went to Kaltenleutgeben, just out of Vienna, where they had the Villa Paulhof, and it was while they were there, September 10, 1898, that the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated at Geneva by an Italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to gain notoriety. The news was brought to them one evening, just at supper-time, by Countess Wydenbouck-Esterhazy. Clemens wrote to Twichell: That good & unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, & I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen's Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, & now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening & say, in a voice broken with tears, "My God! the Empress is murdered," & fly toward her home before we can utter a question --why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it & personally interested; it is as if your neighbor Antony should come flying & say, "Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!" Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday, when the funeral cortege marches. Clemens and the others went into Vienna for the funeral ceremonies and witnessed them from the windows of the new Krantz Hotel, which faces the Capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried. It was a grandly impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that made up the Empire of Austria. Clemens wrote of it at considerable length, and sent the article to Mr. Rogers to offer to the magazines. Later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear. In one place he wrote: Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state; the first time was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless pomp through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled on both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin, & moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness now & a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance, forty-four years before, when she & they were young & unaware.... She was so blameless--the Empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in person & spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it & nameless, a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its creation; would be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt. They passed a quiet summer at Kaltenleutgeben. Clemens wrote some articles, did some translating of German plays, and worked on his "Gospel," an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one's soul through selfishness, later to be published as 'What is Man?' A. C. Dunham and Rev. Dr. Parker, of Hartford, came to Vienna, and Clemens found them and brought them out to Kaltenleutgeben and read them chapters of his doctrines, which, he said, Mrs. Clemens would not let him print. Dr. Parker and Dunham returned to Hartford and reported Mark Twain more than ever a philosopher; also that he was the "center of notability and his house a court." CCIV THE SECOND WINTER IN VIENNA The Clemens family did not return to the Metropole for the winter, but went to the new Krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and commodious suite looking down on the Neuer Markt and on the beautiful facade of the Capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step away. There they passed another brilliant and busy winter. Never in Europe had they been more comfortably situated; attention had been never more lavishly paid to them. Their drawing-room was a salon which acquired the name of the "Second Embassy." Clemens in his note-book wrote: During 8 years now I have filled the position--with some credit, I trust, of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the United States of America --without salary. Which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for Mark Twain, more than any other American in Europe, was regarded as typically representing his nation and received more lavish honors. It had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether seriously or otherwise. When the Tsar of Russia proposed the disarmament of the nations William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, wrote for Mark Twain's opinion. He replied: DEAR MR. STEADY,--The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. MARK TWAIN. He was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now until the end. He no longer had any serious financial qualms. He could afford to be independent. He refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions. He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted. He declined lecture propositions from Pond at the rate of about one a month. He could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some remnants of self-respect. In a letter to Rogers he said: Pond offers me $10,000 for 10 nights, but I do not feel strongly tempted. Mrs. Clemens ditto. Early in 1899 he wrote to Howells that Mrs. Clemens had proved to him that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his English and American copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand dollars' accumulation in the bank. "I have been out and bought a box of 6c. cigars," he says; "I was smoking 4 1/2c. before." The things that men are most likely to desire had come to Mark Twain, and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them. That supreme, elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills. That he did rejoice --reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and in all that gay Viennese life-there is no doubt. He could wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by his path. Once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote: All these things might move and interest one. But how, desperately more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'At the Back of the North Wind'. Oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!... Death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us others & will not look our way. And to Twichell a few days later: A Hartford with no Susy in it--& no Ned Bunce!--It is not the city of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak.... It seems only a few weeks since I saw Susy last--yet that was 1895 & this is 1899.... My work does not go well to-day. It failed yesterday--& the day before & the day before that. And so I have concluded to put the MS. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject. I was trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an official dress for them to wear. It seems an easy theme, yet I couldn't do the thing to my satisfaction. All I got out of it was an article on Monaco & Monte Carlo--matters not connected with the subject at all. Still, that was something--it's better than a total loss. He finished the article--"Diplomatic Pay and Clothes"--in which he shows how absurd it is for America to expect proper representation on the trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those allowed by other nations. He prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked Hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a generation ago. Now and again he worked on some one of the several unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion. The German drama interested him. Once he wrote to Mr. Rogers that he had translated "In Purgatory" and sent it to Charles Frohman, who pronounced it "all jabber and no play." Curious, too, for it tears these Austrians to pieces with laughter. When I read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when I see it on the stage it is exceedingly funny. He undertook a play for the Burg Theater, a collaboration with a Vienna journalist, Siegmund Schlesinger. Schlesinger had been successful with several dramas, and agreed with Clemens to do some plays dealing with American themes. One of them was to be called "Die Goldgraeberin," that is, "The Woman Gold-Miner." Another, "The Rival Candidates," was to present the humors of female suffrage. Schlesinger spoke very little English, and Clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire German. So the work did not progress very well. By the time they had completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they good-naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they understood each other's language more perfectly before they could go on with the project. Frau Kati Schratt, later morganatic wife of Emperor Franz Josef, but then leading comedienne of the Burg Theater, is said to have been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and Director-General Herr Schlenther, head of the Burg Theater management, was deeply disappointed. He had never doubted that a play built by Schlesinger and Mark Twain, with Frau Schratt in the leading role, would have been a great success. Clemens continued the subject of Christian Science that winter. He wrote a number of articles, mainly criticizing Mrs. Eddy and her financial methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on the subject. The new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him. He realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and complete. To Twichell he wrote: Somehow I continue to feel sure of that cult's colossal future.... I am selling my Lourdes stock already & buying Christian Science trust. I regard it as the Standard Oil of the future. He laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be far more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in any quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use, making them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the payee. It seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted by the government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form or another several times since then, and still remains at this writing unadopted. He wrote John Hay about it, remarking at the close that the government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they found they couldn't kill Christians with it. He prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making it all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the magazines would take it. Perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too obvious. Great ideas, once developed, are often like that. CCV SPEECHES THAT WERE NOT MADE In a volume of Mark Twain's collected speeches there is one entitled "German for the Hungarians--Address at the jubilee Celebration of the Emancipation of the Hungarian Press, March 26, 1899." An introductory paragraph states that the ministers and members of Parliament were present, and that the subject was the "Ausgleich"--i.e., the arrangement for the apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria. The speech as there set down begins: Now that we are all here together I think that it will be a good idea to arrange the Ausgleich. If you will act for Hungary I shall be quite willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for it. It is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it was never delivered. It is only a speech that Mark Twain intended to deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press before he started for Budapest. It was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, Mark Twain was presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something the introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared speech wholly disappeared from his memory. I think I will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote Twichell]. My memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain. But I had this luck. What I did was to furnish a text for a part of the splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of the European world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to, although I did not understand any word of it, it being in Hungarian. I was glad I came, it was a great night, & I heard all the great men in the German tongue. The family accompanied Clemens to Budapest, and while there met Franz, son of Louis Kossuth, and dined with him. I assure you [wrote Mrs. Clemens] that I felt stirred, and I kept saying to myself "This is Louis Kossuth's son." He came to our room one day, and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together. He is a man one likes immensely. He has a quiet dignity about him that is very winning. He seems to be a man highly esteemed in Hungary. If I am not mistaken, the last time I saw the old picture of his father it was hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for Susy at the farm. They were most handsomely treated in Budapest. A large delegation greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed continually at their disposal. They remained several days, and Clemens showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity. It was hinted to Mark Twain that spring, that before leaving Vienna, it would be proper for him to pay his respects to Emperor Franz Josef, who had expressed a wish to meet him. Clemens promptly complied with the formalities and the meeting was arranged. He had a warm admiration for the Austrian Emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he wanted to say to him. He claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort of speech into a single German sentence of eighteen words. He did not make use of it, however. When he arrived at the royal palace and was presented, the Emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared German sentence. When he returned from the audience he said: "We got along very well. I proposed to him a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes. I said Szczepanik would invent it for him. I think it impressed him. After a while, in the course of our talk I remembered and told the Emperor I had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had forgotten it. He was very agreeable about it. He said a speech wasn't necessary. He seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. Necessarily he must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did. I couldn't unbend if I were an emperor. I should feel the stiffness of the position. Franz Josef doesn't feel it. He is just a natural man, although an emperor. I was greatly impressed by him, and I liked him exceedingly. His face is always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. It is the Emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have in him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside appearance of being the opposite. He is a man as well as an emperor--an emperor and a man." Clemens and Howells were corresponding with something of the old-time frequency. The work that Mark Twain was doing--thoughtful work with serious intent--appealed strongly to Howells. He wrote: You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else . . . . You have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading . . . . You are my "shadow of a great rock in a weary land" more than any other writer. Clemens, who was reading Howells's serial, "Their Silver-Wedding journey," then running in Harper's Magazine, responded: You are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate & delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way. I don't know how you can--but I suspect. I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived. Since I wrote my Bible--[The "Gospel," What is Man?]--(last year), which Mrs. Clemens loathes & shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before, & so I have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily nor praisefully about him any more . . . . Next morning. I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair. He was not greatly changed. Perhaps he had fewer illusions and less iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to Howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before. There is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to Mrs. Clemens's violence. I mustn't stop to play now or I shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (That is not my spelling. It is Mrs. Clemens's, I have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never remembers.) All through this Vienna period (as during several years before and after) Henry Rogers was in full charge of Mark Twain's American affairs. Clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large, that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings. The complications growing out of the type machine and Webster failures were endless.--["I hope to goodness I sha'n't get you into any more jobs such as the type-setter and Webster business and the Bliss-Harper campaigns have been. Oh, they were sickeners." (Clemens to Rogers, November 15, 1898.)]--The disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary agent. The consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time. Yet Mr. Rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt, perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention. Clemens once wrote him: Oh, dear me, you don't have to excuse yourself for neglecting me; you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling me out of a hole every little while. It makes me lazy, the way that Steel stock is rising. If I were lazier--like Rice--nothing could keep me from retiring. But I work right along, like a poor person. I shall figure up the rise, as the figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till I get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family. (N. B.--Look here, are you charging storage? I am not going to stand that, you know.) Meantime, I note those encouraging illogical words of yours about my not worrying because I am to be rich when I am 68; why didn't you have Cheiro make it 90, so that I could have plenty of room? It would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play out of "Is He Dead?"--[Clemens himself had attempted to make a play out of his story "Is He Dead?" and had forwarded the MS. to Rogers. Later he wrote: "Put 'Is He Dead?' in the fire. God will bless you. I too. I started to convince myself that I could write a play, or couldn't. I'm convinced. Nothing can disturb that conviction."] --From what I gather from dramatists, he will have his hands something more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle. Is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy of Mayo's play, "Pudd'nhead Wilson," for me? There is a capable young Austrian here who saw it in New York and wants to translate it and see if he can stage it here. I don't think these people here would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to try. A couple of London dramatists want to bargain with me for the right to make a high comedy out of the "Million-Pound Note." Barkis is willing. This is but one of the briefer letters. Most of them were much longer and of more elaborate requirements. Also they overflowed with the gaiety of good-fortune and with gratitude. From Vienna in 1899 Clemens wrote: Why, it is just splendid! I have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. Don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into gold. I mean to raise your wages again--I begin to feel that I can afford it. I think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called Unberufen. That is a German word which is equivalent to it "sh! hush' don't let the spirits hear you!" The superstition is that if you happen to let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you've had or are hoping to have you must shut square off and say "Unberufen!" and knock wood. The word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your game. Set her again--do! Oh, look here! You are just like everybody; merely because I am literary you think I'm a commercial somnambulist, and am not watching you with all that money in your hands. Bless you, I've got a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in Christendom, with the remark appended: "Look out for a handsome, tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name of Smith." Don't you try to get away--it won't work. From the note-book: Midnight. At Miss Bailie's home for English governesses. Two comedies & some songs and ballads. Was asked to speak & did it. (And rung in the "Mexican Plug.") A Voice. "The Princess Hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan." "With pleasure--where is she?" "At your elbow." I turned & took the fan & said, "Your Highness's place is in a fairy tale; & by & by I mean to write that tale," whereat she laughed a happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that I could see her better. Beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways & sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the fairy tales. She is 16 or 17, I judge. Mental Telegraphy. Mrs. Clemens was pouring out the coffee this morning; I unfolded the Neue Freie Presse, began to read a paragraph & said: "They've found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----" "By the Roentgen ray!" she exclaimed. That is what I was going to say. She had not seen the paper, & there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me. It was a plain case of telegraphy. No man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please God --primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next. The Being who to me is the real God is the one who created this majestic universe & rules it. He is the only originator, the only originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from without; the originator of colors & of all their possible combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms & shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one. He is the only originator. He made the materials of all things; He made the laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him. He made character--man can portray it but not "create" it, for He is the only creator. He, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist. CCVI A SUMMER IN SWEDEN A part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the development in Jean Clemens of a malady which time had identified as epilepsy. The loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the burden which this household had now to bear. Of course they did not for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief. They decided now to go to London, in the hope of obtaining beneficial treatment. They left Vienna at the end of May, followed to the station by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the train pulled away. Leschetizky himself was among them, and Wilbrandt, the author of the Master of Palmyra, and many artists and other notables, "most of whom," writes Mrs. Clemens, "we shall probably never see again in this world." Their Vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their life, as well as one of the saddest. The memory of Susy had been never absent, and the failing health of Jean was a gathering cloud. They stopped a day or two at Prague, where they were invited by the Prince of Thurn and Taxis to visit his castle. It gave them a glimpse of the country life of the Bohemian nobility which was most interesting. The Prince's children were entirely familiar with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which they had read both in English and in the translation. They journeyed to London by way of Cologne, arriving by the end of May. Poultney Bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great benefit by osteopathy (then known as the Swedish movements), as practised by Heinrick Kellgren at Sanna, Sweden. Clemens was all interest concerning Kellgren's method and eager to try it for his daughter's malady. He believed she could be benefited, and they made preparation to spend some months at least in Sanna. They remained several weeks in London, where they were welcomed with hospitality extraordinary. They had hardly arrived when they were invited by Lord Salisbury to Hatfield House, and by James Bryce to Portland Place, and by Canon Wilberforce to Dean's Yard. A rather amusing incident happened at one of the luncheon-parties. Canon Wilberforce was there and left rather early. When Clemens was ready to go there was just one hat remaining. It was not his, and he suspected, by the initials on the inside, that it belonged to Canon Wilberforce. However, it fitted him exactly and he wore it away. That evening he wrote: PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL, DE VERE GARDENS, July,3, 1899. DEAR CANON WILBERFORCE,--It is 8 P.M. During the past four hours I have not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all that time I have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth try as I might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners have gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to. This mystery is causing my family much alarm. It is difficult to account for it. I find I haven't my own hat. Have you developed any novelties of conduct since you left Mr. Murray's, & have they been of a character to move the concern of your friends? I think it must be this that has put me under this happy charm; but, oh dear! I tremble for the other man! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Scarcely was this note on its way to Wilberforce when the following one arrived, having crossed it in transit: July 3, 1899. DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--I have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of expression this afternoon beyond the normal and I have just discovered the reason!! I have seen the historic signature "Mark Twain" in my hat!! Doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have wondered why. I departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and was a new Lincoln & Bennett--it fitted me exactly and I did not discover the mistake till I got in this afternoon. Please forgive me. If you should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats? or shall I send it to the hotel? I am, very sincerely yrs., 20 Dean's Yard. BASIL WILBERFORCE. Clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the White Friars, the Vagabonds, the Savage, the Beefsteak, and the Authors. He spoke to them, and those "Mark Twain Evenings" have become historic occasions in each of the several institutions that gave him welcome. At the Vagabonds he told them the watermelon story, and at the White Friars he reviewed the old days when he had been elected to that society; "days," he said, "when all Londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had discovered Livingstone, and that the lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been found and they were trying him for it." At the Savage Club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and particularly that first London visit, his days in the club twenty-seven years before. "I was 6 feet 4 in those days," he said. "Now I am 5 feet 8 1/2 and daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes on . . . . Irving was here then, is here now. Stanley is here, and Joe Hatton, but Charles Reade is gone and Tom Hood and Harry Lee and Canon Kingsley. In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a lunch-basket; now he fills the world. I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher." At the Authors Club he paid a special tribute to Rudyard Kipling, whose dangerous illness in New York City and whose daughter's death had aroused the anxiety and sympathy of the entire American nation. It had done much to bring England and America closer together, Clemens said. Then he added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a pun and had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their indulgence, but for their applause. It was this: "Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be severed in Twain." Hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably his first and only attempt, and it still remains the best. They arrived in Sweden early in July and remained until October. Jean was certainly benefited by the Kellgren treatment, and they had for a time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens became enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one, urging each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore universal health. He wrote long articles on Kellgren and his science, largely justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were recorded; though Clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which appealed to both his imagination and his reason. Writing to Twichell he concluded, with his customary optimism over any new benefit: Ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife must be used--& such cases will be rare. The educated physician will himself be an osteopath. Dave will become one after he has finished his medical training. Young Harmony ought to become one now. I do not believe there is any difference between Kellgren's science and osteopathy; but I am sending to America to find out. I want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures a wider range of ailments than the doctor's methods can reach. Twichell was traveling in Europe that summer, and wrote from Switzerland: I seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those glorious Alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly talking the days through-days forever memorable to me. That was twenty-one years ago; think of it! We were youngsters then, Mark, and how keen our relish of everything was! Well, I can enjoy myself now; but not with that zest and rapture. Oh, a lot of items of our tramp travel in 1878 that I had long forgotten came back to me as we sped through that enchanted region, and if I wasn't on duty with Venice I'd stop and set down some of them, but Venice must be attended to. For one thing, there is Howells's book to be read at such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which our rustling leader keeps us. However, in Venice so far we want to be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion. Really I am drunk with Venice. But Clemens was full of Sweden. The skies there and the sunsets be thought surpassed any he had ever known. On an evening in September he wrote: DEAR JOE,--I've no business in here-I ought to be outside. I shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. Venice? land, what a poor interest that is! This is the place to be. I have seen about 60 sunsets here; & a good 40 of them were away & beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty & exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety. America? Italy? the tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. And this one--this unspeakable wonder! It discounts all the rest. It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful. Clemens read a book during his stay in Sweden which interested him deeply. It was the Open Question, by Elizabeth Robbins--a fine study of life's sterner aspects. When he had finished he was moved to write the author this encouraging word: DEAR MISS ROBBINS,--A relative of Matthew Arnold lent us your 'Open Question' the other day, and Mrs. Clemens and I are in your debt. I am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and great literary art and grace of the setting. At your age you cannot have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret? how have you written this miracle? Perhaps one must concede that genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. Well, in any case, I am grateful to you. I have not been so enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one. I seem to be using strong language; still, I have weighed it. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCVII 30, WELLINGTON COURT Clemens himself took the Kellgren treatment and received a good deal of benefit. "I have come back in sound condition and braced for work," he wrote MacAlister, upon his return to London. "A long, steady, faithful siege of it, and I begin now in five minutes." They had settled in a small apartment at 30, Wellington Court, Albert Gate, where they could be near the London branch of the Kellgren institution, and he had a workroom with Chatto & Windus, his publishers. His work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape. His note-book became a mere jumble of engagements. He did write an article or a story now and then, one of which, "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It," was made the important Christmas feature of the 'New York Sunday World.' --[Now included in the Hadleyburg volume; "Complete Works."] Another article of this time was the "St. Joan of Arc," which several years later appeared in Harper's Magazine. This article was originally written as the Introduction of the English translation of the official record of the trials and rehabilitation of Joan, then about to be elaborately issued. Clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to prepare the Introduction of this important volume, but a smug person with pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to edit Mark Twain's manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his own ideas of the Queen's English. Then he had it all nicely typewritten, and returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive thanks and compliments. He did not receive any thanks. Clemens recorded a few of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript: I will not deny that my feelings rose to 104 in the shade. "The idea! That this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this....." But I stopped there, for this was not the Christian spirit. His would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript, after which Clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well here. DEAR MR. X.,--I have examined the first page of my amended Introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your corrections. If I find any changes which shall not seem to me to be improvements I will point out my reasons for thinking so. In this way I may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as much as you have desired to profit me. First Paragraph. "Jeanne d'Arc." This is rather cheaply pedantic, & is not in very good taste. Joan is not known by that name among plain people of our race & tongue. I notice that the name of the Deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the Trials which you have favored me with. To be consistent, it will be necessary that you strike out "God" & put in "Dieu." Do not neglect this. Second Paragraph. Now you have begun on my punctuation. Don't you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that with your limitations? And do you think that you have added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the sentence? Third Paragraph. Ditto. Fourth Paragraph. Your word "directly" is misleading; it could be construed to mean "at once." Plain clarity is better than ornate obscurity. I note your sensitive marginal remark: "Rather unkind to French feelings--referring to Moscow." Indeed I have not been concerning myself about French feelings, but only about stating the facts. I have said several uncourteous things about the French --calling them a "nation of ingrates" in one place--but you have been so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them & failed to get scared at them. The next paragraph ends with a slur at the French, but I have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a compliment. It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out & dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now & then along through life it would not have petrified. Fifth Paragraph. Thus far I regard this as your masterpiece! You are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. Sixth Paragraph. You have a singularly fine & aristocratic disrespect for homely & unpretending English. Every time I use "go back" you get out your polisher & slick it up to "return." "Return" is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with a simper & a smirk. Seventh Paragraph. "Permission" is ducal. Ducal and affected. "Her" great days were not "over," they were only half over. Didn't you know that? Haven't you read anything at all about Joan of Arc? The truth is you do not pay any attention; I told you on my very first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, & you have forgotten it already. You really must get your mind out and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked together. Eighth Paragraph. She "rode away to assault & capture a stronghold." Very well; but you do not tell us whether she succeeded or not. You should not worry the reader with uncertainties like that. I will remind you once more that clarity is a good thing in literature. An apprentice cannot do better than keep this useful rule in mind. Ninth Paragraph. "Known" history. That word has a polish which is too indelicate for me; there doesn't seem to be any sense in it. This would have surprised me last week. . . . "Breaking a lance" is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & I honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in the prize-composition of the school-girl, but I have ceased from employing it since I got my puberty, & must solemnly object to fathering it here. And, besides, it makes me hint that I have broken one of those things before in honor of the Maid, an intimation not justified by the facts. I did not break any lances or other furniture; I only wrote a book about her. Truly yours, MARK TWAIN. It cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half- flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but I did it, & have never regretted it. For it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a shad like him than just . . . . I could have said hundreds of unpleasant things about this tadpole, but I did not even feel them. Yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter. Writing it had served every purpose. An important publishing event of 1899 was the issue by the American Publishing Company of Mark Twain's "Complete Works in Uniform Edition." Clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship. Brander Matthews was selected to write the Introduction and prepared a fine "Biographical Criticism," which pleased Clemens, though perhaps he did not entirely agree with its views. Himself of a different cast of mind, he nevertheless admired Matthews. Writing to Twichell he said: When you say, "I like Brander Matthews, he impresses me as a man of parts & power," I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same way. And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather-stockings & the Vicar I ain't making any objection. Dern your gratitude! His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature & loves it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him even when you don't agree with him; & he can discover & praise such merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a critic. To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. I haven't any right to criticize books, & I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; & therefore I have to stop every time I begin.'--[Once at a dinner given to Matthews, Mark Twain made a speech which consisted almost entirely of intonations of the name "Brander Matthews" to express various shades of human emotion. It would be hopeless, of course, to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of vocalization.] Clemens also introduced the "Uniform Edition" with an Author's Preface, the jurisdiction of which, he said, was "restricted to furnishing reasons for the publication of the collection as a whole." This is not easy to do. Aside from the ordinary commercial reasons I find none that I can offer with dignity: I cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit; I cannot say without immodesty that the public want a "Uniform Edition"; I cannot say without immodesty that a "Uniform Edition" will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; I cannot say without immodesty that a "Uniform Edition" will eradicate crime, though I think it will. I find no reason that I can offer without immodesty except the rather poor one that I should like to see a "Uniform Edition" myself. It is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens. Still, I believe I will stand upon that. I have to have a Preface & a reason, by law of custom, & the reason which I am putting forward is at least without offense. CCVIII MARK TWAIN AND THE WARS English troubles in South Africa came to a head that autumn. On the day when England's ultimatum to the Boers expired Clemens wrote: LONDON, 3.07 P.m., Wednesday, October 11, 1899. The time is up! Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in South Africa at this moment. Some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. Whose heart is broken by this murder? For, be he Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company. Mark Twain would naturally sympathize with the Boer--the weaker side, the man defending his home. He knew that for the sake of human progress England must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other way. In January, 1900, he wrote a characteristic letter to Twichell, which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars then in progress. DEAR JOE,--Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests & confiscate their property. If these things are so the war out there has no interest for me. I have just been examining Chapter LXX of Following the Equator to see if the Boer's old military effectiveness is holding out. It reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war. I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly conceived. He is popularly called uncivilized; I do not know why. Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest & rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation, absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher & better form of civilization than this I am not aware of it & do not know where to look for it. I suppose that we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other artificialities must be added or it isn't complete. We & the English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those others I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies. Provided we could get something better in the place of it. But that is not possible perhaps. Poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public) praise it. And so we must not utter any hurtful word about England in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race. Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, & no (instructed) Englishman doubts it. At least that is my belief. Writing to Howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in South Africa, a "sordid and criminal war," and says that every day he is writing (in his head) bitter magazine articles against it. But I have to stop with that. Even if wrong--& she is wrong England must be upheld. He is an enemy of the human race who shall speak against her now. Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? . . . I talk the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man introduces the topic. Then I say, "My head is with the Briton, but my heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer--now we will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice." And so we discuss & have no trouble. I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself. But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side only. Clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the Times. But when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and addressed to Moberly Bell--he reconsidered and withheld it. It still lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says: Don't give me away, whether you print it or not. But I think you ought to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable. CCIX PLASMON, AND A NEW MAGAZINE Clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. The financial interest which he had taken in the new milk albumen, "a food for invalids," tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon. MacAlister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was anxious to get the product adopted by the army. He believed, if he could get an interview with the Medical Director-General, he could convince him of its merits. Discussing the matter with Clemens, the latter said: "MacAlister, you are going at it from the wrong end. You can't go direct to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. Who is his nearest friend?" MacAlister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official. Clemens said, "That is the man to speak to the Director-General." "But I don't know him, either," said MacAlister. "Very good. Do you know any one who does know him?" "Yes, I know his most intimate friend." "Then he is the man for you to approach. Convince him that plasmon is what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it. Let him understand that what you want is to get this to the Director-General, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way. You'll see." This proved to be a true prophecy. It was only a little while until the British army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. MacAlister reported the success of the scheme to Clemens, and out of it grew the story entitled, "Two Little Tales," published in November of the following year (1901) in the Century Magazine. Perhaps the reader will remember that in the "Two Little Tales" the Emperor is very ill and the lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the Emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken Majesty. Clemens had the courage of his investments. He adopted plasmon as his own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate. He kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot. It was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still. There was another business opportunity came along just at this time. S. S. McClure was in England with a proposition for starting a new magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly American, with Mark Twain as its editor. The magazine was to be called 'The Universal', and by the proposition Clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate increase as his holdings grew. The scheme appealed to Clemens, it being understood in the beginning that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. He wrote of the matter to Mr. Rogers, explaining in detail, and Rogers replied, approving the plan. Mr. Rogers said he knew that he [Rogers] would have to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added: One thing I shall insist upon, however, if I have anything to do with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your mind on the subject you will stick to it. I have not found in your composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which, when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and fifty-cent pieces. If you accept the position, of course that means that you have to come to this country. If you do, the yachting will be a success. There was considerable correspondence with McClure over the new periodical. In one letter Clemens set forth his general views of the matter quite clearly: Let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if it can be prevented. This is not to be comic magazine. It is to be simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written & enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class; not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all of them. It will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. I should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for lack of interest in the work. I value humor highly, & am constitutionally fond of it, but I should not like it as a steady diet. For its own best interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the proximity of sober hues. For me to edit a comic magazine would be an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books which I have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. I think I have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to its fancy. Although I have many times been asked to write something humorous for an editor or a publisher I have had wisdom enough to decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man watching him like that. I have never tried to write a humorous lecture; I have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way not to succeed. I shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but I look for my largest entertainment in editing. I have been edited by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & I have often longed to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue others. My opportunity is come, but I hope I shall not abuse it overmuch. I mean to do my best to make a good magazine; I mean to do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. There are plenty of distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers, philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend. Meanwhile McClure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain existing facts. Something more than a month later he wrote from America at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the magazine. He went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his daily rounds. It was pretty evident that Clemens would not be able to go sailing about on Mr. Rogers's yacht or live at will in London or New York or Vienna or Elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he would be most likely to dread The scheme appears to have died there--the correspondence to have closed. Somewhat of the inducement in the McClure scheme had been the thought in Clemens's mind that it would bring him back to America. In a letter to Mr. Rogers (January 8, 1900) he said, "I am tired to death of this everlasting exile." Mrs. Clemens often wrote that he was restlessly impatient to return. They were, in fact, constantly discussing the practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the Hartford home. Clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere permanently. He was tired of the wandering life they had been leading. Besides the long trip of '95 and '96 they had moved two or three times a year regularly since leaving Hartford, nine years before. It seemed to him that they were always packing and unpacking. "The poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay put," wrote Mrs. Clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land. Mrs. Clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the Hartford home no longer held any attraction for her. There had been a time when her every letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. Now the thought filled her with dread. To her sister she wrote: Do you think we can live through the first going into the house in Hartford? I feel if we had gotten through the first three months all might be well, but consider the first night. The thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up again of the old life-disheartened her, too. She had added years and she had not gained in health or strength. When I was comparatively young I found the burden of that house very great. I don't think I was ever fitted for housekeeping. I dislike the practical part of it so much. I hate it when the servants don't do well, and I hate the correcting them. Yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or ever commanded more devoted service. Her strength of character and the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this confession. They planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing. Jean was still under Kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. They began to look about for summer quarters in or near London. CCX LONDON SOCIAL AFFAIRS All this time Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide. There was a call for him everywhere. No distinguished visitor of whatever profession or rank but must meet Mark Twain. The King of Sweden was among his royal conquests of that season. He was more happy with men of his own kind. He was often with Moberly Bell, editor of the Times; E. A. Abbey, the painter; Sir Henry Lucy, of Punch (Toby, M.P.); James Bryce, and Herbert Gladstone; and there were a number of brilliant Irishmen who were his special delight. Once with Mrs. Clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'European Morals', William E. H. Lecky. Lady Gregory was there and Sir Dennis Fitz-Patrick; who had been Governor-General at Lahore when they were in India, and a number of other Irish ladies and gentlemen. It was a memorable evening. To Twichell Clemens wrote: Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch gentleman & the Scotch lady? These are darlings, every one. Night before last it was all Irish--24. One would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish, & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle.... Sir William Butler said, "the Celt is the spearhead of the British lance." He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. The dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. Now everybody was smiling again. In a note-book entry of this time he wrote: Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900). The news came at 9.17 P.M. Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy. By then the news was all over the American continent. Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and introducing it into his speeches. Finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the House of Lords to explain his views. His old idea that the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. The committee consisted of Lords Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing. When they asked for his views he said: "In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect. I consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law." Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws. He was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee. He kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted. The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing. A few days after the copyright session, Clemens, responding to the toast, "Literature," at the Royal Literary Fund Banquet, made London laugh again, and early in June he was at the Savoy Hotel welcoming Sir Henry Irving back to England after one of his successful American tours. On the Fourth of July (1900) Clemens dined with the Lord Chief-Justice, and later attended an American banquet at the Hotel Cecil. He arrived late, when a number of the guests were already going. They insisted, however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening ended. It was not quite over. A sequel to his "Luck" story, published nine years before, suddenly developed. To go back a little, the reader may recall that "Luck" was a story which Twichell had told him as being supposedly true. The hero of it was a military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders. Clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which took place after the first collapse of the machine. It was published in Harper's Magazine for August, 1891, and something less than a year later, in Rome, an English gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him: "Mr. Clemens, shall you go to England?" "Very likely." "Shall you take your tomahawk with you?" "Why--yes, if it shall seem best." "Well, it will. Be advised. Take it with you." "Why?" "Because of that sketch of yours entitled 'Luck.' That sketch is current in England, and you will surely need your tomahawk." "What makes you think so?" "I think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your scalp, and will probably apply for it. Be advised. Take your tomahawk along." "Why, even with it I sha'n't stand any chance, because I sha'n't know him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before I know what his errand is." "Come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch is?" "Indeed I haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is. Who is it?" His informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide military significance. As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said: "Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time," and he was looking down into the face of the hero of "Luck." "I was caught unprepared," he said in his notes of it. "I didn't sit down--I fell down. I didn't have my tomahawk, and I didn't know what would happen. But he was, composed, and pretty soon I got composed and we had a good, friendly time. If he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took my scalp home intact." CCXI DOLLIS HILL AND HOME It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of London. It was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. Gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English empire from that retired spot. Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement. "Was he always really tranquil within," he says, "or was he only externally so--for effect? We cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. Facts like this speak louder than words." The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in 1900. Clemens says: The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand, splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? That they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-office District, N. W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am aware of it, but that is all. It is not possible to realize it. For there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple, & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea. They all loved Dollis Hill. Mrs. Clemens wrote as if she would like to remain forever in that secluded spot. It is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful; . . . the great old trees are beyond everything. I believe nowhere in the world do you find such trees as in England . . . . Jean has a hammock swung between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond, which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass & trees & Clara & Jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug on the grass in the shade & read & sleep. They all spent most of their time outdoors at Dollis Hill under those spreading trees. Clemens to Twichell in midsummer wrote: I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I am working & deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendous defect. Livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it. Much company came to them at Dollis Hill. Friends drove out from London, and friends from America came often, among them--the Sages, Prof. Willard Fiske, and Brander Matthews with his family. Such callers were served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to leave that idyllic spot. "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied," he wrote when the summer was about over. But there was still a greater attraction than Dollis Hill. Toward the end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long. They were all eager enough to go--Clemens more eager than the rest, though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which in a brief summer they had so learned to love. Writing to W. H. Helm, a London newspaper man who had spent pleasant hours with him chatting in the shade, he said: . . . The packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the removal to America &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred & its contents & satisfactions are departing. There is not much choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a funeral, substantially, & I am tired of attending them. They closed Dollis Hill, spent a few days at Brown's Hotel, and sailed for America, on the Minnehaha, October 6, 1900, bidding, as Clemens believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. They reached New York on the 15th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years of wandering. How glad Mark Twain was to get home may be judged from his remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him. "If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't, get away again." 
2986	----	MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY By Albert Bigelow Paine VOLUME III, Part 1: 1900-1907 CCXII THE RETURN OF THE CONQUEROR It would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the public generally made over the homecoming of Mark Twain. He had left America, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of redemption. At the moment when this Mecca, was in view a great sorrow had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human sympathy. Then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having made his financial fight single-handed-and won. He was heralded literally as a conquering hero. Every paper in the land had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his triumphs. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," says Howells, "as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens." Howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the vast acclaim of the American public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a national fickleness. Says Howells: He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in England." But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. Clemens went to the Earlington Hotel and began search for a furnished house in New York. They would not return to Hartford--at least not yet. The associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became more so. Five days after Mark Twain's return to America, his old friend and co-worker, Charles Dudley Warner, died. Clemens went to Hartford to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. To Sylvester Baxter, of Boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days later: It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, & there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford & the house again; but I realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our hearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain. Even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that Clemens would have returned to Hartford at this time. He had become a world-character, a dweller in capitals. Everywhere he moved a world revolved about him. Such a figure in Germany would live naturally in Berlin; in England London; in France, Paris; in Austria, Vienna; in America his headquarters could only be New York. Clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and Mr. Frank N. Doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished residence at 14 West Tenth Street, which was promptly approved. Doubleday, who was going to Boston, left orders with the agent to draw the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. To Clemens he said: "The house is as good as yours. All you've got to do is to sign the lease. You can consider it all settled." When Doubleday returned from Boston a few days later the agent called on him and complained that he couldn't find Mark Twain anywhere. It was reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. Doubleday was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. He walked over to 14 West Tenth Street and found what he had suspected--Mark Twain had moved in. He had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right and he was quite at home. Doubleday said: "Why, you haven't executed the lease yet." "No," said Clemens, "but you said the house was as good as mine," to which Doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the premises. Doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however. Clemens began to find defects in his new home and assumed to hold Doubleday responsible for them. He sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace, the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to Doubleday's life. As a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. To MacAlister he wrote: We were very lucky to get this big house furnished. There was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned, great size. The house at 14 West Tenth Street became suddenly one of the most conspicuous residences in New York. The papers immediately made its appearance familiar. Many people passed down that usually quiet street, stopping to observe or point out where Mark Twain lived. There was a constant procession of callers of every kind. Many were friends, old and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. Hundreds came merely to express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the war in Africa, the troubles in China; on anything under the sun, important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one might possibly hold an opinion. He was unfailing "copy" if they could but get a word with him. Anything that he might choose to say upon any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with head-lines. Sometimes opinions were invented for him. If he let fall a few words they were multiplied into a column interview. "That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes," he said of one such performance. Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that. Eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation. Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause. Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts. He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them. He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. He confined his work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an arrangement with the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books. The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens. We do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred. Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, "Some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal to Samuel L. Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate. Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent." Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled--as he himself once humorously suggested-to the "thanks of Congress" for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered. The thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. The paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the American expression of good-will. But this was an unneeded suggestion. If he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. As it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin. Even so the strain told on him. "His friends saw that he was wearing himself out," says Howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough. He did not spare himself as often as he should have done. Once to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets: In bed with a chest cold and other company--Wednesday. DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain with this pencil, but in the cir---ces I will leave it all to your imagination. Was it Grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? No, old man, no, no! Ever yours, MARK. He became again the guest of honor at the Lotos Club, which had dined him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse. That former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before had the Lotos Club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the second great occasion. In closing his introductory speech President Frank Lawrence said, "We hail him as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious," and the assembled diners roared out their applause. Clemens in his reply said: Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weighted with. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I wanted--to speak of those debts. You all knew what he meant when he referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster & Co. No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-six creditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated me well; they treated me handsomely. I never knew I owed them anything; not a sign came from them. It was like him to make that public acknowledgment. He could not let an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it. He also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes. How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away from home! We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history. We have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own gates, but in our own neighborhood. We have set Cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. We started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know. We have also been making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all the other powers can say. The "Yellow Terror" is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no part in it. Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver. We have watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child, but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something. I fear we will never raise that child. We've done more than that. We elected a President four years ago. We've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again. One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain--the Aldine, the St. Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies. His old friends were at these dinners--Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers, ex-Speaker Reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts' content. It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject. At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep irony: Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world, and the most fragrant and the purest. The very angels of heaven envy you and wish they had a government like it up there. You got it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person, or any assault was made upon her fair fame. It is you who have made this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and despair of the other capitals of the world--and God bless you for it, gentlemen, God bless you! And when you get to heaven at last they'll say with joy, "Oh, there they come, the representatives of the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel's box and turn on the limelight!" Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to Mark Twain's more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible expression. He still might make them laugh, but he also made them think, and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. He did not preach a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In an article, perhaps it was a speech, begun at this time he wrote: We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. Howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in "an upper room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where," he says, "we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and Boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China." Howells at the time expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain's countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious. But the American people were quite ready to accept him in any of his phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would somewhere be wisdom in it. He had in reality changed little; for a generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. The man who in '64 had written against corruption in San Francisco, who a few years later had defended the emigrant Chinese against persecution, who at the meetings of the Monday Evening Club had denounced hypocrisy in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able to speak out against similar abuses now. And a newer generation as willing to herald Mark Twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells. CCXIII MARK TWAIN--GENERAL SPOKESMAN Clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform. At a dinner given by the Nineteenth Century Club in November, 1900, he spoke on the "Disappearance of Literature," and at the close of the discussion of that subject, referring to Milton and Scott, he said: Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern epics like "Paradise Lost." I guess he's right. He talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of you have ever read "Paradise Lost," and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics. I guess that's true. That fact of the business is you've got to be one of two ages to appreciate Scott. When you're eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some of the rest. It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to live ninety years. But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China. It was there that he declared himself a Boxer. Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home what a pleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allow Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there. China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. The Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success. We drive the Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of his country. I am a Boxer, too, on those terms. Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring fancy rates for "extinguished missionaries" in China as Germany had done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea. The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, "I seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think." Still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure. Again to MacAlister: I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite & presently I'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time. He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government. The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform. Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening. "Think of it!" he wrote Twichell. "Two old rebels functioning there: I as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank God!" The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said: It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson's forebears had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess --Abraham Lincoln! Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are the Blue and the Gray one to-day? By authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a Rebellion--that incident is closed. I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner; and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate service. For a while. This second cousin of mine, Colonel Watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared in a slave State, was a colonel in the Confederate service, and rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great task of annihilating the Federal armies and breaking up the Union. I laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if Colonel Watterson had obeyed my orders I should have succeeded in my giant undertaking. It was my intention to drive General Grant into the Pacific--if I could get transportation--and I told Colonel Watterson to surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came. But he was insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the Union was saved. This is the first time that this secret has been revealed. Until now no one outside the family has known the facts. But there they stand: Watterson saved the Union. Yet to this day that man gets no pension. Those were great days, splendid days. What an uprising it was! For the hearts of the whole nation, North and South, were in the war. We of the South were not ashamed; for, like the men of the North, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and when men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is consecrated. To-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved; and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins answers when I say it--you are proud of the record we made in those mighty collisions in the fields. What an uprising it was! We did not have to supplicate for soldiers on either side. "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong!" That was the music North and South. The very choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from Maine to the Gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it; just as men flocked to the Crusades, sacrificing all they possessed to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe five times over. North and South we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the immortal Gettysburg speech which said: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other has yet produced. The old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable by one common great name--Americans! CCXIV MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner. His housekeeper, Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street. No contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer. Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an extortion. He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused. In the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity. In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he wrote: If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing--he will decide it against you every time. And so will the New York policeman. In London if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it. In New York--but no one carries a cab case into court there. It is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there. Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship. At the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: "This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. It is simply practical business. You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal interest whatever. I am doing this just as any citizen should do. He has no choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel with him. My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way." The driver's license was suspended. The case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in New York City. But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. His many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral. He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing. The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese. In his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for New-Year's Eve, 1900, had written: A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao- Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking- glass.--[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which was postponed until March. Clemens recalled his "Greeting" for that reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: "The list of greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and one definite name--mine: 'Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.' Now I am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. It makes me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard."] This was a sort of preliminary. Then, restraining himself no longer, he embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review entitled, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." There was crying need for some one to speak the right word. He was about the only one who could do it and be certain of a universal audience. He took as his text some Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had been saving for this purpose. The Tribune clipping said: Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment and happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what is the matter with him, and pass on. A Sun clipping depicted the "terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts "--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York. The Sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. But it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named. Another clipping from the same paper reported the "Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions," as having collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, "full payment for all destroyed property belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity." It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, "head for head"--in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected. The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough. Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred. The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. He printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said: By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve--just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels I win, heads you lose. He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument --subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel "to the benighted native"--how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the "Person Sitting in Darkness." Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." He put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it. Howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and "it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard," he added, "with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but you'd better hang yourself afterward." Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said: "So if you make the pictures, you hang with me." But pictures were not required. It was published in the North American Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the cyclone. Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his principles, the other all against him. Every paper in England and America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions. At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home. It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone. Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened. Clemens reveled in it. W. A. Rogers, in Harper's Weekly, caricatured him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, "having the time of his life." Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him as Huck Finn with a gun. The American Board was naturally disturbed. The Ament clipping which Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries. The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr. Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked Mark Twain, whose "brilliant article," he said, "would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument," not to do an innocent man an injustice. Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself. Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had "grossly exaggerated" the amount of Mr. Ament's collections. Instead of thirteen times the indemnity it should have read "one and a third times" the indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded retraction and apology. Clemens would not fail to make the apology--at least he would explain. It was precisely the kind of thing that would appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third times the correct amount. "To My Missionary Critics," in the North American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy reply. "I have no prejudice against apologies," he wrote. "I trust I shall never withhold one when it is due." He then proceeded to make out his case categorically. Touching the exaggerated indemnity, he said: To Dr. Smith the "thirteen-fold-extra" clearly stood for "theft and extortion," and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. He manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere "one-third" a little thing like that was some other than "theft and extortion." Why, only the board knows! I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an idea of it. If a pauper owes me a dollar and I catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is "theft and extortion." If I make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the thirty-three and a third cents are "theft and extortion," just the same. I will put it in another way still simpler. If a man owes me one dog --any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and I--but let it go; the board would never understand it. It can't understand these involved and difficult things. He offered some further illustrations, including the "Tale of a King and His Treasure" and another tale entitled "The Watermelons." I have it now. Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows, I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a scrupulously good fellow though devious. He was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down South, in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro then, as now, to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard. But in the private patches of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. I consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. He said that if I would approve his arrangements he would arrange. I said, "Consider me the board; I approve; arrange." So he took a gun and went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the- halfshell, and one over. I was greatly pleased and asked: "Who gets the extra one?" "Widows and orphans." "A good idea, too. Why didn't you take thirteen?" "It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion." "What is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?" It caused him to reflect. But there was no result. The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he found fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based our strange conduct--as he called it. The understudy said: "On the custom of the niggers. They all do it."--[The point had been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of the slain converts.] The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm. "Custom of the niggers! Are our morals so inadequate that we have to borrow of niggers?" Then he said to the jury: "Three melons were owing; they were collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. A melon was added for the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is another theft, another extortion. Return it whence it came, with the others. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it." He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not seem very kind. It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie: DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I know it. N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count. Yours, MARK. P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself. Carnegie answered: Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall have it. There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I like better than anything I've read for many a day. I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred message in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send that sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible for. Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little missals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become a classic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the author. Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader: Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, wrote: "I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades." Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: "I want to thank you for your matchless article in the current North American. It must make converts of well-nigh all who read it." But a Boston school-teacher was angry. "I have been reading the North American," she wrote, "and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers." On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note: "Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my own, instead of waiting and copying hers. I never thought. I suppose she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the country." A critic with a sense of humor asked: "Please excuse seeming impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? Be honest. How much money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary causes?" But there were more of the better sort. Edward S. Martin, in a grateful letter, said: "How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much seriousness." Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: "I give you my candid opinion that what you have done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. There is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes." Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism: "Do right and you will be conspicuous." CCXV SUMMER AT "THE LAIR" In June Clemens took the family to Saranac Lake, to Ampersand. They occupied a log cabin which he called "The Lair," on the south shore, near the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return another summer. There were swimming and boating and long walks in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. They gave little enough attention to the mails. They took only a weekly paper, and were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. Clemens, especially, loved the place, and wrote to Twichell: I am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of a dwelling-house. The lake edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under me that I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour. It is charmingly like sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a deep sense of comfort & contentment. The heavy forest shuts us solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors. There are beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. They take tea 5 P.M. (not invited) at the table in the woods where Jean does my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon Jean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food. They come to dinner 7 P.M. on the front porch (not invited), but Clara drives them away. It is an occupation which requires some industry & attention to business. They all have the one name --Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend--& none of them answers to it except when hungry. Clemens could work at "The Lair," often writing in shady seclusions along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[ Published in Harper's Magazine for January and February, 1902.]--"The Double-Barrelled Detective Story," intended originally as a burlesque on Sherlock Holmes. It did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly to be ranked as one of Mark Twain's successes. It contains, however, one paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his last one--on the reader. It runs as follows: It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God. The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. The careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird. But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. Some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote: MY DEAR MARK TWAIN,--Reading your "Double-Barrelled Detective Story" in the January Harper's late one night I came to the paragraph where you so beautifully describe "a crisp and spicy morning in early October." I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its woozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagus in the empty sky. Then I read the paragraph again. Oh, Mark Twain! Mark Twain! How could you do it? Put a trap like that into the midst of a tragical story? Do serenity and peace brood over you after you have done such a thing? Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? When did larches begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon? What are deciduous flowers, and do they always "bloom in the fall, tra la"? I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the author. They say, "Very well done." "The alliteration is so pretty." "What's an oesophagus, a bird?" "What's it all mean, anyway?" I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow. Am I right? Or is it a gull? Or a gullet? Hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kind as to label them? Very sincerely yours, ALLETTA F. DEAN. Mark Twain to Miss Dean: Don't you give that oesophagus away again or I'll never trust you with another privacy! So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of that city. After some opening comment he said: I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the oesophagus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother some people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been larger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for the innocent--the innocent and confiding. He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which "slept upon motionless wings." Said Clemens: Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching, and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. Alas! if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind. The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England university. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm: "DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--'Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing.' "It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature, but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your 'Double-Barrelled Detective Story.' "But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it. But, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'I'll be eternally, co-eternally cussed' if I can make it out. Is it a joke or am I an ignoramus?" Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride's sake I was not going to say so. I wrote and told him it was a joke--and that is what I am now saying to my Springfield inquirer. And I told him to carefully read the whole paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it. This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer. I have confessed. I am sorry--partially. I will not do so any more--for the present. Don't ask me any more questions; let the oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing. He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force', twenty-five thousand words, and he adds: How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! This seed was planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a book not heard of by me until then--Sherlock Holmes . . . . I've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for publication soon, if ever. I did write two satisfactory articles for early print, but I've burned one of them & have buried the other in my large box of posthumous stuff. I've got stacks of literary remains piled up there. Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on a cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Rogers had made up a party, including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col. A. G. Paine. Young Harry Rogers also made one of the party. Clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. On the 11th, at Yarmouth, he wrote: Fog-bound. The garrison went ashore. Officers visited the yacht in the evening & said an anvil had been missed. Mr. Rogers paid for the anvil. August 13th. There is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff photographed the garrison, with the exception of Harry (Rogers) and Mr. Clemens. August 14th. Upon complaint of Mr. Reed another dog was procured. He said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it. Poker, for a change. August 15th. To Rockland, Maine, in the afternoon, arriving about 6 P.M. In the night Dr. Rice baited the anchor with his winnings & caught a whale 90 feet long. He said so himself. It is thought that if there had been another witness like Dr. Rice the whale would have been longer. August 16th. We could have had a happy time in Bath but for the interruptions caused by people who wanted Mr. Reed to explain votes of the olden time or give back the money. Mr. Rogers recouped them. Another anvil missed. The descendant of Captain Kidd is the only person who does not blush for these incidents. Harry and Mr. Clemens blush continually. It is believed that if the rest of the garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. Mr. Clemens & Harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from this out. Evening. Judge Cohen came over from another yacht to pay his respects to Harry and Mr. Clemens, he having heard of their reputation from the clergy of these coasts. He was invited by the gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. Mr. Rogers lent him clothes to go home in. August 17th. The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again --not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore, while letting on to be talking to himself. This time he was dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date, untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with the Waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc. But he was not allowed to finish. We put him ashore at Portland. That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht. "We had a noble good time in the yacht," Clemens wrote Twichell on their return. "We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him." Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted. CCXVI RIVERDALE--A YALE DEGREE The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street. They spent a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home. They had permanently concluded not to return to Hartford. They had put the property there into an agent's hands for sale. Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again. They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration. They decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light. The Appleton homestead provided these things. It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the Morris family, so long prominent in New York history. On passing into the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named "Holbrook Hall." It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades. It had associations: the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature. Clemens once remembered: "We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it." There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal. They loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore. They were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own. Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a liberal-minded minister with whom Clemens easily affiliated. Clemens and Carstensen visited back and forth and exchanged views. Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the Reverend Gottheil, a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the Confucian faith, after which they were all going to a Yiddish theater. Clemens said: "Well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete --that is, either Satan or me." Howells often came to Riverdale. He was living in a New York apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. He says: "I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New-Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth." Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year and went over in October to receive their degrees. It was Mark Twain's second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American institution of learning could confer. Twichell wrote: I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever. Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality. Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home. I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration? Their plans did not avail. Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to receive their honors. When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank: DEAR SIR,--I have long been an admirer of your complete works, several of which I have read, and I am with you shoulder to shoulder in the cause of foreign missions. I would respectfully request a personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most inconvenient to you I will call at your baronial hall. I cannot doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the Twelve Apostles, who once visited you in your Hartford home and were mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will be mutually agreeable. Yours truly, W. D. HOWELLS. DR. CLEMENS. CCXVII MARK TWAIN IN POLITICS There was a campaign for the mayoralty of New York City that fall, with Seth Low on the Fusion ticket against Edward M. Shepard as the Tammany candidate. Mark Twain entered the arena to try to defeat Tammany Hall. He wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police reform. He was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of Croker, individually and collectively. He joined a society called 'The Acorns'; and on the 17th of October, at a dinner given by the order at the Waldorf-Astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he characterized Croker as the Warren Hastings of New York. His speech was really a set of extracts from Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Hastings, substituting always the name of Croker, and paralleling his career with that of the ancient boss of the East India Company. It was not a humorous speech. It was too denunciatory for that. It probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort. There is hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end. It concluded with this paraphrase of Burke's impeachment: I impeach Richard Croker of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of all the people of America, whose national character he has dishonored. I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. The Acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the Tammany ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and circulated. --[The "Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany" speech had originally been written as an article for the North American Review.] Clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. He even joined a procession that marched up Broadway, and he made a speech to a great assemblage at Broadway and Leonard Street, when, as he said, he had been sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then. But I would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what I've got. Now, don't let this leak out all over town, but I've been doing some indiscreet eating--that's all. It wasn't drinking. If it had been I shouldn't have said anything about it. I ate a banana. I bought it just to clinch the Italian vote for fusion, but I got hold of a Tammany banana by mistake. Just one little nub of it on the end was nice and white. That was the Shepard end. The other nine-tenths were rotten. Now that little white end won't make the rest of the banana good. The nine-tenths will make that little nub rotten, too. We must get rid of the whole banana, and our Acorn Society is going to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of good government all over the United States. We will elect the President next time. It won't be I, for I have ruined my chances by joining the Acorns, and there can be no office-holders among us. There was a movement which Clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a political party after him. "I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me," he wrote, "and I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for political preferment." In other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could for the betterment of his people. He had his reward, for when Election Day came, and the returns were in, the Fusion ticket had triumphed and Tammany had fallen. Clemens received his share of the credit. One paper celebrated him in verse: Who killed Croker? I, said Mark Twain, I killed Croker, I, the jolly joker! Among Samuel Clemens's literary remains there is an outline plan for a "Casting-Vote party," whose main object was "to compel the two great parties to nominate their best man always." It was to be an organization of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of which should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the man be of clean record and honest purpose. From constable up to President [runs his final clause] there is no office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean, and acceptable men. Whenever the balance of power shall be lodged in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by the Republicans and Democrats, these two parties will select the best man they have in their ranks. Good and clean government will follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country will be quite content. It was a Utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of that native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his gloomier logic. Clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he formulated that document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in these closing lines: If in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. They can be improved, and American citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment and see that it is done. Had this document been put into type and circulated it might have founded a true Mark Twain party. Clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at last with the "Founder's Night" speech at The Players, the short address which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year to the memory of Edwin Booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup passed in his honor. CCXVIII NEW INTERESTS AND INVESTMENTS The spirit which a year earlier had prompted Mark Twain to prepare his "Salutation from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century" inspired him now to conceive the "Stupendous International Procession," a gruesome pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten pages which begin: THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION At the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order: The Twentieth Century A fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of Satan. Banner with motto, "Get What You Can, Keep What You Get." Guard of Honor--Monarchs, Presidents, Tammany Bosses, Burglars, Land Thieves, Convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the symbols of their several trades. Christendom A majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood. On her head a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads of patriots who died for their countries Boers, Boxers, Filipinos; in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a Bible, open at the text "Do unto others," etc. Protruding from pocket bottle labeled "We bring you the blessings of civilization." Necklace-handcuffs and a burglar's jimmy. Supporters--At one elbow Slaughter, at the other Hypocrisy. Banner with motto--"Love Your Neighbor's Goods as Yourself." Ensign--The Black Flag. Guard of Honor--Missionaries and German, French, Russian, and British soldiers laden with loot. And so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture, mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. At the end of all, banners inscribed: "All White Men are Born Free and Equal." "Christ died to make men holy, Christ died to make men free." with the American flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of Lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful aspect over the far-reaching pageant. With much more of the same sort. It is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for Mrs. Clemens ever to consent to its publication. Advancing years did little toward destroying Mark Twain's interest in human affairs. At no time in his life was he more variously concerned and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary, political, religious, financial, scientific. He was always alive, young, actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise, though never less than important to him. He had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find dazzlingly new ways for investing it. As in the old days, he was always putting "twenty-five or forty thousand dollars," as he said, into something that promised multiplied returns. Howells tells how he found him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he learned that it was plasmon. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. It was just at this period (the beginning of 1902) that he was promoting with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in America, investing in it one of the "usual amounts," promising to make Howells over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. Once he wrote him explicit instructions: Yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer of desired results. If you wish to be elaborate--which isn't necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink. Or, stir it into your soup. Or, into your oatmeal. Or, use any method you like, so's you get it down--that is the only essential. He put another "usual sum" about this time in a patent cash register which was acknowledged to be "a promise rather than a performance," and remains so until this day. He capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and protection. It was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands. He invested a lesser sum in shares of the Booklover's Library, which was going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a few dividends. Even the old Tennessee land will-o'-the-wisp-long since repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest, and was added to his list of ventures. He made one substantial investment at this period. They became more and more in love with the Hudson environment, its beauty and its easy access to New York. Their house was what they liked it to be--a gathering --place for friends and the world's notables, who could reach it easily and quickly from New York. They had a steady procession of company when Mrs. Clemens's health would permit, and during a single week in the early part of this year entertained guests at no less than seventeen out of their twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven nights--not an unusual week. Their plan for buying a home on the Hudson ended with the purchase of what was known as Hillcrest, or the Casey place, at Tarrytown, overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the Tappan Zee, close to the Washington Irving home. The beauty of its outlook and surroundings appealed to them all. The house was handsome and finely placed, and they planned to make certain changes that would adapt it to their needs. The price, which was less than fifty thousand dollars, made it an attractive purchase; and without doubt it would have made them a suitable and happy home had it been written in the future that they should so inherit it. Clemens was writing pretty steadily these days. The human race was furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time to touch more or less on most of them. He wreaked his indignation upon the things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the expectation of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively at such times as he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner courses, amplifying on the poverty of an invention that had produced mankind as a supreme handiwork. In a letter to Howells he wrote: Your comments on that idiot's "Ideals" letter reminds me that I preached a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the human race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the Creator. It was a good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to take up a collection. He once told Howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how Mrs. Clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in the reflection that now she would not hear so much about the "damned human race." Yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he never invited, never expected gratitude. One wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did. Besides his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always writing letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of subjects, carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every sort. He even formed a curious society, whose members were young girls--one in each country of the earth. They were supposed to write to him at intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest, to which letters he agreed to reply. He furnished each member with a typewritten copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut Club, as he called it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after this fashion: I have a club--a private club, which is all my own. I appoint the members myself, & they can't help themselves, because I don't allow them to vote on their own appointment & I don't allow them to resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me. By the laws of my club there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don't know --they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good deal. It is a matter, which the club shall decide. I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You as a member for Scotland--oh, this good while! a young citizeness of Joan of Arc's home region as a member for France; a Mohammedan girl as member for Bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member for the United States--for I do not represent a country myself, but am merely member-at-large for the human race. You must not try to resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that. You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company; that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!). One of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of Europe, for the only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good- will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. May I send you the constitution & laws of the club? I shall be so glad if I may. It was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their reports, as he did in his replies, to the end. One of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter of detail. Some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the platform. I will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character. He was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such obituaries, with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself drawn by his own hand--really appeared in Harper's Weekly later in the year. Naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful, burlesque. Some of them were quite worth while. The obvious "Death loves a shining Mark" was of course numerously duplicated, and some varied it "Death loves an Easy Mark," and there was "Mark, the perfect man." The two that follow gave him especial pleasure. OBITUARY FOR "MARK TWAIN" Worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place among his "perennial-consolation heirlooms": "Got up; washed; went to bed." The subject's own words (see Innocents Abroad). Can't go back on your own words, Mark Twain. There's nothing "to strike out"; nothing "to replace." What more could be said of any one? "Got up!"--Think of the fullness of meaning! The possibilities of life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual. Got up to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth! "Washed"--Every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts, purposes. "Went to bed"--Work all done--to rest, to sleep. The culmination of the day well spent! God looks after the awakening. Mrs. S. A. OREN-HAYNES. Mark Twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth more than a whole lot of fossilized priests' eternal truths. D. H. KENNER. CCXIX YACHTING AND THEOLOGY Clemens made fewer speeches during the Riverdale period. He was as frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially the evening functions. He attended a good many luncheons with friendly spirits like Howells, Matthews, James L. Ford, and Hamlin Garland. At the end of February he came down to the Mayor's dinner given to Prince Henry of Prussia, but he did not speak. Clemens used to say afterward that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of his supposed breach of etiquette at the Kaiser's dinner in Berlin; but the fact that Prince Henry sought him out, and was most cordially and humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is against the supposition. Clemens attended a Yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally visited Twichell in Hartford. The old question of moral responsibility came up and Twichell lent his visitor a copy of Jonathan Edwards's 'Freedom of the Will' for train perusal. Clemens found it absorbing. Later he wrote Twichell his views. DEAR JOE,--(After compliments.)--[Meaning "What a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again," etc. See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. No, not all through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism & its God begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That's sound! Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane. Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my suppressed Gospel. But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man's authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words, & acts. It is frank insanity. I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when. After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk --for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to God. And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result: Man is commanded to do so & so. It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men sha'n't & others can't. These are to blame: let them be damned. I enjoy the Colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight. Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours! MARK. Clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in a manuscript which he entitled, "If I Could Be There." It is in the dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing. It is a colloquy between the Master of the Universe and a Stranger. It begins: I If I could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, I should hear conversations like this: A STRANGER. Lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been overlooked. It is in the record. I have found it. LORD. By searching? S. Yes, Lord. L. Who is it? What is it? S. A man. L. Proceed. S. He died in sin. Sin committed by his great-grandfather. L. When was this? S. Eleven million years ago. L. Do you know what a microbe is? S. Yes, Lord. It is a creature too small to be detected by my eye. L. He commits depredations upon your blood? S. Yes, Lord. L. I give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this offense. Go! Work your will upon him. S. But, Lord, I have nothing against him; I am indifferent to him. L. Why? S. He is so infinitely small and contemptible. I am to him as is a mountain-range to a grain of sand. L. What am I to man? S. (Silent.) L. Am I not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand? S. It is true, Lord. L. Some microbes are larger than others. Does man regard the difference? S. No, Lord. To him there is no difference of consequence. To him they are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential. L. To me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a microbe. Man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with indifference; I look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a size. To me both are inconsequential. Man kills the microbes when he can? S. Yes, Lord. L. Then what? Does he keep him in mind years and years and go on contriving miseries for him? S. No, Lord. L. Does he forget him? S. Yes, Lord. L. Why? S. He cares nothing more about him. L. Employs himself with more important matters? S. Yes, Lord. L. Apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities. Why does he affront me with the fancy that I interest Myself in trivialities--like men and microbes? II L. Is it true the human race thinks the universe was created for its convenience? S. Yes, Lord. L. The human race is modest. Speaking as a member of it, what do you think the other animals are for? S. To furnish food and labor for man. L. What is the sea for? S. To furnish food for man. Fishes. L. And the air? S. To furnish sustenance for man. Birds and breath. L. How many men are there? S. Fifteen hundred millions. L. (Referring to notes.) Take your pencil and set down some statistics. In a healthy man's lower intestine 28,000,000 microbes are born daily and die daily. In the rest of a man's body 122,000,000 microbes are born daily and die daily. The two sums aggregate-what? S. About 150,000,000. L. In ten days the aggregate reaches what? S. Fifteen hundred millions. L. It is for one person. What would it be for the whole human population? S. Alas, Lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that multitude. It is billions of billions multiplied by billions of billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions. The figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space on both sides. L. To what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the human race? S. That they may eat. L. Now then, according to man's own reasoning, what is man for? S. Alas-alas! L. What is he for? S. To-to-furnish food for microbes. L. Manifestly. A child could see it. Now then, with this common-sense light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean for? S. To furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply and replenish the microbes. L. Manifestly. Does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders? S. Certainly for the sake of the boarders. L. Man's a boarding-house. S. I perceive it, Lord. L. He is a boarding-house. He was never intended for anything else. If he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early. As concerns the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief that in life he did his duty by his microbes? S. Undoubtedly, Lord. He could not help it. L. Then why punish him? He had no other duty to perform. Whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least original and has a conclusive sound. Mark Twain had very little use for orthodoxy and conservatism. When it was announced that Dr. Jacques Loeb, of the University of California, had demonstrated the creation of life by chemical agencies he was deeply interested. When a newspaper writer commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. I wish I could be as young as that again. Although I seem so old now I was once as young as that. I remember, as if it were but thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or another of nature's safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they had found something valuable was plenty for me. It settled it. But it isn't so now-no. Because in the drift of the years I by and by found out that a Consensus examines a new thing with its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. There was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in Greek times: a Consensus made fun of it. There was the Marquis of Worcester's steam-engine 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it. There was Fulton's steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including the great Napoleon, made fun of it. There was Priestley, with his oxygen: a Consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship did it. And so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an extract from Adam's Diary. Then there was a Consensus about it. It was the very first one. It sat six days and nights. It was then delivered of the verdict that a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and years if there was considerable many of them. Then the Consensus got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit, spinning and sparkling in space! You never saw such a disappointed lot. ADAM. He was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though now and then he offered one of his reflections for print. That beautiful fairy tale, "The Five Boons of Life," of which the most precious is "Death," was written at this period. Maeterlinck's lovely story of the bee interested him; he wrote about that. Somebody proposed a Martyrs' Day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion. In his note-book, too, there is a memorandum for a love-story of the Quarternary Epoch which would begin, "On a soft October afternoon 2,000,000 years ago." John Fiske's Discovery of America, Volume I, he said, was to furnish the animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as to-day; but apparently this idea was carried no further. He ranged through every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning, ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested neither night nor day. In April Clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the Kanawha, which this time would sail for the Bahama and West India islands. The guests were to be about the same.--[The invited ones of the party were Hon. T. B. Reed, A. G. Paine, Laurence Hutton, Dr. C. C. Rice, W. T. Foote, and S. L. Clemens. "Owners of the yacht," Mr. Rogers called them, signing himself as "Their Guest."] He sent this telegram: H. H. ROGERS, Fairhaven, Mass. Can't get away this week. I have company here from tonight till middle of next week. Will Kanawha be sailing after that & can I go as Sunday-school superintendent at half rate? Answer and prepay. DR. CLEMENS. The sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy cruise among those balmy islands. Mark Twain was particularly fond of "Tom" Reed, who had been known as "Czar" Reed in Congress, but was delightfully human in his personal life. They argued politics a good deal, and Reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge of the subject, confessed that he "couldn't argue with a man like that." "Do you believe the things you say?" he asked once, in his thin, falsetto voice. "Yes," said Clemens. "Some of them." "Well, you want to look out. If you go on this way, by and by you'll get to believing nearly everything you say." Draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. Clemens in his notes reports that off the coast of Florida Reed won twenty-three pots in succession. It was said afterward that they made no stops at any harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory orders to "sail on and not interrupt the game." This, however, may be regarded as more or less founded on fiction. CCXX MARK TWAIN AND THE PHILIPPINES Among the completed manuscripts of the early part of 1902 was a North American Review article (published in April)--"Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?"--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal weakness. There were also some papers on the Philippine situation. In one of these Clemens wrote: We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God--the phrase is the government's, not mine--we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. With tacks in it. At least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. Indeed, it is the only way. We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. We are a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it. And again he wrote: I am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around now and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration. But a much more conspicuous comment on the Philippine policy was the so-called "Defense of General Funston" for what Funston himself referred to as a "dirty Irish trick"; that is to say, deception in the capture of Aguinaldo. Clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to-any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular campaign. The article appeared in the North American Review for May, 1902, and stirred up a good deal of a storm. He wrote much more on the subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished. CCXXI THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE One day in April, 1902, Samuel Clemens received the following letter from the president of the University of Missouri: MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS, Although you received the degree of doctor of literature last fall from Yale, and have had other honors conferred upon you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of the University of Missouri. In asking your permission to confer upon you the degree of LL.D. the University of Missouri does not aim to confer an honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. The rules of the University forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia. I hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on the fourth day of next June, when we shall hold our Annual Commencement. Very truly yours, R. H. JESSE. Clemens had not expected to make another trip to the West, but a proffered honor such as this from one's native State was not a thing to be declined. It was at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby--as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. "I have become an old man. You are still thirty-five," Clemens said. They went to the Planters Hotel, and the news presently got around that Mark Twain was there. There followed a sort of reception in the hotel lobby, after which Bixby took him across to the rooms of the Pilots Association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his return. A few of his old comrades were still alive, among them Beck Jolly. The same afternoon he took the train for Hannibal. It was a busy five days that he had in Hannibal. High-school commencement day came first. He attended, and willingly, or at least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished time. A few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. Their heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded years. Laura Hawkins was there and Helen Kercheval (Mrs. Frazer and Mrs. Garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering. He was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the graduates, and told them some things of the young people of that earlier time that brought their laughter and their tears. He was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in his own way. He took an armful of them and said to the graduates: "Take one. Pick out a good one. Don't take two, but be sure you get a good one." So each took one "unsight and unseen" aid made the more exact distributions among themselves later. Next morning it was Saturday--he visited the old home on Hill Street, and stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of photographers made pictures of "this return of the native" to the threshold of his youth. "It all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house; "a boy's home is a big place to him. I suppose if I should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse." He went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked out the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and the rest--that is to say, Tom Blankenship, John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the Bowen boys--set out on their nightly escapades. Of that lightsome band Will Pitts and John Briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less adventurous sort. Buck Brown, who had been his rival in the spelling contests, was still there, and John Robards, who had worn golden curls and the medal for good conduct, and Ed Pierce. And while these were assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old man came up and put out his hand, and it was Jimmy MacDaniel, to whom so long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had first told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats. They put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the hills and resorts and rendezvous of Tom Sawyer and his marauding band. He was entertained that evening by the Labinnah Club (whose name was achieved by a backward spelling of Hannibal), where he found most of the survivors of his youth. The news report of that occasion states that he was introduced by Father McLoughlin, and that he "responded in a very humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the conclusion. Commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother was too much for the great humorist. Before him as he spoke were sitting seven of his boyhood friends." On Sunday morning Col. John Robards escorted him to the various churches and Sunday-schools. They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact. In each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home Sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. At one place he told a moral story. He said: Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were. It is a story very proper for a Sunday-school. When I was a little boy in Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday's Hill, which of course you all know. John Briggs and I played up there. I don't suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected. Little boys in those days were 'most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that. Well, once upon a time, on Holliday's Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast. He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. Then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him. He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. First he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. John Briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. Little boys and girls, that's the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on Holliday's Hill. Of course you won't always be appreciated. He wasn't. His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never mind, he had his reward. He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. There still remains a doubt in Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability. That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday's Hill --the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer. It was jest such a Sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop. They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun. Standing there together and looking across to the low-lying Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to Lover's Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said: "John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw. Down there by the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. Down there on Lover's Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have gone now." John Briggs said: "Sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man Price and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we made up our minds that we'd catch that nigger and drown him?" They came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had so nearly brought them to grief. Sam Clemens said: "John, if we had killed that man we'd have had a dead nigger on our hands without a cent to pay for him." And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while that his career was about to close. "Once, near the shore, I thought I would let down," he said, "but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I ever had." They drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. They drank from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past. "Sam," said John, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we shall meet on this earth. God bless you. Perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship." "John," was the answer, "this day has been worth thousands of dollars to me. We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now. Good-by, John. I'll try to meet you--somewhere." CCXXII A PROPHET HONORED IN HIS COUNTRY Clemens left next day for Columbia. Committees met him at Rensselaer, Monroe City, Clapper, Stoutsville, Paris, Madison, Moberly--at every station along the line of his travel. At each place crowds were gathered when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with flowers. Sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full of tears--his voice would not come. There is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one's native State--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned. No other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for there is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir emotions as old as life itself. It was on the 4th of June, 1902, that Mark Twain received his doctor of laws degree from the State University at Columbia, Missouri. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior, were among those similarly honored. Mark Twain was naturally the chief attraction. Dressed in his Yale scholastic gown he led the procession of graduating students, and, as in Hannibal, awarded them their diplomas. The regular exercises were made purposely brief in order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees. This ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one. Gardner Lathrop read a brief statement introducing "America's foremost author and best-loved citizen, Samuel Langhorne Clemens--Mark Twain." Clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused. He seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply express his thanks and retire. Suddenly, and without a signal, the great audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet. He bowed, but he could not speak. Then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word Missouri, with a pause between each letter. It was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness. He had recovered himself when they finished. He said he didn't know whether he was expected to make a speech or not. They did not leave him in doubt. They cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy humor, gentle and dramatic pathos. He closed by telling the watermelon story for its "moral effect." He was the guest of E. W. Stevens in Columbia, and a dinner was given in his honor. They would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in St. Louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to be held a World's Fair, to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase. Another ceremony he attended was the christening of the St. Louis harbor-boat, or rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name from the St. Louis--[Originally the Elon G. Smith, built in 1873.]--to the Mark Twain. A short trip was made on it for the ceremony. Governor Francis and Mayor Wells were of the party, and Count and Countess Rochambeau and Marquis de Lafayette, with the rest of the French group that had come over for the dedication of the World's Fair grounds. Mark Twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned for the last time to his old place at the wheel. They all collected in the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion. They were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running out from the shore across the bow. In the old days he could have told whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he could not be sure any more. Turning to the pilot languidly, he said: "I feel a little tired. I guess you had better take the wheel." Luncheon was served aboard, and Mayor Wells made the christening speech; then the Countess Rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of Governor Francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, "I christen thee, good boat, Mark Twain." So it was, the Mississippi joined in according him honors. In his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious visitors from France and recounted something of the story of French exploration along that great river. "The name of La Salle will last as long as the river itself," he said; "will last until commerce is dead. We have allowed the commerce of the river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be grateful." Carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon, and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been identified as Eugene Field's birthplace. A bronze tablet recording this fact had been installed, and this was to be the unveiling. The place was not in an inviting quarter of the town. It stood in what is known as Walsh's Row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen into disrepute. Ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty lodgers were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms. A curious nondescript audience assembled around the little group of dedicators, wondering what it was all about. The tablet was concealed by the American flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached cord. Governor Francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had gathered here to unveil a tablet to an American poet, and that it was fitting that Mark Twain should do this. They removed their hats, and Clemens, his white hair blowing in the wind, said: "My friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life, made bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts cheered the thoughts of thousands who never knew him. I take pleasure in unveiling the tablet of Eugene Field." The flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed. By this time the crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking. A working-man proposed three cheers for Mark Twain, and they were heartily given. Then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood collected to regard the old house with a new interest. It was reported to Clemens later that there was some dispute as to the identity of the Field birthplace. He said: "Never mind. It is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace or not. A rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet." CCXXIII AT YORK HARBOR They decided to spend the summer at York Harbor, Maine. They engaged a cottage, there, and about the end of June Mr. Rogers brought his yacht Kanawha to their water-front at Riverdale, and in perfect weather took them to Maine by sea. They landed at York Harbor and took possession of their cottage, The Pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges. Howells, at Kittery Point, was not far away, and everything promised a happy summer. Mrs. Clemens wrote to Mrs. Crane: We are in the midst of pines. They come up right about us, and the house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the veranda that we are right in the branches. We drove over to call on Mr. and Mrs. Howells. The drive was most beautiful, and never in my life have I seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space. Howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and how he used to sit with Clemens that summer at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where they could read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and laugh their hearts out without disturbing her. Clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage "in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman": There was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. The story was one which Clemens had heard in Hannibal, and he doubtless related it in his vivid way. Howells, writing at a later time, quite naturally included it among the several manuscripts which Clemens read aloud to him. Clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have begun it, though this is unlikely. The incidents were too well known and too notorious in his old home for fiction. Among the stories that Clemens did show, or read, to Howells that summer was "The Belated Passport," a strong, intensely interesting story with what Howells in a letter calls a "goat's tail ending," perhaps meaning that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact, altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader. A far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident which Howells related to Clemens as they sat chatting together on the veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. It was a pathetic episode in the life of some former occupants of The Pines--the tale of a double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip away. Out of this grew the story, "Was it Heaven? or Hell?" a heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul. Next to "Hadleyburg," it is Mark Twain's greatest fictional sermon. Clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem. One day at Riverdale, when Mrs. Clemens had been with him on the lawn, they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs. It was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day Clemens conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion. It was built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living, and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. It is an impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer it for publication.--[This poem was completed on the anniversary of Susy's death and is of considerable length. Some selections from it will be found under Appendix U, at the end of this work.] Mrs. Clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became very seriously ill at York Harbor. Howells writes: At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale. She had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks after the arrival at York. Then, early in August, there came a great celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks at night. Mrs. Clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested. She went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and enjoying all that was going on. She was finally persuaded to forego the remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home; but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable. Howells and two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the Queen of Rumania, a Madame Hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter which closed in this simple and modest fashion: I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship! People don't always realize what a happiness that is! God bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every smile on a weary way. CARMEN SYLVA. This was the occasion mentioned by Howells when Mrs. Clemens made tea for them in the parlor for the last time. Her social life may be said to have ended that afternoon. Next morning the break came. Clemens, in his notebook for that day, writes: Tuesday, August 12, 1902. At 7 A.M. Livy taken violently ill. Telephoned and Dr. Lambert was here in 1/2 hour. She could not breathe-was likely to stifle. Also she had severe palpitation. She believed she was dying. I also believed it. Nurses were summoned, and Mrs. Crane and others came from Elmira. Clara Clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence. Clemens slipped about with warnings of silence. A visitor found notices in Mark Twain's writing pinned to the trees near Mrs. Clemens's window warning the birds not to sing too loudly. The patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated. On September 3d the note-book says: Always Mr. Rogers keeps his yacht Kanawha in commission & ready to fly here and take us to Riverdale on telegraphic notice. But Mrs. Clemens was unable to return by sea. When it was decided at last, in October, that she could be removed to Riverdale, Clemens and Howells went to Boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey from York Harbor to Riverdale without change. Howells tells us that Clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these details, and that they absorbed him. There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master . . . . With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. They made the journey on the 16th, in nine and a half hours. With the exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was apparently no worse on their arrival. The stout English butler carried her to her room. It would be many months before she would leave it again. In one of his memoranda Clemens wrote: Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night devotion to the children & me. We did not know how to value it. We know now. And in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said: Livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the people do not know. Yet she is entitled to the lion's share. He wrote Twichell at the end of October: Livy drags along drearily. It must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again. It is a most pathetic case. I wish I could transfer it to myself. Between ripping & raging & smoking & reading I could get a good deal of holiday out of it. Clara runs the house smoothly & capitally. Heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering Twichell a little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder: I should like to know how & where it happened. In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it. This is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by "banging the Bible"--(your own words). You have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark. Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens took up some work--a new Huck Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal. It was to have two parts --Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age. He did some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan. Howells answered: It is a great lay-out: what I shall enjoy most will be the return of the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. There is a matchless chance there. I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in this prefatory part. But the new story did not reach completion. Huck and Tom would not come back, even to go over the old scenes. CCXXIV THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col. George Harvey, president of the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-seventh birthday. The actual date fell three days later; but that would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen. Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a poem, "A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain," which closed: Still, to have everything beyond cavil right, We will dine with you here till Sunday night. Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an attitude of "thinking ambassador" for the guest of the evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes. "The limit has been reached," he announced at the close of Dr. van Dyke's poem. "More that is better could not be said. Gentlemen, Mr. Clemens." It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than he delivered then. He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the nation, men assembled to do him honor. They expected much of him--to Mark Twain always an inspiring circumstance. He was greeted with cheers and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready to end. When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the stillness for his voice; then he said, "I think I ought to be allowed to talk as long as I want to," and again the storm broke. It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of after-dinner eloquence,--[The "Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech" entire is included in the volume Mark Twain's Speeches.]--full of humorous stories and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twichell, and Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well. He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. This peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had shared in long friendship--demands admission: Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is not present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and I think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twichell together --and what I am I owe to them. Twichell--why, it is such a pleasure to look upon Twichell's face! For five and twenty years I was under the Rev. Mr. Twichell's tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a pew in his church and held him in due reverence. That man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long. I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now, there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank-account. Well, I liked the poetry. I liked all the speeches and the poetry, too. I liked Dr. van Dyke's poem. I wish I could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought of at all. And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday. The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially: For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents. It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his death keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he said: His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and met it half-way. Hence, he was "Tom" to the most of his friends and to half of the nation . . . . I cannot remember back to a time when he was not "Tom" Reed to me, nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible. Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to dust in a moment. The appreciation closes: I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant journey. CCXXV CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment of the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna several years before. He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and his admiration for Mrs. Eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism toward her had augmented in the mean time. Howells refers to the "mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy": He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men . . . . An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not. only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. He acknowledged good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to materia medica. It is true that his animosity for the founder of the Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. Furthermore, he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. His quarrel with Mrs. Eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was "a very unsound Christian Scientist." I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [But he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it. Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form. "Mrs. Eddy in Error," in the North American Review for April, 1903, completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time. He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various published papers and some added chapters. It would not be a large volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it with him, stating their side of the case. Mr. William D. McCrackan, one of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate. McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at considerable length. Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote McCrackan a pretty savage letter. He threw it on the hall table for mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. It was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. Next evening a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter, which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. Their friendship began there. For some reason, however, the collaborated volume did not materialize. In the end, publication was delayed a number of years, by which time Clemens's active interest was a good deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his attention. Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time in another manuscript entitled, "Eddypus," an imaginary history of a thousand years hence, when Eddyism should rule the world. By that day its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her birth. It was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such. It was just one of the things which Mark Twain wrote to relieve mental pressure. CCXXVI "WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?" The Christmas number of Harper's Magazine for 1902 contained the story, "Was it Heaven? or Hell?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An Englishman wrote: "I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so profoundly true a story"; and an American declared it to be the best short story ever written. Another letter said: I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them --then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise. There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort. It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter had even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy. I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful & pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened, three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings. Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote: Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed. As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature. Three days later he added: It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103 & 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or Hell?"--has been enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having outdoors in the winter sports. That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs. Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In an account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of Unveracity," as he called it, he said: Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. I was never able to get a reputation like Clara's. Mrs. Clemens questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits, clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income justified. Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period, as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane: Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be) toward train-time dressed in a wrapper. LIVY. Why, Clara, aren't you going to your lesson? CLARA (almost caught). Yes. L. In that costume? CL. Oh no. L. Well, you can't make your train; it's impossible. CL. I know, but I'm going to take the other one. L. Indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for your lesson. CL. No, the lesson-time has been put an hour later. L. (satisfied, then suddenly). But, Clara, that train and the late lesson together will make you late to Mrs. Hapgood's luncheon. CL. No, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to. L. (satisfied). Tell Mrs. Hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which Clara promises to do). Clara, dear, after the luncheon--I hate to put this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands for me? CL. Oh, it won't trouble me a bit-I can do it. (Takes a list of the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to another.) At 3 or 4 P.M. Clara takes the things brought from New York, studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room. LIVY. It's very good of you, dear. Of course, if I had known it was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy I wouldn't have asked you to buy them. Did you get wet? CL. Oh, nothing to hurt. L. You took a cab both ways? CL. Not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough till that was over. L. Well, now, tell me everything Mrs. Hapgood said. Clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the 5,000 Livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was and how the fishes were served. By and by, while talking of something else: LIVY. Clams!--in the end of December. Are you sure it was clams? CL. I didn't say cl---I meant Blue Points. L. (tranquilized). It seemed odd. What is Jean doing? CL. She said she was going to do a little typewriting. L. Has she been out to-day? CL. Only a moment, right after luncheon. She was determined to go out again, but---- L. How did you know she was out? CL. (saving herself in time). Katie told me. She was determined to go out again in the rain and snow, but I persuaded her to stay in. L. (with moving and grateful admiration). Clara, you are wonderful! the wise watch you keep over Jean, and the influence you have over her; it's so lovely of you, and I tied here and can't take care of her myself. (And she goes on with these undeserved praises till Clara is expiring with shame.) To Twichell: I am to see Livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad night; and I stand in dread, for with all my practice I realize that in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth anything in a sick-chamber. Now, Joe, just see what reputation can do. All Clara's life she has told Livy the truth and now the reward comes; Clara lies to her three and a half hours every day, and Livy takes it all at par, whereas even when I tell her a truth it isn't worth much without corroboration . . . . Soon my brief visit is due. I've just been up listening at Livy's door. 5 P.M. A great disappointment. I was sitting outside Livy's door waiting. Clara came out a minute ago and said L ivy is not so well, and the nurse can't let me see her to-day. That pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month. All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on life. Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. He spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages which he was allowed to push under her door. He was always waiting there long before the moment he was permitted to enter. Her illness and her helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly characterized as his "beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul." CCXXVII THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER Most of Mark Twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another, and with more or less success. He had two plays going that winter, one of them the little "Death Disk," which--in story form had appeared a year before in Harper's Magazine. It was put on at the Carnegie Lyceum with considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a long continuance. Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by Lee Arthur. This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and locality. Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent; certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse. Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver and Omaha. It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence. Certain entries in Mark Twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and thought at this period. We find such entries as this: Saturday, January 3, 1903. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny. Sunday, January 4, 1903. The offspring of poverty: Greed, sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking, cheating, stealing, murder. Monday, February 2, 1903. 33d wedding anniversary. I was allowed to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day. She makes but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some, we are sure. Sunday, March 1, 1903. We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. Thursday, March 19, 1903. Susy's birthday. She would be 31 now. The family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself, his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. Once he wrote: Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. And again: Adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received that was worth having--death. The Riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that spring. Jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was attacked by measles, and Clara also fell a victim to the infection. Fortunately Mrs. Clemens's health had somewhat improved. It was during this period that Clemens formulated his eclectic therapeutic doctrine. Writing to Twichell April 4, 1903, he said: Livy does make a little progress these past 3 or 4 days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye. The physicians are doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is the best for all ills. I should distribute the ailments around: surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist; nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to the allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism, gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist. He had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond his reply to Mrs. Eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque, "Instructions in Art," with pictures by himself, published in the Metropolitan for April and May. Howells called his attention to some military outrages in the Philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one of his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[The torture to death of Private Edward C. Richter, an American soldier, by orders of a commissioned officer of the United States army on the night of February 7, 1902. Private Richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his face, a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life became extinct.] Clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject, but he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print. Then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his fury at the race that had produced such a specimen. Mrs. Clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests, now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note. Among the books that Clemens read, or tried to read, during his confinement were certain of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He had never been able to admire Scott, and determined now to try to understand this author's popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority. He wrote to Brander Matthews: DEAR BRANDER,--I haven't been out of my bed for 4 weeks, but-well, I have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, & jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a good turn. 1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English --English which is neither slovenly nor involved? 2. Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin & commonplace, but is of a quality above that? 3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox- fire, make-believe? 4. Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses? 5. Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their characters as described by him? 6. Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and knows why? 7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? 8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to lay the book down? 9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere & in earnest? 10. Did he know how to write English, & didn't do it because he didn't want to? 11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't know the right one when he saw it? 12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day? Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens. I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can't stand any more Mannering --I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly .... My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. But a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott--Quentin Durward. Hastily he wrote to Matthews again: I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took up Quentin Durward & finished that. It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University. I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?--[This letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years later, June, 1910 message from the dead.] Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen Keller's 'The Story of My Life', then recently published. That he finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said: I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss Sullivan, I mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete & perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are all there. When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned to mathematics. With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. When the problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. The expenditures were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. The result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. He put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the money-supply. Writing to MacAlister three days later he said: It was a mistake. When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two. By God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood! Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. It was a great comfort & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the board again. Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality about a well-arranged unreality. It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive a man to suicide. He would refuse to examine the figures, they would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious about them. I cannot get that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: In any other year of these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you can, cut your cloth to fit your income. You can't do that when your wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next. The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially. They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage. So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look around among the villas for us in the regions near that city. CCXXVIII PROFFERED HONORS Mark Twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his popularity showed no signs of diminishing. So far from having waned, it had surged to a higher point than ever before. His crusade against public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of reform. When a writer in a New York newspaper said, "Let us go outside the realm of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the Presidency," and asked, "Who is our ablest and most conspicuous private citizen?" another editorial writer, Joseph Hollister, replied that Mark Twain was "the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to the fullest measure of recognition." But Clemens was without political ambitions. He knew the way of such things too well. When Hollister sent him the editorial he replied only with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny seed of a Presidential boom. One would like to publish many of the beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful, most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in length --beautiful in that they overflow with the writers' sincerity and gratitude. So many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply, some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to the suspicion of being seekers for his autograph. Almost more than any other reward, Mark Twain valued this love of the children. A department in the St. Nicholas Magazine offered a prize for a caricature drawing of some well-known man. There were one or two of certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally a wheelbarrow load of Mark Twain. When he was informed of this he wrote: "No tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the children." Tributes came to him in many forms. In his native State it was proposed to form a Mark Twain Association, with headquarters at Hannibal, with the immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the St. Louis World's Fair, to be called the Mark Twain week, with a special Mark Twain day, on which a national literary convention would be held. But when his consent was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote characteristically: It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a Mark Twain day at the great St. Louis Fair, but such compliments are not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. I value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value it as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in a sort of terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for I might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to regret having done me that honor. After I shall have joined the dead I shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race. The committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him. But again he wrote: While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of Hannibal to confer these great honors upon me I must still forbear to accept them. Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis, and at the village stations all down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without solicitation; but I am a Missourian, and so I shrink from distinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for I then become a party to my own exalting. I am humanly fond of honors that happen, but chary of those that come by canvass and intention. Somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from New Orleans to St. Louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the safety-valve. In his letter to President Francis he said: As to particulars, I think that the race should be a genuine reproduction of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that it should cover the whole course. I think the boats should begin the trip at New Orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end it at North St. Louis, a mile or two above the Big Mound. In a subsequent letter to Governor Francis he wrote: It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great Fair & get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered . . . . I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most prodigious Fair the planet has ever seen. Very well, you have indeed earned it, and with it the gratitude of the State and the nation. Newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him. They invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or short. One reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour talk. Another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he pleased. One wrote asking him two questions: the first, "Your favorite method of escaping from Indians"; the second, "Your favorite method of escaping capture by the Indians when they were in pursuit of you." They inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered most important to a young man's success; his definition of a gentleman. They wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles. But they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity. To one applicant he wrote: No, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof. Your proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it never tempts me. The price isn't the objection; you offer plenty. It is the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which I could not do well enough to satisfy me. To multiply the price by twenty would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence would make no impression upon me. Once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the Herald, when from Mr. Rogers's yacht he had watched Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock go down to defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose. CCXXXIX THE LAST SUMMER AT ELMIRA The Clemenses were preparing to take up residence in Florence, Italy. The Hartford house had been sold in May, ending forever the association with the city that had so long been a part of their lives. The Tarrytown place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for it was the belief now that Mrs. Clemens's health would never greatly prosper there. Howells says, or at least implies, that they expected their removal to Florence to be final. He tells us, too, of one sunny afternoon when he and Clemens sat on the grass before the mansion at Riverdale, after Mrs. Clemens had somewhat improved, and how they "looked up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly." It was a greeting to Howells the last he would ever receive from her. Mrs. Clemens was able to make a trip to Elmira by the end of June, and on the 1st of July Mr. Rogers brought Clemens and his wife down the river on his yacht to the Lackawanna pier, and they reached Quarry Farm that evening. She improved in the quietude and restfulness of that beloved place. Three weeks later Clemens wrote to Twichell: Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at the old stand. During three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea. Clemens did some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built so many of his stories had been written. 'A Dog's Tale'--that pathetic anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever completed in the spot consecrated by Huck and Tom, and by Tom Canty the Pauper and the little wandering Prince. It was October 5th when they left Elmira. Two days earlier Clemens had written in his note-book: Today I placed flowers on Susy's grave--for the last time probably --& read words: "Good-night, dear heart, good-night." They did not return to Riverdale, but went to the Hotel Grosvenor for the intervening weeks. They had engaged passage for Italy on the Princess Irene, which would sail on the 24th. It was during the period of their waiting that Clemens concluded his final Harper contract. On that day, in his note-book, he wrote: THE PROPHECY In 1895 Cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my 68th year (1903) I would become suddenly rich. I was a bankrupt & $94,000 in debt at the time through the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Two years later--in London--Cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, & added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. I am superstitious. I kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it. When at last it came true, October 22, 1903, there was but a month & 9 days to spare. The contract signed that day concentrates all my books in Harper's hands & now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune. They guarantee me $25,000 a year for 5 years, and they will yield twice as much as that.--[In earlier note-books and letters Clemens more than once refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized. The Harper contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher (negotiated for him by Mr. Rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune. The books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that amount, as he had foreseen.] During the conclusion of this contract Clemens made frequent visits to Fairhaven on the Kanawha. Joe Goodman came from the Pacific to pay him a good-by visit during this period. Goodman had translated the Mayan inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and publication by the British Museum. It was a fine achievement for a man in later life and Clemens admired it immensely. Goodman and Clemens enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk over the old tales. Another visitor of that summer was the son of an old friend, a Hannibal printer named Daulton. Young Daulton came with manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so Clemens wrote a letter which would insure that favor: INTRODUCING MR. GEO. DAULTON: TO GILDER, ALDEN, HARVEY, McCLURE, WALKER, PAGE, BOK, COLLIER, and such other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them friends-these: Although I have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, I have what is better: He comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not likely to happen in any of your families, I reckon. I ask you, as a favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity of its spelling. I wish to God you cared less for that particular. I set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in Hannibal, more than 50 years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business. A true man he was; and if I can be of any service to his son--and to you at the same time, let me hope--I am here heartily to try. Yours by the sanctions of time & deserving, Sincerely, S. L. CLEMENS. Among the kindly words which came to Mark Twain before leaving America was this one which Rudyard Kipling had written to his publisher, Frank Doubleday: I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. Cervantes was a relation of his. It curiously happened that Clemens at the same moment was writing to Doubleday about Kipling: I have been reading "The Bell Buoy" and "The Old Man" over and over again-my custom with Kipling's work--and saving up the rest for other leisurely and luxurious meals. A bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being. In these many recent trips up and down the Sound in the Kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and I got his meaning--now I have his words! No one but Kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. Some day I hope to hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of the distance. P. S.--Your letter has arrived. It makes me proud and glad--what Kipling says. I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are there. I would rather see him than any other man. CCXXX THE RETURN TO FLORENCE From the note-book: Saturday, October 24, 1903. Sailed in the Princess Irene for Genoa at 11. Flowers & fruit from Mrs. Rogers & Mrs. Coe. We have with us Katie Leary (in our domestic service 23 years) & Miss Margaret Sherry (trained nurse). Two days later he wrote: Heavy storm all night. Only 3 stewardesses. Ours served 60 meals in rooms this morning. On the 27th: Livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well. As well as Clara & Jean, I think, & far better than the trained nurse. She has been out on deck an hour. November 2. Due at Gibraltar 10 days from New York. 3 days to Naples, then 2 day to Genoa. At supper the band played "Cavalleria Rusticana," which is forever associated in my mind with Susy. I love it better than any other, but it breaks my heart. It was the "Intermezzo" he referred to, which had been Susy's favorite music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular opera-night long ago, and Susy's face rose before him. They were in Naples on the 5th; thence to Genoa, and to Florence, where presently they were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace built by Cosimo more than four centuries ago. In later times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of Wurtemberg and Russia. Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom Clemens had leased it. They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. The Villa Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. Yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid. Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of Italy should be--such a garden as Maxfield Parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's "Todteninsel," and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence. The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful. The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never entered. There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was, was not always in order. The place was approached by narrow streets, along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent. Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope meant always so much.--[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by Signor P. de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]--Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had hoped for. Their former sunny winter had misled them. Tradition to the contrary, Italy--or at least Tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of sunlight. It is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold. Writing to MacAlister, Clemens said: Florentine sunshine? Bless you, there isn't any. We have heavy fogs every morning & rain all day. This house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling. His dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing after another went wrong. With it all, however, Mrs. Clemens seemed to gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of company--to brighten her surroundings. Clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles about the Italian language. To Twichell he reported progress: I have a handsome success in one way here. I left New York under a sort of half-promise to furnish to the Harper magazines 30,000 words this year. Magazining is difficult work because every third page represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article & are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10 cents a word instead of 30. But this time I had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start right in each case. I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; & the reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have I approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort (Livy) has done the same. On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle & not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I am dead. I shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of the year I expect to put in on a couple of long books (half- completed ones). No more magazine work hanging over my head. This secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this enchanting view of Florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work. They are a persistent inspiration. To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest. On this (second) floor Clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that. I go in from time to time every day & trade sass for a look. The central detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun- polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in Switzerland in the days of our youth. From this letter, which is of January 7, 1904, we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens's health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December. One of the stories he had finished was "The $30,000 Bequest." The work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the mood seized him. He experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with Redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking. He dictated some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued. Among these notes there is one elaborate description of the Villa di Quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not surprised to find he had become much attached to the place. The Italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his surroundings. Some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us here: We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south. This one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion. This little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the south end of the house. The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light through the 33 glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time & at no particular place, so far as I can see. Again at the end of March he wrote: Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very homelike to me. Under certain conditions I should like to go on living in it indefinitely. I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet. I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter. Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to Mrs. Clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to continued and almost continuous house-hunting. Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just the right elevation and surroundings. There were plenty of villas; but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. Still it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and new hope always to the invalid at home. "Even if we find it," he wrote Howells, "I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her." She had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more discouraging. On February 22d Clemens wrote in his note-book: At midnight Livy's pulse went to 192 & there was a collapse. Great alarm. Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her. And to MacAlister toward the end of March: We are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring effects for Mrs. Clemens. But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. "But it will not last," he said. The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which Clara Clemens sang. Clemens in his note-book says: April 8. Clara's concert was a triumph. Livy woke up & sent for her to tell her all about it, near midnight. But a day or two later she was worse again--then better. The hearts in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and despair. One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with forebodings. Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens, Orion's wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the death of Aldrich's son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which occurred that spring. Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships. Clemens wrote Twichell: Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid in England was to Stanley's. Lord! how my friends & acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days! Vereshchagin, Mommsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley. I have known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is there I haven't known? CCXXXI THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more, as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens's room except for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he reported: For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens (unberufen). After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks bright & young & pretty. She remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and recuperative power that ever was. But ah, dear! it won't last; this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit! May 13, A.M. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute visits per day to the sick-room. And found what I have learned to expect--retrogression. There was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair to see the wonder of the early Italian summer. She had been a prisoner so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the more so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it. It was on Sunday, the 5th of June, that the end came. Clemens and Jean had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which promised to fulfil most of the requirements. They came home full of enthusiasm concerning it, and Clemens, in his mind, had decided on the purchase. In the corridor Clara said: "She is better to-day than she has been for three months." Then quickly, under her breath, "Unberufen," which the others, too, added hastily--superstitiously. Mrs. Clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all about the new property which was to become their home. She urged him to sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once, when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were. He remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well. Their talk was as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached himself, as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he had brought into her life. When he was summoned to go at last he chided himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and kissed him, saying: "You will come back," and he answered, "Yes, to say good night," meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom. He stood a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning them, her face bright with smiles. He was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation. He went to his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom done since Susy died. He went to the piano up-stairs and sang the old jubilee songs that Susy had liked to hear him sing. Jean came in presently, listening. She had not done this before, that he could remember. He sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "My Lord He Calls Me." He noticed Jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on. Mrs. Clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her attendant: "He is singing a good-night carol to me." The music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be lifted up. Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. Clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed, Clara and Jean standing as if dazed. He went and bent over and looked into her face, surprised that she did not greet him. He did not suspect what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask: "Katie, is it true? Oh, Katie, is it true?" He realized then that she was gone. In his note-book that night he wrote: At a quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!... I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of married life that hurt Livy's heart. He envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace upon her face. He wrote to Howells and to Twichell, and to Mrs. Crane, those nearest and dearest ones. To Twichell he said: How sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing! This rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death; & when I went down again (2.30) it was complete. In all that night & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed strange. To Howells he recalled the closing scene: I bent over her & looked in her face & I think I spoke--I was surprised & troubled that she did not notice me. Then we understood & our hearts broke. How poor we are to-day! But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended! I would not call her back if I could. To-day, treasured in her worn, old Testament, I found a dear & gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 13, 1896, about our poor Susy's death. I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy. And in a few days: It would break Livy's heart to see Clara. We excuse ourself from all the friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come. Intimates --but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed. Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the old times & could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, & ease my heart! CCXXXII THE SAD JOURNEY HOME A tidal wave of sympathy poured in. Noble and commoner, friend and stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence to the friend of mankind. The cablegrams came first--bundles of them from every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow. Howells, Twichell, Aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves learned the meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the language can supply to allay a heart's mourning, each recalling the rarity and beauty of the life that had slipped away. Twichell and his wife wrote: DEAR, DEAR MARK,--There is nothing we can say. What is there to say? But here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the living. HARMONY AND JOE. Howells in his letter said: She hallowed what she touched far beyond priests . . . . What are you going to do, you poor soul? A hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not, however, the beam of hope out of Helen Keller's illumined night: Do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as I reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and the light in their eyes though mine are closed. They were adrift again without plans for the future. They would return to America to lay Mrs. Clemens to rest by Susy and little Langdon, but beyond that they could not see. Then they remembered a quiet spot in Massachusetts, Tyringham, near Lee, where the Gilders lived, and so, on June 7th, he wrote: DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to do; at last I went to the girls with an idea--to ask the Gilders to get us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have not shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to be in time. An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was carried silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. She who is gone was our head, she was our hands. We are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. If she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near to death she would have told us where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were we. She was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing. We send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her heart when she died. S. L. CLEMENS. They arranged to sail on the Prince Oscar on the 29th of June. There was an earlier steamer, but it was the Princess Irene, which had brought them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel. During the period of waiting a curious thing happened. Clemens one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high window-sash. It did not move easily and his hand slipped. It was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. He mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to Frederick Duneka, he said: "Had I fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide. It was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and being misunderstood." The homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically conveyed in his notes: June 29, 1904. Sailed last night at 10. The bugle-call to breakfast. I recognized the notes and was distressed. When I heard them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear unheeded. In my life there have been 68 Junes--but how vague & colorless 67 of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one! July 1, 1904. I cannot reproduce Livy's face in my mind's eye--I was never in my life able to reproduce a face. It is a curious infirmity--& now at last I realize it is a calamity. July 2, 1904. In these 34 years we have made many voyages together, Livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; I above with the crowd & lonely. July 3, 1904. Ship-time, 8 A.M. In 13 hours & a quarter it will be 4 weeks since Livy died. Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is our last one in company. Susy was a year old then. She died at 24 & had been in her grave 8 years. July 10, 1904. To-night it will be 5 weeks. But to me it remains yesterday--as it has from the first. But this funeral march--how sad & long it is! Two days more will end the second stage of it. July 14, 1904 (ELMIRA). Funeral private in the house of Livy's young maidenhood. Where she stood as a bride 34 years ago there her coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife then committed her departed spirit to God now. It was Joseph Twichell who rendered that last service. Mr. Beecher was long since dead. It was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this tender word of farewell: Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. Nor do we believe in it. We who journeyed through the bygone years in companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old. The way behind is long; the way before is short. The end cannot be far off. But what of that? Can we not say, each one: "So long that power hath blessed me, sure it still Will lead me on; O'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn, their angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!" And so good-by. Good-by, dear heart! Strong, tender, and true. Good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away. Dr. Eastman, who had succeeded Mr. Beecher, closed the service with a prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we love was finished. Clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave, bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the German line: 'Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne'! CCXXXIII BEGINNING ANOTHER HOME There was an extra cottage on the Gilder place at Tyringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. Clemens, in his note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents. July 24, 1904. Rain--rain--rain. Cold. We built a fire in my room. Then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted. July 31. LEE, MASSACHUSETTS (BERKSHIRE HILLS). Last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. Trolley frightened Jean's horse --collision--horse killed. Rodman Gilder picked Jean up, unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. Face, nose, side, back contused; tendon of left ankle broken. August 10. NEW YORK. Clam here sick--never well since June 5. Jean is at the summer home in the Berkshire Hills crippled. The next entry records the third death in the Clemens family within a period of eight months--that of Mrs. Moffett, who had been Pamela Clemens. Clemens writes: September 1. Died at Greenwich, Connecticut, my sister, Pamela Moffett, aged about 73. Death dates this year January 14, June 5, September 1. That fall they took a house in New York City, on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, No. 21, remaining for a time at the Grosvenor while the new home was being set in order. The home furniture was brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. Clemens wrote: We have not seen it for thirteen years. Katie Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years, cried when she told me about it to-day. She said, "I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely." Clara Clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. The life at 21 Fifth Avenue, therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family --Clemens and Jean. Clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tyringham, though without much success. He was not well; he was restless and disturbed; his heart bleak with a great loneliness. He prepared an article on Copyright for the 'North American Review',--[Published Jan., 7905. A dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to Thorwald Stolberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, D. C. One of the best of Mark Twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'Eve's Diary', which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away. Adam's single comment at the end, "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. These two books, Adam's Diary and Eve's--amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. Only here the likeness ceases. No Serpent ever entered their Eden. And they never left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together. In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published "Saint Joan of Arc"--the same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before. Joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the public heart. Those who read it were likely to go back and read the Recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. In his later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. Letters came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. A distinguished educator wrote: I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any other piece of literature in any language. And this sentiment grew. The demand for the book increased, and has continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. In the long and last analysis the good must prevail. A day will come when there will be as many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain's works. [The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following 1904. The sales for that year in America were 1,726; for 1905, 2,445 for 1906, 5,381; for 1907, 6,574. At this point it passed Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Yankee, The Gilded Age, Life on the Mississippi, overtook the Tramp Abroad, and more than doubled The American Claimant. Only The Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Roughing It still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.] CCXXXIV LIFE AT 21 FIFTH AVENUE The house at 21 Fifth Avenue, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. It was a proper residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome Hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him. It lacked soul. He added, presently, a great AEolian Orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. He believed that he would play it himself when he needed the comfort of harmony, and that Jean, who had not received musical training, or his secretary could also play to him. He had a passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures, though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical compositions. For Wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a letter to Mrs. Crane he said: Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so divinely beautiful as "Tannhauser." It ought to be used as a religious service. Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. Once, writing to Jean, he asked: What is your favorite piece of music, dear? Mine is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I have found that out within a day or two. It was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer themes of Chopin's nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the "Lorelei" and the "Erlking" and the Scottish airs never wearied him. Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known and laid away. He went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and intimate friends. Once he attended a small dinner given him by George Smalley at the Metropolitan Club; but it was a private affair, with only good friends present. Still, it formed the beginning of his return to social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. As the months wore on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time habit. Then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises. The improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. He estimated that the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for publication. Once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim of a frightful trolley and train collision in Newark, New Jersey, he wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print. DEAR MISS MADELINE, Your good & admiring & affectionate brother has told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that bygone time. I wish I could take you sound & whole out of your bed & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there. For in my spirit I am merciful, and would not break their necks & backs also, as some would who have no feeling. It is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not an intrusion, you see. May you get well-& soon! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. A very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to St. Clair McKelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway accident. DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful. As I understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before . . . . The government's official report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to take care of our railroad business. But it is characteristically American--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages. A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric Russia. Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote: It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest & peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan, or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference--if they have a preference. An article, "The Tsar's Soliloquy," written at this time, was published in the North American Review for March (1905). He wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside. On a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. "The Soliloquy," however, is severe enough. It represents the Tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he presents: Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and worship?--manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle which is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately, none knows better than I: it is my clothes! Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. Then who is the real Emperor of Russia! My clothes! There is no other. The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote "King Leopold's Soliloquy," the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields. Seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture of them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo, a domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the ward of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen nations, America and thirteen European states. Leopold promptly seized the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever committed by an assemblage of civilized people.] Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and Clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His interest did not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared: "I have said all I can say on that terrible subject. I am heart and soul in any movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot write any more." His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely. His final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold when time should have claimed him. It ran: Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages after all the Caesars and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium. Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the Philippines, and in his letters to Twichell he did not hesitate to criticize the President's attitude in this and related matters. Once, in a moment of irritation, he wrote: DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the President. If I could only find the words to define it with! Here they are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome: "For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated Roosevelt the statesman and politician." It's mighty good. Every time in twenty-five years that I have met Roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman & politician I find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy. It is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware of them; ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in his way.... But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it & (ought to) concede it. We are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane & irresponsible. He wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people. It is set down here, because it is a part of Mark Twain's history, and also because a little while after his death there happened to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note (since often reprinted), which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind. It seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation's servants. Clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the "War Prayer." It pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters that tremendous invocation: God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder, Thy clarion, and lightning, Thy sword! and the "long prayer" for victory to the nation's armies. As the prayer closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the preacher's place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he begins: "I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!..... He has heard the prayer of His servant, your shepherd, & will grant it if such shall be your desire after I His messenger shall have explained to you its import--that is to say its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think. "God's servant & yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused & taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two--one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken & the unspoken . . . . "You have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently prayed, silently. And ignorantly & unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is completed into those pregnant words. "Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen! "O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun- flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of one who is the Spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble & contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord; & Thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen." (After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the "War Prayer," stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. "Still you--are going to publish it, are you not?" Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. "No," he said, "I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead." He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind. To Twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely: Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine. To Twichell he pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the very best methods known of diminishing the human race. What a life it is!--this one! Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. After years of thought & labor I have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. Damn such a world anyway. He generally wrote Twichell when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honored by his confidence. In one letter of that year he said: I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. If I tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I couldn't afford the risk. No, the certainty! The certainty that I wouldn't be satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly every time. I have a family to support, & I can't afford this kind of dissipation. Last winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article three times before I got it to suit me. I Put $500 worth of work on it every day for ten days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained but 3,000 words-$900. I burned it & said I would reform. And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically, because I don't have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that isn't any matter; I'm not writing it for that. I have used you as an equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions besides; I can't use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it; I dasn't use Clara, there's things I have to say which she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. And so--you're It. [See the preface to the "Autobiography of Mark Twain": 'I am writing from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.' D.W.] CCXXXV A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people, and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends. Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the painter, and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family, and many more. Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said: I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the middle of October. Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago. Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired wanting for that man to get old. They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there. There was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship. The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook. Clemens wrote to Twichell: We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock. It is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friendship. It is the most remarkable thing I ever heard of. This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript. . It was a fantastic tale entitled "3,000 Years among the Microbes," a sort of scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of course --Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree. He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous passages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For extracts from "3,000 Years among the Microbes" see Appendix V, at the end of this work.] MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE BOOK: 3000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES By a Microbe WITH NOTES added by the same Hand 7000 years later Translated from the Original Microbic by Mark Twain His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. Once he wrote to Mrs. Crane: SUSY DEAR,--I have had a lovely dream. Livy, dressed in black, was sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet as she used to when she was in health. She said, "What is the name of your sweet sister?" I said, "Pamela." "Oh yes, that is it, I thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write it down for me?" I reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands upon both, then said to myself, "It is only a dream," and turned back sorrowfully & there she was still. The conviction flamed through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality. I said, "How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!" She only smiled and did not ask what dream I meant, which surprised me. She leaned her head against mine & kept saying, "I was perfectly sure it was a dream; I never would have believed it wasn't." I think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. I woke & did not know I had been dreaming. She was gone. I wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but I did not spend any thought upon that. I was too busy thinking of how vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still ours & with us. He had the orchestrelle moved to Dublin, although it was no small undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief drifted farther behind him. Sometimes, in the afternoon or in the evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land and sea, of the past and of the future, "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," of the friends he had known and of the things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world. It was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which Howells once said: "We shall never know its like again. When he dies it will die with him." It was during the summer at Dublin that Clemens and Rogers together made up a philanthropic ruse on Twichell. Twichell, through his own prodigal charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which Rogers knew. Rogers was a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many of them of which the world will never know: In this case he said: "Clemens, I want to help Twichell out of his financial difficulty. I will supply the money and you will do the giving. Twichell must think it comes from you." Clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a false light to them, and that Twichell should learn the truth of the gift, sooner or later. So the deed was done, and Twichell and his wife lavished their thanks upon Clemens, who, with his wife, had more than once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now. Clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them to Clara in Norfolk, and later to Rogers himself. He pretended to take great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed delight. To Rogers he wrote: I wanted her [Clara] to see what a generous father she's got. I didn't tell her it was you, but by and by I want to tell her, when I have your consent; then I shall want her to remember the letters. I want a record there, for my Life when I am dead, & must be able to furnish the facts about the Relief-of-Lucknow-Twichell in case I fall suddenly, before I get those facts with your consent, before the Twichells themselves. I read those letters with immense pride! I recognized that I had scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. I haven't had anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon. P. S.-I am hurrying them off to you because I dasn't read them again! I should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe I gave that money. Mr. Rogers hastily replied: MY DEAR CLEMENS,--The letters are lovely. Don't breathe. They are so happy! It would be a crime to let them think that you have in any way deceived them. I can keep still. You must. I am sending you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape detection. Don't get rattled. Seriously. You have done a kindness. You are proud of it, I know. You have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. Joe Wadsworth and I once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a Christmas present. No crime in that. I always put my counterfeit money on the plate. "The passer of the sasser" always smiles at me and I get credit for doing generous things. But seriously again, if you do feel a little uncomfortable wait until I see you before you tell anybody. Avoid cultivating misery. I am trying to loaf ten solid days. We do hope to see you soon. The secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically) passed out of Clemens's mind altogether. He never remembered to tell Twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish. The Russian-Japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement occurred in August. The terms of it did not please Mark Twain. When a newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the subject he wrote: Russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and intolerable slavery. I was hoping there would be no peace until Russian liberty was safe. I think that this was a holy war, in the best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever charged with a higher mission. I think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and Russia's chain riveted; this time to stay. I think the Tsar will now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him, and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an immeasurable joy. I think Russian liberty has had its last chance and has lost it. I think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. One more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of unborn Russians, and I wish it could have been fought. I hope I am mistaken, yet in all sincerity I believe that this peace is entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history. It was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. It was the message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance of knowledge and human understanding. Clemens, a few days later, was invited by Colonel Harvey to dine with Baron Rosen and M. Sergius Witte; but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance. His telegram of declination apparently pleased the Russian officials, for Witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to take it home to show to the Tsar. It was as follows: To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it. MARK TWAIN. But this was a modified form. His original draft would perhaps have been less gratifying to that Russian embassy. It read: To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence & hard work is acquiring it. MARK. There was still another form, brief and expressive: DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. Clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. Charles Francis Adams wrote him: It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views I have myself all along entertained. And this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to him. Clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay entitled, "The Privilege of the Grave"--that is to say, free speech. He was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away, could be published without damage to his friends or family. An article entitled, "Interpreting the Deity," he counted as among the things to be uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. It is an article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the intentions of the Almighty, with historical examples of God's judgments and vindications. Here is a fair specimen. It refers to the chronicle of Henry Huntington: All through this book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions of God and with the reasons for the intentions. Sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out the one that brought the worms. Worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people. This has gone out now, but in the old times it was a favorite. It always indicated a case of "wrath." For instance: "The just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end" (p. 400). It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt. The entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might well enough be printed to-day. It is not altogether clear why it was withheld, even then. He finished his Eve's Diary that summer, and wrote a story which was originally planned to oblige Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, to aid her in a crusade against bullfighting in Spain. Mrs. Fiske wrote him that she had read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection, and urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring. Her letter closed: I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring. The story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Spain. We would translate and circulate the story in that country. I have wondered if you would ever write it. With most devoted homage, Sincerely yours, MINNIE MADDERN FISKE. Clemens promptly replied: DEAR MRS. FISKE, I shall certainly write the story. But I may not get it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. Later I will try it again--& yet again--& again. I am used to this. It has taken me twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I think. --[Probably "The Death Disk:"]--So do not be discouraged; I will stick to this one in the same way. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. It was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately. Within a month from the time he received Mrs. Fiske's letter he had written that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, "A Horse's Tale," and sent it to Harper's Magazine for illustration. In a letter written to Mr. Duneka at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds: This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional--it was a good while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. May you find an artist who has lost an idol. He explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls. We are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat. It is not one of Mark Twain's greatest stories, but its pathos brings the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which it was intended to oppose. When it was published, a year later, Mrs. Fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m Spain. A number of more or less notable things happened in this, Mark Twain's seventieth year. There was some kind of a reunion going on in California, and he was variously invited to attend. Robert Fulton, of Nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to Reno for a great celebration which was to be held there. Clemens replied that he remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the Overland stage in front of the Ormsby Hotel, in Carson City, and told how he would like to accept the invitation. If I were a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly, and I would go. I would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me I would talk--just talk. I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk--and have the time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent hail and farewell as they passed--Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry, Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart, Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton, North, Root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the "slaughter-house," a precious possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake, Jack Williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and so on. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are going now. Those were the days!--those old ones. They will come no more; youth will come no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Would you like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my white head. Good-by. I drink to you all. Have a good time-and take an old man's blessing. In reply to another invitation from H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, he wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his "remnant of life." A man who, like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does --that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (But if he comes don't tell him I said it, for it would hurt him & I wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his indestructible youth anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.) And it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after this fashion: I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was suggested. Which, by the way, is a perfect example of Mark Twain's humorous manner, the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would have been contented to end with the statement, "I could have gone earlier." Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch --"it was suggested." CCXXXVI AT PIER 70 Mark Twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and the returns were coming in. Some one of the old group was dying all the time. The roll-call returned only a scattering answer. Of his oldest friends, Charles Henry Webb, John Hay, and Sir Henry Irving, all died that year. When Hay died Clemens gave this message to the press: I am deeply grieved, & I mourn with the nation this loss which is irreparable. My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him endured 38 years without impairment. It was only a little earlier that he had written Hay an anonymous letter, a copy of which he preserved. It here follows: DEAR & HONORED SIR,--I never hear any one speak of you & of your long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride & praise--& out of the heart. I think I am right in believing you to be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one. There are majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation's great servants, but I believe, & I think I know, that you are the only one of whom the entire nation is proud. Proud & thankful. Name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who would lighten your burdens if I could, not add to them. Irving died in October, and Clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral. To MacAlister he wrote: I profoundly grieve over Irving's death. It is another reminder. My section of the procession has but a little way to go. I could not be very sorry if I tried. Mark Twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him to celebrate; and when Colonel Harvey proposed a birthday gathering in his honor, Clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and sandwiches in some snug place, with Howells, Henry Rogers, Twichell, Dr. Rice, Dr. Edward Quintard, Augustus Thomas, and such other kindred souls as were still left to answer the call. But Harvey had something different in view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh birthday feast, more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary gathering. He felt that the attainment of seventy years by America's most distinguished man of letters and private citizen was a circumstance which could not be moderately or even modestly observed. The date was set five days later than the actual birthday--that is to say, on December 5th, in order that it might not conflict with the various Thanksgiving holidays and occasions. Delmonico's great room was chosen for the celebration of it, and invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any distinction in America, and to many abroad. Of these nearly two hundred accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic regrets. What an occasion it was! The flower of American literature gathered to do honor to its chief. The whole atmosphere of the place seemed permeated with his presence, and when Colonel Harvey presented William Dean Howells, and when Howells had read another double-barreled sonnet, and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, "I will not say, 'O King, live forever,' but, 'O King, live as long as you like!'" and Mark Twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause and welcome. With a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. Those who had gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life but in theirs. They were there to see this supreme embodiment of the American spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. He, too, realized the drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he had himself once expressed it, "for a single, splendid moment on the Alps of fame outlined against the sun." He must have remembered; for when he came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very first banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, "I hadn't any hair; I hadn't any teeth; I hadn't any clothes." He sketched the meagerness of that little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully, delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had attained seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no other regularity of habits. Then, at last, he reached that wonderful, unforgetable close: Threescore years and ten! It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time- expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but "lights out." You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, "Your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart." The tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now. If there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these lines failed to see them or to hear of them. There was not one who was ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears. Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--Brander Matthews, Cable, Kate Douglas Riggs, Gilder, Carnegie, Bangs, Bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning. No other arrival at Pier 70 ever awoke a grander welcome. CCXXXVII AFTERMATH The announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news accounts of it precipitated another avalanche. The carriers' bags were stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from every class of humanity. They were all full of love and tender wishes. A card signed only with initials said: "God bless your old sweet soul for having lived." Aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the hall at Delmonico's. A group of English authors in London combined in a cable of congratulations. Anstey, Alfred Austin, Balfour, Barrie, Bryce, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Gosse, Hardy, Hope, Jacobs, Kipling, Lang, Parker, Tenniel, Watson, and Zangwill were among the signatures. Helen Keller wrote: And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said: "If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little." Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the "seven-terraced summit" of knowing little. So probably you are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven! Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but only by premeditation. It was his observation and his logic that led him to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope. To Miss Keller he wrote: "Oh, thank you for your lovely words!" He was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the Society of Illustrators. Dan Beard, president, was also toast-master; and as he presented Mark Twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely girl, costumed as Joan of Arc, entered and, approaching him, presented him with a laurel wreath. It was planned and carried out as a surprise to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a reality. He was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments. Clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause was a worthy one. He spoke for the benefit of the Russian sufferers at the Casino on December 18th. Madame Sarah Bernhardt was also there, and spoke in French. He followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude English after hearing that divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue. It has always been a marvel to me--that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is! How expressive it seems to be! How full of grace it is! And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid it is! And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to understand it. It is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her. I have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but I have always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself--her fiery self. I have wanted to know that beautiful character. Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself--for I always feel young when I come in the presence of young people. And truly, at seventy, Mark Twain was young, his manner, his movement, his point of view-these were all, and always, young. A number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime. They all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas! they likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as surprising as it sounds, for with Mark Twain humor was never mere fun-making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his philosophy --its bloom and fragrance. When the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and a moment of calm had followed, Mark Twain set down some reflections on the new estate he had achieved. The little paper, which forms a perfect pendant to the "Seventieth Birthday Speech," here follows: OLD AGE I think it likely that people who have not been here will be interested to know what it is like. I arrived on the thirtieth of November, fresh from carefree & frivolous 69, & was disappointed. There is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, "Oh, it is wonderful, perfectly wonderful!" Yes, it is disappointing. You say, "Is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked about them & told what they saw & felt? Why, it looks just like 69." And that is true. Also it is natural, for you have not come by the fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the change; 70 looks like 69; 69 looked like 68; 68 looked like 67--& so on back & back to the beginning. If you climb to a summit & look back--ah, then you see! Down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country & climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the ice-summit where you are perched. You can make out where Infancy verged into Boyhood; Boyhood into down-lipped Youth; Youth into bearded, indefinite Young-Manhood; indefinite Young-Manhood into definite Manhood; definite Manhood, with large, aggressive ambitions, into sobered & heedful Husbandhood & Fatherhood; these into troubled & foreboding Age, with graying hair; this into Old Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself, "Would you do it again if you had the chance?" CCXXXVIII THE WRITER MEETS MARK TWAIN We have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of egotism, the form of the telling must change. It was at the end of 1901 that I first met Mark Twain--at The Players Club on the night when he made the Founder's Address mentioned in an earlier chapter. I was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as I reached the head of the stairs I saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as I remember it, did not enter into my consciousness at all. I saw only that crown of white hair, that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured speech. I was surprised to see how frail and old he looked. From his pictures I had conceived him different. I did not realize that it was a temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of social demands. I have no idea how long I stood there watching him. He had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him nothing less than a hero to his readers. He rose presently to go, and came directly toward me. A year before I had done what new writers were always doing--I had sent him a book I had written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with a kindly letter. I made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him. It warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the time I confess I thought it doubtful. Then he was gone; but the mind and ear had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always clear. It was the following spring that I saw him again--at an afternoon gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because I met Mrs. Clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her, however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit. I think I spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon, and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are wells of human sympathy and free from guile. Bret Harte had just died, and during the afternoon Mr. Clemens asked me to obtain for him some item concerning the obsequies. It was more than three years before I saw him again. Meantime, a sort of acquaintance had progressed. I had been engaged in writing the life of Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, and I had found among the material a number of letters to Nast from Mark Twain. I was naturally anxious to use those fine characteristic letters, and I wrote him for his consent. He wished to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness itself. His admiration of Nast was very great. It was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book when it appeared; but that was 1904, his year of sorrow and absence, and the matter was postponed. Then came the great night of his seventieth birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use of the letters. There was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the next day, I think, that I sent him a copy of the book. It did not occur to me that I should hear of it again. We step back a moment here. Something more than a year earlier, through a misunderstanding, Mark Twain's long association with The Players had been severed. It was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the club. There was a movement among what is generally known' as the "Round Table Group"--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. David Munro, associate editor of the North American Review--"David," a man well loved of men--and Robert Reid, the painter, prepared this simple document: TO MARK TWAIN from THE CLANSMEN Will ye no come back again? Will ye no come back again? Better lo'ed ye canna be, Will ye no come back again? It was signed by Munro and by Reid and about thirty others, and it touched Mark Twain deeply. The lines had always moved him. He wrote: TO ROBT. REID & THE OTHERS-- WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charlie's heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. I shall be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope you can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate. It will be many months before I can foregather with you, for this black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one whose memory is the only thing I worship. It is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver what I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in the small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to me. S. L. C. So the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to social life. At the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken action, and Mark Twain had been brought back, not in the regular order of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. There was only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving. The Players, as a club, does not give dinners. Whatever is done in that way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room, where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty when expanded to its limit. That room and that table have mingled with much distinguished entertainment, also with history. Henry James made his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed it was his first, though this is by the way. A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the Prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on the 5th of January. It was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege. I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and I think David Munro was the first person I met at The Players. As he greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to hear. He had been delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the Nast book. I suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of his. The night of January 5, 1906, remains a memory apart from other dinners. Brander Matthews presided, and Gilder was there, and Frank Millet and Willard Metcalf and Robert Reid, and a score of others; some of them are dead now, David Munro among them. It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of The Players, is placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. He was no longer frail and thin, as when I had first met him. He had a robust, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. One could not take his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest memories. I suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West, where I had first heard uttered the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how, during the thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite what Mark Twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable thing which means more than either, and which we call "inspiration," for lack of a truer word. Now here he was, just across the table. It was the fairy tale come true. Genung said: "You should write his life." His remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such. When he persisted I attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the second, has proved its quality. He urged, in support of his idea, the word that Munro had brought concerning the Nast book, but nothing of what he said kindled any spark of hope. I could not but believe that some one with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and abilities had already been selected for the task. By and by the speaking began --delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the matter went out of my mind. When the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in general talk, I found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of the evening about his Joan of Arc, which I had recently re-read. To my happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all literature. I think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower rooms. At any rate, I presently found the faithful Charles Genung privately reasserting to me the proposition that I should undertake the biography of Mark Twain. Perhaps it was the brief sympathy established by the name of Joan of Arc, perhaps it was only Genung's insistent purpose--his faith, if I may be permitted the word. Whatever it was, there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of honor, which prompted me to say: "May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?" And something--dating from the primal atom, I suppose--prompted him to answer: "Yes, come soon." This was on Wednesday night, or rather on Thursday morning, for it was past midnight, and a day later I made an appointment with his secretary to call on Saturday. I can say truly that I set out with no more than the barest hope of success, and wondering if I should have the courage, when I saw him, even to suggest the thought in my mind. I know I did not have the courage to confide in Genung that I had made the appointment--I was so sure it would fail. I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue and was shown into that long library and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep interest in the books and ornaments along the shelves as I waited. Then I was summoned, and I remember ascending the stairs, wondering why I had come on so futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer for having come at all. He was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit, with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard. He was delving through a copy of Huckleberry Finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which some random correspondent had asked explanation. He was commenting unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in general. He pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters ran along and blended into others more or less personal. By and by I told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had meant to me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large, black-and-gilt-covered book with its wonderful pictures and adventures--the Mediterranean pilgrimage. Very likely it bored him--he had heard it so often--and he was willing enough, I dare say, to let me change the subject and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro had brought. I do not remember what he said then, but I suddenly found myself suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though certainly it was something less--that I might some day undertake a book about himself. I expected the chapter to end at this point, and his silence which followed seemed long and ominous. He said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the undertaking, and had put it aside. He added that he had hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--a detailed story of personality and performance, of success and failure --was of course another matter, and that for such a work no arrangement had been made. He may have added one or two other general remarks; then, turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me, he said: "When would you like to begin?" There was a dresser with a large mirror behind him. I happened to catch my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it mentally: "This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams." But even in a dream one must answer, and I said: "Whenever you like. I can begin now." He was always eager in any new undertaking. "Very good," he said. "The sooner, then, the better. Let's begin while we are in the humor. The longer you postpone a thing of this kind the less likely you are ever to get at it." This was on Saturday, as I have stated. I mentioned that my family was still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get established in the city. I asked if Tuesday, January 9th, would be too soon to begin. He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired something about my plan of work. Of course I had formed nothing definite, but I said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with a stenographer, who had made the notes while I prompted the subject to recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary accumulations. Then he said: "I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. My manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed. I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key and come and go as you please." That was always his way. He did nothing by halves; nothing without unquestioning confidence and prodigality. He got up and showed me the lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material. I did not believe it true yet. It had all the atmosphere of a dream, and I have no distinct recollection of how I came away. When I returned to The Players and found Charles Harvey Genung there, and told him about it, it is quite certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it true and pretended that he was not surprised. CCXXXIX WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN On Tuesday, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable stenographer --Miss Josephine Hobby, who had successively, and successfully, held secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand. Clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some features of his own. He proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier autobiographical chapters, begun with Redpath in 1885, and continued later in Vienna and at the Villa Quarto. He said he did not think he could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical order. It was his purpose, he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him an especial gratification.--[As early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Harper & Brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the details were exchanged with Mr. Rogers. The document, however, was not completed.] He wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said, allowing me free access to them for any material I might find valuable. I could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any special episode or period. I believe this covered the whole arrangement, which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without further prologue. I ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. On the little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of classic value. He dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the Comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again to the more modern period, and closed, I think, with some comments on current affairs. It was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were accepted or waved aside. We were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. We constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. When he turned at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away. "And how much I have enjoyed it!" he said. "It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table --always a most inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it." The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind. It was always delightful, and always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of these at one instant, and another the next. I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just in the way that I first imagined. It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth. It was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syllable--worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. Those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. They often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years. His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now. The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were true --marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. The rest was history only as 'Roughing It' is history, or the 'Tramp Abroad'; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. In a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain's own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations: "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter." At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings's sayings in the remark: "It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so." I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale. It is far from that. It is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself. It is only not reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history. Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials. It is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art. In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value. Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present. It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves. Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to Howells or Twichell, or to some member of his family. Such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation. It was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom. He had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which preceded his brother's death, and the talk of foreknowledge had continued. I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance that the future was a fixed quantity. "As absolutely fixed as the past," he said; and added the remark already quoted.--[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued: "Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of events once it is started. It is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come." It was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day. I have never been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-note of eternity. At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he burst out: "Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!" He had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much to say. I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he surprised me by answering: "Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity's boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age." It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character. CCXL THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN That was a busy winter for him socially. He was constantly demanded for this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a central figure. Once he presided at a Valentine dinner given by some Players to David Munro. He had never presided at a dinner before, he said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one, suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real Scotch occasion, with the Munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in honor of Scotland's gentlest son. An important meeting of that winter was at Carnegie Hall--a great gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding Booker T. Washington in his work for the welfare of his race. The stage and the auditorium were thronged with notables. Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain presided, and both spoke; also Robert C. Ogden and Booker T. Washington himself. It was all fine and interesting. Choate's address was ably given, and Mark Twain was at his best. He talked of politics and of morals--public and private--how the average American citizen was true to his Christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year, and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best to damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work. I used to be an honest man, but I am crumbling--no, I have crumbled. When they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago I went out and tried to borrow the money and couldn't. Then when I found they were letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in New York at a third of the price they were charging me I was hurt, I was indignant, and said, this is the last feather. I am not going to run this town all by myself. In that moment--in that memorable moment, I began to crumble. In fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. In fifteen minutes I was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and I lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property I've got in the world. I had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience. It was marvelous to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will. He did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only prepared the way with cheerfulness. Clemens and Choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind. Helen Keller was to be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork. She sent to Clemens one of her beautiful letters, in which she said: I should be happy if I could have spelled into my hand the words as they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind. Clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with Helen Keller at a little gathering in Lawrence Hutton's home, when she was about the age of fourteen. It was an incident that invited no elaboration, and probably received none. Henry Rogers and I went together. The company had all assembled and had been waiting a while. The wonderful child arrived now with her about equally wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan, and seemed quite well to recognize the character of her surroundings. She said, "Oh, the books, the books, so many, many books. How lovely!" The guests were brought one after another. As she shook hands with each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against Miss Sullivan's lips, who spoke against them the person's name. Mr. Howells seated himself by Helen on the sofa, and she put her fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face. After a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if Helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands and name the possessors of them. Miss Sullivan said, "Oh, she will have no difficulty about that." So the company filed past, shook hands in turn, and with each hand-shake Helen greeted the owner of the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without hesitation. By and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down to the luncheon. I had to go away before it was over, and as I passed by Helen I patted her lightly on the head and passed on. Miss Sullivan called to me and said, "Stop, Mr. Clemens, Helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand. Won't you come back and do that again?" I went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, "Oh, it's Mr. Clemens." Perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but I have never been able to do it. Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her hair? Some one else must answer this. It was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a very simple and rather amusing solution. Helen had come to pay a visit to Mark Twain's Connecticut home, Stormfield, then but just completed. He had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask her how she had recognized him that morning at Hutton's, in what had seemed such a marvelous way. She remembered, and with a smile said: "I smelled you." Which, after all, did not make the incident seem much less marvelous. On one of the mornings after Miss Hobby had gone Clemens said: "A very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke." He was shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken relays, suited to a performance of that sort. The reader may perhaps imagine the effect without further indication of it. "I was going on a yachting trip once, with Henry Rogers, when a reporter stopped me with the statement that Mrs. Astor had said that there had never been a gentleman in the White House, and he wanted me to give him my definition of a gentleman. I didn't give him my definition; but he printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper. I was angry at first, and wanted to bring a damage suit. When I came to read the definition it was a satisfactory one, and I let it go. Now to-day comes a letter and a telegram from a man who has made a will in Missouri, leaving ten thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the State, on which shall be inscribed Mark Twain's definition of a gentleman. He hasn't got the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. I couldn't think, when I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me." It was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no conclusion in the matter. Another telegram was brought in just then, which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old coachman, Patrick McAleer, who had begun in the Clemens service with the bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not survive more than a few days. This led him to speak of Patrick, his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad. Clemens gave orders that everything possible should be done for Patrick's comfort. When the end came, a few days later, he traveled to Hartford to lay flowers on Patrick's bier, and to serve, with Patrick's friends --neighbor coachmen and John O'Neill, the gardener--as pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor. It was the following Sunday, at the Majestic Theater, in New York, that Mark Twain spoke to the Young Men's Christian Association. For several reasons it proved an unusual meeting. A large number of free tickets had been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it had been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the admission would be free to the public. The subject chosen for the talk was "Reminiscences." When we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a considerable distance and a riot was in progress. A great crowd had swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the doors wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had locked them. As a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that presently dashed itself against the entrance. Windows and doors gave way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance. A moment later the house was packed solid. A detachment of police had now arrived, and in time cleared the street. It was said that amid the tumult some had lost their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did not learn until later. We had been taken somehow to a side entrance and smuggled into boxes.--[The paper next morning bore the head-lines: "10,000 Stampeded at the Mark Twain Meeting. Well-dressed Men and Women Clubbed by Police at Majestic Theater." In this account the paper stated that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had been made.] It was peaceful enough in the theater until Mark Twain appeared on the stage. He was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously, "I thank you for this signal recognition of merit," there was a still noisier outburst. In the quiet that followed he began his memories, and went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his daily dictations. At last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel suited to young men. It is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our education of life. We string them into jewels or into tinware, as we may choose. I have received recently several letters asking for counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident that may prove helpful to the young. It is my mission to teach, and I am always glad to furnish something. There have been a lot of incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me along faster than I wanted to go. He took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them; then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking. The answer came, "Thirty-five minutes." He made as if to leave the stage, but the audience commanded him to go on. "All right," he said, "I can stand more of my own talk than any one I ever knew." Opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read: "In which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?" Then he added: I have not answered that telegram. I couldn't. I never wrote any such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just, merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would need nothing else in this world. He opened a letter. "From Howells," he said. My old friend, William Dean Howells--Howells, the head of American literature. No one is able to stand with him. He is an old, old friend of mine, and he writes me, "To-morrow I shall be sixty-nine years old." Why, I am surprised at Howells writing so. I have known him myself longer than that. I am sorry to see a man trying to appear so young. Let's see. Howells says now, "I see you have been burying Patrick. I suppose he was old, too." The house became very still. Most of them had read an account of Mark Twain's journey to Hartford and his last service to his faithful servitor. The speaker's next words were not much above a whisper, but every syllable was distinct. No, he was never old-Patrick. He came to us thirty-six years ago. He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our new home. He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. He really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but he never regarded that a separation. As the children grew up he was their guide. He was all honor, honesty, and affection. He was with us in New Hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day we first met. In all the long years Patrick never made a mistake. He never needed an order; he never received a command. He knew. I have been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and I give it to you--Patrick McAleer. It was the sort of thing that no one but Mark Twain has quite been able to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to see him and to hear his voice. CCXLI GORKY, HOWELLS, AND MARK TWAIN Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from England, five years before. He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. He fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for this departure from his earlier method. There was seldom an afternoon or an evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. Once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become "the belle of New York." But he was something further. An editorial in the Evening Mail said: Mark Twain, in his "last and best of life for which the first was made," seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis--an Aristides for justness and boldness as well as incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. If he deigns to make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. We must be glad that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. His sound, breezy Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. He cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. He talked one afternoon to the Barnard girls, and another afternoon to the Women's University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner Mr. Charles Putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, "When in doubt tell the truth," he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied: DEAR SIR,--I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you so. Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood. If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that questionable companionship? Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me. Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the following March. The "tip" was sufficient. Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark Twain's door-steps. At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out, for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and Clemens replied: Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! The newspaper boys want that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and I'll take care of this end of the line. In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds: There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. But any one who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul, in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells, too, was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says: I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. Clemens's interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky at the "A Club," No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners. Also he wrote a letter to be read by Tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs. The letter ran: DEAR MR. TCHAYKOFFSKY,--My sympathies are with the Russian revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will succeed, and now that I have talked with you I take heart to believe it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven. Most sincerely yours, MARK TWAIN. Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honor. The movement was really assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue, one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study, and on opening the door I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said: "Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens." He shook his head violently. "No, I can't see anything now," and in another moment had disappeared into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by I went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. When I had bought one, and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreieva, a Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected; but it was not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreieva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines. An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. In 'My Mark Twain' he says: That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens. "How many?" he demanded. "Five," the butler faltered. "Reporters?" The butler feigned uncertainty. "What would you do?" he asked me. "I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky but the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. Then he said: "American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs of morning at the lightest touch." Later in the day he made this memorandum: Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's customs are and refrain from offending against them. The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.--[To Dan Beard he said, "Gorky made an awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail."] The Gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the 18th of April I heard, at The Players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later, perhaps, I met Clemens coming out of No. 21. He asked: "Have you heard the news about San Francisco?" I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with big scare-heads; but I supposed the matter was exaggerated. "No," he said, "I am afraid it isn't. We have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is consuming the city. Come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there is a later edition." We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and got some fresh extras. The news was indeed worse, than at first reported. San Francisco was going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. CCXLII MARK TWAIN'S GOOD-BY TO THE PLATFORM It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that Mark Twain gave a "Farewell Lecture" at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier Gen. Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a Mark Twain lecture; but Clemens' had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. "I always expect to talk as long as I can get people to listen to me," he sand, "but I never again expect to charge for it." Later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote: "I will lecture for one thousand dollars, on one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association." It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices, "Mark Twain's Farewell Lecture," were published without delay. I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called. Clemens came into the study where I was working; he often wandered in and out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying: "I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on the stage and help me." I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. Then he said: "I am going to lecture on Fulton--on the story of his achievements. It will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair. Now and then, when I seem to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and I want you to pretend to prompt me. You don't need to laugh, or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that." HANDBILL OF MARK TWAIN'S "FAREWELL LECTURE": MARK TWAIN Will Deliver His Farewell Lecture --------------------------------- CARNEGIE HALL APRIL 19TH, 1906 FOR THE BENEFIT OF Robert Fulton Memorial Association MILITARY ORGANIZATION OLD GUARD IN FULL DRESS UNIFORM WILL BE PRESENT MUSIC BY OLD GUARD BAND TICKETS AND BOXES ON SALE AT CARNEGIE HALL AND WALDORF-ASTORIA SEATS $1.50, $1.00, 50 CENTS It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not for the moment occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to my immeasurable relief. It was a magnificent occasion. That spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the republic. The band played "America" as Mark Twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events, he did a different thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied: I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour. There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. It did not matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. CCXLIII AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters, already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant, and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of it, said: "I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars after I'm dead." A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with the great man. It was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. She kept her contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of deepest reverence: "May I kiss your hand?" It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as she went, she said: "How God must love you!" "I hope so," he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice "I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations." Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as "the King," and in time the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others who loved him. He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prints, a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, "Why didn't you make more?" Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. "Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; I have tried to get it suppressed." Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring. I had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. The purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the location. CCXLIV TRAITS AND PHILOSOPHIES I brought to the dictation one morning the Omar Khayyam card which Twichell had written him so long ago; I had found it among the letters. It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said: How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omar Khayyam! When that card arrived I had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been from under my hand all these years. He had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony. He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said: "Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any crime she wishes in my name." It was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very charming young lady. "I'm very glad," he said, "and I am glad the Lord made her; I hope He will make some more just like her. I don't always approve of His handiwork, but in this case I do." Then suddenly he added: "Well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these things." He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift. "Yes," he said, "it is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. I seem to have inherited all those." Continuing, he spoke of inherited traits in general. "There was Paige," he said; "an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one; but he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. He watched over the expert draftsmen, and superintended the building of that marvel. Pratt & Whitney built it; but it was Paige's machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous gift. We don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. They have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. Man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. In these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. Man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of God. He widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. You can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. There is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except man. Men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house-fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all frisky like the monkey. These things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment: We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit for their possession. It is comical. He did not invent these things; he did not stock himself with them. God conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than Paige could have built the type-setter he invented, or the Pratt & Whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built." He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. He halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added: "What an amusing creature the human being is!" It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or I would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality. CCXLV IN THE DAY'S ROUND A number of dictations of this period were about Susy, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little by saying that Susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the biography she had begun, and added: "Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work! If I had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way, year after year! If I had shown her that I cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little." Then, after a moment of silence: "But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. Theirs is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get." His moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both. He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens's life with privations, that the sorrow of Susy's death had hastened her own end. How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. An artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world. But he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had followed. "A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine," he said, "and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'Lord, how pathetic!' For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end; but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to the humor you couldn't find it." He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. Once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the Back Number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its publisher and I its editor. I think I assented, and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. Once, after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments, he invited Miss Hobby to leave the room temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear. He got up and we began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. It was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the size of it. "One could lose a dog in this bed," he declared. Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. He did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted. Its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. Then he said: "There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that." A moment later, when Miss Hobby returned, he was serene and happy again. He was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those around him--remarkably so, I thought, as a rule. But there were moments that involved risk. He had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. At first I hesitated to do this, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he was likely to say: "Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me?" So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him at the time. But if it happened that I upset his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say: "Now you've knocked everything out of my head." Then, of course, I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. I became lightning-proof at last; also I learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. There was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps I have not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. But poetry was there as well. His presence was full of it: the grandeur of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured speech. Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. At such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed. His hands were so fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child. Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane, his eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. I cannot recall the picture too often, or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. I do not know why I have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to thought --though he smoked at most other times, for that matter. His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco; but I had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing-office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. Rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. Once, to a minister who proposed to send him something very special, he wrote: I should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that I couldn't do it and remain honest. That is to say, if I allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of the kind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had 60 years' experience. No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than anybody else. I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents I know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me. I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cents apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them & never shall; I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance when you come. He smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent; and once, when he had bought a new, expensive English brier-root he regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me, saying: "I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me." I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. One day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey Depew was to resign his Senatorial seat and Mark Twain was to be nominated in his place. The fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. He was a young man, and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. His chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain's comment on the matter. Clemens said very little at the time. He did not wish to be a Senator; he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job, anyway. When the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. The Senatorship would be a stepping-stone to the Presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the Presidential chair the nation could expect an interesting time. Nothing further came of the matter. There was no such report. The young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a "story" out of Mark Twain. The item as printed next day invited a good deal of comment, and Collier's Weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. Sometimes we walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good while I could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most people turned to look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the least come into their scope of vision. They saw only Mark Twain. The feeling was a more comfortably one at The Players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. We sat at the Round Table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. Once we went to the "Music Master," that tender play of Charles Klein's, given by that matchless interpreter, David Warfield. Clemens was fascinated, and said more than once: "It is as permanent as 'Rip Van Winkle.' Warfield, like Jefferson, can go on playing it all his life." We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed with Mark Twain's unstinted approval. Later, when I saw him at The Players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. There were some billiard games going on between the champions Hoppe and Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. He did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. Just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. Then they caught the figure of Mark Twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. The audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs. Such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppe, which the billiardist's extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. When it was over the referee said a few words and invited Mark Twain to speak. He rose and told them a story-probably invented on the instant. He said: "Once in Nevada I dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked up a cue and began to knock the balls around. The proprietor, who was a red-haired man, with such hair as I have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play. I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can shoot.' So I knocked them around, and thought I was doing pretty well, when he said, 'That's all right; I'll play you left-handed.' It hurt my pride, but I played him. We banked for the shot and he won it. Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and I went on chalking my cue; and he played and I chalked all through that game. When he had run his string out I said: "That's wonderful! perfectly wonderful! If you can play that way left-handed what could you do right-handed?' "'Couldn't do anything,' he said. 'I'm a left-handed man.'" How it delighted them! I think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire, for the summer--this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a year before, the Copley Greene place being now occupied by its owner. CCXLVI THE SECOND SUMMER AT DUBLIN The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two or three miles from Dublin, just under Monadnock--a good way up the slope. It is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the handiwork of God is there. I had seen these things in paintings, but I had not dreamed that such a view really existed. The immediate foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and just at the right hand Monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. It was a masterpiece of the Greater Mind, and of the highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man. A church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field, or stone wall, or cultivated land. It was lonely; it was unfriendly; it cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if God, after creating all the world, had wrought His masterwork here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that He had forgotten to give it a soul. In a sense this was true, for He had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. It lacked the human touch; the human interest, and I could never quite believe in its reality. The time of arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. It seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. I believe Jean Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. Something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. She had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all. She was not yet strong, and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. Miss Hobby came, and on the 21st of May the dictations were resumed. We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. Nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. "I think I shall like it," he said, "when I get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labeled, and I think we'll do our dictating out here hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place." So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. When it stormed we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world--a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early, there would be music--the music that he loved most--Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.--[Schubert, Op. 142, No. 2; Chopin, Op. 37, No. 2.]--It is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. In my notes, made from day to day, I find that I have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. I had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was through such a growth of beech timber as I have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. Then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume; and this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the top: a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side. He sat more often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the Monadnock heights, that were always changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. White and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious, large black ants--the largest I have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. Now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. On June 1st I find in my note-book this entry: Warm and pleasant. The dictation about Grant continues; a great privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms. He remained seated today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. He wears his worn morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. He is speaking just now of a Grant dinner which he attended where Depew spoke. One is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of many; an honored figure of all. Earlier, when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, "However, he's dead, and I forgive him." Then, after a moment's reflection, "No; strike that last sentence out." When we laughed, he added, "We can't forgive him yet." A few days later--it was June 4th, the day before the second anniversary of the death of Mrs. Clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. Then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. It was hard work. He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. He gave it up at last, remarking, "We will not work to-morrow." So we went away. He did not dictate on the 5th or the 6th, but on the 7th he resumed the story of Mrs. Clemens's last days at Florence. The weather had changed: the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on the mountains; Monadnock was blotted out. We expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. For two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very little literary work during these months. He had brought his "manuscript trunk" as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the "microbe" story and other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his "stock in trade," as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into "autobiography." Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone, made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. He wrote Howells in June: The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. With intervals. I find that I've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for 155 days since January 9. To be exact, I've dictated 75 hours in 80 days & loafed 75 days. I've added 60,000 words in the month that I've been here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of that time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour. It's a plenty, & I'm satisfied. There's a good deal of "fat." I've dictated (from January 9) 210,000 words, & the "fat" adds about 50,000 more. The "fat" is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which I or editors didn't das't to print. For instance, I am dumping in the little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago & which you said "publish & ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do it" (Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven). It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until I am dead. To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs & assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006--which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited. The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox, scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it: "I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence. Reverence for what--for whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my reverence--my neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself. The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed--it is his privilege; the Christian doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough. They haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. If you could do that you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles and get a reputation." He was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but I remember that he read aloud 'After the Wedding' and 'The Mother'--those two beautiful word-pictures by Howells--which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep-sea lead. Also he read a book by William Allen White, 'In Our Town', a collection of tales that he found most admirable. I think he took the trouble to send White a personal, hand-written letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to "loathe the use of the pen." There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. Once, at least, he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. The "art" consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford days. Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk. But these things were seldom. Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a semi-business nature, usually going by the way of Fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr. Rogers's yacht. Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar Harbor and elsewhere. Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs. Rogers after such a visit: DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--In packing my things in your house yesterday morning I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around, I thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. Two books, Mr. Rogers' brown slippers, & a ham. I thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used to have. I am very sorry it happened, but it sha'n't occur again & don't you worry. He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & I will send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't keep. CCXLVI DUBLIN, CONTINUED In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In one of his dictations he said: The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine. Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes . . . . But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe . . . . I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden.... The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society . . . . I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it --furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac. Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber, and in its way regal. It was the loneliness of a king--King Lear. Yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. When the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called "The Progress of a Moral Purpose." He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph, numbering them from 1 to 7, laying each set in a sheet of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written: This series of q photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's Oldest Friend. S. L. C. He added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it, and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbor. He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. These kittens he called Sackcloth and Ashes--Ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambols always amused him. He would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped back and said: "Walk in, gentlemen. I always give precedence to royalty." And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. I remember once, when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. In that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers. Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. Even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman, celebrated his seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in '91, and in Vienna in '98, in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. His tribute ran: To HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRITISH PREMIER,--Congratulations, not condolences. Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave unless we want to. When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was hardly even respected. MARK TWAIN. He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters, supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations, after reading them aloud with great effect. To tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. The letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents: DEAR MISS STOCKBRIDGE (if she really exists), 257 Benefit Street (if there is any such place): Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter. This whole fake is delightful; & I tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself & that I am your guileless prey. (But never mind, it isn't any matter.) Now as to publication---- He set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the letters should be completed. Clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all, so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. Once he said: "Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as much." He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading, as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, and his verdict: "That is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English, and written when we had no vocabulary." "A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?" "It is indeed." Still I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. Mark Twain's English always focused exactly. CCXLVIII "WHAT IS MAN?" AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately, the Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before and added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the De Vinne Press was engaged to do the work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the superintendent of the De Vinne company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually distributed to intimate friends.--[In an introductory word (dated February, 1905) the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred to the Monday Evening Club essay, "What Is Happiness?" (February, 1883). See chap. cxli.]--A number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. It was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and "man the irresponsible machine" are the main features of 'What Is Man' and both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, "upward and still upward," no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. Once admitting the postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. It was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of created life. Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to "surround every thing, like the sky," he answered: "Yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere." Colonel Harvey came to Dublin that summer and persuaded Clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the North American Review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. The matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned. Colonel Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. It may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. It does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars--a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at Redding. He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some preliminary plans. Clara Clemens, at Norfolk, was written to of the matter. A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. She was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it "Autobiography House," as it was to be built out of the Review money, and he said: "If you will build on my farm and live there it will set Mrs. Howells's health up for sure. Come and I'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. John will tell you it is a choice place." The unusual summer was near its close. In my notebook, under date of September 16th, appears this entry: Windy in valleys but not cold. This veranda is protected. It is peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer's end. This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and apparently I made no record of it; but I do not think it could have been later than the 20th. It had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvelous summer such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech--always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of human-kind. CCXLIX BILLIARDS The return to New York marked the beginning of a new era in my relations with Mark Twain. I have not meant to convey up to this time that there was between us anything resembling a personal friendship. Our relations were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. He was twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments was not measurable. With such conditions friendship must be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf. Truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid, material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a billiard-table.--[Clemens had been without a billiard-table since 1891, the old one having been disposed of on the departure from Hartford.] It was a present from Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, and had been intended for his Christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested delicately that if he had it "right now" he could begin using it sooner. So he went one day with Mr. Rogers to the Balke-Collender Company, and they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the best that money could buy. He was greatly excited over the prospect, and his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it was large enough for billiard purposes. Then his bed was moved into the study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed and hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling. The billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting. Meantime, Clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the notion of spending the winter in Egypt, on the Nile. He had gone so far, within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he might continue his dictations. He was quite full of the idea just at the moment when the billiard table was being installed. He had sent for a book on the subject--the letters of Lady Duff-Gordon, whose daughter, Janet Ross, had become a dear friend in Florence during the Viviani days. He spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the New York dictations, a month or more following the return from Dublin. When the dictation ended he said: "Have you any special place to lunch to-day?" I replied that I had not. "Lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table." I said what was eminently true--that I could not play--that I had never played more "than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. "No matter," he answered; "the poorer you play, the better I shall like it." So I remained for luncheon and we began, November 2d, the first game ever played on the Christmas table. We played the English game, in which caroms and pockets both count. I had a beginner's luck, on the whole, and I remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association. When it was ended he said: "I'm not going to Egypt. There was a man here yesterday afternoon who said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it's too far away from this billiard-table." He suggested that I come back in the evening and play some more. I did so, and the game lasted until after midnight. He gave me odds, of course, and my "nigger luck," as he called it, continued. It kept him sweating and swearing feverishly to win. Finally, once I made a great fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets. "Well," he said, "when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at every pore." After that the morning dictations became a secondary interest. Like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never seemed to come quick enough to suit him. I remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might the sooner get up-stairs to the billiard-room. His earlier habit of not eating in the middle of the day continued; but he would get up and dress, and walk about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that marvelous, marvelous talk which I was always trying to remember, and with only fractional success at best. To him it was only a method of killing time. I remember once, when he had been discussing with great earnestness the Japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was about ending, and he said: "Now we'll proceed to more serious matters--it's your--shot." And he was quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a much larger interest. To the donor of his new possession Clemens wrote: DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--The billiard-table is better than the doctors. I have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles every day with the cue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, I think. Through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body & exercises them all. The games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until midnight, with 2 hours' intermission for dinner & music. And so it is 9 hours' exercise per day & 10 or 12 on Sunday. Yesterday & last night it was 12--& I slept until 8 this morning without waking. The billiard-table as a Sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in Pennsylvania & give it 30 in the game. If Mr. Rogers will take to daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, I think. We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half from New York. It is decided. With love & many thanks. S. L. C. Naturally enough, with continued practice I improved my game, and he reduced my odds accordingly. He was willing to be beaten, but not too often. Like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his favor. We set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed him winner. It was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and I wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to Mrs. Rogers for her gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me. The disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer mattered. The pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. To recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early billiard-days would be to fill a large volume. I can preserve no more than a few characteristic phases. He was not an even-tempered player. When the balls were perverse in their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with his opponent--critical and even fault-finding. Then presently a reaction would set in, and he would be seized with remorse. He would become unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as I knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt, an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation. Naturally, this was a mood that I enjoyed less than that which had induced it. I did not wish him to humble himself; I was willing that he should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet I am glad, as I remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his great humanity. Indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man, but superman. Nor does this term apply only to his psychology. In no other human being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth. At three or four o'clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue. He played always at high pressure. Now and then, in periods of adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general. But, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and humor of it, even in the moment of his climax. Once, when he found it impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and more restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds blackened. Finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one or two of them on the floor. I do not recall his exact remarks during the performance; I was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and those sublime utterances were lost. I gathered up the balls and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by. After a little he said: "This is a most amusing game. When you play badly it amuses me, and when I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you." His enjoyment of his opponent's perplexities was very keen. When he had left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously. I used to affect to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule. Once, when he had made the conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation accordingly, I was tempted to remark: "Whenever I see you laugh at a thing like that I always doubt your sense of humor." Which seemed to add to his amusement. Sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer ostensible advice, suggesting that I should shoot here and there--shots that were possible, perhaps, but not promising. Often I would follow his advice, and then when I failed to score his amusement broke out afresh. Other billiardists came from time to time: Colonel Harvey, Mr. Duneka, and Major Leigh, of the Harper Company, and Peter Finley Dunne (Mr. Dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were not dependable for daily and protracted sessions. Any number of his friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to a single individual. Even I could not have done it--could not have afforded it, however much I might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not been contributory to my work. To me the association was invaluable; it drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream of picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate insight into his character. He was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he might have met pleasantly elsewhere. One afternoon a young man whom he had casually invited to "drop in some day in town" happened to call in the midst of a very close series of afternoon games. It would all have been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the couch and "bet on the game," as Clemens suggested, after the greetings were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of being entertaining. He insisted on walking about the room and getting in the way, and on talking about the Mark Twain books he had read, and the people he had met from time to time who had known Mark Twain on the river, or on the Pacific coast, or elsewhere. I knew how fatal it was for him to talk to Clemens during his play, especially concerning matters most of which had been laid away. I trembled for our visitor. If I could have got his ear privately I should have said: "For heaven's sake sit down and keep still or go away! There's going to be a combination of earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this thing up." I did what I could. I looked at my watch every other minute. At last, in desperation, I suggested that I retire from the game and let the visitor have my cue. I suppose I thought this would eliminate an element of danger. He declined on the ground that he seldom played, and continued his deadly visit. I have never been in an atmosphere so fraught with danger. I did not know how the game stood, and I played mechanically and forgot to count the score. Clemens's face was grim and set and savage. He no longer ventured even a word. By and by I noticed that he was getting white, and I said, privately, "Now, this young man's hour has come." It was certainly by the mercy of God just then that the visitor said: "I'm sorry, but I've got to go. I'd like to stay longer, but I've got an engagement for dinner." I don't remember how he got out, but I know that tons lifted as the door closed behind him. Clemens made his shot, then very softly said: "If he had stayed another five minutes I should have offered him twenty-five cents to go." But a moment later he glared at me. "Why in nation did you offer him your cue?" "Wasn't that the courteous thing to do?" I asked. "No!" he ripped out. "The courteous and proper thing would have been to strike him dead. Did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?" He was blowing off steam, and I knew it and encouraged it. My impulse was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but I suspected that would be indiscreet. He made some further comment on the propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a travesty of an old hymn: "How tedious are they Who their sovereign obey," and so loudly that I said: "Aren't you afraid he'll hear you and come back?" Whereupon he pretended alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in boundless good-humor. I have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods. He was not to be learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him longest did not learn him at all. We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. He invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with almost every shot. It happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday. Ill health had banished every one, even the secretary. Flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers; but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the Gilders--late in the afternoon. When they had gone we went down to dinner. We were entirely alone, and I felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. Once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from "Faust." It was a thing I had not seen him do before, and I never saw him do it again. When he came back to the table he said: "Speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become only shadows and might as well be in the grave. Only those whom one has really loved mean anything at all. Of my playmates I recall John Briggs, John Garth, and Laura Hawkins--just those three; the rest I buried long ago, and memory cannot even find their graves." He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night, when he stopped playing, he said: "I have never had a pleasanter day at this game." I answered, "I hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing it." "Yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth." CCL PHILOSOPHY AND PESSIMISM In a letter to MacAlister, written at this time, he said: The doctors banished Jean to the country 5 weeks ago; they banished my secretary to the country for a fortnight last Saturday; they banished Clara to the country for a fortnight last Monday . . . . They banished me to Bermuda to sail next Wednesday, but I struck and sha'n't go. My complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the very best assets I've got, for it excuses me from every public function this winter--& all other winters that may come. If he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of a very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which were more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period. I conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on occasion. For a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants. It was a holiday most of the time. We hurried through the mail in the morning and the telephone calls; then, while I answered such letters as required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to Miss Hobby, after which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening. When callers were reported by the butler, I went down and got rid of them. Clara Clemens, before her departure, had pinned up a sign, "NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M.," which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed. Clemens occasionally planned excursions to Bermuda and other places; but, remembering the billiard-table, which he could not handily take along, he abandoned these projects. He was a boy whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time. There were likely to be irritations in his morning's mail, and more often he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully sifted. So many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made the claim of more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long and trivial letters. "I have stirred up three generations," he said; "first the grandparents, then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren will begin to arrive soon." His mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting. One could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the contents. Going over one assortment he burst out: "Look at them! Look how trivial they are! Every envelope looks as if it contained a trivial human soul." Many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of one pattern. He was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible to bear more than a line or two of them. Yet a fresh, well-expressed note of appreciation always pleased him. "I can live for two months on a good compliment," he once said. Certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him relentlessly. Of one such he remarked: "That woman intends to pursue me to the grave. I wish something could be done to appease her." And again: "Everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to me--writes to me to get it." These morning sessions were likely to be of great interest. Once a letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist. "That word perfectly disgusts me," he said, and his features materialized the disgust, "just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that one can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he can change the color of his hair. The reason why a man is a pessimist or an optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so; and this man [a minister of the Gospel who was going to explain life to him] is going to tell me why he isn't a pessimist. Oh, he'll do it, but he won't tell the truth; he won't make it short enough." Yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages, theological arguments, and consolations. He might have said to them: "Oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that long ago I played with and set aside." He could have said it and spoken the truth; but I believe he did not even think it. He listened to any one for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his behalf. One morning he read aloud a lecture given in London by George Bernard Shaw on religion, commenting as he read. He said: "This letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were equally frank]. There is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird, and so on down; that is their business. There is always enough for each one to live on. It is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man's property or life if he is strong enough and wants to take it. It is not immoral to create the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly these things." At one place in the lecture Shaw had said: "No one of good sense can accept any creed to-day without reservation." "Certainly not," commented Clemens; "the reservation is that he is a d--d fool to accept it at all." He was in one of his somber moods that morning. I had received a print of a large picture of Thomas Nast--the last one taken. The face had a pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years. Clemens looked at the picture several moments without speaking. Then he broke out: "Why can't a man die when he's had his tragedy? I ought to have died long ago." And somewhat later: "Once Twichell heard me cussing the human race, and he said, 'Why, Mark, you are the last person in the world to do that--one selected and set apart as you are.' I said 'Joe, you don't know what you are talking about. I am not cussing altogether about my own little troubles. Any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when I read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on I realize what a creature the human animal is. Don't you care more about the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?' Joe said he did, and shut up." It occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers. "No difference," he said. "I read books printed two hundred years ago, and they hurt just the same." "Those people are all dead and gone," I objected. "They hurt just the same," he maintained. I sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by his tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and stirred even to violence. Once following the dictation, when I came to the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently much depressed. He said: "I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end to it all. I will kill myself." "You have much to live for----" "But I am so tired of the eternal round," he interrupted; "so tired." And I knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had come to him that day in Florence, and would never pass away. I referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief he would find in his country home. He shook his head. "The country home I need," he said, fiercely, "is a cemetery." Yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began. He was gay and hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game. H. H. Rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very long calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long, and whose interests were so vast and innumerable. He would come in where we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would pick up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then. More often, however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the morning. They were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or perhaps Clemens would read aloud something he had written. But once, after greetings, he began: "Well, Rogers, I don't know what you think of it, but I think I have had about enough of this world, and I wish I were out of it." Mr. Rogers replied, "I don't say much about it, but that expresses my view." This from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers of the time was impressive. Each at the mountain-top of his career, they agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a desire to experiment with the next stage. One could remember a thousand poor and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling and starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling. Well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth. One could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over. CCLI A LOBBYING EXPEDITION Clara Clemens came home now and then to see how matters were progressing, and very properly, for Clemens was likely to become involved in social intricacies which required a directing hand. The daughter inherited no little of the father's characteristics of thought and phrase, and it was always a delight to see them together when one could be just out of range of the crossfire. I remember soon after her return, when she was making some searching inquiries concerning the billiard-room sign, and other suggested or instituted reforms, he said: "Oh well, never mind, it doesn't matter. I'm boss in this house." She replied, quickly: "Oh no, you're not. You're merely owner. I'm the captain--the commander-in-chief." One night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that year. During several previous summers she had planned to visit Vienna to see her old music-master, Leschetizky, once more before his death. She said: "Leschetizky is getting so old. If I don't go soon I'm afraid I sha'n't be in time for his funeral." "Yes," said her father, thoughtfully, "you keep rushing over to Leschetizky's funeral, and you'll miss mine." He had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection, and the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment. During a moment between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his exercise in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a doubt of her father's gift for social management. I said: "Oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong." "Yes, I know," she answered. "The king can do no wrong; but he frightens me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it." He came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent performance of Roosevelt's, which had stirred up a good deal of newspaper amusement--it was the Storer matter and those indiscreet letters which Roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship which Storer so much desired. Miss Clemens was inclined to defend the President, and spoke with considerable enthusiasm concerning his elements of popularity, which had won him such extraordinary admiration. "Certainly he is popular," Clemens admitted, "and with the best of reasons. If the twelve apostles should call at the White House, he would say, 'Come in, come in! I am delighted to see you. I've been watching your progress, and I admired it very much.' Then if Satan should come, he would slap him on the shoulder and say, 'Why, Satan, how do you do? I am so glad to meet you. I've read all your works and enjoyed every one of them.' Anybody could be popular with a gift like that." It was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her: "Ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the ranch, Paine and I are going to Washington on a vacation. You don't seem to admire our society much, anyhow." There were still other reasons for the Washington expedition. There was an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible means to get the measure through. Clemens, during Cleveland's first administration, some nineteen years before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through S. S. ("Sunset") Cox had obtained the "privileges of the floor" of the House, which had enabled him to canvass the members individually. Cox assured the doorkeeper that Clemens had received the thanks of Congress for national literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege. This was not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those days, and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded excellent results. Clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and believed that his friendship with Speaker Cannon--"Uncle Joe"--would obtain for him a similar privilege. The Copyright Association working in its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body. "I canvassed the entire House personally that other time," he said. "Cox introduced me to the Democrats, and John D. Long, afterward Secretary of the Navy, introduced me to the Republicans. I had a darling time converting those members, and I'd like to try the experiment again." I should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season. On the return from Dublin he had said: "I can't bear to put on black clothes again. I wish I could wear white all winter. I should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized. Their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and to the spirit--a garden of Eden for charm and color. "The men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the garden like so many charred stumps. If we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? I should like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes, and so would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. If I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning clothed as I would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant and the congregation would come tagging after me. They would scoff, of course, but they would envy me, too. When I put on black it reminds me of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round." It was not long after this that he said: "I have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let the critics say what they will." So his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening dress and on special occasions. It was a gratifying change, and though the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened by the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person. He had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive. This departure of costume came along a week or two before the Washington trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon Washington in December in that snowy plumage. I ventured: "This is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to invite any half-way measures. I should vote in favor of the white suit." I think Miss Clemens was for it, too. She must have been or the vote wouldn't have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea. At all events, the white suits came along. We were off the following afternoon: Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the Appletons, one of the Putnams, George Bowker, and others were on the train. On the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into the possibility of originating a new one. Clemens said: "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages." We put up at the Willard, and in the morning drove over to the Congressional Library, where the copyright hearing was in progress. There was a joint committee of the two Houses seated round a long table at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill, mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical music-rolls. The fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was not viewed with favor by most of the writers. Clemens referred to the musical contingent as "those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of their own." I should mention that early that morning Clemens had written this letter to Speaker Cannon: December 7, 1906. DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next week, but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish this for your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. I have arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it. Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don't wait for others --there isn't time. I have stayed away and let Congress alone for seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks. Congress knows it perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered. Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick. When shall I come? With love and a benediction; MARK TWAIN. We went over to the Capitol now to deliver to "Uncle Joe" this characteristic letter. We had picked up Clemens's nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, at the Library, and he came along and led the way to the Speaker's room. Arriving there, Clemens laid off his dark overcoat and stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians. He had been noticed as he entered the Capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close behind. Within less than a minute word was being passed through the corridors that Mark Twain was at the Capitol in his white suit. The privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall outside. Speaker Cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he "billowed" in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with such a rush and tide of life. After greetings, Clemens produced the letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition. Uncle Joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it were really a petition, as in fact it was. He smiled, but he said, quite seriously: "That is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by when I am permitted any such liberties. Tom Reed, when he was Speaker, inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of the floor of the House." "I got in the other time," Clemens insisted. "Yes," said Uncle Joe; "but that ain't now. Sunset Cox could let you in, but I can't. They'd hang me." He reflected a moment, and added: "I'll tell you what I'll do: I've got a private room down-stairs that I never use. It's all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to. I'll let you have it as long as you want to stay here, and I'll give you my private servant, Neal, who's been here all his life and knows every official, every Senator and Representative, and they all know him. He'll bring you whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him. You can have the members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much as you please. I'd give you a key to the room, only I haven't got one myself. I never can get in when I want to, but Neal can get in, and he'll unlock it for you. You can have the room, and you can have Neal. Now, will that do you?" Clemens said it would. It was, in fact, an offer without precedent. Probably never in the history of the country had a Speaker given up his private room to lobbyists. We went in to see the House open, and then went down with Neal and took possession of the room. The reporters had promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author, led him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired questions at him, and kept their note-books busy. He made a great figure, all in white there among them, and they didn't fail to realize the value of it as "copy." He talked about copyright, and about his white clothes, and about a silk hat which Howells wore. Back in the Speaker's room, at last, he began laying out the campaign, which would begin next day. By and by he said: "Look here! I believe I've got to speak over there in that committee-room to-day or to-morrow. I ought to know just when it is." I had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it, which I did at once. I hurried back faster than I had gone. "Mr. Clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded full; people waiting to hear you." "The devil!" he said. "Well, all right; I'll just lie down here a few minutes and then we'll go over. Take paper and pencil and make a few headings." There was a couch in the room. He lay down while I sat at the table with a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently he rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready. It was half past three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with people and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside. Herbert Putnam, the librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and Clemens, removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white armor. There was a perceptible stir. Howells, startled for a moment, whispered: "What in the world did he wear that white suit for?" though in his heart he admired it as much as the others. I don't remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying nothing important. Whoever it was, he was followed by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited interest. Then it was Mark Twain's turn. He did not stand by his chair, as the others had done, but walked over to the Speaker's table, and, turning, faced his audience. I have never seen a more impressive sight than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room. He never touched his notes; he didn't even remember them. He began in that even, quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for a word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, I suppose, had ever heard. Certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading. The weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull, statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and dreary platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as copyright champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded for the long waiting. They began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and smile, like flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the refreshing shower that means renewed life and vigor. Every listener was as if standing on tiptoe. When the last sentence was spoken the applause came like an explosion.--[Howells in his book My Mark Twain speaks of Clemens's white clothing as "an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon." He adds: "The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity."] There came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a word and to shake his hand. But he was anxious to get away. We drove to the Willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner. He was elated, and said the occasion required full-dress. We started down at last, fronted and frocked like penguins. I did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect. I supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room without passing through the long corridor known as "Peacock Alley," because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables of the national capital. When we reached the entrance of the dining-room he said: "Isn't there another entrance to this place?" I said there was, but that it was very conspicuous. We should have to go down the long corridor. "Oh, well," he said, "I don't mind that. Let's go back and try it over." So we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine, stately flight of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into "Peacock Alley." To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner. I did not again make the mistake of taking him around to the more secluded elevator. I aided and abetted him every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway, and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of "Peacock Alley." The dinner was a continuous reception. No sooner was he seated than this Congressman and that Senator came over to shake hands with Mark Twain. Governor Francis of Missouri also came. Eventually Howells drifted in, and Clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes. Back in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed over "Uncle Joe's" surrender to the "copyright bandits," and turned in for the night. We were at the Capitol headquarters in Speaker Cannon's private room about eleven o'clock next morning. Clemens was not in the best humor because I had allowed him to oversleep. He was inclined to be discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members would come down to see him. He expressed a wish for some person of influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking gloomily. I slipped out and found the Speaker's colored body-guard, Neal, and suggested that Mr. Clemens was ready now to receive the members. That was enough. They began to arrive immediately. John Sharp Williams came first, then Boutell, from Illinois, Littlefield, of Maine, and after them a perfect procession, including all the leading lights--Dalzell, Champ Clark, McCall--one hundred and eighty or so in all during the next three or four hours. Neal announced each name at the door, and in turn I announced it to Clemens when the press was not too great. He had provided boxes of cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, Clemens in his white suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully excited. There were chairs, but usually there was only standing room. He was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when at last it was over, and Champ Clark, who I believe remained longest and was most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared that he was not a particle tired, and added: "I believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass." He was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success. Neal, who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill. We drove to the hotel and dined that night with the Dodges, who had been neighbors at Riverdale. Later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered around him, among them I remember the minister from Costa Rica, the Italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he had known during his European residence. Some one told of traveling in India and China, and how a certain Hindu "god" who had exchanged autographs with Mark Twain during his sojourn there was familiar with only two other American names--George Washington and Chicago; while the King of Siam had read but three English books--the Bible, Bryce's American Commonwealth, and The Innocents Abroad. We were at Thomas Nelson Page's for dinner next evening--a wonderfully beautiful home, full of art treasures. A number of guests had been invited. Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted to reading. He told of Mrs. Clemens's embarrassment when Stepniak had visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of Balzac, Thackeray, and the others. She had been obliged to say that he had not read them. "'How interesting!' said Stepniak. But it wasn't interesting to Mrs. Clemens. It was torture." He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs. Clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey: "If I had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible that she might have died in my arms. Sometimes I think that perhaps there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was dying and that I was not there." In New York I had once brought him a print of the superb "Adams Memorial," by Saint-Gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still court in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington. On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast, he said: "Engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the Saint-Gaudens bronze." It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such a visit. We entered the little inclosure of cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of the great human mystery of life and death. Instinctively we removed our hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. Then: "What does he call it?" he asked. I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that great line of Shakespeare's--"the rest is silence." "But that figure is not silent," he said. And later, as we were driving home: "It is in deep meditation on sorrowful things." When we returned to New York he had the little print framed, and kept it always on his mantelpiece. CCLII THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION From the Washington trip dates a period of still closer association with Mark Twain. On the way to New York he suggested that I take up residence in his house--a privilege which I had no wish to refuse. There was room going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. So, after that, most of the days and nights I was there. Looking back on that time now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant of play. Then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the rich organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which others do not see. This was the hour between dinner and billiards--the hour which he found most restful of the day. Sometimes he rose, walking the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought. Of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown up, and like a lion's, rather large for his body. But oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and heightening his brilliant coloring. The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. He did not always talk; but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of him when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some new angle of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech. These are the pictures that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof, and they will not fade while memory lasts. Of Mark Twain's table philosophies it seems proper to make rather extended record. They were usually unpremeditated, and they presented the man as he was, and thought. I preserved as much of them as I could, and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and other unprinted writings. This dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the billiard-room. The latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through a great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and religious. His talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled with heresies of his own devising. Once, after a period of general silence, he said: "No one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. It is too nicely assembled and regulated. There is, of course, a great Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness." It was objected, by one of those present, that as the Infinite Mind suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that Mind must feel and eventually regulate. "Yes," he said, "not a sparrow falls but He is noticing, if that is what you mean; but the human conception of it is that God is sitting up nights worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race." Then he recalled a fancy which I have since found among his memoranda. In this note he had written: The suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes, through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in the veins of God; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and wiggle & brag in each, & think God can tell them apart at that distance & has nothing better to do than try. This--the entertainment of an eternity. Who so poor in his ambitions as to consent to be God on those terms? Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, He is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it. "The Bible," he said, "reveals the character of its God with minute exactness. It is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil impulses far beyond the human limit. In the Old Testament He is pictured as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed by their proprietors. It is the most damnatory biography that ever found its way into print. Its beginning is merely childish. Adam is forbidden to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. How could that impress Adam? He could have no idea of what death meant. He had never seen a dead thing. He had never heard of one. If he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just as much as the other one. The watery intellect that invented that notion could be depended on to go on and decree that all of Adam's descendants down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in the beginning. "There is a curious poverty of invention in Bibles. Most of the great races each have one, and they all show this striking defect. Each pretends to originality, without possessing any. Each of them borrows from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as fresh and new inspirations from on high. We borrowed the Golden Rule from Confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted it without a blush. We went back to Babylon for the Deluge, and are as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble; whereas we know now that Noah's flood never happened, and couldn't have happened--not in that way. The flood is a favorite with Bible-makers. Another favorite with the founders of religions is the Immaculate Conception. It had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as a new idea. It was old in Egypt several thousand years before Christ was born. The Hindus prized it ages ago. The Egyptians adopted it even for some of their kings. The Romans borrowed the idea from Greece. We got it straight from heaven by way of Rome. We are still charmed with it." He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about the room. Once, considering the character of God--the Bible God-he said: "We haven't been satisfied with God's character as it is given in the Old Testament; we have amended it. We have called Him a God of mercy and love and morals. He didn't have a single one of those qualities in the beginning. He didn't hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to exhibit His power just to show off--and He kept hardening Pharaoh's heart so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit samples of His workmanship. Now and then, during the forty years' wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with the Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of the two. That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own." He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which had projected the universe. He said: "In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly. "Two things are quite certain: one is that God, the limitless God, manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. The man has never lived who could create even the humblest of God's creatures. The other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man's welfare or comfort, or He wouldn't have created those things to disturb and destroy him. The human conception of pity and morality must be entirely unknown to that Infinite God, as much unknown as the conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded. "If God ever contemplates those qualities in man He probably admires them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves; probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would look as big to Him as a constellation. He could create a constellation with a thought; but He has been all the measureless ages, and He has never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy and morality. He goes on destroying a whole island of people with an earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race. The human being needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done it already; but most of them don't dare to say so." He pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly immoral now. He pointed out that even the Decalogue made no reference to lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor. Also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: The general conclusion being that the morals of the Lord had been the morals of the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the Lord had remained unchanged. It is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any statements of this sort from him. In the first place, there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less vigorous phrase. It was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen. On another evening he began: "The mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. Somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his imagination. Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. I wonder where he got that asset. It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of God. Wallace says that the whole universe was made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the center of it, which we call the world. It looks like a good deal of trouble for such a small result; but it's dangerous to dispute with a learned astronomer like Wallace. Still, I don't think we ought to decide too soon about it--not until the returns are all in. There is the geological evidence, for instance. Even after the universe was created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man. Some of the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old. Lord Kelvin doesn't agree with them. He says that it isn't more than a hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about thirty thousand years of that time. Even so, it was 99,970,000 years getting ready, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see man and admire him. That was because God first had to make the oyster. You can't make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can't do it in a day. You've got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen. Some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed; the oyster is done. Now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him. That would be just like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet. "The oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the world for man was fish. So the old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in. It took twenty million years to make the fish and to fossilize him so we'd have the evidence later. "Then, the Paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to start a new age to make the reptiles. Man would have to have some reptiles --not to eat, but to develop himself from. Thirty million years were required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left were made those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy world in remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and their sixty feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them. They are all gone now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them left on this far-flung fringe of time. "It took all those years to get one of those creatures properly constructed to proceed to the next step. Then came the pterodactyl, who thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been intended to produce him, for there wasn't anything too foolish for a pterodactyl to imagine. I suppose he did attract a good deal of attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course of time. You can't say too much for the picturesqueness of the pterodactyl --he was the triumph of his period. He wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy-looking creature. But the progression went right along. "During the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the Bering Strait and wandered around in Asia and died, all except a few to carry on the preparation with. There were six of those glacial periods, with two million years or so between each. They chased those poor orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty degrees below. They never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land. Sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose just as they got located. They led that uncertain, strenuous existence for about twenty-five million years, always wondering what was going to happen next, never suspecting that it was just a preparation for man, who had to be done just so or there wouldn't be any proper or harmonious place for him when he arrived, and then at last the monkey came, and everybody could see at a glance that man wasn't far off now, and that was true enough. The monkey went on developing for close upon five million years, and then he turned into a man--to all appearances. "It does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination. It makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly different. Those earlier animals didn't have it, and the monkey hasn't it or he wouldn't be so cheerful." [Paine records Twain's thoughts in that magnificent essay: "Was the World Made for Man" published long after his death in the group of essays under the title "Letters from the Earth." There are minor additions in the published version: "coal to fry the fish"; and the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole "without a dry rag on them,"; and the "coat of paint" on top of the bulb on top the Eiffel Tower representing "man's portion of this world's history." Ed.] He often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this final creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the imagination. Once (this was in the billiard-room) I started him by saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here. He said: "Is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions of this planet?" I began to qualify, rather weakly; but what I said did not matter. He was off on his favorite theme. "Man adapted to the earth?" he said. "Why, he can't sleep out-of-doors without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always under going repairs. A machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. The original cave man, the troglodyte, may have got his that way. But now they come through months and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able to bear it. As soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night's rest. The second set will answer for a while; but he will never get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one. The animals are not much troubled that way. In a wild state, a natural state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age. But man starts in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet. He has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-fever, as a matter of course. Afterward, as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another. He's just a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes. Look at the workmanship of him in some of its particulars. What are his tonsils for? They perform no useful function; they have no value. They are but a trap for tonsilitis and quinsy. And what is the appendix for? It has no value. Its sole interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble. What is his beard for? It is just a nuisance. All nations persecute it with the razor. Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be. You seldom see a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head. A man wants to keep his hair. It is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and Nature half the time puts it on so it won't stay. "Man's sight and smell and hearing are all inferior. If he were suited to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies. The robin hears the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound follows a scent that is two days old. Man isn't even handsome, as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the Bengal tiger--that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty. Think of the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that poor thing!--the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe--a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom. If he can't get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like? He has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect. It makes him supreme--the higher animals can't match him there. It's very curious." A letter which he wrote to J. Howard Moore concerning his book The Universal Kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here. DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently & irascibly for me. There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones --morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural & healthy instincts. Yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCLIII AN EVENING WITH HELEN KELLER I recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party given at the Clemenses' home on New-Year's Eve, with charades and story-telling and music. It was the music feature of this party that was distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private houses. The music came over the regular telephone wire, and was delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those used for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers at the central station. Just why the telharmonium has not made good its promises of popularity I do not know. Clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea. He made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions. He did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed. It was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and "Auld Lang Syne" and "America." The other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in honor of Helen Keller. It was fascinating to watch her, and to realize with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her physical life. To see Mark Twain and Helen Keller together was something not easily to be forgotten. When Mrs. Macy (who, as Miss Sullivan, had led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to her with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated every shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic. Helen visited the various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the usual observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail. Her sensitive fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the exclamations she uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow visualized each thing in all its particulars. There was a bronze cat of handsome workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those all--seeing fingers of hers over it she said: "It is smiling." CCLIV BILLIARD-ROOM NOTES The billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter. My play improved, and Clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds altogether, and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in subjection. Frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments over the legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us quite as enjoyable as the rest of the game. Sometimes he would count a shot which was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always a delight to him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of conscience, and whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of repair. It would always end by him saying: "I don't wish even to seem to do anything which can invite suspicion. I refuse to count that shot," or something of like nature. Sometimes when I had let a questionable play pass without comment, he would watch anxiously until I had made a similar one and then insist on my scoring it to square accounts. His conscience was always repairing itself. He had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player. It consisted in turning out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve balls to play on. He had learned that the average player would seldom make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a position where he couldn't play at all. The thing looked absurdly easy. It looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred; but for more than an hour I tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing. Long after the play itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter, the tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail. It was very soon after that that Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley") came down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, Clemens quietly--as if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve balls and asked Dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss. Dunne said he thought he could make a thousand. Clemens quite indifferently said that he didn't believe he could make fifty. Dunne offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made. Dunne scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until Clemens had twenty-five dollars of Dunne's money, and Dunne was sweating and swearing, and Mark Twain rocking with delight. Dunne went away still unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again. Perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned something. He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something more added. Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement. Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the game was actually in progress. If there was anything to be said on either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on the couch, until the matter was concluded. Such interruptions happened pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests. Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by. On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent dreams. All of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering. "There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. "Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house. "My other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my night-garments. People don't seem to notice me there at first, and then pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me suspiciously, and I can see that they are wondering who I am and why I am there in that costume. Then it occurs to me that I can fix it by making myself known. I take hold of some man and whisper to him, 'I am Mark Twain'; but that does not improve it, for immediately I can hear him whispering to the others, 'He says he is Mark Twain,' and they all look at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and I can see that they don't believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that confession. Sometimes, in that dream, I am dressed like a tramp instead of being in my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go away and leave me standing there, ashamed. I generally enjoy my dreams, but not those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." Quite often some curious episode of the world's history would flash upon him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the game to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date and circumstance. He had a natural passion for historic events and a gift for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom reliable. He was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at all. He had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper, he wrote, for his own reminder: The accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail. I prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while I shave--and I always forget to pour it. Yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail, something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks afterward would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune moment. Perhaps this also was a part of his old pilot-training. Once Clara Clemens remarked: "It always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember. Some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping that he didn't, will suddenly come back to him just when you least expect it or care for it." My note-book contains the entry: February 11, 1907. He said to-day: "A blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the game afterward, while we can't remember from one shot to the next." I mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do if he wished. "Yes," he answered, "those are special memories; a pilot will tell you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can't remember what he had for breakfast." "How long did you keep your pilot-memory?" I asked. "Not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for when I went to report on a paper a year or two later I never had to make any notes." "I suppose you still remember some of the river?" "Not much. Hat Island, Helena and here and there a place; but that is about all." CCLV FURTHER PERSONALITIES Like every person living, Mark Twain had some peculiar and petty economies. Such things in great men are noticeable. He lived extravagantly. His household expenses at the time amounted to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest, and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number. His clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to his children; his gratuities were always liberal. He never questioned pecuniary outgoes --seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account so long as there was plenty. He smoked cheap cigars because he preferred their flavor. Yet he had his economies. I have seen him, before leaving a room, go around and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against that waste. I have known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and object to an apparent overcharge of a few cents. It seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: He abhorred extortion and visible waste. Furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership. One evening, while we were playing billiards, I noticed a five-cent piece on the floor. I picked it up, saying: "Here is five cents; I don't know whose it is." He regarded the coin rather seriously, I thought, and said: "I don't know, either." I laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room. The play went on, and I forgot the circumstance. When the game ended that night I went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word. As he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked the assortment over and said: "That five-cent piece you found was mine." I brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again. It may have been one of his jokes, but I think it more likely that he remembered having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that it was missing. More than once, in Washington, he had said: "Draw plenty of money for incidental expenses. Don't bother to keep account of them." So it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious attention to a trifling detail. He had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed Subway, which he called the Underground. Sometimes he would say: "I'll pay your fare on the Underground if you want to take a ride with me." And he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when I rode far up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had taken him to the door, he turned and said, gravely: "Here is five cents to pay your way home." And I took it in the same spirit in which it had been offered. It was probably this trait which caused some one occasionally to claim that Mark Twain was close in money matters. Perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was parsimonious; but, if so, I must believe that it was when he was sorely pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation. He wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and properties. He took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying to get an unfair division of profits. Then it became something besides greed. It became an indignation that amounted to malevolence. I was concerned in a number of dealings with Mark Twain, and at a period in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small, or greedy in his money dealings I think I should have seen it. Personally, I found him liberal to excess, and I never observed in him anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him. Once that winter, when a letter came from Steve Gillis saying that he was an invalid now, and would have plenty of time to read Sam's books if he owned them, Clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed each of those twenty-five volumes. Then he sent them, charges paid, to that far Californian retreat. It was hardly the act of a stingy man. He had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from an authoritative source, and I remember how pleased he was that winter with Prof. William Lyon Phelps's widely published opinion, which ranked Mark Twain as the greatest American novelist, and declared that his fame would outlive any American of his time. Phelps had placed him above Holmes, Howells, James, and even Hawthorne. He had declared him to be more American than any of these--more American even than Whitman. Professor Phelps's position in Yale College gave this opinion a certain official weight; but I think the fact of Phelps himself being a writer of great force, with an American freshness of style, gave it a still greater value. Among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with Eugene F. Ware, of Kansas, with whose penname--"Ironquill"--Clemens had long been familiar. Ware was a breezy Western genius of the finest type. If he had abandoned law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached. There was in his work that same spirit of Americanism and humor and humanity that is found in Mark Twain's writings, and he had the added faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart. I had known Ware personally during a period of Western residence, and later, when he was Commissioner of Pensions under Roosevelt. I usually saw him when he came to New York, and it was a great pleasure now to bring together the two men whose work I so admired. They met at a small private luncheon at The Players, and Peter Dunne was there, and Robert Collier, and it was such an afternoon as Howells has told of when he and Aldrich and Bret Harte and those others talked until the day faded into twilight, and twilight deepened into evening. Clemens had put in most of the day before reading Ware's book of poems, 'The Rhymes of Ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American poetry--I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one he had met before. Among Ware's poems he had been especially impressed with the "Fables," and with some verses entitled "Whist," which, though rather more optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy. They have a distinctly "Western" feeling. WHIST Hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled, And fairly dealt, and still I got no hand; The morning came; but I, with mind unruffled, Did simply say, "I do not understand." Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. Blind are our efforts to control the forces That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt. I do not like the way the cards are shuffled, But still I like the game and want to play; And through the long, long night will I, unruffled, Play what I get, until the break of day. \ 
2987	----	MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY By Albert Bigelow Paine VOLUME III, Part 2: 1907-1910 CCLVI HONORS FROM OXFORD Clemens made a brief trip to Bermuda during the winter, taking Twichell along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before. They had been comparatively young men then. They were old now, but they found the green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever. They did not find their old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and then Twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain schoolbooks in his youth, and Clemens promptly said, "Kirkham's Grammar." Kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she was dead, and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier time, reigned in her stead and entertained the successors of her mother's guests. They walked and drove about the island, and it was like taking up again a long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of the same tale. It gave Mark Twain a fresh interest in Bermuda, one which he did not allow to fade again. Later in the year (March, 1907) I also made a journey; it having been agreed that I should take a trip to the Mississippi and to the Pacific coast to see those old friends of Mark Twain's who were so rapidly passing away. John Briggs was still alive, and other Hannibal schoolmates; also Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis, and a few more of the early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as I had in hand. The billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside in view of prospective benefits. Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials. It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in the cave and on Holliday's Hill. I think it was six weeks later that he died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not reach the end of the year. Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures. When I left he said: "Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die. This is the last word I'll ever send to him." Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late, though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner, and to send back a parting word. I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding genius, Horace Bixby,--[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of 86]--still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his headquarters at St. Louis. Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to receive from Oxford University the literary doctor's degree. There had been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden and too good to be true. That the little barefoot lad that had played along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages in the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be likely to happen outside of a fairy tale. Returning to New York, I ran out to Tuxedo, where he had taken a home for the summer (for it was already May), and walking along the shaded paths of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the Oxford matter. Moberly Bell, of the London Times, had been over in April, and soon after his return to England there had come word of the proposed honor. Clemens privately and openly (to Bell) attributed it largely to his influence. He wrote to him: DEAR MR. BELL,--Your hand is in it & you have my best thanks. Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me I am glad to do it for an Oxford degree. I shall plan to sail for England a shade before the middle of June, so that I can have a few days in London before the 26th. A day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he overtook his letter with a cable: I perceive your hand in it. You have my best thanks. Sail on Minneapolis June 8th. Due in Southampton ten days later. Clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram to himself had confirmed it. "I never expected to cross the water again," he said; "but I would be willing to journey to Mars for that Oxford degree." He put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of Jim Gillis and the others I had visited, dwelling especially on Gillis's astonishing faculty for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his back to the fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other guide than his fancy. It was a long, happy walk we had, though rather a sad one in its memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close the gate of those early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to them afterward. He was back at 21 Fifth Avenue presently, arranging for his voyage. Meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and what not, and it was clear enough that his English sojourn was to be a busy one. He had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but two invitations--a dinner-party given by Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and a luncheon proposed by the "Pilgrims." But it became clear that this would not do. England was not going to confer its greatest collegiate honor without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute. Clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--Mr. Ralph W. Ashcroft, a young Englishman familiar with London life. They sailed on the 8th of June, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the Quaker City to win his great fame. I went with him to the ship. His first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little sad, remembering, I think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor with him but could not share it now. CCLVII A TRUE ENGLISH WELCOME Mark Twain's trip across the Atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant one. The Minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of company. Prof. Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw's biographer, was aboard;--[Professor Henderson has since then published a volume on Mark Twain-an interesting commentary on his writings--mainly from the sociological point of view.]--also President Patton, of the Princeton Theological Seminary; a well-known cartoonist, Richards, and some very attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through his life had appealed to Mark Twain. Indeed, in his later life they made a stronger appeal than ever. The years had robbed him of his own little flock, and always he was trying to replace them. Once he said: "During those years after my wife's death I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some." He adopted several on that journey to England and on the return voyage, and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life. These companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as we shall see by and by. There were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit of the Seamen's Orphanage. One of his adopted granddaughters--"Charley" he called her--played a violin solo and Clemens made a speech. Later his autographs were sold at auction. Dr. Patton was auctioneer, and one autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the record price for a single Mark Twain signature. He wore his white suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it. He told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of his household had always tried to keep him straight. The children, he said, had fallen into the habit of calling it "dusting papa off." Then he went on: When my daughter came to see me off last Saturday at the boat she slipped a note in my hand and said, "Read it when you get aboard the ship." I didn't think of it again until day before yesterday, and it was a "dusting off." And if I carry out all the instructions that I got there I shall be more celebrated in England for my behavior than for anything else. I got instructions how to act on every occasion. She underscored "Now, don't you wear white clothes on ship or on shore until you get back," and I intended to obey. I have been used to obeying my family all my life, but I wore the white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes in it is in the cellar. I am not apologizing for the white clothes; I am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her. He received a great welcome when the ship arrived at Tilbury. A throng of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. It was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day during the four weeks of his English sojourn. In a dictation following his return, Mark Twain said: Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! They stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me. J. Y. W. MacAlister was at the St. Pancras railway station to meet him, and among others on the platform was Bernard Shaw, who had come down to meet Professor Henderson. Clemens and Shaw were presented, and met eagerly, for each greatly admired the other. A throng gathered. Mark Twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at Brown's Hotel, "a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned English inn," he called it, "well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort now rare in England, and becoming rarer every year." But Brown's was not placid and subdued during his stay. The London newspapers declared that Mark Twain's arrival had turned Brown's not only into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of visitors and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement. It was, in fact, an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and magnificence anything he had hitherto known. His former London visits, beginning with that of 1872, had been distinguished by high attentions, but all of them combined could not equal this. When England decides to get up an ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish Americans. An assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it sometimes required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled and busy men to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence. A pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in. Lady Stanley, widow of Henry M. Stanley, wrote: You know I want to see you and join right hand to right hand. I must see your dear face again . . . . You will have no peace, rest, or leisure during your stay in London, and you will end by hating human beings. Let me come before you feel that way. Mary Cholmondeley, the author of Red Pottage, niece of that lovable Reginald Cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and urgent invitations. Archdeacon Wilberforce wrote: I have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel king of the Belgians and telling my people to buy the book. I am only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial welcome in England, but we long to see you again, and I should like to change hats with you again. Do you remember? The Athenaeum, the Garrick, and a dozen other London clubs had anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period of his stay. Every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings. It was such a reception as Charles Dickens had received in America in 1842, and again in 1867. A London paper likened it to Voltaire's return to Paris in 1778, when France went mad over him. There is simply no limit to English affection and, hospitality once aroused. Clemens wrote: Surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: I had seen nothing like them before; I shall see nothing approaching them again! Sir Thomas Lipton and Bram Stoker, old friends, were among the first to present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers. Clemens's resolutions for secluding himself were swept away. On the very next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with J. Henniker Heaton, father of International Penny Postage, at the Bath Club, just across Dover Street from Brown's. He lunched at the Ritz with Marjorie Bowen and Miss Bisland. In the afternoon he sat for photographs at Barnett's, and made one or two calls. He could no more resist these things than a debutante in her first season. He was breakfasting again with Heaton next morning; lunching with "Toby, M.P.," and Mrs. Lucy; and having tea with Lady Stanley in the afternoon, and being elaborately dined next day at Dorchester House by Ambassador and Mrs. Reid. These were all old and tried friends. He was not a stranger among them, he said; he was at home. Alfred Austin, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Alma Tadema, E. A. Abbey, Edmund Goss, George Smalley, Sir Norman Lockyer, Henry W. Lucy, Sidney Brooks, and Bram Stoker were among those at Dorchester House--all old comrades, as were many of the other guests. "I knew fully half of those present," he said afterward. Mark Twain's bursting upon London society naturally was made the most of by the London papers, and all his movements were tabulated and elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the situation it was not left unimproved. The celebrated Ascot racing-cup was stolen just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively mingled their head-lines, "Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen," and kept the joke going in one form or another. Certain state jewels and other regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of Mark Twain's doings. English reporters adopted American habits for the occasion, and invented or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent. Once, when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across narrow Dover Street to the Bath Club, the papers flamed next day with the story that Mark Twain had wandered about the lobby of Brown's and promenaded Dover Street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide attention. Clara Clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by such reports, and cabled this delicate "dusting off": "Much worried. Remember proprieties." To which he answered: "They all pattern after me," a reply to the last degree characteristic. It was on the fourth day after his arrival, June 22d, that he attended the King's garden-party at Windsor Castle. There were eighty-five hundred guests at the King's party, and if we may judge from the London newspapers, Mark Twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng as any member of the royal family. His presentation to the King and the Queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their conversation is quite fully given. Clemens himself reported: His Majesty was very courteous. In the course of the conversation I reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when I had the honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at Homburg, in Germany. I said that I had often told about that episode, and that whenever I was the historian I made good history of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged thereby. I said I should like to go on repeating this history, but that I should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while I should probably never tell it twice in the same way I should at least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands. His Majesty intimated his willingness that I should continue to disseminate that piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts he would trust me to furnish that improvement. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the Queen looked as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when I saw her first. I did not say this to her, because I learned long ago never to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace and inexperienced people to say. That she still looked to me as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have mentioned it to her. I could have said it and spoken the truth, but I was too wise for that. I kept the remark unuttered and saved her Majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time. All that report about my proposal to buy Windsor Castle and its grounds was a false rumor. I started it myself. One newspaper said I patted his Majesty on the shoulder--an impertinence of which I was not guilty; I was reared in the most exclusive circles of Missouri and I know how to behave. The King rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting, but he did it of his own accord. The newspaper which said I talked with her Majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable. Rain was threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the Queen said, "Please put your hat on, Mr. Clemens." I begged her pardon and excused myself from doing it. After a moment or two she said, "Mr. Clemens, put your hat on"--with a slight emphasis on the word "on" "I can't allow you to catch cold here." When a beautiful queen commands it is a pleasure to obey, and this time I obeyed--but I had already disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; I did talk with the Queen of England with my hat on, but it wasn't fair in the newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there were reasons for it which he could not know of. Nearly all the members of the British royal family were there, and there were foreign visitors which included the King of Siam and a party of India princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which Clemens admired openly and said he would like to wear himself. The English papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most distinguished parties ever given at Windsor. Clemens attended it in company with Mr. and Mrs. J. Henniker Heaton, and when it was over Sir Thomas Lipton joined them and motored with them back to Brown's. He was at Archdeacon Wilberforce's next day, where a curious circumstance developed. When he arrived Wilberforce said to him, in an undertone: "Come into my library. I have something to show you." In the library Clemens was presented to a Mr. Pole, a plain-looking man, suggesting in dress and appearance the English tradesman. Wilberforce said: "Mr. Pole, show to Mr. Clemens what you have brought here." Mr. Pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view at last a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in appearance, and cunningly overlaid with green glass. The archdeacon took it and handed it to Clemens as some precious jewel. Clemens said: "What is it?" Wilberforce impressively answered: "It is the Holy Grail." Clemens naturally started with surprise. "You may well start," said Wilberforce; "but it's the truth. That is the Holy Grail." Then he gave this explanation: Mr. Pole, a grain merchant of Bristol, had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true Grail. Another dreamer, a Dr. Goodchild, of Bath, was mixed up in the matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. Mr. Pole seemed a man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed the discovery to be genuine and authentic. Of course there could be no positive proof. It was a thing that must be taken on trust. That the vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations had conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to the natural suggestion of fraud. Clemens, to whom the whole idea of the Holy Grail was simply a poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated, like his own Connecticut Yankee, back into the Arthurian days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. Whatever it was, it was to them the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only second to the cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the honor of having been one of the first permitted to see the relic. In a subsequent dictation he said: I am glad I have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half- hour. In its way it stands alone in my life's experience. In the belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was brought by night and secretly delivered to Nicodemus, nearly nineteen centuries ago, after the Creator of the universe had delivered up His life on the cross for the redemption of the human race; the very cup which the stainless Sir Galahad had sought with knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in Arthur's time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a stately name required--no Sir Galahad, no Sir Bors de Ganis, no Sir Lancelot of the Lake--nothing but a mere Mr. Pole.--[From the New York Sun somewhat later: "Mr. Pole communicated the discovery to a dignitary of the Church of England, who summoned a number of eminent persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it. Forty attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests, Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, Professor Crookas, and ministers of various religious bodies, including the Rev. R. J. Campbell. They heard Mr. Pole's story with deep attention, but he could not prove the genuineness of the relic."] Clemens saw Mr. and Mrs. Rogers at Claridge's Hotel that evening; lunched with his old friends Sir Norman and Lady Lockyer next day; took tea with T. P. O'Connor at the House of Commons, and on the day following, which was June a 5th, he was the guest of honor at one of the most elaborate occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the Pilgrims at the Savoy Hotel. It would be impossible to set down here a report of the doings, or even a list of the guests, of that gathering. The Pilgrims is a club with branches on both sides of the ocean, and Mark Twain, on either side, was a favorite associate. At this luncheon the picture on the bill of fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a great pen for his staff, turning his back on the Mississippi River and being led along his literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is attached by a string. On a guest-card was printed: Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout "Mark Twain!"--that serves you for a deathless sign --On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line-- Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten thousand fathoms deep! --O. S. [OWEN SEAMAN]. Augustine Birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this paragraph: Mark Twain is a man whom Englishmen and Americans do well to honor. He is a true consolidator of nations. His delightful humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. His truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor --overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his presence, and we rejoice to see him here. Long may he live to reap a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection. The toast was drunk standing. Then Clemens rose and made a speech which delighted all England. In his introduction Mr. Birrell had happened to say, "How I came here I will not ask!" Clemens remembered this, and looking down into Mr. Birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused, he said: "Mr. Birrell doesn't know how he got here. But he will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came." He told stories about Howells and Twichell, and how Darwin had gone to sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been shocked to read on a great placard, "Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen." No doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way. I have no doubt my character has suffered from it. I suppose I ought to defend my character, but how can I defend it? I can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that I am sincere--that I speak the truth, and that I have never seen that Cup. I have not got the Cup, I did not have a chance to get it. I have always had a good character in that way. I have hardly ever stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had discretion enough to know about the value of it first. I do not steal things that are likely to get myself into trouble. I do not think any of us do that. I know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts to any great thing. I do confess that when I was here seven years ago I stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. It was not a good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway. I was at a luncheon-party and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I dare say he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the Westminster Battery, if that is the proper term. I do not know, as you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much. He recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver things. He closed: I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing. I must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that I am of the human race. I have my cares and griefs, and I therefore noticed what Mr. Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it --something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of the program: He lit our life with shafts of sun And vanquished pain. Thus two great nations stand as one In honoring Twain. I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since I have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions of people in England, men, women, and children, and there is compliment, praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of affection. Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward. All these letters make me feel that here in England, as in America, when I stand under the English or the American flag I am not a stranger, I am not an alien, but at home. CCLVIII DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, OXFORD He left, immediately following the Pilgrim luncheon, with Hon. Robert P. Porter, of the London Times, for Oxford, to remain his guest there during the various ceremonies. The encenia--the ceremony of conferring the degrees--occurred at the Sheldonian Theater the following morning, June 26, 1907. It was a memorable affair. Among those who were to receive degrees that morning besides Samuel Clemens were: Prince Arthur of Connaught; Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman; Whitelaw Reid; Rudyard Kipling; Sidney Lee; Sidney Colvin; Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland; Sir Norman Lockyer; Auguste Rodin, the sculptor; Saint-Saens, and Gen. William Booth, of the Salvation Army-something more than thirty, in all, of the world's distinguished citizens. The candidates assembled at Magdalen College, and led by Lord Curzon, the Chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant procession to the Sheldonian Theater, a group of men such as the world seldom sees collected together. The London Standard said of it: So brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been selected by Oxford University on Convocation to receive degrees, 'honoris causa', in this first year of Lord Curzon's chancellorship, that it is small wonder that the Sheldonian Theater was besieged today at an early hour. Shortly after 11 o'clock the organ started playing the strains of "God Save the King," and at once a great volume of sound arose as the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the assemblage. Every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office, the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership of Lord Curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar- board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting, thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late Viceroy of India. Following him came the members of Convocation, a goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. Robes of salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of letters. The encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. There is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of Greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the Oxford undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the expense of those honored guests. The degrees of doctor of law were conferred first. Prince Arthur was treated with proper dignity by the gallery; but when Whitelaw Reid stepped forth a voice shouted, "Where's your Star-spangled Banner?" and when England's Prime Minister-Campbell-Bannerman--came forward some one shouted, "What about the House of Lords?" and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until General Booth was introduced as the "Passionate advocate of the dregs of the people, leader of the submerged tenth," and "general of the Salvation Army," when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm that a few minutes later became, according to the Daily News, "a veritable cyclone," for Mark Twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray, had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which the world has to give. The undergraduates went wild then. There was such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, "Have you brought the jumping Frog with you?" "Where is the Ascot Cup?" "Where are the rest of the Innocents?" that it seemed as if it would not be possible to present him at all; but, finally, Chancellor Curzon addressed him (in Latin), "Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment," and the great degree was conferred. If only Tom Sawyer could have seen him then! If only Olivia Clemens could have sat among those who gave him welcome! But life is not like that. There is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across the path. Rudyard Kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with the chorus, "For he's a jolly good fellow," and then came Saint-Satins. The prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly created doctors left the theater with Lord Curzon at their head. So it was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey to Mars. The world had nothing more to give him now except that which he had already long possessed-its honor and its love. The newly made doctors were to be the guests of Lord Curzon at All Souls College for luncheon. As they left the theater (according to Sidney Lee): The people in the streets singled out Mark Twain, formed a vast and cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college gates. But before and after the lunch it was Mark Twain again whom everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. The Maharajah of Bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to Mrs. Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), and hearing that she knew Mark Twain, asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the quadrangle. At the garden-party given the same afternoon in the beautiful grounds of St. John's, where the indefatigable Mark put in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. On the following day, when the Oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. "Mark Twain's Pageant," it was called by one of the papers.--[There was a dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken information, Clemens wore black evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet gown. "When I arrived," he said, "the place was just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. I looked as out of place as a Presbyterian in hell."] Clemens remained the guest of Robert Porter, whose house was besieged with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. If he went on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds assembled. At a luncheon which the Porters gave him the proprietor of the catering establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction of serving Mark Twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment of his life. This gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery. Clemens, learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a talk with him. "I found," he said, "that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much about my books as I knew about them myself." Mark Twain viewed the Oxford pageant from a box with Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of paper, on the outside of which was written, "Not true." Opening it, they read: East is East and West is West, And never the Twain shall meet, --a quotation from Kipling. They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages. The lanes and streets and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in its long history. History was realized in a manner which no one could appreciate more fully than Mark Twain. "I was particularly anxious to see this pageant," he said, "so that I could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a large scale." He was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up. He easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by, and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by and by, Henry VIII. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and Charles I. took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and Henry II. and Rosamond and Queen Elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead centuries. CCLIX LONDON SOCIAL HONORS We may not detail all the story of that English visit; even the path of glory leads to monotony at last. We may only mention a few more of the great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a dinner given to members of the Savage Club by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, also a dinner given by the American Society at the Hotel Cecil in honor of the Fourth of July. Clemens was the guest of honor, and responded to the toast given by Ambassador Reid, "The Day we Celebrate." He made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to the American habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks. To English colonists he gave credit for having established American independence, and closed: We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own, and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by that great American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and beautiful tribute--Abraham Lincoln: a proclamation which not only set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. The owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of slaves when he did not want to be. That proclamation set them all free. But even in this matter England led the way, for she had set her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her example. We always follow her example, whether it is good or bad. And it was an English judge, a century ago, that issued that other great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he may, sets his foot upon English soil his fetters, by that act, fall away and he is a free man before the world! It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of them, England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the Emancipation Proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this debt to her. Let us be able to say to old England, this great- hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our Fourths of July, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the Declaration of Independence, which is the charter of our rights; you, the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Champion and Protector of Anglo-Saxon Freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most honestly thank you for them. It was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to having stolen the Ascot Cup. He lunched one day with Bernard Shaw, and the two discussed the philosophies in which they were mutually interested. Shaw regarded Clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great frankness that America had produced just two great geniuses--Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Later Shaw wrote him a note, in which he said: I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire. I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which a priest says, "Telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world," a piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me. Clemens saw a great deal of Moberly Bell. The two lunched and dined privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the public gatherings. The bare memorandum of the week following July Fourth will convey something of Mark Twain's London activities: Friday, July 5. Dined with Lord and Lady Portsmouth. Saturday, July 6. Breakfasted at Lord Avebury's. Lord Kelvin, Sir Charles Lyell, and Sir Archibald Geikie were there. Sat 22 times for photos, 16 at Histed's. Savage Club dinner in the evening. White suit. Ascot Cup. Sunday, July 7. Called on Lady Langattock and others. Lunched with Sir Norman Lockyer. Monday, July 8. Lunched with Plasmon directors at Bath Club. Dined privately at C. F. Moberly Bell's. Tuesday, July 9. Lunched at the House with Sir Benjamin Stone. Balfour and Komura were the other guests of honor. Punch dinner in the evening. Joy Agnew and the cartoon. Wednesday, July 10. Went to Liverpool with Tay Pay. Attended banquet in the Town Hall in the evening. Thursday, July 11. Returned to London with Tay Pay. Calls in the afternoon. The Savage Club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own account, and their dinner of July 6th was a handsome, affair. He felt at home with the Savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in England. He made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his association with them on his first visit to London, thirty-seven years before. Then he said: That is a long time ago, and as I had come into a very strange land, and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. I am glad to be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that I shall not see you again. I have been received, as you know, in the most delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here. It keeps me choked up all the time. Everybody is so generous, and they do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. Nobody in the world can appreciate it higher than I do. The club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. A note was sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to contain a gilded plaster replica of the Ascot Gold Cup. The note said: Dere Mark, i return the Cup. You couldn't keep your mouth shut about it. 'Tis 2 pretty 2 melt, as you want me 2; nest time I work a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches. There was a postcript which said: "I changed the acorn atop for another nut with my knife." The acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled head of Mark Twain. So, after all, the Ascot Cup would be one of the trophies which he would bear home with him across the Atlantic. Probably the most valued of his London honors was the dinner given to him by the staff of Punch. Punch had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon by Bernard Partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of that paper, Mr. Punch himself, presents him with a glass of the patronymic beverage with the words, "Sir, I honor myself by drinking your health. Long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!" Mr. Agnew, chief editor; Linley Sambourne, Francis Burnand, Henry Lucy, and others of the staff welcomed him at the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie Street, in the historic Punch dining-room where Thackeray had sat, and Douglas Jerrold, and so many of the great departed. Mark Twain was the first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. In the course of the dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy Agnew presented him with the original drawing of Partridge's cartoon. Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory from all other feastings. Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening that he postponed his sailing until the 13th. Before leaving America, he had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July 10th, they carried him, with T. P. O'Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince of Wales's special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall. Clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast. Perhaps because it was his farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career: He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety. Then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart. . . . Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. It is the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state. During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too. Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. One day a majestic Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, "Ship ahoy! What ship is that? And whence and whither?" In a deep and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking- trumpet, "The Begum, of Bengal--142 days out from Canton--homeward bound! What ship is that?" Well, it just crushed that poor little creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, "Only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point --with nothing to speak of!" Oh, what an eloquent word that "only," to express the depths of his humbleness! That is just my case. During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble. Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound! He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances, an American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls. It took the dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the poor and the rich alike. One day they visited the home of an old bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his old age. He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. He was sailing away from them for the last time. They hoped he would make a speech, but that would not have been possible. To the reporters he gave a farewell message: "It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I am sorry the end of it has come. I have met a hundred, old friends, and I have made a hundred new ones. It is a good kind of riches to have; there is none better, I think." And the London Tribune declared that "the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. For Mark Twain has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more for the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the Hague Conference. He has made the world laugh again." His ship was the Minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard to be adopted as grandchildren. On July 5th, in a fog, the Minnetonka collided with the bark Sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. On the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached New York nearly a day in advance of their schedule. Some ceremonies of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil only a few who had received special information were there to greet him. But perhaps he did not notice it. He seldom took account of the absence of such things. By early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the announcement that Mark Twain was home again. It is a sorrow to me that I was not at the dock to welcome him. I had been visiting in Elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a 2d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. When I saw the announcement that he had already arrived I called a greeting over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. I confess I went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently achieved, and I prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when I arrived he was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. As I entered he said: "Get your cue. I have been inventing a new game." And I think there were scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. The pageant was over; the curtain was rung down. Business was resumed at the old stand. CCLX MATTERS PSYCHIC AND OTHERWISE He returned to Tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely with the social life; but the contrast between his recent London experience and his semi-retirement must have been very great. When I visited him now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for companionship, but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great career which in a sense now had been completed since he had touched its highest point. There was no billiard-table at Tuxedo, and he spoke expectantly of getting back to town and the games there, also of the new home which was then building in Redding, and which would have a billiard-room where we could assemble daily--my own habitation being not far away. Various diversions were planned for Redding; among them was discussed a possible school of philosophy, such as Hawthorne and Emerson and Alcott had established at Concord. He spoke quite freely of his English experiences, but usually of the more amusing phases. He almost never referred to the honors that had been paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and cherished them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid to a private citizen; he must have known that in his heart. He spoke amusingly of his visit to Marie Corelli, in Stratford, and of the Holy Grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all psychic manifestations. I said to him: "But remember your own dream, Mr. Clemens, which presaged the death of your brother." He answered: "I ask nobody to believe that it ever happened. To me it is true; but it has no logical right to be true, and I do not expect belief in it." Which I thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole characteristic. He was invited to be a special guest at the Jamestown Exposition on Fulton Day, in September, and Mr. Rogers lent him his yacht in which to make the trip. It was a break in the summer's monotonies, and the Jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in London. When he entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a demonstration which lasted more than five minutes. Every person in the hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas. He made them a brief, amusing talk on Fulton and other matters, then introduced Admiral Harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed by Martin W. Littleton, the real orator of the day. Littleton acquitted himself so notably that Mark Twain conceived for him a deep admiration, and the two men quickly became friends. They saw each other often during the remainder of the Jamestown stay, and Clemens, learning that Littleton lived just across Ninth Street from him in New York, invited him to come over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard games. So it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, Mr. and Mrs. Littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way. Clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave advice, while Littleton and I played. He had a favorite shot that he frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot. He played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected results with it. He was even inspired to write a poem on the subject. "CUSHION FIRST" When all your days are dark with doubt, And dying hope is at its worst; When all life's balls are scattered wide, With not a shot in sight, to left or right, Don't give it up; Advance your cue and shut your eyes, And take the cushion first. The Harry Thaw trial was in progress just then, and Littleton was Thaw's chief attorney. It was most interesting to hear from him direct the day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of Thaw. Littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one afternoon. I had been absent the evening before, and Littleton had been over. It was after luncheon now, and Clemens and I began preparing for the customary games. We were playing then a game with four balls, two white and two red. I began by placing the red balls on the table, and then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls. When I had made the round of the table I had found but one white ball. I thought I must have overlooked the other, and made the round again. Then I said: "There is one white ball missing." Clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and said: "It was here last night." He felt in the pockets of the little white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets were empty. He said: "I'll bet Littleton carried that ball home with him." Then I suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off the table, and I looked carefully under the furniture and in the various corners, but without success. There was another set of balls, and out of it I selected a white one for our play, and the game began. It went along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets, and as constantly being replaced on the table. This had continued for perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that Clemens reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon the table. The one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball. We looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at all. No one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence, though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot. The pocket from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied again and again. Then Clemens said: "We must be dreaming." We stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no material explanation. I suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils, letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one's eyes. Clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic at heart, said: "But that, so far as I know, has never happened to more than one person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental blindness. This thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no question as to the positive absence of the object." "How about dematerialization?" "Yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an explanation." He went on to recall that Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had written of such things, and cited instances which Wallace had recorded. In the end he said: "Well, it happened, that's all we can say, and nobody can ever convince me that it didn't." We went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever after, so far as I know. I am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period. Clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his Christian Union article concerning Mrs. Clemens's government of children, published in 1885. I had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was wishing very much that he could see one. Somewhat later, as he was walking down Fifth Avenue, the thought of this article and his desire for it suddenly entered his mind. Reaching the corner of Forty-second Street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass. As he did so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand. "Mr. Clemens," he said, "you don't know me, but here is something you may wish to have. I have been saving them for more than twenty years, and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. I was going to mail them from my office, but now I will give them to you," and with a word or two he disappeared. The clippings were from the Christian Union of 1885, and were the much-desired article. Clemens regarded it as a remarkable case of mental telegraphy. "Or, if it wasn't that," he said, "it was a most remarkable coincidence." The other circumstance has been thought amusing. I had gone to Redding for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle and the knee. I mention the hour because it seems important. Next morning I received a note, prompted by Mr. Clemens, in which he said: Tell Paine I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. I was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote: I did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how did you find it out? I followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same hour on the same afternoon Clemens himself had fallen up the front steps and, as he said, peeled off from his "starboard shin a ribbon of skin three inches long." The disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for no particular reason. Clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another, being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing little faith in these prognostics. Once when a clairvoyant, of whom he had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself, besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which Clemens had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. The clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him. CCLXI MINOR EVENTS AND DIVERSIONS Mark Twain was deeply interested during the autumn of 1907 in the Children's Theater of the Jewish Educational Alliance, on the lower East Side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. A Miss Alice M. Herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and health to build up an institution through which the interest of the children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. She had interested a great body of Jewish children in the plays of Shakespeare, and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time to time with great success. The admission fee to the performance was ten cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. It required patrons. Miss Herts obtained permission to play "The Prince and the Pauper," and Mark Twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to assist financially in this worthy work. "The Prince and the Pauper" evening turned out a distinguished affair. On the night of November 19, 1907, the hall of the Educational Alliance was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on the East Side; the finance and the fashion of New York were there. It was a gala night for the little East Side performers. Behind the curtain they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. The performance they gave was an astonishing one. So fully did they enter into the spirit of Tom Canty's rise to royalty that they seemed absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the Ghetto. They had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime heights in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in its bigness. Both Mark Twain and Miss Herts made brief addresses, and the audience shouted approval of their words. It seems a pity that such a project as that must fail, and I do not know why it happened. Wealthy men and women manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the Children's Theater exists to-day only as history.--[In a letter to a Mrs. Amelia Dunne Hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the Howland School, Chicago, Mark Twain once wrote: "If I were going to begin life over again I would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as I am. Yes, you are easily the most fortunate of women, I think."] It was at a dinner at The Players--a small, private dinner given by Mr. George C. Riggs-that I saw Edward L. Burlingame and Mark Twain for the only time together. They had often met during the forty-two years that had passed since their long-ago Sandwich Island friendship; but only incidentally, for Mr. Burlingame cared not much for great public occasions, and as editor of Scribner's Magazine he had been somewhat out of the line of Mark Twain's literary doings. Howells was there, and Gen. Stewart L. Woodford, and David Bispham, John Finley, Evan Shipman, Nicholas Biddle, and David Munro. Clemens told that night, for the first time, the story of General Miles and the three-dollar dog, inventing it, I believe, as he went along, though for the moment it certainly did sound like history. He told it often after that, and it has been included in his book of speeches. Later, in the cab, he said: "That was a mighty good dinner. Riggs knows how to do that sort of thing. I enjoyed it ever so much. Now we'll go home and play billiards." We began about eleven o'clock, and played until after midnight. I happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly. He vowed that it was not a gentleman's game at all, that Riggs's wine had demoralized the play. But at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said: "Well, those were good games. There is nothing like billiards after all." We did not play billiards on his birthday that year. He went to the theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with Jesse Lynch Williams, I attended the same performance--the "Toy-Maker of Nuremberg" --written by Austin Strong. It proved to be a charming play, and I could see that Clemens was enjoying it. He sat in a box next to the stage, and the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for his benefit. When later I mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of his pleasure in it. "It is a fine, delicate piece of work," he said. "I wish I could do such things as that." "I believe you are too literary for play-writing." "Yes, no doubt. There was never any question with the managers about my plays. They always said they wouldn't act. Howells has come pretty near to something once or twice. I judge the trouble is that the literary man is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright thinks only of how it will play. One is thinking of how it will sound, the other of how it will look." "I suppose," I said, "the literary man should have a collaborator with a genius for stage mechanism. John Luther Long's exquisite plays would hardly have been successful without David Belasco to stage them. Belasco cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction his genius is supreme." "Yes, so it is; it was Belasco who made it possible to play 'The Prince and the Pauper'--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of it." Clemens attended few public functions now. He was beset with invitations, but he declined most of them. He told the dog story one night to the Pleiades Club, assembled at the Brevoort; but that was only a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away before the exercises were concluded. He also spoke at a banquet given to Andrew Carnegie--Saint Andrew, as he called him--by the Engineers Club, and had his usual fun at the chief guest's expense. I have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and I know what brother Andrew is feeling like now. He has been receiving compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is another side to him that needs censure. I am going to vary the complimentary monotony. While we have all been listening to the complimentary talk Mr. Carnegie's face has scintillated with fictitious innocence. You'd think he never committed a crime in his life. But he has. Look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. Imagine the calamity on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on the whole human race. We've got it all now so that nobody could spell . . . . If Mr. Carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn't have had any spots on the sun, or any San Francisco quake, or any business depression. There, I trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse more than he did his compliments. And now that I think I have him smoothed down and feeling comfortable I just want to say one thing more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far. As he was about to go, Carnegie called his attention to the beautiful souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest's plate. Carnegie said: "The club had those especially made at Tiffany's for this occasion. They cost ten dollars apiece." Clemens sand: "Is that so? Well, I only meant to take my own; but if that's the case I'll load my cab with them." We made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards. The continued strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good. More than once I journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of his evening games, quickly brought me back again. It was my wish only to serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness. Billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then. He walked out a good deal, and especially of a pleasant Sunday morning he liked the stroll up Fifth Avenue. Sometimes we went as high as Carnegie's, on Ninety-second Street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always one of Mark Twain's favorite diversions. From that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the streets, and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference. Oftener, however, we turned at Fifty-ninth Street, walking both ways. When it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in Central Park; and once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note. Its finder, a Mr. Lockwood, received a reward, for Mark Twain wrote him: There is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that never went to the wash at all. Heaven will reward you, I know it will. On Sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour that the churches would be dismissed. On the first Sunday morning we had started a little early, and I thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached Fifty-ninth Street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the throng. He said, quietly: "I like the throng." So we rested in the Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour. Men and women noticed him, and came over to shake his hand. The gigantic man in uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word. He had opened carriages for Mr. Clemens at the Twenty-third Street station, and now wanted to claim that honor. I think he received the most cordial welcome of any one who came. I am sure he did. It was Mark Twain's way to warm to the man of the lower social rank. He was never too busy, never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to his story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy remembering them. We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the expression of that affection which in his London and Liverpool speeches he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. It was his final harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his years of honorable labor and noble living. CCLXII FROM MARK TWAIN's MAIL If the reader has any curiosity as to some of the less usual letters which a man of wide public note may inspire, perhaps he will find a certain interest in a few selected from the thousands which yearly came to Mark Twain. For one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks. It is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of his occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise: DEAR SIR [or MADAM],--I try every remedy sent to me. I am now on No. 87. Yours is 2,653. I am looking forward to its beneficial results. Of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks. One of these sent an advertisement of a certain Elixir of Life, which was guaranteed to cure everything--to "wash and cleanse the human molecules, and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting." Anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. They were not mercenary compliments. The writer had nothing to gain. Two such letters follow--both written in England just at the time of his return. MARK TWAIN. DEAR SIR,--Please accept a poor widow's good-by and kindest wishes. I have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very much--only wish I could afford to buy some. I should very much like to have seen you. I have many photos of you which I have cut from several papers which I read. I have one where you are writing in bed, which I cut from the Daily News. Like myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest. I am 70 and I find I need plenty. Please forgive the liberty I have taken in writing to you. If I can't come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river. May God guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow. Yours sincerely, The other letter also tells its own story: DEAR, KIND MARK TWAIN,--For years I have wanted to write and thank you for the comfort you were to me once, only I never quite knew where you were, and besides I did not want to bother you; but to-day I was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the Savoy that you looked sad and I thought it might cheer you a little tiny bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes with crying every night for long months. Ten years ago I had to leave home and earn my living as a governess and Fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country family in the depths of Staffordshire. According to the genial English custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, I took my evening meal alone in the school-room, where "Henry Tudor had supped the night before Bosworth," and there I had to stay without a soul to speak to till I went to bed. At first I used to cry every night, but a friend sent me a copy of your Huckleberry Finn and I never cried any more. I kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and when Henry Tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me I grabbed my dear Huck and he never once failed me; I opened him at random and in two minutes I was in another world. That's why I am so grateful to you and so fond of you, and I thought you might like to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger. I am a stenographer now and live at home, but I shall never forget how you helped me. God bless you and spare you long to those you are dear to. A letter which came to him soon after his return from England contained a clipping which reported the good work done by Christian missionaries in the Congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible sleeping sickness. The letter itself consisted merely of a line, which said: Won't you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this? The writer's name was signed, and Mark Twain answered: In China the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be decent & go away. But I have not heard that in the Congo the missionary servants of God are unwelcome to the native. Evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind. How it would improve God to take a lesson from them! He invented & distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless, poor savages, & now He sits with His elbows on the balusters & looks down & enjoys this wanton crime. Confidently, & between you & me --well, never mind, I might get struck by lightning if I said it. Those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a measureless satire upon their Master. To which the writer answered: O wicked Mr. Clemens! I have to ask Saint Joan of Arc to pray for you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the Golden Gates and we no longer "see through a glass darkly and know only in part," there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between Joan of Arc and St. Peter, but your blessed Joan will conquer and she'll lead Mr. Clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead for him. Of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel. DEAR SIR,--I have written a book--naturally--which fact, however, since I am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice. Nor need you grieve, though I am sending you a copy. If I knew of any way of compelling you to read it I would do so, but unless the first few pages have that effect I can do nothing. Try the first few pages. I have done a great deal more than that with your books, so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages. If after that attempt you put it aside I shall be sorry--for you. I am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden book, written by himself. To such a one much is due in the way of indulgence. Will you remember that? Have you forgotten early twitterings of your own? In a memorandum made on this letter Mark Twain wrote: Another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject humorous--to me. Commenting further, he said: As I have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way. One beggar is too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into society; another does not care for society, but he wants a postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and then sponge on him for free advice. The man who wouldn't do any of these things will beg for the Presidency. Each admires his own dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven't any. Mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no human being is without some form of it. I know my own form, you know yours. Let us conceal them from view and abuse the others. There is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him with an ax to grind. By and by the ax's aspect becomes familiar to the proprietor of the grindstone. He perceives that it is the same old ax. If you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an office. The first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out such noble praises of you and your political record that you are moved to tears; there's a lump in your throat and you are thankful that you have lived for this happiness. Then the stranger discloses his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race. Six repetitions will cure you. After that you interrupt the compliments and say, "Yes, yes, that's all right; never mind about that. What is it you want?" But you and I are in the business ourselves. Every now and then we carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet. I don't carry mine to strangers--I draw the line there; perhaps that is your way. This is bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers. I do not know how to answer that stranger's letter. I wish he had spared me. Never mind about him--I am thinking about myself. I wish he had spared me. The book has not arrived yet; but no matter, I am prejudiced against it. It was a few days later that he added: I wrote to that man. I fell back upon the old Overworked, polite lie, and thanked him for his book and said I was promising myself the pleasure of reading it. Of course that set me free; I was not obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was gone, and as soon as the book came I opened it to see what it was like. I was not able to put it down until I had finished. It was an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that fact, but I had to do it. That first letter was merely a lie. Do you think I wrote the second one to give that man pleasure? Well, I did, but it was second-hand pleasure. I wrote it first to give myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie. Mark Twain's interest was once aroused by the following: DEAR SIR,--I have had more or less of your works on my shelves for years, and believe I have practically a complete set now. This is nothing unusual, of course, but I presume it will seem to you unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the owner regrets ever having read. Every time my glance rests on the books I do regret having read them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not who may know my feelings. You, who must be kept busy attending to your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, I believe, are sound and are probably shared by more people than you are aware of. Probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has signed it, but if you do, and care to know why I wish I had left your work unread, I will tell you as briefly as possible if you will ask me. GEORGE B. LAUDER. Clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps intending to do so, and a few days later, in Boston, when a reporter called, he happened to remember it. The reporter asked permission to print the queer document, and it appeared in his Mark Twain interview next morning. A few days later the writer of it sent a second letter, this time explaining: MY DEAR SIR,--I saw in to-day's paper a copy of the letter which I wrote you October 26th. I have read and re-read your works until I can almost recall some of them word for word. My familiarity with them is a constant source of pleasure which I would not have missed, and therefore the regret which I have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness. Believe me, the regret which I feel for having read your works is entirely due to the unalterable fact that I can never again have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. Your sincere admirer, GEORGE B. LADDER. Mark Twain promptly replied this time: DEAR SIR, You fooled me completely; I didn't divine what the letter was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very competent deceiver. Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. It was about the end of 1907 that the new St. Louis Harbor boat, was completed. The editor of the St. Louis Republic reported that it has been christened "Mark Twain," and asked for a word of comment. Clemens sent this line: May my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us will need any fire insurance. CCLXIII SOME LITERARY LUNCHEONS Howells, in his book, refers to the Human Race Luncheon Club, which Clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species in concert. It was to consist, beside Clemens himself, of Howells, Colonel Harvey, and Peter Dunne; but it somehow never happened that even this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh, and therefore potent. Out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings which Clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his own table. The first of these came along toward the end of 1907, when Howells was planning to spend the winter in Italy. "Howells is going away," he said, "and I should like to give him a stag-party. We'll enlarge the Human Race Club for the occasion." So Howells, Colonel Harvey, Martin Littleton, Augustus Thomas, Robert Porter, and Paderewski were invited. Paderewski was unable to come, and seven in all assembled. Howells was first to arrive. "Here comes Howells," Clemens said. "Old Howells a thousand years old." But Howells didn't look it. His face was full of good-nature and apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or action. Thomas, Porter, Littleton, and Harvey drifted in. Cocktails were served and luncheon was announced. Claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its center a mass of roses. There was to be no woman in the neighborhood--Clemens announced this fact as a sort of warrant for general freedom of expression. Thomas's play, "The Witching Hour," was then at the height of its great acceptance, and the talk naturally began there. Thomas told something of the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that it would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work. I believe there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks from a managerial point of view. When the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, Colonel Harvey, who was seated at Clemens's left, said: "Uncle Mark"--he often called him that--"Major Leigh handed me a report of the year's sales just as I was leaving. It shows your royalty returns this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars. I don't believe there is another such return from old books on record." This was said in an undertone, to Clemens only, but was overheard by one or two of those who sat nearest. Clemens was not unwilling to repeat it for the benefit of all, and did so. Howells said: "A statement like that arouses my basest passions. The books are no good; it's just the advertising they get." Clemens said: "Yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise. It costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement out of the magazines." "And three hundred every time we put it in," said Harvey. "We often debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to leave it out." The talk switched back to plays and acting. Thomas recalled an incident of Beerbohm Tree's performance of "Hamlet." W. S. Gilbert, of light-opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play ended Mrs. Tree hurried over to him and said: "Oh, Mr. Gilbert, what did you think of Mr. Tree's rendition of Hamlet?" "Remarkable," said Gilbert. "Funny without being vulgar." It was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed. Not much of it all is left to me, but I remember Howells saying, "Did it ever occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell? Well, they did--it was never done by the church. There was a consensus of newspaper opinion that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated institution; in fact a dead letter." And again, "I was coming down Broadway last night, and I stopped to look at one of the street-venders selling those little toy fighting roosters. It was a bleak, desolate evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and kept those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more and more cheerless and sardonic. "'Japanese game chickens,' he said; 'pretty toys, amuse the children with their antics. Child of three can operate it. Take them home for Christmas. Chicken-fight at your own fireside.' I tried to catch his eye to show him that I understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no use. He went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over, 'Chicken-fight at your own fireside.'" The luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently all left but Colonel Harvey. Clemens and the Colonel went up to the billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five cents a game. I was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful one. It ended the day much to Mark Twain's satisfaction, for he was oftenest winner. That evening he said: "We will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month. Howells will be gone, but we must have the others. We cannot have a thing like that too often." There was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which George Riggs was present and that rare Irish musician, Denis O'Sullivan. It was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of the music made by O'Sullivan on some Hindu reeds-pipes of Pan. But we shall have more of O'Sullivan presently--all too little, for his days were few and fleeting. Howells could not get away just yet. Colonel Harvey, who, like James Osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two drawing-room cars, and with Mrs. Harvey took a party of fifty-five or sixty congenial men and women to Lakewood for a good-by luncheon to Howells. It was a day borrowed from June, warm and beautiful. The trip down was a sort of reception. Most of the guests were acquainted, but many of them did not often meet. There was constant visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches. Denis O'Sullivan was among the guests. He looked in the bloom of health, and he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the tin-whistle of Ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering fairies invented a long time ago. This was on the train going down. There was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an informal program fitting to that sunny day. It opened with some recitations by Miss Kitty Cheatham; then Colonel Harvey introduced Howells, with mention of his coming journey. As a rule, Howells does not enjoy speaking. He is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him. This time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no speech. He was among friends. He looked even happy when he got on his feet, and he spoke like a happy man. He talked about Mark Twain. It was all delicate, delicious chaffing which showed Howells at his very best--all too short for his listeners. Clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among his fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of "Godspeed and safe return" to his old comrade and friend. Then once more came Denis and his pipes. No one will ever forget his part of the program. The little samples we had heard on the train were expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps Denis himself wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful as he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds were silent. It never occurred to us then that Denis could die; and as he finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition, and I think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it might not even divert death. It was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky. The evening, like the day, was warm, and some of the party left the ferry-cabin to lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere on the earth. CCLXIV "CAPTAIN STORMFIELD" IN PRINT During the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication of the "Gates Ajar" and the perpetration of Mark Twain's intended burlesque, built on Captain Ned Wakeman's dream, the Christian religion in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. It was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. Clemens re-read his extravaganza, Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the December and January numbers (1907-8) of Harper's Magazine, and was also issued as a small book. If there were any readers who still found it blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters that came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that Mark Twain "had returned to his earlier form." The publication of this story recalled to Clemens's mind another heresy somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of 1891 and 1892 in Berlin. This was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a train with the evangelist Sam Jones and the Archbishop of Canterbury for the other world. He had noticed that his ticket was to a different destination than the Archbishop's, and so, when the prelate nodded and finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with disturbing results. Clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he wrote it, and when Mrs. Clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he had laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed. Clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry. "What a childish notion it was," he said, "and how curious that only a little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile evidences about a place of so much importance. If we should find somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful and blooming tropical Paradise secreted in the center of eternal icebergs--an account written by men who did not even claim to have seen it themselves --no geographical society on earth would take any stock in that book, yet that account would be quite as authentic as any we have of heaven. If God has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, He could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations and misinterpretation. God has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world, and such things as that, none of which agree with His so-called book. As to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no evidence that appeals to logic and reason. I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life." Then, after a long pause, he added: "And yet--I am strongly inclined to expect one." CCLXV LOTOS CLUB HONORS It was on January 11, 1908, that Mark Twain was given his last great banquet by the Lotos Club. The club was about to move again, into splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its old rooms. He wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white moth among a horde of beetles. The room fairly swarmed with them, and they seemed likely to overwhelm him. President Lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his customary address by introducing Robert Porter, who had been Mark Twain's host at Oxford. Porter told something of the great Oxford week, and ended by introducing Mark Twain. It had been expected that Clemens would tell of his London experiences. Instead of doing this, he said he had started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments. He had picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home. He read selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and merriment until just before the close of his speech. Then he repeated, in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his Liverpool speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim. It may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now the closing words, "homeward bound," had only the deeper meaning. Dr. John MacArthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying: "I do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on earth, and it is such men as Mark Twain who make other men not fit to die, but fit to live." Andrew Carnegie also spoke, and Colonel Harvey, and as the speaking ended Robert Porter stepped up behind Clemens and threw over his shoulders the scarlet Oxford robe which had been surreptitiously brought, and placed the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners vociferated their approval. Clemens was quite calm. "I like this," he said, when the noise had subsided. "I like its splendid color. I would dress that way all the time, if I dared." In the cab going home I mentioned the success of his speech, how well it had been received. "Yes," he said; "but then I have the advantage of knowing now that I am likely to be favorably received, whatever I say. I know that my audiences are warm and responseful. It is an immense advantage to feel that. There are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones, and it is hard to warm up again. Perhaps there haven't been so many lately; but I have been acquainted with them more than once." And then I could not help remembering that deadly Whittier birthday speech of more than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning to end. "We have just time for four games," he said, as we reached the billiard-room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games were over. We were winning alternately, and neither noted the time. I was leaving by an early train, and was willing to play all night. The milk-wagons were rattling outside when he said: "Well, perhaps we'd better quit now. It seems pretty early, though." I looked at my watch. It was quarter to four, and we said good night. CCLXVI A WINTER IN BERMUDA Edmund Clarence Stedman died suddenly at his desk, January 18, 1908, and Clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message: I do not wish to talk about it. He was a valued friend from days that date back thirty-five years. His loss stuns me and unfits me to speak. He recalled the New England dinners which he used to attend, and where he had often met Stedman. "Those were great affairs," he said. "They began early, and they ended early. I used to go down from Hartford with the feeling that it wasn't an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time. Choate and Depew and Stedman were in their prime then--we were all young men together. Their speeches were always worth listening to. Stedman was a prominent figure there. There don't seem to be any such men now --or any such occasions." Stedman was one of the last of the old literary group. Aldrich had died the year before. Howells and Clemens were the lingering "last leaves." Clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and added the feature of "doe" luncheons--pretty affairs where, with Clara Clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as Mrs. Kate Douglas Riggs, Geraldine Farrax, Mrs. Robert Collier, Mrs. Frank Doubleday, and others. I cannot report those luncheons, for I was not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too fragmentary a form to be used as history; but I gathered from Clemens himself that he had done all of the talking, and I think they must have been very pleasant afternoons. Among the acknowledgments that followed one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from Mrs. Riggs: N. B.--A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe. The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe? If so is she extinct and can never attend a third? Luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial attack, and toward the end of January he sailed away to Bermuda, where skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom. His sojourn was brief this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of happiness. He had been driving about over the island with a newly adopted granddaughter, little Margaret Blackmer, whom he had met one morning in the hotel dining-room. A part of his dictated story will convey here this pretty experience. My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend: it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection. As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said: "I don't seem to remember your name; what is it?" By the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her. She said: "Why, you've never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you've never seen me before." "Why, that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true, and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name. But I remember it now perfectly--it's Mary." She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle, and she said: "Oh no, it isn't; it's Margaret." I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said: "Ah, well, I couldn't have made that mistake a few years ago; but I am old, and one of age's earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but I am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just as if it were yesterday. It's Margaret Holcomb." She was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine, and she said: "Oh, you are wrong again; you don't get anything right. It isn't Holcomb, it's Blackmer." I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then: "How old are you, dear?" "Twelve; New-Year's. Twelve and a month." We were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days. Every day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough-coated donkey by the name of Maud. Maud was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. Her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground. This battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified, gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was Reginald. Reginald and Maud--I shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for. The trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it. This was because Maud set the pace. Whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears: "This is getting unsatisfactory. We will camp here." The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it. She drove and I superintended. In the course of the first excursions I found a beautiful little shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand. I gave one of them to Margaret and said: "Now dear, sometime or other in the future I shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself 'I know that this is a Margaret by the look of her, but I don't know for sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else's'; but, no matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of my pocket and say, 'I think you are my Margaret, but I am not certain; if you are my Margaret you can produce the other half of this shell.'" Next morning when I entered the breakfast-room and saw the child I approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly: "No, I am mistaken; it looks like my Margaret,--but it isn't, and I am so sorry. I shall go away and cry now." Her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out: "No, you don't have to. There!" and she fetched out the identifying shell. I was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed it from every pore. The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. Many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of the shell. She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last that I was not only old, but very smart. Sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little Margaret by making grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king's reign. For William the Conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years, he drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms. It was the proper method of impressing facts upon the mind of a child. It carried him back to those days at Elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the game of kings. A Miss Wallace, a friend of Margaret's, and usually one of the pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those Bermudian days. --[Mark Twain and the Happy Islands, by Elizabeth Wallace.] Miss Wallace says: Margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an older person who understands them and treats them with respect. Mr. Clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a sweet dignity. There were some pretty sequels to the shell incident. After Mark Twain had returned to New York, and Margaret was there, she called one day with her mother, and sent up her card. He sent back word, saying: "I seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom I think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell I once gave her, of which I have the other half. If the two halves fit, I shall know that this is the same little Margaret that I remember." The message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent up. Mark Twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to Margaret. He afterward corresponded with Margaret, and once wrote her: I'm already making mistakes. When I was in New York, six weeks ago, I was on a corner of Fifth Avenue and I saw a small girl--not a big one--start across from the opposite corner, and I exclaimed to myself joyfully, "That is certainly my Margaret!" so I rushed to meet her. But as she came nearer I began to doubt, and said to myself, "It's a Margaret--that is plain enough--but I'm afraid it is somebody else's." So when I was passing her I held my shell so she couldn't help but see it. Dear, she only glanced at it and passed on! I wondered if she could have overlooked it. It seemed best to find out; so I turned and followed and caught up with her, and said, deferentially; "Dear Miss, I already know your first name by the look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?" She was vexed and said pretty sharply, "It's Douglas, if you're so anxious to know. I know your name by your looks, and I'd advise you to shut yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish. I am surprised that they allow you to run' at large. You are likely to get run over by a baby-carriage any time. Run along now and don't let the cows bite you." What an idea! There aren't any cows in Fifth Avenue. But I didn't smile; I didn't let on to perceive how uncultured she was. She was from the country, of course, and didn't know what a comical blunder. she was making. Mr. Rogers's health was very poor that winter, and Clemens urged him to try Bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to the summer island, and though Margaret was gone, there was other entertaining company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new friends and old friends, and diversions of many sorts. Mr. Rogers's son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, came down and joined the little group. It was one of Mark Twain's real holidays. Mr. Rogers's health improved rapidly, and Mark Twain was in fine trim. To Mrs. Rogers, at the end of the first week, he wrote: DEAR MRS. ROGERS, He is getting along splendidly! This was the very place for him. He enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat. But he will get a backset if Benjamin goes home. Benjamin is the brightest man in these regions, & the best company. Bright? He is much more than that, he is brilliant. He keeps the crowd intensely alive. With love & all good wishes. S. L. C. Mark Twain and Henry Rogers were much together and much observed. They were often referred to as "the King" and "the Rajah," and it was always a question whether it was "the King" who took care of "the Rajah," or vice versa. There was generally a group to gather around them, and Clemens was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the verses of Kipling. "I am not fond of all poetry," he would say; "but there's something in Kipling that appeals to me. I guess he's just about my level." Miss Wallace recalls certain Kipling readings in his room, when his friends gathered to listen. On those Kipling evenings the 'mise-en-scene' was a striking one. The bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose windows which rattled in the sea-wind. Once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the hallway. Yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and Mark Twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch) still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten like frosted threads. In one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he used principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages. Margaret's small successors became the earliest members of the Angel Fish Club, which Clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the spectacular Bermuda aquarium. The pretty angel-fish suggested youth and feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish to him from that time forward. He bought little enamel angel-fish pins, and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could create membership on short notice. It was just another of the harmless and happy diversions of his gentler side. He was always fond of youth and freshness. He regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary part of life. Often he said: "If I had been helping the Almighty when, He created man, I would have had Him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! One would not mind then if he were looking forward to a joyful youth. Think of the joyous prospect of growing young instead of old! Think of looking forward to eighteen instead of eighty! Yes, the Almighty made a poor job of it. I wish He had invited my assistance." To one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return: I miss you, dear. I miss Bermuda, too, but not so much as I miss you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and Ltd.; whereas Bermuda's charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly upon the just, but whenever I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him. CCLXVII VIEWS AND ADDRESSES [As I am beginning this chapter, April 16, 1912, the news comes of the loss, on her first trip, of the great White Star Line steamer Titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are Frank D. Millet, William T. Stead, Isadore Straus, John Jacob Astor, and other distinguished men. They died as heroes, remaining with the ship in order that the women and children might be saved. It was the kind of death Frank Millet would have wished to die. He was always a soldier--a knight. He has appeared from time to time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the Clemens household. One of America's foremost painters; at the time of his death he was head of the American Academy of Arts in Rome.] Mark Twain made a number of addresses during the spring of 1908. He spoke at the Cartoonists' dinner, very soon after his return from Bermuda; he spoke at the Booksellers' banquet, expressing his debt of obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered a fine address at the dinner given by the British Schools and University Club at Delmonico's, May 25th, in honor of Queen Victoria's birthday. In that speech he paid high tribute to the Queen for her attitude toward America, during the crisis of the Civil Wax, and to her royal consort, Prince Albert. What she did for us in America in our time of storm and stress we shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in it and sustained and supported her--Prince Albert's. We need not talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane and the son of Victoria and Albert sits upon the throne. In conclusion, I believe I may justly claim to utter the voice of my country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign. But perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the great City College (May 14, 1908), where President John Finley, who had been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last for his freer and fuller educational undertakings. A great number of honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture of medieval design. These distinguished guests were clad in their academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different from that one at Oxford of a year before. But there was something rather fearsome about it, too. A kind of scaffolding had been reared in the center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly suggestive of one of George Cruikshank's drawings of an execution scene at the Tower of London. Many of the robes were black--these would be the priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have assembled for some royal martyrdom. There was a bright May sunlight over it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten the weird effect. I am sure that others felt it besides myself, for everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no occasion for silence. There was something of another age about the whole setting, to say the least. We left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after. As Clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell, ending with "Twain! Twain! Twain!" and added three cheers for Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. They called for a speech, but he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request. He made a speech to them that night at the Waldorf--where he proposed for the City College a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty applause. In the same address he referred to the "God Trust" motto on the coins, and spoke approvingly of the President's order for its removal. We do not trust in God, in the important matters of life, and not even a minister of the Gospel will take any coin for a cent more than its accepted value because of that motto. If cholera should ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from the plague, but we would put our main trust in the Board of Health. Next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said: "If only the reporters would not try to improve on what I say. They seem to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in its delicacy, and as they can't reproduce the manner and intonation in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the reader." I pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed in their sense of literary art. "Yes," he agreed, "they are so afraid their readers won't see my good points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong. They mean well, but I wish they wouldn't do it." He referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the coins. He had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that we do not really trust in God in any financial matter. "I wanted to answer it," he said; "but I destroyed it. It didn't seem worth noticing." I asked how the motto had originated. "About 1853 some idiot in Congress wanted to announce to the world that this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other Congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course. It took courage in those days to do a thing like that; but I think the same thing would happen to-day." "Still the country has become broader. It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read the 'Age of Reason'." "So it did, and yet that seems a mild book now. I read it first when I was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power. I read it again a year or two ago, for some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become. It seemed that Paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the reader." He drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the Knickerbocker Trust Company's suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in God for the return of these imperiled sums. Clemens himself, at this time, did not expect to come out whole from that disaster. He had said very little when the news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were locked up, and it came near stopping the building activities at Redding. It was only the smaller things of life that irritated him. He often met large calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference. In the Knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and wrote a number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print. It should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the Knickerbocker depositors. CCLXVIII REDDING The building of the new home at Redding had been going steadily forward for something more than a year. John Mead Howells had made the plans; W. W. Sunderland and his son Philip, of Danbury, Connecticut, were the builders, and in the absence of Miss Clemens, then on a concert tour, Mark Twain's secretary, Miss I. V. Lyon, had superintended the furnishing. "Innocence at Home," as the place was originally named, was to be ready for its occupant in June, with every detail in place, as he desired. He had never visited Redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or discussed any of the decorations of the new home. He had required only that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations for guests. He had required that the billiard-room be red, for something in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly in moments of diversion. Besides, his other billiard-rooms had been red, and such association may not be lightly disregarded. His one other requirement was that the place should be complete. "I don't want to see it," he said, "until the cat is purring on the hearth." Howells says: "He had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was without interest." But it was rather, I think, that he was afraid of losing interest by becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also, he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. It was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but there were delays, and it was not until the 18th of June that he took possession. The plan, at this time, was only to use the Redding place as a summer residence, and the Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled. A few days before the 18th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the new house, Clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of No. 21, attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest of the time, waiting for the appointed day and train. It was really a pleasant three days. He invented a new game, and we were riotous and laughed as loudly as we pleased. I think he talked very little of the new home which he was so soon to see. It was referred to no oftener than once or twice a day, and then I believe only in connection with certain of the billiard-room arrangements. I have wondered since what picture of it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph. He had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its architecture was of the Italian villa order. I confess I had moments of anxiety, for I had selected the land for him, and had been more or less accessory otherwise. I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs. It had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those who were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a pleasant day for his arrival. Both petitions were granted; June 18th would fall on Thursday, and Monday night there came a good, thorough, and refreshing shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the dust. The morning of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool. Clemens was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time, though the train did not leave until four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to stop at Redding--its first trip scheduled for the day of Mark Twain's arrival. We were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab was waiting. My daughter, Louise, whose school on Long Island had closed that day, was with us. Clemens wore his white flannels and a Panama hat, and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others, to interview him and speed him to his new home. He was cordial and talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation. A reporter or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his arrival. The new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the Sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify him, and when he spoke at all it was approvingly. The hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short. As the train slowed down for the Redding station, he said: "We'll leave this box of candy"--he had bought a large box on the way --"those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some more." He drew out a great handful of silver. "Give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service." There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting. Redding had recognized the occasion as historic. A varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome. It was now a little before six o'clock of that long June day, still and dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something which was not quite reality in the scene. There was a tendency to be very still. They nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer. It would have been a pity if they had done so. A noise, and the illusion would have been shattered. His carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind. No first impression of a fair land could have come at a sweeter time. Hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the trees. And over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of June. He was very quiet as we drove along. Once with gentle humor, looking over a white daisy field, he said: "That is buckwheat. I always recognize buckwheat when I see it. I wish I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat. It seems to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside." And a little later: "This is the kind of a road I like; a good country road through the woods." The water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the Saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little river, one of those charming Connecticut streams. A little farther on a brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the tiny streams of Switzerland, I believe the Giessbach. The lane that led to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he said, "This is just the kind of a lane I like," thus completing his acceptance of everything but the house and the location. The last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane, and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict. They had not long to wait. As the carriage ascended higher to the open view he looked away, across the Saugatuck Valley to the nestling village and church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one's soul. Then came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an Italian villa, such as he had known in Florence, adapted now to American climate and needs. The scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there always. Neither did the house itself look new. The soft, gray stucco had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background. At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. It was an anxious moment, and no one spoke immediately. But presently his eye had taken in the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open French windows to an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. He said, very gently: "How beautiful it all is? I did not think it could be as beautiful as this." He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight. Then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening hills. When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final verdict: "It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail. It might have been here always." He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home, for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in his adaptation. To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later, one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had "been there always." Only the presence of his daughters was needed now to complete his satisfaction in everything. There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely room. A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar, neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival. "I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me," he said, softly. "I never go to any trouble for anybody"--a statement which all who heard it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny. That first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in the rack, there was none to say that Mark Twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. CCLXIX FIRST DAYS AT STORMFIELD I went up next afternoon, for I knew how he dreaded loneliness. We played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property. Presently he said: "In one way I am sorry I did not see this place sooner. I never want to leave it again. If I had known it was so beautiful I should have vacated the house in town and moved up here permanently." I suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered immediately into the idea. By and by we turned down a deserted road, grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land. At one side was a slope facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of New England. He had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told it was he said: "I would like Howells to have a house there. We must try to give that to Howells." At the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow. I told him that I had often caught fine trout there, and that soon I would bring in some for breakfast. He answered: "Yes, I should like that. I don't care to catch them any more myself. I like them very hot." We passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little house. He noticed it and said: "The man who built that had some memory of Greece in his mind when he put on that little porch with those columns." My second daughter, Frances, was coming from a distant school on the evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her. I suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive. "Yes," he agreed, "I should enjoy that." So I took the reins, and he picked up little Joy, who came running out just then, and climbed into the back seat. It was another beautiful evening, and he was in a talkative humor. Joy pointed out a small turtle in the road, and he said: "That is a wild turtle. Do you think you could teach it arithmetic?" Joy was uncertain. "Well," he went on, "you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent arithmetic--and teach that turtle." We passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike. "Those," he said, "are elephant woods." But Joy answered: "They are fairy woods. The fairies are there, but you can't see them because they wear magic cloaks." He said: "I wish I had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes. I had one once, but it is worn out now." Joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a piece of fairyland. It was a sweet drive to and from the village. There are none too many such evenings in a lifetime. Colonel Harvey's little daughter, Dorothy, came up a day or two later, and with my daughter Louise spent the first week with him in the new home. They were created "Angel-Fishes"--the first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of Bermuda fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls. Each visiting member was required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her name upon it. It was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in this room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of reach. His snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture. The place did not retain its original name. He declared that it would always be "Innocence at Home" to the angel-fish visitors, but that the title didn't remain continuously appropriate. The money which he had derived from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven had been used to build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of "Stormfield" as a substitute. When, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate. Standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he rechristened the place, and "Stormfield" it became and remained. The last day of Mark Twain's first week in Redding, June 25th, was saddened by the news of the death of Grover Cleveland at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. Clemens had always been an ardent Cleveland admirer, and to Mrs. Cleveland now he sent this word of condolence-- Your husband was a man I knew and loved and honored for twenty-five years. I mourn with you. And once during the evening he said: "He was one of our two or three real Presidents. There is none to take his place." CCLXX THE ALDRICH MEMORIAL At the end of June came the dedication at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Museum, which the poet's wife had established there in the old Aldrich homestead. It was hot weather. We were obliged to take a rather poor train from South Norwalk, and Clemens was silent and gloomy most of the way to Boston. Once there, however, lodged in a cool and comfortable hotel, matters improved. He had brought along for reading the old copy of Sir Thomas Malory's Arthur Tales, and after dinner he took off his clothes and climbed into bed and sat up and read aloud from those stately legends, with comments that I wish I could remember now, only stopping at last when overpowered with sleep. We went on a special train to Portsmouth next morning through the summer heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back portion of the opera-house, behind the scenes: Clemens was genial and good-natured with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy, with Howells, who had come over from Kittery Point, how Aldrich must be amused at the whole circumstance if he could see them punishing themselves to do honor to his memory. Richard Watson Gilder was there, and Hamilton Mabie; also Governor Floyd of New Hampshire; Colonel Higginson, Robert Bridges, and other distinguished men. We got to the more open atmosphere of the stage presently, and the exercises began. Clemens was last on the program. The others had all said handsome, serious things, and Clemens himself had mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and he rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered an address that certainly would have delighted Aldrich living, and must have delighted him dead, if he could hear it. It was full of the most charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous. The audience, that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine waves of laughter. He spoke out his regret for having worn black clothes. It was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn time --Aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered. He had been a man who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make life merry and delightful. Certainly, if he could know, he would not wish this dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless occasion. Outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile writer, J. T. Trowbridge, came up to Clemens with extended hand. Clemens said: "Trowbridge, are you still alive? You must be a thousand years old. Why, I listened to your stories while I was being rocked in the cradle." Trowbridge said: "Mark, there's some mistake. My earliest infant smile was wakened with one of your jokes." They stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were photographed--an interesting picture. We returned to Boston that evening. Clemens did not wish to hurry in the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool of the evening. Once, remembering Aldrich, he said: "I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the 'Story of a Bad Boy'. When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up mine, but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. He thought my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of New England, and of course he was right." He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He said: "Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it. "Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there's been still another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by." He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees. CCLXXI DEATH OF "SAM" MOFFETT Clemens' next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey shore. Moffett was his nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. He was superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and large-hearted, and of noble ideals. With much of the same sense of humor which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. Once as a child he had visited Hartford when Clemens was laboring over his history game. The boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. His uncle willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. But he did not need to consult the books; he already had English history stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. At the time of his death Moffett held an important editorial position on Collier's Weekly. Clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. Returning from the funeral, he was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. He was in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the journey. Then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion. We were all alone one very still, warm August afternoon playing, when he suddenly said: "I feel a little dizzy; I will sit down a moment." I brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose and started to play I thought he had a dazed look. He said: "I have lost my memory. I don't know which is my ball. I don't know what game we are playing." But immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it, considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey. I have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first indication of a more serious malady. He became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore. In a letter to Mrs. Crane, August 12th, he spoke of recent happenings: DEAR AUNT SUE,--It was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight, the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. I came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but I am all right again, though the doctor from New York has given peremptory orders that I am not to stir from here before frost. O fortunate Sam Moffett! fortunate Livy Clemens! doubly fortunate Susy! Those swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment that I am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have escaped. How Livy would love this place! How her very soul would steep itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! You must come, Aunt Sue, & stay with us a real good visit. Since June 26 we have had 21 guests, & they have all liked it and said they would come again. To Howells, on the same day, he wrote: Won't you & Mrs. Howells & Mildred come & give us as many days as you can spare & examine John's triumph? It is the most satisfactory house I am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated . . . . I have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a holiday whose other end is the cemetery. CCLXXII STORMFIELD ADVENTURES Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being dismantled. He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. His general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose. He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts. . . He read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. New York politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied: If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt & loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated. But it is too late, & my mouth is closed. I have become a citizen & taxpayer of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in matters which are none of my business. I could not do it with impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another. Howells speaks of Mark Twain's "absolute content" with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. He was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven. The days began and ended in tranquillity. There were no special morning regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. He might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. Guests--there were usually guests --might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. Those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions. Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. If not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. Sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding Glen. The cat was always "purring on the hearth" at Stormfield--several cats --for Mark Twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. There were never too many cats at Stormfield, and the "hearth" included the entire house, even the billiard-table. When, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. The cats really owned Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. Mark Twain held the title deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. They occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention. Mark Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. Clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams. It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. Claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and Clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again. It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven miles. The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there. Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. It was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. The thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing. Subsequently they received severe sentences. Clemens tacked this notice on his front door: NOTICE TO THE NEXT BURGLAR There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not make a noise--it disturbs the family. You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that. Please close the door when you go away! Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCLXXIII STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn. The change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain. There were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the "gorge," a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far. He liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. He said: "I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things again." I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head. "That would only make me more conspicuous." "How about a disguise?" "Yes," he said, "I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but I couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me out." It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. His fame had deprived him of valued privileges. He talked of many things during these little excursions. Once he told how he had successively advised his nephew, Moffett, in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. Moffett had wanted to become a reporter. Clemens devised a characteristic scheme. He said: "I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions." The applicant agreed, eagerly enough. Clemens said: "Go to the newspaper of your choice. Say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. All that you ask is work. That you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. You must never ask for wages. You must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. You must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. Then see what happens." The scheme had worked perfectly. Young Moffett had followed his instructions to the letter. By and by he attracted attention. He was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. In obedience to further instructions, he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. No pay was asked; none was expected. Occasionally one of the items was used. Then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. There was no trouble about his progress after that. He had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work. The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. The idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning. Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. He thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. He referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[See chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]--He would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming. "I'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. There are two special reasons for it and one condition. The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a God and King, for example. The second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not. And the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions." He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a Presidential succession. He did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently. He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently. "The gospel of peace," he said, "is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a soldier-camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest. "Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create." Once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said: "To him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A, when to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. For instance, to the soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill was an Achievement with an A as big as the Pyramids of Cheops; whereas, if Napoleon had fought it, he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. But that is all natural and human enough. We are all like that." The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. I remember one Sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of Herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said could not have happened. "Tacitus makes no mention of it," he said, "and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like Herod. Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects. Why, the Emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed Herod. That tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to have been built by Satan. The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene." He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. "The Great Law" was a phrase often on his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation: From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong & misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness. No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures. CCLXIV CITIZEN AND FARMER The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily. Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone. Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; "angel-fish" swam in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new home; Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--"Mrs. Sally," as Clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed with the architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with Mr. and Mrs. Macy, came up for a week-end visit. Mrs. Crane came over from Elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood, little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up. That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October: I've grown young in these months of dissipation here. And I have left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. Society & theology are sufficient for me. To Helen Allen, a Bermuda "Angel-Fish," he wrote: We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop. The moment I saw the house I was glad I built it, & now I am gladder & gladder all the time. I was not dreaming of living here except in the summer-time--that was before I saw this region & the house, you see--but that is all changed now; I shall stay here winter & summer both & not go back to New York at all. My child, it's as tranquil & contenting as Bermuda. You will be very welcome here, dear. He interested himself in the affairs and in the people of Redding. Not long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance, and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. He appointed Mrs. Lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome each visitor in person. It was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled with the visitors. In the dining-room there were generous refreshments. Again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however great or small, in the building of his home. Mr. and Mrs. Littleton were visiting Stormfield at this time, and both Clemens and Littleton spoke to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their efforts had been worth while. Presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to much reading-matter. He had been for years flooded with books by authors and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city. When these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as the nucleus of a public library. An unused chapel not far away--it could be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the Mark Twain Library of Redding was duly established. Clemens himself was elected its first president, with the resident physician, Dr. Ernest H. Smith, vice-president, and another resident, William E. Grumman, librarian. On the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. He said: I am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers. I suppose you are all farmers: I am going to put in a crop next year, when I have been here long enough and know how. I couldn't make a turnip stay on a tree now after I had grown it. I like to talk. It would take more than the Redding air to make me keep still, and I like to instruct people. It's noble to be good, and it's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. I am glad to help this library. We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books --theoretically at least. Mr. Beard or Mr. Adams will give some land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own. This statement was news to both Mr. Beard and Mr. Adams and an inspiration of the moment; but Mr. Theodore Adams, who owned a most desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library purposes. Clemens continued: I am going to help build that library with contributions from my visitors. Every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. --[A characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a dollar to the Library Building Fund was later placed on the billiard-room mantel at Stormfield with good results.]--If those burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library they would have read a few books and led a better life. Now they are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill you can never tell where he's going to stop. I am sorry for those burglars. They got nothing that they wanted and scared away most of my servants. Now we are putting in a burglar-alarm instead of a dog. Some advised the dog, but it costs even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. I am having the ground electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in Europe. Now I will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know already--Dr. Smith. So a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and there was a feeling that Redding, besides having a literary colony, was to be literary in fact. It might have been mentioned earlier that Redding already had literary associations when Mark Twain arrived. As far back as Revolutionary days Joel Barlow, a poet of distinction, and once Minister to France, had been a resident of Redding, and there were still Barlow descendants in the township. William Edgar Grumman, the librarian, had written the story of Redding's share in the Revolutionary War--no small share, for Gen. Israel Putnam's army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter. Charles Burr Todd, of one of the oldest Redding families, himself--still a resident, was also the author of a Redding history. Of literary folk not native to Redding, Dora Reed Goodale and her sister Elaine, the wife of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, had, long been residents of Redding Center; Jeanette L. Gilder and Ida M. Tarbell had summer homes on Redding Ridge; Dan Beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the banks of the Saugatuck, while Kate V. St. Maur, also two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's granddaughters had recently located adjoining the Stormfield lands. By which it will be seen that Redding was in no way unsuitable as a home for Mark Twain. CCLXV A MANTEL AND A BABY ELEPHANT Mark Twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. The first of these, a mantel from Hawaii, presented to him by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the morning of his seventy-third birthday. This committee had written, proposing to build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. Clemens decided on a billiard-room mantel, and John Howells forwarded the proper measurements. So, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in fine condition, with the Hawaiian word, "Aloha," one of the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament. To the donors of the gift Clemens wrote: The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its friendly "Aloha" was the first uttered greeting received on my 73d birthday. It is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me & which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & I beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure. To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word: I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. It is worthy of the choicest place in the house and it has it. It was the second beautiful mantel in Stormfield--the Hartford library mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the Stormfield living-room. Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. Clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. He recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing I said: "I hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game." And he answered, as then: "Yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth." And he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine. Mark Twain's second present came at Christmas-time. About ten days earlier, a letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a Christmas gift. He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum & Bailey's headquarters at Bridgeport. The news created a disturbance in Stormfield. One could not refuse, discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a disaster to accept it. An elephant would require a roomy and warm place, also a variety of attention which Stormfield was not prepared to supply. The telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by the secretary. There was no good place to put an elephant in Stormfield, but Mr. Collier said, quite confidently: "Oh, put him in the garage." "But there's no heat in the garage." "Well, put him in the loggia, then. That's closed in, isn't it, for the winter? Plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant." "But we play cards in the loggia. We use it for a sort of sun-parlor." "But that wouldn't matter. He's a kindly, playful little thing. He'll be just like a kitten. I'll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and I'll send up several bales of hay in advance. It isn't a large elephant, you know: just a little one --a regular plaything." There was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the Christmas present's arrival. A few days before Christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels of carrots. This store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at Stormfield. It would seem there was no escape now. On Christmas morning Mr. Lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from Barnum & Bailey's, sent by Mr. Collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him settled when he should arrive. Orders were given to bring the man over. The day of doom was at hand. But Lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play. He had seen a good many elephant-trainers at Bridgeport, and he thought this one had a doubtful look. "Where is the elephant?" he asked, as they drove along. "He will arrive at noon." "Where are you going to put him?" "In the loggia." "How big is he?" "About the size of a cow." "How long have you been with Barnum and Bailey?" "Six years." "Then you must know some friends of mine" (naming two that had no existence until that moment). "Oh yes, indeed. I know them well." Lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that perhaps the dread at Stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. Something told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet, than an elephant-trainer. They drove to Stormfield, and the trainer looked over the place. It would do perfectly, he said. He gave a few instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven back to the station to bring it. Lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the trainer. It didn't need a trainer. It was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small --suited to the loggia, as Collier had said--for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the forest toy elephants ever seen anywhere. It was a good joke, such as Mark Twain loved--a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. He wrote Robert Collier, threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating Stormfield. "To send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or stuffed!" he said. "The animal came to life, as you knew it would, and began to observe Christmas, and we now have no furniture left and no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars --nothing but the elephant. Be kind, be merciful, be generous; take him away and send us what is left of the earthquake." Collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant in the trunk. And with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end. CCLXXVI SHAKESPEARE-BACON TALK When the bad weather came there was not much company at Stormfield, and I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion. My own home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. I usually managed to arrive about three o'clock. He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop, and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might be no delay in getting at the games. Or, if it happened that he wished to show me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding down the stair. Once, when I arrived, I heard him calling, and going up I found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling. He said: "They seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors. Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent." He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on them. "How beautifully they light up!" he said; "some of them in the sunlight, some still in the shadow." He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields. "The lights and colors are always changing there," he said. "I never tire of it." To see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. More than any one I ever knew, he lived in the present. Most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. Mark Twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future; but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare-Bacon problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published, 'The Shakespeare Problem Restated', by George Greenwood, and another one in press, 'Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon', by William Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon, and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock testimony--Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that Shakespeare had written one of them. "Is there any evidence that he didn't?" I asked. "There's evidence that he couldn't," he said. "It required a man with the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have read Greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for Shakespeare's authorship." I was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise. "Perhaps," I said, "Shakespeare was the Belasoo of that day--the managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. In that case it is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare's. Even in this day John Luther Long's 'Madam Butterfly' is sometimes called Belasco's play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of it." He considered this view, but not very favorably. The Booth book was at this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction: "I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way." "How can you be so positive?" I asked. He replied: "I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned." I now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest. "It is the great discovery of the age," he said, quite seriously. "The world will soon ring with it. I wish I could tell you about it, but I have passed my word. You will not have long to wait." I was going to sail for the Mediterranean in February, and I asked if it would be likely that I would know this great secret before I sailed. He thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would be given to the world while I was on the water, and it might come to me on the ship by wireless. I confess I was amazed and intensely curious by this time. I conjectured the discovery of some document--some Bacon or Shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the authorship. I hinted that he might write me a letter which I could open on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal. He had passed his word, he repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he assured me more than once that wherever I might be, in whatever remote locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time of the upheaval. Naturally the Shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days that we were together. He had engaged another stenographer, and was now dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated with those of Mr. Greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished and decorated in his own gay manner. These were chapters for his autobiography, he said, and I think he had then no intention of making a book of them. I could not quite see why he should take all this argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, had written the plays. I thought the whole matter very curious. The Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. One evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: "There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known," and he added, "Jesus Christ." He reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. I agreed that they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with justice and reason; but I said I thought there was truth in them, too. "Why do you think so?" he asked. "Because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally and essentially just." "Then you make your own Bible?" "Yes, from those materials combined with human reason." "Then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?" I admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from Shakespeare, Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the Scriptures. We were on common ground now. He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and their blameless lives. I, still pursuing the thought of Jesus, asked: "Do you not think it strange that in that day when Christ came, admitting that there was a Christ, such a character could have come at all--in the time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief?" "I remember," he said, "the Sadducees didn't believe in hell. He brought them one." "Nor the resurrection. He brought them that, also." He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels. "It is all a myth," he said. "There have been Saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus." "But," I argued, "even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is genuine. Suppose that we admit there was no physical Saviour--that it is only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't that make it worthy?" "But then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. You can create your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you've got to give up your atonement." "As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of atonement, doesn't it?" He said: "A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon's plays. You are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. I have preached that in my own Gospel." I remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, I had merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training the ideals to a higher contentment of soul. CCLXXVII "IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?" I set out on my long journey with much reluctance. However, a series of guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a good time to go. Clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me Godspeed. It would be near the end of April before I should see him again. Now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, I remembered the great news I was to hear concerning Shakespeare. In Cairo, at Shepheard's, I looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed. Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any particular Shakespeare news. Arriving in New York, I found that Clemens himself had published his Shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, 'Is Shakespeare Dead?' The title certainly suggested spiritistic matters, and I got a volume at Harpers', and read it going up on the train, hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. But it was only matter I had already known; the secret was still unrevealed. At Redding I lost not much time in getting up to Stormfield. There had been changes in my absence. Clara Clemens had returned from her travels, and Jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her father's secretary. He was greatly pleased with these things, and declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about him. He was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. For one thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, Mark Twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in general should not require his personal attention. He seemed to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of responsibility. When we went in for billiards I spoke of his book, which I had read on the way up, and of the great Shakespearian secret which was to astonish the world. Then he told me that the matter had been delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the revelation was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively to any one who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic name of Francis Bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many --probably through all of the so-called Shakespeare plays. He said it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that Ignatius Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of this book, William Stone Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there. The book would be issued in a few days, he said. He had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind. He confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in, attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it. He had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had understood the rule, and had been able to work out several Bacon signatures. He complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the book came I would have no trouble with it. Without going further with this matter, I may say here that the book arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. It was certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not there. Just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it would be hard to say. Certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in the literary world, and the name of William Shakespeare still continues to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long associated with his name. Mark Twain's own book on the subject--'Is Shakespeare Dead?'--found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. It contained no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable.--[Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis, we attended a fine performance of "Romeo and Juliet" given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said, quite earnestly, "That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote."] Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells. Clemens had called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to attend. We will let him tell of his visit: We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close- knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the place . . . . My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugar-snow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and had been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[This carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to Mrs. Crane when the Hartford house was closed. When Stormfield was built she returned it to its original owner.]--Its springs had not grown yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. Howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of letters of James Russell Lowell. Then, next morning, he was seized with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as Howells, Twichell, and Rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for some future public. He wrote two of these immediately--to Howells and to Twichell. The Howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran: 3 in the morning, April 17, 1909. My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, did you write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it? In my mind's eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelope in the mail-pile. I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. Was it an illusion? I am reading Lowell's letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have just margined a note: "Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now." It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. And he--why, so was he, but he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying: "Don't say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is old, & broods over it." Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter. Time to go to sleep. Yours ever, MARK The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing that the letter is not to be mailed. . . .The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment. And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to Twichell, because it will make him writhe and squirm & break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on Twichell; you'll save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is done, yet a vast advantage is gained. The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. The Twichell letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already said on the subject. He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again. CCLXXVIII THE DEATH OF HENRY ROGERS Clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to Norfolk, Virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the Virginia Railway. He had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public tribute to Henry Rogers, and told something of his personal obligation to the financier. He began by telling what Mr. Rogers had done for Helen Keller, whom he called "the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc." Then he said: That is not all Mr. Rogers has done, but you never see that side of his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping hand daily out of that generous heart of his. You never hear of it. He is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright. But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not God. I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if I don't look at him I can tell it now. In 1894, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. If you will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and I was on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and I could not give away my copyrights. Mr. Rogers had long-enough vision ahead to say, "Your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again," and that was a correct proposition. He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising at the end of four years I would pay dollar for dollar. That arrangement was made, otherwise I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that. You see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is always trying to look like me--I don't blame him for that). These are only emblematic of his character, and that is all. I say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever known. This had been early in April. Something more than a month later Clemens was making a business trip to New York to see Mr. Rogers. I was telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he started. I do not remember why I was not to go along that day, for I usually made such trips with him. I think it was planned that Miss Clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the Grand Central Station. At all events, she did meet him there, with the news that during the night Mr. Rogers had suddenly died. This was May 20, 1909. The news had already come to the house, and I had lost no time in preparations to follow by the next train. I joined him at the Grosvenor Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. He was upset and deeply troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend. He had a helpless look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him adrift. "And how I hate to do anything," he added, "that requires the least modicum of intelligence!" We remained at the Grosvenor for Mr. Rogers's funeral. Clemens served as one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to Fairhaven. He wanted to be very quiet, he said. He could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. Once he asked me to write a letter to Jean: "Say, 'Your father says every little while, "How glad I am that Jean is at home again!"' for that is true and I think of it all the time." But by and by, after a long period of silence, he said: "Mr. Rogers is under the ground now." And so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so largely to the comfort of Mark Twain's old age. He was a man of fine sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor. One Christmas, when he presented Mark Twain with a watch and a match-case, he wrote: MY DEAR CLEMENS,--For many years your friends have been complaining of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. Complaints are now coming in of your use of time. Most of your friends think that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief complaint is in regard to the quality. I have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box. Therefore, I take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that will furnish only the best. Please use it with the kind wishes of Yours truly, H. H. ROGERS. P. S.--Complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you make in your trousers in scratching matches. You will find a furrow on the bottom of the article inclosed. Please use it. Compliments of the season to the family. He was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to Clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried. One reading them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy that at last he was crushed beneath their weight. CCLXXIX AN EXTENSION OF COPYRIGHT One of the pleasant things that came to Mark Twain that year was the passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an extension of fourteen years. Champ Clark had been largely instrumental in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily since Mark Twain's visit to Washington in 1906. Following that visit, Clark wrote: . . . It [the original bill] would never pass because the bill had literature and music all mixed together. Being a Missourian of course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you. What I want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating only to the copyright of books; send it to me and I will try to have it passed. Clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[Similar to the "Open Letter to the Register of Copyrights," North American Review, January, 1905.]--which would instruct Congress, but this he did not complete. Meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in 1909 it became a law. In June Clark wrote: DR. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, Stormfield, Redding, Conn. MY DEAR DOCTOR,--I am gradually becoming myself again, after a period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. After a long lecture tour last summer I went immediately into a hard campaign; as soon as the election was over, and I had recovered my disposition, I came here and went into those tariff hearings, which began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until midnight. Listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take Uncle Joe's rules away from him; on the heels of that "Campaign that Failed" came the tariff fight in the House. I am now getting time to breathe regularly and I am writing to ask you if the copyright law is acceptable to you. If it is not acceptable to you I want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and I will give my best endeavors to the work. I believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case. Your friend, CHAMP CLARK. To this Clemens replied: STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN, June 5, 1909. DEAR CHAMP CLARK,--Is the new copyright law acceptable to me? Emphatically yes! Clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined & just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United States. Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision. The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting & apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said "the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos nothing can be built." But we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning-rods out of the statute book I think. When I think of that other bill, which even the Deity couldn't understand, and of this one, which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. Was it R. U. Johnson? Was it the Authors' League? Was it both together? I don't know, but I take off my hat, anyway. Johnson has written a valuable article about the new law--I inclose it. At last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are ahead of England! Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. Does this sound like shouting? Then I must modify it: all we possessed of copyright justice before the 4th of last March we owed to England's initiative. Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed would regulate the whole matter. It was a generous, even if a somewhat Utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author. The new fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other compromise seem inadvisable.--[The reader may consider this last copyright document by Mark Twain under Appendix N, at the end of this volume.] CCLXXX A WARNING Clemens had promised to go to Baltimore for the graduation of "Francesca" of his London visit in 1907--and to make a short address to her class. It was the eighth of June when we set out on this journey,--[The reader may remember that it was the 8th of June, 1867, that Mark Twain sailed for the Holy Land. It was the 8th of June, 1907, that he sailed for England to take his Oxford degree. This 8th of June, 1909, was at least slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement made with Francesca in London, and my notes show that he discussed, on the way to the station, some incidents of his Holy Land trip and his attitude at that time toward Christian traditions. As he rarely mentioned the Quaker City trip, the coincidence seems rather curious. It is most unlikely that Clemens himself in any way associated the two dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain. Clemens had a number of errands to do in New York, and we drove from one place to another, attending to them. Finally, in the afternoon, the rain ceased, and while I was arranging some matters for him he concluded to take a ride on the top of a Fifth Avenue stage. It was fine and pleasant when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned he complained that he had felt a little chilly. He seemed in fine condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way to Baltimore. Chauncey Depew was on the train and they met in the dining-car--the last time, I think, they ever saw each other. He was tired when we reached the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore and did not wish to see the newspaper men. It happened that the reporters had a special purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his Shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in publication, full credit had not been given to Mr. Greenwood for the long extracts quoted from his work. The sensational head-lines in a morning paper, "Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?" had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. It was a simple matter, easily explained, and Clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody. He felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact that he had been stealing and caught at it would give Mr. Greenwood's book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had intended. He found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only worry being that Clara and Jean would see the paper and be troubled. He had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading. After a little he got up and began walking up and down the room. Presently he stopped and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. He said: "I think I must have caught a little cold yesterday on that Fifth Avenue stage. I have a curious pain in my breast." I suggested that he lie down again and I would fill his hot-water bag. The pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing. I stepped into the next room and busied myself with some writing. By and by I heard him stirring again and went in where he was. He was walking up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries --something relating to prehistoric man. "What a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been," he said--"the very first one! Think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms, practising and getting ready for the pulpit." The fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put his hand on his breast, saying: "That pain has come back. It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it." It seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. I said: "Where is it, exactly, Mr. Clemens?" He laid his hand in the center of his breast and said: "It is here, and it is very peculiar indeed." Remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart, and the "peculiar deadly pain" he had mentioned seemed ominous. I suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had again relieved it. This time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for it did not return while we were in Baltimore. It was the first positive manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us. The weather was pleasant in Baltimore, and his visit to St. Timothy's School and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most to him. The flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses, assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to any one. Edward S. Martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great feasting in the big assembly-hall. It was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the death of Edward Everett Hale--another of the old group. Clemens said thoughtfully, after a moment: "I had the greatest respect and esteem for Edward Everett Hale, the greatest admiration for his work. I am as grieved to hear of his death as I can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended." We were leaving the Belvedere next morning, and when the subject of breakfast came up for discussion he said: "That was the most delicious Baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday morning. I think we'll just repeat that order. It reminds me of John Quarles's farm." We had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast that morning down in the diningroom, and "Francesca" and her mother were there. As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me how once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars there for Washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd yelling at him as he ran. We remained overnight in New York, and that evening, at the Grosvenor, he read aloud a poem of his own which I had not seen before. He had brought it along with some intention of reading it at St. Timothy's, he said, but had not found the occasion suitable. "I wrote it a long time ago in Paris. I'd been reading aloud to Mrs. Clemens and Susy--in '93, I think--about Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, from Macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell. Then I took an imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former state. I described him, and repeated some of his mumblings. Susy and Mrs. Clemens said, 'Write it'--so I did, by and by, and this is it. I call it 'The Derelict.'" He read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of which follows: You sneer, you ships that pass me by, Your snow-pure canvas towering proud! You traders base!--why, once such fry Paid reverence, when like a cloud Storm-swept I drove along, My Admiral at post, his pennon blue Faint in the wilderness of sky, my long Yards bristling with my gallant crew, My ports flung wide, my guns displayed, My tall spars hid in bellying sail! --You struck your topsails then, and made Obeisance--now your manners fail. He had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the figure and phrasing were full of vigor. "It is strong and fine," I said, when he had finished. "Yes," he assented. "It seems so as I read it now. It is so long since I have seen it that it is like reading another man's work. I should call it good, I believe." He put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor talking. "There is no figure for the human being like the ship," he said; "no such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such men as Clive and Hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless, tossed by every wind and tide." We returned to Redding next day. On the train going home he fell to talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able to read. "When I take up one of Jane Austen's books," he said, "such as Pride and Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know, what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so." He recalled again how Stepniak had come to Hartford, and how humiliated Mrs. Clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with the writings of Thackeray and others. "I don't know anything about anything," he said, mournfully, "and never did. My brother used to try to get me to read Dickens, long ago. I couldn't do it--I was ashamed; but I couldn't do it. Yes, I have read The Tale of Two Cities, and could do it again. I have read it a good many times; but I never could stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities." By and by he handed me the Saturday Times Review, saying: "Here is a fine poem, a great poem, I think. I can stand that." It was "The Palatine (in the 'Dark Ages')," by Willa Sibert Cather, reprinted from McClure's. The reader will understand better than I can express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to Mark Twain: THE PALATINE "Have you been with the King to Rome, Brother, big brother?" "I've been there and I've come home, Back to your play, little brother." "Oh, how high is Caesar's house, Brother, big brother?" "Goats about the doorways browse; Night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree, Home of the wild bird and home of the bee. A thousand chambers of marble lie Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. Poppies we find amongst our wheat Grow on Caesar's banquet seat. Cattle crop and neatherds drowse On the floors of Caesar's house." "But what has become of Caesar's gold, Brother, big brother?" "The times are bad and the world is old --Who knows the where of the Caesar's gold? Night comes black on the Caesar's hill; The wells are deep and the tales are ill. Fireflies gleam in the damp and mold, All that is left of the Caesar's gold. Back to your play, little brother." Farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to these lines of Kipling: How is it not good for the Christian's health To hurry the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, And he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white And the name of the late deceased: And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here Who tried to hustle the East." "I could stand any amount of that," he said, and presently: "Life is too long and too short. Too long for the weariness of it; too short for the work to be done. At the very most, the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history." I said: "Still, we need not worry. If death ends all it does not matter; and if life is eternal there will be time enough." "Yes," he assented, rather grimly, "that optimism of yours is always ready to turn hell's back yard into a playground." I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French, and mentioned Bayard Taylor's having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven. Clemens said, reflectively: "Yes--but you see that was Greek." CCLXXXI THE LAST SUMMER AT STORMFIELD I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. At first I went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, I remained most of the nights as well. Our rooms were separated only by a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. In the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his glasses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier. Sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and I would go in, and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather, he would settle them while I dropped in a remark here and there, merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution. The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. Dr. Edward Quintard came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction, when it was not too warm or windy. Once we went as far as the river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment. On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to build a study on it, and call it "Markland." He thought it an admirable building-site, and I think he was pleased with the name. Later he said: "If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the Rogers table, which had been left in New York] I would turn it over to you." I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard-table, and he said: "Now that will be very good. Then, when I want exercise, I can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. You must build that study." So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lounsbury had undertaken the work. During the walks Clemens rested a good deal. There were the New England hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. As I remember now, I think how bravely he bore it. It must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain, for I have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack. We had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. At the first hint from him I would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. Yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or less. We were alone together most of the time. He did not appear to care for company that summer. Clara Clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at meal-times. So it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the last year of Mark Twain's life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star. CCLXXXII PERSONAL MEMORANDA In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of personality and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in which they were set down. One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's Science and Theology, which he called a lovely book.--['A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'.] June 21. A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual, resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to Jean's farm-house. I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution. "Yes," he said, "those are the great evidences; no one who reasons can doubt them." And presently he added: "That is a most amusing book of White's. When you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all. White tells of an old bishop who figured out that God created the world in an instant on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and proved it. And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. He said that God could create the rocks with those fossils in them for ornaments if He wanted to. Why, it takes twenty years to build a little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually believed that God created the whole world and all that's in it in six days. White tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons for thunder; one being that God wanted to show the world His power, and another that He wished to frighten sinners to repent. Now consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest way you can think of it. Consider the idea of God thinking of all that. Consider the President of the United States wanting to impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome of the Capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire." He followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards. June 23. I came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. He was walking up and down, looking like an ancient Roman. He said: "Consider the case of Elsie Sigel--[Granddaughter of Gen. Franz Sigel. She was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement work among the Chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!" Then turning upon me fiercely, he continued: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. Not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. Suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again. They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it--that much can be counted on. Suppose those people go to a community in a far neighborhood and say, 'We'd like to change places with you. Come take our homes and let us have yours.' Those people would say, 'Never mind, we are not interested in your country. We know what has happened there, and what will happen again.' We don't care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment; and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. Formerly it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal fires of damnation. He knew that in all probability that child would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep. But since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome. I wrote a fairy story once. It was published somewhere. I don't remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a fairy gave a man the customary wishes. I was interested in seeing what he would take. First he chose wealth and went away with it, but it did not bring him happiness. Then he came back for the second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness either. Finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy said, in substance, 'If you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen that in the first place.' "The papers called me a pessimist for writing that story. Pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool." But this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance. Under date of July 5th I find this happier entry: We have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. It is a game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly pleased with it. He said this afternoon: "I have never enjoyed billiards as I do now. I look forward to it every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work."--[His work at this time was an article on Marjorie Fleming, the "wonder child," whose quaint writings and brief little life had been published to the world by Dr. John Brown. Clemens always adored the thought of Marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked almost next to Joan of Arc in his affections.] We went out in the loggia by and by and Clemens read aloud from a book which Professor Zubelin left here a few days ago--'The Religion of a Democrat'. Something in it must have suggested to Clemens his favorite science, for presently he said: "I have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and I have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' The Himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man." I spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world. "Could a man live on a world so small as that?" I asked. "Oh yes," he said. "The gravitation that holds it together would hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here. His horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could walk around in half a day." He talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. He had no real knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. He was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama of the universe. The fact that Alpha Centauri was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole, toward the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, at the rate of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him. The astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate; but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that he was going to figure it for himself. I came in one morning, to find that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory. I am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--Alpha Centauri--was between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts. By and by he said: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." And a little later he added: "I've got some kind of a heart disease, and Quintard won't tell me whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. I was in hopes that Quintard would tell me that I was likely to drop dead any minute; but he didn't. He only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. He didn't give me any schedule; but I expect to go with Halley's comet." I seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his notes I find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own: July 14, 1909. Yesterday's dispute resumed, I still maintaining that, whereas we can think, we generally don't do it. Don't do it, & don't have to do it: we are automatic machines which act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, & without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 thinking apparatus. This reminded me of something: thirty years ago, in Hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & I wrote my letters there the first thing every morning. My table lay two points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that position, consequently you could see the door across the length of the billiard-table, but you couldn't see the floor by the said table. I found I was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my letters down-stairs for the mail, so I concluded to lay them on the floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, & that would indicate to him what they were there for. Did it? No, it didn't. He was a machine, & had habits. Habits take precedence of thought. Now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor --lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder couldn't see it there without immediately divining that it was not there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a definite purpose. Very well--it may surprise you to learn that that most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the most brilliant of thinkers. For he is always an automatic machine & has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers. My scheme failed because every human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced thing & placing it where it won't be stepped on. My first intruder was George. He went and came without saying anything. Presently I found the letters neatly piled up on the billiard-table. I was astonished. I put them on the floor again. The next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word. I was profoundly moved, profoundly interested. So I set the trap again. Also again, & again, & yet again--all day long. I caught every member of the family, & every servant; also I caught the three finest intellects in the town. In every instance old, time-worn automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking apparatus never got a chance. I do not remember this particular discussion, but I do distinctly recall being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed, and being properly classified for doing it. Clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about his room. I gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of these characteristic bits may be offered here. KNEE It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them. JEHOVAH He is all-good. He made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other --take your choice. He made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get into hell. He commended man to multiply & replenish-what? Hell. MODESTY ANTEDATES CLOTHES & will be resumed when clothes are no more. [The latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:] MODESTY DIED when clothes were born. MODESTY DIED when false modesty was born. HISTORY A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. MORALS are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind & spirit. SUGGESTION There is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both come from outside--whence all ideas come. DUELS I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me. I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do; I merely do not respect 'em. In some serious matters (relig.) I would have them burnt. I am old now and once was a sinner. I often think of it with a kind of soft regret. I trust my days are numbered. I would not have that detail overlooked. She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay. He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. One fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.--[Under Appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the "Bessie" dialogues.]--He read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor. Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end. Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow fallen short of his conception. "The Mysterious Stranger" in one of its forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him to complete it. CCLXXXIII ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert's Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it. "No," he said, "I didn't like any of it." "But you read it?" "Yes, I read every line of it." "You admitted its literary art?" "Well, it's like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book." "But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in history." "Yes, that is so. But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and slaughter and stench it worries me. It has great art--I can see that. That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene are marvelous, but I wouldn't read that book again without a salary." August 16. He is reading Suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome. This afternoon he began talking about Claudius. "They called Claudius a lunatic," he said, "but just see what nice fancies he had. He would go to the arena between times and have captives and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special enjoyment. Sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say, 'Well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.' Carpentering around the arena wasn't a popular job in those days. He went visiting once to a province and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no executioner on hand. No matter; the Emperor of Rome was in no hurry--he would wait. So he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came." I said, "How do you account for the changed attitude toward these things? We are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering." "Ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the quality of compassion. Relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same. Why, I read somewhere a letter written just before the Lisbon catastrophe in 1755 about a scene on the public square of Lisbon: A lot of stakes with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning. The square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the enjoyment of the scene. The Greeks don't seem to have done these things. I suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion." Colonel Harvey and Mr. Duneka came up to spend the night. Mr. Clemens had one of his seizures during the evening. They come oftener and last longer. One last night continued for an hour and a half. I slept there. September 7. To-day news of the North Pole discovered by Peary. Five days ago the same discovery was reported by Cook. Clemens's comment: "It's the greatest joke of the ages." But a moment later he referred to the stupendous fact of Arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the sun. September 21. This morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had had just before wakening. He said: "I was in an automobile going slowly, with 'a little girl beside me, and some uniformed person walking along by us. I said, 'I'll get out and walk, too'; but the officer replied, 'This is only one of the smallest of our fleet.' "Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two cannons mounted where the front should be. I noticed, too, that we were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. Presently we got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. I turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all admiration.' Then all at once we were in a great group of people and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when I tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving remark." The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came. One morning he said: "I was awake a good deal in the night, and I tried to think of interesting things. I got to working out geological periods, trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical periods. Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles --twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then I took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty pages, and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into space." Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty thousand years (Lord Kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000 souls. I assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in Paradise and the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago. Traveling at the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in Alpha Centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart. Few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures as these. We made occasional business trips to New York, and during one of them visited the Museum of Natural History to look at the brontosaur and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall. To him these were the most fascinating things in the world. He contemplated the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence they had come down to us. Mark Twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life. Dwelling mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely, or minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness, or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical occurrence. It not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and startling forms. More than once I have known him to relate an occurrence of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed. If his attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of his mistake. I do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often surprised and, I think, amused him. Insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical shapes about him. He would fix you keenly with his attention, but you realized, at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part of the material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world in which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed, but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere literal scrutiny. And this was, mainly, of course, because the routine of life did not appeal to him. Even members of his household did not always stir his consciousness. He knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon them; but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that Mount Everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its slopes, useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant's existence, and in no important matter a part of its greater life. CCLXXXIV A LIBRARY CONCERT In a letter which Clemens wrote to Miss Wallace at this time, he tells of a concert given at Stormfield on September 21st for the benefit of the new Redding Library. Gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was up and about and able to play. David Bispham, the great barytone, always genial and generous, agreed to take part, and Clara Clemens, already accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program. The letter to Miss Wallace supplies the rest of the history. We had a grand time here yesterday. Concert in aid of the little library. TEAM Gabrilowitsch, pianist. David Bispham, vocalist. Clara Clemens, ditto. Mark Twain, introduces of team. Detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere --Danbury, New Haven, Norwalk, Redding, Redding Ridge, Ridgefield, and even from New York: some in 60-h.p. motor-cars, some in buggies and carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot from miles around--525 altogether. If we hadn't stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the performance we should have been swamped. We jammed 160 into the library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining- room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the brick-paved square outside the dining-room door. The artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up, and I tell you they performed to the Queen's taste! The program was an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to it. The enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting. They all stayed an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate. We had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated $372 for the Building Fund. We had tea at half past six for a dozen--the Hawthornes, Jeannette Gilder, and her niece, etc.; and after 8-o'clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the bare-stripped library until 10; nobody present but the team and Mr. and Mrs. Paine and Jean and her dog. And me. Bispham did "Danny Deever" and the "Erlkonig" in his majestic, great organ-tones and artillery, and Gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were never played before, I do suppose. There is not much to add to that account. Clemens, introducing the performers, was the gay feature of the occasion. He spoke of the great reputation of Bispham and Gabrilowitsch; then he said: "My daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so much better-looking." The music of the evening that followed, with Gabrilowitsch at the piano and David Bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated. Bispham sang the "Erlkonig" and "Killiecrankie" and the "Grenadiers" and several other songs. He spoke of having sung Wagner's arrangement of the "Grenadiers" at the composer's home following his death, and how none of the family had heard it before. There followed dancing, and Jean Clemens, fine and handsome, apparently full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as care-free as if there was no shadow upon her life. And the evening was distinguished in another way, for before it ended Clara Clemens had promised Ossip Gabrilowitsch to become his wife. CCLXXXV A WEDDING AT STORMFIELD The wedding of Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens was not delayed. Gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in Europe, and unless the marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months. It followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement. They were busy days. Clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to make the list. October 6th was a perfect wedding-day. It was one of those quiet, lovely fall days when the whole world seems at peace. Claude, the butler, with his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room with gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods and fields. They blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and furnishings, and I do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful room. Only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to the ceremony. The Twichells came over a day ahead, for Twichell, who had assisted in the marriage rites between Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon, was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now. A fellow-student of the bride and groom when they had been pupils of Leschetizky, in Vienna --Miss Ethel Newcomb--was at the piano and played softly the Wedding March from "Taunhauser." Jean Clemens was the only bridesmaid, and she was stately and classically beautiful, with a proud dignity in her office. Jervis Langdon, the bride's cousin and childhood playmate, acted as best man, and Clemens, of course, gave the bride away. By request he wore his scarlet Oxford gown over his snowy flannels, and was splendid beyond words. I do not write of the appearance of the bride and groom, for brides and grooms are always handsome and always happy, and certainly these were no exception. It was all so soon over, the feasting ended, and the principals whirling away into the future. I have a picture in my mind of them seated together in the automobile, with Richard Watson Gilder standing on the step for a last good-by, and before them a wide expanse of autumn foliage and distant hills. I remember Gilder's voice saying, when the car was on the turn, and they were waving back to us: "Over the hills and far away, Beyond the utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, beyond the day, Through all the world she followed him." The matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the eve of the wedding, when the Associated Press had been notified. A representative was there; but Clemens had characteristically interviewed himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter a typewritten copy. Replying to the question (put to himself), "Are you pleased with the marriage?" he answered: Yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other father. There are two or three solemn things in life and a happy marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come. I am glad of this marriage, and Mrs. Clemens would be glad, for she always had a warm affection for Gabrilowitsch. There was another wedding at Stormfield on the following afternoon--an imitation wedding. Little Joy came up with me, and wished she could stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she expressed a wish that she could get married like that. Clemens said: "Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it." Then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of himself from one of the Rogerses' Christmas trees. He knew where it was, and he got it out. Then he said: "Now, Joy, we will have another wedding. This is Mr. Colonel Williams, and you are to become his wedded wife." So Joy stood up very gravely and Clemens performed the ceremony, and I gave the bride away, and Joy to him became Mrs. Colonel Williams thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate. CCLXXXVI AUTUMN DAYS A harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will. In his interview Clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many begged him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with him, urging him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his continued life and health. They cited the comfort he had brought to world-weary humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as reasons why he should live. Such letters could not fail to cheer him. A letter of this period, from John Bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its own. Clemens had written Bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on the tariff: Thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff. I guess the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself. Bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce. In sending his regrets he said: The sentiment I would propose if I dared to be present would be the words of Mark Twain, the statesman: "The government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself." Now to Clemens himself he wrote: Rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor Dr. Franklin a wiser one . . . . Be careful, or the Demos will be running you for President when you are not on your guard. Yours more than ever, JOHN BIGELOW. Among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the Rev. Fred Window Adams, of Schenectady, New York, with Mark Twain as its subject. Mr. Adams chose for his text, "Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable for the ministry," and he placed the two Marks, St. Mark and Mark Twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized him as "a fearless knight of righteousness." A few weeks later Mr. Adams himself came to Stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the Gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with Mark Twain. In spite of the good-will and the good wishes Clemens's malady did not improve. As the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer indoors. The cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the doctor's orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise. To Miss Wallace he wrote: I can't walk, I can't drive, I'm not down-stairs much, and I don't see company, but I drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; I read, and read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as formerly), and it's a contented and comfortable life. But this was not altogether accurate as to details. He did come down-stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless of the paroxysms. We found, too, that the seizures were induced by mental agitation. One night he read aloud to Jean and myself the first chapter of an article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," which he was preparing for Harper's Bazar. He had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word had been said. Suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said, "I must lie down," and started toward the stair. I supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot water. He drank it and dropped back on the bed. "Don't speak to me," he said; "don't make me talk." Jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence. I think we both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of his own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards. We played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for the attack. It is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause. Clemens's general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal of trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint. The writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation and a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health. One day he sent for his attorney, Mr. Charles T. Lark, and made some final revisions in his will.--[Mark Twain's estate, later appraised at something more than $600,000 was left in the hands of trustees for his daughters. The trustees were Edward E. Loomis, Jervis Langdon, and Zoheth S. Freeman. The direction of his literary affairs was left to his daughter Clara and the writer of this history.] To see him you would never have suspected that he was ill. He was in good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his face as full of bloom as at any time during the period I had known him; also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good wine. And of course he would find amusement in his condition. He said: "I have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the first time, I have got a genuine excuse. It makes me feel so honest." And once, when Jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said: "Jean, I can't see her. Tell her I am likely to drop dead any minute and it would be most embarrassing." But he did see her, for it was a poet--Angela Morgan--and he read her poem, "God's Man," aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her to Collier's Weekly. He still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather inclusively, as an idiot, he said: "I wish to God the lightning would strike me; but I've wished that fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. I have missed several good chances. Mrs. Clemens was afraid of lightning, and would never let me bare my head to the storm." The element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent and less frequent. I was at Stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally alone; for Jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors, seldom appeared except at meal-times. Occasionally she joined in the billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not great. She would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the science of angles as she had mastered tennis and French and German and Italian. She had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her friend. Katie Leary, who had been Jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child, Jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the Lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she had said: "Poor things!" Katie said: "Why, you didn't say that about the people!" But Jean answered: "Oh, they could speak." One night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it must be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work. "That is why the Rogerses kill themselves," he said. "They would rather kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time. They have forgotten how to rest. They know nothing but to keep on till they drop." I told of something I had read not long before. It was about an aged lion that had broken loose from his cage at Coney Island. He had not offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began pacing up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage. They had come and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed eagerly into it. I noticed that Jean was listening anxiously, and when I finished she said: "Is that a true story?" She had forgotten altogether the point in illustration. She was concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his liberty. Among the letters that Clemens wrote just then was one to Miss Wallace, in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his windows. The autumn splendors passed you by? What a pity! I wish you had been here. It was beyond words! It was heaven & hell & sunset & rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you couldn't look at it and keep the tears back. Such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing, & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then --then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it! In the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his own satisfaction--'Letters from the Earth'; said letters supposed to have been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other immortals in some remote sphere. I'll read passages to you. This book will never be published --in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony . . . Paine enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose. I very well remember his writing those 'Letters from the Earth'. He read them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human race. The immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his special conceit in believing that he was the Creator's pet--the particular form of life for which all the universe was created. Clemens allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to the possibility of print or public offense. He enjoyed them himself, too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold imaginings. One admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these chapters. It is where the celestial correspondent describes man's religion. His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists--utterly and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. Isn't it curious? Isn't it interesting? You must not think I am exaggerating, for it is not so. I will give you the details. Most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short-cut. More men go to church than want to. To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore. Further, all sane people detest noise. All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now then, you have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like? In fifteen hundred years you couldn't do it. They have left out the very things they care for most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer! In man's heaven everybody sings. There are no exceptions. The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth sings there. Thus universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is one hymn alone. The words are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is no rhyme--there is no poetry. "Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the highest!" and a few such phrases constitute the whole service. Meantime, every person is playing on a harp! Consider the deafening hurricane of sound. Consider, further, it is a praise service--a service of compliment, flattery, adulation. Do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it, requires it, commands it? Hold your breath: It is God! This race's God I mean--their own pet invention. Most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human absurdities were new only as to phrasing. He had exhausted the topic long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he never lost interest. Many subjects became stale to him at last; but the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end. From my note-book: October 25. I am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all history--religious, political, military. He seems to have read everything in the world concerning Rome, France, and England particularly. Last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of Rome's decline. Such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--I could not help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public effort to work of that sort. No one could have equaled him at it. He concluded with some comments on the possibility of America following Rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism. November 1. To-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in shorthand. "It is the only rational alphabet," he declared. "All this spelling reform is nonsense. What we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing. Take the letter M, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three. The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand. I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet." I said: "There is this objection: the characters are so slightly different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is seldom that two can read each other's notes." "You are talking of stenographic reporting," he said, rather warmly. "Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet. It is perfectly clear and legible." "Would you have it in the schools, then?" "Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic purposes, but only for use in writing to save time." He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article on the subject. November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments. "I have always been the victim of somebody," he said, "and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. I can't see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing." I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'Letters from the Earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. Somewhat on the defensive I said, "But we must admit that the so- called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive." He answered, "Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born. "I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm." He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin's father, "Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians." "I was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so good." He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles. I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them. "Yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived." November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said: "I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It has made me cry. I want you to read it." (It was Booth Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) "Tarkington has the true touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me." Another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history. CCLXXVII MARK TWAIN'S READING Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain's reading in general. On the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. They were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. All, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or concluding comments. They were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading. There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--'The Memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. On the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote-- This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of French & English high life of that epoch. All through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin. He found little to admire in the human nature of Saint-Simon's period --little to approve in Saint-Simon himself beyond his unrestrained frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he wrote: "Oh, incomparable Saint-Simon!" Saint-Simon is always frank, and Mark Twain was equally so. Where the former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of Louis XIV., the latter has commented: We have to grant that God made this royal hog; we may also be permitted to believe that it was a crime to do so. And on another page: In her memories of this period the Duchesse de St. Clair makes this striking remark: "Sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only by his manner of using his fork." His comments on the orthodox religion of Saint-Simon's period are not marked by gentleness. Of the author's reference to the Edict of Nantes, which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and "authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands," Clemens writes: So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code. In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote: It is all so true, all so human. God made these animals. He must have noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him. There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest. Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand. Here and there are marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and circumstance. There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most. Francis Parkman's Canadian Histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North America. As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old Regime: Very interesting. It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from France and colonized Canada. He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. "What manner of men are these?" he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to "dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois." Clemens was likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism. In one place he wrote: That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp. Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read them --read and digested every word and line. There were two volumes of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White's 'Science and Theology'--a chief interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'Modern English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects', by Henry H. Breen. On the title-page of this book Clemens had written: HARTFORD, 1876. Use with care, for it is a scarce book. England had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh falsely. He once wrote a paper for the Saturday Morning Club, using for his text examples of slipshod English which Breen had noted. Clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. Greville's 'Journal of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV.' he had read much and annotated freely. Greville, while he admired Byron's talents, abhorred the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious person and a debauchee. He adds: Then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the time conscious they are not in reality. Clemens wrote on the margin: But, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason. Do you admire the race (& consequently yourself)? A little further along--where Greville laments that Byron can take no profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully, Clemens commented: If Byron--if any man--draws 50 characters, they are all himself--50 shades, 50 moods, of his own character. And when the man draws them well why do they stir my admiration? Because they are me--I recognize myself. A volume of Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Two Years Before the Mast he loved, and never tired of. The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the Letters of Lowell. A volume of the Letters of Madame de Sevigne had some annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or for that matter to Sevigne herself, whom he once designates as a "nauseating" person, many of whose letters had been uselessly translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. But he would read any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had the throb of life in them, however slight. Of such sort were the books that Mark Twain had loved best, and such were a few of his words concerning them. Some of them belong to his earlier reading, and among these is Darwin's 'Descent of Man', a book whose influence was always present, though I believe he did not read it any more in later years. In the days I knew him he read steadily not much besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle. These and his simple astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling were seldom far from his hand. CCLXXXVIII A BERMUDA BIRTHDAY It was the middle of November, 1909, when Clemens decided to take another Bermuda vacation, and it was the 19th that we sailed. I went to New York a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the 18th received the news that Richard Watson Gilder had suddenly died. Next morning there was other news. Clemens's old friend, William M. Laffan, of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. I met Clemens at the train. He had already heard about Gilder; but he had not yet learned of Laffan's death. He said: "That's just it. Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come along and I never get anything." Then, suddenly remembering, he added: "How curious it is! I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy affair." I asked when he had begun thinking of Laffan. He said: "Within the hour." It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in my mind had carried it instantly to him. Perhaps there was something telepathic in it. He was not at all ill going down to Bermuda, which was a fortunate thing, for the water was rough and I was quite disqualified. We did not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important news--the reported discovery of a new planet. But there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in the Hamilton Hotel. It was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still a satellite. The report had said that it was probably four hundred billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become a near neighbor. He was a good deal excited at first, having somehow the impression that this new planet traveled out beyond the nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of the universe. If I dwell unwarrantably on this phase of Mark Twain's character, it is because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed akin to him in its proportions. He had been born under a flaming star, a wanderer of the skies. He was himself, to me, always a comet rushing through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and systems. It is not likely to rain long in Bermuda, and when the sun comes back it brings summer, whatever the season. Within a day after our arrival we were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and by that marvelously variegated water. We went often to the south shore, especially to Devonshire Bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem more beautiful than elsewhere. Usually, when we reached the bay, we got out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade, the imperial garment of the Lord. At first we went alone with only the colored driver, Clifford Trott, whose name Clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting resemblances with ludicrous results. A little later Helen Allen, an early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a place that was not attractive. Clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel. He kept a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to Bay House--the lovely and quiet home of Helen's parents--and prolonged it from day to day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. Clifford Trott had orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to Bay House for Mark Twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a dainty paradise, that never, I believe, becomes quite a reality even to those who know it best. Clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not likely to be severe or protracted; and I have no doubt the peace of his surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the balmy temperature, all contributed to his improved condition. He talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means restricted his subjects to juvenile matters. He discussed history and his favorite sciences and philosophies, and I am sure that his drift was rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was Mark Twain's gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth. I remember that once he talked, during an afternoon's drive, on the French Revolution and the ridiculous episode of Anacharsis Cloots, "orator and advocate of the human race," collecting the vast populace of France to swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block. The very name of Cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more delightful and graphic than the whole episode as he related it. Helen asked if he thought such a thing as that could ever happen in America. "No," he said, "the American sense of humor would have laughed it out of court in a week; and the Frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in the world." On the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness, his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor. I presented him with a pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the Bermuda lily, and I thought he seemed pleased with them. It was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he was usually kept happy by winning. There were no visitors, and after dinner Helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from Tom Sawyer, so he read the whitewashing scene, Peter and the Pain-killer, and such chapters until tea-time. Then there was a birthday cake, and afterward cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening. Once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor memory: "I'll forget the Lord's middle name some time," he declared, "right in the midst of a storm, when I need all the help I can get." Later he said: "Nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that I would be in Bermuda now." And I thought he meant a good deal more than the words conveyed. It was during this Bermuda visit that Mark Twain added the finishing paragraph to his article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," which, at Howells's suggestion, he had been preparing for Harper's Bazar. It was a characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of human life, may be repeated here. Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the literary guild. Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament--which he did not create and had no authority over. For the temperament is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger's temperament is, Thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is, Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can't be obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law of temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other authorities. I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments. Not in them, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted. What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could Satan have beguiled them to eat the apple. There would have been results! Indeed yes. The apple would be intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated. CCLXXXIX THE DEATH OF JEAN He decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now that he did so! We sailed for America on the 18th of December, arriving the 21st. Jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and I had the feeling that she should not have come. She went directly, I think, to Stormfield, he following a day or two later. On the 23d I was lunching with Jean alone. She was full of interest in her Christmas preparations. She had a handsome tree set up in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones constantly arriving. With her farm management, her housekeeping, her secretary work, and her Christmas preparations, it seemed to me that she had her hands overfull. Such a mental pressure could not be good for her. I suggested that for a time at least I might assume a part of her burden. I was to remain at my own home that night, and I think it was as I left Stormfield that I passed jean on the stair. She said, cheerfully, that she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would be fresh for the evening. I did not go back, and I never saw her alive again. I was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the men from Stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately. When I went out he said: "Miss Jean is dead. They have just found her in her bath-room. Mr. Clemens sent me to bring you." It was as incomprehensible as such things always are. I could not realize at all that Jean, so full of plans and industries and action less than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we call death. Harry Iles drove me rapidly up the hill. As I entered Clemens's room he looked at me helplessly and said: "Well, I suppose you have heard of this final disaster." He was not violent or broken down with grief. He had come to that place where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept it, and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for Jean at least, the fortune was not ill. Her malady had never been cured, and it had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him. It was believed, at first; that Jean had drowned, and Dr. Smith tried methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath. The Gabrilowitsches were by this time in Europe, and Clemens cabled them not to come. Later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield. He said that he should probably go back to Bermuda before long; but that he wished to keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any time that he might need it. We came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but for his comfort and peace of mind. Jervis Langdon was summoned from Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others. In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in Jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. Nobody had been forgotten. For her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. Once when I went into his room he said: "I have been looking in at Jean and envying her. I have never greatly envied any one but the dead. I always envy the dead." He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time. While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a critical condition. He had written this playful answer: MANAGER ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York. I hear the newspapers say I am dying. The charge is not true. I would not do such a thing at my time of life. I am behaving as good as I can. Merry Christmas to everybody! MARK TWAIN. Jean telephoned it for him to the press. It had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered. She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again. The reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears. Later, when I went in again, he was writing: "I am setting it down," he said--"everything. It is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking." He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next. It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey. Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for Clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not seen. No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life. They were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before that time Clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had been her favorite music. I said that she seemed always to care most for the Schubert Impromptu.--[Op. 142, No. 2.]--Then he said: "Play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the Intermezzo for Susy and the Largo for Mrs. Clemens. When I hear the music I shall know that they are starting. Tell them to set lanterns at the door, so I can look down and see them go." So I sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away. A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was closing in. There was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was muffled. The lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly falling flakes. I remained at the organ; but the little group at the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching Jean going away from him for the last time. I played steadily on as he had instructed, the Impromptu, the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria," and Handel's Largo. When I had finished I went up and found him. "Poor little Jean," he said; "but for her it is so good to go." In his own story of it he wrote: From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old Katie--Were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon. He did not come down to dinner, and when I went up afterward I found him curiously agitated. He said: "For one who does not believe in spirits I have had a most peculiar experience. I went into the bath-room just now and closed the door. You know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts. All at once I felt a cold current of air about me. I thought the door must be open; but it was closed. I said, 'Jean, is this you trying to let me know you have found the others?' Then the cold air was gone." I saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but I don't remember that he ever mentioned it afterward. Next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop was a raging, driving mass of white. He wrote most of the day, but stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of condolence which came flooding in. Sometimes he walked over to the window to look out on the furious tempest. Once, during the afternoon, he said: "Jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at Elmira they are burying her." Later he read aloud some lines by Alfred Austin, which Mrs. Crane had sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for Susy: When last came sorrow, around barn and byre Wind-careen snow, the year's white sepulchre, lay. "Come in," I said, "and warm you by the fire"; And there she sits and never goes away. It was that evening that he came into the room where Mrs. Paine and I sat by the fire, bringing his manuscript. "I have finished my story of Jean's death," he said. "It is the end of my autobiography. I shall never write any more. I can't judge it myself at all. One of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you think of it. If it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published." It was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing in the language. He had ended his literary labors with that perfect thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of his soul. It was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close. A paragraph which he omitted may be printed now: December 27. Did I know jean's value? No, I only thought I did. I knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all. It is always so, with us, it has always been so. We are like the poor ignorant private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the great Sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for a franc. Later he knew what he had done. Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament. And I know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. A man's temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it. My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time. That was a feature of Jean's temperament, too. She inherited it from me. I think she got the rest of it from her mother. Jean Clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a genuine passion for all nature. In a little paper found in her desk she had written: I know a few people who love the country as I do, but not many. Most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer months, but very few care much for it the year round. A few people are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some warm April day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others. To me it is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since I have never lost interest in it. It is simple and frank, like Thoreau. Perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift--the gift of written thought. Clemens remained at Stormfield ten days after Jean was gone. The weather was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy. He kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps of letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he prepared a simple card of acknowledgment. He was for the most part in gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then, and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of illness on Jean and shadowed her life. They were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy sort. Many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: "God does not willingly punish us." When he had read a number of these he said: "Well, why does He do it then? We don't invite it. Why does He give Himself the trouble?" I suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the writer of it. "So it does," he said, "and I am glad of it--glad of anything that gives comfort to anybody." He spoke of the larger God--the God of the great unvarying laws, and by and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came more and more to him each day with the thought that Jean and Susy and their mother could not be troubled any more. To Mrs. Gabrilowitsch he wrote: REDDING, CONN, December 29, 1909. O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe! I am not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think. You see, I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& I could die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her! For she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable. You can't imagine what a darling she was that last two or three days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank Heaven! --& how intellectually brilliant. I had never been acquainted with Jean before. I recognized that. But I mustn't try to write about her--I can't. I have already poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two. I will send you that--& you must let no one but Ossip read it. Good-by. I love you so! And Ossip. FATHER. CCXC THE RETURN TO BERMUDA I don't think he attempted any further writing for print. His mind was busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write, rather even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few quiet games--the last we should ever play together. Evenings he asked for music, preferring the Scotch airs, such as "Bonnie Doon" and "The Campbells are Coming." I remember that once, after playing the latter for him, he told, with great feeling, how the Highlanders, led by Gen. Colin Campbell, had charged at Lucknow, inspired by that stirring air. When he had retired I usually sat with him, and he drifted into literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the universe and man. One evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and stopped there. He mentioned "Ben Bolt." "I met that man once," he said. "In my childhood I sang 'Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,' and in my old age, fifteen years ago, I met the man who wrote it. His name was Brown.--[Thomas Dunn English. Mr. Clemens apparently remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by Edgar Allan Poe, "Thomas Dunn Brown."]--He was aged, forgotten, a mere memory. I remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of 'Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt.' He was just an accident. He had a vision and echoed it. A good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt. 'Twenty Years Ago' is just like it 'I have wandered through the village, Tom, and sat beneath the tree'--and Holmes's 'Last Leaf' is another: the memory of the hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love. It is all so beautiful--the past is always beautiful." He quoted, with great feeling and effect: The massy marbles rest On the lips that we have pressed In their bloom, And the names we love to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb. He continued in this strain for an hour or more. He spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes. "Why," he said, "humor is mankind's greatest blessing." "Your own case is an example," I answered. "Without it, whatever your reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters." "Yes," he said, gently, "they have liked to be amused." I tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to Bermuda, with Claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in two days more. He was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny island, and for the quiet peace of the Allen home. His niece, Mrs. Loomis, came up to spend the last evening in Stormfield, a happy evening full of quiet talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that had been his wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station. This was on January 4, 1910. He was to sail next day, and that night, at Mr. Loomis's, Howells came in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they had so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away. I remember that at dinner Clemens spoke of his old Hartford butler, George, and how he had once brought George to New York and introduced him at the various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and sometimes rather embarrassing results. The talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which Clemens defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain recognition of his rights. Howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says "was made memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong." They discussed dreams, and then in a little while Howells rose to go. I went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of Mark Twain's supremacy. He said: "I turn to his books for cheer when I am down-hearted. There was never anybody like him; there never will be." Clemens sailed next morning. They did not meet again. CCXCI LETTERS FROM BERMUDA Stormfield was solemn and empty without Mark Twain; but he wrote by every steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by the hand of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the Allen family usually Helen. His letters were full of brightness and pleasantry --always concerned more or less with business matters, though he was no longer disturbed by them, for Bermuda was too peaceful and too far away, and, besides, he had faith in the Mark Twain Company's ability to look after his affairs. I cannot do better, I believe, than to offer some portions of these letters here. He reached Bermuda on the 7th of January, 1910, and on the 12th he wrote: Again I am living the ideal life. There is nothing to mar it but the bloody-minded bandit Arthur,--[A small playmate of Helen's of whom Clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous. Once he wrote a memorandum to Helen: "Let Arthur read this book. There is a page in it that is poisoned."]--who still fetches and carries Helen. Presently he will be found drowned. Claude comes to Bay House twice a day to see if I need any service. He is invaluable. There was a military lecture last night at the Officers' Mess Prospect; as the lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he wanted to lecture to me particularly, I naturally took Helen and her mother into the private carriage and went. As soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the Governor came to me& was very cordial. I "met up" with that charming Colonel Chapman [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the regiment & had a good time. A few days later he wrote: Thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you & Loomis & Lark and other beloved friends are. I had a letter from Clara this morning. She is solicitous & wants me well & watchfully taken care of. My, my, she ought to see Helen & her parents & Claude administer that trust. Also she says, "I hope to hear from you or Mr. Paine very soon." I am writing her & I know you will respond to your part of her prayer. She is pretty desolate now after Jean's emancipation--the only kindness that God ever did that poor, unoffending child in all her hard life. Send Clara a copy of Howells's gorgeous letter. The "gorgeous letter" mentioned was an appreciation of his recent Bazar article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," and here follows: January 18, 1910. DEAR CLEMENS,--While your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet I want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours. I shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone "He was born in the same century and general section of Middle Western country with Dr. S. L. Clemens, Oxon., and had his degree three years before him through a mistake of the University." I hope you are worse. You will never be riper for a purely intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a worn-out material body on top of your soul. Yours ever, W. D. HOWELLS. On the margin of this letter Clemens had written: I reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day is good to keep, ain't it, Paine? January 24th he wrote again of his contentment: Life continues here the same as usual. There isn't a fault in it --good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day without a break. I know familiarly several very satisfactory people & meet them frequently: Mr. Hamilton, the Sloanes, Mr. & Mrs. Fells, Miss Waterman, & so on. I shouldn't know how to go about bettering my situation. On February 5th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health might require him to stay in Bermuda pretty continuously, but that he wished Stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time. And he added: Yesterday Mr. Allen took us on an excursion in Mr. Hamilton's big motor-boat. Present: Mrs. Allen, Mr. & Mrs. & Miss Sloane, Helen, Mildred Howells, Claude, & me. Several hours' swift skimming over ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place. The Orotava is arriving with 260 passengers--I shall get letters by her, no doubt. P. S.--Please send me the Standard Unabridged that is on the table in my bedroom. I have no dictionary here. There is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they would seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to disturb him, and much that contributed to his peace. Among the callers at the Bay House to see him was Woodrow Wilson, and the two put in some pleasant hours at miniature golf, "putting" on the Allen lawn. Of course a catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not always be guarded against. In a letter toward the end of February he wrote: It is 2.30 in the morning & I am writing because I can't sleep. I can't sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow afternoon to play for me. My God! I wouldn't allow Paderewski or Gabrilowitsch to do that. I would rather have a leg amputated. I knew he was coming, but I never dreamed it was to play for me. When I heard the horrible news 4 hours ago, be d---d if I didn't come near screaming. I meant to slip out and be absent, but now I can't. Don't pray for me. The thing is just as d---d bad as it can be already. Clemens's love for music did not include the piano, except for very gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a professional player. He did not report the sequel of the matter; but it is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures. Sometimes his letters were pure nonsense. Once he sent a sheet, on one side of which was written: BAY HOUSE, March s, 1910. Received of S. L. C. Two Dollars and Forty Cents in return for my promise to believe everything he says hereafter. HELEN S. ALLEN. and on the reverse: FOR SALE The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it recipricate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow. Clearly, however serious Mark Twain regarded his physical condition, he did not allow it to make him gloomy. He wrote that matters were going everywhere to his satisfaction; that Clara was happy; that his household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal surroundings were of the pleasantest sort. Sometimes he wrote of what he was reading, and once spoke particularly of Prof. William Lyon Phelps's Literary Essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he had finished the book.--[To Phelps himself he wrote: "I thank you ever so much for the book, which I find charming--so charming, indeed, that I read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night's sleep. I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me; & even if I don't I am proud & well contented, since you think I deserve it."] So his days seemed full of comfort. But in March I noticed that he generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small photographs I thought he looked thinner and older. Still he kept up his merriment. In one letter he said: While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you with my own hand, so that I may use with utter freedom & without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my secretary's hearing. You are forgiven, but don't let it occur again. He had still made no mention of his illness; but on the 25th of March he wrote something of his plans for coming home. He had engaged passage on the Bermudian for April 23d, he said; and he added: But don't tell anybody. I don't want it known. I may have to go sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty considerable. I don't want to die here, for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition. I should have to lie in the undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down there & unpleasant. The Colliers will meet me on the pier, & I may stay with them a week or two before going home. It all depends on the breast pain. I don't want to die there. I am growing more and more particular about the place. But in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting that we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library entertainments could be given at Stormfield. I confess that this letter, in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and I was tempted to sail for Bermuda to bring him home. Three days later he wrote again: I have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the heart, just as I originally suspected. The news from New York is to the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last; therefore, if I can get my breast trouble in traveling condition I may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed. The same mail that brought this brought a letter from Mr. Allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. Mr. Clemens had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his condition critical. These letters arrived April 1st. I went to New York at once and sailed next morning. Before sailing I consulted with Dr. Quintard, who provided me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic needle. He also joined me in a cablegram to the Gabrilowitsches, then in Italy, advising them to sail without delay. CCXCII THE VOYAGE HOME I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when on the second morning I arrived at Hamilton, I stepped quickly ashore from the tender and hurried to Bay House. The doors were all open, as they usually are in that summer island, and no one was visible. I was familiar with the place, and, without knocking, I went through to the room occupied by Mark Twain. As I entered I saw that he was alone, sitting in a large chair, clad in the familiar dressing-gown. Bay House stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at the window, had an unusual quality. He was not yet shaven, and he seemed unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner. I was too startled, for the moment, to say anything. When he turned and saw me he seemed a little dazed. "Why," he said, holding out his hand, "you didn't tell us you were coming." "No," I said, "it is rather sudden. I didn't quite like the sound of your last letters." "But those were not serious," he protested. "You shouldn't have come on my account." I said then that I had come on my own account; that I had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. "That's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. "Now I'm glad to see you." His breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite. When he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed to me, after all, that I must have been mistaken in thinking him so changed. Certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in danger. He told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "subcutaneous applications," and he had his humor out of it, as of course he must have, even though Death should stand there in person. From Mr. and Mrs. Allen and from the physician I learned how slender had been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had already engaged passage on the Oceana for the 12th, and the one purpose now was to get him physically in condition for the trip. How devoted those kind friends had been to him! They had devised every imaginable thing for his comfort. Mr. Allen had rigged an electric bell which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly at any hour of the night. Clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around. When the pains were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as ever. On the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. He had been rereading Macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the hypocrisy and intrigue of the English court under James II. He spoke, too, of the Redding Library. I had sold for him that portion of the land where Jean's farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the money for some sort of a memorial to Jean. I had written, suggesting that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the Adams lot faced the corner where Jean had passed every day when she rode to the station for the mail. He had been thinking this over, he said, and wished the idea carried out. He asked me to write at once to his lawyer, Mr. Lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a memorial library fund. The pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several succeeding days. He was gay and quite himself, and he often went out on the lawn; but we did not drive out again. For the most part, he sat propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way; and as I looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life that I could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all. I found that he had been really very much alive during those three months--too much for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been careful of his hours or his diet, and had suffered in consequence. He had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the Allens and receiving their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my benefit. As it would seem to have been the last bit of continued writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a few paragraphs may be admitted. The "advice" is concerning deportment on reaching the Gate which St. Peter is supposed to guard-- Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not your place to begin. Do not begin any remark with "Say." When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. If you must talk let the weather alone. St. Peter cares not a damn for the weather. And don't ask him what time the 4.30 train goes; there aren't any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you. You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. He has heard that before. Don't try to kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake. Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit you would stay out and the dog would go in. You will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don't you try it. You would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that. Explain to Helen why I don't come. If you can. There were several pages of this counsel. One paragraph was written in shorthand. I meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other things to think of, and I did not remember. I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading while he himself read or dozed. His nights were wakeful--he found it easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there. He became interested in Hardy's Jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous reading. I noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and I could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day. It was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks returned. The night of the 8th was a hard one. The doctors were summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the pain had been eased. When I returned in the early morning he was sitting in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. He took my hand and said: "Well, I had a picturesque night. Every pain I had was on exhibition." He looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted islands. "'Sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'" he quoted. "That's Hoffman. Anything left of Hoffman?" "No," I said. "I must watch for the Bermudian and see if she salutes," he said, presently. "The captain knows I am here sick, and he blows two short whistles just as they come up behind that little island. Those are for me." He said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and I placed a card-table in front of him. His breakfast came in, and a little later he became quite gay. He drifted to Macaulay again, and spoke of King James's plot to assassinate William II., and how the clergy had brought themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in battle and by assassination. He had taken his seat by the window to watch for the Bermudian. She came down the bay presently, her bright red stacks towering vividly above the green island. It was a brilliant morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. He watched her anxiously and without speaking. Suddenly there were two white puffs of steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her. "Those are for me," he said, his face full of contentment. "Captain Fraser does not forget me." There followed another bad night. My room was only a little distance away, and Claude came for me. I do not think any of us thought he would survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. In the morning he said: "That breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day. I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. I want a jugful of that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning." We began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the 12th; but by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the 12th, so much so that I began to believe, if once he could be in Stormfield, where the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. The humid atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing. That evening he was unusually merry. Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and myself went in to wish him good night. He was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. He was never one to be very obedient. A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. We went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. He hadn't felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. Perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing. Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing in the morning and take him to the ship. He was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid: The sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away. As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. It was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count. At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess of Cardigan for his reading. He asked also for the second volume of Carlyle's French Revolution, which he had with him. But we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible. There were two large port-holes, which I opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside. It was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were there. I had a steamer-chair brought, and with Claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say: "I am going--I shall be gone in a moment." Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than this. I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness. He asked for the "hypnotic 'injunction" (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not deny it. It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress. The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright. During the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. I held the match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. Then the peace of it would bring drowsiness, and while I supported him there would come a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. Only a few moments, for the devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh tortures. Over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth. In spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense of humor, and tender consideration for another. Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: "The ship is passing the hat." Again he said: "I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this dying business. Can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?" He thought if I could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it would not be necessary to support him, and then I could sit on the couch and read while he tried to doze. He wanted me to read Jude, he said, so we could talk about it. I got all the pillows I could and built them up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him contentment. He would doze off a little and then come up with a start, his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if I was still there. Over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. When I could deny him no longer I administered the opiate, but it never completely possessed him or gave him entire relief. As I looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, I could not but remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the world had paid to him. Something of this may have entered his mind, too, for once, when I offered him some of the milder remedies which we had brought, he said: "After forty years of public effort I have become just a target for medicines." The program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch, from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely uttering any complaint; but once he said: "I never guessed that I was not going to outlive John Bigelow." And again: "This is such a mysterious disease. If we only had a bill of particulars we'd have something to swear at." Time and again he picked up Carlyle or the Cardigan Memoirs, and read, or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the book would fall. Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way. Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: "Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it." Then realizing, he said: "I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires." And, somewhat later: "Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long." Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked: "How long have we been on this voyage?" I answered that this was the end of the first day. "How many more are there?" he asked. "Only one, and two nights." "We'll never make it," he said. "It's an eternity." "But we must on Clara's account," I told him, and I estimated that Clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now. "It is a losing race," he said; "no ship can outsail death." It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave. Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly: "When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life. I want to be made comfortable to go." There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread. Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep. Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one. An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at New Hartford. Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green. As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said: "Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?" The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him. "It looks quite imposing," he said. I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910. CCXCIII THE RETURN TO THE INVISIBLE There would be two days more before Ossip and Clara Gabrilowitsch could arrive. Clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this interval, though he clearly was not improving. The physicians denied him the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. But he craved it, and once, when I went in, he said, rather mournfully: "They won't give me the subcutaneous any more." It was Sunday morning when Clara came. He was cheerful and able to talk quite freely. He did not dwell upon his condition, I think, but spoke rather of his plans for the summer. At all events, he did not then suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became evident to all that his stay was very brief. His breathing was becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. His articulation also became affected. I think the last continuous talking he did was to Dr. Halsey on the evening of April 17th--the day of Clara's arrival. A mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to talk himself to sleep. He recalled one of his old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact. He became drowsier as he talked. He said at last: "This is a peculiar kind of disease. It does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. What kind of a disease is that? Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them. You can read and smoke and have only to lie still." And a little later he added: "It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. I put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it." He coughed violently, and afterward commented: "If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you. That is my opinion--of seventy-four years' growth." The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them. A few messages were reported to him. At intervals he read a little. Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page. Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--I said: "It is not reality. He is not going to die." On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to tell Clara to come and sing to him. It was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted. When she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again. But he lingered through the next day and the next. His mind was wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. We did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by him, appeared that night in the sky.--[The perihelion of Halley's Comet for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.] On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle. Early in the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now. I assured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my hand. It was his last word to me. Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words. And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others. Most of the time he dozed. Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort. "Good-by," he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: "If we meet"--but the words were very faint. He looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more. Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle. The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. He had entered into the estate envied so long. In his own words--the words of one of his latest memoranda: "He had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is not artificial--the only safe one. The others are traps that can beguile to humiliation. "Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved." CCXCIV THE LAST RITES It is not often that a whole world mourns. Nations have often mourned a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man. In one of his aphorisms he wrote: "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." And it was thus that Mark Twain himself had lived. No man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even attempt to explain just why. Let us only say that it was because he was so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or circumstance, responded to his touch. From every remote corner of the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in Christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor. No king ever died that received so rich a homage as his. To quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast offering. We took him to New York to the Brick Church, and Dr. Henry van Dyke spoke only a few simple words, and Joseph Twichell came from Hartford and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for Harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended. Mark Twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. The flowers, of which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket itself lay a single laurel wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill. He was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but no one offered even to pick a flower. Howells came, and in his book he says: I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. Then in the quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De Soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be associated with his name. CCXCV MARK TWAIN'S RELIGION There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state --orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind; never of his heart. Once a woman said to him: "Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are." And she might have added, with equal force and truth: "You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are." Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself. Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives. In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and various talks, 1906-07, etc.] Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky. At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. The document follows: I believe in God the Almighty. I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less inspired by Him. I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works: I perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one. I do not believe in special providences. I believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man's family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in favor of the other. I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it. To chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable--even the atrocious God imagined by the Jews would tire of the spectacle eventually. There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it. I believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's experience. It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from them. If I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it, for He is beyond the reach of injury from me--I could as easily injure a planet by throwing mud at it. It seems to me that my misconduct could only injure me and other men. I cannot benefit God by obeying these moral laws--I could as easily benefit the planet by withholding my mud. (Let these sentences be read in the light of the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man --none whatever from God.) Consequently I do not see why I should be either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I do here. If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony. I never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during the last year of his life. He was never intentionally dogmatic. In a memorandum on a fly-leaf of Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology he wrote: RELIGION The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. MARK TWAIN, 19th Cent. A.D. And in another note: I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him. Mark Twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. He despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. It was a religion identified with his daily life and his work. He lived as he wrote, and he wrote as he believed. His favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded. "He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time," says Howells, "with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity." Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. In one of his dictations he said: I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small or a large way. When it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. With his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind. With him, as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily flitted by. With him, as with another, the spirit of desire led him often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but lingeringly--and often invited to return. With him, as with another, a crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others, daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul. With him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word, Humanity. Certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself constitutes an epitome of Mark Twain's creed. His paraphrase, "When in doubt tell the truth," is one of these, and he embodied his whole attitude toward Infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote: Why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the welfare of his child to the extent of his ability. It is all that we require of God. CCXCVI POSTSCRIPT Every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce, tragedy--all the elements are there. To examine in detail any life, however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate. The biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past. In so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success. At best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human soul can ever really know. Mark Twain's appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of dramatic moments. He was always exactly in the setting. Whatever he did, or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest effect. At the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored than ever before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he died. How little one may tell of such a life as his! He traveled always such a broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following after. Such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change! I have written so much, and yet I have put so much aside--and often the best things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best and the variety infinite. One may only strive to be faithful--and I would have made it better if I could. APPENDIX APPENDIX A LETTER FROM ORION CLEMENS TO MISS WOOD CONCERNING HENRY CLEMENS (See Chapter xxvi) KEOKUK, Iowa, October 3, 1858. MISS WOOD,--My mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request that myself and wife should write to you, I hasten to do so. In my memory I can go away back to Henry's infancy; I see his large, blue eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his credulity in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his marbles, expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection of the time when, standing we three alone by our father's grave, I told them always to remember that brothers should be kind to each other; afterward I see Henry returning from school with his books for the last time. He must go into my printing-office. He learned rapidly. A word of encouragement or a word of discouragement told upon his organization electrically. I could see the effects in his day's work. Sometimes I would say, "Henry!" He would stand full front with his eyes upon mine--all attention. If I commanded him to do something, without a word he was off instantly, probably in a run. If a cat was to be drowned or shot Sam (though unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work. If a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of Henry was expected to attend to it, and he would faithfully do so. So they grew up, and many was the grave lecture commenced by ma, to the effect that Sam was misleading and spoiling Henry. But the lectures were never concluded, for Sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean out of my mother's mind, and change it to a laugh. Those were happier days. My mother was as lively as any girl of sixteen. She is not so now. And sister Pamela I have described in describing Henry; for she was his counterpart. The blow falls crushingly on her. But the boys grew up--Sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow, Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection; Sam and I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading. Henry is gone! His death was horrible! How I could have sat by him, hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and ministered to every want in my power that I could discover. This was denied to me, but Sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling, was there. Both his capacity of enjoyment and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would have affected me to see so sad a scene, I can somewhat appreciate Sam's sufferings. In this time of great trouble, when my two brothers, whose heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the utmost stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel, to aid and console, and I bless and thank you for it with my whole heart. I thank all who helped them then; I thank them for the flowers they sent to Henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and when he died, and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed upon the poor boys. We thank the physicians, and we shall always gratefully remember the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense to himself enabled us to deposit Henry's remains by our father. With many kind wishes for your future welfare, I remain your earnest friend, Respectfully, ORION CLEMENS. APPENDIX B MARK TWAIN'S BURLESQUE OF CAPTAIN ISAIAH SELLERS (See Chapter xxvii) The item which served as a text for the "Sergeant Fathom" communication was as follows: VICKSBURG, May 4, 1859. My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 1815. My opinion is that the water will be four feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. I. SELLERS.--[Captain Sellers, as in this case, sometimes signed his own name to his communications.] THE BURLESQUE INTRODUCTORY Our friend Sergeant Fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river, and now on the Railroad Line steamer Trombone, sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. Sergeant Fathom is a "cub" of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. While introducing the Sergeant, "we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend of his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase, 'close,' as well as superhumanly 'safe.'" It is a well-known fact that he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the New Orleans and St. Louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. This astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his boat after early candle-light. It is related of the Sergeant that upon one occasion he actually ran the chute of Glasscock's Island, down-stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was scarcely more than bank full. His method of accomplishing this feat proves what we have just said of his "safeness"--he sounded the chute first, and then built a fire at the head of the island to run by. As to the Sergeant's "closeness," we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right of the "Old Hen,"--[Glasscock's Island and the "Old Hen" were phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the Sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect, his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and, more than all, he hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and sweetness, if you will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an exhaustless fund of funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream, without beginning, or middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of the ancient Mississippi, which, taken together, form a 'tout ensemble' which is sufficient excuse for the tender epithet which is, by common consent, applied to him by all those ancient dames aforesaid, of "che-arming creature!"). As the Sergeant has been longer on the river, and is better acquainted with it than any other "cub" extant, his remarks are entitled to far more consideration, and are always read with the deepest interest by high and low, rich and poor, from "Kiho" to Kamschatka, for let it be known that his fame extends to the uttermost parts of the earth: THE COMMUNICATION R.R. Steamer Trombone, VICKSBURG, May 8, 1859. The river from New Orleans up to Natchez is higher than it has been since the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of 1813) and my opinion is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now entirely under water. However, Mr. Editor, the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley should not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of this prophecy of mine, for I shall proceed to convince them of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the Mississippi is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and eventually that it will cease to rise at all. Therefore, I would hint to the planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game commonly called "draw," that if they can only "stand the rise" this time they may enjoy the comfortable assurance that the old river's banks will never hold a "full" again during their natural lives. In the summer of 1763 I came down the river on the old first Jubilee. She was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff "nowhere," for I steered her with a window-shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and "rounded her to" with a yoke of oxen. Well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above Selmathe only dry land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing "seven up" with the Indians, waiting for the river to fall. Finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. One day we rounded to, and I got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the Indians up there at Selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around No. 8, and while I was gone my partner got aground on the hills at Hickman. After three days' labor we finally succeeded in sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to Memphis. By the time we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where the Gayoso House now stands. We finished loading at Memphis, and loaded part of the stone for the present St. Louis Court House (which was then in process of erection), to be taken up on our return trip. You can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the water was in 1763. In 1775 it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in 1790 it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in 1797, one hundred and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and fifty feet. These were "high-water" years. The "high waters" since then have been so insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. The river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether. In conclusion, sir, I will condescend to hint at the foundation of these arguments: When me and De Soto discovered the Mississippi I could stand at Bolivar Landing (several miles above "Roaring Waters Bar") and pitch a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded across at Donaldsonville. The gradual widening and deepening of the river is the whole secret of the matter. Yours, etc. SERGEANT FATHOM. APPENDIX C I MARK TWAIN'S EMPIRE CITY HOAX (See Chapter xli) THE LATEST SENSATION. A Victim to Jeremy Diddling Trustees--He Cuts his Throat from Ear to Ear, Scalps his Wife, and Dashes Out the Brains of Six Helpless Children! From Abram Curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from Carson, we learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in Ormsby County night before last. It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick's. The family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy, about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins, while visiting Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. It was Mrs. Hopkins's misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was given to what she said. About 10 o'clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long, red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to Hopkins's house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have sought refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. The two girls Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family. He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company, of San Francisco. He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently. Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence. II NEWS-GATHERING WITH MARK TWAIN. Alfred Doten's son gives the following account of a reporting trip made by his father and Mark Twain, when the two were on Comstock papers: My father and Mark Twain were once detailed to go over to Como and write up some new mines that had been discovered over there. My father was on the Gold Hill News. He and Mark had not met before, but became promptly acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names. They went to a little hotel at Carson, agreeing to do their work there together next morning. When morning came they set out, and suddenly on a corner Mark stopped and turned to my father, saying: "By gracious, Alf! Isn't that a brewery?" "It is, Mark. Let's go in." They did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer, and lunching, going back to the hotel that night. The next morning precisely the same thing occurred. When they were on the same corner, Mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and sand: "Good gracious, Alf! Isn't that a brewery?" "It is, Mark. Let's go in." So again they went in, and again stayed all day. This happened again the next morning, and the next. Then my father became uneasy. A letter had come from Gold Hill, asking him where his report of the mines was. They agreed that next morning they would really begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that overlooked the mines, and write it from there. But the next morning, as before, Mark was surprised to discover the brewery, and once more they went in. A few moments later, however, a man who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with them--came in. He was a godsend. My father set down a valuable, informing story, while Mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out of him. Next day Virginia City and Gold Hill were gaining information from my father's article, and entertainment from Mark's story of the mines. APPENDIX D FROM MARK TWAIN'S FIRST LECTURE, DELIVERED OCTOBER 2, 1866. (See Chapter liv) HAWAIIAN IMPORTANCE TO AMERICA. After a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the Sandwich Islands, its profits and possibilities, he said: I have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a genuine importance to America--an importance which is not generally appreciated by our citizens. They pay revenues into the United States Treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year. I do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years ago, according to the Patent Office reports, it was 800,000 hogsheads. The Sandwich Islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead Americans, are capable of providing one-third as much themselves. With the Pacific Railroad built, the great China Mail Line of steamers touching at Honolulu--we could stock the islands with Americans and supply a third of the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest, longest-stapled cotton this side of the Sea Islands, and the very best quality of rice.... The property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the United States? NATIVE PASSION FOR FUNERALS They are very fond of funerals. Big funerals are their main weakness. Fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are things they take a generous delight in. They are fond of their chief and their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will experience in burying them. They will beg, borrow, or steal money enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral on Oahu. Years ago a Kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for murder. They received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it gave an opening for a funeral, you know. All they care for is a funeral. It makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon attend their own funeral as anybody else's. This couple were people of consequence, and had landed estates. They sold every foot of ground they had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in. And the woman appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw-hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. As the noose was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. I never, never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did. VIEW FROM HALEAKALA It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the tremendous abyss ages ago. The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a grasshopper. This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are hidden from sight. And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless ocean. But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things. You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room. You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple and crimson splendors of the setting sun! And so firm does this grand cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below. Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and night and solitude and death! NOTICE OF MARK TWAIN'S LECTURE "THE TROUBLE IS OVER" "The inimitable Mark Twain, delivered himself last night of his first lecture on the Sandwich Islands, or anything else. "Some time before the hour appointed to open his head the Academy of Music (on Pine Street) was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in this city. The Elite of the town were there, and so was the Governor of the State, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. The audience promptly notified Mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging out from the left of the stage. His very manner produced a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. He opened with an apology, by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last moment the party engaged backed out. He explained that he had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play. This placed Mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied, 'That he wasn't going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself.' After the applause subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with the following well-known sentence: 'When, in the course of human events,' etc. He lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power." APPENDIX E FROM "THE JUMPING FROG" BOOK (MARK TWAIN'S FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME) (See Chapters lviii and lix) I ADVERTISEMENT "Mark Twain" is too well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. By his story of the Frog he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope. He is also known to fame as The Moralist of the Main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. It is in his secondary character, as humorist, however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that I aim to present him in the present volume. And here a ready explanation will be found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches; for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found--very often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled. Originally written for newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. Further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. But there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the staple of his writing. J. P. II FROM ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS "MORAL STATISTICIAN"--I don't want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. . . . Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement of your income. Now you all know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous "moral statistics"? Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor-stove. III FROM "A STRANGE DREAM" (Example of Mark Twain's Early Descriptive Writing) . . . In due time I stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast caldron which the natives, ages ago, named 'Hale mau mau'--the abyss wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might never tread above them. We stood there, at dead of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance; started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens with an infernal splendor. "What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to this?" My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. We came at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old King Kamehameha the First--that invincible old pagan Alexander--had found other sepulture than the burning depths of the 'Hale mau mau'. I grew interested at once; I knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; I was aware that there was a legend connected with this matter; and I felt as if there could be no more fitting time to listen to it than the present. The descendant of the Kamehamehas said: The dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the 'Hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in the distance. The guards were set and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. In the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings; the funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. The mourners and watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that the phantom messengers of the dread Goddess of Fire had been in their midst. When at last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead monarch had been spirited away! APPENDIX F THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (See Chapter lx) NEW YORK "HERALD" EDITORIAL ON THE RETURN OF THE "QUAKER CITY" PILGRIMAGE, NOVEMBER 19, 1867. In yesterday's Herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of that most amusing American genius, Mark Twain, giving an account of that most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the 'Quaker City'. It has been amusing all through, this Quaker City affair. It might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at Jaffa, Alexandria, or Yalta, in the Black Sea, as it appears might have happened. In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship. The descendants of the Puritan pilgrims have, naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly sharp eye to business. It was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims, although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as Mark Twain should have found admission into the sacred circle. We are not aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale. There are varieties of genius peculiar to America. Of one of these varieties Mark Twain is a striking specimen. For the development of his peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. Besides, there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know, about this last edition of the Mayflower. APPENDIX G MARK TWAIN AT THE CORRESPONDENTS CLUB, WASHINGTON (See Chapter lxiii) WOMAN A EULOGY OF THE FAIR SEX. The Washington Correspondents Club held its anniversary on Saturday night. Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, responded to the toast, "Woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours." He said: Mr. President,--I do not know why I should have been singled out to receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age. [Applause.] I do not know why I have received this distinction, unless it be that I am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club. But, be this as it may, Mr. President, I am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more gladly, or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice, than I. Because, Sir, I love the sex. [Laughter.] I love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color. [Laughter.] Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. She sews on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes us in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives good advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind sometimes --and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our children. (Ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence appears in Twain's published speeches and may have been added later. D.W.] In all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to woman to say of her that she is a brick. [Great laughter.] Wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain resumed his eulogy.] Look at the noble names of history! Look at Cleopatra! Look at Desdemona! Look at Florence Nightingale! Look at Joan of Arc! Look at Lucretia Borgia! [Disapprobation expressed. "Well," said Mr. Twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, "suppose we let Lucretia slide."] Look at Joyce Heth! Look at Mother Eve! I repeat, sir, look at the illustrious names of history! Look at the Widow Machree! Look at Lucy Stone! Look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton! Look at George Francis Train! [Great laughter.] And, sir, I say with bowed head and deepest veneration, look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not lie--could not lie. [Applause.] But he never had any chance. It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondents' club. [Laughter, groans, hisses, cries of "put him out." Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and resumed.] I repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart she has few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a wet nurse she has no equal among men! [Laughter.] What, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir. (Mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the published 'Speeches'. D.W.] Then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves, if we get a chance. [Laughter.] But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored the very best one of them all--his own mother! [Applause.] APPENDIX H ANNOUNCEMENT FOR LECTURE OF JULY 2, 1868 (See Chapter lxvi) THE PUBLIC TO MARK TWAIN--CORRESPONDENCE SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Hearing that you are about to sail for New York in the P. M. S. S. Company's steamer of the 6th July, to publish a book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. We beg and implore you do not. There is a limit to human endurance. We are your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. Yours truly, 60 names including: Bret Harte, Maj.-Gen. Ord, Maj.-Gen. Halleck, The Orphan Asylum, and various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on Foot and Horseback, and 1500 in the Steerage. (REPLY) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th TO THE 1,500 AND OTHERS,--It seems to me that your course is entirely unprecedented. Heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public, but as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? Am I to go away and let them have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only lecture them twice? What do you take me for? No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know about VENICE. I wish to tell them about the City of the Sea--that most venerable, most brilliant, and proudest Republic the world has ever seen. I wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it lost in two hundred. I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it? Let me talk only just this once, and I will sail positively on the 6th of July, and stay away until I return from China--two years. Yours truly, MARK TWAIN. (FURTHER REMONSTRANCE) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN,--Learning with profound regret that you have concluded to postpone your departure until the 6th July, and learning also, with unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book, or lecture again before you go, at the New Mercantile Library, we hasten to beg of you that you will not do it. Curb this spirit of lawless violence, and emigrate at once. Have the vessel's bill for your passage sent to us. We will pay it. Your friends, Pacific Board of Brokers [and other financial and social institutions] SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Will you start now, without any unnecessary delay? Yours truly, Proprietors of the Alta, Bulletin, Times, Call, Examiner [and other San Francisco publications]. SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Do not delay your departure. You can come back and lecture another time. In the language of the worldly--you can "cut and come again." Your friends, THE CLERGY. SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--You had better go. Yours, THE CHIEF OF POLICE. (REPLY) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. GENTLEMEN,--Restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail. Read: NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868 One Night Only FAREWELL LECTURE of MARK TWAIN Subject: The Oldest of the Republics VENICE PAST AND PRESENT Box-Office open Wednesday and Thursday No extra charge for reserved seats ADMISSION . . . . . . . . . . . ONE DOLLAR Doors open at 7 Orgies to commence at 8 P. M. The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the 4th. The lecture will be delivered certainly on the 2d, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the 4th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars. AT NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868 APPENDIX I MARK TWAIN'S CHAMPIONSHIP OF THOMAS K. BEECHER (See Chapter lxxiv) There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the Opera House. Mr. Beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira Advertiser, over the signature of "S'cat." It created a stir, of course. The article follows: MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY "The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting. This has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action."--N. Y. Evangelist. Poor Beecher! All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it. He could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could promote discord in the church of Christ, and those parties had to make it right with the Deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it! But he went too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity. We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. Mr. Beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent Congregational Church, in this city. The meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. Mr. Beecher regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. So, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by a passage of Scripture which says, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature." Opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of "all the world." He looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of "every creature." These ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the Saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira. And there was. Wherefore, blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ. Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the Opera House meetings. They declined with great unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of. The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera House at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal I do not. Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the Opera House experiment. And he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. He could have relied on any he had in his barrel. The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast. Every Sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera House to be damned. The community talked, talked, talked. Everybody discussed the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera House meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. Everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering. Mr. Beecher asked the Ministerial Union to state their objections to the Opera House matter. They could not--at least they did not. He said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them. They declined to do that. Why should they have declined? They had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion. (That is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around.) But the Opera House meetings went on. That was the mischief of it. And so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B. appeared at the usual Ministers' meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more. He asked why. They gave no reason. They simply declined to have his company longer. Mr. B. said he could not accept of this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever. And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's importunate affection. The Ministerial Union had ruled out Beecher--a point gained. He would get up an excitement about it in public. But that was a miscalculation. He never mentioned it. They waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came. After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. Beecher had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them. The opportunity was slipping away. Alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! And after all, their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. They had ceased to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it. Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently, to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones's child has the measles are chronicled there with avidity. Something must be done. As the Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print. And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this article. They have got their excommunication-bull started at last. It is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope. They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be. It excited a two-line paragraph there. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow! Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira! And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher! For the Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to God for his shortcomings. (Excuse these tears.) (For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that Mr. Beecher did not write this article. And further still, that he did not inspire it. And further still, the Ministerial Union of Elmira did not write it. And finally, the Ministerial Union did not ask me to write it. No, I have taken up this cudgel in defense of the Ministerial Union of Elmira solely from a love of justice. Without solicitation, I have constituted myself the champion of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they are busy, and have not the time to ask me, I will cheerfully do it anyhow. In closing this I must remark that if any question the right of the clergymen of Elmira to turn Mr. Beecher out of the Ministerial Union, to such I answer that Mr. Beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got warmed up.) Cheerfully, S'CAT. APPENDIX J THE INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS OF GEORGE HOLLAND BY THE REV. MR. SABINE. (See Chapter lxxvii) What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity!--even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. If we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay --hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, "You are unworthy; you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; I cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of Heaven." It must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, "We are all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes; it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it; I have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor." It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated the letter of the Gospel, and judged George Holland--not George Holland, either, but his profession through him. Then it is, in a measure, fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. In effect he has said, "We are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress." Pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. And his congregation forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George Holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, "I do not think it teaches moral lessons"? Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of "King Lear"? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of "Othello"? And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? It is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit. All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself. Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.) No, I am not saying that. The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time. The theater teaches large audiences seven times a week--28 or 30 hours altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, "You unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven." How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had Crooks and Kallochs and Sabines in it! No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ; but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should protest. And having protested, it is also fair and just--being driven to it, as it were--to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, "Ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!" Sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out. But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable--that spectacle? Honored and honorable old George Holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! APPENDIX K A SUBSTITUTE FOR RULOFF HAVE WE A SIDNEY CARTON AMONG US? (See Chapter lxxxii) To EDITOR of 'Tribune'. SIR,--I believe in capital punishment. I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. The fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. The fact that in England the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen, and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in France only one to thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of retaining the death-penalty. It is better to hang one murderer in sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all. Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged, but I am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. In this, mine and the public's is a common regret. For it is plain that in the person of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr. Richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day. His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with. But his memory is the least of his great endowments. By the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature, and while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted translations; and in the latter case, if exceptions be taken to his judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaustless knowledge, and builds a very Chinese wall of evidence around his position. Every learned man who enters Ruloff's presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments. One scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject, and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Ruloff's intellectual equal. What miracles this murderer might have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! But what if the law could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. If a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder Ruloff did, will that suffice? If so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth I aver that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who, in the interests of learning and science, will take Ruloff's crime upon himself, and submit to be hanged in Ruloff's place. I can, and will do this thing; and I propose this matter, and make this offer in good faith. You know me, and know my address. SAMUEL LANGHORNE. April 29, 1871. APPENDIX L ABOUT LONDON ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY THE SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 28, 1872. (See Chapter lxxxvii) Reported by Moncure D. Conway in the Cincinnati Commercial It affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. I hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and fluttering] you will excuse these clothes. I am going to the theater; that will explain these clothes. I have other clothes than these. Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "Twain and one flesh" and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush that man into the earth--no. I feel like saying, "Let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks." We will deal in palpable puns. We will call parties named King "your Majesty" and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. Such is human nature. We cannot alter this. It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose. Let us not repine. But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it--a week. I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. Its wonders seem to me to be limitless. I go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvelous. Hour after hour I stand--I stand spellbound, as it were-and gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square. [Leicester Square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.] I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most. I go to that matchless Hyde Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble Arch--and am induced to "change my mind." [Cabs are not permitted in Hyde Park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] It is a great benefaction--is Hyde Park. There, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and of heaven. And if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle. I drive round and round Hyde Park and the more I see of the edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive. And I have been to the Zoological Gardens. What a wonderful place that is! I have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild-animals in any garden before--except Mabille. I never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there--and I don't believe it yet. I have been to the British Museum. I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there. It seems to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her greatness. I say to her, our greatness--as a nation. True, she has built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world's stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust--I refer to the Wellington and Nelson monuments, and--the Albert memorial. [Sarcasm. The Albert memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.] The Library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding. I have read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it. I revere that library. It is the author's friend. I don't care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy. [A copy of every book printed in Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained of by publishers.] And then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. And what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for Sunday! You will pardon my referring to these things. Everything in this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. People here seem always to express distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak. I collar a citizen, and I think I am going to get some valuable information out of him. I ask him how far it is to Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. Now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn. I find myself down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, "How far is it to Charing Cross?" "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he goes. I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. But I am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies. 'Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join me, I give you his Memory. APPENDIX M LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING A MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS. (See Chapter xcvii) BOSTON, November 16, 1935. DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick. The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed, holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing" I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation. It is sixty years since I was here before. I walked hither then with my precious old friend. It seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat. My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I was nearly an hour on my journey. But by the goodness of God thirteen of the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to lose the time. I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever. Our game was neatly played, and successfully. None expected us, of course. You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said, "Announce his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Right Honorable the Earl of Hartford." Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours. In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, "Come to my arms! Away with titles--I'll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell!" Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: "God bless you, old Howells, what is left of you!" We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot "communings" for us --of the olden time. We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the Lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter, forgotten name of New York. In truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O'Mulligan the First established that faith in the empire. And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor; but he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston; but there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace of God he got the opportunity. The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny. His granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the Howellses may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. Keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. Would you believe it?--the Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. They call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says, "Come in." But she has become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now, except when uncommonly vexed. God knows, my dear, it would be a happy thing if you and old Lady Harmony would imitate this spirit. But indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. When I throw chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it. But you --you are but a creature of passion. The monument to the author of 'Gloverson and His Silent Partners' is finished.--[Ralph Keeler. See chap. lxxxiii.]--It is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. This noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures. Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great-grandchildren. I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it. Perhaps his best effort of late years is this: O soul, soul, soul of mine! Soul, soul, soul of throe! Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, And sing thy lauds in crystal wine! This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him. But I must desist. There are draughts here everywhere and my gout is something frightful. My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder. God be with you. HARTFORD. These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion of the city of Dublin. APPENDIX N MARK TWAIN AND COPYRIGHT I PETITION Concerning Copyright (1875) (See Chapter cii) TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED. We, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: That justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. All such men will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that American authors should be protected by copyright in Europe; also, that European authors should be protected by copyright here. Both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant to foreign authors with all convenient despatch a full and effective copyright in America without marring the grace of the act by stopping to inquire whether a similar justice will be done our own authors by foreign governments. If it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice to us it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right from their authors. If a thing is right it ought to be done--the thing called "expediency" or "policy" has no concern with such a matter. And we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right--a right received from God, and only denied them by man. We hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. The fact that the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin. With your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the entry in the office of the Congressional Librarian to be the same as we pay ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be made without a single hampering stipulation that American authors shall receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments. Since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted we could have procured the signature of every writer in the United States, great and small, obscure or famous. As it is, the list comprises the names of about all our writers whose works have at present a European market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter. No objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of our greatest publishing firms will attest. A European copyright here would be a manifest advantage to them. As the matter stands now the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half the gains. Then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms will object to granting an American copyright to foreign authors and artists, who can there be to object? Surely nobody whose protest is entitled to any weight. Trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will ever pray, etc. With great respect, Your Ob't Serv'ts. CIRCULAR TO AMERICAN AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS DEAR SIR,--We believe that you will recognize the justice and the righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the accompanying petition. And we believe that you will be willing that our country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under. If the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor to sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our secretary? }Committee Address -------------------Secretary of the Committee. II Communications supposed to have been written by the Tsar of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey to Mark Twain on the subject of International Copyright, about 1890. ST. PETERSBURG, February. COL. MARK TWAIN, Washington. Your cablegram received. It should have been transmitted through my minister, but let that pass. I am opposed to international copyright. At present American literature is harmless here because we doctor it in such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with Siberia as a summer resort. But your bill would spoil this. We should be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. 'Voila'! my empire would be a republic in five years and I should be sampling Siberia myself. If you should run across Mr. Kennan--[George Kennan, who had graphically pictured the fearful conditions of Siberian exile.]--please ask him to come over and give some readings. I will take good care of him. ALEXANDER III. 144--Collect. CONSTANTINOPLE, February. DR. MARK TWAIN, Washington. Great Scott, no! By the beard of the Prophet, no! How can you ask such a thing of me? I am a man of family. I cannot take chances, like other people. I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. Such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person, like me, and go to teaching that his wife is 964 times as good as he is, and what's hell to that harem, dear friend? I never saw such a fool as you. Do not mind that expression; I already regret it, and would replace it with a softer one if I could do it without debauching the truth. I beseech you, do not pass that bill. Roberts College is quite all the American product we can stand just now. On top of that, do you want to send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can't edit the poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? My friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years. ABDUL II. III MARK TWAIN'S LAST SUGGESTION ON COPYRIGHT. A MEMORIAL RESPECTFULLY TENDERED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. (Prepared early in 1909 at the suggestion of Mr. Champ Clack but not offered. A bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed about this time.) The Policy of Congress:--Nineteen or twenty years ago James Russell Lowell, George Haven Putnam, and the under signed appeared before the Senate Committee on Patents in the interest of Copyright. Up to that time, as explained by Senator Platt, of Connecticut, the policy of Congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years, with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income from literary property created by his hand and brain the property should then be transferred "to the public" as a free gift. That is still the policy of Congress to-day. The Purpose in View:--The purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was still under the protection of copyright. The Purpose Defeated:--This purpose has always been defeated. That is to say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was permanent and secure. The Reason:--The reason is simple: Congress has never made a reduction compulsory. Congress was convinced that the removal of the author's royalty and the book's consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the competition. It was an error. It has not turned out so. The reason is, a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must divide the market with competitors. Proposed Remedy:--The natural remedy would seem to be, amended law requiring the issue of cheap editions. Copyright Extension:--I think the remedy could be accomplished in the following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing as follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book's forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest edition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years. This extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive months to furnish the ten per cent. book upon demand of any person or persons desiring to buy it. The Result:--The result would be that no American classic enjoying the thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any American purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might. He would get a two-dollar book for 20 cents, and he could get none but copyright-expired classics at any such rate. The Final Result:--At the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright would again die, and the price would again advance. This by a natural law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an advantage to any publisher. Reconstruction of The Present Law Not Necessary:--A clause of the suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again: All books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form of said book or article at a price of 90 per cent. below the cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years. REMARKS If the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present Congress and become law--and I hope it will--I shall have personal experience of its effects very soon. Next year, in fact, in the person of my first book, 'The Innocents Abroad'. For its forty-two-year copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and with the latter the permanent low-rate edition. At present the highest price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars per copy. Thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy. A sweeping reduction like this is what Congress from the beginning has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk. Respectfully submitted, S. L. CLEMENS. (A full and interesting elucidation of Mark Twain's views on Copyright may be found in an article entitled "Concerning Copyright," published in the North American Review for January, 1905.) APPENDIX O (See Chapter cxiv) Address of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in the Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1877. MR. CHAIRMAN, This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly California-ward. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'. I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. When he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than before. He let me in-pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're the fourth--I'm going to move." "The fourth what?" said I. "The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move." "You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow. Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!" You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he: "They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down in his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole and says he: "'Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings, "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!"' "Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says: "'Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes.' "Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' You see, it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of Jittery swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and buttonholes me and interrupts me. Says he: "'Honor be to Mudjekeewis! You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--' "But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells: "'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine! For I would drink to other days.' "By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes and says I, 'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous Littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me. I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says: "'I am the doubter and the doubt--' and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out. Says he: "'They reckon ill who leave me out; They know not well the subtle ways I keep. I pass and deal again!' Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one! Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says, "'I tire of globes and aces! Too long the game is played!' and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says, "'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught,' and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! Emerson claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws I'll lay down on him and smother him!' All quiet on the Potomac, you bet! "They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow. Emerson says, 'The noblest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie."' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Bigelow Papers."' Says Holmes, 'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.' They mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more company, and Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says: "'Is yonder squalid peasant all That this proud nursery could breed?' He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing, 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' till I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at seven they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on and his'n under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em, because-- "'Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime; And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.' "As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours and I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a Littery atmosphere." I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors." The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "Ah! impostors, were they? Are you?" I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not traveled on my 'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. APPENDIX P THE ADAM MONUMENT PETITION (See Chapter cxxxiv) TO THE HONORABLE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED. WHEREAS, A number of citizens of the city of Elmira in the State of New York having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument in memory of Adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the following facts and append to the same our humble petition. 1. As far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials. 2. The common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire neglect, although even the Father of our Country has now, and has had for many years, a monument in course of construction. 3. No right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe, should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the people of Elmira. His labors were not in behalf of one locality, but for the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which go therewith; hence all races and all colors and all religions are interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument. 4. It will be to the imperishable credit of the United States if this monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have sprung from his loins after 6,000 years of unappreciation on the part of its elders. 5. The idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of Elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage through the exercise of its great authority. Therefore, Your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to Adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the United States that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other memorial to the said Adam, and to this end we will ever pray. NAMES: (100 signatures) APPENDIX Q GENERAL GRANT'S GRAMMAR (Written in 1886. Delivered at an Army and Navy Club dinner in New York City) Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grant's English. That would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in General Grant's book than they do in Arnold's criticism on the book--but they do not. It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author--but they are not. In fact, General Grant's derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a random statement: it is a fact, and easily demonstrable. I have a book at home called Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam, Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole, Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray (who made the grammar). In Mr. Arnold's criticism on General Grant's book we find two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of delinquents just named. The following passage all by itself ought to elect him: "Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc." To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk. Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark: "To suppose that because a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder of medicine." People may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all, the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant's book is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece. In their line there is no higher literature than those modest, simple memoirs. Their style is at least flawless and no man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, "Unconditional and immediate surrender," "I propose to move immediately upon your works," "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." Mr. Arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another mouth could not have done. And finally we have that gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: "Let us have peace." APPENDIX R PARTY ALLEGIANCE. BEING A PORTION OF A PAPER ON "CONSISTENCY," READ BEFORE THE MONDAY EVENING CLUB IN 1887. (See Chapter clxiii) . . . I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain language. That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. Desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. Their military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them: to him a political party is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers. Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. The volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? Must he prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? Does he take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? It goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army; he is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man. There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic. Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them. If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn against him. I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and dishonor. Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave? What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat and any other kind of lifelong slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another? This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. It enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no, you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things. This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is Consistency--with a capital C. With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-end never will. APPENDIX S ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR "A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT" (See Chapter clxxii) My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story. There was never a time when America applied the death-penalty to more than fourteen crimes. But England, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death! And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes England has distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws. Those Blue Laws should have been spared English criticism for two reasons: 1. They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence. 2. The Blue Laws never had any existence. They were the fancy-work of an English clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. And yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if they had been injected into the English law the dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol. I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of hell and Russia. To have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the State. APPENDIX T A TRIBUTE TO HENRY H. ROGERS (See Chapter cc and earlier) April 25, 1902. I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I have known. He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is my junior by four years. He was graduated from the high school there in 1853, when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. When he was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in Pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. He prospered, and by and by established the Standard Oil Trust with Mr. Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors. In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. Ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and I have had no further trouble with them. Obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and furnished him no difficulties. He released me from my entanglements with Paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when Charles L. Webster & Company failed he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way entitled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm; when I started lecturing around the world to make the money to pay off the Webster debts he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between Harper & Brothers and the American Publishing Company and patch up a working-contract between them and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as I earned money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the 96 alike; when I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return; when I had earned $28,500 more, $18,500 of which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter into Federal Steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $17,500, but sold it in two months at $25,000 profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to "give the other man a chance" (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken). That was at the end of '99 and beginning of 1900; and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. I do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for what I have done. His soul was born superhumanly sweet, and I do not think anything can sour it. I have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities. But for his cool head and wise guidance I should never have come out of the Webster difficulties on top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me. His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. With the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. He invests $100,000 for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $31,000. I invest (in London and here) $66,000 and must wait considerably for results (in case there shall be any). I tell him about it and he finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. He was born serene, patient, all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. Such a man is entitled to the high gift of humor: he has it at its very best. He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known. S. L. CLEMENS. APPENDIX U FROM MARK TWAIN'S LAST POEM BEGUN AT RIVERDALE, NEW YORK. FINISHED AT YORK HARBOR, MAINE, AUGUST 18, 1902 (See Chapter ccxxiii) (A bereft and demented mother speaks) . . . O, I can see my darling yet: the little form In slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white, Pink-belted waist with ample bows, Blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--Capering in delight and choked with glee. It was a summer afternoon; the hill Rose green above me and about, and in the vale below The distant village slept, and all the world Was steeped in dreams. Upon me lay this peace, And I forgot my sorrow in its spell. And now My little maid passed by, and she Was deep in thought upon a solemn thing: A disobedience, and my reproof. Upon my face She must not look until the day was done; For she was doing penance . . . She? O, it was I! What mother knows not that? And so she passed, I worshiping and longing . . . It was not wrong? You do not think me wrong? I did it for the best. Indeed I meant it so. She flits before me now: The peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, The plaited tails of hair, The ribbons floating from the summer hat, The grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care. O, dainty little form! I see it move, receding slow along the path, By hovering butterflies besieged; I see it reach The breezy top clear-cut against the sky, . . . Then pass beyond and sink from sight-forever! Within, was light and cheer; without, A blustering winter's right. There was a play; It was her own; for she had wrought it out Unhelped, from her own head-and she But turned sixteen! A pretty play, All graced with cunning fantasies, And happy songs, and peopled all with fays, And sylvan gods and goddesses, And shepherds, too, that piped and danced, And wore the guileless hours away In care-free romps and games. Her girlhood mates played in the piece, And she as well: a goddess, she, --And looked it, as it seemed to me. 'Twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was And innocent. It made us cry, we elder ones, To live our lost youth o'er again With these its happy heirs. Slowly, at last, the curtain fell. Before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped In roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, So radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm Of praise that crowned her triumph . . . . O, Across the mists of time I see her yet, My Goddess of the Flowers! . . . The curtain hid her . . . . Do you comprehend? Till time shall end! Out of my life she vanished while I looked! . . . Ten years are flown. O, I have watched so long, So long. But she will come no more. No, she will come no more. It seems so strange . . . so strange . . . Struck down unwarned! In the unbought grace, of youth laid low--In the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--In the morning of her life cut down! And I not by! Not by When the shadows fell, the night of death closed down The sun that lit my life went out. Not by to answer When the latest whisper passed the lips That were so dear to me--my name! Far from my post! the world's whole breadth away. O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me For mother-help, and got for answer Silence! We that are old--we comprehend; even we That are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide; Their tale complete: Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision fades. We know them lost to us--Forever lost; we cannot have them back; We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead. APPENDIX V SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, "3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES" THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI. (WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905) (See Chapter ccxxxv) Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. Our tramp is mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison. As for our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American custom-house. Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be hidden from him? He says: "A billion, that is a million millions,[?? Trillion D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still." The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. But with my microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago. There are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. Heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of His creatures. He gave them life, He gave them humble services to perform, they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have their reward. Man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the majority there. He will be disappointed. Let him humble himself. But for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. He has a mission, therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet. Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and feel; I have lived 3,000 years since then [microbic time], and I see the foolishness of it now. We live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it. In matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here over the scientist of the earth, because, as I have just been indicating, we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which exist for him as theories only. Indeed, we know as facts several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. For example, he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections and aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own. Yet such is the case. Some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature and will not associate with them--and would not be allowed to, if they tried. Nothing is more particular about society than a molecule. And so there are no end of castes; in this matter India is not a circumstance. "Tell me, Franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an individual, an animal, a creature?" "Yes." "Then water--any water-is an individual?" "Yes." "Suppose you remove a drop of it? Is what is left an individual?" "Yes, and so is the drop." "Suppose you divide the drop?" "Then you have two individuals." "Suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?" "Again you have two individuals. But you haven't water any more." "Of course. Certainly. Well, suppose you combine them again, but in a new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of hydrogen?" "But you know you can't. They won't combine on equal terms." I was ashamed to have made that blunder. I was embarrassed; to cover it I started to say we used to combine them like that where I came from, but thought better of it, and stood pat. "Now then," I said, "it amounts to this: water is an individual, an animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third individual--and yet each continues to be an individual." I glanced at Franklin, but . . . upon reflection, held my peace. I could have pointed out to him that here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously--that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. But he would not have known what I was talking about. After a moment I resumed: "Listen--and see if I have understood you rightly, to wit: All the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. Is that it?" "Yes, that is correct." "By George, it beats the band!" He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets. "Franklin, we've got it down fine. And to think--there are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute that it could get into a microbe's eye and he wouldn't know it was there!" "Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us, and rot us with disease: Ah, what could they have been created for? They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? Ah, friend Bkshp [microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go. We only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well! We shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after all we have suffered. Let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust. The humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!" You notice that? He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature --he and all the swarming billions of his race. None of them suspects it. That is significant. It is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive --insistently suggestive. It hints at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of space--is what men name the Universe. Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious! I wanted to see them! I was in a fever to see them! I had lenses to two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. The boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed. I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile. He said it was a quite simple thing-he had it at home. I was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. He said: "Hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray to an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are?" Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing! You could have knocked me down with a feather. We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. At the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent, with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind. The warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. They were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail high.--[My own expression, and a quite happy one. I said to the Duke: "Your Grace, they're just about finger-milers!" "How do you mean, m'lord?" "This. You notice the stately General standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? Well, if you could stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh." The Duke said "finger-milers was good"--good and exact; and he afterward used it several times himself.]--Everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad. Many wife-swinks ["Swinks," an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about--crying, mainly. It seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry? The cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a command which we couldn't hear) and a division came tearing down on a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch --the Duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it. Before long the real business of the occasion began. A battalion of priests arrived carrying sacred pictures. That settled it: this was war; these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. Their little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever travestied the human shape I think, and he lifted up his hands and blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could, and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy pictures. It was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those serried masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under the long array of fluttering flags. Evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable little unwatched country for them somewhere. But the little fellow and his brethren didn't fall in--that was a noticeable particular. They didn't fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the swag. Very well, then-what ought we to do? Had we no moral duty to perform? Ought we to allow this war to begin? Was it not our duty to stop it, in the name of right and righteousness? Was it not our duty to administer a rebuke to this selfish and heartless Family? The Duke was struck by that, and greatly moved. He felt as I did about it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour boiling water on the Family and extinguish it, which we did. It extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended. We both regretted this, but the Duke said that these people were nothing to us, and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve such a Family. He was loyally doing the like himself, and so was I, but I don't think we thought of that. And it wasn't just the same, anyway, because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks. Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one. Old Tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and always has been. Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that. It could make me sad, only I know better. D. T. will fetch Blitzy yet one of these days. But these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate that I do not want this tramp to go on living. What would become of me if he should disintegrate? My molecules would scatter all around and take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new estate, but where should I be? I should not have a rag of a feeling left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. Nothing to think with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with. There would be no more me. I should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of Nature --heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed, and nothing left of what had once been Me. It is curious, and not without impressiveness: I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but I should be the next thing to it. And to think what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away! I wish I knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome! My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years longer--500,000 of my microbe years. So may it be. Oh, dear, we are all so wise! Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. Yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. Mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. Why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? I swear I don't know. Why do I respect my own? Well--that is different. APPENDIX W LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE (See Chapter cclxxxii) [It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and distractions; so I will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.] Little Bessie was nearly three years old. She was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with results. One day she said: "Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it all for?" It was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it: "It is for our good, my child. In His wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better." "Is it He that sends them?" "Yes." "Does He send all of them, mama?" "Yes, dear, all of them. None of them comes by accident; He alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better." "Isn't it strange?" "Strange? Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way. I have not heard any one call it strange before. It has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful." "Who first thought of it like that, mama? Was it you?" "Oh no, child, I was taught it." "Who taught you so, mama?" "Why, really, I don't know--I can't remember. My mother, I suppose; or the preacher. But it's a thing that everybody knows." "Well, anyway, it does seem strange. Did He give Billy Norris the typhus?" "Yes." "What for?" "Why, to discipline him and make him good." "But he died, mama, and so it couldn't make him good." "Well, then, I suppose it was for some other reason. We know it was a good reason, whatever it was." "What do you think it was, mama?" "Oh, you ask so many questions! I think it was to discipline his parents." "Well, then, it wasn't fair, mama. Why should his life be taken away for their sake, when he wasn't doing anything?" "Oh, I don't know! I only know it was for a good and wise and merciful reason." "What reason, mama?" "I think--I think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for some sin they had committed." "But he was the one that was punished, mama. Was that right?" "Certainly, certainly. He does nothing that isn't right and wise and merciful. You can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are just and wise." After a pause: "Did He make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the crippled old woman from the fire, mama?" "Yes, my child. Wait! Don't ask me why, because I don't know. I only know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to show His power." "That drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into Mrs. Welch's baby when--" "Never mind about it, you needn't go into particulars; it was to discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway." "Mama, Mr. Burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does He send them?" "Oh, certainly, child, certainly. Of course." "What for?" "Oh, to discipline us! Haven't I told you so, over and over again?" "It's awful cruel, mama! And silly! and if I----" "Hush, oh, hush! Do you want to bring the lightning?" "You know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. Was it to discipline the church?" (Wearily.) "Oh, I suppose so." "But it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything. Was it to discipline the hog, mama?" "Dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while? If you would like to----" "Mama, only think! Mr. Hollister says there isn't a bird, or fish, or reptile, or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that Providence has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. Is that true, mother --because if it is true why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it?" "That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don't want you to listen to anything he says." "Why, mama, he is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good. He says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----Dear mama, have you fainted! I will run and bring help! Now this comes of staying in town this hot weather." APPENDIX X A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MARK TWAIN'S WORK PUBLISHED AND OTHERWISE--FROM 1851-1910 Note 1.--This is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list of Mark Twain's literary undertakings, in the order of performance, showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first published, etc. An excellent Mark Twain bibliography has been compiled by Mr. Merle Johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important items. Note 2.--Only a few of the more important speeches are noted. Volumes that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted. Note 3.--Titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as "Huck Finn" or "Huck" for "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Names of periodicals are abbreviated. The initials U. E. stand for the "Uniform Edition" of Mark Twain's works. The chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the place in this work where the items are mentioned. 1851. (See Chapter xviii of this work.) Edited the Hannibal Journal during the absence of the owner and editor, Orion Clemens. Wrote local items for the Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. Wrote two sketches for The Sat. Eve. Post (Philadelphia). To MARY IN H-l. Hannibal Journal. 1852-53. (See Chapter xviii.) JIM WOLFE AND THE FIRE--Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. 1853. (See Chapter xix.) Wrote obituary poems--not published. Wrote first letters home. 1855-56. (See Chapters xx and xxi.) First after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, Iowa. Letters from Cincinnati, November 16, 1856, signed "Snodgrass" --Saturday Post (Keokuk). 1857. (See Chapter xxi.) Letters from Cincinnati, March 16, 1857, signed "Snodgrass"--Saturday Post (Keokuk). 1858. Anonymous contributions to the New Orleans Crescent and probably to St. Louis papers. 1859. (See Chapter xxvii; also Appendix B.) Burlesque of Capt. Isaiah Sellers--True Delta (New Orleans), May 8 or 9. 1861. (See Chapters xxxiii to xxxv.) Letters home, published in The Gate City (Keokuk). 1862. (See Chapters xxxv to xxxviii.) Letters and sketches, signed "Josh," for the Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, Nevada). REPORT OF THE LECTURE OF PROF. PERSONAL PRONOUN--Enterprise. REPORT OF A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION--Enterprise. THE PETRIFIED MAN--Enterprise. Local news reporter for the Enterprise from August. 1863. (See Chapters xli to xliii; also Appendix C.) Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. First used the name "Mark Twain," February 2. ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE--Enterprise. CURING A COLD--Enterprise. U. E. INFORMATION FOR THE MILLION--Enterprise. ADVICE TO GOOD LITTLE GIRLS--Enterprise. THE DUTCH NICK MASSACRE--Enterprise. Many other Enterprise sketches. THE AGED PILOT MAN (poem)--"ROUGHING IT." U. E. 1864. (See. Chapters xliv to xlvii.) Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. Speech as "Governor of the Third House." Letters to New York Sunday Mercury. Local reporter on the San Francisco Call. Articles and sketches for the Golden Era. Articles and sketches for the Californian. Daily letters from San Francisco to the Enterprise. (Several of the Era and Californian sketches appear in SKETCHES NEW AND OLD. U. E.) 1865. (See Chapters xlix to li; also Appendix E.) Notes for the Jumping Frog story; Angel's Camp, February. Sketches etc., for the Golden Era and Californian. Daily letter to the Enterprise. THE JUMPING FROG (San Francisco) Saturday Press. New York, November 18. U. E. 1866. (See Chapters lii to lv; also Appendix D.) Daily letter to the Enterprise. Sandwich Island letters to the Sacramento Union. Lecture on the Sandwich Islands, San Francisco, October 2. FORTY-THREE DAYS IN AN OPEN BOAT--Harper's Magazine, December (error in signature made it Mark Swain). 1867. (See Chapters lvii to lxv; also Appendices E, F, and G.) Letters to Alta California from New York. JIM WOLFE AND THE CATS--N. Y. Sunday Mercury. THE JUMPING FROG--book, published by Charles Henry Webb, May 1. U. E. Lectured at Cooper Union, May, '66. Letters to Alta California and New York Tribune from the Quaker City --Holy Land excursion. Letter to New York Herald on the return from the Holy Land. After-dinner speech on "Women" (Washington). Began arrangement for the publication of THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. 1868. (See Chapters lxvi to lxix; also Appendices H and I.) Newspaper letters, etc., from Washington, for New York Citizen, Tribune, Herald, and other papers and periodicals. Preparing Quaker City letters (in Washington and San Francisco) for book publication. CAPTAIN WAKEMAN'S (STORMFIELD'S) VISIT TO HEAVEN (San Francisco), published Harper's Magazine, December, 1907-January, 1908 (also book, Harpers). Lectured in California and Nevada on the "Holy Land," July 2. S'CAT! Anonymous article on T. K. Beecher (Elmira), published in local paper. Lecture-tour, season 1868-69. 1869. (See Chapters lxx to lxxni.) THE INNOCENTS ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July 20. U. E. Bought one-third ownership in the Buffalo Express. Contributed editorials, sketches, etc., to the Express. Contributed sketches to Packard's Monthly, Wood's Magazine, etc. Lecture-tour, season 1869-70. 1870. (See Chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also Appendix J.) Contributed various matter to Buffalo Express. Contributed various matter under general head of "MEMORANDA" to Galaxy Magazine, May to April, '71. ROUGHING IT begun in September (Buffalo). SHEM'S DIARY (Buffalo) (unfinished). GOD, ANCIENT AND MODERN (unpublished). 1871. (See Chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also Appendix K.) MEMORANDA continued in Galaxy to April. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND FIRST ROMANCE--[THE FIRST ROMANCE had appeared in the Express in 1870. Later included in SKETCHES.]--booklet (Sheldon & Co.). U. E. ROUGHING IT finished (Quarry Farm). Ruloff letter--Tribune. Wrote several sketches and lectures (Quarry Farm). Western play (unfinished). Lecture-tour, season 1871-72. 1872. (See Chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also Appendix L.) ROUGHING IT--book (Am. Pub. Co.), February. U. E. THE MARK TWAIN SCRAP-BOOK invented (Saybrook, Connecticut). TOM SAWYER begun as a play (Saybrook, Connecticut). A few unimportant sketches published in "Practical jokes," etc. Began a book on England (London). 1873. (See Chapters lxxxviii to xcii.) Letters on the Sandwich Islands-Tribune, January 3 and 6. THE GILDED AGE (with C. D. Warner)--book (Am. Pub. Co), December. U. E. THE LICENSE OF THE PRESS--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Lectured in London, October 18 and season 1873-74. 1874. (See Chapters xciii to xcviii; also Appendix M.) TOM SAWYER continued (in the new study at Quarry Farm). A TRUE STORY (Quarry Farm)-Atlantic, November. U. E. FABLES (Quarry Farm). U. E. COLONEL SELLERS--play (Quarry Farm) performed by John T. Raymond. UNDERTAKER'S LOVE-STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Hartford) Atlantic, January to July, 1875. Monarchy letter to Mrs. Clemens, dated 1935 (Boston). 1875. (See Chapters c to civ; also Appendix N.) UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE--paper for The Monday Evening Club. SKETCHES NEW AND OLD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July. U. E. TOM SAWYER concluded (Hartford). THE CURIOUS REP. OF GONDOUR--Atlantic, October (unsigned). PUNCH, CONDUCTOR, PUNCH--Atlantic, February, 1876. U. E. THE SECOND ADVENT (unfinished). THE MYSTERIOUS CHAMBER (unfinished). AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DAMN FOOL (unfinished). Petition for International Copyright. 1876. (See Chapters cvi to cx.) Performed in THE LOAN OF THE LOVER as Peter Spuyk (Hartford). CARNIVAL OF CRIME--paper for The Monday Evening Club--Atlantic, June. U. E. HUCK FINN begun (Quarry Farm). CANVASSER'S STORY (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, December. U. E. "1601" (Quarry Farm), privately printed. [And not edited by Livy. D.W.] AH SIN (with Bret Harte)--play, (Hartford). TOM SAWYER--book (Am. Pub. Co.), December. U. E. Speech on "The Weather," New England Society, December 22. 1877. (See Chapters cxii to cxv; also Appendix O.) LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ-CLARENCE, ETC. (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic. IDLE EXCURSION (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, October, November, December. U. E. SIMON WHEELER, DETECTIVE--play (Quarry Farm) (not produced). PRINCE AND PAUPER begun (Quarry Farm). Whittier birthday speech (Boston), December. 1878. (See Chapters cxvii to cxx.) MAGNANIMOUS INCIDENT (Hartford)--Atlantic, May. U. E. A TRAMP ABROAD (Heidelberg and Munich). MENTAL TELEGRAPHY--Harper's Magazine, December, 1891. U. E. GAMBETTA DUEL--Atlantic, February, 1879 (included in TRAMP). U. E. REV. IN PITCAIRN--Atlantic, March, 1879. U. E. STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT--book (Osgood & Co.), 1882. U. E. (The three items last named were all originally a part of the TRAMP ABROAD.) 1879. (See Chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also Chapter cxxxiv and Appendix P.) A TRAMP ABROAD continued (Paris, Elmira, and Hartford). Adam monument scheme (Elmira). Speech on "The Babies" (Grant dinner, Chicago), November. Speech on "Plagiarism" (Holmes breakfast, Boston), December. 1880. (See Chapters cxxv to cxxxii.) PRINCE AND PAUPER concluded (Hartford and Elmira). HUCK FINN continued (Quarry Farm, Elmira). A CAT STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). A TRAMP ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), March 13. U. E. EDWARD MILLS AND GEO. BENTON (Hartford)--Atlantic, August. U. E. MRS. McWILLIAMS AND THE LIGHTNING (Hartford)--Atlantic, September. U. E. 1881. (See Chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.) A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE--Century, November. U. E. A BIOGRAPHY OF ----- (unfinished). PRINCE AND PAUPER--book (Osgood R; CO.), December. BURLESQUE ETIQUETTE (unfinished). [Included in LETTERS FROM THE EARTH D.W.] 1882. (See Chapters cxl and cxli.) LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Elmira and Hartford). 1883. (See Chapters cxlii to cxlviii.) LIFE ON THE Mississippi--book (Osgood R CO.), May. U. E. WHAT Is HAPPINESS?--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Introduction to Portuguese conversation book (Hartford). HUCK FINN concluded (Quarry Farm). HISTORY GAME (Quarry Farm). AMERICAN CLAIMANT (with W. D. Howells)--play (Hartford), produced by A. P. Burbank. Dramatized TOM SAWYER and PRINCE AND PAUPER (not produced). 1884. (See Chapters cxlix to cliii.) Embarked in publishing with Charles L. Webster. THE CARSON FOOTPRINTS--the San Franciscan. HUCK FINN--book (Charles L. Webster & Co.), December. U. E. Platform-readings with George W. Cable, season '84-'85. 1885. (See Chapters cliv to clvii.) Contracted for General Grant's Memoirs. A CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED--Century, December. U. E. THE UNIVERSAL TINKER--Century, December (open letter signed X. Y. Z. Letter on the government of children--Christian Union.) KIDITCHIN (children's poem). 1886. (See Chapters clix to clxi; also Appendix Q.) Introduced Henry M. Stanley (Boston). CONNECTICUT YANKEE begun (Hartford). ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT--Century, April, 1887. LUCK--Harper's, August, 1891. GENERAL GRANT AND MATTHEW ARNOLD--Army and Navy dinner speech. 1887. (See Chapters clxii to clxiv; also Appendix R.) MEISTERSCHAFT--play (Hartford)-Century, January, 1888. U. E. KNIGHTS OF LABOR--essay (not published). To THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. CONSISTENCY--paper for The Monday Evening Club. 1888. (See Chapters clxv to clxviii.) Introductory for "Unsent Letters" (unpublished). Master of Arts degree from Yale. Yale Alumni address (unpublished). Copyright controversy with Brander Matthews--Princeton Review. Replies to Matthew Arnold's American criticisms (unpublished). YANKEE continued (Elmira and Hartford). Introduction of Nye and Riley (Boston). 1889. (See Chapters clxix to clxxiii; also Appendix S.) A MAJESTIC LITERARY FOSSIL Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. U. E. HUCK AND TOM AMONG THE INDIANS (unfinished). Introduction to YANKEE (not used). LETTER To ELSIE LESLIE--St Nicholas, February, 1890. CONNECTICUT YANKEE--book (Webster & Co.), December. U. E. 1890. (See Chapters clxxii to clxxiv.) Letter to Andrew Lang about English Criticism. (No important literary matters this year. Mark Twain engaged promoting the Paige typesetting-machine.) 1891. (See Chapters clxxv to clxxvii.) AMERICAN CLAIMANT (Hartford) syndicated; also book (Webster & Co.), May, 1892. U. E. European letters to New York Sun. DOWN THE RHONE (unfinished). KORNERSTRASSE (unpublished). 1892. (See Chapters clxxx to clxxxii.) THE GERMAN CHICAGO (Berlin--Sun.) U. E. ALL KINDS OF SHIPS (at sea). U. E. Tom SAWYER ABROAD (Nauheim)--St. Nicholas, November, '93, to April, '94. U. E. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS (Nauheim). U. E. PUDD'NHEAD WILSON (Nauheim and Florence)--Century, December, '93, to June, '94 U. E. $100,000 BANK-NOTE (Florence)--Century, January, '93. U. E. 1893. (See Chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.) JOAN OF ARC begun (at Villa Viviani, Florence) and completed up to the raising of the Siege of Orleans. CALIFORNIAN'S TALE (Florence) Liber Scriptorum, also Harper's. ADAM'S DIARY (Florence)--Niagara Book, also Harper's. ESQUIMAU MAIDEN'S ROMANCE--Cosmopolitan, November. U. E. IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?--Cosmopolitan, September. U. E. TRAVELING WITH A REFORMER--Cosmopolitan, December. U. E. IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY (Florence)--N. A.--Rev., July, '94. U. E. FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENSES--[This may not have been written until early in 1894.]--(Players, New York)--N. A. Rev., July,'95 U. E. 1894. (See Chapters clxxxviii to cxc.) JOAN OF ARC continued (Etretat and Paris). WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US (Etretat)--N. A. Rev., January, '95 U. E. TOM SAWYER ABROAD--book (Webster & Co.), April. U. E. PUDD'NHEAD WILSON--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November. U. E. The failure of Charles L. Webster & Co., April 18. THE DERELICT--poem (Paris) (unpublished). 1895. (See Chapters clxxxix and cxcii.) JOAN OF ARC finished (Paris), January 28, Harper's Magazine, April to December. MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN--Harper's, September. U. E. A LITTLE NOTE TO PAUL BOURGET. U. E. Poem to Mrs. Beecher (Elmira) (not published). U. E. Lecture-tour around the world, begun at Elmira, July 14, ended July 31. 1896. (See Chapters cxci to cxciv.) JOAN OF ARC--book (Harpers) May. U. E. TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE, and other stories-book (Harpers), November. FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR begun (23 Tedworth Square, London). 1897. (See Chapters cxcvii to cxcix.) FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November. QUEEN'S JUBILEE (London), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed. JAMES HAMMOND TRUMBULL--Century, November. WHICH WAS WHICH? (London and Switzerland) (unfinished). TOM AND HUCK (Switzerland) (unfinished). HELLFIRE HOTCHKISS (Switzerland) (unfinished). IN MEMORIAM--poem (Switzerland)-Harper's Magazine. U. E. Concordia Club speech (Vienna). STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, March, 1898. U. E. 1898. (See Chapters cc to cciii; also Appendix T.) THE AUSTRIAN EDISON KEEPING SCHOOL AGAIN (Vienna) Century, August. U. E. AT THE APPETITE CURE (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, August. U. E. FROM THE LONDON TIMES, 1904 (Vienna)--Century, November. U. E. ABOUT PLAY-ACTING (Vienna)--Forum, October. U. E. CONCERNING THE JEWS (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, September, '99. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MRS. EDDY (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, October. U. E. THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, December, '99 U. E. Autobiographical chapters (Vienna); some of them used in the N. A. Rev., 1906-07. WHAT IS MAN? (Kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), August, 1906. ASSASSINATION OF AN EMPRESS (Kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished). THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER (unfinished). Translations of German plays (unproduced). 1899. (See Chapters cciv to ccviii.) DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES (Vienna)--Forum, March. U. E. MY LITERARY DEBUT (Vienna)--Century, December. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE (Vienna)--N. A. Rev., December, 1902, January and February, 1903. Translated German plays (Vienna) (unproduced). Collaborated with Siegmund Schlesinger on plays (Vienna) (unfinished). Planned a postal-check scheme (Vienna). Articles about the Kellgren treatment (Sanna, Sweden) (unpublished). ST. JOAN OF ARC (London)--Harper's Magazine, December, 1904. U. E. MY FIRST LIE, AND How I GOT OUT OF IT (London)--New York World. U. E. Articles on South African War (London) (unpublished) Uniform Edition of Mark Twain's works (Am. Pub. Co.). 1900. (See Chapters ccix to ccxii.) TWO LITTLE TALES (London)--Century, November, 1901. U. E. Spoke on "Copyright" before the House of Lords. Delivered many speeches in London and New York. 1901. (See Chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.) TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS (14 West Tenth Street, New York) --N. A. Rev., February. TO MY MISSIONARY CRITICS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--N. A. Rev., April. DOUBLE-BARREL DETECTIVE STORY (Saranac Lake, "The Lair") Harper's Magazine, January and February, 1902. Lincoln Birthday Speech, February 11. Many other speeches. PLAN FOR CASTING VOTE PARTY (Riverdale) (unpublished). THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION (Riverdale) (unpublished). ANTE-MORTEM OBITUARIES--Harper's Weekly. Received degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale. 1902. (See Chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also Appendix U.) DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD? (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. U. E. FIVE BOONS of LIFE (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5. U. E. WHY NOT ABOLISH IT? (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5. DEFENSE OF GENERAL FUNSTON (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., May. IF I COULD BE THERE (Riverdale unpublished). Wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished. Received degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri, June. THE BELATED PASSPORT (York Harbor)--Harper's Weekly, December 6. U. E. WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL? (York Harbor)--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. Poem (Riverdale and York Harbor) (unpublished) Sixty-seventh Birthday speech (New York), November 27. 1903. (See Chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.) MRS. EDDY IN ERROR (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. INSTRUCTIONS IN ART (Riverdale)-Metropolitan, April and May. EDDYPUS, and other C. S. articles (unfinished). A DOG'S TALE (Elmira)--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, January 21, 1904. U. E. ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR (Florence)--Harper's Magazine, August, U. E. THE $30,000 BEQUEST (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, December 10, 1904. U. E. 1904. (See Chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.) AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Florence)--portions published, N. A. Rev. and Harper's Weekly. CONCERNING COPYRIGHT (Tyringham, Massachusetts)--N. A. Rev., January, 1905. TSARS SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--N. A. Rev., March, 1905. ADAM'S DIARY--book (Harpers), April. 1905. (See Chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also Appendix V.) LEOPOLD'S SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--pamphlet, P. R. Warren Company. THE WAR PRAYER (21 Fifth Avenue, New York) (unpublished). EVE'S DIARY (Dublin, New Hampshire)--Harper's Magazine, December. 3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES (unfinished). INTERPRETING THE DEITY (Dublin New Hampshire) (unpublished). A HORSE'S TALE (Dublin, New Hampshire)-Harper's Magazine, August and September, 1906. Seventieth Birthday speech. W. D. HOWELLS (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)-Harper's Magazine, July, 1906. 1906. (See Chapters ccxxxix to ccli.) Autobiography dictation (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Dublin, New Hampshire)--selections published, N. A. Rev., 1906 and 1907. Many speeches. Farewell lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19. WHAT IS MAN?--book (privately printed). Copyright speech (Washington), December. 1907. (See Chapters cclvi to cclxiii.) Autobiography dictations (27 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Tuxedo). Degree of Doctor of Literature conferred by Oxford, June 26. Made many London speeches. Begum of Bengal speech (Liverpool). CHRISTIAN SCIENCE--book (Harpers), February. U. E. CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT To HEAVEN--book (Harpers). 1908. (See Chapters cclxiv to cclxx.) Autobiography dictations (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Redding, Connecticut). Lotos Club and other speeches. Aldrich memorial speech. 1909. (See Chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also Appendices N and W.) IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?--book (Harpers), April. A FABLE--Harper's Magazine December. Copyright documents (unpublished). Address to St. Timothy School. MARJORIE FLEMING (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, December. THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, February, 1910 BESSIE DIALOGUE (unpublished). LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (unfinished). THE DEATH OF JEAN--Harper's, December, 1910. THE INTERNATIONAL LIGHTNING TRUST (unpublished). 1910. (See Chapter ccxcii.) VALENTINES TO HELEN AND OTHERS (not published). ADVICE TO PAINE (not published). 
318	----	JOHN BARLEYCORN by Jack London (1876-1916) 1913 CHAPTER I It all came to me one election day. It was on a warm California afternoon, and I had ridden down into the Valley of the Moon from the ranch to the little village to vote Yes and No to a host of proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of California. Because of the warmth of the day I had had several drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting it. Then I had ridden up through the vine-clad hills and rolling pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farm-house in time for another drink and supper. "How did you vote on the suffrage amendment?" Charmian asked. "I voted for it." She uttered an exclamation of surprise. For, be it known, in my younger days, despite my ardent democracy, I had been opposed to woman suffrage. In my later and more tolerant years I had been unenthusiastic in my acceptance of it as an inevitable social phenomenon. "Now just why did you vote for it?" Charmian asked. I answered. I answered at length. I answered indignantly. The more I answered, the more indignant I became. (No; I was not drunk. The horse I had ridden was well named "The Outlaw." I'd like to see any drunken man ride her.) And yet--how shall I say?--I was lighted up, I was feeling "good," I was pleasantly jingled. "When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition," I said. "It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn----" "But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn," Charmian interpolated. "I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is the king of liars. He is the frankest truthsayer. He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life's wisdom. He is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth." And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got it. I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain every thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell, crouched ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight waiting a jail-break. And every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear, white light of alcohol. John Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage, giving away the choicest secrets on himself. And I was his spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple passages into the monotony of one's days. I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing--more nauseous than any physic. Even now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its "kick." And from the age of five to that of twenty-five I had not learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of unwilling apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously tolerant of alcohol, to make me, in the heart and the deeps of me, desirous of alcohol. I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first intoxications and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing that in the end had won me over--namely, the accessibility of alcohol. Not only had it always been accessible, but every interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in far lands, always where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave. I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred precincts taboo to women under pain of death. As a youth, by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence into the wide free world of men. All ways led to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world. "The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire; and for ten years more that desire has grown. And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry. Yet when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of intellectual pessimism. "But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John Barleycorn must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is the curse of it. The so-called truths of life are not true. They are the vital lies by which life lives, and John Barleycorn gives them the lie." "Which does not make toward life," Charmian said. "Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it. John Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the amendment to-day. I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible. The women know the game. They pay for it--the wives and sisters and mothers. And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition. And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation. Not having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward alcohol, it will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more abundant for the manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay, and life more abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the lives of the young men." "Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women coming?" Charmian asked. "Why not write it so as to help the wives and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote?" "The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'" I sneered--or, rather, John Barleycorn sneered; for he sat with me there at table in my pleasant, philanthropic jingle, and it is a trick of John Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer without an instant's warning. "No," said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so many women have learned to do. "You have shown yourself no alcoholic, no dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who has made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of rubbing shoulders with him. Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic Memoirs.'" CHAPTER II And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all sympathy; and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by understanding me and whom and what I write about. In the first place, I am a seasoned drinker. I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol. I am not stupid. I am not a swine. I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I have used my judgment in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor do I stagger. In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the normal, average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the dipsomaniac. There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of things--the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the grave. All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at the end. Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment. CHAPTER III I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot day, and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from the house, half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And be sure you don't spill it," was the parting injunction. It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top, and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a very precious thing. Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house? Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And, anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would know whether I had drunk or spilled it. I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid beneath. It wasn't good at all. But still I drank. The grown-ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it my breath held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over. I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste would come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of that long half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made to foam afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to the brim. And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide thirst of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started up the plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me in his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea mingled with an appalling conviction of sin. I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father roused me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and dragged wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the weight of my limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating that extended to my throat and brain. My condition was like that of one who had gone through a battle with poison. In truth, I had been poisoned. In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't mind it; but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil. As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer. Yes, and to the day of my death I could have managed to get along quite well without it. But circumstance decreed otherwise. At every turn in the world in which I lived, John Barleycorn beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him. And it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings and passing on with my tongue in my cheek, to develop in me a sneaking liking for the rascal. CHAPTER IV My next bout with John Barleycorn occurred when I was seven. This time my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the encounter. Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the bleak sad coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It was a wild, primitive countryside in those days; and often I heard my mother pride herself that we were old American stock and not immigrant Irish and Italians like our neighbours. In all our section there was only one other old American family. One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember, at the Morrisey ranch. A number of young people had gathered there from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there, drinking since early dawn, and, some of them, since the night before. The Morriseys were a huge breed, and there were many strapping great sons and uncles, heavy-booted, big-fisted, rough-voiced. Suddenly there were screams from the girls and cries of "Fight!" There was a rush. Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two giants, flush-faced, with greying hair, were locked in each other's arms. One was Black Matt, who, everybody said, had killed two men in his time. The women screamed softly, crossed themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding their eyes and peeping through their fingers. But not I. It is a fair presumption that I was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see that wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight. Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to cement the new friendship in the kitchen. Soon they were all talking at once, rumbling and roaring as big-chested open-air men will, when whisky has whipped their taciturnity. And I, a little shaver of seven, my heart in my mouth, my trembling body strung tense as a deer's on the verge of flight, peered wonderingly in at the open door and learned more of the strangeness of men. And I marvelled at Black Matt and Tom Morrisey, sprawled over the table, arms about each other's necks, weeping lovingly. The kitchen-drinking continued, and the girls outside grew timorous. They knew the drink game, and all were certain that something terrible was going to happen. They protested that they did not wish to be there when it happened, and some one suggested going to a big Italian rancho four miles away, where they could get up a dance. Immediately they paired off, lad and lassie, and started down the sandy road. And each lad walked with his sweetheart--trust a child of seven to listen and to know the love-affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a lad with a lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been paired off with me. We were the only children in this spontaneous affair. Perhaps the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were chits of girls, quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen, walking with their fellows. But we were uniquely young, this little Irish girl and I, and we walked hand in hand, and, sometimes, under the tutelage of our elders, with my arm around her waist. Only that wasn't comfortable. And I was very proud, on that bright Sunday morning, going down the long bleak road among the sandhills. I, too, had my girl, and was a little man. The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was hailed with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all, and the long dining-room was partly cleared for dancing. And the young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion. To me that music was divine. I had never heard anything so glorious. The young Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed, the Irish lads began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and high spirits reigned. I noted that some of them staggered and fell down in the dances, and that one had gone to sleep in a corner. Also, some of the girls were complaining, and wanting to leave, and others of the girls were titteringly complacent, willing for anything to happen. When our Italian hosts had offered me wine in a general sort of way, I had declined. My beer experience had been enough for me, and I had no inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in anything related to it. Unfortunately, one young Italian, Peter, an impish soul, seeing me sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of the moment, half-filled a tumbler with wine and passed it to me. He was sitting across the table from me. I declined. His face grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine. And then terror descended upon me--a terror which I must explain. My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that brunettes and all the tribe of dark-eyed humans were deceitful. Needless to say, my mother was a blonde. Next, she was convinced that the dark-eyed Latin races were profoundly sensitive, profoundly treacherous, and profoundly murderous. Again and again, drinking in the strangeness and the fearsomeness of the world from her lips, I had heard her state that if one offended an Italian, no matter how slightly and unintentionally, he was certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back. That was her particular phrase--"stab you in the back." Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrisey that morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the spectacle of a knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned to distinguish between facts and theories. My faith was implicit in my mother's exposition of the Italian character. Besides, I had some glimmering inkling of the sacredness of hospitality. Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous Italian, offering me hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I offended him he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse kicked out when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then, too, this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my mother talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew, from the blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the pale and genial blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few drinks. At any rate, his eyes were brilliantly black and sparkling with devilry. They were the mysterious, the unknown, and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyse them and know their prankishness? In them I visioned sudden death, and I declined the wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes changed. They grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of wine closer. What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but never have I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the glass to my lips, and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not kill me just then. That was a relief. But the wine was not. It was cheap, new wine, bitter and sour, made of the leavings and scrapings of the vineyards and the vats, and it tasted far worse than beer. There is only one way to take medicine, and that is to take it. And that is the way I took that wine. I threw my head back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold the poison down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and membranes. Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He half-filled a second tumbler and shoved it across the table. Frozen with fear, in despair at the fate which had befallen me, I gulped the second glass down like the first. This was too much for Peter. He must share the infant prodigy he had discovered. He called Dominick, a young moustached Italian, to see the sight. This time it was a full tumbler that was given me. One will do anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the qualms that rose in my throat, and downed the stuff. Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice again he refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched it disappear down my throat. By this time my exploits were attracting attention. Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country peasants who did not talk English, and who could not dance with the Irish girls, surrounded me. They were swarthy and wild-looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I knew they carried knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus. And Peter and Dominick made me show off for them. Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly mulish in having my own way, I should never have got in this pickle. And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no one to save me from my fate. How much I drank I do not know. My memory of it is of an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine passing across the bare boards of a wine-drenched table and going down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back was worse, and I must survive at any cost. Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did not collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was frozen, I was paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was to convey that never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I was a poised and motionless receptacle for all that quantity of wine. It lay inert in my fear-inert stomach. I was too frightened, even, for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon that downed wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It is not in the spirit of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything like it. The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a majority of the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I found myself, at the door, beside my little maiden. She had not had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and began to mimic them. I thought this a great game, and I, too, began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir up, while my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at the start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch, and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me this was excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced girls. I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide-open mouth I panted for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side, but my legs were leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my heart and brain like a club. Had I been a weakling of a child, I am confident that it would have killed me. As it was, I know I was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was; some were weeping--for themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I was suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me pant harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it was four miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw a small bridge across the road an infinite distance away. In fact, it was not a hundred feet distant. When I reached it, I sank down and lay on my back panting. The girls tried to lift me, but I was helpless and suffocating. Their cries of alarm brought Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded to resuscitate me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him away. And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there. When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for four miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite the terrible strain on my heart and tissues, I continually relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out. The most frightful visions were realities to me. I saw murders committed, and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and raved and fought. My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such delirium, I would hear my mother's voice: "But the child's brain. He will lose his reason." And sinking back into delirium, I would take the idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by keepers, and surrounded by screeching lunatics. One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's Chinatown. In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground through a thousand of these dens, and behind locked doors of iron I suffered and died a thousand deaths. And when I would come upon my father, seated at table in these subterranean crypts, gambling with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all my outrage gave vent in the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed, struggling against the detaining hands, and curse my father till the rafters rang. All the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen. It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night. A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one slept in the thin, frame farm-house that night when John Barleycorn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day he does not remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But my brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every pain as vital and terrible, as on that night. I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very words with which to express my psychology--how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the true inwardness of that disgraceful affair. In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points, and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of alcohol. Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it was, could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my mother, ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke, something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached. Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge, how So-and-So had slept out in the sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I could see, there was no shame anywhere. It had been something ticklishly, devilishly fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast. The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and patted me on the back until I felt that I had done something heroic. Peter and Dominick and the other Italians were proud of my drinking prowess. The face of morality was not set against drinking. Besides, everybody drank. There was not a teetotaler in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school, a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus there was no spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely physiological. I didn't like the damned stuff. CHAPTER V This physical loathing for alcohol I have never got over. But I have conquered it. To this day I conquer it every time I take a drink. The palate never ceases to rebel, and the palate can be trusted to know what is good for the body. But men do not drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body. And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest spots in my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy potato wagons, wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the horses plodding slowly along the deep road through the sandhills, one bright vision made the way never too long. The bright vision was the saloon at Colma, where my father, or whoever drove, always got out to get a drink. And I got out to warm by the great stove and get a soda cracker. Just one soda cracker, but a fabulous luxury. Saloons were good for something. Back behind the plodding horses, I would take an hour in consuming that one cracker. I took the smallest nibbles, never losing a crumb, and chewed the nibble till it became the thinnest and most delectable of pastes. I never voluntarily swallowed this paste. I just tasted it, and went on tasting it, turning it over with my tongue, spreading it on the inside of this cheek, then on the inside of the other cheek, until, at the end, it eluded me and in tiny drops and oozelets, slipped and dribbled down my throat. Horace Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers. I liked saloons. Especially I liked the San Francisco saloons. They had the most delicious dainties for the taking--strange breads and crackers, cheeses, sausages, sardines--wonderful foods that I never saw on our meagre home-table. And once, I remember, a barkeeper mixed me a sweet temperance drink of syrup and soda-water. My father did not pay for it. It was the barkeeper's treat, and he became my ideal of a good, kind man. I dreamed day-dreams of him for years. Although I was seven years old at the time, I can see him now with undiminished clearness, though I never laid eyes on him but that one time. The saloon was south of Market Street in San Francisco. It stood on the west side of the street. As you entered, the bar was on the left. On the right, against the wall, was the free lunch counter. It was a long, narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were small, round tables and chairs. The barkeeper was blue-eyed, and had fair, silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skull-cap. I remember he wore a brown Cardigan jacket, and I know precisely the spot, in the midst of the array of bottles, from which he took the bottle of red-coloured syrup. He and my father talked long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshipped him. And for years afterward I worshipped the memory of him. Despite my two disastrous experiences, here was John Barleycorn, prevalent and accessible everywhere in the community, luring and drawing me. Here were connotations of the saloon making deep indentations in a child's mind. Here was a child, forming its first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and desirable place. Stores, nor public buildings, nor all the dwellings of men ever opened their doors to me and let me warm by their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from narrow shelves against the wall. Their doors were ever closed to me; the saloon's doors were ever open. And always and everywhere I found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on busy thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter, and in summer dark and cool. Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine place, and it was more than that. By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching and gone to live in the city. And here, at ten, I began on the streets as a newsboy. One of the reasons for this was that we needed the money. Another reason was that I needed the exercise. I had found my way to the free public library, and was reading myself into nervous prostration. On the poor ranches on which I had lived there had been no books. In ways truly miraculous, I had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them I had devoured. One was the life of Garfield; the second, Paul du Chaillu's African travels; the third, a novel by Ouida with the last forty pages missing; and the fourth, Irving's "Alhambra." This last had been lent me by a school-teacher. I was not a forward child. Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for more. When I returned the "Alhambra" to the teacher I hoped she would lend me another book. And because she did not--most likely she deemed me unappreciative--I cried all the way home on the three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch. I waited and yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I nerved myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached the necessary pitch of effrontery. And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. Here were thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books, and some were even better. Libraries were not concerned with children in those days, and I had strange adventures. I remember, in the catalogue, being impressed by the title, "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle." I filled an application blank and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at table, I read as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess while the other boys were playing. I began to get the "jerks." To everybody I replied: "Go away. You make me nervous." And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy. I had no time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic. Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon. And I was in and out of many a one. I remember, in those days, on the east side of Broadway, between Sixth and Seventh, from corner to corner, there was a solid block of saloons. In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was something more than common every-day where nothing happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big policemen came shouldering in. Great moments, these, for me, my head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder. And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful, and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know. In the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs? Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges, whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be, for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot. I had no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and stale grief. Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I didn't like the stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper on an ice-wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds. Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie Harper's bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper. The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so good. I was always aware that I was missing something. What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I could buy five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious lastingness. I could chew and worry a single one for an hour. Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy for five cents each. It required a quarter of a day properly to absorb one of them. And many a day I made my entire lunch off one of those slabs. In truth, I found food there, but not in beer. CHAPTER VI But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen, my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a-thrill with romance and adventure, dreaming of wild life in the wild man-world. Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-world was entangled with alcohol. So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me, from an English ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on another ship to San Francisco; and now he wanted to see about getting a berth on a whaler. Across the estuary, near where the whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht Idler. The caretaker was a harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship Bonanza. Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to call upon the harpooner? Would I! Hadn't I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?--the big sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it had been engaged in smuggling opium. And the harpooner who was caretaker! How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom. He never had to leave the water. He slept aboard the Idler each night, while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed. The harpooner was only nineteen years old (and I have never had anything but his own word that he was a harpooner); but he had been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to address as I paddled around the yacht at a wistful distance. Would I take Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner, on the opium-smuggler Idler? WOULD I! The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail, and invited us aboard. I played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so that it would not mar the yacht's white paint, dropping the skiff astern on a long painter, and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half-hitches. We went below. It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen. The clothing on the wall smelled musty. But what of that? Was it not the sea-gear of men?--leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of pilot cloth, sou'westers, sea-boots, oilskins. And everywhere was in evidence the economy of space--the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the incredible lockers. There were the tell-tale compass, the sea-lamps in their gimbals, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away, the signal-flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner's dividers jammed into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat, inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty. The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen, and the sailor, aged seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like men. The harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a drink, and Scotty searched his pockets for dimes and nickels. Then the harpooner carried away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig, for there were no licensed saloons in that locality. We drank the cheap rotgut out of tumblers. Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant, than the harpooner and the sailor? They were men. They proved it by the way they drank. Drink was the badge of manhood. So I drank with them, drink by drink, raw and straight, though the damned stuff couldn't compare with a stick of chewing taffy or a delectable "cannon-ball." I shuddered and swallowed my gorge with every drink, though I manfully hid all such symptoms. Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon. All I had was twenty cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret regret at the enormous store of candy it could have bought. The liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate, lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice. "You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to me. "You double up in a minute and go down. When a whale smashes your boat, the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar, so that when the cold doubles you you'll float." "Sure," I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that I, too, would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic Ocean. And, truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable information, and filed it away in my brain, where it persists to this day. But I couldn't talk--at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen, and had never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to the two sea-dogs, and show my manhood by drinking with them, fairly and squarely, drink and drink. The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the harpooner poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and through my brain like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild, mad, glorious world on multitudinous adventures. We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were as if we had known each other for years and years, and we pledged ourselves to years of future voyagings together. The harpooner told of misadventures and secret shames. Scotty wept over his poor old mother in Edinburgh--a lady, he insisted, gently born--who was in reduced circumstances, who had pinched herself to pay the lump sum to the ship-owners for his apprenticeship, whose sacrificing dream had been to see him a merchantman officer and a gentleman, and who was heartbroken because he had deserted his ship in Australia and joined another as a common sailor before the mast. And Scotty proved it. He drew her last sad letter from his pocket and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I wept with him, and swore that all three of us would ship on the whaleship Bonanza, win a big pay-day, and, still together, make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay our store of money in the dear lady's lap. And, as John Barleycorn heated his way into my brain, thawing my reticence, melting my modesty, talking through me and with me and as me, my adopted twin brother and alter ego, I, too, raised my voice to show myself a man and an adventurer, and bragged in detail and at length of how I had crossed San Francisco Bay in my open skiff in a roaring southwester when even the schooner sailors doubted my exploit. Further, I--or John Barleycorn, for it was the same thing--told Scotty that he might be a deep-sea sailor and know the last rope on the great deep-sea ships, but that when it came to small-boat sailing I could beat him hands down and sail circles around him. The best of it was that my assertion and brag were true. With reticence and modesty present, I could never have dared tell Scotty my small-boat estimate of him. But it is ever the way of John Barleycorn to loosen the tongue and babble the secret thought. Scotty, or John Barleycorn, or the pair, was very naturally offended by my remarks. Nor was I loath. I could whip any runaway sailor seventeen years old. Scotty and I flared and raged like young cockerels, until the harpooner poured another round of drinks to enable us to forgive and make up. Which we did, arms around each other's necks, protesting vows of eternal friendship--just like Black Matt and Tom Morrisey, I remembered, in the ranch kitchen in San Mateo. And, remembering, I knew that I was at last a man--despite my meagre fourteen years--a man as big and manly as those two strapping giants who had quarrelled and made up on that memorable Sunday morning of long ago. By this time the singing stage was reached, and I joined Scotty and the harpooner in snatches of sea songs and chanties. It was here, in the cabin of the Idler, that I first heard "Blow the Man Down," "Flying Cloud," and "Whisky, Johnny, Whisky." Oh, it was brave. I was beginning to grasp the meaning of life. Here was no commonplace, no Oakland Estuary, no weary round of throwing newspapers at front doors, delivering ice, and setting up ninepins. All the world was mine, all its paths were under my feet, and John Barleycorn, tricking my fancy, enabled me to anticipate the life of adventure for which I yearned. We were not ordinary. We were three tipsy young gods, incredibly wise, gloriously genial, and without limit to our powers. Ah!--and I say it now, after the years--could John Barleycorn keep one at such a height, I should never draw a sober breath again. But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule--for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times, with savage usury added. Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water. They are mutually destructive. They cannot co-exist. And John Barleycorn, mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to organic chemistry as we mortals are. We pay for every nerve marathon we run, nor can John Barleycorn intercede and fend off the just payment. He can lead us to the heights, but he cannot keep us there, else would we all be devotees. And there is no devotee but pays for the mad dances John Barleycorn pipes. Yet the foregoing is all in after wisdom spoken. It was no part of the knowledge of the lad, fourteen years old, who sat in the Idler's cabin between the harpooner and the sailor, the air rich in his nostrils with the musty smell of men's sea-gear, roaring in chorus: "Yankee ship come down de ribber--pull, my bully boys, pull!" We grew maudlin, and all talked and shouted at once. I had a splendid constitution, a stomach that would digest scrap-iron, and I was still running my marathon in full vigour when Scotty began to fail and fade. His talk grew incoherent. He groped for words and could not find them, while the ones he found his lips were unable to form. His poisoned consciousness was leaving him. The brightness went out of his eyes, and he looked as stupid as were his efforts to talk. His face and body sagged as his consciousness sagged. (A man cannot sit upright save by an act of will.) Scotty's reeling brain could not control his muscles. All his correlations were breaking down. He strove to take another drink, and feebly dropped the tumbler on the floor. Then, to my amazement, weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back and immediately snored off to sleep. The harpooner and I drank on, grinning in a superior way to each other over Scotty's plight. The last flask was opened, and we drank it between us, to the accompaniment of Scotty's stertorous breathing. Then the harpooner faded away into his bunk, and I was left alone, unthrown, on the field of battle. I was very proud, and John Barleycorn was proud with me. I could carry my drink. I was a man. I had drunk two men, drink for drink, into unconsciousness. And I was still on my two feet, upright, making my way on deck to get air into my scorching lungs. It was in this bout on the Idler that I discovered what a good stomach and a strong head I had for drink--a bit of knowledge that was to be a source of pride in succeeding years, and that ultimately I was to come to consider a great affliction. The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign, who must take numerous glasses in order to get the "kick." The sun was setting when I came on the Idler's deck. There were plenty of bunks below. I did not need to go home. But I wanted to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff astern. The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour. I could see the stiff whitecaps, and the suck and run of the current was plainly visible in the face and trough of each one. I set sail, cast off, took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my hand, and headed across channel. The skiff heeled over and plunged into it madly. The spray began to fly. I was at the pinnacle of exaltation. I sang "Blow the Man Down" as I sailed. I was no boy of fourteen, living the mediocre ways of the sleepy town called Oakland. I was a man, a god, and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to my will. The tide was out. A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened between the boat-wharf and the water. I pulled up my centreboard, ran full tilt into the mud, took in sail, and, standing in the stern, as I had often done at low tide, I began to shove the skiff with an oar. It was then that my correlations began to break down. I lost my balance and pitched head-foremost into the ooze. Then, and for the first time, as I floundered to my feet covered with slime, the blood running down my arms from a scrape against a barnacled stake, I knew that I was drunk. But what of it? Across the channel two strong sailormen lay unconscious in their bunks where I had drunk them. I WAS a man. I was still on my legs, if they were knee-deep in mud. I disdained to get back into the skiff. I waded through the mud, shoving the skiff before me and yammering the chant of my manhood to the world. I paid for it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off my clothes. I swore, "Never again!" The game wasn't worth it. The price was too stiff. I had no moral qualms. My revulsion was purely physical. No exalted moments were worth such hours of misery and wretchedness. When I got back to my skiff, I shunned the Idler. I would cross the opposite side of the channel to go around her. Scotty had disappeared. The harpooner was still about, but him I avoided. Once, when he landed on the boat-wharf, I hid in a shed so as to escape seeing him. I was afraid he would propose some more drinking, maybe have a flask full of whisky in his pocket. And yet--and here enters the necromancy of John Barleycorn--that afternoon's drunk on the Idler had been a purple passage flung into the monotony of my days. It was memorable. My mind dwelt on it continually. I went over the details, over and over again. Among other things, I had got into the cogs and springs of men's actions. I had seen Scotty weep about his own worthlessness and the sad case of his Edinburgh mother who was a lady. The harpooner had told me terribly wonderful things of himself. I had caught a myriad enticing and inflammatory hints of a world beyond my world, and for which I was certainly as fitted as the two lads who had drunk with me. I had got behind men's souls. I had got behind my own soul and found unguessed potencies and greatnesses. Yes, that day stood out above all my other days. To this day it so stands out. The memory of it is branded in my brain. But the price exacted was too high. I refused to play and pay, and returned to my cannon-balls and taffy-slabs. The point is that all the chemistry of my healthy, normal body drove me away from alcohol. The stuff didn't agree with me. It was abominable. But, despite this, circumstance was to continue to drive me toward John Barleycorn, to drive me again and again, until, after long years, the time should come when I would look up John Barleycorn in every haunt of men--look him up and hail him gladly as benefactor and friend. And detest and hate him all the time. Yes, he is a strange friend, John Barleycorn. CHAPTER VII I was barely turned fifteen, and working long hours in a cannery. Month in and month out, the shortest day I ever worked was ten hours. When to ten hours of actual work at a machine is added the noon hour; the walking to work and walking home from work; the getting up in the morning, dressing, and eating; the eating at night, undressing, and going to bed, there remains no more than the nine hours out of the twenty-four required by a healthy youngster for sleep. Out of those nine hours, after I was in bed and ere my eyes drowsed shut, I managed to steal a little time for reading. But many a night I did not knock off work until midnight. On occasion I worked eighteen and twenty hours on a stretch. Once I worked at my machine for thirty-six consecutive hours. And there were weeks on end when I never knocked off work earlier than eleven o'clock, got home and in bed at half after midnight, and was called at half-past five to dress, eat, walk to work, and be at my machine at seven o'clock whistle blow. No moments here to be stolen for my beloved books. And what had John Barleycorn to do with such strenuous, Stoic toil of a lad just turned fifteen? He had everything to do with it. Let me show you. I asked myself if this were the meaning of life--to be a work-beast? I knew of no horse in the city of Oakland that worked the hours I worked. If this were living, I was entirely unenamoured of it. I remembered my skiff, lying idle and accumulating barnacles at the boat-wharf; I remembered the wind that blew every day on the bay, the sunrises and sunsets I never saw; the bite of the salt air in my nostrils, the bite of the salt water on my flesh when I plunged overside; I remembered all the beauty and the wonder and the sense-delights of the world denied me. There was only one way to escape my deadening toil. I must get out and away on the water. I must earn my bread on the water. And the way of the water led inevitably to John Barleycorn. I did not know this. And when I did learn it, I was courageous enough not to retreat back to my bestial life at the machine. I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay, from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon-keepers came down to buy. Every raid on an oyster-bed was a felony. The penalty was State imprisonment, the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that? The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine. And there was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in being a machine slave. And behind it all, behind all of me with youth abubble, whispered Romance, Adventure. So I interviewed my Mammy Jennie, my old nurse at whose black breast I had suckled. She was more prosperous than my folks. She was nursing sick people at a good weekly wage. Would she lend her "white child" the money? WOULD SHE? What she had was mine. Then I sought out French Frank, the oyster pirate, who wanted to sell, I had heard, his sloop, the Razzle Dazzle. I found him lying at anchor on the Alameda side of the estuary near the Webster Street bridge, with visitors aboard, whom he was entertaining with afternoon wine. He came on deck to talk business. He was willing to sell. But it was Sunday. Besides, he had guests. On the morrow he would make out the bill of sale and I could enter into possession. And in the meantime I must come below and meet his friends. They were two sisters, Mamie and Tess; a Mrs. Hadley, who chaperoned them; "Whisky" Bob, a youthful oyster pirate of sixteen; and "Spider" Healey, a black-whiskered wharf-rat of twenty. Mamie, who was Spider's niece, was called the Queen of the Oyster Pirates, and, on occasion, presided at their revels. French Frank was in love with her, though I did not know it at the time; and she steadfastly refused to marry him. French Frank poured a tumbler of red wine from a big demijohn to drink to our transaction. I remembered the red wine of the Italian rancho, and shuddered inwardly. Whisky and beer were not quite so repulsive. But the Queen of the Oyster Pirates was looking at me, a part-emptied glass in her own hand. I had my pride. If I was only fifteen, at least I could not show myself any less a man than she. Besides, there were her sister, and Mrs. Hadley, and the young oyster pirate, and the whiskered wharf-rat, all with glasses in their hands. Was I a milk-and-water sop? No; a thousand times no, and a thousand glasses no. I downed the tumblerful like a man. French Frank was elated by the sale, which I had bound with a twenty-dollar goldpiece. He poured more wine. I had learned my strong head and stomach, and I was certain I could drink with them in a temperate way and not poison myself for a week to come. I could stand as much as they; and besides, they had already been drinking for some time. We got to singing. Spider sang "The Boston Burglar" and "Black Lulu." The Queen sang "Then I Wisht I Were a Little Bird." And her sister Tess sang "Oh, Treat My Daughter Kindily." The fun grew fast and furious. I found myself able to miss drinks without being noticed or called to account. Also, standing in the companionway, head and shoulders out and glass in hand, I could fling the wine overboard. I reasoned something like this: It is a queerness of these people that they like this vile-tasting wine. Well, let them. I cannot quarrel with their tastes. My manhood, according to their queer notions, must compel me to appear to like this wine. Very well. I shall so appear. But I shall drink no more than is unavoidable. And the Queen began to make love to me, the latest recruit to the oyster pirate fleet, and no mere hand, but a master and owner. She went upon deck to take the air, and took me with her. She knew, of course, but I never dreamed, how French Frank was raging down below. Then Tess joined us, sitting on the cabin; and Spider, and Bob; and at the last, Mrs. Hadley and French Frank. And we sat there, glasses in hand, and sang, while the big demijohn went around; and I was the only strictly sober one. And I enjoyed it as no one of them was able to enjoy it. Here, in this atmosphere of bohemianism, I could not but contrast the scene with my scene of the day before, sitting at my machine, in the stifling, shut-in air, repeating, endlessly repeating, at top speed, my series of mechanical motions. And here I sat now, glass in hand, in warm-glowing camaraderie, with the oyster pirates, adventurers who refused to be slaves to petty routine, who flouted restrictions and the law, who carried their lives and their liberty in their hands. And it was through John Barleycorn that I came to join this glorious company of free souls, unashamed and unafraid. And the afternoon seabreeze blew its tang into my lungs, and curled the waves in mid-channel. Before it came the scow schooners, wing-and-wing, blowing their horns for the drawbridges to open. Red-stacked tugs tore by, rocking the Razzle Dazzle in the waves of their wake. A sugar barque towed from the "boneyard" to sea. The sun-wash was on the crisping water, and life was big. And Spider sang: "Oh, it's Lulu, black Lulu, my darling, Oh, it's where have you been so long? Been layin' in jail, A-waitin' for bail, Till my bully comes rollin' along." There it was, the smack and slap of the spirit of revolt, of adventure, of romance, of the things forbidden and done defiantly and grandly. And I knew that on the morrow I would not go back to my machine at the cannery. To-morrow I would be an oyster pirate, as free a freebooter as the century and the waters of San Francisco Bay would permit. Spider had already agreed to sail with me as my crew of one, and, also, as cook while I did the deck work. We would outfit our grub and water in the morning, hoist the big mainsail (which was a bigger piece of canvas than any I had ever sailed under), and beat our way out the estuary on the first of the seabreeze and the last of the ebb. Then we would slack sheets, and on the first of the flood run down the bay to the Asparagus Islands, where we would anchor miles off shore. And at last my dream would be realised: I would sleep upon the water. And next morning I would wake upon the water; and thereafter all my days and nights would be on the water. And the Queen asked me to row her ashore in my skiff, when at sunset French Frank prepared to take his guests ashore. Nor did I catch the significance of his abrupt change of plan when he turned the task of rowing his skiff over to Whisky Bob, himself remaining on board the sloop. Nor did I understand Spider's grinning side-remark to me: "Gee! There's nothin' slow about YOU." How could it possibly enter my boy's head that a grizzled man of fifty should be jealous of me? CHAPTER VIII We met by appointment, early Monday morning, to complete the deal, in Johnny Heinhold's "Last Chance "--a saloon, of course, for the transactions of men. I paid the money over, received the bill of sale, and French Frank treated. This struck me as an evident custom, and a logical one--the seller, who receives the money, to wet a piece of it in the establishment where the trade was consummated. But, to my surprise, French Frank treated the house. He and I drank, which seemed just; but why should Johnny Heinhold, who owned the saloon and waited behind the bar, be invited to drink? I figured it immediately that he made a profit on the very drink he drank. I could, in a way, considering that they were friends and shipmates, understand Spider and Whisky Bob being asked to drink; but why should the longshoremen, Bill Kelley and Soup Kennedy, be asked? Then there was Pat, the Queen's brother, making a total of eight of us. It was early morning, and all ordered whisky. What could I do, here in this company of big men, all drinking whisky? "Whisky," I said, with the careless air of one who had said it a thousand times. And such whisky! I tossed it down. A-r-r-r-gh! I can taste it yet. And I was appalled at the price French Frank had paid--eighty cents. EIGHTY CENTS! It was an outrage to my thrifty soul. Eighty cents--the equivalent of eight long hours of my toil at the machine, gone down our throats, and gone like that, in a twinkling, leaving only a bad taste in the mouth. There was no discussion that French Frank was a waster. I was anxious to be gone, out into the sunshine, out over the water to my glorious boat. But all hands lingered. Even Spider, my crew, lingered. No hint broke through my obtuseness of why they lingered. I have often thought since of how they must have regarded me, the newcomer being welcomed into their company standing at bar with them, and not standing for a single round of drinks. French Frank, who, unknown to me, had swallowed his chagrin since the day before, now that the money for the Razzle Dazzle was in his pocket, began to behave curiously toward me. I sensed the change in his attitude, saw the forbidding glitter in his eyes, and wondered. The more I saw of men, the queerer they became. Johnny Heinhold leaned across the bar and whispered in my ear, "He's got it in for you. Watch out." I nodded comprehension of his statement, and acquiescence in it, as a man should nod who knows all about men. But secretly I was perplexed. Heavens! How was I, who had worked hard and read books of adventure, and who was only fifteen years old, who had not dreamed of giving the Queen of the Oyster Pirates a second thought, and who did not know that French Frank was madly and Latinly in love with her--how was I to guess that I had done him shame? And how was I to guess that the story of how the Queen had thrown him down on his own boat, the moment I hove in sight, was already the gleeful gossip of the water-front? And by the same token, how was I to guess that her brother Pat's offishness with me was anything else than temperamental gloominess of spirit? Whisky Bob got me aside a moment. "Keep your eyes open," he muttered. "Take my tip. French Frank's ugly. I'm going up river with him to get a schooner for oystering. When he gets down on the beds, watch out. He says he'll run you down. After dark, any time he's around, change your anchorage and douse your riding light. Savve?" Oh, certainly, I savve'd. I nodded my head, and, as one man to another, thanked him for his tip; and drifted back to the group at the bar. No; I did not treat. I never dreamed that I was expected to treat. I left with Spider, and my ears burn now as I try to surmise the things they must have said about me. I asked Spider, in an off-hand way, what was eating French Frank. "He's crazy jealous of you," was the answer. "Do you think so?" I said, and dismissed the matter as not worth thinking about. But I leave it to any one--the swell of my fifteen-years-old manhood at learning that French Frank, the adventurer of fifty, the sailor of all the seas of all the world, was jealous of me--and jealous over a girl most romantically named the Queen of the Oyster Pirates. I had read of such things in books, and regarded them as personal probabilities of a distant maturity. Oh, I felt a rare young devil, as we hoisted the big mainsail that morning, broke out anchor, and filled away close-hauled on the three-mile beat to windward out into the bay. Such was my escape from the killing machine-toil, and my introduction to the oyster pirates. True, the introduction had begun with drink, and the life promised to continue with drink. But was I to stay away from it for such reason? Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Romance and Adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third. Or else I must go back to my free library books and read of the deeds of other men and do no deeds of my own save slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a cannery. No; I was not to be deterred from this brave life on the water by the fact that the water-dwellers had queer and expensive desires for beer and wine and whisky. What if their notions of happiness included the strange one of seeing me drink? When they persisted in buying the stuff and thrusting it upon me, why, I would drink it. It was the price I would pay for their comradeship. And I didn't have to get drunk. I had not got drunk the Sunday afternoon I arranged to buy the Razzle Dazzle, despite the fact that not one of the rest was sober. Well, I could go on into the future that way, drinking the stuff when it gave them pleasure that I should drink it, but carefully avoiding over-drinking. CHAPTER IX Gradual as was my development as a heavy drinker among the oyster pirates, the real heavy drinking came suddenly, and was the result, not of desire for alcohol, but of an intellectual conviction. The more I saw of the life, the more I was enamoured of it. I can never forget my thrills the first night I took part in a concerted raid, when we assembled on board the Annie--rough men, big and unafraid, and weazened wharf-rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff low voices, and "Big" George with revolvers strapped about his waist to show that he meant business. Oh, I know, looking back, that the whole thing was sordid and silly. But I was not looking back in those days when I was rubbing shoulders with John Barleycorn and beginning to accept him. The life was brave and wild, and I was living the adventure I had read so much about. Nelson, "Young Scratch" they called him, to distinguish him from "Old Scratch," his father, sailed in the sloop Reindeer, partners with one "Clam." Clam was a dare-devil, but Nelson was a reckless maniac. He was twenty years old, with the body of a Hercules. When he was shot in Benicia, a couple of years later, the coroner said he was the greatest-shouldered man he had ever seen laid on a slab. Nelson could not read or write. He had been "dragged" up by his father on San Francisco Bay, and boats were second nature with him. His strength was prodigious, and his reputation along the water-front for violence was anything but savoury. He had Berserker rages and did mad, terrible things. I made his acquaintance the first cruise of the Razzle Dazzle, and saw him sail the Reindeer in a blow and dredge oysters all around the rest of us as we lay at two anchors, troubled with fear of going ashore. He was some man, this Nelson; and when, passing by the Last Chance saloon, he spoke to me, I felt very proud. But try to imagine my pride when he promptly asked me in to have a drink. I stood at the bar and drank a glass of beer with him, and talked manfully of oysters, and boats, and of the mystery of who had put the load of buckshot through the Annie's mainsail. We talked and lingered at the bar. It seemed to me strange that we lingered. We had had our beer. But who was I to lead the way outside when great Nelson chose to lean against the bar? After a few minutes, to my surprise, he asked me to have another drink, which I did. And still we talked, and Nelson evinced no intention of leaving the bar. Bear with me while I explain the way of my reasoning and of my innocence. First of all, I was very proud to be in the company of Nelson, who was the most heroic figure among the oyster pirates and bay adventurers. Unfortunately for my stomach and mucous membranes, Nelson had a strange quirk of nature that made him find happiness in treating me to beer. I had no moral disinclination for beer, and just because I didn't like the taste of it and the weight of it was no reason I should forgo the honour of his company. It was his whim to drink beer, and to have me drink beer with him. Very well, I would put up with the passing discomfort. So we continued to talk at the bar, and to drink beer ordered and paid for by Nelson. I think, now, when I look back upon it, that Nelson was curious. He wanted to find out just what kind of a gink I was. He wanted to see how many times I'd let him treat without offering to treat in return. After I had drunk half a dozen glasses, my policy of temperateness in mind, I decided that I had had enough for that time. So I mentioned that I was going aboard the Razzle Dazzle, then lying at the city wharf, a hundred yards away. I said good-bye to Nelson, and went on down the wharf. But, John Barleycorn, to the extent of six glasses, went with me. My brain tingled and was very much alive. I was uplifted by my sense of manhood. I, a truly-true oyster pirate, was going aboard my own boat after hob-nobbing in the Last Chance with Nelson, the greatest oyster pirate of us all. Strong in my brain was the vision of us leaning against the bar and drinking beer. And curious it was, I decided, this whim of nature that made men happy in spending good money for beer for a fellow like me who didn't want it. As I pondered this, I recollected that several times other men, in couples, had entered the Last Chance, and first one, then the other, had treated to drinks. I remembered, on the drunk on the Idler, how Scotty and the harpooner and myself had raked and scraped dimes and nickels with which to buy the whisky. Then came my boy code: when on a day a fellow gave another a "cannon-ball" or a chunk of taffy, on some other day he would expect to receive back a cannon-ball or a chunk of taffy. That was why Nelson had lingered at the bar. Having bought a drink, he had waited for me to buy one. I HAD LET HIM BUY SIX DRINKS AND NEVER ONCE OFFERED TO TREAT. And he was the great Nelson! I could feel myself blushing with shame. I sat down on the stringer-piece of the wharf and buried my face in my hands. And the heat of my shame burned up my neck and into my cheeks and forehead. I have blushed many times in my life, but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one. And sitting there on the stringer-piece in my shame, I did a great deal of thinking and transvaluing of values. I had been born poor. Poor I had lived. I had gone hungry on occasion. I had never had toys nor playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt. When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it without any outer garment. For the first time I mutinied against my mother--mutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store undershirt so all the world could see. Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child, with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have were those I got for myself. My meagre childhood developed meagreness. The first things I had been able to get for myself had been cigarette pictures, cigarette posters, and cigarette albums. I had not had the spending of the money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these treasures. I traded duplicates with the other boys, and circulating, as I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities for trading and acquiring. It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prize Fighters, etc. And each series I had three different ways: in the card from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album. Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I traded for other things that boys valued and which they usually bought with money given them by their parents. Naturally, they did not have the keen sense of values that I had, who was never given money to buy anything. I traded for postage-stamps, for minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for marbles (I had a more magnificent collection of agates than I have ever seen any boy possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful worth at least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty cents I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before he could redeem them). I'd trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it over in a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something that was worth something. I was famous as a trader. I was notorious as a miser. I could even make a junkman weep when I had dealings with him. Other boys called me in to sell for them their collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain, and gunny-sacks, and five-gallon oil-cans--aye, and gave me a commission for doing it. And this was the thrifty, close-fisted boy, accustomed to slave at a machine for ten cents an hour, who sat on the stringer-piece and considered the matter of beer at five cents a glass and gone in a moment with nothing to show for it. I was now with men I admired. I was proud to be with them. Had all my pinching and saving brought me the equivalent of one of the many thrills which had been mine since I came among the oyster pirates? Then what was worth while--money or thrills? These men had no horror of squandering a nickel, or many nickels. They were magnificently careless of money, calling up eight men to drink whisky at ten cents a glass, as French Frank had done. Why, Nelson had just spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us. Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave decision. I was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my comradeship with these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong drink. I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson still stood outside. "Come on and have a beer," I invited. Again we stood at the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I who paid ten cents! a whole hour of my labour at a machine for a drink of something I didn't want and which tasted rotten. But it wasn't difficult. I had achieved a concept. Money no longer counted. It was comradeship that counted. "Have another?" I said. And we had another, and I paid for it. Nelson, with the wisdom of the skilled drinker, said to the barkeeper, "Make mine a small one, Johnny." Johnny nodded and gave him a glass that contained only a third as much as the glasses we had been drinking. Yet the charge was the same--five cents. By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance didn't hurt me much. Besides, I was learning. There was more in this buying of drinks than mere quantity. I got my finger on it. There was a stage when the beer didn't count at all, but just the spirit of comradeship of drinking together. And, ha!--another thing! I, too, could call for small beers and minimise by two-thirds the detestable freightage with which comradeship burdened one. "I had to go aboard to get some money," I remarked casually, as we drank, in the hope Nelson would take it as an explanation of why I had let him treat six consecutive times. "Oh, well, you didn't have to do that," he answered. "Johnny'll trust a fellow like you--won't you, Johnny!" "Sure," Johnny agreed, with a smile. "How much you got down against me?" Nelson queried. Johnny pulled out the book he kept behind the bar, found Nelson's page, and added up the account of several dollars. At once I became possessed with a desire to have a page in that book. Almost it seemed the final badge of manhood. After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson decided to go. We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the wharf to the Razzle Dazzle. Spider was just building the fire for supper. "Where'd you get it?" he grinned up at me through the open companion. "Oh, I've been with Nelson," I said carelessly, trying to hide my pride. Then an idea came to me. Here was another one of them. Now that I had achieved my concept, I might as well practise it thoroughly. "Come on," I said, "up to Johnny's and have a drink." Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down. Clam was Nelson's partner, and he was a fine, brave, handsome, moustached man of thirty--everything, in short, that his nickname did not connote. "Come on," I said, "and have a drink." He came. As we turned into the Last Chance, there was Pat, the Queen's brother, coming out. "What's your hurry?" I greeted him. "We're having a drink. Come on along." "I've just had one," he demurred. "What of it?--we're having one now," I retorted. And Pat consented to join us, and I melted my way into his good graces with a couple of glasses of beer. Oh! I was learning things that afternoon about John Barleycorn. There was more in him than the bad taste when you swallowed him. Here, at the absurd cost of ten cents, a gloomy, grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy, was made into a good friend. He became even genial, his looks were kindly, and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and oyster-bed gossip. "Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered schooners. Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker, carelessly, casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had just occurred to me. Looking back, I am confident that the only one there who guessed I was a tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny Heinhold. "Where'd he get it?" I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny. "Oh, he's been sousin' here with Nelson all afternoon," was Johnny's answer. I never let on that I'd heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper was giving me a recommendation as a man. "HE'S BEEN SOUSIN' HERE WITH NELSON ALL AFTERNOON." Magic words! The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a beer glass! I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought the Razzle Dazzle. The glasses were filled and we were ready to drink. "Have something yourself, Johnny," I said, with an air of having intended to say it all the time, but of having been a trifle remiss because of the interesting conversation I had been holding with Clam and Pat. Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive, the strides I was making in my education, and poured himself whisky from his private bottle. This hit me for a moment on my thrifty side. He had taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us were drinking five-cent drinks! But the hurt was only for a moment. I dismissed it as ignoble, remembered my concept, and did not give myself away. "You'd better put me down in the book for this," I said, when we had finished the drink. And I had the satisfaction of seeing a fresh page devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round of drinks amounting to thirty cents. And I glimpsed, as through a golden haze, a future wherein that page would be much charged, and crossed off, and charged again. I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink. He treated us around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had arithmetically evened things up handsomely. "Let's go around to the St. Louis House," Spider suggested when we got outside. Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone home, and Clam had gone upon the Reindeer to cook supper. So around Spider and I went to the St. Louis House--my first visit--a huge bar-room, where perhaps fifty men, mostly longshoremen, were congregated. And there I met Soup Kennedy for the second time, and Bill Kelley. And Smith, of the Annie, drifted in--he of the belt-buckled revolvers. And Nelson showed up. And I met others, including the Vigy brothers, who ran the place, and, chiefest of all, Joe Goose, with the wicked eyes, the twisted nose, and the flowered vest, who played the harmonica like a roystering angel and went on the most atrocious tears that even the Oakland water-front could conceive of and admire. As I bought drinks--others treated as well--the thought flickered across my mind that Mammy Jennie wasn't going to be repaid much on her loan out of that week's earnings of the Razzle Dazzle. "But what of it?" I thought, or rather, John Barleycorn thought it for me. "You're a man and you're getting acquainted with men. Mammy Jennie doesn't need the money as promptly as all that. She isn't starving. You know that. She's got other money in the bank. Let her wait, and pay her back gradually." And thus it was I learned another trait of John Barleycorn. He inhibits morality. Wrong conduct that it is impossible for one to do sober, is done quite easily when one is not sober. In fact, it is the only thing one can do, for John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between one's immediate desires and long-learned morality. I dismissed my thought of debt to Mammy Jennie and proceeded to get acquainted at the trifling expense of some trifling money and a jingle that was growing unpleasant. Who took me on board and put me to bed that night I do not know, but I imagine it must have been Spider. CHAPTER X And so I won my manhood's spurs. My status on the water-front and with the oyster pirates became immediately excellent. I was looked upon as a good fellow, as well as no coward. And somehow, from the day I achieved that concept sitting on the stringer-piece of the Oakland City Wharf, I have never cared much for money. No one has ever considered me a miser since, while my carelessness of money is a source of anxiety and worry to some that know me. So completely did I break with my parsimonious past that I sent word home to my mother to call in the boys of the neighbourhood and give to them all my collections. I never even cared to learn what boys got what collections. I was a man now, and I made a clean sweep of everything that bound me to my boyhood. My reputation grew. When the story went around the water-front of how French Frank had tried to run me down with his schooner, and of how I had stood on the deck of the Razzle Dazzle, a cocked double-barrelled shotgun in my hands, steering with my feet and holding her to her course, and compelled him to put up his wheel and keep away, the water-front decided that there was something in me despite my youth. And I continued to show what was in me. There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with a bigger load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time when we raided far down in Lower Bay, and mine was the only craft back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning trade; and there was the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under a jib, when Scotty burned my mainsail. (Yes; it was Scotty of the Idler adventure. Irish had followed Spider on board the Razzle Dazzle, and Scotty, turning up, had taken Irish's place.) But the things I did on the water only partly counted. What completed everything, and won for me the title of "Prince of the Oyster Beds," was that I was a good fellow ashore with my money, buying drinks like a man. I little dreamed that the time would come when the Oakland water-front, which had shocked me at first would be shocked and annoyed by the devilry of the things I did. But always the life was tied up with drinking. The saloons are poor men's clubs. Saloons are congregating places. We engaged to meet one another in saloons. We celebrated our good fortune or wept our grief in saloons. We got acquainted in saloons. Can I ever forget the afternoon I met "Old Scratch," Nelson's father? It was in the Last Chance. Johnny Heinhold introduced us. That Old Scratch was Nelson's father was noteworthy enough. But there was more in it than that. He was owner and master of the scow-schooner Annie Mine, and some day I might ship as a sailor with him. Still more, he was romance. He was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, raw-boned Viking, big-bodied and strong-muscled despite his age. And he had sailed the seas in ships of all nations in the old savage sailing days. I had heard many weird tales about him, and worshipped him from a distance. It took the saloon to bring us together. Even so, our acquaintance might have been no more than a hand-grip and a word--he was a laconic old fellow--had it not been for the drinking. "Have a drink," I said, with promptitude, after the pause which I had learned good form in drinking dictates. Of course, while we drank our beer, which I had paid for, it was incumbent on him to listen to me and to talk to me. And Johnny, like a true host, made the tactful remarks that enabled us to find mutual topics of conversation. And of course, having drunk my beer, Captain Nelson must now buy beer in turn. This led to more talking, and Johnny drifted out of the conversation to wait on other customers. The more beer Captain Nelson and I drank, the better we got acquainted. In me he found an appreciative listener, who, by virtue of book-reading, knew much about the sea-life he had lived. So he drifted back to his wild young days, and spun many a rare yarn for me, while we downed beer, treat by treat, all through a blessed summer afternoon. And it was only John Barleycorn that made possible that long afternoon with the old sea-dog. It was Johnny Heinhold who secretly warned me across the bar that I was getting pickled and advised me to take small beers. But as long as Captain Nelson drank large beers, my pride forbade anything else than large beers. And not until the skipper ordered his first small beer did I order one for myself. Oh, when we came to a lingering fond farewell, I was drunk. But I had the satisfaction of seeing Old Scratch as drunk as I. My youthful modesty scarcely let me dare believe that the hardened old buccaneer was even more drunk. And afterwards, from Spider, and Pat, and Clam, and Johnny Heinhold, and others, came the tips that Old Scratch liked me and had nothing but good words for the fine lad I was. Which was the more remarkable, because he was known as a savage, cantankerous old cuss who never liked anybody. (His very nickname, "Scratch," arose from a Berserker trick of his, in fighting, of tearing off his opponent's face.) And that I had won his friendship, all thanks were due to John Barleycorn. I have given the incident merely as an example of the multitudinous lures and draws and services by which John Barleycorn wins his followers. CHAPTER XI And still there arose in me no desire for alcohol, no chemical demand. In years and years of heavy drinking, drinking did not beget the desire. Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way of the men with whom I lived. While away on my cruises on the bay, I took no drink along; and while out on the bay the thought of the desirableness of a drink never crossed my mind. It was not until I tied the Razzle Dazzle up to the wharf and got ashore in the congregating places of men, where drink flowed, that the buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of drinks from other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood rite. Then, too, there were the times, lying at the city wharf or across the estuary on the sand-spit, when the Queen, and her sister, and her brother Pat, and Mrs. Hadley came aboard. It was my boat, I was host, and I could only dispense hospitality in the terms of their understanding of it. So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or Scotty, or whoever was my crew, with the can for beer and the demijohn for red wine. And again, lying at the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and plain-clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in bottles. Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn. I valued him extremely well for his associations, but not for the taste of him. All the time I was striving to be a man amongst men, and all the time I nursed secret and shameful desires for candy. But I would have died before I'd let anybody guess it. I used to indulge in lonely debauches, on nights when I knew my crew was going to sleep ashore. I would go up to the Free Library, exchange my books, buy a quarter's worth of all sorts of candy that chewed and lasted, sneak aboard the Razzle Dazzle, lock myself in the cabin, go to bed, and lie there long hours of bliss, reading and chewing candy. And those were the only times I felt that I got my real money's worth. Dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store. As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. Drunks were always memorable. At such times things happened. Men like Joe Goose dated existence from drunk to drunk. The longshoremen all looked forward to their Saturday night drunk. We of the oyster boats waited until we had disposed of our cargoes before we got really started, though a scattering of drinks and a meeting of a chance friend sometimes precipitated an accidental drunk. In ways, the accidental drunks were the best. Stranger and more exciting things happened at such times. As, for instance, the Sunday when Nelson and French Frank and Captain Spink stole the stolen salmon boat from Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek. Changes had taken place in the personnel of the oyster boats. Nelson had got into a fight with Bill Kelley on the Annie and was carrying a bullet-hole through his left hand. Also, having quarrelled with Clam and broken partnership, Nelson had sailed the Reindeer, his arm in a sling, with a crew of two deep-water sailors, and he had sailed so madly as to frighten them ashore. Such was the tale of his recklessness they spread, that no one on the water-front would go out with Nelson. So the Reindeer, crewless, lay across the estuary at the sandspit. Beside her lay the Razzle Dazzle with a burned mainsail and Scotty and me on board. Whisky Bob had fallen out with French Frank and gone on a raid "up river" with Nicky the Greek. The result of this raid was a brand-new Columbia River salmon boat, stolen from an Italian fisherman. We oyster pirates were all visited by the searching Italian, and we were convinced, from what we knew of their movements, that Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek were the guilty parties. But where was the salmon boat? Hundreds of Greek and Italian fishermen, up river and down bay, had searched every slough and tule patch for it. When the owner despairingly offered a reward of fifty dollars, our interest increased and the mystery deepened. One Sunday morning old Captain Spink paid me a visit. The conversation was confidential. He had just been fishing in his skiff in the old Alameda ferry slip. As the tide went down, he had noticed a rope tied to a pile under water and leading downward. In vain he had tried to heave up what was fast on the other end. Farther along, to another pile, was a similar rope, leading downward and unheavable. Without doubt, it was the missing salmon boat. If we restored it to its rightful owner there was fifty dollars in it for us. But I had queer ethical notions about honour amongst thieves, and declined to have anything to do with the affair. But French Frank had quarrelled with Whisky Bob, and Nelson was also an enemy. (Poor Whisky Bob!--without viciousness, good-natured, generous, born weak, raised poorly, with an irresistible chemical demand for alcohol, still prosecuting his vocation of bay pirate, his body was picked up, not long afterward, beside a dock where it had sunk full of gunshot wounds.) Within an hour after I had rejected Captain Spink's proposal, I saw him sail down the estuary on board the Reindeer with Nelson. Also, French Frank went by on his schooner. It was not long ere they sailed back up the estuary, curiously side by side. As they headed in for the sandspit, the submerged salmon boat could be seen, gunwales awash and held up from sinking by ropes fast to the schooner and the sloop. The tide was half out, and they sailed squarely in on the sand, grounding in a row, with the salmon boat in the middle. Immediately Hans, one of French Frank's sailors, was into a skiff and pulling rapidly for the north shore. The big demijohn in the stern-sheets told his errand. They couldn't wait a moment to celebrate the fifty dollars they had so easily earned. It is the way of the devotees of John Barleycorn. When good fortune comes, they drink. When they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink. If their love-making be crowned with success, they are so happy they needs must drink. If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason. And if they haven't anything to do at all, why, they take a drink, secure in the knowledge that when they have taken a sufficient number of drinks the maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have their hands full with things to do. When they are sober they want to drink; and when they have drunk they want to drink more. Of course, as fellow comrades, Scotty and I were called in for the drinking. We helped to make a hole in that fifty dollars not yet received. The afternoon, from just an ordinary common summer Sunday afternoon, became a gorgeous, purple afternoon. We all talked and sang and ranted and bragged, and ever French Frank and Nelson sent more drinks around. We lay in full sight of the Oakland water-front, and the noise of our revels attracted friends. Skiff after skiff crossed the estuary and hauled up on the sandspit, while Hans' work was cut out for him--ever to row back and forth for more supplies of booze. Then Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek arrived, sober, indignant, outraged in that their fellow pirates had raised their plant. French Frank, aided by John Barleycorn, orated hypocritically about virtue and honesty, and, despite his fifty years, got Whisky Bob out on the sand and proceeded to lick him. When Nicky the Greek jumped in with a short-handled shovel to Whisky Bob's assistance, short work was made of him by Hans. And of course, when the bleeding remnants of Bob and Nicky were sent packing in their skiff, the event must needs be celebrated in further carousal. By this time, our visitors being numerous, we were a large crowd compounded of many nationalities and diverse temperaments, all aroused by John Barleycorn, all restraints cast off. Old quarrels revived, ancient hates flared up. Fight was in the air. And whenever a longshoreman remembered something against a scow-schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an oyster pirate remembered or was remembered, a fist shot out and another fight was on. And every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks, wherein the combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced each other and pledged undying friendship. And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and retrieve an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the trip he sailed with Clam. He had espoused Clam's side of the quarrel with Nelson. Also, he had been drinking in the St. Louis House, so that it was John Barleycorn who led him to the sandspit in quest of his old shirt. Few words started the fray. He locked with Nelson in the cockpit of the Reindeer, and in the mix-up barely escaped being brained by an iron bar wielded by irate French Frank--irate because a two-handed man had attacked a one-handed man. (If the Reindeer still floats, the dent of the iron bar remains in the hard-wood rail of her cockpit.) But Nelson pulled his bandaged hand, bullet-perforated, out of its sling, and, held by us, wept and roared his Berserker belief that he could lick Soup Kennedy one-handed. And we let them loose on the sand. Once, when it looked as if Nelson were getting the worst of it, French Frank and John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into the fight. Scotty protested and reached for French Frank, who whirled upon him and fell on top of him in a pummelling clinch after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In the course of separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst the rest of us. These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup Kennedy fought on. Occasionally we returned to them and gave advice, such as, when they lay exhausted in the sand, unable to strike a blow, "Throw sand in his eyes." And they threw sand in each other's eyes, recuperated, and fought on to successive exhaustions. And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of buccaneers and sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk. It was life raw and naked, wild and free--the only life of that sort which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a promise. It was the beginning. From the sandspit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but for high purposes and romantic ends. And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man like French Frank get away with him, we, too, brawled and added to the festivity of the sandspit. And Scotty threw up his job as crew, and departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging to me. During the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied in their bunks, the schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high water and swung about to their anchors. The salmon boat, still filled with rocks and water, rested on the bottom. In the morning, early, I heard wild cries from the Reindeer, and tumbled out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the water-front laugh for days. The beautiful salmon boat lay on the hard sand, squashed flat as a pancake, while on it were perched French Frank's schooner and the Reindeer. Unfortunately two of the Reindeer's planks had been crushed in by the stout oak stem of the salmon boat. The rising tide had flowed through the hole, and just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with him. I lent a hand, and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the damage. Then Nelson cooked breakfast, and while we ate we considered the situation. He was broke. So was I. The fifty dollars reward would never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand beneath us. He had a wounded hand and no crew. I had a burned main sail and no crew. "What d'ye say, you and me?" Nelson queried. "I'll go you," was my answer. And thus I became partners with "Young Scratch" Nelson, the wildest, maddest of them all. We borrowed the money for an outfit of grub from Johnny Heinhold, filled our water-barrels, and sailed away that day for the oyster-beds. CHAPTER XII Nor have I ever regretted those months of mad devilry I put in with Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually. And we abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider afield for our adventures. And all this glorious passage in my life was made possible for me by John Barleycorn. And this is my complaint against John Barleycorn. Here I was, thirsting for the wild life of adventure, and the only way for me to win to it was through John Barleycorn's mediation. It was the way of the men who lived the life. Did I wish to live the life, I must live it the way they did. It was by virtue of drinking that I gained that partnership and comradeship with Nelson. Had I drunk only the beer he paid for, or had I declined to drink at all, I should never have been selected by him as a partner. He wanted a partner who would meet him on the social side, as well as the work side of life. I abandoned myself to the life, and developed the misconception that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks, rising through the successive stages that only an iron constitution could endure to final stupefaction and swinish unconsciousness. I did not like the taste, so I drank for the sole purpose of getting drunk, of getting hopelessly, helplessly drunk. And I, who had saved and scraped, traded like a Shylock and made junkmen weep; I, who had stood aghast when French Frank, at a single stroke, spent eighty cents for whisky for eight men, I turned myself loose with a more lavish disregard for money than any of them. I remember going ashore one night with Nelson. In my pocket were one hundred and eighty dollars. It was my intention, first, to buy me some clothes, after that, some drinks. I needed the clothes. All I possessed were on me, and they were as follows: a pair of sea-boots that providentially leaked the water out as fast as it ran in, a pair of fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton shirt, and a sou'wester. I had no hat, so I had to wear the sou'wester, and it will be noted that I have listed neither underclothes nor socks. I didn't own any. To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass a dozen saloons. So I bought me the drinks first. I never got to the clothing stores. In the morning, broke, poisoned, but contented, I came back on board, and we set sail. I possessed only the clothes I had gone ashore in, and not a cent remained of the one hundred and eighty dollars. It might well be deemed impossible, by those who have never tried it, that in twelve hours a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for drinks. I know otherwise. And I had no regrets. I was proud. I had shown them I could spend with the best of them. Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong. I had clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of "Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil. Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage, then I'd like to know what is. Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John Barleycorn during this period, and shall only mention events that will throw light on John Barleycorn's ways. There were three things that enabled me to pursue this heavy drinking: first, a magnificent constitution far better than the average; second, the healthy open-air life on the water; and third, the fact that I drank irregularly. While out on the water, we never carried any drink along. The world was opening up to me. Already I knew several hundred miles of the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and fishing hamlets on the shores. Came the whisper to range farther. I had not found it yet. There was more behind. But even this much of the world was too wide for Nelson. He wearied for his beloved Oakland water-front, and when he elected to return to it we separated in all friendliness. I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my headquarters. In a cluster of fishermen's arks, moored in the tules on the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and vagabonds, and I joined them. I had longer spells ashore, between fooling with salmon fishing and making raids up and down bay and rivers as a deputy fish patrolman, and I drank more and learned more about drinking. I held my own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to show the strength of my manhood. When, on a morning, my unconscious carcass was disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I had stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-front talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another drink, I was proud indeed. It was an exploit. And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three solid weeks, I was certain I had reached the top. Surely, in that direction, one could go no farther. It was time for me to move on. For always, drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that this carousing and bay-adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and away over the world. It was not canniness on my part. It was curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for things wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was something more, away and beyond. (And, in relation to my much later development as a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the things at the back of life, must be noted, for it was destined to play a dire part in my more recent wrestlings with John Barleycorn.) But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed abysses of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o'clock in the morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled overboard. There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was borne away by the current. I was not startled. I thought the misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the water with my skin soothed me like cool linen. And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights of philosophy, nor seen with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of the gorgeous world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all, lived all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the heels of my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death. Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and it didn't amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had lived for months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation and the old feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best, and I could see for myself what it was worth. There were all the broken-down old bums and loafers I had bought drinks for. That was what remained of life. Did I want to become like them? A thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet sadness over my glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not seen the weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in all the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.) The water was delicious. It was a man's way to die. John Barleycorn changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain. Away with tears and regret. It was a hero's death, and by the hero's own hand and will. So I struck up my death-chant and was singing it lustily, when the gurgle and splash of the current-riffles in my ears reminded me of my more immediate situation. Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the Straits widen out into what bay-farers call the "Bight of Turner's Shipyard." I was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano wharf and on into the bight. I knew of old the power of the suck which developed when the tide swung around the end of Dead Man's Island and drove straight for the wharf. I didn't want to go through those piles. It wouldn't be nice, and I might lose an hour in the bight on my way out with the tide. I undressed in the water and struck out with a strong, single-overhand stroke, crossing the current at right-angles. Nor did I cease until, by the wharf lights, I knew I was safe to sweep by the end. Then I turned over and rested. The stroke had been a telling one, and I was a little time in recovering my breath. I was elated, for I had succeeded in avoiding the suck. I started to raise my death-chant again--a purely extemporised farrago of a drug-crazed youth. "Don't sing--yet," whispered John Barleycorn. "The Solano runs all night. There are railroad men on the wharf. They will hear you, and come out in a boat and rescue you, and you don't want to be rescued." I certainly didn't. What? Be robbed of my hero's death? Never. And I lay on my back in the starlight, watching the familiar wharf-lights go by, red and green and white, and bidding sad sentimental farewell to them, each and all. When I was well clear, in mid-channel, I sang again. Sometimes I swam a few strokes, but in the main I contented myself with floating and dreaming long drunken dreams. Before daylight, the chill of the water and the passage of the hours had sobered me sufficiently to make me wonder what portion of the Straits I was in, and also to wonder if the turn of the tide wouldn't catch me and take me back ere I had drifted out into San Pablo Bay. Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite sober, and that I didn't in the least want to be drowned. I could make out the Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare Island lighthouse. I started to swim for the Solano shore, but was too weak and chilled, and made so little headway, and at the cost of such painful effort, that I gave it up and contented myself with floating, now and then giving a stroke to keep my balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their commotion on the surface of the water. And I knew fear. I was sober now, and I didn't want to die. I discovered scores of reasons for living. And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed that I was going to drown anyway. Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a parlous condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where the swift ebbs from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were fighting with each other, and where, at that particular moment, they were fighting the flood tide setting up against them from San Pablo Bay. A stiff breeze had sprung up, and the crisp little waves were persistently lapping into my mouth, and I was beginning to swallow salt water. With my swimmer's knowledge, I knew the end was near. And then the boat came--a Greek fisherman running in for Vallejo; and again I had been saved from John Barleycorn by my constitution and physical vigour. And, in passing, let me note that this maniacal trick John Barleycorn played me is nothing uncommon. An absolute statistic of the percentage of suicides due to John Barleycorn would be appalling. In my case, healthy, normal, young, full of the joy of life, the suggestion to kill myself was unusual; but it must be taken into account that it came on the heels of a long carouse, when my nerves and brain were fearfully poisoned, and that the dramatic, romantic side of my imagination, drink-maddened to lunacy, was delighted with the suggestion. And yet, the older, more morbid drinkers, more jaded with life and more disillusioned, who kill themselves, do so usually after a long debauch, when their nerves and brains are thoroughly poison-soaked. CHAPTER XIII So I left Benicia, where John Barleycorn had nearly got me, and ranged wider afield in pursuit of the whisper from the back of life to come and find. And wherever I ranged, the way lay along alcohol-drenched roads. Men still congregated in saloons. They were the poor-man's clubs, and they were the only clubs to which I had access. I could get acquainted in saloons. I could go into a saloon and talk with any man. In the strange towns and cities I wandered through, the only place for me to go was the saloon. I was no longer a stranger in any town the moment I had entered a saloon. And right here let me break in with experiences no later than last year. I harnessed four horses to a light trap, took Charmian along, and drove for three months and a half over the wildest mountain parts of California and Oregon. Each morning I did my regular day's work of writing fiction. That completed, I drove on through the middle of the day and the afternoon to the next stop. But the irregularity of occurrence of stopping-places, coupled with widely varying road conditions, made it necessary to plan, the day before, each day's drive and my work. I must know when I was to start driving in order to start writing in time to finish my day's output. Thus, on occasion, when the drive was to be long, I would be up and at my writing by five in the morning. On easier driving days I might not start writing till nine o'clock. But how to plan? As soon as I arrived in a town, and put the horses up, on the way from the stable to the hotel I dropped into the saloons. First thing, a drink--oh, I wanted the drink, but also it must not be forgotten that, because of wanting to know things, it was in this very way I had learned to want a drink. Well, the first thing, a drink. "Have something yourself," to the barkeeper. And then, as we drink, my opening query about roads and stopping-places on ahead. "Let me see," the barkeeper will say, "there's the road across Tarwater Divide. That used to be good. I was over it three years ago. But it was blocked this spring. Say, I'll tell you what. I'll ask Jerry----" And the barkeeper turns and addresses some man sitting at a table or leaning against the bar farther along, and who may be Jerry, or Tom, or Bill. "Say, Jerry, how about the Tarwater road? You was down to Wilkins last week." And while Bill or Jerry or Tom is beginning to unlimber his thinking and speaking apparatus, I suggest that he join us in the drink. Then discussions arise about the advisability of this road or that, what the best stopping-places may be, what running time I may expect to make, where the best trout streams are, and so forth, in which other men join, and which are punctuated with more drinks. Two or three more saloons, and I accumulate a warm jingle and come pretty close to knowing everybody in town, all about the town, and a fair deal about the surrounding country. I know the lawyers, editors, business men, local politicians, and the visiting ranchers, hunters, and miners, so that by evening, when Charmian and I stroll down the main street and back, she is astounded by the number of my acquaintances in that totally strange town. And thus is demonstrated a service John Barleycorn renders, a service by which he increases his power over men. And over the world, wherever I have gone, during all the years, it has been the same. It may be a cabaret in the Latin Quarter, a cafe in some obscure Italian village, a boozing ken in sailor-town, and it may be up at the club over Scotch and soda; but always it will be where John Barleycorn makes fellowship that I get immediately in touch, and meet, and know. And in the good days coming, when John Barleycorn will have been banished out of existence along with the other barbarisms, some other institution than the saloon will have to obtain, some other congregating place of men where strange men and stranger men may get in touch, and meet, and know. But to return to my narrative. When I turned my back on Benicia, my way led through saloons. I had developed no moral theories against drinking, and I disliked as much as ever the taste of the stuff. But I had grown respectfully suspicious of John Barleycorn. I could not forget that trick he had played on me--on me who did not want to die. So I continued to drink, and to keep a sharp eye on John Barleycorn, resolved to resist all future suggestions of self-destruction. In strange towns I made immediate acquaintances in the saloons. When I hoboed, and hadn't the price of a bed, a saloon was the only place that would receive me and give me a chair by the fire. I could go into a saloon and wash up, brush my clothes, and comb my hair. And saloons were always so damnably convenient. They were everywhere in my western country. I couldn't go into the dwellings of strangers that way. Their doors were not open to me; no seats were there for me by their fires. Also, churches and preachers I had never known. And from what I didn't know I was not attracted toward them. Besides, there was no glamour about them, no haze of romance, no promise of adventure. They were the sort with whom things never happened. They lived and remained always in the one place, creatures of order and system, narrow, limited, restrained. They were without greatness, without imagination, without camaraderie. It was the good fellows, easy and genial, daring, and, on occasion, mad, that I wanted to know--the fellows, generous-hearted and -handed, and not rabbit-hearted. And here is another complaint I bring against John Barleycorn. It is these good fellows that he gets--the fellows with the fire and the go in them, who have bigness, and warmness, and the best of the human weaknesses. And John Barleycorn puts out the fire, and soddens the agility, and, when he does not more immediately kill them or make maniacs of them, he coarsens and grossens them, twists and malforms them out of the original goodness and fineness of their natures. Oh!--and I speak out of later knowledge--Heaven forefend me from the most of the average run of male humans who are not good fellows, the ones cold of heart and cold of head who don't smoke, drink, or swear, or do much of anything else that is brase, and resentful, and stinging, because in their feeble fibres there has never been the stir and prod of life to well over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. One doesn't meet these in saloons, nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the adventure-paths, nor loving as God's own mad lovers. They are too busy keeping their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity. And so I draw the indictment home to John Barleycorn. It is just those, the good fellows, the worth while, the fellows with the weakness of too much strength, too much spirit, too much fire and flame of fine devilishness, that he solicits and ruins. Of course, he ruins weaklings; but with them, the worst we breed, I am not here concerned. My concern is that it is so much of the best we breed whom John Barleycorn destroys. And the reason why these best are destroyed is because John Barleycorn stands on every highway and byway, accessible, law-protected, saluted by the policeman on the beat, speaking to them, leading them by the hand to the places where the good fellows and daring ones forgather and drink deep. With John Barleycorn out of the way, these daring ones would still be born, and they would do things instead of perishing. Always I encountered the camaraderie of drink. I might be walking down the track to the water-tank to lie in wait for a passing freight-train, when I would chance upon a bunch of "alki-stiffs." An alki-stiff is a tramp who drinks druggist's alcohol. Immediately, with greeting and salutation, I am taken into the fellowship. The alcohol, shrewdly blended with water, is handed to me, and soon I am caught up in the revelry, with maggots crawling in my brain and John Barleycorn whispering to me that life is big, and that we are all brave and fine--free spirits sprawling like careless gods upon the turf and telling the two-by-four, cut-and-dried, conventional world to go hang. CHAPTER XIV Back in Oakland from my wanderings, I returned to the water-front and renewed my comradeship with Nelson, who was now on shore all the time and living more madly than before. I, too, spent my time on shore with him, only occasionally going for cruises of several days on the bay to help out on short-handed scow-schooners. The result was that I was no longer reinvigorated by periods of open-air abstinence and healthy toil. I drank every day, and whenever opportunity offered I drank to excess; for I still laboured under the misconception that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in drinking to bestiality and unconsciousness. I became pretty thoroughly alcohol-soaked during this period. I practically lived in saloons; became a bar-room loafer, and worse. And right here was John Barleycorn getting me in a more insidious though no less deadly way than when he nearly sent me out with the tide. I had a few months still to run before I was seventeen; I scorned the thought of a steady job at anything; I felt myself a pretty tough individual in a group of pretty tough men; and I drank because these men drank and because I had to make good with them. I had never had a real boyhood, and in this, my precocious manhood, I was very hard and woefully wise. Though I had never known girl's love even, I had crawled through such depths that I was convinced absolutely that I knew the last word about love and life. And it wasn't a pretty knowledge. Without being pessimistic, I was quite satisfied that life was a rather cheap and ordinary affair. You see, John Barleycorn was blunting me. The old stings and prods of the spirit were no longer sharp. Curiosity was leaving me. What did it matter what lay on the other side of the world? Men and women, without doubt, very much like the men and women I knew; marrying and giving in marriage and all the petty run of petty human concerns; and drinks, too. But the other side of the world was a long way to go for a drink. I had but to step to the corner and get all I wanted at Joe Vigy's. Johnny Heinhold still ran the Last Chance. And there were saloons on all the corners and between the corners. The whispers from the back of life were growing dim as my mind and body soddened. The old unrest was drowsy. I might as well rot and die here in Oakland as anywhere else. And I should have so rotted and died, and not in very long order either, at the pace John Barleycorn was leading me, had the matter depended wholly on him. I was learning what it was to have no appetite. I was learning what it was to get up shaky in the morning, with a stomach that quivered, with fingers touched with palsy, and to know the drinker's need for a stiff glass of whisky neat in order to brace up. (Oh! John Barleycorn is a wizard dopester. Brain and body, scorched and jangled and poisoned, return to be tuned up by the very poison that caused the damage.) There is no end to John Barleycorn's tricks. He had tried to inveigle me into killing myself. At this period he was doing his best to kill me at a fairly rapid pace. But, not satisfied with that, he tried another dodge. He very nearly got me, too, and right there I learned a lesson about him--became a wiser, a more skilful drinker. I learned there were limits to my gorgeous constitution, and that there were no limits to John Barleycorn. I learned that in a short hour or two he could master my strong head, my broad shoulders and deep chest, put me on my back, and with a devil's grip on my throat proceed to choke the life out of me. Nelson and I were sitting in the Overland House. It was early in the evening, and the only reason we were there was because we were broke and it was election time. You see, in election time local politicians, aspirants for office, have a way of making the rounds of the saloons to get votes. One is sitting at a table, in a dry condition, wondering who is going to turn up and buy him a drink, or if his credit is good at some other saloon and if it's worth while to walk that far to find out, when suddenly the saloon doors swing wide, and enters a bevy of well-dressed men, themselves usually wide and exhaling an atmosphere of prosperity and fellowship. They have smiles and greetings for everybody--for you, without the price of a glass of beer in your pocket, for the timid hobo who lurks in the corner and who certainly hasn't a vote, but who may establish a lodging-house registration. And do you know, when these politicians swing wide the doors and come in, with their broad shoulders, their deep chests, and their generous stomachs which cannot help making them optimists and masters of life, why, you perk right up. It's going to be a warm evening after all, and you know you'll get a souse started at the very least. And--who knows?--the gods may be kind, other drinks may come, and the night culminate in glorious greatness. And the next thing you know, you are lined up at the bar, pouring drinks down your throat and learning the gentlemen's names and the offices which they hope to fill. It was during this period, when the politicians went their saloon rounds, that I was getting bitter bits of education and having illusions punctured--I, who had pored and thrilled over "The Rail-Splitter," and "From Canal Boy to President." Yes, I was learning how noble politics and politicians are. Well, on this night, broke, thirsty, but with the drinker's faith in the unexpected drink, Nelson and I sat in the Overland House waiting for something to turn up, especially politicians. And there entered Joe Goose--he of the unquenchable thirst, the wicked eyes, the crooked nose, the flowered vest. "Come on, fellows--free booze--all you want of it. I didn't want you to miss it." "Where?" we wanted to know. "Come on. I'll tell you as we go along. We haven't a minute to lose." And as we hurried up town, Joe Goose explained: "It's the Hancock Fire Brigade. All you have to do is wear a red shirt and a helmet, and carry a torch. "They're going down on a special train to Haywards to parade." (I think the place was Haywards. It may have been San Leandro or Niles. And, to save me, I can't remember whether the Hancock Fire Brigade was a republican or a democratic organisation. But anyway, the politicians who ran it were short of torch-bearers, and anybody who would parade could get drunk if he wanted to.) "The town'll be wide open," Joe Goose went on. "Booze? It'll run like water. The politicians have bought the stocks of the saloons. There'll be no charge. All you got to do is walk right up and call for it. We'll raise hell." At the hall, on Eighth Street near Broadway, we got into the firemen's shirts and helmets, were equipped with torches, and, growling because we weren't given at least one drink before we started, were herded aboard the train. Oh, those politicians had handled our kind before. At Haywards there were no drinks either. Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night. We paraded. Then the saloons were opened. Extra barkeepers had been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drink-drenched and unwiped bar. There was no time to wipe the bar, nor wash glasses, nor do anything save fill glasses. The Oakland water-front can be real thirsty on occasion. This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too slow for us. The drink was ours. The politicians had bought it for us. We'd paraded and earned it, hadn't we? So we made a flank attack around the end of the bar, shoved the protesting barkeepers aside, and helped ourselves to bottles. Outside, we knocked the necks of the bottles off against the concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all he could get--especially when it didn't cost anything. We shared our bottles with others, and drank a good portion ourselves, while I drank most of all. And I didn't like the stuff. I drank it as I had drunk beer at five, and wine at seven. I mastered my qualms and downed it like so much medicine. And when we wanted more bottles, we went into other saloons where the free drink was flowing, and helped ourselves. I haven't the slightest idea of how much I drank--whether it was two quarts or five. I do know that I began the orgy with half-pint draughts and with no water afterward to wash the taste away or to dilute the whisky. Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with drunks from the water-front of Oakland. When train time came, there was a round-up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon, and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade. I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my lungs panting for air. My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I remained at the rear of the procession. I left the ranks and ran down a pathway beside the road under broad-spreading trees. Nelson pursued me, laughing. Certain things stand out, as in memories of nightmare. I remember those trees especially, and my desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell, roars of laughter went up from the other drunks. They thought I was merely antic drunk. They did not dream that John Barleycorn had me by the throat in a death-clutch. But I knew it. And I remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not know. It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators who thought I was cutting up tricks for their entertainment. And running there under the trees, I fell and lost consciousness. What happened afterward, with one glimmering exception, I had to be told. Nelson, with his enormous strength, picked me up and dragged me on and aboard the train. When he had got me into a seat, I fought and panted so terribly for air that even with his obtuseness he knew I was in a bad way. And right there, at any moment, I know now, I might have died. I often think it is the nearest to death I have ever been. I have only Nelson's description of my behaviour to go by. I was scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire and suffocation, and I wanted air. I madly wanted air. My efforts to raise a window were vain, for all the windows in the car were screwed down. Nelson had seen drink-crazed men, and thought I wanted to throw myself out. He tried to restrain me, but I fought on. I seized some man's torch and smashed the glass. Now there were pro-Nelson and anti-Nelson factions on the Oakland water-front, and men of both factions, with more drink in them than was good, filled the car. My smashing of the window was the signal for the antis. One of them reached for me, and dropped me, and started the fight, of all of which I have no knowledge save what was told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body, Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all fight had its course. This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. My violent struggles had only accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart, and increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs. After the fight was over and I came to, I did not come to myself. I was no more myself than a drowning man is who continues to struggle after he has lost consciousness. I have no memory of my actions, but I cried "Air! Air!" so insistently, that it dawned on Nelson that I did not contemplate self-destruction. So he cleared the jagged glass from the window-ledge and let me stick my head and shoulders out. He realised, partially, the seriousness of my condition, and held me by the waist to prevent me from crawling farther out. And for the rest of the run in to Oakland I kept my head and shoulders out, fighting like a maniac whenever he tried to draw me inside. And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came. My sole recollection, from the time I fell under the trees until I awoke the following evening, is of my head out of the window, facing the wind caused by the train, cinders striking and burning and blinding me, while I breathed with will. All my will was concentrated on breathing--on breathing the air in the hugest lung-full gulps I could, pumping the greatest amount of air into my lungs in the shortest possible time. It was that or death, and I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for life. All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been called in. And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the others, deeming me merely "sleeping off my drunk," had let me lie there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as every doctor knows, has died of the sudden impact of a quart or more of whisky. Usually one reads of them so dying, strong drinkers, on account of a wager. But I didn't know--then. And so I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit, dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another year to come. Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and wisely alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that intervening score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a shave I ran, how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a century that has been mine. And, oh, it wasn't John Barleycorn's fault that he didn't get me that night of the Hancock Fire Brigade. CHAPTER XV It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to sea. My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little responsible for this. I still drank and frequented saloons--practically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too, fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad trains, and bar-rooms, one must use judgment. To get drunk after the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with discretion. No more quarts of whisky for me. What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his devotees. It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time. It struck me, from watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were living was more destructive than that lived by the average man. John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime. Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of doing sober. And this wasn't the worst of it. It was the penalty that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon-mates I drank with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent and lunatic things when they were drunk. And then the police gathered them in and they vanished from our ken. Sometimes I visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed across the bay to put on the felon's stripes. And time and again I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-DONE IT." And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-hardened soul. The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent provocation. When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out. Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the circumstances, might just as easily have been his head. So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a bad way of living. It made toward death too quickly to suit my youth and vitality. And there was only one way out of this hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out. The sealing fleet was wintering in San Francisco Bay, and in the saloons I met skippers, mates, hunters, boat-steerers, and boat-pullers. I met the seal-hunter, Pete Holt, and agreed to be his boat-puller and to sign on any schooner he signed on. And I had to have half a dozen drinks with Pete Holt there and then to seal our agreement. And at once awoke all my old unrest that John Barleycorn had put to sleep. I found myself actually bored with the saloon life of the Oakland water-front, and wondered what I had ever found fascinating in it. Also, with this death-road concept in my brain, I began to grow afraid that something would happen to me before sailing day, which was set for some time in January. I lived more circumspectly, drank less deeply, and went home more frequently. When drinking grew too wild, I got out. When Nelson was in his maniacal cups, I managed to get separated from him. On the 12th of January, 1893, I was seventeen, and the 20th of January I signed before the shipping commissioner the articles of the Sophie Sutherland, a three topmast sealing schooner bound on a voyage to the coast of Japan. And of course we had to drink on it. Joe Vigy cashed my advance note, and Pete Holt treated, and I treated, and Joe Vigy treated, and other hunters treated. Well, it was the way of men, and who was I, just turned seventeen, that I should decline the way of life of these fine, chesty, man-grown men? CHAPTER XVI There was nothing to drink on the Sophie Sutherland, and we had fifty-one days of glorious sailing, taking the southern passage in the north-east trades to Bonin Islands. This isolated group, belonging to Japan, had been selected as the rendezvous of the Canadian and American sealing fleets. Here they filled their water-barrels and made repairs before starting on the hundred days' harrying of the seal-herd along the northern coasts of Japan to Behring Sea. Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put me in splendid fettle. The alcohol had been worked out of my system, and from the moment the voyage began I had not known the desire for a drink. I doubt if I even thought once about a drink. Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks, remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than all the other passages of their adventurous lives. In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He was a broken skipper. John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was winding up his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle. His case made quite an impression on me. John Barleycorn did other things beside kill a man. He hadn't killed Louis. He had done much worse. He had robbed him of power and place and comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath lasted, which promised to be for a long time. We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic peaks, jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the reefs to the land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down where lay a score or more of sea-gypsies like ourselves. The scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land. Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and Japanese, in queerer sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard. It was my first foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and I would see all I had read in the books come true. I was wild to get ashore. Victor and Axel, a Swede and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep together. (And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing, among the palms and flowers. We would go over that path, he said, and we agreed, and we would see beautiful scenery, and strange native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, what adventure at the end. And Axel was keen to go fishing. The three of us agreed to that, too. We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great sport. As for me, I was keen for anything. And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living coral and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand. We walked across the fringe of beach under the cocoanut-palms and into the little town, and found several hundred riotous seamen from all the world, drinking prodigiously, singing prodigiously, dancing prodigiously--and all on the main street to the scandal of a helpless handful of Japanese police. Victor and Axel said that we'd have a drink before we started on our long walk. Could I decline to drink with these two chesty shipmates? Drinking together, glass in hand, put the seal on comradeship. It was the way of life. Our teetotaler owner-captain was laughed at, and sneered at, by all of us because of his teetotalism. I didn't in the least want a drink, but I did want to be a good fellow and a good comrade. Nor did Louis' case deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching stuff down my throat. John Barleycorn had thrown Louis to a nasty fall, but I was young. My blood ran full and red; I had a constitution of iron; and--well, youth ever grins scornfully at the wreckage of age. Queer, fierce, alcoholic stuff it was that we drank. There was no telling where or how it had been manufactured--some native concoction most likely. But it was hot as fire, pale as water, and quick as death with its kick. It had been filled into empty "square-face" bottles which had once contained Holland gin, and which still bore the fitting legend "Anchor Brand." It certainly anchored us. We never got out of the town. We never went fishing in the sampan. And though we were there ten days, we never trod that wild path along the lava cliffs and among the flowers. We met old acquaintances from other schooners, fellows we had met in the saloons of San Francisco before we sailed. And each meeting meant a drink; and there was much to talk about; and more drinks; and songs to be sung; and pranks and antics to be performed, until the maggots of imagination began to crawl, and it all seemed great and wonderful to me, these lusty hard-bitten sea-rovers, of whom I made one, gathered in wassail on a coral strand. Old lines about knights at table in the great banquet halls, and of those above the salt and below the salt, and of Vikings feasting fresh from sea and ripe for battle, came to me; and I knew that the old times were not dead and that we belonged to that selfsame ancient breed. By mid-afternoon Victor went mad with drink, and wanted to fight everybody and everything. I have since seen lunatics in the violent wards of asylums that seemed to behave in no wise different from Victor's way, save that perhaps he was more violent. Axel and I interfered as peacemakers, were roughed and jostled in the mix-ups, and finally, with infinite precaution and intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our chum down to the boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner. But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to clean up the ship. He had the strength of several men, and he ran amuck with it. I remember especially one man whom he got into the chain-boxes but failed to damage through inability to hit him. The man dodged and ducked, and Victor broke all the knuckles of both his fists against the huge links of the anchor chain. By the time we dragged him out of that, his madness had shifted to the belief that he was a great swimmer, and the next moment he was overboard and demonstrating his ability by floundering like a sick porpoise and swallowing much salt water. We rescued him, and by the time we got him below, undressed, and into his bunk, we were wrecks ourselves. But Axel and I wanted to see more of shore, and away we went, leaving Victor snoring. It was curious, the judgment passed on Victor by his shipmates, drinkers themselves. They shook their heads disapprovingly and muttered: "A man like that oughtn't to drink." Now Victor was the smartest sailor and best-tempered shipmate in the forecastle. He was an all-round splendid type of seaman; his mates recognised his worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John Barleycorn metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the very point these drinkers made. They knew that drink--and drink with a sailor is always excessive--made them mad, but only mildly mad. Violent madness was objectionable because it spoiled the fun of others and often culminated in tragedy. From their standpoint, mild madness was all right. But from the standpoint of the whole human race, is not all madness objectionable? And is there a greater maker of madness of all sorts than John Barleycorn? But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable drink talked of the afternoon's happenings. We liked the quietness of that drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in, several shipmates dropped in, and we had more quiet drinks. Finally, just as we had engaged a Japanese orchestra, and as the first strains of the samisens and taikos were rising, through the paper-walls came a wild howl from the street. We recognised it. Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood-shot eyes and wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted blood, anybody's blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went through doorways, and we went through paper-walls--anything to get away. And after the place was half wrecked, and we had agreed to pay the damage, leaving Victor partly subdued and showing symptoms of lapsing into a comatose state, Axel and I wandered away in quest of a quieter drinking-place. The main street was a madness. Hundreds of sailors rollicked up and down. Because the chief of police with his small force was helpless, the governor of the colony had issued orders to the captains to have all their men on board by sunset. What! To be treated in such fashion! As the news spread among the schooners, they were emptied. Everybody came ashore. Men who had had no intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The unfortunate governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch for all hands. It was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to see anybody try to put them on board. They went around inviting the authorities to try to put them on board. In front of the governor's house they were gathered thickest, bawling sea-songs, circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper houses of Japan. The governor never issued the order to clear the streets, and Axel and I wandered on from drink to drink. After a time, in some of the antics, getting hazy myself, I lost him. I drifted along, making new acquaintances, downing more drinks, getting hazier and hazier. I remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle with Japanese fishermen, Kanaka boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young Danish sailor fresh from cowboying in the Argentine and with a penchant for native customs and ceremonials. And with due and proper and most intricate Japanese ceremonial we of the circle drank saki, pale, mild, and lukewarm, from tiny porcelain bowls. And, later, I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young--youths like me, learning the way of their feet in the world of men. And they WERE men. No mild saki for them, but square faces illicitly refilled with corrosive fire that flamed through their veins and burst into conflagrations in their heads. I remember a melting song they sang, the refrain of which was: "'Tis but a little golden ring, I give it to thee with pride, Wear it for your mother's sake When you are on the tide." They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who had all broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and wept with them, and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on life and romance. And one last picture I have, standing out very clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are swaying and clinging to one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life is great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad. And next, after the blackness, I open my eyes in the early dawn to see a Japanese woman, solicitously anxious, bending over me. She is the port pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway. I am chilled and shivering, sick with the after-sickness of debauch. And I feel lightly clad. Those rascals of runaway apprentices! They have acquired the habit of running away. They have run away with my possessions. My watch is gone. My few dollars are gone. My coat is gone. So is my belt. And yes, my shoes. And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin Islands. Victor got over his lunacy, rejoined Axel and me, and after that we caroused somewhat more discreetly. And we never climbed that lava path among the flowers. The town and the square faces were all we saw. One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire. I might have seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands, if I had done what I ought to have done. But, as I see it, it is not a matter of what one ought to do, or ought not to do. It is what one DOES do. That is the everlasting, irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of men over the world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it because the way led to it, because I was only a human boy, a creature of my environment, and neither an anaemic nor a god. I was just human, and I was taking the path in the world that men took--men whom I admired, if you please; full-blooded men, lusty, breedy, chesty men, free spirits and anything but niggards in the way they foamed life away. And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard where children play. It is small use to tell the brave little boys toddling their way along into knowledge of life that they mustn't play near the uncovered well. They'll play near it. Any parent knows that. And we know that a certain percentage of them, the livest and most daring, will fall into the well. The thing to do--we all know it--is to cover up the well. The case is the same with John Barleycorn. All the no-saying and no-preaching in the world will fail to keep men, and youths growing into manhood, away from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere accessible, and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the connotation of manliness, and daring, and great-spiritedness. The only rational thing for the twentieth-century folk to do is to cover up the well; to make the twentieth century in truth the twentieth century, and to relegate to the nineteenth century and all the preceding centuries the things of those centuries, the witch-burnings, the intolerances, the fetiches, and, not least among such barbarisms, John Barleycorn. CHAPTER XVII North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd, and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten weather and into and through vast fogs which hid the sun from us for a week at a time. It was wild and heavy work, without a drink or thought of drink. Then we sailed south to Yokohama, with a big catch of skins in our salt and a heavy pay-day coming. I was eager to be ashore and see Japan, but the first day was devoted to ship's work, and not until evening did we sailors land. And here, by the very system of things, by the way life was organised and men transacted affairs, John Barleycorn reached out and tucked my arm in his. The captain had given money for us to the hunters, and the hunters were waiting in a certain Japanese public house for us to come and get it. We rode to the place in rickshaws. Our own crowd had taken possession of it. Drink was flowing. Everybody had money, and everybody was treating. After the hundred days of hard toil and absolute abstinence, in the pink of physical condition, bulging with health, over-spilling with spirits that had long been pent by discipline and circumstance, of course we would have a drink or two. And after that we would see the town. It was the old story. There were so many drinks to be drunk, and as the warm magic poured through our veins and mellowed our voices and affections we knew it was no time to make invidious distinctions--to drink with this shipmate and to decline to drink with that shipmate. We were all shipmates who had been through stress and storm together, who had pulled and hauled on the same sheets and tackles, relieved one another's wheels, laid out side by side on the same jib-boom when she was plunging into it and looked to see who was missing when she cleared and lifted. So we drank with all, and all treated, and our voices rose, and we remembered a myriad kindly acts of comradeship, and forgot our fights and wordy squabbles, and knew one another for the best fellows in the world. Well, the night was young when we arrived in that public house, and for all of that first night that public house was what I saw of Japan--a drinking-place which was very like a drinking-place at home or anywhere else over the world. We lay in Yokohama harbour for two weeks, and about all we saw of Japan was its drinking-places where sailors congregated. Occasionally, some one of us varied the monotony with a more exciting drunk. In such fashion I managed a real exploit by swimming off to the schooner one dark midnight and going soundly to sleep while the water-police searched the harbour for my body and brought my clothes out for identification. Perhaps it was for things like that, I imagined, that men got drunk. In our little round of living what I had done was a noteworthy event. All the harbour talked about it. I enjoyed several days of fame among the Japanese boatmen and ashore in the pubs. It was a red-letter event. It was an event to be remembered and narrated with pride. I remember it to-day, twenty years afterward, with a secret glow of pride. It was a purple passage, just as Victor's wrecking of the tea-house in the Bonin Islands and my being looted by the runaway apprentices were purple passages. The point is that the charm of John Barleycorn was still a mystery to me. I was so organically a non-alcoholic that alcohol itself made no appeal; the chemical reactions it produced in me were not satisfying because I possessed no need for such chemical satisfaction. I drank because the men I was with drank, and because my nature was such that I could not permit myself to be less of a man than other men at their favourite pastime. And I still had a sweet tooth, and on privy occasions when there was no man to see, bought candy and blissfully devoured it. We hove up anchor to a jolly chanty, and sailed out of Yokohama harbour for San Francisco. We took the northern passage, and with the stout west wind at our back made the run across the Pacific in thirty-seven days of brave sailing. We still had a big pay-day coming to us, and for thirty-seven days, without a drink to addle our mental processes, we incessantly planned the spending of our money. The first statement of each man--ever an ancient one in homeward-bound forecastles--was: "No boarding-house sharks in mine." Next, in parentheses, was regret at having spent so much money in Yokohama. And after that, each man proceeded to paint his favourite phantom. Victor, for instance, said that immediately he landed in San Francisco he would pass right through the water-front and the Barbary Coast, and put an advertisement in the papers. His advertisement would be for board and room in some simple working-class family. "Then," said Victor, "I shall go to some dancing-school for a week or two, just to meet and get acquainted with the girls and fellows. Then I'll get the run of the different dancing crowds, and be invited to their homes, and to parties, and all that, and with the money I've got I can last out till next January, when I'll go sealing again." No; he wasn't going to drink. He knew the way of it, particularly his way of it, wine in, wit out, and his money would be gone in no time. He had his choice, based on bitter experience, between three days' debauch among the sharks and harpies of the Barbary Coast and a whole winter of wholesome enjoyment and sociability, and there wasn't any doubt of the way he was going to choose. Said Axel Gunderson, who didn't care for dancing and social functions: "I've got a good pay-day. Now I can go home. It is fifteen years since I've seen my mother and all the family. When I pay off, I shall send my money home to wait for me. Then I'll pick a good ship bound for Europe, and arrive there with another pay-day. Put them together, and I'll have more money than ever in my life before. I'll be a prince at home. You haven't any idea how cheap everything is in Norway. I can make presents to everybody, and spend my money like what would seem to them a millionaire, and live a whole year there before I'd have to go back to sea." "The very thing I'm going to do," declared Red John. "It's three years since I've received a line from home and ten years since I was there. Things are just as cheap in Sweden, Axel, as in Norway, and my folks are real country folk and farmers. I'll send my pay-day home and ship on the same ship with you for around the Horn. We'll pick a good one." And as Axel Gunderson and Red John painted the pastoral delights and festive customs of their respective countries, each fell in love with the other's home place, and they solemnly pledged to make the journey together, and to spend, together, six months in the one's Swedish home and six months in the other's Norwegian home. And for the rest of the voyage they could hardly be pried apart, so infatuated did they become with discussing their plans. Long John was not a home-body. But he was tired of the forecastle. No boarding-house sharks in his. He, too, would get a room in a quiet family, and he would go to a navigation school and study to be a captain. And so it went. Each man swore that for once he would be sensible and not squander his money. No boarding-house sharks, no sailor-town, no drink, was the slogan of our forecastle. The men became stingy. Never was there such economy. They refused to buy anything more from the slopchest. Old rags had to last, and they sewed patch upon patch, turning out what are called "homeward-bound patches" of the most amazing proportions. They saved on matches, even, waiting till two or three were ready to light their pipes from the same match. As we sailed up the San Francisco water-front, the moment the port doctors passed us, the boarding-house runners were alongside in whitehall boats. They swarmed on board, each drumming for his own boarding-house, and each with a bottle of free whisky inside his shirt. But we waved them grandly and blasphemously away. We wanted none of their boarding-houses and none of their whisky. We were sober, thrifty sailormen, with better use for our money. Came the paying off before the shipping commissioner. We emerged upon the sidewalk, each with a pocketful of money. About us, like buzzards, clustered the sharks and harpies. And we looked at each other. We had been seven months together, and our paths were separating. One last farewell rite of comradeship remained. (Oh, it was the way, the custom.) "Come on, boys," said our sailing master. There stood the inevitable adjacent saloon. There were a dozen saloons all around. And when we had followed the sailing master into the one of his choice, the sharks were thick on the sidewalk outside. Some of them even ventured inside, but we would have nothing to do with them. There we stood at the long bar--the sailing master, the mate, the six hunters, the six boat-steerers, and the five boat-pullers. There were only five of the last, for one of our number had been dropped overboard, with a sack of coal at his feet, between two snow squalls in a driving gale off Cape Jerimo. There were nineteen of us and it was to be our last drink together. With seven months of men's work in the world, blow high, blow low, behind us, we were looking on each other for the last time. We knew it, for sailors' ways go wide. And the nineteen of us drank the sailing master's treat. Then the mate looked at us with eloquent eyes and called another round. We liked the mate just as well as the sailing master, and we liked them both. Could we drink with one, and not the other? And Pete Holt, my own hunter (lost next year in the Mary Thomas, with all hands), called a round. The time passed, the drinks continued to come on the bar, our voices rose, and the maggots began to crawl. There were six hunters, and each insisted, in the sacred name of comradeship, that all hands drink with him just once. There were six boat-steerers and five boat-pullers and the same logic held with them. There was money in all our pockets, and our money was as good as any man's, and our hearts were as free and generous. Nineteen rounds of drinks. What more would John Barleycorn ask in order to have his will with men? They were ripe to forget their dearly cherished plans. They rolled out of the saloon and into the arms of the sharks and harpies. They didn't last long. From two days to a week saw the end of their money and saw them being carted by the boarding-house masters on board outward-bound ships. Victor was a fine body of a man, and through a lucky friendship managed to get into the life-saving service. He never saw the dancing-school nor placed his advertisement for a room in a working-class family. Nor did Long John win to navigation school. By the end of the week he was a transient lumper on a river steamboat. Red John and Axel did not send their pay-days home to the old country. Instead, and along with the rest, they were scattered on board sailing ships bound for the four quarters of the globe, where they had been placed by the boarding-house masters, and where they were working out advance money which they had neither seen nor spent. What saved me was that I had a home and people to go to. I crossed the bay to Oakland, and, among other things, took a look at the death-road. Nelson was gone--shot to death while drunk and resisting the officers. His partner in that affair was lying in prison. Whisky Bob was gone. Old Cole, Old Smoudge, and Bob Smith were gone. Another Smith, he of the belted guns and the Annie, was drowned. French Frank, they said, was lurking up river, afraid to come down because of something he had done. Others were wearing the stripes in San Quentin or Folsom. Big Alec, the King of the Greeks, whom I had known well in the old Benicia days, and with whom I had drunk whole nights through, had killed two men and fled to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom I had sailed on the Fish Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung through the back and had died a lingering death complicated with tuberculosis. And so it went, a very lively and well-patronised road, and, from what I knew of all of them, John Barleycorn was responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the Annie. CHAPTER XVIII My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I didn't like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the drinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oats and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the family needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hour day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of innocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from month end to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and with labour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I needed diversion, excitement, something beyond the books and the mechanical toil. I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too late. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I had bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possessed a sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over, I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, the Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated. This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped me mentally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Their meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced their wholesome morality and healthful sports. In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go to saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime, we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now. I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities. And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we became chums. Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a sophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls. With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play this game. "Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is, you must get a girl." Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the expense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in their home life. He had the entree to no girl's home. And of course, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarly circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go to dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good places for getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He was a blacksmith's apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I. We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this, and bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes, there remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum that varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was left of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair's Park and back--twenty cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two--thirty cents; or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which for two cost only twenty cents. I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned for money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn't care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my philosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable with the lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of scores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar to drink with me. But how to get a girl? There was no girl's home to which Louis could take me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knew none. And Louis' several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway, in the very human nature of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn't turn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl-friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had. "You'll have to do like I did," he said finally. "I got these by getting them. You'll have to get one the same way." And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I were hard situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board and maintain a decent appearance. We met each other in the evening, after the day's work, on the street corner, or in a little candy store on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here we bought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel's worth of "red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy--all we could get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into a saloon.) But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I was to select her and make myself acquainted with her. We strolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us, strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strolling boys who look. (And to this day, in any town, city, or village, in which I, in my middle age, find myself, I look on with the eye trained of old experience, and watch the sweet innocent game played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll when the spring and summer evenings call.) The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who had come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was timid and bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But I didn't know girls. They were strange and wonderful to me after my precocious man's life. I failed of the bold front and the necessary forwardness when the crucial moment came. Then Louis would show me how--a certain, eloquent glance of eye, a smile, a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies, giggles, coy nervousnesses--and, behold, Louis acquainted and nodding me up to be introduced. But when we paired off to stroll along boy and girl together, I noted that Louis had invariably picked the good-looker and left to me the little lame sister. I improved, of course, after experiences too numerous to enter upon, so that there were divers girls to whom I could lift my hat and who would walk beside me in the early evenings. But girl's love did not immediately come to me. I was excited, interested, and I pursued the quest. And the thought of drink never entered my mind. Some of Louis' and my adventures have since given me serious pause when casting sociological generalisations. But it was all good and innocently youthful, and I learned one generalisation, biological rather than sociological, namely, that the "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins." And before long I learned girl's love, all the dear fond deliciousness of it, all the glory and the wonder. I shall call her Haydee. She was between fifteen and sixteen. Her little skirt reached her shoe-tops. We sat side by side in a Salvation Army meeting. She was not a convert, nor was her aunt who sat on the other side of her, and who, visiting from the country where at that time the Salvation Army was not, had dropped in to the meeting for half an hour out of curiosity. And Louis sat beside me and observed--I do believe he did no more than observe, because Haydee was not his style of girl. We did not speak, but in that great half-hour we glanced shyly at each other, and shyly avoided or as shyly returned and met each other's glances more than several times. She had a slender oval face. Her brown eyes were beautiful. Her nose was a dream, as was her sweet-lipped, petulant-hinting mouth. She wore a tam-o'-shanter, and I thought her brown hair the prettiest shade of brown I had ever seen. And from that single experience of half an hour I have ever since been convinced of the reality of love at first sight. All too soon the aunt and Haydee departed. (This is permissible at any stage of a Salvation Army meeting.) I was no longer interested in the meeting, and, after an appropriate interval of a couple of minutes or less, started to leave with Louis. As we passed out, at the back of the hall a woman recognised me with her eyes, arose, and followed me. I shall not describe her. She was of my own kind and friendship of the old time on the water-front. When Nelson was shot, he had died in her arms, and she knew me as his one comrade. And she must tell me how Nelson had died, and I did want to know; so I went with her across the width of life from dawning boy's love for a brown-haired girl in a tam-o'-shanter back to the old sad savagery I had known. And when I had heard the tale, I hurried away to find Louis, fearing that I had lost my first love with the first glimpse of her. But Louis was dependable. Her name was--Haydee. He knew where she lived. Each day she passed the blacksmith's shop where he worked, going to or from the Lafayette School. Further, he had seen her on occasion with Ruth, another schoolgirl, and, still further, Nita, who sold us red-hots at the candy store, was a friend of Ruth. The thing to do was to go around to the candy store and see if we could get Nita to give a note to Ruth to give to Haydee. If this could be arranged, all I had to do was write the note. And it so happened. And in stolen half-hours of meeting I came to know all the sweet madness of boy's love and girl's love. So far as it goes it is not the biggest love in the world, but I do dare to assert that it is the sweetest. Oh, as I look back on it! Never did girl have more innocent boy-lover than I who had been so wicked-wise and violent beyond my years. I didn't know the first thing about girls. I, who had been hailed Prince of the Oyster Pirates, who could go anywhere in the world as a man amongst men; who could sail boats, lay aloft in black and storm, or go into the toughest hang-outs in sailor town and play my part in any rough-house that started or call all hands to the bar--I didn't know the first thing I might say or do with this slender little chit of a girl-woman whose scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops and who was as abysmally ignorant of life as I was, or thought I was, profoundly wise. I remember we sat on a bench in the starlight. There was fully a foot of space between us. We slightly faced each other, our near elbows on the back of the bench; and once or twice our elbows just touched. And all the time, deliriously happy, talking in the gentlest and most delicate terms that might not offend her sensitive ears, I was cudgelling my brains in an effort to divine what I was expected to do. What did girls expect of boys, sitting on a bench and tentatively striving to find out what love was? What did she expect me to do? Was I expected to kiss her? Did she expect me to try? And if she did expect me, and I didn't what would she think of me? Ah, she was wiser than I--I know it now--the little innocent girl-woman in her shoe-top skirt. She had known boys all her life. She encouraged me in the ways a girl may. Her gloves were off and in one hand, and I remember, lightly and daringly, in mock reproof for something I had said, how she tapped my lips with a tiny flirt of those gloves. I was like to swoon with delight. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. And I remember yet the faint scent that clung to those gloves and that I breathed in the moment they touched my lips. Then came the agony of apprehension and doubt. Should I imprison in my hand that little hand with the dangling, scented gloves which had just tapped my lips? Should I dare to kiss her there and then, or slip my arm around her waist? Or dared I even sit closer? Well, I didn't dare. I did nothing. I merely continued to sit there and love with all my soul. And when we parted that evening I had not kissed her. I do remember the first time I kissed her, on another evening, at parting--a mighty moment, when I took all my heart of courage and dared. We never succeeded in managing more than a dozen stolen meetings, and we kissed perhaps a dozen times--as boys and girls kiss, briefly and innocently, and wonderingly. We never went anywhere--not even to a matinee. We once shared together five cents worth of red-hots. But I have always fondly believed that she loved me. I know I loved her; and I dreamed day-dreams of her for a year and more, and the memory of her is very dear. CHAPTER XIX When I was with people who did not drink, I never thought of drinking. Louis did not drink. Neither he nor I could afford it; but, more significant than that, we had no desire to drink. We were healthy, normal, non-alcoholic. Had we been alcoholic, we would have drunk whether or not we could have afforded it. Each night, after the day's work, washed up, clothes changed, and supper eaten, we met on the street corner or in the little candy store. But the warm fall weather passed, and on bitter nights of frost or damp nights of drizzle, the street corner was not a comfortable meeting-place. And the candy store was unheated. Nita, or whoever waited on the counter, between waitings lurked in a back living-room that was heated. We were not admitted to this room, and in the store it was as cold as out-of-doors. Louis and I debated the situation. There was only one solution: the saloon, the congregating-place of men, the place where men hobnobbed with John Barleycorn. Well do I remember the damp and draughty evening, shivering without overcoats because we could not afford them, that Louis and I started out to select our saloon. Saloons are always warm and comfortable. Now Louis and I did not go into this saloon because we wanted a drink. Yet we knew that saloons were not charitable institutions. A man could not make a lounging-place of a saloon without occasionally buying something over the bar. Our dimes and nickels were few. We could ill spare any of them when they were so potent in paying car-fare for oneself and a girl. (We never paid car-fare when by ourselves, being content to walk.) So, in this saloon, we desired to make the most of our expenditure. We called for a deck of cards and sat down at a table and played euchre for an hour, in which time Louis treated once, and I treated once, to beer--the cheapest drink, ten cents for two. Prodigal! How we grudged it! We studied the men who came into the place. They seemed all middle-aged and elderly work-men, most of them Germans, who flocked by themselves in old-acquaintance groups, and with whom we could have only the slightest contacts. We voted against that saloon, and went out cast down with the knowledge that we had lost an evening and wasted twenty cents for beer that we didn't want. We made several more tries on succeeding nights, and at last found our way into the National, a saloon on Tenth and Franklin. Here was a more congenial crowd. Here Louis met a fellow or two he knew, and here I met fellows I had gone to school with when a little lad in knee pants. We talked of old days, and of what had become of this fellow, and what that fellow was doing now, and of course we talked it over drinks. They treated, and we drank. Then, according to the code of drinking, we had to treat. It hurt, for it meant forty to fifty cents a clatter. We felt quite enlivened when the short evening was over; but at the same time we were bankrupt. Our week's spending money was gone. We decided that that was the saloon for us, and we agreed to be more circumspect thereafter in our drink-buying. Also, we had to economise for the rest of the week. We didn't even have car-fare. We were compelled to break an engagement with two girls from West Oakland with whom we were attempting to be in love. They were to meet us up town the next evening, and we hadn't the car-fare necessary to take them home. Like many others financially embarrassed, we had to disappear for a time from the gay whirl--at least until Saturday night pay-day. So Louis and I rendezvoused in a livery stable, and with coats buttoned and chattering teeth played euchre and casino until the time of our exile was over. Then we returned to the National Saloon and spent no more than we could decently avoid spending for the comfort and warmth. Sometimes we had mishaps, as when one got stuck twice in succession in a five-handed game of Sancho Pedro for the drinks. Such a disaster meant anywhere between twenty-five to eighty cents, just according to how many of the players ordered ten-cent drinks. But we could temporarily escape the evil effects of such disaster, by virtue of an account we ran behind the bar. Of course, this only set back the day of reckoning and seduced us into spending more than we would have spent on a cash basis. (When I left Oakland suddenly for the adventure-path the following spring, I well remember I owed that saloon-keeper one dollar and seventy cents. Long after, when I returned, he was gone. I still owe him that dollar and seventy cents, and if he should chance to read these lines I want him to know that I'll pay on demand.) The foregoing incident of the National Saloon I have given in order again to show the lure, or draw, or compulsion, toward John Barleycorn in society as at present organised with saloons on all the corners. Louis and I were two healthy youths. We didn't want to drink. We couldn't afford to drink. And yet we were driven by the circumstance of cold and rainy weather to seek refuge in a saloon, where we had to spend part of our pitiful dole for drink. It will be urged by some critics that we might have gone to the Y.M.C.A., to night school, and to the social circles and homes of young people. The only reply is that we didn't. That is the irrefragable fact. We didn't. And to-day, at this moment, there are hundreds of thousands of boys like Louis and me doing just what Louis and I did with John Barleycorn, warm and comfortable, beckoning and welcoming, tucking their arms in his and beginning to teach them his mellow ways. CHAPTER XX The jute mills failed of its agreement to increase my pay to a dollar and a quarter a day, and I, a free-born American boy whose direct ancestors had fought in all the wars from the old pre-Revolutionary Indian wars down, exercised my sovereign right of free contract by quitting the job. I was still resolved to settle down, and I looked about me. One thing was clear. Unskilled labour didn't pay. I must learn a trade, and I decided on electricity. The need for electricians was constantly growing. But how to become an electrician? I hadn't the money to go to a technical school or university; besides, I didn't think much of schools. I was a practical man in a practical world. Also, I still believed in the old myths which were the heritage of the American boy when I was a boy. A canal boy could become a President. Any boy who took employment with any firm could, by thrift, energy, and sobriety, learn the business and rise from position to position until he was taken in as a junior partner. After that the senior partnership was only a matter of time. Very often--so ran the myth--the boy, by reason of his steadiness and application, married his employer's daughter. By this time I had been encouraged to such faith in myself in the matter of girls that I was quite certain I would marry my employer's daughter. There wasn't a doubt of it. All the little boys in the myths did it as soon as they were old enough. So I bade farewell for ever to the adventure-path, and went out to the power plant of one of our Oakland street railways. I saw the superintendent himself, in a private office so fine that it almost stunned me. But I talked straight up. I told him I wanted to become a practical electrician, that I was unafraid of work, that I was used to hard work, and that all he had to do was look at me to see I was fit and strong. I told him that I wanted to begin right at the bottom and work up, that I wanted to devote my life to this one occupation and this one employment. The superintendent beamed as he listened. He told me that I was the right stuff for success, and that he believed in encouraging American youth that wanted to rise. Why, employers were always on the lookout for young fellows like me, and alas, they found them all too rarely. My ambition was fine and worthy, and he would see to it that I got my chance. (And as I listened with swelling heart, I wondered if it was his daughter I was to marry.) "Before you can go out on the road and learn the more complicated and higher details of the profession," he said, "you will, of course, have to work in the car-house with the men who install and repair the motors. (By this time I was sure that it was his daughter, and I was wondering how much stock he might own in the company.) "But," he said, "as you yourself so plainly see, you couldn't expect to begin as a helper to the car-house electricians. That will come when you have worked up to it. You will really begin at the bottom. In the car-house your first employment will be sweeping up, washing the windows, keeping things clean. And after you have shown yourself satisfactory at that, then you may become a helper to the car-house electricians." I didn't see how sweeping and scrubbing a building was any preparation for the trade of electrician; but I did know that in the books all the boys started with the most menial tasks and by making good ultimately won to the ownership of the whole concern. "When shall I come to work?" I asked, eager to launch on this dazzling career. "But," said the superintendent, "as you and I have already agreed, you must begin at the bottom. Not immediately can you in any capacity enter the car-house. Before that you must pass through the engine-room as an oiler." My heart went down slightly and for the moment as I saw the road lengthen between his daughter and me; then it rose again. I would be a better electrician with knowledge of steam engines. As an oiler in the great engine-room I was confident that few things concerning steam would escape me. Heavens! My career shone more dazzling than ever. "When shall I come to work?" I asked gratefully. "But," said the superintendent, "you could not expect to enter immediately into the engine-room. There must be preparation for that. And through the fire-room, of course. Come, you see the matter clearly, I know. And you will see that even the mere handling of coal is a scientific matter and not to be sneered at. Do you know that we weigh every pound of coal we burn? Thus, we learn the value of the coal we buy; we know to a tee the last penny of cost of every item of production, and we learn which firemen are the most wasteful, which firemen, out of stupidity or carelessness, get the least out of the coal they fire." The superintendent beamed again. "You see how very important the little matter of coal is, and by as much as you learn of this little matter you will become that much better a workman--more valuable to us, more valuable to yourself. Now, are you prepared to begin?" "Any time," I said valiantly. "The sooner the better." "Very well," he answered. "You will come to-morrow morning at seven o'clock." I was taken out and shown my duties. Also, I was told the terms of my employment--a ten-hour day, every day in the month including Sundays and holidays, with one day off each month, with a salary of thirty dollars a month. It wasn't exciting. Years before, at the cannery, I had earned a dollar a day for a ten-hour day. I consoled myself with the thought that the reason my earning capacity had not increased with my years and strength was because I had remained an unskilled labourer. But it was different now. I was beginning to work for skill, for a trade, for career and fortune, and the superintendent's daughter. And I was beginning in the right way--right at the beginning. That was the thing. I was passing coal to the firemen, who shovelled it into the furnaces, where its energy was transformed into steam, which, in the engine-room, was transformed into the electricity with which the electricians worked. This passing coal was surely the very beginning-unless the superintendent should take it into his head to send me to work in the mines from which the coal came in order to get a completer understanding of the genesis of electricity for street railways. Work! I, who had worked with men, found that I didn't know the first thing about real work. A ten-hour day! I had to pass coal for the day and night shifts, and, despite working through the noon-hour, I never finished my task before eight at night. I was working a twelve-to thirteen-hour day, and I wasn't being paid overtime as in the cannery. I might as well give the secret away right here. I was doing the work of two men. Before me, one mature able-bodied labourer had done the day shift and another equally mature able-bodied labourer had done the night-shift. They had received forty dollars a month each. The superintendent, bent on an economical administration, had persuaded me to do the work of both men for thirty dollars a month. I thought he was making an electrician of me. In truth and fact, he was saving fifty dollars a month operating expenses to the company. But I didn't know I was displacing two men. Nobody told me. On the contrary, the superintendent warned everybody not to tell me. How valiantly I went at it that first day. I worked at top speed, filling the iron wheelbarrow with coal, running it on the scales and weighing the load, then trundling it into the fire-room and dumping it on the plates before the fires. Work! I did more than the two men whom I had displaced. They had merely wheeled in the coal and dumped it on the plates. But while I did this for the day coal, the night coal I had to pile against the wall of the fire-room. Now the fire-room was small. It had been planned for a night coal-passer. So I had to pile the night coal higher and higher, buttressing up the heap with stout planks. Toward the top of the heap I had to handle the coal a second time, tossing it up with a shovel. I dripped with sweat, but I never ceased from my stride, though I could feel exhaustion coming on. By ten o'clock in the morning, so much of my body's energy had I consumed, I felt hungry and snatched a thick double-slice of bread and butter from my dinner pail. This I devoured, standing, grimed with coal-dust, my knees trembling under me. By eleven o'clock, in this fashion I had consumed my whole lunch. But what of it? I realised that it would enable me to continue working through the noon hour. And I worked all the afternoon. Darkness came on, and I worked under the electric lights. The day fireman went off and the night fireman came on. I plugged away. At half-past eight, famished, tottering, I washed up, changed my clothes, and dragged my weary body to the car. It was three miles to where I lived, and I had received a pass with the stipulation that I could sit down as long as there were no paying passengers in need of a seat. As I sank into a corner outside seat I prayed that no passenger might require my seat. But the car filled up, and, half-way in, a woman came on board, and there was no seat for her. I started to get up, and to my astonishment found that I could not. With the chill wind blowing on me, my spent body had stiffened into the seat. It took me the rest of the run in to unkink my complaining joints and muscles and get into a standing position on the lower step. And when the car stopped at my corner I nearly fell to the ground when I stepped off. I hobbled two blocks to the house and limped into the kitchen. While my mother started to cook, I plunged into bread and butter; but before my appetite was appeased, or the steak fried, I was sound asleep. In vain my mother strove to shake me awake enough to eat the meat. Failing in this, with the assistance of my father she managed to get me to my room, where I collapsed dead asleep on the bed. They undressed me and covered me up. In the morning came the agony of being awakened. I was terribly sore, and, worst of all, my wrists were swelling. But I made up for my lost supper, eating an enormous breakfast, and when I hobbled to catch my car I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day before. Work! Let any youth just turned eighteen try to out-shovel two man-grown coal-shovellers. Work! Long before midday I had eaten the last scrap of my huge lunch. But I was resolved to show them what a husky young fellow determined to rise could do. The worst of it was that my wrists were swelling and going back on me. There are few who do not know the pain of walking on a sprained ankle. Then imagine the pain of shovelling coal and trundling a loaded wheelbarrow with two sprained wrists. Work! More than once I sank down on the coal where no one could see me, and cried with rage, and mortification, and exhaustion, and despair. That second day was my hardest, and all that enabled me to survive it and get in the last of the night coal at the end of thirteen hours was the day fireman, who bound both my wrists with broad leather straps. So tightly were they buckled that they were like slightly flexible plaster casts. They took the stresses and pressures which hitherto had been borne by my wrists, and they were so tight that there was no room for the inflammation to rise in the sprains. And in this fashion I continued to learn to be an electrician. Night after night I limped home, fell asleep before I could eat my supper, and was helped into bed and undressed. Morning after morning, always with huger lunches in my dinner pail, I limped out of the house on my way to work. I no longer read my library books. I made no dates with the girls. I was a proper work beast. I worked, and ate, and slept, while my mind slept all the time. The whole thing was a nightmare. I worked every day, including Sunday, and I looked far ahead to my one day off at the end of a month, resolved to lie abed all that day and just sleep and rest up. The strangest part of this experience was that I never took a drink nor thought of taking a drink. Yet I knew that men under hard pressure almost invariably drank. I had seen them do it, and in the past had often done it myself. But so sheerly non-alcoholic was I that it never entered my mind that a drink might be good for me. I instance this to show how entirely lacking from my make-up was any predisposition toward alcohol. And the point of this instance is that later on, after more years had passed, contact with John Barleycorn at last did induce in me the alcoholic desire. I had often noticed the day fireman staring at me in a curious way. At last, one day, he spoke. He began by swearing me to secrecy. He had been warned by the superintendent not to tell me, and in telling me he was risking his job. He told me of the day coal-passer and the night coal-passer, and of the wages they had received. I was doing for thirty dollars a month what they had received eighty dollars for doing. He would have told me sooner, the fireman said, had he not been so certain that I would break down under the work and quit. As it was, I was killing myself, and all to no good purpose. I was merely cheapening the price of labour, he argued, and keeping two men out of a job. Being an American boy, and a proud American boy, I did not immediately quit. This was foolish of me, I know; but I resolved to continue the work long enough to prove to the superintendent that I could do it without breaking down. Then I would quit, and he would realise what a fine young fellow he had lost. All of which I faithfully and foolishly did. I worked on until the time came when I got in the last of the night coal by six o'clock. Then I quit the job of learning electricity by doing more than two men's work for a boy's wages, went home, and proceeded to sleep the clock around. Fortunately, I had not stayed by the job long enough to injure myself--though I was compelled to wear straps on my wrists for a year afterward. But the effect of this work orgy in which I had indulged was to sicken me with work. I just wouldn't work. The thought of work was repulsive. I didn't care if I never settled down. Learning a trade could go hang. It was a whole lot better to royster and frolic over the world in the way I had previously done. So I headed out on the adventure-path again, starting to tramp East by beating my way on the railroads. CHAPTER XXI But behold! As soon as I went out on the adventure-path I met John Barleycorn again. I moved through a world of strangers, and the act of drinking together made one acquainted with men and opened the way to adventures. It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out. Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state, such as Iowa was in 1894, when I wandered up the main street of Des Moines and was variously invited by strangers into various blind pigs--I remember drinking in barber-shops, plumbing establishments, and furniture stores. Always it was John Barleycorn. Even a tramp, in those halcyon days, could get most frequently drunk. I remember, inside the prison at Buffalo, how some of us got magnificently jingled, and how, on the streets of Buffalo after our release, another jingle was financed with pennies begged on the main-drag. I had no call for alcohol, but when I was with those who drank, I drank with them. I insisted on travelling or loafing with the livest, keenest men, and it was just these live, keen ones that did most of the drinking. They were the more comradely men, the more venturous, the more individual. Perhaps it was too much temperament that made them turn from the commonplace and humdrum to find relief in the lying and fantastic sureties of John Barleycorn. Be that as it may, the men I liked best, desired most to be with, were invariably to be found in John Barleycorn's company. In the course of my tramping over the United States I achieved a new concept. As a tramp, I was behind the scenes of society--aye, and down in the cellar. I could watch the machinery work. I saw the wheels of the social machine go around, and I learned that the dignity of manual labour wasn't what I had been told it was by the teachers, preachers, and politicians. The men without trades were helpless cattle. If one learned a trade, he was compelled to belong to a union in order to work at his trade. And his union was compelled to bully and slug the employers' unions in order to hold up wages or hold down hours. The employers' unions like-wise bullied and slugged. I couldn't see any dignity at all. And when a workman got old, or had an accident, he was thrown into the scrap-heap like any worn-out machine. I saw too many of this sort who were making anything but dignified ends of life. So my new concept was that manual labour was undignified, and that it didn't pay. No trade for me, was my decision, and no superintendent's daughters. And no criminality, I also decided. That would be almost as disastrous as to be a labourer. Brains paid, not brawn, and I resolved never again to offer my muscles for sale in the brawn market. Brain, and brain only, would I sell. I returned to California with the firm intention of developing my brain. This meant school education. I had gone through the grammar school long ago, so I entered the Oakland High School. To pay my way I worked as a janitor. My sister helped me, too; and I was not above mowing anybody's lawn or taking up and beating carpets when I had half a day to spare. I was working to get away from work, and I buckled down to it with a grim realisation of the paradox. Boy and girl love was left behind, and, along with it, Haydee and Louis Shattuck, and the early evening strolls. I hadn't the time. I joined the Henry Clay Debating Society. I was received into the homes of some of the members, where I met nice girls whose skirts reached the ground. I dallied with little home clubs wherein we discussed poetry and art and the nuances of grammar. I joined the socialist local where we studied and orated political economy, philosophy, and politics. I kept half a dozen membership cards working in the free library and did an immense amount of collateral reading. And for a year and a half on end I never took a drink, nor thought of taking a drink. I hadn't the time, and I certainly did not have the inclination. Between my janitor-work, my studies, and innocent amusements such as chess, I hadn't a moment to spare. I was discovering a new world, and such was the passion of my exploration that the old world of John Barleycorn held no inducements for me. Come to think of it, I did enter a saloon. I went to see Johnny Heinhold in the Last Chance, and I went to borrow money. And right here is another phase of John Barleycorn. Saloon-keepers are notoriously good fellows. On an average they perform vastly greater generosities than do business men. When I simply had to have ten dollars, desperate, with no place to turn, I went to Johnny Heinhold. Several years had passed since I had been in his place or spent a cent across his bar. And when I went to borrow the ten dollars I didn't buy a drink, either. And Johnny Heinhold let me have the ten dollars without security or interest. More than once, in the brief days of my struggle for an education, I went to Johnny Heinhold to borrow money. When I entered the university, I borrowed forty dollars from him, without interest, without security, without buying a drink. And yet--and here is the point, the custom, and the code--in the days of my prosperity, after the lapse of years, I have gone out of my way by many a long block to spend across Johnny Heinhold's bar deferred interest on the various loans. Not that Johnny Heinhold asked me to do it, or expected me to do it. I did it, as I have said, in obedience to the code I had learned along with all the other things connected with John Barleycorn. In distress, when a man has no other place to turn, when he hasn't the slightest bit of security which a savage-hearted pawn-broker would consider, he can go to some saloon-keeper he knows. Gratitude is inherently human. When the man so helped has money again, depend upon it that a portion will be spent across the bar of the saloon-keeper who befriended him. Why, I recollect the early days of my writing career, when the small sums of money I earned from the magazines came with tragic irregularity, while at the same time I was staggering along with a growing family--a wife, children, a mother, a nephew, and my Mammy Jennie and her old husband fallen on evil days. There were two places at which I could borrow money; a barber shop and a saloon. The barber charged me five per cent. per month in advance. That is to say, when I borrowed one hundred dollars, he handed me ninety-five. The other five dollars he retained as advance interest for the first month. And on the second month I paid him five dollars more, and continued so to do each month until I made a ten strike with the editors and lifted the loan. The other place to which I came in trouble was the saloon. This saloon-keeper I had known by sight for a couple of years. I had never spent my money in his saloon, and even when I borrowed from him I didn't spend any money. Yet never did he refuse me any sum I asked of him. Unfortunately, before I became prosperous, he moved away to another city. And to this day I regret that he is gone. It is the code I have learned. The right thing to do, and the thing I'd do right now did I know where he is, would be to drop in on occasion and spend a few dollars across his bar for old sake's sake and gratitude. This is not to exalt saloon-keepers. I have written it to exalt the power of John Barleycorn and to illustrate one more of the myriad ways by which a man is brought in contact with John Barleycorn until in the end he finds he cannot get along without him. But to return to the run of my narrative. Away from the adventure-path, up to my ears in study, every moment occupied, I lived oblivious to John Barleycorn's existence. Nobody about me drank. If any had drunk, and had they offered it to me, I surely would have drunk. As it was, when I had spare moments I spent them playing chess, or going with nice girls who were themselves students, or in riding a bicycle whenever I was fortunate enough to have it out of the pawnbroker's possession. What I am insisting upon all the time is this: in me was not the slightest trace of alcoholic desire, and this despite the long and severe apprenticeship I had served under John Barleycorn. I had come back from the other side of life to be delighted with this Arcadian simplicity of student youths and student maidens. Also, I had found my way into the realm of the mind, and I was intellectually intoxicated. (Alas! as I was to learn at a later period, intellectual intoxication too, has its katzenjammer.) CHAPTER XXII Three years was the time required to go through the high school. I grew impatient. Also, my schooling was becoming financially impossible. At such rate I could not last out, and I did greatly want to go to the state university. When I had done a year of high school, I decided to attempt a short cut. I borrowed the money and paid to enter the senior class of a "cramming joint" or academy. I was scheduled to graduate right into the university at the end of four months, thus saving two years. And how I did cram! I had two years' new work to do in a third of a year. For five weeks I crammed, until simultaneous quadratic equations and chemical formulas fairly oozed from my ears. And then the master of the academy took me aside. He was very sorry, but he was compelled to give me back my tuition fee and to ask me to leave the school. It wasn't a matter of scholarship. I stood well in my classes, and did he graduate me into the university he was confident that in that institution I would continue to stand well. The trouble was that tongues were gossiping about my case. What! In four months accomplished two years' work! It would be a scandal, and the universities were becoming severer in their treatment of accredited prep schools. He couldn't afford such a scandal, therefore I must gracefully depart. I did. And I paid back the borrowed money, and gritted my teeth, and started to cram by myself. There were three months yet before the university entrance examinations. Without laboratories, without coaching, sitting in my bedroom, I proceeded to compress that two years' work into three months and to keep reviewed on the previous year's work. Nineteen hours a day I studied. For three months I kept this pace, only breaking it on several occasions. My body grew weary, my mind grew weary, but I stayed with it. My eyes grew weary and began to twitch, but they did not break down. Perhaps, toward the last, I got a bit dotty. I know that at the time I was confident, I had discovered the formula for squaring the circle; but I resolutely deferred the working of it out until after the examinations. Then I would show them. Came the several days of the examinations, during which time I scarcely closed my eyes in sleep, devoting every moment to cramming and reviewing. And when I turned in my last examination paper I was in full possession of a splendid case of brain-fag. I didn't want to see a book. I didn't want to think or to lay eyes on anybody who was liable to think. There was but one prescription for such a condition, and I gave it to myself--the adventure-path. I didn't wait to learn the result of my examinations. I stowed a roll of blankets and some cold food into a borrowed whitehall boat and set sail. Out of the Oakland Estuary I drifted on the last of an early morning ebb, caught the first of the flood up bay, and raced along with a spanking breeze. San Pablo Bay was smoking, and the Carquinez Straits off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as I picked up ahead and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned with Nelson in the unreefer Reindeer. Benicia showed before me. I opened the bight of Turner's Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen's arks where in the old days I had lived and drunk deep. And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never dreamed for many a long year to come. I had had no intention of stopping at Benicia. The tide favoured, the wind was fair and howling--glorious sailing for a sailor. Bull Head and Army Points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Suisun Bay which I knew was smoking. And yet, when I laid eyes on those fishing arks lying in the water-front tules, without debate, on the instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and headed for the shore. On the instant, out of the profound of my brain-fag, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to drink. I wanted to get drunk. The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More than anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind wanted surcease from weariness in the way it knew surcease would come. And right here is the point. For the first time in my life I consciously, deliberately, desired to get drunk. It was a new, a totally different manifestation of John Barleycorn's power. It was not a body need for alcohol. It was a mental desire. My over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget. And here the point is drawn to its sharpest. Granted my prodigious brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past, the thought would never have entered my mind to get drunk now. Beginning with physical intolerance for alcohol, for years drinking only for the sake of comradeship and because alcohol was everywhere on the adventure-path, I had now reached the stage where my brain cried out, not merely for a drink, but for a drunk. And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my brain would not have so cried out. I should have sailed on past Bull Head, and in the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind that filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my weary brain and rested and refreshed it. So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the arks. Charley Le Grant fell on my neck. His wife, Lizzie, folded me to her capacious breast. Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and all the survivors of the old guard, got around me and their arms around me. Charley seized the can and started for Jorgensen's saloon across the railroad tracks. That meant beer. I wanted whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask. Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and back. More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in, fishermen, Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in treating, and treated all around in turn again. They came and went, but I stayed on and drank with all. I guzzled. I swilled. I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my brain. And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever, but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky. He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle, and knives had been drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky. And while we downed it, we remembered Nelson and that he had stretched out his great shoulders for the last long sleep in this very town of Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and remembered only the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be filled and drank again. They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see the brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar of it. And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books nineteen hours a day for three solid months, Charley Le Grant shifted my outfit into a big Columbia River salmon boat. He added charcoal and a fisherman's brazier, a coffee pot and frying pan, and the coffee and the meat, and a black bass fresh from the water that day. They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon boat. Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail set like a board. Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted, and Charley had no doubts. He knew me of old, and knew that I could sail as long as I could see. They cast off my painter. I put the tiller up, filled away before it, and with dizzy eyes checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell. The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was white with wrath and sea-lump. But a salmon boat can sail, and I knew how to sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and through it, and across, and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain for all the books and schools. Cresting seas filled me a foot or so with water, but I laughed at it sloshing about my feet, and chanted my disdain for the wind and the water. I hailed myself a master of life, riding on the back of the unleashed elements, and John Barleycorn rode with me. Amid dissertations on mathematics and philosophy and spoutings and quotations, I sang all the old songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the oyster boats to be a pirate--such songs as: "Black Lulu," "Flying Cloud," "Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly," "The Boston Burglar," "Come all you Rambling, Gambling Men," "I Wisht I was a Little Bird," "Shenandoah," and "Ranzo, Boys, Ranzo." Hours afterward, in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together, I took the New York Cut-Off, skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past Black Diamond, on into the San Joaquin, and on to Antioch, where, somewhat sobered and magnificently hungry, I laid alongside a big potato sloop that had a familiar rig. Here were old friends aboard, who fried my black bass in olive oil. Then, too, there was a meaty fisherman's stew, delicious with garlic, and crusty Italian bread without butter, and all washed down with pint mugs of thick and heady claret. My salmon boat was a-soak, but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry blankets and a dry bunk were mine; and we lay and smoked and yarned of old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the rigging and taut halyards drummed against the mast. CHAPTER XXIII My cruise in the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready to enter the university. During the week's cruise I did not drink again. To accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old friends, for as ever the adventure-path was beset with John Barleycorn. I had wanted the drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it. My tired brain had recuperated. I had no moral scruples in the matter. I was not ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia, and I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and studies. Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and realised its significance. At the time, and for a long time afterward, I was to think of it only as a frolic. But still later, in the slough of brain-fag and intellectual weariness, I was to remember and know the craving for the anodyne that resides in alcohol. In the meantime, after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with my abstemiousness, primarily because I didn't want to drink. And next, I was abstemious because my way led among books and students where no drinking was. Had I been out on the adventure-path, I should as a matter of course have been drinking. For that is the pity of the adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn's favourite stamping grounds. I completed the first half of my freshman year, and in January of 1897 took up my courses for the second half. But the pressure from lack of money, plus a conviction that the university was not giving me all that I wanted in the time I could spare for it, forced me to leave. I was not very disappointed. For two years I had studied, and in those two years, what was far more valuable, I had done a prodigious amount of reading. Then, too, my grammar had improved. It is true, I had not yet learned that I must say "It is I"; but I no longer was guilty of a double negative in writing, though still prone to that error in excited speech. I decided immediately to embark on my career. I had four preferences: first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to soften my brain and send me to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote everything--ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day. At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat. And then there was the matter of typewriting. My brother-in-law owned a machine which he used in the day-time. In the night I was free to use it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my wrestlings with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of the typewriter era. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things performed to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce like results. How my back used to ache with it! Prior to that experience, my back had been good for every violent strain put upon it in a none too gentle career. But that typewriter proved to me that I had a pipe-stem for a back. Also, it made me doubt my shoulders. They ached as with rheumatism after every bout. The keys of that machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or some one breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I'd have operated it with a carpenter's hammer. The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same time I was trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical endurance and a brain storm combined to type a thousand words, and I was composing thousands of words every day which just had to be typed for the waiting editors. Oh, between the writing and the typewriting I was well a-weary. I had brain and nerve fag, and body fag as well, and yet the thought of drink never suggested itself. I was living too high to stand in need of an anodyne. All my waking hours, except those with that infernal typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven. And along with this I had no desire for drink because I still believed in many things--in the love of all men and women in the matter of man and woman love; in fatherhood; in human justice; in art--in the whole host of fond illusions that keep the world turning around. But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting. My manuscripts made amazing round-trip records between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It might have been the weirdness of the typewriting that prevented the editors from accepting at least one little offering of mine. I don't know, and goodness knows the stuff I wrote was as weird as its typing. I sold my hard-bought school books for ridiculous sums to second-hand bookmen. I borrowed small sums of money wherever I could, and suffered my old father to feed me with the meagre returns of his failing strength. It didn't last long, only a few weeks, when I had to surrender and go to work. Yet I was unaware of any need for the drink anodyne. I was not disappointed. My career was retarded, that was all. Perhaps I did need further preparation. I had learned enough from the books to realise that I had only touched the hem of knowledge's garment. I still lived on the heights. My waking hours, and most of the hours I should have used for sleep, were spent with the books. CHAPTER XXIV Out in the country, at the Belmont Academy, I went to work in a small, perfectly appointed steam laundry. Another fellow and myself did all the work from sorting and washing to ironing the white shirts, collars and cuffs, and the "fancy starch" of the wives of the professors. We worked like tigers, especially as summer came on and the academy boys took to the wearing of duck trousers. It consumes a dreadful lot of time to iron one pair of duck trousers. And there were so many pairs of them. We sweated our way through long sizzling weeks at a task that was never done; and many a night, while the students snored in bed, my partner and I toiled on under the electric light at steam mangle or ironing board. The hours were long, the work was arduous, despite the fact that we became past masters in the art of eliminating waste motion. And I was receiving thirty dollars a month and board--a slight increase over my coal-shovelling and cannery days, at least to the extent of board, which cost my employer little (we ate in the kitchen), but which was to me the equivalent of twenty dollars a month. My robuster strength of added years, my increased skill, and all I had learned from the books, were responsible for this increase of twenty dollars. Judging by my rate of development, I might hope before I died to be a night watchman for sixty dollars a month, or a policeman actually receiving a hundred dollars with pickings. So relentlessly did my partner and I spring into our work throughout the week that by Saturday night we were frazzled wrecks. I found myself in the old familiar work-beast condition, toiling longer hours than the horses toiled, thinking scarcely more frequent thoughts than horses think. The books were closed to me. I had brought a trunkful to the laundry, but found myself unable to read them. I fell asleep the moment I tried to read; and if I did manage to keep my eyes open for several pages, I could not remember the contents of those pages. I gave over attempts on heavy study, such as jurisprudence, political economy, and biology, and tried lighter stuff, such as history. I fell asleep. I tried literature, and fell asleep. And finally, when I fell asleep over lively novels, I gave up. I never succeeded in reading one book in all the time I spent in the laundry. And when Saturday night came, and the week's work was over until Monday morning, I knew only one desire besides the desire to sleep, and that was to get drunk. This was the second time in my life that I had heard the unmistakable call of John Barleycorn. The first time it had been because of brain-fag. But I had no over-worked brain now. On the contrary, all I knew was the dull numbness of a brain that was not worked at all. That was the trouble. My brain had become so alert and eager, so quickened by the wonder of the new world the books had discovered to it, that it now suffered all the misery of stagnancy and inaction. And I, the long time intimate of John Barleycorn, knew just what he promised me--maggots of fancy, dreams of power, forgetfulness, anything and everything save whirling washers, revolving mangles, humming centrifugal wringers, and fancy starch and interminable processions of duck trousers moving in steam under my flying iron. And that's it. John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and failure, to weariness and exhaustion. He is the easy way out. And he is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they are not and vastly fairer than what they are. But it must not be forgotten that John Barleycorn is protean. As well as to weakness and exhaustion, does he appeal to too much strength, to superabundant vitality, to the ennui of idleness. He can tuck in his arm the arm of any man in any mood. He can throw the net of his lure over all men. He exchanges new lamps for old, the spangles of illusion for the drabs of reality, and in the end cheats all who traffic with him. I didn't get drunk, however, for the simple reason that it was a mile and a half to the nearest saloon. And this, in turn, was because the call to get drunk was not very loud in my ears. Had it been loud, I would have travelled ten times the distance to win to the saloon. On the other hand, had the saloon been just around the corner, I should have got drunk. As it was, I would sprawl out in the shade on my one day of rest and dally with the Sunday papers. But I was too weary even for their froth. The comic supplement might bring a pallid smile to my face, and then I would fall asleep. Although I did not yield to John Barleycorn while working in the laundry, a certain definite result was produced. I had heard the call, felt the gnaw of desire, yearned for the anodyne. I was being prepared for the stronger desire of later years. And the point is that this development of desire was entirely in my brain. My body did not cry out for alcohol. As always, alcohol was repulsive to my body. When I was bodily weary from shovelling coal the thought of taking a drink had never flickered into my consciousness. When I was brain-wearied after taking the entrance examinations to the university, I promptly got drunk. At the laundry I was suffering physical exhaustion again, and physical exhaustion that was not nearly so profound as that of the coal-shovelling. But there was a difference. When I went coal-shovelling my mind had not yet awakened. Between that time and the laundry my mind had found the kingdom of the mind. While shovelling coal my mind was somnolent. While toiling in the laundry my mind, informed and eager to do and be, was crucified. And whether I yielded to drink, as at Benicia, or whether I refrained, as at the laundry, in my brain the seeds of desire for alcohol were germinating. CHAPTER XXV After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the Klondike. It was the first gold rush into that region, the early fall rush of 1897. I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid physical condition. I remember, at the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage across Chilcoot from Dyea Beach to Lake Linderman, I was packing up with the Indians and out-packing many an Indian. The last pack into Linderman was three miles. I back-tripped it four times a day, and on each forward trip carried one hundred and fifty pounds. This means that over the worst trails I daily travelled twenty-four miles, twelve of which were under a burden of one hundred and fifty pounds. Yes, I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure-path again in quest of fortune. And of course, on the adventure-path, I met John Barleycorn. Here were the chesty men again, rovers and adventurers, and while they didn't mind a grub famine, whisky they could not do without. Whisky went over the trail, while the flour lay cached and untouched by the trail-side. As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and disgracefully when with other men. In my personal medicine chest was a quart of whisky. I never drew the cork till six months afterward, in a lonely camp, where, without anaesthetics, a doctor was compelled to operate on a man. The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the operation. Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found that my father was dead and that I was the head and the sole bread-winner of a household. When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from Behring Sea to British Columbia, and travelled in the steerage from there to San Francisco, it will be understood that I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy. Times were hard. Work of any sort was difficult to get. And work of any sort was what I had to take, for I was still an unskilled labourer. I had no thought of career. That was over and done with. I had to find food for two mouths beside my own and keep a roof over our heads--yes, and buy a winter suit, my one suit being decidedly summery. I had to get some sort of work immediately. After that, when I had caught my breath, I might think about my future. Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times, and I had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman. With my new responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea, and I failed to find a job at laundrying. I failed to find a job at anything. I had my name down in five employment bureaux. I advertised in three newspapers. I sought out the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work; but they were either uninterested or unable to find anything for me. The situation was desperate. I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left to me. It was and is my sole legacy in this world. It had cost fifteen dollars, and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars on it. And--oh, yes--a water-front comrade of earlier years drifted along one day with a dress suit wrapped in newspapers. He could give no adequate explanation of how he had come to possess it, nor did I press for an explanation. I wanted the suit myself. No; not to wear. I traded him a lot of rubbish which, being unpawnable, was useless to me. He peddled the rubbish for several dollars, while I pledged the dress-suit with my pawnbroker for five dollars. And for all I know the pawnbroker still has the suit. I had never intended to redeem it. But I couldn't get any work. Yet I was a bargain in the labour market. I was twenty-two years old, weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds stripped, every pound of which was excellent for toil; and the last traces of my scurvy were vanishing before a treatment of potatoes chewed raw. I tackled every opening for employment. I tried to become a studio model, but there were too many fine-bodied young fellows out of jobs. I answered advertisements of elderly invalids in need of companions. And I almost became a sewing machine agent, on commission, without salary. But poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times, so I was forced to forgo that employment. Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and roustabout. But winter was coming on, and the surplus labour army was pouring into the cities. Also I, who had romped along carelessly through the countries of the world and the kingdom of the mind, was not a member of any union. I sought odd jobs. I worked days, and half-days, at anything I could get. I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat them, and laid them again. Further, I took the civil service examinations for mail carrier and passed first. But alas! there was no vacancy, and I must wait. And while I waited, and in between the odd jobs I managed to procure, I started to earn ten dollars by writing a newspaper account of a voyage I had made, in an open boat down the Yukon, of nineteen hundred miles in nineteen days. I didn't know the first thing about the newspaper game, but I was confident I'd get ten dollars for my article. But I didn't. The first San Francisco newspaper to which I mailed it never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript, but held on to it. The longer it held on to it the more certain I was that the thing was accepted. And here is the funny thing. Some are born to fortune, and some have fortune thrust upon them. But in my case I was clubbed into fortune, and bitter necessity wielded the club. I had long since abandoned all thought of writing as a career. My honest intention in writing that article was to earn ten dollars. And that was the limit of my intention. It would help to tide me along until I got steady employment. Had a vacancy occurred in the post office at that time, I should have jumped at it. But the vacancy did not occur, nor did a steady job; and I employed the time between odd jobs with writing a twenty-one-thousand-word serial for the "Youth's Companion." I turned it out and typed it in seven days. I fancy that was what was the matter with it, for it came back. It took some time for it to go and come, and in the meantime I tried my hand at short stories. I sold one to the "Overland Monthly" for five dollars. The "Black Cat" gave me forty dollars for another. The "Overland Monthly" offered me seven dollars and a half, pay on publication, for all the stories I should deliver. I got my bicycle, my watch, and my father's mackintosh out of pawn and rented a typewriter. Also, I paid up the bills I owed to the several groceries that allowed me a small credit. I recall the Portuguese groceryman who never permitted my bill to go beyond four dollars. Hopkins, another grocer, could not be budged beyond five dollars. And just then came the call from the post office to go to work. It placed me in a most trying predicament. The sixty-five dollars I could earn regularly every month was a terrible temptation. I couldn't decide what to do. And I'll never be able to forgive the postmaster of Oakland. I answered the call, and I talked to him like a man. I frankly told him the situation. It looked as if I might win out at writing. The chance was good, but not certain. Now, if he would pass me by and select the next man on the eligible list and give me a call at the next vacancy-- But he shut me off with: "Then you don't want the position?" "But I do," I protested. "Don't you see, if you will pass me over this time--" "If you want it you will take it," he said coldly. Happily for me, the cursed brutality of the man made me angry. "Very well," I said. "I won't take it." CHAPTER XXVI Having burned my ship, I plunged into writing. I am afraid I always was an extremist. Early and late I was at it--writing, typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all the forms of writing, and studying the writers who succeeded in order to find out how they succeeded. I managed on five hours' sleep in the twenty-four, and came pretty close to working the nineteen waking hours left to me. My light burned till two and three in the morning, which led a good neighbour woman into a bit of sentimental Sherlock-Holmes deduction. Never seeing me in the day-time, she concluded that I was a gambler, and that the light in my window was placed there by my mother to guide her erring son home. The trouble with the beginner at the writing game is the long, dry spells, when there is never an editor's cheque and everything pawnable is pawned. I wore my summer suit pretty well through that winter, and the following summer experienced the longest, dryest spell of all, in the period when salaried men are gone on vacation and manuscripts lie in editorial offices until vacation is over. My difficulty was that I had no one to advise me. I didn't know a soul who had written or who had ever tried to write. I didn't even know one reporter. Also, to succeed at the writing game, I found I had to unlearn about everything the teachers and professors of literature of the high school and university had taught me. I was very indignant about this at the time; though now I can understand it. They did not know the trick of successful writing in the years 1895 and 1896. They knew all about "Snow Bound" and "Sartor Resartus"; but the American editors of 1899 did not want such truck. They wanted the 1899 truck, and offered to pay so well for it that the teachers and professors of literature would have quit their jobs could they have supplied it. I struggled along, stood off the butcher and the grocer, pawned my watch and bicycle and my father's mackintosh, and I worked. I really did work, and went on short commons of sleep. Critics have complained about the swift education one of my characters, Martin Eden, achieved. In three years, from a sailor with a common school education, I made a successful writer of him. The critics say this is impossible. Yet I was Martin Eden. At the end of three working years, two of which were spent in high school and the university and one spent at writing, and all three in studying immensely and intensely, I was publishing stories in magazines such as the "Atlantic Monthly," was correcting proofs of my first book (issued by Houghton, Mifflin Co.), was selling sociological articles to "Cosmopolitan" and "McClure's," had declined an associate editorship proffered me by telegraph from New York City, and was getting ready to marry. Now the foregoing means work, especially the last year of it, when I was learning my trade as a writer. And in that year, running short on sleep and tasking my brain to its limit, I neither drank nor cared to drink. So far as I was concerned, alcohol did not exist. I did suffer from brain-fag on occasion, but alcohol never suggested itself as an ameliorative. Heavens! Editorial acceptances and cheques were all the amelioratives I needed. A thin envelope from an editor in the morning's mail was more stimulating than half a dozen cocktails. And if a cheque of decent amount came out of the envelope, such incident in itself was a whole drunk. Furthermore, at that time in my life I did not know what a cocktail was. I remember, when my first book was published, several Alaskans, who were members of the Bohemian Club, entertained me one evening at the club in San Francisco. We sat in most wonderful leather chairs, and drinks were ordered. Never had I heard such an ordering of liqueurs and of highballs of particular brands of Scotch. I didn't know what a liqueur or a highball was, and I didn't know that "Scotch" meant whisky. I knew only poor men's drinks, the drinks of the frontier and of sailor-town--cheap beer and cheaper whisky that was just called whisky and nothing else. I was embarrassed to make a choice, and the steward nearly collapsed when I ordered claret as an after-dinner drink. CHAPTER XXVII As I succeeded with my writing, my standard of living rose and my horizon broadened. I confined myself to writing and typing a thousand words a day, including Sundays and holidays; and I still studied hard, but not so hard as formerly. I allowed myself five and one-half hours of actual sleep. I added this half-hour because I was compelled. Financial success permitted me more time for exercise. I rode my wheel more, chiefly because it was permanently out of pawn; and I boxed and fenced, walked on my hands, jumped high and broad, put the shot and tossed the caber, and went swimming. And I learned that more sleep is required for physical exercise than for mental exercise. There were tired nights, bodily, when I slept six hours; and on occasion of very severe exercise I actually slept seven hours. But such sleep orgies were not frequent. There was so much to learn, so much to be done, that I felt wicked when I slept seven hours. And I blessed the man who invented alarm clocks. And still no desire to drink. I possessed too many fine faiths, was living at too keen a pitch. I was a socialist, intent on saving the world, and alcohol could not give me the fervours that were mine from my ideas and ideals. My voice, on account of my successful writing, had added weight, or so I thought. At any rate, my reputation as a writer drew me audiences that my reputation as a speaker never could have drawn. I was invited before clubs and organisations of all sorts to deliver my message. I fought the good fight, and went on studying and writing, and was very busy. Up to this time I had had a very restricted circle of friends. But now I began to go about. I was invited out, especially to dinner, and I made many friends and acquaintances whose economic lives were easier than mine had been. And many of them drank. In their own houses they drank and offered me drink. They were not drunkards any of them. They just drank temperately, and I drank temperately with them as an act of comradeship and accepted hospitality. I did not care for it, neither wanted it nor did not want it, and so small was the impression made by it that I do not remember my first cocktail nor my first Scotch highball. Well, I had a house. When one is asked into other houses, he naturally asks others into his house. Behold the rising standard of living. Having been given drink in other houses, I could expect nothing else of myself than to give drink in my own house. So I laid in a supply of beer and whisky and table claret. Never since that has my house not been well supplied. And still, through all this period, I did not care in the slightest for John Barleycorn. I drank when others drank, and with them, as a social act. And I had so little choice in the matter that I drank whatever they drank. If they elected whisky, then whisky it was for me. If they drank root beer or sarsaparilla, I drank root beer or sarsaparilla with them. And when there were no friends in the house, why, I didn't drink anything. Whisky decanters were always in the room where I wrote, and for months and years I never knew what it was, when by myself, to take a drink. When out at dinner I noticed the kindly, genial glow of the preliminary cocktail. It seemed a very fitting and gracious thing. Yet so little did I stand in need of it, with my own high intensity and vitality, that I never thought it worth while to have a cocktail before my own meal when I ate alone. On the other hand, I well remember a very brilliant man, somewhat older than I, who occasionally visited me. He liked whisky, and I recall sitting whole afternoons in my den, drinking steadily with him, drink for drink, until he was mildly lighted up and I was slightly aware that I had drunk some whisky. Now why did I do this? I don't know, save that the old schooling held, the training of the old days and nights glass in hand with men, the drinking ways of drink and drinkers. Besides, I no longer feared John Barleycorn. Mine was that most dangerous stage when a man believes himself John Barleycorn's master. I had proved it to my satisfaction in the long years of work and study. I could drink when I wanted, refrain when I wanted, drink without getting drunk, and to cap everything I was thoroughly conscious that I had no liking for the stuff. During this period I drank precisely for the same reason I had drunk with Scotty and the harpooner and with the oyster pirates--because it was an act that men performed with whom I wanted to behave as a man. These brilliant ones, these adventurers of the mind, drank. Very well. There was no reason I should not drink with them--I who knew so confidently that I had nothing to fear from John Barleycorn. And the foregoing was my attitude of mind for years. Occasionally I got well jingled, but such occasions were rare. It interfered with my work, and I permitted nothing to interfere with my work. I remember, when spending several months in the East End of London, during which time I wrote a book and adventured much amongst the worst of the slum classes, that I got drunk several times and was mightily wroth with myself because it interfered with my writing. Yet these very times were because I was out on the adventure-path where John Barleycorn is always to be found. Then, too, with the certitude of long training and unholy intimacy, there were occasions when I engaged in drinking bouts with men. Of course, this was on the adventure-path in various parts of the world, and it was a matter of pride. It is a queer man-pride that leads one to drink with men in order to show as strong a head as they. But this queer man-pride is no theory. It is a fact. For instance, a wild band of young revolutionists invited me as the guest of honour to a beer bust. It is the only technical beer bust I ever attended. I did not know the true inwardness of the affair when I accepted. I imagined that the talk would be wild and high, that some of them might drink more than they ought, and that I would drink discreetly. But it seemed these beer busts were a diversion of these high-spirited young fellows whereby they whiled away the tedium of existence by making fools of their betters. As I learned afterward, they had got their previous guest of honour, a brilliant young radical, unskilled in drinking, quite pipped. When I found myself with them, and the situation dawned on me, up rose my queer man-pride. I'd show them, the young rascals. I'd show them who was husky and chesty, who had the vitality and the constitution, the stomach and the head, who could make most of a swine of himself and show it least. These unlicked cubs who thought they could out-drink ME! You see, it was an endurance test, and no man likes to give another best. Faugh! it was steam beer. I had learned more expensive brews. Not for years had I drunk steam beer; but when I had, I had drunk with men, and I guessed I could show these youngsters some ability in beer-guzzling. And the drinking began, and I had to drink with the best of them. Some of them might lag, but the guest of honour was not permitted to lag. And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to outswine the swine. And when the session broke up I was still on my feet, and I walked, erect, unswaying--which was more than can be said of some of my hosts. I recall one of them in indignant tears on the street corner, weeping as he pointed out my sober condition. Little he dreamed the iron clutch, born of old training, with which I held to my consciousness in my swimming brain, kept control of my muscles and my qualms, kept my voice unbroken and easy and my thoughts consecutive and logical. Yes, and mixed up with it all I was privily a-grin. They hadn't made a fool of me in that drinking bout. And I was proud of myself for the achievement. Darn it, I am still proud, so strangely is man compounded. But I didn't write my thousand words next morning. I was sick, poisoned. It was a day of wretchedness. In the afternoon I had to give a public speech. I gave it, and I am confident it was as bad as I felt. Some of my hosts were there in the front rows to mark any signs on me of the night before. I don't know what signs they marked, but I marked signs on them and took consolation in the knowledge that they were just as sick as I. Never again, I swore. And I have never been inveigled into another beer bust. For that matter, that was my last drinking bout of any sort. Oh, I have drunk ever since, but with more wisdom, more discretion, and never in a competitive spirit. It is thus that the seasoned drinker grows seasoned. To show that at this period in my life drinking was wholly a matter of companionship, I remember crossing the Atlantic in the old Teutonic. It chanced, at the start, that I chummed with an English cable operator and a younger member of a Spanish shipping firm. Now the only thing they drank was "horse's neck"--a long, soft, cool drink with an apple peel or an orange peel floating in it. And for that whole voyage I drank horse's necks with my two companions. On the other hand, had they drunk whisky, I should have drunk whisky with them. From this it must not be concluded that I was merely weak. I didn't care. I had no morality in the matter. I was strong with youth, and unafraid, and alcohol was an utterly negligible question so far as I was concerned. CHAPTER XXVIII Not yet was I ready to tuck my arm in John Barleycorn's. The older I got, the greater my success, the more money I earned, the wider was the command of the world that became mine and the more prominently did John Barleycorn bulk in my life. And still I maintained no more than a nodding acquaintance with him. I drank for the sake of sociability, and when alone I did not drink. Sometimes I got jingled, but I considered such jingles the mild price I paid for sociability. To show how unripe I was for John Barleycorn, when, at this time, I descended into my slough of despond, I never dreamed of turning to John Barleycorn for a helping hand. I had life troubles and heart troubles which are neither here nor there in this narrative. But, combined with them, were intellectual troubles which are indeed germane. Mine was no uncommon experience. I had read too much positive science and lived too much positive life. In the eagerness of youth I had made the ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too relentlessly. I had torn her veils from her, and the sight was too terrible for me to stand. In brief, I lost my fine faiths in pretty well everything except humanity, and the humanity I retained faith in was a very stark humanity indeed. This long sickness of pessimism is too well known to most of us to be detailed here. Let it suffice to state that I had it very bad. I meditated suicide coolly, as a Greek philosopher might. My regret was that there were too many dependent directly upon me for food and shelter for me to quit living. But that was sheer morality. What really saved me was the one remaining illusion--the PEOPLE. The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had failed me. Success--I despised it. Recognition--it was dead ashes. Society, men and women above the ruck and the muck of the water-front and the forecastle--I was appalled by their unlovely mental mediocrity. Love of woman--it was like all the rest. Money--I could sleep in only one bed at a time, and of what worth was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day when I could eat only one? Art, culture--in the face of the iron facts of biology such things were ridiculous, the exponents of such things only the more ridiculous. From the foregoing it can be seen how very sick I was. I was born a fighter. The things I had fought for had proved not worth the fight. Remained the PEOPLE. My fight was finished, yet something was left still to fight for--the PEOPLE. But while I was discovering this one last tie to bind me to life, in my extremity, in the depths of despond, walking in the valley of the shadow, my ears were deaf to John Barleycorn. Never the remotest whisper arose in my consciousness that John Barleycorn was the anodyne, that he could lie me along to live. One way only was uppermost in my thought--my revolver, the crashing eternal darkness of a bullet. There was plenty of whisky in the house--for my guests. I never touched it. I grew afraid of my revolver--afraid during the period in which the radiant, flashing vision of the PEOPLE was forming in my mind and will. So obsessed was I with the desire to die that I feared I might commit the act in my sleep, and I was compelled to give my revolver away to others who were to lose it for me where my subconscious hand might not find it. But the PEOPLE saved me. By the PEOPLE was I handcuffed to life. There was still one fight left in me, and here was the thing for which to fight. I threw all precaution to the winds, threw myself with fiercer zeal into the fight for socialism, laughed at the editors and publishers who warned me and who were the sources of my hundred porterhouses a day, and was brutally careless of whose feelings I hurt and of how savagely I hurt them. As the "well-balanced radicals" charged at the time, my efforts were so strenuous, so unsafe and unsane, so ultra-revolutionary, that I retarded the socialist development in the United States by five years. In passing, I wish to remark, at this late date, that it is my fond belief that I accelerated the socialist development in the United States by at least five minutes. It was the PEOPLE, and no thanks to John Barleycorn, who pulled me through my long sickness. And when I was convalescent came the love of woman to complete the cure and lull my pessimism asleep for many a long day, until John Barleycorn again awoke it. But in the meantime, I pursued Truth less relentlessly, refraining from tearing her last veils aside even when I clutched them in my hand. I no longer cared to look upon Truth naked. I refused to permit myself to see a second time what I had once seen. And the memory of what I had that time seen I resolutely blotted from my mind. And I was very happy. Life went well with me, I took delight in little things. The big things I declined to take too seriously. I still read the books, but not with the old eagerness. I still read the books to-day, but never again shall I read them with that old glory of youthful passion when I harked to the call from over and beyond that whispered me on to win to the mystery at the back of life and behind the stars. The point of this chapter is that, in the long sickness that at some time comes to most of us, I came through without any appeal for aid to John Barleycorn. Love, socialism, the PEOPLE--healthful figments of man's mind--were the things that cured and saved me. If ever a man was not a born alcoholic, I believe that I am that man. And yet--well, let the succeeding chapters tell their tale, for in them will be shown how I paid for my previous quarter of a century of contact with ever-accessible John Barleycorn. CHAPTER XXIX After my long sickness my drinking continued to be convivial. I drank when others drank and I was with them. But, imperceptibly, my need for alcohol took form and began to grow. It was not a body need. I boxed, swam, sailed, rode horses, lived in the open an arrantly healthful life, and passed life insurance examinations with flying colours. In its inception, now that I look back upon it, this need for alcohol was a mental need, a nerve need, a good-spirits need. How can I explain? It was something like this. Physiologically, from the standpoint of palate and stomach, alcohol was, as it had always been, repulsive. It tasted no better than beer did when I was five, than bitter claret did when I was seven. When I was alone, writing or studying, I had no need for it. But--I was growing old, or wise, or both, or senile as an alternative. When I was in company I was less pleased, less excited, with the things said and done. Erstwhile worth-while fun and stunts seemed no longer worth while; and it was a torment to listen to the insipidities and stupidities of women, to the pompous, arrogant sayings of the little half-baked men. It is the penalty one pays for reading the books too much, or for being oneself a fool. In my case it does not matter which was my trouble. The trouble itself was the fact. The condition of the fact was mine. For me the life, and light, and sparkle of human intercourse were dwindling. I had climbed too high among the stars, or, maybe, I had slept too hard. Yet I was not hysterical nor in any way overwrought. My pulse was normal. My heart was an amazement of excellence to the insurance doctors. My lungs threw the said doctors into ecstasies. I wrote a thousand words every day. I was punctiliously exact in dealing with all the affairs of life that fell to my lot. I exercised in joy and gladness. I slept at night like a babe. But-- Well, as soon as I got out in the company of others I was driven to melancholy and spiritual tears. I could neither laugh with nor at the solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor could I laugh, nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage, with the silly superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath all their silliness and softness, were as primitive, direct, and deadly in their pursuit of biological destiny as the monkeys women were before they shed their furry coats and replaced them with the furs of other animals. And I was not pessimistic. I swear I was not pessimistic. I was merely bored. I had seen the same show too often, listened too often to the same songs and the same jokes. I knew too much about the box office receipts. I knew the cogs of the machinery behind the scenes so well that the posing on the stage, and the laughter and the song, could not drown the creaking of the wheels behind. It doesn't pay to go behind the scenes and see the angel-voiced tenor beat his wife. Well, I'd been behind, and I was paying for it. Or else I was a fool. It is immaterial which was my situation. The situation is what counts, and the situation was that social intercourse for me was getting painful and difficult. On the other hand, it must be stated that on rare occasions, on very rare occasions, I did meet rare souls, or fools like me, with whom I could spend magnificent hours among the stars, or in the paradise of fools. I was married to a rare soul, or a fool, who never bored me and who was always a source of new and unending surprise and delight. But I could not spend all my hours solely in her company. Nor would it have been fair, nor wise, to compel her to spend all her hours in my company. Besides, I had written a string of successful books, and society demands some portion of the recreative hours of a fellow that writes books. And any normal man, of himself and his needs, demands some hours of his fellow men. And now we begin to come to it. How to face the social intercourse game with the glamour gone? John Barleycorn. The ever patient one had waited a quarter of a century and more for me to reach my hand out in need of him. His thousand tricks had failed, thanks to my constitution and good luck, but he had more tricks in his bag. A cocktail or two, or several, I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people. A cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly at things which had long since ceased being laughable. The cocktail was a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. It recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to talk. A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good companion with one. I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged myself to merriment. And the thing began so imperceptibly that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was leading me. I was beginning to call for music and wine; soon I should be calling for madder music and more wine. It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the pre-dinner cocktail. I WANTED it, and I was CONSCIOUS that I wanted it. I remember, while war-corresponding in the Far East, of being irresistibly attracted to a certain home. Besides accepting all invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in almost every afternoon. Now, the hostess was a charming woman, but it was not for her sake that I was under her roof so frequently. It happened that she made by far the finest cocktail procurable in that large city where drink-mixing on the part of the foreign population was indeed an art. Up at the club, down at the hotels, and in other private houses, no such cocktails were created. Her cocktails were subtle. They were masterpieces. They were the least repulsive to the palate and carried the most "kick." And yet, I desired her cocktails only for sociability's sake, to key myself to sociable moods. When I rode away from that city, across hundreds of miles of rice-fields and mountains, and through months of campaigning, and on with the victorious Japanese into Manchuria, I did not drink. Several bottles of whisky were always to be found on the backs of my pack-horses. Yet I never broached a bottle for myself, never took a drink by myself, and never knew a desire to take such a drink. Oh, if a white man came into my camp, I opened a bottle and we drank together according to the way of men, just as he would open a bottle and drink with me if I came into his camp. I carried that whisky for social purposes, and I so charged it up in my expense account to the newspaper for which I worked. Only in retrospect can I mark the almost imperceptible growth of my desire. There were little hints then that I did not take, little straws in the wind that I did not see, little incidents the gravity of which I did not realise. For instance, for some years it had been my practice each winter to cruise for six or eight weeks on San Francisco Bay. My stout sloop yacht, the Spray, had a comfortable cabin and a coal stove. A Korean boy did the cooking, and I usually took a friend or so along to share the joys of the cruise. Also, I took my machine along and did my thousand words a day. On the particular trip I have in mind, Cloudesley and Toddy came along. This was Toddy's first trip. On previous trips Cloudesley had elected to drink beer; so I had kept the yacht supplied with beer and had drunk beer with him. But on this cruise the situation was different. Toddy was so nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting toddies. So I brought whisky along--a couple of gallons. Alas! Many another gallon I bought, for Cloudesley and I got into the habit of drinking a certain hot toddy that actually tasted delicious going down and that carried the most exhilarating kick imaginable. I liked those toddies. I grew to look forward to the making of them. We drank them regularly, one before breakfast, one before dinner, one before supper, and a final one when we went to bed. We never got drunk. But I will say that four times a day we were very genial. And when, in the middle of the cruise, Toddy was called back to San Francisco on business, Cloudesley and I saw to it that the Korean boy mixed toddies regularly for us according to formula. But that was only on the boat. Back on the land, in my house, I took no before breakfast eye-opener, no bed-going nightcap. And I haven't drunk hot toddies since, and that was many a year ago. But the point is, I LIKED those toddies. The geniality of which they were provocative was marvellous. They were eloquent proselyters for John Barleycorn in their own small insidious way. They were tickles of the something destined to grow into daily and deadly desire. And I didn't know, never dreamed--I, who had lived with John Barleycorn for so many years and laughed at all his unavailing attempts to win me. CHAPTER XXX Part of the process of recovering from my long sickness was to find delight in little things, in things unconnected with books and problems, in play, in games of tag in the swimming pool, in flying kites, in fooling with horses, in working out mechanical puzzles. As a result, I grew tired of the city. On the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I found my paradise. I gave up living in cities. All the cities held for me were music, the theatre, and Turkish baths. And all went well with me. I worked hard, played hard, and was very happy. I read more fiction and less fact. I did not study a tithe as much as I had studied in the past. I still took an interest in the fundamental problems of existence, but it was a very cautious interest; for I had burned my fingers that time I clutched at the veils of Truth and wrested them from her. There was a bit of lie in this attitude of mine, a bit of hypocrisy; but the lie and the hypocrisy were those of a man desiring to live. I deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage interpretation of biological fact. After all, I was merely forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind. And I repeat, I was very happy. And I add, that in all my days, measuring them with cold, considerative judgment, this was, far and away beyond all other periods, the happiest period of my life. But the time was at hand, rhymeless and reasonless so far as I can see, when I was to begin to pay for my score of years of dallying with John Barleycorn. Occasionally guests journeyed to the ranch and remained a few days. Some did not drink. But to those who did drink, the absence of all alcohol on the ranch was a hardship. I could not violate my sense of hospitality by compelling them to endure this hardship. I ordered in a stock--for my guests. I was never interested enough in cocktails to know how they were made. So I got a bar-keeper in Oakland to make them in bulk and ship them to me. When I had no guests I didn't drink. But I began to notice, when I finished my morning's work, that I was glad if there were a guest, for then I could drink a cocktail with him. Now I was so clean of alcohol that even a single cocktail was provocative of pitch. A single cocktail would glow the mind and tickle a laugh for the few minutes prior to sitting down to table and starting the delightful process of eating. On the other hand, such was the strength of my stomach, of my alcoholic resistance, that the single cocktail was only the glimmer of a glow, the faintest tickle of a laugh. One day, a friend frankly and shamelessly suggested a second cocktail. I drank the second one with him. The glow was appreciably longer and warmer, the laughter deeper and more resonant. One does not forget such experiences. Sometimes I almost think that it was because I was so very happy that I started on my real drinking. I remember one day Charmian and I took a long ride over the mountains on our horses. The servants had been dismissed for the day, and we returned late at night to a jolly chafing-dish supper. Oh, it was good to be alive that night while the supper was preparing, the two of us alone in the kitchen. I, personally, was at the top of life. Such things as the books and ultimate truth did not exist. My body was gloriously healthy, and healthily tired from the long ride. It had been a splendid day. The night was splendid. I was with the woman who was my mate, picnicking in gleeful abandon. I had no troubles. The bills were all paid, and a surplus of money was rolling in on me. The future ever-widened before me. And right there, in the kitchen, delicious things bubbled in the chafing-dish, our laughter bubbled, and my stomach was keen with a most delicious edge of appetite. I felt so good, that somehow, somewhere, in me arose an insatiable greed to feel better. I was so happy that I wanted to pitch my happiness even higher. And I knew the way. Ten thousand contacts with John Barleycorn had taught me. Several times I wandered out of the kitchen to the cocktail bottle, and each time I left it diminished by one man's size cocktail. The result was splendid. I wasn't jingled, I wasn't lighted up; but I was warmed, I glowed, my happiness was pyramided. Munificent as life was to me, I added to that munificence. It was a great hour--one of my greatest. But I paid for it, long afterwards, as you will see. One does not forget such experiences, and, in human stupidity, cannot be brought to realise that there is no immutable law which decrees that same things shall produce same results. For they don't, else would the thousandth pipe of opium be provocative of similar delights to the first, else would one cocktail, instead of several, produce an equivalent glow after a year of cocktails. One day, just before I ate midday dinner, after my morning's writing was done, when I had no guest, I took a cocktail by myself. Thereafter, when there were no guests, I took this daily pre-dinner cocktail. And right there John Barleycorn had me. I was beginning to drink regularly. I was beginning to drink alone. And I was beginning to drink, not for hospitality's sake, not for the sake of the taste, but for the effect of the drink. I WANTED that daily pre-dinner cocktail. And it never crossed my mind that there was any reason I should not have it. I paid for it. I could pay for a thousand cocktails each day if I wanted. And what was a cocktail--one cocktail--to me who on so many occasions for so many years had drunk inordinate quantities of stiffer stuff and been unharmed? The programme of my ranch life was as follows: Each morning, at eight-thirty, having been reading or correcting proofs in bed since four or five, I went to my desk. Odds and ends of correspondence and notes occupied me till nine, and at nine sharp, invariably, I began my writing. By eleven, sometimes a few minutes earlier or later, my thousand words were finished. Another half-hour at cleaning up my desk, and my day's work was done, so that at eleven-thirty I got into a hammock under the trees with my mail-bag and the morning newspaper. At twelve-thirty I ate dinner and in the afternoon I swam and rode. One morning, at eleven-thirty, before I got into the hammock, I took a cocktail. I repeated this on subsequent mornings, of course, taking another cocktail just before I ate at twelve-thirty. Soon I found myself, seated at my desk in the midst of my thousand words, looking forward to that eleven-thirty cocktail. At last, now, I was thoroughly conscious that I desired alcohol. But what of it? I wasn't afraid of John Barleycorn. I had associated with him too long. I was wise in the matter of drink. I was discreet. Never again would I drink to excess. I knew the dangers and the pitfalls of John Barleycorn, the various ways by which he had tried to kill me in the past. But all that was past, long past. Never again would I drink myself to stupefaction. Never again would I get drunk. All I wanted, and all I would take, was just enough to glow and warm me, to kick geniality alive in me and put laughter in my throat and stir the maggots of imagination slightly in my brain. Oh, I was thoroughly master of myself, and of John Barleycorn. CHAPTER XXXI But the same stimulus to the human organism will not continue to produce the same response. By and by I discovered there was no kick at all in one cocktail. One cocktail left me dead. There was no glow, no laughter tickle. Two or three cocktails were required to produce the original effect of one. And I wanted that effect. I drank my first cocktail at eleven-thirty when I took the morning's mail into the hammock, and I drank my second cocktail an hour later just before I ate. I got into the habit of crawling out of the hammock ten minutes earlier so as to find time and decency for two more cocktails ere I ate. This became schedule--three cocktails in the hour that intervened between my desk and dinner. And these are two of the deadliest drinking habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking. I was always willing to drink when any one was around. I drank by myself when no one was around. Then I made another step. When I had for guest a man of limited drinking calibre, I took two drinks to his one--one drink with him, the other drink without him and of which he did not know. I STOLE that other drink, and, worse than that, I began the habit of drinking alone when there was a guest, a man, a comrade, with whom I could have drunk. But John Barleycorn furnished the extenuation. It was a wrong thing to trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk. If I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up with me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that every second drink, or else deny myself the kick equivalent to what he got out of half the number? Please remember, as I recite this development of my drinking, that I am no fool, no weakling. As the world measures such things, I am a success--I dare to say a success more conspicuous than the success of the average successful man, and a success that required a pretty fair amount of brains and will power. My body is a strong body. It has survived where weaklings died like flies. And yet these things which I am relating happened to my body and to me. I am a fact. My drinking is a fact. My drinking is a thing that has happened, and is no theory nor speculation; and, as I see it, it but lays the emphasis on the power of John Barleycorn--a savagery that we still permit to exist, a deadly institution that lingers from the mad old brutal days and that takes its heavy toll of youth and strength, and high spirit, and of very much of all of the best we breed. To return. After a boisterous afternoon in the swimming pool, followed by a glorious ride on horseback over the mountains or up or down the Valley of the Moon, I found myself so keyed and splendid that I desired to be more highly keyed, to feel more splendid. I knew the way. A cocktail before supper was not the way. Two or three, at the very least, was what was needed. I took them. Why not? It was living. I had always dearly loved to live. This also became part of the daily schedule. Then, too, I was perpetually finding excuses for extra cocktails. It might be the assembling of a particularly jolly crowd; a touch of anger against my architect or against a thieving stone-mason working on my barn; the death of my favourite horse in a barbed wire fence; or news of good fortune in the morning mail from my dealings with editors and publishers. It was immaterial what the excuse might be, once the desire had germinated in me. The thing was: I WANTED alcohol. At last, after a score and more of years of dallying and of not wanting, now I wanted it. And my strength was my weakness. I required two, three, or four drinks to get an effect commensurate with the effect the average man got out of one drink. One rule I observed. I never took a drink until my day's work of writing a thousand words was done. And, when done, the cocktails reared a wall of inhibition in my brain between the day's work done and the rest of the day of fun to come. My work ceased from my consciousness. No thought of it flickered in my brain till next morning at nine o'clock when I sat at my desk and began my next thousand words. This was a desirable condition of mind to achieve. I conserved my energy by means of this alcoholic inhibition. John Barleycorn was not so black as he was painted. He did a fellow many a good turn, and this was one of them. And I turned out work that was healthful, and wholesome, and sincere. It was never pessimistic. The way to life I had learned in my long sickness. I knew the illusions were right, and I exalted the illusions. Oh, I still turn out the same sort of work, stuff that is clean, alive, optimistic, and that makes toward life. And I am always assured by the critics of my super-abundant and abounding vitality, and of how thoroughly I am deluded by these very illusions I exploit. And while on this digression, let me repeat the question I have repeated to myself ten thousand times. WHY DID I DRINK? What need was there for it? I was happy. Was it because I was too happy? I was strong. Was it because I was too strong? Did I possess too much vitality? I don't know why I drank. I cannot answer, though I can voice the suspicion that ever grows in me. I had been in too-familiar contact with John Barleycorn through too many years. A left-handed man, by long practice, can become a right-handed man. Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice become an alcoholic? I was so happy. I had won through my long sickness to the satisfying love of woman. I earned more money with less endeavour. I glowed with health. I slept like a babe. I continued to write successful books, and in sociological controversy I saw my opponents confuted with the facts of the times that daily reared new buttresses to my intellectual position. From day's end to day's end I never knew sorrow, disappointment, nor regret. I was happy all the time. Life was one unending song. I begrudged the very hours of blessed sleep because by that much was I robbed of the joy that would have been mine had I remained awake. And yet I drank. And John Barleycorn, all unguessed by me, was setting the stage for a sickness all his own. The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an equivalent effect. When I left the Valley of the Moon, and went to the city, and dined out, a cocktail served at table was a wan and worthless thing. There was no pre-dinner kick in it. On my way to dinner I was compelled to accumulate the kick--two cocktails, three, and, if I met some fellows, four or five, or six, it didn't matter within several. Once, I was in a rush. I had no time decently to accumulate the several drinks. A brilliant idea came to me. I told the barkeeper to mix me a double cocktail. Thereafter, whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered double cocktails. It saved time. One result of this regular heavy drinking was to jade me. My mind grew so accustomed to spring and liven by artificial means that without artificial means it refused to spring and liven. Alcohol became more and more imperative in order to meet people, in order to become sociably fit. I had to get the kick and the hit of the stuff, the crawl of the maggots, the genial brain glow, the laughter tickle, the touch of devilishness and sting, the smile over the face of things, ere I could join my fellows and make one with them. Another result was that John Barleycorn was beginning to trip me up. He was thrusting my long sickness back upon me, inveigling me into again pursuing Truth and snatching her veils away from her, tricking me into looking reality stark in the face. But this came on gradually. My thoughts were growing harsh again, though they grew harsh slowly. Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind. Where was this steady drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such questions. "Come on and have a drink and I'll tell you all about it," is his way. And it works. For instance, the following is a case in point, and one which John Barleycorn never wearied of reminding me: I had suffered an accident which required a ticklish operation. One morning, a week after I had come off the table, I lay on my hospital bed, weak and weary. The sunburn of my face, what little of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded to a sickly yellow. My doctor stood at my bedside on the verge of departure. He glared disapprovingly at the cigarette I was smoking. "That's what you ought to quit," he lectured. "It will get you in the end. Look at me." I looked. He was about my own age, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, eyes sparkling, and ruddy-cheeked with health. A finer specimen of manhood one would not ask. "I used to smoke," he went on. "Cigars. But I gave even them up. And look at me." The man was arrogant, and rightly arrogant, with conscious well-being. And within a month he was dead. It was no accident. Half a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and destroyed him. The complications were astonishing and painful, and for days before he died the screams of agony of that splendid manhood could be heard for a block around. He died screaming. "You see," said John Barleycorn. "He took care of himself. He even stopped smoking cigars. And that's what he got for it. Pretty rotten, eh? But the bugs will jump. There's no forefending them. Your magnificent doctor took every precaution, yet they got him. When the bug jumps you can't tell where it will land. It may be you. Look what he missed. Will you miss all I can give you, only to have a bug jump on you and drag you down? There is no equity in life. It's all a lottery. But I put the lying smile on the face of life and laugh at the facts. Smile with me and laugh. You'll get yours in the end, but in the meantime laugh. It's a pretty dark world. I illuminate it for you. It's a rotten world, when things can happen such as happened to your doctor. There's only one thing to do: take another drink and forget it." And, of course, I took another drink for the inhibition that accompanied it. I took another drink every time John Barleycorn reminded me of what had happened. Yet I drank rationally, intelligently. I saw to it that the quality of the stuff was of the best. I sought the kick and the inhibition, and avoided the penalties of poor quality and of drunkenness. It is to be remarked, in passing, that when a man begins to drink rationally and intelligently that he betrays a grave symptom of how far along the road he has travelled. But I continued to observe my rule of never taking my first drink of the day until the last word of my thousand words was written. On occasion, however, I took a day's vacation from my writing. At such times, since it was no violation of my rule, I didn't mind how early in the day I took that first drink. And persons who have never been through the drinking game wonder how the drinking habit grows! CHAPTER XXXII When the Snark sailed on her long cruise from San Francisco there was nothing to drink on board. Or, rather, we were all of us unaware that there was anything to drink, nor did we discover it for many a month. This sailing with a "dry" boat was malice aforethought on my part. I had played John Barleycorn a trick. And it showed that I was listening ever so slightly to the faint warnings that were beginning to arise in my consciousness. Of course, I veiled the situation to myself and excused myself to John Barleycorn. And I was very scientific about it. I said that I would drink only while in ports. During the dry sea-stretches my system would be cleansed of the alcohol that soaked it, so that when I reached a port I should be in shape to enjoy John Barleycorn more thoroughly. His bite would be sharper, his kick keener and more delicious. We were twenty-seven days on the traverse between San Francisco and Honolulu. After the first day out, the thought of a drink never troubled me. This I take to show how intrinsically I am not an alcoholic. Sometimes, during the traverse, looking ahead and anticipating the delightful lanai luncheons and dinners of Hawaii (I had been there a couple of times before), I thought, naturally, of the drinks that would precede those meals. I did not think of those drinks with any yearning, with any irk at the length of the voyage. I merely thought they would be nice and jolly, part of the atmosphere of a proper meal. Thus, once again I proved to my complete satisfaction that I was John Barleycorn's master. I could drink when I wanted, refrain when I wanted. Therefore I would continue to drink when I wanted. Some five months were spent in the various islands of the Hawaiian group. Being ashore, I drank. I even drank a bit more than I had been accustomed to drink in California prior to the voyage. The people in Hawaii seemed to drink a bit more, on the average, than the people in more temperate latitudes. I do not intend the pun, and can awkwardly revise the statement to "latitudes more remote from the equator." Yet Hawaii is only sub-tropical. The deeper I got into the tropics, the deeper I found men drank, the deeper I drank myself. From Hawaii we sailed for the Marquesas. The traverse occupied sixty days. For sixty days we never raised land, a sail, nor a steamer smoke. But early in those sixty days the cook, giving an overhauling to the galley, made a find. Down in the bottom of a deep locker he found a dozen bottles of angelica and muscatel. These had come down from the kitchen cellar of the ranch along with the home-preserved fruits and jellies. Six months in the galley heat had effected some sort of a change in the thick sweet wine--branded it, I imagine. I took a taste. Delicious! And thereafter, once each day, at twelve o'clock, after our observations were worked up and the Snark's position charted, I drank half a tumbler of the stuff. It had a rare kick to it. It warmed the cockles of my geniality and put a fairer face on the truly fair face of the sea. Each morning, below, sweating out my thousand words, I found myself looking forward to that twelve o'clock event of the day. The trouble was I had to share the stuff, and the length of the traverse was doubtful. I regretted that there were not more than a dozen bottles. And when they were gone I even regretted that I had shared any of it. I was thirsty for the alcohol, and eager to arrive in the Marquesas. So it was that I reached the Marquesas the possessor of a real man's size thirst. And in the Marquesas were several white men, a lot of sickly natives, much magnificent scenery, plenty of trade rum, an immense quantity of absinthe, but neither whisky nor gin. The trade rum scorched the skin off one's mouth. I know, because I tried it. But I had ever been plastic, and I accepted the absinthe. The trouble with the stuff was that I had to take such inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect. From the Marquesas I sailed with sufficient absinthe in ballast to last me to Tahiti, where I outfitted with Scotch and American whisky, and thereafter there were no dry stretches between ports. But please do not misunderstand. There was no drunkenness, as drunkenness is ordinarily understood--no staggering and rolling around, no befuddlement of the senses. The skilled and seasoned drinker, with a strong constitution, never descends to anything like that. He drinks to feel good, to get a pleasant jingle, and no more than that. The things he carefully avoids are the nausea of over-drinking, the after-effect of over-drinking, the helplessness and loss of pride of over-drinking. What the skilled and seasoned drinker achieves is a discreet and canny semi-intoxication. And he does it by the twelve-month around without any apparent penalty. There are hundreds of thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in clubs, hotels, and in their own homes--men who are never drunk, and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that they are beating the game. On the sea-stretches I was fairly abstemious; but ashore I drank more. I seemed to need more, anyway, in the tropics. This is a common experience, for the excessive consumption of alcohol in the tropics by white men is a notorious fact. The tropics is no place for white-skinned men. Their skin-pigment does not protect them against the excessive white light of the sun. The ultra-violet rays, and other high-velocity and invisible rays from the upper end of the spectrum, rip and tear through their tissues, just as the X-ray ripped and tore through the tissues of so many experimenters before they learned the danger. White men in the tropics undergo radical changes of nature. They become savage, merciless. They commit monstrous acts of cruelty that they would never dream of committing in their original temperate climate. They become nervous, irritable, and less moral. And they drink as they never drank before. Drinking is one form of the many forms of degeneration that set in when white men are exposed too long to too much white light. The increase of alcoholic consumption is automatic. The tropics is no place for a long sojourn. They seem doomed to die anyway, and the heavy drinking expedites the process. They don't reason about it. They just do it. The sun sickness got me, despite the fact that I had been in the tropics only a couple of years. I drank heavily during this time, but right here I wish to forestall misunderstanding. The drinking was not the cause of the sickness, nor of the abandonment of the voyage. I was strong as a bull, and for many months I fought the sun sickness that was ripping and tearing my surface and nervous tissues to pieces. All through the New Hebrides and the Solomons and up among the atolls on the Line, during this period under a tropic sun, rotten with malaria, and suffering from a few minor afflictions such as Biblical leprosy with the silvery skin, I did the work of five men. To navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals and passages and unlighted coasts of the coral seas is a man's work in itself. I was the only navigator on board. There was no one to check me up on the working out of my observations, nor with whom I could advise in the ticklish darkness among uncharted reefs and shoals. And I stood all watches. There was no sea-man on board whom I could trust to stand a mate's watch. I was mate as well as captain. Twenty-four hours a day were the watches I stood at sea, catching cat-naps when I might. Third, I was doctor. And let me say right here that the doctor's job on the Snark at that time was a man's job. All on board suffered from malaria--the real, tropical malaria that can kill in three months. All on board suffered from perforating ulcers and from the maddening itch of ngari-ngari. A Japanese cook went insane from his too numerous afflictions. One of my Polynesian sailors lay at death's door with blackwater fever. Oh, yes, it was a full man's job, and I dosed and doctored, and pulled teeth, and dragged my patients through mild little things like ptomaine poisoning. Fourth, I was a writer. I sweated out my thousand words a day, every day, except when the shock of fever smote me, or a couple of nasty squalls smote the Snark, in the morning. Fifth, I was a traveller and a writer, eager to see things and to gather material into my note-books. And, sixth, I was master and owner of the craft that was visiting strange places where visitors are rare and where visitors are made much of. So here I had to hold up the social end, entertain on board, be entertained ashore by planters, traders, governors, captains of war vessels, kinky-headed cannibal kings, and prime ministers sometimes fortunate enough to be clad in cotton shifts. Of course I drank. I drank with my guests and hosts. Also, I drank by myself. Doing the work of five men, I thought, entitled me to drink. Alcohol was good for a man who over-worked. I noted its effect on my small crew, when, breaking their backs and hearts at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms, they knocked off gasping and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into them by stiff jolts of rum. They caught their breaths, wiped their mouths, and went to it again with a will. And when we careened the Snark and had to work in the water to our necks between shocks of fever, I noted how raw trade rum helped the work along. And here again we come to another side of many-sided John Barleycorn. On the face of it, he gives something for nothing. Where no strength remains he finds new strength. The wearied one rises to greater effort. For the time being there is an actual accession of strength. I remember passing coal on an ocean steamer through eight days of hell, during which time we coal-passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky. We toiled half drunk all the time. And without the whisky we could not have passed the coal. This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength. It is real strength. But it is manufactured out of the sources of strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest. But what weary human will look so far ahead? He takes this apparently miraculous accession of strength at its face value. And many an overworked business and professional man, as well as a harried common labourer, has travelled John Barleycorn's death road because of this mistake. CHAPTER XXXIII I went to Australia to go into hospital and get tinkered up, after which I planned to go on with the voyage. And during the long weeks I lay in hospital, from the first day I never missed alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I should have it again when I was on my feet. But when I regained my feet I was not cured of my major afflictions. Naaman's silvery skin was still mine. The mysterious sun-sickness, which the experts of Australia could not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium at the most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture tour which had been arranged. So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of course. I drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals. I drank Scotch highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn I could take up with him or let go of him whenever I pleased, just as I had done all my life. After a time, for cooler climate, I went down to southermost Tasmania in forty-three South. And I found myself in a place where there was nothing to drink. It didn't mean anything. I didn't drink. It was no hardship. I soaked in the cool air, rode horseback, and did my thousand words a day save when the fever shock came in the morning. And for fear that the idea may still lurk in some minds that my preceding years of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I here point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me, was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who in addition was in the slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required several years of temperate climates to cure, and that neither she nor Nakata drank or ever had drunk. When I returned to Hobart Town, where drink was obtainable, I drank as of old. The same when I arrived back in Australia. On the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a tramp steamer commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no drink along, and had no drink for the forty-three days' passage. Arrived in Ecuador, squarely under the equatorial sun, where the humans were dying of yellow fever, smallpox, and the plague, I promptly drank again--every drink of every sort that had a kick in it. I caught none of these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata who did not drink. Enamoured of the tropics, despite the damage done me, I stopped in various places, and was a long while getting back to the splendid, temperate climate of California. I did my thousand words a day, travelling or stopping over, suffered my last faint fever shock, saw my silvery skin vanish and my sun-torn tissues healthily knit again, and drank as a broad-shouldered chesty man may drink. CHAPTER XXXIV Back on the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I resumed my steady drinking. My programme was no drink in the morning; first drink-time came with the completion of my thousand words. Then, between that and the midday meal, were drinks numerous enough to develop a pleasant jingle. Again, in the hour preceding the evening meal, I developed another pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for the simple reason that I never was drunk. But I did get a jingle twice each day; and the amount of alcohol I consumed every day, if loosed in the system of one unaccustomed to drink, would have put such a one on his back and out. It was the old proposition. The more I drank, the more I was compelled to drink in order to get an effect. The time came when cocktails were inadequate. I had neither the time in which to drink them nor the space to accommodate them. Whisky had a more powerful jolt. It gave quicker action with less quantity. Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the pre-midday drinking. In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda. My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to awake. But now this began to fail me. When I had read two or three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two or three drinks were required. So short a period of sleep then intervened before early morning rising that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol. As a result I awoke with mouth parched and dry, with a slight heaviness of head, and with a mild nervous palpitation in the stomach. In fact I did not feel good. I was suffering from the morning sickness of the steady, heavy drinker. What I needed was a pick-me-up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn, once he has broken down a man's defences! So it was a drink before breakfast to put me right for breakfast--the old poison of the snake that has bitten one! Another custom begun at this time was that of the pitcher of water by the bedside to furnish relief to my scorched and sizzling membranes. I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I travelled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of finding them dry. I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my grip. In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And when I got out with the fellows, I cast all rules by the board. I drank when they drank, what they drank, and in the same way they drank. I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink. The gravity of this I realised too well. I made new rules. Resolutely I would refrain from drinking until my work was done. But a new and most diabolical complication arose. The work refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn't be done. I had to drink in order to do it. I was beginning to fight now. I had the craving at last, and it was mastering me. I would sit at my desk and dally with pad and pen, but words refused to flow. My brain could not think the proper thoughts because continually it was obsessed with the one thought that across the room in the liquor cabinet stood John Barleycorn. When, in despair, I took my drink, at once my brain loosened up and began to roll off the thousand words. In my town house, in Oakland, I finished the stock of liquor and wilfully refused to purchase more. It was no use, because, unfortunately, there remained in the bottom of the liquor cabinet a case of beer. In vain I tried to write. Now beer is a poor substitute for strong waters: besides, I didn't like beer, yet all I could think of was that beer so singularly accessible in the bottom of the cabinet. Not until I had drunk a pint of it did the words begin to reel off, and the thousand were reeled off to the tune of numerous pints. The worst of it was that the beer caused me severe heart-burn; but despite the discomfort I soon finished off the case. The liquor cabinet was now bare. I did not replenish it. By truly heroic perseverance I finally forced myself to write the daily thousand words without the spur of John Barleycorn. But all the time I wrote I was keenly aware of the craving for a drink. And as soon as the morning's work was done, I was out of the house and away down-town to get my first drink. Merciful goodness!--if John Barleycorn could get such sway over me, a non-alcoholic, what must be the sufferings of the true alcoholic, battling against the organic demands of his chemistry while those closest to him sympathise little, understand less, and despise and deride him! CHAPTER XXXV But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect, and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The old long sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again. But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts, intellectual in their inception, had been laid by a sane and normal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of John Barleycorn, and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, one must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn promises but never delivers. How to describe this White Logic to those who have never experienced it! It is perhaps better first to state how impossible such a description is. Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the land of enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I have made two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have tried vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny particular phase to persons who have not travelled there. I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told them nothing. And when I cannot tell them this one thing of all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know I have failed to give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land. But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region, and at once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantly to his mind what hours of words and phrases could not convey to the mind of the non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn's realm where the White Logic reigns. To those untravelled there, the traveller's account must always seem unintelligible and fantastic. At the best, I may only beg of the untravelled ones to strive to take on faith the narrative I shall relate. For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol. Philip sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seem to be various orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth are truer than others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these sorts are the very ones that have the greatest use-value to life that desires to realise and live. At once, O untravelled reader, you see how lunatic and blasphemous is the realm I am trying to describe to you in the language of John Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe, all of whose members resolutely shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the roads that lead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth there are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse faint far vistas of other lands and tribes. Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal is healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truth is a different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a dray horse. Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first to last, somehow, in unguessably dim ways, it must believe that life is good; that the drudgery in harness is good; that death, no matter how blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that life is beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading life, it will not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its sprained and spavined best; that old age, even, is decent, dignified, and valuable, though old age means a ribby scare-crow in a hawker's cart, stumbling a step to every blow, stumbling dizzily on through merciless servitude and slow disintegration to the end--the end, the apportionment of its parts (of its subtle flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments, and all the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the hide-house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse must abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth of life and that makes life possible to persist. This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals, including man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, no matter what the price. The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end. This is the order of truth that obtains, not for the universe, but for the live things in it if they for a little space will endure ere they pass. This order of truth, no matter how erroneous it may be, is the sane and normal order of truth, the rational order of truth that life must believe in order to live. To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awful privilege of reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate the intoxicating show of things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward him and his dreams. He can do this, but it is not well for him to do it. To live, and live abundantly, to sting with life, to be alive (which is to be what he is), it is good that man be life-blinded and sense-struck. What is good is true. And this is the order of truth, lesser though it be, that man must know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude that it is absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of truth can obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good that he shall see neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by his lusts and rapacities. And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and truer order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have passed through the long sickness and lived to tell of it and deliberately to forget it to the end of their days. They lived. They realised life, for life is what they were. They did right. And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist the paradox of being, until his victim cries out, as in "The City of Dreadful Night": "Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss." And the feet of the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death. CHAPTER XXXVI Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John Barleycorn's White Logic on me. On my lovely ranch in the Valley of the Moon, brain-soaked with many months of alcohol, I am oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man. In vain do I ask myself why I should be sad. My nights are warm. My roof does not leak. I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite. Every creature comfort is mine. In my body are no aches nor pains. The good old flesh-machine is running smoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is overworked. I have land, money, power, recognition from the world, a consciousness that I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I love, children that are of my own fond flesh. I have done, and am doing, what a good citizen of the world should do. I have built houses, many houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as for trees, have I not planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from any window of my house, I can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting, standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun. My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. Not a hundred men in a million have been so lucky as I. Yet, with all this vast good fortune, am I sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn is with me. And John Barleycorn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of rational civilisation. John Barleycorn is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn was accessible, calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street between the corners. The pseudo-civilisation into which I was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-poison. The system of life was so organised that I (and millions like me) was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops. Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised, organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust.... And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets, at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some day, and soon, be gone. Gone? I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentists which replace the parts of me already gone. Never again will I have the thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory. The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. Never again can I run with the sled-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail. I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes for life. But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one afraid. The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living. I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living, piping for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air. I return across the ranch. Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life. Here is no morality. Only in man is morality, and man created it--a code of action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth. Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness. These were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget; the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously, and played with gently, oh! so gently, as sleeping dogs at the back of consciousness which I did not care to waken. I did but stir them, and let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them. But now White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for White Logic, most valiant, is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream. "Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me," White Logic whispers as I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it? It is truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you." And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest." But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence--you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?" Oh, the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn! "One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's Nirvana," the White Logic adds. "Oh well, here's the house. Cheer up and take a drink. We know, we illuminated, you and I, all the folly and the farce." And in my book-walled den, the mausoleum of the thoughts of men, I take my drink, and other drinks, and roust out the sleeping dogs from the recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls of prejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief. "Drink," says the White Logic. "The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence. And remember what Heine said." Well do I remember that flaming Jew's "With the last breath all is done: joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the theatre, lime-trees, raspberry drops, the power of human relations, gossip, the barking of dogs, champagne." "Your clear white light is sickness," I tell the White Logic. "You lie." "By telling too strong a truth," he quips back. "Alas, yes, so topsy-turvy is existence," I acknowledge sadly. "Ah, well, Liu Ling was wiser than you," the White Logic girds. "You remember him?" I nod my head--Liu Ling, a hard drinker, one of the group of bibulous poets who called themselves the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago. "It was Liu Ling," prompts the White Logic, "who declared that to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed on a river. Very well. Have another Scotch, and let semblance and deception become duck-weed on a river." And while I pour and sip my Scotch, I remember another Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who, four centuries before Christ, challenged this dreamland of the world, saying: "How then do I know but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life? Those who dream of the banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow, wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they dream. Some will even interpret the very dream they are dreaming; and only when they awake do they know it was a dream.... Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who say you are dreams--I am but a dream myself. "Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." CHAPTER XXXVII "Come," says the White Logic, "and forget these Asian dreamers of old time. Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your own warm hills." I pore over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Tokay on the rancho called Petaluma. It is a sad long list of the names of men, beginning with Manuel Micheltoreno, one time Mexican "Governor, Commander-in-Chief, and Inspector of the Department of the Californias," who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo for services rendered his country and for moneys paid by him for ten years to his soldiers. Immediately this musty record of man's land lust assumes the formidableness of a battle--the quick struggling with the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, judgments, foreclosures, writs of attachment, orders of sale, tax liens, petitions for letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched its surface and passed. Who was this James King of William, so curiously named? The oldest surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yet only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteen thousand dollars on security of certain lands including the vineyard yet to be and to be called Tokay. Whence came Peter O'Connor, and whither vanished, after writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a vineyard? Appears Louis Csomortanyi, a name to conjure with. He lasts through several pages of this record of the enduring soil. Comes old American stock, thirsting across the Great American Desert, mule-backing across the Isthmus, wind-jamming around the Horn, to write brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten--names like Halleck, Hastings, Swett, Tait, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood, Carlton, Temple. There are no names like those to-day in the Valley of the Moon. The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names of men of whom I have vaguely heard but whom I have never known. Kohler and Frohling--who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Tokay, but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of 1906 threw down the winery; and I now live in its ruins. La Motte--he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by the soil, and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the site of his orchards and vine-yards, of his proud mansion, of his very fish ponds, I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees. Cooper and Greenlaw--on what is called the Hill Ranch they left two of their dead, "Little Lillie" and "Little David," who rest to-day inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Cooper and Greenlaw in their time cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. To-day I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be ploughed under for green manure. Haska--a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty. "Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic chuckles. "But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend. "It was based on illusion and is a lie." "A vital lie," I retort. "And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?" the White Logic challenges. "Come. Fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James a bit." "A man of health," I say. "From him we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to tie." "Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit of reason the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well--the old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. "Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you? Your body--what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your I is both subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the things possessed. "After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland. But this, man will not accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it. "He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they--monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not. "It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would outwit the Noseless One and the Night. "Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels--your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. "Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget." I obey, for my brain is now well a-crawl with the maggots of alcohol, and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote Richard Hovey: "Abstain not! Life and Love like night and day Offer themselves to us on their own terms, Not ours. Accept their bounty while ye may, Before we be accepted by the worms," "I will cap you," cries the White Logic. "No," I answer, while the maggots madden me. "I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise." "Now will I cap you!" the White Logic breaks in. "But if you would not this poor life fulfil, Lo, you are free to end it when you will, Without the fear of waking after death." And I laugh my defiance; for now, and for the moment, I know the White Logic to be the arch-impostor of them all, whispering his whispers of death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own genial chemistry turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots biting alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again the old voice from beyond of my youth, telling me again that still are mine the possibilities and powers which life and the books had taught me did not exist. And the dinner gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass. Jeering at the White Logic, I go out to join my guests at table, and with assumed seriousness to discuss the current magazines and the silly doings of the world's day, whipping every trick and ruse of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom. The clown's the thing! The clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labour of thinking, and, when the table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing at games, which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness. And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go back through my book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the White Logic which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: "I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky-- Yea, I am Youth because I die!'" CHAPTER XXXVIII The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the dusk of my soul. To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barleycorn. And the reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many a day and week and month. My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck--the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn. And, surviving, I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road. It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy in living, have not been destroyed. They have been scorched, it is true; like the survivors of forlorn hopes, they have by unthinkably miraculous ways come through the fight to marvel at the tally of the slain. And like such a survivor of old red war who cries out, "Let there be no more war!" so I cry out, "Let there be no more poison-fighting by our youths!" The way to stop war is to stop it. The way to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated. We are so made, that is all. We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsenic and strychnine, and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barleycorn the same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics nor for alcoholics do I write, but for our youths, for those who possess no more than the adventure-stings and the genial predispositions, the social man-impulses, which are twisted all awry by our barbarian civilisation which feeds them poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal boys, now born or being born, for whom I write. It was for this reason, more than any other, and more ardently than any other, that I rode down into the Valley of the Moon, all a-jingle, and voted for equal suffrage. I voted that women might vote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race, would vote John Barleycorn out of existence and back into the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have been sorely bruised and that I do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised. The women are the true conservators of the race. The men are the wastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it is by their women that they are saved. About man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink it. And there has never been a day when the women have not resented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had the power to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is to close the saloons. In a thousand generations to come men of themselves will not close the saloons. As well expect the morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of existence. The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race, they will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born; and for the babes of girls, too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and sisters of these boys. And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be the topers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one of these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barleycorn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable. On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic, that, never having had access to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint old custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches. CHAPTER XXXIX Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed. It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and forty-eight days in a windjammer around the Horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of those one hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a drink because I did not desire a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere for drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did not demand alcohol. So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem: THIS IS SO EASY, WHY NOT KEEP IT UP WHEN YOU GET BACK ON LAND? I weighed this problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute non-contact with alcohol. And out of the data of past experience, I reached certain conclusions. In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco, or cocaine, or morphine, or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers begin socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days, who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one. On this long, five-months' voyage, I found that among all my bodily needs not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol existed. But this I did find: my need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol, the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship, the connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They always occurred linked together. Thus, when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others, practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights and days and moments, all purple passages and freedoms, thronged my memory. "Venice" stares at me from the printed page, and I remember the cafe tables on the sidewalks. "The Battle of Santiago," some one says, and I answer, "Yes, I've been over the ground." But I do not see the ground, nor Kettle Hill, nor the Peace Tree. What I see is the Cafe Venus, on the plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying consumptive. The East End of London, I read, or some one says; and first of all, under my eyelids, leap the visions of the shining pubs, and in my ears echo the calls for "two of bitter" and "three of Scotch." The Latin Quarter--at once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool, well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple problems of existence. In a pampero off the River Plate we speculate, if we are disabled, of running in to Buenos Ayres, the "Paris of America," and I have visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices. When we have picked up the North-east Trades in the Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu, and while I persuade I see myself again drinking cocktails on the cool lanais and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf rolls in. Some one mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the restaurants of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light and clatter of many tables, where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims of long-stemmed Rhine-wine glasses. And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all these fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. GLASS IN HAND! There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men, when, glass in hand, they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink--but oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before. Never again would I be a peripatetic conflagration. Never again would I invoke the White Logic. I had learned how not to invoke him. The White Logic now lies decently buried alongside the Long Sickness. Neither will afflict me again. It is many a year since I laid the Long Sickness away; his sleep is sound. And just as sound is the sleep of the White Logic. And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my forefathers had banished John Barleycorn before my time. I regret that John Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I was born, else I should not have made his acquaintance, and I was long trained in his acquaintance. 
22030	----	Transcribed from the 1894 London William Heinemann edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org {Charles G. Leland: p0.jpg} MEMOIRS BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND (HANS BREITMANN) _WITH PORTRAIT_ Second Edition LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1894 [_All rights reserved_] _FIRST EDITION_ (_2 Volumes_), _October_ 1893. PREFACE. It happened once in Boston, in the year 1861 or 1862, that I was at a dinner of the Atlantic Club, such as was held every Saturday, when the question was raised as to whether any man had ever written a complete and candid autobiography. Emerson, who was seated by me at the right, suggested the "Confessions" of Rousseau. I objected that it was full of untruths, and that for plain candour it was surpassed by the "Life of Casanova." Of this work (regarding which Carlyle has said, "Whosoever has looked therein, let him wash his hands and be unclean until even") neither Emerson nor Lowell, nor Palfrey nor Agassiz, nor any of the others present seemed to have any knowledge, until Dr. Holmes, who was more adventurous, admitted he knew somewhat thereof. Now, as I had read it thrice through, I knew it pretty well. I reflected on this, but came to the conclusion that perhaps the great reason why the world has so few and frank autobiographies is really because the world exacts too much. It is no more necessary to describe everything cynically than it is to set forth all our petty diseases in detail. There are many influences which, independent of passion or shame, do far more to form character. Acting from this reflection, I wrote this book with no intention that it should be published; I had, indeed, some idea that a certain friend might use it after my death as a source whence to form a Life. Therefore I wrote, as fully and honestly as I could, _everything_ which I could remember which had made me what I am. It occurred to me as a leading motive that a century or two hence the true inner life of _any_ man who had actually lived from the time when railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, gas, percussion-caps, fulminating matches, the opera and omnibuses, evolution and socialism were quite unknown to his world, into the modern age, would be of some value. So I described my childhood or youth exactly as I recalled, or as I felt it. Such a book requires very merciful allowance from humane reviewers. It seemed to me, also, that though I have not lived familiarly among the princes, potentates, and powers of the earth, yet as I have met or _seen_ or corresponded with about five hundred of the three thousand set down in "Men of the Time," and been kindly classed among them, it was worth while to mention my meetings with many of them. Had the humblest scribbler of the age of Elizabeth so much as mentioned that he had ever exchanged a word with, or even looked at, any of the great writers of his time, his record would now be read with avidity. I have really never in my life run after such men, or sought to make their acquaintance with a view of extending my list; all that I can tell of them, as my book will show, has been the result of chance. But what I have written will be of some interest, I think--at least "in the dim and remote future." I had laid the manuscript by, till I had time to quite forget what I had written, when I unexpectedly received a proposal to write my memoirs. I then read over my work, and determined "to let it go," as it was. It seemed to me that, with all its faults, it fulfilled the requisition of Montaigne in being _ung livre de bonne foye_. So it has gone forth into print. _Jacta est alea_. The story of what is to me by far the most interesting period of my life remains to be written. This embraces an account of my labour for many years in introducing Industrial Art as a branch of education in schools, my life in England and on the Continent for more than twenty years, my travels in Russia and Egypt, my researches among Gypsies and Algonkin Indians, my part in Oriental and Folklore and other Congresses, my discovery of the Shelta or Ogham tongue in Great Britain, and the long and very strangely adventurous discoveries, continued for five years, among _witches_ in Italy, which resulted in the discovery that all the names of the old Etruscan gods are still remembered by the peasantry of the Toscana Romagna, and that ceremonies and invocations are still addressed to them. All this, however, is still too near to be written about. But it may perhaps some day form a second series of reminiscences if the present volumes meet with public favour. As some of my readers (and assuredly a great many of the American) will find these volumes wanting in personal adventure and lively variety of experiences, and perhaps dull as regards "incidents," I would remind them that it is, after all, only the life of a mere literary man and quiet, humble scholar, and that such existences are seldom very dramatic. English readers, who are more familiar with such men or literature, will be less exacting. What I have narrated is nowhere heightened in colour, retouched in drawing, or made the utmost of for effect, and I might have gone much further as regards my experiences in politics with the _Continental Magazine_, and during my connection with Colonel Forney, or life in the West, and have taken the whole, not more from my memory than from the testimony of others. But if this work be, as Germans say, at first too subjective, and devoted too much to mere mental development by aid of books, the "balance" to come of my life will be found to differ materially from it, though it is indeed nowhere in any passage exciting. This present work treats of my infancy in Philadelphia, with some note of the quaint and beautiful old Quaker city as it then was, and many of its inhabitants who still remembered Colonial times and Washington's Republican Court; reminiscences of boyhood in New England; my revolutionary grandfathers and other relatives, and such men as the last survivor of the Boston Tea-party (I also saw the last signer of the Declaration of Independence); an account of my early reading; my college life at Princeton; three years in Europe passed at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln; recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed not devoid of strange life, though I say it); my subsequent connection for three years with Colonel John Forney, during which Grant's election was certainly carried by him, and in which, as he declared, I "had been his right-hand man;" my writing of sundry books, such as the "Breitmann Ballads," and my subsequent life in Europe to the year 1870. I can enumerate in my memory distinctly half-a-dozen little-known men whom I have known, and could with time recall far many more, compared to whose lives my uneventful and calm career has been as that of the mole before the eagle's. Yet not one of their lives will ever be written, which is certainly a pity. The practice of writing real autobiographies is rapidly ceasing in this our age, when it is bad form to be egoistic or to talk about one's self, and we are almost shocked in revising those chronicled in the _Causeries de Lundi_ of Sainte-Beuve. Nowadays we have good gossipy reminiscences of _other_ people, in which the writer remains as unseen as the operator of a Punch exhibition in his _schwassel_ box, while he displays his puppets. I find no fault with this--_a chacun sa maniere_. But it is very natural under such influences that men whose own lives are full of and inspired with their _own_ deeds will not write them on the model of Benvenuto Cellini. One of the greatest generals of modern times, Lord Napier of Magdala, told me that he believed I was the only person to whom he had ever fully narrated his experiences of the siege of Lucknow. He seemed to be surprised at having so forgotten himself. In ancient Viking days the hero made his debut in every society with a "_Me voici_, _mes enfants_! Listen if you want to be astonished!" and proceeded to tell how he had smashed the heads of kings, and mashed the hearts of maidens, and done great deeds all round. It was bad form--and yet we should never have known much about Regner Lodbrog but for such a canticle. If I, in this work, have not quite effaced myself, as good taste demands, let it be remembered that if I had, at the time of writing, distinctly felt that it would be printed as put down, there would, most certainly, have been much less of "me" visible, and the dead- levelled work would have escaped much possible shot of censure. It was a little in a spirit of defiant reaction that I resolved to let it be published as it is, and risk the chances. As Uncle Toby declared that, after all, a mother must in some kind of a way be a relation to her own child, so it still appears to me that to write an autobiography the author must say _something_ about himself; but it is a great and very popular _tour de force_ to quite avoid doing this, and all art of late years has run to merely skilfully overcoming difficulties and avoiding interesting _motives_ or subjects. It may be, therefore, that in days to come, my book will be regarded with some interest, as a curious relic of a barbarous age, and written in a style long passed away-- "When they sat with ghosts on a stormy shore, And spoke in a tongue which men speak no more; Living in wild and wondrous ways, In the ancient giant and goblin days." Once in my younger time, one of the most beautiful and intellectual women whom I ever knew, Madame Anita de Barrera--(Daniel Webster said she was beautiful enough to redeem a whole generation of blue-stockings from the charge of ugliness)--once made a great and pathetic fuss to me about a _grey hair_ which had appeared among her black tresses. "And what difference," I said, "can one white hair make to any friend?" "Well," she replied, "I thought if I could not awaken any other feeling, I might at least inspire in you veneration for old age." So with this work of mine, if it please in naught else, it may still gratify some who love to trace the footsteps of the past, and listen to what is told by one who lived long "before the war." Now for a last word--which involves the only point of any importance to me personally in this preface--I would say that there will be certain readers who will perhaps think that I have exaggerated my life-work, or blown my own trumpet too loudly. To these I declare in plain honesty, that I believe there have been or are in the United States _thousands_ of men who have _far_ surpassed me, especially as regards services to the country during the Civil War. There were leaders in war and diplomacy, editors and soldiers who sacrificed their lives, to whose names I can only bow in reverence and humility. But as it was said of the great unknown who passed away--the _fortes ante Agamemnon_--"they had no poet, and they died." These most deserving ones have not written their lives or set themselves forth, "and so they pass into oblivion"--and I regret it with all my soul. But this is no reason why those who did something, albeit in lesser degree, should not chronicle their experiences exactly as they appear to them, and it is not in human nature to require a man to depreciate that to which he honestly devoted all his energies. Perhaps it never yet entered into the heart of man to conceive how much has really been done by everybody. And I do most earnestly and solemnly protest, as if it were my last word in life, that I have said nothing whatever as regards my political work and its results which was not seriously said at the time by many far greater men than I, so that I believe I have not the least exaggerated in any trifle, even unconsciously. Thus I can never forget the deep and touching sympathy which Henry W. Longfellow expressed to me regarding my efforts to advance Emancipation, and how, when some one present observed that perhaps I would irritate the Non-Abolition Union men, the poet declared emphatically, "But it is a great idea" or "a noble work." And Lowell, Emerson, and George W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, and many more, spoke to the same effect. And what they said of me I may repeat for the sake of History and of Truth. The present work describes more than forty years of life in America, and it is therefore the American reader who will be chiefly interested in it. I should perhaps have mentioned what I reserved for special comment in the future: that during more than ten years' residence in Europe I had _one thing steadily in view all the time_, at which I worked hard, which was to qualify myself to return to America and there introduce to the public schools of Philadelphia the Industrial or Minor Arts as a branch of education, in which I eventually succeeded, devoting to the work there four years, applying myself so assiduously as to neglect both society and amusements, and not obtaining, nor seeking for, pay or profit thereby in any way, directly or indirectly. And if I have, as I have read, since then "expatriated" myself, my whole absence has not been much longer than was that of Washington Irving, and I trust to be able to prove that I have "left my country for my country's good"--albeit in a somewhat better sense than that which was implied by the poet. And I may here incidentally mention, with all due modesty, that since the foregoing paragraph came to me "in revise," I received from Count Angelo di Grubernatis a letter, beginning with the remark that, in consequence of my _gentile ed insistence premura_, or "amiable persistence, begun four-years ago," he has at length carried out my idea and suggestion of establishing a great Italian Folklore Society, of which I am to rank as among the first twelve members. This is the fourth institution of the kind which I have been first, or among the first, to found in Europe, and it has in every case been noted, not without surprise, that I was an American. Such associations, being wide-reaching and cosmopolitan, may be indeed considered by every man of culture as patriotic, and I hope at some future day that I shall still further prove that, as regards my native country, I have only changed my sky but not my heart, and laboured for American interests as earnestly as ever. CHARLES GODFREY LELAND. BAGNI DI LUCCA, ITALY, _August 20_, _1893_. I. EARLY LIFE. 1824-1837. My birthplace--Count Bruno and Dufief--Family items--General Lafayette--The Dutch witch-nurse--Early friends and associations--Philadelphia sixty years ago--Early reading--Genealogy--First schools--Summers in New England--English influences--The Revolutionary grandfather--Centenarians--The last survivor of the Boston Tea-party and the last signer of the Declaration--Indians--Memories of relations--A Quaker school--My ups and downs in classes--Arithmetic--My first ride in a railway car--My marvellous invention--Mr. Alcott's school--A Transcendental teacher--Rev. W. H. Furness--Miss Eliza Leslie--The boarding-school near Boston--Books--A terrible winter--My first poem--I return to Philadelphia. I was born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in which I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came to see it. It was, I believe, of old carved oak, possibly mediaeval, which had been brought from some English manor as a relic. I am indebted for this information to a Mr. Landreth, who lived in the house at the time. {1} It was then a boarding-house, kept by a Mrs. Rodgers. She had taken it from a lady who had also kept it for boarders. The daughter of this latter married President Madison. She was the well-known "Dolly Madison," famous for her grace, accomplishments, and _belle humeur_, of whom there are stories still current in Washington. My authority informed me that there were among the boarders in the house two remarkable men, one of whom often petted me as a babe, and took a fancy to me. He was a Swedish Count, who had passed, it was said, a very wild life as pirate for several years on the Spanish Main. He was identified as the Count Bruno of Frederica Bremer's novel, "The Neighbours." The other was the famous philologist, Dufief, author of "Nature Displayed," a work of such remarkable ability that I wonder that it should have passed into oblivion. My mother had been from her earliest years devoted to literature to a degree which was unusual at that time in the United States. She had been, as a girl, a special _protegee_ of Hannah Adams, the author of many learned works, who was the first person buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Boston. She directed my mother's reading, and had great influence over her. My mother had also been very intimate with the daughters of Jonathan Russell, the well-known diplomatist. My maternal grandfather was Colonel Godfrey, who had fought in the war of the Revolution, and who was at one time an aide-de-camp of the Governor of Massachusetts. He was noted for the remarkable gentleness of his character. I have heard that when he went forth of a morning, all the animals on his farm would run to meet and accompany him. He had to a miraculous degree a certain sympathetic power, so that all beings, men included, loved him. I have heard my mother say that as a girl she had a tame crow who was named Tom, and that he could distinctly cry the word "What?" When Tom was walking about in the garden, if called, he would reply "What?" in a perfectly human manner. When I was one month old, General Lafayette visited our city and passed in a grand procession before the house. It is one of the legends of my infancy that my nurse said, "Charley shall see the General too!" and held me up to the window. General Lafayette, seeing this, laughed and bowed to me. He was the first gentleman who ever saluted me formally. When I reflect how in later life adventure, the study of languages, and a French Revolution came into my experiences, it seems to me as if Count Bruno, Dufief, and Lafayette had all been premonitors of the future. I was a great sufferer from many forms of ill-health in my infancy. Before my second birthday, I had a terrible illness with inflammation of the brain. Dr. Dewees (author of a well-known work on diseases of women and children), who attended me, said that I was insane for a week, and that it was a case without parallel. I mention this because I believe that I owe to it in a degree whatever nervousness and tendency to "idealism" or romance and poetry has subsequently been developed in me. Through all my childhood and youth its influence was terribly felt, nor have I to this day recovered from it. I should mention that my first nurse in life was an old Dutch woman named Van der Poel. I had not been born many days before I and my cradle were missing. There was a prompt outcry and search, and both were soon found in the garret or loft of the house. There I lay sleeping, on my breast an open Bible, with, I believe, a key and knife, at my head lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt. Nurse Van der Poel explained that it was done to secure my rising in life--by taking me up to the garret. I have since learned from a witch that the same is still done in exactly the same manner in Italy, and in Asia. She who does it must be, however, a _strega_ or sorceress (my nurse was reputed to be one), and the child thus initiated will become deep in darksome lore, an adept in _occulta_, and a scholar. If I have not turned out to be all of this _in majoribus_, it was not the fault of my nurse. Next door to us lived a family in which were four daughters who grew up to be famous belles. It is said that when the poet N. P. Willis visited them, one of these young ladies, who was familiar with his works, was so overcome that she fainted. Forty years after Willis distinctly recalled the circumstance. Fainting was then fashionable. Among the household friends of our family I can remember Mr. John Vaughan, who had legends of Priestley, Berkeley, and Thomas Moore, and who often dined with us on Sunday. I can also recall his personal reminiscences of General Washington, Jefferson, and all the great men of the previous generation. He was a gentle and beautiful old man, with very courtly manners and snow-white hair, which he wore in a queue. He gave away the whole of a large fortune to the poor. Also an old Mr. Crozier, who had been in France through all the French Revolution, and had known Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier Tinville, &c. I wish that I had betimes noted down all the anecdotes I ever heard from them. There were also two old ladies, own nieces of Benjamin Franklin, who for many years continually took tea with us. One of them, Mrs. Kinsman, presented me with the cotton quilt under which her uncle had died. Another lady, Miss Louisa Nancrede, who had been educated in France, had seen Napoleon, and often described him to me. She told me many old French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad (which I found in after years in the works of Cazotte), which made a great impression on me--something like that of "Childe Roland to the dark tower came." It was called _Le Sieur Enguerrand_, and the refrain was "_Oh ma bonne j'ai tant peur_." That these and many other influences of culture stirred me strangely even as a child, is evident from the fact that they have remained so vividly impressed on my memory. This reminds me that I can distinctly remember that when I was eight years of age, in 1832, my grandmother, Mrs. Oliver Leland, told my mother that the great German poet Goethe had recently died, and that they bade me remember it. On the same day I read in the _Athenaeum_ (an American reprint of leading articles, poems, &c., from English magazines, which grandmother took all her life long) a translation of Schiller's "Diver." I read it only once, and to this day I can repeat nearly the whole of it. I have now by me, as I write, a silver messenger-ring of King Robert, and I never see it without thinking of the corner of the room by the side-door where I stood when grandmother spoke of the death of Goethe. But I anticipate. My father was a commission merchant, and had his place of business in Market Street below Third Street. His partner was Charles S. Boker, who had a son, George, who will often be mentioned in these Memoirs. George became in after life distinguished as a poet, and was Minister for many years at Constantinople and at St. Petersburg. From Mrs. Rodgers' my parents went to Mrs. Shinn's, in Second Street. It also was a very old-fashioned house, with a garden full of flowers, and a front doorstep almost on a level with the ground. The parlour had a large old fireplace, set with blue tiles of the time of Queen Anne, and it was my delight to study and have explained to me from them the story of Joseph and his brethren and AEsop's fables. Everything connected with this house recurs to me as eminently pleasant, old-fashioned, and very respectable. I can remember something very English-like among the gentlemen-boarders who sat after dinner over their Madeira, and a beautiful lady, Mrs. Stanley, who gave me a sea-shell. Thinking of it all, I seem to have lived in a legend by Hawthorne. There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton's boarding-house in Fifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin Library. I can remember that there was a very good marine picture by Birch in the drawing-room. This was after living in the Washington Square house, of which I shall speak anon. I am not clear as to these removals. There were some men of culture at Mrs. Eaton's--among them Sears C. Walker, a great astronomer, and a Dr. Brewer, who had travelled in Italy and brought back with him pieces of sculpture. We were almost directly opposite the State House, where liberty had been declared, while to the side, across the street, was the Library founded by Dr. Franklin, with his statue over the door. One of his nieces often told me that this was an absolutely perfect likeness. The old iron railing, now removed--more's the pity!--surrounded the Square, which was full of grand trees. It was believed that the spirit of Dr. Franklin haunted the Library, reading the books. Once a coloured woman, who, in darkey fashion, was scrubbing the floor after midnight, beheld the form. She was so frightened that she fainted. But stranger still, when the books were removed to the New Library in Locust Street, the ghost went with them, and there it still "spooks" about as of yore to this day, as every negro in the quarter knows. In regard to Franklin and his apparition, there was a schoolboy joke to this effect: that _whenever_ the statue of Franklin over the Library door heard the clock strike twelve at night, it descended, went to the old Jefferson Wigwam, and drank a glass of beer. But the sell lay in this, that a statue cannot hear. And there was a dim old legend of a colony of Finns, who, in the Swedish time, had a village all to themselves in Wiccacoe. They were men of darksome lore and magic skill, and their women were witches, who at tide and time sailed forth merrily on brooms to the far-away highlands of the Hudson, where they held high revel with their Yankee, Dutch, and Indian colleagues of the mystic spell. David MacRitchie, in a recent work, has made a note of this curious offshoot of the old Philadelphia Swedes. And I can also remember that before a marble yard in Race Street there were two large statues of very grim forbidding-looking dogs, of whom it was said that when there was any one about to die in the quarter, these uncanny hounds came down during a nightly storm and howled a death duet. And when I was very young there still lingered in the minds of those invaluable living chronicles (whether bound in sheepskin or in calf), the oldest inhabitants, memories from before the Revolution of the Indian market, when on every Saturday the natives came from their rural retreats, bringing pelts or skins, baskets, moccasins, _mocos_ or birch boxes of maple-sugar, feathers, and game for sale. Then they ranged themselves all along the west side of Independence Square, in tents or at tables, and sold--or were sold themselves--in bargains. Even now the Sunday-child, or he who is gifted to behold the departed, may see the ghostly forms of Red-men carrying on that weekly goblin market. Miss Eliza Leslie's memory was full of these old stories, which she had collected from old people. As for the black witches, as there were still four negro sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it may be imagined to what an extent _Voodoo_ still prevailed among our Ebo-ny men and brothers. Of one of these my mother had a sad experience. We had a black cook named Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that she was "no good." My mother dismissed her, but several who succeeded her left abruptly. Then it was found that Ann, who professed to be a witch, had put a spell of death on all who should take her place. My mother learned this, and when the last black cook gave warning she received a good admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one. I believe that this ended the enchantment. There is or was in South Fifth Street an African church, over the door of which was the charming inscription, "Those who have walked in Darkness have seen a great light." But this light has not even yet penetrated to the darksome depths of Lombard or South Streets, if I may believe the strange tales which I have heard, even of late, of superstition there. Philadelphia was a very beautiful old-fashioned city in those days, with a marked character. Every house had its garden, in which vines twined over arbours, and the magnolia, honeysuckle, and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the humming-bird rested, and scarlet tanager or oriole with the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade. Then swallows darted at noon over the broad streets, and the mighty sturgeon was so abundant in the Delaware that one could hardly remain a minute on the wharf in early morn or ruddy evening without seeing some six-foot monster dart high in air, falling on his side with a plash. In the winter-time the river was allowed to freeze over, and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the "one thousand and one American fancy drinks," were not as yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and honey, madeira and punch, as they now do on more varied temptations. Lager beer was not as yet in the land. I remember drinking it in after years in New Street, where a German known as _der dicke Georg_ first dealt it in 1848 to our American public. Maize-whisky could then be bought for fifteen cents a gallon; even good "old rye" was not much dearer; and the best Havanna cigars until 1840 cost only three cents a-piece. As they rose in price they depreciated in quality, and it is now many years since I have met with a really aromatic old-fashioned Havanna. It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not "a great village," as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque rural beauty still lingered. The grand old double houses, with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy--such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street--had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded one of the chequer-board map of our city. All of this quiet charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a newer and noisier life. I well remember one of these fine old Colonial houses. It had been the old Penington mansion, but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one of my father's partners in business. It stood at the corner of Fourth and Race Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by a garden. There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen of summer nights tending or watering the flowers. She was a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me. I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old mansion. The house is gone, but it is endeared to me by a very strange memory. When I was six or seven years of age, I had read Shakespeare's "Tempest," and duly reflected on it. The works of Shakespeare were very rare indeed in Quaker Philadelphia in those days, and much tabooed, but Mr. Jones, who had a good library in the great hall upstairs, possessed a set in large folio. This I was allowed to read, but not to remove from the place. How well I can remember passing my Saturday afternoons reading those mighty tomes, standing first on one leg, then on the other for very weariness, yet absorbed and fascinated! About this time I was taken to the theatre to see Fannie Kemble in "Much Ado About Nothing"--or it may have been to a play before that time--when my father said to me that he supposed I had never heard of Shakespeare. To which I replied by repeating all the songs in the "Tempest." One of these, referring to the loves of certain sailors, is not very decent, but I had not the remotest conception of its impropriety, and so proceeded to repeat it. A saint of virtue must have laughed at such a declamation. As it recurs to me, the spirit which was over Philadelphia in my boyhood, houses, gardens, people, and their life, was strangely quiet, sunny, and quaint, a dream of olden time drawn into modern days. The Quaker predominated, and his memories were mostly in the past; ours, as I have often said, was a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever repeating their old poetic legends to the wind of Swedes, witches, and Indians. Among the street-cries and sounds, the first which I can remember was the postman's horn, when I was hardly three years old. Then there were the watchmen, "who cried the hour and weather all night long." Also a coloured man who shouted, in a strange, musical strain which could be heard a mile: "_Tra-la-la-la-la-la-loo_. Le-mon-ice-cream! An'-wanilla-too!" Also the quaint old Hominy-man: "De Hominy man is on his way, Frum de Navy-Yard! Wid his harmony!" (Spoken) "Law bess de putty eyes ob de young lady! Hominy's good fur de young ladies! "De Harmony man is on his way," &c. Also, "Hot-corn!" "Pepper-pot!" "Be-au-ti-ful Clams!" with the "Sweep- oh" cry, and charcoal and muffin bells. One of the family legends was, that being asked by some lady, for whom I had very little liking, to come and visit her, I replied with great politeness, but also with marked firmness, "I am very much obliged to you, ma'am, and thank you--but I _won't_." In Washington Square, three doors from us, at the corner of Walnut Street, lived Dr. George McClellan. He had two sons, one, John, of my own age, the other, George, who was three years younger. Both went to school with me in later years. George became a soldier, and finally rose to the head of the army in the first year of the War of Rebellion, or Emancipation, as I prefer to term it. Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the olden time a Potter's Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had been interred. Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can remember my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neighbours for repeating such tales. I have dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from others the rhymes with the quaint little cuts. "In Adam's fall We sin-ned all." "My book and heart Shall never part," &c. Also of a gingerbread toy, with much sugar, colour, and gilding, and of lying in a crib and having the measles. I can remember that I understood the meaning of the word _dead_ before that of _alive_, because I told my nurse that I had heard that Dr. Dewees was dead. But she replying that he was not, but alive, I repeated "live" as one not knowing what it meant. I recollect, also, that one day, when poring over the pictures in a toy- book, my Uncle Amos calling me a good little boy for so industriously reading, I felt guilty and ashamed because I could not read, and did not like to admit it. Whatever my faults or follies may be, I certainly had an innate rectitude, a strong sense of honesty, just as many children have the contrary; and this, I believe, is due to inherited qualities, though these in turn are greatly modified by early association and influences. That I also had precocious talent and taste for the romantic, poetic, marvellous, quaint, supernatural, and humorous, was soon manifested. Even as an infant objects of _bric-a-brac_ and of antiquity awoke in me an interest allied to passion or awe, for which there was no parallel among others of my age. This was, I believe, the old spirit which had come down through the ages into my blood--the spirit which inspired Leland the _Flos Grammaticorum_, and after him John Leland, the antiquary of King Henry VIII., and Chrs. (Charles) Leland, who was secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the time of Charles I. Let me hereby inform those who think that "Chrs." means Christopher, that there has been a Charles in the family since time immemorial, alternated with an Oliver since the days of Cromwell. John Leyland, an Englishman, now living, who is a deep and sagacious scholar, and the author of the "Antiquities of the Town of Halifax" (a very clever work), declares that for _four hundred years_ there has not been a generation in which some Leland (or Leyland) of the old Bussli de Leland stock has not written a work on antiquity or allied to antiquarianism, though in one case it is a translation of Demosthenes, and in another a work on Deistical Writers. He traces the connection with his own family of the Henry Leland, my ancestor, a rather prominent political Puritan character in his time, who first went to America in 1636, and acquired land which my grandfather still owned. It was very extensive. There is a De la Laund in the roll of Battle Abbey, {13} but John says our progenitor was _De Bussli_, who came over with the Conqueror, ravaged all Yorkshire, killing 100,000 men, and who also burned up, perhaps alive, the 1,000 Jews in the Tower of York. For these eminent services to the state he was rewarded with the manor of Leyland, from which he took his name. The very first _complete_ genealogical register of any American family ever published was that of the Leland family, by Judge Leland, of Roxbury, Mass. (but for which he was really chiefly indebted to another of the name), in which it is shown that Henry Leland had had in 1847 fifteen thousand descendants in America. In regard to which I am honoured with a membership in the Massachusetts Genealogical Society. The crest of Bussli and the rest of us is a raven or crow transfixed by an arrow, with a motto which I dearly love. It is _Cui debeo_, _fidus_. Very apropos of this crow or raven is the following: Heinrich Heine, in his "Germany" (vol. ii. p. 211, Heinemann's edition), compares the same to priests "whose pious croaking is so well known to our ears." This is in reference to such birds which fly about the mountain of Kyffhauser, in which the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa is sleeping, and where he will sleep till they disappear. And then, praising himself, Heine adds: "But old age has weakened them, and there are good marksmen who know right well how to bring them down. I know one of these archers, who now lives in Paris, and who knows how, even from that distance, to hit the crows which fly about the Kyffhauser. When the Emperor returns to earth, he will surely find on his way more than one raven slain by this archer's arrows. And the old hero will say, smiling, 'That man carried a good bow.'" In my note to this I remarked that "the raven or crow transfixed by an arrow is the crest of the coat-of-arms of the name of Leland, or of my own. I sincerely trust that Bussli, the first who bore it, did not acquire the right to do so by shooting a clergyman." As a single crow is an omen of ill-luck, so the same transfixed signifies misfortune overcome, or the forcible ending of evil influences by a strong will. It is a common belief or saying among all the Lelands, however widely related, that there has never been a convicted criminal of the name. _Dii faxint_! At four years of age, while still living in Washington Square, I was sent to an infant school in Walnut Street, above Eighth Street, south side, near by. It was kept by the Misses Donaldson. We all sat in a row, on steps, as in an amphitheatre, but in straight lines. Miss Donaldson, senior, sat at a desk, prim and perpendicular, holding a rod which was fifteen or twenty feet in length, with which she could hit on the head or poke any noisy or drowsy child, without stirring from her post. It was an ingenious invention, and one which might be employed to advantage in small churches. I can remember that at this time I could not hear a tune played without stringing my thoughts to it; not that I have any special ear for music, but because I am moved by melody. There was a rhyme that was often sung to me to the tune of "Over the Water"-- "Charley Buff Had money enough, And locked it in his store; Charley die And shut his eye, And never saw money no more." The influence of this and other tunes on my thought was so great, that I have often wondered whether anybody ever realised how much we may owe to metre acting on thought; for I do not believe that I ever penned any poetry in my life unless it was to a _tune_; and even in this prose which I now write there is ever and anon a _cadence_ as of a brook running along, then rising, anon falling, perceptible to me though not to you, yet which has many a time been noted down by critics speaking gently of my work. This induced me to learn betimes an incredible number of songs; in fact, at the age of ten or eleven I had most of Percy's "Relics" by heart. This naturally enough led me to read, and reading understand, an amount of poetry of such varied character that I speak with strictest truth in saying that I have never met with, and never even read of, any boy who, as a mere little boy, had mastered such a number and variety of ballads and minor poems as I had done--as will appear in the course of this narrative. While living at Mrs. Eaton's I was sent to a school kept by two very nice rather young Quaker ladies in Walnut Street. It was just opposite a very quaint old-fashioned collection of many little dwellings in one (modelled after the Fuggerei of Augsburg?) known as the Quaker Almshouse. One morning I played truant, and became so fearfully weary and bored lounging about, that I longed for the society of school, and never stayed from study any more. Here I was learning to read, and I can remember "The History of Little Jack," and discussing with a comrade the question as to whether the word _history_ really meant _his_ story, or was ingeniously double and inclusive. I also about this time became familiar with many minor works, such as are all now sold at high prices as chap-books, such as "Marmaduke Multiply," "The World Turned Upside Down," "Chrononhotonthologos," "The Noble History of the Giants," and others of Mr. Newberry's gilt-cover toy-books. All of our juvenile literature in those days was without exception London made, and very few persons can now realise how deeply Anglicised I was, and how all this reading produced associations and feelings which made dwelling in England in later years seem like a return to a half-forgotten home, of which we have, however, pleasant fairy-tale reminiscences. The mistress of the school was named Sarah Lewis, and while there, something of a very extraordinary nature--to me, at least--took place. One day, while at my little desk, there came into my head with a strange and unaccountable intensity this thought: "I am I--I am _Myself_--I myself _I_," and so on. By forcing this thought on myself very rapidly, I produced a something like suspension of thought or syncope; not a vertigo, but that mental condition which is allied to it. I have several times read of men who recorded nearly the same thing among their youthful experiences, but I do not recall that any of them induced this _coma_ by reflecting on the ego-ism of the I, or the me-ness of the Me. {16} It often recurred to me in after years when studying Schelling and Fichte, or reading works by Mystics, Quietists, and the like. At a very early age I was indeed very much given to indulging in states of mind resembling metaphysical abstraction--a kind of vague marvelling what I _was_ and what others were; whether they and everything were not spirits playing me tricks, or a delusion--a kind of psychology without material or thought, like a workman without tools. For a short time, while five or six years old, and living at Mrs. Eaton's, I was sent to a school of boys of all ages, kept by a man named Eastburn, in Library Street, whom I can only recall as a coarse, brutal fiend. From morning to night there was not a minute in which some boy was not screaming under the heavy rattan which he or his brother always held. I myself--infant as I was--for not learning a spelling-lesson properly, was subjected to a caning which would have been cruel if inflicted on a convict or sailor. In the lower story this man's sister kept a girls' school, and the ruffian was continually being called downstairs to beat the larger girls. My mother knew nothing of all this, and I was ashamed to tell that I had been whipped. I have all my life been opposed to corporal punishment, be it in schools or for criminals. It brings out of boys all that is evil in their nature and nothing that is good, developing bullying and cruelty, while it is eminently productive of cowardice, lying, and meanness--as I have frequently found when I came to hear the private life of those who defend it as creating "manliness." It was found during the American war that the soldiers who had been most accustomed to beating and to being beaten were by far the greatest cowards, and that "Billy Wilson's" regiment of pugilists was so absolutely worthless as to be unqualified for the field at any time. One thing is very certain, that I have found that boys who attend schools where there is no whipping, and little or no fighting, are freest from that _coarseness_ which is so invariably allied to meanness, lying, and dishonesty. I had about 2000 children in the _public schools_ of Philadelphia pass under my teaching, and never met with but one instance of direct rudeness. There was also only one of dishonesty or theft, and that was by a fighting boy, who looked like a miniature pugilist. Philadelphia manners were formed by Quakers. When I visited, in 1884, certain minor art-work classes established in the East End of London, Mr. Walter Besant said to me that I would find a less gentle set of pupils. In fact, in the first school which I examined, the girls had, the week before, knocked down, kicked, and trampled on an elderly lady who had come to teach them art-work out of pure benevolence. I am often told that whipping put an end to garroting. If this be true, which it is _not_ (for garroting was a merely temporary fancy, which died out in America without whipping), it only proves that the garotters, who were all fighting and boxing roughs, were mere cowards. Red Indians never whip children, but they will die under torture without a groan. My parents were from Massachusetts, and every summer they returned to pass several months in or near Boston, generally with their relatives in Worcester county, in Dedham, in the "Hub" itself, or in Milford, Mendon, or Holliston, the home of my paternal grandfather, Oliver Leland. Thus I grew to be familiar with New England, its beautiful scenery and old-fashioned Yankee rural ways. Travelling was then by stage-coach, and it took two days to go from Philadelphia to Boston, stopping on the way overnight at Princeton, Perth Amboy, or Providence. This is to me a very interesting source of reminiscences. In Dedham, for three summers, I attended school. I remember that we stayed with Dr. Jeremy Stimson, who had married a sister of my mother. I studied French; and can recall that my cousins Caroline and Emily, who were very beautiful young ladies, generally corrected my exercises. I was then seven or eight years of age. Also that I was very much alone; that I had a favourite bow, made by some old Indian; that I read with great relish "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote," and especially books of curiosities and oddities which had a great influence on me. I wandered for days by myself fishing, strolling in beautiful wild places among rocks and fields, or in forests by the River Charles. I can remember how one Sunday during service I sat in church unseen behind the organ, and read Benvenuto Cellini's account of the sorcerer in the Colosseum in Rome: I shall see his Perseus ten minutes hence in the Signoria of Florence, where I now write. Then there were the quiet summer evenings in the drawing-room, where my cousins played the piano and sang "The Sunset Tree," "Alknoomuk," "I see them on the winding way," and Moore's melodies. _Tempi passati_--"'Tis sixty year's since." Caroline meantime married a Mr. Wight, who had passed most of his life in England, and was thoroughly Anglicised. There was also an English lady visiting America who stayed a while in Dedham to be with my cousin. She was _jeune encore_, but had with her a young English gentleman relative who _would_ call her "Mamma!" which we thought rather _niais_. From my reading and my few experiences I, however, acquired a far greater insight into life than most boys would have done, for I remembered and thought long over everything I heard or learned. Between my mother and cousins and our visitors there was much reading and discussion of literary topics, and I listened to more than any one noted, and profited by it. I was always reading and mentally reviewing. If my mother made a call, I was at once absorbed in the first book which came to hand. Thus I can remember that one summer, when we came to Dr. Stimson's, during the brief interval of our being shown into the "parlour," I seized on a Unitarian literary magazine and read the story of Osapho, the Egyptian who trained parrots to cry, "Osapho is a god!" Also an article on Chinese acupuncture with needles to cure rheumatism; which chance readings and reminiscences I could multiply _ad infinitum_. My cousin Caroline, whom I remember as very beautiful and refined, with a _distinguee_ manner, had a small work-box, on the cover of which was a picture of the Pavilion in Brighton. She spoke of the building as a rubbishy piece of architecture; but I, who felt it through the "Arabian Nights," admired it, and pitied her want of taste. _Now_ I have lived altogether three years in Brighton, but I never saw the Pavilion without recalling the little yellow work-box. In some mysterious way the picture seems to me to be grander than the original. Dickens has expressed this idea. I was too grave and earnest as a child to be called a cheerful or happy one, which was partly due to much ill-health; yet, by a strange contradiction not uncommon in America, I was gifted with a precociously keen sense of humour, and not only read, but collected and preserved every comic almanac and scrap of droll anecdote which I could get. Thus there came into my possession half-a-dozen books of the broadest London humour of the time, all of which entered into my soul; such things as:-- '"Ladies in furs and gemmen in spurs, Who lollop and lounge all day; The Bazaar in Soho is completely the go, Walk into the shop of Grimaldi." Reader mine, you can have no conception how deeply I, as a mere little boy, entered into and knew London life and society from such songs, sketches, anecdotes, books, and caricatures as I met with. Others read and forget them, but I took such trifles deep into my soul and _dwelt_ on them. It is only of late years, since I have lived in England, that I have learned how extensively--I may say incredibly well--I was informed for my age as to many phases of English life. Few of us know what may be got out of reading the current light literature of the day, if we only read it _earnestly_ and get it by heart. This I did to a great extent, as my reminiscences continually awakened in England prove. There was in Dedham a very old house of somewhat superior style, which had been built, if not in 1630, at least within a very few years after. It was inhabited by three sisters named Fairbanks, who were very peculiar indeed, and their peculiarity consisted in a strange devotion to the past, and above all to old _English_ memories of colonial times before the Revolution. Even in England this resistance can hardly be understood at the present day, and yet it may still be found alive in New England. In the house itself was a well, dug to supply water when besieged by Indians, and the old ladies used to exhibit an immense old gun once used by Puritans, and an ox-saddle and other relics. They had also a very ancient book of prayer of the Church of England, and an old Bible, and thereby hangs a tale. They were all still living in 1849 or 1850, when I visited them with my very pretty cousin Mary Elizabeth Fisher, and as I professed the Episcopal faith, and had been in England, the precious relics were shown to me as to one of the initiated. But they showed a marked aversion to letting Miss Fisher see them, as she was a Unitarian. So they went on, as many others did in my youth, still staunch adherents to England, nice old Tories, believers in the King or Queen, for whom they prayed, and not in the President. I remember that Miss Eliza Leslie told me in later years of just such another trio. My grandfather in Holliston was, as his father and brothers and uncles had all been, an old Revolutionary soldier, who had been four years in the war and taken part in many battles. He had been at Princeton (where I afterwards graduated) and Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender of Burgoyne to Gates. I was principally concerned to know whether the conqueror had _kept the sword_ handed to him on this occasion, and was rather disappointed to learn that it was given back. Once I found in the garret a bayonet which my grandma said had been carried by grandfather in the war. I turned it with a broom-handle into a lance and made ferocious charges on the cat and hens. This grandfather, Oliver Leland, exerted an extraordinary influence on me, and one hard to describe. He was great, grim, and taciturn to behold, yet with a good heart, and not devoid of humour. He was gouty, and yet not irritable. He continually recurs to me while reading Icelandic sagas, and as a kind of man who would now be quite out of the age anywhere. All his early associations had been of war and a half-wild life. He was born about 1758, and therefore in a rude age in rural New England. He, I may say, deeply interested me. All boys are naturally full of the romance of war; the Revolution was to us more than the Crusades and all chivalry combined, and my grandfather was a living example and chronicle of all that I most admired. Often I sat on a little cricket at his feet, and listened to tales of battles, scoutings, and starving; how he had been obliged to live on raw wheat, which produced evil results, and beheld General Washington and other great men, and had narrow escapes from Indians, and been at the capturing of a fort by moonlight, and seen thousands of pounds' worth of stores destroyed. I frequently thought of old grandfather Oliver when "out" myself during the Civil War, and was half-starved and chilled when scouting, or when doing rough and tough in West Virginia. My grandfather often told me such stories of the war, and others of his father and grandfather, who had fought before him in the old French war in Canada, and how the latter, having gone up to trade among the Indians one winter, endeared himself so much to them that they would not let him go, and kept him a captive until the next summer. I came across traces of this ancestor in an old Canadian record, wherein it appears that he once officiated as interpreter in the French and Indian tongues. Whereby critics may remark that learning French and Algonkin runs in our blood, and that my proclivity for Indians is legitimately inherited. I would that I knew all the folklore that my great-grandsire heard in the Indian wigwams in those old days! I can remember seeing my grandfather once sitting and talking with five other veterans of the war. But I saw them daily in those times, and once several hundreds, or it may be thousands, of them in a great procession in Philadelphia in 1832. And here I may mention that in 1834 I often saw one named Rice, whose age, as authenticated by his pension papers, was 106, and that in 1835 I shook hands with Thomas Hughes, aged 95, who was the last survivor of the Boston Tea party. He had come to visit our school, and how we boys cheered the old gentleman, who was in our eyes one of the greatest men alive! But all the old folk in my boyhood could tell tales of the Revolution, which was indeed not very much older then than the Rebellion is to us now. I can also recollect seeing Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, though my memory of the man is now confused with that of a very perfect portrait which belonged to his granddaughter, Mrs. Jackson, who was a next-door but one neighbour in after years in Walnut Street, Philadelphia. He was a very venerable- looking man. My father served for a short time in the war of 1812, and I have heard him relate that when the startling news of peace arrived in Boston, where he was, he at once took a sleigh and fast horses and drove full speed, being the first to disseminate the news in the country. That was as good as Browning's "Ride to Ghent" in its way--_apropos_ of which Mr. Browning once startled me by telling me, "I suppose you know that it is an invention of mine, and not founded on any real incident." But my father's headlong sleigh-ride--he was young and wild in those days--was real and romantic enough in all conscience. It set bells to ringing, multitudes to cheering, bonfires a-blazing on hills and in towns, and also some few to groaning, as happened to a certain old deacon, who had invested his all in English goods, and said, when he heard the cheers caused by the news, "Wife, if that's war news, I'm saved; but if it's peace, I'm ruined!" Even so it befell me, in after years, to be the first person to announce in the United States, far in advance of any others, the news of the French Revolution of 1848, as I shall fully prove in the sequence. It may be here remarked, that, though not "professionals," all of our family, without a break in the record, have successively taken turns at fighting, and earned our pay as soldiers, since time lost in oblivion; for I and my brother tried it on during the Rebellion, wherein he indeed, standing by my side, got the wound from a shell of which he eventually died; while there were none who were not in the old Indian wars or the English troubles of Charles the Second and First, and so on back, I dare say, to the days of Bussli de Leland, who laid all Yorkshire waste. My grandfather, though not wealthy, owned a great deal of land, and I can remember that he one afternoon showed me a road, saying that he owned the land on each side for a mile. I myself, in after years, however, came to own in fee-simple a square mile of extremely rich land in Kansas, which I sold for sixteen hundred dollars, while my grandfather's was rather of that kind by which men's poverty was measured in Virginia--that is to say, the more land a man had the poorer he was considered to be. It is related of one of these that he once held great rejoicing at having got rid of a vast property by the ingenious process of giving some person one half of it to induce him to take the other. However, as there is now a large town or small city on my grandfather's whilom estate, I wish that it could have been kept. _Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_, or the ducats of Panurge? There was a "home-pasture," a great field behind my grandfather's house, where I loved to sit alone, and which has left a deep impression on my memory, as though it were a fairy-haunted or imagined place. It was very rocky, the stones being covered with clean, crisp, dry lichens, and in one spot there was the gurgling deep down in some crevice of a mysterious unseen spring or rivulet. Young as I was, I had met with a line which bore on it-- "Deep from their vaults the Loxian murmurs flow." And there was something very voice-like or human in this murmur or chattering of the unseen brook. This I distinctly remember, that the place gave me not only a feeling, but a faith that it was haunted by something gentle and merry. I went there many a time for company, being much alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the _Un a games- suk_--the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These beings enter far more largely, deeply, and socially into their life or faith than elves or fairies ever did into those of the Aryan races, and I might well have been their _protege_, for there could have been few little boys living, so fond as I was of sitting all alone by rock and river, hill and greenwood tree. There are yet in existence on some of this land which was once ours certain mysterious walls or relics of heavy stone-work, which my friend Eben C. Horsford thinks were made by the Norsemen. I hope that they were, for I have read many a saga in Icelandic, old Swedish, and Latin, and the romance thereof is deep in my soul; and as my own name is Godfrey, it is no wonder that the god Frey and his Freya are dear to me. In my boyhood--and it may be still the case--the "Injuns" got the credit of having built these mysterious works. Not far from Holliston is Mendon, where I had an uncle, Seth Davenport, who had a large, pleasant, old-fashioned New England farm, which was more productive than my grandfather's, since there were employed on it sixteen men, three of whom were Natick Indians of the old local stock. There were many of them when my mother was young, but I suppose that the last of the tribe has long since died. One of these Indians, Rufus Pease, I can recall as looking like a dark-ruddy gypsy, with a pleasant smile. He very was fond of me. He belonged to a well-known family, and had a brother--and thereby hangs a tale, or, in this case, a scalp-lock. "Marm" Pease, the mother of Rufus, had on one occasion been confined, and old Doctor--I forget his name--who officiated at the birth, had been asked to give the infant a name. Now he was a dry wag, of the kind so dear to Dr. Holmes, and expressed much gratification and gratitude at such a compliment being paid to him. "He had long been desirous," he said, "of naming a child after his dear old friend, Dr. Green." So the name was bestowed, the simple Indians not realising for some time after the christening that their youngest bore the name of Green Pease. Whether he was ever called a duck, I know not. Everything about Uncle Seth and Aunt Betsy was, as I remember, delightfully comfortable, old-fashioned, and in a way beautiful. There was their daughter Rebecca, who was pretty and gentle, so that several wild birds came every morning to feed from her hand and perch on her fingers. Uncle Seth himself wore a scarlet waistcoat, and, as I recall him, seemed altogether in figure to belong to the time of Cromwell, or to earlier days. There was a hall, hung round with many old family portraits in antique dresses, and an immense dairy--the pride of Aunt Betsy's heart--and a garden, in which I was once shown a humming-bird's nest; and cousin Rebecca's mantelpiece, over a vast old fireplace, heaped with mosses, birds' nests, shells, and such curiosities as a young girl would gather in the woods and fields; and the cider-press, in which Uncle Seth ground up the sixteen hundred bushels of apples which he had at one crop, and the new cider gushing in a stream, whereof I had a taste. It was a charming, quiet old homestead, in which books and culture were not wanting, and it has all to me now something of the chiaroscuro and Rembrandt colour and charm of the _Mahrchen_ or fairy-tale. The reality of this charm is apt to go out of life as that of literature or culture comes in. To this day I draw the deepest impression or sentiment of the _pantheism_ or subtle spiritual charm of Nature far more from these early experiences of rural life than from all the books, poetry included, which I have ever perused. Note this well, ye whose best feelings are only a _rechauffe_ of Ruskin and Browning--_secundem ordinem_--for I observe that those who do not think at second hand are growing rare. In the town of Milford lived my uncle, William Godfrey, with my aunt Nancy, and of them and their home I have many pleasant memories. The very first of them all was not so pleasant to me at the time. My parents had just arrived, and had not been ten minutes in the house ere a tremendous squall was heard, and my mother, looking from the window, beheld me standing in the open barn-door holding a tiny chicken in my right hand, while an old hen sat on my head flapping her wings and pecking me in wrath. I, seeing the brood, had forthwith captured one, and for that was undergoing penance. It was a beautiful tableau, which was never forgotten! We went there on visits for many summers. Uncle William was a kind-hearted, "sportive" man, who took _Bell's Life_, and I can remember that there was a good supply of English reading in the house. My uncle had three sons, all much older than I. The eldest, Stearns, was said to have first popularised the phrase "posted up," to signify well-informed. The second, Benjamin, became in after years a great manufacturer and somewhat noted politician, and owner of a famous racehorse. The third, Samuel, went into business in Philadelphia, and crossed the Atlantic with me. He died quite young. All of them, like their father and grandfather, were very good-natured or gentle, and men of perfect integrity. The Lelands, however, were rather _dour_ and grim in their honesty, or more Northern than the Godfreys. This was accounted for by the fact, that while my father's family was Puritan of the purest, and only intermarried with Puritan stock, the Godfreys had in Rhode Island received an infusion of French Huguenot blood, which was indeed very perceptible in their faces and lively pleasant manner. There was a strange tradition, to which my mother sometimes jestingly referred, that there had been among her Rhode Island ancestors a High German (_i.e._, not a Hollander) doctor, who had a reputation as a sorcerer or wizard. He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever heard about him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped out again in me. Something tells me that this was the High German doctor who, according to Washington Irving, laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow, which made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy fairy- land. Whether his friendly spirit still watches over me, or whether I am the man himself, is a problem which I leave to my friend Francis Galton, who indeed personally often reminds me of Irving. High German sorcerers were not common in those days north of Pennsylvania, so that I trow mine was the very man referred to by Geoffrey Crayon. And it is true beyond all doubt that even in infancy, as I have often heard, there was a quaint uncanniness, as of something unknown, in my nature, and that I differed in the main totally from every relative, and indeed from any other little boy, known to anybody; though I was a perfect Godfrey in face when very young, as I am now a typical Leland. I was always given to loneliness in gardens and woods when I could get into them, and to hearing words in birds' songs and running or falling water; and I once appalled a visitor by professing seriously that I could determine for him some question as to what would happen to him by divination with a bullet in an Indian moccasin. We had two servants who spoke old Irish; one was an inexhaustible mine of legends, which she related to me--she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or elfin- favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, "Only listen to his voice; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on them, as also on the darkies. Once I had a wonderful dream. I thought that I was in Dr. Furness's chapel, but that, instead of the gentle reverend clergyman, the devil himself was in the pulpit preaching. Feeling myself inspired, I went up into the pulpit, threw the Evil One out, and preached myself in his place. Now our nurse had a dream-book, and made some pretence to mystic fairy knowledge learned in Kilkenny, and she interpreted this dream as signifying that I would greatly rise in this world, and do strange things. But she was greatly struck with such a vision in such an infant. Now, I was a great reader of Scripture; in fact, I learned a great deal too much of it, believing now that for babes and sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not know, but this I understood, that it was "sass" of some kind, as negroes term it, and so one day I applied it experimentally to my nurse. Though the word was not correctly pronounced, for I had never heard it from anybody, its success was immediate, but not agreeable. The passionate Irish woman flew into a great rage and declared that she would "lave the house." My mother, called in, investigated the circumstances, and found that I really had no idea whatever of the meaning of what I had said. Peace was restored, but Annie declared that only the divil or the fairies could have inspired such an infant to use such language. I was very fond of asking my nurse to sing in old Irish or to teach me Irish words. This she did, but agreed with her sister Biddy that it was all very uncanny, and that there must have been a time when I was perfectly familiar with the owld language, as I had such unearthly fondness for it. I must have been about seven years old when my parents took a house in Arch Street, above Ninth Street, Philadelphia. Here my life begins to be more marked and distinct. I was at first sent, _i.e._, walked daily to the school of Jacob Pierce, a worthy Quaker, who made us call him Jacob, and who carefully taught us all the ordinary branches, and gave us excellent lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry with experiments, and encouraged us to form mineralogical collections, but who objected to our reading history, "because there were so many battles in it." In which system of education all that is good and bad, or rather _weak_, in Quakerism is fully summed up. Like the Roman Catholic, it is utterly unfit for _all_ the world, and incapable of grappling with or adapting itself to the natural expansion of science and the human mind. Thus the Quaker garb, which was originally intended by its simplicity to avoid the appearance of eccentricity or peculiarity (most dress in the time of the Stuarts being extravagant), has now become, by merely sticking to old custom, the most eccentric dress known. The school was in a very large garden, in which was a gymnasium, and in the basement of the main building there was a carpenter's shop with a turning-lathe, where boys were allowed to work as a reward for good conduct. I could never learn the multiplication table. There are things which the mind, like the stomach, spasmodically rejects without the least perceptible cause or reason. So I have found it to be with certain words which _will_ not be remembered. There was one Arab word which I verily believe I looked out one hundred times in the dictionary, and repeated a thousand, yet never could keep it. Every teacher should be keen to detect these antipathies, and cure them by gentle and persuasive means. Unfortunately no one in my youth knew any better way to overcome them than by "keeping me in" after school to study, when I was utterly weary and worn--a very foolish punishment, as is depriving a boy of his meals, or anything else levelled at Nature. I think there must have been many months of time, and of as much vain and desperate effort on my part to remember, wasted on my early arithmetic. Now I can see that by _rewards_ or inducements, and by the very simple process of only learning "one time one is one" for the first lesson, and that and one line more for the second, I could have mastered the whole book in time. But oh! the weary, dreary days, and the sad waste of time, and the anxious nervous suffering, which arithmetic cost me in my youth, and mathematics in after years! But there was one class at Jacob's in which I was _facile-princeps_ and habitual past-grand-master. This was the class which was, like the professorship of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, for Matters and Things in General. That is to say, we read aloud from some book--it may have been selections from English writers--and then Jacob, picking out the hard words or facts or phrases, required of them definition or explanation. One day there arose in these questions a sum in arithmetic, when I shot down to the tail of the class as a plummet drops to the bottom of the well. I shall never forget the proud fierce impatience which I felt, like an imprisoned chieftain who knows that he will speedily be delivered and take dire vengeance on his foes. I had not long to wait. "'Refectory,' what is a 'refectory'? Hillburn Jones, does thee know? Joseph Widdifield, does thee?" But none of them knew till it came to me "down tail," when I cried "An oyster-cellar." "That is quite right, Charley; thee can go up head," said Jacob, and as I passed Hillburn Jones he whispered, half in fun, half enviously, the "Kemble Refectory." This was an oyster-cellar which had been recently opened under the Arch Street Theatre, and whence Hillburn and I had derived our knowledge of the word, the difference being that I remembered more promptly and risked more boldly. But I missed it one day when I defined a _peasant_ as "a nest full of young birds;" the fact being that I recalled a picture in AEsop's fables, and confused _peasant_ with _pheasant_. One day Jacob rebuked the class for letting me always be at their head, when Hillburn Jones, who was a very honest little boy, said, "Indeed, Jacob, thee must know that all that we do know, Charley tells us." For I was already an insatiable reader, and always recalling what I read, and always communicating my knowledge to others in the form of small lectures. I had a book of Scripture stories, with a picture of Pharaoh in his chariot, with the title, "Pharaoh's host sunk in the Red Sea." Hence I concluded that a _host_ was a vehicle of a very superior description. A carriage-builder in our neighbourhood had executed a chaise of very unusual magnificence, and as I stood admiring it I informed Hillburn that this was what was called by the learned a _host_, and that it was in such a host that Pharaoh perished. I remember elevating my voice somewhat for the benefit of a bystander, being somewhat proud of this bit of knowledge. Unfortunately, not only my father, but also my teacher, and with them the entire population of North America, in those days regarded a good knowledge of arithmetic as forming nine-tenths of all that was most needful in education, while indulgence in a taste for general information, and "literature" especially, was glared at with a very evil eye indeed, as tending to injure a "practical business man." That there could be any kind of profitable or respectable calling not based upon arithmetic did not enter into the heart of man to conceive, while among the bankers and merchants of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia there was a deeply-seated conviction that even a wealthy and successful editor, literary man, or artist, was really an inferior as compared to themselves. As this sublime truth was severely rubbed into me several times daily during the greater portion of my youthful life, and as in its earlier stage I rarely met with a man grown who did not look down on me as an unfortunate non-arithmetical, unbusinesslike creature, and let me know it too, I very naturally grew up with a low estimate of my own capacities; and as I was proud and sensitive, this was to me a source of much suffering, which often became terrible as I advanced in years. But at that time the position of the literary man or scholar, with the exception of a very few brilliant magnates who had "made money," was in the United States not an enviable one. Serious interest in art and letters was not understood, or so generally sympathised with, as it now is in "Quakerdelphia." There was a gentleman in Philadelphia who was a scholar, and who having lived long abroad, had accumulated a very curious black-letter and _rariora_ library. For a long time I observed that this library was never mentioned in polite circles without significant smiles. One day I heard a lady say very meaningly, "I suppose that you know what kind of books he has _and how he obtained them_?" So I inquired very naturally if he had come by them dishonestly. To which the reply, half- whispered in my ear lest it should be overheard, was, "They say his books are all _old_ things, which he did not buy at any first-class stores, but picked up at old stalls and in second-hand shops at less than their value; in fact, _they did not cost him much_." Yet these remarks must not be regarded as too sweeping or general. Firstly, I am speaking of sixty years since. Secondly, there were many people of literary tastes in Philadelphia--a little isolated, it is true; and finally, there was a great culture of science, founded by Franklin, and fostered by the medical schools. I could cite a brilliant array of names of men distinguished in these matters. What I am writing is simply a sincere record of my own--somewhat peculiar--or personal experiences. There are doubtless many who would write very differently. And now times are _very_ greatly changed. I have again a quaint early reminiscence. It would happen that now and then a new carriage, always of the same sober description, with two very good, but seldom showy, horses would appear in the streets. Then its owner would be greeted on Market Street with the remark, "Well, Sammy, I see thee's got thee fifty thousand dollars." This sum--ten thousand pounds--constituted the millionaireism or moneyed aristocracy of those days. On it, with a thriving business, Samuel could maintain a family in good fashion, and above all, in great comfort, which was sensibly regarded as better than fashion or style. Fifty thousand dollars entitled a man to keep a carriage and be classed as "quality" by the negroes. It may be worth noting that although the Quakers did not allow the piano in their families, as being too worldly, they compromised by having musical boxes. And I have heard that in the country, where still older fashioned ideas prevailed, the one bit of finery allowed to a Quaker damsel was a red ribbon; but it must be red, not of any other colour. Let it be remembered that at this time Philadelphia, and even the world, were as yet to a great degree in the Middle Ages as compared to the present day. We had few steamboats, and no railroads, or telephones, or percussion-caps, or a tremendous press, or Darwinism, or friction matches. Even the introduction of ice-cream, and stone coal as fuel, and grates was within the memory of our elders. Apropos of matches, the use of tinderbox and brimstone matches was universal; bold young men had tinder pistols; but the wood fire was generally kept under ashes all night, and I can well remember how our negro servants, when it had gone out, were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of coals from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it was handed over the garden fence, the recipient standing on our pump handle and the donor on hers. I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam, and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats. I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort--this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown. I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the principal people signed a petition against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads; it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same. The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on them. As Washington Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, "Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land." Trees grew abundantly in rows in almost every street--one before every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at twilight the _pea-ak_ of the night-hawk could be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the place where our city stands; there were in Coaquannoc, or the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, which claims to be the oldest gentleman's club in Anglo-Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a "fish-house punch" as delicious as that of London civic banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now; they have all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has its merry banquets in its ancient home; for, as the French say, "_Chacun peche a sa maniere_." In graveyards lone or over gardens green glittered of summer nights millions of fireflies; there was the scent of magnolias, roses, pinks, and honeysuckles by every house; for Philadelphians have always had a passion for flowers, and there never was a Quaker, much less a Quakeress, who has not studied botany, and wandered in Bartram's Garden and culled blue gentians in the early fall, or lilies wild in Wissahickon's shade. There still remains a very beautiful relic of this olden time in the old Swedes Church, which every stranger should visit. It is a quaint structure of more than two hundred years, and in its large churchyard (which is not, like Karamsin's graves, "deserted and drear," but charming and garden-like) one can imagine himself in rural England. In the spring of the year there was joyous activity on the Delaware, even in town; for, as the song hath it-- "De fishin' time hab come at last, De winter all am gone and past;" and there was the casting of immense seines and the catching of myriads of shad, the typical fish or emblem of the Quaker Philadelphian, because in the profile outline of the shad people professed to discern the form according to which the Quaker coat was cut. With the shad were many herring, and now and then a desperate giant of a sturgeon, who in his struggles would give those concerned enough to do. Then the yells of the black fishermen, the flapping of the horny knife-backed prey--often by the flashing of a night-fire--formed a picture worthy of Rembrandt. Apropos of these sturgeon, the fresh caviare or roe (which has been pronounced at St. Petersburg to surpass the Russian) was always thrown away, as was often the case with sweetbreads, which were rarely eaten. But if the caviare or roe was really in those days "caviare to the general" multitude, the _nose_ of the fish was not, it being greatly coveted by us small boys wherewith to make a ball for "shinny," which for some occult reason was preferred to any other. Old people of my acquaintance could remember when seals had been killed at Cape May below the city, and how on one or two occasions a bewildered whale of no small dimensions had found its way to Burlington, some miles above. Now and then there would be found in the bay below the city a tremendous, square-shaped, hideous, unnatural piscatorial monster, known as a devil- fish, or briefly devil. It was a legend of my youth that two preachers or ministers of the Presbyterian faith once went fishing in those waters, and having cast out a stout line, fastened to the mast, for shark, were amazed at finding themselves all at once careering through the waves at terrible speed, being dragged by one of the diabolical "monsters of the roaring deep" above mentioned. Whereupon a friend, who was in the boat, burst out laughing. And being asked, "Wherefore this unrestrained hilarity?" replied, "Is it not enough to make a man laugh to see the Devil running away with two clergymen?" There was a very excellent and extensive museum of Matters and Things in General, founded by an ancient artist named Peale, who was the head-central charm and delight of all young Philadelphia in those days, and where, when we had been good all the week, we were allowed to repair on Saturday afternoons. And here I may say by the way, that miscellaneous collections of "curiosities," oddities, and relics are far more attractive to children, and stimulate in them far more interest and inquisitiveness and desire for general information, than do the best scientific collections, where everything is ranked and numbered, and wherein even an Etruscan tiara or a Viking's sword loses much of its charm when placed simply as a "specimen" in a row of others of the kind. I am not arguing here in the least against scientific or properly arranged archaeologic collections, but to declare the truth that for _children_ museums of the despised curiosities are far more attractive and infinitely more useful. I owe so very much myself to the old Peale's Museum; it served to stimulate to such a remarkable degree my interest in antiquities and my singular passion for miscellaneous information, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I cannot pass it by without a tribute to its memory. How often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth--how small did that of a great elephant seem beside it--and recalled the Indian legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys--one shaving another--what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us! No; _that_ was the museum for us, and the time will come when there will be such collections made expressly for the young. "Stuffed monkey" was a common by-word, by the way, for a conceited fellow. Therefore the _Louisville Journal_, speaking of a rival sheet, said: "Reader, if you will go into the Louisville Museum, you will see two stuffed monkeys reading the _Courier_. And if you will then go into the office of the _Louisville Courier_, you may see two living stuffed monkeys editing the same." The beautiful sallies of this kind which appeared in these two newspapers for years would make a lively volume. Never shall I forget one evening alone in that Museum. I had come with Jacob Pierce's school, and strayed off alone into some far-away and fascinating nook, forgetful of friends and time. All the rest had departed homewards, and I sought to find them. The dark evening shades were casting sombre tones in the galleries--I was a very little boy of seven or eight--and the stuffed lions and bears and wolves seemed looming or glooming into mysterious life; the varnished sharks and hideous shiny crocodiles had a light of awful intelligence in their eyes; the gigantic anaconda had long awaited me; the grim hyaena marked me for his own; even deer and doves seemed uncanny and goblined. At this long interval of sixty years, I can recall the details of that walk, and every object which impressively half-appalled me, and how what had been a museum had become a chamber of horrors, yet not without a wild and awful charm. Of course I lost my way in the shades, and was beginning to speculate on having to pass a night among the monsters, and how much there would be left for my friends to mourn over in the morning, when--Eureka! Thalatta!--I beheld the gate of entrance and exit, and made my latter as joyously as ever did the souls who were played out of Inferno by the old reprobate of the Roman tale. Since that adventure I never mentioned it to a living soul till now, and yet there is not an event of my life so vividly impressed on my memory. My father took me very rarely to the theatre; but my Quaker school-mates had never seen the inside of such places at all, and therefore listened greedily to what I could tell them of the sights. One of the wonders of my youth was the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play called "The Englishman in Siam." It was indeed very curious, and it is described as such in works on natural history. And I saw Edwin Forrest (whom I learned to know in later years) in "Metamora," and Fanny Kemble in "Beatrice," and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, to every place of amusement whenever he pleased, and talked familiarly of actors, some of whom he actually knew, and their lives, in a manner which awoke in me awe and a feeling as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we grew older, Boker and I, from reading "Don Quixote" and Scott, used to sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and marvellous romances. It was in the year when it first appeared that I read (in the _New Monthly_) and got quite by heart the rhyming tale of "Sir Rupert the Fearless," a tale of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham. I can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in after years it inspired (allied to Goethe's _Wassermadchen_) my ballad of _De Maiden mit Nodings on_, which has, as I now write, been very recently parodied and pictured by _Punch_, March 18, 1893. My mother had taught me to get poetry by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had imbibed, so to speak, an immense quantity; for, as in opium-eating, those who begin by effort end by taking in with ease. There was something else so very characteristic of old Philadelphia that I will not pass it by. In the fall of the year the reed-bird, which is quite as good as the ortolan of Italy, and very much like it (I prefer the reed-bird), came in large flocks to the marshes and shores of the Delaware and Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with firearms of every faculty and form, followed by dogs of every degree of badness, in all kinds of boats, among which the _bateau_ of boards predominated, intermingled with an occasional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many, however, crept on foot along the shore, and this could be seen below the Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock after flock of once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell in flurried flight, there would be such a banging, cracking, and barking as to suggest a South American revolution aided by blood-hounds. That somebody in the _melee_ now and then got a charge of shot in his face, or that angry parties in dispute over a bird sometimes blazed away at one another and fought _a l'outrance_ in every way, "goes without saying." Truly they were inspiriting sights, and kept up the martial valour, aided by frequent firemen's fights, which made Philadelphians so indomitable in the Rebellion, when, to the amazement of everybody, our Quaker city manifested a genius or love for hard fighting never surpassed by mortals. There were, of course, some odd episodes among the infantry or gunners on foot, and one of these was so well described by my brother Henry in a poem, that I venture to give it place. REED-BIRDING. Two men and a bull-dog ugly, Two guns and a terrier lame; They'd better stick out in the marsh there, And set themselves up for game. But no; I mark by the cocking Of that red-haired Paddy's eye, He's been "reeding" too much for you, sir, Any such game to try. "Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there, And hould the big bull-dog in; There's a bloody big crowd of rade-birds, That nade a pepperin'!" _Ker-rack_! goes the single barrel, _Flip-boong_! roars the old Queen Anne; There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole, A kicked-over, knocked-down man. "Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature, Sure ye're the divil's son; How many fingers' load, thin, Did ye putt in this d---d ould gun?" "How many fingers, be jabers? I nivir putt in a wan; Did ye think I'd be afther jammin' Me fingers into a gun?" "Well, give me the powder, Jamie." "The powder! as sure as I'm born, I put it all into yer musket, For I'd nivir a powder-horn!" Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-shell crabs, gumbo, "snapper," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la saison_--for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or sixty miles--so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians, and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-much to eating up their intellects--as Dr. Holmes declares they do--they had at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of my "grandfather-land" (New England), as he once termed it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time. Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion skater, was there cutting High Dutch; but this I know, that all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without injury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters. And again, during a week on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the apparition. Sears C. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met in all my life any person with so little natural gift or aptitude for learning languages or drawing as I have; and if I have since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colouring matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a piece of coarse rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mortar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all scientists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz! The recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the process, and that this was written with the ink itself! This I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar. We had not many books, but what we had I read and reread with great assiduity. Among them were Cooper's novels, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Washington Irving's "Sketch Book," which had great influence on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature and its associations which has ever since been a part of my very soul. Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a _startling_ genius; but he had sympathised himself into such appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, such as that from Syr Grey Steel:-- "He that supper for is dight, He lies full cold I trow this night; Yestreen to chamber I him led, This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed." Lang--not Andrew--has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in _letres blake_, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world--first discoveries--unique! And then--oh! then--how bitter is the waking! There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well known as Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle" of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," "The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was my boyish signature. "And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time. My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the latter:-- "In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place, And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base; Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat, For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street." I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America. The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a _literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk- lore and literature, which he never did. The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before. As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen" actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter cost of all real "education." It was a great pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true. The word _ideal_ was ever in his mouth. All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over. Yet I cannot say that I _really_ liked the man himself. He was not to me exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy certain weaknesses--and I had mine--which were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so much hated. Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "The Disowned," and "Pilgrims of the Rhine" made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could be made to feel _all_ the influence, all the charm, which his art exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written. He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew _what_ a _melange_ I have written, he would not wonder at it. It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of national revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of H. C. Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, and I believe the only, edition. And there are novels which have gone to the three hundred thousand, of whose authors it may be said that "Over the barren desert of their brains There never strayed the starved camel of an idea," and whose works vanish like wind. What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the great majority of readers confuse these two classes, and believe that mere popular success is correlative with genius and desert. A great cause of this really vulgar error is the growing conviction that artistic skill alone determines merit in literature, and that intellect, as the French, beginning mildly with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve, assert is of far less importance than style. "_Le style_, _c'est l'esprit du siecle_." Apropos of which I remarked that in the warlike Middle Age in France the motto might have been "_L'homme c'est le_ STEEL." Then came the age of wigs, when the cry was, "_L'homme c'est le_ STYLE." And now we are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age, when it might be proclaimed that "_L'homme c'est le_ STEAL." There was another book which I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis for a deep interest in after years in Northern antiquities; they were soon followed by Mallett; and if I have since read many sagas in Icelandic and studied with keenest interest the museums of the North, the first incentive thereto came from my boyish reading. When I was sixteen I executed a poetic version of the "Death Song of Regner Lodbrog," which, though it was never published, I think was at least as good as any translation which I have since executed, "however that may be." I very seriously connected this Norse spirit with my grandfather and his stern uncles and progenitors, who had fought in Canada and in the icy winters of New England; grim men they were all; and I daresay that I was quite right. It always seems to me that among these alternately fighting and farming Icelanders I am among my Leland relatives; and I even once found Uncle Seth in his red waistcoat in the Burnt Njals saga to the life. There was a paragraph, as I write, recently circulating in the newspapers, in which I was compared in appearance to an old grey Viking, and it gave me a strange uncanny thrill, as if the writer of it were a wizard who had revealed a buried secret. My parents, on coming to Philadelphia, had at first attended the Episcopal church, but finding that most of their New England friends held to the Rev. W. H. (now Dr.) Furness, an Unitarian, they took a pew in his chapel. After fifteen years they returned to the Episcopal faith, but allowed me to keep the pew to myself for one or two years, till I went to college. In Dr. Furness's chapel I often heard Channing and all the famous Unitarian divines of the time preach, and very often saw Miss Harriet Martineau, Dr. Combe, the phrenologist, and many other distinguished persons. In other places at different times I met Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, to whom I was introduced, Daniel Webster, to whom I reverently bowed, receiving in return a gracious acknowledgment, Peter Duponceau, Morton, Stephen Girard, Joseph Buonaparte, the two authors of the "Jack Downing Letters"; and I once heard David Crockett make a speech. Apropos of Joseph Buonaparte, I can remember to have heard my wife's mother, the late Mrs. Rodney Fisher, tell how when a little girl, and while at his residence at Bordentown, she had run a race with the old ex-king of Spain. A very intimate friend in our family was Professor John Frost, the manufacturer of literally innumerable works of every description. He had many thousands of woodcut blocks, and when he received an order--as, for example, a history of any country, or of the world, or of a religion, or a school geography, or book of travel or adventure, or a biography, or anything else that the heart of man could conceive--he set his scribes to write, scissors and paste, and lo! the book was made forthwith, he aiding and revising it. What was most remarkable was that many of these _pieces de manufacture_ were rather clever, and very well answered the demand, for their sale was enormous. He had when young been in the West Indies, and written a clever novelette entitled "Ramon, the Rover of Cuba." Personally he was very handsome, refined, and intelligent; a man meant by Nature for higher literary work than mere book-making. Miss Eliza Leslie, the writer of the best series of sketches of American domestic life of her day, was a very intimate friend of my mother, and a constant visitor at our house. She was a sister of Leslie, the great artist, and had been in her early life much in England. I was a great favourite with her, and owed much to her always entertaining and very instructive conversation, which was full of reminiscences of distinguished people and remarkable events. I may say with great truth that I really profited as much by mere hearing as many boys would have done by knowing the originals, so deep was the interest which I felt in all that I heard, and so eager my desire to learn to know the world. Then I was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Alcott's school, for he had become so very "ideal" or eccentric in his teaching and odd methods of punishment by tormenting without ever whipping, that people could not endure his purely intellectual system. So for one winter, as my health was bad and I was frequently ill, for a long time I was allowed to do nothing but attend a writing-school kept by a Mr. Rand. At the end of the season, he sadly admitted that I still wrote badly; I think he pronounced me the worst and most incurable case of bad writing which he had ever attended. In 1849 Judge (then Mr.) Cadwallader, with whom I was studying law, said that he admired my engrossing hand more than any he had ever seen except one. As hands go round the clock, our hands do change. I was to go the next summer to New England with my younger brother, Henry Perry Leland, to be placed in the celebrated boarding-school of Mr. Charles W. Greene, at Jamaica Plains, five miles from Boston; which was done, and with this I enter on a new phase of life, of which I have very vivid reminiscences. Let me state that we first went to Dedham and stayed some weeks. There I found living with his father, an interesting boy of my own age, named William Joshua Barney, a grandson of the celebrated Commodore Barney, anent whom was written the song, "Barney, leave the girls alone," apropos of his having been allowed to kiss Marie Antoinette and all her maids of honour. William had already been at Mr. Greene's school, and we soon became intimate. During this time my father hired a chaise; I borrowed William's shot-gun, and we went together on a delightful tour to visit all our relations in Holliston, Milford, and elsewhere. At one time we stopped to slay an immense black snake; at another to shoot wild pigeons, and "so on about" to Providence and many places. From cousins who lived in old farmhouses in wild and remote places I received Indian arrow-heads and a stone tomahawk, and other rustic curiosities dear to my heart. At the Fremont House in Boston my father showed me one day at dinner several foreign gentlemen of different nations belonging to different Legations. In Rhode Island I found by a stream several large pot-holes in rocks of which I had read, and explained to my father (gravely as usual) how they were made by eddies of water and gravel-stones. One day my father in Boston took me to see a marvellous white shell from China, valued at one hundred pounds. What was the amazement of all present to hear me give its correct Latin name, and relate a touching tale of a sailor who, finding such a shell when shipwrecked on a desert island, took it home with him, "and was thereby raised (as I told them) from poverty to affluence." Which tale I had read the week before in a children's magazine, and, as usual, reflected deeply on it, resolving to keep my eye on all shells in future, in the hope of something turning up. I was _not_, however, a little prig who bored people with my reading, for I have heard old folk say that there was a quaint _naivete_ and droll seriousness, and total unconsciousness of superior information in my manner, which made these outpourings of mine very amusing. I think I was a kind of little Paul Dombey, unconsciously odd, and perhaps innocently Quaker-like. I could never understand why Aunt Nancy, and many more, seemed to be so much amused at serious and learned examples and questions which I laid down to them. For though they did not "smile outright," I had learned to penetrate the New England ironical glance and satirical intonation. My mother said that, when younger, I, having had a difficulty of some kind with certain street-boys, came into the house with my eyes filled with tears, and said, "I told them that they were evil-minded, but they laughed me to scorn." On another occasion, when some vagabond street-boys asked me to play with them, I gravely declined, on the ground that I must "Shun bad company"--this phrase being the title of a tract which I had read, and the boys corresponding in appearance to a picture of sundry young ragamuffins on its title-page. My portrait had been admirably painted in Philadelphia by Mrs. Darley, the daughter of Sully, who, I believe, put the finishing touches to it. When Mr. Walker saw it, he remarked that it looked exactly as if Charley were just about to tell one of his stories. At the time I was reading for the first time "The Child's Own Book," an admirable large collection of fairy-tales and strange adventures, which kept me in fairy-land many a time while I lay confined to bed for weeks with pleurisies and a great variety of afflictions, for in this respect I suffered far more than most children. AT SCHOOL IN NEW ENGLAND. Mr. Charles W. Greene was a portly, ruddy, elderly Boston gentleman of good family, who had been in early life attached in some diplomatic capacity to a Legation, and had visited Constantinople. I think that he had met with reverses, but having some capital, had been established by his many friends as a schoolmaster. He was really a fine old gentleman, with a library full of old books, and had Madeira in quaint little old bottles, on which, stamped in the glass, one could read GREENE 1735. He had a dear little wife, and both were as kind to the boys as possible. Once, and once only, when I had really been very naughty, did he punish me. He took me solemnly into the library (oh, what blessed beautiful reading I often had there!), and, after a solemn speech, and almost with tears in his eyes, gave me three blows with a folded newspaper! That was enough. If I had been flayed with a rope's end, it would not have had a greater moral effect than it did. Everything was very English and old-fashioned about the place. The house was said in 1835 to be a hundred and fifty years old, having been one of the aristocratic Colonial manors. One building after another had been added to it, and the immense elms which grew about testified to its age. The discipline or training was eminently adapted to make young gentlemen of us all. There was almost no immorality among the boys, and no fighting whatever. The punishments were bad marks, and for every mark a boy was obliged to go to bed an hour earlier than the others. Extreme cases of wickedness were punished by sending boys to bed in the daytime. When two were in a room, and thus confined, they used to relieve the monotony of their imprisonment by fighting with pillows. Those who had bad marks were also confined within certain bounds. Good boys, or those especially favoured, were allowed to chop kindling wood, or do other light work, for which they were paid three cents per hour. The boy who was first down in the morning had an apple given to him. This apple was greatly despised by the bolder spirits, who taunted those who arose promptly with a desire to obtain it. Candour compels me to admit that, as a teacher of learning, Mr. Greene was not pre-eminent. He had two schoolrooms, and employed for each as good a teacher as he could hire. But we were not at all thoroughly well taught, although we were kept longer in the schoolroom than was really good for us; for in summer we had an hour's study before breakfast, then from nine till twelve, and again from two to five. In winter we had, instead of the early lesson, an hour in the evening. Something was wanting in the system, and I believe that after a year and a half I knew no more, as regards studies, than I did when I first entered. When a boy's birthday came, he was allowed to have some special dainty for us all. I was very much disgusted with the Boston boys when they selected pork and beans, which I loathed. Some would choose plum-pudding, others apple-pies. There were always two or three dishes for breakfast, as, for instance, fried potatoes and butter, or cold meat, or pan-dowdy--a kind of coarse and broken up apple-pie--with the tea and bread and coffee, but we could only eat of one. There was rather too much petty infant-schoolery in all this, but we got on very well. Pepper and mustard were forbidden, but I always had a great natural craving for these, and when I asked for them, Mr. Greene would shake his head, but always ended by handing them to me. He was a _bon vivant_ himself, and sympathised with me. There were one or two books also of a rather peppery or spicy nature in his library, such as a collection of rollicking London songs, at which he likewise shook his head when I asked for them--but I got them. There I read for the first time all of Walter Scott's novels, and the Percy Ballads, and some of Marryatt's romances, and Hood's Annual, and Dr. Holmes's first poems. There was in Mr. Greene's library a very curious and now rare work in three volumes, published in Boston at some time in the twenties, called "The Marvellous Depository." It consisted of old legends of Boston, such as the story of "Peter Rugg," "Tom Walker and the Devil," "The Golden Tooth," "Captain Kidd," "The Witch Flymaker," and an admirable collection of unearthly German tales, such as "The Devil's Elixir," by Hoffmann (abridged), "Jacob the Bowl," "Rubezahl," "Der Freyschutz," and many more, but all of the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were appalling enough to any one in those days when the supernatural still thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for steady reading, the book was a perfect Sabbat of deviltry and dramatic horrors. The tales were well told, or translated in very simple but vigorous English, and I pored over the collection and got it by heart, and borrowed it, and took it to Dedham in the holidays, and into the woods, where I read it in sunshine or twilight shade by the rippling river, under wild rocks, and so steeped my soul in the supernatural, that I seemed to live a double life. As was natural, my schoolmates read and liked such tales, but they sunk into my very soul, and took root, and grew up into a great overshadowing forest, while with others they were only as dwarf bushes, if they grew at all. All of this--though I did not know it--was unconsciously educating my bewitched mind to a deep and very precocious passion for mediaeval and black-letter literature and occult philosophy, which was destined to manifest itself within a few years. There was another book which greatly influenced my mind and life. I have forgotten the title, but it was a very remarkable collection of curiosities, such as accounts of a family of seven children who had every one some strange peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted mortals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained in a very mysterious way; for one day I found it in my desk, a blessed gift indeed from some unknown friend who had rightly judged of my tastes. This work I literally lived upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my mother's came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear book under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read some anecdote in it. In after years I found a copy of it in the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia, but I have never seen it elsewhere. {56} I had at Mr. Alcott's carefully studied all the Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most of them when recalled by some association; also Goldsmith's "Animated Nature," the perusal of which latter work was to me as the waving of a forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, too, I had read--in fact I owned--the famous Peter Parley books, which gave me, as they have to thousands of boys, a desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled greatly at finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son Frank, who was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and sunshiny boy, sat by me in school. Frank Goodrich in after life wrote a novel entitled "Flirtation and its Consequences," of which my brother said, "What are its consequences, Frank; good rich husbands? By no means." I can remember being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party at the Goodrichs', and evening visits there with my mother. And I may note by the way, that Frank himself lived abroad in after years; that his father became the American Consul in Paris, and that in 1848 he introduced to the _Gouvernement Provisoire_ the American delegation, of which I was one, and how we were caricatured in the _Charivari_, in which caricature I was specially depicted, the likeness being at once recognised by everybody, and how I knew nothing of it all till I was told about it by the beautiful Miss Goodrich, Frank's younger sister, on a Staten Island steamboat, many, many years after. And as a postscript I may add, that it is literally true that before I was quite twenty-three years of age I had been twice caricatured or pictorially jested on in the Munich _Fliegende Blatter_ and twice in the Paris _Charivari_, which may show that I was to a certain degree about town in those days, as I indeed was. While I am about it, I may as well tell the Munich tale. There was a pretty governess, a great friend of mine, who had charge of two children. Meeting her one day in the park, at a sign from me she pressed the children's hats down over their eyes with "Kinder, setzt eure Hute fester auf!" and in that blessed instant cast up her beautiful lips and was kissed. I don't know whether we were overseen; certain it is that in the next number of the _Fliegende Blatter_ the scene was well depicted, with the words. The other instance was this. One evening I met in a _Bierhalle_ a sergeant of police with whom I fraternised. I remember that he could talk modern Greek, having learned it in Greece. This was very _infra dig._ indeed for a student, and one of my comrades said to me that, as I was a foreigner, I was probably not aware of what a fault I had committed, but that in future I must not be seen talking to a soldier. To which I, with a terrible wink, replied, "Mum's the word; that soldier is _lieutenant of police in my ward_, and I have squared it with him all right, so that if there should be a _Bierkrawall_ (a drunken row) in our quarter he will let me go." This, which appeared as a grand flight of genial genius to a German, speedily went through all the students' _kneipe_, and soon appeared, very well illustrated, in the "_F. B_." We were allowed sixpence a week spending-money at Mr. Greene's, two cents, or a penny, being deducted for a bad mark. Sometimes I actually got a full week's income; once I let it run on up to 25 cents, but this was forbidden, it not being considered advisable that the boys should accumulate fortunes. A great deal of my money went for cheap comic literature, which I carefully preserved. In those days there were Crockett's almanacs (now a great fund of folk-lore), and negro songs and stories were beginning to be popular. It is very commonly asserted that the first regular negro minstrel troupe appeared in 1842. This is quite an error. While I was at Mr. Greene's, in 1835, there came to Dedham a circus with as regularly-appointed a negro minstrel troupe of a dozen as I ever saw. I often beheld the pictures of them on the bill. Nor do I think that this was any novelty even then. The Crockett almanacs greatly stimulated my sense of American humour (they do indeed form collectively a very characteristic work), and this, with some similar reading, awoke in me a passion for wild Western life and frontier experiences, which was fully and strangely gratified in after years, but which would certainly have never happened had it not been for this boyish reading. For I beg the reader to observe that it is a very deeply-seated characteristic that whatever once takes root in my mind invariably grows. This comes from the great degree to which I have always gone over, reviewed, and _reflected on_, or nursed everything which ever once really interested me. And as I have thus far written, and shall probably conclude this work without referring to a note, the reader will have ample opportunity of observing how very strangely in all cases the phases of my life were predetermined long before by the literary education which I gave myself, aided very much by hereditary or other causes quite beyond my control. Now, as the object of a _Life_ is to understand every cause which created it, and as mine was to a very unusual degree created by reading and _reflecting_, even in infancy, I beg the reader not to be impatient with me for describing so much in detail the books which made my mind at different times. That is, I pray this much allowance and sympathy from possible readers and critics, that they will kindly not regard me as vain or thinking over-much of, or too much over, myself. For to get oneself forth as one really is requires deep investigation into _every_ cause, and the depicting all early characteristics, and the man never lived who ever did this truly and accurately without much egoism, or what the ill-disposed may treat as such. And I promise the possible reader that when this subjective analysis shall be fairly disposed of, there will be no lack of mere incident or event of objective nature and more general interest. My first winter at Jamaica Plains was the terrible one of 1835, during which I myself saw the thermometer at 50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and there was a snow-bank in the play-ground from October till May. The greatest care possible was taken of us boys to keep us warm and well, but we still suffered very much from chilblains. Water thrown into the air froze while falling. Still there were some happy lights and few shadows in it all. The boys skated or slid on beautiful Jamaica Pond, which was near the school. There was a general giving of sleds to us all; mine broke to pieces at once. I never had luck with any plaything, never played ball or marbles, and hardly ever had even a top. Nor did I ever have much to do with any games, or even learn in later years to play cards, which was all a great pity. Sports should be as carefully looked to in early education as book-learning. I had also a pair of dear gazelle-skates given to me with the rest, but they also broke up on first trial, and I have never owned any since. Destiny was always against me in such matters. The boys built two large snow-houses, roofed in or arched over with hard snow. One was ingeniously and appropriately like an Eskimo hut, with a rather long winding passage leading into it. Of these I wrote in the spring, when the sun had begun to act, "one is almost annihilated, and of the other not a _vestage_ remains." I found the letter by chance many years later. There lived in Boston some friends of my mother's named Gay. In the family was an old lady over eighty, who was a wonderfully lively spirited person. She still sang, as I thought, very beautifully, to the lute, old songs such as "The merry days of good Queen Bess," and remembered the old Colonial time as if it were of yesterday. One day Mr. Gay came out and took me to his house, where I remained from Saturday until Monday; during which time I found among the books, and very nearly read through, all the poems of Peter Pindar or Doctor Wolcott. Precious reading it was for a boy of eleven, yet I enjoyed it immensely. While there, I found in the earth in the garden an oval, dark-green porphyry pebble, which I, moved by a strange feeling, preserved for many years as an amulet. It is very curious that exactly such pebbles are found as fetishes all over the world, and the famous conjuring stone of the Voodoos, which I possess, is only an ordinary black flint pebble of the same shape. Negroes have travelled a thousand miles to hold it in their hands and make a wish, which, if uttered with _faith_, is always granted. Its possession alone entitles any one to the first rank as master in the mysteries of Voodoo sorcery. Truly I began early in the business! I may here say that since I owned the Voodoo stone it has been held in several very famous and a few very beautiful hands. While I was at Mr. Greene's I wrote my first poem. I certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no one. It was as follows: "As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk, Who ne'er in his life had done any work, Rode along to the bath, he saw Hassan the black, With two monstrous water-skins high on his back. "'Ho, Hassan, thou afreet! thou infidel dog! Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog! This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs, And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs!' "The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground, And opened the skins and the water flew round; The Sultan looked on till he laughed his fill; Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill. "When arrived at the bath, 'Is all ready?' he cries. 'Indeed it is not, sire,' the bath-man replies; 'For to fetch the bath-water black Hassan has gone, And your highness can't have it till he shall return.'" In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, translated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, but there is one touch true to life in it--which is the _cursing_. This must have come to me by revelation; and in after years in Cairo I never heard a native address another as "_Afrit_! _Ya-hinzeer_--_wa Yahud_--_yin uldeen ak_?"--"curse your religion!"--but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even in my infancy, had divined so well how they did it! However, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read Morier's "Haji-Baba" with great admiration, and I doubt not that it was the influence of that remarkable book which produced this beautiful result. In after years I met with a lady who was a daughter of Morier. Apropos of the _book_, it reminds me that I specially recall my _reviewing_ it mentally many times. I have reviewed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, shaded Philadelphia and in rural New England so continually and carefully all the time ever since it passed that I am sure its minutest detail on any day would now be accurately recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall almost certainly write this whole work without referring to a note or journal or other document, it will be seen that I remember the past pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I _can_ make myself intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelible impression made on my mind by _books_, and that of scenery and characters now passed away--the two being connected--it all seems to me now to be as it were vividly depicted, coloured, or _written_ in my mind, like pages in an illuminated or illustrated romance. As some one has said that dreams are novels which we read when asleep, so bygone memories, when continually revived and associated with the subtle and delicate influences of _reading_, really become fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are virtually turned to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a _scene_ to one highly cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to actually master this harmony requires so many years of study and thought that I very rarely meet with perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best illustrations whom I can recall, while certain analytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such genial naturalness. At the end of the first year my brother returned to Philadelphia. I passed the summer at Dr. Stimson's, in Dedham, wandering about in the woods with my bow, fishing in the river, reading always whatever fate or a small circulating library provided--I remember that "The Devil on Two Sticks" and the "Narrative of Captain Boyle" were in it--and carving spoons and serpents from wood, which was a premonition of my later work in this line, and of my "Manual of Wood-Carving." At this time something took place which deeply impressed me. This was the two hundredth anniversary of the building of the town of Dedham, which was celebrated with very great splendour: speeches, tents with pine- boughs, music-booths, ginger-beer, side-shows--in short, all the pomp and circumstance of a country fair allied to historic glory. I had made one or two rather fast and, I fear me, not over-reputable acquaintances of my own age, with whom I enjoyed the festival to the utmost. Then I returned to school, and autumn came, and then winter. At this time I felt fearfully lonely. I yearned for my mother with a longing beyond words, and was altogether home-sick. I was seated one Saturday afternoon, busily working in the drawing-class under a little old Englishman named Dr. Hunt, when there came the startling news that a gentleman had come to take me home! I could hardly believe my senses. I went down, and was presented to a man of about thirty, of extremely pleasant and attractive appearance, who told me that his name was Carlisle, that he was a friend of my father's, and that I was at once to return with him to Philadelphia. I wonder that I did not faint with joy. Mr. Carlisle was a man of very remarkable intelligence, kindness, and refinement. Nearly sixty years have passed since then, and yet the memory of the delightful impression which he made on me is as fresh as ever. My trunk was soon packed; we were whirled away to Boston, and went to a hotel, he treating me altogether like a young gentleman and an equal. It had been the dream and hope and wild desire of my life to go to the Lion Theatre in Boston, where circus was combined with roaring maritime melodramas, of which I had heard heavenly accounts from a few of my schoolmates. And Mr. Carlisle took me there that evening, and I saw "Hyder Ali." Never, never in my life before did I dream that dramatic art, poetry, and _mimesis_ could attain to such ideal splendour. And then a sailor came on the stage and sang "Harry Bluff," and when he came to the last line-- "And he died like a true Yankee sailor at last," amid thundering hurrahs, it seemed to me that romance could go no farther. I do not think that Mr. Carlisle had any knowledge of boys, certainly not of such a boy as I was, but I am sure that he must have been amply repaid for his kindness to me in my delight. And there were acrobatic performances, such as I had never seen in my life, and we returned to the hotel and a grand supper, and I was in heaven. The next morning Mr. Carlisle put into my hand, with great delicacy, such a sum as I had never before possessed, telling me that I "would need it for travelling expenses." All the while he drew me out on literature. On the Long Island Sound steamer he bade me notice a young gentleman (whom I was destined to know in after years), a man with curly hair and very foppish air, accompanied by a page "in an eruption of buttons," and told me that it was N. P. Willis. And so revelling in romance and travel, with mince-pie and turkey for my daily food, my pocket stuffed with money, in the most refined and elegant literary society (at least it was there on deck), I came to Philadelphia. I may here say that the memory of Mr. Carlisle has made me through all my life kinder to boys than I might otherwise have been; and if, as a teacher, I have been popular among them, it was to a great degree due to his influence. For, as will appear in many passages in this book, I have to a strange degree the habit of thinking over marked past experiences, and drawing from them precedents by which to guide my conduct; hence it has often happened that a single incident has shown itself in hundreds of others, as a star is reflected in countless pools. II. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 1837-1845. Return to Philadelphia at twelve years of age--Early discipline--School at Mr. C. Walker's--B. P. Hunt--My first reading of Rabelais--Mr. Robert Stewart--Hurlbut's school--Boyish persecution--Much strange reading--Francois Villon--Early studies in philosophy--Transcendentalism and its influence--Spanish--School of E. C. Wines--The French teacher--Long illness--The intelligent horse--Princeton University professors--Albert Dodd and James Alexander--College life--Theology--Rural scenes--Reading--My first essays--The Freshman rebellion--Smoking--George H. Boker--Jacob Behmen or Bohme--Stonington--Captain Nat Palmer and Commodore Vanderbilt--My graduation. How happy I was again to see my mother and father and Henry! And then came other joys. My father had taken a very nice house in Walnut Street, in the best quarter of the city, below Thirteenth Street, and this was a source of pleasure, as was also a barrel of apples in the cellar, to which I had free access. They had been doled out to us very sparingly at school, and I never shall forget the delight with which I one day in December at Jamaica Plain discovered a frozen apple on a tree! Then there was the charm of being in a great city, and familiar old scenes, and the freedom from bad marks, and being ruled into bounds, and sent to bed at early hours. There is, in certain cases, a degree of moral restraint and discipline which is often carried much too far, especially where boys are brought up with a view to pushing themselves in the world. I was sixteen years of age and six feet high before I was allowed to leave off short jackets, go to a theatre, or travel alone, all of which was more injurious to me, I believe, than ordinary youthful dissipation would have been, especially in America. Yet, while thus repressed, I was being continually referred by all grown-up friends to enterprising youth of my own age, who were making a living in bankers' or conveyancers' offices, &c., and acting "like men." The result really being that I was completely convinced that I was a person of feeble and inferior capacity as regarded all that was worth doing or knowing in life, though Heaven knows my very delicate health and long illnesses might of themselves have excused all my failings. The vast majority of Americans, however kind and generous they may be in other respects, are absolutely without mercy or common-sense as regards the not succeeding in life or making money. Such, at least, was my experience, and bitter it was. Elders often forget that even obedience, civility, and morality in youth are luxuries which must be paid for like all other extravagances at a high price, especially in children of feeble constitution. The dear boy grows up "as good as pie," and, being pious, "does not know one card from another," nor one human being from another. You make of him a fool, and then call him one--I mean, what you regard as a fool. I am not at all sure that one or two cruises in a slaver (there were plenty of them sailing out of New York in those days) would not have done me far more good of a certain kind than all the education I had till I left college in America. I am not here complaining, as most weak men do, as if they were specially victims to a wretched fate and a might-have-been-better. The vast majority of boys have not better homes or education, kinder parents, or advantages greater than mine were. But as I do not recall my boyhood's days or my youth till I left college with that _joyousness_ which I find in other men without exception, and as, in fact, there always seems as if a cloud were over it all, while from below there was a low continual murmur as of a patient soul in pain, I feel that there was something wrong in it all, as there indeed was--the wrong of taking all the starch out of a shirt, and then wondering that it was not stiff. But I must say, at the same time, that this free expansion is not required by the vast majority of boys, who are only far too ready and able to spread themselves into "life" without any aid whatever. What is for one meat may be for another poison, and mine was a very exceptional case, which required very peculiar treatment. My father had sold out his business in 1832 to Mr. Charles S. Boker, and since then been principally engaged in real estate and stock speculation. When I returned, he had bought a large property between Chestnut Market and Third Streets, on which was a hotel called Congress Hall, with which there were connected many historical associations, for most of the noted men who for many years visited Philadelphia had lived in it. With it were stables and other buildings, covering a great deal of ground in the busiest portion of the city, but still not in its condition very profitable. Then, again, he purchased the old Arch Street prison, a vast gloomy pile, like four dead walls, a building nearly 400 feet square. It was empty, and I went over it and into the cells many times. I remember thinking of the misery and degradation of those who had been confined there. The discipline had been bad enough, for the prisoners had been allowed to herd freely together. My father tore it down, and built a block of handsome dwelling-houses on its site. As the _trottoir_ or side- walk was narrow, he, at a considerable loss to himself, made a present to the city of a strip of land which left a wide pavement. I say "at a loss," for had the houses been deeper they would have sold for much more. The City Council graciously accepted the gift, with the special condition that my father should pay all the expenses of the transfer! From which I learned the lesson that in this life a man is quite as liable to suffer from doing good as doing evil, unless he employs just as much foresight or caution in the doing thereof. Some of the most deeply regretted acts of my life, which have caused me most sincere and oft-renewed repentance, were altogether and perfectly acts of generosity and goodness. The simple truth of which is that a _gush_, no matter how sweet and pure the water may be, generally displaces something. Many more buildings did my father buy and sell, but committed withal the very serious error of never buying a house as a permanent home or a country place, which he might have easily done, and even to great profit, which error in the long-run caused us all great inconvenience, and much of that shifting from place to place which is very bad for a growing family. The humblest man in such case in a house of his own has certain great advantages over even a millionaire in lodgings. Mr. S. C. Walker had given over his school to a younger brother named Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house in Eighth Street, where also I had taken my lessons in the rudiments of Transcendentalism from the Orphic Alcott. It was now a fairly good school as things went in those days, with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry--the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief assistant was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of astronomy, a very gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a much higher type than any assistant-teacher whom I had ever before met. Under him I read Voltaire's "Charles the Twelfth." George H. Boker, who was one year older than I, and the son of my father's old partner, went to this school. I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen mouths after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of note in my life, or that I read anything unless it was Shakespeare, and reviews which much influenced me. However, I was very wisely allowed to attend a gymnasium, kept by a man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone, much pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts from _Life in London_, with copious cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy place for me. Unfortunately, I could not afford the shooting, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by it, both morally and physically. At this critical period, or a little later, a few pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and "dissipation" would have changed the whole current of my life, probably much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my poor father the conviction, which he had almost to his death, that I was a sad and mortifying failure or exception which had not paid its investment; for which opinion he was in no wise to blame, it being also that of all his business acquaintances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to the devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common-sensible, usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, selling short, or ruining all their relatives by speculating with their money. However, there was also the--rather forlorn--hope ahead that I would do something in a profession. The school went on, Mr. Walker studying law meantime till he had passed his examination, when it was transferred to Mr. B. P. Hunt. With this man, who became and remained my intimate friend till his death, thirty years after, came the first faint intimation of what was destined to be the most critical, the most singular, and by far the most important period of my life. Mr. Hunt was, as he himself declared to me in after years, not at all fitted to be a schoolmaster. He lacked the minor or petty earnestness of character, and even the training or preparation, necessary for such work. On the other hand, he had read a great deal in a desultory way; he was very fond of all kinds of easy literature; and when he found that any boy understood the subject, he would talk with that boy about whatever he had been reading. Yet there was something real and stimulative in him, for there never was a man in Philadelphia who kept school for so short a time and with so few pupils who had among them so many who in after life became more or less celebrated. For he certainly made all of us who were above idiocy think and live in thought above the ordinary range of school- boy life. Thus I can recall these two out of many incidents:-- Finding me one day at an old book-stand, he explained to me Alduses, and Elzevirs, and bibliography, showing me several specimens, all of which I remembered. I had read Watson's "Annals of Philadelphia." [By the way, I knew the daughter of the author.] There was an allusion in it to Cornelius Agrippa, and Mr. Hunt explained and dilated on this great sorcerer to me till I became half crazy to read the "Occult Philosophy," which I did at a roaring rate two years later. One day I saw Mr. Hunt and Mr. Kendall chuckling together over a book. I divined a secret. Now, I was a very honourable boy, and never pried into secrets, but where a quaint old book was concerned I had no more conscience than a pirate. And seeing Mr. Hunt put the book into his desk, I abode my time till he had gone forth, when I raised the lid, and . . . Merciful angels and benevolent fairies! it was Urquhart's translation of Rabelais! One short spell I read, no more; but it raised a devil which has never since been laid. Ear hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, what I felt as I realised, like a young giant just awakened, that there was in me a stupendous mental strength to grasp and understand that magnificent mixture of ribaldry and learning, fun and wisdom, deviltry and divinity. In a few pages' time I knew what it all meant, and that I was gifted to understand it. I replaced the book; nor did I read it again for years, but from that hour I was never quite the same person. The next day I saw Callot's "Temptation of St. Anthony" for the first time in a shop-window, and felt with joy and pride that I understood it out of Rabelais. Two young gentlemen--lawyers apparently--by my side thought it was crazy and silly. To me it was more like an apocalypse. I am speaking plain truth when I say that that one quarter of an hour's reading of Rabelais--standing up--was to me as the light which flashed upon Saul journeying to Damascus. It seems to me now as if it were the great event of my life. It came to such a pass in after years that I could have identified any line in the Chronicle of Gargantua, and I also was the suggester, father, and founder in London of the Rabelais Club, in which were many of the best minds of the time, but beyond it all and brighter than all was that first revelation. It should be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thoroughly taken it all into my _cor cordium_ by much repetition and reflection. Mr. Hunt in time put me up to a great deal of very valuable or curious _belletristic_ fair-lettered or black-lettered reading, far beyond my years, though not beyond my intelligence and love. We had been accustomed to pass to our back-gate of the school through Blackberry Alley-- "Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street, A rose by any name will smell as sweet"-- which was tenanted principally by social evils. He removed to the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets. Under our schoolroom there was a gambling den. I am not aware that these surroundings had any effect whatever upon the pupils. Among the pupils in Seventh Street was one named Emile Tourtelot. We called him Oatmeal Turtledove. I had another friend who was newly come from Connecticut. His uncle kept a hotel and often gave him Havanna cigars. We often took long walks together out of town and smoked them. He taught me the song-- "On Springfield mountains there did dwell," with much more quaint rural New England lore. About this time my grandfather Leland died. I wept sadly on hearing it. My father, who went to Holliston to attend the funeral, brought me back a fine collection of Indian stone relics and old American silver coins, for he had been in his way an antiquarian. _Bon sang ne peut mentir_. I had also the certificate of some Society or Order of Revolutionary soldiers to which he had belonged. One of his brothers had, as an officer, a membership of the hereditary Order of the Cincinnati. This passed to another branch of the family. For many years the principal regular visitor at our house was Mr. Robert Stewart, a gentleman of good family and excellent education, who had during the wars with Napoleon made an adventurous voyage to France, and subsequently passed most of his life as Consul or diplomatic agent in Cuba. He had brought with him from Cuba a black Ebo-African slave named Juan. As the latter seemed to be discontented in Philadelphia, Mr. Stewart, who was kindness itself, offered to send him back freed to Cuba or Africa, and told him he might buy a modest outfit of clothing, such as suited his condition. The negro went to a first-class tailor and ordered splendid clothes, which were sent back, of course. The vindictive Ebo was so angry at this, that one summer afternoon, while Mr. Stewart slept, the former fell on him with an axe and knife, mangled his head horribly, cut the cords of his hand, &c., and thought he had killed him. But hearing his victim groan, he was returning, when he met another servant, who said, "Juan, where are you going?" He replied, "Me begin to kill Mars' Stewart--now me go back finish him!" He was, of course, promptly arrested. Mr. Stewart recovered, but was always blind of one eye, and his right hand was almost useless. Mr. Stewart had in his diplomatic capacity seen many of the pirates who abounded on the Spanish Main in those days. He was an admirable _raconteur_, abounding in reminiscences. His son William inherited from an uncle a Cuban estate worth millions of dollars, and lived many years in Paris. He was a great patron of (especially Spanish) art. So I passed on to my fourteenth year, which was destined to be the beginning of the most critical period of my life. My illnesses had increased in number and severity, and I had shot up into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave up teaching, and became editor of _Littell's Magazine_. I was sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut--as I believe it was then spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man--the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of them continually bullied and annoyed me. Once I was driven into a formal stand-up fight with one younger by a year, but much stronger. I did my best, but was beaten. I offered to fight him then in Indian fashion with a hug, but this he scornfully declined. After this he never met me without insulting me, for he had a base nature, as his after-life proved. These humiliations had a bad effect upon me, for I was proud and nervous, and, like many such boys, often very foolish. But I had a few very good friends. Among these was Charles Macalester. One day when I had been bullied shamefully by the knot of boys who always treated me badly, he ran after me up Walnut Street, and, almost with tears in his eyes, assured me of his sympathy. There were two other intimates. George Patrullo, of Spanish parentage, and Richard Seldener, son of the Swedish Consul. They read a great deal. One day it chanced that Seldener had in his bosom a very large old-fashioned flint-lock horse-pistol loaded with shot. By him and me stood Patrullo and William Henry Hurlbut, who has since become a very well-known character. Thinking that Seldener's pistol was unloaded, Patrullo, to frighten young Hurlbut, pulled the weapon suddenly from Seldener's breast, put it between Hurlbut's eyes and fired. The latter naturally started to one side, so it happened that he only received one shot in his ear. The charge went into the wall, where it made a mark like a bullet's, which was long visible. George Patrullo was drowned not long after while swimming in the Schuylkill river, and Richard Seldener perished on an Atlantic steamer, which was never heard of. On the other hand, something took place which cast a marvellous light into this darkened life of mine. For one day my father bought and presented to me a share in the Philadelphia Library. This was a collection which even then consisted of more than 60,000 well-chosen volumes. And then began such a life of reading as was, I sincerely believe, unusual in such youth. My first book was "Arthur of Little Britaine," which I finished in a week; then "Newes from New Englande, 1636," and the "Historie of Clodoaldus." Before long I discovered that there were in the Loganian section of the library several hundred volumes of occult philosophy, a collection once formed by an artist named Cox, and of these I really read nearly every one. Cornelius Agrippa and Barret's "Magus," Paracelsus, the black-letter edition of Reginald Scot, Glanville, and Gaffarel, Trithemius, Baptista Porta, and God knows how many Rosicrucian writers became familiar to me. Once when I had only twenty-five cents I gave it for a copy of "Waters of the East" by Eugenius Philalethes, or Thomas Vaughan. All of this led me to the Mystics and Quietists. I read Dr. Boardman's "History of Quakerism," which taught me that Fox grew out of Behmen; and I picked up one day Poiret's French work on the Mystics, which was quite a handbook or guide to the whole literature. But these books were but a small part of what I read; for at one time, taking another turn towards old English, I went completely through Chaucer and Gower, both in black letter, the collections of Ritson, Weber, Ellis, and I know not how many more of mediaeval ballads and romances, and very thoroughly and earnestly indeed Warton's "History of English Poetry." Then I read Sismondi's "Literature of Southern Europe" and Longfellow's "Poets and Poetry of Europe," which set me to work on Raynouard and other collections of Provencal poetry, in the knowledge of which I made some progress, and also St. Pelaye's, Le Grand's, Costello's, and other books on the Trouveurs. I translated into rhyme and sent to a magazine, of which I in after years became editor, one or two _lais_, which were rejected, I think unwisely, for they were by no means bad. Then I had a fancy for Miscellanea, and read the works of D'Israeli the elder and Burton's "Anatomy." One day I made a startling discovery, for I took at a venture from the library the black-letter first edition of the poems of Francois Villon. I was then fifteen years old. Never shall I forget the feeling, which Heine compares to the unexpected finding of a shaft of gold in a gloomy mine, which shot through me as I read for the first time these _ballades_. Now-a-days people are trained to them through second-hand sentiment. Villon has become--Heaven bless the mark!--_fashionable_! and aesthetic. I got at him "straight" out of black-letter reading in boyhood as a find of my own, and it was many, many years ere I ever met with a single soul who had heard of him. I at once translated the "Song of the Ladies of the Olden Time"; and I knew what _bon bec_ meant, which is more than one of Villon's great modern translators has done! Also _heaulmiere_, which is _not_ helmet-maker, as another supposes. I went further in this field than I have room to describe. I even read the rococo-sweet poems of Joachim du Bellay. In this year my father gave me "The Doctor," by Robert Southey, a work which I read and re-read assiduously for many years, and was guided by it to a vast amount of odd reading, Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny being one of the books. This induced me to read all of Southey's poems, which I did, not from the library, but from a bookstore, where I had free run and borrowing privileges, as I well might, since my father lost 4,000 pounds by its owner. While at Mr. Greene's school I had given me Alsopp's "Life and Letters of Coleridge," which I read through many times; then in my thirteenth year, in Philadelphia, I read with great love Charles Lamb's works and most of the works of Coleridge. Mr. Alcott had read Wordsworth into us in illimitable quantities, so that I soon had a fair all-round knowledge of the Lakers, whom I dearly loved. Now there was a certain _soupcon_ of Mysticism or Transcendentalism and Pantheism in Coleridge, and even in Wordsworth, which my love of rocks and rivers and fairy lore easily enabled me to detect by sympathy. But all of this was but a mere preparation for and foreshadowing of a great mental development and very precocious culture which was rapidly approaching. I now speak of what happened to me from 1838 to 1840, principally in the latter year. If I use extravagant, vain words, I beg the reader to pardon me. Perhaps this will never be published, therefore _sit verbo venia_! I had become deeply interested in the new and bold development which was then manifesting itself in the Unitarian Church. Channing, whom I often heard preach, had something in common with the Quietists; Mr. Furness was really a thinker "out of bounds," while in reality as gentle and purely Christian as could be. There was something new in the air, and this Something I, in an antiquated form, had actually preceded. It was really only a _rechauffe_ of the Neo-Platonism which lay at the bottom of Porphyry, Proclus, Psellus, Jamblichus, with all of whom I was fairly well acquainted. Should any one doubt this, I can assure him that I still possess a full copy of the "Poemander" or "Pimander" of Hermes Trismegistus, made by me in my sixteenth year, which most assuredly no mortal could ever have understood or made, or cared to make, if he had not read the Neo-Platonists; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this work as a pendant to them, and published it as such. Which work I declared was not a Christian Platonic forgery, but based on old Egyptian works, as has since been well-nigh proved from recent discoveries. (I think it was Dr. Garnett who, hearing me once declare in the British Museum that I believed Hermes was based on an ancient Egyptian text, sent for a French work in which the same view was advanced.) The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and _odium theologicum_ which prevailed in America until 1840 was worse than that in Europe under the Church in the Middle Ages, for even in the latter there had been an Agobard and an Abelard, Knight-Templar agnostics, and _illuminati_ of different kinds. The Unitarians, who believed firmly in every point of Christianity, and that man was saved by Jesus, and would be damned if he did not put faith in him as the Son of God, were regarded literally and truly by everybody as no better than infidels because they believed that Christ was _sent_ by God, and that Three could not be One. Every sect, with rare exceptions, preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast majority even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he was pointed at in the streets; and if a man had even seen a "Deist," he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. Against all this some few were beginning to revolt. There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work at. I bought Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, first edition, and read it through forty times ere I left college, of which I "kept count." My record here as regards some books may run a little ahead; but either before I went to college or during my first year there (almost all before or by 1840-'41), I had read Carlyle's "Miscellanies" thoroughly, Emerson's "Essays," a translation of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," the first half of it many times; Dugald Stewart's works, something of Reid, Locke, and Hobbes's "Leviathan"; had bought and read French versions of Schelling's "Transcendental Idealism" and Fichte's fascinating "Destiny of Man"; studied a small handbook of German philosophy; the works of Campanella and Vanini (Bruno much later, for his works were then exceeding rare. I now have Weber's edition), and also, with intense relish and great profit, an old English version of Spinoza's _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_. In which last work I had the real key and clue to all German philosophy and Rationalism, as I in time found out. I must here modestly mention that I had, to a degree which I honestly believe seldom occurs, the art of _rapid_ yet of carefully-observant reading. George Boker once, quite unknown to me, gave me something to read, watched my eyes as I went from line to line, timed me by watch, and finally examined me on what I had read. He published the incident long after, said he had repeated it more than once _a mon insu_, and that it was remarkable. Such a dual life as I at this time led it has seldom entered into the head of man to imagine. I was, on the one hand, a school-boy in a jacket, leading a humiliated life among my kind, all because I was sickly and weak; while, on the other hand, utterly alone and without a living soul to whom I could exchange an idea, I was mastering rapidly and boldly that which was _then_ in reality the tremendous problem of the age. I can now see that, as regards its _real_ antique bases, I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowledge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism which sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth of "the downward-borne elements of God," as Hermes called them. I missed even the rapt faith of such a weak writer as Sir Kenelm Digby, much more Zoroaster! Vigourous and clever and bold writers they were--Carlyle was far beyond me in literary _art_--but true Pantheists they were _not_. And they were men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on popular, or political, or "literary" topics; but _philosophers_ they most assuredly were _not_, nor men tremendous in spiritual truth. And yet it was precisely as _philosophers_ and thaumaturgists and revealers of _occulta_ that they posed--especially Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and "immorality," crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism. Though there were traces of grim Scotch humour in Carlyle, my patron saint and master, Rabelais, or aught like him, had no credit with them. They _paddled_ in Pantheism, but as regards it, both lacked the stupendous faith and inspiration of the old adepti, who flung their whole souls into God; and yet they sneered at Materialism and Science. I did not then see _all_ of this so clearly as I now do, but I very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comteism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle-Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mystery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling people from the nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they found out that this marvellous thing was that they had been _awakened_, "only that and nothing more"; and _that_ was the great need of the time, and worth more than any magic or theosophy. But I had expected, in simple ignorant faith, that the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be revealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I discovered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the _archaeus_ formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elving and dreaming on 'mid ruins old. Be it observed that all this time I really did not know what I knew. Boys are greatly influenced by their surroundings, and in those days every one about me never spoke of Transcendentalism or "Germanism," or even "bookishness," without a sneer. I was borne by a mysterious inner impulse which I could not resist into this terrible whirlpool of _belles- lettres_, occulta, facetiae, and philosophy; but I had, God knows, little cause for pride that I read so much, for it was on every hand in some way turned against me. If it had only been reading like that of other human beings, it might have been endured; but I was always seen coming and going with parchment-bound tomes. Once I implored my father, when I was thirteen or fourteen, to let me buy a certain book, which he did. This work, which was as dear to me as a new doll to a girl for a long time, was the _Reductorium_ or moralisation of the whole Bible by Petrus Berchorius, black-letter, folio, Basle, 1511. It was from the library of a great and honest scholar, and, as the catalogue stated, "contained MS. notes on the margin by Melanchthon." Promising, this, for an American youth who was expected to go into business or study a profession! While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant, _half-protege_ in a family near us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know this, and innocently asked him one day if _los Gallegos no son los Irlandeses d'Espana_?--if the Gallicians were not the Irish of Spain--which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day "Don Quixote" demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I said before, I learn languages with _incredible_ difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of _Shelta_ in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel--and she might have added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me from my school persecutors, and _amusement_ in a healthy sense, of which I had almost none whatever. Hurlbut's became at last simply intolerable, and my parents, finding out in some way that I was worse for being there, removed me to a far better school kept by E. C. Wines, who had written books on education, and attained some fame thereby. This was in 1839-'40, and I was there to be prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an old French gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked the other boys what French works they had read. Some had gone through _Telemaque_, or _Paul et Virginie_, _Florian_, _etcetera_. The good-goody nature of such reading awoke in me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I was asked, I replied, "_La Pucelle d'Orleans_ and _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ of Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Poems of Villon, _Charles d'Orleans_, _Clotilde de Surville_, and more or less of Helvetius, D'Holbach, and Condillac." Here the professor, feeling himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as in disgust and horror, and cried, "_Assez_! _assez_! Unhappy boy, you have raked through the library of the devil down to the dregs!" Nor was I "selling" him, for I certainly had read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay. I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness with much pain, which I always bore well, as a matter of course or habit. But rather oddly, while in the midst of my Transcendentalism, and reading every scrap of everything about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and study--I was very far gone then, and used to go home from school and light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study the beloved "Critic of Pure Reason" or Carlyle's Miscellanies, having discovered that smoking was absolutely necessary in such reading--[De Quincey required a quart of laudanum to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics]--there came a strange gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think without pleasure. I had passed one summer vacation on a farm near Philadelphia, where I learned something in wood-ranging about wild herbs and catching land-tortoises and "coon-hunting," and had been allowed to hire and ride a horse. I did not know it, but this horse had thrown over his head everybody who had ever mounted him. He was a perfect devil, but also a perfect gentleman. He soon took my measure, and resolved to treat me kindly as a _protege_. When we both wanted a gallop, he made such time as nobody before had dreamed was in him; when he was lazy, he only had to turn his head and look at me, and I knew what that meant and conformed unto him. He had a queer fancy at times to quietly steal up and put his hoof on my foot so as to hurt me, and then there was an impish laugh in his eye. For he laughed at me, and I knew it. There is really such a thing as a horse- laugh. One day we passed through a drove of sheep, and he did not like it--no horse does. After a while I wanted to go by a certain road, but he refused sternly to take it. I found soon after that if I had done so we must have met the sheep again. He had, in fact, understood the route far better than I. I once got a mile out of him in three minutes--more or less; but he had seen me look at my watch, and knew that I wanted to see what he could do. He never did it again. I _may_ have been mistaken here, but it was my impression at the time. Perhaps if I had gone on much longer in intimacy with him I might have profited mentally by it, and acquired what Americans call "horse-sense," of which I had some need. It is the sixth--or the first--sense of all Yankees and Scotchmen. When I returned to the city I was allowed to hire a horse for a few times from a livery stable, and went out riding with a friend. This friend was a rather precociously dissipated youth, and with him I had actually now and then--very rarely--a glass at a bar and oysters. He soon left me for wilder associates, and I relapsed into my old sober habits. Strange as it may seem, I believe that I was really on the brink of becoming like other boys. But it all faded away. Now it became imperative that I should study in earnest. I used to rise at three or four in the morning. What with hard work and great fear of not passing my matriculation, I contrived to get up so much Latin, Greek, and mathematics, that Mr. Wines thought I might attempt it, and so one fine summer day my father went with me to Princeton. I was in a fearful state of nervous anxiety. COLLEGE LIFE. PRINCETON. We went to Princeton, where I presented my letters of introduction, passed a by no means severe examination for the Freshman's class, was very courteously received by the professors to whom I was commended, and, to my inexpressible delight, found myself a college student. Rooms were secured for me at a Mrs. Burroughs', opposite Nassau Hall; the adjoining apartment was occupied by Mr. Craig Biddle, now a judge. George H. Boker was then at the end of his Sophomore year, the term having but a few days to run. He had rooms in college and lived in unexampled style, having actually a carpet on his floor and superior furniture, also a good collection of books, chiefly standard English poets. He at once took me in hand and gave me a character. Princeton College was entirely in the hands of the strictest of "Old School" Presbyterian theologians. Piety and mathematics rated extravagantly high in the course. The latter study was literally reckoned in the grades as being of more account than all the rest collectively. Thus, as eventually happened to me, a student might excel in Latin, English, and Natural Philosophy--in fact, in almost everything, good conduct included--and yet be the last in the class if he neglected mathematics. There was no teaching of French, because, as was naively said, students might read the irreligious works extant in that language, and of course no other modern language; as for German, one would as soon have proposed to raise the devil there as a class in it. If there had been an optional course, as at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by which German was accepted in lieu of mathematics, I should probably have taken the first honour, instead of the last. And yet, with a little more Latin, I was really qualified, on the day when I matriculated at Princeton, to have passed for a Doctor of Philosophy in Heidelberg, as I subsequently accurately ascertained. There were three or four men of great ability in the Faculty of the University. One of these was Professor Joseph Henry, in those days the first natural philosopher and lecturer on science in America. I had the fortune in time to become quite a special _protege_ of his. Another was Professor James Alexander, who taught Latin, rhetoric, and mental philosophy. He was so clear-headed and liberally learned, that I always felt sure that he must at heart have been far beyond the bounds of Old School theology, but he had an iron Roman-like sternness of glance which quite suited a Covenanter. The most remarkable of all was Albert Dodd, Professor of Mathematics and Lecturer on Architecture. This man was a genius of such a high order, that had it not been for the false position in which he was placed, he would have given to the world great works. The false position was this: he was the chief pulpit orator of the old school, and had made war on the Transcendentalist movement in an able article in the _Princeton Review_ (which, by the way, was useful in guiding me to certain prohibited works, before unknown to me). But as he was a man of poetic genial feeling, he found himself irresistibly fascinated by what he had hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he died actually left behind him a manuscript translation of Spinoza's works! The reader may imagine what a marvellous _find_ I was to him. George Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge of the world--man and woman--said one day that he could imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to hear me talk, which remark I did not at all understand and thought rather stupid. I remember that during my first call on him we discussed _Sartor Resartus_, and I expressed it as my firm conviction that the idea of the Clothes Philosophy had been taken from the Treatise on Fire and Salt by the Rosicrucian Lord Blaise. Then, in all _naivete_ and innocence of effect, I discussed some point in Kant's "Critic," and a few other trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however, being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to my anticipations. However, as they were all far beyond me in mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that direction, for well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte was a mere trifle compared to the awful terrors of the Rule of Three, and so treated them as young men who were my superiors in other and greater things. There were wearisome morning prayers in the chapel, and roll-call every morning, and then an hour of recitation before breakfast, study till ten or eleven, study and recitation in the afternoon, and evening prayers again and study in the evening. The Sabbath was anything but a day of rest, for we had the same prayers; morning attendance at church; afternoon, the learning and reciting of _four chapters_ in the Bible; while we were expected in the evening to master one or two chapters in the Greek Testament. I am not sorry that I used to read books during sermon-time. It kept me from, or from me, a great deal of wickedness. _Videlicet_: The sermons consisted principally of assertion that man himself consisted chiefly of original sin. As evil communications corrupt good manners, I myself, being young and impressionable, began to believe that I too was an awful sinner. Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that it consisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not distinctly remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might be able to cross the Pons Asinorum, but "anyway" my prayer was granted when I graduated. Another stock-piece in the _repertoire_ consisted of attacks on Voltaire, Tom Paine, and other antiquated Deists or infidels. I had read with great contempt a copy of "The Rights of Man" belonging to my genial uncle Amos. I say with great contempt, for I always despised that kind of free thought which consisted chiefly of enmity to Christianity. Now I can see that Voltaire and his followers were quite in the right in warring on terrible and immediate abuses which oppressed mankind; but I had learned from Spinoza to believe that every form of faith was good in its way or according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule Christianity because the tale of Balaam's ass was incredible. Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such preaching against "infidels" seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the track. I remember reading translations from Schleiermacher and buying Strauss's "Life of Jesus" before I went to Princeton--I saw Strauss himself in after years at Weinsberg, in Germany--but at Princeton the slightest approach to explaining the most absurd story in the Old Testament was regarded as out-and-out atheism. It had all happened, we were told, just as it is described. I may as well note here the fact that for many years in my early life such a thing as only reading a book through once rarely happened, when I could obtain it long enough. Even the translations of the Neo-Platonists, with Campanella, Vanini, or the Italian naturalists, were read and reread, while the principal English poets, and such books as I owned, were perused daily. And here in this great infant arithmetic school I was in due time set down to study Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" and Locke on the Understanding--like Carlyle's young lion invited to a feast of chickweed. Apropos of the first, I have a droll reminiscence. There had been in Philadelphia two years before a sale of a fine library, and I had been heart-broken because my means had not permitted me to buy the works of Sir Kenelm Digby. However, I found them in the Princeton College Library. The first thing I came to in Paley was his famous simile of the watch--taken bodily and without acknowledgment from Digby. The theft disgusted me. "These be your Christian champions!" I thought-- "Would any of the stock of infidels Had been my evidence ere such a Christian!" And, moreover, Paley forgets to inform us what conclusion the finder might draw if he had picked up a badly made watch which did not keep good time--like this our turnip of a world at times! As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on Sunday, I was allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the village, which agreed very well with my parents' views. I quite fell into the sentiment of the sect, and so went to Professor Dodd to ask for permission from the Faculty to change my religion. When he asked me how it was that I had renegaded into Trinitarianism, I replied that it was due to reflection on the perfectly obvious and usual road of the Platonic hypostases eked out with Gnosticism. I had found in the College Library, and read with great pleasure almost as soon as I got there, Cudworth's "Intellectual System" (I raided a copy as _loot_ from a house in Tennessee in after years, during the war), and learned from it that "it was a religious instinct of man to begin with a Trinity, in which I was much aided by Schelling, and that there was no trace of a Trinity in the Bible, or rather the contrary, yet that it _ought_ consistently to have been there"--a sentiment which provoked from Professor Dodd a long whistle like that of Uncle Toby with Lilliburlero. "For," as I ingeniously represented, "man or God consists of the Monad from which developed spirit or intellect and soul; for _toto enim in mundo lucet Trias cujus Monas est princeps_, as the creed of the Rosicrucians begins (which is taken from the Zoroastrian oracles)"--here there was another long subdued whistle--"and it is set forth on the face of every Egyptian temple as the ball, the wings of the spirit which rusheth into all worlds, and the serpent, which is the _Logos_." Here the whistle became more sympathetic, for Egypt was the professor's great point in his lectures on architecture. And having thus explained the true grounds of the Trinity to the most learned theologian of the Presbyterian sect, I took my leave, quite unconscious that I had said anything out of the common, for all I meant was to give my reasons for going back to the Episcopal Church. As for Professor Dodd, he had given me up from the very first interview to follow my idols as I pleased, only just throwing in argument enough to keep me well going. He would have been the last man on earth to throw down such a marvellous fairy castle, goblin-built and elfin-tenanted, from whose windows rang AEolian harps, and which was lit by night with undying Rosicrucian lamps, to erect on its ruin a plain brick, Old School Presbyterian slated chapel. I was far more amusing as I was, and so I was let alone. I had passed my examination about the end of June, and I was to remain in Princeton until the autumn, reading under a tutor, in the hope of being able to join the Sophomore class when the college course should begin. There I was utterly alone, and rambled by myself in the woods. I believed myself to be a very good Christian in those days; but I was really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or Old Nature heathen as ever lived in Etrusco-Roman or early German days. A book very dear to my heart at that time was the _Curiositez Inouyes_ of Gaffarel (Trollope was under the impression that he was the only man in Europe who ever read it), in which there is an exquisite theory that the stars of heaven in their courses and the lines of winding rivers and bending corn, the curves of shells and minerals, rocks and trees, yes, of all the shapes of all created things, form the trace and letters of a stupendous _writing_ or characters spread all over the universe, which writing becomes little by little legible to the one who by communion with Nature and earnest faith seeks to penetrate the secret. I had found in the lonely woods a small pond by a high rock, where I often sat in order to attain this blessed illumination, and if I did not get quite so far as I hoped, I did in reality attain to a deep unconscious familiarity with birds and leafy shades, still waters, and high rising trees; in short, with all the sweet solemnity of sylvan nature, which has ever since influenced all my life. I mean this not in the second-hand way in which it is so generally understood, but as a _real_ existence in itself, so earnestly felt that I was but little short of talking with elfin beings or seeing fairies flitting over flowers. Those who explain everything by "imagination" do not in the least understand how _actual_ the life in Nature may become to us. Reflect for a minute, thou whose whole soul is in gossip and petty chronicles of fashion, and "sassiety," that in that life thou _wert_ a million years ago, and in it thou wilt be a million years hence, ever going on in all forms, often enough in rivers, rock, and trees, and yet canst not realise with a sense of awe that there are in these forms, passing to others--ever, ever on--myriads of men and women, or at least their _life_--_how_ we know not, as _what_ we know not--only this, that the Will or creative force of the Creator or Creating is in it all. This was the serious yet unconscious inspiration of my young life in those days, in even more elaborate or artistic form, which all went very well hand in hand with the Euclid and Homer or Demosthenes and Livy with which my tutor Mr. Schenk (pronounce _Skank_) was coaching me. My reading may seem to the reader to have been more limited than it was, because I have not mentioned the historians, essayists, or belletrists whose works are read more or less by "almost everybody." It is hardly worth while to say, what must be of course surmised, that Sterne, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, Swift, and Macaulay--in fine, the leading English classics--were really well read by me, my ambition being not to be ignorant of anything which a literary man should know. Macaulay was then new, and I devoured not only his works, but a vast amount by him suggested. I realised at an early age that there was a certain cycle of knowledge common to all really cultivated minds, and this I was determined to master. I had, however, little indeed of the vanity of erudition, having been deeply convinced and constantly depressed or shamed by the reflection that it was all worse than useless, and injurious to making my way in life. When I heard that Professor Dodd had said that at seventeen there were not ten men in America who had read so much, while Professor Joseph Henry often used words to this effect, and stern James Alexander in his lectures would make deeply learned allusions intended for me alone--as, for instance, to Kant's "AEsthetik"--I was anything but elated or vain in consequence. I had read in _Sartor Resartus_, "If a man reads, shall he not be learned?" and I knew too well that reading was with me an unprofitable, perhaps pitiable, incurable mania-amusement, which might ruin me for life, and which, as it was, was a daily source of apprehension between me and my good true friends, who feared wisely for my future. I absolutely made James Alexander smile for once in his life--'twas sunshine on the grim Tarpeian rock. I had bought me a nice English large type Juvenal, and written on the outside in quaint Elizabethan character form--I forget now the name of the author--the following:-- "Ay, Juvenall, thy jerking hande is good, Not gently laying on, but bringing bloude. Oh, suffer me amonge so manye men To treade aright the traces of thy penne, And light my lamp at thy eternal flame!" We students in the Latin class had left our books on a table, when I saw grim and dour James Alexander pick up my copy, read the inscription, when looking up at me he smiled; it was a kind of poetry which pleased him. I remember, too, how one day, when in Professor Dodd's class of mathematics, I, instead of attending to the lecture, read surreptitiously Cardanus _de Subtilitate_ in an old vellum binding, and carelessly laid it on the table afterwards, where Professor Dodd found it, and directed at me one of his half-laughing Mephistophelian glances. Reading of novels in lectures was not unknown; but for Dodd to find anything so caviare-like as Cardanus among our books was unusual. George Boker remarked once, that while Professor Dodd was a Greek, Professor James Alexander was an old Roman, which was indeed a good summary of the two. I have and always had a bad memory, but I continued to retain what I read by repetition or reviewing and by _collocation_, which is a marvellous aid in retaining images. For, in the first place, I read entirely by GROUPS; and if I, for instance, attacked Blair's "Rhetoric," Longinus and Burke Promptly followed; and if I perused "Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote," I at once, on principle, followed it up with "Spain in 1830," and a careful study of Ford's Guide-Book for Spain, and perhaps a score of similar books, till I had got Spain well into me. And as I have found by years of observation and much research, having written a book on Education partly based on this principle, ten books on any subject read together, profit more than a hundred at intervals. And I may here add, that if this record of what I read be dull, it is still that of my real youthful life, giving the clue to my mind as it was formed. Books in those days were the only events of my life. Long before I went to college I had an attack of Irish antiquities, which I relieved by reading O'Brien, Vallancey, the more sensible Petrie, and O'Somebody's Irish grammar, aided by old Annie Mooney, who always remained by us. In after years I discovered an Ogham inscription and the famed Ogham tongue, or _Shelta_, "the lost language of the bards," according to Kuno Meyer and John Sampson. During my first half-year a college magazine was published, and I, a Freshman, was requested to contribute to the first number. I sent in an article on the history of English poetry. Before I wrote it, the great man among the senior students asked leave to be allowed to write it with me. I did not quite like the idea, but reflecting that the association would give me a certain prestige, I accepted his aid. So it appeared; but it was regarded as mine. Professor Dodd said something to me about the inexpediency of so young a person appearing in print. I could have told him that I had already published several poems, &c., in Philadelphian newspapers, but reflecting that it was not kind to have the better of him, I said nothing. From that time I published something in every number. My second article was an essay on Spinoza, and I still think it was rather good for a boy of sixteen. There was the College and also a Society library, out of which I picked a great deal of good reading. One day I asked Professor John MacLean, the college librarian, for the works of Condorcet. His reply was, "Vile book! vile book! can't have it." However, I found in the Society library Urquhart's translation of "Rabelais," which I read, I daresay, as often as any mortal ever did. And here I have a word to say to the wretched idiots who regard "the book called Rabelais" as "immoral" and unfit for youth. Many times did I try to induce my young friends to read "Rabelais," and some actually mastered the story of the goose as a _torche-cul_, and perhaps two or three chapters more; but as for reading through or enjoying it, "that was not in their minds." All complained, or at least showed, that they "did not understand it." It was to them an aggravating farrago of filth and oddity, under which they suspected some formal allegory or meaning which had perished, or was impenetrable. Learn this, ye prigs of morality, that no work of genius ever yet demoralised a dolt or ignoramus. Even the Old Testament, with all its stores of the "shocking," really does very little harm. It requires _mind for mind_ in reading, and vice becomes unattractive even to the vicious when they cannot understand it. I did understand Rabelais, and the _Moyen de Parvenir_, and the _Cymbalum Mundi_, and Boccaccio (I owned these books), and laughed over them, yet was withal as pure-minded a youth as could well be imagined without being a simpleton. For, with all such reading, I best loved such a book as Bromley's "Sabbath of Rest," or sweet, strange works of ancient Mysticism, which bore the soul away to the stars or into Nature. Such a combination is perfectly possible when there is no stain of dishonesty or vulgarity in the character, and I had escaped such influences easily enough. A droll event took place in the spring. It had been usual once a year--I forgot on what occasion--to give to all the classes a holiday. This year it was abolished, and the Sophomore, junior, and senior classes quietly acquiesced. But we, the Freshmen, albeit we had never been there before, rebelled at such infringement of "our rights," and absented ourselves from recitation. I confess that I was a leader in the movement, because I sincerely believed it to be a sin to "remove old landmarks," and that the students required more rest and holidays than were allowed them; in which I was absolutely in the right, for our whole life, except Saturday afternoons, was "one demnition grind." The feeling which was excited by this "Freshman's rebellion" was one of utter amazement, or awful astonishment tempered with laughter, not unmingled with respect. It was the terrier flying at the lion, when the great mastiff, and bloodhound, and Danish dog had quietly slunk aside. There were in the class beside myself several youths of marked character, and collectively we had already made an impression, to which my intimacy with George Boker, and Professor Dodd, and the very _elite_ of the seniors, added not a little force. We were _mysterious_. Hitherto a Freshman had been the greenest of the green, a creature created for ridicule, a sort of "leathery fox" or mere tyro (_ty_--not a ty-pographical error--_pace_ my kind and courteous reviewer in the _Saturday_)--and here were Freshmen of a new kind rising in dignity above all others. Which reminds me of a merry tale. It was usual for Freshmen to learn to smoke for the first time after coming to college, and for more advanced students to go to their rooms, or find them in others, and smoke them sick or into retreating. I, however, found a source of joy in this, that I could now sit almost from morning till night, and very often on to three in the morning, smoking all the time, being deeply learned in Varinas, Kanaster, and the like; for I smoked nothing but real Holland tobacco, while I could buy it. A party of Sophomores informed George Boker that they intended to smoke me out. "Smoke _him_ out!" quoth George; "why, he'd smoke the whole of you dumb and blind." However, it came to pass that one evening several of them tried it on; and verily they might as well have tried it on to Niklas Henkerwyssel, who, as the legend goes, sold his soul to the devil for the ability to smoke all the time, to whom my father had once compared me. So the cigars and tobacco were burned, and I liked it extremely. Denser grew the smoke, and the windows were closed, to which I cheerfully assented, for I liked to have it thick; and still more smoke and more, and the young gentlemen who had come to smother me grew pale, even as the Porcupines grew pale when they tried to burn out the great Indian sorcerer, who burned _them_! But I, who was beginning to enjoy myself amazingly in such congenial society, only filled Boker's great meerschaum with Latakia, and puffed away. One by one the visitors also "puffed away," _i.e._, vanished through the door into the night. "Shall I open the window?" asked George. "Not on my account," I replied. "I rather enjoy it as it is." "I begin to believe," replied my friend, "that you would like it in Dante's hell of clouds. Do you know what those men came here for? It was _to smoke you out_. And you smoked them out, and never knew it." Which was perfectly true. As for smoking, my only trouble was to be able to buy cigars and tobacco. These were incredibly cheap in those days, and I always dressed very respectably, but my smoking always cost me more than my clothing. When we Freshmen had rebelled, we were punished by being rusticated or sent into the country to board. I went to Professor Dodd to receive my sentence, and in a grave voice, in which was a faint ring as of irony, and with the lurking devil which always played in his great marvellous mysterious black eyes, he said, "If you were any other student, I would not send you to the city, and so reward your rebellion with a holiday. But as I know perfectly well that you will go into the Philadelphia Library, and never stop reading till it is time to return, I will send you there." My parents were then absent with my younger sisters in New England, but I had unlimited credit at Congress Hall Hotel, which was kept by a Mr. John Sturdevant, and where I was greatly respected as the son of the owner of the property. So I went there, and fared well, and, as Professor Dodd prophesied, read all the time. One night I went into an auction of delightful old books. My money had run low; there only remained to me one dollar and a half. Now, of all books on earth, what I most yearned for in those days were the works of Jacob Behmen. And the auctioneer put up a copy containing "The Aurora or Morning Rednesse," English version (_circa_ 1636), and I bid. One dollar--one dollar ten cents--twenty--twenty-five; my heart palpitated, and I half fainted for fear lest I should be outbid, when at the very last I got it with my last penny. The black eyes of Professor Dodd twinkled more elfishly than ever when I exhibited to him my glorious treasure. He evidently thought that my exile had been to me anything but a punishment, and he was right. For a copy of _Anthroposophos Theomagicus_ or the works of Robert Fludd I would have got up another rebellion. It was quite against the college regulations for students to live in the town, but as I never touched a card, was totally abstemious and "moral," and moreover in rather delicate health, I was passed over as an odd exception. Once or twice it was proposed to bring me in, but Professor Dodd interfered and saved me. While in Princeton for more than four years, I never once touched a drop of anything stronger than coffee, which was a great pity! Exercise was not in those days encouraged in any way whatever--in fact, playing billiards and ten-pins was liable to be punished by expulsion; there was no gymnasium, no boating, and all physical games and manly exercises were sternly discouraged as leading to sin. Now, if I had drunk a pint of bitter ale every day, and played cricket or "gymnased," or rowed for two hours, it would have saved me much suffering, and to a great degree have relieved me from reading, romancing, reflecting, and smoking, all of which I carried to great excess, having an inborn impulse to be always doing something. That I did not grapple with life as a real thing, or with prosaic college studies or society, was, I can now see, a _disease_, for which, as my peculiar tastes had come upon me from nervous and Unitarian and Alcottian evil influences, I was not altogether responsible. I was a precocious boy, and I had fully developed extraordinary influences, which, like the seed of Scripture, had in my case fallen on more than fertile ground; it was like the soil of the Margariten Island, by Budapest, which is so permeated by hot springs in a rich soil that everything comes to maturity there in one-third of the time which it does elsewhere. I was the last child on earth who should ever have fallen into Alcott's hands, or listened to Dr. Channing or Furness, or have been interested in anything "ideal"; but fate willed that I should drink the elfin goblet to the dregs. George H. Boker had a great influence on me. We were in a way connected, for my uncle Amos had married his aunt, and my cousin, Benjamin Godfrey, his cousin. He was exactly six feet high, with the form of an Apollo, and a head which was the very counterpart of the bust of Byron. A few years later N. P. Willis described him in the _Home Journal_ as the handsomest man in America. He had been from boyhood as precociously a man of the world as I was the opposite. He was _par eminence_ the poet of our college, and in a quiet, gentlemanly way its "swell." I passed a great deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal. He ridiculed the Lakers, whom I loved; and when Southey's last poem, "On Gooseberry Pie," appeared, he declared that the poor old man was in his dotage, to which I assented with sorrow in my heart. Though only one year older than I, yet, as a _Junior_, and from his superior knowledge of life, I regarded him as being about thirty. He was quite familiar, in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipation of Philadelphia and New York; nor was the small circle of his friends, with whom I habitually associated, much behind him in this respect. Even during this Junior year he was offered the post of secretary to our Ambassador at Vienna. From him and the others I acquired a second-hand knowledge of life, which was sufficient to keep me from being regarded as a duffer or utterly "green," though in all such "life" I was practically as innocent as a young nun. Now, whatever I heard, as well as read, I always turned over and over in my mind, thoroughly digesting it to a most exceptional degree. So that I was somewhat like the young lady of whom I heard in Vienna in after years. She was brought up in the utmost moral and strict seclusion, but she found in her room an aperture through which she could witness all that took place in the neighbouring room of a _maison de passe_; but being a great philosopher, she in time regarded it all as the "butterfly passing show" of a theatre, the mere idle play of foolish mortal passions. Even before I began my Freshman year there came into my life a slight but new and valuable influence. Professor Dodd, when I arrived, had just begun his course of lectures on architecture. To my great astonishment, but not at all to that of George Boker, I was invited to attend the course, Boker remarking dryly that he had no doubt that Dodd thanked God for having at last got an auditor who would appreciate him. Which I certainly did. I in after years listened to the great Thiersch, who trained Heine to art, and of whom I was a special _protege_, and many great teachers, but I never listened to any one like Albert Dodd. It was not with him the mere description of styles and dates; it was a deep and truly aesthetic feeling that every phase of architecture mirrors and reciprocally forms its age, and breathes its life and poetry and religion, which characterised all that he said. It was in nothing like the subjective rhapsodies of Ruskin, which bloomed out eight years later, but rather in the spirit of Vischer and Taine, which J. A. Symonds has so beautifully and clearly set forth in his Essays {98}--that is, the spirit of historical development. Here my German philosophy enabled me to grasp a subtle and delicate spirit of beauty, which passed, I fear, over the heads of the rest of the youthful audience. His ideas of the correspondence of Egyptian architecture to the stupendous massiveness of Pantheism and the appalling grandeur of its ideas, were clear enough to me, who had copied Hermes Trismegistus and read with deepest feeling the Orphic and Chaldean oracles. The ideas had not only been long familiar to me, but formed my very life and the subject of the most passionate study. To hear them clearly expressed with rare beauty, in the deep, strange voice of the professor, was joy beyond belief. And as it would not be in human nature for a lecturer not to note an admiring auditor, it happened often enough that something was often introduced for my special appreciation. For I may here note--and it was a very natural thing--that just as Gypsy musicians always select in the audience some one who seems to be most appreciative, at whom they play (they call it _de o kan_), so Professors Dodd and James Alexander afterwards, in their aesthetic, or more erudite disquisitions, rarely failed to fiddle at me--Dodd looking right in my eyes, and Alexander at the ceiling, ending, however, with a very brief glance, as if for conscience' sake. I feel proud of this, and it affects me more now than it did then, when it produced no effect of vanity, and seemed to me to be perfectly natural. I heard certain mutterings and hoots among the students as I went out of the lecture-room, but did not know what it meant. George Boker informed me afterwards that there had been great indignation expressed that "a green ignorant Freshman" had dared to intrude, as I had done, among his intellectual superiors and betters, but that he had at once explained that I was a great friend of Professor Dodd, and a kind of marvellous _rara avis_, not to be classed with common little Freshmen; so that in future I was allowed to go my way in peace. A man of culture who had known Coleridge well, declared that as a conversationalist on varied topics Professor Albert Dodd was his superior. When in the pulpit, or in the lengthened "addresses" of lecturing, there was a marvellous fascination in his voice--an Italian witch, or red Indian, or a gypsy would have at once recognised in him a sorcerer. Yet his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud, a running stream without babbling stones or rapids; but when it came to a climax cataract he cleared it with grandeur, leaving a stupendous impression. In the ordinary monotony of that deep voice there was soon felt an indescribable charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have heard in more or less different phrase from others. There was always in his eyes (and in this as in other points he resembled Emerson) a strange indefinable suspicion of a smile, though he, like the Sage of Concord, rarely laughed. Owing to these black eyes, and his sallow complexion, his sobriquet among the students was "the royal Bengal tiger." He was not unlike Emerson as a lecturer. I heard the latter deliver his great course of lectures in London in 1848--including the famous one on Napoleon--but he had not to the same perfection the music of the voice, nor the indefinable mysterious charm which characterised the style of Professor Dodd, who played with emotion as if while feeling he was ever superior to it. He was a great actor, who had gone far beyond acting or art. Owing, I suppose, to business losses, my father and family lived for two years either at Congress Hall Hotel or _en pension_. I spent my first vacation at the former place. There lived in the house a Colonel John Du Solle, the editor of a newspaper. He was a good-natured, rather dissipated man, who kept horses and had a fancy for me, and took me out "on drives," and once introduced me in the street to a great actress, Susan Cushman, {101} and very often to theatres and coffee-houses and reporters, and printed several of my lucubrations. Du Solle was in after years secretary to P. T. Barnum, whom I also knew well. He was kind to me, and I owe him this friendly mention. Some people thought him a rather dangerous companion for youth, but I was never taken by him into bad company or places, nor did I ever hear from him a word of which my parents would have disapproved. But I really believe that I could at that time, or any other, have kept company with the devil and not been much harmed: it was not in me. Edgar A. Poe was often in Du Solle's office and at Congress Hall. In the summer we all went to Stonington, Connecticut, where we lived at a hotel called the Wadawanuc House. There I went out sailing--once on a clam-bake excursion in a yacht owned by Captain Nat. Palmer, who had discovered Palmer's Land--and sailed far and wide. That summer I also saw on his own deck the original old Vanderbilt himself, who was then the captain of a Sound steamboat; and I bathed every day in salt-water, and fished from the wharf, and smoked a great deal, and read French books; and after a while we went into Massachusetts and visited the dear old villages and Boston, and so on, till I had to return to Princeton. Soon after my father took another house in Walnut Street, the next door above the one where we had lived. This one was rather better, for though it had less garden, it had larger back-buildings. _Bon an_, _mal an_, the time passed away at Princeton for four years. I was often very ill. In the last year the physician who tested my lungs declared they were unsound in two places; and about this time I was believed to have contracted an incurable stoop in the shoulders. One day I resolved that from _that minute_ I would always hold myself straight upright; and I did so, and in the course of time became as straight as an arrow, and have continued so, I believe, ever since. I discovered vast treasures of strange reading in the library of the Princeton Theological College. There was in one corner in a waste-room at least two cart-loads of old books in a cobwebbed dusty pile. Out of that pile I raked the _thirteenth_ known copy of Blind Harry's famed poem, a black-letter Euphues Lely, an _Erra Pater_ (a very weak-minded friend _actually shamed_ me out of making a copy of this great curiosity, telling me it was silly and childish of me to be so pleased with old trash), and many more marvels, which were so little esteemed in Princeton, that one of the professors, seeing me daft with delight over my finds, told me I was quite welcome to keep them all; but I, who better knew their _great_ value, would not avail myself of the offer, reflecting that a time would come when these treasures would be properly valued. God knows it was a _terrible_ temptation to me, and such as I hope I may never have again--_ne inducas nos in temptationem_! The time for my graduation was at hand. I had profited very much in the last year by the teaching and friendly counsel of Professor Joseph Henry, whose lectures on philosophy I diligently attended; also those on geology, chemistry and botany by Professor Torrey, and by the company of Professor Topping. I stood very high in Latin, and perhaps first in English branches. Yet, because I had fallen utterly short in mathematics, I was rated the lowest but one in the class--or, honestly speaking, the very last, for the one below me was an utterly reckless youth, who could hardly be said to have studied or graduated at all. There were two honours usually awarded for proficiency in study. One was the First Honour, and he who received it delivered the Valedictory Oration; the second was the Poem; and by an excess of kindness and justice for which I can never feel too grateful, and which was really an extraordinary stretch of their power under the circumstances, the Poem was awarded to me! I was overwhelmed at the honour, but bitterly mortified and cut to my heart to think how little I had deserved it; for I had never done a thing save read and study that which pleased me and was _easy_. I wrote the poem (and I still think it was a good one, for I put all my soul into it), and sent it in to the Faculty, with a letter stating that I was deeply grateful for their extreme kindness, but that, feeling I had not deserved it, I must decline the honour. But I sent them my MS. as a proof that I did not do so because I felt myself incapable, and because I wished to give them some evidence that they had not erred in regarding me as a poet. Very foolish and boyish, the reader may say, and yet I never regretted it. The Faculty were not to blame for the system pursued, and they did their utmost in every way for four years to make it easy and happy for one of the laziest and most objectionable students whom they had ever had. I have never been really able to decide whether I was right or wrong. At liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, neither I nor the professors would ever have discovered a flaw in my industry. At the closely cramped, orthodox, hide-bound, mathematical Princeton, every weakness in me seemed to be developed. Thirty years later I read in the _Nassau Monthly_, which I had once edited, that if Boker and I and a few others had become known in literature, we had done so _in spite of_ our education there. I do not know who wrote it; whoever he was, I am much obliged to him for a very comforting word. For, discipline apart, it was literally "in spite of our education" that we learned anything worth knowing at Princeton--as it then was. * * * * * From this point a new phase of life begins. Prominent in it and as its moving power was the great kindness of my father. That I had graduated at all under any conditions was gratifying, and so was the fact that it was not in reality without the so-called Second Honour, despite my low grade. And the pitiable condition of my health was considered. During the last year I had taken lessons in dancing and fencing, which helped me a little, and I looked as if I might become strong with a change of life. So my father took my mother and me on a grand excursion. We went to Stonington, New York, and Saratoga, where I attended a ball--my first--and then on to Niagara. On the way we stopped at Auburn, where there was a great State-prison, which I visited alone. There was among its attractions a noted murderer under sentence of death. There were two or three ladies and gentlemen who were shown by the warder with me over the building. He expressed some apprehension as to showing us the murderer, for he was a very desperate character. We entered a large room, and I saw a really gentlemanly-looking man heavily ironed, who was reading a newspaper. While the others conversed with him, I endeavoured to make unobserved a sketch of his face. The warder noticing this, called me to the front to make it boldly, and the prisoner, smiling, told me to go on with it; which I did, and that not so badly--at least, the sitter approved of it. So we went up the beautiful Hudson, which far surpasses the Rhine, and yields the palm only to the Danube, stopping at Poughkeepsie and Albany, and so on to Niagara Falls. On the way we passed through a burning forest. My awe at this wonderful sight amused some one present to whom it was a familiar thing. Which reminds me that about the time when I first went to college, but while staying at Congress Hall, I there met a youth from Alabama or Mississippi, who was on his way to Princeton to join our ranks. To him I of course showed every attention, and by way of promoting his happiness took him to the top of the belfry of the State House, whence there is a fine view. While there I casually remarked what a number of ships there were in the river, whereupon he eagerly cried, "Oh, show me one! I never saw a ship in all my life!" I gazed at him in utter astonishment, as if I would say, "What manner of man art thou?" and then recalling myself, said, "Well, we are just equal, for you never saw a ship, and I never saw a _cotton-field_." The young man smiled incredulously, and replied, "Now I know that you are trying to humbug me, for how _could_ you grow up without ever seeing cotton-fields?" We arrived at Niagara about noon, and I at once went to see the Falls. There was a very respectable-looking old gentleman, evidently from the far South, with two young ladies, one a great beauty, advancing just before. I heard him say, "Now, keep your eyes closed, or look down till you can have a full view." I did the same, and when he cried "Look up!" did so. It was one of the great instants of my life. I know not how it was, but that first glance suggested to me something _chivalric_. It may have been from Byron's simile of the tail of the white horse and the cataract, and the snow-white steed of that incarnation of nobility, Crescentius, and there rang in my memory a mystical verse-- "My eye bears a glance like the gleam of a lance When I hear the waters dash and dance; And I smile with glee, for I love to see The sight of anything that's free!" But it was a mingled sense of nobility, and above all of _freedom_, which impressed me in that roaring mist of waters, in the wild river leaping as in reckless sport over the vast broad precipice. It is usual, especially for those who have no gift of description, to say that Niagara is "utterly indescribable," and the Visitors' Book has this opinion repeated by the American Philistine on every page. But that is because those who say so have no proper comprehension of facts stated, no poetic faculty, and no imagination. Of course no mere description, however perfect, would give the same conception of even a pen or a button as would the _sight_ thereof; but it is absurd and illogical to speak as if this were _peculiar_ to a great thing alone. For my part, I believe that the mere description to a _poet_, or to one who has dwelt by wood and wold and steeped his soul in Nature, of a tremendous cataract a mile in breadth and two hundred feet high, cleft by a wooded island, and rushing onward below in awful rocky rapids with a mighty roar, would, could, or should convey a very good idea of the great sight. For I found in after years, when I came to see Venice and the temples on the Nile, that they were picturesquely or practically precisely what I had expected to see, not one shade or _nuance_ of an expression more or less. As regards Rome and all Gothic cathedrals, I had been assured so often, or so generally, by all "intelligent tourists," that they were all wretched rubbish, that I was amazed to find them so beautiful. And so much as to anticipations of Niagara, which I have thrice visited, and the constant assertion by cads unutterable that it is "indescribable." While at Niagara for three days, I walked about a great deal with a young lady whose acquaintance we had made at the hotel. As she was, I verily believe, the very first, not a relative, with whom I had ever taken a walk, or, I may almost say, formed an acquaintance, it constituted an event in my life equal to Niagara itself in importance. I was at this time just twenty-one, and certain I am that among twenty-one thousand college graduates of my age in America, of the same condition of life, there was not another so inexperienced in worldly ways, or so far behind his age, or so "docile unto discipline." I was, in fact, morally where most boys in the United States are at twelve or thirteen; which is a very great mistake where there is a fixed determination that the youth shall make his own way in life. We cannot have boys good little angels at home and devils in business abroad.--_Horum utrum magis velim_, _mihi incertum est_. III. UNIVERSITY LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1845-1848. Passage in a sailing ship--Gibraltar--Marseilles--Smugglers and a slaver--Italy--Life in Rome--Torlonia's balls and the last great Carnival of 1846--Navone, the chief of police--Florence--Venice--How I passed the Bridge of Sighs--The Black Bait--Slavery--Crossing the Simplon--Switzerland--Pleasing introduction to Germany--Student life at Heidelberg--Captain Medwin--Justinus Kerner--How I saw Jenny Lind--Munich--Lola Montez--Our house on fire--All over Germany--How I was turned out of Poland--Paris in 1847--The Revolution of 1848--I become conspirator and captain of barricades--Taking of the Tuileries--The police bow me out of Prance--A season in London--Return to America. After our return to Philadelphia something of great importance to me began to be discussed. My cousin Samuel Godfrey, who was a few years older than I, finding himself threatened with consumption, of which all his family died, resolved to go to Marseilles on a voyage, and persuaded my father to let me accompany him. At this time I had, as indeed for many years before, such a desire to visit Europe that I might almost have died of it. So it was at last determined that I should go with "Sam," and after all due preparations and packing, I bade farewell to mother and Henry and the dear little twin sisters, and youngest Emily, our pet, and went with my father to New York, where I was the guest for a few days of my cousin, Mrs. Caroline Wight, whom the reader may recall as the one who used to correct my French exercises in Dedham. We were to sail in a packet or ship for Marseilles. My father saw me off. He was wont to say in after years, that as I stood on the deck at the last moment and looked affectionately at him, there was in my eyes an expression of innocence or goodness and gentleness which he never saw again. Which was, I am sure, very true; the great pity being that that look had not utterly disappeared years before. If it only _had_ vanished with boyhood, as it ought to have done, my father would have been spared much sorrow. At this time I was a trifle over six feet two in height, and had then and for some time after so fair a red and white complexion, that the young ladies in Philadelphia four years later teased me by spreading the report that I used rouge and white paint! I was not as yet "filled out," but held myself straightly, and was fairly proportioned. I wore a cap _a l'etudiant_, very much over my left ear, and had very long, soft, straight, dark-brown hair; my dream and ideal being the German student. I was extremely shy of strangers, but when once acquainted soon became very friendly, and in most cases made a favourable impression. I was "neat and very clean-looking," as a lady described me, for the daily bath or sponge was universal in Philadelphia long ere it was even in England, and many a time when travelling soon after, I went without a meal in order to have my tub, when time did not permit of both. I was very sensitive, and my feelings were far too easily pained; on the other hand, I had no trace of the common New England youth's vulgar failing of nagging, teasing, or vexing others under colour of being "funny" or "cute." A very striking, and, all things considered, a remarkable characteristic was that I _hated_, as I still do, with all my soul, gossip about other people and their affairs; never read even a card not meant for my eyes, and detested curiosity, prying, and inquisitiveness as I did the devil. I owe a great development of this to a curious incident. It must have been about the time when I first went to college, that I met at Cape May a naval officer, who roomed with me in a cottage, a farm-house near a hotel, and whom I greatly admired as a man of the world and a model of good manners. To him one day I communicated some gossip about somebody, when he abruptly cut me short, and when I would go on informed me that he never listened to such talk. This made a very deep impression on me, which never disappeared; nay, it grew with my growth and strengthened with my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bostonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about everybody, and to "tittle- tattle," while the Southerners are comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds of the students at Princeton were of the first families in the South, and there my indifference to what did not personally concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in this sun--that he who never cares a straw to know about the affairs of other people, will, not only if he live in Boston, but almost anywhere else--Old England not at all excepted--be forced, in spite of himself, and though he were as meek and lowly as man may be, into looking down on and feeling himself superior unto those people who _will_ read a letter not meant for their eyes, or eavesdrop, or talk in any way about anybody in a strain to which they would not have that person listen. Which reminds me that in after years I got some praise in the newspapers for the saying that a Yankee's idea of hell was a place where he must mind his own business. It came about in this way. In a letter to Charles Astor Bristed I made this remark, and illustrated it with a picture of Virgil taking a Yankee attired in a chimney-pot hat and long night-gown into the Inferno, over whose gate was written-- "Badate a vostri affari voi che intrate!" (Mind your own business ye who enter here!) One day soon after my arrival at Princeton, George Boker laid on the table by me a paper or picture with its face down. I took no notice of it. After a time he said, "Why don't you look at that picture?" I replied simply, "If you wanted me to see it you would have turned it face up." To which he remarked, "I put it there to see whether you would look at it. I thought you would not." George was a "deep, sagacious file," who studied men like books. My cousin who accompanied me had as a boy "run away and gone to sea" cod- fishing on the Grand Banks. If I had gone with him it would have done me good. Another cousin, Benjamin Stimson, did the same; he is the S. often mentioned in Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." Dana and Stimson were friends, and ran away together. It was quite the rule for all my Yankee cousins to do this, and they all benefited by it. In consequence of his nautical experience Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not having my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon knew everything that was going on. Our captain was a handsome, dissipated, and "loud" young man, with rather more sail than ballast, but good-natured and obliging. "Come day, go day," we passed the Gulf Stream and the Azores, and had long sunny calms, when we could not sail, and lay about on deck, warm and lazy, and saw the Azores, and so on, till we were near the Spanish coast. One evening there clipped right under our lee a fisherman's smack. "I say, Leland, hail that fellow!" said the captain. So I called in Spanish, "Adonde venga usted?" "Da Algesiras," was the reply, which thrilled out of my heart the thought that, like the squire in Chaucer-- "He had been at the siege of Algecir." So I called, in parting, "Dios vaya con usted!" Sam informed me that the manner in which I hailed the fisherman had made a great impression on the captain, who lauded me highly. It also made one on me, because it was the first time I ever spoke to a European _in Europe_! Anon we were boarded by an old weather-beaten seadog of a Spanish pilot, unto whom I felt a great attraction; and greeting him in Malagan Spanish, such as I had learned from Manuel Gori, as _Hermano_! and offering him with ceremonious politeness a good cigar, I also drew his regards; all Spaniards, as I well knew, being extremely fond, beyond all men on earth, of intimacy with gentlemen. We were delayed for two days at Gibraltar. I may here remark, by the way, that this voyage of our ship is described in a book by Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler, entitled "A Year of Consolation Abroad." She was on board, but never spoke to a soul among the passengers. I was never acquainted with Mrs. Butler, as I easily might have been, for we had some very intimate friends in common; but as a boy I had been "frightened of her" by certain anecdotes as to her temper, and perhaps the influence lasted into later years. I have, however, heard her lecture. She was a very clever woman, and Mr. Henry James, in _Temple Bar_ for March, 1893, thus does justice to her conversational power: "Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before any other, documentary. The generations move so fast and change so much, that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, which was much, to ancient manners and a close chapter of history. Her conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her age. Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations, which, moreover, would be invidious; but the old London of her talk--the direction I liked is best to take--was, in particular, a gallery of portraits. She made Count d'Orsay familiar, she made Charles Greville present; I thought it wonderful that she could be anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicalities. She was superbly willing to amuse, and on any terms; and her temper could do it as well as her wit. If either of these had failed, her eccentricities were always there. She had more 'habits' than most people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her disposition they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait- waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which made those who loved her love her so much. 'If my servants can live with me a week, they can live with me for ever,' she often said; 'but the first week sometimes kills them.' A domestic who had been long in her service quitted his foreign home the instant he heard of her death, and, travelling for thirty hours, arrived travel-stained and breathless, like a messenger in a romantic tale, just in time to drop a handful of flowers into her grave." There came on board of our boat a fruit-dealer, and the old pilot, seeing that I was about to invest a _real_ in grapes, said, "Let me buy them for you"; which he did, obtaining half-a-peck of exquisite large grapes of a beautiful purple colour. There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into the hold, &c. (the sailors disliked her so much that they refused to touch them), and then cut me dead when on shore. This ancient horror, seeing me with so many grapes, and learning the price, concluded that if a mere boy like me could get so many, she, a lady, could for four reals lay in a stock which would last for life, more or less. So she obtained a bushel-basket, expecting to get it heaped full; but what was her wrath at only getting for her silver half-dollar just enough to hide the bottom thereof! Great was her rage, but rage availed her nought. She did not call old pilots "Brother," or give them cigars, or talk Malagano politely. She was not even "half-Spanish," and therefore, as we used to say at college of certain unpopular people, was "a bad smoke." We went on shore on Sunday, which in those days always made Gibraltar literally like a fancy ball. The first person whom I met was a pretty young lady in full, antique, rich Castilian costume, followed by a servant bearing her book of devotion. Seeing my gaze of admiration, she smiled, at which I bowed, and she returned the salute and went her way. Such an event had never happened to me before in all my life. I accepted it philosophically as one of a new order of things into which I was destined to enter. Then I saw men from every part of Spain in quaint dresses, Castilians in cloaks, Andalusians in the jaunty _majo_ rig, Gallegos, Moors from the Barbary coast, many Greeks, old Jews in gabardines, Scotch Highland soldiers, and endless more--_concursus splendidus_--_non possum non mirari_. I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all this. I strolled about the streets talking Spanish to everybody. Then I met with a smuggler, who asked me if I wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my uncle George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Havanas, and these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had smoked the last twenty- five on the last day. So I went and bought at a low enough figure a box of the worst cigars I had ever met with. But youth can smoke anything--except deceit. Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those days, but an incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorruptible dollar or two, showed us over them. There was, too, a remarkable man, a ship-chandler named Felipe, to whom I was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four languages. He boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, who was a perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he had had a new _maja_, or _moza_, or _muger_, or _puta_, every night for twenty years! which was confirmed by common report. It was a firm principle with him to always _change_. This extraordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a _psychological_ phenomenon. This far surpassed anything I had ever heard at Princeton. Then this and that great English dignitary was pointed out to me--black eyes ogled me--everybody was polite, for I had a touch of the Spanish manner which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and others whom I had known in Philadelphia; and, in short, I saw more that was picturesque and congenial in that one day than I had ever beheld in all my life before. I had got into "my plate." From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Marseilles. The coasts were full of old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off Malaga for a day, but I could not go ashore, much as I longed to. At Marseilles, Sam and the captain and I went to a very good hotel. Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain French lady--the captain said she was a Baroness--having fallen in love with the said captain, had secreted herself on board the vessel, greatly to his horror, and reappeared when out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at Marseilles, the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot the captain, which made a great _scandal_. And, moved by this example, the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, shot the head-waiter on the same day, being also instigated by jealousy. Sam Godfrey chaffed the captain for setting a bad moral example to the niggers--which was all quite a change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively. There had come over on the vessel with us, in the cabin, a droll character, an actor in a Philadelphia theatre, who had promptly found a lodging in a kind of maritime boarding-house. Getting into some difficulty, as he could not speak French he came in a great hurry to beg me to go with him to his _pension_ to act as interpreter, which I did. I found at once that it was a Spanish house, and the resort of smugglers. The landlady was a very pretty black-eyed woman, who played the guitar, and sang Spanish songs, and brought out Spanish wine, and was marvellously polite to me, to my astonishment, not unmingled with innocent gratitude. There I was at home. At Princeton I had learned to play the guitar, and from Manuel Gori, who had during all his boyhood been familiar with low life and smugglers, I had learned many songs and some slang. And so, with a crowd of dark, fierce, astonished faces round me of men eagerly listening, I sang a smuggler's song-- "Yo que soy contrabandista, Y campo a me rispeto, A todos mi desafio, Quien me compra hilo negro? Ay jaleo! Muchachas jaleo! Quien me compra hilo negro!" Great was the amazement and thundering the applause from my auditors. Let the reader imagine a nun of fourteen years asked to sing, and bursting out with "Go it while you're young!" Then I sang the _Tragala_, which coincided with the political views of my friends. But my grand _coup_ was in reserve. I had learned from Borrow's "Gypsies in Spain" a long string of Gitano or Gypsy verses, such as-- "El eray guillabela, El eray obusno; Que avella romanella, No avella obusno!" "Loud sang the _gorgio_ to his fair, And thus his ditty ran:-- 'Oh, may the Gypsy maiden come, And not the Gypsy man!'" And yet again-- "Coruncho Lopez, gallant lad, A smuggling he would ride; So stole his father's ambling prad, And therefore to the galleys sad Coruncho now I guide." This was a final _coup_. How the _diabolo_ I, such an innocent stranger youth, had ever learned Spanish _Gypsy_--the least knowledge of which in Spain implies unfathomable iniquity and fastness--was beyond all comprehension. So I departed full of honour amid thunders of applause. From the first day our room was the resort of all the American ship-captains in Marseilles. We kept a kind of social hall or exchange, with wine and cigars on the side-table, all of which dropping in and out rather reminded me of Princeton. My friend the actor had pitched upon a young English Jew, who seemed to me to be a doubtful character. He sang very well, and was full of local news and gossip. He, too, was at home among us. One evening our captain told us how he every day smuggled ashore fifty cigars in his hat. At hearing this, I saw a gleam in the eyes of the young man, which was a revelation to me. When he had gone, I said to the captain, "You had better not smuggle any cigars to-morrow. That fellow is a spy of the police." The next day Captain Jack on leaving his ship was accosted by the _douaniers_, who politely requested him to take off his hat. He refused, and was then told that he must go before the _prefet_. There the request was renewed. He complied; but "forewarned, forearmed"--there was nothing in it. Captain Jack complimented me on my sagacity, and scolded the actor for making such friends. But he had unconsciously made me familiar with one compared to whom the spy was a trifle. I have already fully and very truthfully described this remarkable man in an article in _Temple Bar_, but his proper place is here. He was a little modest-looking Englishman, who seemed to me rather to look up to the fast young American captains as types or models of more daring beings. Sometimes he would tell a mildly- naughty tale as if it were a wild thing. He consulted with me as to going to Paris and hearing lectures at the University, his education having been neglected. He had, I was told, experienced a sad loss, having just lost his ship on the Guinea coast. One day I condoled with him, saying that I heard he had been ruined. "Yes," replied the captain, "I have. Something like this: My mother once had a very pretty housemaid who disappeared. Some time after I met her magnificently dressed, and I said, 'Sally, where do you live now?' She replied, 'Please, sir, I don't live anywhere now; I've been _ruined_.'" Sam explained to me that the captain had a keg of gold-dust and many diamonds, and having wrecked his vessel intentionally, was going to London to get a heavy insurance. He had been "ruined" to his very great advantage. Then Sam remarked-- "You don't know the captain. I tell you, Charley, that man is an old slaver or pirate. See how I'll draw him out." 'The next day Sam began to talk. He remarked that he had been to sea and had some money which he wished to invest. His health required a warm climate, such as the African coast. We would both, in fact, like to go into the Guinea business. [_Bozales_--"sacks of charcoal," I remarked in Spanish slaver-slang.] The captain smiled. He had apparently heard the expression before. He considered it. He had a great liking for me, and thought that a trip or two under the black flag would do me a great deal of good. So he noted down our address, and promised that as soon as he should get a ship we should hear from him. After that the captain, regarding me as enlisted in the fraternity, and only waiting till 'twas "time for us to go," had no secrets from me. He was very glad that I knew Spanish and French, and explained that if I would learn Coromantee or Ebo, it would aid us immensely in getting cargoes. By the way, I became very well acquainted in after years with King George of Bonney, and can remember entertaining him with a story how a friend of mine once (in Cuba) bought thirty Ebos, and on entering the barracoon the next morning, found them all hanging by the necks dead, like a row of possums in the Philadelphia market--they having, with magnificent pluck, and in glorious defiance of Buckra civilisation, resolved to go back to Africa. I have found other blacks who believed that all good darkies when they die go to Guinea, and one of these was very touching and strange. He had been brought as a slave-child to South Carolina, but was always haunted by the memory of a group of cocoa-palms by a place where the wild white surf of the ocean bounded up to the shore--a rock, sunshine, and sand. There he declared his soul would go. He was a Voodoo, and a man of marvellous strange mind. Day by day my commander gave me, as I honestly believe, without a shadow of exaggeration, all the terrific details of a slaver's life, and his strange experiences in buying slaves in the interior. Compared to the awful massacres and cruelties inflicted by the blacks on one another, the white slave trade seemed to be philanthropic and humane. He had seen at the grand custom in Dahomey 2,500 men killed, and a pool made of their blood into which the king's wives threw themselves naked and wallowed. "One day fifteen were to be tortured to death for witchcraft. I bought them all for an old dress-coat," said the captain. "I didn't want them, for my cargo was made up; it was only to save the poor devils' lives." If a slaver could not get a full cargo, and met with a weaker vessel which was full, it was at once attacked and plundered. Sometimes there would be desperate resistance, with the aid of the slaves. "I have seen the scuppers run with blood," said the captain. And so on, with much more of the same sort, all of which has since been recorded in the "Journal of Captain Canot," from which latter book I really learned nothing new. I might add the "Life of Hobart Pacha," whom I met many times in London. A real old-fashioned slaver was fully a hundred times worse than an average pirate, because he _was_ the latter whenever he wished to rob, and in his business was the cause of far more suffering and death. The captain was very fond of reading poetry, his favourite being Wordsworth. This formed quite a tie between us. He was always rather mild, quiet, and old-fashioned--in fact, muffish. Once only did I see a spark from him which showed what was latent. Captain Jack was describing a most extraordinary run which we had made before a gale from Gibraltar to Cape de Creux, which was, indeed, true enough, he having a very fast vessel. But the _Guinea_ captain denied that such time had ever been made by any craft ever built. "And I have had to sail sometimes pretty fast in my time," he added with one sharp glance--no more--but, as Byron says of the look of Gulleyaz, 'twas like a short glimpse of hell. Pretty fast! I should think so--now and then from an English cruiser, all sails wetted down, with the gallows in the background. But as I had been on board with Sam, the question was settled. We _had_ made a run which was beyond all precedent. I fancy that the captain, if he escaped the halter or the wave, in after years settled down in some English coast-village, where he read Wordsworth, and attended church regularly, and was probably regarded as a gentle old duffer by the younger members of society. But take him for all in all, he was the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, and he always behaved to me like a perfect gentleman, and never uttered an improper word. We had to wait one month till my cousin could get certain news from America. We employed the time in travelling in the south, visiting Arles, Nismes, Montpellier, and other places. An English gentleman named Gordon, whom I had met in Marseilles, had given me a letter of introduction to M. Saint Rene Taillandier in the latter place. I knew nothing at all then about this great man, or that he was the first French critic of German literature, but I presented my letter, and he kindly went with me about the town to show me its antiquities. I can remember discussing Gothic tracery with him; also, that I told him I was deeply interested in the Troubadours. He recommended Raynouard and several other books, when finding that I was familiar with them all, he smiled, and said that he believed he could teach me nothing more. I did not know it then, but that word from him would have been as good as a diploma for me in Paris. As for old Roman ruins and Gothic churches, and cloisters grey, and the arrowy Rhone, and castellated bridges--everything was in a more original moss-grown, picturesque condition then than it now is--I enjoyed them all with an intensity, a freshness or love, which passeth all belief. I had attended Professor Dodd's lectures more than once, and illuminated manuscripts, and had bought me in Marseilles Berty's "Dictionary of Gothic Architecture," and got it by heart, and began to think of making a profession of it, which, if I had known it, was the very wisest thing I could have done. And that this is no idle boast is clear from this, that I in after years made a design according to which a "store," which cost 30,000 pounds, was built, my plan being believed by another skilled architect to have been executed by a "professional." This was really the sad slip and escape of my lifetime. In those days, really _good_ red wine was given to every one at every table; savoury old-fashioned dishes, vegetables, and fruits were served far more freely and cheaply than they now are, when every dainty is sent by rail to Paris or London, and the drinking of Bordeaux and Burgundy did me much good. Blessed days of cheapness and good quality, before chicory, the accursed poison, had found its way into coffee, or oleomargarine was invented, or all things canned--the world will never see ye more! I have now lived for many months in a first-class Florence hotel, and in all the time have not tasted one fresh Italian mushroom, or truffle, or olive--nothing but tasteless abominations bottled in France! It was settled that my cousin should return from Marseilles to the United States, while I was to go on alone to Italy. It was misgivingly predicted at home by divers friends that I would be as a lamb set loose among wolves, and lose all my money at the outstart. Could they have learned that within a week after my arrival I had been regarded by Spanish smugglers as a brother, and tripped up a spy of the police, and been promised a situation as a slaver's and pirate's assistant, they might have thought that I had begun to learn how to take care of myself in a hurry. As for losing my money, I, by a terrible accident, _doubled it_, as I will here describe. Before leaving home, a lady cousin had made for Samuel and me each a purse, and they were exactly alike. Now by a purse I mean a real _purse_, and not a pocket-book, or a porte-monnaie, or a wallet--that is, I mean a long bag with a slit and two rings, and nothing else. And my cousin having often scolded me for leaving mine lying about in our room, I seeing it, as I thought, just a few minutes before my departure, lying on the table, pocketed it, thanking God that Sam had not found it, or scolded me. I went on board the steamboat and set sail towards Italy. I was sea-sick all night, but felt better the next day. Then I had to pay out some money, and thought I would look over my gold. To my utter amazement, it was _doubled_! This I attributed to great generosity on Sam's part, and I blessed him. But, merciful heavens! what were my sensations at finding in the lower depth of my pocket _another purse_ also filled with Napoleons in rouleaux! Then it all flashed upon me. Samuel, the careful, had left _his_ purse lying on the table, and I had supposed it was mine! I felt as wretched as if I had lost instead of won. When I got to Naples I found a letter from my cousin bewailing his loss. He implored me, if I knew nothing about it, not to tell it to a human soul. There was a M. Duclaux in Marseilles, with whom we had had our business dealings, and from him Sam had borrowed what he needed. I at once requested Captain Olive, of the steamer, to convey the purse and its contents to M. Duclaux, which I suppose was done _secundem ordinem_. Poor Sam! I never met him again. He died of consumption soon after returning home. He was one of whom I can say with truth that I never saw in him a fault, however trifling. He was honour itself in everything, as humane as was his grandfather before him, ever cheerful and kind, merry and quaint. The programme of the steamboat declared that meals were included in the fare, "except while stopping at a port." But we stopped every day at Genoa or Leghorn, or somewhere, and stayed about fifteen hours, and as almost every passenger fell sea-sick after going ashore, the meals were not many. On board the first day, I made the acquaintance of Mr. James Temple Bowdoin, of Boston, and Mr. Mosely, of whom I had often heard as editor of the _Richmond Whig_. Mr. Bowdoin was a nephew of Lady Temple, and otherwise widely connected with English families. He is now living (1892), and I have seen a great deal of him of late years. With these two I joined company, and travelled with them over Italy. Both were much older than I, and experienced men of the world; therefore I was in good hands, and better guides, philosophers, mentors, pilots, and friends I could hardly have found. Left to myself, I should probably ere the winter was over have been the beloved chief of a gang of gypsies, or brigands, or witches, or careering the wild sea-wave as a daring smuggler, all in innocence and goodness of heart; for truly in Marseilles I had begun to put forth buds of such strange kind and promise as no friend of mine ever dreamed of. As it was, I got into better, if less picturesque, society. We came to Naples, and went to a hotel, and visited everything. In those days the beggars and pimps and pickpockets were beyond all modern conception. The picturesqueness of the place and people were only equalled by the stinks. It was like a modern realistic novel. We went a great deal to the opera, also to the Blue Grotto of Capri, and ascended Mount Vesuvius, and sought Baiae, and made, in fact, all the excursions. As there were three, and sometimes half-a-dozen of our friends on these trips, we had, naturally, with us quite a _cortege_. Among these was an ill-favoured rascal called "John," who always received a dollar a day. One evening some one raised the question as to what the devil it was that John did. He did not carry anything, or work to any account, or guide, or inform, yet he was always there, and always in the way. So John, being called up, was asked what he did. Great was his indignation, for by this time he had got to consider himself indispensable. He declared that he "directed, and made himself generally useful." We informed him that we would do our own directing, and regarded him as generally useless. So John was discarded. Since then I have found that "John" is a very frequent ingredient in all societies and Government offices. There are Johns in Parliament, in the army, and in the Church. His children are pensioned into the third and fourth and fortieth generation. In fact, I am not sure that John is not the great social question of the age. There was in Philadelphia an Academy of Fine Arts, or Gallery, of which my father had generously presented me with two shares, which gave me free entrance. There were in it many really excellent pictures, even a first- class Murillo, besides Wests and Allstons. Unto this I had, as was my wont, read up closely, and reflected much on what I read, so that I was to a certain degree prepared for the marvels of art which burst on me in Naples. And if I was, and always have been, _rather_ insensible to the merits of Renaissance sculpture and architecture, I was not so to its painting, and not at all blind to the unsurpassed glories of its classic prototypes. Professor Dodd had indeed impressed it deeply and specially on my mind that the revival of a really pure Greek taste in England, or from the work of Stewart and Revett, was contemporary with that for Gothic architecture, and that the appreciation of one, if _true_, implies that of the other. As I was now fully inspired with my new resolution to become an architect, I read all that I could get on the subject, and naturally examined all remains of the past far more closely and critically than I should otherwise have done. And this again inspired in me (who always had a mania for bric-a-brac and antiquity, which is certainly hereditary) a great interest in the characteristic _decoration_ of different ages, which thing is the soul and life of all aesthetic archaeology and the minor arts; which latter again I truly claim to have brought, I may say, into scientific form and made a branch of education in after years. I think that we were a month in Naples. I kept a journal then, and indeed everywhere for three years after. The reader may be thankful that I have it not, for I foresee that I shall easily recall enough to fill ten folios of a thousand pages solid brevier each, at this rate of reminiscences. As my predilection for everything German and Gothic came out more strongly every day, Mr. Mosely called me familiarly Germanicus, a name which was indeed not ill-bestowed at that period. From Naples we went to Rome by _vettura_, or in carriages. We were two days and two nights on the route. I remember that when we entered Rome, I saw the _douanier_ who examined my trunk remove from it, as he thought unperceived, a hair-brush, book, &c., and slyly hide them behind another trunk. I calmly walked round, retook and replaced them in my trunk, to the discomfiture, but not in the least to the shame, of the thief, who only grinned. And here I may say, once for all, that one can hardly fail to have a mean opinion of human common-sense in government, when we see this system of examining luggage still maintained. For all that any country could _possibly_ lose by smuggling in trunks, &c., would be a hundred-fold recompensed by the increased amount of travel and money imported, should it be done away with, as has been perfectly and fully proved in France; the announcement a year ago that examination would be null or formal having had at once the effect of greatly increasing travel. And as there is not a custom-house in all Europe where a man who knows the trick cannot pull through his luggage by bribery--the exceptions being miraculously rare--the absurdity and folly of the system is apparent. We went to the Hotel d'Allemagne, where I fell ill, either because I had a touch of Neapolitan malaria in me (in those days the stench of the city was perceptible three miles out at sea, and might have risen unto heaven above and been smelt by the angels, had they and their home been as near to earth as was believed by the schoolmen), or because the journey had been too much for me. However, an English physician set me up all right in two or three days (he wanted to sell us pictures which would have cured any one--of a love of art), and then there began indeed a glorious scampering and investigating, rooting and rummaging-- "'Mid deathless lairs in solemn Rome." Galleries and gardens, ruins and palaces, Colosseum and temples, churches and museums--ye have had many a better informed and many a more inspired or gifted visitor than I, but whether from your first Sabine days you ever had a happier one, or one who enjoyed you more with the simple enjoyment of youth and hope gratified, I doubt. Sometimes among moss- grown arches on a sunny day, as the verd-antique lizards darted over the stones from dark to light, while far in the distance tinkled bells, either from cows or convents, and all was calm and sweet, I have often wondered if it could indeed be real and not a dream. Life often seemed to me then to be too good to be true. And there was this at least good in my Transcendentalism and Poly-Pantheism, that it quite unconsciously or silently gave me many such hours; for it had sunk so deeply into my soul, and was so much a real part thereof, that it inspired me when I never thought of it, in which I differed by a heaven's width from the professional Yankee Transcendentalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, AEsthetes, and other spiritualists or sorcerers, who always kept their blessed belief, as a holy fugleman, full in sight, to give them sacred straight tips, or as a Star-spangled Bannerman who waved exceedingly, while my spirit was a shy fairy, who dwelt far down in the depths of the all too green sea of my soul, where it seemed to me she had ever been, or ever a storm had raised a wave on the surface. Antiquely verdant green I was, no doubt. And even to this day the best hours of my life are when I hear her sweet voice 'mid ivy greens or ruins grey, in wise books, hoar traditions. Be it where it will, it is _that_, and not the world of men or books, which gives the charm. It was usual for all who drew from Torlonia's bank not less than 20 pounds to be invited to his soirees. To ensure the expenses, the footman who brought the invitation called the day after for not less than _five francs_. But the entertainment was well worth the money, and more. There was a good supper--Thackeray has represented a character in "Vanity Fair" as devouring it--and much amusement. Now I had written my name _Chas._, which being mistaken for _Chev._, I in due time, received an invitation addressed to M. le Chevalier Godfrey de Leland. And it befell that I once found a lost decoration of the Order of the Golden Spur, which in those days _was_ actually sold to anybody who asked for it for ten pounds, and was worth "nothing to nobody." This caused much fun among my friends, and from that day I was known as the Chevalier Germanicus, or the Knight of the Golden Spur, to which I assented with very good grace as a joke. There were even a few who really believed that I had been decorated, though I never wore it, and one day I received quite a severe remonstrance from a very patriotic fellow-countryman against the impropriety of my thus risking my loss of citizenship. Which caused me to reflect how many there are in life who rise to such "honours," Heaven only knows how, in a back-stairs way. I know in London a very great man of science, _nemini secundus_, who has never been knighted, although the tradesman who makes for him his implements and instruments has received the title and the _accolade_. _Fie_ at justitia! I saw at one of the Torlonia entertainments a marvellously beautiful and strange thing, of which I had read an account in Mme. de Stael's _Corinne_. There was a stage, on which appeared a young girl, plainly dressed, and bearing a simple small scarf. She did not speak or dance, or even assume "artistic positions"; what she did was far more striking and wonderful. She merely sat or stood or reclined in many ways, every one of which seemed to be _perfectly_ natural or habitual, and all of which were incredibly graceful. I have forgotten how such women were called in Italy. I am sure that this one had never been trained to it, for the absolute ease and naturalness with which she sat or stood could never have been taught. If it could, every woman in the world would learn it. Ristori was one of these instinctive _Graces_, and it constituted nearly all the art there was in her. This was in 1846. The Carnival of that year in Rome was the last real one which Italy ever beheld. It was the very last, for which every soul saved up all his money for months, in order to make a wild display, and dance and revel and indulge in "Eating, drinking, masking, And other things which could be had for asking." Then all Rome ran mad, and rode in carriages full of flowers, or carts, or wheelbarrows, or triumphal chariots, or on camels, horses, asses, or rails--_n'importe quoi_--and merrily cast _confetti_ of flour or lime at one another laughing, while grave English tourists on balconies laboriously poured the same by the peck from tin scoops on the heads of the multitude, under the delusion that they too were enjoying themselves and "doing" the Carnival properly. It was the one great rule among Italians that no man should in the Carnival, under any provocation whatever, lose his temper. And here John Bull often tripped up. On the last night of the last Carnival--that great night--there was the _Senza Moccolo_ or extinguishment of lights, in which everybody bore a burning taper, and tried to blow or knock out the light of his neighbour. Now, being tall, I held my taper high with one hand, well out of danger, while with a broad felt hat in the other I extinguished the children of light like a priest. I threw myself into all the roaring fun like a wild boy, as I was, and was never so jolly. Observing a pretty young English lady in an open carriage, I thrice extinguished her light, at which she laughed, but at which her brother or beau did not, for he got into a great rage, even the first time, and bade me begone. Whereupon I promptly renewed the attack, and then repeated it, "according to the rules of the game," whereat he began to curse and swear, when I, in the Italian fashion of rebuke (to the delight of sundry Italians), pointed my finger at him and hissed; which constituted the winning _point d'honneur_ in the game. There, too, was the race of wild horses, right down through the Corso or Condotti, well worth seeing, and very exciting, and game suppers o'nights after the opera, and the meeting with many swells and noted folk, and now it all seems like some memory of a wild phantasmagoria or hurried magic- lantern show--galleries and ruins by day, and gaiety by night. Even so do all the scenes of life roll up together at its end, often getting mixed. Yet another Roman memory or two. We had taken lodgings in the Via Condotti, where we had a nice sitting-room in common and a good coal-fire. Our landlady was lady-like and spoke French, and had long been a governess in the great Borghese family. As for her husband, there were thousands of Liberals far and wide who spoke of him as the greatest scoundrel unhung, for he was at the head of the Roman police, and I verily believe knew more iniquity than the Pope himself. It would have been against all nature and precedent if I had not become his dear friend and _protege_, which I did accordingly, for I liked him very much indeed, and Heaven knows that such a rum couple of friends as Giuseppe Navone and myself, when out walking together, could not at that time have been found in Europe. It may here be observed that I was decidedly getting on in the quality of my Mentors, for, as regarded morals and humanity, my old pirate and slaver friend was truly as a lamb and an angel of light compared to Navone. And I will further indicate, as this book will prove, that if I was not at the age of twenty-three the most accomplished young scoundrel in all Europe, it was not for want of such magnificent opportunities and friends as few men ever enjoyed. But it was always my fate to neglect or to be unable to profit by advantages, as, for instance, in mathematics; nor in dishonesty did I succeed one whit better, which may be the reason why the two are somehow dimly connected in my mind. Here I think I see the unfathomable smile in the eye of Professor Dodd (it never got down to his lips), who was the incarnate soul of purity and honour. But then the banker, E. Fenzi, who swindled me out of nearly 500 francs, was an arithmetician, and I write under a sense of recent wrong. How this loss, and Fenzi's failure, flight, and the fuss which it all caused in Florence, were accurately foretold me by a witch, may be read in detail in my "Etrusco-Roman Remains in Tuscan Tradition." London: T. Fisher Unwin. My landlady was a very zealous Catholic, and tried to convert me. This was a new experience, and I enjoyed it. I proved malleable. So she called in a Jesuit priest to perfect the work. I listened with deep interest to his worn-out _fade_ arguments, made a few points of feeble objection for form's sake, yielded, and met him more than half way. But somehow he never called again. _Latet anguis in herba_--my grass was rather too green, I suppose. I was rather sorry, for I expected some amusement. But I had been _too_ deep for the Jesuit--and for myself. The time came for my departure. I was to go alone on to Florence, in advance of my friends. Navone arranged everything nicely for me: I was to go by diligence on to Civita Vecchia, where I was to call on a relative of his, who kept a bric-a-brac shop. I did not know how or why it was that I was treated with such great respect, as if with fear, by the conductor, and by all on the road. I was _en route_ all night, and in the morning, very weary, I went to a hotel, called a commissionaire, and bade him get my passport from the police, and have it _visee_, and secure me a passage on the boat to Leghorn. He returned very soon, and said with an air of bewilderment, "Signore, you sent me on a useless errand. Here is your passport put all _en regle_, and your passage is all secured!" I saw it at once. The kind fatherly care of the great and good Navone had done it all! He had watched over me invisibly and mysteriously all the time during the night; on the road I was a pet child of the Roman police! The Vehmgericht had endorsed me with three crosses! Therefore the passport and the passage were all right, and the captain was very deferential, and I got to Florence safely. In Florence I went to the first hotel, which was then in what is now known as the Palazzo Feroni, or Viesseux's, the great circulating library of Italy. It is a fine machicolated building, which was in the Middle Ages the prison of the Republic. From my window I had a fine view of the Via Tornabuoni--in which I had coffee since I concluded the last line. There were but three or four persons the first evening at the _table-d'hote_. One was a very beautiful Polish countess, who spoke French perfectly. She was very fascinating, and, when she ate a salad, smeared her lovely mouth and cheeks all round with oil to her ears. Some one said something to her about the manner in which the serfs were treated in Poland, whereupon she replied with great vivacity that the Polish serfs were even more degraded and barbarous than those of Russia. Which remark inspired in me certain reflections, which were amply developed in after years by the perusal of Von Moltke's work on Poland, and more recently of that very interesting novel called "The Deluge." If freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell, it was probably, from a humanitarian point of view, with joy. There was, however, at the same hotel a singular man, a Lithuanian Pole named Andrekovitch, with whom I became very intimate, and whom I met in after years in Paris and in America. He had been at a German university, where he had imbibed most liberal and revolutionary ideas. He subsequently took part in one or two revolutions, and was exiled. He had read about Emerson in a French magazine, and was enthusiastic over him. In strange contrast to him was a handsome young man from the Italian Tyrol, who was, like the Pole and myself, full of literary longings, but who was still quite a Roman Catholic. He knew about as much, or as little, of the world as I did, and was "gentle and bland." When we bade farewell, he wept, and kissed me. Andrekovitch was eccentric, wild, and Slavonian-odd to look at at any time. One evening he came into my room clad in scarlet dressing-gown, and having altogether the appearance of a sorcerer just out of a Sabbat. The conversation took a theological turn. Andrekovitch was the ragged remnant of a Catholic, but a very small one. He sailed close to the wind, and neared Rationalism. "But the Pope! . . ." exclaimed the Tyrolese. Andrekovitch rose, looking more sorcerer or Zamiel-like than ever, and exclaiming, "The Pope be--!" left the room. The last word was lost in the slam of the door. It was a melodramatic departure, and as such has ever been impressed on my memory. My father, while a merchant, and also my uncle, had done a very large business in Florentine straw goods, and I had received letters to several English houses who had corresponded with them. I heard, long after, that my arrival had caused a small panic in Florence in business circles, it being apprehended that I had come out to establish a rival branch, or to buy at head-quarters for the American "straw-market." I believe that their fears were appeased when I interviewed them. One of these worthy men had been so long in Italy that he had caught a little of its superstition. He wished to invest in lottery tickets, and asked me for lucky numbers, which I gave him. As I write these lines in Florence, I have within half-an-hour called for the first time on an old witch or _strega_, whom I found surrounded by herbs and bottles, and a magnificent cat, who fixed his eyes on me all the time, as if he recognised a friend. I found, however, that she only knew the common vulgar sorceries, and was unable to give me any of the higher _scongiurazioni_ or conjurations; and as I left, the old sorceress said respectfully and admiringly, "You come to _me_ to learn, O Maestro, but it is fitter that I take lessons from you!" Then she asked me for "the wizard blessing," which I gave her in Romany. So my first and last experiences in the deep and dark art come together! I became acquainted in Florence with Hiram Powers, which reminds me that I once in Rome dined _vis-a-vis_ to Gibson and several other artists, with whom I became intimate as young men readily do. I contrived to study architecture, and made myself very much at home in a few studios. The magnificent _Fiorara_, or flower-girl, whom so many will remember for many years, was then in the full bloom of her beauty. She and others gave flowers to any strangers whom they met, not expecting money down, but when a man departed the flower-girls were always on hand to solicit a gratuity. Twenty years later this same Fiorara, still a very handsome woman, remembered me, and gave my wife a handsome bouquet on leaving. I studied Provencal and Italian poetry in illuminated MSS. in the Ambrosian or Laurentian Library, and took my coffee at Doney's, and saw more of Florence in a few weeks' time than I have ever done since in any one of my residences here, though some of them have been for six and nine months. As is quite natural. Who that lives in London ever goes to see the Tower? All things in Europe were so new and fresh and beautiful and wonderful to me then, and I had been yearning for them so earnestly for so many years, and this golden freedom followed so closely on the deadly _ennui_ of Princeton, that I could never see enough. If any of my readers want to know something of sorcery, I can tell them that among its humblest professors it is perfectly understood that pleasure or enjoyment is one of its deepest mysteries or principles, as an integral part of fascination. So I can feel an _enchantment_, sometimes almost incredible, in gazing on a Gothic ruin in sunshine, or a beautiful face, a picture by Carpaccio, Norse interlaces, lovable old books, my amethyst amulet, or a garden. For if you could sway life and death, and own millions, or walk invisible, you could do no more than _enjoy_; therefore you had better learn to enjoy much without such power. Thus endeth the first lesson! I arrived in Venice. There had been a time in America when, if I could have truthfully declared that I had ever been in a gondola, I should have felt as if I held a diploma of nobility in the Grand Order of Cosmopolites. Having been conveyed in one to my hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt that I at last held it! Now I had really mastered the three great cities of Italy, which was the first and greatest part of all travel in all the world of culture and of art. Fate might hurl me back to America, or even into New Jersey, but I had "swum in a gondola." I very soon made the acquaintance of two brothers from New York named Seymour, somewhat older than myself, and men of reading and culture. With them I "sight-saw" the city. I had read Venice up rather closely at Princeton, and had formed a great desire to go on the Bridge of Sighs. For some reason this was then very strictly forbidden. Our Consul, who was an enterprising young man, told me that he had been for months trying to effect it in vain. It at once became apparent to me as a piece of manifest destiny that I must do it. One day I had with me a clever fellow, a commissionaire or guide, and consulted him. He said, "I think it may be done. You look like an Austrian, and may be taken for an officer. Walk boldly into the chief's office, and ask for the keys of the bridge; only show a little cheek. You may get them. Give the chief's man two francs when you come out. At the worst, he can only refuse to give them." It was indeed a very cheeky undertaking, but I ventured on it with the calmness of innocence. I went into the office, and said, "The keys to the bridge, if you please!" as if I were in an official hurry on State business. The official stared, and said-- "Do I understand that you formally demand the keys?" "_Ja wohl_, certainly; at once, if you please!" They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no renown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded it as a fabulous joke of mine, inspired by poetic genius. But I sometimes think that the official who yielded up the keys, and the man whom he sent with me, and perhaps the commissionaire, all had a put-up job of it among them on those keys, and several glasses all round out of those two francs. _Quien sabe_? _Vive la bagatelle_! We went on an excursion to Padua. What I remember is, that what impressed me most was a placard here and there announcing that a work on Oken had just appeared! This rather startled me. Whether it was for or against the great German offshoot from Schelling, it proved that somebody in Italy had actually studied him! _Eppure si muove_, I thought. It cannot be true that-- "Padua! the lamp of learning In thy halls no more is burning." I have been there several times since. All that I now recall is that the hotel was not very good the last time. I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who had crossed with me on the ship. He was a merry companion. Sailing with him one morning in a gondola along the Grand Canal, we saw sitting before a hotel its porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was Clark's delight, and he called out, "I say, Buck! what the devil are you doing here?" With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern accent-- "Dey sets me hyar fo' a bait to 'tice de Americans with." I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably "enticed" the maid. To which he replied that it was a free country; that he had married the damsel--she was his wife; and so the pair at once packed up and departed. We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on "the underground railway," and went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent. When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied-- "Kase it paid. Dere's nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las' time I went Norf wid massa I made 'nuff out of him to buy myself free twice't over." Doubtless there were many instances of "pampered and petted" household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them--_as happened on an average once at least in a life_--were all to a man quite ready to forsake "ole massa" and "dear ole missus," and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his _freedom_ to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity--and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift! I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not _like_ slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, "the sum of all crimes." In which summation he showed himself indeed a "sumner," as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was _an Abolitionist_. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves. For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned "sla-aves," detest the name of "South," and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free. I lived to see the roof of the "gentlemanly planter," who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke-- "And death-shots flying thick and fast," while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at once blatant "nigger-worshippers," abundant in proof that they had always had "an indescribable horror of slavery"--it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and cautiously--"paw by paw into the water"--these dough faces became hard- baked Abolitionists, far surpassing us of the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted against Grant and _reviled_ him become his most intimate friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably--very far--than do even the English. However, in the case of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the head of any man to write a _Dictionnaire des Girouettes_ in America. These late converts had never known what it was to be Abolitionists while it was "unfashionable," and have, as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart--as I had a thousand times during many years--all for believing the tremendous and plain truth that _slavery_ was a thousand times wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put together. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or Quaker, to be an _Abolitionist_ in Philadelphia from 1848 until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they had been Chinese--"and d---d bad Chinese at that," as a friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for man's relations with poor humanity. My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few exceptions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to edit a "selected" magazine, he went to and fro for many voyages to Haiti, where, singular as it may seem, his experiences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties. I travelled with Mr. Clark from Venice to Milan, where we made a short visit. I remember an old soldier who spoke six languages, who was cicerone of the roof of the Cathedral, and whom I found still on the roof twenty years later, and still speaking the same six tongues. I admired the building as a beautiful fancy, exquisitely decorated, but did not think much of it as a specimen of Gothic architecture. It is the best test of aesthetic culture and knowledge in the world. When you hear anybody praise it as the most exquisite or perfect Gothic cathedral in existence, you may expect to hear the critic admire the designs of Chippendale furniture or the decoration of St. Peter's. So we passed through beautiful Lombardy and came to Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing mountain- torrents bursting over the road; far away, ever and anon, we heard the roar of a _lauwine_ or avalanche; sometimes I looked out, and could see straight down below me a thousand feet into an abyss or on a headlong stream. We entered the great tunnel directly from another, for the snow lay twenty feet deep on the road, and a passage had been dug under it for several hundred feet, and so two tunnels were connected. Just in the worst of the road beyond, and in the bitterest cold, we met a sleigh, in which were an English gentleman and a very beautiful young lady, apparently his daughter, going to Italy. "I saw her but an instant, yet methinks I see her now"--a sweet picture in a strange scene. Poets used to "me-think" and "me-seem" more in those days, but we endured it. Then in the morning we saw Brieg, far down below us in the valley in green leaves and sunshine, and when we got there then I realised that we were in a new land. We had a great giant of a German conductor, who seemed to regard Clark and me as under his special care. Once when we had wandered afar to look at something, and it was time for the stage or _Eilwagen_ to depart, he hunted us up, scolded us "like a Dutch uncle" in German, and drove us along before him like two bad boys to the diligence, "pawing up" first one and then the other, after which, shoving us in, he banged and locked the door with a grunt of satisfaction, even as the Giant Blunderbore locked the children in the coffer after slamming down the lid. Across the scenes and shades of forty years, that picture of the old conductor driving us like two unruly urchins back to school rises, never to be forgotten. We went by mountains and lakes and Gothic towns, rocks, forests, old chateaux, and rivers--the road was wild in those days--till we came to Geneva. Thence Clark went his way to Paris, and I remained alone for a week. I had, it is true, a letter of introduction to a very eminent Presbyterian Swiss clergyman, so I sent it in with my card. His wife came out on the balcony, looked coolly down at me, and concluding, I suppose from my appearance, that I was one of the ungodly, went in and sent out word that her husband was out, and would be gone for an indefinite period, and that she was engaged. The commissionaire who was with me--poor devil!--was dreadfully mortified; but I was not very much astonished, and, indeed, I was treated in much the same manner, or worse, by a colleague of this pious man in Paris, or rather by his wife. I believe that what kept me a week in Geneva was the white wine and trout. At the end of the time I set out to the north, and on the way met with some literary or professional German, who commended to me the "Pfisterer-Zunft" or Bakers' Guild as a cheap and excellent hostelry. And it was curious enough, in all conscience. During the Middle Ages, and down to a very recent period, the _Zunfte_ or trade-guilds in the Swiss cities carried it with a high hand. Even the gentlemen could only obtain rights as citizens by enrolling themselves as the trade of aristocrats. I had heard of the boy who thought he would like to be bound apprentice to the king; in Berne he might have been entered for a lower branch of the business. These guilds had their own local taverns, inns, or _Herbergs_, where travelling colleagues of the calling might lodge at moderate rates, but nobody else. However, as time rolled by, these _Zunfte_ or guild- lodgings were opened to strangers. One of the last which did so was that of the _Pfister_ or bakers (Latin, _pistor_), and this had only been done a few weeks ere I went there. As a literary man whom I met on the ramparts said to me, "That place is still strong in the Middle Age." It was a quaint old building, and to get to my room I had to cross the great guild-hall of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Bakers. There were the portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Order from the fourteenth or fifteenth century on the walls, and the concentrated antique tobacco- smoke of as many ages in the air, which, to a Princeton graduate, was no more than the scent of a rose to a bee. I could speak a little German--not much--but the degree to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything Deutsch, passeth all words and all mortal belief. _Sit verbo venia_! But I do not believe that any human being ever crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a knowledge of the language, even as a spider throweth up an invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. Which thing was perceived marvellously soon, and not without some amazement, by the Germans, who have all at least this one point in common with Savages, New Jerseymen, Red Indians, Negroes, Gypsies, and witches, that they by mystic sympathy _know those who like them_, and take to them accordingly, guided by some altogether inexplicable clue or _Hexengarn_, even as deep calleth unto deep and star answereth star without a voice. Whence it was soon observed at Heidelberg by an American student that "Leland would abuse the Dutch all day long if he saw fit, but never allowed anybody else to do so." The which thing, as I think, argues the very _ne plus ultra_ of sympathy. I found my way to Strasburg, where I went to the tip-top outside of the cathedral, and took the railway train for Heidelberg. And here I had an adventure, which, though trifling to the last degree, was to me such a great and new experience that I will describe it, let the reader think what he will. I went naturally enough first-class, so uncommon a thing then in Germany that people were wont to say that only princes, Englishmen, and asses did so. There entered the same carriage a very lady-like and pretty woman. The guard, seeing this, concluded that--whatever he concluded, he carefully drew down all the curtains, looking at me with a cheerful, genial air of intense mystery, as if to say, "I twig; it's all right; I'll keep your secret." It is a positive fact that all this puzzled me amazingly. There were many things in which I, the friend and pupil of Navone, was as yet as innocent as a babe unborn. The lady seemed to be amused--as well she might. _Sancta simplicitas_! I asked her why the conductor had drawn the curtains. She laughed, and explained that he possibly thought we were a bridal pair or lovers. Common sense and ordinary politeness naturally inspired the reply that I wished we were, which declaration was so amiably received that I suggested the immediate institution of such an arrangement. Which was so far favourably received that it was sealed with a kiss. However, the seal was not broken. I think the lady must have been very much amused. It is not without due reflection that I record this. Kissing went for very little in Germany in those days. It was about as common in Vienna as shaking hands. But this was my first experience in it. So I record it, because it seems as if some benevolent fairy had welcomed me to Germany; it took place just as we crossed the frontier. However, I found out some time after, by a strange accident, that my fairy was the wife of a banker who lived beyond Heidelberg; and at Heidelberg I left her and went to the first hotel in the town. I had formed no plans, and had no letters to anybody. I had read Howitt's "Student Life in Germany" through and through, so I thought I would study in Heidelberg. But how to begin? That was the question. I went into a shop and bought some cigars. There I consulted with the shopkeeper as to what I should do. Could he refer me to some leading authority in the University, known to him, who would give me advice? He could, and advised me to consult with the Pedell Capelmann. Now I didn't know it, but Pedell--meaning beadle, commonly called Poodle by the students--was the head-constable of the University. In honest truth I supposed he must be the President or Pro-Rector. So I went to Pedell Capelmann. His appearance did not quite correspond to my idea of a learned professor. He was an immensely burly, good-natured fellow, who came in in his shirt-sleeves, and who, when he learned what I wanted, burst out into a _Her'r'r' Gottsdonerrwetter_! of surprise, as he well might. But I knew that the Germans were a very _sans facon bourgeois_ people, and still treated him with deep respect. He suggested that, as there were a great many American students there, I had better call on them. He himself would take me to see the Herr O--, with whom, as I subsequently learned, he had more than once had discussions relative to questions of University-municipal discipline. As for the startling peculiarity which attended my introduction to University life, it is best summed up in the remark which the Herr O. (of Baltimore) subsequently made. "Great God, fellows! _he made his first call on old Capelmann_!!" He took me to the Herr O. and introduced me. I was overwhelmed with my cordial reception. There was at once news sent forth that a new man and a brother fellow-countryman had come to join the ranks. "And messengers through all the land sought Sir Tannhauser out." I was pumped dry as to my precedents, and as I came fresh from Princeton and had been through Italy, I was approved of. The first thing was a discussion as to where I was to live. The Frau Directorinn Louis in the University Place had two fine rooms which had just been occupied by a prince. So we went and secured the rooms, which were indeed very pleasant, and by no means dear as it seemed to me. I was to breakfast in my rooms, dine with the family at one o'clock, and sup about town. Then there was a grand council as to what I had better study, and over my prospects in life; and it was decided that, as the law-students were the most distinguished or swell of all, I had better be a lawyer. So it was arranged that I should attend Mittermayer's and others' lectures; to all of which I cheerfully assented. The next step was to give a grand supper in honour of my arrival. After the dinner and the wine, I drank twelve _schoppens_ of beer, and then excused myself on the plea of having letters to write. I believe, however, that I forgot to write the letters. And here I may say, once for all, that having discovered that, if I had no gift for mathematics, I had a great natural talent for Rheinwein and lager, I did not bury that talent in a napkin, but, like the rest of my friends, made the most of it, firstly, during two semesters in Heidelberg: "Then I bolted off to Munich, And within the year, Underneath my German tunic Stowed whole butts of beer; For I drank like fifty fishes, Drank till all was blue, For whenever I was vicious I was thirsty too." The result of which "dire deboshing" was that, having come to Europe with a soul literally attenuated and starved for want of the ordinary gaiety and amusement which all youth requires, my life in Princeton having been one continued strain of a sobriety which continually sank into subdued melancholy, and a body just ready to yield to consumption, I grew vigorous and healthy, or, as the saying is, "hearty as a buck." I believe that if my Cousin Sam had gone on with me even-pace, that he would have lived till to-day. When we came abroad I seemed to be the weakest; he returned, and died in a few months from our hereditary disease. How many hecatombs of young men have been murdered by "seriousness" and "total abstinence," miscalled _temperance_, in our American colleges, can never be known; perhaps it is as well that it never will be; for if it were, there would be a rush to the other extreme, which would "upset society." And here be it noted that, with all our inordinate national or international Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority to everybody and everything foreign, we are in the _main_ thing--that is, the truly rational enjoyment of life and the art of living--utterly inferior to the German and Latin races. We are for the most part either too good or too bad--totally abstemious or raving drunk--always in a hurry after excitement or in a worry over our sins, or those of our neighbours. "Rest, rest, perturbed Yankee, _rest_!" My rooms were on the ground-floor, the bedroom looking into the University Square and my study into a garden. Next door to me dwelt Paulus, the king of the Rationalists. He was then, I believe, ninety- four years of age. He remained daily till about twelve or one in a comatose condition, when he awoke and became lively till about three, when he sank into sleep again. His days were like those of a far Northern winter, lit by the sun at the same hours. The next morning a very gentlemanly young man knocked at my door, and entered and asked in perfect English for a Mr. Bell, who lived in the same house. I informed him that Mr. Bell was out, but asked him to enter my room and take a chair, which he did, conversing with me for half an hour, when he departed, leaving a card on a side-table. In a few minutes later, O., who was of the kind who notice everything, entered, took up the card, and read on it the name and address of the young Grand Duke of Baden, who was naturally by far the greatest man in the country, he being its hereditary ruler. "Where the devil did you get this?" asked O., and all, in amazement. "Oh," I replied, "it's only the Duke. He has just been in here making a call. If you fellows had come five minutes sooner you'd have seen him. Have some beer!" The impression that I was a queer lot, due to my making my first call on Capelmann _et cetera_, was somewhat strengthened by this card, until I explained how I came by it. But as Dr. Johnson in other words remarked, there are people to whom such queer things happen daily, and others to whom they occur once a year. And there was never yet a living soul who entered into my daily life who did not observe that I belong to the former class. If I have a guardian angel, it must be Edgar A. Poe's Angel of the Odd. But he generally comes to those who belong to him! It was a long time before I profited much by my lectures, because it was fearful work for me to learn German. I engaged a tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and talked it _con amore_; but few persons would believe how slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the world! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower? Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a brick to it. By the way, it was a juvenile conjecture of mine that the Tower of Babel was destroyed for being a shot-tower, in which ammunition was prepared to be used by the heathen. Which theory might very well have been inspired by a verse from the old Puritanical rendering of the Psalms:-- "Ye race itt is not alwayes gott By him who swiftest runns, Nor ye Battell by ye Peo-pel Who shoot with longest gunnes." Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a series of articles in the _Dublin University Magazine_, and later from a translation of "The Seeress of Prevorst," and several of the good man's own romances and lyrics. I suppose that, of all men on the face of the earth, I should have at that time preferred to meet him. Wherefore, as a matter of course, it occurred that one fine morning a pleasant gentlemanly German friend of mine, who spoke English perfectly, and whose name was Rucker, walked into my room, and proposed that we should take a two or three days' walk up the Neckar with our knapsacks, and visit the famous old ruined castle of the Weibertreue. My mother had read me the ballad-legend of it in my boyhood, and I had learned it by heart. Indeed, I can still recall it after sixty years:-- "Who can tell me where Weinsberg lies? As brave a town as any; It must have sheltered in its time Brave wives and maidens many: If e'er I wooing have to do, Good faith, in Weinsberg I will woo!" "And then, when we are there," said Rucker, "we will call on an old friend of my father's, named Justinus Kerner. Did you ever hear of him?" Did a Jew ever hear of Moses, or an American of General Washington? In five minutes I convinced my friend that I knew more about Kerner than he himself did. Whereupon it was decided that we should set forth on the following morning. Blessed, beautiful, happy summer mornings in Suabia--green mounts and grey rocks with old castles--peasants harvesting hay--a _Kirchweih_, or peasant's merry-making, with dancing and festivity--till we came to Weinsberg, and forthwith called on the ancient sage, whom we found with the two or three ladies and gentlemen of his family. I saw at a glance that they had the air of aristocracy. He received us very kindly, and invited us to come to dinner and sup with him. The Weibertreue is an old castle which was in or at the end of Dr. Kerner's garden. Once, when all the town had taken refuge in it from the Emperor Conrad, the latter gave the women leave to quit the fort, and also permission to every one to carry with her whatever was unto her most valuable, precious, or esteemed. And so the dames went forth, every one bearing on her back her husband. In the tower of the castle, or in its wall, which was six feet thick, were eight or ten windows, gradually opening like trumpets, through which the wind blew all the time, and pleasantly enough on a hot summer day. In each of these the Doctor had placed an AEolian harp, and he who did not believe in fairies or the gentle spirit of a viewless sound should have sat in that tower and listened to the music as it rose and fell, as in endless solemn glees or part-singing; one harp stepping in, and pealing out richly and strangely as another died away, while anon, even as the new voice came, there thrilled in unison one or two more Ariels who seemed to be hurrying up to join the song. It was a marvellous strange thing of beauty, which resounded, indeed, all over Germany, for men spoke of it far and wide. Quite as marvellous, in the evening, was the Doctor's own performance on the single and double Jew's harp. From this most unpromising instrument he drew airs of such exquisite beauty that one could not have been more astonished had he heard the sweet tones of Grisi drawn from a cat by twisting its tail. But we were in a land of marvels and wonders, or, as an English writer described it, "Weinsberg, a place on the Neckar, inhabited partly by men and women--some in and some out of the body--and partly by ghosts." There were visions in the air, and dreams sitting on the staircases; in fact, when I saw the peasants working in the fields, I should not have been astonished to see them vanish into mist or sink into the ground. And yet from the ruined castle of the Weibertreue Kerner pointed out to us a man walking along the road, and that man was the very incarnation of all that was sober, rational, and undream-like; for it was David Strauss, author of the "Life of Jesus." And at him too I gazed with the awe due to a great man whose name is known to all the cultured world; and to me much more than the name; for I had read, as before mentioned, his "Life of Jesus" when I first went to Princeton. Dr. Kerner took to me greatly, and said that I very much reminded him, in appearance and conversation, of what his most intimate friend, Ludwig Uhland, had been at my age; and as he repeated this several times, and spoke of it long after to friends, I think it must have been true, although I am compelled to admit that people who pride themselves on looking like this or that celebrity never resemble him in the least, mentally or spiritually, and are generally only mere caricatures at best. On our return we climbed into an old Gothic church-tower, in which I found a fifteenth-century bell, bearing the words, _Vivas voco_, _mortuos plango_, _fulgura_ _frango_, and much more-- "The dead I knell, the living wake, And the power of lightning break!" which caused me to reflect on the vast degree to which all the minor uses and observances of the Church--which are nine-tenths of all their religion to the multitude--were only old heathen superstitious in new dresses. The bell was a spell against the demons of lightning in old Etrurian days; to this time the Tuscan peasant bears one in the darkening twilight-tide to drive away the witches flitting round: in him and them "those evening bells" inspired a deeper sentiment than poetry. In a village, Rucker, finding the beer very good, bought a cask of it, which was put on board the little Neckar steamboat on which we returned to Heidelberg. And thus provided, the next evening he gave a "barty" up in the old castle, among the ruins by moonlight, where I "assisted," and the _lager_ was devoured, even to the last drop. I soon grew tired of the family dinners with the Frau Inspectorinn and the Herr Inspector with the _one_ tumbler of Neckar wine, which I was expected not to exceed; so I removed my dining to the "Court of Holland," a first-class hotel, where O. and the other Americans met, and where the expectation was not that a man should by any means limit himself to one glass, but that, taking at least one to begin with, he should considerably exceed it. This hotel was kept by a man named Spitz, who looked his name to perfection. "Er spitzt betrubt die Nase," as Scheffel wrote of him in his poem, _Numero Acht_, the scene of which is laid in the "Court of Holland." Here a word about Scheffel. During the following semester he was for months a daily table-companion of mine at the Bremer-Eck, where a small circle of students--_quorum pars fui_--met every evening to sup and _kneip_, or to drink beer and smoke and sing until eleven. Little did I dream in those days that he would become the great popular poet of his time, or that I should ever translate his _Gaudeamus_. I owe the "Court of Holland" to this day for a dinner and a bottle of wine. It is the only debt I owe, to my knowledge, to anybody on earth. It was resolved among the Americans that we should all make a foot-excursion with knapsacks down the Rhine to Cologne. It was done. So we went gaily from town to town, visiting everything, making excursions inland now and then. We had a bottle or two of the best Johannisberg in the very Schloss itself--_omne cum praetio_--and meeting with such adventures as befell all wandering students in those old-fashioned, merry times. The Rhine was wild as yet, and not paved, swept, garnished and full of modern villas and adornment, as now. I had made, while in America, a manuscript book of the places and legends of and on the Rhine, with many drawings. This, and a small volume of Snow's and Planche's "Legends of the Rhine," I carried with me. I was already well informed as to every village and old ruin or tower on the banks. So we arrived at Cologne, and saw all the sights. The cathedral was not then finished, and the town still boasted its two-and-seventy stinks, as counted by Coleridge. Then we returned by steamer to Mainz, and thence footed it home. Little by little I rather fell away from my American friends, and began to take to German or English associates, and especially to the company of two Englishmen. One was named Leonard Field, who is now a lawyer in Lincoln's Inn Fields; the other was Ewan P. Colquhoun, a younger brother of Sir Patrick Colquhoun, whom I knew well, and as friend, in after years, until his recent death. I always, however, maintained a great intimacy with George Ward, of Boston, who became long after a banker and Baring's agent in America. In one way and another these two twined into my life in after years, and led to my making many acquaintances or friends. I walked a great deal all about Heidelberg to many very picturesque places, maintaining deep interest in all I saw by much loving reading of _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_ and Uhland's collection of old German songs--his own poems I knew long before--the _Nibelungen_ and _Hero-Book_, and a great variety of other works. I had dropped the Occulta, and for a year or two read nothing of the kind except casually the works of Eckhartshausen and Justinus Kerner. I can now see that, as I became healthy and strong, owing to the easy, pleasant existence which I led, it was best for me after all. "Grappling with life" and earnestly studying a profession then might have extinguished me. My mental spring, though not broken, was badly bent, and it required a long time to straighten it. Colquhoun was only eighteen, but far beyond his years in dissipation, and well-nigh advanced to cool cynicism. With him I made many an excursion all about the country. Wherever a _Kirclweih_ or peasants' ball was to be held, he always knew of it, and there we went. One morning early he came to my rooms. There was to be a really stunning duel fought early between a Senior and some very illustrious _Schlager_, and he had two English friends named Burnett who would go with us. So we went, and meeting with Rucker at the _Pawkboden_, it was proposed that we should go on together to Baden-Baden. To which I objected that I had only twenty florins in my pocket, and had no time to return home for more. "Never mind," said Colquhoun; "Rucker has plenty of money; we can borrow from him." We went to Baden and to the first hotel, and had a fine dinner, and saw the Burnetts off. Then, of course, to the gaming-table, where Colquhoun speedily lost all his money, and I so much that I had but ten florins left. "Never mind; we'll pump on Rucker," said Colquhoun. We went up to visit the old castle. While there, Rucker took off his overcoat, in which he had his pocket-book, and laid it over a chair. When we returned to the hotel the pocket-book was gone! There we were, with a hotel-bill to pay and never a cent wherewith to pay it. I had, however, still ten florins. Colquhoun suddenly remembered that he had seen something in the town, price ten florins, which he _must_ buy. It was something which he had promised to buy for a relative in England. It was a very serious case of necessity. I doubted my dear friend, but having sworn him by all his gods that he would _not_ gamble with the money, I gave it to him. So he, of course, went straight to the gaming-table, and, having luck, won enough to pay our debt and take us home. I should mention that Rucker went up to the castle and found his pocket- book with all the money. "For not only doth Fortune favour the bold," as is written in my great unpublished romance of "Flaxius the Immortal," "but, while her hand is in, also helps their friends with no unsparing measure, as is marvellously confirmed by Machiavelli." Vacation came. My friends scattered far and wide. I joined with three German friends and one Frenchman, and we strapped on our knapsacks for a foot-journey into Switzerland. First we went to Freiburg in Baden, and saw the old Cathedral, and so on, singing, and stopping to drink, and meeting with other students from other universities, and resting in forests, amid mountains, by roaring streams, and entering cottages and chatting with girls. _Hurra_! _frei ist der bursch_! One afternoon we walked sixteen miles through a rain which was like a waterfall. I was so drenched that it was with difficulty I kept my passport and letter of exchange from being ruined. When we came out of the storm there were _six_ of us! Another student had, unseen, joined our party in the rain, and I had never noticed it! We came to a tavern at the foot of the Rigiberg. My pack was soaked. One friend lent me a shirt, another a pair of drawers, and we wrapped ourselves in sheets from the beds and called for brandy and water hot--a pleasing novelty to the Germans--and so went to bed. The next day we ascended the Rigi; found many students there; did not see the sun rise in the morning, but still a mighty panorama, wondrous fair, and so walked down again. And receiving my carpet-bag at Lucerne, whither I had had the precaution to send one, I dressed myself again in clean linen and went back to Germany. I meant to travel more in Switzerland, but it was very rainy that year, and, as it proved, I did wisely. I returned to Spitz, but his house was full of English, and he informed me, rather exultantly and foolishly, that he had no room for me, and could not tell me where to go, "every place was full." As I had spent money freely with him I did not like it. The head-waiter followed me out and recommended the Black Eagle, kept by Herr Lehr. There I went, got a good room, and for months after dined daily at its _table-d'hote_. I sent friends there, and returned to the house with my wife twenty years later. My brother also went there long after, and endeared himself to all, helping Herr Lehr to plant his vines. In after years Herr Lehr had forgotten me, but not my brother. Lehr's son was a gentlemanly young fellow, well educated. He became a captain, and was the first officer killed in the Franco-German war. Vacation passed, and the students returned and lectures were resumed. There was a grand _Commers_ or students' supper meeting at which I was present; and again the duelling-ground rang with the sound of blades, and all was merry as before. Herr Zimmer, the University dancing-master, gave lessons and cotillion or waltzing-parties thrice a week, and these I regularly attended. Those who came to them were the daughters of the humbler professors and respectable shopkeepers. During the previous session I had taken lessons from a little old Frenchman, who brought his fiddle and a pretty daughter twice a week to my room, where, with Ward, we formed a class of three. This gentleman was a perfect type--fit to be staged without a touch of change--of the old _emigre_, who has now vanished, even from among the French. His bows, his wit--_la grace extra'ordinaire_--the intonations of his voice, and his vivacity, were beyond the art of any actor now living. There were many more peculiar and marked types of character in the last generation than now exist, when Everybody is becoming Everybody else with such fearful rapidity. There were four great masked balls held in Heidelberg during the winter, each corresponding to a special state of society. That at the Museum or great University Club was patronised by the _elite_ of nobility and the professors and their families. Then came the _Harmonie_--respectable, but not aristocratic. Then another in a hotel, which was rather more rowdy than reputable; not really outrageous, yet where the gentlemen students "whooped it up" in grand style with congenial grisettes; and, finally, there was a fancy ball at the Waldhorn, or some such place, or several of them, over the river, where peasants and students with maids to match could waltz once round the vast hall for a penny till stopped by a cordon of robust rustics. We thought it great fun with our partners to waltz impetuously and bump with such force against the barrier as to break through, in which case we were not only greatly admired, but got another waltz gratis. We had wild peasant-dancing in abundance, and the consumption of wine and beer was something awful. One morning a German student named Gruner, who had been at Jena, came to my room with a brilliant proposition. We should go to Frankfort and hear Jenny Lind sing in her great _role_ of Norma. I had already heard her sing in concert in Heidelberg--where, by the way, the students rushed into her room as soon as she had left, and tore to strips the bed in which she had slept, and carried them away for souvenirs, to the great amazement of an old Englishman who had just been put into the room. (_N.B._--I was not in the party.) I objected that it was getting to the end of the month, and that I had not money enough for such an outing. To which he replied, that we could go on to Homburg, and make money enough at _rouge-et-noir_ to cover all expenses. This obvious and admirable method of raising funds had not occurred to me, so I agreed to go. We went to Frankfort, and heard the greatly overrated Jenny Lind, and the next day proceeded to Hamburg, and at once to the green table. Here I lost a little, but Gruner made so much, that on returning to the table I took from it a sufficient sum to cover all our expenses, and told him that, come what might, it must remain untouched, and gave him the remainder. That afternoon I played for five-franc pieces, and at one time had both my side-pockets so full that they weighed very heavily. And these again I lost. Then Gruner lost all his, and came imploring me for more, but I would not give him a _kreutzer_. Matters were beginning to look serious. I had a reserved fund of perhaps fifty napoleons, which I kept for dire need or accidents. That evening I observed a man who had great luck, winning twice out of three times. I watched his play, and as soon as he lost I set a napoleon--by which I won enough to clear my expenses, and buy me, moreover, a silver-headed cane, a gold watch-chain, and two Swiss watches. I may mention by the way, that since that day I have never played at anything, save losing a ten-franc piece in after years at Wiesbaden. There dined very often at our _table-d'hote_ in the Adler an old German lady named Helmine von Chezy, who had a reputation as a poetess. With her I sometimes conversed. One day she narrated in full what she declared was the true story of Caspar Hauser. Unto her Heine had addressed the epigram-- "Helmine von Chezy, Geborene Klencke, Ich bitte Sie, geh' Sie Mit ihrer Poesie, Sonst kriegt Sie die Kranke!" "Helmine von Chezy, Born Klencke, I pray With your pestilent poems You'll hasten away." There was also an elderly and very pleasant Englishman, with whom I became rather intimate, and who was very kind to me. This was the well- known Captain Medwin, who had known so well Byron, Shelley, Trelawny, and their compeers. He was full of anecdotes, which I now wish that I had recorded. He introduced me to Lady Caroline de Crespigny, who was then living permanently in Heidelberg. This lady, who was said to be then fifty years of age, was still so young-looking and beautiful, that I cannot remember in all my life to have ever seen such an instance of time arrested. I also made the acquaintance of Professor Creutzer, author of the _Symbolik_, a work of vast learning. {156} And I went to balls, one at Professor Gervinus's. I entered myself with the great Leopold Gmelin for a course of lectures on chemistry, and worked away every morning with the test-tubes at analytical chemistry under Professor Posselt, at which I one day nearly poisoned myself by tasting oxalic acid, which I did not recognise under its German name of _Kleesaure_. I read broad and wide in German literature, as I think may be found by examining my notes to my translation of Heine's works, and went with Field several times to Frankfort, to attend the theatre, and otherwise amuse ourselves. There I once made the acquaintance of the very famous comic actor Hasselt. He was a grave, almost melancholy man when off the stage, very fond of archaeology and antiquities. The winter drew to an end. I had long felt a deep desire to visit Munich, to study art, and to investigate fundamentally the wonderful and mysterious science of AEsthetics, of which I had heard so much. So I packed up and paid my bills, and passing through one town where there was in the hotel where I stopped, the last wolf ever killed in Germany, and freshly killed (I believe he has been slain two or three times since), and at another where I was invited to see a criminal beheaded by the sword--which sight I missed by over-sleeping myself--I came through Stuttgart, Ulm, and Augsburg to the German Athens. I went to the Hotel Maulick, where I stayed a week. Opposite to me at table every day sat the famous Saphir, the great Vienna wit and licensed joker. Of course I soon became acquainted with some students, and was entered at the University, and got the card which exempted me from being arrested by any save the University beadles. I believe that we even had our own hangman, but as none of my friends ever had occasion for his services I did not inquire. The same ticket also entitled me to attend the opera at half-price, and if it had only included tobacco and beer gratis, it would have been the means of vast economies. I entered myself for a course of lectures by Professor Friedrich Thiersch on AEsthetics. He it was who had trained Heine to art, and I venture to say that in my case the seed fell on good ground. I took in every thought. His system agreed, on the whole, perfectly with that advanced in after years by Taine, and marvellously well with that set forth in the "Essays, Speculative and Suggestive," of J. A. Symonds--that is, it was eclectic and deductive from historical periods, and not at all "rhapsodical" or merely subjective. I bought the best works, such as Kugler's, for guides, and studied hard, and frequented the Pinacothek and Glyptothek, and I may say really educated myself well in the history of art and different schools of aesthetics. My previous reading, travel, and tastes fitted me in every way to easily master such knowledge. I also followed Becker's course on Schelling, but my heart was not in it, as it would have been two years before. The lectures of Professor Henry and Gmelin and true Science had caused in me a distrust of metaphysics and psychological systems and theories. I began to see that they were all only very ingenious shufflings and combinations and phases of the same old cards of Pantheism, which could be made into Theism, Pietism, Atheism, or Materialism to suit any taste. I was advancing rapidly to pure science, though Evolution was as yet unknown by the name, albeit the Okenites and others with their _Natur-philosophie_ were coming closely to it. In fact, I think it may be truly said that, as regarded deducing man and all things from a _prima materia_ or protoplasm by means of natural selection and vast study of differentiation, they were exactly where Darwin, and Wallace, and Huxley were when we began to know the latter. I do not agree with Max Muller in his very German and very artfully disguised and defended theory that the religious idea originated in a vague sense of the Infinite in the minds of savages; for I believe it began with the bogeys and nightmares of obscure terror, hunger, disease, and death; but the Professor is quite right in declaring that Evolution was first created or developed in the German _Natur-philosophie_, the true beginning of which was with the Italian naturalists, such as Bruno and De Cusa. What is to be observed is this, yet few understand it, nor has even Symonds cleared the last barrier--that when a Pantheist has got so far as to conceive an identity between matter and spirit, while on the other hand a scientific materialist rises to the unity of spirit and matter, there is nothing to choose between them. Only this is true, that the English Evolutionists, by abandoning reasoning based on Pantheistic poetic bases, as in Schelling's case, or purely logical, as in Hegel's, and by proceeding on plainly prosaic, merely material, simply scientific grounds after the example of Bacon, swept away so much rubbish that people no longer recognised the old temple of Truth, and really thought it was a brand new workshop or laboratory. But I can remember very distinctly that to me Evolution did _not_ come as if I had received a new soul, or even a new body, but had merely had a bath, and put on new garments. And as I became an English Evolutionist in due time, I had this great advantage, that by beginning so young I succeeded in doing very thoroughly what Symonds and Maudsley and many more clearly understand is _most_ difficult--that is, not merely to accept the truth, but to get rid of the old _associations_ of the puzzle of a difference between spirit and matter, which thing caused even the former to muddle about "God," and express disgust at "Materialism," and declare that there is "an insoluble problem," which is all in flat contradiction to pure Evolution, which does not meddle with "the Unknowable." There was a Jewish professor named Karl Friedrich Neumann, who was about as many-sided a man as could be found even in a German university. He was a great Chinese scholar--had been in China, and also read on mathematics and modern history. I attended these lectures (not the mathematics) and liked them: so we became acquainted. I found that he had written a very interesting little work on the visit recorded in the Chinese annals of certain Buddhist monks to Fusang--probably Mexico--in the fifth century. I proposed to translate it, and did so, he making emendations and adding fresh matter to the English version. Professor Neumann was a vigorous reader, but he soon found that I was of the same kind. One day he lent me a large work on some Indian subject, and the next I brought it back. He said that I could not have read it in the time. I begged him to examine me on it, which he did, and expressed his amazement, for he declared that he had never met with anything like it in all his life. This from him was praise indeed. Long after, in America, George Boker in closer fashion tested me on this without my knowing it, and published the result in an article. I became acquainted with a learned writer on art named Foerster, who had married a daughter of Jean Paul Richter, and dined once or twice at his house. I also saw him twenty years later in Munich. George Ward came in from Berlin to stay some weeks in Munich. I saw Taglioni several times at the opera, but did not make her acquaintance till 1870. The great, tremendous celebrity at that time in Munich was also an opera-dancer, though not on the stage. This was Lola Montez, the King's last favourite. He had had all his mistresses painted, one by one, and the gallery was open to the public. Lola's was the last, and there was a blank space still left _for a few more_. I thought that about twenty- five would complete the collection. Lola Montez had a small palace, and was raised to be the Countess of Landsfeldt, but this was not enough. She wished to run the whole kingdom and government, and kick out the Jesuits, and kick up the devil, generally speaking. But the Jesuits and the mob were too much for her. I knew her very well in later years in America, when she deeply regretted that I had not called on her in Munich. I must have had a great moral influence on her, for, so far as I am aware, I am the only friend whom she ever had at whom she never threw a plate or book, or attacked with a dagger, poker, broom, chair, or other deadly weapon. We were both born at the same time in the same year, and I find by the rules of sorcery that she is the first person who will meet me when I go to heaven. I always had a great and strange respect for her singular talents; there were very few indeed, if any there were, who really knew the depths of that wild Irish soul. Men generally were madly fascinated with her, then as suddenly disenchanted, and then detracted from her in every way. There were many adventuresses in later years who passed themselves about the world for Lola Montez. I have met with two friends, whom I am sure were honest gentlemen, who told me they had known her intimately. Both described her as a large, powerful, or robust woman. Lola was in reality very small, pale, and thin, or _frele_, with beautiful blue eyes and curly black hair. She was a typical beauty, with a face full of character, and a person of remarkably great and varied reading. One of her most intimate friends was wont to tell her that she and I had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle Neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered so much in conversation that she did not get credit for what she really knew. I once met with a literary man in New York who told me he had long desired to make my acquaintance, because he had heard her praise me so immeasurably beyond anybody else she had ever known, that he wanted to see what manner of man I could be. I heard the same from another, in another place long after. Once she proposed to me to make a bolt with her to Europe, which I declined. The secret of my influence was that I always treated her with respect, and never made love or flirted. An intimate of both of us who was present when this friendly proposal was made remarked with some astonishment, "But, Madame, by what means can you two _live_?" "Oh," replied Lola innocently and confidingly, "people like us" (or "who know as much as we") "can get a living anywhere." And she rolled us each a cigarette, with one for herself. I could tell a number of amusing tales of this Queen of Bohemia, but Space, the Kantean god, forbids me more. But I may say that I never had more really congenial and wide-embracing conversations with any human being in my life than with Her Majesty. There was certainly no topic, within my range, at least, on which she could not converse with some substance of personal experience and reading. She had a mania for meeting and knowing all kinds of peculiar people. I lived in the main street near the Karlsthor, opposite a tavern called the Ober-Pollinger, which was a mediaeval tavern in those days. My landlady was a nice old soul, and she had two daughters, one of whom was a beauty, and as gentle and Germanly good as a girl could be. Her face still lives in a great picture by a great artist. We lived on the third floor; on the ground was a shop, in which cutlery and some fireworks were sold. It befell that George Ward and I were very early in the morning sitting on a bench before the Ober-Pollinger, waiting for a stage-coach, which would take us to some place out of town; when bang! bang! crack! I heard a noise in the firework shop, and saw explosions puffing smoke out of the bursting windows. Great God! the front shop was on fire; it was full of fireworks, such as rockets and crackers, and I knew there was a barrel of gunpowder in the back-shop! I had found it out a few days before, when I went there to buy some for my pistols. And the family were asleep. In an instant I tore across the street, rushed screaming upstairs, roused them all out of bed, howling, "It burns!--there's gunpowder!" Yet, hurried as I was, I caught up a small hand-bag, which contained my money, as I got the girls and their mother downstairs. I was just in time to see a gigantic butcher burst open the two-inch door with an axe, and roll out the barrel containing two hundred pounds of gunpowder, as the flames were licking it. I saw them distinctly. It was the awful row which I made which had brought the people out betimes, including the butcher and his axe. But for that, there would have been a fearful blow-up. But the butcher showed himself a man of gold on this occasion, for he it was who really saved us all. A day or two after, when I was jesting about myself as a knightly rescuer of forlorn damsels, in reply to some remark on the event, George Ward called me to order. There was, as he kindly said, too much that he respected in that event to make fun of it. George Ward is deeply impressed on my memory. He was a sedate young fellow, with a gift of dry humour, now and then expressed in quaint remarks, a gentleman in every instinct, much given to reading and reflecting. When he said anything, he meant it, and this remark of his struck me more than the event itself had done. And to think that I quite forgot, in narrating my Princeton experiences, to tell of something very much like this incident. It was in my last year, and my landlady had just moved into a new house, when, owing to some defect in the building, it caught fire, but was luckily saved after it had received some damage. I awoke in the night, flames bursting into my room, and much smoke. It happened that the day before a friend in Alabama had sent me eleven hundred dollars wherewith to pay for him certain debts. My first thought was for this money, so I hurried to get the key of the secretary in which it was--keys never can be found in a hurry--and when found, I could not find the right one in the bunch. And then it stuck in the lock and would not open it, till finally I succeeded and got the money out. And then, not finding myself quite dead, I in a hurry turned the contents of three drawers in my bureau and my linen on to the bed, threw on it my coats and trousers, tied the four corners of a sheet together in one bundle, caught up my boots, fencing-foils, &c., to make another, and so rescued all I had. I verily believe I did it all in one minute. That day the President, old Dr. Carnahan, when I plead "not prepared" for failing at recitation, excused me with a grim smile. I had really that time some excuse for it. During the Munich incident I thought of the sheets. But I had gunpowder and two girls to look after in the latter place, and time and tide--or gunpowder and girls--wait for no man. And so, with study and art and friends, and much terrible drinking of beer and smoking of Varinas-Kanaster, and roaming at times in gay greenwoods with pretty maids alway, and music and dancing, the Munich semester came to an end. I proposed to travel with an English friend named Pottinger to Vienna, and thence by some adventurous route or other through Germany to Paris; which was a great deal more to undertake in those days than it now is, entailing several hundred per cent. more pain and sorrow, fasting, want of sleep and washing, than any man would encounter in these days in going round the world and achieving _la grande route_; or the common European tour, to boot. For it befell me ere I reached my journey's end to pass eighteen nights in one month in Eilwagen or waggons, the latter being sometimes without springs. And once or twice or thrice I was so utterly worn and wearied that I slept all night, though I was so tossed about that I awoke in the morning literally bruised from head to foot, with my chimney-pot hat under my feet; which was worse than even a forced march on short commons--as I found in after years--or driving in a Russian _telega_, or jackassing in Egypt, or any other of the trifles over which pampered tourists make such heart-rending howls now-a-days. So we went to Prague, and thence to Vienna, which, in the year 1847, was a very different place indeed to what it is at present; for an unbounded gaiety and an air of reckless festivity was apparent then all the time to everybody everywhere. Under it all lurked and rankled abuses, municipal, social, and political, such as would in 1893 be deemed incredible if not unnatural (as may be read in a clever novel called _Die schone Wienerinn_), but on the surface all was brilliant foam and sunshine and laughing sirens. What new thing Strauss would play in the evening was the great event of the day. I saw and heard the great Johann Strauss--this was the grandfather--and in after years his son, and the _schone Edie_ his grandson. Everywhere one heard music, and the Prater was a gay and festive paradise indeed. There was no business; the town lived on the Austrian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Russian, and other nobility, who in those days were extravagant and ostentatious to a degree now undreamed of, and on strangers. As for free and easy licentiousness, Paris was a trifle to it, and the police had strict orders to encourage everything of the kind; the result being that the seventh commandment in all its phases was treated like pie-crust, as a thing made to be broken, the oftener the better. Even on our first arriving at our hotel, our good-natured landlord, moved by the principle that it was not good for a young man to be alone, informed us that if we wished to have damsels in our rooms no objection would be interposed. "Why not?" he said; "this is not a church"; the obvious inference being that to a Viennese every place not a church must necessarily be a temple to Venus. And every Wiener, when spoken to, roared with laughter; and there were minstrels in the streets, and musicians in every dining-place and cafe, and great ringing of bells in chimes, and 'twas merry in hall when beards wagged all, and "the world went very well in those days." Vienna is a far finer town now, but it is a Quaker meeting-house compared to what it was for gaiety forty years ago. This change of life and manners has spread, and will continue to spread, all over the world. In feudal times the people were kept quiet by means of holidays, carnivals, processions, fairs, fairy-tales, treats, and indulgences; even the common childish instinct for gay dress and picturesqueness of appearance was encouraged, and at high tides everybody was fed and given to drink: so that if the poor toiled and fasted and prayed, it might be for months, they had their joyous revellings to anticipate, when there were free tables even for strangers. In those days-- "A Christmas banquet oft would cheer A poor man's heart for half the year." This Middle Age lasted effectively until the epoch of the Revolution and railroads, or, to fix a date, till about 1848. And then all at once, as at a breath, it all disappeared, and now lives, so to speak, only in holes and corners. For as soon as railroads came, factories sprang up and Capital began to employ Labour, and Labour to plot and combine against Capital; and what with scientific inventions and a sudden stimulus to labour, and newspapers, the multitude got beyond fancy dresses and the being amused to keep them quiet like children, and so the _juventus mundi_ passed away. "It is a perfect _shame_!" say the dear young lady tourists, "that the peasantry no longer wear their beautiful dresses; they ought to be _obliged_ to keep them up." "But how would _you_ like, my dear, if you were of the lower orders, to wear a dress which proclaimed it?" Here the conversation ceaseth, for it becomes too deep for the lady tourist to follow. How it was we wandered I do not distinctly remember, but having visited Nuremberg, Prague, and Dresden, we went to Breslau, where a fancy seized us to go to Cracow. True, we had not a special _vise_ from a Russian minister to enter the Muscovite dominions, but the police at Breslau, who (as I was afterwards told) loved to make trouble for those on the frontier, bade us be of good cheer and cheek it out, neither to be afraid of any man, and to go ahead bravely. Which we did. There was a sweet scene at the frontier station on the Polish-Russian line at about three o'clock in the morning, when the grim and insolent officials discovered that our passports had only the police _vise_ from Breslau! I was asked why I had not in my native country secured the _vise_ of a Russian minister; to which I replied that in America the very existence of such a country as Russia was utterly unknown, and that I myself was astonished to find that Russians knew what passports were. Also that I always supposed that foreigners conferred a great benefit on a country by spending their money in it; but that if I could not be admitted, that was an end of it; it was a matter of very trifling consequence, indeed, for we really did not care twopence whether we saw Russia or not; a country more or less made very little difference to such travellers as we were. Cheek is a fine thing in its way, and on this occasion I developed enough brass to make a pan, and enough "sass" to fill it; but all in vain. When I visited the Muscovite realm in after years I was more kindly received. On this occasion we were closely searched and re-searched, although we were not allowed to go on into Russia! Every square inch of everything was examined as with a microscope--even the small scraps of newspaper in which soap or such trifles were wrapped were examined, a note made as to each, and all put under paper-weights; and whatever was suspected--as, for instance, books or pamphlets--was confiscated, although, as I said, we were turned back! And this robbery accomplished, we were informed that the stage-coach, or rather rough post-waggon, in which we came, would return at five o'clock P.M., and that we could in it go back to Dresden, and might pass the time till then on a bench outside the building--reflecting on our sins! I had truly some papers about me which I did not care to have examined, but these were in my cravat, and even Russian ingenuity had not at that time got beyond picking pockets and feeling the linings of coats. It has since been suggested to me by something which I read that I was under suspicion. I had in Munich aided a Swiss student who was under police surveillance for political intriguing to escape, by lending him money to get away. It is probable that for this my passport was marked in a peculiar manner. My companion, Pottinger, was not much searched; all suspicion seemed to fall on me. The stage went on, and Pottinger and I sat on the bench in a mild drizzle at half-past three in the morning, with as miserable a country round about as mortal man ever beheld. By-and-bye one of the subs., a poor Pole, moved by compassion and the hope of reward, cautiously invited us to come into his den. He spoke a very little German and a little Latin (Pottinger was an Oxford man, and knew several heavy classics, Greek and Latin, perfectly by heart). The Pole had a fire, and we began to converse. He had heard of America, and that Polish exiles had been well treated there. I assured him that Poles were admired and cherished among us like pet lambs among children, and the adored of the adored. Then I spoke of Russian oppression, and the Pole, in utmost secrecy, produced a sabre which had been borne under Kosciusko, and showed us a silver coin--utterly prohibited--which had been struck during the brief period of the Polish revolution. The Pole began to prepare _his_ coffee--for one. I saw that something must be done to increase the number of cups. He took up his book of prayers and asked of what religion we were. Of Pottinger I said contemptuously, "He is nothing but a heretic," but that as for myself, I had for some time felt a great inclination towards the _Panna_--Holy Virgin--and that it would afford me great pleasure to conform to the Polish Catholic Church, but that unfortunately I did not understand the language. To which he replied, that if _he_ were to read the morning service in Polish and I would repeat it word by word, that the _Panna_ would count it to my credit just as if I had. And as I was praying in good earnest for a breakfast, I trust that it was accepted. Down on our knees we went and began our orisons. "Leland! you --- humbug!" exclaimed Pottinger. "Go away, you infernal heretic, and don't disturb Christians at their devotions!" was my devout reply. So, prayers concluded, there _was_ coffee and rolls for three. And so in due time the coach returned. I rewarded our host with a thaler, and we returned to Breslau, of which place I noted that the natives never ate anything but sweet cakes for their first morning meal. We stopped at Gorlitz, where I asked a woman standing in the half-doorway of the house of Jacob Bohme if that was his house. But she had never heard of such a man! Dresden we thoroughly explored, and were at Leipzig during the great annual fair. These fairs, in those days, were sights to behold. Now they are succeeded by stupendous Expositions, which are far finer and inconceivably greater, yet which to me lack that kind of gypsy, side-show, droll, old-fashioned attraction of the ancient gatherings, even as Barnum's Colossal Moral Show of half-a-dozen circuses at once and twenty-five elephants does not _amuse_ anybody as the old clown in the ring and one elephant did of yore. Thence to Berlin, where we were received with joy by the American students, who knew all about one another all over Germany. I very much enjoyed the great art gallery, and the conversation of those who, like myself, followed lectures on AEsthetics and the history of art. Thence to Magdeburg and Hanover, Dusseldorf--to cut it short, Holland and the chief cities in Belgium. I noted one little change of custom in Berlin. In South Germany it was a common custom for students, when calling on a friend, to bring and leave generally a small bouquet. When I did this in Berlin my friends were astonished at it. This was an old Italian custom, as we may read in the beautiful One Hundred and Fifty _Brindisi_ or Toasts of Minto. "Porto a voi un fior novello, Ed, oh come vago e bello!" In 1847 even a very respectable hotel in Holland was in any city quite like one of two centuries before. You entered a long antiquely-brown room, traversed full length by a table. Before every chair was placed a little metallic dish with hot coals, and a churchwarden pipe was brought to every visitor at once without awaiting orders. The stolid, literal, mechanical action of all the people's minds was then _wonderful_. An average German peasant was a genius compared to these fresh, rosy-fair, well-clad Hollanders. It was to me a new phase of human happiness in imbecility, or rather in undisturbed routine; for it is written that no bird can fly like a bullet and doze or sleep sweetly at the same time. Yet, as from the Huns, the most hideous wretches in the world, there arose by intermixture the Hungarians, who are perhaps the handsomest, so from the Knickerbocker Dutch sprang the wide-awake New Yorkers! The galleries in Holland and Belgium were to me joys unutterable and as the glory of life itself. Munich and Thiersch still inspired me; I seemed to have found a destiny in aesthetics or art, or what had been wanting in Princeton; that is, how the beautiful entered into life and was developed in history and made itself felt in all that was worth anything at all. Modern English writers on this subject--with exceptions like that of J. A. Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly--are in the same relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration as Emerson and Carlyle to Pantheism in its mightiest early forms. For several years the actual mastery of aesthetics gave me great comfort, and advanced me marvellously in thought to wider and far higher regions. I forget where I parted with Pottinger; all that I can remember was, that early in November I arrived alone in Paris, going to some small hotel or other, and that as all the fatigues of the past many weeks of weary travel seemed to come upon me all at once, I went to bed, and never left the house till four o'clock P.M. the next day. On the next I found my way into the Latin Quarter, and secured a _not_ very superior room in the Place Saint-Michel, near the Ecole de Medecine, to which I moved my luggage. I was very much astonished, while sitting alone and rather blue and overcast in my room, at the sudden entrance of a second cousin of mine named Frank Fisher, who was studying medicine in Paris. He had by some odd chance seen my name registered in the newspapers as having arrived at the hotel, and lost no time in looking me up. He lived on the other side of the Seine in the Boule Rouge, near the Rue Helder, a famous happy hunting-ground for _les biches_--I mean kids or the very dear. I must go forthwith to his quarters and dine, which I did, and so my introduction to Paris was fairly begun. I attended at the College Louis le Grand, and at the Sorbonne, all or any lectures by everybody, including a very dull series on German literature by Philarete Chasles. I read books. _Inter alia_, I went through Dante's "Inferno" in Italian aided by Rivarol's translation, of which I possessed the _very copy_ stamped with the royal arms, and containing the author's autograph, which had been presented to the King. I picked it up on the Quai for a franc, for which sum I also obtained a first edition of _Melusine_, which Mr. Andrew Lang has described as such a delightful rarity. And I also ran a great deal about town. I saw Rachel, and Frederic Lemaitre, and Mlle. Dejazet, and many more at the great theatres, and attended assiduously at Bobinot's, which was a very small theatre in the Quartier Latin, frequented entirely by students and grisettes. I went to many a ball, both great and small, including the masked ones of the Grand Opera, and other theatres, at which there was dissipation and diablerie enough to satisfy the most ardent imagination, ending with the _grande ronde infernale_. I made many acquaintances, and if they were not by any means all highly respectable, they were at least generally very singular or notorious. One day I would dine at a place outside the Barrier, where we had a plain but fairly good dinner for a franc, _vin compris_, and where the honoured guest at the head of the table was the _chef des claqueurs_ or head of the paid applauders at all the theatres. Then it would be at a private _table-d'hote_ of _lorettes_, where there was after dinner a little private card-playing. I heard afterwards that two or three unprincipled gamblers found their way into this nest of poor little innocents and swindled them out of all their money. When I was well in funds I would dine at Magny's, where, in those days, one could get such a dinner for ten francs as fifty would not now purchase. When _au sec_, I fed at Flictoteau's--we called him _l'empoisonneur_--where hundreds of students got a meal of three courses with half a bottle of ordinaire, and not so bad either, for thirty sous. It happened one night at Bobinot's that I sat in the front row of the stage-box, and by me a very pretty, modest, and respectable young girl, with her elder relations or friends. How it happened I do not know, but they all went out, leaving the young lady by me, and I did not speak to her. Which "point" was at once seized by the house. The pit, as if moved by one diabolical inspiration, began to roar, "_Il l'embrassera_!" (He will kiss her), to which the gallery replied, "_Il ne l'embrassera pas_." So they kept it up and down alternately like see-sawing, to an intonation; and be it remarked, by the way, that in French such a monotonous bore is known as a _scie_ or saw, as may be read in my romance in the French tongue entitled _Le Lutin du Chateau_, which was, I regret to say, refused by Hachette the publisher on account of its freedom from strait-laced, blue-nosed, Puritanical conventionalism, albeit he praised its literary merit and style, as did sundry other French scholars, if I may say it--who should not! I saw that something must be done; so, rising, I waved my glove, and there was dead silence. Then I began at the top of my voice, in impassioned style in German, an address about matters and things in general, intermingled with insane quotations from Latin, Slavonian, anything. A change came o'er the spirit of the dream of my auditors, till at last they "took," and gave me three cheers. I had _sold_ the house! There was in the Rue de la Harpe a house called the Hotel de Luxembourg. It was the fragment of a very old palace which had borne that name. It had still a magnificent Renaissance staircase, which bore witness to its former glory. Washington Irving, in one of his earlier tales, describes this very house and the rooms which I occupied in it so accurately, that I think he must have dwelt there. He tells that a student once, during the Revolution, finding a young lady in the street, took her home with him to that house. She had a black ribbon round her neck. He twitched it away, when--off fell her head. She had been guillotined, and revived by sorcery. I soon removed to this house, where I had two very good-sized rooms. In the same establishment dwelt a small actress or two, and divers students, or men who were extremely busy all the winter in plotting a revolution. It was considered as a nest of rather doubtful and desperate characters, and an American _carabin_ or student of medicine told me of another who had fled from the establishment after a few days' experience, "for fear lest he should have his throat cut." But this was very silly, for none of us would have cut anybody's throat for any consideration. Some time ago I read the "Memoirs of Claude," who was the head of police in Paris during my time, and I was quite startled to find how many of the notorieties chronicled in his experiences had been known to me personally. As, for instance, Madame Marie Farcey, who he declares had a heart of gold, and with whom I had many a curious conversation. She was a handsome, very ladylike, suave sort of a person, who was never known to have an intrigue with any man, but who was "far and away" at the very head of all the immorality in Paris, as is well known to everybody who was deeply about town in the Forties. Claude himself I never knew, and it was to his possible great loss; for there came a time when I could, had I chosen, have given him information which would have kept him in office and Louis Philippe on the throne, and turned the whole course of the events of 1848, as I will now clearly and undeniably prove. I did not live in the Hotel de Luxembourg for nothing, and I knew what was going on, and what was coming, and that there was to be the devil to pay. Claude tells us in his "Memoirs" that the revolution of February 24 took him so much by surprise that he had only three hours' previous notice of it, and really not time to remove his office furniture. Now, _one month_ before it burst out I wrote home to my brother that we were to have a revolution on the 24th of February, and that it would certainly succeed. Those who would learn all the true causes and reasons of this may find them in my forthcoming translation of "Heine's Letters from Paris," with my notes. The police of Paris were very clever, but the whole organisation was in so few hands, and we managed so well, that they never found us out. It was beyond all question the neatest, completest, and cheapest revolution ever executed. Lamartine himself was not allowed to know anything about it till he was wanted for President. And all over the Latin Quarter, on our side of the river, in cafes and balls and in shops, and talking to everybody, went the mysterious dwellers of the Hotel de Luxembourg, sounding public opinion and gathering signs and omens, and making recruits and laying trains, which, when fired, caused explosions all over Europe, and sounds which still live in history. And all the work was duly reported at head-quarters. The great secret of the success of the revolution was that it was in the hands of so few persons, who were all absolutely secret and trustworthy. If there had been a few more, the police would have found us out to a certainty. One who was suspected was "squared." At last the ball opened. There was the great banquet, and the muttering storm, and angry mobs, and small _emeutes_. There is a mere alley--I forget its name--on the right bank, which runs down to the Seine, in which it is said that every Paris revolution has broken out. Standing at its entrance, I saw three or four shots fired and dark forms with guns moving in the alley, and then came General Changarnier with his cavalry and made a charge, before which I fled. I had to dodge more than one of these charges during the day. Before dark the rioting was general, and barricades were going up. The great storm-bell of Notre Dame rung all night long. The next morning I rose, and telling Leonard Field, who lived in the same hotel with me, that I was going to work in earnest, loaded a pair of duelling-pistols, tied a sash round my waist _en revolutionnaire_, and with him went forth to business. First I went to the Cafe Rotonde, hard by, and got my breakfast. Then I sallied forth, and found in the Rue de la Harpe a gang of fifty insurgents, who had arms and a crowbar, but who wanted a leader. Seeing that I was one of them, one said to me, "Sir, where shall we make a barricade?" I replied that there was one already to the right and another farther down, but that a third close at hand was open. Without a word they handed me the crowbar, and I prized up the stones out of the pavement, while they undertook the harder work of piling them up. In a few minutes we had a solid wall eight feet high. Field had on light kid gloves, which formed an amusing contrast to his occupation. Then remembering that there was a defenceless spot somewhere else, I marched my troop thither, and built another barricade--all in grim earnest without talking. I forgot to say that on the previous day I had witnessed a marvellously dramatic scene in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, by the market-house. There was across it an immense barricade, made of literally everything--old beds, waggons, stones, and rubbish--and it was guarded by a dense crowd of insurgents, armed or unarmed, of whom I was one. All around were at least three thousand people singing the _Marseillaise_ and the _Chant des Girondins_. There was a charge of infantry, a discharge of muskets, and fifteen fell dead, some almost touching me, while the mob around never ceased their singing, and the sounds of that tremendous and terrible chorus mingled with the dying groans and cries of the victims and the great roar of the bell of Notre Dame. It was like a scene in the opera. This very barricade has been described by Victor Hugo in detail, but not all which took place there, the whole scene being, in fact, far more dramatic or picturesque than he supposed it to have been. It seemed to be predestined that I should see every great event in that drama, from the charge of Changarnier down to the very end, and I hereby declare that on my honour I set forth exactly what I saw with my own eyes, without a shade of colour off the truth. There was a garcon named Edouard, who always waited on me in the Cafe Rotonde. While I was working for life at my second barricade, he came out holding a napkin, and examining my labour critically, waved it, exclaimed approvingly, "_Tres bien_, _Citoyen Charles_--_tres bien_!" It was his little joke for some days after to call me Citoyen Charles. Returning down the Rue de la Harpe before our house my landlady exclaimed to me in alarm, "Hide your pistols! there is a _mouchard_ (spy of the police) following you." I believe that I, my blood being up, said something to the effect that if she would point him out I would shoot him forthwith, but the _mouchard_ had vanished. We had all got into cool earnestness by that time as regards shooting, having been in it constantly for three days. Over the barricade came sprawling a tall ungainly red-haired Yankee, a student of medicine, whom I had met before, and who began to question me as to what I was doing. To which I replied, "What the devil do you want here, anyhow?" not being in a mood to be trifled with. To which he replied, "Nawthin', only a kinder lookin' reound. But what on airth--" "But are you for us, or against?" I cried. "Wall, I ain't on no side." "See here!" I cried in a rage; "those who are not for us are against us. Any one of those fellows you see round here would shoot you at once if I told him to, and if you don't clear out in double quick time, by God I will!" And at this he made himself scarce forthwith, "nor does he come again into this story." Then I went down the street, and as a large supply of ammunition came to us from our friends, with the aid of a student of the Ecole Polytechnique, I distributed it to the mob. I had principally boxes of percussion-caps to give. I mention this because that young man has gone into history for it, and I have as good a right to a share in this extremely small exploit as he. Besides, though not wounded by the foe, I got a bad cut on my hand from a sharp paving-stone, and its scar lasted for many years. I had that day many a chance to knock over a _piou-piou_ or shoot a soldier, as Field said, but I must confess that I felt an invincible repugnance to do so. The poor devils were, after all, only fighting unwillingly against us, and I well knew that unless they came over to our side all would be up with us. Therefore it was our policy to spare them as much as possible. I owe it to Field to state that through all the stirring scenes of the Revolution he displayed great calmness and courage. All at once we heard a terrible outcry down the street. There was a tremendous massing of soldiers there, and to defend that barricade meant death to all defenders. I confess that I hesitated _one instant_, and than rushed headlong to join the fight. Merciful God! the troops had fraternised with us, and they were handing over their muskets to the mob, who were firing them in the air. The scene was terribly moving. My men, who a minute before had expected to be shot, rushed up, embraced and kissed the soldiers, wept like children--in short, everybody kissed and embraced everybody else, and all my warriors got guns, and therewith I dismissed them, for I knew that the war was now about at an end. There was a German-French student named Lenoir, and he, with Field and I, hearing that there was sharp work at the Tuileries, started thither in haste. And truly enough, when we got there, the very devil was loose, with guns firing and the guard-house all in a blaze. The door was burst open, and Field and I were among the very first who entered. We behaved very well, and did not steal anything. I remember that there was a great pile of plate and jewellery soon laid by the door. I went into the throne-room. There was a great silver inkstand on the table, paper and pens, and we wrote, "Respect Property!" "Liberty for Italy and Hungary!" and hung the papers up around the room. I wrote one or two myself, and _touched_ the inkstand for luck, in case I should ever write about the event. It was a great and indeed a very touching and beautiful sight, for all present were inspired with a feeling like that of men who have passed a terrible, racking crisis. _Nous avons vaincu_! Yes, we had conquered. And the Revolution had marched sternly on through years of discontent unto the year of aggravation, Forty-Eight, when there was thunder all round in Europe--and after all, France at one desperate bound had again placed herself in the van! And it was first decided by the taking of the Tuileries! Let me dwell an instant on some minor incidents. Many of the insurgents had been all night without food. The royal dinner was cooking in the kitchen, and it was droll to see the men helping themselves and walking off with the chickens and joints on their bayonets. I had never seen a royal kitchen before. Soon all along the street loafers were seen with jars of preserved cherries, &c., emptying them into their caps. I went into the burning guard-house. A savage fellow offered me a great tin pail, containing about two gallons of wine, which he offered me to drink. I was very thirsty, but I had a scruple against plunder. Grasping his sword, he cried, "_Buvez_, _citoyen_; _c'est du vin royal_." Not wishing to have a duel _a l'outrance_ with a fellow-patriot, and, as I said, being thirsty, I took a good long pull. We mutually winked and smiled. He took a pull also to my health and Liberty. We both "pulled." I forgot to mention how my cohort had partially armed themselves that morning. They burst into every house and carried off all the arms they could find, and then wrote in chalk over the doors--"_Armes donnees_." The Musee Cluny was very near my hotel and I saw it plundered. Such a sight! I saw one vagabond on a fine stolen horse, with a mediaeval helmet on his head, a lance in his hand, and a six-feet double-handed sword or flamberg hanging behind his back. He appeared to be quite drunk, and reared about in eccentric _gambades_. This genius of Freedom reappeared at the Tuileries. Mortal man was never under such temptation to steal as I was--just one fifteenth-century poignard as a souvenir--from that Museum--in fact, it was my _duty_ at that instant to do so, whispered the tempter in my ear. But I resisted; and lo! it came to pass in later years that I became possessed, for a mere trifle, in Dresden, of the court dagger, in exquisite carved ivory, which was originally made for Francis II. of France, and which has been declared by competent authority to be authentic. Owing to his short reign there are very few relics of this monarch. Some of the blackguards in the mob drew out the royal carriages, set fire to them, and rolled them gaily along the _quai_. A noble-looking very old gentleman in military costume spoke to me before the Tuileries, and saying that he had seen all of the old Revolution and Napoleon's wars, actually with tears in his eyes implored me to use my influence to prevent any plundering. "_Respectez la properte_." There were very few gentlemen indeed among the insurgents. I only observed two or three in our quarter, and they were all from our hotel, or rather lodgings. But the next day every swell in Paris came out as an insurgent. _They_ had all worked at barricades--so they said. I certainly had not seen any of them at work. That afternoon I strolled about with Field. We came to a barricade. A very pretty girl guarded it with a sword. She sternly demanded the parole or countersign. I caught hold of her and kissed her, and showed my pistols. She laughed. As I was armed with dirk and pistols, wore a sash, and was unmistakably a Latin Quarter _etudiant_, as shown by long hair, rakish cap on one side, red neck-tie, and single eyeglass, I was everywhere treated as a man and brother, friend and equal, warrior, and--by the girls--almost like a first-cousin. Field shared the glory, of course. And we made a great deal out of it, and were thought all the more of in consequence. _Vive la jeunesse_! Coming to a corner, we heard three or four musket-shots. We turned the corner, and saw a man lying dead or dying in the last quiver, while at his head there was at once placed a stick with a paper on it, on which was written with lead-pencil, "_Mort aux voleurs_!" The day before, one insurgent had offered me a beautiful old silver-mounted sword for one of my pistols, fire-arms being so much in demand, but I declined the offer. The day after, I went into a cafe. There were some students there who had laid their arms on a table. There was a very notorious little _lorette_, known as Pochardinette, who was so called because she was always half-tipsy. She was even noted in a popular song as-- "La Pochardinette, Qui ne sait refuser Ni la ponche a pleine verre, Ni sa bouohe a baiser." Pochardinette picked up a horse-pistol, when its owner cried, "Let that be! That is not the kind of weapon which _you_ are accustomed to manage!" I stared at him with respect, for he had actually translated into French an epigram by Jacopo Sannazar, word for word! I should here mention that on the 24th there was actually a period of two hours during which France had no Government--that is, none that it knew of. Then there appeared on the walls all at once small placards giving the list of names of the _Gouvernement Provisoire_. Now, during this period of suspense there appeared at the Hotel de Ville a mysterious stranger; a small, bustling, active individual, who came in and announced that a new Government had been formed, that he himself had been appointed Minister, that France expected every man to do his duty, and that no one should lose their places who conformed to his orders. "I appoint," he said, "So-and-so to take command of Vincennes. Here, you--_Chose_! notify him at once and send orders. I believe that _Tel-et-tel_ had better take Marseilles. Do any of you fellows know of a good governor for Mauritius?" So _he_ governed France for half-an-hour and then disappeared, and nobody ever knew to this day who this stupendous joker was. A full account of it all appeared some time after, and the cream of the joke was that some of his appointed ones contrived to keep their places. This brief dynasty has not been recorded in any work save this! It was a droll fact that I had, the year before, at Heidelberg, drawn a picture of myself as an insurgent at a barricade, and written under it, "The Boy of the Barricades." I had long had a strange presentiment as to this event. I gave the picture to Peter A. Porter, then a student, and owner of a singular piece of property--that is, Niagara Falls, or at least Goat Island and more or less of the American side. Some time after the 24th he showed me this picture in Paris. He himself, I have heard, died fighting bravely in our Civil War. His men were so much attached to him that they made, to recover his body, a special sally, in which twelve of them were killed. He was _bon compagnon_, very pleasant, and gifted with a very original, quaint humour. If our ungrateful temporary stepmother, France, did not know it, at least the waiters in the cafes, shopkeepers, and other people in the Latin Quarter were aware that Field and I were among the extremely small and select number of gentlemen who had operated at the barricades for the health of Freedom, and for some time we never entered a restaurant without hearing admiring exclamations from the respectful waiters of "_Ces sont les Americains_!" or "_Les Anglais_." And indeed, to a small degree, I even made a legendary local impression; for a friend of mine who went from Philadelphia to Paris two years later, reported that I was still in the memory of the Quarter as associated with the Revolution and life in general. One incident was indeed of a character which French students would not forget. I had among my many friends, reputable and demi-reputable, a rather remarkable _lorette_ named Maria, whose face was the very replica of that of the Laughing Faun of the Louvre--or, if one can conceive it, of a very pretty "white nigger." This young lady being either _ennuyee_ or frightened by the roar of musketry--probably the former--and knowing that I was a Revolutionist and at work, conceived the eccentric idea of hiring a coach, just when the fighting was at the worst, and driving over from the Rue Helder to visit me. Which she actually did. When she came to a barricade, she gave five francs to the champions of liberty, and told them she was bearing important political orders to one of their leaders. Then the warriors would unharness the horses, lift the carriage and beasts somehow over the barricade, re-harness, hurrah, and "_Adieu_, _madame_! _Vive la liberte_!" And so, amid bullets and cheers, and death-stroke, and powder-smoke--_hinc et inde mors et luctus_--Maria came to my door in a carriage, and found me out with a vengeance--for I was revelling at the time in the royal halls of the Bourbons, or at least drinking wine out of a tin pail in the guard- house, whereby I escaped the expense of a truffled champagne dinner at Magny's--while the young lady was about fifty francs out of pocket by her little drive, probably the only one taken that day in Paris. But she had a fearfully jolly time of it, and saw the way that guns were fired to perfection. This, too, became one of the published wonders of the day, and a local legend of renown. Of course all these proceedings put an end to lectures and study for the time. Then Mr. Goodrich, our Consul, as I have before said, organised a deputation of Americans in Paris to go and congratulate the new _Gouvernement Provisoire_ on the new Republic, of which I was one, and we saw all the great men, and Arago made us a speech. Unfortunately all the bankers stopped paying money, and I had to live principally on credit, or sailed rather close to it, until I could write to my father and get a draft on London. But when the Revolution of June was coming, I determined to leave Paris. I had no sympathy for the Socialists, and I knew very well that neither the new Government, nor the still newer Louis Napoleon, who was looming up so dangerously behind it, needed _my_ small aid. There was a regulation in those days that every foreign resident on leaving Paris must give twenty-four hours' notice to the police before he could obtain his passport. But when I applied for mine, it was handed out at once "over the counter," with a smile and a wink, as if unto one who was merrily well known, with an intimation that they were rather glad that I was going, and would do everything to facilitate my departure. I suspect that my _dossier_ must have been interesting reading! M. Claude, or his successor, was probably of the same mind regarding me as the old black preacher in Philadelphia regarding a certain convert, "De Lawd knows we don' want no sitch bredderin in _dis_ congregation!" So I went to Rouen and saw the cathedral and churches--it was a very quaint old town then--and thence to Havre, where I took passage on a steamboat for London. The captain had a very curious old Gnostic-Egyptian ring, with a gem on which were four animal heads in one, or a chimaera. I explained what it was, and that it meant the year. But the captain could not rest till he had got the opinion of a fussy old Frenchman, who, as a doctor, was of course supposed to know more than I. He looked at it, and, with a great air, remarked, "_C'est grecque_!" Then the captain was _quite_ satisfied. It was Greek! I went in London to a very modest hotel, where I was, however, very comfortable. In those days a bottle of the very vilest claret conceivable, and far worse than "Gladstone," cost four or five shillings; therefore I took to pale ale. Ewan Colquhoun soon found me out, and, under his guidance, and that of two or three others whom I had met, I soon explored London. Firstly, he took me daily to his house in St. James Street, where I can recall his mother, Mrs. Colquhoun, and father, and brothers, Patrick and James. Patrick was a remarkable young man. He had graduated at Cambridge and Heidelberg and filled diplomatic capacities in the East, and was familiar with many languages from Arabic to Gaelic, and was the first amateur light-weight boxer in England, and first sculler on the Thames, and had translated and annotated the principal compendium of Roman law. He took me to see a grand rowing match, where we were in the _Leander_ barge. So here and there I was introduced to a great many people of the best society. Meanwhile, with Ewan, I visited the Cider Cellars, Evans', the Judge and Jury Club, Cremorne, and all the gay resorts of those days, not to mention the museums, Tower, and everything down to Madame Tussaud's. I went down in a diving-bell in the Polytechnic, and over Barclay and Perkins' Brewery. One night Colquhoun and I went to Drury Lane, and, after hearing Grisi, Mario, and Lablache together, saw the great _pas de quatre_ which became a historical marvel. For it was danced by Taglioni, Cerito, Carlotta Grisi, and Lucile Grahn. In after years, when I talked with Taglioni about it, she assured me that night I had witnessed what the world had never seen since, the greatest and most perfect execution conceivable. For the four great artists, moved by rivalry, were inspired to do their best before such an audience as was seldom seen. Colquhoun kept pointing out one celebrity after another to me; I verily believe that I saw most of the great men and women of the time. And afterwards I saw a great number in Parliament. There was a rather distinguished-looking Frenchman very much about town in London while I was there. He was always alone, and always dressed in a long, light overcoat. Wherever I went, to Cremorne or the Park, there he was. When Louis Napoleon came up in the world and I saw his photograph, I at once recognised my Frenchman. There roomed next to me in our hotel a German from Vienna named Becker. He was an opera-singer, and the newspapers said that he was fully equal to the first baritone of the day. I forget who that was: was it Pischek? I liked him very much; he was always in my room, and always singing little bits, but I was not much impressed by them, and once told him that I believed that I could sing as loudly as he. He never said a word, but at once let out his whole voice in a tremendous _aria_. I clapped my hands to my ears; I verily believed that he would shatter the windows! I have heard of a singer who actually broke a goblet by vibration, and I now believe that it is possible. I was once shown in the Hague Museum a goblet which rang marvellously in accompaniment when one sang to it, and have met with others like it. I was invited by a young friend named Hunt (a son of the great Chartist), who had been a friend of mine in Heidelberg, where he had taken his degree as doctor of Philosophy, to pass a week in the country at a charming old Elizabethan place, said to have been the original Bleak House. Everything there was perfectly delightful. There were two or three charming young ladies. I remember among them a Miss Oliphaunt. There was a glorious picnic, to which I and all walked eight miles and back. I admired on this occasion for the first time the pedestrian powers of English girls. I visited Verulamium and St. Alban's Abbey, not then "restored," and other beautiful places. It all seemed like a fairy-tale, for the charm of my early reading came over me like enchantment. One night Hunt and I went into a little wayside inn. There were assembled a number of peasants--hedgers and ditchers, or such like. We treated them to ale, and they sang many strange old songs. Then I was called on, and I sang "Sir Patrick Spens," which was well received. I returned to London, and found, to my dismay, that I had not enough money to take me home! I had received a bill of exchange on a merchant in London, and, in my innocence, never dreamed that it constituted no claim on him whatever for a further supply. I called at his office, saw his son, who naturally informed me that they could advance me no more money, but referred me to his father. The old gentleman seemed to be amused, and questioned me all about myself. When he found that his Philadelphia correspondent was very well known to my father, and that the son of the correspondent was a fellow-student of mine at Heidelberg and Paris, he asked me how much I wanted. When I replied, "Only enough to pay my passage," he replied, "Is that all?" and at once gave me the money. Then he questioned me as to my friends in London, and said, "You have seen something of the aristocracy, I would like you to see some of the business people." So he invited me to a dinner at the Reform Club, to meet a few friends. Among these was a Mr. Birch, son of the celebrated Alderman Birch. He had directed the dinner, being a famous _gourmet_, and Soyer had cooked it. That dinner cost my host far more than he had made out of me. We had six kinds of choicest wines, which impressed me _then_. Mr. Birch was a man of literary culture, and we went deeply into books. The next day he sent me a charming work which he had written on the religious belief of Shakespeare, in which it was fairly proved that the immortal bard had none. And I was so well pleased with England, that I liked it better than any country I had ever visited. In 1870, when I came to London, and found my character of "Hans Breitmann" on three stages at once, I received, of course, a great deal of attention. Somebody said to me, "Oh, of course; you come here well known, and are made a great deal of." I replied, "Twenty years ago I came to London without a single letter of introduction, and had only two or three student friends, and received just as much kind hospitality." I think that like generally finds its like, so long as it is honest and can pay its bills. I left Portsmouth for New York in a sailing-vessel or packet. I could have returned by steamer, but preferred the latter, as I should now, if there were any packets crossing the ocean. In old times travel was a pleasure or an art; now it is the science of getting from place to place in the shortest time possible. Hence, with all our patent Pullman cars and their dentist's chairs, Procrustean sofas, and headlong passages, we do _not_ enjoy ourselves as we did when the coach went on the road so slowly as to allow us to see the country, when we halted often and long, many a time in curious old villages. But "the idea of dragging along in that way!" Well, and what, O tourist, dost thou travel _for_? There was on the vessel in which I sailed, among the few passengers, Mrs. and Mr. John Gilbert, a well-known dramatic couple, who were extremely agreeable and genial, the husband abounding in droll reminiscences of the stage; a merry little German musician named Kreutzer, son of the great composer; and a young Englishwoman with a younger brother. I rather doubted the "solidity" of this young lady. By-and-bye it was developed that the captain was in love with her. Out of this, I have heard, came a dreadful tragedy; for the love drove him mad, the insanity developing itself on the return voyage. The captain had to be imprisoned in his own state-room, where he committed suicide in a terrible manner by tearing his throat open with the point of a candlestick or sconce. The second mate, who was as coarse a brute as a common sailor could be, took command, and as he at once got drunk, and kept so, the passengers rose, confined him, and gave the command to the third, who was very young. "Thus woman is the cause of fearful deeds." However, I freely admit that this incident resulted from a long voyage, for we were thirty-five days in going from port to port. In only a week, with three or four days' preliminary sea-sickness, there is hardly time for "flirtation and its consequences." Nor was it so much a stormy trip as one with long sunny calms. Then we hauled up Gulf-weed with little crabs--saw Portuguese men-of-war or sea-anemones sailing along like Cleopatra's barges with purple sails, or counted flying-fish. Apropos of this last I have something to say. During my last trip I once devoted an afternoon to closely observing these bird-like creatures, and very distinctly saw two cases in which the fish turned and flew against the wind or tacked--a fact which has been denied. One day I saw a few rudder-fish playing about the stern. They weigh perhaps some six or seven pounds; so, standing on velvet cushions in the cabin, I fished out of the stern-window. Then came a bite, and in a second I had my fish flapping about on the carpet under the table, to the great amazement of the steward, who had probably never had a live fish jump so promptly before into his hands. And we had it for dinner. One day a ship made to us a signal of distress, and sent a boat, saying that they were completely out of fuel; also that their passengers consisted entirely of the celebrated Ravel troupe of acrobats and actors. It would have been an experience to have crossed in that packet with their chief, Gabriel! Gabriel Ravel--it is one of my brother's published tales--was a good boxer as well as a marvellous acrobat, and he could _look_ like what he pleased. One morning a muscular and vain New York swell saw in a gymnasium one whom he supposed to be a very verdant New Jersey rustic gaping about. The swell exhibited with great pride his skill on the parallel bars, horizontal pole, _et cetera_, and seeing the countryman absolutely dumbfounded with astonishment, proposed to the latter to put on the gloves. "Jersey" hardly seemed to know what gloves were, but with much trouble he was got into form and set to milling. But though he was as awkward as a blind cow, the swell pugilist could not for a very long time get in a blow. Jersey dodged every hit "somehow" in a manner which seemed to be miraculous. At last one told on his chest, and it appeared to be a stunner, for it knocked him into the air, where he turned a double somersault, and then fell on his feet. And it seemed as if, during this flight, he had been suddenly inspired with a knowledge of the manly art, for on descending, he went at the swell and knocked him from time. It was Gabriel Ravel. We saw an iceberg far away, and lay off on the Grand Banks (where our steerage passengers caught cod-fish), and beheld a water-spout--I once saw two at a time in the Mediterranean--and whales, which were far commoner then than now, it being rumoured that the one, and no more, which is regularly seen by passengers now is a tame one belonging to the White Star or some other line, which keeps him moored in a certain place on exhibition; also that what Gulf-weed there is left is grown near New York and scattered by night from certain boats. It may be so--this is an artificial age. All that remains is to learn that the flying-fish are No. 3 salt mackerel set with springs, and I am not sure that I should doubt even _that_. IV. THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 1848-1862. Home--Studying law with John Cadwallader--Philadelphia as I found it--Richard B. Kimball--"Fusang"--Literal reporting in German--First experiences in magazines and newspapers--Father Matthew--Dr. Rufus Griswold--Engaged to be married--A journey North--Colonel Cotl and pistol-practice with him--Alfred Jaell--Editor of Barnum's _Illustrated News_--Dr. Griswold and his MS.--Bixby's--Mr. Barnum--My first books--New York society in the early Fifties--Alice and Phoebe Carey--Washington Irving--Bayard Taylor--N. P. Willis--J. G. Saxe--H. C. Carey--Emily Schaumberg--I become assistant-editor of the _Bulletin_--George H. Boker--Cremation--Editorial life--Paternal enterprise--My father renews his fortune--I am married--The Republican Convention--First great dissension with the South--Translating Heine--The lady in the burning hotel--The writing of "Hans Breitmann's Barty"--Change to New York--Appletons' _Cyclopaedia_--G. W. Ripley and Charles A. Dana--Foreign editing of _New York Times_--"Vanity Fair"--The Bohemians--Artemus Ward--Lincoln's election--The Civil War--My political work in the _Knickerbocker_--Emancipation--I become sole editor of the _Continental Magazine_--What I did in 1862 and 1863 in aid of the Union cause. So we arrived in New York, and within an hour or two after my arrival I was in the train _en route_ for Philadelphia. On the way, I intrusted a newsboy with an English shilling to go and get me change. I still await that change. And in Philadelphia the hackman who drove me to my father's house, as soon as the trunks were removed, departed suddenly, carrying away with him a small hand-bag containing several valuable objects, which I never recovered. I began to think that if the object of travel be to learn to keep one's eyes open and avoid being swindled, that I had better have remained at home. My father had removed to another house in Walnut Street, below Twelfth Street. After this he only changed dwellings once more before his death. This constant change from one rented house to another, like the changes from school to school, is very unfortunate, as I have before said, for any family. It destroys all the feeling and unity of character which grow up in a settled _home_. I pass over the joy of again seeing my parents, the dear sisters, and brother Henry. I was soon settled down, soon visiting friends, going to evening parties, making morning or afternoon calls, and after a little while was entered as a law-student in the office of John Cadwallader in Fourth Street. I cannot pass over the fact, for it greatly influenced my after life, that though everybody was very kind to me, and I was even in a small way a kind of lion, the change from my late life was very hard to bear. I have read a wonderful story of a boy who while at a severe school had a marvellous dream. It seemed to last for years, and while it lasted, he went to the University, graduated, passed into diplomatic life, was a great man and beloved; when all at once he awoke and found himself at school again and birchable. After the freedom of student life in Heidelberg and Munich and Paris, and having been among the few who had carried out a great revolution, and much familiarity with the most cosmopolite type of characters in Europe, and existing in literature and art, I was settled down to live, move, and have all being henceforth and perhaps for ever in Philadelphia! Of which city, at that time, there was not one in the world of which so little evil could be said, or so much good, yet of which so few ever spoke with enthusiasm. Its inhabitants were all well-bathed, well-clad, well-behaved; all with exactly the same ideas and the same ideals. A decided degree of refinement was everywhere perceptible, and they were so fond of flowers that I once ascertained by careful inquiry that in most respectable families there was annually much more money expended for bouquets than for books. When a Philadelphian gave a dinner or supper, his great care was to see that everything _on the table_ was as good or perfect as possible. I had been accustomed to first considering what should be placed _around_ it on the chairs as the main item. The lines of demarcation in "society" were as strongly drawn as in Europe, or more so, with the enormous difference, however, that there was not the slightest perceptible shade of difference in the intellects, culture, or character of the people on either side of the line, any more than there is among the school-boys on either side of the mark drawn for a game. Very trifling points of difference, not perceptible to an outsider, made the whole difference between the exclusives and the excluded; just as the witch-mark no larger than a needle-point indicates to the judge the difference between the saved and the damned. I had not been long engaged in studying law when I made the acquaintance of Richard B. Kimball, a lawyer of New York, who had written a few novels which were very popular, and are still reprinted by Tauchnitz. He knew everybody, and took a great interest in me, and opened the door for me to the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. To this I had contributed articles while at Princeton. I now sent it my translation of Professor Neumann's "Chinese in Mexico in the Fifth Century." I forget whether this was in 1849 or 1850. In after years I expanded it to a book, of which a certain Professor said, firstly in a paper read before the American Asiatic Society, and secondly in a pamphlet, that there was nothing of any importance in it which had not already appeared in Bancroft's work on the Pacific. I wrote to him, pointing out the fact that Bancroft's work did not appear till many years after my article in the _Knickerbocker_. To which the Sinologist replied very suavely and apologetically indeed that he was "very sorry," but had never seen the article in the _Knickerbocker_, &c. But he did not _publish_ the correction, as he should have done. For which reason I now vindicate myself from the insinuated accusation that I borrowed from Bancroft. I had, indeed, almost forgotten this work, "Fusang," when, in 1890, Prince Roland Bonaparte, at a dinner given by him to the Congres des Traditions Populaires, startled me by recurring to it and speaking of it with great praise. For it vindicates the claim of the French that Desguignes first discovered the fact that the Chinese were the first to discover America. If any one doubts this, let him read the truly great work of Vinton on the whole. Prince Roland had been in China and earnestly studied the subject. Von Eichthal had endorsed my views, and wrote to me on Fusang. I have been for many years well acquainted with his nephew, Baron von Eichthal, and his remarkably accomplished wife, who is expert in all the minor arts. My father's resources became about this time limited, and I, in fact, realised that he had taxed himself more than I had supposed to maintain me abroad. His Congress Hall property did not pay much rent. For my position in the world, friends, studies, and society, I found myself very much and very often in great need of money. As at that time we were supposed to be much richer than we really were, this was an additional source of trial. I began to see clearly that in the law, as in all business or professions, I should have to wait for years ere I could make a living. For the instances are very few and far between in which a young man, who has not inherited or grown up to a practice, can make one himself at once. More than this, I was not fitted for law at all. From my birth I had absolutely one of those peculiar temperaments which really disqualify men for "business." If I had entered a law-office in which there was much office-work or practice, I might have acquired a practical interest in the profession, but of this there was in ours literally none whatever. I had a great fondness for copying deeds, &c., but Mr. Cadwallader, though he very much admired my quaint round hand, being the very soul of honour, observing that I was eager for such work, would not give me much of it though it would have been to his profit, because, as he said, "students who paid should not be employed as clerks only, much less as copying machines." As it had always been deeply impressed on my mind by every American friend that I had "no business capacity," and, moreover, as I greatly dreaded speaking in court, I had from the beginning a great fear that I could never live by the law. I mention this because there are many thousands of young men who suffer terribly from such apprehension, and often ruin life by it. A few months' practice in a mercantile college will go far to relieve the first apprehension, while as regards _stage fright_, it can be easily educated out of anybody, as I have since those days educated it out of myself, so that rising to debate or speak inspires in me a _gaudium certaminis_, which increases with the certainty of being attacked. Let the aspirant begin by reading papers before, let us say, a family or school, and continue to do so frequently and at as short intervals as possible before such societies or lyceums as will listen to him. Then let him speak from memory or improvise and debate. This should form a part of all education whatever, and it should be _thorough_. It is specially needed for lawyers and divines, yet a great proportion of both are most insufficiently trained in it; and while I was studying law it was never mentioned to me. I was never so much as once taken into court or _practically_ employed in any manner whatever. I remember an amusing incident in the office. Mr. Cadwallader asked me one day to call, returning from my lunch, on a certain Mr. Dimpfel, one of his clients, leave a certain message and his request as follows:--"I want you, Mr. Leland, to be _very careful_. I have observed that you are sometimes inaccurate in such matters, therefore be sure that you give me Mr. Dimpfel's _very words_." Mr. Cadwallader knew French and Spanish perfectly, but not German, and was not aware that I always conversed with Mr. Dimpfel in the latter language. When I returned my teacher said-- "Now, Mr. Leland, can you repeat accurately _word for word_ what Mr. Dimpfel said?" I replied: "Yes. _Der Herr Dimpfel lasst sich grussen und meldet das er Montag kommen wird um halb drei_. _Und er sagt weiter_ . . . " "That will do," cried Mr. Cadwallader; "you must give it in English." "I beg your pardon," was my grave reply, "but you asked for his very words." I began to write for publication in 1849. Mr. John Sartain, a great engraver, established a magazine, to which I contributed several articles on art subjects, subsequently many more on all subjects, and finally every month a certain number of pages of humorous matter. A man named Manuel Cooke established in Philadelphia a _Drawing-Room Journal_. For this I wrote a great deal for a year or two. It paid me no money, but gave me free admission to theatres, operas, etc., and I learned a great deal as to the practical management of a newspaper. The first summer after my return we went to Stonington, and thence to visit our friends in New England, as of yore. At Dedham I had an attack of cholera; my uncle, Dr. Stimson, gave me during the night two doses of laudanum of fifty drops each, which cured me. Father Matthew came to Dedham. I went with a very pretty young cousin of mine named Marie Lizzie Fisher, since deceased, to hear him preach. After the address, meeting the Father, I went boldly up and introduced myself to him, and then Miss Fisher. I think that his address must have deeply affected me, since I was obliged to stop on my way home to take a drink to steady my nerves. It was against the law at that time to sell such "poison," so the hotel-keeper took me and my paternal uncle, George, who treated, down into the cellar, where he had concealed some Hollands. I can remember that that pleasant summer in Dedham I, one Sunday morning in the church during service, composed a poem, which in after years even found its way into "The Poets and Poetry of America." It began with the words-- "O'er an old ruined doorway Philosophus hung, And madly his bell-cap And bauble he swung." It was a wild mixture of cosmopolitanism and Hamletism, and it indicates accurately the true state of my _cor cordium_ at that time. Earnest thought, or a yearning for truth, and worldly folly, were playing a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and I was the feathered cork. There is a song without words by Mendelssohn, which sets forth as clearly as Shakespeare or Heine could have done in words, deep melancholy or unavoidable suffering expressing itself merrily and gaily in a manner which is both touching and beautiful, or sweet and sad. Without any self- consciousness or display of sentimentalism, I find deep traces of this in many little poems or sketches which I wrote at that time, and which have now been forgotten. I had been in Arcadia; I was now in a very pleasant sunny Philistia; but I could not forget the past. And I never forgot it. Once in Paris, in the opera, I used in jest emphatically the Russian word _harrascho_, "good," when a Russian stranger in the next box smiled joyously, and rising, waved his glove to me. Once in a brilliant soiree in Philadelphia there was a Hungarian Count, an exile, and talking with him in English, I let fall for a joke "_Bassama terem-tete_!" He grasped my hand, and, forgetting all around, entered into a long conversation. It was like the American who, on finding an American cent in the streets in Paris, burst into tears. So from time to time something recalled Europe to me. I went now and then to New York, which I liked better than Philadelphia. I was often a guest of Mr. Kimball. He introduced me to Dr. Rufus Griswold, a strange character and a noted man of letters. He was to his death so uniformly a friend to me, and so untiring in his efforts to aid me, that I cannot find words to express his kindness nor the gratitude which I feel. He became the editor of a literary magazine which was really far in advance of the time. It did not last long; while it endured I supplied for it monthly reviews of foreign literature. There were not many linguists on the American press in those days, and my reviews of works in half-a-dozen languages induced some one to pay a high compliment to the editor. It was Bayard Taylor, I believe, who, hearing this, declared honestly, and as a friend, that I alone deserved the credit. This was repeated by some one to Dr. Griswold in such a form that he thought _I_ had been talking against him, though I had never spoken to a soul about it. The result was that the Doctor promptly dismissed me, and I felt hurt. Mr. Kimball met me and laughed, saying, "The next time you meet the Doctor just go resolutely at him and _replace yourself_. Don't allow him a word." So, meeting Dr. Griswold a few days after in Philadelphia, I went boldly up and said, "You must come at once with me and take a drink--immediately!" The Doctor went like a lamb--not to the slaughter, but to its milk--and when he had drunk a comforting grog, I attacked him boldly, and declared that I had never spoken a word to a living soul as to the authorship of the reviews--which was perfectly true, for I never broke the golden rule of "contributorial anonymity." So the Doctor put me on the staff again. But to the end of his life I was always with him a privileged character, and could take, if I chose, the most extraordinary liberties, though he was one of the most irritable and vindictive men I ever met, if he fancied that he was in any way too familiarly treated. Kossuth came to America, and I was almost squeezed to death--right against a pretty German girl--in the crowd at his reception in Philadelphia. At the dinner in New York I met at Kimball's house Franz Pulszky, and sat by his wife. I have since seen him many times in Buda- Pest. There lived in Philadelphia a gentleman named Rodney Fisher. He had been for many years a partner in an English house in Canton, and also lived in England. He had long been an intimate friend of Russel Sturgis, subsequently of "Baring Brothers." He was a grand-nephew of Caesar Rodney, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a son of Judge Fisher, of Delaware. He was a man of refined and agreeable manners and an admirable relater of his innumerable experiences in Europe and the East. His wife had been celebrated for her beauty. When I first met her in her own house she seemed to me to be hardly thirty years of age, and I believed at first she was one of her own daughters. She was without exception the most amiable, I may say lovable person whom I ever met, and I never had a _nuance_ or shade of difference of opinion with her, or know an instant during which I was not devoted to her. I visited his house and fell in love with his daughter Belle, to whom I became, after about a year, engaged. We were not, however, married till five years after. Thackeray, whom I knew well, said to a Mr. Curtis Raymond, of Boston, not long before leaving for England, that she was the most beautiful woman whom he had seen in America. I cannot help recording this. I need not say that, notwithstanding my terrible anxiety as to my future, from this time I led a very happy life. There was in Philadelphia a very wealthy lady called its Queen. This was Mrs. James Rush. She had built the finest house in our city, and placed in it sixty thousand dollars' worth of furniture. "_E un bel palazzo_!" said an Italian tenor one evening to me at a reception there. This lady, who had read much, had lived long in Europe and "knew cities and men." To say that she was kind to me would feebly express her kindness. It is true that we were by much mutual knowledge rendered congenial. She invited me to attend her weekly receptions, &c., with Miss Fisher. There we met and were introduced to all the celebrated people who passed through Philadelphia. One evening I had there, for instance, a conversation in German with Mme. Sontag, the great singer, as with Jerome Bonaparte, the nephew. When the summer came I joined Mr. Fisher and his two daughters--the second was named Mary--in a tour. We went to New York, thence up the Hudson, and eastward to Boston. After a day's travel we came to a town on the frontier line, where we had to stop for two hours. Mr. Fisher and I, being very thirsty and fatigued, went into a saloon in which were two bars or counters. Advancing to the second of these, I asked for brandy. "We don't sell no brandy here," replied the man. "This is in Massachusetts: go to the other bar--that is in New York." In an instant we left New England for the Middle States, and refreshed ourselves. Thence we went to Springfield and saw the armoury, where guns are made. Thence to Boston, where we stopped at a hotel. I went with Miss Belle Fisher for a day's excursion to Dedham, where my mother and sisters were on a visit. It was very pleasant. From Boston we went to Newport, and stayed at the Ocean House. There I found Milton Sanford, a connection of mine and a noted character. He had lived in Florence and known Browning and his wife. He was, I believe, uncle of Miss Kate Field. He introduced me to Colonel Colt, the celebrated inventor or re-discoverer of the revolver; to Alf. Jaell, a very great pianist; and Edward Marshall, a brother of Humphrey Marshall. Sanford, Colt, Marshall, and I patronised the pistol-gallery every day, nor did we abstain from mint-juleps. I found that, in shooting, Colonel Colt could beat me _at the word_, but that I always had the best of it at a deliberate "take-your-time" shot. There, too, were the two brothers Burnett, whom I had met long before in Heidelberg. What with drives and balls and other gaiety, the time passed pleasantly enough. As I spoke German, I became intimate with Jaell. He could not sing at all. Once I suggested to him that he should compose variations on an air, a German popular song. For a day or two he hummed it as well as he could. On the third morning he took me into a room where there was a piano, and asked me to sing while he played accompaniments. All at once he said, "Stop! I have got it!" and then he played the air with marvellously beautiful variations. He was a great genius, but I never heard him play in public as he played then. He was in a "high hour." It was wonderful. I may here say that in after years, while living at a hotel, I became well acquainted with Thalberg, and especially with Ole Bull, the violinist, who told me much about Heine. So time rolled on for three years. I passed my examination and took an office in Third Street, with a sign proclaiming that I was attorney-at- law and _Avokat_. During six months I had two clients and made exactly three pounds. Then, the house being wanted, I left and gave up law. This was a very disheartening time for me. I had a great many friends who could easily have put collecting and other business in my hands, but none of them did it. I felt this very keenly. Quite apart from a young man's pushing himself, despite every obstacle, there is the great truth that sometimes the obstacles or bad luck become insuperable. Mine did at this time. The author of "Gossip of the Century" has well remarked that "it has been said that however quickly a clever lad may have run up the ladder, whether of fame or fortune, it will always be found that he was lucky enough to find some one who put his foot on the first rung." Which is perfectly true, as I soon found, if not in law, at least in literature. I went more than once to New York, hoping to obtain literary employment. One day Dr. Rufus Griswold came to me in great excitement. Mr. Barnum--the great showman--and the Brothers Beech were about to establish a great illustrated weekly newspaper, and he was to be the editor and I the assistant. It is quite true that he had actually taken the post, for which he did not care twopence, only to provide a place for me, and he had tramped all over New York for hours in a fearful storm to find me and to announce the good news. Then work began for me in tremendous earnest. Let the reader imagine such a paper as the London _Illustrated News_ with one editor and one assistant! Three men could not have read our exchanges, and I was expected to do that and all the minor casual writing for cuts, or cutting down and occasional outside work. And yet even Mr. Barnum, who should have had more sense, one day, on coming in, expressed his amazement on seeing about a cartload of country exchanges which I had not opened. But there was something in Philadelphia which made all work seem play to me, and I long laboured from ten in the morning till midnight. My assiduity attracted attention. Dr. Griswold was always a little "queer," and I used to scold and reprove him for it. He had got himself into great trouble by his remarks on Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Kimball and others, who knew the Doctor, believed, as I do, that there was no deliberate evil or envy in those remarks. Poe's best friends told severe stories of him in those days--_me ipso teste_--and Griswold, naught extenuating and setting down naught in malice, wrote incautiously more than he should. These are the words of another than I. But when Griswold was attacked, then he became savage. One day I found in his desk, which he had committed to me, a great number of further material collected to Poe's discredit. I burnt it all up at once, and told the Doctor what I had done, and scolded him well into the bargain. He took it all very amiably. There was also much more matter to other men's discredit--_ascensionem expectans_--awaiting publication, all of which I burned. It was the result of long research, and evidently formed the material for a book. Had it ever been published, it would have made Rome howl! But, as I said, I was angry, and I knew it would injure Dr. Griswold more than anybody. It is a pity that I had not always had the Doctor in hand--though I must here again repeat that, as regards Poe, he is, in my opinion, not so much to blame as a score of writers have made out. The tales, which were certainly most authentic, or at least apparently so, during the life of the latter, among his best friends regarding him, were, to say the least, discreditable, albeit that is no excuse whatever for publishing them. I have always much disliked the popular principle of judging men's works entirely by their lives, and deciding against the literary merit of _Sartor Resartus_ because Carlyle put his wife's money to his own account _in banco_. And it is, moreover, cruel that a man, because he has been a poet or genius or artist, must needs have every weakness (real or conjectured) in his life served up and grinned at and chatted over, as if he forsooth were a clergyman or some kind of make-believe saint. However, the more vulgar a nature is the more it will gloat on gossip; and herein the most pretentious of the higher classes show themselves no better than the basest. I lived at Dan Bixby's, at the corner of Park Place and Broadway, where I came very near being shot one night by a man who mistook me, or rather my room, for that of the one below, in which his wife was, or had been, with another person. Being very tipsy, the injured individual went one storey too high, and tried to burst in to shoot me with a revolver, but I repelled him after a severe struggle, in which I had sharp work to avoid being shot. I would much rather fight a decent duel any time than have such a "hog-fight." I only had a loaded cane. The worst of it was that the injured husband, having traced his wife, as he erroneously thought, to my room, went to Bixby and the clerk, and asked who lived in it. But as they were my friends, they dismissed him gruffly, yet believed all the same that _I_ had "a petticoat in my wardrobe." Hence for a week all my friends kept making cruel allusions in my presence to gay deceivers and Don Juan _et cetera_, until in a rage I asked what the devil it all meant, when there was an explanation by a clergyman, and I swore myself clear. But I thought it was hard lines to have to stand the revolver, endure all the scandal for a week, and be _innocent_ all the time withal! That was indeed bitter in the cup! Apropos of this small affair, I can recall a droll scene, _de eodem genere_, which I witnessed within a week of the other. There was a rather first-class saloon, bar, and restaurant on Broadway, kept by a good-looking pugilistic-associated individual named George Shurragar. As he had black eyes, and was a shoulder-hitter, and as the name in Romany means "a captain," I daresay he was partly gypsy. And, when weary with editorial work, I sometimes dropped in there for refreshment. One night an elderly, vulgar individual, greatly exalted by many brandies, became disorderly, and drawing a knife, made a grand Malay charge on all present, _a la mok_. George Shurragar promptly settled him with a blow, disarmed him, and "fired him out" into outer darkness. Then George exhibited the knife. It was such a dirty, disreputable-looking "pig-sticker," that we were all disgusted, and George cast it with contempt into the street. Does the reader remember the scene in "The Bohemian Girl" in which the dandy Count examines the nasty knife left behind by the gypsy Devilshoof? It was the very counterpart of this, the difference being that in this case it was the gypsy who despised the instrument. Such trivial amusing incidents and rencontres as these were matters of almost daily occurrence to me in those days, and I fear that I incur the reproach of padding by narrating these. Yet, as I write this, I have just read in the "Life of Benvenuto Cellini" that he too omits the description of a lot of exactly such adventures, as being, like the darkey's imprisonments for stealing, "not worf mentionin'"--and confess I felt great regret that he did so; for there is always a great deal of local and temporal colour in anything whose proper _finale_ should be in a police-court. Hawthorne used to stay at Bixby's. He was a moody man, who sat by the stove and spoke to no one. Bixby had been a publisher, and was proud that he had first issued Hayward's "Faust" in America. He was also proud that his hotel was much frequented by literary men and naval officers. He was very kind to me. Once when I complained to the clerk that the price of my rooms was too high, he replied, "Mr. Leland, the prices of all the rooms in the house, excepting yours, were raised long ago, and Mr. Bixby charged me strictly _not to let you know it_." Uncle Daniel was a gentleman, and belonged to my club--the Century. When he grew older he lived on an annuity, and was a great and privileged favourite among actresses and singers. Thirty years later I called with him in New York on Ada Cavendish. After a fortnight or so, Dr. Griswold began to be very erratic. He had a divorce case going on in Philadelphia. He went off, assuring me that everything was in order, and never returned. The foreman came to me saying that there was no copy, and nothing ready, and everything needed. Here was indeed a pretty kettle of fish! For I at that time absolutely distrusted my own ability to do all the work. I flew to Kimball, who said, "Just put it through by strong will, and you'll succeed." Then I went to Mr. Barnum--Uncle Barnum--who was always "as good as gold" to me. I burst out into a statement of my griefs, mentioning incidentally that I really could not go on as full editor, and do such fearful work on the salary of an office-boy. He listened to it all, I am sure with amusement, and placing his hand kindly on my shoulder as we walked up and down the hall of the Museum, said, "You _sha'n't_ go. Don't get into a funk. I know that you can do the work, and do it _well_. And the salary shall be doubled--certainly!" So the paper was brought out after all. I had great trouble for some time to learn to write editorials. I used to go to the office of a Sunday morn, and sit sometimes from ten till two turning over the exchanges, and seeking for ideas. It was a dreadful ordeal. In fact, in after times it was several years before I could seize a pen, rattle up a subject and dash off a leader. _Now_ I can write far more easily than I can talk. And it is a curious fact that soon after I became really skilled at such extempore work in the opinion of the best judges, such as Raymond, I no longer had any opportunity to practice it. I had worked only a week or two when a rather queer, tall, roughish Yankee was brought into the office. He worked for a while, and in a day or two took possession of my desk and rudely informed me that he was my superior editor and master there. He had, as many men do, mistaken amiable politeness for humility. I replied, knowing that Mr. Beech, out of sight, was listening to every word, that there was no master there but Mr. Beech, and that I should keep my desk. We became affable; but I abode my time, for I found that he was utterly incompetent to do the work. Very soon he told me that he had an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia. I told him that if he wished to go I would do all his work for him. So he went, and Mr. Beech coming in, asked where Mr. --- was. I replied that he had gone away to lecture, and that I was to do his work during his absence. This was really too much, and the Yankee was dismissed "in short order," the Beeches being men who made up their minds promptly and acted vigorously. As for me, I never, shirked work of any kind. A gentleman on a newspaper never does. The more of a snob a man is, the more afraid he is of damaging his dignity, and the more desirous of being "boss" and captain. But though I have terribly scandalised my chief or proprietor by reporting a fire, I never found that I was less respected by the typos, reporters, and subs. I had before leaving Philadelphia published two books. One was "The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams," which I dedicated to my fiancee, Miss Belle Fisher. The other was an odd melange, which had appeared in chapters in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. It was titled _Meister Karl's Sketch-Book_. It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a _pate de foie gras_; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trubner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader. It had at least a _style_ of its own, which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about _pari passu_ with Coryatt's "Crudities," or lower. There were two or three salons in New York where there were weekly literary receptions, and where one could meet the principal writers of the time. I often saw at Kimball's and other places the Misses Wetherell, who wrote the "Wide, Wide World" and "Queechy." They were elderly, and had so very little of the "world" in their ways, that they occurred to me as an example of the fact that people generally write most on what they know least about. Thus a Lowell factory-girl likes to write a tale of ducal society in England; and when a Scotchman has less intelligence of "jocks" and "wut" than any of his countrymen, he compiles, and comments on, American humorists. Once there was a grand publishers' dinner to authors where I went with Alice and Phoebe Carey, who were great friends of mine. There I met and talked with Washington Irving; I remember Bryant and N. P. Willis, _et tous les autres_. Just at that time wine, &c., could only be sold in New York "in the original packages as imported." Alice or Phoebe Carey lamented that we were to have none at the banquet. There was a large dish of grapes before her, and I said, "Why, there you have plenty of it in the original packages!" At that time very hospitable or genial hosts used to place a bottle of brandy and glass in the gentlemen's dressing-room at an evening's reception, and I remember it was considered a scandalous thing when a certain old retired naval officer once emptied the whole bottle single- handed. Of course I was very intimate with Clark of the _Knickerbocker_, Fred Cozzens, John Godfrey Saxe, and all the company of gay and festive humorists who circled about that merry magazine. There was never anything quite like the _Knickerbocker_, and there never will be again. It required a sunny, genial social atmosphere, such as we had before the war, and never after; an easy writing of gay and cultivated men for one another, and not painfully elaborating jocosities or seriosities for the million as in--But never mind. It sparkled through its summer-time, and oh! how its readers loved it! I sometimes think that I would like to hunt up the old title-plate with Diedrich Knickerbocker and his pipe, and issue it again every month to a few dozen subscribers who loved quaint odds and ends, till I too should pass away! It was easy enough to foresee that a great illustrated weekly, with actually one young man, and generally no more, to do all the literary work could not last long. And yet the _New York Times_, or some such journal, said that the work was very well done, and that the paper did well until I left. Heaven knows that I worked hard enough on it, and, what was a great deal to boast of in those days, never profited one farthing beyond free tickets to plays, which I had little time to use. And yet my pay was simply despicably small. I had great temptations to write up certain speculative enterprises, and never accepted one. Our circulation sometimes reached 150,000. And if the publishers (excepting Barnum) had ever shown me anything like thanks or kindness for gratuitous zeal and interest which I took, I could have greatly aided them. One day, for instance, I was asked to write a description of a new ferry. I went there, and the proprietor intimated that he would pay a large sum for an article which would point out the advantage or profit which would accrue from investing in his lots. I told him that if it were really true that such was the case, I would do it for nothing, but that I never made money behind my salary. I began to weary of the small Yankee greed and griping and "thanklessness" which I experienced. There were editors in New York who, for less work, earned ten times the salary which I received. I was not sorry when I heard that some utterly inexperienced New England clergyman had been engaged to take my place. So I returned to Philadelphia. The paper very soon came to grief. I believe that with Barnum alone I could have made it a great success. We had Frank Leslie for chief engraver, and he was very clever and ambitious. I had a knowledge of art, literature, and foreign life and affairs, which could have been turned, with Leslie's co-operation, to great advantage. I needed an office with a few books for reference, at least three or four literary aids, and other ordinary absolutely necessary facilities for work. All that I literally had was a space half-portioned off from the engine-room, where a dozen blackguard boys swore and yelled as it were at my elbow, a desk, a chair, and a pair of scissors, ink, and paste. This wretched scrimping prevailed through the whole business, and thus it was expected to establish a great first-class American illustrated newspaper. It is sometimes forgotten in the United States that to make a vast success, something is requisite beyond enterprise and economy, and that it is a very poor policy to screw your _employes_ down to the last cent, and overwork them, and make business needlessly irksome, when they have it in their power to very greatly advance your interests. I dwell on this because it is a common error everywhere. I have in my mind a case in which an employer, who lived "like a prince," boasted to me how little he paid his men, and how in the long-run it turned out bitterly to his loss in many ways. Those who had no principle robbed him, while the honest, who would have made his interests their own, left him. I have seen business after business broken up in this way. While the principal is in vigour and life, he may succeed with mere servants who are poorly paid; then, after a time, some younger partner, who has learned his morals from the master, pushes him out, or he dies, and the business is worthless, because there is not a soul in it who cares for it, or who has grown up with any common sense of interest with the heirs. I remember one day being obliged in New York to listen to a conversation between two men of business. One owed the other a large sum, honestly enough--of that there was no question between them; but he thought that there was a legal way to escape payment, while the other differed from him. So they argued away for a long time. There was not a word of reproach; the creditor would have cheated the debtor in the same way if he could; the only point of difference was whether it could be done. An _employe_ who can remain in such surroundings and be honest must be indeed a miracle of integrity, and, if he do not over-reach them in the long-run, one of stupidity. I might have made "house and land" out of the newspaper had I been so disposed. Of all the men whom I met in those days in the way of business, Mr. Barnum, the great American humbug, was by far the honestest and freest from guile or deceit, or "ways that were dark, or tricks that were vain." He was very kind-hearted and benevolent, and gifted with a sense of fun which was even stronger than his desire for dollars. I have talked very confidentially with him many times, for he was very fond of me, and always observed that to engineer some grotesque and startling paradox into tremendous notoriety, to make something _immensely_ puzzling with a stupendous _sell_ as postscript, was more of a motive with him than even the main chance. He was a genius like Rabelais, but one who employed business and humanity for material instead of literature, just as Abraham Lincoln, who was a brother of the same band, employed patriotism and politics. All three of them expressed vast problems, financial, intellectual, or natural, by the brief arithmetic of a joke. Mr. Barnum was fearfully busy in those days; what with buying elephants, wooing two- headed girls for his Grand Combination, laying out towns, chartering banks, and inventing unheard-of wonders for the unrivalled collection of one hundred and fifty million unparalleled moral marvels; but he always found time to act as unpaid contributor to a column of humorous items which I always published. I have said that I had no assistant; I forgot that I always had Mr. Barnum as assistant humorous editor for that department. All at once, when least expected, he would come smiling in with some curiosity of literature such as the "reverse"-- "Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel," or a fresh conundrum or joke, with all his heart and soul full of it, and he would be as delighted over the proof as if to see himself in print was a startling novelty. We two had "beautiful times" over that column, for there was a great deal of "boy" still left in Barnum; nor was I by any means deficient in it. One thing I set my face against firmly: I never would in any way whatever write up, aid, or advertise the great show or museum, or cry up the elephant. I was resolved to leave the paper first. On that humorous column Barnum always deferred to me, even as a small school-boy defers to an elder on the question of a game of marbles or hop- scotch. There was no affectation or play in it; we were both quite in earnest. I think I see him now, coming smiling in like a harvest-moon, big with some new joke, and then we sat down at the desk and "edited." How we would sit and mutually and admiringly read to one another our beautiful "good things," the world forgetting, by the world forgot! And yet I declare that never till this instant did the great joke of it all ever occur to me--that two men of our experiences could be so simply pleased! Those humorous columns, collected and republished in a book, might truly bear on the title-page, "By Barnum and Hans Breitmann." And we were both of the opinion that it really would make a very nice book indeed. We were indeed both "boys" over it at play. The entire American press expected, as a matter of course, that the _Illustrated News_ would be simply an advertisement for the great showman, and, as I represented to Mr. Barnum, this would ere long utterly ruin the publication. I do not now really know whether I was quite right in this, but it is very much to Mr. Barnum's credit that he never insisted on it, and that in his own paper he was conspicuous by his absence. And here I will say that, measured by the highest and most refined standard, there was more of the gentleman in Phineas T. Barnum than the world imagined, and very much more than there was in a certain young man in good society who once expressed in my hearing disgust at the idea of even speaking to "the showman." Henry Ward Beecher was a great friend of Barnum and the Beaches, of which some one wrote-- "No wonder Mr. Alfred Beach Prefers, as noblest preacher, A man who is not only Beach, But even more so--Beecher." He came very frequently into our office; but I cannot recall any saying of his worth recording. There was also a brother of H. W. Longfellow, a clergyman, who often visited me, of whom I retain a most agreeable recollection. The newsboys who clustered round the outer door were divided in opinion as to me. One party thought I was Mr. Barnum, and treated me with profound respect. The other faction cried aloud after me, "Hy! you --- ---!" Mr. Barnum wanted me to write his Life. This would have been amusing work and profitable, but I shrunk from the idea of being identified with it. I might as well have done it, for I believe that Dr. Griswold performed the task, and the public never knew or cared anything about it. But my jolly companions at Dan Bixby's used to inquire of me at what hour we fed the monkeys, and whether the Great Gyascutus ever gave me any trouble; and I was sensitive to such insinuations. At this time Mr. Barnum's great moral curiosity was a bearded lady, a jolly and not bad-looking Frenchwoman, whose beard was genuine enough, as I know, having pulled it. My own beard has been described by a French newspaper as _une barbe de Charlemagne_, a very polite pun, but hers was much fuller. It was soft as floss silk. After a while the capillary attraction ceased to draw, and Mr. Barnum thought of an admirable plan to revive it. He got somebody to prosecute him for false pretences and imposture, on the ground that Madame was a man. Then Mr. Barnum had, with the greatest unwillingness and many moral apologies, a medical examination; they might as sensibly have examined Vashishta's cow to find out if it was an Irish bull. Then came the attack on the impropriety of the whole thing, and finally Mr. Barnum's triumphant surrebutter, showing he had most unwillingly been _goaded_ by the attacks of malevolent wretches into an unavoidable course of defence. Of course, spotless innocence came out triumphant. Mr. Barnum's system of innocence was truly admirable. When he had concocted some monstrous cock-and-bull curiosity, he was wont to advertise that "it was with very great reluctance that he presented this unprecedented marvel to the world, as doubts had been expressed as to its genuineness--doubts inspired by the actually apparently incredible amount of attraction in it. All that we ask of an enlightened and honest public is, that it will pass a fair verdict and decide whether it be a humbug or not." So the enlightened public paid its quarters of a dollar, and decided that it _was_ a humbug, and Barnum abode by their decision, and then sent it to another city to be again decided on. I returned to Philadelphia, and to my father's house, and occupied myself with such odds and ends of magazine and other writing as came in my way, and always reading and studying. I was very much depressed at this time, yet not daunted. My year in New York had familiarised me with characteristic phases of American life and manners; my father thought I had gone through a severe mill with rather doubtful characters, and once remarked that I should not judge too harshly of business men, for I had been unusually unfortunate in my experience. A not unfrequent visitor at our house in Philadelphia was our near neighbour, Henry C. Carey, the distinguished scholar and writer on political economy, who had been so extensively robbed of ideas by Bastiat, and who retook his own, not without inflicting punishment. He was a handsome, black-eyed, white-haired man, with a very piercing glance. During the war, when men were sad and dull, and indeed till his death, Mr. Carey's one glorious and friendly extravagance was to assemble every Sunday afternoon all his intimates, including any distinguished strangers, at his house, round a table, in rooms magnificently hung with pictures, and give everybody, _ad libitum_, hock which cost him sixteen shillings a bottle. I occasionally obliged him by translating for him German letters, &c., and he in return revised my pamphlet on Centralization _versus_ State Rights in 1863. H. C. Baird, a very able writer of his school, was his nephew. The latter had two or three sisters, whom I recall as charming girls while I was a law-student. There were many beauties in Philadelphia in those days, and prominent at the time, though as yet a schoolgirl, was the since far-famed Emily Schaumberg, albeit I preferred Miss Belle Fisher, a descendant maternally of the famous Callender beauties, and by her father's side allied to Miss Vining, the American Queen of Beauty during the Revolution at Washington's republican court. There was also a Miss Lewis, whose great future beauty I predicted while as yet a child, to the astonishment of a few, "which prophecy was marvellously fulfilled." Also a Miss Wharton, since deceased, on whom George Boker after her death wrote an exquisite poem. The two were, each of their kind, of a beauty which I have rarely, if ever, seen equalled, and certainly never surpassed, in Italy. How I could extend the list of those too good and fair to live, who have passed away from my knowledge!--Miss Nannie Grigg--Miss Julia Biddle!--_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_? Thus far my American experiences had not paid well. I reflected that if I had remained in Paris I should have done far better. When I left, I knew that the success of Louis Napoleon was inevitable. Three newspapers devoted to him had appeared on the Boulevards in one day. There was money at work, and workmen such as lived in the Hotel de Luxembourg, gentlemen who could not only plan barricades but fight at them, were in great demand, as _honest_ men always are in revolutions. Louis Napoleon was very anxious indeed to attach to him the men of February, and many who had not done one-tenth or one-twentieth of what I had, had the door of fortune flung wide open to them. My police-_dossier_ would have been literally a diploma of honour under the new Empire, for, after all, the men of February, Forty-eight, were the ones who led off, and who all bore the highest reputation for honour. All that I should have required would have been some ambitious man of means to aid--and such men abound in Paris--to have risen fast and high. As it turned out, it was just as well in the end that I neither went in as a political adventurer under Louis Napoleon, nor wrote the Life of Barnum. But no one knew in those days how Louis would turn out. I have but one word to add to this. The secret of the Revolution of February had been in very few hands, which was the secret of its success. Any one of us could have secured fortune and "honours," or at least "orders," by betraying it. But we would as soon have secured orders for the pit of hell as done so. This was known to Louis Napoleon, and he must have realised who these men of iron integrity were for he was very curious and inquiring on this subject. Now, I here claim it as a great, as a surpassing honour for France, and as something absolutely without parallel in history, that several hundred men could be found who could not only keep this secret, but manage so very wisely as they did. Louis Blanc was an example of these honest, unselfish men. I came to know him personally many years after, during his exile in London. One morning George H. Boker came to me and informed me that there was a writing editor wanted on the Philadelphia _Evening Bulletin_. Its proprietor was Alexander Cummings. The actual editor was Gibson Bannister Peacock, who was going to Europe for a six months' tour, and some one was wanted to take his place. Mr. Peacock, as I subsequently found, was an excellent editor, and a person of will and character. He was skilled in music and a man of culture. I retain grateful remembrances of him. I was introduced and installed. With all my experience I had not yet quite acquired the art of extemporaneous editorial composition. My first few weeks were a severe trial, but I succeeded. I was expected to write one column of leader every day, review books, and "paragraph" or condense articles to a brief item of news. In which I succeeded so well, that some time after, when a work appeared on writing for the press, the author, who did not know me at all, cited one of my leaders and one of my paragraphs as models. It actually made little impression on me at the time--I was so busy. I had been at work but a short time, when one day Mr. Cummings received a letter from Mr. Peacock in Europe, which he certainly had hardly glanced at, which he threw to me to read. I did so, and found in it a passage to this effect: "I am sorry that you are disappointed as to Mr. Leland, but I am confident that you will find him perfectly capable in time." This gave me a bitter pang, but I returned it to Mr. Cummings, who soon after came into the office and expressed frankly his great regret, saying that since he had written to Mr. Peacock he had quite changed his opinion. I enjoyed this new life to the utmost. Mr. Cummings, to tell the truth, pursued a somewhat tortuous course in politics and religion. He was a Methodist. One day our clerk expressed himself as to the latter in these words:--"They say he is a Jumper, but others think he has gone over to the Holy Rollers." The Jumpers were a sect whose members, when the Holy Spirit seized them, jumped up and down, while the Holy Rollers under such circumstances rolled over and over on the floor. We also advocated Native Americanism and Temperance, which did not prevent Mr. Peacock and myself and a few _habitues_ of the office from going daily at eleven o'clock to a neighbouring lager-beer _Wirthschaft_ for a refreshing glass and lunch. One day the bar-tender, Hermann, a very nice fellow, said to me, "I remember when you always had a bottle of Rudesheimer every day for dinner. That was at Herr Lehr's, in Heidelberg. I always waited on you." Whoever shall write a history of Philadelphia from the Thirties to the end of the Fifties will record a popular period of turbulence and outrages so extensive as to now appear almost incredible. These were so great as to cause grave doubts in my mind whether the severest despotism, guided by justice, would not have been preferable to such republican license as then prevailed in the city of Penn. I refer to the absolute and uncontrolled rule of the Volunteer Fire Department, which was divided into companies (each having clumsy old fire apparatus and hose), all of them at deadly feud among themselves, and fighting freely with pistols, knives, iron spanners, and slung shot, whenever they met, whether at fires or in the streets. Of these regular firemen, _fifty thousand_ were enrolled, and to these might have been added almost as many more, who were known as runners, bummers, and hangers-on. Among the latter were a great number of incendiaries, all of whom were well known to and encouraged by the firemen. Whenever the latter wished to meet some rival company, either to test their mutual skill or engage in a fight, a fire was sure to occur; the same always happened when a fire company from some other city visited Philadelphia. This gave occasion to an incredible amount of blackmailing, since all house-owners were frequently called on to contribute money to the different companies, sometimes as a subscription for ball-tickets or repairs. It was well understood, and generally pretty plainly expressed, that those who refused to pay might expect to be burned out or neglected. The result of it all was a general fear of the firemen, a most degrading and contemptible subservience to them by politicians of all kinds, a terrible and general growth and spread of turbulence and coarse vulgarity among youth, and finally, such a prevalence of conflagration that no one who owned a house could hear the awful tones of the bell of Independence Hall without terror. Fires were literally of nightly occurrence, and that they were invariably by night was due to the incendiary "runner." A slight examination of the newspapers and cheap broadside literature of that time will amply confirm all that I here state. "Jakey" was the typical fireman; he was the brutal hero of a vulgar play, and the ideal of nineteen youths out of twenty. For a generation or more all society felt the degrading influences of this rowdyism in almost every circle--for there were among the vast majority of men not very many who respected, looked up to, or cared for anything really cultured or refined. I have a large collection of the popular songs of Philadelphia of that time, in all of which there is a striving downwards into blackguardism and brutality, vileness and ignorance, which has no parallel in the literature of any other nation. The French of the _Pere Duchene_ school may be nastier, and, as regards aristocrats, as bloody, but for general all-round _vulgarity_, the state of morals developed among the people at the time of which I speak was literally without its like. It is very strange that Pliny also speaks of the turbulence or rowdyism of the firemen of Rome. I remember that even in Walnut Street, below Thirteenth Street, before my father's house (this being then by far the most respectable portion of Philadelphia), it happened several nights in succession that rival fire- companies, running side by side, fought as they ran, with torches and knives, while firing pistols. There was a young lady named Mary Bicking, who lived near us. I asked her one day if she had ever seen a man shot; and when she answered "No," I replied, "Why don't you look out of your window some night and see one?" The southern part of the city was a favourite battleground, and I can remember hearing ladies who lived in Pine Street describe how, on Sunday summer afternoons, they could always hear, singly or in volleys, the shots of the revolvers and shouts of the firemen as they fought in Moyamensing. Every effort to diminish these evils, or to improve the fire department in any way whatever, was vigorously opposed by the rowdies, who completely governed the city. The first fire-alarm electric telegraphs were a great offence to firemen, and were quietly destroyed; the steam- engines were regarded by them as deadly enemies. But the first great efficient reform in the Philadelphia fire department, and the most radical of all, was the establishment of a fire-detective department under a fire-marshal, whose business it was to investigate and punish all cases of incendiarism. For it was simply incendiarism, encouraged and supported by the firemen themselves, which caused nineteen-twentieths of all these disasters; it was the _fires_ which were the sole support of the whole system. I was much indebted for understanding all this, and acting on it boldly, as I did, to the city editor and chief reporter on the _Evening Bulletin_, Caspar Souder. The Mayor of the city was Richard Vaux, a man of good family and education, and one who had seen in his time cities and men, he having once in his youth, on some great occasion, waltzed with the Princess--now Queen--Victoria. Being popular, he was called _Vaux populi_. I wrote very often leaders urging Mayor Vaux by name to establish a fire-detective department. So great was the indignation caused among the firemen, that I incurred no small risk in writing them. But at last, when I published for one week an article every day clamouring for a reform, Mayor Vaux--as he said directly to Mr. Souder, "in consequence of my appeals"--vigorously established a fire-marshal with two aids. By my request, the office was bestowed on a very intelligent and well-educated person, Dr. Blackburne, who had been a surgeon in the Mexican war, then a reporter on our journal, and finally a very clever superior detective. He was really not only a born detective, but to a marked degree a man of scientific attainments and a skilled statistician. His anecdotes and comments as to pyromaniacs of different kinds were as entertaining and curious as anything recorded by Gaboriau. Some of the most interesting experiences of my life were when I went with Dr. Blackburne from place to place where efforts had been made to burn houses, and noted the unerring and Red-Indian skill with which he distinguished the style of work, and identified the persons and names of the incendiaries. One of these "fire-bugs" was noted for invariably setting fire to houses in such a manner as to destroy as many inmates as possible. If there were an exit, he would block it up. Dr. Blackburne took me to a wooden house in which the two staircases led to a very small vestibule about three feet square before the front door. This space had been filled with diabolical ingenuity with a barrel full of combustibles, so that every one who tried to escape by the only opening below would be sure to perish. Fortunately, the combustibles in the barrel went out after being ignited. "I know that fellow by his style," remarked the Doctor, "and I shall arrest him at four o'clock this afternoon." This fire-detective department and the appointment of Blackburne was the real basis and beginning of all the reforms which soon followed, leading to the abolition of the volunteer system and the establishment of paid _employes_. And as I received great credit for it then, my work being warmly recognised and known to all the newspaper reporters and editors in the city, who were the best judges of it, as they indeed are of all municipal matters, I venture to record it here as something worth mentioning. And though I may truly say that at the time I was so busy that I made no account of many such things, they now rise up from time to time as comforting assurances that my life has not been quite wasted. This reminds me that I had not been very long on the newspaper, and had just begun to throw out editorials with ease, when Mr. Cummings said to me one day that I did not realise what a power I held in my hand, but that I would soon find it out. Almost immediately after, in noticing some article or book which was for sale at No. 24 Chestnut Street, I inadvertently made reference to 24 Walnut Street. Very soon came the proprietor of the latter place, complaining that I had made life a burden to him, because fifty people had come in one day to buy something which he had not. I reflected long and deeply on this, with the result of observing that to influence people it is not at all necessary to argue with them, but simply be able to place before their eyes such facts as you choose. It is very common indeed to hear people in England, who should have more sense, declare that "nobody minds what the newspapers say." But the truth is, that if any man has an eye to read and memory to retain, he _must_, willy-nilly, be influenced by reading, and selection from others by an able editor is often only a most ingenious and artful method of arguing. It has very often happened to me, when I wanted to enforce some important point, to clothe it as an anecdote or innocent "item," and bid the foreman set it in the smallest type in the most obscure corner. And the reader is influenced by it, utterly unconsciously, just as we all are, and just as surely as all reflection follows sensation--as it ever will--into the Ages! There was much mutual robbing by newspapers of telegraphic news in those days. Once it befell that just before the _Bulletin_ went to press a part of the powder-mills of Dupont Brothers in Delaware blew up, and we received a few lines of telegram, stating that Mr. Dupont himself had saved the great magazine by actually walking on a burning building with buckets of water, and preventing the fire from extending, at a most incredible risk of his life. Having half-an-hour's time, I expanded this telegram into something dramatic and thrilling. A great New York newspaper, thinking, from the shortness of time which elapsed in publishing, that it was all telegraphed to us, printed it as one of its own from Delaware, just as I had written it out--which I freely forgive, for verily its review of my last work but one was such as to make me inquire of myself in utter amazement, "Can this be I?"--"so gloriously was I exalted to the higher life." The result of this review was a sworn and firm determination on my part to write another book of the same kind, in which I should show myself more worthy of such cordial encouragement; which latter book was the "Etruscan Legends." I ought indeed to have dedicated it to the _New York Tribune_, a journal which has done more for human freedom than any other publication in history. I do not know certainly whether the brave Dupont whom I mentioned was the Charley Dupont who went to school with me at Jacob Pierce's, nor can I declare that a very gentlemanly old Frenchman who came to see him in 1832 was his father or grandfather, the famous old Dupont de l'Eure of the French Revolution. But I suppose it was the latter who carried and transformed the art of manufacturing moral gunpowder in France to the making material explosives in America. Yes, moral or physical, we are all but gunpowder and smoke--_pulvis et umbra sumus_! There was a morning paper in Philadelphia which grieved me sore by pilfering my news items as I wrote them. So I one day gave a marvellous account of the great Volatile Chelidonian or Flying Turtle of Surinam, of which a specimen had just arrived in New York. It had a shell as of diamonds blent with emeralds and rubies, and bat-like wings of iridescent hue surpassing the opal, and a tail like a serpent. Our contemporary, nothing doubting, at once published this as original matter in a letter from New York, and had to bear the responsibility. But I did not invest my inventiveness wisely; I should have shared the idea with Barnum. There was in Philadelphia at this time a German bookseller named Christern. It was the thought of honourable and devoted men which recalled him to my mind. I had made his acquaintance long before in Munich, where he had been employed in the principal bookseller's shop of the city. His "store" in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, became a kind of club, where I brought such of my friends as were interested in German literature. We met there and talked German, and examined and discussed all the latest European works. He had a burly, honest, rather droll assistant named Ruhl, who had been a student in Munich, then a Revolutionist and exile, and finally a refugee to America. To this shop, too, came Andrekovitch, whom I had last known in Paris as a speculator on the Bourse, wearing a cloak lined with sables. In America he became a chemical manufacturer. When at last an amnesty was proclaimed, his brother asked him to return to Poland, promising a support, which he declined. He too was an honourable, independent man. About this time the great--I forget his name; or was it Schoffel?--who had been President of the Frankfort Revolutionary Parliament, opened a lager-beer establishment in Race Street. I went there several times with Ruhl. George Boker and Frank Wells, who subsequently succeeded me on the _Bulletin_, would drop in every day after the first edition had gone to press, and then there would be a lively time. Frank Wells was, _par eminence_, the greatest punster Philadelphia ever produced. He was in this respect appalling. We had a sub-editor or writer named Ernest Wallace, who was also a clever humorist. One day John Godfrey Saxe came in. He was accustomed among country auditors and in common sanctums to carry everything before him with his jokes. In half-an-hour we extinguished him. Having declared that no one could make a pun on his name, which he had not heard before, Wallace promptly replied, "It's _axing_ too much, I presume; but did you ever hear _that_?" Saxe owned that he had not. George H. Boker, whose name deserves a very high place in American literature as a poet, and in history as one who was of incredible service, quietly performed, in preserving the Union during the war, was also eminently a wit and humorist. We always read first to one another all that we wrote. He had so trained himself from boyhood to self-restraint, calmness, and the _nil admirari_ air, which, as Dallas said, is "the Corinthian ornament of a gentleman" (I may add especially when of Corinthian brass), that his admirable jests, while they gained in clearness and applicability, lost something of that rattle of the impromptu and headlong which renders Irish and Western humour so easy. I recorded the _bon mots_ and merry stories which passed among us all in the _sanctum_ in articles for our weekly newspaper, under the name of "Social Hall Sketches" (a social hall in the West is a steamboat smoking- room). Every one of us received a name. Mr. Peacock was Old Hurricane, and George Boker, being asked what his pseudonym should be, selected that of Bullfrog. These "Social Hall Sketches" had an extended circulation in American newspapers, some for many years. One entirely by me, entitled "Opening Oysters," is to be found in English almanacs, &c., to this day. It was, I think, or am sure, in 1855 that some German in Pennsylvania, instead of burying his deceased wife, burned the body. This called forth a storm of indignant attack in the newspapers. It was called an irreligious, indecent act. I wrote an editorial in which I warmly defended it. According to Bulwer in the "Last Days of Pompeii," the early Christians practised it. Even to this day Urns and torches are common symbols in Christian burying-grounds, and we speak of "ashes" as more decent than mouldering corpses. And, finally, I pointed out the great advantage which it would be to the coal trade of Pennsylvania. A man of culture said to me that it was the boldest editorial which he had ever read. Such as it was, I believe that it was the first article written in modern times advocating cremation. If I am wrong, I am willing to be corrected. To those who are unfamiliar with it, the life in an American newspaper office seems singularly eventful and striking. A friend of mine who visited a sanctum (ours) for the first time, said, as he left, that he had never experienced such an interesting hour in his life. _Firstly_, came our chief city reporter, exulting in the manner in which he had circumvented the police, and, despite all their efforts, got, by ways that were dark, at all the secrets of a brand-new horrible murder. _Secondly_, a messenger with an account of how I, individually, had kicked up the very devil in the City Councils, and set the Mayor to condemning us, by a leader discussing certain municipal abuses. _Thirdly_, another, to tell how I had swept one-half the city by an article exposing its neglect, and how the sweepers and dirt-carts were busy where none had been before for weeks, and how the contractor for cleaning wanted to shoot me. _Fourthly_, a visit from some great dignitary, who put his dignity very much _a l'abri_ in his pocket, to solicit a puff. _Fifthly_, a lady who, having written a very feeble volume of tales which had merely been gently commended in our columns, came round in a rage to shame me by sarcasm, begging me as a parting shot to at least _read_ a few lines of her work. _Sixthly_, a communication from a great New York family, who, having been requested to send a short description of a remarkable wedding-cake, sent me _one hundred and fifty pages_ of minute history of all their ancestors and honours, with strict directions that not a line should be omitted, and the article printed at once most conspicuously. {225} _Seventhly_, . . . but this is a very mild specimen of what went on all the time during office-hours. And on this subject alone I could write a small book. Now, at this time there came about a very great change in my life, or an event which ultimately changed it altogether. My father had, for about two years past, fallen into a very sad state of mind. His large property between Chestnut and Bank Streets paid very badly, and his means became limited. I was seriously alarmed as to his health. My dear mother had become, I may say, paralytic; but, in truth, the physicians could never explain the disorder. To the last she maintained her intellect, and a miraculous cheerfulness unimpaired. All at once a strange spirit, as of new life, came suddenly over my father. I cannot think of it without awe. He went to work like a young man, shook off his despair, financiered with marvellous ability, borrowed money, collected old and long-despaired of debts, tore down the old hotel and the other buildings, planned and bargained with architects--it was then that I designed the facade before described--and built six stores, two of them very handsome granite buildings, on the old site. In short, he made of it a very valuable estate. And as he superintended with great skill and ability the smallest details of the building, which was for that time remarkably well executed, I thought I recognised whence it was that I derived the strongly developed tendency for architecture which I have always possessed. I have since made 400 copies of old churches in England. This was a happy period, when life was without a cloud, excepting my mother's trouble. As my father could now well afford it, he made me an allowance, which, with my earnings from the _Bulletin_ and other occasional literary work, justified me in getting married. I had had a long but still very happy engagement. So we were married by the Episcopal ceremony at the house of my father-in-law in Tenth Street, and a very happy wedding it was. I remember two incidents. Before the ceremony, the Reverend Mr., subsequently Bishop Wilmer, took me, with George Boker, into a room and explained to me the symbolism of the marriage-ring. Now, if there was a subject on earth which I, the old friend of Creuzer of Heidelberg, and master of Friedrich's _Symbolik_, and Durandus, and the work "On Finger-Rings," knew all about, it was _that_; and I never shall forget the droll look which Boker threw at me as the discourse proceeded. But I held my peace, though sadly tempted to set forth my own archaeological views on the subject. The second was this: Philadelphia, as Mr. Philipps has said, abounds in folk-lore. Some one suggested that the wedding would be a lucky one because there was only one clergyman present. But I remarked that among our coloured waiters there was one who had a congregation (my wife's cousin, by the way, had a coloured bishop for coachman). However, this sable cloud did not disturb us. We went to New York, and were visited by many friends, and returned to Philadelphia. We lived for the first year at the La Pierre Hotel, where we met with many pleasant people, such as Thackeray, Thalberg, Ole Bull, Mr. and Mrs. Choteau, of St. Louis, and others. Of Thalberg I have already remarked, in my notes to my translation of Heine's _Salon_, that he impressed me as a very gentlemanly, dignified, and quietly remarkable man, whom it would be difficult to readily or really understand. "He had unmistakably the manner peculiar to many great Germans, which, as I have elsewhere observed, is perceptible in the _maintien_ and features of Goethe, Humboldt, Bismarck," and Brugsch, of Berlin (whom I learned to know in later years). Thalberg gave me the impression, which grew on me, of a man who knew many things besides piano-playing, and that he was born to a higher specialty. He was dignified but affable. I remember that one day, when he, or some one present, remarked that his name was not a common one, I made him laugh by declaring that it occurred in two pieces in an old German ballad:-- "Ich that am BERGE stehen, Und sohaute in das THAL; Da hab' ich sie gesehen, Zum aller letzten mal." "I stood upon the _mountain_, And looked the _valley_ o'er; There I indeed beheld her, But saw her never more." Thalberg's playing was marvellously like his character or himself: Heine calls it gentlemanly. Thackeray was marked in his manner, and showed impulse and energy in small utterances. I may err, but I do not think he could have endured solitude or too much of himself. He was eminently social, and rather given at times to reckless (not deliberate or spiteful), sarcastic or "ironic" sallies, in which he did not, with Americans, generally come off "first best." There was a very beautiful lady in Boston with whom the great novelist was much struck, and whom he greatly admired, as he sent her two magnificent bronzes. Having dined one evening at her house, he remarked as they all entered the dining-room, "Now I suppose that, according to your American custom, we shall all put our feet up on the chimney-piece." "Certainly," replied his hostess, "and as your legs are so much longer than the others, you may put your feet on top of the looking-glass," which was about ten feet from the ground. Thackeray, I was told, was offended at this, and showed it; he being of the "give but not take" kind. One day he said to George Boker, when both were looking at Durer's etching of "Death, Knight, and the Devil," of which I possess a fine copy, "Every man has his devil whom he cannot overcome; I have two--laziness, and love of pleasure." I remarked, "Then why the devil seek to overcome them? Is it not more noble and sensible to yield where resistance is in vain, than to fight to the end? Is it not a maxim of war, that he who strives to defend a defenceless place must be put to death? Why not give in like a man?" I had just published my translation of Heine's _Reisebilder_, and Bayard Taylor had a copy of it. He went in company with Thackeray to New York, and told me subsequently that they had read the work aloud between them alternately with roars of laughter till it was finished; that Thackeray praised my translation to the skies, and that his comments and droll remarks on the text were delightful. Thackeray was a perfect German scholar, and well informed as to all in the book. Apropos of Heine, Ole Bull had known him very well, and described to me his brilliancy in the most distinguished literary society, where in French the German wit bore away the palm from all Frenchmen. "He flashed and sprayed in brilliancy like a fountain." Ole Bull by some chance had heard much of me, and we became intimate. He told me that I had unwittingly been to him the cause of great loss. I had, while in London, become acquainted with an odd and rather scaly fish, a German who had been a courier, who was the keeper of a small cafe near Leicester Square, and who enjoyed a certain fame as the inventor of the _poses plastiques_ or living statues, so popular in 1848. This man soon came over to America, and called on me, wanting to borrow money, whereupon I gave him the cold shoulder. According to Ole Bull, he went to the great violinist, represented himself as my friend and as warmly commended by me, and the heedless artist, instead of referring to me directly, took him as impresario; the result being that he ere long ran away with the money, and, what was quite as bad, Ole Bull's prima-donna, who was, as I understood, specially dear to him. Ole Bull's playing has been, as I think, much underrated by certain writers of reminiscences. There was in it a marvellous originality. While I was there, in the La Pierre Hotel, the first great meeting was held at which the Republican party was organised. Though not an _appointed_ delegate from our State, I, as an editor, took some part in it. Little did we foresee the tremendous results which were to ensue from that meeting! It was second only to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and on it was based the greatest struggle known to history. I could have, indeed, been inscribed as a constitutional member of it for the asking or writing my name, but that appeared to me and others then to be a matter of no consequence compared to the work in hand. So the _Bulletin_ became Republican; Messrs. Cummings and Peacock seeing that that was their manifest destiny. From that day terrible events began to manifest themselves in American politics. The South attempted to seize Kansas with the aid of border ruffians; Sumner was caned from behind while seated; the Southern press became outrageous in its abuse of the North, and the North here and there retaliated. All my long-suppressed ardent Abolition spirit now found vent, and for a time I was allowed to write as I pleased. A Richmond editor paid me the compliment of saying that the articles in the _Bulletin_ were the bitterest and cleverest published in the North, but inquired if it was wise to manifest such feeling. I, who felt that the great strife was imminent, thought it was. Mr. Cummings thought differently, and I was checked. For years there were many who believed that the fearfully growing cancer could be cured with rose-water; as, for instance, Edward Everett. While on the _Bulletin_ I translated Heine's _Pictures of Travel_. For it, poetry included, I was to receive three shillings a page. Even this was never paid me in full; I was obliged to take part of the money in engravings and books, and the publisher failed. It passed into other hands, and many thousands of copies were sold; from all of which I, of course, got nothing. I also became editor of _Graham's Magazine_, which I filled recklessly with all or any kind of literary matter as I best could, little or nothing being allowed for contributions. However, I raised the circulation from almost nothing to 17,000. For this I received fifty dollars (10 pounds) per month. When I finally left it, the proprietors were eighteen months in arrears due, and tried to evade payment, though I had specified a regular settlement every month. Finally they agreed to pay me in monthly instalments of fifty dollars each, and fulfilled the engagement. Talking of the South, I forget now at what time it was that Barnum's Museum in Philadelphia was burned, but I shall never forget a droll incident which it occasioned. Opposite it was a hotel, and the heat was so tremendous that the paint on the hotel was scorched, and it had begun to burn in places. By the door stood a friend of mine in great distress. I asked what was the matter. He replied that in the hotel was a Southern lady who would not leave her trunks, in which there were all her diamonds and other valuables, and that he could not find a porter to bring them down. I was strong enough in those days. "What is the number of her room?" "No. 22." I rushed up--it was scorching hot by this time--burst into No. 22, and found a beautiful young lady in dire distress. I said abruptly, "I come from Mr. --- ---; where are your trunks?" She began to cry confusedly, "Oh, you can do _nothing_; they are very heavy." Seeing the two large trunks, I at once, without a word, caught one by each handle, dragged them after me bumping downstairs, the lady following, to the door, where I found my friend, who had a carriage in waiting. From the lady's subsequent account, it appeared that I had occasioned her much more alarm than pleasure. She said that all at once a great tall gentleman burst into her room, seized her trunks without a word of apology, and dragged them downstairs like a giant; she was never so startled in all her life! It was explained to me that, as in the South only negroes handle trunks, the lady could not regard me exactly as a gentleman. She was within a short ace of being burnt up, trunks and all, but could not forget that she was from the "Sa-outh," and must needs show it. Apropos of this occurrence, I remember something odd which took place on the night of the same day. There was a stylish drinking-place, kept by a man named Guy, in Seventh Street. In the evening, when it was most crowded, there entered a stranger, described as having been fully _seven_ feet high, and powerful in proportion, who kept very quiet, but who, on being chaffed as the giant escaped from Barnum's Museum, grew angry, and ended by clearing out the barroom--driving thirty men before him like flies. Aghast at such a tremendous feat, one who remained, asked, "Who in God's wrath are you?--haven't you a name?" "Yes, I _have_ a name," replied the Berserker; "_I'm_ CHARLES LELAND!" saying which he vanished. The next day it was all over Philadelphia that I had cleared out John Guy's the night before, _sans merci_. True, I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand enormously when inflated or mad; so my denial was attributed to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom I have never heard since. While editing _Graham's Magazine_, I had one day a space to fill. In a hurry I knocked off "Hans Breitmann's Barty" (1856). I gave it no thought whatever. Soon after, Clark republished it in the _Knickerbocker_, saying that it was evidently by me. I little dreamed that in days to come I should be asked in Egypt, and on the blue Mediterranean, and in every country in Europe, if I was its author. I wrote in those days a vast number of such anonymous drolleries, many of them, I daresay, quite as good, in _Graham's Magazine_ and the _Weekly Bulletin_, &c., but I took no heed of them. They were probably appropriated in due time by the authors of "Beautiful Snow." I began to weary of Philadelphia. New York was a wider field and more congenial to me. Mr. Cummings had once, during a financial crisis, appealed to my better feelings very touchingly to let my salary be reduced. I let myself be touched--in the pocket. Better times came, but my salary did not rise. Mr. Cummings, knowing that my father was wealthy, wanted me to put a large sum into his paper, assuring me that it would pay me fifteen per cent. I asked how that could be possible when he could only afford to pay me so very little for such hard work. He chuckled, and said, "That is the way we make our money." Then I determined to leave. Mr. George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, of the _Tribune_, were then editing in New York _Appletons' Cyclopaedia_. Mr. Ripley had several times shown himself my friend; he belonged to the famous old band of Boston Transcendentalists who were at Brook Farm. I wrote to him asking if I could earn as much at the _Cyclopaedia_ as I got from the _Bulletin_. He answered affirmatively; so we packed up and departed. I had a sister in New York who had married a Princeton College-mate named Thorp. We went to their house in Twenty-second Street near Broadway, and arranged it so as to remain there during the winter. In the _Cyclopaedia_ rooms I found abundance of work, though it was less profitable than I expected. For after an article was written, it passed through the hands of six or seven revisers, who revised not always wisely, and frequently far too well. They made their objections in writing, and we, the writers, made ours. I often gained a victory, but the victory cost a great deal of work, and of time which was not paid for. Altogether, I wrote about two hundred articles, great and small, for the _Cyclopaedia_. On the other hand, there was pleasant and congenial society among my fellow-workmen, and the labour itself was immensely instructive. If any man wishes to be well informed, let him work on a cyclopaedia. As I could read several languages, I was additionally useful at times. The greatest conciseness of style is required for such work. In German cyclopaedias this is carried to a fault. After a while I began to find that there was much more money to be made outside the _Cyclopaedia_ than in it. William H. Hurlbut, whom I had once seen so nearly shot, had been the "foreign editor" of the _New York Times_. Mr. Henry Raymond, its proprietor, had engaged a Mr. Hammond to come after some six months to take his place, and I was asked to fill it _ad interim_. I did so, so much to Mr. Raymond's satisfaction, that he much regretted when I left that he had not previously engaged me. He was always very kind to me. He said that now and then, whenever he wanted a really superior art criticism, I should write it. He was quite right, for there were not many reporters in New York who had received such an education in aesthetics as mine. When Patti made her _debut_ in opera for the first time, I was the only writer who boldly predicted that she would achieve the highest lyrical honours or become a "star" of the first magnitude. Apropos of Hurlbut, I heard many years after, in England, that a certain well-known _litterateur_, who was not one of his admirers, having seen him seated in close _tete-a-tete_ with a very notorious and unpopular character, remarked regretfully, "Just to think that with one pistol-bullet _both_ might have been settled!" Hurlbut was, even as a boy, very handsome, with a pale face and black eyes, and extremely clever, being _facile princeps_, the head of every class, and extensively read. But there was "a screw loose" somewhere in him. He was subject, but not very frequently, to such fits of passion or rage, that he literally became blind while they lasted. I saw him one day in one of these throw his arms about and stamp on the ground, as if unable to behold any one. I once heard a young lady in New York profess unbounded admiration for him, because "he looked so charmingly like the devil." For many years the _New York Herald_ always described him as the Reverend Mephistopheles Hurlbut. There was another very beautiful lady who afterwards died a strange and violent death, as also a friend of mine, an editor in _New_ York, both of whom narrated to me at very great length "a grotesque Iliad of the wild career" of this remarkable man. It never rains but it pours. Frank Leslie, who had been with me on Barnum's _Illustrated News_, was now publishing half-a-dozen periodicals and newspapers, and offered me a fair price to give him my mornings. I did so. Unfortunately, my work was not specified, and he retained his old editors, who naturally enough did not want me, although they treated me civilly enough. One of these was Thomas Powell, who had seen a great deal of all the great English writers of the last generation. But there was much rather shady, shaky Bohemianism about the frequenters of our sanctum, and, all things considered, it was a pity that I ever entered it. _Und noch weiter_. There was published in New York at that time (1860) an illustrated comic weekly called _Vanity Fair_. There was also in the city a kind of irregular club known as the Bohemians, who had been inspired by Murger's novel of that name to imitate the life of its heroes. They met every evening at a lager-beer restaurant kept by a German named Pfaff. For a year or two they made a great sensation in New York. Their two principal men were Henry Clapp and Fitz-James O'Brien. Then there were Frank Wood and George Arnold, W. Winter, C. Gardette, and others. Wood edited _Vanity Fair_, and all the rest contributed to it. There was some difficulty or other between Wood and Mr. Stephens, the _gerant_ of the weekly, and Wood left, followed by all the clan. I was called in in the emergency, and what with writing myself, and the aid of R. H. Stoddard, T. B. Aldrich, and a few more, we made a very creditable appearance indeed. Little by little the Bohemians all came back, and all went well. Now I must here specify, for good reasons, that I held myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the poorest settled employment to such life. I mention this because a very brilliant and singular article entitled "Charles G. Leland _l'ennemi des Allemands_" (this title angered me), which appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in 1871, speaks of me by implication as a frequenter of Pfaff's, declaring that I there introduced Artemus Ward to the Bohemian brotherhood, and that it was entirely due to me that Mr. Browne was brought out before the American World. This is quite incorrect. Mr. Browne had made a name by two or three very popular sketches before I had ever seen him. But it is very true that I aided him to write, and suggested and encouraged the series of sketches which made him famous, as he himself frankly and generously declared, for Charles Browne was at heart an honest gentleman, if there ever was one; which is the one thing in life better than success. Mr. Stephens realising that I needed an assistant, and observing that Browne's two sketches of the Showman's letter and the Mormons had made him well known, invited him to take a place in our office. He was a shrewd, naif, but at the same time modest and unassuming young man. He was a native of Maine, but familiar with the West. Quiet as he seemed, in three weeks he had found out everything in New York. I could illustrate this by a very extraordinary fact, but I have not space for everything. I proposed to him to continue his sketches. "Write," I said, "a paper on the Shakers." He replied that he knew nothing about them. I had been at Lenox, Massachusetts, where I had often gone to New Lebanon and seen their strange worship and dances, and while on the _Illustrated News_ had had a conference with their elders on an article on the Shakers. So I told him what I knew, and he wrote it, making it a condition that I would correct it. He wrote the sketch, and others. He was very slow at composition, which seemed strange to me, who was accustomed to write everything as I now do, _currente calamo_ (having written all these memoirs, so far, within a month--more or less, and certainly very little more). From this came his book. When he wrote the article describing his imprisonment, there was in it a sentence, "Jailor, I shall die unless you bring me something to eat!" In the proof we found, "I shall die unless you bring me something to _talk_." He was just going to correct this, when I cried, "For Heaven's sake, Browne, let that stand! It's best as it is." He did so, and so the reader may find it in his work. Meanwhile the awful storm of war had gathered and was about to burst. I may here say that there was a kind of literary club or association of ladies and gentlemen who met once a week of evenings in the Studio Buildings, where I had many friends, such as Van Brunt, C. Gambrell, Hazeltine, Bierstadt, Gifford, Church, and Mignot. At this club I constantly met General Birney, the great Abolitionist, whose famous charge at Gettysburg did so much to decide the battle. Constant intercourse with him and with C. A. Dana greatly inspired me in my anti- slavery views. The manager of _Vanity Fair_ was very much averse to absolutely committing the journal to Republicanism, and I was determined on it. I had a delicate and very difficult path to pursue, and I succeeded, as the publication bears witness. I went several times to Mr. Dana, and availed myself of his shrewd advice. Browne, too, agreed pretty fairly with me. I voted for Abraham Lincoln at the first election in New York. I voted _on principle_, for I confess that every conceivable thing had been said and done to represent him as an ignorant, ungainly, silly Western Hoosier, and even the Republican press had little or nothing to say as to his good qualities. Horace Greeley had "sprung him" on the Convention at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute as the only available man, and he had been chosen as our candidate to defeat Douglas. Let me here relate two anecdotes. When my brother heard of Lincoln's "candidacy" he said-- "I don't see why the people shouldn't be allowed to have a President for once." A Copperhead friend of mine, who was always aiming at "gentility," remarked to me with an air of disgust on the same subject-- "I do _wisht_ we could have a gentleman for President for _oncet_." The said Copperhead became in due time a Republican office-holder, and is one yet. Lincoln was elected. Then came the storm. Our rejoicings were short. Sumter was fired on. Up to that time everybody, including President Lincoln, had quite resolved that, if the South was resolved to secede, it must be allowed to depart in peace. There had been for many years a conviction that our country was growing to be too large to hold together. I always despised the contemptible idea. I had been in correspondence with the Russian Iskander or Alexander Herzen, who was a century in advance of his time. He was the real abolisher of serfdom in Russia, as history will yet prove. I once wrote a very long article urging the Russian Government to throw open the Ural gold mines to foreigners, and make every effort to annex Chinese territory and open a port on the Pacific. Herzen translated it into Russian (I have a copy of it), and circulated twenty thousand copies of it in Russia. The Czar read it. Herzen wrote to me: "It will be pigeon-holed for forty years, and then perhaps acted on. The Pacific will be the Mediterranean of the future." With such ideas I did not believe in the dismemberment of the United States. {237} But Sumter was fired on, and the whole North rose in fury. It was the silliest act ever committed. The South, with one-third of the votes, had two-thirds of all the civil, military, and naval appointments, and every other new State, and withal half of the North, ready to lick its boots, and still was not satisfied. It could not go without giving us a thrashing. And that was the drop too much. So we fought. And we conquered; but _how_? It was all expressed in a few words, which I heard uttered by a common man at a _Bulletin_ board, on the dreadful day when we first read the news of the retreat at Bull Run: "It's hard--but we must buckle up and go at it again." It is very strange that the South never understood that among the mud-sills and toiling slaves and factory serfs of the North the spirit which had made men enrich barren New England and colonise the Western wilderness would make them buckle up and go at it again boldly to the bitter end. One evening I met C. A. Dana on Broadway. War had fairly begun. "It will last," he said, "not less than four years, but it may extend to seven." Trouble now came thick and fast. _Vanity Fair_ was brought to an end. Frank Leslie found that he no longer required my services, and paid my due, which was far in arrears, in his usual manner, that is, by orders on advertisers for goods which I did not want, and for which I was charged double prices. Alexander Cummings had a very ingenious method of "shaving" when obliged to pay his debts. His friend Simon Cameron had a bank--the Middleton--which, if not a very wild cat, was far from tame, as its notes were always five or ten per cent. below par, to our loss--for we were always paid in Middleton. I have often known the clerk to take a handful of notes at par and send out to buy Middleton wherewith to pay me. I am sorry to say that such tricks were universal among the very great majority of proprietors with whom I had dealings. To "do" the _employes_ to the utmost was considered a matter of course, especially when the one employed was a "literary fellow" of any kind or an artist. I should mention that while in New York I saw a great deal of Bayard Taylor and his wife. I had known him since 1850 and was intimate with him till his death. He occupied the same house with the distinguished poet R. H. Stoddard. I experienced from both much kindness. We had amusing Saturday evenings there, where droll plays were improvised, and admirable disguises made out of anything. In after years, in London, Walter H. Pollock, Minto (recently deceased), and myself, did the same. One night, in the latter circle, we played _Hamlet_, but the chief character was the Sentinel, who stared at the Ghost with such open-jawed horror--"_bouche beante_, _rechignez_!"--and so prominently, that poor Hamlet was under a cloud. Pollock's great capuchon overcoat served for all kinds of mysterious characters. We were also kindly entertained many a time and oft in New York by Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Dana. My engagement expired on the _Times_--where, by the way, I was paid in full in good money--and I found myself without employment in a fearful financial panic. During the spring and early summer we had lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel; we now went to a very pleasant boarding-house kept by Mrs. Dunn, on Staten Island. My old friend, George Ward, and G. W. Curtis, well known in literature and politics (who had been at Mr. Greene's school), lived at no great distance from us. The steamboats from New York to Staten Island got to racing, and I enjoyed it very much, but George Ward and some of the milder sort protested against it, and it was stopped; which I thought rather hard, for we had very little amusement in those dismal days. I was once in a steamboat race when our boat knocked away the paddle-box from the other and smashed the wheel. From the days of the Romans and Norsemen down to the present time, there was never any form of amusement discovered so daring, so dangerous, and so exciting as a steamboat race, and nobody but Americans could have ever invented or indulged in it. The old _Knickerbocker Magazine_ had been for a long time running down to absolutely nothing. A Mr. Gilmore purchased it, and endeavoured to galvanise it into life. Its sober grey-blue cover was changed to orange. Mr. Clark left it, to my sorrow; but there was no help for it, for there was not a penny to pay him. I consented to edit it for half ownership, for I had an idea. This was, to make it promptly a strong Republican monthly for the time, which was utterly opposed to all of Mr. Clark's ideas. I must here remark that the financial depression in the North at this time was terrible. I knew many instances in which landlords begged it as a favour from tenants that they would remain rent-free in their houses. A friend of mine, Mr. Fales, one day took me over two houses in Fifth Avenue, of which he had been offered his choice for $15,000 each. Six months after the house sold for $150,000. Factories and shops were everywhere closing, and there was a general feeling that far deeper and more terrible disasters were coming--war in its worst forms--national disintegration--utter ruin. This spirit of despair was now debilitating everybody. The Copperheads or Democrats, who were within a fraction as numerous as the Republicans, continually hissed, "You see to what your nigger worship has brought the country. This is all your doing. And the worst is to come." Then there was soon developed a class known as Croakers, who increased to the end of the war. These were good enough Union people, but without any hope of any happy issue in anything, and who were quite sure that everything was for the worst in this our most unfortunate of all wretched countries. Now it is a law of humanity that in all great crises, or whenever energy and manliness is needed, pessimism is a benumbing poison, and the strongest optimism the very _elixir vitae_ itself. And by a marvellously strange inspiration (though it was founded on cool, far-sighted calculation), I, at this most critical and depressing time, rose to extremest hope and confidence, rejoicing that the great crisis had at length come, and feeling to my very depths of conviction that, as we were sublimely in the right, we must conquer, and that the dread portal once passed we should find ourselves in the fairy palace of prosperity and freedom. But that I was absolutely for a time alone amid all men round me in this intense hope and confidence, may be read as clearly as can be in what I and others published in those days, for all of this was recorded in type. Bayard Taylor had been down to the front, and remarked carelessly to me one day that when he found that there was already a discount of 40 per cent. on Confederate notes, he was sure that the South would yield in the end. This made me think very deeply. There was no reason, if we could keep the Copperheads subdued, why we should not hold our own on our own territory. _Secondly_, as the war went on we should soon win converts. _Thirdly_, that the North had immense resources--its hay crop alone was worth more than all the cotton crop of the South. And _fourthly_, that when manufacturing and contract-making for the army should once begin, there would be such a spreading or wasting of money and making fortunes as the world never witnessed, and that while we grew rich, the South, without commerce or manufactures, must grow poor. I felt as if inspired, and I wrote an article entitled, "Woe to the South." At this time, "Woe to the North" was the fear in every heart. I showed clearly that if we would only keep up our hearts, that the utter ruin of the South was inevitable, while that for us there was close at hand such a period of prosperity as no one ever dreamt of--that every factory would soon double its buildings, and prices rise beyond all precedent. I followed this article by others, all in a wild, enthusiastic style of triumph. People thought I was mad, and the _New York Times_ compared my utterances to the outpourings of a fanatical Puritan in the time of Cromwell. But they were fulfilled to the letter. There is no instance that I know of in which any man ever prophesied so directly in the face of public opinion and had his predictions so accurately fulfilled. I was _all alone_ in my opinions. At all times a feeling as of awe at myself comes over me when I think of what I published. For, with the exception of Gilmore, who had a kind of vague idea that he kept a prophet--as Moses the tailor kept a poet--not a soul of my acquaintance believed in all this. Then I went a step further. I found that the real block in the way of Northern union was the disgust which had gathered round the mere _name_ of Abolitionist. It became very apparent that freeing the slaves would, as General Birney once said to me, be knocking out the bottom of the basket. And people wanted to abolitionise without being "Abolitionists"; and at this time even the _New York Tribune_ became afraid to advocate anti-slavery, and the greatest fanatics were dumb with fear. Then I made a new departure. I advocated emancipation of the slaves _as a war measure only_, and my cry was "Emancipation for the sake of the White Man." I urged prompt and vigorous action without any regard to philanthropy. As publishing such views in the _Knickerbocker_ was like pouring the wildest of new wine into the weakest of old bottles, Gilmore resolved to establish at once in Boston a political monthly magazine to be called the _Continental_, to be devoted to this view of the situation. It was the only political magazine devoted to the Republican cause published during the war. That it fully succeeded in rapidly attracting to the Union party a vast number of those who had held aloof owing to their antipathy to the mere word abolition, is positively true, and still remembered by many. {242} Very speedily indeed people at large caught at the idea. I remember the very first time when one evening I heard Governor Andrews say of a certain politician that he was not an Abolitionist but an _Emancipationist_; and it was subsequently declared by my friends in Boston, and that often, that the very bold course taken by the _Continental Magazine_, and the creation by it of the Emancipationist wing, had hastened by several months the emancipation of the slaves by Abraham Lincoln. It was for this alone that the University of Cambridge, Massachusetts, afterwards, through its president, gave me the degree of A. M., "for literary services rendered to the country during the war," which is as complete a proof of what I assert as could be imagined, for this was in very truth the one sole literary service which I performed at that time, and there were many of my great literary friends who declared their belief in, and sympathy with, the services which I rendered to the cause. But I will now cite some facts which fully and further confirm what I have said. The _Continental Magazine_ was, as I may say, a something more than semi- official organ. Mr. Seward contributed to it two anonymous articles, or rather their substance, which were written out and forwarded to me by Oakey Hall, Esq., of New York. We received from the Cabinet at Washington continual suggestions, for it was well understood that the _Continental_ was read by all influential Republicans. A contributor had sent us a very important article indeed, pointing out that there was all through the South, from the Mississippi to the sea, a line of mountainous country in which there were few or no slaves, and very little attachment to the Confederacy. This article, which was extensively republished, attracted great attention. It gave great strength and encouragement to the grand plan of the campaign, afterwards realised by Sherman. By _official request_, to me directed, the author contributed a second article on the subject. These articles were extensively circulated in pamphlet form or widely copied by the press, and created a great sensation, forming, in fact, one of the great points made in influencing public opinion. Another of the same kind, but not ours, was the famous pamphlet by Charles Stille, of Philadelphia, "How a Free People Conduct a Long War," in which it was demonstrated that the man who can hold out longest in a fight has the best chance, which simple truth made, however, an incredible popular impression. Gilmore and our friends succeeded, in fact, in making the _Continental Magazine_ "respected at court." But I kept my independence and principles, and thundered away so fiercely for _immediate_ emancipation that I was confidentially informed that Mr. Seward once exclaimed in a rage, "Damn Leland and his magazine!" But as he damned me only officially and in confidence, I took it in the Pickwickian sense. And at this time I realised that, though I was not personally very much before the public, I was doing great and good work, and, as I have said, a great many very distinguished persons expressed to me by letter or in conversation their appreciation of it; and some on the other side wrote letters giving it to me _per contra_, and one of these was Caleb Cushing. Cushing in Chinese means "ancient glory," but Caleb's renown was extinguished in those days. I may add that not only did H. W. Longfellow express to me his sympathy for and admiration of my efforts to aid the Union cause, but at one time or another all of my literary friends in Boston, who perfectly understood and showed deep interest in what I was doing. Which can be well believed of a city in which, above all others in the world, everybody sincerely aims at culture and knowledge, the first principle of which--inspired by praiseworthy local patriotism--is to know and take pride in what is done in Boston by its natives. V. LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS SEQUENCE. 1862-1866. Boston in 1862--Kind friends--Literary circles--Emerson, O. W. Holmes, Lowell, E. P. Whipple, Agassiz, &c.--The Saturday dinners--The printed autograph--The days of the Dark Shadow--Lowell and Hosea Biglow--I am assured that the _Continental Magazine_ advanced the period of Emancipation--I return to Philadelphia--My pamphlet on "Centralisation _versus_ States Rights"--Its Results--Books--Ping-Wing--The Emergency--I enter an artillery company--Adventures and comrades--R. W. Gilder--I see rebel scouts near Harrisburg--The shelling of Carlisle--Incidents--My brother receives his death-wound at my side--Theodore Fassitt--Stewart Patterson--Exposure and hunger--The famous bringing-up of the cannon--Picturesque scenery--The battle of Gettysburg--The retreat of Lee--Incidents--Return home--Cape May--The beautiful Miss Vining--Solomon the Sadducee--General Carrol Tevis--The Sanitary Fair--The oil mania--The oil country--Colonel H. Olcott, the theosophist--Adventures and odd incidents in Oil-land--Nashville--Dangers of the road--A friend in need--I act as unofficial secretary and legal adviser to General Whipple--Freed slaves--_Inter arma silent leges_--Horace Harrison--Voodoo--Captain Joseph R. Paxton--Scouting for oil and shooting a brigand--Indiana in winter--Charleston, West Virginia--Back and forth from Providence to the debated land--The murder of A. Lincoln--Goshorn--Up Elk River in a dug- out--A charmed life--Sam Fox--A close shot--Meteorological sorcery--A wild country--Marvellous scenery--I bore a well--Robert Hunt--Horse adventures--The panther--I am suspected of being a rebel spy--The German apology--Cincinnati--Niagara--A summer at Lenox, Mass.--A MS. burnt. We went to Boston early in December, 1861, and during that winter lived pleasantly at the Winthrop House on the Common. I had already many friends, and took letters to others who became our friends. We were very kindly received. Among those whom we knew best were Mrs. and Mr. H. Ritchie, Mrs. and Mr. T. Perkins, Mrs. H. G. Otis, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Ward--but I must really stop, for there was no end to the list. Among my literary friends or acquaintances, or "people whom I have very often met," were Emerson, Longfellow, Dr. O. W. Holmes, J. R. Lowell, E. P. Whipple, Palfrey, G. Ticknor, Agassiz, E. Everett--in a word, all that brilliant circle which shone when Boston was at its brightest in 1862. I was often invited to the celebrated Saturday dinners, where I more than once sat by Emerson and Holmes. As I had been editor of the free lance _Vanity Fair_, and was now conducting the _Continental_ with no small degree of audacity, regardless of friend or foe, it was expected--and no wonder--that I would be beautifully cheeky and New Yorky; and truly my education and antecedents in America, beginning with my training under Barnum, were not such as to inspire faith in my modesty. But in the society of the Saturday Club, and in the very _general_ respect manifested in all circles in Boston for culture or knowledge in every form--in which respect it is certainly equalled by no city on earth--I often forgot newspapers and politics and war, and lived again in memory at Heidelberg and Munich, recalling literature and art. I heard, a day or two after my first Saturday, that I had passed the grand ordeal successfully, or _summa cum magna laude_, and that Dr. Holmes, in enumerating divers good qualities, had remarked that I was modest. Every stranger coming to Boston has a verdict or judgment passed on him--he is numbered and labelled at once--and it is really wonderful how in a few days the whole town knows it. I had met with Emerson many years before in Philadelphia, where I had attracted his attention by remarking in Mrs. James Rush's drawing-room that a vase in a room was like a bridge in a landscape, which he recalled twenty years later. With Dr. Holmes I had corresponded. Lowell! "that reminds me of a little story." There was some "genius of freedom"--_i.e._, one who takes liberties--who collected autographs, and had not even the politeness to send a written request. He forwarded to me this printed circular: "DEAR SIR: As I am collecting the autographs of distinguished Americans, I would be much obliged to you for your signature. Yours truly, --- ---" While I was editing _Vanity Fair_ I received one of these circulars. I at once wrote:-- "DEAR SIR: It gives me great pleasure to comply with your request. CHARLES G. LELAND." I called the foreman, and said, "Mr. Chapin, please to set this up and pull half-a-dozen proofs." It was done, and I sent one to the autograph- chaser. He was angry, and answered impertinently. Others I sent to Holmes and Lowell. The latter thought that the applicant was a great fool not to understand that such a printed document was far more of a curiosity than a mere signature. I met with Chapin afterwards, when in the war. He had with him a small company of printers, all of whom had set up my copy many a time. Printers are always polite men. They all called on me, and having no cards, left cigars, which were quite as acceptable at that time of tobacco-famine. Amid all the horrors and anxieties of that dreadful year, while my old school-mate, General George B. McClellan, was delaying and demanding more men--_mas y mas y mas_--I still had as many happy hours as had ever come into any year of my life. If I made no money, and had to wear my old gloves (I had fortunately a good stock gathered from one of Frank Leslie's debtors), and had to sail rather close to the wind, I still found the sailing very pleasant, and the wind fair and cool, though I was _pauper in aere_. Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis held a ladies' sewing-circle to make garments for the soldiers, at which my wife worked zealously. There were many social receptions, readings, etc., where we met everybody. It was very properly considered bad form in those early days of the war to dance or give grand dinners or great "parties." It was, in fact, hardly decent for a man to dress up and appear as a swell at all anywhere. Death was beginning to strike fast into families through siege and battle, and crape to blacken the door-bells. There was a dark shadow over every life. I had been assured by an officer that my magazine was doing the work of two regiments, yet I was tormented with the feeling that I ought to be in the war, as my grandfather would surely have been at my age. The officer alluded to wrote to me that he on one occasion had read one of my articles by camp-fire to his regiment, who gave at the end three tremendous cheers, which were replied to by the enemy, who were not far away, with shouts of defiance. As for minor incidents of the war-time, I could fill a book with them. One day a young gentleman, a perfect stranger, came to my office, as many did, and asked for advice. He said, "Where I live in the country we have raised a regiment, and they want me to be colonel, but I have no knowledge whatever of military matters. What shall I do?" I looked at him, and saw that he "had it in him," and replied, "New York is full of Hungarian and German military adventurers seeking employment. Get one, and let him teach you and the men; but take good care that he does not supplant you. Let that be understood." After some months he returned in full uniform to thank me. He had got his man, had fought in the field--all had gone well. I remember, as an incident worth noting, that one evening while visiting Jas. R. Lowell at his house in Cambridge, awaiting supper, there came a great bundle of proofs. They were the second series of the Biglow Papers adapted to the new struggle, and as I was considered in Boston at that time as being in my degree a literary political authority or one of some general experience, he was anxious to have my opinion of them, and had invited me for that purpose. He read them to me, manifested great interest as to my opinion, and seemed to be very much delighted or relieved when I praised them and predicted a success. I do not exaggerate in this in the least; his expression was plainly and unmistakably that of a man from whom some doubt had been banished. My brother Henry had at once entered a training-school for officers in Philadelphia, distinguished himself as a pupil, and gone out to the war in 1862. The terrible ill-luck which attended his every effort in life overtook him speedily, and, owing to his extreme zeal and over-work, he had a sunstroke, which obliged him to return home. He was a first-lieutenant. The next year he went as sergeant, and was again invalided. What further befell him will appear in the course of my narrative. The _Continental Magazine_ had done its work and was evidently dying. I had never received a cent from it, and it had just met the expenses of publication. It had done much good and rendered great service to the Union cause. Gilmore had very foolishly yielded half the ownership to Robert J. Walker, of whom I confess I have no very agreeable recollections. So it began to die. But I have the best authority for declaring that, ere it died, it had advanced the time of the Declaration of Emancipation, which was the turning-point of the whole struggle, and all my friends in Boston were of that opinion. This I can fully prove. The summer of 1862 I passed in Dedham, going every day to my office in Boston. We lived at the Phoenix Hotel, and occupied the same rooms which my father and mother had inhabited thirty-five years before. We had many very kind and hospitable friends. I often found time to roam about the country, to sit by Wigwam Lake, to fish in the river Charles, and explore the wild woods. I have innumerable pleasant recollections of that summer. I returned in the autumn with my wife to Philadelphia, and to my father's house in Locust Street. The first thing which I did was to write a pamphlet on "Centralisation _versus_ States Rights." In it I set forth clearly enough the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States could not be interpreted so as to sanction secession, and that as the extremities or limbs grew in power, so there should be a strengthening of the brain or greater power bestowed on the central Government. I also advocated the idea of a far greater protection of general and common industries and interests being adopted by the Government. There was in the Senate a truly great man, of German extraction, named Gottlieb Orth, from Indiana. He was absolutely the founder of the Bureaus of Education, &c., which are now nourishing in Washington. He wrote to me saying that he had got the idea of Industrial bureaus from my pamphlet. In this pamphlet I had opposed the commonly expressed opinion that we must do nothing to "aggravate the South." That is, we should burn the powder up by degrees, as the old lady did who was blown to pieces by the experiment. "Do not drive them to extremes." I declared that the South would go to extremes in any case, and that we had better anticipate it. This brought forth strange fruit in after years, long after the war. While I was in Boston in 1862, I published by Putnam in New York a book entitled "Sunshine in Thought," which had, however, been written long before. It was all directed against the namby-pamby pessimism, "lost Edens and buried Lenores," and similar weak rubbish, which had then begun to manifest itself in literature, and which I foresaw was in future to become a great curse, as it has indeed done. Only five hundred copies of it were printed. I was very busy during the first six months of 1863. I wrote a work entitled "The Art of Conversation, or Hints for Self-Education," which was at once accepted and published by Carleton, of New York. It had, I am assured, a very large sale indeed. I also wrote and illustrated, with the aid of my brother, a very eccentric pamphlet, "The Book of Copperheads." When Abraham Lincoln died two books were found in his desk. One was the "Letters of Petroleum V. Nasby," by Dr. R. Locke, and my "Book of Copperheads," which latter was sent to me to see _and return_. It was much thumbed, showing that it had been thoroughly read by Father Abraham. I also translated Heine's "Book of Songs." Most of these had already been published in the "Pictures of Travel." I restored them to their original metres. I also translated the "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing" from the German, and finished up, partially illustrated, and published two juvenile works. One of these was "Mother Pitcher," a collection of original nursery rhymes for children, which I had written many years before expressly for my youngest sister, Emily, now Mrs. John Harrison of Philadelphia. In this work occurs my original poem of "Ping-Wing the Pieman's Son." Of this Poem _Punch_ said, many years after, that it was "the best thing of the kind which had ever crossed the Atlantic." Ping- Wing appeared in 1891 as a full-page cartoon by Tenniel in _Punch_, and as burning up the Treaty. I may venture to say that Ping-Wing--once improvised to amuse dear little Emily--has become almost as well known in American nurseries as "Little Boy Blue," at any rate his is a popular type, and when Mrs. Vanderbilt gave her famous masked ball in New York, there was in the Children's Quadrille a little Ping-Wing. Ping travelled far and wide, for in after years I put him into Pidgin-English, and gave him a place in the "Pidgin-English Ballads," which have always been read in Canton, I daresay by many a heathen Chinese learning that childlike tongue. I also translated the German "Mother Goose." And now terrible times came on, followed, for me, by a sad event. The rebels, led by General Lee, had penetrated into Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia was threatened. This period was called the "Emergency." I could easily have got a command as officer. I had already obtained for my brother an appointment as major with secretary's duty on Fremont's staff, which he promptly declined. But it was no time to stand on dignity, and I was rather proud, as was my brother, to go as "full private" in an artillery company known as "Chapman Biddle's," though he did not take command of it on this occasion. {252} Our captain was a dealer in cutlery named Landis. After some days' delay we were marched forth. Even during those few days, while going about town in my private's uniform, I realised in a droll new way what it was to be a _common_ man. Maid-servants greeted me like a friend, other soldiers and the humbler class talked familiarly to me. I had, however, no excuse to think myself any better than my comrades, for among the hundred were nearly twenty lawyers or law-students, and all were gentlemen as regards position in society. Among them was R. W. Gilder, now the editor of the _Century_, who was quite a youth then, and in whose appearance there was something which deeply interested me. I certainly have a strange Gypsy faculty for divining character, and I divined a genius in him. He was very brave and uncomplaining in suffering, but also very sensitive and emotional. Once it happened, at a time when we were all nearly starved to death and worn out with want of sleep and fatigue, that I by some chance got a loaf of bread and some molasses. I cut it into twelve slices and sweetened them, intending to give one to every man of our gun. But I could only find eleven, and, remembering Gilder, went about a long mile to find him; and when I gave it to him he was so touched that the tears came into his fine dark eyes. Trivial as the incident was, it moved me. Another was Theodore Fassitt, a next-door neighbour of mine, whose mother had specially commended him to me, and who told me that once or twice he had stolen ears of maize from the horses to keep himself alive. Also Edward Penington, and James Biddle, a gentleman of sixty; but I really cannot give the roll-call. However, they all showed themselves to be gallant gentlemen and true ere they returned home. The first night we slept in a railroad station, packed like sardines, and I lay directly across a rail. Then we were in camp near Harrisburg for a week--_dans la pluie et la misere_. We knew that the rebels were within six miles of us, at Shooter's Hill--in fact, two of our guns went there. Penington was with them, and had a small skirmish, wherein two of the foemen were slain, the corporal being, however, called off before he could secure their scalps. That afternoon, as I was on guard, I saw far down below a few men who appeared to be scouting very cautiously, and hiding as they did so. They seemed mere specks, but I was sure they were rebels. I called on Lieutenant Perkins, who had a glass, but neither he nor others present thought they were of the enemy. Long after, this incident had a droll sequel. Hearing that the rebels were threatening Carlisle, we were sent thither on a forced march of sixteen miles. They had been before us, and partially burned the barracks. We rested in the town. There was a large open space, for all the world like a stage. Ladies and others brought us refreshments; the scene became theatrical indeed. The soldiers, wearied with a long march, were resting or gossipping, when all at once--_whizz- bang_--a shell came flying over our heads and burst. There were cries--the ladies fled like frightened wild-fowl! The operatic effect was complete! About ten thousand rebel regulars, hearing that we had occupied Carlisle, had returned, and if they had known that there were only two or three thousand raw recruits, they might have captured us all. From this fate we were saved by a good strong tremendous lie, well and bravely told. There was a somewhat ungainly, innocent, rustic-looking youth in our company, from whose eyes simple truth peeped out like two country girls at two Sunday-school windows. He, having been sent to the barracks to get some fodder, with strict injunction to return immediately, of course lay down at once in the hay and had a good long nap. The rebels came and roused him out, but promised to let him go free on condition that he would tell the sacred truth as to how many of us Federal troops were in Carlisle. And he, moved by sympathy for his kind captors, and swearing by the Great Copperhead Serpent, begged them to fly for their lives; "for twenty regiments of regulars, and Heaven only knew how many, volunteers, had come in that afternoon, and the whole North was rising, and trains running, and fresh levies pouring in." The rebels believed him, but they would not depart without giving us a touch of their quality, and so fired shell and grape in on us till two in the morning. There were two regiments of "common fellows," or valiant city roughs, with us, who all hid themselves in terror wherever they could. But our company, though unable to fire more than a few shots, were kept under fire, and, being all gentlemen, not a man flinched. I did not, to tell the truth, like our captain; but whatever his faults were, and he had some, cowardice was not among them. Some men are reckless of danger; he seemed to be absolutely insensible to it, as I more than once observed, to my great admiration. He was but a few feet from me, giving orders to a private, when a shell burst immediately over or almost between them. Neither was hurt, but the young man naturally shied, when Landis gruffly cried, "Never mind the shells, sir; they'll not hurt you till they hit you." I was leaning against a lamp-post when a charge of grape went through the lamp. Remembering the story in "Peter Simple," and that "lightning never strikes twice in the same place," I remained quiet, when there came at once another, smashing what was left of the glass about two feet above my head. Long after the war, when I was one day walking with Theodore Fassitt, I told him the tale of how I had awakened the family at the fire in Munich. And Theodore dolefully exclaimed, "I don't see why it is that _I_ can never do anything heroic or fine like that!" Then I said, "Theodore, I will tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a boy only eighteen years of age, and it happened in the war that he was in a town, and the rebels shelled it. Now this boy had charge of four horses, and the general had told him to stay in one place, before a church; and he obeyed. The shells came thick and fast--I saw it all myself--and by-and- bye one came and took off a leg from one of the horses. Then he was in a bad way with his horses, but he stayed. After a while the general came along, and asked him 'why the devil he was stopping there.' And he replied, 'I was ordered to, sir!' Then the general told him to get behind the church at once." "Why!" cried Theodore in amazement, "_I was that boy_!" "Yes," I replied; "and the famous Roman sentinel who remained at his post in Pompeii was no braver, and I don't think he had so hard a time of it as you had with that horse." I was put on guard. The others departed or lay down to sleep on the ground. The fire slackened, and only now and then a shell came with its diabolical scream like a dragon into the town. All at last was quiet, when there came shambling to me an odd figure. There had been some slight attempt by him to look like a soldier--he had a _feather_ in his hat--but he carried his rifle as if after deer or raccoons, and as if he were used to it. "Say, Cap!" he exclaimed, "kin you tell me where a chap could get some ammynition?" "Go to your quartermaster," I replied. "Ain't got no quartermaster." "Well, then to your commanding officer--to your regiment." "Ain't got no commanding officer nowher' this side o' God, nor no regiment." "Then who the devil are you, and where do you belong?" "Don't belong nowher'. I'll jest tell you, Cap, how it is. I live in the south line of New York State, and when I heard that the rebs had got inter Pennsylvany, forty of us held a meetin' and 'pinted me Cap'n. So we came down here cross country, and 'rived this a'ternoon, and findin' fightin' goin' on, went straight for the bush. And gettin' cover, we shot the darndest sight of rebels you ever _did_ see. And now all our ammynition is expended, I've come to town for more, for ther's some of 'em still left--who want killin' badly." "See here, my friend," I replied. "You don't know it, but you're nothing but a bushwhacker, and anybody has a right to hang or shoot you out of hand. Do you see that great square tent?" Here I pointed to the general's marquee. "Go in there and report yourself and get enrolled." And the last I saw of him he was stumbling over the sticks in the right direction. This was my first experience of a real _guerillo_--a character with whom I was destined to make further experience in after days. An earlier incident was to me extremely curious. There was in our battery a young gentleman named Stewart Patterson, noted for his agreeable, refined manners. He was the gunner of our cannon No. Two. We had brass Napoleons. At the distance of about one mile the rebels were shelling us. Patterson brought _his_ gun to bear on theirs, and the two exchanged shots at the same instant. Out of the smoke surrounding Patterson's gun I saw a sword-blade fly perhaps thirty feet, and then himself borne by two or three men, blood flowing profusely. The four fingers of his right hand had been cut away clean by a piece of shell. At the instant I saw the blade flash in its flight, I recalled seeing precisely the same thing long before in Heidelberg. There was a famous duellist who had fought sixty or seventy times and never received a scratch. One day he was acting as _second_, when the blade of his principal, becoming broken at the hilt by a violent blow, flew across the room, rebounded, and cut the second's lip entirely open. It was remarkable that I should twice in my life have seen such a thing, in both instances accompanied by wounds. Long after I met Patterson in Philadelphia, I think, in 1883. He did not recognise me, and gave me his left hand. I said, "Not that hand, Patterson, but the other. You've no reason to be ashamed of it. I saw the fingers shot off." But on that night there occurred an event which, in the end, after years of suffering, caused the deepest sorrow of my life. As we were not firing, I and the rest of the men of the gun were lying on the ground to escape the shells, but my brother, who was nothing if not soldierly and punctilious, stood upright in his place just beside me. There came a shell which burst immediately, and very closely over our heads, and a piece of it struck my brother exactly on the brass buckle in his belt on the spine. The blow was so severe that the buckle was bent in two. It cut through his coat and shirt, and inflicted a slight wound two inches in length. But the blow on the spine had produced a concussion or disorganisation of the brain, which proved, after years of suffering, the cause of his death. At first he was quite senseless, but as he came to, and I asked him anxiously if he was hurt, he replied sternly, "Go back immediately to your place by the gun!" He was like grandfather Leland. A day or two after, while we were on a forced march to intercept a party of rebels, the effect of the wound on my brother's brain manifested itself in a terrible hallucination. He had become very gloomy and reserved. Taking me aside, he informed me that as he had a few days before entered a country-house, contrary to an order issued, to buy food, he was sure that Captain Landis meant as soon as possible to have him shot, but that he intended, the instant he saw any sign of this, at once to attack and kill the captain! Knowing his absolute determined and inflexibly truthful character, and seeing a fearful expression in his eyes, I was much alarmed. Reflecting in the first place that he was half- starved, I got him a meal. I had brought from Philadelphia two pounds of dried beef, and this, carefully hoarded, had eked out many a piece of bread for a meal. I begged some bread, gave my brother some beef with it, and I think succeeded in getting him some coffee. Then I went to Lieutenant Perkins--a very good man--and begged leave to take my brother's guard and to let him sleep. He consented, and my brother gradually came to his mind, or at least to a better one. But he was never the same person afterwards, his brain having been permanently affected, and he died in consequence five years after. I may note as characteristic of my brother, that, twelve years after his death, Walt Whitman, who always gravely spoke the exact truth, told me that there was one year of his life during which he had received no encouragement as a poet, and so much ridicule that he was in utter despondency. At that time he received from Henry, who was unknown to him, a cheering letter, full of admiration, which had a great effect on him, and inspired him to renewed effort. He sent my brother a copy of the first edition of his "Leaves of Grass," with his autograph, which I still possess. I knew nothing of this till Whitman told me of it. The poet declared to me very explicitly that he had been much influenced by my brother's letter, which was like a single star in a dark night of despair, and I have indeed no doubt that the world owes more to it than will ever be made known. During the same week in which this occurred my wife's only brother, Rodney Fisher, a young man, and captain in the regular cavalry, met with a remarkably heroic death at Aldie, Virginia. He was leading what was described as "the most magnificent and dashing charge of the whole campaign," when he was struck by a bullet. He was carried to a house, where he died within a week. He was of the stock of the Delaware Rodneys, and of the English Admiral's, or of the best blood of the Revolution, and well worthy of it. It was all in a great cause, but these deaths entered into the soul of the survivors, and we grieve for them to this day. Our sufferings as soldiers during this Emergency were very great. I heard an officer who had been through the whole war, and through the worst of it in Virginia, declare that he had never suffered as he did with us this summer. And our unfortunate artillery company endured far more than the rest, for while pains were taken by commanding officers of other regiments, especially the regulars, to obtain food, our captain, either because they had the advance on him, or because he considered starving us as a part of the military drama, took little pains to feed us, and indeed neglected his men very much. As we had no doctor, and many of our company suffered from cholera morbus, I, having some knowledge of medicine, succeeded in obtaining some red pepper, a bottle of Jamaica ginger, and whisky, and so relieved a great many patients. One morning our captain forbade my attending to the invalids any more. "Proper medical attendance," he said, "would be provided." It was not; only now and then on rare occasions was a surgeon borrowed for a day. What earthly difference it could make in discipline (where there was no show or trace of it) whether I looked after the invalids or not was not perceptible. But our commander, though brave, was unfortunately one of those men who are also gifted with a great deal of "pure cussedness," and think that the exhibiting it is a sign of bravery. Although we had no tents, only a miserably rotten old gun-cover, and not always that, to sleep under (I generally slept in the open air, frequently in the rain), and often no issue of food for days, we were strictly prohibited from foraging or entering the country houses to buy food. This, which was a great absurdity, was about the only point of military discipline strictly enforced. At one time during the war, when men were not allowed to sleep in the country houses (to protect their owners), the soldiers would very often burn these houses down, in order that, when the family had fled, they might use the fireplace and chimney for cooking; and so our men, forbidden to enter the country houses to buy or beg food, stole it. I can recall one very remarkable incident. We had six guns, heavy old brass Napoleons. One afternoon we had to go uphill--in many cases it was _terribly_ steep--by a road like those in Devonshire, resembling a ditch. It rained in torrents and the water was knee-deep. The poor mules had to be urged and aided in every way, and half the pulling and pushing was done by us. All of us worked like navvies. So we went onwards and upwards for sixteen miles! When we got to the top of the hill, out of one hundred privates, Henry, I, and four others alone remained. R. W. Gilder was one of these, besides Landis and Lieutenant Perkins--that is to say, we alone had not given out from fatigue; but the rest soon followed. This exploit was long after cited as one of the most extraordinary of the war--and so it was. We were greatly complimented on it. Old veterans marvelled at it. But what was worse, I had to lie all night on sharp flints--_i.e._, the slag or _debris_ of an iron smeltery or old forge out of doors--in a terrible rain, and, though tired to death, got very little sleep; nor had we any food whatever even then or the next day. Commissariat there was none, and very little at any time. From all that I learned from many intimate friends who were in the war, I believe that we in the battery suffered to the utmost all that men can suffer in the field, short of wounds and death. Yet it is a strange thing, that had I not received at this time most harassing and distressing news from home, and been in constant fear as regards my brother, I should have enjoyed all this Emergency like a picnic. We often marched and camped in the valley of the Cumberland and in Maryland, in deep valleys, by roaring torrents or "on the mountains high," in scenery untrodden by any artist or tourist, of marvellous grandeur and beauty. One day we came upon a scene which may be best described by the fact that my brother and I both stopped, and both cried out at once, "Switzerland!" The beauty of Nature was to me a constant source of delight. Another was the realisation of the sense of duty and the pleasure of war for a noble cause. It was once declared by a reviewer that in my Breitmann poems the true _gaudium certaminis_, or enjoyment of battle, is more sincerely expressed than by any modern poet, because there is no deliberate or conscious effort to depict it seriously. And I believe that I deserved this opinion, because the order to march, the tramp and rattle and ring of cavalry and artillery, and the roar of cannon, always exhilarated me; and sometimes the old days of France would recur to me. One day, at some place where we were awaiting an attack and I was on guard, General Smith, pausing, asked me something of which all I could distinguish was "Fire--before." Thinking he had said, "Were you ever under fire before?" and much surprised at this interest in my biography, I replied, "Yes, General--in Paris--at the barricades in Forty- eight." He looked utterly amazed, and inquired, "What the devil did you think I said?" I explained, when he laughed heartily, and told me that his question was, "Has there been any firing here before?" Two very picturesque scenes occur to me. One was a night before the battle of Gettysburg. The country was mountain and valley, and the two opposing armies were camped pretty generally in sight of one another. There was, I suppose, nearly half a cord of wood burning for every twelve men, and these camp-fires studded the vast landscape like countless reflections of the stars above, or rather as if all were stars, high or low. It was one of the most wonderful sights conceivable, and I said at the time that it was as well worth seeing as Vesuvius in eruption. Henry had studied for eighteen months in the British Art School in Rome, and passed weeks in sketching the Alhambra, and, till he received his wound, took great joy in the picturesque scenery and "points" of military life. But it is incredible how little we ate or got to eat, and how hard we worked. It is awful to be set to digging ditches in a soil nine-tenths _stone_, when starving. As we were raw recruits, we were not put under fire at Gettysburg, but kept in Smith's reserve. But on the night after the defeat, when Lee retreated in such mad and needless haste across the Potomac, we were camped perhaps the nearest of any troops to the improvised bridge, I think within a mile. That night I was on guard, and all night long I heard the sound of cavalry, the ring and rattle of arms, and all that indicates an army in headlong flight. I say that they went in needless haste. I may be quite in the wrong, but I have always believed that Meade acted on the prudent policy of making a bridge of gold for a retreating enemy; and I always believed, too, that at heart he did not at all desire to inflict extreme suffering on the foe. Had he been a General Birney, he would have smote them then and there hip and thigh, and so ended the war "for good and all," like a Cromwell, with such a slaughter as was never seen. I base all this on one fact. At two o'clock on the afternoon before that night I went to a farmhouse to borrow an axe wherewith to cut some fuel; and I was told that the rebels had carried away every axe in great haste from every house, in order to make a bridge. Now, if I knew that at two o'clock, General Meade, if he had any scouts at all, _must_ have known it. But--_qui vult decipi_, _decipiatur_. That ended the Emergency. The next day, I think, we received the welcome news that we were no longer needed and would soon be sent home. On the way we encamped for a week at some place, I forget where. There was no drill now--we seldom had any--no special care of us, and no "policing" or keeping clean. Symptoms of typhoid fever soon appeared; forty of our hundred were more or less ill. My brother and I knew very well that the only way to avert this was to exercise vigorously. On waking in the morning we all experienced languor and lassitude. Those who yielded to it fell ill. Henry was always so ready to work, that once our sergeant, Mr. Bullard, interposed and gave the duty to another, saying it was not fair. I always remembered it with gratitude. But this feverish languor passed away at once with a little chopping of wood, bringing water, or cooking. One more reminiscence. Our lieutenant, Perkins, was a pious man, and on Sunday mornings held religious service, which we were obliged to attend. One day, when we had by good fortune rations of fresh meat, it was cooked for dinner and put by in two large kettles. During the service two hungry pigs came, and in our full sight overturned the kettles, and, after rooting over the food, escaped with large pieces. I did not care to dine, like St. Antonio, on pigs' leavings. My brother finding me, asked why I looked so glum. I replied that I was hungry. "Is that all?" he replied. "Come with me!" We went some distance until we came to a farmhouse in the forest. He entered, and, to my amazement, was greeted as an old friend. He had been there in the campaign of the previous year. I was at once supplied with a meal. My brother was asked to send them newspapers after his return. He never sought for mysteries and despised dramatic effects, but his life was full of them. Once, when in Naples, he was accustomed to meet by chance every day, in some retired walk, a young lady. They spoke, and met and met again, till they became like friends. One day he saw her in a court procession, and learned for the first time that she was a younger daughter of the King. But he never met her again. There were two or three boys of good family, none above sixteen, who had sworn themselves in as of age--recruiting officers were not particular--and who soon developed brilliant talents for "foraging," looting, guerilla warfare, horse-stealing, pot-hunting rebels, and all those little accomplishments which appear so naturally and pleasingly in youth when in the field. For bringing out the art of taking care of yourself, a camp in time of war is superior even to "sleeping about in the markets," as recommended by Mr. Weller. Other talents may be limited, but the amount of "devil" which can be developed out of a "smart" boy as a soldier is absolutely infinite. College is a Sunday- school to it. One of these youths had "obtained" a horse somewhere, which he contrived to carry along. Many of our infantry regiments gradually converted themselves into cavalry by this process of "obtaining" steeds; and as the officers found that their men could walk better on horses' legs, they permitted it. This promising youngster was one day seated on a caisson or ammunition waggon full of shells, &c., when it blew up. By a miracle he rose in the air, fell on the ground unhurt, and marching immediately up to the lieutenant and touching his hat, exclaimed, "Please, sir, caisson No. Two is blown to hell; please appoint me to another!" That oath was not recorded. Poor boy! he died in the war. There was one man in our corps, a good-natured, agreeable person, a professional politician, who astonished me by the fact that however starved we might be, he had always a flask of whisky wherewith to treat his friends! Where or how he always got it I never could divine. But in America every politician always has whisky or small change wherewith to treat. _Always_. Money was generally of little use, for there was rarely anything to buy anywhere. I soon developed here and there an Indian-like instinct in many things, and this is indeed deep in my nature. I cannot explain it, but it is _there_. I became expert when we approached a house at divining, by the look of waggons or pails or hencoops, whether there was meal or bread or a mill anywhere near. One day I informed our lieutenant that a detachment of rebel cavalry had recently passed. He asked me how I knew it. I replied that rebel horses, being from mountainous Virginia, had higher cocks and narrower to their shoes, and one or two more nails than ours, which is perfectly true. And where did I learn that? Not from anybody. I had noticed the difference as soon as I saw the tracks, and guessed the cause. One day, in after years in England, I noticed that in coursing, or with beagles, the track of a gypsy was exactly like mine, or that of all Americans--that is, Indian-like and _straight-forward_. I never found a Saxon-Englishman who had this step, nor one who noticed such a thing, which I or an Indian would observe at once. Once, in Rome, Mr. Story showed me a cast of a foot, and asked me what it was. I replied promptly, "Either an Indian girl's or an American young lady's, whose ancestors have been two hundred years in the country." It was the latter. Such feet _lift_ or leap, as if raised every time to go over entangled grass or sticks. Like an Indian, I instinctively observe everybody's _ears_, which are unerring indices of character. I can sustain, and always could endure, incredible fasts, but for this I need coffee in the morning. "Mark Twain"--whom I saw yesterday at his villa, as I correct this proof--also has this peculiar Indian-like or American faculty of observing innumerable little things which no European would ever think of. There is, I think, a great deal of "hard old Injun" in him. The most beautiful of his works are the three which are invariably bound in silk or muslin. They are called "The Three Daughters, or the Misses Clemens." It occurred to me, after I had recorded the events of our short but truly vigorous and eventful campaign, to write to R. W. Gilder and ask him--_quid memoriae datum est_--"what memories he had of that great war, wherein we starved and swore, and all but died." There are men in whose letters we are as sure to find genial _life_ as a _spaccio di vino_ or wine-shop in a Florentine street, and this poet-editor is one of them. And he replied with an epistle not at all intended for type, which I hereby print without his permission, and in defiance of all the custom or courtesy which inspires gentlemen of the press. "_May_ _8th_, _1893_. "EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT, THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, "UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK. "MY DEAR LELAND: How your letter carries me back! Do you know that one night when I was trudging along in the dark over a road-bed where had been scattered some loose stones to form a foundation, I heard you and another comrade talking me over in the way to which you refer in your letter? Well, it was either you or the other comrade who said you had given me something to eat, and I know that I must have seemed very fragile, and at times woe-begone. I was possibly the youngest in the crowd. I was nineteen, and really enjoyed it immensely notwithstanding. "I remember you in those days as a splendid expressor of our miseries. You had a magnificent vocabulary, wherewith you could eloquently and precisely describe our general condition of starvation, mud, ill-equippedness, and over-work. As I think of those days, I hear reverberating over the mountain-roads the call, 'Cannoneers to the wheels!' and in imagination I plunge knee-deep into the mire and grab the spokes of the caisson. {266a} "Do you remember the night we spent at the forge? I burnt my knees at the fire out-doors, while in my ears was pouring a deluge from the clouds. I finally gave it up, and spent the rest of the night crouching upon the fire-bed of the forge itself, most uncomfortably. "You will remember that we helped dig the trenches at the fort on the southern side of the river from Harrisburg, {266b} and that one section of the battery got into a fight near that fort; nor can you have forgotten when Stuart Patterson's hand was shot off at Carlisle. As he passed me, I heard him say, 'My God, I'm shot!' That night, after we were told to retire out of range of the cannon, while we were lying under tree near one of the guns, an officer called for volunteers to take the piece out of range. I stood up with three others, but seeing and hearing a shell approach, I cried out, 'Wait a moment!'--which checked them. Just then the shell exploded within a yard of the cannon. If we had not paused, some of us would surely have been hit. We then rushed out, seized the cannon, and brought it out of range. "By the way, General William F. Smith (Baldy Smith) has since told me that he asked permission to throw the militia (including ourselves) across one of Lee's lines of retreat. If he had been permitted to do so, I suppose you and I would not have been in correspondence now. "You remember undoubtedly the flag of truce that came up into the town before the bombardment began. The man was on horseback and had the conventional white flag. The story was that Baldy Smith sent word 'that if they wanted the town they could come and take it.' {267} I suppose you realise that we were really a part of Meade's right, and that we helped somewhat to delay the rebel left wing. Do you not remember hearing from our position at Carlisle the guns of that great battle--the turning-point of the war? {268} "I could run on in this way, but your own memory must be full of the subject. I wish that we could sometime have a reunion of the old battery in Philadelphia. I have a most distinct and pleasant remembrance of your brother--a charming personality indeed, a handsome refined face and dignified bearing. I remember being so starved as to eat crackers that had fallen on the ground; and I devoured, too, wheat from the fields rubbed in the hands to free it from the ear. . . . "Sincerely, R. W. GILDER. "_P.S._--I could write more, but you will not need it from me." Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard commending him, and it was I who gave him something to eat, I being the one in camp who looked specially after two or three of the youngest to see that they did not starve, and who doctored the invalids. I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly remembers me as "a splendid expressor of our miseries, with a magnificent vocabulary" wherewith to set forth fearful adversities. I have never been habitually loquacious in life; full many deem me deeply reticent and owl-like in my taciturnity, but I "can hoot when the moon shines," nor is there altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude kind of popular eloquence, which has--I avow it with humility--enabled me invariably to hold my own in verbal encounters with tinkers, gypsies, and the like, among whom "chaff" is developed to a degree of which few respectable people have any conception, and which attains to a refinement of sarcasm, _originality_, and humour in the London of the lower orders, for which there is no parallel in Paris, or in any other European capital; so that even among my earliest experiences I can remember, after an altercation with an omnibus-driver, he applied to me the popular remark that he was "blessed if he didn't believe that the gemman had been takin' lessons in language hof a cab-driver, _and set up o' nights to learn_." But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vigorous Londoner in "de elegant fluency of sass," as darkies term it, and it moves my heart to think that, after thirty years, and after the marvellous experiences of men who are masters of our English tongue which the editor of the _Century_ must have had, he still retains remembrance of my oratory! At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadelphia. I need not say that we were welcome, or that I enjoyed baths, clean clothes, and the blest sensation of feeling decent once more. Everything in life seemed to be _luxurious_ as it had never been before. Luxuries are very conventional. A copy of Praetorius, for which I paid only fifteen shillings, was to me lately a luxury for weeks; so is a visit to a picture gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emergency to realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions of happiness. Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, the seeds of typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as possible, and went with my wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, or nieces by marriage, and child- nephew, Edward Robins, to Cape May, a famous bathing-place by the ocean. One of the little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Robins, then six years of age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and "a writer of books," while Edward has risen in journalism in Philadelphia. There as I walked often eighteen or twenty miles a day by the sea, when the thermometer was from 90 to 100 degrees in the shade, I soon worked away all apprehension of typhoid and developed muscle. One day I overheard a man in the next bathing-house asking who I was. "I don't know," replied the other, "but if I were he, I'd go in for being a prize-fighter." Everybody was poor in those days, so we went to a very cheap though respectable hotel, where we paid less than half of what we had always given at "The Island," and where we were in company quite as happy or comfortable as we ever had been anywhere, though the death of her brother weighed sadly on my poor wife, and her dear good mother, whom I always loved tenderly, and with whom I never had a shade of difference of opinion nor a whisper of even argument, and to whom I was always devoted. I seem to have been destined to differ from other mortals in a few things: one was, that I always loved my mother-in-law with whole heart and soul, and never considered our _menage_ as perfect unless she were with us. She was of very good and rather near English descent, a Callender, and had been celebrated in her youth for extraordinary beauty. Her husband was related to the celebrated beauty Miss Vining, whom Maria Antoinette, from the fame of her loveliness, invited to come and join her court. At the beginning of this century no great foreigner travelled in America without calling on Miss Vining in Delaware. There is a life of her in Griswold's "Republican Court." It is without any illustrative portrait. I asked Dr. Griswold why he had none. He replied that none existed. I said to him severely, "Let _this_ be a lesson to you never to publish anything without submitting it first to _me_. I have a photograph of her miniature." The Doctor submitted! This summer at Cape May I made the acquaintance of a very remarkable man named Solomon. He was a Jew, and we became intimate. One evening he said to me: "You know so much about the Jews that I have even learned something from you about them. But I can teach you something. Can you tell the difference between the _Aschkenazim_ and the _Sephardim_ by their eyes? No! Well, now, look!" Just then a Spanish-looking beauty from New Orleans passed by. "There is Miss Inez Aguado; observe that the corners of her eyes are long with a peculiar turn. Wait a minute; now, there is Miss Lowenthal--Levi, of course--of Frankfort. Don't you see the difference?" I did, and asked him to which of the classes he belonged. He replied-- "To neither. I am of the sect of the ancient Sadducees, who took no part in the Crucifixion." Then I replied, "You are of the _Karaim_." "No; that is still another sect or division, though very ancient indeed. We never held to the Halacha, and we laugh at the Mishna and Talmud and all that. We do not believe or disbelieve in a God--Yahveh, or the older Elohim. We hold that every man born knows enough to do what is right; and that is religion enough. After death, if he has acted up to this, he will be all right should there be a future of immortality; and if he hasn't, he will be none the worse off for it. We are a very small sect. We call ourselves the _Neu Reformirte_. We have a place of worship in New York." This was the first agnostic whom I had ever met. I thought of the woman in Jerusalem who ran about with the torch to burn up heaven and the water to extinguish hell-fire. Yes, the sect was very old. The Sadducees never denied anything; they only inquired as to truth. Seek or _Sikh_! I confess that Mr. Solomon somewhat weakened the effect of his grand free- thought philosophy by telling me in full faith of a Rabbi in New York who was so learned in the Cabala that by virtue of the sacred names he could recover stolen goods. Whether, like Browning's sage, he also received them, I did not learn. But _c'est tout comme chez nous autres_. The same spirit which induces a man to break out of orthodox humdrumness, induces him to love the marvellous, the forbidden, the odd, the wild, the droll--even as I do. It is not a fair saying that "atheists are all superstitious, which proves that a man must _believe_ in something." No; it is the spirit of nature, of inquiry, of a desire for the new and to penetrate the unknown; and under such influence a man may truly be an atheist as regards what he cannot prove or reconcile with universal love and mercy, and yet a full believer that magic and ghosts may possibly exist among the infinite marvels and mysteries of nature. It is admitted that a man may believe in God without being superstitious; it is much truer that he may be "superstitious" (whatever that means) without believing that there is an anthropomorphic _bon Dieu_. However this may be, Mr. Solomon made me reflect often and deeply for many a long year, until I arrived to the age of Darwin. I also made at Cape May the acquaintance of a very remarkable man, whom I was destined to often meet in other lands in after years. This was Carrol (not as yet General) Tevis. We first met thus. The ladies wanted seats out on the lawn, and there was not a chair to be had. He and I were seeking in the hotel-office; all the clerks were absent, and all the chairs removed; but there remained a solid iron sofa or settee, six feet long, weighing about 600 pounds. Tevis was strong, and a great fencer; there is a famous _botte_ which he invented, bearing his name; perhaps Walter H. Pollock knows it. I gave the free-lance or _condottiero_ a glance, and proposed to prig the iron sofa and lay waste the enemy. It was a deed after his Dugald Dalgetty heart, and we carried it off and seated the ladies. In the autumn there was a vast Sanitary Fair for the benefit of the army hospitals held in Philadelphia. I edited for it a daily newspaper called _Our Daily Fare_, which often kept me at work for eighteen hours per diem, and in doing which I was subjected to much needless annoyance and mortification. At this Fair I saw Abraham Lincoln. It was about this time that the remarkable oil fever, or mania for speculating in oil-lands, broke out in the United States. Many persons had grown rich during the war, and were ready to speculate. Its extent among all classes was incredible. Perhaps the only parallel to it in history was the Mississippi Bubble or the South Sea speculations, and these did not collectively employ so much capital or call out so much money as this petroleum mania. It had many strange social developments, which I was destined to see in minute detail. My first experience was not very pleasant. A publisher in New York asked me to write him a humorous poem on the oil mania. It was to be large enough to make a small volume. I did so, and in my opinion wrote a good one. It cost me much time and trouble. When it was done, the publisher _refused to take it_, saying that it was not what he wanted. So I lost my labour or _oleum perdidi_. I had two young friends named Colton, who had been in the war from the beginning to the end, and experienced its changes to the utmost. Neither was over twenty-one. William Colton, the elder, was a captain in the regular cavalry, and the younger, Baldwin, was his orderly. It was a man in the Captain's company, named Yost, who furnished the type of Hans Breitmann as a soldier. The brothers told me that one day in a march in Tennessee, not far from Murfreesboro', they had found petroleum in the road, and thought it indicated the presence of oil-springs. I mentioned this to Mr. Joseph Lea, a merchant of Philadelphia. He was the father of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, who has since become a very distinguished artist, well known in England, being the first lady painter from whom the British Government ever bought a picture. Mr. Lea thought it might be worth some expense to investigate this Tennessee oil. I volunteered to go, if my expenses were paid, and it was agreed to. It is difficult at the present day to give any reader a clear idea of the dangers and trouble which this undertaking involved, and I was fully aware beforehand what they would be. The place was on the border, in the most disorganised state of society conceivable, and, in fact, completely swarming with guerillas or brigands, _sans merci_, who simply killed and stripped everybody who fell into their hands. All over our border or frontier there are innumerable families who have kept up feuds to the death, or _vendettas_, in some cases for more than a century; and now, in the absence of all civil law, these were engaged in wreaking their old grudges without restraint, and assuredly not sparing any stranger who came between them. I had a friend in C. A. Dana, the Assistant-Secretary of War, and another in Colonel Henry Olcott, since known as the theosophist. The latter had just come from the country which I proposed to visit. I asked him to aid me in getting military passes and introductions to officers in command. He promised to do so, saying that he would not go through what I had before me for all the oil in America. {274} And, indeed, one could not take up a newspaper without finding full proof that Tennessee was at that time an _inferno_ or No-man's Land of disorder. I went to it with my eyes wide open. After so many years of work, I was as poor as ever, and the seven years of harvest which I had prophesied had come, and I was not gathering a single golden grain. My father regarded me as a failure in life, or as a literary ne'er-do-weel, destined never to achieve fortune or gain an _etat_, and he was quite right. My war experience had made me reckless of life, and speculation was firing every heart. I bought myself a pair of long, strong, overall boots and blanket, borrowed a revolver, arranged money affairs with Mr. Lea, who always acted with the greatest generosity, intelligence, and kindness, packed my carpet-bag, and departed. It was midwinter, and I was destined for a wintry region, or Venango County, where, until within the past few months, there had been many more bears and deer than human beings. For it was in Venango, Pennsylvania, that the oil-wells were situated, and Mr. Lea judged it advisable that I should first visit them and learn something of the method of working, the geology of the region, and other practical matters. My brother accompanied me to the station, and I left at about 8 p.m. After a long, long, weary night and day, I arrived at an oil town, whose name I now forget. By great good fortune I secured a room, and by still greater luck I got acquainted the next morning at breakfast with three or four genial and gentlemanly men, all "speculators" like myself, who had come to spy into the plumpness and oiliness of the land. We hired a sleigh and went forth on an excursion among the oil-wells. It was in some respects the most remarkable day I ever spent anywhere. For here was oil, oil, oil everywhere, in fountains flowing at the rate of a dollar a second (it brought 70 cents a gallon), derricks or scaffoldings at every turn over wells, men making fortunes in an hour, and beggars riding on blooded horses. I myself saw a man in a blue carter's blouse, carrying a black snake-whip, and since breakfast, for selling a friend's farm, he had received 1250,000 as commission (_i.e._, 50,000 pounds). When we stopped to dine at a tavern, there stood behind us during all the meal many country-fellows, all trying to sell oil-lands; every one had a great bargain at from thirty or forty thousand dollars downwards. The lowest in the lot was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, a loutish-looking youth, who looked as if his vocation had been peddling apples and lozenges. He had only a small estate to dispose of for $15,000 (3,000 pounds), but he was very small fry indeed. My companions met with many friends; all had within a few days or hours made or lost incredible sums by gambling in oil-lands, borrowing recklessly, and failing as recklessly. Companies were formed here on the spot as easily as men get up a game of cards, and of this within a few days I witnessed many instances. Two men would meet. "Got any land over?" (_i.e._, not "stocked"). "Yes, first-rate; geologer's certificate; can you put it on the market?" "That's my business. I've floated forty oil stocks already, terms half profits." So it would be floated forthwith. Gambling by _millions_ was in the air everywhere; low common men held sometimes _thirty companies_, all their own, in one pocket, to be presently sprung in New York or elsewhere. And in contrast to it was the utterly bleak wretchedness and poverty of every house, and the miserable shanties, and all around and afar the dismal, dark, pine forests covered with snow. I heard that day of a man who got a living by spiritually intuiting oil. "Something told him," some Socratic demon or inner impulse, that there was "ile" here or there, deep under the earth. To pilot to this "ile" of beauty he was paid high fees. One of my new friends avowed his intention of at once employing this oil-seer as over-seer. We came to some stupendous tanks and to a well which, as one of my friends said enviously and longingly, was running three thousand dollars a day in clear greenbacks. Its history was remarkable. For a very long time an engineer had been here, employed by a company in boring, but bore he never so wisely, he could get nothing. At last the company, tired of the expenditure and no returns, wrote to him ordering him to cease all further work on the next Saturday. But the engineer had become "possessed" with the idea that he _must_ succeed, and so, unheeding orders, he bored away all alone the next day. About sunset some one going by heard a loud screaming and hurrahing. Hastening up, he found the engineer almost delirious with joy, dancing like a lunatic round a fountain of oil, which was "as thick as a flour-barrel, and rising to the height of a hundred feet." It was speedily plugged and made available. All of this occurred only a very few days before I saw it. That night I stopped at a newly-erected tavern, and, as no bed was to be had, made up my mind to sleep in my blanket on the muddy floor, surrounded by a crowd of noisy speculators, waggoners, and the like. I tell this tale vilely, for I omitted to say that I did the same thing the first night when I entered the oil-country, got a bed on the second, and that this was the third. But even here I made the acquaintance of a nice Scotchman, who found out another very nice man who had a house near by, and who, albeit not accustomed to receive guests, said he would give us two one bed, which he did. However, the covering was not abundant, and I, for all my blanket, was a-cold. In the morning I found a full supply of blankets hanging over the foot-board, but we had retired without a light, and had not noticed them. Our breakfast being rather poor, our host, with an apology, brought in a great cold mince-pie three inches thick, which is just the thing which I love best of all earthly food. That he apologised for it indicated a very high degree of culture indeed in rural America, and, in fact, I found that he was a well-read and modest man. It was, I think, at a place called Plummer that I made the acquaintance of two brothers named B---, who seemed to vibrate on the summit of fortune as two golden balls might on the top of the oil-fountain to which I referred. One spoke casually of having at that instant a charter for a bank in one pocket, and one for a railroad in the other. They bought and sold any and all kinds of oil-land in any quantity, without giving it a thought. While I was in their office, one man exhibited a very handsome revolver. "How much did it cost?" asked B. "Fifty dollars" (10 pounds). "I wish," replied B., "that when you go to Philadelphia you'd get me a dozen of them for presents." A man came to the window and called for him. "What do you want?" "Here are the two horses I spoke about yesterday." Hardly heeding him, and talking to others, B. went to the window, cast a casual glance at the steeds, and said, "What was it you said that you wanted for them?" "Three thousand dollars." "All right! go and put 'em in the stable, and come here and get the money." From Plummer I had to go ten miles to Oil City. If I had only known it, one of my very new friends, who was very kind indeed to a stranger, would have driven me over in his sleigh. But I did not know it, and so paid a very rough countryman ten dollars (2 pounds) to take me over on a _jumper_. This is the roughest form of a sledge, consisting of two saplings with the ends turned up, fastened by cross-pieces. The snow on the road was two feet deep, and the thermometer at zero. But the driver had two good horses, and made good time. I found it very difficult indeed to hold on to the vehicle and also to keep my carpet-bag. Meanwhile my driver entertained me with an account of a great misfortune which had just befallen him. It was as follows:-- "Before this here oil-fever came along I had a little farm that cost me $150, and off that, an' workin' at carpentrin', I got a _mighty_ slim livin'. I used to keep all my main savin's to pay taxes, and often had to save up the cents to get a prospective drink of whisky. Well, last week I sold my farm for forty thousand dollars, and dern my skin ef the feller that bought it didn't go and sell it yesterday for a hundred and fifty thousand! Just like my derned bad luck!" "See here, my friend," I said; "I have travelled pretty far in my time, but I never saw a country in which a man with forty thousand dollars was not considered rich." "He may be rich anywhere else with it," replied the _nouveau riche_ contemptuously, "but it wouldn't do more than buy him a glass of whisky here in Plummer." Having learned what I could of oil-boring, I went to Cincinnati, and then to Nashville by rail. It may give the reader some idea of what kind of a country and life I was coming into when I tell him that the train which preceded mine had been stopped by the guerillas, who took from it fifty Federal soldiers and shot them dead, stripping the other passengers; and that the one which came after had a hundred and fifty bullets fired into it, but had not been stopped. We passed by Mammoth Cave, but at full speed, for it was held by the brigands. All of which things were duly chronicled in the Northern newspapers, and read by all at home. I got to Nashville. It had very recently been taken by the Federal forces under General Thomas, who had put it under charge of General Whipple, who was, in fact, the ruling or administrative man of the Southwest just then. I went to the hotel. Everything was dismal and dirty--nothing but soldiers and officers, with all the marks of the field and of warfare visible on them--citizens invisible--everything proclaiming a city camp in time of war--sixty thousand men in a city of twenty thousand, more or less. I got a room. It was so cold that night that the ice froze two inches thick in my pitcher in my room. I expected to find the brothers Colton in Nashville. I went to the proper military authority, and was informed that their regiment was down at the front in Alabama, as was also the officer who had the authority to give them leave of absence. I was also informed that my only chance was to go to Alabama, or, in fact, into the field itself, as a civilian! This was a dreary prospect. However, I made up my mind to it, and was walking along the street in a very sombre state of mind, for I was going to a country like that described in "Sir Grey Stele"-- "Whiche is called the Land of Doubte." And doubtful indeed, and very dismal and cold and old, did everything seem on that winter afternoon as I, utterly alone, went my way. What I wanted most of all things on earth was a companion. With my brother I would have gone down to the front and to face all chances as if it were to a picnic. When ill-fortune intends to make a spring, she draws back. But good fortune, God bless her! does just the same. Therefore _si fortuna tonat_, _caveto mergi_--if fortune frowns, do not for that despond. Just as I was passing a very respectable-looking mansion, I saw a sign over its office-door bearing the words: "Captain Joseph R. Paxton, Mustering- in and Disbursing Officer." Joseph R. Paxton was a very intimate friend of mine in Philadelphia. He was still a young man, and one of the most remarkable whom I have ever known. He was a great scholar. He was more familiar with all the _rariora_, _curiosa_, and singular marvels of literature than any body I ever knew except Octave Delepierre, with whose works he first made me acquainted. He had translated Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor" into French, and had been accepted by a Paris publisher. He had been a lawyer, an agent for a railroad, and had long edited in Philadelphia a curious journal entitled _Bizarre_, and written a work on gems. His whole soul, however, was in the French literature of the eighteenth century, and he always had a library which would make a collector's mouth water. Had he lived in London or Paris, he would have made a great reputation. And he was kind-hearted, genial, and generous to a fault. He had always some unfortunate friend living on him, some Bohemian of literature under a cloud. I entered the office and found him, and great was his amazement! "_Que diable_, _mon ami_, _faistu ici dans cette galere_?" was his greeting. I explained the circumstances in detail. He at once exclaimed, "Come and live here with me. General Whipple is my brother-in-law, and he will be here in a few days and live with us. He'll make it all right." "Here, Jim!" he cried to a great six-foot man of colour--"run round to the hotel and bring this gentleman's luggage!" There I remained for a very eventful month. Paxton had entered with the conquerors, and had just seized on the house. I may indeed say that _we_ seized on it, as regards any right--I being accepted as hail-fellow-well- met, and as a bird of the same feather. In it was a piano and a very good old-fashioned library. It was like Paxton to loot a library. He had had his pick of the best houses, and took this one, "niggers included," for the servants, by some odd freak, preferred freedom with Paxton to slavery with their late owner. This gentleman was a Methodist clergyman, and Paxton found among his papers proofs that he had been concerned in a plot to burn Cincinnati by means of a gang of secret incendiaries. Whenever the blacks realised the fact that a Northern man was a _gentleman_--they all have marvellous instincts for this, and a respect for one beyond belief--they took to him with a love like that of bees for a barrel of syrup. I have experienced this so often, and in many cases so touchingly, that I cannot refrain from recording it. Among others who thus took to me was the giant Jim, who was unto Paxton and me as the captive of our bow and spear, albeit an emancipated contraband. When the Southerners defied General Butler to touch their slaves, because they were their "property" by law, the General replied by "confiscating" the property by what Germans call _Faustrecht_ (or fist-right) as "contraband of war." This Jim, the general waiter and butler, was a character, shrewd, clever, and full of dry humour. When I was alone in the drawing-room of an evening, he would pile up a great wood-fire, and, as I sat in an arm-chair, would sit or recline on the floor by the blaze and tell me stories of his slave life, such as this:-- "My ole missus she always say to me, 'Jim, don' you ever have anything to do with dem Yankees. Dey're all pore miserable wile wretches. Dey lib in poverty an' nastiness and don' know nothin'.' I says to her, 'It's mighty quare, missus. I can't understan' it. Whar do all dem books come from? Master gits em from de Norf. Who makes all our boots an' clothes and sends us tea an' everythin'? Dey can't all be so pore an' ignoran' ef dey writes our books an' makes everythin' we git.' 'Jim,' she says, 'you're a fool, an' don' understan' nothin'.' 'Wery good, missus,' says I, but I thinked it over. All we do is to raise cotton, an' dey make it into cloff, which we hav'n't de sense to do." I believe that I give this word for word. And Jim, as I found, was a leading mind among the blacks. I had a letter of introduction from Mr. Lea to Horace Harrison, who was the State Attorney for Tennessee. At this time his power was very great, for he had in his hands the disposition of all the estates of all the rebels in Tennessee. He was the type of a Southwestern gentleman. He reminded me very much of my old Princeton friends, and when I was in his office smoking a pipe, I felt as if I were in college again. I liked him very much. One morning I called, and after some deliberation he said, "You are a lawyer, are you not?" I replied that I had studied law under Judge Cadwallader. "Then I should like to consult with you as a lawyer. I have a very difficult case to deal with. There is a law declaring that all property belonging to rebels shall be seized and held for one year. Now, here is a man whose estate I have held for six months, who has come in and declared his allegiance, and asks for his lands. And I believe that before long, unless he comes in now, they will be almost ruined. What shall I do?" "It appears to me," I replied, "that if the disposal of these lands is in your hands, you must be supposed to exert some will and discretion. _Stat pro ratione voluntas_ is a good axiom here. We are not at all _in statu quo ante bellum_--in fact, the war is not at an end, nor decided. Your duty is to act for the good of the country, and not simply to _skin_ the enemy like a bushwhacker, but to pacify the people. _Victor volentes per populos dat jura_--laws should always be mildly interpreted. In your case, considering the very critical condition of the country, I should in equity give the man his property, and take his oath of allegiance. Severe measures are not advisable--_quod est violentum_, _non est durabile_." This is, I believe, pretty accurately what I said. That evening, as I was sitting with General Whipple, he amazed me by addressing me exactly as Mr. Harrison had done in the morning. "I say, Leland, you're a lawyer, and I want your advice. There are six warehouses here, and I want them badly for military stores. But Horace Harrison says that I can't have them, because he holds them for the United States. What am I to do?" "General Whipple," I replied, "is this town under military occupation in time of war, or is it not?" "Most decidedly it is." "So I should think from the way your patrols bother me. And if such is the case, all things must yield to military wants. Where we have no legal principles or courts to decide, we must fall back on legal axioms. And here the law is clear and explicit, for it says, _Inter arma leges silent_--the laws are suspended in warfare." "A magnificent saying!" exclaimed the General admiringly. "Ah! you ought to be in the Supreme Court." And seizing a pen he wrote to the State Attorney:-- "SIR: This town, being but recently captured from the enemies of the United States, is, of course, under military occupation, which renders absolutely necessary for military purpose many temporary seizures and uses, such as that of the six warehouses referred to in our late correspondence. As regards legal precedent and principle, I need not remind one of your learning that--(I say, Leland, how do you spell that Latin?--_I-n-t-e-r_--yes, I've got it)--_Inter arma silent leges_." I am afraid that Horace Harrison, when he got that letter, suspected that I had been acting as counsel for both sides. However, as I took no fee, my conscience was at rest. I think that I was of great use to General Whipple at that time, and, as he said one day, an unofficial secretary. Great and serious matters passed through our hands (for the General and Harrison were taking the lead in virtually reforming the whole frontier or debatable land), and these grand affairs were often hurried through "like hot cakes." My slender legal attainments were several times in requisition on occasions when the head of the Supreme Court would have been a more appropriate referee. I discovered, however, that there was really a department of law in which I might have done good work. Questions of very serious importance were often discussed and disposed of among us three with very great economy of time and trouble. And here I may say--"excuse the idle word"--that I wonder that I never in all my life fell into even the most trifling diplomatic or civil position, when, in the opinion of certain eminent friends, I possess several qualifications for such a calling--that is, quickness in mastering the legal bearings of a question, a knowledge of languages and countries, readiness in drawing up papers, and an insatiable love of labour, which latter I have not found to be _always_ possessed by the accomplished gentlemen whom our country employs abroad. I may here narrate a curious incident which touched and gratified me. When all the slaves in Nashville were set free by the entrance of our troops, the poor souls, to manifest their joy, seized a church (nobody opposing), and for three weeks held heavy worship for twenty-four hours per diem. _But not a white soul was allowed to enter_--the real and deeply-concealed reason being that Voodoo rites (which gained great headway during the war) formed a part of their devotion. However, I was informed that an exception would be made in my case, and that I was free to enter. And why? Had Jim surmised, by that marvellous intuition of character which blacks possess, that I had in me "the mystery"? Now, to- day I hold and possess the black stone of the Voodoo, the possession of which of itself makes me a grand-master and initiate or adept, and such an invitation would seem as natural as one to a five-o'clock tea elsewhere; but I was not known to any one in Nashville as a "cunjerer," and the incident strikes me as very curious. Apropos of marvels, many of the blacks can produce in their throats by some strange process sounds, and even airs, resembling those of the harmonicon, or musical box, one or the other or both. One evening in Nashville, in a lonely place, I heard exquisite music, which I thought must be that of a superior hand-organ from afar. But, to my amazement, I could discover none; there were only two black boys in the street. Alexis Paxton, the son of my host, explained to me that what I heard was unquestionably music made by those ebony flutes of boys, and that there were some wonderful performers in the city. I have listened to the same music at a public exhibition. I greatly wonder that I have never heard of this kind of music in Europe or the East. It is distinctly _instrumental_, not vocal in its tones. It has the obvious recommendation of economy, since by means of it a young lady could be performer and pianoforte all in one, which was indeed the beginning of the invention in Syrinx, who was made into a pan-pipe, which as a piano became the great musical curse (according to Heine) of modern times, and by which, as I conjecture, the fair Miss Reed or Syrinx revenges herself on male humanity. By the way, the best singer of "_Che faro senza Euridice_" whom I ever heard was a Miss Reed, a sister of Mrs. Paran Stevens. I had a very pleasant time with Paxton, and I know right well that I was no burden on him, but a welcome friend. _Au reste_, there was plenty of room in the house, and abundant army stores to be had for asking, and one or two rare acquaintances. One of these was a Southern officer, now a general, who had come over to our side and fought, as the saying was, with a rope round his neck. He was terribly hated by the rebels, which hate he returned with red-hot double compound interest--for a renegade is worse than ten Turks. He was the very type of a grim, calm old Border moss-trooper. He lived in his boots, and never had an ounce of luggage. One evening General Whipple (always humane and cultivated, though as firm as an iron bar) said to him before me, "I really don't know what to do with many of my rebel prisoners. They dress themselves in Federal uniforms for want of other clothes; they take them from the dead on the battlefield, and try to pass themselves off for Federals. It is very troublesome." "No trouble to me," replied the other. "And how do you do with them?" "Shoot them as _spies_. Why, only last week I got four dozen of them, and in less than four minutes I had them all laid out stiff in the road." The reader need not imagine that the general here romanced or exaggerated. At that very moment the massacres and murders which were going on within three miles of us were beyond belief. The bands of _guerillas_ or bushwhackers which swept the country murdered in cold blood all who fell into their hands, and the Confederate soldiers often did the same. There resulted, of course, a deadly hatred on both sides, and the most unscrupulous retaliation. I could fill a book with the very interesting observations which I made in Nashville. And here I call attention to a very strange coincidence which this recalls. During the previous year I had often expressed a great desire to be in some State during its transition from Confederacy to Unionism, that I might witness the remarkable social and political paradoxes and events which would result, and I had often specified Tennessee as the one above all others which I should prefer to visit for this purpose. And I had about as much idea that I should go to the moon as there. But prayers are strangely granted at strange hours--_plus impetravi quam fuissem ausus_--and I was placed in the very centre of the wheel. This very remarkable fulfilment of a wish, and many like it, though due to mere chance, naturally made an impression on me, for no matter how strong our eyesight may be, or our sense of truth, we are all dazed when coming out of darkness into light, and all the world is in that condition now. No matter how completely we exchange the gloom of supernaturalism for the sunlight of science, phantoms still seem to flit before our eyes, and, what is more bewildering still, we do not as yet know but what these phantoms may be physical facts. Perhaps the Voodoo stone _may_ have the power to awaken the faith which may move the vital or nervous force, which may act on hidden subtler forms of electricity and matter, atoms and molecules. Ah! we have a great deal to learn! Through General Whipple's kind aid the brothers Colton were at once brought up from the front. With them and Captain Paxton we went to Murfreesboro, and at once called on the general in command, whose name I have forgotten. He struck me as a grim, brave old commander, every inch a soldier. While we conversed with him a sergeant entered, a man who looked as if he lived in the saddle, and briefly reported that a gang of guerillas were assembled at a certain place some miles away--I forget how far, but the distance was traversed in an incredibly short time. The general issued orders for a hundred cavalry to go at once and "get" them. They "got" them, killing many, and the next morning, on looking from my window, I saw the victors ride into the courtyard, many of them with their captives tied neck and heels, like bags of corn, over the cruppers of the horses. A nice night's ride they must have had! But the choice was between death and being cruppered, and they preferred the latter to coming a cropper. Strange that the less a man has to live for the more he clings to life. The general thought that if he gave us a corporal and four men, and if we were well armed, that we _might_ go out on the Bole Jack road and return unharmed, "unless we met with any of the great gangs of bushwhackers." But he evidently thought, as did General Whipple, who did not heed a trifle by any means, that we were going into the lion's jaws. So the next morning, _equo iter ingredi_, I rode forth. I had some time before been appointed aide-de-camp to Governor Pollock, of Pennsylvania, with the rank of colonel, and had now two captains and a corporal with his guard. It was a rather small regiment. We heard grim stories that morning as to what had taken place all around us within almost a few hours. Three Federal pickets had been treacherously shot while on guard the night before; the troops had surprised a gang of bushwhackers holding a ball, and firing through the windows, dropped ten of them dead while dancing; two men had been murdered by --- --- and his gang. This was a noted guerilla, who was said to have gone south with the Confederate army, but who was more generally believed to have remained in hiding, and to have committed most of the worst outrages and murders of late. At the first house where we stopped in the woods there lay a wounded man, one of the victims of the dance the night before. The inmates were silent, but not rude to us. I offered a man whisky, but he replied, "I don't use it." We rode on. Once there was an alarm of "bushwhackers." I should have forgotten it but for the memory of the look of Baldwin Colton's eyes, the delighted earnestness of a man or of a wild creature going to fight. He and his brother had hunted and fought guerillas a hundred times, perhaps much oftener, for it was a regular daily service at the front. Once during a retreat, Baldwin (eighteen or nineteen years of age) fell out of rank so often to engage in hand-to-hand sword conflicts with rebel cavalrymen, that his brother detached four to take him prisoner and keep him safe. Daring spirits among our soldiers often became very fond of this kind of duelling, in which the rebs were not a whit behind them, and two of the infantry on either side would, under cover of the bushes, aim and pop away at one another perhaps for hours, like two red Indians. I have forgotten whether it was with extra whisky, coffee, or money that we specially gratified our corporal and guard; but Baldwin, who was "one of 'em," informed me that they enjoyed this little outing immensely, just like a picnic, and had a good time. From which it may be inferred that men's ideas of enjoyment are extremely relative. It could not have been in the dodging of guerillas--to that they were accustomed; perhaps it was the little extra ration, or the mystery of the excursion, for they were much puzzled to know what I wanted, why I examined the road and rocks, and all so strangely, and went into the very worst place in all the land to do so. Baldwin Colton himself had been so knocked about during the war, and so starved as a prisoner in Southern hands, that he looked back on a sojourn in that _ergastulum_, Libby Prison, as rather an oasis in his sad experiences. "It wasn't so bad a place as some, and there was good company, and always _something to eat_." The optimist of Candide was a Mallock in mourning compared to this. That night we came to somebody's plantation. I forget his name, but he was a Union man, probably a _very_ recent acquisition, but genial. He had read the _Knickerbocker_, and knew my name well, and took good care of us. In the morning I offered him ten dollars for our night's lodging, which was, in the opinion of my two captains, stupendously liberal, as soldiers never paid. Our host declined it like a Southern planter, on the ground that he never sold his hospitality. So I put the money into the hand of one of his pretty children as a present. But as we rode forth we were called back, and reminded that we had forgotten to pay for the _soldiers_! I gave another five-dollar greenback and rode away disgusted. And at the gate a negro girl begged us to give her a "dalla" (dollar) to buy a fish-line. It all came from my foolish offer to pay. Gratitude is a sense of further benefits to be bestowed. The place where the oil had been seen was near a conical rocky hill called Grindstone Knob. We examined carefully and found no trace of it. The geology of the country was unfavourable, much flint and conglomerate, if I remember, and wanting in the signs of coal, shales, &c., and "faults" or ravines. I may be quite wrong, but such was my opinion. No one who lived thereabout had ever heard of "ile." Once I asked a rustic if any kind of oil was found in the neighbourhood in springs. His reply was, "What! _ile_ come up outer the ground like water! H---! I never heard of sitch a thing." _There was no oil_. At the foot of Grindstone Knob was a rather neat, small house, white, with green blinds. We were somewhat astonished to learn from a negro boy, who spoke the most astonishingly bad English, that this was the home of Mas' --- ---. Yes, this was the den of the wolf himself, and I had no doubt that he was not far off. There was a small cotton plantation round about. We entered, and were received by a good-looking, not unladylike, but rather fierce-eyed young woman and her younger sister. It was Mrs. ---. The two had been to a lady's seminary in Nashville, and played the piano for us. I felt that we were in a strange situation, and now and then walked to the window and looked out, listening all the time suspiciously to every sound. It was easy enough for Mrs. ---, the brigand's wife, to perceive from my untanned complexion that I had not been in the field, and was manifestly no soldier. "_You_ look like an officer," she said to Captain Colton, "and so does _that_ one, but what is _he_?" meaning me by this last. We had dinner--roast kid--and when we departed I gave the dame five dollars, having the feeling that I could not be indebted to thieves for a dinner. We had gone but a little distance when we saw two bushwhackers with guns, and gave chase, but they disappeared in the bushes, much to the grief of our men, who would have liked either to shoot them or to bring them in. Then the corporal told us that while we were at dinner's "faithful blacks" had informed his men that "Mas' had been at home ever since Crismas"; that at eleven o'clock every night they assembled at the house and thence went out marauding and murdering. I paused, astonished and angry. It was almost certain that the bushwhacker had been during dinner probably in the cellar under our feet. The guerillas had great fear of our regular soldiers; two of the latter were a match at any time for half-a-dozen of the former, as was proved continually. Should I go back and hang --- up over his own door? I was dying to do it, but we had before us a very long ride through the Cedar Barrens, the sun was sinking in the west, and we had heard news which made it extremely likely that a large band of guerillas would be in the way. That resolve to go actually saved our lives, for I heard the next day that a hundred and fifty of these free murderers had gone on our road just after us. This fact was at once transferred to the Northern newspapers, that "on --- a hundred and fifty bushwhackers passed over the Bole Jack road." Which was read by my wife and father, who knew that on that very day I was on that road, to their great apprehension. I never shall forget the dismal appearance of the Cedar Barrens. The soil was nowhere more than two inches deep, and the trees which covered it by millions had all died as soon as they attained a height of fifteen or twenty feet. Swarms of ill-omened turkey-buzzards were the only living creatures visible "like foul _lemures_ flitting in the gloom." Riding over the battlefield the Coltons and Paxton pointed out many things, for they had all been in it severely. At one place, Major Rosengarten, a brother of my old Paris fellow-student, had had a sabre- fight with a rebel, and they told me how Rosengarten's sword, being one of the kind which was issued by contract in the earlier days of the war, bent and broke like a piece of tin. Hearing a ringing sound Baldwin jumped from his horse, picked up a steel ramrod and gave it to me for a cane. As we approached Murfreesboro' I met a genial, daring soldier, one Major Hill, whom I had seen before. He had with him a hundred and fifty cavalry. "Where are you going so late by night?" I said. He replied, "I am after that infernal scoundrel, --- ---. My scouts have found out pretty closely his range. I am going to divide my men into tens and scatter them over the country and then close in." "Major," I replied, "I will tell you just where to lay your hand at once, heavy on him. Do you know Grindstone Knob and a white house with green windows at its foot?" "I do." "Well, be there at exactly eleven to-night, and you'll get him. I have been there and learned it from the niggers." "Well, I declare that you are a good scout, Mr. Leland!" cried the Major in amazement. "What can I do to thank you?" "Well, Major Hill," I said, "I have one thing to request: that is, if you get ---, don't parole him. _Shoot him at once_; he is a red-handed murderer." "I _will_ shoot him," said the Major, and rode forth into the night with his men. But whether he ever got --- I never knew, though according to the calculations of the Coltons, who were extremely experienced in such matters, "Massa ---" had not more than one chance in a thousand to escape, and Hill was notoriously a good guerilla-hunter and a man of his word. I believe that at the plantation our men had camped out. At Murfreesboro' we returned them to the general, and I took the Coltons to a hotel, which was so very rough that I apologised for it, while Baldwin said it seemed to him to be luxurious beyond belief, and that it was the first night for eighteen months in which he had slept in a bed. In the morning I wanted a spur, having lost one of mine, and there was brought to me a large boxful of all kinds of spurs to choose from, which had been left in the house at one time or another during the war. I did not remain long in Nashville after returning thither. I had instructions to go to Louisville, Kentucky, and there consult with a certain merchant as to certain lands. General Whipple accompanied me to the "depot," which was for the time and place as much of an honour as if Her Majesty were to come to see me off at Victoria Station. There was many and many a magnate in those days and there, who would have given thousands to have had his ear as Paxton and I had it. One night we were in the side private box at the theatre in Nashville. Couldock, whom I had known well many years before, was on the stage. The General was keeping himself deeply in the shade to remain unseen. He remarked to Paxton that he wanted a house for his family, who would soon arrive, and could not find one, for they were all occupied. This one remark shows the man. I wonder how long General Butler would have hesitated to move anybody! Captain Paxton knew everything and everybody. With a quick glance from his keen dark eyes he exclaimed-- "I've got it! Do you see that fat man laughing so heartily in the pit? He has a splendid house; it would just suit you; and he's a d---d old rebel. I know enough about him to hang him three times over. He has" (here followed a series of political iniquities). "_Voila votre affaire_." "And how is it that he has kept his house?" asked the General. "He sent the quartermaster a barrel of whisky, or something of that sort." The General looked thoughtfully at the fat man as the latter burst into a fresh peal of laughter. I thought that if he had known what was being said in our box that laugh would have died away. I do not know whether the General took the house. I think he did. I left for Louisville. There I saw the great merchant, who invited me to his home to supper and consulted with me. His daughters were rebels and would not speak to me. He had a great deal of property in Indiana, which _might_ be oil-lands. If I would visit it and report on it, he would send his partner with me to examine it. I consented to go. This partner, Mr. W., was a young man of agreeable, easy manners. With him I went to Indianapolis, and thence by "stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we reached our journey's end at a large log-house on a good farm. I liked the good man of the house. He said to us, after a time, that at first he thought we were a couple of stuck-up city fellows, but had found to his joy that we were old-fashioned, sensible people. There was no sugar at his supper-table, but he had three substitutes for it--"tree-sweetnin', bee-sweetnin', and sorghum"--that is, maple sugar, honey, and the molasses made from Chinese maize. Only at a mile's distance there was a "sugar-camp," and we could see the fires and hear the shouts of the people engaged night and day in making sugar from the trees. He told me that on the hills in sight a mysterious light often wandered. During the Revolutionary war some one had buried a barrelful of silver plate and money, and over it flitted the quivering silver flame, but no one could ever find the spot. The next day I examined the land. There was abundance of fossiliferous limestone, rich in petrifactions of tertiary shells, also cartloads of beautiful _geodes_ or round flint balls, which often rattled, and which, when broken, were encrusted with white or purple amethystine crystals. I decided that there were places where oil might be found, though there was certainly no indication of it. I believe that my conjecture subsequently proved to be true, and that Indiana has shown herself to be a wise virgin not without oil. On the afternoon of the next day, riding with my guide, I found that I had left my blanket at a house miles behind. I offered the man a large price to return and bring it, which he did. While waiting by the wood, in a dismal drizzle, I saw a log cabin and went to it for shelter. Its only inmate was a young woman, who, seeing me coming, hastily locked the door and rushed into the neighbouring woods. When the guide returned I expressed some astonishment at the flight; _he_ did not. With a very grave expression he asked me, "Don't the gals in _your_ part of the country allays break for the woods when they see _you_ a-coming?" "Certainly not," I replied. To which he made answer, "Thank God, our gals here hev got better morrils than yourn." We returned to St. Louis. There I was shown the immensely long tomb of Porter the Kentucky giant. This man was nine feet in height! I had seen him alive long before in Philadelphia. I made several interesting acquaintances in St. Louis, the Athens of the West. But I must hurry on. I went to Cincinnati, where I found orders to wait for Mr. Lea. A syndicate had been formed in Providence, Rhode Island, which had purchased a great property in Cannelton, West Virginia. This consisted of a mountain in which there was an immense deposit of cannel coal. Cannelton was very near the town of Charleston, which is at the junction of the Kanawha (a tributary of the Ohio) and Elk rivers. I waited a week at the hotel in Cincinnati for Mr. Lea. It was a weary week, for I had no acquaintances and made none. Never in my life before did I see so many Sardines, or Philistines of the dullest stamp as at that hotel. But at last Mr. Lea came with a party of ladies and gentlemen. A small steamboat was secured, and we went up the Ohio. The voyage was agreeable and not without some incidents. There was a freshet in the river, and one night, taking a short cut over a cornfield, the steamboat stuck fast--like Eve--in an apple-tree. One day one of the party asked me what was the greatest aggregate deposit of coal known in England. I could not answer. A few hours after we stopped at a town in Kentucky. There I discovered by chance some old Patent Office reports, and among them all the statistics describing the coal mines in England. When we returned to the boat I told my informant that the largest deposit in England was just half that of Cannelton, and added many details. Mr. Lea was amazed at my knowledge. I told him that I deserved no credit, for I had picked it up by chance. "Yes," he replied, "and how was it that you _chanced_ to read that book? None of us did. Such chances come to inquiring minds." It also chanced that this whole country abounded in signs of petroleum. It was found floating on springs. The company possessed rights of royalty on thousands of acres on Elk River, which was as yet in the debatable land, harassed by rebels. These claims, however, were "run out," and needed to be renewed by signatures from the residents. They were in the hands of David Goshorn, who kept the only "tavern" or hotel in Charleston, and he asked $5,000 for his rights. There was another party in the field after them. I verily believe that David Goshorn sold the right to me because he played the fiddle and I the guitar, and because he did not like the rival, who was a Yankee, while I was a congenial companion. Many a journey had we together, and as I appreciated him as a marked character of odd oppositions, we got on admirably. In Cannelton I went down into a coal mine and risked my life strangely in ascending a railway. The hill is 1,500 feet in height, and on its face is a railway which ascends at an angle of 15 degrees, perhaps the steepest in America. I ascended in it, and soon observed that of the two strands of the iron cable which drew it one was broken. The very next week the other broke, and two men were killed by an awful death, they and the car falling a thousand feet to the rocks below. The next week we returned to Cincinnati, and thence to Philadelphia. On my way from New York to Providence I became acquainted in the train with a modest, gentlemanly man, who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of Thomson who wrote the "Seasons." I thought him both great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat; and among fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his head down, while I sat on his arm and throttled him _sans merci_--I avow it--and tore off in haste his neckcloth (his neck was frightfully swelled), while Thomson brought cold water from the "cooler," with which we bathed his face freely, and chafed his pulse and forehead. Little by little he recovered. The other passengers, as usual, did nothing, and a little old naval officer, who had been fifty years in service (as Thomson told me), simply kicked and screamed convulsively, "Take him away! take him away!" The epileptic was George Christy, the original founder of the Christy Minstrels. I can never think of this scene without exclaiming, "_Vive_ Thomson!" for he was the only man among us who displayed quiet self-possession and _savoir faire_. As for me, my "old Injun" was up, and I had "sailed in" for a fight by mere impulse. _Vive_ Thomson! _Bon sang ne peut mentir_. I went to Providence, where I was empowered to return to Cannelton to pay Goshorn $5,000, and renew the leases on Elk River. I should have to travel post to anticipate the Yankee. It was not concealed from me that even if I succeeded, I had before me a very dangerous and difficult task. But after what I had already gone through with I was ready for anything. I was really developing rapidly a wild, reckless spirit--the "Injun" was coming out of me. My old life and self had vanished like dreams. Only now and then, in the forests or by torrents, did something like poetry revisit me; _literature_ was dead in me. Only once did I, in a railway train, compose the "Maiden mit nodings on." I bore it in my memory for years before I wrote it out. I arrived in Philadelphia. The next morning I was to rise early and fly westward. No time to lose. Before I rose, my sister knocked at the door and told us the awful news that President Lincoln had been murdered! As I went to the station I saw men weeping in the streets, and everybody in great grief, conversing with strangers, as if all had lost a common relation. Everywhere utter misery! I arrived in Pittsburg. It was raining, and the black pall of smoke which always clothes the town was denser than ever, and the long black streamers which hung everywhere as mourning made the whole place unutterably ghastly. In the trains nothing but the murder was spoken of. There was a young man who had been in the theatre and witnessed the murder, which he described graphically and evidently truthfully. I reached Cincinnati, and as soon as possible hurried on board the steamboat. We went along to Charleston, and it will hardly be believed that I very nearly missed the whole object of my journey by falling asleep. We had but one more very short distance to go, when, overcome by fatigue, I dropped into a nap. Fortunately I was awakened by the last ringing of the bell, and, seizing my carpet-bag, ran ashore just as the plank was to be withdrawn. I went directly to Goshorn's hotel. He was a stout, burly man, shrewd in his way, good-natured, but not without temper and impulses. He looked keenly after business, played the fiddle, and performed a few tricks of legerdemain. He had a ladylike wife, and both were very kind to me, especially after they came to know me pretty well. The lady had a nice, easy horse, which ere long was lent me freely whenever I wanted to ride. One day it was missing. The master grieved. They had named it after me in compliment. "Goshorn," I said, "in future I shall call _you Horse- gone_." But he was not pleased with the name. However, it was recovered by a miracle, for the amount of horse-stealing which went on about us then was fabulous. After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in "ile" bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men and rebels. _He_ could pass the lines and go anywhere. At one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Richmond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go with him into the city! I had a neighbour named Fassit, an uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed the natives. One morning there came to Mr. Fassit a letter imploring him to return: "Come back, o come agin and bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. We dont make war on _Ile_." And I, being thus respected, went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed if _not_ particularly charming life all winter and the spring, to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will appear in the sequence. The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and home--with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows _liked_ me. One said to me one day, "You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. What's the reason?" I explained it that he had only met with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the _liking_ which I have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk. Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. "Money won't be of much use," he said; "what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superstitious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something _utterly_ unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that scrap of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a young _raven_. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all my life. During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and we went headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, unless the boatmen know every rock and point, for the dugout canoe goes over at a touch, and there is no life to be saved in the rapids. Now we were flying like a swallow, and could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pass, just in the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an inch for a canoe to pass, but to do this it was necessary to have moonlight enough to see the King Rock, which rose in the stream close by the passage, and at the critical instant to "fend off" with the hand and prevent the canoe from driving full on the rock. A terrible storm was coming up, thunder was growling afar, and clouds fast gathering in the sky. The men had heard me talking the day before as to how storms were formed in circles, and it had deeply impressed them. When Goshorn asked them what we had better do, they said, "Leave it all to Mr. Leland; he knows everything." I looked at the moon and saw that the clouds were not driving dead against it, but _around_ while closing in, and I know not by what strange inspiration I added, "You will have just time to clear King Rock!" It was still far away. I laid down my paddle and drew my blanket round me, and smoked to the storm, and sang incantations to myself. It was a fearful trial, actually risking death, but I felt no fear--only a dull confidence in fate. Closer grew the clouds--darker the sky--when during the very last second of light King Rock came in sight. Goshorn was ready with his bull-like strength and gave the push; and just as we shot clear into the channel it became dark as pitch, and the rain came down in a torrent. Goshorn pitched his hat high into the air--_aux moulins_--and hurrahed and cried in exulting joy. "Now, Mr. Leland, sing us that German song you're always so jolly with--_lodle yodle tol de rol de rol_!" From that hour I was _Kchee-Bo-o-in_ or Grand Pow-wow to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I believe in myself when such mad "spells" come over me. One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and sunshiny, and we were paddling along when we saw a "summer duck" swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting in the bow exactly between me and the duck. "Fire at it with your revolver!" cried Sam. "It is too far away," I replied, "and you are right in the way." Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William Tell's at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a feather. "I knew you'd hit!" cried Sam triumphantly. And so I had, but I should not like to try that shot again. Reflex action of the brain and secondary automatism! It must be so--Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the "old Injun" and my High- Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the _least_ self-deception or delusion. It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over so easily, men will pass over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pass over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of canoe was raised. Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about _manna_ in the wilderness! _money_ in the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill of delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, "Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o' _delicacy_ with us." Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to _live_. One day we came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county court for amusement. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of which the poorest English peasant _knows_ something, yet every one of these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty. One night we stopped at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a _far_ higher standard of morals among these people than among the ignorant elsewhere. It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed me a hill, and a hunter had told him that when standing on it one summer afternoon he had seen in a marshy place the very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all wallowing together in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a bear's claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the time that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his well-furnished table bear's meat, venison, or other game, fish, ham, chickens, &c. There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk River, and some of its "incidents" were marvellously strange. The hard sandstone rocks had worn into shapes resembling castles and houses, incredibly like buildings made by man. One day I saw and copied a vast square rock through which ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high, with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense square tower. There are the most natural-looking houses and Schlosser imaginable rising all alone in the forest. Very often the summits of the hills were crowned with round towers. On the Ohio River there is a group of these shaped like segments of a truncated cone, and "corniced" with another piece reversed, like this: {Round tower: p304.jpg} These are called "Devil's Tea-tables." I drew them several times, but could never give them the appearance of being _natural_ objects. It is very extraordinary how Nature seems to have mocked man in advance in these structures. In Fingal's Cave there is an absolutely original style of architecture. The last house which we came to was the best. In it dwelt a gentlemanly elderly man with two ladylike daughters. His son, who was dressed in "store clothes," had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the war had borne hard on them, and for a long time _everything_ which they used or wore had been made by their own hands. They had a home-made loom and spinning-wheel--I saw several such looms on the river; they raised their own cotton and wool and maple sugar, and were in all important details utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not live rudely at all, but like ladies and gentlemen, as really intelligent people always can when they are _free_. The father had, not long before, standing in his own door, shot a deer as it looked over the garden gate at him. Goshorn, observing that I attached some value to the horns (a new idea to him), secured them for himself. A day or two after, while descending the river, we stopped to see an old hunter who lived on the bank. He was a very shrewd, quaint old boy, "good for a novel." He examined Goshorn's spectacles with so much interest, that I suspect it was really the first time in his life that he ever fully ascertained the "true inwardness and utilitarianism" of such objects. He expressed great admiration, and said that if he had them he could get twice as many deer as he did. I promised to send him a pair. I begged from him deer-horns, which he gave me very willingly, expressing wonder that I wanted such rubbish, and at my delight. And seeing that my companion had a pair, he said scornfully: "Dave Goshorn, what do _you_ know about such things? What's set _you_ to gittin' deer's horns? Give 'em to this here young gentleman, who understands such things that we don't, and who wants 'em fur some good reason." I will do Goshorn the justice to say that he gave them to me for a parting present. My room at his house was quite devoid of all decoration, but by arranging on the walls crossed canoe-paddles, great bunches of the picturesque locust-thorn, often nearly a foot in length, and the deer's horns, I made it look rather more human. But this arrangement utterly bewildered the natives, especially the maids, who naively asked me why I hung them old bones and thorns up in my room. As this thorn is much used by the blacks in Voodoo, I suppose that it was all explained by being set down to my "conjurin'." The maid who attended to my room was a very nice, good girl, but one who could not have been understood in England. I found that she gathered up and treasured many utterly worthless trifling bits of pen-drawing which I threw away. She explained that where she came from on Coal River, anything like a picture was a great curiosity; also that her friends believed that all the pictures in books, newspapers, &c., were drawn by hand. I explained to her how they were made. When _I_ left I offered her two dollars. She hesitated, and then said, "Mr. Leland, there have been many, many gentlemen here who have offered me money, but I never took a cent from any man till _now_. And I _will_ take this from you to buy something that I can remember you by, for you have always treated me kindly and like a lady." In rural America such girls are really lady- helps, and not "servants," albeit those who know how to get on with them find them the very best servants in the world; but they must be treated as _friends_. I went up Elk River several times on horse or in canoe to renew leases or to lease new land, &c. The company sent on a very clever and intelligent rather young man named Sandford, who had been a railroad superintendent, to help me. I liked him very much. We had a third, a young Virginian, named Finnal. At or near Cannelton I selected a spot where we put up a steam-engine, and began to bore for oil. It was very near the famous gas- well which once belonged to General Washington. This well gave forth every week the equivalent of _one hundred and fifty_ tons of coal. It was utilised in a factory. After I sunk our shaft it gave out; but I do not believe that we stopped it, for no gas came into our well. Finnal was the superintendent of the well. One day he nearly sat down--_nudo podice_--on an immense rattlesnake. He had a little cottage and a fine horse. He kept the latter in a stable and painted the door _white_, so that when waking in the night he could see if any horse-thief had opened it. Many efforts were made to rob him of it. At this time Lee's army was disbanded, and fully one-half came straggling in squads up the valley to Charleston to be paroled. David Goshorn's hotel was simply crammed with Confederate officers, who slept anywhere. With these I easily became friends; they seemed like Princeton Southern college mates. Now I have to narrate a strange story. One evening when I was sitting and smoking on the portico with some of these _bons compagnons_ I said to one-- "People say that your men never once during the war got within sight of Harrisburg or of a Northern city. But I believe they did. One day when I was on guard I saw five men scout on the bank in full sight of it. But nobody agreed with me." The officer laughed silently, and cried aloud to a friend with a broken arm in a sling, who lay within a room on a bed, "Come out here, L---. Here is something which will interest you more than anything you ever heard before." He came out, and, having heard my story, said-- "Nobody ever believed your story, nor did anybody ever believe mine. Mine is this--that when we were at Sporting Hill a corporal of mine came in and declared that he and his men had scouted into within full sight of Harrisburg. I knew that the man told the truth, but nobody else would believe that any human being dared to do such a thing, or could do it. And now you fully prove that it was done." There came to Goshorn's three very interesting men with whom I became intimate. One was Robert Hunt, of St. Louis. He was of a very good Virginia family, had been at Princeton College, ran away in his sixteenth year, took to the plains as a hunter, and for twenty-three years had ranged the Wild West from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. At the end of the time an uncle in the Fur Company had helped him on, and he was now rich. He was one of the most genial, gay, and festive, reckless yet always gentlemanly men I ever knew. He expressed great astonishment, as he learned gradually to know me, at finding we were so congenial, and that I had so much "real Injun" in me. His eyes were first opened to this great fact by a very singular incident, of which I can never think without pleasure. Hunt, with two men who had been cavalry captains all through the war, and his friend Ross, who had long been an Indian trader, and I, were all riding up Elk Valley to look at lands. We paused at a place where the road sloped sideways and was wet with rain. As I was going to remount, I asked a German who stood by to hold my horse's head, and sprang into the saddle. Just at this critical instant--it all passed in a second--as the German had not heard me, my horse, feeling that he must fall over on his left side from my weight, threw himself _completely over backward_. As quick as thought I jumped up on his back, put my foot just between the saddle and his tail, and took a tremendous flying leap so far that I cleared the horse. I only muddied the palms of my gloves, on which I fell. The elder cavalry captain said, "When I saw that horse go over backwards, I closed my eyes and held my breath, for I expected the next second to see you killed." But Robert Hunt exclaimed, "Good as an Injun, by God!" And when I some time after made fun of it, he shook his head gravely and reprovingly, as George Ward did over the gunpowder, and said, "It was a _magnificent_ thing!" That very afternoon Hunt distinguished himself in a manner which was quite as becoming an aborigine. I was acting as guide, and knowing that there was a ford across a tributary of the Elk, sought and thought I had found it. But I was mistaken, and what was horrible, we found ourselves in a deep quicksand. On such occasions horses become, as it were, insane, trying to throw the riders and then jump on them for support. By good luck we got out of it soon, but there was an _awful_ five minutes of kicking, plunging, splashing, and "ground and lofty" swearing. I got across dry by drawing my legs up before me on the saddle, _a la_ tailor, but the others were badly wet. But no sooner had we emerged from the stream than Robert Hunt, bursting into a tremendous "_Ho_! _ho_!" of deep laughter, declared that he had shown more presence of mind during the emergency than any of us; for, brandishing his whisky flask, he declared that while his horse was in the flurry it occurred to him that the best thing he could do was to lighten the load, and he had therefore, with incredible presence of mind, drunk up all the whisky! However, he afterwards confessed to me that the true reason was that, believing death was at hand, and thinking it a pity to die thirsty, he had drained the bottle, as did the old Indian woman just as she went over the Falls of Niagara. Anyhow, the incorrigible _vaurien_ had really emptied his flask while in the "quick." Though I say it, I believe that Hunt and I were a pretty well matched couple, and many a wild prank and Indian-like joke did we play together. More than once he expressed great astonishment that I, a man grown up in cities and to literary pursuits, should be so much at home where he found me, or so congenial. He had been at Princeton, and, _ex pede Herculem_, had a point whence to judge me, but it failed. {309} His friend Ross was a quiet, sensible New Englander, who reminded me of Artemus Ward, or Charles Browne. He abounded in quaint anecdotes of Indian experiences. As did also a Mr. Wadsworth, who had passed half his life in the Far West as a surveyor among the Chippeways. He had written a large manuscript of their legends, of which Schoolcraft made great use in his _Algic_ book. I believe that much of Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ owed its origin thus indirectly to Mr. Wadsworth. In after years I wrote out many of his tales, as told to me, in articles in _Temple Bar_. The country all about Charleston was primitively wild and picturesque, rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and dreams of _sylvani_ and forest fairies. There were fountained hills, and dreamy darkling woods, and old Indian graves, and a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other hand could "shoot their mark" with a rifle to perfection, and who would assuredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy messenger of _Ile_, and an angel of coming moneyed times. One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. There was only an old woman there--one of the stern, resolute, hard-muscled frontier women, the daughters of mothers who had fought "Injuns"--and a calf. And thereby hung a tale, which the three men with me fully authenticated. The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so worried, harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by Federals and Confederates--one day the former, the next the latter; blue and grey, or sky and sea--that the old lady had nothing left to live on. Hens, cows, horses, corn, all had gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her heart. One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a broom, rushed to the now henless hen-house, in which she kept the calf, to find in it a full- grown panther attacking her pet. By this time the old lady had grown desperate, and seizing the broom, she proceeded to "lam" the wild beast with the handle, and with all her heart; and the fiend of ferocity, appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the marks of the panther's claws, not yet quite healed; I saw the broom; and, lastly, I saw the old woman, the mother in Ishmael; whose face was a perfect guarantee of the truth of the story. One of us suggested that the old lady should have the calf's hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an Indian, which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare's application of it, or to "Hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs." Then there came the great spring freshet in Elk River, which rose unusually high, fifty feet above its summer level. It had come to within an inch or two of my floor, and yet I went to bed and to sleep. By a miracle it rose no more, for I had a distinct conviction it would not, which greatly amazed everybody. But many were drowned all about us. The next day a man who professed bone-setting and doctoring, albeit not diplomaed, asked me to go with him and act as interpreter to a German patient who had a broken thigh. While felling a tree far away in the forest, it thundered down on him, and kept him down for two or three days till he was discovered. To get to him we went in a small canoe, and paddled ourselves with shingles or wooden tiles, used to cover roofs. On the way I saw a man on a roof fiddling; only a bit of the roof was above water. He was waiting for deliverance. Many and strange indeed were all the scenes and incidents of that inundation, and marvellous the legends which were told of other freshets in the days of yore. I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, and always stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. One night Sandford and friends sat down to teach me poker, when _bang_, _bang_, went a revolver outside, and a bullet buried itself in the door close by me. A riotous, evil-minded darkey, who attended to my washing, had got into a fight, and was forthwith conveyed to the Bull-pen, or military prison. I was afraid lest I might lose my shirts, and so "visited him" next day and found him in irons, but reading a newspaper at his ease. From him I learned the address of "the coloured lady" who had my underclothing. The Bull-pen was a picturesque place--a large log enclosure, full of strange inmates, such as wild guerillas in moccasins, grey-back Confederates and blue-coat Federals guilty of many a murder, arson, and much horse-stealing, desolate deserters, often deserving pity--the _debris_ of a four years' war, the crumbs of the great loaf fallen to the dirt. Warm weather came on, and I sent to Philadelphia for a summer suit of clothes. It came, and it was of a _light grey colour_. At that time Oxford "dittos," or a suit _pareil partout_, were unknown in West Virginia. I was dressed from head to foot in Confederate grey. Such a daring defiance of public opinion, coupled with my mysterious stealing into the rebel country, made me an object of awe and suspicion--a kind of Sir Grey Steal! There was at that time in Charleston a German artillery regiment which really held the town--that is to say, the height which commanded it. I had become acquainted with its officers. All at once they gave me the cold shoulder and cut me. My friend Sandford was very intimate with them. One evening he asked their Colonel why they scorned me. The Colonel replied-- "Pecause he's a tamned repel. Aferypody knows it." Sandford at once explained that I was even known at Washington as a good Union man, and had, moreover, translated Heine, adding other details. "Gott verdammich--_heiss_!" cried the Colonel in amazement. "Is dot der Karl Leland vot dranslate de _Reisebilder_? Herr je! I hafe got dat very pook here on mein table! Look at it. Bei Gott! here's his name! _Dot_ is der crate Leland vot edit de _Continental Magazine_! Dot moost pe a fery deep man. Und I dink _he_ vas a repel!" The next morning early the Colonel sent his ambulance or army waggon to my hotel with a request that I would come and take breakfast with him. It was a bit of Heidelberg life over again. We punished Rheinwein and lager- beer in quantities. There were old German students among the officers, and I was received like a brother. At last Sandford and I determined to return to the East. There was in the hotel a coloured waiter named Harrison. He had been a slave, but "a gentleman's gentleman," was rather dignified, and allowed no ordinary white man to joke with him. On the evening before my departure I said to him-- "Well, Harrison, I hope that you haven't quite so bad an opinion of me as the other people here seem to have." He manifested at once a really violent emotion. Dashing something to the ground, he cried-- "Mr. Leland, you _never_ did anything contrary to a gentleman. I always maintained it. Now please tell me the truth. Is it true that you're a great friend of Jeff Davis?" "Damn Jeff Davis!" I replied. "And you ain't a major in the Confederate service?" "I'm a clear-down Abolitionist, and was born one." "And you ain't had no goings on with the rebels up the river to bring back the Confederacy here?" "Devil a dealing." And therewith I explained how it was that I went unharmed up into the rebels' country, and great was the joy of Harrison, who, as I found, had taken my part valiantly against those who suspected me. There was a droll comedy the next day on board the steamboat on which I departed. A certain Mr. H., who had been a rebel and recanted at the eleventh hour and become a Federal official, requested everybody on board not to notice me. Sandford learned it all, and chuckled over it. But the captain and mate and crew were all still rebels at heart. Great was my amazement at being privately informed by the steward that the captain requested as a favour that I would sit by him at dinner and share a bottle of wine. I did so, and while I remained on board was treated as an honoured guest. And now I would here distinctly declare that, apart from my political principles, from which I never swerved, I always found the rebels--that is, Southern and Western men with whom I had had intimate dealings--without one exception _personally_ the most congenial and agreeable people whom I had ever met. There was not to be found among them what in England is known as a prig. They were natural and gentlemanly, even down to the poorest and most uneducated. One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my influence with the Cannelton Company to get him employment at their works. "Sam," I replied, "I can't do it. It is only three weeks now, when you were employed at another place, that you tried to stuff the overseer into the furnace, and if the men had not prevented, you would have burned him up alive." "Yes," replied Sam, "but he had called me a -- son --- of ---." "Very good," I answered; "and if he had called me _that_, I should have done the same. But I don't think, if I _had_ done it, I should ever have expected to be employed again on another furnace. You see, Samuel, my son, that these Northern men have very queer notions--_very_." Sam was quite convinced. At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I do not set myself up for a judge of wines, but I have naturally a delicate sense of smell or _flair_, though not the extraordinary degree in which my brother possessed it, who never drank wine at all. He was the first person who ever, in printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked me if I could tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I would try; so they gave me a glass of some kind, and I said that honestly I could only declare that I should say it was Portugal common country wine, but I must be wrong. Then Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, "I believe that after all you know a great deal about wine. I told the landlord what you said, and he laughed, arid said, 'I had not the American wine which you called for, and so I gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.'" This wine is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy mixed. At Cincinnati, Sandford proposed that we should return by way of Detroit and Niagara. I objected to the expense, but he, who knew every route and rate by heart, explained to me that, owing to the competition in railway rates, it would only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, _plus_ $2.50 (ten shillings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of "Two Years before the Mast"), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia. It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle, revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not _act_ in a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who ever learned to paddle a dug-out _correctly_; but as I was obliged to do this sometimes for fifteen hours a day _nolens volens_, it is not remarkable that I became an expert. As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature, life, and association, it is absolutely as different from all civilised feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment. "Zum Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn. So einzig, ach! so einzig hin. Dort lebt man freundlich, lebt man froh, Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so." It does not come from reading or culture--it comes of itself by nature, or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in something like superstition can it find expression, but that must be childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such subjects are invariably received by ladies in society. I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pass some time at Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very pleasantly at a country inn. It is a very interesting town, where a peculiar German dialect is generally spoken. There was a very respectable wealthy middle-aged lady, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she could not speak English. And when I was introduced to her, I made matters worse by speaking to her naturally in broad South German, whereupon she informed me that she spoke _Hoch_-Deutsch! But I made myself popular among the natives with my German, and our landlord was immensely proud of me. I wasn't "one of dem city fellers dat shames demselfs of de Dutch," not I. "Vy, I dells you vot, mein Gott! he's _proud_ of it!" I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Massachusetts, in the charming country immortalised in "Elsie Venner"; of which work, and my letter on it to Dr. Holmes, and my conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a chapter. But "let us not talk about them but pass on." I returned to Philadelphia and to my father's house, where I remained one year. I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book to be entitled the "Origin of American Popular Phrases." I had scissored from newspapers, collected from negro minstrels and Western rustics, and innumerable New England friends, as well as books and old songs and comic almanacs and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work, which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been accepted by a New York publisher, and was in the printer's hands. I never awaited anything with such painful anxiety as I did this publication, for I had never been in such straits nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if the more earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. And then almost as soon as my manuscript was in the printer's hands his office was burned, and the work perished, for I had not kept a copy. It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of it to this day I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and more probably not one. I had done my _very best_ to make a good book and some money, and could do no more. When I was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the story in the "Arabian Nights" of the prisoner who knew that he was going to be set free because a rat had run away with his dinner. So I, at the age of seven, announced to my father that I believed that whenever a man had bad luck, good was sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept. And to this day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it is true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort from the fact that the accident was reported in all the newspapers all over the Union. About the 1st of July, 1866, we left my father's house to go to Cape May, where we remained for two months. In September we went to a very good boarding-house in Philadelphia, kept by Mrs. Sandgren. She possessed and showed me Tegner's original manuscript of "Anna and Axel." I confess that I never cared over-much for Tegner, and that I infinitely prefer the original Icelandic Saga of Frithiof to his sago-gruel imitation of strong soup. VI. LIFE ON THE PRESS. 1866-1869. I become managing editor of John W. Forney's _Press_--Warwick the King- maker--The dead duck--A trip to Kansas in the old buffalo days--Miss Susan Blow, of St. Louis--The Iron Mountain of Missouri--A strange dream--Rattlesnakes--Kaw Indians--I am adopted into the tribe--Grand war- dance and ceremonies--Open-air lodgings--Prairie fires--In a dangerous country--Indian victims--H. M. Stanley--Lieutenant Hesselberger--I shoot a buffalo--Wild riding--In a herd--Indian white men--Ringing for the carriage with a rifle--Brigham the driver--General and Mrs. Custer--Three thousand miles in a railway car--How "Hans Breitmann's" ballads came to be published--The publisher thinks that he cannot sell more than a thousand of the book--I establish a weekly newspaper--Great success--Election rioting--Oratory and revolvers--How the meek and lowly Republicans revolvered the Democrats--The dead duck and what befell him who bore it--I make two thousand German votes by giving Forney a lesson in their language--_Freiheit und Gleichheit_--The Winnebago Indian chief--Horace Greeley--Maretzek the Bohemian--Fanny Janauschek and the Czech language--A narrow escape from death on the Switchback--Death of my father--Another Western railway excursion--A quaint old darkey--Chicago--I threaten to raise the rent--General influence of Chicago--St. Paul, Minnesota--A seven days' journey through the wilderness--The Canadian--Smudges--Indians--A foot journey through the woods--Indian pack- bearers--Mayor Stewart--I rifle a grave of silver ornaments--Isle Royale--My brother, Henry Perry Leland--The press--John Forney carries Grant's election, and declares that I really did the work--The weekly press and George Francis Train--Grant's appointments--My sixth introduction to the General--Garibaldi's dagger. We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren's more than a week when George Boker, knowing my need, spoke to Colonel John Forney, who was at that time not only Secretary of the Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of the _Chronicle_ newspaper in Washington, of the _Press_ in Philadelphia, "both daily," as the Colonel once said, which very simple and commonplace expression became a popular by-word. Colonel Forney wanted a managing editor for the _Press_, and, as I found in due time, not so much a man of enterprise and a leader--that _he_ supplied--nor yet one to practically run the journal--that his son John, a young man of eighteen, supplied--so much as a steady, trustworthy, honest _pivot_ on which the compass could turn during his absences--and that _I_ supplied. I must, to explain the situation, add gently that John, who could not help it considering his experiences, was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a steady manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John the junior was extremely clever as a practical managing editor, remembering everything, and knowing--what I never did or could--all the little tricks, games, and wiles of all the reporters and others employed. Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had such a great influence for many years in American politics, that as I had a great deal to do with him--very much more than was generally known--at a time when he struck his greatest political _coup_, in which, as he said, I greatly aided him, I will here dwell on him a space. Before I knew him I called him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally admitted that it was to his intense hatred of Buchanan, added to his speech-making, editing, and tremendously vigorous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that "Ten-cent Jimmy" owed his defeat. At this time, in all presidential elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John Forney could and did turn Pennsylvania like a Titan; and he frankly admitted that he owed the success of his last turn to me, as I shall in time relate. Forney's antipathies were always remarkably well placed. He hated Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he hated Simon Cameron; and finally it came to pass that he hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of twenty-four carats--an _aquafortis_ detestation--and for a most singular cause. One night when this "President by the pistol, and smallest potato in the American garden of liberty," was making one of his ribald speeches, after having laid out Horace Greeley, some one in the crowd cried-- "Now give us _John Forney_!" With an air of infinite contempt the President exclaimed-- "I don't waste _my_ powder on dead ducks." He had better have left that word unsaid, for it ruined him. It woke Colonel John Forney up to the very highest pitch of his fighting "Injun," or, as they say in Pennsylvania, his "Dutch." He had always been to that hour a genial man, like most politicians, a little too much given to the social glass. But from that date of the dead duck he became "total abstinence," and concentrated all his faculties and found all his excitement in vengeance hot and strong, without a grain of sugar. In which I gladly sympathised and aided, for I detested Johnson as a renegade Copperhead, or rather venomous toad to the South, who wished with all his soul to undo Lincoln's work and bring in the Confederacy. And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had not defeated him, we should have had such disasters as are now inconceivable, the least of them being a renewal of the war. Johnson had renegaded from the Confederacy because, being only a tailor, he had ranked as a "low white," or something despised even by "quality" negroes. The Southern aristocracy humbugged him by promising that if he would betray the Union he should be regarded as one of themselves, by which very shallow cheat he was--as a snob would be--easily caught, and in due time cast off. I had been but a few weeks on the _Press_, and all was going on well, when one morning the Colonel abruptly asked me if I could start in the morning for Fort Riley, of which all I knew was that it constituted an extreme frontier station in Kansas. There was to be a Kansas Pacific railway laid out, and a large party of railroad men intended to go as far as the last surveyor's camp. Of course, a few editors had been invited to write up the road, and these in turn sent some one in their place. I knew at once that I should have something like the last year's wild life over again, and I was delighted. I borrowed John Forney's revolver, provided an agate-point and "manifold paper" for duplicate letters to our "two papers, both daily," and at the appointed hour was at the railway station. There had been provided for us the director's car, a very large and extremely comfortable vehicle, with abundance of velvet "settees" or divan sofas, with an immense stock of lobster-salad, cold croquettes, game, with "wines of every fineness," and excellent waiters. The excursion, indeed, cost 1,000 pounds; but it was made to pay, and that to great profit. We were all a very genial, congenial party of easy-going geniuses. There was Hassard, the "day editor" of the _New York Tribune_, who had been with me on the _Cyclopaedia_, and to whom I was much attached, for he was a gentlemanly scholar, and withal had seen enough of life on the _Tribune_ to hold his own with any man; and Captain William Colton, who had been with me in Tennessee; Robert Lamborn, who had studied science in Germany, and was now a railroad man, and many more who are recorded in my pamphlet, "Three Thousand Miles in a Railway Car," and my old associate, Caspar Souder, of the _Bulletin_. This excursion was destined, in connection with this pamphlet, to have a marvellous effect on my future life. In every town where we paused--and our pauses were frequent, as we travelled very much on the "go-as-you-please" plan--we were received by the authorities with honour and speeches and invited to dinners or drinks. Our conductors were courtesy itself. One afternoon one of them on a rough bit of road said, "Gentlemen, whenever you wish to open a bottle of champagne, please to pull the cord and stop the train. You can then drink without spilling your wine." So we went to Chicago and St. Louis, where we were entertained by Mr. Blow, and where I became acquainted with his daughter Susan. She was then a beautiful blonde, and, as I soon found, very intelligent and cultured. She was long years afterwards busy in founding philanthropic schools in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I was there--a singularly noble woman. However, at this time neither of us dreamed of the school-keeping which we were to experience in later years. At this soiree, and indeed for the excursion the next day, we had as a guest Mr. Walter, of the London _Times_. The next day we had a special train and an excursion of ladies and gentlemen to visit the marvellous Knob or Iron Mountain. This is an immense conical hill with a deep surrounding dale, beyond which rise other hills all of nearly solid iron. Returning that evening in the train, a very strange event took place. There was with us a genial, pleasant, larky young fellow, one of the famous family of the MacCooks. When the war came on he was at college--went into the army, fought hard--rose to be captain, and then after the peace went back to the college and finished his studies. This was the "event." We were telling stories of dreams; when it came to my turn I said:-- "In 1860 I had never been in Ohio, nor did I know anything about it. One night--it was at Reading, Pennsylvania--I fell asleep, I dreamed that I _woke up_, rose from the bed, went to the match-box, struck a light, and while it burned observed the room, which was just the same as when I had retired. The match went out. I lit another, when what was my amazement to observe that _everything in the room had changed its colour to a rich brown_! Looking about me, I saw on a kind of _etagere_ scores of half- burned candles in candlesticks, as if there had been a ball. I lighted nearly all of them. Hearing a sound as of sweeping and the knocking of a broom-handle without, I went into the next room, which was the hall where the dance had been held. A very stupid fellow was sweeping it out. I asked him where I was. He could not reply intelligently. There came into the hall a bustling, pleasant woman, rather small, who I saw at a glance was the housekeeper. She said something to the man as to the room's being dark. I remarked that there was light enough in my room, for I had lit all the candles. She cried, laughing, 'What extravagance!' I answered, 'My dear little woman, what does a candle or two signify to you? Now please tell me where I am. Last night I went to sleep in Reading, Pennsylvania. Where am I now?' She replied (and of this word I was not sure), 'In _Columbus_, Ohio.' I asked if there was any prominent man in the place who was acquainted with Philadelphia, and who might aid me to return. She reflected, and said that Judge _Duer_ and his two daughters (of whom I had never heard) had just returned from the East." Here MacCook interrupted me eagerly: "You were not in Columbus, but in _Dayton_, Ohio. And it was not Judge Duer, but Judge _Duey_, with his two daughters, who was that summer in the East." I went on:-- "I left the room and went into the hall. I came to the front door. Far down below me I saw a winding river and a steamboat." Here MacCook spoke again: "That was _surely_ Dayton. I know the house and the view. But it could not have been Columbus." I went on:-- "I went downstairs too far by mistake into the cellar. There I found a man sawing wood. I went up again. [Pray observe that a year _after_, when I went West, this very incident occurred one morning in Cincinnati, Ohio.] I found in the bar-room three respectable-looking men. I told them my story. One said to the others, 'He is always the same old fellow!' I stared at him in amazement. He held out one hand and moved the other as if fiddling. Monotonous creaking sounds followed, and I gradually awoke. The same sounds continued, but they were caused by the grasshoppers and tree-toads, who pipe monotonously all night long in America." Nothing ever came of the dream, but it all occurred _exactly_ as I describe it. I have had several quite as strange. Immediately after I had finished my narration, some one, alluding to our party, asked if there was any one present who could sing "Hans Breitmann's Barty," and I astonished them not a little by proclaiming that I was the author, and by singing it. We went on to Leavenworth, where we had a dinner at the hotel which was worthy of Paris. We had, for example, prairie pullets or half-grown grouse, wild turkeys and tender venison. Thence to Fort Riley, and so on in waggons to the last surveyor's camp. I forget where it was on the route that we stopped over-night at a fort, where I found some old friends and made new ones. A young officer--Lieutenant Brown, I think--gave me a bed in his cabin. His ceiling was made of canvas. For weeks he had heard a great rattlesnake moving about on it. One day he had made a hole in the ceiling and put into it a great fierce tom-cat. The cat "went for" the snake and there was an awful row. After a time the cat came out looking like a devil with every hair on end, made straight for the prairie, and was never heard of again. Neither was the snake. They had finished one another. On another occasion, when sitting in a similar cabin, my gentle hostess, an officer's wife, whom I had known a few years before as a beauty in society, remarked that she had two large rattlesnakes in her ceiling, and that if we would be silent we might hear them crawling about. They could not be taken out without rebuilding the roof. Captain Colton had just recovered from a very bad attack of fever and ague, and, being young, had the enormous appetite which follows weeks of quinine. I saw him this day eat a full meal of beefsteaks, and then immediately after devour another, at Brown's, of buffalo-meat. The air of the Plains causes incredible hunger. We all played a good knife and fork. About twilight-tide there came in a very gentlemanly Catholic priest. I was told that he was a roving missionary. He led a charmed life, for he went to visit the wildest tribes, and was everywhere respected. I conversed with him in French. After a while he spread his blanket, lay down on the floor and slept till morning, when he read his prayers and departed. The next day the fort square was full of Kaw Indians, all in savage array, about to depart for their autumnal buffalo-hunt. I met one venerable heathen with his wife and babe, with whom I made genial acquaintance. I asked the wife the name for a whip; she replied _B'meergashee_; a pony was _shoonga_, the nose _hin_, and a woman _shimmy- shindy_! I bought his whip for a dollar. The squaw generously offered to throw in the baby, which I declined, and we all laughed and parted. I went to the camp, and there the whole party, seeing my curious whip, went at the Kaws to buy theirs. Bank-bills were our only currency then, and the Indians knew there were such things as counterfeits. They consulted together, eyed us carefully, and then every man as he received his dollar brought it to me for approval. By chance I knew the Pawnee word for "good" (_Washitaw_), and they also knew it. Then came a strange wild scene. I spoke to the chief, and pointing to my whip said, "_B'meergashee_" and indicating a woman and a pony, repeated, "_Shimmy- shindy_, _shoonga-hin_," intimating that its use was to chastise women and ponies by hitting them on the nose. Great was the amazement and delight of the Kaws, who roared with laughter, and their chief curiously inquired, "_You_ Kaw?" To which I replied, "_O_, _nitchee_, _me_ Kaw, _washita_ good Injun me." He at once embraced me with frantic joy, as did the others, to the great amazement of my friends. A wild circular dance was at once improvised to celebrate my reception into the tribe; at which our driver Brigham dryly remarked that he didn't wonder they were glad to get me, for I was the first Injun ever seen in that tribe with a whole shirt on him. This was the order of proceedings:--I stood in the centre and sang wildly the following song, which was a great favourite with our party, and all joining in the chorus:-- I slew the chief of the Muscolgee; I burnt his squaw at the blasted tree! By the hind-legs I tied up the cur, He had no time to fondle on her. _Chorus_. Hoo! hoo! hoo! the Muscolgee! Wah, wah, wah! the blasted tree! A faggot from the blasted tree Fired the lodge of the Muscolgee; His sinews served to string my bow When bent to lay his brethren low. _Chorus_. Hoo! hoo! hoo! the Muscolgee! Wah, wah, wah! the blasted tree! I stripped his skull all naked and bare, And here's his skull with a tuft of hair! His heart is in the eagle's maw, His bloody bones the wolf doth gnaw. _Chorus_. Hoo! hoo! hoo! the Muscolgee! Wah, wah, wah! the blasted tree! The Indians yelled and drummed at the Reception Dance. "Now you good Kaw--Good Injun you be--all same me," said the chief. Hassard and Lamborn cracked time with their whips, and, in short, we made a grand circular row; truly it was a wondrous striking scene! From that day I was called the Kaw chief, even by Hassard in his letters to the _Tribune_, in which he mentioned that in scenes of excitement I rode and whooped like a savage. It _may_ be so--_I_ never noticed it; perhaps he exaggerated, but I must admit that I do like Indians, and they like me. We took ambulances or strong covered army-waggons and pushed on. We were now well out on the plains. All day long we passed prairie-dog villages and saw antelopes bounding afar. At night we stopped at the hotel _Alla Fresca_, or slept in the open air. It was perfectly delightful, though in November. Far in the distance many prairie fires stretched like miles of blazing serpents over the distance. I thought of the innumerable camp- fires before the battle of Gettysburg, and determined that the two were among the most wonderful sights of my life. We rose very early in the morning, by grey light, and after a drink of whisky pushed on. I may here mention that from 1863 for six years I very rarely indeed tasted any intoxicant. So we went on till we reached the last surveyor's camp. We had not been there half an hour before a man came in declaring that he had just saved his scalp, having seen a party of Apaches in their war-paint, but luckily hid himself before they discovered him. It was evident that we had now got beyond civilisation. Already, on the way, we had seen ranches which had been recently burned by the Indians, who had killed their inmates. One man, observing my Kaw whip, casually remarked that as I was fond of curiosities he was sorry that he had not kept six arrows which he had lately pulled out of a man whom he had found lying dead in the road, and who had just been shot by the Indians. Within this same hour after our arrival there came in a Lieutenant Hesselberger, bringing with him a Mrs. Box and her two daughters, one about sixteen and the other twelve. The Indians had on the Texas frontier murdered and scalped her husband before her eyes, burned their home, and carried the three into captivity, where for six months they were daily subjected to such _incredible_ outrages and cruelty that it was simply a miracle that they survived. As it was, they looked exactly like corpses. Lieutenant Hesselberger, with bravery beyond belief, having heard of these captives, went alone to the Indians to ransom them. Firstly, they fired guns unexpectedly close to his head, and finding that he did not start, brought out the captives and subjected them to the extremes of gross abuse before his eyes, and repeatedly knocked them down with clubs, all of which he affected to disregard. At last the price was agreed on and he took them away. In after years, when I described all this in London to Stanley, the African explorer, he said, "Strange! I, too, was there that very day, and saw those women, and wrote an account of it to the _New York Herald_." I daresay that I met and talked to him at the time among those whom we saw. Not far from our camp there was a large and well-populated beaver-dam, which I studied with great interest. It was more like a well regulated town than is many a western mining village. I do not wonder that Indians regard _Quahbeet_, the beaver, as a human being in disguise. N.B.--The beaver always, when he cuts a stick, sharpens it like a lead-pencil--which indicates an artistic nature. It was now resolved that a number of our party should go into the Smoky Hill country to attend a very great Indian council, while the rest returned home. So I joined the adventurers. The meeting was not held, for I believe the Indians went to war. But we rode on. One morning I saw afar a few black specks, and thought they were cattle. And so they were, but the free cattle of the plains, or buffaloes. That evening, as we were out of meat, Colton and others went out to hunt them, and had a fine chase, but got nothing. The next morning Colton kindly gave me his chance--that is, he resigned to me a splendid black horse used to the business--and most of us went to the field. After a while, or a four miles' run, we came up with a number. There was a fine cow singled out and shot at, and I succeeded in putting a ball in just behind the shoulder. Among us all she became beef, and an expert hunter with us, whose business it was to supply the camp with meat, skinned and butchered her and cooked a meal for us on the spot. The beef was deliciously tender and well flavoured. Now, before this cooking, in the excitement of the chase, I had ridden on like an Indian, as Hassard said in his letter, whooping like one all alone after the buffalo, and in my joy forgot to shake the spent cartridge out of my Spenser seven-shooter carbine. All at once I found myself right in the herd, close by a monstrous bull, whose height at the instant when he turned on me to gore me seemed to be about a hundred and fifty feet. But my horse was used to this, and swerved with incredible tact and swiftness, while I held on. I then had a perfectly close shot, not six feet off, under the shoulder, and I raised the carbine and pulled trigger, when it--_ticked_! I had forgotten the dead cartridge, and was not used to the arm which I carried. I think that I swore, and if I did not I am sorry for it. Before I could arrange my charge the buffaloes were far away. {Stairs of rock: p329.jpg} However, we had got our cow, and that was more than we really needed. At any rate, I had shot a buffalo and had a stupendous run. And here I must mention that while racing and whooping, I executed the most insanely foolish thing I ever did in all my life, which astonished the hunter and all present to the utmost. I was at the top of a declivity from which there descended a flight of natural stairs of rock, but every one very broad, like the above sketch. And being inspired by the devil, and my horse not objecting at all, I clattered down over it at full speed _a la_ Putnam. I have heard that Indians do this very boldly, declaring that it is perfectly safe if the rider is not afraid, and I am quite sure that mine must have been an Indian horse. I hope that no one will think that I have put forward or made too much of these trifling boyish tricks of recklessness. They are of daily occurrence in the Wild West among men who like excitement, and had Robert Hunt been among us there would have been fun indeed. So we turned homewards, for the Indian Conference had proved a failure. We had for our driver a man named Brigham, to whom I had taken a great liking. He had lived as a trader among the wildest Indians, spoke Spanish fluently, and knew the whole Western frontier like his pocket. The day after we had seen Mrs. Box come in, I was praising the braveness of Lieutenant Hesselberger in venturing to rescue her. "It isn't all bravery at all," said Brigham. "He's brave as a panther, but there's more in it than _that_. There is about one man in a hundred, and not more, who can go among the most God-forsaken devils of Injuns and never get hurt. The Injuns take to them at a glance and love 'em. _I'm_ such a man, and I've proved it often enough, God knows! Lieutenant Hesselberger is one, and," he added abruptly, "Mr. Leland, _you're_ another." "What makes you think so?" I said, greatly surprised. "'Cause I've watched you. You've got Injun ways that you don't know of. Didn't I notice the other day, when the gentlemen were buying the whips from the Kaws, that every Injun took a squint, and then came straight to _you_? Why didn't they go to one of the other gentlemen? Because they've got an instinct like a dog for their friends, and for such as _we_." We were coming to Fort Harker. I forget how it all came about, but we found ourselves afoot, with a mile or two to walk, carrying our guns, carpet-bags, and _petites bagages_, while about fifty yards ahead or more there was Brigham driving on merrily to the fort, under the impression that we had secured other conveyance. Captain Colton fired his carbine. It made about as much noise as a percussion-cap, and the wind was from Brigham toward us. Carried away by an impulse, I caught Colonel Lamborn's light rifle out of his hand. "Great God!" he cried, "you don't mean to shoot at him?" "If you'll insure the mules," I said, "I will the driver." My calculation was to send a bullet so near to Brigham that he could hear it whizz, but not to touch him. It was not so dangerous as the shot I had fired over Sam Fox, and the "spirit" was on me! But I did _not_ know that in the covered waggon sat Hassard talking with Brigham, their faces being, as Hassard declared, just about six inches apart. I fired, and the bullet passed just between their noses! Hassard heard the whizz, and cried, "What's that?" "_Injuns_, by God!" roared Brigham, forgetting that we had left the Indian country two days behind us. "Lie down in the waggon while I drive." And drive he did, till out of gunshot, and then putting his face out, turned around, and gave in full desperate cry the taunting war-whoop of the Cheyennes. It was a beautiful sight that of Brigham's broad red face wild with rage--and his great gold earrings and Mexican sombrero--turning round the waggon at us in defiance like Marmion! But when he realised that _we_ had fired at him, just as a pack of d---d Apaches might have done, for fun, to stop the waggon, his expression became one of utter bewilderment. As I came up I thought there might be a shindy. "Brigham," I said in Spanish, "_es la mano o el navajo_?" [Is it to be hand, or knife?] Brigham was proud of his Spanish; it was his elegant accomplishment, and this was a good scene. Grasping my hand cordially, he said, "_La mano_." Like a true frontiersman, he felt in a minute the _grandeur_ of the joke. There was, if I may so vulgarly express myself, an _Indian-uity_ in it which appealed to his deepest feelings. There was a silence for several minutes, which he broke by exclaiming-- "I've driven waggons now this twelve years on the frontier, but I never heard before of tryin' to stop the waggon by shootin' at the driver." There was another long silent pause, when he resumed-- "I wish to God there was a gulch (ravine) between here and the fort! I'd upset this crowd into it d---d quick!" That evening I took leave of Brigham. I drank healths with him in whisky, and shook hands, and said-- "I did a very foolish and reckless thing to-day, Brigham, when I shot at you, and I am sorry for it, and I beg your pardon. Here is a dagger which I have had for twenty-five years. I carried it all over Europe. I have nothing better to give you; please take it. And when you stick a Greaser (Mexican) with it, as I expect you will do some day, then think of me." The tears rose to his eyes, and he departed. I never met him again, but "well I wot" he ever had kindly remembrance of me. We were to be guests of General Custer at the fort, and I was rather shy of meeting the castellan after firing at his driver! But he greeted me with a hearty burst of laughter, and said-- "Mr. Leland, you have the most original way of ringing a bell when you want to call a carriage that I ever heard of." As for Hassard, when he witnessed my parting with Brigham, he said-- "This is all mighty fine! daggers and whisky, and all kinds of beautiful things flying around for Brigham, but what am _I_ to have?" "And what dost thou expect, son Hassard?" I replied. Holding out both his hands, he replied-- "Much tobacco! much tobacco!" This was in allusion to a story told us by Lieutenant Brown. Not long before, the Lieutenant, seeing, as he thought, a buffalo, had fired at it. But the buffalo turned out to be an Indian on a pony; and the Indian riding fiercely at the Lieutenant, cried aloud for indemnity or the "blood-fine" in the words, "Much tobacco!" And so I stood cigars. Life is worth living for--or it would be--if it abounded more in such types as Mrs. General Custer and her husband. There was a bright and joyous chivalry in that man, and a noble refinement mingled with constant gaiety in the wife, such as I fear is passing from the earth. Her books have shown that she was a woman of true culture, and that she came by it easily, as he did, and that out of a little they could make more than most do from a life of mere study. I fear that there will come a time when such books as hers will be the only evidences that there were ever such people--so fearless, so familiar with every form of danger, privation, and trial, and yet joyous and even reckless of it all. Good Southern blood and Western experiences had made them free of petty troubles. The Indians got his scalp at last, and with him went one of the noblest men whom America ever brought forth. {333} That evening they sent for a Bavarian-Tyroler soldier, who played beautifully on the cithern. As I listened to the _Jodel-lieder_ airs I seemed to be again in his native land. It was a pleasure to me to hear from him the familiar dialect. At St. Louis we were very kindly entertained in several distinguished houses. At one they gave us some excellent Rhine wine. "What do you think of this?" said Hassard, who was a good Latinist. I replied, "Vinum Rhenense decus et gloria mense." In the next we had Moselle wine. "And what of this?" I answered, "Vinuin Moslanum fuit omne tempore sanum." And here I would say that every memory which I have of Missouri (and there are more by far than this book indicates), as of Missourians, is extremely pleasant. The State is very beautiful, and I have found among my friends there born such culture and kindness and genial hospitality as I have never seen surpassed. To the names of Mary A. Owen, {334} Blow, Mark Twain, and the Choteaus I could add many more. So we jogged on homeward. I resumed my work. I had written out all the details of our trip in letters to the _Press_. They had excited attention. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company suggested that they should be published in a pamphlet. I did so, and called it "Three Thousand Miles in a Railroad Car." They offered to pay me a very good sum for my trouble in so doing. I declined it, because I felt that I had been amply paid by the pleasure which I had derived from the journey. But I received grateful recognition subsequently in another form. The pamphlet was most singular of its kind. It was a full report of all the statistics and vast advantages of the Kansas Pacific Road. It contained very valuable facts and figures; and it was all served up with jokes, songs, buffalo-hunting, Indians, and Brigham. It was a marvellous farrago, and it "took." It was sent to every member of Congress and "every other man." Before it appeared, a friend of mine named Ringwalt, who was both a literary man and owner of a printing-office, offered me $200 if I would secure him the printing of it. I said that I would not take the money, but that I would get him the printing, which I easily did; but being a very honourable man, he was led to discharge the obligation. One day he said to me, "Why don't you publish your 'Breitmann Ballads?' Everybody is quoting them now." I replied, "There is not a publisher in America who would accept them." And I was quite right, for there was not. He answered, "I will print them for you." I accepted the offer, but when they were set up an idea occurred to me by which I could save my friend his expenses. I went to a publisher named T. B. Peterson, who said effectively this--"The book will not sell more than a thousand copies. There will be about a thousand people who will buy it, even for fifty cents, so I shall charge that, though it would be, as books go, only as a twenty-five cent work." He took it and paid my friend for the composition. I was not to receive any money or share in the profits till all the expenses had been paid. Mr. Peterson immediately sold 2,000--4,000--I know not how many thousands--at fifty cents a copy. It was republished in Canada and Australia, to my loss. An American publisher who owned a magazine asked me, through his editor, to write for it a long Breitmann poem. I did so, making, however, an explicit verbal arrangement _that it should not be republished as a book_. It was, however, immediately republished as such, with a title to the effect that it was the "Breitmann Ballads." I appealed to the editor, and it was withdrawn, but I know not how many were issued, to my loss. I had transferred the whole right of publication in England to my friend Nicolas Trubner, whom I had met when he had visited America, and I wrote specially for his edition certain poems. John "Camden" Hotten wrote to me modestly asking me to give _him_ the sole right to republish the work. He said, "I hardly know what to say about the price. Suppose we say _ten pounds_!" I replied, "Sir, I have given the whole right of publication to Mr. Trubner, and I would not take it from him for ten thousand pounds." Hotten at once published an edition which was a curiosity of ignorance and folly. There was a blunder on an average to every page. He had annotated it! He explained that _Knasterbart_ meant "a nasty fellow," and that the French _garce_ was _gare_, "a railway station!" Trubner had sold 5,000 copies before this precious affair appeared. After Hotten's death the British public were informed in an obituary that he had "_first_ introduced me" to their knowledge! Hans Breitmann became a type. I never heard of but one German who ever reviled the book, and that was a Democratic editor in Philadelphia. But the Germans themselves recognised that the pen which poked fun at them was no poisoned stiletto. Whenever there was a grand German procession, Hans was in it--the indomitable old _Degen_ hung with _loot_--and he appeared in every fancy ball. Nor were the Confederates offended. One of the most genial, searching, and erudite reviews of the work, which appeared in a Southern magazine (De Bow's), declared that I had truly written the Hudibras of the Civil War. What struck this writer most was the fact that I had opened a _new_ field of humour. And here he was quite right. With the exception of Dan Rice's circus song of "Der goot oldt Sherman shentleman," and a rather flat parody of "Jessie, the Flower of Dumblane," I had never seen or heard of any specimen of Anglo-German poetry. To be _merely original_ in language is not to excel in everything--a fact very generally ignored--else my Pidgin-English ballads would take precedence of Tennyson's poems! On the other hand, very great poets have often not made a new _form_. The Yankee type, both as regards spirit and language, had become completely common and familiar in prose and poetry, before Lowell revived it in the clever _Biglow Papers_. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee," and several other poems, are, however, _both_ original and admirable. Whatever the merits or demerits of mine were--and it was years ere I ever gave them a thought--the public, which is always eager for something new, took to them at once. I say that for years I never gave them a thought. All of the principal poems except the "Barty" and "Breitmann as a Politician," were merely written to fill up letters to C. A. Bristed, of New York, and I kept no copies of them--in fact, utterly _forgot_ them. _Weingeist_ was first written in a letter to a sister of Captain Colton, with the remark that it was easier to write such a ballad than any prose. But Bristed published them _a mon insu_ in a sporting paper. Years after I learned that I published one called "Breitmann's Sermon" in _Leslie's Magazine_. This I have never recovered. If I write so much about these poems now, I certainly was not vain of them when written. The public found them out long before I did, and it is not very often that it gets ahead of a poet in appreciating his own works. However, I was "awful busy" in those days. I had hardly begun on the _Press_ ere I found that it had a weekly paper, made up from the daily type transferred, which only just paid its expenses. Secondly, I discovered that there was not a soul on the staff except myself who had had any experience of weekly full editing. I at once made out a schedule, showing that by collecting and grouping agricultural and industrial items, putting in two or three columns of original matter, and bringing in a story to go through the daily first, the weekly could be vastly improved at very little expense. Colonel Forney admired the scheme, but asked "who was to carry it out." I replied that I would. He remonstrated, very kindly, urging that I had all I could do as it was. I answered, "Colonel Forney, this is not a matter of time, but _method_. There is always time for the man who knows how to lay it out." So I got up a very nice paper. But for a very long time I could not get an agent to solicit advertisements who knew the business. The weekly paid its expenses and nothing more. But one day there came to me a young man named M. T. Wolf. He was of Pennsylvania German stock. He had lost a small fortune in the patent medicine business and wanted employment badly. I suggested that, until something else could be found, he should try his hand at collecting "advers." Now, be it observed, as Mozart was born to music, and some men have a powerful instinct to study medicine, and others are so unnatural as to take to mathematics, Wolf had a grand undeveloped genius beyond all belief for collecting advertisements. He had tried many pursuits and failed, but the first week he went into this business he brought in $200 (40 pounds), which gave him forty dollars, and he never afterwards fell below it, but often rose above. "Advers." for him meant not adversity. It was very characteristic of Colonel Forney, who was too much absorbed in politics to attend much to business, that long after the _Weekly Press_ was yielding him $10,000 a year _clear profit_, he said to me one day, "Mr. Leland, you must not be discouraged as to the weekly; the clerks tell me in the office that it _meets its expenses_!" There was abundance of life and incident on the newspaper in those days, especially during election times in the autumn. I have known fights, night after night, to be going on in the street below, at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut, between Republicans and Democrats, with revolver shots and flashes at the rate of fifty to a second, when I was literally so occupied with pressing telegrams that I could not look out to see the fun. One night, however, when there were death-shots falling thick and fast, I saw a young man make a most _incredible_ leap. He had received a bullet under the shoulder, and when a man or a deer is hit there he always leaps. I heard afterwards that he recovered, though this is a vital place. It happened once that for a week the Republicans were kept from resisting or retaliating by their leaders, until the Democrats began to disgrace themselves by excesses. Then all at once the Republicans boiled over, thrashed their foes, and attacking the Copperhead clubs, threw their furniture out of the window, and--inadvertently perhaps--also a few Copperheads. Just before they let their angry passions rise in this fashion there came one night a delegation to serenade Colonel Forney at the office. The Colonel was grand on such occasions. He was a fine, tall, portly man, with a lion-like mien and a powerful voice. He began-- "My friends, fellow-citizens and Republicans, you have this week acted nobly." Cries from the crowd, "_We hev_! _we hev_!" "You, when smitten on the right cheek, turned unto the oppressor the left." "We did! we _did_!" "You are beyond all question models--I may say with truth, paragons of patience, long-suffering, and humility. You are--Christian gentlemen!" "We air! we _air_!" While this was passing, a great gloomy thundercloud of the Democratic enemy gathered on the opposite sidewalk, and as the Colonel lifted his voice again, there came a cry-- "Shut up, you d---d old Republican dead-duck!" That word was a spell to raise the devil withal. Bang! bang! bang! went the revolvers of the Union men in a volley, and the Democrats fled for their lives down Seventh Street, pursued by the meek, lowly, and long- suffering Christians--like rabbits before wolves. The enemy at last resolved to attack the _Press_ and burn the building. Then we had one hundred and fifty policemen sent to garrison and guard. There was a surging, howling mob outside, and much guerilla-shooting, but all I can remember is my vexation at having so much to disturb me in making up the paper. I never went armed in my life when I could help it, for I hate _impedimenta_ in my pockets. All of us in the office hung up our coats in a dark place outside. Whenever I sent an assistant to get some papers from mine, he said that he always knew my coat because there was no pistol in it. Scenes such as these, and quite as amusing, were of constant occurrence in those days in Philadelphia. "All night long in that sweet little village was heard the soft note of the pistol and the dying scream of the victim." Now, be it noted, that a stuffed dead duck had become the _gonfalon_ or banner of the Republicans, and where it swung there the battle was fiercest. There was a young fellow from South Carolina, who had become a zealous Union man, and who made up for a sinful lack of sense by a stupendous stock of courage. One morning there came into the office an object--and such an object! His face was all swathed and hidden in bloody bandages; he was tattered, and limped, and had his arm in a sling. "In the name of Heaven, who and what are you?" I exclaimed. "And who has been passing you through a bark-mill that you look so ground-up?" In a sepulchral voice he replied, "I'm ---, and last night _I carried the dead duck_!" Till I came on the _Press_ there was, it may be said, almost no community between the Germans of North Philadelphia and the Americans in our line. But I had become intimate with Von Tronk, a Hanoverian of good family, a lawyer, and editor, I believe, of the _Freie Presse_. I even went once or twice to speak at German meetings. In fact, I was getting to be considered "almost as all de same so goot ash Deutsch," and very "bopular." One day Von Tronk came with a request. There was to be an immense German Republican _Massenversammlung_ or mass-meeting in a great beer-garden. "If Colonel Forney could only be induced to address them!" I undertook to do it. It was an entirely new field to him, but one wondrous rich in votes. Now Colonel Forney, though from Lancaster County and of German-Swiss extraction, knew not a word of the language, and I undertook to coach him. "You will only need one phrase of three words," I said, "to pull you through; but you must pronounce them perfectly and easily. They are _Freiheit und Gleichheit_, 'freedom and equality.' Now, if you _please_, _fry-height_." The Colonel went at his lesson, and being naturally clever, with a fine, deep voice, in a quarter of an hour could roar out _Freiheit und Gleichheit_ with an intonation which would have raised a revolution in Berlin. We came to the garden, and there was an immense sensation. The Colonel had winning manners, with a manly mien, and he was duly introduced. When he rose to speak there was dead silence. He began-- "Friends and German Fellow-citizens:--Yet why should I distinguish the words, since to me every German is a friend. I am myself, as you all know, of unmingled German extraction, and I am very, very proud of it. But there is one German sentiment which from a child has been ever in my heart, and from infancy ever on my lips, and that sentiment, my friends, is _Freiheit und Gleichheit_!" If ever audience was astonished in this world it was that of the _Massenversammlung_ when this burst on their ears. They hurrahed and roared and banged the tables in such a mad storm of delight as even Colonel Forney had never seen surpassed. Rising to the occasion, he thundered on, and as he reached the end of every sentence he repeated, with great skill and aptness, _Freiheit und Gleichheit_. "You have made two thousand votes by that speech, Colonel," I said, as we returned. "Von Tronk will manage it at this crisis." After that, when the Colonel jested, he would called me "the Dutch vote-maker." This was during the Grant campaign. Droll incidents were of constant occurrence in this life. Out of a myriad I will note a few. One day there came into our office an Indian agent from the West, who had brought with him a Winnebago who claimed to be the rightful chief of his tribe. They were going to Washington to enforce the claim. While the agent conversed with some one the Indian was turned over to me. He was a magnificent specimen, six feet high, clad in a long trailing scarlet blanket, with a scarlet straight feather in his hair which continued him up _ad infinitum_, and he was straight as a lightning rod. He was handsome, and very dignified and grave; but I understood _that_. I can come it indifferent well myself when I am "out of my plate," as the French, say, in strange society. He spoke no English, but, as the agent said, knew six Indian languages. He was evidently a chief by blood, "all the way down to his moccasins." What with a few words of Kaw (I had learned about a hundred words of it with great labour) and a few other phrases of other tongues, I succeeded in interesting him. But I could not make him smile, and I swore unto myself that I would. Being thirsty, the Indian, seeing a cooler of ice-water, with the daring peculiar to a great brave, went and took a glass and turned on the _spicket_. He filled his glass--it was brim-full--but he did not know how to _turn it off_. Then I had him. As it ran over he turned to me an appealing helpless glance. I said "_Neosho_." This in Pottawattamie means an inundation or overflowing of the banks, and is generally applied to the inundation of the Mississippi. There is a town on the latter so called. This was too much for the Indian, and he laughed aloud. "Great God! what have you been saying to that Indian?" cried the agent, amazed. "It is the first time he has laughed since he left home." "Only a little pun in Pottawattamie. But I really know very little of the language." "I have no knowledge of the Indian languages," remarked our city editor, MacGinnis, a genial young Irishman, "least of all, thank God! of Pottawattamie. But I have always understood that when a man gets so far in a tongue as to make _puns_ in it, it is time for him to stop." Years after this I was one evening in London at an opening of an exhibition of pictures. There were present Indian Hindoo princes in gorgeous array, English nobility, literary men, and fine ladies. Among them was an unmistakable Chippeway in a white Canadian blanket-coat, every inch an Indian. I began with the usual greeting, "_Ho nitchi_!" (Ho, brother!), to which he gravely replied. I tried two or three phrases on him with the same effect. Then I played a sure card. Sinking my voice with an inviting wink, I uttered "_Shingawauba_," or whisky. "Dot fetched him." He too laughed. _Gleich mit gleich_, _gesellt sich gern_. While living in New York, and during my connection with the _Press_, I often met and sometimes conversed with Horace Greeley. Once I went with him from Philadelphia to New York, and he was in the car the observed of all observers to an extraordinary degree. He sat down, took out an immense roll of proof, and said, "_Lead pencil_!" One was immediately handed to him by some stranger, who was by that one act ennobled, or, what amounts to the same thing in America, grotesquely _charactered_ for life. He was the man who gave Horace Greeley a lead pencil! I, as his companion, was also regarded as above ordinary humanity. When the proof was finished "Horace" said to me-- "How is John Forney getting on?" "Like Satan, walking to and fro upon the face of the earth, going from the _Chronicle_ in Washington one day to the _Press_ in Philadelphia on the next, and filling them both cram full of leaders and letters." "Two papers, both daily! I tell Forney that I find it is all I can do to attend to one. Tell him not to get too rich--bad for the constitution and worse for the country. Any man who has more than a million is a public nuisance." Finally, we walked together from the ferry to the corner of Park Place and Broadway, and the philosopher, after minutely explaining to me which omnibus I was to take, bade me adieu. I do not think we ever met again. In the summer Colonel Forney went to Europe with John the junior. When he left he said, "I do not expect you to raise the circulation of the _Press_, but I hope that you will be able to keep it from falling in the dead season." I went to work, and what with enlarging the telegraphic news, and correspondence, and full reports of conventions, I materially increased the sale. It cost a great deal of money, to be sure, but the Colonel did not mind that. At this time there came into our office as associate with me Captain W. W. Nevin. He had been all through the war. I took a great liking to him, and we always remained intimate friends. All in our office except myself were from Lancaster County, the birthplace, I believe, of Fitch and Fulton. It is a Pennsylvania German county, and as I notoriously spoke German openly without shame ours was called a Dutch office. Once when Colonel Forney wrote a letter from Holland describing the windmills, the _Sunday Transcript_ unkindly remarked that "he had better come home and look after his own Dutch windmill at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets." I had at this time a great deal to do with the operas and theatres, and often wrote the reviews. After a while, as Captain Nevin relieved me of a great deal of work, and I had an able assistant named Norcross, I devoted myself chiefly to dramatic criticism and the weekly, and such work as suited me best. As for the dignity of managership, Captain Nevin and I tossed it from one to the other like a hot potato in jest, but between us we ran the paper very well. There was an opera impresario named Maurice Strakosch, of whom I had heard that he was hard to deal with and irritable. I forget now who the prima donna in his charge was, but there had appeared in our paper a criticism which might be interpreted in some detail unfavourably by a captious critic. One afternoon there came into the office, where I was alone, a gentlemanly- seeming man, who began to manifest anger in regard to the criticism in question. I replied, "I do not know, sir, what your position in the opera troupe may be, but if it be anything which requires a knowledge of English, I am afraid that you are misplaced. There was no intention to offend in the remarks, and so far as the lady is concerned I shall only be too glad to say the very best I can of her. _Comprenez_, _monsieur_, _c'est une bagatelle_." He laughed, and we spoke French, then Italian, then German, and of Patti and Sontag and Lind. Then I asked him what he really was, and he replied, "I do not believe that you even know the name of my native tongue. It is Czech." I stared at him amazed, and said-- "Veliky Bog! Rozprava pochesky? Nekrasneya rejece est." The Bohemian gentleman drew a handsomely bound book from his pocket. "Sir," he said, "this is my album. It is full of signatures of great artists, even of kings and queens and poets. There is not a name in it which is not that of a distinguished person, and I do not know what your name is, but I beg that you will write it in my book." Nearly the same scene was repeated soon after, with the same words, when the great actress Fanny Janauschek came to Philadelphia. At that time she played only in German. Her manager, Grau, introduced me to her, and she complimented me on my German, and praised the language as the finest in the world. "Yes," I replied, "it _is_ certainly very fine. But I know a finer, which goes more nearly to the heart, and with which I can move you more deeply." "And what is that?" cried the great artist astonished. "It is," I replied, in her native tongue, "_Bohemian_. That is the language for me." Madame Janauschek was so affected that she burst out crying, though she was a woman of tremendous nerve. We became great friends, and often met again in after years in England. I have seen Ristori play for thirty nights in succession, {346} and Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt; but as regards true genius, Janauschek in her earlier days was incomparably their superior; for these all played from nerves and instinct, but Janauschek from her brain and intellect. I often wondered that she did not write plays. It is said of Rachel that there was once a five-act play in which she died at the end of the fourth act. After it had had a long run she casually asked some one _how it ended_. She had never read the fifth act. Such a story could never have been told of Janauschek. In the summer there were one or two railroad excursions to visit new branch roads in Pennsylvania. While on one of these I visited the celebrated Mauch Chunk coal mines, and rode on the switchback railway, where I had a fearfully narrow escape from death. This switchback is a _montagne Russe_ coming up and down a hill, and six miles in length. Yet, though the rate of speed is appalling, the engineer can stop the car in a few seconds' time with the powerful brake. We were going down headlong, when all at once a cow stepped out of the bushes on the road before us, and if we had struck her we must have gone headlong over the cliff and been killed. But by a miracle the engineer stopped the car just as we got to the cow. We were saved by a second. Something very like it had occurred to my wife and to me in 1859. We were going to Reading by rail, when the train ran off the track and went straight for an embankment where there was a fall of 150 feet. It was stopped just as the locomotive protruded or looked over the precipice. Had there been the _least trifle_ more of steam on at that instant we must all have perished. In November of this my second year on the _Press_ my father died. One thing occurred on this sad bereavement which alleviated it a little. I had always felt all my life that he had never been satisfied with my want of a fixed career or position. He did not, I think, _very_ much like John Forney, the audacious, reckless politician, but he still respected his power and success, and it astonished him a little, and many others quite as much, to find that I was in many respects Forney's right-hand man, and manager of a bold political paper which had a great influence. A day or two before he died my father expressed himself kindly to the effect that I had at last done well, and that he was satisfied with me. At last, after so many years, he felt that I had _etat_--a calling, a definite position. In fact, in those days it was often said that Forney could make himself President, as he indeed might have done but for certain errors, no greater than have been committed by more successful men, and a stroke of ill-luck such as few can resist. The winter passed quietly. I was extremely fond of my life and work. Summer came, and with it a great desire for a change and wild life and the West, for I had worked very hard. A very great railway excursion, which was destined to have a great effect, was being organised, and both my wife and I were invited to join it. Mr. John Edgar Thompson, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mr. Hinckley, of the Baltimore road, President Felton, Professor Leidy, Robert Lamborn, and a number of other notables, were to go to Duluth, on Lake Superior, and decide on the terminus of the railroad as a site for a city. Mrs. John E. Thompson had her own private car, which was seventy feet in length, and fitted up with every convenience and luxury. To this was added the same directors' car in which I had travelled to Minnesota. There were to be in all ten or twelve gentlemen and ten ladies. There was such efficient service that one young man, a clerk, was detailed especially to look after our luggage. As we stopped every night at some hotel, he would inquire what we required to be taken to our rooms, and saw that it was brought back in the morning. I went off in such a hurry that I forgot my Indian blanket, nor had I any revolver or gun, all of which, especially the blanket, I sadly missed ere I returned. I got, before I left, a full white flannel or fine white cloth suit, which was then a startling novelty, and wore it to the Falls of the Mississippi. Little did I foresee that ere it gave out I should also have it on at the Cataracts of the Nile! So we started and after a few hours' travel, stopped at Altona. There I was very much amused by an old darkey at the railway-station hotel, who had, as he declared, "specially the kyar of de ladies an' quality." He had been a slave till the war broke out, and had been wondrously favoured by visions and revelations which guided him to freedom. "De Lawd he 'pear to me in a dream, an' I hyar a vi'ce which cry, 'Simon, arise an' git out of dis, an' put fo' de Norf as fass as you kin travel, fo' de day of de 'pressor is at an end, an' you is to be free.' So I rosed an' fled, hardly a-waitin' to stuff my bag wid some corn-dodgers an' bacon, an' foller de Norf Star till I git confused an' went to sleep agin, wen, lo, an angel expostulated hisself befo' my eyes in a wision, an' say, 'Simon, beholdes' dou dat paff by de riber? Dat's de one fo' you to foller, ole son!' So I follers it till I git on de right trail. Den I met anoder nigger a-'scapin' from the bon's of captivity, an' carryin' a cold ham, an' I jined in wid him--you bet--an' so we come to de Lawd's country." And so gaily on to Chicago. We went directly to the first hotel, and as soon as I had toiletted and gone below, I saw on the opposite building a sign with the words _Chicago Tribune_. This was an exchange of ours, so I crossed over, and meeting the editor by chance in the doorway, was welcomed and introduced to Governor Desbrosses, who stood by. Then I went to a telegraph office and sent a despatch to the _Press_. The man wanted me to pay. I told him to C. O. D., "collect on delivery." He declined. I said, "Your principal office is in Philadelphia, is it not?--Third and Chestnut Streets. Just send a telegram and ask the name of your landlord. It's Leland, and _I'm the man_. If you make me pay, I'll raise your rent." He laughed heartily and let me off, but not without a parting shot: "You see, Mr. Leland, there are so many scallawags {349} from the East come here, that we are obliged to be a little particular." I returned to the hotel, and was immediately introduced to some one having authority. I narrated my late experience. He looked at me and said, "How long have you been in Chicago?" I replied, "About thirty minutes." He answered gravely, "I think you'd better _stay_ here. You'll suit the place." I was beginning to feel the moral influence of the genial air of the West. Chicago is emphatically what is termed "a place," and a certain amount of calm confidence in one's self is not in that city to any one's discredit. Once there was an old lady of a "hard" type in the witness-box in an American city. She glared round at the judge, the jury, and the spectators, and then burst out with, "You needn't all be staring at me in that way. I don't keer a --- for you all. I've lived eleven years in Chicago, and ain't affeard of the devil." Chicago is said in Indian to mean the place of skunks, but calling a rose a skunk-cabbage don't make it one. Walking on the edge of the lake near the city, the waters cast up a good- sized living specimen of that extraordinary fish-lizard, the great _menobranchus_, popularly known as the hell-bender from its extreme ugliness. Owing to the immense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered great aid to embryology, a science which, when understood _au fond_, will bring about great changes in the human race. We were taken out in a steamboat to the end of the great aqueduct, which was, when built, pronounced, I think by the London _Times_, to be the greatest engineering work of modern times. In due time we came to St. Paul, Minnesota. We went to a very fair hotel and had a very good dinner. In the West it is very common among the commonalty to drink coffee and milk through dinner, and indeed with all meals, instead of wine or ale, but the custom is considered as vulgar by swells. Having finished dessert, I asked the Irish waiter to bring me a small cup of black coffee and brandy. Drawing himself up stiffly, Pat replied, "We don't serve caafy at dinner in _this_ hotel." There was a grand roar of laughter which the waiter evidently thought was at _my_ expense, as he retreated smiling. We were kindly received in St. Paul by everybody. There is this immense advantage of English or American hospitality over that of all other countries, that it introduces us to the _home_, and makes us forget that we are strangers. When we were at the end of the fearfully wearisome great moral circus known as the Oriental Congress, held all over Scandinavia in 1890, there came to me one evening in the station a great Norseman with his friends. With much would-be, ox-like dignity he began, "You ha-ave now experienced de glorious haspitality off our country. You will go oom and say--" "Stop a minute there!" I exclaimed, for I was bored to death with a show which had been engineered to tatters, and to half defeating all the work of the Congress, in order to glorify the King and Count Landberg. "I have been here in your country six weeks, and I had letters of introduction, and have made no end of acquaintances. I have been shown thousands of fireworks, which blind me, and offered dozens of champagne, which I never touch, and public dinners, which I did not attend. But during the whole time I have never once seen the inside of a Swedish or Norwegian house." Which was perfectly true, nor have I ever seen one to this day. There is a kind of "hospitality" which consists of giving yourself a grand treat at a tavern or _cafe_, and inviting your strangers to it to help you to be glorified. But to very domestic people and utter Philistines, _domestic_ life lacks the charm of a brass band, and the mirrors and gilding of a restaurant or hotel; therefore, what they themselves enjoy most, they, with best intent, but most unwisely, inflict on more civilised folk. But in America and England, where home-life is _worth_ living and abounding in every attraction, and public saloons are at a discount, the case is reversed. And in these Western towns, of which many were, so to speak, almost within hearing of the whoop of the savage or the howl of the wolf (as Leavenworth really was), we experienced a refinement of true hospitality in homes--kindness and tact such as I have never known to be equalled save in Great Britain. One evening I was at a house in St. Paul, where I was struck by the beauty, refined manners, and agreeableness of our hostess, who was a real Chippeway or Sioux Indian, and wife of a retired Indian trader. She had been well educated at a Canadian French seminary. We were taken over to see the rival city of Minneapolis, of which word my brother Henry said it was a vile grinding up together of Greek and Indian. _Minne_ means water; _Minne-sota_, turbid water, and _Minne-haha_ does not signify "laughing," but _falling_ water. This we also visited, and I found it so charming, that I was delighted to think that for once an Indian name had been kept, and that the young ladies of the boarding-schools of St. Paul or Minneapolis had not christened or devilled it "Diana's Bath." We were received kindly by the Council of the city of Minneapolis. Half of them had come from the East afflicted with consumption, and all had recovered. But it is necessary to remain there to live. My wife's cousin, Mr. Richard Price, who then owned the great saw-mill next the Fall of St. Anthony, came with this affliction from Philadelphia, and got over it. After six years' absence he returned to Philadelphia, and died in six weeks of consumption. Strangely enough, consumption is the chief cause of death among the Indians, but this is due to their careless habits, wearing wet moccasins and the like. Now a great question arose. It was necessary for the magnates of our party to go to Duluth, and to do this they must make a seven days' journey through the wilderness, either on a very rough military road cut through the woods during the war, or sometimes on no road at all. Houses or post-stations, often of only one or two rooms, were sometimes a day's journey apart. The question was whether delicate ladies, utterly unaccustomed to anything like hard travel could take this trip, during which they must endure clouds of mosquitos, put up with camp-cooking, or often none, and otherwise go through privations such as only an Indian or a frontiersman would care to experience? The entire town of St. Paul, and all the men of our party, vigorously opposed taking the ladies, while I, joining the latter, insisted on it that they could go; for, as I said to all assembled, where the devil is afraid to go he sends a woman; and I had always observed that in travelling, long after men are tired out women are generally all right. They are never more played out _than they want to be_. "Femme plaint, femme deult, Femme est malade quand elle veult, Et par Sainte Marie! Quand elle veult elle est guerye." And of course _we_ carried the day. Twelve men, even though backed up by a city council, have no chance against any ten women. To be sure women, like all other savages, require a male leader--I mean to say, just as Goorkha troops, though brave as lions, must have an English captain--so they conquered under my guidance! Having had experience in fitting out for the wilderness, I was requested to see to the stores--so many hams to so many people for so many days, so much coffee, and so forth. I astonished all by insisting that there should be one _tin cup_ to every traveller. "Every glass you have will soon be broken," I said. And so it was, sooner than I expected. As tin cups could not be found in St. Paul, we bought three or four dozen small tin basins of about six inches diameter at the rim, and when champagne was served out it was, _faute de mieux_, drunk from these eccentric goblets. In the first waggon were Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Leland. Their driver was a very eccentric Canadian Frenchman named Louis. He was to the last degree polite to the ladies, but subject to attacks of Indian rage at mere trifles, when he would go aside, swear, and destroy something like a lunatic in a fury, and then return quite happy and serene. I was in the second waggon with three ladies, a man being wanted in every vehicle. Our driver was named George, and he was altogether like Brigham, minus the Mexican-Spanish element. George had, however, also lived a great deal among Indians, and been at the great battle of the Chippeways and Sioux, and was full of interesting and naive discourse. Of course, we of the two leading waggons all talked to Louis in French, who gave himself great airs on it. One morning George asked me in confidence, "Mr. Leland, you're not all French, are you?" "Certainly not," I replied; "we're from Philadelphia." "Well," replied George, "so I told Louis, but he says you _are_ French, like him, and shut me up by askin' me if I hadn't heard you talkin' it. Now what I want to know is, if you're _not_ French, how came the _whole_ of you to know it?" I explained to George, to his astonishment, that in the East it was usual for all well-educated persons, especially ladies, to learn it. I soon became as intimate with George as I had been with Brigham, and began to learn Chippeway of him, and greet the Indians whom we met. One day George said-- "Of course you have no Indian blood in you, Mr. Leland; but weren't you a great deal among 'em when you were young?" "Why?" "Because you've got queer little old Injun ways. Whenever you stop by the roadside to talk to anybody and sit down, you always rake the small bits of wood together and pull out a match and make a _smudge_" (a very smoky fire made by casting dust on it), "just like an Indian in an Injun kind of way." (In after years I found this same habit of making fires of small bits of wood peculiar to old English gypsies.) The smudge is the great summer institution of Minnesota. It is the safeguard against mosquitos. They are all over the State in such numbers that they constitute a plague. We all wore all the time over our faces and necks a kind of guard or veil, shaped exactly like an Egyptian _fanous_ or folding lantern. It is cylindrical, made of _tulle_ or coarse lace, with rings. At every house people sat in the porticos over a tin bucket, in which there was a smudge--that is to say, in smoke. In the evening some one goes with a tin or iron pail containing a smudge, and fills the bedrooms with dense smoke. One evening Mr. Hinckley and another of our party went fishing without veils. They returned with their necks behind swollen up as if with _goitres_ or _Kropfe_. I knew a young Englishman who with friends, somewhere beyond Manitoba, encountered such a storm of mosquitos that their oxen were killed, and the party saved themselves by riding away on horseback. So he told me. At the stations--all log-houses--the ladies collected pillows and buffalo blankets, and, making a great bed, all slept in one room. We men slept in waggons or under a tent, which was not quite large enough for all. The Indian women cut spruce twigs and laid them over-lapping on the ground for our bed. By preference I took the outside, _al fresco_. One night we stayed at a house which had an upper and a lower storey. The ladies camped upstairs. In the morning, when we men below awoke, all took a drink of whisky. There entered a very tall Indian, clad in a long black blanket, who looked on very approvingly at the drinking. I called to my wife above to hand me down my whisky flask. "There is a big Indian here who wants a drink," I remarked. "I think I know," she replied, "who that big Indian is," but handed down the flask. "Don't waste whisky on an _Indian_" said one of my companions. But I filled the cup with a tremendous slug, and handed it to the Objibway. He took it down like milk, and never a word spoke he, but when it was swallowed he looked at me and winked. Such a wink as that was! I think I see it now--so inspired with gratitude and humour as to render all words needless. He had a rare sense of tact and gratitude. Soon after I was sitting out of doors among a few ladies, when the Indian, who had divined that I was short of Chippeway and wished to learn, stalked up, and pointing to our beauty, said gravely, _squoah_--_i.e._, woman. Then he indicated several other articles, told me the Indian name for each and walked away. It was all he could do. The ladies, who could not imagine why this voluntary lesson was given to me, were much amused at it. But I understood it; he had seen the Injun in me at a glance, and knew what I wanted most! One night we stopped at a place called Kettle River. It was very picturesque. Over the rushing stream the high rocky banks actually overhung the water. I got into a birch canoe with my wife, and two Indian boys paddled us, while others made a great fire on the cliff above, which illuminated the scene. Other Indian youths jumped into the water and swam about and skylarked, whooping wildly. It reminded me strangely of the Blue Grotto of Capri, where our boatmen jumped in and swam in a sulphur-azure glow, only that this was red in the firelight. Our whisky ran short--it always does on all such excursions--and our drivers in consequence became very "short" also, or rather unruly. But _bon chemin_, _mal chemin_, we went on, and the ladies, as I had predicted, pulled through merrily. One day, at a halt, I found, with the ladies, in the woods by a stream, a pretty sight. It was a wigwam, which was very open, and which had been made to look like a bower with green boughs. When I was in the artillery I was the only person who ever thus adorned our tent in Indian style. It is very pleasant on a warm day, and looks artistic. In the wigwam sat a pretty Indian woman with a babe. The ladies were, of course, at once deeply interested, but the Indian could not speak English. One of the ladies had a common Japanese fan, with the picture of a grotesque god, and I at once saw my way to interest our hostess. I once read in the journal of a missionary's wife in Canada that she had a curious Malay or Cingalese dagger, with a curved blade and wooden sheath, while on the handle was the figure of an idol. One day she showed this to an Indian, and the next day he came with five more, and these again with fifteen, till it seemed as if the whole country had gone wild over it. Very much alarmed at such heathenism, the lady locked it up and would show it no more. Ere she did so, she asked an old Indian how it was possible to make a scabbard of one piece of wood, with a hole in it to fit the blade. This man, who had been one of the most devoted admirers of the deity on the handle, saw no puzzle in this. He explained that the hole was burned in by heating the blade. I showed the god on the fan to the Indian woman, and said, "_Manitu_--_ktchee manitu_" ("a god--a great god"). She saw at once that it was heathen, and her heart went out unto it with great delight. With a very few Chippeway words and many signs I explained to her that forty days' journey from us was the sea, and forty days beyond another country where the people had this _manitou_. I believe that the lady gave her the fan, and it may be that she worships it to this day. How absurd it is to try to force on such people Catholic or Protestant forms, which they do _not_ understand and never will, while their souls take in with joy the poly-pantheistic developments of supernaturalism, and that which suits their lives. Like the little boy who _thought_ he would like to have a Testament, but _knew_ he wanted a squirt, the Indian, unable to rise to the grandeur of monotheistic trinitarianism, is delighted with goblins, elves, and sorcery. He can manage the squirt. At Fond-du-Lac I became acquainted with a Mr. Duffy, a very genial and clever man, a son of a former governor of Rhode Island. He had an Indian wife and family, and was looked up to by the Indians as _Kitchimokomon_, "the white man." That he was a gentleman will appear from the following incident. There was one of our party who, to put it mildly, was not remarkable for refinement. A trader at Fond-du-Lac had a very remarkable carved Indian pipe, for which he asked me fifteen dollars. It certainly was rather a high price, so I offered ten. Immediately the man of whom I spoke laid down fifteen dollars and took the pipe. He was _dans son droit_, but the action was churlish. It seemed so to Duffy, who was standing by. After I had returned to Philadelphia, Mr. Duffy sent me a very handsome pipe for a present, which he assured me had been smoked at two grand councils. He was indeed a "white man." There was an old Indian here whose name in Indian meant "He who changes his position while sitting," but white people called him Martin "for short." He was wont to smoke a very handsome pipe. One day, seeing him smoking a wretched affair rudely hewn, I asked him if he had not a better. He replied, "I had, but I sold it to the _kcheemo-komon iqueh_"--the long-knife woman (_i.e._, to a white lady). Inquiry proved that the "long-knife woman" was Miss Lottie Foster, a very beautiful and delicate young lady from Philadelphia, to whom such a barbaric term seemed strangely applied. As for me, because I always bought every stone pipe which I could get, the Indians called me _Poaugun_ or Pipe. Among the Algonkin of the East in after-days I had a name which means _he who seeks hidden things_ (_i.e._, mysteries). We came to Duluth. There were in those days exactly six houses and twenty-six Indian wigwams. However, we were all accommodated somehow. Here there were grand conferences of the railroad kings with the authorities of Duluth and Superior City, which was a few miles distant, and as the Dulutherans outbid the Father Superiors, the terminus of the road was fixed at Duluth. It was arranged that the ladies should remain at Duluth while we, the men, were to go through the woods to examine a situation a day's march distant. We had Indians to carry our luggage. Every man took a blanket and a cord, put his load into it, turned the ends over the cord, and then drew it up like a bag. They carried very easily from 150 to 250 lbs. weight for thirty miles a day over stock and stone, up and down steep banks or amid rotten crumbling trees and moss. Though a good walker, I could not keep up with them. I had with me a very genial and agreeable man as walking companion. His name was Stewart, and he was mayor, chief physician, and filled half-a- dozen other leading capacities in St. Paul. Our fellow-travellers vanished in the forest. Mayor Stewart and I with one Indian carrier found ourselves at two o'clock very thirsty indeed. The view was beautiful enough. A hundred yards below us by the steep precipice rushed the St. Lawrence, but we could not get at it to drink. Stewart threw himself on the grass in despair. "Yes," he cried, "we're lost in the wilderness, and I'm going to die of thirst. Remember me to my family." "I say," he suddenly cried, "ask that Injun the name of that river." I asked of the Indian, "_Wa go nin-iu_?" ("How do you call that?") Thinking I wanted to know the name for a stream, he replied, "_Sebe_." This is the same as _sipi_ in Missis-sippi. "I knew it," groaned Stewart. "There is no such river as the _Sebe_ laid down on the map. We're lost in an unknown region." "It occurs to me," I said, "that this is a judgment on me. When I think of the number of times in my life when I have walked past bar-rooms and neglected to go in and take a drink, I must think that it is a retribution." "And I say," replied Stewart, "that if you ever do get back to civilisation, you'll be the old --- toper that ever was." When we came to the camp we found there by mere chance a large party of surveyors. As there were thirty or forty of us, it was resolved, as so many white men had never before been in that region, to constitute a township and elect a member to the Legislature, or Congress, or something--I forget what; but it appeared that it was legal, and it was actually done--I voting with the rest as a settler. I, too, am a _Minnesot_. We railroad people formed one party and sat at our evening meal by ourselves, the surveyors made another, and the Indians a third _table- d'hote_. An open tin of oysters was before us, and somebody said they were not good. One only needs say so to ruin the character of an oyster--and too often of "a human bivalve," as the Indiana orator said. We were about to pitch it away, when I asked the attendant to give it to the Indians. It was gravely passed by them from man to man till it came to the last, who lifted it to his mouth and _drank off the entire quart_, _oysters and all_, as if it had been so much cider. Amazed at this, I asked what it meant, but the only explanation I could get was, "He like um oyster." This was a charming excursion, all through the grene wode wilde, and I enjoyed it. I had Indian society, and learned Indian talk, and bathed in charming rushing waters, and saw enormous pine trees 300 feet high, and slept _al fresco_, and ate _ad libitum_. To this day its remembrance inspires in me a feeling of deep, true poetry. I think it was at Duluth that one morning there was brought in an old silver cross which had just been found in an Indian grave on the margin of the lake, not very far away. I went there with some others. It was evidently the grave of some distinguished man who had been buried about a hundred years ago. There were the decayed remains of an old-fashioned gun, and thousands of small beads adhering, still in pattern, to the _tibiae_. I dug up myself--in fact they almost lay on the surface, the sand being blown away--several silver bangles, which at first looked exactly like birch-bark peelings, and, what I very much prized, two or three stone cylinders or tubes, about half an inch in diameter, with a hole through them. Antiquaries have been much puzzled over these, some thinking that they were musical instruments, others implements for gambling. My own theory always was that they were used for smoking tobacco, and as those which I found were actually stuffed full of dried semi-decayed "fine cut," I still hold to it. I also purchased from a boy a red stone pipe-head, which was found in the same grave. I should here say that the pipe which had been bought away from me by the man above mentioned had on it the carving of a _reindeer_, which rendered it to me alone of living men peculiarly valuable, since I have laboured hard, and subsequently set forth in my "Algonkin Legends" the theory that the Algonkin Indians went far to the North and there mingled with the Norsemen of Greenland and Labrador. The man who got the pipe promised to leave it to me when he died, but he departed from life and never kept his word. A frequent source of grief to me has been to see objects of great value, illustrating some point in archaeology, seized as "curiosities" by ignorant wealthy folk. The most detestable form of this folly is the buying of _incunabula_, first editions or uncut copies, and keeping them from publication or reading, and, in short, of worshipping anything, be it a book or a coin, merely because it is _rare_. Men never expatiate on _rariora_ in literature or in china, or talk cookery and wines over-much, without showing themselves prigs. It is not any beauty in the _thing_, but the delightful sense of their own culture or wealth which they cultivate. When there is nothing in a thing but mere _rarity_ and cost to commend it, it is absolutely worthless, as is the learning and connoisseurship thereupon dependent. Business concluded, we took a steamboat, and were very sea-sick on Lake Superior for twenty-four hours. Then we went to the Isle Royale, and saw the mines, which had been worked even by the ancient Mexicans; also an immense mass of amethysts. The country here abounds in agates. At Marquette there was brought on board a single piece of pure virgin copper from the mine which weighed more than 4,000 pounds. There it was, I think, that we found our cars waiting, and returned in them to Philadelphia. It was at this time that my brother Henry died, and his loss inflicted on me a terrible mental blow, which went far, subsequently, to bring about a great crisis in my health. My dear brother was the most remarkable illustration of the fact that there are men who, by no fault of their own, and who, despite the utmost honour or integrity, deep intelligence, good education, and varied talents, are overshadowed all their lives by sorrow, and meet ill-luck at every turn. He went at sixteen as _employe_ into a Cuban importing house, where he learned Spanish. His principal failed, and thence he passed to a store in New York, where he worked far too hard for $600 a year. His successor, who did much less, was immediately paid $2,500 per annum. Finding that his employer was being secretly ruined by his partner, he warned the former, but only with the result of being severely reprimanded by the merchant and my father as a mischief-maker. After a while this merchant was absolutely ruined and bankrupted by his partner, as he himself declared to me, but, like many men, still kept his _rancune_ against my poor brother. By this time the eyesight and health of Henry quite gave out for some time. Every effort which he made, whether to get employment, to become artist or writer, failed. He published two volumes of tales, sporting sketches, &c., with Lippincott, in Philadelphia, which are remarkable for originality. One of them was subsequently written out by another distinguished author in another form. I do not say it was after my brother's, for I have known another case in which two men, having heard a story from Barnum, both published it, ignorant that the other had done so. But I would declare, in justice to my brother, that he told this story, which I am sure the reader knows, quite as well as did the other. He travelled a great deal, was eighteen months in Rome and its vicinity, visited Algeria, Egypt, and Cuba and the West, always spending so little money that my father expressed his amazement at it. I regret to say that in my youth I never astonished him in this way. But this morbid conscientiousness or delicacy as to being dependent did him no good, for he might just as well have been thoroughly comfortable, and my father would never have missed it. The feeling that he could get no foothold in life, which had long troubled me, became a haunting spectre which followed him to the grave. His work "Americans in Rome" is one of the cleverest, most sparkling, and brilliant works of humour, without a trace of vulgarity, ever written in America. It had originally some such title as "Studios and Mountains," but the publisher, thinking that the miserable clap-trap title of "Americans in Rome" would create an impression that there was "gossip," and possibly scandal, in it, insisted on that. It was published in the weary panic of 1862 in the war, and fell dead from the press. Though he never really laughed, and was generally absolutely grave, my brother had an incredibly keen sense of fun, and in conversation could far outmaster or "walk over the head" of any humorist whom I ever met. He was very far, however, from showing off or being a professional wit. He was very fond, when talking with men who considered themselves clever, of making jests or puns in such a manner and in such an unaffected ordinary tone of voice that they took no note of the _quodlibets_. He enjoyed this much more than causing a laugh or being complimented. But taking his life through, he was simply unfortunate in everything, and his worst failures were when he made wisely directed energetic efforts to benefit himself or others. He rarely complained or grieved, having in him a deep _fond_ of what I, for want of a better term, call _Indian nature_, or stoicism, which is common in Americans, and utterly incomprehensible to, or rarely found in, a European. The death of my father left me a fifth of his property, which was afterwards somewhat augmented by a fourth share of my poor brother's portion. For one year I drew no money from the inheritance, but went on living as before on my earnings, so that my wife remarked it really took me a year to realise that I had any money. After some months I bought a house in Locust Street, just opposite to where my father had lived, and in this house I remained six months previously to going to Europe in 1869. We had coloured servants, and I never in all my life, before or since, lived so well as during this time. The house was well furnished; there was even the great luxury of no piano, which is a great condition of happiness. This year I was fearfully busy. As I had taken the dramatic criticism in hand, for which alone we had always employed a man, I went during twelve months 140 times to the opera, and every evening to several theatres, _et cetera_. Once I was caught beautifully. There had been an opera bouffe, the "Grande Duchesse" or something, running for two or three weeks, and I had written a criticism on it. This was laid over by "press of matter," but as the same play was announced for the next night with the same performers, we published the critique. But it so chanced that the opera by some accident was not played! The _Evening Bulletin_, my old paper, rallied me keenly on this blunder, and I felt badly. John Forney, jun., however, said it was mere rubbish of no consequence. He was such an arrant Bohemian and hardened son of the press, that he regarded it rather as a joke and a feather in our caps, indicating that we were a bounding lot, and not tied down to close observances. Truly this is a very fine spirit of freedom, but it may be carried too far, as I think it was by a friend of mine, who had but one principle in life, and that was _never_ to write his newspaper correspondence in the place from which it was dated. It came to pass that about three weeks after this retribution overtook the _Bulletin_, for it also published a review of an opera which was not sung, but I meanly passed the occurrence by without comment. When a man hits you, it is far more generous, manly, and fraternal to hit him back a good blow than to degrade him by silent contempt. The Presidential campaign between Grant and Johnson was beginning to warm up. Colonel Forney was in a cyclone of hard work between Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York, carrying on a thousand plots and finely or coarsely drawn intrigues, raising immense sums, speaking in public, and, not to put it too finely, buying or trading votes in a thousand tortuous or "mud-turtlesome and possum-like ways"--for _non possumus_ was not in his Latin. Never shall I forget the disgust and indignation with which the great Republican champion entered the office one evening, and, flinging himself on a chair, declared that votes in New Jersey had gone up to sixty dollars a head! And I was forced to admit that sixty dollars for a Jerseyman did seem to be an exorbitant price. So he went forth on the war-path with fresh paint and a sharp tomahawk. It often happened to me in his absence to have very curious and critical decisions in my power. One of these is the "reading in" or "reading out" of a man from his party. This is invariably done by a leading political newspaper. I remember, for instance, a man who had been very prominent in politics, and gone over to the Democrats, imploring me to readmit him to the fold; but, as I regarded him as a mere office-hunter, I refused to do it. _Excommunicatus sit_! There was a _very_ distinguished and able man in a very high position. To him I had once addressed a letter begging a favour which would have been nothing at all to grant, but which was of great importance to me, and he had taken no notice of it. It came to pass that we had in our hands to publish certain very damaging charges against this great man. He found it out, and, humiliated, I may say agonised with shame and fear, he called with a friend, begging that the imputations might not be published. I believe from my soul that if I had not been so badly treated by him I should have refused his request, but, as it was, I agreed to withdraw the charges. It was the very best course, as I afterwards found. I am happy to say that, in after years, and in other lands, he showed himself very grateful to me. I am by nature as vindictive as an unconverted Indian, and as I am deeply convinced that it is vile and wicked, I fight vigorously against it. In my _Illustrated News_ days in New York I used to keep an old German hymn pasted up before me in the sanctum to remind me not to be revengeful. Out of all such battling of opposing principles come good results. I feel this in another form in the warring within me of superstitious _feelings_ and scientific convictions. It became apparent that on Pennsylvania depended the election of President. The State had only been prevented from turning Copperhead- Democrat--which was the same as seceding--by the incredible exertions of the Union League, led by George H. Boker, and the untiring aid of Colonel Forney. But even now it was very uncertain, and in fact the election--on which the very existence of the Union virtually depended--was turned by only a few hundred votes; and, as Colonel Forney and George H. Boker admitted, it would have been lost but for what I am going to narrate. There were many thousand Republican Clubs all through the State, but they had no one established official organ or newspaper. This is of vast importance, because such an organ is sent to doubtful voters in large numbers, and gives the keynote or clue for thousands of speeches and to men stumping or arguing. It occurred to me early to make the _Weekly Press_ this organ. I employed a young man to go to the League and copy all the names and addresses of all the thousands of Republican clubs in the State. Then I had the paper properly endorsed by the League, and sent a copy to every club at cost price or for nothing. This proved to be a _tremendous_ success. It cost us money, but Colonel Forney never cared for that, and he greatly admired the _coup_. I made the politics hot, to suit country customers. I found the gun and Colonel Forney the powder and ball, and between us we made a hit. One day Frank Wells, of the _Bulletin_ (very active indeed in the Union League), met me and asked if I, since I had lived in New York, could tell them anything as to what kind of a man George Francis Train really was. "He has come over all at once," he said, "from the Democratic party, and wishes to stump Pennsylvania, if we will pay him his expenses." I replied-- "I know Train personally, and understand him better than most men. He is really a very able speaker for a popular American audience, and will be of immense service if rightly managed. But you must get some steady, sensible man to go with him and keep him in hand and regulate expenses, &c." It was done. After the election I conversed with the one who had been the bear-leader, and he said-- "It was an immense success. Train made thousands of votes, and was a most effective speaker. His mania for speaking was incredible. One day, after addressing two or three audiences at different towns, we stopped at another to dine. While waiting for the soup, I heard a voice as of a public speaker, and looking out, saw Train standing on a load of hay, addressing a thousand admiring auditors." There are always many men who claim to have carried every Presidential election--the late Mr. Guiteau was one of these geniuses--but it is also true that there are many who would by _not_ working have produced very great changes. Forney was a mighty wire-puller, if not exactly before the Lord, at least before the elections, and he opined that I had secured the success. There were _certainly_ other men--_e.g._, Peacock, who influenced as many votes as the _Weekly Press_, and George Francis Train--without whose aid Pennsylvania and Grant's election would have been lost, but it is something to have been one of the few who did it. When General Grant came in, he resolved to have nothing to do with "corrupt old politicians," even though they had done him the greatest service. So he took up with a lot of doubly corrupt young ones, who were only inferior to the veterans in ability. Colonel Forney was snubbed cruelly, in order to rob him. Whatever he had done wrongly, he had done his _work_ rightly, and if Grant intended to throw his politicians overboard, he should have informed them of it before availing himself of their services. His conduct was like that of the old lady who got a man to saw three cords of wood for her, and then refused to pay him because he had been divorced. I had never in my life asked for an office from anybody. Mr. Charles A. Dana once said that the work I did for the Republican party on _Vanity Fair_ alone was worth a foreign mission, and that was a mere trifle to what I did with the _Continental Magazine_, my pamphlet, &c. When Grant was President, I petitioned that a little consulate worth $1,000 (200 pounds) might be given to a poor Episcopal clergyman, but a man accustomed to consular work, who spoke French, and who had been secretary to two commodores. It was for a small French town. It was supported by Forney and George H. Boker; but it was _refused_ because I was "in Forney's set," and the consulate was given to a Western man who did not know French. If John Forney, instead of using all his immense influence for Grant, had opposed him tooth and nail, he could not have been treated with more scornful neglect. The pretence for this was that Forney had defaulted $40,000! I know every detail of the story, and it is this:--While Forney was in Europe, an agent to whom he had confided his affairs did take money to that amount. As soon as Forney learned this, he promptly raised $40,000 by mortgage on his property, and repaid the deficit. Even his enemy Simon Cameron declared he did not believe the story, and the engine of _his_ revenge was always run by "one hundred Injun power." I had "met" Grant several times, when one day in London I was introduced to him again. He said that he was very happy to make my acquaintance. I replied, "General Grant, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to you _six times_ already, and I hope for many happy renewals of it." A week or two after, this appeared in _Punch_, adapted to a professor and a duchess. When the Sanitary Fair was held in Philadelphia in 1863, a lady in New York wrote to Garibaldi, begging him for some personal souvenir to be given to the charity. Garibaldi replied by actually sending the dagger which he had carried in every engagement, expressing in a letter a hope that it might pass to General Grant. But a warm partisan of McClellan so arranged it that there should be an election for the dagger between the partisans of Grant and McClellan, every one voting to pay a dollar to the Fair. For a long time the McClellanites were in a majority, but at the last hour Miss Anna M. Lea, now Mrs. Lea Merritt, very cleverly brought down a party of friends, who voted for Grant, secured the dagger for him, and so carried out the wish of Garibaldi. Long after an amusing incident occurred relative to this. In conversation in London with Mrs. Grant, I asked her if the dagger had been received. She replied, "Oh, yes," and then added naively, "but wasn't it really _alt a humbug_?" The death of my father and brother within a year, the sudden change in my fortunes, the Presidential campaign, and, above all, the working hard seven days in the week, had been too much for me. I began to find, little by little, that I could not execute half the work to which I was accustomed. Colonel Forney was very kind indeed, and never said a word. But I began to apprehend that a break-down in my health was impending. I needed change of scene, and so resolved, finding, after due consideration, that I had enough to live on, to go abroad for a long rest. It proved to be a very wise resolve. So I rented my house, packed my trunks, and departed, to be gone "for a year or two." I would say, in concluding this chapter, that Colonel John Forney was universally credited, with perfect justice, as having carried Grant's election. When Grant was about to deliver his inaugural speech, a stranger who stood by me, looking at the immense expectant crowd, remarked to a friend, "This is a proud day for John Forney!" "Yes," replied the other, "the Dead Duck has elected Grant." But Forney cheerfully and generously declared that it was the _Weekly Press_ which had carried Pennsylvania, and that I had managed it entirely alone. All these things were known to thousands at the time, but we lived in such excitement that we made but little account thereof. However, there are men of good repute still living who will amply confirm all that I have said of my work on the _Continental Magazine_; and that Abraham Lincoln himself did actually credit me with this is proved by the following incident. Because I had so earnestly advocated Emancipation as a war measure at a time when even the most fiery and advanced Abolition papers, such as the _Tribune_, were holding back and shouting _pas trop de zele_--and as it proved wisely, by advocating it publicly--_merely as a war measure_--the President, at the request of George H. Boker, actually signed for me fifty duplicate very handsome copies of the Proclamation of Emancipation on parchment paper, to every one of which Mr. Seward also added his signature. One of these is now hanging up in the British Museum as my gift. I perfectly understood and knew at the time, as did all concerned, that this was a recognition, and a very graceful and appropriate one, of what I had done for Emancipation--Harvard having A.M.'d me for the same. The copies I presented to the Sanitary Fair to be sold for its benefit, but there was not much demand for them; what were left over I divided with George Boker. VII. EUROPE REVISITED. 1869-1870. Voyage on the _Pereire_--General Washburne--I am offered a command in another French Revolution--Paris--J. Meredith Read and Prevost Paradol--My health--Spa--J. C. Hotten--Octave Delepierre--Heidelberg--Dresden--Julian Hawthorne and G. Lathrop--Verona--Venice--Rome--W. W. Story--Florence--Lorimer Graham--"Breitmann" in the Royal Family--Tuscany. We sailed on the famed _Pereire_ from New York to Brest in May, 1869. We had not left port before a droll incident occurred. On the table in the smoking-room lay a copy of the "Ballads of Hans Breitmann." A fellow- passenger asked me, "Is that your book?" I innocently replied, "Yes." "Excuse me, sir," cried another, "it is _mine_." "I beg your pardon," I replied, "but it is really mine." "Sir, I _bought_ it." "I don't care if you did," I replied; "it is mine--for I wrote it." There was a roar of laughter, and we all became acquainted at once. General Washburne was among the passengers. He had been appointed Minister to France and was going to Paris, where he subsequently distinguished himself during the siege by literally taking the place of seven foreign Ministers who had left, and kindly caring for all their _proteges_. It never occurred to the old frontiersman to leave a place or his duties because fighting was going on. I had a fine twelve-feet blue Indian blanket, which I had bought somewhere beyond Leavenworth of a trader. When sitting on deck wrapped in it, the General would finger a fold lovingly, and say, "Ah! the Indians always have good blankets!" We arrived in Brest, and Mrs. Leland, who had never before been in Europe, was much pleased at her first sight, early in the morning, of a French city; the nuns, soldiers, peasants, and all, as seen from our window, were indeed very picturesque. We left that day by railway for Paris, and on the road a rather remarkable incident occurred. There was seated opposite to us a not very amiable-looking man of thirty, who might be of the superior class of mechanics, and who evidently regarded us with an evil eye, either because we were suspected _Anglais_ or aristocrats. I resolved that he should become amicable. Ill-tempered though he might be, he was still polite, for at every stopping-place he got out to smoke, and extinguished his cigar ere he re-entered. I said to him, "Madame begs that you will not inconvenience yourself so much--pray continue to smoke in here." This melted him, as it would any Frenchman. Seeing that he was reading the _Rappel_, I conversed "liberally." I told him that I had been captain of barricades in Forty-eight, and described in full the taking of the Tuileries. His blood was fired, and he confided to me all the details of a grand plot for a Revolution which he was going up to Paris to attend to, and offered me a prominent place among the conspirators, assuring me that I should have a glorious opportunity to fight again at the barricades! I was appalled at his want of discretion, but said nothing. Sure enough, there came the _emeute_ of the plebiscite, as he had predicted, but it was suppressed. George Boker wrote to me: "When I heard of a revolution in Paris, I knew at once that you must have arrived and had got to work." And when I told him that I knew of it in advance, and had had a situation offered me as leader, he dryly replied, "Oh, I suppose so--as a matter of course." It was certainly a strange coincidence that I left Paris in Forty-eight as a Revolutionary _suspect_, and re-entered it in 1870 in very nearly the same capacity. We found agreeable lodgings at the Rond Point of the Champs Elysees. The day after our arrival I determined to arrange the terms of living with our landlord. He and his wife had the reputation of being fearful screws in their "items." So he, thinking I was a newly arrived and perfectly ignorant American, began to draw the toils, and enumerate so much for the rooms, so much for every towel, so much, I believe, for salt and every spoon and fork. I asked him how much he would charge for everything in the lump. He replied, "_Mais_, _Monsieur_, _nous ne faisons pas jamais comme cela a Paris_." Out of all patience, I burst out into vernacular: "_Sacre nom de Dieu et mille tonnerres_, _vieux galopin_! you dare to tell _me_, a _vieux carabin du Quartier Latin_, that you cannot make arrangements! _Et depuisse-quand_, _s'il vous plait_?" {372} He stared at me in blank amazement, and then said with a smile: "_Tiens_! _Monsieur est donc de nous_!" "That I am," I replied, and we at once made a satisfactory compromise. We had pleasant friends, and saw the sights and shopped; but I began to feel in Paris for the first time that the dreaded break-down or collapse which I had long apprehended was coming over me. There was a very clever surgeon and physician named Laborde, who was called Nelaton's right-hand man. I met him several times, and he observed to a mutual friend that I was evidently suffering seriously from threatening nervous symptoms, and that he would like to attend me. He did so, and gave me daily a teaspoonful of bromide of potassium. This gave me sleep and appetite; but, after some weeks or months, the result was a settled, mild melancholy and tendency to rest. In fact, it was nearly eighteen months before I recovered so that I could write or work, and _live_ as of old. I had inherited from both parents, and suffered all my life fearfully at intervals, from brachycephalic or dorsal neuralgia. Dr. Laborde made short work of this by giving me appallingly strong doses of _tincture of aconite and sulphate of quinine_. Chemists have often been amazed at the prescription. But in due time the trouble quite disappeared, and I now, _laus Deo_! very rarely ever have a touch of it. As many persons suffer terribly from this disorder, which is an _aching_ in the back of the head and neck accompanied by "sick headache," I give the ingredients of the cure; the proper quantity must be determined by the physician. {373} We dined once with Mr. Washburne, who during dinner showed his extreme goodness of heart in a very characteristic manner. Some foolish American had during the _emeute_--in which I was to have been a leader, had I so willed--got himself into trouble, not by fighting, but through mere prying Yankee "curiosity" and mingling with the crowd. Such people really deserve to be shot more than any others, for they get in the way and spoil good fighting. He was deservedly arrested, and sent for his Minister, who, learning it, at once arose, drove to the _prefecture_, and delivered his inquisitive compatriot. On another occasion we were the guests of J. Meredith Read, then our Minister to Athens, where we met Prevost Paradol. But at this time there suddenly came over me a distaste for operas, theatres, dinners, society--in short, of crowds, gaslight, and gaiety in any form, from which I have never since quite recovered. I had for years been fearfully overdoing it all in America, and now I was in the reaction, and longed for rest. I was in that state when one could truly say that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. It is usual for most people to insist in such cases that what the sufferer needs is "excitement" and "distraction of the mind," change of scene or gaiety, when in reality the patient should be most carefully trained to repose, which is not always easily done, for so very little attention has been paid to this great truth, that even medical science as yet can do very little towards calming nervous disorders. In most cases the trouble lies in the presence, or unthinking heedless influence, of other people; and, secondly, in the absence of interesting minor occupations or arts, such as keep the mind busy, yet not over-excited or too deeply absorbed. An important element in such cases is to interest deeply the patient in himself as a vicious subject to be subdued by his own exertions. No one who has _never_ had the gout severely can form any conception of the terribly arrogant irritability which accompanies it. I say _arrogant_, because it is independent of any voluntary action of the mind. I have often felt it raging in me, and laughed at it, as if it were a chained wild beast, and conversed with perfect serenity. Unfortunately, even our dearest friends, generally women, cannot, to save their very lives and souls, refrain from having frequent piquant scenes with such tempting subjects; while, on the other hand, the subjects are often led by mere vanity into exhibiting themselves as something peculiar. Altogether, I believe that where there is no deeply seated hereditary or congenital defect, or no displacement or injury from violence or disease, there is always a cure to be hoped for, or at least possible; but this cure depends in many cases so very much upon the wisdom and patience of friends and physicians, that it is only remarkable that we find so many recoveries as we do. Where the patient and friends are all really persons of superior intelligence, almost miraculous cures may be effected. But unfortunately, if it be not born in us, it requires a great deal of genius to acquire properly the real _dolce far niente_. From Paris we went to Spa in the Ardennes. In this very beautiful place, in a picturesque land of legends, I felt calmer and more relieved. I think it was there that for the first time I got an inkling that my name was becoming known in Europe. There was a beautiful young English lady whom I occasionally met in an artist's studio, who one day asked me with some interest whom the Leland could be of whom one heard sometimes--"he writes books, I think." I told her that I had a brother who had written two or three clever works, and she agreed with me that he must be the man; still she inclined to think that the name was not Henry, but Charles. Mr. Nicolas Trubner, whom I had not seen since 1856, came with his wife and daughter to Spa, and this was the beginning of a great intimacy which lasted to his death. Which meeting reminds me of something amusing. I had written the first third of "Breitmann as a Politician," which J. "Camden" Hotten had republished, promising the public to give them the rest before long. This I prevented by copyrighting the two remaining thirds in England! Being very angry at this, Hotten accused me in print of having written this conclusion expressly to disappoint and injure _him_! In fact, he really seemed to think that Mr. Trubner and I were only a pair of foreign rogues, bound together to wrong Mr. J. C. Hotten out of his higher rights in "Breitmann." I wrote a pamphlet in which I said this and some other things very plainly. Mr. Trubner showed this to his lawyer, who was of the opinion that it could not be published because it bore on libel, though there was nothing in it worse than what I have here said. However, Mr. Trubner had it privately printed, and took great joy, solace, and comfort for a very long time in reading it to his friends after dinner, or on other occasions, and as he had many, it got pretty well about London. I may here very truly remark that Mr. Hotten, in the public controversy which he had with Mr. Trubner on the subject of my "Ballads," displayed an effrontery absolutely without parallel in modern times, apropos of which _Punch_ remarked-- "The name of Curll will never be forgotten, And neither will be thine, John Camden Hotten." From Spa we went to Brussels, where I remember to have seen many times at work in the gallery the famous artist without arms who painted with his toes. What was quite a remarkable was the excellence of his copies from Rembrandt. Nature succeeded in his case in "heaping voonders oopen voonders," as Tom Hood says in his "Rhine." I became well acquainted with Tom Hood the younger in after years, and to this day I contribute something every year to _Tom Hood's Annual_. At Brussels we stayed at a charming old hotel which had galleries one above the other round the courtyard, exactly like those of the White Hart Inn immortalised in "Pickwick." There was in Philadelphia a perfect specimen of such an inn, which has of late years been rebuilt as the Bingham House. While in Spa I studied Walloon. From Brussels to Ghent, which I found much modernised from what it had been in 1847, when it was still exactly as in the Middle Age, but fearfully decayed, and, like Ferrara, literary with grass-grown streets. _Und noch weiter_--to Ostend, where for three weeks I took lessons in Flemish or Dutch from a young professor, reading "Vondel" and "Bilderdijk," who, if not in the world of letters known, deserves to be. I had no dictionary all this time, and the teacher marvelled that I always knew the meaning of the words, which will not seem marvellous to any one who understands German and has studied Anglo-Saxon and read "Middle or Early English." Then back to Spa to meet Mr. and Mrs. Trubner and her father Octave Delepierre, who was a great scholar in _rariora_, _curiosa_, and old French, and _facile princeps_ the greatest expert in Macaronic poetry who ever wrote. May I here venture to mention that he always declared that my later poem of "Breitmann and the Pope" was the best Macaronic poem which he had ever read? His reason for this was that it was the most reckless and heedless or extravagant combination of Latin and modern languages known to him. I had, however, been much indebted to Mr. Oscar Browning for revising it. And so the truth, which long in darkness lay, now comes full clearly to the light of day. Thence to Liege, Amsterdam, the Hague, Haarlem, and Leyden, visiting all the great galleries and many private collections. At Amsterdam we saw the last grand kermess or annual fair ever held there. It was a Dutch carnival, so wild and extravagant that few can comprehend now to what extremes "spreeing" can be carried. The Dutch, like the Swedes, have or had the strange habit of bottling up their hilarity and letting it out on stated occasions in uproarious frolics. I saw _carmagnoles_ in which men and women, seized by a wild impulse, whirled along the street in a frantic dance to any chance music, compelling every bystander to join. I heard of a Prince from Capua, who, having been thus _carmagnoled_, returned home in rags. In Leyden I visited the Archaeological Museum, where I by chance became acquainted with the chief or director, who was then engaged in rearranging his collections, and who, without knowing my name, kindly expressed the wish that I would remain a week to aid him in preparing the catalogue. As there are few works on prehistoric relics which I do not know, and as I had for many years studied with zeal innumerable collections of the kind, I venture to believe that his faith in my knowledge was not quite misplaced. Even as I write I have just received the _Catalogue of Prehistoric Works in Eastern America_, by Cyrus Thomas--a work of very great importance. Thence we went to Cologne, where it was marvellous to find the Cathedral completed, in spite of the ancient legend which asserts that though the devil had furnished its design he had laid a curse upon it, declaring that it should never be finished. Thence up the Rhine by castles grey and smiling towns, recalling my old foot-journey along its banks; and so on to Heidelberg, where I stayed a month at the Black Eagle. Herr Lehr was still there. He had grown older. His son was taking dancing lessons of Herr Zimmer, who had taught me to waltz twenty years before. One day I took my watch to a shop to be repaired, when the proprietor declared that he had mended it once before in 1847, and showed me the private mark which he put on it at the time. There were several American students, who received me very kindly. I remember among them Wright, Manly, and Overton. When I sat among them smoking and drinking beer, and mingling German student words with English, it seemed as if the past twenty years were all a dream, and that I was a _Bursch_ again. Overton had the reputation of being _par eminence_ the man of men in all Heidelberg, who could take off a full quart at one pull without stopping to take breath--a feat which I had far outdone at Munich, in my youth, with the _horn_, and which I again accomplished at Heidelberg "without the foam," Overton himself, who was a very noble young fellow, applauding the feat most loudly. But I have since then often done it with Bass or Alsopp, which is much harder. I need not say that the "Breitmann Ballads," which had recently got among the Anglo-American students, and were by them greatly admired, did much to render me popular. I found or made many friends in Heidelberg. One night we were invited to a supper, and learned afterwards that the two children of our host, having heard that we were Americans, had peeped at us through the keyhole and expressed great disappointment at not finding us _black_. In November we went to Dresden. We were so fortunate as to obtain excellent rooms and board with a Herr and Madame Rohn, a well-to-do couple, who, I am sure, took boarders far more for the sake of company than for gain. Herr Rohn had graduated at Leipzig, but having spent most of his life in Vienna, was a man of exuberant jollity--a man of gold and a gentleman, even as his wife was a truly gentle lady. As I am very tall, and detest German small beds, I complained of mine, and Herr Rohn said he had another, of which I could not complain. And I certainly could not, for when it came I found it was at least eight feet in length. It seems that they had once had for a boarder a German baron who was _more than seven feet_ high, and had had this curiosity constructed; and Herr Rohn roared with laughter as I gazed on it, and asked if I would have it lengthened. We remained in Dresden till February, and found many friends, among whom there was much pleasant homelike hospitality. Among others were Julian Hawthorne and sisters, and George Parsons Lathrop. They were young fellows then, and not so well known as they have since become, but it was evident enough that they had good work in them. They often came to see me, and were very kind in many ways. I took lessons in porcelain-painting, which art I kept up for many years, and was, of course, assiduous in visiting the galleries, Green Vault, and all works of art. I became well acquainted with Passavant, the director. I was getting better, but was still far from being as mentally vigorous as I had been. I now attribute this to the enormous daily dose of bromide which I continued to take, probably mistaking its _influence_ for the original nervous exhaustion itself. It was not indeed till I got to England, and substituted _lupulin_ in the form of hops--that is to say, pale ale or "bitter"--in generous doses, that I quite recovered. So we passed on to Prague, which city, like everything Czech, always had a strange fascination for me. There I met a certain Mr. Vojtech Napristek (or Adalbert Thimble), who had once edited in the United States a Bohemian newspaper with which I had exchanged, and with whom I had corresponded, but whom I had never before seen. He had established in Prague, on American lines, a Ladies' Club of two hundred, which we visited, and was, I believe, owing to an inheritance, now a prosperous man. Though I am not a Thimble, it also befell me, in later years, to found and preside over a Ladies' Art Club of two hundred souls. At that time the famous legendary bridge, with the ancient statue of St. John Nepomuk, still existed as of yore. No one imagined that a time would come when they would be washed away through sheer neglect. So on to Munich, where, during a whole week, I saw but one _Riegelhaube_, a curious head-dress or chignon-cover of silver thread, once very common. Even the old Bavarian dialect seemed to have almost vanished, and I was glad to hear it from our porter. Many old landmarks still existed, but King Louis no longer ran about the streets--I nearly ran against him once; people no longer were obliged by law to remove cigars or pipes from their mouths when passing a sentry-box. Lola Montez had vanished. _Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_? So we went over the Brenner Pass, stopped at Innspruck, and saw the church described by Heine in his _Reisebilder_, and came to Verona, the Bern of the _Heldenbuch_. "_Ich will gen Bern ausreiten_, _sprach Meister Hildebrand_." It was a happy thought of the Italians to put picturesque Verona down as the first stopping-place for Northern travellers, and I rather like Ruskin's idea of buying the town and keeping it intact as a piece of _bric-a-brac_. He might have proposed Rome while he was about it; "anything there can be had for money," says Juvenal. When we arrived at the station I alone was left to encounter the fierce douaniers. One of them, inquisitive as to tobacco, when I told him I had none, laid his finger impressively on the mouthpiece of my pipe, remarking that where the tail of the fox was seen the fox could not be far off. To which I replied that I indeed had no tobacco, but wanted some very badly, and that I would be much obliged to him if he would give me a little to fill my pipe. So all laughed. My wife entering at this instant, cried in amazement, "Why, Charles! where did you ever learn to talk Italian?" Which shows that there can be secrets even between married people; though indeed my Italian has always been of such inferior quality that it is no wonder that I never boasted of it even in confidence. It is, in fact, the Hand-organo dialect flavoured with Florentine. There was an old lady who stood at the door of a curiosity-shop in Verona, and she had five pieces of bone-carvings from some old _scatola_ or marriage-casket. She asked a fabulous price for them, and I offered five francs. She scorned the paltry sum with all the vehemence of a susceptible soul whose tenderest feelings have been outraged. So I went my way, but as I passed the place returning, the old lady came forth, and, graciously courtesying and smiling, held forth to me the earrings neatly wrapped in paper, and thanked me for the five francs! Which indicated to me that the good small folk of Italy had not materially changed since I had left the country. We came to Venice, and went to a hotel, where we had a room given to us which, had we wished to give a ball, would have left nothing to be desired. I counted in it twenty-seven chairs and seven tables, all at such a distance from one another that they seemed not to be on speaking terms. I do not think I ever got quite so far as the upper end of that room while I inhabited it--it was probably somewhere in Austria. I have spoken of having met Mr. Wright at Heidelberg. He was from Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. The next day after my arrival I found among the names of the departed, "Signore Wright-_Kilkes_, from Barre, Pennsylvania, America." This reminded me of the Anglo-American who was astonished at Rome at receiving invitations and circulars addressed to him as "Illustrissimo Varanti Solezer." It turned out that an assistant, reading aloud to the clerk the names from the trunks, had mistaken a very large "WARRANTED SOLE LEATHER" for the name of the owner. And this on soles reminds me that there was a _femme sole_ or lone acrimonious British female at our hotel, who declared to me one evening that she had _never_ in all her life been so _insulted_ as she was that day at a banker's; and the insult consisted in this, that she, although quite unknown to him, had asked him to cash a cheque on London, which he had declined to do. I remarked that no banker who did business properly ever ought to cash a cheque from a total stranger. "Sir," said the lady, "do _I look_ like an impostor?" "Madame," I replied, "I have seen thieves and wretches of the vilest type who could not have been distinguished from either of us as regards respectability of appearance. You do not appear to know much about such people." "I am happy to say, sir," replied the lady with intense acidity, "that _I_ do _not_." But she added triumphantly, "What do you say when I tell you that I had my _cheque-book_? How could I have possessed it if I had not a right to draw?" "Any scamp," I replied, "can deposit a few pounds in a bank, buy a cheque- book, and then draw his money." But the next day she came to me in radiant sneering triumph. She had found another banker, who was a gentleman, with a marked emphasis, who had cashed her cheque. How many people there are in this world whose definition of a gentleman is "one who does whatever pleases _us_!" In Florence we went directly to the Hotel d'Europe in the Via Tuornabuoni, where my Indian blanket vanished even while entering the hotel, and surrounded only by the servants to whom the luggage had been confided. As the landlord manifested great disgust for me whenever I mentioned such a trifle, and as the porter and the rest declared that they would answer soul and body for one another's honesty, I had to grin and bear it. I really wonder sometimes that there are not more boarders, who, like Benvenuto Cellini, set fire to hotels or cut up the bedclothes before leaving them. That worthy, having been treated not so badly as I was at the Hotel d'Europe and at another in Florence, cut to pieces the sheets of his bed, galloped away hastily, and from the summit of a distant hill had the pleasure of seeing the landlord in a rage. Now people write to the _Times_, and "cut up" the whole concern. It all comes to the same thing. In Florence I saw much of an old New York friend, the now late Lorimer Graham. When he died, Swinburne wrote a poem on him. He was a man of great culture and refined manner. There was something sympathetic in him which drew every one irresistibly into liking. It was his instinct to be kind and thoughtful to every one. He gave me letters to Swinburne, Lord Houghton, and others. I made an acquaintance by chance in Florence whom I can never forget: for he was a character. One day while in the Uffizi Gallery engaged in studying the great Etruscan vase, now in the Etruscan Museum, a stranger standing by me said, "Does not this seem to you like a mysterious book written in forgotten characters? Is not a collection of such vases like a library?" "On that hint I spake." "I see," I replied, "you refer to the so-called Etruscan Library which an Englishman has made, and which contains only vases and inscriptions in that now unknown tongue of Etruria. And indeed, when we turn over the pages of Inghirami, Gherard, and Gori, Gray, or Dennis, it does indeed really seem--But what do you really think the old Etruscan language truly was?" "Look here, my friend," cried the stranger in broad Yankee, "I guess I'm barkin' up the wrong tree. I calculated to tell _you_ something, but you're ahead of me." We both laughed and became very good friends. He lived at our hotel, and had been twenty-five years in Italy, and knew every custode in every gallery, and could have every secret treasure unlocked. He was perfectly at home about town--would stop and ask a direction of a cab-driver, and was capable of going into an umbrella-shop when it rained. We went on to Rome, and I can only say that as regards what we saw there, my memory is confused literally with an _embarras de richesses_. The Ecumenical Council was being held, at which an elderly Italian gentleman, who possibly did not know oxygen from hydrogen, or sin from sugar, was declared to be infallible in his judgment of all earthly things. While in Rome we saw a great deal of W. W. Story, the sculptor, and his wife and daughter, Edith, for whom Thackeray wrote his most beautiful tale, and I at my humble distance the ballad of "Breitmann in Rome," which contained a remarkable prophecy, of the Franco-German war. At their house we met Odo Russell and Oscar Browning, and many more whose names are known to all. It was there also that a lady of the Royal English household amused us very much one evening by narrating how the "Breitmann Ballads," owing to their odd mixture of German and English, were favourite subjects for mutual reading and recitation among the then youthful members of the Royal family, and what haste and alarm there was to put the forbidden book out of the way when Her Majesty the Queen was announced as coming. I also met in Rome the American poet and painter T. Buchanan Read, who gave me a dinner, and very often that remarkable character General Carroll Tevis, who, having fought under most flags, and been a Turkish bey or pacha, was now a chamberlain of the Pope. In the following year he fought for the French, behaved with great bravery in Bourbaki's retreat, and was decorated on the field of battle. Then again, when I was in Egypt, Tevis was at the head of the military college. He had fairly won his rank of general in the American Civil War, but as there was some disinclination or other to give it to him, I had used my influence in his favour with Forney, who speedily secured it for him. He was a perfect type of the old _condottiero_, but with Dugald Dalgetty's scrupulous faith to his military engagements. The American clergyman in Rome was the Rev. Dr. Nevin, a brother of my friend Captain Nevin. There was also Mrs. John Grigg, an old Philadelphia friend (now residing in Florence), to whom we were then, as we have continually been since, indebted for the most cordial hospitality. Through the kind aid of General Tevis we were enabled to see all the principal ceremonies of the Holy Week and Easter. This year, owing to the Council, everything was on a scale of unusual magnificence. I can say with Panurge that I have seen three Popes, but will not add with him, "and little good did it ever do me," for Mrs. Leland at least was much gratified with a full sight and quasi-interview with His Holiness. There was a joyous sight for a cynic to be seen in Rome in those days--in fact, it was only last year (1891) that it was done away with. This was the drawing of the lottery by a priest. There was on a holy platform a holy wheel and a holy little boy to draw the holy numbers, and a holy old priest to oversee and _bless_ the whole precious business. The blessing of the devil would have been more appropriate, for the lotteries are the curse of Italy. What the Anglo-American mechanic puts into a savings bank, the Italian invests in lotteries. In Naples there are now fourteen tickets sold per annum for the gross amount of the population, and in Florence twelve. One day I took a walk out into the country with Briton Riviere and some other artists. I had a cake or two of colour, and Riviere, with wine for water, at a _trattoria_ where we lunched, made a picture of the attendant maid. He pointed out to me on the road a string of peasants carrying great loaves of coarse bread. They had walked perhaps twenty miles to buy it, because in those days people were not allowed to bake their own bread, but must buy it at the public _forno_, which paid a tax for the privilege. So long as Rome was under Papal control, its every municipal institution, such as hospitals, prisons, and the police, were in a state of absolutely incredible inhuman vileness, while under everything ran corruption and dishonesty. The lower orders were severely disciplined as to their sexual morals, because it was made a rich source of infamous taxes, as it now is in other cities of Europe; but cardinals and the wealthier priests kept mistresses, almost openly, since these women were pointed out to every one as they flaunted about proudly in their carriages. From Rome we passed into Pisa, Genoa, Spezzia, and Nice, over the old Cornici road, and so again to Paris, where we remained six weeks, and then left in June, 1870, just before the war broke out. While in the city we saw at different times in public the Emperor and Empress, also the Queen of Spain. The face of Louis Napoleon was indeed somewhat changed since I saw him in London in 1848, but it had not improved so much as his circumstances, as he was according to external appearances and popular belief now extremely well off. But appearances are deceptive, as was soon proved, for he was in reality on the verge of a worse bankruptcy than even his uncle underwent, for the nephew lost not only kingdom and life, but also every trace of reputation for wisdom and honesty, remaining to history only as a brazen royal adventurer and "copper captain." In Rome our dear old friend Mrs. John Grigg showed us, as I said, many kind attentions, which she has, in Florence, continued to this day. This lady is own aunt to my old school friend General George B. McClellan. At an advanced age she executes without glasses the most exquisite embroidery conceivable, and her heart and intellect are in keeping with her sight. VIII. ENGLAND. 1870. The Trubners--George Eliot and G. H. Lewes--Heseltine--Edwards--Etched by Bracquemond and Legros--Jean Ingelow--Tennyson--Hepworth Dixon--Lord Lytton the elder--Lord Houghton--Bret Harte--France, Alsace, and Lorraine--Samuel Laing--Gypsies--The Misses Horace Smith--Brighton and odd fish--Work and books--Hunting--Dore--Art and Nature--Taglioni--Chevalier Wykoff--Octave Delepierre--Breitmann--Thomas Carlyle--George Borrow--A cathedral tour round about England--Salisbury, Wells, and York. It is pleasant being anywhere in England in June, and the passing from picturesque Dover to London through laughing Kent is a good introduction to the country. The untravelled American, fresh from the "boundless prairies" and twenty-thousand-acre fields of wheat, sees nothing in it all but the close cultivation of limited land; but the tourist from the Continent perceives at once that, with most careful agriculture, there are indications of an exuberance of wealth, true comfort, and taste rarely seen in France or Germany. The many trees of a better quality and slower growth than the weedy sprouting poplar and willow of Normandy; the hedges, which are very beautiful and ever green; the flowerbeds and walks about the poorest cottage; the neatly planted, prettily bridged side roads, all indicate a superiority of wealth or refinement such as prevails only in New England, or rather which _did_ prevail, until the native population, going westward, was supplanted by Irish or worse, if any worse there be at turning neatness into dirty disorder. That older American population was deeply English, with a thousand rural English traditions religiously preserved; and the chief of these is clean _neatness_, which, when fully carried out, always results in simple, unaffected beauty. This was very strongly shown in the Quaker gardens, once so common in Philadelphia--and in the people. We arrived in London, and went directly to the Trubners', No. 29 Upper Hamilton Terrace, N.W. The first person who welcomed me was Mr. Delepierre, an idol of mine for years; and the first thing I did was to borrow half-a-crown of him to pay the cab, having only French money with me. It was a charming house, with a large garden, so redolent of roses that it might have served Chriemhilda of old for a romance. For twenty years that house was destined to be an occasional home and a dwelling where we were ever welcome, and where every Sunday evening I had always an appointed place at dinner, and a special arm-chair for the never-failing Havannah. Mrs. Trubner had, in later years, two boxes of Havannahs of the best, which had belonged to G. H. Lewes, and which George Eliot gave her after his death. I have kept two _en souvenir_. I knew a man once who had formed a large collection of such relics. There was a cigar which he had received from Louis Napoleon, and one from Bismarck, and so forth. But, alas! once while away on his travels, the whole museum was smoked up by a reckless under-graduate younger brother. _In fumo exit_. How many people well known to the world--or rather how few who were not--have I met there--Edwin Arnold, G. H. Lewes, H. Dixon, M. Van der Weyer, Frith the artist, Mrs. Trubner's uncle Lord Napier of Magdala, Pigott, Norman Lockyer, Bret Harte, "and full many more," scholars, poets, editors, and, withal, lady writers of every good shade, grade, and quality. How many of them all have passed since then full silently into the Silent Land, where we may follow, but return no more! How many a pleasant smile and friendly voice and firm alliances and genial acquaintances, often carried out in other lands, date their beginning in my memory to the house in Hamilton Terrace! How often have I heard by land or sea the familiar greeting, "I think I met you once at the Trubners'!" For it was a salon, a centre or sun with many bright and cheering rays--a civilising institution! Mrs. Trubner was the life of this home. Anglo-Belgian by early relation and education, she combined four types in one. When speaking English, she struck me as the type of an accomplished and refined British matron; in French, her whole nature seemed Parisienne; in Flemish, she was altogether Flamande; and in German, Deutsch. If Cerberus was three gentlemen in one, Mrs. Trubner was four ladies united. Very well read, she conversed not only well on any subject, but, what is very unusual in her sex, with sincere interest, and not merely to entertain. If interrupted in a conversation she resumed the subject! This is a remarkable trait! The next day after our arrival Mrs. Trubner took Mrs. Leland, during a walk, to call on George Eliot, and that evening G. H. Lewes, Hepworth Dixon, and some others came to a reception at the Trubners'. Both of these men were, as ever, very brilliant and amusing in conversation. I met them very often after this, both at their homes and about London. I also became acquainted with George Eliot or Mrs. Lewes, who left on me the marked impression, which she did on all, of being a woman of genius, though I cannot recall anything remarkable which I ever heard from her. I note this because there were most extraordinary reports of her utterances among her admirers. A young American lady once seriously asked me if it were true that at the Sunday afternoon receptions in South Bank one could always see rows of twenty or thirty of the greatest men in England, such as Carlyle, Froude, and Herbert Spencer, all sitting with their note-books silently taking down from her lips the ideas which they subsequently used in their writings! There seemed, indeed, to be afloat in America among certain folk an idea that something enormous, marvellous, and inspired went on at these receptions, and that George Eliot posed as a Pythia or Sibyl, as the great leading mind of England, and lectured while we listened. There is no good portrait, I believe, of her. She had long features and would have been called plain but for her solemn, earnest eyes, which had an expression quite in keeping with her voice, which was one not easily forgotten. I never detected in her any trace of genial humour, though I doubt not that it was latent in her; and I thought her a person who had drawn her ideas far more from books and an acquaintance with certain types of humanity whom she had set herself deliberately to study--albeit with rare perception--than from an easy intuitive familiarity with all sorts and conditions of men. But she worked out _thoroughly_ what she knew by the intuition of genius, though in this she was very far inferior to Scott. Thus she wrote the "Spanish Gypsy," having only seen such gypsies two or three times. One day she told me that in order to write "Daniel Deronda," she had read through two hundred books. I longed to tell her that she had better have learned Yiddish and talked with two hundred Jews, and been taught, as I was by my friend Solomon the Sadducee, the art of distinguishing Fraulein Lowenthal of the Ashkenazim from Senorita Aguado of the Sephardim _by the corners of their eyes_! I had read more than once Lewes's "Life of Goethe," his "History of Philosophy and Physiology," and even "written him" for the Cyclopaedia. With him I naturally at once became well acquainted. I remember here that Mr. Ripley had once reproved me for declaring that Lewes had really a claim to be an original philosopher or thinker; for Boston intellect always frowned on him after Margaret Fuller condemned him as "frivolous and atheistic." I remember that Tom Powell had told me how he had dined somewhere in London, where there was a man present who had really been a cannibal, owing to dire stress of shipwreck, and how Lewes, who was there, was so fascinated with the man-eater that he could think of nothing else. Lewes told me that once, having gone with a party of archaeologists to visit a ruined church, he found on a twelfth-century tombstone some illegible letters which he persuaded the others to believe formed the name Golias, probably having in mind the poems of Walter de Mapes. When I returned from Russia I delighted him very much by describing how I had told the fortunes by hand of six gypsy girls. He declared that telling fortunes to gypsies was the very height of impudence! "A hundred jests have passed between us twain, Which, had I space, I'd gladly tell again." A call which I have had, since I wrote that last line, from John Postle Heseltine, Esq., reminds me that he was one of the first acquaintances I made in London. Mr. E. Edwards, a distinguished etcher and painter, gave me a dinner at Richmond, at which Mr. Heseltine was present. In Edwards' studio I met with Bracquemond and Legros, both of whom etched my portrait on copper. Mr. Heseltine is well known as a very distinguished artist of the same kind, as well as for many other things. Edwards was very kind to me in many ways for years. Legros I found very interesting. There was in Edwards' studio the unique _complete_ collection of the etchings of Meryon, which we examined. Legros remarked of the incredibly long- continued industry manifested in some of the pictures, that lunatics often manifested it to a high degree. Meryon, as is known, was mad. I had etched a very little myself and was free of the fraternity. Within a few days Mr. Strahan, the publisher, took me to Mr. (now Lord) Tennyson's reception, where I met with many well-known people. Among them were Lady Charlotte Locker and Miss Jean Ingelow. These ladies, with great kindness, finding that I was married, called on Mrs. Iceland, and invited us to dine. I became a constant visitor for years at Miss Ingelow's receptions, where I have met Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall (whom I had seen in 1848), Calverly, Edmund Gosse, Hamilton Aide, Mr. and Mrs Alfred Hunt. I conversed with Tennyson, but little passed between us on that occasion. I got to know him far better "later on." I here anticipate by several years two interviews which I had with Tennyson in 1875, who had _ad interim_ been deservedly "lauded into Lordliness," and which, to him at least, were amusing enough to be recalled. The first was at a dinner at Lady Franklin's, and her niece Miss Cracroft. And here I may, in passing, say a word as to the extraordinary kindly nature of Lady Franklin. I think it was almost as soon as we became acquainted that she, learning that I suffered at times from gout, sent me a dozen bottles of a kind of bitter water as a cure. There were at the dinner as guests Mr. Tennyson, Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, Dr. Quain, and myself. There was no lack of varied anecdote, reminiscences of noted people and of travel; but by far the most delightful portion of it all was to watch the gradual unfreezing of Tennyson, and how from a grim winter of taciturnity, under the glowing influence of the sun of wine, as the Tuscan Redi hath it-- "Dell' Indico Oriente Domator glorioso il Dio di Vino . . . Di quel Sol, che in Ciel vedete . . ."-- he passed into a glorious summer of genial feeling. I led unto it thus:--My friend Professor Palmer and I had projected a volume of songs in English Romany or Gypsy, which is by far the sweetest and most euphonious language in Europe. My friend had translated "Home they brought her warrior dead," by Tennyson, into this tongue, and I had the MS. of it in my pocket. Tennyson was very much pleased at the compliment, and asked me to read the poem, which I did. The work was by permission dedicated to him. At last, when dinner was over, Tennyson, who had disposed of an entire bottle of port, rose, and approaching me, took me gaily-gravely by both sides, as if he would lift me up, and drawing himself up to his full height, said, "I like to see a poet a full- sized substantial man," or "tall and strong," or words to that effect. I replied that it was very evident from the general appearance of Shakespeare's bust that he was a very tall man, but that though the thunder of height had hit twice--the Poet Laureate being the second case--that I had been very slightly singed, tall as I was. _Enfin_, some days after, Tennyson in a letter invited me to call and see him should I ever be in the Isle of Wight; which took place by mere chance some time after--in fact, I did not know, when I was first at the hotel in Freshwater, that Tennyson lived at a mile's distance. I walked over one afternoon and sent in my card. Mr. Hallam Tennyson, then a very handsome young man of winsome manner, came out and said that his father was taking his usual _siesta_, but begged me to remain, kindly adding, "Because I know, Mr. Leland, he would be very sorry to have missed you." After a little time, however, Tennyson himself appeared, and took me up to his den or studio, where I was asked to take a pipe, which I did with great good-will, and blew a cloud, enjoying it greatly, because I felt with my host, as with Bulwer, that we had quickly crossed acquaintanceship into the more familiar realm where one can talk about whatever you please with the certainty of being understood and getting a sympathetic answer. There are lifelong friends with whom one never really gets to this, and there are acquaintances of an hour at _table- d'hotes_, who "come like shadows, so depart," who talk with a touch to our hearts. Bulwer and Tennyson were such to me, and _apre miro zi_, as the gypsies say--on my life-soul!--if I had talked with them, as I did, without knowing who they were, I should have recalled them with quite as much interest as I now do, and see them again in dreams. And here I may add, that the common-place saying that literary men are rarely good talkers, and generally disappointing, is not at all confirmed by my experiences. After burning our tobacco, in Indian fashion, to better acquaintance (I forgot to say that the poet had two dozen clay pipes ranged in a small wooden rack), we went forth for a seven miles' walk on the Downs. And at last, from the summit of one, I pointed down to a small field below, and said-- But first I must specify that the day before I had gone with a young lady of fourteen summers named Bee or Beatrice Fredericson, both of us bearing baskets, to pick blackberries for tea, and coming to a small field which was completely surrounded by a hedge, we saw therein illimitable blackberries glittering in the setting sunlight, and longed to enter. Finding a gap which had been filled by a dead thorn-bush, I removed the latter, and, going in, we soon picked a quart of the fruit. But on leaving we were met by the farmer, who made a to-do, charging us with trespassing. To which I replied, "Well, what is to pay?" He asked for two shillings, but was pacified with one; and so we departed. Therefore I said to Tennyson, "I went into that field yesterday to pick your blackberries, and your farmer caught us and made me pay a shilling for trespassing." And he gravely replied, though evidently delighted--"Served you right! What business had you to come over my hedge into my field to steal my blackberries?" "_Mea culpa_," I answered, "_mea maxima culpa_." "Mr. Leland," pursued Tennyson, as gravely as ever, grasping all the absurdity of the thing with evident enjoyment, "you have no idea how tourists trespass here to get at me. They climb over my gate and look in at my windows. It is a fact--one did so only last week. But I declare that you are the very first poet and man of letters who ever came here--to steal blackberries!" Here he paused, and then added forcibly-- "I _do_ believe you are a gypsy, after all." Then we talked of the old manor-houses in the neighbourhood, and of the famous Mortstone, a supposed Saxon rude monolith near by. I thought it prehistoric, because I had dug out from the pile of earth supporting and coeval with it (and indeed only with a lead-pencil) a flint flake chipped by hand and a bit of cannel coal, which indicate dedication. My host listened with great interest, and then told me a sad tale: how certain workmen employed by him to dig on his land had found a great number of old Roman bronze coins, but, instead of taking them to him, had kept them, though they cared so little for them that they gave a handful to a boy whom they met. "I told them," said Tennyson, "that they had been guilty of malappropriation, and though I was not quite sure whether the coins belonged to me or to the Crown, that they certainly had no right to them. Whereupon their leader said that if I was not satisfied they would not work any longer for me, and so they went away." I had on this occasion a long and interesting discussion with Mr. Tennyson relative to Walt Whitman, and involving the principles or nature of poetry. According to the poet-laureate, poetry, as he understood it, consisted of elevated or refined, or at least superior thought, expressed in melodious form, and in this latter it seemed to him (for it was very modestly expressed) that Whitman was wanting. Wherein he came nearer to the truth than does Symonds, who overrates, as it seems to me, the value, as regards art and poetry, of simply _equalising_ all human intelligences. Though I never met Symonds, there was mutual knowledge between us, and when I published my "Etrusco-Roman Remains in Popular Traditions," which contains the results of six years' intimacy with witches and fortune-tellers, he wrote a letter expressing enthusiastic admiration of it to Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. Now all three of these great men are dead. I shall speak of Whitman anon, for in later years for a long time I met him almost daily. I can remember that during the conversation Tennyson expressed himself, rather to my amazement, with some slight indignation at a paltry review abusing his latest work; to which I replied-- "If there is anything on earth for which I have envied you, even more than for your great renown as a poet, it has been because I supposed you were completely above all such attacks and were utterly indifferent to them." Which he took amiably, and proceeded to discuss ripe fruit and wasps--or their equivalent. Yet I doubt whether I was quite in the right, since those who live for fame honourably acquired must ever be susceptible to stings, small or great. An editor who receives abusive letters so frequently that he ends by pitching them without reading into the waste-basket, and often treats ribald attacks in print in the same manner--as I have often done--has so many other affairs on his mind that he becomes case-hardened. But I have observed from long experience that there is a Nemesis who watches those who arrogate the right to lay on the rod, and gives it to them with interest in the end. It was very soon after my arrival in London that I was invited to lunch at Hepworth Dixon's to meet Lord Lytton, or Bulwer, the great writer. His works had been so intensely and sympathetically loved by me so long, that it seemed as if I had been asked to meet some great man of the past. I found him, as I expected, quite congenial and wondrous kind. I remember a droll incident. Standing at the head of the stairs, he courteously made way and asked me to go before. I replied, "When Louis XIV. asked Crillon to do the same, Crillon complied, saying, 'Wherever your Majesty goes, be it before or behind, is always the first place or post of honour,' and I say the same with him," and so went in advance at once. I saw by his expression that he was pleased with the quotation. We were looking at a portrait of Shakespeare which Dixon had found in Russia. Lord Lytton asked me if I thought it an original or true likeness. I observed that the face was full of many fine seamy lines, which infallibly indicate great nervous genius of the highest order--noting at the same time that Lord Lytton's countenance was very much marked in a like manner. The observation was new to him, and he seemed to be interested in it, as he always was in anything like chiromancy or metoscopy. A few days later I was invited to come and pass nearly a week with Hepworth Dixon at Knebworth, Lord Lytton's country seat. It is a very picturesque _chateau_, profusely adorned with fifteenth-century Gothic grotesques, with a fine antique hall, stained glass windows, and gallery. There is in it a chamber containing a marvellous and massive carved oak bedstead, the posts of which are human figures the size of life, and in it and in the same room Queen Elizabeth is said to have slept when she heard of the destruction of the Spanish Armada. It was the room of honour, and it had been kindly assigned to me. It all seemed like a dream. There was in the family of the late Lord Lytton his son, who made a most favourable impression on me. I think the first _coup_ was my finding that he knew the works of Andreini, and that it had occurred to him as well as to me that Euphues Lily's book had been modelled on them. There was also his wife, a magnificent and graceful beauty; Lord Lytton's nephew, Mr. Bulwer; and several ladies. The first morning we all fished in the pond, and, to my great amazement, Lord Lytton pulled out _a great one-eyed perch_! I almost expected to see him pull out Paul Clifford or Zanoni next! In the afternoon we were driven out to Cowper Castle to see a fine gallery of pictures, our host acting as cicerone, and as he soon found that I was fairly well educated in art, and had been a special pupil of Thiersch in Munich, and something more than an amateur, we had many interesting conversations. I think I may venture to say that he did _not_ expect to find a whilom student of aesthetics, art-history, and Philosophy in the author of "Hans Breitmann." What was delightful was his exquisite tact in never saying as much; but I could detect it in the sudden interest and involuntary compliment implied in his tone of conversation. In a very short time he began to speak to me on all literary or artistic subjects without preliminary question, taking it for granted that I understood them and chimed in with him. I was with every interview more and more impressed with his _culture_--I mean with what had resulted from his reading--his marvellous tact of kindness in small things to all, and his quick and vigorous comparing and contrasting of images and drawing conclusions. But there was evidently enough a firm bed-rock or hard pan under all this gold. I was amazed one day when a footman, who had committed some _bevue_ or blunder, or apprehended something, actually turned pale and stammered with terror when Lord Lytton gravely addressed a question to him. I never in my life saw a man so much frightened, even before a revolver. But Lord Lytton was beyond all question really interested when he found me so much at home in Rosicrucian and occult lore, and that I had been with Justinus Kerner in Weinsberg, and was familiar with the forgotten dusky paths of mysticism. He had in his house the famous Earl Stanhope crystal, and wished me to sleep with it under my pillow, but I was so afraid lest the precious relic should be injured, that I resolutely declined the honour, for which I am now sorry, for I sometimes have dreams of a most extraordinary character. This Stanhope crystal is not, however, the great mirror of Dr. Dee, though it has been said to be so. The latter belonged to a gentleman in London, who also offered to lend it to me. It is made of cannel coal. That Lord Lytton made a very remarkable impression on me is proved by the fact that I continued to dream of him at long intervals after his death; and I am quite sure that such feeling is, by its very nature, always to a certain slight degree reciprocal. He had a natural and unaffected _voice_, yet one with a marked character; something like Tennyson's, which was even more striking. Both were far removed from the now fashionable intonation, which is the admiration and despair of American swells. It is only the _fin de siecle_ form of the _demnition_ dialect of the Forties and the _La-ard_ and _Lunnon_ of an earlier age. Lord Lytton was generally invisible in the morning, sometimes after lunch. In the evening he came out splendidly groomed, fresh as a rose, and at dinner and after was as interesting as any of his books. He had known "everybody" to a surprising extent, and had anecdotes fresh and vivid of every one whom he had met. He loved music, and there was a lady who sang old Spanish ballads with rare taste. I enjoyed myself incredibly. I may be excused for mentioning here that I sent a copy of the second edition of my "Meister Karl's Sketch-Book" to Lord Lytton. No one but Irving and Trubner had ever praised it. When Lord Lytton published afterwards "Kenelm Chillingly," I found in it _three_ passages in which I recognised beyond dispute others suggested by my own work. I do not in the least mean that there was _any_ borrowing or taking beyond the mere suggestion of thought. Why I think that Lord Lytton had these hints in his mind is that he gave the name of Leland to one of the minor characters in the book. When I published a full edition of "Breitmann's Poems," he wrote me a long letter criticising and praising the work, and a much longer and closely written one, of seven pages, relating to my "Confucius and Other Poems." I was subsequently invited to receptions at his house in London, where I first met Browning, and had a long conversation with him. I saw him afterwards at Mrs. Proctor's. This was the wife of Barry Cornwall, whom I also saw. He was very old and infirm. I can remember when the "Cornlaw Rhymes" rang wherever English was read. As I consider it almost a duty to record what I can remember of Bulwer, I may mention that one evening, at his house in London, he showed me and others some beautiful old brass salvers in _repousse_ work, and how I astonished him by describing the process, and declaring that I could produce a _facsimile_ of any one of them in a day or two; to which assertion hundreds to whom I have taught the art, as well as my "Manual of Repousse," and another on "Metal Work," will, I trust, bear witness. And this I mention, not vainly, but because Lord Lytton seemed to be interested and pleased, and because, in after years, I had much to do with reviving the practice of this beautiful art. It was practising this, and a three years' study of oak-wood carving, which led me to write on the Minor Arts. _Mihi aes et triplex robur_. Lord Lytton had the very curious habit of making almost invisible hieroglyphics or crosses in his letters--at least I found them in those to me, as it were for luck. It was a very common practice from the most ancient Egyptian times to within two centuries. Lord Lytton's were evidently intended to escape observation. But there was indeed a great deal in his character which would escape most persons, and which has not been revealed by any writer on him. This I speedily divined, though, of course, I never discovered what it all was. Lord Houghton, "Richard Monckton Milnes," to whom I had a letter of introduction from Lorimer Graham, was very kind to me. I dined and lunched at his house, where I met Odo Russell or Lord Ampthill, the Duke of Bedford, the Hon. Mrs. Norton, W. W. Story, and I know not how many more distinguished in society, or letters. At Lord Lytton's I made the acquaintance of the Duke of Wellington. I believe, however, that this meeting with Lord Houghton and the Duke was in my second year in London. The first English garden-party which I ever attended was during this first season, at the villa of Mr. Bohn, the publisher, at Twickenham. There I made the acquaintance of George Cruikshank, whom I afterwards met often, and knew very well till his death. He was a gay old fellow, and on this occasion danced a jig with old Mr. Bohn on the lawn, and joked with me. There, too, we met Lady Martin, who had been the famed Helen Faucit. Cruikshank was always inexhaustible in jokes, anecdotes, and reminiscences. At his house I made the acquaintance of Miss Ada Cavendish. To revert to Mr. Trubner's, I may say that one evening after dinner, when, genial though quiet, Bret Harte was one of the guests, he was asked to repeat the "Heathen Chinee," which he could not do, as he had never learned it--which is not such an unusual thing, by the way, as many suppose. But I, who knew it, remarked, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is nothing to merely _write_ a poem. True genius consists in getting it by or from heart [_from_ Bret Harte, for instance], and repeating it. This genius nature has denied to the illustrious poet before you--but not to me, as I will now illustrate by declaiming the 'Heathen Chinee.'" Which performance was received with applause, in which Harte heartily joined. But my claim to possess genius would hardly have borne examination, for it was years before I ever learned "Hans Breitmann's Barty," nor would I like to risk even a pound to one hundred that I can do it now without mixing the verses or committing some error. Once during the season I went with my wife and Mr. W. W. Story to Eton, where we supped with Oscar Browning. We were taken out boating on the river, and I enjoyed it very much. There is a romance about the Thames associated with a thousand passages in literature which goes to the very heart. I was much impressed by the marked character of Mr. Browning and his frank, genial nature; and I found some delightful old Latin books in his library. May I meet with many such men! This year, what with the German war and the Trubner-Hotten controversy, my "Breitmann Ballads" had become, I may say, well known. The character of Hans was actually brought into plays on three stages at once. Boucicault, whom I knew well of yore in America, introduced it into something. I had found Ewan Colquhoun--the same old sixpence--and one night he took me to the Strand Theatre to see a play in which my hero was a prominent part. I was told afterwards that the company having been informed of my presence, all came to look at me through the curtain-hole. There were some imitations of my ballads published in _Punch_ and the _Standard_, and the latter were so admirably executed--pardon the vain word!--that I feared, because they satirised the German cause, that they might be credited to me; therefore I wrote to the journal, begging that the author would give some indication that I had not written them, which was kindly done. Finally, a newspaper was started called _Hans Breitmann_, and the Messrs. Cope, of Liverpool, issued a brand of Hans Breitmann cigars. Owing to the resemblance between the words Bret and Breit there was a confusion of names, and my photograph was to be seen about town, with the name of Bret Harte attached to it. This great injustice to Mr. Harte was not agreeable, and I, or my friends, remonstrated with the shop-folk with the to-be-expected result, "Yes-sir, yes-sir--very sorry, sir--we'll correct the mistake, sir!" But I don't think it was ever corrected till the sale ceased. I was sometimes annoyed with many imitations of my poems by persons who knew no German, which were all attributed to me. A very pious Presbyterian publication, in alluding to something of the kind, said that "Mr. Leland, _because he is the author of Bret Harte_, thinks himself justified in publishing any trash of this description." I thought this a _very_ improper allusion for a clergyman, not to say libellous. In fact, many people really believed that Bret Harte was a _nom de plume_ or the title of a poem. And I may here say by the way that I never "wrote under" the pseudonym of Hans Breitmann in my life, nor called myself any such name at any time. It is simply the name of one of many _books_ which I have written. An American once insisting to me that I _should_ be called so from my work, I asked him if he would familiarly accost Mr. Lowell as "Josh Biglow." If there is anything in the world which denotes a subordinate position in the social scale or defect in education, it is the passion to call men "out of their names," and never feel really acquainted with any one until he is termed Tom or Jack. It is doubtless all very genial and jocose and sociable, but the man who shows a tendency to it should _not_ complain when his betters put him in a lower class or among the "lower orders." Once at a reception at George Boughton's, the artist, there was, as I heard, an elderly gentleman rushing about asking to see or be introduced to _Hart Bretmann_, whose works he declared he knew by heart, and with whom he was most anxious to become acquainted. Whether he ever discovered this remarkable conglomerate I do not know. I once made the acquaintance of an American at the Langham Hotel who declared that I had made life a burden to him. His name was H. Brightman, and being in business in New York, he never went to the Custom- House or Post-Office but what the clerks cried "Hans Brightman! of course. Yes, we have read about you, sir--in history." But even in this London season I found more serious work to attend to than comic ballads or society. Mr. Trubner was very anxious to have me write a pamphlet vindicating the claim of Germany to Alsace and Lorraine, and I offered to do it gladly, if he would provide all the historical data or material. The result of this was the _brochure_ entitled "France, Alsace, and Lorraine," which had a great success. It at once reappeared in America, and even in Spanish in South America. The German Minister in London ordered six copies, and the _Times_ made the work, with all its facts and figures, into an editorial article, omitting, I regret to say, to mention the source whence it was derived; but this I forgive with all my heart, considering the good words which it has given me on other occasions. For the object of the work was not at all to glorify the author, but to send home great truths at a very critical time; and the article in the _Times_, which was little else but my pamphlet condensed, caused a great sensation. But the principal result from it was this: I had in the work discussed the idea, then urged by the French and their friends, that, to avoid driving France to "desperation," very moderate terms should be accepted in order to conciliate. For the French, as I observed in effect, will do their _very worst in any case_, and every possible extreme should be anticipated and assumed. This same argument had previously been urged in my "Centralisation _versus_ States Rights." When Prince Bismarck conversed with the French Commissioners to arrange terms of peace, he met this argument of not driving the French to extremes with a phrase so closely like the one which I had used in my pamphlet, that neither Mr. Trubner nor several others hesitated to declare to me that it was beyond all question taken from it. Bismarck had _certainly_ received the pamphlet, which had been recognised by the _Times_, and in many other quarters, as a more than ordinary paper, and Prince Bismarck, like all great diplomatists, _prend son bien ou il le trouve_. In any case this remains true, that that which formed the settling argument of Germany, found at the time expression in my pamphlet and in the Chancellor's speech. We made soon after a visit to the Rev. Dean and Mrs. Carrington, in Bocking, Essex. They had a fair daughter, Eva, then quite a girl, who has since become well known as a writer, and is now the Countess Cesaresco Martinengro--an Italian name, and not Romany-Gypsy, as its terminations would seem to indicate. There is in the village of Bocking, at a corner, a curious and very large grotesque figure of oak, which was evidently in the time of Elizabeth a pilaster in some house-front. My friend Edwards, who was wont to roam all over England in a mule-waggon etching and sketching, when in Bocking was informed by a rustic that this figure was the image of Harkiles (Hercules), a heathen god formerly worshipped in the old Catholic convent upon the hill, in the old times! From London we went in August, 1870, to Brighton, staying at first at the Albion Hotel. There, under the influence of fresh sea-air, long walks and drives in all the country round, I began to feel better, yet it was not for many weeks that I fairly recovered. A chemist named Phillips, who supplied me with bromide of potass, suggested to me, to his own loss, that I took a great deal too much. I left it off altogether, substituting pale ale. Finding this far better, I asked Mr. Phillips if he could not prepare for me _lupulin_, or the anodyne of hops. He laughed, and said, "Do you find the result required in ale?" I answered, "Yes." "And do you like ale?" "Yes." "Then," he answered, "why don't you _drink_ ale?" And I did, but before I took it up my very vitality seemed to be well-nigh exhausted with the bromide. Samuel Laing, M.P., the chairman of the Brighton Railway, had at that time a house in Brighton, with several sons and daughters, the latter of whom have all been very remarkable for beauty and accomplishments. In this home there was a hospitality so profuse, so kind, so brilliant and refined, that I cannot really remember to have ever seen it equalled, and as we fully participated in it at all times in every form, I should feel that I had omitted the deepest claim to my gratitude if I did not here acknowledge it. Mr. Laing was or is of a stock which deeply appealed to my sympathies, for he is the son of the famous translator of the _Heimskringla_, a great collection of Norse sagas, which I had read, and in which he himself somewhat aided. Of late years, since he has retired from more active financial business, Mr. Laing has not merely turned his attention to literature; he has deservedly distinguished himself by translating, as I may say, into the clearest and most condensed or succinct and lucid English ever written, so as to be understood by the humblest mind, the doctrines of Darwin, Huxley, and the other leading scientific minds of the day. Heine in his time received a great deal of credit for having thus acted as the flux and furnace by which the ore of German philosophy was smelted into pure gold for general circulation; but I, who have translated all that Heine wrote on this subject, declare that he was at such work as far inferior to Samuel Laing as a mere verbal description of a beautiful face is inferior to a first-class portrait. This family enters so largely into my reminiscences and experiences, that a chapter would hardly suffice to express all that I can recall of their hospitality for years, of the dinners, hunts, balls, excursions, and the many distinguished people whom I have met under their roof. It is worth noting of Mr. Laing's daughters, that Mary, now Mrs. Kennard, is at the head of the sporting-novel writers; that the beautiful Cecilia, now Mrs. MacRae, was pronounced by G. H. Lewes, who was no mean judge, to be the first amateur pianiste in England; while the charming "Floy," or Mrs. Kennedy, is a very able painter. With their two very pretty sisters, they formed in 1870 as brilliant, beautiful, and accomplished a quintette as England could have produced. One day Mr. Laing organised an excursion with a special train to Arundel Castle. By myself at other times I found my way to Lewes and other places rich in legendary lore. Of this latter I recall something worth telling. Harold, the conquered Saxon king, had a son, and the conqueror William had a daughter, Gundrada. The former became a Viking pirate, and in his old age a monk, and was buried in a church, now a Presbyterian chapel. There his epitaph may be read in fine bold lettering, still distinct. That man is dear to me. Gundrada married, died, and was buried in a church with a fine Norman tombstone over her remains. The church was levelled with the ground, but the slab was preserved here and there about Lewes as a relic. When the railway was built, about 1849, there was discovered, where the church had been, the bones of Gundrada and her husband in leaden coffins distinctly inscribed with their names. A very beautiful Norman chapel was then built to receive the coffins, and over them is placed the original memorial in black marble. There is also in Lewes an archaeological museum appropriately bestowed in an old Gothic tower. All of which things did greatly solace me. As did also the Norman or Gothic churches of Shoreham, Newport, the old manor of Rottingdean, and the marvellous Devil's Dyke, which was probably a Roman fort, and from which it is said that fifty towns or villages may be seen "far in the blue." One day I went with my wife and two ladies to visit the latter. The living curiosity of the place was a famous old gypsy woman named Gentilla Cooper, a pure blood or real _Kalorat_ Romany. I had already in America studied Pott's "Thesaurus of Gypsy Dialects," and picked up many phrases of the tongue from the works of Borrow, Simson, and others. The old dame tackled us at once. As soon as I could, I whispered in her ear an improvised rhyme:-- "The bashno and kani, The rye and the rani, Hav'd akai 'pre o boro lon pani." Which means that the cock and the hen, the gentleman and the lady, came hither across the great salt water. The effect on the gypsy was startling; she fairly turned pale. Hustling the ladies away to one side to see a beautiful view, she got me alone and hurriedly exclaimed, "_Rya_--master! _be_ you one of our people?" with much more. We became very good friends, and this little incident had in time for me great results, and many strange experiences of gypsy life. There live in Brighton two ladies, Miss Horace Smith and her sister Rosa, who were and are well known in the cultured world. They are daughters of Horace Smith, who, with his brother James, wrote the "Rejected Addresses." Their reminiscences of distinguished men are extremely varied and interesting. The elder sister possesses an album to which Thackeray contributed many verses and pen-sketches. Their weekly receptions were very pleasant; at them might be seen most of the literary or social celebrities who came to Brighton. A visit there was like living a chapter in a book of memoirs and reminiscences. I have had, if it be only a quiet, and not very eventful or remarkable, at least a somewhat varied life, and the Laings and Smiths, with their surroundings, form two of its most interesting varieties. I believe they never missed an opportunity to do us or any one a kindly act, to aid us to make congenial friends, or the like. How many good people there really are in the world! Of these ladies the author of "Gossip of the Century" writes:-- "Horace Smith's two daughters are still living, and in Brighton. Their very pleasant house is frequented by the best and most interesting kind of society, affording what may be called a _salon_, that rare relic of ancient literary taste and cementer of literary intimacies--a salon which the cultivated consider it a privilege to frequent, and where these ladies receive with a grace and geniality which their friends know how to appreciate. It is much to be regretted that gatherings of this description seem to be becoming rarer every year, for as death disturbs them society seems to lack the spirit or the good taste, or the ability, to replace them." Brighton is a very pleasant place, because it combines the advantages of a seaside resort with those of a clean and cheerful city. Walking along the front, you have a brave outlook to the blue sea on one hand, and elegant shop-windows and fine hotels on the other. A little back in the town on a hill is the fine old fifteenth-century church of St. Nicholas, in which there is perhaps the most curious carved Norman font in England; but all this is known to so few visitors, that I feel as if I were telling a great secret in letting it out. Smith's book-store on the Western Road, and Bohn's near the station, are kept by very well-informed and very courteous men. I have been much indebted to the former in many ways, and found by his aid many a greatly needed and rare work. When I first went to Brighton there was one evening a brilliant aurora borealis. As I looked at it, I heard an Englishman say, to my great amazement, it was the first time he had ever seen one in his life! I once saw one in America of such extraordinary brilliancy and duration, that it prolonged the daylight for half an hour or more, till I became amazed, and then found it was a Northern Light. It lasted till sunrise in all its splendour. I have taken down from Algonkin Indians several beautiful legends relating to them. In one, the Milky Way is the girdle of a stupendous deity, and the Northern Lights the splendid gleams emitted by his ball when playing. In another, the narrator describes him as clad in an ineffable glory of light, and in colours unknown on earth! And this reminds me further that I have just read in the newspapers of the death of Edwin Booth, who was born during the famous star shower of 1833, which phenomenon I witnessed from beginning to end, and remember as if it were only yesterday. Now, I was actually dreaming that I was in a room in which _cigars_ were flying about in every direction, when my father came and woke me and my brother Henry, to come and see an exceeding great marvel. There were for a long time many thousands of stars at once in the sky, all shooting, as it were, or converging towards a centre. They were not half so long as the meteors which we see; one or two had a crook or bend in the middle, _e.g._ {The meteor pattern: p409.jpg} The next day I was almost alone at school in the glory of having seen it, for so few people were awake in sober Philadelphia at three in the morning that one of the newspapers ridiculed the whole story. I can distinctly recall that the next day, at Mr. Alcott's, I read through a very favourite work of mine, a translation of the German _Das Mahrchen ohne Ende_--"The Story without an End." All kinds of odd fish came to Brighton, floating here and there; but two of the very oddest were encountered by me in it on my last visit. I was looking into a chemist's window, when two well-dressed and decidedly jolly feminines, one perhaps of thirty years, and the other much younger and quite pretty, paused by me, while the elder asked-- "Are you looking for a hair-restorer?" "I am not, though I fear I need one much more than you do." "The search for a good hair-restorer," she replied in Italian, "is as vain as the search for happiness." "True," I answered in the same tongue, "and unless you have the happiness in you, or a beautiful head of hair like yours already growing on you, you will find neither." "What we _forget_," added the younger in Spanish, "is the best part of our happiness." "_Senorita_, _parece que no ha olvidado su Espanol_--The young lady appears not to have forgotten her Spanish--I replied. (Mine is not very good.) "There is no use asking whether _you_ talk French," said the elder. "_Konnen Sie auch Deutsch sprechen_?" "_Ja wohl_! Even worse than German itself," I answered. Just then there came up to us a gypsy girl whom I knew, with a basket of flowers, and asked me in Gypsy to buy some; but I said, "_Parraco pen_, _ja vri_, _mandy kams kek ruzhia kedivvus_"--Thank you, sister, no flowers to-day--and she darted away. "Did you understand _that_?" I inquired. "No; what was it?" "_Gitano_--gypsy." "But how in Heaven's name," cried the girl, "could she _know_ that _you_ spoke Gitano?" "Because I am," I replied slowly and grimly, "the chief of all the gypsies in England, the _boro Romany rye_ and President of the Gypsy Society. Subscription one pound per annum, which entitles you to receive the journal for one year, and includes postage. Behold in me the gypsy king, whom all know and fear! I shall be happy to put your names down as subscribers." At this appalling announcement, which sounded like an extract from a penny dreadful, my two romantic friends looked absolutely bewildered. They seemed as if they had read in novels how mysterious gypsy chiefs cast aside their cloaks, revealing themselves to astonished maidens, and as I had actually spoken Gitano to a gypsy in their hearing, it must be so. They had come for wool with all their languages, poor little souls! and gone back shorn. The elder said something about their having just come to Brighton for six hours' frolic, and so they departed. They had had their spree. I have often wondered what under the sun they could have been. Attaches of an opera company--ladies'-maids who had made the grand tour--who knows? A mad world, my masters! I can recall of that first year, as of many since at Brighton, long breezy walks on the brow of the chalk cliffs, looking out at the blue sea white capped, or at the downs rolling inland to Newport, sometimes alone, at times in company. On all this chalk the grass does not grow to more than an inch or so in length, and as the shortest, tenderest food is best for sheep, it is on this that they thrive--I believe by millions--yielding the famous South Downs mutton. In or on this grass are incredible numbers of minute snails, which the sheep are said to devour; in fact, I do not see how they could eat the grass without taking them in, and these contribute to give the mutton its delicate flavour. Snails are curious beings. Being epicene, they conduct their wooings on the mutual give and take principle, which would save human beings a great deal of spasmodic flirtation, and abolish the whole _femme incomprise_ business, besides a great many bad novels, if we could adopt it. When winter comes, half-a- dozen of them retire into a hole in a bank, connect themselves firmly into a loving band like a bunch of grapes by the tenderest ties, and stay there till spring. Finally, in folk-lore the snail is an uncanny or demoniac being, because it has horns. Its shell is an amulet, and the presentation of one by a lady to a gentleman is a very decided declaration of love, especially in Germany. _Sed mittamus haec_. At this time, and for some time to come, I was engaged in collecting and correcting a book of poems of a more serious character than the "Breitmann Ballads." This was "The Music Lesson of Confucius and other Poems." Of which book I can say truly that it had a _succes d'estime_, though it had a very small sale. There were in it ten or twelve ballads only which were adapted to singing, and _all_ of these were set to music by Carlo Pinsutti, Virginia Gabriel, or others. There was in it a poem entitled "On Mount Meru." In this the Creator is supposed to show the world when it was first made to Satan. The adversary finds that all is fit and well, save "the being called Man," who seems to him to be the worst and most incongruous. To which the Demiurgus replies that Man will in the end conquer all things, even the devil himself. And at the last the demon lies dying at the feet of God, and confesses that "Man, thy creature hath vanquished me for ever--_Vicisti Galilaee_!" Some years after I read a work by a French writer in which this same idea of God and the devil is curiously carried out and illustrated by the history of architecture. And as in the case of the letter from Lord Lytton Bulwer, warm praise from other persons of high rank in the literary world and reviews, I had many proofs that these poems had made a favourable impression. The only exception which I can recall was a very sarcastic review in the _Athenaeum_, in which the writer declared his belief that the poems or Legends of Perfumes in the book were originally written as advertisements of some barber or tradesman, and being by him rejected as worthless, had been thrown back on my hands! Other works by me it treated kindly--so it goes in this world--like a recipe for a cement which I have just copied into my great work on "Mending and Repairing"--in which vinegar is combined with sugar. While at Brighton we met Louis Blanc, whom we had previously seen several times at the Trubners', in London. In Brighton he heard the news of the overthrow of the Empire and departed for Paris. At Christmas we went to London to visit the Trubners, and thence to the Langham Hotel, where we remained till July. I recall very little of what I witnessed or did beyond seeing the Queen prorogue Parliament and translating Scheffel's _Gaudeamus_, a little volume of German humorous poems. Scheffel, as I have before written, was an old _Mitkneipant_, or evening-beer companion of mine in Heidelberg. In July we made up a travelling party with Mrs. S. Laing and her daughters Cecilia and Floy, and departed for a visit to the Rhine--that is to say, these ladies preceded us, and we joined them at the Hotel des Quatre Saisons in Homburg. It was a very brilliant season, for the German Emperor, fresh with the glory of his great victory, was being _feted_ everywhere, and Homburg the brilliant was not behind the German world in this respect. I saw the great man frequently, near and far, and was much impressed with his appearance. _Punch_ had not long before represented him as Hans Breitmann in a cartoon, deploring that he had not squeezed more milliards out of the French, and I indeed found in the original very closely my ideal of Hans, who always occurs to me as a German gentleman, who drinks, fights, and plunders, not as a mere rowdy, raised above his natural sphere, but as a rough cavalier. And that the great-bearded giant Emperor Wilhelm did drink heavily, fight hard, and mulct France mightily, is matter of history. This was the last year of the gaming-tables at Homburg. Apropos of these, the roulette-table was placed in the Homburg Museum, where it may be seen amid many Roman relics. Two or three years ago, while I was in the room, there came in a small party of English or Yankee looking or gazing tourists, to whom the attendant pointed out the roulette-table. "And did the old Romans really play at roulette, and was _that_ one of their tables?" said the leader of the visitors. This ready simple faith indicates the Englishman. The ordinary American is always possessed with the conviction that everything antique is a forgery. Once when I was examining the old Viking armour in the Museum of Copenhagen, a Yankee, in whose face a general vulgar distrust of all earthly things was strongly marked, came up to me and asked, "Do you believe that all these curiosities air _genooine_?" "I certainly do," I replied. With an intensely self-satisfied air he rejoined, "I guess you can't fool _me_ with no such humbug." There was a great deal of cholera that year in Germany, and I had a very severe attack of it either in an incipient form or something thereunto allied: suffice it to say that for twelve hours I almost thought I should die of pure pain. I took in vain laudanum, cayenne pepper, brandy, camphor, and kino--nothing would remain. At last, at midnight, when I was beginning to despair, or just as I felt like being wrecked, I succeeded in keeping a little weak laudanum and water on my stomach, and then the point was cleared. After that I took the other remedies, and was soon well. But it was a crisis of such fearful suffering that it all remains vividly impressed on my memory. I do not know whether any sensible book has ever been written on the moral influence of pain, but it is certain that a wonderful one might be. So far as I can understand it, I think that in the vast majority of cases it is an evil, or one of Nature's innumerable mistakes or divagations, not as yet outgrown or corrected; and it is the great error of Buddhistic-Christianity that it _accepts_ pain not merely as inevitable, but glorifies and increases it, instead of making every conceivable exertion to _diminish_ it. Herein clearly lies the difference between Science and Religion. Science strives in every way to alleviate pain and suffering; erroneous "Religion" is based on it. During the Middle Ages, the Church did all in its power to hinder, if not destroy, the healing art. It made anatomy of the human body a crime, and carried its precautions so far that, quite till the Reformation, the art of healing (as Paracelsus declares) was chiefly in the hands of witches and public executioners. _Torturers_, chiefly clergymen such as Grillandus, were in great honour, while the healing leech was disreputable. It was not, as people say, "the age" which caused all this--it was the result of religion based on crucifixion and martyrdoms and pain--in fact, on that element of _torture_ which we are elsewhere taught, most inconsistently, is the special province of the devil in hell. The _cant_ of this still survives in Longfellow's "Suffer and be strong," and in the pious praise of endurance of pain. What the world wants is the hope held out to it, or enforced on it as a religion or conviction, that pain and suffering are to be diminished, and that our chief duty should consist in diminishing them, instead of always praising or worshipping them as a cross! We left our friends and went for a short time to Switzerland, where we visited Lucerne, Interlaken, Basle, and Berne. Thence we returned to London and the Langham Hotel. This was at that time under the management of Mr. John Sanderson, an American, whom I had known of old. He was a brother of Professor Sanderson, of Philadelphia, who wrote a remarkably clever work entitled _The American in Paris_. John Sanderson himself had contributed many articles to Appletons' _Cyclopaedia_, belonged to the New York Century Club, and, like all the members of his family, had culture in music and literary taste. While he managed the Langham it was crowded during all the year, as indeed any decent hotel almost anywhere may be by simple proper liberal management. This is a subject which I have studied _au fond_, having read _Das Hotel wesen der Gegenwart_, a very remarkable work, and passed more than twenty years of my life in hotels in all countries. I can remember that during the first year of my residence in England I tried to persuade a chemist to import from South America the _coca_ leaf, of which not an ounce was then consumed in Europe. Weston the walker brought it into fashion "later on." I had heard extraordinary and authentic accounts of its enabling Indian messengers to run all day from a friend who had employed them. Apropos of this, "I do recall a wondrous pleasant tale." My cousin, Godfrey Davenport, a son of the Uncle Seth mentioned in my earlier life, owned what was regarded as the model plantation of Louisiana. My brother Henry visited him one winter, and while there was kindly treated by a very genial, hospitable neighbouring planter, whom I afterwards met at my father's house in Philadelphia. He was a good-looking, finely-formed man, lithe and active as a panther--the _replica_ of Albert Pike's "fine Arkansas gentleman." And here I would fain disquisit on Pike, but type and time are pressing. Well, this gentleman had one day a difference of opinion with another planter, who was, like himself, a great runner, and drawing his bowie knife, pursued him on the run, _twenty-two miles_, ere he "got" his victim. The distance was subsequently measured and verified by the admiring neighbours, who put up posts in commemoration of such an unparalleled pedestrian feat. When I returned to Brighton, after getting into lodgings, I began to employ or amuse myself in novel fashion. Old Gentilla Cooper, the gypsy, had an old brother named Matthias, a full-blood Romany, of whom all his people spoke as being very eccentric and wild, but who had all his life a fancy for picking up the old "Egyptian" tongue. I engaged him to come to me two or three times a week, at half-a-crown a visit, to give me lessons in it. As he had never lived in houses, and, like Regnar Lodbrog, had never slept under a fixed roof, unless when he had taken a nap in a tavern or stable, and finally, as his whole life had been utterly that of a gypsy in the roads, at fairs, or "by wood and wold as outlaws wont to do," I found him abundantly original and interesting. And as on account of his eccentricity and amusing gifts he had always been welcome in every camp or tent, and was watchful withal and crafty, there was not a phase, hole, or corner of gypsy life or a member of the fraternity with which or whom he was not familiar. I soon learned his jargon, with every kind of gypsy device, dodge, or peculiar custom, and, with the aid of several works, succeeded in drawing from the recesses of his memory an astonishing number of forgotten words. Thus, to begin with, I read to him aloud the Turkish Gypsy Dictionary of Paspati. When he remembered or recognised a word, or it recalled another, I wrote it down. Then I went through the vocabularies of Liebrich, Pott, Simson, &c., and finally through Brice's Hindustani Dictionary and the great part of a much larger work, and one in Persian. The reader may find most of the results of Matty's teaching in my work entitled "The English Gypsies and their Language." Very often I went with my professor to visit the gypsies camped about Brighton, far or near, and certainly never failed to amuse myself and pick up many quaint observations. In due time I passed to that singular state when I could never walk a mile or two in the country anywhere without meeting or making acquaintance with some wanderer on the highways, by use of my newly-acquired knowledge. Thus, I needed only say, "Seen any of the Coopers or Bosvilles lately on the drum?" (road), or "Do you know Sam Smith?" &c., to be recognised as one of the grand army in some fashion. Then it was widely rumoured that the Coopers had got a _rye_, or master, who spoke Romany, and was withal not ungenerous, so that in due time there was hardly a wanderer of gypsy kind in Southern England who had not heard of me. And though there are thousands of people who are more thoroughly versed in Society than I am, I do not think there are many so much at home in such extremely _varied_ phases of it as I have been. I have sat in a gypsy camp, like one of them, hearing all their little secrets and talking familiarly in Romany, and an hour after dined with distinguished people; and this life had many other variations, and they came daily for many years. My gypsy experiences have not been so great as those of Francis H. Groome (once a pupil and _protege_ of Benfey), or the Grand Duke Josef of Hungary, or of Dr. Wlislocki, but next after these great masters, and as an all-round gypsy rye in many lands, I believe that I am not far behind any _aficionado_ who has as yet manifested himself. To become intimate, as I did in time, during years in Brighton, off and on, with all the gypsies who roamed the south of England, to be beloved of the old fortune-tellers and the children and mothers as I was, and to be much in tents, involves a great deal of strangely picturesque rural life, night-scenes by firelight, in forests and by river-banks, and marvellously odd reminiscences of other days. There was a gypsy child who knew me so well that the very first words she could speak were "_O 'omany 'i_" (O Romany rye), to the great delight of her parents. After a little while I found that the _Romany_ element was spread strangely and mysteriously round about among the rural population in many ways. I went one day with Francis H. Groome to Cobham Fair. As I was about to enter a tavern, there stood near by three men whose faces and general appearance had nothing of the gypsy, but as I passed one said to the other so that I could hear-- "_Dikk adovo rye_, _se o Romany rye_, _yuv_, _tacho_!" (Look at that gentleman; he is a gypsy gentleman, sure!) I naturally turned my head hearing this, when he burst out laughing, and said-- "I told you I'd make him look round." Once I was startled at hearing a well-dressed, I may say a gentlemanly- looking man, seated in a gig with a fine horse stopping by the road, say, as I passed with my wife-- "_Dikk adovo gorgio adoi_!" (Look at that Gentile, of no-gypsy!) Not being accustomed to hear myself called a _gorgio_, I glanced up at him angrily, when he, perceiving that I understood him and was of the mysterious brotherhood, smiled, and touched his hat to me. One touch of nature makes the whole world grin. But the drollest proposal ever made to me in serious earnest came from that indomitable incarnate old _gypssissimus Tsingarorum_, Matthew Cooper, who proposed that I should buy a donkey. He knew where to get one for a pound, but 2 pounds 10s. would buy a "stunner." He would borrow a small cart and a tent, and brown my face and hands so that I would be dark enough, and then on the _drum_--"over the hills." As for all the expenses of the journey, I need not spend anything, for he could provide a neat nut-brown maid, who would not only do all our cooking, but earn money enough by fortune-telling to support us all. I would be expected, however, to greatly aid by my superior knowledge of ladies and gentlemen; and so all would go merrily on, with unlimited bread and cheese, bacon and ale, and tobacco--into the blue away! I regret to say that Matthew expected to inherit the donkey. About this time, as all my friends went hunting once or twice a week, I determined to do the same. Now, as I had never been a good rider, and had anything but an English seat in the saddle, I went to a riding-school and underwent a thorough course both on the pig-skin and bare-backed. My teacher, Mr. Goodchild, said eventually of me that I was the only person whom he had ever known who had at my time of life learned to ride well. But to do this I gave my whole mind and soul to it; and Goodchild's standard, and still more that of his riding-master, who had been a captain in a cavalry regiment, was very high. I used to feel quite as if I were a boy again, and one under pretty severe discipline at that, when the Captain was drilling me. For his life he could not treat his pupils otherwise than as recruits. "Sit up straighter, sir! Do you call _that_ sitting up? _That's_ not the way to hold your arms! Knees in! Why, sir, when I was learning to ride I was made to put shillings between my knees and the side, and if I dropped one _I forfeited it_!" Then in due time came the meets, and the fox and hare hunting, during which I found my way, I believe, into every village or nook for twenty miles round. By this time I had forgotten all my troubles, mental or physical, and after riding six or seven hours in a soft fog, would come home the picture of health. I remember that one very cold morning I was riding alone to the meet on a monstrous high black horse which Goodchild had bought specially for me, when I met two gypsy women, full blood, selling wares, among them woollen mittens--just what I wanted, for my hands were almost frozen in Paris kids. The women did not know me, but I knew them by description, and great was the amazement of one when I addressed her by name and in Romany. "_Pen a mandy_, _Priscilla Cooper_, _sa buti me sosti del tute for adovo pustini vashtini_?" (Tell me, Priscilla Cooper, how much should I give you for those woollen gloves?) "Eighteen pence, master." The common price was ninepence. "I will _not_ give you eighteen pence," I replied. "Then how much _will_ you give, master?" asked Priscilla. "_Four shillings_ will I give, and not a penny less--_miri pen_--you may take it or leave it." I went off with the gloves, while the women roared out blessings in Romany. There was something in the whole style of the gift, or the _manner_ of giving it, which was specially gratifying to gypsies, and the account thereof soon spread far and wide over the roads as a beautiful deed. The fraternity of the roads is a strange thing. Once when I lived at Walton there was an old gypsy woman named Lizzie Buckland who often camped near us. A good and winsome young lady named Lillie Doering had taken a liking to the old lady, and sent her a nice Christmas present of clothing, tea, &c., which was sent to me to give to the Egyptian mother. But when I went to seek her, she had flown over the hills and far away. It made no difference. I walked on till I met a perfect stranger to me, a woman, but "evidently a traveller." "Where is old Liz?" I asked. "Somewhere about four miles beyond Moulsey." "I've got a present for her; are you going that way?" "Not exactly, but I'll take it to her; a few miles don't signify." I learned that it had gone from hand to hand and been safely delivered. It seems a strange way to deliver valuables, to walk forth and give them to the first tramp whom you meet; but I knew my people. I may here say that during this and the previous winter I had practised wood-carving. In which, as in studying Gypsy, I had certain ultimate aims, which were fully developed in later years. I have several times observed in this record that when I get an idea I cherish it, think it over, and work it up. Out of this wood-carving and _repousse_ and the designing which it involved I in time developed ideas which led to what I may fairly call a great result. We remained at Brighton until February, when we went to London and stayed at the Langham Hotel. Then began the London life of visits, dinners, and for me, as usual, of literary work. In those days I began to meet and know Professor E. H. Palmer, Walter Besant, Walter H. Pollock, and many other men of the time of whom I shall anon have more to say. I arranged with Mr. Trubner as to the publication of "The English Gypsies." I think it was at this time that I dined one evening at Sir Charles Dilke's, where a droll incident took place. There was present a small Frenchman, to whom I had not been introduced, and whose name therefore I did not know. After dinner in the smoking-room I turned over with this gentleman a very curious collection of the works of Blake, which were new to him. Finding that he evidently knew something about art, I explained to him that Blake was a very strange visionary--that he believed that the spirits of the dead appeared to him, and that he took their portraits. "_C'etait donc un fou_," remarked the Frenchman. "_Non_, Monsieur," I replied, "he was not a madman. He was almost a genius. Indeed, _c'etait un Dore manque_" (he was all but a Dore). There was a roar of laughter from all around, and I, innocently supposing that I had said something clever unawares, laughed too. After all had departed, and I was smoking alone with Sir Charles, he said-- "Well, what did you think of Dore?" "Dore!" I replied astonished, "why, I never saw Dore in all my life." "That was Dore to whom you were talking," he answered. "Ah! well," was my answer, "then it is all right." I suppose that Dore believed that I knew at the time who he was. Had he been aware that I did not know who he was, the compliment would have seemed much stronger. I have either been introduced to, conversed with, or been well acquainted at one time or another with Sir John Millais, Holman Hunt, the Rossettis, Frith, Whistler, Poynter, Du Maurier, Charles Keene, Boughton, Hodges, Tenniel (who set my motive of "Ping-Wing," as I may say, to music in a cartoon in _Punch_), the Hon. John Collier, Riviere, Walter Crane, and of course many more--or less--here and there in the club, or at receptions. Could I have then foreseen or imagined that I should ever become--albeit in a very humble grade--an artist myself, and that my works on design and the minor arts would form the principal portion of my writings and of my life's work, I should assuredly have made a greater specialty of such society. But at this time I could hardly draw, save in very humble fashion indeed, and little dreamed that I should execute for expensive works illustrations which would be praised by my critics, as strangely happened to my "Gypsy Sorcery." But we never know what may befall us. "Oh, little did my mother think, The day she cradled me, The lands that I should travel in, Or the sights that I should see; Or gae rovin' about wi' gypsy carles, And sic like companie." As the _Noctes_ varies it. For it actually came to pass that a very well- known man of letters, while he, with the refined politeness characteristic of his style, spoke of mine as "rigmarole," still praised my pictures. In April we went to Leamington to pay a visit to a Mr. Field, where we also met his brother, my old friend Leonard Field, whom I had known in Paris in 1848. During this, journey we visited Kenilworth, the town and castle of Warwick, Stratford-on-Avon, and all therewith connected. At the Easter spring-tide, when primroses first flush by running waters, and there are many long bright sunny days in the land, while birdes' songs do ripple in the aire, it is good roaming or resting in such a country, among old castles, towers, and hamlets quaint and grey. To him who can think and feel, it is like the reading of marvellously pleasant old books, some in Elizabethan type, some in earlier black letter, and hearing as we read sweet music and far-distant chimes. And apropos of this, I would remark that while I was at Princeton an idea fixed itself so firmly in my mind that to this day I live on it and act on it. It is this:--There is a certain stage to be reached in reading and reflection, especially if it be aided by broad aesthetic culture and science, when every landscape, event, or human being is or may be to us exactly the same as a _book_. For everything in this world which can be understood and felt can be described, and whatever can be described may be written and printed. For ordinary people, no ideas are distinct or concentrated or "literary" till they are in black and white; but the scholar or artist in words puts thoughts into as clear a form in his own mind. Having deeply meditated on this idea for forty years, and been constantly occupied in realising it, I can say truly that I _often_ compose or think books or monographs which, though not translated into type, are as absolutely _literature_ to me as if they were. There is so _much_ more in this than will at first strike most readers, that I can not help dwelling on it. It once happened to me in Philadelphia, in 1850, to pass _all_ the year--in fact, nearly two years--"in dusky city pent," and during all that time I never got a glimpse of the country. As a director of the Art Union, I was continually studying pictures, landscapes by great artists, and the like. The second year, when I went up into Pennsylvania, I found that I had strangely developed what practically amounted to a kind of pseudophia. Every fragment of rural scenery, every rustic "bit," every group of shrubs or weeds, everything, in fact, which recalled pictures, or which could itself be pictured, appeared to me to be a picture perfectly executed. This lasted as a vivid or real perception for about a week, but the memory of it has been in my mind ever since. It was not so much the beautiful in all Nature which I saw, as that in Nature which was within the power of the skilled artist to execute. In like manner the practised reflector and writer reads books in everything to a degree which no other person can understand. Wordsworth attained this stage, and the object of the "Excursion" is to teach it. In the "Letters of James Smetham" there is a passage to the effect that he felt extremely happy among English hedgerows, and found inexhaustible delight in English birds, trees, flowers, hills, and brooks, but could not appreciate his little back-garden with a copper-beech, a weeping-ash, nailed-up rose trees, and twisting creepers. After I had made a habit, till it became a passion, of seeking decorative motives, strange and novel curves--in short, began to detect the transcendent alphabet or written language of beauty and mystery in every plant whatever (of which the alphabet may be found in the works of Hulme), I found in every growth of every kind, yes, in every weed, enough to fill my soul with both art and poetry; I may say specially in weeds, since in them the wildest and most graceful motives are more abundant than in garden flowers. Unto me _now_ anything that grows is, in simple truth, more than what any landscape once was. This began in youth in much reading of, and long reflection on, the signatures, correspondences, and mystical fancies of the Paracelsian writers--especially of Gaffarel, of whom I have a Latin version by me as I write--and of late years I have carried its inspiration into decorative art. I have said so much of this because, as this is an autobiography, I cannot omit from it something which, unseen in actions, still forms a predominant motive in my life. It is something which, while it perfectly embraces _all_ landscaping or picture-making or dainty delicate cataloguing in poetry, _a la_ Morris at times, or like the Squyre of Lowe Degre, in detail, also involves a far more earnest feeling, and one which combines thought or _religion_ with emotion, just as a melody which we associate with a beautiful poem is worth more to us than one which we do not. Burne Jones is a higher example of this. During this season we met at Mrs. Inwood Jones'--who was a niece of Lady Morgan and had many interesting souvenirs of her aunt--several people of note, among whom was Mme. Taglioni, now a very agreeable and graceful though naturally elderly lady. I was charmed with her many reminiscences of well-known characters, and as I had seen her as well as Ellsler and all the great _ballerine_ many times, we had many conferences. Somebody said to her one day, "So you know Mr. Leland?" "Yes," replied Taglioni in jest, "he was one of my old lovers." This was reported to me, when I said, "I wish she had told me that thirty years sooner." In 1846 Taglioni owned three palaces in Venice, one of them the Ca' d'oro, and in 1872 she was giving lessons in London. At Mrs. Frank Hill's I made the acquaintance of the marvellously clever Eugene Schuyler, and at Mr. Smalley's of the equally amazingly cheeky and gifted "Joaquin" Miller. Somewhere else I met several times another curious celebrity whom I had known in America, the Chevalier Wykoff. Though he was almost the type and proverb of an adventurer, I confess that I always liked him. He was gentlemanly and kind in his manner, and agreeable and intelligent in conversation. Though he had been Fanny Ellsler's agent or secretary, and written those two curiously cool works, "Souvenirs of a Roving Diplomatist" (he had been employed by Palmerston) and "My Courtship and its Consequences" (in reference to his having been imprisoned in Italy for attempting to carry off an elderly heiress), he was also the author of a really admirable work on the political system of the United States, which any man may read to advantage. A century ago or more he would have been a great man in his way. He knew everybody. I believe that as General Tevis formed his bold ideal of life from much reading of _condottieri_ or military adventurers, and Robert Hunt from Cooper's novels, so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career from studying and admiring the diplomatic _parvenus_ of Queen Anne's time. These _Bohemiens de la haute volee_, who drew their first motives from study, are by far more interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate type. One summer when I was at Bateman's, near Newport, with G. H. Boker, Robert Leroy, and our wives, Leroy reported one day that he had seen Wykoff, Hiram Fuller, a certain very dashing _prima donna_, and two other notorieties sitting side by side in a row on the steps of the Ocean House. I remarked that if there had only been with them the devil and Lola Montez, the party would have been complete. Leroy was famous for his quaint _mots_, in which he had a counterpart in "Tom Appleton," of Boston, whom I also knew very well. The Appletoniana and Leroyalties which were current in the Sixties would make a lively book. I remember that one evening at a dinner at Trubner's in this year there were present M. Van der Weyer, G. H. Lewes, and M. Delepierre. I have rarely heard so much good talk in the same time. Thoughts so gay and flashes so refined, such a mingling of choice literature, brilliant anecdote, and happy jests, are seldom heard as I heard them. _Tempi passati_! Apropos of George H. Boker and Leroy, I may here remark that they were both strikingly tall and _distingue_ men, but that when they dressed themselves for bass-fishing, and "put on mean attire," they seemed to be common fisher-folk. One day, while fishing on the rocks, there came up the elegant _prima donna_ referred to, who, seeing that they had very fine lobsters, ordered them to be taken to the hotel for her. "Can't do it, ma'am," answered Leroy brusquely; "we want them for bait." The lady swept away indignantly. To her succeeded Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not know them personally, and who began to put to Mr. Boker questions as to his earnings and his manner of life, to all of which Mr. Boker replied with great _naivete_. Mr. B., however, had on his pole a silver reel, which had cost 30 pounds ($150), and at last Mr. Emerson's eye rested on that, and word no more spoke he, but, with a smile and bowing very politely, went his road. _Ultimam dixit salutem_. One evening I was sitting in the smoking-room of the Langham Hotel, when an American said to me, "I hear that Charles Leland, who wrote 'Breitmann,' is staying here." "Yes, that is true," I replied. "Could you point him out to me?" asked the stranger. "I will do so with pleasure--in fact, if you will tell me your name, I think I can manage to introduce you." The American was very grateful for this, and asked when it would be. "_Now_ is the time," I said, "for I am he." On another occasion another stranger told me, that having heard that Mr. Leland was in the smoking-room, he had come in to see him, and asked me to point him out. I pointed to myself, at which he was much astonished, and then, apologetically and half ashamed, said, "Who do you really suppose, of all the men here present, I had settled on as being you?" I could not conjecture, when he pointed to a great broom-bearded, broad-shouldered, jovial, intemperate, German-looking man, and said, "There! I thought that must be the author of 'Hans Brietmann.'" Which suggested to me the idea, "Does the public, then, generally believe that poets look like their heroes?" One can indeed imagine Longfellow as Poor Henry of the "Golden Legend," but few would expect to find the counterpart of Biglow in a Lowell. And yet this belief or instinct is in every case a _great_ compliment, for it testifies that there is that in the poem which is inspired by Nature and originality, and that it is not all mere art-work or artificial. And it is true that by some strange law, name, body, and soul generally do preserve some kind of unity in the realm of literature. There has never been, as yet, a really great Gubbins or Podgers in poetry, or Boggs in romance; and if literature has its Hogg, let it be remembered that the wild boar in all Northern sagas and chronicles, like the Eber in Germany, or the Wolf, was a name of pride and honour, as seen in Eberstein. The Whistler of St. Leonard's is one of the most eccentric and original of Scott's characters, and the Whistler of St. Luke's, or the patron saint of painting, is in no respect deficient in these noble qualifications. The Seven Whistlers who fly unseen by night, ever piping a wild nocturne, are the most uncanny of birds, while there is, to my mind, something absolutely grotesquely awful (as in many of "Dreadful Jemmy's" pictures) in the narration that in ancient days the immense army of the Mexican Indians marched forth to battle all whistling in unison--probably a symphony in blood-colour. Fancy half a million of Whistlers on the war-path, about to do battle to the death with as many Ruskins--I mean red-skins! _Nomen est omen_. One of the most charming persons whom I ever met in my life was the Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton, and one of the most delightful dinners at which my wife and I were ever present was at her house. As I had been familiar with her poems from my boyhood, I was astonished to find her still so beautiful and young--if my memory does not deceive me, I thought her far younger looking than myself. I owe her this compliment, for I can recall her speaking with great admiration of Mrs. Leland to Lord Houghton and "Bulwer." Mrs. Norton had not only a graceful, fascinating expression of figure and motion, but narrated everything so well as to cast a peculiar life and interest into the most trifling anecdote. I remember one of the latter. "Lord Houghton," she said, "calls you, Mr. Leland, the poet of jargons." (He indeed introduced me to all his guests once by this term.) "Jargon is a confusion of language, and I have a maid who lives in a jargon of ideas--as to values. The other day she broke to utter ruin an antique vase"--(I do not accurately recall what the object was)--"which cost four hundred pounds, and when I said that it was such a grief to me to lose it, she replied, while weeping, 'Oh, do not mind it, my lady; _I'll_ buy you just such another,' as if it were worth tenpence." Mrs. Norton had marvellously beautiful and expressive eyes, such as one seldom meets thrice in a life. As a harp well played inspires tears or the impulse to dance, so her glances conveyed, almost in the same instant, deep emotion and exquisite merriment. I remember that she was much amused with some of my American jests and reminiscences, and was always prompt to respond, _eodem genere_. So nightingale the wodewale answereth. During this season in London I met Thomas Carlyle. Our mutual friend, Moncure Conway, had arranged that I should call on the great writer at the house of the latter in Chelsea. I went there at about eleven in the morning, and when Mr. Carlyle entered the room I was amazed--I may say almost awed--by something which was altogether unexpected, and this was his _extraordinary_ likeness to my late father. A slight resemblance to Carlyle may be seen in my own profile, but had he been with my father, the pair might have passed for twins; and in iron-grey grimness and the never-to-be-convinced expression of the eyes they were identity itself. I can only remember that for the first twenty or thirty minutes Mr. Carlyle talked such a lot of skimble-skamble stuff and rubbish, which sounded like the very _debris_ and lees of his "Latter-Day Pamphlets," that I began to suspect that he was quizzing me, or that this was the manner in which he ladled out Carlyleism to visitors who came to be Carlyled and acted unto. It struck me as if Mr. Tennyson, bored with lion-hunting guests, had begun to repeat his poetry to them out of sheer sarcasm, or as if he felt, "Well, you've come to _see_ and _hear_ me--a poet--so take your poetry, and be d---d to you!" However, it may be I felt a coming wrath, and the Socratic demon or gypsy _dook_, which often rises in me on such occasions, and never deceives me, gave me a strong premonition that there was to be, if not an exemplary row, at least a lively incident which was to put a snapped end to this humbugging. It came thus. All at once Mr. Carlyle abruptly asked me, in a manner or with an intonation which sounded to me almost semi-contemptuous, "And what kind of an American may you be?" (I _think_ he said "will you be?") "German, or Irish, or what?" To which I replied, not over amiably:-- "Since it interests you, Mr. Carlyle, to know the origin of my family, I may say that I am descended from Henry Leland, whom the tradition declares to have been a noted Puritan, and active in the politics of his time,' and who went to America in 1636." To this Mr. Carlyle replied:-- "I doubt whether any of your family have since been equal to your old Puritan great-grandfather" (or "done anything to equal your old Puritan grandfather"). With this something to the effect that we had done nothing in America since Cromwell's Revolution, equal to it in importance or of any importance. Then a great rage came over me, and I remember _very_ distinctly that there flashed through my mind in a second the reflection, "Now, if I have to call you a d---d old fool for saying that, I _will_; but I'll be even with you." When as quickly the following inspiration came, which I uttered, and I suspect somewhat energetically:-- "Mr. Carlyle, I think that my brother, Henry Leland, who got the wound from which he died standing by my side in the war of the rebellion, fighting against slavery, was worth ten of my old Puritan ancestors; at least, he died in a ten times better cause. And" (here my old "Indian" was up and I let it out) "allow me to say, Mr. Carlyle, that I think that in all matters of historical criticism you are principally influenced by the merely melodramatic and theatrical." Here Mr. Carlyle, looking utterly amazed and startled, though not at all angry, said, for the first time, in broad Scotch-- "Whot's _thot_ ye say?" "I say, Mr. Carlyle," I exclaimed with rising wrath, "that I consider that in all historical judgments you are influenced only by the melodramatic and theatrical." A grim smile as of admiration came over the stern old face. Whether he really felt the justice of the hit I know not, but he was evidently pleased at the manner in which it was delivered, and it was with a deeply reflective and not displeased air that he replied, still in Scotch-- "Na, na, I'm nae _thot_." It was the terrier who had ferociously attacked the lion, and the lion was charmed. From that instant he was courteous, companionable, and affable, and talked as if we had been long acquainted, and as if he liked me. It occurred to me that the resemblance of Carlyle to my father during the row was appalling, the difference being that my father _never_ gave in. It would have been an awful sight to see and a sound to hear if the two could have "discussed" some subject on which they were equally informed--say the American tariff or slavery. After a while Mr. Froude the historian came in, and we all went out together for a walk in the Park. Pausing on the bridge, Mr. Carlyle called my attention to the very rural English character of a part of the scenery in the distance, where a church-spire rises over ranges of tree- tops. I observed that the smoke of a gypsy fire and a tent by a hedge was all that was needed. Then we began to talk about gypsies, and I told Mr. Carlyle that I could talk Romany, and ran on with some reminiscences, whereat, as I now recall, though I did not note it then, his amusement at or interest in me seemed to be much increased, as if I had unexpectedly turned out to be something a little out of the ordinary line of tourist interviewers; and truly in those days Romany ryes were not so common as they now are. Then Mr. Carlyle himself told a story, how his father--if I remember rightly--had once lent a large sum to or trusted a gypsy in some extraordinary manner. It befell in after days that the lender was himself in sore straits, when the gypsy took him by night to a hut, and digging up or lifting the _hard-stane_ or hearth-stone, took out a bag of guineas, which he transferred to his benefactor. We parted, and this was the only time I ever conversed with Mr. Carlyle, though I saw him subsequently on more than one occasion. He sent word specially by Mr. Conway to me that he would be pleased to have me call again; but "once bitten twice shy," and I had not so much enjoyed my call as to wish to repeat it. But I believe that what Mr. Carlyle absolutely needed above all things on earth was somebody to put on the gloves with him metaphorically about once a day, and give and take a few thumping blows; nor do I believe that he would have shrunk from a tussle _a la Choctaw_, with biting, gouging, tomahawk and scalper, for he had an uncommonly _dour_ look about the eyes, and must have been a magnificent fighter when once roused. But though I had not his vast genius nor wit, I had the great advantage of having often had very severe differences with my father, who was, I believe, as much Carlyled by Nature as Carlyle himself, if not more so, whereas it is morally impossible that the Sage of Chelsea could ever have found any one like himself to train under. But to Carlyle people in conversation requires constant practice with a master--_consuetudine quotidiana cum aliquo congredi_--and he had for so long a time knocked everybody down without meeting the least resistance, that victory had palled upon him, and he had, so to speak, "vinegared" on himself. With somebody to "sass him back," Carlyle would have been cured of the dyspepsia, and have lived twenty years longer. Carlyle's was and ever will be one of the greatest names in English literature, and it is very amusing to observe how the gossip-makers, who judge of genius by tittle-tattle and petty personal defects, have condemned him _in toto_ because he was not an angel to a dame who was certainly a bit of a _diablesse_. Thus I find in a late very popular collection the remark that-- "It is curious to note in the 'Life and Correspondence of Lord Houghton' the high estimation in which Carlyle was held by him. His regard and admiration cannot but seem exaggerated, now that we know so much of the Chelsea philosopher's real character." This is _quite_ the moral old lady, who used to think that Raphael was a good painter "till she read all about that nasty Fornarina." There was another hard old character with whom I became acquainted in those days, and one who, though not a Carlyle, still, like him, exercised in a peculiar way a great influence on English literature. This was George Borrow. I was in the habit of reading a great deal in the British Museum, where he also came, and there I was introduced to him. He was busy with a venerable-looking volume in old Irish and made the remark to me that he did not believe there was a man living who could read old Irish with ease (which I now observe to myself was "fished" out of Sir W. Betham). We discussed several gypsy words and phrases. I met him in the same place several times. He was a tall, large, fine-looking man, who must have been handsome in his youth. I knew at the time in London a Mr. Kerrison, who had been as a very young man, probably in the Twenties, very intimate with Borrow. He told me that one night Borrow acted very wildly, whooping and vociferating so as to cause the police to follow him, and after a long run led them to the edge of the Thames, "and there they thought they had him." But he plunged boldly into the water and swam in his clothes to the opposite shore, and so escaped. "For he fled o'er to t'other side, And so they could not find him; He swam across the flowing tide, And never looked behind him." About this time (1826?) George Borrow published a small book of poems which is now extremely rare. I have a copy of it. In it there is a lyric in which, with his usual effrontery, he describes a very clever, tall, handsome, accomplished man, who knows many languages and who can drink a pint of rum, ending with the remark that he himself was this admirable person. As Heine was in England at this time, it is not improbable that he met with this poem; but in any case, there is a resemblance between it and one of his own in the _Buch der Lieder_, which runs thus:-- "Brave man, he got me the food I ate, His kindness and care I can never forget, Yet I cannot kiss him, though other folk can, For I myself am this excellent man!" It came to pass that after a while I wrote my book on "The English Gypsies and their Language," and sent a note to Mr. Borrow in which I asked permission to dedicate it to him. I sent it to the care of Mr. Murray, who subsequently assured me that Mr. Borrow had actually received it. Now Mr. Borrow had written thirty years before some sketches and fragments on the same subject, which would, I am very certain, have remained unpublished to this day but for me. He received my note on Saturday--never answered it--and on Monday morning advertised in all the journals his own forthcoming work on the same subject. Now, what is sincere truth is, that when I learned this I laughed. I thought very little of my own work, and if Mr. Borrow had only told me that it was in the way of his I would have withdrawn it at once, and that with right goodwill, for I had so great a respect for the Nestor of gypsyism that I would have been very glad to have gratified him with such a small sacrifice. But it was not in him to suspect or imagine so much common decency in any human heart, and so he craftily, and to my great delight and satisfaction, "got ahead" of me. For, to tell the truth of truth, I was pleased to my soul that I had caused him to make and publish the work. I have said too hastily that it was written thirty years before. What I believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a vocabulary, and a few loose sketches, which he pitchforked together, but that the book itself was made and cemented into one with additions for the first time after he received my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. Sir Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at Constantinople, Mr. Borrow came there, and gave it out that he was a marvellous Oriental scholar. But there was great scepticism on this subject at the Legation, and one day at the _table-d'hote_, where the great writer and divers young diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of Borrow began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result being that he was obliged to confess that he not only did not understand what they were saying, but did not even know what the language was. Then he was tried in Modern Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe it was far more--like the African king, or the English prime minister, who, the longer his shirts were made, insisted on having the higher collars, until the former trailed on the ground and the latter rose above the top of his head--"when they came home from the wash!" What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the "interest" in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors Nature; so associated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild roads. Borrow's heart was large and true as regarded English rural life; there was a place in it for everything which was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was not a view-hunter of "bits," trained according to Ruskin and the _deliberate_ word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian picturesque poems; but he often brings us nearer to Nature than they do, not by photography, but by casually letting fall a word or trait, by which we realise not only her form but her soul. Herein he was like Washington Irving, who gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply inspired with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writings literal description is so rarely introduced, that it is a marvel how much the single buttercup lights up the landscape for a quarter of a mile, when a thousand would produce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been art in Irving--art of the most subtle kind--but in Borrow it was instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was superior even to Whitman. And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, Irving, Borrow, Whitman, and some others whom I have met, that with such men in only one or two interviews, one covers more ground and establishes more intimacy than with the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with hundreds of times. Which fact has been set forth by Wieland in his work on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeniously, as people expressed it a century ago, or so cleverly, as we now say, or so sympathetically, as an Italian would say, that my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in me compared to what he has written. When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we started on a grand tour about England. First we went to Salisbury. I was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, contrasts so strangely with the advanced architectural skill displayed in the cutting and fitting of the vast blocks, that the whole seems to be a mighty paradox. This was the work of many thousands of men--of very well directed labour under the supervision of architects who could draw and measure skilfully with a grand sense of _proportion_ or symmetry, who had, however, not attained to ornament--a thing without parallel in humanity. This is absolutely bewildering, as is the utter want of all indication as to its real purpose. The old British tradition that the stones were brought by magic from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others declare as to similar remains on the North African coast, suggest something, but what that was remains to be discovered. Men have, however, developed great works of the massive and simple order in poetry, as well as in architecture. The Nibelungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are in it only one or two similes or decorations. "Simplicity is its sole ornament." From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of England form the pages of a vast work in which there is written the history of a paradox or enigma as marvellous as that of Stonehenge; and it is this--that the farther back we go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time when Roman culture had died and the mediaeval had not begun, the more exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the higher their tone, and, as in the case of Early and Decorated English, the more beautiful their ornament. That is to say, that exactly in the time when, according to all our modern teaching and ideas, there should have been _no_ architectural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the contrary, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, criticism, learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and most depraved state, its highest flights aiming at nothing better than cheap imitation of old examples. The age which produced the Romanesque architecture, whether in northern Italy, along the Rhine as the Lombard, or in France and England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, bloody, and illiterate; and yet in the noblest and grandest conceptions of architectural art it surpassed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpasses a star. While we _know_ that man has advanced, it still remains true that the history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a steady retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully explained to us that when the devils in hell built the first great temple or palace--Pandemonium--they achieved the greatest work of architecture ever seen! York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and more sympathetic impression than St. Peter's of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman or Gothic art could produce more grandly and impressively with _shade_ alone. It is the difference between a garden and a forest. This is shown in the glorious mediaeval _grisaille_ windows, in which such art proves its absolute perfection. While I was looking at these in rapt admiration, an American friend who did not lack a certain degree of culture asked me if I did not find in them a great want of colour! I made in York the acquaintance of a youth named Carr, son of a former high sheriff, who, by the way, showed us very great hospitality whenever we visited the city. This young man had read Labarthe and other writers on archaeology, and was enthusiastic in finding relics of the olden time. He took me into a great many private houses. I visited every church, and indeed saw far more than do the great majority of even the most inquiring visitors. The Shambles was then and is still perhaps one of the most curious specimens of a small mediaeval street in the world. I felt as if I could pass a life in the museum and churches, and I did, in fact, years after, remain there, very busy, for three weeks, sketching innumerable corbels, gargoyles, goblins, arches, weather-worn saints and sinners. And in the Cathedral I found the original of the maid in the garden a-hanging out the clothes. She is a fair sinner, and the blackbird is a demon volatile, who, having lighted on her shoulder, snaps her by the nose to get her soul. The motive often occurs in Gothic sculpture. We may trace it back--_vide_ the "Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers" of Amelia B. Edwards (whom I have also met at an Oriental Congress)--to Roman Harpies and the Egyptian _Ba_, depicted in the "Book of the Dead" or the "Egyptian Bible." THE END. Footnotes: {1} As I was very desirous of learning more about this celebrated fireplace, I inserted a request in the _Public Ledger_ for information regarding it, which elicited the following from some one to me unknown, to whom I now return thanks:-- "MR. CITY-EDITOR OF THE _Public Ledger_,--In your edition of this date, I notice a communication headed 'To Local Antiquarians.' Without any well-founded pretensions to the designation 'Antiquarian,' as I get older I still take a great interest in the early history of our beloved city. I remember _distinctly_ the fact, but not the date, of reading a description of the 'mantelpiece.' It was of wood, handsomely carved on the pillars, and under the shelf, and on the centre between the pillars, was the following quaint and witty _hieroglyphic_ inscription:-- When the grate is M. T. put: When it is . putting: which is a little puzzling at first sight, but readily translated by converting the punctuation points into written words. SENIOR. "_Frankford_, _May 24_, _1892_." I can add to this, that the chimney-piece was originally made for wood- fires, and that long after a grate was set in and the inscription added. {13} Also given as Delaund or Dellaund in one copy. De Quincey was proud of his descent from De la Laund. I may here say that John Leyland, who is a painstaking and conscientious antiquarian and accomplished genealogist, has been much impressed with the extraordinary similarity of disposition, tastes, and pursuits which has characterised the Lelands for centuries. Any stranger knowing us would think that he and I were nearly related. It is told of the manor of Leyland that during the early Middle Ages it was attempted to build a church there in a certain place, but every morning the stones were found to be removed. Finally, it was completed, but the next dawn beheld the whole edifice removed to the other spot, while a spirit-voice was heard to call (one account says that the words were found on a mystic scroll): "Here shall itt bee, And here shall itt stande; And this shall bee called: Ye Churche of Leyland." {16} A similar incident is recorded in _Kenelm Chillingly_. I had long before the publication of the work conversed with Lord Lytton on the subject--which is also touched on in my _Sketch-Book of Meister Karl_, of which the illustrious author had a copy. {56} Since writing the foregoing, and by a most appropriately odd coincidence or mere chance, I have received with delight a copy of this work from Jesse Jaggard, a well-known dealer in literary curiosities in Liverpool, who makes a specialty of _hunting up_ rarities to order, which is of itself a quaint business. The book is entitled "Curiosities for the Ingenious, Selected from the Most Authentic Treasures of Nature, Science and Art, Biography, History, and General Literature. London: Thomas Boys, Ludgate Hill, 1821." Boys was the publisher of the celebrated series of "The Percy Anecdotes." I should here, in justice to Mr. Jaggard, mention that I am indebted to him for obtaining for me several rare and singular works, and that his catalogues are remarkably well edited. {98} May I be pardoned for here mentioning that Mr. Symonds, not long before his death, wrote a letter to one of our mutual friends, in which he spoke "most enthusiastically" of my work on "Etruscan Roman Traditions in Popular Tradition." "For that alone would I have writ the book." {101} "Susan Cushman was extremely pretty, but was not particularly gifted; in personal appearance she was altogether unlike Charlotte; . . . the latter was a large, tall woman" ("Gossip of the Century," vol. ii.). John Du Solle took me for the first time to see Charlotte Cushman, and then asked me what I thought she looked like. And I replied, "A bull in black silk." {156} He was the real head, and the most sensible, of that vast array of wild antiquaries, among whom are Faber, Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Bryant, and several score more whom I in my youth adored and devoured with a delight surpassing words. {225} (Here I forgot myself--this occurred in New York.) {237} Herzen once sent me a complete collection of all his books. {242} Abraham Lincoln once remarked of the people who wanted emancipation, but who did not like to be called Abolitionists, that they reminded him of the Irishman who had signed a temperance pledge and did not like to break it, yet who sadly wanted a "drink." So going to an apothecary he asked for a glass of soda-water, adding, "an', docther dear, if yees could put a little whisky into it _unbeknownst_ to me, I'd be much obliged to yees." I believe that I may say that as Mr. Lincoln read all which I published (as I was well assured), I was the apothecary here referred to, who administered the whisky of Abolition disguised in the soda-water of Emancipation. {252} Chapman Biddle himself was a very remarkable man as a lawyer, and a person of marked refinement and culture. He became my friend in after years, as did his son Walter. Both are now departed. I wrote and publicly read an "In Memoriam" address and poem on his death, in delivering which I had great pains to refrain from weeping, which was startling to me, not being habitually expressive of emotion. {266a} In reference to "heaving out" by main force, cannon from some deep slough, perhaps of stiff clay, which holds like glue, or, what I think far more wearisome, urging them along for miles over the heaviest roads or broken ways, when the poor exhausted mules have almost given out. Though, as he says, he was only nineteen and seemed very fragile, the indomitable pluck and perseverance of Gilder in all such trials were such as to call special commendation from my brother Henry, who was not habitually wasteful of praise. {266b} "Well do I remember" also what accursed work it was, the ground consisting chiefly of broken stone, and how a number of Paddies, who were accustomed to such labour, assembled above and around us to enjoy the unusual sight of "jontlemen" digging like "canawlers," and how I, while at my spade, excited their hilarity and delight by casting at them scraps of "ould Eerish," or Irish. The fight of the section here alluded to was, I believe, rather of the nature of an improvised rencontre, albeit two or three rebels were killed in the artillery duel. Corporal Penington was, I believe, as usual, the inspiring Mephistopheles of the affair. {267} This reply, which is much better in every respect than that of "The old guard dies but never yields," was made in the face of far more overwhelming numbers, and has few parallels for sheer audacity, all things considered, in the history of modern warfare. It passed into a very widely-spread popular _mot_ in America. It is more than an _on dit_, for I was nearly within ear-shot when it was uttered, and it was promptly repeated to me. Yet, if my memory serves me right, there is something like this, "Come and take it!" recorded in the early Tuscan wars in Villari's introduction to the "Life of Machiavelli," translated by his accomplished wife. I have, as I write this note, just had the pleasure of meeting with the Minister and Madame Villari at a dinner at Senator Comparetti's in Florence, which is perhaps the reason why I recall the precedent. And I may also recall as a noteworthy incident, that at this dinner Professor Milani, the great Etruscologist and head of the Archaeological Museum, congratulated me very much on having been the first and only person who ever discovered an old Etruscan word still living in the traditions of the people--_i.e._, _Intial_, the Spirit of the Haunting Shadow. This is a little discursive--_mais je prends mon bien ou je le trouve_, and it is all autobiographic! "It is all turkey," as the wolf said when he ate the claws. The proposal of General Smith to resist with us alone the tremendous maddened rush of half of Lee's veterans has its re-echo in my ballad, where Breitmann attempts with his Bummers to stem the great army of the South. The result would have probably been the same--that is, we should have been "gobbled up." But he would have undoubtedly tried it without misgiving. I have elsewhere narrated my only interview with him. {268} The thunder of the artillery at Gettysburg was indeed something to be long and well remembered. It was so awful that on the field wild rabbits, appalled by the sound, ran to the gunners and soldiers and tried to take refuge in their bosoms. Those who have only heard cannon fired singly, or a single discharge of cannon, can have no conception of what such sounds when long sustained are like. {274} Apropos of Olcott he did good and noble work in the war, in the field, and also out of it as a Government detective, and I am very far from being ashamed to say that I aided him more than once in the latter capacity. There was a lady in Philadelphia who availed herself of a distinguished position in society so as to go and come from Richmond and act as spy and carry letters between rebel agents. I knew this and told Olcott of it, who put a stop to her treason. I also learned that a rascally contractor had defrauded Government with adulterated chemicals. Olcott had him heavily fined. {309} The reader may find some interesting references to Robert Hunt in the Introduction by me to the _Life of James Beckwourth_, the famous chief of the Crow Indians. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. {333} "CUSTER was the life and soul of the greatest hand-to-hand victory ever gained over the Indians of the Plains--except Patsy Connor's Bear River Fight."--_The Masked Venus_, by RICHARD HENRY SAVAGE. {334} Miss Owen is well known to all folk-lorists as the first living authority on _Voodoo_. {346} I am revising this MS. in the beautiful palazzo built for Ristori, 22 Lung Arno Nuovo, Florence. It is now the Pensione Pellini. On the ground floor are statues representing Ristori in different parts. {349} Scallawag, from the Gaelic _scallag_, a vagabond.--_D. MacRitchie_. {372} For _depuisse-quand_, _vide_ Paul de Kock. {373} On due reflection, I believe that I have here had a slip of memory. I was not till after a year, when returning from Italy, that these incidents occurred. But as it is all strictly true in every detail, I let it remain, as of little consequence. 
3195	----	MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1876-1885 VOLUME III. By Mark Twain ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE XVI. LETTERS, 1876, CHIEFLY TO W. D. HOWELLS. LITERATURE AND POLITICS. PLANNING A PLAY WITH BRET HARTE. The Monday Evening Club of Hartford was an association of most of the literary talent of that city, and it included a number of very distinguished members. The writers, the editors, the lawyers, and the ministers of the gospel who composed it were more often than not men of national or international distinction. There was but one paper at each meeting, and it was likely to be a paper that would later find its way into some magazine. Naturally Mark Twain was one of its favorite members, and his contributions never failed to arouse interest and discussion. A “Mark Twain night” brought out every member. In the next letter we find the first mention of one of his most memorable contributions--a story of one of life's moral aspects. The tale, now included in his collected works, is, for some reason, little read to-day; yet the curious allegory, so vivid in its seeming reality, is well worth consideration. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Jan. 11, '76. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Indeed we haven't forgotten the Howellses, nor scored up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is I was under the doctor's hands for four weeks on a stretch and have been disabled from working for a week or so beside. I thought I was well, about ten days ago, so I sent for a short-hand writer and dictated answers to a bushel or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness. Getting everything shipshape and cleared up, I went to work next day upon an Atlantic article, which ought to be worth $20 per page (which is the price they usually pay for my work, I believe) for although it is only 70 pages MS (less than two days work, counting by bulk,) I have spent 3 more days trimming, altering and working at it. I shall put in one more day's polishing on it, and then read it before our Club, which is to meet at our house Monday evening, the 24th inst. I think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club--though the title of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow,--this title being “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”--which reminds me that today's Tribune says there will be a startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being which is tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with the sketch of mine which I am talking about! However, mine can lie unpublished a year or two as well as not--though I wish that contributor of yours had not interfered with his coincidence of heroes. But what I am coming at, is this: won't you and Mrs. Howells come down Saturday the 22nd and remain to the Club on Monday night? We always have a rattling good time at the Club and we do want you to come, ever so much. Will you? Now say you will. Mrs. Clemens and I are persuading ourselves that you twain will come. My volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive that 20,000 copies have been sold--or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3 weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt. I am on the sick list again--and was, day before yesterday--but on the whole I am getting along. Yrs ever MARK Howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting, adding that sickness was “quite out of character” for Mark Twain, and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel well. He closed by urging that Bliss “hurry out” 'Tom Sawyer.' “That boy is going to make a prodigious hit.” Clemens answered: ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston. HARTFORD, Jan. 18, '76. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Thanks, and ever so many, for the good opinion of 'Tom Sawyer.' Williams has made about 300 rattling pictures for it--some of them very dainty. Poor devil, what a genius he has and how he does murder it with rum. He takes a book of mine, and without suggestion from anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it. There was never a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to you day before yesterday, when I sat down (in still rather wretched health) to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final revision of Tom Sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of MS that your pencil marks were scattered all along. This was splendid, and swept away all labor. Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil marks and made the emendations which they suggested. I reduced the boy battle to a curt paragraph; I finally concluded to cut the Sunday school speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls; I tamed the various obscenities until I judged that they no longer carried offense. So, at a single sitting I began and finished a revision which I had supposed would occupy 3 or 4. days and leave me mentally and physically fagged out at the end. I was careful not to inflict the MS upon you until I had thoroughly and painstakingly revised it. Therefore, the only faults left were those that would discover themselves to others, not me--and these you had pointed out. There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked. When Huck is complaining to Tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow's, he says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies, and he winds up by saying: “and they comb me all to hell.” (No exclamation point.) Long ago, when I read that to Mrs. Clemens, she made no comment; another time I created occasion to read that chapter to her aunt and her mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to speak) and they let it pass. I was glad, for it was the most natural remark in the world for that boy to make (and he had been allowed few privileges of speech in the book;) when I saw that you, too, had let it go without protest, I was glad, and afraid; too--afraid you hadn't observed it. Did you? And did you question the propriety of it? Since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's hook, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults. Don't bother to answer now, (for you've writing enough to do without allowing me to add to the burden,) but tell me when you see me again! Which we do hope will be next Saturday or Sunday or Monday. Couldn't you come now and mull over the alterations which you are going to make in your MS, and make them after you go back? Wouldn't it assist the work if you dropped out of harness and routine for a day or two and have that sort of revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the work-shop? I can always work after I've been to your house; and if you will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over the exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like a cordial. (I feel sort of mean trying to persuade a man to put down a critical piece of work at a critical time, but yet I am honest in thinking it would not hurt the work nor impair your interest in it to come under the circumstances.) Mrs. Clemens says, “Maybe the Howellses could come Monday if they cannot come Saturday; ask them; it is worth trying.” Well, how's that? Could you? It would be splendid if you could. Drop me a postal card--I should have a twinge of conscience if I forced you to write a letter, (I am honest about that,)--and if you find you can't make out to come, tell me that you bodies will come the next Saturday if the thing is possible, and stay over Sunday. Yrs ever MARK. Howells, however, did not come to the club meeting, but promised to come soon when they could have a quiet time to themselves together. As to Huck's language, he declared: “I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice it because the locution was so familiar to my Western sense, and so exactly the thing that Huck would say.” Clemens changed the phrase to, “They comb me all to thunder,” and so it stands to-day. The “Carnival of Crime,” having served its purpose at the club, found quick acceptance by Howells for the Atlantic. He was so pleased with it, in fact, that somewhat later he wrote, urging that its author allow it to be printed in a dainty book, by Osgood, who made a specialty of fine publishing. Meantime Howells had written his Atlantic notice of Tom Sawyer, and now inclosed Clemens a proof of it. We may judge from the reply that it was satisfactory. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Apl 3, '76. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It is a splendid notice and will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the unfriendly. To “fear God and dread the Sunday school” exactly described that old feeling which I used to have, but I couldn't have formulated it. I want to enclose one of the illustrations in this letter, if I do not forget it. Of course the book is to be elaborately illustrated, and I think that many of the pictures are considerably above the American average, in conception if not in execution. I do not re-enclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and corrected it, and so I judge you do not need it. About two days after the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals and magazines. I read the “Carnival of Crime” proof in New York when worn and witless and so left some things unamended which I might possibly have altered had I been at home. For instance, “I shall always address you in your own S-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby.” I saw that you objected to something there, but I did not understand what! Was it that it was too personal? Should the language be altered?--or the hyphens taken out? Won't you please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as you choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous? “Deuced” was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with “devilish.” Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and bones racked with rheumatism. She keeps her bed. “Aloha nui!” as the Kanakas say. MARK. Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain: “You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a greater actor than a writer.” Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very tractable one. His appearance in Hartford in “The Loan of a Lover” was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their cues, and nearly broke up the performance. It was, of course, an amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to put it on for a long run. The “skeleton novelette” mentioned in the next letter refers to a plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, “blindfolded” as to what the others had written. It was a regular “Mark Twain” notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells's continued enthusiasm in it. Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a long time. It appears in their letters again and again, though perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Apl. 22, 1876. MY DEAR HOWELLS, You'll see per enclosed slip that I appear for the first time on the stage next Wednesday. You and Mrs. H. come down and you shall skip in free. I wrote my skeleton novelette yesterday and today. It will make a little under 12 pages. Please tell Aldrich I've got a photographer engaged, and tri-weekly issue is about to begin. Show him the canvassing specimens and beseech him to subscribe. Ever yours, S. L. C. In his next letter Mark Twain explains why Tom Sawyer is not to appear as soon as planned. The reference to “The Literary Nightmare” refers to the “Punch, Conductor, Punch with Care” sketch, which had recently appeared in the Atlantic. Many other versifiers had had their turn at horse-car poetry, and now a publisher was anxious to collect it in a book, provided he could use the Atlantic sketch. Clemens does not tell us here the nature of Carlton's insult, forgiveness of which he was not yet qualified to grant, but there are at least two stories about it, or two halves of the same incident, as related afterward by Clemens and Canton. Clemens said that when he took the Jumping Frog book to Carlton, in 1867, the latter, pointing to his stock, said, rather scornfully: “Books? I don't want your book; my shelves are full of books now,” though the reader may remember that it was Carlton himself who had given the frog story to the Saturday Press and had seen it become famous. Carlton's half of the story was that he did not accept Mark Twain's book because the author looked so disreputable. Long afterward, when the two men met in Europe, the publisher said to the now rich and famous author: “Mr. Clemens, my one claim on immortality is that I declined your first book.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Apl. 25, 1876 MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Thanks for giving me the place of honor. Bliss made a failure in the matter of getting Tom Sawyer ready on time--the engravers assisting, as usual. I went down to see how much of a delay there was going to be, and found that the man had not even put a canvasser on, or issued an advertisement yet--in fact, that the electrotypes would not all be done for a month! But of course the main fact was that no canvassing had been done--because a subscription harvest is before publication, (not after, when people have discovered how bad one's book is.) Well, yesterday I put in the Courant an editorial paragraph stating that Tam Sawyer is “ready to issue, but publication is put off in order to secure English copyright by simultaneous publication there and here. The English edition is unavoidably delayed.” You see, part of that is true. Very well. When I observed that my “Sketches” had dropped from a sale of 6 or 7000 a month down to 1200 a month, I said “this ain't no time to be publishing books; therefore, let Tom lie still till Autumn, Mr. Bliss, and make a holiday book of him to beguile the young people withal.” I shall print items occasionally, still further delaying Tom, till I ease him down to Autumn without shock to the waiting world. As to that “Literary Nightmare” proposition. I'm obliged to withhold consent, for what seems a good reason--to wit: A single page of horse-car poetry is all that the average reader can stand, without nausea; now, to stack together all of it that has been written, and then add it to my article would be to enrage and disgust each and every reader and win the deathless enmity of the lot. Even if that reason were insufficient, there would still be a sufficient reason left, in the fact that Mr. Carlton seems to be the publisher of the magazine in which it is proposed to publish this horse-car matter. Carlton insulted me in Feb. 1867, and so when the day arrives that sees me doing him a civility I shall feel that I am ready for Paradise, since my list of possible and impossible forgivenesses will then be complete. Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold novelette “A Murder and A Marriage” is “good.” Pretty strong language--for her. The Fieldses are coming down to the play tomorrow, and they promise to get you and Mrs. Howells to come too, but I hope you'll do nothing of the kind if it will inconvenience you, for I'm not going to play either strikingly bad enough or well enough to make the journey pay you. My wife and I think of going to Boston May 7th to see Anna Dickinson's debut on the 8th. If I find we can go, I'll try to get a stage box and then you and Mrs. Howells must come to Parker's and go with us to the crucifixion. (Is that spelt right?--somehow it doesn't look right.) With our very kindest regards to the whole family. Yrs ever, MARK. The mention of Anna Dickinson, at the end of this letter, recalls a prominent reformer and lecturer of the Civil War period. She had begun her crusades against temperance and slavery in 1857, when she was but fifteen years old, when her success as a speaker had been immediate and extraordinary. Now, in this later period, at the age of thirty-four, she aspired to the stage--unfortunately for her, as her gifts lay elsewhere. Clemens and Howells knew Miss Dickinson, and were anxious for the success which they hardly dared hope for. Clemens arranged a box party. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: May 4, '76. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I shall reach Boston on Monday the 8th, either at 4:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. (Which is best?) and go straight to Parker's. If you and Mrs. Howells cannot be there by half past 4, I'll not plan to arrive till the later train-time (6,) because I don't want to be there alone--even a minute. Still, Joe Twichell will doubtless go with me (forgot that,) he is going to try hard to. Mrs. Clemens has given up going, because Susy is just recovering from about the savagest assault of diphtheria a child ever did recover from, and therefore will not be entirely her healthy self again by the 8th. Would you and Mrs. Howells like to invite Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich? I have a large proscenium box--plenty of room. Use your own pleasure about it--I mainly (that is honest,) suggest it because I am seeking to make matters pleasant for you and Mrs. Howells. I invited Twichell because I thought I knew you'd like that. I want you to fix it so that you and the Madam can remain in Boston all night; for I leave next day and we can't have a talk, otherwise. I am going to get two rooms and a parlor; and would like to know what you decide about the Aldriches, so as to know whether to apply for an additional bedroom or not. Don't dine that evening, for I shall arrive dinnerless and need your help. I'll bring my Blindfold Novelette, but shan't exhibit it unless you exhibit yours. You would simply go to work and write a novelette that would make mine sick. Because you would know all about where my weak points lay. No, Sir, I'm one of these old wary birds! Don't bother to write a letter--3 lines on a postal card is all that I can permit from a busy man. Yrs ever MARK. P. S. Good! You'll not have to feel any call to mention that debut in the Atlantic--they've made me pay the grand cash for my box!--a thing which most managers would be too worldly-wise to do, with journalistic folks. But I'm most honestly glad, for I'd rather pay three prices, any time, than to have my tongue half paralyzed with a dead-head ticket. Hang that Anna Dickinson, a body can never depend upon her debuts! She has made five or six false starts already. If she fails to debut this time, I will never bet on her again. In his book, My Mark Twain, Howells refers to the “tragedy” of Miss Dickinson's appearance. She was the author of numerous plays, some of which were successful, but her career as an actress was never brilliant. At Elmira that summer the Clemenses heard from their good friend Doctor Brown, of Edinburgh, and sent eager replies. ***** To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh: ELMIRA, NEW YORK, U. S. June 22, 1876. DEAR FRIEND THE DOCTOR,--It was a perfect delight to see the well-known handwriting again! But we so grieve to know that you are feeling miserable. It must not last--it cannot last. The regal summer is come and it will smile you into high good cheer; it will charm away your pains, it will banish your distresses. I wish you were here, to spend the summer with us. We are perched on a hill-top that overlooks a little world of green valleys, shining rivers, sumptuous forests and billowy uplands veiled in the haze of distance. We have no neighbors. It is the quietest of all quiet places, and we are hermits that eschew caves and live in the sun. Doctor, if you'd only come! I will carry your letter to Mrs. C. now, and there will be a glad woman, I tell you! And she shall find one of those pictures to put in this for Mrs. Barclays and if there isn't one here we'll send right away to Hartford and get one. Come over, Doctor John, and bring the Barclays, the Nicolsons and the Browns, one and all! Affectionately, SAML. L. CLEMENS. From May until August no letters appear to have passed between Clemens and Howells; the latter finally wrote, complaining of the lack of news. He was in the midst of campaign activities, he said, writing a life of Hayes, and gaily added: “You know I wrote the life of Lincoln, which elected him.” He further reported a comedy he had completed, and gave Clemens a general stirring up as to his own work. Mark Twain, in his hillside study, was busy enough. Summer was his time for work, and he had tried his hand in various directions. His mention of Huck Finn in his reply to Howells is interesting, in that it shows the measure of his enthusiasm, or lack of it, as a gauge of his ultimate achievement ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Aug. 9, 1876. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I was just about to write you when your letter came--and not one of those obscene postal cards, either, but reverently, upon paper. I shall read that biography, though the letter of acceptance was amply sufficient to corral my vote without any further knowledge of the man. Which reminds me that a campaign club in Jersey City wrote a few days ago and invited me to be present at the raising of a Tilden and Hendricks flag there, and to take the stand and give them some “counsel.” Well, I could not go, but gave them counsel and advice by letter, and in the kindliest terms as to the raising of the flag--advised them “not to raise it.” Get your book out quick, for this is a momentous time. If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells's bad place. I am infringing on your patent--I started a record of our children's sayings, last night. Which reminds me that last week I sent down and got Susie a vast pair of shoes of a most villainous pattern, for I discovered that her feet were being twisted and cramped out of shape by a smaller and prettier article. She did not complain, but looked degraded and injured. At night her mamma gave her the usual admonition when she was about to say her prayers--to wit: “Now, Susie--think about God.” “Mamma, I can't, with those shoes.” The farm is perfectly delightful this season. It is as quiet and peaceful as a South Sea Island. Some of the sunsets which we have witnessed from this commanding eminence were marvelous. One evening a rainbow spanned an entire range of hills with its mighty arch, and from a black hub resting upon the hill-top in the exact centre, black rays diverged upward in perfect regularity to the rainbow's arch and created a very strongly defined and altogether the most majestic, magnificent and startling half-sunk wagon wheel you can imagine. After that, a world of tumbling and prodigious clouds came drifting up out of the West and took to themselves a wonderfully rich and brilliant green color--the decided green of new spring foliage. Close by them we saw the intense blue of the skies, through rents in the cloud-rack, and away off in another quarter were drifting clouds of a delicate pink color. In one place hung a pall of dense black clouds, like compacted pitch-smoke. And the stupendous wagon wheel was still in the supremacy of its unspeakable grandeur. So you see, the colors present in the sky at once and the same time were blue, green, pink, black, and the vari-colored splendors of the rainbow. All strong and decided colors, too. I don't know whether this weird and astounding spectacle most suggested heaven, or hell. The wonder, with its constant, stately, and always surprising changes, lasted upwards of two hours, and we all stood on the top of the hill by my study till the final miracle was complete and the greatest day ended that we ever saw. Our farmer, who is a grave man, watched that spectacle to the end, and then observed that it was “dam funny.” The double-barreled novel lies torpid. I found I could not go on with it. The chapters I had written were still too new and familiar to me. I may take it up next winter, but cannot tell yet; I waited and waited to see if my interest in it would not revive, but gave it up a month ago and began another boys' book--more to be at work than anything else. I have written 400 pages on it--therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn's Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done. So the comedy is done, and with a “fair degree of satisfaction.” That rejoices me, and makes me mad, too--for I can't plan a comedy, and what have you done that God should be so good to you? I have racked myself baldheaded trying to plan a comedy harness for some promising characters of mine to work in, and had to give it up. It is a noble lot of blooded stock and worth no end of money, but they must stand in the stable and be profitless. I want to be present when the comedy is produced and help enjoy the success. Warner's book is mighty readable, I think. Love to yez. Yrs ever MARK Howells promptly wrote again, urging him to enter the campaign for Hayes. “There is not another man in this country,” he said, “who could help him so much as you.” The “farce” which Clemens refers to in his reply, was “The Parlor Car,” which seems to have been about the first venture of Howells in that field. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, August 23, 1876. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am glad you think I could do Hayes any good, for I have been wanting to write a letter or make a speech to that end. I'll be careful not to do either, however, until the opportunity comes in a natural, justifiable and unlugged way; and shall not then do anything unless I've got it all digested and worded just right. In which case I might do some good--in any other I should do harm. When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause. The farce is wonderfully bright and delicious, and must make a hit. You read it to me, and it was mighty good; I read it last night and it was better; I read it aloud to the household this morning and it was better than ever. So it would be worth going a long way to see it well played; for without any question an actor of genius always adds a subtle something to any man's work that none but the writer knew was there before. Even if he knew it. I have heard of readers convulsing audiences with my “Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man.” If there is anything really funny in the piece, the author is not aware of it. All right--advertise me for the new volume. I send you herewith a sketch which will make 3 pages of the Atlantic. If you like it and accept it, you should get it into the December No. because I shall read it in public in Boston the 13th and 14th of Nov. If it went in a month earlier it would be too old for me to read except as old matter; and if it went in a month later it would be too old for the Atlantic--do you see? And if you wish to use it, will you set it up now, and send me three proofs?--one to correct for Atlantic, one to send to Temple Bar (shall I tell them to use it not earlier than their November No.) and one to use in practising for my Boston readings. We must get up a less elaborate and a much better skeleton-plan for the Blindfold Novels and make a success of that idea. David Gray spent Sunday here and said we could but little comprehend what a rattling stir that thing would make in the country. He thought it would make a mighty strike. So do I. But with only 8 pages to tell the tale in, the plot must be less elaborate, doubtless. What do you think? When we exchange visits I'll show you an unfinished sketch of Elizabeth's time which shook David Gray's system up pretty exhaustively. Yrs ever, MARK. The MS. sketch mentioned in the foregoing letter was “The Canvasser's Tale,” later included in the volume, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Other Stories. It is far from being Mark Twain's best work, but was accepted and printed in the Atlantic. David Gray was an able journalist and editor whom Mark Twain had known in Buffalo. The “sketch of Elizabeth's time” is a brilliant piece of writing --an imaginary record of conversation and court manners in the good old days of free speech and performance, phrased in the language of the period. Gray, John Hay, Twichell, and others who had a chance to see it thought highly of it, and Hay had it set in type and a few proofs taken for private circulation. Some years afterward a West Point officer had a special font of antique type made for it, and printed a hundred copies. But the present-day reader would hardly be willing to include “Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen Elizabeth” in Mark Twain's collected works. Clemens was a strong Republican in those days, as his letters of this period show. His mention of the “caves” in the next is another reference to “The Canvasser's Tale.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Sept. 14, 1876. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, the collection of caves was the origin of it. I changed it to echoes because these being invisible and intangible, constituted a still more absurd species of property, and yet a man could really own an echo, and sell it, too, for a high figure--such an echo as that at the Villa Siminetti, two miles from Milan, for instance. My first purpose was to have the man make a collection of caves and afterwards of echoes; but perceived that the element of absurdity and impracticability was so nearly identical as to amount to a repetition of an idea..... I will not, and do not, believe that there is a possibility of Hayes's defeat, but I want the victory to be sweeping..... It seems odd to find myself interested in an election. I never was before. And I can't seem to get over my repugnance to reading or thinking about politics, yet. But in truth I care little about any party's politics--the man behind it is the important thing. You may well know that Mrs. Clemens liked the Parlor Car--enjoyed it ever so much, and was indignant at you all through, and kept exploding into rages at you for pretending that such a woman ever existed--closing each and every explosion with “But it is just what such a woman would do.”--“It is just what such a woman would say.” They all voted the Parlor Car perfection--except me. I said they wouldn't have been allowed to court and quarrel there so long, uninterrupted; but at each critical moment the odious train-boy would come in and pile foul literature all over them four or five inches deep, and the lover would turn his head aside and curse--and presently that train-boy would be back again (as on all those Western roads) to take up the literature and leave prize candy. Of course the thing is perfect, in the magazine, without the train-boy; but I was thinking of the stage and the groundlings. If the dainty touches went over their heads, the train-boy and other possible interruptions would fetch them every time. Would it mar the flow of the thing too much to insert that devil? I thought it over a couple of hours and concluded it wouldn't, and that he ought to be in for the sake of the groundlings (and to get new copyright on the piece.) And it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully written, why not go ahead and write the 3 preceding acts? And then after it is finished, let me put into it a low-comedy character (the girl's or the lover's father or uncle) and gobble a big pecuniary interest in your work for myself. Do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest--but do write the other 3 acts, and then it will be valuable to managers. And don't go and sell it to anybody, like Harte, but keep it for yourself. Harte's play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable and then it will clear a great sum every year. I am out of all patience with Harte for selling it. The play entertained me hugely, even in its present crude state. Love to you all. Yrs ever, MARK Following the Sellers success, Clemens had made many attempts at dramatic writing. Such undertakings had uniformly failed, but he had always been willing to try again. In the next letter we get the beginning of what proved his first and last direct literary association, that is to say, collaboration, with Bret Harte. Clemens had great admiration for Harte's ability and believed that between them they could turn out a successful play. Whether or not this belief was justified will appear later. Howells's biography of Hayes, meanwhile, had not gone well. He reported that only two thousand copies had been sold in what was now the height of the campaign. “There's success for you,” he said; “it makes me despair of the Republic.” Clemens, on his part, had made a speech for Hayes that Howells declared had put civil-service reform in a nutshell; he added: “You are the only Republican orator, quoted without distinction of party by all the newspapers.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Oct. 11, 1876. MY DEAR HOWELLS, This is a secret, to be known to nobody but you (of course I comprehend that Mrs. Howells is part of you) that Bret Harte came up here the other day and asked me to help him write a play and divide the swag, and I agreed. I am to put in Scotty Briggs (See Buck Fanshaw's Funeral, in “Roughing It.”) and he is to put in a Chinaman (a wonderfully funny creature, as Bret presents him--for 5 minutes--in his Sandy Bar play.) This Chinaman is to be the character of the play, and both of us will work on him and develop him. Bret is to draw a plot, and I am to do the same; we shall use the best of the two, or gouge from both and build a third. My plot is built--finished it yesterday--six days' work, 8 or 9 hours a day, and has nearly killed me. Now the favor I ask of you is that you will have the words “Ah Sin, a Drama,” printed in the middle of a note-paper page and send the same to me, with Bill. We don't want anybody to know that we are building this play. I can't get this title page printed here without having to lie so much that the thought of it is disagreeable to one reared as I have been. And yet the title of the play must be printed--the rest of the application for copyright is allowable in penmanship. We have got the very best gang of servants in America, now. When George first came he was one of the most religious of men. He had but one fault--young George Washington's. But I have trained him; and now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear George stand at that front door and lie to the unwelcome visitor. But your time is valuable; I must not dwell upon these things.....I'll ask Warner and Harte if they'll do Blindfold Novelettes. Some time I'll simplify that plot. All it needs is that the hanging and the marriage shall not be appointed for the same day. I got over that difficulty, but it required too much MS to reconcile the thing--so the movement of the story was clogged. I came near agreeing to make political speeches with our candidate for Governor the 16th and 23 inst., but I had to give up the idea, for Harte and I will be here at work then. Yrs ever, MARK Mark Twain was writing few letters these days to any one but Howells, yet in November he sent one to an old friend of his youth, Burrough, the literary chair-maker who had roomed with him in the days when he had been setting type for the St. Louis Evening News. ***** To Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis: HARTFORD, Nov. 1, 1876. MY DEAR BURROUGHS,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 20 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug.... imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness--and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today. Northerners, too, of a certain grade. It is of children like this that voters are made. And such is the primal source of our government! A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it. I think I comprehend the position there--perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think--social ostracism, otherwise. The same thing exists here, among the Irish. An Irish Republican is a pariah among his people. Yet that race find fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism. Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely. I live in the freest corner of the country. There are no social disabilities between me and my Democratic personal friends. We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other's political opinions. Don't you ever come to New York again and not run up here to see me. I Suppose we were away for the summer when you were East; but no matter, you could have telegraphed and found out. We were at Elmira N. Y. and right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance. Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several years, but I suspect that I made him mad with my last--shortly after you saw him in St. Louis, I judge. There is one thing which I can't stand and won't stand, from many people. That is sham sentimentality--the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams” and all that sort of drivel. Will's were always of this stamp. I stood it years. When I get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the stomach ache. And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer. I told him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past, and take a pill. I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is the past--can't be restored. Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a little--but only a little--but my idea was to kill his sham sentimentality once and forever, and so make a good fellow of him again. I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a little more endurable and I asked him to write and thank me honestly for doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him--but he hasn't done it yet. Maybe he will, sometime. I am grateful to God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news from you) else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me when that event happened. I enclose photograph for the young ladies. I will remark that I do not wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because I found, when I used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes. I wish you had sent pictures of yourself and family--I'll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined. Your old friend, SAML L. CLEMENS. XVII. LETTERS, 1877. TO BERMUDA WITH TWICHELL. PROPOSITION TO TH. NAST. THE WHITTIER DINNER. Mark Twain must have been too busy to write letters that winter. Those that have survived are few and unimportant. As a matter of fact, he was writing the play, “Ah Sin,” with Bret Harte, and getting it ready for production. Harte was a guest in the Clemens home while the play was being written, and not always a pleasant one. He was full of requirements, critical as to the 'menage,' to the point of sarcasm. The long friendship between Clemens and Harte weakened under the strain of collaboration and intimate daily intercourse, never to renew its old fiber. It was an unhappy outcome of an enterprise which in itself was to prove of little profit. The play, “Ah Sin,” had many good features, and with Charles T. Parsloe in an amusing Chinese part might have been made a success, if the two authors could have harmoniously undertaken the needed repairs. It opened in Washington in May, and a letter from Parsloe, written at the moment, gives a hint of the situation. ***** From Charles T. Parsloe to S. L. Clemens: WASHINGTON, D. C. May 11th, 1877. MR. CLEMENS,--I forgot whether I acknowledged receipt of check by telegram. Harte has been here since Monday last and done little or nothing yet, but promises to have something fixed by tomorrow morning. We have been making some improvements among ourselves. The last act is weak at the end, and I do hope Mr. Harte will have something for a good finish to the piece. The other acts I think are all right, now. Hope you have entirely recovered. I am not very well myself, the excitement of a first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I have is too much for a beginner. I ain't used to it. The houses have been picking up since Tuesday Mr. Ford has worked well and hard for us. Yours in, haste, CHAS. THOS. PARSLOE. The play drew some good houses in Washington, but it could not hold them for a run. Never mind what was the matter with it; perhaps a very small change at the right point would have turned it into a fine success. We have seen in a former letter the obligation which Mark Twain confessed to Harte--a debt he had tried in many ways to repay--obtaining for him a liberal book contract with Bliss; advancing him frequent and large sums of money which Harte could not, or did not, repay; seeking to advance his fortunes in many directions. The mistake came when he introduced another genius into the intricacies of his daily life. Clemens went down to Washington during the early rehearsals of “Ah Sin.” Meantime, Rutherford B. Hayes had been elected President, and Clemens one day called with a letter of introduction from Howells, thinking to meet the Chief Executive. His own letter to Howells, later, probably does not give the real reason of his failure, but it will be amusing to those who recall the erratic personality of George Francis Train. Train and Twain were sometimes confused by the very unlettered; or pretendedly, by Mark Twain's friends. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: BALTIMORE, May 1, '77. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Found I was not absolutely needed in Washington so I only staid 24 hours, and am on my way home, now. I called at the White House, and got admission to Col. Rodgers, because I wanted to inquire what was the right hour to go and infest the President. It was my luck to strike the place in the dead waste and middle of the day, the very busiest time. I perceived that Mr. Rodgers took me for George Francis Train and had made up his mind not to let me get at the President; so at the end of half an hour I took my letter of introduction from the table and went away. It was a great pity all round, and a great loss to the nation, for I was brim full of the Eastern question. I didn't get to see the President or the Chief Magistrate either, though I had sort of a glimpse of a lady at a window who resembled her portraits. Yrs ever, MARK. Howells condoled with him on his failure to see the President, “but,” he added, “if you and I had both been there, our combined skill would have no doubt procured us to be expelled from the White House by Fred Douglass. But the thing seems to be a complete failure as it was.” Douglass at this time being the Marshal of Columbia, gives special point to Howells's suggestion. Later, in May, Clemens took Twichell for an excursion to Bermuda. He had begged Howells to go with them, but Howells, as usual, was full of literary affairs. Twichell and Clemens spent four glorious days tramping the length and breadth of the beautiful island, and remembered it always as one of their happiest adventures. “Put it down as an Oasis!” wrote Twichell on his return, “I'm afraid I shall not see as green a spot again soon. And it was your invention and your gift. And your company was the best of it. Indeed, I never took more comfort in being with you than on this journey, which, my boy, is saying a great deal.” To Howells, Clemens triumphantly reported the success of the excursion. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, May 29, 1877. Confound you, Joe Twichell and I roamed about Bermuda day and night and never ceased to gabble and enjoy. About half the talk was--“It is a burning shame that Howells isn't here.” “Nobody could get at the very meat and marrow of this pervading charm and deliciousness like Howells;” “How Howells would revel in the quaintness, and the simplicity of this people and the Sabbath repose of this land.” “What an imperishable sketch Howells would make of Capt. West the whaler, and Capt. Hope with the patient, pathetic face, wanderer in all the oceans for 42 years, lucky in none; coming home defeated once more, now, minus his ship--resigned, uncomplaining, being used to this.” “What a rattling chapter Howells would make out of the small boy Alfred, with his alert eye and military brevity and exactness of speech; and out of the old landlady; and her sacred onions; and her daughter; and the visiting clergyman; and the ancient pianos of Hamilton and the venerable music in vogue there--and forty other things which we shall leave untouched or touched but lightly upon, we not being worthy.” “Dam Howells for not being here!” (this usually from me, not Twichell.) O, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day! If you had gone with us and let me pay the $50 which the trip and the board and the various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. Ponder these things. Lord, what a perfectly bewitching excursion it was! I traveled under an assumed name and was never molested with a polite attention from anybody. Love to you all. Yrs ever MARK Aldrich, meantime, had invited the Clemenses to Ponkapog during the Bermuda absence, and Clemens hastened to send him a line expressing regrets. At the close he said: ***** To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.: FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, June 3, 1877. Day after tomorrow we leave for the hills beyond Elmira, N. Y. for the summer, when I shall hope to write a book of some sort or other to beat the people with. A work similar to your new one in the Atlantic is what I mean, though I have not heard what the nature of that one is. Immoral, I suppose. Well, you are right. Such books sell best, Howells says. Howells says he is going to make his next book indelicate. He says he thinks there is money in it. He says there is a large class of the young, in schools and seminaries who--But you let him tell you. He has ciphered it all down to a demonstration. With the warmest remembrances to the pair of you Ever Yours SAMUEL L. CLEMENS. Clemens would naturally write something about Bermuda, and began at once, “Random Notes of an Idle Excursion,” and presently completed four papers, which Howells eagerly accepted for the Atlantic. Then we find him plunging into another play, this time alone. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, June 27, 1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--If you should not like the first 2 chapters, send them to me and begin with Chapter 3--or Part 3, I believe you call these things in the magazine. I have finished No. 4., which closes the series, and will mail it tomorrow if I think of it. I like this one, I liked the preceding one (already mailed to you some time ago) but I had my doubts about 1 and 2. Do not hesitate to squelch them, even with derision and insult. Today I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal character, that old detective--I skeletoned the first act and wrote the second, today; and am dog-tired, now. Fifty-four close pages of MS in 7 hours. Once I wrote 55 pages at a sitting--that was on the opening chapters of the “Gilded Age” novel. When I cool down, an hour from now, I shall go to zero, I judge. Yrs ever, MARK. Clemens had doubts as to the quality of the Bermuda papers, and with some reason. They did not represent him at his best. Nevertheless, they were pleasantly entertaining, and Howells expressed full approval of them for Atlantic use. The author remained troubled. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, July 4,1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It is splendid of you to say those pleasant things. But I am still plagued with doubts about Parts 1 and 2. If you have any, don't print. If otherwise, please make some cold villain like Lathrop read and pass sentence on them. Mind, I thought they were good, at first--it was the second reading that accomplished its hellish purpose on me. Put them up for a new verdict. Part 4 has lain in my pigeon-hole a good while, and when I put it there I had a Christian's confidence in 4 aces in it; and you can be sure it will skip toward Connecticut tomorrow before any fatal fresh reading makes me draw my bet. I've piled up 151 MS pages on my comedy. The first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. Tomorrow and next day will finish the 3rd act and the play. I have not written less than 30 pages any day since I began. Never had so much fun over anything in my life-never such consuming interest and delight. (But Lord bless you the second reading will fetch it!) And just think!--I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and hang it he has gone off pottering with Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie. I read everything about the President's doings there with exultation. I wish that old ass of a private secretary hadn't taken me for George Francis Train. If ignorance were a means of grace I wouldn't trade that gorilla's chances for the Archbishop of Canterbury's. I shall call on the President again, by and by. I shall go in my war paint; and if I am obstructed the nation will have the unusual spectacle of a private secretary with a pen over one ear a tomahawk over the other. I read the entire Atlantic this time. Wonderful number. Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke's story was a ten-strike. I wish she would write 12 old-time New England tales a year. Good times to you all! Mind if you don't run here for a few days you will go to hence without having had a fore-glimpse of heaven. MARK. The play, “Ah Sin,” that had done little enough in Washington, was that summer given another trial by Augustin Daly, at the Fifth Avenue Theater, New York, with a fine company. Clemens had undertaken to doctor the play, and it would seem to have had an enthusiastic reception on the opening night. But it was a summer audience, unspoiled by many attractions. “Ah Sin” was never a success in the New York season--never a money-maker on the road. The reference in the first paragraph of the letter that follows is to the Bermuda chapters which Mark Twain was publishing simultaneously in England and America. ELMIRA, Aug 3,1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have mailed one set of the slips to London, and told Bentley you would print Sept. 15, in October Atlantic, and he must not print earlier in Temple Bar. Have I got the dates and things right? I am powerful glad to see that No. 1 reads a nation sight better in print than it did in MS. I told Bentley we'd send him the slips, each time, 6 weeks before day of publication. We can do that can't we? Two months ahead would be still better I suppose, but I don't know. “Ah Sin” went a-booming at the Fifth Avenue. The reception of Col. Sellers was calm compared to it. The criticisms were just; the criticisms of the great New York dailies are always just, intelligent, and square and honest--notwithstanding, by a blunder which nobody was seriously to blame for, I was made to say exactly the opposite of this in a newspaper some time ago. Never said it at all, and moreover I never thought it. I could not publicly correct it before the play appeared in New York, because that would look as if I had really said that thing and then was moved by fears for my pocket and my reputation to take it back. But I can correct it now, and shall do it; for now my motives cannot be impugned. When I began this letter, it had not occurred to me to use you in this connection, but it occurs to me now. Your opinion and mine, uttered a year ago, and repeated more than once since, that the candor and ability of the New York critics were beyond question, is a matter which makes it proper enough that I should speak through you at this time. Therefore if you will print this paragraph somewhere, it may remove the impression that I say unjust things which I do not think, merely for the pleasure of talking. There, now, Can't you say-- “In a letter to Mr. Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain describes the reception of the new comedy 'Ali Sin,' and then goes on to say:” etc. Beginning at the star with the words, “The criticisms were just.” Mrs. Clemens says, “Don't ask that of Mr. Howells--it will be disagreeable to him.” I hadn't thought of it, but I will bet two to one on the correctness of her instinct. We shall see. Will you cut that paragraph out of this letter and precede it with the remarks suggested (or with better ones,) and send it to the Globe or some other paper? You can't do me a bigger favor; and yet if it is in the least disagreeable, you mustn't think of it. But let me know, right away, for I want to correct this thing before it grows stale again. I explained myself to only one critic (the World)--the consequence was a noble notice of the play. This one called on me, else I shouldn't have explained myself to him. I have been putting in a deal of hard work on that play in New York, but it is full of incurable defects. My old Plunkett family seemed wonderfully coarse and vulgar on the stage, but it was because they were played in such an outrageously and inexcusably coarse way. The Chinaman is killingly funny. I don't know when I have enjoyed anything as much as I did him. The people say there isn't enough of him in the piece. That's a triumph--there'll never be any more of him in it. John Brougham said, “Read the list of things which the critics have condemned in the piece, and you have unassailable proofs that the play contains all the requirements of success and a long life.” That is true. Nearly every time the audience roared I knew it was over something that would be condemned in the morning (justly, too) but must be left in--for low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself. There was as much money in the house the first two nights as in the first ten of Sellers. Haven't heard from the third--I came away. Yrs ever, MARK. In a former letter we have seen how Mark Twain, working on a story that was to stand as an example of his best work, and become one of his surest claims to immortality (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), displayed little enthusiasm in his undertaking. In the following letter, which relates the conclusion of his detective comedy, we find him at the other extreme, on very tiptoe with enthusiasm over something wholly without literary value or dramatic possibility. One of the hall-marks of genius is the inability to discriminate as to the value of its output. “Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective” was a dreary, absurd, impossible performance, as wild and unconvincing in incident and dialogue as anything out of an asylum could well be. The title which he first chose for it, “Balaam's Ass,” was properly in keeping with the general scheme. Yet Mark Twain, still warm with the creative fever, had the fullest faith in it as a work of art and a winner of fortune. It would never see the light of production, of course. We shall see presently that the distinguished playwright, Dion Boucicault, good-naturedly complimented it as being better than “Ahi Sin.” One must wonder what that skilled artist really thought, and how he could do even this violence to his conscience. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Wednesday P.M. (1877) MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It's finished. I was misled by hurried mis-paging. There were ten pages of notes, and over 300 pages of MS when the play was done. Did it in 42 hours, by the clock; 40 pages of the Atlantic--but then of course it's very “fat.” Those are the figures, but I don't believe them myself, because the thing's impossible. But let that pass. All day long, and every day, since I finished (in the rough) I have been diligently altering, amending, re-writing, cutting down. I finished finally today. Can't think of anything else in the way of an improvement. I thought I would stick to it while the interest was hot--and I am mighty glad I did. A week from now it will be frozen--then revising would be drudgery. (You see I learned something from the fatal blunder of putting “Ah Sin” aside before it was finished.) She's all right, now. She reads in two hours and 20 minutes and will play not longer than 2 3/4 hours. Nineteen characters; 3 acts; (I bunched 2 into 1.) Tomorrow I will draw up an exhaustive synopsis to insert in the printed title-page for copyrighting, and then on Friday or Saturday I go to New York to remain a week or ten days and lay for an actor. Wish you could run down there and have a holiday. 'Twould be fun. My wife won't have “Balaam's Ass”; therefore I call the piece “Cap'n Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective.” Yrs MARK. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Aug. 29, 1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Just got your letter last night. No, dern that article,--[One of the Bermuda chapters.]--it made me cry when I read it in proof, it was so oppressively and ostentatiously poor. Skim your eye over it again and you will think as I do. If Isaac and the prophets of Baal can be doctored gently and made permissible, it will redeem the thing: but if it can't, let's burn all of the articles except the tail-end of it and use that as an introduction to the next article--as I suggested in my letter to you of day before yesterday. (I had this proof from Cambridge before yours came.) Boucicault says my new play is ever so much better than “Ah Sin;” says the Amateur detective is a bully character, too. An actor is chawing over the play in New York, to see if the old Detective is suited to his abilities. Haven't heard from him yet. If you've got that paragraph by you yet, and if in your judgment it would be good to publish it, and if you absolutely would not mind doing it, then I think I'd like to have you do it--or else put some other words in my mouth that will be properer, and publish them. But mind, don't think of it for a moment if it is distasteful--and doubtless it is. I value your judgment more than my own, as to the wisdom of saying anything at all in this matter. To say nothing leaves me in an injurious position--and yet maybe I might do better to speak to the men themselves when I go to New York. This was my latest idea, and it looked wise. We expect to leave here for home Sept. 4, reaching there the 8th--but we may be delayed a week. Curious thing. I read passages from my play, and a full synopsis, to Boucicault, who was re-writing a play, which he wrote and laid aside 3 or 4 years ago. (My detective is about that age, you know.) Then he read a passage from his play, where a real detective does some things that are as idiotic as some of my old Wheeler's performances. Showed me the passages, and behold, his man's name is Wheeler! However, his Wheeler is not a prominent character, so we'll not alter the names. My Wheeler's name is taken from the old jumping Frog sketch. I am re-reading Ticknor's diary, and am charmed with it, though I still say he refers to too many good things when he could just as well have told them. Think of the man traveling 8 days in convoy and familiar intercourse with a band of outlaws through the mountain fastnesses of Spain--he the fourth stranger they had encountered in thirty years--and compressing this priceless experience into a single colorless paragraph of his diary! They spun yarns to this unworthy devil, too. I wrote you a very long letter a day or two ago, but Susy Crane wanted to make a copy of it to keep, so it has not gone yet. It may go today, possibly. We unite in warm regards to you and yours. Yrs ever, MARK. The Ticknor referred to in a former letter was Professor George Ticknor, of Harvard College, a history-writer of distinction. On the margin of the “Diary” Mark Twain once wrote, “Ticknor is a Millet, who makes all men fall in love with him.” And adds: “Millet was the cause of lovable qualities in people, and then he admired and loved those persons for the very qualities which he (without knowing it) had created in them. Perhaps it would be strictly truer of these two men to say that they bore within them the divine something in whose presence the evil in people fled away and hid itself, while all that was good in them came spontaneously forward out of the forgotten walls and comers in their systems where it was accustomed to hide.” It is Frank Millet, the artist, he is speaking of--a knightly soul whom all the Clemens household loved, and who would one day meet his knightly end with those other brave men that found death together when the Titanic went down. The Clemens family was still at Quarry Farm at the end of August, and one afternoon there occurred a startling incident which Mark Twain thought worth setting down in practically duplicate letters to Howells and to Dr. John Brown. It may be of interest to the reader to know that John T. Lewis, the colored man mentioned, lived to a good old age--a pensioner of the Clemens family and, in the course of time, of H. H. Rogers. Howells's letter follows. It is the “very long letter” referred to in the foregoing. ***** To W. D. Howells and wife, in Boston: ELMIRA, Aug. 25 '77. MY DEAR HOWELLSES,--I thought I ought to make a sort of record of it for further reference; the pleasantest way to do that would be to write it to somebody; but that somebody would let it leak into print and that we wish to avoid. The Howellses would be safe--so let us tell the Howellses about it. Day before yesterday was a fine summer day away up here on the summit. Aunt Marsh and Cousin May Marsh were here visiting Susie Crane and Livy at our farmhouse. By and by mother Langdon came up the hill in the “high carriage” with Nora the nurse and little Jervis (Charley Langdon's little boy)--Timothy the coachman driving. Behind these came Charley's wife and little girl in the buggy, with the new, young, spry, gray horse--a high-stepper. Theodore Crane arrived a little later. The Bay and Susy were on hand with their nurse, Rosa. I was on hand, too. Susy Crane's trio of colored servants ditto--these being Josie, house-maid; Aunty Cord, cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way (see her portrait in “A True Story just as I Heard It” in my Sketches;) Chocklate (the laundress) (as the Bay calls her--she can't say Charlotte,) still taller, still more majestic of proportions, turbaned, very black, straight as an Indian--age 24. Then there was the farmer's wife (colored) and her little girl, Susy. Wasn't it a good audience to get up an excitement before? Good excitable, inflammable material? Lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure. Lewis is the farmer (colored). He is of mighty frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a clear eye. Age about 45--and the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck. It is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile. Lewis has worked mighty hard and remained mighty poor. At the end of each whole year's toil he can't show a gain of fifty dollars. He had borrowed money of the Cranes till he owed them $700 and he being conscientious and honest, imagine what it was to him to have to carry this stubborn, helpless load year in and year out. Well, sunset came, and Ida the young and comely (Charley Langdon's wife) and her little Julia and the nurse Nora, drove out at the gate behind the new gray horse and started down the long hill--the high carriage receiving its load under the porte cochere. Ida was seen to turn her face toward us across the fence and intervening lawn--Theodore waved good-bye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless appeal for help. The next moment Livy said, “Ida's driving too fast down hill!” She followed it with a sort of scream, “Her horse is running away!” We could see two hundred yards down that descent. The buggy seemed to fly. It would strike obstructions and apparently spring the height of a man from the ground. Theodore and I left the shrieking crowd behind and ran down the hill bare-headed and shouting. A neighbor appeared at his gate--a tenth of a second too late! the buggy vanished past him like a thought. My last glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high in the air out of a cloud of dust, and then it disappeared. As I flew down the road my impulse was to shut my eyes as I turned them to the right or left, and so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of mutilation and death I was expecting. I ran on and on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself: “I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive.” When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched together--one of them full of people. I said, “Just so--they are staring petrified at the remains.” But when I got amongst that bunch, there sat Ida in her buggy and nobody hurt, not even the horse or the vehicle. Ida was pale but serene. As I came tearing down, she smiled back over her shoulder at me and said, “Well, we're alive yet, aren't we?” A miracle had been performed--nothing else. You see Lewis, the prodigious, humped upon his front seat, had been toiling up, on his load of manure; he saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him, on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man's head at every jump. So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a V with the fence--the running horse could not escape that, but must enter it. Then Lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse's bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing! It was down hill, mind you. Ten feet further down hill neither Lewis nor any other man could have saved them, for they would have been on the abrupt “turn,” then. But how this miracle was ever accomplished at all, by human strength, generalship and accuracy, is clean beyond my comprehension--and grows more so the more I go and examine the ground and try to believe it was actually done. I know one thing, well; if Lewis had missed his aim he would have been killed on the spot in the trap he had made for himself, and we should have found the rest of the remains away down at the bottom of the steep ravine. Ten minutes later Theodore and I arrived opposite the house, with the servants straggling after us, and shouted to the distracted group on the porch, “Everybody safe!” Believe it? Why how could they? They knew the road perfectly. We might as well have said it to people who had seen their friends go over Niagara. However, we convinced them; and then, instead of saying something, or going on crying, they grew very still--words could not express it, I suppose. Nobody could do anything that night, or sleep, either; but there was a deal of moving talk, with long pauses between pictures of that flying carriage, these pauses represented--this picture intruded itself all the time and disjointed the talk. But yesterday evening late, when Lewis arrived from down town he found his supper spread, and some presents of books there, with very complimentary writings on the fly-leaves, and certain very complimentary letters, and more or less greenbacks of dignified denomination pinned to these letters and fly-leaves,--and one said, among other things, (signed by the Cranes) “We cancel $400 of your indebtedness to us,” &c. &c. (The end thereof is not yet, of course, for Charley Langdon is West and will arrive ignorant of all these things, today.) The supper-room had been kept locked and imposingly secret and mysterious until Lewis should arrive; but around that part of the house were gathered Lewis's wife and child, Chocklate, Josie, Aunty Cord and our Rosa, canvassing things and waiting impatiently. They were all on hand when the curtain rose. Now, Aunty Cord is a violent Methodist and Lewis an implacable Dunker--Baptist. Those two are inveterate religious disputants. The revealments having been made Aunty Cord said with effusion-- “Now, let folks go on saying there ain't no God! Lewis, the Lord sent you there to stop that horse.” Says Lewis: “Then who sent the horse there in sich a shape?” But I want to call your attention to one thing. When Lewis arrived the other evening, after saving those lives by a feat which I think is the most marvelous of any I can call to mind--when he arrived, hunched up on his manure wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too--and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past 7 years that he has occupied this farm. Aug. 27. P. S. Our little romance in real life is happily and satisfactorily completed. Charley has come, listened, acted--and now John T. Lewis has ceased to consider himself as belonging to that class called “the poor.” It has been known, during some years, that it was Lewis's purpose to buy a thirty dollar silver watch some day, if he ever got where he could afford it. Today Ida has given him a new, sumptuous gold Swiss stem-winding stop-watch; and if any scoffer shall say, “Behold this thing is out of character,” there is an inscription within, which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. I was asked beforehand, if this would be a wise gift, and I said “Yes, the very wisest of all;” I know the colored race, and I know that in Lewis's eyes this fine toy will throw the other more valuable testimonials far away into the shade. If he lived in England the Humane Society would give him a gold medal as costly as this watch, and nobody would say: “It is out of character.” If Lewis chose to wear a town clock, who would become it better? Lewis has sound common sense, and is not going to be spoiled. The instant he found himself possessed of money, he forgot himself in a plan to make his old father comfortable, who is wretchedly poor and lives down in Maryland. His next act, on the spot, was the proffer to the Cranes of the $300 of his remaining indebtedness to them. This was put off by them to the indefinite future, for he is not going to be allowed to pay that at all, though he doesn't know it. A letter of acknowledgment from Lewis contains a sentence which raises it to the dignity of literature: “But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to use me as a instrument for the saving of those presshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.” That is well said. Yrs ever MARK. Howells was moved to use the story in the “Contributors' Club,” and warned Clemens against letting it get into the newspapers. He declared he thought it one of the most impressive things he had ever read. But Clemens seems never to have allowed it to be used in any form. In its entirety, therefore, it is quite new matter. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Sept. 19, 1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I don't really see how the story of the runaway horse could read well with the little details of names and places and things left out. They are the true life of all narrative. It wouldn't quite do to print them at this time. We'll talk about it when you come. Delicacy--a sad, sad false delicacy--robs literature of the best two things among its belongings. Family-circle narrative and obscene stories. But no matter; in that better world which I trust we are all going to I have the hope and belief that they will not be denied us. Say--Twichell and I had an adventure at sea, 4 months ago, which I did not put in my Bermuda articles, because there was not enough to it. But the press dispatches bring the sequel today, and now there's plenty to it. A sailless, wasteless, chartless, compassless, grubless old condemned tub that has been drifting helpless about the ocean for 4 months and a half, begging bread and water like any other tramp, flying a signal of distress permanently, and with 13 innocent, marveling chuckleheaded Bermuda niggers on board, taking a Pleasure Excursion! Our ship fed the poor devils on the 25th of last May, far out at sea and left them to bullyrag their way to New York--and now they ain't as near New York as they were then by 250 miles! They have drifted 750 miles and are still drifting in the relentless Gulf Stream! What a delicious magazine chapter it would make--but I had to deny myself. I had to come right out in the papers at once, with my details, so as to try to raise the government's sympathy sufficiently to have better succor sent them than the cutter Colfax, which went a little way in search of them the other day and then struck a fog and gave it up. If the President were in Washington I would telegraph him. When I hear that the “Jonas Smith” has been found again, I mean to send for one of those darkies, to come to Hartford and give me his adventures for an Atlantic article. Likely you will see my today's article in the newspapers. Yrs ever, MARK. The revenue cutter Colfax went after the Jonas Smith, thinking there was mutiny or other crime on board. It occurs to me now that, since there is only mere suffering and misery and nobody to punish, it ceases to be a matter which (a republican form of) government will feel authorized to interfere in further. Dam a republican form of government. Clemens thought he had given up lecturing for good; he was prosperous and he had no love for the platform. But one day an idea popped into his head: Thomas Nast, the “father of the American cartoon,” had delivered a successful series of illustrated lectures --talks for which he made the drawings as he went along. Mark Twain's idea was to make a combination with Nast. His letter gives us the plan in full. ***** To Thomas Nast, Morristown, N. J.: HARTFORD, CONN. 1877. MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say “I die innocent.” But the same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten years ago (when I was unknown) viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones) with you for company. My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, “Absorb these.” For instance--[Here follows a plan and a possible list of cities to be visited. The letter continues] Call the gross receipts $100,000 for four months and a half, and the profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them.) I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last winter when I made a little reading-trip he only paid me $300 and pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks to see how the thing would go. I was charmed. Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should have some fun. Yours truly, SAMUEL L. CLEMENS. The plan came to nothing. Nast, like Clemens, had no special taste for platforming, and while undoubtedly there would have been large profits in the combination, the promise of the venture did not compel his acceptance. In spite of his distaste for the platform Mark Twain was always giving readings and lectures, without charge, for some worthy Hartford cause. He was ready to do what he could to help an entertainment along, if he could do it in his own way--an original way, sometimes, and not always gratifying to the committee, whose plans were likely to be prearranged. For one thing, Clemens, supersensitive in the matter of putting himself forward in his own town, often objected to any special exploitation of his name. This always distressed the committee, who saw a large profit to their venture in the prestige of his fame. The following characteristic letter was written in self-defense when, on one such occasion, a committee had become sufficiently peevish to abandon a worthy enterprise. ***** To an Entertainment Committee, in Hartford: Nov. 9. E. S. SYKES, Esq: Dr. SIR,--Mr. Burton's note puts upon me all the blame of the destruction of an enterprise which had for its object the succor of the Hartford poor. That is to say, this enterprise has been dropped because of the “dissatisfaction with Mr. Clemens's stipulations.” Therefore I must be allowed to say a word in my defense. There were two “stipulations”--exactly two. I made one of them; if the other was made at all, it was a joint one, from the choir and me. My individual stipulation was, that my name should be kept out of the newspapers. The joint one was that sufficient tickets to insure a good sum should be sold before the date of the performance should be set. (Understand, we wanted a good sum--I do not think any of us bothered about a good house; it was money we were after) Now you perceive that my concern is simply with my individual stipulation. Did that break up the enterprise? Eugene Burton said he would sell $300 worth of the tickets himself.--Mr. Smith said he would sell $200 or $300 worth himself. My plan for Asylum Hill Church would have ensured $150 from that quarter.--All this in the face of my “Stipulation.” It was proposed to raise $1000; did my stipulation render the raising of $400 or $500 in a dozen churches impossible? My stipulation is easily defensible. When a mere reader or lecturer has appeared 3 or 4 times in a town of Hartford's size, he is a good deal more than likely to get a very unpleasant snub if he shoves himself forward about once or twice more. Therefore I long ago made up my mind that whenever I again appeared here, it should be only in a minor capacity and not as a chief attraction. Now, I placed that harmless and very justifiable stipulation before the committee the other day; they carried it to headquarters and it was accepted there. I am not informed that any objection was made to it, or that it was regarded as an offense. It seems late in the day, now, after a good deal of trouble has been taken and a good deal of thankless work done by the committees, to, suddenly tear up the contract and then turn and bowl me down from long range as being the destroyer of it. If the enterprise has failed because of my individual stipulation, here you have my proper and reasonable reasons for making that stipulation. If it has failed because of the joint stipulation, put the blame there, and let us share it collectively. I think our plan was a good one. I do not doubt that Mr. Burton still approves of it, too. I believe the objections come from other quarters, and not from him. Mr. Twichell used the following words in last Sunday's sermon, (if I remember correctly): “My hearers, the prophet Deuteronomy says this wise thing: 'Though ye plan a goodly house for the poor, and plan it with wisdom, and do take off your coats and set to to build it, with high courage, yet shall the croaker presently come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Verily this plan is not well planned--and he will go his way; and the obstructionist will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Behold, this is but a sick plan--and he will go his way; and the man that knows it all will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and say, Lo, call they this a plan? then will he go his way; and the places which knew him once shall know him no more forever, because he was not, for God took him. Now therefore I say unto you, Verily that house will not be budded. And I say this also: He that waiteth for all men to be satisfied with his plan, let him seek eternal life, for he shall need it.'” This portion of Mr. Twichell's sermon made a great impression upon me, and I was grieved that some one had not wakened me earlier so that I might have heard what went before. S. L. CLEMENS. Mr. Sykes (of the firm of Sykes & Newton, the Allen House Pharmacy) replied that he had read the letter to the committee and that it had set those gentlemen right who had not before understood the situation. “If others were as ready to do their part as yourself our poor would not want assistance,” he said, in closing. We come now to an incident which assumes the proportions of an episode-even of a catastrophe--in Mark Twain's career. The disaster was due to a condition noted a few pages earlier--the inability of genius to judge its own efforts. The story has now become history --printed history--it having been sympathetically told by Howells in My Mark Twain, and more exhaustively, with a report of the speech that invited the lightning, in a former work by the present writer. The speech was made at John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday dinner, given by the Atlantic staff on the evening of December 17, 1877. It was intended as a huge joke--a joke that would shake the sides of these venerable Boston deities, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, and the rest of that venerated group. Clemens had been a favorite at the Atlantic lunches and dinners--a speech by him always an event. This time he decided to outdo himself. He did that, but not in the way he had intended. To use one of his own metaphors, he stepped out to meet the rainbow and got struck by lightning. His joke was not of the Boston kind or size. When its full nature burst upon the company--when the ears of the assembled diners heard the sacred names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes lightly associated with human aspects removed--oh, very far removed --from Cambridge and Concord, a chill fell upon the diners that presently became amazement, and then creeping paralysis. Nobody knew afterward whether the great speech that he had so gaily planned ever came to a natural end or not. Somebody--the next on the program--attempted to follow him, but presently the company melted out of the doors and crept away into the night. It seemed to Mark Twain that his career had come to an end. Back in Hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote Howells his anguish. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Sunday Night. 1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies--a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies. I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now. So it is my opinion and my wife's that the telephone story had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion? It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it. The whole matter is a dreadful subject--let me drop it here--at least on paper. Penitently yrs, MARK. Howells sent back a comforting letter. “I have no idea of dropping you out of the Atlantic,” he wrote; “and Mr. Houghton has still less, if possible. You are going to help and not hurt us many a year yet, if you will.... You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that, even in this world.” Howells added that Charles Elliot Norton had expressed just the right feeling concerning the whole affair, and that many who had not heard the speech, but read the newspaper reports of it, had found it without offense. Clemens wrote contrite letters to Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow, and received most gracious acknowledgments. Emerson, indeed, had not heard the speech: His faculties were already blurred by the mental mists that would eventually shut him in. Clemens wrote again to Howells, this time with less anguish. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Friday, 1877. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Your letter was a godsend; and perhaps the welcomest part of it was your consent that I write to those gentlemen; for you discouraged my hints in that direction that morning in Boston--rightly, too, for my offense was yet too new, then. Warner has tried to hold up our hands like the good fellow he is, but poor Twichell could not say a word, and confessed that he would rather take nearly any punishment than face Livy and me. He hasn't been here since. It is curious, but I pitched early upon Mr. Norton as the very man who would think some generous thing about that matter, whether he said it or not. It is splendid to be a man like that--but it is given to few to be. I wrote a letter yesterday, and sent a copy to each of the three. I wanted to send a copy to Mr. Whittier also, since the offense was done also against him, being committed in his presence and he the guest of the occasion, besides holding the well-nigh sacred place he does in his people's estimation; but I didn't know whether to venture or not, and so ended by doing nothing. It seemed an intrusion to approach him, and even Livy seemed to have her doubts as to the best and properest way to do in the case. I do not reverence Mr. Emerson less, but somehow I could approach him easier. Send me those proofs, if you have got them handy; I want to submit them to Wylie; he won't show them to anybody. Had a very pleasant and considerate letter from Mr. Houghton, today, and was very glad to receive it. You can't imagine how brilliant and beautiful that new brass fender is, and how perfectly naturally it takes its place under the carved oak. How they did scour it up before they sent it! I lied a good deal about it when I came home--so for once I kept a secret and surprised Livy on a Christmas morning! I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner; have only moped around. But I'm going to try tomorrow. How could I ever have. Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect. Livy and I join in the warmest regards to you and yours, Yrs ever, MARK. Longfellow, in his reply, said: “I do not believe anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not, and Holmes tells me he was not. So I think you may dismiss the matter from your mind without further remorse.” Holmes wrote: “It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or feel wounded by your playful use of my name.” Miss Ellen Emerson replied for her father (in a letter to Mrs. Clemens) that the speech had made no impression upon him, giving at considerable length the impression it had made on herself and other members of the family. Clearly, it was not the principals who were hurt, but only those who held them in awe, though one can realize that this would not make it much easier for Mark Twain. XVIII. LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1878-79. TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL. WRITING A NEW TRAVEL BOOK. LIFE IN MUNICH. Whether the unhappy occurrence at the Whittier dinner had anything to do with Mark Twain's resolve to spend a year or two in Europe cannot be known now. There were other good reasons for going, one in particular being a demand for another book of travel. It was also true, as he explains in a letter to his mother, that his days were full of annoyances, making it difficult for him to work. He had a tendency to invest money in almost any glittering enterprise that came along, and at this time he was involved in the promotion of a variety of patent rights that brought him no return other than assessment and vexation. Clemens's mother was by this time living with her son Onion and his wife, in Iowa. ***** To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa: HARTFORD, Feb. 17, 1878 MY DEAR MOTHER,--I suppose I am the worst correspondent in the whole world; and yet I grow worse and worse all the time. My conscience blisters me for not writing you, but it has ceased to abuse me for not writing other folks. Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of my time. It comes mainly of business responsibilities and annoyances, and the persecution of kindly letters from well meaning strangers--to whom I must be rudely silent or else put in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers. There are other things also that help to consume my time and defeat my projects. Well, the consequence is, I cannot write a book at home. This cuts my income down. Therefore, I have about made up my mind to take my tribe and fly to some little corner of Europe and budge no more until I shall have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs. Please say nothing about this at present. We propose to sail the 11th of April. I shall go to Fredonia to meet you, but it will not be well for Livy to make that trip I am afraid. However, we shall see. I will hope she can go. Mr. Twichell has just come in, so I must go to him. We are all well, and send love to you all. Affly, SAM. He was writing few letters at this time, and doing but little work. There were always many social events during the winter, and what with his European plans and a diligent study of the German language, which the entire family undertook, his days and evenings were full enough. Howells wrote protesting against the European travel and berating him for his silence: “I never was in Berlin and don't know any family hotel there. I should be glad I didn't, if it would keep you from going. You deserve to put up at the Sign of the Savage in Vienna. Really, it's a great blow to me to hear of that prospected sojourn. It's a shame. I must see you, somehow, before you go. I'm in dreadfully low spirits about it. “I was afraid your silence meant something wicked.” Clemens replied promptly, urging a visit to Hartford, adding a postscript for Mrs. Howells, characteristic enough to warrant preservation. P. S. to Mrs. Howells, in Boston: Feb. '78. DEAR MRS. HOWELLS. Mrs. Clemens wrote you a letter, and handed it to me half an hour ago, while I was folding mine to Mr. Howells. I laid that letter on this table before me while I added the paragraph about R,'s application. Since then I have been hunting and swearing, and swearing and hunting, but I can't find a sign of that letter. It is the most astonishing disappearance I ever heard of. Mrs. Clemens has gone off driving--so I will have to try and give you an idea of her communication from memory. Mainly it consisted of an urgent desire that you come to see us next week, if you can possibly manage it, for that will be a reposeful time, the turmoil of breaking up beginning the week after. She wants you to tell her about Italy, and advise her in that connection, if you will. Then she spoke of her plans--hers, mind you, for I never have anything quite so definite as a plan. She proposes to stop a fortnight in (confound the place, I've forgotten what it was,) then go and live in Dresden till sometime in the summer; then retire to Switzerland for the hottest season, then stay a while in Venice and put in the winter in Munich. This program subject to modifications according to circumstances. She said something about some little by-trips here and there, but they didn't stick in my memory because the idea didn't charm me. (They have just telephoned me from the Courant office that Bayard Taylor and family have taken rooms in our ship, the Holsatia, for the 11th April.) Do come, if you possibly can!--and remember and don't forget to avoid letting Mrs. Clemens find out I lost her letter. Just answer her the same as if you had got it. Sincerely yours S. L. CLEMENS. The Howellses came, as invited, for a final reunion before the breaking up. This was in the early half of March; the Clemenses were to sail on the 11th of the following month. Orion Clemens, meantime, had conceived a new literary idea and was piling in his MS. as fast as possible to get his brother's judgment on it before the sailing-date. It was not a very good time to send MS., but Mark Twain seems to have read it and given it some consideration. “The Journey in Heaven,” of his own, which he mentions, was the story published so many years later under the title of “Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.” He had began it in 1868, on his voyage to San Francisco, it having been suggested by conversations with Capt. Ned Wakeman, of one of the Pacific steamers. Wakeman also appears in 'Roughing It,' Chap. L, as Capt. Ned Blakely, and again in one of the “Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” as “Captain Hurricane Jones.” ***** To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk: HARTFORD, Mch. 23, 1878. MY DEAR BRO.,--Every man must learn his trade--not pick it up. God requires that he learn it by slow and painful processes. The apprentice-hand, in black-smithing, in medicine, in literature, in everything, is a thing that can't be hidden. It always shows. But happily there is a market for apprentice work, else the “Innocents Abroad” would have had no sale. Happily, too, there's a wider market for some sorts of apprentice literature than there is for the very best of journey-work. This work of yours is exceedingly crude, but I am free to say it is less crude than I expected it to be, and considerably better work than I believed you could do, it is too crude to offer to any prominent periodical, so I shall speak to the N. Y. Weekly people. To publish it there will be to bury it. Why could not same good genius have sent me to the N. Y. Weekly with my apprentice sketches? You should not publish it in book form at all--for this reason: it is only an imitation of Verne--it is not a burlesque. But I think it may be regarded as proof that Verne cannot be burlesqued. In accompanying notes I have suggested that you vastly modify the first visit to hell, and leave out the second visit altogether. Nobody would, or ought to print those things. You are not advanced enough in literature to venture upon a matter requiring so much practice. Let me show you what a man has got to go through: Nine years ago I mapped out my “Journey in Heaven.” I discussed it with literary friends whom I could trust to keep it to themselves. I gave it a deal of thought, from time to time. After a year or more I wrote it up. It was not a success. Five years ago I wrote it again, altering the plan. That MS is at my elbow now. It was a considerable improvement on the first attempt, but still it wouldn't do--last year and year before I talked frequently with Howells about the subject, and he kept urging me to do it again. So I thought and thought, at odd moments and at last I struck what I considered to be the right plan! Mind I have never altered the ideas, from the first--the plan was the difficulty. When Howells was here last, I laid before him the whole story without referring to my MS and he said: “You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America.” I doubt my ability to get Dean Stanley to do anything of the sort, but I shall do the rest--and this is all a secret which you must not divulge. Now look here--I have tried, all these years, to think of some way of “doing” hell too--and have always had to give it up. Hell, in my book, will not occupy five pages of MS I judge--it will be only covert hints, I suppose, and quickly dropped, I may end by not even referring to it. And mind you, in my opinion you will find that you can't write up hell so it will stand printing. Neither Howells nor I believe in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter, the Savior is none the less a sacred Personage, and a man should have no desire or disposition to refer to him lightly, profanely, or otherwise than with the profoundest reverence. The only safe thing is not to introduce him, or refer to him at all, I suspect. I have entirely rewritten one book 3 (perhaps 4.) times, changing the plan every time--1200 pages of MS. wasted and burned--and shall tackle it again, one of these years and maybe succeed at last. Therefore you need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. Mr. Perkins will send you and Ma your checks when we are gone. But don't write him, ever, except a single line in case he forgets the checks--for the man is driven to death with work. I see you are half promising yourself a monthly return for your book. In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch. How many of mine I have counted! and never a one of them but failed! It is much better to hedge disappointment by not counting.--Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more. My time in America is growing mighty short. Perhaps we can manage in this way: Imprimis, if the N. Y. Weekly people know that you are my brother, they will turn that fact into an advertisement--a thing of value to them, but not to you and me. This must be prevented. I will write them a note to say you have a friend near Keokuk, Charles S. Miller, who has a MS for sale which you think is a pretty clever travesty on Verne; and if they want it they might write to him in your care. Then if any correspondence ensues between you and them, let Mollie write for you and sign your name--your own hand writing representing Miller's. Keep yourself out of sight till you make a strike on your own merits there is no other way to get a fair verdict upon your merits. Later-I've written the note to Smith, and with nothing in it which he can use as an advertisement. I'm called--Good bye-love to you both. We leave here next Wednesday for Elmira: we leave there Apl. 9 or 10--and sail 11th Yr Bro. SAM. In the letter that follows the mention of Annie and Sam refers, of course, to the children of Mrs. Moffett, who had been, Pamela Clemens. They were grown now, and Annie Moffett was married to Charles L. Webster, who later was to become Mark Twain's business partner. The Moffetts and Websters were living in Fredonia at this time, and Clemens had been to pay them a good-by visit. The Taylor dinner mentioned was a farewell banquet given to Bayard Taylor, who had been appointed Minister to Germany, and was to sail on the ship with Mark Twain. Mark Twain's mother was visiting in Fredonia when this letter was written. ***** To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in Fredonia: Apr. 7, '78. MY DEAR MOTHER,--I have told Livy all about Annie's beautiful house, and about Sam and Charley, and about Charley's ingenious manufactures and his strong manhood and good promise, and how glad I am that he and Annie married. And I have told her about Annie's excellent house-keeping, also about the great Bacon conflict; (I told you it was a hundred to one that neither Livy nor the European powers had heard of that desolating struggle.) And I have told her how beautiful you are in your age and how bright your mind is with its old-time brightness, and how she and the children would enjoy you. And I have told her how singularly young Pamela is looking, and what a fine large fellow Sam is, and how ill the lingering syllable “my” to his name fits his port and figure. Well, Pamela, after thinking it over for a day or so, I came near inquiring about a state-room in our ship for Sam, to please you, but my wiser former resolution came back to me. It is not for his good that he have friends in the ship. His conduct in the Bacon business shows that he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose from your apron strings. You don't teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself, but you do just the reverse. You are assisted in your damaging work by the tyrannous ways of a village--villagers watch each other and so make cowards of each other. After Sam shall have voyaged to Europe by himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs, do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in Fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there? No, he will smile at the idea. If he avoids this courtesy now from principle, of course I find no fault with it at all--only if he thinks it is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is only a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion. I only say it may--I cannot venture to say it will. Hartford is not a large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort. Three or four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter from somebody “exposing” the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on the premises (a drug store.) A tempest of indignation swept the town. Our clergymen and everybody else said the “culprit” had not only done an innocent thing, but had done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody's right or business to find fault with it. Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we never have any temperance “rot” going on in Hartford. I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story for criticism. When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can and bang away. I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but 3 days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a bushel and a half of letters. I am very nearly tired to death. I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got up and said so and excused myself from speaking. I arrived here at 3 o'clock this morning. I think the next 3 days will finish me. The idea of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous. A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under Livy's charge. Livy couldn't easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own account, but fully expected I would make trouble when I heard of it. But I didn't. A girl can't well travel alone, so I offered no objection. She leaves us at Hamburg. So I've got 6 people in my care, now--which is just 6 too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity. I expect nothing else but to lose some of them overboard. We send our loving good-byes to all the household and hope to see you again after a spell. Affly Yrs. SAM. There are no other American letters of this period. The Clemens party, which included Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, sailed as planned, on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. As before stated, Bayard Taylor was on the ship; also Murat Halstead and family. On the eve of departure, Clemens sent to Howells this farewell word: “And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it, or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much.” A characteristic tribute, and from the heart. The first European letter came from Frankfort, a rest on their way to Heidelberg. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: FRANKFORT ON THE MAIN, May 4, 1878. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I only propose to write a single line to say we are still around. Ah, I have such a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of being “out of it all.” I think I foretaste some of the advantages of being dead. Some of the joy of it. I don't read any newspapers or care for them. When people tell me England has declared war, I drop the subject, feeling that it is none of my business; when they tell me Mrs. Tilton has confessed and Mr. B. denied, I say both of them have done that before, therefore let the worn stub of the Plymouth white-wash brush be brought out once more, and let the faithful spit on their hands and get to work again regardless of me--for I am out of it all. We had 2 almost devilish weeks at sea (and I tell you Bayard Taylor is a really lovable man--which you already knew) then we staid a week in the beautiful, the very beautiful city of Hamburg; and since then we have been fooling along, 4 hours per day by rail, with a courier, spending the other 20 in hotels whose enormous bedchambers and private parlors are an overpowering marvel to me: Day before yesterday, in Cassel, we had a love of a bedroom, 31 feet long, and a parlor with 2 sofas, 12 chairs, a writing desk and 4 tables scattered around, here and there in it. Made of red silk, too, by George. The times and times I wish you were along! You could throw some fun into the journey; whereas I go on, day by day, in a smileless state of solemn admiration. What a paradise this is! What clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government. And I am so happy, for I am responsible for none of it. I am only here to enjoy. How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand. With love from us 2 to you 2. MARK. P. S. We are not taking six days to go from Hamburg to Heidelberg because we prefer it. Quite on the contrary. Mrs. Clemens picked up a dreadful cold and sore throat on board ship and still keeps them in stock--so she could only travel 4 hours a day. She wanted to dive straight through, but I had different notions about the wisdom of it. I found that 4 hours a day was the best she could do. Before I forget it, our permanent address is Care Messrs. Koester & Co., Backers, Heidelberg. We go there tomorrow. Poor Susy! From the day we reached German soil, we have required Rosa to speak German to the children--which they hate with all their souls. The other morning in Hanover, Susy came to us (from Rosa, in the nursery) and said, in halting syllables, “Papa, vie viel uhr ist es?”--then turned with pathos in her big eyes, and said, “Mamma, I wish Rosa was made in English.” (Unfinished) Frankfort was a brief halting-place, their destination being Heidelberg. They were presently located there in the beautiful Schloss hotel, which overlooks the old castle with its forest setting, the flowing Neckar, and the distant valley of the Rhine. Clemens, who had discovered the location, and loved it, toward the end of May reported to Howells his felicities. ***** Fragment of a letter to W. D. Howells, in Boston: SCHLOSS-HOTEL HEIDELBERG, Sunday, a. m., May 26, 1878. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--....divinely located. From this airy porch among the shining groves we look down upon Heidelberg Castle, and upon the swift Neckar, and the town, and out over the wide green level of the Rhine valley--a marvelous prospect. We are in a Cul-de-sac formed of hill-ranges and river; we are on the side of a steep mountain; the river at our feet is walled, on its other side, (yes, on both sides,) by a steep and wooded mountain-range which rises abruptly aloft from the water's edge; portions of these mountains are densely wooded; the plain of the Rhine, seen through the mouth of this pocket, has many and peculiar charms for the eye. Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (enclosed balconies) one looking toward the Rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend nearly all our time in these--when one is sunny the other is shady. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking and suppering in them. The view from these bird-cages is my despair. The pictures change from one enchanting aspect to another in ceaseless procession, never keeping one form half an hour, and never taking on an unlovely one. And then Heidelberg on a dark night! It is massed, away down there, almost right under us, you know, and stretches off toward the valley. Its curved and interlacing streets are a cobweb, beaded thick with lights--a wonderful thing to see; then the rows of lights on the arched bridges, and their glinting reflections in the water; and away at the far end, the Eisenbahnhof, with its twenty solid acres of glittering gas-jets, a huge garden, as one may say, whose every plant is a flame. These balconies are the darlingest things. I have spent all the morning in this north one. Counting big and little, it has 256 panes of glass in it; so one is in effect right out in the free sunshine, and yet sheltered from wind and rain--and likewise doored and curtained from whatever may be going on in the bedroom. It must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two sounds; the happy clamor of the birds in the groves, and the muffled music of the Neckar, tumbling over the opposing dykes. It is no hardship to lie awake awhile, nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song. While Livy and Miss Spaulding have been writing at this table, I have sat tilted back, near by, with a pipe and the last Atlantic, and read Charley Warner's article with prodigious enjoyment. I think it is exquisite. I think it must be the roundest and broadest and completest short essay he has ever written. It is clear, and compact, and charmingly done. The hotel grounds join and communicate with the Castle grounds; so we and the children loaf in the winding paths of those leafy vastnesses a great deal, and drink beer and listen to excellent music. When we first came to this hotel, a couple of weeks ago, I pointed to a house across the river, and said I meant to rent the centre room on the 3d floor for a work-room. Jokingly we got to speaking of it as my office; and amused ourselves with watching “my people” daily in their small grounds and trying to make out what we could of their dress, &c., without a glass. Well, I loafed along there one day and found on that house the only sign of the kind on that side of the river: “Moblirte Wohnung zu Vermiethen!” I went in and rented that very room which I had long ago selected. There was only one other room in the whole double-house unrented. (It occurs to me that I made a great mistake in not thinking to deliver a very bad German speech, every other sentence pieced out with English, at the Bayard Taylor banquet in New York. I think I could have made it one of the features of the occasion.)--[He used this plan at a gathering of the American students in Heidelberg, on July 4th, with great effect; so his idea was not wasted.] We left Hartford before the end of March, and I have been idle ever since. I have waited for a call to go to work--I knew it would come. Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; 3 days ago I concluded to move my manuscript over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided at last. So tomorrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till middle of July or 1st August, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany 2 or 3 weeks, and then I'll go to work again--(perhaps in Munich.) We both send a power of love to the Howellses, and we do wish you were here. Are you in the new house? Tell us about it. Yrs Ever MARK. There has been no former mention in the letters of the coming of Twichell; yet this had been a part of the European plan. Mark Twain had invited his walking companion to make a tramp with him through Europe, as his guest. Material for the new book would grow faster with Twichell as a companion; and these two in spite of their widely opposed views concerning Providence and the general scheme of creation, were wholly congenial comrades. Twichell, in Hartford, expecting to receive the final summons to start, wrote: “Oh, my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To begin with, I am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together--why, it's my dream of luxury.” August 1st brought Twichell, and the friends set out without delay on a tramp through the Black Forest, making short excursions at first, but presently extending them in the direction of Switzerland. Mrs. Clemens and the others remained in Heidelberg, to follow at their leisure. To Mrs. Clemens her husband sent frequent reports of their wanderings. It will be seen that their tramp did not confine itself to pedestrianism, though they did, in fact, walk a great deal, and Mark Twain in a note to his mother declared, “I loathe all travel, except on foot.” The reports to Mrs. Clemens follow: ***** Letters to Mrs. Clemens, in Heidelberg: ALLERHEILIGEN Aug. 5, 1878 8:30 p.m. Livy darling, we had a rattling good time to-day, but we came very near being left at Baden-Baden, for instead of waiting in the waiting-room, we sat down on the platform to wait where the trains come in from the other direction. We sat there full ten minutes--and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that that was not the right place. On the train the principal of the big English school at Nauheim (of which Mr. Scheiding was a teacher), introduced himself to me, and then he mapped out our day for us (for today and tomorrow) and also drew a map and gave us directions how to proceed through Switzerland. He had his entire school with him, taking them on a prodigious trip through Switzerland--tickets for the round trip ten dollars apiece. He has done this annually for 10 years. We took a post carriage from Aachen to Otterhofen for 7 marks--stopped at the “Pflug” to drink beer, and saw that pretty girl again at a distance. Her father, mother, and two brothers received me like an ancient customer and sat down and talked as long as I had any German left. The big room was full of red-vested farmers (the Gemeindrath of the district, with the Burgermeister at the head,) drinking beer and talking public business. They had held an election and chosen a new member and had been drinking beer at his expense for several hours. (It was intensely Black-foresty.) There was an Australian there (a student from Stuttgart or somewhere,) and Joe told him who I was and he laid himself out to make our course plain, for us--so I am certain we can't get lost between here and Heidelberg. We walked the carriage road till we came to that place where one sees the foot path on the other side of the ravine, then we crossed over and took that. For a good while we were in a dense forest and judged we were lost, but met a native women who said we were all right. We fooled along and got there at 6 p.m.--ate supper, then followed down the ravine to the foot of the falls, then struck into a blind path to see where it would go, and just about dark we fetched up at the Devil's Pulpit on top of the hills. Then home. And now to bed, pretty sleepy. Joe sends love and I send a thousand times as much, my darling. S. L. C. HOTEL GENNIN. Livy darling, we had a lovely day jogged right along, with a good horse and sensible driver--the last two hours right behind an open carriage filled with a pleasant German family--old gentleman and 3 pretty daughters. At table d'hote tonight, 3 dishes were enough for me, and then I bored along tediously through the bill of fare, with a back-ache, not daring to get up and bow to the German family and leave. I meant to sit it through and make them get up and do the bowing; but at last Joe took pity on me and said he would get up and drop them a curtsy and put me out of my misery. I was grateful. He got up and delivered a succession of frank and hearty bows, accompanying them with an atmosphere of good-fellowship which would have made even an English family surrender. Of course the Germans responded--then I got right up and they had to respond to my salaams, too. So “that was done.” We walked up a gorge and saw a tumbling waterfall which was nothing to Giessbach, but it made me resolve to drop you a line and urge you to go and see Giessbach illuminated. Don't fail--but take a long day's rest, first. I love you, sweetheart. SAML. OVER THE GEMMI PASS. 4.30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, 1878. Livy darling, Joe and I have had a most noble day. Started to climb (on foot) at 8.30 this morning among the grandest peaks! Every half hour carried us back a month in the season. We left them harvesting 2d crop of hay. At 9 we were in July and found ripe strawberries; at 9.30 we were in June and gathered flowers belonging to that month; at 10 we were in May and gathered a flower which appeared in Heidelberg the 17th of that month; also forget-me-nots, which disappeared from Heidelberg about mid-May; at 11.30 we were in April (by the flowers;) at noon we had rain and hail mixed, and wind and enveloping fogs, and considered it March; at 12.30 we had snowbanks above us and snowbanks below us, and considered it February. Not good February, though, because in the midst of the wild desolation the forget-me-not still bloomed, lovely as ever. What a flower garden the Gemmi Pass is! After I had got my hands full Joe made me a paper bag, which I pinned to my lapel and filled with choice specimens. I gathered no flowers which I had ever gathered before except 4 or 5 kinds. We took it leisurely and I picked all I wanted to. I mailed my harvest to you a while ago. Don't send it to Mrs. Brooks until you have looked it over, flower by flower. It will pay. Among the clouds and everlasting snows I found a brave and bright little forget-me-not growing in the very midst of a smashed and tumbled stone-debris, just as cheerful as if the barren and awful domes and ramparts that towered around were the blessed walls of heaven. I thought how Lilly Warner would be touched by such a gracious surprise, if she, instead of I, had seen it. So I plucked it, and have mailed it to her with a note. Our walk was 7 hours--the last 2 down a path as steep as a ladder, almost, cut in the face of a mighty precipice. People are not allowed to ride down it. This part of the day's work taxed our knees, I tell you. We have been loafing about this village (Leukerbad) for an hour, now we stay here over Sunday. Not tired at all. (Joe's hat fell over the precipice--so he came here bareheaded.) I love you, my darling. SAML. ST. NICHOLAS, Aug. 26th, '78. Livy darling, we came through a-whooping today, 6 hours tramp up steep hills and down steep hills, in mud and water shoe-deep, and in a steady pouring rain which never moderated a moment. I was as chipper and fresh as a lark all the way and arrived without the slightest sense of fatigue. But we were soaked and my shoes full of water, so we ate at once, stripped and went to bed for 2 1/2 hours while our traps were thoroughly dried, and our boots greased in addition. Then we put our clothes on hot and went to table d'hote. Made some nice English friends and shall see them at Zermatt tomorrow. Gathered a small bouquet of new flowers, but they got spoiled. I sent you a safety-match box full of flowers last night from Leukerbad. I have just telegraphed you to wire the family news to me at Riffel tomorrow. I do hope you are all well and having as jolly a time as we are, for I love you, sweetheart, and also, in a measure, the Bays.--[Little Susy's word for “babies.”]--Give my love to Clara Spaulding and also to the cubs. SAML. This, as far as it goes, is a truer and better account of the excursion than Mark Twain gave in the book that he wrote later. A Tramp Abroad has a quality of burlesque in it, which did not belong to the journey at all, but was invented to satisfy the craving for what the public conceived to be Mark Twain's humor. The serious portions of the book are much more pleasing--more like himself. The entire journey, as will be seen, lasted one week more than a month. Twichell also made his reports home, some of which give us interesting pictures of his walking partner. In one place he wrote: “Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations.” Twichell tells how at Kandersteg they were out together one evening where a brook comes plunging down from Gasternthal and how he pushed in a drift to see it go racing along the current. “When I got back to the path Mark was running down stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he had not been so excited in three months.” In other places Twichell refers to his companion's consideration for the feeling of others, and for animals. “When we are driving, his concern is all about the horse. He can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard.” After the walk over Gemmi Pass he wrote: “Mark to-day was immensely absorbed in flowers. He scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens, and wanted more room.” Whereupon Twichell got out his needle and thread and some stiff paper he had and contrived the little paper bag to hang to the front of his vest. The tramp really ended at Lausanne, where Clemens joined his party, but a short excursion to Chillon and Chamonix followed, the travelers finally separating at Geneva, Twichell to set out for home by way of England, Clemens to remain and try to write the story of their travels. He hurried a good-by letter after his comrade: ***** To Rev. J. H. Twichell: (No date) DEAR OLD JOE,--It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you: I am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's. It is justifiable to do this; for why should I let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps? Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. But you are, and we cannot get around it. So take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both. MARK. From Switzerland the Clemens party worked down into Italy, sight-seeing, a diversion in which Mark Twain found little enough of interest. He had seen most of the sights ten years before, when his mind was fresh. He unburdened himself to Twichell and to Howells, after a period of suffering. ***** To J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: ROME, Nov. 3, '78. DEAR JOE,--.....I have received your several letters, and we have prodigiously enjoyed them. How I do admire a man who can sit down and whale away with a pen just the same as if it was fishing--or something else as full of pleasure and as void of labor. I can't do it; else, in common decency, I would when I write to you. Joe, if I can make a book out of the matter gathered in your company over here, the book is safe; but I don't think I have gathered any matter before or since your visit worth writing up. I do wish you were in Rome to do my sightseeing for me. Rome interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more. That is, the Rome which the average tourist feels an interest in; but there are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara Spaulding are having a royal time worshiping the old Masters, and I as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. A friend waits for me. A power of love to you all. Amen. MARK. In his letter to Howells he said: “I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good-enough humor with anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me!” From Italy the Clemens party went to Munich, where they had arranged in advance for winter quarters. Clemens claims, in his report of the matter to Howells, that he took the party through without the aid of a courier, though thirty years later, in some comment which he set down on being shown the letter, he wrote concerning this paragraph: “Probably a lie.” He wrote, also, that they acquired a great affection for Fraulein Dahlweiner: “Acquired it at once and it outlasted the winter we spent in her house.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: No 1a, Karlstrasse, 2e Stock. Care Fraulein Dahlweiner. MUNICH, Nov. 17, 1878. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We arrived here night before last, pretty well fagged: an 8-hour pull from Rome to Florence; a rest there of a day and two nights; then 5 1/2 hours to Bologna; one night's rest; then from noon to 10:30 p.m. carried us to Trent, in the Austrian Tyrol, where the confounded hotel had not received our message, and so at that miserable hour, in that snowy region, the tribe had to shiver together in fireless rooms while beds were prepared and warmed, then up at 6 in the morning and a noble view of snow-peaks glittering in the rich light of a full moon while the hotel-devils lazily deranged a breakfast for us in the dreary gloom of blinking candles; then a solid 12 hours pull through the loveliest snow ranges and snow-draped forest--and at 7 p.m. we hauled up, in drizzle and fog, at the domicile which had been engaged for us ten months before. Munich did seem the horriblest place, the most desolate place, the most unendurable place!--and the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meagre, and the porcelain stoves so grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and Clara (Spaulding) sat down forlorn, and cried, and I retired to a private, place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow German beds; and when Livy and I finished talking across the room, it was all decided that we would rest 24 hours then pay whatever damages were required, and straightway fly to the south of France. But you see, that was simply fatigue. Next morning the tribe fell in love with the rooms, with the weather, with Munich, and head over heels in love with Fraulein Dahlweiner. We got a larger parlor--an ample one--threw two communicating bedrooms into one, for the children, and now we are entirely comfortable. The only apprehension, at present, is that the climate may not be just right for the children, in which case we shall have to go to France, but it will be with the sincerest regret. Now I brought the tribe through from Rome, myself. We never had so little trouble before. The next time anybody has a courier to put out to nurse, I shall not be in the market. Last night the forlornities had all disappeared; so we gathered around the lamp, after supper, with our beer and my pipe, and in a condition of grateful snugness tackled the new magazines. I read your new story aloud, amid thunders of applause, and we all agreed that Captain Jenness and the old man with the accordion-hat are lovely people and most skillfully drawn--and that cabin-boy, too, we like. Of course we are all glad the girl is gone to Venice--for there is no place like Venice. Now I easily understand that the old man couldn't go, because you have a purpose in sending Lyddy by herself: but you could send the old man over in another ship, and we particularly want him along. Suppose you don't need him there? What of that? Can't you let him feed the doves? Can't you let him fall in the canal occasionally? Can't you let his good-natured purse be a daily prey to guides and beggar-boys? Can't you let him find peace and rest and fellowship under Pere Jacopo's kindly wing? (However, you are writing the book, not I--still, I am one of the people you are writing it for, you understand.) I only want to insist, in a friendly way, that the old man shall shed his sweet influence frequently upon the page--that is all. The first time we called at the convent, Pere Jacopo was absent; the next (Just at this moment Miss Spaulding spoke up and said something about Pere Jacopo--there is more in this acting of one mind upon another than people think) time, he was there, and gave us preserved rose-leaves to eat, and talked about you, and Mrs. Howells, and Winnie, and brought out his photographs, and showed us a picture of “the library of your new house,” but not so--it was the study in your Cambridge house. He was very sweet and good. He called on us next day; the day after that we left Venice, after a pleasant sojourn Of 3 or 4 weeks. He expects to spend this winter in Munich and will see us often, he said. Pretty soon, I am going to write something, and when I finish it I shall know whether to put it to itself or in the “Contributors' Club.” That “Contributors' Club” was a most happy idea. By the way, I think that the man who wrote the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 643 has said a mighty sound and sensible thing. I wish his suggestion could be adopted. It is lovely of you to keep that old pipe in such a place of honor. While it occurs to me, I must tell you Susie's last. She is sorely badgered with dreams; and her stock dream is that she is being eaten up by bears. She is a grave and thoughtful child, as you will remember. Last night she had the usual dream. This morning she stood apart (after telling it,) for some time, looking vacantly at the floor, and absorbed in meditation. At last she looked up, and with the pathos of one who feels he has not been dealt by with even-handed fairness, said “But Mamma, the trouble is, that I am never the bear, but always the person.” It would not have occurred to me that there might be an advantage, even in a dream, in occasionally being the eater, instead of always the party eaten, but I easily perceived that her point was well taken. I'm sending to Heidelberg for your letter and Winnie's, and I do hope they haven't been lost. My wife and I send love to you all. Yrs ever, MARK. The Howells story, running at this time in the Atlantic, and so much enjoyed by the Clemens party, was “The Lady of the Aroostook.” The suggestions made for enlarging the part of the “old man” are eminently characteristic. Mark Twain's forty-third birthday came in Munich, and in his letter conveying this fact to his mother we get a brief added outline of the daily life in that old Bavarian city. Certainly, it would seem to have been a quieter and more profitable existence than he had known amid the confusion of things left behind in, America. ***** To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in America: No. 1a Karlstrasse, Dec. 1, MUNICH. 1878. MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I broke the back of life yesterday and started down-hill toward old age. This fact has not produced any effect upon me that I can detect. I suppose we are located here for the winter. I have a pleasant work-room a mile from here where I do my writing. The walk to and from that place gives me what exercise I need, and all I take. We staid three weeks in Venice, a week in Florence, a fortnight in Rome, and arrived here a couple of weeks ago. Livy and Miss Spaulding are studying drawing and German, and the children have a German day-governess. I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do English. Susie often translates Livy's orders to the servants. I cannot work and study German at the same time: so I have dropped the latter, and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. We have all pretty good health, latterly, and have seldom had to call the doctor. The children have been in the open air pretty constantly for months now. In Venice they were on the water in the gondola most of the time, and were great friends with our gondolier; and in Rome and Florence they had long daily tramps, for Rosa is a famous hand to smell out the sights of a strange place. Here they wander less extensively. The family all join in love to you all and to Orion and Mollie. Affly Your son SAM. XIX. LETTERS 1879. RETURN TO AMERICA. THE GREAT GRANT REUNION Life went on very well in Munich. Each day the family fell more in love with Fraulein Dahlweiner and her house. Mark Twain, however, did not settle down to his work readily. His “pleasant work-room” provided exercise, but no inspiration. When he discovered he could not find his Swiss note-book he was ready to give up his travel-writing altogether. In the letter that follows we find him much less enthusiastic concerning his own performances than over the story by Howells, which he was following in the Atlantic. The “detective” chapter mentioned in this letter was not included in 'A Tramp Abroad.' It was published separately, as 'The Stolen White Elephant' in a volume bearing that title. The play, which he had now found “dreadfully witless and flat,” was no other than “Simon Wheeler, Detective,” which he had once regarded so highly. The “Stewart” referred to was the millionaire merchant, A. T. Stewart, whose body was stolen in the expectation of reward. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: MUNICH, Jan. 21, (1879) MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It's no use, your letter miscarried in some way and is lost. The consul has made a thorough search and says he has not been able to trace it. It is unaccountable, for all the letters I did not want arrived without a single grateful failure. Well, I have read-up, now, as far as you have got, that is, to where there's a storm at sea approaching,--and we three think you are clear, out-Howellsing Howells. If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth--truth to the life; every where your pen falls it leaves a photograph. I did imagine that everything had been said about life at sea that could be said, but no matter, it was all a failure and lies, nothing but lies with a thin varnish of fact,--only you have stated it as it absolutely is. And only you see people and their ways, and their insides and outsides as they are, and make them talk as they do talk. I think you are the very greatest artist in these tremendous mysteries that ever lived. There doesn't seem to be anything that can be concealed from your awful all-seeing eye. It must be a cheerful thing for one to live with you and be aware that you are going up and down in him like another conscience all the time. Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred years,--it is the fate of the Shakespeares and of all genuine prophets,--but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. You're not a weed, but an oak; not a summer-house, but a cathedral. In that day I shall still be in the Cyclopedias, too, thus: “Mark Twain; history and occupation unknown--but he was personally acquainted with Howells.” There--I could sing your praises all day, and feel and believe every bit of it. My book is half finished; I wish to heaven it was done. I have given up writing a detective novel--can't write a novel, for I lack the faculty; but when the detectives were nosing around after Stewart's loud remains, I threw a chapter into my present book in which I have very extravagantly burlesqued the detective business--if it is possible to burlesque that business extravagantly. You know I was going to send you that detective play, so that you could re-write it. Well I didn't do it because I couldn't find a single idea in it that could be useful to you. It was dreadfully witless and flat. I knew it would sadden you and unfit you for work. I have always been sorry we threw up that play embodying Orion which you began. It was a mistake to do that. Do keep that MS and tackle it again. It will work out all right; you will see. I don't believe that that character exists in literature in so well-developed a condition as it exists in Orion's person. Now won't you put Orion in a story? Then he will go handsomely into a play afterwards. How deliciously you could paint him--it would make fascinating reading--the sort that makes a reader laugh and cry at the same time, for Orion is as good and ridiculous a soul as ever was. Ah, to think of Bayard Taylor! It is too sad to talk about. I was so glad there was not a single sting and so many good praiseful words in the Atlantic's criticism of Deukalion. Love to you all Yrs Ever MARK We remain here till middle of March. In 'A Tramp Abroad' there is an incident in which the author describes himself as hunting for a lost sock in the dark, in a vast hotel bedroom at Heilbronn. The account of the real incident, as written to Twichell, seems even more amusing. The “Yarn About the Limburger Cheese and the Box of Guns,” like “The Stolen White Elephant,” did not find place in the travel-book, but was published in the same volume with the elephant story, added to the rambling notes of “An Idle Excursion.” With the discovery of the Swiss note-book, work with Mark Twain was going better. His letter reflects his enthusiasm. ***** To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: MUNICH, Jan 26 '79. DEAR OLD JOE,--Sunday. Your delicious letter arrived exactly at the right time. It was laid by my plate as I was finishing breakfast at 12 noon. Livy and Clara, (Spaulding) arrived from church 5 minutes later; I took a pipe and spread myself out on the sofa, and Livy sat by and read, and I warmed to that butcher the moment he began to swear. There is more than one way of praying, and I like the butcher's way because the petitioner is so apt to be in earnest. I was peculiarly alive to his performance just at this time, for another reason, to wit: Last night I awoke at 3 this morning, and after raging to my self for 2 interminable hours, I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment--all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand. Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs for that missing sock; I kept that up; and still kept it up and kept it up. At first I only said to myself, “Blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer; my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger,--and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and softly pawed all over the place,--and sure enough at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article. I rose joyfully up and butted the wash-bowl and pitcher off the stand and simply raised----so to speak. Livy screamed, then said, “Who is that? what is the matter?” I said “There ain't anything the matter--I'm hunting for my sock.” She said, “Are you hunting for it with a club?” I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. So I lay on the sofa, with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. I found the Swiss note-book, some time ago. When it was first lost I was glad of it, for I was getting an idea that I had lost my faculty of writing sketches of travel; therefore the loss of that note-book would render the writing of this one simply impossible, and let me gracefully out; I was about to write to Bliss and propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work--tore up a great part of the MS written in Heidelberg,--wrote and tore up,--continued to write and tear up,--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! Since then I'm glad Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss note-book than I did, for I like my work, now, exceedingly, and often turn out over 30 MS pages a day and then quit sorry that Heaven makes the days so short. One of my discouragements had been the belief that my interest in this tour had been so slender that I couldn't gouge matter enough out of it to make a book. What a mistake. I've got 900 pages written (not a word in it about the sea voyage) yet I stepped my foot out of Heidelberg for the first time yesterday,--and then only to take our party of four on our first pedestrian tour--to Heilbronn. I've got them dressed elaborately in walking costume--knapsacks, canteens, field-glasses, leather leggings, patent walking shoes, muslin folds around their hats, with long tails hanging down behind, sun umbrellas, and Alpenstocks. They go all the way to Wimpfen by rail-thence to Heilbronn in a chance vegetable cart drawn by a donkey and a cow; I shall fetch them home on a raft; and if other people shall perceive that that was no pedestrian excursion, they themselves shall not be conscious of it.--This trip will take 100 pages or more,--oh, goodness knows how many! for the mood is everything, not the material, and I already seem to see 300 pages rising before me on that trip. Then, I propose to leave Heidelberg for good. Don't you see, the book (1800 MS pages,) may really be finished before I ever get to Switzerland? But there's one thing; I want to tell Frank Bliss and his father to be charitable toward me in,--that is, let me tear up all the MS I want to, and give me time to write more. I shan't waste the time--I haven't the slightest desire to loaf, but a consuming desire to work, ever since I got back my swing. And you see this book is either going to be compared with the Innocents Abroad, or contrasted with it, to my disadvantage. I think I can make a book that will be no dead corpse of a thing and I mean to do my level best to accomplish that. My crude plans are crystalizing. As the thing stands now, I went to Europe for three purposes. The first you know, and must keep secret, even from the Blisses; the second is to study Art; and the third to acquire a critical knowledge of the German language. My MS already shows that the two latter objects are accomplished. It shows that I am moving about as an Artist and a Philologist, and unaware that there is any immodesty in assuming these titles. Having three definite objects has had the effect of seeming to enlarge my domain and give me the freedom of a loose costume. It is three strings to my bow, too. Well, your butcher is magnificent. He won't stay out of my mind.--I keep trying to think of some way of getting your account of him into my book without his being offended--and yet confound him there isn't anything you have said which he would see any offense in,--I'm only thinking of his friends--they are the parties who busy themselves with seeing things for people. But I'm bound to have him in. I'm putting in the yarn about the Limburger cheese and the box of guns, too--mighty glad Howells declined it. It seems to gather richness and flavor with age. I have very nearly killed several companies with that narrative,--the American Artists Club, here, for instance, and Smith and wife and Miss Griffith (they were here in this house a week or two.) I've got other chapters that pretty nearly destroyed the same parties, too. O, Switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow. Those mountains had a soul; they thought; they spoke,--one couldn't hear it with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was!--and how real. Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp!--that stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny we were in that awful presence--and how painless it was to be so; how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance. And Lord how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of the Mountains. Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world--but only these take you by the heart-strings. I wonder what the secret of it is. Well, time and time again it has seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more. It is a longing--a deep, strong, tugging longing--that is the word. We must go again, Joe.--October days, let us get up at dawn and breakfast at the tower. I should like that first rate. Livy and all of us send deluges of love to you and Harmony and all the children. I dreamed last night that I woke up in the library at home and your children were frolicing around me and Julia was sitting in my lap; you and Harmony and both families of Warners had finished their welcomes and were filing out through the conservatory door, wrecking Patrick's flower pots with their dress skirts as they went. Peace and plenty abide with you all! MARK. I want the Blisses to know their part of this letter, if possible. They will see that my delay was not from choice. Following the life of Mark Twain, whether through his letters or along the sequence of detailed occurrence, we are never more than a little while, or a little distance, from his brother Orion. In one form or another Orion is ever present, his inquiries, his proposals, his suggestions, his plans for improving his own fortunes, command our attention. He was one of the most human creatures that ever lived; indeed, his humanity excluded every form of artificiality --everything that needs to be acquired. Talented, trusting, child-like, carried away by the impulse of the moment, despite a keen sense of humor he was never able to see that his latest plan or project was not bound to succeed. Mark Twain loved him, pitied him--also enjoyed him, especially with Howells. Orion's new plan to lecture in the interest of religion found its way to Munich, with the following result: ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: MUNICH, Feb. 9. (1879) MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have just received this letter from Orion--take care of it, for it is worth preserving. I got as far as 9 pages in my answer to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success. I said I couldn't lose my 9 pages--so she said send them to you. But I will acknowledge that I thought I was writing a very kind letter. Now just look at this letter of Orion's. Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? Mrs. Clemens said “Raise his monthly pension.” So I wrote to Perkins to raise it a trifle. Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States and invested the result! You must put him in a book or a play right away. You are the only man capable of doing it. You might die at any moment, and your very greatest work would be lost to the world. I could write Orion's simple biography, and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this I will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance. This was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed. Observe Orion's career--that is, a little of it: (1) He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock. 2. After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper. A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 state republicans, also. The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right--but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: “I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all rose up and went away.” How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another? Not a word of complaint, you see--only a patient, sad surprise. 3. His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost. 4. Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for stories, he concluded to write some for the same price. I read his first one and persuaded him not to write any more. 5. Then he read proof on the N. Y. Eve. Post at $10 a week and meekly observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around “like a steamboat mate.” 6. Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture--was sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm. I gave him $900 and he went to a ten-house village a miles above Keokuk on the river bank--this place was a railway station. He soon asked for money to buy a horse and light wagon,--because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday and his wife found it rather far to walk. For a long time I answered demands for “loans” and by next mail always received his check for the interest due me to date. In the most guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital twice in 6 months instead of only once. But alas, when the debt at last reached $1800 or $2500 (I have forgotten which) the interest ate too formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or speak of it. At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into Keokuk. Later in one of his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents worth of corn and then selling it for 50. 7. Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year for two years, (this was 4 or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would prove it. This is the pension which we have just increased to $600. The first year his legal business brought him $5. It also brought him an unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro orphans out of $700. He still has this case. He has waggled it around through various courts and made some booming speeches on it. The negro children have grown up and married off, now, I believe, and their litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody--but Orion still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring with his venerable case. The second year, he didn't make anything. The third he made $6, and I made Bliss put a case in his hands--about half an hour's work. Orion charged $50 for it--Bliss paid him $15. Thus four or five years of slaving has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that “law library.” Meantime his office rent has been $60 a year, and he has stuck to that lair day by day as patiently as a spider. 8. Then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as “Mark Twain's Brother”--that to be on the bills. Subject of proposed lecture, “On the Formation of Character.” 9. I protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a bold tilt against total abstinence and the Red Ribbon fanatics. It raised a fine row among the virtuous Keokukians. 10. I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler. 11. Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble and beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll. Now come! Don't fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at your feet, but take it up and use it. One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him. Well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours. Poor old Methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long? Yrs ever, MARK. ***** To Orion Clemens Unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to W. D. Howells: MUNICH, Feb. 9, (1879) MY DEAR BRO.,--Yours has just arrived. I enclose a draft on Hartford for $25. You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time it arrives,--but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project, whatever it is. You see I have an ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,--but mind you, I didn't invent that faith, you conferred it on me yourself. But fire away, fire away! I don't see why a changeable man shouldn't get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time. That is to say, I don't see why a kaleidoscope shouldn't enjoy itself as much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as a whetstone, nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick. I don't feel like girding at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because I recognize and realize at last that it is incurable; but before I learned to accept this truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the power of throwing me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions of profanity. But fire away, now! Your magic has lost its might. I am able to view your inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and say “This one or that one or the other one is not up to your average flight, or is above it, or below it.” And so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average, it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even practical ones. While I was not sorry you abandoned it, I should not be sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial. But on the whole you did the wise thing to lay it aside, I think, because a lecture is a most easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town, such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in your pride. It was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures; because Keokuk is not unaware that you have been a Swedenborgian, a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, and a Methodist (on probation), and that just a year ago you were an infidel. If Keokuk had gone to your lecture course, it would have gone to be amused, not instructed, for when a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't convince other people. They would have gone to be amused and that would have been a deep humiliation to you. It could have been safe for you to appear only where you were unknown--then many of your hearers would think you were in earnest. And they would be right. You are in earnest while your convictions are new. But taking it by and large, you probably did best to discard that project altogether. But I leave you to judge of that, for you are the worst judge I know of. (Unfinished.) That Mark Twain in many ways was hardly less child-like than his brother is now and again revealed in his letters. He was of steadfast purpose, and he possessed the driving power which Orion Clemens lacked; but the importance to him of some of the smaller matters of life, as shown in a letter like the following, bespeaks a certain simplicity of nature which he never outgrew: ***** To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: MUNICH, Feb. 24. (1879) DEAR OLD JOE,--It was a mighty good letter, Joe--and that idea of yours is a rattling good one. But I have not sot down here to answer your letter,--for it is down at my study,--but only to impart some information. For a months I had not shaved without crying. I'd spend 3/4 of an hour whetting away on my hand--no use, couldn't get an edge. Tried a razor strop-same result. So I sat down and put in an hour thinking out the mystery. Then it seemed plain--to wit: my hand can't give a razor an edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given. I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V--the long point being the continuation of the edge--and that after much use the shape is this V--the attenuated edge all worn off and gone. By George I knew that was the explanation. And I knew that a freshly honed and freshly strapped razor won't cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final operation, it will cut.--So I sent out for an oil-stone; none to be had, but messenger brought back a little piece of rock the size of a Safety-match box--(it was bought in a shoemaker's shop) bad flaw in middle of it, too, but I put 4 drops of fine Olive oil on it, picked out the razor marked “Thursday” because it was never any account and would be no loss if I spoiled it--gave it a brisk and reckless honing for 10 minutes, then tried it on a hair--it wouldn't cut. Then I trotted it through a vigorous 20-minute course on a razor-strap and tried it on a hair-it wouldn't cut--tried it on my face--it made me cry--gave it a 5-minute stropping on my hand, and my land, what an edge she had! We thought we knew what sharp razors were when we were tramping in Switzerland, but it was a mistake--they were dull beside this old Thursday razor of mine--which I mean to name Thursday October Christian, in gratitude. I took my whetstone, and in 20 minutes I put two more of my razors in splendid condition--but I leave them in the box--I never use any but Thursday O. C., and shan't till its edge is gone--and then I'll know how to restore it without any delay. We all go to Paris next Thursday--address, Monroe & Co., Bankers. With love Ys Ever MARK. In Paris they found pleasant quarters at the Hotel Normandy, but it was a chilly, rainy spring, and the travelers gained a rather poor impression of the French capital. Mark Twain's work did not go well, at first, because of the noises of the street. But then he found a quieter corner in the hotel and made better progress. In a brief note to Aldrich he said: “I sleep like a lamb and write like a lion--I mean the kind of a lion that writes--if any such.” He expected to finish the book in six weeks; that is to say, before returning to America. He was looking after its illustrations himself, and a letter to Frank Bliss, of The American Publishing Company, refers to the frontpiece, which, from time to time, has caused question as to its origin. To Bliss he says: “It is a thing which I manufactured by pasting a popular comic picture into the middle of a celebrated Biblical one--shall attribute it to Titian. It needs to be engraved by a master.” The weather continued bad in France and they left there in July to find it little better in England. They had planned a journey to Scotland to visit Doctor Brown, whose health was not very good. In after years Mark Twain blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, which he declared would have meant so much to Mrs. Clemens. He had forgotten by that time the real reasons for not going--the continued storms and uncertainty of trains (which made it barely possible for them to reach Liverpool in time for their sailing-date), and with characteristic self-reproach vowed that only perversity and obstinacy on his part had prevented the journey to Scotland. From Liverpool, on the eve of sailing, he sent Doctor Brown a good-by word. ***** To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh: WASHINGTON HOTEL, LIME STREET, LIVERPOOL. Aug. (1879) MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--During all the 15 months we have been spending on the continent, we have been promising ourselves a sight of you as our latest and most prized delight in a foreign land--but our hope has failed, our plan has miscarried. One obstruction after another intruded itself, and our short sojourn of three or four weeks on English soil was thus frittered gradually away, and we were at last obliged to give up the idea of seeing you at all. It is a great disappointment, for we wanted to show you how much “Megalopis” has grown (she is 7 now) and what a fine creature her sister is, and how prettily they both speak German. There are six persons in my party, and they are as difficult to cart around as nearly any other menagerie would be. My wife and Miss Spaulding are along, and you may imagine how they take to heart this failure of our long promised Edinburgh trip. We never even wrote you, because we were always so sure, from day to day, that our affairs would finally so shape themselves as to let us get to Scotland. But no,--everything went wrong we had only flying trips here and there in place of the leisurely ones which we had planned. We arrived in Liverpool an hour ago very tired, and have halted at this hotel (by the advice of misguided friends)--and if my instinct and experience are worth anything, it is the very worst hotel on earth, without any exception. We shall move to another hotel early in the morning to spend to-morrow. We sail for America next day in the “Gallic.” We all join in the sincerest love to you, and in the kindest remembrance to “Jock”--[Son of Doctor Brown.]--and your sister. Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. It was September 3, 1879, that Mark Twain returned to America by the steamer Gallic. In the seventeen months of his absence he had taken on a “traveled look” and had added gray hairs. A New York paper said of his arrival that he looked older than when he went to Germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray. Mark Twain had not finished his book of travel in Paris--in fact, it seemed to him far from complete--and he settled down rather grimly to work on it at Quarry Farm. When, after a few days no word of greeting came from Howells, Clemens wrote to ask if he were dead or only sleeping. Howells hastily sent a line to say that he had been sleeping “The sleep of a torpid conscience. I will feign that I did not know where to write you; but I love you and all of yours, and I am tremendously glad that you are home again. When and where shall we meet? Have you come home with your pockets full of Atlantic papers?” Clemens, toiling away at his book, was, as usual, not without the prospect of other plans. Orion, as literary material, never failed to excite him. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Sept. 15, 1879. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--When and where? Here on the farm would be an elegant place to meet, but of course you cannot come so far. So we will say Hartford or Belmont, about the beginning of November. The date of our return to Hartford is uncertain, but will be three or four weeks hence, I judge. I hope to finish my book here before migrating. I think maybe I've got some Atlantic stuff in my head, but there's none in MS, I believe. Say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, I to furnish the broad-comedy cuss. I don't know anything about his ability, but his letter serves to remind me of our old projects. If you haven't used Orion or Old Wakeman, don't you think you and I can get together and grind out a play with one of those fellows in it? Orion is a field which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new top-dressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about this, won't you? I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle, always melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying to reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts. Poor old chap, he is good material. I can imagine his wife or his sweetheart reluctantly adopting each of his new religious in turn, just in time to see him waltz into the next one and leave her isolated once more. (Mem. Orion's wife has followed him into the outer darkness, after 30 years' rabid membership in the Presbyterian Church.) Well, with the sincerest and most abounding love to you and yours, from all this family, I am, Yrs ever MARK. The idea of the play interested Howells, but he had twinges of conscience in the matter of using Orion as material. He wrote: “More than once I have taken the skeleton of that comedy of ours and viewed it with tears..... I really have a compunction or two about helping to put your brother into drama. You can say that he is your brother, to do what you like with him, but the alien hand might inflict an incurable hurt on his tender heart.” As a matter of fact, Orion Clemens had a keen appreciation of his own shortcomings, and would have enjoyed himself in a play as much as any observer of it. Indeed, it is more than likely that he would have been pleased at the thought of such distinguished dramatization. From the next letter one might almost conclude that he had received a hint of this plan, and was bent upon supplying rich material. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Oct. 9 '79. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Since my return, the mail facilities have enabled Orion to keep me informed as to his intentions. Twenty-eight days ago it was his purpose to complete a work aimed at religion, the preface to which he had already written. Afterward he began to sell off his furniture, with the idea of hurrying to Leadville and tackling silver-mining--threw up his law den and took in his sign. Then he wrote to Chicago and St. Louis newspapers asking for a situation as “paragrapher”--enclosing a taste of his quality in the shape of two stanzas of “humorous rhymes.” By a later mail on the same day he applied to New York and Hartford insurance companies for copying to do. However, it would take too long to detail all his projects. They comprise a removal to south-west Missouri; application for a reporter's berth on a Keokuk paper; application for a compositor's berth on a St. Louis paper; a re-hanging of his attorney's sign, “though it only creaks and catches no flies;” but last night's letter informs me that he has retackled the religious question, hired a distant den to write in, applied to my mother for $50 to re-buy his furniture, which has advanced in value since the sale--purposes buying $25 worth of books necessary to his labors which he had previously been borrowing, and his first chapter is already on its way to me for my decision as to whether it has enough ungodliness in it or not. Poor Orion! Your letter struck me while I was meditating a project to beguile you, and John Hay and Joe Twichell, into a descent upon Chicago which I dream of making, to witness the re-union of the great Commanders of the Western Army Corps on the 9th of next month. My sluggish soul needs a fierce upstirring, and if it would not get it when Grant enters the meeting place I must doubtless “lay” for the final resurrection. Can you and Hay go? At the same time, confound it, I doubt if I can go myself, for this book isn't done yet. But I would give a heap to be there. I mean to heave some holiness into the Hartford primaries when I go back; and if there was a solitary office in the land which majestic ignorance and incapacity, coupled with purity of heart, could fill, I would run for it. This naturally reminds me of Bret Harte--but let him pass. We propose to leave here for New York Oct. 21, reaching Hartford 24th or 25th. If, upon reflection, you Howellses find, you can stop over here on your way, I wish you would do it, and telegraph me. Getting pretty hungry to see you. I had an idea that this was your shortest way home, but like as not my geography is crippled again--it usually is. Yrs ever MARK. The “Reunion of the Great Commanders,” mentioned in the foregoing, was a welcome to General Grant after his journey around the world. Grant's trip had been one continuous ovation--a triumphal march. In '79 most of his old commanders were still alive, and they had planned to assemble in Chicago to do him honor. A Presidential year was coming on, but if there was anything political in the project there were no surface indications. Mark Twain, once a Confederate soldier, had long since been completely “desouthernized”--at least to the point where he felt that the sight of old comrades paying tribute to the Union commander would stir his blood as perhaps it had not been stirred, even in that earlier time, when that same commander had chased him through the Missouri swamps. Grant, indeed, had long since become a hero to Mark Twain, though it is highly unlikely that Clemens favored the idea of a third term. Some days following the preceding letter an invitation came for him to be present at the Chicago reunion; but by this time he had decided not to go. The letter he wrote has been preserved. ***** To Gen. William E. Strong, in Chicago: FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD. Oct. 28, 1879. GEN. WM. E. STRONG, CH'M, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COMMITTEE: I have been hoping during several weeks that it might be my good fortune to receive an invitation to be present on that great occasion in Chicago; but now that my desire is accomplished my business matters have so shaped themselves as to bar me from being so far from home in the first half of November. It is with supreme regret that I lost this chance, for I have not had a thorough stirring up for some years, and I judged that if I could be in the banqueting hall and see and hear the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee at the moment that their old commander entered the room, or rose in his place to speak, my system would get the kind of upheaval it needs. General Grant's progress across the continent is of the marvelous nature of the returning Napoleon's progress from Grenoble to Paris; and as the crowning spectacle in the one case was the meeting with the Old Guard, so, likewise, the crowning spectacle in the other will be our great captain's meeting with his Old Guard--and that is the very climax which I wanted to witness. Besides, I wanted to see the General again, any way, and renew the acquaintance. He would remember me, because I was the person who did not ask him for an office. However, I consume your time, and also wander from the point--which is, to thank you for the courtesy of your invitation, and yield up my seat at the table to some other guest who may possibly grace it better, but will certainly not appreciate its privileges more, than I should. With great respect, I am, Gentlemen, Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Private:--I beg to apologize for my delay, gentlemen, but the card of invitation went to Elmira, N. Y. and hence has only just now reached me. This letter was not sent. He reconsidered and sent an acceptance, agreeing to speak, as the committee had requested. Certainly there was something picturesque in the idea of the Missouri private who had been chased for a rainy fortnight through the swamps of Ralls County being selected now to join in welcome to his ancient enemy. The great reunion was to be something more than a mere banquet. It would continue for several days, with processions, great assemblages, and much oratory. Mark Twain arrived in Chicago in good season to see it all. Three letters to Mrs. Clemens intimately present his experiences: his enthusiastic enjoyment and his own personal triumph. The first was probably written after the morning of his arrival. The Doctor Jackson in it was Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, the guide-dismaying “Doctor” of Innocents Abroad. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: PALMER HOUSE, CHICAGO, Nov. 11. Livy darling, I am getting a trifle leg-weary. Dr. Jackson called and dragged me out of bed at noon, yesterday, and then went off. I went down stairs and was introduced to some scores of people, and among them an elderly German gentleman named Raster, who said his wife owed her life to me--hurt in Chicago fire and lay menaced with death a long time, but the Innocents Abroad kept her mind in a cheerful attitude, and so, with the doctor's help for the body she pulled through.... They drove me to Dr. Jackson's and I had an hour's visit with Mrs. Jackson. Started to walk down Michigan Avenue, got a few steps on my way and met an erect, soldierly looking young gentleman who offered his hand; said, “Mr. Clemens, I believe--I wish to introduce myself--you were pointed out to me yesterday as I was driving down street--my name is Grant.” “Col. Fred Grant?” “Yes. My house is not ten steps away, and I would like you to come and have a talk and a pipe, and let me introduce my wife.” So we turned back and entered the house next to Jackson's and talked something more than an hour and smoked many pipes and had a sociable good time. His wife is very gentle and intelligent and pretty, and they have a cunning little girl nearly as big as Bay but only three years old. They wanted me to come in and spend an evening, after the banquet, with them and Gen. Grant, after this grand pow-wow is over, but I said I was going home Friday. Then they asked me to come Friday afternoon, when they and the general will receive a few friends, and I said I would. Col. Grant said he and Gen. Sherman used the Innocents Abroad as their guide book when they were on their travels. I stepped in next door and took Dr. Jackson to the hotel and we played billiards from 7 to 11.30 P.M. and then went to a beer-mill to meet some twenty Chicago journalists--talked, sang songs and made speeches till 6 o'clock this morning. Nobody got in the least degree “under the influence,” and we had a pleasant time. Read awhile in bed, slept till 11, shaved, went to breakfast at noon, and by mistake got into the servants' hall. I remained there and breakfasted with twenty or thirty male and female servants, though I had a table to myself. A temporary structure, clothed and canopied with flags, has been erected at the hotel front, and connected with the second-story windows of a drawing-room. It was for Gen. Grant to stand on and review the procession. Sixteen persons, besides reporters, had tickets for this place, and a seventeenth was issued for me. I was there, looking down on the packed and struggling crowd when Gen. Grant came forward and was saluted by the cheers of the multitude and the waving of ladies' handkerchiefs--for the windows and roofs of all neighboring buildings were massed full of life. Gen. Grant bowed to the people two or three times, then approached my side of the platform and the mayor pulled me forward and introduced me. It was dreadfully conspicuous. The General said a word or so--I replied, and then said, “But I'll step back, General, I don't want to interrupt your speech.” “But I'm not going to make any--stay where you are--I'll get you to make it for me.” General Sherman came on the platform wearing the uniform of a full General, and you should have heard the cheers. Gen. Logan was going to introduce me, but I didn't want any more conspicuousness. When the head of the procession passed it was grand to see Sheridan, in his military cloak and his plumed chapeau, sitting as erect and rigid as a statue on his immense black horse--by far the most martial figure I ever saw. And the crowd roared again. It was chilly, and Gen. Deems lent me his overcoat until night. He came a few minutes ago--5.45 P.M., and got it, but brought Gen. Willard, who lent me his for the rest of my stay, and will get another for himself when he goes home to dinner. Mine is much too heavy for this warm weather. I have a seat on the stage at Haverley's Theatre, tonight, where the Army of the Tennessee will receive Gen. Grant, and where Gen. Sherman will make a speech. At midnight I am to attend a meeting of the Owl Club. I love you ever so much, my darling, and am hoping to get a word from you yet. SAML. Following the procession, which he describes, came the grand ceremonies of welcome at Haverley's Theatre. The next letter is written the following morning, or at least soiree time the following day, after a night of ratification. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: CHICAGO, Nov. 12, '79. Livy darling, it was a great time. There were perhaps thirty people on the stage of the theatre, and I think I never sat elbow-to-elbow with so many historic names before. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, Augur, and so on. What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left and his right boot-sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair--you note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness--and as these references came frequently, the nervous change of position and attitude were also frequent. But Grant!--he was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and gratulation, but as true as I'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant, during 30 minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever--when Gen. Sherman stepped to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down and whispered in his ear. Gen. Grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. He sat down, took about the same position and froze to it till by and by there was another of those deafening and protracted roars, when Sherman made him get up and bow again. He broke up his attitude once more--the extent of something more than a hair's breadth--to indicate me to Sherman when the house was keeping up a determined and persistent call for me, and poor bewildered Sherman, (who did not know me), was peering abroad over the packed audience for me, not knowing I was only three feet from him and most conspicuously located, (Gen. Sherman was Chairman.) One of the most illustrious individuals on that stage was “Ole Abe,” the historic war eagle. He stood on his perch--the old savage-eyed rascal--three or four feet behind Gen. Sherman, and as he had been in nearly every battle that was mentioned by the orators his soul was probably stirred pretty often, though he was too proud to let on. Read Logan's bosh, and try to imagine a burly and magnificent Indian, in General's uniform, striking a heroic attitude and getting that stuff off in the style of a declaiming school-boy. Please put the enclosed scraps in the drawer and I will scrap-book them. I only staid at the Owl Club till 3 this morning and drank little or nothing. Went to sleep without whisky. Ich liebe dish. SAML. But it is in the third letter that we get the climax. On the same day he wrote a letter to Howells, which, in part, is very similar in substance and need not be included here. A paragraph, however, must not be omitted. “Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields, when they were in their prime. And imagine what it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up, 'When we were marching through Georgia.' Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I shan't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them.... Grand times, my boy, grand times!” At the great banquet Mark Twain's speech had been put last on the program, to hold the house. He had been invited to respond to the toast of “The Ladies,” but had replied that he had already responded to that toast more than once. There was one class of the community, he said, commonly overlooked on these occasions--the babies--he would respond to that toast. In his letter to Howells he had not been willing to speak freely of his personal triumph, but to Mrs. Clemens he must tell it all, and with that child-like ingenuousness which never failed him to his last day. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: CHICAGO, Nov. 14 '79. A little after 5 in the morning. I've just come to my room, Livy darling, I guess this was the memorable night of my life. By George, I never was so stirred since I was born. I heard four speeches which I can never forget. One by Emory Storrs, one by Gen. Vilas (O, wasn't it wonderful!) one by Gen. Logan (mighty stirring), one by somebody whose name escapes me, and one by that splendid old soul, Col. Bob Ingersoll,--oh, it was just the supremest combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began. My soul, how handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in the midst of those 500 shouting men, and poured the molten silver from his lips! Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master! All these speeches may look dull in print, but how the lightning glared around them when they were uttered, and how the crowd roared in response! It was a great night, a memorable night. I am so richly repaid for my journey--and how I did wish with all my whole heart that you were there to be lifted into the very seventh heaven of enthusiasm, as I was. The army songs, the military music, the crashing applause--Lord bless me, it was unspeakable. Out of compliment they placed me last in the list--No. 15--I was to “hold the crowd”--and bless my life I was in awful terror when No. 14. rose, at a o'clock this morning and killed all the enthusiasm by delivering the flattest, insipidest, silliest of all responses to “Woman” that ever a weary multitude listened to. Then Gen. Sherman (Chairman) announced my toast, and the crowd gave me a good round of applause as I mounted on top of the dinner table, but it was only on account of my name, nothing more--they were all tired and wretched. They let my first sentence go in silence, till I paused and added “we stand on common ground”--then they burst forth like a hurricane and I saw that I had them! From that time on, I stopped at the end of each sentence, and let the tornado of applause and laughter sweep around me--and when I closed with “And if the child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded,” I say it who oughtn't to say it, the house came down with a crash. For two hours and a half, now, I've been shaking hands and listening to congratulations. Gen. Sherman said, “Lord bless you, my boy, I don't know how you do it--it's a secret that's beyond me--but it was great--give me your hand again.” And do you know, Gen. Grant sat through fourteen speeches like a graven image, but I fetched him! I broke him up, utterly! He told me he laughed till the tears came and every bone in his body ached. (And do you know, the biggest part of the success of the speech lay in the fact that the audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.) Bless your soul, 'twas immense. I never was so proud in my life. Lots and lots of people--hundreds I might say--told me my speech was the triumph of the evening--which was a lie. Ladies, Tom, Dick and Harry--even the policemen--captured me in the halls and shook hands, and scores of army officers said “We shall always be grateful to you for coming.” General Pope came to bunt me up--I was afraid to speak to him on that theatre stage last night, thinking it might be presumptuous to tackle a man so high up in military history. Gen. Schofield, and other historic men, paid their compliments. Sheridan was ill and could not come, but I'm to go with a General of his staff and see him before I go to Col. Grant's. Gen. Augur--well, I've talked with them all, received invitations from them all--from people living everywhere--and as I said before, it's a memorable night. I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world. But my sakes, you should have heard Ingersoll's speech on that table! Half an hour ago he ran across me in the crowded halls and put his arms about me and said “Mark, if I live a hundred years, I'll always be grateful for your speech--Lord what a supreme thing it was.” But I told him it wasn't any use to talk, he had walked off with the honors of that occasion by something of a majority. Bully boy is Ingersoll--traveled with him in the cars the other day, and you can make up your mind we had a good time. Of course I forgot to go and pay for my hotel car and so secure it, but the army officers told me an hour ago to rest easy, they would go at once, at this unholy hour of the night and compel the railways to do their duty by me, and said “You don't need to request the Army of the Tennessee to do your desires--you can command its services.” Well, I bummed around that banquet hall from 8 in the evening till 2 in the morning, talking with people and listening to speeches, and I never ate a single bite or took a sup of anything but ice water, so if I seem excited now, it is the intoxication of supreme enthusiasm. By George, it was a grand night, a historical night. And now it is a quarter past 6 A.M.--so good bye and God bless you and the Bays,--[Family word for babies]--my darlings SAML. Show it to Joe if you want to--I saw some of his friends here. Mark Twain's admiration for Robert Ingersoll was very great, and we may believe that he was deeply impressed by the Chicago speech, when we find him, a few days later, writing to Ingersoll for a perfect copy to read to a young girls' club in Hartford. Ingersoll sent the speech, also some of his books, and the next letter is Mark Twain's acknowledgment. ***** To Col. Robert G. Ingersoll: HARTFORD, Dec. 14. MY DEAR INGERSOLL,--Thank you most heartily for the books--I am devouring them--they have found a hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle. I wish I could hear you speak these splendid chapters before a great audience--to read them by myself and hear the boom of the applause only in the ear of my imagination, leaves a something wanting--and there is also a still greater lack, your manner, and voice, and presence. The Chicago speech arrived an hour too late, but I was all right anyway, for I found that my memory had been able to correct all the errors. I read it to the Saturday Club (of young girls) and told them to remember that it was doubtful if its superior existed in our language. Truly Yours, S. L. CLEMENS. The reader may remember Mark Twain's Whittier dinner speech of 1877, and its disastrous effects. Now, in 1879, there was to be another Atlantic gathering: a breakfast to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to which Clemens was invited. He was not eager to accept; it would naturally recall memories of two years before, but being urged by both Howells and Warner, he agreed to attend if they would permit him to speak. Mark Twain never lacked courage and he wanted to redeem himself. To Howells he wrote: ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Nov. 28, 1879. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--If anybody talks, there, I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest--else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. But you may read what I say, beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. Of course I thought it wisest not to be there at all; but Warner took the opposite view, and most strenuously. Speaking of Johnny's conclusion to become an outlaw, reminds me of Susie's newest and very earnest longing--to have crooked teeth and glasses--“like Mamma.” I would like to look into a child's head, once, and see what its processes are. Yrs ever, S. L. CLEMENS. The matter turned out well. Clemens, once more introduced by Howells--this time conservatively, it may be said--delivered a delicate and fitting tribute to Doctor Holmes, full of graceful humor and grateful acknowledgment, the kind of speech he should have given at the Whittier dinner of two years before. No reference was made to his former disaster, and this time he came away covered with glory, and fully restored in his self-respect. XX. LETTERS OF 1880, CHIEFLY TO HOWELLS. “THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER.” MARK TWAIN MUGWUMP SOCIETY. The book of travel,--[A Tramp Abroad.]--which Mark Twain had hoped to finish in Paris, and later in Elmira, for some reason would not come to an end. In December, in Hartford, he was still working on it, and he would seem to have finished it, at last, rather by a decree than by any natural process of authorship. This was early in January, 1880. To Howells he reports his difficulties, and his drastic method of ending them. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Jan. 8, '80. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Am waiting for Patrick to come with the carriage. Mrs. Clemens and I are starting (without the children) to stay indefinitely in Elmira. The wear and tear of settling the house broke her down, and she has been growing weaker and weaker for a fortnight. All that time--in fact ever since I saw you--I have been fighting a life-and-death battle with this infernal book and hoping to get done some day. I required 300 pages of MS, and I have written near 600 since I saw you--and tore it all up except 288. This I was about to tear up yesterday and begin again, when Mrs. Perkins came up to the billiard room and said, “You will never get any woman to do the thing necessary to save her life by mere persuasion; you see you have wasted your words for three weeks; it is time to use force; she must have a change; take her home and leave the children here.” I said, “If there is one death that is painfuller than another, may I get it if I don't do that thing.” So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last line I should ever write on this book. (A book which required 2600 pages of MS, and I have written nearer four thousand, first and last.) I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket, to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has been roosting for more than a year and a half. Next time I make a contract before writing the book, may I suffer the righteous penalty and be burnt, like the injudicious believer. I am mighty glad you are done your book (this is from a man who, above all others, feels how much that sentence means) and am also mighty glad you have begun the next (this is also from a man who knows the felicity of that, and means straightway to enjoy it.) The Undiscovered starts off delightfully--I have read it aloud to Mrs. C. and we vastly enjoyed it. Well, time's about up--must drop a line to Aldrich. Yrs ever, MARK. In a letter which Mark Twain wrote to his brother Orion at this period we get the first hint of a venture which was to play an increasingly important part in the Hartford home and fortunes during the next ten or a dozen years. This was the type-setting machine investment, which, in the end, all but wrecked Mark Twain's finances. There is but a brief mention of it in the letter to Orion, and the letter itself is not worth preserving, but as references to the “machine” appear with increasing frequency, it seems proper to record here its first mention. In the same letter he suggests to his brother that he undertake an absolutely truthful autobiography, a confession in which nothing is to be withheld. He cites the value of Casanova's memories, and the confessions of Rousseau. Of course, any literary suggestion from “Brother Sam” was gospel to Orion, who began at once piling up manuscript at a great rate. Meantime, Mark Twain himself, having got 'A Tramp Abroad' on the presses, was at work with enthusiasm on a story begun nearly three years before at Quarry Farm-a story for children-its name, as he called it then, “The Little Prince and The Little Pauper.” He was presently writing to Howells his delight in the new work. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Mch. 11, '80. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--... I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loth to hurry, not wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It begins at 9 a.m., Jan. 27, 1547, seventeen and a half hours before Henry VIII's death, by the swapping of clothes and place, between the prince of Wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance (and half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and after that, the rightful small King has a rough time among tramps and ruffians in the country parts of Kent, whilst the small bogus King has a gilded and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on the throne--and this all goes on for three weeks--till the midst of the coronation grandeurs in Westminster Abbey, Feb. 20, when the ragged true King forces his way in but cannot prove his genuineness--until the bogus King, by a remembered incident of the first day is able to prove it for him--whereupon clothes are changed and the coronation proceeds under the new and rightful conditions. My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others--all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished Edward VI's reign from those that preceded and followed it. Imagine this fact--I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She is become the horseleech's daughter and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir. Last night, for the first time in ages, we went to the theatre--to see Yorick's Love. The magnificence of it is beyond praise. The language is so beautiful, the passion so fine, the plot so ingenious, the whole thing so stirring, so charming, so pathetic! But I will clip from the Courant--it says it right. And what a good company it is, and how like live people they all acted! The “thee's” and the “thou's” had a pleasant sound, since it is the language of the Prince and the Pauper. You've done the country a service in that admirable work.... Yrs Ever, MARK. The play, “Yorick's Love,” mentioned in this letter, was one which Howells had done for Lawrence Barrett. Onion Clemens, meantime, was forwarding his manuscript, and for once seems to have won his brother's approval, so much so that Mark Twain was willing, indeed anxious, that Howells should run the “autobiography” in the Atlantic. We may imagine how Onion prized the words of commendation which follow: ***** To Orion Clemens: May 6, '80. MY DEAR BROTHER,--It is a model autobiography. Continue to develop your character in the same gradual inconspicuous and apparently unconscious way. The reader, up to this time, may have his doubts, perhaps, but he can't say decidedly, “This writer is not such a simpleton as he has been letting on to be.” Keep him in that state of mind. If, when you shall have finished, the reader shall say, “The man is an ass, but I really don't know whether he knows it or not,” your work will be a triumph. Stop re-writing. I saw places in your last batch where re-writing had done formidable injury. Do not try to find those places, else you will mar them further by trying to better them. It is perilous to revise a book while it is under way. All of us have injured our books in that foolish way. Keep in mind what I told you--when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least. I have penciled the MS here and there, but have not needed to make any criticisms or to knock out anything. The elder Bliss has heart disease badly, and thenceforth his life hangs upon a thread. Yr Bro SAM. But Howells could not bring himself to print so frank a confession as Orion had been willing to make. “It wrung my heart,” he said, “and I felt haggard after I had finished it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking.” Howells added that the best touches in it were those which made one acquainted with the writer's brother; that is to say, Mark Twain, and that these would prove valuable material hereafter--a true prophecy, for Mark Twain's early biography would have lacked most of its vital incident, and at least half of its background, without those faithful chapters, fortunately preserved. Had Onion continued, as he began, the work might have proved an important contribution to literature, but he went trailing off into by-paths of theology and discussion where the interest was lost. There were, perhaps, as many as two thousand pages of it, which few could undertake to read. Mark Twain's mind was always busy with plans and inventions, many of them of serious intent, some semi-serious, others of a purely whimsical character. Once he proposed a “Modest Club,” of which the first and main qualification for membership was modesty. “At present,” he wrote, “I am the only member; and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type, the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but upon reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. I do not know that we can find any others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner, Twichell, Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more --together with Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the sex.” Howells replied that the only reason he had for not joining the Modest Club was that he was too modest--too modest to confess his modesty. “If I could get over this difficulty I should like to join, for I approve highly of the Club and its object.... It ought to be given an annual dinner at the public expense. If you think I am not too modest you may put my name down and I will try to think the same of you. Mrs. Howells applauded the notion of the club from the very first. She said that she knew one thing: that she was modest enough, anyway. Her manner of saying it implied that the other persons you had named were not, and created a painful impression in my mind. I have sent your letter and the rules to Hay, but I doubt his modesty. He will think he has a right to belong to it as much as you or I; whereas, other people ought only to be admitted on sufferance.” Our next letter to Howells is, in the main, pure foolery, but we get in it a hint what was to become in time one of Mask Twain's strongest interests, the matter of copyright. He had both a personal and general interest in the subject. His own books were constantly pirated in Canada, and the rights of foreign authors were not respected in America. We have already seen how he had drawn a petition which Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, and others were to sign, and while nothing had come of this plan he had never ceased to formulate others. Yet he hesitated when he found that the proposed protection was likely to work a hardship to readers of the poorer class. Once he wrote: “My notions have mightily changed lately.... I can buy a lot of the copyright classics, in paper, at from three to thirty cents apiece. These things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country..... And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $5,000 a year, I am down on it anyway, and I'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.: Thursday, June 6th, 1880. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--There you stick, at Belmont, and now I'm going to Washington for a few days; and of course, between you and Providence that visit is going to get mixed, and you'll have been here and gone again just about the time I get back. Bother it all, I wanted to astonish you with a chapter or two from Orion's latest book--not the seventeen which he has begun in the last four months, but the one which he began last week. Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, “George didn't take the cat down to the cellar--Rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.” So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, “I do believe I hear that cat in the drawing-room--what did you do with him?” I answered up with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said “I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar.” Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. But the sense of what she said, was, “He couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory--so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand.” So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts. Brisk times here.--Saturday, these things happened: Our neighbor Chas. Smith was stricken with heart disease, and came near joining the majority; my publisher, Bliss, ditto, ditto; a neighbor's child died; neighbor Whitmore's sixth child added to his five other cases of measles; neighbor Niles sent for, and responded; Susie Warner down, abed; Mrs. George Warner threatened with death during several hours; her son Frank, whilst imitating the marvels in Barnum's circus bills, thrown from his aged horse and brought home insensible: Warner's friend Max Yortzburgh, shot in the back by a locomotive and broken into 32 distinct pieces and his life threatened; and Mrs. Clemens, after writing all these cheerful things to Clara Spaulding, taken at midnight, and if the doctor had not been pretty prompt the contemplated Clemens would have called before his apartments were ready. However, everybody is all right, now, except Yortzburg, and he is mending--that is, he is being mended. I knocked off, during these stirring times, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the Summer, 3 or 6 weeks hence. So I am writing to you not because I have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon..... I have a letter from a Congressman this morning, and he says Congress couldn't be persuaded to bother about Canadian pirates at a time like this when all legislation must have a political and Presidential bearing, else Congress won't look at it. So have changed my mind and my course; I go north, to kill a pirate. I must procure repose some way, else I cannot get down to work again. Pray offer my most sincere and respectful approval to the President--is approval the proper word? I find it is the one I most value here in the household and seldomest get. With our affection to you both. Yrs ever MARK. It was always dangerous to send strangers with letters of introduction to Mark Twain. They were so apt to arrive at the wrong time, or to find him in the wrong mood. Howells was willing to risk it, and that the result was only amusing instead of tragic is the best proof of their friendship. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.: June 9, '80. Well, old practical joker, the corpse of Mr. X----has been here, and I have bedded it and fed it, and put down my work during 24 hours and tried my level best to make it do something, or say something, or appreciate something--but no, it was worse than Lazarus. A kind-hearted, well-meaning corpse was the Boston young man, but lawsy bless me, horribly dull company. Now, old man, unless you have great confidence in Mr. X's judgment, you ought to make him submit his article to you before he prints it. For only think how true I was to you: Every hour that he was here I was saying, gloatingly, “O G-- d--- you, when you are in bed and your light out, I will fix you” (meaning to kill him)...., but then the thought would follow--“No, Howells sent him--he shall be spared, he shall be respected he shall travel hell-wards by his own route.” Breakfast is frozen by this time, and Mrs. Clemens correspondingly hot. Good bye. Yrs ever, MARK. “I did not expect you to ask that man to live with you,” Howells answered. “What I was afraid of was that you would turn him out of doors, on sight, and so I tried to put in a good word for him. After this when I want you to board people, I'll ask you. I am sorry for your suffering. I suppose I have mostly lost my smell for bores; but yours is preternaturally keen. I shall begin to be afraid I bore you. (How does that make you feel?)” In a letter to Twichell--a remarkable letter--when baby Jean Clemens was about a month old, we get a happy hint of conditions at Quarry Farm, and in the background a glimpse of Mark Twain's unfailing tragic reflection. ***** To Rev. Twichell, in Hartford: QUARRY FARM, Aug. 29 ['80]. DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he “didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” I should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer.... I will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in Hartford, where I have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotation of the Affection Board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. Four weeks ago the children still put Mamma at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. But now: Jean Mamma Motley [a cat] Fraulein [another] Papa That is the way it stands, now Mamma is become No. 2; I have dropped from No. 4., and am become No. 5. Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats “developed” I didn't stand any more show. I've got a swollen ear; so I take advantage of it to lie abed most of the day, and read and smoke and scribble and have a good time. Last evening Livy said with deep concern, “O dear, I believe an abscess is forming in your ear.” I responded as the poet would have done if he had had a cold in the head-- “Tis said that abscess conquers love, But O believe it not.” This made a coolness. Been reading Daniel Webster's Private Correspondence. Have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, “eloquent,” bathotic (or bathostic) letters written in that dim (no, vanished) Past when he was a student; and Lord, to think that this boy who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief tremendous moment with the world's eyes upon him, and then--f-z-t-! where is he? Why the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast empty level, it seems, with a formless spectre glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. Well, we are all getting along here first-rate; Livy gains strength daily, and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and--but no more of this; somebody may be reading this letter 80 years hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960,) save yourself the trouble of looking further; I know how pathetically trivial our small concerns will seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind, now, and once more toothless; and the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh! MARK. At the Farm that year Mark Twain was working on The Prince and the Pauper, and, according to a letter to Aldrich, brought it to an end September 19th. It is a pleasant letter, worth preserving. The book by Aldrich here mentioned was 'The Stillwater Tragedy.' ***** To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.: ELMIRA, Sept. 15, '80. MY DEAR ALDRICH,--Thank you ever so much for the book--I had already finished it, and prodigiously enjoyed it, in the periodical of the notorious Howells, but it hits Mrs. Clemens just right, for she is having a reading holiday, now, for the first time in same months; so between-times, when the new baby is asleep and strengthening up for another attempt to take possession of this place, she is going to read it. Her strong friendship for you makes her think she is going to like it. I finished a story yesterday, myself. I counted up and found it between sixty and eighty thousand words--about the size of your book. It is for boys and girls--been at work at it several years, off and on. I hope Howells is enjoying his journey to the Pacific. He wrote me that you and Osgood were going, also, but I doubted it, believing he was in liquor when he wrote it. In my opinion, this universal applause over his book is going to land that man in a Retreat inside of two months. I notice the papers say mighty fine things about your book, too. You ought to try to get into the same establishment with Howells. But applause does not affect me--I am always calm--this is because I am used to it. Well, good-bye, my boy, and good luck to you. Mrs. Clemens asks me to send her warmest regards to you and Mrs. Aldrich--which I do, and add those of Yrs ever MARK. While Mark Twain was a journalist in San Francisco, there was a middle-aged man named Soule, who had a desk near him on the Morning Call. Soule was in those days highly considered as a poet by his associates, most of whom were younger and less gracefully poetic. But Soule's gift had never been an important one. Now, in his old age, he found his fame still local, and he yearned for wider recognition. He wished to have a volume of poems issued by a publisher of recognized standing. Because Mark Twain had been one of Soule's admirers and a warm friend in the old days, it was natural that Soule should turn to him now, and equally natural that Clemens should turn to Howells. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Sunday, Oct. 2 '80. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Here's a letter which I wrote you to San Francisco the second time you didn't go there.... I told Soule he needn't write you, but simply send the MS. to you. O dear, dear, it is dreadful to be an unrecognized poet. How wise it was in Charles Warren Stoddard to take in his sign and go for some other calling while still young. I'm laying for that Encyclopedical Scotchman--and he'll need to lock the door behind him, when he comes in; otherwise when he hears my proposed tariff his skin will probably crawl away with him. He is accustomed to seeing the publisher impoverish the author--that spectacle must be getting stale to him--if he contracts with the undersigned he will experience a change in that programme that will make the enamel peel off his teeth for very surprise--and joy. No, that last is what Mrs. Clemens thinks--but it's not so. The proposed work is growing, mightily, in my estimation, day by day; and I'm not going to throw it away for any mere trifle. If I make a contract with the canny Scot, I will then tell him the plan which you and I have devised (that of taking in the humor of all countries)--otherwise I'll keep it to myself, I think. Why should we assist our fellowman for mere love of God? Yrs ever MARK. One wishes that Howells might have found value enough in the verses of Frank Soule to recommend them to Osgood. To Clemens he wrote: “You have touched me in regard to him, and I will deal gently with his poetry. Poor old fellow! I can imagine him, and how he must have to struggle not to be hard or sour.” The verdict, however, was inevitable. Soule's graceful verses proved to be not poetry at all. No publisher of standing could afford to give them his imprint. The “Encyclopedical Scotchman” mentioned in the preceding letter was the publisher Gebbie, who had a plan to engage Howells and Clemens to prepare some sort of anthology of the world's literature. The idea came to nothing, though the other plan mentioned--for a library of humor--in time grew into a book. Mark Twain's contracts with Bliss for the publication of his books on the subscription plan had been made on a royalty basis, beginning with 5 per cent. on 'The Innocents Abroad' increasing to 7 per cent. on 'Roughing It,' and to 10 per cent. on later books. Bliss had held that these later percentages fairly represented one half the profits. Clemens, however, had never been fully satisfied, and his brother Onion had more than once urged him to demand a specific contract on the half-profit basis. The agreement for the publication of 'A Tramp Abroad' was made on these terms. Bliss died before Clemens received his first statement of sales. Whatever may have been the facts under earlier conditions, the statement proved to Mark Twain's satisfaction; at least, that the half-profit arrangement was to his advantage. It produced another result; it gave Samuel Clemens an excuse to place his brother Onion in a position of independence. ***** To Onion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa: Sunday, Oct 24 '80. MY DEAR BRO.,--Bliss is dead. The aspect of the balance-sheet is enlightening. It reveals the fact, through my present contract, (which is for half the profits on the book above actual cost of paper, printing and binding,) that I have lost considerably by all this nonsense--sixty thousand dollars, I should say--and if Bliss were alive I would stay with the concern and get it all back; for on each new book I would require a portion of that back pay; but as it is (this in the very strictest confidence,) I shall probably go to a new publisher 6 or 8 months hence, for I am afraid Frank, with his poor health, will lack push and drive. Out of the suspicions you bred in me years ago, has grown this result,--to wit, that I shall within the twelvemonth get $40,000 out of this “Tramp” instead Of $20,000. Twenty thousand dollars, after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a month--so I shall tell Mr. Perkins to make your check that amount per month, hereafter, while our income is able to afford it. This ends the loan business; and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it--and you can also reflect that the money you have been receiving of me all these years is interest charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. Jean got the stockings and is much obliged; Mollie wants to know whom she most resembles, but I can't tell; she has blue eyes and brown hair, and three chins, and is very fat and happy; and at one time or another she has resembled all the different Clemenses and Langdons, in turn, that have ever lived. Livy is too much beaten out with the baby, nights, to write, these times; and I don't know of anything urgent to say, except that a basket full of letters has accumulated in the 7 days that I have been whooping and cursing over a cold in the head--and I must attack the pile this very minute. With love from us Y aff SAM $25 enclosed. On the completion of The Prince and Pauper story, Clemens had naturally sent it to Howells for consideration. Howells wrote: “I have read the two P's and I like it immensely, it begins well and it ends well.” He pointed out some things that might be changed or omitted, and added: “It is such a book as I would expect from you, knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun.” Clemens had thought somewhat of publishing the story anonymously, in the fear that it would not be accepted seriously over his own signature. The “bull story” referred to in the next letter is the one later used in the Joan of Arc book, the story told Joan by “Uncle Laxart,” how he rode a bull to a funeral. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Xmas Eve, 1880. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I was prodigiously delighted with what you said about the book--so, on the whole, I've concluded to publish intrepidly, instead of concealing the authorship. I shall leave out that bull story. I wish you had gone to New York. The company was small, and we had a first-rate time. Smith's an enjoyable fellow. I liked Barrett, too. And the oysters were as good as the rest of the company. It was worth going there to learn how to cook them. Next day I attended to business--which was, to introduce Twichell to Gen. Grant and procure a private talk in the interest of the Chinese Educational Mission here in the U. S. Well, it was very funny. Joe had been sitting up nights building facts and arguments together into a mighty and unassailable array and had studied them out and got them by heart--all with the trembling half-hearted hope of getting Grant to add his signature to a sort of petition to the Viceroy of China; but Grant took in the whole situation in a jiffy, and before Joe had more than fairly got started, the old man said: “I'll write the Viceroy a Letter--a separate letter--and bring strong reasons to bear upon him; I know him well, and what I say will have weight with him; I will attend to it right away. No, no thanks--I shall be glad to do it--it will be a labor of love.” So all Joe's laborious hours were for naught! It was as if he had come to borrow a dollar, and been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case.... But it's getting dark. Merry Christmas to all of you. Yrs Ever, MARK. The Chinese Educational Mission, mentioned in the foregoing, was a thriving Hartford institution, projected eight years before by a Yale graduate named Yung Wing. The mission was now threatened, and Yung Wing, knowing the high honor in which General Grant was held in China, believed that through him it might be saved. Twichell, of course, was deeply concerned and naturally overjoyed at Grant's interest. A day or two following the return to Hartford, Clemens received a letter from General Grant, in which he wrote: “Li Hung Chang is the most powerful and most influential Chinaman in his country. He professed great friendship for me when I was there, and I have had assurances of the same thing since. I hope, if he is strong enough with his government, that the decision to withdraw the Chinese students from this country may be changed.” But perhaps Li Hung Chang was experiencing one of his partial eclipses just then, or possibly he was not interested, for the Hartford Mission did not survive. XXI. LETTERS 1881, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS. ASSISTING A YOUNG SCULPTOR. LITERARY PLANS. With all of Mark Twain's admiration for Grant, he had opposed him as a third-term President and approved of the nomination of Garfield. He had made speeches for Garfield during the campaign just ended, and had been otherwise active in his support. Upon Garfield's election, however, he felt himself entitled to no special favor, and the single request which he preferred at length could hardly be classed as, personal, though made for a “personal friend.” ***** To President-elect James A. Garfield, in Washington: HARTFORD, Jany. 12, '81. GEN. GARFIELD DEAR SIR,--Several times since your election persons wanting office have asked me “to use my influence” with you in their behalf. To word it in that way was such a pleasant compliment to me that I never complied. I could not without exposing the fact that I hadn't any influence with you and that was a thing I had no mind to do. It seems to me that it is better to have a good man's flattering estimate of my influence--and to keep it--than to fool it away with trying to get him an office. But when my brother--on my wife's side--Mr. Charles J. Langdon--late of the Chicago Convention--desires me to speak a word for Mr. Fred Douglass, I am not asked “to use my influence” consequently I am not risking anything. So I am writing this as a simple citizen. I am not drawing on my fund of influence at all. A simple citizen may express a desire with all propriety, in the matter of a recommendation to office, and so I beg permission to hope that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his present office of Marshall of the District of Columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interest of your administration. I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless character and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point, his history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them too. With great respect I am, General, Yours truly, S. L. CLEMENS. Clemens would go out of his way any time to grant favor to the colored race. His childhood associations were partly accountable for this, but he also felt that the white man owed the negro a debt for generations of enforced bondage. He would lecture any time in a colored church, when he would as likely as not refuse point-blank to speak for a white congregation. Once, in Elmira, he received a request, poorly and none too politely phrased, to speak for one of the churches. He was annoyed and about to send a brief refusal, when Mrs. Clemens, who was present, said: “I think I know that church, and if so this preacher is a colored man; he does not know how to write a polished letter--how should he?” Her husband's manner changed so suddenly that she added: “I will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: Consider every man colored until he is proved white.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Feb. 27, 1881. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I go to West Point with Twichell tomorrow, but shall be back Tuesday or Wednesday; and then just as soon thereafter as you and Mrs. Howells and Winny can come you will find us ready and most glad to see you--and the longer you can stay the gladder we shall be. I am not going to have a thing to do, but you shall work if you want to. On the evening of March 10th, I am going to read to the colored folk in the African Church here (no whites admitted except such as I bring with me), and a choir of colored folk will sing jubilee songs. I count on a good time, and shall hope to have you folks there, and Livy. I read in Twichell's chapel Friday night and had a most rattling high time--but the thing that went best of all was Uncle Remus's Tar Baby. I mean to try that on my dusky audience. They've all heard that tale from childhood--at least the older members have. I arrived home in time to make a most noble blunder--invited Charley Warner here (in Livy's name) to dinner with the Gerhardts, and told him Livy had invited his wife by letter and by word of mouth also. I don't know where I got these impressions, but I came home feeling as one does who realizes that he has done a neat thing for once and left no flaws or loop-holes. Well, Livy said she had never told me to invite Charley and she hadn't dreamed of inviting Susy, and moreover there wasn't any dinner, but just one lean duck. But Susy Warner's intuitions were correct--so she choked off Charley, and staid home herself--we waited dinner an hour and you ought to have seen that duck when he was done drying in the oven. MARK. Clemens and his wife were always privately assisting worthy and ambitious young people along the way of achievement. Young actors were helped through dramatic schools; young men and women were assisted through college and to travel abroad. Among others Clemens paid the way of two colored students, one through a Southern institution and another through the Yale law school. The mention of the name of Gerhardt in the preceding letter introduces the most important, or at least the most extensive, of these benefactions. The following letter gives the beginning of the story: ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Private and Confidential. HARTFORD, Feb. 21, 1881. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Well, here is our romance. It happened in this way. One morning, a month ago--no, three weeks--Livy, and Clara Spaulding and I were at breakfast, at 10 A.M., and I was in an irritable mood, for the barber was up stairs waiting and his hot water getting cold, when the colored George returned from answering the bell and said: “There's a lady in the drawing-room wants to see you.” “A book agent!” says I, with heat. “I won't see her; I will die in my tracks, first.” Then I got up with a soul full of rage, and went in there and bent scowling over that person, and began a succession of rude and raspy questions--and without even offering to sit down. Not even the defendant's youth and beauty and (seeming) timidity were able to modify my savagery, for a time--and meantime question and answer were going on. She had risen to her feet with the first question; and there she stood, with her pretty face bent floorward whilst I inquired, but always with her honest eyes looking me in the face when it came her turn to answer. And this was her tale, and her plea-diffidently stated, but straight-forwardly; and bravely, and most winningly simply and earnestly: I put it in my own fashion, for I do not remember her words: Mr. Karl Gerhardt, who works in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops, has made a statue in clay, and would I be so kind as to come and look at it, and tell him if there is any promise in it? He has none to go to, and he would be so glad. “O, dear me,” I said, “I don't know anything about art--there's nothing I could tell him.” But she went on, just as earnestly and as simply as before, with her plea--and so she did after repeated rebuffs; and dull as I am, even I began by and by to admire this brave and gentle persistence, and to perceive how her heart of hearts was in this thing, and how she couldn't give it up, but must carry her point. So at last I wavered, and promised in general terms that I would come down the first day that fell idle--and as I conducted her to the door, I tamed more and more, and said I would come during the very next week--“We shall be so glad--but--but, would you please come early in the week?--the statue is just finished and we are so anxious--and--and--we did hope you could come this week--and”--well, I came down another peg, and said I would come Monday, as sure as death; and before I got to the dining room remorse was doing its work and I was saying to myself, “Damnation, how can a man be such a hound? why didn't I go with her now?” Yes, and how mean I should have felt if I had known that out of her poverty she had hired a hack and brought it along to convey me. But luckily for what was left of my peace of mind, I didn't know that. Well, it appears that from here she went to Charley Warner's. There was a better light, there, and the eloquence of her face had a better chance to do its office. Warner fought, as I had done; and he was in the midst of an article and very busy; but no matter, she won him completely. He laid aside his MS and said, “Come, let us go and see your father's statue. That is--is he your father?” “No, he is my husband.” So this child was married, you see. This was a Saturday. Next day Warner came to dinner and said “Go!--go tomorrow--don't fail.” He was in love with the girl, and with her husband too, and said he believed there was merit in the statue. Pretty crude work, maybe, but merit in it. Patrick and I hunted up the place, next day; the girl saw us driving up, and flew down the stairs and received me. Her quarters were the second story of a little wooden house--another family on the ground floor. The husband was at the machine shop, the wife kept no servant, she was there alone. She had a little parlor, with a chair or two and a sofa; and the artist-husband's hand was visible in a couple of plaster busts, one of the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait of his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at 16. Then we went into the kitchen, and the girl flew around, with enthusiasm, and snatched rag after rag from a tall something in the corner, and presently there stood the clay statue, life size--a graceful girlish creature, nude to the waist, and holding up a single garment with one hand the expression attempted being a modified scare--she was interrupted when about to enter the bath. Then this young wife posed herself alongside the image and so remained--a thing I didn't understand. But presently I did--then I said: “O, it's you!” “Yes,” she said, “I was the model. He has no model but me. I have stood for this many and many an hour--and you can't think how it does tire one! But I don't mind it. He works all day at the shop; and then, nights and Sundays he works on his statue as long as I can keep up.” She got a big chisel, to use as a lever, and between us we managed to twist the pedestal round and round, so as to afford a view of the statue from all points. Well, sir, it was perfectly charming, this girl's innocence and purity---exhibiting her naked self, as it were, to a stranger and alone, and never once dreaming that there was the slightest indelicacy about the matter. And so there wasn't; but it will be many along day before I run across another woman who can do the like and show no trace of self-consciousness. Well, then we sat down, and I took a smoke, and she told me all about her people in Massachusetts--her father is a physician and it is an old and respectable family--(I am able to believe anything she says.) And she told me how “Karl” is 26 years old; and how he has had passionate longings all his life toward art, but has always been poor and obliged to struggle for his daily bread; and how he felt sure that if he could only have one or two lessons in-- “Lessons? Hasn't he had any lessons?” No. He had never had a lesson. And presently it was dinner time and “Karl” arrived--a slender young fellow with a marvelous head and a noble eye--and he was as simple and natural, and as beautiful in spirit as his wife was. But she had to do the talking--mainly--there was too much thought behind his cavernous eyes for glib speech. I went home enchanted. Told Livy and Clara Spaulding all about the paradise down yonder where those two enthusiasts are happy with a yearly expense of $350. Livy and Clara went there next day and came away enchanted. A few nights later the Gerhardts kept their promise and came here for the evening. It was billiard night and I had company and so was not down; but Livy and Clara became more charmed with these children than ever. Warner and I planned to get somebody to criticise the statue whose judgment would be worth something. So I laid for Champney, and after two failures I captured him and took him around, and he said “this statue is full of faults--but it has merits enough in it to make up for them”--whereat the young wife danced around as delighted as a child. When we came away, Champney said, “I did not want to say too much there, but the truth is, it seems to me an extraordinary performance for an untrained hand. You ask if there is promise enough there to justify the Hartford folk in going to an expense of training this young man. I should say, yes, decidedly; but still, to make everything safe, you had better get the judgment of a sculptor.” Warner was in New York. I wrote him, and he said he would fetch up Ward--which he did. Yesterday they went to the Gerhardts and spent two hours, and Ward came away bewitched with those people and marveling at the winning innocence of the young wife, who dropped naturally into model-attitude beside the statue (which is stark naked from head to heel, now--G. had removed the drapery, fearing Ward would think he was afraid to try legs and hips) just as she has always done before. Livy and I had two long talks with Ward yesterday evening. He spoke strongly. He said, “if any stranger had told me that this apprentice did not model that thing from plaster casts, I would not have believed it.” He said “it is full of crudities, but it is full of genius, too. It is such a statue as the man of average talent would achieve after two years training in the schools. And the boldness of the fellow, in going straight to nature! He is an apprentice--his work shows that, all over; but the stuff is in him, sure. Hartford must send him to Paris--two years; then if the promise holds good, keep him there three more--and warn him to study, study, work, work, and keep his name out of the papers, and neither ask for orders nor accept them when offered.” Well, you see, that's all we wanted. After Ward was gone Livy came out with the thing that was in her mind. She said, “Go privately and start the Gerhardts off to Paris, and say nothing about it to any one else.” So I tramped down this morning in the snow-storm--and there was a stirring time. They will sail a week or ten days from now. As I was starting out at the front door, with Gerhardt beside me and the young wife dancing and jubilating behind, this latter cried out impulsively, “Tell Mrs. Clemens I want to hug her--I want to hug you both!” I gave them my old French book and they were going to tackle the language, straight off. Now this letter is a secret--keep it quiet--I don't think Livy would mind my telling you these things, but then she might, you know, for she is a queer girl. Yrs ever, MARK. Champney was J. Wells Champney, a portrait-painter of distinction; Ward was the sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward. The Gerhardts were presently off to Paris, well provided with means to make their dreams reality; in due time the letters will report them again. The Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris gave Mark Twain great pleasure. He frequently read them aloud, not only at home but in public. Finally, he wrote Harris, expressing his warm appreciation, and mentioning one of the negro stories of his own childhood, “The Golden Arm,” which he urged Harris to look up and add to his collection. “You have pinned a proud feather in Uncle-Remus's cap,” replied Harris. “I do not know what higher honor he could have than to appear before the Hartford public arm in arm with Mark Twain.” He disclaimed any originality for the stories, adding, “I understand that my relations toward Uncle Remus are similar to those that exist between an almanac maker and the calendar.” He had not heard the “Golden Arm” story and asked for the outlines; also for some publishing advice, out of Mark Twain's long experience. ***** To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta: ELMIRA, N.Y., Aug. 10. MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--You can argue yourself into the delusion that the principle of life is in the stories themselves and not in their setting; but you will save labor by stopping with that solitary convert, for he is the only intelligent one you will bag. In reality the stories are only alligator pears--one merely eats them for the sake of the salad-dressing. Uncle Remus is most deftly drawn, and is a lovable and delightful creation; he, and the little boy, and their relations with each other, are high and fine literature, and worthy to live, for their own sakes; and certainly the stories are not to be credited with them. But enough of this; I seem to be proving to the man that made the multiplication table that twice one are two. I have been thinking, yesterday and to-day (plenty of chance to think, as I am abed with lumbago at our little summering farm among the solitudes of the Mountaintops,) and I have concluded that I can answer one of your questions with full confidence--thus: Make it a subscription book. Mighty few books that come strictly under the head of literature will sell by subscription; but if Uncle Remus won't, the gift of prophecy has departed out of me. When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater..... You didn't ask me for a subscription-publisher. If you had, I should have recommended Osgood to you. He inaugurates his subscription department with my new book in the fall..... Now the doctor has been here and tried to interrupt my yarn about “The Golden Arm,” but I've got through, anyway. Of course I tell it in the negro dialect--that is necessary; but I have not written it so, for I can't spell it in your matchless way. It is marvelous the way you and Cable spell the negro and creole dialects. Two grand features are lost in print: the weird wailing, the rising and falling cadences of the wind, so easily mimicked with one's mouth; and the impressive pauses and eloquent silences, and subdued utterances, toward the end of the yarn (which chain the attention of the children hand and foot, and they sit with parted lips and breathless, to be wrenched limb from limb with the sudden and appalling “You got it”). Old Uncle Dan'l, a slave of my uncle's' aged 60, used to tell us children yarns every night by the kitchen fire (no other light;) and the last yarn demanded, every night, was this one. By this time there was but a ghastly blaze or two flickering about the back-log. We would huddle close about the old man, and begin to shudder with the first familiar words; and under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout. When you come to glance at the tale you will recollect it--it is as common and familiar as the Tar Baby. Work up the atmosphere with your customary skill and it will “go” in print. Lumbago seems to make a body garrulous--but you'll forgive it. Truly yours S. L. CLEMENS The “Golden Arm” story was one that Clemens often used in his public readings, and was very effective as he gave it. In his sketch, “How to Tell a Story,” it appears about as he used to tell it. Harris, receiving the outlines of the old Missouri tale, presently announced that he had dug up its Georgia relative, an interesting variant, as we gather from Mark Twain's reply. ***** To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta: HARTFORD, '81. MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--I was very sure you would run across that Story somewhere, and am glad you have. A Drummond light--no, I mean a Brush light--is thrown upon the negro estimate of values by his willingness to risk his soul and his mighty peace forever for the sake of a silver sev'm-punce. And this form of the story seems rather nearer the true field-hand standard than that achieved by my Florida, Mo., negroes with their sumptuous arm of solid gold. I judge you haven't received my new book yet--however, you will in a day or two. Meantime you must not take it ill if I drop Osgood a hint about your proposed story of slave life..... When you come north I wish you would drop me a line and then follow it in person and give me a day or two at our house in Hartford. If you will, I will snatch Osgood down from Boston, and you won't have to go there at all unless you want to. Please to bear this strictly in mind, and don't forget it. Sincerely yours S. L. CLEMENS. Charles Warren Stoddard, to whom the next letter is written, was one of the old California literary crowd, a graceful writer of verse and prose, never quite arriving at the success believed by his friends to be his due. He was a gentle, irresponsible soul, well loved by all who knew him, and always, by one or another, provided against want. The reader may remember that during Mark Twain's great lecture engagement in London, winter of 1873-74, Stoddard lived with him, acting as his secretary. At a later period in his life he lived for several years with the great telephone magnate, Theodore N. Vail. At the time of this letter, Stoddard had decided that in the warm light and comfort of the Sandwich Islands he could survive on his literary earnings. ***** To Charles Warren Stoddard, in the Sandwich Islands: HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81. MY DEAR CHARLIE,--Now what have I ever done to you that you should not only slide off to Heaven before you have earned a right to go, but must add the gratuitous villainy of informing me of it?... The house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really need here, is an incendiary. If the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for these privileges, and never house-keep any more. I think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing and wearying slavery of house-keeping. However, she thinks she must submit to it for the sake of the children; whereas, I have always had a tenderness for parents too, so, for her sake and mine, I sigh for the incendiary. When the evening comes and the gas is lit and the wear and tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning we wish, once more, that we were free and irresponsible boarders. Work?--one can't you know, to any purpose. I don't really get anything done worth speaking of, except during the three or four months that we are away in the Summer. I wish the Summer were seven years long. I keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them at home. Yes, and it is all because my time is taken up with answering the letters of strangers. It can't be done through a short hand amanuensis--I've tried that--it wouldn't work--I couldn't learn to dictate. What does possess strangers to write so many letters? I never could find that out. However, I suppose I did it myself when I was a stranger. But I will never do it again. Maybe you think I am not happy? the very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to be happy when I can't work; I am resolved that hereafter I won't be. What I have always longed for, was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea. Yours ever MARK. That magazine article of yours was mighty good: up to your very best I think. I enclose a book review written by Howells. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am delighted with your review, and so is Mrs. Clemens. What you have said, there, will convince anybody that reads it; a body cannot help being convinced by it. That is the kind of a review to have; the doubtful man; even the prejudiced man, is persuaded and succumbs. What a queer blunder that was, about the baronet. I can't quite see how I ever made it. There was an opulent abundance of things I didn't know; and consequently no need to trench upon the vest-pocketful of things I did know, to get material for a blunder. Charley Warren Stoddard has gone to the Sandwich Islands permanently. Lucky devil. It is the only supremely delightful place on earth. It does seem that the more advantage a body doesn't earn, here, the more of them God throws at his head. This fellow's postal card has set the vision of those gracious islands before my mind, again, with not a leaf withered, nor a rainbow vanished, nor a sun-flash missing from the waves, and now it will be months, I reckon, before I can drive it away again. It is beautiful company, but it makes one restless and dissatisfied. With love and thanks, Yrs ever, MARK. The review mentioned in this letter was of The Prince and the Pauper. What the queer “blunder” about the baronet was, the present writer confesses he does not know; but perhaps a careful reader could find it, at least in the early edition; very likely it was corrected without loss of time. Clemens now and then found it necessary to pay a visit to Canada in the effort to protect his copyright. He usually had a grand time on these trips, being lavishly entertained by the Canadian literary fraternity. In November, 1881, he made one of these journeys in the interest of The Prince and the Pauper, this time with Osgood, who was now his publisher. In letters written home we get a hint of his diversions. The Monsieur Frechette mentioned was a Canadian poet of considerable distinction. “Clara” was Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, who had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Europe in 1873, and again in 1878. Later she became Mrs. John B. Staachfield, of New York City. Her name has already appeared in these letters many times. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: MONTREAL, Nov. 28 '81. Livy darling, you and Clara ought to have been at breakfast in the great dining room this morning. English female faces, distinctive English costumes, strange and marvelous English gaits--and yet such honest, honorable, clean-souled countenances, just as these English women almost always have, you know. Right away-- But they've come to take me to the top of Mount Royal, it being a cold, dry, sunny, magnificent day. Going in a sleigh. Yours lovingly, SAML. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: MONTREAL, Sunday, November 27, 1881. Livy dear, a mouse kept me awake last night till 3 or 4 o'clock--so I am lying abed this morning. I would not give sixpence to be out yonder in the storm, although it is only snow. [The above paragraph is written in the form of a rebus illustrated with various sketches.] There--that's for the children--was not sure that they could read writing; especially jean, who is strangely ignorant in some things. I can not only look out upon the beautiful snow-storm, past the vigorous blaze of my fire; and upon the snow-veiled buildings which I have sketched; and upon the churchward drifting umbrellas; and upon the buffalo-clad cabmen stamping their feet and thrashing their arms on the corner yonder: but I also look out upon the spot where the first white men stood, in the neighborhood of four hundred years ago, admiring the mighty stretch of leafy solitudes, and being admired and marveled at by an eager multitude of naked savages. The discoverer of this region, and namer of it, Jacques Cartier, has a square named for him in the city. I wish you were here; you would enjoy your birthday, I think. I hoped for a letter, and thought I had one when the mail was handed in, a minute ago, but it was only that note from Sylvester Baxter. You must write--do you hear?--or I will be remiss myself. Give my love and a kiss to the children, and ask them to give you my love and a kiss from SAML. ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: QUEBEC, Sunday. '81. Livy darling, I received a letter from Monsieur Frechette this morning, in which certain citizens of Montreal tendered me a public dinner next Thursday, and by Osgood's advice I accepted it. I would have accepted anyway, and very cheerfully but for the delay of two days--for I was purposing to go to Boston Tuesday and home Wednesday; whereas, now I go to Boston Friday and home Saturday. I have to go by Boston on account of business. We drove about the steep hills and narrow, crooked streets of this old town during three hours, yesterday, in a sleigh, in a driving snow-storm. The people here don't mind snow; they were all out, plodding around on their affairs--especially the children, who were wallowing around everywhere, like snow images, and having a mighty good time. I wish I could describe the winter costume of the young girls, but I can't. It is grave and simple, but graceful and pretty--the top of it is a brimless fur cap. Maybe it is the costume that makes pretty girls seem so monotonously plenty here. It was a kind of relief to strike a homely face occasionally. You descend into some of the streets by long, deep stairways; and in the strong moonlight, last night, these were very picturesque. I did wish you were here to see these things. You couldn't by any possibility sleep in these beds, though, or enjoy the food. Good night, sweetheart, and give my respects to the cubs. SAML. It had been hoped that W. D. Howells would join the Canadian excursion, but Howells was not very well that autumn. He wrote that he had been in bed five weeks, “most of the time recovering; so you see how bad I must have been to begin with. But now I am out of any first-class pain; I have a good appetite, and I am as abusive and peremptory as Guiteau.” Clemens, returning to Hartford, wrote him a letter that explains itself. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Dec. 16 '81. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It was a sharp disappointment--your inability to connect, on the Canadian raid. What a gaudy good time we should have had! Disappointed, again, when I got back to Boston; for I was promising myself half an hour's look at you, in Belmont; but your note to Osgood showed that that could not be allowed out yet. The Atlantic arrived an hour ago, and your faultless and delicious Police Report brought that blamed Joe Twichell powerfully before me. There's a man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth,) and has as sure an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the world, perhaps--then why in the nation doesn't he report himself with a pen? One of those drenching days last week, he slopped down town with his cubs, and visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat woman, and a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. The giant had a broom, and was cleaning up and fixing around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me. So he dropped in under the man's elbow, dogged him patiently around, prodding him with questions and getting irritated snarls in return which would have finished me early--but at last one of Joe's random shafts drove the centre of that giant's sympathies somehow, and fetched him. The fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained a flood of personal history that was unspeakably entertaining. Among other things it turned out that he had been a Turkish (native) colonel, and had fought all through the Crimean war--and so, for the first time, Joe got a picture of the Charge of the Six Hundred that made him see the living spectacle, the flash of flag and tongue-flame, the rolling smoke, and hear the booming of the guns; and for the first time also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from the mouth of a master, and realized that nobody had “blundered,” but that a cold, logical, military brain had perceived this one and sole way to win an already lost battle, and so gave the command and did achieve the victory. And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, and reproduce that giant's picturesque and admirable history. But dern him, he can't write it--which is all wrong, and not as it should be. And he has gone and raked up the MS autobiography (written in 1848,) of Mrs. Phebe Brown, (author of “I Love to Steal a While Away,”) who educated Yung Wing in her family when he was a little boy; and I came near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid fascinations of it. Why in the nation it has never got into print, I can't understand. But, by jings! the postman will be here in a minute; so, congratulations upon your mending health, and gratitude that it is mending; and love to you all. Yrs Ever MARK. Don't answer--I spare the sick. XXII. LETTERS, 1882, MAINLY TO HOWELLS. WASTED FURY. OLD SCENES REVISITED. THE MISSISSIPPI BOOK. A man of Mark Twain's profession and prominence must necessarily be the subject of much newspaper comment. Jest, compliment, criticism --none of these things disturbed him, as a rule. He was pleased that his books should receive favorable notices by men whose opinion he respected, but he was not grieved by adverse expressions. Jests at his expense, if well written, usually amused him; cheap jokes only made him sad; but sarcasms and innuendoes were likely to enrage him, particularly if he believed them prompted by malice. Perhaps among all the letters he ever wrote, there is none more characteristic than this confession of violence and eagerness for reprisal, followed by his acknowledgment of error and a manifest appreciation of his own weakness. It should be said that Mark Twain and Whitelaw Reid were generally very good friends, and perhaps for the moment this fact seemed to magnify the offense. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Jan. 28 '82. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Nobody knows better than I, that there are times when swearing cannot meet the emergency. How sharply I feel that, at this moment. Not a single profane word has issued from my lips this mornin--I have not even had the impulse to swear, so wholly ineffectual would swearing have manifestly been, in the circumstances. But I will tell you about it. About three weeks ago, a sensitive friend, approaching his revelation cautiously, intimated that the N. Y. Tribune was engaged in a kind of crusade against me. This seemed a higher compliment than I deserved; but no matter, it made me very angry. I asked many questions, and gathered, in substance, this: Since Reid's return from Europe, the Tribune had been flinging sneers and brutalities at me with such persistent frequency “as to attract general remark.” I was an angered--which is just as good an expression, I take it, as an hungered. Next, I learned that Osgood, among the rest of the “general,” was worrying over these constant and pitiless attacks. Next came the testimony of another friend, that the attacks were not merely “frequent,” but “almost daily.” Reflect upon that: “Almost daily” insults, for two months on a stretch. What would you have done? As for me, I did the thing which was the natural thing for me to do, that is, I set about contriving a plan to accomplish one or the other of two things: 1. Force a peace; or 2. Get revenge. When I got my plan finished, it pleased me marvelously. It was in six or seven sections, each section to be used in its turn and by itself; the assault to begin at once with No. 1, and the rest to follow, one after the other, to keep the communication open while I wrote my biography of Reid. I meant to wind up with this latter great work, and then dismiss the subject for good. Well, ever since then I have worked day and night making notes and collecting and classifying material. I've got collectors at work in England. I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while a stenographer set it down. As my labors grew, so also grew my fascination. Malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe I drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it. I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who was bitter against the whole thing.) One part of my plan was so delicious that I had to try my hand on it right away, just for the luxury of it. I set about it, and sure enough it panned out to admiration. I wrote that chapter most carefully, and I couldn't find a fault with it. (It was not for the biography--no, it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.) Well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind (from Mrs. Clemens's): “Wouldn't it be well to make sure that the attacks have been 'almost daily'?--and to also make sure that their number and character will justify me in doing what I am proposing to do?” I at once set a man to work in New York to seek out and copy every unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov. 1st to date. On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I had subscribed for the paper. The result arrived from my New York man this morning. O, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! The “almost daily” assaults, for two months, consist of--1. Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3. A remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious--and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. There--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety! Can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4 harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? The whole offense, boiled down, amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark of the Tribune about my book--not me between Nov. 1 and Dec. 20; and a couple of foreign criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26! If I can't stand that amount of friction, I certainly need reconstruction. Further boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest from the Tribune (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it.) One jest--and that is all; for the foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper. And to offset that one jest, the Tribune paid me one compliment Dec. 23, by publishing my note declining the New York New England dinner, while merely (in the same breath,) mentioning that similar letters were read from General Sherman and other men whom we all know to be persons of real consequence. Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work have got to go into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house; not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the change occasionally from this housekeeping slavery to that wild independence. A life of don't-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what I have asked for in many a secret prayer. I shall come by and by and require of you what you have offered me there. Yours ever, MARK. Howells, who had already known something of the gathering storm, replied: “Your letter was an immense relief to me, for although I had an abiding faith that you would get sick of your enterprise, I wasn't easy until I knew that you had given it up.” Joel Chandler Harris appears again in the letters of this period. Twichell, during a trip South about this time, had called on Harris with some sort of proposition or suggestion from Clemens that Harris appear with him in public, and tell, or read, the Remus stories from the platform. But Harris was abnormally diffident. Clemens later pronounced him “the shyest full-grown man” he had ever met, and the word which Twichell brought home evidently did not encourage the platform idea. ***** To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta: HARTFORD, Apl. 2, '82. Private. MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--Jo Twichell brought me your note and told me of his talk with you. He said you didn't believe you would ever be able to muster a sufficiency of reckless daring to make you comfortable and at ease before an audience. Well, I have thought out a device whereby I believe we can get around that difficulty. I will explain when I see you. Jo says you want to go to Canada within a month or six weeks--I forget just exactly what he did say; but he intimated the trip could be delayed a while, if necessary. If this is so, suppose you meet Osgood and me in New Orleans early in May--say somewhere between the 1st and 6th? It will be well worth your while to do this, because the author who goes to Canada unposted, will not know what course to pursue [to secure copyright] when he gets there; he will find himself in a hopeless confusion as to what is the correct thing to do. Now Osgood is the only man in America, who can lay out your course for you and tell you exactly what to do. Therefore, you just come to New Orleans and have a talk with him. Our idea is to strike across lots and reach St. Louis the 20th of April--thence we propose to drift southward, stopping at some town a few hours or a night, every day, and making notes. To escape the interviewers, I shall follow my usual course and use a fictitious name (C. L. Samuel, of New York.) I don't know what Osgood's name will be, but he can't use his own. If you see your way to meet us in New Orleans, drop me a line, now, and as we approach that city I will telegraph you what day we shall arrive there. I would go to Atlanta if I could, but shan't be able. We shall go back up the river to St. Paul, and thence by rail X-lots home. (I am making this letter so dreadfully private and confidential because my movements must be kept secret, else I shan't be able to pick up the kind of book-material I want.) If you are diffident, I suspect that you ought to let Osgood be your magazine-agent. He makes those people pay three or four times as much as an article is worth, whereas I never had the cheek to make them pay more than double. Yrs Sincerely S. L. CLEMENS. “My backwardness is an affliction,” wrote Harris..... “The ordeal of appearing on the stage would be a terrible one, but my experience is that when a diffident man does become familiar with his surroundings he has more impudence than his neighbors. Extremes meet.” He was sorely tempted, but his courage became as water at the thought of footlights and assembled listeners. Once in New York he appears to have been caught unawares at a Tile Club dinner and made to tell a story, but his agony was such that at the prospect of a similar ordeal in Boston he avoided that city and headed straight for Georgia and safety. The New Orleans excursion with Osgood, as planned by Clemens, proved a great success. The little party took the steamer Gold Dust from St. Louis down river toward New Orleans. Clemens was quickly recognized, of course, and his assumed name laid aside. The author of “Uncle Remus” made the trip to New Orleans. George W. Cable was there at the time, and we may believe that in the company of Mark Twain and Osgood those Southern authors passed two or three delightful days. Clemens also met his old teacher Bixby in New Orleans, and came back up the river with him, spending most of his time in the pilot-house, as in the old days. It was a glorious trip, and, reaching St. Louis, he continued it northward, stopping off at Hannibal and Quincy.' ***** To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: QUINCY, ILL. May 17, '82. Livy darling, I am desperately homesick. But I have promised Osgood, and must stick it out; otherwise I would take the train at once and break for home. I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago. It has been a moving time. I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. They were children with me, and afterwards schoolmates. Now they have a daughter 19 or 20 years old. Spent an hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me--a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished. That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again. I have been clasping hands with the moribund--and usually they said, “It is for the last time.” Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St. Paul, with a heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and Susie and Bay and the peerless Jean. And so good night, my love. SAML. Clemens's trip had been saddened by learning, in New Orleans, the news of the death of Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh. To Doctor Brown's son, whom he had known as “Jock,” he wrote immediately on his return to Hartford. ***** To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh HARTFORD, June 1, 1882. MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news among the cable dispatches. There was no place in America, however remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had made him known and loved all over the land. To Mrs. Clemens and me, the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was peculiarly near and dear. Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes once more before he should be called to his rest. We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent. My wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies. Faithfully yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Our Susie is still “Megalops.” He gave her that name: Can you spare a photograph of your father? We have none but the one taken in a group with ourselves. William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism. His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon its issue in book form took first place among his published novels. Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote. Once, long afterward, he said: “Most authors give us glimpses of a radiant moon, but Howells's moon shines and sails all night long.” When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt, in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading delivery. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.: MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this July instalment of your story. It's perfectly dazzling--it's masterly--incomparable. Yet I heard you read it--without losing my balance. Well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable. I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind. Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns repeated by a somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by I strike it in print, and shout to myself, “God bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset splendors!” Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh and dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the form of it as being familiar--but that is all. That is, I remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth a damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that. That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read. There are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before. And they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. How very drunk, and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece! Why I didn't notice that that religious interview between Marcia and Mrs. Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but dear me, it's just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it for the “Library.”) Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you glide right along, and I don't get a chance to let the things soak home; but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in which to gently and thoroughly filter into me. Your humor is so very subtle, and elusive--(well, often it's just a vanishing breath of perfume which a body isn't certain he smelt till he stops and takes another smell) whereas you can smell other... (Remainder obliterated.) Among Mark Twain's old schoolmates in Hannibal was little Helen Kercheval, for whom in those early days he had a very tender spot indeed. But she married another schoolmate, John Garth, who in time became a banker, highly respected and a great influence. John and Helen Garth have already been mentioned in the letter of May 17th. ***** To John Garth, in Hannibal: HARTFORD, July 3 '82. DEAR JOHN,--Your letter of June 19 arrived just one day after we ought to have been in Elmira, N. Y. for the summer: but at the last moment the baby was seized with scarlet fever. I had to telegraph and countermand the order for special sleeping car; and in fact we all had to fly around in a lively way and undo the patient preparations of weeks--rehabilitate the dismantled house, unpack the trunks, and so on. A couple of days later, the eldest child was taken down with so fierce a fever that she was soon delirious--not scarlet fever, however. Next, I myself was stretched on the bed with three diseases at once, and all of them fatal. But I never did care for fatal diseases if I could only have privacy and room to express myself concerning them. We gave early warning, and of course nobody has entered the house in all this time but one or two reckless old bachelors--and they probably wanted to carry the disease to the children of former flames of theirs. The house is still in quarantine and must remain so for a week or two yet--at which time we are hoping to leave for Elmira. Always your friend S. L. CLEMENS. By the end of summer Howells was in Europe, and Clemens, in Elmira, was trying to finish his Mississippi book, which was giving him a great deal of trouble. It was usually so with his non-fiction books; his interest in them was not cumulative; he was prone to grow weary of them, while the menace of his publisher's contract was maddening. Howells's letters, meant to be comforting, or at least entertaining, did not always contribute to his peace of mind. The Library of American Humor which they had planned was an added burden. Before sailing, Howells had written: “Do you suppose you can do your share of the reading at Elmira, while you are writing at the Mississippi book?” In a letter from London, Howells writes of the good times he is having over there with Osgood, Hutton, John Hay, Aldrich, and Alma Tadema, excursioning to Oxford, feasting, especially “at the Mitre Tavern, where they let you choose your dinner from the joints hanging from the rafter, and have passages that you lose yourself in every time you try to go to your room.... Couldn't you and Mrs. Clemens step over for a little while?... We have seen lots of nice people and have been most pleasantly made of; but I would rather have you smoke in my face, and talk for half a day just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in London.” The reader will gather that this could not be entirely soothing to a man shackled by a contract and a book that refused to come to an end. ***** To W. D. Howells, in London: HARTFORD, CONN. Oct 30, 1882. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I do not expect to find you, so I shan't spend many words on you to wind up in the perdition of some European dead-letter office. I only just want to say that the closing installments of the story are prodigious. All along I was afraid it would be impossible for you to keep up so splendidly to the end; but you were only, I see now, striking eleven. It is in these last chapters that you struck twelve. Go on and write; you can write good books yet, but you can never match this one. And speaking of the book, I inclose something which has been happening here lately. We have only just arrived at home, and I have not seen Clark on our matters. I cannot see him or any one else, until I get my book finished. The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still lacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I am going to write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done, or break down at it. The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning, and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given,) 9500 words, so I reduced my burden by one third in one day. It was five days work in one. I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. It is ten days work, and unless something breaks, it will be finished in five. We all send love to you and Mrs. Howells, and all the family. Yours as ever, MARK. Again, from Villeneuve, on lake Geneva, Howells wrote urging him this time to spend the winter with them in Florence, where they would write their great American Comedy of 'Orme's Motor,' “which is to enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice.... We could have a lot of fun writing it, and you could go home with some of the good old Etruscan malaria in your bones, instead of the wretched pinch-beck Hartford article that you are suffering from now.... it's a great opportunity for you. Besides, nobody over there likes you half as well as I do.” It should be added that 'Orme's Motor' was the provisional title that Clemens and Howells had selected for their comedy, which was to be built, in some measure, at least, around the character, or rather from the peculiarities, of Orion Clemens. The Cable mentioned in Mark Twain's reply is, of course, George W. Cable, who only a little while before had come up from New Orleans to conquer the North with his wonderful tales and readings. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Switzerland: HARTFORD, Nov. 4th, 1882. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, it would be profitable for me to do that, because with your society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not Boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter season. I never had such a fight over a book in my life before. And the foolishest part of the whole business is, that I started Osgood to editing it before I had finished writing it. As a consequence, large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder, and I have the burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken continuity of the work, while I am at the same time trying to build the last quarter of the book. However, at last I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably, write when I choose to write, leave it alone when I so prefer. The printers must wait, the artists, the canvassers, and all the rest. I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought to have finished it before showing to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had thought of this thing earlier, I would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. In the same mail with your letter, arrived the enclosed from Orme the motor man. You will observe that he has an office. I will explain that this is a law office and I think it probably does him as much good to have a law office without anything to do in it, as it would another man to have one with an active business attached. You see he is on the electric light lay now. Going to light the city and allow me to take all the stock if I want to. And he will manage it free of charge. It never would occur to this simple soul how much less costly it would be to me, to hire him on a good salary not to manage it. Do you observe the same old eagerness, the same old hurry, springing from the fear that if he does not move with the utmost swiftness, that colossal opportunity will escape him? Now just fancy this same frantic plunging after vast opportunities, going on week after week with this same man, during fifty entire years, and he has not yet learned, in the slightest degree, that there isn't any occasion to hurry; that his vast opportunity will always wait; and that whether it waits or flies, he certainly will never catch it. This immortal hopefulness, fortified by its immortal and unteachable misjudgment, is the immortal feature of this character, for a play; and we will write that play. We should be fools else. That staccato postscript reads as if some new and mighty business were imminent, for it is slung on the paper telegraphically, all the small words left out. I am afraid something newer and bigger than the electric light is swinging across his orbit. Save this letter for an inspiration. I have got a hundred more. Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in a cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his faculty. You know when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the Apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club; Osgood, full, Boyle O'Reilly, full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the floor, and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. I wish I were in Switzerland, and I wish we could go to Florence; but we have to leave these delights to you; there is no helping it. We all join in love to you and all the family. Yours as ever MARK. XXIII. LETTERS, 1883, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS. A GUEST OF THE MARQUIS OF LORNE. THE HISTORY GAME. A PLAY BY HOWELLS AND MARK TWAIN. Mark Twain, in due season, finished the Mississippi book and placed it in Osgood's hands for publication. It was a sort of partnership arrangement in which Clemens was to furnish the money to make the book, and pay Osgood a percentage for handling it. It was, in fact, the beginning of Mark Twain's adventures as a publisher. Howells was not as happy in Florence as he had hoped to be. The social life there overwhelmed him. In February he wrote: “Our two months in Florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even half-witted people passed. We have spent them in chasing round after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them. My story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the fatal marks of haste and distraction. Of course, I haven't put pen to paper yet on the play. I wring my hands and beat my breast when I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which I couldn't escape.” Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation. Howells's story of this time was “A Woman's Reason.” Governor Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut from 1871 to 1873. Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874 was United States Postmaster-General. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Florence: HARTFORD, March 1st, 1883. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in London, and another time in Paris. It is a kind of foretaste of hell. There is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now chosen. One must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the human race, or life in Europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an impossibility. I learned something last night, and maybe it may reconcile me to go to Europe again sometime. I attended one of the astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of Stoddard, who exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest all out of them with his comments upon them. But all the world go there to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied. And they ought to be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the first act. But he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in Holland load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have any, wholly uninterrupted. If you had hired such a boat and sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. We shall have to do this another time. We have lost an opportunity for the present. Do you forget that Heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with Talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain? Then why do you try to get to Heaven? Be warned in time. We have all read your two opening numbers in the Century, and consider them almost beyond praise. I hear no dissent from this verdict. I did not know there was an untouched personage in American life, but I had forgotten the auctioneer. You have photographed him accurately. I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time. Usually my first waking thought in the morning is, “I have nothing to do to-day, I belong to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave.” Of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor. Therefore I labor. But I take my time about it. I work one hour or four as happens to suit my mind, and quit when I please. And so these days are days of entire enjoyment. I told Clark the other day, to jog along comfortable and not get in a sweat. I said I believed you would not be able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides; therefore I thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that that would be best and pleasantest. You remember Governor Jewell, and the night he told about Russia, down in the library. He was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and I stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the information that he was dying. His case had been dangerous during that day only and he died that night, two hours after I left. His taking off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and sincerely regretted. Win. E. Dodge, the father-in-law of one of Jewell's daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before Jewell died, but Jewell died without knowing that. Jewell's widow went down to New York, to Dodge's house, the day after Jewell's funeral, and was to return here day before yesterday, and she did--in a coffin. She fell dead, of heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home. Florence Strong, one of Jewell's daughters, who lives in Detroit, started East on an urgent telegram, but missed a connection somewhere, and did not arrive here in time to see her father alive. She was his favorite child, and they had always been like lovers together. He always sent her a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a custom which he never suspended even when he was in Russia. Mrs. Strong had only just reached her Western home again when she was summoned to Hartford to attend her mother's funeral. I have had the impulse to write you several times. I shall try to remember better henceforth. With sincerest regards to all of you, Yours as ever, MARK. Mark Twain made another trip to Canada in the interest of copyright --this time to protect the Mississippi book. When his journey was announced by the press, the Marquis of Lorne telegraphed an invitation inviting him to be his guest at Rideau Hall, in Ottawa. Clemens accepted, of course, and was handsomely entertained by the daughter of Queen Victoria and her husband, then Governor-General of Canada. On his return to Hartford he found that Osgood had issued a curious little book, for which Clemens had prepared an introduction. It was an absurd volume, though originally issued with serious intent, its title being The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English.'--[The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, by Pedro Caxolino, with an introduction by Mark Twain. Osgood, Boston, 1883. ]--Evidently the “New Guide” was prepared by some simple Portuguese soul with but slight knowledge of English beyond that which could be obtained from a dictionary, and his literal translation of English idioms are often startling, as, for instance, this one, taken at random: “A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature.” Mark Twain thought this quaint book might amuse his royal hostess, and forwarded a copy in what he considered to be the safe and proper form. ***** To Col. De Winton, in Ottawa, Canada: HARTFORD, June 4, '83. DEAR COLONEL DE WINTON,--I very much want to send a little book to her Royal Highness--the famous Portuguese phrase book; but I do not know the etiquette of the matter, and I would not wittingly infringe any rule of propriety. It is a book which I perfectly well know will amuse her “some at most” if she has not seen it before, and will still amuse her “some at least,” even if she has inspected it a hundred times already. So I will send the book to you, and you who know all about the proper observances will protect me from indiscretion, in case of need, by putting the said book in the fire, and remaining as dumb as I generally was when I was up there. I do not rebind the thing, because that would look as if I thought it worth keeping, whereas it is only worth glancing at and casting aside. Will you please present my compliments to Mrs. De Winton and Mrs. Mackenzie?--and I beg to make my sincere compliments to you, also, for your infinite kindnesses to me. I did have a delightful time up there, most certainly. Truly yours S. L. CLEMENS. P. S. Although the introduction dates a year back, the book is only just now issued. A good long delay. S. L. C. Howells, writing from Venice, in April, manifested special interest in the play project: “Something that would run like Scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights,” so perhaps his book was going better. He proposed that they devote the month of October to the work, and inclosed a letter from Mallory, who owned not only a religious paper, The Churchman, but also the Madison Square Theater, and was anxious for a Howells play. Twenty years before Howells had been Consul to Venice, and he wrote, now: “The idea of my being here is benumbing and silencing. I feel like the Wandering Jew, or the ghost of the Cardiff giant.” He returned to America in July. Clemens sent him word of welcome, with glowing reports of his own undertakings. The story on which he was piling up MS. was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun seven years before at Quarry Farm. He had no great faith in it then, and though he had taken it up again in 1880, his interest had not lasted to its conclusion. This time, however, he was in the proper spirit, and the story would be finished. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, July 20, '83. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We are desperately glad you and your gang are home again--may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. Charley Clark has gone to the other side for a run--will be back in August. He has been sick, and needed the trip very much. Mrs. Clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last Spring, but she is pulling up, now. The children are booming, and my health is ridiculous, it's so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports. I haven't piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks and a half ago. Why, it's like old times, to step right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. I wrote 4000 words to-day and I touch 3000 and upwards pretty often, and don't fall below 1600 any working day. And when I get fagged out, I lie abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for 6 or 7 days. I have finished one small book, and am away along in a big 433 one that I half-finished two or three years ago. I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not. It's a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. There's a raft episode from it in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi..... I'm booming, these days--got health and spirits to waste--got an overplus; and if I were at home, we would write a play. But we must do it anyhow by and by. We stay here till Sep. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air, then home. We are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according. Yrs Ever MARK ***** To Onion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Id.: ELMIRA, July 22, '83. Private. DEAR MA AND ORION AND MOLLIE,--I don't know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us flourishing. I haven't had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie. Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. So I did it, and took the open air. Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out. It took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year. I whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, and gave it that King's name--thus: I measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there were years in it. You can look out over the grounds and see the little pegs from the front door--some of them close together, like Richard II, Richard Cromwell, James II, &c., and some prodigiously wide apart, like Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c. It gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign. Shall invent a violent game to go with it. And in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors--in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates and events--on a cribbage board. Hello, supper's ready. Love to all. Good bye. SAML. Onion Clemens would naturally get excited over the idea of the game and its commercial possibilities. Not more so than his brother, however, who presently employed him to arrange a quantity of historical data which the game was to teach. For a season, indeed, interest in the game became a sort of midsummer madness which pervaded the two households, at Keokuk and at Quarry Farm. Howells wrote his approval of the idea of “learning history by the running foot,” which was a pun, even if unintentional, for in its out-door form it was a game of speed as well as knowledge. Howells adds that he has noticed that the newspapers are exploiting Mark Twain's new invention of a history game, and we shall presently see how this happened. Also, in this letter, Howells speaks of an English nobleman to whom he has given a letter of introduction. “He seemed a simple, quiet, gentlemanly man, with a good taste in literature, which he evinced by going about with my books in his pockets, and talking of yours.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How odd it seems, to sit down to write a letter with the feeling that you've got time to do it. But I'm done work, for this season, and so have got time. I've done two seasons' work in one, and haven't anything left to do, now, but revise. I've written eight or nine hundred MS pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn't name the number of days; I shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. I used to restrict myself to 4 or 5 hours a day and 5 days in the week, but this time I've wrought from breakfast till 5.15 p.m. six days in the week; and once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly. I wrote you and Twichell on the same night, about the game, and was appalled to get a note from him saying he was going to print part of my letter, and was going to do it before I could get a chance to forbid it. I telegraphed him, but was of course too late. If you haven't ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don't. I've got the thing at last so it will work, I guess, but I don't want any more tasks of that kind. When I wrote you, I thought I had it; whereas I was only merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn't be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody had done. I think I've got it in pretty fair shape--so I have caveated it. Earl of Onston--is that it? All right, we shall be very glad to receive them and get acquainted with them. And much obliged to you, too. There's plenty of worse people than the nobilities. I went up and spent a week with the Marquis and the Princess Louise, and had as good a time as I want. I'm powerful glad you are all back again; and we will come up there if our little tribe will give us the necessary furlough; and if we can't get it, you folks must come to us and give us an extension of time. We get home Sept. 11. Hello, I think I see Waring coming! Good-by-letter from Clark, which explains for him. Love to you all from the CLEMENSES. No--it wasn't Waring. I wonder what the devil has become of that man. He was to spend to-day with us, and the day's most gone, now. We are enjoying your story with our usual unspeakableness; and I'm right glad you threw in the shipwreck and the mystery--I like it. Mrs. Crane thinks it's the best story you've written yet. We--but we always think the last one is the best. And why shouldn't it be? Practice helps. P. S. I thought I had sent all our loves to all of you, but Mrs. Clemens says I haven't. Damn it, a body can't think of everything; but a woman thinks you can. I better seal this, now--else there'll be more criticism. I perceive I haven't got the love in, yet. Well, we do send the love of all the family to all the Howellses. S. L. C. There had been some delay and postponement in the matter of the play which Howells and Clemens agreed to write. They did not put in the entire month of October as they had planned, but they did put in a portion of that month, the latter half, working out their old idea. In the end it became a revival of Colonel Sellers, or rather a caricature of that gentle hearted old visionary. Clemens had always complained that the actor Raymond had never brought out the finer shades of Colonel Sellers's character, but Raymond in his worst performance never belied his original as did Howells and Clemens in his dramatic revival. These two, working together, let their imaginations run riot with disastrous results. The reader can judge something of this himself, from The American Claimant the book which Mark Twain would later build from the play. But at this time they thought it a great triumph. They had “cracked their sides” laughing over its construction, as Howells once said, and they thought the world would do the same over its performance. They decided to offer it to Raymond, but rather haughtily, indifferently, because any number of other actors would be waiting for it. But this was a miscalculation. Raymond now turned the tables. Though favorable to the idea of a new play, he declared this one did not present his old Sellers at all, but a lunatic. In the end he returned the MS. with a brief note. Attempts had already been made to interest other actors, and would continue for some time. XXIV. LETTERS, 1884, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS. CABLE'S GREAT APRIL FOOL. “HUCK FINN” IN PRESS. MARK TWAIN FOR CLEVELAND. CLEMENS AND CABLE. Mark Twain had a lingering attack of the dramatic fever that winter. He made a play of the Prince and Pauper, which Howells pronounced “too thin and slight and not half long enough.” He made another of Tom Sawyer, and probably destroyed it, for no trace of the MS. exists to-day. Howells could not join in these ventures, for he was otherwise occupied and had sickness in his household. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: Jan. 7, '84. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--“O my goodn's”, as Jean says. You have now encountered at last the heaviest calamity that can befall an author. The scarlet fever, once domesticated, is a permanent member of the family. Money may desert you, friends forsake you, enemies grow indifferent to you, but the scarlet fever will be true to you, through thick and thin, till you be all saved or damned, down to the last one. I say these things to cheer you. The bare suggestion of scarlet fever in the family makes me shudder; I believe I would almost rather have Osgood publish a book for me. You folks have our most sincere sympathy. Oh, the intrusion of this hideous disease is an unspeakable disaster. My billiard table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich Islands: the walls axe upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature; that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place meanwhile, and abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill Ragsdale at 12 years of age, and the heroine at 4, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, 3 months before the arrival of the missionaries and the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. Then these two will become educated Christians, and highly civilized. And then I will jump 15 years, and do Ragsdale's leper business. When we came to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. Yrs Ever MARK. He never finished the Sandwich Islands story which he and Howells were to dramatize later. His head filled up with other projects, such as publishing plans, reading-tours, and the like. The type-setting machine does not appear in the letters of this period, but it was an important factor, nevertheless. It was costing several thousand dollars a month for construction and becoming a heavy drain on Mark Twain's finances. It was necessary to recuperate, and the anxiety for a profitable play, or some other adventure that would bring a quick and generous return, grew out of this need. Clemens had established Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage, in a New York office, as selling agent for the Mississippi book and for his plays. He was also planning to let Webster publish the new book, Huck Finn. George W. Cable had proven his ability as a reader, and Clemens saw possibilities in a reading combination, which was first planned to include Aldrich, and Howells, and a private car. But Aldrich and Howells did not warm to the idea, and the car was eliminated from the plan. Cable came to visit Clemens in Hartford, and was taken with the mumps, so that the reading-trip was postponed. The fortunes of the Sellers play were most uncertain and becoming daily more doubtful. In February, Howells wrote: “If you have got any comfort in regard to our play I wish you would heave it into my bosom.” Cable recovered in time, and out of gratitude planned a great April-fool surprise for his host. He was a systematic man, and did it in his usual thorough way. He sent a “private and confidential” suggestion to a hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's friends and admirers, nearly all distinguished literary men. The suggestion was that each one of them should send a request for Mark Twain's autograph, timing it so that it would arrive on the 1st of April. All seemed to have responded. Mark Twain's writing-table on April Fool morning was heaped with letters, asking in every ridiculous fashion for his “valuable autograph.” The one from Aldrich was a fair sample. He wrote: “I am making a collection of autographs of our distinguished writers, and having read one of your works, Gabriel Convoy, I would like to add your name to the list.” Of course, the joke in this was that Gabriel Convoy was by Bret Harte, who by this time was thoroughly detested by Mark Twain. The first one or two of the letters puzzled the victim; then he comprehended the size and character of the joke and entered into it thoroughly. One of the letters was from Bloodgood H. Cutter, the “Poet Lariat” of Innocents Abroad. Cutter, of course, wrote in “poetry,” that is to say, doggerel. Mark Twain's April Fool was a most pleasant one. ***** Rhymed letter by Bloodgood H. Cutter to Mark Twain: LITTLE NECK, LONG ISLAND. LONG ISLAND FARMER, TO HIS FRIEND AND PILGRIM BROTHER, SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ. Friends, suggest in each one's behalf To write, and ask your autograph. To refuse that, I will not do, After the long voyage had with you. That was a memorable time You wrote in prose, I wrote in Rhyme To describe the wonders of each place, And the queer customs of each race. That is in my memory yet For while I live I'll not forget. I often think of that affair And the many that were with us there. As your friends think it for the best I ask your Autograph with the rest, Hoping you will it to me send 'Twill please and cheer your dear old friend: Yours truly, BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Apl 8, '84. MY DEAR HOWELLS, It took my breath away, and I haven't recovered it yet, entirely--I mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck Finn. Now if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest--proceed, in God's name, and be by me forever blest. I cannot conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself; but if there is such a man and you be that man, why then pile it on. It will cost me a pang every time I think of it, but this anguish will be eingebusst to me in the joy and comfort I shall get out of the not having to read the verfluchtete proofs myself. But if you have repented of your augenblichlicher Tobsucht and got back to calm cold reason again, I won't hold you to it unless I find I have got you down in writing somewhere. Herr, I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair and reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & P cost me the last rags of my religion. M. Howells had written that he would be glad to help out in the reading of the proofs of Huck Finn, which book Webster by this time had in hand. Replying to Clemens's eager and grateful acceptance now, he wrote: “It is all perfectly true about the generosity, unless I am going to read your proofs from one of the shabby motives which I always find at the bottom of my soul if I examine it.” A characteristic utterance, though we may be permitted to believe that his shabby motives were fewer and less shabby than those of mankind in general. The proofs which Howells was reading pleased him mightily. Once, during the summer, he wrote: “if I had written half as good a book as Huck Finn I shouldn't ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is, I don't, so send them on; they will always find me somewhere.” This was the summer of the Blaine-Cleveland campaign. Mark Twain, in company with many other leading men, had mugwumped, and was supporting Cleveland. From the next letter we gather something of the aspects of that memorable campaign, which was one of scandal and vituperation. We learn, too, that the young sculptor, Karl Gerhardt, having completed a three years' study in Paris, had returned to America a qualified artist. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Aug. 21, '84. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--This presidential campaign is too delicious for anything. Isn't human nature the most consummate sham and lie that was ever invented? Isn't man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all his aspects? Man, “know thyself “--and then thou wilt despise thyself, to a dead moral certainty. Take three quite good specimens--Hawley, Warner, and Charley Clark. Even I do not loathe Blaine more than they do; yet Hawley is howling for Blaine, Warner and Clark are eating their daily crow in the paper for him, and all three will vote for him. O Stultification, where is thy sting, O slave where is thy hickory! I suppose you heard how a marble monument for which St. Gaudens was pecuniarily responsible, burned down in Hartford the other day, uninsured--for who in the world would ever think of insuring a marble shaft in a cemetery against a fire?--and left St. Gauden out of pocket $15,000. It was a bad day for artists. Gerhardt finished my bust that day, and the work was pronounced admirable by all the kin and friends; but in putting it in plaster (or rather taking it out) next day it got ruined. It was four or five weeks hard work gone to the dogs. The news flew, and everybody on the farm flocked to the arbor and grouped themselves about the wreck in a profound and moving silence--the farm-help, the colored servants, the German nurse, the children, everybody--a silence interrupted at wide intervals by absent-minded ejaculations wising from unconscious breasts as the whole size of the disaster gradually worked its way home to the realization of one spirit after another. Some burst out with one thing, some another; the German nurse put up her hands and said, “Oh, Schade! oh, schrecklich!” But Gerhardt said nothing; or almost that. He couldn't word it, I suppose. But he went to work, and by dark had everything thoroughly well under way for a fresh start in the morning; and in three days' time had built a new bust which was a trifle better than the old one--and to-morrow we shall put the finishing touches on it, and it will be about as good a one as nearly anybody can make. Yrs Ever MARK. If you run across anybody who wants a bust, be sure and recommend Gerhardt on my say-so. But Howells was determinedly for Blaine. “I shall vote for Blaine,” he replied. “I do not believe he is guilty of the things they accuse him of, and I know they are not proved against him. As for Cleveland, his private life may be no worse than that of most men, but as an enemy of that contemptible, hypocritical, lop-sided morality which says a woman shall suffer all the shame of unchastity and man none, I want to see him destroyed politically by his past. The men who defend him would take their wives to the White House if he were president, but if he married his concubine--'made her an honest woman' they would not go near him. I can't stand that.” Certainly this was sound logic, in that day, at least. But it left Clemens far from satisfied. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, Sept. 17, '84. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for Blaine. I believe you said something about the country and the party. Certainly allegiance to these is well; but as certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor--the party or the country come second to that, and never first. I don't ask you to vote at all--I only urge you to not soil yourself by voting for Blaine. When you wrote before, you were able to say the charges against him were not proven. But you know now that they are proven, and it seems to me that that bars you and all other honest and honorable men (who are independently situated) from voting for him. It is not necessary to vote for Cleveland; the only necessary thing to do, as I understand it, is that a man shall keep himself clean, (by withholding his vote for an improper man) even though the party and the country go to destruction in consequence. It is not parties that make or save countries or that build them to greatness--it is clean men, clean ordinary citizens, rank and file, the masses. Clean masses are not made by individuals standing back till the rest become clean. As I said before, I think a man's first duty is to his own honor; not to his country and not to his party. Don't be offended; I mean no offence. I am not so concerned about the rest of the nation, but--well, good-bye. Ys Ever MARK. There does not appear to be any further discussion of the matter between Howells and Clemens. Their letters for a time contained no suggestion of politics. Perhaps Mark Twain's own political conscience was not entirely clear in his repudiation of his party; at least we may believe from his next letter that his Cleveland enthusiasm was qualified by a willingness to support a Republican who would command his admiration and honor. The idea of an eleventh-hour nomination was rather startling, whatever its motive. ***** To Mr. Pierce, in Boston: HARTFORD, Oct. 22, '84. MY DEAR MR. PIERCE,--You know, as well as I do, that the reason the majority of republicans are going to vote for Blaine is because they feel that they cannot help themselves. Do not you believe that if Mr. Edmunds would consent to run for President, on the Independent ticket--even at this late day--he might be elected? Well, if he wouldn't consent, but should even strenuously protest and say he wouldn't serve if elected, isn't it still wise and fair to nominate him and vote for him? since his protest would relieve him from all responsibility; and he couldn't surely find fault with people for forcing a compliment upon him. And do not you believe that his name thus compulsorily placed at the head of the Independent column would work absolutely certain defeat to Blain and save the country's honor? Politicians often carry a victory by springing some disgraceful and rascally mine under the feet of the adversary at the eleventh hour; would it not be wholesome to vary this thing for once and spring as formidable a mine of a better sort under the enemy's works? If Edmunds's name were put up, I would vote for him in the teeth of all the protesting and blaspheming he could do in a month; and there are lots of others who would do likewise. If this notion is not a foolish and wicked one, won't you just consult with some chief Independents, and see if they won't call a sudden convention and whoop the thing through? To nominate Edmunds the 1st of November, would be soon enough, wouldn't it? With kindest regards to you and the Aldriches, Yr Truly S. L. CLEMENS. Clemens and Cable set out on their reading-tour in November. They were a curiously-assorted pair: Cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to habits, neat, prim, all that Clemens was not. In the beginning Cable undertook to read the Bible aloud to Clemens each evening, but this part of the day's program was presently omitted by request. If they spent Sunday in a town, Cable was up bright and early visiting the various churches and Sunday-schools, while Mark Twain remained at the hotel, in bed, reading or asleep. XXV. THE GREAT YEAR OF 1885. CLEMENS AND CABLE. PUBLICATION OF “HUCK FINN.” THE GRANT MEMOIRS. MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY. The year 1885 was in some respects the most important, certainly the most pleasantly exciting, in Mark Twain's life. It was the year in which he entered fully into the publishing business and launched one of the most spectacular of all publishing adventures, The Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant. Clemens had not intended to do general publishing when he arranged with Webster to become sales-agent for the Mississippi book, and later general agent for Huck Finn's adventures; he had intended only to handle his own books, because he was pretty thoroughly dissatisfied with other publishing arrangements. Even the Library of Humor, which Howells, with Clark, of the Courant, had put together for him, he left with Osgood until that publisher failed, during the spring of 1885. Certainly he never dreamed of undertaking anything of the proportions of the Grant book. He had always believed that Grant could make a book. More than once, when they had met, he had urged the General to prepare his memoirs for publication. Howells, in his 'My Mark Twain', tells of going with Clemens to see Grant, then a member of the ill-fated firm of Grant and Ward, and how they lunched on beans, bacon and coffee brought in from a near-by restaurant. It was while they were eating this soldier fare that Clemens--very likely abetted by Howells --especially urged the great commander to prepare his memoirs. But Grant had become a financier, as he believed, and the prospect of literary earnings, however large, did not appeal to him. Furthermore, he was convinced that he was without literary ability and that a book by him would prove a failure. But then, by and by, came a failure more disastrous than anything he had foreseen--the downfall of his firm through the Napoleonic rascality of Ward. General Grant was utterly ruined; he was left without income and apparently without the means of earning one. It was the period when the great War Series was appeasing in the Century Magazine. General Grant, hard-pressed, was induced by the editors to prepare one or more articles, and, finding that he could write them, became interested in the idea of a book. It is unnecessary to repeat here the story of how the publication of this important work passed into the hands of Mark Twain; that is to say, the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., the details having been fully given elsewhere.--[See Mark Twain: A Biography, chap. cliv.]-- We will now return for the moment to other matters, as reported in order by the letters. Clemens and Cable had continued their reading-tour into Canada, and in February found themselves in Montreal. Here they were invited by the Toque Bleue Snow-shoe Club to join in one of their weekly excursions across Mt. Royal. They could not go, and the reasons given by Mark Twain are not without interest. The letter is to Mr. George Iles, author of Flame, Electricity, and the Camera, and many other useful works. ***** To George Iles, far the Toque Blew Snow-shoe Club, Montreal: DETROIT, February 12, 1885. Midnight, P.S. MY DEAR ILES,--I got your other telegram a while ago, and answered it, explaining that I get only a couple of hours in the middle of the day for social life. I know it doesn't seem rational that a man should have to lie abed all day in order to be rested and equipped for talking an hour at night, and yet in my case and Cable's it is so. Unless I get a great deal of rest, a ghastly dulness settles down upon me on the platform, and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment. Usually it is just this latter, but that is because I take my rest faithfully, and prepare myself to do my duty by my audience. I am the obliged and appreciative servant of my brethren of the Snow-shoe Club, and nothing in the world would delight me more than to come to their house without naming time or terms on my own part--but you see how it is. My cast iron duty is to my audience--it leaves me no liberty and no option. With kindest regards to the Club, and to you, I am Sincerely yours S. L. CLEMENS. In the next letter we reach the end of the Clemens-Cable venture and get a characteristic summing up of Mark Twain's general attitude toward the companion of his travels. It must be read only in the clear realization of Mark Twain's attitude toward orthodoxy, and his habit of humor. Cable was as rigidly orthodox as Mark Twain was revolutionary. The two were never anything but the best of friends. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: PHILADA. Feb. 27, '85. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--To-night in Baltimore, to-morrow afternoon and night in Washington, and my four-months platform campaign is ended at last. It has been a curious experience. It has taught me that Cable's gifts of mind are greater and higher than I had suspected. But-- That “But” is pointing toward his religion. You will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly. Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company; I rage and swear at him sometimes, but we do not quarrel; we get along mighty happily together; but in him and his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. Nat Goodwin was on the train yesterday. He plays in Washington all the coming week. He is very anxious to get our Sellers play and play it under changed names. I said the only thing I could do would be to write to you. Well, I've done it. Ys Ever MARK. Clemens and Webster were often at the house of General Grant during these early days of 1885, and it must have been Webster who was present with Clemens on the great occasion described in the following telegram. It was on the last day and hour of President Arthur's administration that the bill was passed which placed Ulysses S. Grant as full General with full pay on the retired list, and it is said that the congressional clock was set back in order that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. General Grant had by this time developed cancer and was already in feeble health. ***** Telegram to Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford: NEW YORK, Mar. 4, 1885. To MRS. S. L. CLEMENS, We were at General Grant's at noon and a telegram arrived that the last act of the expiring congress late this morning retired him with full General's rank and accompanying emoluments. The effect upon him was like raising the dead. We were present when the telegram was put in his hand. S. L. CLEMENS. Something has been mentioned before of Mark Twain's investments and the generally unprofitable habit of them. He had a trusting nature, and was usually willing to invest money on any plausible recommendation. He was one of thousands such, and being a person of distinction he now and then received letters of inquiry, complaint, or condolence. A minister wrote him that he had bought some stocks recommended by a Hartford banker and advertised in a religious paper. He added, “After I made that purchase they wrote me that you had just bought a hundred shares and that you were a 'shrewd' man.” The writer closed by asking for further information. He received it, as follows: ***** To the Rev. J----, in Baltimore: WASHINGTON, Mch. 2,'85. MY DEAR SIR,--I take my earliest opportunity to answer your favor of Feb. B---- was premature in calling me a “shrewd man.” I wasn't one at that time, but am one now--that is, I am at least too shrewd to ever again invest in anything put on the market by B----. I know nothing whatever about the Bank Note Co., and never did know anything about it. B---- sold me about $4,000 or $5,000 worth of the stock at $110, and I own it yet. He sold me $10,000 worth of another rose-tinted stock about the same time. I have got that yet, also. I judge that a peculiarity of B----'s stocks is that they are of the staying kind. I think you should have asked somebody else whether I was a shrewd man or not for two reasons: the stock was advertised in a religious paper, a circumstance which was very suspicious; and the compliment came to you from a man who was interested to make a purchaser of you. I am afraid you deserve your loss. A financial scheme advertised in any religious paper is a thing which any living person ought to know enough to avoid; and when the factor is added that M. runs that religious paper, a dead person ought to know enough to avoid it. Very Truly Yours S. L. CLEMENS. The story of Huck Finn was having a wide success. Webster handled it skillfully, and the sales were large. In almost every quarter its welcome was enthusiastic. Here and there, however, could be found an exception; Huck's morals were not always approved of by library reading-committees. The first instance of this kind was reported from Concord; and would seem not to have depressed the author-publisher. ***** To Chas. L. Webster, in New York: Mch 18, '85. DEAR CHARLEY,--The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass, have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure. S. L. C. Perhaps the Concord Free Trade Club had some idea of making amends to Mark Twain for the slight put upon his book by their librarians, for immediately after the Huck Finn incident they notified him of his election to honorary membership. Those were the days of “authors' readings,” and Clemens and Howells not infrequently assisted at these functions, usually given as benefits of one kind or another. From the next letter, written following an entertainment given for the Longfellow memorial, we gather that Mark Twain's opinion of Howells's reading was steadily improving. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, May 5, '85. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--.... Who taught you to read? Observation and thought, I guess. And practice at the Tavern Club?--yes; and that was the best teaching of all: Well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points home to that audience--absolute proof of good reading. But you couldn't read worth a damn a few years ago. I do not say this to flatter. It is true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already gone. Alas, Osgood has failed at last. It was easy to see that he was on the very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to hope--but not expect that he would pull through. The Library of Humor is at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it. To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure, perhaps you had better send down and get it. I told him, the other day, that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for its delivery to you. In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus the Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words. This makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first. He looks mighty well, these latter days. Yrs Ever MARK. “I am exceedingly glad,” wrote Howells, “that you approve of my reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the platform next winter.... but I would never read within a hundred miles of you, if I could help it. You simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: ELMIRA, July 21, 1885. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You are really my only author; I am restricted to you, I wouldn't give a damn for the rest. I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork. I wouldn't read another of those books for a farm. I did try to read one other--Daniel Deronda. I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven't any romance literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books. But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could be improved. I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized. I haven't read Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left; but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud to the family. It is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again! That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death. And as for “The Bostonians,” I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that. Yrs Ever MARK It is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians. He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms. It is interesting to note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: “What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes..... Did you ever read De Foe's 'Roxana'? If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in.” General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak. Clemens visited him at Mt. McGregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year. This was some time in July. On the 23d of that month General Grant died. Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie. Mark Twain's contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here. ***** To the New York “Sun,” on the proper place for Grant's Tomb: To THE EDITOR OP' THE SUN:--SIR,--The newspaper atmosphere is charged with objections to New York as a place of sepulchre for General Grant, and the objectors are strenuous that Washington is the right place. They offer good reasons--good temporary reasons--for both of these positions. But it seems to me that temporary reasons are not mete for the occasion. We need to consider posterity rather than our own generation. We should select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will still be in the right place 500 years from now. How does Washington promise as to that? You have only to hit it in one place to kill it. Some day the west will be numerically strong enough to move the seat of government; her past attempts are a fair warning that when the day comes she will do it. Then the city of Washington will lose its consequence and pass out of the public view and public talk. It is quite within the possibilities that, a century hence, people would wonder and say, “How did your predecessors come to bury their great dead in this deserted place?” But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last. I cannot but think she has been well and wisely chosen as the guardian of a grave which is destined to become almost the most conspicuous in the world's history. Twenty centuries from now New York will still be New York, still a vast city, and the most notable object in it will still be the tomb and monument of General Grant. I observe that the common and strongest objection to New York is that she is not “national ground.” Let us give ourselves no uneasiness about that. Wherever General Grant's body lies, that is national ground. S. L. CLEMENS. ELMIRA, July 27. The letter that follows is very long, but it seems too important and too interesting to be omitted in any part. General Grant's early indulgence in liquors had long been a matter of wide, though not very definite, knowledge. Every one had heard how Lincoln, on being told that Grant drank, remarked something to the effect that he would like to know what kind of whisky Grant used so that he might get some of it for his other generals. Henry Ward Beecher, selected to deliver a eulogy on the dead soldier, and doubtless wishing neither to ignore the matter nor to make too much of it, naturally turned for information to the publisher of Grant's own memoirs, hoping from an advance copy to obtain light. ***** To Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn: ELMIRA, N. Y. Sept. 11, '85. MY DEAR MR. BEECHER,--My nephew Webster is in Europe making contracts for the Memoirs. Before he sailed he came to me with a writing, directed to the printers and binders, to this effect: “Honor no order for a sight or copy of the Memoirs while I am absent, even though it be signed by Mr. Clemens himself.” I gave my permission. There were weighty reasons why I should not only give my permission, but hold it a matter of honor to not dissolve the order or modify it at any time. So I did all of that--said the order should stand undisturbed to the end. If a principal could dissolve his promise as innocently as he can dissolve his written order unguarded by his promise, I would send you a copy of the Memoirs instantly. I did not foresee you, or I would have made an exception. ........................... My idea gained from army men, is that the drunkenness (and sometimes pretty reckless spreeing, nights,) ceased before he came East to be Lt. General. (Refer especially to Gen. Wm. B. Franklin--[If you could see Franklin and talk with him--then he would unbosom,]) It was while Grant was still in the West that Mr. Lincoln said he wished he could find out what brand of whisky that fellow used, so he could furnish it to some of the other generals. Franklin saw Grant tumble from his horse drunk, while reviewing troops in New Orleans. The fall gave him a good deal of a hurt. He was then on the point of leaving for the Chattanooga region. I naturally put “that and that together” when I read Gen. O. O. Howards's article in the Christian Union, three or four weeks ago--where he mentions that the new General arrived lame from a recent accident. (See that article.) And why not write Howard? Franklin spoke positively of the frequent spreeing. In camp--in time of war. ......................... Captain Grant was frequently threatened by the Commandant of his Oregon post with a report to the War Department of his conduct unless he modified his intemperance. The report would mean dismissal from the service. At last the report had to be made out; and then, so greatly was the captain beloved, that he was privately informed, and was thus enabled to rush his resignation to Washington ahead of the report. Did the report go, nevertheless? I don't know. If it did, it is in the War Department now, possibly, and seeable. I got all this from a regular army man, but I can't name him to save me. The only time General Grant ever mentioned liquor to me was about last April or possibly May. He said: “If I could only build up my strength! The doctors urge whisky and champagne; but I can't take them; I can't abide the taste of any kind of liquor.” Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense? Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others and likewise himself that he hadn't even ever had any taste for it? It sounded like the latter, but that's no evidence. He told me in the fall of '84 that there was something the matter with his throat, and that at the suggestion of his physicians he had reduced his smoking to one cigar a day. Then he added, in a casual fashion, that he didn't care for that one, and seldom smoked it. I could understand that feeling. He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination--the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk. It's the perfect way and the only true way (I speak from experience.) How I do hate those enemies of the human race who go around enslaving God's free people with pledges--to quit drinking instead of to quit wanting to drink. But Sherman and Van Vliet know everything concerning Grant; and if you tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify. Regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they make their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a frankness and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and stupefying. West Point seems to teach them that, among other priceless things not to be got in any other college in this world. If we talked about our guild-mates as I have heard Sherman, Grant, Van Vliet and others talk about theirs--mates with whom they were on the best possible terms--we could never expect them to speak to us again. ....................... I am reminded, now, of another matter. The day of the funeral I sat an hour over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman and Senator Sherman; and among other things Gen. Sherman said, with impatient scorn: “The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories! Why Grant was full of humor, and full of the appreciation of it. I have sat with him by the hour listening to Jim Nye's yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye's histories, Clemens. It makes me sick--that newspaper nonsense. Grant was no namby-pamby fool, he was a man--all over--rounded and complete.” I wish I had thought of it! I would have said to General Grant: “Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs--and the repentance and reform. Trust the people.” But I will wager there is not a hint in the book. He was sore, there. As much of the book as I have read gives no hint, as far as I recollect. The sick-room brought out the points of Gen. Grant's character--some of them particularly, to wit: His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, “Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not--and, he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying;” Fred Grant was right--he did fulfill it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-and, in no contradiction of this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers and general ruck sent to him by Tom, Dick and Harry from everywhere--a pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention--he was the most lovable great child in the world; (I mentioned his loyalty: you remember Harrison, the colored body-servant? the whole family hated him, but that did not make any difference, the General always stood at his back, wouldn't allow him to be scolded; always excused his failures and deficiencies with the one unvarying formula, “We are responsible for these things in his race--it is not fair to visit our fault upon them--let him alone;” so they did let him alone, under compulsion, until the great heart that was his shield was taken away; then--well they simply couldn't stand him, and so they were excusable for determining to discharge him--a thing which they mortally hated to do, and by lucky accident were saved from the necessity of doing;) his toughness as a bargainer when doing business for other people or for his country (witness his “terms” at Donelson, Vicksburg, etc.; Fred Grant told me his father wound up an estate for the widow and orphans of a friend in St. Louis--it took several years; at the end every complication had been straightened out, and the property put upon a prosperous basis; great sums had passed through his hands, and when he handed over the papers there were vouchers to show what had been done with every penny) and his trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing business for himself (at that same time he was paying out money in driblets to a man who was running his farm for him--and in his first Presidency he paid every one of those driblets again (total, $3,000 F. said,) for he hadn't a scrap of paper to show that he had ever paid them before; in his dealings with me he would not listen to terms which would place my money at risk and leave him protected--the thought plainly gave him pain, and he put it from him, waved it off with his hands, as one does accounts of crushings and mutilations--wouldn't listen, changed the subject;) and his fortitude! He was under, sentence of death last spring; he sat thinking, musing, several days--nobody knows what about; then he pulled himself together and set to work to finish that book, a colossal task for a dying man. Presently his hand gave out; fate seemed to have got him checkmated. Dictation was suggested. No, he never could do that; had never tried it; too old to learn, now. By and by--if he could only do Appomattox-well. So he sent for a stenographer, and dictated 9,000 words at a single sitting!--never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never repeating--and in the written-out copy he made hardly a correction. He dictated again, every two or three days--the intervals were intervals of exhaustion and slow recuperation--and at last he was able to tell me that he had written more matter than could be got into the book. I then enlarged the book--had to. Then he lost his voice. He was not quite done yet, however:--there was no end of little plums and spices to be stuck in, here and there; and this work he patiently continued, a few lines a day, with pad and pencil, till far into July, at Mt. McGregor. One day he put his pencil aside, and said he was done--there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. Well, I've written all this, and it doesn't seem to amount to anything. But I do want to help, if I only could. I will enclose some scraps from my Autobiography--scraps about General Grant--they may be of some trifle of use, and they may not--they at least verify known traits of his character. My Autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction and rotten grammar. It is the only dictating I ever did, and it was most troublesome and awkward work. You may return it to Hartford. Sincerely Yours S. L. CLEMENS. The old long-deferred Library of Humor came up again for discussion, when in the fall of 1885 Howells associated himself with Harper & Brothers. Howells's contract provided that his name was not to appear on any book not published by the Harper firm. He wrote, therefore, offering to sell out his interest in the enterprise for two thousand dollars, in addition to the five hundred which he had already received--an amount considered to be less than he was to have received as joint author and compiler. Mark Twain's answer pretty fully covers the details of this undertaking. ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HARTFORD, Oct. 18, 1885. Private. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I reckon it would ruin the book that is, make it necessary to pigeon-hole it and leave it unpublished. I couldn't publish it without a very responsible name to support my own on the title page, because it has so much of my own matter in it. I bought Osgood's rights for $3,000 cash, I have paid Clark $800 and owe him $700 more, which must of course be paid whether I publish or not. Yet I fully recognize that I have no sort of moral right to let that ancient and procrastinated contract hamper you in any way, and I most certainly won't. So, it is my decision,--after thinking over and rejecting the idea of trying to buy permission of the Harpers for $2,500 to use your name, (a proposition which they would hate to refuse to a man in a perplexed position, and yet would naturally have to refuse it,) to pigeon-hole the “Library”: not destroy it, but merely pigeon-hole it and wait a few years and see what new notion Providence will take concerning it. He will not desert us now, after putting in four licks to our one on this book all this time. It really seems in a sense discourteous not to call it “Providence's Library of Humor.” Now that deal is all settled, the next question is, do you need and must you require that $2,000 now? Since last March, you know, I am carrying a mighty load, solitary and alone--General Grant's book--and must carry it till the first volume is 30 days old (Jan. 1st) before the relief money will begin to flow in. From now till the first of January every dollar is as valuable to me as it could be to a famishing tramp. If you can wait till then--I mean without discomfort, without inconvenience--it will be a large accommodation to me; but I will not allow you to do this favor if it will discommode you. So, speak right out, frankly, and if you need the money I will go out on the highway and get it, using violence, if necessary. Mind, I am not in financial difficulties, and am not going to be. I am merely a starving beggar standing outside the door of plenty--obstructed by a Yale time-lock which is set for Jan. 1st. I can stand it, and stand it perfectly well; but the days do seem to fool along considerable slower than they used to. I am mighty glad you are with the Harpers. I have noticed that good men in their employ go there to stay. Yours ever, MARK. In the next letter we begin to get some idea of the size of Mark Twain's first publishing venture, and a brief summary of results may not be out of place here. The Grant Life was issued in two volumes. In the early months of the year when the agents' canvass was just beginning, Mark Twain, with what seems now almost clairvoyant vision, prophesied a sale of three hundred thousand sets. The actual sales ran somewhat more than this number. On February 27, 1886, Charles L. Webster & Co. paid to Mrs. Grant the largest single royalty check in the history of book-publishing. The amount of it was two hundred thousand dollars. Subsequent checks increased the aggregate return to considerably more than double this figure. In a memorandum made by Clemens in the midst of the canvass he wrote. “During 100 consecutive days the sales (i. e., subscriptions) of General Grant's book averaged 3,000 sets (6,000 single volumes) per day: Roughly stated, Mrs. Grant's income during all that time was $5,000 a day.” ***** To W. D. Howells, in Boston: HOTEL NORMANDIE NEW YORK, Dec. 2, '85. MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I told Webster, this afternoon, to send you that $2,000; but he is in such a rush, these first days of publication, that he may possibly forget it; so I write lest I forget it too. Remind me, if he should forget. When I postponed you lately, I did it because I thought I should be cramped for money until January, but that has turned out to be an error, so I hasten to cut short the postponement. I judge by the newspapers that you are in Auburndale, but I don't know it officially. I've got the first volume launched safely; consequently, half of the suspense is over, and I am that much nearer the goal. We've bound and shipped 200,000 books; and by the 10th shall finish and ship the remaining 125,000 of the first edition. I got nervous and came down to help hump-up the binderies; and I mean to stay here pretty much all the time till the first days of March, when the second volume will issue. Shan't have so much trouble, this time, though, if we get to press pretty soon, because we can get more binderies then than are to be had in front of the holidays. One lives and learns. I find it takes 7 binderies four months to bind 325,000 books. This is a good book to publish. I heard a canvasser say, yesterday, that while delivering eleven books he took 7 new subscriptions. But we shall be in a hell of a fix if that goes on--it will “ball up” the binderies again. Yrs ever MARK. November 30th that year was Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday, an event noticed by the newspapers generally, and especially observed by many of his friends. Warner, Stockton and many others sent letters; Andrew Lang contributed a fine poem; also Oliver Wendell. Holmes --the latter by special request of Miss Gilder--for the Critic. These attentions came as a sort of crowning happiness at the end of a golden year. At no time in his life were Mark Twain's fortunes and prospects brighter; he had a beautiful family and a perfect home. Also, he had great prosperity. The reading-tour with Cable had been a fine success. His latest book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, had added largely to his fame and income. The publication of the Grant Memoirs had been a dazzling triumph. Mark Twain had become recognized, not only as America's most distinguished author, but as its most envied publisher. And now, with his fiftieth birthday, had come this laurel from Holmes, last of the Brahmins, to add a touch of glory to all the rest. We feel his exaltation in his note of acknowledgment. ***** To Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Boston: DEAR MR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. And then the family: If I can convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by; and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. I knew what that poem would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise should come. Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. With reverence and affection, Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Holmes wrote with his own hand: “Did Miss Gilder tell you I had twenty-three letters spread out for answer when her suggestion came about your anniversary? I stopped my correspondence and made my letters wait until the lines were done.” 
28791	----	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 28791-h.htm or 28791-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h/28791-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28791/28791-h.zip) A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER by HAMLIN GARLAND * * * * * [Illustration] January twenty-second. Dear Mrs. LeCron: In the spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that I might not come back. With this in mind, I began to dictate the story of my career up to that time. It was put in the third person but it was my story and the story of my people, the Garlands and the McClintocks. This manuscript, crude and hasty as it was, became the basis of A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER. It was the beginning of a four-volume autobiography which it has taken me fifteen years to write. As a typical mid-west settler I felt that the history of my family would be, in a sense, the chronicle of the era of settlement lying between 1840 and 1914. I designedly kept it intimate and personal, the joys and sorrows of a group of migrating families. Of the four books, Volume One, THE TRAIL MAKERS, is based upon my memory of the talk around a pioneer fireside. The other three volumes are as true as my own memory can make them. Hamlin Garland * * * * * A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER by HAMLIN GARLAND [Illustration] Grosset & Dunlap Publishers by arrangement with The MacMillan Company Printed in the United States of America Copyright, 1914 And 1917 by P. F. Collier & Son Copyright, 1917 by Hamlin Garland Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927, February, 1928. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. HOME FROM THE WAR 1 II. THE MCCLINTOCKS 14 III. THE HOME IN THE COULEE 27 IV. FATHER SELLS THE FARM 42 V. THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 50 VI. DAVID AND HIS VIOLIN 59 VII. WINNESHEIK "WOODS AND PRAIRIE LANDS" 68 VIII. WE MOVE AGAIN 79 IX. OUR FIRST WINTER ON THE PRAIRIE 85 X. THE HOMESTEAD ON THE KNOLL 99 XI. SCHOOL LIFE 107 XII. CHORES AND ALMANACS 116 XIII. BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE 125 XIV. WHEAT AND THE HARVEST 144 XV. HARRIET GOES AWAY 161 XVI. WE MOVE TO TOWN 173 XVII. A TASTE OF VILLAGE LIFE 189 XVIII. BACK TO THE FARM 204 XIX. END OF SCHOOL DAYS 221 XX. THE LAND OF THE DAKOTAS 234 XXI. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT 248 XXII. WE DISCOVER NEW ENGLAND 267 XXIII. COASTING DOWN MT. WASHINGTON 279 XXIV. TRAMPING, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, AND CHICAGO 287 XXV. THE LAND OF THE STRADDLE-BUG 301 XXVI. ON TO BOSTON 318 XXVII. ENTER A FRIEND 333 XXVIII. A VISIT TO THE WEST 353 XXIX. I JOIN THE ANTI-POVERTY BRIGADE 375 XXX. MY MOTHER IS STRICKEN 396 XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS 410 XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 421 XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL 433 XXXIV. WE GO TO CALIFORNIA 440 XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY 455 A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER [Illustration] A Son of the Middle Border CHAPTER I Home from the War All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the cottage in which my mother was living alone--my father was in the war. As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague obscurity--and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror. It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank, Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green, our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we are all sitting around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we all wait in breathless suspense for her first word. "A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's Richard now!" We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as turn his head toward the house. Trembling with excitement she hurries little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist.... We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home,--but so it was. His knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose top a cat was dreaming, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands. He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, so hollow-eyed, so changed was he. "Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked. His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am," he answered. Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him. "Come here, my little man," my father said.--"_My little man!_" Across the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home from the war?" "My little man!" How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had forgotten him--the baby had never known him. Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach, like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come to his poor old pap home from the war." The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by." The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he exulted. Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired, aching bones, and there I joined him. "Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've dreamed about a million times." Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for "hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee." That was a mystic hour--and yet how little I can recover of it! The afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask about the crops, the neighbors.--The sunlight passes. Mother leads the way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his arms. He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into my remembrance. He is my father--that I feel ringing through the dim halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and the marches he had made. The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to linger might weary my reader at the outset, although I count myself most fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western settlement. The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of warriors. Aside from the natural distortion of a boy's imagination I am quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate. The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the door-step beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path. Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out. She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls. I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin, stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it lay a marsh filled with monsters, from which the Water People sang night by night. Beyond was a wooded mountain. This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass, and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these! The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."--At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond--only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men--and even there I wished my mother to be within immediate call. My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could not enlist among the first volunteers, though he was deeply moved to do so, till his land was paid for--but at last in 1863 on the very day that he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the roll and went back to his wife, a soldier. I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why. My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots--and besides his name was already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist neighbors--"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls. My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting, nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far away--but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words _Grant_, _Lincoln_, _Sherman_, "_furlough_," "_mustered out_," ring like bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic years. Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war. I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so commingled with later impressions,--experiences which came long after--that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined, but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete. Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my training military, for my father brought back from his two years' campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a soldier. He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children. I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of punishment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us, for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of marches and battles, or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it. His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster, and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there, and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could describe some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York," thrilled us--filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful. But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike." He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us (sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battlefields of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any criticism of them. Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best to have him picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held delightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians. He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and "running the rapids." He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they encountered in the village. It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for driving the Garlands out of town--then up rose old Hugh McClintock, big and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame on ye!" And such was the power of his mighty arm and such the menace of his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the new comers into the wilderness. Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village, and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands until he was well. "And that's the way the McClintocks and the Garlands first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee to Monticello I never knew." I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beautiful as the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not, for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness. In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with him the odor of the pine forest and exhibited the skill and training of a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father, who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The lumberman's life at that time was rough but not vicious, for the men were nearly all of native American stock, and my father was none the worse for his winters in camp. His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau, and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in summer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the Pilot." As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. I remember hearing him very forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow." He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his eagle-gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many occasions to note. As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a peculiar measured swinging stride--the stride of Sherman's veterans. As I was born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my early memories of Green's coulee are permeated with the haze of the passing war-cloud. My soldier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and hammered on dishpans in imitation of officers and drummers. Canteens made excellent water-bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape. All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid consciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint of the bitter anguish of her suspense after each great battle. It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a handsome girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype of the time am I able to correct this childish impression. Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their hunters used occasionally to come trailing down across our meadow on their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading point. Sometimes they walked into our house, always without knocking--but then we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor, and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks) and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same matter-of-fact fashion. Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched Frank and me bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work--good!" and we were very proud of the old man's praise. CHAPTER II The McClintocks The members of my mother's family must have been often at our home during my father's military service in the south, but I have no mental pictures of them till after my father's homecoming in '65. Their names were familiar--were, indeed, like bits of old-fashioned song. "Richard" was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah" and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested something alien as well as poetic. They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I had once viewed it from the top of the tall bluff which stood like a warder at the gate of our valley, and when one bright morning my father said, "Belle, get ready, and we'll drive over to Grandad's," we all became greatly excited. In those days people did not "call," they went "visitin'." The women took their knitting and stayed all the afternoon and sometimes all night. No one owned a carriage. Each family journeyed in a heavy farm wagon with the father and mother riding high on the wooden spring seat while the children jounced up and down on the hay in the bottom of the box or clung desperately to the side-boards to keep from being jolted out. In such wise we started on our trip to the McClintocks'. The road ran to the south and east around the base of Sugar Loaf Bluff, thence across a lovely valley and over a high wooded ridge which was so steep that at times we rode above the tree tops. As father stopped the horses to let them rest, we children gazed about us with wondering eyes. Far behind us lay the LaCrosse valley through which a slender river ran, while before us towered wind-worn cliffs of stone. It was an exploring expedition for us. The top of the divide gave a grand view of wooded hills to the northeast, but father did not wait for us to enjoy that. He started the team on the perilous downward road without regard to our wishes, and so we bumped and clattered to the bottom, all joy of the scenery swallowed up in fear of being thrown from the wagon. The roar of a rapid, the gleam of a long curving stream, a sharp turn through a pair of bars, and we found ourselves approaching a low unpainted house which stood on a level bench overlooking a river and its meadows. "There it is. That's Grandad's house," said mother, and peering over her shoulder I perceived a group of people standing about the open door, and heard their shouts of welcome. My father laughed. "Looks as if the whole McClintock clan was on parade," he said. It was Sunday and all my aunts and uncles were in holiday dress and a merry, hearty, handsome group they were. One of the men helped my mother out and another, a roguish young fellow with a pock-marked face, snatched me from the wagon and carried me under his arm to the threshold where a short, gray-haired smiling woman was standing. "Mother, here's another grandson for you," he said as he put me at her feet. She greeted me kindly and led me into the house, in which a huge old man with a shock of perfectly white hair was sitting with a Bible on his knee. He had a rugged face framed in a circle of gray beard and his glance was absent-minded and remote. "Father," said my grandmother, "Belle has come. Here is one of her boys." Closing his book on his glasses to mark the place of his reading he turned to greet my mother who entered at this moment. His way of speech was as strange as his look and for a few moments I studied him with childish intentness. His face was rough-hewn as a rock but it was kindly, and though he soon turned from his guests and resumed his reading no one seemed to resent it. Young as I was I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few moments later drew my attention and the white-haired dreamer fades from this scene. The room swarmed with McClintocks. There was William, a black-bearded, genial, quick-stepping giant who seized me by the collar with one hand and lifted me off the floor as if I were a puppy just to see how much I weighed; and David, a tall young man with handsome dark eyes and a droop at the outer corner of his eyelids which gave him in repose a look of melancholy distinction. He called me and I went to him readily for I loved him at once. His voice pleased me and I could see that my mother loved him too. From his knee I became acquainted with the girls of the family. Rachel, a demure and sweet-faced young woman, and Samantha, the beauty of the family, won my instant admiration, but Deb, as everybody called her, repelled me by her teasing ways. They were all gay as larks and their hearty clamor, so far removed from the quiet gravity of my grandmother Garland's house, pleased me. I had an immediate sense of being perfectly at home. There was an especial reason why this meeting should have been, as it was, a joyous hour. It was, in fact, a family reunion after the war. The dark days of sixty-five were over. The Nation was at peace and its warriors mustered out. True, some of those who had gone "down South" had not returned. Luke and Walter and Hugh were sleeping in The Wilderness, but Frank and Richard were safely at home and father was once more the clarion-voiced and tireless young man he had been when he went away to fight. So they all rejoiced, with only a passing tender word for those whose bodies filled a soldier's nameless grave. There were some boys of about my own age, William's sons, and as they at once led me away down into the grove, I can say little of what went on in the house after that. It must have been still in the warm September weather for we climbed the slender leafy trees and swayed and swung on their tip-tops like bobolinks. Perhaps I did not go so very high after all but I had the feeling of being very close to the sky. The blast of a bugle called us to dinner and we all went scrambling up the bank and into the "front room" like a swarm of hungry shotes responding to the call of the feeder. Aunt Deb, however shooed us out into the kitchen. "You can't stay here," she said. "Mother'll feed you in the kitchen." Grandmother was waiting for us and our places were ready, so what did it matter? We had chicken and mashed potato and nice hot biscuit and honey--just as good as the grown people had and could eat all we wanted without our mothers to bother us. I am quite certain about the honey for I found a bee in one of the cells of my piece of comb, and when I pushed my plate away in dismay grandmother laughed and said, "That is only a little baby bee. You see this is wild honey. William got it out of a tree and didn't have time to pick all the bees out of it." At this point my memories of this day fuse and flow into another visit to the McClintock homestead which must have taken place the next year, for it is my final record of my grandmother. I do not recall a single word that she said, but she again waited on us in the kitchen, beaming upon us with love and understanding. I see her also smiling in the midst of the joyous tumult which her children and grandchildren always produced when they met. She seemed content to listen and to serve. She was the mother of seven sons, each a splendid type of sturdy manhood, and six daughters almost equally gifted in physical beauty. Four of the sons stood over six feet in height and were of unusual strength. All of them--men and women alike--were musicians by inheritance, and I never think of them without hearing the sound of singing or the voice of the violin. Each of them could play some instrument and some of them could play any instrument. David, as you shall learn, was the finest fiddler of them all. Grandad himself was able to play the violin but he no longer did so. "'Tis the Devil's instrument," he said, but I noticed that he always kept time to it. Grandmother had very little learning. She could read and write of course, and she made frequent pathetic attempts to open her Bible or glance at a newspaper--all to little purpose, for her days were filled from dawn to dark with household duties. I know little of her family history. Beyond the fact that she was born in Maryland and had been always on the border, I have little to record. She was in truth overshadowed by the picturesque figure of her husband who was of Scotch-Irish descent and a most singular and interesting character. He was a mystic as well as a minstrel. He was an "Adventist"--that is to say a believer in the Second Coming of Christ, and a constant student of the Bible, especially of those parts which predicted the heavens rolling together as a scroll, and the destruction of the earth. Notwithstanding his lack of education and his rude exterior, he was a man of marked dignity and sobriety of manner. Indeed he was both grave and remote in his intercourse with his neighbors. He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament, particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and passionate lamentations. The poetry of _Isaiah_, The visions of _The Apocalypse_, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection trump--or the fields of amaranth blooming "on the other side of Jordan." As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can see him sitting in his straight-backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune--or chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of _John_ or _Daniel_. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain. My belief is that Grandmother did not fully share her husband's faith in The Second Coming but upon her fell the larger share of the burden of entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing in the fields. I think he loved his wife and children, and yet I never heard him speak an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was just, but he was not tender. With eyes turned inward, with a mind filled with visions of angel messengers with trumpets at their lips announcing "The Day of Wrath," how could he concern himself with the ordinary affairs of human life? Too old to bind grain in the harvest field, he was occasionally intrusted with the task of driving the reaper or the mower--and generally forgot to oil the bearings. His absent-mindedness was a source of laughter among his sons and sons-in-law. I've heard Frank say: "Dad would stop in the midst of a swath to announce the end of the world." He seldom remembered to put on a hat even in the blazing sun of July and his daughters had to keep an eye on him to be sure he had his vest on right-side out. Grandmother was cheerful in the midst of her toil and discomfort, for what other mother had such a family of noble boys and handsome girls? They all loved her, that she knew, and she was perfectly willing to sacrifice her comfort to promote theirs. Occasionally Samantha or Rachel remonstrated with her for working so hard, but she only put their protests aside and sent them back to their callers, for when the McClintock girls were at home, the horses of their suitors tied before the gate would have mounted a small troop of cavalry. It was well that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had little else. I do not suppose she ever knew what it was to have a comfortable well-aired bedroom, even in childbirth. She was practical and a good manager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sad husbandman. Only the splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed and clothed. "What is the use of laying up a store of goods against the early destruction of the world?" he argued. He was bitterly opposed to secret societies, for some reason which I never fully understood, and the only fury I ever knew him to express was directed against these "dens of iniquity." Nearly all his neighbors, like those in our coulee, were native American as their names indicated. The Dudleys, Elwells, and Griswolds came from Connecticut, the McIldowneys and McKinleys from New York and Ohio, the Baileys and Garlands from Maine. Buoyant, vital, confident, these sons of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite in the spirit of sportsmen. They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance and skill, threshing a "bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of the barn-raisings, harvestings and railsplittings of the valley filled my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good reason for my idolatry of David and William. With the hearts of woodsmen and fists of sailors they were precisely the type to appeal to the imagination of a boy. Hunters, athletes, skilled horsemen--everything they did was to me heroic. Frank, smallest of all these sons of Hugh, was not what an observer would call puny. He weighed nearly one hundred and eighty pounds and never met his match except in his brothers. William could outlift him, David could out-run him and outleap him, but he was more agile than either--was indeed a skilled acrobat. His muscles were prodigious. The calves of his legs would not go into his top boots, and I have heard my father say that once when the "tumbling" in the little country "show" seemed not to his liking, Frank sprang over the ropes into the arena and went around the ring in a series of professional flip-flaps, to the unrestrained delight of the spectators. I did not witness this performance, I am sorry to say, but I have seen him do somersaults and turn cart-wheels in the door-yard just from the pure joy of living. He could have been a professional acrobat--and he came near to being a professional ball-player. He was always smiling, but his temper was fickle. Anybody could get a fight out of Frank McClintock at any time, simply by expressing a desire for it. To call him a liar was equivalent to contracting a doctor's bill. He loved hunting, as did all his brothers, but was too excitable to be a highly successful shot--whereas William and David were veritable Leather-stockings in their mastery of the heavy, old-fashioned rifle. David was especially dreaded at the turkey shoots of the county. William was over six feet in height, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, and stood "straight as an Injun." He was one of the most formidable men of the valley--even at fifty as I first recollect him, he walked with a quick lift of his foot like that of a young Chippewa. To me he was a huge gentle black bear, but I firmly believed he could whip any man in the world--even Uncle David--if he wanted to. I never expected to see him fight, for I could not imagine anybody foolish enough to invite his wrath. Such a man did develop, but not until William was over sixty, gray-haired and ill, and even then it took two strong men to engage him fully, and when it was all over (the contest filled but a few seconds), one assailant could not be found, and the other had to call in a doctor to piece him together again. William did not have a mark--his troubles began when he went home to his quaint little old wife. In some strange way she divined that he had been fighting, and soon drew the story from him. "William McClintock," said she severely, "hain't you old enough to keep your temper and not go brawling around like that and at a school meeting too!" William hung his head. "Well, I dunno!--I suppose my dyspepsy has made me kind o' irritable," he said by way of apology. My father was the historian of most of these exploits on the part of his brothers-in-law, for he loved to exalt their physical prowess at the same time that he deplored their lack of enterprise and system. Certain of their traits he understood well. Others he was never able to comprehend, and I am not sure that they ever quite understood themselves. A deep vein of poetry, of sub-conscious celtic sadness, ran through them all. It was associated with their love of music and was wordless. Only hints of this endowment came out now and again, and to the day of his death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and sweetness, sloth and tremendous energy, slovenliness and exaltation which made Hugh McClintock and his sons the jest and the admiration of those who knew them best. Undoubtedly to the Elwells and Dudleys, as to most of their definite, practical, orderly and successful New England neighbors, my uncles were merely a good-natured, easy-going lot of "fiddlers," but to me as I grew old enough to understand them, they became a group of potential poets, bards and dreamers, inarticulate and moody. They fell easily into somber silence. Even Frank, the most boisterous and outspoken of them all, could be thrown into sudden melancholy by a melody, a line of poetry or a beautiful landscape. The reason for this praise of their quality, if the reason needs to be stated, lies in my feeling of definite indebtedness to them. They furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive singer of sad romantic songs. Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly, resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of "push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them both and respected my mother for defending them. To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the McClintocks did not appear particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a natural feature of the landscape, but as the years passed and other and more enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm, became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed. My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha said: "Mother isn't at all well today." David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep her from working?" "You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but she wouldn't." David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their mother's busy feet. Suddenly she appeared at the door, a frightened look on her face. "Why, mother!--what is the matter?" asked her daughter. She pointed to her mouth and shook her head, to indicate that she could not speak. David leaped toward her, but she dropped before he could reach her. Lifting her in his strong arms he laid her on her bed and hastened for the doctor. All in vain! She sank into unconsciousness and died without a word of farewell. She fell like a soldier in the ranks. Having served uncomplainingly up to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep in silent dignity. CHAPTER III The Home in the Coulee Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the Mississippi and on to southern markets. It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers, mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it commanded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining market-place whereto he carried all our grain. In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William, even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun--much less turn hand-springs or tame a wild horse, but we liked him notwithstanding his limitations and were always glad when he came to visit us. Even at this time I recognized the wide differences which separated the McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to the west and in a town helped to emphasize the divergence. All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club, a forum and a commercial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the doubter, the critic, all his life. We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland, never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands. The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root" which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy." She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed. Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection. Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears. Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning. Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain, and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown. Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native American. The first and nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without an amusing story of her doings. She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by force of lung power as well as by a certain painful candor. "Port, you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her habit to apologize to her guests, as they took their seats at her abundant table, "Wal, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat--" expecting of course to have everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which they generally did. But once my father took her completely aback by rising resignedly from the table--"Come, Belle," said he to my mother, "let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog." The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered. "Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with the broom." In spite of her profanity and ignorance she was a good neighbor and in time of trouble no one was readier to relieve any distress in the coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite welcome even at our quilting bees, for her loud voice silenced every other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories.--Yes, I can remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, and that our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color in the room--just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying fall." Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We had few toys except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our garments were mostly home-made. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to town with me, buy the calico for a dress and be wearing it for supper"--but I fear that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that clothing was for her only a sort of uniform,--and yet I will not say this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and bows and arrows. * * * * * Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood. I heard more and more of LaCrosse, and out of the mist filled lower valley the booming roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries and the sea. My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen. This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long stick. Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we joyfully gathered. I remember with especial pleasure the delicious shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow. Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted, something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was a feast. There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake! During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I, with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away. Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the ground, and he put a tine through it. As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster. Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on the farm--and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his square jaws and poisonous fangs. Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with if one kept to the daylight. The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer, although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape. Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die till sundown. Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, which as it went plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him disappear. Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task. We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous. I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do not relive in some degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me. Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the barn. On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on our way to "Colorado." Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of our equipment for a year or two. One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple, and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole. Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very plentiful in our home. My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove. It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the "continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born with a hunger for print. We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows. It must have been a _Farmer's Annual_ or State agricultural report, but it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "_I remember, I remember_," "_The Old Armchair_" and other pieces of a domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair, and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines: I love it, I love it, and who shall dare To chide me for loving the old armchair? I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction. The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible, but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What caused this odor I cannot tell--perhaps it had been used to press flowers or sprigs of sweet fern. Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of _Harper's Weekly_ behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young ones to move." The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house, and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers' exploits--stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be rivermen when we grew up. The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of rival crews. In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life, my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the raftsmen and mill hands. The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in their sides. But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare. The "drivers," so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating up the refuse--all these sights and sounds made a return to school difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little tame in comparison with the life of the booms. We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or eleven, I forget which--I am perfectly certain of the number of buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions. Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable number of sausages--but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once looking at the sun or pausing for breath? However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride made him altogether admirable. Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior, and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a successful doctor, and we talked of the days when I was his slave and humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, who lived in Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small opinion of me. No doubt I _was_ a nuisance. The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles of our feet. If we went out of the road there were sand-burrs and we lost a great deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated those sand-burrs!--However, on these sand barrens many luscious strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious odor, and it sometimes took us a long time to reach home. There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in that silent bivouac of the dead. Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and self-command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying candor of conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat, and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of torment. My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow, bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to accompany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affection for this pet and thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy. One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of yours!--There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are done with him." These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with love and trust,--I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head. I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at last, the teacher observing my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?" And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out, "I'm sick, I want to go home." "You may go," said the teacher kindly. Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way home. No stopping now for burrs!--I ran like one pursued. I shall never forget as long as I live, the pain, the panic, the frenzy of that race against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my side ached, my mouth was dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment, seeing pursuers in every moving object. At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog into the house and shut the door. "What is the matter?" asked my mother. I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me, but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in torrential flow. "Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling--they wouldn't dare to hurt your dog!" This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the torture he was inflicting. It is often said, "How little is required to give a child joy," but men--and women too--sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child pain. CHAPTER IV Father Sells the Farm Green's Coulee was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons went by, became thoroughly dissatisfied with its disadvantages. More and more he resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much of his quarter-section remained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug in the marsh and young oaks to be uprooted from the forest, and he was obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course, when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity for twelve hours' labor did not exist. Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remembered the glorious prairies he had crossed on his exploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired. It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along a steep slope, and he loathed the irregular little patches running up the ravines behind the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to its narrow cage. He loved to talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor, but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came unexpectedly. Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie, peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer intends to make of it a model dairy farm." This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant,--few women are. She was content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neighbors of Green's Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant. To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold. He was eager to push on toward it, confident of the outcome. His spirit was reflected in one of the songs which we children particularly enjoyed hearing our mother sing, a ballad which consisted of a dialogue between a husband and wife on this very subject of emigration. The words as well as its wailing melody still stir me deeply, for they lay hold of my sub-conscious memory--embodying admirably the debate which went on in our home as well as in the homes of other farmers in the valley,--only, alas! our mothers did not prevail. It begins with a statement of unrest on the part of the husband who confesses that he is about to give up his plow and his cart-- Away to Colorado a journey I'll go, For to double my fortune as other men do, _While here I must labor each day in the field And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_. To this the wife replies: Dear husband, I've noticed with a sorrowful heart That you long have neglected your plow and your cart, Your horses, sheep, cattle at random do run, And your new Sunday jacket goes every day on. _Oh, stay on your farm and you'll suffer no loss, For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss._ But the husband insists: Oh, wife, let us go; Oh, don't let us wait; I long to be there, and I long to be great, While you some fair lady and who knows but I May be some rich governor long 'fore I die, _Whilst here I must labor each day in the field, And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield_. But wife shrewdly retorts: Dear husband, remember those lands are so dear They will cost you the labor of many a year. Your horses, sheep, cattle will all be to buy, You will hardly get settled before you must die. Oh, stay on the farm,--etc. The husband then argues that as in that country the lands are all cleared to the plow, and horses and cattle not very dear, they would soon be rich. Indeed, "we will feast on fat venison one-half of the year." Thereupon the wife brings in her final argument: Oh, husband, remember those lands of delight Are surrounded by Indians who murder by night. Your house will be plundered and burnt to the ground While your wife and your children lie mangled around. This fetches the husband up with a round turn: Oh, wife, you've convinced me, I'll argue no more, I never once thought of your dying before. I love my dear children although they are small And you, my dear wife, I love greatest of all. Refrain (both together) We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss. This song was not an especial favorite of my father. Its minor strains and its expressions of womanly doubts and fears were antipathetic to his sanguine, buoyant, self-confident nature. He was inclined to ridicule the conclusions of its last verse and to say that the man was a molly-coddle--or whatever the word of contempt was in those days. As an antidote he usually called for "O'er the hills in legions, boys," which exactly expressed his love of exploration and adventure. This ballad which dates back to the conquest of the Allegheny mountains opens with a fine uplifting note, Cheer up, brothers, as we go O'er the mountains, westward ho, Where herds of deer and buffalo Furnish the fare. and the refrain is at once a bugle call and a vision: Then o'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha! and when my mother's clear voice rose on the notes of that exultant chorus, our hearts responded with a surge of emotion akin to that which sent the followers of Daniel Boone across the Blue Ridge, and lined the trails of Kentucky and Ohio with the canvas-covered wagons of the pioneers. A little farther on in the song came these words, When we've wood and prairie land, Won by our toil, We'll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil! which always produced in my mind the picture of a noble farm-house in a park-like valley, just as the line, "Well have our rifles ready, boys," expressed the boldness and self-reliance of an armed horseman. The significance of this song in the lives of the McClintocks and the Garlands cannot be measured. It was the marching song of my Grandfather's generation and undoubtedly profoundly influenced my father and my uncles in all that they did. It suggested shining mountains, and grassy vales, swarming with bear and elk. It called to green savannahs and endless flowery glades. It voiced as no other song did, the pioneer impulse throbbing deep in my father's blood. That its words will not bear close inspection today takes little from its power. Unquestionably it was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of my pioneering race. Its strains will be found running through this book from first to last, for its pictures continued to allure my father on and on toward "the sunset regions," and its splendid faith carried him through many a dark vale of discontent. Our home was a place of song, notwithstanding the severe toil which was demanded of every hand, for often of an evening, especially in winter time, father took his seat beside the fire, invited us to his knees, and called on mother to sing. These moods were very sweet to us and we usually insisted upon his singing for us. True, he hardly knew one tune from another, but he had a hearty resounding chant which delighted us, and one of the ballads which we especially like to hear him repeat was called _Down the Ohio_. Only one verse survives in my memory: The river is up, the channel is deep, The winds blow high and strong. The flash of the oars, the stroke we keep, As we row the old boat along, Down the O-h-i-o. Mother, on the contrary, was gifted with a voice of great range and sweetness, and from her we always demanded _Nettie Wildwood_, _Lily Dale_, _Lorena_ or some of Root's stirring war songs. We loved her noble, musical tone, and yet we always enjoyed our father's tuneless roar. There was something dramatic and moving in each of his ballads. He made the words mean so much. It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved to sing were sad. _Nellie Wildwood_, _Minnie Minturn_, _Belle Mahone_, _Lily Dale_ were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad. Not one smiling face peered forth from the pages of _The Home Diadem_. Lonely like a withered tree, What is all the world to me? Light and life were all in thee, Sweet Belle Mahone, wailed stalwart David and buxom Deborah, and ready tears moistened my tanned plump cheeks. Perhaps it was partly by way of contrast that the jocund song of _Freedom's Star_ always meant so much to me, but however it came about, I am perfectly certain that it was an immense subconscious force in the life of my father as it had been in the westward marching of the McClintocks. In my own thinking it became at once a vision and a lure. The only humorous songs which my uncles knew were negro ditties, like _Camp Town Racetrack_ and _Jordan am a Hard Road to Trabbel_ but in addition to the sad ballads I have quoted, they joined my mother in _The Pirate's Serenade_, _Erin's Green Shore_, _Bird of the Wilderness_, and the memory of their mellow voices creates a golden dusk between me and that far-off cottage. During the summer of my eighth year, I took a part in haying and harvest, and I have a painful recollection of raking hay after the wagons, for I wore no shoes and the stubble was very sharp. I used to slip my feet along close to the ground, thus bending the stubble away from me before throwing my weight on it, otherwise walking was painful. If I were sent across the field on an errand I always sought out the path left by the broad wheels of the mowing machine and walked therein with a most delicious sense of safety. It cannot be that I was required to work very hard or very steadily, but it seemed to me then, and afterward, as if I had been made one of the regular hands and that I toiled the whole day through. I rode old Josh for the hired man to plow corn, and also guided the lead horse on the old McCormick reaper, my short legs sticking out at right angles from my body, and I carried water to the field. It appears that the blackbirds were very thick that year and threatened, in August, to destroy the corn. They came in gleeful clouds, settling with multitudinous clamor upon the stalks so that it became the duty of Den Green to scare them away by shooting at them, and I was permitted to follow and pick up the dead birds and carry them as "game." There was joy and keen excitement in this warfare. Sometimes when Den fired into a flock, a dozen or more came fluttering down. At other times vast swarms rose at the sound of the gun with a rush of wings which sounded like a distant storm. Once Den let me fire the gun, and I took great pride in this until I came upon several of the shining little creatures bleeding, dying in the grass. Then my heart was troubled and I repented of my cruelty. Mrs. Green put the birds into potpies but my mother would not do so. "I don't believe in such game," she said. "It's bad enough to shoot the poor things without eating them." Once we came upon a huge mountain rattlesnake and Den killed it with a shot of his gun. How we escaped being bitten is a mystery, for we explored every path of the hills and meadows in our bare feet, our trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked blackberries and hazelnuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee and its surrounding hills. CHAPTER V The Last Threshing in the Coulee Life on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations. There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all. In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other work was finished. Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the _bow-ouw, ouw-woo, boo-oo-oom_ of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect. I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in the coulee.--I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle, get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow." All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to hear the rattle of the ponderous separator. Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill" when we heard a far-off faint halloo. "There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square tin lantern and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. "That's Frank's voice." The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we could only stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the teamsters through the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here and there, now lighting up a face, now bringing out the separator which seemed a weary and sullen monster awaiting its den. The men's voices sounded loud in the still night, causing the roused turkeys in the oaks to peer about on their perches, uneasy silhouettes against the sky. We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our beloved uncles, but mother said, "You must go to sleep in order to be up early in the morning," and reluctantly we turned away. Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could hear the squawk of the hens, as father wrung their innocent necks, and the crash of the "sweeps" being unloaded sounded loud and clear and strange. We longed to be out there, but at last the dance of lights and shadows on the plastered wall died away, and we fell into childish dreamless sleep. We were awakened at dawn by the ringing beat of the iron mauls as Frank and David drove the stakes to hold the "power" to the ground. The rattle of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang of steel bars, intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply through the frosty air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the kitchen warned us that our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast forward. Knowing that it was time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action. As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power. Shivering yet entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn we crept out to stand and watch the play. The frost lay white on every surface, the frozen ground rang like iron under the steel-shod feet of the horses, and the breath of the men rose up in little white puffs of steam. Uncle David on the feeder's stand was impatiently awaiting the coming of the fifth team. The pitchers were climbing the stacks like blackbirds, and the straw-stackers were scuffling about the stable door.--Finally, just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red began to unroll along the vast gray dome of sky Uncle Frank, the driver, lifted his voice in a "Chippewa war-whoop." On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. Long drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the world that the McClintocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of laggard hands could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!" and the cylinder began to hum. In those days the machine was either a "J. I. Case" or a "Buffalo Pitts," and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to a "power" staked to the ground, round which they travelled pulling at the ends of long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tremendous. "Tumbling rods" with "knuckle joints" carried the motion to the cylinder, and the driver who stood upon a square platform above the huge, greasy cog-wheels (round which the horses moved) was a grand figure in my eyes. Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank thought it very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand on that small platform all through the long hours of a cold November day, when the cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust and leaves along the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was far pleasanter to sit on the south side of the stack and watch the horses go round. It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song. The three men in command of the machine were set apart as "the threshers."--William and David alternately "fed" or "tended," that is, one of them "fed" the grain into the howling cylinder while the other, oil-can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of the pinions and so kept the machine in good order. The feeder's position was the high place to which all boys aspired, and on this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be able to stand where he stood was the highest honor in the world. It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing day. The wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright blue sky, and the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl the circling zone of cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and the single-trees and pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. The dust flew, the whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get the sheaves to the feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end of the machine, were like warriors, urged to desperate action by battle cries. The stackers wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting for our amusement. The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to the top where the men were stationed, one behind the other, and to have them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laughing to see us emerge from our golden cover. We were especially impressed by the bravery of Ed Green who stood in the midst of the thick dust and flying chaff close to the tail of the stacker. His teeth shone like a negro's out of his dust-blackened face and his shirt was wet with sweat, but he motioned for "more straw" and David, accepting the challenge, signalled for more speed. Frank swung his lash and yelled at the straining horses, the sleepy growl of the cylinder rose to a howl and the wheat came pulsing out at the spout in such a stream that the carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in order to keep the grain from piling up around the measurer.--There was a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil--for each sack weighed ninety pounds. We got tired of wallowing in the straw at last, and went down to help Rover catch the rats which were being uncovered by the pitchers as they reached the stack bottom.--The horses, with their straining, out-stretched necks, the loud and cheery shouts, the whistling of the driver, the roar and hum of the great wheel, the flourishing of the forks, the supple movement of brawny arms, the shouts of the men, all blended with the wild sound of the wind in the creaking branches of the oaks, forming a glorious poem in our unforgetting minds. At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, "Whoa there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip before the eyes of the more spirited of the teams in order to convince them that he really meant "stop." The pitchers stuck their forks upright in the stack and leaped to the ground. Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it seemed to us!-- Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, who was "changing works," stood ready to serve the food as soon as the men were seated.--The table had been lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side. The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could find them, and their attack on the boiled potatoes and chicken should have been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed seeing them eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, followed by two stabbing motions, and it was gone.--Two bites laid a leg of chicken as bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the corner waiting our turn, it seemed that every "smitch" of the dinner was in danger, for the others were not far behind Ed and Dan. At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and we were free to sit at "the second table" and eat, while the men rested outside. David and William, however, generally had a belt to sew or a bent tooth to take out of the "concave." This seemed of grave dignity to us and we respected their self-sacrificing labor. Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, the roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily all the afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night began to fall, and the wind died out. This was the most impressive hour of a marvellous day. Through the falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a solemn roar, rising at intervals to a rattling impatient yell as the cylinder ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, looming dim and gigantic in the half-light. The straw-pile mountain high, the pitchers in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and especially the driver on his power, seemed almost superhuman to my childish eyes. Gray dust covered the handsome face of David, changing it into something both sad and stern, but Frank's cheery voice rang out musically as he called to the weary horses, "Come on, Tom! Hup there, Dan!" The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep circles and they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts of a machine, dull-eyed and covered with sweat. At last William raised the welcome cry, "All done!"--the men threw down their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, soothing voice, "_Whoa_, lads! _Steady_, boys! Whoa, there!" But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they could not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though slowly, on and on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing the ends of the sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was still, the cylinder kept its hum, till David throwing a last sheaf into its open maw, choked it into silence. Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, and the thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and weary down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued than at dinner, washed with greater care, and combed the chaff from their beards. The air was still and cool, and the sky a deep cloudless blue starred with faint fire. Supper though quiet was more dramatic than dinner had been. The table lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the fragrant dishes, the women flying about with steaming platters, all seemed very cheery and very beautiful, and the men who came into the light and warmth of the kitchen with aching muscles and empty stomachs, seemed gentler and finer than at noon. They were nearly all from neighboring farms, and my mother treated even the few hired men like visitors, and the talk was all hearty and good tempered though a little subdued. One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew to milk the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and the youngsters to eat what was left and "do up the dishes." After we had eaten our fill Frank and I also went out to the barn (all wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack of straw), there to listen to David and father chatting as they rubbed their tired horses.--The lantern threw a dim red light on the harness and on the rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows in the corners. I could hear the mice rustling in the straw of the roof, and from the farther end of the dimly-lighted shed came the regular _strim-stram_ of the streams of milk falling into the bottom of a tin pail as the hired hand milked the big roan cow. All this was very momentous to me as I sat on the oat box, shivering in the cold air, listening with all my ears, and when we finally went toward the house, the stars were big and sparkling. The frost had already begun to glisten on the fences and well-curb, and high in the air, dark against the sky, the turkeys were roosting uneasily, as if disturbed by premonitions of approaching Thanksgiving. Rover pattered along by my side on the crisp grass and my brother clung to my hand. How bright and warm it was in the kitchen with mother putting things to rights while father and my uncles leaned their chairs against the wall and talked of the west and of moving. "I can't get away till after New Year's," father said. "But I'm going. I'll never put in another crop on these hills." With speechless content I listened to Uncle William's stories of bears and Indians, and other episodes of frontier life, until at last we were ordered to bed and the glorious day was done. Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years have dropped nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. From this distance I cannot understand how my father brought himself to leave that lovely farm and those good and noble friends. CHAPTER VI David and His Violin Most of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which followed closely on our threshing day, are in my treasure house. Like a canvas by Rembrandt only one side of the figures therein is defined, the other side melts away into shadow--a luminous shadow, through which faint light pulses, luring my wistful gaze on and on, back into the vanished world where the springs of my life lie hidden. It is a raw November evening. Frank and Harriet and I are riding into a strange land in a clattering farm wagon. Father and mother are seated before us on the spring seat. The ground is frozen and the floor of the carriage pounds and jars. We cling to the iron-lined sides of the box to soften the blows. It is growing dark. Before us (in a similar vehicle) my Uncle David is leading the way. I catch momentary glimpses of him outlined against the pale yellow sky. He stands erect, holding the reins of his swiftly-moving horses in his powerful left hand. Occasionally he shouts back to my father, whose chin is buried in a thick buffalo-skin coat. Mother is only a vague mass, a figure wrapped in shawls. The wind is keen, the world gray and cheerless. My sister is close beside me in the straw. Frank is asleep. I am on my knees looking ahead. Suddenly with rush of wind and clatter of hoofs, we enter the gloom of a forest and the road begins to climb. I see the hills on the right. I catch the sound of wheels on a bridge. I am cold. I snuggle down under the robes and the gurgle of ice-bound water is fused with my dreams. I am roused at last by Uncle David's pleasant voice, "Wake up, boys, and pay y'r lodging!" I look out and perceive him standing beside the wheel. I see a house and I hear the sound of Deborah's voice from the warmly-lighted open door. I climb down, heavy with cold and sleep. As I stand there my uncle reaches up his arms to take my mother down. Not knowing that she has a rheumatic elbow, he squeezes her playfully. She gives a sharp scream, and his team starts away on a swift run around the curve of the road toward the gate. Dropping my mother, he dashes across the yard to intercept the runaways. We all stand in silence, watching the flying horses and the wonderful race he is making toward the gate. He runs with magnificent action, his head thrown high. As the team dashes through the gate his outflung left hand catches the end-board of the wagon,--he leaps into the box, and so passes from our sight. We go into the cottage. It is a small building with four rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, but in the sitting room we come upon an open fireplace,--the first I had ever seen, and in the light of it sits Grandfather McClintock, the glory of the flaming logs gilding the edges of his cloud of bushy white hair. He does not rise to greet us, but smiles and calls out, "Come in! Come in! Draw a cheer. Sit ye down." A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind of the gray outside world is forgotten. This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged to a rented farm. Grandad had sold the original homestead on the LaCrosse River, and David who had lately married a charming young Canadian girl, was the head of the family. Deborah, it seems, was also living with him and Frank was there--as a visitor probably. The room in which we sat was small and bare but to me it was very beautiful, because of the fire, and by reason of the merry voices which filled my ears with music. Aunt Rebecca brought to us a handful of crackers and told us that we were to have oyster soup for supper. This gave us great pleasure even in anticipation, for oysters were a delicious treat in those days. "Well, Dick," Grandad began, "so ye're plannin' to go west, air ye?" "Yes, as soon as I get all my grain and hogs marketed I'm going to pull out for my new farm over in Iowa." "Ye'd better stick to the old coulee," warned my grandfather, a touch of sadness in his voice. "Ye'll find none better." My father was disposed to resent this. "That's all very well for the few who have the level land in the middle of the valley," he retorted, "but how about those of us who are crowded against the hills? You should see the farm I have in Winnesheik!! Not a hill on it big enough for a boy to coast on. It's right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie, and I have a spring of water, and a fine grove of trees just where I want them, not where they have to be grubbed out." "But ye belong here," repeated Grandfather. "You were married here, your children were born here. Ye'll find no such friends in the west as you have here in Neshonoc. And Belle will miss the family." My father laughed. "Oh, you'll all come along. Dave has the fever already. Even William is likely to catch it." Old Hugh sighed deeply. "I hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our country,--this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first time I saw it." At this point David came in, and everybody shouted, "Did you stop them?" referring of course to the runaway team. "I did," he replied with a smile. "But how about the oysters. I'm holler as a beech log." The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last Thanksgiving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were! They made up the entire meal,--excepting mince pie which came as a closing sweet. Slowly, one by one, the men drew back and returned to the sitting room, leaving the women to wash up the dishes and put the kitchen to rights. David seized the opportunity to ask my father to tell once again of the trip he had made, of the lands he had seen, and the farm he had purchased, for his young heart was also fired with desire of exploration. The level lands toward the sunset allured him. In his visions the wild meadows were filled with game, and the free lands needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest. He said, "As soon as Dad and Frank are settled on a farm here, I'm going west also. I'm as tired of climbing these hills as you are. I want a place of my own--and besides, from all you say of that wheat country out there, a threshing machine would pay wonderfully well." As the women came in, my father called out, "Come, Belle, sing 'O'er the Hills in Legions Boys!'--Dave get out your fiddle--and tune us all up." David tuned up his fiddle and while he twanged on the strings mother lifted her voice in our fine old marching song. Cheer up, brothers, as we go, O'er the mountains, westward ho-- and we all joined in the jubilant chorus-- Then o'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha!-- My father's face shone with the light of the explorer, the pioneer. The words of this song appealed to him as the finest poetry. It meant all that was fine and hopeful and buoyant in American life, to him--but on my mother's sweet face a wistful expression deepened and in her fine eyes a reflective shadow lay. To her this song meant not so much the acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives. She sang it submissively, not exultantly, and I think the other women were of the same mood though their faces were less expressive to me. To all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation, suffering, loneliness, heart-ache. From this they passed to other of my father's favorite songs, and it is highly significant to note that even in this choice of songs he generally had his way. He was the dominating force. "Sing 'Nellie Wildwood,'" he said, and they sang it.--This power of getting his will respected was due partly to his military training but more to a distinctive trait in him. He was a man of power, of decision, a natural commander of men. They sang "Minnie Minturn" to his request, and the refrain,-- I have heard the angels warning, I have seen the golden shore-- meant much to me. So did the line, But I only hear the drummers As the armies march away. Aunt Deb was also a soul of decision. She called out, "No more of these sad tones," and struck up "The Year of Jubilo," and we all shouted till the walls shook with the exultant words: Ol' massa run--ha-ha! De darkies stay,--ho-ho! It must be now is the kingdom a-comin' In the year of Jubilo. At this point the fire suggested an old English ballad which I loved, and so I piped up, "Mother, sing, 'Pile the Wood on Higher!'" and she complied with pleasure, for this was a song of home, of the unbroken fireside circle. Oh, the winds howl mad outdoors The snow clouds hurry past, The giant trees sway to and fro Beneath the sweeping blast. and we children joined in the chorus: Then we'll gather round the fire And we'll pile the wood on higher, Let the song and jest go round; What care we for the storm, When the fireside is so warm, And pleasure here is found? Never before did this song mean so much to me as at this moment when the winds were actually howling outdoors, and Uncle Frank was in very truth piling the logs higher. It seemed as though my stuffed bosom could not receive anything deeper and finer, but it did, for father was saying, "Well, Dave, now for some _tunes_." This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance tunes, cotillions, hornpipes,--melodies which had passed from fiddler to fiddler until they had become veritable folk-songs,--pieces like "Money Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on, absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing cries, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand. At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as he bent above his instrument his black eyes glowing, his fine head drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world. He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests, voices that pleaded: Oh, let me in, for loud the linn Goes roarin' o'er the moorland craggy. He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle, love a torment. He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, fumbling with the catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were asleep. Beckie, where are you going to put these children?" Aunt Rebecca, a trim little woman with brown eyes, looked at us reflectively, "Well, now, I don't know. I guess we'll have to make a bed for them on the floor." This was done, and for the first time in my life, I slept before an open fire. As I snuggled into my blankets with my face turned to the blaze, the darkness of the night and the denizens of the pineland wilderness to the north had no terrors for me. * * * * * I was awakened in the early light by Uncle David building the fire, and then came my father's call, and the hurly burly of jovial greeting from old and young. The tumult lasted till breakfast was called, and everybody who could find place sat around the table and attacked the venison and potatoes which formed the meal. I do not remember our leave-taking or the ride homeward. I bring to mind only the desolate cold of our own kitchen into which we tramped late in the afternoon, sitting in our wraps until the fire began to roar within its iron cage. Oh, winds of the winter night! Oh, firelight and the shine of tender eyes! How far away you seem tonight! So faint and far, Each dear face shineth as a star. Oh, you by the western sea, and you of the south beyond the reach of Christmas snow, do not your hearts hunger, like mine tonight for that Thanksgiving Day among the trees? For the glance of eyes undimmed of tears, for the hair untouched with gray? It all lies in the unchanging realm of the past--this land of my childhood. Its charm, its strange dominion cannot return save in the poet's reminiscent dream. No money, no railway train can take us back to it. It did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning winds--a union which can never come again to you or me, father, uncle, brother, till the coulee meadows bloom again unscarred of spade or plow. CHAPTER VII Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands" Our last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply engaged on my school work. As it was out of the question for us to attend the village school the elders arranged for a neighborhood school at the home of John Roche, who had an unusually large living room. John is but a shadowy figure in this chronicle but his daughter Indiana, whom we called "Ingie," stands out as the big girl of my class. Books were scarce in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth edition of "Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever deliberately told us a tale--except the hired girls, and their romances were of such dark and gruesome texture that we often went to bed shivering with fear of the dark. Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, I came into possession of two books, one called _Beauty and The Beast_, and the other _Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp_. These volumes mark a distinct epoch in my life. The grace of the lovely Lady as she stood above the cringing Beast gave me my first clear notion of feminine dignity and charm. On the magic Flying Carpet I rose into the wide air of Oriental romance. I attended the building of towered cities and the laying of gorgeous feasts. I carried in my hand the shell from which, at the word of command, the cool clear water gushed. My feet were shod with winged boots, and on my head was the Cap of Invisibility. My body was captive in our snowbound little cabin but my mind ranged the golden palaces of Persia--so much I know. Where the wonder-working romances came from I cannot now tell but I think they were Christmas presents, for Christmas came this year with unusual splendor. The sale of the farm had put into my father's hands a considerable sum of money and I assume that some small part of this went to make our holiday glorious. In one of my stockings was a noble red and blue tin horse with a flowing mane and tail, and in the other was a monkey who could be made to climb a stick. Harriet had a new china doll and Frank a horn and china dog, and all the corners of our stockings were stuffed with nuts and candies. I hope mother got something beside the potatoes and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with delightful humor--an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us. The snow fell deep in January and I have many glorious pictures of the whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay, and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced out of the road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray socks. We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which was my inseparable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord of wood--delivered. I took it to school one day, but Ed Roche abused it, took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds.--Had I been large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's sympathetic ears. I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home." He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern school, the school of self-reliance and resolution. Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migration, and yet in spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's preparation I had no definite premonition of coming change, and when the day of departure actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as though it had all happened without the slightest warning. So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its shelf, the idea of "moving" was pleasantly diverting, but when one raw winter day I saw the faithful clock stuffed with rags and laid on its back in a box, and the chairs and dishes being loaded into a big sleigh, I began to experience something very disturbing and very uncomfortable. "O'er the hills in legions, boys," did not sound so inspiring to me then. "The woods and prairie lands" of Iowa became of less account to me than the little cabin in which I had lived all my short life. Harriet and I wandered around, whining and shivering, our own misery augmented by the worried look on mother's face. It was February, and she very properly resented leaving her home for a long, cold ride into an unknown world, but as a dutiful wife she worked hard and silently in packing away her treasures, and clothing her children for the journey. At last the great sleigh-load of bedding and furniture stood ready at the door, the stove, still warm with cheerful service, was lifted in, and the time for saying good-bye to our coulee home had come. "Forward march!" shouted father and led the way with the big bob-sled, followed by cousin Jim and our little herd of kine, while mother and the children brought up the rear in a "pung" drawn by old Josh, a flea-bit gray.--It is probable that at the moment the master himself was slightly regretful. A couple of hours' march brought us to LaCrosse, the great city whose wonders I had longed to confront. It stood on the bank of a wide river and had all the value of a sea-port to me for in summertime great hoarsely bellowing steamboats came and went from its quay, and all about it rose high wooded hills. Halting there, we overlooked a wide expanse of snow-covered ice in the midst of which a dark, swift, threatening current of open water ran. Across this chasm stretching from one ice-field to another lay a flexible narrow bridge over which my father led the way toward hills of the western shore. There was something especially terrifying in the boiling heave of that black flood, and I shivered with terror as I passed it, having vividly in my mind certain grim stories of men whose teams had broken through and been swept beneath the ice never to reappear. It was a long ride to my mother, for she too was in terror of the ice, but at last the Minnesota bank was reached, La Crescent was passed, and our guide entering a narrow valley began to climb the snowy hills. All that was familiar was put behind; all that was strange and dark, all that was wonderful and unknown, spread out before us, and as we crawled along that slippery, slanting road, it seemed that we were entering on a new and marvellous world. We lodged that night in Hokah, a little town in a deep valley. The tavern stood near a river which flowed over its dam with resounding roar and to its sound I slept. Next day at noon we reached Caledonia, a town high on the snowy prairie. Caledonia! For years that word was a poem in my ear, part of a marvellous and epic march. Actually it consisted of a few frame houses and a grocery store. But no matter. Its name shall ring like a peal of bells in this book. It grew colder as we rose, and that night, the night of the second day, we reached Hesper and entered a long stretch of woods, and at last turned in towards a friendly light shining from a low house beneath a splendid oak. As we drew near my father raised a signal shout, "Hallo-o-o the House!" and a man in a long gray coat came out. "Is that thee, friend Richard?" he called, and my father replied, "Yea, neighbor Barley, here we are!" I do not know how this stranger whose manner of speech was so peculiar, came to be there, but he was and in answer to my question, father replied, "Barley is a Quaker," an answer which explained nothing at that time. Being too sleepy to pursue the matter, or to remark upon anything connected with the exterior, I dumbly followed Harriet into the kitchen which was still in possession of good Mrs. Barley. Having filled our stomachs with warm food mother put us to bed, and when we awoke late the next day the Barleys were gone, our own stove was in its place, and our faithful clock was ticking calmly on the shelf. So far as we knew, mother was again at home and entirely content. This farm, which was situated two miles west of the village of Hesper, immediately won our love. It was a glorious place for boys. Broad-armed white oaks stood about the yard, and to the east and north a deep forest invited to exploration. The house was of logs and for that reason was much more attractive to us than to our mother. It was, I suspect, both dark and cold. I know the roof was poor, for one morning I awoke to find a miniature peak of snow on the floor at my bedside. It was only a rude little frontier cabin, but it was perfectly satisfactory to me. Harriet and I learned much in the way of woodcraft during the months which followed. Night by night the rabbits, in countless numbers printed their tell-tale records in the snow, and quail and partridges nested beneath the down-drooping branches of the red oaks. Squirrels ran from tree to tree and we were soon able to distinguish and name most of the tracks made by the birds and small animals, and we took a never-failing delight in this study of the wild. In most of my excursions my sister was my companion. My brother was too small. All my memories of this farm are of the fiber of poetry. The silence of the snowy aisles of the forest, the whirring flight of partridges, the impudent bark of squirrels, the quavering voices of owls and coons, the music of the winds in the high trees,--all these impressions unite in my mind like parts of a woodland symphony. I soon learned to distinguish the raccoon's mournful call from the quavering cry of the owl, and I joined the hired man in hunting rabbits from under the piles of brush in the clearing. Once or twice some ferocious, larger animal, possibly a panther, hungrily yowled in the impenetrable thickets to the north, but this only lent a still more enthralling interest to the forest. To the east, an hour's walk through the timber, stood the village, built and named by the "Friends" who had a meeting house not far away, and though I saw much of them, I never attended their services. Our closest neighbor was a gruff loud-voiced old Norwegian and from his children (our playmates) we learned many curious facts. All Norwegians, it appeared, ate from wooden plates or wooden bowls. Their food was soup which they called "bean swaagen" and they were all yellow haired and blue-eyed. Harriet and I and one Lars Peterson gave a great deal of time to an attempt to train a yoke of yearling calves to draw our handsled. I call it an attempt, for we hardly got beyond a struggle to overcome the stubborn resentment of the stupid beasts, who very naturally objected to being forced into service before their time. Harriet was ten, I was not quite nine, and Lars was only twelve, hence we spent long hours in yoking and unyoking our unruly span. I believe we did actually haul several loads of firewood to the kitchen door, but at last Buck and Brin "turned the yoke" and broke it, and that ended our teaming. The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to their fellows driving by high overhead. At times their cries halted the flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix indistinguishably with the captive birds. The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on the lakes of the far north. Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Norwegians to assist in clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the granary but this did not prevent them from communicating to our house-maid a virulent case of smallpox. Several days passed before my mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in Wisconsin, and knew its danger. It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be nursed, was in despair when father developed the disease and took to his bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited upon her more punishment than belonged to her, for to add the final touch, in the midst of all her other afflictions she was expecting the birth of another child. I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend, hardly an acquaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy. Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate. Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my bed, realizing with childish, intuitive knowledge that she was passing through a cruel convulsion which could not be softened or put aside. I went to sleep again at last, and when I woke, I had a little sister. Harriet and I having been vaccinated, escaped with what was called the "verylide" but father was ill for several weeks. Fortunately he was spared, as we all were, the "pitting" which usually follows this dreaded disease, and in a week or two we children had forgotten all about it. Spring was upon us and the world was waiting to be explored. One of the noblest features of this farm was a large spring which boiled forth from the limestone rock about eighty rods north of the house, and this was a wonder-spot to us. There was something magical in this never-failing fountain, and we loved to play beside its waters. One of our delightful tasks was riding the horses to water at this spring, and I took many lessons in horsemanship on these trips. As the seeding time came on, enormous flocks of pigeons, in clouds which almost filled the sky, made it necessary for some one to sentinel the new-sown grain, and although I was but nine years of age, my father put a double-barrelled shotgun into my hands, and sent me out to defend the fields. This commission filled me with the spirit of the soldier. Proudly walking my rounds I menaced the flocks as they circled warily over my head, taking shot at them now and again as they came near enough, feeling as duty bound and as martial as any Roman sentry standing guard over a city. Up to this time I had not been allowed to carry arms, although I had been the companion of Den Green and Ellis Usher on their hunting expeditions in the coulee--now with entire discretion over my weapon, I loaded it, capped it and fired it, marching with sedate and manly tread, while little Frank at my heels, served as subordinate in his turn. The pigeons passed after a few days, but my warlike duties continued, for the ground-squirrels, called "gophers" by the settlers, were almost as destructive of the seed corn as the pigeons had been of the wheat. Day after day I patrolled the edge of the field listening to the saucy whistle of the striped little rascals, tracking them to their burrows and shooting them as they lifted their heads above the ground. I had moments of being sorry for them, but the sight of one digging up the seed, silenced my complaining conscience and I continued to slay. The school-house of this district stood out upon the prairie to the west a mile distant, and during May we trudged our way over a pleasant road, each carrying a small tin pail filled with luncheon. Here I came in contact with the Norwegian boys from the colony to the north, and a bitter feud arose (or existed) between the "Yankees," as they called us, and "the Norskies," as we called them. Often when we met on the road, showers of sticks and stones filled the air, and our hearts burned with the heat of savage conflict. War usually broke out at the moment of parting. Often after a fairly amicable half-mile together we suddenly split into hostile ranks, and warred with true tribal frenzy as long as we could find a stone or a clod to serve as missile. I had no personal animosity in this, I was merely a Pict willing to destroy my Angle enemies. As I look back upon my life on that woodland farm, it all seems very colorful and sweet. I am re-living days when the warm sun, falling on radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies into flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous grapevines and cherry trees and the delicious nuts which grew in profusion throughout the forest to the north. This forest which seemed endless and was of enchanted solemnity served as our wilderness. We explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it brought, each season for the wealth of its experience, and we welcomed the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle. CHAPTER VIII We Move Again One day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country." "My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in the American wilderness." He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table, he drew from his pocket a case in which he carried a silver fork and spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for him! Every family that we knew at that time used three-tined steel forks and my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend he'd better go somewhere else for his meals." This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was known that many of these landhunting Englishmen carried large sums of gold on their persons. We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy our lovely farm and that father was already half-persuaded. We loved this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak. This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us. The wood and prairie land of Winnesheik County did not satisfy him, although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his vision, the realization of our song. For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we would all move again. If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in it without especial protest. Our life in Burr Oak township that summer was joyous for us children. It seems to have been almost all sunshine and play. As I reflect upon it I relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It appears that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which was remotely edible. We gorged upon May-apples until we were ill, and munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern-roots, leaves, bark, seed-balls,--everything!--not because we were hungry but because we loved to experiment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or in awe of the darkness. It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two--the others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who permitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long days lassoing--or rather snaring--the feet of these horses and subduing them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them all without a serious injury. Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons, and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west, bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border. This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it. Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until in the afternoon of the second day, we came to a meadow so wide that its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's habitation other than the road in which we travelled. The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint. Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffalo" of our song might, at any moment, present themselves,--but they did not, and my father took no account even of the marsh fowl. "Forward march!" he shouted, and on we went. Hour after hour he pushed into the west, the heads of his tired horses hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but her chieftain's voice cheerily urging his team lost nothing of its clarion resolution. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of prairie. This westward march entranced him, I think he would have gladly kept on until the snowy wall of the Rocky Mountains met his eyes, for he was a natural explorer. Sunset came at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother called out sharply, "Wake up, children! Here we are!" Struggling to my feet I looked about me. Nothing could be seen but the dim form of a small house.--On every side the land melted into blackness, silent and without boundary. Driving into the yard, father hastily unloaded one of the wagons and taking mother and Harriet and Jessie drove away to spend the night with Uncle David who had preceded us, as I now learned, and was living on a farm not far away. My brother and I were left to camp as best we could with the hired man. Spreading a rude bed on the floor, he told us to "hop in" and in ten minutes we were all fast asleep. * * * * * The sound of a clattering poker awakened me next morning and when I opened my sleepy eyes and looked out a new world displayed itself before me. The cabin faced a level plain with no tree in sight. A mile away to the west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a half-section of unfenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its lonely spread.--I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely marvelled at it, and while I wandered about the yard, the hired man scorched some cornmeal mush in a skillet and this with some butter and gingerbread, made up my first breakfast in Mitchell County. An hour or two later father and mother and the girls returned and the work of setting up the stove and getting the furniture in place began. In a very short time the experienced clock was voicing its contentment on a new shelf, and the kettle was singing busily on its familiar stove. Once more and for the sixth time since her marriage, Belle Garland adjusted herself to a pioneer environment, comforted no doubt by the knowledge that David and Deborah were near and that her father was coming soon. No doubt she also congratulated herself on the fact that she had not been carried beyond the Missouri River--and that her house was not "surrounded by Indians who murder by night." A few hours later, while my brother and I were on the roof of the house with intent to peer "over the edge of the prairie" something grandly significant happened. Upon a low hill to the west a herd of horses suddenly appeared running swiftly, led by a beautiful sorrel pony with shining white mane. On they came, like a platoon of cavalry rushing down across the open sod which lay before our door. The leader moved with lofty and graceful action, easily out-stretching all his fellows. Forward they swept, their long tails floating in the wind like banners,--on in a great curve as if scenting danger in the smoke of our fire. The thunder of their feet filled me with delight. Surely, next to a herd of buffalo this squadron of wild horses was the most satisfactory evidence of the wilderness into which we had been thrust. Riding as if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared, mounted upon a horse which very evidently was the mate of the leader. He rode magnificently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to overtake and head off the leader.--All to no purpose! The halterless steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion, bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Silently we watched the rider turn and ride slowly homeward. The plain had become our new domain, the horseman our ideal. CHAPTER IX Our First Winter on the Prairie For a few days my brother and I had little to do other than to keep the cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted with the region round about. It burned deep into our memories, this wide, sunny, windy country. The sky so big, and the horizon line so low and so far away, made this new world of the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee.--The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbivora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a few years too late to see them. To the south the sections were nearly all settled upon, for in that direction lay the county town, but to the north and on into Minnesota rolled the unplowed sod, the feeding ground of the cattle, the home of foxes and wolves, and to the west, just beyond the highest ridges, we loved to think the bison might still be seen. The cabin on this rented farm was a mere shanty, a shell of pine boards, which needed re-enforcing to make it habitable and one day my father said, "Well, Hamlin, I guess you'll have to run the plow-team this fall. I must help neighbor Button wall up the house and I can't afford to hire another man." This seemed a fine commission for a lad of ten, and I drove my horses into the field that first morning with a manly pride which added an inch to my stature. I took my initial "round" at a "land" which stretched from one side of the quarter section to the other, in confident mood. I was grown up! But alas! my sense of elation did not last long. To guide a team for a few minutes as an experiment was one thing--to plow all day like a hired hand was another. It was not a chore, it was a job. It meant moving to and fro hour after hour, day after day, with no one to talk to but the horses. It meant trudging eight or nine miles in the forenoon and as many more in the afternoon, with less than an hour off at noon. It meant dragging the heavy implement around the corners, and it meant also many ship-wrecks, for the thick, wet stubble matted with wild buckwheat often rolled up between the coulter and the standard and threw the share completely out of the ground, making it necessary for me to halt the team and jerk the heavy plow backward for a new start. Although strong and active I was rather short, even for a ten-year-old, and to reach the plow handles I was obliged to lift my hands above my shoulders; and so with the guiding lines crossed over my back and my worn straw hat bobbing just above the cross-brace I must have made a comical figure. At any rate nothing like it had been seen in the neighborhood and the people on the road to town looking across the field, laughed and called to me, and neighbor Button said to my father in my hearing, "That chap's too young to run a plow," a judgment which pleased and flattered me greatly. Harriet cheered me by running out occasionally to meet me as I turned the nearest corner, and sometimes Frank consented to go all the way around, chatting breathlessly as he trotted along behind. At other times he was prevailed upon to bring to me a cookie and a glass of milk, a deed which helped to shorten the forenoon. And yet, notwithstanding all these ameliorations, plowing became tedious. The flies were savage, especially in the middle of the day, and the horses, tortured by their lances, drove badly, twisting and turning in their despairing rage. Their tails were continually getting over the lines, and in stopping to kick their tormentors from their bellies they often got astride the traces, and in other ways made trouble for me. Only in the early morning or when the sun sank low at night were they able to move quietly along their ways. The soil was the kind my father had been seeking, a smooth dark sandy loam, which made it possible for a lad to do the work of a man. Often the share would go the entire "round" without striking a root or a pebble as big as a walnut, the steel running steadily with a crisp craunching ripping sound which I rather liked to hear. In truth work would have been quite tolerable had it not been so long drawn out. Ten hours of it even on a fine day made about twice too many for a boy. Meanwhile I cheered myself in every imaginable way. I whistled. I sang. I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks running through the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the lizards unhoused by the share, tormenting them to make them sweat their milky drops (they were curiously repulsive to me), and I measured the little granaries of wheat which the mice and gophers had deposited deep under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt enviously upon the sailing hawk, and on the passing of ducks. The occasional shadowy figure of a prairie wolf made me wish for Uncle David and his rifle. On certain days nothing could cheer me. When the bitter wind blew from the north, and the sky was filled with wild geese racing southward, with swiftly-hurrying clouds, winter seemed about to spring upon me. The horses' tails streamed in the wind. Flurries of snow covered me with clinging flakes, and the mud "gummed" my boots and trouser legs, clogging my steps. At such times I suffered from cold and loneliness--all sense of being a man evaporated. I was just a little boy, longing for the leisure of boyhood. Day after day, through the month of October and deep into November, I followed that team, turning over two acres of stubble each day. I would not believe this without proof, but it is true! At last it grew so cold that in the early morning everything was white with frost and I was obliged to put one hand in my pocket to keep it warm, while holding the plow with the other, but I didn't mind this so much, for it hinted at the close of autumn. I've no doubt facing the wind in this way was excellent discipline, but I didn't think it necessary then and my heart was sometimes bitter and rebellious. The soldier did not intend to be severe. As he had always been an early riser and a busy toiler it seemed perfectly natural and good discipline, that his sons should also plow and husk corn at ten years of age. He often told of beginning life as a "bound boy" at nine, and these stories helped me to perform my own tasks without whining. I feared to voice my weakness. At last there came a morning when by striking my heel upon the ground I convinced my boss that the soil was frozen too deep for the mold-board to break. "All right," he said, "you may lay off this forenoon." Oh, those beautiful hours of respite! With time to play or read I usually read, devouring anything I could lay my hands upon. Newspapers, whether old or new, or pasted on the wall or piled up in the attic,--anything in print was wonderful to me. One enthralling book, borrowed from Neighbor Button, was _The Female Spy_, a Tale of the Rebellion. Another treasure was a story called _Cast Ashore_, but this volume unfortunately was badly torn and fifty pages were missing so that I never knew, and do not know to this day, how those indomitable shipwrecked seamen reached their English homes. I dimly recall that one man carried a pet monkey on his back and that they all lived on "Bustards." Finally the day came when the ground rang like iron under the feet of the horses, and a bitter wind, raw and gusty, swept out of the northwest, bearing gray veils of sleet. Winter had come! Work in the furrow had ended. The plow was brought in, cleaned and greased to prevent its rusting, and while the horses munched their hay in well-earned holiday, father and I helped farmer Button husk the last of his corn. Osman Button, a quaint and interesting man of middle age, was a native of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight and influence. From O. Button I got my first definite notion of Bret Harte's country, and of the long journey which they of the ox team had made in search of Eldorado. His family "mostly boys and girls" was large, yet they all lived in a low limestone house which he had built (he said) to serve as a granary till he should find time to erect a suitable dwelling. In order to make the point dramatic, I will say that he was still living in the "granary" when last I called on him thirty years later! A warm friendship sprang up between him and my father, and he was often at our house but his gaunt and silent wife seldom accompanied him. She was kindly and hospitable, but a great sufferer. She never laughed, and seldom smiled, and so remains a pathetic figure in all my memories of the household. The younger Button children, Eva and Cyrus, became our companions in certain of our activities, but as they were both very sedate and slow of motion, they seldom joined us in our livelier sports. They were both much older than their years. Cyrus at this time was almost as venerable as his father, although his years were, I suppose, about seventeen. Albert and Lavinia, we heard, were much given to dancing and parties. One night as we were all seated around the kerosene lamp my father said, "Well, Belle, I suppose we'll have to take these young ones down to town and fit 'em out for school." These words so calmly uttered filled our minds with visions of new boots, new caps and new books, and though we went obediently to bed we hardly slept, so excited were we, and at breakfast next morning not one of us could think of food. All our desires converged upon the wondrous expedition--our first visit to town. Our only carriage was still the lumber wagon but it had now two spring seats, one for father, mother and Jessie, and one for Harriet, Frank and myself. No one else had anything better, hence we had no sense of being poorly outfitted. We drove away across the frosty prairie toward Osage--moderately comfortable and perfectly happy. Osage was only a little town, a village of perhaps twelve hundred inhabitants, but to me as we drove down its Main Street, it was almost as impressive as LaCrosse had been. Frank clung close to father, and mother led Jessie, leaving Harriet and me to stumble over nail-kegs and dodge whiffle trees what time our eyes absorbed jars of pink and white candy, and sought out boots and buckskin mittens. Whenever Harriet spoke she whispered, and we pointed at each shining object with cautious care.--Oh! the marvellous exotic smells! Odors of salt codfish and spices, calico and kerosene, apples and ginger-snaps mingle in my mind as I write. Each of us soon carried a candy marble in his or her cheek (as a chipmunk carries a nut) and Frank and I stood like sturdy hitching posts whilst the storekeeper with heavy hands screwed cotton-plush caps upon our heads,--but the most exciting moment, the crowning joy of the day, came with the buying of our new boots.--If only father had not insisted on our taking those which were a size too large for us! They were real boots. No one but a Congressman wore "gaiters" in those days. War fashions still dominated the shoe-shops, and high-topped cavalry boots were all but universal. They were kept in boxes under the counter or ranged in rows on a shelf and were of all weights and degrees of fineness. The ones I selected had red tops with a golden moon in the center but my brother's taste ran to blue tops decorated with a golden flag. Oh! that deliciously oily _new_ smell! My heart glowed every time I looked at mine. I was especially pleased because they did _not_ have copper toes. Copper toes belonged to little boys. A youth who had plowed seventy acres of land could not reasonably be expected to dress like a child.--How smooth and delightfully stiff they felt on my feet. Then came our new books, a McGuffey reader, a Mitchell geography, a Ray's arithmetic, and a slate. The books had a delightful new smell also, and there was singular charm in the smooth surface of the unmarked slates. I was eager to carve my name in the frame. At last with our treasures under the seat (so near that we could feel them), with our slates and books in our laps we jolted home, dreaming of school and snow. To wade in the drifts with our fine high-topped boots was now our desire. It is strange but I cannot recall how my mother looked on this trip. Even my father's image is faint and vague (I remember only his keen eagle-gray terrifying eyes), but I can see every acre of that rented farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine. It had a small lean-to on the eastern side and a sitting room and bedroom below. Overhead was a low unplastered chamber in which we children slept. As it grew too cold to use the summer kitchen we cooked, ate and lived in the square room which occupied the entire front of the two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square. As our attic was warmed only by the stove-pipe, we older children of a frosty morning made extremely simple and hurried toilets. On very cold days we hurried down stairs to dress beside the kitchen fire. Our furniture was of the rudest sort. I cannot recall a single piece in our house or in our neighbors' houses that had either beauty or distinction. It was all cheap and worn, for this was the middle border, and nearly all our neighbors had moved as we had done in covered wagons. Farms were new, houses were mere shanties, and money was scarce. "War times" and "war prices" were only just beginning to change. Our clothing was all cheap and ill fitting. The women and children wore home-made "cotton flannel" underclothing for the most part, and the men wore rough, ready-made suits over which they drew brown denim blouses or overalls to keep them clean. Father owned a fine buffalo overcoat (so much of his song's promise was redeemed) and we possessed two buffalo robes for use in our winter sleigh, but mother had only a sad coat and a woolen shawl. How she kept warm I cannot now understand--I think she stayed at home on cold days. All of the boys wore long trousers, and even my eight year old brother looked like a miniature man with his full-length overalls, high-topped boots and real suspenders. As for me I carried a bandanna in my hip pocket and walked with determined masculine stride. My mother, like all her brothers and sisters, was musical and played the violin--or fiddle, as we called it,--and I have many dear remembrances of her playing. _Napoleon's March_, _Money Musk_, _The Devil's Dream_ and half-a-dozen other simple tunes made up her repertoire. It was very crude music of course but it added to the love and admiration in which her children always held her. Also in some way we had fallen heir to a Prince melodeon--one that had belonged to the McClintocks, but only my sister played on that. Once at a dance in neighbor Button's house, mother took the "dare" of the fiddler and with shy smile played _The Fisher's Hornpipe_ or some other simple melody and was mightily cheered at the close of it, a brief performance which she refused to repeat. Afterward she and my father danced and this seemed a very wonderful performance, for to us they were "old"--far past such frolicking, although he was but forty and she thirty-one! At this dance I heard, for the first time, the local professional fiddler, old Daddy Fairbanks, as quaint a character as ever entered fiction, for he was not only butcher and horse doctor but a renowned musician as well. Tall, gaunt and sandy, with enormous nose and sparse projecting teeth, he was to me the most enthralling figure at this dance and his queer "Calls" and his "York State" accent filled us all with delight. "_Ally_ man left," "Chassay _by_ your pardners," "Dozy-do" were some of the phrases he used as he played _Honest John_ and _Haste to the Wedding_. At times he sang his calls in high nasal chant, "_First_ lady lead to the _right_, deedle, deedle dum-dum-- _gent_ foller after--dally-deedle-do-do--_three_ hands round"--and everybody laughed with frank enjoyment of his words and action. It was a joy to watch him "start the set." With fiddle under his chin he took his seat in a big chair on the kitchen table in order to command the floor. "Farm on, farm on!" he called disgustedly. "Lively now!" and then, when all the couples were in position, with one mighty No. 14 boot uplifted, with bow laid to strings he snarled, "Already--GELANG!" and with a thundering crash his foot came down, "Honors TEW your pardners--right and left FOUR!" And the dance was on! I suspect his fiddlin' was not even "middlin'," but he beat time fairly well and kept the dancers somewhere near to rhythm, and so when his ragged old cap went round he often got a handful of quarters for his toil. He always ate two suppers, one at the beginning of the party and another at the end. He had a high respect for the skill of my Uncle David and was grateful to him and other better musicians for their non-interference with his professional engagements. The school-house which was to be the center of our social life stood on the bare prairie about a mile to the southwest and like thousands of other similar buildings in the west, had not a leaf to shade it in summer nor a branch to break the winds of savage winter. "There's been a good deal of talk about setting out a wind-break," neighbor Button explained to us, "but nothing has as yet been done." It was merely a square pine box painted a glaring white on the outside and a desolate drab within; at least drab was the original color, but the benches were mainly so greasy and hacked that original intentions were obscured. It had two doors on the eastern end and three windows on each side. A long square stove (standing on slender legs in a puddle of bricks), a wooden chair, and a rude table in one corner, for the use of the teacher, completed the movable furniture. The walls were roughly plastered and the windows had no curtains. It was a barren temple of the arts even to the residents of Dry Run, and Harriet and I, stealing across the prairie one Sunday morning to look in, came away vaguely depressed. We were fond of school and never missed a day if we could help it, but this neighborhood center seemed small and bleak and poor. With what fear, what excitement we approached the door on that first day, I can only faintly indicate. All the scholars were strange to me except Albert and Cyrus Button, and I was prepared for rough treatment. However, the experience was not so harsh as I had feared. True, Rangely Field did throw me down and wash my face in snow, and Jack Sweet tripped me up once or twice, but I bore these indignities with such grace and could command, and soon made a place for myself among the boys. Burton Babcock was my seat-mate, and at once became my chum. You will hear much of him in this chronicle. He was two years older than I and though pale and slim was unusually swift and strong for his age. He was a silent lad, curiously timid in his classes and not at ease with his teachers. I cannot recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.--They were "the big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or eighteen years old,--and Frances was the special terror of the teacher, a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college. In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions, and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations were quite impossible.--But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed the worse for our colds. There was not much chivalry in the school--quite the contrary, for it was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong enough to do it. Girls were foolish, ridiculous creatures, set apart to be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great joke.--How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to mine. This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter--fortunately, for it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth and love became furtive and hypocritic. The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical, ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile. And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It was our theater. Some of the roughest characters in the neighborhood rose and professed repentance, for a season, even old Barton, the profanest man in the township, experienced a "change of heart." We all enjoyed the singing, and joined most lustily in the tunes. Even little Jessie learned to sing _Heavenly Wings_, _There is a Fountain filled with Blood_, and _Old Hundred_. As I peer back into that crowded little schoolroom, smothering hot and reeking with lamp smoke, and recall the half-lit, familiar faces of the congregation, it all has the quality of a vision, something experienced in another world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of disordered sleep. CHAPTER X The Homestead on the Knoll Spring came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a release from prison, and when at the close of a warm day in March we heard, pulsing down through the golden haze of sunset, the mellow _boom, boom, boom_ of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were told, was the certain sign of spring. Day by day the call of this gay herald of spring was taken up by others until at last the whole horizon was ringing with a sunrise symphony of exultant song. "_Boom, boom, boom!_" called the roosters; "_cutta, cutta, wha-whoop-squaw, squawk!_" answered the hens as they fluttered and danced on the ridges--and mingled with their jocund hymn we heard at last the slender, wistful piping of the prairie lark. With the coming of spring my duties as a teamster returned. My father put me in charge of a harrow, and with old Doll and Queen--quiet and faithful span--I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above my head and around me on the mellowing soil the life of the season, thickened. Aided by my team I was able to study at close range the prairie roosters as they assembled for their parade. They had regular "stamping grounds" on certain ridges, Where the soil was beaten smooth by the pressure of their restless feet. I often passed within a few yards of them.--I can see them now, the cocks leaping and strutting, with trailing wings and down-thrust heads, displaying their bulbous orange-colored neck ornaments while the hens flutter and squawk in silly delight. All the charm and mystery of that prairie world comes back to me, and I ache with an illogical desire to recover it and hold it, and preserve it in some form for my children.--It seems an injustice that they should miss it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life, an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the lake in Central Park. Dragging is even more wearisome than plowing, in some respects, for you have no handles to assist you and your heels sinking deep into the soft loam bring such unwonted strain upon the tendons of your legs that you can scarcely limp home to supper, and it seems that you cannot possibly go on another day,--but you do--at least I did. There was something relentless as the weather in the way my soldier father ruled his sons, and yet he was neither hard-hearted nor unsympathetic. The fact is easily explained. His own boyhood had been task-filled and he saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of his children. Having had little play-time himself, he considered that we were having a very comfortable boyhood. Furthermore the country was new and labor scarce. Every hand and foot must count under such conditions. There are certain ameliorations to child-labor on a farm. Air and sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing, and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes of birds, and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil. There were no pigeons on the prairie but enormous flocks of ducks came sweeping northward, alighting at sunset to feed in the fields of stubble. They came in countless myriads and often when they settled to earth they covered acres of meadow like some prodigious cataract from the sky. When alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of thunder. At times the lines of their cloud-like flocks were so unending that those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in the rear were but dim bands beneath the southern sun.--I tried many times to shoot some of them, but never succeeded, so wary were they. Brant and geese in formal flocks followed and to watch these noble birds pushing their arrowy lines straight into the north always gave me special joy. On fine days they flew high--so high they were but faint lines against the shining clouds. I learned to imitate their cries, and often caused the leaders to turn, to waver in their course as I uttered my resounding call. The sand-hill crane came last of all, loitering north in lonely easeful flight. Often of a warm day, I heard his sovereign cry falling from the azure dome, so high, so far his form could not be seen, so close to the sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic circling sweep. He came after the geese. He was the herald of summer. His brazen, reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with mellow, pulsating earth, springing grass and cloudless glorious May-time skies. As my team moved to and fro over the field, ground sparrows rose in countless thousands, flinging themselves against the sky like grains of wheat from out a sower's hand, and their chatter fell upon me like the voices of fairy sprites, invisible and multitudinous. Long swift narrow flocks of a bird we called "the prairie-pigeon" swooped over the swells on sounding wing, winding so close to the ground, they seemed at times like slender air-borne serpents,--and always the brown lark whistled as if to cheer my lonely task. Back and forth across the wide field I drove, while the sun crawled slowly up the sky. It was tedious work and I was always hungry by nine, and famished at ten. Thereafter the sun appeared to stand still. My chest caved in and my knees trembled with weakness, but when at last the white flag fluttering from a chamber window summoned to the mid-day meal, I started with strength miraculously renewed and called, "_Dinner!_" to the hired hand. Unhitching my team, with eager haste I climbed upon old Queen, and rode at ease toward the barn. Oh, it was good to enter the kitchen, odorous with fresh biscuit and hot coffee! We all ate like dragons, devouring potatoes and salt pork without end, till mother mildly remarked, "Boys, boys! Don't 'founder' yourselves!" From such a meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had half an hour in which to get my courage back,--and besides, there was always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared superhuman to me. I was in awe of him. He kept track of everything, seemed hardly to sleep and never complained of weariness. Long before the nooning was up, (or so it seemed to me) he began to shout: "Time's up, boys. Grab a root!" And so, lame, stiff and sore, with the sinews of my legs shortened, so that my knees were bent like an old man's, I hobbled away to the barn and took charge of my team. Once in the field, I felt better. A subtle change, a mellower charm came over the afternoon earth. The ground was warmer, the sky more genial, the wind more amiable, and before I had finished my second "round" my joints were moderately pliable and my sinews relaxed. Nevertheless the temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore their purple valleys.--The wind whispered in the tall weeds, and sighed in the hazel bushes. The dried blades touching one another in the passing winds, spoke to me, and the gophers, glad of escape from their dark, underground prisons, chirped a cheery greeting. Such respites were strangely sweet. So day by day, as I walked my monotonous round upon the ever mellowing soil, the prairie spring unrolled its beauties before me. I saw the last goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane, and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie hens began to seek seclusion in the swales, and the pocket gopher, busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last the full tide of May covered the world with luscious green. Harriet and Frank returned to school but I was too valuable to be spared. The unbroken land of our new farm demanded the plow and no sooner was the planting on our rented place finished than my father began the work of fencing and breaking the sod of the homestead which lay a mile to the south, glowing like a garden under the summer sun. One day late in May my uncle David (who had taken a farm not far away), drove over with four horses hitched to a big breaking plow and together with my father set to work overturning the primeval sward whereon we were to be "lords of the soil." I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow beneath the remorseless beam, civilization seemed a sad business, and yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in the "breaking" season. Smooth, glossy, almost unwrinkled the thick ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow behind the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making. The land was not all clear prairie and every ounce of David's great strength was required to guide that eighteen-inch plow as it went ripping and snarling through the matted roots of the hazel thickets, and sometimes my father came and sat on the beam in order to hold the coulter to its work, while the giant driver braced himself to the shock and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy scythe.--Later we dug postholes and built fences but each day was spent on the new land. Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy galleons from west to east, the wind was strong but kind, and we worked in a glow of satisfied ownership. Many rattlesnakes ("massasaugas" Mr. Button called them), inhabited the moist spots and father and I killed several as we cleared the ground. Prairie wolves lurked in the groves and swales, but as foot by foot and rod by rod, the steady steel rolled the grass and the hazel brush under, all of these wild things died or hurried away, never to return. Some part of this tragedy I was able even then to understand and regret. At last the wide "quarter section" lay upturned, black to the sun and the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed. It was sad and yet it was not all loss, even to my thinking, for I realized that over this desolation the green wheat would wave and the corn silks shed their pollen. It was not precisely the romantic valley of our song, but it was a rich and promiseful plot and my father seemed entirely content. Meanwhile, on a little rise of ground near the road, neighbor Gammons and John Bowers were building our next home. It did not in the least resemble the foundation of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply excited us all. It was of pine and had the usual three rooms below and a long garret above and as it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down. It was as good as most of the dwellings round about us but it stood naked on the sod, devoid of grace as a dry goods box. Its walls were rough plaster, its floor of white pine, its furniture poor, scanty and worn. There was a little picture on the face of the clock, a chromo on the wall, and a printed portrait of General Grant--nothing more. It was home by reason of my mother's brave and cheery presence, and the prattle of Jessie's clear voice filled it with music. Dear child,--with her it was always spring! CHAPTER XI School Life Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds, granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both carpenter and stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the digging of our well. Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in. Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin' down there?" "Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I guess it's too complicated for me." "Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two--and the big eend out,"--and with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove away. My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light. He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall without a particle of trouble." Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry. The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy. Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire. It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied. This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so, hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial after he had been given up for dead. This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains--the blessed rains--and put an end to my fears. In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat. My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by THE PLAINS with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by THE GREAT WOODS, filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by OSAGE AND CHICAGO; and on the east by HESPER, ONALASKA and BOSTON. A luminous trail ran from Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc--all else was "chaos and black night." For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom large in a lad's horizon. One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed the season with almost perfect contentment had it not been for the fact that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the measurer. Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about. The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had their uses after all. One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray shrouds. Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel--for the remainder of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm. So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning, we thawed holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My own relief was mingled with surprise--surprise to find the landscape so unchanged. True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained unchanged. We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats, and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our hearts. The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind, wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case around the roaring hot stove. Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two miles against these winds. The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which our elders alluded as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no joke. After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind enough to overlook this disorder. The wonder is that any of us lived through that winter, for at recess, no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to play "fox and geese" or "dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study. Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books. With terror as well as delight I rose to read _Lochiel's Warning_, _The Battle of Waterloo_ or _The Roman Captive_. Marco Bozzaris and William Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became imaginatively a page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman in the army of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land. With a high ideal of the way in which these grand selections should be read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them before the class. "STRIKE FOR YOUR ALTARS AND YOUR FIRES. STRIKE FOR THE GREEN GRAVES OF YOUR SIRES--GOD AND YOUR NATIVE LAND," always reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous gasp and I often fell back into my seat in disgrace, the titter of the girls adding to my pain. Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the stony street."--I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Burton was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had suddenly become a blur to him. No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while. Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man, did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did, nevertheless _Thanatopsis_ was there and _The Village Blacksmith_, and extracts from _The Deer Slayer_ and _The Pilot_ gave us a notion that in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside Scott and Dickens. A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack of copies of the _New York Weekly_, a paper filled with stories of noble life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture, designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame, but it doesn't--I rejoice in the memory of it. I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in _Old Sleuth_ and _Jack Harkaway_. My taste was catholic. I ranged from _Lady Gwendolin_ to _Buckskin Bill_ and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871. One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost to me my father was brought to subscribe for _The Hearth and Home_ or some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of everyday life. In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools, protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of the middle border. To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and Daddy Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper, so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover. I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's characters were near neighbors. The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their worthlessness. This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a teacher and writer of fiction. It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls, humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to gather close about the stove. Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like, at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made my teeth ache. Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves, adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and buoyancy of our youthful hearts. CHAPTER XII Chores and Almanacs Our farm-yard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave shelter to the north. In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw-rick, the cattle passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood about humped and shivering--only on sunny days did their arching backs subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to be "tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant wrath. I could not understand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful. One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pumping water for our herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid, and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well, some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his fill--and this had to be done when the thermometer was thirty below, just the same as at any other time. And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her. Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once established, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost helpless. We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to "Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let them in--for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was set right, very quickly, by her superiors. Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for water but this to me was a melancholy winter function, and sometimes as I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the personification of a desolate and abused race. Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber warmed only by the stove-pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not rise by candle-light but I did, not because I was eager to make a record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early rising. I groaned and whined but I rose--and always I found mother in the kitchen before me, putting the kettle on. It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet was hasty--something less than "a lick and a promise." I couldn't (or didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem useless in an attic bedchamber at five in the morning of a December day--I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five A. M. even in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment. Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flapjacks, sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed, watching at the gate of the new day. Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our "revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pancake batter--but she was always there! "What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?"--This is a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun? I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit summer and winter, and that most of our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition. None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all. My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button, Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit, but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I came home from school at half-past four. Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hattie was able to play a few simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John occasionally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open admiration. There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played "Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a book. Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing in the neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most respectful consideration. Jane Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_ brought to us both anguish and delight. _Tempest and Sunshine_ was another discovery. I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for _Ivanhoe_ but I read and re-read it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I borrowed a huge bundle of _The New York Saturday Night_ and _The New York Ledger_ and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric the Saxon." At this time _Godey's Ladies Book_ and _Peterson's Magazine_ were the only high-class periodicals known to us. _The Toledo Blade_ and _The New York Tribune_ were still my father's political advisers and Horace Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind. Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small, badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and "Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery. These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and "Allen's Cherry Pectoral" were most needed to "purify the blood." They were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous mixtures they celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an overworked wife. These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and "Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from _Poor Richard_. Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind, and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or "bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow-cheeked folk were shown "before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the same "complaints." Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely took into account the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of time with these publications and to them a large part of my education is due. It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy, half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. _The Life of P. T. Barnum_, Franklin's _Autobiography_ we owned and they were also wellsprings of joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the Lacedemonians that "hunger is the best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made the most of all that came our way. Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of it are mostly pleasant. Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter, the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells, along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak teacher and his flock. I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting. The schoolroom had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town, for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood and in one of these was a postoffice. That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret for they added the final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove School House." Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the thermometer stood twenty below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams splinter. Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said, "It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was mawkish if not actually improper. Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an important part of our contentment. Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their elders met only at public meetings. Singing, even among the young people was almost entirely confined to hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. _Tell Me the Old Old Story_ did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and _Hold the Fort for I am Coming_ was no longer a signal from Sherman, but a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing _O, Bear Me Away on Your Snowy Wings_, although we had no real desire to be taken "to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for _Minnie Minturn_ and _Nellie Wildwood_,--but his love for Smith's _Grand March_ persisted and my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he explained its meaning. The war was passing into the mellow, reminiscent haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his pursuit of the Sunset was at an end. CHAPTER XIII Boy Life on the Prairie The snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds began to blow, lakes developed with magical swiftness in the fields, and streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or from the wood-pile, for splitting firewood was our first spring task. From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use. Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work, after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time suggestion which vibrated in the _caw-caw_ of the hens as they burrowed in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother helped to pile the finished product. The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had husked the down-row so painfully in November. From the wood-pile I was often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in these excursions. However, my joy in his companionship was not unmixed with bitterness, for I deeply envied him the skates which he wore. They were trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which transfigured their wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all earthly glory. My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages argues a high degree of enthusiasm. Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us, and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home. We held to this sport to the last--till the ice with prodigious booming and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts (which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the greatest trouble in getting them on again. Greasing them with hot tallow was a regular morning job. Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile. Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We start seeding tomorrow." Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough, unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness from their ravaged hills. Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it--a million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion, and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to "lap-half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father could not be fooled. He saw every "balk." As the ground dried off the dust arose from under the teeth of the harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western farmer. One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,--a cloud which darkened the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust, almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away. As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our loss (which was much greater than any of our neighbors) was due to the extra care with which we had pulverized the ground. "If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!" Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Woodring's side of the line fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt, his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that nature was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventy acres of this land had to be resown. Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out experiences like this--they omit the mud and the dust and the grime, they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they stood in crowded malodorous stalls. In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his boot straps once--and regretted it almost instantly.--No, no, it won't do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too well--and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail they are nasty brutes--quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose all their charm--for me. Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste of equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially at the table. Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs, and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard, getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist. Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the cows came in to relieve the monotony of farm-work. Wide tracts of unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free commoners" in the eyes of the law. The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom. Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those that had wintered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of previous servitude. They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Canuck," with a strain of broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how deeply-buried instincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will. Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells, across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf--often from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality. In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an excellent place for boys. As we galloped along together it was easy to imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or buffalo. We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the language and the psychology of kine as well as colts. We watched the big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We possessed perfect understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a perfectly definite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned, truculent three-year-olds all came in for interpretation. Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth, alert and watchful. Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary cause of some ancestral danger. At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment. In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green, hairlike grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats, and other tall forage plants waved in the wind. Along the streams and in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of wide-bladed marsh grass. Almost without realizing it, I came to know the character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to be seen from the back of a horse. Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of the still more glorious unknown wilderness beyond. Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wandered away to the meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams, tiger-lilies and lady slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splendid serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hundred spicy plants rose in the shimmering mid-day air. At such times the mere joy of living filled our young hearts with wordless satisfaction. Nor were the upland ridges less interesting, for huge antlers lying bleached and bare in countless numbers on the slopes told of the herds of elk and bison that had once fed in these splendid savannahs, living and dying in the days when the tall Sioux were the only hunters. The gray hermit, the badger, still clung to his deep den on the rocky unplowed ridges, and on sunny April days the mother fox lay out with her young, on southward-sloping swells. Often we met the prairie wolf or startled him from his sleep in hazel copse, finding in him the spirit of the wilderness. To us it seemed that just over the next long swell toward the sunset the shaggy brown bulls still fed in myriads, and in our hearts was a longing to ride away into the "sunset regions" of our song. All the boys I knew talked of Colorado, never of New England. We dreamed of the plains, of the Black Hills, discussing cattle raising and mining and hunting. "We'll have our rifles ready, boys, ha, ha, ha-ha!" was still our favorite chorus, "Newbrasky" and Wyoming our far-off wonderlands, Buffalo Bill our hero. David, my hunter uncle who lived near us, still retained his long old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, and one day offered it to me, but as I could not hold it at arm's length, I sorrowfully returned it. We owned a shotgun, however, and this I used with all the confidence of a man. I was able to kill a few ducks with it and I also hunted gophers during May when the sprouting corn was in most danger. Later I became quite expert in catching chickens on the wing. On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called "tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses. Against these dark-green masses, breakers of blue-joint radiantly rolled.--To the east some four miles ran the Little Cedar River, and plum trees and crab-apples and haws bloomed along its banks. In June immense crops of strawberries offered from many meadows. Their delicious odor rose to us as we rode our way, tempting us to dismount and gather and eat. Over these uplands, through these thickets of hazel brush, and around these coverts of popple, Burton and I careered, hunting the cows, chasing rabbits, killing rattlesnakes, watching the battles of bulls, racing the half-wild colts and pursuing the prowling wolves. It was an alluring life, and Harriet, who rode with us occasionally, seemed to enjoy it quite as much as any boy. She could ride almost as well as Burton, and we were all expert horse-tamers. We all rode like cavalrymen,--that is to say, while holding the reins in our left hands we guided our horses by the pressure of the strap across the neck, rather than by pulling at the bit. Our ponies were never allowed to trot. We taught them a peculiar gait which we called "the lope," which was an easy canter in front and a trot behind (a very good gait for long distances), and we drilled them to keep this pace steadily and to fall at command into a swift walk without any jolting intervening trot.--We learned to ride like circus performers standing on our saddles, and practised other of the tricks we had seen, and through it all my mother remained unalarmed. To her a boy on a horse was as natural as a babe in the cradle. The chances we took of getting killed were so numerous that she could not afford to worry. Burton continued to be my almost inseparable companion at school and whenever we could get together, and while to others he seemed only a shy, dull boy, to me he was something more. His strength and skill were remarkable and his self-command amazing. Although a lad of instant, white-hot, dangerous temper, he suddenly, at fifteen years of age, took himself in hand in a fashion miraculous to me. He decided (I never knew just why or how)--that he would never again use an obscene or profane word. He kept his vow. I knew him for over thirty years and I never heard him raise his voice in anger or utter a word a woman would have shrunk from,--and yet he became one of the most fearless and indomitable mountaineers I ever knew. This change in him profoundly influenced me and though I said nothing about it, I resolved to do as well. I never quite succeeded, although I discouraged as well as I could the stories which some of the men and boys were so fond of telling, but alas! when the old cow kicked over my pail of milk, I fell from grace and told her just what I thought of her in phrases that Burton would have repressed. Still, I manfully tried to follow his good trail. * * * * * Corn-planting, which followed wheat-seeding, was done by hand, for a year or two, and this was a joyous task.--We "changed works" with neighbor Button, and in return Cyrus and Eva came to help us. Harriet and Eva and I worked side by side, "dropping" the corn, while Cyrus and the hired man followed with the hoes to cover it. Little Frank skittered about, planting with desultory action such pumpkin seeds as he did not eat. The presence of our young friends gave the job something of the nature of a party and we were sorry when it was over. After the planting a fortnight of less strenuous labor came on, a period which had almost the character of a holiday. The wheat needed no cultivation and the corn was not high enough to plow. This was a time for building fence and fixing up things generally. This, too, was the season of the circus. Each year one came along from the east, trailing clouds of glorified dust and filling our minds with the color of romance. From the time the "advance man" flung his highly colored posters over the fence till the coming of the glorious day we thought of little else. It was India and Arabia and the jungle to us. History and the magic and pomp of chivalry mingled in the parade of the morning, and the crowds, the clanging band, the haughty and alien beauty of the women, the gold embroidered housings, the stark majesty of the acrobats subdued us into silent worship. I here pay tribute to the men who brought these marvels to my eyes. To rob me of my memories of the circus would leave me as poor as those to whom life was a drab and hopeless round of toil. It was our brief season of imaginative life. In one day--in a part of one day--we gained a thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature. It was an embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It was a compendium of biologic research but more important still, it brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It gave us something to talk about. We always went home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful--but content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and could remember it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in the field the memory of its splendors went with us like a golden cloud. * * * * * Most of the duties of the farmer's life require the lapse of years to seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of nature's life. As I write I am back in that marvellous time.--The cornfield, dark-green and sweetly cool, is beginning to ripple in the wind with multitudinous stir of shining, swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height, and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings. The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices. The bobolinks sail and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in majesty amidst a roll of thunder. The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing, uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of the sun and the season--and over all, and laving all, moves the slow wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze. At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of our song, and that we were indeed "lords of the soil." I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens just that much heavier. I doubt if the women--any of them--got out into the fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes. Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, they were too tired and too worried to re-act to the beauties of the landscape. I now began to dimly perceive that my mother was not well. Although large and seemingly strong, her increasing weight made her long days of housework a torture. She grew very tired and her sweet face was often knotted with physical pain. She still made most of our garments as well as her own. She tailored father's shirts and underclothing, sewed carpet rags, pieced quilts and made butter for market,--and yet, in the midst of it all, found time to put covers on our baseball, and to do up all our burns and bruises. Being a farmer's wife in those days, meant laboring outside any regulation of the hours of toil. I recall hearing one of the tired house-wives say, "Seems like I never get a day off, not even on Sunday," a protest which my mother thoroughly understood and sympathized with, notwithstanding its seeming inhospitality. No history of this time would be complete without a reference to the doctor. We were a vigorous and on the whole a healthy tribe but accidents sometimes happened and "Go for the doctor!" was the first command when the band-cutter slashed the hand of the thresher or one of the children fell from the hay-rick. One night as I lay buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I heard my mother call me--and something in her voice pierced me, roused me. A poignant note of alarm was in it. "Hamlin," she called, "get up--at once. You must go for the doctor. Your father is very sick. _Hurry!_" I sprang from my bed, dizzy with sleep, yet understanding her appeal. "I hear you, I'm coming," I called down to her as I started to dress. "Call Hattie. I need her too." The rain was pattering on the roof, and as I dressed I had a disturbing vision of the long cold ride which lay before me. I hoped the case was not so bad as mother thought. With limbs still numb and weak I stumbled down the stairs to the sitting room where a faint light shone. Mother met me with white, strained face. "Your father is suffering terribly. Go for the doctor at once." I could hear the sufferer groan even as I moved about the kitchen, putting on my coat and lighting the lantern. It was about one o'clock of the morning, and the wind was cold as I picked my way through the mud to the barn. The thought of the long miles to town made me shiver but as the son of a soldier I could not falter in my duty. In their warm stalls the horses were resting in dreamful doze. Dan and Dick, the big plow team, stood near the door. Jule and Dolly came next. Wild Frank, a fleet but treacherous Morgan, stood fifth and for a moment I considered taking him. He was strong and of wonderful staying powers but so savage and unreliable that I dared not risk an accident. I passed on to bay Kittie whose bright eyes seemed to inquire, "What is the matter?" Flinging the blanket over her and smoothing it carefully, I tossed the light saddle to her back and cinched it tight, so tight that she grunted. "I can't take any chances of a spill," I explained to her, and she accepted the bit willingly. She was always ready for action and fully dependable. Blowing out my lantern I hung it on a peg, led Kit from her stall out into the night, and swung to the saddle. She made off with a spattering rush through the yard, out into the road. It was dark as pitch but I was fully awake now. The dash of the rain in my face had cleared my brain but I trusted to the keener senses of the mare to find the road which showed only in the strips of water which filled the wagon tracks. We made way slowly for a few minutes until my eyes expanded to take in the faint lines of light along the lane. The road at last became a river of ink running between faint gray banks of sward, and my heart rose in confidence. I took on dignity. I was a courier riding through the night to save a city, a messenger on whose courage and skill thousands of lives depended. "Get out o' this!" I shouted to Kit, and she leaped away like a wolf, at a tearing gallop. She knew her rider. We had herded the cattle many days on the prairie, and in races with the wild colts I had tested her speed. Snorting with vigor at every leap she seemed to say, "My heart is brave, my limbs are strong. Call on me." Out of the darkness John Martin's Carlo barked. A half-mile had passed. Old Marsh's fox hound clamored next. Two miles were gone. From here the road ran diagonally across the prairie, a velvet-black band on the dim sod. The ground was firmer but there were swales full of water. Through these Kittie dashed with unhesitating confidence, the water flying from her drumming hooves. Once she went to her knees and almost unseated me, but I regained my saddle and shouted, "Go on, Kit." The fourth mile was in the mud, but the fifth brought us to the village turnpike and the mare was as glad of it as I. Her breath was labored now. She snorted no more in exultation and confident strength. She began to wonder--to doubt, and I, who knew her ways as well as I knew those of a human being, realized that she was beginning to flag. The mud had begun to tell on her. It hurt me to urge her on, but the memory of my mother's agonized face and the sound of my father's groan of pain steeled my heart. I set lash to her side and so kept her to her highest speed. At last a gleam of light! Someone in the village was awake. I passed another lighted window. Then the green and red lamps of the drug store cheered me with their promise of aid, for the doctor lived next door. There too a dim ray shone. Slipping from my weary horse I tied her to the rail and hurried up the walk toward the doctor's bell. I remembered just where the knob rested. Twice I pulled sharply, strongly, putting into it some part of the anxiety and impatience I felt. I could hear its imperative jingle as it died away in the silent house. At last the door opened and the doctor, a big blonde handsome man in a long night gown, confronted me with impassive face. "What is it, my boy?" he asked kindly. As I told him he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a moment. "Your father is suffering sharply, is he?" "Yes, sir. I could hear him groan.--Please hurry." He mused a moment. "He is a soldier. He would not complain of a little thing--I will come." Turning in relief, I ran down the walk and climbed upon my shivering mare. She wheeled sharply, eager to be off on her homeward way. Her spirit was not broken, but she was content to take a slower pace. She seemed to know that our errand was accomplished and that the warm shelter of the stall was to be her reward. Holding her down to a slow trot I turned often to see if I could detect the lights of the doctor's buggy which was a familiar sight on our road. I had heard that he kept one of his teams harnessed ready for calls like this, and I confidently expected him to overtake me. "It's a terrible night to go out, but he said he would come," I repeated as I rode. At last the lights of a carriage, crazily rocking, came into view and pulling Kit to a walk I twisted in my saddle, ready to shout with admiration of the speed of his team. "He's driving the 'Clay-Banks,'" I called in great excitement. The Clay-Banks were famous throughout the county as the doctor's swiftest and wildest team, a span of bronchos whose savage spirits no journey could entirely subdue, a team he did not spare, a team that scorned petting and pity, bony, sinewy, big-headed. They never walked and had little care of mud or snow. They came rushing now with splashing feet and foaming, half-open jaws, the big doctor, calm, iron-handed, masterful, sitting in the swaying top of his light buggy, his feet against the dash board, keeping his furious span in hand as easily as if they were a pair of Shetland ponies. The nigh horse was running, the off horse pacing, and the splatter of their feet, the slash of the wheels and the roaring of their heavy breathing, made my boyish heart leap. I could hardly repress a yell of delight. As I drew aside to let him pass the doctor called out with mellow cheer, "Take your time, boy, take your time!" Before I could even think of an answer, he was gone and I was alone with Kit and the night. My anxiety vanished with him. I had done all that could humanly be done, I had fetched the doctor. Whatever happened I was guiltless. I knew also that in a few minutes a sweet relief would come to my tortured mother, and with full faith and loving confidence in the man of science, I jogged along homeward, wet to the bone but triumphant. CHAPTER XIV Wheat and the Harvest The early seventies were years of swift change on the Middle Border. Day by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was blackened by the plow. Month by month the sweet wild meadows were fenced and pastured and so at last the colts and cows all came into captivity, and our horseback riding ceased, cut short as if by some imperial decree. Lanes of barbed wire replaced the winding wagon trails, our saddles gathered dust in the grain-sheds, and groves of Lombardy poplar and European larch replaced the tow-heads of aspen and hazel through which we had pursued the wolf and fox. I will not say that this produced in me any keen sense of sorrow at the time, for though I missed our horse-herds and the charm of the open spaces, I turned to tamer sports with the resilient adaptability of youth. If I could not ride I could at least play baseball, and the swimming hole in the Little Cedar remained untouched. The coming in of numerous Eastern settlers brought added charm to neighborhood life. Picnics, conventions, Fourth of July celebrations--all intensified our interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie. Our school-house did not change--except for the worse. No one thought of adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard. Sun-smit, bare as a nose it stood at the cross-roads, receiving us through its drab door-way as it had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell" and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the wind-breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the effect of the bleak expanse. My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen" in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury--which is pathetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room became suddenly and happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-arranged the furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure. The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother longed for a real "in-grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring wagon. We got the wagon first. That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment. The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted sitting room with its two chromos of _Wide Awake_ and _Fast Asleep_--its steel engraving of General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner--all these come back to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all things political. It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting into a settled community, that was all. During these years the whole middle border was menaced by bands of horse-thieves operating under a secret well-organized system. Horses disappeared night by night and were never recovered, till at last the farmers, in despair of the local authorities, organized a Horse Thief Protective Association which undertook to pursue and punish the robbers and to pay for such animals as were not returned. Our county had an association of this sort and shortly after we opened our new farm my father became a member. My first knowledge of this fact came when he nailed on our barn-door the white cloth poster which proclaimed in bold black letters a warning and a threat signed by "the Committee."--I was always a little in doubt as to whether the horse-thieves or ourselves were to be protected, for the notice was fair warning to them as well as an assurance to us. Anyhow very few horses were stolen from barns thus protected. The campaign against the thieves gave rise to many stirring stories which lost nothing in my father's telling of them. Jim McCarty was agent for our association and its effectiveness was largely due to his swift and fearless action. We all had a pleasant sense of the mystery of the night riding which went on during this period and no man could pass with a led horse without being under suspicion of being either a thief or a deputy. Then, too, the thieves were supposed to have in every community a spy who gave information as to the best horses, and informed the gang as to the membership of the Protective Society. One of our neighbors fell under suspicion at this time and never got clear of it. I hope we did him no injustice in this for never after could I bring myself to enter his house, and he was clearly ostracized by all the neighbors. * * * * * As I look back over my life on that Iowa farm the song of the reaper fills large place in my mind. We were all worshippers of wheat in those days. The men thought and talked of little else between seeding and harvest, and you will not wonder at this if you have known and bowed down before such abundance as we then enjoyed. Deep as the breast of a man, wide as the sea, heavy-headed, supple-stocked, many-voiced, full of multitudinous, secret, whispered colloquies,--a meeting place of winds and of sunlight,--our fields ran to the world's end. We trembled when the storm lay hard upon the wheat, we exulted as the lilac shadows of noon-day drifted over it! We went out into it at noon when all was still--so still we could hear the pulse of the transforming sap as it crept from cool root to swaying plume. We stood before it at evening when the setting sun flooded it with crimson, the bearded heads lazily swirling under the wings of the wind, the mousing hawk dipping into its green deeps like the eagle into the sea, and our hearts expanded with the beauty and the mystery of it,--and back of all this was the knowledge that its abundance meant a new carriage, an addition to the house or a new suit of clothes. Haying was over, and day by day we boys watched with deepening interest while the hot sun transformed the juices of the soil into those stately stalks. I loved to go out into the fairy forest of it, and lying there, silent in its swaying deeps, hear the wild chickens peep and the wind sing its subtle song over our heads. Day by day I studied the barley as it turned yellow, first at the root and then at the neck (while the middle joints, rank and sappy, retained their blue-green sheen), until at last the lower leaves began to wither and the stems to stiffen in order to uphold the daily increasing weight of the milky berries, and then almost in an hour--lo! the edge of the field became a banded ribbon of green and yellow, languidly waving in and out with every rush of the breeze. Now we got out the reaper, put the sickles in order, and father laid in a store of provisions. Extra hands were hired, and at last, early on a hot July morning, the boss mounted to his seat on the self-rake "McCormick" and drove into the field. Frank rode the lead horse, four stalwart hands and myself took "stations" behind the reaper and the battle was on! Reaping generally came about the 20th of July, the hottest and dryest part of the summer, and was the most pressing work of the year. It demanded early rising for the men, and it meant an all day broiling over the kitchen stove for the women. Stern, incessant toil went on inside and out from dawn till sunset, no matter how the thermometer sizzled. On many days the mercury mounted to ninety-five in the shade, but with wide fields all yellowing at the same moment, no one thought of laying off. A storm might sweep it flat, or if neglected too long, it might "crinkle." Our reaper in 1874 was a new model of the McCormick self-rake,--the Marsh Harvester was not yet in general use. The Woods Dropper, the Seymour and Morgan hand-rake "contraptions" seemed a long way in the past. True the McCormick required four horses to drag it but it was effective. It was hard to believe that anything more cunning would ever come to claim the farmer's money. Weird tales of a machine on which two men rode and bound twelve acres of wheat in ten hours came to us, but we did not potently believe these reports--on the contrary we accepted the self-rake as quite the final word in harvesting machinery and cheerily bent to the binding of sheaves with their own straw in the good old time-honored way. No task save that of "cradling" surpassed in severity "binding on a station." It was a full-grown man's job, but every boy was ambitious to try his hand, and when at fourteen years of age I was promoted from "bundle boy" to be one of the five hands to bind after the reaper, I went to my corner with joy and confidence. For two years I had been serving as binder on the corners, (to keep the grain out of the way of the horses) and I knew my job. I was short and broad-shouldered with large strong hands admirably adapted for this work, and for the first two hours, easily held my own with the rest of the crew, but as the morning wore on and the sun grew hotter, my enthusiasm waned. A painful void developed in my chest. My breakfast had been ample, but no mere stomachful of food could carry a growing boy through five hours of desperate toil. Along about a quarter to ten, I began to scan the field with anxious eye, longing to see Harriet and the promised luncheon basket. Just when it seemed that I could endure the strain no longer she came bearing a jug of cool milk, some cheese and some deliciously fresh fried-cakes. With keen joy I set a couple of tall sheaves together like a tent and flung myself down flat on my back in their shadow to devour my lunch. Tired as I was, my dim eyes apprehended something of the splendor of the shining clouds which rolled like storms of snow through the deep-blue spaces of sky and so, resting silently as a clod I could hear the chirp of the crickets, the buzzing wings of flies and the faint, fairylike tread of smaller unseen insects hurrying their way just beneath my ear in the stubble. Strange green worms, grasshoppers and shining beetles crept over me as I dozed. This delicious, dreamful respite was broken by the far-off approaching purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother--a falling, thrilling, piteous little pipe. Such momentary communion with nature seemed all the sweeter for the work which had preceded it, as well as that which was to follow it. It took resolution to rise and go back to my work, but I did it, sustained by a kind of soldierly pride. At noon we hurried to the house, surrounded the kitchen table and fell upon our boiled beef and potatoes with such ferocity that in fifteen minutes our meal was over. There was no ceremony and very little talking till the hid wolf was appeased. Then came a heavenly half-hour of rest on the cool grass in the shade of the trees, a siesta as luxurious as that of a Spanish monarch--but alas!--this "nooning," as we called it, was always cut short by father's word of sharp command, "Roll out, boys!" and again the big white jugs were filled at the well, the horses, lazy with food, led the way back to the field, and the stern contest began again. All nature at this hour seemed to invite to repose rather than to labor, and as the heat increased I longed with wordless fervor for the green woods of the Cedar River. At times the gentle wind hardly moved the bended heads of the barley, and the hawks hung in the air like trout sleeping in deep pools. The sunlight was a golden, silent, scorching cataract--yet each of us must strain his tired muscles and bend his aching back to the harvest. Supper came at five, another delicious interval--and then at six we all went out again for another hour or two in the cool of the sunset.--However, the pace was more leisurely now for the end of the day was near. I always enjoyed this period, for the shadows lengthening across the stubble, and the fiery sun, veiled by the gray clouds of the west, had wondrous charm. The air began to moisten and grow cool. The voices of the men pulsed powerfully and cheerfully across the narrowing field of unreaped grain, the prairie hens led forth their broods to feed, and at last, father's long-drawn and musical cry, "Turn OUT! All hands TURN OUT!" rang with restful significance through the dusk. Then, slowly, with low-hung heads the freed horses moved toward the barn, walking with lagging steps like weary warriors going into camp. In all the toil of the harvest field, the water jug filled a large place. It was a source of anxiety as well as comfort. To keep it cool, to keep it well filled was a part of my job. No man passed it at the "home corner" of the field. It is a delightful part of my recollections of the harvest. O cool gray jug that touched the lips In kiss that softly closed and clung, No Spanish wine the tippler sips, No port the poet's praise has sung-- Such pure, untainted sweetness yields As cool gray jug in harvest fields. I see it now!--a clover leaf Out-spread upon its sweating side!-- As from the sheltering sheaf I pluck and swing it high, the wide Field glows with noon-day heat, The winds are tangled in the wheat. The swarming crickets blithely cheep, Across the stir of waving grain I see the burnished reaper creep-- The lunch-boy comes, and once again The jug its crystal coolness yields-- O cool gray jug in harvest fields! My father did not believe in serving strong liquor to his men, and seldom treated them to even beer. While not a teetotaler he was strongly opposed to all that intemperance represented. He furnished the best of food, and tea and coffee, but no liquor, and the men respected him for it. The reaping on our farm that year lasted about four weeks. Barley came first, wheat followed, the oats came last of all. No sooner was the final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and "stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began. This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were paid off, only the more responsible ones were retained. The rush, the strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles, four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing green with swiftly-springing weeds. A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bundles, two drivers for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the sheaves from the shock with a three-tined fork and threw them to the man on the load. At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bundles" on the stack, but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of me--not only in my own estimation, but in the eyes of my boy companions to whom I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the stack over the rick. No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neighbor thrash--("changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling which I afterward put into verse-- A lonely task it is to plow! All day the black and shining soil Rolls like a ribbon from the mold-board's Glistening curve. All day the horses toil, Battling with savage flies, and strain Their creaking single-trees. All day The crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain. Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he was promoted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or play cards in the kitchen. Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket. There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate stakes, and huge sudden rewards. All that I had heard or read of Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of pasteboard marvellous. My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think he would forbid them to me, I took a fearsome joy in assuming his bitter opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill, our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in. We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very comfortable." Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother and told her that father had consented to our playing, she looked grave but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play," they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter. Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in my mind. _Prue and I_ and _The Blithedale Romance_ were on an equal footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted beings found only in the East--in splendid cities. They were not folks, they were demigods, men and women living aloof and looking down benignantly on toiling common creatures like us. It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance meet an author, or even hear one lecture--although it was said that they did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they sometimes reached our county town. I am told--I do not know that it is true--that I am one of the names on a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular pack! The crops on our farms in those first years were enormous and prices were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season. Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery lightened the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's dish-washing and cooking did not correspondingly lessen. I fear it increased, for with the widening of the fields came the doubling of the harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework herself--cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain, and I have many recollections of neighbors riding up in the night and calling for her with agitated voices. Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize, the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of course, and Frank and I churned and carried wood and brought water; but even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part of the day, she was required to furnish forth three meals, and to help Frank and Jessie dress for church.--She sang less and less, and the songs we loved were seldom referred to.--If I could only go back for one little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for those grinding days! Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us only at long intervals. He still owned his long-barrelled rifle but it hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west seemed complete. Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by David who came over from Orchard with his machine--the last time as it turned out--and stayed to the end. As I cut bands beside him in the dust and thunder of the cylinder I regained something of my boyish worship of his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he smiled and tore the sheaf apart--thus deepening my love for him. I looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of the machine made of him a chieftain.--The touch of melancholy which even then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm. One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vegetation but always on lands after they had been safeguarded by strips of plowing. On this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irritation and self-confidence I decided to clear away the matted stubble on the same strip though at some distance from the stacks. This seemed safe enough at the time for the wind was blowing gently from the opposite direction. It was a lovely golden day and as I stood watching the friendly flame clearing the ground for me, I was filled with satisfaction. Suddenly I observed that the line of red was moving steadily against the wind and _toward_ the stacks. My satisfaction changed to alarm. The matted weeds furnished a thick bed of fuel, and against the progress of the flame I had nothing to offer. I could only hope that the thinning stubble would permit me to trample it out. I tore at the ground in desperation, hoping to make a bare spot which the flame could not leap. I trampled the fire with my bare feet. I beat at it with my hat. I screamed for help.--Too late I thought of my team and the plow with which I might have drawn a furrow around the stacks. The flame touched the high-piled sheaves. It ran lightly, beautifully up the sides--and as I stood watching it, I thought, "It is all a dream. It can't be true." But it was. In less than twenty minutes the towering piles had melted into four glowing heaps of ashes. Four hundred dollars had gone up in that blaze. Slowly, painfully I hobbled to the plow and drove my team to the house. Although badly burned, my mental suffering was so much greater that I felt only part of it.--Leaving the horses at the well I hobbled into the house to my mother. She, I knew, would sympathize with me and shield me from the just wrath of my father who was away, but was due to return in an hour or two. Mother received me in silence, bandaged my feet and put me to bed where I lay in shame and terror. At last I heard father come in. He questioned, mother's voice replied. He remained ominously silent. She went on quietly but with an eloquence unusual in her. What she said to him I never knew, but when he came up the stairs and stood looking down at me his anger had cooled. He merely asked me how I felt, uncovered my burned feet, examined them, put the sheet back, and went away, without a word either of reproof or consolation. None of us except little Jessie, ever alluded to this tragic matter again; she was accustomed to tell my story as she remembered it,--"an 'nen the moon changed--the fire ran up the stacks and burned 'em all down--" When I think of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show. We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the responsibilities of soldiers into all that we did. While still I was hobbling about, suffering from my wounds my uncles William and Frank McClintock drove over from Neshonoc bringing with them a cloud of strangely-moving revived memories of the hills and woods of our old Wisconsin home. I was peculiarly delighted by this visit, for while the story of my folly was told, it was not dwelt upon. They soon forgot me and fell naturally into discussion of ancient neighbors and far-away events. To me it was like peering back into a dim, dawn-lit world wherein all forms were distorted or wondrously aggrandized. William, big, black-bearded and smiling, had lost little of his romantic appeal. Frank, still the wag, was able to turn hand-springs and somersaults almost as well as ever, and the talk which followed formed an absorbing review of early days in Wisconsin. It brought up and defined many of the events of our life in the coulee, pictures which were becoming a little vague, a little blurred. Al Randal and Ed Green, who were already almost mythical, were spoken of as living creatures and thus the far was brought near. Comparisons between the old and the new methods of seeding and harvest also gave me a sense of change, a perception which troubled me a little, especially as a wistful note had crept into the voices of these giants of the middle border. They all loved the wilderness too well not to be a little saddened by the clearing away of bosky coverts and the drying up of rippling streams. We sent for Uncle David who came over on Sunday to spend a night with his brothers and in the argument which followed, I began to sense in him a spirit of restlessness, a growing discontent which covered his handsome face with a deepening shadow. He disliked being tied down to the dull life of the farm, and his horse-power threshing machine no longer paid him enough to compensate for the loss of time and care on the other phases of his industry. His voice was still glorious and he played the violin when strongly urged, though with a sense of dissatisfaction. He and mother and Aunt Deborah sang _Nellie Wildwood_ and _Lily Dale_ and _Minnie Minturn_ just as they used to do in the coulee, and I forgot my disgrace and the pain of my blistered feet in the rapture of that exquisite hour of blended melody and memory. The world they represented was passing and though I did not fully realize this, I sensed in some degree the transitory nature of this reunion. In truth it never came again. Never again did these three brothers meet, and when they said good-bye to us next morning, I wondered why it was, we must be so widely separated from those we loved the best. CHAPTER XV Harriet Goes Away Girls on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She was small, moody and silent, and as all her interests became feminine I lost that sense of comradeship with which we used to ride after the cattle and I turned back to my brother who was growing into a hollow-chested lanky lad--and in our little sister Jessie we took increasing interest. She was a joyous child, always singing like a canary. SHE was never a "trial." Though delicate and fair and pretty, she manifested a singular indifference to the usual games of girls. Contemptuous of dolls, she never played house so far as I know. She took no interest in sewing, or cooking, but had a whole yard full of "horses," that is to say, sticks of varying sizes and shapes. Each pole had its name and its "stall" and she endlessly repeated the chores of leading them to water and feeding them hay. She loved to go with me to the field and was never so happy as when riding on old Jule.--Dear little sister, I fear I neglected you at times, turning away from your sweet face and pleading smile to lose myself in some worthless book. I am comforted to remember that I did sometimes lift you to the back of a real horse and permit you to ride "a round," chattering like a sparrow as we plodded back and forth across the field. Frank cared little for books but he could take a hand at games although he was not strong. Burton who at sixteen was almost as tall as his father was the last to surrender his saddle to the ash-bin. He often rode his high-headed horse past our house on his way to town, and I especially recall one day, when as Frank and I were walking to town (one fourth of July) Burt came galloping along with five dollars in his pocket.--We could not see the five dollars but we did get the full force and dignity of his cavalier approach, and his word was sufficient proof of the cash he had to spend. As he rode on we, in crushed humility, resumed our silent plodding in the dust of his horse's hooves. His round of labor, like my own, was well established. In spring he drove team and drag. In haying he served as stacker. In harvest he bound his station. In stacking he pitched bundles. After stacking he plowed or went out "changing works" and ended the season's work by husking corn--a job that increased in severity from year to year, as the fields grew larger. In '74 it lasted well into November. Beginning in the warm and golden September we kept at it (off and on) until sleety rains coated the ears with ice and the wet soil loaded our boots with huge balls of clay and grass--till the snow came whirling by on the wings of the north wind and the last flock of belated geese went sprawling sidewise down the ragged sky. Grim business this! At times our wet gloves froze on our hands. How primitive all our notions were! Few of the boys owned overcoats and the same suit served each of us for summer and winter alike. In lieu of ulsters most of us wore long, gay-colored woolen scarfs wound about our heads and necks--scarfs which our mothers, sisters or sweethearts had knitted for us. Our footwear continued to be boots of the tall cavalry model with pointed toes and high heels. Our collars were either home-made ginghams or "boughten" ones of paper at fifteen cents per box. Some men went so far as to wear "dickies," that is to say, false shirt fronts made of paper, but this was considered a silly cheat. No one in our neighborhood ever saw a tailor-made suit, and nothing that we wore fitted,--our clothes merely enclosed us. Harriet, like the other women, made her own dresses, assisted by my mother, and her best gowns in summer were white muslin tied at the waist with ribbons. All the girls dressed in this simple fashion, but as I write, recalling the glowing cheeks and shining eyes of Hattie and Agnes and Bess, I feel again the thrill of admiration which ran through my blood as they came down the aisle at church, or when at dancing parties they balanced or "sashayed" in _Honest John_ or _Money Musk_.--To me they were perfectly clothed and divinely fair. The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was strikingly significant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed himself, was of the Yankee merchant type. A general store in Wisconsin was slowly making him a citizen of substance and his quiet comment brought to me an entirely new conception of the middle west and its future. He was a philosopher. He peered into the years that were to come and paid little heed to the passing glories of the plain. He predicted astounding inventions and great cities, and advised my father to go into dairying and diversified crops. "This is a natural butter country," said he. He was an invalid, and it was through him that we first learned of graham flour. During his stay (and for some time after) we suffered an infliction of sticky "gems" and dark soggy bread. We all resented this displacement of our usual salt-rising loaf and delicious saleratus biscuits but we ate the hot gems, liberally splashed with butter, just as we would have eaten dog-biscuit or hardtack had it been put before us. One of the sayings of my uncle will fix his character in the mind of the reader. One day, apropos of some public event which displeased him, he said, "Men can be infinitely more foolish in their collective capacity than on their own individual account." His quiet utterance of these words and especially the phrase "collective capacity" made a deep impression on me. The underlying truth of the saying came to me only later in my life. He was full of "_citrus-belt_" enthusiasm and told us that he was about to sell out and move to Santa Barbara. He did not urge my father to accompany him, and if he had, it would have made no difference. A winterless climate and the raising of fruit did not appeal to my Commander. He loved the prairie and the raising of wheat and cattle, and gave little heed to anything else, but to me Addison's talk of "the citrus belt" had the value of a romance, and the occasional Spanish phrases which he used afforded me an indefinable delight. It was unthinkable that I should ever see an _arroyo_ but I permitted myself to dream of it while he talked. I think he must have encouraged my sister in her growing desire for an education, for in the autumn after his visit she entered the Cedar Valley Seminary at Osage and her going produced in me a desire to accompany her. I said nothing of it at the time, for my father gave but reluctant consent to Harriet's plan. A district school education seemed to him ample for any farmer's needs. Many of our social affairs were now connected with "the Grange." During these years on the new farm while we were busied with breaking and fencing and raising wheat, there had been growing up among the farmers of the west a social organization officially known as The Patrons of Husbandry. The places of meeting were called "Granges" and very naturally the members were at once called "Grangers." My father was an early and enthusiastic member of the order, and during the early seventies its meetings became very important dates on our calendar. In winter "oyster suppers," with debates, songs and essays, drew us all to the Burr Oak Grove school-house, and each spring, on the twelfth of June, the Grange Picnic was a grand "turn-out." It was almost as well attended as the circus. We all looked forward to it for weeks and every young man who owned a top-buggy got it out and washed and polished it for the use of his best girl, and those who were not so fortunate as to own "a rig" paid high tribute to the livery stable of the nearest town. Others, less able or less extravagant, doubled teams with a comrade and built a "bowery wagon" out of a wagon-box, and with hampers heaped with food rode away in state, drawn by a four or six-horse team. It seemed a splendid and daring thing to do, and some day I hoped to drive a six-horse bowery wagon myself. The central place of meeting was usually in some grove along the Big Cedar to the west and south of us, and early on the appointed day the various lodges of our region came together one by one at convenient places, each one moving in procession and led by great banners on which the women had blazoned the motto of their home lodge. Some of the columns had bands and came preceded by far faint strains of music, with marshals in red sashes galloping to and fro in fine assumption of military command. It was grand, it was inspiring--to us, to see those long lines of carriages winding down the lanes, joining one to another at the cross roads till at last all the granges from the northern end of the county were united in one mighty column advancing on the picnic ground, where orators awaited our approach with calm dignity and high resolve. Nothing more picturesque, more delightful, more helpful has ever risen out of American rural life. Each of these assemblies was a most grateful relief from the sordid loneliness of the farm. Our winter amusements were also in process of change. We held no more singing schools--the "Lyceum" had taken its place. Revival meetings were given up, although few of the church folk classed them among the amusements. The County Fair on the contrary was becoming each year more important as farming diversified. It was even more glorious than the Grange Picnic, was indeed second only to the fourth of July, and we looked forward to it all through the autumn. It came late in September and always lasted three days. We all went on the second day, (which was considered the best day) and mother, by cooking all the afternoon before our outing, provided us a dinner of cold chicken and cake and pie which we ate while sitting on the grass beside our wagon just off the racetrack while the horses munched hay and oats from the box. All around us other families were grouped, picnicking in the same fashion, and a cordial interchange of jellies and pies made the meal a delightful function. However, we boys never lingered over it,--we were afraid of missing something of the program. Our interest in the races was especially keen, for one of the citizens of our town owned a fine little trotting horse called "Huckleberry" whose honest friendly striving made him a general favorite. Our survey of fat sheep, broad-backed bulls and shining colts was a duty, but to cheer Huckleberry at the home stretch was a privilege. To us from the farm the crowds were the most absorbing show of all. We met our chums and their sisters with a curious sense of strangeness, of discovery. Our playmates seemed alien somehow--especially the girls in their best dresses walking about two and two, impersonal and haughty of glance. Cyrus and Walter were there in their top-buggies with Harriet and Bettie but they seemed to be having a dull time, for while they sat holding their horses we were dodging about in freedom--now at the contest of draft horses, now at the sledge-hammer throwing, now at the candy-booth. We were comical figures, with our long trousers, thick gray coats and faded hats, but we didn't know it and were happy. One day as Burton and I were wandering about on the fair grounds we came upon a patent medicine cart from which a faker, a handsome fellow with long black hair and an immense white hat, was addressing the crowd while a young and beautiful girl with a guitar in her lap sat in weary relaxation at his feet. A third member of the "troupe," a short and very plump man of commonplace type, was handing out bottles. It was "Doctor" Lightner, vending his "Magic Oil." At first I perceived only the doctor whose splendid gray suit and spotless linen made the men in the crowd rustic and graceless, but as I studied the woman I began to read into her face a sadness, a weariness, which appealed to my imagination. Who was she? Why was she there? I had never seen a girl with such an expression. She saw no one, was interested in nothing before her--and when her master, or husband, spoke to her in a low voice, she raised her guitar and joined in the song which he had started, all with the same air of weary disgust. Her voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of silver in a skein of brass. I forgot my dusty clothes, my rough shoes,--I forgot that I was a boy. Absorbed and dreaming I listened to these strange new songs and studied the singular faces of these alien songsters. Even the shouting tenor had a far-away gleam in the yellow light of his cat-like eyes. The leader's skill, the woman's grace and the perfect blending of their voices made an ineffaceable impression on my sensitive, farm-bred brain. The songs which they sang were not in themselves of a character to warrant this ecstasy in me. One of them ran as follows: O Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was black as jet, In the little old log cabin in the lane; And everywhere that Mary went, The lamb went too, you bet. In the little old log cabin in the lane. In the little old log cabin O! The little old log cabin O! The little old log cabin in the lane, They're hangin' men and women now For singing songs like this In the little old log cabin in the lane. Nevertheless I listened without a smile. It was art to me. It gave me something I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and the chiming, bird-like voice of the girl lent to the absurd words of this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events of the day of no account. In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its cure, and offered his medicines for sale, and in this dull part of the program the tenor assisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat, resumed her impersonal and weary air. That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called _Love or the Law_ I once made a laborious attempt to account for her, but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my desk. No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young, forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new intoxicating blooms. * * * * * Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, reluctantly we climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us suffering with sick-headache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows, feed the pigs and bed down the horses. As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly detect the physical relationship between that mop-headed, long-lipped lad, and the gray-haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning desires which led me to these material expressions of manly pride. There is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in that absurd ornament--and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction complete. Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of her, for she was always engaged for dances or socials by the neighbors' sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I resented this and was openly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode with us to spelling schools or "soshybles." There was always some youth with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town with growing pride in her improving manners. Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign herself to the loss of her school-life. The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove. She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we were necessarily out in the fields at work, and mother was busied with her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in the living room--and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beautiful, tragic morning in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her. She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a wounded animal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which her transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was passing from me--that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and earth! This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe. Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency and change of the westward moving Border Line.--Like the wild flowers she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village bounds. * * * * * My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the light of the sky and the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed home. Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring, much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way. My duties and my pleasures were those of the boys around me. In all essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in all the social affairs of the township we fully shared. Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by, lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cow-bell's steady clang tells of the homecoming herd. Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, we still could fall a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky. CHAPTER XVI We Move to Town One day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being completed in Osage," he said. The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an end not merely to our further pioneering but, (as the plan developed) promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a town world where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt vaguely our father's perturbation. For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick Garland began to dream of making a living at something less backbreaking than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I do not recall the fashion of it. Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the elevator some six miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother. As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States, migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean shirt and a few socks. They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women. A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid. Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no account. From these men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of information concerning South Clark Street in Chicago, and the river front in St. Louis. Their talk did not allure, it mostly shocked and horrified us. We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in the world and it stood away in such violent opposition to the teaching of our fathers and uncles that it did not corrupt us. That man, the stronger animal, owed chivalry and care to woman, had been deeply grounded in our concept of life, and we shrank from these vile stories as from something disloyal to our mothers and sisters. To those who think of the farm as a sweetly ideal place in which to bring up a boy, all this may be disturbing--but the truth is, low-minded men are low-minded everywhere, and farm hands are often creatures with enormous appetites and small remorse, men on whom the beauty of nature has very little effect. To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to town and a drunken spree, and they did not hesitate to say so in the presence of Burton and myself. Some of them did not hesitate to say anything in our presence. After a hard week's work we all felt that a trip to town was only a fair reward. Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed farmhand is walking bare footed up and down the middle of the road defying the world.--From a corner of the street I watch with tense interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action, a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. The crowd jeers at him for his cowardice--a burst of shouting is heard. A trampling follows and forth from the door of a saloon bulges a throng of drunken, steaming, reeling, cursing ruffians followed by brave Jim McCarty, the city marshal, with an offender under each hand.--The scene changes to the middle of the street. I am one of a throng surrounding a smooth-handed faker who is selling prize boxes of soap and giving away dollars.--"Now, gentlemen," he says, "if you will hand me a dollar I will give you a sample package of soap to examine, afterwards if you don't want the soap, return it to me, and I'll return your dollar." He repeats this several times, returning the dollars faithfully, then slightly varies his invitation by saying, "so that I can return your dollars." No one appears to observe this significant change, and as he has hitherto returned the dollars precisely according to promise, he now proceeds to his harvest. Having all his boxes out he abruptly closes the lid of his box and calmly remarks, "I said, 'so that I _can_ return your dollars,' I didn't say I would.--Gentlemen, I have the dollars and _you_ have the experience." He drops into his seat and takes up the reins to drive away. A tall man who has been standing silently beside the wheel of the carriage, snatches the whip from its socket, and lashes the swindler across the face. Red streaks appear on his cheek.--The crowd surges forward. Up from behind leaps a furious little Scotchman who snatches off his right boot and beats the stranger over the head with such fury that he falls from his carriage to the ground.--I rejoice in his punishment, and admire the tall man who led the assault.--The marshal comes, the man is led away, and the crowd smilingly scatters.-- We are on the way home. Only two of my crew are with me. The others are roaring from one drinking place to another, having a "good time." The air is soothingly clean and sweet after the tumult and the reek of the town. Appalled, yet fascinated, I listen to the oft repeated tales of just how Jim McCarty sprang into the saloon and cleaned out the brawling mob. I feel very young, very defenceless, and very sleepy as I listen.-- On Sunday, Burton usually came to visit me or I went over to his house and together we rode or walked to service at the Grove school-house. He was now the owner of a razor, and I was secretly planning to buy one. The question of dress had begun to trouble us both acutely. Our best suits were not only made from woolen cloth, they were of blizzard weight, and as on week days (in summer) our entire outfit consisted of a straw hat, a hickory shirt and a pair of brown denim overalls you may imagine what tortures we endured when fully encased in our "Sunday best," with starched shirts and paper collars. No one, so far as I knew, at that time possessed an extra, light-weight suit for hot-weather wear, although a long, yellow, linen robe called a "duster" was in fashion among the smart dressers. John Gammons, who was somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet, was among the first of my circle to purchase one of these very ultra garments, and Burton soon followed his lead, and then my own discontent began. I, too, desired a duster. Unfortunately my father did not see me as I saw myself. To him I was still a boy and subject to his will in matters of dress as in other affairs, and the notion that I needed a linen coat was absurd. "If you are too warm, take your coat off," he said, and I not only went without the duster, but suffered the shame of appearing in a flat-crown black hat while Burton and all the other fellows were wearing light brown ones, of a conical shape. I was furious. After a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took the matter up with the Commander-in-Chief. I argued, "As I am not only doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock and tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in the choice of a hat." The soldier listened in silence but his glance was stern. When I had ended he said, "You'll wear the hat I provide." For the first time in my life I defied him. "I will not," I said. "And you can't make me." He seized me by the arm and for a moment we faced each other in silent clash of wills. I was desperate now. "Don't you strike me," I warned. "You can't do that any more." His face changed. His eyes softened. He perceived in my attitude something new, something unconquerable. He dropped my arm and turned away. After a silent struggle with himself he took two dollars from his pocket and extended them to me. "Get your own hat," he said, and walked away. This victory forms the most important event of my fifteenth year. Indeed the chief's recession gave me a greater shock than any punishment could have done. Having forced him to admit the claims of my growing personality as well as the value of my services, I retired in a panic. The fact that he, the inexorable old soldier, had surrendered to my furious demands awed me, making me very careful not to go too fast or too far in my assumption of the privileges of manhood. Another of the milestones on my road to manhood was my first employment of the town barber. Up to this time my hair had been trimmed by mother or mangled by one of the hired men,--whereas both John and Burton enjoyed regular hair-cuts and came to Sunday school with the backs of their necks neatly shaved. I wanted to look like that, and so at last, shortly after my victory concerning the hat, I plucked up courage to ask my father for a quarter and got it! With my money tightly clutched in my hand I timidly entered the Tonsorial Parlor of Ed Mills and took my seat in his marvellous chair--thus touching another high point on the road to self-respecting manhood. My pleasure, however, was mixed with ignoble childish terror, for not only did the barber seem determined to force upon me a shampoo (which was ten cents extra), but I was in unremitting fear lest I should lose my quarter, the only one I possessed, and find myself accused as a swindler. Nevertheless I came safely away, a neater, older and graver person, walking with a manlier stride, and when I confronted my classmates at the Grove school-house on Sunday, I gave evidence of an accession of self-confidence. The fact that my back hair was now in fashionable order was of greatest comfort to me. If only my trousers had not continued their distressing habit of climbing up my boot-tops I would have been almost at ease but every time I rose from my seat it became necessary to make each instep smooth the leg of the other pantaloon, and even then they kept their shameful wrinkles, and a knowledge of my exposed ankles humbled me. Burton, although better dressed than I, was quite as confused and wordless in the presence of girls, but John Gammons was not only confident, he was irritatingly facile. Furthermore, as son of the director of the Sunday school he had almost too much distinction. I bitterly resented his linen collars, his neat suit and his smiling assurance, for while we professed to despise everything connected with church, we were keenly aware of the bright eyes of Bettie and noted that they rested often on John's curly head. He could sing, too, and sometimes, with sublime audacity, held the hymn book with her. The sweetness of those girlish faces held us captive through many a long sermon, but there were times when not even their beauty availed. Three or four of us occasionally slipped away into the glorious forest to pick berries or nuts, or to loaf in the odorous shade of the elms along the creek. The cool aisles of the oaks seemed more sweetly sanctifying (after a week of sun-smit soil on the open plain) than the crowded little church with its droning preacher, and there was something mystical in the melody of the little brook and in the flecking of light and shade across the silent woodland path. To drink of the little ice-cold spring beneath the maple tree in Frazer's pasture was almost as delight-giving as the plate of ice-cream which we sometimes permitted ourselves to buy in the village on Saturday, and often we wandered on and on, till the sinking sun warned us of duties at home and sent us hurrying to the open. It was always hard to go back to the farm after one of these days of leisure--back to greasy overalls and milk-bespattered boots, back to the society of fly-bedevilled cows and steaming, salty horses, back to the curry-comb and swill bucket,--but it was particularly hard during this our last summer on the prairie. But we did it with a feeling that we were nearing the end of it. "Next year we'll be living in town!" I said to the boys exultantly. "No more cow-milking for me!" I never rebelled at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with an incredulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intellectual activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their souls. "I'm sorry to leave you," I jeered, "but so it goes. Some are chosen, others are left. Some rise to glory, others remain plodders--" such was my airy attitude. I wonder that they did not roll me in the dust. Though my own joy and that of my brother was keen and outspoken, I have no recollection that my mother uttered a single word of pleasure. She must have been as deeply excited, and as pleased as we, for it meant more to her than to us, it meant escape from the drudgery of the farm, from the pain of early rising, and yet I cannot be sure of her feeling. So far as she knew this move was final. Her life as a farmer's wife was about to end after twenty years of early rising and never ending labor, and I think she must have palpitated with joy of her approaching freedom from it all. As we were not to move till the following March, and as winter came on we went to school as usual in the bleak little shack at the corner of our farm and took part in all the neighborhood festivals. I have beautiful memories of trotting away across the plain to spelling schools and "Lyceums" through the sparkling winter nights with Franklin by my side, while the low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls went flapping silently away before us.--I am riding in a long sleigh to the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a performance of _Lord Dundreary_ at the Barker school-house.--I am a neglected onlooker at a Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school--and through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a peculiar poignancy of appeal. Though but a shaggy colt in those days, I acknowledged a keen longing to join in the parties and dances of the grown-up boys and girls. I was not content to be merely the unnoticed cub in the corner. A place in the family bob-sled no longer satisfied me, and when at the "sociable" I stood in the corner with tousled hair and clumsy ill-fitting garments I was in my desire, a confident, graceful squire of dames. The dancing was a revelation to me of the beauty and grace latent in the awkward girls and hulking men of the farms. It amazed and delighted me to see how gloriously Madeleine White swayed and tip-toed through the figures of the "Cotillion," and the sweet aloofness of Agnes Farwell's face filled me with worship. I envied Edwin Blackler his supple grace, his fine sense of rhythm, and especially the calm audacity of his manner with his partners. Bill, Joe, all the great lunking farm hands seemed somehow uplifted, carried out of their everyday selves, ennobled by some deep-seated emotion, and I was eager for a chance to show that I, too, could balance and bow and pay court to women, but--alas, I never did, I kept to my corner even though Stelle Gilbert came to drag me out. Occasionally a half-dozen of these audacious young people would turn a church social or donation party into a dance, much to the scandal of the deacons. I recall one such performance which ended most dramatically. It was a "shower" for the minister whose salary was too small to be even an honorarium, and the place of meeting was at the Durrells', two well-to-do farmers, brothers who lived on opposite sides of the road just south of the Grove school-house. Mother put up a basket of food, father cast a quarter of beef into the back-part of the sleigh, and we were off early of a cold winter night in order to be on hand for the supper. My brother and I were mere passengers on the straw behind, along with the slab of beef, but we gave no outward sign of discontent. It was a clear, keen, marvellous twilight, with the stars coming out over the woodlands to the east. On every road the sound of bells and the voices of happy young people came to our ears. Occasionally some fellow with a fast horse and a gay cutter came slashing up behind us and called out "Clear the track!" Father gave the road, and the youth and his best girl went whirling by with a gay word of thanks. Watch-dogs guarding the Davis farm-house, barked in savage warning as we passed and mother said, "Everybody's gone. I hope we won't be late." We were, indeed, a little behind the others for when we stumbled into the Ellis Durrell house we found a crowd of merry folks clustered about the kitchen stove. Mrs. Ellis flattered me by saying, "The young people are expecting you over at Joe's." Here she laughed, "I'm afraid they are going to dance." As soon as I was sufficiently thawed out I went across the road to the other house which gave forth the sound of singing and the rhythmic tread of dancing feet. It was filled to overflowing with the youth of the neighborhood, and Agnes Farwell, Joe's niece, the queenliest of them all, was leading the dance, her dark face aglow, her deep brown eyes alight. The dance was "The Weevilly Wheat" and Ed Blackler was her partner. Against the wall stood Marsh Belford, a tall, crude, fierce young savage with eyes fixed on Agnes. He was one of her suitors and mad with jealousy of Blackler to whom she was said to be engaged. He was a singular youth, at once bashful and baleful. He could not dance, and for that reason keenly resented Ed's supple grace and easy manners with the girls. Crossing to where Burton stood, I heard Belford say as he replied to some remark by his companions, "I'll roll him one o' these days." He laughed in a constrained way, and that his mood was dangerous was evident. In deep excitement Burton and I awaited the outcome. The dancing was of the harmless "donation" sort. As musical instruments were forbidden, the rhythm was furnished by a song in which we all joined with clapping hands. Come hither, my love, and trip together In the morning early, Give to you the parting hand Although I love you dearly. I won't have none of your weevilly wheat I won't have none of your barley, I'll have some flour In half an hour To bake a cake for Charley.-- Oh, Charley, he is a fine young man, Charley he is a dandy, Charley he is a fine young man For he buys the girls some candy. The figures were like those in the old time "Money Musk" and as Agnes bowed and swung and gave hands down the line I thought her the loveliest creature in the world, and so did Marsh, only that which gladdened me, maddened him. I acknowledged Edwin's superior claim,--Marsh did not. Burton, who understood the situation, drew me aside and said, "Marsh has been drinking. There's going to be war." As soon as the song ceased and the dancers paused, Marsh, white with resolution, went up to Agnes, and said something to her. She smiled, but shook her head and turned away. Marsh came back to where his brother Joe was standing and his face was tense with fury. "I'll make her wish she hadn't," he muttered. Edwin, as floor manager, now called out a new "set" and as the dancers began to "form on," Joe Belford hunched his brother. "Go after him now," he said. With deadly slowness of action, Marsh sauntered up to Blackler and said something in a low voice. "You're a liar!" retorted Edwin sharply. Belford struck out with a swing of his open hand, and a moment later they were rolling on the floor in a deadly grapple. The girls screamed and fled, but the boys formed a joyous ring around the contestants and cheered them on to keener strife while Joe Belford, tearing off his coat, stood above his brother, warning others to keep out of it. "This is to be a fair fight," he said. "The best man wins!" He was a redoubtable warrior and the ring widened. No one thought of interfering, in fact we were all delighted by this sudden outbreak of the heroic spirit. Ed threw off his antagonist and rose, bleeding but undaunted. "You devil," he said, "I'll smash your face." Marsh again struck him a staggering blow, and they were facing each other in watchful fury as Agnes forced her way through the crowd and, laying her hand on Belford's arm, calmly said, "Marsh Belford, what are you doing?" Her dignity, her beauty, her air of command, awed the bully and silenced every voice in the room. She was our hostess and as such assumed the right to enforce decorum. Fixing her glance upon Joe whom she recognized as the chief disturber, she said, "You'd better go home. This is no place for either you or Marsh." Sobered, shamed, the Belfords fell back and slipped out while Agnes turned to Edwin and wiped the blood from his face with self-contained tenderness. * * * * * This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters. Although short and heavy, I was deft with my hands, as one or two of the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was counted a man. I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild horsemen and dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned out to be daughters of nobility, and marvellous detectives who bore charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story-- Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement. There was the _Quaker Sleuth_, for instance, and _Mad Matt the Trailer_, and _Buckskin Joe_ who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar), rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a phantom troop of skeleton horsemen, a grisly squadron, which came like an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the renegades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click of hoofs. In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of _Saturday Nights_ in exchange for my _New York Weeklys_ and from one of our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some twenty-five or thirty numbers of _The Sea Side Library_. These also cost a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit for another,--provided your own was in good condition. It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder in the manner of my heroes. I devoured _Jack Harkaway_ and _The Quaker Sleuth_ precisely as I played ball--to pass the time and because I enjoyed the game. Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such reading, and argued against it furiously, but no one paid much attention to his protests--especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting with a very lurid example of "The Damnable Lies" open in his hand. "I was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained. Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to it till you find how it turns out." Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him rather better after this sign of weakness. It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach, even the copy of _Paradise Lost_ which my mother presented to me on my fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator. The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a little less barren and ugly. And yet with all these growing signs of prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes, all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch. Settlement was complete. CHAPTER XVII A Taste of Village Life The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm. The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped even in the city. Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself was an enormous gain, especially to my mother. Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and pitiless--"The Town Boys." Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, knowing that they hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a strange barn-yard,--knowing that I would be called upon to prove my quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my freedom from persecution. Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun. During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it. We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.--The fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world. In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a little more than the market price. This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent the farmers' interest." These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained, remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to do. One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud debater.--The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as peacemaker. Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy. On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley, the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and sometimes fiercely personal. After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds. My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the books--in all ways taking a man's place,--I lost all sense of being a boy. The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled, and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do this purposely--to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling through sunless days. A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger--and this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days. This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town, while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering who came to service regularly--but on foot, so intense was the spirit of democracy among us. Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial hospitality. She was never envious or bitter. In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of beauty were seldom mentioned. With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of delight, of consolation." In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world, the world of art. I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also, a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon. There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm) and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky, ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one knew it! Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me nearer the clothing and the education I desired. Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the seminary term which began in September. Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me. My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and understanding humor. In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago. To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came to mean so much to me in after years. It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me. Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed, white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was. Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a friend, and an almost infallible guide. The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself. It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these "exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice! My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a pain which never left me--except possibly in the morning before I had time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the fields at the edge of the town or at home when mother was away, in the barn while milking--at every opportunity I went through my selection with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did everything but mumble a smooth pebble--realizing that most of the boys in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of appetite. The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes, and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were, of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking down--but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their dread and terror. While the names which preceded mine were called off that first afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out "Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box. My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head oscillated like a toy balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air, and my heart was pounding like a drum. However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge. I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably _Catiline's Defense_ or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the smiling face of my principal exalted me. Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I was only sixteen! The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, I relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made. There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress, and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She too, loved tragic prose and passionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her recite, One of them dead in the East by the sea And one of them dead in the West by the sea, was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet mother. Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a ring and watch. Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also wore collars of linen--real linen--which had to be laundered, but few of us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties, and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of youth! How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators or Generals--so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters. With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles--and almost before I realized it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a "galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were. Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured on _The Lost Arts_. My father took us all to see and hear this orator hero of his boyhood days in Boston. I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript--read quietly, colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment. Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker. Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo, mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant, but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary sing-song. I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another, a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with her. They were all boyish adorations. Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm. CHAPTER XVIII Back to the Farm Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties. On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "Today we move back upon the farm." This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles which lay between the farm and the elevator. There is no mention of my mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as to her sons. Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold, cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way, there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the harrow. It was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these discomforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an aspiration to occupy my mind. My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before. The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows, the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie pigeons--all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me, bringing something sweeter and more significant than before. I had gained in perception and also in the power to assimilate what I perceived. This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their condition. We had gained our first set of comparative ideas, and with them an unrest which was to carry us very far away. True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of Congressman Deering's house but we had obtained revelatory glimpses of its well-kept lawn, and through the open windows we had watched the waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's frock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant leisure which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed. Over against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.--All that we possessed seemed very cheap and deplorably commonplace. My brother, who had passed a vivid and wonderful year riding race horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of swimming and baseball, also went groaning and grumbling to the fields. He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the smell of manure and hated the greasy clothing which our tasks made necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and the grass grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint. My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown, quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact, unusual and of decided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one hundred acres of heavy grain. The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart heavy. Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to escape the curry-comb and the cow. Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society, and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and ranted the immortal soliloquies of _Hamlet_ and _Richard_ as I held the plow, feeling certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and Demosthenes. Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary. On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of the farm. My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask, "Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?" He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him for his non-interference with my religious affairs. All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me in this unlovely condition. However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for it was a test of skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work on the farm and long to return to it. The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent, self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of sunshine and the harvest. Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which, having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal, the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper, with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our task--replete, content, ready for another hour of toil. Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of summer and the coming of fall. But there was a mitigating charm even in these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return to school. Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of the symphony. That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine. My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later. Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand. There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell-metal pinions. Wheeled plows were common and self-binding harvesters were coming in. Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very sympathetic. In his eyes I already had a very good equipment for the battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, divined that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which her sons made to raise themselves above the commonplace level of neighborhood life. All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to our books. With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road on that gorgeous autumn morning! No more dust, no more grime, no more mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders.--Yes, through some mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday; and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to say nothing of bed linen and soap. The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was a short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of changeable temper who teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five boarders as well as for the members of her own family, was a soul of heroic pride and most indomitable energy. She was a tall, dark, thin woman who had once been handsome. Poor creature--how incessantly she toiled, and how much she endured! She had three graceful and alluring daughters,--Ella, nineteen, Cora, sixteen, and Martha, a quiet little mouse of about ten years of age. Ella was a girl of unusual attainment, a teacher, self-contained and womanly, with whom we all, promptly, fell in love. Cora, a moody, dark-eyed, passionate girl who sometimes glowed with friendly smiles and sometimes glowered in anger, was less adored. Neither of them considered Burton or myself worthy of serious notice. On the contrary, we were necessary nuisances. To me Ella was a queen, a kindly queen, ever ready to help me out with my algebra. Everything she did seemed to me instinct with womanly grace. No doubt she read the worship in my eyes, but her attitude was that of an older sister. Cora, being nearer my own age, awed me not at all. On the contrary, we were more inclined to battle than to coo. Her coolness toward me, I soon discovered, was sustained by her growing interest in a young man from Cerro Gordo County. We were a happy, noisy gang, and undoubtedly gave poor Mrs. Leete a great deal of trouble. There was Boggs (who had lost part of one ear in some fracas with Jack Frost) who paced up and down his room declining Latin verbs with painful pertinacity, and Burton who loved a jest but never made one, and Joe Pritchard, who was interested mainly in politics and oratory, and finally that criminally well-dressed young book agent (with whom we had very little in common) and myself. In cold weather we all herded in the dining room to keep from freezing, and our weekly scrub took place after we got home to our own warm kitchens and the family wash-tubs. Life was a pure joy to Burton as to me. Each day was a poem, each night a dreamless sleep! Each morning at half past eight we went to the Seminary and at four o'clock left it with regret. I should like to say that we studied hard every night, burning a great deal of kerosene oil, but I cannot do so.--We had a good time. The learning, (so far as I can recall) was incidental. It happened that my closest friends, aside from Burton, were pupils of the public school and for that reason I kept my membership in the Adelphian Society which met every Monday evening. My activities there, I find, made up a large part of my life during this second winter. I not only debated furiously, disputing weighty political questions, thus advancing the forensic side of my education, but later in the winter I helped to organize a dramatic company which gave a play for the benefit of the Club Library. Just why I should have been chosen "stage director" of our "troupe," I cannot say, but something in my ability to declaim _Regulus_ probably led to this high responsibility. At any rate, I not only played the leading juvenile, I settled points of action and costume without the slightest hesitation. Cora was my _ingenue_ opposite, it fell out, and so we played at love-making, while meeting coldly at the family dining table. Our engagement in the town hall extended through two March evenings and was largely patronized. It would seem that I was a dominant figure on both occasions, for I declaimed a "piece" on the opening night, one of those resounding orations (addressed to the Carthaginians), which we all loved, and which permitted of thunderous, rolling periods and passionate gestures. If my recollection is not distorted, I was masterful that night--at least, Joe Pritchard agreed that I was "the best part of the show." Joe was my friend, and I hold him in especial affection for his hearty praise of my effort. On this same night I also appeared in a little sketch representing the death of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, in which the dying man beholds in a vision his beloved Leader. Walter Blakeslee was the "Washington" and I, with heavily powdered hair, was the veteran. On the second night I played the juvenile lover in a drama called _His Brother's Keeper_. Cora as "Shellie," my sweetheart, was very lovely in pink mosquito netting, and for the first time I regretted her interest in the book agent from Cerro Gordo. Strange to say I had no fear at all as I looked out over the audience which packed the town hall to the ceiling. Father and mother were there with Frank and Jessie, all quite dazed (as I imagined) by my transcendent position behind the foot lights. It may have been this very night that Willard Eaton, the county attorney, spoke to my father saying, "Richard, whenever that boy of yours finishes school and wants to begin to study law, you send him right to me," which was, of course, a very great compliment, for the county attorney belonged to the best known and most influential firm of lawyers in the town. At the moment his offer would have seemed very dull and commonplace to me. I would have refused it. Our success that night was so great that it appeared a pity not to permit other towns to witness our performance, hence we boldly organized a "tour." We booked a circuit which included St. Ansgar and Mitchell, two villages, one four, the other ten miles to the north. Audacious as this may seem, it was deliberately decided upon, and one pleasant day Mitchell and George and I loaded all our scenery into a wagon and drove away across the prairie to our first "stand" very much as Molière did in his youth, leaving the ladies to follow (in the grandeur of hired buggies) later in the day. That night we played with "artistic success"--that is to say, we lost some eighteen dollars, which so depressed the management that it abandoned the tour, and the entire organization returned to Osage in diminished glory. This cut short my career as an actor. I never again took part in a theatrical performance. Not long after this disaster, "Shellie," as I now called Cora, entered upon some mysterious and romantic drama of her own. The travelling man vanished, and soon after she too disappeared. Where she went, what she did, no one seemed to know, and none of us quite dared to ask. I never saw her again but last year, after nearly forty years of wandering, I was told that she is married and living in luxurious ease near London. Through what deep valleys she has travelled to reach this height, with what loss or gain, I cannot say, but I shall always remember her as she was that night in St. Ansgar, in her pink-mosquito-bar dress, her eyes shining with excitement, her voice vibrant with girlish gladness. Our second winter at the Seminary passed all too quickly, and when the prairie chickens began to boom from the ridges our hearts sank within us. For the first time the grouse's cheery dance was unwelcome for it meant the closing of our books, the loss of our pleasant companions, the surrender of our leisure, and a return to the mud of the fields. It was especially hard to say good-bye to Ella and Maud, for though they were in no sense sweethearts they were very pleasant companions. There were others whom it was a pleasure to meet in the halls and to emulate in the class-rooms, and when early in April, we went home to enter upon the familiar round of seeding, corn-planting, corn plowing, harvesting, stacking and threshing, we had only the promise of an occasional trip to town to cheer us. It would seem that our interest in the girls of Burr Oak had diminished, for we were less regular in our attendance upon services in the little school-house, and whenever we could gain consent to use a horse, we hitched up and drove away to town. These trips have golden, unforgettable charm, and indicate the glamor which approaching manhood was flinging over my world. My father's world was less jocund, was indeed filled with increasing anxiety, for just before harvest time a new and formidable enemy of the wheat appeared in the shape of a minute, ill-smelling insect called the chinch bug. It already bore an evil reputation with us for it was reported to have eaten out the crops of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, and, indeed, before barley cutting was well under way the county was overrun with laborers from the south who were anxious to get work in order to recoup them for the loss of their own harvest. These fugitives brought incredible tales of the ravages of the enemy and prophesied our destruction but, as a matter of fact, only certain dry ridges proclaimed the presence of the insect during this year. The crop was rather poor for other reasons, and Mr. Babcock, like my father, objected to paying board bills. His attitude was so unpromising that Burton and I cast about to see how we could lessen the expense of upkeep during our winter term of school. Together we decided to hire a room and board ourselves (as many of the other fellows did) and so cut our expenses to a mere trifle. It was difficult, even in those days, to live cheaper than two dollars per week, but we convinced our people that we could do it, and so at last wrung from our mothers a reluctant consent to our trying it. We got away in October, only two weeks behind our fellows. I well remember the lovely afternoon on which we unloaded our scanty furniture into the two little rooms which we had hired for the term. It was still glorious autumn weather, and we were young and released from slavery. We had a table, three chairs, a little strip of carpet, and a melodeon, which belonged to Burton's sister, and when we had spread our carpet and put up our curtains we took seats, and cocking our feet upon the window sill surveyed our surroundings with such satisfaction as only autocrats of the earth may compass. We were absolute masters of our time--that was our chiefest joy. We could rise when we pleased and go to bed when we pleased. There were no stables to clean, no pigs to feed, nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid. My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere, coat, trousers and vest all alike,--and the trousers fitted me! Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was mine--in the fullest sense--and when I next entered chapel I felt not merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident security, a well-dressed person. I had a "boughten" shirt also, two boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a white one for Sunday. I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval of it. I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair of those man-killing top-boots--which were not only hard to get on and off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs. Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over, the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won. Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread, and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other fellows actually did. Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did. Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only followed along behind. Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our peculiarities, for she always seemed to be laughing at us, and I think it must have been her smiles that prevented any romantic attachment. We walked and talked without any deeper interest than good comradeship. Mrs. Babcock was famous for her pies and cakes, and Burton always brought some delicious samples of her skill. As regularly as the clock, on every Tuesday evening he said, in precisely the same tone, "Well, now, we'll have to eat these pies right away or they'll spoil," and as I made no objection, we had pie for luncheon, pie and cake for supper, and cake and pie for breakfast until all these "goodies" which were intended to serve as dessert through the week were consumed. By Thursday morning we were usually down to dry bread and butter. We simplified our housework in other ways in order that we might have time to study and Burton wasted a good deal of time at the fiddle, sawing away till I was obliged to fall upon him and roll him on the floor to silence him. I still have our ledger which gives an itemized account of the cost of this experiment in self board, and its footings are incredibly small. Less than fifty cents a day for both of us! Of course our mothers, sisters and aunts were continually joking us about our housekeeping, and once or twice Mrs. Babcock called upon us unexpectedly and found the room "a sight." But we did not mind her very much. We only feared the bright eyes of Ethel and Maude and Carrie. Fortunately they could not properly call upon us, even if they had wished to do so, and we were safe. It is probable, moreover, that they fully understood our methods, for they often slyly hinted at hasty dish-washing and primitive cookery. All of this only amused us, so long as they did not actually discover the dirt and disorder of which our mothers complained. Our school library at that time was pitifully small and ludicrously prescriptive, but its shelves held a few of the fine old classics, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray--the kind of books which can always be had in sets at very low prices--and in nosing about among these I fell, one day, upon two small red volumes called _Mosses from an Old Manse_. Of course I had read of the author, for these books were listed in my _History of American Literature_, but I had never, up to this moment, dared to open one of them. I was a discoverer. I turned a page or two, and instantly my mental horizon widened. When I had finished the _Artist of the Beautiful_, the great Puritan romancer had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity. The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled by the glory of it. It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my career--it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary, I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals. To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human soul. I loved the roll of his words in _The March of Time_ and the quaint phrasing of the _Rill from the Town Pump_; _Rappacini's Daughter_ whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. _Drowne and His Wooden Image_, the _Great Stone Face_--each story had its special appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner--(even the maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me. Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of his books, but found only _American Notes_ and _the Scarlet Letter_. Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of _Jack Harkaway_. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation. CHAPTER XIX End of School Days Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers. During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself, in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the village. Each term was very like another so far as its broad program went but innumerable, minute but very important progressions carried me toward manhood, events which can hardly be stated to an outsider. Burton remained my room-mate and in all our vicissitudes we had no vital disagreements but his unconquerable shyness kept him from making a good impression on his teachers and this annoyed me--it made him seem stupid when he was not. Once, as chairman of a committee it became his duty to introduce a certain lecturer who was to speak on "Elihu Burritt," and by some curious twist in my chum's mind this name became "Lu-hi Burritt" and he so stated it in his introductory remarks. This amused the lecturer and raised a titter in the audience. Burton bled in silence over this mishap for he was at heart deeply ambitious to be a public speaker. He never alluded to that speech even to me without writhing in retrospective shame. Another incident will illustrate his painfully shy character. One of our summer vacations was made notable by the visit of an exceedingly pretty girl to the home of one of Burton's aunts who lived on the road to the Grove, and my chum's excitement over the presence of this alien bird of paradise was very amusing to me as well as to his brother Charles who was inclined, as an older brother, to "take it out" of Burt. I listened to my chum's account of his cousin's beauty with something more than fraternal interest. She came, it appeared, from Dubuque and had the true cosmopolitan's air of tolerance. Our small community amused her. Her hats and gowns (for it soon developed that she had at least two), were the envy of all the girls, and the admiration of the boys. No disengaged or slightly obligated beau of the district neglected to hitch his horse at Mrs. Knapp's gate. Burton's opportunity seemed better than that of any other youth, for he could visit his aunt as often as he wished without arousing comment, whereas for me, a call would have been equivalent to an offer of marriage. My only chance of seeing the radiant stranger was at church. Needless to say we all made it a point to attend every service during her stay. One Sunday afternoon as I was riding over to the Grove, I met Burton plodding homeward along the grassy lane, walking with hanging head and sagging shoulders. He looked like a man in deep and discouraged thought, and when he glanced up at me, with a familiar defensive smile twisting his long lips, I knew something had gone wrong. "Hello," I said. "Where have you been?" "Over to Aunt Sallie's," he said. His long, linen duster was sagging at the sides, and peering down at his pockets I perceived a couple of quarts of lovely Siberian crab-apples. "Where did you get all that fruit?" I demanded. "At home." "What are you going to do with it?" "Take it back again." "What do you mean by such a performance?" With the swift flush and silent laugh which always marked his confessions of weakness, or failure, he replied, "I went over to see Nettie. I intended to give her these apples," he indicated the fruit by a touch on each pocket, "but when I got there I found old Bill Watson, dressed to kill and large as life, sitting in the parlor. I was so afraid of his finding out what I had in my pockets that I didn't go in. I came away leaving him in possession." Of course I laughed--but there was an element of pathos in it after all. Poor Burt! He always failed to get his share of the good things in this world. * * * * * We continued to board ourselves,--now here, now there, and always to the effect of being starved out by Friday night, but we kept well and active even on doughnuts and pie, and were grateful of any camping place in town. Once Burton left a soup-bone to simmer on the stove while we went away to morning recitations, and when we reached home, smoke was leaking from every keyhole. The room was solid with the remains of our bone. It took six months to get the horrid smell of charred beef out of our wardrobe. The girls all sniffed and wondered as we came near. On Fridays we went home and during the winter months very generally attended the Lyceum which met in the Burr Oak school-house. We often debated, and on one occasion I attained to the honor of being called upon to preside over the session. Another memorable evening is that in which I read with what seemed to me distinguished success Joaquin Miller's magnificent new poem, _Kit Carson's Ride_ and in the splendid roar and trample of its lines discovered a new and powerful American poet. His spirit appealed to me. He was at once American and western. I read every line of his verse which the newspapers or magazines brought to me, and was profoundly influenced by its epic quality. And so, term by term, in growing joy and strength, in expanding knowledge of life, we hurried toward the end of our four years' course at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines, attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on our minds. During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg." He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky about his collars and ties,--was, indeed, one of the earliest to purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he never did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine figure and careful dress. As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I write. Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining one's best girl. The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My only comfort was that no one but ourselves could possibly know what an erratic conversationalist I had been. However, she did not seem to lay it up against me. I think she was as much astonished as I and I am persuaded that she valued the compliment of my extravagant gallantry. It is only fair to say that I had risen by this time to the dignity of "boughten shirts," linen collars and "Congress gaiters," and my suit purchased for graduating purposes was of black diagonal with a long tail, a garment which fitted me reasonably well. It was hot, of course, and nearly parboiled me of a summer evening, but I bore my suffering like the hero that I was, in order that I might make a presentable figure in the eyes of my classmates. I longed for a white vest but did not attain to that splendor. Life remained very simple and very democratic in our little town. Although the county seat, it was slow in taking on city ways. I don't believe a real bath-tub distinguished the place (I never heard of one) but its sidewalks kept our feet out of the mud (even in March or April), and this was a marvellous fact to us. One or two fine lawns and flower gardens had come in, and year by year the maples had grown until they now made a pleasant shade in June, and in October glorified the plank walks. To us it was beautiful. As county town, Osage published two papers and was, in addition, the home of two Judges, a state Senator and a Congressman. A new opera house was built in '79 and an occasional "actor troupe" presented military plays like _Our Boys_ or farces like _Solon Shingle_. The brass band and the baseball team were the best in the district, and were loyally upheld by us all. With all these attractions do you wonder that whenever Ed and Bill and Joe had a day of leisure they got out their buggies, washed them till they glistened like new, and called for their best girls on the way to town? Circuses, Fourth of Julys, County Fairs, all took place in Osage, and to own a "covered rig" and to take your sweetheart to the show were the highest forms of affluence and joy--unless you were actually able to live in town, as Burton and I now did for five days in each week, in which case you saw everything that was free and denied yourself everything but the circus. Nobody went so far in economy as that. As a conscientious historian I have gone carefully into the records of this last year, in the hope of finding something that would indicate a feeling on the part of the citizens that Dick Garland's boy was in some ways a remarkable youth, but (I regret to say) I cannot lay hands on a single item. It appears that I was just one of a hundred healthy, hearty, noisy students--but no, wait! There is one incident which has slight significance. One day during my final term of school, as I stood in the postoffice waiting for the mail to be distributed, I picked up from the counter a book called _The Undiscovered Country_. "What is this about?" I asked. The clerk looked up at me with an expression of disgust. "I bought it for a book of travel," said he, "but it is only a novel. Want it? I'll sell it cheap." Having no money to waste in that way, I declined, but as I had the volume in my hands, with a few minutes to spare, I began to read. It did not take me long to discover in this author a grace and precision of style which aroused both my admiration and my resentment. My resentment was vague, I could not have given a reason for it, but as a matter of fact, the English of this new author made some of my literary heroes seem either crude or stilted. I was just young enough and conservative enough to be irritated and repelled by the modernity of William Dean Howells. I put the book down and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it. Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over praise of _Roughing It_. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a lover of the modern when taken off my guard. Meanwhile I had definitely decided not to be a lawyer, and it happened in this way. One Sunday morning as I was walking toward school, I met a young man named Lohr, a law student several years older than myself, who turned and walked with me for a few blocks. "Well, Garland," said he, "what are you going to do after you graduate this June?" "I don't know," I frankly replied. "I have a chance to go into a law office." "Don't do it," protested he with sudden and inexplicable bitterness. "Whatever you do, don't become a lawyer's hack." His tone and the words, "lawyer's hack" had a powerful effect upon my mind. The warning entered my ears and stayed there. I decided against the law, as I had already decided against the farm. * * * * * Yes, these were the sweetest days of my life for I was carefree and glowing with the happiness which streams from perfect health and unquestioning faith. If any shadow drifted across this sunny year it fell from a haunting sense of the impermanency of my leisure. Neither Burton nor I had an ache or a pain. We had no fear and cherished no sorrow, and we were both comparatively free from the lover's almost intolerable longing. Our loves were hardly more than admirations. As I project myself back into those days I re-experience the keen joy I took in the downpour of vivid sunlight, in the colorful clouds of evening, and in the song of the west wind harping amid the maple leaves. The earth was new, the moonlight magical, the dawns miraculous. I shiver with the boy's solemn awe in the presence of beauty. The little recitation rooms, dusty with floating chalk, are wide halls of romance and the voices of my girl classmates (even though their words are algebraic formulas), ring sweet as bells across the years. * * * * * During the years '79 and '80, while Burton and I had been living our carefree jocund life at the Seminary, a series of crop failures had profoundly affected the county, producing a feeling of unrest and bitterness in the farmers which was to have a far-reaching effect on my fortunes as well as upon those of my fellows. For two years the crop had been almost wholly destroyed by chinch bugs. The harvest of '80 had been a season of disgust and disappointment to us for not only had the pestiferous mites devoured the grain, they had filled our stables, granaries, and even our kitchens with their ill-smelling crawling bodies--and now they were coming again in added billions. By the middle of June they swarmed at the roots of the wheat--innumerable as the sands of the sea. They sapped the growing stalks till the leaves turned yellow. It was as if the field had been scorched, even the edges of the corn showed signs of blight. It was evident that the crop was lost unless some great change took place in the weather, and many men began to offer their land for sale. Naturally the business of grain-buying had suffered with the decline of grain-growing, and my father, profoundly discouraged by the outlook, sold his share in the elevator and turned his face toward the free lands of the farther west. He became again the pioneer. DAKOTA was the magic word. The "Jim River Valley" was now the "land of delight," where "herds of deer and buffalo" still "furnished the cheer." Once more the spirit of the explorer flamed up in the soldier's heart. Once more the sunset allured. Once more my mother sang the marching song of the McClintocks, O'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha! and sometime, in May I think it was, father again set out--this time by train, to explore the Land of The Dakotas which had but recently been wrested from the control of Sitting Bull. He was gone only two weeks, but on his return announced with triumphant smile that he had taken up a homestead in Ordway, Brown County, Dakota. His face was again alight with the hope of the borderman, and he had much to say of the region he had explored. As graduation day came on, Burton and I became very serious. The question of our future pressed upon us. What were we to do when our schooling ended? Neither of us had any hope of going to college, and neither of us had any intention of going to Dakota, although I had taken "Going West" as the theme of my oration. We were also greatly worried about these essays. Burton fell off in appetite and grew silent and abstracted. Each of us gave much time to declaiming our speeches, and the question of dress troubled us. Should we wear white ties and white vests, or white ties and black vests? The evening fell on a dark and rainy night, but the Garlands came down in their best attire and so did the Babcocks, the Gilchrists and many other of our neighbors. Burton was hoping that his people would not come, he especially dreaded the humorous gaze of his brother Charles who took a much less serious view of Burton's powers as an orator than Burton considered just. Other interested parents and friends filled the New Opera House to the doors, producing in us a sense of awe for this was the first time the "Exercises" had taken place outside the chapel. Never again shall I feel the same exultation, the same pleasure mingled with bitter sadness, the same perception of the irrevocable passing of beautiful things, and the equally inexorable coming on of care and trouble, as filled my heart that night. Whether any of the other members of my class vibrated with similar emotion or not I cannot say, but I do recall that some of the girls annoyed me by their excessive attentions to unimportant ribbons, flounces, and laces. "How do I look?" seemed their principal concern. Only Alice expressed anything of the prophetic sadness which mingled with her exultation. The name of my theme, (which was made public for the first time in the little programme) is worthy of a moment's emphasis. _Going West_ had been suggested, of course by the emigration fever, then at its height, and upon it I had lavished a great deal of anxious care. As an oration it was all very excited and very florid, but it had some stirring ideas in it and coming in the midst of the profound political discourses of my fellows and the formal essays of the girls, it seemed much more singular and revolutionary, both in form and in substance, than it really was. As I waited my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally, for it was exceedingly florid, filled with phrases like "the lure of the sunset," "the westward urge of men," and was neither prose nor verse. Nevertheless I detected a slight current of sympathy coming up to me, and in the midst of the vast expanse of faces, I began to detect here and there a friendly smile. Mother and father were near but their faces were very serious. After a few moments the blood began to circulate through my limbs and I was able to move about a little on the stage. My courage came back, but alas!--just in proportion as I attained confidence my emotional chant mounted too high! Since the writing was extremely ornate, my manner should have been studiedly cold and simple. This I knew perfectly well, but I could not check the perfervid rush of my song. I ranted deplorably, and though I closed amid fairly generous applause, no flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked with ironic significance, "Well, that was an original piece of business!" This delighted me exceedingly, for I had written with special deliberate intent to go outside the conventional grind of graduating orations. Feeling dimly, but sincerely, the epic march of the American pioneer I had tried to express it in an address which was in fact a sloppy poem. I should not like to have that manuscript printed precisely as it came from my pen, and a phonographic record of my voice would serve admirably as an instrument of blackmail. However, I thought at the time that I had done moderately well, and my mother's shy smile confirmed me in the belief. Burton was white with stage-fright as he stepped from the wings but he got through very well, better than I, for he attempted no oratorical flights. Now came the usual hurried and painful farewells of classmates. With fervid hand-clasp we separated, some of us never again to meet. Our beloved principal (who was even then shadowed by the illness which brought about his death) clung to us as if he hated to see us go, and some of us could not utter a word as we took his hand in parting. What I said to Alice and Maud and Ethel I do not know, but I do recall that I had an uncomfortable lump in my throat while saying it. As a truthful historian, I must add that Burton and I, immediately after this highly emotional close of our school career, were both called upon to climb into the family carriage and drive away into the black night, back to the farm,--an experience which seemed to us at the time a sad anticlimax. When we entered our ugly attic rooms and tumbled wearily into our hard beds, we retained very little of our momentary sense of victory. Our carefree school life was ended. Our stern education in life had begun. CHAPTER XX The Land of the Dakotas The movement of settlers toward Dakota had now become an exodus, a stampede. Hardly anything else was talked about as neighbors met one another on the road or at the Burr Oak school-house on Sundays. Every man who could sell out had gone west or was going. In vain did the county papers and Farmer's Institute lecturers advise cattle raising and plead for diversified tillage, predicting wealth for those who held on; farmer after farmer joined the march to Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota. "We are wheat raisers," they said, "and we intend to keep in the wheat belt." Our own family group was breaking up. My uncle David of pioneer spirit had already gone to the far Missouri Valley. Rachel had moved to Georgia, and Grandad McClintock was with his daughters, Samantha and Deborah, in western Minnesota. My mother, thus widely separated from her kin, resigned herself once more to the thought of founding a new home. Once more she sang, "O'er the hills in legions, boys," with such spirit as she could command, her clear voice a little touched with the huskiness of regret. I confess I sympathized in some degree with my father's new design. There was something large and fine in the business of wheat-growing, and to have a plague of insects arise just as our harvesting machinery was reaching such perfection that we could handle our entire crop without hired help, was a tragic, abominable injustice. I could not blame him for his resentment and dismay. My personal plans were now confused and wavering. I had no intention of joining this westward march; on the contrary, I was looking toward employment as a teacher, therefore my last weeks at the Seminary were shadowed by a cloud of uncertainty and vague alarm. It seemed a time of change, and immense, far-reaching, portentous readjustment. Our homestead was sold, my world was broken up. "What am I to do?" was my question. Father had settled upon Ordway, Brown County, South Dakota, as his future home, and immediately after my graduation, he and my brother set forth into the new country to prepare the way for the family's removal, leaving me to go ahead with the harvest alone. It fell out, therefore, that immediately after my flowery oration on _Going West_ I found myself more of a slave to the cattle than ever before in my life. Help was scarce; I could not secure even so much as a boy to aid in milking the cows; I was obliged to work double time in order to set up the sheaves of barley which were in danger of mouldering on the wet ground. I worked with a kind of bitter, desperate pleasure, saying, "This is the last time I shall ever lift a bundle of this accursed stuff." And then, to make the situation worse, in raising some heavy machinery connected with the self-binder, I strained my side so seriously that I was unable to walk. This brought the harvesting to a stand, and made my father's return necessary. For several weeks I hobbled about, bent like a gnome, and so helped to reap what the chinch bugs had left, while my mother prepared to "follow the sunset" with her "Boss." September first was the day set for saying good-bye to Dry Run, and it so happened that her wedding anniversary fell close upon the same date and our neighbors, having quietly passed the word around, came together one Sunday afternoon to combine a farewell dinner with a Silver Wedding "surprise party." Mother saw nothing strange in the coming of the first two carriages, the Buttons often came driving in that way,--but when the Babcocks, the Coles, and the Gilchrists clattered in with smiling faces, we all stood in the yard transfixed with amazement. "What's the meaning of all this?" asked my father. No one explained. The women calmly clambered down from their vehicles, bearing baskets and bottles and knobby parcels, and began instant and concerted bustle of preparation. The men tied their horses to the fence and hunted up saw-horses and planks, and soon a long table was spread beneath the trees on the lawn. One by one other teams came whirling into the yard. The assembly resembled a "vandoo" as Asa Walker said. "It's worse than that," laughed Mrs. Turner. "It's a silver wedding and a 'send off' combined." They would not let either the "bride" or the "groom" do a thing, and with smiling resignation my mother folded her hands and sank into a chair. "All right," she said. "I am perfectly willing to sit by and see you do the work. I won't have another chance right away." And there was something sad in her voice. She could not forget that this was the beginning of a new pioneering adventure. The shadows were long on the grass when at the close of the supper old John Gammons rose to make a speech and present the silver tea set. His voice was tremulous with emotion as he spoke of the loss which the neighborhood was about to suffer, and tears were in many eyes when father made reply. The old soldier's voice failed him several times during his utterance of the few short sentences he was able to frame, and at last he was obliged to take his seat, and blow his nose very hard on his big bandanna handkerchief to conceal his emotion. It was a very touching and beautiful moment to me, for as I looked around upon that little group of men and women, rough-handed, bent and worn with toil, silent and shadowed with the sorrow of parting, I realized as never before the high place my parents had won in the estimation of their neighbors. It affected me still more deeply to see my father stammer and flush with uncontrollable emotion. I had thought the event deeply important before, but I now perceived that our going was all of a piece with the West's elemental restlessness. I could not express what I felt then, and I can recover but little of it now, but the pain which filled my throat comes back to me mixed with a singular longing to relive it. There, on a low mound in the midst of the prairie, in the shadow of the house we had built, beneath the slender trees we had planted, we were bidding farewell to one cycle of emigration and entering upon another. The border line had moved on, and my indomitable Dad was moving with it. I shivered with dread of the irrevocable decision thus forced upon me. I heard a clanging as of great gates behind me and the field of the future was wide and wan. From this spot we had seen the wild prairies disappear. On every hand wheat and corn and clover had taken the place of the wild oat, the hazelbush and the rose. Our house, a commonplace frame cabin, took on grace. Here Hattie had died. Our yard was ugly, but there Jessie's small feet had worn a slender path. Each of our lives was knit into these hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in response to some powerful yearning call, my father was about to set out for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west. Small wonder that my mother sat with bowed head and tear-blinded eyes, while these good and faithful friends crowded around her to say good-bye. She had no enemies and no hatreds. Her rich singing voice, her smiling face, her ready sympathy with those who suffered, had endeared her to every home into which she had gone, even as a momentary visitor. No woman in childbirth, no afflicted family within a radius of five miles had ever called for her in vain. Death knew her well, for she had closed the eyes of youth and age, and yet she remained the same laughing, bounteous, whole-souled mother of men that she had been in the valley of the Neshonoc. Nothing could permanently cloud her face or embitter the sunny sweetness of her creed. One by one the women put their worn, ungraceful arms about her, kissed her with trembling lips, and went away in silent grief. The scene became too painful for me at last, and I fled away from it--out into the fields, bitterly asking, "Why should this suffering be? Why should mother be wrenched from all her dearest friends and forced to move away to a strange land?" * * * * * I did not see the actual packing up and moving of the household goods, for I had determined to set forth in advance and independently, eager to be my own master, and at the moment I did not feel in the least like pioneering. Some two years before, when the failure of our crop had made the matter of my continuing at school an issue between my father and myself, I had said, "If you will send me to school until I graduate, I will ask nothing further of you," and these words I now took a stern pleasure in upholding. Without a dollar of my own, I announced my intention to fare forth into the world on the strength of my two hands, but my father, who was in reality a most affectionate parent, offered me thirty dollars to pay my carfare. This I accepted, feeling that I had abundantly earned this money, and after a sad parting with my mother and my little sister, set out one September morning for Osage. At the moment I was oppressed with the thought that this was the fork in the trail, that my family and I had started on differing roads. I had become a man. With all the ways of the world before me I suffered from a feeling of doubt. The open gate allured me, but the homely scenes I was leaving suddenly put forth a latent magic. I knew every foot of this farm. I had traversed it scores of times in every direction, following the plow, the harrow, or the seeder. With a great lumber wagon at my side I had husked corn from every acre of it, and now I was leaving it with no intention of returning. My action, like that of my father, was final. As I looked back up the lane at the tall Lombardy poplar trees bent like sabres in the warm western wind, the landscape I was leaving seemed suddenly very beautiful, and the old home very peaceful and very desirable. Nevertheless I went on. Try as I may, I cannot bring back out of the darkness of that night any memory of how I spent the time. I must have called upon some of my classmates, but I cannot lay hold upon a single word or look or phrase from any of them. Deeply as I felt my distinction in thus riding forth into the world, all the tender incidents of farewell are lost to me. Perhaps my boyish self-absorption prevented me from recording outside impressions, for the idea of travelling, of crossing the State line, profoundly engaged me. Up to this time, notwithstanding all my dreams of conquest in far countries, I had never ridden in a railway coach! Can you wonder therefore that I trembled with joyous excitement as I paced the platform next morning waiting for the chariot of my romance? The fact that it was a decayed little coach at the end of a "mixed accommodation train" on a stub road did not matter. I was ecstatic. However, I was well dressed, and my inexperience appeared only in a certain tense watchfulness. I closely observed what went on around me and was careful to do nothing which could be misconstrued as ignorance. Thrilling with excitement, feeling the mighty significance of my departure, I entered quietly and took my seat, while the train roared on through Mitchell and St. Ansgar, the little towns in which I had played my part as an actor,--on into distant climes and marvellous cities. My emotion was all very boyish, but very natural as I look back upon it. The town in which I spent my first night abroad should have been called Thebes or Athens or Palmyra; but it was not. On the contrary, it was named Ramsey, after an old pioneer, and no one but a youth of fervid imagination at the close of his first day of adventure in the world would have found it worth a second glance. To me it was both beautiful and inspiring, for the reason that it was new territory and because it was the home of Alice, my most brilliant school mate, and while I had in mind some notion of a conference with the county superintendent of schools, my real reason for stopping off was a desire to see this girl whom I greatly admired. I smile as I recall the feeling of pride with which I stepped into the 'bus and started for the Grand Central Hotel. And yet, after all, values are relative. That boy had something which I have lost. I would give much of my present knowledge of the world for the keen savor of life which filled my nostrils at that time. The sound of a violin is mingled with my memories of Ramsey, and the talk of a group of rough men around the bar-room stove is full of savage charm. A tall, pale man, with long hair and big black eyes, one who impressed me as being a man of refinement and culture, reduced by drink to poverty and to rebellious bitterness of soul, stands out in powerful relief--a tragic and moving figure. Here, too, I heard my first splendid singer. A patent medicine cart was in the street and one of its troupe, a basso, sang _Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep_ with such art that I listened with delight. His lion-like pose, his mighty voice, his studied phrasing, revealed to me higher qualities of musical art than I had hitherto known. From this singer, I went directly to Alice's home. I must have appeared singularly exalted as I faced her. The entire family was in the sitting room as I entered--but after a few kindly inquiries concerning my people and some general remarks they each and all slipped away, leaving me alone with the girl--in the good old-fashioned American way. It would seem that in this farewell call I was permitting myself an exaggeration of what had been to Alice only a pleasant association, for she greeted me composedly and waited for me to justify my presence. After a few moments of explanation, I suggested that we go out and hear the singing of the "troupe." To this she consented, and rose quietly--she never did anything hurriedly or with girlish alertness--and put on her hat. Although so young, she had the dignity of a woman, and her face, pale as a silver moon, was calm and sweet, only her big gray eyes expressed the maiden mystery. She read my adoration and was a little afraid of it. As we walked, I spoke of the good days at "the Sem," of our classmates, and their future, and this led me to the announcement of my own plans. "I shall teach," I said. "I hope to be able to work into a professorship in literature some day.--What do you intend to do?" "I shall go on with my studies for a while," she replied. "I may go to some eastern college for a few years." "You must not become too learned," I urged. "You'll forget me." She did not protest this as a coquette might have done. On the contrary, she remained silent, and I was aware that while she liked and respected me, she was not profoundly moved by this farewell call. Nevertheless I hoped, and in that hope I repeated, "You will write to me, won't you?" "Of course!" she replied, and again I experienced a chilling perception that her words arose from friendliness rather than from tenderness, but I was glad of even this restrained promise, and I added, "I shall write often, for I shall be lonely--for a while." As I walked on, the girl's soft warm arm in mine, a feeling of uncertainty, of disquiet, took possession of me. "Success" seemed a long way off and the road to it long and hard. However, I said nothing further concerning my doubts. The street that night had all the enchantment of Granada to me. The girl's voice rippled with a music like that of the fountain Lindarazza, and when I caught glimpses of her sweet, serious face beneath her hat-rim, I dreaded our parting. The nearer to her gate we drew the more tremulous my voice became, and the more uncertain my step. At last on the door-step she turned and said, "Won't you come in again?" In her tone was friendly dismissal, but I would not have it so. "You will write to me, won't you?" I pleaded with choking utterance. She was moved (by pity perhaps). "Why, yes, with pleasure," she answered. "Good-bye, I hope you'll succeed. I'm sure you will." She extended her hand and I, recalling the instructions of my most romantic fiction, raised it to my lips. "Good-bye!" I huskily said, and turned away. My next night was spent in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, _The Mystery of Metropolisville_ and my imagination responded to the magic which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a long and impassioned account of my sensations as I stood beside the Cannonball River. My search for a school proving futile, I pushed on to the town of Farmington, where the Dakota branch of the Milwaukee railroad crossed my line of march. Here I felt to its full the compelling power of the swift stream of immigration surging to the west. The little village had doubled in size almost in a day. It was a junction point, a place of transfer, and its thin-walled unpainted pine hotels were packed with men, women and children laden with bags and bundles (all bound for the west) and the joyous excitement of these adventurers compelled me to change my plan. I decided to try some of the newer counties in western Minnesota. Romance was still in the West for me. I slept that night on the floor in company with four or five young Iowa farmers, and the smell of clean white shavings, the wailing of tired children, the excited muttering of fathers, the plaintive voices of mothers, came through the partitions at intervals, producing in my mind an effect which will never pass away. It seemed to me at the moment as if all America were in process of change, all hurrying to overtake the vanishing line of the middle border, and the women at least were secretly or openly doubtful of the outcome. Woman is not by nature an explorer. She is the home-lover. Early the next morning I bought a ticket for Aberdeen, and entered the train crammed with movers who had found the "prairie schooner" all too slow. The epoch of the canvas-covered wagon had passed. The era of the locomotive, the day of the chartered car, had arrived. Free land was receding at railroad speed, the borderline could be overtaken only by steam, and every man was in haste to arrive. All that day we rumbled and rattled into a strange country, feeding our little engine with logs of wood, which we stopped occasionally to secure from long ricks which lined the banks of the river. At Chaska, at Granite Falls, I stepped off, but did not succeed in finding employment. It is probable that being filled with the desire of exploration I only half-heartedly sought for work; at any rate, on the third day, I found myself far out upon the unbroken plain where only the hairlike buffalo grass grew--beyond trees, beyond the plow, but not beyond settlement, for here at the end of my third day's ride at Millbank, I found a hamlet six months old, and the flock of shining yellow pine shanties strewn upon the sod, gave me an illogical delight, but then I was twenty-one--and it was sunset in the Land of the Dakotas! All around me that night the talk was all of land, land! Nearly every man I met was bound for the "Jim River valley," and each voice was aquiver with hope, each eye alight with anticipation of certain success. Even the women had begun to catch something of this enthusiasm, for the night was very beautiful and the next day promised fair. Again I slept on a cot in a room of rough pine, slept dreamlessly, and was out early enough to witness the coming of dawn,--a wonderful moment that sunrise was to me. Again, as eleven years before, I felt myself a part of the new world, a world fresh from the hand of God. To the east nothing could be seen but a vague expanse of yellow plain, misty purple in its hollows, but to the west rose a long low wall of hills, the Eastern Coteaux, up which a red line of prairie fire was slowly creeping. It was middle September. The air, magnificently crisp and clear, filled me with desire of exploration, with vague resolution to do and dare. The sound of horses and mules calling for their feed, the clatter of hammers and the rasping of saws gave evidence of eager builders, of alert adventurers, and I was hotly impatient to get forward. At eight o'clock the engine drew out, pulling after it a dozen box-cars laden with stock and household goods, and on the roof of a freight caboose, together with several other young Jasons, I rode, bound for the valley of the James. It was a marvellous adventure. All the morning we rattled and rumbled along, our engine snorting with effort, struggling with a load almost too great for its strength. By noon we were up amid the rounded grassy hills of the Sisseton Reservation where only the coyote ranged and the Sioux made residence. Here we caught our first glimpse of the James River valley, which seemed to us at the moment as illimitable as the ocean and as level as a floor, and then pitching and tossing over the rough track, with our cars leaping and twisting like a herd of frightened buffaloes, we charged down the western slope, down into a level land of ripened grass, where blackbirds chattered in the willows, and prairie chickens called from the tall rushes which grew beside the sluggish streams. Aberdeen was the end of the line, and when we came into it that night it seemed a near neighbor to Sitting Bull and the bison. And so, indeed, it was, for a buffalo bull had been hunted across its site less than a year before. It was twelve miles from here to where my father had set his stakes for his new home, hence I must have stayed all night in some small hotel, but that experience has also faded from my mind. I remember only my walk across the dead-level plain next day. For the first time I set foot upon a landscape without a tree to break its sere expanse--and I was at once intensely interested in a long flock of gulls, apparently rolling along the sod, busily gathering their morning meal of frosted locusts. The ones left behind kept flying over the ones in front so that a ceaseless change of leadership took place. There was beauty in this plain, delicate beauty and a weird charm, despite its lack of undulation. Its lonely unplowed sweep gave me the satisfying sensation of being at last among the men who held the outposts,--sentinels for the marching millions who were approaching from the east. For two hours I walked, seeing Aberdeen fade to a series of wavering, grotesque notches on the southern horizon line, while to the north an equally irregular and insubstantial line of shadows gradually took on weight and color until it became the village in which my father was at this very moment busy in founding his new home. My experienced eyes saw the deep, rich soil, and my youthful imagination looking into the future, supplied the trees and vines and flowers which were to make this land a garden. I was converted. I had no doubts. It seemed at the moment that my father had acted wisely in leaving his Iowa farm in order to claim his share of Uncle Sam's rapidly-lessening unclaimed land. CHAPTER XXI The Grasshopper and the Ant Without a doubt this trip, so illogical and so recklessly extravagant, was due entirely to a boy's thirst for adventure. Color it as I may, the fact of my truancy remains. I longed to explore. The valley of the James allured me, and though my ticket and my meals along the route had used up my last dollar, I felt amply repaid as I trod this new earth and confronted this new sky--for both earth and sky were to my perception subtly different from those of Iowa and Minnesota. The endless stretches of short, dry grass, the gorgeous colors of the dawn, the marvellous, shifting, phantom lakes and headlands, the violet sunset afterglow,--all were widely different from our old home, and the far, bare hills were delightfully suggestive of the horseman, the Indian and the buffalo. The village itself was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of "corner lots" and "boulevards," and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers. The spirit of the builder seized me and so with my return ticket in my pocket, I joined the carpenters at work on my father's claim some two miles from the village with intent to earn money for further exploration. Grandfather Garland had also taken a claim (although he heartily disliked the country) and in order to provide for both families a double house was being built across the line between the two farms. I helped shingle the roof, and being twenty-one now, and my own master, I accepted wages from my father without a qualm. I earned every cent of my two dollars per day, I assure you, but I carefully omitted all reference to shingling, in my letters to my classmates. At the end of a fortnight with my pay in my pocket I started eastward on a trip which I fully intended to make very long and profoundly educational. That I was green, very green, I knew but all that could be changed by travel. At the end of my second day's journey, I reached Hastings, a small town on the Mississippi river, and from there decided to go by water to Redwing some thirty miles below. All my life I had longed to ride on a Mississippi steamboat, and now, as I waited on the wharf at the very instant of the fulfillment of my desire, I expanded with anticipatory satisfaction. The arrival of the _War Eagle_ from St. Paul carried a fine foreign significance, and I ascended its gang-plank with the air of a traveller embarking at Cairo for Assouan. Once aboard the vessel I mingled, aloofly, with the passengers, absorbed in study of the river winding down among its wooded hills. This ecstasy lasted during the entire trip--indeed it almost took on poetic form as the vessel approached the landing at Redwing, for at this point the legendary appeal made itself felt. This lovely valley had once been the home of a chieftain, and his body, together with that of his favorite warhorse, was buried on the summit of a hill which overlooks the river, "in order" (so runs the legend) "that the chief might see the first faint glow of the resurrection morn and ride to meet it." In truth Redwing was a quiet, excessively practical little town, quite commonplace to every other passenger, except myself. My excited imagination translated it into something very distinctive and far-off and shining. I took lodgings that night at a very exclusive boarding house at six dollars per week, reckless of the effect on my very slender purse. For a few days I permitted myself to wander and to dream. I have disturbing recollections of writing my friends from this little town, letters wherein I rhapsodized on the beauty of the scenery in terms which I would not now use in describing the Grand Canyon, or in picturing the peaks of Wyoming. After all I was right. A landscape is precisely as great as the impression it makes upon the perceiving mind. I was a traveller at last!--that seemed to be my chiefest joy and I extracted from each day all the ecstasy it contained. My avowed object was to obtain a school and I did not entirely neglect my plans but application to the county superintendent came to nothing. I fear I was half-hearted in my campaign. At last, at the beginning of the week and at the end of my money, I bought passage to Wabasha and from there took train to a small town where some of my mother's cousins lived. I had been in correspondence with one of them, a Mrs. Harris, and I landed at her door (after a glorious ride up through the hills, amid the most gorgeous autumn colors) with just three cents in my pocket--a poverty which you may be sure I did not publish to my relations who treated me with high respect and manifested keen interest in all my plans. As nothing offered in the township round about the Harris home, I started one Saturday morning to walk to a little cross-roads village some twenty miles away, in which I was told a teacher was required. My cousins, not knowing that I was penniless, supposed, of course, that I would go by train, and I was too proud to tell them the truth. It was very muddy, and when I reached the home of the committeeman his mid-day meal was over, and his wife did not ask if I had dined--although she was quick to tell me that the teacher had just been hired. Without a cent in my pocket, I could not ask for food--therefore, I turned back weary, hungry and disheartened. To make matters worse a cold rain was falling and the eighteen or twenty miles between me and the Harris farm looked long. I think it must have been at this moment that I began, for the first time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at this hour. The road was deep in mud, and as night drew on the rain thickened. At last I said, "I will go into some farm-house and ask the privilege of a bed." This was apparently a simple thing to do and yet I found it exceedingly hard to carry out. To say bluntly, "Sir, I have no money, I am tired and hungry," seemed a baldly disgraceful way of beginning. On the other hand to plead relationship with Will Harris involved a relative, and besides they might not know my cousin, or they might think my statement false. Arguing in this way I passed house after house while the water dripped from my hat and the mud clogged my feet. Though chilled and hungry to the point of weakness, my suffering was mainly mental. A sudden realization of the natural antagonism of the well-to-do toward the tramp appalled me. Once, as I turned in toward the bright light of a kitchen window, the roar of a watch dog stopped me before I had fairly passed the gate. I turned back with a savage word, hot with resentment at a house-owner who would keep a beast like that. At another cottage I was repulsed by an old woman who sharply said, "We don't feed tramps." I now had the precise feeling of the penniless outcast. With morbidly active imagination I conceived of myself as a being forever set apart from home and friends, condemned to wander the night alone. I worked on this idea till I achieved a bitter, furtive and ferocious manner. However, I knocked at another door and upon meeting the eyes of the woman at the threshold, began with formal politeness to explain, "I am a teacher, I have been to look for a school, and I am on my way back to Byron, where I have relatives. Can you keep me all night?" The woman listened in silence and at length replied with ungracious curtness, "I guess so. Come in." She gave me a seat by the fire, and when her husband returned from the barn, I explained the situation to him. He was only moderately cordial. "Make yourself at home. I'll be in as soon as I have finished my milking," he said and left me beside the kitchen fire. The woman of the house, silent, suspicious (it seemed to me) began to spread the table for supper while I, sitting beside the stove, began to suffer with the knowledge that I had, in a certain sense, deceived them. I was fairly well dressed and my voice and manner, as well as the fact that I was seeking a school, had given them, no doubt, the impression that I was able to pay for my entertainment, and the more I thought of this the more uneasy I became. To eat of their food without making an explanation was impossible but the longer I waited the more difficult the explanation grew. Suffering keenly, absurdly, I sat with hanging head going over and over the problem, trying to formulate an easy way of letting them know my predicament. There was but one way of escape--and I took it. As the woman stepped out of the room for a moment, I rose, seized my hat and rushed out into the rain and darkness like a fugitive. I have often wondered what those people thought when they found me gone. Perhaps I am the great mystery of their lives, an unexplained visitant from "the night's Plutonian shore." I plodded on for another mile or two in the darkness, which was now so intense I could scarcely keep the road. Only by the feel of the mud under my feet could I follow the pike. Like Jean Valjean, I possessed a tempest in my brain. I experienced my first touch of despair. Although I had never had more than thirty dollars at any one time, I had never been without money. Distinctions had not counted largely in the pioneer world to which I belonged. I was proud of my family. I came of good stock, and knew it and felt it, but now here I was, wet as a sponge and without shelter simply because I had not in my pocket a small piece of silver with which to buy a bed. I walked on until this dark surge of rebellious rage had spent its force and reason weakly resumed her throne. I said, "What nonsense! Here I am only a few miles from relatives. All the farmers on this road must know the Harris family. If I tell them who I am, they will certainly feel that I have the claim of a neighbor upon them."--But these deductions, admirable as they were, did not lighten my sky or make begging easier. After walking two miles further I found it almost impossible to proceed. It was black night and I did not know where I stood. The wind had risen and the rain was falling in slant cataracts. As I looked about me and caught the gleam from the windows of a small farmhouse, my stubborn pride gave way. Stumbling up the path I rapped on the door. It was opened by a middle-aged farmer in his stocking feet, smoking a pipe. Having finished his supper he was taking his ease beside the fire, and fortunately for me, was in genial mood. "Come in," he said heartily. "'Tis a wet night." I began, "I am a cousin of William Harris of Byron--" "You don't say! Well, what are you doing on the road a night like this? Come in!" I stepped inside and finished my explanation there. This good man and his wife will forever remain the most hospitable figures in my memory. They set me close beside the stove insisting that I put my feet in the oven to dry, talking meanwhile of my cousins and the crops, and complaining of the incessant rainstorms which were succeeding one another almost without intermission, making this one of the wettest and most dismal autumns the country had ever seen. Never in all my life has a roof seemed more heavenly, or hosts more sweet and gracious. After breakfast next morning I shook hands with the farmer saying: "I shall send you the money for my entertainment the first time my cousin comes to town," and under the clamor of his hospitable protestations against payment, set off up the road. The sun came out warm and beautiful and all about me on every farm the teamsters were getting into the fields. The mud began to dry up and with the growing cheer of the morning my heart expanded and the experience of the night before became as unreal as a dream and yet it had happened, and it had taught me a needed lesson. Hereafter I take no narrow chances, I vowed to myself. Upon arrival at my cousin's home I called him aside and said, "Will, you have work to do and I have need of wages,--I am going to strip off this 'boiled shirt' and white collar, and I am going to work for you just the same as any other hand, and I shall expect the full pay of the best man on your place." He protested, "I don't like to see you do this. Don't give up your plans. I'll hitch up and we'll start out and keep going till we find you a school." "No," I said, "not till I earn a few dollars to put in my pocket. I've played the grasshopper for a few weeks--from this time on I'm the busy ant." So it was settled, and the grasshopper went forth into the fields and toiled as hard as any slave. I plowed, threshed, and husked corn, and when at last December came, I had acquired money enough to carry me on my way. I decided to visit Onalaska and the old coulee where my father's sister and two of the McClintocks were still living. With swift return of confidence, I said good-bye to my friends in Zumbrota and took the train. It seemed very wonderful that after a space of thirteen years I should be returning to the scenes of my childhood, a full-grown man and paying my own way. I expanded with joy of the prospect. Onalaska, the reader may remember, was the town in which I had gone to school when a child, and in my return to it I felt somewhat like the man in the song, _Twenty Years Ago_--indeed I sang, "I've wandered through the village, Tom, I've sat beneath the tree" for my uncle that first night. There was the river, filled as of old with logs, and the clamor of the saws still rose from the sawdust islands. Bleakly white the little church, in which we used to sit in our Sunday best, remained unchanged but the old school-house was not merely altered, it was gone! In its place stood a commonplace building of brick. The boys with whom I used to play "Mumblety Peg" were men, and some of them had developed into worthless loafers, lounging about the doors of the saloons, and although we looked at one another with eyes of sly recognition, we did not speak. Eagerly I visited the old coulee, but the magic was gone from the hills, the glamour from the meadows. The Widow Green no longer lived at the turn of the road, and only the Randals remained. The marsh was drained, the big trees cleared away. The valley was smaller, less mysterious, less poetic than my remembrances of it, but it had charm nevertheless, and I responded to the beauty of its guarding bluffs and the deep-blue shadows which streamed across its sunset fields. Uncle William drove down and took me home with him, over the long hill, back to the little farm where he was living much the same as I remembered him. One of his sons was dead, the other had shared in the rush for land, and was at this time owner of a homestead in western Minnesota. Grandfather McClintock, still able to walk about, was spending the autumn with William and we had a great deal of talk concerning the changes which had come to the country and especially to our family group. "Ye scatter like the leaves of autumn," he said sadly--then added, "Perhaps in the Final Day the trumpet of the Lord will bring us all together again." We sang some of his old Adventist hymns together and then he asked me what I was planning to do. "I haven't any definite plans," I answered, "except to travel. I want to travel. I want to see the world." "To see the world!" he exclaimed. "As for me I wait for it to pass away. I watch daily for the coming of the Chariot." This gray old crag of a man interested me as deeply as ever and yet, in a sense, he was an alien. He was not of my time--scarcely of my country. He was a survival of the days when the only book was the Bible, when the newspaper was a luxury. Migration had been his lifelong adventure and now he was waiting for the last great remove. His thought now was of "the region of the Amaranth," his new land "the other side of Jordan." He engaged my respect but I was never quite at ease with him. His valuations were too intensely religious; he could not understand my ambitions. His mind filled with singular prejudices,--notions which came down from the Colonial age, was impervious to new ideas. His character had lost something of its mellow charm--but it had gained in dramatic significance. Like my uncles he had ceased to be a part of my childish world. I went away with a sense of sadness, of loss as though a fine picture on the walls of memory had been dimmed or displaced. I perceived that I had idealized him as I had idealized all the figures and scenes of my boyhood--"but no matter, they were beautiful to me then and beautiful they shall remain," was the vague resolution with which I dismissed criticism. The whole region had become by contrast with Dakota, a "settled" community. The line of the middle border had moved on some three hundred miles to the west. The Dunlaps, McIldowneys, Dudleys and Elwells were the stay-at-homes. Having had their thrust at the job of pioneering before the war they were now content on their fat soil. To me they all seemed remote. Their very names had poetic value, for they brought up in my mind shadowy pictures of the Coulee country as it existed to my boyish memories. I spent nearly two months in Onalaska, living with my Aunt Susan, a woman of the loveliest character. Richard Bailey, her husband, one of the kindliest of men, soon found employment for me, and so, for a time, I was happy and secure. However, this was but a pause by the roadside. I was not satisfied. It was a show of weakness to settle down on one's relations. I wanted to make my way among strangers. I scorned to lean upon my aunt and uncle, though they were abundantly able to keep me. It was mid-winter, nothing offered and so I turned (as so many young men similarly placed have done), toward a very common yet difficult job. I attempted to take subscriptions for a book. After a few days' experience in a neighboring town I decided that whatever else I might be fitted for in this world, I was not intended for a book agent. Surrendering my prospectus to the firm, I took my way down to Madison, the capital of the state, a city which seemed at this time very remote, and very important in my world. Only when travelling did I have the feeling of living up to the expectations of Alice and Burton who put into their letters to me, an envy which was very sweet. To them I was a bold adventurer! Alas for me! In the shining capital of my state I felt again the world's rough hand. First of all I tried The State House. This was before the general use of typewriters and I had been told that copyists were in demand. I soon discovered that four men and two girls were clamoring for every job. Nobody needed me. I met with blunt refusals and at last turned to other fields. Every morning I went among the merchants seeking an opportunity to clerk or keep books, and at last obtained a place at six dollars per week in the office of an agricultural implement firm. I was put to work in the accounting department, as general slavey, under the immediate supervision of a youth who had just graduated from my position and who considered me his legitimate victim. He was only seventeen and not handsome, and I despised him with instant bitterness. Under his direction I swept out the office, made copies of letters, got the mail, stamped envelopes and performed other duties of a manual routine kind, to which I would have made no objection, had it not been for the gloating joy with which that chinless cockerel ordered me about. I had never been under that kind of discipline, and to have a pin-headed gamin order me to clean spittoons was more than I could stomach. At the end of the week I went to the proprietor, and said, "If you have nothing better for me to do than sweep the floor and run errands, I think I'll quit." With some surprise my boss studied me. At last he said: "Very well, sir, you can go, and from all accounts I don't think we'll miss you much," which was perfectly true. I was an absolute failure so far as any routine work of that kind was concerned. So here again I was thrown upon a cruel world with only six dollars between myself and the wolf. Again I fell back upon my physical powers. I made the round of all the factories seeking manual labor. I went out on the Catfish, where, through great sheds erected for the manufacture of farm machinery, I passed from superintendent to foreman, from foreman to boss,--eager to wheel sand, paint woodwork, shovel coal--anything at all to keep from sending home for money--for, mind you, my father or my uncle would have helped me out had I written to them, but I could not do that. So long as I was able to keep a roof over my head, I remained silent. I was in the world and I intended to keep going without asking a cent from anyone. Besides, the grandiloquent plans for travel and success which I had so confidently outlined to Burton must be carried out. I should have been perfectly secure had it been summertime, for I knew the farmer's life and all that pertained to it, but it was winter. How to get a living in a strange town was my problem. It was a bright, clear, intensely cold February, and I was not very warmly dressed--hence I kept moving. Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from turning me into the street. Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and Dickens. I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a date for me in a neighboring country church.--Thereafter while I glowed with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter. One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton) seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer--of such absurd contradictions are the visions of youth. I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us both--I contracted to lecture under his management! He was delighted at the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy. Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of service I had been preparing for during all my years at school--but alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we failed. I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my father had given Frank for his business education. However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western metropolis, but dared not do so--yet. I felt safe only when in sight of a plowed field. At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life. From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely started, but on Saturday of the second week the proprietor called me to him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable, and yet I think we must part." The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my mind) ignoble; first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally improved the English.--However, I admitted the charge of insubordination, and we parted quite amicably. It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims the assistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to recognize that I was not a "bum." He offered me the position of night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These were dark hours! During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns. Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world, I had this satisfaction--I was getting it! Very sweet and far away seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my classmates, but was careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only of my travels and my reading. As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the County Jail, I consented, at least I took part in the singing. In this way I partly paid the debt I owed the Association, and secured some vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My three associates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew would come seeding, building and a chance for me. At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?" In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done." Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay (a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools. Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came soon,--too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I borrowed twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which helped me through another afternoon. The third day was less painful and by the end of the week, I was able to do anything required of me. Upon receiving my pay I went immediately to the hardware store and bought a set of tools and a carpenter's apron, and early on Monday morning sallied forth in the _opposite direction_ as a carpenter seeking a job. I soon came to a big frame house in course of construction. "Do you need another hand?" I asked. "Yes," replied the boss. "Take hold, right here, with this man." "This man" turned out to be a Swede, a good-natured fellow, who made no comment on my deficiencies. We sawed and hammered together in very friendly fashion for a week, and I made rapid gains in strength and skill and took keen pleasure in my work. The days seemed short and life promising and as I was now getting two dollars per day, I moved out of my charity bed and took a room in a decayed mansion in the midst of a big lawn. My bearing became confident and easy. Money had straightened my back. The spring advanced rapidly while I was engaged on this work and as my crew occasionally took contracts in the country I have vivid pictures of the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings, and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein. I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me the tragedy of her life--and always I have the foolish boyish notion that I am out in the world and seeing life. Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with anticipatory delight, for to me the word _Booth_ meant all that was splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that something might prevent me from hearing him. At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my youthful trail. My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene, discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the noble Dane, and the sound of his voice,--that magic velvet voice--floated to my ear with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor space nor matter existed for me--I was in an ecstasy of attention. I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the tragedies and historical plays, and I had been assured by my teachers that _Hamlet_ was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed page. With voice and face and hand he restored for duller minds the visions of the poet, making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own. From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a glorious melancholy, I returned to my association with a tinker, a tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed silence as only love is supposed to give. I re-read my _Hamlet_ now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's matchless voice. Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development, needing only the girl to be perfect--but I had no one but Alice to whom I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning _Hamlet_ and the genius of Edwin Booth. CHAPTER XXII We Discover New England Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful scenic effects in _Old Put_ and _The Gold Seekers_, wherein actors rode down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and sawing, I evolved a daring plan--I decided to visit Boston and explore New England. With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said, and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived there. Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance of Massachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of _The Liberator_ were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that there were giants in those days and the thought of walking the streets where Garrison was mobbed and standing in the hall which Webster had hallowed with his voice gave me a profound anticipatory stir of delight. As first assistant to a quaint and dirty old carpenter, I was now earning two dollars per day, and saving it. There was no occasion in those days for anyone to give me instructions concerning the care of money. I knew how every dollar came and I was equally careful to know where every nickel went. Travel cost three cents per mile, and the number of cities to be visited depended upon the number of dimes I should save. With my plan of campaign mapped out to include a stop at Niagara Falls and fourth of July on Boston Common I wrote to my brother at Valparaiso, Indiana, inviting him to join me in my adventure. "If we run out of money and of course we shall, for I have only about thirty dollars, we'll flee to the country. One of my friends here says we can easily find work in the meadows near Concord." The audacity of my design appealed to my brother's imagination. "I'm your huckleberry!" he replied. "School ends the last week in June. I'll meet you at the Atlantic House in Chicago on the first. Have about twenty dollars myself." At last the day came for my start. With all my pay in my pocket and my trunk checked I took the train for Chicago. I shall never forget the feeling of dismay with which, an hour later, I perceived from the car window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for this, I was told was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often reported to me by wandering hired men. It was in truth only a huge flimsy country town in those days, but to me it was august as well as terrible. Up to this moment Rockford was the largest town I had ever seen, and the mere thought of a million people stunned my imagination. "How can so many people find a living in one place?" Naturally I believed most of them to be robbers. "If the city is miles across, how am I to get from the railway station to my hotel without being assaulted?" Had it not been for the fear of ridicule, I think I should have turned back at the next stop. The shining lands beyond seemed hardly worth a struggle against the dragon's brood with which the dreadful city was a-swarm. Nevertheless I kept my seat and was carried swiftly on. Soon the straggling farm-houses thickened into groups, the villages merged into suburban towns, and the train began to clatter through sooty freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines; at last, after crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I faced the hackmen of Chicago, as verdant a youth as these experienced pirates had ever made common cause against. I knew of them (by report), and was prepared for trouble, but their clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those of wolves. In my hand I carried an imitation leather valise, and as I passed, each of the drivers made a snatch at it, almost tearing it from my hands, but being strong as well as desperate, I cleared myself of them, and so, following the crowd, not daring to look to right or left, reached the street and crossed the bridge with a sigh of relief. So much was accomplished. Without knowing where I should go, I wandered on, shifting my bag from hand to hand, till my mind recovered its balance. My bewilderment, my depth of distrust, was augmented by the roar and tumult of the crowd. I was like some wild animal with exceedingly sensitive ears. The waves of sound smothered me. At last, timidly approaching a policeman, I asked the way to the Atlantic Hotel. "Keep straight down the street five blocks and turn to the left," he said, and his kind voice filled me with a glow of gratitude. With ears benumbed and brain distraught, I threaded the rush, the clamor of Clark street and entered the door of the hotel, with such relief as a sailor must feel upon suddenly reaching safe harbor after having been buffeted on a wild and gloomy sea by a heavy northeast gale. It was an inconspicuous hotel of the "Farmer's Home" type, but I approached the desk with meek reluctance and explained, "I am expecting to meet my brother here. I'd like permission to set my bag down and wait." With bland impersonal courtesy the clerk replied, "Make yourself at home." Gratefully sinking into a chair by the window, I fell into study of the people streaming by, and a chilling sense of helplessness fell upon me. I realized my ignorance, my feebleness. As a minute bubble in this torrent of human life, with no friend in whom I could put trust, and with only a handful of silver between myself and the gray wolf, I lost confidence. The Boston trip seemed a foolish tempting of Providence and yet, scared as I was, I had no real intention of giving it up. My brother's first words as he entered the door, were gayly derisive. "Oh, see the whiskers!" he cried and his calm acceptance of my plan restored my own courage. Together we planned our itinerary. We were to see Niagara Falls, of course, but to spend the fourth of July on Boston Common, was our true objective. "When our money is used up," I said, "we'll strike out into the country." To all this my brother agreed. Neither of us had the slightest fear of hunger in the country. It was the city that gave us pause. All the afternoon and evening we wandered about the streets (being very careful not to go too far from our hotel), counting the stories of the tall buildings, and absorbing the drama of the pavement. Returning now and again to our sanctuary in the hotel lobby we ruminated and rested our weary feet. Everything interested us. The business section so sordid to others was grandly terrifying to us. The self-absorption of the men, the calm glances of the women humbled our simple souls. Nothing was commonplace, nothing was ugly to us. We slept that night in a room at the extreme top of the hotel. It couldn't have been a first class accommodation, for the frame of the bed fell in the moment we got into it, but we made no complaint--we would not have had the clerk know of our mishap for twice our bill. We merely spread the mattress on the floor and slept till morning. Having secured our transportation we were eager to be off, but as our tickets were second class, and good only on certain trains, we waited. We did not even think of a sleeping car. We had never known anyone rich enough to occupy one. Grant and Edwin Booth probably did, and senators were ceremonially obliged to do so, but ordinary folks never looked forward to such luxury. Neither of us would have known what to do with a berth if it had been presented to us, and the thought of spending two dollars for a night's sleep made the cold chills run over us. We knew of no easier way to earn two dollars than to save them, therefore we rode in the smoker. Late that night as we were sitting stoically in our places, a brakeman came along and having sized us up for the innocents we were, good-naturedly said, "Boys, if you'll get up I'll fix your seats so's you can lie down and catch a little sleep." Silently, gratefully we watched him while he took up the cushions and turned them lengthwise, thus making a couch. To be sure, it was a very short and very hard bed but with the health and strength of nineteen and twenty-two, we curled up and slept the remainder of the night like soldiers resting on their guns. Pain, we understood, was an unavoidable accompaniment of travel. When morning dawned the train was running through Canada, and excitedly calling upon Franklin to rouse, I peered from the window, expecting to see a land entirely different from Wisconsin and Illinois. We were both somewhat disappointed to find nothing distinctive in either the land or its inhabitants. However, it was a foreign soil and we had seen it. So much of our exploration was accomplished. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when we came in sight of the suspension bridge and Niagara Falls. I suppose it would be impossible for anyone now to feel the same profound interest in any natural phenomenon whatsoever. We believed that we were approaching the most stupendous natural wonder in all the world, and we could scarcely credit the marvel of our good fortune. All our lives we had heard of this colossal cataract. Our school readers contained stately poems and philosophical dissertations concerning it. Gough, the great orator, had pointed out the likeness of its resistless torrent to the habit of using spirituous liquors. The newspapers still printed descriptions of its splendor and no foreigner (so we understood) ever came to these shores without visiting and bowing humbly before the voice of its waters.--And to think that we, poor prairie boys, were soon to stand upon the illustrious brink of that dread chasm and listen to its mighty song was wonderful, incredible, benumbing! Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees. We were like those who first discover a continent. As we crept nearer, the shuddering roar deepened, and our awe, our admiration, our patriotism deepened with it, and when at last we leaned against the rail and looked across the tossing spread of river swiftly sweeping to its fall, we held our breaths in wonder. It met our expectations. Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having adventured so far. That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we crossed the Hudson, and as the Berkshire hills began to loom against the dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the Massachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against the glass and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the passing landscape. Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy sky with wooded heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Massachusetts to me meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of art--and it contained Boston! As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery, observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides, precisely as in the illustrations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses (their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben Franklin's _Autobiography_. Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.--Most of the people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like bells, _Lexington_, _Concord_, _Cambridge_, _Charlestown_, and--at last _Boston_! What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow, ledge-like pavements, the awkward two-wheeled drays and carts, the men selling lobsters on the corner, the newsboys with their "papahs," the faces of the women so thin and pale, the men, neat, dapper, small, many of them walking with finicky precision as though treading on eggs,--everything had a Yankee tang, a special quality, and then, the noise! We had thought Chicago noisy, and so it was, but here the clamor was high-keyed, deafening for the reason that the rain-washed streets were paved with cobble stones over which enormous carts bumped and clattered with resounding riot. Bewildered,--with eyes and ears alert, we toiled up Haymarket Square shoulder to shoulder, seeking the Common. Of course we carried our hand-bags--(the railway had no parcel rooms in those days, or if it had we didn't know it) clinging to them like ants to their eggs and so slowly explored Tremont Street. Cornhill entranced us with its amazing curve. We passed the Granary Burying Ground and King's Chapel with awe, and so came to rest at last on the upper end of the Common! We had reached the goal of our long pilgrimage. To tell the truth, we were a little disappointed in our first view of it. It was much smaller than we had imagined it to be and the pond was ONLY a pond, but the trees were all that father had declared them to be. We had known broad prairies and splendid primitive woodlands--but these elms dated back to the days of Washington, and were to be reverenced along with the State House and Bunker Hill. We spent considerable time there on that friendly bench, resting in the shadows of the elms, and while sitting there, we ate our lunch, and watched the traffic of Tremont Street, in perfect content till I remembered that the night was coming on, and that we had no place to sleep. Approaching a policeman I inquired the way to a boarding house. The officer who chanced to be a good-natured Irishman, with a courtesy almost oppressive, minutely pointed the way to a house on Essex Street. Think of it--Essex Street! It sounded like Shakespeare and Merrie England! Following his direction, we found ourselves in the door of a small house on a narrow alley at the left of the Common. The landlady, a kindly soul, took our measure at once and gave us a room just off her little parlor, and as we had not slept, normally, for three nights, we decided to go at once to bed. It was about five o'clock, one of the noisiest hours of a noisy street, but we fell almost instantly into the kind of slumber in which time and tumult do not count. When I awoke, startled and bewildered, the sounds of screaming children, roaring, jarring drays, and the clatter of falling iron filled the room. At first I imagined this to be the business of the morning, but as I looked out of the window I perceived that it was sunset! "Wake up!" I called to Franklin. "_It's the next day!_" "We've slept twenty-four hours!--What will the landlady think of us?" Frank did not reply. He was still very sleepy, but he dressed, and with valise in hand dazedly followed me into the sitting room. The woman of the house was serving supper to her little family. To her I said, "You've been very kind to let us sleep all this time. We were very tired." "All this time?" she exclaimed. "Isn't it the next day?" I asked. Then she laughed, and her husband laughed, doubling himself into a knot of merriment. "Oh, but that's rich!" said he. "You've been asleep exactly an hour and a quarter," he added. "How long did you _think_ you'd slept--two days?" Sheepishly confessing that I thought we had, I turned back to bed, and claimed ten hours more of delicious rest. All "the next day" we spent in seeing Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, the old North Church, King's Chapel, Longfellow's home, the Washington Elm, and the Navy Yard.--It was all glorious but a panic seized us as we found our money slipping away from us, and late in the afternoon we purchased tickets for Concord, and fled the roaring and turbulent capital. We had seen the best of it anyway. We had tasted the ocean and found it really salt, and listened to "the sailors with bearded lips" on the wharves where the ships rocked idly on the tide,--The tide! Yes, that most inexplicable wonder of all we had proved. We had watched it come in at the Charles River Bridge, mysterious as the winds. We knew it was so. Why Concord, do you ask? Well, because Hawthorne had lived there, and because the region was redolent of Emerson and Thoreau, and I am glad to record that upon reaching it of a perfect summer evening, we found the lovely old village all that it had been pictured by the poets. The wide and beautiful meadows, the stone walls, the slow stream, the bridge and the statue of the "Minute Man" guarding the famous battlefield, the gray old Manse where Hawthorne lived, the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow, the grave of Emerson--all these historic and charming places enriched and inspired us. This land, so mellowed, so harmonious, so significant, seemed hardly real. It was a vision. We rounded out our day by getting lodgings in the quaint old Wright's tavern which stood (and still stands) at the forks of the road, a building whose date painted on its chimney showed that it was nearly two hundred years old! I have since walked Carnarvan's famous walls, and sat in the circus at Nismes--but I have never had a deeper thrill of historic emotion than when I studied the beamed ceiling of that little dining room. Our pure joy in its age amused our landlord greatly. Being down to our last dollar, we struck out into the country next morning, for the purpose of finding work upon a farm but met with very little encouragement. Most of the fields were harvested and those that were not were well supplied with "hands." Once we entered a beautiful country place where the proprietor himself (a man of leisure, a type we had never before seen) interrogated us with quizzical humor, and at last sent us to his foreman with honest desire to make use of us. But the foreman had nothing to give, and so we went on. All day we loitered along beautiful wood roads, passing wonderful old homesteads gray and mossy, sheltered by trees that were almost human in the clasp of their protecting arms. We paused beside bright streams, and drank at mossy wells operated by rude and ancient sweeps, contrivances which we had seen only in pictures. It was all beautiful, but we got no work. The next day, having spent our last cent in railway tickets, we rode to Ayer Junction, where we left our trunks in care of the baggage man and resumed our tramping. CHAPTER XXIII Coasting Down Mt. Washington In spite of all our anxiety, we enjoyed this search for work. The farmers were all so comically inquisitive. A few of them took us for what we were, students out on a vacation. Others though kind enough, seemed lacking in hospitality, from the western point of view, and some were openly suspicious--but the roads, the roads! In the west thoroughfares ran on section lines and were defined by wire fences. Here they curved like Indian trails following bright streams, and the stone walls which bordered them were festooned with vines as in a garden. That night we lodged in the home of an old farmer, an octogenarian who had never in all his life been twenty miles from his farm. He had never seen Boston, or Portland, but he had been twice to Nashua, returning, however, in time for supper. He, as well as his wife (dear simple soul), looked upon us as next door to educated Indians and entertained us in a flutter of excited hospitality. We told them of Dakota, of the prairies, describing the wonderful farm machinery, and boasting of the marvellous crops our father had raised in Iowa, and the old people listened in delighted amaze. They put us to bed at last in a queer high-posted, corded bedstead and I had a feeling that we were taking part in a Colonial play. It was like living a story book. We stared at each other in a stupor of satisfaction. We had never hoped for such luck. To be thrust back abruptly into the very life of our forebears was magical, and the excitement and delight of it kept us whispering together long after we should have been asleep. This was thirty years ago, and those kindly old souls have long since returned to dust, but their big four-posted bed is doing service, no doubt, in the home of some rich collector. I have forgotten their names but they shall live here in my book as long as its print shall endure. They seemed sorry to have us go next morning, but as they had nothing for us to do, they could only say, "Good-bye, give our love to Jane, if you see her, she lives in Illinois." Illinois and Dakota were all the same to them! Again we started forth along the graceful, irregular, elm-shaded roads, which intersected the land in every direction, perfectly happy except when we remembered our empty pockets. We could not get accustomed to the trees and the beauty of the vineclad stone walls. The lanes made _pictures_ all the time. So did the apple trees and the elms and the bending streams. About noon of this day we came to a farm of very considerable size and fairly level, on which the hay remained uncut. "Here's our chance," I said to my brother, and going in, boldly accosted the farmer, a youngish man with a bright and pleasant face. "Do you want some skilled help?" I called out. The farmer admitted that he did, but eyed us as if jokers. Evidently we did not look precisely like workmen to him, but I jolted him by saying, "We are Iowa schoolboys out for a vacation. We were raised on a farm, and know all about haying. If you'll give us a chance we'll make you think you don't know much about harvesting hay." This amused him. "Come in," he said, "and after dinner we'll see about it." At dinner we laid ourselves out to impress our host. We told him of the mile-wide fields of the west, and enlarged upon the stoneless prairies of Dakota. We described the broadcast seeders they used in Minnesota and bragged of the amount of hay we could put up, and both of us professed a contempt for two-wheeled carts. In the end we reduced our prospective employer to humbleness. He consulted his wife a moment and then said, "All right, boys, you may take hold." We stayed with him two weeks and enjoyed every moment of our stay. "Our expedition is successful," I wrote to my parents. On Sundays we picked berries or went fishing or tumbled about the lawn. It was all very beautiful and delightfully secure, so that when the time came to part with our pleasant young boss and his bright and cheery wife, we were as sorry as they. "We must move on," I insisted. "There are other things to see." After a short stay in Portland we took the train for Bethel, eager to visit the town which our father had described so many times. We had resolved to climb the hills on which he had gathered berries and sit on the "Overset" from which he had gazed upon the landscape. We felt indeed, a certain keen regret that he could not be with us. At Locks Mills, we met his old playmates, Dennis and Abner Herrick, men bent of form and dim of eye, gnarled and knotted by their battle with the rocks and barren hillsides, and to them we, confident lads, with our tales of smooth and level plow-lands, must have seemed like denizens from some farmers' paradise,--or perhaps they thought us fictionists. I certainly put a powerful emphasis on the pleasant side of western life at that time. Dennis especially looked upon us with amazement, almost with awe. To think that we, unaided and alone, had wandered so far and dared so much, while he, in all his life, had not been able to visit Boston, was bewildering. This static condition of the population was a constant source of wonder to us. How could people stay all their lives in one place? Must be something the matter with them.--Their ox-teams and tipcarts amused us, their stony fields appalled us, their restricted, parsimonious lives saddened us, and so, not wishing to be a burden, we decided to cut our stay short. On the afternoon of our last day, Abner took us on a tramp over the country, pointing out the paths "where Dick and I played," tracing the lines of the old farm, which had long since been given over to pasture, and so to the trout brook and home. In return for our "keep" we sang that night, and told stories of the west, and our hosts seemed pleased with the exchange. Shouldering our faithful "grips" next morning, we started for the railway and took the train for Gorham. Each mile brought us nearer the climax of our trip. We of the plains had longed and dreamed of the peaks. To us the White Mountains were at once the crowning wonder and chief peril of our expedition. They were to be in a very real sense the test of our courage. The iron crest of Mount Washington allured us as a light-house lures sea-birds. Leaving Gorham on foot, and carrying our inseparable valises, we started westward along the road leading to the peaks, expecting to get lodging at some farm-house, but as we stood aside to let gay coaches pass laden with glittering women and haughty men, we began to feel abused. We were indeed, quaint objects. Each of us wore a long yellow linen "duster" and each bore a valise on a stick, as an Irishman carries a bundle. We feared neither wind nor rain, but wealth and coaches oppressed us. Nevertheless we trudged cheerily along, drinking at the beautiful springs beside the road, plucking blackberries for refreshment, lifting our eyes often to the snow-flecked peaks to the west. At noon we stopped at a small cottage to get some milk, and there again met a pathetic lonely old couple. The woman was at least eighty, and very crusty with her visitors, till I began to pet the enormous maltese cat which came purring to our feet. "What a magnificent animal!" I said to Frank. This softened the old woman's heart. She not only gave us bread and milk but sat down to gossip with us while we ate. She, too, had relatives "out there, somewhere in Iowa" and would hardly let us go, so eager was she to know all about her people. "Surely you must have met them." As we neared the foot of the great peak we came upon hotels of all sizes but I had not the slightest notion of staying even at the smallest. Having walked twelve miles to the foot of the mountain we now decided to set out for the top, still carrying those precious bags upon our shoulders. What we expected to do after we got to the summit, I cannot say, for we knew nothing of conditions there and were too tired to imagine--we just kept climbing, sturdily, doggedly, breathing heavily, more with excitement than with labor, for it seemed that we were approaching the moon,--so bleak and high the roadway ran. I had miscalculated sadly. It had looked only a couple of hours' brisk walk from the hotel, but the way lengthened out toward the last in a most disheartening fashion. "Where will we stay?" queried Frank. "Oh, we'll find a place somewhere," I answered, but I was far from being as confident as I sounded. We had been told that it cost five dollars for a night's lodging at the hotel, but I entertained some vague notion that other and cheaper places offered. Perhaps I thought that a little village on the summit presented boarding houses. "No matter, we're in for it now," I stoutly said. "We'll find a place--we've got to find a place." It grew cold as we rose, surprisingly, dishearteningly cold and we both realized that to sleep in the open would be to freeze. As the night fell, our clothing, wet with perspiration, became almost as clammy as sheet iron, and we shivered with weakness as well as with frost. The world became each moment more barren, more wind-swept and Frank was almost at his last gasp. It was long after dark, and we were both trembling with fatigue and hollow with hunger as we came opposite a big barn just at the top of the trail. The door of this shelter stood invitingly open, and creeping into an empty stall we went to sleep on the straw like a couple of homeless dogs. We did not for a moment think of going to the hotel which loomed like a palace a few rods further on. A couple of hours later I was awakened by the crunch of a boot upon my ankle, followed by an oath of surprise. The stage-driver, coming in from his last trip, was looking down upon me. I could not see his face, but I did note the bright eyes and pricking ears of a noble gray horse standing just behind his master and champing his bit with impatience. Sleepy, scared and bewildered, I presented my plea with such eloquence that the man put his team in another stall and left us to our straw. "But you get out o' here before the boss sees you," said he, "or there'll be trouble." "We'll get out before daybreak," I replied heartily. When I next awoke it was dawn, and my body was so stiff I could hardly move. We had slept cold and our muscles resented it. However, we hurried from the barn. Once safely out of reach of the "boss" we began to leap and dance and shout to the sun as it rose out of the mist, for this was precisely what we had come two thousand miles to see--sunrise on Mount Washington! It chanced, gloriously, that the valleys were filled with a misty sea, breaking soundlessly at our feet and we forgot cold, hunger, poverty, in the wonder of being "above the clouds!" In course of time our stomachs moderated our transports over the view and I persuaded my brother (who was younger and more delicate in appearance) to approach the kitchen and purchase a handout. Frank being harshly persuaded by his own need, ventured forth and soon came back with several slices of bread and butter and part of a cold chicken, which made the day perfectly satisfactory, and in high spirits we started to descend the western slope of the mountain. Here we performed the incredible. Our muscles were so sore and weak that as we attempted to walk down the railway track, our knees refused to bear our weight, and while creeping over the ties, groaning and sighing with pain, a bright idea suddenly irradiated my mind. As I studied the iron groove which contained the cogs in the middle of the track, I perceived that its edges were raised a little above the level of the rails and covered with oil. It occurred to me that it might be possible to slide down this track on a plank--if only I had a plank! I looked to the right. A miracle! There in the ditch lay a plank of exactly the right dimensions. I seized it, I placed it cross-wise of the rails. "All aboard," I called. Frank obeyed. I took my place at the other end, and so with our valises between us, we began to slip slowly, smoothly, and with joyous ease down the shining track! Hoopla! We had taken wing! We had solved our problem. The experiment was successful. Laughing and shouting with exultation, we swept on. We had but to touch every other tie with our heels in order to control our speed, so we coasted, smoothly, genially. On we went, mile after mile, slipping down the valley into the vivid sunlight, our eyes on the glorious scenery about us, down, down like a swooping bird. Once we passed above some workmen, who looked up in open-mouthed amazement, and cursed us in voices which seemed far and faint and futile. A little later the superintendent of the water tank warningly shouted, "_Stop that! Get Off!_" but we only laughed at him and swept on, out over a high trestle, where none could follow. At times our heads grew dizzy with the flicker and glitter of the rocks beneath us and as we rounded dangerous curves of the track, or descended swift slides with almost uncontrollable rapidity, I had some doubts, but we kept our wits, remained upon the rails, and at last spun round the final bend and came to a halt upon a level stretch of track, just above the little station. There, kicking aside our faithful plank, we took up our valises and with trembling knees and a sense of triumph set off down the valley of the wild Amonoosuc. CHAPTER XXIV Tramping, New York, Washington, and Chicago For two days we followed the Amonoosuc (which is a lovely stream), tramping along exquisite winding roads, loitering by sunny ripples or dreaming in the shadow of magnificent elms. It was all very, very beautiful to us of the level lands of Iowa and Dakota. These brooks rushing over their rocky beds, these stately trees and these bleak mountain-tops looming behind us, all glowed with the high splendor, of which we had dreamed. At noon we called at a farm-house to get something to eat and at night we paid for lodging in a rude tavern beside the way, and so at last reached the railway and the Connecticut River. Here we gained our trunks (which had been sent round by express) and as the country seemed poor and the farms barren, we spent nearly all our money in riding down the railway fifty or sixty miles. At some small town (I forget the name), we again took to the winding roads, looking for a job. Jobs, it turned out, were exceedingly hard to get. The haying was over, the oats mainly in shock, and the people on the highway suspicious and inhospitable. As we plodded along, our dimes melting away, hunger came, at last, to be a grim reality. We looked less and less like college boys and more and more like tramps, and the householders began to treat us with hostile contempt. No doubt these farmers, much beset with tramps, had reasonable excuse for their inhospitable ways, but to us it was all bitter and uncalled for. I knew that cities were filled with robbers, brigands, burglars and pirates, but I had held (up to this time), the belief that the country, though rude and barren of luxury was nevertheless a place of plenty where no man need suffer hunger. Frank, being younger and less hardy than I, became clean disheartened, and upon me fell the responsibility and burden of the campaign. I certainly was to blame for our predicament. We came finally to the point of calling at every house where any crops lay ungathered, desperately in hope of securing something to do. At last there came a time when we no longer had money for a bed, and were forced to sleep wherever we could find covert. One night we couched on the floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should be cold! During all the early warm part of the night a family of skunks rustled about us, and toward morning we both woke because of the chill. On the third night we secured the blessed opportunity of nesting in a farmer's granary. All humor had gone out of our expedition. Each day the world grew blacker, and the men of the Connecticut Valley more cruel and relentless. We both came to understand (not to the full, but in a large measure) the bitter rebellion of the tramp. To plod on and on into the dusk, rejected of comfortable folk, to couch at last with pole-cats in a shock of grain is a liberal education in sociology. On the fourth day we came upon an old farmer who had a few acres of badly tangled oats which he wished gathered and bound. He was a large, loose-jointed, good-natured sloven who looked at me with stinging, penetrating stare, while I explained that we were students on a vacation tramping and in need of money. He seemed not particularly interested till Frank said with tragic bitterness, "If we ever get back to Dakota we'll never even look this way again." This interested the man. He said, "Turn in and cut them oats," and we gladly buckled to our job. Our spirits rose with the instant resiliency of youth, but what a task that reaping proved to be! The grain, tangled and flattened close to the ground, had to be caught up in one hand and cut with the old-fashioned reaping-hook, the kind they used in Egypt five thousand years ago--a thin crescent of steel with a straight handle, and as we bowed ourselves to the ground to clutch and clip the grain, we nearly broke in two pieces. It was hot at mid-day and the sun fell upon our bended shoulders with amazing power, but we toiled on, glad of the opportunity to earn a dollar. "Every cent means escape from this sad country," I repeated. We stayed some days with this reticent gardener, sleeping in the attic above his kitchen like two scullions, uttering no complaint till we had earned seven dollars apiece; then we said, "Good luck," and bought tickets for Greenfield, Massachusetts. We chose this spot for the reason that a great railway alluringly crossed the river at that place. We seemed in better situation to get west from such a point. Greenfield was so like Rockford (the western town in which I had worked as a carpenter), that I at once purchased a few tools and within a few hours secured work shingling a house on the edge of the town, while my brother took a hand at harvesting worms from a field of tobacco near by. The builder, a tall man, bent and grizzled, complimented me warmly at the close of my second day, and said, "You may consider yourself hired for as long as you please to stay. You're a rattler." No compliment since has given me more pleasure than this. A few days later he invited both of us to live at his home. We accepted and were at once established in most comfortable quarters. Tranquil days followed. The country was very attractive, and on Sundays we walked the neighboring lanes, or climbed the high hills, or visited the quaint and lonely farm-houses round about, feeling more akin each week to the life of the valley, but we had no intention of remaining beyond a certain time. Great rivers called and cities allured. New York was still to be explored and to return to the west before winter set in was our plan. At last the time came when we thought it safe to start toward Albany and with grateful words of thanks to the carpenter and his wife, we set forth upon our travels. Our courage was again at topmost gauge. My success with the saw had given me confidence. I was no longer afraid of towns, and in a glow of high resolution and with thirty dollars in my pocket, I planned to invade New York which was to me the wickedest and the most sorrowful as well as the most splendid city in the world. Doubtless the true story of how I entered Manhattan will endanger my social position, but as an unflinching realist, I must begin by acknowledging that I left the Hudson River boat carrying my own luggage. I shudder to think what we two boys must have looked like as we set off, side by side, prospecting for Union Square and the Bowery. Broadway, we knew, was the main street and Union Square the center of the island, therefore we turned north and paced along the pavement, still clamped to our everlasting bags. Broadway was not then the deep canon that it is today. It was walled by low shops of red brick--in fact, the whole city seemed low as compared with the high buildings of Chicago, nevertheless I was keenly worried over the question of housing. Food was easy. We could purchase a doughnut and a cup of coffee almost anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something more than serious--it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one night," said he. He always was rather careless of the future! I reminded him that we still had Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington to "do" and every cent must be husbanded--so we moved along toward Union Square with the question of a hotel still undecided, our arms aching with fatigue. "If only we could get rid of these awful bags," moaned Frank. To us Broadway was a storm, a cyclone, an abnormal unholy congestion of human souls. The friction of feet on the pavement was like the hissing of waves on the beach. The passing of trucks jarred upon our ears like the sevenfold thunders of Patmos, but we kept on, shoulder to shoulder, watchful, alert, till we reached Union Square, where with sighs of deep relief we sank upon the benches along with the other "rubes" and "jay-hawkers" lolling in sweet repose with weary soles laxly turned to the kindly indiscriminating breeze. The evening was mild, the scene enthralling, and we would have been perfectly happy but for the deeply disturbing question of a bed. Franklin, resting upon my resourceful management, made no motion even when the sun sank just about where that Venetian fronted building now stands, but whilst the insolent, teeming populace in clattering carts and drays charged round our peaceful sylvan haven (each driver plying the lash with the fierce aspect of a Roman charioteer) I rose to a desperate mission. With a courage born of need I led the way straight toward the basement portal of a small brown hotel on Fourth Avenue, and was startled almost into flight to find myself in a bar-room. Not knowing precisely how to retreat, I faltered out, "Have you a bed for us?" It is probable that the landlord, a huge foreign-looking man understood our timidity--at any rate, he smiled beneath his black mustache and directed a clerk to show us a room. In charge of this man, a slim youth, with a very bad complexion, we climbed a narrow stairway (which grew geometrically shabbier as we rose) until, at last, we came into a room so near the roof that it could afford only half-windows--but as we were getting the chamber at half-price we could not complain. No sooner had the porter left us than we both stretched out on the bed, in such relief and ecstasy of returning confidence as only weary youth and honest poverty can know.--It was heavenly sweet, this sense of safety in the heart of a tempest of human passion but as we rested, our hunger to explore returned. "Time is passing. We shall probably never see New York again," I argued, "and besides our bags are now safely _cached_. Let's go out and see how the city looks by night." To this Franklin agreed, and forth we went into the Square, rejoicing in our freedom from those accursed bags. Here for the first time, I observed the electric light shadows, so clear-cut, so marvellous. The park was lighted by several sputtering, sizzling arc-lamps, and their rays striking down through the trees, flung upon the pavement a wavering, exquisite tracery of sharply defined, purple-black leaves and branches. This was, indeed, an entirely new effect in our old world and to my mind its wonder surpassed nature. It was as if I had suddenly been translated to some realm of magic art. Where we dined I cannot say, probably we ate a doughnut at some lunch counter but I am glad to remember that we got as far as Madison Square--which was like discovering another and still more enchanting island of romance. To us the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a great and historic building, for in it Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Greeley had often registered. Ah, what a night that was! I did not expend a dollar, not even a quarter, but I would give half of all I now own for the sensitive heart, the absorbent brain I then possessed. Each form, each shadow was a miracle. Romance and terror and delight peopled every dusky side street. Submerged in the wondrous, drenched with the spray of this measureless ocean of human life, we wandered on and on till overborne nature called a halt. It was ten o'clock and prudence as well as weariness advised retreat. Decisively, yet with a feeling that we would never again glow beneath the lights of this radiant city, I led the way back to our half-rate bed in the Union Square Hungarian hotel. It is worth recording that on reaching our room, we opened our small window and leaning out, gazed away over the park, what time the tumult and the thunder and the shouting died into a low, continuous roar. The poetry and the majesty of the city lost nothing of its power under the moon. Although I did not shake my fist over the town and vow to return and conquer it (as penniless writers in fiction generally do) I bowed down before its power. "It's too much for us," I told my brother. "Two millions of people--think of it--of course London is larger, but then London is so far off." Sleep for us both was but a moment's forgetfulness. At one moment it was night and at another it was morning. We were awakened by the voice of the pavement, that sound which Whitman calls "the loud, proud, restive bass of the streets," and again I leaned forth to listen to the widespread crescendo roar of the deepening traffic. The air being cool and clear, the pedestrians stepped out with brisker, braver movement, and we, too, rose eager to meet the day at the gate of the town. All day we tramped, absorbing everything that went on in the open. Having explored the park, viewed the obelisk and visited the zoo, we wandered up and down Broadway, mooning upon the life of the streets. Curbstone fights, police manoeuvres, shop-window comedies, building operations--everything we saw instructed us. We soaked ourselves in the turbulent rivers of the town with a feeling that we should never see them again. We had intended to stay two days but a tragic encounter with a restaurant bandit so embittered and alarmed us that we fled New York (as we supposed), forever. At one o'clock, being hungry, very hungry, we began to look for a cheap eating house, and somewhere in University Place we came upon a restaurant which looked humble enough to afford a twenty-five cent dinner (which was our limit of extravagance), and so, timidly, we ventured in. A foreign-looking waiter greeted us, and led us to one of a number of very small tables covered with linen which impressed even Frank's uncritical eyes with its mussiness. With a feeling of having inadvertently entered a den of thieves, I wished myself out of it but lacked the courage to rise and when the man returned and placed upon the table two glasses and a strange looking bottle with a metal stopper which had a kind of lever at the side, Frank said, "Hi! Good thing!--I'm thirsty." Quite against my judgment he fooled around with the lever till he succeeded in helping himself to some of the liquid with which the bottle was filled. It was soda water and he drank heartily, although I was sure it would be extra on the bill. The food came on slowly, by fits and starts, and the dishes were all so cold and queer of taste that even Frank complained. But we ate with a terrifying premonition of trouble. "This meal will cost us at least thirty-five cents each!" I said. "No matter, it's an experience," my spendthrift brother retorted. At last when the limp lettuce, the amazing cheese and the bitter coffee were all consumed, I asked the soiled, outlandish waiter the price. In reply he pencilled on a slip as though we were deaf, and finally laid the completed bill face down beside my plate. I turned it over and grew pale. It totalled _one dollar and twenty cents_! I felt weak and cold as if I had been suddenly poisoned. I trembled, then grew hot with indignation. "Sixty cents apiece!" I gasped. "Didn't I warn you?" Frank was still in reckless mood. "Well, this is the only time we have to do it. They won't catch us here again." I paid the bill and hurried out, bitterly exclaiming, "No more New York for me. I will not stay in such a robbers' den another night." And I didn't. At sunset we crossed the ferry and took the train for New Brunswick, New Jersey. Why we selected this town I cannot say, but I think it must have been because it was half-way to Philadelphia--and that we were just about as scared of Philadelphia as we were resentful of New York. After a night battle with New Jersey mosquitoes and certain plantigrade bed-fellows native to cheap hotels, we passed on to Philadelphia and to Baltimore, and at sunset of the same day reached Washington, the storied capital of the nation. Everything we saw here was deeply significant, national, rousing our patriotism. We were at once and profoundly interested by the negro life which flowered here in the free air of the District as under an African sun; the newsboys, the bootblacks, the muledrivers, all amused us. We spent that first night in Washington in a little lodging house just at the corner of the Capitol grounds where beds were offered for twenty-five cents. It was a dreadful place, but we slept without waking. It took a large odor, a sharp lance to keep either of us awake in those days. Tramping busily all the next day, we climbed everything that could be climbed. We visited the Capitol, the war building, the Treasury and the White House grounds. We toiled through all the museums, working harder than we had ever worked upon the farm, till Frank cried out for mercy. I was inexorable. "Our money is getting low. We must be very saving of carfare," I insisted. "We must see all we can. We'll never be here again." Once more we slept (among the negroes in a bare little lodging house), and on the third day, brimming with impressions, boarded the Chicago express and began our glorious, our exultant return over the Alleghanies, toward the west. It was with a feeling of joy, of distinct relief that we set our faces toward the sunset. Every mile brought us nearer home. I knew the West. I knew the people, and I had no fear of making a living beyond the Alleghanies. Every mile added courage and hope to our hearts, and increased the value of the splendid, if sometimes severe experiences through which we had passed. Frank was especially gay for he was definitely on his way home, back to Dakota. And when next day on the heights of the Alleghany mountains, the train dipped to the west, and swinging around a curve, disclosed to us the tumbled spread of mountain-land descending to the valley of the Ohio, we sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys" as our forefathers did of old. We were about to re-enter the land of the teeming furrow. Late that night as we were riding through the darkness in the smoking car, I rose and, placing in my brother's hands all the money I had, said good-bye, and at Mansfield, Ohio, swung off the train, leaving him to proceed on his homeward way alone. It was about one o'clock of an autumn night, sharp and clear, and I spent the remainder of the morning on a bench in the railway station, waiting for the dawn. I could not sleep, and so spent the time in pondering on my former experiences in seeking work. "Have I been wrong?" I asked myself. "Is the workman in America, as in the old world, coming to be a man despised?" Having been raised in the splendid patriotism, perhaps one might say flamboyant patriotism, of the West during and following our Civil War, I had been brought up to believe that labor was honorable, that idlers were to be despised, but now as I sat with bowed head, cold, hungry and penniless, knowing that I must go forth at daylight--seeking work, the world seemed a very hostile place to me. Of course I did not consider myself a workman in the ordinary hopeless sense. My need of a job was merely temporary, for it was my intention to return to the Middle West in time to secure a position as teacher in some country school. Nevertheless a lively imagination gave me all the sensations of the homeless man. The sun rose warm and golden, and with a return of my courage I started forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady, invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her dinner--a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My spirits rose. I was secure. My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's _Life of Napoleon_ which I found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me almost as profoundly as Hugo's _Les Misérables_ had done the year before. On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I gladly accepted the offer. On the following afternoon I started forth a passenger with Hank Ring on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat, therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I started my school. The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero, and my ears were never quite free from peeling skin and fevered tissues. My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Saturday I usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the principal of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me in securing a class in oratory among his students. This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my work in the country. No Saturday was too stormy, and the roads were never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and living. But after all this was but the final section of my eastern excursion--for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there is my share of the government land--and, if I am to carry out my plan of fitting myself for a professorship," I argued--"these claims are worth securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other man's." My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing all my future to the hazard of the homestead. And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And yet, Son of the Middle Border--I had discovered that I was also a Grandson of New England. CHAPTER XXV The Land of the Straddle-Bug A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day in Neshonoc to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush of land-seekers. The movement which had begun three years before was now at its height. Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the sundown plain, where a fat-soiled valley had been set aside by good Uncle Sam for the enrichment of every man. Such elation, such hopefulness could not fail to involve an excitable youth like myself. My companion, Forsythe, dropped off at Milbank, but I kept on, on into the James Valley, arriving at Ordway on the evening of the second day--a clear cloudless evening in early April, with the sun going down red in the west, the prairie chickens calling from the knolls and hammers still sounding in the village, their tattoo denoting the urgent need of roofs to shelter the incoming throng. The street swarmed with boomers. All talk was of lots, of land. Hour by hour as the sun sank, prospectors returned to the hotel from their trips into the unclaimed territory, hungry and tired but jubilant, and as they assembled in my father's store after supper, their boastful talk of "claims secured" made me forget all my other ambitions. I was as eager to clutch my share of Uncle Sam's bounty as any of them. The world seemed beginning anew for me as well as for these aliens from the crowded eastern world. "I am ready to stake a claim," I said to my father. Early the very next day, with a party of four (among them Charles Babcock, a brother of Burton), I started for the unsurveyed country where, some thirty miles to the west, my father had already located a pre-emption claim and built a rough shed, the only shelter for miles around. "We'll camp there," said Charles. It was an inspiring ride! The plain freshly uncovered from the snow was swept by a keen wind which held in spite of that an acrid prophecy of sudden spring. Ducks and geese rose from every icy pond and resumed their flight into the mystic north, and as we advanced the world broadened before us. The treelessness of the wide swells, the crispness of the air and the feeling that to the westward lay the land of the Sioux, all combined to make our trip a kind of epic in miniature. Charles also seemed to feel the essential poetry of the expedition, although he said little except to remark, "I wish Burton were here." It was one o'clock before we reached the cabin and two before we finished luncheon. The afternoon was spent in wandering over the near-by obtainable claims and at sundown we all returned to the shed to camp. As dusk fell, and while the geese flew low gabbling confidentially, and the ducks whistled by overhead in swift unerring flight, Charles and I lay down on the hay beside the horses, feeling ourselves to be, in some way, partners with God in this new world. I went to sleep hearing the horses munching their grain in the neighboring stalls, entirely contented with my day and confident of the morrow. All questions were answered, all doubts stilled. We arose with the sun and having eaten our rude breakfast set forth, some six miles to the west, to mark the location of our claims with the "straddle-bugs." The straddle-bug, I should explain, was composed of three boards set together in tripod form and was used as a monument, a sign of occupancy. Its presence defended a claim against the next comer. Lumber being very scarce at the moment, the building of a shanty was impossible, and so for several weeks these signs took the place of "improvements" and were fully respected. No one could honorably jump these claims within thirty days and no one did. At last, when far beyond the last claimant, we turned and looked back upon a score of these glittering guidons of progress, banners of the army of settlement, I realized that I was a vedette in the van of civilization, and when I turned to the west where nothing was to be seen save the mysterious plain and a long low line of still more mysterious hills, I thrilled with joy at all I had won. It seemed a true invasion, this taking possession of the virgin sod, but as I considered, there was a haunting sadness in it, for these shining pine pennons represented the inexorable plow. They prophesied the death of all wild creatures and assured the devastation of the beautiful, the destruction of all the signs and seasons of the sod. Apparently none of my companions shared this feeling, for they all leaped from the wagon and planted their stakes, each upon his chosen quarter-section with whoops of joy, cries which sounded faint and far, like the futile voices of insects, diminished to shrillness by the echoless abysses of the unclouded sky. As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compass and a couple of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison. We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless beetles--stragglers from the main skirmish line. Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway. Tired but peaceful, we reached Ordway at dark and Mrs. Wynn's supper of ham and eggs and potatoes completed our day most satisfactorily. My father, who had planned to establish a little store on his claim, now engaged me as his representative, his clerk, and I spent the next week in hauling lumber and in helping to build the shanty and ware-room on the section line. As soon as the place was habitable, my mother and sister Jessie came out to stay with me, for in order to hold his pre-emption my father was obliged to make it his "home." Before we were fairly settled, my mother was forced to feed and house a great many land-seekers who had no other place to stay. This brought upon her once again all the drudgery of a pioneer house-wife, and filled her with longing for the old home in Iowa. It must have seemed to her as if she were never again to find rest except beneath the sod. Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks, and yet it was perfectly right that they should pay. Our buildings had been established with great trouble and at considerable expense, and my father said, "We cannot afford to feed so many people without return," and yet it seemed to me like taking an unfair advantage of poor and homeless men. It was with the greatest difficulty that I brought myself to charge them anything at all. Fortunately the prices had been fixed by my father. Night by night it became necessary to lift a lantern on a high pole in front of the shack, in order that those who were traversing the plain after dark might find their way, and often I was aroused from my bed by the arrival of a worn and bewildered party of pilgrims rescued from a sleepless couch upon the wet sod. For several weeks mother was burdened with these wayfarers, but at last they began to thin out. The skirmish line moved on, the ranks halted, and all about the Moggeson ranch hundreds of yellow shanties sparkled at dawn like flecks of gold on a carpet of green velvet. Before the end of May every claim was taken and "improved"--more or less. Meanwhile I had taken charge of the store and Frank was the stage driver. He was a very bad salesman, but I was worse--that must be confessed. If a man wanted to purchase an article and had the money to pay for it, we exchanged commodities right there, but as far as my selling anything--father used to say, "Hamlin couldn't sell gold dollars for ninety cents a piece," and he was right--entirely right. I found little to interest me in the people who came to the store for they were "just ordinary folk" from Illinois, and Iowa, and I had never been a youth who made acquaintances easily, so with nothing of the politician in me, I seldom inquired after the babies or gossiped with the old women about their health and housekeeping. I regretted this attitude afterward. A closer relationship with the settlers would have furnished me with a greater variety of fictional characters, but at the time I had no suspicion that I was missing anything. As the land dried off and the breaking plow began its course, a most idyllic and significant period of life came on. The plain became very beautiful as the soil sent forth its grasses. On the shadowed sides of the ridges exquisite shades of pink and purple bloomed, while the most radiant yellow-green flamed from slopes on which the sunlight fell. The days of May and June succeeded one another in perfect harmony like the notes in a song, broken only once or twice by thunderstorms. An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams, while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in their new gardens. On every side was the most cheerful acceptance of hard work and monotonous fare. No one acknowledged the transient quality of this life, although it was only a novel sort of picnic on the prairie, soon to end. Many young people and several groups of girls (teachers from the east) were among those who had taken claims, and some of these made life pleasant for themselves and helpful to others by bringing to their cabins, books and magazines and pictures. The store was not only the social center of the township but the postoffice, and Frank, who carried the mail (and who was much more gallant than I) seemed to draw out all the school ma'ams of the neighborhood. The raising of a flag on a high pole before the door was the signal for the post which brought the women pouring in from every direction eager for news of the eastern world. In accordance with my plan to become a teacher, I determined to go to the bottom of the laws which govern literary development, and so with an unexpurgated volume of Taine, a set of Chambers' _Encyclopædia of English Literature_, and a volume of Greene's _History of the English People_, I set to work to base myself profoundly in the principles which govern a nation's self-expression. I still believed that in order to properly teach an appreciation of poetry, a man should have the power of dramatic expression, that he should be able to read so as to make the printed page live in the ears of his pupils. In short I had decided to unite the orator and the critic. As a result, I spent more time over my desk than beside the counter. I did not absolutely refuse to wait on a purchaser but no sooner was his package tied up than I turned away to my work of digesting and transcribing in long hand Taine's monumental book. Day after day I bent to this task, pondering all the great Frenchman had to say of _race_, _environment_, and _momentum_ and on the walls of the cabin I mapped out in chalk the various periods of English society as he had indicated them. These charts were the wonder and astonishment of my neighbors whenever they chanced to enter the living room, and they appeared especially interested in the names written on the ceiling over my bed. I had put my favorites there so that when I opened my eyes of a morning, I could not help absorbing a knowledge of their dates and works. However, on Saturday afternoon when the young men came in from their claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with them--in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest competitor. Occasionally I practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which the men occasionally organized. As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make. Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot and dry and the grass, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at mid-day. Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned, from the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil. And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man. By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we had so confidently thrust ourselves. But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now. Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came. Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel. There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed strangely "furnish the cheer." As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was fitted for, and there shone no promise of that. Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the wolf. One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that the little cockney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out of the sleigh to run by its side. Poor little man! This was not the romantic home he had expected to gain when he left his office on the Strand. Luckily, his wretched shanty was some six miles nearer than mine or he would have died. Leaving him safe in his den, I pushed on toward my own claim, in the teeth of a terrific gale, the cold growing each moment more intense. "The sunset regions" at that moment did not provoke me to song. In order to reach my cabin before darkness fell, I urged my team desperately, and it was well that I did, for I could scarcely see my horses during the last mile, and the wind was appalling even to me--an experienced plainsman. Arriving at the barn I was disheartened to find the doors heavily banked with snow, but I fell to in desperate haste, and soon shoveled a passageway. This warmed me, but in the delay one of my horses became so chilled that he could scarcely enter his stall. He refused to eat also, and this troubled me very much. However, I loaded him with blankets and fell to work rubbing his legs with wisps of hay, to start the circulation, and did not desist until the old fellow began nibbling his forage. By this time the wind was blowing seventy miles an hour, and black darkness was upon the land. With a rush I reached my shanty only to find that somebody had taken all my coal and nearly all my kindling, save a few pieces of pine. This was serious, but I kindled a fire with the blocks, a blaze which was especially grateful by reason of its quick response. Hardly was the stove in action, when a rap at the door startled me. "Come," I shouted. In answer to my call, a young man, a neighbor, entered, carrying a sack filled with coal. He explained with some embarrassment, that in his extremity during the preceding blizzard, he had borrowed from my store, and that (upon seeing my light) he had hurried to restore the fuel, enough, at any rate, to last out the night. His heroism appeased my wrath and I watched him setting out on his return journey with genuine anxiety. That night is still vivid in my memory. The frail shanty, cowering close, quivered in the wind like a frightened hare. The powdery snow appeared to drive directly through the solid boards, and each hour the mercury slowly sank. Drawing my bed close to the fire, I covered myself with a buffalo robe and so slept for an hour or two. When I woke it was still dark and the wind, though terrifying, was intermittent in its attack. The timbers of the house creaked as the blast lay hard upon it, and now and again the faint fine crystals came sifting down upon my face,--driven beneath the shingles by the tempest. At last I lit my oil lamp and shivered in my robe till dawn. I felt none of the exultation of a "king in fairyland" nor that of a "lord of the soil." The morning came, bright with sun but with the thermometer forty degrees below zero. It was so cold that the horses refused to face the northwest wind. I could not hitch them to the sleigh until I had blanketed them both beneath their harness; even then they snorted and pawed in terror. At last, having succeeded in hooking the traces I sprang in and, wrapping the robe about me, pushed eastward with all speed, seeking food and fire. This may be taken as a turning point in my career, for this experience (followed by two others almost as severe) permanently chilled my enthusiasm for pioneering the plain. Never again did I sing "Sunset Regions" with the same exultant spirit. "O'er the hills in legions, boys," no longer meant sunlit savannahs, flower meadows and deer-filled glades. The mingled "wood and prairie land" of the song was gone and Uncle Sam's domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept, offered little charm to my imagination. From that little cabin on the ridge I turned my face toward settlement, eager to escape the terror and the loneliness of the treeless sod. I began to plan for other work in other airs. Furthermore, I resented the conditions under which my mother lived and worked. Our home was in a small building next to the shop, and had all the shortcomings of a cabin and none of its charm. It is true nearly all our friends lived in equal discomfort, but it seemed to me that mother had earned something better. Was it for this she had left her home in Iowa. Was she never to enjoy a roomy and comfortable dwelling? She did not complain and she seldom showed her sense of discomfort. I knew that she longed for the friends and neighbors she had left behind, and yet so far from being able to help her I was even then planning to leave her. In a sullen rage I endured the winter and when at last the sun began to ride the sky with fervor and the prairie cock announced the spring, hope of an abundant crop, the promise of a new railroad, the incoming of jocund settlers created in each of us a confidence which expressed itself in a return to the land. With that marvellous faith which marks the husbandmen, we went forth once more with the drill and the harrow, planting seed against another harvest. Sometime during these winter days, I chanced upon a book which effected a profound change in my outlook on the world and led to far-reaching complications in my life. This volume was the Lovell edition of _Progress and Poverty_ which was at that time engaging the attention of the political economists of the world. Up to this moment I had never read any book or essay in which our land system had been questioned. I had been raised in the belief that this was the best of all nations in the best of all possible worlds, in the happiest of all ages. I believed (of course) that the wisdom of those who formulated our constitution was but little less than that of archangels, and that all contingencies of our progress in government had been provided for or anticipated in that inspired and deathless instrument. Now as I read this book, my mind following step by step the author's advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme for the great orator. Here was opportunity for the most devoted evangel. Raw as I was, inconspicuous as a grasshopper by the roadside, I still had something in me which responded to the call of "the prophet of San Francisco," and yet I had no definite intention of becoming a missionary. How could I? Penniless, dependent upon the labor of my hands for a livelihood, discontented yet unable to decide upon a plan of action, I came and went all through that long summer with laggard feet and sorrowful countenance. My brother Franklin having sold his claim had boldly advanced upon Chicago. His ability as a bookkeeper secured him against want, and his letters were confident and cheerful. At last in the hour when my perplexity was greatest--the decisive impetus came, brought by a chance visitor, a young clergyman from Portland, Maine, who arrived in the town to buy some farms for himself and a friend. Though a native of Madison Mr. Bashford had won a place in the east and had decided to put some part of his salary into Dakota's alluring soil. Upon hearing that we were also from Wisconsin he came to call and stayed to dinner, and being of a jovial and candid nature soon drew from me a fairly coherent statement of my desire to do something in the world. At the end of a long talk he said, "Why don't you come to Boston and take a special course at the University? I know the Professor of Literature, and I can also give you a letter to the principal of a school of Oratory." This offer threw me into such excitement that I was unable to properly thank my adviser, but I fell into depths of dejection as soon as he left town. "How can I go east? How can I carry out such a plan?" I asked myself with bitter emphasis. All I had in the world was a small trunk, a couple of dozen books, a valise and a few acres of barren unplowed land. My previous visit to Boston was just the sort to tempt me to return, but my experiences as a laborer in New England had lessened my confidence in its resources--and yet the thought of being able to cross the Common every day opened a dazzling vista. The very fact that Mr. Bashford had gone there from the west as a student, a poor student, made the prodigiously daring step seem possible to me. "If only I had a couple of hundred dollars," I said to my mother who listened to my delirious words in silence. She divined what was surging in my heart and feared it. Thereafter I walked the floor of my room or wandered the prairie roads in continual debate. "What is there for me to do out here?" I demanded. "I can farm on these windy dusty acres--that's all. I am a failure as a merchant and I am sick of the country." There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down before its mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate, mocking world. The harvest was again light and the earth shrunk and seamed for lack of moisture. A hint of winter in the autumn air made me remember the remorseless winds and the iron earth over which the snows swept as if across an icy polar sea. I shuddered as I thought of again fighting my way to that desolate little cabin in McPherson County. I recalled but dimly the exultation with which I had made my claim. Boston, by contrast, glowed with beauty, with romance, with history, with glory like the vision of some turreted town built in the eastern sky at sunset. "I'll do it," I said at last. "I'll sell my claim. I'll go east. I'll find some little hole to creep into. I'll study night and day and so fit myself for teaching, then I'll come back west to Illinois or Wisconsin. Never will I return to this bleak world." I offered my claim for sale and while I continued my daily labor on the farm, my mind was far-away amid the imagined splendors of the east. My father was puzzled and a good deal irritated by his son's dark moods. My failure to fit into the store was unaccountable and unreasonable. "To my thinking," said he, "you have all the school you need. You ought to find it easy to make a living in a new, progressive community like this." To him, a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The place for a young man is in the west." Bitter and rebellious of mood, uneasy and uncertain of purpose my talks with him resulted only in irritation and discord, but my mother, with an abiding faith in my powers, offered no objection. She could not advise, it was all so far above and beyond her, but she patted my hand and said, "Cheer up! I'm sure it will come out all right. I hate to have you go, but I guess Mr. Bashford is right. You need more schooling." I could see that she was saddened by the thought of the separation which was to follow--with a vague knowledge of the experience of all the mothers of pioneer sons she feared that the days of our close companionship were ended. The detachment was not for a few months, it was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she told me to go. "It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm only rotting here. I'll come back--at least to visit you." In tremendous excitement I mortgaged my claim for two hundred dollars and with that in my hand, started for the land of Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, believing that I was in truth reversing all the laws of development, breasting the current of progress, stemming the tide of emigration. All about me other young men were streaming toward the sunset, pushing westward to escape the pressure of the earth-lords behind, whilst I alone and poor, was daring all the dangers, all the difficulties from which they were so eagerly escaping. There was in my heart an illogical exaltation as though I too were about to escape something--and yet when the actual moment of parting came, I embraced my sorrowing mother, and kissed my quaint little sister good-bye without feeling in the least heroic or self-confident. At the moment sadness weakened me, reducing me to boyish timidity. CHAPTER XXVI On to Boston With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be. My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan. Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit from a South Clark street merchant--you know the kind. It was a "Prince Albert Soot"--my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston. It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day, dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep--I had little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece. Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand. Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof and bed. My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian Association. The officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see. Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place. From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately knocked on the door of No. 12. A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold. She looked entirely respectable, and as she named a price which I could afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with manifest pride. Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early. I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent. My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I found the sun shining. Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two sizes,--one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also offered doughnuts at a penny each. Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north. It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there was just space enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my purse. From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston, whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr. Bashford, in Portland, Maine, was the only person in all the east on whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one. A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging house. At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches with which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin, they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost elfish intelligence. Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read, and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month. The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless cold. Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were not. Just around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city. However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of tapping was enormous. My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston University classes did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr. Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized was too much! This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate my money was going May would see me bankrupt. I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves. This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project. Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ and without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual significance of America was let loose upon me. Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil. My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I returned to my table in the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my thirty cents' worth of "food units." In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in their circles all modern discovery. It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-glass and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward fitting myself for employment in the west. Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers, their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the Lowell Institute Lectures, the _Atlantic Monthly_--(all the distinctive institutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to succeed--in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I said. Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the "Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do, probably I hoped for sympathy in some form. The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about taking out books. With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you spoken to the Librarian about it?" "I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home." "I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want." I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a protégé of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read fourteen hours a day instead of ten. Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry _all_ the time. I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do? Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five dollars a week, but even at that the end of my _stay_ in the city was not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely. Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union, thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks. We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families." There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day, laughing vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was counted as one of this group of irresponsibles. All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims for higher honors. During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis, and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent, Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you feeling?--You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself." It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders. As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in countenance, I had no qualms. The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being in truth a group of intellectual mendicants waiting for oratorical hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away. Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight--so was Minot Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall, white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from _Job_ I easily imagined myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of lightning." Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and the glory of English speech. Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first balcony, and there on my feet and in complete absorption, I saw in wondrous procession _Hamlet_, _Lear_, _Othello_, _Petruchio_, _Sir Giles Overreach_, _Macbeth_, _Iago_, and _Richelieu_ emerge from the shadow and re-enact their tragic lives before my eyes. These were my purple, splendid hours. From the light of this glorious mimic world I stumbled down the stairs out into the night, careless of wind or snow, my brain in a tumult of revolt, my soul surging with high resolves. The stimulation of these performances was very great. The art of this "Prince of Tragedy" was a powerful educational influence along the lines of oratory, poetry and the drama. He expressed to me the soul of English Literature. He exemplified the music of English speech. His acting was at once painting and sculpture and music and I became still more economical of food in order that I might the more often bask in the golden atmosphere of his world. I said, "I, too, will help to make the dead lines of the great poets speak to the living people of today," and with new fervor bent to the study of oratory as the handmaid of poetry. The boys who acted as ushers in the balcony came at length to know me, and sometimes when it happened that some unlucky suburbanite was forced to leave his seat near the railing, one of the lads would nod at me and allow me to slip down and take the empty place. In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face, and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power of externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a voice of equal beauty and majesty. Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him with the characters he portrayed. As for me--I could not sleep for hours after leaving the theater. Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "_Duncan is in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well._" With horror and admiration I recalled him, when as _Sir Giles_, with palsied hand helpless by his side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone widow sits upon my sword," or when as _Petruchio_ in making a playful snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off--but as it's Kate's I kiss it." To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added to the grandeur of every scene. Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly enriched me. This singularly endowed artist presented to me the radiant summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me! Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the tragedian in his greatest rôles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture, every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading glory of that month. These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies. Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room, living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song. And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world I resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney. In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin Booth in _Hamlet_ might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by the school committee of Blankville, Illinois. I had moments of being troubled and uneasy and at times experienced a feeling that was almost despair. CHAPTER XXVII Enter a Friend One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy of Expression" I went to hear him, more by way of routine than with any expectation of being enlightened or even interested, but his very first words surprised and delighted me. His tone was positive, his phrases epigrammatic, and I applauded heartily. "Here is a man of thought," I said. At the close of the address I ventured to the platform and expressed to him my interest in what he had said. He was a large man with a broad and smiling face, framed in a brown beard. He appeared pleased with my compliments and asked if I were a resident of Boston. "No, I am a western man," I replied. "I am here to study and I was especially interested in your quotations from Darwin's book on _Expression in Man and Animals_." His eyes expressed surprise and after a few minutes' conversation, he gave me his card saying, "Come and see me tomorrow morning at my office." I went home pleasantly excited by this encounter. After months of unbroken solitude in the midst of throngs of strangers, this man's cordial invitation meant much to me. On the following morning, at the hour set, I called at the door of his office on the top floor of No. 7 Beacon Street, which was an old-fashioned one-story building without an elevator. Brown asked me where I came from, what my plans were, and I replied with eager confidence. Then we grew harmoniously enthusiastic over Herbert Spencer and Darwin and Mantegazza and I talked a stream. My long silence found vent. Words poured from me in a torrent but he listened smilingly, his big head cocked on one side, waiting patiently for me to blow off steam. Later, when given a chance, he showed me the manuscript of a book upon which he was at work and together we discussed its main thesis. He asked me my opinion of this passage and that--and I replied, not as a pupil but as an equal, and the author seemed pleased at my candor. Two hours passed swiftly in this way and as the interview was about to end he asked, "Where do you live?" I told him and explained that I was trying to fit myself for teaching and that I was living as cheaply as possible. "I haven't any money for tuition," I confessed. He mused a moment, then said, "If you wish to come into my school I shall be glad to have you do so. Never mind about tuition,--pay me when you can." This generous offer sent me away filled with gratitude and an illogical hope. Not only had I gained a friend, I had found an intellectual comrade, one who was far more widely read, at least in science, than I. I went to my ten-cent lunch with a feeling that a door had unexpectedly opened and that it led into broader, sunnier fields of toil. The school, which consisted of several plain offices and a large class-room, was attended by some seventy or eighty pupils, mostly girls from New England and Canada with a few from Indiana and Ohio. It was a simple little workshop but to me it was the most important institution in Boston. It gave me welcome, and as I came into it on Monday morning at nine o'clock and was introduced to the pretty teacher of Delsarte, Miss Maida Craigen, whose smiling lips and big Irish-gray eyes made her beloved of all her pupils, I felt that my lonely life in Boston was ended. The teachers met me with formal kindliness, finding in me only another crude lump to be moulded into form, and while I did not blame them for it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there--thus robbing myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing. Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would make me self-supporting. My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for his use. In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five dollars per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall. By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their inherited deeply musical brain-cells! One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston interests, and by careful reading of the _Transcript_ was enabled to vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border. Washington a vulgar political camp--only Philadelphia was admitted to have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources were pitiably slender and failing! But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs. Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the tepid rays of a diminished sun. For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen, Brown did not see fit to invite me to dinner, probably because of my rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile was defensive. However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted his invitation with naïve precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars. This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip--after I got there! Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs. Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and I got on smoothly. Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota." My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of longing for the country. Therefore--though I dreaded meeting another stranger,--I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains, to call upon Dr. Cross. This ride was a further revelation of the beauty of New England. For half an hour the little horse-car ran along winding lanes under great overarching elm trees, past apple-orchards in bursting bloom. On every hand luscious lawns spread, filled with crocuses and dandelions just beginning to spangle the green. The effect upon me was somewhat like that which would be produced in the mind of a convict who should suddenly find his prison doors opening into a June meadow. Standing with the driver on the front platform, I drank deep of the flower-scented air. I had never seen anything more beautiful. Dr. Cross, a sweet and gentle man of about sixty years of age (not unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been living in a cellar. "I was genuinely alarmed about you," he said. His small frame house was simple, but it stood in the midst of a clump of pear trees, and when I broke out in lyrical praise of the beauty of the grass and glory of the flowers, the doctor smiled and became even more distinctly friendly. It appeared that through Mr. Bashford he had purchased a farm in Dakota, and the fact that I knew all about it and all about wheat farming gave me distinction. He introduced me to his wife, a wholesome hearty soul who invited me to dinner. I stayed. It was my first chance at a real meal since my visit to Portland, and I left the house with a full stomach, as well as a full heart, feeling that the world was not quite so unfriendly after all. "Come again on Sunday," the doctor almost commanded. "We shall expect you." My money had now retired to the lower corner of my left-hand pocket and it was evident that unless I called upon my father for help I must go back to the West; and much as I loved to talk of the broad fields and pleasant streams of Dakota, I dreaded the approach of the hour when I must leave Boston, which was coming to mean more and more to me every day. In a blind vague way I felt that to leave Boston was to leave all hope of a literary career and yet I saw no way of earning money in the city. In the stress of my need I thought of an old friend, a carpenter in Greenfield. "I'm sure he will give me a job," I said. With this in mind I went into Professor Brown's office one morning and I said, "Well, Professor, I must leave you." "What's that? What's the matter?" queried the principal shrilly. "My money's gone. I've got to get out and earn more," I answered sadly. He eyed me gravely. "What are you going to do?" he inquired. "I am going back to shingling," I said with tragic accent. "Shingling!" the old man exclaimed, and then began to laugh, his big paunch shaking up and down with the force of his mirth. "Shingling!" he shouted finally. "Can _you_ shingle?" "You bet I can," I replied with comical access of pride, "but I don't like to. That is to say I don't like to give up my work here in Boston just when I am beginning to feel at home." Brown continued to chuckle. To hear that a man who knew Mantegazza and Darwin and Whitman and Browning could even _think_ of shingling, was highly humorous, but as he studied my forlorn face he sensed the despairing quiver in my voice and his kind heart softened. He ceased to smile. "Oh, you mustn't do that," he said earnestly. "You mustn't surrender now. We'll fix up some way for you to earn your keep. Can't you borrow a little?" "Yes, I could get a few dollars from home, but I don't feel justified in doing so,--times are hard out there and besides I see no way of repaying a loan." He pondered a moment, "Well, now I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll make you our Instructor in Literature for the summer term and I'll put your Booth lecture on the programme. That will give you a start, and perhaps something else will develop for the autumn." This noble offer so emboldened me that I sent west for twenty-five dollars to pay my board, and to have my suit dyed.--It was the very same suit I had bought of the Clark Street tailor, and the aniline purple had turned pink along the seams--or if not pink it was some other color equally noticeable in the raiment of a lecturer, and not to be endured. I also purchased a new pair of shoes and a necktie of the Windsor pattern. This cravat and my long Prince Albert frock, while not strictly in fashion, made me feel at least presentable. Another piece of good fortune came to me soon after. Dr. Cross again invited me to dine and after dinner as we were driving together along one of the country lanes, the good doctor said, "Mrs. Cross is going up into New Hampshire for the summer and I shall be alone in the house. Why don't you come and stay with me? You need the open air, and I need company." This generous offer nearly shipwrecked my dignity. Several moments passed before I could control my voice to thank him. At last I said, "That's very kind of you, Doctor. I'll come if you will let me pay at least the cost of my board." The Doctor understood this feeling and asked, "How much are you paying now?" With slight evasion I replied, "Well, I try to keep within five dollars a week." He smiled. "I don't see how you do it, but I can give you an attic room and you can pay me at your convenience." This noble invitation translated me from my dark, cold, cramped den (with its night-guard of redoubtable cockroaches) into the light and air of a comfortable suburban home. It took me back to the sky and the birds and the grass--and Irish Mary, the cook, put red blood into my veins. In my sabbath walks along the beautiful country roads, I heard again the song of the cat-bird and the trill of the bobolink. For the first time in months I slept in freedom from hunger, in security of the morrow. Oh, good Hiram Cross, your golden crown should be studded with jewels, for your life was filled with kindnesses like this! Meanwhile, in preparation for the summer term I gladly helped stamp and mail Brown's circulars. The lecture "Edwin Booth as Iago" I carefully re-wrote--for Brown had placed it on his printed programme and had also announced me as "Instructor in Literature." I took care to send this circular to all my friends and relatives in the west. Decidedly that summer of Taine in a Dakota cabin was bearing fruit, and yet just in proportion as Brown came to believe in my ability so did he proceed to "hector" me. He never failed to ask of a morning, "Well, when are you going back to shingling?" The Summer School opened in July. It was well attended, and the membership being made up of teachers of English and Oratory from several states was very impressive to me. Professors of elocution and of literature from well-known colleges and universities gave dignity and distinction to every session. My class was very small and paid me very little but it brought me to know Mrs. Payne, a studious, kindly woman (a resident of Hyde Park), who for some reason which will forever remain obscure, considered me not merely a youth of promise, but a lecturer of value. Having heard from Brown how sadly I needed money--perhaps she even detected poverty in my dyed coat, she not only invited me to deliver an immediate course of lectures at her house in Hyde Park but proceeded to force tickets upon all her friends. The importance of this engagement will appear when the reader is informed that I was owing the Doctor for a month's board, and saw no way of paying it, and that my one suit was distressingly threadbare. There are other and more interesting ways of getting famous but alas! I rose only by inches and incredible effort. My reader must be patient with me. My subjects were ambitious enough, "The Art of Edwin Booth," was ready for delivery, but "Victor Hugo and his Prose Masterpieces," was only partly composed and "The Modern German Novel" and "The American Novel" were in notes merely, therefore with puckered brow and sturdy pen I set to work in my little attic room, and there I toiled day and night to put on paper the notions I had acquired concerning these grandiose subjects. In after years I was appalled at the audacity of that schedule, and I think I had the grace to be scared at the time, but I swung into it recklessly. Tickets had been taken by some of the best known men among the teachers, and I was assured by Mrs. Payne that we would have the most distinguished audience that ever graced Hyde Park. "Among your listeners will be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening date with palpitating but determined heart. It was a tense moment for me as (while awaiting my introduction) I looked into the faces of the men and women seated in that crowded parlor. Just before the dais, shading his eyes with his hand, was a small man with a pale face and brown beard. This was Charles E. Hurd, literary editor of the _Transcript_. Near him sat Theodore Weld, as venerable in appearance as Socrates (with long white hair and rosy cheeks), well known as one of the anti-slavery guard, a close friend of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Beside him was Professor Raymond of Princeton, the author of several books, while Churchill of Andover and half a dozen other representatives of great colleges loomed behind him. I faced them all with a gambler's composure but behind my mask I was jellied with fear. However, when I rose to speak, the tremor passed out of my limbs, the blood came back to my brain, and I began without stammering. This first paper, fortunately for us all, dealt with Edwin Booth, whom I revered. To my mind he not only expressed the highest reach of dramatic art in his day, he was the best living interpreter of Shakespeare, and no doubt it was the sincerity of my utterance which held my hearers, for they all listened intently while I analyzed the character of _Iago_, and disclosed what seemed to me to be the sources of the great tragedian's power, and when I finished they applauded with unmistakable approval, and Mrs. Payne glowed with a sense of proprietorship in her protégé who had seized the opportunity and made it his. I was absurd but triumphant. Many of the guests (kindly of spirit) came up to shake hands and congratulate me. Mr. Hurd gave me a close grip and said, "Come up to the _Transcript_ office and see me." John J. Enneking, a big, awkward red-bearded painter, elbowed up and in his queer German way spoke in approval. Churchill, Raymond, both said, "You'll do," and Brown finally came along with a mocking smile on his big face, eyed me with an air of quizzical comradeship, nudged me slyly with his elbow as he went by, and said, "Going back to shingling, are you?" On the homeward drive, Dr. Cross said very solemnly, "You have no need to fear the future." It was a very small event in the history of Hyde Park, but it was a veritable bridge of Lodi for me. I never afterward felt lonely or disheartened in Boston. I had been tested both as teacher and orator and I must be pardoned for a sudden growth of boyish self-confidence. The three lectures which followed were not so successful as the first, but my audience remained. Indeed I think it would have increased night by night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly sure that her protégé had in him all the elements of success, but I fear Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have been more hospitable, more cordial. The ninety dollars which I gained from this series of lectures was, let me say, the less important part of my victory, and yet it was wondrous opportune. They enabled me to cancel my indebtedness to the Doctor, and still have a little something to keep me going until my classes began in October, and as my landlord did not actually evict me, I stayed on shamelessly, fattening visibly on the puddings and roasts which Mrs. Cross provided and dear old Mary cooked with joy. She was the true artist. She loved to see her work appreciated. My class in English literature that term numbered twenty and the money which this brought carried me through till the mid-winter vacation, and permitted another glorious season of Booth and the Symphony Orchestra. In the month of January I organized a class in American Literature, and so at last became self-supporting in the city of Boston! No one who has not been through it can realize the greatness of this victory. I permitted myself a few improvements in hose and linen. I bought a leather hand-bag with a shoulder strap, and every day joined the stream of clerks and students crossing the Common. I began to feel a proprietary interest in the Hub. My sleeping room (also my study), continued to be in the attic (a true attic with a sloping roof and one window) but the window faced the south, and in it I did all my reading and writing. It was hot on sunny days and dark on cloudy days, but it was a refuge. As a citizen with a known habitation I was permitted to carry away books from the library, and each morning from eight until half-past twelve I sat at my desk writing, tearing away at some lecture, or historical essay, and once in a while I composed a few lines of verse. Five afternoons in each week I went to my classes and to the library, returning at six o'clock to my dinner and to my reading. This was my routine, and I was happy in it. My letters to my people in the west were confident, more confident than I ofttimes felt. During my second summer Burton Babcock, who had decided to study for the Unitarian ministry, came east with intent to enter the Divinity School at Harvard. He was the same old Burton, painfully shy, thoughtful, quaintly abrupt in manner, and together we visited the authorities at Cambridge and presented his case as best we could. For some reason not clear to either of us, the school refused to aid and after a week's stay with me Burton, a little disheartened but not resentful, went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Boston seemed very wonderful to him and I enjoyed his visit keenly. We talked inevitably of old friends and old days in the manner of middle-aged men, and he told me that John Gammons had entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed in Decorah, that Charles, my former partner in Dakota, had returned to the old home very ill with some obscure disease. Mitchell Morrison was a watch-maker and jeweler in Winona and Lee Moss had gone to Superior. The scattering process had begun. The diverging wind-currents of destiny had already parted our little group and every year would see its members farther apart. How remote it all seems to me now,--like something experienced on another planet! Each month saw me more and more the Bostonian by adoption. My teaching paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry, however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly "mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could return to the West in the guise of a conqueror. Just what I was about to conquer and in what way I was to secure eminence was not very clear to me, but I was resolved none the less, and had no immediate intention of returning. In the summer of 1886 Brown held another Summer School and again I taught a class. Autumn brought a larger success. Mrs. Lee started a Browning Class in Chelsea, and another loyal pupil organized a Shakespeare class in Waltham. I enjoyed my trips to these classes very much and one of the first stories I ever wrote was suggested by some characters I saw in an old grocery store in Waltham. As I recall my method of teaching, it consisted chiefly of readings. My critical comment could not have been profound. I was earning now twelve dollars per week, part of this went for railway fare, but I still had a margin of profit. True I still wore reversible cuffs and carried my laundry bundles in order to secure the discount, but I dressed in better style and looked a little less like a starving Russian artist, and I was becoming an author! My entrance into print came about through my good friend, Mr. Hurd, the book reviewer of the _Transcript_. For him I began to write an occasional critical article or poem just to try my hand. One of my regular "beats" was up the three long flights of stairs which led to Hurd's little den above Washington Street, for there I felt myself a little more of the literary man, a little nearer the current of American fiction. Let me repeat my appreciation of the fact that I met with the quickest response and the most generous aid among the people of Boston. There was nothing cold or critical in their treatment of me. My success, admittedly, came from some sympathy in them rather than from any real deserving on my part. I cannot understand at this distance why those charming people should have consented to receive from me, opinions concerning anything whatsoever,--least of all notions of literature,--but they did, and they seemed delighted at "discovering" me. Perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man from the plains. It was well that I was earning my own living at last, for things were not going especially well at home. A couple of dry seasons had made a great change in the fortunes of my people. Frank, with his usual careless good nature as clerk in the store had given credit to almost every comer, and as the hard times came on, many of those indebted failed to pay, and father was forced to give up his business and go back to the farm which he understood and could manage without the aid of an accountant. "The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented, wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west--to Montana, I think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid. Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I cannot get you something to do." It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother was profoundly relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued. Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to. He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother. As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea. We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber voice.... It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury, watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art, of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my people in the West. And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a song already sung. When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the _Wayside Inn_ of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich with its memories of great men and noble women, had no direct inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to celebrate the West was growing. Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my pen to write of them. One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me of that peculiar ringing _scrape_ which the farm shovel used to make when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene. It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,--it was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances, its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it." To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work. The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article. Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm. I sent "The Corn Husking" to the _New American Magazine_, and almost by return mail the editor, William Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up this article by others of the same nature." It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly--but I did not blame him for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life. It must have been about this time that I sold to _Harper's Weekly_ a long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and the _Memoirs of General Grant_ for my father, with intent to suitably record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her lap, and caught the light of her happy smile! CHAPTER XXVIII A Visit to the West At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way from buying a berth in a sleeping car. To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest treatment of the letter "r" gave me assurance that I was approaching my native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical comment. This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May, to be exact, Hurd of the _Transcript_ had placed in my hands a novel called _Zury_ and my review of it had drawn from its author, a western man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I passed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home. Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small, alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with full vigor and all night if we felt like it. Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?" To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue." "Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative form because it's easier. Buckle to it--you can write stories as well as I can--but you must sweat!" This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge. The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view, was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots. The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all over the West," he said in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life--you can, but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!" I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a household word seemed very remote,--but I went away resolved to "grind" if grinding would do any good. Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence, the flat stretches of grass, the leaning Lombardy trees,--everything was significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque. Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the pungent realities of the streamless plain. Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them. Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country--these my people. It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened now and again with sudden showers. Great clouds, trailing veils of rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,--for an instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with breath of flame. It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood, a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with noble trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse. All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility of woman's life on a farm. I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New Hampshire illustrious?" These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties. At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles City, from which I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the "accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary. Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised little,--fortunately--and I was returning, without the pot of gold and with only a tinge of glory. Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would hesitate to follow me. A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the West. Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the fact that I was no longer a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man, with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys, from the most alien climate. Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often--but to me for an hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked myself. At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before), I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye. It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The 'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the disguising effect of my beard. How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely. With eyes singling out each familiar object I loitered along the walk. There stood the grimy wagon shop from which a hammer was ringing cheerily, like the chirp of a cricket,--just as aforetime. Orrin Blakey stood at the door of his lumber yard surveying me with curious eyes but I passed him in silence. I wished to spend an hour or two in going about in guise of a stranger. There was something instructive as well as deliciously exciting in thus seeing old acquaintances as from behind a mask. They were at once familiar and mysterious--mysterious with my new question, "Is this life worth living?" The Merchants' Hotel which once appeared so luxurious (within the reach only of great lecturers like Joseph Cook and Wendell Phillips) had declined to a shabby frame tavern, but entering the dining room I selected a seat near an open window, from which I could look out upon the streets and survey the throng of thickening sightseers as they moved up and down before me like the figures in a vitascope. I was waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace slowly by was Lawyer Ricker, stately, solemn and bibulous as ever, his red beard flowing over a vest unbuttoned in the manner of the old-fashioned southern gentleman, his spotless linen and neat tie showing that his careful, faithful wife was still on guard. Him I remembered for his astounding ability to recite poetry by the hour and also because of a florid speech which I once heard him make in the court room. For six mortal hours he spoke on a case involving the stealing of a horse-blanket worth about four dollars and a half. In the course of his argument he ranged with leisurely self-absorption, from ancient Egypt and the sacred Crocodile down through the dark ages, touching at Athens and Mount Olympus, reviewing Rome and the court of Charlemagne, winding up at four P. M. with an impassioned appeal to the jury to remember the power of environment upon his client. I could not remember how the suit came out, but I did recall the look of stupefaction which rested on the face of the accused as he found himself likened to Gurth the swine-herd and a peasant of Carcassone. Ricker seemed quite unchanged save for the few gray hairs which had come into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a man of great natural ability. Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister, when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they walked past my window. Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little grayer--that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?" There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart. He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year. Of course we don't try to raise much grain--it's mostly stock, but I thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old days of wheat raising--it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good days were also in the past! As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?" I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress, tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fancher and Gammons were feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind and toil. At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of their existence. Then down the street came "The Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them standing with their little sister to watch "the parade." From the window of a law office, Emma and Matilda Leete were leaning and I decided to make myself known to them. Emma, who had been one of my high admirations, had developed into a handsome and interesting woman with very little of the village in her dress or expression, and when I stepped up to her and asked, "Do you know me?" her calm gray eyes and smiling lips denoted humor. "Of course I know you--in spite of the beard. Come in and sit with us and tell all of us about yourself." As we talked, I found that they, at least, had kept in touch with the thought of the east, and Ella understood in some degree the dark mood which I voiced. She, too, occasionally doubted whether the life they were all living was worth while. "We make the best of it," she said, "but none of us are living up to our dreams." Her musical voice, thoughtful eyes and quick intelligence, re-asserted their charm, and I spent an hour or more in her company talking of old friends. It was not necessary to talk down to her. She was essentially urban in tone while other of the girls who had once impressed me with their beauty had taken on the airs of village matrons and did not interest me. If they retained aspirations they concealed the fact. Their husbands and children entirely occupied their minds. Returning to the street, I introduced myself to Uncle Billy Fraser and Osmund Button and other Sun Prairie neighbors and when it became known that "Dick Garland's boy" was in town, many friends gathered about to shake my hand and inquire concerning "Belle" and "Dick." The hard, crooked fingers, which they laid in my palm completed the sorrowful impression which their faces had made upon me. A twinge of pain went through my heart as I looked into their dim eyes and studied their heavy knuckles. I thought of the hand of Edwin Booth, of the flower-like palm of Helena Modjeska, of the subtle touch of Inness, and I said, "Is it not time that the human hand ceased to be primarily a bludgeon for hammering a bare living out of the earth? Nature all bountiful, undiscriminating, would, under justice, make such toil unnecessary." My heart burned with indignation. With William Morris and Henry George I exclaimed, "Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to blame,"--but of this I said nothing at the time--at least not to men like Babcock and Fraser. Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had planted fifteen years before. I entered the low stone cabin wherein Neighbor Button had lived for twenty years (always intending sometime to build a house and make a granary of this), and at the table with the family and the hired men, I ate again of Ann's "riz" biscuit and sweet melon pickles. It was not a pleasant meal, on the contrary it was depressing to me. The days of the border were over, and yet Arvilla his wife was ill and aging, still living in pioneer discomfort toiling like a slave. At neighbor Gardner's home, I watched his bent complaining old wife housekeeping from dawn to dark, literally dying on her feet. William Knapp's home was somewhat improved but the men still came to the table in their shirt sleeves smelling of sweat and stinking of the stable, just as they used to do, and Mrs. Knapp grown more gouty, more unwieldy than ever (she spent twelve or fourteen hours each day on her swollen and aching feet), moved with a waddling motion because, as she explained, "I can't limp--I'm just as lame in one laig as I am in t'other. But 'tain't no use to complain, I've just so much work to do and I might as well go ahead and do it." I slept that night in her "best room," yes, at last, after thirty years of pioneer life, she had a guest chamber and a new "bedroom soot." With open pride and joy she led Belle Garland's boy in to view this precious acquisition, pointing out the soap and towels, and carefully removing the counterpane! I understood her pride, for my mother had not yet acquired anything so luxurious as this. She was still on the border! Next day, I called upon Andrew Ainsley and while the women cooked in a red-hot kitchen, Andy stubbed about the barnyard in his bare feet, showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty, collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn. Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair. Agnes had married and moved away to Dakota, and Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded rag carpets, and sagging sofas,--the bare walls of her pitiful little house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain. All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these lives. I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie about it?" Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped had returned as from some far-off glorious land of achievement. My improved dress, my changed manner of speech, everything I said, roused in them a kind of rebellious rage and gave them unwonted power of expression. Their mood was no doubt transitory, but it was as real as my own. Men who were growing bent in digging into the soil spoke to me of their desire to see something of the great eastern world before they died. Women whose eyes were faded and dim with tears, listened to me with almost breathless interest whilst I told them of the great cities I had seen, of wonderful buildings, of theaters, of the music of the sea. Young girls expressed to me their longing for a life which was better worth while, and lads, eager for adventure and excitement, confided to me their secret intention to leave the farm at the earliest moment. "I don't intend to wear out my life drudging on this old place," said Wesley Fancher with a bitter oath. In those few days, I perceived life without its glamor. I no longer looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. I saw no humor in the bent forms and graying hair of the men. I began to understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes. I recalled her as she passed from the churn to the stove, from the stove to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and clothing mended for the night. The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my theme. I had no intention at the moment of putting it into fiction. The reader may interrupt at this point to declare that all life, even the life of the city is futile, if you look at it in that way, and I reply by saying that I still have moments when I look at it that way. What is it all about, anyhow, this life of ours? Certainly to be forever weary and worried, to be endlessly soiled with thankless labor and to grow old before one's time soured and disappointed, is not the whole destiny of man! Some of these things I said to Emma and Matilda but their optimism was too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see." Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt, I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now, a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be paid. This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it. Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen, these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the feudalism of their native lands and were here because they had no share in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the earth. I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives! And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the sunset?--Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting toiler remains poor?" With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns, a desolate, drab little town. Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my city experience. In an instant I was back precisely where I had been when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear ranks. And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk. I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet you." When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart. The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt. Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund, was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray. I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me. She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien, in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For all his military bluster, the old soldier was entirely subject to her. She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene, sweet but determined. The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I must return, in time to resume my teaching in September. Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full wages, I'll take a hand." This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?" "I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took my place as of old on the stack. On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of the grain brought to me by the three header boxes. It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty in keeping up my end of the whiffletree. The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generally managed to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so hot and drear for her! Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat, had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more. At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first actual farmer in American fiction,--now tell the truth about it," he wrote. Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain. Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift--and still I did not realize that I had entered upon a new career. At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother. Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman, who made a trip back to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why, that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you." Smilingly she held out her hand. "Very well, you may give me my share now." "Wait till I write it," I replied, a little taken aback. Going to my room I set to work and wrote nearly two thousand words of the sketch. This I brought out later in the day and read to her with considerable excitement. I really felt that I had struck out a character which, while it did not conform to the actual woman in the case, was almost as vivid in my mind. Mother listened very quietly until I had finished, then remarked with sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of my ability to go on--indefinitely! I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the same.) Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I pencilled the first draft of a little poem called _Color in the Wheat_ which I also read to her. She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?" Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors, and sometimes a shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the ranks of the toilers. There was a very good reason for my close application to the fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of their approval of the case. At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east. It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart. Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once more. With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt. I was deserting her, recreant to my blood!--That I was re-enacting the most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet--I went! It seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister--but I did not. I went away borne on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its resistless flood. This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan. Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts--that truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness of others a monstrous egotism. In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort of literary form. CHAPTER XXIX I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist. My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form this newly-born conception of the border. No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful (and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost unrelievedly tragic futility. In the few weeks between my return and the beginning of my teaching, I wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at all I began to send them away, to the _Century_, to _Harper's_, and other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep disappointment when they came back--as they all did! However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an elevated aim and continued to fire away. There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them. One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my "false interpretation of western life." The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!" pleaded the editors. "No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling the truth about the city,--the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the new-mown hay and singing _The Old Oaken Bucket_ on the porch by moonlight. "The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded, "the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into my stories in their proper proportions." Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians, popular preachers and vast traders diminished in importance in my mind, so the significance of Whitman, and Tolstoi and George increased, for they all represented qualities which make for saner, happier and more equitable conditions in the future. Perhaps I despised idlers and time-savers unduly, but I was of an age to be extreme. During the autumn Henry George was announced to speak in Faneuil Hall, sacred ark of liberty, and with eager feet my brother and I hastened to the spot to hear this reformer whose fame already resounded throughout the English-speaking world. Beginning his campaign in California he had carried it to Ireland, where he had been twice imprisoned for speaking his mind, and now after having set Bernard Shaw and other English Fabians aflame with indignant protest, was about to run for mayor of New York City. I have an impression that the meeting was a noon-day meeting for men, at any rate the historical old hall, which had echoed to the voices of Garrison and Phillips and Webster was filled with an eager expectant throng. The sanded floor was packed with auditors standing shoulder to shoulder and the galleries were crowded with these who, like ourselves, had gone early in order to ensure seats. From our places in the front row we looked down upon an almost solid mosaic of derby hats, the majority of which were rusty by exposure to wind and rain. As I waited I recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also read _Progress and Poverty_ and both of us felt that we were taking part in a distinctly historical event, the beginning of a new abolition movement. At last, a stir at the back of the platform announced the approach of the speaker. Three or four men suddenly appeared from some concealed door and entered upon the stage. One of them, a short man with a full red beard, we recognized at once,--"The prophet of San Francisco" as he was then called (in fine derision) was not a noticeable man till he removed his hat. Then the fine line of his face from the crown of his head to the tip of his chin printed itself ineffaceably upon our minds. The dome-like brow was that of one highly specialized on lines of logic and sympathy. There was also something in the tense poise of his body which foretold the orator. Impatiently the audience endured the speakers who prepared the way and then, finally, George stepped forward, but prolonged waves of cheering again and again prevented his beginning. Thereupon he started pacing to and fro along the edge of the platform, his big head thrown back, his small hands clenched as if in anticipation of coming battle. He no longer appeared small. His was the master mind of that assembly. His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light. His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement. His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple. Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society" similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit." My brother turned to me--"Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to speak for them." Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought the chairman. With a tremor of excitement in my voice I said, "If you can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you." Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question, shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We _have_ a speaker for next Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and occupation?" I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight o'clock. Come and bring all your friends." "You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined up with the anarchists sure!" That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part. All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend Chamberlin, _The Listener_ of _The Transcript_ filled his column with a long review of my heretical harangue.--With one leap I had reached the lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval! Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my argument was on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform. However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was my life, land reform one of my convictions. High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve. From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the lanes and climbed the hills with my brother. In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own work, I bitterly resented the laws which created millionaires at the expense of the poor. These were days of security and tranquillity, and good friends thickened. Each week I felt myself in less danger of being obliged to shingle, though I still had difficulty in clothing myself properly. Again I saw Booth play his wondrous round of parts and was able to complete my monograph which I called _The Art of Edwin Booth_. I even went so far as to send to the great actor the chapter on his _Macbeth_ and received from him grateful acknowledgments, in a charming letter. A little later I had the great honor of meeting him for a moment and it happened in this way. The veteran reader, James E. Murdock, was giving a recital in a small hall on Park Street, and it was privately announced that Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett would be present. This was enough to justify me in giving up one of my precious dollars on the chance of seeing the great tragedian enter the room. He came in a little late, flushing, timid, apologetic! It seemed to me a very curious and wonderful thing that this man who had spoken to millions of people from behind the footlights should be timid as a maid when confronted by less than two hundred of his worshipful fellow citizens in a small hall. So gentle and kindly did he seem. My courage grew, and after the lecture I approached the spot where he stood, and Mr. Barrett introduced me to him as "the author of the lecture on _Macbeth_."--Never had I looked into such eyes--deep and dark and sad--and my tongue failed me miserably. I could not say a word. Booth smiled with kindly interest and murmured his thanks for my critique, and I went away, down across the Common in a glow of delight and admiration. In the midst of all my other duties I was preparing my brother Franklin for the stage. Yes, through some mischance, this son of the prairie had obtained the privilege of studying with a retired "leading lady" who still occasionally made tours of the "Kerosene Circuit" and who had agreed to take him out with her, provided he made sufficient progress to warrant it. It was to prepare him for this trip that I met him three nights in the week at his office (he was bookkeeper in a cutlery firm) and there rehearsed _East Lynne_, _Leah the Forsaken_, and _The Lady of Lyons_. From seven o'clock until nine I held the book whilst he pranced and shouted and gesticulated through his lines. At last, emboldened by his star's praise, he cut loose from his ledger and went out on a tour which was extremely diverting but not at all remunerative. The company ran on a reef and Frank sent for carfare which I cheerfully remitted, crediting it to his educational account. The most vital literary man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,--those who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with keen enjoyment of his delicate humor, and his graceful, incisive English; in other circles he was condemned because of his "injustice to the finer sex." As for me, having begun my literary career (as the reader may recall) by assaulting this leader of the realistic school I had ended, naturally, by becoming his public advocate. How could I help it? It is true a large part of one of my lectures consisted of a gratuitous slam at "Mr. Howells and the so-called realists," but further reading and deeper thought along the lines indicated by Whitman, had changed my view. One of Walt's immortal invitations which had appealed to me with special power was this: Stop this day and night with me And you shall possess the origin of all poems; You shall no longer take things at second or third hand Nor look through the eyes of the dead, Nor through my eyes either, But through your own eyes.... You shall listen to all sides, And filter them from yourself. Thus by a circuitous route I had arrived at a position where I found myself inevitably a supporter not only of Howells but of Henry James whose work assumed ever larger significance in my mind. I was ready to concede with the realist that the poet might go round the earth and come back to find the things nearest at hand the sweetest and best after all, but that certain injustices, certain cruel facts must not be blinked at, and so, while admiring the grace, the humor, the satire of Howells' books, I was saved from anything like imitation by the sterner and darker material in which I worked. My wall of prejudice against the author of _A Modern Instance_ really began to sag when during the second year of my stay in Boston, I took up and finished _The Undiscovered Country_ (which I had begun five or six years before), but it was _The Minister's Charge_ which gave the final push to my defenses and fetched them tumbling about my ears in a cloud of dust. In fact, it was a review of this book, written for the _Transcript_ which brought about a meeting with the great novelist. My friend Hurd liked the review and had it set up. The editor, Mr. Clement, upon reading it in proof said to Hurd, "This is an able review. Put it in as an editorial. Who is the writer of it?" Hurd told him about me and Clement was interested. "Send him to me," he said. On Saturday I was not only surprised and delighted by the sight of my article in large type at the head of the literary page, I was fluttered by the word which Mr. Clement had sent to me. Humbly as a minstrel might enter the court of his king, I went before the editor, and stood expectantly while he said: "That was an excellent article. I have sent it to Mr. Howells. You should know him and sometime I will give you a letter to him, but not now. Wait awhile. War is being made upon him just now, and if you were to meet him your criticism would have less weight. His enemies would say that you had come under his personal influence. Go ahead with the work you have in hand, and after you have put yourself on record concerning him and his books I will see that you meet him." Like a knight enlisted in a holy war I descended the long narrow stairway to the street, and went to my home without knowing what passed me. I ruminated for hours on Mr. Clement's praise. I read and re-read my "able article" till I knew it by heart and then I started in, seriously, to understand and estimate the school of fiction to which Mr. Howells belonged. I read every one of his books as soon as I could obtain them. I read James, too, and many of the European realists, but it must have been two years before I called upon Mr. Clement to redeem his promise. Deeply excited, with my note of introduction carefully stowed in my inside pocket, I took the train one summer afternoon bound for Lee's Hotel in Auburndale, where Mr. Howells was at this time living. I fervently hoped that the building would not be too magnificent for I felt very small and very poor on alighting at the station, and every rod of my advance sensibly decreased my self-esteem. Starting with faltering feet I came to the entrance of the grounds in a state of panic, and as I looked up the path toward the towering portico of the hotel, it seemed to me the palace of an emperor and my resolution entirely left me. Actually I walked up the street for some distance before I was able to secure sufficient grip on myself to return and enter. "It is entirely unwarranted and very presumptuous in me to be thus intruding on a great author's time," I admitted, but it was too late to retreat, and so I kept on. Entering the wide central hall I crept warily across its polished, hardwood floor to the desk where a highly ornate clerk presided. In a meek, husky voice I asked, "Is Mr. Howells in?" "He is, but he's at dinner," the despot on the other side of the counter coldly replied, and his tone implied that he didn't think the great author would relish being disturbed by an individual who didn't even know the proper time to call. However, I produced my letter of introduction and with some access of spirit requested His Highness to have it sent in. A colored porter soon returned, showed me to a reception room off the hall, and told me that Mr. Howells would be out in a few minutes. During these minutes I sat with eyes on the portieres and a frog in my throat. "How will he receive me? How will he look? What shall I say to him?" I asked myself, and behold I hadn't an idea left! Suddenly the curtains parted and a short man with a large head stood framed in the opening. His face was impassive but his glance was one of the most piercing I had ever encountered. In the single instant before he smiled he discovered my character and my thought as though his eyes had been the lenses of some singular and powerful x-ray instrument. It was the glance of a novelist. Of course all this took but a moment's time. Then his face softened, became winning and his glance was gracious. "I'm glad to see you," he said, and his tone was cordial. "Won't you be seated?" We took seats at the opposite ends of a long sofa, and Mr. Howells began at once to inquire concerning the work and the purposes of his visitor. He soon drew forth the story of my coming to Boston and developed my theory of literature, listening intently while I told him of my history of American Ideals and my attempt at fiction. My conception of the local novel and of its great importance in American literature, especially interested the master who listened intently while I enlarged upon my reasons for believing that the local novel would continue to grow in power and insight. At the end I said, "In my judgment the men and women of the south, the west and the east, are working (without knowing it) in accordance with a great principle, which is this: American literature, in order to be great, must be national, and in order to be national, must deal with conditions peculiar to our own land and climate. Every genuinely American writer must deal with the life he knows best and for which he cares the most. Thus Joel Chandler Harris, George W. Cable, Joseph Kirkland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins, like Bret Harte, are but varying phases of the same movement, a movement which is to give us at last a really vital and original literature!" Once set going I fear I went on like the political orator who doesn't know how to sit down. I don't think I did quit. Howells stopped me with a compliment. "You're doing a fine and valuable work," he said, and I thought he meant it--and he did mean it. "Each of us has had some perception of this movement but no one has correlated it as you have done. I hope you will go on and finish and publish your essays." These words uttered, perhaps, out of momentary conviction brought the blood to my face and filled me with conscious satisfaction. Words of praise by this keen thinker were like golden medals. I had good reason to know how discriminating he was in his use of adjectives for he was even then the undisputed leader in the naturalistic school of fiction and to gain even a moment's interview with him would have been a rich reward for a youth who had only just escaped from spreading manure on an Iowa farm. Emboldened by his gracious manner, I went on. I confessed that I too was determined to do a little at recording by way of fiction the manners and customs of my native West. "I don't know that I can write a novel, but I intend to try," I added. He was kind enough then to say that he would like to see some of my stories of Iowa. "You have almost a clear field out there--no one but Howe seems to be tilling it." How long he talked or how long I talked, I do not know, but at last (probably in self-defense), he suggested that we take a walk. We strolled about the garden a few minutes and each moment my spirits rose, for he treated me, not merely as an aspiring student, but as a fellow author in whom he could freely confide. At last, in his gentle way, he turned me toward my train. It was then as we were walking slowly down the street, that he faced me with the trust of a comrade and asked, "What would you think of a story dealing with the effect of a dream on the life of a man?--I have in mind a tale to be called _The Shadow of a Dream_, or something like that, wherein a man is to be influenced in some decided way by the memory of a vision, a ghostly figure which is to pursue him and have some share in the final catastrophe, whatever it may turn out to be. What would you think of such a plot?" Filled with surprise at his trust and confidence, I managed to stammer a judgment. "It would depend entirely upon the treatment," I answered. "The theme is a little like Hawthorne, but I can understand how, under your hand, it would not be in the least like Hawthorne." His assent was instant. "You think it not quite like me? You are right. It does sound a little lurid. I may never write it, but if I do, you may be sure it will be treated in my own way and not in Hawthorne's way." Stubbornly I persisted. "There are plenty who can do the weird kind of thing, Mr. Howells, but there is only one man who can write books like _A Modern Instance_ and _Silas Lapham_." All that the novelist said, as well as his manner of saying it was wonderfully enriching to me. To have such a man, one whose fame was even at this time international, desire an expression of my opinion as to the fitness of his chosen theme, was like feeling on my shoulder the touch of a kingly accolade. I went away, exalted. My apprenticeship seemed over! To America's chief literary man I was a fellow-writer, a critic, and with this recognition the current of my ambition shifted course. I began to hope that I, too, might some day become a social historian as well as a teacher of literature. The reformer was still present, but the literary man had been reinforced, and yet, even here, I had chosen the unpopular, unprofitable side! Thereafter the gentle courtesy, the tact, the exquisite, yet simple English of this man was my education. Every hour of his delicious humor, his wise advice, his ready sympathy sent me away in mingled exaltation and despair--despair of my own blunt and common diction, exaltation over his continued interest and friendship. How I must have bored that sweet and gracious soul! He could not escape me. If he moved to Belmont I pursued him. If he went to Nahant or Magnolia or Kittery I spent my money like water in order to follow him up and bother him about my work, or worry him into a public acceptance of the single tax, and yet every word he spoke, every letter he wrote was a benediction and an inspiration. He was a constant revelation to me of the swift transitions of mood to which a Celtic man of letters is liable. His humor was like a low, sweet bubbling geyser spring. It rose with a chuckle close upon some very somber mood and broke into exquisite phrases which lingered in my mind for weeks. Side by side with every jest was a bitter sigh, for he, too, had been deeply moved by new social ideals, and we talked much of the growing contrasts of rich and poor, of the suffering and loneliness of the farmer, the despair of the proletariat, and though I could never quite get him to perceive the difference between his program and ours (he was always for some vague socialistic reform), he readily admitted that land monopoly was the chief cause of poverty, and the first injustice to be destroyed. "But you must go farther, much farther," he would sadly say. Of all of my literary friends at this time, Edgar Chamberlin of the _Transcript_ was the most congenial. He, too, was from Wisconsin, and loved the woods and fields with passionate fervor. At his house I met many of the young writers of Boston--at least they were young then--Sylvester Baxter, Imogene Guiney, Minna Smith, Alice Brown, Mary E. Wilkins, and Bradford Torrey were often there. No events in my life except my occasional calls on Mr. Howells were more stimulating to me than my visits to the circle about Chamberlin's hearth--(he was the kind of man who could not live without an open fire) and Mrs. Chamberlin's boundlessly hospitable table was an equally appealing joy. How they regarded me at that time I cannot surely define--perhaps they tolerated me out of love for the West. But I here acknowledge my obligation to "The Listener." He taught me to recognize literary themes in the city, for he brought the same keen insight, the same tender sympathy to bear upon the crowds of the streets that he used in describing the songs of the thrush or the whir of the partridge. He was especially interested in the Italians who were just beginning to pour into The North End, displacing the Irish as workmen in the streets, and often in his column made gracious and charming references to them, softening without doubt the suspicion and dislike with which many citizens regarded them. Hurd, on the contrary, was a very bookish man. He sat amidst mountains of "books for review" and yet he was always ready to welcome the slender volume of the new poet. To him I owe much. From him I secured my first knowledge of James Whitcomb Riley, and it was Hurd who first called my attention to Kirkland's _Zury_. Through him I came to an enthusiasm for the study of Ibsen and Bjornsen, for he was widely read in the literature of the north. On the desk of this hard-working, ill-paid man of letters (who never failed to utter words of encouragement to me) I wish to lay a tardy wreath of grateful praise. He deserves the best of the world beyond, for he got little but hard work from this. He loved poetry of all kinds and enjoyed a wide correspondence with those "who could not choose but sing." His desk was crammed with letters from struggling youths whose names are familiar now, and in whom he took an almost paternal interest. One day as I was leaving Hurd's office he said, "By the way, Garland, you ought to know Jim Herne. He's doing much the same sort of work on the stage that you and Miss Wilkins are putting into the short story. Here are a couple of tickets to his play. Go and see it and come back and tell what you think of it." Herne's name was new to me but Hurd's commendation was enough to take me down to the obscure theater in the South End where _Drifting Apart_ was playing. The play was advertised as "a story of the Gloucester fishermen" and Katharine Herne was the "Mary Miller" of the piece. Herne's part was that of a stalwart fisherman, married to a delicate young girl, and when the curtain went up on his first scene I was delighted with the setting. It was a veritable cottage interior--not an English cottage but an American working man's home. The worn chairs, the rag rugs, the sewing machine doing duty as a flowerstand, all were in keeping. The dialogue was homely, intimate, almost trivial and yet contained a sweet and touching quality. It was, indeed, of a piece with the work of Miss Jewett only more humorous, and the action of Katharine and James Herne was in key with the text. The business of "Jack's" shaving and getting ready to go down the street was most delightful in spirit and the act closed with a touch of true pathos. The second act, a "dream act" was not so good, but the play came back to realities in the last act and sent us all away in joyous mood. It was for me the beginning of the local color American drama, and before I went to sleep that night I wrote a letter to Herne telling him how significant I found his play and wishing him the success he deserved. Almost by return mail came his reply thanking me for my good wishes and expressing a desire to meet me. "We are almost always at home on Sunday and shall be very glad to see you whenever you can find time to come." A couple of weeks later--as soon as I thought it seemly--I went out to Ashmont to see them, for my interest was keen. I knew no one connected with the stage at this time and I was curious to know--I was almost frenziedly eager to know the kind of folk the Hernes were. My first view of their house was a disappointment. It was quite like any other two-story suburban cottage. It had a small garden but it faced directly on the walk and was a most uninspiring color. But if the house disappointed me the home did not. Herne, who looked older than when on the stage, met me with a curiously impassive face but I felt his friendship through this mask. Katharine who was even more charming than "Mary Miller" wore no mask. She was radiantly cordial and we were friends at once. Both persisted in calling me "professor" although I explained that I had no right to any such title. In the end they compromised by calling me "the Dean," and "the Dean" I remained in all the happy years of our friendship. Not the least of the charms of this home was the companionship of Herne's three lovely little daughters Julie, Chrystal and Dorothy, who liked "the Dean"--I don't know why--and were always at the door to greet me when I came. No other household meant as much to me. No one understood more clearly than the Hernes the principles I stood for, and no one was more interested in my plans for uniting the scattered members of my family. Before I knew it I had told them all about my mother and her pitiful condition, and Katharine's expressive face clouded with sympathetic pain. "You'll work it out," she said, "I am sure of it," and her confident words were a comfort to me. They were true Celts, swift to laughter and quick with tears; they inspired me to bolder flights. They met me on every plane of my intellectual interests, and our discussions of Herbert Spencer, Henry George, and William Dean Howells often lasted deep into the night. In all matters concerning the American Drama we were in accord. Having found these rare and inspiring souls I was not content until I had introduced them to all my literary friends. I became their publicity agent without authority and without pay, for I felt the injustice of a situation where such artists could be shunted into a theater in The South End where no one ever saw them--at least no one of the world of art and letters. Their cause was my cause, their success my chief concern. _Drifting Apart_, I soon discovered, was only the beginning of Herne's ambitious design to write plays which should be as true in their local color as Howells' stories. He was at this time working on two plays which were to bring lasting fame and a considerable fortune. One of these was a picture of New England coast life and the other was a study of factory life. One became _Shore Acres_ and the other _Margaret Fleming_. From time to time as we met he read me these plays, scene by scene, as he wrote them, and when _Margaret Fleming_ was finished I helped him put it on at Chickering Hall. My brother was in the cast and I served as "Man in Front" for six weeks--again without pay of course--and did my best to let Boston know what was going on there in that little theater--the first of all the "Little Theaters" in America. Then came the success of _Shore Acres_ at the Boston Museum and my sense of satisfaction was complete. How all this puts me back into that other shining Boston! I am climbing again those three long flights of stairs to the _Transcript_ office. Chamberlin extends a cordial hand, Clement nods as I pass his door. It is raining, and in the wet street the vivid reds, greens, and yellows of the horse-cars, splash the pavement with gaudy color. Round the tower of the Old South Church the doves are whirling. It is Saturday. I am striding across the Common to Park Square, hurrying to catch the 5:02 train. The trees of the Mall are shaking their heavy tears upon me. Drays thunder afar off. Bells tinkle.--How simple, quiet, almost village-like this city of my vision seems in contrast with the Boston of today with its diabolic subways, its roaring overhead trains, its electric cars and its streaming automobiles! Over and over again I have tried to re-discover that Boston, but it is gone, never to return. Herne is dead, Hurd is dead, Clement no longer edits the _Transcript_, Howells and Mary Wilkins live in New York. Louise Chandler Moulton lies deep in that grave of whose restful quiet she so often sang, and Edward Everett Hale, type of a New England that was old when I was young, has also passed into silence. His name like that of Higginson and Holmes is only a faint memory in the marble splendors of the New Public Library. The ravening years--how they destroy! CHAPTER XXX My Mother is Stricken In the summer of 1889, notwithstanding a widening opportunity for lectures in the East, I decided to make another trip to the West. In all my mother's letters I detected a tremulous undertone of sadness, of longing, and this filled me with unrest even in the midst of the personal security I had won. I could not forget the duty I owed to her who had toiled so uncomplainingly that I might be clothed and fed and educated, and so I wrote to her announcing the date of my arrival. My friend, Dr. Cross, eager to see The Short-Grass Country which was a far-off and romantic territory to him, arranged to go with me. It was in July, and very hot the day we started, but we were both quite disposed to make the most of every good thing and to ignore all discomforts. I'm not entirely certain, but I think I occupied a sleeping car berth on this trip; if I did so it was for the first time in my life. Anyhow, I must have treated myself to regular meals, for I cannot recall being ill on the train. This, in itself, was remarkable. Strange to say, most of the incidents of the journey between Boston and Wisconsin are blended like the faded figures on a strip of sun-smit cloth, nothing remains definitely distinguishable except the memory of our visit to my Uncle William's farm in Neshonoc, and the recollection of the pleasure we took in the vivid bands of wild flowers which spun, like twin ribbons of satin, from beneath the wheels of the rear coach as we rushed across the state. All else has vanished as though it had never been. These primitive blossoms along the railroad's right-of-way deeply delighted my friend, but to me they were more than flowers, they were cups of sorcery, torches of magic incense. Each nodding pink brought back to me the sights and sounds and smells of the glorious meadows of my boyhood's vanished world. Every weed had its mystic tale. The slopes of the hills, the cattle grouped under the trees, all wrought upon me like old half-forgotten poems. My uncle, big, shaggy, gentle and reticent, met us at the faded little station and drove us away toward the sun-topped "sleeping camel" whose lines and shadows were so lovely and so familiar. In an hour we were at the farm-house where quaint Aunt Maria made us welcome in true pioneer fashion, and cooked a mess of hot biscuit to go with the honey from the bees in the garden. They both seemed very remote, very primitive even to me, to my friend Cross they were exactly like characters in a story. He could only look and listen and smile from his seat in the corner. William, a skilled bee-man, described to us his methods of tracking wild swarms, and told us how he handled those in his hives. "I can scoop 'em up as if they were so many kernels of corn," he said. After supper as we all sat on the porch watching the sunset, he reverted to the brave days of fifty-five when deer and bear came down over the hills, when a rifle was almost as necessary as a hoe, and as he talked I revived in him the black-haired smiling young giant of my boyhood days, untouched of age or care. He was a poet, in his dreamy reticent way, for when next morning I called attention to the beauty of the view down the valley, his face took on a kind of wistful sweetness and a certain shyness as he answered with a visible effort to conceal his feeling--"I like it--No place better. I wish your father and mother had never left the valley." And in this wish I joined. On the third day we resumed our journey toward Dakota, and the Doctor, though outwardly undismayed by the long hard ride and the increasing barrenness of the level lands, sighed with relief when at last I pointed out against the level sky-line the wavering bulk of the grain elevator which alone marked the wind-swept deserted site of Ordway, the end of our journey. He was tired. Business, I soon learned, had not been going well on the border during the two years of my absence. None of the towns had improved. On the contrary, all had lost ground. Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were deeply disheartened. The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion against government and against God. The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissensions had grown common. Two of my father's neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their crops. Several had slipped away "between two days" to escape their debts, and even little Jessie, who met us at the train, brave as a meadow lark, admitted that something gray had settled down over the plain. Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were now quite firmly established. On the west lay the lands of the Sioux and beyond them the still more arid foot-hills. The westward movement of the Middle Border for the time seemed at an end. My father, Jessie told me, was now cultivating more than five hundred acres of land, and deeply worried, for his wheat was thin and light and the price less than sixty cents per bushel. It was nearly sunset as we approached the farm, and a gorgeous sky was overarching it, but the bare little house in which my people lived seemed a million miles distant from Boston. The trees which my father had planted, the flowers which my mother had so faithfully watered, had withered in the heat. The lawn was burned brown. No green thing was in sight, and no shade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn road, dust rose like smoke from crevices, giving upon deep-hidden subterranean fires. It was not a good time to bring a visitor to the homestead, but it was too late to retreat. Mother, grayer, older, much less vigorous than she had been two years before, met us, silently, shyly, and I bled, inwardly, every time I looked at her. A hesitation had come into her speech, and the indecision of her movements scared me, but she was too excited and too happy to admit of any illness. Her smile was as sweet as ever. Dr. Cross quietly accepted the hot narrow bedroom which was the best we could offer him, and at supper took his place among the harvest help without any noticeable sign of repugnance. It was all so remote, so characteristic of the border that interest dominated disgust. He was much touched, as indeed was I, by the handful of wild roses which father brought in to decorate the little sitting-room. "There's nothing I like better," he said, "than a wild rose." The old trailer had noticeably softened. While retaining his clarion voice and much of his sleepless energy, he was plainly less imperious of manner, less harsh of speech. Jessie's case troubled me. As I watched her, studied her, I perceived that she possessed uncommon powers, but that she must be taken out of this sterile environment. "She must be rescued at once or she will live and die the wife of some Dakota farmer," I said to mother. Again I was disturbed by the feeling that in some way my own career was disloyal, something built upon the privations of my sister as well as upon those of my mother. I began definitely to plan their rescue. "They must not spend the rest of their days on this barren farm," I said to Dr. Cross, and my self-accusation spurred me to sterner resolve. It was not a pleasant time for my good friend, but, as it turned out, there was a special providence in his being there, for a few days later, while Jessie and I were seated in the little sitting-room busily discussing plans for her schooling we heard a short, piercing cry, followed by low sobbing. Hurrying out into the yard, I saw my mother standing a few yards from the door, her sweet face distorted, the tears streaming down her cheeks. "What is it, mother?" I called out. "I can't lift my feet," she stammered, putting her arms about my neck. "I can't move!" and in her voice was such terror and despair that my blood chilled. It was true! She was helpless. From the waist downward all power of locomotion had departed. Her feet were like lead, drawn to the earth by some terrible magnetic power. In a frenzy of alarm, Jessie and I carried her into the house and laid her on her bed. My heart burned with bitter indignation. "This is the end," I said. "Here is the result of long years of ceaseless toil. She has gone as her mother went, in the midst of the battle." At the moment I cursed the laws of man, I cursed myself. I accused my father. Each moment my remorse and horror deepened, and yet I could do nothing, nothing but kneel beside the bed and hold her hand while Jessie ran to call the doctor. She returned soon to say she could not find him. Slowly the stricken one grew calmer and at last, hearing a wagon drive into the yard, I hurried out to tell my father what had happened. He read in my face something wrong. "What's the matter?" he asked as I drew near. "Mother is stricken," I said. "She cannot walk." He stared at me in silence, his gray eyes expanding like those of an eagle, then calmly, mechanically he got down and began to unhitch the team. He performed each habitual act with most minute care, till I, impatient of his silence, his seeming indifference, repeated, "Don't you understand? Mother has had a stroke! She is absolutely helpless." Then he asked, "Where is your friend Dr. Cross?" "I don't know, I thought he was with you." Even as I was calling for him, Dr. Cross came into the cabin, his arms laden with roses. He had been strolling about on the prairie. With his coming hope returned. Calmly yet skillfully he went to the aid of the sufferer, while father, Jessie and I sat in agonized suspense awaiting his report. At last he came back to us with gentle reassuring smile. "There is no immediate danger," he said, and the tone in which he spoke was even more comforting than his words. "As soon as she recovers from her terror she will not suffer"--then he added gravely, "A minute blood vessel has ruptured in her brain, and a small clot has formed there. If this is absorbed, as I think it will be, she will recover. Nothing can be done for her. No medicine can reach her. It is just a question of rest and quiet." Then to me he added something which stung like a poisoned dart. "She should have been relieved from severe household labor years ago." My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my father who had kept my mother always on the border, working like a slave long after the time when she should have been taking her ease. Above all, I resented my own failure, my own inability to help in the case. Here was I, established in a distant city, with success just opening her doors to me, and yet still so much the struggler that my will to aid was futile for lack of means. Sleep was difficult that night, and for days thereafter my mind was rent with a continual and ineffectual attempt to reach a solution of my problem, which was indeed typical of ambitious young America everywhere. "Shall I give up my career at this point? How can I best serve my mother?" These were my questions and I could not answer either of them. At the end of a week the sufferer was able to sit up, and soon recovered a large part of her native cheerfulness although it was evident to me that she would never again be the woman of the ready hand. Her days of labor were over. Her magnificent voice was now weak and uncertain. Her speech painfully hesitant. She who had been so strong, so brave, was now both easily frightened and readily confused. She who had once walked with the grace and power of an athlete was now in terror of an up-rolled rug upon the floor. Every time I looked at her my throat ached with remorseful pain. Every plan I made included a vow to make her happy if I could. My success now meant only service to her. In no other way could I justify my career. Dr. Cross though naturally eager to return to the comfort of his own home stayed on until his patient had regained her poise. "The clot seems in process of being taken up," he said to me, one morning, "and I think it safe to leave her. But you had better stay on for a few weeks." "I shall stay until September, at least," I replied. "I will not go back at all if I am needed here." "Don't fail to return," he earnestly advised. "The field is just opening for you in Boston, and your earning capacity is greater there than it is here. Success is almost won. Your mother knows this and tells me that she will insist on your going on with your work." Heroic soul! She was always ready to sacrifice herself for others. The Doctor's parting words comforted me as I returned to the shadeless farmstead to share in the work of harvesting the grain which was already calling for the reaper, and could not wait either upon sickness or age. Again I filled the place of stacker while my father drove the four-horse header, and when at noon, covered with sweat and dust, I looked at myself, I had very little sense of being a "rising literary man." I got back once again to the solid realities of farm life, and the majesty of the colorful sunsets which ended many of our days could not conceal from me the starved lives and lonely days of my little sister and my aging mother. "Think of it!" I wrote to my brother. "After eight years of cultivation, father's farm possesses neither tree nor vine. Mother's head has no protection from the burning rays of the sun, except the shadow which the house casts on the dry, hard door-yard. Where are the 'woods and prairie lands' of our song? Is this the 'fairy land' in which we were all to 'reign like kings'? Doesn't the whole migration of the Garlands and McClintocks seem a madness?" Thereafter when alone, my mother and I often talked of the good old days in Wisconsin, of David and Deborah and William and Frank. I told her of Aunt Loretta's peaceful life, of the green hills and trees. "Oh, I wish we had never left Green's Coulee!" she said. But this was as far as her complaint ever went, for father was still resolute and undismayed. "We'll try again," he declared. "Next year will surely bring a crop." In a couple of weeks our patient, though unable to lift her feet, was able to shuffle across the floor into the kitchen, and thereafter insisted on helping Jessie at her tasks. From a seat in a convenient corner she picked over berries, stirred cake dough, ground coffee and wiped dishes, almost as cheerfully as ever, but to me it was a pitiful picture of bravery, and I burned ceaselessly with desire to do something to repay her for this almost hopeless disaster. The worst of the whole situation lay in the fact that my earnings both as teacher and as story writer were as yet hardly more than enough to pay my own carefully estimated expenses, and I saw no way of immediately increasing my income. On the face of it, my plain duty was to remain on the farm, and yet I could not bring myself to sacrifice my Boston life. In spite of my pitiful gains thus far, I held a vital hope of soon,--very soon--being in condition to bring my mother and my sister east. I argued, selfishly of course, "It must be that Dr. Cross is right. My only chance of success lies in the east." Mother did her best to comfort me. "Don't worry about us," she said. "Go back to your work. I am gaining. I'll be all right in a little while." Her brave heart was still unsubdued. While I was still debating my problem, a letter came which greatly influenced me, absurdly influenced all of us. It contained an invitation from the Secretary of the Cedar Valley Agriculture Society to be "the Speaker of the Day" at the County Fair on the twenty-fifth of September. This honor not only flattered me, it greatly pleased my mother. It was the kind of honor she could fully understand. In imagination she saw her son standing up before a throng of old-time friends and neighbors introduced by Judge Daly and applauded by all the bankers and merchants of the town. "You must do it," she said, and her voice was decisive. Father, though less open in his expression, was equally delighted. "You can go round that way just as well as not," he said. "I'd like to visit the old town myself." This letter relieved the situation in the most unexpected way. We all became cheerful. I began to say, "Of course you are going to get well," and I turned again to my plan of taking my sister back to the seminary. "We'll hire a woman to stay with you," I said, "and Jessie can run up during vacation, or you and father can go down and spend Christmas with old friends." Yes, I confess it, I was not only planning to leave my mother again--I was intriguing to take her only child away from her. There is no excuse for this, none whatever except the fact that I had her co-operation in the plan. She wanted her daughter to be educated quite as strongly as I could wish, and was willing to put up with a little more loneliness and toil if only her children were on the road to somewhere. Jessie was the obstructionist. She was both scared and resentful. She had no desire to go to school in Osage. She wanted to stay where she was. Mother needed her,--and besides she didn't have any decent clothes to wear. Ultimately I overcame all her scruples, and by promising her a visit to the great city of Minneapolis (with the privilege of returning if she didn't like the school) I finally got her to start with me. Poor, little scared sister, I only half realized the agony of mind through which you passed as we rode away into the Minnesota prairies! The farther she got from home the shabbier her gown seemed and the more impossible her coat and hat. At last, as we were leaving Minneapolis on our way to Osage she leaned her tired head against me and sobbed out a wild wish to go home. Her grief almost wrecked my own self-control but I soothed her as best I could by telling her that she would soon be among old friends and that she couldn't turn back now. "Go on and make a little visit anyway," I added. "It's only a few hours from Ordway and you can go home at any time." She grew more cheerful as we entered familiar scenes, and one of the girls she had known when a child took charge of her, leaving me free to play the part of distinguished citizen. The last day of the races was in action when I, with a certain amount of justifiable pride, rode through the gate (the old familiar sagging gate) seated beside the President of the Association. I wish I could believe that as "Speaker of the Day," I filled the sons of my neighbors with some small part of the awe with which the speakers of other days filled me, and if I assumed something of the polite condescension with which all public personages carry off such an entrance, I trust it will be forgiven me. The event, even to me, was more inspiring in anticipation than in fulfillment, for when I rose to speak in the band-stand the wind was blowing hard, and other and less intellectual attractions were in full tide. My audience remained distressingly small--and calm. I have a dim recollection of howling into the face of the equatorical current certain disconnected sentences concerning my reform theory, and of seeing on the familiar faces of David Babcock, John Gammons and others of my bronzed and bent old neighbors a mild wonder as to what I was talking about. On the whole I considered it a defeat. In the evening I spoke in the Opera House appearing on the same platform whence, eight years before, I had delivered my impassioned graduating oration on "Going West." True, I had gone east but then, advice is for others, not for oneself. Lee Moss, one of my classmates, and in those Seminary days a rival orator, was in my audience, and so was Burton, wordless as ever, and a little sad, for his attempt at preaching had not been successful--his ineradicable shyness had been against him. Hattie was there looking thin and old, and Ella and Matilda with others of the girls I had known eight years before. Some were accompanied by their children. I suspect I aroused their wonder rather than their admiration. My radicalism was only an astonishment to them. However, a few of the men, the more progressive of them, came to me at the close of my talk and shook hands and said, "Go on! The country needs just such talks." One of these was Uncle Billy Frazer and his allegiance surprised me, for he had never shown radical tendencies before. Summing it all up on my way to Chicago I must admit that as a great man returning to his native village I had not been a success. After a few hours of talk with Kirkland I started east by way of Washington in order that I might stop at Camden and call upon old Walt Whitman whose work I had been lecturing about, and who had expressed a willingness to receive me. It was hot and dry in the drab little city in which he lived, and the street on which the house stood was as cheerless as an ash-barrel, even to one accustomed to poverty, like myself, and when I reached the door of his small, decaying wooden tenement, I was dismayed. It was all so unlike the home of a world-famous poet. It was indeed very like that in which a very destitute mechanic might be living, and as I mounted the steps to Walt's room on the second story my resentment increased. Not a line of beauty or distinction or grace rewarded my glance. It was all of the same unesthetic barrenness, and not overly clean at that. The old man, majestic as a stranded sea-God, was sitting in an arm chair, his broad Quaker hat on his head, waiting to receive me. He was spotlessly clean. His white hair, his light gray suit, his fine linen all gave the effect of exquisite neatness and wholesome living. His clear tenor voice, his quiet smile, his friendly hand-clasp charmed me and calmed me. He was so much gentler and sweeter than I had expected him to be. He sat beside a heap of half-read books, marked newspapers, clippings and letters, a welter of concerns which he refused to have removed by the broom of the caretaker, and now and again as he wished to show me something he rose and hobbled a step or two to fish a book or a letter out of the pile. He was quite lame but could move without a crutch. He talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face were as placid as those on the brow of an ox--not one showed petulance or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word. He spoke of one of my stories to which Traubel had called his attention, and reproved me gently for not "letting in the light." It was a memorable meeting for me and I went away back to my work in Boston with a feeling that I had seen one of the very greatest literary personalities of the century, a notion I have had no cause to change in the twenty-seven years which have intervened. CHAPTER XXXI Main Travelled Roads My second visit to the West confirmed me in all my sorrowful notions of life on the plain, and I resumed my writing in a mood of bitter resentment, with full intention of telling the truth about western farm life, irrespective of the land-boomer or the politicians. I do not defend this mood, I merely report it. In this spirit I finished a story which I called _A Prairie Heroine_ (in order that no one should mistake my meaning, for it was the study of a crisis in the life of a despairing farmer's wife), and while even here, I did not tell the whole truth, I succeeded in suggesting to the sympathetic observer a tragic and hopeless common case. It was a tract, that must be admitted, and realizing this, knowing that it was entirely too grim to find a place in the pages of the _Century_ or _Harper's_ I decided to send it to the _Arena_, a new Boston review whose spirit, so I had been told, was frankly radical. A few days later I was amazed to receive from the editor a letter of acceptance enclosing a check, but a paragraph in the letter astonished me more than the check which was for one hundred dollars. "I herewith enclose a check," wrote the editor, "which I hope you will accept in payment of your story.... I note that you have cut out certain paragraphs of description with the fear, no doubt, that the editor would object to them. I hope you will restore the manuscript to its original form and return it. When I ask a man to write for me, I want him to utter his mind with perfect freedom. My magazine is not one that is afraid of strong opinions." This statement backed up by the writer's signature on a blue slip produced in me a moment of stupefaction. Entertaining no real hope of acceptance, I had sent the manuscript in accordance with my principle of trying every avenue, and to get such an answer--an immediate answer--with a check! As soon as I recovered the use of my head and hand, I replied in eager acknowledgment. I do not recall the precise words of my letter, but it brought about an early meeting between B. O. Flower, the editor, and myself. Flower's personality pleased me. Hardly more than a boy at this time, he met me with the friendliest smile, and in our talk we discovered many common lines of thought. "Your story," he said, "is the kind of fiction I need. If you have any more of that sort let me see it. My magazine is primarily for discussion but I want to include at least one story in each issue. I cannot match the prices of magazines like the _Century_ of course, but I will do the best I can for you." It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this meeting to me, for no matter what anyone may now say of the _Arena's_ logic or literary style, its editor's life was nobly altruistic. I have never known a man who strove more single-heartedly for social progress, than B. O. Flower. He was the embodiment of unselfish public service, and his ready sympathy for every genuine reform made his editorial office a center of civic zeal. As champions of various causes we all met in his open lists. In the months which followed he accepted for his magazine several of my short stories and bought and printed _Under the Wheel_, an entire play, not to mention an essay or two on _The New Declaration of Rights_. He named me among his "regular contributors," and became not merely my comforter and active supporter but my banker, for the regularity of his payments raised me to comparative security. I was able to write home the most encouraging reports of my progress. At about the same time (or a little later) the _Century_ accepted a short story which I called _A Spring Romance_, and a three-part tale of Wisconsin. For these I received nearly five hundred dollars! Accompanying the note of acceptance was a personal letter from Richard Watson Gilder, so hearty in its words of appreciation that I was assured of another and more distinctive avenue of expression. It meant something to get into the _Century_ in those days. The praise of its editor was equivalent to a diploma. I regarded Gilder as second only to Howells in all that had to do with the judgment of fiction. Flower's interests were ethical, Gilder's esthetic, and after all my ideals were essentially literary. My reform notions were subordinate to my desire to take honors as a novelist. I cannot be quite sure of the precise date of this good fortune, but I think it must have been in the winter of 1890 for I remember writing a lofty letter to my father, in which I said, "If you want any money, let me know." As it happened he had need of seed wheat, and it was with deep satisfaction that I repaid the money I had borrowed of him, together with three hundred dollars more and so faced the new year clear of debt. Like the miner who, having suddenly uncovered a hidden vein of gold, bends to his pick in a confident belief in his "find" so I humped above my desk without doubts, without hesitations. I had found my work in the world. If I had any thought of investment at this time, which I am sure I had not, it was concerned with the west. I had no notion of settling permanently in the east. My success in entering both the _Century_ and the _Arena_ emboldened me to say to Dr. Cross, "I shall be glad to come down out of the attic and take a full-sized chamber at regular rates." Alas! he had no such room, and so after much perturbation, my brother and I hired a little apartment on Moreland street in Roxbury and moved into it joyously. With a few dollars in my pocket, I went so far as to buy a couple of pictures and a new book rack, the first property I had ever owned, and when, on that first night, with everything in place we looked around upon our "suite," we glowed with such exultant pride as only struggling youth can feel. After years of privation, I had, at last, secured a niche in the frowning escarpment of Boston's social palisade. Frank was twenty-seven, I was thirty, and had it not been for a haunting sense of our father's defeat and a growing fear of mother's decline, we would have been entirely content. "How can we share our good fortune with her and with sister Jessie?" was the question which troubled us most. Jessie's fate seemed especially dreary by contrast with our busy and colorful life. "We can't bring them here," I argued. "They would never be happy here. Father is a borderman. He would enjoy coming east on a visit, but to shut him up in Boston would be like caging an eagle. The case seems hopeless." The more we discussed it the more insoluble the problem became. The best we could do was to write often and to plan for frequent visits to them. One day, late in March, Flower, who had been using my stories in almost every issue of his magazine, said to me: "Why don't you put together some of your tales of the west, and let us bring them out in book form? I believe they would have instant success." His words delighted me for I had not yet begun to hope for an appearance as the author of a book. Setting to work at once to prepare such a volume I put into it two unpublished novelettes called _Up the Cooley_ and _The Branch Road_, for the very good reason that none of the magazines, not even _The Arena_, found them "available." This reduced the number of sketches to six so that the title page read: MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS Six Mississippi Valley Stories BY HAMLIN GARLAND The phrase "main travelled road" is common in the west. Ask a man to direct you to a farmhouse and he will say, "Keep the main travelled road till you come to the second crossing and turn to the left." It seemed to me not only a picturesque title, significant of my native country, but one which permitted the use of a grimly sardonic foreword. This I supplied. "The main travelled road in the west (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snows across it, but it does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and blackbirds and bobolinks are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally over its shallows. Mainly it is long and weariful and has a dull little town at one end, and a home of toil at the other. Like the main travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate." This, my first book, was put together during a time of deep personal sorrow. My little sister died suddenly, leaving my father and mother alone on the bleak plain, seventeen hundred miles from both their sons. Hopelessly crippled, my mother now mourned the loss of her "baby" and the soldier's keen eyes grew dim, for he loved this little daughter above anything else in the world. The flag of his sunset march was drooping on its staff. Nothing but poverty and a lonely old age seemed before him, and yet, in his letters to me, he gave out only the briefest hints of his despair. All this will explain, if the reader is interested to know, why the dedication of my little book was bitter with revolt: "To my father and mother, whose half-century of pilgrimage on the main travelled road of life has brought them only pain and weariness, these stories are dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." It will explain also why the comfortable, the conservative, those who farmed the farmer, resented my thin gray volume and its message of acrid accusation. It was published in 1891 and the outcry against it was instant and astonishing--to me. I had a foolish notion that the literary folk of the west would take a local pride in the color of my work, and to find myself execrated by nearly every critic as "a bird willing to foul his own nest" was an amazement. Editorials and criticisms poured into the office, all written to prove that my pictures of the middle border were utterly false. Statistics were employed to show that pianos and Brussels carpets adorned almost every Iowa farmhouse. Tilling the prairie soil was declared to be "the noblest vocation in the world, not in the least like the pictures this eastern author has drawn of it." True, corn was only eleven cents per bushel at that time, and the number of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters and the hired man were uneasy and clamorous. My answer to all this criticism was a blunt statement of facts. "Butter is not always golden nor biscuits invariably light and flaky in my farm scenes, because they're not so in real life," I explained. "I grew up on a farm and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of its life into print. I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth." But I didn't! Even my youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a revelation of the lives led by the women on the farms of the middle border. Before the tragic futility of their suffering, my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil. The old soldier had nothing to say but mother wrote to me, "It scares me to read some of your stories--they are so true. You might have said more," she added, "but I'm glad you didn't. Farmers' wives have enough to bear as it is." "My stories were not written for farmers' wives," I replied. "They were written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns." "I hope the liars read 'em," was her laconic retort. Nevertheless, in spite of all the outcry against my book, words of encouragement came in from a few men and women who had lived out the precise experiences which I had put into print. "You have delineated my life," one man said. "Every detail of your description is true. The sound of the prairie chickens, the hum of the threshing machine, the work of seeding, corn husking, everything is familiar to me and new in literature." A woman wrote, "You are entirely right about the loneliness, the stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the world the truth." Another critic writing from the heart of a great university said, "I value your stories highly as literature, but I suspect that in the social war which is coming you and I will be at each other's throats." This controversy naturally carried me farther and farther from the traditional, the respectable. As a rebel in art I was prone to arouse hate. Every letter I wrote was a challenge, and one of my conservative friends frankly urged the folly of my course. "It is a mistake for you to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like Whitman," he said. "It is a mistake to be published by the _Arena_. Your book should have been brought out by one of the old established firms. If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse the governing classes, you will succeed." Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my bones. I was not wearing my indignation as a cloak. My rebellious tendencies came from something deep down. They formed an element in my blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,--exemplify. Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine, be fine--but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out of the picture. In the light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics. The editor of the _Arena_ remained my most loyal supporter. He filled the editorial section of his magazine with praise of my fiction and loudly proclaimed my non-conformist character. No editor ever worked harder to give his author a national reputation and the book sold, not as books sell now, but moderately, steadily, and being more widely read than sold, went far. This proved of course, that my readers were poor and could not afford to pay a dollar for a book, at least they didn't, and I got very little royalty from the sale. If I had any illusions about that they were soon dispelled. On the paper bound book I got five cents, on the cloth bound, ten. The sale was mainly in the fifty-cent edition. It was not for me to criticise the methods by which my publisher was trying to make me known, and I do not at this moment regret Flower's insistence upon the reforming side of me,--but for the reason that he was essentially ethical rather than esthetic, some part of the literary significance of my work escaped him. It was from the praise of Howells, Matthews and Stedman, that I received my enlightenment. I began to perceive that in order to make my work carry its message, I must be careful to keep a certain balance between Significance and Beauty. The artist began to check the preacher. Howells gave the book large space in "The Study" in _Harper's_ and what he said of it profoundly instructed me. Edward Everett Hale, Mary E. Wilkins, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and many others were most generous of applause. In truth I was welcomed into the circle of American realists with an instant and generous greeting which astonished, at the same time that it delighted me. I marvel at this appreciation as I look back upon it, and surely in view of its reception, no one can blame me for considering my drab little volume a much more important contribution to American fiction than it really was. It was my first book, and so, perhaps, the reader will excuse me for being a good deal uplifted by the noise it made. Then too, it is only fair to call attention to the fact that aside from Edward Eggleston's _Hoosier Schoolmaster_, _Howe's Story of a Country Town_, and _Zury_, by Joseph Kirkland, I had the middle west almost entirely to myself. Not one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame, and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing her stories of Arkansas life for _Scribners_ but had published only one book. Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by posterity." In short, I was assured that my face was set in the right direction and that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and thirty-one is a most excellent period of life! And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for her was no longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the letter telling of her passing, my mind was irradiated with the picture she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the day of my security, her place was empty. CHAPTER XXXII The Spirit of Revolt During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and the old time politicians were uneasy. As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia--and both were frankly sympathetic with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary Ellen Lease with Cassandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions. The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt. The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved my father. He wrote me that he had joined "the Populists," and was one of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was the chief advocate of a third party. Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of his magazine filled with impassioned defenses of it. One day, early in '91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said, "Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for a novel, as picturesque in its way as _The Rise of the Vendée_--Can't you make use of it?" To this I replied, with some excitement--"Why yes, I think I can. I have in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to try." "Bring the manuscript in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer, and bring it out in book form next winter." In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment which I called at this time _Bradley Talcott_. It contained about thirty thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I saw possibilities in this manuscript--I was in the mood to do that--and sent it in. Flower read it and reported almost by return mail. "We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies necessary to complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay you for the serial besides." The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were nobly generous. They set me free. They gave me wings!--For the first time in my life I was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car, and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did so with elation--with a sense of conquest? Eager to explore--eager to know every state of the Union and especially eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails." On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known leaders in the field. Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm life were in no wise softened by these experiences. How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and twenty-six cent cotton--these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and silos! As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates and places--and no wonder, for I was doing something every moment (I travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that summer does stand clearly out--that of a meeting with my father at Omaha in July. It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the _Arena_ I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills. He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing," he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it." My commission from Flower and the fact that the _Arena_ was willing to pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors. Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last." It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his irresolution, his timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of self-distrust which are signs of advancing years. For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel--if I can only get fifteen bushels to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear--and then, besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her terribly." This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic, so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West--in America--and it produced in me a sense of dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall into this slough of discouragement? My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate. "I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but I am coming out again this fall to speak in the campaign and I shall surely run up and visit her then." "I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County Committee." All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel, I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over the whole nation--but above all others the problem of my father's desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother--"he is going to need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending another winter out there on the plain." My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading parts in _Shore Acres_ was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to the old pioneer. * * * * * Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his school or any other school. His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating joke--"Going back to shingling?" he demanded. "No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more--except for exercise after I get my homestead in the west--but I think--I'm not sure--I _think_ I can make a living with my pen." He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go--but you are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we parted. Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking nearly every day--getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a rich fund of experiences. It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester? With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the writer and recluse. As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me. He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in the midst of disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my father--"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to stick to the job." Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation. They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected. They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the full, the honor which their neighbors paid me--their son! Their presence so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address. We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly regaining the use of her limbs. Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live together,--not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be long now." She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all right again--at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are successful." This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to rescue her from the destitution and loneliness of this arid land. My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not really taken root in Massachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to be the all-conquering capital of The Nation. My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston to build up Manhattan had begun. My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in _Shore Acres_, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding houses." With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd like to spend a winter in the old town anyway." My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal was eaten at home. Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons, but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly acknowledged their indebtedness to him. Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays. Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the good old Convent Avenue days!" New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now, but to me it was a veritable hell because of the appalling inequality which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in waves of unearned rent. And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me, I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My dominion is the West." Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks--which we were. In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents. My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No, that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a city." "We could buy a farm over in Jersey." "What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange conditions.--No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to Iowa or to Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit them there." "That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to Dakota again." The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful associations in my mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I received a letter from my mother. There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be troubled and uneasy. CHAPTER XXXIII The End of the Sunset Trail In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not live so far away!" There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be actually ill. That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort. The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light, thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm. After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast, and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare. No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt, humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees. Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me. At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a castaway on some gelid Greenland coast. Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature. With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith, however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west. "The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can regulate the water for my crops." "You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west. I have a better plan than that." The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor. Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator. Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its doors sagging. Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor, and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your youth.--Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old New England custom and be happy." Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes. He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it out right here or farther west." To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone. Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort, back to a real home beside her brothers." As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once more, but I never shall." "Yes, you shall," I asserted. We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim? "Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey--to what end? Here you are,--snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout face. _You must take the back trail._ It will hurt, but it must be done." "I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life, and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in succession--we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so long as I can run a team." "Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in such surroundings as these. I won't have it--it isn't right." At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying, "Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William and look the ground over.--But I won't consider going back to stay till I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll talk with you." "Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley." * * * * * This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails, go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you, sell out and move,--always toward the open country. To remain quietly in your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and stories of my youth. Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood against the blast like friendly warders. The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful. As I went about the streets with my uncle William--gray-haired old pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello, Bill"--adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?" "He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going to sell out next year and come back here." They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?" "Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively. "I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?" This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very well,--but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her own folks." "Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply. In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York, well pleased with my plan. After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now the day of reckoning had come. CHAPTER XXXIV We Go to California The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life--a little solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my family could catch and cling. All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships--At times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants--which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving. My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low--you know the kind, we saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do the housework so that we can visit her often,"--and so on and on! Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way. It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale, hungry looking boy at this time and had just written _The Red Badge of Courage_, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half from the keep of a cruel typist. He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript in his ulster. Now it was _The Men in the Storm_, now a bunch of _The Black Riders_, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council over his dark future. "You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found small comfort in that prospect. To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical--for my study was the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were at least dukes. An expression used by Suderman in his preface to _Dame Care_ had made a great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that _my_ mother shall not 'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight. I take no credit for my desire to comfort her--it's just my way of having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part." Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my devotion to my parents. "No," I insisted,--"if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have shown mother _Shore Acres_ and given her an opportunity to hear a symphony concert." Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of fact none of them paid me any royalty, my subsistence came from the sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with _The Century_, and _Harper's_, _The Youth's Companion_ and _The Arena_. The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer. On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and myself. Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting _Prairie Folks_ into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press Club and I began to understand and like the city. As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of life. My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said, "provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse." "Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of West Salem, and if you can content yourself to live with us there, I shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with mother and talk the matter over with us." To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will follow in a few days," she said--"if he can find someone to look after his stock and tools while he is gone." She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate "company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day. There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either the wind or the sun. The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind. "I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece of land. He likes his big fields." One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us. It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll ever see him again. He's too poor and too proud to come back here, and I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him." This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour--I've just decided that you and father shall go along." The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing like that," she declared. "It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of your life." Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do. If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him." Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it as settled and so did William and Maria. I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David once more--why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along together." He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well. Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more." I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems. It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for Christmas." The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest, whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound. At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted. Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm--at least for the winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the law allows," he added with a smile. Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare. Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope it will be forgiven me for I was determined that this should be the greatest event in her life. My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own. During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have been here before the railroad." Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it. "The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks, "was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon." Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just starting to break a garden when the troops came." It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and miners--all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast range--and, at last, the swift descent to the orange groves and singing birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth the cost of the trip." Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion had come too late for her. A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really _see_ the ocean?" she asked. "Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and ships and sharks--may be a whale or two." Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate." "Of course--that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you come up to visit David." My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County, Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home. Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a place here." This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota. There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco, Portland and Olympia, eager to see California--all of it. Its mountains, its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the _Argonauts_ and _The Songs of the Sierras_ to me, and one of my main objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights. No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of mountains." Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San José, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother were to come up from Santa Barbara. It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of December we all met at my uncle's door. This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together, as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all. Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units? The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father, had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep discouragement. From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota. From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again moved westward--ever westward, and here now at last in San José, at the end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at whatever he could find to do. Nevertheless, he was still the borderer, still the man of the open. Something in his face and voice, something in his glance set him apart from the ordinary workman. He still carried with him something of the hunter, something which came from the broad spaces of the Middle Border, and though his bushy hair and beard were streaked with white, and his eyes sad and dim, I could still discern in him some part of the physical strength and beauty which had made his young manhood so glorious to me--and deeper yet, I perceived in him the dreamer, the Celtic minstrel, the poet. His limbs, mighty as of old, were heavy, and his towering frame was beginning to stoop. His brave heart was beating slow. Fortune had been harshly inimical to him and his outlook on life was bitter. With all his tremendous physical power he had not been able to regain his former footing among men. In talking of his misfortunes, I asked him why he had not returned to Wisconsin after his loss in Montana, and he replied, as my father had done. "How could I do that? How could I sneak back with empty pockets?" Inevitably, almost at once, father spoke of the violin. "Have you got it yet?" he asked. "Yes," David replied. "But I seldom play on it now. In fact, I don't think there are any strings on it." I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had no will to play, but he dug the almost forgotten instrument out of a closet, strung it and tuned it, and that evening after dinner, when my father called out in familiar imperious fashion, "Come, come! now for a tune," David was prepared, reluctantly, to comply. "My hands are so stiff and clumsy now," he said by way of apology to me. It was a sad pleasure to me, as to him, this revival of youthful memories, and I would have spared him if I could, but my father insisted upon having all of the jocund dances and sweet old songs. Although a man of deep feeling in many ways, he could not understand the tragedy of my uncle's failing skill. But mother did! Her ear was too acute not to detect the difference in tone between his playing at this time and the power of expression he had once possessed, and in her shadowy corner she suffered sympathetically when beneath his work-worn fingers the strings cried out discordantly. The wrist, once so strong and sure, the hands so supple and swift were now hooks of horn and bronze. The magic touch of youth had vanished, and yet as he went on, some little part of his wizardry came back. At father's request he played once more _Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin'_, and while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep Wisconsin valley and Grandfather McClintock, a dreaming giant, was drumming on his chair, his face flame-lit, his hair a halo of snow and gold. Tune after tune the old Borderman played, in answer to my father's insistent demands, until at last the pain of it all became unendurable and he ended abruptly. "I can't play any more.--I'll never play again," he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in its coffin. We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats, resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and all the west was a land of hope. My father now joined in urging David to go back to the middle border. "I'll put you on my farm," he said. "Or if you want to go back to Neshonoc, we'll help you do that. We are thinking of going back there ourselves." David sadly shook his grizzled head. "No, I can't do that," he repeated. "I haven't money enough to pay my carfare, and besides, Becky and the children would never consent to it." I understood. His proud heart rebelled at the thought of the pitying or contemptuous eyes of his stay-at home neighbors. He who had gone forth so triumphantly thirty years before could not endure the notion of going back on borrowed money. Better to die among strangers like a soldier. Father, stern old pioneer though he was, could not think of leaving his wife's brother here, working like a Chinaman. "Dave has acted the fool," he privately said to me, "but we will help him. If you can spare a little, we'll lend him enough to buy one of these fruit farms he's talking about." To this I agreed. Together we loaned him enough to make the first payment on a small farm. He was deeply grateful for this and hope again sprang up in his heart. "You won't regret it," he said brokenly. "This will put me on my feet, and by and by perhaps we'll meet in the old valley."--But we never did. I never saw him again. I shall always insist that a true musician, a superb violinist was lost to the world in David McClintock--but as he was born on the border and always remained on the border, how could he find himself? His hungry heart, his need of change, his search for the pot of gold beyond the sunset, had carried him from one adventure to another and always farther and farther from the things he most deeply craved. He might have been a great singer, for he had a beautiful voice and a keen appreciation of the finer elements of song. It was hard for me to adjust myself to his sorrowful decline into old age. I thought of him as he appeared to me when riding his threshing machine up the coulee road. I recalled the long rifle with which he used to carry off the prizes at the turkey shoots, and especially I remembered him as he looked while playing the violin on that far off Thanksgiving night in Lewis Valley. I left California with the feeling that his life was almost ended, and my heart was heavy with indignant pity for I must now remember him only as a broken and discouraged man. The David of my idolatry, the laughing giant of my boyhood world, could be found now, only in the mist which hung above the hills and valleys of Neshonoc. CHAPTER XXXV The Homestead in the Valley To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want to know Frisco." My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting through a list of tedious duties. There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in _Incog_. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed herself quite breathless over the absurd situations of the farce but father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough," said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in _Shore Acres_." At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have something of the quality of home to us all. We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his "troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern California. This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not go back to Dakota now." "Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys." With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn. Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their plans, and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the bustle of preparation was at a very high point. The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary capitals of the world. Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade, Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum. Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs the heart of America," I declared in _Crumbling Idols_, an essay which I was at this time writing for the _Forum_. In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My writing was of the Middle Border, and must continue to be so. Its spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to acquire. Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and success," they added. Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business--but I did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors. Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You _must_ see this fair. On the way back I will go as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking about." My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long journey." Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave intonation. We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives," we said. With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits and all of the finest exteriors--not to mention a glimpse of the polyglot amazements of the Midway. In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments, and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would never see again. Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair, visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world. She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big and dark as those of a child. At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it." Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City. At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake. Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison--they with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich, too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted. However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it became!--With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem, both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn. * * * * * Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums, raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs, syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had lavished upon it. As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular cottage growing into something fine and sweet and--our own! There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle to the west, my decision came. "This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?" "Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied. "Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here for our Thanksgiving dinner." Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota. The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous. To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for a boom. Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid, and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home. It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her wanderings were over, her heart at peace. My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother sent out the invitations for our dinner. So far as we could, we intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group. At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in after dinner. The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and turkeys and fat squashes grew. My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch." Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west! It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it all seems part of a kindlier world, a vanished world--as it is! There were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,--all the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity--and we were unafraid. The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on, Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this dinner." "I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah. "And Rachel," added mother. This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a little later. The dead claimed their places. Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow, was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a memory. My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing _Nellie Wildwood_," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled. Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on the tender refrain: Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood Never more to long for the spring. and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire. George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked Frank to play _Maggie, air ye sleepin'_, he shook his head, saying, "That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all. Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join his voice to hers. It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling. It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin' In the year of Jubilo! we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression of our own rejoicing present. Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then at last, at my request, she sang _The Rolling Stone_, and with a smile at father, we all joined the chorus. We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss. My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to discover my mental characteristics striking so deep into this typically American soil. One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father, "Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here." "This is my home," I repeated. When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder. "Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking about. My head is full of plans for its improvement." "It's good enough for me as it is," she protested. "No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can." Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of other necessary battles which I must fight and win. * * * * * As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I bring you from the city?" With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can bring me,--one thing more that I want." "What is that?" "A daughter. I need a daughter--and some grandchildren." +-----------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in | | the original document have been preserved. | | | | Typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | Page 21 McEldowney changed to McIldowney | | Page 61 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik | | Page 80 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik | | Page 80 Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik | | Page 164 arroya changed to arroyo | | Page 202 luminious changed to luminous | | Page 250 Canon changed to Canyon | | Page 259 missing word "he" inserted | | Page 270 buffetted changed to buffeted | | Page 294 maneuvres changed to manoeuvres | | Page 309 these changed to those | | Page 316 turretted changed to turreted | | Page 328 Douglas changed to Douglass | | Page 334 gratitud changed to gratitude | | Page 362 "of" added between "all us" | | Page 364 unwieldly changed to unwieldy | | Page 376 Harpers changed to Harper's | | Page 378 Proverty changed to Poverty | | Page 383 gratuitious changed to gratuitous | | Page 391 Kurd's changed to Hurd's | | Page 393 discusssions changed to discussions | | Page 410 Harpers changed to Harper's | | Page 414 wearyful changed to weariful | | Page 418 Harpers changed to Harper's | | Page 418 other changed to others | | Page 443 Harpers changed to Harper's | | Page 448 that changed to than | +-----------------------------------------------+ 
3390	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--My Mark Twain by William Dean Howells MY MARK TWAIN I. It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian. At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of, "Oh, Youth!" That was her name for him among their friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for just the boy he was. II. There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books, 'Vagabond Adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields, much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, Bret Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why, fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens. Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens had come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be called the English violet order of architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences. The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completed sale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, "It sells right along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in. "Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence. III. The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there." Then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over again. Or at times he would reason high-- "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him. He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. "He asked me," Clemens would say, "if I couldn't give him the names of people who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard from him. 'Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very good word for you.' I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed. 'So I guess I shall have to back you myself.'" Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say, but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little children. There had been a boy, and "Yes, I killed him," Clemens once said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain this was through its father's imprudence. I never heard him speak of his son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin and talking and talking. It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run over, and he was glad the whole world should see it. His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this, as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness. Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity. IV. Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship. It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke, could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I knew already from his many stories about him. We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness, but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate. I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words, of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her, "You seem to think that woman could write," and he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any. He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me over Clemens wrote, "That man seems to have been to you what Browning was to me." I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay's it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the vengefulness of William Morris's 'Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,' and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying the murderer of his brother: "I am threescore years and ten, And my hair is 'nigh turned gray, But I am glad to think of the moment when I took his life away." Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in. Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor, which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy for them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose. V. At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript to her I skipped that." It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to their friends. I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country, and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried, so far as the modest traditions of 'The Atlantic' would permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like the Bible." We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the making of his great book, 'Life on the Mississippi'. Upon the whole I have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was supported in his opinion by that of the 'portier' in his hotel at Vienna, and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. 'The New York Times' and the 'St. Louis Democrat' profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure, and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as ever. VI. It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of 'The Gilded Age.' This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah, whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent, who counted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him a note of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph. One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in. By-and-by the popularity of the play waned, and the time came when he sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according to Clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way. We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my fondness. At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the despairing renunciation, "That is a Raymond play." We tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter--a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in no hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had no doubt he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript, in spite of Clemens's charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor's hands. But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible. At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him. He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial performances. Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here is a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools." Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die. VII. There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens very much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew." I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford when Arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. "Who-who in the world is that?" I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you. VIII. I shall not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him, but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath, or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from the thread of thought in my mind. "I wonder why we hate the past so," and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "It's so damned humiliating," which is what any man would say of his past if he were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was not stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it. He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring Brace's 'Gesta Christi'; or, 'History of Humane Progress', and I could offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church, and he groaned out: "Oh yes, I go. It 'most kills me, but I go," and I did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had finally come to her saying, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you." He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth, and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart, and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it merely functional. To make an end of these records as to Clemens's beliefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness. All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite compassion, "Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?" Nothing more, but the look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from my sense. IX. He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final personality was something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens's meaning to the public without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, "You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the Twelve Apostles." George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away content with himself and all the rest of the world. The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of conduct "unbecoming an officer and gentleman," and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white, but, "Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part black that undid him." It made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white were guiltless. Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history. He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away." He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on fable. He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it, once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful, not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter. X. I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest, with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science, Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, "The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality. But I must not go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner; luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say; he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another's remark and gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing. Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk. Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess, after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost killed her, but it was worth it. In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him. He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post of duty. Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn steps of Porter's Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled panting back to Boston, with "their tongues hanging out like dogs," but we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord, passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we stood, lost in this "contest of civilities," the coach passed us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to Concord that day and did not. We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted wisdom of taking the train at Porter's Station, and had agreed to say that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection. XI. From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens's affection for me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a "gentleman friend," that emulous of the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book. Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to comment, "I suppose you will report this fellow." "Yes," he answered, slowly and sadly. "That's what I should have done once. But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month." Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that with Unions was the working-man's only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the 'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.' XII. Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their journey with a night's rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott's Tower, ten miles out of Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked. Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly. He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with the long Semitic curve of Clemens's nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so. I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens's instance in his own uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking, when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely, I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted, concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were his wife's misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and tenderness and "natural piety"; and she would not have had him judged by a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer's life. This is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those doubts. XIII. Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man's falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to die; he would have liked the rapping back. He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till well toward the winter twilight. He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of the now worn-out Authors' Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop (everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading, but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as 'The Prince and the Pauper;' but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from unprinted chapters (say, out of 'The Undiscovered Country' or 'A Modern Instance') he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every genuine art to that end. XIV. There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform. The Authors' Readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from one's book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture's purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined 'Memorable Murders' for subscription publication; we both abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them. He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated me on having gone into "the lecture field," and then he said: "I know where you are now. You are in hell." It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader's eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as he was. "Pay what thou owest." That is right, even when thou owest it by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy need. Clemens's behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel, but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and his payment of his portion of our race's debt to the race of the colored student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the discharge of his firm's liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and I least of all men. He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons, joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther. Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her, and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be, and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator in witnessing the inexorable doom of others. XV. When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors, who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave great pleasure and no pain. I forget some of the "emergent occasions," but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and came so near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady contributors' company, but that night there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived. I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant, and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph. But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at all. The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow." It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens seemed unable to accept the tribute. I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow, a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and said, "Ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost an instant in replying to Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the matter again. "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool," Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of the self-abasement. To me Clemens wrote a week later, "It doesn't get any better; it burns like fire." But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising Clemens's burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in Clemens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child's note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke. XVI. Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together without something out of the common happening, and one day something far out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously impersonal interest, "Oh, see that woman getting into the water!" This would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door, and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment. Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to be so entirely ignored. There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me. XVII. A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before, where there was a "little Scotch lord" present, to whom the English tacitly referred Clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves different from other men. Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it. He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say, the man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it. He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or, he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years, he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him, and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies, but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies; their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him. He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor's head. Later, he wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was acquitted, and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur's administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. I asked him to write to Grant in my father's behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant's publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to find Grant in his business office, that place where his business innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above. It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens's often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant. It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large. He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through his report how Grant described his suffering. The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss, and the success of Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of, when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens's book agents would carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant. XIX. The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact, sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness, and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a dinner, but now he was silent, as if "high sorrowful and cloyed"; and it was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed for the actor. He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which eventuated with him in his theory of what he called "the damned human race." This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably, as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about "the damned human race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel really minded it much more than that Guardian Angel of his. It probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it. Nothing came of his pose regarding "the damned human race" except his invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their indifference. In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero's courage in the field and the martyr's at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer would suffer in forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or "reformed the lords," as it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased as "the Majesty of England." He rolled the words deep-throatedly out, and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings. XX. He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary interest in the inventions of others. At one moment "the damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood, or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not mistaken as to Clemens's enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor. In these things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it, but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of emotion sent over the world by 'Looking Backward,' and again when we were all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the workingman's cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right. When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn that "the damned human race" was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. XXI. For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father's and mother's hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men. He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human credulity and folly. An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. XXII. The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this: our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years. Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he did everything she wanted. At one place, some suburban villa, he could get no answer to his ring, and he "hove" his cards over the gate just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers' mercy he always managed to get where he wanted. The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him to do what the cat might. It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that Clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider "the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in England." But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens's health alone that they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should change for his wife's sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly: "What? What?" as if it might be an asking for him instead of the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her? She thought you didn't like her." What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom. To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering the money paid over by that brother's publisher to a false friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was, who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness. XXIII. During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the last time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where we could read our manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out without disturbing her. At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun. He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I have mentioned. The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read me those first chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole story. I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more largely his than the lives of most men's wives are theirs. For his own life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done with it. Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came for his wife's removal from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him: the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of it. My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at 21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography. He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library, but a literature. It should make good the world's loss through Omar's barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was really done on a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it, and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these. It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked. We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends, and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of Kossuth's visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the "oppressed of Europe"; the oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced in Gorky's presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature. I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens's familiar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at the elevator's mouth for all who went to see Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing to say of Gorky's domestic affairs; for the public interest had now strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens. "How many?" he demanded. "Five," the butler faltered. "Reporters?" The butler feigned uncertainty. "What would you do?" he asked me. "I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong, and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime. XXIV. To the period of Clemens's residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon. The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity. It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could not do. His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered to him if he had known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition. He disliked clubs; I don't know whether he belonged to any in New York, but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted. There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it. He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other. XXV. My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor, when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. 'Go Down, Daniel', was one in which I can hear his quavering tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No one could read 'Uncle Remus' like him; his voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember especially his rapture with Mr. Cable's 'Old Creole Days,' and the thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper's brother when the city's survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage where the leper lived in hiding: "Strit must not pass!" Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he took a man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men. It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong. Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Absolute devotion to the day of her death, Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence Amuse him, even when they wronged him Amusingly realized the situation to their friends But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month" Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions Church: "Oh yes, I go It 'most kills me, but I go," Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature Despair broke in laughter Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour He did not care much for fiction He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection He was a youth to the end of his days Heroic lies His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it Honest men are few when it comes to themselves It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say Jane Austen Left him to do what the cat might Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm Liked to find out good things and great things for himself Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Nearly nothing as chaos could be Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never saw a man more regardful of negroes No man ever yet told the truth about himself No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish Polite learning hesitated his praise Praised it enough to satisfy the author Reparation due from every white to every black man Shackles of belief worn so long Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort Stupidly truthful The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it Truthful Used to ingratitude from those he helped Vacuous vulgarity of its texts Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent Whether every human motive was not selfish Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!" 
3391	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--A Belated Guest by William Dean Howells A BELATED GUEST It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries, of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people, they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them? Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms, that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or three instances, if one does one's duty by each. People begin to say, and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah, here he is again with his recollections!" Well, but if the recollections by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least excused? I. My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner', and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure, that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing, but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him. When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame," his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco? Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead, then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam," he could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life." The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and prospered them. Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two volumer," and no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented. II. Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned. Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow." It was a little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The Cathedral.' But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air." This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly. Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name. With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to class together as "the old saints," Harte had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them. Emerson's smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over a glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness. III. As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly. But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why, is that an azalea?" To be sure, this might have been less from his ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea of Californian size could easily lend itself to. You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant fellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic." He preferred to talk about the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be living. "Why," the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge. There's Phillips Place." "Well," Harte assented, "Phillips Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue." He entered eagerly into the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the lofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of the towering forms that dwarfed it so. He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized then and there. "Look at him," he said, from time to time. "This is the dream of his life," and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal's mind. At a dinner long after in London, where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful black. "He looks," one of his friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French marquis of the ancien regime." "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully, "or like an American actor made up for the part." The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature. Never was any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!" No doubt he tasted all the delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite unaffected. If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on our map. It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse. Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet; whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language, he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems, characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them. In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life. The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book, which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself, "With sick and scornful looks averse," confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston counting-room. It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the booksellers' counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New York. It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people. Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a propos' for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization. It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not doing anything. IV. The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station; there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car. But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in picturesque farewell from the platform. Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed to death between a moving train and such an archway. Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities in the world, "In life's morning march when his bosom was young," and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it. Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other. [This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet writes the best prose. D.W.] ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life Dollars were of so much farther flight than now Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself Express the appreciation of another's fit word Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller Now death has come to join its vague conjectures Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens 
32603	----	Julia Ward Howe. FROM SUNSET RIDGE: POEMS OLD AND NEW. 12mo, $1.50. REMINISCENCES. With many Portraits and other Illustrations. Crown 8vo, $2.50. IS POLITE SOCIETY POLITE? AND OTHER ESSAYS. With a Portrait of Mrs. Howe. Square 8vo, $1.50. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK. [Illustration: Photograph of Julia Ward Howe; signature] REMINISCENCES 1819-1899 BY JULIA WARD HOWE WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS [Decorative Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JULIA WARD HOWE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. BIRTH, PARENTAGE, CHILDHOOD 1 II. LITERARY NEW YORK 21 III. NEW YORK SOCIETY 29 IV. HOME LIFE: MY FATHER 43 V. MY STUDIES 56 VI. SAMUEL WARD AND THE ASTORS 64 VII. MARRIAGE: TOUR IN EUROPE 81 VIII. FIRST YEARS IN BOSTON 144 IX. SECOND VISIT TO EUROPE 188 X. A CHAPTER ABOUT MYSELF 205 XI. ANTI-SLAVERY ATTITUDE: LITERARY WORK: TRIP TO CUBA 218 XII. THE CHURCH OF THE DISCIPLES: IN WAR TIME 244 XIII. THE BOSTON RADICAL CLUB: DR. F. H. HEDGE 281 XIV. MEN AND MOVEMENTS IN THE SIXTIES 304 XV. A WOMAN'S PEACE CRUSADE 327 XVI. VISITS TO SANTO DOMINGO 345 XVII. THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT 372 XVIII. CERTAIN CLUBS 400 XIX. ANOTHER EUROPEAN TRIP 410 XX. FRIENDS AND WORTHIES: SOCIAL SUCCESSES 428 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE JULIA WARD HOWE _Frontispiece_ _From a photograph by Hardy, 1897._ SARAH MITCHELL, NIECE OF GENERAL FRANCIS MARION AND GRANDMOTHER OF MRS. HOWE 4 _From a painting by Waldo and Jewett._ JULIA WARD AND HER BROTHERS, SAMUEL AND HENRY 8 _From a miniature by Anne Hall._ JULIA CUTLER WARD, MOTHER OF MRS. HOWE 12 _From a miniature by Anne Hall._ SAMUEL WARD, FATHER OF MRS. HOWE 46 _From a miniature by Anne Hall._ SAMUEL WARD, JR 68 _From a painting by Baron Vogel._ FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 138 _From a photograph._ THE SOUTH BOSTON HOME OF MR. AND MRS. HOWE 152 _From a painting in the possession of M. Anagnos._ WENDELL PHILLIPS, AT THE AGE OF 48 158 _From a photograph lent by Francis J. Garrison, Boston._ THEODORE PARKER 166 _From a photograph by J. J. Hawes._ JULIA WARD HOWE 176 _From a painting (1847) by Joseph Ames._ SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE, M. D. 230 _From a photograph by Black, about 1859._ JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE 246 _From a photograph by the Notman Photographic Company._ JOHN BROWN 254 _From a photograph (about 1857) lent by Francis J. Garrison, Boston._ JOHN A. ANDREW 262 _From a photograph by Black._ JULIA WARD HOWE 270 _From a photograph by J. J. Hawes, about 1861._ FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST DRAFT OF THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC 276 _From the original MS. in the possession of Mrs. E. P. Whipple, Boston._ RALPH WALDO EMERSON 292 _From a photograph by Black._ FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE, D. D. 302 _From a photograph lent by his daughter, Charlotte A. Hedge._ SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE, M. D. 328 _From a photograph by A. Marshall (1870), in the possession of the Massachusetts Club._ LUCY STONE 376 _From a photograph by the Notman Photographic Company._ MARIA MITCHELL 386 _From a photograph._ THE NEWPORT HOME OF MR. AND MRS. HOWE 406 _From a photograph by Briskham and Davidson._ THOMAS GOLD APPLETON 432 _From a photograph lent by Mrs. John Murray Forbes._ JULIA ROMANA ANAGNOS 440 _From a photograph._ REMINISCENCES CHAPTER I BIRTH, PARENTAGE, CHILDHOOD I have been urgently asked to put together my reminiscences. I could wish that I had begun to do so at an earlier period of my life, because at this time of writing the lines of the past are somewhat confused in my memory. Yet, with God's help, I shall endeavor to do justice to the individuals whom I have known, and to the events of which I have had some personal knowledge. Let me say at the very beginning that I esteem this century, now near its close, to have eminently deserved a record among those which have been great landmarks in human history. It has seen the culmination of prophecies, the birth of new hopes, and a marvelous multiplication both of the ideas which promote human happiness and of the resources which enable man to make himself master of the world. Napoleon is said to have forbidden his subordinates to tell him that any order of his was impossible of fulfillment. One might think that the genius of this age must have uttered a like injunction. To attain instantaneous communication with our friends across oceans and through every continent; to command locomotion whose swiftness changes the relations of space and time; to steal from Nature her deepest secrets, and to make disease itself the minister of cure; to compel the sun to keep for us the record of scenes and faces, of the great shows and pageants of time, of the perishable forms whose charm and beauty deserve to remain in the world's possession,--these are some of the achievements of our nineteenth century. Even more wonderful than these may we esteem the moral progress of the race; the decline of political and religious enmities, the growth of good-will and mutual understanding between nations, the waning of popular superstition, the spread of civic ideas, the recognition of the mutual obligations of classes, the advancement of woman to dignity in the household and efficiency in the state. All this our century has seen and approved. To the ages following it will hand on an inestimable legacy, an imperishable record. While my heart exults at these grandeurs of which I have seen and known something, my contribution to their history can be but of fragmentary and fitful interest. On the world's great scene, each of us can only play his little part, often with poor comprehension of the mighty drama which is going on around him. If any one of us undertakes to set this down, he should do it with the utmost truth and simplicity; not as if Seneca or Tacitus or St. Paul were speaking, but as he himself, plain Hodge or Dominie or Mrs. Grundy, is moved to speak. He should not borrow from others the sentiments which he ought to have entertained, but relate truthfully how matters appeared to him, as they and he went on. Thus much I can promise to do in these pages, and no more. I was born on May 27, 1819, in the city of New York, in Marketfield Street, near the Battery. My father was of Rhode Island birth and descent. One of his grandmothers was the beautiful Catharine Ray to whom are addressed some of Benjamin Franklin's published letters. His father attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the war of the Revolution, being himself the son of Governor Samuel Ward, of Rhode Island,[1] married to a daughter of Governor Greene, of the same state. My mother was grandniece to General Francis Marion, of Huguenot descent, known in the Revolution as the Swamp-fox of southern campaigns. Her father was Benjamin Clarke Cutler, whose first ancestor in this country was John De Mesmekir, of Holland. [Footnote 1: Governor Samuel Ward refused to enforce the Stamp Act, and also did valuable service as a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses. He frequently served as chairman of the Committee of the Whole, during the secret sessions of Congress. His death, in the spring of 1776, is said to have been due in large measure to the fatigue caused by his incessant labors in behalf of his country. Although he did not live to sign the Declaration of Independence, he was one of the first men to prophesy the separation of the colonies from the mother country.] [Illustration: SARAH MITCHELL (MRS. HOWE'S grandmother) _From a painting by Waldo and Jewett._] Let me here remark that an expert in chiromancy, after making a recent examination of my hand, exclaimed, "You inherit military blood; your hand shows it." My own earliest recollections are of a fine house on the Bowling Green, a region of high fashion in those days. In the summer mornings my nurse sometimes walked abroad with me, and showed me the young girls of our neighborhood, engaged with their skipping ropes. Our favorite resort was the Battery, where the flagstaff used in the Revolution was still to be seen. The fort at Castle Garden had already been converted into a pleasure resort, where fireworks and ices might be enjoyed. We were six children in all, yet Wordsworth's little maid would have reckoned us as seven, as a sister of four years had died shortly before my birth, leaving me her name and the dignity of eldest daughter. She was always mentioned in the family as the _first little Julia_. My two eldest brothers, Samuel and Henry Ward, were pupils at Round Hill School. The third, Francis Marion, named for the General, was my junior by fifteen months, and continued to be my constant playmate until, at the proper age, he joined the others at Round Hill School. A few words regarding my mother may not here be out of place. Married at sixteen, she died at the age of twenty-seven, so beloved and mourned by all who knew her that my early years were full of the testimony borne by surviving friends to the beauty and charm of her character. She had been a pupil at the school of Mrs. Elizabeth Graham, of saintly memory, and had inherited from her own mother a taste for intellectual pursuits. She was especially fond of poetry and a few lovely poems of hers remain to show that she was no stranger to its sacred domain. One of these was printed in a periodical of her own time, and is preserved in Griswold's "Female Poets of America." Another set of verses is addressed to me in the days of my babyhood. All of these bear the imprint of her deeply religious character. Mrs. Margaret Armstrong Astor, of whom more will be said in these annals, remembered my mother as prominent in the society of her youth, and spoke of her as beautiful in countenance. An old lady, resident in Bordentown, N. J., where Joseph, ex-king of Spain, made his home for many years, had seen my mother arrayed for a dinner at this royal residence, in a white dress, probably of embroidered cambric, and a lilac turban. Her early death was a lifelong misfortune to her children, who, although tenderly bred and carefully watched, have been forced to pass their days without the dear refuge of a mother's heart, the wise guidance of a mother's inspiration. A dear old cousin of my father's, who lived to the age of one hundred and two years, loved to talk of a visit which she had made in her youth to my grandfather Ward, then resident in New York. She had not quite forgiven him for not allowing her to attend an assembly on which, being only sixteen years of age, she had set her heart. Years after this time, when such vanities had quite gone out of her mind, she again visited relatives in the city, and came to spend the day with my mother. Of this occasion she said to me: "Julia, your mother's tact was remarkable, and she showed it on that day, for, knowing me to be a young woman of serious character, she presented me on my arrival with a plain linen collar which she had made for me. On a table beside her lay Law's 'Serious Call to the Unconverted.' Don't you see how well she had suited matters to my taste?" This aged relative used to boast that she had never read a novel. She desired to make one exception in favor of the story of the Schönberg-Cotta family, but, hearing that it was a work of fiction, esteemed it safest to adhere to the rule which she had observed for so many years. Her son, lately deceased, once told me that when she felt called upon to chastise him for some childish offense, she would pray over him so long that he would cry out: "Mother, it's time to begin whipping." Her husband was a son of General Nathanael Greene, of Revolutionary fame. The attention bestowed upon impressions of childhood to-day will, I hope, justify me in recording some of the earliest points in consciousness which I still recall. I remember when a thimble was first given to me, some simple bit of work being at the same time placed in my hand. Some one said, "Take the needle in this hand." I did so, and, placing the thimble on a finger of the other hand, I began to sew without its aid, to the amusement of my teacher. This trifle appears to me an early indication of a want of perception as to the use of tools which has accompanied me through life. I remember also that, being told that I must ask pardon for some childish fault, I said to my mother, with perfect contentment, "Oh yes, I pardon you," and was surprised to hear that in this way I had not made the _amende honorable_. I encountered great difficulty in acquiring the _th_ sound, when my mother tried to teach me to call her by that name. "Muzzer, muzzer," was all that I could manage to say. But the dear parent presently said, "If you cannot do better than that, you will have to go back and call me mamma." The shame of going back moved me to one last effort, and, summoning my utmost strength of tongue, I succeeded in saying "mother," an achievement from which I was never obliged to recede. A journey up the Hudson River was undertaken, when I was very young, for the bettering of my mother's health. An older sister of hers went with us, as well as a favorite waiting-woman, and a young physician whose care had saved my father's life a year or more before my own birth. After reaching Albany, we traveled in my father's carriage; the grown persons occupying the seats, and I sitting in my little chair at their feet. A book of short tales and poems was often resorted to for my amusement, and I still remember how the young doctor read to me, "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man," and how my tears came, and could not be hidden. [Illustration: JULIA WARD AND HER BROTHERS, SAMUEL AND HENRY _From a miniature by Anne Hall._] The sight of Niagara caused me much surprise. Playing on the piazza of the hotel, one day, with only the doctor for my companion, I ventured to ask him, "Who made that great hole where the water comes down?" He replied, "The great Maker of all." "Who is that?" I innocently inquired; and he said, "Do you not know? Our Father who art in heaven." I felt that I ought to have known, and went away somewhat abashed. Another day my mother told me that we were going to visit Red Jacket, a great Indian chief, and that I must be very polite to him. She gave me a twist of tobacco tied with a blue ribbon, which I was to present to him, and bade me observe the silver medal which I should see hung on his neck, and which, she said, had been given to him by General Washington. We drove to the Indian encampment, of which I dimly remember the extent and the wigwams. A tall figure advanced to the carriage. As its door was opened, I sprang forward, clasped my arms around the neck of the noble savage, and was astonished at his cool reception of such a greeting. I was surprised and grieved afterwards to learn that I had not done exactly the right thing. The Indians, in those days and long after, occupied numerous settlements in the western part of the State of New York, where one often saw the boys with their bows and arrows, and the squaws carrying their papooses on their backs. The journey here mentioned must have taken place when I was little more than four years old. Another year and a half brought me the burden of a great sorrow. I recall months of sweet companionship with the first and dearest of friends, my mother. The last summer of her life was passed at a fine country-seat in Bloomingdale, which was then a picturesque country place, about six miles from New York, but is now incorporated in the city. My father was fond of fine horses, and the pets of the stable played no unimportant part in our childish affection. The family coach was an early institution with us, and in the days of which I now speak, its exterior was of a delicate yellow, known as straw-color, while the lining and cushions were of bright blue cloth. This combination of color was effected to please my dear mother, who was accounted in her time a woman of excellent taste. I remember this summer as a particularly happy period. My younger brother and I had our lessons in a lovely green bower. Our French teacher came out at intervals in the Bloomingdale stage. My mother often took me with her for a walk in the beautiful garden, from which she plucked flowers that she arranged with great taste. There was much mysterious embroidering of small caps and gowns, the purpose of which I little guessed. The autumn came, and with it our return to town. And then, one bitter morning, I awoke to hear the words, "Julia, your mother is dead." Before this my father had announced to us that a little sister had arrived. "And she can open and shut her eyes," he said, smiling. His grief at the loss of my mother was so intense as to lay him prostrate with illness. He told me, years after this time, that he had welcomed the physical agony which perforce diverted his thoughts from the cause of his mental suffering. The little sister of whose coming he had told us so joyfully was for a long time kept from his sight. The rest of us were gathered around him, but this feeble little creature was not asked for. At last my dear old grandfather came to visit us, and learned the state of my father's feelings. The old gentleman went into the nursery, took the tiny infant from its nurse, and laid it in my father's arms. The little one thenceforth became the object of his most tender affection. He regarded all his children with great solicitude, feeling, as he afterward said to one of us, that he must now be mother as well as father. My mother's last request had been that her unmarried sister, the same one who had accompanied us on the journey to Niagara, should be sent for to have charge of us, and this arrangement was speedily effected. This aunt of ours had long been a care-taker in her mother's household, where she had had much to do with bringing up her younger sisters and brothers. My mother had been accustomed to borrow her from time to time, and my aunt had threatened to hang out a sign over the door with the inscription, "Cheering done here by the job, by E. Cutler." She was a person of rare honesty, entirely conscientious in character, possessed of few accomplishments, but endowed with the keenest sense of humor. She watched over our early years with incessant care. We little ones were kept much in our warm nursery. We were taken out for a drive in fine weather, but rarely went out on foot. As a consequence of this overcherishing, we were constantly liable to suffer from colds and sore throats. The young physician of whom I have already spoken became an inmate of our house soon after my mother's death. He was afterward well known in New York society as an excellent practitioner, and as a man of a certain genius. Those were the days of mighty doses, and the slightest indisposition was sure to call down upon us the administration of the drugs then in favor with the faculty, but now rarely used. [Illustration: JULIA CUTLER WARD (MRS. HOWE'S mother) _From a miniature by Anne Hall._] My father's affliction was such that a change of scene became necessary for him. The beautiful house at the Bowling Green was sold, with the new furniture which had been ordered expressly for my mother's pleasure, and which we never saw uncovered. We removed to Bond Street, which was then at the upper extremity of New York city. My father's friends said to him, "Mr. Ward, you are going out of town." And so indeed it seemed at that time. We occupied one of three white freestone houses, and saw from our windows the gradual building up of the street, which is now in the central part of New York. My father had purchased a large lot of land at the corner of our street and Broadway. On a part of this he subsequently erected a house which was considered one of the finest in the city. My father was disposed to be extremely careful in the choice of our associates, and intended, no doubt, that we should receive our education at home. At a later day his plans were changed somewhat, and after some experience of governesses and masters I was at last sent to a school in the near neighborhood of our house. I was nine years old at this time, somewhat precocious for my age, and endowed with a good memory. This fact may have led to my being at once placed in a class of girls much older than myself, especially occupied with the study of Paley's "Moral Philosophy." I managed to commit many pages of this book to memory, in a rather listless and perfunctory manner. I was much more interested in the study of chemistry, although it was not illustrated by any experiments. The system of education followed at that time consisted largely in memorizing from the text-books then in use. Removing to another school, I had excellent instruction in penmanship, and enjoyed a course of lectures on history, aided by the best set of charts that I have ever seen, the work of Professor Bostwick. In geometry I made quite a brilliant beginning, but soon fell off from my first efforts. The study of languages was very congenial to me; I had been accustomed to speak French from my earliest years. To this I was enabled to add some knowledge of Latin, and afterward of Italian and German. The routine of my school life was varied now and then by a concert and by Handel's oratorios, which were given at long intervals by an association whose title I cannot now recall. I eagerly anticipated, and yet dreaded, these occasions, for my enjoyment of them was succeeded by a reaction of intense melancholy. The musical "stars" of those days are probably quite out of memory in these later times, but I remember some of them with pleasure. It is worth noticing that, while the earliest efforts in music in Boston produced the Handel and Haydn Society, and led to the occasional performance of a symphony of Beethoven or of Mozart, the taste of New York inclined more to operatic music. The brief visit of Garcia and his troupe had brought the best works of Rossini before the public. These performances were followed, at long intervals, by seasons of English opera, in which Mrs. Austin was the favorite prima donna. This lady sang also in oratorio, and I recall her rendering of the soprano solos in Handel's "Messiah" as somewhat mannered, but on the whole quite impressive. A higher grade of talent came to us in the person of Mrs. Wood, famous before her marriage as Miss Paton. I heard great things of her performance in "La Sonnambula," which I was not allowed to see. I did hear her, however, at concerts and in oratorios, and I particularly remember her rendering of the famous soprano song, "To mighty kings he gave his acts." Her voice was beautiful in quality and of considerable extent. It possessed a liquid and fluent flexibility, quite unlike the curious staccato and tremolo effects so much in favor to-day. My father's views of religious duty became much more stringent after my mother's death. I had been twice taken to the opera during the Garcia performances, when I was scarcely more than seven years of age, and had seen and heard the Diva Malibran, then known as Signorina Garcia, in the rôles of Cenerentola (Cinderella) and Rosina in the "Barbiere di Seviglia." Soon after this time the doors were shut, and I knew of theatrical matters only by hearsay. The religious people of that period had set their faces against the drama in every form. I remember the destruction by fire of the first Bowery Theatre, and how this was spoken of as a "judgment" upon the wickedness of the stage and of its patrons. A well-known theatre in Richmond, Va., took fire while a performance was going on, and the result was a deplorable loss of life. The pulpits of the time "improved" this event by sermons which reflected severely upon the frequenters of such places of amusement, and the "judgment" was long spoken of with holy horror. My musical education, in spite of the limitations of opportunity just mentioned, was the best that the time could afford. I had my first lessons from a very irritable French artist, of whom I stood in such fear that I could remember nothing that he taught me. A second teacher, Mr. Boocock, had more patience, and soon brought me forward in my studies. He had been a pupil of Cramer, and his taste had been formed by hearing the best music in London, which then, as now, commanded all the great musical talent of Europe. He gave me lessons for many years, and I learned from him to appreciate the works of the great composers, Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart. When I grew old enough for the training of my voice, Mr. Boocock recommended to my father Signor Cardini, an aged Italian, who had been an intimate of the Garcia family, and was well acquainted with Garcia's admirable method. Under his care my voice improved in character and in compass, and the daily exercises in holding long notes gave strength to my lungs. I think that I have felt all my life through the benefit of those early lessons. Signor Cardini remembered Italy before the invasion of Napoleon I., and sometimes entertained me with stories of the escapades of his student life. He had resided long in London, and had known the Duke of Wellington. He related to me that once, when he was visiting the great soldier at his country-seat near the sea, the duke invited him to look through his telescope, saying, "Signor Cardini, venez voir comme on travaille les Français." This must have had reference to some manoeuvre of the English fleet, I suppose. Mr. Boocock thought that it would be desirable for me to take part in concerted pieces, with other instruments. This exercise brought me great delight in the performance of certain trios and quartettes. The reaction from this pleasure, however, was very painful, and induced at times a visitation of morbid melancholy which threatened to affect my health. While I greatly disapprove of the scope and suggestions presented by Count Tolstoï in his "Kreutzer Sonata," I yet think that, in the training of young persons, some regard should be had to the sensitiveness of youthful nerves, and to the overpowering response which they often make to the appeals of music. The dry practice of a single instrument and the simple drill of choral exercises will not be apt to overstimulate the currents of nerve force. On the other hand, the power and sweep of great orchestral performances, or even the suggestive charm of some beautiful voice, will sometimes so disturb the mental equilibrium of the hearer as to induce in him a listless melancholy, or, worse still, an unreasoning and unreasonable discontent. The early years of my youth were passed in the seclusion not only of home life, but of a home most carefully and jealously guarded from all that might be represented in the orthodox trinity of evil, the world, the flesh, and the devil. My father had become deeply imbued with the religious ideas of the time. He dreaded for his children the dissipations of fashionable society, and even the risks of general intercourse with the unsanctified many. He early embraced the cause of temperance, and became president of the first temperance society formed in this country. As a result, wine was excluded from his table. This privation gave me no trouble, but my brothers felt it, especially the eldest, who had passed some years in Europe, where the use of wine was, as it still is, universal. I was walking with my father one evening when we met my two younger brothers, each with a cigar in his mouth. My father was much troubled, and said, "Boys, you must give this up, and I will give it up, too. From this time I forbid you to smoke, and I will join you in relinquishing the habit." I am afraid that this sacrifice on my father's part did not have the desired effect, but am quite certain that he never witnessed the infringement of his command. At the time of which I speak, my father's family all lived in our immediate neighborhood. He had considerably distanced his brothers in fortune, and had built for himself the beautiful house of which I have already spoken. In the same street with us lived my music-loving uncle, Henry, somewhat given to good cheer, and of a genial disposition. In a house nearer to us resided my grandfather, Samuel Ward, with an unmarried daughter and three bachelor sons, John, Richard, and William. The outings of my young girlhood were confined to this family circle. I went to school, indeed, but never to dancing-school, a sober little dancing-master giving us lessons at home. I used to hear, with some envy, of Monsieur Charnaud's classes and of his "publics," where my schoolfellows disported themselves in their best clothes. My grandfather was a stately old gentleman, a good deal more than six feet in height, very mild in manner, and fond of a game of whist. With us children he used to play a very simple game called "Tom, come tickle me." Cards were not allowed in my father's house, and my brothers used to resort to the grand-paternal mansion when they desired this diversion. The eldest of my father's unmarried brothers was my uncle John, a man more tolerant than my father, and full of kindly forethought for his nieces and nephews. In his youth he had sustained an injury which deprived him of speech for more than a year. His friends feared that he would never speak again, but his mother, trying one day to render him some small assistance, did not succeed to her mind, and said, "I am a poor, awkward old woman." "No, you are not!" he exclaimed, and at once recovered his power of speech. He was anxious that his nieces should be well instructed in practical matters, and perhaps he grudged a little the extra time which we were accustomed to devote to books and music. He was fond of sending materials for dresses to me and my sisters, but insisted that we should make them up for ourselves. This we managed to do, with a good deal of help from the family seamstress. When I had published my first literary venture, uncle John showed me in a newspaper a favorable notice of my work, saying, "This is my little girl who knows about books, and writes an article and has it printed, but I wish that she knew more about housekeeping,"--a sentiment which in after years I had occasion to echo with fervor. CHAPTER II LITERARY NEW YORK Although the New York of my youth had little claim to be recognized as a literary centre, it yet was a city whose tastes and manners were much influenced by people of culture. One of these, Robert Sands, was the author of a poem entitled "Yamoyden," its theme being an Indian story or legend. His family dated back to the Sands who once owned a considerable part of Block Island, and from whom Sands Point takes its name. If I do not mistake, these Sands were connected by marriage with one of my ancestors, who were also settlers in Block Island. I remember having seen the poet Sands in my childhood, a rather awkward, near-sighted man. His life was not a long one. A sister of his, Julia Sands, wrote a biographical sketch of her brother, and was spoken of as a literary woman. William Cullen Bryant resided in New York many years. He took a prominent part in politics, but mingled little in general society, being much absorbed in his duties as editor of the "Evening Post," of which he was also the founder. I first heard of Fitz-Greene Halleck as the author of various satirical pieces of verse relating to personages and events of nearly eighty years ago. He is now best remembered by his "Marco Bozzaris," a noble lyric which we have heard quoted in view of recent lamentable encounters between Greek and Barbarian. Among the lecturers who visited New York, I remember Professor Silliman of Yale College, Dr. Follen, who spoke of German literature, George Combe, and Mr. Charles Lyell. Charles King, for many years editor of a daily paper entitled "The New York American," was a man of much literary taste. He had been a pupil at Harrow when Byron was there. He was an appreciative friend of my father, although as convivial in his tastes as my father was the reverse. I remember that once, when a temperance meeting was going on in one of our large parlors, Mr. King called and, finding my father thus engaged, began to frolic with us young people. He even dared to say: "How I should like to open those folding doors just wide enough to fire off a bottle of champagne at those temperance folks!" He was the patron of my early literary ventures, and kindly allowed my fugitive pieces to appear in his paper. He always advocated the abolition of slavery, and could never forgive Henry Clay his part in effecting the Missouri Compromise. He and his brother James, my father's junior partner, were sons of Rufus King, a man eminent in public life. I was a child of perhaps eight years when I heard my elders say with regret that "old Mr. King was dying." Quite late in his life, Mr. Charles King became President of Columbia College. This institution, with the houses of its officers, occupied the greater part of Park Place. Its professors were well known in society. The college was very conservative in its management. The professor of mathematics was asked one day by one of his class whether the sun did not really stand still in answer to the prayer of Joshua. He laughed at the question, and was in consequence reprimanded by the faculty. Professor Anthon, of the college, became known through his school and college editions of many Latin classics. Professor Moore, in the department of Hellenics, was popular among the undergraduates, partly, it was said, on account of his very indulgent method of conducting examinations. Professor McVickar, in the chair of Philosophy, was one of the early admirers of Ruskin. The families of these gentlemen mingled a good deal in the society of the time, and contributed no doubt to impart to it a tone of polite culture. I should say that before the forties the sons of the best families of New York city were usually sent to Columbia College. My own brothers, three in number, were among its graduates. New York parents in those days looked upon Harvard as a Unitarian institution, and shunned its influence for their sons. The venerable Lorenzo Da Ponte was for many years a resident of New York, and a teacher of the Italian language and literature. When Dominick Lynch introduced the first opera troupe to the New York public, sometime in the twenties, the audience must surely have comprised some of the old man's pupils, well versed in the language of the librettos. In earlier life, he had furnished the text of several of Mozart's operas, among them "Don Giovanni" and "Le Nozze di Figaro." Dominick Lynch, whom I have just mentioned, was an enthusiastic lover of music. His visits to my father's house were occasions of delight to me. He was without a rival as an interpreter of ballads, and especially of the songs of Thomas Moore. His voice, though not powerful, was clear and musical, and his touch on the pianoforte was perfect. I remember creeping under the instrument to hide my tears when I heard him sing the ballad of "Lord Ullin's Daughter." Charles Augustus Davis, the author of the "Letters of J. Downing, Major, Downingville Militia, Second Brigade, to his old Friend Mr. Dwight, of the New York Daily Advertiser," was a gentleman well known in the New York society of my youth. The letters in question contained imaginary reports of a tour which the writer professed to have made with General Jackson, when the latter was a candidate for reëlection to the Presidency. They were very popular at the time, but have long passed into oblivion. I remember that in one of them, Major Downing describes an occasion on which it was important that the general should interlard his address with a few Latin quotations. Not possessing any learning of that kind, he concluded his speech with: "E pluribus unum, gentlemen, sine qua non." The great literary boast of the city at the time of which I speak was undoubtedly Washington Irving. I was still a child in the nursery when I heard of his return to America, after a residence of some years in Spain. A public dinner was given in honor of this event. One who had been present at it told of Mr. Irving's embarrassment when he was called upon for a speech. He rose, waved his hand in the air, and could only utter a few sentences, which were heard with difficulty. Many years after this time I was present, with other ladies, at a public dinner given in honor of Charles Dickens by prominent citizens of New York. We ladies were not bidden to the feast, but were allowed to occupy a small anteroom whose open door commanded a view of the tables. When the speaking was about to begin, a message came, suggesting that we should take possession of some vacant seats at the great table. This we were glad to do. Washington Irving was president of the evening, and upon him devolved the duty of inaugurating proceedings by an address of welcome to the distinguished guest. People who sat near me whispered, "He'll break down--he always does." Mr. Irving rose, and uttered a sentence or two. His friends interrupted him by applause which was intended to encourage him, but which entirely overthrew his self-possession. He hesitated, stammered, and sat down, saying, "I cannot go on." It was an embarrassing and painful moment, but Mr. John Duer, an eminent lawyer, came to his friend's assistance, and with suitable remarks proposed the health of Charles Dickens, to which Mr. Dickens promptly responded. This he did in his happiest manner, covering Mr. Irving's defeat by a glowing eulogy of his literary merits. "Whose books do I take to bed with me, night after night? Washington Irving's! as one who is present can testify." This one was evidently Mrs. Dickens, who was seated beside me. Mr. Dickens proceeded to speak of international copyright, saying that the prime object of his visit to America was the promotion of this important measure. I met Washington Irving several times at the house of John Jacob Astor. He was silent in general company, and usually fell asleep at the dinner-table. This occurrence was indeed so common with him that the guests present only noticed it with a smile. After a nap of some ten minutes he would open his eyes and take part in the conversation, apparently unconscious of having been asleep. In his youth, Mr. Irving had traveled quite extensively in Europe. While in Rome, he had received marked attention from the banker Torlonia, who repeatedly invited him to dinner parties, the opera, and so on. He was at a loss to account for this until his last visit to the banker, when Torlonia, taking him aside, said, "Pray tell me, is it not true that you are a grandson of the great Washington?" Mr. Irving had in early life given offense to the descendants of old Dutch families in New York by the publication of "Knickerbocker's History of New York," in which he had presented some of their forbears in a humorous light. The solid fame which he acquired in later days effaced the remembrance of this old-time grievance, and in the days in which I had the pleasure of his acquaintance, he held an enviable position in the esteem and affection of the community. He always remained a bachelor, owing, it was said, to an attachment, the object of which had been removed by death. I have even heard that the lady in question was a beautiful Jewess, the same one whom Walter Scott has depicted in his well-known Rebecca. This legend of the beautiful Jewess was current in my youth. A later authority informs us that Mr. Irving was really engaged to Matilda, daughter of Josiah Ogden Hoffman, a noted lawyer of New York, and that the death of the lady prevented the intended marriage from taking place. "He could never, to his dying day, endure to hear her name mentioned," it is said, "and, nearly thirty years after her death, the accidental discovery of a piece of her embroidery saddened him so that he could not speak." CHAPTER III NEW YORK SOCIETY It has been explained that the continued prosperity of France under very varying forms of government is due to the fact that the municipal administration of the country is not affected by these changes, but continues much the same under king, emperor, and republican president. I find something analogous to this in the perseverance of certain underlying tendencies in society despite the continual variations which diversify the surface of the domain of Fashion. The earliest social function which I remember is a ball given by my father and mother when I must have been about four years of age. Quite late in the evening, I was taken out of bed and arrayed in an embroidered cambric slip. Some one tried to fasten a pink rosebud on the waist of my dress, but did not succeed to her mind. I was brought into our drawing-rooms, which had undergone a surprising transformation. The floors were bare, and from the ceiling of either room was suspended a circle of wax lights and artificial flowers. The orchestra included a double bass. I surveyed the company of the dancers, but soon curled myself up on a sofa, where one of the dowagers fed me with ice-cream. This entertainment took place at our house on Bowling Green, a neighborhood which has long been given up to business. As a child, I remember silver forks as in use at my father's dinner parties. On ordinary occasions, we used the three-pronged steel fork which is now rarely seen. My father sometimes admonished my maternal grandmother not to put her knife into her mouth. In her youth every one used the knife in this way. Meats were carefully roasted in what was called a tin kitchen, before an open fire. Desserts on state occasions consisted of pastry, wine jelly, blanc-mange, with pyramids of ice-cream. This last was always supplied by a French resident, Jean Contoit by name, whose very modest garden long continued to be the principal place from which such a dainty could be obtained. It may have been M. Contoit who, speaking to a compatriot of his first days in America, said, "Imagine! when I first came to this country, people cooked vegetables with water only, _and the calf's head was thrown away_!" Of the dress of that period I remember that ladies wore white cambric gowns, finely embroidered, in winter as well as in summer, and walked abroad in thin morocco slippers. Pelisses were worn in cold weather, often of some bright color, rose pink or blue. I have found in a family letter of that time the following description of a bride's toilet: "Miss E. was married in a frock of white merino, with a full suit of steel: comb, earrings, and so on." I once heard Mrs. William Astor, _née_ Armstrong, tell of a pair of brides, twin sisters, who appeared at church dressed in pelisses of white merino, trimmed with chinchilla, with caps of the same fur. They were much admired at the time. Among the festivities of old New York, the observance of New Year's Day held an important place. In every house of any pretension, the ladies of the family sat in their drawing-rooms, arrayed in their best dresses, and the gentlemen of their acquaintance made short visits, during which wine and rich cakes were offered them. It was allowable to call as early as ten o'clock in the morning. The visitor sometimes did little more than appear and disappear, hastily muttering something about "the compliments of the season." The gentlemen prided themselves upon the number of visits paid, the ladies upon the number received. Girls at school vexed each other with emulative boasting: "We had fifty calls on New Year's Day." "Oh! but _we_ had sixty-five." This perfunctory performance grew very tedious by the time the calling hours were ended, but apart from this, the day was one on which families were greeted by distant relatives rarely seen, while old friends met and revived their pleasant memories. In our house, the rooms were all thrown open. Bright fires burned in the grates. My father, after his adoption of temperance principles, forbade the offering of wine to visitors, and ordered it to be replaced by hot coffee. We were rather chagrined at this prohibition, but his will was law. I recall a New Year's Day early in the thirties, on which a yellow chariot stopped before our door. A stout, elderly gentleman descended from it, and came in to pay his compliments to my father. This gentleman was John Jacob Astor, who was already known to be possessed of great wealth. The pleasant custom just described was said to have originated with the Dutch settlers of the olden time. As the city grew in size, it became difficult and well-nigh impossible for gentlemen to make the necessary number of visits. Finally, a number of young men of the city took it upon themselves to call in squads at houses which they had no right to molest, consuming the refreshments provided for other guests, and making themselves disagreeable in various ways. This offense against good manners led to the discontinuance, by common consent, of the New Year's receptions. A younger sister of my mother, named Louisa Cordé Cutler, was one of the historic beauties of her time. She was a frequent and beloved guest at my father's house, but her marriage took place at my grandmother's residence in Jamaica Plain. The bridegroom was the only son of Judge McAllister, of Savannah, Georgia. One of my aunt's bridesmaids, Miss Elizabeth Danforth, a lady much esteemed in the older Boston, once gave me the following account of the marriage:-- "Yes, this is my beautiful bride. [My aunt was now about sixty years old.] Well do I recall the evening of her marriage. I was to be her bridesmaid, you know, and when the time came, I was all dressed and ready. But the Dorchester coach was wanted for old Madam Blake's funeral, and as there was no other conveyance to be had, I was obliged to wait for it. The time seemed endless while I was walking up and down the hall in my bridesmaid's dress, my mother from time to time exhorting me to have patience, without much effect. "At last the coach came, and in it I was driven to your grandmother's house in Jamaica Plain. As I entered the door I met the bridal party coming downstairs. Your mother said to me, 'Oh! Elizabeth, we thought you were not coming.' After this all passed off pleasantly. Your grandmother was dressed in a lilac silk gown of rather antiquated fashion, adorned with frills and furbelows which had passed out of date. Your mother, who had come on from New York for the ceremony, said to her later in the evening, 'Dear mamma, you must make a present of that gown to some theatrical friend. It is only fit for the boards.'" The officiating clergyman of the occasion was the Reverend Benjamin Clarke Cutler, brother of the bride. It was his first service of the kind, and the company were somewhat amused when, in absence or confusion of mind, he pronounced the nuptial blessing upon _M_ and _N_, the letters which stand in the church ritual for the names of the parties contracting. Accordingly, at the wedding supper, the first toast was drunk "to the health and happiness of M and N," and responded to with much merriment. I have further been told that the bride's elder sister, afterwards known as Mrs. Francis, danced "in stocking-feet" with my father's elder brother, this having been the ancient rule when the younger children were married before the older ones. In spite of the costume which met with her daughter's disapproval, my maternal grandmother was not indifferent to dress. She used to lament the ugliness of modern fashions, and to extol those of her youth, in which she was one of the _élégantes_ of Southern society. She remembered with pleasure that General Washington once crossed a ball-room to speak with her. This was probably when she was the wife or widow of Colonel Herne, to whom she was married at the age of fourteen (when her dolls, she told me, were taken away from her), and whose death occurred before she had attained legal majority. She had received a good musical education for those times, and Colonel Perkins of Boston once told me that he remembered her as a fascinating young widow with a lovely voice. It must have been during her visit to Boston that she met my grandfather Cutler, who straightway fell in love with and married her. When past her sixtieth year she would sometimes sing an old-time duet with my father. She had a great love of good literature. Here is what she told me about the fashions of her youth: "We wore our hair short, and _créped_ all over in short curls, which were kept in place by a spangled ribbon, bound around the head. Powder was universally worn. The _Maréchale_ powder was most becoming to the complexion, having a slight yellowish tinge. We wore trains, but had a set of cords by which we pulled them up in festoons, when we went to dance. Brocades were much worn. I wanted one, but could not find one at the time, so I embroidered a pretty yellow silk dress of mine, and made a brocade of it." She once mentioned having known, in days long distant, of a company of ladies who had banded themselves together for some new departure of a patriotic intent, and who had waited upon General Washington in a body. I have since ascertained that they called themselves "Daughters of Liberty." A kindred association had been formed of "Sons of Liberty." Perhaps these ladies were of the mind of Mrs. John Adams, who, when congratulating her husband upon the liberties assured to American men by the then new Constitution of the United States, thought it "a pity that the legislators had not also done something for the ladies." Among the familiar figures of my early life is that of Dr. John Wakefield Francis. I wish it were in my power to give any adequate description of this remarkable man, who was certainly one of the worthies of his time. As already said, he was my uncle by marriage, and for many years a resident in my father's house. He was of German origin, florid in complexion and mercurial in temperament. His fine head was crowned with an abundance of silken curly hair. He always wore gold-bowed glasses, being very near-sighted, was a born humorist, and delighted in jest and hyperbole. He was an omnivorous reader, and was so constituted that four hours of sleep nightly sufficed to keep him in health. This was fortunate for him, as he had an extensive practice, and was liable to be called out at all hours of the night. A candle always stood on a table beside his pillow, and with it a pile of books and papers, which he habitually perused long before the coming of daylight. It so happened, however, that he waked one morning at about four of the clock, and saw his wife, wrapped in shawls, sitting near the fire, reading something by candlelight. The following conversation ensued:-- "Eliza, what book is that you are reading?" "'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' dear." "Is it? I don't need to know anything more about it--it must be the greatest book of the age." His humor was extravagant. I once heard him exclaim, "How brilliant is the light which streams through the fissure of a cracked brain!" Again he spoke of "a fellow who couldn't go straight in a ropewalk." His anecdotes of things encountered in the exercise of his profession were most amusing. He found us seated in the drawing-room, one evening, to receive a visit from a very shy professor of Brown University. The doctor, surveying the group, seized this poor man, lifted him from the floor, and carried him round the circle, to express his pleasure at seeing an old friend. The countenance of the guest meanwhile showed an agony of embarrassment and terror. The doctor was very temperate in everything except tea, which he drank in the green variety, in strong and copious libations. Indeed, he had no need of wine or other alcoholic stimulants, his temperament being almost incandescent. Overflowing as he was with geniality, he yet accommodated himself easily to the requirements of a sick room, and showed himself tender, vigilant, and most sympathetic. He attended many people who could not, and some who would not, pay for his visits. One of these last, having been brought by him through an attack of cholera, was so much impressed with the kindness and skill of the doctor that he at once and for the first time sent him a check in recognition of services that money could not repay. After many years of residence with us, my uncle and aunt Francis removed, first to lodgings, and later to a house of their own. Here my aunt busied herself much with the needs of rich and poor. Ladies often came to her seeking good servants, her recommendation being considered an all-sufficient security. Women out of place came to her seeking employment, which she often found for them. These acts of kindness, often involving a considerable expenditure of time and trouble, the dear lady performed with no thought of recompense other than the assurance that she had been helpful to those who needed her assistance in manifold ways. In her new abode Auntie lived with careful economy, dispensing her simple hospitality with a generous hand. She was famous among her friends for delicious coffee and for excellent tea, which she always made herself, on the table. She sometimes invited friends for an evening party, but made it a point to invite those who were not her favorites for a separate occasion, not wishing to dilute her enjoyment of the chosen few, and, on the other hand, desiring not to hurt the feelings of any of her acquaintance by wholly leaving them out. When Edgar Allan Poe first became known in New York, Dr. Francis invited him to the house. It was on one of Auntie's good evenings, and her room was filled with company. The poet arrived just at a moment when the doctor was obliged to answer the call of a patient. He accordingly opened the parlor door, and pushed Mr. Poe into the room, saying, "Eliza, my dear, the Raven!" after which he immediately withdrew. Auntie had not heard of the poem, and was entirely at a loss to understand this introduction of the new-comer. It was always a pleasure to welcome distinguished strangers to New York. Mrs. Jameson's visit to the United States, in the year 1835, gave me the opportunity of making acquaintance with that very accomplished lady and author. I was then a girl of sixteen summers, but I had read the "Diary of an Ennuyée," which first brought Mrs. Jameson into literary prominence. I read afterwards with avidity the two later volumes in which she gives so good an account of modern art work in Europe. In these she speaks with enthusiasm of certain frescoes in Munich which I was sorry, many years later, to be obliged to consider less beautiful than her description of them would have warranted one in believing. When I perused these works, having myself no practical knowledge of art, their graphic style seemed to give me clear vision of the things described. The beautiful Pinakothek and Glyptothek of Munich became to me as if I actually saw them, and when it was my good fortune to visit them I seemed, especially in the case of the marbles, to meet with old friends. Mrs. Jameson's connoisseurship was not limited to pictorial and sculptural art. Of music also she was passionately fond. In the book just spoken of she describes an evening passed with the composer Wieck in his German home. In this she speaks of his daughter Clara, and of her lover, young Schumann. Clara Wieck, afterwards Madame Schumann, became well known in Europe as a pianist of eminence, and of Schumann as a composer it needs not now to speak. There were various legends regarding Mrs. Jameson's private history. It was said that her husband, marrying her against his will, parted from her at the church door, and thereafter left England for Canada, where he was residing at the time of her visit. I first met her at an evening party at the house of a friend. I was invited to make some music, and sang, among other things, a brilliant bravura air from "Semiramide." When I would have left the piano, Mrs. Jameson came to me and said, "_Altra cosa_, my dear." My voice had been cultivated with care, and though not of great power was considered pleasing in quality, and was certainly very flexible. I met Mrs. Jameson at several other entertainments devised in her honor. She was of middle height, her hair red blond in color. Her face was not handsome, but sensitive and sympathetic in expression. The elegant dames of New York were somewhat scandalized at her want of taste in dress. I actually heard one of them say, "How like the devil she does look!" After a winter passed in Canada, Mrs. Jameson again visited New York, on her way to England. She called upon me one day with a friend, and asked to see my father's pictures. Two of these, portraits of Charles First and his queen, were supposed to be by Vandyke. Mrs. Jameson doubted this. She spoke of her intimacy with the celebrated Mrs. Somerville, and said, "I think of her as a dear little woman who is very fond of drawing." When I went to return her visit, I found her engaged in earnest conversation with a son of Sir James Mackintosh. When he had taken leave, she said to me, "Mr. Mackintosh and I were almost at daggers drawing." So far as I could learn, their dispute related to democratic forms of government, and the society therefrom resulting, which he viewed with favor and she with bitter dislike. I inquired about her winter in Canada. She replied, "As the Irishman said, I had everything that a pig could want." A volume from her hand appeared soon after this time, entitled "Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada." Her work on "Sacred and Legendary Art" and her "Legends of the Madonna" were published some years later. CHAPTER IV HOME LIFE: MY FATHER I left school at the age of sixteen, and began thereafter to study in good earnest. Until that time a certain over-romantic and imaginative turn of mind had interfered much with the progress of my studies. I indulged in day-dreams which appeared to me far higher in tone than the humdrum of my school recitations. When these were at an end, I began to feel the necessity of more strenuous application, and at once arranged for myself hours of study, relieved by the practice of vocal and instrumental music. At this juncture, a much esteemed friend of my father came to pass some months with us. This was Joseph Green Cogswell, founder and principal of Round Hill School, at which my three brothers had been among his pupils. The school, a famous one in its day, was now finally closed. Our new guest was an accomplished linguist, and possessed an admirable power of imparting knowledge. With his aid, I resumed the German studies which I had already begun, but in which I had made but little progress. Under his tuition, I soon found myself able to read with ease the masterpieces of Goethe and Schiller. Rev. Leonard Woods, son of a well-known pastor of that name, was a familiar guest at my father's house. He took some interest in my studies, and at length proposed that I should become a contributor to the "Theological Review," of which he was editor at that time. I undertook to furnish a review of Lamartine's "Jocelyn," which had recently appeared. When I had done my best with this, Dr. Cogswell went over the pages with me very carefully, pointing out defects of style and arrangement. The paper attracted a good deal of attention, and some comments on it gave occasion to the admonition which my dear uncle thought fit to administer to me, as already mentioned. The house of my young ladyhood (I use this term, as it was the one in use at the time of which I write) was situated at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway. When my father built it, the fashion of the city had not proceeded so far up town. The model of the house was a noble one. Three spacious rooms and a small study occupied the first floor. These were furnished with curtains of blue, yellow, and red silk. The red room was that in which we took our meals. The blue room was the one in which we received visits, and passed the evenings. The yellow room was thrown open only on high occasions, but my desk and grand piano were placed in it, and I was allowed to occupy it at will. This and the blue room were adorned by beautiful sculptured mantelpieces, the work of Thomas Crawford, afterwards known as a sculptor of great merit. Many years after this time he became the husband of the sister next me in age, and the father of F. Marion Crawford, the now celebrated novelist. Our family was patriarchal in its dimensions, including my aunt and uncle Francis, whose children were all born in my father's house, and were very dear to him. My maternal grandmother also passed much time with us. My two younger brothers, Henry and Marion, were at home with us after a term of years at Round Hill School. My eldest brother, Samuel (afterwards the Sam. Ward of the Lobby), a most accomplished and agreeable young man, had recently returned from Europe, bringing with him a fine library. My father, having already added to his large house a spacious art gallery, now built a study, whose walls were entirely occupied by my brother's books. I had free access to these, and did not neglect to profit by it. From what I have just said, it may rightly be inferred that my father was a man of fine tastes, inclined to generous and even lavish expenditure. He desired to give us the best educational opportunities, the best and most expensive masters. He filled his art gallery with the finest pictures that money could command in the New York of that day. He gave largely to public undertakings, was one of the founders of the New York University, and was one of the foremost promoters of church building in the then distant West. He demurred only at expenses connected with dress and fashionable entertainment, for he always disliked and distrusted the great world. My dear eldest brother held many arguments with him on this theme. He saw, as we did, that our father was disposed to ignore the value of ordinary social intercourse. On one occasion the dispute between them became quite animated. "Sir," said my brother, "you do not keep in view the importance of the social tie." "The social what?" asked my father. "The social tie, sir." "I make small account of that," said the elder gentleman. "I will die in defense of it!" impetuously rejoined the younger. My father was so much amused at this sally that he spoke of it to an intimate friend: "He will die in defense of the social tie, indeed!" [Illustration: SAMUEL WARD (MRS. HOWE'S father) _From a miniature by Anne Hall._] Our way of living was simple. The table was abundant, but not with the richest food. For many years, as I have said, no alcoholic stimulant appeared on it. My father gave away by dozens the bottles of costly wine stored in his cellar, but neither tasted their contents nor allowed us to do so. He was for a great part of his life a martyr to rheumatic gout, and a witty friend of his once said: "Ward, it must be the poor man's gout that you have, as you drink only water." We breakfasted at eight in winter, at half past seven in summer. My father read prayers before breakfast and before bedtime. If my brothers lingered over the morning meal, he would come in, hatted and booted for the day, and would say: "Young gentlemen, I am glad that you can afford to take life so easily. I am old and must work for my living," a speech which usually broke up our morning coterie. Dinner was served at four o'clock, a light lunch abbreviating the fast for those at home. At half past seven we sat down to tea, a meal of which toast, preserves, and cake formed the staple. In the evening we usually sat together with books and needlework, often with an interlude of music. An occasional lecture, concert, or evening party varied this routine. My brothers went much into fashionable society, but my own participation in its doings came only after my father's death, and after the two years' mourning which, according to the usage of those days, followed it. My father retained the Puritan feeling with regard to Saturday evening. He would remark that it was not a proper evening for company, regarding it as a time of preparation for the exercises of the day following, the order of which was very strict. We were indeed indulged on Sunday morning with coffee and muffins at breakfast, but, besides the morning and afternoon services at church, we young folks were expected to attend the two meetings of the Sunday-school. We were supposed to read only Sunday books, and I must here acknowledge my indebtedness to Mrs. Sherwood, an English writer now almost forgotten, whose religious stories and romances were supposed to come under this head. In the evening, we sang hymns, and sometimes received a quiet visitor. My readers, if I have any, may ask whether this restricted routine satisfied my mind, and whether I was at all sensible of the privileges which I really enjoyed, or ought to have enjoyed. I must answer that, after my school-days, I greatly coveted an enlargement of intercourse with the world. I did not desire to be counted among "fashionables," but I did aspire to much greater freedom of association than was allowed me. I lived, indeed, much in my books, and my sphere of thought was a good deal enlarged by the foreign literatures, German, French, and Italian, with which I became familiar. Yet I seemed to myself like a young damsel of olden time, shut up within an enchanted castle. And I must say that my dear father, with all his noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as my jailer. My brother's return from Europe and subsequent marriage opened the door a little for me. It was through his intervention that Mr. Longfellow first visited us, to become a valued and lasting friend. Through him in turn we became acquainted with Professor Felton, Charles Sumner, and Dr. Howe. My brother was very fond of music, of which he had heard the best in Paris and in Germany. He often arranged musical parties at our house, at which trios of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert were given. His wit, social talent, and literary taste opened a new world to me, and enabled me to share some of the best results of his long residence in Europe. My father's jealous care of us was by no means the result of a disposition tending to social exclusiveness. It proceeded, on the contrary, from an over-anxiety as to the moral and religious influences to which his children might become subjected. His ideas of propriety were very strict. He was, moreover, not only a strenuous Protestant, but also an ardent "Evangelical," or Low Churchman, holding the Calvinistic views which then characterized that portion of the American Episcopal church. I remember that he once spoke to me of the anguish he had felt at the death of his own father, of the orthodoxy of whose religious opinions he had had no sufficient assurance. My grandfather, indeed, was supposed, in the family, to be of a rather skeptical and philosophizing turn of mind. He fell a victim to the first visitation of the cholera in 1832. Despite a certain austerity of character, my father was much beloved and honored in the business world. He did much to give to the firm of Prime, Ward and King the high position which it attained and retained during his lifetime. He told me once that when he first entered the office, he found it, like many others, a place where gossip circulated freely. He determined to put an end to this, and did so. Among the foreign correspondents of his firm were the Barings of London, and Hottinguer et Cie. of Paris. In the great financial troubles which followed Andrew Jackson's refusal to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, several States became bankrupt, and repudiated the obligations incurred by their bonds, to the great indignation of business people in both hemispheres. The State of New York was at one time on the verge of pursuing this course, which my father strenuously opposed. He called meeting after meeting, and was unwearied in his efforts to induce the financiers of the State to hold out. When this appeared well-nigh impossible, he undertook that his firm should negotiate with English correspondents a loan to carry the State over the period of doubt and difficulty. This he was able to effect. My eldest brother came home one day and said to me:-- "As I walked up from Wall Street to-day, I saw a dray loaded with kegs on which were inscribed the letters, 'P. W. & K.' Those kegs contained the gold just sent to the firm from England to help our State through this crisis." My father once gave me some account of his early experiences in Wall Street. He had been sent, almost a boy, to New York, to try his fortune. His connection with Block Island families through his grandmother, Catharine Ray Greene, had probably aided in securing for him a clerk's place in the banking house of Prime and Sands, afterwards Prime, Ward and King. He soon ascertained that the Spanish dollars brought to the port by foreign trading vessels could be sold in Wall Street at a profit. He accordingly employed his leisure hours in the purchase of these coins, which he carried to Wall Street and there sold. This was the beginning of his fortune. A work published a score or more of years since, entitled "The Merchant Princes of Wall Street," concluded some account of my father by the statement that he died without fortune. This was far from true. His death came indeed at a very critical moment, when, having made extensive investments in real estate, his skill was requisite to carry this extremely valuable property over a time of great financial disturbance. His brother, our uncle, who became the guardian of our interests, was familiar with the stock market, but little versed in real estate transactions. By untimely sales, much of my father's valuable estate was scattered; yet it gave to each of his six children a fair inheritance for that time; for the millionaire fever did not break out until long afterwards. The death of this dear and noble parent took place when I was a little more than twenty years of age. Six months later I attained the period of legal responsibility, but before this a new sense of the import of life had begun to alter the current of my thoughts. With my father's death came to me a sense of my want of appreciation of his great kindness, and of my ingratitude for the many comforts and advantages which his affection had secured to me. He had given me the most delightful home, the most careful training, the best masters and books. He had even, as I have said, built a picture gallery for my especial instruction and enjoyment. All this I had taken, as a matter of course, and as my natural right. He had done his best to keep me out of frivolous society, and had been extremely strict about the visits of young men to the house. Once, when I expostulated with him upon these points, he told me that he had early recognized in me a temperament and imagination over-sensitive to impressions from without, and that his wish had been to guard me from exciting influences until I should appear to him fully able to guard and guide myself. It was hardly to be expected that a girl in her teens, or just out of them, should acquiesce in this restrictive guardianship, tender and benevolent as was its intention. My little acts of rebellion were met with some severity, but I now recall my father's admonitions as "Soft rebukes with blessings ended." I cannot, even now, bear to dwell upon the desolate hush which fell upon our house when its stately head lay, silent and cold, in the midst of weeping friends and children. Six of us were made orphans, three sons and three daughters. We had had our little disagreements and dissensions, but the blow which now fell upon us drew us together with the bond of a common sorrow. My eldest brother had recently gone to reside in a house of his own. The second one, Henry by name, became at this time my great intimate. He was a high-strung youth, very chivalrous in disposition, full of fun and humor, but with a deep vein of thought. He was already betrothed to one whom I held dear, and I looked forward to many years brightened by his happiness, but alas! an attack of typhoid fever took him from us in the bloom of his youth. I was with him day and night during his illness, and when he closed his eyes, I would gladly, oh, so gladly, have died with him! The great anguish of this loss told heavily upon me, and I remember the time as one without light or comfort. I sought these indeed. A great religious revival was going on in New York, and a zealous young friend persuaded me to attend some of the meetings held in a neighboring church. I had never taken very seriously the doctrines of the religious body in which I had been reared. They now came home to me with terrible force, and a season of depression and melancholy followed, during which I remained in a measure cut off from the wholesome influences which reconcile us to life, even when it must be embittered by a sense of irreparable loss. At the time of my father's death, my dear bachelor uncle John, already mentioned, left his own house and came to live with us. When our paternal mansion was sold, some years later, he removed with us to the house of my eldest brother, who was already a widower. After my marriage my uncle again occupied a house of his own, in which for many years he made us all at home, even with our later incumbrances of children and nurses. He was, in short, the best and kindest of uncles. In business he was more adventurous than his rather deliberate manner would have led one to suppose. It was said that, in the course of his life, he had made and lost several fortunes. In the end he left a very fair estate, which was divided among the several sets of his nieces and nephews. Long before this he had become one of the worthies of Wall Street, and was universally spoken of as "Uncle John." Shortly after his retirement from active business, the Board of Brokers of New York requested him to sit to A. H. Wenzler for a portrait, to be hung in their place of meeting. The portrait was executed with entire success. I ought to mention in this connection that the directors of the New York Bank of Commerce, of which my father was the founder and first president, ordered a portrait of him from the well-known artist, Huntington. CHAPTER V MY STUDIES As a love of study has been a leading influence in my life, I will here employ a little time, at the risk of some repetition, in tracing the way in which my thoughts had mostly tended up to the period when, after two years of deep depression, I suddenly turned to practical life with an eager desire to profit by its opportunities. From early days my dear mother noticed in me an introspective tendency, which led her to complain that when I went with her to friends' houses I appeared dreamy and little concerned with what was going on around me. My early education, received at home, interested me more than most of my school work. While one person devoted time and attention to me, I repaid the effort to my best ability. In the classes of my school-days, the contact between teacher and pupil was less immediate. I shall always remember with pleasure Mrs. B.'s "Conversations" on Chemistry, which I studied with great pleasure, albeit that I never saw one of the experiments therein described. I remember that Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" interested me more than his "Philosophy," and that Blair's "Rhetoric," with its many quotations from the poets, was a delight to me. As I have before said, I was not inapt at algebra and geometry, but was too indolent to acquire any mastery in mathematics. The French language was somehow _burnt_ into my mind by a cruel French teacher, who made my lessons as unpleasant as possible. My fear of him was so great that I really exerted myself seriously to meet his requirements. I have profited in later life by his severity, having been able not only to speak French fluently but also to write it with ease. I was fourteen years of age when I besought my father to allow me to have some lessons in Italian. These were given me by Professor Lorenzo Da Ponte, son of the veteran of whom I have already spoken. With him I read the dramas of Metastasio and of Alfieri. Through all these years there went with me the vision of some great work or works which I myself should give to the world. I should write the novel or play of the age. This, I need not say, I never did. I made indeed some progress in a drama founded upon Scott's novel of "Kenilworth," but presently relinquished this to begin a play suggested by Gibbon's account of the fall of Constantinople. Such successes as I did manage to achieve were in quite a different line, that of lyric poetry. A beloved music-master, Daniel Schlesinger, falling ill and dying, I attended his funeral and wrote some stanzas descriptive of the scene, which were printed in various papers, attracting some notice. I set them to music of my own, and sang them often, to the accompaniment of a guitar. Although the reading of Byron was sparingly conceded to us, and that of Shelley forbidden, the morbid discontent which characterized these poets made itself felt in our community as well as in England. Here, as elsewhere, it brought into fashion a certain romantic melancholy. It is true that at school we read Cowper's "Task," and did our parsing on Milton's "Paradise Lost," but what were these in comparison with:-- "The cold in clime are cold in blood," or:-- "I loved her, Father, nay, adored." After my brother's return from Europe, I read such works of George Sand and Balzac as he would allow me to choose from his library. Of the two writers, George Sand appeared to me by far the superior, though I then knew of her works only "Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre," "Spiridion," "Jacques," and "André." It was at least ten years after this time that "Consuelo" revealed to the world the real George Sand, and thereby made her peace with the society which she had defied and scandalized. Of my German studies I have already made mention. I began them with a class of ladies under the tuition of Dr. Nordheimer. But it was with the later aid of Dr. Cogswell that I really mastered the difficulties of the language. It was while I was thus engaged that my eldest brother returned from Germany. In conversing with him, I acquired the use of colloquial German. Having, as I have said, the command of his fine library, I was soon deep in Goethe's "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister," reading also the works of Jean Paul, Matthias Claudius, and Herder. Thus was a new influence introduced into the life of one who had been brought up after the strictest rule of New England Puritanism. I derived from these studies a sense of intellectual freedom so new to me that it was half delightful, half alarming. My father undertook one day to read an English translation of "Faust." He presently came to me and said,-- "My daughter, I hope that you have not read this wicked book!" I must say, even after an interval of sixty years, that I do not consider "Wilhelm Meister" altogether good reading for the youth of our country. Its great author introduces into his recital scenes and personages calculated to awaken strange discords in a mind ignorant of any greater wrong than the small sins of a well-ordered household. Although disapproving greatly of Goethe, my father took a certain pride in my literary accomplishments, and was much pleased, I think, at the commendation which followed some of my early efforts. One of these, a brief essay on the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller, was published in the "New York Review," perhaps in 1848, and was spoken of in the "North American" of that time as "a charming paper, said to have been written by a lady." I have already said that a vision of some important literary work which I should accomplish was present with me in my early life, and had much to do with habits of study acquired by me in youth, and never wholly relinquished. At this late day, I find it difficult to account for a sense of literary responsibility which never left me, and which I must consider to have formed a part of my spiritual make-up. My earliest efforts in prose, two review articles, were probably more remarked at the time of their publication than their merit would have warranted. But women writers were by no means as numerous sixty years ago as they are to-day. Neither was it possible for a girl student in those days to find that help and guidance toward a literary career which may easily be commanded to-day. The death, within one year, of my father and most dearly loved brother touched within me a deeper train of thought than I had yet known. The anguish which I then experienced sought relief in expression, and took form in a small collection of poems, which Margaret Fuller urged me to publish, but which have never seen the light, and never will. Among the friends who frequented my father's house was the Rev. Francis L. Hawkes, long the pastor of a very prominent and fashionable Episcopal church in New York. I remember that on one occasion he began to abuse my Germans in good earnest for their irreligion and infidelity, of which I, indeed, knew nothing. I inquired whether he had read any of the authors whom he so unsparingly condemned. He was forced to confess that he had not, but presently turned upon me, quite indignant that I should have asked such a question. I recall another occasion on which the anti-slavery agitation was spoken of. Dr. Hawkes condemned it very severely, and said: "If I could get hold of one of those men who are trying to stir up the slaves of the South to cut their masters' throats, I would hang him to that lamp-post." An uncle of mine who was present said: "Doctor, I honor you!" but I felt much offended at the doctor's violence. With these exceptions his society was a welcome addition to our family circle. He was a man of genial temperament and commanding character, widely read in English literature, and esteemed very eloquent as a preacher. I remember moments in which the enlargement of my horizon of thought and of faith became strongly sensible to me, in the quiet of my reading, in my own room. A certain essay in the "Wandsbecker Bote" of Matthias Claudius ends thus: "And is he not also the God of the Japanese?" Foolish as it may appear, it had never struck me before that the God whom I had been taught to worship was the God of any peoples outside the limits of Judaism and Christendom. The suggestion shocked me at first, but, later on, gave me much satisfaction. Another such moment I recall when, having carefully read "Paradise Lost" to the very end, I saw presented before me the picture of an eternal evil, of Satan and his ministers subjugated indeed by God, but not conquered, and able to maintain against Him an opposition as eternal as his goodness. This appeared to me impossible, and I threw away, once and forever, the thought of the terrible hell which till then had always formed part of my belief. In its place, I cherished the persuasion that the victory of goodness must consist in making everything good, and that Satan himself could have no shield strong enough to resist permanently the divine power of the divine spirit. This was a great emancipation for me, and I soon welcomed with joy every evidence in literature which tended to show that religion has never been confined to the experience of a particular race or nation, but has shown itself at all times, and under every variety of form, as a seeking for the divine and a reverence for the things unseen. So much for study! CHAPTER VI SAMUEL WARD AND THE ASTORS My first peep at the great world in grown-up days was at a dinner party given by a daughter of General Armstrong, married to the eldest son of the first John Jacob Astor. Mrs. Astor was a person of very elegant taste. She had received a part of her education in Paris, at the time when her father represented our government at the Court of France. Her notions of propriety in dress were very strict. According to these, jewels were not to be worn in the daytime. Glaring colors and striking contrasts were to be avoided. Much that is in favor to-day would have been ruled out by her as inadmissible. At the dinner of which I speak the ladies were in evening dress, which in those days did not transcend modest limits. One very pretty married lady wore a white turban, which was much admired. Another lady was adorned with a coronet of fine stone cameos,--which has recently been presented to the Boston Art Museum by a surviving member of her family. My head was dressed for this occasion by Martel, a dainty half Spanish or French octoroon, endowed with exquisite taste, a ready wit, and a saucy tongue. He was the Figaro of the time, and his droll sayings were often quoted among his lady customers. The hair was then worn low at the back of the head, woven into elaborate braids and darkened with French _pomade_, while an ornament called a _féronière_ was usually worn upon the forehead or just above it. This was sometimes a string of pearls with a diamond star in the middle, oftener a gold chain or band ornamented with a jewel. The fashion, while it prevailed, was so general that evening dress was scarcely considered complete without it. Not long after the dinner party just mentioned, my eldest brother married the eldest daughter of the Astor family. I officiated at the wedding as first bridesmaid, a sister of the bride and one of my own completing the number. The bride wore a dress of rich white silk, and was coiffed with a scarf of some precious lace, in lieu of a veil. On her forehead shone a diamond star, the gift of her grandfather, Mr. John Jacob Astor. The bridesmaids' dresses were of white _moire_, then a material of the newest fashion. I had begged my father to give me a _féronière_ for this occasion, and he had presented me with a very pretty string of pearls, having a pearl pansy and drop in the centre. This fashion, I afterwards learned, was very ill suited to the contour of my face. At the time, however, I had the comfort of supposing that I looked uncommonly well. The ceremony took place in the evening at the house of the bride's parents. A very elaborate supper was afterwards served, at which the first groomsman proposed the health of the bride and groom, which was drunk without response. A wedding journey was not a _sine qua non_ in those days, but a wedding reception was usual. In this instance it took the form of a brilliant ball, every guest being in turn presented to the bride. On the floor of the ball-room a floral design had been traced in colored chalks. The evening was at its height when my father gravely admonished me that it was time to go home. Paternal authority was without appeal in those days. In my character of bridesmaid, I was allowed to attend one or two of the entertainments given in honor of this marriage. The gayeties of New York were then limited to balls, dinners, and evening parties. The afternoon tea was not invented until a much later period. One or two extra _élégantes_ received on stated afternoons. My dear uncle John, taking up a card left for me, with the inscription, "Mrs. S. at home on Thursday afternoon," remarked, "At home on Thursday afternoon? I am glad to learn that she is so domestic." This lady, who was a leading personage in the social world, used also to receive privileged friends on one evening in the week, giving only a cup of chocolate and some cakes or biscuits. My eldest brother, Samuel Ward, the fourth of the same name, has been so well known, both in public and in private life, that my reminiscences would not be complete without some special characterization of him. In my childhood he was my ideal and my idol. A handsome youth, quick of wit and tender of heart, brilliant in promise, and with a great and versatile power of work in him, I doubt whether Round Hill School ever turned out a more remarkable pupil. From Round Hill my brother passed to Columbia College, graduating therefrom after a four years' course. His mathematical attainments were considered remarkable, and my father, desiring to give him the best opportunity of extending his studies, sent him to Europe before he had attained his majority, with a letter of credit whose amount the banker, Hottinguer, thought it best not to impart to the young student, so much did he consider it beyond his needs. My brother's career in Europe, where he spent some years at this time, was not altogether in accordance with the promise of his early devotion to mathematical science. He saw much of German student life, and studied enough to obtain a degree from the University of Tübingen. Before his departure from America he had written two articles for the "North American Review." One of these was on Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," the other on Euler's works. In Paris, he became the intimate friend of the famous critic, Jules Janin, and made acquaintance with other literary men of the time. He returned to America in 1835, speaking French like a Parisian and German as fluently as if that had been his native language. He had purchased a great part of the scientific library of La Grange, and an admirable collection of French and German works. At this period, he desired to make literature, rather than science, the leading pursuit of his life. He devoted much time to the composition of a work descriptive of Paris. He wrote many chapters of this in French, and I was proud to be allowed to render them into English. He brought into the Puritanic limits of our family circle a flavor of European life and culture which greatly delighted me. [Illustration: SAMUEL WARD JR. _From a painting by Baron Vogel._] My brother had spent a great deal of money while in Europe, and my father, who had done so much for him, began to think it time that this darling of fortune should take steps to earn his own support. The easiest way for him to accomplish this was to accept a post in the banking house of Prime, Ward and King, with the prospect of partnership later. He decided, with some reluctance, to pursue this course. His first day's performance at the office was so faulty that my father, on reviewing it, exclaimed, "You will play the very devil with the check-book, sir, if you use it in this way." He, however, applied himself diligently to his office work, and soon mastered its difficulties, but without developing a taste for business pursuits. Literature was still his ruling passion, and he devoted such leisure as he could command to study and to the composition of several lectures, which he delivered with some success. I have already spoken of his marriage with a daughter of Mr. William B. Astor. This union, a very happy one, was not of long duration. After a few years of married life, he was left a widower, with a daughter still in infancy, who became the especial charge and darling of my sister Louisa. After an interval of some years, my brother married Miss Grimes of New Orleans, a lady of uncommon beauty and talent. In the mean time we had to mourn the death of our beloved father, whose sober judgment and strong will had exercised a most salutary influence upon my brother's sanguine temperament. He now became anxious to increase his income; and this anxiety led him to embark in various speculations, which were not always fortunate. He left the firm of Prime, Ward and King, and was one of the first who went to California after its cession to the United States. The Indians were then in near proximity to San Francisco, and Uncle Sam, as he came to be called, went much among them, and became so well versed in their diverse dialects as to be able to act as interpreter between tribes unacquainted with each other's forms of speech. He once wrote out and sent me some tenses of an Indian verb which had impressed him with its resemblance to corresponding parts of the Greek language. I showed this to Theodore Parker, who considered it remarkable, and at once caused my brother to be elected as a member of some learned association devoted to philological research. An anecdote of his experience with the Indians may be briefly narrated here. He had been passing some time at a mining camp in the neighborhood of an Indian settlement, and had entered into friendly relations with the principal chief of the tribe. Thinking that a trip to San Francisco would greatly amuse this noble savage, he with some difficulty persuaded the elders of the tribe to allow their leader to accompany him to the city, where they had no sooner landed than the chief slipped out of sight and could not be found. Several days passed without any news of him, although advertisements were soon posted and a liberal reward offered to any one who should discover his whereabouts. My brother and his party were finally obliged to return to camp without him. This they did very unwillingly, knowing that the chief's prolonged absence would arouse the suspicions of his followers that he had met with ill-treatment. And so indeed it proved. Soon after their arrival at the settlement they were told that the Indians were becoming much excited, and that a council and war-dance were in preparation. The whites, a handful of men, armed themselves, and were preparing to sell their lives dearly, when suddenly the chief himself appeared among them. The Indians were pacified and the whites were overjoyed. The fugitive gave the following explanation of his strange conduct. He had been much alarmed by the noises heard on board the steamer, which he seemed to have mistaken for a living creature. "He must be sick, he groans so!" was his expression. Resolving that he would not return by that means of conveyance, he had found for himself a hiding-place on a hill commanding a view of the harbor. From this height of vantage he was able to observe the movements of the party which had brought him to the city. When he saw the men reëmbark on the steamer, he felt himself secure from recapture, and managed to steal a horse and to find his way back to his own people. If his misunderstanding of the nature of the boat should seem improbable, we must remember the Highlander who picked up a watch on some battlefield, and the next day sold it for a trifle, averring that "the creature had died in the night." During the period of the civil war, my brother resided in Washington, where his social gifts were highly valued. His sympathies were with the Democratic party, but his friendships went far beyond the limits of partisanship. He had an unusual power of reconciling people who were at variance with each other, and the dinners at which he presided furnished occasions to bring face to face political opponents accustomed to avoid each other, but unable to resist the _bonhomie_ which sought to make them better friends. He became known as King of the Lobby, but much more as the prince of entertainers. Although careful in his diet, he was well versed in gastronomics, and his menus were wholly original and excellent. He had friendly relations with the diplomats who were prominent in the society of the capital. Lord Rosebery and the Duke of Devonshire were among his friends, as were also the late Senator Bayard and President Garfield. Quite late in life, he enjoyed a turn of good fortune, and was most generous in his use of the wealth suddenly acquired, and alas! as suddenly lost. His last visit to Europe was in 1882-83, when, after passing some months with Lord and Lady Rosebery, he proceeded to Rome to finish the winter with our sister, Mrs. Terry. In his travels he had contracted a fatal disease, and his checkered and brilliant career came to an end at Pegli, near Genoa, in the spring of 1884. Of his oft contemplated literary work there remains a volume of poems entitled "Literary Recreations." The poet Longfellow, my brother's lifelong friend and intimate, esteemed these productions of his as true poetry, and more than once said to me of their author, "He is the most lovable man that I have ever known." I certainly never knew one who took so much delight in giving pleasure to others, or whose life was so full of natural, overflowing geniality and beneficence. Shortly after his first marriage my brother and his bride came to reside with us. In their company I often visited the Astor mansion, which was made delightful by good taste, good manners, and hospitable entertainment. Mr. William B. Astor, the head of the family, was a rather shy and silent man. He had received the best education that a German university could offer. The Chevalier Bunsen had been his tutor, and Schopenhauer, then a student at the same university, had been his friend. He had a love for letters, and might perhaps have followed this natural leading to advantage, had he not become his father's man of business, and thus been forced to devote much of his life to the management of the great Astor estate. At the time of which I speak, he resided on the unfashionable side of Broadway, not far below Canal Street. At this time I was often invited to the house of his father, Mr. John Jacob Astor. This house, which the old gentleman had built for himself, was situated on Broadway, between Prince and Spring streets. Adjoining it was one which he had built for a favorite granddaughter, Mrs. Boreel. He was very fond of music, and sometimes engaged the services of a professional pianist. I remember that he was much pleased at recognizing, one evening, the strains of a brilliant waltz, of which he said: "I heard it at a fair in Switzerland years ago. The Swiss women were whirling round in their red petticoats." On another occasion, we sang the well-known song, "Am Rhein;" and Mr. Astor, who was very stout and infirm of person, rose and stood beside the piano, joining with the singers. "Am Rhein, am Rhein, da wachset süsses Leben," he sang, instead of "Da wachsen unsere Reben." My sister-in-law, Emily Astor Ward, was endowed with a voice whose unusual power and beauty had been enhanced by careful training. We sometimes sang together or separately at old Mr. Astor's musical parties, and at one of these he said to us, as we stood together: "You are my singing birds." Of our two _répertoires_, mine was the most varied, as it included French and German songs, while she sang mostly operatic music. The rich volume of her voice, however, carried her hearers quite away. Her figure and carriage were fine, and in her countenance beauty of expression lent a great charm to features which in themselves were not handsome. Although the elder Astor had led a life mainly devoted to business interests, he had great pleasure in the society of literary men. Fitz-Greene Halleck and Washington Irving were familiar visitors at his house, and he conceived so great a regard for Dr. Joseph Green Cogswell as to insist upon his becoming an inmate of his family. He finally went to reside with Mr. Astor, attracted partly by the latter's promise to endow a public library in the city of New York. This was accomplished after some delay, and the doctor was for many years director of the Astor Library. He used to relate some humorous anecdotes of excursions which he made with Mr. Astor. In the course of one of these, the two gentlemen took supper together at a hotel recently opened. Mr. Astor remarked: "This man will never succeed." "Why not?" inquired the other. "Don't you see what large lumps of sugar he puts in the sugar bowl?" Once, as they were walking slowly to a pilot-boat which the old gentleman had chartered for a trip down the harbor, Dr. Cogswell said: "Mr. Astor, I have just been calculating that this boat costs you twenty-five cents a minute." Mr. Astor at once hastened his pace, reluctant to waste so much money. In his own country Mr. Astor had been a member of the German Lutheran Church. He once mentioned this fact to a clergyman who called upon him in the interest of some charity. The visitor congratulated Mr. Astor upon the increased ability to do good, which his great fortune gave him. "Ah!" said Mr. Astor, "the disposition to do good does not always increase with the means." In the last years of his life he was afflicted with insomnia. Dr. Cogswell often sat with him through a great part of the night, the coachman, William, being also in attendance. In these sleepless nights, his mind appeared to be much exercised with regard to a future state. On one of these occasions, when Dr. Cogswell had done his best to expound the theme of immortality, Mr. Astor suddenly said to his servant: "William, where do you expect to go when you die?" The man replied: "Why, sir, I always expected to go where the other people went." Young as my native city was in my youth, it still retained some fossils of an earlier period. Conspicuous among these were two sisters, of whom the elder had been a recognized beauty and belle at the time of the War of Independence. Miss Charlotte White was what was called "a character" in those days. She was tall and of commanding figure, attired after an ancient fashion, but with great care. I remember her calling upon my aunt one morning, in company with a lady friend much inclined to _embonpoint_. The lady's name was Euphemia, and Miss White addressed her thus: "Feme, thou female Falstaff." She took some notice of me, and began to talk of the gayeties of her youth, and especially of a ball given at Newport during the war, at which she had received especial attention. On returning the visit we found the sisters in the quaintest little sitting-room imaginable, the floor covered with a green Brussels carpet, woven in one piece, with a medallion of flowers in the centre, evidently manufactured to order. The furniture was of enameled white wood. We were entertained with cake and wine. The younger of the sisters was much afraid of lightning, and had devised a curious little refuge to which she always betook herself when a thunderstorm appeared imminent. This was a wooden platform standing on glass feet, with a seat and a silken canopy, which the good lady drew closely around her, remaining thus enveloped until the dreaded danger was past. My father sometimes endeavored to overcome my fear of lightning by taking me up to the cupola of our house, and bidding me admire the beauty of the storm. Wishing to impress upon me the absurdity of giving way to fear, he told me of a lady whom he had known in his youth who, being overtaken by a thunderstorm at a place of public resort, so lost her head that she seized the wig of a gentleman standing near her, and waved it wildly in the air, to his great wrath and discomfiture. I am sorry to say that this dreadful warning provoked my laughter, but did not increase my courage. The years of mourning for my father and beloved brother being at an end, and the sister next to me being now of an age to make her début in society, I began with her a season of visiting, dancing, and so on. My sister was very handsome, and we were both welcome guests at fashionable entertainments. I was passionately fond of music, and scarcely less so of dancing, and the history of the next two winters would, if written, chronicle a series of balls, concerts, and dinners. I did not, even in these years of social routine, abandon either my studies or my hope of contributing to the literature of my generation. Hours were not then unreasonably late. Dancing parties usually broke up soon after one o'clock, and left me fresh enough to enjoy the next day's study. We saw many literary people and some of the scientists with whom my brother had become acquainted while in Europe. Among the first was John L. O'Sullivan, the accomplished editor of the "Democratic Review." When the poet Dana visited our city, he always called upon us, and we sometimes had the pleasure of seeing with him his intimate friend, William Cullen Bryant, who very rarely appeared in general society. Among our scientific guests I especially remember an English gentleman who was in those days a distinguished mathematician, and who has since become very eminent. He was of the Hebrew race, and had fallen violently in love with a beautiful Jewish heiress, well known in New York. His wooing was not fortunate, and the extravagance of his indignation at its result was both pathetic and laughable. He once confided to me his intention of paying his addresses to the lady's young niece. "And Miss ---- shall become our Aunt Hannah!" he said, with extreme bitterness. I exhorted him to calm himself by devotion to his scientific pursuits, but he replied: "Something better than mathematics has waked up here!" pointing to his heart. He wrote many verses, which he read aloud to our sympathizing circle. I recall from one of these a distich of some merit. Speaking of his fancied wrongs, and warning his fair antagonist to beware of the revenge which he might take, he wrote:-- "Wine gushes from the trampled grape, Iron's branded into steel." In the end he returned to the science which had been his first love, and which rewarded his devotion with a wide reputation. These years glided by with fairy-like swiftness. They were passed by my sisters and myself under my brother's roof, where the beloved uncle also made his home with us so long as we remained together. I have dwelt a good deal on the circumstances and surroundings of my early life in my native city. If this state of things here described had continued, I should probably have remained a frequenter of fashionable society, a musical amateur, and a _dilettante_ in literature. CHAPTER VII MARRIAGE: TOUR IN EUROPE Quite other experiences were in store for me. I chanced to pass the summer of 1841 at a cottage in the neighborhood of Boston, with my sisters and a young friend much endeared to us as the betrothed of the dearly loved brother Henry, whose recent death had greatly grieved us. Longfellow and Sumner often visited us in our retirement. The latter once made mention of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe's wonderful achievement in the case of Laura Bridgman, the first blind deaf mute who had ever been taught the use of language. He also brought us some of the reports which gave an account of the progress of her education. It was proposed that we should drive over to the Perkins Institution on a given day. Mr. Longfellow came for me in a buggy, while Mr. Sumner conducted my two sisters and our friend. We found Laura, then a child of ten years, seated at her little desk, and beside her another girl of the same age, also a blind deaf mute. The name of this last was Lucy Reed, and we learned that, until brought to the Institution, she had been accustomed to cover her head and face with a cotton bag of her own manufacture. Her complexion was very delicate and her countenance altogether pleasing. While the two children were holding converse through the medium of the finger alphabet, Lucy's face was suddenly lit up by a smile so beautiful as to call forth from us an involuntary exclamation. Unfortunately, this young girl was soon taken away by her parents, and I have never had any further knowledge concerning her. Dr. Howe was absent when we arrived at the Institution, but before we took leave of it, Mr. Sumner, looking out of a window, said, "Oh! here comes Howe on his black horse." I looked out also, and beheld a noble rider on a noble steed. The doctor dismounted, and presently came to make our acquaintance. One of our party proposed to give Laura some trinket which she wore, but Dr. Howe forbade this rather sternly. He made upon us an impression of unusual force and reserve. Only when I was seated beside Longfellow for the homeward drive, he mischievously remarked, "Longfellow, I see that your horse has been down," at which the poet seemed a little discomfited. Mr. Sanborn, in the preface to his biography of Dr. Howe, says:-- "It has fallen to my lot to know, both in youth and in age, several of the most romantic characters of our century; and among them one of the most romantic was certainly the hero of these pages. That he was indeed a hero, the events of his life sufficiently declare." This writer, in his interesting memoir, often quotes passages from one prepared by myself shortly after my husband's death. In executing this work, I was forced to keep within certain limits, as my volume was primarily intended for the use of the blind, a circumstance which necessitated the printing of it in raised letters. As this process is expensive, and its results very cumbersome, economy of space becomes an important condition in its execution. Mr. Sanborn, not having suffered this limitation, and having had many documents at his disposal, has been able to add much interesting matter to what I was only able to give in outline. An even fuller biography than his will be published ere many years, by our children, but the best record of the great philanthropist's life remains in the new influences which he brought to bear on the community. Traces of these may be found in the improved condition of the several classes of unfortunates whose interests he espoused and vindicated, often to the great indignation of parties less enlightened. He himself had, what he was glad to recognize in Wendell Phillips, a prophetic quality of mind. His sanguine temperament, his knowledge of principles and reliance upon them, combined to lead him in advance of his own time. Experts in reforms and in charities acknowledge the indebtedness of both to his unremitting labors. What the general public should most prize and hold fast is the conviction, so clearly expressed by him, that humanity has a claim to be honored and aided, even where its traits appear most abnormal and degraded. He demanded for the blind an education which would render them self-supporting; for the idiot, the training of his poor and maimed capabilities; for the insane and the criminal, the watchful and redemptive tutelage of society. In the world as he would have had it, there should have been neither paupers nor outcasts. He did all that one man could do to advance the coming of this millennial consummation. My husband, Dr. Howe, was my senior by nearly a score of years. If I mention this discrepancy in our ages, it is that I may acknowledge in him the superiority of experience which so many years of the most noble activity had naturally given him. My own true life had been that of a student and of a dreamer. Dr. Howe had read and thought much, but he had also acquired the practical knowledge which is rarely attained in the closet or at the desk. His career from the outset had been characterized by energy and perseverance. In his college days, this energy had found much of its vent in undertakings of boyish mischief. When he came to man's estate, a new inspiration took possession of him. The devotion to ideas and principles, the zeal for the rights of others which go to make up the men of public spirit--those leading traits now appeared in him, and at once gave him a place among the champions of human freedom. The love of adventure and the example of Lord Byron had, no doubt, some part in his determination to cast in his lot with the Greeks in the memorable struggle which restored to them their national life. But the solidity and value of the services which he rendered to that oppressed people showed in time that he was endowed, not only with the generous impulses of youth, but with the forethought of mature manhood. After some years of gallant service, in which he shared all the privations of the little army, accustoming himself to the bivouac by night, to hunger, hard fare, and constant fighting by day, he became convinced that the Greeks were in danger of being reduced to submission by absolute starvation. All the able-bodied men of the nation were in the field. The Turks had devastated the land, and there were no hands to till it. He therefore returned to America, and there preached so effectual a crusade in behalf of the Greeks that a considerable sum of money was contributed for their relief. These funds were expended by Dr. Howe in shiploads of clothing and provisions, of which he himself superintended the distribution, thus enabling the Greeks to hold out until a sudden turn in political affairs induced the diplomacy of western Europe to espouse their cause. When the liberation of Greece had become an assured fact, Dr. Howe returned to America to find and take up his life-work. The education of the blind presented a worthy field for his tireless activity. He founded, built up, and directed the first institution for their benefit known in this country. This was a work of great difficulty, and one for which the means at hand appeared utterly inadequate. Beginning with the training of three little blind children in his father's house, he succeeded so well in enlisting the sympathies of the public in behalf of the class which they represented that funds soon flowed in from various sources. The present well-known institution, with its flourishing workshop, printing establishment, and other dependencies, stands to attest his work, and the support given to it by the community. A new lustre was added to his name by the wonderful series of experiments which brought the gifts of human speech and knowledge to a blind deaf mute. The story of Laura Bridgman is too well known to need repetition in these pages. As related by Charles Dickens in his "American Notes," it carried Dr. Howe's fame to the civilized world. When he visited Europe with this deed of merit put upon his record, it was as one whom high and low should delight to honor. Mr. Emerson somewhere speaks of the romance of some special philanthropy. Dr. Howe's life became an embodiment of this romance. Like all inspired men, he brought into the enterprises of his day new ideas and a new spirit. Deep in his heart lay a sense of the dignity and ability of human nature, which forced him to reject the pauperizing methods then employed in regard to various classes of unfortunates. The blind must not only be fed and housed and cared for; they must learn to make their lives useful to the community; they must be taught and trained to earn their own support. Years of patient effort enabled him to accomplish this; and the present condition of the blind in American communities attests the general acceptance of their claim to the benefits of education and the dignity of useful labor. Dr. Howe's public services, however, were by no means limited to the duties of his especial charge. With keen power of analysis, he explored the most crying evils of society, seeking to discover, even in their sources, the secret of their prevention and cure. His masterly report on idiocy led to the establishment of a school for feeble-minded children, in which numbers of these were trained to useful industries, and redeemed from brutal ignorance and inertia. He aided Dorothea Dix in her heroic efforts to improve the condition of the insane. He worked with Horace Mann for the uplifting of the public schools. He stood with the heroic few who dared to advocate the abolition of slavery. In these and many other departments of work his influence was felt, and it is worthy of remark that, although employing his power in so many directions, his use of it was wonderfully free from waste. He indulged in no vaporous visions, in no redundancy of phrases. The documents in which he gave to the public the results of his experience are models of statement, terse, simple, and direct. I became engaged to Dr. Howe during a visit to Boston in the winter of 1842-43, and was married to him on the 23d of April of the latter year. A week later we sailed for Europe in one of the small Cunard steamers of that time, taking with us my youngest sister, Annie Ward, whose state of health gave us some uneasiness. My husband's great friend, Horace Mann, and his bride, Mary Peabody, sailed with us. During the first two days of the voyage I was stupefied by sea-sickness, and even forgot that my sister was on board the steamer. On the evening of the second day I remembered her, and managed with the help of a very stout stewardess to visit her in her stateroom, where she had for her roommate a cousin of the poet Longfellow. We bewailed our common miseries a little, but the next morning brought a different state of things. As soon as I was awake, my husband came to me bringing a small dose of brandy with cracked ice. "Drink this," he said, "and ask Mrs. Bean [the stewardess] to help you get on your clothes, for you must go up on deck; we shall be at Halifax in a few hours." Magnetized by the stronger will, I struggled with my weakness, and was presently clothed and carried up on deck. "Now, I am going for Annie," said Dr. Howe, leaving me comfortably propped up in a safe seat. He soon returned with my dear sister, as helpless as myself. The fresh air revived us so much that we were able to take our breakfast, the first meal we ate on board, in the saloon with the other passengers. We went on shore, however, for a walk at Halifax, and from that time forth were quite able-bodied sea-goers. On the last day before that of our landing, an unusually good dinner was served, and, according to the custom of the time, champagne was furnished gratis, in order that all who dined together might drink the Queen's health. This favorite toast was accordingly proposed and responded to by a number of rather flat speeches. The health of the captain of our steamer was also proposed, and some others which I cannot now recall. This proceeding amused me so much that I busied myself the next day with preparing for a mock celebration in the ladies' cabin. The meeting was well attended. I opened with a song in honor of Mrs. Bean, our kind and efficient stewardess. "God save our Mrs. Bean, Best woman ever seen, God save Mrs. Bean. God bless her gown and cap, Pour guineas in her lap, Keep her from all mishap, God save Mrs. Bean." The company were invited to join in singing these lines, which were, of course, a take-off on "God save our gracious Queen." I can still see in my mind's eye dear old Madam Sedgwick, mother of the well-known jurist, Theodore of that name, lifting her quavering, high voice to aid in the singing. Mrs. Bean was rather taken aback by the unexpected homage rendered her. We all called out: "Speech! speech!" whereupon she curtsied and said: "Good ladies makes good stewardesses; that's all I can say," which was very well in its way. Rev. Jacob Abbott was one of our fellow passengers, and had been much in our cabin, where he busied himself in compounding various "soft drinks" for convalescent lady friends. His health was accordingly proposed with the following stanza:-- "Dr. Abbott in our cabin, Mixing of a soda-powder, How he ground it, How did pound it, While the tempest threatened louder." I next gave the cow's health, whereupon a lady passenger, with a Scotch accent, demurred: "I don't want to drink her health at a'. I think she is the poorest _coo_ I ever heard of." Arriving in London, we found comfortable lodgings in Upper Baker Street, and busied ourselves with the delivery of our many letters of introduction. The Rev. Sydney Smith was one of the first to honor our introduction with a call. His reputation as a wit was already world-wide, and he was certainly one of the idols of London society. In appearance he was hardly prepossessing. He was short and squat of figure, with a rubicund countenance, redeemed by a pair of twinkling eyes. When we first saw him, my husband was suffering from the result of a trifling accident. Mr. Smith said, "Dr. Howe, I must send you my gouty crutches." My husband demurred at this, and begged Mr. Smith not to give himself that trouble. He insisted, however, and the crutches were sent. Dr. Howe had really no need of them, and I laughed with him at their disproportion to his height, which would in any case have made it impossible for him to use them. The loan was presently returned with thanks, but scarcely soon enough; for Sydney Smith, who had lost heavily by American investments, published in one of the London papers a letter reflecting severely upon the failure of some of our Western States to pay their debts. The letter concluded with these words: "And now an American, present at this time in London, has deprived me of my last means of support." One questioned a little whether the loan had not been made for the sake of the pleasantry. In the course of the visit already referred to, Mr. Smith promised that we should receive cards for an entertainment which his daughter, Mrs. Holland, was about to give. The cards were received, and we presented ourselves at the party. Among the persons there introduced to us was Mme. Van de Weyer, wife of the Belgian minister, and daughter of Joshua Bates, formerly of Massachusetts, and in after years the founder of the Public Library of Boston, in which one hall bears his name. Mr. Van de Weyer, we were told, was on very friendly terms with the Prince Consort, and his wife was often invited by the Queen. The historian Grote and his wife also made our acquaintance. I especially remember her appearance because it was, and was allowed to be, somewhat _grote_sque. She was very tall and stout in proportion, and was dressed on this occasion in a dark green or blue silk, with a necklace of pearls about her throat. I gathered from what I heard that hers was one of the marked personalities of that time in London society. At this party Sydney Smith was constantly the centre of a group of admiring friends. When we first entered the rooms, he said to us, "I am so busy to-night that I can do nothing for you." Later in the evening he found time to seek me out. "Mrs. Howe," said he, "this is a rout. I like routs. Do you have routs in America?" "We have parties like this in America," I replied, "but we do not call them routs." "What do you call them there?" "We call them receptions." This seemed to amuse him, and he said to some one who stood near us:-- "Mrs. Howe says that in America they call routs re-cep-tions." He asked what I had seen in London so far. I replied that I had recently visited the House of Lords, whereupon he remarked:-- "Mrs. Howe, your English is excellent. I have only heard you make one mispronunciation. You have just said 'House of Lords.' We say 'House of Lards.'" Some one near by said, "Oh, yes! the house is always addressed as 'my luds and gentlemen.'" When I repeated this to Horace Mann, it so vexed his gentle spirit as to cause him to exclaim, "House of Lords? You ought to have said 'House of Devils.'" I have made several visits in London since that time, one quite recently, and I have observed that people now speak of receptions, and not of routs. I think, also, that the pronunciation insisted upon by Sydney Smith has become a thing of the past. I think that Mrs. Sydney Smith must have called or have left a card at our lodgings, for I distinctly remember a morning call which I made at her house. The great wit was at home on this occasion, as was also his only surviving son. An elder son had been born to him, who probably inherited something of his character and ability, and whose death he laments in one or more of his published letters. The young man whom I saw at this time was spoken of as much devoted to the turf, and the only saying of his that I have ever heard quoted was his question as to how long it took Nebuchadnezzar to get into condition after he had been out to grass. Mrs. Smith received me very pleasantly. She seemed a grave and silent woman, presenting in this respect a striking contrast to her husband. I knew very little of the political opinions of the latter, and innocently inquired whether he and Mrs. Smith went sometimes to court. The question amused him. He said to his wife, "My dear, Mrs. Howe wishes to know whether you and I go to court." To me he said, "No, madam. That is a luxury which I deny myself." I last saw Sydney Smith at an evening party at which, as usual, he was surrounded by friends. A very amiable young American was present, apropos of whom I heard Mr. Smith say:-- "I think I shall go over to America and settle in Boston. Perkins here says that he'll patronize me." Thomas Carlyle was also one of our earliest visitors. Some time before leaving home, Dr. Howe had received from him a letter expressing his great interest in the story of Laura Bridgman as narrated by Charles Dickens. In this letter he mentioned Laura's childish question, "Do horses sit up late?" In the course of his conversation he said, laughing heartily: "Laura Bridgman, dear child! Her question, Do horses sit up late?" Before taking leave of us he invited us to take tea with him on the following Sunday. When the day arrived, my husband was kept at home by a severe headache, but Mr. and Mrs. Mann, my sister, and myself drove out to Chelsea, where Mr. Carlyle resided at that time. In receiving us he apologized for his wife, who was also suffering from headache and could not appear. In her absence I was requested to pour tea. Our host partook of it copiously, in all the strength of the teapot. As I filled and refilled his cup, I thought that his chronic dyspepsia was not to be wondered at. The repast was a simple one. It consisted of a plate of toast and two small dishes of stewed fruit, which he offered us with the words, "Perhaps ye can eat some of this. I never eat these things myself." The conversation was mostly a monologue. Mr. Carlyle spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and his talk sounded to me like pages of his writings. He had recently been annoyed by some movement tending to the disestablishment of the Scottish Church. Apropos of this he said, "That auld Kirk of Scotland! To think that a man like Johnny Graham should be able to wipe it out with a flirt of his pen!" Charles Sumner was spoken of, and Mr. Carlyle said, "Oh yes; Mr. Sumner was a vera dull man, but he did not offend people, and he got on in society here." Carlyle's hair was dark, shaggy, and rather unkempt; his complexion was sallow, with a slight glow of red on the cheek; his eye was full of fire. As we drove back to town, Mr. Mann expressed great disappointment with our visit. He did not feel, he said, that we had seen the real Carlyle at all. I insisted that we had. Soon after our arrival in London a gentleman called upon us whom the servant announced as Mr. Mills. It happened that I did not examine the card which was brought in at the same time. Dr. Howe was not within, and in his absence I entertained the unknown guest to the best of my ability. He spoke of Longfellow's volume of poems on slavery, then a recent publication, saying that he admired them. Our talk turning upon poetry in general, I remarked that Wordsworth appeared to be the only poet of eminence left in England. Before taking leave of me the visitor named a certain day on which he requested that we would come to breakfast at his house. Forgetful of the card, I asked "Where?" He said, "You will find my address on my card. I am Mr. Milnes." On looking at the card I found that this was Richard Monckton Milnes, afterward known as Lord Houghton. I was somewhat chagrined at remembering the remark I had made in connection with Wordsworth. He probably supposed that I was ignorant of his literary rank, which I was not, as his poems, though never very popular, were already well known in America. The breakfast to which Mr. Milnes had invited us proved most pleasant. Our host had recently traveled in the East, and had brought home a prayer carpet, which we admired. His sister, Lady Galway, presided at table with much grace. The breakfast was at this time a favorite mode of entertainment, and we enjoyed many of these occasions. I remember one at the house of Sir Robert Harry Inglis, long a leading Conservative member of the House of Commons. Punch once said of him:-- "The Inglis thinks the world grows worse, And always wears a rose." And this flower, which always adorned his buttonhole, seemed to match well with his benevolent and somewhat rubicund countenance. At the breakfast of which I speak, he cut the loaf with his own hands, saying to each guest, "Will you have a slice or a hunch?" and cutting a slice from one end or a hunch from the other, according to the preference expressed. These breakfasts were not luncheons in disguise. They were given at ten, or even at half past nine o'clock. The meal usually consisted of fish, cutlets, eggs, cold bread and toast, with tea and coffee. At Samuel Rogers's I remember that plover's eggs were served. We also dined one evening with Mr. Rogers, and met among the guests Mr. Dickens and Lady B., one of the beautiful Sheridan sisters. A gentleman sat next me at table, whose name I did not catch. I had heard much of the works of art to be seen in Mr. Rogers's house, and so took occasion to ask him whether he knew anything about pictures. He smiled, and answered, "Well, yes." I then begged him to explain to me some of those which hung upon the walls, which he did with much good-nature. Presently some one at the table addressed him as "Mr. Landseer," and I became aware that I was sitting next to the celebrated painter of animals. His fine face had already attracted me. I apologized for the question which I had asked, and which had somewhat amused him. I had recently seen at Stafford House a picture of his, representing two daughters of the Duke of Sutherland playing with a dog. He said that he did not care much for that picture, that the Duchess had herself chosen the subject, etc. Mr. Rogers, indeed, possessed some paintings of great value, one a genuine Raphael, if I mistake not. He had also many objects of _virtu_. I think it was after a breakfast at his house that he showed us some Etruscan potteries. Dr. Howe took up one of these rather carelessly. It was a cup, and the handle became separated from it. My husband appeared so much disconcerted at this that I could not help laughing a little at the expression of his countenance. Mr. Rogers afterwards said to an American friend, "Mrs. Howe was quite cruel to laugh at the doctor's embarrassment." On one occasion he showed us some autograph letters of Lord Byron, with whom he had been well acquainted. He read a passage from one of these, in which Lord Byron, after speaking of the ancient custom of the Doge wedding the Adriatic, wrote: "I wish the Adriatic would take my wife." In after years I was sometimes questioned as to what had most impressed me during my first visit in London. I replied unhesitatingly, "The clever people collected there." The moment, indeed, was fortunate. We had come well provided with letters of introduction. Besides this, my husband was at the time a first-class lion, and this merit avails more in England than any other, and more there than elsewhere. Mr. Sumner had given us a letter to the Marquis of Lansdowne, which the latter honored by a call, and further by sending us cards for a musical evening at Lansdowne House. Lord Lansdowne was a gracious host. His lady was more formal in manner. Their music-room was oblong in shape, and the guests were seated along the wall on either side. Before the performance began I noticed a movement among those present, the cause of which became evident when the Duchess of Gloucester appeared, leaning on the arm of the master of the house. She was attired, or, as newspapers put it, "gowned," in black, wearing white plumes in her headdress, and with bare neck and arms, according to the imperative fashion of the time. She was well advanced in years, and had probably never been remarked for good looks, but was said to be beloved by the Queen and by many friends. The programme of the entertainment was one which to-day would seem rather commonplace, though the performers were not so. A handsome young man, of slender figure, opened the concert by singing the serenade from the opera of "Don Pasquale." I felt at once that this must be Mario, but that name cannot suggest to one who never heard him either the beauty of his voice or the refinement of his intonation. I still feel a sort of intoxication when I recall his rendering of "Com' é gentil." Grisi sang several times. She was then in what some one has termed, "the insolence of her youth and beauty." Mlle. Persiani, also of the grand opera, gave an air by Gluck, which I myself had studied, "Pago fúi, fúi lieto un di." Lord Lansdowne told me that this lady was the most obliging of artists. I afterwards heard her in "Linda di Chamounix," which was then in its first favor. The concert ended with the prayer from Rossini's "Mosé in Egitto," sung by the artists already named with the addition of the great Lablache. At the conclusion of it we adjourned to the supper-room, which afforded us a better opportunity of observing the distinguished company. My husband was presently engaged in conversation with the Hon. Mrs. Norton, who was then very handsome. Her hair, which was decidedly black, was arranged in flat bandeaux, according to the fashion of the time. A diamond chain, formed of large links, encircled her fine head. Her eyes were dark and full of expression. Her dress was unusually _décolletée_, but most of the ladies present would in America have been considered extreme in this respect. Court mourning had recently been ordered for the Duke of Sussex, uncle to the Queen, and many black dresses were worn. My memory, nevertheless, tells me that the great Duchess of Sutherland wore a dress of pink _moire_, and that her head was adorned with a wreath of velvet leaves interspersed with diamonds. Her brother, Lord Morpeth, was also present. I heard a lady say to him, "Are you worthy of music?" He replied, "Oh, yes; very worthy." I heard the same phrase repeated by others, and, on inquiring as to its meaning, was told that it was a way of asking whether one was fond of music. The formula has long since gone out of fashion. Somewhat later in the season we were invited to dine at Lansdowne House. Among the guests present I remember Lord Morpeth. I had some conversation with the daughter of the house, Lady Louisa Fitzmaurice, who was pleasing, but not pretty, and wore a dress of light blue silk, with a necklace around her throat formed of many strands of fine gold chain. I was asked at this dinner whether I should object to sitting next to a colored person in, for example, a box at the opera. Were I asked this question to-day, I should reply that this would depend upon the character and cleanliness of the colored person, much as one would say in the case of a white man or woman. I remember that Lord Lansdowne wore a blue ribbon across his breast, and on it a flat star of silver. Among the well-remembered glories of that summer, the new delight of the drama holds an important place. I had been denied this pleasure in my girlhood, and my enjoyment of it at this time was fresh and intense. Among the attentions lavished upon us during that London season were frequent offers of a box at Covent Garden or "Her Majesty's." These were never declined. Of especial interest to me was a performance of Macready as Claude Melnotte in Bulwer's "Lady of Lyons." The part of Pauline was played by Helen Faucit. Both of these artists were then at their best. Thomas Appleton, of Boston, and William Wadsworth, of Geneseo, were with us in our box. The pathetic moments of the play moved me to tears, which I tried to hide. I soon saw that all my companions were affected in the same way, and were making the same effort. I saw Miss Faucit again at an entertainment given in aid of the fund for a monument to Mrs. Siddons. She recited an ode written for the occasion, of which I still recall the closing line:-- "And measure what we owe by what she gave." I saw Grisi in the great rôle of Semiramide, and with her Brambilla, a famous contralto, and Fornasari, a basso whom I had longed to hear in the operas given in New York. I also saw Mlle. Persiani in "Linda di Chamounix" and "Lucia di Lammermoor." All of these occasions gave me unmitigated delight, but the crowning ecstasy of all I found in the ballet. Fanny Elssler and Cerito were both upon the stage. The former had lost a little of her prestige, but Cerito, an Italian, was then in her first bloom and wonderfully graceful. Of her performance my sister said to me, "It seems to make us better to see anything so beautiful." This remark recalls the oft-quoted dialogue between Margaret Fuller and Emerson apropos of Fanny Elssler's dancing:-- "Margaret, this is poetry." "Waldo, this is religion." I remember, years after this time, a talk with Theodore Parker, in which I suggested that the best stage dancing gives us the classic in a fluent form, with the illumination of life and personality. I cannot recall, in the dances which I saw during that season, anything which appeared to me sensual or even sensuous. It was rather the very ecstasy and embodiment of grace. A ball at Almack's certainly deserves mention in these pages, the place itself belonging to the history of the London world of fashion. The one of which I now speak was given in aid of the Polish refugees who were then in London. The price of admission to this sacred precinct would have been extravagant for us, but cards for it were sent us by some hospitable friend. The same attention was shown to Mr. and Mrs. Mann, who with us presented themselves at the rooms on the appointed evening. We found them spacious enough, but with no splendor or beauty of decoration. A space at the upper end of the ball-room was marked off by rail or ribbon--I cannot remember which. While we were wondering what this should mean, a brilliant procession made its appearance, led by the Duchess of Sutherland in some historic costume. She was followed by a number of persons of high rank, among whom I recognized her lovely daughters, Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower and Lady Evelyn. These young ladies and several others were attired in Polish costume, to wit, polonaises of light blue silk, and short white skirts which showed the prettiest little red boots imaginable. This high and mighty company took possession of the space mentioned above, where they proceeded to dance a quadrille in rather solemn state. The company outside this limit stood and looked on. Among the groups taking part in this state quadrille was one characterized by the dress worn at court presentations: the ladies in pink and blue brocades, with plumes and lappets; the gentlemen in small-clothes, with swords,--and all with powdered hair. I first met the Duchess of Sutherland at a dinner given in our honor by Lord Morpeth's parents, the Earl and Countess of Carlisle. The Great Duchess, as the Duchess of Sutherland was often called, was still very handsome, though already the mother of grown-up children. She wore a dress of brown gauze or barége over light blue satin, with a wreath of brown velvet leaves and blue forget-me-nots in her hair, and on her arm, among other jewels, a miniature of the Queen set in diamonds. At one time she was Mistress of the Robes, but I am not sure whether she held this office at the time of which I speak. Her relations with the palace were said to be very intimate and friendly. In the picture of the Queen's Coronation, so well known to us by engravings, hers is one of the most striking figures. We did, indeed, hear that on one occasion the Duchess had kept the Queen waiting, and that the sovereign said to her on her arrival, "Duchess, you must allow me to present you with my watch, yours evidently does not keep good time." The eyes of the proud Duchess filled with tears, and, on returning home, she sent to the palace a letter resigning her post in the royal service. The Queen was, however, very fond of her, and the little difficulty was soon amicably settled. I recall a pleasantry about Lady Carlisle that was current in London society in the season of which I write. Sydney Smith pretended to have dreamed that Lord Morpeth had brought back a black wife from America, and that his mother, on seeing her, had said, "She is not so very black." Lady Carlisle was proverbial for her kindliness and good temper, and it was upon this point that the humor of the story turned. I will also mention a dinner given in our honor by John Kenyon, well known as a Mæcenas of that period. Miss Sedgwick, in her book of travels, speaks of him as a distinguished conversationalist, much given to hospitality. He is also remembered as a cousin of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The scenes just described still remain quite vivid in my memory, but it would be difficult for me to recount the visits made in those days by my husband and Horace Mann to public institutions of all kinds. I did indeed accompany the two philanthropists in some of their excursions, which included schools, workhouses, prisons, and asylums for the insane. We went one day, in company with Charles Dickens and his wife, to visit the old prison of Bridewell. We found the treadmill in operation. Every now and then a man would give out, and would be allowed to leave the ungrateful work. The midday meal, bread and soup, was served to the prisoners while we were still in attendance. To one or two, as a punishment for some misdemeanor, bread alone was given. Charles Dickens looked on, and presently said to Doctor Howe, "My God! if a woman thinks her son may come to this, I don't blame her if she strangles him in infancy." At Newgate prison we were shown the fetters of Jack Sheppard and those of Dick Turpin. While we were on the premises the van arrived with fresh prisoners, and one of the officials appeared to jest with a young woman who had just been brought in, and who, it seemed, was already well known to the officers of justice. Dr. Howe did not fail to notice this with disapprobation. At one of the charity schools which we visited, Mr. Mann asked whether corporal punishment was used. "Commonly, only this," said the master, calling up a little girl, and snapping a bit of india rubber upon her neck in a manner which caused her to cry out. I need not say that the two gentlemen were indignant at this unprovoked infliction. In strong contrast to old-time Bridewell appeared the model prison of Pentonville, which we visited one day in company with Lord Morpeth and the Duke of Richmond. The system there was one of solitary confinement, much approved, if I remember rightly, by "my lord duke," who interested himself in showing us how perfectly it was carried out. Neither at meals nor at prayers could any prisoner see or be seen by a fellow prisoner. The open yard was divided by brick walls into compartments, in each of which a single felon, hooded, took his melancholy exercise. The prison was extremely neat. Dr. Howe at the time approved of the solitary discipline. I am not sure whether he ever came to think differently about it. At a dinner at Charles Dickens's we met his intimate friend, John Forster, a lawyer of some note, later known as the author of a biography of Dickens. When we arrived, Mr. Forster was amusing himself with a small spaniel which had been sent to Mr. Dickens by an admiring friend, who desired that the dog might bear the name of Boz. Somewhat impatient of such tributes, Mr. Dickens had named it Snittel Timbury. Of the dinner, I only remember that it was of the best so far as concerns food, and that later in the evening we listened to some comic songs, of one of which I recall the refrain; it ran thus:-- "Tiddy hi, tiddy ho, tiddy hi hum, Thus was it when Barbara Popkins was young." Mr. Forster invited us to dine at his chambers in the Inns of Court. Mr. and Mrs. Dickens were of the party, and also the painter Maclise, whose work was then highly spoken of. After dinner, while we were taking coffee in the sitting-room, I had occasion to speak to my husband, and addressed him as "darling." Thereupon Dickens slid down to the floor, and, lying on his back, held up one of his small feet, quivering with pretended emotion. "Did she call him 'darling'?" he cried. I was sorry indeed when the time came for us to leave London, and the more as one of the pleasures there promised us had been that of a breakfast with Charles Buller. Mr. Buller was the only person who at that time spoke to me of Thomas Carlyle, already so great a celebrity in America. He expressed great regard for Carlyle, who, he said, had formerly been his tutor. I was sorry to find in papers of Carlyle's, recently published, a rather ungracious mention of this brilliant young man, whose early death was much regretted in English society. From England we passed on to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the inn at Llangollen we saw an engraving representing two aged ladies sitting opposite to each other, engaged in some friendly game. These were the once famous maids whose romantic elopement and companionship of many years gave the place some celebrity. In the burying-ground of the parish church we were shown their tomb, bearing an inscription not only commemorating the ladies themselves, but making mention also of the lifelong service of a faithful female attendant. Of my visit to Scotland, never repeated, I recall with interest Holyrood Palace, where the blood stain of Rizzio's murder was still shown on the wooden floor, the grave of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, and Stirling Castle, where, if I mistake not, the regalia of Robert Bruce was shown us. Among the articles composing it was a cameo of great beauty, surrounded by diamonds, and a crown set with large turquoises and sapphires. We passed a Sunday at Melrose, and attended an open-air service in the ruins of the ancient abbey. We saw little of Edinburgh besides its buildings, the society people of the place being mostly in _villeggiatura_. Mr. Sumner had given us letters to two of the law lords. One of these invited us to a seaside dinner at some little distance from town. The other entertained us at his city residence. Of greater interest was our tour in Ireland. Lord Morpeth had given us some introductions to friends in Dublin. At the same time he had written Mr. Sumner that he hoped Dr. Howe would not in any way become conspicuous as a friend to the Repeal measures which were then much in the public mind. This Repeal portended nothing less than the disruption of the existing political union between Ireland and England. The Dublin Corn Exchange was the place in which Repeal meetings were usually held. We attended one of these. My sister and I had seats in the gallery, which was reserved for ladies. Dr. Howe remained on the floor. This meeting had for one of its objects the acknowledgment of funds recently sent from America. The women who sat near us in the gallery found out, somehow, that we were Americans, and that an American gentleman had accompanied us to the meeting. They insisted upon making this known, and only forbore to do so at our earnest request. These friends were vehement in their praise of O'Connell, who was the principal speaker of the occasion. "He's the best man, the most religious!" they said; "he communes so often." I remember his appearance well, but can recall nothing of his address. He was tall, blond, and florid, with remarkable vivacity of speech and of expression. His popularity was certainly very great. While he was speaking, a gentleman entered and approached him. "How d'ye do, Tom Steele?" said O'Connell, shaking hands with the new-comer. The audience applauded loudly, Steele being an intimate friend and ally of O'Connell, and, like him, an earnest partisan of Repeal. Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, had given us a letter to Miss Edgeworth, who resided at some distance from the city of Dublin. From her we soon received an invitation to luncheon, of which we gladly availed ourselves. Our hostess met us with a warm welcome. She had had some correspondence with Dr. Howe, and seemed much pleased to make his acquaintance. I remember her as a little old lady, with an old-fashioned cap and curls. She was very vivacious, and had much to say to Dr. Howe about Laura Bridgman. He in turn asked what she thought of the Repeal movement. She said in reply, "I don't understand what O'Connell really means." Some one present casually mentioned the new substitution of lard oil for whale oil for use in lamps. Miss Edgeworth said, "I hear that, in consequence of this new fashion, the whale cannot bear the sight of a pig." We met on this occasion a half-brother and a half-sister of Miss Edgeworth, much younger than herself. I think that they must have been twins, so closely did they resemble each other in appearance. At parting Miss Edgeworth gave each of us an etching of Irish peasants, the work of a friend of hers. On the one which she gave to my husband she wrote, "From a lover of truth to a lover of truth." After leaving Dublin we traveled north as far as the Giant's Causeway. The state of the country was very forlorn. The peasantry lived in wretched hovels of one or two rooms, the floor of mud, the pig taking his ease within doors, and the chickens roosting above the fireplace. Beggars were seen everywhere, and of the most persistent sort. In most places where we stopped for the night, accommodations were far from satisfactory. The safest dishes to order were stirabout and potatoes. My husband had received an urgent invitation from an Irish nobleman, Lord Walcourt, to visit him at his estate, which was in the south of Ireland. We found Lord Walcourt living very simply, with two young daughters and a baby son. He told my husband that when he first read a book of Fourier, he instantly went over to France to make the acquaintance of the author, whom he greatly admired. "If I had only read on to the end of the book," he said, "I should have seen that Fourier was already dead." He told us that Lady Walcourt spent much time in London or on the Continent, from which we gathered that country life in Ireland was not much to her taste. Dr. Howe and our host had a good deal of talk together concerning socialistic and other reforms. My sister and I found his housekeeping rather meagre. He was evidently a whole-souled man, but we learned later on that he was considered very eccentric. A visit to the poet Wordsworth was one of the brilliant visions that floated before my eyes at this time. Mr. Ticknor had kindly furnished us with an introduction to the great man, who was then at the height of his popularity. To criticise Wordsworth and to praise Byron were matters equally unpardonable in the London of that time, when London was, what it has ceased to be, the very heart and centre of the literary world. Of our journey to the lake country I can now recall little, save that its last stage, a drive of ten or more miles from the railway station to the poet's village, was rendered very comfortless by constant showers, and by an ill-broken horse which more than once threatened mischief. Arrived at the inn, my husband called at the Wordsworth residence, and left there his card and the letter of introduction. In return a note was soon sent, inviting us to take tea that evening with Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth. Our visit was a very disappointing one. The widowed daughter of our host had lost heavily by the failure of certain American securities. These losses formed the sole topic of conversation not only between Wordsworth and Dr. Howe, but also between the ladies of the family, my sister, and myself. The tea to which we had been bidden was simply a cup of tea, served without a table. We bore the harassing conversation as long as we could. The only remark of Wordsworth's which I brought away was this: "The misfortune of Ireland is that it was only a partially conquered country." When we took leave, the poet expressed his willingness to serve us during our stay in his neighborhood. We left it, however, on the following morning, without seeing him or his again. A little akin to this experience was that of a visit to the Bank of England, made at the invitation of one of its officers whom I had known and entertained in America. Another of the functionaries of the bank volunteered his services as a cicerone. He showed us among other things the treasure recently received from the Chinese government, in payment of a war indemnity. It was all in little blocks, parallelograms and horseshoes of gold and silver. An ingenious little machine was also shown us for the detection of light weight sovereigns. We paid for his attention by listening to many uncivil pleasantries regarding the financial condition of our own country. I still remember the insolent sneer with which this gentleman said, "By the bye, have you sold the Bank of the United States yet?" He was presumably ignorant of the real history of the bank, which had long ceased to be a government institution, President Jackson having annulled its charter and removed the government deposits. I mention these incidents because they were the only exceptions to the uniform kindness with which we were generally received, and to the homage paid to my husband as one of the most illustrious of modern philanthropists. Berlin would have been the next important stop in our journey but for an impediment which we had hardly anticipated. In the days of the French revolution of 1830, the Poles had made one of their oft-repeated struggles to regain national independence. General Lafayette was much interested in this movement, and at his request Dr. Howe undertook to convey to some of the Polish chiefs funds sent for their aid by parties in the United States. He succeeded in accomplishing this errand, but was arrested on the very night of his arrival in Berlin, and was only released by the intervention of our government, after a tedious imprisonment _au secret_. He was then sent with a military escort to the confines of Prussia with the warning to return no more. Thirteen years had elapsed since these events took place. Dr. Howe had meantime acquired a world-wide reputation as a philanthropist. The Poles had long been subdued, and Europe seemed to be free from all revolutionary threatenings. Through the intervention of Chevalier Bunsen, who was then Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James, Dr. Howe applied for permission to revisit the kingdom of Prussia, but this was refused him. Some years after this time, Dr. Howe received from the Prussian government a gold medal in acknowledgment of his services to the blind. On weighing it, he found that the value of the gold was equal to the amount of money which he had been required to pay for his board in the prison at Berlin. In spite of the prohibition, we managed to see something of the Rhine, and journeyed through Switzerland and the Austrian Tyrol to Vienna, where we remained for some weeks. We here made the acquaintance of Madame von Walther and her daughter Theresa, afterward known as Madame Pulszky, the wife of one of Louis Kossuth's most valued friends. Arriving in Milan, we presented a letter of introduction from Miss Catharine Sedgwick to Count Confalonieri, after Silvio Pellico the most distinguished of the Italian patriots who underwent imprisonment in the Austrian fortress of Spielberg. His life had been spared only through the passionate pleading of his wife, who traveled day and night to throw herself at the feet of the Empress, imploring the commutation of the death sentence passed upon her husband. This heroic woman did not long survive the granting of her prayer. She died while her husband was still in prison; but the men who had been his companions in misfortune so revered her memory as always to lift their hats when they passed near her grave. Years had elapsed since the events of which I speak, and the count had married a second wife, a lively and attractive person, from whom, as from the count, we received many kind attentions. Dr. Howe was at this time called to Paris by some special business, and I remained a month in Milan with my sister. We greatly enjoyed the beauty of the cathedral and the hospitality of our new friends. Among these were the Marchese Arconati and his wife, a lady of much distinction, and in after years a friend of Margaret Fuller. Some delightful entertainments were given us by these and other friends, and I remember with pleasure an expedition to Monza, where the iron crown of the Lombard kingdom is still shown. Napoleon is said to have placed it on his head while he was still First Consul. Apropos of this, we saw in one of the Milanese mansions a seat on which Napoleon had once sat, and which, in commemoration of this, bore the inscription, "Egli ci ha dato l'unione" (He gave us unity). Alas! this precious boon was only secured to Italy many years later, and after much shedding of blood. Several of the former captives of Spielberg were living in Milan at this time. Of these I may mention Castiglia and the advocate Borsieri. Two others, Foresti and Albinola, I had often seen in New York, where they lived for many years, beloved and respected. In all of them, a perfectly childish delight in living seemed to make amends for the long and dreary years passed in prison. Every pulse-beat of freedom was a joy to them. Yet the iron had entered deeply into their souls. Natural leaders and men of promise, they had been taken out of the world of active life in the very flower of their youth and strength. The fortress in which they were confined was gloomy and desolate. For many months no books were allowed them, and in the end only books of religion, so called. They had begged for employment, and were given wool to knit stockings, and dirty linen rags to scrape for lint, with the sarcastic remark that to people of their benevolent disposition such work as this last should be most congenial. The time, they said, seemed endless in passing, but little when past, no events having diversified its dull blankness. When I listened to the conversation of these men, and saw Italy so bound hand and foot by Austrian and other tyrants, I felt only the hopeless chaos of the political outlook. Where should freedom come from? The logical bond of imprisonment seemed complete. It was sealed with four impregnable fortresses, and the great spiritual tyranny sat enthroned in the centre, and had its response in every other despotic centre of the globe. I almost ask to-day, "By what miracle was the great structure overthrown?" But the remembrance of this miracle forbids me to despair of any great deliverance, however desired and delayed. He who maketh the wrath of man to serve Him can make liberty blossom out of the very rod that the tyrant wields. The emotions with which people in general approach the historic sites of the world have been so often described as to make it needless for me to dwell upon my own. But I will mention the thrill of wonder which overcame me as we drove over the Campagna and caught the first glimpse of St. Peter's dome. Was it possible? Had I lived to come within sight of the great city, Mistress of the World? Like much else in my journeying, this appeared to me like something seen in a dream, scarcely to be apprehended by the bodily senses. The Rome that I then saw was mediæval in its aspect. A great gloom and silence hung over it. Coming to establish ourselves for the winter, we felt the pressure of many discomforts, especially that of the imperfect heating of houses. Our first quarters were in Torlonia's palace on the Piazza di Spagna. My husband found these gloomy and sunless, and was soon attracted by a small but comfortable apartment in Via San Nicolà da Tolentino, where we passed a part of the winter. There my husband undertook one day to make a real Christmas fire. In doing so he dragged the logs too far forward on the unsubstantial hearth, setting fire to the crossbeams which supported the floor. This was fortunately discovered before the danger became imminent, and the mischief was soon remedied. I was not allowed to hear about it until long afterwards. Dr. Howe went out early one morning, and did not return until late in the evening. Had I known at the time the reason of his absence, I should have felt great anxiety. He had gone to the post-office, but in doing so had passed some spot at which a sentry was stationed. He happened to be absorbed in his own thoughts, and did not notice the warning given. The sentry seized him, and Dr. Howe began to beat him over the head. A crowd soon gathered, and my husband was arrested and taken to the guard-house. The situation was a grave one, but the doctor immediately sent for the American consul, George Washington Greene. With the aid of this friendly official the necessary explanations were made and accepted, and the prisoner was liberated. The consul just mentioned was a cousin of my father and a grandson of the famous General Nathanael Greene of the Revolution. He was much at home in Roman society, and through him we had access to the principal houses in which were given the great entertainments of the season. The first of these that I attended appeared to me a melancholy failure, judging by our American ideas of a pleasant evening party. The great ladies sat very quietly in the salon of reception, and the gentlemen spoke to them in an undertone. There was none of the joyous effusion with which even a "few friends" meet on similar occasions in Boston or New York. Exceeding stiffness was obviously the "good form" of the occasion. A ball given by the banker prince, Torlonia, presented a more animated scene. The beautiful princess of the house, then in the bloom of her youth, was conspicuous among the dancers. Her fair head was encircled by a fine tiara of diamonds. She was by birth a Colonna. The attraction of the great fortune was said to have led to her alliance with the prince, who was equally her superior in age and her inferior in rank. I was told that he had presented his bride with the pearls formerly belonging to the shrine of the Madonna of Loretto, and I remember to have seen her once in evening dress, adorned with pearls of enormous size, which were probably those in question. I thought her quite as beautiful on another occasion, when she wore a simple gown of _écru_ silk, with a necklace of carved coral beads. This was at a reception given at the charity school of San Michele, where a play was performed by the pupils of the institution. The theme of the drama was the worship of the golden calf by the Israelites and the overthrow of the idol by Moses. The industrial school of San Michele, like every other institution in the Rome of that time, was entirely under ecclesiastical control. If I remember rightly, Monsignore Morecchini had to do with its management. This interesting man stood at the time at the head of the administration of public charities. He called one day at our lodgings, and I had the pleasure of listening to a long conversation between him and my husband, regarding chiefly the theme in which both gentlemen were most deeply interested, the education of the working classes. I was present, some time later, at a meeting of the Academy of St. Luke, at which the same monsignore made an address of some length, and with his own hands presented the medals awarded to successful artists. One of these was given to an Italian lady, who appeared in the black costume and lace veil which are still _de rigueur_ at all functions of the papal court. I remember that the monsignore delivered his address with a sort of rhythmic intoning, not unlike the singsong of the Quaker preaching of fifty years ago. Of the matter of his discourse I can recall only one sentence, in which he mentioned as one of the boasts of Rome the fact that she possessed _la maggiore basilica del mondo_, "the largest basilica in the world." The Church of St. Peter, like that of Santa Maria Maggiore, is indeed modeled after the design of the basilicas or courts of justice of ancient Rome, and Italians are apt to speak of it as "la basilica di san Pietro." To another monsignore, Baggs by name, and Bishop of Pella, we owed our presentation to Pope Gregory Sixteenth, the immediate predecessor of Pope Pius Ninth. Our cousin the consul, George W. Greene, went with us to the reception accorded us. Papal etiquette was not rigorous in those days. It only required that we should make three genuflections, simply bows, as we approached the spot where the Pope stood, and three more in retiring, as from a royal presence, without turning our backs. Monsignore Baggs, after presenting my husband, said to him, "Dr. Howe, you should tell his Holiness about the little blind girl [Laura Bridgman] whom you educated." The Pope remarked that he had been assured that the blind were able to distinguish colors by the touch. Dr. Howe said that he did not believe this. His opinion was that if a blind person could distinguish a stuff of any particular color, it must be through some effect of the dye upon the texture of the cloth. The Pope said that he had heard there had been few Americans in Europe during the past season, and had been told that they had been kept at home by the want of money, for which he made the familiar sign with his thumb and forefinger. Apropos of I forget what, he remarked, "Chi mi sente dare la benedizione del balcone di san Pietro intende ch'io non sono un giovinotto," "Whoever hears me give the benediction from the balcony of St. Peter's will understand that I am not a youth." The audience concluded, the Pope obligingly turned his back upon us, as if to examine something lying on the table which stood behind him, and thus spared us the inconvenience of bowing, curtsying, and retiring backward. I remember to have heard of a great floral festival held not long after this time at some village near Rome. Among other exhibits appeared a medallion of his Holiness all done in flowers, the nose being made rather bright with carnations. The Pope visited the show, and on seeing the medallion exclaimed, laughing, "Son brutto da vero, manon cosi", "I am ugly indeed, but not like this." The experience of our winter in Rome could not be repeated at this day of the world. The Rome of fifty-five years ago was altogether mediæval in its aspect. The great inclosure within its walls was but sparsely inhabited. Convent gardens and villas of the nobility occupied much space. The city attracted mostly students and lovers of art. The studios of painters and sculptors were much visited, and wealthy patrons of the arts gave orders for many costly works. Such glimpses as were afforded of Roman society had no great attraction other than that of novelty for persons accustomed to reasonable society elsewhere. The strangeness of titles, the glitter of jewels, amused for a time the traveler, who was nevertheless glad to return to a world in which ceremony was less dominant and absolute. Among the frequent visitors at our rooms were the sculptor Crawford, Luther Terry, and Freeman, well known then and since as painters of merit. Between the first named of these and the elder of my two sisters an attachment sprang up, which culminated in marriage. Another artist of repute, Törmer by name, often passed the evening with us. He was somewhat deformed, and our man-servant always announced him as "Quel gobbetto, signor," "That hunchback, sir." The months slipped away very rapidly, and the early spring brought the dear gift of another life to gladden and enlarge our own. My dearest, eldest child was born at Palazzetto Torlonia, on the 12th of March, 1844. At my request, the name of Julia Romana was given to her. As an infant she possessed remarkable beauty, and her radiant little face appeared to me to reflect the lovely forms and faces which I had so earnestly contemplated before her birth. Of the months preceding this event I cannot at this date give any very connected account. The experience was at once a dream and a revelation. My mind had been able to anticipate something of the achievements of human thought, but of the patient work of the artist I had not had the smallest conception. We visited, one day, the catacombs of St. Calixtus with a party of friends, among whom was the then celebrated Padre Machi, an ecclesiastic who was considered a supreme authority in this department of historic research. Acting as our guide, he pointed out to us the burial-places of martyrs, distinguished by the outline of a palm rudely impressed on the tufa out of which the various graves have been hollowed. We explored with him the little chapels which bear witness to the ancient holding of religious services in this dark underground city of the dead. In these chapels the pictured emblem of the fish is often met with. Scholars do not need to be reminded that the Greek word [Greek: ichthus] was adopted by the early Christians as an anagram of the name and title of their leader. Each of us carried a lighted taper, and we were careful to keep well together, mindful of the danger of losing ourselves in the depths of these vast caverns. A story was told us of a party which was thus lost, and could never be found again, although a band of music was sent after them in the hope of bringing them into safety. While we were giving heed to the instructive discourse of Padre Machi, a mischievous youth of the company came near to me and said in a low voice, "Has it occurred to you that if our guide should suddenly die here of apoplexy, we should never be able to find our way out?" This thought was dreadful indeed, and I confess that I was very thankful when at last we emerged from the depths into the blessed daylight. Among the wonderful sights of that winter, I recall an evening visit to the sculpture gallery of the Vatican, where the statues were shown us by torchlight. I had not as yet made acquaintance with those marble shapes, which were rendered so lifelike by the artful illumination that when I saw them afterward in the daylight, it seemed to me that they had died. My husband visited one day the Castle of St. Angelo, which was then not only a fortress but also a prison for political offenders. As he passed through one of the corridors, a young man from an inner room or cell rushed out and addressed him, apparently in great distress of mind. He cried, "For the love of God, sir, try to help me! I was taken from my home a fortnight since, I know not why, and was brought here, where I am detained, utterly ignorant of the grounds of my arrest and imprisonment." This incident disturbed my husband very much. Of course, he could do nothing to aid the unfortunate man. We were invited, one evening, to attend what the Romans still call an "accademia," _i. e._ a sort of literary club or association. It was held in what appeared to be a public hall, with a platform on which were seated those about to take part in the exercises of the evening. Among these were two cardinals, one of whom read aloud some Greek verses, the other a Latin discourse, both of which were applauded. After or before these, I cannot remember which, came a recitation from a once famous improvisatrice, Rosa Taddei. She is mentioned by Sismondi in one of his works as a young person, most wonderful in her performance. She was now a woman of middle age, wearing a sober gown and cap. The poem which she read was on the happiness to be derived from a family of adopted children. I remember its conclusion. He who should give himself to the care of other people's children would be entitled to say:-- "Formai questa famiglia Sol colla mia virtu." "I built myself this family solely by my own merit." The performances concluded with a satirical poem given by a layman, and describing the indignation of an elegant ecclesiastic at the visit of a man in poor and shabby clothes. His complaint is answered by a friend, who remarks:-- "La vostra eccellenza Vorrebbe tutti i poverelli ricchi." "Your Excellency would have every poor fellow rich." The presence of the celebrated phrenologist, George Combe, in Rome at this time added much to Dr. Howe's enjoyment of the winter, and to mine. His wife was a daughter of the great actress, Mrs. Siddons, and was a person of excellent mind and manners. Observing that she always appeared in black, I asked one day whether she was in mourning for a near relative. She replied, rather apologetically, that she adopted this dress on account of its convenience, and that English ladies, in traveling, often did so. I remember that Fanny Kemble, who was a cousin of Mrs. Combe, once related the following anecdote to Dr. Howe and myself: "Cecilia [Mrs. Combe] had grown up in her mother's shadow, for Mrs. Siddons was to the last such a social idol as to absorb the notice of people wherever she went, leaving little attention to be bestowed upon her daughter. This was rather calculated to sour the daughter's disposition, and naturally had that effect." Mrs. Kemble then spoke of a visit which she had made at her cousin's house after her marriage to Mr. Combe. In taking leave, she could not refrain from exclaiming, "Oh, Cecilia, how you have improved!" to which Mrs. Combe replied, "Who could help improving when living with perfection?" Dr. Howe and Mr. Combe sometimes visited the galleries in company, viewing the works therein contained in the light of their favorite theory. I remember having gone with them through the great sculpture hall of the Vatican, listening with edification to their instructive conversation. They stood for some time before the well-known head of Zeus, the contour and features of which appeared to them quite orthodox, according to the standard of phrenology. In this last my husband was rather an enthusiastic believer. He was apt, in judging new acquaintances, to note closely the shape of the head, and at one time was unwilling even to allow a woman servant to be engaged until, at his request, she had removed her bonnet, giving him an opportunity to form his estimate of her character or, at least, of her natural proclivities. In common with Horace Mann, he held Mr. Combe to be one of the first intelligences of the age, and esteemed his work on "The Constitution of Man" as one of the greatest of human productions. When, in the spring of 1844, I left Rome, in company with my husband, my sisters, and my baby, it seemed like returning to the living world after a long separation from it. In spite of all its attractions, I was glad to stand once more face to face with the belongings of my own time. We journeyed first to Naples, which I saw with delight, thence by steamer to Marseilles, and by river boat and diligence to Paris. My husband's love of the unusual must, I think, have prompted him to secure passage for our party on board the little steamer which carried us well on our way to Paris. Its small cabin was without sleeping accommodations of any kind. As the boat always remained in some port overnight, Dr. Howe found it possible to hire mattresses for us, which, alas, were taken away at daybreak, when our journey was resumed. Of the places visited on our way I will mention only Avignon, a city of great historic interest, retaining little in the present day to remind the traveler of its former importance. My husband here found a bricabrac shop, containing much curious furniture of ancient date. Among its contents were two cabinets of carved wood, which so fascinated him that, finding himself unable to decide in favor of either, he concluded to purchase both of them. The dealer of whom he bought them promised to have them packed so solidly that they might be thrown out of an upper window without sustaining any injury, adding, "Et de plus, j'écrirai là dessus 'très fragile'" (And in addition, I will mark it "very fragile"), which amused my husband. He had justified this purchase to me by reminding me that we should presently have our house to furnish. Indeed, the two cabinets proved an excellent investment, and are as handsome as ever, after much wear and tear of other household goods. We made some stay in Paris, of which city I have chronicled elsewhere my first impressions. Among these was the pain of hearing a lecture from Philarète Chasles, in which he spoke most disparagingly of American literature, and of our country in general. He said that we had contributed nothing of value to the world of letters. Yet we had already given it the writings of Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Poe. It is true that these authors were little, if at all, known in France at that time; but the speaker, proposing to instruct the public, ought to have informed himself concerning that whereof he assumed to speak with knowledge. Dr. Howe attended one of the official receptions of M. Guizot, who was prime minister at this time. I tried to persuade him to wear the decorations given him by the Greek government in recognition of his services in the Greek revolution, but he refused to do so, thinking such ornaments unfitting a republican. I had the pleasure of witnessing one of the last performances of the celebrated _danseuse_, Madame Taglioni. She it was of whom one of the same profession said, "Nous autres, nous sautons et nous tombons, mais elle monte et elle descend." The ballet was "La Sylphide," in which she had achieved one of her earliest triumphs. Remembering this, Dr. Howe found her somewhat changed for the worse. I admired her very much, and her dancing appeared to me characterized by a perfection and finish which placed her beyond competition with more recent favorites. I was fortunate also in seeing Mademoiselle Rachel in "La Czarina," a part which did not give full scope for her great talent. The demerits of the play, however, could not wholly overcloud the splendor of her unique personality, which at moments electrified the audience. Our second visit to England, in the autumn of the year 1844, on the way back to our own country, was less brilliant and novel than our first, but scarcely less in interest. We had received several invitations to visit friends at their country residences, and these opened to us the most delightful aspect of English hospitality. The English are nowhere so much at home as in the country, and they willingly make their visitors at home also. Our first visit was at Atherstone, then the residence of Charles Nolte Bracebridge, one of the best specimens of an English country gentleman of the old school. His wife was a very accomplished gentlewoman, skillful alike with pencil and with needle, and possessed of much literary culture. We met here, among other guests, Mr. Henry Reeve, well known in the literary society of that time. Mrs. Bracebridge told us much of Florence Nightingale, then about twenty-four years old, already considered a person of remarkable character. Our hosts had visited Athens, and sympathized with my husband in his views regarding the Greeks. They were also familiar with the farther East, and had brought cedars from Mount Lebanon and Arab horses from I know not where. Atherstone was not far from Coventry. Mr. Bracebridge claimed descent from Lady Godiva, and informed me that a descendant of Peeping Tom of Coventry was still to be found in that place. He himself was lord of the manor, but had neither son nor daughter to succeed him. He told me some rather weird stories, one of which was that he had once waked in the night to see a female figure seated by his fireside. I think that the ghost was that of an old retainer of the family, or possibly an ancestress. An old prophecy also had been fulfilled with regard to his property. This was that when a certain piece of land should pass from the possession of the family, a small island on the estate would cease to exist. The property was sold, and the island somehow became attached to the mainland, and as an island ceased to exist. My two sisters accompanied Dr. Howe and myself in the round of visits which I am now recording. They were young women of great personal attraction, the elder of the two an unquestioned beauty, the younger gifted with an individual charm of loveliness. They were much admired among our new friends. Thomas Appleton followed us at one of the houses in which we stayed. He told me, long afterwards, that he was asked at this time whether there were many young ladies in America as charming as the Misses Ward. Mrs. Bracebridge in speaking to me of Florence Nightingale as a young person likely to make an exceptional record, told me that her mother rather feared this, and would have preferred the usual conventional life for her daughter. The father was a pronounced Liberal, and a Unitarian. While we were still at Atherstone, we received an invitation to pass a few days with the Nightingale family at Emblee, and betook ourselves thither. We found a fine mansion of Elizabethan architecture, and a cordial reception. The family consisted of father and mother and two daughters, both born during their parents' residence in Italy, and respectively christened Parthenope and Florence, one having first seen the light in the city whose name she bore, the other in Naples. [Illustration: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE _From a photograph._] Of the two, Parthenope was the elder; she was not handsome, but was _piquante_ and entertaining. Florence, the younger sister, was rather elegant than beautiful; she was tall and graceful of figure, her countenance mobile and expressive, her conversation most interesting. Having heard much of Dr. Howe as a philanthropist, she resolved to consult him upon a matter which she already had at heart. She accordingly requested him one day to meet her on the following morning, before the hour for the family breakfast. He did so, and she opened the way to the desired conference by saying, "Dr. Howe, if I should determine to study nursing, and to devote my life to that profession, do you think it would be a dreadful thing?" "By no means," replied my husband. "I think that it would be a very good thing." So much and no more of the conversation Dr. Howe repeated to me. We soon heard that Miss Florence was devoting herself to the study of her predilection; and when, years after this time, the Crimean war broke out, we were among the few who were not astonished at the undertaking which made her name world famous. Just before our final embarkation for America, we passed a few days with the same friends at Lea Hurst, a pretty country seat near Malvern. There we met the well-known historian, Henry Hallam, celebrated also as the father of Tennyson's lamented Arthur. "Martin Chuzzlewit" had recently appeared, and I remember that Mr. Hallam read aloud with much amusement the famous transcendental episode beginning, "To be introduced to a Pogram by a Hominy." Mr. Hallam asked me whether talk of this sort was ever heard in transcendental circles in America. I was obliged to confess that the caricature was not altogether without foundation. Soon after reaching London for the second time, we were invited to visit Dr. and Mrs. Fowler at Salisbury. The doctor was much interested in anthropology and kindred topics, and my husband found in him a congenial friend. The house was a modest one, but the housekeeping was generous and tasteful. As Salisbury was a cathedral town, the prominent people of the place naturally belonged to the Anglican Church. At the Fowlers' hospitable board we met the bishop, the dean, the rector, and the curate. I attended several services in the beautiful cathedral, and enjoyed very much a visit to Stonehenge, which we made in company with our hosts, in a carriage drawn by two small mules. I inquired why they used mules in preference to horses, and was told that it was to avoid the tax imposed upon the latter. Stonehenge was in the district of Old Sarum, once a rotten borough, as certain places in England were termed which, with little or no population, had yet the right to be represented in Parliament. Dr. Fowler was familiar with the ancient history of the place, which, as we saw it, contained nothing but an area of desolate sand. The wonderful Druidical stones of Stonehenge commanded our attention. They are too well known to need description. Our host could throw no light upon their history, which belongs, one must suppose, with that of kindred constructions in Brittany. Bishop Denison, at the time of our visit, was still saddened by the loss of a beloved wife. He invited us to a dinner at which his sister, Miss Denison, presided. The dean and his wife were present, the Fowlers, and one or two other guests. To my surprise, the bishop gave me his arm and conducted me to the table, where he seated me on his right. Mrs. Fowler afterwards remarked to me, "How charming it was of the bishop to take you in to dinner. As an American you have no rank, and are therefore exempt from all questions of precedence." Mrs. Fowler once described to me an intimate little dinner with the poet Rogers, for which he had promised to provide just enough, and no more. Each dish exactly matched the three convives. Half of a chicken sufficed for the roast. As his usual style of entertainment was very elegant, he probably derived some amusement from this unnecessary economy. We left Salisbury with regret, Dr. Fowler giving Dr. Howe a parting injunction to visit Rotherhithe workhouse, where he himself had seen an old woman who was blind, deaf, and crippled. My husband made this visit, and wrote an account of it to Dr. Fowler.[2] He read this to me before sending it. In the mischief of which I was then full to overflowing, I wrote a humorous travesty of Dr. Howe's letter in rhyme, but when I showed it to him, I was grieved to see how much he seemed pained at my frivolity. [Footnote 2: This old woman was one of a number of trebly-afflicted persons--deaf, dumb, and blind--whom Dr. Howe found time to visit on this wedding trip, beginning their instruction himself in some cases, and interesting persons in the neighborhood in carrying it on. In his report of the Institution for the Blind, written after his return from Europe in 1844, he gives an account of these cases, closing with an eloquent appeal in behalf of these neglected and suffering members of the human family. "And here the question will recur to you (for I doubt not it has occurred a dozen times already), Can nothing be done to disinter this human soul? It is late, but perhaps not too late. The whole neighborhood would rush to save this woman if she were buried alive by the caving in of a pit, and labor with zeal until she were dug out. Now if there were one who had as much patience as zeal, and who, having carefully observed how a little child learns language, would attempt to lead her gently through the same course, he might possibly awaken her to a consciousness of her immortal nature. The chance is small indeed; but with a smaller chance they would have dug desperately for her in the pit; and is the life of the soul of less import than that of the body? "It is to be feared that there are many others whose cases are not known out of their own families, who are regarded as beyond the reach of help, and who are therefore left in their awful desolation. "This ought not to be, either for the good of the sufferers, or of those about them. It is hardly possible to conceive a case in which some improvement could not be effected by patient perseverance; and the effort ought to be made in every one of them. "The sight of any being, in human shape, left to brutish ignorance, is always demoralizing to the beholders. There floats not upon the stream of life any wreck of humanity so utterly shattered and crippled that its signals of distress should not challenge attention and command assistance."] Dear Sir, I went south As far as Portsmouth, And found a most charming old woman, Delightfully void Of all that's enjoyed By the animal vaguely called human. She has but one jaw, Has teeth like a saw, Her ears and her eyes I delight in: The one could not hear Tho' a cannon were near, The others are holes with no sight in. Her cinciput lies Just over her eyes, Not far from the bone parietal; The crown of her head, Be it vulgarly said, Is shaped like the back of a beetle. Destructiveness great Combines with conceit In the form of this wonderful noddle, But benev'lence, you know, And a large _philopro_ Give a great inclination to coddle. And so on. CHAPTER VIII FIRST YEARS IN BOSTON In the autumn of 1844 we returned from our wedding journey, and took up our abode in the near neighborhood of the city of Boston, of which at intervals I had already enjoyed some glimpses. These had shown me Margaret Fuller, holding high communion with her friends in her well-remembered conversations; Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was then breaking ground in the field of his subsequent great reputation; and many another who has since been widely heard of. I count it as one of my privileges to have listened to a single sermon from Dr. Channing, with whom I had some personal acquaintance. I can remember only a few passages. Its theme must have been the divine love; for Dr. Channing said that God loved black men as well as white men, poor men as well as rich men, and bad men as well as good men. This doctrine was quite new to me, but I received it gladly. The time was one in which the Boston community, small as it then was, exhibited great differences of opinion, especially regarding the new transcendentalism and the anti-slavery agitation, which were both held much in question by the public at large. While George Ripley, moved by a fresh interpretation of religious duty, was endeavoring to institute a phalanstery at Brook Farm, the caricatures of Christopher Cranch gave great amusement to those who were privileged to see them. One of these represented Margaret Fuller driving a winged team attached to a chariot on which was inscribed the name of her new periodical, "The Dial," while the Rev. Andrews Norton regarded her with holy horror. Another illustrated a passage from Mr. Emerson's essay on Nature--"I play upon myself. I am my own music"--by depicting an individual with a nose of preternatural length, pierced with holes like a flageolet, upon which his fingers sought the intervals. Yet Mr. Cranch belonged by taste and persuasion among the transcendentalists. As my earliest relations in Boston were with its recognized society, I naturally gave some heed to the views therein held regarding the transcendental people. What I liked least in these last, when I met them, was a sort of jargon which characterized their speech. I had been taught to speak plain and careful English, and though always a student of foreign languages, I had never thought fit to mix their idioms with those of my native tongue. Apropos of this, I remember that the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck once said to me of Margaret Fuller, "That young lady does not speak the same language that I do,--I cannot understand her." Mr. Emerson's English was as new to me as that of any of his contemporaries; but in his case I soon felt that the thought was as novel as the language, and that both marked an epoch in literary history. The grandiloquence which was common at that time now appears to me to have been the natural expression of an exhilaration of mind which carried the speaker or writer beyond the bounds of commonplace speech. The intellect of the time had outgrown the limits of Puritan belief. The narrow literalism, the material and positive view of matters highly spiritual, abstract, and indeterminate, which had been handed down from previous generations, had become irreligious to the foremost minds of that day. They had no choice but to enter the arena as champions of the new interpretation of life which the cause of truth imperatively demanded. I speak now of the transcendental movement as I had opportunity to observe it in Boston. Let us not ignore the fact that it was a world movement. The name seems to have been borrowed from the German phraseology, in which the philosophy of Kant was termed "the transcendental philosophy." More than this, the breath which kindled among us this new flame of hope and aspiration came from the same source. For this was the period of Germany's true glory. Her intellectual radiance outshone and outlived the military meteor which for a brief moment obscured all else to human vision. The great vitality of the German nation, the indefatigable research of its learned men, its wholesome balance of sense and spirit, all made themselves widely felt, and infused fresh blood into veins impoverished by ascetic views of life. Its philosophers were apostles of freedom, its poets sang the joy of living, not the bitterness of sin and death. These good things were brought to us piecemeal, by translations, by disciples. Dr. Hedge published an English rendering of some of the masterpieces of German prose. Longfellow gave us lovely versions of many poets. John S. Dwight produced his ever precious volume of translations of the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller. Margaret Fuller translated Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe." Carlyle wrote his wonderful essays, inspired by the new thought, and adding to it daring novelty of his own. The whole is matter of history now, quite beyond the domain of personal reminiscence. I have spoken of the transcendentalists and the abolitionists as if they had been quite distinct bodies of believers. Reflecting more deeply, I feel that both were features of the new movement. In the transcendentalists the enthusiasm of emancipated thought was paramount, while the abolitionists followed the vision of emancipated humanity. The lightning flash which illuminated the heaven of the poets and philosophers fell also on the fetters of the slave, and showed them to the thinking world as a disgrace no longer to be tolerated by civilized peoples. I recall my first years of life in Boston as nearly touched by the sense of the unresolved discords which existed in its society. My husband was much concerned in some of the changes of front which took place at this time. An ardent friend both of Horace Mann and of Charles Sumner, he shared the educational views of the first and the political convictions of the second. In the year 1845, having been elected to serve on the Boston School Board, Dr. Howe instituted so drastic a research into the condition of the public schools as to draw upon himself much animadversion and some ill-will. Horace Mann, on the other hand, characterized this work as "one which only Sam Howe or an angel could have done." Dr. Howe and Mr. Mann, during their travels in Europe, had become much interested in the system of training, new at that time, by which deaf-mutes were enabled to use vocal speech, and to read on the lips the words of those who addressed them. Soon after his return from Europe, Mr. Mann published a report in which he dwelt much on the great benefit of this new departure in the education of deaf-mutes, and advocated the introduction of the system into our own schools. Dr. Howe expressed the same views, and the two gentlemen were held up to the public as disturbers of its peace. My husband disapproved of the use of signs, which, up to that time, had figured largely in the instruction of American deaf-mutes, and in their intercourse with each other. He felt that the use of language was an important condition of definite thought, and hailed the new powers conferred by the European system as a liberation of its pupils from the greatest of their disabilities, the privation of direct intercourse with their fellow creatures. His advice, privately sought and given, induced a number of parents to undertake themselves the education of their deaf children, or, at least, to have that education conducted at home, and under their own supervision. In after years such parents and children were forward in expressing their gratitude for the advice given and followed. The Horace Mann school in Boston, and the Clarke school in Northampton, attest the perseverance of the advocates of the new method of instruction, and their ultimate success. I had formerly seen Boston as a petted visitor from another city would be apt to see it. I had found it altogether hospitable, and rather eager to entertain a novelty. It was another matter to see it with its consideration cap on, pondering whether to like or mislike a new claimant to its citizenship. I had known what we may term the Boston of the Forty, if New York may be called the city of the Four Hundred. I was now to make acquaintance with quite another city,--with the Boston of the teachers, of the reformers, of the cranks, and also--of the apostles. Wondering and floundering among these new surroundings, I was often at a loss to determine what I should follow, what relinquish. I endeavored to enter reasonably into the functions and amusements of general society, and at the same time to profit by the new resources of intellectual life which opened out before me. One offense against fashion I would commit: I would go to hear Theodore Parker preach. My society friends shook their heads. "What is Julia Howe trying to find at Parker's meeting?" asked one of these one day in my presence. "Atheism," replied the lady thus addressed. I said, "Not atheism, but a theism." The change had already been great, from my position as a family idol and "the superior young lady" of an admiring circle to that of a wife overshadowed for the time by the splendor of her husband's reputation. This I had accepted willingly. But the change from my life of easy circumstances and brilliant surroundings to that of the mistress of a suite of rooms in the Institution for the Blind at South Boston was much greater. The building was two miles distant from the city proper, the only public conveyance being an omnibus which ran but once in two hours. My friends were residents of Boston, or of places still more remote from my dwelling-place, and South Boston was then, as it has continued to be, a distinctly unfashionable suburb. My husband did not desire that I should undertake any work in connection with the Institution under his charge. I found its teachers pleasant neighbors, and was glad to have Laura Bridgman continue to be a member of the household. Dr. Howe had a great fancy for a piece of property which lay very near the Institution. In due time he purchased it. We found an ancient cottage on the place, and made it habitable by the addition of one or two rooms. Our new domain comprised several acres of land, and my husband took great pleasure in laying out an extensive fruit and flower garden, and in building a fine hothouse. We removed to this abode on a lovely summer day; and as I entered the grounds I involuntarily exclaimed, "This is green peace!" Somehow, the nickname, jocosely given, remained in use. The estate still stands on legal records as "The Green Peace Estate." Friends would sometimes ask us, "How are you getting on at Green Beans--is that the name?" My husband was so much attached to this place that when, after a residence of many years in the city, he returned thither to spend the last years of his life, he spoke of it as "Paradise Regained." It partly amuses, and partly saddens me to recall, at this advanced period of my life, the altogether mistaken views which I once held regarding certain sets of people in Boston, of whom I really knew little or nothing. The veil of prejudgment through which I saw them was not, indeed, of my own weaving, but I was content to dislike them at a distance, until circumstances compelled a nearer and a truer view. I had supposed the abolitionists to be men and women of rather coarse fibre, abounding in cheap and easy denunciation, and seeking to lay rash hands on the complex machinery of government and of society. My husband, who largely shared their opinions, had no great sympathy with some of their methods. Theodore Parker held them in great esteem, and it was through him that one of my strongest imaginary dislikes vanished as though it had never been. The object of this dislike was William Lloyd Garrison, whom I had never seen, but of whose malignity of disposition I entertained not the smallest doubt. [Illustration: THE HOME AT SOUTH BOSTON _From a painting in the possession of M. Anagnos._] It happened that I met him at one of Parker's Sunday evenings at home. I soon felt that this was not the man for whom I had cherished so great a distaste. Gentle and unassuming in manner, with a pleasant voice, a benevolent countenance, and a sort of glory of sincerity in his ways and words, I could only wonder at the falsehoods that I had heard and believed concerning him. The Parkers had then recently received the gift of a piano from members of their congregation. A friend began to play hymn tunes upon it, and those of us who could sing gathered in little groups to read from the few hymn-books which were within reach. Dr. Howe presently looked up and saw me singing from the same book with Mr. Garrison. He told me afterward that few things in the course of his life had surprised him more. From this time forth the imaginary Garrison ceased to exist for me. I learned to respect and honor the real one more and more, though as yet little foreseeing how glad I should be one day to work with and under him. The persons most frequently named as prominent abolitionists, in connection with Mr. Garrison, were Maria Weston Chapman and Wendell Phillips. Mrs. Chapman presided with much energy and grace over the anti-slavery bazaars which were held annually in Boston through a long space of years. For this labor of love she was somewhat decried, and the _sobriquet_ of "Captain Chapman" was given her in derision. She was handsome and rather commanding in person, endowed also with an excellent taste in dress. I cannot remember that she ever spoke in public, but her presence often adorned the platform at anti-slavery meetings. She was the editor of the "Liberty Bell," and was a valued friend and ally of Wendell Phillips. Of Mr. Phillips I must say that I at first regarded him through the same veil of prejudice which had caused me so greatly to misconceive the character of Mr. Garrison. I was a little softened by hearing that at one of the bazaars he had purchased a copy of my first volume of poems, with the remark, "She doesn't like me, but I like her poetry." This naturally led me to suppose that he must have some redeeming traits of character. I had not then heard him speak, and I did not wish to hear him; but I met him, also, at one of the Parker Sunday evenings, and, after a pleasant episode of conversation, I found myself constrained to take him out of my chamber of dislikes. Mr. Phillips was entitled, by birth and education, to an unquestioned position in Boston society. His family name was of the best. He was a graduate both of Harvard College and of its Law School. No ungentlemanly act had ever tarnished his fame. His offense was that, at a critical moment, he had espoused an unpopular cause,--one which was destined, in less than a score of years, so to divide the feeling of our community as to threaten the very continuance of our national life. Oh, to have been in Faneuil Hall on that memorable day when the pentecostal flame first visited him; when he leaped to the platform, all untrained for such an encounter, and his eloquent soul uttered itself in protest against a low and sordid acquiescence in the claims of oppression and tyranny! In that hour he was sealed as an apostle of the higher law, to whose advocacy he sacrificed his professional and social interests. The low-browed, chain-bound slave had now the best orator in America to plead his cause. It was the beginning of the end. Mr. Phillips, without doubt, sometimes used intemperate language. I myself have at times dissented quite sharply from some of his statements. Nevertheless, a man who rendered such great service to the community as he did has a right to be judged by his best, not by his least meritorious performance. He was for years an unwelcome prophet of evil to come. Society at large took little heed of his warning; but when the evil days did come, he became a counselor "good at need." I recall now a scene in Tremont Temple just before the breaking out of our civil war. An anti-slavery meeting had been announced, and a scheme had been devised to break it up. As I entered I met Mrs. Chapman, who said, "These are times in which anti-slavery people must stand by each other." On the platform were seated a number of the prominent abolitionists. Mr. Phillips was to be the second speaker, but when he stepped forward to address the meeting a perfect hubbub arose in the gallery. Shrieks, howls, and catcalls resounded. Again and again the great orator essayed to speak. Again and again his voice was drowned by the general uproar. I sat near enough to hear him say, with a smile, "Those boys in the gallery will soon tire themselves out." And so, indeed, it befell. After a delay which appeared to some of us endless, the noise subsided, and Wendell Phillips, still in the glory of his strength and manly beauty, stood up before the house, and soon held all present spellbound by the magic of his speech. The clear silver ring of his voice carried conviction with it. From head to foot, he seemed aflame with the passion of his convictions. He used the simplest English, and spoke with such distinctness that his lowest tones, almost a whisper, could be heard throughout the large hall. Yerrinton, the only man who could report Wendell Phillips's speeches, once told my husband that it was like reporting chain lightning. On the occasion of which I speak, the unruly element was quieted once for all, and the further proceedings of the meeting suffered no interruption. The mob, however, did not at once abandon its intention of doing violence to the great advocate. Soon after the time just mentioned Dr. Howe attended an evening meeting, at the close of which a crowd of rough men gathered outside the public entrance, waiting for Phillips to appear, with ugly threats of the treatment which he should receive at their hands. The doors presently opened, and Phillips came forth, walking calmly between Mrs. Chapman and Lydia Maria Child. Not a hand was raised, not a threat was uttered. The crowd gave way in silence, and the two brave women parted from Phillips at the door of his own house. My husband spoke of this as one of the most impressive sights that he had ever witnessed. His report of it moved me to send word to Mr. Phillips that, in case of any recurrence of such a disturbance, I should be proud to join his body-guard. Mr. Phillips was one of the early advocates of woman suffrage. I remember that I was sitting in Theodore Parker's reception room conversing with him when Wendell Phillips, quite glowing with enthusiasm, came in to report regarding the then recent woman's rights convention at Worcester. Of the doings there he spoke in warm eulogy. He complained that Horace Mann had written a non-committal letter, in reply to the invitation sent him to take part in the convention. Ralph Waldo Emerson, he said, had excused himself from attendance on the ground that he was occupied in writing a life of Margaret Fuller, which, he hoped, would be considered as a service in the line of the objects of the meeting. This convention was held in October of the year 1850, before the claims of women to political efficiency had begun to occupy the attention and divide the feeling of the American public. When, after the close of the civil war, the question was again brought forward, with a new zeal and determination, Mr. Phillips gave it the great support of his eloquence, and continued through a long course of years to be one of its most earnest advocates. [Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS At the age of 48 _From a photograph lent by Francis J. Garrison, Boston._] The last time that I heard Wendell Phillips speak in public was in December, 1883, at the unveiling of Miss Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau, in the Old South Meeting-House. Mrs. Livermore was one of the speakers of the occasion. When the stated exercises were at an end, she said to me, "Let us thank Mr. Phillips for what he has just said. We shall not have him with us long." I expressed surprise at this, and she said further, "He has heart disease, and is far from well." Soon after this followed his death, and the splendid public testimonial given in his honor. I was one of those admitted to the funeral exercises, in which friends spoke of him most lovingly. I also saw his remains lying in state in Faneuil Hall, on the very platform where, in his ardent youth, he had uttered his first scathing denunciation of the slave power and its defenders. The mournful and reverent crowd which gathered for one last look at his beloved countenance told, better than words could tell, of the tireless services which, in the interval, had won for him the heart of the community. It was a sight never to be forgotten. I first heard of Theodore Parker as the author of the sermon on "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity." At the time of its publication I was still within the fold of the Episcopal Church, and, judging by hearsay, was prepared to find the discourse a tissue of impious and sacrilegious statements. Yet I ventured to peruse a copy of it which fell into my hands. I was surprised to find it reverent and appreciative in spirit, although somewhat startling in its conclusions. At that time the remembrance of Mr. Emerson's Phi Beta address was fresh in my mind. This discourse of Parker's was a second glimpse of a system of thought very different from that in which I had been reared. Not long after my marriage, being in Rome with my husband, I was interested to hear of Parker's arrival there. As Dr. Howe had some slight acquaintance with him, we soon invited him to dine with us. He was already quite bald, and this untimely blemish appeared in strange contrast with the youthful energy of his facial expression. He was accompanied by his wife, whose mild countenance, compared with his, suggested even more than the usual contrast between husband and wife. One might have said of her that she came near being very handsome. Her complexion was fair, her features were regular, and the expression of her face was very naïf and gentle. A certain want of physical maturity seemed to have prevented her from blossoming into full beauty. It was a great grief both to her and to her husband that their union was childless. Theodore Parker's reputation had already reached Rome, and there as elsewhere brought him many attentions from scholars, and even from dignitaries of the Catholic Church. He remained in the Eternal City, as we did, through the winter, and we saw him frequently. When, in the spring, my eldest child was born, I desired that she should be christened by Parker. This caused some uneasiness to my sisters, who were with me at the time. One of them took occasion to call upon Parker at his lodgings, and to inquire how the infant was to be christened, in what name. Our friend replied that he had never heard of any baptismal formula other than the usual one, "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." My sister was much relieved, and the baptism was altogether satisfactory. This was the beginning of a family intimacy which lasted many years, ending only with Parker's life. After our return to America my husband went often to the Melodeon, where Parker preached until he took possession of the Music Hall. The interest which my husband showed in these services led me in time to attend them, and I remember as among the great opportunities of my life the years in which I listened to Theodore Parker. Those who knew Parker only in the pulpit did not half know him. Apart from the field of theological controversy, he was one of the most sympathetic and delightful of men. I have rarely met any one whose conversation had such a ready and varied charm. His idea of culture was encyclopædic, and his reading, as might have been inferred from the size of his library, was enormous. The purchase of books was his single extravagance. One whole floor was given up to them, and in spite of this they overflowed into hall and drawing-room. He was very generous in lending them, and I often profited by his kindness in this respect. His affection for his wife was very great. From a natural love of paradox, he was accustomed to style this mild creature "Bear," and he delighted to carry out this pleasantry by adorning his _étagère_ with miniature bears, in wood-carving, porcelain, and so on. His gold shirt stud bore the impress of a bear. At one Christmas time he showed me a breakfast cup upon which a bear had been painted, by his express order, as a gift for his wife. At another he granted me a view of a fine silver candlestick in the shape of a bear and staff, which was also intended for her. To my husband Parker often spoke of the excellence of his wife's discernment of character. He would say, "My quiet little wife, with her simple intuition, understands people more readily than I do. I sometimes invite a stranger to my house, and tell her that she will find him as pleasant as I have found him. It may turn out so; but if my wife says, 'Theodore, I don't like that man; there's something wrong about him,' I always find in the end that I have been mistaken,--that her judgment was correct." Parker's ideal of culture included a knowledge of music. His endeavors to attain this were praiseworthy, but unsuccessful. I have heard the late John S. Dwight relate that when he was a student in Harvard Divinity School, Parker, who was then his fellow student, desired to be taught to sing the notes of the musical scale. Dwight volunteered to give him lessons, and began, as is usual, by striking the dominant _do_ and directing Parker to imitate the sound. Parker responded, and found himself able to sing this one note; but when Dwight passed on to the second and the third, Parker could only repeat the note already sung. He had no ear for music, and his friend advised him to give up the hopeless attempt to cultivate his voice. In like manner, at an earlier date, Dr. Howe and Charles Sumner joined a singing class, but both evincing the same defect were dismissed as hopeless cases. Parker attended sedulously the concerts of classical music given in Boston, and no doubt enjoyed them, after a fashion. I remember that I once tried to explain to him the difference between having an ear for music and not having one. I failed, however, to convince him of any such distinction. The years during which I heard him most frequently were momentous in the history of our country and of our race. They presaged and preceded grave crises on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe was going on the ferment of ideas and theories which led to the revolutions of 1848 and the temporary upturning of states and of governments. In the United States, the seed of thought sown by prophetic minds was ripening in the great field of public opinion. Slavery and all that it involved became not only hateful but intolerable to men of right mind, and the policy which aimed at its indefinite extension was judged and condemned. Parker at this time had need in truth of the two-edged sword of the Spirit. On the one hand he encountered the foes of religious freedom, on the other the advocates and instruments of political oppression. His sermons on theism belonged to one of these domains, those which treated of public men and measures to the other. Among these last, I remember best that on Daniel Webster, and the terrible "Lesson for the Day" which denounced Judge Loring for the part he had taken in the rendition of Anthony Burns. The discourse which treated of Webster was indeed memorable. I remember well the solemnity of its opening sentences, and the earnest desire shown throughout to do justice to the great gifts of the great man, while no one of his public misdeeds was allowed to escape notice. The whole performance, painful as it was in parts, was very uplifting, as the exhibition of true mastery must always be. Its unusual length caused me to miss the omnibus which should have brought me to South Boston in good time for our Sunday dinner. As I entered the house and found the family somewhat impatient of the unwonted delay, I cried, "Let no one find fault! I have heard the greatest thing that I shall ever hear!" At the time of the attempted rendition of the fugitive slave Shadrach a meeting was held in the Melodeon, at which various speakers gave utterance to the indignation which aroused the whole community. Parker had been the prime mover in calling this meeting. He had written for it some verses to be sung to the tune of "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," and he made the closing and most important address. It was on this occasion that I first saw Colonel Higginson, who was then known as the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, pastor of a religious society in Worcester, Mass. The part assigned to him in the exercises was to read portions of Scripture appropriate to the day. This he did with excellent effect. Parker, in the course of his address, held up a torn coat, and said, "This is the coat of our brother Shadrach," reverting in his mind to the Bible story of the torn coat of Joseph over which his father grieved so sorely. As I left the hall I heard some mischievous urchins commenting upon this. "Nonsense!" cried one of them, "that wasn't Shadrach's coat at all. That was Theodore's coat." Parker was amused when I told him of this. From time to time Parker would speak in his sermons of the position which woman should hold in a civilized community. The question of suffrage had not then been brought into prominence, and, as I remember, he insisted most upon the claim of the sex to equality of education and of opportunity. On one occasion he invited Lucretia Mott to his pulpit. On another its privileges were accorded to Mrs. Seba Smith. I was present one Sunday when he announced to his congregation that the Rev. Antoinette L. Brown would address them on the Sunday following. As he pronounced the word "Reverend," I detected an unmistakable and probably unconscious curl of his lip. The lady was, I believe, the first woman minister regularly ordained in the United States. She was a graduate of Oberlin, in that day the only college in our country which received among its pupils women and negroes. She was ordained as pastor by an Orthodox Congregational society, and has since become better known as Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a strenuous advocate of the rights of her sex, an earnest student of religious philosophy, and the author of some valuable works on this and kindred topics. [Illustration: THEODORE PARKER _From a photograph by J. J. Hawes._] I am almost certain that Parker was the first minister who in public prayer to God addressed him as "Father and Mother of us all." I can truly say that no rite of public worship, not even the splendid Easter service in St. Peter's at Rome, ever impressed me as deeply as did Theodore Parker's prayers. The volume of them which has been published preserves many of his sentences, but cannot convey any sense of the sublime attitude of humility with which he rose and stood, his arms extended, his features lit up with the glory of his high office. Truly, he talked with God, and took us with him into the divine presence. I cannot remember that the interest of his sermons ever varied for me. It was all one intense delight. The luminous clearness of his mind, his admirable talent for popularizing the procedures and conclusions of philosophy, his keen wit and poetic sense of beauty,--all these combined to make him appear to me one of the oracles of God. Add to these his fearlessness and his power of denunciation, exercised in a community a great part of which seemed bound in a moral sleep. His voice was like the archangel's trump, summoning the wicked to repentance and bidding the just take heart. It was hard to go out from his presence, all aglow with the enthusiasm which he felt and inspired, and to hear him spoken of as a teacher of irreligion, a pest to the community. As all know, this glorious career came too soon to an end. While still in the fullness of his powers, and at the moment when he was most needed, the taint of hereditary disease penetrated his pure and blameless life. He came to my husband's office one day, and said, "Howe, that venomous cat which has destroyed so many of my people has fixed her claws here," pointing to his chest. The progress of the fatal disease was slow but sure. He had agreed with Dr. Howe that they should visit South America together in 1860, when he should have attained his fiftieth year. Alas! in place of that adventurous voyage and journey, a sad exodus to the West Indies and thence to Europe was appointed, an exile from which he never returned. Many years after this time I visited the public cemetery in Florence, and stood before the simple granite cross which marks the resting-place of this great apostle of freedom. I found it adorned with plants and vines which had evidently been brought from his native land. A dear friend of his, Mrs. Sarah Shaw Russell, had said to me of this spot, "It looks like a piece of New England." And I thought how this piece of New England belonged to the world. One of the most imposing figures in my gallery of remembrance is that of Charles Sumner, senator and martyr. When I first saw him I was still a girl in my father's house, from which the father had then but recently passed. My eldest brother, Samuel Ward, had made Mr. Sumner's acquaintance through a letter of introduction given to the latter by Mr. Longfellow. At his suggestion we invited Mr. Sumner to pass a quiet evening at our house, promising him a little music. Our guest had but recently returned from England, where letters from Chief Justice Story had given him access both to literary and to aristocratic circles. His appearance was at that time rather singular. He was very tall and erect, and the full suit of black which he wore added to the effect of his height and slenderness of figure. Of his conversation, I remember chiefly that he held the novels of Walter Scott in very light esteem, and that he quoted with approbation Sir Adam Ferguson as having said that Manzoni's "Promessi Sposi" was worth more than all of Sir Walter's romances put together. Mr. Sumner was at this time one of a little group of friends which an ironical lady had christened "the Mutual Admiration Society." The other members were the poet Longfellow, George S. Hillard, Cornelius Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard College, of which at a later day he became president, and Dr. Howe. These gentlemen were indeed bound together by ties of intimate friendship, but the humorous designation just quoted was not fairly applicable to them. They rejoiced in one another's successes, and Sumner on one occasion wrote to Dr. Howe, apropos of some new poem of Mr. Longfellow's, "What a club we are! I like to indulge in a little _mutual_." The developments of later years made some changes in these relations. When the Boston public became strongly divided on the slavery question, Hillard and Felton were less pronounced in their views than the others, while Longfellow, Sumner, and Dr. Howe remained united in opinion and in feeling. Hillard, who possessed more scholarship and literary taste than Sumner, could never understand the reason of the high position which the latter in time attained. He remained a Webster Whig, to use the language of those days, while Sumner was elected to Webster's seat in the Senate. Felton was a man of very genial temperament, devoted to the duties of his Greek professorship and to kindred studies. He was by nature averse to strife, and the encounters of the political arena had little attraction for him. The five always remained friends and well-wishers. They became much absorbed in the cares and business of public and private life, and the club as such ceased to be spoken of. In the days of their great intimacy, a certain grotesqueness of taste in Sumner made him the object of some good-natured banter on the part of the other "Mutuals." It was related that on a certain Fourth of July he had given his office boy, Ben, a small gratuity, and had advised him to pass the day at Mount Auburn, where he would be able to enjoy quiet and profitable meditation. Felton was especially merry over this incident; but he, in turn, furnished occasion for laughter when on a visit to New York, in company with the same friends. A man-servant whom they had brought with them was ordered to carry Felton's valise to the Astor House. This was before the days of the baggage express. The man arrived late in the day, breathless with fatigue, and when questioned replied, "Faith! I went to all the _oyster_ houses in Broadway before I could find yees." I little thought when I first knew Mr. Sumner that his most intimate friend was destined to become my own companion for life. Charles Sumner was a man of great qualities and of small defects. His blemishes, which were easily discerned, were temperamental rather than moral. He had not the sort of imagination which enables a man to enter easily into the feelings of others, and this deficiency on his part sometimes resulted in unnecessary rudeness. His father, Sheriff Sumner, had been accounted the most polite Bostonian of his day. It was related of him that once, being present at the execution of a criminal, and having trodden upon the foot of the condemned man, the sheriff took off his hat and apologized for the accident. Whereupon the criminal exclaimed, "Sheriff Sumner, you are the politest man I ever knew, and if I am to be hanged, I had rather be hanged by you than by any one else." It was sometimes remarked that the sheriff's mantle did not seem to have fallen upon his son. Charles Sumner's appearance was curiously metamorphosed by a severe attack of typhoid fever, which he suffered, I think, in 1843 or 1844. After his recovery he gained much in flesh, and entirely lost that ungainliness of aspect which once led a friend to compare him to a geometrical line, "length without breadth or thickness." He now became a man of strikingly fine presence, his great height being offset by a corresponding fullness of figure. His countenance was strongly marked and very individual,--the features not handsome in themselves, but the whole effect very pleasingly impressive. He had but little sense of humor, and was not at home in the small cut-and-thrust skirmishes of general society. He was made for serious issues and for great contests, which then lay unguessed before him. Of his literalness some amusing anecdotes have been told. At an official ball in Washington, he remarked to a young lady who stood beside him, "We are fortunate in having these places; for, standing here, we shall see the first entrance of the new English and French ministers into Washington society." The young girl replied, "I am glad to hear it. I like to see lions break the ice." Sumner was silent for a few minutes, but presently said, "Miss ----, in the country where lions live there is no ice." During the illness of which I have spoken, he was at times delirious, and his mother one day, going into his room, found that he was endeavoring to put on a change of linen. She begged him to desist, knowing him to be very weak. He said in reply, "Mother, I am not doing it for myself, but for some one else." Some debates on prison discipline, held in Boston in the year 1845, attracted a good deal of attention. Dr. Howe had become much dissatisfied with the management of prisons in Massachusetts, and desired to see the adoption of the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement. Mr. Sumner entered warmly into his views. The matter was brought before the Boston public, and the arguments for and against the proposed change were very fully stated and discussed. Mr. Sumner spoke several times in favor of the solitary system, and on each occasion carried off the honors of the meeting. The secretary of the prison discipline association at that time, a noted conservative, opposed very strenuously the introduction of the Pennsylvania system. In the course of the debates, Mr. Sumner turned upon him in a sudden and unexpected manner, with these words: "In what I am about to say, I shall endeavor to imitate the secretary's candor, but not his temper." Now the secretary was one of the magnates of Boston, accustomed to be treated with great consideration. The start that he gave on being thus interpellated was so comic that it has impressed itself upon my memory. The speaker proceeded to apply to this gentleman a well-known line of Horace, descriptive of the character of Achilles:-- "Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer." I confess that to me this direct attack appeared uncalled for, and I thought that the cause could have been as well advocated without recourse to personalities. I once invited Mr. Sumner to meet a distinguished guest at my house. He replied, "I do not know that I wish to meet your friend. I have outlived the interest in individuals." In my diary of the day I recorded the somewhat ungracious utterance, with this comment: "God Almighty, by the latest accounts, has not got so far as this." Mr. Sumner was told of this, in my presence, though not by me. He said at once, "What a strange sort of book your diary must be! You ought to strike that out immediately." Sumner was often robbed in the street or at a railroad station; his tall figure attracting attention, and his mind, occupied with things far away, giving little heed to what went on in his immediate presence. Members of his family were wont to say, "It is about time now for Charles to have his pocket picked again." The fact often followed the prediction. Mr. Sumner's eloquence differed much in character from that of Wendell Phillips. The two men, although workers in a common cause, were very dissimilar in their natural endowments. Phillips had a temperament of fire, while that of Sumner was cold and sluggish. Phillips had a great gift of simplicity, and always made a bee line for the central point of interest in the theme which he undertook to present. Sumner was recondite in language and elaborate in style. He was much of a student, and abounded in quotations. In his senatorial days, I once heard a satirical lady mention him as "the moral flummery member from Massachusetts, quoting Tibullus!" The first political speech which I heard from Mr. Sumner was delivered, if I mistake not, at a schoolhouse in the neighborhood of Boston. I found his oratory somewhat overloud and emphatic for the small hall and limited attendance. He had not at that time found his proper audience. When he was heard, later on, in Faneuil Hall or Tremont Temple, the ringing roll of his voice was very effective. His gestures were forcible rather than graceful. In argument he would go over the same ground several times, always with new amplifications and illustrations of his subject. There was a dead weight of honesty and conviction in what he said, and it was this, perhaps, that chiefly gave him his command over an audience. He had also in a remarkable degree the trait of mastery, and the ability to present his topic in a large way. I am not sure whether Sumner's idea of culture was as encyclopædic as that of Theodore Parker, but he certainly aspired to be what is now called "an all-round man," and especially desired to attain connoisseurship in art. He had not the many-sided power of appreciation which distinguished Parker, yet a reverence for the beautiful, rather moral than æsthetic, led him to study with interest the works of the great masters. In his later years, he never went abroad without bringing back pictures, engravings, or rare missals. He had little natural apprehension of music, but used to express his admiration of some favorite operas, among them Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Rossini's "Barbiere di Seviglia." In the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, of which he was chairman for many years, his acquaintance with foreign languages was much valued. I remember a line of Tasso which he sometimes quoted when beautiful hands were spoken of:-- "Dove ne nodo appar, ne vena eccede." On the other hand, I have heard him say that mathematics always remained a sealed book to him; and that his professor at Harvard once exclaimed, "Sumner, I can't whittle a mathematical idea small enough to get it into your brain." [Illustration: JULIA WARD HOWE _From a painting by Joseph Ames in 1847._] The period between 1851 and the beginning of the civil war found Mr. Sumner at his post in the Senate of the United States. His position was from the outset a difficult one. His election had displaced a popular idol. His views regarding the heated question of the time, the extension of slavery to the territories, were far in advance of those held by the majority of the senatorial body or by the community at large. His uncompromising method of attack, his fiery utterances, contrasting strangely with the unusual mildness of his disposition, exasperated the defenders of slavery. These, perhaps, seeing that he was no fighting man, may have supposed him deficient in personal courage. He, however, knew very well the risks to which he exposed himself. His friends advised him to carry arms, and my husband once told old Mrs. Sumner, his mother, that Charles ought to be provided with a pistol. "Oh, doctor," said the old lady, "he would only shoot himself with it." In the most trying days of the civil war, this same old lady came to Dr. Howe's office, anxious to learn his opinion concerning the progress of the contest. Dr. Howe in reply referred her to her own son for the desired information, saying, "Dear Madam Sumner, Charles knows more about public affairs than I do. Why don't you ask him about them?" "Oh, doctor, if I ask Charles, he only says, 'Mother, don't trouble yourself about such things.'" I was in Washington with Dr. Howe early in the spring of 1856. I remember being present in the senate chamber when a rather stormy debate took place between Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, and Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts. Charles Sumner looked up and, seeing me in the gallery, greeted me with a smile of recognition. I shall never forget the beauty of that smile. It seemed to me to illuminate the whole precinct with a silvery radiance. There was in it all the innocence of his sweet and noble nature. I asked my husband to invite Sumner to dine with us at Willard's Hotel, where we were staying. "No, no," he said, "Sumner would consider it _infra dig._ to dine with us at the hotel." He did, however, call upon us. In the course of conversation he said to me, "I shall soon deliver a speech in the Senate which will occasion a good deal of excitement. It will not surprise me if people leave their seats and show signs of unusual disturbance." The speech was delivered soon after this time. It was a direct and forcible arraignment of the slave power, which was then endeavoring to change the free Territory of Kansas into a slave State. The disturbance which Mr. Sumner had anticipated did not fail to follow, but in a manner which neither he nor any of his friends had foreseen. At the hotel I had remarked a handsome man, evidently a Southerner, with what appeared to me an evil expression of countenance. This was Brooks of South Carolina, the man who, not long after this time, attacked Charles Sumner in his seat in the senate chamber, choosing a moment when the personal friends of his victim were not present, and inflicting upon him injuries which destroyed his health and endangered his life. I will not enlarge here upon the pain and distress which this event caused to us and to the community at large. For several weeks our senator's life hung in the balance. For a very much longer time his vacant seat in the senate chamber told of the severe suffering which incapacitated him for public work. This time of great trial had some compensation in the general sympathy which it called forth. Sumner had won the crown of martyrdom, and his person thenceforth became sacred, even to his enemies. It was after a residence of many years in Washington that Mr. Sumner decided to build and occupy a house of his own. The spot chosen by him was immediately adjoining the well-known Arlington Hotel. The house was handsome and well appointed, adorned also with pictures and fine bronzes, in both of which he took great delight. Dr. Howe and I were invited to visit him there one evening, with other guests. Among these was Caleb Cushing, with whom Mr. Sumner soon became engaged in an animated discussion, probably regarding some question of the day. So absorbed were the two gentlemen in their argument that each of them frequently interrupted the other. The one interrupted would expostulate, saying, "I have not finished what I have to say;" at which the other would bow and apologize, but would presently offend again, in the same way. At my own house in Boston, Mr. Sumner called one evening when we were expecting other company. The invited guests presently arrived, and he abruptly left the room without any parting word or gesture. I afterwards spoke of this to Dr. Howe, who said, "That is Sumner's idea of taking French leave." Whereupon our dear eldest said, "Why, mamma, Mr. Sumner's way of taking French leave is as if the elephant should undertake to walk incognito down Broadway." The last important act of Mr. Sumner's public life was the elaborate argument by which he defeated the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States. This question presented itself during the first term of General Grant's administration. The proposal for annexation was made by the President of the Dominican Republic. General Grant, with the forethought of a military commander, desired that the United States should possess a foothold in the West Indies. A commission of three was accordingly appointed to investigate and report upon the condition of the island. The three were Hon. Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, Andrew D. White, at that time president of Cornell University, and Dr. Howe. A thorough visitation of the territory was made by these gentlemen, and a report favorable to the scheme of annexation was presented by them on their return. Dr. Howe was greatly interested for the Dominicans, who had achieved political independence and separation from Hayti by a severe struggle, which was always liable to be renewed on the part of their former masters. Mr. Sumner, on the other hand, espoused the cause of the Haytian government so warmly that he would not wait for the report of the commission to be presented, but hastened to forestall public opinion by a speech in which he displayed all his powers of oratory, but showed something less than his usual acquaintance with facts. His eloquence carried the day, and the plan of annexation was defeated and abandoned, to the great regret of the commissioners and of the Dominicans themselves. I shall speak elsewhere of my visiting Santo Domingo in company with Dr. Howe. Our second visit there was made in the spring of the year 1874. I had gone one day to inspect a school high on the mountains of Samana, when a messenger came after me in haste, bearing this written message from my husband: "Please come home at once. Our dear, noble Sumner is no more." The monthly steamer, at that time the only one that ran to Santo Domingo, had just brought the news, deplored by many, to my husband inexpressibly sad. In the winter of 1846-47 I one day heard Dr. Holmes speak of Agassiz, who had then recently arrived in America. He described him as a man of great talent and reputation, who added to his mental gifts the endowment of a superb physique. Soon after this time I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the eminent naturalist, and of attending the first series of lectures which he gave at the Lowell Institute. The great personal attraction of Agassiz, joined to his admirable power of presenting the results of scientific investigation in a popular form, made a vivid impression upon the Boston public. All his lecture courses were largely attended. These and his continued presence among us gave a new impetus to the study of natural science. In his hands the record of the bones and fossils became a living language, and the common thought was enriched by the revelation of the wonders of the visible universe. Agassiz's was an expansive nature, and his great delight lay in imparting to others the discoveries in which he had found such intense pleasure. This sympathetic trait relieved his discourse of all dryness and dullness. In his college days he had employed his hour of intermission at noon in explaining the laws of botany to a class of little children. When required to furnish a thesis at the close of his university course, he chose for his theme the proper education of women, and insisted that it ought not to be inferior to that given to men. I need hardly relate how a most happy marriage in later life made him one of us, nor how this opened the way to the establishment in his house of a school whose girl pupils, in addition to other valuable instruction, enjoyed daily the privilege of listening to his clear and lucid exposition of the facts and laws of his favorite science. His memory is still bright among us. The story of his life and work is beautifully told in the "Life and Correspondence" published soon after his death by his widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, well known to-day as the president of Radcliffe College. His children and grandchildren are among our most valued citizens. His son, Professor Alexander Agassiz, inherits his father's devotion to science, while his daughter, Mrs. Quincy Shaw, has shown her public spirit in her great services to the cause of education. An enduring monument to his fame is the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, and I am but one of many still surviving who recall with gratitude the enlargement of intellectual interest which he brought to our own and other communities. Women who wish well to their own sex should never forget that, on the occasion of his first lectures delivered in the capital of Brazil, he earnestly requested the emperor that ladies might be allowed to be present,--a privilege till then denied them on grounds of etiquette. The request was granted, and the sacred domain of science for the first time was thrown open to the women of South America. * * * * * I cannot remember just when it was that an English visitor, who brought a letter of introduction to my husband, spoke to me of the "Bothie of Tober-na-Fuosich" and its author, Arthur Hugh Clough. The gentleman was a graduate of Oxford or of Cambridge. He came to our house several times, and I consulted him with regard to the classic rhythms, in which he was well versed. I had it in mind at this time to write a poem in classic rhythm. It was printed in my first volume, "Passion Flowers;" and Mr. Sanborn, in an otherwise very friendly review of my work, characterized as "pitiable hexameters" the lines which were really not hexameters at all, nor intended to pass for such. They were pentameters constructed according to my own ideas; I did not have in view any special school or rule. I soon had the pleasure of reading the "Bothie," which I greatly admired. While it was fresh in my mind Mr. Clough arrived in Boston, furnished with excellent letters of introduction both for that city and for the dignitaries of Cambridge. My husband at once invited him to pass some days at our house, and I was very glad to welcome him there. In appearance I thought him rather striking. He was tall, tending a little to stoutness, with a beautifully ruddy complexion and dark eyes which twinkled with suppressed humor. His sweet, cheery manner at once attracted my young children to him, and I was amused, on passing near the open door of his room, to see him engaged in conversation with my little son, then some five or six years of age. In Dr. Howe's daily absences I tried to keep our guest company a little, but I found him very shy. I remember that I said to him, when we had made some acquaintance, that I had often wished to meet Thackeray, and to give him two buffets, saying, "This one is for your Becky Sharp and this one for Blanche Amory,"--regarding both as slanders upon my sex. Mr. Clough suggested that in the great world of London such characters were not out of place. The device of Blanche Amory's book, "Mes Larmes," seemed to have afforded him much amusement. It happened that, while he was with us, I dined one day with a German friend, who served us with quite a wonderful repast. The feast had been a merry one, and at the dessert two such sumptuous dishes were presented to us that I, having tasted of one of them, said to a friend across the table, "Anna, this is poetry!" She was occupied with the opposite dish, and, mindful of the old pleasantry to which I alluded, replied, "Julia, this is religion." At breakfast, the next morning, I endeavored to entertain those present with some account of the great dinner. As I enlarged a little upon the excellence of the details, Mr. Clough said, "Mrs. Howe, you seem to have a great appreciation of these matters." I disclaimed this; whereupon he rejoined, "Mrs. Howe, you are modest." Some months later I met Mr. Clough at a friend's house, where some informal charades were about to be attempted. Being requested to take part in one, I declined; and when urged, I replied, "No, no, I am modest,--Mr. Clough once said so." He looked at me in some pretended surprise, and said, "It must have been at a very early period in our acquaintance." This "give and take" was all in great good humor, and Mr. Clough was a delightful guest in all societies. Sorry indeed were we when, having become quite at home among us, he returned to England, there to marry and abide. I remember that he told me of one winter which he had passed at his university without fire in his quarters. When I heard of his illness and untimely death, it occurred to me that the seeds of the fatal disease might have been sown during that season of privation. CHAPTER IX SECOND VISIT TO EUROPE In June, 1850, after a seven years' residence in and near Boston, during which I labored at study and literary composition, I enjoyed an interval of rest and recreation in Europe. With me went Dr. Howe and our two youngest children, one of them an infant in arms. We passed some weeks in London, and went thence to renew our acquaintance with the Nightingale family, at their summer residence in Derbyshire. Florence Nightingale had been traveling in Egypt, and was still abroad. Her sister, Parthenope, read us some of her letters, which, as may be imagined, were full of interest. Florence and her companions, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, had made some stay in Rome, on their way to Egypt. Margaret Fuller called one day at their lodgings. Florence herself opened the door, and said to the visitor, "Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge are not at home." Margaret replied, "My visit is intended for Miss Florence Nightingale;" and she was admitted to a tête-à-tête of which one would be glad to know something. It was during this visit that I learned the sad news of Margaret's shipwreck and death. Dr. Howe, with all his energy of body and of mind, was somewhat of a valetudinarian. The traces of a severe malarial fever, contracted by him in the Greek campaign of his youth, went with him through life. He was subject to frightful headaches, and these and other ailments caused him to take great interest in theories of hygiene, and among these in the then new system of hydropathy, as formulated by Priessnitz. At the time now spoken of he arranged to pass a period at Boppard on the Rhine, where a water-cure had recently been established. He became an outside patient of this institution, and seemed to enjoy thoroughly the routine of bathing, douching, packing, etc. Beyond the limits of the water-cure the little town presented few features of interest. Wandering about its purlieus one day, I came upon a sort of open cave or recess in the rocks in which I found two rude cradles, each occupied by a silent and stolid baby. Presently two rough-looking women, who had been carrying stones from the riverside, came in from their work. The little ones now broke out into dismal wailing. "Why do they cry so?" I asked. "They ought to be glad to see you." "Oh, madam, they cry because they know how soon we must leave them again." Tom Appleton disposed of the water-cure theory in the following fashion: "Water-cure? Oh yes, very fine. Priessnitz forgot one day to wash his face, and so he died." My husband's leave of absence was for six months only, and we parted company at Heidelberg; he to turn his face homewards, I to proceed with my two sisters to Rome, where it had been arranged that I should pass the winter. Our party occupied two thirds of the diligence in which we made a part of the journey. My sister L. had with her two little daughters, my youngest sister had one. These, with my two babies and the respective nurses, filled the _rotonde_ of the vehicle. The three mammas occupied the _coupé_, while my brother-in-law, Thomas Crawford, took refuge in the _banquette_. The custom-house officer at one place approached with his lantern, to ascertain the contents of the diligence. Looking into the _rotonde_, he remarked, "Baby baggage," and inquired no further. Dr. Howe had charged me to provide myself with a watch when I should pass through Geneva, and had given me the address of a friend who, he said, would advise me where best to make the purchase. Following his instructions, I wrote Dr. G. a letter in my best French; and he, calling at our hotel, expressed his surprise at finding that I was not a Frenchwoman. He found us all at breakfast, and, after the first compliments, began a voluble tirade in favor of the use of emetics, which was scarcely in place at the moment. From this he went on to speak of the management of children. "When my son was born," he said, "and showed the first symptoms of hunger, I would not allow him to be fed. If his cries had met with an immediate response he would have said to himself, 'I have a servant.' I made him wait for his food until he was obliged to say, 'I have a master.'" I thought of my own dear nurslings and shook my head. Learning that Mr. Crawford was a sculptor, he said, "I, too, in my youth desired to exercise that art, and modeled a bust, in which I made concave the muscle which should have been convex. A friend recommended to me the study of anatomy, and following it I became a physician." We reached Rome late in October. A comfortable apartment was found for me in the street named Capo le Case. A donkey brought my winter's supply of firewood, and I made haste to hire a grand piano. The artist Edward Freeman occupied the suite of rooms above my own. In the apartment below, Mrs. David Dudley Field and her children were settled for the winter. Our little colony was very harmonious. When Mrs. Field entertained company, she was wont to borrow my large lamp; when I received, she lent me her teacups. Mrs. Freeman, on the floor above, was a most friendly little person, partly Italian by birth, but wholly English in education. She willingly became the companion and guide of my walks about Rome, which were long and many. I had begun the study of Hebrew in America, and was glad to find a learned rabbi from the Ghetto who was willing to give me lessons for a moderate compensation. My sister, Mrs. Crawford, was at that time established at Villa Negroni, an old-time papal residence. This was surrounded by extensive gardens, and within the inclosure were an artificial fish pond and a lodge which my brother-in-law converted into a studio. My days in Rome passed very quietly. The time, which flew by rapidly, was divided between study within doors, the care and companionship of my little children, and the exploration of the wonderful old city. I dined regularly at two o'clock, having with me at table my little son and my baby secured in her high chair. I shared with my sisters the few dissipations of the season,--an occasional ball, a box at the opera, a drive on the Campagna. On Sunday mornings my youngest sister usually came to breakfast with me, and afterward accompanied me to the Ara Coeli Church, where a military mass was celebrated, the music being supplied by the band of a French regiment. The time, I need scarcely say, was that of the early years of the French occupation of the city, to which France made it her boast that she had brought back the Pope. As I chronicle these small personal adventures of mine, I am constrained to blush at their insufficiency. I write as if I had forgotten the wonderful series of events which had come to pass between my first visit to Rome and this second tarrying within its walls. In the interval, the days of 1848 had come and gone. France had dismissed her citizen king, and had established a republic in place of the monarchy. The Pope of Rome, for centuries the representative and upholder of absolute rule, had stood before the world as the head of the Christianity which liberalizes both institutions and ideas. In Germany the party of progress was triumphant. Europe had trembled with the birth-pangs of freedom. A new and glorious confederacy of states seemed to be promised in the near future. The tyrannies of the earth were surely about to meet their doom. My own dear eldest son was given to me in the spring of this terrible and splendid year of 1848. When his father wrote "_Dieu donné_" under the boy's name in the family Bible, he added to the welcome record the new device, "_Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_." The first Napoleon had overthrown rulers and dynasties. A greater power than his now came upon the stage,--the power of individual conviction backed by popular enthusiasm. My husband, who had fought for Greek freedom in his youth, who had risked and suffered imprisonment in behalf of Poland in his early manhood, and who had devoted his mature life to the service of humanity, welcomed the new state of things with all the enthusiasm of his generous nature. To him, as to many, the final emancipation and unification of the human race, the millennium of universal peace and good-will, seemed near at hand. Alas! the great promise brought only a greater failure. The time for its fulfillment had not yet arrived. Freedom could not be attained by striking an attitude, nor secured by the issuing of a document. The prophet could see the plan of the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven, but the fact remained that the city of God must be built by patient day's work. Such builders Europe could not bring to the front. The Pope retreated before the logical sequence of his own initiative. France elected for her chief a born despot of the meaner order, whose first act was to overthrow the Roman Republic. Germany had dreamed of freedom, but had not dreamed of the way to secure it. Reaction everywhere asserted itself. The light of the great hope died down. Coming to Rome while these events were still fresh in men's minds, I could see no trace of them in the popular life. The waters were still as death; the wrecks did not appear above the surface. I met occasionally Italians who could talk calmly of what had happened. Of such an one I asked, "Why did Pio Nono so suddenly forsake his liberal policy?" "Oh, the Pope was a puppet moved from without. He never rightly understood the import of his first departure. When the natural result of this came about, he fled from it in terror." These things were spoken of only in the secrecy of very private interviews. In general intercourse they were not mentioned. Now and then, a servant, lamenting the dearness of necessaries, the paper money, etc., would say, "And this has been brought about by blessed [_benedetto_] Pio Nono!" People of higher condition eulogized thus the pontiff's predecessor: "Gregorio was at least a man of decided views. He knew what he wanted and how to obtain it." Once only, in a village not far distant from Rome, I heard an Italian peasant woman say to a prince, "We [her family] are Republicans." Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, Garibaldi, your time was not yet come. The French were not beloved in Rome. I was told that the mass of the people would not endure the license of their conquerors in the matter of sex, and that assassinations in consequence were frequent. In high society it was said that a French officer had endeavored to compel one of the Roman princes to invite to his ball a lady of doubtful reputation, by threatening to send a challenge in case of refusal. The invitation was nevertheless withheld, and the challenge, if sent, was never accepted. In the English and American circles which I frequented, I sometimes felt called upon to fight for the claim of Italy to freedom and self-government. At a dinner party, at which the altercation had been rather lively, I was invited to entertain the company with some music. Seating myself at the piano, I made it ring out the Marseillaise with a will. But I was myself too much disconcerted by the recent failure to find in my thoughts any promise of better things. My friends said, "The Italians are not fit for self-government." I may ask fifty years later, "Who is?" The progress of ideas is not indeed always visible to superficial observers. I was engaged one day in making a small purchase at a shop, when the proprietor leaned across the counter and asked, almost in a whisper, for the loan of a Bible. He had heard of the book, he said, and wished very much to see a copy of it. Our _chargé d'affaires_, Mr. Cass, mentioned to me the fact that an entire edition of Deodati's Italian translation of the New Testament had recently been seized and burned by order of the papal government. But to return to matters purely personal. As the Christmas of 1850 drew near, my sister L., ever intent on hospitality, determined to have a party and a Christmas tree at Villa Negroni. This last was then a novelty unheard of in Rome. I was to dine with her, and had offered to furnish the music for an informal dance. On Christmas Eve I went with a party of friends to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where the Pope, according to the custom of those days, was to appear in state, bearing in his arms the cradle supposed to be that of the infant Jesus, which was usually kept at St. Peter's. We were a little late in starting, and were soon obliged to retire from the highway, as the whole papal _cortége_ came sweeping by,--the state coaches of crimson and gold, and the _Guardia Nobile_ with their glittering helmets, white cloaks, and high boots. Their course was illuminated by pans of burning oil, supported by iron staves, the spiked ends of which were stuck in the ground. When the rapid procession had passed on we hastened to overtake it, but arrived too late to witness either the arrival of the Pope or his progress to the high altar with the cradle in his arms. On Christmas Day I attended high mass at St. Peter's. Although the weather was of the pleasantest, an aguish chill disturbed my enjoyment of the service. This discomfort so increased in the course of the day that, as I sat at dinner, I could with difficulty carry a morsel from my plate to my lips. "This is a chill," said my sister. "You ought to go to bed at once." I insisted upon remaining to play for the promised dance, and argued that the fever would presently succeed the chill, and that I should then be warm enough. I passed the evening in great bodily discomfort, but managed to play quadrilles, waltzes, and the endless Virginia Reel. When at last I reached home and my bed, the fever did come with a will. I was fortunate enough to recover very quickly from this indisposition, and did not forget the warning which it gave me of the dangers of the Roman climate. The shivering evening left me a happier recollection. Among my sister's guests was Horace Binney Wallace, of Philadelphia, whom I had once met in his own city. He had angered me at that time by his ridicule of Boston society, of which he really knew little or nothing. He was now in a less aggressive frame of mind, and this second meeting with him was the beginning of a much-valued friendship. We visited together many points of historic interest in the city,--the Pantheon, the Tarpeian Rock, the bridge of Horatius Cocles. He had some fanciful theories about the traits of character usually found in conjunction with red hair. As he and I were both distinguished by this feature, I was much pleased to learn from him that "the highest effort of nature is to produce a _rosso_." He was a devoted student of the works of Auguste Comte, and had recently held some conversation with that remarkable man. In the course of this, he told me, he asked the great Positivist how he could account for the general religious instinct of the human race, so contrary to the doctrines of his philosophy. Comte replied, "Que voulez-vous, monsieur? Anormalité cérébrale." My new friend was good enough to interest himself in my literary pursuits. He advised me to study the most important of Comte's works, but by no means to become a convert to his doctrines. In due time I availed myself of his counsel, and read with great interest the volumes prescribed by him. Horace Wallace was an exhilarating companion. I have never forgotten the silvery _timbre_ of his rather high voice, nor the glee with which he would occasionally inform me that he had discovered a new and most remarkable _rosso_. This was sometimes a picture, but oftener a living individual. If he found himself disappointed in the latter case, he would account for it by saying that he had at first sight mistaken the color of the hair, which shaded too much upon the yellow. Despite his vivacity of temperament, he was subject to fits of severe depression. Some years after this time, finding himself in Paris, he happened to visit a friend whose mental powers had been impaired by severe illness. He himself had been haunted for some time by the fear of becoming insane, and the sad condition of his friend so impressed him with the fear of suffering a similar disaster that he made haste to avoid the dreaded fate by taking his own life. The following lines, written not long after this melancholy event, bear witness to my grateful and tender remembrance of him:-- VIA FELICE 'Twas in the Via Felice My friend his dwelling made, The Roman Via Felice, Half sunshine, half in shade. But I lodged near the convent Whose bells did hallow noon, And all the lesser hours, With sweet recurrent tune. They lent their solemn cadence To all the thoughtless day; The heart, so oft it heard them, Was lifted up to pray. And where the lamp was lighted At twilight, on the wall, Serenely sat Madonna, And smiled to bless us all. I see him from the window That ne'er my heart forgets; He buys from yonder maiden My morning violets. Not ill he chose these flowers With mild, reproving eyes, Emblems of tender chiding, And love divinely wise. For his were generous learning And reconciling art; Oh, not with fleeting presence My friend and I could part. * * * * * Oh, not where he is lying With dear ancestral dust, Not where his household traces Grow sad and dim with rust; But in the ancient city And from the quaint old door, I'm watching, at my window, His coming evermore. For Death's eternal city Has yet some happy street; 'Tis in the Via Felice My friend and I shall meet. Adolph Mailliard, the husband of my youngest sister, had been an intimate friend of Joseph Bonaparte, Prince of Musignano. My sister was in consequence invited more than once to the Bonaparte palace. The father of the family was Prince Charles Bonaparte, who married his cousin, Princess Zénaïde. She had passed some years at the Bonaparte villa in Bordentown, N. J., the American residence of her father, Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king of Spain. This princess, who was _tant soit peu gourmande_ said one day to my sister, "What good things they have for breakfast in America! I still remember those hot cakes." The conversation was reported to me, and I managed, with the assistance of the helper brought from home, to send the princess a very excellent bannock of Indian meal, of which she afterwards said, "It was so good that we ate what was left of it on the second day." This reminds me of a familiar couplet:-- "And what they could not eat that night The queen next morning fried." Among the friends of that winter were Sarah and William Clarke, sister and brother of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke. It was in their company that Margaret Fuller made the journey recorded in her "Summer on the Lakes." Both were devoted to her memory. I afterwards learned that William Clarke considered her the good genius of his life, her counsel and encouragement having come to his aid in a season of melancholy depression and self-depreciation. Miss Clarke was characterized by an exquisite refinement of feeling and of manner. She was also an artist of considerable merit. This was the first of many winters passed by her in Rome. I will further mention only a dinner given by American residents in Rome on Washington's birthday, at which I was present. Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, the well-known writer, was also one of the guests. She had composed for the occasion a poem, of which I recall the opening line,-- "We are met in the clime where the wild flowers abound," and the closing ones,-- "To the halo that circles our Washington's head Let us pour a libation the gods never knew." Among many toasts, my sister Annie proposed this one, "Washington's clay in Crawford's hand," which was appropriate, as Thomas Crawford was known at the time to be engaged in modeling the equestrian statue of Washington which crowns his Richmond monument. My Roman holiday came to an end in the summer of the year 1851, and my return to my home and friends became imperative. As the time of my departure approached, I felt how deeply the subtle fascination of Roman life had entered into my very being. Pain, amounting almost to anguish, seized me at the thought that I might never again behold those ancient monuments, those stately churches, or take part in the society which had charmed me principally through its unlikeness to any that I had known elsewhere. I have indeed seen Rome and its wonders more than once since that time, but never as I saw them then. I made the homeward voyage with my sister Annie and her husband in an old-fashioned Havre packet. We were a month at sea, and after the first days of discomfort I managed to fill the hours of the long summer days with systematic occupation. In the mornings I perused Swedenborg's "Divine Love and Wisdom." In the afternoon I read, for the first and only time, Eugène Sue's "Mystères de Paris," which the ship's surgeon borrowed for me from a steerage passenger. In the evening we played whist; and when others had retired for the night, I often sat alone in the cabin, meditating upon the events and lessons of the last six months. These lucubrations took form in a number of poems, which were written with no thought of publication, but which saw the light a year or two later. CHAPTER X A CHAPTER ABOUT MYSELF If I may sum up in one term the leading bent of my life, I will simply call myself a student. Dr. Howe used to say of me: "Mrs. Howe is not a great reader, but she always studies." Albeit my intellectual pursuits have always been such as to task my mind, I cannot boast that I have acquired much in the way of technical erudition. I have only drawn from history and philosophy some understanding of human life, some lessons in the value of thought for thought's sake, and, above all, a sense of the dignity of character above every other dignity. Goethe chose well for his motto the words:-- "Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit." "Time is my inheritance; time is my estate." But I may choose this for mine:-- "I have followed the great masters with my heart." The first writer of importance with whom I made acquaintance after leaving school was Gibbon, whose "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" occupied me during one entire winter. I have already mentioned my early familiarity with the French and Italian languages. In these respective literatures I read the works which in those days were usually commended to young women. These were, in French, Lamartine's poems and travels, Chateaubriand's "Atala" and "René," Racine's tragedies, Molière's comedies; in Italian, Metastasio, Tasso, Alfieri's dramas and autobiography. Under dear Dr. Cogswell's tuition, I read Schiller's plays and prose writings with delight. In later years, Goethe, Herder, Jean Paul Richter, were added to my repertory. I read Dante with Felice Foresti, and such works of Sand and Balzac as were allowed within my reach. I had early acquired some knowledge of Latin, and in later life found great pleasure in reading the essays and Tusculan dissertations of Cicero. The view of ethics represented in these writings sometimes appeared to me of higher tone than the current morality of Christendom, and I rejoiced in the thought that, even in the Rome of the pre-Christian Cæsars, God had not left himself without a witness. This enlarged notion of the ethical history of mankind might easily lead one in life's novitiate to underestimate the comparative value of the usually accepted traditions. I confess that I, personally, did not escape this error, which I have seen largely prevalent among studious people of my own time. Who can say what joy there is in the rehabilitation of human nature, which is one essential condition of the liberal Christian faith? I had been trained to think that all mankind were by nature low, vile, and wicked. Only a chosen few, by a rare and difficult spiritual operation, could be rescued from the doom of a perpetual dwelling with the enemies of God, a perpetual participation in the torments "prepared for them from the beginning of the world." The rapture of this new freedom, of this enlarged brotherhood, which made all men akin to the Divine Father of all, every religion, however ignorant, the expression of a sincere and availing worship, might well produce in a neophyte an exhilaration bordering upon ecstasy. The exclusive doctrine which had made Christianity, and special forms of it, the only way of spiritual redemption, now appeared to me to commend itself as little to human reason as to human affection. I felt that we could not rightly honor our dear Christ by immolating at his shrine the souls of myriads of our fellows born under the widely diverse influences which could not be thought of as existing unwilled by the supreme Providence. Antichrist was once a term of consummate reproach, often applied by zealous Protestants to their arch enemy, the Pope of Rome. As will be imagined, I intend a different use of it, and have chosen the term to express the opposition which has sprung up within the Christian church, not only to the worship of the son as a divine being, but even to the notion of his long undisputed preëminence in wisdom, goodness, and power. And here, as I once said that I had taken German in the natural way, with no preconceived notion of the import and importance of German literature, so I may say that I first received Christianity in the way natural to one of my birth and education. I have since been called upon to confront the topic in many ways. Swedenborg's theory of the divine man, Parker's preaching, the Boston Radical Club, Frank Abbot's depreciating comparison of Jesus with Socrates,--after following unfoldings of this wonderful panorama, I must say that the earliest view is that which I hold to most, that, namely, of the heavenly Being whose presence was beneficence, whose word was judgment, whose brief career on earth ended in a sacrifice, whose purity and pathos have had much to do with the redemption of the human race from barbarism and the rule of the animal passions. During the first score of years of my married life, I resided for the most part at South Boston. This remoteness from city life insured to me a good deal of quiet leisure, much of which I devoted to my favorite pursuits. It was in these days that I turned to my almost forgotten Latin, and read the "Aeneid" and the histories of Livy and Tacitus. At a later date my brother gave me Orelli's edition of Horace, and I soon came to delight much in that quasi-Hellenic Roman. I remember especially the odes which my brother pointed out to me as his favorites. These were: "Mæcenas atavis edite regibus;" "Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus;" "O fons Bandusiæ;" and, above all, "Exegi monumentum ære perennius." With no pretensions to correct scholarship, I yet enjoyed these Latin studies quite intensely. They were so much in my mind that, when we sat down to our two o'clock dinner, my husband would sometimes ask: "Have you got those elephants over the river yet?" alluding to Hannibal and the Punic war. Prior to these Latin studies, I read a good deal in Swedenborg, and was much fascinated by his theories of spiritual life. I remember "Heaven and Hell," "Divine Love and Wisdom," and "Conjugal Love" as the writings which interested me most; but the cumbrous symbolism of his Bible interpretation finally shut my mind against further entertainment of so fanciful a guest. Hegel was for some time my study among the German philosophers. After some severe struggling with his extraordinary diction, I became convinced that the obscurity of his style was intentional, and left him in some indignation. The deep things of philosophy are difficult enough when treated by one who desires to make them clear. Where the intention is rather to mask than to unfold the meaning which is in the master's mind, interpretation is difficult and hazardous. Hegel's own saying about his lectures is well known: "One only of my pupils understood me, and he misunderstood me." George Bancroft, the historian, spoke of Hegel as a man of weak character, and Dr. Francis Lieber, who had been under his instruction, had the same opinion of him. In the days of the Napoleonic invasion of Germany, Lieber had gone into the field, with other young men of the university. When, recovered from a severe wound, he took his place again among the students of philosophy, Hegel before beginning the day's lecture cried: "Let all those fools who went out against the French depart from this class." I think that I must have had by nature an especial sensitiveness to language, as the following trifling narration will show. I was perhaps twelve years old when Rev. James Richmond, who had studied in Germany, dining at my father's house, spoke of one of his German professors who was wont, as the prelude to his exercise, to exclaim: "Aus, aus, ihr Fremden." These words meant nothing to me then, but when, eight years later, I mastered the German tongue, I recalled them perfectly, and understood their meaning. One of my first efforts, after my return from Europe in 1851, was to acquaint myself with the "Philosophie Positive" of Auguste Comte. This was in accordance with the advice of my friend, Horace Wallace, who, indeed, lent me the first volume of the work. The synoptical view of the sciences therein presented revealed to me an entirely new aspect of thought. I did not, for a moment, adopt Comte's views of religion, neither did I at all agree in his wholesale condemnation of metaphysics, which appeared to me self-contradictory, his own system involving metaphysical distinctions as much, perhaps, as any other. On the other hand, the objectivism of his point of view brought a new element into my too concentrated habit of thought. I deemed myself already too old, being about thirty years of age, to conquer the difficulties of the higher mathematics, and of the several sciences in which these play so important a part. But I had had a bird's-eye view of this wonderful region of the natural sciences, and this, I think, never passed quite out of my mind. I used to talk about the books with Parker, who read everything worth reading. They had not greatly appealed to him. I also, at this time, read Hegel's "Aesthetik," and endeavored to read his "Logik," which I borrowed from Parker, and which he pronounced "so crabbed as to be scarcely worth enucleating." I cannot remember what it was which, soon after this time, led me to the study of Spinoza. I followed this with great interest, and became for a time almost intoxicated with the originality and beauty of his thoughts. While still under his influence I spoke of him to Mr. Bancroft as "der unentbehrliche," the indispensable Spinoza. He demurred at this, acknowledged Spinoza's analysis of the passions to be admirable, but assured me that Kant alone deserved to be called "indispensable;" and this dictum of his made me resolve to become at once a student of the "Critique of Pure Reason." I found this at first rather dry, after the glowing and daring flights of Spinoza, but I soon learned to hold the philosopher of Königsberg in great affection and esteem. I have read extensively in his writings, even in his minor treatises, and having attained some conception of his system, was inclined to say with Romeo: "Here I set up my everlasting rest." I devoted some of the best years of my life to these studies, and to the writings which grew out of them. I remember one summer at my Valley near Newport, in which I felt that I had read and written quite as much as was profitable. "I must go outside of my own thoughts, I must do something for some one," I said to myself. Just then the teacher of my sister's children broke out with malarial fever. She was staying with my sister at a farmhouse near by. The call to assist in nursing her was very welcome, and when I was thanked for my services I could truly say that I had been glad of the opportunity of rendering them for my own sake. The Kantian volumes occupied me for many months, even years. In fact, I have never gone beyond them. A new philosophy has sometimes appeared to me like a new disease. If we have found our master, and are satisfied with him, what need have we of starting again, to make the same journey with a new guide. Once we have got there, it seems better to abide. The early years of my married life interposed a barrier between my literary dreams and their realization. Those years brought me much to learn and much to do. The burden of housekeeping was new to me, a sister of mine, highly gifted in this respect, having charged herself with its duties so long as we were "girls together." I accordingly found myself lamentably deficient in household skill and knowledge. I endeavored to apply myself to the remedying of these defects, but with indifferent success. I was by nature far from observant, and often passed through a room without much notion of its condition or contents, my thoughts being intent on other matters. The period, too, was one of transition as regards household service. The old-time American servants were no longer to be obtained. The Irish girls who supplied their place were for the most part ignorant and untrained, their performance calling for a discipline and instruction which I, never having received, was quite unable to give them. During the first years of my residence at the Institution for the Blind, Dr. Howe delighted in inviting his friends to weekly dinners, which cost me many unhappy hours. My want of training and of forethought often caused me to forget some very important item of the repast. My husband's eldest sister, who lived with us, and who had held the reins of the housekeeping until my arrival, was averse to company, and usually absented herself on the days of the dinner parties. In her absence, I often did not know where to look for various articles which were requisite and necessary. I remember one dinner for which I had relied upon a form of ice as the principal feature of the dessert. The company was of the best, and I desired that the feast should correspond with it. The ice, which had been ordered from town, did not appear. I did my best to conceal my chagrin, but was scarcely consoled when the missing refreshment was found, the next morning, in a snowbank near our door, where the messenger had deposited it without word or comment. The same mischance might, indeed does sometimes happen at this later date. I should laugh at it now, but then I almost wept over it. Our kitchen and dining-room were on one floor, and a convenient slide allowed dishes to be passed from one room to the other. On a certain occasion, my sister being with me, I asked her whether my dinner had gone off well enough. "Oh yes," she replied; "only the slide was left open, and through it I saw the cook buttering the venison." I especially remember one summer which I resolved to devote to the study of cookery, for which there was then no school, and no teacher to be had at will. Having purchased Miss Catherine Beecher's Cook-book, I devoted some weeks to an experimental following of its recipes, with no satisfactory result. A little later, my husband secured the services of a very competent housekeeper, and my distresses and responsibilities were much diminished. After some years of this indulgence, I felt bound to make a second and more strenuous effort at housekeeping, and succeeded much better than before, having by this time managed to learn something of the nature and needs of household machinery. As I now regard these matters, I would say to every young girl, rich or poor, gifted or dull: "Learn to make a home, and learn this in the days in which learning is easy. Cultivate a habit of vigilance and forethought. With a reasonable amount of intelligence, a woman should be able to carry on the management of a household, and should yet have time for art and literature in some sort." In more recent years, having been called upon to take part in a public discussion regarding the compatibility of domestic with literary occupation, I endeavored to formulate the results of my own experience as follows:-- "If you have at your command three hours _per diem_, you may study art, literature, and philosophy, not as they are studied professionally, but in the degree involved in general culture. "If you have but one hour in every day, read philosophy, or learn foreign languages, living or dead. "If you can command only fifteen or twenty minutes, read the Bible with the best commentaries, and daily a verse or two of the best poetry." As I write this, I recall the piteous image of two wrecks of women, Americans and wives of Americans, who severally poured out their sorrows to me, saying that the preparation of "three square meals a day," the washing, baking, sewing, and child-bearing, had filled the measure of their days and exceeded that of their strength: "And yet," each said, "I wanted the Greek and Latin and college course as much as any one could wish for it." But surely, no love of intellectual pursuits should lead any of us to disparage and neglect the household gifts and graces. A house is a kingdom in little, and its queen, if she is faithful, gentle, and wise, is a sovereign indeed. CHAPTER XI ANTI-SLAVERY ATTITUDE: LITERARY WORK: TRIP TO CUBA Returning to Boston in 1851, I found the division of public sentiment more strongly marked than ever. The Fugitive Slave Law was much in the public mind. The anti-slavery people attacked it with might and main, while the class of wealthy conservatives and their followers strongly deprecated all opposition to its enactments. During my absence Charles Sumner had been elected to the Senate of the United States, in place of Daniel Webster, who had hitherto been the political idol of the Massachusetts aristocracy. Mr. Sumner's course had warmly commended him to a large and ever increasing constituency, but had brought down upon him the anger of Mr. Webster's political supporters. My husband's sympathies were entirely with the class then derided as "a band of disturbers of the public peace, enemies of law and order." I deeply regretted the discords of the time, and would have had all people good friends, however diverse in political persuasion. As this could not be, I felt constrained to cast in my lot with those who protested against the new assumptions of the slave power. The social ostracism which visited Charles Sumner never fell upon Dr. Howe. This may have been because the active life of the latter lay without the domain of politics, but also, I must think, because the services which he continually rendered to the community compelled from all who knew him, not only respect, but also cordial good-will. I did not then, or at any time, make any willful breach with the society to which I was naturally related. It did, however, much annoy me to hear those spoken of with contempt and invective who, I was persuaded, were only far in advance of the conscience of the time. I suppose that I sometimes repelled the attacks made upon them with a certain heat of temper, to avoid which I ought to have remembered Talleyrand's famous admonition, "Surtout point de zèle." Better, perhaps, would it have been to rest in the happy prophecy which assures us that "Wisdom is justified of all her children." Ordinary society is apt to class the varieties of individuals under certain stereotyped heads, and I have no doubt that it held me at this time to be a seeker after novelties, and one disposed to offer a premium for heresies of every kind. Yet I must say that I was never made painfully aware of the existence of such a feeling. There was always a leaven of good sense and good sentiment even in the worldly world of Boston, and as time went on I became the recipient of much kindness, and the happy possessor of a circle of substantial friends. * * * * * Shortly after my return to Boston, my husband spoke to me of a new acquaintance,--a Polish nobleman, Adam Gurowski by name,--concerning whom he related the following circumstances. Count Gurowski had been implicated in one of the later Polish insurrections. In order to keep his large estates from confiscation he had made them over to his younger brother, upon the explicit condition that a sufficient remittance should be regularly sent him, to enable him to live wherever his lot should thenceforth be cast. He came to this country, but the remittances failed to follow him, and he presently found himself without funds in a foreign land. Being a man of much erudition, he had made friends with some of the professors of Harvard University. They offered him assistance, which he declined, and it soon appeared that he was working in the gardens of Hovey & Co., in or near Cambridge. His new friends remonstrated with him, pleading that this work was unsuitable for a man of his rank and condition. He replied, "I am Gurowski; labor cannot degrade me." This independence of his position commended him much to the esteem of my husband, and he was more than once invited to our house. Some literary employment was found for him, and finally, through influence exerted at Washington, a position as translator was secured for him in the State Department. He was at Newport during the summer that we passed at the Cliff House, and he it was who gave it the title of Hotel Rambouillet. His proved to be a character of remarkable contradictions, in which really noble and generous impulses contrasted with an undisciplined temper and an insatiable curiosity. While inveighing constantly against the rudeness of American manners, he himself was often guilty of great impoliteness. To give an example: At his boarding-house in Newport a child at table gave a little trouble, upon which the count animadverted with great severity. The mother, waxing impatient, said, "I think, count, that you have no right to say so much about table manners; for you yesterday broke the crust of the chicken pie with your fist, and pulled the meat out with your fingers!" His curiosity, as I have said, was unbounded. Meeting a lady of his acquaintance at her door, and seeing a basket on her arm, he asked, "Where are you going, Mrs. ----, so early, with that basket?" She declined to answer the question, on the ground that the questioner had no concern in her errand. On the evening of the same day he again met the lady, and said to her, "I know now where you were going this morning with that basket." If friends on whom he called were said to be engaged or not at home, he was at great pains to find out how they were engaged, or whether they were really at home in spite of the message to the contrary. One gentleman in Newport, not desiring to receive the count's visit, and knowing that he would not be safe anywhere in his own house, took refuge in the loft of his barn and drew the ladder up after him. And yet Adam Gurowski was a true-hearted man, loyal to every good cause and devoted to his few friends. His life continued to the last to be a very checkered one. When the civil war broke out, his disapprobation of men and measures took expression in vehement and indignant protest against what appeared to him a willful mismanagement of public business. William H. Seward was then at the head of the Department of State, and against his policy the count fulminated in public and in private. He was warned by friends, and at last officially told that he could not be retained in the department if he persisted in stigmatizing its chief as a fool, a timeserver, no matter what. He persevered, and was dismissed from his place. He had been on friendly terms with Charles Sumner, to whom he probably owed his appointment. He tormented this gentleman to such a degree as to terminate all relations between the two. Of this breach Mr. Sumner gave the following account: "The count would come to my rooms at all hours. When I left my sleeping-chamber in the morning, I often found him in my study, seated at my table, perusing my morning paper and probably any other matter which might excite his curiosity. If he happened to come in while a foreign minister was visiting me, he would stay through the visit. I bore with this for a long time. At last the annoyance became insupportable. One evening, after a long sitting in my room, he took leave, but presently returned for a fresh _séance_, although it was already very late. I said to him, 'Count, you must go now, and you must never return.' 'How is this, my dear friend?' exclaimed the count. 'There is no explanation,' said I, 'only you must not come to my room again.'" This ended the acquaintance! The count after this spoke very bitterly of Mr. Sumner, whose procedure did seem to me a little severe. Unfortunately the lesson was quite lost upon Gurowski, and he continued to make enemies of those with whom he had to do, until nearly every door in Washington was closed to him. There was one exception. Mrs. Charles Eames, wife of a well-known lawyer, was one of the notabilities of Washington. Hers was one of those central characters which are able to attract and harmonize the most diverse social elements. Her house had long been a resort of the worthies of the capital. Men of mark and of intelligence gathered about her, regardless of party divisions. No one understood Washington society better than she did, and no one in it was more highly esteemed or less liable to be misrepresented. Mrs. Eames well knew how provoking and tormenting Count Gurowski was apt to be, but she knew, too, the remarkable qualities which went far to redeem his troublesome traits of character. And so, when the count seemed to be entirely discredited, she stood up for him, warning her friends that if they came to her house they would always be likely to meet this unacceptable man. He, on his part, was warmly sensible of the value of her friendship, and showed his gratitude by a sincere interest in all that concerned her. The courageous position which she had assumed in his behalf was not without effect upon the society of the place, and people in general felt obliged to show some respect to a person whom Mrs. Eames honored with her friendship. I myself have reason to remember with gratitude Mrs. Eames's hospitality. I made more than one visit at her house, and I well recall the distinguished company that I met there. The house was simple in its appointments, for the hosts were not in affluent circumstances, but its atmosphere of cordiality and of good sense was delightful. At one of her dinner parties I remember meeting Hon. Salmon P. Chase, afterwards Chief Justice of the United States, Secretary Welles of the Navy, and Senator Grimes of Iowa. I had seen that morning a life-size painting representing President Lincoln surrounded by the members of his Cabinet. Mr. Chase, I think, asked what I thought of the picture. I replied that I thought Mr. Lincoln's attitude rather awkward, and his legs out of proportion in their length. Mr. Chase laughed, and said, "Mr. Lincoln's legs are so long that it would be difficult to exaggerate them." I came to Washington soon after the conclusion of the war, and heard that Count Gurowski was seriously ill at the home of his good friend. I hastened thither to inquire concerning him, and learned that his life was almost despaired of. Mr. Eames told me this, and said that his wife and a lady friend of hers were incessant in their care of him. He promised that I should see him as soon as a change for the better should appear. Instead of this I received one day a message from Mrs. Eames, saying that the count was now given up by his physician, and that I might come, if I wished to see him alive once more. I went to the house at once, and found Mrs. Eames and her friend at the bedside of the dying man. He was already unconscious, and soon breathed his last. At Mr. Eames's request I now gave up my room at the hotel and came to stay with Mrs. Eames, who was prostrated with the fatigue of nursing the sick man and with grief for his loss. While I sat and talked with her Mr. Eames entered the room, and said, "Mrs. Howe, my wife has always had a menagerie here in Washington, and now she has lost her faithful old grizzly." I was intrusted with some of the arrangements for the funeral. Mrs. Eames said to me that, as the count had been a man of no religious belief, she thought it would be best to invite a Unitarian minister to officiate at his funeral. I should add that her grief prevented her from perceiving the humor of the suggestion. I accordingly secured the services of the Rev. John Pierpont, who happened to be in Washington at the time. Charles Sumner came to the house before the funeral, and actually shed tears as he looked on the face of his former friend. He remarked upon the beauty of the countenance, saying in his rather oratorical way, "There is a beauty of life, and there is a beauty of death." The count's good looks had been spoiled in early life by the loss of one eye, which had been destroyed, it was said, in a duel. After death, however, this blemish did not appear, and the distinction of the features was remarkable. Among his few effects was a printed volume containing the genealogy of his family, which had thrice intermarried with royal houses, once in the family of Maria Lesczinska, wife of Louis XV. of France. Within this book he had inclosed one or two cast-off trifles belonging to Mrs. Eames, with a few words of deep and grateful affection. So ended this troublous life. The Russian minister at Washington called upon Mrs. Eames soon after the funeral, and spoke with respect of the count, who, he said, could have held a brilliant position in Russia, had it not been for his quarrelsome disposition. Despite his skepticism, and in all his poverty, he caused a mass to be said every year for the soul of his mother, who had been a devout Catholic. To the brother whose want of faith added the distresses of poverty to the woes of exile, Gurowski once addressed a letter in the following form: "To John Gurowski, the greatest scoundrel in Europe." A younger brother of his, a man of great beauty of person, enticed one of the infantas of Spain from the school or convent in which she was pursuing her education. This adventure made much noise at the time. Mrs. Eames once read me part of a letter from this lady, in which she spoke of "the fatal Gurowski beauty." It was in the early years of this decade (1850-1860) that I definitively came before the world as an author. My first volume of poems, entitled "Passion Flowers," was published by Ticknor and Fields, without my name. In the choice and arrangement of the poems James T. Fields had been very helpful to me. My lack of experience had led me to suppose that my incognito might easily be maintained, but in this my expectations were disappointed. The authorship of the book was at once traced to me. It was much praised, much blamed, and much called in question. From the highest literary authorities of the time it received encouraging commendation. Mr. Emerson acknowledged the copy sent him, in a very kind letter. Mr. Whittier did likewise. He wrote, "I dare say thy volume has faults enough." For all this, he spoke warmly of its merits. Prescott, the beloved historian, made me happy with his good opinion. George Ripley, in the "New York Tribune," Edwin Whipple and Frank Sanborn in Boston, reviewed the volume in a very genial and appreciative spirit. I think that my joy reached its height when I heard Theodore Parker repeat some of my lines from the pulpit. Miss Catharine Sedgwick, in speaking of the poems to a mutual friend, quoted with praise a line from my long poem on Rome. Speaking of my first hearing of the nightingale, it says:-- "A note Fell as a star falls, trailing sound for light." Dr. Francis Lieber quoted the following passage as having a Shakespearean ring:-- "But, as none can tell Among the sunbeams which unconscious one Comes weaponed with celestial will, to strike The stroke of Freedom on the fettered floods, Giving the spring his watchword--even so Rome knew not she had spoke the word of Fate That should, from out its sluggishness, compel The frost-bound vastness of barbaric life, Till, with an ominous sound, the torrent rose And rushed upon her with terrific brow, Sweeping her back, through all her haughty ways, To her own gates, a piteous fugitive." I make mention of these things because the volume has long been out of print. It was a timid performance upon a slender reed, but the great performers in the noble orchestra of writers answered to its appeal, which won me a seat in their ranks. The work, such as it was, dealt partly with the stirring questions of the time, partly with things near and familiar. The events of 1848 were still in fresh remembrance: the heroic efforts of Italian patriots to deliver their country from foreign oppression, the struggle of Hungary to maintain her ancient immunities. The most important among my "Passion Flowers" were devoted to these themes. The wrongs and sufferings of the slave had their part in the volume. A second publication, following two years later, and styled "Words for the Hour," was esteemed by some critics as better than the first. George William Curtis, at that time editor of "Putnam's Magazine," wrote me, "It is a better book than its predecessor, but will probably not meet with the same success." And so, indeed, it proved. I had always contemplated writing for the stage, and was now emboldened to compose a drama entitled, "The World's Own," which was produced at Wallack's Theatre in New York. The principal characters were sustained by Matilda Heron, then in the height of her popularity, and Mr. Sothern, afterwards so famous in the rôle of Lord Dundreary. The play was performed several times in New York and once in Boston. It was pronounced by one critic "full of literary merits and of dramatic defects." It did not, as they say, "keep the stage." My next literary venture was a series of papers descriptive of a visit made to the island of Cuba in 1859, under the following circumstances. Theodore Parker had long intended to make this year one of foreign travel. He had planned a journey in South America, and Dr. Howe had promised to accompany him. The sudden failure of Parker's health at this time was thought to render a change of climate imperative, and in the month of February a voyage to Cuba was prescribed for him. In this, Dr. Howe willingly consented to accompany him, deciding also that I must be of the party. [Illustration: SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE _From a photograph about 1859._] Our departure was in rough weather. George Ripley, formerly of Brook Farm and then of the "New York Tribune," an early friend of Parker, came to see us off. My husband insisted somewhat strenuously upon my coming to table at the first meal served on board, as this would secure me a place for the entire voyage. I felt very ill, and Parker, who was seated at the same table, looked at my husband and said, "_Natura duce_," for which I was very grateful. Presently the captain, who was carving a roast of beef, asked some one whether a slice of fat was likewise desired. At this I fled to my cabin without waiting for permission. Parker also took refuge in his berth, and we did not meet again for some time. We had encountered a head wind in the Gulf Stream, and were rolled and tossed about in great discomfort. I persisted in being carried on deck every day. My stewardess once said to the stout steward who rendered me this service, "This lady has a great deal of energy and _no power_." My bearer, seeking, no doubt, to comfort me, growled in my ear, "Well now, I expect this sea-sickness is a dreadful thing." Soon a brighter day dawned upon us, and Parker appeared on deck, limp and helpless, and glad to lie upon a mattress. We had sad tales to tell of what we had suffered. A pretty lady passenger, who sat with us, held up a number of the "Atlantic Monthly" containing Colonel Higginson's well-remembered paper, "Ought Women to learn the Alphabet?" "Yes," cried her husband, "for they have got to teach it." By this time we had reached the southern seas, and I had entirely recovered from my sea-sickness. When I made my appearance, standing erect, and in my right clothes and mind, people did not recognize me, and asked, "Where did that lady come from?" On our way to Havana we stopped for a day at Nassau. Here we were entertained at luncheon by a physician of the island. Among the articles served to us was the tropical breadfruit, which might really be mistaken for a loaf fresh from the baker's oven. Before this we attended a morning drill of soldiers at the fort. In the book which I published afterwards, I spoke of the presiding officer as a lean Don Quixote on a leaner Rosinante. The colonel, for such was his rank, sent me word that he did not resent my mention of himself, but thought that I might have spoken more admiringly of his horse, of which he was very proud. A drive in the environs and an evening service at the church completed my experience of the friendly little island. When we reëmbarked for Cuba a gay party of young people accompanied us, all in light summer wear, fluttering with frills and ribbons. The rough sea soon sent them all below, to reappear only when we neared the end of our journey. The voyage had been of small service to our friend Parker, who was a wretched sailor. Arrived in Havana, he was able to go about somewhat with Dr. Howe. He had, however, a longer voyage before him, and my husband and I went with him to the Spanish steamer which was to carry him to Vera Cruz, whence he sailed for Europe, never to return. Our parting was a sad one. Parker embraced us both, probably feeling, as we did, that he might never see us again. I still carry in my mind the picture of his serious face, crowned with gray locks and a soft gray hat, as he looked over the side of the vessel and waved us a last farewell. The following extract from my "Trip to Cuba" preserves the record of our mutual leave-taking. "A pleasant row brought us to the side of the steamer. It was dusk already as we ascended her steep gangway, and from that to darkness there is at this season but the interval of a breath. Dusk too were our thoughts at parting from Can Grande, the mighty, the vehement, the great fighter. How were we to miss his deep music, here and at home! With his assistance we had made a very respectable band; now we were to be only a wandering drum and fife,--the fife particularly shrill and the drum particularly solemn. "And now came silence and tears and last embraces; we slipped down the gangway into our little craft and, looking up, saw bending above us, between the slouched hat and the silver beard, the eyes that we can never forget, that seemed to drop back in the darkness with the solemnity of a last farewell. We went home, and the drum hung himself gloomily on his peg, and the little fife _shut up_ for the remainder of the evening." To our hotel in Havana came, one day, a lovely lady, with pathetic dark eyes and a look of ill health. She was accompanied by her husband and little son. This was Mrs. Frank Hampton, formerly Miss Sally Baxter, a great belle in her time, and much admired by Mr. Thackeray. When we were introduced to each other, I asked, "Are you _the_ Mrs. Hampton?" She asked, "Are you _the_ Mrs. Howe?" We became friends at once. The Hamptons went with us to Matanzas, where we passed a few pleasant days. Dr. Howe was very helpful to the beautiful invalid. Something in the expression of her face reminded him of a relative known to him in early life, and on inquiry he found that Mrs. Hampton's father was a distant cousin of his own. Mrs. Hampton talked much of Thackeray, who had been, while in this country, a familiar visitor at her father's house. She told me that she recognized bits of her own conversation in some of the sayings of Ethel Newcome, and I have little doubt that in depicting the beautiful and noble though wayward girl he had in mind something of the aspect and character of the lovely Sally Baxter. In his correspondence with the family he was sometimes very playful, as when he wrote to Mrs. Baxter thanking her for the "wickled palnuts and pandy breaches," which she had lately sent him. When we left Havana our new friends went with us to Charleston, and invited us to visit them at their home in Columbia, S. C. This we were glad to do. The house at which the Hamptons received us belonged to an elder brother, Wade Hampton, whose family were at this time traveling in Europe. Wade Hampton called upon Dr. Howe, and soon introduced a topic which we would gladly have avoided, namely, the strained relations between the North and the South. "We mean to fight for it," said Wade Hampton. But Dr. Howe afterwards said to me: "They cannot be in earnest about meaning to fight. It would be too insane, too fatal to their own interests." So indeed it proved, but they then knew us as little as we knew them. They thought that we could not fight, and we thought that they would not. Both parties were soon made wiser by sad experience. My account of this trip, after publication in the "Atlantic Monthly," was issued in book form by Ticknor and Fields. Years after this time, a friend of mine landed in Cuba with a copy of the book in her hand luggage. It was at once taken from her by the custom-house officers, and she never saw it again. This little work was favorably spoken of and well received, but it did not please everybody. In one of its chapters, speaking of the natural indolence of the negroes in tropical countries, I had ventured to express the opinion that compulsory employment is better than none. Good Mr. Garrison seized upon this sentence, and impaled it in a column of "The Liberator" headed, "The Refuge of Oppression." I certainly did not intend it as an argument in favor of negro slavery. As an abstract proposition, and without reference to color, I still think it true. The publication of my Cuban notes brought me an invitation to chronicle the events of the season at Newport for the "New York Tribune." This was the beginning of a correspondence with that paper which lasted well into the time of the civil war. My letters dealt somewhat with social doings in Newport and in Boston, but more with the great events of the time. To me the experience was valuable in that I found myself brought nearer in sympathy to the general public, and helped to a better understanding of its needs and demands. It was in the days now spoken of that I first saw Edwin Booth. Dr. Howe and I betook ourselves to the Boston Theatre one rainy evening, expecting to see nothing more than an ordinary performance. The play was "Richelieu," and we had seen but little of Mr. Booth's part in it before we turned to each other and said, "This is the real thing." In every word, in every gesture, the touch of genius made itself felt. A little later I saw him in "Hamlet," and was even more astonished and delighted. While he was still completing this his first engagement in Boston, I received a letter from his manager, proposing that I should write a play for Mr. Booth. My first drama, though not a success, had made me somewhat known to theatrical people. I had been made painfully aware of its defects, and desired nothing more than to profit by the lesson of experience in producing something that should deserve entire approbation. It was therefore with a good hope of success that I undertook to write the play. Mr. Booth himself called upon me, in pursuance of his request. The favorable impression which he had made upon me was not lessened by a nearer view. I found him modest, intelligent, and above all genuine,--the man as worthy of admiration as the artist. Although I had seen Mr. Booth in a variety of characters, I could only think of representing him as Hippolytus, a beautiful youth, of heroic type, enamored of a high ideal. This was the part which I desired to create for him. I undertook the composition without much delay, and devoted to it the months of one summer's sojourn at Lawton's Valley. This lovely little estate had come to us almost fortuitously. George William Curtis, writing of the Newport of forty years ago, gives a character sketch of one Alfred Smith, a well-known real estate agent, who managed to entrap strangers in his gig, and drove about with them, often succeeding in making them purchasers of some bit of property in the sale of which he had a personal interest. In the summer of 1852 my husband became one of his victims. I say this because Dr. Howe made the purchase without much deliberation. In fact, he could hardly have told any one why he made it. The farm was a very poor one, and the farmhouse very small. Some necessary repairs rendered it habitable for our family of little children and ourselves. I did not desire the purchase, but I soon became much attached to the valley, which my husband's care greatly beautified. This was a wooded gorge, perhaps an eighth of a mile from the house, and extending some distance between high rocky banks. We found it a wilderness of brambles, with a brook which ran much out of its proper course. Dr. Howe converted it into a most charming out-of-door _salon_. A firm green sod took the place of the briers, the brook was restrained within its proper limits, and some fine trees replaced as many decayed stumps. An old, disused mill added to the picturesqueness of the scene. Below it rushed a small waterfall. Here I have passed many happy hours with my books and my babies, but it was not in this enchanting spot that I wrote my play. I had at this time and for many years afterward a superstition about a north light. My eyes had given me some trouble, and I felt obliged to follow my literary work under circumstances most favorable for their use. The exposure of our little farmhouse was south and west, and its only north light was derived from a window at the top of the attic stairs. Here was a platform just large enough to give room for a table two feet square. The stairs were shut off from the rest of the house by a stout door. And here, through the summer heats, and in spite of many wasps, I wrote my five-act drama, dreaming of the fine emphasis which Mr. Booth would give to its best passages and of the beautiful appearance he would make in classic costume. He, meanwhile, was growing into great fame and favor with the public, and was called hither and thither by numerous engagements. The period of his courtship and marriage intervened, and a number of years elapsed between the completion of the play and his first reading of it. At last there came a time in which the production of the play seemed possible. Charlotte Cushman and Edwin Booth were both in Boston performing, as I remember, but not at the same theatre. They agreed to act in my play. E. L. Davenport, manager of the Howard Athenæum, undertook to produce it, and my dream was very near becoming a reality. But lo! on a sudden, the manager bethought him that the time was rather late in the season; that the play would require new scenery; and, more than all, that his wife, who was also an actress, was not pleased with a secondary part assigned to her. A polite note informed me of his change of mind. This was, I think, the greatest "let down" that I ever experienced. It affected me seriously for some days, after which I determined to attempt nothing more for the stage. In truth, there appeared to be little reason for this action on the part of the manager. Miss Cushman, speaking of it, said to me, "My dear, if Edwin Booth and I had done nothing more than to stand upon the stage and say 'good evening' to each other, the house would have been filled." Mr. Booth, in the course of these years, experienced great happiness and great sorrow. On the occasion of our first meeting he had spoken to me of "little Mary Devlin" as an actress of much promise, who had recently been admired in "several _heavy_ parts." In process of time he became engaged to this young girl. Before the announcement of this fact he appeared with her several times before the Boston public. Few that saw it will ever forget a performance of Romeo and Juliet in which the two true lovers were at their best, ideally young, beautiful, and identified with their parts. I soon became well acquainted with this exquisite little woman, of whose untimely death the poet Parsons wrote:-- "What shall we do now, Mary being dead, Or say or write that shall express the half? What can we do but pillow that fair head, And let the spring-time write her epitaph?-- "As it will soon, in snowdrop, violet, Windflower and columbine and maiden's tear; Each letter of that pretty alphabet That spells in flowers the pageant of the year. * * * * * "She hath fulfilled her promise and hath passed; Set her down gently at the iron door! Eyes look on that loved image for the last: Now cover it in earth,--her earth no more." These lines recall to me the scene of Mary Booth's funeral, which took place in wintry weather, the service being held at the chapel in Mount Auburn. Hers was a most pathetic figure as she lay, serene and lovely, surrounded with flowers. As Edwin Booth followed the casket, his eyes heavy with grief, I could not but remember how often I had seen him enact the part of Hamlet at the stage burial of Ophelia. Beside or behind him walked a young man of remarkable beauty, to be sadly known at a later date as Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Lincoln and the victim of his own crime. Henry Ward Beecher, meeting Mary Booth one day at dinner at my house, was so much impressed with her peculiar charm that, on the occasion of her death, he wrote a very sympathetic letter to Mr. Booth, and became thenceforth one of his most esteemed friends. * * * * * The years between 1850 and 1857, eventful as they were, appear to me almost a period of play when compared with the time of trial which was to follow. It might have been likened to the tuning of instruments before some great musical solemnity. The theme was already suggested, but of its wild and terrible development who could have had any foreknowledge? Parker, indeed, writing to Dr. Howe from Italy, said, "What a pity that the map of our magnificent country should be destined to be so soon torn in two on account of the negro, that poorest of human creatures, satisfied, even in slavery, with sugar cane and a banjo." On reading this prediction, I remarked to my husband: "This is poor, dear Parker's foible. He always thinks that he knows what will come to pass. How absurd is this forecast of his!" "I don't know about that," replied Dr. Howe. CHAPTER XII THE CHURCH OF THE DISCIPLES: IN WAR TIME I must here ask leave to turn back a little in the order of my reminiscences, my narrative having led me to pass by certain points which I desire to mention. The great comfort which I had in Parker's preaching came to an end when my children attained an age at which it appeared desirable that they should attend public worship. Concerning this my husband argued as follows:-- "The children [our two eldest girls] are now of an age at which they should receive impressions of reverence. They should, therefore, see nothing at the Sunday service which would militate against that feeling. At Parker's meeting individuals read the newspapers before the exercises begin. A good many persons come in after the prayer, and some go out before the conclusion of the sermon. These irregularities offend my sense of decorum, and appear to me undesirable in the religious education of the family." It was a grievous thing for me to comply with my husband's wishes in this matter. I said of it to his friend, Horace Mann, that to give up Parker's ministry for any other would be like going to the synagogue when Paul was preaching near at hand. Parker was soon made aware of Dr. Howe's views, but no estrangement ensued between the two friends. He did, however, write to my husband a letter, in which he laid great stress upon the depth and strength of his own concern in religion. My husband cherished an old predilection for King's Chapel, and would have been pleased if I had chosen to attend service there. My mind, however, was otherwise disposed. Having heard Parker, at the close of one of his discourses, speak in warm commendation of James Freeman Clarke, announcing at the same time that Mr. Clarke was about to begin a new series of services at Williams Hall, I determined to attend these. With Mr. Clarke I had indeed some slight acquaintance, having once heard him preach at Freeman Place Chapel, and having met him on divers occasions. It is well known that this, his first pastorate in Boston, was nearly lost to him in consequence of his inviting Theodore Parker on one occasion to occupy his pulpit. The feeling against the latter was then so strong as to cause an influential part of the congregation to withdraw from the society, which therefore threatened to fail for want of funds. Some years later Mr. Clarke resigned his charge and went abroad for a prolonged stay, possibly with indefinite ideas as to the future employment of his life. He was possessed of much literary and artistic taste, and might easily have added one to the number of those who, like George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, and others, had entered the Unitarian ministry, to leave it, after a few years, for fields of labor in which they were destined to achieve greater success. [Illustration: JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE _From a photograph by the Notman Photographic Company._] Fortunately, the suggestion of such a course, if entertained by him at all, did not prevail. Mr. Clarke's interest in the Christian ministry was too deeply grounded to be easily overcome. Returning from a restful and profitable sojourn in Europe, he sought to gather again those of his flock who had held to him and to each other. He found them ready to welcome him back with unabated love and trust. It was at this juncture that I heard Theodore Parker make the mention of him which brought him to my remembrance, bringing me also very reluctantly to his new place of worship. The hall itself was unattractive, and the aspect of its occupants decidedly unfashionable. Indeed, a witty friend of mine once said to me that the bonnets seen there were of so singular a description, as constantly to distract her attention from the minister's sermon. This absence of fashion rather commended the place to me; for I had had in my life enough and too much of that church-going in which the bonnets, the pews, and the doctrine appear to rest on one dead level of conventionalism. Mr. Clarke's preaching was as unlike as possible to that of Theodore Parker. While not wanting in the critical spirit, and characterized by very definite views of the questions which at that time were foremost in the mind of the community, there ran through the whole course of his ministrations an exquisite tone of charity and good-will. He had not the philosophic and militant genius of Parker, but he had a genius of his own, poetical, harmonizing. In after years I esteemed myself fortunate in having passed from the drastic discipline of the one to the tender and reconciling ministry of the other. The members of the congregation were mostly strangers to me, yet I felt from the first a respect for them. In process of time I came to know something of their antecedents, and to make friends among them. After some years of attendance at Williams Hall, our society, somewhat increased in numbers, removed to Indiana Place Chapel, where we remained until we were able to erect for ourselves the commodious and homelike building which we occupy to-day. Our minister was a man of much impulse, but of more judgment. In his character were blended the best traits of the conservative and of the liberal. His ardent temperament and sanguine disposition bred in him that natural hopefulness which is so important an element in all attempted reform. His sound mind, well disciplined by culture, held fast to the inherited treasures of society, while a fortunate power of apprehending principles rendered him very steadfast, both in advance and in reserve. In the agitated period which preceded the civil war and in that which followed it, he in his modest pulpit became one of the leaders, not of his own flock alone, but of the community to which he belonged. I can imagine few things more instructive and desirable than was his preaching in those troublous times, so full of unanswered question and unreconciled discord. His church was like an organ, with deep undertones and lofty, aspiring treble,--the master hand pressing the keys, the heart of the congregation responding with a full melody. Festivals of sorrow were held in Indiana Place Chapel, and many of them,--James Buchanan's hollow fast, a day of mourning for John Brown, and, saddest and greatest of all, a solemn service following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. We were led through these shadows of death by the radiant light of a truly Christian faith, which our pastor ever held before us. Among the many who stood by him in his labors of love was a lady possessed of rare taste in the disposition of floral and other decorations. We came at last to confer on her the title of the Flower Saint. On the occasion last mentioned, when we entered the building, full of hopeless sorrow, we saw pulpit and altar adorned with a rich violet pall, on which, at intervals, hung wreaths of white lilies. So something of the pomp of victory was mingled with our bitter sense of loss. The nation's chief was gone, but with the noble army of martyrs we now beheld him, crowned with the unfading glory of his work. Mr. Clarke's life possesses an especial interest from the fact of its having been one of those rare lives which start in youth with an ideal, and follow it through manhood to old age; parting from it only at the last breath, and bequeathing it to posterity in its full growth and beauty. This ideal appeared to him in the guise of a free church, whose pews should not be sold, whose seats should be open to all, with no cumbrous encounter of cross-interests,--a church of true worship and earnest interpretation, which should be held together by the bond of veritable sympathy. This living church he built out of his own devout and tender heart. A dream at first, he saw it take shape and grow, and when he flitted from its sphere he felt that it would stand and endure. In marriage Mr. Clarke had been most fortunate. He became attached early in life to a young lady of rare beauty, and of character not less uncommon, to whom he once wrote some charming lines, beginning,-- "When shall we meet again, dearest and best? Thou going eastward, and I to the west?" This attachment probably dated from the period of his theological studies at Meadville, Pa. In due course of time the two lives became united in a most happy and helpful partnership. Mrs. Clarke truly attained the dignity of a mother in Israel. She went hand-in-hand with her husband in all his church work. She made his home simple in adornment but exquisite in comfort. She was less social in disposition than he, less excitable, indeed, so calm of nature that her husband, in giving her a copy of my first volume of poems, wrote on the fly-leaf, "To the passionless, 'Passion Flowers,'" and in the lines that followed compared her to the Jungfrau with its silvery light. This calmness, which was not coldness, sometimes enabled her to render a service which might have been difficult to many. I remember that a young minister, a fresh convert from Calvinistic doctrine, preached one Sunday a rather crude sermon, in Mr. Clarke's absence. After the close of the service Mrs. Clarke went up to the speaker, who was expected to preach that evening at a well-known church in the city, and said, "Mr. ----, if you intend to give the sermon we have just heard at the ---- church this evening, you will do well to omit certain things in it." She proceeded to mention the changes which appeared to her desirable. Her advice, most kindly given, was no doubt appreciated. Let me here record my belief that society rarely attains anywhere a higher level than that which all must recognize in the Boston of the last forty years. The religious philosophy of the Unitarian pulpit; the intercourse with the learned men of Harvard College, more frequent formerly than at present; the inheritance of solid and earnest character, most precious of estates; the nobility of thought developed in Margaret Fuller's pupils; the cordial piety of such leaders as Phillips Brooks, James Freeman Clarke, and Edward Everett Hale; the presence of leading authors,--Holmes, Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell,--all these circumstances combined have given to Massachusetts a halo of glory which time should not soon have power to dim. Massachusetts, as I understand her, asks for no false leadership, for no illusory and transient notoriety. Where Truth and Justice command, her sons and daughters will follow; and if she should sometimes be found first in the ranks, it will not be because her ambition has displaced others, but because the strength of her convictions has carried her beyond the ranks of the doubting and deliberate. The decade preceding the civil war was indeed a period of much agitation. The anomalous position of a slave system in a democratic republic was beginning to make itself keenly felt. The political preponderance of the slaveholding States, fostered and upheld by the immense money power of the North, had led their inhabitants to believe that they needed to endure no limits. Recent legislation, devised and accomplished by their leaders, had succeeded in enforcing upon Northern communities a tame compliance with their most extravagant demands. The extension of the slave system to the new territories, soon to constitute new States, became the avowed purpose of Southern politicians. The conscience of the North, lulled by financial prosperity, awoke but slowly to an understanding of the situation. To enlighten this conscience was evidently the most important task of public-spirited men. Among other devices to this end, a newspaper was started in Boston with the name of "The Commonwealth." Its immediate object was to reach and convince that important portion of the body politic which distrusts rhetoric and oratory, but which sooner or later gives heed to dispassionate argument and the advocacy of plain issues. My husband took an active interest in the management of this paper, and indeed assumed its editorship for one entire winter. In this task I had great pleasure in assisting him. We began our work together every morning,--he supervising and supplying the political department of the paper, I doing what I could in the way of social and literary criticism. Among my contributions to the work were a series of notices of Dr. Holmes's Lowell lectures on the English poets, and a paper on Mrs. Stowe and George Sand. "The Commonwealth" did good service in the battle of opinion which unexpectedly proved a prelude to the most important event in our history as a nation. The reading public hardly needs to-day to be reminded that Mrs. Stowe's story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" played an important part in the change of base, which in time became evident in the North. The torch of her sympathy, held before the lurid pictures of slave life, set two continents on fire with loathing and indignation against abuses so little in accordance with civil progress and Christian illumination. Europeans reproached us with this enthroned and persevering barbarism. "Why is it endured?" they asked, and we could only answer: "It has a legal right to exist." Some time in the fifties, my husband spoke to me of a very remarkable man, of whom, he said, I should be sure to hear sooner or later. This man, Dr. Howe said, seemed to intend to devote his life to the redemption of the colored race from slavery, even as Christ had willingly offered his life for the salvation of mankind. It was enjoined upon me that I should not mention to any one this confidential communication; and to make sure that I should not, I allowed the whole matter to pass out of my thoughts. It may have been a year or more later that Dr. Howe said to me: "Do you remember that man of whom I spoke to you,--the one who wished to be a saviour for the negro race?" I replied in the affirmative. "That man," said the doctor, "will call here this afternoon. You will receive him. His name is John Brown." Thus admonished, I watched for the visitor, and prepared to admit him myself when he should ring at the door. [Illustration: JOHN BROWN _From a photograph about 1857._] This took place at our house in South Boston, where it was not at all _infra dig._ for me to open my own door. At the expected time I heard the bell ring, and, on answering it, beheld a middle-aged, middle-sized man, with hair and beard of amber color, streaked with gray. He looked a Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained. We had a brief interview, of which I only remember my great gratification at meeting one of whom I had heard so good an account. I saw him once again at Dr. Howe's office, and then heard no more of him for some time. I cannot tell how long after this it was that I took up the "Transcript" one evening, and read of an attack made by a small body of men on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Dr. Howe presently came in, and I told him what I had just read. "Brown has got to work," he said. I had already arrived at the same conclusion. The rest of the story is matter of history: the failure of the slaves to support the movement initiated for their emancipation, the brief contest, the inevitable defeat and surrender, the death of the rash, brave man upon the scaffold. All this is known, and need not be repeated here. In speaking of it, my husband assured me that John Brown's plan had not been so impossible of realization as it appeared to have been after its failure. Brown had been led to hope that, upon a certain signal, the slaves from many plantations would come to him in such numbers that he and they would become masters of the situation with little or no bloodshed. Neither he nor those who were concerned with him had it at all in mind to stir up the slaves to acts of cruelty and revenge. The plan was simply to combine them in large numbers, and in a position so strong that the question of their freedom would be decided then and there, possibly without even a battle. I confess that the whole scheme appeared to me wild and chimerical. Of its details I knew nothing, and have never learned more. None of us could exactly approve an act so revolutionary in its character, yet the great-hearted attempt enlisted our sympathies very strongly. The weeks of John Brown's imprisonment were very sad ones, and the day of his death was one of general mourning in New England. Even there, however, people were not all of the same mind. I heard a friend say that John Brown was a pig-headed old fool. In the Church of the Disciples, on the other hand, a special service was held on the day of the execution, and the pastor took for his text the saying of Christ, "It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master." Victor Hugo had already said that the death of John Brown would thenceforth hallow the scaffold, even as the death of Christ had hallowed the cross. The record of John Brown's life has been fully written, and by a friendly hand. I will only mention here that he had much to do with the successful contest which kept slavery out of the territory of Kansas. He was a leading chief in the border warfare which swept back the pro-slavery immigration attempted by some of the wild spirits of Missouri. In this struggle, he one day saw two of his own sons shot by the Border Ruffians (as the Missourians of the border were then called), without trial or mercy. Some people thought that this dreadful sight had maddened his brain, as well it might. I recall one humorous anecdote about him, related to me by my husband. On one occasion, during the border war, he had taken several prisoners, and among them a certain judge. Brown was always a man of prayer. On this occasion, feeling quite uncertain as to whether he ought to spare the lives of the prisoners, he retired into a thicket near at hand, and besought the Lord long and fervently to inspire him with the right determination. The judge, overhearing this petition, was so much amused at it that, in spite of the gravity of his own position, he laughed aloud. "Judge ----," cried John Brown, "if you mock at my prayers, I shall know what to do with you without asking the Almighty." I remember now that I saw John Brown's wife on her way to visit her husband in prison and to see the last of him. She seemed a strong, earnest woman, plain in manners and in speech. This brings me to the period of the civil war. What can I say of it that has not already been said? Its cruel fangs fastened upon the very heart of Boston, and took from us our best and bravest. From many a stately mansion father or son went forth, followed by weeping, to be brought back for bitterer sorrow. The work of the women in providing comforts for the soldiers was unremitting. In organizing and conducting the great bazaars, which were held in furtherance of this object, many of these women found a new scope for their activities, and developed abilities hitherto unsuspected by themselves. Even in gay Newport there were sad reverberations of the strife; and I shall never forget an afternoon on which I drove into town with my son, by this time a lad of fourteen, and found the main street lined with carriages, and the carriages filled with white-faced people, intent on I knew not what. Meeting a friend, I asked, "Why are these people here? What are they waiting for, and why do they look as they do?" "They are waiting for the mail. Don't you know that we have had a dreadful reverse?" Alas! this was the second battle of Bull Run. I have made some record of it in a poem entitled "The Flag," which I dare mention here because Mr. Emerson, on hearing it, said to me, "I like the architecture of that poem." Prominent among the helpers called out by the war was our noble war governor, John Albion Andrew. My first acquaintance with him was formed in the early days of the Free-Soil Party, of which he and my husband were leading members. This organization, if I remember rightly, grew out of an earlier one which marked the very beginning of a new movement. Its members were spoken of as "young Whigs," and its principles were friendship for the negro and opposition to war, which at that time was particularly directed against the Mexican war. It was as a young Whig that Dr. Howe consented to become a candidate for a seat in the Congress of the United States. The development of a pro-slavery policy on the part of our government, and the intention made evident of not only maintaining but also extending the area of slavery, soon gave to the new party a very serious _raison d'être_, and under its influence the young Whigs became Free Soilers.[3] [Footnote 3: In the days here spoken of, the Cochituate water was first brought into Boston. I was asked one day to furnish a toast for a temperance festival, and felt moved to send the following: "Free soil,--free water,--free grace," which was well received.] Some of these gentlemen came often to our house, and among them I soon learned to distinguish Mr. Andrew. As time went on, he became a familiar friend in our household. Our mutual interest in the Church of the Disciples, and our regard for its pastor were bonds which drew us together. He was, indeed, a typical American of the best sort. Most happy in temperament, with great vitality and enjoyment of life, he united in his make-up the gifts of quick perception and calm deliberation. His judgments were broad, sound, and charitable, his disposition full of good-will, his tastes at once simple and comprehensive. He was at home in high society, and not less so among the lowly. He was very social in disposition, and much "given to hospitality," but without show or pretense. He had been one of the original members of the Church of the Disciples, and had certainly been drawn toward Mr. Clarke by a deep and genuine religious sympathy. Although a man of most serious convictions, he was able to enter heartily into the spirit of every social occasion. He was with us sometimes at our rural retreat on Newport Island, far from the scenes of fashionable life. I once had the honor of entertaining in this place the members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While we were all busy with preparations for the reception of these eminent persons, Mr. Andrew--he was not as yet governor--offered to compound for the company a pleasing beverage. He took off his coat, and went to work with lemons, sugar, and other ingredients, and was very near being found in his shirt-sleeves by those of the scientists who were first upon the ground. At another time we were arranging some tableaux for one of my children's parties, and had chosen the subjects from Thackeray's fairy tale of the "Rose and the Ring." I came to our friend in some perplexity, and said, "Dear Mr. Andrew, in the tableaux this evening Dr. Howe is to personate Kutasoff Hedzoff; would you be willing to pose as Prince Bulbo?" "By all means," was the response. I brought the book, and Mr. Andrew studied and imitated the costume of the prince, even to the necktie and the rose in his buttonhole. In the years that followed, he as well as we had little time for merry-making. While the political sky was darkening and the thunder of war was faintly rumbling in the air, Dr. Howe said to me one day, "Andrew is going to be governor of Massachusetts." My first recollection of him in war time concerns the attack made upon the United States troops as they were passing through Baltimore. The telegram sent by him to the mayor of that city seemed to give an earnest of what we might expect from him. He requested that the bodies of our soldiers who had fallen in the streets should be tenderly cared for, and sent to their State, Massachusetts. We were present when these bodies were received at King's Chapel burial-ground, and could easily see how deeply the governor was moved at the sad sight of the coffins draped with the national flag. This occasion drew from me the poem beginning,-- "Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms, To deck our girls for gay delights: The crimson flower of battle blooms, And solemn marches fill the nights." When James Freeman Clarke's exchanging pulpits with Theodore Parker alienated from him a part of his congregation, Governor Andrew strongly opposed the views of the seceders, and at a meeting called in connection with the movement made so eloquent a plea against the separation as to move his hearers to tears. [Illustration: JOHN A. ANDREW _From a photograph by Black._] Very generous was his conduct in the case of John Brown, when the latter lay in a Southern prison, about to be tried for his life, without counsel and without money. Mr. Andrew, on becoming acquainted with his condition, telegraphed to eminent lawyers in Washington to engage them for the defense of the prisoner, and made himself responsible for the legal expenses of the case, amounting to thirteen hundred dollars. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1860, and his forethought and sagacity were soon shown in the course of action instituted by him to prepare the State for immediate and active participation in the military movements which he felt to be near at hand. The measures then taken by him were much derided; but, when the crisis came, the heart of the public went out to him in gratitude, for every emergency had been thought out and provided for. The governor now became a very busy man. Who can number the hurried journeys which he made between Boston and Washington, when his counsel was imperatively demanded in the one place and no less needed in the other? These exhausting labors, which continued throughout the war, never disturbed the serenity of his countenance, always luminous with cheerfulness. They were, no doubt, undermining his bodily vigor; but his devotion to public duty was such that he was well content to spend and be spent in its fulfillment. I was present at the State House when Governor Andrew presented to the legislature of Massachusetts the parting gift of Theodore Parker,--the gun which his grandfather had carried at the battle of Lexington. After a brief but very appropriate address, the governor pressed the gun to his lips before giving it into the keeping of the official guardian of such treasures. This scene was caricatured in one of the public prints of the time. I remember it as most impressive. The governor was an earnest Unitarian, and as already said a charter member of the Church of the Disciples. His religious sympathies, however, outwent all sectarian limits. He prized and upheld the truly devout spirits, wherever found, and delighted in the Methodism of Father Taylor. He used to say, "When I want to enjoy a good warm time, I go to Brother Grimes's colored church." Although himself a Protestant of the Protestants, he entertained a sincere esteem for individuals among the Catholic clergy. Among these I remember Father Finotti as one of whom he often spoke, and who was sometimes a guest at his table. When Madame Ristori made her first visit to this country, Father Finotti entertained her one day at dinner, inviting also Governor and Mrs. Andrew. The governor told me afterward that he enjoyed this meeting very much, and described some song or recitation which the great actress gave at table, and which the aged priest heard with emotion, recalling the days of his youth and the dear land of his birth. Once, when Governor Andrew was with us at our summer home, my husband suddenly proposed that we should hold a Sunday service in the shade of our beautiful valley. This was on the Sunday morning itself, and the time admitted of no preparation. I had with me neither hymnal nor book of sermons, and was rather at a loss how to carry out my husband's design. The governor at once came to my assistance. He gave the Scripture lessons from memory, and deaconed out the lines of a favorite hymn,-- "The dove let loose in eastern skies, Returning fondly home." This we sang to the best of our ability. The governor had in memory some writing of his own appropriate to the occasion; and, all joining in the Lord's prayer, the simple and beautiful rite was accomplished. The record of our State during the war was a proud one. The repeated calls for men and for money were always promptly and generously answered. And this promptness was greatly forwarded by the energy and patriotic vigilance of the governor. I heard much of this at the time, especially from my husband, who was greatly attached to the governor, and who himself took an intense interest in all the operations of the war. I am glad to remember that our house was one of the places in which Governor Andrew used to take refuge, when the need of rest became imperative. Having, perhaps, passed much of the night at the State House, receiving telegrams and issuing orders, he would sometimes lie down on a sofa in my drawing-room, and snatch a brief nap before dinner would be announced. I seemed to live in and along with the war, while it was in progress, and to follow all its ups and downs, its good and ill fortune with these two brave men, Dr. Howe and Governor Andrew. Neither of them for a moment doubted the final result of the struggle, but both they and I were often very sad and much discouraged. Andrew was especially distressed at the disastrous retreat in the Wilderness, when medicines, stores, and even wounded soldiers were necessarily left behind. He said of this, "When I read the accounts of it I thought that the bottom had dropped out of everything." He was not alone in feeling thus. While Governor Andrew held himself at the command of the government, and was ready to answer every call from the White House with his presence, he was no less persistent in the visitations required in his own State. Of some of these I can speak from personal experience, having often had the pleasure of accompanying him and Mrs. Andrew in such excursions. I went twice with the gubernatorial party to attend the Agricultural Fair at Barnstable. The first time we were the guests of Mr. Phinney, the veteran editor of a Barnstable paper. On another occasion we visited Berkshire, and were entertained at Greenfield, North Adams, and Stockbridge. Dress parades were usually held at these times. How well I have in mind the governor's appearance as, in his military cloak, wearing scrupulously white kid gloves, he walked from rank to rank, receiving the salute of the men and returning it with great good humor! He evidently enjoyed these meetings very much. His staff consisted of several young men of high position in the community, who were most agreeable companions,--John Quincy Adams, Henry Lee, handsome Harry Ritchie, and one or two others whose names I do not recall. In the jollity of these outings the governor did not forget to visit the public institutions, prisons, reform schools, insane asylums, etc. His presence carried cheer and sunshine into the most dreary places, and his deep interest in humanity made itself felt everywhere. From an early period in the war he saw that the emancipation of the negroes of the South was imperatively demanded to insure the success of the North. It had always been a moral obligation. It had now become a military necessity. When the act was consummated, he not only rejoiced in it, but bent all his energies upon the support of the President in an act so daring and so likely to be deprecated by the half-hearted. His efforts to this end were not confined to his own State. He did much to promote unity of opinion and concert in action among the governors of other States. He strongly advocated the organization of colored regiments, and the first of these that reached the field of battle came from his State. All of us, I suppose, have met with people who are democratic in theory, but who in practical life prefer to remain in relation mostly with individuals of their own or a superior class. Our great governor's democracy was not founded on intellectual conviction alone. It was a democracy of taste and of feeling. I say of taste, because he discerned the beauty of life which is often found among the lowly, the faithfulness of servants, the good ambition of working people to do their best with hammer and saw, with needle and thread. He earnestly desired that people of all degrees, high and low, rich and poor, should enjoy the blessings of civilization, should have their position of use and honor in the great human brotherhood. And it was this sweet and sincere humanity of heart which gave him so wide and varied a sphere of influence. He could confer with the cook in her kitchen, with the artisan at his task, with the convict in his cell, and always leave behind him an impression of kindness and sympathy. I have often in my mind compared society to a vast orchestra, which, properly led, gives forth a heavenly music, and which, ill conducted, utters only harsh and discordant sounds. The true leader of the orchestra has the music in his mind. He can read the intricate scroll which is set up before him; and so the army of melody responds to his tap, and instrument after instrument wakes at his bidding and is silent at his command. I cannot help thinking of Governor Andrew as such a leader. In his heart was written the music of the law of love. Before his eyes was the scroll of the great designs of Providence. And so, being at peace in himself, he promoted peace and harmony among those with whom he had to do; unanimity of action during the war, unanimity of consent and of rejoicing when peace came. So beneficent a presence has rarely shown itself among us. I trust that something of its radiance will continue to enlighten our national counsels and to cheer our hearts with the great hope which made him great. During the years of the war, Washington naturally became the great centre of interest. Politicians of every grade, adventurers of either sex, inventors of all sorts of military appliances, and simple citizens, good and bad, flocked thither in great numbers. My own first visit to it was in the late autumn of 1861, and was made in company with Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Governor Andrew, and my husband. Dr. Howe had already passed beyond the age of military service, but was enabled to render valuable aid as an officer of the Sanitary Commission, and also on the commission which had in charge the condition and interests of the newly freed slaves. Although Dr. Howe had won his spurs many years before this time, in the guerrilla contests of the Greek struggle for national life, his understanding of military operations continued to be remarkable. Throughout the course of the war, I never remember him to have been deceived by an illusory report of victory. He would carefully consider the plan of the battle, and when he would say, "This looks to me like a defeat," the later reports were sure to justify his surmises. [Illustration: JULIA WARD HOWE _From a photograph by J. J. Hawes, about 1861._] As we approached the city, I saw from time to time small groups of armed men seated on the ground near a fire. Dr. Howe explained to me that these were the pickets detailed to guard the railroad. The main body of the enemy's troops was then stationed in the near neighborhood of Washington, and the capture of the national capital would have been of great strategic advantage to their cause. In order to render this impossible, the great Army of the Potomac was encamped around the city, with General McClellan in command. Within the city limits mounted officers and orderlies galloped to and fro. Ambulances, drawn by four horses, drove through the streets, stopping sometimes before Willard's Hotel, where we had all found quarters. From my window I saw the office of the "New York Herald," and near it the ghastly advertisement of an agency for embalming and forwarding the bodies of those who had fallen in the fight or who had perished by fever. William Henry Channing, nephew of the great Channing, and heir to his spiritual distinction, had left his Liverpool pulpit, deeply stirred by love of his country and enthusiasm in a noble cause. On Sundays, his voice rang out, clear and musical as a bell, within the walls of the Unitarian church. I went more than once with him and Mr. Clarke to visit camps and hospitals. It was on the occasion of one of these visits that I made my very first attempt at public speaking. I had joined the rest of my party in a reconnoitring expedition, the last stage of which was the headquarters of Colonel William B. Greene, of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. Our friend received us with a warm welcome, and presently said to me, "Mrs. Howe, you must speak to my men." Feeling my utter inability to do this, I ran away and tried to hide myself in one of the hospital tents. Colonel Greene twice found me and brought me back to his piazza, where at last I stood, and told as well as I could how glad I was to meet the brave defenders of our cause, and how constantly they were in my thoughts. Among my recollections of this period I especially cherish that of an interview with President Abraham Lincoln, arranged for us by our kind friend, Governor Andrew. The President was laboring at this time under a terrible pressure of doubt and anxiety. He received us in one of the drawing-rooms of the White House, where we were invited to take seats, in full view of Stuart's portrait of Washington. The conversation took place mostly between the President and Governor Andrew. I remember well the sad expression of Mr. Lincoln's deep blue eyes, the only feature of his face which could be called other than plain. Mrs. Andrew, being of the company, inquired when we could have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Lincoln, and Mr. Lincoln named to us the day of her reception. He said to Governor Andrew, apropos of I know not what, "I once heerd George Sumner tell a story." The unusual pronunciation fixed in my memory this one unimportant sentence. The talk, indeed, ran mostly on indifferent topics. When we had taken leave, and were out of hearing, Mr. Clarke said of Mr. Lincoln, "We have seen it in his face; hopeless honesty; that is all." He said it as if he felt that it was far from enough. None of us knew then--how could we have known?--how deeply God's wisdom had touched and inspired that devout and patient soul. At the moment few people praised or trusted him. "Why did he not do this, or that, or the other? He a President, indeed! Look at this war, dragging on so slowly! Look at our many defeats and rare victories!" Such was the talk that one constantly heard regarding him. The most charitable held that he meant well. Governor Andrew was one of the few whose faith in him never wavered. Meanwhile, through evil and good report, he was listening for the mandate which comes to one alone, bringing with it the decision of a mind convinced and of a conscience resolved. When the right moment came, he issued the proclamation of emancipation to the slaves. He sent his generals into the enemy's country. He lived to welcome them back as victors, to electrify the civilized world with his simple, sincere speech, to fall by the hand of an assassin, to bequeath to his country the most tragical and sacred of her memories. It would be impossible for me to say how many times I have been called upon to rehearse the circumstances under which I wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I have also had occasion more than once to state the simple story in writing. As this oft-told tale has no unimportant part in the story of my life, I will briefly add it to these records. I distinctly remember that a feeling of discouragement came over me as I drew near the city of Washington at the time already mentioned. I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission. My husband, as already said, was beyond the age of military service, my eldest son but a stripling; my youngest was a child of not more than two years. I could not leave my nursery to follow the march of our armies, neither had I the practical deftness which the preparing and packing of sanitary stores demanded. Something seemed to say to me, "You would be glad to serve, but you cannot help any one; you have nothing to give, and there is nothing for you to do." Yet, because of my sincere desire, a word was given me to say, which did strengthen the hearts of those who fought in the field and of those who languished in the prison. We were invited, one day, to attend a review of troops at some distance from the town. While we were engaged in watching the manoeuvres, a sudden movement of the enemy necessitated immediate action. The review was discontinued, and we saw a detachment of soldiers gallop to the assistance of a small body of our men who were in imminent danger of being surrounded and cut off from retreat. The regiments remaining on the field were ordered to march to their cantonments. We returned to the city very slowly, of necessity, for the troops nearly filled the road. My dear minister was in the carriage with me, as were several other friends. To beguile the rather tedious drive, we sang from time to time snatches of the army songs so popular at that time, concluding, I think, with "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground; His soul is marching on." The soldiers seemed to like this, and answered back, "Good for you!" Mr. Clarke said, "Mrs. Howe, why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?" I replied that I had often wished to do this, but had not as yet found in my mind any leading toward it. I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, "I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper. I had learned to do this when, on previous occasions, attacks of versification had visited me in the night, and I feared to have recourse to a light lest I should wake the baby, who slept near me. I was always obliged to decipher my scrawl before another night should intervene, as it was only legible while the matter was fresh in my mind. At this time, having completed my writing, I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, "I like this better than most things that I have written." The poem, which was soon after published in the "Atlantic Monthly," was somewhat praised on its appearance, but the vicissitudes of the war so engrossed public attention that small heed was taken of literary matters. I knew, and was content to know, that the poem soon found its way to the camps, as I heard from time to time of its being sung in chorus by the soldiers. As the war went on, it came to pass that Chaplain McCabe, newly released from Libby Prison, gave a public lecture in Washington, and recounted some of his recent experiences. Among them was the following: He and the other Union prisoners occupied one large, comfortless room, in which the floor was their only bed. An official in charge of them told them, one evening, that the Union arms had just sustained a terrible defeat. While they sat together in great sorrow, the negro who waited upon them whispered to one man that the officer had given them false information, and that the Union soldiers had, on the contrary, achieved an important victory. At this good news they all rejoiced, and presently made the walls ring with my Battle Hymn, which they sang in chorus, Chaplain McCabe leading. The lecturer recited the poem with such effect that those present began to inquire, "Who wrote this Battle Hymn?" It now became one of the leading lyrics of the war. In view of its success, one of my good friends said, "Mrs. Howe ought to die now, for she has done the best that she will ever do." I was not of this opinion, feeling myself still "full of days' works," although I did not guess at the new experiences which then lay before me. While the war was still at its height, I received a kind letter from Hon. George Bancroft, conveying an invitation to attend a celebration of the poet Bryant's seventieth birthday, to be given by the New York Century Club, of which Mr. Bancroft was the newly-elected president. He also expressed the hope that I would bring with me something in verse or in prose, to add to the tributes of the occasion. Having accepted the invitation and made ready my tribute, I repaired to the station on the day appointed, to take the train for New York. Dr. Holmes presently appeared, bound on the same errand. As we seated ourselves in the car, he said to me, "Mrs. Howe, I will sit beside you, but you must not expect me to talk, as I must spare my voice for this evening, when I am to read a poem at the Bryant celebration." "By all means let us keep silent," I replied. "I also have a poem to read at the Bryant celebration." The dear Doctor, always my friend, overestimated his power of abstinence from the interchange of thought which was so congenial to him. He at once launched forth in his ever brilliant vein, and we were within a few miles of our destination when we suddenly remembered that we had not taken time to eat our luncheon. I find in my diary of the time this record: "Dr. Holmes was my companion. His ethereal talk made the journey short and brilliant." The journal further says: "Arriving in New York, Mr. Bancroft met us at the station, intent upon escorting Dr. Holmes, who was to be his guest. He was good enough to wait upon me also; carried my trunk, which was a small one, and lent me his carriage. He inquired about my poem, and informed me of its place in the order of exercises.... "At 8.15 drove to the Century Building, which was fast filling with well-dressed men and women. Was conducted to the reception room, where I waited with those who were to take part in the performances of the evening." I will add here that I saw, among others, N. P. Willis, already infirm in health, and looking like the ghost of his former self. There also was Dr. Francis Lieber, who said to me in a low voice: "_Nur verwegen!_" (Only be audacious.) "Presently a double line was formed to pass into the hall. Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Bryant, and I brought up the rear, Mr. Bryant giving me his arm. On the platform were three armchairs, which were taken by the two gentlemen and myself." The assemblage was indeed a notable one. The fashion of New York was well represented, but its foremost artists, publicists, and literary men were also present. Mr. Emerson had come on from Concord. Christopher Cranch united with other artists in presenting to the venerable poet a portfolio of original drawings, to which each had contributed some work of his own. I afterwards learned that T. Buchanan Read had arrived from Washington, having in his pocket his newly composed poem on "Sheridan's Ride," which he would gladly have read aloud had the committee found room for it on their programme. A letter was received from the elder R. H. Dana, in which he excused his absence on account of his seventy-seven years and consequent inability to travel. Dr. Holmes read his verses very effectively. Mr. Emerson spoke rather vaguely. For my part in the evening's proceedings, I will once more quote from the diary:-- "Mr. Bryant, in his graceful reply to Mr. Bancroft's address of congratulation, spoke of me as 'she who has written the most stirring lyric of the war.' After Mr. Emerson's remarks my poem was announced. I stepped to the middle of the platform, and read it well, I think, as every one heard me, and the large room was crammed. The last two verses were applauded. George H. Boker, of Philadelphia, followed me, and Dr. Holmes followed him. This was, I suppose, the greatest public honor of my life. I record it here for my grandchildren." The existence of these grandchildren lay then in the problematic future. I was requested to leave my poem in the hands of the committee for publication in a volume which would contain the other tributes of the evening. Dr. Holmes told me that he had declined to do this, and said in explanation, "I want my _honorarium_ from the 'Atlantic Monthly.'" We returned to Boston twenty-four hours later, by night train. Eschewing the indulgence of the sleeper, we talked through the dark hours. The Doctor gave me the nickname of "_Madame Comment_" (Mrs. Howe), and I told him that he was the most perfect of traveling companions. CHAPTER XIII THE BOSTON RADICAL CLUB: DR. F. H. HEDGE The Boston Radical Club appears to me one of the social developments most worthy of remembrance in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. From a published record of its meetings I gather that the first of them was held at the residence of Dr. Bartol in the autumn of the year 1867. I felt a little grieved and aggrieved at the time, in that no invitation had been sent me to be present on this occasion, but was soon consoled by a letter offering me membership in the new association, which, it may be supposed, I did not decline. The government of the club was of the simplest. Its meetings were held on the first Monday of every month, and most frequently at the house of Rev. John T. Sargent, though occasionally at that of Dr. Bartol. The master of the house usually presided, but Mrs. Sargent was always present and aided much in suggesting the names of the persons who should be called upon to discuss the essay of the day. The proceedings were limited to the reading and discussion of a paper, which rarely exceeded an hour in length. On looking over the list of essayists, I find that it includes the most eminent thinkers of the day, in so far as Massachusetts is concerned. Among the speakers mentioned are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Hedge, David A. Wasson, O. B. Frothingham, John Weiss, Colonel Higginson, Benjamin Peirce, William Henry Channing, C. C. Everett, and James Freeman Clarke. It was a glad surprise to me when I was first invited to read a paper before this august assemblage. This honor I enjoyed more than once, but I appreciated even more the privilege of listening and of taking part in the discussions which, after the lapse of many years, are still remembered by me as truly admirable and instructive. I did indeed hear at these meetings much that pained and even irritated me. The disposition to seek outside the limits of Christianity for all that is noble and inspiring in religious culture, and to recognize especially within these limits the superstition and intolerance which have been the bane of all religions--this disposition, which was frequently manifested both in the essays presented and in their discussion, offended not only my affections, but also my sense of justice. I had indeed been led to transcend the limits of the old tradition; I had also devoted much time to studies of philosophy, and had become conversant with the works of Auguste Comte, Hegel, Spinoza, Kant, and Swedenborg. Nothing of what I had heard or read had shaken my faith in the leadership of Christ in the religion which makes each man the brother of all, and God the beneficent father of each and all,--the religion of humanity. Neither did this my conviction suffer any disturbance through the views presented by speakers at the Radical Club. Setting this one point aside, I can but speak of the club as a high congress of souls, in which many noble thoughts were uttered. Nobler than any special view or presentation was the general sense of the dignity of human character and of its affinity with things divine, which always gave the master tone to the discussions. The first essay read before the Radical Club of which I have any distinct recollection was by Rev. John Weiss, and had for its title, "The Immanence of God." It was highly speculative in character, and appeared to me to suggest many insoluble questions, among others, that of the origin of the sensible world. Lord and Lady Amberley, who were present, expressed to me great admiration of the essay. The occasion was rendered memorable by the beautiful presence of Lucretia Mott. Other discourses of John Weiss I remember with greater pleasure, notably one on the legend of Prometheus, in which his love for Greece had full scope, while his vivid imagination, like a blazing torch, illuminated for us the deep significance of that ancient myth. I remember, at one of these meetings, a rather sharp passage at arms between Mr. Weiss and James Freeman Clarke. Mr. Weiss had been declaiming against the insincerity which he recognized in ministers who continue to use formulas of faith which have ceased to correspond to any real conviction. The speaker confessed his own shortcoming in this respect. "All of us," he said,--"yes, I myself have prayed in the name of Christ, when my own feeling did not sanction its use." On hearing this, Mr. Clarke broke in. "Let Mr. Weiss answer for himself," he said with some vehemence of manner. "If in his pulpit he prayed in the name of Christ, and did not believe in what he said, it was John Weiss that lied, and not one of us." The dear minister afterwards asked me whether he had shown any heat in what he said. I replied, "Yes, but it was good heat." Another memorable day at the club was that on which the eminent French Protestant divine, Athanase Coquerel, spoke of religion and art in their relation to each other. After a brief but interesting review of classic, Byzantine, and mediæval art, M. Coquerel expressed his dissent from the generally received opinion that the Church of Rome had always been foremost in the promotion and patronage of the fine arts. The greatest of Italian masters, he averred, while standing in the formal relations with that church, had often shown opposition to its spirit. Michael Angelo's sonnets revealed a state of mind intolerant of ecclesiastical as of other tyranny. Raphael, in the execution of a papal order, had represented true religion by a portrait figure of Savonarola. Holbein and Rembrandt were avowed Protestants. He considered the individuality fostered by Protestantism as most favorable to the development of originality in art. With these views Colonel Higginson did not agree. He held that Christianity had reached its highest point under the dispensation of the Catholic faith, and that the progress of Protestantism marked its decline. This assertion called forth an energetic denial from Dr. Hedge, Mr. Clarke, and myself. M. Coquerel paid a second visit to the Radical Club, and spoke again of art, but without reference to any question between differing sects. He began this discourse by laying down two rules which should be followed by one aspiring to become an artist. In the first place, he must make sure that he has something to say which can only be said through this medium. In the second place, he must make himself master of the grammar of the art which he intends to pursue. While I cannot avoid recognizing the anti-Christian twist which mostly prevailed in the Radical Club, I am far from wishing to convey the impression that those of us who were otherwise affected were not allowed the opportunity of expressing our own individual opinions. The presence at the meetings of such men as James Freeman Clarke, Dr. Hedge, William Henry Channing, and Wendell Phillips was a sufficient earnest of the catholicity of intention which prevailed in the government of the club. Only the intellectual bias was so much in the opposite direction that we who stood for the preëminence of Christianity sometimes felt ourselves at a disadvantage, and in danger of being set down as ignorant of much that our opponents assumed to know. In this connection I must mention a day on which, under the title of "Jonathan Edwards," Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes favored the club with a very graphic exposition of old-time New England Calvinism. The brilliant doctor's treatment of this difficult topic was appreciative and friendly, though by no means acquiescent in the doctrines presented. He said, indeed, that "the feeling which naturally arises in contemplating the character of Jonathan Edwards is that of deep reverence for a man who seems to have been anointed from his birth; who lived a life pure, laborious, self-denying, occupied with the highest themes, and busy in the highest kind of labor." Nevertheless, Wendell Phillips thought the paper, on the whole, unjust to Edwards, and felt that there must have been in his doctrine another side not fully brought forward by the essayist. These and other speakers were heard with great interest, and the meeting was one of the best on our record. I have heard it said that Wendell Phillips's orthodoxy was greatly valued among the anti-slavery workers, especially as the orthodox pulpits of the time gave them little support or comfort. I was told that Edmund Quincy, one day, saw Parker and Phillips walking arm in arm, and cried out: "Parker, don't dare to pervert that man. We want him as he is." I was thrice invited to read before the Radical Club. The titles of my three papers were, "Doubt and Belief," "Limitations," "Representation, and How to Secure it." William Henry Channing was one of the bright lights of the Radical Club, a man of fervent nature and of exquisite perceptions, presenting in his character the rare combination of deep piety with breadth of view and critical acumen. We were indebted to him for a discourse on "The Christian Name," in which he vindicated the claim of Christianity to the homage of the ages. His words, most welcome to me, came to us like reconciling harmony after a succession of discords. A singular over-appreciation of the value of the spoken as compared with the written word led Mr. Channing to speak always or mostly without a manuscript. It was much to be regretted that he in this way failed to give a permanent literary form to the thoughts which he so eloquently expressed, reminding some of his hearers of the costly pearl dissolved in wine. The discourse of which I have just spoken, while arousing considerable difference of opinion among those who listened to it, did nevertheless leave behind it a sweetening and elevating influence, due to a fresh outpouring of the divine spirit of charity and peace. In this connection I may speak of a series of discourses upon questions of religion, mostly critical in tone, which were given at Horticultural Hall on Sunday afternoons in the palmy days of the Radical Club. I had listened with pain to one of these, of which the drift appeared to me particularly undevout, and was resting still under the weight of this painful impression when I saw William Henry Channing coming towards me, and detained him for a moment's speech. "What are we to say to all this?" I inquired. "Be of good cheer," said he; "the topic demanded a telescopic rifle, and this man has been firing at something ten miles away with a blunderbuss." I was always glad of Mr. Channing's presence on occasions on which matters of faith were likely to be called in question. I felt great support in the assurance that he would always uphold the right, and in the right spirit. It was in the strength of this assurance that I betook myself to Mrs. Sargent's house one evening, to hear Mr. Francis E. Abbot expound his peculiar views to a little company of Unitarian ministers. Mr. Abbot, in the course of his remarks, exclaimed: "The Christian Church is blind! it is blind!" Mr. Wasson replied: "We cannot allow Brother Abbot to think that he is the only one who sees." I remember of this evening that I came away much impressed with the beautiful patience of the older gentlemen. I must mention one more occasion at the Radical Club. I can remember neither the topic nor the reader of the essay, but the discussion drifted, as it often did, in the direction of woman suffrage, and John Weiss delivered himself of the following utterance: "When man and woman shall meet at the polls, and he shall hold out his hand and say to her, Give me your quick intuition and accept in return my ratiocination"----A ringing laugh here interrupted the speaker. It came from Kate Field. Mr. Emerson had a brief connection with the Radical Club; and this may be a suitable place in which to give my personal impressions of the Prophet of New England. In remembering Mr. Emerson, we should analyze his works sufficiently to be able to distinguish the things in which he really was a leader and a teacher from other traits peculiar to himself, and interesting as elements of his historic character, but not as features of the ideal which we are to follow. Mr. Emerson objected strongly to newspaper reports of the sittings of the Radical Club. The reports sent to the New York "Tribune" by Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton were eagerly sought and read in very distant parts of the country. I rejoiced in this. It seemed to me that the uses of the club were thus greatly multiplied and extended. It became an agency in the great church universal. Mr. Emerson's principal objection to the reports was that they interfered with the freedom of the occasion. When this objection failed to prevail, he withdrew from the club almost entirely, and was never more heard among its speakers. I remember hearing Mr. Emerson, in his discourse on Henry Thoreau, relate that the latter had once determined to manufacture the best lead pencil that could possibly be made. Having attained this end, parties interested at once besought him to make this excellent article attainable in trade. He said, "Why should I do this? I have shown that I am able to produce the best pencil that can be made. This was all that I cared to do." The selfishness and egotism of this point of view did not appear to have entered into Mr. Emerson's thoughts. Upon this principle, which of the great discoverers or inventors would have become a benefactor to the human race? Theodore Parker once said to me, "I do not consider Emerson a philosopher, but a poet lacking the accomplishment of rhyme." This may not be altogether true, but it is worth remembering. There is something of the _vates_ in Mr. Emerson. The deep intuitions, the original and startling combinations, the sometimes whimsical beauty of his illustrations,--all these belong rather to the domain of poetry than to that of philosophy. The high level of thought upon which he lived and moved and the wonderful harmony of his sympathies are his great lesson to the world at large. Despite his rather defective sense of rhythm, his poems are divine snatches of melody. I think that, in the popular affection, they may outlast his prose. I was once surprised, in hearing Mr. Emerson talk, to find how extensively read he was in what we may term secondary literature. Although a graduate of Harvard, his reading of foreign literatures, ancient and modern, was mostly in translations. I should say that his intellectual pasture ground had been largely within the domain of belles-lettres proper. [Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON _From a photograph by Black._] He was a man of angelic nature, pure, exquisite, just, refined, and human. All concede him the highest place in our literary heaven. First class in genius and in character, he was able to discern the face of the times. To him was entrusted not only the silver trump of prophecy, but also that sharp and two-edged sword of the Spirit with which the legendary archangel Michael overcomes the brute Satan. In the great victory of his day, the triumph of freedom over slavery, he has a record not to be outdone and never to be forgotten. A lesser light of this time was the Rev. Samuel Longfellow. I remember him first as of a somewhat vague and vanishing personality, not much noticed when his admired brother was of the company. This was before the beginning of his professional career. A little later, I heard of his ordination as a Unitarian minister from Rev. Edward Everett Hale, who had attended, and possibly taken part in, the services. The poet Longfellow had written a lovely hymn for the occasion, beginning with this line:-- "Christ to the young man said, 'Give me thy heart.'" Mr. Hale spoke of "Sam Longfellow" as a valued friend, and remarked upon the modesty and sweetness of his disposition. "I saw him the other day," said Mr. Hale. "He showed me a box of colors which he had long desired to possess, and which he had just purchased. Sam said to me, 'I thought I might have this now.'" He was fond of sketching from nature. Years after this time, I heard Mr. Longfellow preach at the Hawes Church in South Boston. After the service I invited him to take a Sunday dinner with Dr. Howe and myself. He consented, and I remember that in the course of our conversation he said, "Theodore Parker has made things easier for us young ministers. He has demolished so much which it was necessary to remove." The collection entitled "Hymns of the Spirit," and published under the joint names of Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, is a valuable one, and the hymns which Mr. Longfellow himself contributed to the _répertoire_ of the denomination are deeply religious in tone; and yet I must think that among Unitarians of thirty or more years ago he was held to be something of a skeptic. Thomas G. Appleton was speaking of him in my presence one day, and said, "He asked me whether I could not get along without the idea of a personal God. I replied, 'No, you ---- ----.'" Appleton shook his fist, and was very vehement in his expression; but his indignation had reference to Mr. Longfellow's supposed opinions, and not at all to his character, which was esteemed of all men. I myself was present when he read his essay on "Law" before the Radical Club. Of this I especially recall a rather elaborate argument against the popular notion of a directing and overruling Providence. He supported his statement by the imagined story of a shipwreck or railroad disaster, in which some would escape injury, while others quite as worthy might be killed or maimed for life. "How," he asked, "could we call a providence divine which, able to save all of those people, should rescue only a part of them, leaving the rest to perish?" When it became my turn to take part in the discussion of this paper, I admitted the logical consistency of Mr. Longfellow's argument. I could point out no flaw in it, and yet, I maintained that the faith in an overruling Providence lay so deeply in my mind that it still persevered, in spite of the ingenious statements to which we had just listened. Mrs. Livermore, who was present on this occasion, expressed herself as much of my opinion, acknowledging the consistency of the demonstration, but declining to abide in the conclusion arrived at. My last recollection of speech with Mr. Longfellow is of an evening on which I lectured at his church in Germantown. He gave me a most hospitable reception, and I found it very pleasant to be his guest. * * * * * To speak of my first impressions of Dr. F. H. Hedge, I must turn back to the autumn of 1841, when he delivered his first Phi Beta address at Harvard College. This was the summer already mentioned as having brought my first meeting with Dr. Howe. Commencement and Phi Beta in those days were held in the early autumn, and my sisters and I were staying at a cottage in Dorchester when we received an invitation from Mrs. Farrar, of hospitable memory, to pass the day at her house, with other guests, among whom Margaret Fuller was mentioned. It was arranged that I should go with Margaret to the church in which the morning meeting would be held. I had never even heard of Dr. Hedge, but I listened to him with close attention, and can still recall the steely ring of his voice, and the effect of his clear-cut sentences. The poem was given by Charles Sprague; and of this I only remember that in one couplet, speaking of the wonderful talents which parents are apt to recognize in their children, he asked whence could have come those ordinary men and women whom we all know. This question provoked some laughter on the part of the audience. As we left the church, I asked Margaret whether she had not found Dr. Hedge's discourse very good. She replied, "Yes; it was high ground for middle ground." Many years after this time, I asked Dr. Hedge what Margaret could have meant by this saying. His answer was that she had hoped to see him take a more pronounced position with regard to the vexed questions of the time. From the church we returned to dine with Mrs. Farrar, on whose pleasant piazza I enjoyed a long walk and talk with Margaret. By and by a carriage stopped before the door. She said, "It is Mr. Ripley; he has come for me. I have promised to visit his wife." In a few words she told me about this remarkable woman, who was long spoken of as "the wonderful Mrs. Ripley." It must have been, I think, some twelve years later that I met Dr. Hedge for the first time at a friend's house in Providence, R. I. He was at this time pastor of the first and only Unitarian church in that city. In the course of the evening which I passed in his company, I was repeatedly invited to sing, and did so, remarking at last that when I began to sing I was like the minister when he began to pray, I never knew when to leave off. Years after this time, I met him walking in Washington Street, Boston, with a mutual acquaintance. This person, whose name I cannot now recall, stopped me and said, "Here is our friend, Dr. Hedge, who is henceforth to be in our neighborhood." I replied that I was glad to hear it, and was somewhat taken aback when Dr. Hedge, addressing me, said, "No, you are not glad at all. You don't care anything about ministers." "Why do you say so?" I rejoined. "I belong to James Freeman Clarke's congregation, and I do care a great deal about some ministers." Dr. Hedge then mischievously reminded me of my speech in Providence, which I had entirely forgotten, and with a little mutual pleasantry he went on his way and I on mine. Dr. Hedge's irony might have been characterized as "a pleasant sour." I think that I felt, in spite of it, the weight and value of his character, even when he appeared to treat me with little consideration. I heard an excellent sermon from him one day, at our own church, and went up after service to thank him for it. I had with me three of my young children and, as I showed them, I said, "See what a mother in Israel I have become." "It takes something more than a large family to make a mother in Israel," said the doctor. I do not quite know how it was that I took him, as the French say, into great affection, inviting him frequently to my house, and feeling a sort of illumination in his clear intellect and severe taste. Before I had come to know him well, I asked Theodore Parker whether he did not consider Dr. Hedge a very learned man. He replied, "Hedge is learned in spots." Parker's idea of learning was of the encyclopædic kind. He wanted to know everything about everything; his reading and research had no limits but those of his own strength, and for many years he was able to set these at naught. He was wonderfully well informed in many directions, and his depth of thought enabled him to make his multifarious knowledge available for the great work which was the joy of his life. Yet I remember that even he, on one occasion, spoke of the cinnerian matter of the brain, usually termed the _cineritious_. Horace Mann, who was present, corrected this, and said, "Parker, that is the first mistake I ever heard you make." Parker seemed a little annoyed at this small slip. I heard a second Phi Beta discourse from Dr. Hedge some time in the sixties. I remember of it that he compared the personal and petty discipline of Harvard College with the independent régime of the German universities, which he greatly preferred. He also said, quite distinctly, that he considered the study of German literature to-day more important than that of the Greek classics. This was a liberal theologian's point of view. I agreed to it at the time, but have thought differently since I myself have acquired some knowledge of the Greek language, and especially since the multiplication of good translations has brought the great works of German philosophy and literature so well within the reach of those who have not mastered the cumbrous and difficult language. Dr. Hedge's last removal was to Cambridge, whither he had been called to fill the chair of the German professorship. I recall with interest a course of lectures on philosophy, which he gave at the university, and which outsiders were permitted to attend. I was unwilling to miss any of these; and on one occasion, having passed the night without sleeping, on the road between New York and Boston, I determined, in spite of my fatigue, to attend the lecture appointed for that day. I accordingly went out to Cambridge, and took my seat among Dr. Hedge's hearers. From time to time a spasm of somnolence would seize me, but the interest of the lecture was so great and my desire to hear it so strong that I did not once catch myself napping. Dr. Hedge was a lover of the drama. When Madame Janauschek first visited Boston, he asked me to accompany him in a visit to her. The conversation was in German, which the doctor spoke fluently. Madame J. said, among other things, that she had intended coming a year earlier, and had sent forward at that time her photograph and her biography. The doctor once invited me to go with him to the Boston Theatre, which was then occupied by a French troupe. This was at some period of our civil war. The most important of the plays given was "La Joie fait Peur." As it proceeded, Dr. Hedge said to me, "What a wonderful people these French are! They have put passion enough into this performance to carry our war through to a successful termination." Dr. Hedge had known Margaret Fuller well in her youth and his own. His judgment of her was perhaps more generous than hers of him, as indicated in her criticism just quoted of his discourse, namely, that it occupied "high ground for middle ground." In truth, the two were very unlike. Margaret's nature impelled her to rush into "the imminent deadly breach," while an element of caution and world-wisdom made the doctor averse to all unnecessary antagonism and conflict. She probably considered him timid where he felt her to be rash. In after years he often spoke of her to me, always with great appreciation. I remarked once to him that she had entertained a very good opinion of herself. He replied, "Yes, and she was entitled to it." He recalled some passages of her life in Cambridge. She once gave a party and invited only friends from Boston, leaving out all her Cambridge acquaintances, who, in consequence, were much offended, and ceased to make their usual calls. A sister of his, Dr. Hedge said, was the only one of those ladies who continued to visit her. He saw Margaret for the last time in Rome, and found her much changed and subdued. She was laboring at the time under one of those severe fits of depression to which her letters from Rome bear witness. The conversation between the two friends was long and intimate. Margaret spoke of the terrible night which she had passed alone upon a mountain in Scotland. Dr. Hedge more than once said to me, "Margaret experienced religion during that night." When, in process of time, the New England Women's Club celebrated what would have been Margaret's sixtieth birthday, Dr. Hedge joined with James Freeman Clarke in loving and reverent testimony to her unusual talents and noble character. I had the pleasure of twice hearing Dr. Hedge's admirable essay on "Luther," which he first delivered at Arlington Street Church, and repeated, some years later, before the Town and Country Club of Newport, R. I. But my crowning recollection of him, and perhaps of the crowning performance of his life, is of that memorable evening of anniversary week in the year 1886, when he made his exhaustive and splendid statement of the substance of the Unitarian faith. The occasion was a happy one. The Music Hall was filled with the great Unitarian audience furnished by Boston and its vicinity. George William Curtis was the president of the evening, and introduced the several speakers with his accustomed grace. He made some little pun on Dr. Hedge's name, and the noble speaker quietly stepped forward, with the fire of unquenchable youth in his eyes, with the balance and reserve of power in every word, in every gesture. No note nor scrap of paper did he hold in his hand. None did he need, for he spoke of that upon which his whole life had been founded and built. Every one of his sentences was like a stone, fitly squared and perfectly laid. And so he built up before us, with crystal clearness, the beautiful fabric of our faith, lifting us, as it rose, to a region of the highest peace and contentment. Oh, the joy of it! My heart rests upon it still. [Illustration: FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE _From a photograph lent by his daughter, Charlotte A. Hedge._] It is well known that Dr. Hedge received the most important part of his education in Germany. He was accordingly one of the first of those who helped to turn the fructifying current of German thought upon the somewhat arid soil of Puritan New England. This soil had indeed produced great things and great men, but the mind of New England was still too much dominated by the traditions of scholasticism, embodied in the system of Calvin. It needed an infusion of the æsthetic element, and the larger outlook of a truly speculative philosophy. The philosophy which it had inherited was one of dogmatism, sophistical in that it made its own syllogisms the final limit and bound of truth. The few Americans who had studied in real earnest in Germany brought back with them the wide sweeping besom of the Kantian method, and much besides. This showed the positive assumptions of the old school to have no such foundation of absolute truth as had been conceded to them. Under their guidance men had presumed to measure the infinite by their own petty standard, and to impose upon the Almighty the limits and necessities with which they had hedged the way of their fellow-men. God could not have mercy in any way other than that which they felt bound to prescribe. His wisdom must coincide with their conclusions. His charity must be as narrow as their own. Those who could not or would not acquiesce in these views were ruled outside of the domain of Christendom. Had it not been for Channing, Freeman, Buckminster, and a few others in that early day, they would have been as sheep without a shepherd. The history is well known. I need not repeat it here. CHAPTER XIV MEN AND MOVEMENTS IN THE SIXTIES This decade, 1860-1870, marks a new epoch in my intellectual life. In the period already described, I had found my way to recognized authorship. In this later time, an even greater enlargement of activity was before me, unanticipated until, by gradual steps, I came into it. The results of my more serious study now began to take form in writings of a corresponding scope. I remember to have heard John Weiss use more than once this phrase, "the poets and men of expression." The antithesis to this, in his view, evidently was, "the philosophers and men of deep thought." I confess that I myself am one of those to whom expression, in some form, is natural and even necessary; and yet I think that my best studies have been those which have made me most desirous to give to my own voice the echo of other voices, and to ascertain by experiment how much or how little of my individual persuasion is in accordance with the normal direction of human experience. In the days of which I now write, it was borne in upon me (as the Friends say) that I had much to say to my day and generation which could not and should not be communicated in rhyme, or even in rhythm. I once spoke to Parker of my wish to be heard, to commend my own thoughts with my own voice. He found this not only natural, but also in accordance with the spirit of the age, which, he said, "called for the living presence and the living utterance." I did not act at once, or even very soon, upon this prompting; the difficulties to be overcome were many. My husband was himself averse to public appearances. Women speakers were few in those days, and were frowned upon by general society. He would have been doubly sensitive to such undesirable publicity on my account. Meantime, the exigencies of the time were calling one woman after another to the platform. Lucy Stone devoted the first years of her eloquence to anti-slavery and the temperance reform. Anna Dickinson achieved a sudden and brilliant popularity. I did not dream of trying my strength with theirs, but I began to weave together certain essays which might be read to an invited audience in private parlors. I then commissioned certain of my friends to invite certain of their friends to my house for an appointed evening, and began, with some trepidation, my course of parlor lectures. We were residing, at this time, in the house in Chestnut Street which was afterwards made famous by the sittings of the Radical Club. The parlors were very roomy, and were well filled by those who came to hear me. Among them was my neighbor, Rev. Dr. Lothrop, who, in speaking of these occasions at a later day, once said, "I think that they were the best meetings that I ever knew. The conversation that followed the readings was started on a high plane." This conversation was only informal talk among those who had been listeners. My topics, so far as I can recall them, were as follows: "How _not_ to teach Ethics;" "Doubt and Belief, the Two Feet of the Mind;" "Moral Triangulation, or the Third Party;" "Duality of Character;" "The Fact Accomplished." My audience consisted largely of my society friends, but was by no means limited to them. The elder Agassiz, Dr. Lothrop, E. P. Whipple, James Freeman Clarke, and William R. Alger attended all my readings. After the first one, Mr. Clarke said to me, "You have touched too many chords." After hearing my thesis on "Duality of Character," he took my hand in his, and said, "Oh! you sweet soul!" Mr. Emerson was not among my hearers, but expressed some interest in my undertaking, and especially in my lecture on "The Third Party." Meeting me one day, he said, "You have in this a mathematical idea." This was in my opinion the most important lecture of my course. It really treated of a third element in all twofold relations,--between married people, the bond to which both alike owed allegiance; between States, the compact which originally bound them together. The civil war was then in its first stage. The air was full of secession. Many said, "If North and South agree to set aside their bonds of union, and to become two republics, why should they not do it?" Then the sacredness of the bond possessed my mind. "Was an agreement, so solemnly entered into, so vital in its obligations, to be so lightly canceled?" I labored with all my might to prove that this could not be done. I remember too that in one of my lectures I gave my own estimate of Auguste Comte, which differed from the general impression concerning him. I am not sure that I should take the same ground in these days. Whether my hearers were the wiser for my efforts I cannot say, but of this I am sure, that they brought me much instruction. I learned somewhat to avoid anti-climax, and to seek directness and simplicity of statement. On the morning of the day on which I was to give my lecture, I would read it over, and a curious sense of the audience seemed to possess me, a feeling of what it would and of what it would not follow. My last corrections were made in accordance with this feeling. A general regret was expressed when my little course was ended, and Dr. Lothrop wrote me quite an earnest letter, requesting me to prolong it if possible. I could not do this at the time; but while the war was at its height, I made a second visit to Washington, where through the kindness of friends a pleasant place was found in which I repeated these lectures, having among my hearers some of the chief notabilities then present at the capital. In my journal of this time, never published, I find the following account of a day in Washington:-- "To the White House, to see Carpenter's picture of the President reading the emancipation proclamation to his Cabinet. An interesting subject for a picture. The heads of Lincoln, Stanton, and Seward nearly finished, and good portraits. "Dressed for dinner at Mrs. Eames's, where Secretary Chase and Senator Sumner were expected. Mr. Chase is a stately man, very fine looking and rather imposing. I sat by him at dinner; he was very pleasant. After dinner came Mrs. Douglas in her carriage, to take me to my reading. Senator Foster and Mr. Chase announced their intention of going to hear me. Mr. Chase conducted me to Mrs. Douglas's carriage, promising to follow. 'Proteus, or the Secret of Success,' was my topic. I had many pleasant greetings after the lecture. Mr. Chase took me in his carriage to his house, where his daughter had a party for Teresa Carreño. Here I was introduced to Lord Lyons, British minister, and to Judge Harris. Spoke with Bertinatti, the Italian minister. Mr. Chase took me in to supper. "Mr. Channing brought me into the room, which was well filled. People were also standing in the entry and on the stairs. I read my lecture on 'The Third Party.' The audience proved very attentive, and included many people of intelligence. George W. Julian and wife, Solomon Whiting, Admiral Davis, Dr. Peter Parker, our former minister to China, Hon. Thomas Eliot, Governor Boutwell, Mrs. Southworth, Professor Bache,--all these, and many more, were present. They shook hands with me, very cordially, after the lecture." I had announced "Practical Ethics" as the theme of my lectures, and had honestly written them out of my sense of the lapses everywhere discernible in the working of society. Having accomplished so much, or so little, I desired to go more deeply into the study of philosophy, and, having greedily devoured Spinoza, I turned to Kant, whom I knew only by name. I fed upon his volumes with ever increasing delight and yet endeavored to obey one of his rules, by having a philosophy of my own. Among my later productions was an essay entitled "Distinctions between Philosophy and Religion." This was suggested by a passage in one of Spinoza's letters, in which he says to his correspondent, "I thought that we were to correspond upon matters of philosophy. I find that instead of these you propose to me questions of religion." On reading this sentence I felt that, in the religious teaching of our own time, the two were apt to be confounded. It seemed to me that even Theodore Parker had not always distinguished the boundary line, and I began to reflect seriously upon the difference between a religious truth and a philosophical proposition. I confess that my nearer acquaintance with the philosophers, ancient and modern, inspired me at this time with the desire of contributing something of my own to the thought of the ages. The names of certain essays of mine, composed after the series just mentioned, and never put into print, will serve to show the direction in which my efforts were tending. Of these, "Polarity" was the first, "Limitation" the second. Then followed "The Fact Accomplished," "Man _a priori_ and _a posteriori_," and finally, "Ideal Causation," which marked my last step in this progress. These papers were designed to interest the studious few who appreciate thought for thought's sake. The paper on "Polarity" was read before the Boston Radical Club. Armed with "Man _a priori_," I encountered an audience of scientists at Northampton, where a scientific convention was in progress. Finally, being invited to speak before the Parker Fraternity on a certain Sunday, and remembering that Parker, in his day, had not feared to let out the metaphysical stops of his organ pretty freely, I took with me into the pulpit the paper on "Ideal Causation," which had seemed to me the crown of my endeavor hitherto. To my sorrow, I found that it did not greatly interest my hearers, and that one who was reported to have wondered "what Mrs. Howe was driving at" had spoken the mind of many of those present. I laid this lesson much to heart, and, becoming convinced that metaphysics did not supply the universal solvent for human evils, I determined to find a _pou sto_ nearer to the sympathies of the average community, from which I might speak for their good and my own. From my childhood the Bible had been dear and familiar to me, and I now began to consider texts and sermons, in place of the transcendental webs which I had grown so fond of spinning. The passages of Scripture which now occurred to me filled me with a desire to emphasize their wisdom by a really spiritual interpretation. From this time on, I became more and more interested in the religious ministration of women; and though it is looking forward some way in my chronicle, this may be the proper place to say that in the spring of the year 1875, I had much to do with calling the first convention of women ministers, which was held in the Church of the Disciples, in anniversary week. Among those who met with us were some plain women from Maine, who told us that they had long acted as evangelists in portions of the State in which churches were few and far between. Several clergymen of different denominations attended our exercises, and one of them, Rev. J. J. Hunting, pronounced ours the best meeting of the week. Among the ordained women who took part with us were Rev. Ellen Gustin, Mary H. Graves, Lorenza Haynes, and Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a fair young mother, who went to her pulpit full of the inspiration of her cradle songs. I would gladly enlarge here, did my limits allow it, upon the theme of the woman ministry, but must take up again the thread of my tale. My husband was greatly moved by the breaking out of the Cretan insurrection in 1866. He saw in this event an opportunity of assisting his beloved Greece, and at once gathered together a committee for collecting funds in aid of this cause. A meeting was held in Boston Music Hall, at which Dr. Holmes, Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett Hale, and other prominent speakers presented the claims of the Cretans to the sympathy of the civilized world. Dr. Howe's appearance did not indicate his age. His eye was bright, his hair abundant, and but slightly touched with gray. When he rose and said, "Fifty years ago I was very much interested in the Greek Revolution," it seemed almost incredible that he should be speaking of himself. The public responded generously to his appeal, and a considerable sum of money was raised. The greater part of this was devoted to the purchase of provisions and clothing for the families of the Cretan combatants, which were known to be in a very destitute condition. In the spring of 1867 Dr. Howe determined to visit Greece, in order to have a nearer view of the scene of action. I accompanied him, and with us went two of our daughters, Julia Romana, remembered as the wife of Michael Anagnos, and Laura, now Mrs. Henry Richards, known as the author of "Captain January." We received gratifying attentions from the wealthy Greeks of London. Passing thence to the continent, we were soon in Rome, where I enjoyed some happy days with my beloved sister, Louisa, then, after some years of widowhood, the wife of Luther Terry. Dr. Howe hastened on to Athens, taking with him our eldest daughter. I followed him later, bringing the younger one with me. Arriving at the Piræus, we were met by a messenger, who told us that Dr. Howe had just escaped a serious danger at sea, and was too much fatigued to be able to come to meet us. We soon joined him at the Hôtel des Etrangers, and inquired eagerly regarding the accident which had befallen him. He had started in a small steamer lent him by the government, intending to visit one of the islands on which were congregated a number of Cretan refugees, mostly women and children. The steamer had proceeded some way on its course when the machinery gave out, leaving them at the mercy of the waves. They were without provisions, and were in danger of drifting out to sea, with no power of controlling the course of the vessel. After many hours of anxious uncertainty, a favorable breeze sprang up, and Dr. Howe tore down the canvas canopy which had shielded the deck from the sun. This he managed to spread for a sail, and by this the vessel was in time brought within reach of the shore. A telegram summoned help from Athens, and the party reached the city an hour or so before our arrival. I here insert some passages from a book of travels, in which I recorded the impressions of this first visit to Greece. The work was published soon after my return to Boston, and was named "From the Oak to the Olive." "Here is the Temple of Victory; within are the bas-reliefs of the Victories arriving in the hurry of their glorious errands. Something so they tumbled in upon us when Sherman conquered the Carolinas, and Sheridan the valley of the Shenandoah, when Lee surrendered, and the glad President went to Richmond. One of these Victories is untying her sandal, in token of her permanent abiding. Yet all of them have trooped away long since, scared by the hideous havoc of barbarians. And the bas-reliefs, their marble shadows, have all been battered and mutilated into the saddest mockery of their original tradition. The statue of Wingless Victory that stood in the little temple has long been absent. But the only Victory that the Parthenon now can seize or desire is this very Wingless Victory, the triumph of a power that retreats not--the power of Truth.... "Poor Greece, plundered by Roman, Christian, and Mussulman! Hers were the lovely statues that grace the halls of the Vatican--at least, the loveliest of them. And Rome shows to this day two colossal groups, of which one bears the inscription, 'Opus Praxitelæ,' the other that of 'Opus Phidiæ.' And Naples has a Greek treasure or two, one thinks, besides her wealth of sculptural gems, of which the best are of Greek workmanship. And in England those bas-reliefs, which are the treasure of art students and the wonder of the world, were pulled from the pediment of the Parthenon, like the pearly teeth from a fair mouth, the mournful gaps remaining open in the sight of the unforgiving world. 'Thou art old and decrepit,' said England. 'I am still in strength and vigor. All else has gone, as well thy dower as thy earnings. Thou hast but these left. I want them, so give them me.'... "We were ushered into a well-sized room, in which lay heaps of cotton underclothing and of calico dresses, most of them in the shape of sacks and skirts. These were the contents of one or two boxes recently arrived from Boston. Some of them were recognized by me as the work of a hive of busy bees who used to gather weekly in my own New England parlor, summoned thither by my daughter Florence, now Mrs. David P. Hall. And what stress there was at those meetings, and what hurrying! And how the little maidens took off their feathery bonnets and dainty gloves, wielding the heavy implements of cutting, and eagerly adjusting the arms and legs, the gores and gathers! With patient pride the mother trotted off to the bakery, that a few buns might sustain these strenuous little cutters and sewers, whose tongues, however active over the charitable work, talked, we may be sure, no empty nonsense nor unkind gossip. "For charity begins indeed at home, in the heart, and, descending to the fingers, rules also the rebellious member whose mischief is often done before it is meditated. At the sight of these well-made garments a little swelling of the heart seized me, with the love and pride of a remembrance so dear. But sooner than we could turn from it to set about our business, the Cretans were in presence. "Here they come, called in order from a list, with names nine syllables long, mostly ending in _poulos_, a term signifying descent, like the Russian 'witzch.' Here they come,--the shapely maiden, the sturdy matron, the gray-haired grandmother, with little ones of all small sizes and ages. Many of the women carried infants at the breast; many were expectant of maternity. Not a few of them were followed by groups of boys and girls. Most of them were ill clothed; and many of them appeared extremely destitute of attire. A strongly-marked race of people, with dark eyes, fine black hair, healthy complexions, and symmetrical figures. They bear traces of suffering. Some of the infants have pined, but most of them promise to do well. Each mother cherishes and shows her little beggar in the approved way. The children are usually robust, although showing in their appearance the very limited resources of their parents. Some of the women have tolerable gowns; to these we give only underclothing. Others have but the rag of a gown--a few strips of stuff over their coarse chemises. These we make haste to cover with the beneficent growth of New England factories. They are admitted in groups of three or four at a time. As many of us fly to the heaps of clothing, and hastily measure them by the length and breadth of the individual. A papa, or priest, keeps order among them. He wears his black hair uncut, his narrow robe is much patched, and he holds in his hand a rosary of beads, which he fingers mechanically. "The dresses sent did not quite hold out, but sufficed to supply the most needy, and, in fact, the greater number. Of the underclothes we carried back a portion, having given something to every one. To an old papa who came, looking ill and disconsolate, I sent two shirts and a good dark woolen jacket. Among all of these only one discontented old lady demurred at the gift bestowed. She wanted a gown; but there was not one left, so that she was forced to content herself, much against her will, with some underclothing. The garments supplied, of which many were sent by the Boston Sewing Circle, under the superintendence of Miss Abby W. May, proved to be very suitable in pattern and quality. As we descended the steps we met with some of the children, already arrayed in their little clean shirts, and strutting about with the inspiration of fresh clothing, long unfelt by them.... "Despite the velvet flatteries and smiling treasons of diplomacy, the present government of Greece is, as every government should be, on its good behavior before the people. Wonderfully clever, enterprising, and liberal have the French people made the author of the 'Life of Julius Cæsar.' Wonderfully reformative did the radicals of 1848 make the Pope. And the Greek nation, taken in the large, may prove to have some common sense to impart to its symbolical head, of whom we can only hope that the 'something rotten in the state of Denmark' may not have been taken from it to corrupt the state of Greece." But it was not through one sense alone that I received in Athens the delight of a new enchantment. My ear drank in the music of the Greek tongue which I constantly heard spoken by those around me. My husband's Greek committee held their sessions in our hotel parlors, and I found that, by closely listening to their talk, I could make out a word here and there. Encouraged by this, I presently purchased a primer and devoted myself to the study of its contents. I had in earlier life made one or two futile attempts to master the language. Now that it became a living tongue to me, I determined to acquire it, and in some measure succeeded. From that time to the present I have never ceased the serious pursuit of what I then began almost in play. In spite of the fact that a price had been set upon his head by the Turkish authorities in Crete, Dr. Howe persisted in his determination to visit the island. His stay there was necessarily limited to a few hours, but what he was able to observe of the character and disposition of the inhabitants led him to anticipate a triumph for their cause. We returned to Boston in the autumn of the same year, and at once began to make arrangements for a fair by which we hoped to raise some money for the Cretans. A great part of the winter was devoted to this work, and in the early spring a beautiful bazaar was held at Boston Music Hall, where the post of president was assigned to me. I was supported by a very efficient committee of ladies and gentlemen, and it was in this work that I became well acquainted with Miss Abby W. May, whose invaluable method and energy had much to do with the success of the undertaking. The fair lasted one week, and our sales and entertainments realized something more than thirty thousand dollars. But alas! the emancipation of Crete was not yet to be. We passed the summer of 1868 at Stevens Cottage, which was very near the town of Newport. I do not exactly remember how it came about that my dear friend and pastor, Rev. Charles Brooks, invited me to read some of my essays at his church on Sunday afternoons. I had great pleasure in doing this. The church was well filled, and the audience excellent in character, and a lady among these one day kissed me after my lecture, saying, "This is the way I want to hear women speak." Another lady, it is true, was offended at some saying of mine. I think that it was to this effect. Speaking of the idle lives of some rich women, I said, "If God works, Madam, you can afford to work also." At this the person in question rose and went away, saying, "I won't listen to such stuff as this." I was not at all aware of the occurrence at the time, nor did I hear of it until the same lady having sent me cards for a reception at her house, I attended it, thereby provoking some comment. I was glad afterwards that I had done so, as the lady in question paid me every friendly attention, and made me quite sure that she had only yielded to a momentary ebullition of temper, to which, indeed, she was too prone. I read the "Phædo" of Plato in the original Greek this summer, and was somewhat helped in this by an English scholar, a university man, who was passing the summer in Newport. He was "coaching" two young men who intended to enter one of the English universities, and was obliged to pass my house on his way to his lessons. He often paid me a visit, and was very willing to help me over a difficult passage. The report of my parlor readings soon brought me invitations to speak in public. The first of these that I remember came from a committee having in charge a meditated course of Sunday afternoon lectures on ethical subjects, to be given without other exercises, in Horticultural Hall. I was heard more than once in this course, and remember that one of my themes was "Polarity," on which I had written an essay, of which I thought, perhaps, too highly. In the course of the season I was engaged in preparing for another reading. Meeting Rev. Phillips Brooks one day in my sunset outing, I said to him, "Do you ever, in writing a sermon, lose sight of your subject? I have a discourse to prepare and have lost sight of mine." "Oh, yes," he replied, "it often happens to me." This confession encouraged me to persevere in my work, and I finished my lecture, and read it with acceptance. I suppose that I may have greatly exaggerated in my own mind the value of these writings to other people. To me, they brought much reflection and unfolding of thought. As I have said in another place, I read the two first named to a small circle of friends at my own house, and was somewhat disappointed at the result, as none of those present seemed willing to assume my point of view. Repeating one of them under similar circumstances at the house of a friend, Henry James, the elder, called upon me to explain some point which my lecture had brought into view. I asked if he could explain the point at issue. He replied that he could not. Being somewhat disconcerted, I said to him, "You should not ask questions which you yourself cannot answer." I meant by this to say that one must not be called upon to explain what is evidently inexplicable. Mr. James, however, did not so understand me, but told me afterwards that he considered this the most extraordinary statement that he had ever heard. He discoursed a good deal after my lecture with much color and brilliancy, as was his wont. His views of the Divine were highly anthropomorphic, and I remember that he said among other things, "My dear Madam, God is working all the time in his shirt-sleeves with all his might." This dear man was a great addition to the thought-power current in Boston society. He had lived much abroad, and was for many years a student of Swedenborg and of Fourier. His cast of mind was more metaphysical than logical, and he delighted in paradox. In his writings he would sometimes overstate greatly, in order to be sure of impressing his meaning upon his readers or hearers. Himself a devout Christian, he nevertheless once said, speaking on Sunday in the Church of the Disciples, that the moral law and the Christian Church were the meanest of inventions. He intended by this phrase to express his sense of the exalted moral and religious obligation of the human mind, the dignity of which ought to transcend the prescriptions of the Decalogue and the discipline of the church. My eldest daughter, then a girl of sixteen, said to me as we left the church, "Mamma, I should think that Mr. James would wish the little Jameses not to wash their faces for fear it should make them suppose that they were clean." Mr. Emerson, to whom I repeated this remark, laughed quite heartily at it. In anecdote Mr. James was inexhaustible. His temperament was very mercurial, almost explosive. I remember a delightful lecture of his on Carlyle. I recall, too, a rather metaphysical discourse which he read in John Dwight's parlors, to a select audience. When we went below stairs to put on our wraps, I asked a witty friend whether she had enjoyed the lecture. She replied that she had, but added, "I would give anything at this moment for a look at a good fat idiot," which seemed to show that the tension of mind produced by the lecture had not been without pain. I once had a long talk with Mr. James on immortality. I had recently lost my youngest child, a beautiful little boy of three years. The question of a future life then came to me with an agonized intensity. Should I ever meet again the exquisite little creature who had been taken from my arms? Mr. James was certain that I should have this coveted joy. He illustrated his belief in a singular way. "I lost a leg," he said, "in early youth. I have had a consciousness of the limb itself all my life. Although buried and out of sight, it has always remained a part of me." This reassuring did not appeal to me strongly, but his positive faith in a life after death gave me much comfort. Mr. James occasionally paid me a visit. As he was sitting in my parlor one day my little Maud, some seven or eight years old, passed by the open door. Mr. James called out, "Come here, Maud. You are the wickedest looking thing I have seen in some time." The little girl came, and Mr. James took her up on his knee. Presently, to my horror, she exclaimed, "Oh, how ugly you are! You are the ugliest creature I ever saw." This freak of the child so impressed my visitor that, meeting some days later with a lady friend, he could not help saying to her, "Mrs. ----, I know that I am ugly, but am I the ugliest person that you ever saw? Maud Howe said the other day that she had never seen any one so ugly." My friend was in truth far from ill-looking. His features were reasonably good, and his countenance fairly glowed with amiability, geniality, and good-will. I found afterwards that my Maud had seriously resented the epithet "wicked looking" applied to her, and had simply sought to take a childish revenge in accusing Mr. James of ugliness. Although Mr. James held much to Swedenborg's point of view, he did not belong to the Swedenborgian denomination. I have heard that, on the contrary, he was considered by its members as decidedly heterodox. I think that he rarely attended any church services. I have heard of his holding a communion service with one member of his family. He published several works on topics connected with religion. CHAPTER XV A WOMAN'S PEACE CRUSADE I had felt a great opposition to Louis Napoleon from the period of the infamous act of treachery and violence which made him emperor. The Franco-Prussian war was little understood by the world at large. To us in America its objects were entirely unknown. On general principles of good-will and sympathy we were as much grieved as surprised at the continual defeats sustained by the French. For so brave and soldierly a nation to go through such a war without a single victory seemed a strange travesty of history. When to the immense war indemnity the conquerors added the spoliation of two important provinces, indignation added itself to regret. The suspicion at once suggested itself that Germany had very willingly given a pretext for the war, having known enough of the demoralized condition of France to be sure of an easy victory, and intending to make the opportunity serve for the forcible annexation of provinces long coveted. As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, "Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?" I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed. I did not dare to make this public without the advice of some wise counselor, and sought such an one in the person of Rev. Charles T. Brooks of Newport, a beloved friend and esteemed pastor. The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasm implored women, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life which costs them so many pangs. I did not doubt but that my appeal would find a ready response in the hearts of great numbers of women throughout the limits of civilization. I invited these imagined helpers to assist me in calling and holding a congress of women in London, and at once began a wide task of correspondence for the realization of this plan. My first act was to have my appeal translated into various languages, to wit: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and to distribute copies of it as widely as possible. I devoted the next two years almost entirely to correspondence with leading women in various countries. I also held two important meetings in New York, at which the cause of peace and the ability of women to promote it were earnestly presented. At the first of these, which took place in the late autumn of 1870, Mr. Bryant gave me his venerable presence and valuable words. At the second, in the spring following, David Dudley Field, an eminent member of the New York bar, and a lifelong advocate of international arbitration, made a very eloquent and convincing address. [Illustration: SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE _From a photograph by A. Marshall, 1870, in the possession of the Massachusetts Club._] In the spring of the year 1872 I visited England, hoping by my personal presence to effect the holding of a Woman's Peace Congress in the great metropolis of the civilized world. In Liverpool, I called upon Mrs. Josephine Butler, whose labors in behalf of her sex were already well known in America. Mrs. Butler said to me, "Mrs. Howe, you have come at a fortunate moment. The cruel immorality of our army regulations, separating so great a number of our men from family life, is much in the public mind just at present. This is a good time in which to present the merits and the bearings of peace." Mrs. Butler suggested that I might easily find opportunities of speaking in various parts of England, and added some names to the list of friends of peace with which I had already provided myself. Among these were Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Winkworth, whose hospitality I enjoyed for some days, on my way to London. This couple belonged to the society of Friends, but had much to say about the theistic movement in the society. In London Mrs. Winkworth went with me, one Sunday, to the morning service of Rev. Charles Voysey. The lesson for the day was taken from the writings of Theodore Parker. We spoke with Mr. Voysey after the sermon. He said, "I had chosen those passages from Parker with great care." After my own copious experiences of dissent in various forms, Mr. Voysey's sermon did not present any very novel interest. I had come to London to do everything in my power to found and foster what I may call "a Woman's Apostolate of Peace," though I had not then hit upon that name. For aid and counsel, I relied much upon the presence in London of my friend, Rev. William Henry Channing, a man of almost angelic character. I think it must have been through his good offices that I was invited both as guest and as speaker to the public banquet of the Unitarian Association. I confess that it was not without trepidation that I heard the toast-master say to the assembled company, "I crave your attention for Julia Ward Howe." My heart, however, was so full of my theme that I spoke very readily, without hesitation, and, if I might judge by the applause which followed, with some acceptance. Sir John Bowring now made my acquaintance, and complimented me upon my speech. The eloquent French preacher, Athanase Coquerel, also spoke with me. The occasion was to me a memorable one. I had already attended the anniversary meeting of the English Peace Society, and had asked permission to speak, which had been denied me on the ground that women never had spoken at these meetings. Finding but little encouragement for my efforts from existing societies in London, I decided to hire a hall of moderate size, where I myself might speak on Sunday afternoons. The Freemasons' Tavern presented one just suited to my undertaking. With the help of a friend, the meeting was properly advertised, and I betook myself thither on the first Sunday afternoon, strong in the belief that my effort was of the right sort, but very uncertain as to its result. Arriving at Freemasons' Tavern, I asked the doorkeeper whether there was any one in the hall. "Oh, yes! a good many," he said. I entered and found quite a numerous company. My procedure was very simple,--a prayer, the reading of a hymn, and a discourse from a Scripture text. I had prepared this last with considerable care, and kept the manuscript of it beside me, but my memory enabled me to give the substance of what I had written without referring to the paper. My impression is that I spoke in this way on some five or six Sundays. Of all these discourses, I remember only the last one, of which the text was, "I am persuaded that neither height nor depth, nor any other creature," etc. The attendance was very good throughout, and I cherished the hope that I had sown some seed which would bear fruit thereafter. I remember that our own poet, Thomas William Parsons, happening to be in London at this time, suggested to me a poem of Mrs. Stowe's as very suitable to be read at one of my Sunday services. It was the one beginning:-- "When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean," and I am glad to remember that I did read it as advised. My work in London brought me in contact with a number of prominent workers in various departments of public service. My acquaintance with Miss Frances Power Cobbe was pleasantly renewed, and I remember attending an afternoon reception at her house, at which a number of literary notabilities were present, among them the brilliant historian, Mr. Froude. I had the pleasure also of meeting Mrs. Peter Taylor, founder of a college for working women; she and her husband had been very friendly to the Northern side during the civil war. An important movement had been set on foot just at this time by Mrs. Grey and her sister, Miss Sherret. This was the institution of schools for girls of the middle class, whose education, up to that time, had usually been conducted at home by a governess. Mrs. Grey encountered a good deal of opposition in carrying out her plans. She invited me to attend a meeting in the Albert Hall, Kensington, where these plans were to be fully discussed. The Bishop of Manchester spoke in opposition to the proposed schools. He took occasion to make mention of a visit which he had recently made to the United States, and to characterize the education there given to girls as merely "ambitious." The scheme, in his view, involved a confusion of ranks which, in England, would be inadmissible. "Lady Wilhelmina from Grosvenor Square," he averred, "would never consent to sit beside the grocer's daughter." I was invited to speak after the bishop, and could not avoid taking him up on this point. "In my own country," I said, "the young lady who corresponds to the lady from Grosvenor Square does sit beside the grocer's daughter, and when the two have enjoyed the same advantages of education, it is not always easy to be sure which is which." I had been privately requested to say nothing about woman suffrage, to which Mrs. Grey had not then given in her adhesion. I did, however, mention the opening of the professions to women in my own country. Mrs. Grey thanked me for my speech, but said, "Oh, dear Mrs. Howe, why did you speak of the women ministers?" Some five or six years after this time I chanced to meet Mrs. Grey in Rome. She assured me that the middle-class schools had proved a great success, and said that young girls differing much from each other in social rank had indeed sat beside each other, without difficulty or trouble of any kind. I had heard that Mrs. Grey had become a convert to woman suffrage, and asked her if this was true. She replied, "Oh, yes; the moment that I began practically to work for women, I found the suffrage an absolute necessity." One of my pleasantest recollections of my visit to England is that of a day or two passed in Cambridge, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Professor J. R. Seeley, author of "Ecce Homo." I do not now recall the circumstances which took me to the great university town, but I remember with gratitude the Seeley mansion, as one should do who was made at home there. Mr. Seeley lent a kind ear to my plea for a combination of women in behalf of a world's peace. I had also the pleasure of hearing a lecture from him on Edmund Burke, whose liberalism he considered rather sporadic than chronic, an expression of sentiment called forth by some exceptional emergency, while the eloquent speaker remained a conservative at heart. He did not, as he might have done, explain such inconsistencies on the simple ground of Burke's Irish blood, which gave him genius but not the logic of consistency. Mrs. Seeley was a very amiable and charming woman. I remember that her husband read to me Calverley's clever take-off of Browning, and that we all laughed heartily over it. A morning ramble made me aware of the beauty of the river banks. I attended a Sunday service in King's College Chapel, with its wonderful stone roof. Here also I made the acquaintance of Miss Clough, sister to the poet. She presided at this time over a household composed of young lady students, to whom some of the university courses were open, and who were also allowed to profit by private lessons from some of the professors of the university. Miss Clough was tall and dark-eyed, like her brother, her hair already whitening, though she was still in the vigor of middle age. She appeared to be greatly interested in her charge. I spoke with some of her students, and learned that most of them intended to become teachers. So ends this arduous but pleasant episode of my peace crusade. I will only mention one feature more in connection with it. I had desired to institute a festival which should be observed as mothers' day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines. I chose for this the second day of June, this being a time when flowers are abundant, and when the weather usually allows of open-air meetings. I had some success in carrying out this plan. In Boston I held the Mothers' Day meeting for quite a number of years. The day was also observed in other places, once or twice in Constantinople, and often in places nearer home. My heart was gladdened, this last year, by learning from a friend that a peace association in Philadelphia still celebrates Mothers' Day. I was very sorry to give up this special work, but in my prosecution of it I could not help seeing that many steps were to be taken before one could hope to effect any efficient combination among women. The time for this was at hand, but had not yet arrived. Insensibly, I came to devote my time and strength to the promotion of the women's clubs, which are doing so much to constitute a working and united womanhood. During my stay in England, I received many invitations to address meetings in various parts of the country. In compliance with these, I visited Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, and Carlisle. In Bristol I was the guest of Mary Carpenter, who gave me some friendly advice regarding the convention which I hoped to hold in London. She assured me that such a meeting could have no following unless the call for it were dignified by the name of some prominent member of the English aristocracy. In this view, she strongly advised me to write to the Duchess of Argyll, requesting an interview at which I might speak to her of my plans. I did write the letter, and obtained the interview. The Duchess, with whom I had had some acquaintance for many years, invited me to luncheon on a certain day. I found her, surrounded by her numerous family of daughters, the youngest of whom carried round a dish of fruit at dessert. Luncheon being at an end, the Duchess granted me a short tête-à-tête. "My only objection to a lady's speaking in public," she said, "is based upon St. Paul's saying: 'I suffer not a woman to teach,' etc." I replied, "Yes; but remember that, in another place, he says that a woman may prophesy wearing a veil." She assented to this statement, but did not appear to interest herself much in my plan of a Woman's Peace Congress. She had always been much interested in Dr. Howe's work, and began to ask me about him, and about Charles Sumner, for whom she entertained great regard. Messages were presently sent in to the effect that the carriage was waiting for the afternoon drive, and I took my leave, expecting no help from this very amiable and estimable lady. Before the beginning of my Sunday services, I received a letter from Mr. Aaron Powell of New York, asking me to attend a Peace Congress about to be held in Paris, as a delegate. I accordingly crossed the Channel, and reached Paris in time to attend the principal séance of the congress. It was not numerously attended. The speakers all read their discourses from manuscript. The general tone was timid and subdued. Something was said regarding the then recent Franco-Prussian war, and the growing humanity shown by both of the contending parties in the mutual arrangements for taking care of the wounded. I presented my credentials, and asked leave to speak. With some embarrassment, I was told that I might speak to the officers of the society, when the public meeting should be adjourned. I accordingly met a dozen or more of these gentlemen in a side room, where I simply spoke of my endeavors to enlist the sympathies and efforts of women in behalf of the world's peace. Returning to London, I had the privilege of attending as a delegate one of the great Prison Reform meetings of our day. As well as I can remember, each day of the congress had its own president, and not the least interesting of these days was that on which Cardinal Manning presided. I remember well his domed forehead and pale, transparent complexion, telling unmistakably of his ascetic life. He was obviously much interested in Prison Reform, and well cognizant of its progress. An esteemed friend and fellow country-woman of mine, Mrs. Elizabeth B. Chace of Rhode Island, was also accredited as a delegate to this congress. At one of its meetings she read a short paper, giving some account of her own work in the prisons of her State. At this meeting, the question of flogging prisoners came up, and a rather brutal jailer of the old school told an anecdote of a refractory prisoner who had been easily reduced to obedience by this summary method. His rough words stirred my heart within me. I felt that I must speak; and Mrs. Chace kindly arose, and said to the presiding officer, "I beg that Mrs. Julia Ward Howe of Boston may be heard before this debate is closed." Leave being given, I stood up and said my say, arguing earnestly that no man could be made better by being degraded. I can only well recall a part of my little speech, which was, I need scarcely say, quite unpremeditated:-- "It is related of the famous Beau Brummel that a gentleman who called upon him one morning met a valet carrying away a tray of neckcloths, more or less disordered. 'What are these?' asked the visitor; and the servant replied, 'These are our failures.' Even thus may society point to the criminals whom she dismisses from her presence. Of these men and women, whom she has failed to train in the ways of virtue and of industry, she may well say: 'These are our failures.'" My words were much applauded, and I think the vote taken was against the punishment in question. The sittings of the congress were mainly held in the hall of the Temple, which is enriched with carvings and coats of arms. Here, also, a final banquet was held, at which I was invited to speak, and did so. Rev. Frederick Wines had an honored place in this assembly, and his words were listened to with great attention. Miss Carpenter came from Bristol to attend the congress, and I was present when she presided over a section especially devoted to women prisoners. A number of the addresses presented at the congress were in foreign languages. A synopsis of these was furnished on the spot by an apt translator. I recall the whole occasion as one of great interest. I must not forget to mention the fact that the only daughter of Edward Livingston, author of the criminal code of the State of Louisiana, was an honored guest at this congress. The meetings at which I spoke in different parts of England were usually presided over by some important personage, such as the mayor of the city. On one occasion a man of the people, quite popular in his way, expressed his warm approval of my peace doctrine, and concluded his remarks by saying, "Mrs. Howe, I offer you the hand of the Tyne-side Orator." All these efforts were intended to lead up to the final meeting which I had determined to hold in London, and which I did hold in St. George's Hall, a place very suitable for such occasions. At this meeting, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Bright sat with me on the platform, and the venerable Sir John Bowring spoke at some length, leaning on his staff as became his age. The attendance was very good. The meeting was by no means what I had hoped that it might be. The ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of woman suffrage, and were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war. I found indeed some helpful allies among my own sex. Two sisters of John Bright, Mrs. Margaret Lucas and Mrs. Maclaren, aided me with various friendly offices, and through their instrumentality the money which I had expended in the hire of halls was returned to me. I had not in any way suggested or expected this, but as I was working entirely at my own cost the assistance was very welcome and opportune. I cannot leave this time without recalling the gracious figure of Athanase Coquerel. I had met this remarkable man in London at the anniversary banquet of the British Unitarian Association. It was in this country, however, that I first heard his eloquent and convincing speech, the occasion being a sermon given by him at the Unitarian Church of Newport, R. I., in the summer of the year 1873. It happened on this Sunday that the poet Bryant, John Dwight, and Parke Godwin were seated near me. All of them expressed great admiration of the discourse, and one exclaimed, "That French art, how wonderful it is!" The text chosen was this: "And greater works than these shall ye do." "How could this be?" asked the preacher. "How could the work of the disciples be greater than that of the Master? In one sense only. It could not be greater in spirit or in character. It could be greater in extent." The revolution in France occasioned by the Franco-Prussian war was much in the public mind at this time, and the extraordinary crisis of the Commune was almost unexplained. As soon as I found an opportunity of conversing with Monsieur Coquerel, I besought him to set before us the true solution of these matters in the lectures which he was about to deliver. He consented to do so, and in one of his discourses represented the Commune as the result of a state of exasperation on the part of the people of Paris. They saw their country invaded by hostile armies, their sacred city beleaguered. In the desperation of their distress, all longed to take active part in some counter movement, and the most brutal and ignorant part of the populace were turned, by artful leaders, to this work of destruction. The speaker gave a very moving account of the hardships of the siege of Paris, the privations endured of food and fuel, the sacrifice of costly furniture as fire-wood to keep alive children in imminent danger of death. In the midst of the tumults and horrors enumerated, he introduced the description of the funeral of an eminent scientist. The quiet cortége moved on to the cemetery where halt was made, and the several speakers of the occasion, as if oblivious of the agonies of the hour, bore willing testimony to the merits and good work of their departed colleague. The principal object of Monsieur Coquerel's visit to this country was to collect funds for the building of a church in Paris which should grandly and truly represent liberal Christianity. I fear that his success in this undertaking fell far short of the end which he had hoped to attain. His death occurred not long after his return to France, and I do not know whether the first stone of his proposed edifice was ever laid. CHAPTER XVI VISITS TO SANTO DOMINGO In the year 1872, Dr. Howe was appointed one of three commissioners to report upon the advisability of annexing Santo Domingo to the United States. The two other commissioners were Hon. Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, and Hon. Andrew D. White. A government steamer was placed at the disposal of the commissioners, and a number of newspaper correspondents accompanied them. Prominent among these was William Henry Hurlburt, at that time identified with the "New York World." Before taking leave of his family, Dr. Howe said, "Remember that you cannot hear from us sooner than a month under the most favorable circumstances, so do not be frightened at our long silence." I have never heard an explanation of the motives which led the press in general to speak slightingly of the Tennessee, the war steamer upon which the commission embarked for Santo Domingo. Scarcely a week after her departure, a sensational account was published of a severe storm in the southern seas, and of a large steamer seen in unavailing struggle with the waves. "The steamer was probably the Tennessee, and it is most likely that she foundered in the storm and went down with all on board." In spite of my husband's warning, I could not but feel great anxiety in view of this statement. The days of suspense that followed it were dark indeed and hard to live through. In due time, however, came intelligence of the safe arrival of the Tennessee, and of the good condition of all on board. It happened that I had gone out for a walk on the morning when this good news reached Boston. On my return I found Dr. Dix waiting, his eyes full of tears, to tell me that the Tennessee had been heard from. The numerous congratulations which I now received showed how general had been the fear of the threatened mishap, and how great the public interest in Dr. Howe's safety. In later years, I made the acquaintance of Hon. Andrew D. White and his most charming wife. Though scarcely on the verge of middle age, her beautiful dark hair had turned completely white, in the unnecessary agony which she suffered in the interval between her husband's departure and the first authentic news received of the expedition. It was a year later than this that Dr. Howe was urged by parties interested to undertake a second visit to Santo Domingo, with the view of furthering the interests of the Samana Bay Company. He had been so much impressed with the beauty of the island that he wished me to share its enchantments with him. We accordingly set sail in a small steamer, the Tybee, in February of the year 1873. Our youngest daughter, Maud, went with us, and our party consisted of Maud's friend, Miss Derby, now Mrs. Samuel Richard Fuller, my husband's three nieces, and Miss Mary C. Paddock, a valued friend. Colonel Fabens, a man much interested in the prospects of the island, also embarked with us. The voyage was a stormy one, the seas being exceeding rough, and the steamer most uneasy in her action. After some weary days and nights, we cast anchor in the harbor of Puerta Plata, and my husband came to the door of my stateroom crying, "Come out and see the great glory!" I obeyed, and beheld a scene which amply justified his exclamation. Before us, sheer out of the water, rose Mount Isabel, clothed with tropical verdure. At its foot lay the picturesque little town. Small carts, drawn each by a single bullock, were already awaiting the unloading of the cargo. We were soon on shore, and within the shelter of a tolerable hotel, where fresh fruits and black coffee restored our sea-worn spirits. The day was Sunday, and I managed to attend a Methodist service held in a commodious chapel. The aspect of the little town was very cheerful and friendly. Negro women ran about the streets, with red turbaned heads and clad in trailing gowns of calico. The prancing little horses delighted me with their swift and easy motion. On the day subsequent to our landing, we accepted an invitation to breakfast at a sugar plantation, not very far from the town. A cart drawn by a bullock furnished the only vehicle to be had in the place. Our entertainers were a young Cuban and his American wife. They had embarked a good deal of capital in machinery; I regretted to learn later that their enterprise had not been altogether successful. The merchants in Puerta Plata were largely Germans and Jews. They were at heart much opposed to the success of the Samana Bay enterprise, fearing that it would build up Samana at the expense of their own town. So, a year later, their money was used to inaugurate a revolution, which overthrew President Baez, and installed in his place a man greatly his inferior in talent, but one who could be made entirely subservient to the views of the Puerta Plata junta. After a day and a night in Puerta Plata we returned to our steamer, which was now bound for Samana Bay, and thence for the capital, Santo Domingo. Let me say in passing that it is quite incorrect to speak of the island as "San Domingo," This might be done if Domingo were the name of a saint, but Santo Domingo really means "Holy Sunday," and is so named in commemoration of the first landing of Columbus upon the island. Of Samana itself I will speak hereafter. After two more days of rough sea travel we were very glad to reach the capital, where the Palacio Nacional had been assigned as our residence. This was a spacious building surrounding a rectangular court. A guard of soldiers occupied the lower story, and the whole of the second floor was placed at our disposal. Furniture there was little or none, but we had brought with us a supply of beds, bedding, and articles necessary for the table. The town afforded us chairs and tables, and with the help of our friend, Miss Paddock, we were soon comfortably installed in our new quarters. The fleas at first gave us terrible torment, but a copious washing of floors and the use of some native plant, the name of which I cannot remember, diminished this inconvenience, to which also we gradually became accustomed. The population of Santo Domingo is much mixed, and I could not see that the blacks were looked down upon by the whites, the greater part of whom gave evidence of some admixture of African blood. In the harbor of the capital, before leaving the steamer, I had had some conversation with one François, a man of color, who had come on board to secure the services of one of our fellow-passengers, an aged clergyman, for his church. The old gentleman insisted that he was past preaching, on account of his age and infirmities. I began to question François about his church, and found that it consisted of a small congregation of very poor colored people, all Americans by birth or descent. They held their services only on Sunday evenings, having neither clothes nor shoes fit for appearance in the daytime. Their real minister had died, and an elder who had taken his place was too lame to cross the river in order to attend the services, so they had to do without preaching. I cannot remember just how it came about, but I engaged to hold service for them on Sunday evenings during my stay at the capital. Behold me then, on my first Sunday evening, entering the little wooden building with its mud floor. It boasted a mahogany pulpit of some size, but I took my seat within the chancel rail and began my ministration. I gave out the hymns, and the tattered hymn-books were turned over. I soon learned that this was a mere form, few of those present being able to read. They knew the hymns by heart and sang them with a will. I had prepared my sermon very carefully, being anxious really to interest these poor shepherdless sheep. They appeared to listen very thankfully, and I continued these services until nearly the time of my departure from the island. I had not brought any written sermons with me, nor had I that important aid in sermonizing, a concordance. A young daughter of Colonel Fabens, a good Bible scholar, used to find my texts for me. I remember that, after my first preaching, a young woman called upon me and quoted some words from my sermon, very much in the sense of the old anecdote about "that blessed word Mesopotamia." When Good Friday and Easter came my colored people besought me to hold extra services, in order that their young folks might understand that these sacred days were of as much significance to them as to the Catholics, by whom they were surrounded. I naturally complied with their request, and arranged to have the poor little place decorated with palms and flowers for the Easter service. I have always remembered with pleasure one feature of my Easter sermon. In this I tried to describe Dante's beautiful vision of a great cross in the heavens, formed of clusters of stars, the name of Christ being inscribed on each cluster. The thought that the mighty poet of the fourteenth century should have had something to impart to these illiterate negroes was very dear to me. As soon as the report of my preaching became noised abroad, the aged elder, whose place I had taken, bestirred himself and managed to put in an appearance at the little church. He mounted the stairs of the mahogany pulpit, and seemed to keep guard over the congregation, while I continued to speak from the chancel. I invited him to give out the hymns, which he did, mentioning also the page on which they would be found. He afterwards told me that his wife, who could read, had taught him those hymns. "I never could do nothing with books," he said. We found but little English spoken at the capital except among the colored people. I always recall with amusement a bit of conversation which I had with one of the merchants who was fond of speaking our language. He had sent his errand boy to us with a message. Meeting him later in the day, I said, "I saw your servant this morning." "Yes, ze nigger. He mudder fooley in St. Thomas." I made some effort to ascertain what were the educational advantages afforded in the capital. I found there a school for boys, under the immediate charge of the Catholic clergy. Hearing also of a school for girls, founded and administered by a young woman of the city, I called one day to find out what I could of her and of her work. She was the daughter of a woman physician who had much reputation in the place. Her mother had received no technical medical education, but had practiced nursing under the best doctors, and had also acquired through experience a considerable understanding of the uses of herbs. She was a devout Catholic, and having once been desperately ill, had vowed her infant daughter to the Virgin in case of her recovery. The daughter had not entered a convent, but had devoted herself to the training of young girls. She appeared to be a very modest and simple person, and was pleased to have me inspect the needlework, maps, and copy books of her pupils. "At any rate, I keep them out of the street," she said. François, my first colored acquaintance at the capital, had spoken to me of a Bible society formed there. It was a secret association, and he told me several times that its members earnestly desired to make my acquaintance. I finally arranged with him to attend one of their meetings, and went, in his company, to a building in which an inner room was set apart for their use. I was ushered into this with some ceremony, and found a company of natives of various shades of color. On a raised platform were seated the presiding officers of the occasion. Presently one of these rang his bell and began to address me in a rather high-flown style, assuring me that my noble works were well understood by those present, and that they greatly desired to hear from me. I was much puzzled at this address, feeling almost certain that nothing that I had ever done would have been likely to penetrate the atmosphere of this isolated spot. The speech was in Spanish and I was expected to reply in the same language. This I was not able to do, my knowledge of Spanish being limited to a few colloquial phrases. The French language answered pretty well, however, and in this I managed to express my thanks for the honor done me and my sincere interest in the welfare of the island. All present had risen to receive me. There seemed to be nothing further for me to do, and I took leave, followed by clapping of hands. To this day I have never been able to understand the connection of this association with any Bible society, and still less the flattering mention made of some supposed merits on my part. François warned me that this meeting was not to be generally spoken of, and I endeavored to preserve a discreet silence regarding it. On another evening we were all invited to attend the public exercises of a debating club of young men. The question to be argued was whether it is permissible to do evil in view of a supposed good result. The debate was a rather spirited one. The best of the speakers, who had been educated in Spain, had much to say of the philosopher Balmés, whose sayings he more than once quoted. The question having been decided in the negative, the speaker who had maintained the unethical side of the question explained that he had done this only because it was required of him, his convictions and sympathies being wholly on the other side. President Baez had received us with great cordiality. He called upon us soon after our arrival, having previously sent us a fine basket of fruit. He seemed an intelligent man, and my husband's estimate of him was much opposed to that conveyed in Mr. Sumner's invective against "a traitor who sought to sell his own country." Baez had sense enough to recognize the security which annexation to the United States would give to his people. The English are sometimes spoken of as "a nation of shopkeepers." Santo Domingo might certainly be called a city of shopkeepers. When we visited it, all of the principal families were engaged in trade. When daughters were considered of fit age to enter society, they made their début behind the counter of their father or uncle. My husband decided, soon after our arrival, to invite the townspeople to a dance. In preparation for this festivity, the largest room in the palace was swept and garnished with flowers. A native band of musicians was engaged, and a merry and motley throng invaded our sober premises. The favorite dances were mostly of the order of the "contradanza," which I had seen in Cuba. This is a slow and stately measure, suited to the languor of a hot climate. I ventured to introduce a Virginia Reel, which was not much enjoyed by the natives. President Baez did not honor us with his presence, but his brother Damian and his sister Rosita were among our guests. A United States warship was in the harbor, and its officers were a welcome reinforcement to our company. Among these was Lieutenant De Long, well remembered now as the leader of the ill-fated Jeannette expedition. At two o'clock in the morning my husband showed signs of extreme fatigue. I felt that the gayeties must cease, and was obliged to say to some of the older guests that Dr. Howe's health would not permit him to entertain them longer. It seemed like sending children home from a Christmas party, the dancers appeared so much taken aback. They had expected to dance until day dawn. Still they departed without objecting. The next day those of us who visited the principal street of the city saw the beaux of the night before busy in their shops, some of them in shirt-sleeves. Our days passed very quietly. Dr. Howe took his accustomed ride before breakfast. One feature of this meal consisted of water-cocoanuts, gathered while the night dew was on them, and of a delicious coolness. The water having been poured out, the nuts were thrown into the court below, where the soldiers of the guard ate them greedily. The rations served out to these men consisted simply of strips of sugar cane. Their uniforms were of seersucker, and the homely palm-leaf hat completed their costume. After breakfast I usually sat at my books, often preparing my Sunday sermon. A siesta followed the noonday repast, and after this the greatest amusement of the day began. The little, fiery steeds were brought into the courtyard, and I rode forth, followed by my young companions and escorted by the assistant secretary of the treasury. Several of the young gentlemen of the town who could command the use of a horse would join our cavalcade, as we swept out of the city limits and into the beautiful regions beyond. The horses have a peculiarly easy gait, and are yet very swift and gentle. As the season advanced, and the spring showers began to fall, we were sometimes glad to take refuge under a mango tree, its spreading branches and thick foliage sheltering us like a tent. Our cavaliers, in view of this emergency, were apt to provide themselves with umbrellas, to the opening and shutting of which the horses were well accustomed. In case of any chill "a little rum" was always recommended. The careless mention of this typical beverage amused and almost frightened me, accustomed to hear rum spoken of with bated breath, as if unfit even for mention. The besetting evil of the island seemed to be lockjaw. I was told that the smallest wound or scratch, or even a chill, might produce it. I distinctly remember having several times felt an unusual stiffness of the lower jaw, consequent upon a slight check of perspiration. I cannot imagine a more delightful winter climate than that of Santo Domingo. Dr. Howe used sometimes to come to my study and ask, "Are you comfortable?" "Perfectly comfortable. Why do you ask?" "Because the thermometer stands at 86° Fahrenheit." A delicious sea-breeze blew in at the wide open window, and we who sat in it had no feeling of extreme heat. I remember a little excursion which we made on horseback to a village some twelve miles distant from the capital. We started in the very early morning, wishing to reach the place of our destination before the approach of noon. It was still quite dark when we mounted our horses, with a faithful escort of Dominican friends. "_Sabrosa mañana!_" exclaimed the assistant secretary of the treasury, who rode beside me. Our road lay through a beautiful bit of forest land. The dawn found us at a pretty and primitive ferry, which we crossed without dismounting. The beauty of the scenery was beyond description. The air was refreshed by a succession of little mountain streamlets, which splashed with a cool sound about our horses' feet. Arriving at the village we found a newly erected _bohio_, or hut of palm-wood strips, prepared for us. It was hung with hammocks and furnished with rockingchairs, with a clean floor of sand and pebbles. At a neighboring _fonda_ luncheon was served to our party. We returned to our _bohio_ for a much needed siesta, reserving the afternoon for a ramble. A service was going on at the village church. After a late dinner we went to visit the priest. His servant woman appeared reluctant to admit us. This we understood when the old gentleman came forward to receive us, dressed like a peasant, and wearing a handkerchief tied about his head in peasant fashion. To me, as the senior lady of the party, he offered a cigar. He took pains to return our visit the next day, but came to our _bohio_ in full canonicals. He was anxious to possess a certain Spanish work on botany, and offered me a sum of money in prepayment of its price. This I declined to receive, feeling that the chances were much against my ever being able to fulfill his commission. Immediately after his visit we mounted our steeds and rode back to the capital, which we reached after the great gate had been closed for the night, a narrow postern opening to admit our party one by one. Before our departure from the island, President Baez invited us to a state dinner at his residence. The appointments of the table were elegant and tasteful. The repast was a long one, consisting of a great variety of Dominican dishes, which appeared and disappeared with great celerity. Before the dessert was served, we were requested to leave the table and return to the sitting-room. Presently we came back to the table, and found it spread with fruits and sweets innumerable. Two years after this time, my husband's health required a change of climate. He decided to visit Santo Domingo once more, and was anxious that I should accompany him. I was rather unwilling to do so, being much engaged at home. Wishing to offer me the greatest inducement, he said, "You shall preach to your colored folks as much as you like." In March of 1875, accordingly, we set sail in the same Tybee which had carried us on our first voyage to the beautiful island. The political situation meantime had greatly changed. The revolution already spoken of had expelled President Baez, and had put in his place a man devoted to the interests of Puerta Plata, as opposed to the growth of Samana. We landed at the capital, and as we walked up the street to our hotel familiar forms emerged from the shops on the right and on the left. These friends all accosted us with eager questions:-- "Addonde estan las muchachas?" (Where are the girls?) "Addonde esta Maud?" "Addonde esta Lucia?" We were obliged to say that they were not with us, and the blank, disappointed faces showed that we, the elders, counted for little in the absence of "metal more attractive." After a short stay at the capital, we reëmbarked for Samana, where we passed some weeks of delightful quiet in a pretty cottage on the outskirts of the little town. On the evening of our taking possession, I stood at the door of our new abode, watching the moon rise and overtop two stately palms which formed the immediate foreground of our landscape. On the left was the pretty crescent-shaped beach, and beyond it the lights of the town shone brightly. This was a foretaste of many delightful hours in which my soul was fed with the beauty of my surroundings. Our cottage was distant about a mile from the town, which my husband liked to visit every morning. It was possible to go thither by the beach, but he preferred to take a narrow bridle path on the side of a very steep hill. I had never been a bold rider, and I must confess that I suffered agonies of fear in following him on these expeditions. If I lagged behind, he would cry, "Come on! it's as bad as going to a funeral to ride with you." And so, I suppose, it was. I remember one day when a great palm branch had fallen across our path. I thought that my horse would certainly slip on it, sending me to depths below. Fortunately he did not. That very day, while Dr. Howe was taking his siesta, I went to the place where this impediment lay, and with a great effort threw it over the steep mountain-side. The whole neighborhood of Samana is very mountainous, and I sometimes found it impossible to obey the word of command. One day my husband spurred his horse and made a gallant dash at a very steep ascent, ordering me to follow him. I tried my best, but only got far enough to find myself awkwardly at a standstill, and unable to go either backward or forward. The Doctor was obliged to dismount and to lead my horse down to the level ground. This, he assured me, was a severe mortification for him. Dr. Howe desired at this time to make a journey on horseback to a part of the interior which he had not visited. He engaged as a guide a man familiar with the region and able on foot to keep pace with any ordinary horse. I remember that this man asked for a warning of some days, in order that he might purchase his _combustibles_, meaning comestibles. This journey, often talked of, was never undertaken. We sometimes varied the even tenor of our days in Samana by a sail in the pretty steam launch belonging to the Samana Bay Company. On one occasion we took a rowboat and went to visit an English carpenter who had built himself a hut in the forest not far from the shore. We found his wife surrounded by her young family. The cabin was provided with berths for sleeping accommodation. The household work was done mostly in the open air. On a rude table I found some Greek books. "Whose are those?" I asked. "Oh, they belong to my husband. He studies Greek in order to understand the New Testament." Yet this man was so illiterate as to allow some pupils of his to use a small i for our personal pronoun. In spite of my husband's permission, I did not preach very much during this visit to Samana. I found there a Methodist church with a settled pastor. I did take part in an open-air service one Sunday afternoon. The place chosen was well up on the side of a mountain, the assembly consisting entirely of colored people. I arrived a little after time and found a zealous elder speaking. When he saw me he said, "And now dat de lady hab come I will _obdunk_ [abdicate] from de place." A little school kept by the carpenter was not far from this spot. It occupied a shed in a region magnificent with palms. I went one day, by special arrangement, to speak to the pupils, who were of both sexes. The ascent was so steep that I was glad to avail myself of the offer of a steer with a straw saddle on his back, led by a youth of the neighborhood. From the school I went to the hut of a colored woman, who had requested the honor of entertaining me at lunch, and who waited upon me with great good-will. While I was still resting in the shade of the cabin a man appeared, leading two saddle horses and bearing a missive from Dr. Howe, requesting my immediate return. I have elsewhere alluded to this and to Dr. Howe's touching words, "Our dear, noble Sumner is no more. Come home at once. I am much distressed." My husband had been greatly chagrined by Mr. Sumner's conduct with regard to the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo. The death of his lifelong friend seemed to bring back all his old tenderness and he grieved deeply over his loss. Of the longevity of the negro population of Santo Domingo we heard wonderful accounts. I myself, while in Samana, saw and spoke with a colored woman who was said to have reached the age of one hundred and thirty years. She was a native of Maryland, and had become a mother and a grandmother before leaving the United States. In Samana she married again and had a second set of children and grandchildren. These particulars I learned from a daughter of her second marriage, herself a woman of forty. The aged mother and grandmother came up to Samana during my stay there to make some necessary purchases. Her figure was slender and, as the French say, "_bien-prise_." Her only infirmity appeared to be her deafness. A curious custom in this small community was the consecration of all houses as soon as completed. This was usually made the occasion of what we term a house-warming. Friends were invited, and were expected to make contributions of cake. The priest of the parish offered prayer and sprinkled the premises with holy water, after which the festivities commenced. The music consisted of a harmonicon and a notched gourd, which was scraped with an iron rod to mark the time. Cakes and lemonade were handed about in trays. Grandmothers sat patient with their grandbabes on their laps while the mothers danced to their hearts' content. It chanced one day that I attended one of these merry-makings. While the dance was in progress a superbly handsome man, bronze in complexion and very polite in manner, commanded from the musicians, "Una polka por Madama Howe." I had neither expected nor desired to dance, but felt obliged to accept this invitation. A large proportion of the Dominicans, be it said in passing, are of mixed race, the white element in them being mostly Spanish. This last so predominates that the leading negro characteristics are rarely observed among them. They are intelligent people, devout in their Catholicism and generally very honest. Families of the wealthier class are apt to send their sons to Spain for education. Quite distinct from these are the American blacks, who are the remnant and in large part the descendants of an exodus of free negroes from our Middle States, which took place in the neighborhood of the year 1840. These people are Methodists, but are, for some reason, entirely neglected by the denomination, both in England and in America. They are anxious to keep their young folks within the pale of Protestantism. Of such was composed my little congregation in the city of Santo Domingo. In the place last named I made the acquaintance of a singular family of birds, individuals of which were domesticated in many houses. These creatures could be depended upon to give the household warning of the approach of a stranger. They also echoed with notes of their own the hourly striking of the city clocks, and zealously destroyed all the insects which are generated by the heat of a tropical climate. The _per contra_ is that they themselves are rather malodorous. During my stay in Samana a singular woman attached herself to me. She was a mulatto, and her home was on a mountain side in the neighborhood of the school of which I have just spoken. Here she was rarely to be found; and her husband bewailed her frequent absences and consequent neglect of her large family. She had some knowledge of herbs, which she occasionally made available in nursing the sick. She one day brought her aged mother to visit me, and the elder woman, speaking of her, said, "Oh, yes! Rosanna's got edication." Of this "edication" I had a specimen in a letter which she wrote me after my departure, and which began thus, "Hailyal [hallelujah], Mrs. Howe, here's hopin." In these days the brilliant scheme of the Samana Bay Company came to its final failure. The Dominican government now insisted that the flag of the company should be officially withdrawn. The Tybee having departed on her homeward voyage, the one warship of the republic made its appearance in the harbor, a miserable little schooner, but one that carried a gun. On the morrow of her arrival, a scene of some interest was enacted. The employees of the company, all colored men, marched to the building over which the flag was floating. Every man carried a fresh rose at the end of his musket. Dr. Howe made a pathetic little speech, explanatory of the circumstances, and a military salute was fired as the flag was hauled down. A spiteful caricature appeared in a paper published, I think, at the capital, representing the transaction just mentioned, with Dr. Howe in the foreground in an attitude of deep dejection, Mrs. Howe standing near, and saying, "Never mind." * * * * * From my own memoir of Dr. Howe I quote the following record of his last days on earth. "The mild climate and exercise in the open air had done all that could have been expected for Dr. Howe, and he returned from Santo Domingo much improved in health. The seeds of disease, however, were still lurking in his system, and the change from tropical weather to our own uncertain spring brought on a severe attack of rheumatism, by which his strength was greatly reduced. He rallied somewhat in the autumn, and was able to pass the winter in reasonable comfort and activity. "The first of May, 1875, found him at his country seat in South Portsmouth, R. I., where the planting of his garden and the supervision of his poultry afforded him much amusement and occupation. In the early summer he was still able to ride the beautiful Santo Domingo pony which President Baez had sent him three years before. This resource, however, soon failed him, and his exercise became limited to a short walk in the neighborhood of his house. His strength constantly diminished during the summer, yet he retained his habits of early rising and of active occupation, as well as his interest in matters public and private. He returned to Boston in the autumn, and seemed at first benefited by the change. He felt, however, and we felt, that a change was impending. "On Christmas day he was able to dine with his family, and to converse with one or two invited guests. On the first of January he said to an intimate friend: 'I have told my people that they will bury me this month.' This was merely a passing impression, as in fact he had not so spoken to any of us. On January 4th, while up and about as usual, he was attacked by sudden and severe convulsions, followed by insensibility; and on January 9th he breathed his last, surrounded by his family, and apparently without pain or consciousness. Before the end Laura Bridgman was brought to his bedside, to touch once more the hand that had unlocked the world to her. She did so, weeping bitterly." A great mourning was made for Dr. Howe. Eulogies were pronounced before the legislature of Massachusetts, and resolutions of regret and sympathy came to us from various beneficent associations. From Greece came back a touching echo of our sorrow, and by an order, sent from thence, a floral tribute was laid upon the casket of the early friend and champion of Greek liberties. A beautiful helmet and sword, all of violets, the parting gift of the household, seemed a fitting recognizance for one whom Whittier has named "The Modern Bayard." Shortly after this sad event a public meeting was held in Boston Music Hall in commemoration of Dr. Howe's great services to the community. The governor of Massachusetts (Hon. Alexander H. Rice) presided, and testimonials were offered by many eminent men. Poems written for the occasion were contributed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Ellery Channing, and Rev. Charles T. Brooks. Of these exercises I will only say that, although my husband's life was well known to me, I listened almost with amazement to the summing up of its deeds of merit. It seemed almost impossible that so much good could be soberly said of any man, and yet I knew that it was all said truthfully and in grave earnest. My husband's beloved pupil, Laura Bridgman, was seated upon the platform, where a friend interpreted the proceedings to her in the finger language. The music, which was of a high order, was furnished by the pupils of the institution for the blind at South Boston. The occasion was one never to be forgotten. As I review it after an interval of many years, I find that the impression made upon me at the time does not diminish. I still wonder at the showing of such a solid power of work, such untiring industry, such prophetic foresight and intuition, so grand a trust in human nature. These gifts were well-nigh put out of sight by a singularly modest estimate of self. Truly, this was a knight of God's own order. I cannot but doubt whether he left his peer on earth. CHAPTER XVII THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT I sometimes feel as if words could not express the comfort and instruction which have come to me in the later years of my life from two sources. One of these has been the better acquaintance with my own sex; the other, the experience of the power resulting from associated action in behalf of worthy objects. During the first two thirds of my life I looked to the masculine ideal of character as the only true one. I sought its inspiration, and referred my merits and demerits to its judicial verdict. In an unexpected hour a new light came to me, showing me a world of thought and of character quite beyond the limits within which I had hitherto been content to abide. The new domain now made clear to me was that of true womanhood,--woman no longer in her ancillary relation to her opposite, man, but in her direct relation to the divine plan and purpose, as a free agent, fully sharing with man every human right and every human responsibility. This discovery was like the addition of a new continent to the map of the world, or of a new testament to the old ordinances. "Oh, had I earlier known the power, the nobility, the intelligence which lie within the range of true womanhood, I had surely lived more wisely and to better purpose." Such were my reflections; yet I must think that the great Lord of all reserved this new revelation as the crown of a wonderful period of the world's emancipation and progress. It did not come to me all at once. In my attempts at philosophizing I at length reached the conclusion that woman must be the moral and spiritual equivalent of man. How, otherwise, could she be entrusted with the awful and inevitable responsibilities of maternity? The quasi-adoration that true lovers feel, was it an illusion partly of sense, partly of imagination? or did it symbolize a sacred truth? While my mind was engaged with these questions, the civil war came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face? While I followed, rather unwillingly, this train of thought, an invitation was sent me to attend a parlor meeting to be held with the view of forming a woman's club in Boston. I presented myself at this meeting, and gave a languid assent to the measures proposed. These were to hire a parlor or parlors in some convenient locality, and to furnish and keep them open for the convenience of ladies residing in the city and its suburbs. Out of this small and modest beginning was gradually developed the plan of the New England Woman's Club, a strong and stately association destined, I believe, to last for many years, and leaving behind it, at this time of my writing, a record of three decades of happy and acceptable service. While our club life was still in its beginning, I was invited and induced to attend a meeting in behalf of woman suffrage. Indeed, I had given my name to the call for this meeting, relying upon the assurance given me by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, that it would be conducted in a very liberal and friendly spirit, without bitterness or extravagance. The place appointed was Horticultural Hall. The morning was inclement; and as I strayed into the hall in my rainy-day suit, nothing was further from my mind than the thought that I should take any part in the day's proceedings. I had hoped not to be noticed by the officers of the meeting, and was rather disconcerted when a message reached me requesting me to come up and take a seat on the platform. This I did very reluctantly. I was now face to face with a new order of things. Here, indeed, were some whom I had long known and honored: Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Colonel Higginson, and my dear pastor, James Freeman Clarke. But here was also Lucy Stone, who had long been the object of one of my imaginary dislikes. As I looked into her sweet, womanly face and heard her earnest voice, I felt that the object of my distaste had been a mere phantom, conjured up by silly and senseless misrepresentations. Here stood the true woman, pure, noble, great-hearted, with the light of her good life shining in every feature of her face. Here, too, I saw the husband whose devotion so ably seconded her life-work. The arguments to which I now listened were simple, strong, and convincing. These champions, who had fought so long and so valiantly for the slave, now turned the searchlight of their intelligence upon the condition of woman, and demanded for the mothers of the community the civil rights which had recently been accorded to the negro. They asked for nothing more and nothing less than the administration of that impartial justice for which, if for anything, a Republican government should stand. When they requested me to speak, which they did presently, I could only say, "I am with you." I have been with them ever since, and have never seen any reason to go back from the pledge then given. Strangely, as it then seemed to me, the arguments which I had stored up in my mind against the political enfranchisement of women were really so many reasons in its favor. All that I had felt regarding the sacredness and importance of the woman's part in private life now appeared to me equally applicable to the part which she should bear in public life. [Illustration: LUCY STONE _From a photograph by the Notman Photographic Company._] One of the comforts which I found in the new association was the relief which it afforded me from a sense of isolation and eccentricity. For years past I had felt strongly impelled to lend my voice to the convictions of my heart. I had done this in a way, from time to time, always with the feeling that my course in so doing was held to call for apology and explanation by the men and women with whose opinions I had hitherto been familiar. I now found a sphere of action in which this mode of expression no longer appeared singular or eccentric, but simple, natural, and, under the circumstances, inevitable. In the little band of workers which I had joined, I was soon called upon to perform yeoman's service. I was expected to attend meetings and to address audiences, at first in the neighborhood of Boston, afterwards in many remote places, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis. Among those who led or followed the new movement, I naturally encountered some individuals in whom vanity and personal ambition were conspicuous. But I found mostly among my new associates a great heart of religious conviction and a genuine spirit of selfsacrifice. My own contributions to the work appeared to me less valuable than I had hoped to find them. I had at first everything to learn with regard to public speaking, and Lucy Stone and Mrs. Livermore were much more at home on the platform than I was. I was called upon to preside over conventions, having never learned the rules of debate. I was obliged to address large audiences, having been accustomed to use my voice only in parlors. Gradually all this bettered itself. I became familiar with the order of proceedings, and learned to modulate my voice. More important even than these things, I learned something of the range of popular sympathies, and of the power of apprehension to be found in average audiences. All of these experiences, the failures, the effort, and the final achievement, were most useful to me. In years that followed I gave what I could to the cause, but all that I gave was repaid to me a thousandfold. I had always had to do with women of character and intelligence, but I found in my new friends a clearness of insight, a strength and steadfastness of purpose, which enabled them to take a position of command, in view of the questions of the hour. Among the manifold interests which now opened up before me, the cause of woman suffrage was for a time predominant. The novelty of the topic in the mind of the general public brought together large audiences in Boston and in the neighboring towns. Lucy Stone's fervent zeal, always guided by her faultless feeling of propriety, the earnest pleading of her husband, the brilliant eloquence and personal magnetism of Mary A. Livermore,--all these things combined to give to our platform a novel and sustained attraction. Noble men, aye, the noblest, stood with us in our endeavor,--some, like Senator Hoar and George S. Hale, to explain and illustrate the logical sequence which should lead to the recognition of our citizenship; others, like Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, and Henry Ward Beecher, able to overwhelm the crumbling defenses of the old order with the storm and flash of their eloquence. We acted, one and all, under the powerful stimulus of hope. The object which we labored to accomplish was so legitimate and rational, so directly in the line of our religious belief, of our political institutions, that it appeared as if we had only to unfold our new banner, bright with the blazon of applied Christianity, and march on to victory. The black man had received the vote. Should the white woman be less considered than he? During the recent war the women of our country had been as ministering angels to our armies, forsaking homes of ease and luxury to bring succor and comfort to the camp-hospital and battlefield. Those who tarried at home had labored incessantly to supply the needs of those at the front. Should they not be counted among the citizens of the great Republic? Moreover, we women had year after year worked to build, maintain, and fill the churches throughout the land with a patient industry akin to that of coral insects. Surely we should be invited to pass in with our brothers to the larger liberty now shown to be our just due. We often spoke in country towns, where our morning meetings could be but poorly attended, for the reason that the women of the place were busy with the preparation of the noonday meal. Our evening sessions in such places were precious to school-teachers and factory hands. Ministers opened to us their churches, and the women of their congregations worked together to provide for us places of refreshment and repose. We met the real people face to face and hand to hand. It was a period of awakened thought, of quickened and enlarged sympathy. I recall with pleasure two campaigns which we made in Vermont, where the theme of woman suffrage was quite new to the public mind. I started on one of these journeys with Mr. Garrison, and enjoyed with him the great beauty of the winter landscape in that most lovely State. The evergreen forests through which we passed were hung with icicles, which glittered like diamonds in the bright winter sun. Lucy Stone, Mr. Blackwell, and Mrs. Livermore had preceded us, and when we reached the place of destination we found everything in readiness for our meeting. At one town in Vermont some opposition to our coming had been manifested beforehand. We found, on arriving, that the chairman of our committee of arrangements had left town suddenly as if unwilling to befriend us. A vulgar and silly ballad had been printed and circulated, in which we three ladies were spoken of as three old crows. The prospect for the evening was not encouraging. We deliberated for a moment in the anteroom of our hall. I said, "Let me come first in the order of exercises, as I read from a manuscript, and shall not be disconcerted even if they throw chairs at us." As we entered some noise was heard from the gallery. Mr. Garrison came forward and asked whether we were to be given a hearing or not. Instantly a group of small boys were ejected from their seats by some one in authority. Mrs. Livermore now stepped to the front and looked the audience through and through. Silence prevailed, and she was heard as usual with repeated applause. I read my paper without interruption. The honors of the evening belonged to us. I remember another journey, a nocturnal one, which I undertook alone, in order to join the friends mentioned above at a suffrage meeting somewhere in New England. As I emerged from the Pullman in the cold twilight of an early winter morning, carrying a heavy bag, and feeling friendless and forlorn, I met Mrs. Livermore, who had made the journey in another car. At sight of her I cried, "Oh, you dear big Livermore!" Moved by this appeal, she at once took me under her protection, ordered a hotel porter to relieve me of my bag, and saw me comfortably housed and provided for. It was fortunate for us that the time of our deliverance appeared to us so near, as fortunate perhaps as the misinterpretation which led the early Christians to look daily for the reappearing on earth of their Master. Among my most valued recollections are those of the many legislative hearings in which I have had the privilege of taking part, and which cover a period of more than twenty years. Mr. Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Mr. Blackwell long continued to be our most prominent advocates, supported at times by Colonel Higginson, Wendell Phillips, and James Freeman Clarke. Mrs. Livermore was with us whenever her numerous lecture engagements allowed her to be present. Mrs. Cheney, Judge Sewall, and several lawyers of our own sex gave us valuable aid. These hearings were mostly held in the well-known Green Room of the Boston State House, but a gradual _crescendo_ of interest sometimes led us to ask for the use of Representatives' Hall, which was often crowded with the friends and opponents of our cause. Among the remonstrants who spoke at these hearings occasionally appeared some illiterate woman, attracted by the opportunity of making a public appearance. I remember one of these who, after asking to be heard, began to read from an elaborate manuscript which had evidently been written for her. After repeatedly substituting the word "communionism" for "communism," she abandoned the text and began to abuse the suffragists in language with which she was more familiar. When she had finished her diatribe the chairman of the legislative committee said to our chairman, Mr. Blackwell, "A list of questions has been handed to me which the petitioners for woman suffrage are requested to answer. The first on the list is the following:-- "If the suffrage should be granted to women, would not the ignorant and degraded ones hasten to crowd the polls while those of the better sort would stay away from them?" Mr. Garrison, rising, said in reply, "Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that the question just propounded is answered by the present occasion. Here are education, character, intelligence, asking for suffrage, and here are ignorance and vulgarity protesting against it." This crushing sentence was uttered by Mr. Garrison in a tone of such bland simplicity that it did not even appear unkind. On a later occasion a lady of excellent character and position appeared among the remonstrants, and when asked whether she represented any association replied rather haughtily, "I think that I represent the educated women of Massachusetts," a goodly number of whom were present in behalf of the petition. The remonstrants had hearings of their own, at one of which I happened to be present. On this occasion one of their number, after depicting at some length the moral turpitude which she considered her sex likely to evince under political promise, concluded by saying: "No woman should be allowed the right of suffrage until _every_ woman shall be perfectly wise, perfectly pure, and perfectly good." This dictum, pronounced in a most authoritative manner, at once brought to my mind the homely proverb, "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander;" and I could not help asking permission to suggest a single question, upon which a prominent Boston lawyer instantly replied: "No, Mrs. Howe, you may not [speak]. We wish to use all our time." The chairman of the committee here interposed, saying: "Mr. Blank, it does not belong to you to say who shall or shall not be heard here." He advised me at the same time to reserve my question until the remonstrants should have been fully heard. As no time then remained for my question, I will ask it now: "If, as is just, we should apply the test proposed by Mrs. W. to the men of the community, how long would it be before they could properly claim the privilege of the franchise?" _Du reste_, the gentleman in question, with whom my relations have always been entirely friendly, explained himself to me at the close of the hearing by saying: "I treated you as I would have treated a man under similar circumstances." I now considered my occupations as fully equal to the capacity of my time and strength. My family, my studies, and my club demanded much attention. My elder children were now grown up, and some social functions were involved in this fact, such as chaperonage, the giving of parties, and much entertainment of college and school friends. Nevertheless, a new claimant for my services was about to come upon the scene. In the early summer of the year 1868, the Sorosis of New York issued a call for a congress of women to be held in that city in the autumn of the same year. Many names, some known, others unknown to me, were appended to the document first sent forth in this intention. My own was asked for. Should I give or withhold it? Among the signatures already obtained, I saw that of Maria Mitchell, and this determined me to give my own. Who was Maria Mitchell? A woman from Nantucket, and of Quaker origin, who had been brought to public notice by her discovery of a new comet, a service which the King of Denmark had offered to reward with a gold medal. This prize was secured for her through the intervention of Hon. Edward Everett. She had also been appointed Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College. What was Maria Mitchell? A gifted, noble, lovable woman, devoted to science, but heartloyal to every social and personal duty. I seemed to know this of her when I knew her but slightly. At the time appointed, the congress assembled, and proved to be an occasion of much interest. Mrs. Livermore, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, Lucy Stone, Mrs. Charlotte B. Wilbour were prominent among the speakers heard at its sessions. I viewed its proceedings a little critically at first, its plan appearing to me rather vast and vague. But it had called out the sympathy of many earnest women, and the outline of an association presented was a good one, although the machinery for filling it up was deficient. Mrs. Livermore was elected president, Mrs. Wilbour chairman of executive committee, and I was glad to serve on a sub-committee, charged with the duty of selecting topics and speakers for the proposed annual congress. Mrs. Livermore's presidency lasted but two years, her extraordinary success as a lecturer making it impossible for her to give to the new undertaking the attention which it required. Mrs. Wilbour would no doubt have proved an efficient aid to her chief, but at this juncture a change of residence became desirable for her, and she decided to reside abroad for some years. Miss Alice Fletcher, now so honorably known as the friend and champion of our Indian tribes, was a most efficient secretary. The governing board was further composed of a vice president and director from each of the States represented by membership in the association. The name had been decided upon from the start. It was the Association for the Advancement of Women, and its motto was: "Truth, Justice, and Honor." [Illustration: MARIA MITCHELL _From a photograph._] Maria Mitchell succeeded Mrs. Livermore in the office of president. I think that the congress held in Philadelphia in the Centennial year was the occasion of her first presiding. Her customary manner had in it a little of the Quaker shyness, but when she appeared upon the platform the power of command, or rather of control, appeared in all that she said or did. In figure she was erect and above middle height. Her dress was a rich black silk, made after a plain but becoming fashion. The contrast between her silver curls and black eyes was striking. Her voice was harmonious, her manner at once gracious and decided. The question of commencing proceedings with prayer having been raised, Miss Mitchell invited those present to unite in a silent prayer, a form of worship common among the Friends. The impression made by our meetings was such that we soon began to receive letters from distant parts of the country, inviting us to journey hither and thither, and to hold our congresses east, west, north, and south. Our year's work was arranged by committees, which had reference severally to science, art, education, industrial training, reforms, and statistics. Our association certainly seemed to have answered an existing need. Leading women from many States joined us, and we distributed our congresses as widely as the limits of our purses would allow. Journeys to Utah and California were beyond the means of most of our workers, and we regretfully declined invitations received from friends in these States. In our earlier years our movements were mainly west and east. We soon felt, however, that we must make acquaintance with our Southern sisters. In the face of some discouragement, we arranged to hold a congress in Baltimore, and had every reason to be satisfied with its result. Kentucky followed on our list of Southern States, and the progressive women of Louisville accorded us a warm welcome and a three days' hearing in one of the finest churches of the city. To Tennessee, east and west, we gave two visits, both of which were amply justified by the cordial reception given us. In process of time Atlanta and New Orleans claimed our presence. Among the many mind-pictures left by our congresses, let me here outline one. The place is the court-house of Memphis, Tenn., which has been temporarily ceded for our use. The time is that of one of our public sessions, and the large audience is waiting in silent expectancy, when the entrance of a quaint figure attracts all eyes to the platform. It is that of a woman of middle height and past middle age, dressed in plain black, her nearly white hair cut short, and surmounted by a sort of student's cap of her own devising. Her appearance at first borders on the grotesque, but is presently seen to be nearer the august. She turns her pleasant face toward the audience, takes off her cap, and unrolls the manuscript from which she proposes to read. Her eyes beam with intelligence and kindly feeling. The spectators applaud her before she has opened her lips. Her aspect has taken them captive at once. Her essay, on some educational theme, is terse, direct, and full of good thought. It is heard with close attention and with manifest approbation, and whenever, in the proceedings that follow, she rises to say her word, she is always greeted with a murmur of applause. This lady is Miss Mary Ripley, a public school teacher of Buffalo city, wise in the instruction of the young and in the enlightenment of elders. We all rejoice in her success, which is eminently that of character and intellect. I feel myself drawn on to offer another picture, not of our congress, but of a scene which grew out of it. The ladies of our association have been invited to visit a school for young girls, of which Miss Conway, one of our members, is the principal. After witnessing some interesting exercises, we assemble in the large hall, where a novel entertainment has been provided for us. A band of twelve young ladies appear upon the platform. They wear the colors of "Old Glory," but after a new fashion, four of them being arrayed from head to foot in red, four in blue, and four in white. While the John Brown tune is heard from the piano, they proceed to act in graceful dumb show the stanzas of my Battle Hymn. How they did it I cannot tell, but it was a most lovely performance. In the year 1898, for the first time since its first meeting, our association issued no call for a congress of women. The reasons for our failure to do so may be briefly stated. Some of our most efficient members had been removed by death, some by unavoidable circumstances. But more than this, the demands made upon the time and strength of women by the women's clubs, which are now numerous and universal, had come to occupy the attention of many who in other times had leisure to interest themselves in our work. The biennial conventions of the general federation of women's clubs no doubt appear to many to fill the place which we have honorably held, and may in some degree answer the ends which we have always had in view. Yet a number of us still hold together, united in heart and in hand. Although we have sadly missed our departed friends, I have never felt that the interest or value of our meetings suffered any decline. The spirit of those dear ones has seemed, on the contrary, to abide among us, holding us pledged to undertake the greater effort made necessary by their absence. We still count among our members many who keep the inspiration under which we first took the field. We feel, moreover, that our happy experience of many years has brought us lessons too precious to hide or to neglect. The coming together either of men or of women from regions widely separate from each other naturally gives occasion for comparison. So far as I have known, the comparisons elicited by our meetings have more and more tended to resolve imagined discords into prevailing harmony. The sympathy of feeling aroused by our unity of object has always risen above the distinctions of section and belonging. Honest differences of opinion, honestly and temperately expressed, tend rather to develop good feeling than to disturb it. I am glad to be able to say that sectional prejudice has appeared very little, if at all, in the long course of our congresses, and that self-glorification, whether of State or individual, has never had any place with us, while the great instruction of meeting with earnest and thoughtful workers from every part of our country's vast domain has been greatly appreciated by us and by those who, in various places, have met with us. We have presented at our meetings reports on a variety of important topics. Our congress of three days usually concluding on Saturday, such of our speakers as are accustomed to the pulpit have often been invited to hold forth in one or more of the churches. In Knoxville, Tenn., for example, I was cordially bidden to lift up my voice in an orthodox Presbyterian church, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney spoke before the Unitarian society, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell preached to yet another congregation, and Mrs. Henrietta L. T. Wolcott improved the Sunday by a very interesting talk on waifs, of which class of unfortunates she has had much official and personal knowledge. An extended account of our many meetings would be out of place in this volume, but some points in connection with them may be of interest. It often happened that we visited cities in which no associations of women, other than the church and temperance societies, existed. After our departure, women's clubs almost invariably came into being. Our eastern congresses have been held in Portland, Providence, Springfield, and Boston. In the Empire State, we have visited Buffalo, Syracuse, and New York. Denver and Colorado Springs have been our limit in the west. Northward, we have met in Toronto and at St. John. In the south, as already said, our pilgrimages have reached Atlanta and New Orleans. We have sometimes been requested to supplement our annual congress by an additional day's session at some place easily reached from the city in which the main meeting had been appointed to be held. Of these supplementary congresses I will mention a very pleasant one at St. Paul, Minn., and a very useful one held by some of our number in Salt Lake City. At the congress held in Boston in the autumn of 1879, I was elected president, my predecessor in the office, Mrs. Daggett, declining further service. As the years have gone on, Death has done his usual work upon our number. I have already spoken of our second president, Maria Mitchell, who continued, after her term of office, to send us valuable statements regarding the scientific work of women. Mrs. Kate Newell Daggett, our third president, had long been recognized as a leader of social and intellectual progress in her adopted city of Chicago. The record in our calendar is that of an earnest worker, well fitted to commend the woman's cause by her attractive presence and cultivated mind. Miss Abby W. May was a tower of strength to our association. She excelled in judgment, and in the sense of measure and of fitness. Her sober taste in dress did not always commend her to our assemblage, composed largely of women, but the plainness of her garb was redeemed by the beauty of her classic head and by the charm of her voice and manner. She was grave in demeanor, but with an undertone of genuine humor which showed her to be truly human. She was the worthy cousin of Rev. Samuel Joseph May, and is remembered by me as the crown of a family of more than common distinction. The progress of the woman question naturally developed a fresh interest in the industrial capacity of the sex. Experts in these matters know that the work of woman enters into almost every department of service and of manufacture. In order to make this more evident, it seemed advisable to ask that a separate place might be assigned at some of the great industrial fairs, for the special showing of the inventions and handicraft of women. Such a space was conceded to us at one of the important fairs held in Boston in 1882, and I was invited to become president of this, the first recognized Woman's Department. In this work I received valuable aid from Mrs. Henrietta L. T. Wolcott, who, in the capacity of treasurer, was able to exercise a constant supervision over the articles consigned to our care. On the opening day of the fair General Butler, who was then governor of Massachusetts, presided. In introducing me, he said, in a playfully apologetic manner, "Mrs. Howe may say some things which we might not wish to hear, but it is my office to present her to this audience." He probably thought that I was about to speak of woman suffrage. My address, however, did not touch upon that topic, but upon the present new departure, its value and interest. General Butler, indeed, sometimes claimed to be a friend of woman suffrage, but one of our number said of him in homely phrase: "He only wants to have his dish right side up when it rains." The most noticeable points in our exhibit were, first, the number of useful articles invented by women; secondly, a very creditable exhibition of scientific work, largely contributed by the lady students and graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; lastly, a collection of books composed by women, among which were some volumes of quite ancient date. I suppose that my connection with this undertaking led to my receiving and accepting an invitation to assume the presidency of a woman's department in a great World's Fair to be held in New Orleans in the late autumn and winter of 1883-84. Coupled with this invitation was the promise of a sum of money amply sufficient to defray all the expenses involved in the management of so extensive a work. My daughter Maud was also engaged to take charge of an alcove especially devoted to the literary work of women. We arrived in New Orleans in November, and found our affairs at a standstill. Our "chief of exposition," as she was called, Mrs. Cloudman, had measured and marked off the spaces requisite for the exhibits of the several States, but no timber was forthcoming with which to erect the necessary stands, partitions, etc. On inquiry, I was told that the funds obtained in support of the enterprise had proved insufficient, and that some expected contributions had failed. There was naturally some censure of the manner in which the resources actually at hand had been employed, and some complaining of citizens of New Orleans who had been expected to contribute thousands of dollars to the exposition, and who had subscribed only a few hundreds. I proceeded at once to organize a board of direction for the department, composed of the lady commissioners in charge of exhibits from their several States. One or two of these ladies objected to the separate showing of woman's work, and were allowed to place their goods in the general exhibit of their States. I had friendly relations with these ladies, but they were not under my jurisdiction. Our embarrassing deadlock lasted for some time, but at length a benevolent lumber dealer endowed us with three thousand feet of pine boards. The management furnished no workman for us, but the commanders of two United States warships in the harbor lent us the services of their ship-carpenters, and in process of time the long gallery set apart for our use was partitioned off in pretty alcoves, draped with bright colors, and filled with every variety of handiwork. I was fond of showing, among other novelties, a heavy iron chain, forged by a woman-blacksmith, and a set of fine jewelry, entirely made by women. The exposition was a very valuable one, and did not fail to attract a large concourse of people from all parts of the country. In the great multitude of things to be seen, and in the crowded attendance, visitors were easily confused, and often failed to find matters which might most interest them. In order to improve the opportunity offered, I bethought me of a series of short talks on the different exhibits, to be given either by the commissioners in charge of them, or by experts whose services could be secured. These twelve o'clock talks, as they were called, became very popular, and were continued during the greater part of the season. In the same gallery with ourselves was the exhibit made by the colored people of New Orleans. Of this I remember best a pathetic little art gallery, in which was conspicuous a portrait of Governor Andrew. I proposed one day to the directors of this exhibit that they should hold a meeting in their compartment, and that I should speak to them of their great friends at the North, whom I had known familiarly, and whose faces they had never seen. They responded joyfully to my offer; and on a certain day assembled in their alcove, which they had decorated with flowers, surrounding a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. A choir of melodious voices sang my Battle Hymn, and all listened while I spoke of Garrison, Sumner, Andrew, Phillips, and Dr. Howe. A New Orleans lady who was present, Mrs. Merritt, also made a brief address, bidding the colored people remember that "they had good friends at the South also," which I was glad to hear and believe. The funds placed at our disposal falling far short of what had been promised us at the outset, we found ourselves under the necessity of raising money to defray our necessary expenses, among which was that of a special police, to prevent pilfering. To this end, a series of entertainments was devised, beginning with a lecture of my own, which netted over six hundred dollars. Several other lectures were given, and Colonel Mapleson allowed some of his foremost artists to give a concert for the benefit of our department, by which something over a thousand dollars was realized. We should still have suffered much embarrassment had not Senator Hoar managed to secure from Congress an appropriation of ten thousand dollars, from which our debts were finally paid in full. The collection over which my daughter presided, of books written by women, scientific drawings, magazines, and so on, attracted many visitors. Her colleague in this charge was Mrs. Eveline M. Ordway. Through their efforts, the authors of these works permitted the presentation of them to the Ladies' Art Association of New Orleans. This gift was much appreciated. My management of the woman's department brought upon me some vulgar abuse from local papers, which was more than compensated for by the great kindness which I received from leading individuals in the society of the place. At the exposition I made acquaintance with many delightful people, among whom I will mention Captain Pym, who claimed to be the oldest Arctic voyager living, President Johnston of Tulane University, and Mrs. Townsend, a poet of no mean merit, who had had the honor of being chosen as the laureate of the opening exposition. When my duties as president were at an end, I parted from my late associates with sincere regret, and turned my face northward, with grateful affection for the friends left behind me. CHAPTER XVIII CERTAIN CLUBS At a tea-party which took place quite early in my club career, Dr. Holmes expatiated at some length upon his own unfitness for club association of any kind. He then turned to me and said, "Mrs. Howe, I consider you eminently _clubable_." The hostess of the occasion was Mrs. Josiah Quincy, Jr., a lady of much mark in her day, interested in all matters of public importance, and much given to hospitality. I shall make the doctor's remark the text for a chapter giving some account of various clubs in which I have had membership and office. The first of these was formed in the early days of my residence in Boston. It was purely social in design, and I mention it here only because it possessed one feature which I have never seen repeated. It consisted of ten or more young women, mostly married, and all well acquainted with one another. Our meetings took place fortnightly, and on the following plan. Each of us was allowed to invite one or two gentlemen friends. The noble pursuit of crochet was then in great favor, and the ladies agreed to meet at eight o'clock, to work upon a crochet quilt which was to be made in strips and afterwards joined. At nine o'clock the gentlemen were admitted. Prior invitations had been given simply in the name of the club, and their names were not disclosed until they made their appearance. The element of comic mystery thus introduced gave some piquancy to our informal gathering. Some light refreshments were then served, and the company separated in great good humor. This little club was much enjoyed, but it lasted only through one season, and the crochet quilt never even approached completion. My next club experience was much later in date and in quite another locality. The summers which I passed in my lovely Newport valley brought me many pleasant acquaintances. Though at a considerable distance from the town of Newport, I managed to keep up a friendly intercourse with those who took the trouble to seek me out in my retirement. The historian Bancroft and his wife were at this time prominent figures in Newport society. Their hospitality was proverbial, and at their entertainments one was sure to meet the notabilities who from time to time visited the now reviving town. Mrs. Ritchie, only daughter of Harrison Gray Otis, of Boston, resided on Bellevue Avenue, as did Albert Sumner, a younger brother of the senator, a handsome and genial man, much lamented when, with his wife and only child, he perished by shipwreck in 1858. Colonel Higginson and his brilliant wife, a sad sufferer from chronic rheumatism, had taken up their abode at Mrs. Dame's Quaker boarding-house. The elder Henry James also came to reside in Newport, attracted thither by the presence of his friends, Edmund and Mary Tweedy. These notices of Newport are intended to introduce the mention of a club which has earned for itself some reputation and which still exists. Its foundation dates back to a summer which brought Bret Harte and Dr. J. G. Holland to Newport, and with them Professors Lane and Goodwin of Harvard University. My club-loving mind found sure material for many pleasant meetings, and a little band of us combined to improve the beautiful summer season by picnics, sailing parties, and household soirées, in all of which these brilliant literary lights took part. Helen Hunt and Kate Field were often of our company, and Colonel Higginson was always with us. Our usual place of meeting was the house of a hospitable friend who resided on the Point. Both house and friend have to do with the phrase "a bully piaz," which has erroneously been supposed to be of my invention, but which originated in the following manner: Colonel Higginson had related to us that at a boarding-house which he had recently visited, he found two children of a Boston family of high degree, amusing themselves on the broad piazza. The little boy presently said to the little girl:-- "I say, sis, isn't this a bully piaz?" My friend on the Point had heard this, and when she introduced me to the veranda which she had added to her house, she asked me, laughing, "whether I did not consider this a bully piaz." The phrase was immediately adopted in our confraternity, and our friend was made to figure in a club ditty beginning thus:-- "There was a little woman with a bully piaz, Which she loved for to show, for to show." This same house contained a room which the owner set apart for dramatic and other performances, and here, with much mock state, we once held a "commencement," the Latin programme of which was carefully prepared by Professor Lane of Harvard University. I acted as president of the occasion, Colonel Higginson as my aid; and we both marched up the aisle in Oxford caps and gowns, and took our places on the platform. I opened the proceedings by an address in Latin, Greek, and English; and when I turned to Colonel Higginson, and called him, "Filie meum dilectissime," he wickedly replied with three bows of such comic gravity that I almost gave way to unbecoming laughter. Not long before this he had published his paper on the Greek goddesses. I therefore assigned as his theme the problem, "How to sacrifice an Irish bull to a Greek goddess." Colonel Waring, the well-known engineer, being at that time in charge of a valuable farm in the neighborhood, was invited to discuss "Social small potatoes; how to enlarge the eyes." An essay on rhinosophy was given by Fanny Fern, the which I, chalk in hand, illustrated on the blackboard by the following equation:-- "Nose + nose + nose = proboscis Nose - nose - nose = snub." A class was called upon for recitations from Mother Goose in seven different languages. At the head of this Professor Goodwin, then and now of Harvard, honored us with a Greek version of "The Man in the Moon." A recent Harvard graduate recited the following:-- "Heu! iter didulum, Felis cum fidulum, Vacca transiluit lunam, Caniculus ridet Quum talem videt, Et dish ambulavit cum spoonam." The question being asked whether this last line was in strict accordance with grammar, the scholar gave the following rule: "The conditions of grammar should always give way to the exigencies of rhyme." A supposed graduate of the department of law coming forward to receive her degree, was thus addressed: "Come hither, my dear little lamb, I welcome you to a long career at the _baa_." As I record these extravagances, I seem to hear faint reverberations of the laughter of some who are no longer in life, and of others who will never again meet in such lightness of heart. This brilliant conjunction of stars was now no more in Newport, and the delicious fooling of that unique summer was never repeated. Out of it came, however, the more serious and permanent association known as the Town and Country Club of Newport. Of this I was at once declared president, but my great good fortune lay in my having for vice-president Professor William B. Rogers, illustrious as the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The rapid _crescendo_ of the fast world which surrounded us at this time made sober people a little anxious lest the Newport season should entirely evaporate into the shallow pursuit of amusement. This rampant gayety offered little or nothing to the more thoughtful members of society,--those who love to combine reasonable intercourse with work and study. [Illustration: THE HOME AT NEWPORT _From a photograph by Briskham and Davidson._] I felt the need of upholding the higher social ideals, and of not leaving true culture unrepresented, even in a summer watering-place. Professor Rogers entered very fully into these views. With his help a simple plan of organization was effected, and a small governing board was appointed. Colonel Higginson became our treasurer, Miss Juliet R. Goodwin, granddaughter of Hon. Asher Robbins, was our secretary. Samuel Powel, formerly of Philadelphia, a man much in love with natural science, was one of our most valued members. Our membership was limited to fifty. Our club fee was two dollars. Our meetings took place once in ten days. At each meeting a lecture was given on some topic of history, science, or general literature. Tea and conversation followed, and the party usually broke up after a session of two hours. Colonel Higginson once deigned to say that this club made it possible to be sensible even at Newport and during the summer. The names of a few persons show what we aimed at, and how far we succeeded. We had scientific lectures from Professor Rogers, Professor Alexander Agassiz, Dr. Weir Mitchell, and others. Maria Mitchell, professor of astronomy at Vassar College, gave us a lecture on Saturn. Miss Kate Hillard spoke to us several times. Professor Thomas Davidson unfolded for us the philosophy of Aristotle. Rev. George E. Ellis gave us a lecture on the Indians of Rhode Island, and another on Bishop Berkeley. Professor Bailey of Providence spoke on insectivorous plants, and on one occasion we enjoyed in his company a club picnic at Paradise, after which the wild flowers in that immediate vicinity were gathered and explained. Colonel Higginson ministered to our instruction and entertainment, and once unbent so far as to act with me and some others in a set of charades. The historian George Bancroft was one of our number, as was also Miss Anna Ticknor, founder of the Society for the Encouragement of Studies at Home. Among the worthies whom we honor in remembrance I must not omit to mention Rev. Charles T. Brooks, the beloved pastor of the Unitarian church. Mr. Brooks was a scholar of no mean pretensions, and a man of most delightful presence. He had come to Newport immediately after graduating at Harvard Divinity School, and here he remained, faithfully at work, until the close of his pastoral labors, a period of forty years. He was remarkably youthful in aspect, and retained to the last the bloom and bright smile of his boyhood. His sermons were full of thought and of human interest; but while bestowing much care upon them, he found time to give to the world a metrical translation of Goethe's "Faust" and an English version of the "Titan" of Jean Paul Richter. Professor Davidson's lecture on Aristotle touched so deeply the chords of thought as to impel some of us to pursue the topic further. Dear Charles Brooks invited an adjourned meeting of the club to be held in his library. At this several learned men were present. Professor Boyesen spoke to us of the study of Aristotle in Germany; Professor Botta of its treatment in the universities of Italy. The laity asked many questions, and the fine library of our host afforded the books of reference needed for their enlightenment. The club proceedings here enumerated cover a period of more than thirty years. The world around us meanwhile had reached the height of fashionable success. An entertainment, magnificent for those days, was given, which was said to have cost ten thousand dollars. Samuel Powel prophesied that a collapse must follow such extravagance. A change certainly did follow. The old, friendly Newport gradually disappeared. The place was given over to the splendid festivities of fashion, which is "nothing if not fashionable." Under this influence it still abides. The four-in-hand is its climax. Dances can be enjoyed only by those who can begin them at eleven o'clock at night, and end in the small hours of the morning. If one attends a party, one sees the hall as full of lackeys as would be displayed at a London entertainment in high life. They are English lackeys, too, and their masters and mistresses affect as much of the Anglican mode of doing things as Americans can fairly master. The place has all its old beauty, with many modern improvements of convenience; but its exquisite social atmosphere, half rustic, half cosmopolitan, and wholly free, is found no longer. The quiet visitors of moderate fortunes find their tastes better suited across the bay, at Jamestown and Narragansett Pier. Thus whole generations of the transients have come and gone since the time of my early memories. CHAPTER XIX ANOTHER EUROPEAN TRIP In 1877 I went abroad with my daughter Maud, now Mrs. Elliott, and with her revisited England, France, and Italy. In London we had the pleasure of being entertained by Lord Houghton, whom I had known, thirty or more years earlier, as a bachelor. He was now the father of two attractive daughters, and of a son who later succeeded to his title. At a breakfast at his house I met Mr. Waddington, who was at that time very prominent in French politics. At one of Lord Houghton's receptions I witnessed the entrance of a rather awkward man, and was told that this was Mr. Irving, whose performance of Hamlet was then much talked of. Here I met the widow of Barry Cornwall, who was also the mother of the lamented Adelaide Procter. An evening at Devonshire House and a ball at Mr. Goschen's were among our gayeties. At the former place I saw Mr. Gladstone for the first time, and met Lord Rosebery, whom I had known in America. I had met Mrs. Schliemann and had received from her an invitation to attend a meeting (I think) of the Royal Geographical Society, at which she was to make an address. Her theme was a plea in favor of the modern pronunciation of Greek. It was much applauded, and the discussion of the views presented by her was opened by Mr. Gladstone himself. Lord Houghton one day asked whether I should like to go to breakfast with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. One reply only to such a question was possible, and on the morning appointed we drove together to the Gladstone mansion. We were a little early, for Mrs. Gladstone complained that the flowers ordered from her country seat had but just arrived. A daughter of the house proceeded to arrange them. Breakfast was served at two round tables, exactly alike. I was glad to find myself seated between the great man and the Greek minister, John Gennadius. The talk ran a good deal upon Hellenics, and I spoke of the influence of the Greek in the formation of the Italian language, to which Mr. Gladstone did not agree. I know that scholars differ on this point, but I still retain the opinion which I then expressed. I ventured a timid remark regarding the great number of Greek derivatives used in our common English speech. Mr. Gladstone said very abruptly, "How? What? English words derived from Greek?" and almost "Frightened Miss Muffet away." He was said to be habitually disputatious, and I thought that this must certainly be the case; for he surely knew better than most people how largely and familiarly we incorporate the words of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon in our every-day talk. Lord Houghton also took me one evening to a reception at the house of Mr. Palgrave. At a dinner given in our honor at Greenwich, I was escorted to the table by Mr. Mallock, author of "The New Republic." I remember him as a young man of medium height and dark complexion. Of his conversation I can recall only his praise of the Church of Rome. William Black, the well-known romancer, took tea with me at my lodgings one afternoon. Here I also received Mr. Green, author of "A Short History of the English People," and Mr. Knowles, editor of the "Nineteenth Century." Mrs. Delia Stuart Parnell, whom I had known in America, had given me a letter of introduction to her son Charles, who was already conspicuous as an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland. He called upon me and appointed a day when I should go with him to the House of Commons. He came for me in his brougham, and saw me safely deposited in the ladies' gallery. He was then at the outset of his stormy career, and his younger sister told me that he had in Parliament but one supporter of his views, "a man named Biggar." He certainly had admirers elsewhere, for I remember having met a disciple of his, O'Connor by name, at a "rout" given by Mrs. Justin McCarthy. I asked this lady if her husband agreed with Mr. Parnell. She replied with warmth, "Of course; we are all Home Rulers here." We passed some weeks in Paris, where I found many new objects of interest. I here made acquaintance with M. Charles Lemonnier, who for many years edited a radical paper named "Les Etats Unis d'Europe." He was the husband of Elise Lemonnier, the founder of a set of industrial schools for women which bore her name, in grateful memory of this great service. I had met M. Desmoulins at a Peace Congress in America, and was indebted to him for the pleasure of an evening visit to Victor Hugo at his own residence. In "The History of a Crime," which was then just published, M. Hugo mentions M. Desmoulins as one who suffered, as he did, from the _coup d'état_ which made Louis Napoleon emperor. A congress of _gens de lettres_ was announced in those days, and I received a card for the opening meeting, which was held in the large Châtelet Theatre. Victor Hugo presided, and read from a manuscript an address of some length, in a clear, firm voice. The Russian novelist, Tourgenieff, was also one of the speakers. He was then somewhat less than sixty years of age. Victor Hugo was at least fifteen years older, but, though his hair was silver white, the fire of his dark eyes was undimmed. I sought to obtain entrance to the subsequent sittings of this congress, but was told that no ladies could be admitted. I became acquainted at this time with Frederic Passy, the well-known writer on political economy. Through his kindness I was enabled to attend a meeting of the French Academy, and to see the Immortals in their armchairs, and in their costume, a sort of quaint long coat, faced with the traditional palms stamped or embroidered on green satin. The entertainment was a varied one. The principal discourse eulogized several deceased members of the august body, and among them the young artist, Henri Regnault, whose death was much deplored. This was followed by an essay on Raphael's pictures of the Fornarina, and by another on the social status of the early Christians, in which it was maintained that wealth had been by no means a contraband among them, and that the holding of goods in common had been but a temporary feature of the new discipline. The exercises concluded with the performance by chorus and orchestra of a musical composition, which had for its theme the familiar Bible story of "Rebecca at the Well." A noticeable French feature of this was the indignation of Laban when he found his sister "alone with a man," the same being the messenger sent by Abraham to ask the young girl's hand in marriage for his son. The prospect of an advantageous matrimonial alliance seemed to set this right, and the piece concluded with reëstablished harmony. My friend M. Frederic Passy asked me one day whether I should like to see the crowning of a _rosière_ in a suburban town. He explained to me that this ceremony was of annual occurrence, and that it usually had reference to some meritorious conduct on the part of a young girl who was selected to be publicly rewarded as the best girl of her town or village. This honor was accompanied by a gift of some hundreds of francs, intended to serve as the marriage portion of the young girl. I gladly accepted the ticket of admission offered me by M. Passy, the more as he was to be the orator of the occasion, fixed for a certain Sunday afternoon. After a brief railroad journey I reached the small town, the name of which escapes my memory, and found the notables of the place assembled in a convenient hall, the mayor presiding. Soon a band of music was heard approaching, and the _rosière_, with her escort, entered and took the place assigned her. She was dressed in white silk, with a wreath of white roses around her head. A canopy was held over her, and at her side walked another young girl, dressed also in white, but of a less expensive material. This, they told me, was the _rosière_ of the year before who, according to custom, waited upon her successor to the dignity. Upon the mayor devolved the duty of officially greeting and complimenting the _rosière_. M. Passy's oration followed. His theme was religious toleration. As an instance of this he told us how, at the funeral of the great Channing in Boston, Archbishop Chevereux caused the bells of the cathedral to be tolled, as an homage to the memory of his illustrious friend. It appeared to me whimsical that I should come to an obscure suburb of Paris to hear of this. At home I had never heard it mentioned. Mrs. Eustis, Dr. Channing's daughter, on being questioned, assured me that she perfectly remembered the occurrence. M. Passy presented me with a volume of his essays on questions of political economy. Among the topics therein treated was the vexed problem, "Does expensive living enrich the community?" I was glad to learn that he gave lectures upon his favorite science to classes of young women as well as of young men. Among my pleasant recollections of Paris at this time is that of a visit to the studio of Gustave Doré, which came about on this wise. An English clergyman whom we had met in London happened to be in Paris at this time, and one day informed us that he had had some correspondence with Doré, and had suggested to the latter a painting of the Resurrection from a new point of view. This should represent, not the opening grave, but the gates of heaven unclosing to receive the ascending form of the Master. The artist had promised to illustrate this subject, and our new friend invited us to accompany him to the studio, where he hoped to find the picture well advanced. Accordingly, on a day appointed, we knocked at the artist's door and were admitted. The apartment was vast, well proportioned to the unusual size of many of the works of art which hung upon the walls. Doré received us with cordiality, and showed Mr. ---- the picture which he had suggested, already nearly completed. He appeared to be about forty years of age, in figure above medium height, well set up and balanced. His eyes were blue, his hair dark, his facial expression very genial. After some conversation with the English visitor, he led the way to his latest composition, which represented the van of a traveling showman, in front of which stood its proprietor, holding in his arms the body of his little child, just dead, in the middle of his performance. Beside him stood his wife, in great grief, and at her feet the trick dogs, fantastically dressed, showed in their brute countenances the sympathy which those animals often evince when made aware of some misfortune befalling their master. Here we also saw a model of the enormous vase which the artist had sent to the exposition of that year (1879), and which William W. Story contemptuously called "Doré's bottle." The artist professed himself weary of painting for the moment. He seemed to have taken much interest in his recent modeling, and called our attention to a genius cast in bronze, which he had hoped that the municipality would have purchased for the illumination of the "Place de l'Opéra." The head was surrounded by a coronet intended to give forth jets of flame, while the wings and body should be outlined by lights of another color. In the course of conversation, I remarked to him that his artistic career must have begun early in life. He replied:-- "Indeed, madam, I was hardly twenty years of age when I produced my illustrations of the 'Wandering Jew.'" I had more than once visited the Doré Gallery in London, and I spoke to him of a study of grasses there exhibited, which, with much else, I had found admirable. I believe that Doré's works are severely dealt with by art critics, and especially by such of them as are themselves artists. Whatever may be the defects of his work, I feel sure that he has produced some paintings which deserve to live in the public esteem. Among these I would include his picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, for the contrast therein shown between the popular enthusiasm and the indifference of a group of richly dressed women, seated in a balcony, and according no attention whatever to the procession passing in the street just below them. Worthy to be mentioned with this is his painting of Francesca da Rimini and her lover, as Dante saw them in his vision of hell. Mrs. Longfellow once showed me an engraving of this work, exclaiming, as she pointed to Francesca, "What southern passion in that face!" I was invited several times to speak while in Paris. I chose for the theme of my first lecture, "Associations of Women in the United States." The chairman of the committee of invitation privately requested me beforehand not to speak either of woman suffrage or of the Christian religion. He said that the first was dreaded in France because many supposed that the woman's vote, if conceded, would bring back the dominion of the Catholic priesthood; while the Christian religion, to a French audience, would mean simply the Church of Rome. I spoke in French and without notes, though not without preparation. No tickets were sold for these lectures and no fee was paid. A large salver, laid on a table near the entrance of the hall, was intended to receive voluntary contributions towards the inevitable expenses of the evening. I was congratulated, after the lecture, for having spoken with "_tant de bonne grace_." Before leaving Paris I was invited to take part in a congress of woman's rights (_congrès du droit des femmes_). It was deemed proper to elect two presidents for this occasion, and I had the honor of being chosen as one of them, the other being a gentleman well known in public life. My co-president addressed me throughout the meeting as "Madame la Présidente." The proceedings naturally were carried on in the French language. Colonel T. W. Higginson was present, as was Theodore Stanton, son of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Among the lady speakers was one, of whom I was told that she possessed every advantage of wealth and social position. She was attired like a woman of fashion, and yet she proved to be an ardent suffragist. Somewhat in contrast with these sober doings was a ball given by the artist Healy at his residence. In accepting the invitation to attend this party, I told Mrs. Healy in jest that I should insist upon dancing with her husband, whom I had known for many years. Soon after my entrance Mrs. Healy said to me, "Mrs. Howe, your quadrille is ready for you. See what company you are to have." I looked and beheld General Grant and M. Gambetta, who led out Mrs. Grant, while her husband had Mrs. Healy for his partner. At this ball I met Mrs. Evans, wife of the well-known dentist, who, in 1870, aided the escape of the Empress Eugénie. Mrs. Evans wore in her hair a diamond necklace, said to have been given to her by the Empress. I found in Paris a number of young women, students of art and medicine, who appeared to lead very isolated lives and to have little or no acquaintance with one another. The need of a point of social union for these young people appearing to me very great, I invited a few of them to meet me at my lodgings. After some discussion we succeeded in organizing a small club which, I am told, still exists. Marshal MacMahon was at this time President of the French republic. I attended an evening reception given by him in honor of General and Mrs. Grant. Our host was supposed to be the head of the Bonapartist faction, and I heard some rumors of an intended _coup d'état_ which should bring back imperialism and place Plon-Plon[4] on the throne. This was not to be. The legitimist party held the Imperialists in check, and the Republicans were strong enough to hold their own. [Footnote 4: The nickname for Prince Napoleon.] I remember Marshal MacMahon as a man of medium height, with no very distinguishing feature. He was dressed in uniform and wore many decorations. We passed on to Italy. Soon after my arrival in Florence I was asked to speak on suffrage at the _Circolo Filologico_, one of the favorite halls of the city. The attendance was very large. I made my argument in French, and when it was ended a dear old-fashioned conservative in the gallery stood up to speak, and told off all the counter pleas with which suffragists are familiar,--the loss of womanly grace, the neglect of house and family, etc. When he had finished speaking a charming Italian matron, still young and handsome, sprang forward and took me by the hand, saying, "I feel to take the hand of this sister from America." Cordial applause followed this and I was glad to hear my new friend respond with much grace to our crabbed opponent in the gallery. The sympathy of the audience was evidently with us. A morning visit to the Princess Belgioiosa may deserve a passing mention. This lady was originally Princess Ghika, of a noble Roumanian family. She had married a Russian--Count Murherstsky. I never knew the origin of the Italian title. My dear friend, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, went with me to the princess's villa, which was at some distance from the city proper. Although the winter was well begun she received us in a room without fire. She was wrapped in furs from head to foot while we shivered with cold. She appeared to be about sixty years of age, and showed no traces of the beauty which I had seen in a portrait of her taken in her youth. She spoke English fluently, but with idioms derived from other languages, in some of which I should have understood her more easily than in my own. Our first winter abroad was passed in Rome, which I now saw for the first time as the capital of a united Italy. The king, "_Il Re Galantuomo_," was personally popular with all save the partisans of the Pope's temporal dominion. I met him more than once driving on Monte Pinciano. He was of large stature, with a countenance whose extreme plainness was redeemed by an expression of candor and of good humor. In the course of this winter Victor Emmanuel died. The marks of public grief at this event were unmistakable. The ransomed land mourned its sovereign as with one heart. I recall vividly the features of the king's funeral procession, which was resplendent with wreaths and banners sent from every part of Italy. The monarch's remains were borne in a crimson coach of state, drawn by six horses. His own favorite war-horse followed, veiled in crape. Nobles and servants of noble houses walked before and after the coach in brilliant costumes, bareheaded, carrying in their hands lighted torches of wax. I stood to see this wonderful sight with my dear friend Sarah Clarke, at a window of her apartment opposite to the Barberini Palaces. As the cortége swept by I dropped my tribute of flowers. I was also present when King Umberto took the oath of office before the Italian Parliament, to whose members in turn the oath of allegiance was administered. In a box, in full view, were seated a number of royalties, to wit, Queen Margherita, her sister-in-law, the Queen of Portugal, the Prince of Wales, and the then Crown Prince of Germany, loved and lamented as "_unser Fritz_." The little Prince of Naples sat with his royal mother, and kindly Albert Edward of England lifted him in his arms at the crowning moment in order that he might better see what was going on. By a curious chance I had one day the pleasure of taking part with Madame Ristori in a reading which made part of an entertainment given in aid of a public charity. Madame Ristori had promised to read on this occasion the scene from the play of Maria Stuart, in which she meets and overcrows her rival, Queen Elizabeth. The friend who should have read the part of this latter personage was suddenly disabled by illness, and I was pressed into the service. Our last rehearsal was held in the anteroom of the hall while the musical part of the entertainment was going on. Madame Ristori made me repeat my part several times, insisting that my manner was too reserved and would make hers appear extravagant. I did my best to conform to her wishes, and the reading was duly applauded. Another historic death followed that of Victor Emmanuel after the interval of a month. Pope Pius IX. had reigned too long to be deeply mourned by his spiritual subjects, one of whom remarked in answer to my condolence, "I should think that he had lived long enough." This same friend, however, claimed for Pio the rare merit of having abstained from enriching his own family, and said that when the niece of the Pontiff was married her uncle bestowed on her nothing save the diamonds which had been presented to him by the Sultan of Turkey. Be it also remembered, to his eternal credit, that Pio would not allow the last sacraments to be denied to the king, who had been his political enemy. "He was always a sincere Catholic," said the Pope, "and he shall not die without the sacraments." My dear sister, Mrs. Terry, went with me to attend the consecration of the new Pope, which took place in the Sistine Chapel. Leo XIII. was brought into the church with the usual pomp, robed in white silk, preceded by a brand new pair of barbaric fans, and wearing his triple crown. He was attended by a procession of high dignitaries, civil and ecclesiastic, the latter resplendent with costly silks, furs, and jewels. I think that what interested me most was the chapter of the Gospel which the Pope read in Greek, and which I found myself able to follow. After the elevation of the host, the new Pontiff retired for a brief space of time to partake, it was said, of some slight refreshment. As is well known, the celebrant and communicant at the Mass must remain in a fasting condition from the midnight preceding the ceremony until after its conclusion. For some reason which I have never heard explained, Pope Leo, in his receptions, revived some points of ceremony which his predecessors had allowed to lapse. In the time of Gregory XVI., Protestants had only been expected to make certain genuflections on approaching and on leaving the pontifical presence. Pope Leo required that all persons presented to him should kneel and kiss his hand. This, as a Protestant, I could never consent to do, and so was obliged to forego the honor of presentation. It was said in Rome that a brother of the Pope, a plain man from the country, called upon him just before or after his coronation. He was very stout in person, and objected to the inconvenience of kneeling for the ceremonial kiss. The Pope, however, insisted, and his relative departed, threatening never to return. CHAPTER XX FRIENDS AND WORTHIES: SOCIAL SUCCESSES Time would fail me if I should undertake to mention the valued friendships which have gladdened my many years in Boston, or to indicate the social pleasures which have alternated with my more serious pursuits. One or two of these friends I must mention, lest my reminiscences should be found lacking in the good savor of gratitude. I have already spoken of seeing the elder Richard H. Dana from time to time during the years of my young ladyhood in New York. He himself was surely a transcendental, of an apart and individual school. Nevertheless, the transcendentals of Boston did not come within either his literary or his social sympathies. I never heard him express any admiration for Mr. Emerson. He may, indeed, have done so at a later period; for Mr. Emerson in the end won for himself the heart of New England, which had long revolted at his novelties of thought and expression. Mr. Dana's ideal evidently was Washington Allston, for whom his attachment amounted almost to worship. The pair were sometimes spoken of in that day as "two old-world men who sat by the fire together, and upheld each other in aversion to the then prevailing state of things." I twice had the pleasure of seeing Washington Allston. My first sight of him was in my early youth when, being in Boston with my father for a brief visit, my dear tutor, Joseph G. Cogswell, undertook to give us this pleasure. Mr. Allston's studio was in Cambridgeport. He admitted no one within it during his working hours, save occasionally his friend Franklin Dexter, who was obliged to announce his presence by a particular way of knocking at the door. Mr. Cogswell managed to get possession of this secret, and when we drove to the door of the studio he made use of the well-known signal. "Dexter, is that you?" cried a voice from within. A moment later saw us within the sanctuary. My father was intending to order a picture from Mr. Allston, and this circumstance amply justified Mr. Cogswell, in his own opinion, for the stratagem employed to gain us admittance. Mr. Allston was surprised but not disconcerted by our entrance, and proceeded to do the honors of the rather bare apartment with genial grace. He had not then unrolled his painting of Belshazzar's Feast, which, begun many years before that time, had long been left in an unfinished condition. As I remember, the great artist had but little to show us. My father was especially pleased with a group, one figure of which was a copy of Titian's well-known portrait of his daughter, the other being a somewhat commonplace representation of a young girl of modern times. My father afterwards told me that he had thought of purchasing this picture. While he was deliberating about it Thomas Cole the landscape painter called upon him, bringing the design of four pictures illustrating the course of human life. The artist's persuasion induced him to give an order for this work, which was not completed until after my dear parent's death, when we found it something of a white elephant. The pictures were suitable only for a gallery, and as none of us felt able to indulge in such a luxury they were afterward sold to some public institution, with a considerable loss on our part. Some years after my marriage I encountered Mr. Allston in Chestnut Street, Boston, on a bitter winter day. He had probably been visiting his friend Mr. Dana, who resided in that street. The ground was covered with snow, and Mr. Allston, with his snowy curls and old-fashioned attire, looked like an impersonation of winter, his luminous dark eyes suggesting the fire which warms the heart of the cold season. The wonderful beauty of the face, intensified by age, impressed me deeply. He did not recognize me, having seen me but once, and we passed without any salutation; but his living image in my mind takes precedence of all the shadowy shapes which his magic placed upon canvas. Boston should never forget the famous dinner given to Charles Dickens on the occasion of his first visit to America in 1842. Among the wits who made the feast one to be remembered Allston shone, a bright particular star. He was a reader of Dickens, but was much averse to serials, and waited always for the publication of the stories in book form. He died while one of these was approaching completion, I forget which it was, but remember that Felton, commenting upon this, said, "This shows what a mistake it is not to read the numbers as they are issued. He has thereby lost the whole of this story when he might have enjoyed a part of it." One other singular figure comes back to me across the wide waste of years, and seems to ask some mention at my hands. The figure is that of Thomas Gold Appleton, a man whom, in his own despite, the old Boston dearly cherished. In appearance he was of rather more than medium height, and his countenance, which was not handsome, bore a curious resemblance to that of his beautiful sister Fanny, the beloved wife of the poet Longfellow. He wore his hair in what might have been called elf locks, and the expression of his dark blue eyes varied from one of intense melancholy to amused observation. [Illustration: THOMAS GOLD APPLETON _From a photograph lent by Mrs. John Murray Forbes._] Tom Appleton, as he was usually called, was certainly a man of parts and of great reputation as a wit, but I should rather have termed him a humorist. He cultivated a Byronic distaste for the Puritanic ways of New England. In truth, he was always ready for an encounter of arms (figuratively speaking) with institutions and with individuals, while yet in heart he was most human and humane. Born in affluence, he did not embrace either business or profession, but devoted much time to the study of painting, for which he had more taste than talent. It was as a word artist that he was remarkable; and his graphic felicities of expression led Mr. Emerson to quote him as "the first conversationalist in America," an eminence which I, for my part, should have been more inclined to accord to Dr. Holmes. He loved European life, and had many friends among the notabilities of English society. He was a fellow passenger on the steamer which carried Dr. Howe and myself as far as Liverpool on our wedding journey. People in our cabin were apt to call for a Welsh rabbit before turning in for the night. Apropos of this, he remarked to me, "You eat a rabbit before going to bed, and presently you dream that you are a shelf with a large cheese resting upon it." He was much attached to his father, of whom he once said to me, "We don't dare to mention anything pathetic at our table. If we did, father would be sure to spoil the soup" (with his tears, being understood). The elder Appleton belonged to the congregation of the Federal Street Church. I asked his son if he ever attended service there. He said, "Oh, yes; I sometimes go to hear the minister exhort that assemblage of weary ones to forsake the vanities of life. Looking at the choir, I see some forlorn women who seem, from the way in which they open their mouths, to mistake the congregation for a dentist." He did not care for music. At a party devoted to classical performances, he turned to me: "Mrs. Howe, are you going to give us something from the symphony in P?" He was much of an amateur in art, literature, and life, never appearing to take serious hold of matters either social or political. Wendell Phillips had been his schoolmate, and the two, in company with John Lothrop Motley, had fought many battles with wooden swords in the Appleton garret. For some unexplained reason, he had but little faith in Phillips's philanthropy, and the relations of childhood between the two did not extend to their later life. His Atlantic voyages became so frequent that he once said to a friend, "I always keep my steamer ticket in my pocket, like a soda-water ticket." Indeed, his custom almost carried out this saying. I have heard that once, being in New York, he invited friends to breakfast with him at his hotel. On arriving they found only a note informing them of his departure for Europe on that very morning. I myself one day invited him to dinner with other friends, among whom was his sister, Mrs. Longfellow. We waited long for him, and I at last said to Mrs. Longfellow, "What can it be that detains your brother so late?" "I don't know, indeed," was her reply. "Your brother?" cried one of the guests. "I met him this morning on his way to the steamer. He must have sailed some hours since." A friend once spoke to him of matrimony, of which he said in reply, "Marriage? I could never undergo it unless I was held, and took chloroform." Yet those who knew him well supposed that he had had some romance of his own. To his praise be it said that he was a man of many friendships, and by no means destitute of public spirit. It was from Mr. Dana that I first heard of John Sullivan Dwight, whom he characterized as a man of moderate calibre, who had "set up for an infidel," and who had dared to speak of the Apostle to the Gentiles as Paul, without the prefix of his saintship. In the early years of my residence in Boston I sometimes heard of Mr. Dwight as a disciple of Fourier, a transcendental of the transcendentals, and a prominent member of a socialist club. I first came to know him well when Madame Sontag was singing in Boston. We met often at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Schlesinger-Benzon, a house which deserves grateful remembrance from every lover of music who was admitted to its friendly and æsthetic interior. Many were the merry and musical festivities enjoyed under that hospitable roof. The house was of moderate dimensions and in a part of Boylston Street now wholly devoted to business. Mrs. Benzon was a sister of the well-known Lehmann artists and of the father of the late coach of the Harvard boating crew. She was very fond of music, and it was at one of her soirées that Elise Hensler made her first appearance and sang, with fine expression and a beautiful fresh voice, the air from "Robert le Diable:"-- "Va, dit-elle, va, mon enfant, Dire au fils qui m'a delaissée." These friends, with others, interested themselves in Miss Hensler's musical education and enabled her to complete her studies in Paris. As is well known, she became a favorite prima donna in light opera, and was finally heard of as the morganatic wife of the King (consort) Ferdinand of Portugal. Madame Sontag and her husband, Count Rossi, came often to the Benzon house. I met them there one day at dinner, when in the course of conversation Madame Sontag said that she never acted in private life. The count remarked rather rudely, "I saw you enact the part of Zerlina quite recently." This was probably intended for a harmless pleasantry, but the lady's change of color showed that it did not amuse her. Before this time Dwight's "Journal of Music" had published a very friendly review of my first volume of poems. It did not diminish my appreciation of this kind service to learn in later years that it had been rendered by Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, then scarcely an acquaintance of mine, to-day an esteemed friend of many years, whom I have found excellent in counsel and constant and loyal in regard. During the many years of my life at South Boston, Mr. Dwight and his wife were among the faithful few who would brave the disagreeable little trip in the omnibus and across the bridge with the low draw, to enliven my fireside. I valued these guests very highly, having had occasion to perceive that Bostonians are apt to limit their associations to the regions in which they are most at home. Speaking of this once with a friend, I said, "In Boston Love crosses the bridge, but Friendship stops at the Common." After the death of his wife Mr. Dwight had many lonely years. He was very fond of young people, and as my younger children grew up he became strongly attached to them. As editor of the "Journal of Music" he was the recipient of tickets for musical entertainments of all sorts. His enjoyment of these was heightened by congenial company, and to my children, and later to my grandchildren, he was the great dispenser of musical delights. He was to us almost as one of the family, and to him our doors were never closed. His was a very individual strain of character, combining a rather flamboyant imagination with a severe taste. He could never accept the Wagner cult, and stood obstinately for the limits of classical music, insisting even that the performance of Wagner's operas perverted the tone both of strings and brasses, and that it took some time for the instruments to recover from this misuse. He had much to do with the formation of the Harvard Musical Association, and the programmes which he arranged for its concerts are precious in remembrance. Dr. Holmes sat near me at Mr. Dwight's funeral, which took place in the Harvard rooms, whose presiding genius he had been. The services were very simple and genial. Some lovely singing, a poetical tribute or so, some heart-warm words spoken by friends, mingled with the customary prayer and scripture reading. In the interval of silence before these began, Dr. Holmes said to me, in a low tone, "Mrs. Howe, we may almost imagine the angels who announced a certain nativity to be hovering near these remains." Otto Dresel, beloved as an artist and dreaded as a critic, was an intimate of the Benzon household, and was almost idolized by Mr. Dwight. He had the misfortune to be over-critical, but no less so of himself than of others. He did much to raise the appreciation of music in Boston, possessed as he was with a sense of the dignity and sacredness of the art. His compositions, not many in number, had a deep poetical charm, as had also his soulful interpretation of Chopin's works. As a teacher he was unrivaled. Two of my daughters were indebted to him for a very valuable musical education. Boston has seemed darker to me since the light of this eminent musical intelligence has left it. I subjoin a tribute of my affection for him in these lines, which were suggested by Mr. Loeffler's rendering of Handel's "Largo" at a concert, especially dedicated to the memory of this dear friend. I also add a verse descriptive of the effect of the funeral march from Beethoven's "Heroica," which made part of the programme in question. HANDEL'S LARGO. _Boston Music Hall, October 11, 1890._ IN MEMORIAM OTTO DRESEL. On every shining stair an angel stood, And to our dear one said, "Walk higher, friend." Till, rapt from earth, in a celestial mood, He passed from sight to blessings without end; And where his feet had trod, a radiant flood His lofty message of content did send. BEETHOVEN'S FUNERAL MARCH. The heavy steps that 'neath new burdens tread, The heavy hearts that wait upon the dead, The struggling thoughts that single out, through tears, The happy memories of bygone years, And on the deaf and silent presence call: O friend belov'd! O master! is this all? But as the cadence moves, the song flowers fling To us the promise of eternal spring, Love that survives the wreck of its delight, And goes, torch bearing, into darksome night. Trumpet and drum have marked the victor's way, The seraph voices now their legend say: "O loving friends! refrain your waiting fond; The gates are passed, and heaven is bright beyond." In March, 1885, I had the unspeakable grief of losing my dear eldest daughter, Julia Romana, of whose birth in Rome I have made mention. She was a person of rare endowments and of great originality of character, inheriting much of her father's personal shyness, but more of his benevolence and public spirit. She was the constant companion and faithful ally of that beloved parent. During the years of our residence in the city, she would often walk over with him to South Boston before breakfast. She delighted in giving lessons to the blind pupils of the Institution, and succeeded so well in teaching German to a class of the blind teachers that these were enabled, on visiting Germany, to use and understand the language. She read extensively, and was gifted with so retentive a memory that we were accustomed to refer to her disputed dates and other questions in history. A small volume of her verses has been printed, with the title of "Stray Chords." Some of these poems show remarkable depth of thought and great felicity of expression. [Illustration: JULIA ROMANA ANAGNOS _From a photograph._] A new source of delight was opened to her by the summer school of philosophy held for some years at Concord, Mass. Here her mind seemed to have found its true level, and I cannot think of the sittings of the school without a vision of the rapt expression of her face as she sat and listened to the various speakers. Something of this pleasure found expression in a slender volume named "Philosophiæ Quæstor," in which she has preserved some features of the school, now, alas! a thing of remote remembrance. The impressions of it also took shape in a club which she gathered about her, and to which she gave the name of the Metaphysical Club. It was beautiful to see her seated in the midst of this thoughtful circle, which she seemed to rule with a staff of lilies. The club was one in which diversity of opinion sometimes brought individuals into sharp contrast with each other, but her gentle government was able to bring harmony out of discord, and to subdue alike the crudeness of skepticism and the fierceness of intolerance. Her interest in her father's pupils was unremitting. A friend said to me not long ago, "It was one of the sights of Boston in the days of the Harvard musical concerts to see your Julia's radiant face as she would come into Music Hall, leading a blind pupil by either hand." In December, 1869, she became the wife of Michael Anagnos, who was then my husband's assistant, and who succeeded him as principal of the Institution at South Boston. After fifteen years of happy wedlock, she suffered a long and painful illness which terminated fatally. Almost her last thought was of her beloved club, and she asked that a valued friend might be summoned, that she might consult with him, no doubt, as to its future management. To her husband she said, "Be kind to the little blind children, for they are papa's children." These parting words of hers are inscribed on the wall of the Kindergarten for the Blind at Jamaica Plain. Beautiful in life, and most beautiful in death, her sainted memory has a glory beyond that of worldly fame. * * * * * A writer of my own sex, years ago, desiring to do me some pen-service, wrote to me asking for particulars of my life, and emphasizing her wishes with these words: "I wish to hear not of your literary work, but of your social successes." I could not at the time remember that I had had any, and so did not respond to her request. But let us ask what are social successes? A climb from obscurity to public notice? An abiding place on the stage of fashionable life? A wardrobe that newspaper correspondents may report? Fine equipages, furniture, and entertainments? These things have had small part in my thoughts. As I take account of my long life, I become well aware of its failures. What may I chronicle as its successes? It was a great distinction for me when the foremost philanthropist of the age chose me for his wife. It was a great success for me when, having been born and bred in New York city, I found myself able to enter into the intellectual life of Boston, and to appreciate the "high thinking" of its choice spirits. I have sat at the feet of the masters of literature, art, and science, and have been graciously admitted into their fellowship. I have been the chosen poet of several high festivals, to wit, the celebration of Bryant's sixtieth birthday, the commemoration of the centenary of his birth, and the unveiling of the statue of Columbus in Central Park, New York, in the Columbian year, so called. I have been the founder of a club of young girls, which has exercised a salutary influence upon the growing womanhood of my adopted city, and has won for itself an honorable place in the community, serving also as a model for similar associations in other cities. I have been for many years the president of the New England Woman's Club, and of the Association for the Advancement of Women. I have been heard at the great Prison Congress in England, at Mrs. Butler's convention _de moralité publique_ in Geneva, Switzerland, and at more than one convention in Paris. I have been welcomed in Faneuil Hall, when I have stood there to rehearse the merits of public men, and later, to plead the cause of oppressed Greece and murdered Armenia. I have written one poem which, although composed in the stress and strain of the civil war, is now sung South and North by the champions of a free government. I have been accounted worthy to listen and to speak at the Boston Radical Club and at the Concord School of Philosophy. I have been exalted to occupy the pulpit of my own dear church and that of others, without regard to denominational limits. Lastly and chiefly, I have had the honor of pleading for the slave when he was a slave, of helping to initiate the woman's movement in many States of the Union, and of standing with the illustrious champions of justice and freedom, for woman suffrage, when to do so was a thankless office, involving public ridicule and private avoidance. I have made a voyage upon a golden river, 'Neath clouds of opal and of amethyst. Along its banks bright shapes were moving ever, And threatening shadows melted into mist. The eye, unpracticed, sometimes lost the current, When some wild rapid of the tide did whirl, While yet a master hand beyond the torrent Freed my frail shallop from the perilous swirl. Music went with me, fairy flute and viol, The utterance of fancies half expressed, And with these, steadfast, beyond pause or trial, The deep, majestic throb of Nature's breast. My journey nears its close--in some still haven My bark shall find its anchorage of rest, When the kind hand, which every good has given, Opening with wider grace, shall give the best. INDEX Abbott, Francis E., his comparison of Jesus and Socrates, 208; expounds his views, 289. Abbott, Rev. Jacob, stanza to, 91. "Accademia," an, in Rome, 130. Adams, John Quincy, on Governor Andrew's staff, 266. Adams, Mrs. John (Abigail Smith), anecdote of, 36. Agassiz, Alexander, 184; lectures to the Town and Country Club, 406. Agassiz, Louis, personal appearance, 182; scientific interests, 183; attends Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 306. Agassiz, Mrs. Louis (Elizabeth Cary), president of Radcliffe College, 183. Albinola, an Italian patriot, 120. Alfieri, dramas of, 57, 206. Alger, William R., attends Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 306. Allston, Washington, his studio, 429; at a dinner to Charles Dickens, 431. Almack's, ball at, 105, 106. Anagnos, Michael, 313; marries Julia Romana Howe, 441. Anagnos, Mrs. Michael, born at Rome, 128; accompanies her parents to Europe, 313; her death, 439; her work and study, 440; her Metaphysical Club, and interest in the blind, 441. Andrew, John A., war governor of Massachusetts, 258; his character, 259; his genial nature, 260; becomes governor of Massachusetts, 261; pays for the legal defense of John Brown, 262; a Unitarian: broad religious sympathies, 263, 264; his energy in national affairs, 265; his trips about the State, 266; supports emancipation, 267; arranges an interview with Lincoln for the Howes, 271; his faith in Lincoln, 272. Anthon, Charles, professor at Columbia College, 23. Appleton, Thomas G., of Boston, 104; conversation with Samuel Longfellow, 293; his appearance, 431; his wit and culture, 432; lack of serious application, 433; his voyages to Europe, 434. Arconati, Marchese, his hospitality to the Howes, 119. Argyll, Duchess of, declines to aid the woman's peace crusade plan, 338. Armstrong, General John, father of Mrs. William B. Astor, 64. Association for the Advancement of Women, the, founded, 386; distribution of its congresses, 392. Astor, John Jacob, Washington Irving at the house of, 27; calls on Mrs. Howe's father on New Year's Day, 32; wedding gift of, to his granddaughter, 65; fondness for music, 74; anecdotes of, 75, 76. Astor, William B., his culture and education, 73. Astor, Mrs. William B. (Margaret Armstrong), her recollection of Mrs. Howe's mother, 5; describes a wedding, 31; gives a dinner: her good taste, 64. Atherstone, the Howes at, 136. "Atlantic Monthly, The," 232, 236, 280; first published the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," 275. Austin, Mrs., sings in New York, 15. Avignon, the Howes at, 133. Bache, Prof. A. D., at Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Baez, President of Santo Domingo, calls upon the Howes, 355; invites them to a state dinner: is expelled by a revolution, 360. Baggs, Monsignore, Bishop of Pella, presents the Howes to the Pope, 125. Bailey, Prof. J. W., lectures on insectivorous plants, 407. Balzac, Honoré de, his works read, 58, 206. Bancroft, George, the historian, his estimate of Hegel, 210; invites Mrs. Howe to write something for the Bryant celebration, 277; his part therein, 279; his life at Newport, 401; in the Town and Country Club, 407. "Barbiere di Seviglia," given in New York, 15; admired by Charles Sumner, 176. Bartol, Dr. C. A., first meeting of the Boston Radical Club held at his house, 281. Bates, Joshua, founder of the Boston Public Library, 93. "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the, writing of, 273-275. Baxter, Sally. See Hampton, Mrs. Frank. Bean, Mrs., stewardess of Cunard steamer, 89; lines to, 90. Beecher, Miss Catherine, her "Cook Book," 215. Beecher, Henry Ward, his letter on Mary Booth's death, 242; advocates woman's suffrage, 378. Beethoven, symphonies of, in Boston, 14; appreciation of his work taught, 16; selections from, given at the Wards', 49. Belgioiosa, Princess, her origin and marriage, 422. Benzon, Mr. Schlesinger, his house a musical centre, 435. Berlin, Dr. Howe imprisoned at, 118. Black, William, the novelist, 412. Blackwell, Henry B., his efforts in the cause of woman suffrage, 380-382. Blackwell, Rev. Mrs. S. C. (Antoinette Brown), first woman minister in the United States, 166; preaches, 392. Blair's Rhetoric, 57. Bloomingdale, country-seat of Mrs. Howe's father at, 10. Boker, George H., at the Bryant celebration, 279. Bonaparte, Charles, 202. Bonaparte, Joseph, ex-king of Spain, 5, 202. Bonaparte, Joseph, Prince of Musignano, 202. Boocock, Mr., a music teacher, 16. Booth, Edwin, at the Boston Theatre, requests Mrs. Howe to write him a play, 237; his marriage, 241; his wife's death, 242. Booth, Mrs. Edwin (Mary Devlin), her marriage and death, 241, 242. Booth, Wilkes, at Mary Booth's funeral, 242. Boppard, water-cure at, 189. Bordentown, N. J., residence of Joseph, ex-king of Spain, 5, 202. Borsieri, an Italian patriot, 120. Boston, Mrs. Howe spends the summer of 1842-43 near, 81; her first years in, 144-187; its workers and thinkers, 150; high level of society in, 251. Boston Radical Club, 208; founded, 281; its essayists: subjects discussed, 282; John Weiss at, 283, 284; Athanase Coquerel at, 284-286; Mrs. Howe reads her paper on "Polarity" before, 311. Bostwick, Professor, his historical charts, 14. "Bothie of Tober-na-Fuosich," Clough's, 184. Botta, Prof., speaks on Aristotle, 408. Boutwell, Gov. George S., attends Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Bowery Theatre, fire in, 16. Bowling Green, early recollections of, 4. Bowring, Sir John, 331; speaks at woman's peace crusade meeting in London, 341. Boyesen, Prof. H. H., speaks on Aristotle, 408. Bracebridge, Charles N., 136; travels in Egypt with Florence Nightingale, 188. Bracebridge, Mrs. C. N., 136; her opinion of Florence Nightingale, 137; travels in Egypt with her, 188. Brambilla, an opera singer, 104. Breakfasts as a form of entertainment, 98. Bridewell Prison, 108. Bridgman, Laura, first blind deaf mute taught the use of language, 81; referred to in Dickens's "American Notes," 87; mentioned by Thomas Carlyle, 95; by Maria Edgeworth, 113; described to the Pope, 126; lives with the Howes, 151; at Dr. Howe's death-bed, 369; at the memorial meeting to him, 370. Bright, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob, at Mrs. Howe's peace meeting in London, 341. Brokers, New York Board of, portrait of John Ward in their rooms, 55. Brook Farm, 145. Brooks, Rev. Charles T., invites Mrs. Howe to speak in his church, 321; his advice asked with regard to starting the woman's peace crusade, 328; writes a poem for the memorial meeting for Dr. Howe, 370; in the Town and Country Club, 407. Brooks, Rev. Phillips, anecdote of, 322. Brooks, Preston Smith, 179. Brown, John, calls on Dr. Howe, 254; his attack on Harper's Ferry, 255; in Missouri, 256; anecdote of, 257. Bruce, Robert, regalia of, 111. Bryant, William Cullen, editor of the "Evening Post," 21; visitor at the Ward home, 79; celebration of his seventieth birthday, 277-280; at the meetings for promoting the woman's peace crusade, 329; admires the sermon of Athanase Coquerel at Newport, 342. Bull Run, second battle of, 258. Buller, Charles, his appreciation of Carlyle, 110. Bunsen, Chevalier, Prussian ambassador to England, 118. Burns, Anthony, 164. Butler, Benjamin F., disinterestedness of his friendship for woman suffrage questioned, 395. Butler, Mrs. Josephine, encourages the woman's peace congress idea, 329. Byron, Lord, at Harrow, 22; his works unwillingly allowed in the Ward family, 58; his example leads Dr. Howe to Greece, 85; autograph letter of, 100; praise of, unpardonable in London, 115. Cardini, Signor, Mrs. Howe's instructor in vocal music, 16; his anecdote of the Duke of Wellington, 17. Carlisle, Earl of, dinner given by, 106. Carlisle, Countess of, dinner given by, 106; her good nature: pleasantry about, 107. Carlyle, Thomas, his courtesy to the Howes, 96; appearance, 97. Carreño, Teresa, party for, at Secretary Chase's house, 309. Cass, Lewis, _chargé d'affaires_ in the Papal States, 196. Castiglia, an Italian patriot, 120. Castle Garden, 4. Cerito, her dancing, 104. Chace, Mrs. Elizabeth B., at the Prison Reform meetings, 339. Channing, William Ellery, the preacher, sermon by, 144; bells tolled in France at the death of, 416. Channing, William Ellery, the poet, writes a poem for the memorial meeting for Dr. Howe, 370; Channing, William Henry, his ministry in Washington in war time, 270; in the Radical Club, 286; his attitude in that organization, 287-289; introduces Mrs. Howe at her Washington lecture, 309; aids her woman's peace crusade movement, 330. Chapman, Mrs. Maria Weston, a leading abolitionist, 153; at an abolition meeting, 156; acts as body-guard to Wendell Phillips, 157. Charnaud, Monsieur, his dancing classes, 19. Chase, Hon. Salmon P., 225; his courtesy to Mrs. Howe, 308, 309. Chasles, Philarète, his disparaging lecture on American literature, 134. Chateaubriand, his "Atala" and "René," 206. Chemistry, Mrs. B.'s "Conversations" on, 56. Cheney, Mrs. Ednah D., aids the woman suffrage movement, 382; speaks before a Unitarian society, 392; introduces Mrs. Howe to Princess Belgioiosa, 423; her review of Mrs. Howe's first book of poems, 436. Child, Mrs. Lydia Maria, acts as body-guard to Wendell Phillips, 157. Christianity, Mrs. Howe's views on, 207, 208; attitude of the Boston Radical Club towards, 286. Civil War, the, 257, 258, 265; condition of Washington during, 270. Clarke, James Freeman, his meetings at Williams Hall, 245; goes abroad, 246; at Indiana Place Chapel, 247; his marriage, 249; always supported by Gov. Andrew, 261; goes to Washington in 1861, 269; visits hospitals, 270; his opinion of Abraham Lincoln, 272; opposes Weiss at the Radical Club, 284; upholds the Christian tone of that organization, 286; his tribute to Margaret Fuller, 301; attends Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 306; in the woman suffrage movement, 375, 382. Clarke, Mrs. J. F., her character, 250. Clarke, Sarah, 202; at the coronation of King Umberto at Rome, 424. Clarke, William, 202. Claudius, Matthias, works of, 59; his "Wandsbecker Bote," 62. Clay, Henry, advocates the Missouri Compromise, 22. Clough, Miss Anne J., 335. Clough, Arthur Hugh, visits the Howes, 184; his manner and appearance, 185; his repartee, 187. Cobbe, Frances Power, 332. Cogswell, Dr. Joseph Green, principal of the Round Hill School, 43; teaches Mrs. Howe German, 44, 59, 206; resides at the Astor mansion, 75; anecdotes of, 76; introduces the Wards to Washington Allston, 429. Columbia College, its situation on Park Place, its conservatism: eminent professors at, 23; Samuel Ward attends, 67. Combe, George, 22; in Rome, 131, 132; his "Constitution of Man," 133. Combe, Mrs. George (Cecilia Siddons), anecdote of, 132. "Commonwealth, The," 252. Comte, Auguste, his "Philosophie Positive," 211; Mrs. Howe's estimate of, 307. "Conjugal Love," Swedenborg's, 209. Constantinople, the fall of, drama upon, 57. "Consuelo," George Sand's, reveals the author's real character, 58. Contoit, Jean, a French cook, 30. Conway, Miss, exercises by her school, 389. Copyright, International, urged by Charles Dickens, 26. Coquerel, Athanase, the French Protestant divine, at the Radical Club, 284, 285; sees Mrs. Howe in London, 331; his sermon in Newport, 342; his explanation of the Paris commune, 343. Corporal punishment, 109. Coventry, England, 136. Cowper, William, his "Task" read by Mrs. Howe at school, 58. Cramer, John Baptist, a London musician, 16. Cranch, Christopher P., caricatures the transcendentalists, 145; his present to Bryant on his seventieth birthday, 278. Crawford, F. Marion, the novelist, 45. Crawford, Thomas, the sculptor, his work in the Ward mansion, 45; meets the Howes in Rome: marries Louisa Ward, 127; travels to Rome with Mrs. Howe, 190; his statue of Washington, 203. Crawford, Mrs. Thomas. See Ward, Louisa. Cretan insurrection of 1866, Dr. Howe's efforts in behalf of, 312, 313; distribution of clothes to the refugees of, 317-319; bazaar in aid of the sufferers, 320. "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant's, 212. Curtis, George William, his opinion of "Words for the Hour," 230; writes about Newport, 238; presides at the Unitarian anniversary in 1886, 302; advocates woman suffrage, 378. Cushing, Caleb, 180. Cushman, Miss Charlotte, 240. Cutler, Benjamin Clarke, Mrs. Howe's grandfather, 4. Cutler, Rev. Benjamin Clarke (son of the preceding), officiates at his sister's wedding, 34. Cutler, Mrs. Benjamin Clarke, Mrs. Howe's grandmother, her costume at her daughter Louisa's wedding, 34; her beauty and charm, 35; describes the dress of her younger days, 35, 36. Cutler, Eliza. See Francis, Mrs. John W. Cutler, Louisa Cordé. See McAllister, Mrs. Julian. Daggett, Mrs. Kate Newell, third president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, 393. Dana, Richard H., the elder, a visitor at the Ward home, 79; a kind of transcendentalist, 428. Danforth, Elizabeth, describes Louisa Cutler's wedding, 33, 34. Dante, his works read, 206. Da Ponte, Lorenzo, teacher of Italian in New York, his earlier career, 24. Da Ponte, Lorenzo (son of preceding), teaches Mrs. Howe Italian, 57. Davenport, E. L., manager of the Howard Athenæum, declines Mrs. Howe's drama, 240. Davidson, Prof. Thomas, lectures on Aristotle, 406, 408. Davis, Charles Augustus, his "Downing Letters," 24, 25. Davis, Admiral Charles H., attends one of Mrs. Howe's lectures, 309. De Long, Lieut. G. W., at the dance given by the Howes in Santo Domingo, 356. De Mesmekir, John, 4. Denison, Bishop, 140. Desmoulins, M. Benoit C., his kindness to Mrs. Howe, 413. Devlin, Mary. See Booth, Mrs. Edwin. Dexter, Franklin, a friend of Allston, 429. "Dial, The," Margaret Fuller's paper, 145. "Diary of an Ennuyée," Mrs. Jameson's, 40. Dickens, Charles, dinner to, in New York, 26; at Mr. Rogers's dinner, 99; takes the Howes to Bridewell Prison, 108; gives a dinner for them, 110. Dickinson, Anna, 305. Disciples, Church of the, 256; Governor Andrew a member of, 263. "Divine Love and Wisdom," Swedenborg's, 204, 209. Dix, Dorothea L., her work for the insane, 88. "Don Giovanni," its libretto, 24; admired by Charles Sumner, 176. Doré, Gustave, the artist, his studio and work, 416-419. Douglas, Stephen A., 178. "Downing Letters," those of C. A. Davis, 25. Dresel, Otto, musical critic and teacher, 438; tribute to his memory, 439. Dress, in the thirties, 30, 31; at Mrs. Astor's dinner, 64, 65; at Samuel Ward's wedding, 65; at Lansdowne House, 102, 103; at the ball at Almack's, 106. Dublin, the Howes in, 112-114. Duer, John, at the Dickens dinner, 26. Dwight, John S., translates Goethe and Schiller, 147; tries to teach Theodore Parker to sing, 162, 163; Henry James reads a paper at the house of, 324; admires Athanase Coquerel's sermon at Newport, 342; Dana's estimate of, 435; his "Journal of Music," 436; his kindness to Mrs. Howe's children, 437; Dr. Holmes's remark at his funeral, 438. Eames, Charles, 223, 224. Eames, Mrs. Charles, her kindness to Count Gurowski, 223-226; invites Mrs. Howe to dinner, 308. Edgeworth, Maria, the Howes' visit to, 113. Edinburgh, 121. Edwards, Jonathan, Dr. Holmes's paper on, 286. Eliot, Thomas, attends a lecture by Mrs. Howe in Washington, 309. Elliott, Mrs. (Maud Howe), her remark to Henry James, the elder, 325; goes to Santo Domingo with her parents, 347; takes charge of the woman's literary work at the New Orleans exposition, 395; goes abroad with her mother, 410. Ellis, Rev. George E., lectures on the Rhode Island Indians, 407. Elssler, Fanny, a ballet dancer, 104; opinions of Emerson and Margaret Fuller on her dancing, 105. Emblee, the Nightingales at, 138. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 87; remark on Fanny Elssler's dancing, 105; begins his work, 144; caricatured by Cranch, 145; avoids woman suffrage, 158; praises "Passion Flowers," 228; at the Bryant celebration, 279; a member of the Radical Club, 282; objects to having its meetings reported: his paper on Thoreau, 290; Theodore Parker's opinion of, 291; character and attainments, 292; his interest in Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 307. England, Bank of, visited, 116, 117. Evans, Mrs., 421. Everett, C. C., a member of the Radical Club, 282. "Evidences of Christianity," Paley's, 56. Fabens, Colonel, on the voyage to Santo Domingo, 347. Farrar, Mrs., visited by Mrs. Howe, 295, 296. Faucit, Helen, the actress, 104. "Faust," Goethe's, condemned by Mr. Ward, 59. Felton, Prof. C. C., first known by the Ward family through Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel, 49; his friends, 169. "Female Poets of America," Griswold's, 5. Fern, Fanny, her essay on _rhinosophy_, 404. Field, David Dudley, addresses the second meeting of the woman's peace crusade, 329. Field, Mrs. D. D., 191. Field, Kate, at the Radical Club, 290; at Newport, 402. Fields, James T., 228. Finotti, Father, 263, 264. Fitzmaurice, Lady Louisa, daughter of the Marquis of Lansdowne, 103. Fletcher, Alice, prominent at the woman's congress, 386. Follen, Dr. Karl, 22. Foresti, Felice, an Italian patriot, 120; reads Dante with Mrs. Howe, 206. Forks, three-pronged steel, in general use, 30. Fornasari, an opera singer, 104. Forster, John, at Charles Dickens's dinner: invites the Howes to dine, 110. Fowler, Dr. and Mrs., their courtesy to the Howes, 139-141. Francis, Dr. John W., accompanies Mrs. Ward to Niagara, 8; becomes a member of the Ward household, 12; his appearance, 36; his humor, 37; his habits, 38; his introduction of Edgar Allan Poe, 39. Francis, Mrs. John W. (Eliza Cutler), takes charge of the Ward family at her sister's death, 11, 12; dances in "stocking-feet" at her sister's wedding, 34; her kindness, 38; her hospitality, 39. François, a colored man in Santo Domingo, invites Mrs. Howe to hold religious services, 350, 353. Freeman, Edward, the artist, 127; a neighbor of Mrs. Howe in Rome, 191. Freeman, Mrs. Edward, 192. "From the Oak to the Olive," extracts from, 315-319. Frothingham, O. B., a member of the Radical Club, 282. Froude, James Anthony, the historian, at Miss Cobbe's reception, 333. Fuller, Margaret, urges Mrs. Howe to publish her earlier poems, 61; her remark on Fanny Elssler's dancing, 105; in Cranch's caricature, 145; translates Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe," 147; life of, undertaken by Emerson, 158; criticises Dr. Hedge's Phi Beta address, 296; highly esteemed by Dr. Hedge, 300; the sixtieth anniversary of her birth celebrated, 301. Fuller, Mrs. Samuel R., goes to Santo Domingo with the Howes, 347. Galway, Lady, 98. Gambetta, M., at Mr. Healey's ball, 421. Garcia, the opera singer, 14. Garrison, William Lloyd, Mrs. Howe's dislike of, dispelled, 152, 153; attacks a statement of hers, 236; joins the woman suffrage movement, 375; his work for that cause, 380, 381. Gennadius, John, Greek minister to England, 411. German scholarship, its beneficial effect on New England, 303. Gibbon, Edward, 57; his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," 205. Gladstone, William E., at Devonshire House, 410; breakfast with him, 411. Gloucester, Duchess of, her appearance, 101. Godwin, Parke, admires Athanase Coquerel's sermon at Newport, 342. Goethe, his "Faust" and "Wilhelm Meister," 59; Mrs. Howe's essay on his minor poems, 60; his motto, 205. Gonfalonieri, Count, an Italian patriot imprisoned at Spielberg: his life saved by his wife, 119. Goodwin, Juliet R., becomes secretary of the Town and Country Club, 406. Goodwin, Prof. William W., 402; his Latin version of the "Man in the Moon," 404. Graham, Mrs. Elizabeth, school of, 5. Grant, Gen. U. S., at the ball at Mr. Healy's, 421. Graves, Rev. Mary H., takes part in the convention of women ministers, 312. Greeks, Dr. Howe's labors for, 85, 86, 313, 319. "Green Peace Estate, The," 152. Green, J. R., the historian, 412. Greene, George Washington, American consul at Rome, helps Dr. Howe, 123; accompanies the Howes to the papal reception, 125. Greene, Gen. Nathanael, 7, 123. Greene, Mrs. N. R., cousin of Mrs. Howe's father, anecdote of, 6. Greene, William, governor of Rhode Island, 4. Greene, Mrs. William (Catharine Ray), an ancestress of Mrs. Howe, 3; her connection with Block Island families of service, 51. Greene, William B., colonel of the First Mass. Heavy Artillery, 271. Gregory XVI., Pope, receives the Howes, 125; anecdote of, 126, 127. Grey, Mrs., her interest in schools for girls of the middle class, 333. Grimes, Brother, a colored preacher, 263. Grimes, James W., senator from Iowa, 225. Grimes, Medora. See Ward, Mrs. Samuel. Grisi, sings at Lansdowne House, 101; in "Semiramide," 104. Griswold, R. W., his "Female Poets of America," 5. Grote, George, the historian, 93. Grote, Mrs. George (Harriet Lewin), somewhat _grote_sque, 93. Guizot, M., prime minister of France, 135. Gurowski, Adam, Count, 220; employed by the State Department: his temper and curiosity, 221, 222; dismissed by Seward, 222; his breach with Sumner, 223; befriended by Mrs. Eames, 223, 224; his death, 225; his family affairs, 227. Gurowski, John, 227. Gustin, Rev. Ellen, at the convention of women ministers, 312. Hair, mode of dressing, 65. Hale, Rev. Edward Everett, his opinion of Samuel Longfellow, 293; speaks at the meeting in behalf of the Cretan insurgents, 313. Hale, George S., a friend of woman suffrage, 378. Hall, Mrs. David P. (Florence Howe), her interest in sewing for the Cretan refugees, 316. Hallam, Henry, the historian, 139. Halleck, Fitz-Greene, his "Marco Bozzaris," 22; frequent visitor at the Astor mansion, 77; his remarks on Margaret Fuller's English, 146. Hampton, Mrs. Frank (Sally Baxter), meets the Howes in Havana, 234; invites them to her home in South Carolina, 235. Hampton, Wade, his statement with regard to slavery, 235. Handel, his "Messiah" given in New York, 15; appreciation of his work taught, 16. Handel and Haydn Society, 14. Harte, Bret, at Newport, 402. Harvard College, shunned as a Unitarian institution, 24. Harvard Divinity School, Theodore Parker at, 162. Hawkes, Rev. Francis L., his abuse of Germans and abolitionists, 61. Haynes, Rev. Lorenza, takes part in the convention of women ministers, 312. Healy, G. P. A., the artist, ball at his residence, 420, 421. Healy, Mrs., 420. Hedge, Dr. F. H., his translations, 147; member of the Radical Club, 282; defends Protestant progress, 285; his Phi Beta address, 295; pastorates in Providence and Boston, 296, 297; second Phi Beta address, 298; becomes professor of German at Harvard, 299; fondness for the drama, 299, 300; his high opinion of Margaret Fuller, 300, 301; his statement of the Unitarian faith, 302; broadening effect of his studies in Germany, 303. Hegel, the German philosopher, 209; estimates of, 210; his "Aesthetik" and "Logik," 212. Hell, ideas of, 62. Hensler, Miss Elise, sings first at Mrs. Benzon's house, 435. Herder, works of, read, 59, 206. Herne, Colonel, first husband of Mrs. Cutler, Mrs. Howe's grandmother, 35. Heron, Matilda, in "The World's Own," 230. Higginson, Colonel Thomas Wentworth, at the Shadrach meeting, 165; his paper "Ought Women to learn the Alphabet," 232; his position on Christianity at the Radical Club, 285; at the woman suffrage meeting, 375; aids that cause, 382; at Newport, 402; at a mock "Commencement," 403; becomes treasurer of the Town and Country Club, 406; at the woman's rights congress in Paris, 420. Hillard, George S., his friends and character, 169, 170. Hillard, Kate, speaks at the Town and Country Club, 406. "Hippolytus," Mrs. Howe's drama of, proposed by Booth, 237; ultimately declined, 240. Hoar, Hon. George Frisbie, a friend of woman suffrage, 378; secures an appropriation for the New Orleans Exposition, 398. Hoffman, Matilda, engaged to Washington Irving, 28. Holland, Mrs. Henry (Saba Smith), reception at her house, 92. Holland, Dr. J. G., at Newport, 402. Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, at the Bryant celebration, 277-280; as a traveling companion, 277, 280; his paper at the Radical Club on Jonathan Edwards, 286; speaks at the meeting to help the Cretan insurgents, 313; writes a poem for the memorial meeting to Dr. Howe, 370. Hooker, Mrs. Isabella Beecher, speaks at the woman's congress, 385. Horace, 174; Orelli's edition of, 209. Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes), the poet, Mrs. Howe meets, 97; entertains her in 1877, 410; takes her to Mr. Gladstone's, 411. Housekeeping, the trials of, 213-215; every girl should learn the art of, 216. Howe, Florence. See Hall, Mrs. David P. Howe, Julia Romana. See Anagnos, Mrs. Michael. Howe, Mrs. Julia Ward, asked to write her reminiscences, 1; birth and parentage, 3, 4; brothers and sisters, 4, 5; early indication of inaptness with tools, 7; travels to Niagara, 8, 9; childish incidents, 7-10; her mother's death, 10; early education, 13, 14; musical training, 16, 17; seclusion of her home, 18; first ball, 29; acquaintance with Mrs. Jameson, 41, 42; leaves school: studies German with Dr. Cogswell, 43; reviews Lamartine's "Jocelyn," 44; manner of living at home, 47; her social intercourse restricted, 48; feelings on the death of her father, 52; his guidance of, 53; effect of her brother Henry's death, 54; her studies, 56-63; in chemistry, 56; in French and Italian, 57; literary work, dramas and lyrics, 57, 58; reading, 58; German studies, 59; further literary work, essays and poems, 60, 61; religious growth, 62; first dinner party, 64; her attire: bridesmaid at her brother's wedding, 65; fear of lightning, 78; social opportunities, 78, 79; spends the summer of 1841 near Boston: visits the Perkins Institution, 81; sees Dr. Howe, 82; her memoir of Dr. Howe for the blind, 83; engagement and marriage, 88; voyage to Europe, 89-91; entertained in London, 92-110; in Scotland, 111; in Dublin, 112; visits Miss Edgeworth, 113; the poet Wordsworth, 115; at Vienna, 118; at Milan, 119; arrival in Rome, 121; birth of eldest daughter, 128; leaves Rome, 133; returns to England, 133-135; visits Atherstone, 136, 137; sees the Nightingales, 138; goes to Lea Hurst, 139; Salisbury, 139-143; her travesty of Dr. Howe's letter, 142; attends Theodore Parker's meetings, 150; life in South Boston, 151, 152; in Washington, 178; second trip abroad, 188; reaches Rome, 191; returns to America, 204; studious nature, 205; ideas on Christianity, 206-208; work in Latin, 209; philosophical studies, 210-213; housekeeping trials, 214-217; free-soil preferences, 219; at Count Gurowski's death-bed, 226; her "Passion Flowers" published, 228; her "Words of the Hour" and "The World's Own" published, 230; trip to Cuba, 231; parting with Theodore Parker, 233, 234; her book about the Cuban trip, 236; writes for the "New York Tribune," 236, 237; requested by Booth to write a play, 237; disappointed at its nonappearance, 240; attends James Freeman Clarke's meetings, 245; helps Dr. Howe edit "The Commonwealth," 253; sees John Brown, 254; goes on some trips with Gov. and Mrs. Andrew, 266; visits Washington in 1861, 269; first attempt at public speaking, 271; meets Abraham Lincoln, 272; how she came to write the "Battle Hymn," 273-275; takes part in the Bryant celebration, 277-280; her papers before the Radical Club, 287; pleasantry with Dr. Hedge, 297; increasing desire to write and speak, 304, 305; gives parlor lectures at her home, 306; repeats the course in Washington, 308, 309; various philosophical papers and essays, 310; reads a paper on "Polarity" before the Radical Club, and one on "Ideal Causation" to the Parker Fraternity, 311; interested in calling the first convention of woman ministers, 312; starts for Greece, 313; arrival in Athens, 314; distributes clothes to the Cretan refugees, 316-318; returns to Boston: conducts the Cretan Bazaar, 320; lectures in Newport and Boston, 321, 322; starts a woman's peace crusade, 328; holds meetings to advance the cause in New York, 329; visits England to organize a Woman's Peace Congress, 329; speaks at the banquet of the Unitarian Association, 331; her Sunday afternoon meetings at Freemasons' Tavern, 331, 332; meets Mrs. Grey, 333; visits Prof. Seeley, 335; is constrained to apply her energy to the woman's club movement, 336; her peace addresses in England, where made, 337; asked to attend the Peace Congress in Paris, 338; attends a Prison Reform meeting, 339; her speech there, 340; holds a final meeting to further her peace crusade in London, 341; goes to Santo Domingo with Dr. Howe, 349; holds religious services for the negroes there, 350-352; visits a girls' school, 352; invited to speak to a secret Bible society, 353; every-day life there, 357, 358; invited to a state dinner by President Baez, 360; her second visit to Santo Domingo, 360; her difficulties in riding horseback, 362; her interest in the emancipation of woman takes more definite form, 372, 373; attends the meeting to found the New England Woman's Club, 374; joins the woman suffrage movement, 375; her efforts for that cause, 376; gains experience, 377; trips to promote the cause, 379-381; at legislative hearings, 381-384; attends the woman's congress in 1868, 385; elected fourth president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, 393; directs the woman's department at a Boston fair, 394; at the New Orleans Exposition, 395; difficulties encountered there, 396; speech to the negroes, 398; considered _clubable_ by Dr. Holmes, 400; presides at a mock "Commencement," 403; goes abroad with her daughter Maud in 1877: entertained by Lord Houghton, 410; breakfasts with Mr. Gladstone, 411; goes to the House of Commons with Charles Parnell, 412; visits Paris, 413; goes to the French Academy, 414; at the crowning of a _rosière_, 415; visits Doré's studio, 416-419; lectures in Paris, 419; president of a woman's rights congress, 420; at the Healys' ball, 421; speaks on suffrage in Italy, 422; visits Princess Belgioiosa, 422, 423; sees Umberto crowned, 424; reads with Madame Ristori, 424, 425; sees Leo XIII. consecrated, 426; meets Washington Allston, 429; first acquaintance with John S. Dwight, 435; feeling of loss at Otto Dresel's death, 438; her eldest daughter's death, 439; successes and failures of her life, 442-444. Howe, Maud. See Elliott, Mrs. Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley, first known to the Wards through Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel, 49; his achievement in Laura Bridgman's case, 81; Mr. Sanborn's estimate of, 83; his philanthropic efforts, 84; espouses the cause of Greece, 85, 86; his work for the blind, 86, 87; other activities: marries Julia Ward, 88; goes abroad, 89; entertained in London, 92-107, 110, 111; visits London prisons, 108, 109; in Scotland, 111; in Dublin, 112; visits Miss Edgeworth, 113; the poet Wordsworth, 115; his connection with the Polish rebellion, 117, 118; excluded from Prussia, 118; tour through Europe to Rome, 118-121; arrested in Rome, 123; presented to the Pope, 126; with George Combe, 131, 132; leaves Rome, 133; conversation with Florence Nightingale, 138; his visit to Rotherhithe workhouse, 141; his activity on the Boston School Board, 148; advocates the teaching of speech to deaf-mutes, 149; inability to sing, 163; his circle of friends, 169, 170; his interest in prison reforms, 173; commissioner on the annexation of Santo Domingo, 181; visits Europe in 1850, 188; takes the water cure at Boppard, 189; his abolition sympathies, 218; trip to Cuba, 230; buys Lawton's Valley at Newport, 238; objects to his children attending the Parker meetings, 244; edits "The Commonwealth," 252; his friendship with Gov. Andrew, 253; his judgment in military affairs, 269; averse to women speaking in public, 305; his interest in the Cretan insurrection, 312, 313; starts for Greece, 313; arrival in Athens: his life endangered, 314; visits Crete: returns to Boston, 320; visits Santo Domingo to report on the advisibility of annexing it, 345; goes to Santo Domingo again, 347; gives a dance for the people, 355; goes to Santo Domingo a third time, 360; hears of Sumner's death, 364; returns to Boston, 368; his death, 369; tributes to his memory, 370. Hudson River, journey up the, 8. Hugo, Victor, remark on John Brown, 256; at the congress of _gens de lettres_, 413. Hunt, Helen, at Newport, 402. Hunting, Rev. J. J., commends the exercises of the convention of woman ministers, 312. Huntington, Daniel, paints portrait of Mrs. Howe's father, 55. "Hymns of the Spirit," collected by Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, 293. Indians, the, in New York State, 9; Samuel Ward's intercourse with, in California, 70. Inglis, Sir Robert Harry, 98. Iron Crown of Lombardy, 119, 120. Irving, Sir Henry, 410. Irving, Washington, his embarrassment in public speaking, 25; at the dinner to Charles Dickens, 26; his manners and travels, 27; his love affair, 28; frequent visitor at the Astor mansion, 75. Italy, emancipation of, 121, 193-196. Jackson, Andrew, ridiculed in the "Downing Letters," 25; crushes the bank of the United States, 50. James, Henry, the elder, his character and culture, 323, 324; his views on immortality, 325; Swedenborgian tendencies, 326; at Newport, 402. Jameson, Mrs. (Anna Brownell Murphy), visits New York: her books and ability, 40; private history and appearance, 41; Mrs. Howe's acquaintance with her, 41, 42; describes Canada: later books by, 42. Janauschek, Madame, visited by Dr. Hedge and Mrs. Howe in Boston, 299. Janin, Jules, French critic, friend of Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel, 68. Johnson, Samuel, joint editor of "Hymns of the Spirit," 293. Johnston, William P., president of Tulane University, 399. Julian, George W., attends Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Kant, Immanuel, his transcendental philosophy, 146; his "Critique of Pure Reason," 212; influence on Mrs. Howe, 310. Kemble, Fanny, story of, 131, 132. "Kenilworth," Scott's novel of, play founded on, 57. Kenyon, John, his dinner for the Howes, 108. King, Charles, editor of the "New York American," 22; president of Columbia College, 23. King, James, junior partner of Samuel Ward, 23. King, Rufus, 23. Knowles, James, editor of the "Nineteenth Century," 412. Lafayette, General, interested in the Polish revolution, 117. Lamartine, his poems and travels, 206. Landseer, Sir Edwin, at the Rogers dinner, 99. Lane, Prof. George M., 402. Lansdowne, Marquis of, his courtesy to the Howes, 100, 101. Lansdowne, Marchioness of, 100. Lansdowne House, musical evening at, 100-102; dinner at, 103. Lawton's Valley, the Howes' summer home at Newport, 238. Lee, Henry, on Gov. Andrew's staff, 266. Lemonnier, M. Charles, editor, 413. Lemonnier, Mme. Elise, founder of industrial schools for women, 413. Leo XIII., consecrated: revives certain points of ceremony, 426. Lesczinska, Maria, wife of Louis XV., 227. Leveson-Gower, Lady Elizabeth, 106. Leveson-Gower, Lady Evelyn, 106. Libby Prison, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" sung at, 276. "Liberator, The," 236. "Liberty Bell, The," 154. Lieber, Dr. Francis, his opinion of Hegel, 210; commends a passage from "Passion Flowers," 229; at the Bryant celebration, 278. Lincoln, Abraham, services at his death, 248; Mrs. Howe's interview with, 271, 272. "Linda di Chamounix," 104. "Literary Recreations," poems by Samuel Ward, 73. Livermore, Mrs. Mary, 158, 294; her eloquence and skill, 377, 378; labors for woman suffrage, 380-382; prominent in the woman's congress, 385, 386. Livy, histories of, 209. Llangollen, story of the two maids of, 111. London, the Howes in, 91-111; Mrs. Howe's work there for the peace crusade, 330-336; her last stay there, 410-413. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, becomes a friend of Mrs. Howe through her brother Samuel, 49; his opinion of Samuel Ward, 73; takes Mrs. Howe to the Perkins Institution, 81, 82; his translations, 147. Longfellow, Rev. Samuel, ordained, 292; his character and convictions: hymns, 293; his essay on "Law" before the Radical Club, 294. Loring, Judge, denounced by Theodore Parker, 164. Lothrop, Rev. Samuel K., attends Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 306; requests her to prolong the course, 308. Lucas, Mrs. Margaret, assists Mrs. Howe in her woman's peace movement, 341. "Lucia di Lammermoor," 104. "Luther," Dr. Hedge's essay on, 301. Lynch, Dominick, introduces the first opera troupe to New York, 24. Lyons, Richard, Lord, British minister at Washington, 309. Machi, Padre, visits the catacombs with the Howes, 128. Mackintosh, Robert James, calls on Mrs. Jameson, 42. Maclaren, Mrs., assists Mrs. Howe in her peace movement, 341. Maclise, Daniel, the painter, 110. MacMahon, Marshal, his reception to Gen. and Mrs. Grant, 421. Macready, William Charles, the actor, 104. Mailliard, Adolph, 201. Mailliard, Mrs. Adolph (Annie Ward), sister of Mrs. Howe: accompanies her to Europe, 88; dines with Carlyle at Chelsea, 96; her loveliness, 137; her husband, 201; her toast at the Washington's Birthday dinner in Rome, 203; returns to America with Mrs. Howe, 204. Malibran, Madame, in the rôles of Cenerentola and Rosina, 15. Mallock, William H., at a dinner for Mrs. Howe, 412. Manchester, Bishop of, opposes the founding of schools for girls of the middle class, 333. Mann, Horace, uplifts the public schools, 88; goes to Europe, 89; visits Carlyle at Chelsea, 96; inspects the London prisons, 108, 109; opinion of George Combe, 133; praises Dr. Howe's work in the Boston schools, 148; advocates the teaching of speech to deaf-mutes, 149; shrinks from woman suffrage, 157. Mann, Mrs. Horace (Mary Peabody), goes to Europe with the Howes, 89; visits Thomas Carlyle, 96. Manning, Cardinal, presides at a Prison Reform meeting, 339. "Marco Bozzaris," 22. Margherita, Queen, at King Umberto's coronation, 424. Mario, sings at Lansdowne House, 101. Marion, Gen. Francis, 4. Martel, a hair-dresser, 65. "Martin Chuzzlewit," transcendental episode in, 139. Martineau, Harriet, statue of, 158. May, Abby W., aids bazaar in behalf of the Cretans, 320; her energy in the Association for the Advancement of Women, 393. May, Rev. Samuel J., 394. McAllister, Julian, marries Louisa Cutler, 33. McAllister, Mrs. Julian, 33. McAllister, Judge Matthew H., 33. McCabe, Chaplain, mentions the singing of the "Battle Hymn" in Libby Prison, 276. McCarthy, Mrs. Justin, "rout" given by, 413. McVickar, John, professor of philosophy at Columbia College, 23. "Merchant Princes of Wall Street, The," inaccuracy of, 52. Merritt, Mrs., a New Orleans lady, addresses the colored people, 398. Metastasio, dramas of, read, 57, 206. Milan, the Howes in, 119, 120. Milnes, Richard Monckton. See Houghton, Lord. Milton, John, his "Paradise Lost" used as a text-book, 58. Mitchell, Maria, her character and attainments: signs the call for a congress of women, 385; becomes the president in 1876, 387; lectures to the Town and Country Club, 406. Mitchell, Dr. Weir, lectures to the Town and Country Club, 406. Molière, his comedies read, 206. Monza, trip to, 119. Moore, Prof., at Columbia College, 23. "Moral Philosophy," William Paley's, 13. Morecchini, Monsignore, minister of public charities at Rome, 124. Morpeth, George, Lord (afterwards seventh earl of Carlisle), at Lansdowne House, 102, 103; Sydney Smith's dream about, 107; takes the Howes to Pentonville prison, 109. Motley, John Lothrop, at school with Tom Applet on, 433. Mott, Lucretia, 166; at the Radical Club, 283. Moulton, Mrs. William U. (Louise Chandler), reports the Radical Club meetings for the "New York Tribune," 290. Mozart, symphonies of, given in Boston, 14; appreciation of his work taught, 16; his work given at the Wards', 49; admired by Sumner, 176. Munich, works of art at, described by Mrs. Jameson, 40. Museum of Fine Arts, The, in Boston, 44. Music, early efforts for, in Boston and New York, 14, 15; effect on youthful nerves considered, 17, 18. "Mystères de Paris," Eugène Sue's, 204. Napoleon I., anecdote of, 1; invasion of Italy by, 17; incidents of that invasion, 120. Nassau, visit to, 232. Newgate prison, visit to, 108. Newport, Mrs. Howe spends a summer at the Cliff House there, 221; Dr. Howe buys an estate at, 238; Mrs. Howe writes her play there, 239; people who stayed at, 401, 402; the Town and Country Club of, formed, 405. New Year's Day, custom of visiting on, 31, 32. New York City, growth of, shown, 12, 13; first musical ventures in, 14, 15; its people of culture, 21-25; social events in, 29, 66; Bryant celebration at, 277-280; meetings in, to encourage the woman's peace crusade, 329. "New York Review," publishes an essay by Mrs. Howe, 60. New York State, Indians of, 9; in the financial crisis of 1837, 51. Niagara, surprise at the first sight of, 8. Nightingale, Florence, 136; her character: conversation with Dr. Howe, 138; studies nursing, 139; travels abroad: visited by Margaret Fuller, 188. Nightingale, Parthenope, 138, 188. Nineteenth century, the, its mechanical and intellectual achievements, 1, 2. Nordheimer, Dr. Isaac, teaches Mrs. Howe German, 59. "North American Review, The," articles by Samuel Ward in, 68. Norton, Rev. Andrews, in Cranch's caricature, 145. Norton, Hon. Mrs. (Caroline Sheridan), at Lansdowne House: her attire, 102. "Nozze di Figaro, Le," libretto of, by whom, 24. O'Connell, Daniel, the Irish agitator, 113. Ordway, Mrs. Eveline M., with Mrs. Elliott at the New Orleans Exposition, 399. O'Sullivan, John L., editor of the "Democratic Review," 79. Paddock, Mary C., goes to Santo Domingo with the Howes, 347. Paley, William, his "Moral Philosophy," 13; his "Evidences of Christianity," 56. Palgrave, F. T., reception at his house, 412. "Paradise Lost," used as a text-book, 58; religious interpretation of, 62. Paris, Samuel Ward in: his work descriptive of, 68; the Howes arrive in, 134; peace congress at, 338; Mrs. Howe's last visit to, 413. Parker, Dr. Peter, attends Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Parker, Theodore, 105; Mrs. Howe attends his meetings, 150; his Sunday evenings, 153; his sermon on "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity," 159; his visit to Rome: christens Mrs. Howe's eldest daughter, 160; his culture, 161; affection for his wife, 162; musical attainments, 163; his great sermons, 164; at the Shadrach meeting, 165; women admitted to his pulpit, 166; his personal characteristics, 167; death, 168; compared with Sumner, 176; his opinion of Hegel, 211; repeats lines from "Passion Flowers," 228; goes to Cuba accompanied by the Howes, 231; continues to Vera Cruz and Europe, 233; his meetings, 244; his parting gift to Massachusetts, 263; his opinion of Emerson, 291; of Dr. Hedge, 298; sympathizes with Mrs. Howe's desire for expression, 305. Parker, Mrs. Theodore, 160, 162. Parnell, Charles S., escorts Mrs. Howe to the House of Commons, 412. Parnell, Mrs. Delia Stuart, gives Mrs. Howe a note of introduction to her son, 412. Parsons, Thomas W., his poem on the death of Mary Booth, 241; suggests a poem for Mrs. Howe's Sunday meetings in London, 332. "Passion Flowers," Mrs. Howe's first volume of poems, 228, 229; reviewed in Dwight's "Journal of Music" by Mrs. E. D. Cheney, 436. Passy, Frederic, takes Mrs. Howe to the French Academy, 414; also to the crowning of a _rosière_, 415; presents her with a volume of his essays, 416. Paul, Jean, works of, read, 59. Pegli, Samuel Ward dies at, 73. Peirce, Benjamin, a member of the Radical Club, 282. Pellico, Silvio, an Italian patriot, 119. Pentonville prison, visited, 109. Perkins, Col. Thomas H., his recollection of Mrs. Cutler, 35. Persiani, Mlle., an opera singer, 104. "Phædo," Plato's, read by Mrs. Howe, 321. Phillips, Wendell, his prophetic quality of mind recognized, 84; leader of the abolitionists: his birth and education, 154; at anti-slavery meetings, 155-157; an advocate of woman suffrage, 157, 158; his death, 159; compared with Sumner, 175; effect of his presence at the Radical Club, 286; his orthodoxy, 287; speaks at the meeting to help the Cretan insurgents, 313; at the woman suffrage meeting, 375; supports that cause, 378, 382; at school with Tom Appleton, 433. "Philosophie Positive," Comte's, 211. Phrenology, belief in, 132, 133. Pius IX., Pope, 125; his weakness, 194, 195; his death, 425. Poe, Edgar Allan, his visit to Dr. Francis, 39. Polish insurrection of 1830, the, connection of Dr. Howe with, 117. Polish refugees, ball in aid of, 105. Powel, Samuel, his prophecy in regard to Newport, 408. Powell, Mr. Aaron, asks Mrs. Howe to attend the Paris Peace Congress as a delegate, 338. Priessnitz, his water cure, 189. Prime, Ward & King, firm of, Mrs. Howe's father a member, 50, 51; her brother Samuel admitted, 69. Prisons, visited by Dr. Howe, 108, 109. Pulszky, Mme. (Theresa von Walther), 118. Pym, Capt., an Arctic voyager, 399. Quincy, Edmund, his remark to Theodore Parker, 287. Quincy, Jr., Mrs. Josiah, woman's club started at her house, 400. Rachel, Madame, the actress, 135. Racine, his tragedies read, 206. Red Jacket, an Indian Chief, 9. Reed, Lucy, a blind deaf mute, 81, 82. Regnault, Henri, eulogized at the French Academy, 414. Repeal Measures, agitation for, in Dublin, 112. Rice, A. H., governor of Massachusetts, presides at the Music Hall meeting in memory of Dr. Howe, 370. Richards, Mrs. Henry (Laura Howe), accompanies her parents to Europe, 313. Richmond, Duke of, visits Bridewell prison with the Howes, 109. Richmond, Rev. James, 210. Richmond, Va., theatre in, burned, 16; Crawford's statue of Washington for, 203. Ripley, George, his efforts at Brook Farm, 145; reviews "Passion Flowers," 228; sees the Howes and Parkers off for Cuba, 231. Ripley, Mrs. George (Sophia Dana), 296. Ripley, Mary, speaks at the woman's congress in Memphis, 389. Ristori, Mme., the actress, 264; reads Marie Stuart in Rome, 424. Ritchie, Harry, the handsome, on Gov. Andrew's staff, 266. Ritchie, Mrs., daughter of Harrison Gray Otis, 401. Rogers, Samuel, the poet, dinner at his house, 99, 100; his economical dinner, 141. Rogers, Prof. William B., vice-president of the Town and Country Club, 405; lectures to the club, 406. Rome, the Howes' arrival in, 121; stiffness of society in, 123, 127; Mrs. Howe's second visit to, 191; political condition of, 193-195; Mrs. Howe's stay in, on her way to Greece, 313; spends the winter of 1877-78 in, 423-427. Rosebery, Lord, a friend of Samuel Ward, 72; visited by, 73; at Devonshire House, 410. Rosebery, Lady, 73. Rossi, Count, at Mrs. Benzon's, 436. Rossini, works of performed in New York, 14; admired by Sumner, 176. Round Hill School, 5; its principal, 43; Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel at, 67. "Routs," receptions so called, 93. Russell, Mrs. Sarah Shaw, a friend of Theodore Parker, 168. St. Angelo, Castle of, 130. St. Calixtus, catacombs of, 128. St. Luke, academy of, 124. St. Peter, church of, 121, 125, 126. Salisbury, the Howes at, 139-141. Samana Bay, the Howes' first visit to, 348; later stay at, 361-368; school at, 364. Samana Bay Company, Dr. Howe visits Santo Domingo in its interests, 346; ended by order of the Dominican government, 367. San Francisco, Samuel Ward at, 70. San Michele, industrial school of, 124. Sanborn, Franklin B., his biography of Dr. Howe, 82; reviews "Passion Flowers," 185, 228. Sand, George, her works read by Mrs. Howe, 58, 206. Sands, Julia, her biography of her brother, 21. Sands, Robert, the poet, of an old New York family, 21. Santa Maria Maggiore, church of, 125. Santo Domingo, annexation of, considered by a commission, 180, 345; proper way to spell the name, 348; religious meetings for the negroes in the city of, 349-351; small amount of English spoken there, 352; secret Bible society in, 353; debating club there, 354; a city of shopkeepers, 355; pleasant winter climate of, 358; longevity of the negroes in, 364; characteristics of the people, 366. Sargent, Rev. John T., meetings of the Boston Radical Club at his house, 281. Satan, idea of, 62. Schiller, Mrs. Howe's essay on his minor poems, 60; plays read, 206. Schlesinger, Daniel, Mrs. Howe's music teacher, stanzas on his death, 58. Schliemann, Mrs., 410. "Schönberg-Cotta family, The," 6. Schubert, his music played at the Ward home, 49. Schumann, the composer, 40. Schumann, Madame (Clara Wieck), mentioned by Mrs. Jameson, 40. Scotland, the Howes in, 111, 112. Scott, Sir Walter, 28; his novel "Kenilworth," play founded on, 57; grave of, at Abbotsford, 111; works lightly esteemed by Charles Sumner, 169. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, on John Kenyon, 108; her letter of introduction to Count Gonfalonieri, 119; praises a line from "Passion Flowers," 228. Sedgwick, Mrs. Theodore (Susan Ridley), 90. Seeley, Prof. J. R., hospitality and kindness to Mrs. Howe: his lecture on Burke, 335. Sewall, Judge Samuel E., aids the woman suffrage movement, 382. Seward, William H., secretary of state, stigmatized by Count Gurowski, 222. Shaw, Mrs. Quincy A., 184. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, his books prohibited in the Ward family, 58. Sherret, Miss, her interest in schools for girls of the middle class, 333. Sherwood, Mrs. (Mary Martha Butt), her stories, 48. Siddons, Mrs. William (Sarah Kemble), fund for her monument, 104; her daughter, 131. Silliman, Prof. Benjamin, of Yale College, 22. Smith, Alfred, real estate agent of Newport, 238. Smith, Mrs. Seba, 166. Smith, Rev. Sydney, calls on the Howes: his reputation as a wit, 91; appearance, 92; anecdotes of, 92-95; pleasantry about Lord Morpeth, 107. Smith, Mrs. Sydney, Mrs. Howe calls on, 94. Somerville, Mrs. (Mary Fairfax), intimate with Mrs. Jameson, 42. "Sonnambula, La," given in New York, 15. Sontag, Mme., at Mrs. Benzon's, 435. Sothern, Edward Askew, in "The World's Own," 230. Southworth, Mrs. F. H. (Emma D. E. Nevitt), attends Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Spielberg, the Austrian fortress of, Italian patriots imprisoned in, 119, 120. Spinoza, 212, 309. Stanton, Theodore, 420. Steele, Tom, friend of Daniel O'Connell, 113. Stone, Lucy, 305; speaks for woman suffrage in Boston, 375; her skill and zeal, 377, 378; her work for that cause, 380, 381; prominent at the woman's congress, 385. Stonehenge, Druidical stones at, 140. Story, Chief Justice, 169. Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher, her "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 253. Sue, Eugène, his "Mystères de Paris," 204. Sumner, Albert, brother of the senator, 402. Sumner, Charles, first known to the Wards through Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel, 49; takes the Wards to the Perkins Institution, 81, 82; Thomas Carlyle's estimate of, 96, 97; inability to sing, 163; his first appearance at the Ward home, 168; his friends, 169; his political opinions, 170; his temperament and aspect, 171-173; attitude on prison reform, 173, 174; his eloquence, 175; his culture, 176; his life in Washington, 177-180; opposes the annexation of Santo Domingo, 181; his death, 182; defeats Webster for the Senate, 218; his breach with Count Gurowski, 223; grieves at Gurowski's death, 226; dines at Mrs. Eames's, 308. Sumner, Charles Pinckney, sheriff, anecdote of, 171, 172. Sumner, Mrs. C. P., anecdotes of, 177, 178. Sunday, observance of, in the Ward family, 48. Sutherland, Duke of, 99. Sutherland, Duchess of (Harriet Howard), 99; her attire at Lansdowne House, 102; at the ball at Almack's, 106; at the Countess of Carlisle's dinner, 106, 107; her relations with the Queen, 107. Swedenborg, Emanuel, his "Divine Love and Wisdom," 204; his theory of the divine man, 208; works read, 209. "Sylphide, La," 135. Taddei, Rosa, 130. Taglioni, Madame, _danseuse_, 135. "Task, The," William Cowper's, 58. Tasso, 176, 206. Taylor, "Father" (Edward T.), Boston Methodist city missionary, 263. Taylor, Mrs. Peter, founds a college for working women, 333. Terry, Luther, an artist in Rome, 127; married to Mrs. Crawford, 312. Terry, Mrs. Luther. See Ward, Louisa. Thackeray, William M., his admiration for Mrs. Frank Hampton, 234; depicts her in Ethel Newcome, 235. Theatre, the, frowned down in New York, 15, 16. Thoreau, Henry D., Emerson's paper on, 290. Ticknor, Miss Anna, in the Town and Country Club, 407. Ticknor, George, letter of introduction from, to Miss Edgeworth, 113; to Wordsworth, 115. Tolstoi, Count Lyeff, his "Kreutzer Sonata" disapproved of, 17. Torlonia, a Roman banker, anecdote of, 27; ball given by, 123. Torlonia's Palace, 122, 128. Törmer, an artist, 127. Tourgenieff, the Russian novelist, 412. Town and Country Club of Newport founded, 405; its eminent lecturers, 406, 407. Townsend, Mrs. Gideon (Mary A. Van Voorhis), poet of the opening of the New Orleans Exposition, 399. Transcendentalism, ridiculed by Dickens, 139; by Cranch, 145; a world movement, 146, 147. "Trip to Cuba," Mrs. Howe's book, extract from, 233; published in the "Atlantic Monthly" and in book form: attacked, 236. Tübingen, University of, confers a degree on Samuel Ward, Mrs. Howe's brother, 68. Turks, their devastation of Greece, 85. Tweedy, Edmund, 402. Tweedy, Mary, 402. Umberto, king of Italy, crowned, 424. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Mrs. Stowe's, 253. United States, Bank of, Jackson's refusal to renew charter of, 50; English sneer at, 117. Van de Weyer, Mr. Sylvain, Belgian minister to England, 93. Van de Weyer, Mrs. Sylvain, 92. Vatican, evening visit to, 129; head of Zeus in, 132. "Via Felice," a poem, 200. Victor Emmanuel, his popularity and death, 423. Victoria, Queen, 93. Vienna, the Howes at, 118. Von Walther, Mme., 118. Voysey, Rev. Charles, sermon by, 330. Waddington, W. H., 410. Wade, Benjamin F., commissioner on the annexation of Santo Domingo, 181, 345. Wadsworth, William, of Geneseo, 104. Walcourt, Lord, visited by the Howes, 114, 115. Walcourt, Lady, 115. Wall Street, Samuel Ward in, 51; John Ward in, 55. Wallace, Horace Binney, a delightful companion, 198, 199; sad death, 200; lines to, 200, 201; recommends Comte's work, 211. "Wandsbecker Bote," Matthias Claudius's, 62. Ward, Annie. See Mailliard, Mrs. Adolph. Ward, Frances Marion, sent to Round Hill School, 5; at home, 45. Ward, Henry, uncle of Mrs. Howe, a lover of music and good cheer, 19. Ward, Henry, brother of Mrs. Howe, sent to Round Hill School, 5; at home, 45; his character, 53; death, 54. Ward, John, uncle of Mrs. Howe, 19; a practical man, 20; notes of his life, 54-55; anecdote of, 66. Ward, Louisa, wife of Thomas Crawford, 45; at Rome, 73; her beauty, 137; her journey to Rome with Mrs. Ward, 190; established at Villa Negroni, 192; marries Luther Terry: visited in 1867 by Mrs. Howe, 313; goes to the consecration of Leo XIII., 425. Ward, Richard, 19. Ward, Gov. Samuel, of Rhode Island, 3, note. Ward, Samuel, grandfather of Mrs. Howe, appearance and manner, 19; her father's grief at his death, 50. Ward, Samuel, father of Mrs. Howe, his birth and descent, 3; grief at his wife's death, 11; care for his children, 11; plans for their education, 13; religious views become more stringent, 15; gives up wine, tobacco, and cards, 18-20; his fine taste, 45; generosity: discussion with his son regarding social intercourse, 46; his family habits, 47; his observance of Sunday, 48; ideas of propriety; religious faith, 49; business ability, 50; carries New York State through the crisis of 1837, 50, 51; his early experience in Wall St., 51; his death, 52; his careful restraint of his daughter, 52, 53; his portrait in the New York Bank of Commerce, 55; condemns Goethe's "Faust," 59; displeased with his son Samuel's work, 69. Ward, Mrs. Samuel (Julia Rush), mother of Mrs. Howe: marriage and education: her charm of character, 5; anecdotes of, 5, 6; her tact, 6; death, 10, 11. Ward, Samuel, brother of Mrs. Howe, sent to Round Hill School, 5; travels in Europe: at home, 45; his defense of society, 46; enlivens the austerity of the Ward household, 49; establishes a home of his own, 53; marries Emily Astor, 65; his appearance and education, 67; travels abroad, 68; his lack of interest in business, his second marriage, 69; goes to California, 70; Indian adventures, 70, 71; life in Washington: becomes "King of the Lobby," 72; his friends, 72, 73; his visit to Lord Rosebery: death at Pegli: volume of poems, 73. Ward, Mrs. Samuel (Emily Astor), her marriage, 65; her fine voice, 74, 75. Ward, Mrs. Samuel (Medora Grimes), married, 69. Ward, William, 19. Waring, Col. George E., 404. Washington, Samuel Ward in, 72; Charles Sumner's residence in, 180; Count Gurowski in, 221-223; Mrs. Eames's position there, 224; funeral of Gurowski in, 226; condition of, during the civil war, 269, 270; Mrs. Howe lectures in, 308. Washington, Gen. George, 9; his attention to Mrs. Cutler, 35; waited on by "Daughters of Liberty," 36; birthday celebrated in Rome, 203. Wasson, David A., a member of the Radical Club, 282; his reply to Mr. Abbott, 289. Webster, Daniel, Theodore Parker's sermon on, 164; defeated for the senatorship by Sumner, 218. Wedding ceremonies described, 33, 34, 65, 66. Weiss, Rev. John, at the Boston Radical Club, 283, 284; on woman suffrage, 289; on poets and philosophers, 304. Welles, Gideon, secretary of the navy, 225. Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, anecdote of, 17. Wentzler, A. H., paints portrait of John Ward, 55. Whipple, Edwin P., reviews "Passion Flowers," 228; attends Mrs. Howe's parlor lectures, 306. White, Andrew D., commissioner on the annexation of Santo Domingo, 181, 345. White, Mrs. Andrew D., 346. White, Charlotte, a "character" in early New York, 77. Whiting, Solomon, attends Mrs. Howe's lecture in Washington, 309. Whitney, Miss Anne, her statue of Harriet Martineau, 158. Whittier, John G., praises "Passion Flowers," 228; his characterization of Dr. Howe, 370. Wieck, the German composer, described by Mrs. Jameson, 40. Wilbour, Mrs. Charlotte B., prominent in the woman's congress, 385, 386. Wilderness, battle of, 265. "Wilhelm Meister," Goethe's, discussed, 59. Wilkes, Rev. Eliza Tupper, takes part in the convention of woman ministers, 312. Willis, N. P., at the Bryant celebration, 278. Wilson, Henry, 178. Wines, Rev. Frederick, at the Prison Reform meetings, 340. Winkworth, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen, friends of peace, their hospitality, 330. Wolcott, Mrs. Henrietta L. T., her talk on waifs, 392; helps Mrs. Howe with the woman's department of a fair in Boston in 1882, 394. Woman suffrage, championed by Wendell Phillips, 157, 158; by John Weiss, 289; meeting in favor of, in Boston, 375; other efforts, 376; workers for it, 378; urged in Vermont, 380; legislative hearings upon, 381-384. Wood, Mrs., sings in New York: her voice, 15. Woods, Rev. Leonard, invites Mrs. Howe to contribute to the "Theological Review," 44. "Words for the Hour," Mrs. Howe's second publication, 230. Wordsworth, William, the poet, the Howes' visit to, 115, 116. "World's Own, The," a drama by Mrs. Howe, 230. Yerrington, James B., 156. Zénaïde, Princess, 202. [Transcribers' note: Original spelling has been maintained and not standardized. Footnotes have been renumbered for consistency. To indicate text in italic font, _underscores_ have been used. Typographical errors that were corrected: 'an-answered'-->'answered': It was a timid performance upon a slender reed, but the great performers in the noble orchestra of writers answered to its appeal, which won me a seat in their ranks. 'Gary'-->'Cary': The story of his life and work is beautifully told in the "Life and Correspondence" published soon after his death by his widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, well known to-day as the president of Radcliffe College. 'spoken or'-->'spoken of': The young man whom I saw at this time was spoken of as much devoted to the turf, and the only saying of his that I have ever heard quoted was his question as to how long it took Nebuchadnezzar to get into condition after he had been out to grass. 'sum'-->'summer': spends the summer of 1841 near Boston: visits the Perkins Institution. 'Vermöchtniss'-->'Vermächtniss': "Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit." The index entries for 'William Ellery Channing', the preacher, referred to on pp. 144 and 416; and the poet, referred to on p. 370, were separated.] 
3392	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Cambridge Neighbors by William Dean Howells CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me. At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age, time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of the Atlantic Monthly. As for the social environment I should have been puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century. They are now nearly all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death's doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise. I. One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name. He was of low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight, short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven, and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair, clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off. I believe he never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his inextinguishable youth. It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task as any American has performed. But he might have been indefinitely less than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as that of Longfellow himself. We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the beginning of a life-long friendship with him. I was known to him only by my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which after wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined a home-school, to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his own daughter under his roof. These things drew us closer together, and he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble. At one such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil. It passed, for that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known in him. But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such pompous acknowledgment as, "Professor Child, all that I have become, sir, I owe to your influence in my college career." He did, with delicious mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college did not form the sunniest exposure for young folly and vanity. I know that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery could take him off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cutting phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage that offers itself at times to all men. But mostly he wished to do people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his heart. Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the affection which he divided with them and with his flowers. I recall him in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his gardening. This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses, which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he spent his summers in Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly across at you. If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a succession of hospitable obeisances. He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as "Il Pesceballo" (he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style finely personal to himself. His learning in the line of his Harvard teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time, and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched. I fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest life. At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary superiority; and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite learning for a moment, with the cry, "Scendiamo fra il popolo!" (Let us go down among the people.) II. Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and trouble for another. He once took thought for me at a time when it was very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear. I do not remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he did not seek quite that martyrdom. He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was always willing to do for others. In the form of a favor to himself he brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to us. Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev' together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most characteristic of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet. Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's religion more than the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In those earlier days I believe he really thought it was! Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by works in fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in matter and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'. The lovely idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened life into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular effect. Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood. III. It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast as he learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong word with instant and final rejection. He had not learned American English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters in such matters, its difference from true American and true English. It was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without his choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing. I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our speech is rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other writers born to different languages who have handled English with anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand, and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he began to speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in Norway before he came to America. What English he knew he learned the use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of it as Americans. He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge. He had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here he was almost as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate essays in fiction. After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness', and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch. There are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful sense of their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of human nature, and of American character. He understood our character quite as well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not to do so. I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought to have been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's achievements we must never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our life. In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite willing to say that I know few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with American types and conditions. It has the vast horizon of the masterpieces of fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone, but for every reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at an end. I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things. Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world, and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he should have written less and less. He never wrote anything that was not worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure. The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the direction of the work which he loved so well. When a man adds to his achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction, and four books for boys. Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be merely a scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know American life better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil; and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with us had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans. He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life; both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social, but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be. When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in his appointment in Columbia. New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which our citizenship is worth having. I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders. But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he talked as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality, indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse. I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did. This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with them. IV. It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man, very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also mine. But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way, with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual realities from which they project. His piety, which sometimes expressed itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were. Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the doctrine of the Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. He put into this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly suggestive: I mean the one called 'Society the Redeemed Form of Man.' He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of themselves he presented in the image of "simmering in their own fat and putting a nice brown on each other." Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He thought that very likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny; and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace, and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them. As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed, however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession. I went one evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the angelic life. James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition they were probably the sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself. With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells. His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social and civil facts through his religion. He was essentially religious, but he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon political questions. My own darkness as to anything like social reform was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I could understand. He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly understood, he had misgivings. He would never have turned away from him that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done more harm than good. I never knew him to judge men by the society scale. He was most human in his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of his dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor House, where such a man could seldom have found himself. When they were served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat on James's plate: he disliked fat. James said that he considered the request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented. He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave. He was indeed tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself to have given. At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said, "He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced him." His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore. V. The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin, and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization, and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but love of the place. "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England. Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how, after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an 'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!" Some papers which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic, but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he agreed with rather than his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact. Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs. Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been reading------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in relinquishing his error. I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side, of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California, and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon the Stanislow." He quoted to the author some passages from the poem recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that delicious poem. Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally of the Swiss "Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cambridge were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became, by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road. Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Like nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship's master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination. The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!" A moment of hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a horn?" There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into parley with her. "What cargo?" The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology, "Only from Liverpool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as possible. Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge. He was a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston. One was apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth between the two cities, and which were often so full of one's acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea. They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform. I do not mean that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the illustration of my point. His book probably carried the American name farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best might in a heartless neglect even at home. The book was delightful, and I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that classics are made of. I venture no conjecture as to its present popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best. The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father, the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition, being alive, though past literary activity. It was distinctively a literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its continued literary vitality in the romance of 'Espiritu Santo' by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew. VII. There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be named with 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Ralph Keeler wrote the 'Vagabond Adventures' which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri. They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its correspondent. "Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his intention. "They'll garrote you down there." "Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, "that's what Aldrich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on condition that I make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it, 'If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of 'Marjorie Daw and Other People,' I should not now be in this place.'" He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was never heard of again. I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully trusted that "the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us." The faith worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed, and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance. "Why do you use bias for opinion?" I demanded, in going over a proof with him. "Oh, because I'm such an ass--such a bi-ass." He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his listener's shoulder: "Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it. It's the only one you've got, or ever will have." This light and joyous creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his manner. Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to be greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house of a suave old actor, who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it. I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished. VIII. Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of real quality as a poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of "The Old Sergeant" Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness. He was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at Longfellow's, he could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease. He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of supernatural things. He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters. But none was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it almost the best ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson's father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to apparitions, and so he said simply, "Won't you sit down, father?" The phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work. "Ah!" he said, "I forgot that I was not substance." I do not know whether "The Old Sergeant" is ever read now; it has probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am afraid none of Willson's other verse is remembered. But he was then a distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our poets. I did not see him again. Shortly afterwards I heard that he had left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid course, for a very little later came the news of his death. IX. The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived; for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself, if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge never let a man keep a cold yet!" If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it. Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The 'genius loci' was limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the beholder. In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done, and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast. I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out. He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge than anything else. He held his native town in an idolatry which was not blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her droll points and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so many virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended me to him. I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write again for me. Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a self-distrust of it which I could not overcome. When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way. He had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till he died. In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him. "But you know," he would explain, "I haven't a house of my own to ask you to, and I should like to give you the supper here." When I had agreed to this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and then say, as if a great load were off his mind, "Well, then, I will send up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his way. On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth bag, sagged by some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at our own table. It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not well understand it myself. But if he resented it, he never showed his resentment. As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too ethereal for remembrance. The last time I met him was at Lowell's funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the friend we mourned. My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose chimney-tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. He was one of the first of my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages to count against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a most gentle and kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its interests. As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In this temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the doctor's insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with him, and refused even to answer his letters. "Of course," the doctor said, "I was not going to stand that from my mother's son, and I simply kept on writing." So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of quarrel with us. "I can't vote," he declared, "but my coachman can, and I don't know how I'm to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me all over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic side." Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had long quitted the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character as to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and gave his time altogether to his history. It is a work which will hardly be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and temperate expression. It is very just, and without endeavor for picture or drama it is to me very attractive. Much that has to be recorded of New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave with the simplicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such an apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself, and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of the best and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gentleness of his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather better and not worse than other people of the same time. He was himself a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to leave it to its own punishment. Personally he was without any flavor of harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the gentlest I have ever known. Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He could not only play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and painted pictures perhaps not so good. I always liked his Venetian pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as well as liked many of his poems. During the time that I knew him more than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist soul and the poet heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that shadowed his visage. My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York. We met at Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song, "On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly killing mock-gravity. XI. At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that of the neighboring capital. It would be rather hard to prove this, and I must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it. The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not seek them too insistently. People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though their belief had long ceased to be so. They had weights and measure, stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the test. These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them; most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not satisfied even with other people's, and so our society is in a state of tolerant and tremulous misgiving. Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of family did not mean the want of it. Money still less than family commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his riches. I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its alloys. I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and inspiration, would my penalties have been so light. On the other hand, the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again for others the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times, when I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated, some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it. The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing, but what was of good import in me flourished in it. The life of the place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably. I speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost wholly of the past. Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E. Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest had not yet their actual prominence. One, in deed among so many absent, is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named without offering him the recognition which I should have known an infringement of his preferences. But the literary Cambridge of thirty years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for the humanities. I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Cold-slaw Collective opacity Expectation of those who will come no more Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault Found life was not all poetry He had no time to make money Intellectual poseurs No time to make money NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible 
33345	----	LAFCADIO HEARN The Hearn crest is "on a mount vert a heron arg.," and the motto "Ardua petit ardea." [Illustration: Lafcadio Hearn and His Wife.] LAFCADIO HEARN BY NINA H. KENNARD _CONTAINING SOME LETTERS FROM LAFCADIO HEARN TO HIS HALF-SISTER, MRS. ATKINSON_ [Illustration] NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY MCMXII Copyright, 1912, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY REMEMBRANCE No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain of the Greater Memory. PREFACE When Death has set his seal on an eminent man's career, there is a not unnatural curiosity to know something of his life, as revealed by himself, particularly in letters to intimate friends. "All biography ought, as much as possible, to be autobiography," says Stevenson, and of all autobiographical material, letters are the most satisfactory. Generally written on the impulse of the moment, with no idea of subsequent publication, they come, as it were, like butter fresh from the churning with the impress of the mind of the writer stamped distinctly upon them. One letter of George Sand's written to Flaubert, or one of Goethe's to Frau von Stein, or his friend Stilling, is worth pages of embellished reminiscences. The circumstances surrounding Lafcadio Hearn's life and work impart a particular interest and charm to his correspondence. He was, as he himself imagined, unfitted by personal defect from being looked upon with favour in general society. This idea, combined with innate sensitive shyness, caused him, especially towards the latter years of his life, to become more or less of a recluse, and induced him to seek an outlet in intellectual commune with literary comrades on paper. Hence the wonderful series of letters, edited by Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), to Krehbiel, Ellwood Hendrik, and Chamberlain. Those to Professor Chamberlain, written during the most productive literary period of his life, from the vantage ground, as it were, of many years of intellectual work and experience, are particularly interesting, giving a unique and illuminating revelation of a cultured and passionately enthusiastic nature. During his stay at Kumamoto, when the bulk of the letters to Chamberlain were written, he initiated a correspondence with his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, who had written to him from Ireland. His erratic nature, tamed and softened by the birth of his son, Kazuo, turned with yearning towards his kindred, forgotten for so many years, and these Atkinson letters, though not boasting the high intellectual level of those to Professor Chamberlain, show him, in their affectionate playfulness, and in the quaint memories recalled of his childhood, under a new and delightful aspect. There has been a certain amount of friction with his American editress, owing to the fact of my having been given the right to use these letters. It is as well, therefore, to explain that owing to criticisms and remarks made about people and relatives, in Hearn's usual outspoken fashion, it would have been impossible, in their original form, to allow them to pass into the hands of any one but a person intimately connected with the Hearn family; but I can assure Mrs. Wetmore and Captain Mitchell McDonald--those kind friends who have done so much for the sake of Hearn's children and widow--that Mrs. Koizumi, financially, suffers nothing from the fact of the letters not having crossed the Atlantic. Besides being indebted to Mrs. Atkinson for having been allowed to make extracts from the letters written to her, my thanks are due to Miss Edith Hardy, her cousin, for the use of diaries and reminiscences; also to the Rev. Joseph Guinan, of Priests' House, Ferbane, for having put me in communication with the ecclesiastical authorities at Ushaw; also to Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, who was apparently Lafcadio's most intimate comrade at Ushaw, and was therefore able to give me much information concerning his college career. I must also express my indebtedness to friends in Japan, to Mr. W. B. Mason, who was so obliging and helpful when Mrs. Atkinson, her daughter and I arrived as strangers at Yokohama; also to Mr. Robert Young, who gave me copies of all the leading articles written by Hearn during the period of his engagement as sub-editor to the _Kobe Chronicle and Japan Mail_. But still more are my thanks due to the various American publishers of Hearn's works for permission to make quotations from them; to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., New York, for permission to quote from "Kotto" and "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation"; to Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, for permission to quote from "Exotica and Retrospectives," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," and "A Japanese Miscellany"; to Messrs. Gay & Hancock for permission to quote from "Kokoro"; to Messrs. Harper for permission to quote from "Two Years in the French West Indies"; and, above all, to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for permission to quote from "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and Hearn's "Letters," for without quoting from his letters it would be an almost futile task to attempt to write a biography of Lafcadio Hearn. What a pathos there is in the thought, that only since Lafcadio Hearn became "a handful of dust in a little earthen pot" hidden away in a Buddhist grave in Japan, has real appreciation of his genius reached England. On the top of the hill at Nishi Okubo, isolated from the sound of English voices, cut off from the clasp of English hands, he was animated by an intense longing for appreciation and recognition in the Anglo-Saxon literary world. "At last," he writes to a friend, "you will be glad to hear that my books are receiving some little attention in England," and again, "Favourable criticism in England is worth a great deal more than favourable criticism elsewhere." How overwhelmed he would have been to find his name now bracketed amongst the nineteenth century's best-known prose writers, to whom he looked up from the depths of his own imagined insignificance. Indeed, in that country where he longed for appreciation, the idea is gradually growing, that when many shining lights in the literary world of to-day stand unread on topmost library shelves, Lafcadio Hearn will still be studied by the scientist, and valued by the cultured, because of the subtle comprehension and sympathy with which he has presented, in exquisite language, a subject of ever-increasing importance and interest--the soul of the people destined, in the future, to hold undisputed sway in the Far East. _Southmead_, _Farnham Royal_, 1911. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I EARLY YEARS 1 II BOYHOOD 23 III TRAMORE 33 IV USHAW 40 V LONDON 52 VI CINCINNATI 65 VII VAGABONDAGE 81 VIII MEMPHIS 88 IX NEW ORLEANS 93 X WIDER HORIZON 102 XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 111 XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS 124 XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE 137 XIV WEST INDIES 148 XV JAPAN 160 XVI MATSUE 172 XVII MARRIAGE 179 XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI 187 XIX KUMAMOTO 199 XX OUT OF THE EAST 231 XXI KOBE 238 XXII TOKYO 260 XXIII USHIGOME 274 XXIV NISHI OKUBO 286 XXV HIS DEATH 299 XXVI HIS FUNERAL 310 XXVII VISIT TO JAPAN 313 XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO 328 CONCLUSION 339 INDEX 351 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE LAFCADIO HEARN AND HIS WIFE. _Frontispiece_ MAJOR CHARLES BUSH HEARN (HEARN'S FATHER). 16 MRS. ATKINSON (HEARN'S HALF-SISTER). 204 KAZUO (HEARN'S SON) AND HIS NURSE. 220 KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN). 228 DOROTHY ATKINSON. 232 KAZUO, (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN). 314 CARLETON ATKINSON. 318 LAFCADIO HEARN CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS "Buddhism finds in a dewdrop the symbol of that other microcosm which has been called the soul.... What more, indeed, is man, than just such a temporary orbing of viewless ultimates--imaging sky, and land, and life--filled with perpetual mysterious shudderings--and responding in some wise to every stir of the ghostly forces that environ him?... In each of a trillion of dewdrops there must be differences infinitesimal of atom-thrilling and of reflection, and in every one of the countless pearls of ghostly vapour, updrawn from the sea of birth and death, there are like infinitesimal peculiarities. Personality, individuality, the ghosts of a dream in a dream! Life infinite only there is; and all that appears to be is but the thrilling of it--sun, moon, and stars--earth, sky, and sea--and mind and man, and space and time, all of them are shadows, the shadows come and go; the Shadow-maker shapes for ever." On the fly-leaf of a small octavo Bible, given to Charles Hearn by his grandmother, the following entry may be read: "Patricio, Lafcadio, Tessima, Carlos Hearn. August 1850, at Santa Maura." The characters are in cramped Romaic Greek, the paper is yellow, the ink faded with age. Whether the entry was made by Lafcadio's father or mother it is difficult to say; one fact is certain: it announces the appearance on this world's stage of one of the most picturesque and remarkable figures of the end of the last century. Those who like to indulge in the fascinating task of tracing the origin of genius will find few instances offering more striking coincidences or curious ancestral inheritances than that afforded by Lafcadio Hearn. On his father's side he came of the Anglo-Hibernian stock--mixture of Saxon and Celt--which has produced poets, orators, soldiers, signal lights in the political, literary, and military history of the United Kingdom for the last two centuries. We have no proof that Lafcadio's grandfather--as has been stated--came over with Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, when he was appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1731. The Rev. Daniel Hearn undoubtedly acted as private chaplain to His Grace, and about the same time--as recognition for services done, we conclude--became possessed of the property of Correagh in the County of Westmeath. A Roman Catholic branch of the Hearn family is to be found in County Waterford--has been settled there for centuries. At Tramore, the seaside place near the city of Waterford, where Lafcadio spent several summers at the Molyneuxs' house with his great-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, the Rev. Thomas Hearn is still remembered as a prominent figure in the Roman Catholic movement against Protestantism. He founded the present cathedral, also the Catholic College in Waterford, and introduced one of the first of the Conventual Orders into the South of Ireland. It is through these Waterford Hearns that Henry Molyneux claimed relationship with the County Westmeath portion of the family. As to the English origin of the family, the Irish Hearns have an impression that it was a West Country (Somersetshire) stock. Records certainly of several Daniel Hearns--it is the Christian name that furnishes the clue--occur in ecclesiastical documents both in Wiltshire and Somersetshire. In Burke's "Colonial Gentry" there is a pedigree given of a branch of Archdeacon Hearn's descendants, who migrated to Australia about fifty years ago. There it is stated that the Hearn stock was originally "cradled in Northumberland." Ford Castle in that county belonged to the Herons--pronounced Hearn--to which belonged Sir Hugh de Heron, a well-known North Country baronet, mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion." The crest, as with Lafcadio's Irish Protestant branch of Hearns, was a heron, with the motto, "The Heron Seeks the Heights." Mrs. Koizumi, Hearn's widow, tells us that her husband pronounced his name "Her'un," "and selected 'Sageha No Tsuru'--heron with wings down--for the design which he made to accompany his name and number at the Literary College, Tokyo University." There can be no doubt that the place-names and families, bearing the Hearn name in various countries, are of different, often entirely distinct origin. Nevertheless, the various modifications of the word--namely, Erne, Horne, Hearn, Hern, Herne, Hearon, Hirn, etc., are derived from one root. In the Teutonic languages it is _irren_, to wander, stray, err or become outlaw. _Hirn_, the brain or organ of the wandering spirit or ghost, the Latin _errare_ and Frankish _errant_, with the Celtic _err_ names are related, though the derivation comes from ancient, Indo-Germanic languages. In the West Country in England the name Hearn is well-known as a gipsy one, and in the "Provincilia Dictionary" for Northumberland, amongst other worthies of note, a certain "Francis Heron" or "Hearn," King of the "Faws" or gipsies, is referred to. I give all these notes because they bear out the tradition, stoutly maintained by some members of the family, that gipsy blood runs in their veins. An aunt of Lafcadio's tells a story of having once met a band of gipsies in a country lane in Ireland; one of them, an old woman, offered to tell Miss Hearn's fortune. After examining her hand, she raised her head, looked at her meaningly, and tapping her palm with her finger said, "You are one of us, the proof is here." Needless to say that Lafcadio valued a possible gipsy ancestor more than all the archdeacons and lieutenant-colonels that figured in his pedigree, and was wont to show with much pride the mark on his thumb supposed to be the infallible sign of Romany descent. Some foreign exotic strain is undoubtedly very apparent in many members of the Hearn family. Lafcadio's marked physiognomy, dark complexion, and black hair could not have been an exclusive inheritance from his mother's side, for it can be traced in Charles Hearn's children by his second wife, and again in their children. This exotic element--quite distinct from the Japanese type--is so strong as to have impressed itself on Hearn's eldest son by his Japanese wife, creating a most remarkable likeness between him and his cousin, Mrs. Atkinson's son. The near-sighted eyes, the marked eyebrows, the dark brown hair, the soft voice and gentle manner, are characteristics owned by both Carleton Atkinson and Kazuo Koizumi. History says that the original birthplace of the gipsies was India. Even in Egypt, the country claimed by the gipsies themselves as the place where their race originated, the native gipsy is not Egyptian in appearance, but Hindoo. Curious to think that Lafcadio Hearn, the interpreter of Buddhism and oriental legend to the West, may, on his father's side, have been descended from Avatars, whose souls were looked upon as gods, centuries ago, in India. On his mother's side the skein of Lafcadio's lineage is still more full of knots and entanglements than on his father's. It is impossible to state with any amount of accuracy to what nationality Mrs. Charles Hearn belonged. It has been generally taken for granted that she was Greek; Lafcadio used to say so himself. Some of the Hearns, on the other hand, maintain that she was Maltese, which is quite probable. Owing to the agricultural richness of the Ionian Islands, Italians, Greeks, Levantine Jews, and Maltese had all taken up their abode in the Sept-Insula at various times and seasons. Lafcadio's third name, Tessima, was his mother's maiden-name, and is one that figures continually in Maltese census- and rent-rolls. When Mrs. Hearn separated from her husband to return to her own family she went to Malta, not to the Ionian Islands. The fact, as Lafcadio states, that he could only stammer half Italian, half Romaic, when he first arrived in Dublin, rather points to a Maltese origin. What wild Arabic blood may he not, therefore, have inherited on his mother's side? For, as is well-known, in times gone by Arab tribes, migrating from the deserts of Asia and Africa, overran the shores of the Mediterranean and settled in Malta, intermarrying with the original Venetian Maltese. "We are all compounds of innumerable lives, each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead, they live in all of us, and move us, stirring faintly in every heart beat." Certainly Lafcadio was an exemplification of his own theory. During the course of his strange life all the characteristics of his manifold outcome manifested themselves--the nomadic instincts of the Romany and Arab, the revolutionary spirit of the Celt, the luxuriant imagination of the oriental, with that unquenchable spark of industry and energy inherited from his Anglo-Saxon forbears. From the time they settled in Ireland the Hearns served their country for the most part in church and army. Lafcadio's grandfather was colonel of the 43rd Regiment, which he commanded at the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular War. He married Elizabeth Holmes, member of a family distinguished in Irish legal and literary circles. To her children she bequeathed musical and artistic gifts of no mean order. From his father Lafcadio inherited a remarkable aptitude for drawing, and, as is easy to see from his letters to Krehbiel, an ardent love of music. Elizabeth Holmes's second son, Richard Holmes Hearn, insisted while quite a boy on setting forth to study art in the studios in Paris. He never made money or a great name, but some of his pictures, inspired by the genius of Corot and Millet, are very suggestive and beautiful. He was quite as unconventional in his mode of thought, and quite as erratic and unbusinesslike as his famous nephew--"Veritable blunderers," as Lafcadio says, "in the ways of the world." Writing from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, about some photographs she had sent him of her children, he says: "They seem to represent new types; that makes no difference in one sense and a good deal of difference in another. I think, though I am not sure, as I have never known you or the other half-sister, that we Hearns all lacked something. The something is very much lacking in me, and in my brother. I mean 'force' ... I think we of father's blood are all a little soft of soul ... very sweet in a woman, not so good in a man. What you call the 'strange mixture of weakness and firmness' is essentially me; my firmness takes the shape of an unconquerable resistance in particular directions--guided by feeling mostly, and not always in the directions most suited to my interests. There must have been very strong characteristics in father's inheritance to have made so strong a resemblance in his children by two different mothers--and I want so much to find out if the resemblance is also psychological." Charles Bush Hearn, Lafcadio's father, elected to enter the army, as his father and grandfather had done before him. According to Hart's "Army List" he joined the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Foot as assistant surgeon on April 15th, 1842. In the year 1846 he was sent on the Medical Staff to Corfu. The revolutionary spirit which swept over Europe in 1849 infected the Ionian Islands as well as the mainland of Greece. At Cephalonia they nominated a regent of their own nationality, and strenuous efforts were made to shake off the yoke of the English government. At the request of Viscount Seaton, the then governor, additional troops were sent from England to restore order. When they arrived, they, and the other regiments stationed at Corfu, were quartered on the inhabitants of the various islands. Oriental ideas on the subject of women still existed in this half-Eastern region. Ladies hardly ever appeared at any of the entertainments. If a dinner was given none but men were present. Many stories were told of the expedients resorted to by English officers in their endeavours to institute a closer intercourse with the female portion of the population. Now that troops were quartered in their homes this state of things was speedily changed. Young ladies were induced to join their guests in riding, boating, and walking expeditions. Picnics were instituted at which people got lost in the woods, and did not return until the small hours of the morning, pleasure boats went ashore, necessitating the rescue of lovely ladies from the danger of the deep; the so-called "pleasure boats" being presumably some of the numerous ferry boats that plied to and fro between the islands. But in telling the love story of Charles Hearn and Rosa Tessima, there is really no need to conjure up imaginary shipwrecks, or lost pathways. Good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or guitar with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice, Charles Hearn was gifted with all the qualifications for the captivation of a young girl's fancy, and by all accounts he had never allowed these qualifications to deteriorate for want of use. Only the other day, I was looking over some old papers in an Irish country house with a friend. Amongst them we came across a poem by Charles Bush Hearn, written from Correagh, the Hearns' place in County Westmeath, to a lady who at that time was very beautiful and an heiress. A lock of hair was enclosed:-- "Dearest and nearest to my heart, Thou art fairer than the silver moon, And I trust to see thee soon." There are quite half-a-dozen verses of the same quality ending up with the following:-- "Adieu, sweet maid! my heart still bleeds with love And evermore will beat for thee!!" "Alas, I am no poet!" Lafcadio exclaims, half a century later. The power of song was apparently not a gift his father had to bequeath. Before going to Corfu the young officer had fallen in love with a countrywoman of his own; means, however, were lacking on both sides, and she was persuaded by relations to accept a richer suitor. While still smarting under the pangs of disappointed love, lonely, heartsore, Rosa Tessima crossed his path, and the fate of both was sealed. Where they met we know not. The Tessimas were inhabitants of the Island of Cerigo, but communication between the islands was frequent. As to the stories, which subsequently drifted to relations in Ireland, of the girl's brothers having attacked and stabbed Charles Hearn in consequence of the injury done to their sister's reputation, it is more than likely they are entirely legendary. The Ionian male had no exalted opinion of women, and was not likely to resort to revenge for imaginary wrongs. There may have been some difficulty with regard to her dowry, as in those days the sons inherited the land and were obliged, when a daughter left her paternal home, to bestow upon her the settlement she was entitled to; this was sometimes accompanied by a considerable amount of friction. Lafcadio was born at Santa Maura, the modern name for the ancient Leucadia of the Greeks. Charles Hearn, presumably, was transferred there by some necessity in his profession as military surgeon. The island, excepting Corfu, is the largest in the Sept-Insula. On the southern extremity of the western portion of the coast is situated the rock whence Sappho is supposed to have sought "the end of all life's ends." Not far off stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. A few stones piled together still mark the spot where ceremonies were celebrated at the altar in honour of the sun-god. The groves of cypress and ilex that clothe the slope were in days gone by supposed to be peopled by the divinities of ancient Greece. A crystalline stream of water, bubbling down the hillside by the temple wall, runs into a well, familiarly known as the Fountain of Arethusa. Standing in the courtyard of the temple a glimpse can be caught of the Island of Ithaca quivering in the luminous haze, with the Gulf of Corinth and the Greek hills beyond. Although he left the Ionian Islands in infancy, the idea of having been born surrounded by associations of the ancient Hellenic world--the world that represented for him the ideal of supreme artistic beauty--impressed itself upon Hearn's imagination. Often, later, amidst the god-haunted shrines and ancient groves and cemeteries of Japan, vague ancestral dreams of the mystery of his birthplace in the distant Greek island with its classic memories, stirred dimly within him. After seeing, for instance, the ancient cemetery of Hamamura, in Izumo, he pictures a dream of a woman, sitting in a temple court--his mother, presumably--chanting a Celtic dirge, and a vague vision of the celebrated Greek poetess who had wandered amidst the ilex-groves and temples of the ancient Leucadia.... Awakening, he heard, in the night, the moaning of the real sea--the muttering of the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. Towards the end of 1851, England agreed to relinquish her military occupation of the greater portion of the Ionian Islands. The troops were withdrawn, and Charles Hearn received orders to proceed with his regiment from Corfu to the West Indies. With a want of foresight typically Hibernian, he arranged that his wife and two-year-old son should go to Dublin, to remain with his relations during the term of his service in the West Indies. The trio proceeded together as far as Malta. How long husband and wife stopped there, or if she remained after he had left with his regiment, it is impossible to say. Years afterwards, Lafcadio declared that he was almost certain of having been in Malta as a child, and that he specially remembered the queer things told him about the Old Palace, the knights and a story about a monk, who, on the coming of the French had the presence of mind to paint the gold chancel railings with green paint. Precocious the little boy may have been, but it is scarcely possible that his brain could have been retentive enough to bear all this in memory when but two years old. He must have been told it later by his father, or read a description of the island in some book of history or travels. From Malta Mrs. Hearn proceeded to Paris, to stop with her husband's artist brother, Richard. Charles Hearn had written to him beforehand, begging him to smooth the way for his wife's arrival in Dublin. His brother "Dick"--indeed, all his belongings--were devoted to good-looking, easy-going Charles, but it was with many qualms and much hesitation that Richard undertook the task entrusted to him. Charles Hearn's mother and an unmarried aunt, Susan, lived in Dublin at Gardner's Place. "Auntie Sue," as the spinster lady is always referred to by the present generation of Hearns, was the possessor of a ready pen. A novel of hers entitled "Felicia" is still extant in manuscript; the melodramatic imagination, lack of construction, grammar and punctuation, peculiar to the feminine amateur novelist of that day, are very much in evidence. She also kept a diary recording the monotonous routine usual to the life of a middle-aged spinster in the backwater of social circles in Dublin; the arrival and departure of servants, the interchange of visits with relations and friends; each day marked by a text from the Gospels and Epistles. Because of the political and religious animus existing between Protestants and Papists in Ireland, orthodox circles were far more prejudiced and bigoted than the narrowest provincial society in England. All the Hearns belonging to the Westmeath branch of the family were members of the Irish Protestant squirearchy, leaders of religious movements, presiding with great vigour at church meetings and parochial functions; it is easy, therefore, to understand the trepidation with which they viewed the arrival of this foreign relation of theirs, a Roman Catholic, who would consort with priests, and indulge in religious observances hitherto anathema to thoroughgoing Protestants. Richard Hearn, thoroughly appreciating all the difficulties of the situation, thought it expedient, apparently, to leave his sister-in-law in Liverpool and go on in front, to propitiate prejudices and mitigate opinions. On July 28th, 1852, we read in Susan Hearn's diary: "Dear Richard arrived at 10 o'clock from Liverpool, and was obliged to return at 7 o'clock on Friday evening. We trust to see him again in the course of a day or two, accompanied by Charles' wife and son. May Almighty God bless and prosper the whole arrangement." Kindly, warm-hearted maiden lady! Providence is not wont to prosper arrangements made in direct opposition to all providential possibilities. On July 29th she writes: "A letter from Charles, dated the 25th June from Grenada, West Indies! Dear, beloved fellow! in perfect health, but in great anxiety until he hears of his wife and son's arrival. I trust we shall have them soon with us." Then on August 1st: "Richard returned at 7 this morning accompanied by our beloved Charles' wife and child, and a nice young person as attendant. Rosa we are all inclined to love, and her little son is an interesting, darling child." The "nice young person" who came with Mrs. Hearn, as attendant and interpreter, was an important factor in the misunderstandings that arose between Rosa and her relations, and later, in the troubles between husband and wife. Mrs. Hearn, unable to speak a word of English, was influenced and prejudiced by meanings imparted to perfectly harmless actions and statements. Probably sensitive to sunlight, colour, and climate, as was her son, having passed her life hitherto in a southern land amidst orange-groves and vineyards, overlooking a sea blue as the sky overarching it, it is easy to imagine the depressing influences to Rosa Hearn of finding herself beneath an atmosphere heavy with smoke, and thick with fog, the murky, sunless world of sordid streets, such as constitutes the major portion of the capital of Ireland. The description, given by those who are impartial judges, rather divests Rosa of the poetical romance that her son has cast around her memory. She was handsome, report says, with beautiful eyes, but ill-tempered and unrestrained, sometimes even violent. Musical, but too indolent to cultivate the gift, clever, but absolutely uneducated, she lived the life of an oriental woman, lying all day long on a sofa, complaining of the dulness of her surroundings, of the climate of Ireland, of the impossibility of learning the language. To her children she was capricious and tyrannical, at times administering rather severe castigation. When people fell short of the height to which he had raised them in imagination, when he discovered that they had not all the qualities he imagined them to possess, Lafcadio, as a rule, promptly cast them from their high estate, and nothing was too bitter to say or think of them. In his mother's case, before the searchlight of reality had time to dissipate the illusion, she had passed from his ken forever. When his own life was transformed by the birth of his first child, the idea of maternal affection was deepened and expanded, and gradually became connected with a belief in ancestral influences and transmission of a "Karma" ruling human existence from generation to generation. He then imagines the beauty of a mother's smile surviving the universe, the sweetness of her voice echoing in worlds still uncreated, and the eloquence of her faith animating prayers made to the gods of another time, another heaven. Years later he makes an eloquent appeal to his brother, asking him if he does not remember the dark and beautiful face that used to bend over his cradle, or the voice which told him each night to cross his fingers, after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." When he saw his brother's photograph, his heart throbbed; for here, he felt, was the unknown being in whom his mother's life was perpetuated, with the same strange impulses, the same longings, the same resolves as his own. "My mother's face only I remember," he says in a letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, written from Kumamoto, "and I remember it for this reason. One day it bent over me caressingly. It was delicate and dark, with large black eyes--very large. A childish impulse came to me to slap it. I slapped it--simply to see the result, perhaps. The result was immediate severe castigation, and I remember both crying and feeling I deserved what I got. I felt no resentment, although the aggressor in such cases is usually the most indignant at consequences." * * * * * The only person with whom Mrs. Charles Hearn seems to have forgathered amongst her Irish relations was a Mrs. Justin Brenane--"Sally Brenane," Charles Hearn's aunt, on the maternal side. She had married a Mr. Justin Brenane--a Roman Catholic gentleman of considerable means--and had adopted his religion with all the ardour of a convert. Poor, weak, bigoted, kindly old soul! She and Mrs. Charles Hearn had the bond in common of belonging to a religion antagonistic to the prejudices of the people with whom their lot was cast; she also, at that time, was devoted to her nephew Charles. Never having had a child of her own, she longed for something young on which to lavish the warmth of her affection. The delicate, eerie little black-haired boy, Patricio Lafcadio, became prime favourite in the Brenane establishment at Rathmines, and the old lady was immediately fired with the idea of having him educated at a Roman Catholic school, and of making him heir to the ample fortune and property in the County of Wexford left to her by her husband. In the comfort and luxury of Mrs. Brenane's house, Mrs. Charles Hearn found, for the first time since she had left the Ionian Islands, something she could call a home. She enjoyed, too, in her indolent fashion, driving in Mrs. Brenane's carriage, a large barouche, in which the old lady "took an airing" every day, driving into Dublin when she was at her house at Rathmines for shopping, or to the cathedral for Mass. A curious group, the foreign-looking lady with the flashing eyes, accompanied by her dark-haired, olive-complexioned small boy, garbed in strange garments, with earrings in his ears, as different in appearance as was possible to the rosy-cheeked, sturdy Irish "gossoons" who crowded round, gaping and amused, to gaze at them. Mrs. Brenane herself was a noteworthy figure, always dressed in marvellous, quaintly-shaped, black silk gowns. Not a speck of dust was allowed to touch these garments, a large holland sheet being invariably laid on the seat of the carriage, and wrapped round her by the footman, when she went for her daily drive. * * * * * In July and August, 1853, there are various entries in Susan Hearn's diary, relating to her brother, Charles Hearn, in the West Indies. Yellow fever had broken out and had appeared amongst the troops. Charles had been ill, "a severe bilious attack and intermittent fever." Then, on August 19th: "Letters from dearest Charles, dated July 28th, in great hopes that he may be sent home with the invalids; so we may see him the latter end of September, or the beginning of October." Then comes an entry that he had "sailed with the other invalids for Southampton." The prospect was all sunlight, not the veriest film of a cloud was apparent to onlookers; yet the air was charged with the elements of storm! Charles Hearn was a man particularly susceptible to feminine grace and charm. He found on his return a wife whose beauty had vanished, the light washed out of her eyes by weeping, a figure grown fat and unwieldy, lines furrowed on the beautiful face by discontent and ill-humour; but, above all other determining causes for bringing about the unhappiness of this ill-matched pair, Charles Hearn had heard by chance, from a fellow-officer on the way home, that his first love, the only woman to whom his wandering fancy had been constant, was free again, and was living as a widow in Dublin. What took place between husband and wife these fateful days can only be surmised, but these significant entries occur in Susan Hearn's diary. "October 8th, 1853. Beloved Charles arrived in perfect health, looking well and happy; through the Great Mercy of Almighty God, my eyes once more behold him." "Sunday, October 9th. Charles, his wife, and little boy, dined with us in Gardner's Place, all well and happy. That night we were plunged into deep affliction by the sudden and dangerous illness of Rosa, Charles' wife. She still continues ill, but hopes are entertained of her recovery." After this entry the diary breaks off abruptly, and we are left to fill in details by family statements and hearsay. An inherited predisposition to insanity probably ran in Rosa's veins. We are told that, during her husband's absence in the West Indies, whilst stopping at Rathmines with Mrs. Brenane, she had endeavoured to throw herself out of the window when suffering from an attack of mania. Now, whether in consequence of the passionate jealousy of her southern nature, which for months had been worked upon by that "nice person," Miss Butcher, or whether the same predisposition broke out again, we only know that the restraining link of self-control, that keeps people on the right side of the "thin partition," gave way. Gloomy fits of silence and depression were succeeded by scenes of such violence that the poor creature had ultimately to be put under restraint. The attack was apparently temporary. Daniel James, her second son, was born a year later in Dublin, after the departure of her husband for the Crimea. Charles Hearn was undoubtedly a most gallant soldier; he fought at the battles of Alma and Inkermann, through the siege of Sevastopol, and returned in March, 1855. After this his regiment was stationed for some little time at the Curragh. Years afterwards Lafcadio described the scarlet-coated, gold-laced officers who frequented the house at this time, and remembered creeping about as a child amongst their spurred feet under the dinner-table. [Illustration: Major Charles Bush Hearn (Hearn's Father).] It is extremely difficult to make out how much the little fellow knew, or did not know, of the various tragic circumstances that darkened these years--the unhappiness that at last led to the separation of his father and mother; and the cloud that at various periods overshadowed his mother's brain. In the series of letters written to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, which, unfortunately, we are not permitted to give in their entirety, strange lights are cast on the course of events. "I only once," he says, "remember seeing my brother as a child. Father had brought me some tin soldiers, and cannon to fire peas. While I was arranging them in order for battle, and preparing to crush them with artillery, a little boy with big eyes was introduced to me as my brother. Concerning the fact of brotherhood, I was totally indifferent--especially for the reason that he seized some of my soldiers, and ran away with them immediately. I followed him; I wrenched the soldiers from him; I beat him and threw him downstairs; it was quite easy, because he was four years my junior. What afterwards happened I do not know. I have a confused idea that I was scolded and punished. But I never saw my brother again." The following reminiscence requires little comment:-- "I was walking in Dublin with my father. He never laughed, so I was afraid of him. He bought me cakes. It was a day of sun, with rain clouds above the roofs, but no rain. I was in petticoats. We walked a long way. Father stopped at a flight of stone steps before a tall house, and knocked the knocker, I think. Inside, at the foot of a staircase a lady came to meet us. She seemed to me tall--but a child cannot judge stature well except by comparison. What I distinctly remember is that she seemed to me lovely beyond anything I had ever seen before. She stooped down and kissed me: I think I can feel the touch of her hand still. Then I found myself in possession of a toy gun and a picture book she had given me. On the way home, father bought me some plum cakes, and told me never to say anything to 'auntie' about our visit. I can't remember whether I told or not. But 'auntie' found it out. She was so angry that I was frightened. She confiscated the gun and the picture book, in which I remember there was a picture of David killing Goliath. Auntie did not tell me why she was angry for more than ten years after." The tall lovely lady was Mrs. Crawford, destined later to be Lafcadio's stepmother. By her first husband she had two daughters. The Hearn and Crawford children used apparently to meet and play together at this time in Dublin. Mrs. Weatherall, one of these daughters, tells me that a more uncanny, odd-looking little creature than Patricio Lafcadio it would be difficult to imagine. When first she saw him he was about five years of age. Long, lanky black hair hung on either side of his face, and his prominent, myopic eyes gave him a sort of dreamy, absent look. In his arms he tightly clasped a doll, as if terrified that someone might take it from him. "Tell Mrs. Weatherall I cannot remember the pleasant things she tells of--the one day's happy play with a little girl," he writes from Japan to Mrs. Atkinson. "I remember a little girl, but it can't have been the same. I went into the garden. The little girl stood with one hand on her hips, and said: 'I think I am stronger than you. Can you run?' I said angrily 'Yes.' 'Let us run a race,' she said. We ran. I was badly beaten. Then she laughed, and I was red with shame, for I felt my face hot. 'I am certainly stronger than you,' she said; 'now shall we wrestle?' I resisted rudely. But in spite of my anger she threw me down easily. 'Ah!' she said:--'now you must do what I tell you.' She tied my hands behind me, and led me into the house to a cage where there was a large parrot. My hair was long. She made the parrot seize my hair. When I tried to get away from the cage, the parrot pulled savagely. Then I cried, and the little girl sat down on the ground in her silk dress, and rolled with laughter. Then she called her mother to see. I hoped her mother would scold her and free me. But the mother also laughed, and went away again, leaving me there. I never saw that little girl again. I think, though, that her name was Jukes. She seemed to me to feel like a grown-up person. I was afraid of her, and disliked her because she was cleverer than me, and treated me like a little dog. But _how_ I would love to see her now. I suppose she is the mother of men to-day--great huge men, perhaps generals, certainly colonels. "At all events, tell Mrs. W. that I wish, ever so much, she were a little girl again and I a little boy, and that we could play together like then, in the day I can't remember. Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now. I rather think I should like to see her." Poor Lafcadio! What pathos there is in the question "Ask her if the sun was not then much larger, and the sky much bluer, and the moon more wonderful than now." Those were the days before the loss of his eye at Ushaw College had maimed his visual powers, and transformed his life. In his delightful impressionist description of a journey made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea, the same idea is repeated. As mile after mile he rolled along the shore in his kuruma, the elusive fragrance of a most dear memory returned to him, of a magical time and place "in which the sun and the moon were larger, and the sky much more blue and nearer to the world," and he recalls the love that he had cherished for one whom he does not name, but who I know to be his aunt, Mrs. Elwood, who "softly ruled his world and thought only of ways to make him happy." Mrs. Elwood was an elder sister of Charles Hearn, married to Frank Elwood, owner of a beautiful place, situated on Lough Corrib in the County Mayo. She was a most delightful and clever person, beloved by her children and all her family connections, especially by her aunt, Mrs. Brenane, who was often in the habit of stopping at the Elwoods' place with her adopted son. We can imagine her telling the little fellow stories, in the "great hush of the light before moonrise," and then crooning a weird little song to put him to sleep. "At last there came a parting day, and she wept and told me of a charm she had given which I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old."[1] [1] "Out of the East," Gay & Hancock. "The last time I saw father was at Tramore," he tells his half-sister, when retailing further his childish memories; "he had asked leave to see me. We took a walk by the sea. It was a very hot day; and father had become bald then; and when he took off his hat I saw that the top of his head was all covered with little drops of water. He said: 'She is very angry; she will never forgive me.' 'She' was Auntie. I never saw him again. "I have distinct remembrances of my uncle Richard; I remember his big beard, and a boxwood top he gave me. Auntie was prejudiced against him by some tale told her about his life in Paris." * * * * * The year after his return from the Crimea, Charles and Rosa Hearn's luckless union was dissolved by mutual consent. Gossip says that after her departure she married the lawyer (a Jew) who had protected her interests when she severed her connexion with Ireland; but we have no proof of this, neither have we proof of the statement made by some members of the Hearn family, that she returned a year or so later to see her children but was prevented from doing so. From what we know of Rosa Hearn, it is far more probable that, in the sunshine amidst the vineyards and orange-groves of her own southern land, the gloom and misery of those five years in Dublin was sponged completely from the tablets of her memory. After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford. Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith. Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his grand-aunt. Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard in Paris. Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she wished me to, and I was lazy." Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship _Mula_ at Suez, thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years. With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end. We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness--that tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the arena of life. CHAPTER II BOYHOOD "You speak about that feeling of fulness of the heart with which we look at a thing--half-angered by inability to analyse within ourselves the delight of the vision. I think the feeling is unanalysable, simply because, as Kipling says, 'the doors have been shut behind us.' The pleasure you felt in looking at that tree, was it only your pleasure, no,--many who would have loved you, were looking through you and remembering happier things. The different ways in which different places and things thus make appeal would be partly explained;--the supreme charm referring to reminiscences reaching through the longest chain of life, and the highest. But no pleasure of this sort can have so ghostly a sweetness as that which belongs to the charm of an ancestral home. Then how much dead love lives again, how many ecstasies of the childhoods of a hundred years must revive!" Most of Lafcadio's life while with Mrs. Brenane seems to have been passed in Dublin, at her house, 73, Upper Leeson Street; at Tramore, a seaside place on the coast of Waterford in Ireland; at Linkfield Place, Redhill, Surrey, a house belonging to Henry Molyneux, a Roman Catholic friend of Mrs. Brenane's--destined to play a considerable part in the boy's life--and in visiting about among Mrs. Brenane's relatives, whose name was legion. Mrs. Brenane, when left a widow, lived occasionally in a small house, Kiltrea, situated on the Brenane property, near Enniscorthy. We have records of Charles Hearn, Mrs. Brenane's favourite nephew, and his sister, Miss Hearn, visiting her there, but can nowhere hear of Lafcadio stopping in Wexford. In 1866, the old lady lost her money, and Kiltrea was let to a Mr. Cookman, whose son lives there now. Mrs. Wetmore, in her sketch of Hearn's life, states that he "seems to have been removed about his seventh year to Wales, and from thenceforward only to have visited Ireland occasionally." This erroneous idea--common to most of Hearn's biographers--has originated from Hearn himself. He later makes allusions to journeyings in England and Wales, but never mentions Ireland. This is typical of his sensitive, capricious genius. Ireland was connected with unpleasant memories; he therefore preferred to transplant his imaginings to a more congenial atmosphere. Besides which, in his later years, he was fascinated by the descriptions of Welsh scenery given in Borrow's "Wild Wales," and De Quincey's "Wanderings in Wales." Interpolated between a story of grim Japanese goblinry, and a delightful dream of the fairyland of Horai, in "Kwaidan,"[2] one of Hearn's last books, there is a sketch called "Hi-Mawari" (Sunflower), the scene of which is undoubtedly laid in Ireland, at the Elwoods' place; and "the dearest and fairest being in his little world," alluded to here, and in his "Dream of a Summer's Day," is his aunt, Mrs. Elwood. Beautiful as any Welsh hills are the Connemara Peaks, faintly limned against the forget-me-not Irish sky. But Lafcadio eliminates Ireland from his memory, and calls them "Welsh hills." [2] The publishers of "Kwaidan" are Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The "Robert" mentioned in the sketch was his cousin, Robert Elwood, who ultimately entered the navy, and was drowned off the coast of China, when endeavouring to save a comrade, who had fallen overboard. Hence the allusion at the end of the essay ... "all that existed of the real Robert must long ago have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend." The old harper, "the swarthy, unkempt vagabond, with bold black eyes, under scowling brows," was Dan Fitzpatrick of Cong, a well-known character in the County Mayo. One of his stock songs was "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." A daughter of his, who accompanied her father on his tramps and collected the money contributed by the audience, was, a few years ago, still living in the village of Cong. Forty-six years later, noticing a sunflower near the Japanese village of Takata, memories of the Irish August day came back to him, the pungent resinous scent of the fir-trees, the lawn sloping down to Lough Corrib, his cousin Robert standing beside him while they watched the harper place his harp upon the doorstep, and troll forth-- "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day ..." The only person he had ever heard sing these words before was she who was enshrined in the inmost sanctuary of his childish heart. All Charles Hearn's sisters were musical; but above all Mrs. Elwood was famous for her singing of Moore's melodies. The little fellow was indignant that a coarse man should dare to sing the same words; but, with the utterance of the syllables "to-day," the corduroy-clad harper's voice broke suddenly into pathetic tenderness, and the house, and lawn, and everything surrounding the boy, trembled and swam in the tears that rose to his eyes. In a letter to his half-sister, written probably November, 1891, he thus alludes to the Elwoods: "I remember a cousin, Frank Elwood, ensign in the army. I disliked him, because he used to pinch me when I was a child. He was a handsome fellow, I liked to see him in his uniform. I forget when I saw my cousin, Robert Elwood, last. I might have been eight or nine years old--I might have been twelve. And that's all." It was customary, in the middle of last century, for Irish people, who could afford it, to cross St. George's Channel for their summer holiday. Mrs. Brenane, his grand-aunt, passed several summers at Bangor. These visits seemed to have been some of the happiest periods in Lafcadio's life. He was then the adopted child of a rich old lady, pampered, spoilt, and made much of by all the members of her circle. Carnarvon Castle was a favourite resort; there Lafcadio had his first experience of the artistic productions of the Far East. One season he was sent with his nurse to reside in the cottage of a sea-captain, whose usual "run" had been to China and Japan. Piled up in every corner of the little house were eastern grotesqueries, ancient gods, bronze images, china animals. We can imagine the ghostly influence these weird curiosities would exercise over the sensitive brain of a lonely little boy. Years after, writing to Krehbiel, he gives a vivid description of a Chinese gong that hung on an old-fashioned stand in the midst of the heterogeneous collection. When tapped with a leather beater, it sobbed, like waves upon a low beach ... and with each tap the roar grew deeper and deeper, till it seemed like an abyss in the Cordillera, or a crashing of Thor's chariot wheels. By his own showing, Lafcadio must have been a most difficult boy to manage. He tells his half-sister, should any thought come to her that it would have been better that they could have grown up together, she ought to dismiss it at once as mere vexation of spirit. "We were too much alike as little ones to have loved each other properly; and I was, moreover, what you were not, wilful beyond all reason, and an incarnation of the spirit of contrariness. We should have had the same feelings in other respects; but they would have made us fall out, except when we would have united against a common oppressor. Character is finally shaped only by struggle, I fancy; and assuredly one can only learn the worth of love and goodness by a large experience of their opposites. I think I have been tolerably well ripened by the frosts of life, and that I should be a good brother now. I should not have been so as a child; I was a perfect imp." Hearn's widow, Mrs. Koizumi, told us that often when watching his children at play he would amuse them with anecdotes of what he himself was as a child. Apparently, from his earliest days, he was given to taking violent likes and dislikes, always full of whims and wild imaginings, up to any kind of prank, with a genius for mischief--traps arranged with ink-bottles above doors so that when the door was opened, the ink-bottle would fall. One lady, apparently, was the object he selected for playing off most of his practical jokes. "She was a hypocrite and I could not bear her. When she tapped my head gently, and said 'Oh, you dear little fellow,' I used to call at her, 'Osekimono' (flatterer) and run away and hide myself." He hated meat, but his grand-aunt would insist on his eating it; when she wasn't looking he would hide it away in the cupboard, where, days after, she would discover it half-rotten. Surely it was the irony of fate that gave such a creature of fire and touchwood, with quivering nerves and abnormal imagination, into the charge of an injudicious, narrow-minded, bigoted person, such as Sally Brenane; and yet she was very fond of him, and he of her. At Tramore, an old family servant said that he used to "follow her about like a lap-dog." But it was Mrs. Brenane's maid, his nurse as well, Kate Mythen, who was one of the principal influences in his life, in these days at Tramore, and Redhill, before he went to Ushaw. To Kate's care he was, to a great extent, committed. As Robert Louis Stevenson used to make Allison Cunningham, or "Cummie," the confidante of his childish woes, and joys, and imaginings, so Lafcadio Hearn communicated to Kate Mythen all that was in his strange little heart and imaginative brain. But "Cummie" was staunch, with the old Scotch Covenanter staunchness. The last book Stevenson wrote was sent to her with "the love of her boy." After he left Ushaw, Lafcadio Hearn never saw Kate Mythen and held no communion with her of any kind. She must have known of the banishment of the boy, of the alienation of his adopted mother's affections, of the transference of his inheritance to others, yet she died in Mrs. Molyneux's house at Tramore in 1903, only a year before her nursling, whose name then had become so famous; to her it was tainted and defiled, for had he not cast off the rule of Holy Mother Church, and declared himself a Buddhist and a pagan? Such is the power of priest and religion over the Celtic mind. Hearn's references to the nameless terror of dreams, to which he was a prey in his childhood, especially as set forth in a sketch entitled "Nightmare Touch," reveals the sufferings of a creature highly strung and sensitive to the point almost of lunacy. He was condemned, when about five years of age, it seems, to sleep by himself in a lonely room. His foolish old grand-aunt, who had never had children of her own and could not therefore enter into his sufferings, ordained that no light should be left in his room at night. If he cried with terror he was whipped. But in spite of the whippings, he could not forbear to talk about what he heard on creaking stairways and saw behind the folds of curtains. Though harshly treated at school, he was happier there than at home, because he was not condemned to sleep alone, and the greater part of his day was spent with "living human beings" and not "ghosts." The most interesting portion of Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," is that which treats of Hearn's eyesight. As an oculist, he maintains that Hearn must have suffered from congenital eyestrain, brought on by pronounced myopia from his earliest childhood, long before the accident at Ushaw. The description that Hearn gives somewhere of the "sombre yellowish glow, suffusing the dark, making objects dimly visible, while the ceiling remained pitch black, as if the air were changing colour from beneath," is a phenomenon familiar to all who have suffered from eyestrain. After Hearn's death, in a drawer of his library at Tokyo half-a-dozen envelopes were found, each containing a sketch neatly written in his small legible handwriting. He apparently had intended to construct a book of childish reminiscences after the manner of Pierre Loti's "Livre de la Pitié et a de la Mort." These sketches throw many sidelights on his early years, but, except the one named "Idolatry" they are not up to the level of his usual work. The material is too scanty, events seen through the haze of memory are thrown out of focus, unimportant incidents made too important. "Only with much effort," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, "can I recall scattered memories of my boyhood. It seems as if a much more artificial self were constantly trying to speak instead of the self that is in me--thus producing obvious incongruities." "My Guardian Angel" relates the sufferings inflicted on his childish mind by a certain cousin Jane--apparently one of the Molyneux clan, a convert to the Roman Catholic church, who made the little fellow intensely unhappy by telling him that he would burn for ever in Hell fire if he did not believe in God. When she left in the spring he hoped she might die. He was haunted by fears of her vengeance during her absence, and when she returned later, dying of consumption, he could not bear to be near to her. She left him a bequest of books, of which he hardly appreciated the value then. It included a full set of the "Waverley Novels," the works of Miss Edgworth, Martin's "Milton," Pope's "Iliad and Odyssey," some quaint translations of the "Arabian Nights," and Locke's essay on "The Human Understanding." Curiously enough, there was not a single theological book in the collection. His cousin Jane's literary tastes were apparently uninfluenced by her religious views. In 1859, Henry Molyneux was living at Linkfield Lodge, Linkfield Lane, Redhill. The Redhill of to-day, with its acres of bricks and mortar, its smart shops, its imposing Town Hall, and Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, is a very different place from the straggling village that it was in those days. The few gentlemen's houses were occupied by business men, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway being the first in England to run fast morning and evening trains for the convenience of those who wanted to come and go daily to London. Mrs. Brenane seems to have been in the habit of going over periodically to Redhill from Ireland to stop with Molyneux and his wife. She had, at various times, invested most of her fortune left to her by her husband in Molyneux's business, a depot for oriental goods in Watling Street. When Henry Molyneux became bankrupt--we see his name assigned by the Court in the London List of Bankrupts for 1866--the house at Redhill was given up, and he and his wife, accompanied by Mrs. Brenane, settled permanently at Tramore, and there, apparently, when he was allowed to leave college, Lafcadio spent his vacations. His grand-aunt by that time had become a permanent inmate of the Molyneux establishment. Before I had seen the Atkinson letters, I wondered how much Hearn knew of the influences brought to bear on his life at this time. In the second Atkinson letter he openly reveals his entire knowledge of the incidents that appear to have deprived him of his inheritance. Jesuits, he thought, managed the Molyneux introduction--but was not sure. "It was brought about by the Molyneuxs claiming to be relatives of Aunty's dead husband." (Here, Lafcadio was mistaken, for Molyneux, on the contrary, declared himself to be connected with the Hearns and called himself Henry Hearn Molyneux.) "Aunty adored that husband," he goes on, "she was all her life troubled about one thing. When he was dying he had said to her: 'Sally, you know what to do with the property?' She tried to question him more, but he was already beyond the reach of questions. Now the worry of her whole life was to know just what those words meant. The priests persuaded her they meant that she was to take care the property remained in Catholic hands, in the hands of the relatives of her husband. She hesitated a long time; was suspicious. Then the Molyneux people fascinated her. Henry had been brought up by the Jesuits. He had been educated for commerce, spoke four or five languages fluently. He soon became omnipotent in the house. Aunt told me she was going to help him for her husband's sake. The help was soon given in a very substantial way, by settling five hundred a year on the young lady he was engaged to marry.... Mr. Henry next succeeded in having himself declared heir in Aunty's will; I to be provided for by an annuity of (I think, but am not sure) £500. 'Henry,' who had 'made himself the darling,' was not satisfied. He desired to get the property into his hands during Aunty's life. This he was able to do to his own, as well as Aunty's, ruin. He failed in London. The estate was put into the hands of receivers. I was withdrawn from college, and afterwards sent to America, to some of Henry's friends. I had some help from them in the shape of five dollars per week for a few months. Then I was told to go to the devil and take care of myself. I did both. Aunty died soon after. Henry Molyneux wrote me a letter, saying that there were many things to be sent me, etc., he also said he had been made sole Executor, but told me nothing about the Will. (If you ever have a chance to find out about it, please do.) I wrote him a letter which probably troubled his digestion, as he never was heard of more by me.... There was a daughter, however, quite attractive. 'My first love'--at fourteen. I used to write her foolish letters, and wore a lock of her hair for a year or two.... "Well,--there is enough reminiscences for once. If you wish for any more, little sister mine, I'll chatter another time. To-day, under pressure of work, I have to say good-bye. "Lovingly ever, "LAFCADIO HEARN." In another letter, he says, "I know Aunt Brenane made a Will; for she told me so in Dublin, when living at 73, Upper Leeson Street; and I used to go to an aged Lawyer with her, but I can't remember his name. I don't think the matter is very important after all; but it might, if accurately known, give revelation about some other matters." CHAPTER III TRAMORE "If you, O reader, chance to be a child of the sea; if in early childhood, you listened each morning and evening to that most ancient and mystic hymn-chant of the waves, ... if you have ever watched wonderingly, the far sails of the fishing vessels turn rosy in the blush of sunset, or once breathed as your native air the divine breath of the ocean, and learned the swimmer's art from the hoary breakers.... When the long, burning summer comes, and the city roars dustily around you, and your ears are filled with the droning hum of machinery, and your heart full of the bitterness of the struggle for life, does not there visit you at long intervals in the dingy office or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and vast stretches of wrinkled sand and far-fluttering breezes that seem to whisper, 'Come!'? "So that when the silent night descends, you find yourself revisiting in dreams those ocean shores thousands of miles away. The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, and ecstasy as of life restored. And so you start into wakefulness with the thunder of the sea-dream in your ears and tears of regret in your eyes, to find about you only heat and dust and toil; the awakening rumble of traffic, and 'the city sickening on its own thick breath.'" Tramore is situated six miles south of the city of Waterford, at the end of a bay three miles wide. The facilities for sea-bathing and the picturesqueness of the surrounding scenery have made it a favourite resort for the inhabitants of Waterford. On summer mornings when a light wind ripples the water, or on calm dewy nights when the stars rule supreme in a vault of purple ether, or on stormy days when the waves come rolling in, driven by the backwash of an Atlantic storm, to break with thunderous clamour on the long stretch of beach, Tramore Bay presents scenes striking and grand enough to stamp themselves for ever on a mind such as Lafcadio Hearn's. There are periods, only to be measured by days, hours, seconds, when impressions are garnered for a lifetime. Amidst work that is stereotyped, artificial, the recollection, stirring in the artist's brain--perhaps after the lapse of years--of a day spent by the sea listening to the murmur of the waves, or sometimes even of only a ray of sunlight falling through a network of leaves on a pathway, or the scent of flowers under a garden wall, will infuse a fragrance, a freshness, something elemental and simple, into a few lines of prose or verse, raising them at once out of dull common-place into the region of pathos, sometimes of inspiration. Not seldom was Hearn inspired when he took pen in hand, but never so bewitchingly as when he described the sea, or set down, sometimes unconsciously, memories of these childish days. At the fishing village of Yaidzu on the coast of Suruga, twenty years later, while watching the wild sea roaring over its beach of sand, there came to him the sensation of seeing something unreal, looking at something that had no more tangible existence than a memory! Whether suggested by the first white vision of the surf over the bamboo hedge--or by those old green tide-lines in the desolation of the black beach--or by some tone of the speaking sea, or by something indefinable in the touch of the wind,--or by all these--he could not say; but slowly there became defined within him the thought of having beheld just such a coast very long ago, he could not tell where, in those childish years of which the recollections were hardly distinguishable from dreams.... Then he found himself thinking of the vague terror with which he had listened years before, as a child, to the voice of the sea; and he remembered that on different coasts, in different parts of the world, the sound of surf had always revived the feeling. Certainly this emotion was older than he was himself by thousands and thousands of centuries, the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral. The quotation set at the beginning of this chapter, taken from a fragment entitled "Gulf Winds,"[3] shows his inspiration at its best. Freeing himself from the trammels of journalistic work on the _Commercial_, while cooped up in the streets of New Orleans, he recalls the delight of the sea in connection with the Levantine sailors in the marketplace, and breaks into a piece of poetic prose which I maintain has not been surpassed by any English prose writer during the course of last century. [3] "Gulf Winds" is in print, but it is not known when and where it was published. Dr. Gould quotes it in his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin. "Chita," Hearn's first work of fiction, is in no way an artistic production; it lacks construction and the delicate touches that constitute the skilful delineation of character; but every now and then memories of his childhood fall across its pages, illumining them as with sudden light. _Chita_, at the Viosca Chénière, conquering her terror of the sea, and learning to swim, watching the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning under the deepening of the dawn--like a far-fluttering and scattering of rose leaves; _Chita_ learning the secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven, which, the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend, the scudding of clouds, darkening of the sea-line, and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, foretelling wild weather, are but reminiscences of his own childish existence at Tramore. For him, as for _Chita_, there was no factitious life those days, no obligations to remain still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt; no being sent early to bed for the comfort of his elders; no cruel necessity of straining eyes for long hours over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without. When Lafcadio returned to Tramore from Ushaw for his vacations, long days were spent boating or swimming. One old Wexford boatman was his especial companion. The boy would sit listening with unabated interest for hours to stories of shipwreck or legendary adventures, which every Irish fisherman can spin interminably; legends of Celtic and Cromwellian warfare, of which the vestiges, in ruined castles and watch towers, are to be seen on the cliffs surrounding the bay. Kate Mythen, his nurse, was wont to say, that the small Patrick, as he was always called in those days, would recount these yarns with many additions and embellishments inspired by his vivid imagination. Often too vivid, indeed, for not infrequent punishment had to be administered for his habit of "drawing the long bow." Accuracy is seldom united with strong imaginative power, and certainly during the course of his life, as well as in his childhood, Hearn was not distinguished by accuracy of statement. The real companions of the boy's heart at that time were not those surrounding him--not his grand-aunt, or Kate Mythen, or the Wexford fishermen. Ideas, images, romantic imaginings caught from books, or from wanderings over hill and dale, separated him from the outside world. While other children were building castles of sand on the beach, he was building castles with towers reaching to the sky, touched by the light of dawn and deepening fire of evening; impregnable ramparts over which none could pass and behind which, for the rest of his days, his soul entrenched itself. Lying on the sea strand, rocked in the old fisherman's boat, his ears filled with the echo of voices whispering incomprehensible things, he saw, and heard, and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, ever remains eternally new, eternally mystical and divine--the delicious shock that follows upon youth's first vision of beauty supreme. The strange perception, or, as Hearn calls it, recognition, of that sudden power moving upon the mystery of thought and existence, was not to Hearn an attribute of this life, but the shadowing of what had been, the phantom of rapture forgotten, an inheritance from countless generations of people that had preceded him, a surging up from the "ancestral sea of life from whence he came." It was probably here at Tramore that occurred the incidents recorded in the sketch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as having been found amongst his papers after his death. His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly, stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however, exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear. Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediæval creed seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate. The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow; the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places, but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar.... After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees, in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At moments the simple pleasures of life would quicken to a joy so large, so deep that it frightened him. But at other times there would come to him a new, strange sadness, a shadowy and inexplicable pain. A new day had dawned for this impressionable, ardent young spirit; he had crossed the threshold between childhood and youth; henceforth the "Eternal Haunter" abode with him; never might he even kiss the hem of her garment, but hers the shining presence that, however steep and difficult the pathway, led him at last into the "great and guarded" city of artistic appreciation and accomplishment. CHAPTER IV USHAW "Really there is nothing quite so holy as a College friendship. Two lads, absolutely innocent of everything in the world or in life, living in ideals of duty and dreams of future miracles, and telling each other all their troubles, and bracing each other up. I had such a friend once. We were both about fifteen when separated. Our friendship began with a fight, of which I got the worst; then my friend became for me a sort of ideal which still lives. I should be almost afraid to ask where he is now (men grow away from each other so): but your letter brought his voice and face back--just as if his ghost had come in to lay a hand on my shoulder." St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, is situated on a slope of the Yorkshire Hills, near Durham. In the estimation of English Roman Catholics, it stands next to Stonyhurst as an educational establishment. Since Patrick Lafcadio Hearn's days it has counted amongst its pupils Francis Thomson, the poet, and Cardinal Wiseman, the archbishop, both of whom ever retained an affectionate and respectful memory of their Alma Mater. Lafcadio Hearn was sent there from Redhill in Surrey, arriving on September 9th, 1863, at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Brenane is not likely to have been a determining influence in sending him to college. For all her narrow-minded piety, the old lady was warm-hearted and intensely attached to Lafcadio, and must have known how unfitted he was for collegiate life in consequence of constitutional delicacy and defective eyesight. We have seen, also, that she had little to do with his religious education. In a letter written from Japan to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio declares that he was sent to a school "kept by a hateful, venomous-hearted old maid," but his idea must either have been prompted by a sort of crazy fear of the far-reaching power of the Jesuits, or by the inaccuracy of his memory with regard to many early impressions. That he was sent to Ushaw with a view to entering the priesthood is incorrect. The education at Ushaw is by no means exclusively devoted to preparing boys for the priesthood. In a letter to his brother, he says: "You are misinformed as to Grand-Aunt educating your brother for the priesthood. He had the misfortune to spend some years in Catholic Colleges, where the educational system chiefly consists of keeping the pupils as ignorant as possible. I was not even a Catholic." Monsignor Corbishly, the late ecclesiastical head of Ushaw College and a school-fellow of Lafcadio's, stated that if there were any ideas on the part of Hearn's relatives that he should enter the priesthood, the authorities of Ushaw College, as soon as they had become aware of the "mental and moral tendencies" of the boy, would have decided that he was quite unfit to become a member of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This disposes of one of the many Hearn myths. That non-success should have attended the endeavours of the authorities of Ushaw and that most of his contemporaries, now shining lights in the Church of Rome, should refer to Lafcadio Hearn as a "painful subject" was a foregone conclusion. The same fanciful, vagrant, original spirit that had characterised his childhood, characterised him apparently in his college career. Besides an emphatic antagonism to laws and conventions, a distinguishing characteristic of his was a horror of forms and ceremonies; one of the manifestations that fascinated him in Shintoism and Buddhism later was their worship of nature and entire absence of ceremonial or doctrinal teaching. All the aims and thoughts of his boyish heart were directed against prescribed studies and ordinary grooves of thought. A rebellion against restraint, a something explosive and incalculable, places Hearn amongst those whom the French term _deséquilibrés_, one of those ill-poised and erratic spirits, whose freaks and eccentricities are so nearly allied to madness. Besides his rebellion against restraint, his dislike to ecclesiasticism was artistic and æsthetic. Before he came to college his mind, as we have seen, was kindled and informed with enthusiasm for natural beauty and the grace of the ancient Hellenic idea. And from nature and Hellenic ideas, Christianity, as exemplified by the Roman Catholic church, has always stood aloof. "I remember," he relates in one of his essays, "when a boy, lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing I could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible; he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed 'the folly and the wickedness of Pantheism,' with the result that I immediately became a Pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!" That there were faults and misunderstandings and mistaken ideas of discipline on the part of his preceptors is perhaps possible. Those were the days of "stripes innumerable," and what was a right-minded ecclesiastic to do with a boy, but thrash him, when, in the very stronghold of Catholicism, he declared himself a Pantheist? If Monsignor Corbishly with his tactful and unprejudiced mind had been at that time head of Ushaw, as he ultimately became, instead of a contemporary of Hearn's, it is open to conjecture that the life of the little genius might have taken an entirely different course. Like his prototype, Flaubert, there was a _fond d'ecclésiastique_ in Hearn's nature, as was proved by his later life. Had his earnestness, industry, and ascetic self-denial been appealed to, with his warm heart and pliable nature, might he not have been tamed and brought into line? It is the old story where genius is concerned. Because an exceptional youth happens to place himself in revolt against the system of a university, the authorities cannot remake their laws to fit into his eccentricity. Hearn, as he himself confesses, voluntarily handicapped himself all his life, and lost the race, run with stronger, better-conditioned competitors. But that he should have come away from Ushaw College, as he declares, knowing as little as when he entered, is plainly one of his customary exaggerations. The Reverend H. F. Berry, French master during his residence there, was certainly not competent to instil a finished French style into the future translator of "Sylvestre Bonnard." But it is impossible that he could have left college entirely ignorant of English literature of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, remaining, as he did, at the head of his class in English composition for three years of his residence at Ushaw. He himself gives a valid explanation for the reasons of his ignorance on many subjects. His memories, he says, "of early Roman history were cloudy, because the Republic did not interest him; but his conceptions of the Augustan era remained extremely vivid; and great was his delight in those writers who related how Hadrian almost realised that impossible dream of modern æsthetics, the 'Resurrection of Greek Art.' "Of modern Germany and Scandinavia he knew nothing; but the Eddas, and the Sagas, and the Chronicles of the Heimskringla, and the age of the Vikings and Berserks, he had at his finger ends, because they were mighty and awesomely grand." Ornamental education, he declared, when writing to Mr. Watkin from Kobe, in 1896, was a wicked, farcical waste of time. "It left me incapacitated to do anything; and still I feel the sorrow and the sin of having dissipated ten years in Latin and Greek stuff, when a knowledge of some one practical thing, and of a modern language or two, would have been of so much service. As it is, I am only self taught; for everything I learned at school I have since had to unlearn. You helped me with some of the unlearning, dear old Dad!..." In answer to a letter of inquiry, Canon D----, one of those in his class at the time, writes: "Poor Paddy Hearn! I cannot tell you much about him, but what little I can, I will now give you. I remember him as a boy about 14 or 15 very well. I can see his face now, beaming with delight at some of his many mischievous plots with which he disturbed the College and usually was flogged for. He was some two or three classes, or more, below my own, hence never on familiar terms. But he was always considered 'wild as a March hare,' full of escapades, and the terror of his masters, but always most kind and good-natured, and I fancy very popular with his school-mates. He never did harm to anybody, but he loved to torment the authorities. He had one eye either gone or of glass. There was a wildish boy called 'St. Ronite,'[4] who was one of his companions in mischief. He laughed at his many whippings, wrote poetry about them and the birch, etc., and was, in fact, quite irresponsible." [4] I give this name as it is written in Canon D----'s letter. Monsignor Corbishly (during the latter years of his life head of Ushaw College) gives the following information about Lafcadio:-- "He came here from Redhill, Surrey, a few months after I did; no one could be in the College without knowing him. He was always very much in evidence, very popular among his school-fellows. He played many pranks of a very peculiar and imaginative kind. He was full of fun, wrote very respectable verses for a boy, was an omnivorous reader, worshipped muscle, had his note-book full of brawny arms, etc. "As a student he shone only in English writing; he was first in his class the first time he composed in English, and kept first, or nearly first, all the time he was here, and there were several in his class who were considered very good English writers--for boys. In other subjects, he was either quite middling or quite poor. I do not suppose he exerted himself except in English. "I should say he was very happy here altogether, had any amount to say and was very original. He was not altogether a desirable boy, from the Superior's point of view, yet his playfulness of manner and brightness, disarmed any feeling of anger for his many escapades.... He was so very curious a boy, so wild in the tumult of his thoughts, that you felt he might do anything in different surroundings." Most of the accounts given by his school-fellows at the time repeat the same as to his wildness and his facility in writing English. In this subject he seems to have excelled all his school-fellows, invariably getting the prize for English composition. Later, at Cincinnati, Lafcadio told his friend Mr. Tunison that he remembered, as a boy, being given a prize for English literature and feeling such a very little fellow, when he got up before the whole school to receive it. His appearance seems to have been somewhat ungainly, and he was exceedingly shortsighted. When reading he had to bring the book very close to his eyes. He had a great taste for the strange and weird, and had a certain humour of a grim character. There was always something mysterious about him, a mystery which he delighted in increasing rather than dissipating. The confession which he is supposed to have made to Father William Wrennal that he hoped the devil would come to him in the form of a beautiful woman, as he had come to the anchorites in the desert, was worthy of his fellow-countryman Sheridan, in its Celtic mischief and humour. Mr. Achilles Daunt, of Kilcascan Castle, County Cork, seems to have been Lafcadio's principal chum at Ushaw. Mr. Daunt has considerable literary talents himself, and has written one or two delightful books of travel. His reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn at Ushaw are far the most detailed and interesting. He says that Lafcadio's descriptive talent was already noticeable in those days. The wild and ghostly in literature was what chiefly attracted him. "Naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, he once rather shocked some of us by demanding evidence of beliefs, which we had never dreamt of questioning. He loved nature in her exterior aspects, and his conversation, for a lad of his age, was highly picturesque. Knightly feats of arms, combats with gigantic foes in deep forests, low red moons throwing their dim light across desolate spaces, and glinting on the armour of great champions, storms howling over wastes and ghosts shrieking in the gale--these were favourite topics of conversation, and in describing these fancies his language was unusually rich. "I believe he was regarded as slightly off his mental balance. He and I were at one time in the same class; but he was kept for two years in, I think, the class or 'school,' as we called it, of 'High Figures.'[5] This separated us a little, as the lads in the High Figures were not permitted to use the same library as we used in the 'Grammar Class.' A note was handed to me one evening from him as I sat reading in this library, inviting me to take a stroll. The style of this epistle was eminently characteristic of his tastes and style, and although it is now more than forty years ago, I think the following is very nearly a correct copy of it:-- [5] "High Figures" is the name of a class or "School" (as we call "classes" at Ushaw), _e.g._ Low Figures, High Figures, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. If a boy is kept in the same school or class for two years, _e.g._ High Figures, it is owing to his not being fit to be moved up into the next class, Grammar. Each class has its own library, so that a boy in the class of High Figures would not be allowed to intrude into the Library of the school or class above him, Grammar. "'Meet me at twelve at the Gothic door, Massive and quaint, of the days of yore; When the spectral forms of the mighty dead Glide by in the moonlight with silent tread; When the owl from the branch of the blasted oak Shrieks forth his note so wild, And the toad from the marsh echoes with croak In the moonlight soft and mild, When the dead in the lonely vaults below Rise up in grim array And glide past with footsteps hushed and slow, Weird forms, unknown in day; When the dismal death-bells clang so near, Sounding o'er world and lea, And the wail of the spirits strikes the ear Like the moan of the sobbing sea.' "He was always at school called Paddy. He would never tell what the initial 'L' stood for; probably fearing that his companions would make sport of a name which to them would seem outlandish, or at least odd. His face usually bore an expression of sadness, although he now and then romped as gaily as any of his comrades. But the sadness returned when the passing excitement was over. He cared little, or not at all, for school games, cricket, football, etc., and this not merely because of his want of sight, but because they failed to interest him. I and he were in the habit of walking round the shrubberies in the front of the College, indulging our tastes in fanciful conversation until the bell summoned us again to study. "A companion one day alluded to the length of his home address. Lafcadio said his address was longer--'P. L. Hearn, Esq., Ushaw College, near Durham, England, Europe, Eastern Hemisphere, The Earth, Universe, Space, God.' His companion allowed that his address was more modest. "You ask if Hearn ever spent his holidays with relatives in Ireland or Wales. As far as I can remember, he latterly never left Ushaw during the vacations. He was reticent regarding his family, and although I believe I was his most intimate friend I cannot recall his ever having told me anything of his relations with his family, or of his childhood." It is presumably to Mr. Achilles Daunt that Hearn alludes in a letter written thirty years after he had left Ushaw, which has been placed as a heading to this chapter. At this time occurred an incident that influenced the whole of Hearn's subsequent life. While playing a game known as the "Giant's Stride" one of his companions allowed the knotted end of the rope to slip from his hand. It struck Lafcadio, and in consequence of the inflammation supervening he lost the sight of an eye. "I am horribly disfigured by the loss of my left eye," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "punched out at school. They are gentle in English Schools, particularly in Jesuitical schools!" He elsewhere mentions an operation undergone in Dublin in the hope of saving the eye. Of this statement we have no confirmation. Lafcadio seems to have been born with prominent near-sighted eyes. They must have been a Hearn inheritance, for Mrs. Atkinson's son, Carleton, has prominent myopic eyes, and Lafcadio's eldest son has been disqualified, by his near-sight, from entering the Japanese army. There is something intensely pathetic in Hearn's perception of the idea of beauty, and of the reality manifested in his own person. Something of the ghostliness in his present shell must have belonged, he imagined, to the vanished world of beauty, must have mingled freely with the best of youth and grace and force, must have known the worth of long, lithe limbs on the course of glory, and of the pride of a winner in contests, and the praise of maidens, stately as the young sapling of a palm which Odysseus beheld springing by the altar in Delos. Little of beauty, or grace, or lithe limbs belonged to Paddy Hearn. He never was more than five feet three inches in height and was much disfigured by his injured eye. The idea that he was repulsive in appearance, especially to women, always pursued him. Adversity sows the seed. With his extraordinary recuperative power, Lafcadio all his life made ill-luck an effective germinating power. Twenty years later, in one of his editorials in the _Times Democrat_, he alludes to the artistic value of myopia for an impressionist artist, declaring that the inability to see detail in a landscape makes it more mystical and impressive. Certainly, in imaginative work his defective sight seems, if one can say so, a help, rather than a drawback in the conjuring up of ghostly scenes and wraiths and imaginings, glimpses, as it were, enlarging and extending the world around him and insight into others far removed from ordinary comprehension or practical insight. The quality of double perception became at last a cultivated habit of mind. "I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost, and of being haunted--haunted by the prodigious, luminous spectre of the world," he says, in his essay on "Dust." The fact remains, however, that no pursuits requiring quickness and accuracy of sight were henceforth possible for him; the cultivation of his quite remarkable talent for drawing was out of the question. No doubt his sight had been defective from birth, but the entire loss of the sight of one eye intensified it to a considerable extent, and kept him in continual terror of complete loss of visual power. It has been stated that Lafcadio Hearn was expelled from Ushaw. Ecclesiastics are not prone to state their reasons for any line of action they may choose to take. No inquiries were made and no reasons were given. His departure is easily accounted for without any question of expulsion. In fact, it was a matter of necessity, for in consequence of the loss of the money, invested in the Molyneux business, his grand-aunt was no longer able to pay his school fees. Towards the end of his residence at college he generally spent his holidays (or a portion of them) at Ushaw, going home less and less as time went on. Mrs. Brenane's mind, weakened by age and misfortune, was incapable any longer of forming a sound opinion. Those surrounding her persuaded her that the boy whom she had hitherto loved as her own son, and declared her heir, was a "scapegrace and infidel, no fit inmate for a Christian household." Besides which, the lamentable fact remained that she, who only a few years before had lived in affluence, no longer owned a home of her own, and Lafcadio was hardly likely to care to avail himself of Molyneux's hospitality. At the time of Henry Molyneux's marriage to Miss Agnes Keogh, a marriage which took place a year before his failure in 1866, Mrs. Brenane bestowed the whole of the landed property her husband, Justin Brenane, had left her, in the form of a marriage settlement on the young lady. The rest of her life, therefore, was spent as a dependent in the Molyneux's house, Sweetbriars, Tramore. Thus did Lafcadio Hearn lose his inheritance, but if he had inherited it would he ever have been the artist he ultimately became? He was wont to say that hard knocks and intellectual starvation were, with him, a necessary stimulus to creative work, and pain of exceeding value betimes. "Everybody who does me a wrong, indirectly does me a right. I am forced to detach myself from things of the world, and devote myself to things of the imagination and spirit." Amidst luxurious surroundings, with a liberal competency to live upon, might he not perhaps have spent his life in reading or formulating vague philosophical theories, seeking the "unknown reality," instead of being driven by the pressing reality of having to support a wife and children? CHAPTER V LONDON "In Art-study one must devote one's whole life to self-culture, and can only hope at last to have climbed a little higher and advanced a little farther than anybody else. You should feel the determination of those Neophytes of Egypt who were led into subterranean vaults and suddenly abandoned in darkness and rising water whence there was no escape, save by an iron ladder. "As the fugitive mounted through heights of darkness, each rung of the quivering stairway gave way immediately he had quitted it, and fell back into the abyss, echoing; but the least exhibition of fear or weariness was fatal to the climber."[6] [6] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A parlour-maid of Mrs. Brenane's, Catherine by name, who had accompanied her from Ireland when the old lady came over to the Molyneux's house at Redhill, had married a man of the name of Delaney, and had settled in London, near the docks, where her husband was employed as a labourer. To them Hearn went when he left Ushaw. The Delaneys were in fairly comfortable circumstances, and Hearn's account in the letters--the only ones we have of his at this time--written to his school-friend, Mr. Achilles Daunt, of the grimness of the surroundings in which his lot was cast, of the nightly sounds of horror, of windows thrown violently open, or shattered into pieces, of shrieks of agony, cries of murder, and plunges in the river, are to be ascribed to his supersensitive and excitable imagination. The artist cannot always be tied down to the strict letter of the law. It inspires a much deeper human interest to picture genius struggling against overwhelming odds--poverty-stricken, starving--than lazily and luxuriously floating down the current of life with unlimited champagne and chicken mayonnaise on board. Stevenson was at this time supposed to be living like a "weevil in a biscuit," when his father was only too anxious to give him an allowance. Jimmy Whistler, only a little way up the river from Hearn, at Wapping, was said to be living on "cat's meat and cheese parings," when, if he had chosen to conform to the most elementary principles of business, he might have been in easy circumstances by the sale of his work. As to direct penury, and Hearn's statement that he "was obliged to take refuge in the workhouse," if accurate it must have been brought about by his own improvident and intractable nature and invariable refusal to submit to discipline or restraint of any kind. Hearn's memories of his youth were extremely vague. Referring to this period of his life later, in Japan, he tells a pupil that, though some of his relations were rich, none of them offered to pay to enable him to finish his education; and though brought up in a luxurious home, surrounded by western civilisation, he was obliged to educate himself in spite of overwhelming difficulties, and in consequence of the neglect of his relations, partly lost his sight, spent two years in bed, and was forced to become a servant. This is a remarkable case of Celtic rebellion against the despotism of fact. He never was called upon to fill the duties of a servant until he arrived in America. He never could have spent two years in bed, for there are no two years unaccounted for, either at this time or later in Cincinnati. It would not have suited the policy of those ruling his destiny to leave him in a state of destitution. A certain allowance was probably sent to Catherine Delaney, as later in Cincinnati to Mr. Cullinane, sufficient for his keep and every-day expenses. With a knowledge of Lafcadio's methods, we can imagine that any sum given to him would probably have run through his fingers within the first hour--his last farthing spent on the purchase of a book or curio that fascinated him in a shop window. Thus he might find himself miles away from home, obliged to obtain haphazard the means of supplying himself with food and shelter. Absence of mind was characteristic of all the Hearns, and unpunctuality, until he was drilled and disciplined by official life in Japan, one of Lafcadio's conspicuous failings. We can imagine the practical ex-parlourmaid keeping his meals waiting, during the first period of his stay, and gradually, when she found that no dependence could be placed on his movements, taking no further heed or trouble, and paying no attention to his coming and going. At various periods during the course of his life, Hearn indulged in the experiment of working his brain at the expense of his body--sometimes to the extent of seriously undermining his health, and having to submit to the necessity of knocking off work until lost ground had been made up. He held the opinion that the owner of pure "horse health" never possessed the power of discerning "half lights." In its separation of the spiritual from the physical portion of existence, severe sickness was often invaluable to the sufferer by the revelation it bestows of the psychological under-currents of human existence. From the intuitive recognition of the terrible, but at the same time glorious fact, that the highest life can only be reached by subordinating physical to spiritual influences, separating the immaterial from the material self, lies all the history of asceticism and self-suppression as the most efficacious means of developing religious and intellectual power. Fantastic were the experiments and vagaries he indulged in now and then, as when he tried to stay the pangs of hunger at Cincinnati by opium, or when, on his first arrival in Japan, he insisted on adopting a diet of rice and lotus roots, until he discovered that endeavouring to make the body but a vesture for the soul, means irritated nerves, weak eyesight and acute dyspepsia. Now, even as a lad, began Hearn's life of loneliness and withdrawal from communion with his fellows. Buoyed up by an undefined instinct that he possessed power of some sort, biding his time, possessing his soul in silence, and wrapping a cloak of reserve about his internal hopes and aims, he gradually turned all his thoughts into one channel. Youth has a marvellous fashion of accepting injustice and misrepresentation, if allowed to keep its inner life untouched. Now he showed that strange mixture of weakness and strength, stoicism and sensibility, ignorance of the world, and stubborn resistance to external influence that distinguished him all through the course of his life. If those amongst whom his lines had hitherto been cast chose to cast him forth, and look upon him as a pariah, he would not even deign to excuse himself, or seek to be reinstated in their affections. After all, what signify the nettles and brambles by the wayside, when in front lies the road leading to a shining goal of hope, of work, of achievement? What matter a heavy heart and an empty stomach, when you are stuffing your brain to repletion with new impressions and artistic material? Slowly and surely even now he was coming to the conviction that literature was his vocation, and he began preparing himself, struggling, as he expresses it, with that dumbness, that imperfection of utterance, that beset the literary beginner, arising generally from the fact that the latent thought or emotion has not yet defined itself with sufficient sharpness. "Analyse it, make the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, and the necessary utterance will come, until at last the emotional idea develops itself unconsciously. Analysing the feeling that remains dim, and making the effort of trying to understand exactly the emotion that moves us, prompt at last the necessary utterance. Every feeling is expressible.... You may work at a page for months before the idea clearly develops, the result is often surprising; for our best work is often out of the unconscious." Already in the small frail body, with half the eyesight given to other men, dwelt that quality of perseverance, that indomitable determination which, with all Hearn's deviations from the straight path, with all his blunderings, guided him at last out of the perplexities and weariness of life into calm and sunlight, to the enjoyment of that happiness which was possible to a man of his temperament. "All roads lead to Rome," but it is well for the artist if he find the right one early in his career. Hearn set forth on his pilgrimage within hearing of the tolling of the bell of St. Paul's, ending it within hearing of the "bronze beat" of the temple bell of Yokohama, carrying through all his romantic journeyings that most wonderful romance of all, his own genius. "Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One must pay a price to see and to know," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson, recalling these days. "Still, the purchase is worth making." Great as the deprivation must have been, not to return to the meadows and flowery lanes of Tramore, to the windswept bay, and the sound of the undulating tide, what a chance was now offered him! A free charter of the streets of London. If, as he says, he had received no education at Ushaw, he received it here, the best of all, in these grimy, sordid surroundings, noting the pathos of everyday things, fascinated by the sight of the human stream pouring through the streets of the great metropolis, its currents and counter-currents and eddyings, strengthening or weakening, as the tide rose or ebbed, of the city sea of toil. This was what gave his genius that breadth of vision and range of emotion which, half a century later, enabled him to interpret the ceremony and discipline, the sympathy or repulsion, the "race ghost" of the most mysterious people on the face of the globe. We can see in imagination the odd-looking lad creeping, in his gentle, near-sighted fashion, through the vast necropolis of dead gods in the British Museum, where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain? Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good and true.'" We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the white-winged ships, "swift Hermæ of traffic--ghosts of the infinite ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day destined to become the interpreter. We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain. "One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and dead suns. "For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten. Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar even to the newly-born the meaning of this tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt, likewise our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual being--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows, dim loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains, to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voices that recalls their past."[7] [7] From "A Street Singer," "Kokoro," Messrs. Gay & Hancock. It is interesting to feel the throb of the intellectual pulse of England in the late sixties when Lafcadio Hearn was wandering about the wilderness of London, absorbing thoughts and storing ideas for the future. Tennyson had done his best work. "Maud" and "Locksley Hall" were in every one's heart and on every one's lips, illustrating the trend and the expression of men's thoughts. Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold, at Oxford, were forming the modern school of English prose; Ruskin in his fourth-floor room at Maida Vale, with "the lights of heaven for his candles," was opening the mind of middle-class England to a new set of art theories. The Brownings were in Bryanston Square, she occupied in writing "Aurora Leigh," he in completing "Sordello." William Morris, "in dismal Queen's Square, in black, filthy old London, in dull end of October, was making a wondrous happy poem, with four sets of lovers, called 'Love is Enough.'" The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were trying to lead Englishmen out of the "sloshy" bread-and-butter school of sentimentalism to what they called "truth" in subject and execution. The _Germ_ was running its short and erratic career; Rossetti had published in its pages the "Blessed Damozel," had finished "The Burden of Nineveh," and had begun the "House of Life." Jimmy Whistler, during the intervals of painting "Nocturnes" at Cherry Tree Inn, was flying over to Paris, returning laden with "Japaneseries," exhibiting for the first time to the public, at his house in Chelsea, a flutter of purple fans, and _kakemonos_ embroidered at the foot of Fuji-no-yama, which, in his whimsical way, he declared to be "as beautiful as the Parthenon marbles." Darwin had fulminated his scientific principles of natural selection and evolution, fanning into a flame the conflict between religious orthodoxy and natural science. Theologians were up in arms. To doubt a single theological tenet, or the literal accuracy of an ancient Hebraic text, seemed to them to place the whole reality of religious life and nature in question. Ten years before, Herbert Spencer had been introduced by Huxley to Tyndall as "Ein Kerl der speculirt," and well had he maintained the character; "Principles of Ethics" had already been written and he was at work at the "Synthetic Philosophy." Science, however, in those days seems to have been a closed book to Lafcadio. The wrangles and discussions over eastern legend and the creation of the world as set forth in Genesis never seem to have reached his mind, until years afterwards in New Orleans. He appears to have wandered rather in the byways of fiction, devouring any rubbish that came his way in the free libraries he frequented. It is surprising to think of the writer of "Japan, an Interpretation," having been fascinated by Wilkie Collins's "Armadale." The name "Ozias Midwinter," indeed, he used afterwards as a pseudonym for the series of letters contributed to the _Commercial_ from New Orleans. There is a certain pathos in the appeal that the description of the personality and character of _Midwinter_ made to his imagination. "What had I known of strangers' hands all through my childhood? I had only known them as hands raised to threaten. What had I known of other men's voices? I had known them as voices that jeered, voices that whispered against me in corners.... I beg your pardon, sir, I have been used to be hunted and cheated and starved." Lafcadio's stay in London lasted a year; an imagination such as his lives an eternity in a year. A veil of mystery overhangs the period intervening between this and his arrival in America which I have in vain endeavoured to penetrate. Mr. Milton Bronner, in his preface to the "Letters from the Raven," alludes to the "travel-stained, poverty-burdened lad of nineteen, who had 'run away from a Monastery _in Wales_,' and who still had part of his monk's garb for clothing." In writing Hearn's biography, it is always well to remember his tendency to embroider upon the drab background of fact. Mrs. Koizumi, his widow, told us in Japan that when applying for an appointment, as professor at the Waseda University, her husband informed the officials that he had been educated in England and Ireland, "also some time in France." His brother, Daniel James, at present a farmer at St. Louis, Michigan, says that he knows Lafcadio to have been for some time at college in France, and Mr. Joseph Tunison, his intimate friend at Cincinnati, states that Lafcadio, when talking of his later childhood and youth, referred to Ireland, England, and "some time at school in France." Hitherto it has been a task of no difficulty to trace the inmates of Roman Catholic colleges abroad, it having been customary to keep records of the name of every inmate and student of each college, but since the breaking up of the religious houses in France, many of these records have been lost or destroyed. Strong internal evidence, which it is unnecessary to quote here, leads to the conclusion that he was delivered, as a scapegrace and good-for-nothing, into the charge of the ecclesiastics at the Roman Catholic institution of the _Petits Précepteurs_ at Yvetot, near Rouen. Finding their methods of calling sinners to repentance unendurable, he took the key of the fields, and made a bolt of it. If, as we imagine, he went to Paris, he most certainly did not reveal himself to his Uncle Richard, who was living there at the time. Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor, disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore, not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila. It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity--appanage of his artistic nature--with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris, where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to clutch the Unattainable." A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital memories--memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work. It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin," while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the _Chat Noir_, and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, François Millet, in poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing "The Sowers" and "The Angelus." Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's. Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers. However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity. It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit, which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors. It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands, Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"--"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt. In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law. It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him. CHAPTER VI CINCINNATI "... I think there was one mistake in the story of OEdipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the Sphinx's alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every one who couldn't answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in life;--so I can speak from authority. She doesn't kill people like me,--she only bites and scratches them; and I've got the marks of her teeth in a number of places on my soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same tiresome question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply telling her, 'I don't know.'"[8] [8] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In a letter to his sister, written from Kumamoto, in Japan, years later, Hearn tells her that he found his way to the office of an old English printer, named Watkin, some months after his arrival in Cincinnati. "I asked him to help me. He took a fancy to me, and said, 'You do not know anything; but I will teach you. You can sleep in my office. I cannot pay you, because you are of no use to me, except as a companion, but I can feed you.' He made me a paper-bed (paper-shavings from the book-trimming department); it was nice and warm. I did errand boy in the intervals of tidying the papers, sweeping the floor of the shop, and sharing Mr. Watkin's frugal meals." In Henry Watkin's Reminiscences the purport is given of the conversation that passed between the future author of "Kokoro" and himself at his shop in the city of Cincinnati, when Hearn first found his way there in the year 1859. "Well, young man, what ambition do you nourish?" "To write, sir." "Mercy on us. Learn something that will put bread in your mouth first, try your hand at writing later on." Henry Watkin was a person apparently of elastic views and varied reading; self-educated, but shrewd and gifted with a natural knowledge of mankind. He was nearly thirty years older than the boy he spoke to, but he remembered the days when his ideal of life had been far other than working a printing-press in a back street in Cincinnati. At one time he had steeped himself in the French school of philosophy, Fourierism and St. Simonism; then for a time followed Hegel and Kant, regaling himself in lighter moments with Edgar Allan Poe and Hoffmann's weird tales. The lad who had come to solicit his aid was undersized, extremely near-sighted--one of his eyes, in consequence of the accident that had befallen him at Ushaw, was prominent and white--he was intensely shy, and had a certain caution and stealthiness of movement that in itself was apt to influence people against him. But the intellectual brow, a something dignified and reserved in voice and manner, an intangible air of breeding, arrested Mr. Watkin's attention. As Hearn somewhere says, hearts are the supreme mysteries in life, people meet, touch each other's inner being with a shock and a feeling as if they had seen a ghost. This strange waif, who had drifted to the door of his printing-office, touched Henry Watkin's sympathetic nature; he discerned at once, behind the unprepossessing exterior, a specific individuality, and conceived an immediate affection for the boy. Many were the shifts that Lafcadio had been put to from the time he left France until he cast anchor in the haven of Mr. Watkin's printing-shop in a retired back street in the city of Cincinnati. Filling up the gaps in his own recital, we can see the sequence of events that invariably distinguished Hearn's progress through life. In his improvident manner he had apparently squandered the money that had been contributed by Mrs. Brenane for his journey, and thus found himself in considerable difficulties. Amongst the papers found after his death was a sketch, inspired, he tells Professor Yrjo Hirn, writing from Tokyo in January, 1902, by the names of the Scandinavian publishers, Wahlstrom and Weilstrand. It is sufficiently reminiscent of Stevenson to make one think that the reading of "Across the Plains," rather than the names of Scandinavian publishers, was responsible for its inception. It relates very much the same experiences as Stevenson's on his journey from New York to Chicago in an American emigrant train. Absolutely destitute of money and food, he must have presented a forlorn appearance. Moved to pity, a Norwegian peasant girl, seated opposite him in the car, offered him a slice of brown bread and yellow cheese. Thirty-five years later he recalled the vision of this kind-hearted girl, no doubt endowing her memory with a beauty and charm that never were hers--and under the title of "My First Romance" left it for publication amongst his papers. After his arrival in Cincinnati the lad seems very nearly to have touched the confines of despair; and for some months lived a life of misery such as seems incredible for a person of intellect and refinement in a civilised city. Sometimes when quite at the end of his tether he had, it appears, to sleep in dry-goods boxes in grocers' sheds, even to seek shelter in a disused boiler in a vacant "lot." "My dear little sister," he writes years afterwards to Mrs. Atkinson, when recounting his adventures at this period, "has been very, very lucky, she has not seen the wolf's side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle. "I found myself dropped into the enormous machinery of life I knew nothing about, friends tried to get me work after I had been turned out of my first boarding-house through inability to pay. I lost father's photograph at that time by seizure of all my earthly possessions. I had to sleep for nights in the street, for which the police scolded me; then I found refuge in a mews, where some English coachmen allowed me to sleep in a hay-loft at night, and fed me by stealth with victuals stolen from the house." This incident Mrs. Wetmore, in her biography of Hearn, refers to as having taken place during his stay in London. His letter to his sister and his use of the word "dollars" in estimating the value of the horses, unmistakably connects the scene of it with the United States, where at that time it was the custom to employ English stablemen. His sketch, written years after, recalling this night in a hay-loft, delightfully simple and suggestive, tells of the delights of his hay-bed, the first bed of any sort for many a long month! The pleasure of the sense of rest! whilst overhead the stars were shining in the frosty air. Beneath, he could hear the horses stirring heavily, and he thought of the sense of force and life that issued from them. They were of use in the world, but of what use was he?... And the sharp shining stars, they were suns, enormous suns, inhabited perhaps by creatures like horses, with small things like rats and mice hiding in the hay. The horses did not know that there were a hundred million of suns, yet they were superior beings worth a great deal of money, much more than he was, yet he knew that there were hundreds of millions of suns and they did not. "I endeavoured later," he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "to go as accountant in a business office, but it was soon found that I was incapable of filling the situation, defective in mathematical capacity, and even in ordinary calculation power. I was entered into a Telegraph Office as Telegraph Messenger Boy, but I was nineteen and the other boys were young; I looked ridiculously out of place and was laughed at. I was touchy--went off without asking for my wages. Enraged friends refused to do anything further for me. Boarding-houses warned me out of doors. At last I became a Boarding-house servant, lighted fires, shovelled coals, etc., in exchange for food and privilege of sleeping on the floor of the smoking-room. I worked thus for about one and a half years, finding time to read and write stories. The stories were published in cheap Weekly Papers, long extinct; but I was never paid for them. I tried other occupations also--canvassing, show-card writing, etc. These brought enough to buy smoking tobacco and second-hand clothes--nothing more." It is typical of Hearn that, though driven to such straits, he never applied to Mr. Cullinane, to whose charge he had been committed. We are not surprised that the little room at the back of Mr. Watkin's shop, with the bed of paper shavings, and Mr. Watkin's frugal meals, yes, even sleeping in dry-goods boxes in a grocer's shed, or the shelter of a disused boiler in a vacant "lot," was preferable to the acceptance of money sent through the intervention of Henry Molyneux to Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law. In his book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn,"[9] Dr. George Milbury Gould alludes to this gentleman in the following terms:-- [9] Messrs. Fisher Unwin. "There is still living, an Irishman, to whom Lafcadio was sent from Ireland, and in whose care, at least to a limited extent, the boy was placed. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870." "He was not sure," says Gould in his account of an interview with Mr. Cullinane, "whether Mrs. Brenane was really Hearn's grand-aunt; the fact is, he declared that he knew nothing, and no one knew anything true of Hearn's life. Asked why the lad was shipped to him, he replied, 'I do not know--I do not even know whether he was related to my brother-in-law, Molyneux, or not.'" From these statements Gould infers that the boy couldn't stop in any school to which he was sent, that he was apparently an unwelcome charge upon his father's Irish relations. Every one, indeed, who had anything to do with him made haste to rid themselves of the obligation. The friendship with Mr. Watkin, the old English printer, was destined to last for the term of Hearn's life. Many of Hearn's friends in America have insinuated that Mr. Watkin exaggerated the strength of the tie that bound him to Lafcadio Hearn; but Hearn's letters to his sister bear out all the statements made in the introduction to the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." Even when Hearn succeeded in obtaining occupation elsewhere, he would return to Mr. Watkin's office during leisure hours, either for a talk with his friend, or, if Mr. Watkin was out, for a desultory reading of the books in the "library," the appellation by which the two or three shelves containing Mr. Watkin's heterogeneous collection was dignified. He was of no use in Mr. Watkin's business owing to defective eyesight, but when he returned after his day's work elsewhere, literary, political and religious subjects were discussed and quarrelled over. As was now and afterwards his custom with his friends, in spite of daily intercourse, Hearn kept up a frequent correspondence with Mr. Watkin. This correspondence has been edited and published by Mr. Milton Bronner under the title of "Letters from the Raven." Edgar Allan Poe had died in 1849, but the influence of his weird and strange genius was still pre-eminent in America. Early in their acquaintance Hearn established the habit of addressing Mr. Watkin as "Old Man" or "Dad," while on the other hand the boy, in consequence of his sallow complexion, black hair, and admiration for Poe's works, was known as the "Raven." During the long years of their correspondence, a drawing of a raven was generally placed in lieu of signature when Lafcadio wrote to Mr. Watkin. Many of these pen-and-ink sketches interspersed with other illustrations here and there through the letters show considerable talent for drawing, of a fantastic sort, that might have been developed, had Hearn's eyesight permitted, and had he not nourished other ambitions. Some of the letters are simply short statements left on the table for Mr. Watkin's perusal when he returned home, or a few lines of nonsense scribbled on a bit of paper and pinned on a door of the office. Often when Hearn was offended by some observation, or a reprimand administered by the older man, he would "run away in a huff." Mr. Watkin, who was genuinely attached to the erratic little genius and understood how to deal with him, would simply follow him, tell him not to be a fool, and bring him back again. In the fourth autobiographical fragment, found amongst Hearn's papers after his death, is one entitled "Intuition." He there alludes to Watkin as "the one countryman he knew in Cincinnati--a man who had preceded him into exile by nearly forty years." In a glass case at the entrance to a photographer's shop, Hearn had come across the photograph of a face, the first sight of which had left him breathless with wonder and delight.... The gaze of the large dark eyes, the aquiline curve of the nose, the mouth firm but fine--made him think of a falcon, in spite of the delicacy of the face.... He stood looking at it, and the more he looked, the more the splendid wonder of it seemed to grow like a fascination. But who was she? He dared not ask the owner of the gallery. To his old friend Watkin, therefore, he went and at once proposed a visit to the photographer's. The picture was as much a puzzle to him as to Hearn. For long years the incident of the photograph passed from Hearn's memory until, in a Southern city hundreds of miles away, he suddenly perceived, in a glass case in a druggist's shop, the same photograph. "Please tell me whose face that is," he asked. "Is it possible you do not know?" responded the druggist. "Surely you are joking?" Hearn answered in the negative. Then the man told him--it was that of the great tragedienne, Rachel. * * * * * Cincinnati is separated from Kentucky by the Ohio. It is there but a narrow river, and the Cincinnati folk were wont to migrate into Kentucky when there were lectures on spiritualism, revivalist meetings, or political haranguings going on. Hearn and his old "Dad" used often to make the journey when the day's work was done. Hearn was ever fascinated by strange and unorthodox methods of thought. We can imagine him poring over Fourier's "Harmonie Universelle" as well as the strange theories set forth in esoteric Buddhism with its astral visions and silent voices, even accepting the materialisation of tea-cups and portraits and the transportation of material objects through space. These were not the only expeditions they made together. When, later, Hearn was on the staff of the _Enquirer_ as night reporter, his "Dad" often accompanied him on his night prowls along the "levee," as the water edge is called on the river towns of the Mississippi valley. At the time of Hearn's death in 1904 a member of the _Enquirer_ staff visited Mr. Henry Watkin, who was then living in the "Old Men's Home" (he died a few months ago), a well-known institution in Cincinnati where business people of small means spend their declining years. An account of this visit was printed in the newspaper on October 2nd. The writer described the old bureau in Watkin's room with its many pigeon-holes, holding gems more dear to the old man than all "the jewels of Tual"--the letters of Lafcadio Hearn. To it the old gentleman tottered when the reporter asked for a glimpse of the precious writings, and as he balanced two packages, yellow with age, in his hand, he told, in a voice heavy with emotion, how he first met Hearn accidentally, and how their friendship ripened day after day and grew into full fruition with the years. "I always called him 'The Raven,'" said Watkin, "because his gloomy views, his morbid thoughts and his love for the weird and uncanny reminded me of Poe at his best--or worst, as you might call it; only, in my opinion, Hearn's was the greater mind. Sometimes he came to my place when I was out and then he left a card with the picture of a raven varied according to his whim, and I could tell from it the humour he was in when he sketched it." Mr. Watkin was then eighty-six years of age, and dependence can hardly be placed on his memories of nearly fifty years before. One of his statements, that Hearn had come, in company with a Mr. McDermott, to see him twenty-four hours after he had been in Cincinnati, cannot be quite accurate, because of Hearn's own account to his sister of having spent nights in the streets of Cincinnati, of his various adventures after his arrival, of his having worked as type-setter and proof-reader for the Robert Clarke Co., before seeking employment at Mr. Watkin's office. It was while he was sleeping on the bed of paper shavings behind Mr. Watkin's shop that he acted as private secretary to Thomas Vickers, librarian in the public library at Cincinnati. He mentions Thomas Vickers at various times in his letters to Krehbiel, and refers to rare books on music and copies of classical works to be found at the library. During all this period, wandering from place to place, endeavouring to find employment of any kind, the boy's underlying ambition was to obtain a position on the staff of one of the large daily newspapers, and thus work his way to a competency that would enable him to devote himself to literary work of his own. "I believe he would have signed his soul away to the devil," one of his colleagues says, "to get on terms of recognition with either Colonel John Cockerill, then managing editor of the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or Mr. Henderson, the city editor of the _Commercial_." Though Hearn may not have signed his soul to the devil, he certainly sold his genius to ignoble uses when he wrote his well-known description of the tan-yard murder. His ambition however was gratified. A reporter who could thus cater to the public greed for horrors was an asset to the Cincinnati press. We have an account, given by John Cockerill, twenty years later, of Hearn's first visit to the _Enquirer_:-- "One day there came to the office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms. "When admitted, in a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditures, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable. "Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written.... "From that time forward he sat in the corner of my room and wrote special articles for the Sunday Edition as thoroughly excellent as anything that appeared in the magazines of those days. I have known him to have twelve and fifteen columns of this matter in a single issue of the paper. He was delighted to work, and I was pleased to have his work, for his style was beautiful and the tone he imparted to the newspaper was considerable. Hour after hour he would sit at his table, his prominent eyes resting as close to the paper as his nose would permit, scratching away with beaver-like diligence and giving me no more annoyance than a bronze ornament. His eyes troubled him greatly in those days, one was bulbous, and protruded farther than the other. He was as sensitive as a flower. An unkind word from anybody was as serious to him as a cut from a whiplash, but I do not believe he was in any sense resentful.... He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories. The negro stevedores on the steamboat-landings fascinated him. He wrote of their songs, their imitations, their uncouth ways, and he found picturesqueness in their rags, poetry in their juba dances." A journalistic feat still remembered in Cincinnati for its daring was Hearn's ascent of the spire of the cathedral on the back of a famous steeplejack, for the purpose of writing an account of the view of the city from that exalted position. Mr. Edmund Henderson gives an account of the accomplishment of the performance. Hearn was told of the peril of the thing but he would not listen. Despite his physique he was as courageous as a lion, and there was no assignment of peril that he would not bid for avidly. "Before the climb began the editor handed him a field glass with the suggestion that he might find it useful. Hearn, however, quietly handed it back with the remark 'perhaps I had better not take it; something might happen.' Amidst the cheers of the crowd beneath the foolhardy pair accomplished their climb. Hearn came back to the office and wrote two columns describing his sensations, and the wonders of the view he had obtained from the steeple top, though he was so near-sighted he could not have seen five feet beyond the tip of his nose." Henceforth Hearn accepted the "night stations" on the staff of the paper. Amongst the policemen of Cincinnati, who accompanied him in his wanderings, he was a prime favourite, known as "O'Hearn" both to them and to his fellow-reporters. After hours of exposure, weary and hungry, he might be seen sitting in the deserted newspaper office until the small hours of the morning, under a miserable gas-jet burning like a "mere tooth of flame in its wire muzzle," his nose close to paper and book, working at translations from Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Being a meridional, he said, he felt rather with the Latin race than the Anglo-Saxon, and he hoped with time and study to be able to create something different from the stone-grey and somewhat chilly style of the latter-day English and American romance. Although later he modified considerably his opinion with regard to the moral tendency of their art, he ever retained the same admiration for the artistic completeness and finish of the French Impressionist School; their instinct for the right phrase, their deftness in setting it precisely in the right position, the strength that came from reserve, and the ease due to vividly-realised themes and objects, all these elements combined conferred a particular charm on their method of expression to a stylist of Hearn's quality. Not being able to find a publisher for Gautier's "Avatar," his first translation from the French, he subjected it "to the holy purification of fire." He next attempted a portion of some of Gautier's tales, included under the title of "One of Cleopatra's Nights"; then he undertook the arduous task of translating Flaubert's "La Tentation de Saint Antoine." "It is astonishing what system will accomplish. If a man cannot spare an hour a day he can certainly spare a half-hour. I translated "La Tentation" by this method, never allowing a day to pass without translating a page or two. The work is audacious in parts; but I think nothing ought to be suppressed." As well attempt, however, to gain a hearing for a free-thinking speech at Exeter Hall as to obtain readers for Gautier's or Flaubert's productions amidst a society nourished on Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau! Unorthodox in religious opinion some of the American prophets and poets might be, but rigid and narrow as a company of Puritans in the matter of social morality. When we know that about this time Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp" was refused admittance to the pages of a San Francisco magazine as likely to shock the sentiments of its readers and injure the circulation of the periodical in consequence of the morals of the mother of the _Luck_, we are not surprised that Hearn's attempt to introduce the American public to the masterpieces of the French Impressionist School was foredoomed to failure. There is a certain naïve, determined defiance of convention in his insistence on gaining admiration both from his friends and the public for productions that were really quite unsuited to general circulation at that time in America. We find him, for instance, recommending the perusal of "Mdlle. de Maupin" to a clergyman of the Established Church and sending a copy of Gautier's poems to Miss Bisland in New Orleans. "I shall stick," he says, "to my pedestal of faith in literary possibilities like an Egyptian Colossus with a broken nose, seated solemnly in the gloom of my own originality, seeking no reward save the satisfaction of creating something beautiful; but this is worth working for." It is a noteworthy fact and one that may be mentioned here that, in spite of his extraordinary mastery of the subtleties of the French language, he always spoke French with an atrociously bad accent. "He had a very bad ear," his friend, Henry Krehbiel, tells us in his article on "Hearn and Folk Music," "organically incapable of humming the simplest tune; he could not even sing the scale, a thing that most people do naturally." From these Cincinnati days dates Hearn's hatred of the drudgery of journalism, "a really nefarious trade," he declared later; "it dwarfs, stifles and emasculates thought and style.... The journalist of to-day is obliged to hold himself in readiness to serve any cause.... If he can enrich himself quickly and acquire comparative independence, then, indeed, he is able to utter his heart's sentiments and indulge his tastes...." Amongst his colleagues on the staff of the _Enquirer_ Hearn was not popular. He was looked upon as what Eton boys call a "sap"; his fussiness about punctuation and style, soon earned for him the sobriquet of "Old Semi-Colon." This meticulous precision on the subject of punctuation and the value of words remained a passion with him all his life. He used to declare he felt about it as a painter would feel about the painting of his picture. He told his friend, Tunison, that the word "gray" if spelt "grey" gave him quite a different colour sensation. We remember his delightful outburst in a letter to Chamberlain, that has been so often quoted. "For me words have colour, form, character: they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations;--they have moods, humours, eccentricities:--they have tints, tones, personalities," etc., etc. Though Hearn did not get on with others of the newspaper staff, he formed ties of intimacy with several choice spirits then moving in the best literary circles of Cincinnati and now well known in the literary life of the United States. Henry Krehbiel, recognised in England and America as an eminent music lecturer and critic, was one of his most intimate friends. Joseph Tunison was another; he afterwards became editor of the _Dayton Journal_, and, as well as Krehbiel, wrote sympathetically of the little Irishman after his death, expressing indignation at the scurrilous attacks made upon his reputation by several papers in the United States. "He was a wonderfully attractive personality, full of quaint learning, and a certain unworldly wisdom. He had a fashion of dropping his friends one by one; or of letting them drop him, which comes to the same thing; whether indifference or suspicion was at the bottom of this habit it would be hard to say. But he never spoke ill of them afterwards. It was not his way to tell much about himself; and what he did say was let out as if by accident in the course of conversation on other topics.... It was impossible to be long in his company without learning that his early years had been years of bitterness. His reminiscences of childhood included not only his dark-haired, dark-eyed mother, but also a beautiful blonde lady, who had somehow turned his happiness to misery." CHAPTER VII VAGABONDAGE "Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is, and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps, told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of white faces produced something like fear (and the evil spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races."[10] [10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell? The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman, "Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries, which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of his unbalanced mental equipment. On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing reporter's work for the _Enquirer_ he fell under the "Shadow of the Ethiopian." In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle. "He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs. Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat extremes of hate and love--a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature. Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been better for those dependent on us." The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn, then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863 President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself. In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they talked much of her early days and years of slavery. His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible position. After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books. The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto, or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole." It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses, as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted, indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or Polynesian. Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory of heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry. All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society; the "levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New Orleans; fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as companions in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called improvements in civilisation have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see, hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourself out of the natural world. I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots, under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and luke-warm sea--where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer thing in the natural order than seventy times seven New Yorks."[11] [11] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority. That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest, and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He never took into consideration whether it was wise to do so or not. Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had settled down to accept the discipline of social laws and conventions, he took a very different view of the racial question in the United States and confessed the want of comprehension he had displayed on the subject. Writing years afterwards to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the unfortunate incident in Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some people who were looked down upon in the place where he lived. He thought that those who looked down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over to their side. Then the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and he hated them. But he was then too young to understand. The trouble was really caused by moral questions far larger than those he had been arguing about. Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view of the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known as "The Voodoo Queen." Page Baker, the editor of the _Times Democrat_ immediately came forward to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen, the article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman, who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was afterward shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism. "Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating for himself what he wrote about; but what the _Sun_ states is not only untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been the man the _Sun_ says he was, he could not have held the position he did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him." In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the _Enquirer_, and in the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the _Commercial_, but he had too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate constitution. He longed to get away. Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South, his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a November morning, were oddly connected with _Jean ah-Poquelin_. Even before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds, to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion. A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of opinion with the editor of the _Commercial_. In fact, money for the journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper. CHAPTER VIII MEMPHIS "So I wait for the poet's Pentecost--the inspiration of Nature--the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten, and the sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshippers--with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds. When one becomes bathed in this azure and gold air--saturated with the perfume of the sea, he can't help writing something. And he cannot help feeling a new sense of being. The Soul of the Sea mingles with his own, is breathed into him: the Spirit that moveth over the deep is the Creator indeed--vivifying, illuminating, strengthening. I really feel his Religion--the sense of awe that comes to one in some great silent temple. You would feel it too under this eternal vault of blue, when the weird old Sea is touching the keys of his mighty organ ..."[12] [12] Letter to Dr. Matas in Dr. Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin. It was in the autumn of 1877 that Lafcadio Hearn, with forty dollars in his pocket and a head full of dreams, started for Memphis on his way to New Orleans. Mr. Halstead and Mr. Edward Henderson, editors of the _Commercial_, and his old friend, Mr. Watkin, were at the little Miami depot to bid him God speed. Memphis is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Hearn had to await the steamboat there on its return journey from New Orleans. In those days punctuality was not rigidly enforced, and very often the arrival of the steamer necessitated a wait of several days at Memphis. The only person with whom Hearn kept up communication in the northern city he had left was Henry Watkin. Hieroglyphs of ravens, tombstones, and crescent moons illustrate the text. It is in moments of loneliness and depression, such as these days at Memphis, that the real Hearn shows himself. He becomes now and then almost defiantly frank in his self-revelations and confessions. On October 28 he dispatched a card bearing two drawings of a raven; "In a dilemma at Memphis" was the inscription under a raven scratching its head with a claw. The other is merely labelled "Remorseful." His finances had, apparently, run out, and in spite of paying two dollars a day for his accommodations, he, according to his own account, had to lodge in a tumble-down, dirty, poverty-stricken hotel. I have already referred to Hearn's choice of the name of "Ozias Midwinter," as signature to his series of letters contributed at this time to the _Commercial_. These letters, his first professional work, except "The Tan-yard Murder" and "The Ascent of the Spire of St. Peters," rescued from destruction, show how long hours of unflagging industry spent on achieving a finished style were at last to bear fruit, giving them that extraordinary variety, ease, and picturesqueness which, combined with originality of thought and keenness of judgment, placed him ultimately in the forefront of the writers of the day. A postcard, written to Mr. Watkin on November 15, 1877, enabled the identification in the files of the _Commercial_ of these "Midwinter" letters. He approached the Memphis of the Mississippi, he said, dreaming of the Memphis of the Nile, and found but tenantless warehouses with shattered windows, poverty-stricken hotels vainly striving to keep up appearances.... The city's life, he said, seemed to have contracted about its heart, leaving the greater portion of its body paralysed. It gave him the impression of a place that had been stricken by some great misfortune beyond the hope of recovery. When rain and white fogs came, the melancholy of Memphis became absolutely Stygian; all things wooden uttered strange groans and crackling sounds; all things of stone or of stucco sweated as if in the agony of dissolution, and beyond the cloudy brow of the bluffs the Mississippi flowed a Styx flood, with pale mists lingering like shades upon its banks. "Elagabalus, wishing to obtain some idea of the vastness of Imperial Rome, ordered all the cobwebs in the city to be collected together and heaped before him. Estimated by such a method, the size of Memphis would appear vast enough to astonish even Elagabalus." Of Forrest, the great Confederate leader, whose funeral took place at Memphis while Hearn was there, he gives a vivid description. "Rough, rugged, desperate, uncultured. His character fitted him rather for the life of the border and the planter. He was by nature a typical pioneer--one of those fierce and terrible men who form in themselves a kind of protecting fringe to the borders of white civilisation." Then comes a typical paragraph: "The night they buried him, there came a storm.... From the same room whence I had watched the funeral, I saw the Northern mists crossing the Mississippi into Arkansas like an invading army; then came grey rain, and at last a fierce wind, making wild charges through it all. Somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union." To Mr. Watkin he wrote describing his big, dreary hotel room overlooking the Mississippi whence he could hear the panting and puffing of the cotton boats and the deep calls of the river traffic, but of the _Thompson Dean_ there was not a sign to be seen or heard. In every corner between the banisters of the old stairway spiders were busy spinning their dusty tapestries, and when he walked over the floors at night they creaked and groaned as if something or somebody was following him in the dark. It was, he declared, a lonely sensation, that of finding yourself alone in a strange city. He felt inclined to cry during the solitary hours of the night, as he used to do when a college boy returned from vacation.... "I suppose," he adds, "you are beginning to think I am writing quite often. I suppose I am, and you know the reason why; and perhaps you are thinking to yourself, 'He feels lonely, and is accordingly affectionate, but by and by he will forget.' Well, I suppose you are right." By and by, when he was less lonely, he said, he would write perhaps only by weeks, or perhaps by months, or perhaps, again, only by years--until the times and places of old friendships were forgotten and old faces had become dim as dreams. At last the New Orleans steamer, the _Thompson Dean_, arrived, and Hearn floated off on board into the current of the mighty river, and also, inspired by the enchantment of his surroundings, into the flood-tide of his genius. A letter contributed to the _Commercial_, describing the "Fair Paradise of the South," the great sugar country, in which he now found himself, shows how he was gaining in the manipulation of his material, also gaining in the power of appreciating the splendour of the vision, the inmost ultimate secret Nature ever reveals to those who can comprehend and decipher it. As the little half-blind genius sat on the cotton bales on the deck of the _Thompson Dean_ those autumn days, peering forth one moment, the next with nose close to the paper, his pen scratching rapidly, describing the marvellous pictures, setting down the impressions that slipped by on either hand, all the joy of an imprisoned tumultuous soul set free, mentally and morally free, must have come to him. It breathes in every line, in every paragraph of his work. And not only was this passionate joy his, but also the exhilarating assurance of knowing that by self-denial, industry and the determination to succeed he had achieved and perfected the power to describe and expound the marvellous pageant to others. From the horizon widening in front of him, through the "Great South Gate," from "The Gulf" and the Tropics, from Martinique and Florida came the health-giving breeze, carrying on its wings courage, regeneration, and the promise of future recognition and fame. Many were his backslidings, even to the extent of meditating suicide during the first years of his sojourn in New Orleans, but never did he fall so morally low as at Cincinnati. That life of sordidness and ignominy was left behind, the unclean spirit exorcised and cast forth! He had made his body a house of shame, but that very shame had set throbbing subtle, infinite vibrations, a spiritual resonance and response to higher endeavour and hope. He knew himself to be a man again, sane, clear-brained, his deep appreciation of beauty able to rise on the heights of the music of utterance as he poured forth the delight of his soul. Surely some light from the Louisiana sun must have flashed from the page athwart the gloom of the dusty office of the _Commercial_; some magic, bewitching the senses of the practical, hard-headed editor, inducing him to offer the piece of poetic prose contributed by his "Ozias Midwinter" correspondent, describing a Louisiana sunrise, to the ordinary reading public of a Cincinnati daily newspaper. CHAPTER IX NEW ORLEANS "The infinite gulf of blue above seems a shoreless sea, whose foam is stars, a myriad million lights are throbbing and flickering and palpitating, a vast stillness filled with perfume prevails over the land,--made only more impressive by the voices of the night-birds and crickets; and all the busy voices of business are dead. The boats are laid up, cotton presses closed, and the city is half empty. So that the time is really inspiring. But I must wait to record the inspiration in some more energetic climate." It is by Hearn's letters to Mr. Watkin that we are able to follow his more intimate feelings and mode of life at this period of his career. He was at first extravagantly enthusiastic about the quaint beauty and novelty of his surroundings, the luxuriant vegetation, the warmth of the climate, the charm of the Creole population of the older portion of the city. The wealth of a world, unworked gold in the ore, he declared, was to be found in this half-ruined Southern Paradise; in spite of her pitiful decay, it still was an enchanting city. This rose-coloured view of New Orleans was soon dissipated by pressing financial anxiety. He had been visiting his uncle, he wrote, and was on the verge of beggary. It was possible, however, to live on fish and vegetables for twenty cents a day. Not long after, we find him begging his old Dad to sell all his books, "except the French ones," and send him the proceeds, as he was in a state of desperation with no friend to help him. The need of money, indeed, so cramped and hindered his movements that he was unable any longer to get material for the "copy" of his newspaper correspondence. Want of money seems also to have necessitated frequent change of residence. His first card is written from 228 Baronne Street, care of Mrs. Bustellos. In the left-hand corner is the drawing of a raven sitting disconsolate beside a door. Shortly afterwards he describes himself as living in an old house with dovecot-shaped windows shadowed with creeping plants, where we have a picture of him sitting close to the fire, smoking his pipe of "_terre Gambièse_," conjuring up fancies of palm-trees and humming-birds, and perfume-laden winds, while a "voice from the far tropics called to him across the darkness." It is easy with our knowledge of Hearn to imagine how the money he started with in his pocket from Cincinnati melted away during his sojourn at Memphis, his journey down the Mississippi, and two or three days spent amidst the attractions of the curio shops and restaurants of the Crescent City. Gould mentions indignantly Hearn's "intolerable and brutalising improvidence." Without using language quite so intemperate, it must be acknowledged that he had a most irritating incapacity for mastering the ignoble necessity for making expenditure tally with revenue. The editor of the _Commercial_, being accustomed to deal with the ordinary American journalist, to whom forty dollars was as a fortune, did not reckon apparently with Hearn's Celtic recklessness in the matter of ways and means. Seven months later, he declared that he hadn't made seven cents by his literary work in New Orleans. His books and clothes were all gone, his shirt was sticking through the seat of his pants, and he could only enjoy a five-cent meal once every two days. At last he hadn't even a penny to buy stamps to mail his letters, and still the _Commercial_ hadn't sent him any supplies. Mr. Watkin's means did not admit of his helping the woe-begone "raven." He was also prevented by business affairs from sending a reply for some weeks. His silence elicited another post-card, a tombstone this time, surmounted by a crescent moon, with a dishevelled-looking raven perched close by. "I dream of old, ugly things," Hearn writes years later from Japan, when referring to the possibility of his son being subjected to the poverty and suffering he had experienced himself. "I am alone in an American city; and I've only ten cents in my pocket--and to send off a letter that I must send will take three cents. That leaves me seven cents for the day's food.... The horror of being without employ in an American city appals me--because I remember." The _Hermes_ of �schylus ventured the opinion, as an impartial observer of events, that adversity was no doubt salutary for _Prometheus_. The same might be said of most of those touched with Promethean fire. Not only does privation and struggle keep the spark alight, but often blows it into a flame. In spite of hunger and straitened means, Hearn was absorbing impressions on every hand. New Orleans, in the seventies and eighties of last century, presented conditions for the nourishing and expanding of such a genius as his, that were most likely unattainable in any other city in the world. From an article written by him, entitled "The Scenes of Cable's Romances," that appeared at this time in the _Century Magazine_, we can conjure up this strange city rising out of the water like a dream, its multi-coloured dilapidated Franco-Spanish houses, with their eccentric façades and quaint shop-signs and names. We can see the Rue Royale, its picturesqueness almost unadulterated by innovation, its gables, eaves, dormers, projecting balconies or verandahs, overtopping or jutting out of houses of every imaginable tint; each window adorned with sap-green batten shutters, and balustraded with Arabesque work in wrought iron, framing some monogram of which the meaning is forgotten. We can imagine the little genius wandering along such a street, watching the Indians as they passed in coloured blankets, Mexicans in leather gaiters, negresses decked out in green and yellow bandanas, planters in white flannels, American business men in broadcloth and straw hats--sauntering backwards and forwards beneath the quaint arcades, balconies and coloured awnings. We picture the savannahs and half-submerged cypress-groves on the river bank, the green and crimson sunsets, the star-lit dusks, the sound of the mighty current of the Mississippi as it slipped by under the shadow of willow-planted jungle and rustling orange-groves towards Barataria and the Gulf. He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined, refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to allow them to be sent away to the cities up North. We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant--from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the antique world--one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some of his oranges, a dozen at six cents. From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the ancient régime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory from the carven stone. Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground, with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,--the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,--positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque, through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed." The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their country that had sold them for expediency. With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of those who had once been opulent--the princely misery that never doffed its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the _mont de piété_) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery, young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers, and crying for hunger after they were gone. Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue. During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various intervals contributed letters to the _Commercial_. Now that his genius has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting. The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect trade in the state of Ohio. We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:-- "I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?" In April, 1878, apparently in response to a demand for news more suited to the exigencies of a daily northern newspaper, came two letters on political questions, written in so biassed and half-hearted a fashion that it was not surprising to see the next letter from New Orleans signed by another name. So the little man lost his opportunity, an opportunity such as is given to few journalists, situated as he was, of earning a competency and achieving a literary position. He himself acknowledged that his own incompatibility of temper and will were to be credited with most of the adverse circumstances which beset him so frequently during the course of his life. A little yielding on his part was all that was necessary at this time to enable him to keep his head above water until regular work came his way. Not long after this catastrophe Hearn attained his twenty-eighth birthday. Alluding to this fact, he says that, looking back to the file of his twenty-eight years, he realised an alarming similarity of misery in each of them, ill-success in every aim, an inability to make headway by individual force against unforeseen and unexpected disappointments. Indeed, sometimes, when success seemed certain, it was upset by some unanticipated obstacle, generally proceeding from his own waywardness and unpractical nature. Some loss of temper, and impatience, which, instead of being restrained and concealed, was shown with stupid frankness, might be credited with a large majority of failures. All this he confessed in one of his characteristic letters addressed to Mr. Watkin about this time. He then recounts the sufferings he had been through, how he found it impossible to make ten dollars a month when twenty was a necessity for comfortable living. He had been cheated, he said, and swindled considerably, and had cheated and swindled others in retaliation. Then he damns New Orleans and its inhabitants, as later he damned Japan and the Japanese. But the real fact was that, with that gipsy-like nature of his, he loved wandering and change of scene; he disliked the monotony of staying beyond a certain time in the same place. "My heart always feels like a bird, fluttering impatiently for the migrating season. I think I could be quite happy if I were a swallow and could have a summer nest in the ear of an Egyptian Colossus, or a broken capital of the Parthenon." About this time an epidemic of yellow fever swept over the city, desolating the population. Hearn did not fall a victim, but underwent a severe attack of "dengue" fever. "I got hideously sick, and then well again," he writes to Mrs. Atkinson. It killed nearly seven thousand people. He describes the pest-stricken city, with its heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from the furnace circle of the horizon; the slow-running river, its current yellow as a flood of fluid wax, the air suffocating with vapour; and the luminous city filled with a faint, sickly odour--a stale smell as of dead leaves suddenly disinterred from wet mould, and each day the terror-stricken population offering its sacrifice to Death, the faces of the dead yellow as flame! On door-posts, telegraph-poles, pillars of verandahs, lamps over government letter-boxes, glimmered the white enunciations of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured into the gutters, and huge purifying fires kindled after sunset. After his attack of fever, unable to regain his strength owing to insufficient food and the unhealthiness of the part of the city where he had elected to live, Hearn's eyesight became affected. "I went stone blind, had to be helped to a doctor's office--no money, no friends. My best friend was a revolver kept to use in case the doctor failed," he tells his sister. In "Chita," which, as we have said, is only a bundle of reminiscences, he refers to the suicide of a Spaniard, Ramirez. From his tomb a sinister voice seemed to say, "Go thou and do likewise!"... Then began within that man the ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between darkness and light, which all sensitive natures must wage in their own souls at least once in their lives. The suicide is not a coward, he is an egotist; as he struggled with his own worst self something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and human suffering was revealed to him. He flung the lattice shutters apart and looked out. How sweet the morning, how well life seemed worth living, as the sunlight fell through the frost haze outside, lighting up the quaint and chequered street and fading away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples. Verily it is the sun that gladdeneth the infinite world. CHAPTER X WIDER HORIZONS "There are no more mysteries--except what are called hearts, those points at which individuals rarely touch each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out of soul-sight."[13] [13] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The doctor Hearn alludes to in his letter to his sister was Rudolf Matas, a Spaniard, now an eminent physician and a very important person in New Orleans. He did not fail the little man who was brought almost stone blind to his consulting-room that winter of 1876. In six months his eyes were comparatively well, and he was able to return to regular literary work. Matas always remained Hearn's firm partisan, and was an enthusiastic admirer of his genius; Hearn seems to have reciprocated his affection, and years afterwards addressed some of his most interesting letters from Martinique to his "dear brother and friend Rudolfo Matas." By him he is said to have been told the incidents in the story of "Chita," and to him the book was dedicated. * * * * * After the yellow fever had passed away "there were plenty of vacancies waiting to be filled," Hearn significantly tells his sister.... A daily newspaper called the _Item_ was at that time issued in New Orleans. A great deal of clipping and paste-pot went to its production, "items" taken from European and American sources filling most of its columns. Hearn described it as a poor little sheet going no farther north than St. Louis. He was offered the assistant-editorship; the leisure that he found for literary pursuits on his own account more than compensated for the smallness of the salary. He hoped now to be able to scribble as much as he liked, and to have an opportunity for reading, with a view to more consecutive and concentrated work than mere contributions to daily and weekly newspapers. He also had many opportunities, he said, for mixing with strange characters, invaluable as literary material--Creoles, Spaniards, Mexicans--all that curious, heterogeneous society peculiar to New Orleans. If in Cincinnati to mix with coloured folk was deemed sufficient to place yourself under the ban of decent society, it was ten times more so in New Orleans; but Lafcadio Hearn, Bohemian and rebel, took the keenest pleasure in outraging public opinion, and challenging scandalous tongues, breaking out of bounds whenever the spirit prompted, and throwing in his lot with people who were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts from the world of so-called respectability. At one time he took up his abode in a ruined house, under the same roof as a Creole fortune-teller. He describes her room with its darkened windows, skulls and crossbones, and lamp lit in front of a mysterious shrine. This was quite sufficient to associate his name with hers, and many were the unfounded rumours--Nemesis of the unfortunate episode with Althea Foley at Cincinnati--which floated northwards regarding the manner of his life. Some members of a Brahminical Society visited New Orleans about this time. Needless to say that Hearn immediately foregathered with them, and in leisure hours took to studying the theories of the East, the poetry of ancient India, the teachings of the wise concerning "absorption and emotion, the illusions of existence, and happiness as the equivalent of annihilation," maintaining that Buddhism was wiser than the wisest of occidental faiths. He astonished the readers of the _Item_ by weird and mystical articles on the subject of the Orient and oriental creeds, considerably increasing the sale of the little paper, and drawing attention, amongst cultured circles in New Orleans, to his own genius. The routine of his life at this time is given in letters written to his "old Dad" and his friend, Krehbiel. The same ascetic scorn for material comfort, heritage of his oriental ancestry, seems to have distinguished him at this period in New Orleans, as later in Japan. The early cup of coffee, the morning's work at the office, "concocting devilment" for the _Item_, his Spanish lessons with José de Jesus y Preciado, the "peripatetic blasphemy," as he named him afterwards, dinner at a Chinese restaurant for an infinitesimal sum, an hour or two spent at second-hand book-stalls, and home to bed. There is, I am told, an individual, Armand Hawkins by name, owner of an ancient book-store at New Orleans, still alive, who remembers the curious little genius, with his prominent eyes, wonderful knowledge on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects recounted in a soft, musical voice, who used to come almost daily to visit his book-store. He it was who enabled Hearn to get together the library about which there has been so much discussion since his death. Next to his love of buying old books, Hearn's great indulgence seems to have been smoking, not cigars, but pipes of every make and description. The glimpses we get of him from his own letters and from reminiscences collected from various people in New Orleans all give the same impression. A Bohemian love of vagabondage, picking up impressions here and there, some of which were set down in pencil, some in ink; as far as his eyesight would permit, many were the sketches made at this time. None of them have been preserved, except the very clever Mephistophelian one sent to Mr. Watkin and reproduced in the volume entitled "Letters from the Raven." "He was a gifted creature," says a lady who knew him at this time. "He came fluttering in and out of our house like a shy moth, and was adored by my children." He had no ambitions, no loves, no anxieties, sometimes a vague unrest without a motive, sometimes a feeling as if his heart were winged and trying to soar; sometimes a half-crazy passion for a great night with wine and women and music; but the wandering passion was strongest of all, and he felt no inclination to avail himself of the only anchor which keeps the ship of a man's life in port.... Nights were so liquid with tropic moonlight, days so splendid with green and gold, summer so languid with perfume and warmth, that he hardly knew whether he was dreaming or awake. In 1881, Hearn succeeded in becoming a member of the staff of the leading New Orleans paper, the _Times Democrat_, "the largest paper," he tells his sister, "in the Southern States." He now seemed to have entered on a halcyon period of life--congenial society, romantic and interesting surroundings. Penetrated with enthusiasm for the modern French literary school as he was, he here met intellects and temperaments akin to his own. Now he was enabled to get his translations from Gautier and Baudelaire printed, and read for the first time by an appreciative public. "Everybody was kind," he tells his sister; "I became well and strong, lived steadily, spent my salary on books. I was thus able to make up for my deficiencies of education.... I had only a few hours of work each day;--plenty of time to study. I wrote novels and other books which literary circles approved of." With Page Baker, the owner and editor-in-chief of the _Times Democrat_, he formed a salutary and enduring friendship. The very difference in character between the two seems to have made the bond all the more enduring. Page Baker was a man of great business capacity, and at the same time keen discrimination in literary affairs. From the first he conceived the highest opinion of Hearn's literary ability. However fantastic or out-of-the-way his contributions to the columns of the _Times Democrat_, they were always inserted without elision. Years afterwards, writing to him from Japan, Hearn declares, in answer to a panegyric written by Page Baker on some of his Japanese books, that the most delightful criticisms he ever had were Page Baker's own readings aloud of his vagaries in the "_T. D._" office, after the proofs came down, just fresh from the composition room, with the wet, sharp, inky smell still on the paper. Baker, apparently, in 1893 sent him substantial help, and Hearn writes thanking him from the bottom of his much-scarified heart. Often amidst the cramped, austere conditions of his existence in Japan, he recalled these days of communion with congenial spirits at New Orleans, and work with his colleagues at the _Times Democrat_ office. "Ghosts! After getting your letter last night I dreamed. Do you remember that splendid Creole who used to be your city editor--John----?--is it not a sin that I have forgotten his name? He sat in a big chair in the old office, and told me wonderful things, which I could not recall on waking." In a letter dated July 7, 1882, Hearn tells Mr. Watkin that he had entered into an arrangement with Worthington, the publisher, for the issuing of his translation of Gautier's stories made at Cincinnati. It was to cost him one hundred and fifty dollars, but there was an understanding that this money was to be repaid by royalties on the sale of the book and any extra profits. He announced his intention of going North in a few months by way of Cincinnati, as he wished to see Worthington about his new publication. Though he was making, he said, the respectable wage of thirty dollars a week for five hours' work a day, he felt enervated by the climate, incapable of any long stretch of work, and thought change to a northern climate for a bit might stimulate his intellectual powers. He then touched on the changes that passing years had wrought in his outlook on life. "Less despondent, but less hopeful; wiser a little and more silent; less nervous, but less merry; ... not strictly economical, but coming to it steadily." His horizons were widening, the accomplishment of a fixed purpose in life was really the only pleasurable experience, and the grasp of a friendly hand the only real satisfaction of an existence that wisdom declared a delusion and a snare. Hearn at times indulged in exaggerated fits of economy, the one thought that animated him being the idea of freeing himself from the yoke of dependence on the whims of employers--from the harness of journalism. He made up his mind to keep house for himself, so hired a room in the northern end of the French quarter, and purchased a complete set of cooking utensils and kitchen ware. He succeeded in reducing his expenses to two dollars a week, and kept them at that (exclusive of rent), although his salary rose to thirty dollars a week. Having saved a respectable sum, he formed the fantastical idea of trying to keep a restaurant, run on the lines of the cheap Spanish and Chinese restaurants he had been wont to frequent. "Business--ye Antiquities"; hard, practical business! he told Krehbiel; honourable, respectable business, but devoid of dreamful illusions. "Alas, this is no world for dreaming." The venture ended as might have been expected. Hearn had not inherited the commercial instincts of his ancestors who sold oil and wine in the Ionian Islands; his partner robbed him of all the money he had invested, and decamped, leaving him saddled with the restaurant and a considerable number of debts. A swindling building society seems to have absorbed the rest of his savings. After these two catastrophes the little man became almost comically terrified at financial enterprise of any kind, even the investment of money in dividend-paying concerns. When Captain Mitchell McDonald later, in Japan, endeavoured to induce him to put his money into various lucrative concerns, Hearn declared that he would prefer to lose everything he owned than submit to the worry of investing it. The mere idea of business was "a horror, a nightmare, a torture unspeakable." Though apparently only journalising and translating, Hearn was piling up experiences and sensations, not making use of them except in letters, but laying down the concrete and setting the foundation for his work in the West Indies and Japan. "The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a friendly, distant party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them silently away." Emerson did not take into account those apparently infertile periods in an artist's life, when the days come and go, but though they pass silently away, all their gifts are not unused, nor is their passage unproductive. How invaluable, for instance, was Hearn's study of Creole proverbs for his "Two Years in the French West Indies." How invaluable for his interpretation of the Orient were the studies he undertook for "Strange Leaves from Strange Literature," and his six small adaptations entitled "Chinese Ghosts." After several refusals "Stray Leaves" was accepted for publication by Osgood. He thus announced the fact to his friend Krehbiel:-- "DEAR K. (Private), "'Stray Leaves,' etc., have been accepted by James R. Osgood and Co. Congratulate your little Dreamer of Monstrous Dreams, "Aschadnan na Mahomet Rasoul Allah, "Bismillah, "Allah-hu-akbar." The book was dedicated to "Page M. Baker, Editor of the New Orleans _Times Democrat_." This series of small sketches is typical of the clarity of language and purity of thought that invariably distinguish Hearn's work; but it lacks the realism, the keenness of _choses vues_, so characteristic of his Japanese sketches. There is none of the haunting, moving tragedy and ghostliness, the spiritual imagination and introspection of "Kokoro" or the "Exotics." Though polished and scholarly, showing refinement in the use of words, the interest is remote and visionary, permeated here and there also with a certain amount of Celtic sentimentality, a "Tommy Moore" flavour, somewhat too saccharine in quality. The one, for instance, called "Boutimar" treats of a very hackneyed subject, the offering of the water of youth, and life without end, to Solomon, and the sage's refusal, because of the remembrance suggested by Boutimar that he would outlive children, friends and all whom he loved; therefore "Solomon, without reply, silently put out his arm and gave back the cup.... But upon the prophet-king's rich beard, besprinkled with powder of gold, there appeared another glitter as of clear dew,--the diamond dew of the heart, which is tears." "Chinese Ghosts," though distinguished also by that _soigneux_ flavour that gives a slightly artificial impression, holds far more the distinctive flavour of Hearn's genius. His own soul is written into the legend of "Pu the potter." "Convinced that a soul cannot be divided, Pu entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work,--his soul for the soul of his Vase." By the publication of the "Letters from the Raven" we are enabled to push those to Krehbiel, published by Miss Bisland, into place, and assign fairly accurate dates to each of them. He tells Mr. Watkin that he was six months before finding a fixed residence. In August, 1878, he writes inviting him to come in the autumn to pay him a visit, and telling him of delightful rooms with five large windows opening on piazzas, shaded by banana-trees. This apparently is the house in St. Louis Street, which he describes to Krehbiel. Miss Bisland places it almost at the beginning of the series, but it must have been written at a considerably later period. How picturesque and vivid is his description! With the magic of his pen he conjures up the huge archway, with its rolling echoes, the courtyard surrounded by palm-trees, their dry leaves rustling in the wind, the broad stairway guarded by a hoary dog, his own sitting-room and study, "vast enough for a carnival ball," with its five windows and glass doors opening flush with the floor and rising to the ceiling. Gautier, the artist to whom at one time Hearn pinned his faith, is said to have observed once to an admirer of his art: "I am only a man to whom the visible world is visible." So Lafcadio Hearn, though gifted with only half the eyesight of ordinary folk, was by the prescience of his genius enabled to see not only the visible world that the Frenchman saw, but an immaterial and spiritual world as well. CHAPTER XI LETTERS AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS "Writing to you as a friend, I write of my thoughts and fancies, of my wishes and disappointments, of my frailties and follies and failures and successes,--even as I would write to a brother. So that sometimes what might not seem strange in words, appears very strange upon paper." Lafcadio Hearn's thoughts, aspirations and mode of life are revealed with almost daily minuteness during this period at New Orleans--indeed, for the rest of his life, by his interchange of letters with various friends. Those contained in the three volumes published by Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) are now indisputably placed in the first rank amongst the many series from eminent people that have been given to the world during the last half-century. It is apparent in every line that no idea of publicity actuated the writing of his outpourings; indeed, we imagine that nothing would have surprised Hearn more than the manner in which his letters have been discussed, quoted, criticised. They are simply the outcome of an impulse to unburden an extraordinarily imaginative and versatile brain of its cargo of opinions, views, prejudices, beliefs; to pour, as it were, into the listening ear of an intelligent and sympathetic friend the confessions of his own intellectual struggles, his doubts and despairs. Shy, reserved, oppressed in social daily intercourse by a sense of physical disabilities, with a pen in hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, he cast off all disquieting considerations and allowed the spiritual structure of emotion and thought to show itself in the nakedness of its humanity. To most authors letter-writing is an unwelcome task. "Ask a carpenter to plane planks just for fun," as Hearn quotes from Gautier; but to him it was a relaxation from his daily task of journalism and literary work. Dr. Gould says that, while stopping in his house at Philadelphia, Hearn would sometimes break off suddenly in the midst of a discussion, especially if he were afraid of losing his temper, and retire to his own room, where he would fill sheets of the yellow paper, which he habitually used, with theories and reasons for and against his argument; these he would leave later on Gould's study table. To his literary brother, Krehbiel, he discourses, as if they were face to face, of artistic endeavour and the larger life of the intellect. In his "jeremiads" to Mr. Watkin he reveals his most intimate feelings and sufferings; the routine of his daily work is told hour by hour. Perpetually standing outside himself, as it were, he studies his nature, inclinations, habits, and yet never gives you the impression of being egotistical. His attitude is rather that of a scientist studying an odd specimen. The intellectual isolation of his latter years, passed amongst an alien race with alien views and beliefs, seems to have created a necessity for converse with those of his own race and mode of thought; his correspondence with Chamberlain reflects all his perturbations of spirit--perturbations that he dared not confide to those surrounding him--a record of illusion and disillusion with regard to his adopted country. The Japanese letters, therefore, above all, have the charm of temperament, the very essence of the man, recorded in a style of remarkable picturesqueness and reality. The series of letters to Mrs. Atkinson, of which I have been given possession for use in this sketch of Hearn's life, have an entirely different signification to those already referred to. Unfortunately I am not permitted to give them in their entirety, as Hearn in his usual petulant, reckless fashion refers to family incidents, and speaks of relations in a manner which it would be impossible to publish to the world. Many of the most characteristic passages have necessarily, therefore, been omitted; in spite of this, there are many portions intensely interesting as a revelation of a side of his character not hitherto shown to the public. Pathetic recurrences to childish memories, incidents of his boyhood that reveal a certain tenderness for places and people which, hitherto, reserved as he was, he never had expressed to outsiders. The sudden awakening of brotherly romantic attachment for his half-sister, and the equally sudden break-off of all communications and intercourse, are so thoroughly characteristic of Hearn's wayward and unaccountable character. How, after such an incident, absolve him of the charge, so frequently made, of caprice and inconstancy; in fact, you would not attempt to defend him were it not for the unwavering friendship and affection displayed in one or two instances; above all, in the unselfish and generous manner in which he gave up all his private inclinations and ambitions for the sake of his wife and family, and his undeviating devotion to Miss Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore), the Lady of a Myriad Souls, to whom his most beautiful and eloquent letters are addressed. It seems really to have only been during the last decade of his life that he allowed irritability and sensitiveness to interfere between him and his best friends. Years after he had left Cincinnati, he recalled the memory of comrades he had left there; never were their mutual struggles and aspirations forgotten. "It seemeth to me," he writes to Krehbiel, "that I behold overshadowing the paper the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes.... How the old forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher to the Supreme Hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East whence, the legendary word hath it, 'Lightning ever cometh.'" He always remained generously sympathetic to the literary interests and ventures of the "Cincinnati Brotherhood." Tunison wrote a book on the Virgilian Legend, Hearn devotes paragraphs, suggesting titles, publishers, and the best place for publication. To Farney, the artist, he offers hospitality, if he will come to New Orleans to paint some of the quaint nooks and corners; and later, he recommends him to Miss Bisland as an artist whom she might employ to do illustrations for her magazine. "Lazy as a serpent, but immensely capable." Hearn was a strange mixture of humility and conceit, but there was not a particle of literary jealousy in his composition. To Krehbiel he writes: "Comparing yourself to me won't do ... dear old fellow! I am in most things a botch. You say you envy me certain qualities; but you forget how those qualities are at variance with an Art whose beauties are geometrical and whose perfection is mathematical. You envy me my power of application, if you only knew the pain and labour I have to create a little good work! And there are months when I cannot write. It is not hard to write when the thought is there; but the thought will not always come; there are weeks when I cannot even think." Though humble about his own, he was intolerant of amateur art. Comically averse to criticising his friends' work, he implores Mitchell McDonald not to send him his literary efforts, and is loath even to express an opinion on Miss Bisland's. Reading these letters containing a record of the manner in which he goes to work, writing and re-writing until the thought re-shaped itself and the style was polished and fixed, we can see how high he pitched his ideal and how unlikely it was that others would reach the same standard. In one letter, written in the fifty-third year of his age, to Professor Chamberlain, after thirty years of literary work, he, one of the most finished masters of English prose, confesses to drudgery worthy of his boyish days, when plodding over an English composition at Ushaw College. He recommended Roget's "Thesaurus" to a young author who asked his advice; Skeat's Dictionary, too, and Brachet for French, as books that give the subtle sense of words, to which much that arrests attention in prose and poetry are due. The consciousness of art gives a new faith, he says, after one of these passages of good advice. Putting jesting on one side, he believed that if he could create something he knew to be sublime he would feel that the Unknown Power had selected him for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycle of its eternal purpose. In consequence of various opinions and criticisms expressed by Lafcadio Hearn in his letters, a charge has been brought against him of showing no appreciation for the greater intellectual luminaries. The little man's personal prejudices were certainly too pronounced to make his a trustworthy opinion, either upon political or literary affairs. The mood or whim of the moment influenced his judgment, causing him often to commit himself to statements that must not be accepted at the foot of the letter. He admitted that, being a creature of extremes, he did not see what existed where he loved or hated, and confessed to being an extremely crooked visioned judge of art. It is these whimsical and unexpected revelations of his own method of thought and artistic theories that constitute the charm of his letters. You feel as though you were passing through a varied and strongly accentuated landscape. You never know what will be revealed over the brow of the hill, or round the next bend of the road. In a delightfully humorous, whimsical passage, he declares that his mind to him "a kingdom was--not!" Rather was it a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; he then goes on to enumerate his possession of souls, some of them longing to live in tropical solitude, others in the bustle of great cities, others hating inaction, and others dwelling in meditative isolation. He gives us, in fact, in this passage the very essence of his personality, with all his whims, vagaries, freakishness and inconstancy set down by his own incomparable pen. Things moved him artistically rather than critically, carrying him hither and thither in the movement of every whispering breeze of romance and poetry, equally prejudiced and intolerant in likes and dislikes of people and places as in literary affairs. "I had a sensation the other day," he writes to Basil Hall Chamberlain. "I felt as if I hated Japan unspeakably, and the whole world seemed not worth living in, when there came to the house two women to sell ballads. One took her samisen and sang; never did I listen to anything sweeter. All the sorrow and beauty, all the pain and the sweetness of life thrilled and quivered in that voice; and the old first love of Japan and of things Japanese came back, and a great tenderness seemed to fill the place like a haunting."[14] [14] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In a moment of petulance he committed himself to the statement that he could not endure any more of Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, having learnt the gems of them by heart. He really thought he preferred Dobson, Watson, and Lang. It is generally easy to trace the impulse dictating the criticism of the moment. While he was writing the sketch at Kumamoto entitled "The Stone Buddha," Chamberlain lent him a volume of Watson's poems--"The Dream of Man" he declared to be "high sublimity," because Watson happened to enunciate philosophical ideas akin to his own. Dobson had translated some poems of Gautier's, and therefore was worthy of all honour; Miss Deland was "one of the greatest novelists of the century," because the heroine of "Philip and His Wife" reminded him of Miss Bisland. He pronounced Matthew Arnold to be "one of the colossal humbugs of the century; a fifth-rate poet, and an unutterably dreary essayist," because at the moment he was animated by one of his intense enthusiasms for _Edwin_ Arnold, whose acquaintance Hearn had made during one of Arnold's visits to Japan. "Far the nobler man and writer, permeated with the beauties of strong faiths and exotic creeds; the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless mankind with the universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths of science, and the better nature of humanity." But in spite of all his whimsicality, and when uninfluenced by pique or partiality, his criticisms are not to be surpassed, here and there expanding into an inspired burst of enthusiasm. On cloudy nights, when passing through southern seas, the waste of water sometimes spreads like a dark metallic surface round you. A shoal of fish or band of porpoises suddenly comes along; the surface begins to ripple and move; flakes of phosphorescence shoot here and there; illumined streaks flash alongside the ship, and in a few seconds the undulations of the waves are shimmering, a mass of liquid light. So in Hearn's letters, treating the dullest subjects--writing to Chamberlain, for instance, on the subject of his health, and diet, and the storage of physical and brain force, he suddenly breaks off, and takes up the subject of Buddhism and Shintoism. "There is, however, a power, a mighty power, in tradition and race feeling. I can't remember now where I read a wonderful story about a Polish brigade under fire during the Franco-Prussian war." Then he tells the story in his own inimitable way: "The Polish brigade stood still under the infernal hail, cursed by its German officers for the least murmur,--'Silence! you Polish hogs!' while hundreds, thousands fell, but the iron order always was to wait. Men sobbed with rage. At last, old Steinmetz gave a signal--_the_ signal. The bugles rang out with the force of Roland's last blast at Roncesvalles, the air forbidden ever to be sung or heard at other times--the national air (you know it)--'_No! Poland is not dead_!' And with that crash of brass all that lives of the brigade was hurled at the French batteries. Mechanical power, if absolutely irresistible, might fling back such a charge, but no human power. For old Steinmetz had made the mightiest appeal to those 'Polish brutes' that man, God, or devil could make, the appeal to the ghost of the Race. The dead heard it; and they came back that day,--the dead of a thousand years." Or again, in his description of a chance hearing of the singing of "Auld Lang Syne" by Adelina Patti. He is writing in an ordinary strain on some everyday subject; in the next paragraph an association of ideas, connected with ballad music, evokes the memory thus exquisitely recounted:-- "'Patti is going to sing at the St. Charles,' said a friend to me years ago. 'I know you hate the theatre, but you _must_ go.' (I had been surfeited with drama by old duty as a dramatic reporter, and had vowed not to enter a theatre again.) I went. There was a great dim pressure, a stifling heat, a whispering of silks, a weight of toilet-perfumes. Then came an awful hush; all the silks stopped whispering. And there suddenly sweetened out through that dead, hot air a clear, cool, tense thread-gush of melody unlike any sound I had ever heard before save, in tropical nights, from the throat of a mocking-bird. It was 'Auld Lang Syne,' only, but with never a _tremolo_ or artifice; a marvellous, audacious simplicity of utterance. The silver of that singing rings in my heart still." Amidst the numerous oscillations of his fancies and partialities, there were one or two writers to whom Hearn owned an unswerving allegiance. Pierre Loti, Herbert Spencer, and Rudyard Kipling were foremost among these. Even in spite of Loti's description of Japan and his treatment of Japanese ladies in "Madame Chrysanthême," Hearn retained the same admiration for him to the end. "Oh! do read the divine Loti's 'Roman d'un Spahi.' No mortal critic, not even Jules Lemaître or Anatole France, can explain that ineffable and superhuman charm. I hope you will have everything of Loti's. Some time ago, when I was afraid I might die, one of my prospective regrets was that I might not be able to read 'L'Inde san les Anglais.'..." Hearn had a wonderful memory--he could repeat pages of poetry even of the poets he declared he did not care for. In Japan, Mr. Mason told us that one evening at his house at Tokyo, when he was present, an argument was started on the subject of Browning. In reply to some one's criticisms on "The Ring and the Book," Hearn, to verify a statement, repeated passage after passage from various poems of Browning in his soft musical voice. A member of the Maple Club also mentioned an occasion when the subject of Napoleon cropped up. A little man whom no one noticed at first sat apart listening. At last some one made a statement that roused him; the insignificant figure with prominent eyes bent forward and poured forth a flood of information on the subject under discussion so fluent, so accurate that the assembled company listened in amazement. Hearn's personal characteristics have often been described. In the biographies and collections of letters that have been given to the world, there are photographs of him from the time when he was a little boy in collegiate jacket and turned-down collar, to his last years in Japan, when he nationalised himself a Japanese and habitually wore the Japanese kimono. At New Orleans, past his thirtieth year, looked upon as a writer of promise by a cultured few, though not yet successful with the public, he was a much more responsible and important person than the little "brownie" who used to sit in the corner of John Cockerill's office, turning out page after page of "copy" for the _Cincinnati Enquirer_, or doing the "night stations" for the _Commercial_. In later years, in consequence of his sedentary habits, he became corpulent and of stooping gait; at this time he was about five feet three inches in height, his complexion clear olive, his hair straight and black, his salient features a long, sharp, aquiline nose and prominent near-sighted eyes, the left one, injured at Ushaw, considerably more prominent than the other. In his sensitive, morbid fashion he greatly over-exaggerated the disfiguring effect this had on his personal appearance. When engaged in conversation, he habitually held his hand over it, and was always photographed in profile looking down. In some ways the Hearn type was very visible, the square brow and well-shaped head and finely-modelled mouth and chin. He also inherited the delicate, filbert-nailed hands (always exquisitely kept) and the musical voice of his Celtic forbears. One of his pupils at Tokyo University speaks of the "voice of the old professor with one eye, and white hair, being as lovely as his words." Professor Foxwell who made his acquaintance in Japan, gives the following account of his personal manner in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," read before the Japan Society in London: "I had just recovered from smallpox when I first met Hearn, and must have been an extraordinary object. My face, to begin with, was the colour of beetroot. Hearn took not the least notice; seemed hardly to notice my appearance. This fact impressed me very much, and when I knew him better I found that the same wide tolerance of mind ran through all his thoughts and actions. It might have been tact, but nothing seemed to surprise him. It was as if he had lived too much to be surprised at anything. He seemed to me on that particular morning, and whenever I met him afterwards, to be the most natural, unaffected, companionable person I had ever come across. Secondly, I thought he was extraordinarily gentle, more gentle than a woman, since it was not a physical gentleness, but a gentleness of thought. You noticed it in his tone, in his voice, in his manner. He had a mind which worked with velvet or gossamer touch. Thirdly, in spite of that softness and gentleness, he looked intensely male. You could see that in his eye, and you would feel it in the quiet mastery of every sentence. And fourthly, he seemed to be, unlike most foreigners, altogether at home in Japan. He appeared to have come into smooth water, placid and unconcerned. Yet I found him essentially European, in spite of his being so at home in Japan. You could see that from his very great fairness of complexion, tense facial expression, and delicate susceptibility. That was obvious. Then his nose settled it. It struck me at the time as curious that a foreigner so eager to interpret Japan should be himself so occidental in appearance. Another point with regard to this first meeting: our acquaintance lasted for three years, but I do not think I knew him any better or any more at the end than I did at that first meeting." Hearn was as unconventional in his dress as in most things, deliberately protesting against social restrictions in his personal attire. Shy, diffident people, who above all things wish to avoid attracting attention, seem so often to forget that if they would only garb themselves like the rest of the world it would be the best disguise they could adopt. The jeers and laughter of the passers-by in the streets of Philadelphia, even the fact that a number of street gamins formed a queue, the leader holding by his coat-tails while they kept in step, singing, "Where, where did you get that hat?" had not any effect, Gould tells us, in inducing him to substitute conventional headgear for the enormous tropical straw hat, or the reefer coat and flannel shirt, that he habitually wore. Mr. Mason, in Japan, told us, that Hearn boasted of not having worn a starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do. "Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves." In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have nothing that was not of the best make and quality. In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd, nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you came in contact with him. CHAPTER XII THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS "The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses and change them several times a day; and the multitude of dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they saw these things ... and the men who most admired her could not presume to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd. She had altogether too many souls." The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he had hitherto known entered his life, an influence destined to last for close on a quarter of a century, from these New Orleans days until the month of September, 1904, when he died. In all the annals of literary friendships between men and women, it is difficult to recall one more delightful or more wholly satisfactory than this, between Miss Elizabeth Bisland (Mrs. Wetmore) and the strange little Irish genius. Many beautiful things has Lafcadio Hearn written, but none more tender, none more beautiful, than the story of his devotion and friendship, as told in his letters. The affection between Jean Jacques Ampère and Madame Récamier is the one that perhaps most nearly approaches it. Here, however, the position is reversed. Madame Récamier was a decade older than her admirer; Elizabeth Bisland was a decade younger. Yet there always seems to have been something maternal, protecting, in her affection for this "veritable blunderer in the ways of the world." Her comprehension, her pity, shielded and guarded him; into his wounded heart she poured the balm of affection and appreciation, soothing and healing the bruises given him in the tussle of life. Link by link we follow the sentiment that Lafcadio Hearn cherished for Miss Bisland, as it runs, an untarnished chain of gold, athwart his life. Through separation, through distances of thousands of miles, the unwavering understanding remained, a simple, definite, and dependable thing, never at fault, except once or twice, when the clear surface was disturbed, apparently by the expression of too warm a sentiment on his side. "There is one very terrible Elizabeth," he writes to Ellwood Hendrik from Japan, in reference to Miss Bisland's marriage to Mr. Wetmore, "whom I had a momentary glimpse of once, and whom it will not be well for Mr. W. or anybody else to summon from her retirement." Time and again he returned to his friend as to his own purer, better self, though he seems to have had a pathetic, sad-hearted, clear-eyed conviction that her love--as love is understood in common parlance--could never be his. And she, doubtless, acknowledged there was something intangible and rare in the feeling she nourished for him that raised it above that of mere friendship. Whatever he had been, whatever he had done, she cared not; she only knew that he had genius far above any of those amongst whom her lines had hitherto been cast, and, with tremendous odds against him, was offering up burnt-offerings on the altar of the shrine where she, as a neophyte, also worshipped. * * * * * Miss Elizabeth Bisland was the daughter of a Louisiana landowner, ruined, like many others, in the war. With the idea of aiding her family by the proceeds of her pen, the young girl quitted the seclusion of her parents' house in the country and bravely entered the arena of journalistic work in New Orleans. Hearn at that time was regularly working on the staff of the _Times Democrat_. The faithfulness of his translations from the French, and the beauty of the style of some of his contributions, had found an appreciative circle in the Crescent City, and a clique had been formed of what were known as "Hearn's admirers." His translations from Gautier, Maupassant, "Stray Leaves from Strange Literature," all appeared in the columns of Page Baker's newspaper. He also, under the title of "Fantastics," contributed every now and then slight sketches inspired by his French prototypes. Dreams, he called them, of a tropical city, with one twin idea running through them all--love and death. They gave him the gratification of expressing a thought that cried out within his heart for utterance, and the pleasant fancy that a few kindred minds would dream over them as upon pellets of green hashisch. One of these was inspired by Tennyson's verse-- "My heart would hear her and beat Had I lain for a century dead;-- Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red." The sketch appeared apparently in the columns of the _Times Democrat_. There Miss Bisland saw it, and in the enthusiasm of her seventeen years, wrote an appreciative letter to the author. By chance the "Fantastic" was recovered from his later correspondence. Writing to Mitchell McDonald years afterwards in Japan, we find Hearn referring to the expression "Lentor Inexpressible." "I am going to change 'Lentor Inexpressible,' which you did not like. I send you a copy of the story in which I first used it--years and years ago. Don't return the thing--it has had its day. It belongs to the Period of Gush." Mitchell McDonald, we imagine, obeyed his injunction, and did not return the "Fantastic," but laid it away amongst his papers, and so "A Dead Love" has been saved for re-publication. It certainly is crude enough to deserve the designation of belonging to the "Period of Gush," and is distinguished by all the weakness and none of the strength of the French Impressionist school. The idea of the spirit conquering material obstacles, a longing for the unattainable, the exceptional in life and nature, to the extent even of continued sensibility after death, are phases of thought that permeate every line, and may be found in two of Gautier's stories translated by Hearn, and in several of Baudelaire's poems. A young man weary of life because of the hopelessness of his love, yielded it up at last, dying with the name of the beloved on his lips.... Yet the repose of the dead was not for him; even in the tomb the phantom man dreamed of life, and strength, and joy, and the litheness of limbs to be loved: also of that which had been and of that which now could never be.... Years came and went with "Lentor Inexpressible," but for the dead there was no rest ... the echoes of music and laughter, the chanting and chattering of children at play, and the liquid babble of the beautiful brown women floated to his ears. And at last it came to pass that the woman whose name had been murmured by his lips when the shadow of death fell upon him, visited the ancient place of sepulture, he recognised the sound of her footstep, the rustle of her garments, knew the sweetness of her presence, but she, unconscious, passed by, and the sound of her footsteps died away forever. Hearn, at the time he first met Elizabeth Bisland, was going through a period of depression about his work, and a hatred of New Orleans. The problem of existence, he said, stared him in the face with eyes of iron. Independence was so hard to obtain; there was no scope for a man who preserved freedom of thought and action--absolute quiet, silence, dreams, friends in the evening, a pipe, a little philosophy, was his idea of perfect bliss. As he was situated at the time, he could not obtain even a woman's society, he complained, unless he buried himself in the mediocrity to which she belonged. Twenty years later, writing to Mrs. Wetmore (as Miss Elizabeth Bisland had become), he refers to those first years of friendship in the strange old city of New Orleans. He recalls to her memory her dangerous illness, and people's fear that she might die in the quaint little hotel where she was stopping. Impossible, he said, to think of that young girl as a grey-haired woman of forty. His memory was of a voice and a thought, _une jeune fille un peu farouche_ (no English word could give the same sense of shyness and force), "who came into New Orleans from the country, and wrote nice things for a paper there, and was so kind to a particular variety of savage, that he could not understand--and was afraid." But all this was long ago, he concludes regretfully; "since then I have become grey and the father of three boys." For the greater part of Lafcadio Hearn's and Elizabeth Bisland's friendship they seem to have occupied towards one another the position of literary brother and sister. From the very beginning he tried to induce her to share his literary enthusiasm. With that odd social unconventionality that distinguished him, he endeavoured to make this young girl of eighteen sympathise with his admiration of the artistic beauties of Flaubert and Gautier. Sending a volume of Gautier's poems, he writes: "I won't presume to offer you this copy; it is too shabby, has travelled about with me in all sorts of places for eight years. But if you are charmed by this 'parfait magicien des lettres françaises' (as Beaudelaire called him) I hope to have the pleasure of offering you a nicer copy...." Years afterwards he refers to literary obligations that he owed her, mentioning evening chats in her New York flat, when the sound of her voice, low and clear, and at times like a flute, was in his ear. "The gods only know what I said; for my thoughts in those times were seldom in the room--but in the future, which was black without stars!" In 1884 Hearn went to Grande Isle, in the Archipelago of the Gulf, for his summer holiday. Miss Bisland would appear to have been there at the same time, yet with that half-tamed, barbaric, incomprehensible nature of his, his fancy seems to have been turned rather towards the copper-coloured ladies of Barataria. "A beauty that existed in the Tertiary epoch--three hundred thousand years ago. The beauty of the most ancient branch of humanity." It was during this visit to Grande Isle that the story of "Chita" was written and contributed to _Harper's Magazine_ under the title of "Torn Letters." We know not at what date Miss Bisland left New Orleans to go to New York. One thing only is certain, that so firm a spiritual hold had she taken of Lafcadio Hearn's genius that no distance of space nor spite of circumstance could separate her intellect from his. Like a delicious and subtle perfume, wafted from some garden close, her presence meets you as you pass from letter to letter in his correspondence; from chapter to chapter of his books. Far or near, dear to her or indifferent, the memory of her smile and the light of her eyes were henceforth his best inspiration. Thousands of miles away in the Far East it stimulated his genius and quickened his pen. I, who had the privilege of meeting the "Lady of a Myriad Souls" when she visited England a short time ago, could not help marvelling, as I looked at her, and talked to her, dainty and beautiful as she was in lace and diamonds, at the irony of the dictates of fate, or _Karma_ (as he, Buddhist-wise, would have called it), that had ordained that hers was to be the ascendant influence in the life of Lafcadio Hearn--the Bohemian, who, by his own confession, had for a decade never dressed for dinner, or put on a starched collar or shirt front. In New York Miss Bisland became joint-editor of a magazine called the _Cosmopolitan_, and after Hearn's arrival in June, 1887, a frequent correspondence was kept up between them on literary matters. She solicited contributions, apparently, and he answered: "I don't think I can write anything clever enough to be worthy your using. But it is a pleasure you should think so.... My work, however weak, is so much better than myself that the less said about me the better.... Your own personality has charm enough to render the truth very palatable.... Does a portrait of an ugly man make one desirous to read his books? "... I will try to give you something for the Christmas number anyhow, but not very long." He then goes on to set forth a theory that seems at this time rather to have influenced his literary output. With the nineteenth century, he believed that the long novel would pass out of existence; three-quarters of what was written was unnecessary, evolved simply out of obedience to effete formulas and standards. The secret of the prose fiction "that lives through the centuries, like the old Greek romances, is condensation, the expression of feeling in a few laconic sentences.... No descriptions, no preliminaries, no explanation--nothing but the feeling itself at highest intensity." As is so often the case, this opinion expressed in a letter is a running commentary on the work he was doing at the moment. "Chita," the longest work of fiction he ever attempted, had appeared serially in _Harper's Magazine_, and he was occupied in reconstructing it in book form. It certainly has feeling at highest intensity and no diffuseness, but it lacks the delicate touches, the indications of character by small incidents, and realistic details, that render Pierre Loti's novels, for instance, so vividly actual and accurate. It is strong to the highest emotional pitch, and some of the descriptions are marvellous, but the book gives the impression of being fragmentary and unfinished. After two years of exclusive intellectual communion and discussion of literary matters between Lafcadio Hearn and Miss Bisland, he suddenly, writing from Philadelphia, declares his intention of never addressing her as Miss Bisland again except upon an envelope. "It is a formality--and you are you; and you are not a formality--but a somewhat--and I am only I."[15] [15] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. After this the personal note becomes predominant, and Miss Bisland ceases, even on paper, to be a formality in Lafcadio Hearn's emotional life. During the course of the same summer, Hearn went to the West Indies for his three months' midsummer trip. From thence he wrote one or two delightful letters to the Lady of a Myriad Souls. In the same year he was again in New York, but almost immediately accepted an offer made to him by the Harpers to return to the West Indies for two years. The following letter tells its own tale, and so daintily and pathetically that one does not feel as if one could change a word:-- "Your letter reached me when everything that had seemed solid was breaking up, and Substance had become Shadow. It made me very foolish--made me cry. Your rebuke for the trivial phrase in my letter was very beautiful as well as very richly deserved. But I don't think it is a question of volition. It is necessary to obey the impulses of the Unknown for Art's sake,--or rather, you _must_ obey them. The Spahi's fascination by the invisible forces was purely physical. I think I am right in going; perhaps I am wrong in thinking of making the tropics a home. Probably it will be the same thing over again: impulse and chance compelling another change. "The carriage--no, the New York hack and hackman (no romance or sentimentality about these!) is waiting to take me to Pier 49 East River. So I must end. But I have written such a ridiculous letter that I shan't put anybody's name to it."[16] [16] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. In 1889 he again returned to America, and went for his famous visit to George Milbury Gould at Philadelphia. On November 14th of the same year Miss Bisland received a request to call at the office of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. On her arrival at eleven o'clock in the morning, she was asked if she would leave New York for San Francisco the same evening for a seventy-five days' journey round the world. The proposition was that she should "run" in competition with another lady sent by a rival magazine for a wager. Miss Bisland consented. After her return, under the title of "A Trip Around the World," she published her experiences in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. These contributions were afterwards incorporated in a small volume. They are charmingly and brightly written. She, however, did not win her wager, as the other lady completed the task in a slightly shorter period. Before he knew of the projected journey, Lafcadio wrote to tell her that he had had a queer dream. A garden with high clipped hedges, in front of a sort of country house with steps leading down and everywhere hampers and baskets. Krehbiel was there, starting for Europe, never to return. He could not remember what anybody said precisely, voices were never audible in dreams. In his next letter he alludes to his imaginings. "So it was you and not I, that was to run away.... When I saw the charming notice about you in the _Tribune_ there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.... I and my friends have been wagering upon you hoping for you to win your race--so that every one may admire you still more, and your name flash round the world quicker than the sunshine, and your portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you are never the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled; it would only be one small phase of you, Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!..." I do not think that amidst all the letters of poets or writers there are any more original or passionately poignant than the last two or three of the series in Miss Bisland's first volume of Hearn's letters. It seems almost like tearing one of Heine's Lyrics to pieces to endeavour to give the substance of these fanciful and exquisite outpourings in any words but his own. Again and again he recurs to his favourite idea of the multiplicity of souls. Turn by turn, he says, one or other of the "dead within her" floats up from the depth within, transfiguring her face. "It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;--and that you keep saying to them: 'But you are dead and cannot see--you can only feel; and I can see,--and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait, and leave me in peace with myself.' But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ... what was it? "Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?--I hope you will get my book before you go; it will be sent on Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the 'gnat of a soul' that belongs to me between the leaves." Soon after the return of the lady of his dreams from her "trip around the world," Hearn left for the Far East, where he lived for the rest of his days. He wrote to her once or twice after his arrival in Japan, and then a long, long interval intervened. He married a Japanese lady, and she married Mr. Wetmore. Not until 1900 were all the long estranging years that lay between the time when he had last seen her in New York and the period of his professorship at a Japanese college forgotten, and he fell back on the simple human affection of their early intercourse. No longer did he think of her as the rich, beautiful, fashionable woman, but as the _jeune fille un peu farouche_, who in distant New Orleans days had understood and expressed a belief in his genius with all a girl's unsophisticated enthusiasm. She had written to him, and he gives her a whimsically pathetic answer, touching on memories, on thoughts, on aspirations, which had been a closed book for so long a period of time, and now, when re-opened, was seen to be printed as clearly on mind and heart as if he had parted with her but an hour before. About a dozen letters succeed one another, and in September, 1904--the month in which he died--comes his last. He tells her that to see her handwriting again, upon the familiar blue envelope, was a great pleasure; except that the praise she lavished upon him was undeserved. He then refers to the dedication of the "Japanese Miscellany" which he had made to her. "The book is not a bad book in its way, and perhaps you will later on find no reason to be sorry for your good opinions of the writer. I presume that you are far too clever to believe more than truth, and I stand tolerably well in the opinion of a few estimable people in spite of adverse tongues and pens...." He then tells her that the "Rejected Addresses," the name in writing to her he had given to "Japan, an Interpretation," would shortly appear in book form.... "I don't like the idea of writing a serious treatise on sociology; I ought to keep to the study of birds and cats and insects and flowers, and queer small things--and leave the subject of the destiny of Empires to men of brains. Unfortunately, the men of brains will not state the truth as they see it. If you find any good in the book, despite the conditions under which it was written, you will recognise your share in the necessarily ephemeral value thereof. "May all good things ever come to you, and abide." It is said by many, especially those who knew Hearn in later years, that he was heartless, capricious, incapable of constancy to any affection or sentiment, and yet, set forth so that all "who run may read," is this record of a devotion and friendship, cherished for a quarter of a century, lasting intact through fair years and foul, through absence, change of scene, even of nationality. "Fear not, I say again; believe it true That not as men mete shall I measure you...." Time, besides his scythe and hour-glass, carries an accurate gauge for the estimation of human character and genius. CHAPTER XIII RELIGION AND SCIENCE "For the Buddha of the deeper Buddhism is not Gautama, nor yet any one Tathagata, but simply the divine in man. Chrysalides of the infinite we all are: each contains a ghostly Buddha, and the millions are but one. All humanity is potentially the Buddha-to-come, dreaming through the ages in Illusion; and the teacher's smile will make beautiful the world again when selfishness shall die. Every noble sacrifice brings the hour of his awakening; and who may justly doubt--remembering the myriads of the centuries of man--that even now there does not remain one place on earth where life has not been freely given for love or duty?" Though some years were yet to elapse before Hearn received his definite marching orders, each halt was but a bivouac nearer the field of operations where effective work and fame awaited him. "Have wild theories about Japan," he writes prophetically to Mr. Watkin. "Splendid field in Japan--a climate just like England--perhaps a little milder. Plenty of European and English newspapers...." And again, "I have half a mind to study medicine in practical earnest, for as a doctor I may do well in Japan." When the New Orleans Exposition was opened in 1885, Harpers, the publishers--who had already sent Hearn on a tour in Florida with an artist of their staff--now made an arrangement with him, by which he was to supply descriptive articles, varied by sketches and drawings, copied from photographs, of the principal exhibits. On January 3rd, Hearn's first article appeared in _Harper's Weekly_. In it he describes the fans, the _kakemonos_, the screens in the Japanese department. Long lines of cranes flying against a vermilion sky, a flight of gulls sweeping through the golden light of a summer morning; the heavy, eccentric, velvety flight of bats under the moon; the fairy hovering of moths, of splendid butterflies; the modelling and painting of animal forms, the bronzed tortoises, crabs, storks, frogs, not mere copies of nature, but exquisite idealisations stirred his artistic sense as did also the representations of the matchless mountain Fuji-no-yama--of which the artist, Hokusai, alone drew one hundred different views, on fans, behind rains of gold, athwart a furnace of sunset, or against an immaculate blue burnished by some wizard dawn, exhaling from its mimic crater a pillar of incense smoke, towering above stretches of vineyards and city-speckled plains, or perchance begirdled by a rich cloud of silky shifting tints, like some beauty of Yoshiwara. It seems almost as if he already saw the light of the distant dreamy world and the fairy vapours of morning, and the marvellous wreathing of clouds, and heard the pilgrims' clapping of hands, saluting the mighty day in Shinto prayer, as a decade later he saw, and heard, when he ascended Fuji-no-yama. * * * * * A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last century. One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death. The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun." Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with the offending individual. "A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...." This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from that time the world never again appeared to him quite the same as it had appeared before. It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature. Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately, moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it, "Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were eliminated. These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world. In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal re-appearance, for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may be safely said of this acme of Buddhist philosophy--'the rest is silence!'" It is plain, therefore, that the two points of contact upon which Hearn, in his attempted reconciliation between Buddhism and modern science laid most stress, were disproved by leading scientists even before he had read Spencer's "First Principles" at New Orleans in 1886, and it is disconcerting to find him using his deftness in the manipulation of words, to reconcile statements of Huxley's and Darwin's with his own wishes. His statement, indeed, that the right of a faith to live is only to be proved by its possible reconciliation with natural and scientific facts, proves how little fitted he was to expound natural science. Long before he went to Japan, he had been interested in oriental religion and ethics. But his Buddhism was really only a vague, poetical theory, as was his Christianity. "When I write God, of course I mean only the World-Soul, the mighty and sweetest life of Nature, the great Blue Ghost, the Holy Ghost which fills planets and hearts with beauty." The deeper Buddhism, he affirmed, was only the divine in man. Bruised and buffeted in the struggle for existence, it is easy to imagine the attraction that the Buddhist ideal of discipline and self-effacement would exercise over a mind such as his. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, standing opposite the great Dai Batsu with its picturesque surroundings in the garden at Kamakura, he was carried away by the ideal of calm, of selflessness that it embodied. It has generally been taken for granted that he died a Buddhist; he emphatically declared, during the last year of his life, that he subscribed to no Buddhistical tenets. Invariably the best critic of his own nature--"Truly we have no permanent opinions," he writes, "until our mental growth is done. The opinions we have are simply lent us for awhile by the gods--at compound interest!" There is a characteristic anecdote told of him by a cousin who went to visit him when a boy at Ushaw. He asked her to bow to the figure of the Virgin Mary, which stood upon the stairway. She refused, upon which he earnestly repeated his request. Shortly after this incident he volunteered the statement to one of the college tutors, who found him lying on his back in the grass, looking up at the sky, that he was a pantheist. After he had been reading some of the Russian novelists, though he confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass, interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II. In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy, contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer. Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--was the beginning of the religious sentiment in man. It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead. From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to make a path for his comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears the approval of ghostly witnesses." Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason, who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship. The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead." Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their "ancestral spirits." In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the scientific theory of evolution. "He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism in particular,--which history has engrafted on the æsthetic heart of Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science; and these three traditions are fused by the peculiar sympathies of his mind into one rich and novel compound,--a compound so rare as to have introduced into literature a psychological sensation unknown before. More than any other living author he has added a new thrill to our intellectual experience." When at Tokyo, if you find your way into the street called Naka-dori, where ancient curios and embroideries are to be bought--you will perchance be shown a wonderful fabric minutely intersected with delicate traceries on a dark-coloured texture. If you are accompanied by any one who is acquainted with ancient Japanese embroidery, they will show you that these traceries are fine Japanese ideographs; poems, proverbs, legends, embroidered by the laying on of thread by thread all over the tissue, producing a most harmonious and beautiful effect. Thus did Hearn, like these ancient artificers, weave ancient theories of pre-existence and Karma into spiritual fantasies and imaginations. Ever in consonance with wider interests his work opened up strange regions of dreamland, touched trains of thought that run far beyond the boundaries of men's ordinary mental horizon. In his sketch, for instance, called the "Mountain of Skulls,"[17] how weirdly does he make use of the idea of pre-existence. A young man and his guide are pictured climbing up a mountain, where was no beaten path, the way lying over an endless heaping of tumbled fragments. [17] "In Ghostly Japan," Little, Brown & Co. Under the stars they climbed, aided by some superhuman power, and as they climbed the fragments under their feet yielded with soft dull crashings.... And once the pilgrim youth laid hand on something smooth that was not stone--and lifted it--and was startled by the cheekless gibe of death. In his inimitable way, Hearn tells how the dawn breaks, casting a light on the monstrous measureless height round them. "All of these skulls and dust of bones, my son, are your own!" says his guide. "Each has at some time been the nest of your dreams and delusions and desires." The Buddhist idea of pre-existence has been believed in by orientals from time immemorial; in the Sacontala the Indian poet, Calidas, says: "Perhaps the sadness of men, in seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music, arises from some remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." The idea has been re-echoed by many in our own time, but by none more exquisitely and fancifully than by Lafcadio Hearn. In one of his sketches, entitled, "A Serenade," his prose is the essence of music, weird and pathetic as a nocturne by Chopin; setting thrilling a host of memories and dreams, suggesting hints and echoes of ineffable things. You feel the violet gloom, the warm air, and see the fire-flies, the plumes of the palms, and the haunting circle of the sea beyond, the silence only broken by the playing of flutes and mandolines. "The music hushed, and left me dreaming and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the mystery was of other existences than mine."[18] [18] "Exotics and Retrospectives," Little, Brown & Co. Then he brings forward the favourite theme, that our living present is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution--created by experiences of vanished being more countless than the sands of a myriad seas.... Echoing into his own past, he imagines the music startling from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakening endless remembrance, and with that awakening the delight passed, and in the dark the sadness only lingered--unutterable--profound. CHAPTER XIV WEST INDIES "Ah! the dawnless glory of tropic morning! The single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the Mornes! and the early breezes from the hills--all cool out of the sleep of the forest, ... and the wild high winds that run roughling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound. And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green drenched with silent pouring of creepers ... and the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea.... And the violet velvet distances of evening, and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning sunset,--when all the heavens seem filled with vapours of a molten sun!" In the early part of June, 1887, Hearn left New Orleans, and made his way to New York via Cincinnati. He went to see no one in the western city, where he had been so well known, but his old friend Mr. Watkin. Seated in the printing-office, then situated at 26, Longworth Street, they chatted together all day to the accompaniment of the ticking of the tall clock, loud and insistent, like the footstep of a man booted and spurred. We can imagine their discussions and arguments on the subject of Herbert Spencer and Darwin, Esoteric Buddhism, and "that which the Christian calls soul,--the Pantheist Nature,--the philosopher, the Unknowable." Hearn took his departure from Cincinnati late in the evening. A delightful trip, he wrote to Mr. Watkin, had brought him safe and sound to New York, where his dear friend, Krehbiel, was waiting to receive him and take him as a guest to his cosy home. "I cannot tell you," he adds, "how our little meeting delighted me, or how much I regretted to depart so soon.... I felt that I loved you more than I ever did before; feel also how much I owed you and will always owe you." Mr. Watkin, who died in the spring of 1911, aged eighty-six, spent the last years of his life in the "Old Men's Home" in Cincinnati. I received a letter from him a few months before his death relating to his friend Lafcadio Hearn. After this meeting in 1887, he was never fated to see his "Raven," but the old man kept religiously all the letters written to him by the odd little genius, who forty years before had so often sat with him in his printing-office, pouring forth his hopes and ambitions, his opinions and beliefs, his wild revolts and despairs. Loyally did the old printer add his voice to Krehbiel's and Tunison's in defence of his reputation after Hearn's death in 1904. The Krehbiels lived in a flat, 438, West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, and Lafcadio had arranged to stop with them there before he left New Orleans. Krehbiel's position as musical critic to the _Tribune_ necessitated his frequenting busy literary and social circles; it is easy to imagine how Hearn, just arrived from the easy-going, loafing life of New Orleans, must have suffered in such a _milieu_. Gould, in his "Biography," notes with "sorrow and pain" that Hearn's letters to Krehbiel suddenly ceased in 1887. "One may be sure," he adds, "that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed." Without blaming either Krehbiel or Hearn, it is easy to see many reasons for the break-off of the close communion between the friends. For a person of Hearn's temperament, innumerable sunken rocks beset the waters in which he found himself in New York City. Before starting on his journey thither he told Krehbiel that the idea of mixing in society in a great metropolis was a horrible nightmare, that he had been a demophobe for years, hating crowds and the heterogeneous acquaintances of ordinary city life. "Here I visit a few friends for months, then disappear for six. Can't help it;--just a nervous condition that renders effort unpleasant. So I shall want to be very well hidden away in New York,--to see no one except you and Joe." It was hardly a prudent step on Krehbiel's part to subject this sensitive, excitable spirit to so great a trial of temper as caging him in a flat in the very midst of the "beastly machinery." He and Hearn had not met personally since Cincinnati days, many divergencies of sentiment and feeling must have arisen between them in that space of ten years, subtle antagonisms of personal habit and manner of life, formed in the passage of the years, that would not have revealed themselves in letters transmitted across thousands of miles. Hearn, like many Irishmen, was intemperate in argument. Testiness in argument is a quality peculiar to the Celt, and in the Hearn family was inordinately developed. Richard Hearn, Lafcadio's uncle, the warmest and gentlest-hearted of men, would sometimes become quite unmanageable in the course of a political or artistic discussion. Old Mrs. Hearn, Lafcadio's grandmother, a person far superior to any of the Hearns of her day in mental calibre, was wont to declare that the only way she had lived in peace and amity with her husband and his relations was that for thirty years she had never ventured to express an opinion. Krehbiel was a Teuton, a northerner; Hearn was an oriental with oriental tendencies and sympathies. Continually in the course of the Krehbiel correspondence, Hearn reminds his friend that his ancestors were Goths and Vandals--and he tells him that he still possesses traces of that Gothic spirit which detests all beauty that is not beautiful with the fantastic and unearthly beauty that is Gothic.... This is a cosmopolitan art era, he tells him again, and you must not judge everything that claims art merit by a Gothic standard. From the fine criticisms and essays that have been given to the public by Henry Krehbiel, it is apparent that his musical taste was entirely for German music. Above all, he was an enthusiast upon the subject of the Modern School, the Music of the Future, as it was called; Hearn, on the other hand--no musician from a technical point of view--frankly declared that he preferred a folk-song or negro melody, to a Beethoven's sonata or an opera by Wagner. Krehbiel, in an article written after his death, entitled "Hearn and Folk Music," declares that it would have broken Hearn's heart had he ever told him that any of the music which he sent him or of which he wrote descriptions showed no African, but Scotch and British characteristics, or sophistications from the civilised art. "He had heard from me of oriental scales, and savage music, in which there were fractional tones unknown to the occidental system. These tones he thought he heard again in negro and Creole melodies, and he was constantly trying to make me understand what he meant by descriptions, by diagrams, he could not record rhythms in any other way. The _glissando_ effect which may be heard in negro singing, and the use of tones not in our scales, he described over and over again as 'tonal splinterings.' They had for him a great charm." Miss Elizabeth Bisland was in New York, acting as sub-editor of the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_. Lafcadio made an unsuccessful attempt to see her. "Nobody can find anybody, nothing seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathematics, and geometry, and enigmatics, and riddles and confusion worse confounded.... I am sorry not to see you--but since you live in Hell what can I do?" This is his outburst to Tunison. To Harpers, the publishers, he offered to go where they would send him, so long as it was south, taking an open engagement to send them letters when he could. They suggested a trip to the West Indies and British Guiana. In the beginning of June, 1887, he started on the _Barracouta_ for Trinidad. His account of his "Midsummer Trip to the West Indies," a trip that only lasted for three months, from July to September, appeared originally in _Harper's Monthly_. It was afterwards incorporated in his larger book, "Two Years in the French West Indies." Hearn's more intimate life, during this, his first visit to the tropics, is to be found recounted in his letters to Dr. Matas, the New Orleans physician. They reveal the same erratic, unpractical, wayward being as ever, beset by financial difficulties, carried away by unbalanced enthusiasms. He had been without a cent of money, he said, for four months, and, unacquainted with any one, he could not get credit, yet starvation at Martinique was preferable to luxury in New York. "The climate was simply heaven on earth, no thieves, no roughs, no snobs; everything primitive and morally pure. Confound fame, wealth, reputation and splendour! Leave them all, give up New Orleans, these things are superfluous in the West Indies, obsolete nuisances." All ambition to write was paralysed, "but nature did the writing in green, azure, and gold, while the palms distilled _Elixir Vitæ_."[19] [19] Dr. George Milbury Gould's book, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," published by Messrs. Fisher Unwin. There is only one letter to Krehbiel from the West Indies, published in the series edited by Miss Bisland. Krehbiel was apparently leaving for Europe to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Hearn expresses a hope that before his departure from New York he would arrange with Tunison or somebody to put the things left in his charge by Hearn, in a place of safety until some arrangement had been come to with Harpers, the publishers. Though there is no record of a broken friendship, the two comrades had apparently drifted apart. All the old spontaneity, the close communion of mind with mind was gone. You cannot help feeling as if you had personally lost a valued and sympathetic companion. During the course of the month of September, Hearn found himself back in the United States. His stay, however, only lasted a week. He arrived on the 21st, and on the 28th of the same month returned to the tropics on board the _Barracouta_, on which he had returned. "Two Years in the French West Indies," though it has not the poetic pathos, the weird atmosphere, that make his Japanese books so arresting and original, is a delightful collection of pictures taken absolutely fresh from the heart of tropical nature with its luxuriant and exotic beauty. Had he never written anything but this, Hearn would have been recognised as one, at least, of the striking figures in the prose literature of the latter end of the nineteenth century. To appreciate the beauty of its style, it is well to compare it with books on the same subject, Froude's "West Indies," for instance, or Sir Frederick Treve's "Cradle of the Deep," written, both of them, in sonorous, vigorous English. You are interested, carried along in the flow of chapter and paragraph, suddenly you come upon a few sentences that take your senses captive with the music of their eddying ripple. You feel as if you had been walking through a well-cultured upland country, when from under a hidden bank the music of a running stream falls upon your ear with the soothing magic of its silvery cadence; looking at the foot of the page you see it is a quotation from Lafcadio Hearn. For instance:-- "Soundless as a shadow is the motion of all these naked-footed people. On any quiet mountain way, full of curves, where you fancy yourself alone, you may often be startled by something you _feel_, rather than hear behind you,--surd steps, the springy movement of a long lithe body, dumb oscillations of raiment,--and ere you can turn to look, the haunter swiftly passes with Creole greeting of 'bon-jou' or 'bonsoue, missie.'..." "Two Years in the French West Indies" was dedicated "A mon cher ami, "L�OPOLD ARNOUX "Notaire à Saint Pierre, Martinique. "Souvenir de nos promenades, de nos voyages, de nos causeries, des sympathies échangées, de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et inoubliable, de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pays des Revenants." * * * * * Arnoux is mentioned subsequently in one or two of Hearn's letters. He alludes to suppers eaten with him at Grande Anse, in a little room opening over a low garden full of banana-trees, to the black beach of the sea, with the great voice thundering outside so that they could scarcely hear themselves speak, and the candle in the verrine fluttering like something afraid. In 1902, in a letter written to Ellwood Hendrik from Tokyo, shortly after the great eruption of Mt. Pelée that destroyed Saint Pierre, he alludes to Arnoux' garden, and speaks of a spray of arborescent fern that had been sent him. In the fragment, also, called "Vanished Light," he describes the amber shadows and courtyard filled with flickering emerald and the chirrup of leaping water. A little boy and girl run to meet him, and the father's voice, deep and vibrant as the tone of a great bell, calls from an inner doorway, "Entrez donc, mon ami!" "But all this was--and is not!... Never again will sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city; never again will its ways be trodden, never again will its gardens blossom ... except in dreams." Hearn definitely left Martinique in 1889, bound for America; having completed the task he had undertaken to do. Much as he loved the lazy, easy tropical life, "the perfumed peace of enormous azured noons, and the silent flickering of fire-flies through the lukewarm distance, the turquoise sky and the beautiful brown women," he began, before the end of his stay, to acknowledge that the resources of intellectual life were lacking; no libraries, no books in any language; a mind accustomed to discipline became, he said, like a garden long uncultivated, in which rare flowers returned to their primitive savage forms, smothered by rank, tough growths, which ought to be pulled up and thrown away. "Nature does not allow serious study or earnest work, and if you revolt against her, she leaves you helpless and tortured for months. One must not seek the Holy Ghost, the world is young here,--not old and wise and grey as in the North.... The material furnished by the tropics could only," he said, "be utilised in a Northern atmosphere...." The climate numbed mental life, and the inspiration he hoped for wouldn't come. During his stay in New York, while preparing "Youma" (a story written in the West Indies) for press and going over the proofs of "Chita" before its appearance in book form, he seems to have been in a pitiable state of destitution, obliged to make a translation of Anatole France's "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard" to keep bread in his mouth. "So you read my translation of 'Sylvestre Bonnard?'" he says to his sister, writing from Japan. "I made it in two weeks, the Publishers paying me only $100. Of course the translation was too quickly done to be very good. I could not have written it all in the prescribed time, so a typewriter was hired for me. She was a pretty girl and I almost fell in love with her." In 1889, Hearn made that ill-advised visit to Philadelphia, to Dr. George Milbury Gould. He had only known this gentleman hitherto through an interchange of letters. Gould had written to him at New Orleans, expressing delight with some of Hearn's translations from the French, upon which Hearn, in his usual impulsive way rushed into a correspondence. This was in April, 1887. Gould had written several pamphlets on the subject of myopia and defective sight, these he sent to Hearn, and Hearn had responded, touching, as usual, on every sort of philosophical and literary subject. When he returned to the United States, after his two years in the French West Indies, he thought he would like to consult Gould on the subject of his eyesight. He therefore wrote, suggesting that if a quiet room could be found for him in Philadelphia he would try his luck there. Gould's account of his first appearance in his consulting-room is familiar to all who have read his book. "The poor exotic was so sadly out of place, so wondering, so suffering and shy, that he would certainly have run out of the house if by a tone of voice I had betrayed any curiosity or a doubt."[20] [20] "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Fisher Unwin. Being extremely hard-up, Hearn was glad to accept an arrangement to stop in Gould's house for a while, sharing the family meals, but spending the greater part of the day at work on his proof-correcting in a room set apart for him. An incident, related by Gould, shows Hearn's extraordinary shyness and dislike to make the acquaintance of strangers. He was desirous of giving an idea of the music of Creole songs in his book on the West Indies, but, because of his ignorance of technical counterpoint, was unable to do so. Gould made an arrangement with a lady, an acquaintance, to repeat the airs on her piano as he whistled them. An appointment was made for a visit, but on their way to the house Hearn gradually became more and more silent, and his steps slower and slower. When at last he reached the doorstep and the bell had been rung, his courage failed, and before the servant appeared he had run, as if for life, and was half a square away. Gould claims to have made noteworthy changes in Hearn's character during the summer he stayed with him at Philadelphia. He declares that he first gave him a "soul," taught him the sense of duty, and made him appreciate the beauties of domestic life! A very beautiful story entitled "Karma," published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ after Hearn had left for Japan, certainly shows that a change of some sort was being wrought. "I never could find in the tropics that magnificent type of womanhood which, in the New England girl, makes one afraid even to think about sex, while absolutely adoring the personality. Perfect nature inspires a love that is fear. I don't think any love is noble without it. The tropical woman inspires a love that is half compassion; this is always dangerous, untrustworthy, delusive." Gould, also, much to the indignation of Hearn's friends, claims to have been the first person who definitely turned his thoughts to the Far East. Inasmuch as Hearn's mind had been impregnated with Japan from New Orleans days, this seems an unlikely statement; but of all unprofitable things in this world is the sifting of literary wrangles; Hearn's intimacy with George Milbury Gould has led to lawsuits, recriminations, and many distasteful and painful episodes between Gould and some of Hearn's friends. It is as well perhaps, therefore, to go into detail as little as possible. A passage occurs in one of Hearn's letters to Ellwood Hendrik which disposes of the matter. "Of course we shall never see each other again in this world, and what is the use of being unkind after all?... The effect is certainly to convince a man of forty-four that the less he has to do with his fellowmen the better, or, at least, that the less he has to do with the so-called 'cultured' the better...." From the city of doctors and Quakers, Hearn wrote several letters to Miss Bisland, at first entirely formal upon literary subjects. He couldn't say when he was going to New York, as he was tied up by business muddle, waiting for information, anxious beyond expression about an undecided plan, shivering with cold, and longing for the tropics. Lights are thrown upon his emotional and intellectual life in letters written in the autumn to Dr. Gould from New York. Japan was looming large on the oriental horizon. A book by Percival Lowell, entitled "The Soul of the Far East," had just appeared. It apparently made a profound impression upon Hearn; every word he declared to be dynamic, as lucid and philosophical as Schopenhauer. All his former enthusiasm for Japan was aroused, he followed her progress with the deepest interest. The Japanese constitution had been promulgated in 1889, the first diet had met in Tokyo in 1890, the simultaneous reconstruction of her army, and creation of a navy, was gradually placing her in the van of far eastern nations; and, what was more important to commercial America, her trade had enormously developed under the new régime. Harpers, the publishers, came to the conclusion that it would be expedient to send one of their staff to Tokyo as regular correspondent; Hearn had succeeded in catching the attention of the public by his story of "Chita" and "A Midsummer Trip," that had both been published serially in their magazine. With his graphic and picturesque pen he would adequately, they thought, fill the post. In an interview with the managing director he was approached upon the subject, and, needless to say, eagerly accepted the offer. It was arranged, therefore, that, accompanied by Charles D. Weldon, one of Harpers' artists, he was to start in the beginning of the March of 1890 for the Far East. Little did Hearn realise that the strange land for which he was bound was to receive him forever, to make him one with its religion, its institutions, its nationality, and that, as he closed the door of the publisher's room that day, he was closing the door between himself and western civilisation forever. CHAPTER XV JAPAN "... Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk can give you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the dream,--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring which lend preternatural loveliness to a Japanese landscape in the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have entered bodily into Fairyland, into a world that is not and never could be your own. You have been transported out of your own century, over spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age,--back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! the tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that all here is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence." Mrs. Wetmore is inaccurate in stating that Lafcadio Hearn started for Japan on May 8th, 1890. She must mean March, for he landed in Yokohama on Good Friday, April 13th, after a six weeks' journey. His paper, entitled "A Winter Journey to Japan," contributed to _Harper's_, describes a journey made in the depth of winter. He stepped from the railway depot, "not upon Canadian soil, but upon Canadian ice. Ice, many inches thick, sheeted the pavement, and lines of sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, waited before the station for passengers.... A pale-blue sky arched cloudlessly overhead; and grey Montreal lay angled very sharply in the keen air over the frozen miles of the St. Lawrence; sleighs were moving,--so far away that it looked like a crawling of beetles; and beyond the farther bank where ice-cakes made a high, white ridge, a line of purplish hills arose into the horizon...." Hearn's account of his journey through wastes of snow, up mountain sides, through long chasms, passing continually from sun to shadow, and from shadow to sun, the mountains interposing their white heads, and ever heaping themselves in a huge maze behind, are above the average of ordinary traveller's prose, but there is no page that can be called arresting or original. The impressions seem to be written to order, written, in fact, as subordinate to the artist's illustrations. So irksome did this necessity of writing a text to Weldon's illustrations become, that it is said to have been one of the reasons for the rupture of his contract with Harpers almost immediately after his arrival in Japan. The seventeen days that he passed on the northern Pacific, with their memories of heavy green seas and ghostly suns, the roaring of the rigging and spars against the gale, the steamer rocking like a cradle as she forced her way through the billowing waves, are well described. There is a weird touch, too, in his description of the Chinese steerage passengers, playing the game of "fan-tan" by the light of three candles at a low table covered with a bamboo mat. Deep in the hold below he imagines the sixty square boxes resembling tea-chests, covered with Chinese lettering, each containing the bones of a dead man, bones being sent back to melt into that Chinese soil from whence, by nature's vital chemistry, they were shapen ... and he imagines those labelled bones once crossing the same ocean on just such a ship, and smoking or dreaming their time away in just such berths, and playing the same strange play by such a yellow light, in even just such an atmosphere, heavy with vaporised opium. "Meanwhile, something has dropped out of the lives of some of us, as lives are reckoned by Occidental time,--a day. A day that will never come back again, unless we return by this same route,--over this same iron-grey waste, in the midst of which our lost day will wait for us,--perhaps in vain." Not from the stormy waters of the Pacific, however, not from gleaming Canadian pinnacles, or virgin forests, or dim cañons, was this child of the South and the Orient, this interpreter of mankind in all his exotic and strange manifestations to draw his inspiration, but from the valleys and hill-sides of that immemorial East that stretched in front of him, manured and fructified by untold centuries of thought and valour and belief. The spell fell on him from the moment that, through the transparent darkness of the cloudless April morning, he caught sight of the divine mountain. The first sight of Fuji, hanging above Yokohama Bay like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day, is a sight never to be forgotten, a vision that, for the years Hearn was yet to traverse before the heavy, folded curtain fell on his stage of life, was destined to form the background of his poetic dreams and imaginings. Mr. Henry Watkin appears to have been the first person to whom Hearn wrote from Japan. So great was the charm of this new country that he seemed irresistibly called to impart some of the delight to those he had left behind in America. He told him that he passed much of his time in the temples, trying to see into the heart of the strange people surrounding him. He hoped to learn the language, he said, and become a part of the very soul of the people. He rhapsodised on the subject of the simple humanity of Japan and the Japanese.... He loved their gods, their customs, their dress, their bird-like, quavering songs, their houses, their superstitions, their faults. He was as sure as he was of death that their art was as far in advance of our art, as old Greek art was superior to that of the earliest art groupings. There was more art in a print by Hokusai, or those who came after him, than in a $100,000 painting. Occidentals were the barbarians. Most travellers when first visiting Japan see only its atmosphere of elfishness, of delicate fantasticality. The queer little streets, the quaint shops where people seem to be playing at buying and selling, the smiling, small people in "geta" and "kimono," the mouldering shrines with their odd images and gardens; but to Hearn a transfiguring light cast a ghostly radiance on ordinary sights and scenes, opening a world of suggestion, and inspiring him with an eloquent power of impressing upon others not only the visible picturesqueness and oddity of Japanese life, but that dim surmise of another and inscrutable humanity, that atmosphere of spirituality so inseparably a part of the religion Buddha preached to man. With almost sacramental solemnity, he gazed at the strange ideographs, wandered about the temple gardens, ascended the stairways leading to ancient shrines. What these experiences did for his genius is to be read in the first book inspired by the Orient while he was still under the glamour of enchantment. Amidst the turmoil, the rush, the struggle of our monster City of the West, if you open his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and read his description of his first visit to a Buddhist temple, you will find the silence of centuries descending upon your soul, the thrill of something above and beyond the commonplace of this everyday world. The bygone spirit of the race, with its hidden meanings and allegories, its myths and legends, the very essence of the heart of the people, that has lain sleeping in the temple gloom, will reveal itself; the faint odour of incense will float to your nostrils; the shuffling of pilgrim feet to your ear; you will see the priests sliding back screen after screen, pouring in light on the gilded bronzes and inscriptions; involuntarily you will look for the image of the Deity, of the presiding spirit between the altar groups of convoluted candelabra, and you will see "only a mirror! Symbolising what? Illusion? Or that the universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our hearts?" A storm soon passed across the heaven of his dreams. He suddenly terminated his contract with Harpers. "I am starved out," he wrote to Miss Bisland. "Do you think well enough of me to try to get me employment at a regular salary, somewhere in the United States?"... It is said that his reason for breaking with Harpers was a difference of opinion as to the relative position of himself and their artist, Mr. Charles D. Weldon. Hearn was expected to write up to the illustrations of the articles sent to the magazine, instead of the illustrations being done for Hearn's letterpress. Besides which, the fact transpired that the artist was receiving double Hearn's salary. The little Irishman was a mixture of exaggerated humility and sensitive pride on the score of his literary work; always in extremes in this, as in all else. He was also, as we have seen, extremely unbusinesslike; he never attempted to enter into an agreement of any kind. It seems difficult to accept his statement that his publishers, having made a success with "Chita" and "Youma" and "Two Years in the French West Indies," paid him only at the rate of five hundred dollars a year. No doubt Harpers might have been able to put a very different complexion on the matter. As a proof of the difficulty in conducting affairs with him, when he threw up his Japanese engagement he declined to accept royalties on books already in print. Harpers were obliged to make arrangements to transmit the money through a friend in Japan, and it was only after considerable persuasion and a lapse of several years that he was induced to accept it. So often in his career through life Hearn proved an exemplification of his own statement. Those who are checked by emotional feeling, where no check is placed on competition, must fail. Uncontrolled emotional feeling was the rock on which he split, at this and many other critical moments in his career. He had brought a letter of introduction, presumably from Harpers, the publishers, to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, professor, of English literature at the Tokyo University, the well-known author of "Things Japanese." On his arrival, Hearn thought of obtaining a position as teacher in a Japanese family, so as to master the spoken language. Simply to have a small room where he could write would satisfy him, he told Professor Chamberlain, and so long as he was boarded he would not ask for remuneration. He knew, also, that he could not carry out his fixed determination of writing a comprehensive book on Japan, without passing several years exclusively amongst the Japanese people. Chamberlain, however, saw at once that Hearn's capacities were far superior to those necessary for a private tutorship. Having been so long resident in Japan, and written so much upon the country, as well as occupying a professorship in Tokyo Imperial University, his influence in Japanese official life was considerable; he now bestirred himself, and succeeded in getting Hearn an appointment as English teacher in the Jinjo Chugakko, or ordinary middle school, at Matsue, in the province of Izumo, for the term of one year. A week or two later Hearn was able to announce to his dear sister, Elizabeth, that he was going to become a country schoolmaster in Japan. On several occasions Professor Chamberlain held out the kindly hand of comradeship to Lafcadio; to him Hearn owed his subsequent appointment at the Tokyo University. For five or six years the two men were bound together in a close communion of intellectual enthusiasms and mutual interests, as is easy to see by the wonderful correspondence recently published. To him and to Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, Lafcadio dedicated his "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." TO THE FRIENDS WHOSE KINDNESS ALONE RENDERED POSSIBLE MY SOJOURN IN THE ORIENT PAYMASTER MITCHELL McDONALD, U.S.N. AND BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN, ESQ. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOLOGY AND JAPANESE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES IN TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE Then came a sudden break. After Hearn's death, Chamberlain, in discussing the subject, lamented "the severance of a connection with one so gifted." He made one or two attempts at renewal of intercourse, which were at first met with cold politeness, afterwards with complete silence, causing him to desist from further endeavours. The key, perhaps, to Hearn's course of action, is to be found in some observations that he addresses to Professor Chamberlain just before the close of their friendship. They had been in correspondence on the subject of the connection of the tenets of Buddhism and scientific expositions of evolutionary science in England. "Dear Chamberlain: In writing to you, of course, I have not been writing a book, but simply setting down the thoughts and feelings of the moment as they come.... "I write a book exactly the same way; but all this has to be smoothed, ordinated, corrected, toned over twenty times before a page is ready.... I cannot help fearing that what you mean by 'justice and temperateness' means that you want me to write as if I were you, or at least to measure sentence or thought by your standard.... If I write well of a thing one day, and badly another, I expect my friend to discern that both impressions are true, and solve the contradiction--that is, if my letters are really wanted." The fact is that, if Hearn took up a philosophic or scientific opinion, he was determined to make all with whom he held converse share them, and if they did not do so at once, like the despotic oriental monarch, he would overturn the chessboard. "The rigid character of his philosophical opinions," says Chamberlain, "made him perforce despise as intellectual weaklings all those who did not share them, or shared them in a lukewarm manner, and his disillusionment with a series of friends in whom he had once thought to find intellectual sympathy is seen to have been inevitable." It was principally during the last fourteen years of his life that Hearn acquired the unenviable name of being ungrateful, inconstant, and capricious. To those friends made in his youthful days of struggle and adversity he remained constant, but with the exception of Mitchell McDonald, Nishida Sentaro, and Amenomori, it is the same story of perversity and estrangement. An unceremonious entry into his house, without deference to ancient Japanese etiquette, which enjoined the taking off of boots and the putting on of sandals, a sneer at Shinto ancestor worship, a difference of opinion on Herbert Spencer, and Hearn would disappear actually and metaphorically. This proves his want of heart, you say. But a careful study of Hearn's "Wesen" will show that his apparent inconstancy did not arise from a change of affection, but because his very affection for the people he had turned from made the taut strands of friendship more difficult to reunite, especially for a person of his shy temperament. Which of us has not recognised the greater difficulty of making up a "tiff" with a friend for whom one cares deeply than with a person to whom one is indifferent? The tougher the stuff the more ravelled the edges of the tear, and the more difficult to join together. At Kobe, an incident was related to us by Mr. Young, his chief on the _Kobe Chronicle_ and a person to whom Hearn owed much and was attached by many ties of gratitude and friendship. A guest at dinner ventured to dissent from Hearn's opinion that the reverential manner in which people prostrated themselves before the mikado was in no way connected with religious principles. Hearn shrugged his shoulders, rose, walked away from the table, and nothing would induce him to return. He did not, indeed, enter Mr. Young's house again for some days, though doing his work at the office for the newspaper as usual. When Hearn left Tokyo to take up his appointment at Matsue, he was accompanied by his friend Akira, a young student and priest, who spoke English and could, therefore, act as interpreter. At Kobe they left the railway and continued their journey in jinrikishas, a journey of four days with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan. "Out of the city and over the hills to Izumo, the Land of the Ancient Gods!" The incantation is spoken, we find ourselves in the region of Horai--the fairyland of Japan--with its arch of liquid blue sky, lukewarm, windless atmosphere, an atmosphere enormously old, but of ghostly generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, souls of people who thought in ways never resembling occidental ways. Writing later to Chamberlain, Hearn acknowledged that what delighted him those first days in Japan was the charm of nature in human nature, and in human art, simplicity, mutual kindness, child-faith, gentleness, politeness ... for in Japan even hate works with smiles and pretty words. For the first time Hearn was not merely describing a sensuous world of sights and sounds, but a world of soft domesticity, where thatched villages nestled in the folds of the hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey tiles above a congregation of thatched homesteads. Can anything be more delightful than his description of one of the village inns, with its high-peaked roof of thatch, and green-mossed eaves, like a coloured print out of Hiroshige's picture-books, with its polished stairway and balconies, reflecting like mirrored surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid down. The old gold-flowered lacquer ware, the diaphanous porcelain wine-cups, the teacup holders, which are curled lotus leaves of bronze; even the iron kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the brazen hibachi whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions; distant as it was from all art-centres, there was no object visible in the house which did not reveal the Japanese sense of beauty and form. "Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees anything uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under foreign influence. But here I am in Ancient Japan, probably no European eyes ever looked upon these things before." After he had submitted to being bathed by his landlord, as if he had been a little child, and eaten a repast of rice, eggs, vegetables and sweetmeats, he sat smoking his kiseru until the moon arose, peeping through the heart-shaped little window that looked out on the garden behind, throwing down queer shadows of tilted eaves, and horned gables, and delightful silhouettes. Suddenly a measured clapping of hands became audible, and the echoing of _geta_, and the tramping of wooden sandals filled the street. His companion, Akira, told him they were all going to see the dance of the Bon-odori at the temple, the dance of the Festival of the Dead, and that they had better go, too. This dance of the Festival of the Dead he describes in his usual graphic way: the ghostly weaving of hands, the rhythmic gliding of feet--above all, the flitting of the marvellous sleeves, apparitional, soundless, velvety as the flitting of great tropical bats. In the midst of the charmed circle there crept upon him a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted, until, recalled to reality by a song full of sweet, clear quavering, gushing from some girlish mouth, and fifty other voices joined in the chant. "Melodies of Europe," he ends, "awaken within us feelings we can utter, sensations familiar as mother-speech, inherited from all the generations behind us. But how explain the emotion evoked by a primitive chant, totally unlike anything in western melody, impossible even to write in those tones which are the ideographs of our music-tongue? "And the emotion itself--what is it? I know not; yet I feel it to be something infinitely more old than I, something not of only one place or time, but vibrant to all common joy or pain of being, under the universal sun. Then I wonder if the secret does not lie in some untaught spontaneous harmony of that chant with Nature's most ancient song, in some unconscious kinship to the music of solitudes,--all trillings of summer life that blend to make the great sweet Cry of the Land." CHAPTER XVI MATSUE "Far underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions. He who would know what Shinto is must learn to know that mysterious soul in which the sense of beauty and the power of art and the fire of heroism and magnetism of loyalty and the emotion of faith have become inherent, immanent, unconscious, instinctive." The year spent in the quaint old city of Matsue--birth-place of the rites, mysteries and mythologies of the ancient religion--was one of the happiest and most productive, intellectually, of Hearn's career. His "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was the result. It is perhaps not as finished as some of his later Japanese stories. Writing some years afterwards, he said that when he wanted to feel properly humbled he read about half a page of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"--then he howled and wondered how he ever could have written so badly, and found that he was only really a very twenty-fifth-rate workman, and that he ought to be kicked. Like some of the early poems of celebrated poets, however, though now and then lacking in polish and reticence, the glow of enthusiasm, of surprised delight, that illumines every page will always make this book, in spite of the vogue of much of his subsequent work, the one which is most read and by which he is best known. Here, amongst this bizarre people, he found his predilection for the odd, the queer, the strange, satisfied beyond his utmost desire. Matsue was not the tourists' Japan, not the Japan of bowler hats and red-brick warehouses, but the Japan where ancient faiths were still a living force, where old customs were still followed, and ancient chivalry still an animating power. How fresh and picturesque is his record of the experiences of every day and every hour as they pass. We hear it, and see it all with him: the first of the noises that waken a sleeper ... the measured, muffled echoing of the ponderous pestle of the cleaner of rice, the most pathetic of the sounds of Japanese life; the beating, indeed, of the pulse of the land; the booming of the great temple bell, signalling the hour of Buddhist morning prayer, the clapping of hands, as the people saluted the rising of the sun, and the cries of the earliest itinerant vendors, the sellers of _daikon_ and other strange vegetables ... and the plaintive call of the women who hawked little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires. Sliding open his little Japanese window, he looked out. Veiled in long nebulous bands of mist, the lake below looked like a beautiful spectral sea, of the same tint as the dawn-sky and mixing with it ... an exquisite chaos, as the delicate fogs rose, slowly, very slowly, and the sun's yellow rim came into sight. From these early morning hours until late at night every moment was packed full of new experiences, new sensations. Not only was the old city itself full of strange and unexpected delights, but the country round was a land of dreams, strange gods, immemorial temples. One day it was a visit to the Cave of the Children's Ghosts, where at night the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the feet of Jizo, changing the stones every night. Doubtless in the quaint imagination of the people there still lingers the primitive idea of some communication, mysterious and awful, between the world of waters and the world of the dead. It is always over the sea, after the Feast of Souls, that the spirits pass murmuring back to their dim realm, in those elfish little ships of straw which are launched for them upon the sixteenth day of the seventh moon. The vague idea behind the pious act is that all waters flow to the sea and the sea itself unto the "Nether-distant Land." Then a visit to Kitzuki to visit the Buddhist temple, into whose holy precincts no European had hitherto been admitted. Senke Takamori, the spiritual governor of Kitzuki, whose princely family dated back their ancestry to the goddess of the sun, received him with extraordinary urbanity. Senke, it appears, was connected with the Koizumis, the family to which Hearn's future wife belonged. To see the ancient temple of Kitzuki at that time was to see the living centre of Shinto, to feel the life pulse of the ancient cult throbbing in the nineteenth century as in the unknown past--that religion that lives not in books, nor ceremonial, but in the national heart. The magnetism of another faith polarised his belief. The forces about him, working imperceptibly, influenced him and drew him towards the religion of those amongst whom he lived, moulding and forming that extraordinary mixture of thought and imagination that enabled him to enter into the very heart and soul of ancient Japan. If ever a man was, as religious people term it, "called," Hearn was called to the task of interpreting the superstitions and beliefs of this strange people. Putting jesting on one side, he once said, if he could create something unique and rare he would feel that the Unknowable had selected him for a mouthpiece for a medium of utterance in the holy cycle of its eternal utterance. The half-blind, vagrant little genius had at last found the direction in which the real development of his genius lay; the loose, quivering needle of thought, that had moved hither and thither, was now set in one direction. The stage he was treading, though at first he did not realise it, was gradually becoming the sphere of a drama with eternal and immutable forces as scene-shifters and curtain-raisers. The qualities that had enabled Japan to conquer China, and had placed her practically in the forefront of far eastern nations, he was called upon to analyse and explain; to interpret the curious myths of this great people of little men, who, shut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, had, out of their own inner consciousness, built up a code of discipline and behaviour that, in its self-abnegation, its sense of cohesion, and fidelity to law, throws our much-vaunted western civilisation into the shade. Hearn brought to bear upon the interpretation a rare power of using words, sympathetic insight, an earnest and vivid imagination that enabled him to comprehend the strongly accentuated characteristics of a race living close to the origins of life; barbaric, yet highly refined; superstitious, yet capable of adapting themselves to modern thought; playful as children, yet astounding in their heroic gallantry and patriotism. His genius enabled him to catch a glimpse of the indisputable truth that legend and tradition are a science in themselves, that, however grotesque, however fantastic primeval myths and allegories may be, they are indicative of the gradual evolution of the heart and mind of generations as they arise and pass away. An idea, he said, was growing upon him about the utility of superstition, as compared with the utility of religion. In consequence of his having elected to live the everyday life, and enter into the ordinary interests and occupations of this strange people, as no occidental ever had before, he was enabled to see that many Japanese superstitions had a sort of shorthand value in explaining eternal and valuable things. When it would have been useless to preach to people vaguely about morality or cleanliness or ordinary rules of health, a superstition, a belief that certain infringement of moral law will bring direct corporal punishment, that maligned spirits will visit a room that is left unswept, that the gods will chastise over-excess in eating or drinking, are related to the most inexorable and highest moral laws, and it is easy to understand how invaluable is the study of their superstitions in analysing and explaining so enigmatical a people as the Japanese. "Hearn thought a great deal of what we educated Japanese think nothing," said a highly-cultured Tokyo professor to me, with sarcastic intonation. Hearn, on the other hand, maintained that not to the educated Japanese must you go to understand the vitality of heart and intelligence which through centuries of the Elder Life has evolved so remarkable a nationality. To set forth the power that has moulded the character of this far eastern people, material must be culled from the unsophisticated hearts of the peasants and the common folk. "The people make the gods, and the gods the people make are the best." Hearn did not attempt, therefore, a mechanical repetition of social and religious tenets; but in the mythological beliefs, in the legendary lore that has slumbered for generations in simple minds he caught the suggestion of obedience and fidelity to authority, the strenuous industry and self-denial that endowed these quaint superstitions with a potency far beyond the religion and meaning, or the primitive idea that caused their inception. Merely accurate and erudite students would call the impressions that he collected here, in this unfamiliar Japan, trifling and fantastic, but he is able to prove that the details of ordinary intercourse, however trifling, the way in which men marry and bring up their children, the very manner in which they earn their daily bread, above all, the rules they impose, and the punishment and rewards they invoke to have them obeyed, reveal more of the manner by which the religion, the art, the heroism of this far eastern people have been developed, than hundreds of essays treating of dynasties, treaties and ceremonials. Aided by that very quality which some may look upon as a mental defect, Hearn's tendency to over-emphasise an impressive moment at the expense of accuracy stood him now in good stead. Physical myopia, he maintained, was an aid to artistic work from one aspect: "The keener the view, the less depth in the impression produced. There is no possibility of attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye that, like the eye of a hawk, pierces shadow and can note the separate quiver of every leaf." So mental myopia united with the shaping power of imagination was more helpful in enabling him to catch a glimpse of the trend of thought and characteristics of the folk whose country he adopted than the piercing judgment that saw faults and intellectual short-comings. Many people, even the Japanese themselves, have said that Hearn's view in his first book of things in their country was too roseate. Others have declared that he must have been a hypocrite to write of Japan in so enthusiastic a strain when in private letters, such as those to Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik, he expresses so great a detestation for the people and their methods. Those who say so do not know the nature of the man whom they are discussing; compromise with those in office was entirely antagonistic to his mode of thought. His life was composed of passing illusions and disillusions. That he, with his artistic perception, should have been carried off his balance by the quaintness and mysticism that he encountered in the outlying portions of the country was but natural. Go into the highlands of Japan amongst the simple folk, where primitive conditions still reign, where the ancient gods are still believed to haunt the ancient shrines, where the glamour and the grace of bygone civilisation still lingers, you will yield to the same charm, and, as Hearn himself says, better the sympathetic than the critical attitude. Perhaps the man who comes to Japan full of hate for all things oriental may get nearer the truth at once, but he will make a kindred mistake to him who views it all, as I did at first, almost with the eyes of a lover. CHAPTER XVII MARRIAGE "'Marriage may be either a hindrance or help on the path,' the old priest said, 'according to conditions. All depends upon conditions. If the love of wife and child should cause a man to become too much attached to the temporary advantages of this unhappy world, then such love would be a hindrance. But, on the contrary, if the love of wife and child should enable a man to live more purely and more unselfishly than he could do in a state of celibacy, then marriage would be a very great help to him in the Perfect Way. Many are the dangers of marriage for the wise; but for those of little understanding, the dangers of celibacy are greater, and even the illusion of passion may sometimes lead noble natures to the higher knowledge.'" Hearn's marriage, as his widow told us, took place early in the year of 1891, "23rd of Meiji." That on either side it was one of passionate sentiment is doubtful. Marriages in Japan are generally arranged on the most businesslike footing. By the young Japanese man, it is looked upon as a natural duty that has duly to be performed for the perpetuation of his family. Passion is reserved for unions unsanctioned by social conventions. Dominated as he was by the idea that his physical deficiencies rendered a union with one of his own nationality out of the question, he yet knew that at his time of life he had to enter into more permanent conditions with the other sex than hitherto, or face a future devoid of settled purpose or stability. His state of health also demanded domestic comfort and feminine care. The only alternative that presented itself to a celibate life was to choose a wife from amongst the people with whom his lines were cast. From the first moment of his arrival, Hearn had been carried away by enthusiasm for the gentleness, the docility, of the women of Japan. He compares them, much to their advantage, with their American sisters. "In the eternal order of things, which is the highest being, the childish, confiding, sweet Japanese girl, or the occidental Circe women of artificial society, with their enormous power of evil and their limited capacity for good?" In his first letter to Miss Bisland, he writes: "This is a domesticated nature, which loves man and makes itself beautiful for him in a quiet grey and blue way like the Japanese women." It seems an unromantic statement to make with regard to an artist who has written such exquisite passages on the sentiment that binds a man to a woman, but Hearn, in spite of his intellectual idealism, had from certain points of view a very material outlook. All considerations--even those connected with the deepest emotions that stir the human heart--were secondary to the necessities of his genius and artistic life. His intimacy with Althea Foley in Cincinnati was prompted and fostered by gratitude for her care in preparing his meals, and nursing him when ill, thus saving him from the catastrophe of relinquishing his position on the staff of the _Enquirer_, which meant not only the loss of all means of subsistence, but also the possibility of prosecuting the ambition of his life--a literary career. Now, at Matsue, after a touch of somewhat severe illness obliging him to pass some weeks in bed, it became really a matter of life or death that he should give up living from hand to mouth in country inns. With the Japanese teacher of English at the Matsue College, an accomplished English scholar, Hearn had formed a close intimacy from the moment of his arrival, an intimacy, indeed, only broken by Nishida Sentaro's death in 1898. "His the kind eyes that saw so much for the stranger, his the kind lips that gave him so much wise advice, helping him through the difficulties that beset him, in consequence of his ignorance of the language." At the beginning of his first term Hearn found the necessity of remembering or pronouncing the names of the boys, even with the class-roll before him, almost an insurmountable difficulty. Nishida helped him; gave him all the necessary instructions about hours and text-books, placed his desk close to his, the better to prompt him in school hours, and introduced him to the directors and to the governor of the province. "Out of the East," the volume written later at Kumamoto, was dedicated to Nishida Sentaro, "In dear remembrance of Izumo days." "Hearn's faith in this good friend was something wonderful," his wife tells us. "When he heard of Nishida's illness, in 1897, he exclaimed: 'I would not mind losing everything that belongs to me if I could make him well.' He believed in him with such a faith only possible to a child." Nishida Sentaro was also one of the ancient lineage and caste, and an intimate friend of the Koizumi family. Matsue had been at one time almost exclusively occupied by the Samurai feudal lords. After throwing open her doors to the world, and admitting western civilisation, Japan found herself obliged to accept, amongst other democratic innovations, the sweeping away of the great feudal and military past, reducing families of rank to obscurity and poverty. Youths and maidens of illustrious extraction, who had only mastered the "arts of courtesy" and the "arts of war," found themselves obliged to adopt the humblest occupations to provide themselves and their families with the means of livelihood. Daughters of men once looked upon as aristocrats had to become indoor servants with people of a lower caste, or to undertake the austere drudgery of the rice-fields or the lotus-ponds. Their houses and lands were confiscated--their heirlooms, costly robes, crested lacquer ware, passed at starvation prices to those whom "misery makes rich." Amongst these aristocrats the Koizumis were numbered. Nishida Sentaro, knowing their miserable circumstances, and seeing how advisable it would be, if it were Hearn's intention to remain in Japan, to have a settled home of his own, formed the idea of bringing about a union between Setsu and the English teacher at the Matsue College. On his own initiative he undertook the task of approaching his foreign friend. Finding him favourably inclined, he suggested the marriage as a suitable one to Setsu's parents. It is supposed that marriage in Japan must be solemnised by a priest, but this is not so. A Japanese marriage is simply a legal pledge, and is not invested with any of the solemnity and importance cast around it in occidental society. A union between an Englishman and a Japanese woman can be dissolved with the greatest facility; in fact, it is seldom looked upon as an obligatory engagement. It is doubtful if Nishida, when he undertook to act as intermediary, or _Nakodo_, as they call it in Japan, looked upon the contract entered into by Lafcadio Hearn and Setsu Koizumi as a permanent affair. Hearn from the first took it seriously, but it was certainly not until after the birth of his first child that the marriage was absolutely legalised according to English notions, and then only by his nationalising himself a Japanese citizen. One of Hearn's saving qualities was compassion for the weak and suffering. The young girl's surroundings were calculated to inspire the deepest pity in the hearts of those admitted--as he was--behind the closely drawn veil of pride and reserve that the Samurai aristocrats drew between their poverty and public observation. What the Samurai maiden,--brought up in the seclusion of Matsue--may have thought of the grey-haired, odd-looking little Irishman of forty-four (a patriarchal age in Japan), who was offered to her as a husband, we know not. She accepted her fate, Japanese fashion, and as the years went by and she began to appreciate his gentlemanly breeding and chivalry, inherited as was hers from generations of well-bred ancestors, the fear and bewilderment with which he filled her during these first years of marriage, changed to a profound and true affection, indeed, to an almost reverential respect for the _Gakusha_ (learned person) who kept the pot boiling so handsomely, and was run after by all the American and English tourists at Tokyo. So far as we can judge now, Setsu Koizumi can never have had any of the exotic charm of the butterfly maidens of Kunisada, or the irresistible fascination ascribed to her countrywomen by foreign male visitors to Japan. The Izumo type is not a good-looking one,--the complexion darker and less fresh than that of the Tokyo women--but comely, with the comeliness of truth, common-sense and goodness she always must have been. Tender and true, as her _Yerbina_, or personal, name, "Setsu," signifies, she had learned in self-denial and poverty the virtues of patience and self-restraint--a daughter of Japan--one of a type fast becoming extinct--who deemed it a fault to allow her personal trials to wound other hearts. She may not have been obliged to submit to the trials of most Japanese wives, the whims and tyranny, for instance, of her father- and mother-in-law, or the drudgery to provide for, or wait upon a numerous Japanese household; but from many indications we know that her life sometimes was not by any means a bed of roses. Humorous, and at the same time pathetic, are her reminiscences of these first days of marriage, as related in later life. "He was such an intense nature," she says, "and so completely absorbed in his work of writing that it made him appear strange and even outlandish in ordinary life. He even acknowledged himself that he must look like a madman." During the course of his life, when undergoing any severe mental or physical strain, Hearn was subject to periods of hysterical trance, during which he lost consciousness of surrounding objects. There is a host of superstitions amongst the Japanese connected with trances or fainting fits. Each human being is supposed to possess two souls. When a person faints they believe that one soul is withdrawn from the body, and goes on all sorts of unknown and mysterious errands, while the other remains with the envelope to which it belongs; but when this takes place a man goes mad; mad people are those who have lost one of their souls. On first seeing her husband in this condition, the little woman was so terrified that she hastened to Nishida Sentaro to seek advice. "He always acted for us as middle-man in those Matsue days, and I confess I was afraid my husband might have gone crazy. However, I found soon afterwards that it was only the time of enthusiasm in thought and writing; and I began to admire him more on that account." The calm and material comforts of domestic life gave Hearn, for a time, a more assured equilibrium, but these trances returned again with considerable frequency in later days. Amenomori, his secretary at Tokyo, tells a story of waking one night and seeing a light in Hearn's study. He was afraid Hearn might be ill, and cautiously opened the door and peeped in. There he saw the little genius, absorbed in his work, standing at his high desk, his nose almost touching the paper on which he wrote. Leaf after leaf was covered with his small, delicate handwriting. After a while, Amenomori goes on, he held up his head, "and what did I see? It was not the Hearn I was familiar with; his face was mysteriously white; his eyes gleamed. He appeared like one in touch with some unearthly presence." Many other peculiarities and idiosyncrasies used to cause his wife much perturbation of soul. "He had a rare sensibility of feeling,"[21] she says, "also peculiar tastes." One of his peculiar tastes, apparently, was his love of cemeteries. She could not find out what he found so interesting in ancient epitaphs and verses. When at Kumamoto he told her that he had "found a pleasant place." When he offered to take her there, she found that it was through a dark path leading to a cemetery. He said, "Stop and listen. Do you hear the voices of the frogs and the Uguisu singing?" The poor little woman could only tremble at the dark and the eerieness. [21] It is well to remember that Mrs. Hearn cannot speak or write a word of English; all her "Reminiscences" are transcribed for her by the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi. She gives a funny picture of herself and Lafcadio, in a dry-goods store, when clothes had to be bought "at the changing of the season," he selecting some gaudy garment with a large design of sea-waves or spider-nests, declaring the design was superb and the colour beautiful. "I often suspected him," the simple woman adds, "of having an unmistakable streak of passion for gay things--however, his quiet conscience held him back from giving way to it." His incurable dislike, too, to conform to any of the rules of etiquette--looked upon as all-important in Japan, especially for people in official positions--was a continued source of trouble to the little woman. She could hardly, she says, induce him to wear his "polite garments," which were _de rigueur_ at any official ceremony. On one occasion, indeed, he refused to appear when the Emperor visited the Tokyo College because he would not put on his frock coat and top hat. The difficulty of language was at first insuperable. After a time they instituted the "Hearn San Kotoba," or Hearnian language, as they called it, but in these Matsue days an interpreter had to be employed. The "race problem," however, was the real complication that beset these two. That comradeship such as we comprehend it in England could exist between two nationalities, so fundamentally different as Setsu Koizumi's and Lafcadio Hearn's, is improbable if not impossible. "Even my own little wife," Hearn writes years afterwards, "is somewhat mysterious still to me, though always in a lovable way--of course a man and a woman know each other's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race tendencies difficult to understand." CHAPTER XVIII THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI "The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them. And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable, so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for intellectual converse a man can't really have with women. Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many questions involved." As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them. On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of centuries of cultivation and care. The summer passed in this Japanese _Yashiki_ was as happy as any in Hearn's life, and one to which he perpetually looked back with longing regret. Wandering from room to room, sitting in sunned spaces where leaf shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft green, dreamy peace of the landscape garden, he found a sanctuary where the soul stopped elbowing and trampling, and being elbowed and trampled--a free, clear space, where he could see clearly, breathe serenely, fully. Discussions with publishers, differences of opinion with friends were soothed and forgotten; his domestic arrangements seemed all that he could have expected, and, as he was receiving a good salary, and life was not expensive in the old city, money difficulties for the moment receded into the back-ground. His health improved. He weighed, he said, twenty pounds more than he did when he first arrived ... but, he adds, this is perhaps because I am eating three full meals a day instead of two. Echoes from the outer world reached him at intervals, such as the announcement of the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland. He describes himself as dancing an Indian war-dance of exultation in his Japanese robes, to the unspeakable astonishment of his placid household. After which he passed two hours in a discourse in "the Hearnian dialect." Subject of exultation and discourse--the marriage of Miss Elizabeth Bisland. Hearn's description of the old _Yashiki_ garden is done with all the descriptive charm of which he was a master. Many others have described Japanese gardens, but none have imparted the mental "atmosphere," the special peculiarities that make them so characteristic of the genius of the people that have originated them. It is impossible to find space to follow him into all the details of his "garden folk lore" as he calls it; of _Hijo_, things without desire, such as stones and trees, and _Ujo_, things having desire, such as men and animals, the miniature hills clothed with old trees, the long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering shrubs, like river banks, verdant elevations rising from spaces of pale yellow sand, smooth as a surface of silk, miming the curves and meanderings of a river course. Much too beautiful, these sanded spaces, to be trodden on; the least speck of dirt would mar their effect, and it required the trained skill of an experienced native gardener--a delightful old man--to keep them in perfect form. Lightly and daintily as the shadows of the tremulous leaves of the bamboo-grove and the summer light that touches the grey stone lanterns, and the lotus flowers on the pond, so does his genius flit from subject to subject, conjuring up and idealising ancient tradition and superstitions. The whole of his work seems transfused with mystic light. We can hear him talking with Kinjuro, the venerable gardener; we can catch the song of the caged _Uguisu_, an inmate of the establishment, presented to him by one of the sweetest ladies in Japan, the daughter of the Governor of Izumo. The _Uguisu_, or Japanese nightingale, is supposed to repeat over and over again the sacred name of the Sutras, "Ho-ke-kyo," or Buddhist confession of faith. First the warble; then a pause of about five seconds, then a slow, sweet, solemn utterance of the holy name. They planted, his wife tells us, some morning glories in summer. He watched them with the greatest delight, until they bloomed, and then was equally wretched when he saw them withering. One early winter morning he noticed one tiny bloom, in spite of the sharp frost; he was delighted and surprised, and exclaimed in Japanese, "Utsukushii yuki, anata, nanbo shojik" (What a lovely courage, what a serious intention). When, the next morning, the old gardener picked it, Hearn was in despair. "That old man may be good and innocent, but he was brutal to my flower," he said. He was depressed all day after this incident. He had already, he declared, become a little too fond of his dwelling-place; each day after returning from his college duties and exchanging his teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable Japanese robe, he found more than compensation for the weariness of five class-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shady verandah overlooking the gardens. The antique garden walls, high mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seemed to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There were no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of _semi_, or, at intervals, the solitary splash of a diving frog, and those walls secluded him from much more than city streets; outside them hummed the changed Japan telegraphs, and newspapers, and steam-ships. Within dwelt the all-reposing peace of nature, and the dreams of the sixteenth century; there was a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet; perhaps the gentle beauty of dead ladies who lived when all the surroundings were new. For they were the gardens of the past. The future would know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius could produce. The working of Hearn's heart and mind at this time is an interesting psychological study. He had been wont to declare that his vocation was a monastic one. He now initiated an asceticism as severe in its discipline as that of St. Francis of Assisi on the Umbrian hills. The code on which he moulded his life was formulated according to the teaching of the great Gautama. If the soul is to attain life and effect progress, continual struggle against temptation is necessary. Appetites must be restrained. Indulgence means retrogression. It is not without a sense of amusement that we observe the complex personality, Lafcadio Hearn, in the Matsue phase of self-suppression and discipline. Well might Kinjuro, the old gardener, tell him that he had seven souls. A dignified university professor had taken the place of the erratic Bohemian who frequented the levee at Cincinnati, and of the starving little journalist who, arrayed in reefer coats, flannel shirt, and outlandish hat, used to appear in the streets of New Orleans. Now clad in official robes, he passed out through a line of prostrate servants on his way to college, each article of clothing having been handed to him, as he dressed, with endless bows of humility and submission by the daughter of a line of feudal nobles. He gives to his sister the same account of his austere, simple day, as to Basil Hall Chamberlain: the early morning prayer and greeting of the sun, his meals eaten alone before the others, the prayers again at eventide, some of them said for him as head of the house. Then the little lamps of the _kami_ before the shrine were left to burn until they went out; while all the household waited for him to give the signal for bedtime, unless, as sometimes, he became so absorbed in writing as to forget the hour. Sometimes, however, in spite of severe discipline and mortification of the flesh, ghostly reminders returned to prove that the old self was very real indeed. The "Markham Girl" is certainly well done. "I asked myself: 'If it was I?' and conscience answered: 'If it was you, in spite of love, and duty, and honour, and Hell fire staring you in the face, you would have gone after her....'" Then he adds a tirade as to his being a liar and quibbler when he attempts to contradict the statement, "and that's why I am poor and unsuccessful, void of mental balance, and an exile in Japan." Or a sinister note is struck, as in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, alluding to a story in Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," "The New Melusine," of which the application is apparent. A man was loved by a fairy; and she told him she must either say good-bye, or that he must become little like herself and go to dwell with her in her father's kingdom. She put a gold ring on his finger that made him small, and they entered into their tiny world. The man was greatly petted by the fairy folk, and had everything given to him which he could desire. In spite of it all, however, although he had a pretty child too, he became ungrateful and selfish and got tired, and dreamed of being a giant. He filed the ring off his finger, and became big again, and ran away to spend the gold in riotous living. "The fairy was altogether Japanese--don't you think so? And the man was certainly a detestable fellow." Though the little man permitted himself such outbursts as this on paper, he soon crept back to the grim reality of a wooden pillow and Japanese food; back to a kingdom undisturbed by electrical storms of passion, to interviews with college students and communion with a wife whose knowledge was circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." "Never be frightened at anything but your own heart," he writes to one of these Matsue pupils, when giving him good advice some years later. Poor Lafcadio! Good reason had he to be frightened of that wild, wayward, undisciplined heart that so often had betrayed him in days gone by. When in Japan we heard whispers of Hearn having fallen a victim to the wiles of the accomplished ladies who abide in the street of the Geisha. After his marriage to Setsu Koizumi, however, not even from his enemies, and their name was legion, at Kumamoto, Kobe, or Tokyo, did we ever hear the faintest suggestion of scandal connected with his name. In Japan, where there is no privacy of any sort in everyday life, where, if a man is faithless to his wife, all the quarter where he lives knows of it, and the wife accepts it as her _Ingwa_--or sin in a former state of existence--it would have been impossible for Hearn to have stepped over the line, however tentatively, without its being known and talked about. A pleasant vision is the one we conjure up of him on the verandah of the old _Yashiki_, squatted, Buddha-wise, smoking a tiny long-stemmed Japanese pipe, his little wife seated near him, relating, by the aid of the interpreter, the superstitions and legends of the ancient Province of the Gods. She tells us how he took even the most trivial tale to heart, murmuring, "How interesting," his face sometimes even turning pale while he looked fixedly in front of him. Under these conditions of tranquillity and well-being his genius seemed to expand and develop. The "Shirabyoshi,"[22] or "Dancing Girl," the finest piece of imaginative work he ever did, was conceived and written during the course of the summer passed in the old _Yashiki_. Its first inception is indicated in a letter to Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1891. "There was a story some time ago in the _Asahi-shimbun_[23] about a 'Shirabyoshi,' that brought tears to my eyes, as slowly and painfully translated by a friend." [22] "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [23] The _Asahi-shimbun_ was one of the principal Japanese illustrated daily papers, printed and published at Osaka. The "Dancing Girl" has been translated into four foreign languages--German, Swedish, French and Italian--a writer in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ declares it to be one of the love-stories of the world. The only remarkable fact is, that it has not made more of a stir in England. The hero is the well-known Japanese painter Buncho; the heroine a Geisha. There is something simple, natural, tragic and yet intangible and ethereal in the manner in which Hearn tells it; the presence of a vital spirit, the essential element of passion and regret, the throb of warm human emotion, in spite of its exotic setting, brings it into kinship with the human experience of all times and countries. There is no attempt at scenery, only a woman hidden away in the heart of nature, in a lonely cottage amongst the hills, with her love, her memory, her regret. Into this solitary life enters youth, attractive, beautiful, the possibility of further romance; but no romance other than the one she cherishes is for her. Unfortunately it is only possible to give the merest sketch of the story that Hearn unfolds with consummate artistic skill. He begins with an account of dancing-girls, of the education they have to undergo, how they use their accomplishments to cast a web of enchantment over men. It is one of these apparently soulless creatures, a dancing-girl, a woman of the town, wearing clothes belonging neither to maid nor wife, that he makes the central figure of his story; and by her constancy to ideal things, her pure and simple passion, he thrills us through with the sense of the impermanence of humanity and beauty, and the strength of love overcoming and conquering the tragedy of life. How different the manner in which he treats the scenes between the young man and the beautiful dancing-girl, compared to the manner in which his French prototypes--in which Pierre Loti, for instance, whom Hearn declares to be one of the greatest living artists--would have treated it. Far ahead has he passed beyond them; the moral, the life of the soul, is never lost sight of, in not one line does he play on the lower emotions of his readers. A young artist was travelling on foot over the mountains from Kyoto to Yeddo, and lost his way.... He had almost resigned himself to passing the night under the stars, when, down the farther slope of the hill, a single thin yellow ray of light fell upon the darkness. Making his way towards it, he found that it was a small cottage, apparently a peasant's house.... Not until he had knocked and called several times, did he hear any stir. At last, however, a feminine voice asked what he wanted. He told her, and after a brief delay the storm doors were pushed open and a woman appeared with a paper lantern. She scrutinised him in silence, and then said briefly, "Wait, I will bring water." Having washed from his feet the dust of travel, he was shown into a neat room, and a brazier was set before him, and a cotton _zabuton_ for him to kneel upon. He was struck by the beauty of his hostess, as well as by her goodness, when she told him that he might stay there that night.... "I will have no time to sleep to-night," she said, "therefore you can have my bed and paper mosquito curtain." After he had slept a while, the mysterious sound of feet moving rapidly fell upon his ears; he slipped out of bed, and creeping to the edge of the screen, peeped through. There before her illuminated _Butsudan_, he saw the young woman dancing. Turning suddenly she met his eyes, but before he had time to speak, she smiled: "You must have thought me mad when you saw me dancing, and I am not angry with you for trying to find out what I was doing." Then she went on to tell him how a youth and she had fallen in love with one another, and how they had gone away and built the cottage in the mountains, and each evening she had danced to please him. One cold winter he fell sick and died; since then she had lived alone with nothing to console her but the memory of her lover, laying daily before his tablet the customary offerings, and nightly dancing to please his spirit. After she had told her tale, she begged the young man to go back and try again to sleep. On leaving next morning, he wanted to pay for the hospitality he had received. "What I did was done for kindness alone, and it certainly was not worth money," she said, as she dismissed him. Then, pointing out the path he had to follow, she watched him until he passed from sight, his heart, as he went, full of the charm and beauty of the woman he had left behind. Many years passed by; the painter had become old, and rich, and famous. One day there came to his house an old woman, who asked to speak with him. The servants, thinking her a common beggar, turned her away, but she came so persistently that at last they had to tell their master. When, at his orders, the old woman was admitted, she began untying the knots of a bundle she had brought with her; inside were quaint garments of silk, a wonderful costume, the attire of a _Shirabyoshi_. With many beautiful and pathetic touches, Hearn tells how, as he watched her smooth out the garments with her trembling fingers, a memory stirred in the master's brain; again in the soft shock of recollection, he saw the lonely mountain dwelling in which he had received unremunerated hospitality, the faintly burning light before the Buddhist shrine, the strange beauty of a woman dancing there alone in the dead of the night. "Pardon my rudeness for having forgotten your face for the moment," he said, as he rose and bowed before her, "but it is more than forty years since we last saw each other; you received me at your house. You gave up to me the only bed you had. I saw you dance and you told me all your story." The old woman, quite overcome, told him that, in the course of years, she had been obliged, through poverty, to part with her little house, and, becoming weak and old, could no longer dance each evening before the _Butsudan_. Therefore, she had sought out the master, since she desired for the sake of the dead a picture of herself in the costume and attitude of the dance that she might hang it up before the _Butsudan_. "I am not now as I was then," she added. "But, oh, master, make me young again. Make me beautiful that I may seem beautiful to him, for whose sake I, the unworthy, beseech this!" He told her to come next day, and that he only would be too delighted to thus repay the debt he had owed her for so many years. So he painted her, as she had been forty years before. When she saw the picture, she clasped her hands in delight, but how was she ever to repay the master? She had nothing to offer but her _Shirabyoshi_ garments. He took them, saying he would keep them as a memory, but that she must allow him to place her beyond the reach of want. No money would she accept, but thanking him again and again, she went away with her treasure. The master had her followed, and on the next day took his way to the district indicated amidst the abodes of the poor and outcast. He tapped on the door of the old woman's dwelling, and receiving no answer pushed open the shutter, and peered through the aperture. As he stood there the sensation of the moment when, as a tired lad, forty years before, he had stood, pleading for admission to the lonesome little cottage amongst the hills, thrilled back to him. Entering softly, he saw the woman lying on the floor seemingly asleep. On a rude shelf he recognised the ancient _Butsudan_ with its tablet, and now, as then, a tiny lamp was burning; in front of it stood the portrait he had painted. "The master called the sleeper's name once or twice. Then, suddenly, as she did not answer, he saw that she was dead, and he wondered while he gazed upon her face, for it seemed less old. A vague sweetness, like the ghost of youth, had returned to it; the wrinkles and the lines of sorrow had been strangely smoothed by the touch of a phantom Master mightier than he." CHAPTER XIX KUMAMOTO "Of course Urashima was bewildered by the gods. But who is not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima Mio-jin.... "These are quite differently managed in the West. After disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with visible gods? "Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the feeling of a season not to be also related to something real in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors." Only for a year did Hearn's sojourn in Fairyland last. The winter following his arrival was a very severe one. The northern coast of Japan lies open to the Arctic winds blowing over the snow-covered plains of Siberia. Heavy falls of snow left drifts five feet high round the _Yashiki_ on the hill. The large rooms, so delightful in the summer with their verandah opening on the garden, were cold as "cattle barns" in winter, with nothing but charcoal braziers to heat them. He dare not face another such experience, and asked, if possible, to be transferred to warmer quarters. Aided again by his friend, Professor Chamberlain, the authorities at Tokyo were induced to give him the professorship of English at the Imperial University at Kumamoto. Kumamoto is situated in Kyushu, facing Formosa and the Chinese coast; the climate, therefore, is much milder than that of Matsue. Here, however, began Hearn's first disillusionment; like Urashima Taro, having dwelt within the precincts of Fairyland he felt the shock of returning to Earth again. The city struck him as being ugly and commonplace, a half-Europeanised garrison town, resounding to the sounds of bugles and the drilling of soldiers, instead of pilgrim songs and temple bells. "But Lord! I must try to make money; for nothing is sure in Japan and I am now so tied down to the country that I can't quit it, except for a trip, whether the Government employs me or not." He began to look back with regret to the days passed at Matsue. "You must travel out of Izumo," he said, "after a long residence, and find out how unutterably different it is from other places,--for instance, this country ... the charming simplicity of the Izumo folk does not here exist." All his Izumo servants had accompanied him to his new quarters, and apparently all his wife's family, for he mentions the fact that he has nine lives dependent upon him: wife, wife's mother, wife's father, wife's adopted mother, wife's father's father, then servants, and a Buddhist student. This wouldn't do in America, he says to Ellwood Hendrik, but it is nothing in Japan. The moral burden, however, was heavy enough; he indulged in the luxury of filial piety, and it was impossible to let a little world grow up round him, to depend on him, and then break it all up--the good and evil results of "filial piety" are only known to orientals, and an oriental he had now become. His people felt like fish out of water, everything surrounding them was so different from their primitive home in Izumo. A goat in the next yard, "_mezurashii kedamono_," filled his little wife with an amused wonder. Some geese and a pig also filled her with surprise, such animals did not exist in the highlands of Japan. The Kumamoto Government College was one of the largest in Japan,--came next, indeed, to the Imperial University in Tokyo in importance. It was run on the most approved occidental lines. A few of the boys still adhered to their Japanese dress, but most of them adopted the military uniform now, as a rule, worn in Japanese colleges. There were three classes, corresponding with three higher classes of the _Jinjo Chugakko_--and two higher classes. He did not now teach on Saturdays. There were no stoves--only _hibachi_. The library was small, and the English books were not good. There was a building in which Jiu-jitsu was taught; and separate buildings for sleeping, eating, and bathing. The bath-room was a surprise. Thirty or forty students could bathe at the same time; and four hundred could sit down to meals in the great dining-hall. There was a separate building, also, for the teaching of chemistry, natural history, etc.; and a small museum. Hearn apparently foregathered with none of the masters of the college, except the old teacher of Chinese. The others he simply saluted morning and evening, and in the intervals between classes sat in a corner to himself smoking his pipe. "You talk of being without intellectual companionship!" he writes to Hendrik. "OH YE EIGHT HUNDRED MYRIADS OF GODS! What would you do if you were me? Lo! The illusion is gone! Japan in Kyushu is like Europe--except I have no friend. The differences in ways of thinking, and the difficulties of language, render it impossible for an _educated_ Japanese to find pleasure in the society of a European. My scholars in this great Government school are not boys, but men. They speak to me only in class. The teachers never speak to me at all. I go to the college and return after class,--always alone, no mental company but books. But at home everything is sweet." In consequence of this isolation, or because of the softening influence of matrimony, here at Kumamoto he seemed for the first time to awake to the fact of having relations in that distant western land he had left so many years before. "Our soul, or souls, ever wanders back to its own kindred," he says to his sister. His father, Charles Bush Hearn, had left three children by his second wife (daughters), all born in India. Invalided home, Charles Hearn had died, in the Red Sea, of Indian fever; the three orphan children and his widow continued their journey to Ireland. At their mother's death, which occurred a few years later, the girls were placed under the guardianship of various members of the family; two of them ultimately married; one of them a Mr. Brown, the other a Mr. Buckley Atkinson. The unmarried one, Miss Lillah Hearn, went out to Michigan in America, to stop with Lafcadio's brother, and her own half-brother, Daniel James Hearn, or Jim, as he was usually called. Public interest was gradually awakening with regard to Japanese affairs. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's and Satow's books were looked upon as standard works to refer to for information concerning the political and social affairs of the extraordinary little people who were working their way to the van in the Far East. But, above all, Lafcadio Hearn's articles contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_, afterwards published under the title of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," had claimed public attention. Miss Lillah Hearn was the first member of the family to write to this half-brother, who was becoming so famous, but received no answer. Then Mrs. Brown, the other sister, approached him, silence greeted her efforts as well. On hearing of his marriage to a Japanese lady, Mrs. Atkinson, the youngest sister, wrote. Whether it was that she softened the exile's heart in his expatriation by that sympathy and innate tact which are two of her distinguished qualities, it is impossible to say, but her letter was answered. This strange relative of theirs who had gone to Japan, adopted Japanese dress and habits, and married a Japanese lady, had become somewhat of a legendary character to his quiet-going Irish kindred. The arrival of the first letter, therefore, was looked upon as quite an event and was passed from house to house, and hand to hand, becoming considerably mutilated in its journeyings to and fro. The first page is entirely gone, and the second page so erased and torn that it is only decipherable here and there. We are enabled to put an approximate date to it by his reference to Miss Bisland's marriage, of which he had heard towards the end of his stay at Matsue. "I have written other things, but am rather ashamed of them," he adds. "So Miss Bisland has married and become Mrs. Wetmore. She is as rich at least as she could wish to be, but I have not heard from her for more than a year. I suppose friendship ends with marriage. If my sister was not married, I think--I only think--I would feel more brotherly. "Well, I will say _au revoir_. Many thanks for the letter you wrote me. I would like Please give me you can. Don't think busy to write--much I teach for a week--English and Elementary Latin: the time I study and write for pleasure, not for profit. There isn't much profit in literature unless, as a novelist, one happens to please a popular taste,--which isn't good taste. Some exceptions there are, like Rudyard Kipling; but your brother has not his inborn genius for knowing, seizing and painting human nature. Love to you and yours--from "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Tetorihomnatu_ 34, "_Kumamoto, Kyushu, "Japan._" Mrs. Atkinson replied immediately, thus beginning a series of delightful letters, which alas! relate, so many of them, to intimate family affairs that it is impossible to publish them in their original form. "My sweet little sister," he wrote in answer, "your letter was more than personally grateful: it had also an unexpected curious interest for me, as a revelation of things I did not know. I don't know anything of my relations--their names, places, occupations, or even number: therefore your letter interested me in a peculiar way, apart from its amiable charm. Before I talk any more, I thank you for the photographs. They have made me prouder than I ought to be. I did not know that I had such nice kindred and such a fairy niece. My wife stole your picture from me almost as soon as I had received it, to caress it, and pray to Buddha and all the ancient gods to love the original: she has framed it in a funny little Japanese frame, and suspended it in that sacred part of the house, called the Toko, a sort of alcove, in which only beautiful things are displayed. Formerly the gods were placed there (many hundred years ago); but now the gods have a separate shrine in the household, and the Toko is only the second Holy place...." [Illustration: Mrs. Atkinson (Hearn's Half-sister).] The next letter is dated June 27th, '92, 25th year of Meiji. "Dear sister, I love you a little bit more on hearing that you are little. The smaller you are the more I will be fond of you. As for marriage being a damper upon affection between kindred, it is true only of Occidental marriages. The Japanese wife is only the shadow of her husband, infinitely unselfish and naïve in all things.... "If you want me to see you soon, you must pray to the Occidental gods to make me suddenly rich. However, I doubt if they have half as much influence as the gods of Japan,--who are helping me to make a bank account as fast as honest work can produce such a result. I have no babies; and don't expect to have, and may be able to cross the seas one of these days to linger in your country a while. But really I don't know. I drift with the current of events. "As for my book on Japan,--my first book,--there is much to do yet,--it ought to be out in the Fall. It will be called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," and will treat of strange things. "I would like to see you very much; for you are too tantalizing in your letters, and tell me nothing about your inner self. I want to find out what the angel shut up in your heart is like. No doubt very sweet, but I would like to pull it out, and stroke its wings, and make it chipper a little. As for the little ones, make them love me; for if they see me without previous discipline, they will be afraid of my ugly face when I come--I send you a photo of one-half of it, the other is not pleasant, I assure you: like the moon, I show only one side of myself. In Spanish countries they call me Leucadio--much easier for little folk to pronounce. By the way, you never gave me your address,--sign of impulsive haste, like my own. "With best love, "LAFCADIO HEARN." Then in January, 1903, he writes again, "Your kind sweet letter reached me at Christmas time, where there is no Christmas. Don't you know that you are very happy to be able to live in England? I am afraid you do not. Perhaps you could not know without having lived much elsewhere.... Your photo has come. The same eyes, the same chin, brow, nose: we are strangely alike--excepting that you are very comely, and I very much the reverse--partly by exaggeration of the traits which make your face beautiful, and partly because I am disfigured by the loss of an eye--punched out at school.... Won't you please give my kindest thanks to your husband for the pains he has taken to please me! I hope to meet him some day, and thank him in person, if I don't leave my bones in some quaint and curious Buddhist cemetery out here...." The wonderful series of letters to Professor Hall Chamberlain, recently published by Miss Bisland, are also written from Kumamoto and Kobe, and to a great extent run simultaneously with those to his sister. He had a habit of repeating himself; the same expressions, the same quotations, appear in both series, and sometimes are again repeated in his published essays. When struck by an idea or incident, it seems as if he must impart it as something noteworthy to every one with whom he was holding communion. He gives, for instance, the same account to his sister of the routine of his Japanese day as related to Professor Hall Chamberlain and Ellwood Hendrik. We can imagine his rigidly Protestant Irish relations amidst the conventional surroundings of an Irish country house, following minutely the services of the established church as preached to them by their local clergyman, utterly bewildered in reading the description of the outlandish cult to which he, their relation, subscribed in Japan. The awakening to the rising of the sun with the clapping of hands of servants in the garden, the prayers at the _Butsudan_, the putting out the food for the dead, all the strange, quaint customs that mark the passing of the day in the ancient Empire of Nippon. Not by thousands of miles only was he separated from his occidental relations, but by immemorial centuries of thought. On May 21st, 1893, there is another letter to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson, in which he first announces his expectation of becoming a father. It is so characteristic of Lafcadio to take it for granted that the child would be a boy, and already to make plans for his education abroad. "_Tsuboi, Nichihorabata_ 35, _Kumamoto, "Kyushu, Japan. May_ 21_st_, '93. "MY DEAR MINNIE: "(I think 'sister' is too formal, I shall call you by your pet name hereafter.) First let me thank you very, very much for the photographs. I was extremely pleased with that of your husband;--and thought at once, 'Ah! the lucky girl!' For your husband, my dear Sis, is no ordinary man. There are faces that seen for the first time leave an impression which gives the whole of the man, _ineffaceably_. And they are rare. I think I know your husband already, admire him and love him,--not simply for your sake, but for his own. He [is] all man,--and strong,--a good oak for your ivy. I don't mean physical strength, though he seems (from the photograph) to have an uncommon amount of it, but strength of character. You can feel pretty easy about the future of your little ones with such a father. (Don't read all this to him, though,--or he will think I am trying to flatter either him or you,--though, of course, you can tell him something of the impression his photo gives me, in a milder form.) And you don't know what the real impression is,--nor how it is enhanced by the fact that I have been for three years isolated from all English or European intercourse,--never see an English face, except that of some travelling missionary, which is apt to be ignoble. The Oriental face is somewhat inscrutable,--like the faces of the Buddhist gods. In youth it has quite a queer charm,--the charm of mysterious placidity, of smiling calm. (But among the modernised, college-bred Japanese this is lost.) What one never--or hardly ever--sees among these Orientals is a face showing strong character. The race is strangely impersonal. The women are divinely sweet in temper; the men are mysteries, and not altogether pleasant. I feel myself in exile; and your letters and photographs only make me homesick for English life,--just one plunge into it again. "--Will I ever see you? Really I don't know. Some day I should like to visit England,--provided I could assure myself of sufficient literary work there to justify a stay of at least half-a-year, and the expense of the voyage. Eventually that might be possible. I would never go as a mere guest--not even a sister's; but I should like to be able to chat with the sister occasionally on leisure-evenings. I am quite a savage on the subject of independence, let me tell you; and would accept no kindnesses except those of your company at intervals. But all this is not of to-day. I cannot take my wife to Europe, it would be impossible to accustom her to Western life,--indeed it would be cruel even to try. But I may have to educate my child abroad,--which would be an all-powerful reason for the voyage. However, I would prefer an Italian, French, or Spanish school-life to an English one. "--Oh yes, about the book--'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan' is now in press. It will appear in two volumes, without illustrations. The publishers are Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston,--the best in America. Whether you like the book or no, I can't tell. I have an idea you do not care much about literary matters;--that you are too much wife and mother for that;--that your romances and poetry are in your own home. And such romance and poetry is the best of all. However, if you take some interest in trying to look at ME between the lines, you may have patience to read the work. Don't try to read it, if you don't like. "--But here is something you might do for me, as I am not asking for certain friendly offices. When the book is criticised, you might kindly send me a few of the best reviews. Miss Bisland, while in London, wrote me the reviews of some of my other books had been very kindly; but she never dreamed of supplementing this pleasant information by cutting out a few specimens for me.--By the way, she has married well, you know,--has become awfully rich and fashionable, and would not even condescend to look at me if she passed me in Broadway--I _suppose_. But she well deserved her good fortune; for she was certainly one of the most gifted girls I ever knew, and has succeeded in everything--against immense obstacles--with no help except that of her own will and genius. "--And now I must give you a lecture. I don't want more than one sister,--haven't room in my heart for more. All appear to be as charming as they are sweet looking. I am interested to hear how they succeed, etc., etc. But don't ask me to write to everybody, and don't show everybody my letters. I can't diffuse myself very far. You said you would be 'my favourite.' A nice way you go about it! Suppose I tell you that I am a very jealous, nasty brother; and that if I can't have one sister by herself I don't want any sister at all! Would that be very, very naughty? But it is true. And now you can be shocked just as much as you please. "--Yes, I have lost an eye, and look horrible. The operation in Dublin did not cause the disfigurement, but a blow, or rather the indirect results of a blow, received from a play-fellow. "--You ask me if I should like a photograph of father. I certainly should, if you can procure me one without trouble. I hope--much more than to see England,--to visit India, and try to find some tradition of him. I did not know positively, until last year, that father had been in the West Indies. When I went there, I had the queerest, ghostliest sensation of having seen it all before. I think I should experience even stranger sensations in India! The climate would be agreeable for me. Remember, I passed fourteen years of my life south of winter. The first snow I saw from 1876 to 1890 was on my way through Canada to Japan. Indeed, if ever I become quite independent, I want to return to the tropics. "Enough to tire your eyes,--isn't it?--for this time. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "In the names of the eight hundred myriads of Gods,--do give me your address. The only way I have been able to write you is by finding the word _Portadown_ in _Whittaker's Almanac_. You are a careless, naughty 'Sis.' "I enclose my name and address in Japanese. "YAKUMO KOIZUMI, "_Tsuboi, "Nichihorabata 35, "Kumamoto, Kyushu_." All the women are making funny little Japanese baby-clothes, and all the Buddhist Divinities, who watch over little children, are being prayed to.... "Letters of congratulation," he said, "were coming from all directions, for the expectation of a child is always a subject of great gladness in Japan.... Behind all this there is a universe of new sensations, revelations of things in Buddhist faith which are very beautiful and touching. About the world an atmosphere of delicious, sacred naïveté,--difficult to describe because resembling nothing in the Western world...." Hearn's account of his home before the birth of his son throws most interesting lights on Japanese methods of thought and daily life. He refers to the pretty custom of a woman borrowing a baby when she is about to become a mother. It is thought an honour to lend it. And it is extraordinarily petted in its new home. The one his wife borrowed was only six months old, but expressed in a supreme degree all the Japanese virtues; docile to the degree of going to sleep when bidden, and of laughing when it awakened. The eerie wisdom of its face seemed to suggest a memory of all its former lives. The incident he relates also of a little Samurai boy whom he and his wife had adopted is interesting as showing the Spartan discipline exercised over Japanese children from earliest youth, enabling them in later life to display that iron self-control that has astonished the world; interesting, also, as showing how nothing escaped Hearn's quick observation and assiduous intellect. Hearn, at first, wanted to fondle the child, and make much of him, but he soon found that it was not in accordance with custom. He therefore ceased to take notice of him; and left him under the control of the women of the house. Their treatment of him Hearn thought peculiar; the little fellow was never praised and rarely scolded. One day he let a little cup fall and broke it. No notice was taken of the accident for fear of giving him pain. Suddenly, though the face remained quite smilingly placid as usual, he could not control his tears. As soon as they saw him cry, everybody laughed and said kind things to him, till he began to laugh, too. But what followed was more surprising. Apparently he had been distantly treated. One day he did not return from school until three hours after the usual time; suddenly the women began to cry--they were, indeed, more deeply affected than their treatment of the boy would have justified. The servants ran hither and thither in their anxiety to find him. It turned out that he had only been taken to a teacher's house for something relating to school matters. As soon as his voice was heard at the door, every one was quiet, cold, and distantly polite again. On September 17th he writes again to his sister, thanking her for a copy she had sent him of the _Saturday Review_. "You could send me nothing more pleasing, or more useful in a literary way. It is all the more welcome as I am really living in a hideous isolation, far away from books, and book-shops, and Europeans. When I can get--which I hope is the next year--into a more pleasant locality, I shall try to pick out some pretty Oriental tales to send to the little ones." He was not able, he goes on, to go far from Kumamoto, not liking to leave his little wife too long alone; so his vacation was rather monotonous. He travelled only as far as Nagasaki. It was quaint and pretty, but hotter than any West Indian port in the hot season. He was economising, he said, and had saved nearly three thousand five hundred dollars. Once he had provided for his wife, he hoped to be able to make a few long voyages to places east of Japan. "You are much to be envied," he goes on to his sister, "for your chances of travel. What a pity you are not able to devote yourself to writing and painting in a place like Algiers--full of romance and picturesqueness. If you go there, don't fail to see the old Arab part of the city--the Kasbah, I think they call it. How about the Continent? Have you tried Southern Italy? And don't you think that one gets all the benefit of travel only by keeping away from fashion-resorts and places consecrated by conventionalism? Nothing to me is more frightful than a fashionable seaside resort--such as those of the Atlantic Coast. My happiest sojourns of this sort have been in little fishing villages, and little queer old unknown towns, where there are no big vulgar hotels, and where one can dress and do exactly as one pleases. "What will you do with your little man when he grows up? Army, or Civil Service? Whatever you do, never let him go to America, and lose all his traditions. Australia would be far better. I expect he will be gloriously well able to take care of himself anywhere,--judging by his father, but I have come to the belief that one cannot too soon begin the cultivation of a single aim and single talent in life. This is the age of specialism. No man can any longer be successful in many things. Even the 'general practitioner' in medicine has almost become obsolete. "Nothing seems to me more important now for a little boy than the training of his linguistic faculties,--giving him every encouragement in learning languages by ear--(the only natural way); and your travelling sometimes with him will help you to notice how his faculties are in that direction. But perhaps it will be possible for him to pass all his life in England. (For me, England, Ireland and Scotland mean the same thing.) That would be pleasant indeed.... When I think of your little man with the black eyes, I hope that his life will always be in the circle of English traditions, wherever the English Flag flies, there remain. "I suppose you know that in this Orient the construction of the family is totally different to what it is in Europe.... We are too conceitedly apt to think that what is good for Englishmen is good for all nations,--our ethics, our religion, our costumes, etc. The plain facts of the case are that all Eastern races lose, instead of gaining, by contact with us. They imitate our vices instead of our virtues, and learn all our weaknesses without getting any of our strength. Already statistics show an enormous increase of crime in Japan as the result of 'Christian civilisation'; and the open ports show a demoralisation utterly unknown in the interior of the country, and unimaginable in the old feudal days before 1840 or 1850...." In the next letter he gives his sister a minute account of his Japanese manner of life on the floor without chairs or tables. It has been described so often by visitors to Japan, and by Hearn himself, that it is unnecessary to repeat it here. He ends his letter:-- "I am now so used to the Japanese way of living, that when I have to remain all day in Western clothes, I feel very unhappy; and I think I should not find European life pleasant in summer time. Some day, I will send you a photograph of my house. "I wish you much happiness and good health and pleasant days of travel, and thank you much for the paper. "This letter is rather rambling, but perhaps you will find something interesting in it. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO." In September comes another letter to Mrs. Atkinson: "You actually talk about writing too often,--which is strange! There is only this difficulty about writing,--that we both know so little of each other that topics interesting to both can be only guessed at. That should be only a temporary drawback. "The more I see your face in photos, the more I feel drawn toward you. Lillah and the other sister represent different moods and tenses pictorially. You seem most near to me,--as I felt on first reading your letter. You have strength, too, where I have not. You are certainly very sensitive, but also self-repressed. I think you are not inclined to make mistakes. I think you can be quickly offended, and quick to forgive--if you understand the offence to be only a mistake. You would not forgive at all should you discern behind the fault a something much worse than mistake,--and in this you would be right. You are inclined to reserve, and not to bursts of joy;--you have escaped my extremes of depression and extremes of exultation. You see very quickly beyond the present relations of a fact--I think all this. But of course you have been shaped in certain things by social influences I have never had,--so that you must have perfect poise where I would flounder and stumble. "But imagining won't do always. I should like to know more of you than a photograph or a rare letter can tell. I don't know, remember, anything _at all_ about you. I do not know where you were born, where you were educated,--anything of your life; or what is much more, infinitely more important, I don't know your emotions and thoughts and feelings and experiences in the past. What you are now, I can guess. But what _were_ you,--long ago? What memories most haunt you of places and people you liked? If you could tell me some of these, how pleasantly we might compare notes. Mere facts tell little: the interest of personality lies most in the infinitely special way that facts affect the person. I am very curious about you,--but, don't take this too seriously; because though my wishes are strong, my disinclination to cause you pain is stronger; and you have told me that writing is sometimes fatiguing to you. It were so much better could we pass a day or two together. "You must not underrate yourself as you did in your last. Your few lines about the scenery,--short as they were,--convinced me that you could do something literary of a very nice sort had you the time and chance to give yourself to any such work. But I do not wish that you would--except to read the result; for literary labour is extremely severe work, even after the secret of method is reached. I am only beginning to learn; and to produce five pages means to write at least twenty-five. Enthusiasms and inspirations have least to do with the matter. The real work is condensing, compressing, choosing, changing, shifting words and phrases,--studying values of colour and sound and form in words; and when all is done, the result satisfies only for a time. What I wrote six years ago, I cannot bear the sight of to-day. If I had been a genius, I wonder whether I would feel the same. "Romances are not in novels, but in lives. Can you not tell me some of yours when you are feeling very, very well, and don't know what to do? What surprised me was your observation about 'sentimental' in your last letter,--and that upon such a worthy topic! What can you think of me? And here in this Orient, where the spirit of more ancient faiths enters into one's blood with the sense of the doctrine of filial piety, and the meaning of ancestor worship,--how very, very strange and cruel it seems to me that my little sister should be afraid of being thought _sentimental_ about the photograph of her father! What self-repression does all this mean, and what iron influences in Western life--English life that I have almost forgotten! However, character loses nothing: under the exterior ice, the Western could only gain warmth and depth if it be of the right sort. I hope, nevertheless, my little sister will be just as 'sentimental' as she possibly can when she writes to Japan,--and feel sure of more than sympathy and gratitude. Unless she means by 'sentimental' only something in regard to style of writing--in which case I assure her that she cannot err. If she is afraid of being thought really sentimental, I should be much more afraid of meeting her,--for I should wish to say sweet things and to hear them, too, should I deserve. "At all events remember that you have given me something very precious,--not only in itself,--but precious because precious to you. And it shall never be lost,--in spite of earthquakes and possible fires." (The something he alludes to as "very precious" was a photograph of their father, Charles Hearn, that Mrs. Atkinson had sent him.) "--I wish I could talk to you more about Father and India. I wish to ask a hundred thousand questions. But on paper it is difficult to express all one wishes to say. And letters of mere questions carry no joy with them, and no sympathy. So I shall not ask _now_ any more. And you must not tire your dear little aching head to write when you do not feel well. I shall write again soon. For a little while good-bye, with love and all sweet hope to you ever, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Kumamoto, "Kyushu, Japan. "Jan_. 30, '94." On November 17th, 1893, at one o'clock in the morning, Hearn's eldest son, Leopold Kazuo Koizumi, was born. He declared that the strangest and strongest sensation of his life was hearing for the first time the cry of his own child. There was a strange feeling of being double; something more, also, impossible to analyse--the echo in a man's heart of all the sensations felt by all the fathers and mothers of his race at a similar instant in the past. A few weeks later he writes to his sister, giving her news about his son. "The physician says that from the character of his bones he ought to become very tall. He is very dark. He has my nose and promises to have the Hearn eyebrows; but he has the Oriental eye. Whether he will be handsome or ugly, I can't tell: his little face changes every day;--he has already looked like five different people. When first born, I thought him the prettiest creature I ever saw. But that did not last. I am so inexperienced in the matter of children that I cannot trust myself to make any predictions. Of course I find the whole world changed about me.... "My wife," he goes on, "is quite well. Happily the old military caste to which she belongs is a strong one, but how sacred and terrible a thing is maternity. When it was all over I felt very humble and grateful to the Unknowable Power which had treated us so kindly. The possibility of men being cruel to the women who bear their children seemed at the moment to darken existence. "I have received your last beautiful photograph--or I should say two:--the vignette is, of course, the most lovable, but both are very, very nice. I gave the full-figure one to Setsu. She would like to have her boy grow up looking either like you or like Posey--but most like you. (Thanks also for the pretty photo of yourself and Posey: Posey is decidedly handsome.) But I fear my son can never be like either of you. He is altogether Oriental so far,--looks at me with the still calm Buddhist eyes of the Far East, and the soul of another race. Even his nose will never declare his Western blood; for the finest class of the Japanese offer many strongly aquiline faces. Setsu is a Samurai, and though her own features are the reverse of aquiline, there are aquiline faces among the kindred. "I am awfully anxious that the boy should get to be like you. I have had your most beautiful photograph copied by a clever photographer here and have sent the copies to friends, saying, 'this is my sister; and this is the boy. I want him to look like her.' You see I am proud of you,--not only as to the ghostly, but also as to the material part of you. Physiologically I am all Latin and Pagan,--even though my little boy's eyes are bright blue. "... It is really nonsense, sending such a thing as his photo at fifty-five days old, because the child changes so much every week. But you are my little sister. I have called him Leopold Kazuo Hearn--for European use and custom. Kazuo, in Japanese, signifies 'First of the Excellent.' I have not registered him under that name, however; because by the law, if I registered my wife or son in the Consulate, both become English citizens, and lose the right to hold any property, or do any business in Japan, or even to live in the interior without a passport. I have, therefore, stopped at the Japanese marriage ceremony, and a publication of the fact abroad. In the present order I dare not deprive my folks of their nationality." Then some time later he writes:-- "You ask for all kinds of news about Kajiwo. Well, he is now able to stand well, and is tremendously strong to all appearance. He tries to speak. 'Aba' is the first _word_ spoken by Japanese babes: it means 'good-bye.' Here is a curious example of the contrast between West and East,--the child comes into the world saying farewell. But this would be in accordance with Buddhist philosophy,--saying farewell to the previous life. "You are right about supposing that the birth of a son in Japan is an occasion of special rejoicing. All the baby clothes are ready long before birth--(except the ornamental ones)--as the _Kimono_ or little robe is the same shape for either sex (_of children_). But, when the child is born, if it be a girl, very beautiful clothes of bright colours, covered with wonderful pictures, are made for it. If it be a boy the colours are darker, and the designs different. My little fellow's silken Kimono is covered with pictures of tortoises, storks, pine, and other objects typical of long life, prosperity, steadfastness, etc. This subject is enormously elaborate and complicated,--so that I cannot tell you all about it in a letter. "After the child is born, all friends and relatives bring presents,--and everybody comes to see and congratulate the mother. You would think this were a trial. I was afraid it would tire Setsu. But she was walking about again on the seventh day after birth. The strength of the boy is hers,--not mine. "I was also worried about the physician. I wanted the chief surgeon of the garrison,--because I was afraid. He was a friend, and laughed at me. He said: 'If anything terrible should happen, call me, but otherwise don't worry about a doctor. The Japanese have managed these things in their own way for thousands of years without doctors: a woman or two will do.' So two women came, and all was well. I hated the old women first, but after their success, I became very fond of them, and hugged them in English style, which they could not understand." The kind dull veil that nature keeps stretched between mankind and the Unknown was drawn again. The world became to Hearn nearly the same as it had been before the birth of his child, and he could plan, he said, for the boy's future. He was afraid he might be near-sighted, and wondered if he would be intellectual. "He was so proud of him," his wife says, "that whenever a guest, a student, or a fellow-professor called, he would begin talking about him and his perfections without allowing his friend to get a word in. He perfectly frightened me with a hundred toys he brought home when he returned." After his son's birth, Hearn naturally became still more anxious to have Setsu registered legally as his wife, but he was always met by official excuses and delays. He was told that if he wished the boy to remain a Japanese citizen he must register him in the mother's name only. If he registered him in his own name his son became a foreigner. On the other hand, Hearn knew that if he nationalised himself his salary would be reduced to a Japanese level. [Illustration: Kazuo (Hearn's Son) and his Nurse.] "I don't quite see the morality of the reduction," he says, "for services should be paid according to the market value at least;--but there is no doubt it would be made. As for America, and my relatives in England, I am married: that has been duly announced. Perhaps I had better wait a few years and then become a citizen. Being a Japanese citizen would, of course, make no difference whatever as to my relations in any civilised countries abroad. It would only make some difference in an uncivilised country,--such as revolutionary South America, where English or French, or American protection is a good thing to have. But the long and the short of the matter is that I am anxious about Setsu's and the boy's interests: my own being concerned only at that point where their injury would be Setsu's injury." The only way out of the difficulty, he concluded, was to abandon his English nationality and adopt his wife's family name, Koizumi. As a prefix for his own personal use he selected the appellation of the Province of Izumo "Yakumo" ("Eight clouds," or the "Place of the Issuing of Clouds," the first word of the ancient, Japanese song "Ya-he-gaki"). On one of his letters he shows his sister how his name is written in Japanese. Mrs. Atkinson's youngest child, Dorothy, was born in March, 1894. There is an interval of exactly four months between her and her cousin Kazuo. It is in reference to this event that the following letter was written:-- "How sweet of you to get Mrs. or Miss Weatherall to write me the dear news! You will be well by the time this reaches you, so that I may venture to write more than congratulations. "I was quite anxious about you,--feeling as if you were the only real _fellow-soul_ in my world but one:--and birth is a thing so much more terrible than all else in the universe--more so than death itself--that the black border round the envelope made my heart cold for a moment. I had forgotten the why. Now I hope you will not have any more sons or daughters; you have three,--and I trust you will have no more pain or trouble. As for me, I am very resolved not to become a father again. "You will laugh at me, and perhaps think it very strange that when only thirty-five I began to feel a kind of envy of friends with children. I knew their troubles, anxieties, struggles; but I saw their sons grow up, beautiful and gifted men, and I used to whisper to myself,--'But I never shall have a child.' Then it used to seem to me that no man died so utterly as the man without children: for him I fancied (like some folk still really think in other lands) that death would be utter eternal blackness. When I did, however, hear the first cry of my boy--_my_ boy, dreamed about in forgotten years--I had for that instant the ghostly sensation of being _double_. Just then, and only then, I did not think,--but _felt_, 'I am TWO.' It was weird but gave me thoughts that changed all pre-existing thoughts. My boy's gaze still seems to me a queerly beautiful thing: I still feel I am looking at myself when he looks at me. Only the thought has become infinitely more complicated. For I think about all the dead who live in the little heart of him--races and memories diverse as East and West. But who made his eyes blue and his hair brown? And will he be like you? And will he ever see the little cousin who has just entered the world? The other day, for one moment, he looked just like your boy in the picture." Mrs. Atkinson about this time went through private trials upon which it is unnecessary to touch here. The following letter of consolation and encouragement was written to her by her half-brother:-- "Well, you too have had your revelations,--which means deep pains. One must pay a terrible price to see and to know. Still, the purchase is worth making. You know the Emerson lines:-- "Though thou love her as thyself, As a self of purer clay; Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive, Heartily know When half-Gods go, The Gods arrive!... "Reverse the condition: the moral is the same,--and it is eternal. By light alone one cannot see; there must be shadows in multitude to help. What we love is good, and exists, but often exists only in _us_,--then we become angry at others, not knowing the illusion was the work of the Gods. The Gods are always right. They make us sometimes imagine that something we love ever so much is in others, while it is only in our own hearts. The reason they do this to some, like you and me, is to teach us what terrible long, long mistakes we might have made without their help. Sometimes they really cause a great deal of more serious trouble, and we can't tell why. We must wait and believe and be quite sure the Gods are good. "What is not always good is the tender teaching we get at home. We are told of things so beautiful that we believe everybody must believe them,--truth, and love, and duty, and honour of soul, etc. We are even taught the enormous lie that the world is entirely regulated by these beliefs. I wonder if it would not be much better to teach children the adult truth:--'The world is thus and so:--those beliefs are ideal only which do not influence the intellectual life, nor the industrial life, nor the social life. The world is a carnival-ball; and you must wear a mask thereat,--and never, _never_ doff it;--except to the woman or the man you must love always. Learn to wear your mask with grace--only keep your heart fresh in spite of all bitter knowledge.' Wouldn't this be the best advice? As a mere commonplace fact,--the whole battle of life is fought in disguise by those who win. No man knows the heart of another man. No woman knows the heart of another woman. Only the woman can learn the man, and the man the woman;--and this only after years! What a great problem it is; and how utterly it is neglected in teaching the little human flowers that we set out in the world's cold without a thought! "You are more and more like me in every letter; but you are better far. I have not learned reserve with friends yet: I supply the lack by a retreating disposition,--a disinclination to make acquaintances. I love very quickly and strongly; but just as quickly dislike what I loved--if deceived, and the dislike does not die. My general experience has been that the loveable souls are but rarely lodged in the forms which most attract us: there _are_ such exceptions on the woman's side as my dear little Sis,--and there are exceptions on the male side of a particular order, and rare. But the rule remains. I wonder if all these jokes are not played on us by the Gods, who think,--'No!--you want the infinite! That can be reached later only,--after innumerable births. First learn, for a million years or so, just to love only _souls_. You _must_! for you will be punished if you try to obtain all perfections in one.' I think the Gods talk to us about that way; and when we leave the Spring season of life behind, we find the Gods were right after all. "--Still, the great puzzle is in all these things there are no general rules solid enough to trust in. I fancy the best teaching for a heart would be,--'Always caution,--but--believe the tendency of the world is to good.' And _largeness_ seems to be necessary,--never to suffer oneself to see only one charm; but to train oneself to study combinations and understand them. Any modern human nature is too complex to be otherwise judged. "Music,--yes! If I were near you I would be always teasing you to play:--and would bring you all kinds of queer exotic melodies to make variations on: strange melodies from Spanish America and the Creole Islands, and Japan, and China, and all sorts of strange places. We should try to do very curious things in the way of ballads and songs, and you would teach me all sorts of musical things I don't know. By the way, you will be shocked to learn, perhaps, that I have never been able to appreciate the superiority of the new German music: The Italian still seems to me the divine: but that may be because I have never had time to train myself to appreciate. "--You do not know how much I sympathise with all your anxieties and troubles, and how much I wish for your strength and happiness. Would I not like to be travelling with you to countries where you would find all the rest and light and warmth you could enjoy! Perhaps, some day that may be. Pray to the Gods for my good fortune; and we shall share the pleasure together if They listen. If They do not, we must wait as the Buddhists say until the future birth. Then I want to be a very rich man, or woman, and you a very dear little sister or brother;--and I want to have a steam yacht of 30,000 horse-power. "--Your sweetest little daughter, may you live to see her happiness in all things! I am glad I have no daughter. A boy can fight--must fight his way; but a daughter is the luxury of a rich man. Had I a daughter, she would be too dear; and I should feel inclined to say if dying:--'My child, I am unable to guard you longer, and the world is difficult: you would do better to come to Shadowland with me.' But your Marjory will be well guarded and petted, and have the world made sweet for her; and you will have no more grief. You have had all your disappointments and troubles in girlhood--childhood;--the future must be kind to you. As for me, I really think the Gods owe me some favours; they have ignored me so long that I am now all expectation." Then again:-- "MY VERY SWEET LITTLE SISTER, "Your dear letter came yesterday, and filled us all with gladness. You see I say US;--for my folks prayed very hard for you to the ancient Gods and to the Buddhas,--that I might not lose that little sister of mine.--And now to answer questions. "Indeed, Setsu got the photos, and wondered at them, for she had never seen a carriage before of that kind, or a room like your room; and very childishly asked me to make her a room like yours. To which I said:--'The cost of such a room would buy for you a whole street in your native city of Matsue; and besides, you would be very unhappy and uncomfortable in such a room.' And when I explained, she wondered still more. (A very large Japanese house could be bought with the grounds for about £30--I mean a big, big merchant's house--in Izumo.) Another wonder was the donkey in the other photo, for none had ever seen such an animal. "--As for your ever coming to Japan, my dear, if you do, you shall have a chair. But I fear--indeed I am almost certain--that the day is not very far away when I must leave Setsu and Kajiwo to the care of the ancient Gods, and go away and work bravely for them elsewhere, till Kajiwo is old enough to go abroad. The days of foreign influence and of foreign teaching in Japan are rapidly drawing to a close. Japan is learning to do well without us; and we have not been kind enough to her to win her love. We have persecuted her with hordes of fanatical missionaries, robbed her by unjust treaties, forced her to pay monstrous indemnities for trifling wrongs;--we have forced her to become strong, and she is going to do without us presently, the future is dark. Happily my folks will be provided for; and I expect to be able, if I must go, to return in a few years. It is barely possible that I might get into journalism in Japan,--but not at all sure. I suppose you know that is my living profession: I understand all kinds of newspaper work. But as I am no believer in conventions, I am not likely to get any of the big sinecures. To do that one must be a ladies' man, a member of some church, a social figure. I am no ladies' man: I am known to the world as an 'infidel,' and I hate society unutterably. Were I rich enough to live where I please, I should certainly (if unable to live in Japan) return to the tropics. Indeed, I have a faint hope of passing at least the winters of my old age near the Equator. Where the means are to come from I don't know; but I have a kind of faith in Goethe's saying, that whatever a man most desires in youth, he will have an excess of in his old age. Leisure to write books in a warm climate is all I ask. Pray to the Gods, if you believe in any Gods, to help the dream to be realised. "Kajiwo is my nightmare. I am tortured all day and all night by the problem of how to set him going in life before I become dust. Sometimes I think how bad it was of me to have had a child at all. Yet before that, I did not really know what life was; and I would not lose the knowledge for any terms of gifts of years. Besides, I am beginning to think I am really a tolerably good sort of fellow,--for if I had been really such a monster of depravity as the religious fanatics declared, how could I have got such a fine boy. There must be some good in me anyhow. Nobody shall make a 'Christian' of Kajiwo if I can help it--by 'Christian' I mean a believer in absurd and cruel dogmas. The world talks much about Christianity, but no one teaches it. "--So glad to hear you are able to go out a little again. Perhaps a long period of strong solid calm health is preparing for you. After the trials and worries of maternity such happy conditions often come as a reward. I hope to chat with you by a fire when we are both old, and Kaji has shot up into a man,--looking like his aunt a little--with a delicate aquiline face. But only the Eternities know what his face will be like. It is changeable as water now. I won't send another photo of him till he looks pretty again. "With best love, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_June_ 24, '94. "I must go off travelling in a couple of weeks. Perhaps there will be a little delay before my next letter reaches you." [Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVEN).] In the next letter he touches upon these travels undertaken with his wife, mother-in-law, and Kaji (an abbreviation of Kazuo, or Kajiwo, as Hearn was in the habit of calling him at first). "How sweet of you," he says, "to send that charming photo of the children. It delighted us all. Setsu never saw a donkey--there are none in Japan; and all wondered at the strange animal. What I wondered at was to see what a perfect pretty little woman the charming Marjory is. As for the boy, he is certainly what every parent wants a boy to be as to good looks; but I also think he must have a very sweet temper. I trust that you won't allow the world to spoil it for him. They do spoil tempers at some of the great public schools. I cannot believe it is necessary to let young lads be subjected to the brutality of places like Eton and Harrow. It hardens them too much. The answer is that the great school turns out the conquerors of the world,--the subalterns of Kipling,--the Clives,--the daring admirals and great captains, etc. Perhaps in this militant age it is necessary. But I notice the great thinkers generally come from other places. However, this is the _practical_ age,--there is nothing for philosophers, poets, or painters to succeed in, unless they are independently situated. I shall try to make a good doctor out of Kaji, if I can. I could never afford to do more for him. And if possible I shall take him to Europe, and stay there with him for a couple of years. But that is a far-away matter." Characteristically with that apprehensive mind of his, his son's future, as Hearn himself confesses, became a perfect nightmare. "I must make an Englishman of him, I fear. His hair has turned bright brown. He is so strong that I expect him to become a very powerful man: he is very deep-chested and thick-built and so heavy now, that people think I am not telling the truth about his age. "Kajiwo's soul seems to be so English that I fancy his memory of former births would scarcely refer much to Japan. How about the real compound race-soul, though? One would have to recollect having been two at the same time. This seems to me a defect in the popular theory--still the Japanese hold, or used to hold, that the soul is itself a multiple--that each person has a _number of souls_. That would give an explanation. Scientifically it is true. We are all compounds of innumerable lives--each a sum in an infinite addition--the dead are not dead--they live in all of us and move us,--and stir faintly in every heart-beat. And there are ghostly interlinkings. Something of _you_ must be in _me_, and of both of us in Kajiwo. "--I wonder if this also be true of little Dorothy. It is a curious thing that you tell me about the change in colour of the eyes. I only saw that happen in hot climates. Creole children are not uncommonly born with gold hair and bright blue eyes. A few years later the skin, eyes, hair seem to have entirely changed,--the first to brown, the two last to coal-black. "--I am writing all this dreamy stuff just to amuse my sweet little sister,--because I can't be near to pet her and make her feel very happy. Well, a little Oriental theory may have some caressing charm for you. It is a very gentle faith--though also very deep; and you will find in my book how much it interests me. "Take very, very, _very_ good care of your precious little self,--and do not try to write till you feel immensely strong. Setsu sends sweet words and wishes. And I----! "With love, "LAFCADIO HEARN. "_Kumamoto, June_ 2, '94." CHAPTER XX OUT OF THE EAST "So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced shadows were the sole product of Western civilisation, and bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows of machinery and chimneys and telegraph poles; and at the shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of houses twenty storeys high, and of hunger begging under them; and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty; and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and the shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for the purpose of an auto-da-fe. Whereat Japan became rather serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes. Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still cling to her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did before." After the lapse of a certain amount of time Hearn gradually became more reconciled to Kumamoto. The climate agreed with him, he put on flesh, all his Japanese clothes, he declared, even his _kimono_, had become too small. "I cannot say whether this be the climate, the diet, or what. Setsu says it is because I have a good wife: but she might be prejudiced, you know." It is more likely that his well-being at this time arose from his having given up the experiment of living exclusively on a Japanese regimen. After his bout of illness at Matsue, he found that he could not recuperate on the fare of the country, even when reinforced with eggs. Having lived for ten months thus, horribly ashamed as he was to confess his weakness, he found himself obliged to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and devoured enormous quantities of beef and fowl, and drank terrific quantities of beer. "The fault is neither mine nor that of the Japanese: it is the fault of my ancestors, the ferocious, wolfish hereditary instincts and tendencies of boreal mankind. The sins of the fathers, etc." Meantime, his knowledge of the strange people amongst whom his lot was cast was deepening and expanding. "Out of the East," the collection of essays--essence of experiences accumulated at this time, and the book, next perhaps to "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," by which he is best known--is typical of his genius at its best and at its worst. The first sketch, entitled, "The Dream of a Summer's Day," is simply a bundle of impressions of the journey to which he alludes when writing to his sister, made from Nagasaki to Kumamoto, along the shores of the Inland Sea. This journey, through some of the most beautiful scenery of Japan, after the horrors of a foreign hotel at an open port, was one of those experiences that form an epoch in an artist's life, touching him with the magic wand of inspiration. All the delightful impressions made by the poetry and the elusive beauty of old Japan seem concentrated into six pages of poetic prose. To the world it is known as "The Dream of a Summer's Day."[24] To those who have been in Japan, and love the delicate beauty of her mountain ranges, the green of her rice-fields, and the indigo shadows of her cryptomeria-groves, it summons up delightful memories, the rapture felt in the crystalline atmosphere, its picturesque little people, its running waters, the flying gleams of sunlight, the softly tolling bells, the distant ridges blue and remote in the warm air. Like a bubbling spring the sense of beauty broke forth from the caverns of ancient memory, where, according to Lafcadio, it had lain imprisoned for years, to ripple and murmur sweet music in his ears. He went back to the days of his childhood, back to dreams lying in the past in what had become for him an alien land; the fragrance of a most dear memory swept over his senses. The gnat of the soul of him flitted out into the gleam of blue 'twixt sea and sun, back to the cedarn balcony pillars of the Japanese hotel, whence he could see the opening of the bay and the horizon, haunted by mountain shapes, faint as old memories, and then again to distant and almost forgotten memories of his youth by Lough Corrib, in the West of Ireland, the result being as beautiful a prose poem as Hearn ever wrote. [24] "Out of the East," Houghton, Mifflin & Co. [Illustration: Dorothy Atkinson.] The last essay in the collection is called "Yuko," a reminiscence. There are many of Lafcadio Hearn's critics who say that, in consequence of his ignorance of the Japanese language, and the isolation in which he lived, he never could have known anything really of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the people to whom he professed to act as interpreter. Sometimes they maintain that his views are unfavourable to an exaggerated extent, at another too laudatory. His essay entitled "Yuko" might certainly be taken as an example of the manner in which he selected certain superficial manifestations as typical of the inner life of the Japanese--a people as reserved, as secretive, as difficult to follow in their emotional aspects as the hidden currents to which he compares them, quoting the words of Kipling's pilot: "And if any man comes to you, and says, 'I know the Javva currents,' don't you listen to him; for those currents is never yet known to mortal man!" Yuko was a servant-maid in a wealthy family at Kinegawa. She had read in the daily newspaper the account of the attempt on the life of the Czarevitch during his visit to Japan in 1891. Being an hysterical, excitable girl, she was apparently wound up to the pitch of temporary insanity. Leaving her employer's home, she made her way to Kyoto, and there, buying a razor, she cut her throat opposite the gate of the Mikado's palace. Hearn writes of the incident as if the girl were a Joan of Arc, obeying the dictates of the most fervent patriotism. He goes to the extent of describing the Mikado, "The Son of Heaven," hearing of the girl's death, and "augustly ceasing to mourn for the crime that had been committed because of the manifestations of the great love his people bore him." Afterwards, Hearn admitted that his enthusiasm was perhaps exaggerated, for revelations showed that Yuko, in a letter she had left, had spoken of "a family claim." Under the raw strong light of these commonplace revelations, he confessed that his little sketch seemed for the moment much too romantic, and yet the real poetry of the event remained unlessened--the pure ideal that impelled a girl to take her own life merely to give proof of the love and loyalty of a nation. No small, mean, dry facts could ever belittle that large fact. Let those, however, who say that Hearn did not understand the enigmatical people amongst whom his lines were cast, read his article on "Jiu-jitsu" in this same volume. It is headed by a quotation from the "Tao-Te-King." "Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. So is it with all things.... Firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness are the concomitants of life. Hence he who relies upon his own strength shall not conquer." Preaching from this text, Hearn writes a masterly article, showing how Japan, though apparently adopting western inventions, preserves her own genius and mode of thought in all vital questions absolutely unchanged. The essay ends with a significant paragraph, showing how we occidentals, who have exterminated feebler races by merely over-living them, may be at last exterminated ourselves by races capable of under-living us, more self-denying, more fertile, and less expensive for nature to support. Inheriting, doubtless, our wisdom, adopting our more useful inventions, continuing the best of our industries--perhaps even perpetuating what is most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts; pushing us out of the progress of the world, as the dinotherium, or the ichthyosaurus, were pushed out before us. Towards the end of his stay at Kumamoto, he wrote one of his delightful, whimsically affectionate letters to his old friend, Mr. Watkin, in answer apparently to one from him, recalling their talks and expeditions in the old days at Cincinnati, and expressing his gratitude for the infinite patience and wisdom shown in his treatment of his naughty, superhumanly foolish, detestable little friend. "Well, I wish I were near you to love you, and make up for all old troubles." He then tells his "dad" that he has been able to save between $3,500 and $4,000, that he has placed in custody in his wife's name. The reaction, he said, against foreign influence was very strong, and the future looked more gloomy every day. Eventually, he supposed, he must leave Japan and work elsewhere, and he ends, "When I first met you I was nineteen. I am now forty-four--well, I suppose I must have lots more trouble before I go to Nirvana." Towards the end of the Chinese-Japanese War Hearn was worried with anxiety on the subject of the noncontinuance of his appointment at the Kumamoto College. "Government Service," he writes to Amenomori, "is uncertain to the degree of terror,--a sword of Damocles; and Government doesn't employ men like you as teachers. If it did, and would give them what they should have, the position of a foreign teacher would be pleasant enough. He would be among thinkers and find some kindness,--instead of being made to feel that he is the servant of petty political clerks." He approached Page Baker, his old New Orleans friend, asking him if he could get him anything if he started in the spring for America. Something good enough to save money at, not only for himself, but something that would enable him to send money to Japan; he was not desirous of seeing Boston, New York or Philadelphia, but would rather be in Memphis, Charleston, or glorious Florida. Page Baker had apparently been sending him help, for on June 2nd Hearn writes acknowledging a draft for one hundred and sixty-three pounds, thanking him ten thousand times from the bottom of his much scarified heart. "I am now forty-four," he adds, "and as grey as a badger. Unless I can make enough to educate my boy well, I don't know what I'm worth,--but I feel that I shall have precious little time to do it in; add twenty to forty-four, and how much is left of a man?" In another letter he again alludes to the manner in which the government are cutting down the number of employés: "My contract runs only until March," he ends, "and my chances are 0." At last, after many hesitations, he definitely decided to leave government service, and in the autumn of 1894 accepted the offer of a position on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_ made by Mr. Robert Young, proprietor and editor of the newspaper. To his sister he wrote from the _Kobe Chronicle_ office, Kobe, Japan:-- "MY DEAR MINNIE, "I am too much in a whirl just now to write a good letter to you (whose was the little curl in your last?--you never told me). I am writing only to say that I have left the Government Service to edit a paper in one of the open ports. This is returning to my old profession, and is pleasant enough,--though not just now very lucrative. "Best love to you. Perhaps we shall meet in a few years. My boy is well, beginning to walk a little. My book was to be issued on the 29th Sept. "Ever affectionately, "LAFCADIO." CHAPTER XXI KOBE Last spring I journeyed to Japan with Mrs. Atkinson, Lafcadio Hearn's half-sister, and her daughter. Mrs. Atkinson was anxious to make the acquaintance of her Japanese half-sister-in-law to ascertain the circumstances surrounding the family, also if it were possible to carry out her half-brother's wishes with regard to educating his eldest son, Kazuo--his Benjamin--in England. The first place at which we landed was Kobe, situated on the eastern end of the Inland Sea, opposite Osaka, the Manchester of Japan. Kobe is numbered among the open ports. Consuls can fly their country's flag and occupy offices on the "Bund." Surrounding the bay are a number of German, American and British warehouses. Foreigners also are allowed to reside in the city under Japanese law. During the six weeks on board the P. & O. coming out, I had been reading Hearn's books, and was steeped in the legendary lore, the "hidden soul-life" of ancient Nippon. At Moji--gateway of the Inland Sea--it had blown a gale, and the Japanese steamer, the _Chikugo Maru_, to which we had transhipped at Shanghai, was obliged to come to anchor under the headland. The ecstasy, therefore, after rolling in a heavy sea all night, of floating into the calm, sun-bathed waters of the Inland Sea, made the enchantment all the more bewitching. Reclining in our deck-chairs, we looked on the scene as it slowly passed before our eyes, and yielded, without a struggle, to the exquisite and fantastical charm of the spirit of Old Japan. For what seemed uncounted hours we crept between the dim boundaries of tinted mountains, catching glimpses here and there of mysterious bays and islands, of shadowy avenues, arched by symbolic _Torii_ leading to ancient shrines, of groups of fishing villages that seemed to have grown on the shore, their thatched roofs covered with the purple flowers of the roof plant, the "_Yane-shobu_." At first we endeavoured to decipher in Murray the names of the enchanting little hamlets, with their cedarn balconies, high-peaked gables, and quaint terraced gardens, inhabited by a strange people in _geta_ and _kimono_, like figures on a Japanese screen depicting a scene of hundreds of years ago. Across the mind of almost every one the magic of Japan strikes with a sensation of strangeness and delight,--a magic that gives the visitor a sense of great issues, and remote visions, telling of a kingdom dim and half-apprehended. Unsubstantial and fragile as all these villages looked, they were hallowed by memorable stories of heroism and self-sacrifice, either in the last war with Russia and China, or in her own internecine fights centuries ago; chronicles of men who had fought heroically and died uncomplainingly in defence of their country, chronicles of women who had scorned to weep when told of the death of husbands, fathers and brothers in the pest-stricken rice-fields of China, or in the trenches before Port Arthur. A warm, perfect noon came and went, and the sun that had poured himself from above into the earth as into a cup, gradually descended, as we crept up the waters of the Inland Sea, towards the shoulders of the eastern peaks, until they turned saffron and then flushed pink, and then paled to green. There was no moon, but the night stretched in pale radiance overhead. And as we watched the stars burn with the extraordinary brilliancy peculiar to Japan, we dreamed that we looked on the River Celestial, the Ghost of Waters. We saw the mists hovering along the verge, and the water grasses that bend in the winds of autumn, and we knew that the falling dew was the spray from the herdsman's oar. And the heavens "seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the Gods." The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream. It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country. Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short _kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again in the era of Kusimoki Marahige. Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn. Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood; while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you passed along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul, charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes writing on long strips of paper from right to left. Enigmatical, incomprehensible it might be, but there was nothing displeasing, nothing objectionable as in a native Arab town, or even in the streets of Canton or Shanghai. No unhappy children, or cross, red-faced women; no coarse, drunken men, no loud voices, no brawling. Though all was alien to your traditions, you were forced to acknowledge a charm, a refinement, a courtesy, a kindliness far superior to those to be found in European cities. The conditions existing in Kobe when Hearn arrived in 1895 were not satisfactory from a sanitary point of view. Cholera had come with the victorious army from China, and had carried off, during the hot season, about thirty thousand people. The smoke and odour from the funeral pyres that burnt continually, came wind-blown into Hearn's garden down from the hills behind the town, just to remind him, as he says, "that the cost of burning an adult of my own size is 80 sen--about half a dollar in American money at the present rate of exchange." From the upper balcony of his house the Japanese street, with its rows of little shops, was visible to the bay; from thence he watched the cholera patients being taken away, and the bereaved, as soon as the law allowed, flitting from the paper-shuttered abodes, while the ordinary life of the street went on day and night, as if nothing particular had happened. The itinerant vendors with their bamboo poles, and baskets or buckets, passed the empty houses, and uttered their accustomed cry; the blind shampooer blew his melancholy whistle; the private watchman made his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; and the children chased one another as usual with screams and laughter. Sometimes a child vanished, but the survivors continued their play as if nothing had happened, according to the wisdom of the ancient East. A supersensitive man, not in robust health, must have felt acutely the depressing effects of this state of things. Sclerosis of the arteries and other symptoms of heart failure, warned him during this autumn of 1895 that he was "descending the shady side of the hill." An attack of inflammation of the eyes also gave him much trouble. He had been worried, he says in a letter to Page Baker, by the fear that either he or his friend might die before they met again. "I think of you a great deal.... You are a long-lived, tough race, you Bakers. Page Baker will be most likely writing some day things of Lafcadio Hearn that was, which the said Lafcadio never deserved, and never will deserve." Death had no terrors for Lafcadio Hearn, but the premonitions of physical shipwreck that beset him now depressed him heart and soul because of the work still left undone. He would like nothing so much, he said, as to get killed, if he had no one but himself in the world to take care of--which is just why he wouldn't get killed. He couldn't afford luxuries until his work was done. To his sister he writes:-- "I have been on my back in a dark room for a month with inflammation of the eyes, and cannot write much. Thanks for sweet letter. I received a _Daily News_ from you,--many, many thanks. Did not receive the other papers you spoke of--probably they were stolen in Kumamoto. I fear I cannot do much newspaper work for some time. The climate does not seem to suit my eyes,--a hot climate would be better. I may be able to make a trip next winter to some tropical place, if I make any money out of my books. My new book--"Out of the East"--will be published soon after this letter reaches you. "Future looks doubtful--don't feel very jolly about it. The mere question of living is the chief annoyance. I am offered some further work in Kobe, that would leave me leisure (they promise) for my own literary work, but I am not sure. However, the darkest hour is before the dawn, perhaps. "Kaji is well able to walk now, and talks a little. Every day his hair is growing brighter; a thorough English boy. "Excuse bad eyes. "Love to you, "LAFCADIO." Although more than twelve years had elapsed between our visit and the period when Hearn had resided in Kobe, nearly every one remembered the odd little journalist, who might be seen daily making his way, in his shy, near-sighted fashion, from his house in Kitinagasa Dori, to the office of the _Kobe Chronicle_. Dr. Papellier of Kobe, who attended Hearn in a professional capacity at this time, was full of reminiscences. Long before meeting him at Kobe Dr. Papellier had been a great admirer of his genius, had, indeed, when surgeon on board a German vessel, translated "Chita" for a Nuremburg paper. Being an oculist, one of his first injunctions, as soon as he examined Hearn's eyes, was cessation from all work and rest in a darkened room if he wished to escape total blindness. The right eye was myopic to an extent seldom seen, and at the moment was so severely inflamed by neuritis that the danger of an affection to the retina seemed imminent,--the left was entirely blind. For the purpose of keeping up his spirits, under this unwonted constraint, Dr. Papellier, in spite of his professional engagements, went out of his way to visit the little man frequently, and would stop hours chatting; showed him, indeed, a kindness and consideration that, we were told, were quite exceptional. Hearn, Dr. Papellier relates, was a good and fluent talker, content to keep the ball rolling himself, and preferred an attentive listener rather than a person who stated his own opinions. Their topics of conversations circled round the characteristics of the civilisation in which they were living. Hearn's emotional enthusiasm for the Japanese, the doctor said, had cooled; he had received several shocks in dealing with officials at Kumamoto, and said his illusions were vanishing, and he wanted to leave the country; France, China, or the South Sea Islands seemed each in turn to attract his wayward fancy. The account of Stevenson's life in Samoa had made a great impression on him. He declared that if he had not his Japanese family to look after he would pack up his books of reference and start at once for Samoa. "His wife, who understood no English at all, seldom appeared, a servant girl usually attending to his wants when I was present. "It struck me at the time that his knowledge of the Japanese vernacular was very poor for a man of his intelligence, who, for nearly four years, had lived almost entirely in the interior, surrounded by those who could only talk the language of the country. "It was plain that what he knew about Japan must have been gained through the medium of interpreters. I was still more surprised when I discovered how extremely near-sighted he was. His impressions of scenery or Japanese works of art could never have been obtained as ordinary people obtain them. The details had to be studied piece by piece with a small telescope, and then described as a whole." His mode of life, Dr. Papellier said, was almost penurious, although he must have been receiving a good salary from the _Kobe Chronicle_, and was making something by his books. At home he dressed invariably in Japanese style; his clothes being very clean and neat. The furniture of his small house was scanty. His food, which was partly Japanese and partly so-called "foreign," was prepared in a small restaurant somewhere in the town. In his position as medical attendant Papellier regarded it as his duty to remonstrate on this point, impressing upon him that he ought to remember the drain on his constitution of the amount of brain work that he was doing, both at the _Kobe Chronicle_ office and writing at home. There were reasons for this that Hearn would not care to tell Papellier. Mrs. Koizumi was in delicate health, expecting her second child, and Hearn doubtless, with that consideration that invariably distinguished him in his treatment of his wife, had his food brought from outside so as to save her the trouble and exertion of cooking it at home. Only in one way, Papellier said, did he allow himself any indulgence, and that was in the amount he smoked. Although he seldom took spirits, he smoked incessantly--not cigars, but a small Japanese pipe--a _kiseru_--which he handled in a skilful way, lighting one tiny tobacco pellet in the glowing ashes of the one just consumed. One of his hobbies was collecting pipes, the other was collecting books. He had already got together a valuable library at New Orleans, he did the same in Japan. He was able to exercise these hobbies inexpensively, but they needed knowledge, time and patience. At his death he possessed more than two hundred pipes, all shapes and sizes. Every one whom we met when we arrived at Kobe advised us to call on the editor of the _Kobe Chronicle_ if we wanted information on the subject of Lafcadio Hearn. We therefore made our way to the _Kobe Chronicle_ office as soon as we could. Mr. Young as well as Mrs. Young, whose acquaintance we made subsequently, were both full of reminiscences of the odd little genius. He generally made it a rule to drop into the Youngs' house every Sunday for lunch; his particular fancy in the way of food, or, at all events, the only thing he expressed a fancy for, was plum-pudding--a plum-pudding therefore became a standing dish on Sundays, so long as Hearn was in Kobe. "The Japanese," he was wont to say, "are a very clever people, but they don't understand plum-pudding." Absence of mind, and inattention to events passing around him, was very noticeable, the Youngs told us, these days. Sometimes he seemed even to find a difficulty in fixing his thoughts on the identity of the individual with whom he was conversing. Mrs. Young, if she will permit me to say so, is an extremely agreeable-looking, clear-complexioned, chestnut-haired Englishwoman. For some considerable time Hearn always addressed her in Japanese. At last one day she remarked: "You know, Mr. Hearn, I am not Japanese." "Oh, really," was his reply, as if for the first time he had realised the fact. From that time forward he addressed her in English. Mr. Young was kind enough to furnish me with copies of Hearn's editorials during the seven or eight months he worked on the staff of the _Kobe Chronicle_. Though not coinciding with many of Hearn's opinions and conclusions, with regard to the Japanese and their religious and social convictions, Mr. Young gave him a free hand so far as subject-matter and expression of opinion were concerned. None of his contributions, however, are distinguished by Hearn's peculiar literary qualities. The flint-edged space of the newspaper column cramped and hampered his genius. Work with him, he declared, was always a pain, but writing for money an impossibility. Of course, he said, he could write, and write, and write, but the moment he began to write for money the little special colour vanished, the special flavour that was within him evaporated, he became nobody again; and the public wondered why it paid any attention to so commonplace a fool. So he had to sit and wait for the gods. His mind, however, ate itself when unemployed. Even reading did not fill the vacuum. His thoughts wandered, and imaginings, and recollections of unpleasant things said or done recurred to him. Some of these unpleasant things were remembered longer than others; under this stimulus he rushed to work, wrote page after page of vagaries, metaphysical, emotional, romantic--and threw them aside. Then next day he rewrote them and rewrote them until they arranged themselves into a whole, and the result was an essay that the editor of the _Atlantic_ declared was a veritable illumination, and no mortal man knew how or why it was written, not even he himself. Two of Hearn's characteristics, both of which militated considerably against his being an effective newspaper correspondent, were his personal bias and want of restraint. A daily newspaper must, above all things, be run on customary and everyday lines, but Hearn did not possess the ordinary hold on the conventional methods and usages of life. For instance, when treating of the subject of free libraries he thus expresses himself: "A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of wisdom and beauty, but as a 'dumping-ground' for offal, a repository of human frivolity, insanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth!--why not collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to see them. No, I would give to all these off-scourings and clippings the same doom." No consideration would deter him from flying in the face of the ordinary reader if it suited him so to do. He had always passionately resisted the christianising of Japan, not only from a religious, but from an artistic point of view. He thus roused the wrath of the orthodox,--a wrath that pursued him from this year in Kobe until his death, and makes the very sound of his name detested in Christian religious circles in Japan. "For myself," he says in one of the _Kobe Chronicle_ leaders, "I could sympathise with the individual, but never with the missionary cause. Unconsciously, every honest being in the Mission Army is a destroyer,--and a destroyer only; for nothing can replace what they break down. Unconsciously, too, the missionaries everywhere represent the edge,--the _acies_,--to use the Roman word--of Occidental aggression. We are face to face here with the spectacle of a powerful and selfish civilisation, demoralising and crushing a weaker, and, in many ways a nobler one (if we are to judge by comparative ideals); and the spectacle is not pretty. We must recognise the inevitable, the Cosmic Law, if you like; but one feels and hates the moral wrong, and this perhaps blinds one too much to the sacrifices and pains accepted by the 'noble army.'" Hearn's gradually-increasing disinclination to meet strangers was, at this time, indicative of a morbid condition of mind and body. He summarily refused to hold any intercourse with the foreign commercial element in Kobe, pronouncing them rough and common. After life in the interior, he declared life at an open port to be very unpleasant. The Germans represented the best of the foreign element, plain and homely, which at all events was a virtue. But he harked back to the life in Old Japan as being better, and cleaner, and higher in every way, with only the bare means of Japanese comfort, than the luxury and money-grabbing at Kobe; in his opinion, the Japanese peasant was ten times more a gentleman than a foreign merchant could ever learn to be.... Then he indulges in one of his outbursts against carpets--pianos--windows--curtains--brass bands--churches! and white shirts! and "_yofuku_"! Would that he had been born savage; the curse of civilised cities was on him, and he supposed he couldn't get away permanently from them. "How much I could hate all that we call civilisation I never knew before. How ugly it is I never could have conceived without a long sojourn in Old Japan--the only civilised country that existed since Antiquity." "Kokoro," the book written at this time, is now celebrated, and justly so. Hearn himself called it a "crazy book." Crazy, it may be designated, from its very originality, its strange interpretation of strange things, the new note that it initiates, and the sympathetic power it displays of divining beliefs and mythologies, the "race ghost" of one of the most enigmatical people on earth. "The papers composing this volume," he says in his preface, "treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,--for which reason they have been grouped under the title 'Kokoro' (Heart)." Written with the above character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning--just as we say in English, "the heart of things." It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one can return to it again and again, and in interpreting the "heart" of Japan, Hearn's work is absolutely truthful. I know that this is contradicted by many. Professor Foxwell tells a story of a lady tourist who told him before she came to Japan she had read Hearn's books and thought they were delightful as literature, but added, "What a disappointment when you come here; the people are not at all like his descriptions!" The lady had not perhaps grasped the fact that Hearn's principal book on Japan, the book that every tourist reads, is called "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." The conditions and people that he describes are certainly not to be found along the beaten tourist track that Western civilisation has invaded with webs of steel and ways of iron. He perhaps exaggerated some of the characteristics and beliefs of the strange people amongst whom he lived, and saw romance in the ordinary course of the life around him, where romance did not exist. Dr. Papellier, for instance, said that he once showed him a report in the _Kobe Chronicle_, describing the suicide of a demi-mondaine and her lover in a railway tunnel. The incident formed the basis of "The Red Bridal," published in "Out of the East," which Papellier declared to be an entirely distorted account of the facts as they really occurred. It is the old story of imaginative genius and ordinary commonplace folk. In discussing the question, Hearn insisted that every artist should carry out the theory of selection. A photograph would give the unessential and the essential; an artist picks out important aspects; the portrait-painter's work, though manifestly less exact, is incomparably finer because of its spirituality; though less technically correct, it has acquired the imaginative sentiment of the mind of the artist. When depicting the Japanese he felt justified in emphasising certain excellent qualities, putting these forward and ignoring the rest; choosing the grander qualities, as portrait-painters do, and passing over the petty frailties, the mean characteristics that might impress the casual observer. Nothing is more lovely, for instance, than a Japanese village amongst the hills, when seen just after sunrise--through the mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment passes with the vapours: in the raw clear light he can find no palace of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks. He attained to a certainty and precision of form in these "Kokoro" essays that places them above any previous work. Now we can see the benefit of his concentration of mind, of his earnestness of purpose and monastic withdrawal from things of the world; no outside influences disturbed his communing with himself, and it is this communing that imparts a vague and visionary atmosphere, a ghostly thrill to every page of the volume. Yet here was he, in the forty-fifth year of his age, a master amongst masters, arguing with solemn earnestness upon the use or mis-use of the word "shall" and "will," begging Professor Hall Chamberlain for information and guidance. "You will scarcely be able to believe me, I imagine, but I must confess that your letter on 'shall' and 'will' is a sort of revelation in one sense--it convinces me that some people, and I suppose all people of fine English culture, really feel a sharp distinction of meaning in the sight and sound of the words 'will' and 'shall.' I confess also that I never have felt such a distinction, and cannot feel it now. I have been guided chiefly by euphony, and the sensation of 'will' as softer and gentler than 'shall.' The word 'shall' in the second person especially has for me a queer identification with English harshness and menace,--memories of school perhaps. I shall study the differences by your teaching and try to avoid mistakes, but I think I shall never be able to feel the distinction. The tone to me is everything--the word nothing." The best essays in "Kokoro" were inspired, not by Kobe, but by Kyoto, one of the most beautiful cities in Japan, seat of the ancient government and stronghold of the ancient creeds. It lies only a short distance from Kobe, and many were the days and hours that Hearn spent dreaming in the charming old-fashioned hotel and picking up impressions amidst the Buddhist shrines and gardens of the surrounding country. "Notes from a Travelling Diary," "Pre-existence," and the charming sketch "Kimiko," written on the text "To wish to be forgotten by the beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget," all originated in Kyoto. In a letter to his sister dated March 11th, 1895, he alludes to his book "Kokoro." "My sweet little beautiful sister, since my book is being so long delayed I may anticipate matters by telling you something of the so-called Ancestor-Worship of which I spoke in my last letter. The subject is not in any popular work on Japan, and I think should interest you, if for no other reason than that you are yourself such a sweet little mother. "When a person dies in Japan, a little tablet is made which stands upon a pedestal, and is about a foot high. On this narrow tablet is inscribed either the real name of the dead, or the Buddhist name given to the soul. This is the Mortuary Tablet, or as you have sometimes seen it called in books, the Ancestral Tablet. "If children die they also have tablets in the home, but they are not prayed to,--but prayed _for_. Nightly the Mother talks to her dead child, advising, reminding, with words of caress,--just as if the little one were alive, and a tiny lamp is lighted to guide the little ghostly feet home. "Well, I do not want to write a dry essay for you, but in view of all the unkind things said about Japanese beliefs, I thought you might like to hear this, for I think you will feel there is something beautiful in the rule of reverence to the dead. "I hope, though I am not at all sure, that you will receive some fairy tales by this same mail,--as I have trusted the sending of them to a Yokohama friend. Here there are no book-houses at all--only shops for the sale of school texts. Should you get the stories, I want you to read the 'Matsuyama Mirror' first. There is a ghostly beauty that I think you will feel deeply. After all, the simplest stories are the best. "I wanted to say many more things; but the mail is about to leave, and I must stop to-day. "My little fellow is trying hard to talk and to walk. He is now very fair and strong. "Tell me, dear little beautiful sister, how you are always,--give me good news of yourself,--and love me a little bit. I will write soon again. "LAFCADIO HEARN." In November, 1895, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain visited him at Kobe, and then probably the possibility was discussed of Hearn's re-entering the government service as professor of English in the Imperial University at Tokyo. But as late as April, 1896, he still seemed uncertain that his engagement under government was assured. Professor Toyama wrote to him, saying that his becoming a Japanese citizen had raised a difficulty, which he hoped might be surmounted. Hearn replied, that he was not worried about the matter, and had never allowed himself to consider it very seriously--hinting, at the same time, that he would not accept a lower salary. If Matsue only had been a little warmer in the winter, he would rather be teaching there than in Tokyo, in any event he hoped some day to make a home there. About this time comes Hearn's last letter to his sister:-- "MY DEAR LITTLE SIS, "What you say about writing for English papers, etc., is interesting, but innocent. Men do not get opportunities to dispose of any MS. to advantage without one of two conditions. Either they must have struck a popular vein--become popular as writers; or they must have _social_ influence. I am not likely to become popular, and I have no social influence. No good post would be given me,--as I am not a man of conventions, and I am highly offensive to the Orthodoxies who have always tried to starve me to death--without success, happily, as yet. I am looking, however, for an English publisher, and hope some day to get a hearing in some London print. But for the time being, it is not what I wish that I can get, but what I can. Perhaps your eyes will open wide with surprise to hear that I shall get nothing, or almost nothing for my books. The contracts deprive me of all but a nominal percentage on the 2nd thousand. "Well, this is only a line to thank you for your sweet little letter. I have Marjory's too, and shall write her soon. Love, "LAFCADIO. "Excuse eyes. "P.S.--I reopened this letter to add a few lines on second thought. "You wrote in your last about Sir F. Ball. His expression of pleasure about my books may have been merely politeness to a pretty lady,--my sweet little sister. But it may have been genuine--probably was partly so. He could very easily say a good word for me to the Editors of the great Reviews,--the _Fortnightly_, _Nineteenth Century_, etc.--though I am not sure whether his influence would weigh with them very greatly. "At all events what I need is 'a friend at Court,'--and need badly. Perhaps, perhaps only, my little sis could help me in that direction. I think I might ask you,--when possible, to try. The help an earnest man wants isn't money: it is opportunity. "We have a cozy little home in Kobe, and Kobe is pretty, but I fear I shall have to leave it by the time this reaches you. Therefore perhaps it will be better to address me: 'c/o James E. Beale, _Japan Daily Mail_, Yokohama, Japan.' I shall soon send Kajiwo's last photo with some more fairy tales written by myself for your 'bairns.' "Love to you, "L. H." As Lafcadio Hearn's biographer, I almost shrink from saying that this was the last letter of the series written to his sister, Mrs. Atkinson. It somehow was so satisfactory to think of the exile having resumed intercourse with his own people, and with his native land; but with however deep a feeling of regret, the fact must be acknowledged that he suddenly put an end to the intercourse for some unaccountable reason. He not only never wrote again, but returned her envelope, empty of its contents, without a line of explanation. Mrs. Atkinson has puzzled over the enigma many times, but has never been able to fathom the reason for such an action on the part of her eccentric half-brother. There was nothing, she declares, in her letter to wound even his irritable nerves. At one time she thought it might have been in consequence of the attempts of various other members of the family to open a correspondence with him; he reiterated several times to Mrs. Atkinson the statement that "one sister was enough." I, on the other hand, think the key may with more probability be found in a passage from one of his letters written at this time, saying he had received letters from relatives in England that had made his thoughts not blue, but indigo blue. A longing had entered his heart that each year henceforward became stronger, to return to his native land, to hold communion with those of his own race; this nostalgia was rendered acute by his sister's letters, his literary work was interfered with and his nerves upset; he therefore made up his mind suddenly to stop the correspondence. The person who behaved thus was the same erratic creature, who, having previously made an appointment, on going to keep it, rang the bell and then, seized with nervous panic--ran away; or had fits of nervous depression lasting for days because a printer had put a few commas in the wrong place or misspelt some Japanese words. Hearn possessed supreme intellectual courage, would stick to his artistic "pedestal of faith" with a determination that was heroic, but where his nerves were concerned he was an arrant coward. If letters, or arguments with friends, flurried him, or awakened uncongenial thoughts or memories, he was capable of putting the letters away unread, and breaking off a friendship that had lasted for years. Thinking his silence might be caused by ill-health, Mrs. Atkinson wrote several times. The only answer she received was from Mr. James Beale of the _Japan Mail_:-- "Japan Mail _Office_, "_Yokohama_, "_July_ 9_th_, 1896. "Dear Madam, "I hasten to relieve your anxiety in regard to your brother's health. I have just returned from an expedition in the North, and previous to leaving about a month ago, was on the point of asking Hearn if he could accompany me, because it was a part of the country which he has never visited, but about that time I received a letter from him in which he stated that he was very busy (I believe he has another book on the stocks), and I did not mention the matter when I wrote. His letter was written in a very cheerful strain and indicated no illness or trouble with his eyes. In regard to the latter I have heard nothing since the spring of '95, when, through rest from study, they had recovered their normal condition. As Hearn once lived in a very isolated town on the West Coast I used to receive letters and other postal matter for him and do little commissions for him here, and I remember at times English letters passing through my hands. These were all carefully reposted to him as they came, and I should say that your letters had undoubtedly reached him. "No apology is necessary on your part, as I am pleased to afford you whatever consolation you may find in the knowledge of the fact that your brother is alive and well. I think I may venture to say that if he has neglected his friends it is due to being busy. "I send you his address below. "Yours faithfully, "JAS. ELLACOTT BEALE. "_No. 16, Zashiki, "Shichi-chome, Bangai, "Naka Zamate-dori, "Kobe, Japan._ "MRS. M. C. BUCKLEY-ATKINSON. "Since writing the foregoing I have learned that your brother has been appointed to a post in the University. The announcement will appear in to-morrow's _Mail_. "This appointment will necessitate Hearn's removal to the capital, and as the vacation expires on September 15, the address at Kobe I have given will not find him. As soon as his Tokyo address reaches me I will send it to you. "J. E. B." As a set-off to this unaccountable break in his correspondence with his sister, I would like to end this chapter with a touching and pathetic letter, addressed to Mrs. Watkin at Cincinnati, and another to his "Old Dad," friends of over twenty years' standing, but unfortunately am not able to do so. Hitherto Hearn's affection had been given to Mr. Watkin; of his female belongings he had seen but little. Now apparently, Mrs. and Miss Effie Watkin ventured to address the "great man," as their husband's and father's eccentric Bohemian little friend had become. To Mrs. Watkin he touches on the mysteries of spiritualism which were scarcely mysteries in the Far East; some day he hoped to drop in on all the circle he loved and talk ghostliness. Some hints of it appeared, he said, in a little book of his, "Out of the East." He imagined Mr. Watkin to be more like Homer than ever. He himself had become grey and wrinkled, fat, too, and disinclined for violent exercise. In other words, he was getting down the shady side of the hill, the horizon before him was already darkening, and the winds blowing out of it cold. He was not in the least concerned about the enigmas, he said, except that he wondered what his boy would do if he were to die. To his "Old Dad" he writes a whimsically affectionate letter, his old and dearest friend, he calls him. Practical, material people predicted that he was to end in gaol, or at the termination of a rope, but his "Old Dad" always predicted he would be able to do something. He was anxious for as much success as he could get for his son's sake. To have the future of others to care for certainly changed the face of life; he worked and hoped, the best and only thing to do. CHAPTER XXII TOKYO "... No one ever lived who seemed more a creature of circumstance than I; I drift with various forces in the line of least resistance, resolve to love nothing, and love always too much for my own peace of mind,--places, things, and persons,--and lo! presto! everything is swept away, and becomes a dream, like life itself. Perhaps there will be a great awakening; and each will cease to be an Ego: become an All, and will know the divinity of man by seeing, as the veil falls, himself in each and all." One of the greatest sacrifices that Hearn ever made,--and he made many for the sake of his wife and family--was the giving up of his life in the patriarchal Japan of mystery and tradition, with its _Yashikis_ and ancient shrines--to inhabit the modernised metropolis of Tokyo. The comparative permanency of the appointment and the, for Japan, high salary of twenty pounds a year, combined with the fact that lecturing was less arduous for his eyesight than journalistic work on the _Kobe Chronicle_, were the principal inducements. Still, it was one of the ironies of Fate that this shy, irritable creature, who had an inveterate horror of large cities and a longing to get back to an ancient dwelling surrounded by shady gardens, and high, moss-grown walls, should have been obliged to spend the last eight years of his life in a place pulsating with life, amidst commercial push and bustle. His wife, on the other hand, longed to live in the capital, as Frenchwomen long to live in Paris. Tokyo, the really beautiful Tokyo--of the old stories and picture-books--still existed in her provincial mind; she knew all the famous names, the bridges, streets, and temples. Hearn appears to have made an expedition from Kobe to Tokyo at the beginning of the year 1896, to spy out the land and decide what he would do. To his friend, Ellwood Hendrik, he writes, giving him a description of the university, such a contrast in every way to his preconceived ideas, with its red-brick colleges and imposing façade, a structure that would not appear out of place in the city of Boston or Philadelphia, or London. After his final acceptance of the appointment, and his move to the capital, he experienced considerable difficulty in finding a house. 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, situated in Ushigome, a suburb of Tokyo, was the one he at last selected. He describes it as a bald utilitarian house with no garden, no surprises, no delicacies, no chromatic contrasts, a "rat-trap," compared to most Japanese houses, that were many of them so beautiful that ordinary mortals hardly dared to walk about in them. In telling the story of Lafcadio Hearn's life at Tokyo, it is well to remember that he only occupied the house where his widow now lives at Nishi Okubo for two years before his death. The bulk of his literary work was done at 21, Tomihasa-chio. When I was at Tokyo I endeavoured to find the house, but my ignorance of the language, the "fantastic riddle of streets," that constitute a Tokyo suburb, to say nothing of the difficulties besetting a stranger in dealing with Japanese jinrikisha men, obliged me at last to abandon the quest as hopeless. I did not even succeed in tracing the proprietor, a _sake_-brewer, who had owned eight hundred Japanese houses in the neighbourhood, or in locating the old Buddhist temple of Kobduera, where Hearn spent so much of his time, wandering in the twilight of the great trees, dreaming out of space, out of time. The suburb of Ushigome is situated at some distance from the university. One hour daily to go, and one to return by jinrikisha. But Hearn had one joy; he was able to congratulate himself on the absence of visitors. Any one who endeavoured to invade the solitude of his suburban abode must have "webbed feet and been able to croak and spawn!" Hearn's description of Tokyo might be placed as a pendant to his celebrated description of New York City. To any one who has visited the Japanese metropolis during the last five years, it is most vividly realistic--the size of the place, stretching over miles of country; here the quarter of the foreign embassies, looking like a well-painted American suburb--near by an estate with quaint Chinese gates several centuries old; a little farther, square miles of indescribable squalor; then miles of military parade-ground trampled into a waste of dust, and bounded by hideous barracks; then a great park full of weird beauty, the shadows all black as ink; then square miles of streets of shops, which burn down once a year; then more squalor; then rice-fields and bamboo-groves; then more streets. Gigantic reservoirs with no water in them, great sewer pipes without any sanitation.... To think of art, or time, or eternity, he said, in the dead waste and muddle of this mess, was difficult. But Setsu was happy--like a bird making its nest, she was fixing up her new home, and had not yet had time to notice what ugly weather it was. In spite of grumbling and complaints about his surroundings at Tokyo, there were redeeming features that rendered the position comparatively tolerable. Some of his old pupils from Izumo were now students at the Imperial University; they were delighted to welcome their old professor, seeking help and sympathy as in days gone by. Knowing Hearn's irritable and sensitive disposition, the affection and respect entertained for him by his pupils at the various colleges in which he taught, and the manner in which he was given his own way and his authority upheld, even when at variance with the directors, speaks well both for him and his employers. His work, too, was congenial. He threw himself into the preparation and delivery of his lectures heart and soul. To take a number of orientals, and endeavour to initiate them in the modes of thought and feeling of a people inhabiting a mental and moral atmosphere as far apart as if England and Japan were on different planets, might well seem an impossible task. In summing up the valuable work which Hearn accomplished in his interpretation of the West to the East, these lectures, delivered while professor of English literature at Kumamoto and Tokyo, must not be forgotten. At the end of her two delightful volumes of Hearn's "Life and Letters," Mrs. Wetmore gives us one of them, delivered at Tokyo University, taken down at the time by T. Ochiai, one of his students. Another is given by Yone Noguchi in his book on "Hearn in Japan." They are fair examples of the manner in which Hearn spoke, not to their intellects, but to their emotions. His theory was that beneath the surface the hearts of all nationalities are alike. An emotional appeal, therefore, was more likely to be understood than a mechanical explanation of technique and style. The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form, through every condition of society, and almost into every household. Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl." The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's. Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc. No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of gold--luckily for themselves. He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that inspired the Mohammedan curse, "May God put a Hat on you!" All the professors were obliged to stand out in the sleet and snow--no overcoats allowed, though it was horribly cold. They were twice actually permitted to bow down before His Majesty. Most of them got cold, but nothing more for the nonce. "Lowell discovered one delicious thing in the Far East--'The Gate of everlasting Ceremony.' But the ancient ceremony was beautiful. Swallow-tails and plugs are not beautiful. My little wife tells me: 'Don't talk like that: even if a robber were listening to you upon the roof of the house, he would get angry.' So I am only saying to you: 'I don't see that I should be obliged to take cold, merely for the privilege of bowing to H. M.' Of course this is half-jest, half-earnest. There is a reason for things--for anything except--a plug hat...." * * * * * As nearly as we can make out, his friend, Nishida Sentaro, died during the course of this winter. He was an irreparable loss to Hearn, representing, as he did, all that constituted his most delightful memories of Japan. In his last book, "Japan, an Interpretation," he alludes to him as the best and dearest friend he had in the country, who had told him a little while before his death: "When in four or five years' further residence you find that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you may boast of beginning to know something about them." With none of the professors at the university at Tokyo does Hearn ever seem to have formed ties of intimacy. Curiously enough, the professor of French literature, a Jesuit priest, was to him the most sympathetic. Hearn in some things was a conservative, in others a radical. During the Boer War he took up the cause of the Dutch against the English, only because he inaccurately imagined the Boers to have been the original owners of Dutch South Africa. Protestant missionaries he detested, looking upon them as iconoclasts, destroyers of the beautiful ancient art, which had been brought to Japan by Buddhism. The Jesuits, on the other hand, favoured the preservation of ancient feudalism and ecclesiasticism. Hearn's former prejudices, therefore, on the subject of Roman Catholicism were considerably mitigated during his residence in Japan. He describes his landlord, the old _sake_-brewer, coming to definitely arrange the terms of the lease of the house. When he caught sight of Kazuo he said, "You are too pretty,--you ought to have been a girl."... "That set me thinking," Hearn adds, "if Kazuo feels like his father about pretty girls,--what shall I do with him? Marry him at seventeen or nineteen? Or send him to grim and ferocious Puritans that he may be taught the Way of the Lord? I am now beginning to think that really much of ecclesiastical education (bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded upon the best experience of man under civilisation; and I understand lots of things which I used to think superstitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom." He and the Jesuit professor of French got into a religious discussion one day, and Hearn found him charming. Of course he looked upon Hearn as a heretic, and considered all philosophy of the nineteenth century false,--everything, indeed, accomplished by free thought and Protestantism, folly, leading to ruin. But he and Hearn had sympathies in common, contempt of conventional religion, scorn of missionaries, and recognition of the naturally religious character of the Japanese. After Nishida Sentaro's death, the only Japanese friendship that Hearn retained was that for Amenomori Nobushige, to whom "Kokoro" was dedicated:-- TOKYO "to my friend Amenomori Nobushige poet, scholar and patriot." We first find Amenomori's name mentioned in Hearn's letters the year he left Kumamoto for Kobe. When we were at Tokyo we were told that Amenomori's widow, who lives there, possesses a voluminous correspondence that passed between her husband and Hearn, principally on the subject of Buddhism. Some day I imagine it will be published. To Amenomori, as to others, Hearn poured out his despair at the uncongenial surroundings of Tokyo; he wanted new experiences, and Tokyo was not the place for them. "Perhaps the power to feel a thrill dies with the approach of a man's fiftieth year--perhaps the only land to find the new sensation is in the Past,--floats blue peaked under some beautiful dead sun in the 'tropic clime of youth.' Must I die and be born again, to feel the charm of the Far East--or will Amenomori Nobushige discover for me some unfamiliar blossom growing beside the fountain of Immortality? Alas! I don't know...." Amenomori seems to have had a real affection for the eccentric little genius, and to have philosophically accepted his fits of temper and apparently unaccountable vagaries. In the company of all Japanese, however, even the most highly cultivated, Hearn declared that all occidentals felt unhappy after an hour's communion. When the first charm of formality is over, the Japanese suddenly drifts away into his own world, as far from this one as the star Rephan. Mitchell McDonald, paymaster of the United States navy, stationed at Yokohama, was apparently the only person for whom Hearn cherished a warm human sentiment at this time beyond his immediate family circle. In Miss Bisland's account of her "Flying Trip Around the World" she mentions McDonald of Yokohama--in brown boots and corduroys--as escorting her to various places of interest during her short stay in Japan. It was apparently through her intervention that the introduction of Lafcadio Hearn was effected, and must have taken place almost immediately on Hearn's arrival in Japan, for he mentions McDonald in one of his first letters to Ellwood Hendrik, and "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" was dedicated to him in conjunction with Chamberlain. "After all I am rather a lucky fellow," he writes to McDonald, "a most peculiarly lucky fellow, principally owing to the note written by a certain sweet young lady, whose portrait now looks down on me from the ceiling of No. 21, Tomihasa-chio." Writing from Tokyo to Mrs. Wetmore, in January, 1900, he tells her that above the table was a portrait of a young American officer in uniform,--a very dear picture. Many a time, Hearn said, they had sat up till midnight, talking about things. The conversation at these dinners, eaten overlooking the stretch of Yokohama Harbour, with the sound of the waves lapping on the harbour wall beneath, and the ships and boats passing to and fro beyond, never seems to have been about literary matters, which perhaps accounts for the friendship between the two lasting so long. "Like Antæus I feel always so much more of a man, after a little contact with your reality, not so much of a _literary_ man however." The salt spray that Hearn loved so well seemed to cling to McDonald, the breeziness of a sailor's yarning ran through their after-dinner talks, the adventures of naval life at sea, and at the ports where McDonald had touched during his service. He was always urging McDonald to give him material for stories, studies of the life of the "open ports"--only real facts--not names or dates--real facts of beauty, or pathos, or tragedy. He felt that all the life of the open ports is not commonplace; there were heroisms and romances in it; and there was really nothing in this world as wonderful as life itself. All real life was a marvel, but in Japan a marvel that was hidden as much as possible--"especially hidden from dangerous chatterers like Lafcadio Hearn." If he could get together a book of short stories--six would be enough--he would make a dedication of it to M. McD. as prettily as he could. Under the soothing influence of a good cigar, Hearn would even take his friend into his confidence about many incidents in his own past life--that past life which generally was jealously guarded from the outside world. He tells McDonald the pleasure it gives him, his saying that he resembles his father, but "I have more smallness in me than you can suspect. How could it be otherwise! If a man lives like a rat for twenty or twenty-five years he must have acquired something of the disposition peculiar to house rodents, mustn't he?" The communion between these two was more like that between some popular, athletic, sixth-form boy at Eton, whose softer side had been touched by the forlornness of a shy, sickly, bullied minor, than that between two middle-aged men, one representing the United States in an official capacity, the other one of the most famous writers of the day. The first letter relates to a visit that McDonald apparently paid to Ushigome, an audacious proceeding that few ventured upon. Hearn expressed his appreciation of McDonald's good nature in coming to his miserable little shanty, over a muddy chaos of street--the charming way in which he accepted the horrid attempt at entertainment, and his interest and sympathy in Hearn's affairs. In the house at Nishi Okubo mementoes are still preserved of McDonald's visits. A rocking-chair,--rare piece of furniture in a Japanese establishment--a spirit lamp, and an American cigar-ash holder. McDonald apparently saw, as Dr. Papellier had seen at Kobe, that Hearn was killing himself by his ascetic Japanese mode of life. Raw fish and lotus roots were not food suited for the heavy brain work Hearn was doing, besides his professional duties at the university. McDonald, therefore, insisted on being allowed to send him wine and delicacies of all sorts. "With reference to the 'best,'" Hearn writes, "you are a dreadful man! How could you think that I have got even half way to the bottom? I have only drunk three bottles yet, but that is a shameful 'only.'" They seemed to have exchanged books and discussed things, and laughed and made jokes school-boy fashion. Hearn talks of their sprees, their dinners, their tiffins, "irresistibles," and alludes to "blue ghost" and "blue soul"--names given to some potation partaken of at the club or at the hotel. It shows McDonald's powers of persuasion that Hearn was tempted out of his shell at Ushigome to pass two or three days at Yokohama. Sunlit hours were these in the exile's life. Three days passed with his friend at Yokohama were, Hearn declares, the most pleasurable in a pilgrimage of forty-seven years. "What a glorious day we did have!" he says again. "Wonder if I shall ever be able to make a thumb-nail literary study thereof,--with philosophical reflections. The Naval Officer, the Buddhist Philosopher (Amenomori), and the wandering Evolutionist. The impression is altogether too sunny and happy and queer, to be forever lost to the world. I must think it up some day...." There is something pathetic in these healthy-minded, healthy-bodied men petting and making much of the little genius, half in pity, half in admiration, recognising in an indefinite way that some divine attribute was his. McDonald, in his enthusiastic sailor fashion, used to express his belief in Hearn's genius, telling him that he was a greater writer than Loti. Being a practical person, he was apparently continually endeavouring to try and induce his little friend to take a monetary view of his intellectual capacities. Hearn tells him that he understands why he wished him to write fiction--he wanted him to make some profit out of his pen, and he knew that "fiction" was about the only stuff that really paid. Then he sets forth the reasons why men like himself didn't write more fiction. First of all, he had little knowledge of life, and by that very want of knowledge was debarred from mixing with the life which alone can furnish the material. They can _divine_, but must have some chances to do that, for society everywhere suspects them. Men like Kipling belong to the great Life Struggle, and the world believes them and worships them; "but Dreamers that talk about pre-existence, and who think differently from common-sense folk, are quite outside of social existence." Then his old dream of being able to travel was again adverted to, or even an independence that would liberate him from slavery to officialdom--but he had too many little butterfly lives to love and take care of. His dream of even getting to Europe for a time to put his boy to college there must remain merely a possibility. The only interruption to the harmony of the communion between the two friends was Hearn's dislike of meeting the inquisitive occidental tourist; this dislike attained at last the proportions of an obsession, and the more he withdrew and shut himself up, the more did legendary tales circle round him, and the more determined were outsiders to get behind the veil that he interposed between himself and them. He went in and out the back way so as to avoid the risk of being seen from afar off. Thursday last, he tells McDonald, three enemies dug at his hole, but he zigzagged away from them. He adverts, too, to a woman, who had evidently never seen or known him, who spelt his name Lefcardio, and pestered him with letters. "Wish you would point out to her somebody who looks small and queer, and tell her 'that is Mr. Hearn, he is waiting to see you.'" The curiosity animating these people, he declared, was simply the kind of curiosity that impelled them to look at strange animals--six-legged calves, for instance. His friends, he declared, were as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than his enemies, for these latter, with infinite subtlety, kept him out of places where he hated to go, and told stories of him to people to whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet, and their unconscious aid helped him so that he almost loved them. But his friends!--they were the real destroyers, they praised his work, believed in it, and yet, not knowing what it cost, would break the wings and scatter the feather-dust, even as a child caressing a butterfly. Converse and sympathy might be precious things to others, but to him they were deadly, for they broke up habits of industry, and caused the sin of disobedience to the Holy Ghost--"against whom sin shall not be forgiven,--either in this life, or in the life to come." Sometimes he wished, he said, that he were lost upon the mountains, or cast away upon a rock, rather than in the terrible city of Tokyo. "Yet here I am, smoking a divine cigar--out of my friend's gift-box--and brutally telling him that he is killing my literary soul, or souls. Am I right or wrong? I feel like kicking myself. And yet I feel that I ought never again in this world to visit the Grand Hotel." In spite of these protestations, however, McDonald would lure him to come down again and again to Yokohama, and again and again make him smoke good cigars, drink good wine, and eat nourishing food. Once, when the little man had, with characteristic carelessness, forgotten to bring a great-coat, McDonald wrapped him up in his own to send him home--an incident which Hearn declared he would remember for its warmth of friendship until he died. Another time, when he complained of toothache, McDonald got the navy doctor to remove, as he thought, the primary cause. Hearn gives a humorous account of this incident. He found that when he returned home the wrong one had been pulled. Its character, he said, had been modest and shrinking, the other one, on the contrary, had been Mount Vesuvius, the last great Javanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathematical combination. It was magnanimous of Hearn to dedicate "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" to the doctor after this incident. McDonald and his genial surroundings seemed to have thoroughly understood how to manage the little man. When he became irritable and unreasonable they apparently took not the least notice, and good-naturedly wheedled him back into a good temper again--treated him, in fact, as Mr. Watkin had treated him during his attacks of temper at Cincinnati. So, without any real break, this friendship, as well as Mrs. Wetmore's, lasted until the end. Since Hearn's death, Captain McDonald has loyally stood by his widow and children, taking upon himself the self-imposed duties of executor, collecting together scattered MS., and arranging the sale of the copyright of his books in the United States. CHAPTER XXIII USHIGOME "Every one has an inner life of his own,--which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally, when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it--sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.... Are we not all Dopplegangers?--and is not the invisible the only life we really enjoy?" In spite of his railings against Tokyo, Hearn was probably happier at Ushigome and Nishi Okubo than he had ever been during his other sojournings in Japan, excepting always the enchanted year at Matsue. To paraphrase George Barrow, there was day and night, both sweet things, sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things, likewise there was the wind that rustled through the bamboo-grove. Hearn had all the oriental's scorn of comfort: so long as he could indulge in the luxury of dreaming and writing, his pipe and Webster's Dictionary within reach, he asked for little else. This master of impressionist prose confessed--in his diffident and humble manner where his art was concerned--that now for the first time he began to write English with ease. Roget's "Thesaurus," and Skeat's "Etymological Dictionary" were definitely discarded. He recognised, also, that he had caught the ear of the public, not only in America but in England. The manner of Hearn's life at this time entirely contradicts his pessimistic statements, that "the Holy Ghost had deserted him ...," that "he had lost his pen of fire ...," and that he was "like a caged cicada that could not sing." No author who writes and publishes can ever really, in his heart of hearts, be a pessimist. There is no conviction so optimistic as thinking that your thoughts and opinions are worth setting forth for the benefit of the public. Though he had not much sympathy with Japanese and foreign professors, and clashed now and then with the officials at the Imperial University, at home he enjoyed the most complete tranquillity; all is noiseless in a Japanese house, not a footfall audible on the soft matting, everything was favourable to absorption in his work. He was an early riser, always at his desk by six o'clock, pipe in one hand and pen in the other. "Even when in bed with a cold, or not feeling well," his wife tells us, "it was always, write, write, write." Sometimes she found him in the library, jumping for joy because he had a new idea. She would ask him, "Did you finish your last story?" Sometimes he would answer, "That story has to wait for some time. Perhaps a month--perhaps a year--perhaps five years!" He kept one story in his drawer for seven long years before it was finished. I believe that many stories of his were left unfinished in his drawer, or, at least, in the drawer of his mind when he passed away. Though perturbed every now and then by the little man's fits of excitement and temper--phases of mind unknown to her own countrymen--and though she shrinkingly recognised the neighbours' suspicion that he was slightly crazy, Setsu Koizumi nourished a deep affection for her foreign husband, and Hearn, on the other hand, though intellectually an abyss might yawn between them, had the greatest respect for his wife's common-sense. "I have learnt to be guided by K.'s mamma," he says, writing eight years after his marriage--"indeed, no occidental-born could manage a purely Japanese household, or direct Japanese according to his own light, things are so opposite, so eccentric, so provoking at times,--so impossible to understand.... By learning to abstain from meddling, I have been able to keep my servants from the beginning, and have learned to prize some of them at their weight in gold." Quaint and pathetic sidelights are cast upon this strange Anglo-Japanese union by Mrs. Hearn's recently-published "Reminiscences" and by various letters of his to friends. "I was reproached very justly on reaching home last night," Lafcadio tells Mitchell McDonald. "'But you did not bring your American friend's picture?... Forgot to put it into the valise?... Oh! but you _are_ queer--always, always dreaming! And don't you feel just a little bit ashamed?'" On another occasion, the little woman, seeing by the expression of his face that he was in a bad temper when writing to his publisher, got possession of the letter and "posted it in a drawer," asking him next day whether he would not like to withhold some of the correspondence. He acted on the hint thus wisely given, and the letter "was never sent." She describes him blowing for fun into a conch shell he had bought one day at Enoshima, delighting, like a mischievous boy, in the billowy sound that filled the room; or holding it to his ear to "listen to the murmur of the august abodes from whence it came." Happy in his garden and simple things--"the poet's home is to him the whole world," as the Japanese poem says--we see him talking, laughing, and singing at meals. "He had two kinds of laughter," his wife says, "one being a womanish sort of laughter, soft and deep; the other joyous and open-hearted, a catching sort of laughter, as if all trouble were forgotten, and when he laughed the whole household laughed, too." His multiplying family was growing up healthy and intelligent. He was kept in touch with youth and vigorous life, through intercourse with them and his pupils at the university. The account given us of his merrymaking with his children puts a very different aspect on Hearn's nature and outlook on life. However crabbed and reserved his attitude towards the outside world might be, at home with his children he was the cheeriest of comrades, expansive and affectionate. Sometimes he would play "_onigokko_," or devil-catching play (hide-and-seek), with them in the garden. "Though no adept in the Japanese language, he succeeded in learning the words of several children's songs, the Tokyo Sunset Song, for instance-- "Yu-yake! Ko-yake! Ashita wa tenki ni nare." "Evening-burning! Little-burning! Weather, be fair to-morrow!" or the Song of "Urashima Taro." He was much given to drawing, making pen-and-ink sketches illustrating quotations from English poetry for his eldest boy, Kazuo. Some of these which have recently been published are quite suggestively charming, distinguished by that quaint sadness which runs through all his work. In one, illustrative of Kingsley's "Three Fishers," though the lighthouse has a slight slant to leeward, the sea and clouds give an effect of storm and impending disaster which is wonderful. He was too near-sighted to be allowed to walk alone in the bustling, crowded streets of Tokyo; he one day, indeed, sprained his ankle severely, stumbling over a heap of stones and earth that he did not see. But in Kazuo's and his wife's company, he explored every corner of the district where he lived. He very seldom spoke, she tells us, as he walked with bent head, and they followed silently so as not to disturb his meditations. There was not a temple unknown to him in Zoshigaya, Ochiai, and the neighbouring quarters. He always carried a little note-book, and frequently brought it out to make notes of what he saw as they passed along. An ancient garden belonging to a temple near his house was a favourite resort, until one day he found three of the cedar trees cut down; this piece of vandalism, for the sake of selling the timber, made him so miserable that he refused any longer to enter the precincts, and for some time contented himself with a stroll round the lake in the university grounds. One of his students describes Hearn's slightly stooping form, surmounted by a soft broad-brimmed hat, pacing slowly and contemplatively along the lake, or sitting upon a stone on the shore, smoking his Japanese pipe. Though Hearn hated the ceremonious functions connected with his professional position, he was by no means averse, during the first half of his stay at Tokyo,--whilst his health indeed still permitted the indulgences--to a good dinner and cigar, in congenial company at the club. He was often compelled, at dinner, we were told, to ask some one at his elbow what was in his plate; sometimes a friend would make jestingly misleading replies, to which he would cheerfully respond: "Very well, if you can eat it, so can I." Professor Foxwell describes dining and then loafing and strolling and smoking with him. "It was not so much the dinner he enjoyed, as the twilight afterwards in Ueno Park, the soft night air romantic with fireflies hovering amongst the luxurious foliage. Our intercourse, though constant and not to be forgotten, was nothing to describe. I think we never argued or discussed the burning questions that divided the foreign community in Japan. We simply ate and drank and smoked, and in fact behaved as 'slackers.' We delighted in the air, the sunshine, the babies, the flowers, nothing but trifles, things too absurd to recall." Various cultured people in foreign circles in Tokyo were anxious enough to initiate friendly relations with the literary man whose Japanese books were beginning to make such a stir in the world, but Hearn kept them rigidly at a distance; indeed, as time went on he became more and more averse to mixing with his countrymen and countrywomen at Tokyo. He imagined that they were all inimical to him, and that he was the victim of gross injustice, and organised conspiracy. These prejudiced ideas were really the outcome of a peculiarly sensitive brain, lacking normal mental balance. Nothing but "Old Japan" was admitted inside his garden fence. A motley company! Well-cleaners, pipe-stem makers, ballad-singers, an old fortune-teller who visited Hearn every season. We can see him seated beside Hearn in his study, telling his fortune, which he did four times, until, as Hearn tells us, his predictions were fulfilled in such-wise that he became afraid of them. A set of ebony blocks, which could be so arranged as to form any of the Chinese hexagrams, were his stock-in-trade, and he always began his divination with an earnest prayer to the gods. In the winter of 1903 he was found frozen in the snow on the Izumo hills. "Even the fortune-teller knows not his own fate," is a Japanese saying quoted by Hearn in connection with the incident. But it was at Yaidzu, a small fishing village on the eastern coast, where he generally spent his summer vacation with his two boys, for sea-bathing, that he was in his element. The Yaidzu people had the deepest affection and respect for him, and during the summer vacation he liked to become one of them, dressing as they did, and living their simple patriarchal life. Indeed, he preferred the friendship of country barbers, priests and fishermen far more than that of college professors. As there was no inn at Yaidzu, Hearn lodged at the house of Otokichi, who, as well as being a fisherman, kept a fish-shop, and cooked every description of fish in a wonderful variety of ways. Aided by Hearn's description, we can see Otokichi's shop, its rows of shelves supporting boxes of dried fish, packages of edible seaweed, bundles of straw sandals, gourds for holding _sake_, and bottles of lemonade, while surmounting all was the _kamidana_--the shelf of the gods--with its _Daruma_, or household divinity. Many and fanciful were his dreams as he loafed and lay on the beach at Yaidzu, sometimes thinking of the old belief, that held some dim relation between the dead and the human essence fleeting in the gale--floating in the mists--shuddering in the leaf--flickering in the light of waters--or tossed on the desolate coast in a thunder of surf, to whiten and writhe in the clatter of shingle.... At others, as when a boy at school, lying looking at the clouds passing across the sky, and imagining himself a part of the nature that was living and palpitating round him. It is impossible in the space at my command, to examine Hearn's work at Tokyo in detail; it consists of nine books. The first one published after his appointment as professor of English at the university was "Gleanings in Buddha Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East." Though it saw the light at Tokyo in 1897, the greater part of it is said to have been written at Kobe. Henceforth all his Japanese literary work was but "Gleanings," gathered in the fields he had ploughed and sown at Matsue, Kobe, Kumamoto and Kyoto. Every grain of impression, of reminiscence, scientific and emotional, was dropped into the literary mill. Amongst the essays comprising the volume entitled "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," there is nothing particularly arresting. His chapter on "Nirvana" is hackneyed and unsubstantial, ending with the vaporous statement that "the only reality is One; all that we have taken for substance is only shadow; the physical is the unreal: _and the outer-man is the ghost_." In dealing with Hearn's genius we have to accept frequent contradictions and changes of statement. His deductions need classifying and substantiating, he often generalises from insufficient premises, and over-emphasises the impression of the moment at the expense of accuracy. In his article on the "Eternal Feminine," he endeavours to prove that the Japanese man is incapable of love, as we understand it in the West. Having taken up an idea, he uses all his skill in the manipulation of words to support his view, even though in his inner consciousness he fostered a conviction that it was not exactly a correct one. The fact of occidental fiction being revolting to the Japanese moral sense is far-fetched. Many people amongst ourselves are of opinion that in much of our fictional work the sexual question is given a great deal too much prominence; what wonder, therefore, that the male Japanese, being bound by social convention to keep all feeling under restraint, from the first moment he can formulate a thought, should look upon it as indecorous, and, above all, inartistic, to express his sentiments unreservedly on the subject of the deeper emotions, but that does not for a moment prove that he is incapable of feeling them. All Japanese art, poetry as well as painting, is impressionistic and suggestive instead of detailed. "_Ittakkiri_" (entirely vanished, in the sense of "all told"), is a term applied contemptuously to the poet who, instead of an indication, puts the emotion itself into words. The art of writing poetry is universal in Japan; verses, seldom consisting of more than two lines, are to be found upon shop-signs, panels, screens and fans. They are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains and women's crêpe silk underwear, they are written by every one and for all occasions. Is a woman sad and lonely at home, she writes poems. Is a man unoccupied for an hour, he employs himself putting his thoughts into poetry. Hearn was continually on the quest of these simple poems: to Otani he writes, "Please this month collect for me, if you can, some songs of the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind." The translations given by him in his essay entitled "Out of the Street," contradict his statement that the Japanese are incapable of deep feeling, and prove that love is as important an element in the Island Empire as with us, though the expression is less outspoken. Some of them are charming. "To Heaven with all my soul I prayed to prevent your going; Already, to keep you with me, answers the blessed rain. "Things never changed since the Time of the Gods: The flowing of water, the Way of Love." His next book was "Exotics and Retrospectives"; he thought of dedicating this volume to Mrs. Wetmore (Elizabeth Bisland), but in a letter to Ellwood Hendrik he expresses a doubt as to the advisability of doing so, as some of the essays might be rather of a startling character. Ultimately he dedicated it to H. H. Hall, late U. S. Navy, "In Constant Friendship." * * * * * The prefatory note shows how permeated his mode of thought was at this time with Buddhistical theories.... "To any really scientific imagination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of Eastern faith,--particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts,--might have suggested something much more significant than my cluster of 'Retrospectives.' These are offered merely as intimations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognise than to define." The first essay, describing his ascent of Fuji-no-yama, is as beautiful a piece of impressionistic prose as Hearn ever wrote--the immense poetry of the moment as he stood on the summit and looked at the view for a hundred leagues, and the pilgrims poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned eastward, clapping their hands as a salutation to the mighty day. The colossal vision had already become a memory ineffaceable--a memory of which no luminous detail could fade till the light from the myriad millions of eyes that had looked for untold ages from the summit supreme of Fuji to the rising of the sun had been quenched, even to the hour when thought itself must fade. * * * * * "Ghostly Japan," written in 1899, was dedicated to Mrs. Alice von Behrens for auld lang syne. We cannot trace any mention of this lady elsewhere, but conclude she was one of his New York acquaintances. "Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: the dream of this world of pain appears to us even by day," is the translation of the Japanese poem on the first page. To Mitchell McDonald he wrote, saying that he did not quite know what to do with regard to "Ghostly Japan." Then later he says, he has been and gone and done it. In fifteen minutes he had the whole thing perfectly packed and labelled and addressed in various languages, dedicated to Mrs. Behrens, but entrusted largely to the gods. To save himself further trouble of mind, he told the publishers just to do whatever they pleased about terms--and not to worry him concerning them. Then he felt like a man liberated from prison--smelling the perfumed air of a perfect spring day. In 1900 came "Shadowings," dedicated to Mitchell McDonald. Some of the fantasies at the end are full of his peculiar ghostly ideas. A statement of his belief in previous existence occurs again and again: "The splendour of the eyes that we worship belongs to them only as brightness to the morning star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,--a ghost light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-face we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of Heaven,--eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust.... Thus and only thus do truth and delusion mingle in the magic of eyes--the spectral past suffusing with charm ineffable the apparition of the present; and the sudden splendour in the soul of the seer is but a flash, one soundless sheet lightning of the infinite memory." "Shadowings" was succeeded by a "Japanese Miscellany," dedicated to Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore. Here there is no reference to "Auld Lang Syne," nor is there a touch of sentiment from beginning to end. The book is perhaps more intensely Japanese and fanciful than any yet written, and to occidental readers the least interesting. One of the sketches, inspired by his sojournings in the village of Yaiduz, is a pæan, as it were, sung to the sea. Another on "Dragon-Flies" is delightful because of its impressionist translations of Japanese poems. "Lonesomely clings the dragon-fly to the under side of the leaf. ... Ah! the autumn rains!" And a verse written by a mother, who, seeing children chasing butterflies, thinks of her little one who is dead:-- "Catching dragon-flies!... I wonder where he has gone to-day." CHAPTER XXIV NISHI OKUBO "From the foot of the mountain, many are the paths ascending in shadow; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold the selfsame Moon."--_Buddhist poem translated by_ Lafcadio Hearn. It was on the 19th of March, 1902, that the Koizumi family removed from 21, Tomihasa-chio, Ichigaya, Ushigome, to 266, Nishi Okubo. Hearn had purchased the house out of his savings and settled it on his wife according to English law, as no woman can hold property in Japan. It is there that Mrs. Hearn now lives, sub-letting half of it to Captain Fujisaki--one of Hearn's Matsue students, who has remained an intimate friend of his widow and children. Nishi Okubo is known as the Gardeners' Quarter, where the celebrated Tokyo azaleas are grown, and where a show of azaleas is held once a year. After he took possession, Hearn added on the library, or Buddha-room, as it is now called, and a guest-room, which was assigned to Mrs. Koizumi for her occupation. Had Hearn at this time managed his affairs with the least businesslike acumen, he might have enjoyed the comfortable competency which his widow now receives from the royalties and sales of his books, which have most of them been translated into German, Swedish and French, and achieved a considerable circulation in England. There is little doubt he was lamentably wanting in the most rudimentary knowledge of practical business affairs, and was entirely to blame for the difficulties in which he so repeatedly found himself. "I have given up thinking about the business side of literature, and am quite content to obtain the privilege of having my books produced according to my notions of things," he writes to Mitchell McDonald. On the day of his arrival in the new house, while,--assisted by his wife,--he was arranging his books in the shelves in the library, he suddenly heard an _uguisu_ (nightingale) singing in the bamboo-grove outside. He stopped to listen, then "How delightful!" he said to his wife, "Oh! how I hope I will live here for years until I have made enough for you and the children." During the last two years of his life he suffered a great deal from his eyes; each month more powerful glasses had to be used; and he was obliged to stand writing at a high desk, his face almost touching the paper. Yet what a beautiful handwriting it is! almost as plain as copperplate. Composition was easy for him, but the mechanical labour of setting down his thoughts became very irksome. Many were the kind offers of help that he received; Mr. Mason, for instance, proposed to do any necessary copying he wanted, but he was too irritable to do work in conjunction with any one, and was never able to dictate successfully. The absence of intellectual communion with his own compatriots would have been a cruel test for most writers. His manuscript had to float round half a world before it met with sympathetic understanding. Surrounded by complete spiritual solitude, a voluntary outlaw from the practical thought of his time, the current of emotional and practical life which bore most of his contemporaries to affluence and popularity flowed entirely outside his mental boundary. Yet, is it not most probable that this aloofness and seclusion from the world invested his Tokyo work with its unique and original quality? "The isolation ought," he writes, "unless you are physically tired by the day's work,--to prove of value. All the best work is done this way by tiny, tireless and regular additions, preserving in memory what you think and see. In a year you will be astounded to find them self-arranging, kaleidoscopically, into something symmetrical,--and trying to live. Then pray God, and breathe into their nostrils,--and be astonished and pleased." "You will remember," he says elsewhere, "my philosophical theory that no two living beings have the same voice ... and it is the uniqueness of each that has its value.... I simply now try to do the best I can, without reference to nationalities or schools." Strangeness, we are told by the Romantic school, is essential for the highest beauty; it was a theory Hearn always maintained, but his strangeness now became spiritualised. Instead of the oddness of a Creole song, or a negro "roustabout," it was the oddness of the ethics and religious superstitions of the genius of a remarkable people. At this time Hearn had a recurrence of the emotional trances he had suffered from at various times in his life, a state of mental anæmia common to brain-workers of no great physical stamina. "He saw things," as his wife says, "that were not, and heard things that were not." Absence of mind was a peculiarity inherited with his Hearn inheritance. Sometimes, when called to supper, he would declare he had had it already, and continue writing instead of joining his family, or if he did join them, he would make all sorts of blunders, putting salt instead of sugar in his coffee, and eating sugar with his fish. When his brain thus went "argonauting," as Ruskin expresses it, practical consistency was forgotten, even the sense of personal identity. He beheld ghostly apparitions in the surrounding air, he held communion with a multitude of supernatural visions, a procession stretching back out of life into the night of forgotten centuries. We can see him seated in his library, weaving his dreams while all the household slept, so absorbed in his work as to have forgotten bedtime, the stillness only broken by the rapping of his little pipe against the _hibachi_, the intermittent scratch of his pen, and the rustle of the leaves as he threw them down, while the bronze figure of Buddha on his lotus-stand, stood behind with uplifted hand and enigmatic smile. Richard Jefferies was wont to say that all his best work was done from memory. The "Pageant of Summer," with its vivid descriptions and realised visions of country meadows and hedgerows was written in his curtained sick-room at the seaside village of Goring. So Hearn in his house at Tokyo, his outlook bounded by the little plot of garden beneath his study window, recalled all he had seen and felt during his wanderings amongst the hills and by the seashore in distant parts of Japan. The laughter of streams and whisper of leaves, the azure of sky and sea; the falling of the blossoms of the cherry-trees, the lilac spread of the _myiakobana_, the blazing yellow of the _natalé_, the flooded levels of the lotus-fields, and the pure and tender green of the growing rice. Again he watched the flashing dragon-flies, the long grey sand-crickets, the shrilling _semi_, and the little red crabs astir under the roots of the pines; again he heard the croaking of the frogs, that universal song of the land in Japan, the melody of the _uguisu_ and the moan of the surf on the beach at Yaidzu. Hearn is principally known in England by his letters and essays on the social and political development of Japan. Cultured people who have Charles Lamb, De Quincey, or Robert Louis Stevenson at their fingers' ends will open eyes of wonder if you venture to suggest that Hearn's incidental sketches represent some of the best work of the kind done by any of our English essayists. Fresh, spontaneous and unconventional, the whole of his genius seems suddenly poured forth in an impulse of sadness, pity or humour. After some grim Japanese legend, we are greeted by one of these dainty fancies when his acute sensibility, touched and awakened, concentrated itself on the trifle of a moment. With the mastery of words that he had attained after years of hard work, he was enabled to catch the evanescent inspiration, and set it down, preaching from the significance of small things an infinite philosophy. A dewdrop hanging to the lattice of his window; the sighing of the wind in the bamboo-grove, the moon rising above his garden fence, were all full of soul secrets, soul life. In a sketch entitled "Moon Desire," for instance, he begins playfully, almost trivially, and ends with a fine burst of eloquence on the subject of human desire and attainment. "He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence--he asked me for the Moon. "Unwisely I protested:-- "'The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.' "He answered:-- "'By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.' "... Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon. "This set me to thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom.... "Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings that if realised could only work us woe,--such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways? "No, foolish as may seem to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun, and the Morning-Star, and all the Host of Heaven." He suffered much from depression of spirits towards the end, his wife tells us, and a Celtic tendency to vague and wistful dreaminess became more strongly developed, things full of unexplained meanings, supernatural, outside the experience of all ages, filled his mind. He had been wont to talk of himself as "A Voice" in past New York days. Now the sense of disembodiment, of having sloughed his mortal envelope and become "_one_" with every gloom of shadow and flicker of sun, one with the rapture of wind and sea--was his. The fact of his own existence was so strange and unrealisable that he seemed always touching the margin of life, meditating on higher conditions than existence here below. "In the dead of the night! So black, chill, and still,--that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body.... A clock strikes three! I shall see the sun again! "Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn--... Doubt the reality of the substance ... the faiths of men, the gods,--doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;--there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,--one infinite blind black certainty.... And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent for ever away;--the Sheol is naked before us,--and destruction hath no covering. "So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist--which is horror!... But-- "_Must I believe that I really exist?..._" Out of this idea he weaves a chapter of thrilling possibilities, and ends, "I am awake, fully awake!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of time I was;--beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without shore I am;--and Doubt and Fear are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth.... "Then a sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft grey glimmering;--and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed. "Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Purifier,--symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!..." * * * * * All his life Hearn had had a singular tenderness for animals. Mrs. Hearn describes his bringing his cats, dogs, and crickets with him when he moved from Ushigome to Nishi Okubo. The very mysteries of animal intelligence fascinated him, and, imbued as he was with ideas of pre-existence and the unity of all life, he raised them in imagination almost to an equality with man. The dog that guarded his gate at night, the dog that was everybody's and nobody's, owned nowhere. "It stays in the house of the foreigner," said the smith's wife when the policeman asked who it belonged to. "Then the foreigner's name must be painted upon the dog." Accordingly, Hearn had his name painted on her back in big Japanese characters. But the neighbours did not think that she was sufficiently safeguarded by a single name. So the priest of Kobduera painted the name of the temple on her left side, in beautiful Chinese text; and the smith put the name of his shop on her right side; and the vegetable-seller put on her breast the ideographs for "eight hundred"--which represent the customary abbreviation of the word _yaoya_ (vegetable-seller)--any _yaoya_ being supposed to sell eight hundred or more different things. Consequently she was a very curious-looking dog; but she was well protected by all that caligraphy. His wife observed him with bewilderment as he spread out a piece of newspaper on the matting, and fetching some ants out of a mound in the garden, watched them moving about the whole afternoon. How could the little woman guess that his busy brain was weaving the fine Essay on "Ants," published under the heading of "Insect Studies" in "Kwaidan"? "The air--the delicious air!--is full of sweet resinous odours shed from the countless pine-boughs broken and strewn by the gale. In the neighbouring bamboo-grove I hear the flute-call of the bird that praises the Sutra of the Lotos; and the land is very still by reason of the South wind. Now the summer, long delayed, is truly with us: butterflies of queer Japanese colours are flickering about; _semi_ are whizzing; wasps are humming; gnats are dancing in the sun; and the ants are busy repairing their damaged habitations.... "... But those big black ants in my garden do not need any sympathy. They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants." After relating the whimsical story of a man, visited by a beautiful woman, who told him that she was acquainted with the language of ants, and as he had been good to those in his garden, promised to anoint his ears, so that if he stooped down and listened carefully to the ants' talk, he would hear of something to his advantage-- "Sometimes," says Hearn, "the fairy of science touches my ears and eyes with her wand; and then, for a little time, I am able to hear things inaudible and perceive things imperceptible." After pages of minute description of the biology of ants, leading to a still larger significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law, he thus ends his essay:-- "Apparently the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all eras condemned. "The greatest strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a 'dramatic tendency' in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism." In "Exotics and Retrospectives" Hearn has written an Essay on "Insect Musicians" that reveals his erudite and minute care in the study of "things Japanese." He describes the first beginning of the custom of keeping musical insects, tracing it down from ancient Japanese records to a certain Chuzo who lived in the Kwansei era in 1789. From the time of this Chuzo began the custom of breeding insect musicians, and improving the quality of their song from generation to generation. Every detail of how they are kept in jars, or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay and are supplied every day with fresh food is recounted. The essay ends: "Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night festival proclaim a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets;--the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,--substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed." During his later days at Nishi Okubo he owned one of these "insect musicians," a grass-lark or _Kusa-Hibari_. "The creature's cage was exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide. He was so small that you had to look very carefully through the brown gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. He was only a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito--with a pair of antennæ much longer than his own body, and so fine that they could only be distinguished against the light. "He was worth in the market exactly twelve cents; very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!... "By day he slept or meditated, with a slice of egg-plant, or cucumber ... and always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awaked. Then the room began to fill with a sound of delicate and indescribable sweetness, a thin, thin, silvery rippling and trilling, as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepened the sound became sweeter, sometimes swelling until the whole house seemed to vibrate with the elfish resonance.... "Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors for many generations back could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love,--and death. He has forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now--for the bride that will never come.... He cries to the dust of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time.... Human loves do very much the same thing without knowing it. They call their illusion an Ideal, and their Ideal is, after all, a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory...." Then he goes on in half-humorous, half-pathetic way, to tell how Hana, the unsympathetic Hana, the housemaid, when there was no more egg-plant, never thought of substituting a slice of onion or cucumber. So the fairy music stopped, and the stillness was full of reproach, and the room cold in spite of the stove. And he reproved Hana ... "but how absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley grain!... I have felt so much in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,--telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the vast of Being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sank on to the very end,--an atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,--especially Hana the housemaid! "Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing." During the last few months of Hearn's life, every gleam of eyesight, every heart-beat, all his nerve power were directed to one subject--the polishing of his twenty-two lectures incorporated later under the title "Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation." This volume is, as it were, the crystallisation and summary of his fourteen years' residence in the country, and, as one of his most eminent critics says, "is a work which is a classic in science, a wonder of erudition, the product of long years of keenest observation, of marvellous comprehension." Though the "Romance of the Milky Way" was published later, these Rejected Addresses, as he whimsically termed them, were the last product of his industrious pen. A sudden and violent illness interrupted the work for a time, but as soon as it was possible he was at his desk again. "So hard a task was it," his wife tells us, "that on one occasion he said: 'This book will kill me, it is more than I can do to create so big a book in so short a time.' As, at the time, he had no teaching or lecturing at the university, he poured all his strength into his writing at home." When it was completed it seemed as if a load were lifted off him, and he looked forward eagerly to the sight of the new volume: a little before his death he said that he could hear in imagination the sound of the typewriter in America copying the pages for the press. The privilege, however, of seeing the book completed was not destined to be his. In no book of Hearn's are impartial judgment, insight and comprehensiveness displayed as clearly as in "Japan, an Interpretation." It is a challenge to those who say that his views of Japan were fallacious and unreliable, and that he was only capable of giving descriptions of scenery or retailing legends and superstitions. CHAPTER XXV HIS DEATH "... Are not we ourselves as lanterns launched upon a deeper and a dimmer sea, and ever separating farther and farther one from another as we drift to the inevitable dissolution? Soon the thought-light in each burns itself out: then the poor frames, and all that is left of their once fair colours, must melt forever into the colourless Void...." Ten years after his arrival in Japan the lode-star of Lafcadio Hearn's life and genius rose above the far eastern horizon, to cast her clear and serene radiance on the shadowed path that henceforth was but a descent towards the end. We conclude that "The Lady of a Myriad Souls" had written an appreciative letter on the subject of his work, and his, dated January, 1900, was in answer to hers. The thread was taken up where it had been dropped, the old affection and friendship reopened, unchanged, unimpaired. Three subjects occupied Hearn's thoughts at this time to the exclusion of all others: a longing to get back to the West amongst his own people, his failing health, and anxiety for the future of his eldest boy--his Benjamin--in case of his death. Except perhaps a hint to McDonald, it is only to Mrs. Wetmore that he drew aside the veil, and showed how clearly he realised that his span of life was now but a short one. "The sound of the breakers ahead is in his ears," "the scythe is sharpening in sight." "I have had one physical warning ... my body no longer belongs to me, as the Japanese say." And again: "At my time of life, except in the case of strong men, there is a great loss of energy, the breaking up begins." With intense longing did his thoughts these days revert to the Western lands from which he had voluntarily expatriated himself. "I have been so isolated that I must acknowledge the weakness of wishing to be amongst Englishmen again ... with all their prejudices and conventions." The Race Problem! one of the most perplexing on earth. A man thinks he has wholly and finally given up his country, sloughed off inherited civilisation, discarded former habits and cast of thought; but--such a stubborn thing is human nature--sooner or later, the oft-repeated cry of the wanderer, surrounded by alien hearts and alien faces, arises to that Power that made him what he is. "Give back the land where I was born, let me fight for what my own people fight for, let me love as they love, worship as they worship." At the time of Kazuo's birth Hearn had expressed a hope "that he might wear sandals and kimono, and become a good little Buddhist." This was during the period of his enthusiasm for "things Japanese." When he came to issue with the officials at Kumamoto, and later at Tokyo, a change was effected in his view, and he longed earnestly to make him an occidental--one of his own people. All the expansion of communion and understanding denied him in the life he had passed amongst those who viewed things from an entirely different standpoint, seemed centred on the boy. He hoped to educate him abroad, to make an Englishman of him, to put him into a profession, either in the army or navy, so that he might serve the country his father had forsworn. In this desire Hearn reckoned without his host. By his action in nationalising himself a Japanese, when he married Setsu Koizumi, his son is a Japanese, born in Japan under Japanese conditions, and unless he throws off all family ties and responsibilities, which, being the eldest son, are--according to communal law in Japan--considerable, he must submit to this inexorable destiny. In his father's adopted country the military or naval profession is closed to him, however, in consequence of his defective eyesight, and both would have been closed to him also in England. Mrs. Atkinson, anxious to carry out the wishes her half-brother had expressed in his letters, with regard to the future of his eldest son, made inquiries on the subject of various people at Tokyo. The same answer was given on every side. He is a Japanese, and must conform to the dictates of the Japanese authorities. They might permit him to go away for a year or so for study, but he must serve the country his father had adopted, in some capacity, or renounce his nationality. Meantime, the boy is receiving a first-class education at the Waseda University; he is perfectly happy, and would be most reluctant to separate from his relations. As to his mother, it would break her heart if any idea of his leaving Tokyo was suggested. In the spring of 1903 as Hearn had anticipated, he was forced out of the Imperial University, on the pretext that as a Japanese citizen he was not entitled to a foreign salary. The students, as we can see by Yone Noguchi's last book, made a strong protest in his favour, and he was offered a re-engagement, but at terms so devised that it was impossible for him to re-engage. He was also refused the money allowed to professors for a nine months' vacation after a service of six years; yet he had served seven years. On this subject Hearn was very bitter. "The long and the short of the matter is that after having worked during thirteen years for Japan, and sacrificed everything for Japan, I have been only driven out of the service and practically vanished from the country. For while the politico-religious combination that has engineered this matter remains in unbroken power, I could not hold any position in any educational establishment here for even six months." In judging the controversy between Hearn and the authorities at this juncture, it is well to remember that Japan was struggling for existence. She was heavily in debt, having been deprived by the allied powers of her indemnity from China. She could not afford to be soft-hearted, and her own people, students, professors, every one official, were heroically at this time renouncing emolument of any kind to help their country in her need. Hearn's health precluded the possibility of his fulfilling the duties of his engagement, and the means at the disposal of the government did not permit of their taking into consideration the possible payment of a pension. It seems hard, perhaps, but the Japanese are a hard race, made of steel and iron, or they never could have accomplished the overwhelming task that has been set them within the last ten years. At the time when the war with Russia was raging, and Hearn got his discharge, her resources were strained to the utmost, her own people were submitting to almost incredible privations, officials who had been receiving pay that it seemed almost impossible to live upon, accepting one-half the salary they had been accustomed to, and college professors not only existing on starvation rations, but managing to pay the expenses of junior students. It must also be remembered that national sentiment had been awakened, that the Japanese were reverting to the ancient authority, and belief and foreign teaching was at a discount. All this, however, did not make it easier for Hearn; in spite of his admiration for Japanese gallantry he railed at Japanese officialism. To the listening soul of his friend beyond the ocean, thousands of miles away, he poured forth all his disillusionments, all his anxieties. To her he turned for advice and guidance, for "did she not represent to his imagination all the Sibyls? and was not her wisdom as the worth of things precious from the uttermost coasts?" He felt he must leave the Far East for a couple of years to school his little son in foreign languages. "Whether I take him to England or America, I do not yet know; but America is not very far from England. Two of the boys are all Japanese,--sturdy and not likely to cause anxiety, but the eldest," he says, "is not very strong, and I must devote the rest of my life to looking after him." And she--his wise friend--knowing the limitations enforced by Hearn's isolation and failing health, living as she did in the midst of that awful American life of competition and struggle, enjoined prudent action and patient waiting, for, after all, "no one can save him but himself." "Very true," was Hearn's answer--and well did he know, for had not he, the half-blind journalist, worked his way, unaided and alone, into the position of being one of the signal lights in the literature of the day? "No one can save him but himself.... I am, or have been, always afraid: the Future-Possible of Nightmare immediately glooms up,--and I flee, and bury myself in work. Absurd?... Kazuo is everything that a girl might be, that a man should not be,--except as to bodily strength.... I taught him to swim and make him practice gymnastics every day; but the spirit of him is altogether too gentle, a being entirely innocent of evil--what chance for him in such a world as Japan? Do you know that terribly pathetic poem of Robert Bridges': 'Pater Filio'?" The following are the lines to which Hearn refers:-- "Sense with keenest edge unused, Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire; Lovely feet as yet unbruised, On the ways of dark desire; Sweetest hope that lookest smiling O'er the wilderness defiling! "Why such beauty, to be blighted, By the swarm of foul destruction? Why such innocence delighted, When sin stalks to thy seduction? All the litanies e'er chanted, Shall not keep thy faith undaunted. "I have pray'd the Sainted Morning To unclasp her hands to hold thee; From resignful Eve's adorning Stol'n a robe of peace to enfold thee; With all charms of man's contriving Arm'd thee for thy lonely striving. "Me too once unthinking Nature, --Whence Love's timeless mockery took me,-- Fashion'd so divine a creature, Yes, and like a beast forsook me. I forgave, but tell the measure, Of her crime in thee, my treasure." It seems as if he were haunted by memories of his own thwarted childhood and shipwrecked youth. If possible he wished to guard and protect his Benjamin from the pitfalls that had beset his path, knowing that the same dangers might prevail in Kazuo's case as in his own, and that there might be no one to protect and guard him. A charming piece of prose, from which I give a few extracts, was found amongst Hearn's papers after his death. The manuscript, lent to me by Mrs. Atkinson, lies by my hand as I write; it is entitled "Fear." "An old, old sea-wall, stretching between two boundless levels, green and blue. Everything is steeped in white sun; and I am standing on the wall. Along its broad and grass-grown top a boy is running towards me,--running in sandals of wood,--the sea-breeze blowing aside the long sleeves of his robe as he runs.... With what sudden incommunicable pang do I watch the gracious little figure leaping in the light.... A delicate boy, with the blended charm of two races.... And how softly vivid all things under this milky radiance,--the smiling child-face with lips apart,--the twinkle of the light quick feet,--the shadows of grasses and of little stones!... "But quickly as he runs, the child will come no nearer to me,--the slim brown hand will never cling to mine. For this light is the light of a Japanese sun that set long years ago.... Never, dearest!--never shall we meet,--not even when the stars are dead!" By the exercise of a considerable amount of diplomacy Mrs. Wetmore succeeded at this time in inducing Jacob Gould Schurmann, president of Cornell University, to enter into an arrangement with Hearn for a series of lectures on Japan. As of old, she believed him capable of conquering Fate, in spite of the despotism of fact as exemplified in the loss of eyesight and broken health; she felt sure he could interest an American audience by the material he had to offer, and the scholarly way in which he knew how to utilise it. His answer to the suggestion of the lectures is characteristic:-- "O fairy! what have you dared to say? I am quite sure that I do _not_ know anything about Japanese art, or literature, or ethnology, or politics, or history. (You did not say 'politics' or 'history,' however, and that seems to be what is wanted.) But perhaps you know _what_ I know better than I myself know,--or perhaps you can give me to eat a Fairy Apple of Knowledge. At present I have no acquaintance even with the Japanese language: I cannot read a Japanese newspaper: and I have learned only enough, even of the _kana_, to write a letter home. I cannot lie--to my Fairy; therefore it is essential that I make the following declaration:--" Then he repeats the statement made in the preface of "Japan, an Interpretation." For these lectures prepared with so much industry and care were destined ultimately to go to the making of that beautiful and lucid exposition of the history and thought of a great people. The world has to be grateful to President Schurmann for withdrawing from his contract, and cancelling the offer made to Hearn for the delivery of lectures at the university. The excuse that illness had broken out at Cornell was hardly a sufficient one. There is little doubt that unfavourable reports of Hearn's state of health, and doubts as to the possibility of his being able to lecture in public, had drifted to Cornell, and the president, acting for the best interests of his university, did not feel justified in abiding by his proposals. With that extraordinary mental elasticity that characterised him all his life, Hearn made the best of the situation, and set to work, polishing and repolishing his twenty-two lectures until they reached the high level of style that distinguishes "Japan, an Interpretation." His courage was the more extraordinary as, filled with the idea that he was at last going to America, he had gone into every detail of meeting his friend. "I would go straight to your Palace of Fairy before going elsewhere," he writes to Mrs. Wetmore, "only to see you again--even for a moment--and to hear you speak in some one of the myriad voices would be such a memory for me, and you would let me 'walk about gently touching things.'..." Then in another letter comes a sigh of regret, and as it were farewell. "But your gifts, O Faery Queen have faded away, even as in the Song ... and I am also fading away." After the failure of his projected visit to America, a suggestion was made by the University of London that he should give a series of lectures there. But here was the "Ah-ness" of things. Had Hearn's health permitted he would probably have been in England in 1905, where he would have been received with honour. The Japanese had fought Russia and beaten her. People became wildly enthusiastic about Japan: the libraries were besieged with inquiries for Hearn's books,--just at the eleventh hour, when he had become a name, he died! All his life his dream had been to be independent, to be able to travel. Referring to a gentleman who was in Japan, he once said, "I envy him his independence. Think of being able to live where one pleases, nobody's servant,--able to choose one's own studies and friends and books." The offer of an easy post was made to Hearn about this time as professor of English in the Waseda University founded by Count Okuma. He closed with it at once, thus putting an end to all negotiations with the University of London. His youngest child, Setsu-ko, was born this year, and all idea of leaving Japan was henceforth abandoned. In his last letter to Mrs. Wetmore, dated September, 1904--the month in which he died--he touches on the dedication he had made to her in his book, "A Japanese Miscellany." To the last the same sympathy and understanding reigned between them. Patiently she exhorted, comforted. Her wise counsel and advice soothed his torn nerves and aching heart to the end. So this affection, untouched by the moth and rust of worldly intercourse, went down with him "into the dust of death." Slowly but surely the years with their chequered story were drawing to an end. The sum of endeavour was complete, the secrets Death had in its keeping were there for the solving of this ardent, industrious spirit. Many accounts have been published of Hearn's last hours, too many some of his friends in Japan think. From all of them we glean the same impression--a calm heroic bearing towards the final mystery, a fine consideration for others, the thought of the future of his wife and children, triumphing over suffering and death. He always rose before six. "On the morning of the 26th of September, he was smoking in his library," his wife tells us. "When I went in to say my morning greeting, 'Ohayo gozaimasu,' he seemed to be fallen in deep thought, then he said, 'It's verily strange.' I asked him what was strange, and he said, 'I dreamed an extraordinary dream last night, I made a long travel, but here I am now smoking in the library of our house at Nishi Okubo. Life and the world are strange.' "'Was it in the Western country?' I asked again. 'Oh, no, it was neither in the Western country nor Japan, but the strangest land,' he said." While writing, Hearn had a habit of breaking off suddenly and walking up and down the library or along the verandah facing the garden. The day he died he stopped and looked into his wife's room next the library. In her _tokonoma_ she had just hung up a Japanese painting representing a moonlight scene. "Oh, what a lovely picture," he exclaimed. "I wish I could go in my dreams to such a country as that." Sad to think he had passed into the country of dreams and moonlight before the next twelve hours were over! Two or three days before his death one of the girls called O Saki, the daughter of Otokichi, of Yaidzu, found a cherry-blossom on a cherry-tree in the garden,--not much to look at--but it was a blossom blooming out of season, in the direction of his library; she told her fellow-servant Hana, who in turn repeated it to Mrs. Koizumi. "I could not help telling him; he came out of the library and gazed at it for some moments, 'The flower must have been thinking that Spring is here for the weather is so warm and lovely. It is strange and beautiful, but will soon die under the approaching cold.' "You may call it superstition if you will, but I cannot help thinking that the _Kaerizaki_, or bloom, returned out of season, appeared to bid farewell to Hearn as it was his beloved tree...." In a letter written to Mrs. Atkinson, some months after Lafcadio's death, Mrs. Koizumi, thus describes his last hours: "On the evening of September 26th, after supper, he conversed with us pleasantly, and as he was about going to his room, a sudden aching attacked his heart. The pain lasted only some twenty minutes. After walking to and fro, he wanted to lie down; with his hands on his breast he lay very calm in bed, but in a few minutes after, as if feeling no pain at all, with a little smile about his mouth, he ceased to be a man of this side of the world. I could not believe that he died, so sudden was his fate." CHAPTER XXVI HIS FUNERAL "If these tendencies which make individuals and races belong, as they seem to do, to the life of the Cosmos, what strange possibilities are in order. Every life must have its eternal records in the Universal life,--every thought of good or ill or aspiration,--and the Buddhistic Karma would be a scientific, not a theoretical doctrine; all about us the thoughts of the dead, and the life of countless dead worlds would be forever acting invisibly on us." Perhaps of all the incongruous, paradoxical incidents connected with Lafcadio Hearn's memory, none is more incongruous or paradoxical than his funeral. It is believed by many that Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) died a Buddhist, though he himself explicitly declared that he subscribed to no religious formula, and detested all ecclesiasticism. When he faced the last great problem, as we see by his essay entitled "Ultimate Questions" in the volume published after his death, his thoughts soared beyond any boundary line or limitation, set by dogmatists or theologians; all fanciful ideas of Nirvana, or Metempsychosis or ancestor worship, were swept away, he was but an entity freed from superstitious and religious palliatives, facing the awful idea of infinite space. Yet--Nemesis of his own instability, revealing also how absolutely alien to his sphere of thought were the surroundings in which he had spent his latter years--at his death his body was taken possession of by priests, who prepared it for burial, sat beside it until the obsequies were over, and conducted the burial service with every fantastic accomplishment of Buddhist ceremonial, in a Buddhist temple! A detailed account is given of the funeral by an American lady, Miss Margaret Emerson. She arrived in Japan imbued with an intense admiration for Hearn's writings; and made every endeavour to meet him or hear him lecture, when one morning she saw his death announced in a Yokohama paper, accompanied by a brief notice stating that the funeral procession would start from his residence, 266, Nishi Okubo, at half-past one on September 29th, and would proceed to the Jitom Kobduera Temple in Ichigaya, where the Buddhist service was to be held. It was one of those luminous Japanese days that had so often inspired the little artist's pen. Not even the filament of a cloud veiled the pale azure of the sky. Only the solitary cone of Fuji-yama stood out, a "ghostly apparition" between land and sea. Everywhere was life, and hope, and joy; the air full of the voices and laughter of little children, flying kites or playing with their balls, amidst a flutter of shadows and flicker of sunrays, as the tawdry procession filed out under the relentless light of the afternoon sun. He, whose idea it would have been to slip out of life unheralded and unnoticed was carried to his last resting-place preceded by a priest ringing a bell, men carrying poles, from which hung streamers of paper _gohei_; others bearing lanterns and others again wreaths, and huge bouquets of asters and chrysanthemums, while two boys in rickshas carried little cages containing birds that were to be released on the grave, symbols of the soul released from its earthly prison. Borne, palanquin-wise, upon the shoulders of six men, of the caste whose office it is to dig graves and assist at funerals, was the coffin, containing what had been the earthly envelope of that marvellous combination of good and evil tendencies, the soul of Lafcadio Hearn. While the temple bell tolled with muffled beat, the procession filed into the old Temple of Jitom Kobduera. The mourners divided into two groups, Hearn's wife, who, robed in white, had followed with her little daughter in a ricksha, entering by the left wing of the temple, while the male chief mourners, consisting of Kazuo, Lafcadio's eldest son, Tanabe (one of his former students at Matsue), and several university professors, went to the right. Then followed all the elaborate ceremonial of the Buddhist burial service. The eight Buddhist priests dressed in magnificent vestments chanted the chant of the Chapter of Kwannon in the Hokkekyo. After the addresses to the soul of the dead, the chief mourner rose and led forward Hearn's eldest son; together they knelt before the hearse, touching their foreheads to the ground, and placed some grains of incense upon the little brazier burning between the candles. The wife, when they had retired, stepped forward, leading a little boy of seven, in a sailor suit with brass buttons and white braid. She also unwrapped some grains of incense from some tissue paper, and placed them upon the brazier. Then, after a considerable amount of bowing and chanting, the ceremony ended and the congregation left the church. Outside it was intimated to the assembled congregation that the body would be taken next day to the Zoshigaya Temple for the final rites of cremation in the presence of the family. Then the university students were dismissed by the professors with a few words, and the ceremony of the day was at an end. CHAPTER X VISIT TO JAPAN "Every dwelling in which a thinker lives certainly acquires a sort of soul. There are Lares and Penates more subtle than those of the antique world; these make the peace and rest of a home." On the 16th March, 1909, early in the morning, Mrs. Atkinson, Miss Atkinson and myself, left Kobe, reaching Yokohama late in the evening. Mrs. Atkinson, who had written from Kobe to her half-sister-in-law, announcing our arrival in Japan, expected to find a letter from Nishi Okubo awaiting us at the Grand Hotel. She had not made allowance for the red tape--the bales of red tape--that surround social as well as official transactions in Japan. Before we left Kobe, Mr. Robert Young had given us a letter of introduction to Mr. W. B. Mason, Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain's coadjutor in the editing of Murray's "Handbook to Japan," late of the Imperial Department of Communications, also custodian of the Club library at Yokohama, and a person, we were told, to whom every one had recourse in a difficulty. He cast sidelights on the probable reasons for delay in the answer to Mrs. Atkinson's letter. To begin with, Tokyo covers an area of one hundred square miles, and, though ostensibly modelled on English lines, the Japanese postal system leaves much to be desired, especially in dealing with English letters; in finding fault on this score, I wonder what a London postman would do with letters addressed in Japanese? Mr. Mason also reminded us that Mrs. Koizumi did not understand a word of English; she must have recourse to an interpreter before communicating with her Irish sister-in-law, but, above all, in accounting for delay, Mrs. Atkinson had addressed her letter to "Mrs. Lafcadio Hearn," a name by which no properly constituted Japanese postman would find himself justified in recognising Hearn's widow. By nationalising himself a Japanese, Hearn's identity, so far as his occidental inheritance went, had vanished forever. He and his wife were only known at Tokyo as Mr. and Mrs. Koizumi. Mr. Mason, like many others whom we met, was full of anecdotes about Lafcadio, his oddities, his caprices. In days gone by he had been extremely intimate with him, but Hearn had put a sudden end to the friendship; Mr. Mason never knew exactly why, but imagined it was in consequence of his neglecting to take off his footgear and put on sandals one day before entering Hearn's house. In passing judgment on Hearn for these sudden ruptures with friends, because of their lapses from the punctilio of Japanese tradition, it is well to remember that his wife came of the ancient Izumo stock, and was educated according to Japanese rules; a dusty or muddy boot placed on her cream-white tatami was almost an indignity. Hearn deeply resented any slight shown to her, and, from the moment he married, observed all old habits and customs, and insisted on his visitors doing the same. The expression in Japan for an unceremonious or bad-mannered person is "another than expected person"; the definition is delightfully Japanese; it explains the traditions of the race: no one ever does anything unexpected--all is arranged by rule and order; in any other civilised country, considering the circumstances, Mrs. Atkinson would have taken a Tokaido train to Tokyo, and from the Shimbasi station gone immediately in a jinrikisha to see her sister-in-law; the two ladies would have fallen into one another's arms, and a close intimacy would have been begun. Not so in Japan. [Illustration: KAZUO (HEARN'S SON, AGED ABOUT SEVENTEEN).] "Patience is a virtue inculcated by life in the Far East," said Mr. Mason. "Come out with me, I will show you some of the most beautiful sights in the world, and in course of time either Mrs. Koizumi or a letter will turn up." Anxious not to offend the little Japanese lady by any proceeding not in consonance with the social etiquette of her country, we took Mr. Mason's advice. I had been reading "Out of the East," and pleaded that our first pilgrimage might be to the Jizo-Do Temple, scene of Lafcadio Hearn's interview with the old Buddhist priest. Up a hill above Yokohama we climbed, until we reached the summit, where, embosomed in fairy-like clouds of plum-tree blossom, a carpet of pink-and-white petals round its august feet, stood an ancient shrine. From the platform in front of the great bronze bell, hanging in a pagoda-like tower, we looked out over the city of Yokohama. Again I experienced what I had felt coming up the Inland Sea, an impression, common to almost every one who visits Japan, that I was gazing on a dream world, lying outside everyday experience, a world "having a special sun and tinted atmosphere of its own," arched by a sky of magic light, the very sky of Buddha. Down the hillside a cascade of clustering eaves and quaint curved tiled roofs, surrounded by gardens, descended to the very edge of the sapphire sea. Behind, in the distance, rose a range of dark-blue hills, and enormously above the line of them all, through the vapoury mist, gleamed one solitary snow-capped cone; we knew its familiar outline on Japanese fans and screens, in Japanese picture-books--the sacred, the matchless mountain--Fuji-no-yama. There, in the stillness of the Japanese afternoon, we summoned from out the twenty years that had elapsed since Hearn's visit, a vision of the old priest, seated, brush in hand, writing one of the three hundred volumes of the history of the religions of Japan, of the interpreter Akira, and of the little Celtic dreamer seated Buddha-wise between them, while, mingled with the sound of the purring of the cat, and the song of the _uguisu_ from the plum-tree grove, we heard the murmur of their voices. "That which we are, in the consequence of that which we have been.... Every act contains both merit and demerit, just as even the best painting has defects and excellence. But when the sum of good in any action exceeds the sum of evil, just as in a good painting the merits outweigh the faults, then the result is progress. And gradually by such progress will all evil be eliminated.... They who by self-mastery reach such conditions of temporary happiness, have gained spiritual force also, and some knowledge of truth. Their strength to conquer themselves increases more and more with every triumph, until they reach at last that world of Apparitional Birth, in which the lower forms of temptation have no existence." Wisely had Mr. Mason counselled patience. The next afternoon, while seated at tea-time in the hall of the Grand Hotel, we saw two figures pass through the swing door at the entrance ... one was a Japanese lady, dressed in the national Japanese costume--a kimono of dark iron-grey silk--the other, a tall, slim, near-sighted youth of seventeen dressed also in kimono, wearing a peaked collegiate cloth cap and sandals on his feet. The pair hesitated at the doorway, and after questioning one of the hotel clerks, came towards us under his guidance. Mrs. Atkinson realised at once that this was her Japanese half-sister-in-law. The nearest relations never embrace in Japan, but the two ladies saluted one another with profound bows and smiles. Mrs. Koizumi could never have been, even according to Japanese ideas, good-looking; it was difficult to reconcile this subdued, sad-faced, Quaker-like person with Hearn's description written to Ellwood Hendrik, of the little lady whom he dressed up like a queen, and who nourished dreams of "beautiful things to be bought for the adornment of her person." But the face had a pleasing expression of gentle, sensible honesty. Had it not been for the arched eyebrows, oblique eyes and elaborate coiffure--the usual erection worn by her country-women--she might have been a dignified, well-mannered housekeeper in a large English establishment. The only exception to the strict nationality of her costume was a shabby, carelessly-folded, American silk umbrella that she carried, instead of the dainty contrivance of oil paper and bamboo so generally used and so typical of Japan. There was something vaguely and indefinably suggestive, like the revival of a sensation, a shadowing of memory, blended in the associations of that umbrella; we felt certain it had been used by her "August One" in his "honourable" journeyings to and from the Imperial University. After having placed this precious possession, with careful precision, leaning against a chair, she turned to introduce her son to his aunt. He was already bowing profoundly over Dorothy Atkinson's hand in the background. At first the lad had given the impression of being a Japanese, but as he laughed and talked with his beautiful cousin, you recognised another race; no child of Nippon was this, the fairy folk had stolen a Celtic changeling and put him into their garb; but he was not one of them, he was an Irishman and a Hearn, bearing a striking resemblance to Carleton Atkinson, Dorothy's brother. The same gentle manner, soft voice, and near-sighted eyes, obliging the wearing of strong glasses. I remembered his father's words: "The eldest is almost of another race, with brown hair and eyes of the fairy colour, and a tendency to pronounce with a queer little Irish accent the words of old English poems which he has to learn by heart." Then, as the thought passed through one's mind of his extraordinary likeness to his Irish relations, an impassive, Buddha-like, Japanese expression--a mask of reserve as it were--fell like a curtain over his face,--he was Japanese again. He spoke English slowly and haltingly; to me it was incomprehensible; his cousin, on the contrary, seemed to understand every word, as if a sort of freemasonry existed between them. There was something pathetic in watching his earnest endeavours to make his occidental relative understand what he wished to say. It is a myth that Mrs. Koizumi talks English; her "Reminiscences" have been taken down and translated by interpreters; principally by the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. If she ever knew any, it has been entirely forgotten. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Mr. Mason, who is a first-rate Japanese scholar, we should have found ourselves considerably embarrassed. One thing, however, she certainly possessed--that most desirable thing in woman, to which her husband had been so sensitive--a soft and musical voice. Mrs. Atkinson had brought some gifts for the four children from England, and an old-fashioned gold locket, which had belonged to Lafcadio's father, for her sister-in-law. She tried playfully to pass the chain round Mrs. Koizumi's neck, but the little lady crossed her hands on her bosom and declined persistently to allow her to do so. Mr. Mason then told us that it was against all the rules of decorum for a Japanese woman to wear any article of jewellery. [Illustration: CARLETON ATKINSON.] Towards the end of her visit, which lasted an interminable time--Japanese visits usually do--Mrs. Koizumi gave us an invitation for the following Sunday to come to dinner at 266, Nishi Okubo, and promised that her son Kazuo should come to fetch us. Needless to say, this invitation was the acme of our hopes; we accepted eagerly, and, to save Kazuo the trouble of coming to Yokohama, we determined to flit the next day, Saturday, from Yokohama to Tokyo. The Métropole, or, as Hearn dubbed it, "The Palace of Woe," was the hotel we selected. Our dinner that night was eaten in the room where Professor Foxwell, in his delightful "Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn," describes him leaping from the table, darting to the window, and making for the garden, on catching sight of a young lady tourist, a friend of Professor Foxwell's, at the farther end of the room. Next morning, as arranged, Kazuo Koizumi arrived to escort us to Nishi Okubo. That particular Sunday was the anniversary of the Festival of the Spring Equinox (_Shunki Korei-sai_). There is an autumn and a spring equinox festival when days and nights are equal. The pullulating population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren, into the streets. The ladies were in their best _kimonos_, their hair elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and woman. A pretty _musumé's_ ivory-coloured oval face against the cream-colour background of an oiled-paper Japanese umbrella, makes a delightful picture, and nothing can be imagined more fantastically picturesque than a Tokyo street in brilliant sunshine, or under a flurry of rain when hundreds of these ineffective shelters with their quaint designs of chrysanthemums, cherry-blossom, or wisteria, are suddenly opened. Alas! in ten years' time, like many other quaint and beautiful Japanese productions, these oil-paper umbrellas will have passed away into the region of faintly-remembered things. The gentle decorous politeness of the crowd was remarkable. If any of the men had a little too much _sake_ on board, their tipsiness was only betrayed by their aimlessly happy, smiling expression. Sometimes, indeed, it could only be guessed at by the gentle sway of a couple walking arm-in-arm down the street. In the luke-warm air was a mingling of odours peculiar to Japan, smells of _sake_, smells of seaweed soup, smells of _daikon_ (the strong native radish), and, dominating all, a sweet, thick, heavy scent of incense that floated out from the shadows behind the temple doors, while above all was a speckless azure sky arching this fantastical world. The city lay glorified in a joy of sunshine. Kazuo Koizumi had told us that it was only a short walk to the trams, and that by them we could get close to Nishi Okubo. It seemed to us an interminable journey as we followed the tall, slim figure over bridges, down miles of paved streets, and at last, when we did reach the trams, we found them full to overflowing, not only with men and women, but with babies, babies tumbling, rolling, laughing on the floor, on their mothers' laps, on their mothers' backs; there was certainly no doubt of Japan having that most valuable asset to a fighting country, male children, and that most necessary adjunct, female children; nowhere was there an ill-fed, ill-cared for one to be seen. Finding the trams impossible, we induced Kazuo to hail jinrikishas, and still on and on for miles, behind our fleet-footed _kuruma_ men, did our journey last, through the quarter of the foreign legations, past government offices and military stations, beside the moat surrounding the mikado's palace, with its grass slopes and pine-clad fosse, down declivities and up others, through endless lanes, bordered by one-storeyed houses standing in shrubberies behind bamboo fences. At last Kazuo Koizumi, whose _kuruma_ led the way, halted before a small gateway, surmounted by a lamp in an iron stand, stamped, as we understood afterwards, with Hearn's monogram in Japanese ideographs. Passing through, we found ourselves opposite the entrance of a lightly-built two-story house, rather resembling a suburban bungalow in England. Directly we entered we were transported into a different era. Here no modern Japan was visible. On the threshold, waiting to receive us, was an "august residence maid," kneeling, palms extended on the floor. I glanced at the ebon head touching the matting, and wondered if it belonged to Hana, the unsympathetic Hana who had let the grass-lark die. Beside her was Setsu-ko, Hearn's youngest child, in a brilliantly-coloured _kimono_, while on the step above stood Professor Tanabe, who had been one of Hearn's pupils at Matsue, now an intimate friend of the Koizumi family, living near by, and acting occasionally as interpreter for Mrs. Hearn. What a picture--as an eastern philosopher, for instance--he would have made for Moroni or Velasquez, with the delicate grey and cream background of the Japanese _tatami_ and paper _shoji_. He had the clear olive complexion and intellectually-spiritualised expression, result of the discipline and thought enjoined by his far eastern religion. He looked tall as he stood above us, the close folds of his black silk college gown descending to his feet. With all the courtesy and dignity of a Spanish Hidalgo did he receive us, holding out a slim, delicately-modelled hand, and bidding us welcome in our native tongue, in a voice harmonious and clear as one of his own temple bells. To take off our foot-gear in so dignified a presence, and put on the rice sandals offered us by the maid, was trying; for the little girl had raised her forehead from the matting, and, with hands on knees, with many bows, had first of all surveyed us sideways like a bird, and then, gently approaching with deferential liftings of the eyes and deprecating bows, she took a pair of sandals from a row that stood close by, helped us to take off our boots and put on the sandals. We then remarked that she was not at all unsympathetic-looking, but a nice, chubby, rosy-faced handmaiden. We hoped devoutly we had no holes in our stockings, and after a considerable amount of awkward fumbling, got through the ordeal in time to curtsey and bow to Mrs. Koizumi, who appeared beside Professor Tanabe on the step above us, softly inviting us to "honourably deign to enter her unworthy abode." The best rooms in a Japanese house are always to the rear, and so arranged as to overlook the garden. We followed our hostess to the _engawa_ (verandah) leading to the guest-room next to what had been Hearn's study. The _fusima_ or paper screens separating the two rooms were pushed back in their grooves, we passed through the opening and stood within what they called the "Buddha-room." At first I thought it was so named because of a bronze figure of Buddha, standing on a lotus flower, with hand upraised in exhortation, on the top of the bookcase, but afterwards ascertained that it was because of the _Butsudan_, or family shrine, that occupied an alcove in the corner. Every one after death is supposed to become a Buddha; this was the spirit chamber where the memory of the august dead was worshipped. At last I stood where ate, slept, thought and wrote (for bedroom and sitting-room are identical in Japan) the author of "Kokoro," "Japan, an Interpretation," and so many other wonderful books, and I felt as I looked at that room of Lafcadio Hearn's that the dead were more alive than the quick. The walls--or rather the paper panels and wood laths that did duty for walls--were haunted with memories. I pictured the odd little figure--dressed in the _kimono_ given him by Otani embroidered in characters of letters or poems--"Surely just the kind of texture which a man of letters ought to wear!"--with the prominent eyes, intellectual brow, and sensitive mouth, squatting "in the ancient, patient manner" on his _zabuton_--smoking his _kiseru_, or standing at the high desk, his nose close to the paper, covering sheets and sheets with his delicate handwriting, every now and then turning over the leaves of the quarto, calf-bound, American edition of Webster's Dictionary that stood on a stand next his desk. There was an atmosphere of daintiness, of refined clean manners, of a sense of beauty and purity in the room; with its stillness, almost eerie stillness, offering an arresting contrast to the multitudinous rush and clamour of the city outside--it gave an impression of restfulness, of calm, almost of regeneration, with its cool, colourless, stainless matting and delicate grey walls, lighted by the clear light of the Japanese day that fell beneath the verandah through the window panels that, like the _fusima_, ran in grooves on the garden side of the room. I understood from Mrs. Koizumi that when Hearn had added on the study and guest-room to the existing house, glass had been substituted for paper in these window panels. He, who had so devoutly hoped years before that glass would never replace paper in the window panels of Japanese houses! Not only that, but an American stove, with a stove pipe, had occupied the corner where now stands the _Butsudan_, contaminating that wonderful Japanese atmosphere he had raved about, that "translucent, crystalline atmosphere" unsullied by the faintest breath of coal smoke. These hardy folk told us that they were always catching coughs and colds when they had the stove and glass windows, so they took both out, and put back the paper _shoji_ and the charcoal brazier. It was illuminating indeed to see many western innovations against which Hearn had railed in his earlier days in Japan, in various parts of his study. The _andon_--tallow-candle--stuck in a paper shade--national means of lighting a room--had apparently been discarded, and a Queen's reading lamp stood in all its electro-plated hideousness on a little table in the corner. On another was an electric bell with india-rubber tube. Japanese rooms are never encumbered by ornament, a single _kakemono_, or piece of fine lacquer or china appearing for a few days, and then making room for something else; but here, the oriental and occidental thought and life--that Hearn blended so deftly in his work--joined hands. Round the room at the height of about four feet from the floor, bookcases were placed, filled with books, English most of them--De Quincey, Herbert Spencer, Barrie, were a few of the names I caught a glimpse of; against the laths separating the household shrine from the shelves near the _Butsudan_ rested volumes of Browning and Kipling. I wondered where the many things that Hearn must have collected, the old prints, and bronzes, and enamelled ware, he so often alluded to, had been put away. Above all, where was the photograph of the "Lady of a Myriad Souls," and the one of Mitchell McDonald that he mentioned as hanging on the ceiling? It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay _godong_ given to the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all valuable and artistic objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from fire, earthquakes and floods. Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate grey ground. On the wall opposite the guest-room hung a _kakemono_ or scroll-picture representing a river running quickly between rocks. "The water runs clear from the heights," was the translation given to us of the Japanese ideographs in the corner--by Professor Tanabe. It had been a present from Kazuo to his father. Two of the younger children now appeared, the third boy Iwayo, we heard, was away, visiting some of the ships in the harbour; the two we saw were Idaho, the second son, and Setsu-ko, the little girl. Presently, I don't quite know how, it was intimated that the dinner-hour had arrived, and I must confess that the announcement was a welcome one. Owing to our wanderings in the Tokyo streets, and the lateness of the hour, our "honourable insides" were beginning to clamour for sustenance of some sort. Japanese dinners have been described so often that it is unnecessary to go into all the details of the one of which we partook at Nishi Okubo that Sunday afternoon. It was served in the guest-room next Hearn's study, and lasted well over an hour. To me it was exasperating beyond measure. My impression is that the Japanese delight in discomfort. They own a country in which any one could be happy. A climate very much like our own, with a dash of warmth and more sunshine than we can boast, a climate where anything grows and flourishes and an atmosphere clear as crystal; instead of enjoying it and expanding to the delightful circumstances surrounding them, they set to work to make themselves uncomfortable in what seemed to me such an irritating and futile way. That any sane people should eat a succession of horrible concoctions made up of raw fish, lotus roots, bamboo shoots, and sweets that tasted of Pears' soap, whisked into a lather, with a little sugar added as an afterthought, eaten Japanese fashion, was worse than the judgment passed on Nebuchadnezzar, and with the beasts of the field Nebuchadnezzar, at least, had no appearances to keep up, whereas we had to respond to a courtesy that was agonising in the exquisiteness of its delicacy. The very dainty manner in which it was all served, in small porcelain dishes, on lacquer trays, with little paper napkins, the size of postage stamps tied with gold cord, seemed to emphasise the utter inadequacy of the food. The use of chop-sticks, too, was not one of the least of our trials, especially as we were told that if we broke one of the spilikins it was an omen of death. I really must say that I sympathised with the youth of modern Japan when I heard that most of them sit on chairs at their meals and now use knives and forks like ordinary people. Mrs. Koizumi, indeed, told us a story of one of Hearn's Tokyo pupils, who, on making a call on the professor, found him seated orthodox Japanese fashion with his feet under him. The visitor, accepting the cushion and pipe offered him, could not refuse to follow suit. Soon, however, he found his position intolerable. Hearn smiled. "All the new young men of Japan are growing into the western style," he said, "I do not blame you, please stretch your legs and be comfortable." After dinner we returned again to the study. A wintry sunlight fell athwart the garden, a regular Japanese garden; to the left was a bamboo-grove, the lanceolated leaves whispering in the winds. On the right, at the foot of two or three steps that led to a higher bank, was a stone lantern such as you see in temple grounds. On the top of the bank a cryptomeria threw a dark shadow, and a plum-tree near it was a mass of snowy white bloom. But what arrested our attention was a small flower-bed close to the cedarn pillars of the verandah. It was bordered with evergreens, and within we could see some daffodils, blue hyacinths and primroses. Mrs. Koizumi told us that the bed was called the "English garden," and that Hearn had bought the bulbs and plants and made the gardener plant them. Somehow that little flower-bed, in that far-away country, so alien to his own, seemed to me to express most of the pathos of Lafcadio Hearn's life. Here, "overseas, alone," he had put in those "English posies," daffodils, and primroses, and hyacinths, with a longing in his heart to smell once more the peat-laden atmosphere of his Irish home, to see the daisy-strewn meadows of Tramore, and the long sunlit slopes of Lough Corrib. "Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas, Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these, Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land-- Masters of the Seven Seas, Oh! love and understand!" CHAPTER XXVIII SECOND VISIT TO NISHI OKUBO "Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands,--like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters. Under these shreds of the elfish vapour you still can find Horai--but not elsewhere.... Remember that Horai is also called Shinkiro, which signifies Mirage,--the Vision of the Intangible. And the Vision is fading,--never again to appear save in pictures and poems and dreams...." Before we took our departure Mrs. Koizumi--through the medium of Professor Tanabe--asked us again to honour her "contemptible abode" on Friday the 26th, the day of the month on which the "August One" had died, when, therefore, according to Japanese custom, the incense sticks and the lamp were lighted before the _Butsudan_ and a repast laid out in honour of the dead. That day also, she told us, Kazuo would conduct us to the Zoshigaya Cemetery where we might see his father's grave, and place flowers in the flower cups before the tombstone. The invitation was gladly accepted, and with numerous bows on both sides (we were gradually learning how to spend five minutes over each hand-shake) we made our return journey to the Métropole Hotel. The four subsequent days were spent by my friends sight-seeing; they went to Nikko, an expedition which took three days, and the feasibility was discussed of obtaining a permit from the British Legation to visit one of the mikado's palaces. But I felt no desire to see the abode of a europeanised mikado, who dressed in broadcloth, sat on a chair like any other uninteresting occidental monarch and submitted to the dictates of a constitution framed on the pattern of the Prussian diet. No sight-seeing, indeed, had any significance for me, unless it was connected with memories of a half-blind, eccentric genius, not looked upon as of any account except by a small circle of literary enthusiasts. The sphere which has been allotted to us for our short span, grants us in its daily and yearly revolutions few sensations so delightful as encountering social conditions, material manifestations, totally different to anything hitherto experienced or imagined. The impressions of those enchanted weeks in Japan, however, would have lost half their charm, had they not been illumined and interpreted by so sympathetic an expositor as the author of "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." To me, reading his books, full of admiration for his genius, the ancient parts of the city, the immemorial temples, the gardens still untouched by European cultivation, became permeated with spiritual and romantic meaning. A _Shirabyoshi_ lurked behind every screen in the Yoshiwara quarter; the ululation of the dogs as I heard them across the district of Tsukiji at night, seemed a howl in which all the primitive cries of their ancestors were concentrated; every cat was a Tama seeking her dead kittens, while the songs sung by the children as they played in the streets gained a new meaning from Hearn's translations. I even wandered in the ancient parts of the city to see if I could find a Japanese maiden slipping the eye of the needle over the point of the thread, instead of putting the thread through the eye of the needle; and there, seated on _zabutons_ in a little shop, as large--or rather as small--as life, I caught them in the act. How they laughed, those two little _musumés_, when they saw me watching them so intently. I felt as I passed along that I had acquired another proof of the "surprising _otherness_ of things" to insert amongst my notes on this extraordinary land of Nippon. I fear I also violated every rule of etiquette by visiting Japanese houses in Tokyo without appointment, where I was told people lived who had known Hearn and could give me information concerning him. Professor Ume, of the Imperial University, was one. In her "Reminiscences" Mrs. Hearn says that an hour or two before he died Hearn had told her to have recourse to Professor Ume in any difficulty, and I thought he might by chance throw some light on Hearn's last hours, and any dispositions of property he might have made on behalf of his widow and children. A very exquisite house was the professor's, with its grey panels and cedar-wood battens, its cream-coloured mats, its embroidered screens, and azaleas in amber-crackled pots. For half-an-hour I waited lying on a _zabuton_ (I had not yet learnt to kneel Japanese fashion), the intense silence only broken by the gentle pushing backwards and forwards, at intervals, of the screen that separated the two rooms, and the entrance of a little maid bringing tiny cups of green tea with profuse curtseys and bows. When the gentleman of the house did appear, he behaved in a manner so profoundly obsequious that I, despite a slight feeling of irritation at the time I had been kept waiting, and the vileness of the tea of which I had been partaking, grovelled in self-abasement. The moment I attempted, however, to touch upon the subject of Hearn, it was as if a drawer with a secret spring had been shut. The Japanese are too courteous to change a subject abruptly; they slip round it with a dexterity that is surprising. When I endeavoured to ascertain what communication Hearn had held with him, and if he had named executors and left a will--Koizumi San was fond of smoking and sometimes honoured his contemptible abode to smoke a pipe--further than that he knew nothing. The same experience met me at the Imperial University (Teikoko Daigaku), where I was audacious enough to penetrate into the sanctum where the heads of the college congregated. Needless to say I was there received also with studied civility, but an impenetrable reserve that was distinctly awe-inspiring. A slim youth was summoned and told to conduct me into the university garden, to see the lake, said to be Hearn's favourite haunt between lecture hours. There was no undue haste exhibited, but you felt that the endeavour to obtain information about the former English professor at the university was not viewed with any sort of favour by his colleagues. In the hotel were tourists of various nationalities, half of whom spent their time laughing at the "odd little Japs," the rest were divided between Murray and Baedeker, and went conscientiously the round of the temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the northern coast. A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both. Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus, contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal truth: ambition and success, exultation and despair, joy and grief will pass away as a storm passes across the heavens, bringing at last the only solution futurity offers for the tumult and suffering of human life--infinite calm, infinite rest. "Deep, still, and luminous as the ether" ... was the impression made on Hearn by this embodiment of the Buddhist faith, with its peace profound and supreme self-effacement. Is it to be wondered at that henceforth he attempted to reconcile the great oriental religion which it represented, with every scientific principle and philosophical doctrine to which he had hitherto subscribed? It was bitterly cold on the afternoon of Friday the 26th; even the shelter of the house at Nishi Okubo with its _shoji_ was comforting after our long jinrikisha ride in a biting wintry wind. We had come prepared to find a certain amount of sadness and solemnity reigning among our hosts, it being the month-day commemorative of the August One's death. But we were greeted with the same laughter, bows, genuflections by the maid and little Setsu-ko as on our previous visit, while on the upper step of the _genkan_ (entrance-room) with extended hands and smiling welcome, stood the slim figure of Tanabe. At first, when Mrs. Hearn, talking cheerily and gaily, led us to the alcove occupied by the family shrine, we thought for a moment that she was moved by a feeling of amusement at the eccentric little genius to whom she had been married. Then we recalled various incidents of our travels in the country, and Hearn's essay on the Japanese smile: "To present always the most agreeable face possible, is a rule of life ... even though the heart is breaking, it is a social duty to smile bravely." Taught by centuries of awful discipline, the habit that urges people to hide their own grief, so as to spare the feelings of others, struck us, when we mastered its signification, as having a far more moving and pathetic effect than the broken tones and ready tears of occidental widows when referring to the departed. The doors of the _Butsudan_ were set wide open, and on the _kamidan_, or shelf in front of the commemorative tablet, stood a lighted lamp and burning incense rods. Tiny lacquered bowls containing a miniature feast of his favourite food, and vases of artificial sprays of iris were placed side by side. In front of Hearn's photograph stood a pen in a bronze stand. This pen, we understood from Tanabe, was one of three that had been given to him by Mitchell McDonald. The one in the shrine was Kazuo's, presented to him in memory of his father, another was given to Mrs. Atkinson by her half-sister-in-law that Friday afternoon, the third had been buried with the writer of _Japan_, beneath his tombstone in the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood in the study opposite the _Butsudan_ the ghostly charm, the emotional poetry, of this vague and mysterious soul-lore that regarded the dead as forming part of the domestic life, conscious still of children and kindred, needing the consoling efficacy of their affection, crept into our hearts with a soothing sense of satisfaction and comfort. Yone Noguchi, in an account he gives of a visit to 266, Nishi Okubo, describes the spiritual influence of Hearn permeating the house as though he were still living. None of the children ever go to bed without saying, "Good-night, happy dreams, Papa San," to his bas-relief that hangs in the study. Morning and evening Mrs. Koizumi, a daughter of the ancient caste, subscribing to Shinto beliefs, holds communion with the august spirit. Now she murmured a prayer with folded hands, and then turned with that gentle courtesy of her countrywomen, and made a motion to us to occupy the three chairs placed in a row in the middle of the room. Kneeling down in front of us, she opened a cupboard under the shrine, pulled out a drawer wherein lay photographs, pictures and manuscripts that had belonged to her husband, a photograph of Page Baker and his daughter Constance, and one of "friend Krehbiel with the grey Teutonic eyes and curly hair"; portraits also of Mrs. Atkinson and her children, one representing her eldest girl and boy in panniers on either side of the donkey that had created so much amusement in the establishment--a donkey being an unknown animal in Japan--when it arrived at Kumamoto. Another represented the Atkinson barouche, with its pair of horses, coachman and groom. The mikado's state equipage was the only conveyance, these simple people told us, they had ever seen to equal its splendour. It was very cold, and we frigid occidentals sat close to the apology for a fire, three little coals of smouldering charcoal that lay in the brazier. One of the ends of my fur stole fell into the ashes; I did not perceive it for a moment or two, until the smell of the smouldering fur attracted the attention of the others. Profound silence descended upon the company as they watched me extinguish it with a certain amount of difficulty. I am certain they thought it an omen of some sort--everything amongst the old-world Japanese is looked upon as a good or bad omen. Setsu-ko cuddled up to her aunt, either because she was cold, or because her mother--for politeness' sake, I imagine--told her that Mrs. Atkinson was her father's sister, and that she was to look upon her with the same respect as upon her father. Kazuo, Iwayo, and Idaho, Hearn's three boys, were there, all of them fine specimens of Eurasians. The remembrance recurred to me, as I looked at them, of Herbert Spencer's dictum on the subject of Anglo-Japanese marriages. What would Hearn have said if he had known that the "greatest thinker on earth" had committed himself to the statement, in an interview with the Japanese ambassador in 1898, of the extreme inadvisability of marriages between Englishmen and Japanese, declaring that the children of mixed parentage are inferior, both in mental endowments and health. This statement, we may say, like many others made by the "greatest thinker on earth," is flatly contradicted by fact. There are thousands of instances in the Far East of the fine race produced by the mixture of occidental and Japanese, especially, indeed, in the Koizumi children, who are unusually healthy and intelligent. What a singular picture this family of Lafcadio Hearn made in _kimonos_ and sandals, with their dark complexions, Irish eyes and Irish smile--for on each of them fate has bestowed a gift from the land of their father's birth--with the background of bookcases full of English books, the Buddhist shrine and Japanese _kakemonos_ and ideographs. Some of the bitterest disillusionments of Hearn's life would most likely have been caused by his own children, had he lived to see them grow up. The ship of his eldest son's life that he spent his latter days "freighting and supplying for its voyage" would most likely have gone down on the sunk rock of alien blood and a different "race-ghost." I doubt Miss Setsu-ko adapting herself to her father's ideal of unassertive femininity, or contenting herself with being merely a household chattel, subservient to mother and father-in-law, her knowledge of the world circumscribed by Kanbara's "Greater Knowledge for Women." Was it my imagination, or did I see a slightly impatient, indulgent acceptance on Kazuo's part of the little rites before the _Butsudan_, as if he looked upon them from the height of his modern education as a material weakness? "The Japanese child is as close to you as the European child," says Hearn, "perhaps closer and sweeter, because infinitely more natural, and naturally refined. Cultivate his mind, and the more it is cultivated the further you push him from you. Then the race difference shows itself. As the oriental thinks naturally to the left, where we think to the right, the more you cultivate him the more strongly will he think in the opposite direction from you. Finis: sweetness, sympathy." After the decoction, colour of pale whisky, that under the name of "tea," accompanied by tiny spongecake (Kasutera)--his Papa San's favourite cake, Kazuo told us--had been handed round and partaken of, jinrikishas were called, for our expedition to the Zoshigaya Cemetery. As we stood on the verandah before starting, a wintry ray of sunlight fell across the garden, and a breeze rustled through the bamboo-grove, stirring the daffodils and hyacinths in the flower-bed beneath. It was the last sunlight we saw that afternoon! Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies--along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent), we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. Nothing "was beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness"; on the contrary, rather distressingly European, with straight gravelled paths and formal plots, enclosed by a box edging and a little wicket gate. I am under the impression that it was a portion of the Japanese cemetery allotted by government for the burial of "foreigners"; as no information was volunteered upon the subject, however, we did not like to ask. Walking along the gravel path, behind Kazuo's kimonoed figure, we at last reached the tomb, distinguished by an upright granite slab, the same shape as Hearn's Ihai in the Buddhist shrine, slightly rounded at the top. A thick-set circle of evergreens, transplanted from the Nishi Okubo garden by Mrs. Koizumi's orders, sheltered it behind. On one of the stones in front of the slab was an oval cavity filled with water; two smaller round holes for burning incense flanked the larger one. On either side were bamboo cups in which flowers were placed. On the slab was the inscription-- "Shogaku In-den Jo-ge Hachi-un Ko ji"--"Believing Man Similar to Undefiled Flowers Blooming like Eight Rising Clouds, who dwells in Mansion of Right Enlightenment." The light was fading and the air felt bitterly cold as we stood beside the grave; the dark clouds that had lain in ambush, as it were, in the background, came driven across the sky by gusts of wind, swaying the thicket of evergreens and the tall maple and plane-trees beyond the cemetery boundary. Snowflakes began to fall, and, with the suddenness characterising all atmospheric changes in this unstable land, a thin coating covered the evergreens in a few seconds, and lay on the plum-blossom in the bamboo holders, placed on the stone platform in front of the tombstone. The "Snow Woman" (or Yuki-Onna), of whom Hearn wrote his strange legend, seemed to touch our hearts with her cold hand, as we turned and walked away, saddened by the thought of our kinsman, Lafcadio Hearn, whose name was on so many English-speaking lips at the moment, buried--an alien amongst aliens--in a Buddhist grave, under a Japanese name, thousands of miles away from his own land, his own people. CONCLUSION LAFCADIO HEARN'S was a personality and genius which people will always judge from the extreme point of view in either direction. Most ordinary common-sense folk, with whom he came in contact, looked upon him as an odd, irritable, prejudiced little man, distinctly irreligious, and rather immoral; but the elect few, admitted to his intimacy, recognised the tender heart, luminous brain, gentlemanly breeding, and human morality that lay hidden behind the disguise of Japanese kimono and obi, or beneath the flannel shirt, reefer coat, and extraordinary headgear of his New Orleans days. As to his genius, the English public, who consistently ignored it until a few years ago, are now inclined to blow his trumpet too lustily. He has recently been placed by critics amongst the greatest English letter-writers; declared to be "a supreme prose-poet," "one of those whose influence will last through the ages"; while Miss Bisland, his American biographer, has no hesitation in locating him amongst the greater fixed stars in the literary firmament. If you cherish a deep sympathy for a man's intellect and character, the worst service you can render him is to veil his failings and qualities behind a mist of eulogy. Lafcadio Hearn, with his shy, sensitive nature, would have shuddered at the "plangent phrases and canorous orismology" that have been bestowed upon him by his friends. Sometimes the idea may have vaguely come to him, "like the scent of a perfume, or the smell of a spring wind," that one day he might write something great; but, on the whole, his estimate of his own mental powers was a humble one--"not that he was modest in literary matters," he says, on the contrary satanically proud, but like an honest carpenter who knows his trade, he could recognise bad workmanship, and tell his customer: "That isn't going to cost you much, because the work is bad. See, this is backed with cheap wood underneath--it looks all right, only because you don't know how we patch up things." Although in our day Hearn's work has an original and significant appeal, will it have the same for the generations following us in the century on which we have entered? Each period brings in its train many literary interests and fashions, which the next rejects; but for Lafcadio Hearn's work there is no authentic equivalent, no substitute. He had the extraordinary advantage of seeing a phase of civilisation of absorbing interest, and found himself well-equipped to interpret it. Evanescent in itself, he gave it stability and form, and, what is more, discerned the outward demonstration of a deep-lying essential ideal--the ideal that has influenced mankind so often through the centuries: oblivion of self, the curbing of natural appetites as a means to more elevated happiness and well-being than mere pleasure and self-indulgence. All this phase in Japanese life he has recounted in exquisite and finished prose, and for this alone will be prized for many a day by cultured readers and thinkers. Besides his Japanese work, his delightful letters have achieved a unique place in the literary world, because of the variety of subject, and because of that great incentive to literary interest and sympathy--the eternal answering of intellect to intellect, of feeling to feeling, of enthusiasm to enthusiasm. But when you declare him--as Miss Bisland does in the Preface to the last volume of Letters--great as Jean Jacques Rousseau, it is well to remember what each accomplished. The author of the "Contrat Social" gave a new gospel to Europe, and initiated a social and political upheaval, the influence of which has lasted to our own day. Hearn was incapable of initiating any important movement, he never entered into the storm-swept heart of the world, outside his own mental horizon. He could interpret moods and methods of belief and thought, and pour forth a lyrical outburst on the subject of a national hymn, but his deductions from significant artistic movements in the history of occidental civilisation were neither broad nor unbiassed. A thing was so because he so viewed it at the moment; if his view varied it was not so, and he was equally firmly convinced the new aspect in which it appeared to him was right. If you disagreed with him, or attempted to argue it out with him, he would grow impatient, and throw up the game. He was quite incapable, indeed, of taking any view of a question but his own, and he never was of the same opinion two days together. Unmindful of the spaces of thought that lay between one method of sentiment and another, he swooped to conclusions without having really endeavoured to inform himself of details before discussing them. As to his feelings on the political development of Japan, so entirely conservative were his prejudices, and so intense his dislike of the modernisation of the ancient civilisation, that he found satisfaction in the insulting remarks cast at him as he passed through the streets of Kobe, and in the relinquishing of the instruction of English literature in their colleges. He declared his horror of the ironclads that Japan was adding to her navy, a fishing-boat with tatami sails, or a sampan rowed by men in blue cotton jerkins, was to him a far more impressive sight than the "Splendid Monster" that he saw at Mionoseki. Worthy of all praise, he stated, were the laws in the Chinese sacred books, that "he who says anything new shall be put to death," and "he who invents inventions shall be killed!" Hearn's literary judgments were as capricious and biassed as his political ones. A mental nomad, he pitched his tent in whatever camping-ground he found by the roadside, folding it and moving on again whenever the fancy prompted him. Gautier, Flaubert, Tennyson, Percival Lowell, Edwin Arnold, Du Maurier, were some that abode with him for a season. It is doubtful if he had any discernment for ancient art, until late in his artistic career. His New Orleans Hellenism was the Hellenism of the banks of the Seine, in 1870, rather than the Hellenism of Greece. He dedicated the translation of Gautier's tales "To the Lovers of the Loveliness of the Antique World," whereas nothing was less antique than Gautier's Parisian classicism, with its ornate upholstery and sensuous interpretation of Greek fable. The very fact of Hearn's comparison between the art of Praxiteles and Phidias, and the grotesque whimsicality of Japanese imaginings, shows that he had not grasped the dignity and breadth of Greek culture. He confesses that it was only when he was turning grey that he really understood the horror and the beauty, the reality and the depth, of Greek legend; of Medusa, who freezes hearts and souls into stone, the "Sirens singing with white bones bleaching under their women's breasts, and Orpheus, who sought Hell for a shadow and lost it." Hearn was a Latin, and follower of the Romantic in contradistinction to the Realistic school. "Have you ever attempted to mount some old tower stairway, spiring up through darkness, and in the heart of that darkness found yourself at the cobwebbed edge of nothing? The emotional worth of such experience--from a literary point of view--is proved by the force of the sensations aroused, and by the vividness with which they are remembered." This prelude to one of his ghostly Japanese legends, with its _frisson_, its suggestion of awe, its mystery, its strangeness, breathes the very essence of Romanticism. Literary brother to Loti and Rénan on his Celtic-Breton side, with their sense of style and the rhythm of the phrase, Hearn had all the Celtic longing for something beyond the elements of everyday life, gazing with longing, like the man in Meredith's poem, at the mist-veiled hills on the other side of the valley, losing his illusions, and sighing to return when he had attained to the reality of the vision, and found the slopes as stony, and the paths as rugged, as in the region he had quitted. At New Orleans the Celtic spirit of vague unrest led him to long for the tropics, or the Spanish Main; in the West Indies, he regretted the "northern domain of inspiration and achievement," and towards the end of his stay in Japan, suffered from nostalgia and the sense of exile from the land of his birth. In spite of his acknowledgment, however, of the greatness of the West, and the appreciation of it, born of life in an alien land, he returned to the memory of his Japanese home--the simple love and courtesy of Old Japan and the charm of the fairy world seized his soul again, as a child might catch a butterfly. Combined with Celtic melancholy and dreaminess, he had also inherited, without doubt, some unhealthiness of mind. To all intents and purposes, he was at times a madman, and at others certainly very near the borderland of insanity. "Mason is always sane," he says, "whereas, for the greater part of my existence, I have been insane." It was this strange, unforeseen element in his nature that accounts for so much that is otherwise inexplicable. Impossible is it to say how much of the very strength of his work did not proceed from nervous susceptibility. If it made him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting dejection, it also gave him power to see visions and retain memories. His excitable mental attitude towards one of the ordinary events of a literary man's career, the corrections of a printer's reader, "that awful man, without wrath and wholly without pity, like the angels!"... The yells of anguish in bed at night, when he thought of the blunders in the proofs he had returned, discloses a piteous state of highly-wrought nerves. Hearn's strangely uncontrolled nature is certainly a striking exemplification of the statement that concentration on daily mental work is the best antidote to insanity. During the period, towards the end of his life at Tokyo, when most subject to attacks of coma and mental hysteria, he wrote his sanest book, a model of lucid historical narrative. "Art! Art! Bitter deception!" cries Flaubert. "Phantom that flows with light, only to lead one on to ruin." For Lafcadio Hearn, art was the one reality, the anchor that kept him from drifting to mental wreckage; out of his very industry and determination grew a certain healthy habit of thought and life. It has been said that Hearn had no creative ability. With regard to his capability of writing a complex work of fiction, this is perhaps true, he had forfeited his birthright to produce a _Pêcheur d'Islande_; but on most of his Japanese work his individuality is unmistakably impressed. He had a wonderful memory and was an omnivorous reader. To Chamberlain he acknowledged that observations made to him, and ideas expressed, were apt to reappear again in work of his own, having, after the lapse of a certain amount of time, become so much a part of his thought, that he found it "difficult to establish the boundary line between meum and tuum." We can see the verification of this statement by phrases and epithets, inspired by other writers, scattered through his pages. "The Twilight of the Gods" is an echo of "The Burden of Nineveh." The subtitle, "Hand and Soul," of "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," was taken from Rossetti's prose romance. Keats's sonnet on the "Colour Blue," probably prompted his essay on "Azure-Psychology." Yet, in spite of small borrowings here and there, how inviolate he keeps his own characteristics and intimate method of thought! Percival Lowell's "Soul of the Far East" had enormously impressed him, even in America before he went to Japan; but there is not a sentence akin to Lowell in "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan." He knew Kipling's writings from end to end, yet Kipling, in his letters to the _Pioneer_ on Japan, afterwards published in a volume entitled "From Sea to Sea," is insensibly more influenced by Hearn than Hearn was ever influenced by Kipling. As to his knowledge of Japan having been gleaned from industriously exploited Japanese sources, he himself would have been the first to admit the truth of this statement. Nishida Sentaro, Otani, Amenomori, all contributed experiences, and by this means he came into possession of accurate and living sources of inspiration, that acquired a deeper significance as they passed through his imaginative brain. He endeavoured, as he says, to interpret the East to the West, on the emotional rather than on the material side. By the perception of his genius he enables us to see how the Japanese took natural manifestations and wove them into religious creeds, coarse and uncouth, perhaps, at times, but proving the vitality of the hearts of the primitive folk surrounding him. He recognised that the people, the man in the rain coat, the peasant who tills the rice-fields and feeds the silk-worms, and weaves the silk, are those that have laid the foundations of the wonderful empire. The moralising of a decrepit old Buddhist priest, the talk of a peasant at the plough, the diary of a woman in indigent circumstances, with her patient resignation and acceptance of the cheerless lot, are told with pathetic simplicity and realism. Querulously he complained that people would not take him seriously, that they treated him as a fabulist. Inaccurate he may have been in some of the conclusions he drew from superficial manifestations, and his outbursts of enthusiasm or dislike may be too pronounced to please the matter-of-fact man who knows not what enthusiasm means. "It is only in the hand of the artist," some one has said, "that Truth becomes impressive." You can hardly take up a newspaper now-a-days without finding a quotation from Hearn on the subject of Japan. His rhythmic phrases seem to fall on men's ears like bars of melodious music, his picturesque manner of relating prosaic incidents turns them into poetic episodes, convincing the most practical-minded that in dealing with a country like Japan, interpretation does not solely consist in describing the thing you see, but in the imaginative power that looks beyond and visualises what is invisible to ordinary folk. What a personal quality and profound significance, for instance, is to be found in his reverie in Hakata, the town of the Girdle Weavers, as he stands in front of the enormous bronze head of Buddha, and sees the pile of thousands of metal mirrors, contributed by Japanese women, to make a colossal seated figure of the god; hundreds had been already used to cast the head, thousands would be needed to mould the figure--an unpractical and extravagant sacrifice of beautiful things, but to Hearn far more was manifest than merely the gift of bronze mirrors. Into the depths of a mirror the soul of its owner is supposed to enter. Countless legends relate that it feels all her joys and pains, a weird sympathy with her every emotion; then in his fanciful, whimsical way he conjures up shadowy ideas about the remnants of souls, the smiles, the incidents of home-life imaged on their surface. Turning the face of some of the mirrors, and looking into their depths, he imagines the possibility of catching some of these memories in the very act of hiding away. "Thus," he ends, "the display in front of the Buddha statue becomes far more than what it seems. We human beings are like mirrors, reflecting something of the universe, and the signification of ourselves in that universe.... The imagery of the faith of the Ancient East is, that all forms must blend at last with that Infinite Being, whose smile is Eternal Rest." Thus subtly does he interpret the dim, far-reaching vision, and pathetic imaginings of a susceptible people. As to Hearn's veering round in his opinion of the Japanese, which has by some been called insincere and double-faced, because while he was drawing a salary from the Japanese government, and adapting himself to Japanese social conditions, he was damning the Japanese and expressing his hatred of those surrounding him, the only answer to be given to those who blame him is to tell them to visit Japan, to reside in the primitive portions of the country, with its ancient shrines, quaint villages, courteous ways, and afterwards go to Tokyo or one of the open ports, see the modern Japanese man in bowler hat and American clothes--then and then only will they be able to understand what an artist, such as Hearn, must have suffered in watching the transformation being effected. On the subject of Old Japan he never changed his opinion, which was, perhaps, from certain points of view, over-enthusiastic. This very enthusiasm, however, enabled him to accumulate impressions which, if he had been indifferent, would not have stamped themselves on his imagination. Hearn's genius was essentially subjective, the outer aspect of his work was the outcome of an inward vision. We should never have had this inward vision so clearly revealed, if it had not been, as it were, mirrored in a heart full of sympathy and appreciation. You must strike an average between his admiration and dislike of the kingdom of his adoption, as you must strike an average in his expressions of literary and political opinion. In consequence of Hearn's railings against Fate, the world has come to the conclusion that his was a particularly ill-starred life. But the tragedy really lay in the temperament of the man himself. Circumstances were by no means adverse to the development of his genius. The most salient misfortune that befell him, the loss of his inheritance, saved him, most likely, from artistic sterility. With his impressionable nature, an atmosphere of wealth and luxury might have paralysed his mental activity. It was certainly a lucky star that led him to New Orleans, and later to the West Indies; and what a supreme piece of good fortune was the chance that came to him of spending the last fourteen years of his life in Japan, before the ancient civilisation had been swept away. It was pitiful, people say, to think of Hearn's poverty in the end, but when you see his Tokyo house, with its speckless cleanliness, its peace, its calm, you will no longer regret that his means did not enable him to leave it. Japan was the country made for him, and not the least benign ordinance that Fate imposed upon him was his inability to accept the invitation, given to him during the last years of his life, by University College, London. We can see him amidst the mist and fog in the hurry and bustle of the great city, the ugliness of its daily life and social arrangements: he would have quarrelled with his friends, with the university professors, with his landlady, ending his life, most likely, in a London lodging, instead of sinking to rest surrounded by the devotion and care of those that loved him. An intrepid soldier in the ranks of literature was Lafcadio Hearn. His work was not merely literary material turned out of his brain, completed by his industrious hand; to him it was more serious than life. He is, indeed, one of the most extraordinary examples of the strange and persistent power of genius, "ever advancing," as he himself expresses it, "by seeking to attain ideals beyond his reach, by the Divine Temptation of the Impossible!" Well did he realise that the more appreciation for perfection a man cherishes, the more instinct for art, the smaller will be his success with the general public. But never was his determination to do his best actuated by any hope of pecuniary gain. From the earliest years of his literary career, his delight in composition was the pure delight of intellectual activity, rather than delight in the result, a pleasure, not in the work but in the working. According to him, nothing was less important than worldly prosperity, to write for money was an impossibility, and Fame, a most damnable, infernal, unmitigated misery and humbug. To enjoy the moments of delight in the perception of beauty "in this short day of frost and sun," is the only thing, says Walter Pater, that matters, and "the only success in life." Judged from this point of view, Hearn's was certainly a successful life. To the pursuit of the beautiful his days and years were devoted. "One minute's work to thee denied Stands all Eternity's offence"-- he quotes from Kipling. This it is that gives his career a certain dignity and unity, despite the errors and blunders defacing it at various periods. Man of strange contradictions as he was, there was always one subject on which he never was at issue either with himself or destiny. Like those pilgrims whom he describes, toiling beside him up the ascent of Fuji-no-yama, towards the sacred peak to salute the dawn, so through hours of suffering and toil, under sunshine and under the stars, turning neither to the right hand nor the left, scorning luxury and ease, Lafcadio Hearn pursued his path, keeping his gaze steadily fixed on one object, his thoughts fixed on one aim. In one of those eloquent outpourings, when his pen was touched with a spark of divine fire, he gives expression to the pervasive influence of the spirit of beauty, "the Eternal Haunter," and the shock of ecstasy, when for a moment she reveals herself to her worshipper. Indescribable is her haunting smile, and inexpressible the pain that it awakens ... her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the tides of life and time, in the hopes and desires of youth, through the myriad generations that have arisen and passed away. What a lesson does Hearn teach to the sons of art in these days of cheap publication and hurried work. His record of stoical endeavour and invincible patience ought to be printed in letters of gold, and hung on the study wall of all seeking to enter the noble career. His re-writing of pages, some of them fifty times, the manner in which he put his work aside and waited, groping for something he knew was to be found, but the exact shape of which he did not know. Like the sculptor who felt that the figure was already in the marble, the art was to hew it out. As the years went by, the elusive vision ceased to consist merely of the beauty of line and form, and took the higher beauty of immortal things, emotions that did not set flowing a current of sensuous desire and passion, but appealed to those impulses that stir man's higher life, making him realise that there are enthusiasms and beliefs "which it were beautiful to die for." INDEX AKIRA, 168, 170, 316. Alma Tadema, 57. Amenomori Nobushige, 168, 184, 235, 267. American criticism, an, 145. Ancestor worship, Hearn's views on, 143, 144, 149. Ancestral tablet, the, 253. "Ants," essay on, 293. Arnold, Matthew, 59. Arnoux, Leopold, 154. Asama-Yama, 144. Atkinson, Mrs., 4, 13, 217, 301, 304, 313; letters to, 31-48, 56, 67, 68, 86, 100, 112, 204, 221, 252; visits Japan, 313 _et seq._ Atkinson, Mr. Buckley, 202. Atkinson, Carleton, 4, 49. Atkinson, Dorothy, 313, 317. Avatars, 4. BAKER, CONSTANCE, 334. Baker, Page M., 106, 109, 236, 242. Ball, Sir F., 255. Bangor, 26. Baudelaire, 63. Beale, Mr. James, 256, 257. Behrens, Mrs., 284. Berry, Rev. H. F., 43. Bisland, Miss Elizabeth, 110, 111, 125, 133, 151, 267; marriage of, 188, 203; letters to, 158, 180; joint-editor of _Cosmopolitan_, 130. Borrow, George, 274. Boston, 261. Brenane, Mrs. Justin, 2, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30. Bridges, Robert, quoted, 303. British Museum, image of Buddha in, 57. Bronner, Milton, 61. Brown, Mr., 202. Brownings, the, 59, 324. Buddha of Enoshima, 331, 332. Buddhism, 42, 141, 144. Butcher, Miss, 16. CALIDAS, 146. Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 112, 165, 206; letters to, 116, 169, 177, 191. "Chinese Ghosts," 109. "Chita," 35, 36. Cholera at Kobe, 241. Cincinnati, 53, 65 _et seq._ Cincinnati Brotherhood, 114. Civilisation, attack on, 249. Cockerill, Colonel John, 74. Collins, Wilkie, 60. _Commercial, The_, Hearn joins, 86. "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn" (G. M. Gould), 69. Conventual Orders, 2. Corbishly, Monsignor, 41, 42, 44. Corfu, 6-9. Correagh, 2, 8. Crawford, Mrs., 18, 21. Crescent City, 94. Crosby, Lieutenant, 133. Cullinane, Mr. and Mrs., 53, 64. "DAD." _See_ Watkin. Dai Batsu of Enoshima, 331. Dai Batsu of Kamakura, 142. "Dancing Girl, The," 194. Darwin, Charles, 59, 60, 140. Daunt, Mr. Achilles, 46, 48, 52. Delaney, Catherine, 53, 58. Dengue fever, 100. De Quincey, 289. "Dragon Flies," 285. "Dream of a Summer's Day," 24. Dublin, 5, 10, _et seq._ Du Maurier, 63. "Dust," Hearn's essay on, 49. ELWOOD, FRANK, 25. Elwood, Mrs., 24. Elwood, Robert, 24, 25. Emerson, Miss Margaret, 311. _Enquirer, The_, Hearn on staff of, 74-79. "Eternal Feminine," article on, 281. "Exotics and Retrospectives," 282, 283, 294. "FANTASTICS," 126. "First Principles," Spencer's, 141. Flaubert, Gustave, 43. Foley, Althea, 81, 83, 180. Ford Castle, 3. Formosa, 200. Forrest, General, funeral of, 90. Foxwell, Professor, 120, 278. Franco-Prussian War, 62. Froude, James, 153. Fuji, first sight of, 162. Fuji-no-Yama, 144, 311. Fujisaki, Captain, 286. "GARDEN FOLK LORE," 189. Gautier, Theophile, 62. "Ghostly Japan," 283, 284. "Gleanings in Buddha Fields," 273, 280. "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," 163, 172, 268, 329. Gould, Dr. George Milbury, 69, 149, 158. Greek culture, 342. Gulf winds, 35. HALL, H. H., 282. Halstead, Mr., 88. Hamamura, cemetery of, 9. Hana, 297. _Harper's Weekly_, 137. Harrison, Frederic, 143. Hawkins, Armand, 104. Hearn, Lafcadio, birth, 1, 9; Hibernian ancestors, 2; English origin, 2; the interpreter of Buddhism, 4; maternal lineage, 4, 5; Hellenic associations of birthplace, 9; memories of Malta, 10; reminiscences of childhood, 17; separation of his parents, 20; adopted by Mrs. Brenane, 21; his defective eyesight, 29, 45, 48; relations with Mr. Molyneux, 30; views of ideal beauty, 36; at Tramore, 37; at school at Ushaw, 40; literary tastes at school, 43; unattractive appearance, 49; in London, 52 _et seq._; literary vocation, 55; Paris, 62; Cincinnati, 65; his shyness, 66; reaches the depths, 68; servant in boarding-house, 69; secretaryship, 74; on staff of _Enquirer_, 74; ascends Cincinnati church spire, 76; his translations, 76; and Althea Foley, 81; and Marie Levaux, 85; joins staff of _The Commercial_, 85; at Memphis, 88; destitution, 94; fever, 100; _Times Democrat_, 105; method of argument, 112; intellectual isolation, 112; intolerance of amateur art, 114; characteristics, 120; visits West Indies, 131; letters, 135; marriage, 134, 179-186; arrangement with Harpers, 137; political opinions, 142; visits Mr. Watkin, 148; the Krehbiels, 148, 149; musical sense, 151; arrives in Yokohama, 160; terminates contract with Harpers, 164; Professor Chamberlain, 165; philosophical opinions and character, 167; appointment in Matsue, 168; Japanese estimate of, 176; passion for work, 184; family, 200; naturalisation, 220; symptoms of physical failure, 242; devotion to family, 260; emotional trances, 288; love of animals, 292; death, 299, _et seq._; his religion, 310; funeral, 310; children, 336; personality, 339; biassed deductions, 341; literary judgments, 342; his romanticism, 343; quotations from, 346; his opinion of Japanese, 347; estimate of his work, 348, 349. Hearn, Charles Bush, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 22, 202. Hearn, Mrs. Charles, 4, 10, 12, 14, 21. Hearn, Mrs., 150; "Reminiscences" of, 276. Hearn, Rev. Daniel, 2, 16, 61, 202. Hearn, Leopold Kazuo, 219. Hearn, Rev. Thomas, 2. Hearn, Miss, 3. Hearn, Miss Lillah, 202, 203. Hearn, Richard, 10 _et seq._, 150. Hearn, Susan, 10 _et seq._ Hearn family in Waterford, 2. Henderson, Mr. Edmund, 74, 76. Hendrik, Ellwood, 125, 263; letters to, 154, 177, 261. Heron, Francis, 3. Heron, Sir Hugh de, 3. Hijo, 189. Hirn, Professor, letter to, 67. Holmes, Elizabeth, 5. Hugo, Victor, 62. Huxley, Professor, 60, 141. ICHIGAYA, 311. "Idolatry," 37. Imperial University, Japanese, 330. "In Ghostly Japan," 145. "Insect Studies," 293. "Intuition," 71. Ionian Islands, 5. Izumo, 262. JAPAN, discipline of official life in, 54; spirit of, 229; old Japan, 347. "Japan, an Attempt at Interpretation," 297. Japanese character, analysis of, 176. Japanese constitution promulgated, 158. Japanese day, a, 206. Japanese funeral, a, 312. "Japanese Miscellany, A," 284. Japanese regimen, 231. Japanese school classes, 201. Japanese training of children, 211. Jefferies, Richard, 289. Jitom Kobduera Temple, 311. Jiu-jitsu, 201. Jizo-Do Temple, 315. KENTUCKY, 72. Keogh, Miss Agnes, 50. Kinegawa, 233. Kingsley, Charles, 277. Kinjuro, 189, 191. Kipling, Rudyard, 233, 271, 324, 345. Kitinagasa, Dori, 243. Kobduera, Temple of, 261. Kobe, 168, 193. _Kobe Chronicle_, 168, 248. Koizumi, Mrs. Setsu, 3, 27, 60, 286, 300, 308, 314 _et seq._, 334; "Reminiscences" of, 122; letter of, 309. Koizumi, Idaho, 325. Koizumi, Iwayo, 325. Koizumi, Kazuo, 4, 217, 277, 300, 312, 317 _et seq._, 337. Koizumi, Setsu-ko, 307, 321, 325, 335. "Kokoro," 65, 109, 249, 251, 266. Krehbiel, Henry, 5, 26, 74, 78, 79, 104, 112, 114, 152. Kumamoto, 13, 65, 193, 199. Kusa-Hibari (grass-lark), 295. Kusimoki marahige, 240. "Kwaidan," 24. Kyoto, 252. Kyushu, 200. "LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS" (Miss Bisland), 113, 124-136. Lamb, Charles, 289. Levaux, Marie, 85. "Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn" (Wetmore), 263. Literary College, Tokyo, 3. Loti, Pierre, 29, 84. Lough Corrib, 25, 233. Louisiana, 92. Lowell, Percival, 345. "Luck of Roaring Camp" (Bret Harte), 77. MALTA, 5, 10. Martinique, 155. Mason, Mr. W. B., 122, 143, 287, 313, 315. Matas, Dr. Rudolf, 102, 152. Matsue, 142, 168, 172-178. McDermott, Mr., 73. McDonald, Capt. Mitchell, 108, 126, 168, 267, 271, 276, 284, 287, 299, 324, 333. Memphis, 88-92. "Midwinter, Ozias," 60, 89, 98. Mifflin, Houghton & Co., 208. Millet, François, 62. Mionoseki, ironclads at, 341. Moje, 238. Molyneux, Henry, and Mrs., 2, 23, 28, 30, 50, 69. Montreal, 160. "Moon Desire," 290. Morris, William, 59. "Mountain of Skulls," 145. "My First Romance," 67. "My Guardian Angel," 29. Mythen, Kate, 28, 36. NAGASAKI, 212, 232. New Orleans, 60, 85, 93-101; yellow fever at, 100; Exposition at, 137. New York, 131. "Nightmare Touch," 28. Nishi Okubo, 261, 269, 286 _et seq._ Nishida Sentaro, 168, 181, 184, 265, 345. OKUMA, COUNT, 307. Osaka, 238. O Saki, 308. Otani, 323. Otokichi, 280, 308. "Out of the East," 232, 243, 315. PAPELLIER, DR., 243, 250, 270. Pater, Walter, 59, 349. Philadelphia, 131, 261. Pre-Raphaelites, aims of, 59. "Principles of Ethics" (Spencer), cited, 140. RACHEL, picture of, 71, 72. "Raven, The," 73. Redhill, 30, 45. "Romance of the Milky Way, A," 298. Rossetti, D. G., 59. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 340. Ruskin, 59, 288. SACKVILLE, LIONEL, DUKE OF DORSET, 2. "St. Ronite," 44. Santa Maura, 1, 9. Schurmann, J. G., 305, 306. Seaton, Viscount, 7. "Serenade, A," 146. Setsu-ko (Koizumi), 307, 321. "Shadowings," 284. Shinto worship, 41, 144, 168. "Shirabzoshi" or "Dancing Girl," 193. Shunki Korei-sai, 319. Spencer, Herbert, cited, 60, 139-143, 168, 324, 335. Steinmetz, General, 118. Stevenson, R. L., 28, 63, 289. "Stray Leaves," 109, 126. Suruga, 34. "Sylvestre Bonnard," 43. TAKATA, 25. Tanabe, Professor, 312, 321 _et seq._, 328. Tennyson, 59. Thomson, Francis, 40. "Toko, The," 204. Tokyo, 67, 260 _et seq._, 313. "Torn Letters," 129. Toyama, Professor, 254. Tramore, 2, 20, 28, 31, 33-39. Treves, Sir Frederick, 153. "Trilby," 63. Tunison, Mr. Joseph, 22, 45, 61, 79, 152. "Two Years in the French West Indies," 108, 152. Tyndall, 60. "UJO," 189. Ume, Professor, 330. Ushaw, 28, 29, 36, 40-51. Ushigome, 274-285. VICKERS, THOMAS, 74. "Voodoo Queen," 85. WASEDA UNIVERSITY, 301, 307. Waterford, 34. Watkin, Henry ("Dad"), 44, 65, 66, 70, 73, 90, 100, 112, 147, 162, 235, 258. Watkin, Miss Effie, 258. Weatherall, Mrs., quoted, 18, 19, 221. Weldon, Charles, 159. West Indies, Hearn in, 148 _et seq._ Westmeath, 2, 8. Wetmore, Mrs. (Miss Bisland q. v.), 273, 282, 299, 305, 307. Wexford, 36. Whistler, James, 59, 63. Wiseman, Cardinal, at Ushaw, 40. Worthington, Mr., 106. Wrennal, Father William, 46. YAIDZU, 34, 279, 290. "Yakumo," 221. Yashiki garden, 260. Yokohama, 270, 313. Yone Noguchi, 185, 263, 301, 318, 334. Young, Mr. Robert, 143, 247, 313. Young, Mrs., 246. "Yuko," 233. Yvetot, 61. ZOSHIGAYA, 278. Transcriber's Notes. Passages in italics are indicated by _underscores_. Passages in small caps are replaced by either Title case or ALL CAPS, depending on how the words were used. Inconsistent hyphenation preserved as in the original. The List of Illustrations was changed to match the captions of the illustrations. On page 51, the comma after "indirectly does me a right" was replaced with a period. On page 52, in the footnote "Lafacadio" was changed to "Lafcadio". On page 65, the [OE] ligature was replaced with "OE". On page 71, "acquiline" was changed to "aquiline". On page 82, "Marysville" was changed to "Maysville". On page 83, "indigant" was changed to "indignant". On page 118, the period inside the quote was changed to a comma. On page 120, "important person that" was changed to "important person than". On page 138, "Houkousai" was changed to "Hokusai". On page 145, "pyschological" was changed to "psychological". On page 163, "Hokousai" was changed to "Hokusai". On page 177, "adoped" was changed to "adopted". On page 202, "Lillian" was changed to "Lilliah". On page 203, the added spaces were in the original, to indicate missing words. Those missing spaces have been retained here. On page 210, "KOIZUME" was changed to "KOIZUMI". On page 245, "kizeru" was changed to "kiseru". On page 260, "bad" was changed to "had". On page 264, "spead" was changed to "spread". On page 275, "library,." was changed to "library,". On page 282, "Ultitimately" was changed to "Ultimately". On page 291, "condi tions" was changed to "conditions". On page 315, "out" was changed to "our". On page 334, "portaits" was changed to "portraits". On page 336, a closing quotation mark was places after "Finis: sweetness and sympathy." On page 353, "Théophile" was changed to "Theophile". On page 355, in the Index, the "Sackville" entry was moved to the "S" section and was identified with small caps as the first "S" word, instead of "St. Ronite", and "Shirabzoshi" was replaced with "Shirabyoshi". 
33930	----	[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE [REPRODUCED FROM A PHOTO GIVEN TO MRS. WEISS BY POE THREE DAYS BEFORE HE LEFT RICHMOND]] THE HOME LIFE OF POE BY SUSAN ARCHER WEISS BROADWAY PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK 1907 _Title Page by Wm. Lincoln Hudson · Cover by Stephen G. Clow_ Copyright, 1907, BY SUSAN ARCHER WEISS. All rights reserved. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PAGE. First Glimpse of Edgar Poe 1 CHAPTER II. Poe's First Home 9 CHAPTER III. The Allan Home 13 CHAPTER IV. Poe's Boyhood 20 CHAPTER V. Schoolboy Love Affairs 36 CHAPTER VI. Rosalie Poe 41 CHAPTER VII. The Unrest of Youth 44 CHAPTER VIII. In Barracks 52 CHAPTER IX. Poe and Mrs. Allan 57 CHAPTER X. The Closing of the Gate 61 CHAPTER XI. Mrs. Clemm 64 CHAPTER XII. A Pretty Girl with Auburn Hair Whom Poe Loved 70 CHAPTER XIII. Poe's Double Marriage 74 CHAPTER XIV. The Poes in Richmond 82 CHAPTER XV. In New York 88 CHAPTER XVI. The Real Virginia 90 CHAPTER XVII. Poe's Philadelphia Home 94 CHAPTER XVIII. Virginia's Illness 102 CHAPTER XIX. Back to New York 108 CHAPTER XX. Poe and Mrs. Osgood 119 CHAPTER XXI. At Fordham 127 CHAPTER XXII. The Shadow at the Door 137 CHAPTER XXIII. Mrs. Shew 145 CHAPTER XXIV. Quiet Life at Fordham 148 CHAPTER XXV. With Old Friends 154 CHAPTER XXVI. Mrs. Whitman 169 CHAPTER XXVII. Again in Richmond 179 CHAPTER XXVIII. A Morning with Poe--"The Raven" 184 CHAPTER XXIX. Mrs. Shelton 194 CHAPTER XXX. The Mystery of Fate 203 CHAPTER XXXI. After the War 212 CHAPTER XXXII. Poe's Character 219 Appendix 227 TO THE READER. In considering this book, will the reader especially note that it is not a "Life" or a "Biography" of Poe, of which too many already exist and to which nothing can be added after the exhaustive works of Woodbury and Prof. Harrison. I have not treated Poe in his character of poet or author, but confined myself to his private home-life, domestic and social, as I have heard it described by Poe's most intimate friends who knew him from infancy--some of them my own relatives--and from my own brief knowledge of him in the last three months of his life. The book may therefore be considered as a _supplement_ to the more complete "Lives and Biographies," showing Poe in a character as yet wholly unknown to the public, but which should be known in order to enable us to form a correct judgment of his character. I have corrected various misstatements of writers which, repeated by one from another, have come to be received as truth. I have made no attempt at producing an artistic work, but have treated the subject as it demands, in a plain and practical manner with regard to facts apart from idealism of any kind. THE AUTHOR. HOME LIFE OF POE. CHAPTER I. FIRST GLIMPSE OF EDGAR POE. It may be regarded as a somewhat curious coincidence that the first glimpse afforded us of Edgar Poe is on the authority of my own mother. This is the story, as she told it to me: "In the summer of 1811 there was a fine company of players in Norfolk, and we children were as a special treat taken to see them. I remember the names of Mr. Placide, Mr. Green, Mr. Young and Mr. Poe, with their wives. I can recall Mrs. Young as a large, fair woman with golden hair; but my most distinct recollection is of Mrs. Poe. She was rather small, with a round, rosy, laughing face, short dark curls and beautiful large blue eyes. Her manner was gay and saucy, and the audience was continually applauding her. She appeared to me a young girl, but was past thirty, and had been twice married. "At this time," continued my mother, "we were living on Main street, and my uncle, Dr. Robert Butt, of the House of Burgesses, lived close by, on Burmuda street. The large, bright garret-room of his house was used by our little cousins as a play-room, and was separated from that of the adjoining house by only a wooden partition. One day, when we were playing here, we heard voices on the other side of the partition, and, peeping through a small knothole, saw two pretty children, with whom we soon made acquaintance. Mr. and Mrs. Poe had taken lodgings in this garret with a little boy and girl and an old Welsh nurse. Sometimes this woman would say to us, 'Hush, hush, dumplings, don't make a noise,' and we knew that some one was sick in that room. Most of the time she had the children out of doors, and in the evenings we would play with them on the sidewalk. The boy was a merry, romping little fellow, but hard to manage. One day, when he would persist in playing in the middle of the street, a runaway horse came dashing around a corner, and I remember how the nurse rushed toward him, screaming: 'Ho! Hedgar! Hedgar!' snatching him away at the risk of her own life. "This nurse was a very nice old woman, plump, rosy and good-natured. She wore a huge white cap with flaring frills, and pronounced her words in a way that amused us. She was devoted to the children, who were spoiled and wilful. The little girl was running all about, and the boy appeared about three years old." Of this old lady it may be here said that she was really the mother of Mrs. Poe, whom she called "Betty." As an actress of the name of Arnold, she had played in various companies in both this country and Europe, taking parts in which comic songs were sung. Her pretty daughter, Elizabeth, she had brought up to her own profession, and had married her early to an actor named Hopkins, who died in October, 1805. Two months after his death his widow married David Poe, who was at that time a member of their company; and mean while her mother, Mrs. Arnold, had bestowed her own hand upon a musician of the romantic name of Tubbs, who soon left her a widow. Thenceforth she devoted herself to her daughter's family, remaining with the company and occasionally appearing in some unimportant part. When in the summer of that year of 1811 Mr. Placide's company left Norfolk to open a season in Richmond, Mr. David Poe was too ill with consumption to accompany them, and his family remained in Norfolk. He must undoubtedly have died there; for from that time in all the affairs of his family his name is not once mentioned, nor is the remotest allusion made to him. He was probably buried by the city in one of the obscure suburban cemeteries. By his death the widow was left penniless, and Mr. Placide, to whose company she still belonged, and who was anxious to have her services in his Richmond campaign, sent one of his employees to bring the family to Richmond at his own expense. A room and board had been engaged for them "at the house of a milliner named Fipps on Main street," in the low-lying district between Fifteenth and Seventeenth streets, still known as "_Bird-in-hand_." This room was not by any means the wretched apartment which it has been described by some of Poe's biographers. It was not a "cellar," not even a basement room, but one back of the shop, the family residing above, and must have been comfortably furnished, for this neighborhood was at this time the shopping district of the ladies of Richmond, and Mrs. Fipps was probably a fashionable shopkeeper. Damp Mrs. Poe's room must have been, since this locality was the lowest point in the city, where, when the river overflowed its banks, as was frequently the case, the water would rise to the back doors of the Main street buildings and at times flood the ground floors. In this room Mrs. Poe contracted the malarial fever then known as "ague-and-fever," which proved fatal to her. Owing to her illness Mrs. Poe, though her appearance was constantly advertised, did not appear on the stage more than a half dozen times, if as often. Mr. Placide wrote to her husband's relatives in Baltimore in behalf of herself and children, but received no satisfactory answer, and the company kindly gave her a benefit performance. Also, one of the Richmond papers, the "_Enquirer_," of November 25th, made an appeal "to the kind-hearted of the city" in behalf of the sick actress and her little children. This brought to their aid among others Mr. John Allan and his friend, Mr. Mackenzie. Both these gentlemen were engaged in the tobacco business, and being of Scotch nationality, the feeling of clanship led them to take a special interest in this family, whom they discovered to be of good Scotch stock. Everything possible was done for their comfort, and Mrs. Allan herself came to minister to the sick woman. On her first visit she found Mrs. Tubbs feeding the children with bread soaked in sweetened gin and water, which she called "gin-tea," and explained that it was her custom, in order to "make them strong and healthy." This was little Edgar's initiation into the habit which became the bane and ruin of his life. It soon became evident that Mrs. Poe was very near her end. Pneumonia set in; and on the 8th of December, 1811, she died. The question now was, what was to be done with the children? After a consultation among all parties, it was agreed that Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Allan should take charge of them at their own homes until they should be claimed by their Baltimore relatives. It was a sad scene when the little ones were lifted up to look their last upon the face of their dead mother, and then to be separated forever from the grandmother who had so loved and cared for them. In parting she gave to each a memento of their mother; to the boy a small water-color portrait of the latter, inscribed, "For my dear little son, Edgar, from his mother," and to the girl a jewel case, the contents of which had long since been disposed of. It was all that she had had to leave them, and with this slender inheritance in their hands the little waifs were taken away to the homes of strangers. On the day following a small funeral procession wended its way up the steep ascent of Church Hill to the graveyard of St. John's church,[1] crowning its summit. At that day it was no easy matter to get one whose profession had been that of an actor buried in consecrated ground; yet Mr. Mackenzie succeeded in effecting this. The grave was in a then obscure part of the cemetery, "close against the eastern wall," and here, after the brief service, the mother of Edgar Poe was laid to rest. [1] In this historical church it was that Patrick Henry thrilled the hearts of his hearers with the memorable words, "Give me liberty or give me death!" and sent them forever "ringing down the grooves of time." Mrs. Tubbs remained with Mr. Placide's company, and doubtless returned with them to England and to her own family. Six weeks after the death of Mrs. Poe occurred that awful tragedy and holocaust of the burning of the Richmond theatre, which shrouded the whole country in gloom. On that night a large and fashionable audience attended the performance of "_The Bleeding Nun_," eighty of whom perished in the flames. Mrs. Allen had expressed a wish to attend, with her sister and little Edgar, but her husband objected and instead took them on a Christmas visit to the country; so they escaped the tragedy, as did also the members of Placide's company. CHAPTER II. POE'S FIRST HOME. Mr. and Mrs. Mackenzie, on taking charge of the Poe children, entered into a correspondence with their grandfather, Mr. David Poe, of Baltimore, in regard to them. He was by no means anxious to claim them. He represented that he and his wife were old and poor, and that already having the eldest child, William Henry, upon his hands, he could not afford to burden himself with the others. Finally he proposed that the children should be placed in an orphan asylum, where they would be properly cared for, on hearing of which Mrs. Mackenzie declared that she would never turn the baby, Rosalie, out of her home, but would bring her up with her own children; while Mrs. Allan, who was childless and had become much attached to Edgar, proposed to her husband to adopt him. Mr. Allan demurred. His chief objection was that the boy was the child of actors, and that to have him brought up as his son would not be advisable for him or creditable to themselves. It required some special pleading on the part of the lady, and she so far prevailed as that her husband consented to keep and care for the boy as for a son, but refused to be bound by any terms of legal responsibility as either guardian or adoptive parent, preferring to remain free to act in the future as he might think proper. Mr. Mackenzie pursued the same course with regard to Rosalie, though each bestowed on his protege his own family name in baptism. There has been much useless discussion among Poe's biographers in regard to the ages of the children at this time. Woodbury "_calculates_," according to certain data obtained from a Boston newspaper regarding the appearance of Mrs. Poe on the stage. "At this time," he says, speaking of her prolonged absence in 1807, "William Henry _may have_ been born;" and accordingly fixes Edgar's birth as having occurred two years later, in 1809. Wishing to satisfy myself on this point, I some time since decided to go to the fountain-head for information, and wrote to Mrs. Byrd, a daughter of Mrs. Mackenzie, who had been brought up with Rosalie Poe. Her answer I have carefully preserved and here give _verbatim_: "Dear S----.--You ask the ages of Rose and Edgar. He was born in 1808, Rose in 1810. A remark of his (in answer to an invitation to her wedding) was that if I had put off my marriage one week it would have been on his birthday. I was married on the 5th of October.... Their mother died on the 8th Dec., 1811; and on the 9th the children were taken to Mr. Allan's and our house.... Their mother was boarding at Mrs. Fipps', a milliner on Main street. She was Scotch and of good family; and my father and Mr. Allan had her put away decently at the old Church on the Hill.... Mr. Poe died first." This account of the children's ages is entitled to more weight than those of his biographers, based upon mere calculation and "_probabilities_." When the children were baptized as Edgar Allan and Rosalie Mackenzie, their ages were also recorded, though whether in church or family records is not known; and it is not likely that Mrs. Byrd, who was brought up with Rosalie Poe, could be mistaken on this point. Were Woodbury correct in assuming that William Henry, the eldest child, "_may have_ been born" in October, 1807, and Edgar, January 19, 1809, it would follow that the latter, when taken charge of by the Allans in December, 1811, was less than two years old; an impossibility, considering that his sister was then over one year old and running about playing with other children. As to Mr. Poe's claim to October 12 as his birthday, it is not likely that, howsoever often he may have given a false date to others, he would have ventured upon it to the daughter of Mrs. Mackenzie, the latter of whom would have detected the error. It must be accepted as a final conclusion that, as Mrs. Byrd states, Edgar was born in 1808 and Rosalie in 1810.[2] Her positive assertion is proof sufficient against all mere calculation and conjecture; and in this book I shall hold to these dates as authentic. [2] The official date of Rosalie Poe's death, on June 14, 1874, represents her as 64 years of age. This would make her a year and a half old when adopted by the Mackenzies, in December, 1811. CHAPTER III. THE ALLAN HOME. Mr. Allan was at this time thirty-one years of age--a plain, practical business man, or, as some one has described him, "an honest, hard-headed Scotchman, kindly, but stubborn and irascible." His wife, some years younger than himself, was a beautiful woman, warm-hearted, impulsive and fond of company and amusement. Both were charitable, and though not at this time in what is called "society," were in comfortable circumstances and fond of entertaining their friends. There was yet another member of the family, Miss Ann Valentine, an elder sister of Mrs. Allan; a lady of a lovely disposition and almost as fond of Edgar as was his so-called "mother." She was always his "Aunt Nancy." The Allans were at this time living in the business part of the town, occupying one of a row of dingy three-story brick houses still standing on Fourteenth street, between Main and Franklin. Mr. Allan had his store on the ground floor, the family apartments being above. This was at that time and until long afterward a usual mode of living with some of the down-town merchants; though a few had already built handsome residences on Shocko Hill. Little Edgar, bright, gay and beautiful, soon became the pet and pride of the household. Even Mr. Allan grew fond of him, and his wife delighted in taking him about and showing him off among her acquaintances. In his baggy little trousers of yellow Nankin or silk pongee, with his dark ringlets flowing over an immense "tucker," red silk stockings and peaked purple velvet cap, with its heavy gold tassel falling gracefully on one shoulder, he was the admiration of all beholders. His disposition was affectionate and his temper sweet, though having been hitherto allowed to have his own way, he was self-willed and sometimes difficult to manage. To correct his faults and as a counter balance to his wife's undue indulgence, Mr. Allan conscientiously set about training the boy according to his own ideas of what was best. When Edgar was "good" he was petted and indulged, but an act of disobedience or wrong-doing was punished, as some said, with undue severity. To shield him from this was the aim of the family, even of the servants; and the boy soon learned to resort to various little tricks and artifices on his own account. An amusing instance of this was told by Mrs. Allan herself. Edgar one day would persist in running out in the rain, when Mr. Allan peremptorily called him in, with the threat of a whipping. He presently entered and, meekly walking up to his guardian, looked him in the face with his large, solemn gray eyes and held out a bunch of switches. "What are these for?" inquired the latter. "To whip me with," answered the little diplomat; and Mr. Allan had to turn aside to hide a smile, for the "switches" had been selected with a purpose, being only the long, tough leaf-stems of the alanthus tree. Another anecdote I recall illustrative of the strict discipline to which Edgar was subject. My uncle, Mr. Edward Valentine, who was a cousin of Mrs. Allan, and often a visitor at her house, was very fond of Edgar; and liking fun almost as much as did the child, taught him many amusing little tricks. One of these was to snatch away a chair from some big boy about to seat himself; but Edgar, too young to discriminate, on one occasion made a portly and dignified old lady the subject of this performance. Mr. Allan, who in his anger was always impulsive, immediately led away the culprit, and his wife took the earliest opportunity of going to console her pet. As the child was little over three years old, it may be doubted whether the punishment administered was the wisest course, but it was Mr. Allan's way, who apparently believed in the moral suasion of the rod. Edgar had no dogs and no pony, and did not ride out with a groom to attend him, "like a little prince," as a biographer has represented. At this time the Allans' circumstances were not such as to admit of such luxuries. As to his appearance in this style at the famous White Sulphur Springs, that is equally mythical.[3] [3] Lest my mention of these little anecdotes and certain other matters should lead the reader to conclude that I am quoting from Gill, I would refer them to Appendix No. 1 of this volume. There was, however, at least one summer when Edgar was six years of age in which the Allans were at one of the lesser Virginia springs, and in returning paid a visit to Mr. Valentine's family, near Staunton. This gentleman often took Edgar out with him, either driving or seated behind him on horseback; and on receiving his paper from the country post-office would make the boy read the news to the mountain rustics, who regarded him as a prodigy of learning. Thus far he had been taught by an old Scotch dame who kept an "infant-school," and who then and for years afterward called him "her ain wee laddie," and to whom as long as she lived he was accustomed to carry offerings of choice smoking tobacco. He also learned from her to speak in the broad Scottish dialect, which greatly amused and pleased Mr. Allan. The boy was at even this age remarkably quick in learning anything. Mr. Valentine also delighted in getting up wrestling matches between Edgar and the little pickaninnies with whom he played, rewarding the victor with gifts of money. But there was one thing which no money or other reward could induce the boy to undertake, and this was to go near the country churchyard after sunset, even in company with these same little darkies. Once, in riding home late, Edgar being seated behind Mr. Valentine, they passed a deserted log-cabin, near which were several graves, when the boy's nervous terror became so great that he attempted to get in front of his companion, who took him on the saddle before him. "They would run after us and pull me off," he said, betraying at even this early age the weird imagination of his maturer years. This incident led to his being questioned, when it was discovered that he had been accustomed to go with his colored "mammy" to the servants' rooms in the evenings, and there listen to the horrible stories of ghosts and graveyard apparitions such as this ignorant and superstitious race delight in. It is not improbable that the gruesome sketch of the "_Tempest_" family, one of his earliest published, whose ghosts are represented as seated in coffins around a table in an undertaker's shop, and thence flying back to their near-by graves, was not inspired by some such story heard in Mr. Allan's kitchen. Undoubtedly, these ghostly narratives, heard at this early and impressionable age, served in part to produce those weird and ghoulish imaginings which characterize some of Poe's writings, and to create that tinge of superstition which was well known to his friends. He always avoided cemeteries, hated the sight of coffins and skeletons, and would never walk alone at night even on the street; believing that evil spirits haunted the darkness and walked beside the lonely wayfarer, watching to do him a mischief. Death he loathed and feared, and a corpse he would not look upon. And yet, as bound by a weird fascination, he wrote continually of death. Edgar Poe, like every other Southern child, had his negro "mammy" to attend to him until he went to England, to whom and the other servants he was as much attached as they to him. Indeed, a marked trait of his character was his liking for negroes, the effect of early association, and to the end of his life he delighted in talking with them and in their quaint and kindly humor and odd modes of thought and expression. Edgar had been about three years with the Allans when he was again deprived of a home and sent among strangers. Mr. Allan went on a business trip to England and Scotland, accompanied by his wife, Miss Valentine and Edgar; the latter of whom was put to school in London, where he must have felt his loneliness and isolation. Still, he came to the Allans in holiday times, and was with them in Scotland for some months previous to their return to Virginia. Little is known of them during this absence of five years. CHAPTER IV. POE'S BOYHOOD. The Allans returned to Richmond in June, 1820, Edgar being then twelve years old. Having no house ready for their reception they were invited by Mr. Ellis, Mr. Allan's business partner, to his home on Franklin, then as now the fashionable street of the city. Mr. Allan at once put Edgar to Professor Clarke's classical school, where he was in intimate association with boys of the best city families. At the end of this year the Allans removed to a plain cottage-like dwelling at the corner of Clay and Fifth streets, in a quiet and out-of-the-way neighborhood. It consisted of but five rooms on the ground floor and a half story above; and here for some years they resided. Of Poe as a schoolboy various accounts have been given by former schoolmates, with most of whom he was very popular, while others represent him as reserved and not generally liked. All, however, agree that he was a remarkably bright pupil, with, in the higher classes, but one rival, and that he was high-spirited and the leader in all sorts of fun and frolic. Mrs. Mackenzie's eldest son, John, or "Jack," two years older than Edgar, though not mentioned by any of Poe's biographers, was the most intimate and trusted of all his lifelong friends. The two were playmates in childhood, and schoolmates and companions up to the time of Poe's departure for the University. Poe always called Mrs. Mackenzie "Ma," and was almost as much at home in her house as was his sister. I remember Mr. John Mackenzie as a portly, jolly, middle-aged gentleman with a florid face and a hearty laugh. This is what he said of Poe after the latter's death: "I never saw in him as boy or man a sign of morbidness or melancholy; unless," he added, "it was when Mrs. Stanard died, when he appeared for some time grieving and depressed. At all other times he was bright and full of fun and high spirits. He delighted in playing practical jokes, masquerading, and making raids on orchards and turnip-patches. Oh, yes; every schoolboy liked a sweet, tender, juicy turnip; and many a time after the apple crop had been gathered in, we might have been seen, a half dozen of us, seated on a rail-fence like so many crows, munching turnips. We didn't object to a raw sweet potato at times--anything that had the relish of being stolen. On Saturdays we had fish-fries by the river, or tramped into the woods for wild grapes and chinquepins. It was not always that Mr. Allan would allow Edgar to go on these excursions, and more than once he would steal off and join us, though knowing that he would be punished for it." "Mr. Allan was a good man in his way," added Mr. Mackenzie, "but Edgar was not fond of him. He was sharp and exacting, and with his long, hooked nose and small keen eyes looking from under his shaggy eyebrows, always reminded me of a hawk. I know that often, when angry with Edgar, he would threaten to turn him adrift, and that he never allowed him to lose sight of his dependence on his charity." Edgar, he said, was allowed a liberal weekly supply of pocket money, but being of a generous disposition and giving treats of taffy and hot gingerbread to his schoolmates at recess, besides being generally extravagant, this supply was always exhausted before the week was out, when he would borrow, and so be kept constantly in debt. He was, however, very prompt in paying off his debts. Mr. Robert Sully, nephew of the distinguished artist, Thomas Sully, and himself an artist, was through life one of Poe's firmest friends. A boy of delicate physique and a disposition so sensitive and irritable that few could keep on good terms with him, he was always in difficulties. "I was a dull boy at school," he said to me; "and Edgar, when he knew that I had an unusually hard lesson, would help me out with it. He would never allow the big boys to teaze me, and was kind to me in every way. I used to admire and in a way envy him, he was so bright, clever and handsome. "He lived not far from me, just around the corner; and one Saturday he came running up to our house, calling out, "Come along, Rob! We are going to the Hermitage woods for chinquepins, and you must come too. Uncle Billy is going for a load of pine-needles, and we can ride in his wagon." Now, that showed his consideration; he knowing that I could not walk the long distances that most boys could, and therefore seldom went on one of their excursions." In one of Poe's biographies is an absurd story to the effect that Mr. Clarke, his first teacher, once on detecting him robbing a neighbor's turnip-patch, tied one of the vegetables about his neck as a token of disgrace, which the boy purposely wore home, when Mr. Allan, in a fury at this insult to his adopted son, called on the teacher and threatened him with personal chastisement. It is scarcely necessary at this day to deny the truth of that story; but the following is what Mr. Clarke himself says about it in an interview with a reporter in Baltimore some years after Poe's death, he being at that time nearly eighty years old.[4] [4] This account, clipped from a Baltimore paper, was given by Professor Clarke's son to a Richmond reporter in 1894. "Edgar had a very sweet disposition. He was always cheerful, brimful of mirth and a very great favorite with his schoolmates. I never had occasion to speak a harsh word to him, much less to make him do penance. He had a great ambition to excel." He spoke with pride of Edgar as a student, especially in the classics. He and Nat Howard on one vacation each wrote him a complimentary letter in Latin, both equally excellent in point of scholarship; but Edgar's was in verse, which Nat could not write. "Whenever Poe came to Baltimore he would not forget to come and see me, and I would offer him wine. It was the custom, you know. When he became editor of Graham's Magazine and could afford it, he sent wine to me, gratis.... I think that as boy and man Edgar loved me dearly. I am sure I loved him.... Yes; he was a dear, open-hearted, cheerful and good boy; and as a man he was a loving and affectionate friend to me. I went to his funeral." The old Professor said that Poe's sister, Rosalie, he had seen when her brother was a pupil of his. "She was at that time about ten years old, was pretty and a very sweet child." Poe, after leaving Professor Clarke's, entered Dr. Burke's classical school in 1832, where he remained until he went to the University. Here one of his classmates was Dr. Creed Thomas, a noted Richmond physician, who died so late as in 1890. In his reminiscences of Poe, published in a Richmond paper not long before his own death, he says: "Poe was one of our brightest pupils. He read and scanned the Latin poets with ease when scarcely thirteen years of age. He was an apt student and always recited well, with a great ambition to excel in everything. "Despite his retiring disposition he was never lacking in courage. There was not a pluckier boy in school. He never provoked a quarrel, but would always stand up for his rights.... It was a noticeable fact that he never asked any of his schoolmates to go home with him after school. The boys would frequently on Fridays take dinner or spend the night with each other at their homes, but Poe was never known to enter in this social intercourse. After he left the school ground we saw no more of him until next day." Dr. Thomas spoke of Poe's fondness for the stage. He and several other of the brightest boys held amateur theatricals in an old building rented for the purpose. Poe was one of the best actors; but Mr. Allan, upon learning of it, forbade his having anything to do with these theatricals, a great grievance to the boy. "A singular fact," proceeds Dr. Thomas, "is that Poe never got a whipping while at Burke's. I remember that the boys used to come in for a flogging quite frequently--I got my share. Poe was quiet and dignified during school hours, attending strictly to his studies; and we all used to wonder at his escaping the rod so successfully." He adds that Poe was not popular with most of his schoolmates; that his manners were retiring and distant. Doubtless there were boys with whom he did not care to associate, feeling the lack of a congeniality between himself and them. Then there were the prim and priggish class who looked with virtuous disapproval on the robber of apple orchards and turnip-patches, and who in after years never had a good word to say of Poe, whether as boy or man. It will be observed from Dr. Davis' account that the "quiet and dignified" manner which distinguished Poe in manhood was natural to him even as a boy. As regards his never inviting his schoolmates to accompany him home to dinner or to spend the night, this would not have been agreeable to Edgar, who would have preferred having his time to himself for reading or writing his verses, a volume of which he now began to make up. But he was by no means deprived of company at home. The Allans, as has been said, were fond of entertaining their friends, and at their "sociables" and "tea parties" Edgar was generally required to be present, with one or two young friends to keep him company, and often he was treated to a "party" of his own--boys and girls--where a rigid etiquette was required, though dancing and charades were indulged in. This was Mrs. Allan's idea of affording him enjoyment and cultivating in him elegant and graceful manners; but to him it was most distasteful. Throughout his life he detested social companies. Mrs. Mackenzie, in speaking of the social restraint under which the Allans at this time sought to keep Edgar, said that it was very distasteful to the boy, who liked to choose his companions, and who now, at the age of fifteen, began to be dissatisfied and to think that he was subject to undue restraint at home. She often heard him express the wish that he had been adopted by Mr. Mackenzie instead of by Mr. Allan; and she would talk to him in her motherly way, endeavoring to impress him with a sense of what he owed to the latter. His disposition, she said, was very sweet and affectionate, and he was grateful for any kindness, and always happy to be at her house as much as he was allowed to be from home. Her son John could never be persuaded to visit Edgar at his home, so strict was the etiquette observed at table and in general behavior. She believed that Mr. Allan, in taking charge of Edgar, had been influenced more by a desire to please his wife than any real interest in the child, though he had conscientiously endeavored to do his duty by him. She had once heard him say that Edgar did not know the meaning of the word _gratitude_; to which she replied that it could not be expected of children, who were not able to understand their obligations; and that she did not at present look for gratitude from Rose, but for affection and obedience. Mrs. Allan was devoted to Edgar and he was very fond of her. It was she, Mrs. Mackenzie thought, rather than her husband, who so extravagantly supplied him with money, seeming to take a pride in his having more than his schoolmates. She was a good and amiable woman, fond of pleasure generally, and less domestic in her tastes than either her husband or sister. Mr. John Mackenzie, in speaking of Edgar, bore witness to his high spirit and pluckiness in occasional schoolboy encounters, and also to his timidity in regard to being alone at night and his belief in and fear of the supernatural. He had heard Poe say, when grown, that the most horrible thing he could imagine as a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch-dark room when alone at night; or to awaken in semi-darkness and see an evil face gazing close into his own; and that these fancies had so haunted him that he would often keep his head under the bed-covering until nearly suffocated. The restrictions sought to be placed upon Poe's associations and amusements served only to render him more democratic. He, with two or three of his young friends of congenial tastes, were fond of stealing off for a bath in the river near _Rocketts_ or below _the Falls_, in company with the hardy, adventurous boys of those localities, who were known as "river rats." It was from them that he learned to swim, to row and, when the river was low, to wade across its rocky bed to the willowy islands and set fish-traps. When in Richmond in after years, he told how he had met with some of these former companions, and how much he had enjoyed talking with them about "old times" on the river. As regards religious influences and teachings in the Allan home, it does not appear that Edgar was especially subject to these. Mr. and Mrs. Allan were members of St. John's Episcopal church and punctilious in all church observances, and they required of Edgar a strict attendance at Sunday school and his presence in the family pew during divine service. But in those days it was not thought necessary for professed Christians to deny themselves social pleasures. On Sundays luxurious dinners were provided, to which friends were invited from church, and rides and drives were indulged in. Edgar was sent to dancing school, and Mrs. Allan had her dancing entertainments and her husband his card parties, which were attended by some of the most prominent professional men of the city; amusements which, as is well known, exposed Episcopalians to the charge of worldliness by other denominations. At all these entertainments wine flowed freely. I have an impression, too vague to be asserted as fact, that Edgar Poe was confirmed at the same time with his sister and Mary Mackenzie, at St. John's church, and by the clergyman who had baptized them. To any inquiry as to his religious denomination, he always answered, "I am an Episcopalian." But it was often remarked upon by their friends in Richmond that neither he nor Rosalie had ever been known to manifest a sign of religious feeling or of interest in religious things. It was noticeable in both that, phrenologically considered, the organ of _veneration_ was so undeveloped as to give a depressed or flat appearance to the top of the head when seen in profile. And it was known to Poe's intimate friends that, while he believed in a Supreme Power, he had no faith in the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. Hence he was as a bark at sea with a guiding star in view but no rudder to direct its course. His eager seeking for truth was ever but a groping in darkness, with now and then a faint, far-away ray of the light of Truth flashing upon his sight--as we see in _Eureka_. Yet Poe was careful to offer no disrespect to religion, and he was a frequent attendant at church and a great lover of church music. Great injustice has been done the Allans by Poe's biographers in representing them as responsible for his early dissipation. By all the story has been repeated of how the child of three or four years was accustomed to be given a glass of wine at dinner parties and required to drink the health of the company. It was no unusual thing for little children to be taught this trick for the amusement of company, as from my own recollections I can myself aver. But the liquor given them was simply a little sweetened wine and water. As Edgar grew older he was, like other boys in his position--as the Mackenzies--allowed his glass of wine at table; but no word was ever heard of his being fond of wine until his return from the University. I have heard a Richmond gentleman who was Poe's chum at the University speak of the latter's peculiar manner of drinking. He was no _connoisseur_, they said, in either wine or other liquors, and seemed to care little for their mere taste or flavor. "You never saw him critically discussing his wine or smacking his lips over its excellence; but he would generally swallow his glass at a draught, as though it had been water--especially when he was in any way worried." In this way he would soon become intoxicated, while his companions remained sober. "He had the weakest head of any one that I ever knew," said this gentleman, who attributed his dissipation while at the University, not to a natural inclination, but to a weakness of will which allowed himself to be easily influenced by his companions. Hitherto we have seen in Poe, the schoolboy, only what was amiable and lovable; but now, in his sixteenth year, he began to show that beneath this were springs of bitterness which, when disturbed, could arouse him to a passion and a power hitherto unsuspected. I never heard of but one authentic instance of his being subject to slight or "snubbing" while a boy on account of his parentage or his dependent position in Mr. Allan's family, although several writers have taken it for granted that such was the case. What effect such treatment would have had upon him is evinced in the instance in question, in which a young man, a sprig of an aristocratic family, chose to object to association with the son of actors, and not only made a point of ignoring him on all occasions, but made offensive allusions to him as a "charity boy." This last being reported to Edgar, aroused in him a resentment which found expression in a rhyming lampoon upon "_Don Pompiosa_," so brimfull of wit, sarcasm and keenest ridicule that it was circulated throughout the city for some time, though none knew who was the author. The young man in question could not make his appearance upon the street without being pointed out and laughed at, with audible allusions to "_Don Pompiosa_," and was, it was said, at length actually driven from the town, leaving Poe triumphant. This was the forerunner of those keen literary onslaughts which in after years made Poe as a critic the terror of his enemies. CHAPTER V. SCHOOLBOY LOVE AFFAIRS. That Poe was, both as boy and man, unusually susceptible to the influence of feminine charms has been the testimony of all who best knew him. "I never knew the time," said Mr. Mackenzie, "that Edgar was not in love with some one." Nor was it unusual for me, when a girl, to meet with some comely matron who would laughingly admit that she had been "one of Edgar Poe's sweethearts." Neither did he confine his boyish gallantries to girls of his own age, but admired grown-up belles and young married ladies as well; though this was probably in a great measure owing to the playful petting with which they treated the handsome and chivalrous boy-lover. But this was a trait which did not meet with the approval of Miss Jane Mackenzie, sister of the gentleman who adopted Rosalie Poe. This lady, noted for her elegant manners and accomplishments, kept a fashionable "Young Ladies' Boarding-School," patronized by the best families of the State; and many a brilliant belle and admired Virginia matron boasted of having received her education at "Miss Jane's." As I remember her, she was tall and stately, prim and precise, and was attired generally in black silk and elaborate cap and frizette, a very _Lady-Prioress_ sort of a person. She had the reputation of being exceedingly "strict" in regard to the manners and conduct of her pupils, and was a contrast to the rest of her family, all of whom were remarkably genial. When Edgar was about fifteen or sixteen he began to make trouble for Miss Jane. Repeatedly she would detect him in secret correspondence with some one of her fair pupils, supplemented on his part by offerings of candy and "original poetry," his sister Rosalie being the medium of communication. The verses were sometimes compared by the fair recipients and found to be alike, with the exception of slight changes appropriate to each; a practice which he kept up in after years. He possessed some skill in drawing, and it was his habit to make pencil-sketches of his girl friends, with locks of their hair attached to the cards. Poe himself has told of his boyish devotion to Mrs. Stanard, which made so deep an impression upon the mind and heart of the embryo poet. The story is well known of how he once accompanied little Robert Stanard home from school (to see his pet pigeons and rabbits), and how his heart was won by the gentle and gracious reception given him by the boy's lovely mother, and the tenderness of tone and manner with which she talked to him; she knowing his pathetic history. In his heart a chord of feeling was stirred which had never before been touched; and thenceforth he regarded her with a passionate and reverential devotion such as we may imagine the religious devotee to feel for the Madonna. He calls this "the first pure and ideal love of his soul," and possibly it may in time have been increased by the knowledge of the doom which hung above and overtook her at the last--the partial shrouding of the bright intellect, the effect of a hereditary taint. Indeed, it is probable that on this account Poe saw very little if anything of Mrs. Stanard in the two succeeding years, in which time she led a secluded life with her family, dying in April, 1824, at the age of thirty-one. But the impression had been made, and remained with him during his lifetime, forming the one solitary _Ideal_ which pervaded nearly all his poems--the death of the young, lovely and beloved. This experience was probably the beginning of those occasional dreamy and melancholy moods about this time noticed by some of his companions. The living friend of his boyhood's dream became the "lost Lenore" of his maturer years. But though Poe deeply felt the loss of this beloved friend, the story is not to be accepted that he was accustomed to go at night to the cemetery where she was buried "and there, prostrate on her grave, weep away the long hours of cold and darkness." No one who knew Poe in his boyhood, with his horror of cemeteries, of darkness, and of being alone at night, would believe this story, first told by Poe himself to Mrs. Whitman, and by her poetic fancy further embellished. Besides this is the practical refutation afforded by the high brick wall and locked gates of the cemetery, with the strict discipline of the Allan home, which would have made such midnight excursions impossible. Another account connected with Mrs. Stanard, and repeated by Poe's biographers until it has become an article of faith with the public, is that the exquisite lines "To Helen" were inspired by and addressed to that lady. If written at ten years of age, as Poe asserts, it will be remembered that he was at this time at school in London, and it was not until two years after his return, and when he was thirteen years of age, that he ever saw Mrs. Stanard. He might have altered the lines to suit her--his "Psyche," with the pale and "classic face"--and I recall that the "folded scroll" of the first version was afterward changed to "the agate lamp within thy hand," as more appropriate to Psyche. Poe never made an alteration in his poems that was not an improvement. Those who knew Mrs. Stanard describe her as slender and graceful, with regular delicate features, a complexion of marble pallor and dark, pensive eyes. A portrait of her which was in possession of her son, Judge Robert Stanard, represented her as a young girl wearing--perhaps in respect to her Scottish descent--a _snood_ in her dark, curling hair. CHAPTER VI. ROSALIE POE. Of Edgar Poe's sister, Rosalie, it may be said that all accounts represent her as having been, up to the age of ten years, a pretty child, with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and of a sweet disposition. Though evincing nothing of Edgar's talent and quickness at learning, she was yet a rather better pupil than the average; and it had been Miss Mackenzie's intention to give her every advantage of education afforded by her own school, so as to fit her for becoming a teacher. But when Rosalie Poe was in her eleventh or twelfth year, a strange change came over her, for which her friends could never account. Without having ever been ill, a sudden blight seemed to fall upon her, as frost upon a flower, and she drooped, as it were, mentally and physically. She lost all energy and ambition, and thenceforth made little or no progress in her studies, growing up into a languid and uninteresting girlhood. Still, she was amiable, generous and devoted to her friends, who were generally chosen for their personal beauty, and for this reason my sister was a great favorite with her. To Mrs. Mackenzie she was always dutiful and affectionate, but her great pride and affection centered in her brother. She felt painfully, and would often allude to, the difference between them. Once she said to me, "Of course, I can't expect Edgar to love me as I do him, he is so far above me." A peculiarity of Miss Poe is worth mentioning, because it is one shared by her brother, and must have been hereditary. She could not taste wine without its having an immediate effect upon her. She would, after venturing to take a glass of wine at dinner, sleep for hours, and awaken either with a headache or in an irritable and despondent mood. As is well known, the same effect was produced upon Edgar by a moderate indulgence in drink, such as would not affect another man; and this hereditary weakness should go far in accounting for and excusing those excesses of which all the world is unfortunately aware. Of the elder brother of Edgar, William Henry, I have heard scarcely any mention until after Poe's death, and few seemed to know that there was such a person. It seems, however, that in the summer, when Edgar was preparing for the University, this brother came to Richmond on a visit to himself and Rose. Edgar took him around to introduce to his young lady acquaintances, by one of whom he has been described as handsome, gentlemanly and agreeable. He died a year or two afterward, leaving some poems which show him to have been possessed of unusual poetic talent. Had he lived, he might have rivaled his brother as a poet. CHAPTER VII. THE UNREST OF YOUTH. In the summer of 1825, Mr. Allan, having come into possession of a large fortune left him by an uncle, purchased and removed to the handsome brick residence at the corner of Main and Fifth streets, built by Mr. Gallego, a wealthy Spanish gentleman, and which became known as the Allan House. To own such a residence had long been the desire of Mrs. Allan, and upon taking possession of the house she furnished it handsomely and commenced entertaining in a style which rendered them conspicuous in Richmond society. It was even said that they lived extravagantly; and Edgar, with abundance of pocket-money, became the envy of his companions. But he was not happy. The impatience of restraint of which the Mackenzies spoke, and the dissatisfaction of which was to him, despite its luxuries, an uncongenial home, rendered him discontented. The heart of the boy of fifteen began to pulse with the restlessness of the bird when it feels the first nervous twitchings of its wings, and his great desire now was to get away from home and enjoy greater freedom. He would often, when particularly dissatisfied, speak to the Mackenzies of going to sea or enlisting in the army. At present, however, he contented himself with requesting Mr. Allan to send him to the University. Mr. Allan did not see the use of a higher education for one whom he destined for a commercial business, but finally yielded; and Edgar left Mr. Burke's school and, under a private tutorage, commenced fitting himself for the University. This period, from June to February 14, 1825, was the only time, with the exception of two brief intervals, that he resided in the Allan House. On another point, however, he did not so easily have his way. He was very anxious that his youthful poems should be published in book form, and importuned Mr. Allan to that effect, but this was a thing with which the latter had no sympathy. He did consent to go with the boy to hear what Mr. Clarke's judgment of the verses would be; but finally concluded that Edgar was too young to publish a book; and so the latter's eager and ambitious hopes were for the time frustrated. Still, this must have been a pleasant summer for him, in the enjoyment of his new home, with its fine lawn and garden, in place of the cramped cottage on Clay street, and especially in the knowledge that he was breaking away from his schoolboy days and assuming something of the independence of youth. It was at this time that he made the famous swim of seven miles on James river, from Warwick Park to Richmond, which has been so much commented upon--showing with what fine athletic powers he was gifted. It was on the 14th of February, 1825, that Poe entered the University; inscribing on the matriculation book the date of his birth as January 19, 1809, making him sixteen years of age, when he was really seventeen (born in 1808). This date, it will be observed, agrees with no other that he has given. Of his course at the University his biographers have informed us, on the authority of professors and students, some of whom credit him with almost every vice of dissipation, while others defend him from such imputation. But when he returned home, at the end of the first year, with a brilliant scholastic record, it became known that Mr. Allan had been called upon to pay his gambling and other debts, amounting on the whole to over two thousand dollars. Mr. Allan went on to Charlottesville to investigate the matter, and scrupulously paid all that he considered honest debts, refusing to notice the gambling debts. Poe, having paid little attention to his personal affairs, was almost as much surprised as was Mr. Allan at the amount of his indebtedness. He appeared truly penitent, and frankly so expressed himself to Mr. Allan, offering to repay the latter by his services in his counting-house. It was agreed that after the Christmas holidays he should take his place in the office as clerk. This was the beginning of the declension of Poe's social and personal reputation. By his elders he was severely condemned, while the good little boys who had formerly looked doubtfully upon the robber of orchards and turnip-patches now passed him by with sidelong glances and pursed-up lips. And yet, good cause though Mr. Allan had to be angry--as he was--we have the following account of Edgar's reception at home when he returned from the University for the Christmas holidays, a reception for which he was doubtless indebted to his devoted foster-mother: A former schoolmate of his, Charles Bolling, writes to the editor of a Richmond paper that Mr. Allan, when on a visit to the country, having given him a cordial invitation to call on him when in Richmond, he, one evening, near Christmas, went to his house, where he was kindly received. After sitting awhile, he perceived certain signs as of preparation for the entertainment of company, and at once rose to leave, but his host insisted upon his remaining, saying that Edgar had just come home from the University, and some of his young friends had been invited to meet him. Bolling replied that he was not in a suitable dress for company, when Mr. Allan said: "Go up to Edgar's room. He will supply you with one of his own suits." He found Edgar lying on a lounge reading, who welcomed him cordially, and, throwing open his wardrobe doors, placed the contents at his disposal. This was a room which, on their removal to their new home, Mrs. Allan had chosen for Edgar's occupation, furnishing it handsomely, with his books and pictures arranged in bookcases and on the wall. He took great pleasure in this apartment, and had always passed much of his time there. When the two youths had attired themselves to their satisfaction, they repaired to the drawing-room, where Poe did his duty in welcoming his guests. But after awhile he took Bolling aside and proposed that they should go down the street and have a spree of their own. To this the latter very properly objected, saying: "Oh, no; that would never do." But being urged, finally consented; and they stole away from the company together. This was an assertion of independence which one year previous he would not have ventured upon. But he was now no longer a schoolboy, but a University student and, as he claimed, nearly eighteen years of age. This past year had wrought a great change in him; and he was already in his heart prepared to break away from the restraint and authority which he had found so irksome and assert his independence. In due time Poe was installed in Mr. Allan's counting-house as clerk, but had occupied that position but a short time when it became intolerable to him. He begged Mr. Allan to give him some other employment, saying that he would rather earn his living in any other way. Mr. Allan, still angry about the University debts, told him that he was his own master, and could choose what employment he pleased, but that henceforth he was not to look to him for assistance. After an angry scene between the two, Poe packed his traveling bag and, leaving the Allan house, did not return to it for the space of two years. It will be observed that this was no runaway act on Poe's part, as asserted by biographers. He took an affectionate leave of Mrs. Allan and Miss Valentine--who supplied him with money--and neither of whom believed but that he would be back in a few weeks. He went to take leave of the Mackenzies, who, all but his friend "Jack," advised him to return and submit himself to Mr. Allan; but this he would not, could not, do. He claimed that Mr. Allan had spoken insultingly to him, and declared that he would no longer be dependent on him. And so he went forth, as he said, to seek his fortune. He made his way to Boston, where the first use to which he put his money was in publishing a cheap edition of his poems. They were not of a kind to attract attention, and he never realized a dollar from them. Ambitious to have them known, he sent a number to his friends in Richmond and other places South, and the rest turned over to his publisher, an obscure young man of the name of Thomas, in part payment of the expense of publishing. Then followed a season of wandering in search of employment until, his money all gone, he had no resource but to enlist in the army, which he did on May 2, 1827, being then, as he claimed, eighteen (really nineteen) years of age, but representing himself as twenty-two. CHAPTER VIII. IN BARRACKS. In the year 1829, my uncle, Dr. Archer, then Post Surgeon at Fortress Monroe, was one day called to the hospital to attend a private soldier known as Edgar A. Perry. Finding him a young man of superior manners and education, his interest was aroused, and his patient, won by his sympathy, finally confessed that his real name was Edgar A. Poe, and that he was the adopted son of Mr. John Allan, of Richmond; and also expressed an earnest desire to leave the army, in which he had now been for two years, the term of enlistment being five years. Dr. Archer informed the commanding officer of these revelations, and as Perry, _alias_ Poe, had proven himself in all respects a model soldier, interest in his case was at once aroused. It was suggested that, with his education and the social position which he had enjoyed, a cadetship at West Point would be more suited to him than the place of a private at Fortress Monroe. Poe, in his anxiety to be rid of the army, was willing enough to accept this proposal, and by the advice of his new friends wrote to Mr. Allan, informing him of his wishes and asking his assistance. For some time he received no answer; but at length there came a letter which must have caused his heart a pang of real sorrow. It was from Mr. Allan, informing him of the death of his wife, and directing him to apply for a furlough and come on at once to Richmond, where he arrived two days after her burial. Woodbury is mistaken in saying that in all this time Mr. Allan had not known of Edgar's whereabouts. According to Miss Valentine, Poe never at any time ceased entirely to correspond with Mrs. Allan, who never, to her dying day, lost her interest in the boy whom she had loved as a son, and neither ceased her endeavors to reconcile himself and her husband, urging Edgar to return and Mr. Allan to receive him. In anticipation of such result, she kept his room as he had left it, ready for his occupation at any time that it might suit his wayward fancy to return. Mr. Allan talked to Poe seriously, and, finding that his great desire was to get a discharge from the army, promised to assist him; but only upon condition of his entering West Point, by which there would be secured to him an honorable and independent position for life, and Allan himself be relieved from all responsibility concerning him. But that he had not entirely forgiven Edgar was evident from a letter to the latter's commanding officer, wherein he exposes, unnecessarily, perhaps, the youth's gambling habits at the University, declaring that "he is no relation of mine whatever, and no more to me than many others who, being in need, I have regarded as being my care." Poe must have felt this latter as a humiliation; and it was certainly not calculated to increase his regard for the writer. Poe's career at West Point is well known. At first all went well. One of his Virginia comrades, Col. Allan Magruder, describes him as of a simple and kindly nature, but, by reason of his distance and reserve, not popular with the cadets, and that he at length confined his association exclusively to Virginians. But the old discontent and impatience of restraint returned upon him, and after some months he wrote to Mr. Allan that he wished to leave West Point--a step to which the latter positively refused his assistance. Finding nobody inclined to help him, he resolved to force his discharge. He purposely neglected his studies and military duties, deliberately violated the rules, engaged--it was said by some--in all sorts of disgraceful pranks; and finally was tried by court-martial and, on March 7, 1831, dismissed from the institute. It has been naturally inferred that Poe's object in this voluntary self-sacrifice was simply to free himself from the irksomeness of military duties which, on trial, he found so opposed to his taste and inclination. But perhaps the real motive was one which has never yet been suspected. Some time after Poe's death I was informed by a lady that, being in company where the conversation turned upon the poet and his writings, one who did not admire the latter remarked that Edgar Poe could have been of more use to both himself and others by remaining at West Point and adopting the army as a profession. To this an old army officer, Capt. Patrick Galt, replied that he had been informed by one who had been a classmate of Poe that the latter had been driven away from West Point by the slights and snubs of the cadets on account of his parentage and his bringing up as an object of charity. West Point, this officer declared, had in Poe's time been a very hotbed of aristocratic prejudice and pretension, and, Poe's history being known, these young aristocrats held themselves aloof, while the more snobbish among them, probably by reason of his reserve and acknowledged superiority in some respects, did not hesitate to attempt to humiliate him on occasion. Poe, he said, probably knew that this odium would in a measure attach to him throughout his whole military career, and he acted wisely in declining to expose himself to it. Hence the shyness and reserve of which some of his fellow-cadets speak, and his exclusive association with Virginians, who generally stand by each other. CHAPTER IX. POE AND MRS. ALLAN. In the meantime Mr. Allan had contracted a second marriage, the lady being a Miss Louisa Patterson, of New Jersey. She was thirty years of age; not handsome, but of dignified and courteous manners, with large, strongly-marked features, indicative of decision of character and, as was said, of a will of her own. Nevertheless, she was amiably inclined, and as a society leader very tactful and diplomatic. One marked characteristic of hers was that she never forgave the least slight or disrespect to herself, though the offender were but a child; and of this I remember some curious instances in my own acquaintance with her, many years after the time of which I speak. It does not appear how Poe received the news of this marriage; but one thing seems certain--that, strangely enough, the idea never occurred to him that it in any way affected his own position in Mr. Allan's house. He had never received from the latter any word to that effect; Miss Valentine (his "Aunt Nancy"), with the old servants, who had known, and served, and loved him from his babyhood, were still there, and doubtless his room was still being kept, as ever before, ready for his occupation. It was therefore with perfect confidence that, upon being dismissed from West Point, he proceeded to Richmond, having barely enough money to pay his way, and, sounding the brazen knocker of Mr. Allan's door, greeted the old servant pleasantly, handing him his traveling bag to be carried to his room, at the same time asking for Miss Valentine. The answer of the servant astonished him. His old room had been taken by Mrs. Allan as a guest-chamber and his personal effects removed to "the end-room." This was the last of several small apartments opening upon a narrow corridor extending on one side of the house above the kitchen and the servants' apartments. It had at one time been occupied by Mrs. Allan's maid. On receiving this information, Poe was extremely indignant, and, refusing to have his carpet-bag carried to that room, requested to see Mrs. Allan. The lady came down to the parlor in all her dignity, and answered to his inquiry that she had arranged her house to suit herself; that she had not been informed that Mr. Poe had any present claim to that room or that he was expected again to occupy it. Warm words ensued, and she reminded him that he was a pensioner on her husband's charity, which provoked him to more than hint that she had married Mr. Allan from mercenary motives. This was enough for the lady. She sent for her husband, who was at his place of business, and who, upon hearing her account of the interview, coupled with the assertion that "Edgar Poe and herself could not remain a day under the same roof," without seeing Poe, sent to him an imperative order to leave the house at once, which he immediately did. It was told by himself that as he crossed the hall Mr. Allan hastily entered it from a side-door and called harshly to him, at the same time drawing out his purse, but that he, without pause or notice, continued on his way. This account of the rupture between Poe and the Allans I heard from the Mackenzies and Mrs. Julia Mayo Cabell, wife of Poe's schoolboy friend, Dr. Robert G. Cabell, to whom Poe himself related it. The friends of the Allens gave a much more sensational account of the affair, which was much discussed, and went the rounds of the city, with such additions and exaggerations as gossip could invent, until it culminated at length in the dark picture with which Griswold horrified the world. It was to this incident that Poe alluded when he told Mrs. Whitman that "his pride had led him to deliberately throw away a large fortune rather than submit to a trivial wrong." CHAPTER X. THE CLOSING OF THE GATE. When Poe, after leaving Mr. Allan's door, crossed the lawn and passed out of the gate, can any one realize how momentous was the instant of time in which the gate closed after him, or what a woeful human tragedy was in that instant inaugurated? The closing of the gate meant the shutting out forever of his past life; the clang of the iron latch was the knell of all that had been bright and pleasant and prosperous in that life, now lost to him forever. There he stood, homeless, penniless, friendless, utterly alone in the world, with a pathless future before him, shadowy, dim, no hand to point him onward and no star to guiden. From this moment commences the true history of Edgar A. Poe. * * * * * On leaving the Allan house, Poe went directly to the Mackenzies, the only place to which he could turn, and spent several days with these kind friends, discussing what would be best for him to do, now that he had his own way to make in the world. They advised him to begin by teaching, until he could see his way more clearly; but Richmond was at present no place for him, and he decided to go to Baltimore, where his relatives, knowing the city so well, might be able to assist him. The Mackenzies gave him what money they could spare, and Miss Valentine, on hearing where he was, sent more. But in Baltimore Poe found himself coldly received by his relatives. Since his miserable failure at West Point, when his prospects had seemed so bright and all conspiring for his good, they had lost all faith in him, and did not propose to trouble themselves on his account. On his last visit, Neilson Poe, at whose house he was staying, had obtained for him a place in an editor's office, which after a brief trial Poe threw up. He now again applied for that place, but failed; as also in his application for the position of assistant teacher in some academy. And now commenced that wretched life of wandering, and penury, and, according to Mr. Kennedy, of actual starvation, which is as sad as any other such history in literature, with the exception of that of poor Chatterton. His days were passed in roaming about the streets in search of employment--anything by which he could obtain food and at night a miserable place where to rest his weary limbs. He wrote a few stories which he endeavored to dispose of to editors, but met with no success. Many stories have been told in regard to this unhappy period of Poe's life. One, related by a Richmond man, stated that, being in Baltimore about the time in question, he one day had occasion to visit a brick-yard, when there passed him by a line of men bearing the freshly moulded bricks to the kiln. Glancing at them casually, he was amazed to recognize among them Edgar Poe. He could not be mistaken, having been for years familiar with his appearance. Whether Poe recognized him, he could not say; but when he returned next day he was not there, nor did any one know of the name of Poe among the laborers. It was the opinion of this man that he had merely picked up a day's job for a day's need. He was said to have been recognized in other equally uncongenial occupations, but relief was at hand in the time of his sorest need. CHAPTER XI. MRS. CLEMM. His father's sister, Mrs. Maria Clemm, who had for some years been living in a New York country town, supporting herself and little daughter by dressmaking, about this time returned to Baltimore, and hearing from the Poes of the presence of her brother's son in the city, commenced a search for him. She found him, at length, ill--really ill; and at once took him to her own humble home, installing him in a room which had been furnished for a lodger, and from that hour attended and cared for him with a true motherly devotion. Those who believe in the spirit of the old adage, "Blood is thicker than water," may imagine what a blessed relief this was to the weary and almost despairing wanderer. Here he had what he needed almost as much as he did food--rest; rest for the weak and exhausted body and for the anxious mind as well. Here, in the quiet little room, he could lie and dream, in the blissful consciousness that near him were the watchful eyes and careful hands of his own father's sister, ready to attend to his slightest want. And from the day on which he first entered her humble abode Poe was never more to be a homeless wanderer. To him it proved ever a safe little harbor, a sure haven of refuge and repose in all storms and troubles that assailed, even to his life's end. Mrs. Clemm was at this time a strong, vigorous woman, somewhat past middle age, and of large frame and masculine features. Her manner was dignified and well-bred, and she was possessed of abundant self-reliance, ready resource, and, as must be said, of clever artifice as well, where artifice was necessary to the accomplishment of a purpose. Her abode, though plainly and cheaply furnished, was a picture of neatness and such comfort as she could afford to give it; but her means were only what could be derived from dressmaking, taking a lodger or two, and at times teaching a few small children. This state of affairs dawned upon Poe as he slowly recovered from his fever-dreams; and he again became aware of the strong necessity of further exertion on his part. Mrs. Clemm would not allow him to go to a hospital. Probably she feared to lose him. In some degree, isolated from her other kindred, she had in her loneliness found a son, and the pertinacity with which she thenceforth clung to him was something remarkable. Poe soon resumed his weary search for employment, but for some time without success. In his hours of enforced idleness at home he found employment in teaching his little cousin, Virginia, a pretty and affectionate child of ten years, who, however, was fonder of a walk or a romp with him than of her lessons. She was devoted to her handsome cousin, and having hitherto lived with her mother and with few or no playmates or companions, soon learned to depend upon him for all pleasure or amusement. They called each other both then and ever after, "Buddie" and "Sissy," while Mrs. Clemm was "Muddie" to both. Of this period of Poe's life in Baltimore, Dr. Snodgrass, a literary Bohemian of the time, has given us glimpses: "In Baltimore, his chief resort was the Widow Meagher's place, an inexpensive but respectable eating-house, with a bar attached and a room where the customers could indulge in a smoke or a social game of cards. This was frequented chiefly by printers and employees of shipping offices. Poe was a great favorite with the Widow Meagher, a kindly old Irish woman. On entering there you would generally find him seated behind her oyster counter, at which she presided; himself as silent as an oyster, grave and retiring. Knowing him to be a poet, she addressed him always by the old Irish title of _Bard_, and by this name he was here known. It was, "Bard, have a nip;" "Bard, take a hand." Whenever anything particularly pleased the old woman's fancy, she would request Poe to put it in "poethry," and I have seen many of these little pieces which appeared to me more worthy of preservation than some included in his published works. It happened that Poe one evening, in his wanderings about the streets, stopped to read a copy of _The Evening Visitor_ exposed for sale, and had his attention attracted by the offer of a purse of one hundred dollars for the best original story to be submitted to that journal anonymously. Remembering his rejected manuscripts, he at once hastened home and, making them into a neat parcel, dispatched them to the office of the _Visitor_, though with little or no hope of their meeting with acceptance. His feelings may therefore be imagined when he shortly received a letter informing him that the prize of one hundred dollars had been awarded to his story of "The Gold Bug," and desiring him to come to the office of the _Visitor_ and receive the money. It was on this occasion that Poe made the acquaintance of Mr. J. P. Kennedy, author of "_Swallow Barn_," who proved such a true friend to him in time of need. Mr. Kennedy says he recognized in the thin, pale, shabbily dressed but neatly groomed young man a gentleman, and also that he was starving. He invited him frequently to his table, presented him with a suit of clothes and, seeing how feeble he was, gave him the use of a horse for the exercise which he so much needed. He also obtained for him some employment in the office of the _Evening Visitor_, whose editor, Mr. Wilmer, accepted several stories from his pen; and it was now, evidently, that Poe decided upon literature as a profession. Under these favoring conditions Poe rapidly recovered his health and spirits. Mr. Wilmer, who saw a good deal of him at this time, says that when their office work was done they would often walk out together into the suburbs, generally accompanied by Virginia, who would never be left behind. At the office he was punctual, industrious and his work satisfactory. In all his association with him he never saw him under the influence of intoxicants or knew him to drink except once, moderately, when he opened a bottle of wine for a visitor. I once clipped from a Baltimore paper the following article by a reporter to whom the story was related by "a lively and comely old lady," herself its heroine. I give it as an illustration of the easy confidence with which Poe, even in his youth, sought the acquaintance of women who attracted his attention: CHAPTER XII. "A PRETTY GIRL WITH AUBURN HAIR WHOM POE LOVED." "The old lady commenced by saying that she had known Poe quite intimately when she and her mother were residents of Baltimore, about 1832. She was then seventeen years of age and attending a finishing school in that city. She confided to me, laughingly, that she was considered a very pretty girl, with dark eyes and curling auburn hair. "The first time she noticed Poe, she said, was once when she was studying her lesson at the window of her room, which was in the rear of the house. Looking up, she saw a very handsome young man standing at an opposite back window on the next street looking directly at her. She pretended to take no notice, but on the following evening the same thing occurred. He appeared to be writing at his window, and each time that he laid aside a sheet he would look over at her, and at length bowed. This time a school friend was with her, who, in a spirit of fun, returned the bow. That evening, as the two were seated on the veranda together, this young man sauntered past and, deliberately ascending the steps of the adjoining house, spoke to them, addressing them by name. He sat for some time on the dividing rail of the two verandas, making himself very agreeable, and the acquaintance thus commenced in a mere spirit of school-girl fun, was kept up for several weeks, some story being invented to satisfy the mother. "'Of course, it was all wrong,' said the old lady, 'but it was fun, nevertheless; and we girls could see no harm in it. But one evening, when Mr. Poe and myself had been strolling up and down in the moonlight until quite late, my mother desired him not to come again, as I was only a school girl and the neighbors would talk. So our acquaintance ended abruptly.' She added that, although they never again met, she always felt the deepest interest in hearing of him, and had never forgotten her fascinating boy-lover. "Asked if she had ever seen Virginia, she replied: 'Yes, several times, when she was with her cousin;' that 'she was a pretty child, but her chalky-white complexion spoiled her.'" Mr. Allan died in March, 1834, leaving three fine little boys to inherit his fortune. Some time before his death an absurd story was circulated, which we find related in the Richmond _Standard_, of April, 1881, thirty-one years after Poe's death, on the authority of Mr. T. H. Ellis, of Richmond. It appears that a friend of Poe wrote to the latter that Mr. Allan had spoken kindly of him, seeming to regret his harshness, and advising him to come on to Richmond and call on him in his illness. Acting upon this advice, he, one evening in February, presented himself at Mr. Allan's door. The rest, as told by Ellis, is as follows: "He was met at the door by Mrs. Allan, who, not recognizing him, said that her husband had been forbidden by his physician to see visitors. Thrusting her rudely aside, he rapidly made his way upstairs and into the chamber where Mr. Allan sat in an arm-chair, who, on seeing him, raised his cane, threatening to strike him if he approached nearer, and ordered him to leave the house, which he did." Woodbury asserts the truth of this story, because, as he says, "Mr. Ellis had the very best means of knowing the truth." But Ellis was at this time only a youth of 18 or 20, and had no more opportunity of knowing the truth than the numerous acquaintances of the Allans' to whom they related their version of the incident, with never a mention of the cane. Poe, they said, accused the servant of having delivered his message to Mrs. Allan and, creating some disturbance, the latter called to the servant to "drive that drunken man away." Mr. Ellis should have remembered that Mrs. Allan, to the day of her death, asserted that she had never but once seen Poe; consequently, this story of the second meeting between them and of Poe's "rudely thrusting her aside," and being threatened with the cane, is simply a specimen of the gossip which was continually being circulated concerning Poe by his enemies. CHAPTER XIII. POE'S DOUBLE MARRIAGE. How it was that Poe, when a mature man of twenty-seven, came to marry his little cousin of twelve or thirteen has ever appeared something of a mystery. As understood by his Richmond friends, it appeared that when, in July of 1835, he left Baltimore to assume the duties of assistant editor to Mr. White of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, Virginia, deprived of her constant companion, so missed him and grieved over his absence that her mother became alarmed for her health, and wrote to Poe concerning it; and that in May of the following year the two came to Richmond, where Poe and Virginia were married, she being at that time not fourteen years of age. For this marriage Mrs. Clemm was severely criticised, the universal belief being that she had "made the match." Of any other marriage than this these friends never heard; since it was only from a letter found among Poe's papers after his death, and the reluctant admission of Mrs. Clemm, that it became known that a previous marriage had taken place. The marriage records of Baltimore show that on September 22, 1835, Edgar A. Poe took out a license to marry Virginia E. Clemm. Mrs. Clemm, when interviewed by one of Poe's biographers, admitted that there had been such a marriage, and stated that the ceremony had been performed by Bishop John Johns in Old Christ Church; though of this there is no mention in the church records. Immediately after the ceremony, she said, Poe returned to Richmond and to his editorial duties on the _Messenger_. She vouchsafed no explanation, except that the two were engaged previous to Poe's departure for Richmond. A possible explanation of the mystery may be that Mrs. Clemm, having set her heart upon keeping her nephew in the family, could think of no surer means than that of a match between himself and her daughter. When he left Baltimore for Richmond, in July, she doubtless had her fears; and then came reports of his notorious love affairs, one of which came near ending in an elopement and marriage. It was probably then that she wrote to him about Virginia's grieving for him; following up this letter with another saying that Neilson Poe had offered to take Virginia into his family and care for her until she should be eighteen years of age. This brought a prompt reply from Poe, begging that she would not consent to this plan and take "Sissy" away from him. This last letter is dated August 29. What other correspondence followed we do not know; but two weeks later, on September 11, 1835, we find Poe writing to his friend, Mr. Kennedy, the following extraordinary letter, in which he clearly hints at suicide: "I am wretched. I know not why. Console me--for you can. But let it be quickly, or it will be too late. Convince me that it is worth one's while to live.... Oh, pity me, for I feel that my words are incoherent.... Urge me to do what is right. Fail not, as you value your peace of mind hereafter. "EDGAR A. POE." This production, which, in whatever light it is viewed, cannot but be regarded as an evidence of pitiable weakness. Some writer has chosen to attribute Poe's anguish to the prospect of losing Virginia. But it does not at all appear that such is the case; for, even if Neilson Poe did make such an offer, Poe knew well enough that neither Mrs. Clemm nor her daughter would ever consent to accept it. The whole thing appears to have been simply a plan of Mrs. Clemm to bring matters to the satisfactory conclusion which she desired. She possessed over her nephew then and always the influence and authority of a strong and determined will over a very weak one; and we here see that in less than two months after Poe's leaving her house she had carried her point and married him to her daughter. Having thus secured him, she was content to wait a more propitious time for making the marriage public. There is yet a little episode which may have influenced this affair and may serve further to explain it. When Poe first went to Richmond, Mr. White, as a safeguard from the temptation to evil habits, received him as an inmate of his own home, where he immediately fell in love with the editor's youngest daughter, "little Eliza," a lovely girl of eighteen. It was said that the father, who idolized his daughter, and was also very fond of Poe, did not forbid the match, but made his consent conditional upon the young man's remaining perfectly sober for a certain length of time. All was going well, and the couple were looked upon as engaged, when Mrs. Clemm, who kept a watchful eye upon her nephew, may have received information of the affair, and we have seen the result. Does this throw any light upon Poe's pitiful appeal, "Urge me to do what is right"? Was this why the marriage was kept secret--to give time for a proper breaking off of the match with Elizabeth White? And it is certain, from all accounts, that Poe now, at once, plunged into the dissipation which was, according to general report, the occasion of Mr. White's prohibition of his attentions to his daughter. It was she to whom the lines, "_To Eliza_," now included in Poe's poems, were addressed. When I was a girl I more than once heard of Eliza White and her love affair with Edgar Poe. "She was the sweetest girl that I ever knew," said a lady who had been her schoolmate; "a slender, graceful blonde, with deep blue eyes, who reminded you of the Watteau Shepherdesses upon fans. She was a great student, and very bright and intelligent. She was said to be engaged to Poe, but they never appeared anywhere together. It was soon broken off on account of his dissipation. I don't think she ever got over it. She had many admirers, but is still unmarried." Recently I read an article written by Mrs. Holmes Cumming, of Louisville, Kentucky, in which she spoke of persons and places that she had seen in Richmond associated with Poe. Among others, she met with a niece of Eliza White, who, when a child, had often seen Poe at the latter's home. She remembered having at a party seen him dancing with Eliza, and how every one remarked what a handsome couple they were. She had never seen any one enjoy dancing more than Poe did; not but that he was very dignified, but you could see in his whole manner and expression how he enjoyed it." Perhaps it was because he had "little Eliza" for a partner. Previous to Poe's first marriage, he had boarded with a Mrs. Poore on Bank street, facing the Capitol square, and with whose son-in-law, Mr. Thomas W. Cleland, he held friendly relations. A few weeks after his first marriage (which was still kept secret) he removed to the establishment of a Mrs. Yarrington, in the same neighborhood, where, being joined by Mrs. Clemm and Virginia, they lived together as formerly, he--as he informed Mr. George Poe--paying out of his slender salary nine dollars a week for their joint board. This continued until May of the next year, when the public marriage of Poe and Virginia took place. On this occasion Mr. Thomas Cleland was obliging enough to consent to act as Poe's surety, and he also secured the services of his own pastor, the Rev. Amasa Converse, a noted Presbyterian minister. Late on the evening of May 16, Mr. Cleland, with Mrs. Clemm, Poe and Virginia, left Mrs. Yarrington's and, walking quietly up Main street to the corner of Seventh, were married in Mr. Converse's own parlor and in the presence of his family, Mrs. Clemm giving her full and free consent. The clergyman remarked afterward that Mrs. Clemm struck him as being "polished, dignified, and agreeable in her bearing," while the bride "looked very young." The party then returned to their boarding-house, where Mrs. Clemm invited the lady boarders to her room to partake of wine and cake, when it was discovered that it was a wedding celebration.[5] [5] A letter to Mrs. Holmes Cumming, from a son of the Rev. Amasa Converse, 1905. It will be observed that, according to the marriage bond, Virginia was married under her maiden name of Clemm, thus ignoring the former ceremony; and that Poe subscribed to the oath of Thomas Cleland that she was "of the full age of twenty-one years," when in reality she was but thirteen, having been born August 16, 1822. Thus is shown how pliable was Poe in the hands of his mother-in-law; and as regards Mr. Cleland, who was a very pious Presbyterian, it can only be hoped that he never discovered in what manner he had been imposed upon. CHAPTER XIV. THE POES IN RICHMOND. When Poe went to Richmond as assistant editor to Mr. White, it had been with the expectation of resuming his old place among his former friends and associates--a prospect which, as he himself stated in a letter to that gentleman, had afforded him very great pleasure. He had no idea of the altered estimate in which he was held by some of these, and of the general prejudice existing against him in consequence of the exaggerated reports concerning his rupture with the Allans and the later story of his attempt to force himself into Mr. Allan's presence. It is true that the Mackenzies, the Sullys, Dr. Robert G. Cabell and his wife, with some others of the best people, remained his firm friends; but he found himself without social standing and with but few associates among his former acquaintances. It was even said that when a leading society lady, enjoying a literary reputation--the mother of Mrs. Julia Mayo Cabell and Mrs. General Winfield Scott--gave an entertainment to which she invited the talented young editor of the _Messenger_, two of the most priggish of these gentlemen declined to attend rather than meet their former schoolmate, Edgar Poe. This state of things must undoubtedly have served to irritate and embitter one of Poe's proud and sensitive nature, and may have partly led to the dissipated habits in which he now for the first time began to indulge--besides, in some measure, influencing the extreme bitterness and severity, or, as it has been called, _venom_ of the criticism for which the _Messenger_ began to be noted. Never before had he been accused of unamiability of disposition, but his temper seems suddenly to have changed, and he was called "haughty, overbearing and quarrelsome." A great and, it is to be feared, irreparable obloquy has attached to Poe's name through the utterance of a single individual--a Mr. Ferguson, who was employed as a printer's assistant in the office of the _Messenger_ at the time of Poe's editorship of that magazine. Not many years ago, Mr. Ferguson, who is still living, said, in answer to some inquiry concerning the poet: "There never was a more perfect gentleman than Mr. Poe when he was sober," but that at other times "he would just as soon lie down in the gutter as anywhere else." And this assertion has been taken up by one and another writer until it appears now to be received as a fixed fact. I have often heard this statement indignantly denied by persons who knew Poe at this time. Howsoever much under the influence of drink he might be, he was, they say, never at any time or by any person seen staggering through the streets or lying in a gutter. On the contrary, he was extremely sensitive about being seen by his friends, and especially ladies, under the influence of drink. Poe himself, long after this time, while denying the charge of general dissipation, confessed that while in Richmond he at long intervals yielded to temptation, and after each excess was invariably for some days confined to his bed. And now, in addition to other charges against him, was that of neglecting his wife and being frequently seen in attendance on other women; a point on which his motherly friend, Mrs. Mackenzie, more than once felt herself called upon to remonstrate with him. He would be, for a week at a time, away from his home, putting up at various hotels and boarding-houses, and spending his money freely, instead of, as formerly, committing it to the keeping of his mother-in-law. Mrs. Clemm, descending from the dignity of a boarder, tried to open a boarding-house of her own, but failed; and she now rented a cheap tenement on Seventh street and went back to her dressmaking, letting out rooms, and probably taking one or two boarders. But it was seldom that her son-in-law was to be found here; though always, after one of his excesses, he would seek its seclusion until fit to again appear in public. Mr. Hewitt, who was about this time in Richmond, says that he heard a great deal of gossip about Poe's love affairs; and describes him as, at this time, of remarkable personal beauty--"graceful, and with dark, curling hair and magnificent eyes, wearing a Byron collar and looking every inch a poet." An old gentleman, a distinguished lawyer, once undertook his defence, saying: "Poe is one of the kind whom men envy and calumniate and women adore. How many could resist the temptation?" The Mackenzies spoke of Virginia at this time--now fourteen years of age--as being small for her age, but very _plump_; pretty, but not especially so, with sweet and gentle manners and the simplicity of a child. Rose Poe, now twenty-six years of age, would sometimes take her young sister-in-law to spend an afternoon at the Mackenzies, where she appeared as much of a child as any of the pupils, joining in their sports of swinging and skipping rope. On one occasion her husband--"Buddy"--came unexpectedly to bring her home, when she scandalized Miss Jane Mackenzie by rushing into the street and greeting him with the _abandon_ of a child. Nearly twenty years after this time there were persons living on Main street who remembered having almost daily seen about the Old Market, in business hours, a tall, dignified looking woman, with a market basket on one arm, while on the other hung a little girl with a round, ever-smiling face, who was addressed as "Mrs. Poe"! She, too, carried a basket. Whatsoever was the cause of Poe's discontent, he never appeared happy or satisfied while in Richmond. His dissipated habits grew upon him, with a consequent neglect of editorial duties, which sorely tried the patience of his good and kind friend, Mr. White, to whom, it must be admitted, Poe never appeared sufficiently grateful. Whether Mr. White was compelled at length to reluctantly discharge him, or whether, as Mr. Kennedy says, Poe himself gave up his place as editor of the _Messenger_, thinking that with his now established literary reputation he could do better in the North, is not clear; but in the summer of 1838 he left Richmond and, with his family, removed to New York. Mrs. Clemm, at least, could not have been averse to the move; for it seems certain that there was a general prejudice against her on account of her having made or consented to the match between her little daughter and a man of Poe's age and dissipated habits. CHAPTER XV. IN NEW YORK. Of Poe's business and literary affairs in New York, and subsequently in Philadelphia, his biographers have fully informed us, but with little or no mention of his home life or his family. All that we can gather concerning the latter is that never at any time were their circumstances such as would enable them to dispense with the utmost economy of living, and that, as regarded the practical everyday business affairs of life, Poe was almost as helpless and dependent upon his mother-in-law as was his child-wife. But for this devoted mother, what could they have done?--those two, whom she rightly called her "children." Poe was sadly disappointed in his hopes of obtaining literary employment in New York, and but for Mrs. Clemm's opening a boarding-house on Carmine street, an obscure locality, the family might have starved. Here, however, he seems to have turned over a new leaf, for one of the boarders, a Mr. Gowans, a book-seller on the next street, declares that in the eight months of his residence at Mrs. Clemm's, and a daily intercourse with Poe, he never saw him otherwise than "sober, courteous, and a perfect gentleman." Being a stranger in New York, he was removed from the temptations which had assailed him in Richmond, and this fact should be noted as a proof that, when left to himself, he showed no inclination to indulge in dissipation. Of Virginia, Poe's wife, then fifteen years of age, this gallant old bachelor says, in the exaggerated style of flattery common in those days: "Her eyes outshone those of any houri, and her features would defy the genius of a Canova to imitate. Poe delighted in her round, childlike face and plump little figure." CHAPTER XVI. THE REAL VIRGINIA. As regards the nature of Poe's affection for his wife, I have often recalled an expression of Mr. John Mackenzie when, after the poet's death, a group of his friends were familiarly discussing his character. One doubted whether Poe had ever really loved his wife; to which Mr. Mackenzie replied: "I believe that Edgar loved his wife, but not that he was ever in love with her--which accounts for his constancy." I have heard other men say that it was impossible that Poe, at the age of twenty-seven, could have felt for the child of twelve, with whom he had played and romped in the familiar association of home life and the free intercourse of brother and sister, aught of the absorbing and idealizing passion of love. At most, said they, there could have been but the tender and protective affection of an elder brother or cousin; which, as Mr. Mackenzie remarked, was in one of Poe's temperament the best guarantee for its continuance. Apart from the disparity of age, there was no congeniality of mind or character to draw these two into sympathy. Virginia was not mentally gifted, and Poe once, after her death, remarked to Mrs. Mackenzie that she had never read half of his poems. When writing, he would go to Mrs. Clemm to explain his ideas or to ask her opinion, but never to Virginia. She was his pet, his plaything, his little "Sissy," whose sunny temper and affectionate disposition brightened and cheered his home. "She was always a child," said a lady who knew her well. "Even in person smaller and younger looking than her real age, she retained to the last the shy sweetness and simplicity of childhood." It would certainly appear that Poe's child-wife never attained to the full completeness of the nature and affections of a mature woman. She was never known to manifest jealousy of the women whom he so notoriously admired; neither did scandals disturb nor his neglect estrange her. Mrs. Clemm would sometimes, as in duty bound, take him to task for his irregularities, but no word of reproach ever escaped Virginia. She regarded him with the most implicit and childlike trust; and certainly it seems that Poe, of all men, knew how, by endearing epithets and eloquent protestations, to win a woman's confidence--as will presently appear. But, naturally, this was not the kind of affection to satisfy one of Poe's impassioned and poetic nature. He craved a woman's love, and the sympathetic appreciation of talented women, in whose companionship, as Mrs. Whitman assures us, he delighted. What he did not find in Virginia he sought elsewhere. In special he missed in her that understanding and appreciation of his genius which he found in some other women. She loved and admired her handsome and fascinating husband, but never appeared to take pride in his genius or his fame as a poet. The accounts of Virginia's beauty, say those who knew her personally, have been greatly exaggerated by Poe's biographers, who, taking their impressions from the description of Mr. Gowans already mentioned, have painted the poet's child-wife in the most glowing colors. The general idea of her is like that which Mr. Woodbury expresses: "A sylph-like creature, of such delicate and ethereal beauty that we almost expect to see it vanish away, like one of Poe's own creations." But the real Virginia was neither delicate nor ethereal. She is described by those who knew her at the age of twenty-two as looking more like a girl of fifteen than a woman grown, with, notwithstanding her frail health, a round, full face and figure, full, pouting lips, a forehead too high and broad for beauty, and bright black eyes and raven-black hair, contrasting almost startlingly with a white and colorless complexion. Her manner and expression were soft and shy, with something childlike and appealing. "She was liked by every one," says Mr. Graham. A decided _lisp_ added to her child-likeness. CHAPTER XVII. POE'S PHILADELPHIA HOME. Poe, disappointed in his hopes of success in New York, left that city and, in the summer of 1839, removed to Philadelphia, then the literary center of the United States. Of his business experiences while here--his successes and disappointments--his quarrels with certain editors and literary men and his friendly relations with others, his biographers have informed us. But it is in his home and private life that we are interested. Their financial circumstances at this time must have been deplorable, for they had to borrow money to enable them to remove to Philadelphia. Under the circumstances, to take board was impracticable; and it appears from the reminiscences of certain neighbors, that they for some time occupied very poor lodgings in an obscure street in the vicinity of a market. But Poe was much more successful here than in New York, and we find them in the following spring established in a home of their own in a locality known as _Spring Garden_, a quiet suburb far from the dust and noise of the city. Some one has recently taken pains to hunt out with infinite patience and perseverance this house, which the Poes occupied for nearly five years. It was an ordinary framed Dutch-roofed building, with but three rooms on the ground floor, and under the eaves little horizontal strips of windows on a level with the floor, which could scarcely have admitted light and air. But there was, when they took possession, a bit of grassy side yard which had once been part of a garden, and a porch over which grew a straggling rose-bush. This latter Mrs. Clemm's skillful hands carefully pruned and trained, thus winning for the humble abode the title still applied to it of "The poet's rose-embowered cottage," to which some enthusiast has added, "Where Poe and his idolized Virginia dreamed their divine dream of love." To a lady who was at this time a resident of Spring Garden we are indebted for a glimpse of the Poes in this their quiet and half-rural abode. "Twice a day, on my way to and from school," she said, "I had to pass their house, and in summer time often saw them. In the mornings Mrs. Clemm and her daughter would be generally watering the flowers, which they had in a bed under the windows. They seemed always cheerful and happy, and I could hear Mrs. Poe's laugh before I turned the corner. Mrs. Clemm was always busy. I have seen her of mornings clearing the front yard, washing the windows and the stoop, and even white-washing the palings. You would notice how clean and orderly everything looked. She rented out her front room to lodgers, and used the middle room, next to the kitchen, for their own living room or parlor. They must have slept under the roof. We never heard that they were poor, and they kept pretty much to themselves in the two years we lived near them. I don't think that in that time I saw Mr. Poe half a dozen times. We heard he was dissipated, but he always appeared like a gentleman, though thin and sickly looking. His wife was the picture of health. It was after we moved away that she became an invalid." Mrs. Clemm, she added, was a dress and cloak maker; and she thinks that Mrs. Poe assisted her, as she would sometimes see the latter seated on the stoop engaged in sewing. "She was pretty, but not noticeably so. She was too fleshy." This account refers to a time when Poe was assistant editor of _The Gentleman's Magazine_, and the family were enjoying a degree of peace and prosperity such as they never subsequently knew. Poe lost this position, according to Mr. Burton, the editor-in-chief, by indulgence in dissipated habits. In replying to this charge, he wrote to a friend, Mr. Snodgrass, that "on the honor of a gentleman" he had not, since leaving Richmond, tasted anything stronger than cider, and that upon one occasion only. In this he was borne out by the testimony of Mrs. Clemm, who asserted, "I know that for years he never tasted even a glass of wine." Mr. Burton, in making the charge, adds: "I believe that for eighteen months previous to this time he had not drank." Still, the severity and, one might say, almost cruelty of his personal criticisms continued, and nothing could exceed the bitterness of his vituperation against those by whom, as he conceived, he had been wronged or unjustly treated. Mr. Burton, in replying, in a forbearing and even kindly manner, to a very abusive letter from him, advised him to "lay aside his ill-feeling against his fellow-writers, and to cultivate a more tolerant and kindly spirit." He even proposed that Poe should resume his place upon the magazine, but this he proudly declined, and continued to contribute his brilliant stories to other periodicals. These attracted the attention of Mr. Graham, who had just established the magazine which bore his name, and who offered him the editorship, which Poe accepted, and gave to it his best work. Under his management it prospered wonderfully, and soon became the leading periodical of the country. Still, with a good salary and a brilliant literary reputation, Poe was dissatisfied. The old restlessness and discontent returned. What he desired was a magazine of his own, for which he might be at liberty to write according to his own will. His independent and ambitious spirit revolted at being limited to certain bounds and controlled by what he considered the narrow views of editors. We find him as early as June 26, 1841, writing to Mr. Snodgrass: "Notwithstanding Graham's unceasing civility and real kindness, I am more and more disgusted with my situation." It ended at length in his resigning the editorship of _Graham's_ and devoting himself to writing for other publications, a step which was the beginning of a long period of financial and other troubles. From Col. Du Solle, editor of "_Noah's New York Sunday Times_," who as a resident of Philadelphia about that time knew Poe well, I gained some information concerning him. His dissipation, the Colonel said, was too notorious to be denied; and that for days, and even weeks at a time, he would be sharing the bachelor life and quarters of his associates, who were not aware that he was a married man. He would, on some evenings when sober, come to the rooms occupied by himself and some other writers for the press and, producing the manuscript of _The Raven_, read to them the last additions to it, asking their opinion and suggestions. He seemed to be having difficulty with it, said Col. Du Solle, and to be very doubtful as to its merits as a poem. The general opinion of these critics was against it. The irregular habits of this summer resulted in the fall (1839) in a severe illness, the first of the peculiar attacks to which Poe during the rest of his life was at intervals subject. On recovering, he devoted himself to the realization of a plan for establishing a magazine of his own, to be called "_The Penn Magazine_," and wrote to Mr. Snodgrass that his "prospects were glorious," and that he intended to give it the reputation of using no article except from the best writers, and that in criticism it was to be sternly, absolutely just with both friends and foe, independent of the medium of a publisher's will." In these last words we read the whole secret of his past dissatisfaction and of his future aspiration as an editor. The _Penn Magazine_ was advertised to appear on January 1, 1841, but this scheme was balked by a financial depression which at that time occurred throughout the country. But who will not sympathize with Poe and admit that, considering the disappointments to which he was continually subject, and the constant humiliation and drawback of the poverty which met him on every hand, balking each movement and design--together with the ill-health from which he was now destined to be a constant sufferer--his faults and failures should not be treated with every possible allowance? If he were naturally weak, and lacking in the strength and firmness of will to determinately resist obstacles and discouragements, we see in it the effect of the heredity, apparent in his sister; and consequently so much greater is his claim to be leniently judged. CHAPTER XVIII. VIRGINIA's ILLNESS. In all this time of which we have spoken, embracing a period of several years, Mrs. Clemm and her daughter continued their quiet life at the cottage, the former doing what she could toward the support and comfort of the family. But a great affliction was to befall them, in the dangerous illness of Virginia, now in her twenty-first year, who had the misfortune, while singing, to break a small blood-vessel. She had already developed signs of consumption, and from this time forth remained more or less an invalid, subject to occasional hemorrhages, but, from all accounts, losing none of her characteristic cheerfulness and light-heartedness. Poe was at this time still engaged in the editorship _of Graham's Magazine_, and it is now that we begin to hear of him in the character of "a devoted husband, watching beside the sick bed of an idolized wife," with which the world is familiar. Certainly the condition of the helpless creature who so clung to him, and the real danger which threatened her, was calculated to awaken all the tenderness of his nature. "She could not bear the slightest exposure," wrote Mr. Harris in _Hearth and Home_, "all needed the utmost care and all those conveniences as to apartment and surroundings which are so important in the case of an invalid. And yet the room where she lay for weeks, hardly able to breathe except as she was fanned, was a little place with the ceiling so low over the narrow bed that her head almost touched it." Mr. Graham tells how he saw Poe "hovering around his wife's couch with fond fear and tender anxiety, _shuddering visibly_ at her slightest cough;" and mentions his driving out with them one summer day, and of the husband's "watchful eyes eagerly bent on the slightest change in that beloved face." Another literary friend of Poe's who visited the family in this time of trial, Mr. Clarke, tells of his once taking his little daughter with him, knowing Virginia to be fond of the companionship of children; and as a proof of the latter's light-heartedness relates how the little girl was induced to sing a comic song, which Virginia received with "peal after peal of merry laughter." The reminiscences of these kindly gentlemen who, at Poe's own request, called upon him, regarding the poet and his family, are of the most flattering character. Poe in his own home was the perfection of graceful courtesy, and Mrs. Clemm amiably dignified, with a countenance when speaking of "her children" almost "saint-like in its expression of patience and motherly devotion." Of Virginia, Mr. Harris says, "She looked hardly more than fourteen, was soft, fair and girlish." He says, furthermore, that Mrs. Poe, whom he had not known previous to her misfortune, had up to that time "possessed a voice of marvelous sweetness and a harp and piano," which leads an English writer to represent the poet's wife as "an accomplished musician, with the voice of a St. Cecilia." This is a specimen of the exaggeration to which "biographers" sometimes lend themselves, to be taken up by those who follow and received by the public as fact. Poe now again interested himself in getting up a magazine, to which he gave the name of "_The Stylus_" and there seemed an even more brilliant prospect than before of its success. He wrote a prospectus, and went to Washington to obtain subscriptions from President Tyler and the Cabinet, but was taken ill, the result, it was said, of his meeting with a convivial acquaintance; and Mrs. Clemm being notified thereof, on his return to Philadelphia met him at the railroad station and took him home in safety from further possible temptation. Owing partly to this indiscretion, _The Stylus_ was again a failure; and the matter being known throughout the city, did not add to Poe's personal reputation. Now, also, just as for the first time, Poe began to be mentioned in the character of a devoted husband, there arose a widespread scandal concerning a handsome and wealthy lady whom, it was said, he accompanied to Saratoga, and who was paying his expenses there. But while the story appears to have been so far true, it certainly admits of a different construction from that given by the gossips. Poe was at this time in wretched health, hardly able to attend to his literary work, and in consequence the financial condition of himself and family was deplorable. What more probable than that some kind friend of his, seeing the absolute necessity to him of a change, should have invited him to be her guest at the quiet summer resort near Saratoga to which she was going? It was a more delicate and, for him, a safer way than to have supplied him with money on his own account. The lady, it was said, had her own little turn-out, in which they daily drove into Saratoga; and this exercise, with the mineral waters, the nourishing food and other advantages of the place, doubtless secured to him the benefits which his friend desired. It is impossible to believe that Poe could so have defied public opinion as to have voluntarily given cause for a scandal of this nature, for which the gossip of a public watering place should alone be held responsible. Poe now again applied himself to his writing, but, for some reason, with but little success. In desperation he hastily finished the manuscript of _The Raven_ and offered it to Graham, who, not satisfied as to its merits as a poem, declined it, but expressed a willingness to abide by the decision of a number of the office employees, clerks and others, who, being called in, sat solemnly attentive and critical while Poe read to them the poem. Their decision was against it, but on learning of the poet's penniless condition and that, as he confessed, he had not money to buy medicine for his sick wife, they made up a subscription of fifteen dollars, which was given, not to Poe himself, but to Mrs. Clemm, "for the use of the sick lady." This account, given in a New York paper by one of the office committee many years after the poet's death, has been denied by a Mr. William Johnston, who was at that time an office-boy in Graham's employ. He says that he was present at the reading of the poem, and that no subscription was taken up. This may have been done subsequently, without his knowledge. Of Poe, he spoke in the most enthusiastic terms of admiration and affection, as the kindest and most courteous gentleman that he had ever met with; prompt and industrious at his work, and having always a pleasant word and smile for himself. He never, in the course of Poe's engagement with Graham, saw him otherwise than perfectly sober. CHAPTER XIX. BACK TO NEW YORK. Poe, discouraged, and with the old restlessness upon him, suddenly resolved to leave Philadelphia. On the 6th of April, 1844, he started with Virginia for New York, leaving Mrs. Clemm to settle their affairs in general. Most fortunately for Poe's memory, there remains to us a letter written by him to Mrs. Clemm, in which he gives her an account of their journey. It is of so private and confidential a nature, and speaks so frankly and freely of such small domestic matters as most persons do not care to have exposed to strangers, that in reading it one feels almost as if violating the sacredness of domestic privacy. But I here refer to it as showing Poe's domestic character in a most attractive light: "NEW YORK, Sunday morning, April 7, just after breakfast. "MY DEAR MUDDIE: We have just this moment done breakfast, and I now sit down to write you about everything.... In the first place, we arrived safe at Walnut street wharf. The driver wanted me to pay him a dollar, but I wouldn't. Then I had to pay a boy a levy to put the trunks in the baggage car. In the meantime I took Sis into the Depot Hotel. It was only a quarter-past six, and we had to wait until seven.... We started in good spirits, but did not get here until nearly three o'clock. Sissy coughed none at all. When we got to the wharf it was raining hard. I left her on board the boat, after putting the trunks in the ladies' cabin, and set off to buy an umbrella and look for a boarding-house. I met a man selling umbrellas, and bought one for twenty-five cents. Then I went up Greenwich street and soon found a boarding-house.... It has brown-stone steps and a porch with brown pillars. "Morrison" is the name on the door. I made a bargain in a few minutes and then got a hack and went for Sis. I was not gone more than half an hour, and she was quite astonished to see me back so soon. She didn't expect me for an hour. There were two other ladies on board, so she wasn't very lonely. When we got to the house we had to wait about half an hour till the room was ready. The cheapest board that I ever knew, taking into consideration the central situation and the _living_. I wish Kate (Virginia's pet cat, 'Catalina') could see it. She would faint. Last night for supper we had the nicest tea you ever drank, strong and hot; wheat bread and rye bread, cheese, tea-cakes (elegant), a good dish (two dishes) of elegant ham and two of cold veal, piled up like a mountain and large slices; three dishes of the cakes, and everything in the greatest profusion. No fear of our starving here. The land-lady seemed as if she could not press us enough, and we were at home directly. Her husband is living with her, a fat, good-natured old soul. There are eight or ten boarders, two or three of them ladies--two servants. For breakfast we had excellent flavored coffee, hot and strong, not too clear and no great deal of cream; veal cutlets, elegant ham-and-eggs and nice bread and butter. I never sat down to a more plentiful or a nicer breakfast. I wish you could have seen the eggs, and the great dishes of meat. I ate the first hearty breakfast I have eaten since we left our little home. Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had no night-sweat. She is now mending my pants, which I tore against a nail. I went out last night and bought a skein of silk, a skein of thread, two buttons and a tin pan for the stove. The fire kept in all night. We have now got four dollars and a half left. To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits and have not drank a drop, so that I hope soon to get out of trouble. The very instant that I scrape together enough money I will send it on. You can't imagine how much we both miss you. Sissy had a hearty cry last night because you and Catalina weren't here. We are resolved to get two rooms the first moment we can. In the meantime it is impossible that we can be more comfortable or more at home than we are. Be sure to go to the P. O. and have my letters forwarded. It looks as if it were going to clear up now. As soon as I can write the article for Lowell, I will send it to you and get you to get the money from Graham. Give our best love to Catalina." (Signature cut out here.) In this letter, written as simply and as unreservedly as that of a child to its mother, we see Poe himself--Poe in his real nature. Not the poet, with his studied affectation of gloom and sadness; not the critic, severe in his judgment of all that did not agree with his standard of literary excellence, and not even the society man, wearing the mask of cold and proud reserve--but Poe himself; Poe the man, shut in from the eyes of the world in the privacy of his home life and the companionship of his own family. Who could recognize in this gentle, kindly and tender man, with his playful mood and his affectionate consideration for those whom he loved--even for _Catalina_--the "morbid and enigmatical" being that the world chooses to imagine him--the gloomy wanderer amid "the ghoul-haunted regions of Weir," the despairing soul forever brooding over the memory of his lost Lenore? And how readily he yields himself to the enjoyment of the moment; how cheerful he is in a situation which would depress any other man--a stranger in a strange city, just making a new start in life, with "four dollars and a half" to begin with! Surely there is something most pathetic in all this as we see it from Poe's own unconscious pen; with the purchase of the twenty-five-cent umbrella to shield "Sissy" from the rain, the two buttons and the skein of thread, and, ever mindful of Sissy's comfort, the tin pan for the stove. The picture is invaluable as enabling us to understand the true characters of Poe and his wife and the peculiar relations existing between them--Virginia, trustful, loving and happy, and Poe, all kindness and protective tenderness for his little "Sissy." We look upon it as a life-like photograph, clear and distinct in every line; Poe with the traces of care and anxiety for the time swept away from his face, and Virginia--as she is described at this time--a woman grown, but "looking not more than fourteen," plump and smiling, with her bright, black eyes and full pouting lips. It is Poe himself who reveals her character as no other has done, when he says that, though "delighted" with her new experience and situation, she yet "had a hearty cry," childlike, missing her mother and her cat. It would have been well for them could they have remained at this model "cheap" boarding-house, where they were so well provided for. But it was beyond their means, with board for three persons; and so they look about for "two rooms," and when ready send for Mrs. Clemm and Catalina. Two rooms for the three; in one of which Mrs. Clemm must perform all her domestic operations of cooking and laundering, for, as we afterwards learn, Poe was indebted to his mother-in-law for that "immaculate linen" in which, howsoever shabby the outer garments, he invariably appeared. And despite the threadbare suit, he was always, it was said, as well groomed and scrupulously neat as the most fastidious gentleman could be. That in New York Poe did not at first succeed according to his expectations is rendered evident by the fact that in the following October, he being ill, Mrs. Clemm applied to N. P. Willis for some employment for him, who gave him a place in his office as assistant editor. Willis says that Mrs. Clemm's countenance as she pleaded for her son-in-law was "beautiful and saintly by reason of an evident complete giving up of her life to privation and sorrowful tenderness" for those whom she loved. Of Poe, he says that he was "a quiet, patient, industrious and most gentlemanly person, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling of every one." He also says, in speaking of a lecture which he delivered about this time before the _New York Lyceum_, and which was attended by several hundred persons: "He becomes a desk; his beautiful head showing like a statuary embodiment of Discrimination--his accent like a knife through water." It was now--in January, 1845--that _The Raven_ was published in the _Evening Mirror_, taking the world by storm. Probably no one was more surprised at its immediate success than was Poe himself, who, as he afterwards stated to a friend, had never had much opinion of the poem. He now found himself elevated to the highest rank of American literary fame, and with this his worldly fortune should also have risen, yet we find him going on in the same rut as before, writing but little for the magazine and for that little being poorly paid--too poorly to enable the family to live in any degree of comfort. From one cheap lodging to another they removed, with such frequency as to suggest to us the suspicion that their rent was not always ready when due. But after some time the old discontent returned upon Poe. Willis and the _Mirror_ were too narrow for him; and he sought and was fortunate enough to obtain a place on the _Broadway Journal_, at that time the leading journal of the day, and of which he was soon appointed assistant editor. With a good salary, the family were now enabled to live in more comfort. They rented a front and back room on the third story of an old house on East Broadway, which had once been the residence of a prosperous merchant, but had long ago been given over to the use of poor but respectable tenants. It was musty and mouldy, but here they were elevated somewhat above the noise and dust of the street, and had sunlight and a good view from the narrow windows. It was here that, late one evening, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, whose sarcastic pen is so well known, called on Poe instead of at his office, to inquire the fate of a certain "_Ode_" which he had sent to the _Broadway Journal_ for publication. Necessarily he was received in the front room, which was Virginia's. The following is his account of the visit: "Poe received me with the courtesy habitual with him when he was himself, and gave me to understand that my _Ode_ would be published in the next number of his paper.... What did he look like?... He was dressed in black from head to foot, except, of course, that his linen was spotlessly white.... The most noticeable things about him were his high forehead, dark hair and sharp, black eye. His cousin-wife, always an invalid, was lying on a bed between himself and me. She never stirred, but her mother came out of the back parlor and was introduced to me by her courtly nephew." Stoddard is here mistaken in his description of Poe's eyes. They were neither sharp nor black, but large, soft, dreamy eyes, of a fine steel-gray, clear as crystal, and with a jet-black pupil, which would in certain lights expand until the eyes appeared to be all black. Stoddard continues: "I saw Poe once again, and for the last time. It was a rainy afternoon, such as we have in our November, and he was standing under an awning waiting for the shower to pass over. My conviction was that I ought to offer him my umbrella and go home with him, but I left him standing there, and there I see him still, and shall always, poor and penniless, but proud, reliant, dominant. May the gods forgive me! I never can forgive myself." In April, five months after this time, Poe's old habits unfortunately returned upon him. Mr. Lowell one day, in passing through New York, called to see him, when Mrs. Clemm excused his "strange actions" by frankly stating that "Edgar was not himself that day." She afterward made the same statement to Mr. Briggs, whose assistant editor Poe was, and who writes, June, 1845, to Lowell: "I believe he had not drank anything for more than eighteen months until the last three months, and concludes that he would have to dispense with his services. The matter was settled, however, by Poe's proposing to buy the _Broadway Journal_, hoping to make of it in a measure what he had desired for the _Stylus_. The prospect seemed to promise fair enough for its success, and Mr. Greeley and Mr. Griswold each generously contributed a sum of fifty dollars; but the plan finally failed for want of sufficient funds, George Poe, to whom Edgar applied, remembering his former unpaid loan, making no response to his appeal. This was another great disappointment to Poe, just as on former occasions his hopes seemed on the point of realization. Thus, in whatsoever direction he turned, grim poverty faced and frowned him down. Surely, it was enough to discourage him; and yet to the end of his life he eagerly followed this illusive hope. Mrs. Clemm, too, who had in this time been trying to support the family by keeping a boarding-house, also met with her disappointments. For some reason her boarders never remained long with her, and the family, who had removed to obscure lodgings on Amity street, now found themselves in one of their frequent seasons of poverty and distress. CHAPTER XX. POE AND MRS. OSGOOD. It was a fortunate day when Mrs. Clemm, hunting about the suburbs of the great city for a cheap place of abode, discovered the little cottage at Fordham, a country railroad station some miles from New York. It was but an humble place at best, an old cottage of four rooms, in ill-repair; but the rent was low, the situation--on the summit of a rocky knoll--pleasant, affording fine views of the Harlem river; and there was pure air, plenty of outdoor space, and that famous cherry tree, now, in the month of May, in full and fragrant bloom. A few repairs were made, and Mrs. Clemm's vigorous hands, with the assistance of soap and water and whitewash, soon transformed the neglected abode into a miracle of neatness and order. Checked matting hid the worn parlor floor, and the cheap furniture which they had brought with them looked better here than ever it had done in the cramped and stuffy rooms of the city. Outside a neglected rose-bush was trained against the wall, supplying Virginia with roses in its season. Her room was above the parlor, at the head of a narrow staircase; a low-ceiled apartment, with sloping walls and small, square windows; and it was here at a desk or table near his wife's sick bed that most of Poe's writing was now done. In the preceding winter Virginia's health had apparently greatly improved, and her illness was not of so serious a nature as to confine her entirely to the house or to interfere with the social or literary engagements of her husband, who was, as poet, lecturer, editor and critic, at the zenith of his fame. In this time he had attended the _soirees_ of Miss Lynch and others of the literary class, once or twice accompanied by his wife. At these he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Hewitt, Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith and Mrs. E. F. Ellet, with others of the "starry sisterhood of poetesses," as they were called by some poetaster of the day, with each of whom he in succession formed one of the sentimental platonic friendships to which he was given. All these, however, were destined to yield to the superior attractions of a sister poetess, Mrs. Frances Sergeant Osgood, wife of the artist of that name. Mrs. Osgood, at this time about thirty-years of age, is described by R. H. Stoddard as "A paragon--not only loved by men, but liked by women as well." Attractive in person, bright, witty and sweet-natured, she won even the splenatic Thomas Dunn English and the stoical Greeley, whose approval of her was as frankly expressed as was his denunciation of the "ugliness, self-conceit and disagreeableness" of her friend, the transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller. Poe, who had written a very flattering notice of Mrs. Osgood's poems--in return for which she addressed him some lines in the character of _Israefel_--obtained an introduction and visited her frequently. Also, at his request, she called upon his wife, and friendly relations were soon established between them. To her, after Poe's death, we are indebted for a characteristic picture of the poet and his wife in their home in Amity street; and which, though almost too well known for repetition, I will here give as a specimen of his home life: "It was in his own simple yet poetical home that the character of Edgar Poe appeared to me in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate, witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted child, for his young, gentle and idolized wife and for all who came, he had, even in the midst of the most harassing literary duties, a kind word, a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. At his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore'[6] patient, assiduous, uncomplaining, tracing in an exquisitely clear chirography and with almost superhuman swiftness the lightning thoughts, the rare and radiant fancies as they flowed through his wonderful brain. For hours I have listened entranced to his strains of almost celestial eloquence. [6] A pencil sketch of Mrs. Stanard by Poe himself. "I recollect one morning toward the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay and light-hearted, Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a pressing invitation to come to them, and I, who never could resist her affectionate summons, and who enjoyed his society far more in his own home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity street. I found him just completing his series of papers called "_The Literati of New York_." 'Now,' said he, displaying in laughing triumph several little rolls of narrow paper (he always wrote thus for the press), 'I am going to show you by the difference of length in these the different degrees of estimation in which I hold all you literary people. In each of these one of you is rolled up and fully discussed. Come, Virginia, and help me.' And one by one they unfolded them. At last they came to one which seemed interminable. Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the room with one end and her husband went to the opposite with the other. 'And whose linked sweetness long drawn out is that?' said I. 'Hear her,' he cried; 'just as if her little vain heart didn't tell her it's herself.'" From this account--the exaggerated phrases of which will be noted--it would appear that a great degree of intimacy existed between Poe and his fair visitor, when he could in his own home--the two tiny rooms in Amity street--write "hour after hour" undisturbed by her presence. Virginia was delighted with her new friend, but Mrs. Clemm, noting these frequent and lengthy visits, regarded her with a suspicious eye. Too well she knew of the platonic friendships of her Eddie; but there appeared something in this affair beyond what was usual, and, in fact, gossip had already begun to link together their names. Mrs. Osgood herself seems to have relied upon Mrs. Poe's frequent invitations and fondness for her society as a shield against meddlesome tongues, but in vain--for not only were the jealous and vigilant eyes of Poe's mother-in-law bent upon her, but those of the "starry sisterhood" as well. There was a flutter and a chatter in the literary dovecote, and at length one of the starry ones--Mrs. Ellet--concluded it to be her bounden duty to inquire into the matter. Calling at Fordham one day, in Poe's absence, she and Mrs. Clemm, who had probably never before met, engaged in a confidential discussion, in the course of which the irate mother-in-law showed the visitor a letter from Mrs. Osgood to Poe (one wonders how she got possession of that letter), the contents of which were so opposed to all the latter's ideas of propriety that it was clear that something would have to be done. Eventually two of the starry ones--of whom one was Margaret Fuller--waited upon Mrs. Osgood, whom they advised to commission them to demand of Poe the return of her letters, which, strangely enough, she did, though probably only as a conciliatory measure. Poe, in his exasperation at this unwarrantable intermeddling, remarked significantly that "Mrs. Ellet had better come and look after her own letters;" upon which she sent to demand them. But he meantime had cut her acquaintance by leaving them at her own door without either written word or message; very much, we may imagine, as Dean Swift strode into Vanessa's presence and threw at her feet her letter to Stella. This was either in May or early June, shortly after their removal to Fordham. Poe had no idea of allowing this episode to interfere with his visits to Mrs. Osgood, and the gossip continued, until, to avoid further annoyance, she left New York and went to Albany on a visit to her brother-in-law, Dr. Harrington. On the 12th of June we find Poe writing an affectionate note to his wife, explaining why he stays away from her that night, and concluding with: "Sleep well, and God grant you a peaceful summer with your devoted "EDGAR." A few days after this, toward the end of June, he was in Albany, making passionate love to Mrs. Osgood. In dismay she left that city and went to Boston, whither he followed her; and again to Lowell and Providence, giving rise to a widespread scandal, which caused the lady infinite trouble and distress. But Mrs. Osgood, brilliant, talented and virtuous, was also kind-hearted to a fault, and where her feelings and sympathies were appealed to, amiably weak. Instead of indignantly and determinately rejecting Poe's impassioned love-making, she says she pitied him, argued with him, appealed to his reason and better feelings, and, in special, reminded him of his sick wife, who lay dying at home and longing for his presence. Finally, she returned to Albany; and Poe, ill at a hotel, wrote urgently to Mrs. Clemm for money to pay his board bill and take him back to Fordham. CHAPTER XXI. AT FORDHAM. It was at this time, in the summer of 1845, that Poe's sister, Miss Rosalie Poe, went on a visit to her brother, whom she had not seen in ten years. On her return home, and for years thereafter, she was accustomed to speak of this visit; and it was a curious picture which she gave of the life of the poet and his family in the humble little cottage on Fordham Hill. Poe was away when she arrived--presumably in his insane pursuit of Mrs. Osgood. Miss Poe told of "Aunt Clemm's" distress and anxiety on his account, and of how she "scraped together every penny" and borrowed money from herself to send to Edgar, who, she said, had been taken ill while on a business trip. There were no provisions in the house scarcely, and she herself, both then and at various other times, would purchase supplies from the market and grocers' wagons which passed; for there were no stores at the little country station of Fordham. Miss Poe told of her brother's arrival at home, and of how she overheard Mrs. Clemm administering to him a severe "scolding." He was so ill that he had to be put to bed by Mrs. Clemm, who sat up with him all night while he "talked out of his head" and begged for morphine. After some days he was better, and walked about the house and sat under the pine trees crowning a rocky knoll within calling distance of the house--ever a constant and favorite retreat of his, affording fine views of the river and neighboring country. One day, still weak and ill, he sat at his desk and looked over his papers. Mrs. Clemm then took his place, and wrote at his dictation. Aunt Clemm, said Rosalie, could exactly imitate Edgar's writing. On the following day she filled her satchel with some of these papers and went to the city, whence she returned late in the evening, quite after dark, with a hamper of provisions and medicines to Virginia's great delight, who had feared some mishap to her mother and cried accordingly. Miss Poe believed that this hamper was a present from some one, but Aunt Clemm was very reserved toward her in regard to her affairs. She knew, she said, that Mrs. Clemm had never liked her, but Edgar and Virginia were kind. From this time Poe wrote industriously, seldom going to town, but sending his mother-in-law instead. Several times Mrs. Clemm gave her niece some "copying" to do, but this was not to her a very gratifying task, and when, on her return home, she was asked what it was about, had not the least idea! She always insisted that _Anabel Lee_ was written at this time, as she repeatedly heard Edgar read it to Mrs. Clemm and also to himself, and recognized it when it was published two years afterward. A curious picture was that which she gave of the poet's reading his manuscript to his mother-in-law while the latter sat beside his desk inking the worn seams of his and her own garments; or of Poe, seated on a "settle" outside the kitchen door, also reading to her some of his "rare and radiant fancies," while she presided over the family laundry. He seems to have been constantly appealing to her sympathy with his writing, but never to Virginia. According to Miss Poe, Mrs. Clemm was at this time dependent for her own earnings on her sewing and fancy knitting, with pretty knick-knacks, which she disposed of at a certain "notion store." Virginia, too, when well enough, liked this kind of work. They had few visitors, for Mrs. Clemm, too busy for gossip, made a point of discouraging calls from the neighbors, with the exception of two or three families of better class than most of those surrounding them. These latter were a half-rural people, keeping dairies and cultivating market gardens. Miss Poe spoke of Virginia's cheerfulness. Nothing ever disturbed her. "She was always laughing." She liked to have children about her; and they came every day, bringing their dolls and playthings, with little offerings of fruit and flowers from their home gardens. She taught them to cut out and make their dolls' dresses, and would sometimes be very merry with them. She did not appear to suffer, said Miss Poe--did not lose flesh, and had always a hearty appetite, eating what the others ate, though very fond of nice things, especially candy. Her mother and Edgar petted her like a baby. "Aunt Clemm and Virginia," declared Miss Poe with conviction, "cared for nobody but themselves and Edgar." Virginia was at this time twenty-four years of age. It was not to be wondered at that, as Miss Poe said, her brother, immediately after his return, remained at home, seldom going into town, but sending his mother to dispose of his manuscripts. It has been said that when he did make his appearance in the city and among his usual business haunts, he found himself everywhere coldly received, in consequence of the notorious episode with Mrs. Osgood, for whom it was known he had left his sick wife. His literary enemies, of whom he had made many by his keen criticisms, made the most of this charge against him, in addition to that of dissipated habits, to which he now gave himself up with a recklessness which he had never before shown. Poe afterward attempted to defend himself against this reproach and the whole scandal of this season by attributing its excesses to his grief and anxiety on account of his wife, whom, he says, he "loved as man never loved before," a phrase the extravagance of which betrays its insincerity. He describes how through the years of her illness he "loved her more and more dearly and clung to her with the most desperate pertinacity, until he became insane, with intervals of horrible sanity.... During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank." And thus he endeavors to explain away his pursuit of Mrs. Osgood! It cannot but be noted that in all Poe's accounts of himself, and especially of his feelings, is a palpable affectation and exaggeration, with an extravagance of expression bordering on the tragic and melo-dramatic; a style which is exemplified in some of his writings, and may be equally imaginative in both cases. Mrs. Osgood also, in her "_Reminiscences_," after Poe's death, sought to clear both him and herself from the scandal of that summer by writing of the affection and confidence existing between himself and his wife--"his idolized Virginia"--as she saw them in their home, and declares her belief that his wife was the only woman whom he had ever really loved. In this we do not feel disposed to question her sincerity. Touching the slander against herself, she wrote to a friend: "You have proof in Mrs. Poe's letters to me and Poe's to Mrs. Ellet, either of which would fully establish my innocence.... Neither of them, as you know, were persons likely to take much trouble to prove a woman's innocence, and it was only because she felt that I had been cruelly wronged by _her mother_ and Mrs. Ellet that she impulsively rendered me this justice." Of course, the letter of Mrs. Poe here referred to was written at the suggestion of her husband, but it is curious to observe how frankly and _naively_ Mrs. Osgood--not now writing for the public--expresses her real opinion of Poe and his wife. Mrs. Osgood goes on to say: "Oh, it is too cruel that I, the only one of all those women who did _not_ seek his acquaintance, should be sought out after his death as the only victim to suffer from the slanders of his mother." From this it would appear that _after Poe's death_ the old scandal was revived, and by Mrs. Clemm herself. About this time she was having frequent interviews with Dr. Griswold in regard to Poe's papers, which she had handed over to him for use in the _Memoirs_ upon which he was engaged. Naturally, Mrs. Clemm, who seems never to have forgiven Mrs. Osgood for the troubles of that unfortunate first summer at Fordham, would express herself freely to Griswold, who was a warm friend and admirer of Mrs. Osgood. Was it on account of such utterances that Griswold wrote to Mrs. Whitman: "Be very careful what you say to Mrs. Clemm. She is not your friend or anybody's friend, and has no element of goodness or kindness in her nature, but whose heart is full of wickedness and malice." Mrs. Osgood was a lovely and estimable woman, and if she did allow her admiration of Poe and her warm-hearted sympathy with one of a kindred poetic nature to impulsively carry her beyond the bounds of a strictly platonic friendship, it was in all innocence on her part, and did not lose her the good opinion of those who knew her. The blame was all for Poe and the feeling against him intense. Undoubtedly the impression which she made on Poe was something beyond what he ordinarily experienced toward women. In my own acquaintance with him he several times spoke of her, and always with a sort of grave and reverential tenderness--as one may speak of the dead, or as he might have spoken of the lost friend of his boyhood, Mrs. Stanard. Although, as Mrs. Osgood says, Poe and herself never met in the few remaining years of their lives, yet several of his poems, without any real attempt at disguise, express his remembrance of her. It was to her that the lines "_To F----_" were addressed, after their parting: "Beloved, amid the earnest woes That crowd around my earthly path-- (Dear path, alas! where grows Not e'en one thornless rose)-- My soul at last a solace hath In dreams of thee--and therein knows An Eden of calm repose. "And thus thy memory is to me Like some enchanted far-off isle In some tumultuous sea; Some ocean throbbing far and free With storms--but where meanwhile Serenest skies continually Just o'er that one bright island smile." In "_A Dream_" he thus again alludes to her: "That holy dream, that holy dream, When all the world was chiding, Hath cheered me like a lovely beam A lonely spirit guiding. "What though that light through storm and night Still trembles from afar? What could there be more purely bright Than truth's day-star?" About the same time he wrote the lines, "_To My Mother_," the only one of his poems in which he alluded to his wife, concluding with the couplet: "By that infinitude which made my wife Dearer unto my soul than its own life." It will be observed that the sentimental things, in both prose and verse, which Poe has written concerning his love for his wife--and they are but two or three at most--were written immediately after his affair with Mrs. Osgood and the universal charge against him that he had deserted a dying wife for her sake. It is impossible that at this remote period of time it could be understood how seriously--from all contemporaneous accounts--Poe's reputation was affected by this unfortunate episode; especially at the North, where it was best known. When Miss Poe left Fordham, in July, she carried with her a letter from Mrs. Clemm to Mr. John Mackenzie, soliciting pecuniary aid for Edgar on plea of his wretched health. Mr. Mackenzie was at this time married and with a family of his own, but he never lost his interest in his old friend or ceased to assist him so far as was in his power. CHAPTER XXII. THE SHADOW AT THE DOOR. During the winter and succeeding summer matters did not improve at the cottage. Poe, with health completely shattered and spirits horribly depressed, remained at home with his sick wife for the most part, only occasionally arousing himself to write. A lady, who was at this time a little girl and one of Virginia's visitors, afterward told a reporter of how she would sometimes see Mr. Poe writing at his table in the upstairs room, and how as each sheet was finished he would paste it on to the last one, until it was long enough to reach across the floor. Then she would venture to roll it up for him in a neat cylinder, taking care not to disturb him. Sometimes, when he was not employed, he would tell the children blood-curdling stories of ghouls and goblins, when his eyes would light up in a wonderful manner. "I lost my heart to those beautiful eyes," she said. Mrs. Clemm continued to make the rounds of the editors' offices with these manuscripts, but met with little success. Poe's mind was not at its brightest. He was not in a writing mood; and, as has been since observed, he was reduced to the expedient of rewriting and altering certain smaller articles and offering them to the more obscure papers and journals. Mrs. Clemm, in the midst of her manifold duties, could do but little with her sewing in the way of support for the family. So her furniture went, piece by piece, the furniture which Miss Poe had so often described--the parlor box-lounge upon which she slept; the dining-table, which stood in the midst of the room, ready for the meal which was so seldom placed upon it; the large engraving above the mantelpiece, and the collection of sea-shells--all disappeared, until the once cosey little apartment presented a bare and poverty-stricken appearance. Mrs. Gove, one of the literary women of the day, described it as being furnished with only a checked matting, a small corner-stand, a hanging-shelf of books and four chairs. Years afterward, when strangers would visit the cottage at Fordham, they would hear from the neighbors pathetic accounts of the family during this summer of 1846. "We knew that they were poor," said one, "but they tried to keep it to themselves. Many a time I have wanted to send them things from my garden, but was afraid to do so." One old dame said to a New York reporter: "I've known when they were out of provisions, for then Mrs. Clemm, who always seemed cheerful, would come out with a basket and a shining case-knife and go 'round digging greens (dandelions). Once I said to her, says I, 'Greens may be took too frequent.' 'Oh, no,' says she, smiling, 'they cool the blood, and Eddie likes them.'" Thus poor Mrs. Clemm, with her assumed cheerfulness, would seek to produce the impression that their dinner of wild herbs was a matter of choice instead of necessity. Another neighbor said to a visitor: "I never saw checked matting last as theirs did. There was nothing upstairs but an old cot in a little hall-room or closet, where Mrs. Clemm slept, and an old table and chair and bed in the next room, where Mr. Poe wrote. But you could eat your dinner off the two floors." The testimony of still another was: "In the kitchen she had only a little stove, a pine table and a chair; but the floor was as white as the table, and the tins as bright as silver. I don't think that she had more than a dozen pieces of crockery, all on a little shelf in the kitchen. The only meat I've ever known them to have was a five-cent bone for soup or a few butcher's trimmings for a stew; but it seemed Mrs. Clemm could make a little of anything go twice as far as other people could." In the early part of this summer Virginia's health appeared better than usual. A neighbor who lived nearest them said to a visitor to Poe's old home: "In fine weather that summer--the summer before she died--we could sometimes see her sitting at her front door, wrapped up, with her husband or mother beside her, Mr. Poe reading a paper and Mrs. Clemm knitting. Most times there would be one or two children along, and Mr. Poe would play ball with them while his wife laughingly looked on. She looked like a child herself, hardly taller than they were. Well--no; she wasn't exactly pretty. She looked _too spooky_, with her white face and big, black eyes; but she was interesting looking, and we felt sorry for her--and for them all, for that matter. You could see they had known better days." As the summer wore on, and the first autumn breezes shook the leaves from the cherry tree, a change came over Virginia. Mrs. Clemm wrote to Miss Poe that unless she could go to her relations at the South--a thing not to be thought of--she would not live through the winter. Eddie's health was completely broken, and unless she herself remained strong enough to take care of them both, all would have to go to the poor-house. These letters were generally indirect appeals for pecuniary aid. Through similar pathetic accounts given by Mrs. Clemm to editors to whom she offered manuscripts, the condition of the poet and his family became known and was commented upon by the public papers, to Poe's great indignation, who took occasion in an anonymous communication to deny its truth. But that it was no time for pride to stand in the way of dire necessity is evident from the account of Mrs. Gove on her first visit to the cottage late in that fall. One can hardly realize a condition of things such as she described--the bare and fireless room, the bed with its thin, white covering and the military cloak--a relic of the West Point days--spread over it, and the sick woman, "whose only means of warmth was as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet, while she herself hugged a large tortoise-shell cat to her bosom." And the thin, haggard man, suffering like his wife from cold and the lack of nourishing food, but who yet received his visitor with such courtly elegance of manner, was the author of _The Raven_, with which the world was even then being thrilled! It was a blessed day for the distressed family that on which, about the last of October, Mrs. Shew came to the now bleak little cottage on the hill and, like a ministering angel, devoted herself to caring for and comforting them--not only as regarded their material wants but with kind and encouraging words as well. With a sufficient competence and the medical education given her by her father, she was enabled thus to devote herself to the service of those who could not afford the attendance of a regular physician. Not only did she supply them with medicine, but with careful nursing and proper food prepared by her own hands in Mrs. Clemm's little kitchen. Mrs. Gove collected sixty dollars, with which their other wants were supplied; so that during the months of November and December the family were more comfortably situated than was usual with them. But meantime Virginia rapidly declined, until it became evident that her frail life was very near its close. On the day before her death Poe, in mortal dread of that awful _shadow_ which had been so long in its approach and now stood upon their threshold, wrote urgently to Mrs. Shew to come and pass the night with them. "My poor Virginia still lives, though failing fast." She came, in time to take leave of the dying wife. One of Poe's biographers[7] has stated that on the day previous to Mrs. Poe's death she requested Mrs. Shew to read two letters from the second Mrs. Allen exonerating Poe from having ever caused a difficulty in her house. To those who knew Mrs. Allan and had heard from herself and her family the frequent accounts of that occurrence--accounts never retracted by her to her dying day--this statement is not worth a moment's consideration. The only question is, Who wrote those letters, and how is it that they were never made public or again heard of? And who could have imposed upon the dying woman a task such as this, instead of themselves taking the responsibility? [7] Ingraham. From this incident, if the account be true, it would appear that Virginia was gentle, obedient and submissive to the last. On the day following--January 3, 1847--her innocent, childlike spirit passed away from earth. She was in the twenty-sixth year of her age. CHAPTER XXIII. MRS. SHEW. With the death of his wife a great horror and gloom fell upon Poe. The blow which he had for years dreaded had at length fallen. That which he had feared and loathed above all things--the monster, Death--had entered his home and made it desolate. As a poet, he could delight in writing about the death of the young and lovely, but from the dread reality he shrank with an almost superstitious horror and loathing. It was said, on Mrs. Clemm's authority, that he refused to look upon the face of his dead wife. He desired to have no remembrance of the features touched by the transforming fingers of death. Mrs. Shew still kindly ministered to him, endeavoring also to arouse him from his gloom and encourage him to renewed effort. But it seemed at first useless. He had no hope or cheering beyond the grave, and it was at this time that he might appropriately have written: "A voice from out of the future cries 'On! on!' but o'er the past-- Dim gulf--my spirit hovering lies, Mute, motionless, aghast." Mrs. Shew, a thoroughly practical woman of sound, good sense and judgment, and with so little of the æsthetic that she confessed to Poe that she had never read his poems, nevertheless took a friendly interest in him and felt for him in his loneliness. To afford him the benefit of a change, she took him as her patient to her own home and commissioned him to furnish her dining-room and library according to his own taste. She also encouraged him to write, placing pen and paper before him and bidding him to try; and in this way, it is claimed by one account, "_The Bells_" came to be written, or at least begun. Under the influence of cheerful society, comfort and good cheer, Poe's health and spirits improved, and on his return home he again commenced writing. Soon, however, a relapse occurred, and his kind friend and physician found it necessary to resume her visits to Fordham. For all this Poe was grateful, but, unfortunately, he was more; and at length on a certain day he so far betrayed his feelings that Mrs. Shew then and there informed him that her visits to him must cease. On the day following she wrote a farewell letter, in which she gave him advice and directions in regard to his health, warning him of its precarious state, and of the necessity of his abandoning the habits which were making a wreck of him mentally and physically. She advised him as the only thing that could save him to marry some good woman possessed of sufficient means to support him in comfort, and who would love him well enough to spare him the necessity of mental overwork, for which he was not now fitted. It may be here remarked that of all the women that we know of to whom Poe offered his platonic devotion, Mrs. Shew was the only one by whom it was promptly and decidedly rejected. CHAPTER XXIV. QUIET LIFE AT FORDHAM. The beginning of this year was a dreary time at the cottage at Fordham. The resources of the family, which had been generously contributed to, mostly by strangers and anonymously, were now exhausted, and Poe, still ill and in wretched spirits, was not capable of the exertion necessary to replenish them. In the preceding summer he had by a severe criticism of Thomas Dunn English aroused the ire of that gentleman, who revenged himself in an article for which Poe brought a suit of libel, recovering damages to the amount of two hundred and fifty dollars--a welcome boon in a time of need. He remained at home, applying himself to his writing, and, mindful of Mrs. Shew's advice, abstained from stimulants and took regular exercise on the country roads about Fordham. His frequent companion in these walks was a priest of St. John's College, near Fordham, who, being an educated and intellectual man, must have proven a most congenial and welcome acquaintance. This priest, who seems to have known Poe well, declares that he "made a superhuman struggle against starvation," and speaks of him as a gentle and amiable man, easily influenced by a kind word or act. Most of his time, said Mrs. Clemm, was passed out of doors. He did not like the loneliness of the house, and would not remain alone in the room in which Virginia had died. When he chose to write at night, as was sometimes the case, and was particularly absorbed in his subject, he would have his devoted mother-in-law sit beside him, "dozing in her chair" and at intervals supplying him with hot coffee, or Catalina, his wife's old pet, perched upon his knee or shoulder, cheering him with her gentle purring. Virginia's death seemed to have drawn these three more closely together. They could thenceforth often be seen walking up and down the garden-walk, Poe and his mother, arm-in-arm, or with their arms about each other's waists, and Catalina staidly keeping pace with them, rubbing and purring. Mrs. Clemm told Stoddard how, when Poe was about this time writing "_Eureka_," he would walk at night up and down the veranda explaining his views and dragging her along with him, "until her teeth chattered and she was nearly frozen." It is to be feared that he was not always sufficiently considerate of his indulgent mother-in-law. Poe soon experienced the benefits of his restful and temperate life. Health and spirits improved, and he began to take an interest in the everyday things about him. As spring advanced, he and Mrs. Clemm laid out some flower beds in the front garden and planted them with flowers and vines given by the neighbors, until when in May the cherry tree again blossomed the little abode assumed quite an attractive appearance. Upon an old "settle" left by a former tenant, and which Mrs. Clemm's skillful hands had mended and scrubbed and stained into respectability and placed beneath the cherry tree as a garden-seat, Poe might now often be seen reclining; gazing up into the branches, where birds and bees flitted in and out, or talking and whistling to his own pets, a parrot and bobolink, whose cages hung in the branches. A passer-by was impressed by the picture presented quite early one summer morning of the poet and his mother standing together on the green turf, smilingly looking up and talking to these pets. Here, on the convenient _settle_, on returning from one of his long sunrise rambles, he would rest until summoned by his mother to his frugal breakfast. I have at various times heard persons remark that in reading the life of a distinguished man they have desired to know some of the lesser details of his daily life--as, how did he dress? what did he eat? We have all been interested in learning that General Washington liked corn bread and fried bacon for breakfast; that Sir Walter Scott was fond of "oaten grills with milk," and that Wordsworth's favorite lunch was bread and raisins. As regards Poe, we must go back to his sister's account of what his morning meal consisted of while she was at Fordham--"a pretzel and two cups of strong coffee;" or, when there was no pretzel, the crusty part of a loaf with a bit of salt herring as a relish. Poe had the reputation of being a very moderate eater and of preferring simple viands, even at the luxurious tables of his friends. He was fond of fruit, and his sister said of buttermilk and curds, which they obtained from their rural neighbors. But we recall his enjoyment of the "elegant" tea-cakes at the Morrisons on Greenwich street and the fried eggs for breakfast. A lady who as a little girl knew Poe and his mother at this time said to a correspondent of the _New York Commercial Advertiser_: "We lived so near them that we saw them every day. They lived miserably, and in abject poverty. He was naturally improvident, and but for the neighbors they must have starved. My mother sent many a thing from her storeroom to their table. He was not a man who drank in the common acceptation of the term, but those were days when wine ran like water, and not to serve it would seem niggardly. I remember that one day 'Muddie,' as Mr. Poe called Mrs. Clemm, came to our house and asked us not to offer wine to Edgar, as his head was weak, but that he did not like to refuse it." As an illustration of the fascination which Poe possessed, even for strangers, is the following letter from Mr. John DeGalliford, of Chattanooga, Tenn., to this same New York correspondent: "I am drawn to you by your defense of Edgar A. Poe. I love him, though I met him but once. It was in September, 1845. I was sitting on a pile watching our bark that was moored to the pile. A quiet, neatly-dressed gentleman came up to me and asked me numberless questions in regard to our seafaring life. He was so lovable in his conversation that I never forgot him, and I prize the memory of those few hours of his sweet talk with me and hold it sacred to his memory. He could not have been a drinking man, for his looks did not show it. On my telling that I was a runaway boy from Kentucky, he took some scraps of paper from his pocket and took notes, saying that he could make a nice story of what I had told him. I took him aboard the bark and showed him a pet monkey I had brought from Natal. He ate a piece of biscuit and drank some cold coffee, and said he would come again and see me and get acquainted with my captain. This was years ago, and I am now an old man, seventy-three years old, but I can remember, word for word, all that passed." CHAPTER XXV. WITH OLD FRIENDS. It must be admitted that Poe, after his affair with Mrs. Osgood and the severe illness which followed, was never again what he had been. With health and spirits impaired, his intellect had in a great measure lost its brilliant creative power--its inspirations, as we may call it--and thenceforth his writings were no longer the spontaneous and irrepressible impulse of genius, but the product of mental effort and labor. In special had his poetic talent in a measure deserted him, as is evident in his latest poems, with one or two exceptions. Recognizing this condition--and with what a pang we may imagine--he recalled Mrs. Shew's advice in regard to a second marriage, and, admitting its wisdom, began to look about for a suitable matrimonial partner. Finally his choice fell upon Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, of Providence, Rhode Island, one of the "poetesses" of the time, and the most brilliant of them all. A consideration which doubtless chiefly influenced him in this choice was that Mrs. Whitman, being a lady of literary taste and independent means, would be likely to take an interest in the _Stylus_, the hope of establishing which he had never abandoned, and would assist him in carrying out his plans in regard to it. Of Mrs. Whitman, at this time about forty-five years of age, I have the following account from a lady--Mrs. F. H. Kellogg--whose mother was an intimate friend and near neighbor of hers in Providence: "She was considered very eccentric--impulsive and regardless of conventionalities. She dressed always in white, and on the coldest winter evenings, with snow on the ground, would cross over to our house in thin slippers and with nothing on her head but a thin, gauzy, white scarf. She probably thought this æsthetic--and perhaps it was. There was one thing which I must not omit to mention, because it was a part of herself--_ether_. The scent accompanied her everywhere. It was said she could not write except under its influence, but of this I do not know." As an illustration of her impulsive ways, Mrs. Kellogg says: "I was one evening, when a little girl, sitting on the front steps when she and her sister, Miss Powers, crossed over to our house. They went into the parlor, and I heard Mrs. Whitman ask my sister to sing for her _The Mocking Bird_. She appreciated my sister's beautiful singing, but on this occasion, while she was in the very midst of '_Listen to the Mocking Bird_,' suddenly a cloud of white rushed past me like a tornado, and I heard Mrs. Whitman's voice exclaiming excitedly, '_I have it! I have it!_' Of course, we were all astonished and could not understand it at all, until Miss Powers afterward explained it to us. It seems that the beautiful music and singing had excited in her some poetic thought or idea; and, regardless or forgetful of conventionalities, she had impulsively rushed home to put it in writing, or perhaps in poetry, before it should vanish away." Miss Sarah Jacobs, one of Griswold's "_Female Poets_," and a friend of Mrs. Whitman, describes her as small and dark, with deep-set dreamy eyes "that looked above and beyond but never _at_ you;" quick, bird-like motions, and as being a believer in occult influences, as Poe himself professed to be. "For all the sweet, poetic fragrance of her nature, she took an interest in common things. She was wise, she was witty; and no one could be long in her presence without becoming aware of the sweet and generous sympathy of her nature." Up to this time Poe and Mrs. Whitman had never met, though Mrs. Osgood says that the lady had written to him and sent him a valentine, of which he had taken no notice. This was against him in his present venture, but he was not discouraged. He set about his courtship in his usual manner, by addressing to Mrs. Whitman (June 10) some lines--"_To Helen_"--commencing: "I saw thee once--once only;--" supposed to commemorate his first sight of her as, passing her garden "one July midnight," he beheld her robed in white, reclining on a bank of violets, with her eyes raised heavenward. "No footsteps stirred; the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. Oh, heaven--oh, God! How my heart beats in coupling those two words-- Save only _thee and me_!" So, he continues, he gazed entranced until--the hour being past midnight and a storm-cloud threatening--the lady very properly arose and disappeared from his sight; all but her eyes. These remained and followed him home, and had followed him ever since: "----two sweetly scintillant Venuses; unextinguished by the sun." All this must have been very gratifying to Mrs. Whitman--if she believed in it--but, remembering her neglected valentine, she was in no haste to acknowledge the poetic offering, and Poe, after waiting some weeks, had his attention drawn in another direction. He had written to his friend, Mr. Mackenzie, concerning his matrimonial aspirations, and he now received an answer, suggesting that he come to Richmond and try his fortune with an old-time school-girl sweetheart, Miss Sarah Elmira Royster, now a rich "Widow Shelton," who had several times of late inquired after him and sent her "remembrances." Animated by this new hope, he, late in the summer of 1847, proceeded to Richmond, where he visited among his friends and called upon Mrs. Shelton, but especially paid attention to a pretty widow, a Mrs. Clarke. This lady, when a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, many years after Poe's death, gave to the editor of a paper some reminiscences of him at this time. "The good lady was deeply interested that the world might think well of Poe, and grew warm on the subject of his wrongs. She claimed that the poet was a Virginian, and, like most Virginians, she is very proud of her State. She wondered where Gill had gotten the material for Poe's vindication. She had first met Poe at the Mackenzies, when he was editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, and he afterward boarded at the same hotel as herself; but she saw most of him on his visit to Richmond previous to his last. He was then at her house daily, and sometimes two or three times a day. He came there, as he said, to rest. "If there happened to be friends present he was often obliging enough to read, and would sometimes read some of his own poems; but he would never read _The Raven_ unless he felt in the mood for it. When in Richmond he generally stayed with the Mackenzies at _Duncan Lodge_, and would drive in with them at any time. One day he came in with his sister and two of the Mackenzies and stopped with me. There were some other people present, and he read _The Raven_ for us. He shut out the daylight and read by an astral lamp on the table. When he was through all of us that had any tact whatever spared our comments and let our thanks be brief; for he was most impatient of both." Of Poe's reading, Mrs. Clark spoke with enthusiasm. "It was altogether peculiar and indescribable," she said. "I have heard _The Raven_ read by his friend, John R. Thompson, and others, but it sounded so strange and affected, compared with his own delivery. Poe had a wonderful voice--rich, mellow and sweet. I cannot give you any idea of it. Edwin Booth sometimes reminds me of him in his eyes and expression, but Poe's voice was peculiar to himself. I have never heard anything like it. He often read from Shelley and other poets. One day he pointed out to me in one of Shelley's poems what he considered the truest characteristic of hopeless love that he knew of: "'The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow.' "I enjoyed a good deal of his society during that visit in 1847. On his last visit I saw less of him. He was then said to be engaged to a Mrs. Shelton. Some said he was marrying her for her money. There was a good deal of gossip at that time concerning Poe. His intemperate habits especially were exaggerated and made the most of by those who did not like him, while his companions in dissipation escaped unnoticed. When he was in company at a party for instance--you might see a little of him in the earlier part of the evening, but he would presently be off somewhere. Then his eccentricities; I think that when a very young man he imitated Byron." Mrs. Clarke said she had seldom seen a good likeness of Poe. The best she had cut from an old magazine. "This engraving," she said, showing it, reflects at once the fastidiousness and the virility characteristic of his temperament. All the others have an expression pitiably weak. His worst calumniators could hardly desire for him a harder fate than the continual reproduction of that feeble visage. When he had money he was lavish and over-generous with it. He was always refined. You felt it in his very presence. And as long as I knew him, and as much as I was with him, I never saw him in the least intoxicated. I have seen him when he had had enough wine to make him talk with even more than his usual brilliancy. Indeed, to talk in a large general company, some little stimulant was necessary to him. Dr. Griswold says he was arrogant, dogmatic and impatient of contradiction. I have heard him engage in discussions frequently; oftenest with diffidence, always with consideration for others. In a large company it was only when exhilarated with wine that he spoke out his views and ideas with any degree of self-assertion." Mrs. Clarke said that his sister, Rosalie, was rather pretty and resembled himself somewhat in appearance, but "was as different as possible in mental capacity. She was amiable, patient and sweet-tempered, but as a companion wholly tiresome and monotonous. She seemed to have had little or no individuality or force of character. She thought a great deal of her brother, but during the greater part of their lives they had seen nothing of each other. The family of Mr. Mackenzie treated her affectionately and kindly, and until the breaking up of the household she remained with them, and then went to Baltimore to her relatives, the Poes. I don't know what became of her afterwards." Mrs. Clarke speaks of Poe's reading and lectures during his first visit to Richmond; but these were mere small social entertainments at the houses of various acquaintances. He really gave but one public lecture during this visit to Richmond. One evening at Mrs. Mackenzie's she said to him: "Edgar, since people appear so eager to hear you repeat _The Raven_, why not give a public recital, which might benefit you financially?" Being further urged, he finally yielded. One hundred tickets were advertised, at fifty cents each, and the music hall of the fashionable Exchange Hotel engaged for the occasion. On the appointed evening Poe stepped upon the platform to face an audience of _thirteen_ persons, including the janitor and several to whom complimentary tickets had been presented. Of these was Mrs. Shelton, who occupied a seat directly in front of the platform. Poe was cool and selfpossessed, but his delivery mechanical and rather hurried, and on concluding he bowed and abruptly retired. One of the audience remarked upon the unlucky number of thirteen; and Mrs. Julia Mayo Cabell commented indignantly upon the indifference of the Richmond people to "their own great poet." Poe was undoubtedly in a degree mortified, not at the indifference manifested, but at the picture presented by the large and brilliantly lighted hall and himself addressing the group of thirteen which constituted the audience. But his failure may be explained by the fact that in this month of August the _elite_ and educated people of the city were mostly absent in the mountains and by the sea-shore; and the weather being extremely sultry, few were inclined to exchange the cool breezes of the "city of the seven hills" for a crowded and heated lecture room, even to hear _The Raven_ read by its author. During this visit of Poe to Richmond, I, with my mother and sister, was away from home, in the mountains, and we thus missed seeing him. On our return shortly after his departure, we heard various anecdotes concerning him, one or two of which I subjoin as illustrative of his natural disposition. One evening, quite late, an alarm of fire was raised, and all the young men of Duncan Lodge, accompanied by Poe, hastened to the scene of disaster, about a mile further in the country. Finding a great crowd collected, and that their services were not required, they sat on a fence looking on, and it was past midnight when they thought of returning home. Gay young Dr. "Tom" Mackenzie remarked that it would never do to return in their immaculate white linen suits, as they would be sure to get a "wigging" from the old ladies for not having helped to put out the fire, and, besides, they were all hungry, and he knew how they could get a good supper. With that he seized a piece of charred wood and commenced besmirching their white garments and their hands and faces, including Poe's. Arriving at home in an apparently exhausted condition, they were treated by Mrs. Mackenzie herself, who would not disturb her servants, to the best that the pantry afforded, nor was the trick discovered until the following day. Mrs. Mackenzie laughed, but from Mrs. Carter, the mother of two of the culprits, and who was gifted with eloquence, they got the "wigging" which they had been anxious to avoid. And from accounts, Poe enjoyed it all immensely. A lady told me that one evening, going over to Duncan Lodge, her attention was attracted by the sound of voices in the garden, where she beheld all the young men in the broad central alley engaged in the classic game of "leapfrog." When it came to Mr. Poe's turn, she said, "he took a swift run and skimmed over their backs like a bird, seeming hardly to touch the ground. I never saw the like." Mr. Jones, Mrs. Mackenzie's son-in-law, who was rather large and heavy, came to grief in his performance, and no one laughed more heartily than did Poe. Was this the melancholy, morbid, "weird and wholly incomprehensible being" that the world has pictured the author of _The Raven_? Among these youthful spirits and his old friends, the depressing influences of his late life and home--the poverty, the friendlessness--seemed to vanish, and his real disposition reasserted itself. Pity that it could not have been always so. I am convinced that a great deal of Poe's unhappiness and apparent reserve and solitariness was owing to his obscure home life, which kept him apart from all genial social influences. At the North, wherever seen out of his business hours, he appears to have been "alone and solitary, proud and melancholy looking," says one, who had no idea of the loneliness of spirit, the lack of genial companionship, which made him so. With a few he was on friendly terms, but of intimate friends or associates he had not one so far as is known. Of the Mackenzies, so closely associated with Poe during his lifetime, I may be allowed to say that a more attractive family group I have rarely known. Beside those I have mentioned were the two youngest members, "Mr. Dick" and Mattie or "Mat"--wayward, generous, warm-hearted Mat, indifferent to people's opinion and heedless of conventionalities. She cared for nothing so much as her horse and dog, and spent an hour each day in the stables, while her aunt, Miss Jane, would exclaim in despair: "I don't know what to do with Martha. I cannot make a lady of her;" to which she would answer with a satisfied assurance that nature had never intended her to be a lady. But about this time--in October--Mat was married. There are ladies living who have heard from their mothers, at that time young girls, accounts of this famous wedding. The festivities were kept up for full two weeks, with ever-changing house parties, and each evening music and dancing, with unbounded hospitality. Miss Jane Mackenzie, upon whom the family chiefly depended, and whose fortune they expected to inherit, was gone on a visit to her brother in London; but she had given Mat a liberal sum wherewith to celebrate her wedding. Sadly my thoughts pass from this gay time over the next ten years or so to the time of "the war" and the changes which it brought to this family and to us all. CHAPTER XXVI. MRS. WHITMAN. Poe was still in Richmond, presumably courting the widow Shelton, though in so quiet a manner that it attracted little or no attention, when he unexpectedly received from Mrs. Whitman, who seems to have repented of her silence, a letter or poem of so encouraging a nature that he immediately left Richmond and proceeded to New York. Here he obtained a letter of introduction to Mrs. Whitman, which he on the following day presented to that lady at her home in Providence. The next evening he spent in her company, and on the succeeding day asked her to marry him! Receiving no definite answer, he, on his return to New York, sent her a letter in which, alluding to his previous intention of addressing Mrs. Shelton, he says: "Your letter reached me on the very day on which I was about to enter upon a course which would have borne me far away from you, sweet, sweet Helen, and the divine dream of your love." A few weeks later, when he had obtained from her a conditional promise of marriage, he again wrote--a letter in which he clearly alludes to his still cherished design of establishing the _Stylus_, from which he anticipates such brilliant results. Thus he artfully and apparently for the first time seeks to interest her in the scheme. "Am I right, dearest Helen, in the impression that you are ambitious? If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires. It would be a glorious triumph for us, darling--for you and me ... to establish in America the sole unquestionable aristocracy--that of the intellect; to secure its supremacy, to lead and control it. All this I can do, Helen, and will--if you bid me _and aid me_." Aware of her belief in occult and spiritual influences, he tells her that once, on hearing a lady repeat certain utterances of hers which appeared but the secret reflex of his own spirit, his soul seemed suddenly to become one with hers. "From that hour I loved you. I have never seen or heard your name without a shiver, half of delight, half of anxiety. The impression left upon my mind was that you were still a wife." (No such scruple had disturbed him in the case of Mrs. Osgood and others.) He goes on thus artfully to explain the incident of his declining Mrs. Osgood's offer of an introduction to Mrs. Whitman while in Providence. "For this reason I shunned your presence. You may remember that once, when I passed through Providence with Mrs. Osgood, I positively refused to accompany her to your house. I dared neither go, or say why I could not. I dared not speak of you, much less see you. _For years_ your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in with a delirious thirst all that was uttered in my presence respecting you." It will be observed that he is here speaking of a time when his wife, whom he "loved as man never before loved," was yet living; and also when he was giving himself up to his unreasoning passion for Mrs. Osgood, whom he had followed to Providence. After this, who shall undertake to defend Poe from the charge of insincerity and dissimulation? Mrs. Osgood calls Poe's letters "divinely beautiful." We cannot tell how Mrs. Whitman was affected by them, but certainly her whole course exhibits her in a constant struggle between her own inclination and the influence of friends who desired to save her from the match with Poe. As early as January 21, 1848, it was known to the public that an engagement existed between the two, and I have the authority of Mrs. Kellogg for the statement that during the summer of that year Mrs. Whitman three times renewed this engagement and was as often compelled to break it, owing to his unfortunate habits. The last engagement was made on his solemnly vowing reformation; on which a day was fixed for the marriage and the services of a clergyman bespoken by Poe himself, who thereupon wrote to Mrs. Clemm desiring her to be ready to receive himself and his bride--at Fordham! One may imagine the dismay of poor Mrs. Clemm when she read this letter and looked around the humble home with its low-ceiled upstairs room, which had been Virginia's; the pine kitchen table and her dozen pieces of crockery. For once her strong mind and resourceful talent must have failed her. How was she to accommodate the fastidious bride of her most inconsiderate son-in-law? How even provide a wedding repast against their arrival? But happily she was spared the horror of such an experience, for on the appointed day Poe arrived at Fordham alone, though in a state of nervous excitement, which necessitated days and even weeks of careful nursing on the part of his patient and long-suffering mother-in-law. This final separation between the two--for they never again met--was caused by Poe's intemperance at his hotel in Providence on the day previous to that appointed for his marriage. He had delivered a lecture which was enthusiastically applauded, and on his return to the hotel he found himself surrounded by an admiring crowd, whose hospitalities he at first resolutely declined, but with his usual weakness of will, finally yielded to. Of the stormy scene when, on the following day, Mrs. Whitman finally and decisively refused to marry him, she has herself given an account, representing Poe as alternately pleading and "raving" in his unwillingness to accept her decision. But there can be no question but that he was at this time either in some degree mentally unbalanced or in such a state physically as that the least excess would serve to excite his mind beyond its normal condition and render him partly irresponsible. Of this we have proof in the fact of his intention of taking his proposed bride to Fordham. That Mrs. Whitman was really interested in her gifted and eccentric suitor is evident, and in her heart she was loyal to him, as is shown by her defence of him after his death, and also by the lines which she addressed to him some months after their separation, entitled, "_The Isle of Dreams_." Most of her poems written after this time had some reference to him; and it is worthy of note that no woman whom Poe professed to love ever lost her interest in him. The fascination which he exerted over them must have been something extraordinary. As regards Poe's feelings toward Mrs. Whitman, it is evident from the beginning that there was no real love on his part. He expressed no regret at the ending of his "divine dream of love," but seems rather to have experienced toward her a degree of resentment which thus found expression in a letter to a friend: "From this day forth I shun the pestilential society of literary women. They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set, with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem. Mrs. Osgood is the only exception I know of." This tirade was doubtless excited partly by a scandal just now started by one of the literary set in question concerning Poe and a young married lady of Lowell. While delivering a lecture in that city he had been hospitably entertained at her home, where he spent several days, with the usual result of contracting a sentimental friendship with the charming hostess, whom he calls "Annie." During the latter part of his engagement to Mrs. Whitman his visits and attentions to this lady did not escape the notice of the "literary set," and a scandal was at once started by one of them, who drew the attention of "Annie's" husband to the matter. He accepted Poe's explanation and his proposal rather to give up the society of these friends than to be the cause of trouble to them, saying: "I cannot and will not have it upon my conscience that I have interfered with the domestic happiness of _the only being on earth whom I have loved at the same time with purity and with truth_." Certainly an extraordinary avowal to be made to the lady's husband; and we ask ourselves to how many women had he made a similar declaration? We have seen that when Poe for the last time left Mrs. Whitman's he went direct to Fordham, where, said Mrs. Clemm, he raved about "Annie," and even sent to her, reminding her of the "holy promise which he had exacted from her in their hour of parting, that she would come to him on his bed of death," and now claiming the fulfilment of that promise. Whether or not she complied does not appear; but it is more than likely that the lines, "_For Annie_," were suggested by his fever-dreams of her presence, first written while still half-delirious, and subsequently slightly altered to their present form. This piece, with the lines, "_To My Mother_," after being declined by all the more prominent magazines, finally appeared in the cheap "_Boston Weekly_," and must have been a surprise to "Annie" and her husband. But there was one woman of the "literary set" who showed that she at least was not deserving of the sweeping condemnation wherewith the irate poet had visited them. This was Mrs. Anna Estelle Lewis, a young poetess who, with her husband, was on friendly terms with Poe, and whose poems he had favorably noticed. Poe was still, mentally and physically, in a state which rendered him incapable of writing, and the condition at Fordham was deplorable. Suspecting this state of things, Mrs. Lewis and her husband invited Poe to visit them at their home in Brooklyn, and Mr. Lewis says that thenceforth they frequently had both himself and Mrs. Clemm to stay with them. It was this kindly couple that R. H. Stoddard so sharply satirizes in his "_Reminiscences_" of Poe, while accepting an evening's hospitality at their home after the poet's death. On this occasion he met with Mrs. Clemm, of whom he has given a pen picture of which we instinctively recognize the life-likeness. We can see the good lady seated serenely among the company in her "black bombazine and conventional widow's cap," lightly fingering her eye-glasses, as was her company habit, and with her strongly marked features wearing that "benevolent" smile which was characteristic of her most amiable moods. "She assured me," says Stoddard, "that she had often heard her Eddie speak of me--which I doubted--and that she believed she had also heard him speak of the stripling by my side--which was an impossibility.... She regretted that she had no more autographs to dispose of, but hinted that she could manufacture them, since she could exactly imitate her Eddie's handwriting; and this she told as though it had been to her credit." Deeply chagrined at the ending of his affair with Mrs. Whitman, and consequent disappointment in regard to the _Stylus_, Poe now, encouraged by his mother-in-law, again turned his thoughts to Mrs. Shelton. It was in July that he and Mrs. Clemm left Fordham, he to proceed to Richmond, and she, having let their rooms until his return, to stay with the Lewises. Mr. Lewis says that it was at his front door that Poe took an affectionate leave of them all; Mrs. Clemm, ever watchful and careful against possible temptation or pitfalls by the way, accompanying him to the boat to see him off. In parting from her he spoke cheeringly and affectionately. "God bless you, my own darling Muddie. Do not fear for Eddie. See how good I will be while away; and I will come back to love and comfort you."[8] [8] Ingram. And so, smiling and hopeful, the devoted mother stood upon the pier and watched to the last the receding form which she was never again to behold. CHAPTER XXVII. AGAIN IN RICHMOND. When Poe came to Richmond on this visit, he went first to Duncan Lodge, but afterward, for sake of the convenience of being in the city, took board at the old _Swan Tavern_, on Broad street, once a fashionable hostelry, but at this time little more than a cheap, though respectable, boarding-house for business men. Broad street--so named from its unusual width--extended several miles in a straight line from Chimberazo Heights and Church Hill on the east, where Mrs. Shelton had her residence, to the western suburbs, where Duncan Lodge and our own home of "_Talavera_" were situated. This was the route which Poe traversed in his visits to Mrs. Shelton. There were no street cars in those days, hacks were expensive, and the walk from "the Swan" to Church Hill was long and fatiguing. Poe would break his journey by stopping to rest at the office of Dr. John Carter, a young physician who had recently hung out his sign, about half-way between those two points. During the three months of his stay in Richmond we saw a good deal of Poe. He appeared at first to be in not very good health or spirits, but soon brightened up and was invariably cheerful, seeming to be enjoying himself. I do not know to what it was to be attributed, unless to his increased fame as a poet, but certainly his reception in Richmond at this time was very different from what it had been two years previously. He became the fashion; and was _fêted_ in society and discussed in the papers. His friend, Mrs. Julia Mayo Cabell--a first cousin of Mrs. Allan--inaugurated the evening entertainments to which people were invited "to meet Mr. Poe." It was generally expected that at these gatherings he would recite _The Raven_, and this he was often obliging enough to do, though we knew that it was to him an unwelcome task. In our own home, no matter who were the visitors, we would never allow this request to be made of him after he had on one occasion gratified us by a recital. I remember on this occasion being disappointed in his manner of delivery. I had expected some little graceful and expressive action, but he sat motionless as a statue except that at the line, "_Prophet! cried I, thing of evil!_" he slightly erected his head; and again, in repeating: "Get thee back into the tempest and the night's plutonian shore!" he turned his face suddenly though slightly toward the outer darkness of the open window near which he sat, each time raising his voice. He explained his own idea to be that any action served to attract the attention of the audience from the poem to the speaker, thus detracting from the effect of the former. I was told how, at one of these entertainments, Poe was embarrassed by the persistent attentions of a moth or beetle, until a sympathetic old lady took a seat beside him and, with wild wavings of a huge fan, kept the troublesome insect at a distance. This mingling of the comic with the tragic element rather spoiled the effect of the latter, and though Poe preserved his dignity, he was perceptibly annoyed. I never saw Mr. Poe in a large company, but was told that on such occasions he invariably assumed his mask of cold and proud reserve, not untouched by an expression of sadness, which was natural to his features when in repose. It was then that he "looked every inch a poet." In general companies he disliked any attempt to draw him out, never expressing himself freely, and at times manifesting a shyness amounting almost to an appearance of diffidence, which was very noticeable. A marked peculiarity was that he never, while in Richmond, either in society or elsewhere, made any advance to acquaintance, or sought an introduction, even to a lady. Aware of the estimation in which his character was held by some persons, he stood aloof, in proud independence, though responding with ready courtesy to any advance from others. Ladies who desired Mr. Poe's acquaintance would be compelled to privately seek an introduction from some friend, since he himself never requested it, and it was observed that he preferred the society of mature women to that of the youthful belles, who were enthusiastic over the author of _Lenore_ and _The Raven_. Mr. Poe spent his mornings in town, but in the evenings would generally drive out to Duncan Lodge with some of the Mackenzies. He liked the half-country neighborhood, and would sometimes join us in our sunset rambles in the romantic old Hermitage grounds. Those were pleasant evenings at Duncan Lodge and Talavera, with no lack of company at either place. CHAPTER XXVIII. A MORNING WITH POE AND "THE RAVEN." (A Leaf from a Journal.) One pleasant though slightly drizzly morning in the latter part of September I sat in our parlor at Talavera at a table on which were some new magazines and a vase of tea roses freshly gathered. Opposite me sat Mr. Poe. A basket of grapes--his favorite fruit--had been placed between us; and as we leisurely partook of them we chatted lightly. He inquired at length what method I pursued in my writing. The idea was new to me, and on my replying that I wrote only on the impulse of a newly conceived idea, he proceeded to give me some needed advice. I must make a _study_ of my poem, he said, line by line and word by word, and revise and correct it until it was as perfect as it could be made. It was in this way that he himself wrote. And then he spoke of _The Raven_. He had before told me of the difficulties which he had experienced in writing this poem and of how it had lain for more than _ten years_ in his desk unfinished, while he would at long intervals work on it, adding a few words or lines, altering, omitting and even changing the plan or idea of the poem in the endeavor to make of it something which would satisfy himself. His first intention, he said, had been to write a short poem only, based upon the incident of an _Owl_--a night-bird, the bird of wisdom--with its ghostly presence and inscrutable gaze entering the window of a vault or chamber where he sat beside the bier of the lost _Lenore_. Then he had exchanged the Owl for the Raven, for sake of the latter's "_Nevermore_"; and the poem, despite himself, had grown beyond the length originally intended. Does not this explain why the Raven--though not, like the Owl, a night-bird--should be represented as attracted by the lighted window, and, perching "upon the _bust of Pallas_," which would be more appropriate to the original Owl, Minerva's bird? Also, we recognize the latter in the lines: "By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore."[9] [9] As by also: "And its eyes have all the seeming Of a demon that is dreaming." Poe, in adopting the Raven, evidently did not obliterate all traces of the Owl. Of these troubles with the poem he had before informed me, and now, in answer to a remark of mine, he said, in effect: "_The Raven_ was never completed. It was published before I had given the final touches. There were in it certain knotty points and tangles which I had never been able to overcome, and I let it go as it was." He told how, toward the last, he had become heartily tired of and disgusted with the poem, of which he had so poor an opinion that he was many times on the point of destroying it. I believe that his having published it under the _nom de plume_ of "_Quarles_" was owing to this lack of confidence in it, and that had it proven a failure he would never have acknowledged himself the author. He feared to risk his literary reputation on what appeared to him of such uncertain merit. He now, in speaking of the poem, regretted that he had not fully completed before publishing it. "If I had a copy of it here," he said, "I could show you those knotty points of which I spoke, and which I have found it impossible to do away with," adding: "Perhaps you will help me. I am sure that you can, if you will." I did not feel particularly flattered by this proposal, knowing that since his coming to Richmond he had made a similar request of at least two other persons. However, I cleared the table of the fruit and the flowers and placed before him several sheets of generous foolscap, on which I had copied for a friend _The Raven_ as it was first published. He requested me to read it aloud, and as I did so, slowly and carefully, he sat, pencil in hand, ready to mark the difficult passages of which he had spoken. I paused at the third line. Had I not myself often noted the incongruity of representing the poet as pondering over _many_ a volume instead of a single one? I glanced inquiringly at Mr. Poe and, noting his unconscious look, proceeded. When I reached the line, "And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor;" he gave a slight shiver or shrug of the shoulders--an expressive motion habitual to him--and the pencil came down with an emphatic stroke beneath the six last words. This was one of the hardest knots, he said, nor could he find a way of getting over it. "_Ember_" was the only word rhyming with the two preceding lines, but in no way could he dispose of it except as he had done--thus producing the worst line in the poem. We "pondered" over it for awhile and finally gave it up. (But I may here mention that I have since, in studying the poem, made a discovery which, strangely enough, seems never to have occurred to the author. This was that in this particular stanza he had unconsciously reversed the order or arrangement of the lines, placing those of the triple rhymes first and the rhyming couplet last. Thus all his long years of worry over that unfortunate "_ember_" had been unnecessary, since the construction of the verse required not only the omission of the word as a rhyme, but of the whole line of "And each separate dying ember;" when the succeeding objectionable words, "Wrought its ghost upon the floor," could have been easily altered; and the addition of a third line to the succeeding couplet would have made the stanza correct.) Our next pause was at the word "_beast_," through which he ran his pencil. "Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above my chamber door." "I must get rid of that word," he said; "for, of course, no beast could be expected to occupy such a position." "Oh, yes; a mouse, for instance," I suggested, at which he gave me one of his rare humorous smiles. Leaving this point for future consideration, we passed on to a more serious difficulty. "This and more I sat divining, With my head at ease reclining On the cushion's velvet _lining_, with the lamplight gloated o'er." The knotty point here was in the word "lining"--a blunder obvious to every reader. Poe said that the only way he could see of getting over the difficulty was by omitting the whole stanza. But he was unwilling to give up that "violet velvet" chair, which, with the "purple silken curtain," he considered a picturesque adjunct to the scene, imparting to it a character of luxury which served as a relief to the more sombre surroundings. I had so often heard this impossible "lining" criticised that when he inquired, "Shall I omit or retain the stanza?" I ventured to suggest that it might be better to give up the stanza than have the poem marred by a defect so conspicuous. For a moment he held the pencil poised, as if in doubt, and I have since wondered what would have been his decision. But just here we were interrupted by the tumultuous entrance of my little dog, Pink, in hot pursuit of the family cat. The latter took refuge beneath the table at which we were seated, and there ensued a brisk exchange of duelistic passes, until I called off Pink and Mr. Poe took up the cat and, placing her on his knee, stroked her soothingly, inquiring if she were my pet. Upon my disclaiming any partiality for felines, he said, "I like them," and continued his gentle caressing. (Was he thinking of _Catalina_, his wife's pet cat, which he had left at home at Fordham, and which after her death had sat upon his shoulder as he wrote far into the night? Recalling his grave and softened expression, I think that it must have been so. But at that time I had never heard of Catalina.) But now came the final and most difficult "tangle" of all--the blunder apparent to the world--the defect which mars the whole poem, and yet is contained in but a single line: "And the lamplight o'er him streaming casts his shadow on the floor." Poe declared this to be hopeless, and that it was, in fact, the chief cause of his dissatisfaction with the poem. Indeed, it may well excite surprise that he, so careful and fastidious as to the completeness of his work, should have allowed _The Raven_ to go from his hands marred by a defect so glaring, but this is proof that he did indeed regard it as hopeless. * * * * * When Mr. Poe left us on this September morning he took with him this manuscript copy of _The Raven_; which, however, he on the following day handed to me, begging that I would keep it until his return from New York. I found that he had marked several minor defects in the poem, one of which was his objection to the word "shutter," as being too commonplace and not agreeing with the word "lattice," previously used. He remarked, before leaving for New York, that he intended having _The Raven_, after some further work upon it, published in an early number of the _Stylus_. I do not doubt but that, had he lived, he would have made it much more perfect than it now is. After his death his friend, Mr. Robert Sully, the Richmond artist, was desirous of making a picture of the _Raven_, but explained to me why it could not be done--all on account of that impossible "shadow on the floor." Of course, said he, to produce such an effect the lamplight must come from above and behind the bust and the bird. No; it was impracticable." This set me to thinking; and the result was that I, some time after, went to Mr. Sully's studio and said to him: "How would it do to have a glass transom above the door; one of those large fan-shaped transoms which we sometimes find in old colonial mansions, opening on a lofty galleried hall?" It would do, he said. Indeed, with such an arrangement, and the lamp supposed to be suspended from the hall ceiling, as in those old mansions, there would be no difficulty with either the poem or the picture. And we were both delighted at our discovery, and thought how pleased Poe would have been with the idea--so effective in explaining that mysterious shadow on the floor. Mr. Sully commenced upon his picture, but died before completing it. * * * * * This manuscript copy of _The Raven_, with all its pencil-marks, as made by Mr. Poe on that September morning, remained in my possession for many years. It is yet photographed upon my memory, with all the details here given from an odd leaf of a journal which I kept about that time--the quiet parlor, the outside drizzle, the books, the roses, and the face and figure of Mr. Poe as he gravely bent over that manuscript copy of his immortal poem of _The Raven_. Had he no premonition that even then a darker shadow than that of the _Raven_ was hovering over him? It was one of the last occasions on which I ever saw him. CHAPTER XXIX. MRS. SHELTON. Poe's first visits on his arrival in Richmond had been to Mrs. Shelton, and it soon became known that an engagement existed between them, although they were never seen together in public, and Poe on all occasions denied the engagement. Yet morning after morning the curious neighbors were treated to a sight of the poet ascending the steps of the tall, plain, substantial looking brick house on the corner of Grace street, facing the rear of St. John's church, and had they watched more closely they might at times have seen another figure following in its footsteps. This was Rosalie Poe, who, delighted at her brother's engagement, and being utterly without tact or judgment, would present herself at Mrs. Shelton's door shortly after his own arrival, as she said, for the pleasure of seeing the couple together. Once she surprised them at a _tête-à-tête_ luncheon at which "corned beef and mustard" figured; but on another occasion Mrs. Shelton met and informed her that Mr. Poe had a headache from his long walk and was resting on the parlor sofa, where she herself would attend to him, and so dismissed her, to her great indignation. Not alone to Mrs. Shelton's were these "shadowings" of her brother confined, but if she at any time knew of his intention to call at some house where she herself was acquainted, she would as likely as not make her own appearance during his visit; or, in promenading Broad street, he would unexpectedly find himself waylaid and introduced to some prosy acquaintance of his sister. It required Mrs. Mackenzie's authority to relieve him from these annoyances. There was, however, something pathetic in the sister's pride in and affection for a brother from whom she received but little manifestation of regard. He treated her indulgently, but, as she herself often said, in her homely way, "Edgar could never love me as I do him, _because he is so far above me_." About the middle of August Mrs. Shelton's interested neighbors observed that the poet's visits to her suddenly ceased; and then followed a report that the engagement was broken, and that a bitter estrangement existed between the two. Mr. Woodbury, Poe's biographer, doubts this, and declares that, "We have no evidence that such was the case;" but we, who were on the spot, as it were, and had opportunity of judging, _knew_ that the report was true. Miss Van Lew, the famous "war postmistress" of Richmond, once said to me as, standing on the porch of her house, she pointed out Mrs. Shelton's residence: "I used at first to often see Mr. Poe enter there, but never during the latter part of his stay in Richmond. It seemed to be known about here that the engagement was off.... Gossip had it that Mrs. Shelton discarded him because persuaded by friends that he was after her money. All her relatives are said to be opposed to the match." From Poe's own confidential statement to Mr. John Mackenzie, who had first suggested the match with Mrs. Shelton, it appears that money considerations was really the cause of the trouble. Mrs. Shelton had the reputation of being a thorough business woman and very careful and cautious with regard to her money. Poe was at this time canvassing in the interests of the _Stylus_, in which he received great encouragement from his friends, but when he applied to Mrs. Shelton it is certain that she failed to respond as he desired. She had no faith in the success of his plan, neither any sympathy with its purpose. Also, in discussing arrangements for their marriage, she announced her intention of keeping entire control of her property. Poe himself broke their engagement. Next there arose a difficulty concerning certain letters which the lady desired to have returned to her and which he declined to give up, except on condition of receiving his own. Possibly each feared that these letters might some time fall into the hands of Poe's biographers. If they were written during his courtship of Mrs. Whitman, and when still uncertain of the result, he appears to have been keeping Mrs. Shelton in reserve. Mrs. Shelton, during a few days' absence of Poe at the country home of Mr. John Mackenzie, came to Duncan Lodge and appealed to Mrs. Mackenzie to influence Poe in returning her letters. I saw her on this occasion--a tall, rather masculine-looking woman, who drew her veil over her face as she passed us on the porch, though I caught a glimpse of large, shadowy, light blue eyes which must once have been handsome. We heard no more of her until some time about the middle of September, when suddenly Poe's visits to her were resumed, though in a very quiet manner. It seems certain that the engagement was then renewed, and that Mrs. Shelton must have promised to assist Poe in his literary enterprise; for from that time he was enthusiastic in regard to the _Stylus_ and what he termed its "assured success." He even commenced arranging a _Table of Contents_ for the first number of the magazine; and Mrs. Mackenzie told me how he one morning spent an hour in her room taking from her information, notes and _data_ for an article which he intended to appear in one of its earliest numbers. He was in high spirits, and declared that he had never felt in better health. This was after an attack of serious illness, due to his association with dissipated companions. Tempted as he was on every side and wherever he went in the city, it was not strange that he had not always the strength of will to resist; and twice during this visit to Richmond he was subject to attacks somewhat similar to those which he had known at Fordham, and through which he was now kindly nursed by his friends at Duncan Lodge. Poe gave but one public lecture on this visit to Richmond--that on "The Poetic Principle"--and of this most exaggerated accounts have been given by several writers, even to the present day, they representing it to have been a great financial success. One recent lecturer remarks upon the strangeness of the fate when, just as the hitherto impecunious poet was "about returning home with five thousand and five hundred dollars in his pocket, he should have been robbed of it all." The truth of the matter is that but two hundred and fifty tickets were printed, the price being fifty cents each, and, as Dr. William Gibbon Carter informed me, there were by actual count not more than one hundred persons present at the lecture, some being holders of complimentary tickets. Another account says there were but sixty present, but that they were of the very _elite_ of the city. Considering that from the proceeds of the lecture all expenses of hall rent had to be paid, we cannot wonder at Poe's writing to Mrs. Clemm, "My poor, poor Muddie, I am yet unable to send you a single dollar." I was present at this lecture, with my mother and sister and Rose Poe, who as we took seats reserved for us, left her party and joined us. I noticed that Poe had no manuscript, and that, though he stood like a statue, he held his audience as motionless as himself--fascinated by his voice and expression. Rose pointed out to me Mrs. Shelton, seated conspicuously in front of the platform, facing the lecturer. This position gave me a good view of her, with her large, deep-set, light-blue eyes and sunken cheeks, her straight features, high forehead and cold expression of countenance. Doubtless she had been handsome in her youth, but the impression which she produced upon me was that of a sensible, practical woman, the reverse of a poet's ideal. And yet she says "Poe often told her that she was the original of his lost _Lenore_." When Poe had concluded his lecture, he lightly and quickly descended the platform and, passing Mrs. Shelton without notice, came to where we were seated, greeting us in his usual graceful manner. He looked pleased, smiling and handsome. The audience arose, but made no motion to retire; watching him as he talked and evidently waiting to speak to him; but he never glanced in their direction. Rose, radiantly happy, stood drawn up to her full height, and observed, "Edgar, only see how the people are staring at the poet and his sister." I believe it to have been the proudest moment of her life, and one which she ever delighted to recall. This occurred during the period of estrangement between Poe and Mrs. Shelton. Quite suddenly, in the latter part of September, Poe decided to go to New York. His object was, as he himself declared, to make some arrangements in regard to the _Stylus_, though gossip said to bring Mrs. Clemm on to his marriage. It is difficult to get a clear idea of the relation between Poe and Mrs. Shelton, owing to the contradictory statements of the two. Undoubtedly they must have met during Poe's first visit to Richmond, and he tells Mrs. Whitman that he was about to address the lady when her own letters caused him to change his mind. And yet Mrs. Shelton speaks of their meeting on his last visit as though it had been the first since their youthful acquaintance. As she entered the parlor, she says, on his first call, "I knew him at once," and, as the pious and practical woman that she was, she adds, "I told him that I was on my way to church, and that I allowed nothing to interfere with this duty." She says also in her _Reminiscences_, "I was never engaged to him, but there was an understanding;" and yet, on his death, she appeared in public attired in deepest widow's weeds. That she was devoted to him appears from her own letter to Dr. Moran when informed by him of Poe's death, "He was dearer to me than any other living creature." Poe himself, writing to Mrs. Clemm, says: "Elmira has just returned from the country. I believe that she loves me more devotedly than any one I _ever_ knew." He adds, apparently in allusion to his marriage, "Nothing has yet been arranged, and it will not do to hurry matters," concluding with, "If possible, I will get married before leaving Richmond." On his deathbed in Washington he said to Dr. Moran, "Sir, I was to have been married in ten days," and requested him to write to Mrs. Shelton. CHAPTER XXX. THE MYSTERY OF FATE. One evening--it was Sunday, the 2d of October--Dr. John Carter was seated alone in his office when Poe entered, having just paid a farewell visit to Mrs. Shelton before leaving in the morning for New York. He remarked to Dr. Carter that he would probably stop for one day in Baltimore, and perhaps also in Philadelphia, on business; would like to remain longer, but had written to Mrs. Clemm to expect him at Fordham some time this week. He would be back in Richmond in about a fortnight. While talking, he took up a handsome malacca sword-cane belonging to Dr. Carter and absently played with it. He looked grave and preoccupied; several times inquired the hour, and at length rising suddenly, remarked that he would step over to Saddler's restaurant and get supper. He took the cane with him, Dr. Carter understanding from this circumstance and his not taking leave, that he would presently return on his way to the _Swan_, where he had left his baggage. He did not, however, reappear; and on the next morning Dr. Carter inquired about him at Saddler's. The proprietor said that Poe and two friends had remained to a late hour, talking and drinking moderately, and had then left together to go aboard the boat, which would start at four o'clock for Baltimore. He said that Poe, when he left, was in good spirits and quite sober; though this last may be doubted, since he not only forgot to return Dr. Carter's cane but to send for his own baggage at the Swan Some persons have insisted that Poe must have been drugged by these men, who were strangers to Mr. Saddler, and there was even a sensational story published in a Northern magazine to the effect that Poe had been followed to Baltimore by two of Mrs. Shelton's brothers, and there, after having certain letters taken from him, beaten so severely that he was found dying in an obscure alley. This story was first started by Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith in one of the New York journals, though it does not appear from what source she derived her information. No denial was made or notice taken of it by Mrs. Shelton's friends, and the story gradually died out. For over forty years the mystery of the tragic death of the poet remained a mystery, strangely and persistently defying all attempts at elucidation. But within the last few years there has appeared in a St. Louis paper a communication which professes to give a truthful account of the circumstances connected with the poet's death, and which wears such an appearance of probability that it is at least worth considering. This letter, which is addressed to the editor of the paper, is from a certain Dr. Snodgrass, who represents himself to have been for many years a resident of Dakota. He says that on the evening of October 2, 1849, being in Baltimore, he stepped into a plain but respectable eating-house or restaurant kept by an Irish widow, where, to his surprise, he met with Poe, whom he had once been accustomed to meet here, but had not seen for some years. After taking some refreshment, they left the place together, but had not proceeded far when they were seized upon by two men, who hurried them off to some place where they were, with several others, kept close prisoners through the night and following day, though otherwise well treated. It was the eve of a great municipal election, and the city was wild with excitement. Next evening the kidnappers, having drugged their captives, hurried them to the polls, where they, in a half-conscious condition, were made to vote over and over again. The doctor, it appears, was only partially affected, but Poe succumbed utterly, and at length one of the men said, "What is the use of dragging around a dead man?" With that, they called a hack, put Poe within it, and ordered the driver to take him to the Washington Hospital. Dr. Snodgrass says positively: "I myself saw Poe thrust into the hack, heard the order given, and saw the vehicle drive off with its unconscious burden." Thus--if this account may be relied upon--ended the strange, sad tragedy of the poet's life; none stranger, none sadder, in all the annals of modern literature. Dr. Snodgrass intimates that his reason for so long a delay in making this story known was his unwillingness to have his own part in the affair exposed, and with the notoriety which its connection with the poet would render unavoidable. But now, he says, in his old age, and having outlived all who knew him at the time, this consideration is of little worth to him. If the story be not true, we cannot see why it should have been invented. At least, it cannot, at the present day, be disproved, and it certainly appears to be the most probable and natural explanation of the poet's death that has been given. It agrees also with Dr. Moran's account of Poe's condition when he was received at the hospital, and with the latter's earnest assurance that he himself was not responsible for that condition, and also with his requesting that Dr. Snodgrass be sent for. The kidnappers had probably exchanged his garments for others as a means of disguise, intending to restore them eventually. They at least did not take from him the handsome malacca cane which was in his grasp when he reached the hospital; and which which would tend to prove that he was not then altogether unconscious. This cane was, at Dr. Carter's request, returned to him by Mrs. Clemm, to whom Dr. Moran sent it. His baggage, left at the Swan, was sent by Mr. Mackenzie to Mrs. Clemm, disproving the story that it had been stolen from him in Baltimore. In addition to the above, we find another and very similar account, apparently by the same Dr. Snodgrass, in the "_San Francisco Chronicle_ of August 31," the date of the year not appearing on the clipping from which I make the following extracts: "You say that Poe did not die from the effects of deliberate dissipation?" asked the _Chronicle_ reporter. "That is just what I do mean; and I say further that he died from the effects of deliberate murder." The author of this assertion was a well-known member of this city's advanced and inveterate Bohemia; a gentleman who has long since retired from the active pursuits of his profession and spends his old age in dreamy meditation, frequenting one of the popular resorts of the craft, but mingling little in their society. When joining in their conversation, it is generally to correct some errors from his inexhaustible mine of reminiscences, and on these occasions his words are few and precise. "Then you knew something of the poet, Doctor?" "I was his intimate associate for years. Much that biographers have said of him is false, especially regarding his death. Poe was not an habitual drunkard, but he was a steady drinker when his means admitted of it. His habitual resort when in Baltimore was the Widow Meagher's place, on the city front, inexpensive, but respectable, having an oyster and liquor stand, and corresponding in some respects with the coffee shops of San Francisco. Here I frequently met him." "But about his death?" "The mystery of the poet's death had remained a mystery for more than forty years when there appeared in a Texas paper an article from the pen of the editor, in which he gave a letter from a Dr. Snodgrass professing to reveal the truth of the matter. "About the time that this article was published there appeared one in the San Francisco _Chronicle_ by a reporter of that paper, telling of an interview which he had with this same Dr. Snodgrass, of whom he says: 'He was a well-known literary Bohemian of this city who long ago gave up his profession and is spending his old age in a state of dreamy existence from which he is seldom aroused except to correct some error concerning people and things of past times, of which he possesses a mine of reminiscences.'" The Doctor, denying that Poe had died from dissipation, gave an account of the manner of his death as he knew it, corresponding in all particulars with that given by him to the Texas editor. In conclusion, he said: "Poe did not die of dissipation. I say that he was deliberately murdered. He died of laudanum or some other drug forced upon him by his kidnappers. When one said, 'What is the use of carrying around a dying man?' they put him in a cab and sent him to the hospital. I was there and saw it myself." "Poe had been shifting about between Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York for some years. Once he had been away for several months in Richmond, and one evening turned up at the widow's. I was there when he came in. Then it was drinks all round, and at length we were real jolly. It was the eve of an election, and we started up town. There were four of us, and we had not gone half a dozen squares when we were nabbed by policemen, who were looking up voters to "coop." It was the practice in those days to seize people, whether drunk or sober, and keep them locked up until the polls were opened and then march them to every precinct in control of the party having the coop. This coop was in the rear of an engine-house on Calvert street. It was part of the plan to stupefy the prisoners with drugged liquor. Next day we were voted at thirty different places, it being as much as one's life was worth to rebel. Poe was so badly drugged that he had to be carried on two or three rounds, and then the gang said it was no use trying any longer to vote a dead man and must get rid of him. And with that they shoved him into a cab and sent him away." "Then he died from dissipation, after all?" "Nothing of the kind. He died from the effects of laudanum or some other poison forced on him in the coop. He was in a dying condition when being voted twenty or thirty times. The story told by Griswold and others of his being picked up in the street is a lie. I saw him thrust into the cab myself." And Mrs. Clemm? When she received Poe's letter bidding her to expect him at Fordham that week, she hastened thither to set her house in order for his reception. Day after day she watched and waited, but he did not come. And at length, when the week had passed, she one evening sat alone in the little cottage around which and through the naked branches of the cherry tree the October wind was sighing, and in anguish of spirit wrote to "Annie": "Eddie is dead--_dead_." CHAPTER XXXI. AFTER THE WAR. In the fall of 1865--the year which saw the conclusion of the unhappy war--I returned to Richmond and to my old home of Talavera, which I had not seen in four years. What a shock to me was the first sight of it! In place of the pleasant, smiling home, there stood a bare and lonely house in the midst of encircling fortifications, still bristling with dismantled gun-carriages. Every outbuilding had disappeared. All the beautiful trees which had made it so attractive--even the young cedar of Lebanon, which had been our pride--were gone; greenhouses, orchard, vineyard, everything, had been swept away, leaving only a dead level overgrown with broom-straw, amidst which were scattered rusted bayonets and a few hardy plants struggling through the trampled ground. The place was no longer "_Talavera_," but "_Battery 10_." In this desolate abode I remained some time, awaiting the arrival of our scattered family, and with no protectors save a faithful old negro couple. Each evening we would barricade as well as we could the entrance to the fort, as some slight protection against the hordes of newly freed negroes who roamed the country, living on whatever they could pick up. One evening when we had taken this precaution, some one was heard calling without, and, mounting the ramparts, I beheld a forlorn looking figure in black standing upon the outer edge of the trench. It proved to be Rosalie Poe; and when I had brought her into the light and warmth of the fire, I saw how changed and ill she appeared. She told me of the Mackenzies. Mrs. Mackenzie was dead. "Mat" (Mrs. Byrd) was a widow, with a beautiful young daughter, and her brother, Mr. Richard, was in wretched health. Miss Jane Mackenzie had died in England, leaving her fortune to her brother, residing there, and the destruction of the war had completed the poverty of the family. They lived on a little place in the country, with a cow and a garden as their chief means of support. "They have to work for a living now," Rose said, forlornly; "but I am not strong enough to work. I am going to Baltimore, to my relations there, and see what they can do for me." I inquired after young Dr. Mackenzie, gay, handsome, genial "Tom," whom everybody loved. "Tom is dead," said Rose, sadly. "He died of camp-fever and bad food. When he came home he had only the clothes which he wore, and a neighbor gave us something to bury him in." With a pang I thought of the gay wedding at Duncan Lodge, and the happy faces that had been there assembled. When Rose left me, I could but hope that she would be kindly received by her relatives in Baltimore. But some months thereafter, being in New York, I received from her a number of photographs of her brother, which she begged of me to dispose of for her benefit at one dollar each. Mrs. M. A. Kidder, of Boston, kindly interested herself in the matter, but wrote me that she met with but poor success, at even the reduced price of twenty-five cents, people saying that they had not sufficient respect for Poe's character to care to possess his portrait. I found it to be nearly the same in New York. And meantime Rose wrote me every few days. "DEAR S----: Haven't you got anything for me yet? Do try and do something for me, for I am worse off now than ever. I walk about the streets all day" (trying to dispose of her brother's pictures), "and at night have to look for a place to sleep. I feel like a lost sheep." Thus the sister of Edgar A. Poe, in the year 1868, wandered homeless and friendless through the streets of Baltimore, as more than thirty years previous her brother had done. We heard long afterward that, through some kind Northern lady, she applied for admittance to the _Louise Home_, in Washington, which Mr. Corcoran was willing to grant, but that certain of his "guests"--ladies who had formerly occupied high social positions--were of opinion that, considering Miss Poe's eccentricities, she would be better suited and better satisfied in a less pretentious establishment. Finally she was received into the "_Epiphany Church Home_," in Washington, where she seems to have enjoyed a good deal of liberty, being often seen riding on the street cars and visiting the offices of wealthy business men, who, if they did not care to possess a photograph of Poe, were yet willing to assist his penniless sister. It was never known what she did with the money so collected; but from a letter to Mrs. Byrd, it would appear that her intention was to purchase a grave for herself near that of her brother. Mrs. Byrd wrote to me: "I think Poe's friends might lay Rose in a grave beside him. It has always been her dearest wish." Rosalie Poe died suddenly, with a letter in her hand but that moment received, and which, when opened, proved to be from Mr. George W. Childs, enclosing a check for fifty dollars; doubtless in answer to an application for aid. They gave her a pauper's grave in the cemetery of the Epiphany Church Home. The record of her death by the Board is: "_Rosalie Poe. Died June 14, 1874. Aged 64._" Some years after the death of Rose Poe, I received a visit from Mrs. Byrd, whom I had not seen since the war, and we talked over times past and present. It had been Rosalie's own choice, she said, to go to Baltimore. She did not like the country or the hard life which they were leading. She must have collected considerable money, but never told where she kept it; nor was it ever found. She told me about her family. Her pretty daughter had married a poor man in preference to a rich one who had offered, and they had two beautiful babies and were very happy. Her brother Richard was infirm and able to do but little work. They had a little place in the country, where they raised their own vegetables, and sent poultry and eggs to market. She and her son-in-law did all the hard work about the place. "I wash and cook for six persons," said she, cheerily. "Yes," she continued, in her old quaint way, "we are poor, but respectable, and I am more content than ever I was at Duncan Lodge. I feel that I have something to live for, and the working life suits me. Yes, we are happy; although there are not two tea-cups in the house of the same pattern." She spoke of Poe, whom she considered to have been always unjustly treated. Everybody could see what his faults were, but few gave him credit for his good qualities--his generous nature and kindly and affectionate disposition, especially as exemplified in the harmony always existing between himself and his wife and mother-in-law. While giving the latter full credit for her devotion to Edgar, her impression was that, except in the matter of his dissipation, her influence over him had not been for good. Her mother and brother, John, believed that the marriage with Virginia had been the greatest misfortune of his life, and that he himself, while patiently resigning himself to his lot, had come to regard it as such. Some ten years after the death of Poe I received from Mrs. Clemm a letter giving a pathetic account of her homelessness and poverty. But, she added, she had been offered a home with her relatives at the South; and she appealed to me, as a friend of her "Eddie," to assist her in raising the money necessary to pay her expenses thither. A similar appeal she made to other of Poe's former friends; but we heard of her afterward as an inmate of the Church Home Infirmary in Baltimore, where she died in 1871, having outlived her son-in-law some twenty-two years. It is a curious coincidence that the building in which she died was the same in which, as the Washington Hospital, Poe had breathed his last. Her grave is in Westminster cemetery, and in sight of Poe's monument. CHAPTER XXXII. POE'S CHARACTER. In order thoroughly to understand Poe, it is necessary that one should recognize the dominant trait of his character--a trait which affected and in a measure overruled all the rest--in a word, _weakness of will_. "Unstable as water," is written upon Poe's every visage in characters which all might read; in the weak falling away of the outline of the jaw, the narrow, receding chin, and the sensitive, irresolute mouth. Above the soul-lighted eyes and the magnificent temple of intellect overshadowing them, we look in vain for the rising dome of _Firmness_, which, like the keystone of the arch, should strengthen and bind together the rest. Lacking this, the arch must be ever tottering to a fall. To this weakness of will we may trace nearly every other defect in Poe's character, together with most of the disappointments and failures in whatsoever he undertook. He lacked the resolution and persistence necessary to battle against obstacles, to persevere to the end against opposition and discouragement, and to resist temptations and influences which he knew would lead him astray from the object which he had at heart. In this way he lost many a coveted prize when it seemed almost within his grasp. The accepted opinion is that Poe's dissipation was his chief fault, as it was that to which was owing his ruin in the end. But even this was the effect chiefly of weakness of will. He was not by nature inclined to evil, but the contrary; and we have seen that, when left to himself and not exposed to temptation, he was, from all accounts, "sober, industrious and exemplary in his conduct." But he lacked firmness to resist the temptation which, more than in the case of most men, assailed him on every side. Dr. William Gibbon Carter has told me how, when Poe was in Richmond on his last visit, and doing his best to remain sober, he would in his visits and strolls about the city be constantly greeted by friends and acquaintances with invitations to "take a julep." It was the custom of the time. Poe, said Dr. Carter, in one morning declined twenty-four such invitations, but finally yielded; and the consequence was the severe illness which threatened his life whilst in the city. The effect of one glass on him, said the Doctor, was that of several on any other man. Often he was tempted to drink from an amiable reluctance to decline the offered hospitality. A marked peculiarity of Poe's character was the restless discontent which from his sixteenth year took possession of and clung to him through life, and was to him a source of much unhappiness. It was not the discontent of poverty or of ungratified worldly ambition, but the dissatisfaction of a genius which knows itself capable of higher things, from which it is debarred--the desire of the caged eagle for the wind-swept sky and the distant eyrie. He was not satisfied with being a mere writer of stories. He believed that, with a broader scope, he could wield a powerful influence over the literary world and make a record for strength, brilliancy and originality of thought which would render his name famous in other countries as in this. His desire was to set established rules and conventionalities at defiance, and to be fearless, independent, dominant in his assertion of himself and his ideas and convictions. As an editor writing for other editors, he found himself trammeled by what he called their narrowness and timidity. He must be his own master, his own editor; and hence his lifelong dream and desire took form in the conception of the Stylus--that _ignis fatuus_ which he pursued to the last day of his life--uncertain, elusive, yet ever eagerly sought, and always ending in disappointment and bitterness of soul. Time and again it seemed within his grasp, and, as he exultantly proclaimed, "his prospects glorious," when, by his own weakness of will, it was lost to him. Undoubtedly, one of the chief factors in the non-success of Poe's life and its consequent unhappiness was his marriage. Setting aside the poetic imaginings which have been and doubtless will continue to be written concerning this marriage as one of idylic mutual love and "idolatry," the story, in the light of established facts, resolves itself into a very prosaic one. Mr. John Mackenzie, Poe's lifelong and only intimate and confidential friend, never hesitated to say that had Poe been left to himself the idea would never have occurred to him of marrying his little child-cousin. In no transaction of his life was his pitiable weakness more manifest than in this feeble yielding of himself to the dominant will of a mother-in-law. Had Poe remained single or have married another than Virginia, his regard for her would have continued just what it had been in the beginning and what it remained to the end--the affection of a brother or cousin for a sweet and lovable child. But no one can believe that Poe's nature could have found its satisfying in such a marriage; and, in fact, whatsoever sentimental things he may have written concerning it, his whole conduct goes to prove its insincerity. Poe was of all men one who most craved and needed the love and sympathy of a woman of a nature kindred to his own--a woman of talent and qualities of mind and heart to appreciate his genius and all that was best in him; one who would be to him not only a congenial companion, but a "helpmeet" as well. Had he married one of Mrs. Osgood's tender sensibilities and feminine charm, or Mrs. Whitman, with her talent and strong character, or even a woman of the practical good sense and judgment of Mrs. Shew, who knew so well how to care for him mentally and physically--Poe would have been a different man. But his imprudent and, as it has been called, unnatural marriage, cut him off from what would probably have been the highest happiness of his life, with its accompanying worldly and social advantages, and bound him down to a life of unceasing toil, penury and helplessness. It deprived him of a social position and social enjoyment; for his poverty-stricken "home" was never one to which he could invite his friends; and he himself seems never to have found in it any real pleasure, but to have regarded it merely as a haven of refuge in seasons of distress. But as the years went by and, despite his incessant toil, his life and his home grew more cheerless and poverty-stricken, he became hopeless and in a measure reckless. It is to be noted that it was only after the death of his wife that he appeared to recover anything like hope or energy. Then his prospects suddenly brightened in the love of a good and talented woman who could have made his life happy and prosperous, when, owing to his miserable weakness of will in yielding to temptation, for which there was no excuse, it was all at once swept from his grasp. Mr. John Mackenzie might well have said, as he did, that Poe's marriage was the greatest misfortune of his life and as a millstone around his neck, holding him down against every effort to rise. But perhaps not even this close friend knew how keenly the poet must have felt the narrowness of his life, the sordidness of his home, and the humiliation of his poverty. Patiently and uncomplainingly he bore his unhappy lot; and it is to be noted to his credit that howsoever he might at times go astray, no word or act of unkindness toward the wife and mother who loved him was ever known to escape from him. It will be seen from all that has here been written, in the light of prosaic truth, that Poe's real character was one very different from that which it has pleased the world in general to ascribe to him--judging him as it does by the character of his writings as a poet. The folly of such judgment, and the extent to which it was until recently carried, is simply surprising. It is true that he appeared to have but one ideal--the death of a woman young, lovely and beloved--and that ideal in the imagining of the world resolved itself into the personality of his wife. She, they concluded, was the original of all the Lenores, and Anabel Lees, and Ullalumes, which inspired his melancholy and despairing lyre; and in its gloom and hopelessness they could see nothing but the expression of the poet's own nature. As well have accused Rembrandt of being gloomy and morose because he painted in dark colors. Like the artist, Poe loved obscure and sombre ideas and conceptions, and he delighted in embodying these in his poems as much as Rembrandt did in transferring his own to canvas. APPENDIX. NO. 1. Lest the reader should be under the impression that much of what I relate concerning Poe's childhood and certain circumstances connected with his early youth is taken from Gill's _Life of Poe_, I will make an explanation. At the time when the first edition of Gill's work was issued I was engaged in writing what I intended to be a little book concerning Poe, compiled from my own personal knowledge of him and what I had been told by others. In some way Gill heard of this, and wrote to me, coolly requesting to be allowed to see my manuscript, which I, of course, excused myself from doing. Again and again he wrote, saying that he "merely wished to see exactly what I had written." In self-defence, I finally sent him the first part or chapter of the manuscript, he promising to return it as soon as read. After some weeks it was returned to me, without a word accompanying; and at the same time a second edition of Gill's "_Life_" was issued--the first having been suppressed--in which, to my surprise, I found copious extracts from my manuscript. All those little anecdotes of Poe's childhood were thus appropriated, with more important matter--such as Poe's dissipation when in Richmond and his enlisting in the army, both of which Gill had in his first edition positively denied; and this he made use of as though it had been his own original material. My book was, of course, ruined, and all that I could do was, some years after, to write "_The Last Days of Poe_," published in _Scribner's Magazine_, though even from this Gill made "_Notes_" for the Appendix of his second or third edition. Some of the material thus appropriated by Gill I have reclaimed and inserted in this work. A comparison between the first and second edition of Gill's "_Life of Poe_" affords a curious study, since in the second he has carefully corrected the misstatements of the former from my manuscript. My friend, Gen. Roger A. Pryor, late Judge of the Supreme Court of New York, brought suit against Gill in this matter, but met with so much trouble and annoyance by reason of the latter's persistence in evading it, that it was finally, at my own earnest request, abandoned. Mr. Gill, I am informed, is still living. NOTE 2. A strange fate was that of the poet's family, all of whom were indebted to charity for a last resting place. His father, David Poe, died in Norfolk in the summer of 1811. His grave is unknown. His mother was buried by charity in Richmond, December 9, 1811. His wife was indebted for a grave near Fordham, in New York, to charitable contributions of friends. His sister, Rosalie Mackenzie Poe, died July 14, 1874, and was given a pauper's grave in the cemetery of the Epiphany Church Home, in Washington. Mrs. Clemm, his mother-in-law, died an inmate of the Church Home Infirmary, Baltimore, and was buried by the charity of friends in Westminster churchyard of that city in 1871. 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3393	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Studies of Lowell by William Dean Howells STUDIES OF LOWELL I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in 1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866; and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did? I. It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box. My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have made me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both. He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes humorous and always touching. Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my enthusiasm. That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions of people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. In the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own. II. Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as "the village": for so he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was charming to be treated 'da signore', but he seemed to doubt whether it was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty to the American ideal. It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical interest of the time in Lowell's talk. It had been all about literature and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years. He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old, with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening, and his father saying, "Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives here--what little boy?" At another time he pointed out a certain window in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his father's fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship. III. My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6 writing in the office of 'The Nation'. I contributed several sketches of Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he bade me "sweat the Heine out of" me, "as men sweat the mercury out of their bones." When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation); and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me. He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton's, for one of the Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the "Claudian Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like "Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?" "You are in Cambridge, Mr. Howells," Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion. Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, "Goodnight, fellow-townsman." "I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen," I returned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon me; and that he was coming very soon. He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk. These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit listener's surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early kindness for them. IV. In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American custom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence. This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the anti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord with Lowell's feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone. There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded, he spoke of her as "The Land of Broken Promise." It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who love their country most among us. It is well to hold one's country to her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do not suppose it was the "common man" of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender of the common man's hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with them, too, as it was in "the time when the slave would not let him sleep." He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he "--not of the race That hawk, their sorrows in the market place," but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his table. He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics owed him. They were "to do as they were bid," and yet he had a tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man's indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, "Siete il benvenuto," or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with him in the region where we were most at home together. Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the truth that he would not question it even in jest. If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago." He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered all his adoration and despair in one word. "Damn!" he said, and no more. I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the 'somma poeta'. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe that he was full of quaint humor. V. While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a failure. "But I shall never finish it," he sighed, as if he felt irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through its personages. He enjoyed writing such a poem as "The Cathedral," which is not of his best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him; perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a second revision go back to the first version. He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it. In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning's post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession, the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers's "Among the Laurels" by Lowell's "Foot-path." He was not only much more sensitive of others' rights than his own, but in spite of a certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them. VI. At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses, and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste, their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her a great kiss, with the words, "You are a very good girl, my dear," and practically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them, and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run. I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought him out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, what might not one expect of American democracy! His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from the elms and the syringas where "The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang." From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last, in the southwest corner of the house, was his study. There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night yet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's, and he was familiarly in and out at Mr. Norton's, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell. For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than of winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow's house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up with their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal punishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very reverent of other people's religious feelings. He expressed a special tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was so vast, and we saw such a little part of it. As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double. He then said he used often to see people's Doppelganger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of 'em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this one seldom. Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only very rarely, the human nature of some story "unmeet for ladies" was too much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men, though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life. He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road even if it had some dirt sticking to it. He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the country, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure; but this was after all less envy than a fine regret. At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell's dress or bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, were notably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows; neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember. When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music. Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well from the ground. VII. It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born. But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides, Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching, however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the 'Biglow Papers' were all the talk. I need not declare that there was nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the eyes of the public. "I see that you have dropped me this year," he wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to believe the truth when I told him. He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends. If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment. This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang. He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father had planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood! VIII. In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he was an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it. The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called 'Among My Books' and 'My Study Windows'. He wished to name these more soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a literary way, he submitted to others' judgment in all such matters. I doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without reference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal handsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had done their part. He held up four fingers, "Quattro," he said in Italian, and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, "I thought they might have made it cinque." Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the payment to me. "It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a watch." I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money "Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give." more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to money. He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line "The silvern chords of the piano trembled," he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of another piece: "And what she would, would rather that she would not" he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last word made it "public-school English," and he mocked it with the answer a maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at home. She said, "No, sir, he is not," when she ought to have said "No, sir, he isn't." He was appeased when I came back the next day with the stanza amended so that the verse could read: "And what she would, would rather she would not so" but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince. He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories: my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying, "You're rather shady, there, old fellow." But he would not have had me too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his scholarship. His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on very well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not bear to cut anything. IX. He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would have-been an act of bad faith. He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and left him heart-loose as he had not been before. I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he gave a quick "Ah!" and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we turned into his study without further allusion to the matter. A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said with a sigh of vague reluctance, "I should like to see a play of Calderon," as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could still be fulfilled. "Upon this hint I acted," and in due time it was found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid. X. When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it. But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I should not lose anything of their charm. He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England, and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society, perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country, slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders, but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a recognition of it as suffering. He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of a young man's. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, was still "You young dog" to him. It was a bright and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he had to gratify in that way. He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight terminate in Lord Percy's coming "To hammer stone for life in Concord jail." It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who are not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from the frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he spoke it. We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books; when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication, and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, "Fanny, that was a fine dinner you gave us." Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great that people spoke of him seriously, as "an addition to society" in London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness. XI. In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American's coming into his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up. With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the courage of my convictions, both literary and social. He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction, though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness the delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years, and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to wish it. XII. After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so agreeable to him. It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr. Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump difference--unless he disliked the differer. For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at home. One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly he lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years. His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here. He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by saying, "I like you because you don't put your hands on me," and I heard of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, "Yes, if they won't shake hands." Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth. He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life. He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance, he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies, and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, and his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time shown himself so cheerful. It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two o'clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels. Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I shall not look upon his like. I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either alone. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: I believe neither in heroes nor in saints It is well to hold one's country to her promises Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave 
3394	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--The White Mr. Longfellow by William Dean Howells THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few, and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses; across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel. I. It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not one livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike, who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of amazing depth and thickness. The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say, in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests; they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the income of the poorest. In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun., John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons, Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte, when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a partial rehearsal of them, "Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from your front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!" Everybody had written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the cities of men. II. We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House. Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the 'Paradiso', and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve. The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named, was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that, the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines: I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion, believe thoroughly in Longfellow's plan. When I read his version my sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to him. All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good, for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness. I remember the poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes, "Unhappily, it is obsolete." I dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked. When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss. III. In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields's story or Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his unequalled intuitions. The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate, as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the cayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's astonishing how fond these fellows are of pepper." The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough awake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of natural history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. "Yes, I've dropped a red pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen." "Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to save him from worse, and turned the talk. I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I remember once Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which intellectual people like to play with. I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now," he demanded, "what do you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen." One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck. Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our whole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the champagne even surprisingly fine. "But," he said to his host, who now told the story, "it cawn't be genuine, you know!" Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with him at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put him aboard. "Put him aboard, and don't leave him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get off." These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!" There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb and the city on the street railways. "I did think," Longfellow pathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little respite from L., but he walks out." In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I think these things are more adapted to music than the magazine," and this seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I answered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to music." He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker now. IV. The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in. Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress, and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury, which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her feet. "Dust is in her beautiful eyes," and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place took Longfellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow's study where he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall clock in their angle. The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his devotions. "He rebuked him," said Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing his scabbard at his head." All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a design of the poet's own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it. Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: "Does it kick? Does it kick?" No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was one most memorable supper, when he read the "Bigelow Paper" he had finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been "Butchered to make a blind man's holiday." The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow's old friend George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him upon his arm again for their return to the study. He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow's translation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands. V. After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why don't you do that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?" The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace. He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers at home; some people complained of a certain 'gene' in him; and he had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell's did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York. You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer's himself, and we often found ourselves together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but they were always signed in autograph. I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat and overshoes. I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him, and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire; in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed to "Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow," which he said was the very most amusing superscription he had ever seen. It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected, and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said, firmly, "Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can't accept a decoration from a Catholic prince." His decision was from his conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will approve his decision. VI. Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of "Olimipico something." But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands, few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the "Psalm of Life" in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party. Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as I can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments. No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which he did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of "Longfellow and other Plagiarists," Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe's case. He very, very rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which he did not fail to share with all who live. He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their company if they continued to assail him. But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could never have done that sort of thing himself. It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often have been urged upon him. Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they reached Boston. His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the indefatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant. The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners and men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest. The poet's heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of "The Challenge," then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the fancy of "The poverty-stricken millions Who challenge our wine and bread, And impeach us all as traitors, Both the living and the dead," his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, "Yes, I often think of those things." He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not see the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him. VII. When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: "Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and the "Courtship of Miles Standish" were by that time old stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another. The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth," in the third part of "Tales of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success. About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer wished to produce his "Masque of Pandora," with music, and he was patient when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of his generous character, had taken my play of "A Counterfeit Presentment," and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the performance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors and employees of the theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery, those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration, intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, and made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers produced from their persons. He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first and loudest. Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected to offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, "I wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming, he named his fellow-guests!" I answered that though I should probably never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and good friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too confidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful informality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from him saying, in effect, "Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night, and I want you to come too. There will be no one else but Greene and myself, and we will have an Italian dinner." Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow's table on terms like these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote risk of wounding my friend's susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere. Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must have some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box," said Longfellow, and he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the smile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, that time." At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?" Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no knowledge of it except that it had been Washington's headquarters. Of course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general regard to the public welfare. I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and them. I never heard from him anything that was 'de haut en bas', when he spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and Longfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. He disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption from it. VIII. Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But this leniency of Longfellow's was what constituted him great as well as good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he had no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come from the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himself to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said of him was that he had 'gene', and this was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found 'gene' in a celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, "Give my love to the White Mr. Longfellow." A good many, years before Longfellow's death he began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were going about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he would not be aware of having slept. "But," he would add, with his heavenly patience, "I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so long." I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm. After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not find him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar, and a maid showed her face wet with tears. "How is Mr. Longfellow?" I palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, "Oh, the poor gentleman has just departed!" I turned away as if from a helpless intrusion at a death-bed. At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where "Dead he lay among his books," in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow's noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify it with "the peace of God." All who were left of his old Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson. He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: "The gentleman we have just been burying," he said, to the friend who had come with him, "was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name." I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should be published. There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite fragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself. What Longfellow's place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say; that is Time's affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Anglo-American genius for ugliness Backed their credulity with their credit Candle burning on the table for the cigars Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse Literary dislikes or contempts Memory will not be ruled Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be 
3395	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell Holmes by William Dean Howells OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies. Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS. of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the better for good society. Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician, in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities. Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian, something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston, and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality. II. In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the 'Nation' claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position. To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be. The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the book, and not liked him. "I understood, of course," he said, "that he was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that this was by all means my own understanding too. His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat. The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. "And if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face, "you don't know anything." We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards barbarism. The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew." "I am, I am," said the doctor. "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive, I'm alive!" Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant. III. He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter, however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston. It was at certain meetings of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as convincing as the natural. There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him, far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the error concerning him. It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his "medicated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things of the soul. IV. In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls; and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men; we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences, however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity. "Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be trampled on; but I can't do that. If they want to be trampled on, they must get some one else." He thought that our American way was infinitely better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies, when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-side. The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness. Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be. I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher, then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter. His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems, it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it. We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating. The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own mind. V. He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch, and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen, in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said "Eh, b'en," instead of "Eh, bien." He knew that we must be always on the lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times three? I can stand it!" He himself gave in the generous fulness he desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently. In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New England than otherwise. It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse, somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own detriment from it. VI. After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often, and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity. He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter; and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor. He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz, of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime. For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world. But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own; he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind. It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note, going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary," which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him. VII. As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you? Come up, come up!" and I found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits. The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best. It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France. He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won; nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more. The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of it before. "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness." He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure. Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going. Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a thing could have been. He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others, and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it, though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series. D.W.]--that unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already; the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge. VIII. I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?" He added, to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable: "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet, The lowliest home where human hearts have beat? Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain, A century's showery torrents wash in vain; Its starving orchard where the thistle blows, And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows; Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen Next an old roof, or where a roof has been; Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds, Man's mute companions following where he leads; Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads, Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds; Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb; Its roses breathing of the olden time; All the poor shows the curious idler sees, As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees, Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell, Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!" The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and "There," he said, "isn't it so? The cellar and the well--they can't be thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest and defy decay." He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to which they give the final touch. He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present, as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other people's, and who was not wont "To bait his homilies with his brother worms." At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous; but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing. In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism, he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong. He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. "He was ten years younger than I," said the doctor. I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so. That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly nature. In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear, he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I love to think is all that divides us." Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women, and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and "Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have found them in his book, and forgotten it. He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh, of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads. Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed, that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region, and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach of its salt breath. I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array. When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take, as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that he would have found in actually going. I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood, through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that which every reader receives from his work. That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation, no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him. IX. It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I, for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive Appeared to have no grudge left Could make us feel that our faults were other people's Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy He was not bored because he would not be He was not constructive; he was essentially observant His readers trusted and loved him Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities Old man's tendency to revert to the past Person who wished to talk when he could listen Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous Secret of the man who is universally interesting Sought the things that he could agree with you upon Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity Study in a corner by the porch Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best Times when a man's city was a man's country Turn of the talk toward the mystical Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity 
3396	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It by William Dean Howells LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the destinies of the great literary periodical of New England. I. I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin, for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the "splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by no means fully represent. The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the case is now different, and the best known among living American writers are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism. Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law, science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have anything like a national literature; but that was something like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as Holmes's, such humor and humanity as Lowell's. The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself. Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or 'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense. This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of the mother-country. III. The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was, then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we can feel only "When a great thought strikes along the brain And flushes all the cheek." When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with Fields himself. We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune reduced the size and number of its periodicals. 'The Young Folks' was sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the 'Atlantic Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership, and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one unkindness. IV. But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and 'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical literature to itself. It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it. Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's "Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, "A New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to that city every winter from her native town. By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was a most beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient of the pallor of words. She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and 'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life. Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years. V. I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from neighborhood was just begun. Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P. Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrogative habit of mind. He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater than his sense of it. I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed. Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory of all who ever knew him. Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone. It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor which characterizes the whole American people. I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of 'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having used in my 'Venetian Life' the Briticism 'directly' for 'as soon as.' Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession, because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests, which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with the gentle courtesy which welcomed me. Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its youth. I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps; perhaps." He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy; and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting them so contemporaneously. VII. The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it. Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, "Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city endures. VIII. The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him. If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one to whose vision "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, Vast images in glimmering dawn, Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an 'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his character, his personality, his identity fully persisted. I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) that there had been an abuse of it. IX. The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who were Foes to good manners. Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure. There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them. After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds. X. Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a world too vast to be the test that her own "One entire and perfect crysolite" would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it, accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader for a last revision in the plates. It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person. Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so. In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a differentiation of the New England type which was not less characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages; but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge, where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later. His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full; whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a great distinction. It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton, another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him, and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh discoverer. There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war. Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence. The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him. He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Celia Thaxter Charles F. Browne Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces Edmund Quincy Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense Few men last over from one reform to another Francis Parkman Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature Got out of it all the fun there was in it Greeting of great impersonal cordiality Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event Julia Ward Howe Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking Pointed the moral in all they did Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast Whitman's public use of his privately written praise 
3397	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Roundabout to Boston by William Dean Howells ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart's content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he was. I. Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as letters to the 'Boston Advertiser', after vainly offering them to more aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great new series of the 'Biglow Papers' gathered volume with the force they had from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking. At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree. I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London. Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives, especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in "the dress of an American gentleman." The morning after his arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which, according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his newspapers from the general rule. Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the Lieutenant-Governor, and "How fortunate," he added, when we were got back into the gondola, "that I should have happened to bring my court dress with me!" I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister. I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley, except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, "to act officiously, not officially, in the matter," and the hapless claimant got what was left of his estate. I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his worshipper's own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted, single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were not so many as they have since become. For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well thought of in every way. At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister, could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna. II. One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States, according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics. I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but I had read, before I met him, his novel of 'Archy Moore, or The White Slave', which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent, silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came. I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round, "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way," and so left the room. I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a deserting sailor must be kept in the consul's custody till some vessel of our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy. Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit, and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to attest the authenticity of the American eagle. III. Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for "Recent Italian Comedy." It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing. Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand, at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer, try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes, almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it. The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction, never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book. I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them. At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in the book called Italian Journeys. But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens. At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late into the night, and early into the morning. About two o'clock, when all the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice: "If you have a friend to dine, Give him your best wine; If you have two, The second-best will do." As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people, for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to me as if we were equal in deed and in fame? The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and bidding each other the 'Dorma bene' which has the quality of a benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement it holds highest and best. IV. I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati; there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere, and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight. My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard's. "Get a basis," said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised with him, among other acquaintances. "Get a salaried place, something regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest." But it was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis, though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects. There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper, then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well, we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been buying my material. I had begun printing in the 'Nation' those letters about my Italian journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the 'Nation'. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week, and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the skies. This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it (not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an end. I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned high, to my heart's content, of literary things with them and him. With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality. There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself. There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. "Whose hand is this, Lorry?" he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, "whose hand is this?" Then there was nothing for Graham but to say, "It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly down without a word. V. It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters, and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in discussing an obscure point in Browning's poem of 'My Last Duchess'. I have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis's personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy. He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer, his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in literature, for the 'Howadji' books, and for the lovely fantasies of 'Prue and I', and for the sound-hearted satire of the 'Potiphar Papers', and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him. His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic, though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women's rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little question of their own honesty. I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in concerning him. There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor, the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts. VI. Of those evenings at the Taylors' in New York, I can recall best the one which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr. and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly, "Don't despise Boston!" and I answered, as we shook hands, "Few are worthy to live in Boston." It was New-Year's eve, and that night it came on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the 'Atlantic Monthly'. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the 'Nation', and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor & Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Act officiously, not officially Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong George William Curtis Give him your best wine Longfellow Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions Motley Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong Women's rights 
3398	----	LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES by William Dean Howells CONTENTS: Biographical My First Visit to New England First Impressions of Literary New York LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Visit to New England BIBLIOGRAPHICAL Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work. Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring to share them with the reader. The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here, beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend, the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect of portraiture; and this I did my best to do. It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New England in quality. While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories, with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own. There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call the book by that name who likes. Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of 1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the "hochst angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live here with those who live here no more. W. D. H. LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE--My First Visit to New England MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches, and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet. But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio, as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs. I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our houses, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be answered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus." There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twenty are. II. That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met. I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him know that: "Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren," that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press, and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit. In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet, my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing. Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom I afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he had not shone in ours. III At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines from time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper's, and in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself after his hour on the platform. He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto, and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say, to my great amaze and happiness, "Hello, here's Howells!" "Oh," I broke out upon him, "I was just looking for some one I knew. I hope you are some one who knows me!" "Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the young fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment. He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy, four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known them, were apt to make me sick. I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me, or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at Doctor-------'s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversation ended. He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic or the public. He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training. I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me of the early thirties! I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I expect to use it in the other world." Yea, that made it worth while, I consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As sure as I am of this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith which spoke in his voice and was more than his words. I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement, were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his life. IV I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not, was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters, in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs. Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she was still writing. This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time, and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then, when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named. I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto, and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner's, the Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were still unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity. Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham's Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame. V. Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey; but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features, and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look, and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at home. At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment. Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to, and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude. But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe, now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I got my friend to show me "----the breezy dome of groves, The shadows of Deering's woods," because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and tenderest poems; and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the "---black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tides tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea," mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond vision of the poet's past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or a later time that I went to revere "--the dead captains as they lay In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay, where they in battle died," but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under "--the trees which shadow each well-known street, As they balance up and down," for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I well remember. The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature, or that might be associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them together. VI. I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop, with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my memory. The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities, which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia, where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to the tree that stood "Auf brennender Felsenwand." Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold height, I am in doubt to this day. I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again. If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston. VII. I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day. I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order, ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man, coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to excel in fashion. I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited Haverhill, too, before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in, and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston, there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been, professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets. That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my earlier ignorance. I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken. The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in the "groves of academe" at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of "Old Harvard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now. It must have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past, and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near the Delta. Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fable for Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably. But in the 'Vision of Sir Launfal' and the 'Legend of Brittany' he had won a liking if not a listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American poet, "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love," and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender rhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something of the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me; I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the Christ-look which Page's portrait has flattered in it. His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation, the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an artistic sense of beauty in the instrument. I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something about Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense, that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house, which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "James Howel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken; but "The love he bore to learning was at fault" for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that is all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." He said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections, for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of type. He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time. I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo, that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, "I commonly do that the first time," as if it were a frequent habit with him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically. VIII. We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later. I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war begun in Jackson's time was then silently stretching itself under its long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert at Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like enough to warrant me in addressing him. He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks, which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my place. I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery, unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature, and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced. I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets, though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds, that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me, for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before, pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about him of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thought that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of 'The Amber Gods' who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides, it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then very much longed to have. They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury," but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him. In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the rules that govern us with common men. IX. My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt, if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor & Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr. Fields's little room at the back of the store, with its window looking upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, "I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold." But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the moment all my pleasure and pride. It was 'The Pilot's Story,' which I suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out upon him with the demand: "What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint Louis?" I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural enough, and he had made the line read: "What will you say to our boy when he cries for 'Ma,' there in Saint Louis?" He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr. Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters, and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's. But the publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it, but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which had nearly been my end. X. As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people in some little upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards able to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was there with him. Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination, and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty. His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected to find myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile, the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four. A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure were complete. Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I felt through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands." I took his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially boys together. I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Lowell's incandescent sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the 'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing could induce him to use 'neath for beneath, no exigency of versification or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion. Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion" was the most popularly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty. Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house had just published his "Marble Faun," and who had recently come home on the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't know that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel." They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the dinner-bell." What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted. Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of the dinner 'a la Russe', as it was then called, only from books; and it was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petits verres' of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether visionary. Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the morning. XI. I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full "beard as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the London tailor. Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me; and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my day. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler. The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in the visible measure of it. In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, and whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the contemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, "Come up and see the sad English sunset!" which had an instant value to me such as some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well as 'The Marble Faun'. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and I made no question of it myself. After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight of authors' copies, and volumes invaluable with the autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words. I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked. But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher in the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and that made a whole world's difference. XII. The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation, which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic. Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table the cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at the publisher's in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to it. "Ah, yes," he said; "but this is the flower of the souchong; it is the blossom, the poetry of tea," and then he told me how it had been given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay. The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the publisher's, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close, and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned with a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself. I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to one Congregational Church in Columbus. Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise. It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit of fire-eating. I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as early as I could, and as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. XIII. I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but pathos to this day. I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well for me to be standing by, "With sick and scornful looks averse," while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they rested from their toil. I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord, past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys. From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the glisten of the open fields. I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off, began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the high excitement of the prodigious adventure. XV. Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon; and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have been difficult even in a Heinesque poem. I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne, and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me, doubly enriched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I were to see him at all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some easier means of escaping me. The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many pictures of it. But Hawthorne's look was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one night at Longfellow's table, when one of the guests happened to speak of the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell said, after a glance at it, "Yes, it's good; but it hasn't his fine 'accipitral' [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.] look." In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have instantly felt him to be a personage. I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers, and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or Lowell had. With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself, as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention, that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is still strange to his countrymen. Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case, where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, "This is my library." I knew that men were his books, and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my finger on the 'Blithedale Romance' and said that I preferred that to the others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans liked that best too. Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things; and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got away, to be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness, the little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul. Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything, for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from his hand; the 'Marble Faun' had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer interval than usual, the 'Blithedale Romance', and the 'House of Seven Gables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his name higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his difference from all men evermore. I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling, but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less veridical for all that. XVI. I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all. He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then, when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon. It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth I was then. XVII. Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again is not the word. It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many; yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be leading the thought of the world. I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a neighbor. "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is a mere mush," and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy. He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say that I had never heard of him. I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner, and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his "pleached garden" a little, and then we came again into his library, where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did. "Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson. "Poe's," I said again. "Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!" I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down, with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then. A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused retreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point of ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note, and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither, and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage, and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there could be none in this. But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes, "Why, how old are you?" "I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again. "Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!" In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy, I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New England. LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Impressions of Literary New York by William Dean Howells FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860, which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark, after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the literary situation in the metropolis. I. Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could, for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters, it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere. What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of respectability. If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were a Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that fashion myself, but I had not the courage. This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses. There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did. They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure, yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this may be the secret of Boston. II. It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone," the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then; I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with "Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken very seriously by me. In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so distinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful by their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away. It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes came to Pfaff's: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow was cast forward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse and the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the 'Saturday Press'. I felt that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they had very good at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of my commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous space under the pavement. There were writers for the 'Saturday Press' and for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for worse things till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material. It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and still waits its second palingenesis. The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a passage from a private letter of Emerson's, though I believe he would not have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness. As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very "imperial anarch" in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better; there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial, such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's emotions; yet I would not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does, and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly, fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me and spoke to me. III. That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the Bohemians for me, and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that table under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards, that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could have done, in some respects. My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and the mountains. The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time, but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting, and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life, and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half, and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war, when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was incredibly inexpensive. After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of. IV. I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston and Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though the Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine, though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before. After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor, of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised. I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince, but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President's secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I could have done at Rome on a fifth of it. If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr. Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written, and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughing together, in the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before; but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand, did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion. V. I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O'Connor, at the house of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fat peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered round the first fires of autumn, O'Connor would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, "Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the air." He was not wrong; only the victory was for the other aide. Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of 'Leaves of Grass', and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know. Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a friend's house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness, and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business, and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors. But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else. But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many; but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each said how much he liked certain thing of the other's; I even seized my advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem, for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic sense of fitness, "Forlorn," and I tried it first with the 'Atlantic Monthly', which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a former editor of 'Harper's Monthly', but he could not see his advantage in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning with the 'Fortnightly Review', sent it to him for me. It was promptly returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of Mr. Lucas's death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the office of the 'Nation' newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr. Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its misfortunes endeared it to its author. But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like sitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avenged if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up so stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its votaries. I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very, very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would write like any one but herself. I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the time at least no "----rumor of oppression or defeat, Of unsuccessful or successful war," could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for me as anything I could think of. The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant young Irishman who had dazzled us with his story of "The Diamond Lens," and frozen our blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--"What was It"--a ghost that could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound received in battle. VI. Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston, which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At dinner (which we had at two o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he said of me to his wife: "Think of his having got Stillman's place! We ought to put poison in his wine," and he told me of the wish the painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin's work there in a book of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune. The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist, traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written myself. At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He died in it, at last. In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance. As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring women. ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust Became gratefully strange Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like Charles Reade Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it Death of the joy that ought to come from work Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two Edward Everett Hale Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it Emerson Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love Heine Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life I did not know, and I hated to ask I find this young man worthy If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal Incredible in their insipidity Industrial slavery Lincoln Love of freedom and the hope of justice Lowell Man who had so much of the boy in him Men who took themselves so seriously as that need Met with kindness, if not honor Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Never paid in anything but hopes of paying Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century Remember the dinner-bell Seen through the wrong end of the telescope Stoddard Things common to all, however peculiar in each Thoreau Visited one of the great mills Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness Wit that tries its teeth upon everything 
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34313	----	LITERATURE IN THE MAKING BY SOME OF ITS MAKERS PRESENTED BY JOYCE KILMER [Illustration] HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published April, 1917 TO LOUIS BEVIER, PH.D., LITT.D. AND LOUIS BEVIER, JR. CONTENTS PAGE _WAR STOPS LITERATURE_ 3 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS William Dean Howells, the foremost American novelist of his generation, was born at Martin's Ferry, Ohio, March 11, 1837. Most of his many novels have been realistic and sympathetic studies of contemporary American life. For some years he has written "The Editor's Easy Chair" in _Harper's Magazine_. He has received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Columbia, and in 1915 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him its Gold Medal "For distinguished work in fiction." _The Daughter of the Storage_ and _Years of My Youth_ are his latest books. _THE JOYS OF THE POOR_ 19 KATHLEEN NORRIS Kathleen Norris was born in San Francisco, California, July 16, 1880. She is the wife of Charles Gilman Norris, himself a writer and the brother of the late Frank Norris. Among Mrs. Norris's best-known novels are _Mother_, _The Story of Julia Page_, and _The Heart of Rachel_. _NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART_ 35 BOOTH TARKINGTON Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, July 29, 1869. A prolific and brilliant writer, he has scored many successes of different types, being the author of the romantic drama _Monsieur Beaucaire_, and of many novels dealing with contemporary Middle-Western life. Recently he has, in _Seventeen_ and the "Penrod" stories, given his attention to the comedies and tragedies of American youth. _ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR_ 45 MONTAGUE GLASS Montague Glass was born at Manchester, England, July 23, 1877. Coming in his youth to the United States, he brought into American fiction a new type--that of the metropolitan Jewish-American business man. His _Potash and Perlmutter_ and _Abe and Mawruss_ have given him a European as well as an American reputation. _THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE_ 63 REX BEACH Rex Beach was born at Atwood, Michigan, September 1, 1877. His novels deal chiefly with the West and the North, and his favorite theme is adventurous life in the open. Among his best-known books are _The Spoilers_, _The Silver Horde_, and _Rainbow's End_. _WHAT IS GENIUS?_ 75 ROBERT W. CHAMBERS Robert W. Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, May 26, 1865. One of the most widely read writers of his time, he has given his attention chiefly to English and American society, making it the theme of a large number of novels, among which may be mentioned _The Fighting Chance_, _Japonette_, and _Athalie_. _DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY_ 89 JAMES LANE ALLEN James Lane Allen was born near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1849. In 1886 he gave up his profession of teaching to devote his attention to literature. Many of his novels deal with the South. Of them perhaps _The Kentucky Cardinal_ and _The Choir Invisible_ are best known. _SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES_ 101 HARRY LEON WILSON Harry Leon Wilson was born in Oregon, Illinois, May 1, 1867. He was co-author with Booth Tarkington of _The Man from Home_, and his _Bunker Bean_ and _Ruggles of Red Gap_ have given him a great reputation for irresistible and peculiarly American humor. _THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_ 119 EDWARD S. MARTIN Edward Sandford Martin was born in Willowbrook, Owasco, New York, January 2, 1856. His keen yet sympathetic observation of modern life finds expression in essays, many of which have been used editorially in Life. Several volumes of his essays have been published, among which may be mentioned _The Luxury of Children, and Some Other Luxuries_ and _Reflections of a Beginning Husband_. _COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT_ 131 ROBERT HERRICK Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 26, 1868. He has been until recently a professor at the University of Chicago. He is a critic and a writer of realistic novels. _The Web of Life_, _The Common Lot_, _Together_, and _Clark's Field_ are novels that show Mr. Herrick's questioning attitude toward some modern social institutions. _SIXTEEN DON'TS FOR POETS_ 145 ARTHUR GUITERMAN Arthur Guiterman was born of American parents in Vienna, Austria, November 28, 1871. He is a writer of deft and humorous light verse, of which a volume was recently published under the title _The Laughing Muse_. He contributes a weekly rhymed review to _Life_. _MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION_ 157 GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON George Barr McCutcheon was born on a farm in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, July 26, 1866. He is a short-story writer and novelist, devoting himself chiefly to tales of adventure. _Beverley of Graustark_ and the volumes that succeeded it have gained him many admirers among lovers of romance. _BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART_ 169 FRANK H. SPEARMAN Frank H. Spearman was born at Buffalo, New York, September 6, 1859. He is known both as a short-story writer and a writer of articles on economic topics. His novels are founded chiefly on themes dealing with the great industrial enterprises of the West, especially the railroads. The best known of these are _The Daughter of a Magnate_ and _The Strategy of Great Railroads_. _THE NOVEL MUST GO_ 187 WILL N. HARBEN Will N. Harben, who was born in Dalton, Georgia, July 5, 1858, began his career in business in the South. His entrance into literature began with the assistant editorship of the _Youth's Companion_. He had gained a distinctive place as an interpreter of phases of Southern life in the company which includes Cable, Harris, and Johnston. His novels include _Pole Baker_, _Ann Boyd_, _Second Choice_, and many others. _LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_ 199 JOHN ERSKINE John Erskine was born in New York City, October 5, 1879. He is Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia University, the author of many text-books and critical works, of _Actæon and Other Poems_ and of _The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent and Other Essays_. _CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE_ 213 JOHN BURROUGHS John Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3, 1837. He taught school in his early years, and held for a time a clerkship in the United States Treasury. Since 1874 he has devoted himself to literature and fruit culture. Among his well-known "Nature" books may be noted _Wake Robin_, _Bird and Bough_, and _Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt_. _"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_ 229 ELLEN GLASGOW Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, 1874. Her novels, among which may be mentioned _The Voice of the People_, _The Romance of a Plain Man_, and _Life and Gabriella_, deal chiefly with social and psychological problems, and their scenes are for the most part in the southern part of the United States. _"CHOCOLATE FUDGE" IN THE MAGAZINE_ 241 FANNIE HURST Fannie Hurst was born in St. Louis, October 19, 1889. She has served as a saleswoman and as a waitress and crossed the Atlantic in the steerage to get material for her short stories of the life of the working-woman, selections of which have been published with the titles _Just Around the Corner_ and _Every Soul Hath Its Song_. _THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_ 253 AMY LOWELL Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 9, 1874. She is prominently identified with _vers libre_, _imagisme_, and other ultra-modern poetic tendencies. She has published a volume of essays on modern French poetry and three books of poems, of which _Men, Women, and Ghosts_ is the most recent. _A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_ 265 EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine, December 22, 1869. He has written plays, but is chiefly known for his poems, most of them studies of character. His most recent volume is _Merlin: A Poem_. _LET POETRY BE FREE_ 277 JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY Josephine Preston Peabody was born in New York City. She won the Stratford-on-Avon Prize for her poetic drama _The Piper_. She has published many books of verse, one of which, called _Harvest Moon_, deals chiefly with woman's tragic share in the Great War. She is the wife of Prof. Lionel Simeon Marks of Harvard. _THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_ 289 CHARLES RANN KENNEDY Charles Rann Kennedy was born at Derby, England, February 14, 1871. His plays, dealing with social and religious questions, include _The Servant in the House_, _The Terrible Meek_, _The Idol-Breakers_, and _The Rib of the Man_, his latest work. _THE MASQUE AND DEMOCRACY_ 305 PERCY MACKAYE Percy MacKaye was born in New York City, March 16, 1875. He has written many poems and plays, and has been especially identified with the production of community pageants and masques, having written and directed the St. Louis Civic Masque in 1914, and the Shakespeare Masque in New York City in 1916. Among his published works may be mentioned _The Scarecrow_, _Jeanne d'Arc_, _Sappho and Phaon_ and _Anti-Matrimony_ (plays) and _Uriel and Other Poems_. INTRODUCTION This book is an effort to bridge the gulf between literary theory and literary practice. In these days of specialization it is more than ever true that the man who lectures and writes about the craft of writing seldom has the time or the inclination to show, by actual work, that he can apply his principles. On the other hand, the successful novelist, poet, or playwright devotes himself to his craft and seldom attempts to analyze and display the methods by which he obtains his effect, or even to state his opinion on matters intellectual and æsthetic. Now, the professor of English and the literary critic are valuable members of society, and the development of literature owes much to their counsel and guardianship. But there is a special significance in the opinion which the writer holds concerning his own trade, in the advice which he bases upon his own experience, in the theory of life and art which he has formulated for himself. Therefore I have spent considerable time in talking with some of the most widely read authors of our day, and in obtaining from them frank and informal statements of their points of view. I have purposely refrained from confining myself to writers of any one school or type of mind--the dean of American letters and the most advanced of our newest poetical anarchists alike are represented in these pages. The authors have talked freely, realizing that this was an opportunity to set forth their views definitely and comprehensively. They have not the time to write or lecture about their art, but they are willing to talk about it. They knew that through me they spoke, in the first place, to the great army of readers of their books who have a natural and pleasing curiosity concerning the personality of the men and women who devote their lives to providing them with entertainment, and, in some cases, instruction. They knew that through me they spoke, in the second place, to all the literary apprentices of the country, who look eagerly for precept and example to those who have won fame by the delightful labor of writing. They knew that through me they spoke, in the third place, to critics and students of literature of our own generation and, perhaps, of those that shall come after us. How eagerly would we read, for instance, an interview with Francis Bacon on the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, or an interview with Oliver Goldsmith in which he gave his real opinion of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Boswell! A century or so from now, some of the writers who in this book talk to the world may be the objects of curiosity as great. The writers who have talked with me received me with courtesy, gave me freely of their time and thought, and showed a sincere desire for the furtherance of the purpose of this book. To them, accordingly, I tender my gratitude for anything in these pages which the reader may find of interest or of value. Their explanations of their literary creeds and practices were furnished in the first instance for the _New York Times_, to which I desire to express my acknowledgments. JOYCE KILMER. LITERATURE IN THE MAKING _WAR STOPS LITERATURE_ WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS War stops literature. This is the belief of a man who for more than a quarter of a century has been in the front rank of the world's novelists, who wrote _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ and _A Modern Instance_ and nearly a hundred other sympathetic interpretations of American life. Mr. William Dean Howells was the third writer to whom was put the question, "What effect will the Great War have on literature?" And he was the first to give a direct answer. A famous French dramatist replied: "I am not a prophet. I have enough to do to understand the present and the past; I cannot concern myself with the future." A famous English short-story writer said, "The war has already inspired some splendid poetry; it may also inspire great plays and novels, but, of course, we cannot tell as yet." But Mr. Howells said, quite simply, "War stops literature." He said it as unemotionally as if he were stating a familiar axiom. He does not consider it an axiom, however, for he supplied proof. "I have never believed," he said, "that great events produced great literature. They seldom call forth the great creative powers of man. In poetry it is not the poems of occasion that endure, but the poems that have come into being independently, not as the result of momentous happenings. "This war does not furnish the poet, the novelist, and the dramatist with the material of literature. For instance, the Germans, as every one will admit, have shown extraordinary valor. But we do not think of celebrating that valor in poetry; it does not thrill the modern writers as such valor thrilled the writers of bygone centuries. When we think of the valor of the Germans, our emotion is not admiration but pity. "And the reason for this is that fighting is no longer our ideal. Fighting was not a great ideal, and therefore it is no longer our ideal. All that old material of literature--the clashing of swords, the thunder of shot and shell, the great clouds of smoke, the blood and fury--all this has gone out from literature. It is an anachronism." "But the American Civil War produced literature, did it not?" I asked. "What great literature did it produce?" asked Mr. Howells in turn. "As I look back over my life and recall to mind the great number of books that the Civil War inspired I find that I am thinking of things that the American people have forgotten. They did not become literature, these poems and stories that came in such quantities and seemed so important in the sixties. "There were the novels of J. W. De Forest, for instance. They were well written, they were interesting, they described some phases of the Civil War truthfully and vividly. We read them when they were written--but you probably have never heard of them. No one reads them now. They were literature, but that about which they were written has ceased to be of literary interest. "Of course, the Civil War, because of its peculiar nature, was followed by an expansion, intellectual as well as social and economic. And this expansion undoubtedly had its beneficial effect on literature. But the Civil War itself did not have, could not have, literary expression. "Of all the writings which the Civil War directly inspired I can think of only one that has endured to be called literature. That is Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode.' "War stops literature. It is an upheaval of civilization, a return to barbarism; it means death to all the arts. Even the preparation for war stops literature. It stopped it in Germany years ago. A little anecdote is significant. "I was in Florence about 1883, long after the Franco-Prussian War, and there I met the editor of a great German literary weekly--I will not tell you its name or his. He was a man of refinement and education, and I have not forgotten his great kindness to my own fiction. One day I asked him about the German novelists of the day. "He said: 'There are no longer any German novelists worthy of the name. Our new ideal has stopped all that. Militarism is our new ideal--the ideal of Duty--and it has killed our imagination. So the German novel is dead.'" "Why is it, then," I asked, "that Russia, a nation of militaristic ideals, has produced so many great novels during the past century?" "Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession. And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination. "But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity, their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find expression in their great novels and plays. "I well remember how the Russian novelists impressed me when I was a young man. They opened to me what seemed to be a new world--and it was only the real world. There is Tcheckoff--have you read his _Orchard_? What life, what color, what beauty of truth are in that book! "Then there is Turgenieff--how grateful I am for his books! It must be thirty years since I first read him. Thomas Sargent Perry, of Boston, a man of the greatest culture, was almost the first American to read Turgenieff. Stedman read Turgenieff in those days, too. Soon all of the younger writers were reading him. "I remember very well a dinner at Whitelaw Reid's house in Lexington Avenue, when some of us young men were enthusiastic over the Russian novel, and the author we mentioned most frequently was Turgenieff. "Dr. J. G. Holland, the poet who edited _The Century_, lived across the street from Mr. Reid, and during the evening he came over and joined us. He listened to us for a long time in silence, hardly speaking a word. When he rose to go, he said: 'I have been listening to the conversation of these young men for over an hour. They have been talking about books. And I have never before heard the names of any of the authors they have mentioned.'" "Were those the days," I asked, "in which you first read Tolstoy?" "That was long before the time," answered Mr. Howells. "Tolstoy afterward meant everything to me--his philosophy as well as his art--far more than Turgenieff. Tolstoy did not love all his writing. He loved the thing that he wrote about, the thing that he lived and taught--equality. And equality is the best thing in the world. It is the thing for which the Best of Men lived and died. "I never met Tolstoy," said Mr. Howells. "But I once sent him a message of appreciation after he had sent a message to me. Tolstoy was great in the way he wrote as well as in what he wrote. Tolstoy's force is a moral force. His great art is as simple as nature." "Do you think that the Russian novelists have influenced your work?" I asked. "I think," Mr. Howells replied, "that I had determined what I was to do before I read any Russian novels. I first thought that it was necessary to write only about things that I knew had already been written about. Certain things had already been in books; therefore, I thought, they legitimately were literary subjects and I might write about them. "But soon I knew that this idea was wrong, that I must get my material, not out of books, but out of life. And I also knew that it was not necessary for me to look at life through English spectacles. Most of our writers had been looking at life through English spectacles; they had been closely following in the footsteps of English novelists. I saw that around me were the materials for my work. I saw around me life--wholesome, natural, human. "I saw a young, free, energetic society. I saw a society in which love--the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world--was innocent; a society in which the relation between man and woman was simple and pure. Here, I thought, are the materials for novels. Why should I go back to the people of bygone ages and of lands not my own?" "Do you think," I asked, "that romanticism has lost its hold on the novelists?" Mr. Howells smiled. "When realism," he said, "is once in a novelist's blood he never can degenerate into romanticism. Romanticism is no longer a literary force among English-speaking authors. Romanticism belongs to the days in which war was an aim, an ideal, instead of a tragic accident. It is something foreign to us. And literature must be native to the soil, affected, of course, by the culture of other lands and ages, but essentially of the people of the land and time in which it is produced. Realism is the material of democracy. And no great literature or art can arise outside of the democracy." Tolstoy was mentioned again, and Mr. Howells was asked if he did not think that the Russian novelist's custom of devoting a part of every day to work that was not literary showed that all writers would be better off if they were obliged to make a living in some other way than by writing. Mr. Howells gave his answer with considerable vigor. His calm, blue eyes lost something of their kindliness, and his lips were compressed into a straight, thin line before he said: "I certainly do not think so. The artist in letters or in lines should have leisure in which to perform his valuable service to society. The history of literature is full of heartbreaking instances of writers whose productive careers were retarded by their inability to earn a living at their chosen profession. The belief that poverty helps a writer is stupid and wrong. Necessity is not and never has been an incentive. Poverty is not and never has been an incentive. Writers and other creative artists are hindered, not helped, by lack of leisure. "I remember my own early experiences, and I know that my writing suffered very much because I could not devote all my time to it. I had to spend ten hours in drudgery for every two that I spent on my real work. The fact that authors who have given the world things that it treasures are forced to live in a state of anxiety over their finances is lamentable. This anxiety cannot but have a restrictive influence on literature. It is not want, but the fear of want, that kills." "Still, in spite of their precarious financial condition, modern authors are doing good work, are they not?" I asked. "Certainly they are," answered Mr. Howells, "the novelists especially. There is Robert Herrick, for example. His novels are interesting stories, and they also are faithful reflections of American life. Will Harben's work is admirable. It has splendid realism and fine humor. Perhaps one thing that has kept it, so far, from an appreciation so general as it will one day receive, is the fact that it deals, for the most part, with one special locality, a certain part of Georgia. "And in Spain--what excellent novelists they have there and have had for a long time! The realistic movement reached Spain long before it reached England and the United States. In fact, English-speaking countries were the last to accept it. I have taken great pleasure in the works of Armando Valdés. Then there are Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazián, and that priest who wrote a realistic novel about Madrid society. All these novelists are realists, and realists of power. "Then there are the great Scandinavians. I hope that I may some time attempt to express a little of my gratitude for the pleasure that Björnson's works have given me." I asked, "What do you think of contemporary poetry?" "I admired chiefly that of Thomas Hardy," said Mr. Howells. "His poems have force and actuality and music and charm. Masefield I like, with reservations. Three modern poets who give me great pleasure are Thomas Hardy, William Watson, and Charles Hanson Towne. The first one of Mr. Towne's poems that I read was "Manhattan." I have not forgotten the truth of that poetic interpretation of New York. His poems are beautiful and they are full of humanity. In his latest book there is a poem called 'A Ballad of Shame and Dread' that moved me deeply. It is a slight thing, but it is wonderfully powerful. Like all of Towne's poetry, it is warm with human sympathy." "Do you think," I asked, "that the great social problems of the day, the feminine unrest, for instance, are finding their expression in literature?" "No," said Mr. Howells, "I cannot call to mind any adequate literary expression of the woman movement. Perhaps this is because the women who know most about it and feel it most strongly are not writers. The best things that have been said about woman suffrage in our time have been said by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She has written the noblest satire since Lowell. What wit she has, and what courage! Once I heard her address a meeting of Single-Taxers. Now, the Single-Taxers are all right so far as they go, but they don't go far enough. The Single-Taxers heckled her, but she had a retort ready for every interruption. She stood there with her brave smile and talked them all down." "Do you think that Ibsen expressed the modern feminine unrest in _The Doll's House_?" Mr. Howells was asked. "Ibsen seldom expressed things," was his reply. "He suggested them, mooted them, but he did not express them. _The Doll's House_ does not express the meaning of unrest, it suggests it. Ibsen told you where you stood, not where to go." Mr. Howells had recently presided at a meeting which was addressed by M. Brieux, and he expressed great admiration for the work of the French dramatist. "He is a great dramatist," he said. "He has given faithful reports of life, and faithful reports of life are necessarily criticisms of life. All great novels are criticisms of life. And I think that the poets will concern themselves more and more with the life around them. It is possible that soon we may have an epic in which the poet deals with the events of contemporary life." Mr. Howells is keenly awake to the effect which the war is having on conditions in New York. And in his sympathy for the society which inevitably must suffer for a war in which it is not directly concerned, the active interest of the novelist was evident. "If all this only could be reflected in a book!" he said. "If some novelist could interpret it!" _THE JOYS OF THE POOR_ KATHLEEN NORRIS Any young woman who desires to become a famous novelist and short-story writer like Kathleen Norris will do well to take the following steps: In the first place, come to New York. In the second place, marry some one like Charles Gilman Norris. Of course, every one who read _Mother_ and _The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_ and _Saturday's Child_ knew that the author was a married woman--and also a married woman with plenty of personal experience with babies and stoves and servants and other important domestic items. But not until I visited Kathleen Norris at her very genuine home in Port Washington did I appreciate the part which that domestic item called a husband has played in Kathleen Norris's communications to the world. I made this discovery after Charles Gilman Norris--accompanied by little Frank, who bears the name of the illustrious novelist who was his uncle--had motored me through Port Washington's pleasant avenues to the Norris house. Before a fire of crackling hickory logs, Kathleen Norris (clad in something very charming, which I will not attempt to describe) was talking about the qualities necessary to a writer's success. And one of these, she said, was a business sense. Now, Mrs. Norris did not look exactly business-like. Nor is "a business sense" the quality which most readers would immediately hit upon as the characteristic which made the author of _Gayley the Troubadour_ different from the writers of other stories. I ventured to suggest this to Mrs. Norris. "I don't claim to possess a business sense," she said. "But my husband has a business sense. He has taken charge of selling my stories to the magazines and dealing with publishers and all of that. I do think that literally thousands of writers are hindered from ever reaching the public by the lack of business sense. And I know that my husband has been responsible for getting most of my work published. My stories have appeared since my marriage, you know. I don't need to have a business sense, all I have to do is to write the stories. My husband does all the rest--I don't need even to have any of the author's complacency, or the author's pride!" Mrs. Norris's fame is only about five years old--about as old as her son. I asked her about her life before she was known as a writer, expecting to hear picturesque tales of literary tribulations among the hills of California. But her description of her journey to success was not the conventional one; her journey was not for years paved with rejection slips and illumined with midnight oil. "It was New York that did it," she said. "When we first came to New York from California the editor of a magazine with which Mr. Norris was connected gave us a tea. Most of the people who were present were short-story writers and novelists. It was pleasant for me to meet them, and I enjoyed the afternoon. But my chief sensation was one of shock--it was a real shock to me to find that writers were people! "I felt as if I had met Joan of Arc, Cæsar, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, and all the great figures of history, and found them to be human beings like myself. 'These writers are not supermen and superwomen,' I said to myself, 'they are human beings like me. Why can't I do what they're doing?' "I thought this over after we went home that evening. And I made a resolve. I resolved that before the next tea that I attended I would tell a story. And when I next went to a tea I had sold a story." "To what publication had you sold it?" I asked. "To an evening paper," said Mrs. Norris; "but I had written and sold a story. That was something; it meant a great deal to me. My first stories were all sold to this evening paper, for twelve dollars each. This paper printed a story every day, paying twelve dollars for each of them, and giving a prize of fifty dollars for the best story published each week. I won one of the fifty-dollar prizes." Any one who to-day could buy a Kathleen Norris story for fifty dollars would be not an editor, but a magician. Yet the memory of that early triumph seemed to give Mrs. Norris real pleasure. "I wrote _What Happened to Alanna_ two years before the Fire," she said. ("The Fire" means only one thing when a Californian says it.) "But most of my stories have been written since I came to New York." I asked Mrs. Norris for the history of one of her earliest stories, a story of California life which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_. She said: "That story went to twenty-six magazines before it was printed. My husband had an alphabetical list of magazines. He sent the story first to the _Atlantic Monthly_ and then to twenty-five other magazines. They all returned it. Then he started at the top of the list again, and this time the _Atlantic Monthly_ accepted it." The mention of Mr. Norris's activities in selling this story brought our conversation back to the subject of the "business sense." "A writer needs the ability to sell a story as well as the ability to write it," said Mrs. Norris, "unless there is some one else to do the writing. Many a woman writes a really good story, sends it hopefully to an editor, gets it back with a printed notice of its rejection, and puts it away in a desk drawer. Then years later she tells her grandchildren that she once wanted to be an author, but found that she couldn't do it. "Now, that is no way for a writer to gain success. The writer must be persevering, not only in writing, but in trying to get his work before the public. Unless, as I said, there is some one else to supply the perseverance in getting the work before the public. "I think that the desire to write generally indicates the possession of the power to write. But young writers are too easily discouraged. But I have no right to blame a writer for being discouraged. I had frightful discouragement--until I was married." It is easy to see that Kathleen Norris does not hesitate to find in her own home life material for her industrious pen. Little Frank has undoubtedly served his mother as a model many times--which is not meant to indicate that he is that monstrosity, a model child. Indeed, Mrs. Norris believes that a novelist should use the material which lies ready at hand, instead of seeking for exotic and unusual topics. She sees that people want to read about the things with which they are already familiar, that they are not (as many young writers seem to think) eager for novelties. "I cannot understand," she said, "how it is that writers will clamor for recognition, and abuse the public for not welcoming them with enthusiasm, and yet will not give the public what they know that the public wants. So many people seem to want just their own sort of art, but to want money, too. Now, I wouldn't write for a million dollars some of those things that are called 'best sellers.' But I cannot see why a writer who is avowedly writing for the public should think it beneath him to treat the themes in which the public is interested. The greatest tragedy of literature is the writer who persists in trying to give the public what it does not want. Think of poor Gissing, for instance, dying embittered because he couldn't sell his work!" Mrs. Norris's conviction that a writer should use the material around him is so strong that she seems actually to be pained by the thought of all the excellent things for stories that are going to waste. I asked her if literature ever could come from apartment-houses. She said: "Of course it can! There is no reason why there shouldn't be good stories and novels of apartment-house life. One reason why we are not writing more and better stories of the life around us is because we are living that life so intensely--too intensely. We live in this country so close to our income that the problem of earning money makes us lose sight of the essentials of life. It would be a fine thing for us, mentally and spiritually, if we should live on less than we do. If, for example, a family that found it was in receipt of a few hundred dollars more a year than before should decide, therefore, to live under a simpler scale than before, to do away with some really worthless luxuries, what a fine thing that would be!" Of course many young writers come to Mrs. Norris for advice. And some of them excellently illustrate the tendency which she deprecates, the tendency to write about the unknown instead of the familiar. "I was talking the other day to a young girl of my acquaintance who is a costume model," she said. "She has literary aspirations. Now, her life itself has been an interesting story--her rise from a shopgirl to her present position. And every now and then she will say something to me that is a most interesting revelation--something that indicates the rich store of experience that she might, if she would, draw upon in her stories. On one occasion she said to me, 'I went home and put my shoe-drawer in order.' "'What do you mean?' I asked. 'What is your shoe-drawer?' "'Why, my shoe-drawer!' she answered. 'You see, we costume models have to have a drawer full of shoes, because we must change our shoes to match every costume.' "Why is it," asked Mrs. Norris, "that a girl like that cannot see the value of such an incident as that? That shoe-drawer is a picturesque and interesting thing, unknown to most people. And this girl, who knows all about it, and wants to write, cannot see its literary value! And yet what more interesting subject is there for her to write about than that shoe-drawer? I do not see why writers will not appreciate the importance of writing about the things that are around them." Mrs. Norris gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh. "I really shouldn't attempt to lay down the law in this way," she said. "I can speak only for myself--I must write of the people and things that I know best, but I ought not to attempt to prescribe what other people shall write about." Mrs. Norris's chief literary enthusiasm seems to be Charles Dickens. "When we were all infants out in the backwoods of California," she said, "we battened on Dickens. Dickens and a writer whom I don't suppose anybody reads nowadays--Henry Kingsley. The boys read Sir Walter Scott's novels, and left Dickens to me. I read Dickens with delight, and I still read him with delight. I have found passages in Dickens of which I honestly believe there are no equal in all English literature except in Shakespeare. I do not think that there is ever a year in which I do not read some of Dickens's novels over again. Of course, any one can find Dickens's faults--but I do not see how any one can fail to find his excellences." "What is it in Dickens that especially attracts you?" I asked. Mrs. Norris was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I think I like him chiefly because he saw so clearly the joys of the poor. He did not give his poor people nothing but disease and oppression and despair. He gave them roast goose and plum pudding for their Christmas dinner--he gave them faith and hope and love. He knew that often the rich suffer and the poor are happy. "Many of the modern realists seem ignorant of the fact that the poor may be happy. They think that the cotter's Saturday night must always be squalid and sordid and dismal, and that the millionaire's Saturday night must be splendid and joyful. As a matter of fact, the poor family may be, and often is, healthier and happier in every way than the rich family. But these extreme realists are not like Dickens, they have not his intimate knowledge of the life of the poor. They have the outsider's viewpoint. "Too many writers are telling us about the sorrows of the poor. We need writers who will tell us about the joys of the poor. We need writers who will be aware of the pleasures to be derived from a good dinner of corned beef and cabbage and a visit to a moving-picture theater. Often when I pass a row of mean houses, as they would be called, I think gratefully of the good times that I have had in just such places." The thought of that little Celtic Californian reading Dickens among the redwood-trees appealed to me. So I asked Mrs. Norris to tell more about her childhood. "Well," she said, "we hear a great deal about the misery, the bleak and barren lives of the children who live in the tenements of New York's lower East Side. But I think that an East Side tenement child would die of ennui if it should be brought up as we were brought up. We had none of the amusing and exciting experiences of the East Side child--we had no white stockings, no ice-cream cones, no Coney Island, nothing of the sort. "We never even went to school. We would study French for a while with some French neighbor who had sufficient leisure to teach us, and then we'd study Spanish for a while with some Spaniard. That was the extent of our schooling. "My parents died when I was eighteen years old. I went to the city and tried my hand at different sorts of work. For one thing, I tried to get up children's parties, but in eighteen months I managed only one. Then I did settlement work, was a librarian, a companion, and society reporter on a newspaper. Then I got married--and wrote stories." Mrs. Norris was at one time opposed to woman suffrage. Now, however, she is a suffragist, but she refuses to say that she has been "converted" to suffragism. "I can't say that I have been converted to suffragism," she said, "any more than I can say that I have been converted to warm baths and tooth-brushes. And it does not seem to me that any women should need to defend her right to vote any more than she should need to defend her right to love her children. There is a theme for a novel--a big suffrage novel will be written one of these days." It may be that the author of _Mother_ will be the author of this "big suffrage novel." But at present she disclaims any such intention. But she admits that there is a purpose in all her portrayals of normal, wholesome American home life. "I don't think that I believe in 'art for art's sake,' as it is generally interpreted," she said. "Of course, I don't believe in what is called the commercial point of view--I have never written anything just to have it printed. But I do not believe that there is any one standard of art. I think that any book which the people ought to read must have back of it something besides the mere desire of the writer to create something. I never could write without a moral intention." _NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART_ BOOTH TARKINGTON Mr. Booth Tarkington never will be called the George M. Cohan of fiction. His novel, _The Turmoil_, is surely an indictment of modern American urban civilization; of its materialism, its braggadocio, its contempt for the things of the soul. It was with the purpose of making this indictment a little clearer than it could be when it is surrounded by a story, that I asked Mr. Tarkington a few questions. And his answers are not likely to increase our national complacencies. In the first place, I asked Mr. Tarkington if the atmosphere of a young and energetic nation might not reasonably be expected to be favorable to literary and artistic expression. "Yes, it might," said Mr. Tarkington. "There may be spiritual progress in America as phenomenal as her material progress. "There is and has been extraordinary progress in the arts. But the people as a whole are naturally preoccupied with their material progress. They are much more interested in Mr. Rockefeller than in Mr. Sargent." The last two sentences of Mr. Tarkington's reply made me eager for something a little more specific on that subject. "What are the forces in America to-day," I asked, "that hinder the development of art and letters?" Mr. Tarkington replied: "There are no forces in America to-day that hinder the development of individuals in art and letters, save in unimportant cases here and there. But there is a spirit that hinders general personal decency, knows and cares nothing for beauty, and is glad to have its body dirty for the sake of what it calls 'prosperity.' "It 'wouldn't give a nickel' for any kind of art. But it can't and doesn't hinder artists from producing works of art, though it makes them swear." "But do not these conditions in many instances seriously hinder individual artists?" Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Nothing stops an artist if he is one," he said. "But many things may prevent a people or a community from knowing or caring for art. "The climate may be unfavorable; we need not expect the Eskimos to be interested in architecture. In the United States politicians have usually controlled the public purchase of works of art and the erection of public buildings. This is bad for the public, naturally." "I suppose," I said, "that the conditions you describe are distinctively modern, are they not? At what time in the history of America have conditions been most favorable to literary expression?" Mr. Tarkington's reply was not what I expected. "At all times," he said. "Literary expression does not depend on the times, though the appreciation of it does, somewhat." I asked Mr. Tarkington if he agreed with Mr. Gouverneur Morris in considering the short story a modern development. He did not. "There are short stories in the Bible," he said, "and in every mythology; 'folk stories' of all races and tribes. Probably Mr. Morris's definition of the short story would exclude these. I agree with him that short stories are better written nowadays." "But you do not believe," I said, "that American literature in general is better than it used to be, do you? Why is it that there is now no group of American writers like the New England group which included Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau?" "Why is there," Mr. Tarkington asked in turn, "no group like Homer (wasn't he a group?) in Greece? There may be, but if there is just such a modern group it would tend only to repeat the work of the Homeric group, which wouldn't be interesting to the rest of us. "The important thing is to find a group unlike Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, and Thoreau. That is, if one accepts the idea that it is important to find a group." Mr. Tarkington's criticisms of the modern American city have been so severe that I expected him to tell me that all writers should live in the country. But again he surprised me. In reply to my question as to which environment was more favorable to the production of literature, the city or the country, he said: "It depends upon the nerves of the writer. A writer can be born anywhere, and he can grow up anywhere." There has recently been considerable discussion--Professor Edward Garnet and Gertrude Atherton have taken a considerable share in it--on the relative merits of contemporary English and American fiction. I asked Mr. Tarkington if in his opinion the United States had at the present time novelists equal to those of England. "That is unanswerable!" he answered. "Writers aren't like baseball teams. What's the value of my opinion that _The Undiscovered Country_ is a 'greater' novel than _A Pair of Blue Eyes_? These questions remind me of school debating societies. Nothing is demonstrated, but everybody has his own verdict." Until I asked Mr. Tarkington about it I had heard only two opinions as to the probable effect on literature of the war. One was that which William Dean Howells tersely expressed by saying: "War stops literature," and the other was that the war is purifying and strengthening all forms of literary expression. But Mr. Tarkington had something new to say about it. "What effect," I asked, "is the war likely to have on American literature?" "None of consequence," he answered. "The poet will find the subject, war or no war. The sculptor doesn't depend upon epaulets." Mr. Tarkington is so inveterate a writer of serials, and his work is so familiar to the readers of the American magazines, that I desired to get his expert opinion as to whether or not the American magazines, with their remarkably high prices, had harmed or benefited fiction. His reply was somewhat non-committal. "They have induced many people to look upon the production of fiction as a profitable business," he said. "But those people would merely not have 'tried fiction' at all otherwise. Prices have nothing to do with art." Mr. Tarkington had some interesting things to say about that venerable mirage, the Great American Novel. I asked him if that longed-for work would ever be written; if, for example, there would ever be a work of fiction reflecting American life as _Vanity Fair_ reflects English life. He replied: "If Thackeray had been an American he would not have written a novel reflecting American life as _Vanity Fair_ reflected the English life of its time. He would have written of New York; his young men would have come there after Harvard. The only safe thing to say of the Great American Novel is that the author will never know he wrote it." Mr. Charles Belmont Davis had told me that a writer who had some means of making a living other than writing would do better work than one who devoted himself exclusively to literature. I asked Mr. Tarkington what he thought about this. "I think," he said, "that it would be very well for a writer to have some means of making a living other than writing. There are likely to be times in his career when it would give him a sense of security concerning food. But I doubt if it would much affect his writing, unless he considered writing to be a business." Mr. Tarkington's answer to my next question is hereby commended to the attention of all those feminine revolutionists who believe that they are engaged in the pleasant task of changing the whole current of modern thought. "How has literature been affected," I asked, "by the suffrage movement and feminism?" Mr. Tarkington looked up in some surprise. "I haven't heard of any change," he said. The author of _The Turmoil_ could never be accused of jingoism. But he is far from agreeing with those critics who believe that American literature is merely "a phase of English literature." I asked him if he believed that there was such a thing as a distinctively American literature. "Certainly," he replied. "Is _Huckleberry Finn_ a phase? It's a monument; not an English one. English happens to be the language largely used." The allusion in Mr. Tarkington's last reply suggested--what every reader of _Penrod_ must know--that this novelist is an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain. So I told him that Mr. T. A. Daly had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., and had said that these men wrote nothing of real merit and were "the Charlie Chaplins of their time." Mr. Tarkington smiled. "Get Mr. T. A. Daly to talk some more," he said. "We'd like to hear something about Voltaire and Flo Ziegfeld. Second thoughts indicate that 'T. A. Daly' is the pen name of Mr. Charlie Chaplin. Of course! And that makes it all right and natural. I thought at first that it was a joke." _ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR_ MONTAGUE GLASS Once upon a time William Dean Howells leveled the keen lance of his satire against what he called "the monstrous rag baby of romanticism." In those simple days, literary labels were easily applied. A man who wrote about Rome, Italy, was a romanticist; a man who wrote about Rome, New York, was a Realist. Now, however, a writer who finds his themes in the wholesale business district of New York City does not disavow the title formerly given exclusively to makers of drawn-sword-and-prancing-steed fiction. Montague Glass is a romanticist. The laureate of the cloak-and-suit trade and biographer of Mr. Abe Potash and Mr. Mawruss Perlmutter does not believe that romance is a matter of time and place. A realistic novel, he believes, may be written about the Young Pretender or Alexander the Great, and a romance about--well, about Elkan Lubliner, American. Of course, I asked him to defend his claim to the name of romanticist. He did so, but in general terms, without special reference to his own work. For this widely read author has the amazing virtue of modesty. "I do not think," he said, "that the so-called historical novelists are the only romanticists. The difference between the two schools of writers is in method, rather than in subject. "A romanticist is a writer who creates an atmosphere of his own about the things with which he deals. He is the poet, the constructive artist. He calls into being that which has not hitherto existed. "A realist, however, is a writer who faithfully reproduces an atmosphere that already exists. He reports, records; one of his distinguishing characteristics must be his attention to detail. The romanticist is as truthful as the realist, but he deals with a few large truths rather than with many small facts." "And you," I said, determined to make the conversation more personal, "prefer the romantic method?" "Yes," said Mr. Glass, "I do. I prefer to use the romantic method, and to read the works of the writers who use it. I believe that there is more value in suggestion than in detailed description. For instance, I do not think that my stories would gain vividness if I should put all the dialogue--I tell my stories chiefly by means of dialogues, you know--into dialect. So I do not put down the dialogue phonetically. I spell the words correctly, not in accordance with the pronunciation of my characters. "This is not an invariable rule. When, for instance, Abe or Mawruss has learned a new long word which he uses frequently to show it off, he generally mispronounces it. He may say 'quincidence' for 'coincidence.' Such a mispronunciation as this I reproduce, for it has its significance as a revelation of character. But I do not attempt to put down all mispronunciations; I let the dialect be imagined. "The romanticist, you see, uses his own imagination and expects imagination in his readers. His method might be called impressionistic; he outlines and suggests, instead of describing exhaustively. The romanticist really is more economical than the realist, and he has more restraint." "Who are the leading romanticists of the day?" I asked. "Well," Mr. Glass replied, "my favorite among contemporary romanticists is Joseph Conrad. There is a man who is certainly no swashbuckling novelist of the Wardour Street school. He writes of modern life, and yet he is a romanticist through and through. "I think that I may justly claim to be one of the first admirers of Conrad in America. I used to read him when apparently the only other man in this part of the world to appreciate him was William L. Alden, who praised him in the columns of the _New York Times Review of Books_. "I well remember my discovery of Conrad. I went to Brooklyn to hear 'Tosca' sung at the Academy of Music. I had bought my ticket, and I had about an hour to spend before it would be time for the curtain to rise. So I went across the street to the Brooklyn Public Library. "While I was idly looking over the novels on the shelves I came upon Conrad's _Typhoon_. I sat down and began to read it. "When I arose, I had finished the book. Also, I had missed the first two acts of the opera--and I had been eager to hear them. But Conrad more than compensated for the loss of those two acts. "Many of the modern English writers are romanticists. Galsworthy surely is no realist. And William de Morgan, although he writes at great length and has abundance of detail, is a romanticist. He does not use detail for its own sake, as the realists use it; he uses it only when it has some definite value in unfolding the plot or revealing character. He uses it significantly; he is particularly successful in using it humorously, as Daudet and Dickens used it. Arnold Bennett is a realist, and I think that one of the reasons why he is so widely read in the United States is because the life which he describes so minutely is a life much like that of his American readers. People like to read about the sort of life they already know. The average reader wants to have a sense of familiarity with the characters in his novels." Mr. Glass is a contrary person. It is contrary for the only novelist who knows anything about New York's cloak-and-suit trade to be of English birth and to look like a poet. It is contrary of him to have that distinctively American play, "Potash and Perlmutter," start its London run two years ago and be "still going strong." And it was contrary of him not to say, as he might reasonably be expected to say in view of his own success, that the encounters and adventures of business must be the theme of the American novelists of the future. "No," he said, in answer to my question, "I do not see any reason for the novelist to confine himself to business life. Themes for fiction are universal. A novelist should write of the life he knows best, whatever it may be. "I do not mean that the novelist should write about his own business. I mean that he should write about the psychology that he understands. A man who spends years in the cloak-and-suit business is not, therefore, qualified to write novels about that business, even if he is qualified to write novels at all. "I had no real knowledge of the cloak-and-suit trade when I began to write about it. I made many technical blunders. For instance, I had Potash and Perlmutter buying goods by the gross instead of by the piece. And I received many indignant letters pointing out my mistake. "I had never been in the cloak-and-suit trade. But my work as a lawyer had brought me into contact with many people who were in that business, and I had intimate knowledge of the psychology of the Jew, his religion, his humor, his tragedy, his whole attitude toward life. "The trouble with many young writers," said Mr. Glass, "is that they don't know what they are writing about. They are attempting to describe psychological states of which they have only third-hand knowledge. Their ideas have no semblance of truth, and therefore their work is absolutely unconvincing." "At any rate," I said, "you will admit that American writers are more and more inclined to make the United States the scene of their stories. Do you think that O. Henry's influence is responsible for this?" "No," said Mr. Glass, "I do not think that this is due to O. Henry's influence. It was a natural development. You see, O. Henry's literary life lasted for only about four years, and while he has had many imitators, I do not think that he can be given credit for directing the attention of American writers to the life of their own country. "Probably William Dean Howells should be called the founder of the modern school of American fiction. He was the first writer to achieve distinguished success for tales of modern American life. There were several other authors who began to write about Americans soon after Mr. Howells began--Thomas Janvier, H. C. Bunner, and Brander Matthews were among them. "Kipling's popularity gave a great impetus to the writing of short stories of modern life. It is interesting to trace the course of the short story from Kipling to O. Henry. "Did you ever notice," asked Mr. Glass, "that the best stories on New York life are written by people who have been born and brought up outside of the city? The writer who has always lived in New York seems thereby to be disqualified from writing about it, just as the man in the cloak-and-suit trade is too close to his subject to reproduce it in fiction. The writer who comes to New York after spending his youth elsewhere gets the full romantic effect of New York; he gets a perspective on it which the native New-Yorker seldom attains. The viewpoint of the writer who has always lived in New York is subjective, whereas one must have the objective viewpoint to write about the city successfully. "I have been surprised by the caricatures of American life which come from the pen of writers American by birth and ancestry. Recently I read a novel by an American who has--and deserves, for he is a writer of talent and reputation--a large following. This was a story of life in a manufacturing town with which the novelist is thoroughly familiar. It, however, appears to have been written to satisfy a grudge and consequently one could mistake it for the work of an Englishman who had once made a brief tour of America. For the big manufacturer who was the principal character in the story was vulgar enough to satisfy the prejudice of any reader of the _London Daily Mail_. Certainly the descriptions of the gaudy and offensive furniture in the rich manufacturer's house and the dialogue of the members of his family and the servants could provide splendid ammunition for the _Saturday Review_ or _The Academy_. The book appears to be a caricature, and yet that novelist had lived most of his life among the sort of people about whom he was writing! "And how absolutely ignorant most New-Yorkers are of New York. Irvin Cobb comes here from Louisville, Kentucky, and gets an intimate knowledge of the city, and puts that knowledge into his short stories. But a man brought up here makes the most ridiculous mistakes when he writes about New York. "I read a story of New York life recently that absolutely disgusted me, its author was so ignorant of his subject. Yet he was a born New-Yorker. Let me tell you what he wrote. He said that a man went into an arm-chair lunch-room and bought a meal. His check amounted to sixty-five cents! Now any one who knows anything about arm-chair lunch-rooms beyond the mere fact of their existence knows that the cashier of such an institution would drop dead if a customer paid him sixty-five cents at one time. Then, the hero of this story had as a part of his meal in this arm-chair lunch-room a baked potato, for which he paid fifteen cents! Imagine a baked potato in such a place, and a fifteen-cent baked potato at that!" Mr. Glass did not, like most successful humorists, begin as a writer of tragedy. His first story to be printed was "Aloysius of the Docks," a humorous story of an East Side Irish boy, which appeared in 1900. The lower East Side was for many years the scene of most of his stories. But he does resemble most other writers in this respect, that he wrote verse before he wrote fiction. I asked him to show me some of his poetry, and he demurred somewhat violently. But, after all, a poet is a poet, and at last I succeeded in persuading him to produce this exhibit. Here it is--a poem by the author of "Potash and Perlmutter": FERRYBOATS There sounds aloft a warning scream, The jingling bell gives tongue below, She breasts again the busy stream, And cleaves its murky tide to snow. Bereft of burnished glittering brass, Ungainly bulging fore and aft, Slowly from shore to shore they pass-- The matrons of the river craft. Mr. Glass believes that humorous writing in America has changed more than any other sort. But he does not, as I thought he would, attribute this change to the increased cosmopolitanism of the country, to the influx of people from other lands. "Certainly our ideas of what is funny have changed," he said. "Humor is an ephemeral thing. A generation ago we laughed at what to-day would merely make us ill. The subjects and the methods of the humorists are different. Who nowadays can find a laugh in the pages of Artemus Ward, Philander Q. Doesticks, or Petroleum V. Nasby? Yet in their time these men set the whole continent in a roar. "Contrast two humorists typical of their respective periods--Bill Nye and Abe Martin. I remember many years ago reading a story by Bill Nye which every one then considered tremendously funny. He told how he went downtown and got a shave and put on a clean collar and as he said, 'otherwise disguised himself.' When he got home his little dog refused to recognize him, and several pages were devoted to his efforts to persuade the dog of his identity. Then, failing to convince the dog that he was really the same Bill Nye in spite of his shave and clean collar, he impaled it on a pitchfork and buried it, putting over it the epitaph, 'Not dead, but jerked hence by request.' "Now contrast with that a good example of modern American humor--a joke by Abe Martin which I recently saw. There was a picture of two or three men looking at a tattered tramp, and one of them was represented as saying: 'You wouldn't think to look at him that that man played an elegant game of billiards ten years ago!' "It is an entirely different form of humor, you see. Bill Nye and the writers of his school got their effects by grotesque misspelling, fantastic ideas, and by the liberal use of shock and surprise. The modern humor is subtler, more delicate, and more likely to endure. "I do not think that the fact that America has become more cosmopolitan has anything to do with this altered sense of humor. The American humorists do not select cosmopolitan themes; the best of them are distinctively American in their subject. Irvin Cobb, George Fitch, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Edna Ferber Stewart, who wrote _The Fugitive Blacksmith_--all these people draw their inspiration from purely American phases of the life around them." "What is it, then," I asked, "that has changed American humor?" "Leisure," answered Mr. Glass. "Philander Q. Doesticks and other humorists of his time wrote to amuse pioneers, people rough and elemental in their tastes. Their audience consisted of men who worked hard most of the time, and therefore had to be hit hard by any joke that was to entertain them at all. But as Americans grew more leisurely, and therefore had time to read, see plays, and look at pictures, they lost their taste for crude and violent horseplay, and the new sort of humor came in. Undoubtedly the same thing occurs in every newly settled country--Australia, for example. It is unlikely that the Australian of one hundred years from now will be amused by the things that amuse Australians to-day. "But the humor that entertains the citizens of a country of which the civilization is well established is likely to retain its charm through the years. Mark Twain's stories do not lose their flavor. But Mark Twain was not exclusively a humorist; he was a student of life and he reflected the tragedy of existence as well as its comedy. So does Irvin Cobb, who is the nearest approach to Mark Twain now living. "One source of Mark Twain's strength is his occasional vulgarity. That surely is something that we should have in greater abundance in American humor. I do not mean that our humorists should be pornographic and obscene; I mean merely that they should be allowed great freedom in their choice of themes. There is no humor without vulgarity. Our humorists have been so limited and restrained that we have no paper fit to be compared with _Simplicissimus_ or _Le Rire_. "You see, a vulgar thing is not offensive if it is funny. Fun for fun's sake is a much more important maxim than art for art's sake. The humorists have a greater need for freedom in choice of themes than the serious writers, especially the realistic writers, who are always demanding greater freedom." Mr. Glass returned to the subject of the failure of cosmopolitanism to influence American literature by calling attention to the fact that very few American writers find their themes among their foreign-born fellow-citizens. "Where," he asked, "are the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans? No writer knows these foreign-born citizens well enough to write about them. The best American stories are about native Americans. I admit that my stories are not about people peculiar to New York--you can find counterparts of 'Potash and Perlmutter' in Berlin, Paris, and London. But mine are not among the best stories of American character. The best story of American character is 'Daisy Miller.'" Mr. Glass believes that the technique of the short story has improved greatly during the last score of years, but he is not so favorable in his view of the modern novel, especially of the "cross-section of life" type of work. He believes that the war will produce a great revival of literary excellence in Europe, just as the Franco-Prussian War did; and he called attention to something which has apparently been neglected by most people who have discussed the subject--the tremendous inspiration which Guy de Maupassant found in the Franco-Prussian War. But he said, in conclusion: "But any man who sits down to judge American literature in the course of a few minutes' talk is an ass for his pains. Literary snap judgments are foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all." _THE "MOVIES" BENEFIT LITERATURE_ REX BEACH Even the most prejudiced opponent of the moving pictures will admit that they are becoming more intellectually respectable. Crude farce and melodrama are being replaced by versions of classic plays and novels; literature is elevating the motion picture. And Mr. Rex Beach believes that the motion picture is benefiting literature. This author of widely read novels had been talking to me about the departments of literature--the novel, the short story, and the rest--and among them he named the moving picture. I asked him if he believed that moving pictures were dangerous for novelists, leading them to fill their books with action, with a view to the profits of cinematographic reproduction. He said: "Well, authors are human beings, of course. They like to make money and to have their work reach as large an audience as possible. I suppose that the great majority of them keep their eyes on the screen, because they know how profitable the moving picture is and because they want their work seen by more people than would read their novels." "Do you think that this harms their work?" I asked. "It might if the novelists overdid it," he answered. "It would harm their work if they became nothing but scenario writers. But so far the result has been good. "The tendency of the moving picture has been to make authors visualize more clearly than ever before their characters and scenes that they are writing about. Their work has become more realistic. I do not mean realistic in the sense in which this word is used of some French writers; I do not mean erotic or morbid. I mean actual, convincing, clearly visualized. "Literature has elevated the moving picture, keeping it out, to a great extent, of melodrama and slap-stick comedy. And in return, the moving picture has done a service to fiction, making the authors give more attention to exact visualization." "Has American fiction been lacking in visualization?" I asked. "No," said Mr. Beach. "American novelists visualize more clearly to-day than they did four or five years ago, before the moving picture had become so important, but they always were strong in visualization. This sort of realism is America's chief contribution to fiction." "Then you believe that there is a distinctively American literature?" I asked. "You do not agree with the critic who said that American literature was 'a condition of English literature'?" "I do not agree with him," Mr. Beach replied. "American writers use the English language, so I suppose that what they write belongs to English literature. But there is a distinctively American literature; Americans talk in their own manner, think in their own manner, and handle business propositions in their own manner, and naturally they write in their own manner. American literature is different from other kinds of literature just as American business methods are different from those of Europe. "Fiction written in America must necessarily be tinged with American thought and American action. I have no patience with people who say that America has no literature. They say that nothing we are writing to-day will live. Well, what if that is true? It's true not only of literature, but of everything else. "Our roads won't last forever; they're built in a hurry to be used in a hurry. But they're better roads to drive and motor over than those old Roman roads of Europe. Our office-buildings won't last as long as the Pyramids, but they're better for business purposes. "Personally, I've never been enthusiastic over things that have no virtues but age and ugliness. I'd rather have a good, strong, serviceable piece of Grand Rapids furniture than any ramshackle, moth-eaten antique." "But don't you think," I asked, "that the permanence of a book's appeal is a proof of its greatness?" "I don't see how we can tell anything definite about the permanence of the appeal of books written in our time. And I don't mean by literature writings that necessarily endure through the ages. I believe that literature is the expression of the mind, the sentiment, the intellectual attitude of the people who live at the time it is written. I admit that our literature is ephemeral--like everything else about us--but I believe that it is good." Mr. Rex Beach was not pacing his floor nervously; he was crossing the room with the practical intention of procuring a cigarette. Nevertheless, his firm tread lent emphasis to his remarks. "There is a sort of literary snobbery," he said, "noticeable among people who condemn contemporaneous literature just because it is contemporaneous. The strongest proof that there is something good in the literature of the day is that it reaches a great audience. There must be something in it or people wouldn't read it. "The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must appeal. Take any big question of public importance--after it has been discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last decide it. "A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work. "Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people who believe as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of these days. "It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers--it will make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action. Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions, and the writers must overcome this inertia. "The writers must stir up the politicians and the people. There's been a whole lot of mush written about peace. There always will be war. We can't reform the world. "The pacifists say that it is useless to arm because war cannot be prevented by armaments. The obvious answer to that is that neither can the failure to arm prevent war. And the verdict after the war will be better if we are prepared for it. The writers must call our attention to the folly of leaving ourselves open to attack. "It's hard to reach the conscience of the American people on any big issue. We are too independent, too indifferent, too ready to slump back. That's one of the penalties of democracy, I suppose; the national sense of patriotism becomes atrophied. It needs some whaling-big jolt to wake it up. Every American writer can help to do this. "The trouble is that we have too many men with feminine minds, too many of these delicate fellows with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. I can't imagine any women with ideas more feminine than those of Bryan--could any woman evolve anything more feminine than his peace-at-any-price idea?" Mr. Beach smiled. "I suppose I should not be talking about world politics," he said. "There are so many men who have specialized in that subject and are therefore competent to talk about it. I am only a specialist in writing." "Do you think," I asked, "that writers should be specialists in writing? Some people believe that the best fiction, for example, is produced by men who do some other work for a living." "I certainly believe that a writer should devote himself to writing," said Mr. Beach. "This is an age of specialization, and literature is no exception to the general rule. Literature is like everything else--you must specialize in it to be successful." "This has not always been the case, has it?" I asked. "Has literature been produced by people who made writing only an avocation?" "Surely," said Mr. Beach. "It is only within the last few years that writers have been able to write for a living and make enough to keep the fringe off their cuffs." I asked what had caused this change. "It has been caused chiefly by the magazines. The modern magazines have done two important things for fiction--they have brought it within every one's reach, and they have increased the prices paid to the authors, thus enabling them to make a living by devoting themselves exclusively to writing." "But it has been said," I ventured, "that a writer, no matter how talented he may be, cannot make a comfortable living out of writing fiction unless he is most extraordinarily gifted with ideas, and that, therefore, a writer takes a tremendous risk if he throws himself upon literature for support." "How is a writer going to get ideas for stories," asked Mr. Beach, in turn, "unless he uses ideas? The more ideas a man uses, the more ideas will come to him. "The imaginative quality in a man is like any other quality; the more it is functioned the better it is functioned. If you fail to use any organ of your body, nature will in time let that organ go out of commission. "It is just the same with imagination as with any organ of the body. If a writer waits for ideas to come to him and ceases to exercise his imagination, his imagination will become atrophied. But if he uses his imagination it will grow stronger and ideas will come to him with increasing frequency." Mr. Beach is an enthusiastic advocate of the moving picture. In the course of his discussion of it he advanced an interesting theory as to the next stage of its development. "The next use of the moving picture," he said, "will be the editorial use. We have had the moving picture used as a comic device, as a device to spread news, and as an interpreter of fiction. But as yet no one has endeavored to use it as a means to mold public opinion in great vital issues of the day. "Of course, it has been used educationally, and as part of various propaganda schemes. But it will be used in connection with great political problems. It will become the most powerful of all influences for directing public opinion in politics and in everything else. "It will play a mighty part in the thought of the country and of the world. "I have seen men and women coming from a great moving-picture show almost hysterical with emotion. I have heard them shout and stamp and whistle at what they saw flashed before them on a white sheet as they never did in any theater. "What a strong argument 'The Birth of a Nation' presents! Now, suppose that same art and that same equipment were used to present arguments about some political issue of our own time, instead of one of our fathers' time. What a force that would be!" _WHAT IS GENIUS?_ ROBERT W. CHAMBERS Sentimental Tommy's great predecessor in the relentless pursuit of the "right word" was, teachers of literature tell us, the unsentimental Gustave Flaubert. But these academic gentlemen, who insist that the writer shall spend hours, even days, if necessary, in perfecting a single sentence, seldom produce any literature. I asked Robert W. Chambers, who has written more "best sellers" than any other living writer, what he thought of Flaubert's method of work. He looked at me rather quizzically. "I think," he said, with a smile, "that Flaubert was slow. What else is there to think? Of course he was a matchless workman. But if he spent half a day in hunting for one word, he was slow, that's all. He might have gone on writing and then have come back later for that inevitable word." "But what do you think of Flaubert's method, as a method?" I asked. "Do you think that a writer who works with such laborious care is right?" "It's not a question of right or wrong," said Mr. Chambers, "it's a question of the individual writer's ability and tendency. If a man can produce novels like those of Flaubert, by writing slowly and laboriously, by all means let him write that way. But it would not be fair to establish that as the only legitimate method of writing. "Some authors always write slowly. With some of them it's like pulling teeth for them to get their ideas out on paper. It's the same way in painting. You may see half a dozen men drawing from the same model. One will make his sketch premier coup; another will devote an hour to his; another will work all day. They may be artists of equal ability. It is the result that counts, not the method or the time." "And what is it that makes a man an artist, in pigments or in words?" I asked. "Do you believe in the old saying that the poet--the creative artist--is born and not made?" "No," said Mr. Chambers, "I do not think that that is the truth. I think that with regard to the writer it is true to this extent, that there must exist, in the first place, the inclination to write, to express ideas in written words. Then the writer must have something to express really worthy of expression, and he must learn how to express it. These three things make the writer--the inclination to say something, the possession of something worth saying, and the knowledge of how to say it." "And where does genius come in?" I asked. "What is genius?" asked Mr. Chambers, in turn. "I don't know. Perhaps genius is the combination of these three qualities in the highest degree. "Of course," he added, with a laugh, "I know that all this is contrary to the opinion of the public. People like to believe that writers depend entirely upon an inspiration. They like to think that we are a hazy lot, sitting around and posing and waiting for some sort of divine afflatus. They think that writers sit around like a Quaker meeting, waiting for the spirit to move them." "But have there not been writers," I asked, "who seem to prove that there is some truth in the inspiration theory? There is William de Morgan, for example, beginning to write novels in his old age. He spent most of his life in working in ceramics, not with words." "On the contrary," said Mr. Chambers, "I think that William de Morgan proves my theory. He really spent all his life in learning to write--he was in training for being a novelist all the while. The novelist's training may be unconscious. He must have--as William de Morgan surely always has had--keen interest in the world. That is the main thing for the writer to have--a vivid interest in life. If we are to devote ourselves to the production of pictures of humanity according to our own temperaments, we must have this vivid interest in life; we must have intense curiosity. The men who have counted in literature have had this intense, never-satiated curiosity about life. "This is true for the romanticists as well as the realists. The most imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life. "I know of no better examples of this truth than the gargoyles which one sees in Gothic architecture in Europe. These extraordinary creatures that thrust their heads from the sides of cathedrals, misshapen and grotesque, are nevertheless thoroughly logical. That is, no matter how fantastic they may be, they have backbones and ribs and tails, and these backbones and ribs and tails are logical--that is, they could do what backbones and ribs and tails are supposed to do. "In real life there are no creatures like the gargoyles, but the important thing is that the gargoyles really could exist. This is a good example of the true method of construction. The base of the construction must rest on real knowledge. The medieval sculptors knew the formation of existing animals; therefore they knew how to make gargoyles." "How does this theory apply to poets?" I asked. "I don't know," answered Mr. Chambers, "but it seems to me to apply to all creative work. The artist must know life before he can build even a travesty on life." I called Mr. Chambers's attention to the work of certain ultra-modern poets who deliberately exclude life from their work. He was not inclined to take them seriously. "There always have been aberrations," he said, "and there always will be. They're bound to exist. And there is bound to be, from time to time, attitudinizing and straining after effect on the part of prose writers as well as poets. And it is all based on one thing--self-consciousness. It is self-consciousness that spoils the work of some modern writers." I asked Mr. Chambers to be more specific in his allusions. "I cannot mention names," he said, "but there are certain writers who are always conscious of the style in which they are writing. Sometimes they consciously write in the style of some other men. They are thinking all the while of their technique and equipment, and the result is that their work loses its effect. A writer should not be convinced all the while that he is a realist or a romanticist; he should not subject himself deliberately to some special school of writing, and certainly he should not be conscious of his own style. The less a writer thinks of his technique the sooner he arrives at self-expression. "It's just like ordinary conversation. A man is known by the way in which he talks--that is his 'style.' But he is not all the while acutely conscious of his manner of talking--unless he has an impediment in his speech. So the writer should be known by his untrammeled and unembarrassed expression." I asked Mr. Chambers what he thought of the idea that the popularity of magazines has vitiated the public taste and lowered the standard of fiction. "I do not think that this is the case," he said. "I do not see that the custom of serial publication has harmed the novel. It is not a modern innovation, you know. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot had serial publication. But I do believe that the American public reads less fiction than it did a generation ago, and that its taste is not so good as it was." This was a surprising statement to come from an author whom the public has received with such enthusiasm, so I asked Mr. Chambers to explain. "In the days of our forefathers," he said, "this was an Anglo-Saxon country. Then the average intelligence of the nation was higher and the taste in literature better. But there came the great rush of immigration to the United States from Europe, and the Anglo-Saxon culture of the country was diluted. "You see signs of this lowered standard of taste in fiction and on the stage. The demand is for primitive and childish stuff, and the reason for this is that the audience has only a sort of backstairs intelligence. If we had progressed along the lines in which we were headed before this wave of immigration, we would not be satisfied with the books and magazines that are given us to-day. "Of course the magazines are mechanically better to-day than they were a generation ago. Then we had not the photogravure and the half-tone and the other processes that make our magazines beautiful. But we had better taste and also we had more leisure. "I remember when one of the most widely read of our magazines was a popular science monthly, which printed articles by great scientists on biological and other topics. That was in the days when Darwin was announcing his theory of evolution--the first great jolt which orthodoxy received. People would not take time to read a magazine of that sort now. They are so occupied with business and dancing and all sorts of occupations that they have little leisure for reading." Mr. Chambers stopped talking suddenly and laughed. "I'm not a good man for you to bring these questions to," he said, "because I never have had any special reverence for books or literature as such. I reverence the books that I like, not all books." "And have you such a thing as a favorite author?" I asked. "Yes," said Mr. Chambers. "Dumas." During the 1870's Mr. Chambers was an art student in Paris, and he has many interesting memories of the French and English writers and painters who have made that period memorable. He knew Paul Verlaine (whose poetry he greatly admires), Charles Conder, and Aubrey Beardsley. "One day," he said, "I was out on a shooting-trip--I think it was in Belgium--and I met a young English poet, a charming fellow, whose work I was later to know and like. It was the poet who wrote at least one great poem--'Cynara'--it was Ernest Dowson. "I knew many of the Beaux Arts crowd, because my brother was a student of architecture at the Beaux Arts. And they were a decent, clean crowd--they were not 'decadents.' I do not take much stock in the pose of 'decadence,' nor in the artistic temperament. I never saw a real artist with the artistic temperament. I always associated that with weakness." Mr. Chambers, although he has intimate knowledge of the Quartier Latin, has little use for "Bohemia." "What is Bohemia?" he asked. "If it is a place where a number of artists huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say against it. But if it is a place where a number of artists come to scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing. The artist should not separate himself from the world. "These artistic and literary cults are wrong. I do not believe in professional clubs and cliques. If writers form a combination for business reasons, that is all right, but a writer should not associate exclusively with other writers; he should do his work and then go out and see and talk to people in other professions. We should sweep the cobwebs from the profession of writing and not try to fence it in from the public." To the somewhat trite question as to the effects of the war on literature, Mr. Chambers made first his usual modest answer, "I don't know." But when I told him of the author who had dogmatically stated that war always stops literature, and that the Civil War had produced no writing worthy of preservation, Mr. Chambers reconsidered. "Did he say that the Civil War had produced no literature worthy of preservation?" he said. "He must have forgotten that the Civil War caused one man to make contributions to our literature as valuable as anything we possess. He must have forgotten Abraham Lincoln." Before I left, I mentioned to Mr. Chambers the theory that literature is better as a staff than as a crutch, as an avocation than as a vocation. This, like the "inevitable word" theory, is greatly beloved by college professors. Mr. Chambers said: "I disagree utterly with that theory. Do you remember how Dr. Johnson wrote _Rasselas_? It was in order to raise the money to pay for his mother's funeral. I believe that the best work is done under pressure. Of course the work must be enjoyed; a man in choosing a profession should select that sort of work which he prefers to do in his leisure moments. Let him do for his lifework the task which he would select for his leisure--and let him not take himself too seriously!" _DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY_ JAMES LANE ALLEN That Edgar Allan Poe, in spite of his acknowledged genius, has had practically no influence on the development of the short story in America, and that the current short story written in America is inferior to that written during the years between 1870 and 1895, these are two remarkable statements made to me by James Lane Allen, the distinguished author of _The Choir Invisible_, _The Mettle of the Pasture_, and many another memorable novel. I found Mr. Allen in the pleasant workroom of his New York residence. Himself a Southerner, he is an enthusiastic admirer of the poet whose name is inseparably linked with Southern letters. But I was soon to find that he does not share the opinion of those who consider Poe the originator of the modern short story, nor does he rate Poe's influence in fiction as very wide. "There is always much interest in short stories," he said, "among authors, and in the great body of readers. You say that Mr. Gouverneur Morris believes that except Poe almost no writer before our generation could write short stories. "I do not wish to be placed in a position of publicly criticizing Mr. Gouverneur Morris's opinion of the short story. But it may not seem antagonistic to the opinion of any one to call attention to the fact that, of all American short stories yet written, the two most widely known in and outside our country were written independently of Poe. These are _The Man Without a Country_ and _Rip Van Winkle_. "As the technique of the American short story is understood and applied to-day, neither of these two stories can be regarded as a work of impeccable art. But flaws have not kept them from fame. By a common verdict the flawless short stories of the day are fameless. Certainly, also, Hawthorne was uninfluenced by Poe in writing short stories that remain secure among brief American classics. "This, of course, is limiting the outlook to our own literature. Beyond our literature, what of Balzac? In the splendor of his achievements with the novel, Balzac has perhaps been slighted as a master of the short story. Think, for instance, of such a colossal fragment as _The Atheists Mass_. "And what of Boccaccio? For centuries before Poe, the _Decameron_ shone before the eyes of the world as the golden treasury of model forms for the short story. "And centuries before Boccaccio, flashing from hand to hand all over the world, there was a greater treasury still, the treasury of _The Arabian Nights_. "It is no disparagement to Poe to say that his genius did not originate the genius of the short story. His true place, his logical place, in the development of the short story is that of a man with ancestors--naturally! "Since there is a breath of nativity blowing through his stories, I think it is the breath of far distant romance from somewhere. Certainly his stories are as remote from our civilization and from all things American as are Oriental tales." Mr. Allen showed he had given much thought to Edgar Allan Poe's place among the American fiction writers, so I thought that he might also have some interesting things to say about Poe as a poet. He had. He mentioned a quality of Poe's verse which for some reason or other seems heretofore to have escaped the notice of students of American poetry. "It may be worth while calling attention," he said, "to the fact that nearly all of Poe's poems belong to the night. Twelve o'clock noon never strikes to his poetic genius. His best poems are Poe's Nights, if not _Arabian Nights_. "There is a saying that the German novel long ago died of the full moon. To Poe the dead moon was the orb of life. The sun blotted him out." Great as is his admiration for Poe's genius, Mr. Allen does not believe he has greatly influenced American prose. He said: "As to the influence of Poe's short stories in our country, this seems to be a tradition mainly fostered by professors of English in American universities and by the historians of our literature. The tradition does not prevail among American writers. Actually there is no traceable stamp of the influence of his prose writings on the work of any American short-story writer known to me, save one. That one is Ambrose Bierce." "Why is it," I asked, "that Poe's influence on American fiction has been so slight?" "The main reason," Mr. Allen answered, "why Poe's stories have remained outside American imitation or emulation is perhaps because they are projected outside American sympathies. They lie to-day where they lay when they were written--beyond the confines of what the German calls the literature of the soil. "Poe and Ambrose Bierce are at least to be linked in this: that they are the two greatest and the two coldest of all American short-story writers. Any living American fictionist will perhaps bear testimony to the fact that he has never met any other writer who has been influenced by the stories of Poe." "Mr. Allen," I said, "you believe that the American short story has not been influenced by Poe; has the American short story, however, improved since his time?" "The renascence of the American short story," said Mr. Allen, thoughtfully, "its real efflorescence as a natural literary art form, took place after the close of the Civil War. The historians of our literature have, perhaps, as is customary with them, held to the strict continuity of tradition as explaining this renascence. If so, they have omitted one of the instinctive forces of human nature, which invariably act in nations that have literatures and act ungovernably at the termination of all wars. "After any war spontaneity in story-telling is one of the ungovernable impulses of human nature. This can be traced from modern literature back to primitive man returning from his feuds. When he had no literature, he carved his story on the walls of his cave or on a bone to tell the glory of the fight. Before he could even carve a bone he hung up a row of the heads of the defeated. Perhaps the original form of the war short story was a good, thick volume of heads. Within our own civilization the American Indian told his short stories in this way--with American heads or tufts of scalps--a sad way of telling them for our forefathers. "At the close of the American Civil War the atmosphere, both North and South, was charged with stories. The amazing fact is not that short stories should have begun at that time, but that they should have begun with such perfection. This perfection expressed itself more richly during the period, say, from 1870 to 1895--twenty-five years--than it has ever done since. "The evidence is at hand that the best of the American short stories written during that period outweigh in value those that have been written later--with the exception of those of one man. And this evidence takes this form--that these stories were collected into volumes, had an enormous sale, had the highest critical appreciation, have passed into the histories of literature written since, have gone into the courses of English literature now being taught in the universities, and are still steadily being sold. "Is this true of the best short stories being written now? Are any of the short stories written since that period being bound into volumes and extensively sold? Do the professors of English literature recommend them to their classes? That is the practical test. "The one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period as a world within himself; as much apart from any one else as are Hawthorne and Poe." Mr. Allen did not express an opinion as to the probable effects on literature of the war. He said: "Now, the North and the South in the renascence of the short story after the Civil War divide honors about equally. But it is impossible to speak of the Southern short story, or indeed of Southern literature at all, without being brought to the brink of a subject which lies back of the whole philosophy of Southern literature." Mr. Allen paused for a moment. Then he continued, speaking with an intensity which reminded me of his Southern birth and upbringing: "Suppose that at the end of the present European war Germany should be victorious and France defeated. And suppose that in France there should not be left a single publishing-house, a single literary periodical, a single literary editor, a single critic, and scarcely even a single buyer of books. "And suppose that the defeated French people wanted to cry out their soul over their defeat and against their conquerors. And suppose that in order to do this every French novelist, short-story writer, or poet, unable to keep silent, should begin to write and begin to send his novel or his short story or his poem over into Germany to be read by a German editor, published by a German publisher, and sold in a German bookshop to a German reader. What kind of French literature of the war do you think would appear in Germany and be fostered there? "But this is exactly what happened after the war between the North and the South. "The few voices that began to be sent northward across the demolished battle-line could only be the voices that would be listened to and welcomed on the other side. That is the reason why that first literature was so mild, so tempered, so thin, so devitalized, that it seemed not to come from an enraged people, but from the memories of their ghosts. "As a result of finding war literature inexpressible in such conditions, the young generation of Southerners dropped the theme of war altogether and explored other paths. So that perhaps the most original and spontaneous fragments of this new Southern post-bellum literature are in the regions of the imagination, where no note of war is heard. "It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that if Joel Chandler Harris, a young Southerner, had possessed full freedom to wreak his genius on the war, the world might never have heard of 'Uncle Remus.' The world might never have known that among the cotton-plantations there dwelt a brother to Æsop and to La Fontaine." _SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES_ HARRY LEON WILSON From the Pacific Coast--from what is enthusiastically termed "the Golden West"--from that section of the United States which is large and chivalrous and gladly suffers suffrage--comes a voice, replying to my question: "What is the matter with contemporary fiction?" And the voice says, "_Cherchez la femme!_" It is the voice of Mr. Harry Leon Wilson, author of _Bunker Bean_, _Ruggles of Red Gap_, and many another popular novel, and co-author with Mr. Booth Tarkington of several successful plays. Mr. Wilson believes that the dullness and insincerity of our novels are due to the taste of most of their readers--that is, to the taste of the women. I asked Mr. Wilson what, in his opinion, was the influence most harmful to the development of literature in America. "I know little about literature," Mr. Wilson replied, "but if you mean the novel, I should say the intense satisfaction with it as it is, of the maker, the seller, and the buyer. And to trace this baneful satisfaction to its source, I should say it lies in the lack of a cultivated taste in our women readers of fiction. "Publishers are agreed, I believe, that women buy the great bulk of their output. The current novel is as deliberately planned to please the woman buyer as is any other bit of trade goods. The publisher knows what she wants to read, the writer finds out from the publisher, and you can see the result in the advertisements--and the writer's royalty statements. "'We want,' says the publisher, 'a stunning girl for the cover and a corking good love interest to catch the women.' (Publishers do talk that way when they have safely locked themselves in their low dens.) "This love interest is always said to be wholesome and sweet. I don't know. Certainly it is sweet enough. In the trade novel it's as if you took a segment of rich layer cake, the chocolate-and-jelly kind, poured over it a half-pint of nice thick molasses, and then, just to make sure, sprinkled this abundantly with fine sugar. "Anyway, that's what the publisher has found--and he has the best means of knowing--that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a clergyman. "And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush, because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he, with no one to tell him? "And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels--and how is one to tell? "At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable, perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is known to be 'fond of reading.' "Another evil influence is often alleged--the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this. "Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel. "It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting--we know the best and get the best. "But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can--and does--write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture. "The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants--something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid. "True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener. "His defense was pathetic. First, that ninety out of a hundred of our novels are beneath criticism. Second, as to the remaining ten that would merit the rapier instead of the bludgeon--'criticism is harder to sell than post-meridian virtue. I have tried.' "And he has to eat as often as any publisher. So there you are! People are not going to pay him for finding fault with something they are intensely satisfied with. It all comes back to the women. When their taste is corrected we shall have better novels. But not before then!" "Mr. Wilson," I said, "do you believe that the development of the magazine, with its high prices and serialization, has been harmful or beneficial to fiction?" "In the first place, the magazine hasn't developed," he answered. "It has merely multiplied--the cheap ones, I mean. And prices have not increased except to about a dozen of our national favorites. Where there is one writer who can get fifteen hundred dollars for a short story, or fifteen thousand dollars for the serial rights to a novel, there are a thousand who can get not more than a fifteenth of those prices. "On the whole, I think that the effect of the cheap monthlies has been good. They are the only ones that welcome the new writer. They try him out. Then, if the public takes to him, the better magazines find it out after a while and form an alliance with him--that is, if his characters are so sweet and wholesome that the magazine can still be left on the center-table where Cuthbert or Berryl might see it after school. "Nowadays I never expect to find a good short story in any of the cheap magazines. Of course, it does happen now and then, but not often enough to make me impatient for their coming. And, of course, the cheap monthlies do print, for the most part, what are probably the worst short stories that will ever be written in the world--the very furthest from anything real. "These writers, too, like the novelists, study one another instead of life. We will say one of them writes a short story about a pure young shopgirl of flower-like beauty who, spending an evening of innocent recreation in a notorious Tenderloin dive (one of those places that I, for one, have never been able to find), is insulted by the leader of Tammany Hall, who is always hanging around there for evil purposes. At the last moment she is saved from his loathsome advances by a dashing young stranger in a cute-cut blue serge suit, who carries her off in a taxicab and marries her at 2 A.M. And he, of course, proves to be the great traction magnate who owns all the city's surface-car lines. "The other writers, and some new ones that never before thought of writing, read this story, which is called 'All for Love,' and learn to do the 'type'--the pure young shopgirl, a bit slangy in spite of her flower-like beauty; the abhorrent politician (some day he will have a distressing mix-up with his very own daughter in one of these evil places--see if he doesn't!), the low-browed dive-keeper, and the honest young traction magnate. They will learn with a little practice to do these as the dupes of the 'Be-a-cartoonist!' schools learn to draw 'An Irishman,' 'A German,' 'A Jew,' and the dental façade of Colonel Roosevelt. "But we must remember that O. Henry came to us from the cheap magazines, never did get into the higher-priced ones, and was, by the way, wretchedly paid for his stories. True, he received good prices in his later days, but I doubt if they raised the average for his output to two hundred dollars a story. He neglected to come to the feast in a wedding garment, so the more pretentious magazines would have none of him. "For one O. Henry, then, we can forgive the lesser monthlies for the bulk of their stuff that can be read only by born otoliths. The more magazines, the better our chance of finding the new man, and only in the cheap ones can he come to life." Many dogmatic statements have been made concerning the great American novel. I have been told that it would come from the South, that it would come from the West, that it would never be written. But Mr. Wilson has a new and revolutionary theory. "Will there," I asked, "ever be the great American novel? That is, will there ever be a novel which reflects American life as adequately as _Vanity Fair_ reflects English life?" "There have already been dozens of them!" was Mr. Wilson's emphatic reply. "To go no farther back, Booth Tarkington wrote one the other day, and so did Theodore Dreiser. (Dreiser's story, 'The "Genius,"' of course couldn't have appeared in any American magazine. Trust your canny publisher not to let his magazine hand know what his book hand is doing!) "But let us lay forever that dear old question that has haunted our literary columns for so many years. The answer, of course, is that there is no novel that reflects English life any more adequately than _The Turmoil_, or '_The Genius_,' or _The Virginian_, or _Perch of the Devil_, or _Unleavened Bread_, or _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ reflects American life. "Certainly _Vanity Fair_ doesn't do this. It reflects but a very narrow section of London life. For the purposes of fictional portrayal England is just as big and difficult--as impossible in one novel--as the United States. "To know England through fiction one must go to all her artists, past and present, getting a little from each. Hardy gives us an England that Thackeray never suspected, and Galsworthy gives us still another, not to go on to the England of George Moore, Phillpotts, Quiller-Couch, Wells, Bennett, Walpole, George, or Mackenzie. I hope at the proper time that a tasteful little tablet will be erected to my memory for having laid this ancient and highly respectable apparition." In his interesting contribution to a symposium of opinions as to what are the six best novels in the English language, Mr. Wilson had some things to say about Dickens which were not likely to bring him a vote of thanks from the Dickens Fellowship. I wished to have his opinion of Dickens stated more definitely, and so, basing my question on a statement he had made in the symposium, I asked, "What qualities in the work of Charles Dickens make him a bad model for novelists to follow?" Mr. Wilson replied: "Dickens has been a blight to most writers who were susceptible to his vices. He was a great humorist, but an inferior novelist, and countless other inferior novelists have believed that they could be great humorists by following his childishly easy formula. "That is, those who were influenced by him copy his faults. Witness our school of characterization based on the Dickens method, a school holding that 'character' is a mere trick of giving your creation exaggerated mannerisms or physical surfaces--as with Dickens it was rarely anything else. "Dickens created vaudeville 'characters'--unsurpassed for twenty-minute sketches, deadly beyond that to the mentally mature. His stock in trade was the grotesque make-up. In stage talk he couldn't create a 'straight' part. "Strip his people of their make-ups, verbal, hirsute, sartorial, surgical, pathological, what not--and dummies remain. Meet them once and you know them for the rest of the tale, the Micawbers, Gamps, Pecksniffs, Nicklebys; each has his stunt and does it over and over at each new meeting, to the--for me, at least--maddening delay of the melodrama. I like melodrama as well as any one, badgered heroines, falsely accused heroes, missing wills, trap-doors, disguised philanthropists, foul murders, and even slow-dying children who are not only moralists, but orators; and I like to see the villain get his at last, and get it good; but I can't read Dickens any more, because the tale must be held up every five minutes for one of the funny 'characters' to do his stunt. "How many years will it take us--writers, I mean--to realize that there are no characters in Dickens in the sense that Dmitri in _The Brothers Caramazov_ is a character? How few of our current novelists can distinguish between the soulless caricaturing of Dickens and the genuine character-drawing of a Turgenieff or a Dostoievski! "How few of us can see how the soul of Dmitri is slowly unfolded to the reader with never a bit of make-up! To this moment, I don't know if he wore a beard or not; but I know the man. Dickens would have given him funny whiskers, astigmatism, a shortened leg, a purple nose, and still to make sure we wouldn't mistake him a catch phrase for his utterance. "Any novelist who has mastered the rudiments of his craft, even though he hasn't an atom of humor in his make-up, can write a Dickens novel, and any publisher will print it for the Christmas trade if it's fairly workman-like, and it will be warmly praised in the reviews. That happens every season. "And that's why Dickens is a bad model. If one must have a model, why not Hall Caine, infinitely the superior of Dickens as a craftsman? Of course, having no humor, he can't be read by people who have, but he knows his trade, where Dickens was a preposterous blunderer." Charles Belmont Davis once told me that a novelist should have some other regular occupation besides writing. I asked Mr. Wilson his opinion on this subject. "Mr. Davis didn't originate this theory," he said. "It's older than he is. Anyway, I don't believe in it. I know of no business to-day that would leave a man time to write novels, and a novelist worth his salt won't have time for any other business. "Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else. "Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth, preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this late day. "Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read _The High Priestess_, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel writing--something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be. "From the author of _Unleavened Bread_ we once had a right to expect much. But _The High Priestess_ chiefly makes me regret that he didn't have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have forgotten--for he did know it once--that a novelist may or may not think straight, but he must feel. "Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist would starve in any other business." I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their time." Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?" he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway? True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain, arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have attained the world stature--so that we must go back and back to Cervantes to find his like." _THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_ EDWARD S. MARTIN If William Makepeace Thackeray were alive to-day he would not write a _Book of Snobs_. He might write a _Book of Reformers_. This is the opinion of that shrewd and kindly satirist, Edward S. Martin. I found him not in New York, the city whose lights and shadows are reflected in much of his graceful prose and pungent verse, but out among the Connecticut hills. In the pleasant study of his quaint Colonial cottage he talked about the thing he delights to observe--humanity. "Thackeray would not write a _Book of Snobs_ to-day," he said. "The snob is not now the appealing subject that he was in the early days of the reign of Queen Victoria. Thackeray could not now find enough snobs and snobbery to write about, either in England or in America. Snobs are by way of having punctured tires these days. "Don't you think that the snobs were always very much apart from our civilization and national ideals? They were a symptom of an established and conservative society. And this established and conservative society Thackeray in his way helped to break down. "To-day, in England and in the United States, that kind of society is in a precarious condition. If Thackeray were now writing, he would not satirize snobs. It is more likely that he would satirize the reformers. I think that all the snobs have hit the sawdust trail." "How did this happen?" I asked. "What was it that did away with the snobs?" "It was largely a natural process of change," said Mr. Martin. "The snobs were put on the defensive. You see, there is a harder push of democracy now than there was in Thackeray's time. The world of which the snob was so conspicuous a part seems, especially since the war began, to have passed away. Of course the literature of that world is not dead, but for the moment it seems obsolete. "To-day the whole attention of civilized mankind is fixed on the great fundamental problems; there is no time for snobbery. For one thing, there is the problem of national self-preservation. And there has recently been before the civilized world, more strongly than ever before, the great problem of the development of democracy. "I suppose that the war will check, to a certain extent, the development of democracy. In England the great task of the hour is to organize all the powers of society for defense against attack, against attack by a power organized for forty years for that attack. "I suppose England will get organization out of this war. And if we get into the war, we'll get organization out of it." Mr. Martin is generally thought of as a critic of social rather than political conditions. But he is keenly interested in politics. Speaking of American politics and the possibility of America's entering the war, he said: "For the past fifteen years our greatest activity in politics has been to rip things open. It seemed to most people that the organization was getting too strong and that it was controlled by too few people. The fight has been against that condition. "But if we became involved in a serious war trouble the energy of our people would be directed to an attempt to secure increased efficiency. We would become closely organized again. I don't think we'd lose the benefit of what has been done in the past years, but we would come to a turn in the road. "I suppose it would bring us all together, if we got into this war, and I suppose we'd get some good out of it. "You see, the people who formerly directed our Government haven't had much power for several years. Now they are valuable people. And they will come back into power again, but with greatly modified conditions. "I don't think that a new set of people are going to manage the affairs of the nation. I think that the affairs of the nation will be managed by the people who managed them before. But these people will be much more under control than they were before, and they will be subject to new laws. "How much good government by commission is going to do I don't know. We have not as yet had good enough men to enter into this important work, and the best of those who have entered have not stayed in this employment. So the development of experts in government has not come along as well as people hoped it would." The genial philosopher smiled quizzically and rose from his chair. "I'm afraid I'm getting too political," he said, pacing slowly up and down the room. "Let's get back to snobs and snobbery. "You asked me a few minutes ago why the snob had become so inconspicuous a figure in our modern society. Well, I know one reason for this altered condition of affairs. Woman has abolished the snob. Woman has changed man." "And what changed woman?" I asked. "Many things; the development of machinery, for instance," he replied. "Woman has not changed so much as the conditions of life have changed. "The development of machinery has caused changes that impress me deeply. It has produced immense alterations in the conditions of life and in the relations between people. "War has been changed in a striking manner by this development of machinery. Never in the history of warfare was machinery so prominent and important as to-day. In fact, I think I am justified in speaking of this war as a machine-bore! "Machinery really has had a great deal to do with changing the condition and activities of woman, and has been a powerful influence in bringing about the modern movement for women's suffrage. Machinery has changed the employment of women and forced them into kinds of work which are not domestic. "The typewriter and the telephone have revolutionized our methods of doing business. The typewriter and the telephone have filled our offices with women. They are doing work which twenty years ago would have been considered most unfeminine. "The war is strengthening this tendency of women to take up work that is not domestic. I have heard it said that women first got into the undomestic kinds of business in France during the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon wanted to have all the men out in the line of battle, so he had girls instructed in bookkeeping and other kinds of office work. "The business activities of Frenchwomen date from that time. And a similar result seems to be coming out of this war. In France, in England, in all the countries engaged in the war the women are filling the positions left vacant by the men." "Do you think," I asked, "that this is a good thing for civilization, this increased activity of women in business?" "I don't know," said Mr. Martin, musingly. "I don't know. But I do know this, that the main employment of woman is to rear a family. Office work, administrative work--these things are of only secondary importance. The one vital thing for women to do is to rear families. They must do this if the human race is to continue." "Mr. Martin," I said, "you told me that Thackeray, if he were alive, would satirize the reformers. Just what sort of reformer is it that has taken the place of the snob?" Mr. Martin did not at once answer. He smiled, as if enjoying some entertaining memory. Then he started to speak, and mentioned the name of a prominent reformer. But his New England caution checked him. He said: "No, I'd better not say anything about that. I'd rather not. I'd rather say that the things that the snobs admired and particularly embodied have lost prestige during the last twenty years. "After 1898, after our great rise to prosperity, the captains of industry and of finance were the great men of the country. But I think these great men are less stunning now than they were then. And money is less stunning, too. "All the business of money-making has had a great loss of prestige since 1900. People think more of other things. And the people who are thinking of other things than money-making have more of a 'punch' than they had before. The wise have more of a punch, and so have the foolish." Again came that reminiscent smile. "Reformers can be very trying," he said. "Very trying, indeed. Did you ever read Brand Whitlock's _Forty Years of It_? Brand Whitlock had his own trials with the reformers. Whitlock is a sensible, generous man, and his attitude toward reformers is a good deal humorous and not at all violent. That would be Thackeray's attitude toward them, I think, if he were living to-day. He'd satirize the reformers instead of the snobs." Mr. Martin is not inclined to condemn or to accept absolutely any of the modern reform movements. "All reform movements," he said, "run until they get a check. Then they stop. But what they have accomplished is not lost." The society women who undertake sociological reform work find in Mr. Martin no unsympathetic critic. "These wealthy women," he said, "take up reform work as a recourse. Society life is not very filling. They have a sense of emptiness. So they go in for reform, to fill out their lives more adequately. "But I don't know that I'd call that kind of thing reform. I'd call it a large form of social activity. These women are attending to a great mass of people who need this attention. But the bulk of this kind of work is too small for it to be called reform. "In New York there are very many young people who need care and leadership. The neglected and incompetent must be looked after. The old-fashioned family control has been considerably loosened, and an attempt must be made to guard those who are therefore less protected than they would have been a generation ago. Certainly these efforts to look after young people who don't have enough care taken of them by their families are directed in the right direction." I asked Mr. Martin what he thought of the present condition of American literature, particularly the work presented to the public on the pages of magazines. "Just now," he said, "the newspapers seem to have almost everything. The great interest of the last few years has been in the newspapers. They have had a tremendous story to tell, they have told it every day, and other things have seemed, in comparison, flat and lifeless. "It has been a hard time for every sort of a publication not absolutely up to the minute all the time. The newspapers have had the field almost to themselves. "And I think that the newspapers have greatly improved. They have had an immense chance, and it has been very stimulating." _COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT_ ROBERT HERRICK "Realism," said Robert Herrick, "is not the celebration of sexuality." I had not recalled to earth that merry divine whose lyric invitation to go a-Maying still echoes in the heart of every lover of poetry. The Robert Herrick with whom I was talking is a poet and a discriminating critic of poetry, but the world knows him chiefly for his novels--_The Common Lot_, _Together_, _Clark's Field_, and other intimate studies of American life and character. He is a realist, and not many years ago there were critics who thought that his manner of dealing with sexual themes was dangerously frank. Therefore, the statement that he had just made seemed to me particularly significant. "It seems to have become the fashion," he said, "to apply the term Realist to every writer who is obsessed with sex. I think I know the reason for this. Our Anglo-Saxon prudery kept all mention of sex relations out of our fiction for many years. Among comparatively modern novelists the realists were the first to break the shackles of this convention, and write frankly of sex. And from this it has come, most unfortunately, that realism and pornography are often confused by novelists and critics as well as by the public. "This confusion of ideas was apparent in some of the criticisms of my novel _Together_. In an early chapter of the book there was an incident which was intended to show that the man and woman who were the chief figures in the book were spiritually incompatible, that their relations as husband and wife would be wrong. This was, in fact, the theme of the book, and this incident in the first chapter was intended to foreshadow the later events of their married life. Well, the critics who disliked this chapter said that what they objected to was its 'gross realism.' "Now, as a matter of fact, that part of the book was not realistic at all. I was describing something unusual, abnormal, while realism has to do with the normal. The critic had, of course, a perfect right to believe that the subject ought not to be treated at all, but 'gross realism' was the most inappropriate description possible. "Undoubtedly there are many writers who believe that they are realists because they write about nothing but sex. Undoubtedly, too, there are many writers who are conscious of the commercial value of sex in literature. Of course a writer ought to be conscious of the sex impulse in life, but he ought not to display it constantly. I wish our writers would pay less attention to the direct manifestations of sex and more to its indirect influence, to the ways in which it affects all phases of activity." "Who are some of the writers who seem to you to be especially ready to avail themselves of the commercial value of sex?" I asked. Mr. Herrick smiled. "I think you know the writers I mean without my mentioning their names," he said. "They write for widely circulated magazines, and make a great deal of money, and their success is due almost entirely to their industrious celebration of sexual affairs. You know the sort of magazine for which they write--it always has on the cover a highly colored picture of a pretty woman, never anything else. That, too, is an example, and a rather wearying example, of the commercializing of the sex appeal. "I think that Zola, although he was a great artist, was often conscious of the business value of the sex theme. He knew that that sort of thing had a tremendous appeal, and, for me, much of his best work is marred by his deliberate introduction of sex, with the purpose--which, of course, he realized--of making a sensation and selling large editions of his books. This sort of commercialism was not found in the great Russian realists, the true realist--Dostoievski, for example. But it is found in the work of some of the modern Russian writers who are incorrectly termed realists." "Mr. Herrick," I asked, "just what is a realist?" Mr. Herrick's youthful face, which contrasts strangely with his white hair, took on a thoughtful expression. "The distinction between realism and romanticism," he said, "is one of spirit rather than of method. The realist has before him an aim which is entirely different from that of the romanticist. "The realist writes a novel with one purpose in view. And that purpose is to render into written words the normal aspect of things. "The aim of the romanticist is entirely different. He is concerned only with things which are exciting, astonishing--in a word, abnormal. "I do not like literary labels, and I think that the names 'realist' and 'romanticist' have been so much misused that they are now almost meaningless. The significance of the term changes from year to year; the realists of one generation are the romanticists of the next. "Bulwer Lytton was considered a realist in his day. But we think of him only as a sentimental and melodramatic romanticist whose work has no connection with real life. "Charles Dickens was considered a realist by the critics of his own generation, and it is probable that he considered himself a realist. But his strongest instinct was toward the melodramatic. He wrote chiefly about simple people, it is true, and chiefly about his own land and time. But the fact that a writer used his contemporaries as subjects does not make him a realist. Dickens's people were unusual; they were better or worse than most people, and they had extraordinary adventures; they did not lead the sort of life which most people lead. Therefore, Dickens cannot accurately be called a realist." "You called Dostoievski a realist," I said. "What writers who use the English language seem to you to deserve best the name of realist?" "I think," said Mr. Herrick, "that the most thoroughgoing realist who ever wrote in England was Anthony Trollope. _Barchester Towers_ and _Framley Parsonage_ are masterpieces of realism; they give a faithful and convincing picture of the every-day life of a section of English society with which their author was thoroughly familiar. Trollope reflected life as he saw it--normal life. He was a great realist. "In the United States there has been only one writer who has as great a right to the name realist as had Anthony Trollope. That man is William Dean Howells. Mr. Howells has always been interested in the normal aspect of things. He has taken for his subject a sort of life which he knows intimately; he has not sought for extraordinary adventures for his theme, nor has he depicted characters remote from our experience. His novels are distinguished by such fidelity to life that he has an indisputable claim to be called a realist. "But, as I said, it is dangerous and unprofitable to attempt to label literary artists. Thackeray was a realist. Yet _Henry Esmond_ is classed as a romantic novel. In that book Thackeray used the realistic method; he spent a long time in studying the manners and customs of the time about which he was writing; and all the details of the sort of life which he describes are, I believe, historically accurate. And yet _Henry Esmond_ is a romance from beginning to end; it is a romantic novel written by a realist, and written according to what is called the realistic method. "On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott was a romanticist. No one will deny that. Yet in many of his early books he dealt with what may be called realistic material; he described with close fidelity to detail a sort of life and a sort of people with which he was well acquainted. "Whether a writer is a realist or a romanticist is, after all, I think, partly a matter of accident or culture. I happen to be a realist because I was brought up on the great Russian realists like Gogol and the great English realists from George Elliot down to Thomas Hardy. If I had been brought up on romantic writers I suppose that I might now be writing an entirely different sort of novel from that with which I am associated. "There is a sounder distinction," said Mr. Herrick, "than that which people try to draw between the realistic novel and the romantic novel. This is the distinction between the novel of character and the novel of events. Personally, I never have been able to see how the development of character can be separated from the plot of a novel. A book in which the characters exhibit exactly the same characteristics, moral and intellectual, in the last chapter as in the first, seems to me to be utterly worthless. "I will, however, make one exception--that is, the novel of the Jules Verne type. In this sort of book, and in romances of the Monte Cristo kind, action is the only thing with which the author and the reader are concerned, and any attempt to develop character would clog the wheels of the story. "But every other kind of novel depends on character. Even in the best work of Dumas, in _The Three Musketeers_, for example, the characters of the principal figures develop as the story progresses. "The highest interest of a novel depends upon the development of its characters. If the characters are static, then the book is feeble. I have never been able to see how the plot and the development of the characters can be separated. "Of course, the novel of character is full of adventure. The adventures of Henry James's characters are of absorbing interest, but they are psychological adventures, internal adventures. If some kind person wanted to give one of Henry James's novels what is commonly called 'a bully plot' the novel would fail." As to the probable effect on literature of the war, Mr. Herrick has a theory different from that of any other writer with whom I have discussed the subject. "I think," he said, "that after the war we shall return to fatuous romanticism and weak sentimentality in literature. The tendency will be to read novels in order to forget life, instead of reading them to realize life. There will be a revival of a deeper religious sense, perhaps, but there will also be a revival of mere empty formalism in religion. It has been so in the past after great convulsions. Men need time to recover their spiritual pride, their interest in ideas." But Mr. Herrick's own reaction to the war does not seem to justify his pessimistic prophecy. Certainly the personal experience which he next narrated to me does not indicate that Mr. Herrick is growing sentimental and romantic. "When I was in Rome recently," he said, "I was much impressed by D'Annunzio. I was interested in him as a problem, as a picturesque literary personality, as a decadent raffine type regenerated by the war. I have not read any of his books for many years. "I took some of D'Annunzio's books to read on my voyage home. I read _Il Piacere_. I realized its charm, I realized the highly æsthetic quality of its author, a scholarly and exact æstheticism as well as an emotional æstheticism. But, nevertheless, I had to force myself to read the book. It was simply a description of a young man's amorous adventures. And I could not see any reason for the existence of this carefully written record of passional experiences. "It seemed to me that the war had swept this sort of thing aside, or had swept aside my interest in this sort of thing. The book seemed to me as dull and trivial and as remote as a second-rate eighteenth-century novel. And I wondered if we would ever again return to the time when such a record of a young man's emotional and sensual experiences would be worth while. "I came to the conclusion that D'Annunzio himself would not now write such a novel. I think that it would seem to him to be too trivial a report on life. I think that the war has so forced the essential things of life upon the attention of young men." _SIXTEEN DON'TS FOR POETS_ ARTHUR GUITERMAN Arthur Guiterman has been called the Owen Seaman of America. Of course he isn't, any more than Owen Seaman is the Arthur Guiterman of England. But the verse which brings Arthur Guiterman his daily bread is turned no less deftly than is that of _Punch's_ famous editor. Arthur Guiterman is not a humorist who writes verse; he is a poet with an abundant gift of humor. Now, the author of _The Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup_ and _The Quest of the Riband_, and of those unforgetable rhymed reviews, differs from most other poets not only in possessing an abnormally developed sense of humor, but also in being able to make a comfortable living out of the sale of his verse. But when he talked to me recently he was by no means inclined to advise all able young poets to expect their poetry to provide them with board and lodging. "Of course it is possible to make a living out of verse," he said. "Walt Mason does, and so does Berton Braley. And now most of my income comes from my verse. Formerly I wrote short stories, but I haven't written one for seven or eight years. "Nevertheless, I think it is inadvisable for any one to set out with the idea of depending on the sale of verse as a means of livelihood. You see, there are, after all, two forms, and only two forms, of literary expression--the prose form and the verse form. Some subjects suit the prose form, others suit the verse form. Any one who makes writing his profession has ideas severally adapted to both of these forms. And every writer should be able to express his idea in whichever of these two forms suits it better. "Now, the verse form is older than the prose form. And so I have come to look upon it as the form peculiarly attractive to youth. Many writers outgrew the tendency to use the verse form, but some never outgrew it. Sir Walter Scott was a verse-writer before he was a prose-writer, and so was Shakespeare. So were many modern writers--Robert W. Chambers, for example. "This theory is true especially in regard to lyric verse. The lyric is nearly always the work of a young man. As a man grows older he sings less and preaches more. Certainly this was true of Milton. "I never thought that I should write verse for a living. But verse happens to be the medium that I love. I ran across my first poem the other day--it was about fireflies, and I was eight years old when I wrote it. Certainly nearly all writers write verse before they write prose; perhaps it is atavistic. I don't know that Henry James began with verse. But I would be willing to bet that he did. "One trouble with a great many people who make a living out of writing verse is that they feel obliged always to be verse-writers, never to write prose, even when the subject demands that medium. Alfred Noyes gives us an example of this unfortunate tendency in his _Drake_. I am not disparaging Alfred Noyes's work; he has written charming lyrics, but in _Drake_, and perhaps in some of the _Tales from the Mermaid Tavern_, I feel that he has written verse not because the subject was especially suited to that medium, but because he felt that he was a verse-writer and therefore should not write prose." Mr. Guiterman is firmly convinced, however, that a verse-writer ought to be able, in time, to make a living out of his work. "If a man calls himself a writer," he said, "he ought to be able to make a living out of writing. And I think that the writer of verse has a greater opportunity to-day than ever before. I don't mean to say that the appreciation of poetry is more intense than ever before, but it is more general. More people are reading poetry now than in bygone generations. "Compare with the traditions that we have to-day those of the early nineteenth century, of the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Then books of verse sold in large quantities, it is true, but to a relatively small public, to one class of readers. Now not only the poet, but also the verse-writer has an enormous public. If a really great poet should arise to-day he would find awaiting him a larger public than that known by any poet of the past. But it would be necessary for the poet to be great for him to find this public. Byron would be more generally appreciated to-day, if he were to live again, than he was in his own generation. I mention Byron because I think it probable that the next great poet will have something of Byron's dynamic quality." "Who was the last great poet?" I asked. "How is one to decide whether or not a poet is great?" asked Mr. Guiterman in turn. "My own feeling is that the late William Vaughn Moody was a great poet in the making. Perhaps he never really fulfilled his early promise; perhaps he went back to the themes of bygone ages too much in finding themes for his poetry. It may be that the next really great poet will sing an entirely different strain; it may be that I will be one of those who will say that his work is all bosh. "But at any rate, he won't be an imitation Whitman or anything of that sort. He won't be any special school, nor will he think that he is founding a school. But it may be that his admirers will found a school with him as its leader, and they may force him to take himself seriously, and thus ruin himself." Returning to the subject of the advisability of a writer being able to express himself in verse as well as in prose, Mr. Guiterman said: "Especially in our generation is it true that good verse requires extreme condensation. In most work to-day brevity is desirable. The epigram beats the epic. If Milton were living to-day he would not write epics. I don't think it improbable that we have men with Miltonic minds, and they are not writing epics. "If a man finds that he cannot express his idea in verse more forcefully than he can in prose, then he ought to write prose. Very often a writer is interested in some little incident which he would not be justified in treating in prose, something too slight to be the theme of a short story. This is the sort of thing which he should put into verse. There is Leigh Hunt's _Jennie Kissed Me_, for example. Suppose he had made a short story of it." Thinking of this poet's financial success, I asked him just what course he would advise a young poet to pursue who had no means of livelihood except writing. "Well, the worst thing for him to do," said Mr. Guiterman, "would be to devote all his attention to writing an epic. He'd starve to death. "I suppose the best thing for him to do would be to write on as many subjects as possible, including those of intense interest to himself. What interests him intensely is sure to interest others, and the number of others whom it interests will depend on how close he is by nature to the mind of his place and time. He should get some sort of regular work so that he need not depend at first upon the sale of his writings. This work need not necessarily be literary in character, although it would be advisable for him to get employment in a magazine or newspaper office, so that he may get in touch with the conditions governing the sale of manuscripts. "He should write on themes suggested by the day's news. He should write topical verse; if there is a political campaign on, he should write verse bearing upon that; if a great catastrophe occurs, he should write about that, but he must not write on these subjects in a commonplace manner. "He should send his verses to the daily papers, for they are the publications most interested in topical verse. But also he should attempt to sell his work to the magazines, which pay better prices than the newspapers. If it is in him to do so, he should write humorous verse, for there is always a good market for humorous verse that is worth printing. He should look up the publishers of holiday cards, and submit to them Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter verses, for which he would receive, probably, about five dollars apiece. He should write advertising verses, and he should, perhaps, make an alliance with some artist with whom he can work, each supplementing the work of the other." "Mr. Guiterman," I said, "is this the advice that you would give to John Keats if he were to ask you?" "Yes, certainly," said Mr. Guiterman. "But you understand that our hypothetical poet must all the time be doing his own work, writing the sort of verse which he specially desires to write. If his pot-boiling is honestly done, it will help him with his other work. "He must study the needs and limitations of the various publications. He must recognize the fact that just because he has certain powers it does not follow that everything he writes will be desired by the editors. Marked ability and market ability are different propositions. "If he finds that the magazines are not printing sad sonnets, he must not write sad sonnets. He must adapt himself to the demands of the day. "There is high precedent for this course. You asked if I would give this advice to the young Keats. Why not, when Shakespeare himself followed the line of action of which I spoke? He began as a lyric poet, a writer of sonnets. He wrote plays because he saw that the demand was for plays, and because he wanted to make a living and more than a living. But because he was Shakespeare his plays are what they are. "The poet must be influenced by the demand. There is inspiration in the demand. Besides the material reward, the poet who is influenced by the demand has the encouraging, inspiring knowledge that he is writing something that people want to read." I asked Mr. Guiterman to give me a list of negative commandments for the guidance of aspiring poets. Here it is: "Don't think of yourself as a poet, and don't dress the part. "Don't classify yourself as a member of any special school or group. "Don't call your quarters a garret or a studio. "Don't frequent exclusively the company of writers. "Don't think of any class of work that you feel moved to do as either beneath you or above you. "Don't complain of lack of appreciation. (In the long run no really good published work can escape appreciation.) "Don't think you are entitled to any special rights, privileges, and immunities as a literary person, or have any more reason to consider your possible lack of fame a grievance against the world than has any shipping-clerk or traveling-salesman. "Don't speak of poetic license or believe that there is any such thing. "Don't tolerate in your own work any flaws in rhythm, rhyme, melody, or grammar. "Don't use 'e'er' for 'ever,' 'o'er' for 'over,' 'whenas' or 'what time' for 'when,' or any of the 'poetical' commonplaces of the past. "Don't say 'did go' for 'went,' even if you need an extra syllable. "Don't omit articles or prepositions for the sake of the rhythm. "Don't have your book published at your own expense by any house that makes a practice of publishing at the author's expense. "Don't write poems about unborn babies. "Don't--don't write hymns to the great god Pan. He is dead; let him rest in peace! "Don't write what everybody else is writing." _MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION_ GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON Why is the modern American novel inferior to the modern English novel? Of course, there are some patriotic critics who believe that it is not inferior. But most readers of fiction speak of H. G. Wells and Compton Mackenzie, for example, with a respect and admiration which they do not extend to living American novelists. Why is this? Is it because of snobbishness or literary colonialism on the part of the American public? George Barr McCutcheon does not think so. The author of _Beverly of Graustark_ and many another popular romance believes that there is in America a force definitely harmful to the novel. And that force is the magazine. "The development of the magazine," he said to me, "has affected fiction in two ways. It has made it cheap and yet expensive, if you know what I mean. "Novels written solely with the view to sensationalism are more than likely to bring discredit, not upon the magazine, but upon the writer. He gets his price, however, and the public gets its fiction. "In my humble opinion, a writer should develop and complete his novel without a thought of its value or suitability to serial purposes. He should complete it to his own satisfaction--if that is possible--before submitting it to either editor or publisher. They should not be permitted to see it until it is in its complete form." "But you yourself write serial stories, do you not?" I asked. "I have never written a serial," answered Mr. McCutcheon. "Some of my stories have been published serially, but they were not written as serials. "I am quite convinced in my own mind that if we undertake to analyze the distinction between the first-class English writers of to-day and many of our Americans, we will find that their superiority resolves itself quite simply into the fact that they do not write their novels as serials. In other words, they write a novel and not a series of chapters, parts, and instalments." "Do you think that the American novel will always be inferior to the English novel?" I asked. "Is it not probable that the American novel will so develop as to escape the effects of serialization?" "There is no reason," Mr. McCutcheon replied, "why Americans should not produce novels equal to those of the English, provided the same care is exercised in the handling of their material, and that they make haste as slowly as possible. Just so long, however, as we are menaced by the perils of the serial our general output will remain inferior to that of England. "I do not mean to say that we have no writers in this country who are the equals in every respect of the best of the English novelists. We have some great men and women here, sincere, earnest workers who will not be spoiled." Mr. McCutcheon has no respect for the type of novel, increasingly popular of late, in which the author devotes page after page to glowing accounts of immorality with the avowed intention of teaching a high moral lesson. He has little faith in the honesty of purpose of the authors of works of this sort. "The so-called sex novel," he said, "is one of our gravest fatalities. I may be wrong, but I am inclined to think that most novels of that character are written, not from an æsthetic point of view, but for the somewhat laudable purpose of keeping the wolf from the door and at the same time allowing the head of the family to ride in an automobile of his own. "The typical serial writer is animated by the desire, or perhaps it is an obligation, to make the 'suspended interest' paramount to all else. This interest must not be allowed to flag between instalments. "The keen desire for thrills must be gratified at all costs. It is commanded by the editor--and I do not say that the editor errs. His public expects it in a serial. It must not be disappointed." I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he believed that a writer could produce sensational and poorly constructed fiction in order to make a living and yet keep his talent unimpaired; if a writer was justified in writing trash in order to gain leisure for serious work. He replied: "There are writers to-day who persist in turning out what they vaingloriously describe as 'stuff to meet the popular demand.' They invariably or inevitably declare that some day they will 'be in a position to write the sort of stuff they want to write.' "These writers say, in defense of their position, that they are not even trying to do their best work, that they are merely biding their time, and that--some day! I very much doubt their sincerity, or, at any rate, their capacity for self-analysis. I believe that when an author sets himself down to write a book (I refer to any author of recognized ability), he puts into that book the best that is in him at the time. "It is impossible for a good, conscientious writer to work on a plane lower than his best. Only hack writers can do such things. "There is not one of us who does not do his best when he undertakes to write his book. We only confess that we have not done our best when a critic accuses us of pot-boiling, and so forth. Then we rise in our pride and say, 'Oh, well, I can do better work than this, and they know it.' "It is true that we may not be doing the thing that we really want to do, but I am convinced that we are unconsciously doing our best, just the same. It all resolves itself into this statement--a good workman cannot deliberately do a poor piece of work. "I am free to confess that I have done my very best in everything I have undertaken. It may fall short of excellence as viewed from even my own viewpoint, but it is the best I know how to do. "So you may take it from me that the writer who declares that he is going to do something really worth while, just as soon as he gets through doing the thing that the public expects him to do, is deceiving himself and no one else. An author cannot stand still in his work. He either progresses or retrogrades, and no man progresses except by means of steady improvement. He cannot say, 'I will write a poor book this year and a great book next year.'" Mr. McCutcheon is so unashamedly a romanticist that I expected to find him an enthusiastic partisan of the first and greatest master of the romantic novel in English. But, to my surprise, he said: "I suppose the world has outgrown Sir Walter Scott's novels. It is quite natural that it should. The world is older and conditions have changed. The fairest simile I can offer in explanation is that as man himself grows older he loses, except in a too frequently elastic memory, his interest in the things that moved him when he was a boy." But while Mr. McCutcheon believes (in defiance of the opinion of the publishers who continue to bring out, year by year, their countless new editions of the Waverley Novels in all the languages of the civilized world) that the spell of the Wizard of the North has waned, he nevertheless believes that the romantic novel has lost none of its ancient appeal. "I do not believe," he said, "that the vogue of the romantic novel, or tale (which is a better word for describing the sort of fiction covered by this generic term), will ever die. The present war undoubtedly will alter the trend of the modern romantic fiction, but it will not in effect destroy it." "How will it alter it?" I asked. "Years most certainly will go by," he replied, "before the novelist may even hope to contend with the realities of this great and most unromantic conflict. Kings and courtiers are very ordinary, and, in some cases, ignoble creatures in these days, and none of them appears to be romantic. "We find a good many villains among our erstwhile heroes, and a good many heroes among our principal villains. People will not care to read war novels for a good many years to come, but it is inevitable that future generations will read even the lightest kind of fiction dealing with this war, horrible though it is. Just so long as the world exists there will be people who read nothing else but the red-blood, stirring romantic stories. "There exists, of course, a class of readers who will not be tempted by the romantic, who will not even tolerate it, because they cannot understand it. That class may increase, but so will its antithesis. "I know a man who has read the Bible through five or six times, not because he is of a religious turn of mind or even mildly devout, but because there is a lot of good, sound, exciting romance in it! A man who is without romance in his soul has no right to beget children, for he cannot love them as they ought to be loved. They represent romance at its best. He is, therefore, purely selfish in his possession of them." Mr. McCutcheon had spoken of the probable effect of the war on the popular taste for romantic fiction. I reminded him of William Dean Howells's much-quoted statement, "War stops literature." "War stops everything else," said Mr. McCutcheon, "so why not literature? It stops everything, I amend, except bloodshed, horror, and heartache. "And when the war itself is stopped, you will find that literature will be revived with farming and other innocent and productive industries. I venture to say that some of the greatest literature the world has ever known is being written to-day. Out of the history of this titanic struggle will come the most profound literary expressions of all time, and from men who to-day are unknown and unconsidered." I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he did not believe that the youthful energy of the United States was likely to make its citizens impatient of romance, that quality being generally considered the exclusive property of nations ancient in civilization. He did not think so. "America," he said, "is essentially a romantic country, our great and profound commercialism to the contrary notwithstanding. America was born of adventure; its infancy was cradled in romance; it has grown up in thrills. And while to-day it may not reflect romance as we are prone to consider it, there still rests in America a wonderful treasure in the shape of undeveloped possibilities. "We are, first of all, an eager, zestful, imaginative people. We are creatures of romance. We do two things exceedingly well--we dream and we perform. "Our dreams are of adventure, of risk, of chance, of impossibilities, and of deeds that only the bold may conceive. And we find on waking from these dreams that we have performed the deeds we dreamed of. "The Old World looks upon us as braggarts. Perhaps we are, but we are kindly, genial, smiling braggarts--and the braggart is, after all, our truest romanticist. "I like to hear a grown man admit that he still believes in fairies. That sort of man thinks of the things that are beautiful, even though they are invisible. And--if you stop to think about it--the most beautiful things in the world are invisible." _BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART_ FRANK H. SPEARMAN The late J. Pierpont Morgan writing sonnet sequences, Rockefeller regarding oil as useful only when mixed with pigment and spread upon canvas by his own deft hand, Carnegie designing libraries instead of paying for them--these are some of the entertaining visions that occur to the mind of Frank H. Spearman when he contemplates in fancy a civilization in which business no longer draws the master minds away from art. I asked the author of _Nan of Music Mountain_ if he thought that the trend of present-day American life--its commercialism and materialism--affected the character of our literature. He replied: "Let us take commercialism first: By it you mean the pursuit of business. Success in business brings money, power, and that public esteem we may loosely term fame--the admiration of our fellow-men and the sense of power among them. "Commercialism, thus defined, affects the character of our literature in a way that none of our students of the subject seems to have apprehended. We live in an atmosphere of material striving. Our great rewards are material successes. The extremely important consequence is that our business life through its greater temptations--through its being able to offer the rewards of wealth and mastery and esteem--robs literature and the kindred arts of our keenest minds. We have, it is true, eminent doctors and lawyers, but the complaint that commercialism has invaded these professions only proves that they depend directly on business prosperity for a substantial portion of their own rewards. "I am not forgetting the crust and garret as the traditional setting for the literary genius; but, when this state of affairs existed, the genius had no chance to become a business millionaire within ten years--or, for that matter, within a hundred. And while poverty provides an excellent foundation for a career, it is not so good as a superstructure--at least, not outside the ranks of the heroic few who renounce riches for spiritual things. "More than once," continued Mr. Spearman, "in meeting men among our masters of industry, I have been struck by the thought that these are the men who should be writing great books, painting great pictures, and building great cathedrals; their tastes, I have sometimes found, run in these directions quite as strongly as the tastes of lesser men who give themselves to literature, painting, or architecture. But the present-day market for cathedrals is somewhat straitened, and a great ambition may nowadays easily neglect the prospective rewards of literature for those of steel-making. "Business success--not achieved in literature and the arts--comes first with us; in consequence, the ranks of those who follow these professions are robbed of the intellect that should contribute to them. This is the real way in which commercialism--our pursuit of business--affects our literature. It depletes, too, in the same way, the quality of men in our public life. "Charles G. Dawes has called my attention more than once to the falling off in caliber among men from whose ranks our politicians and public men are drawn. It is not that our present administration is so conspicuously weak; go to any of the Presidential conventions this year and note the falling off in quality among the politicians. In one generation the change has been startling. The sons of the men that loomed large in public life twenty-five years ago to-day are masters of business. "Business takes everything. We have had really magnificent financiers, such as the elder Morgan, who should be our Michael Angelo. I have known railroad executives who might have been distinguished novelists, and bankers who would have been great artists were the American people as obsessed with the painting of pictures and the making of statues as those of Europe once were. "In Michael Angelo's day public interest in solving problems in manufacture and transportation did not overshadow that in painting and sculpture. Leonardo in our day would be building railroads, digging canals, or inventing the aeroplane--and doing better, perhaps, at these things than any man living; he came perilously close to doing all of them in his own day. "Before you can bring our steel-founders and business men into literature you must make success in literature and its kindred arts esteemed as the greatest reward. As it is, I fear it is likely to be chiefly those who through lack of capacity, inclination, or robust health are unequal to the heat and burden of great business that will be left for the secondary callings, among which we must at present rank literature. It would be interesting, too, to consider to what extent this movement of men toward business rewards has been compensated for by the opportunities afforded to women in the field thus deserted; we certainly have many clever women cultivating it." "But what," I asked, "about materialism--not specifically commercialism, but materialism? Do you think that its evil effects are evident in contemporary literature?" "Materialism--you mean the philosophy--has quite a different effect on any literature--a poisonous, a baneful effect, rather than a merely harmful one," Mr. Spearman answered. "Can you possibly have, at any time or anywhere, great art without a great faith? Since the era of Christianity, at any rate, it seems to me that periods of faith, or at least periods enjoying the reflexes and echoes of faith, have afforded the really nourishing atmosphere for artistic development. Spirituality provides that which the imagination may seize upon for the substance of its creative effort; without spirituality the imagination shrivels, and the materialist, while losing none of his characteristic confidence, shrinks continually to punier artistic stature." Something in what Mr. Spearman had said reminded me of Henry Holt's criticisms of the modern magazines. So I asked Mr. Spearman what effect the development of the American magazine, with its high prices for serials and series of stories, had had upon our fiction. He answered: "Good, I think. Our fiction must compete in its rewards with those of business. One of the rewards of either--even if you put it, in the first case, the lowest--is the monetary reward, and the more substantial that can be made, the more chance fiction will have of holding up its head. "I have had occasion to watch pretty closely the development of the inclinations and ambitions of a number of average American boys--boys that have had fairly intimate opportunities to consider both literature and business. I have been startled more than once to find that as each of them came along and was asked what he wanted to do, the substance of his answer has been, 'Something to make money.' "If you question your own youthful acquaintances, you will receive in most cases, I dare say, similar answers. I am afraid if Giotto had been a Wyoming shepherd-boy he would want to be a steel-maker. Anything that tends to attract the young to the pursuit of literature as a calling strengthens our fiction, and the magazine should have credit for an 'assist' in this direction. Don't forget, of course, that the magazine itself derives directly, by way of advertising, from business." "Do you think, then," I asked, "that our writers are producing work as likely to endure as that which is being produced in England?" Mr. Spearman smiled whimsically. "Your question suggests to me," he replied, "rather than any judgment in the case, the reflection that the average English writer has possessed over our average American writer the very great advantage of an opportunity to become really educated; to this extent their equipment is appreciably stronger than ours. If you will read the ordinary run of English fiction or play-writing and compare it with similar work of ours, you cannot fail to note the better finish in their work. And in expressing a conviction that our writers are somewhat handicapped as to this factor in their equipment, I do not indict them for wasted opportunities; I indict our own substantial failure in educational methods. For a generation or more we have experimented, and from the very first grade in our grammar-schools up to the university courses there have resulted confusion and ineptitude. I instance specifically our experimentation with electives and our widespread contempt for the classics. To attempt to master any of the arts and not to be intimately familiar with what the Greeks and the Romans have left us of their achievement--not to speak of those, to us, uncharted seas of medieval achievement in every direction following the twelfth century--is to make the effort under a distinct disadvantage. "The average English writer has had much more of this intimacy, or at least a chance at much more of it, than the average American writer. In the sphere of literary criticism I have heard Mr. Brownell speak of the better quality of even the anonymous English literary criticism so frequently to be found in their journals when compared with similar American work. There is only one explanation for these things, and it lies in the training. All of this not implying, in indirect answer to your question, that the English writer is to bear away the prize in the competition for literary permanence. American Samsons may, despite everything, burst their bonds; but if they win it will often be without what their teachers should have supplied. "Mr. Brownell, in his definitive essay on Cooper, in comparing the material at Balzac's hand with that at Cooper's, remarks on the fact that Cooper's background was essentially nature. 'Nothing, it is true, is more romantic than nature,' adds Mr. Brownell, 'except nature plus man. But the exception is prodigious.' Europe measures behind her writers almost three thousand years of man. "We have in this country no atmosphere of Christian tradition such as that which pervades Europe--English-speaking people parted with historic Christianity before they came here. But, willingly or unwillingly, the English and the Continental writers are saturated with this magnificent background of Christianity--they can't escape it. And what I note as striking evidence of the value to them of this brooding spirit of twenty European centuries is the fact that their very pagans choose Christian material to work with. Goethe himself, fine old pagan that he was, turned to Christian quarries for his _Faust_. The minor pagans turn in likewise, though naturally with slighter results. But to all of them, Christianity, paraphrasing Samson, might well say: 'If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not read--your own riddle of longed-for recognition.'" "Why is it that the art of fiction is no longer taken as seriously as it was, for example, in the time of Sir Walter Scott?" "I don't know how seriously," countered Mr. Spearman, "you mean your question to be taken. It suggests that in the day of Walter Scott the field of novel-writing was still so new that only bolder spirits ventured into it. It was not a day when the many could attempt the novel with any assurances of success in marketing their wares. In consequence we got then the work of only big men and women. Pioneers--though not necessarily respectable--are a hardy lot. "Still--touching on your other question about the great American novel--if I wished to develop great musicians I should start every one possible at studying music, and I can't help thinking that the more there are among us who attempt novels the greater probability there will be for the production of a masterpiece. A man's mind is a mine. Neither he nor any one else knows what is in it. Possessing the property in fee simple, he has, of course, certain valuable proprietary rights. But the only way I know of to find out to a certainty just what lies within the property is persistently to tunnel and drift, or, as Mr. Brownell says, 'to get out what is in you.' And I am in complete accord with him in the belief that temperament is the best possible endowment for a novelist--and temperament comes, if you are a Christian, from God; if a pagan, from the gods." Mr. Spearman returned to his theme of the effect of materialism on literature in the course of a discussion of the French novel of the day as compared to the novel of Zola and his imitators. He said: "I think the important thing for Zola was that his day coincided with a materialistic ascendency in the thought of France. He lived at a time admirably suited to a man of his type. Zola found a France weak and contemptible in its government, and in consequence a soil in which grossness could profitably be cultivated. "He was by no means a great artist; he was merely a writer writhing for recognition when he turned to filth. He took it up to commercialize it, to turn it into money and reputation. Men such as he are continually, at different times and in different countries, lifting their heads. But unless they are sustained by what chances to be a loose public attitude on questions of decency, they are clubbed into silence. "And just why should the exploitation of filth assume to monopolize the word 'realism'? To define precisely what realism should include and exclude would call for hard thinking. But it doesn't take much thought to reach the conclusion that mere annalists of grossness have no proper monopoly of the term. Grossness is no adequate foundation for a literary monument; it is not even a satisfactory corner-stone. The few writers one thinks of that constitute exceptions would have left a better monument without it. "But if you wish to realize how fortunate Zola was in coinciding with a period when the chief effort of the ruling spirits of France was to war on all forces that strove to conserve decency, try to imagine what sort of a reception _L'Assommoir_ would be accorded to-day by the tears of France stricken through calamity to its knees. "France is experiencing now realism of quite another sort from that propagated by Zola--a realism that is wringing the souls and turning the thoughts of a great and unhappy people back once more to the eternal verities; in these grossness never had a place. "And if you don't want to think in grossness, don't read in it; if you don't want to act in grossness, don't think in it. To exploit it is to exaggerate its proper significance in the affairs of life. "Twenty-five years ago an American writer set out as a Zola disciple to give us something American along Zola's lines. He made a failure of it--so complete that he was forced to complain that later efforts in which he returned to paths of decency were refused by editors and publishers. He had spoiled his name as an asset. If you are curious to note how far the bars have been let down in his direction in twenty-five years, contemplate what passes to-day among us with quite a footing of magazine and book popularity. It means simply that we are falling into those conditions of public indifference in which moral parasites may flourish. But if one were forced to-day to choose in France between the material taken up by Zola after his failure to cultivate successfully cleaner fields, and that chosen by Réné Bazin and the new and hopeful French school of spirituality, there could be no question that the latter would afford the better opportunity. And there can be no real question but that the exponents of grossness are likewise opportunists, looking first of all for a market for their names--as most men are doing. But some men, by reason of inclination or voluntary restraint, have restricted themselves in their choice of literary materials." Mr. Spearman has recently given much of his time to moving-picture work, with the result that his name is nearly as familiar to the devotees of the flickering screen as to habitual magazine readers. I asked him how the development of the moving picture is likely to affect literature. He replied: "What I can say on this point will perhaps be more directly of interest to writers themselves; the development of the moving picture broadens their market. It has, if you will let me put it in this way, increased the number of our theaters in their capacity for absorbing material for the drama a thousandfold. Inevitably a new industry developing with such amazing rapidity is still in the experimental stages, and those who know it best say its possibilities are but just beginning. What I note of interest to the literary worker is that men advanced and in authority in the production of pictures have reached this conclusion: Behind every good picture there must be a good story. The slogan to-day is 'The story is the thing.' And those close to the 'inside' of the industry say to-day to the fictionist: 'Hold on to your stories. Within a year or two they will command from the movies much higher prices than to-day, because the supply is fast becoming exhausted.'" It was in the course of his remarks about the rewards of literature that Mr. Spearman told an interesting story concerning Henry James and George du Maurier. He said: "The recent death of Henry James is bringing out many anecdotes concerning him. At the time of George du Maurier's death it was recalled that he had once given the material for _Trilby_ to Henry James with permission to use it; and the story ran that, resolving to use it himself, Mr. James returned the material to Du Maurier, who wrote the novel from it. "But I don't think it has ever appeared that the real reason why Henry James did not attempt _Trilby_ was that he possessed no musical sense; Mr. James himself told me this, and without a sense of music the material was useless to any one. I discussed the incident with him some ten years ago and he added, in connection with _Trilby_ and Du Maurier, other interesting facts. "_Trilby_ did not at first make a signal success in England. Its first big hit was made in _Harper's Magazine_. Not realizing the American possibilities, Mr. du Maurier, when offered by Harper & Brothers a choice between royalties and five thousand dollars outright for the book rights, took the lump sum as if it were descended straight from heaven. When the news of the extraordinary success of the book in this country reached him, he realized his serious mistake, and in the family circle there was keen depression over it. But further surprises were in store for him. To their eternal credit, the house of Harper & Brothers--honorable then as now--in view of the unfortunate situation in which their author had placed himself, voluntarily canceled the first contract and restored Du Maurier to a royalty basis. The fear in the English home then was that this arrangement would come too late to bring in anything. Not only, however, did the book continue to sell, but the play came on, and together the rights afforded George du Maurier a competency that banished further worry from the home." _THE NOVEL MUST GO_ WILL N. HARBEN The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane, and the moving picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take interest in fiction. It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright, nor M. Pathé. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is himself a successful novelist. He is Will N. Harben, author of _Pole Baker_, _Ann Boyd_, _The Desired Woman_, and many other widely read tales of life in rural Georgia. Although he is so closely associated with the Southern scenes about which he has written, Mr. Harben spends most of his time in New York nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly--but before I tell his views on this subject I will repeat what he had to say about this possible extinction of the novel. "You have read," he said, "of the tremendous vogue of _Pickwick Papers_ when it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been received with such enthusiasm. "In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick punch-ladles, Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts. "Now, when you walk down Broadway, do you find any reminders of the popular novels of the day? You do not, except of course in the bookshops. But you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste. In the windows of stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of characters in the fiction of the day, but of Charlie Chaplin. "Of course the moving picture has not supplanted the novel. But people all over the country are becoming less and less interested in fiction. The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now give to the latest film. "And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning us away from the novel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this direction. "Take, for instance, the town from which I come--Dalton, Georgia. There the people who used to read novels spend their time which they used to give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they go on long trips, sometimes they go to visit their friends in near-by towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed to spend their leisure. "Naturally, this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years ago, when Dalton had a population of about three thousand, it had two well-patronized bookshops. Now it has a population of about seven thousand and no bookshops at all! "I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by means of the automobile, and therefore do not care so much about getting adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of time--the fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to reading. "Now, if the aeroplane were to be perfected--as we have every reason to believe it will be--so that we could travel in it as we now do in the automobile, what possible interest would we have in reading dry novels? It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly the surface of Mars--do you think that people will want to read novels when this wonderful new world is before their eyes? "The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming more and more nervous. They are not the placid creatures that they were in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any publisher to-day would be interested, for example, in an author who produced a novel as long as _David Copperfield_ and of the same excellence." "But do you think," I asked, "that the fault is entirely that of the public? Haven't the authors changed, too?" "I think that the authors have changed," said Mr. Harben, reflectively. "The authors do not live as they used to live. "The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write. Instead, they live with other authors. "Nowadays, an author achieves success by writing, we will say, about the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives with artists. That must have its effect upon his work." "But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to look for the historian of _Pole Baker_!" Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts of human beings--with people who didn't know or care whether or not I was a writer. "So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants--people of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort--people who make no pretensions to be artists--are the best company for a writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other people who are trying to write about humanity." "But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?" "Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away from them. I know that this is true of myself. "It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and 'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it. "You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it." "Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to write a story about life in a New York apartment?" Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel about New York must be written in New York--while a novel about Dalton, Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia." "How do you account for that?" I asked. "Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here. Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it. "And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb. "New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways and elevators and dumb-waiters--there's nothing new to say about them. "I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New York City. And their novels are all of one pattern--necessarily, because life in New York City is all of one pattern. "In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr. Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in which people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern. "What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone away." "But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked. "No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in the office of _The Constitution_." "In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American novel will not be written about New York." "What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel." "I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature without thinking of _Vanity Fair_, for instance. Certainly there is no American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as that novel is of English life." "Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be less likely to come into being than the great English novel. "You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in the season all England may be met there." Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern realists. "The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about--there is Dostoievski's _Crime and Punishment_, for example!" In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description. "Why is it that _Pepys's Diary_ is interesting to us?" he asked. "It is because of its detail. "But if Pepys had been a Howells--if he had been as careful in describing great things as he was in describing small things--then his _Diary_ would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand years from now to get an idea of how we live. "That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody will read!" _LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_ JOHN ERSKINE Brown of Harvard is no more. The play of that name may still be running, but of Harvard life it is now about as accurate a picture as _Trelawney of the Wells_ is of modern English life. At Harvard, and at all the great American universities, the dashing, picturesque young athlete is no longer the prevailing type of the undergraduate ideal. Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes persist--it would be a tragedy if they did not--but the type of youth that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the "grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that the campus is not the most important place in the world; aware, in fact, that the university is not the universe. This young man knows about class politics, but also about international politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but actually desires to create it. The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At Columbia--I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it--there has lately developed a genuine interest in--what do you suppose? Poetry! I interviewed the bulletin-board outside Hamilton Hall before I interviewed Professor Erskine, and it, too, surprised me. It was not the bulletin-board of my not altogether remote undergraduate days. It bore notices telling of a meeting of the "Forum for Religious Discussion," of an anti-militaristic mass-meeting, of a rehearsal of an Elizabethan drama. It was a sign of the times. Professor Erskine said that undergraduate ideals had greatly changed during the last few years. I asked him how this had come to pass. "Well," he replied, "I think that college life reflects the ordinary life of the world more closely than is usually believed. This is a day of general cultural and spiritual awakening. The college student is waking, just as everybody else is waking; like everybody else, he is becoming more interested in the great things of life. There is no reason why the college walls should shut him in from the hopes, ambitions, and problems of the rest of humanity. "It isn't only the boys that have changed--the parents have changed too. Time was when the father and mother wanted their son to go to college so that he could join a group of pleasant, nice-mannered boys of good family. Now they have a definite idea of the practical value of a college education, they send their son to college intelligently. "Also, the whole theory of teaching has changed. The purely Germanic system has been superseded by something more humane. The old idea of scholarship for its own sake is no longer insisted upon. Instead, the subjects taught are treated in their relation to life, the only way in which they can be of real interest to the students. "You will look in vain in the modern university for the old type of absent-minded, dry-as-dust professor. He has been superseded by the professor who is a man as well as a scholar. And naturally he approaches his subject and his classes in a different spirit from that of his predecessor. "We have a new sort of teacher of English. He is not now (as was once often the case) a retired clergyman, or a specialist recruited from some unliterary field. He is, in many cases, a creative artist, a dramatist, a novelist, or a poet. "When I was in college this was not generally true. Then such a professor as George Edward Woodberry or Brander Matthews was unique. Now the college wants poets and creative writers." These are Professor Erskine's actual words. I asked him to repeat his last statement and he said, apparently with no sense of the amazement which his words caused in me, "The college wants the poets!" The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. But, then, there are poets and poets. There is, for example, Prof. Curtis Hidden Page. There is also one John Erskine, author of _Actæon and Other Poems_, and Adjunct Professor of English at Columbia University. There is also Prof. Alfred Noyes. But there are also some thousand or so poets in the United States who will be surprised to know that the college wants them. Academic appreciation of poets has generally consisted of a cordial welcome given their collected works two hundred years after their deaths. "English as a cultural finish," Professor Erskine continued, "has gone by the board. English is taught nowadays with as much seriousness as philosophy or history. Art in all its forms is considered as the history of the race, and treated seriously by the student as well as by the professor. To-day the students regard Shakespeare and Tennyson as very important men. They study them as in a course in philosophy they would study Bergson. Literature, philosophy, and history have been drawn together as one subject, as they should be." "What," I asked, "are some of the extra-curricular manifestations of literary interest among the students?" "In the first place," he answered, "the extraordinary amount of writing done by the students. It is not at all unusual now for a Columbia student to sell his work to the regular magazines. The student who writes for the magazines and newspapers is no longer a novelty. Randolph Bourne, who was recently graduated, contributed a number of essays to the _Atlantic Monthly_ during his junior and senior years. "Many of the students write for the newspapers. The better sort of newspaper humorists have had a strong influence on the undergraduate mind; they have shown the way to writing things that are funny but have an intellectual appeal. This has resulted in the production of some really excellent light verse. Also, Horace's stock has gone up. "During the last two years some remarkable plays have been handed into the Columbia University Dramatic Association. Not only were they serious, but also they were highly poetic. "And this," said Professor Erskine, "marks what I hope is the distinguishing literary atmosphere at Columbia. The trend of the plays written by Columbia students is strongly poetic. This is not true, perhaps, of the plays written by students of other institutions. The writers of plays want to write poetic plays, and--what is perhaps even more surprising--the other students do not consider poetic drama 'high-brow stuff.' "Philolexian, the oldest of the Columbia literary societies, has been producing Elizabethan plays. These plays have been enthusiastically received, and the enthusiasm does not seem to show any signs of dying down. The students come to the study of these plays with a feeling of familiarity, for they have seen them acted." "Does this enthusiasm for literature show itself in the college magazine?" I asked. "It shows itself," answered Professor Erskine, "by the absence of a literary magazine. The literary magazine has completely collapsed. In small colleges, far away from the cities where the regular magazines are published, the college magazine is the only available outlet for the work of the students who can write. But here in New York the students know the condition of the literary market, and the more skilful writers among them do not care to give their writings to an amateur publication when they can sell them off the campus. So the _Columbia Monthly_ got only second-best material. The boys who really could write would not sacrifice their work by burying it in a college publication, so the _Columbia Monthly_ died. "The history of a literary club we have up here, called Boar's Head, is significant. It was started as a sort of revival of an older organization called King's Crown. At first the program consisted of an address at each meeting by some prominent writer. For a while the meetings were well attended, but gradually the interest died down. "At length I found what the trouble was--the boys wanted to do their own entertaining. Now work by the members is read at every meeting; there are no addresses by outsiders. "And here again the poetic trend of the undergraduate mind at Columbia is displayed. The Scribblers' Club, which consisted of short-story writers, is dead--there were not enough short-story writers to support it. And at the meetings of Boar's Head there have been read, during the past two years, only one or two short stories. "The boys bring plays and poems to the Boar's Head meetings, but not short stories. Last year most of the poems which were read were short lyrics. Toward the end of last year and during the present year longer poems have been read. They are not poems in the Masefield manner; they are modeled rather on Keats and Coleridge. This fact has interested me because the magazines, as a rule, have not been buying long poems. I was interested to see that William Stanley Braithwaite, in his excellent _Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year-Book of American Poetry_, calls attention to the increasing popularity of the longer poem. "Last year Boar's Head decided to bring out a little book containing the best of the poems that were read at its meetings. A number of subscribers at twenty-five cents each were procured, and _Quad Ripples_ was published. It contained only short poems. This year Boar's Head has published _Odes and Episodes_, a collection of light verse by one of its former members, Archie Austin Coates. It soon will publish a collection of poems read at its meetings, and all these poems are long. Some of these poems are so good that it is a real sacrifice for the boys to have them printed in this book instead of in some magazine. "Of course, there were always 'literary men' at Columbia, but they were considered unusual. Now they no longer even form a class by themselves. One of our best writers of light verse is the captain of the baseball team. "Speaking of light verse and baseball," continued Professor Erskine, "there is a certain connection between the _Columbia Monthly_ and football, besides the obvious parallel which lies in the fact that both have ceased to exist. Some of the boys express eagerness to revive the college magazine, just as they express eagerness to revive football. But it is, I believe, merely a matter of pride with them. They are eager to have football and to have a college magazine; they are not so eager to contribute to the support of either institution. "One proof of the literary renascence of Columbia is that the essays written in the regular course of the work in philosophy and in English are better than ever before." "Do you believe," I asked, "that being in the city has had a good effect on literary activity among Columbia students?" He answered: "I do think so, decidedly. It has produced an extreme individualism and has given the boys enterprising minds. It is true that it has its disadvantages, it has made the student, so to speak, centrifugal, and has destroyed collegiate co-operation of the old sort. But it has produced an original, independent type of student. "The older type of college student was interested in football because he knew that people expected him to be interested in football. The Columbia student of to-day is interested in poetry, not because it is a Columbia tradition to be interested in poetry, but because his tastes are naturally literary." Several of the causes of this poetic renascence at Columbia had been mentioned in the course of our conversation, but Professor Erskine had ignored one of the most important of them. So I will mention it now. It is John Erskine. _CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE_ JOHN BURROUGHS "Well," said John Burroughs, "she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I guess we'll have to go in." So we left the little summer-house overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study. Now, "she" was a fat and officious robin, and her nest was in a corner of the summer-house just over my head, as I sat with the poet-naturalist. The nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young robins, and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by our talk. As we walked to the study, leaving to the robin family undisputed possession of the summer-house, I heard John Burroughs say in tones of mild indignation, half to himself and half to me: "I won't stand this another year! This is the third year she's taken possession of that summer-house, and next May she simply must build her nest somewhere else!" Nevertheless, I think that this impudent robin will rear her 1917 brood in John Burroughs's summer-house, if she wants to. When I walked up from the station to Riverby--John Burroughs's twenty-acre home on the west shore of the Hudson--I was surprised by the agility of my seventy-nine-year-old companion. He walked with the elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the hills. "Living in the city," he said, "is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business; it is a place where men overreach one another in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live. "Years ago, I think, it was possible to have a home in the city. I used to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste. "Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations. All this grind and rush and roar of the Subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children of New-Yorkers. And that effect cannot be good. "And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of æsthetic perception! I'd like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no repose in New York so far as I can see. "Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can find repose in the city--I can't. I hear that people write on the trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway--I don't see how they do it!" "Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a grassy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its mark on our literature?" "I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country, his study under the pines, where, as he wrote: the sacred pine-tree adds To the leaves her myriads. "Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first venture." We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman. "Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city." "Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved the throngs of men, he loved human associations. "But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the 'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as a printer and on the _Eagle_. "For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers." John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's. "Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest. It's absolutely true. "I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Washington. And he came up to see me here. When I was in Washington Whitman used to like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling charm. "Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did, and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson didn't hesitate--unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big ideas." I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change in the world's attitude toward Whitman. "Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the conventional standards of English literature. We understood and appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's garb, in his shirt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature. "We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a cumulative thing." "You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?" "Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the classic poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and Emerson are our two greatest poets." While we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood-thrush resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had discussed on our way from the station--the city's evil effect on literature. "Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people. "If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily paper is a new institution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things that make for great art. "It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey. "So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience--but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted. "In my own work--if I may mention it in all humbleness--I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid. "If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and write--Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland." It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world--better known even than _Wake Robin_ and that immortal _A Hunt for the Nightingale_ and _In Fresh Fields_--is one of his poems, _Waiting_, the poem that begins: Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me. "I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend. "The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the _Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of Three Centuries_. "It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter. "There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and asked if he could print _Waiting_ on a card and circulate it among his friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards, and I found that he had added a stanza to it--a religious stanza, all about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my poem--poor God, ignored by a little atom like me! "When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me--it's a sort of transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true--like attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that Shakespeare meant." A few rods from John Burroughs's riverside house a brown thrush is building her nest in a cherry-tree. She is a bird of individual ideas, and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the proper basis for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs seated in his study communing with the memories of Whitman and Emerson, and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him, as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the thrush's nest so that the wind could not destroy it. _"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_ ELLEN GLASGOW What is the matter with American literature? There are many answers that might be made to this often-asked question. "Nothing" might be one answer. "Commercialism" might be another. But the answer given by Ellen Glasgow, whose latest successful novel of American manners and morals is _Life and Gabriella_, is "evasive idealism." I found the young woman who has found in our Southern States themes for sympathetic realism rather than picturesque romance temporarily resident, inappropriately enough, in a hotel not far from Broadway and Forty-second Street. And I found her to be a woman of many ideas and strong convictions. One strongly felt and forcibly expressed conviction was that the "evasive idealism" which is evident in so much of our popular fiction is in reality the chief blemish on the American character, manifesting its baleful influence in our political, social, and economic life. Miss Glasgow first used the term "evasive idealism" in an effort to explain why contemporary English novels are better than contemporary American novels. "Certainly," she said, "the novels written by John Galsworthy and the other English novelists of the new generation are better than anything that we are producing in the United States at the present time. And I think that the reason for this is that in America we demand from our writers, as we demand from our politicians, and in general from those who theoretically are our men of light and leading, an evasive idealism instead of a straightforward facing of realities. In England the demand is for a direct and sincere interpretation of life, and that is what the novelists of England, especially the younger novelists, are making. But what the American public seems to desire is the cheapest sort of sham optimism. And apparently our writers--a great many of them--are ready and eager to meet this demand. "You know the sort of book which takes best in this country. It is the sort of book in which there is not from beginning to end a single attempt to portray a genuine human being. Instead there are a number of picturesque and attractive lay figures, and one of them is made to develop a whimsical, sentimental, and maudlinly optimistic philosophy of life. "That is what the people want--a sugary philosophy, utterly without any basis in logic or human experience. They want the cheapest sort of false optimism, and they want it to be uttered by a picturesque, whimsical character, in humorous dialect. Books made according to this receipt sell by the hundreds of thousands. "I don't know which is the more tragic, the fact that a desire for this sort of literary pabulum exists, or the fact that there are so many writers willing to satisfy that desire. But I do know that the widespread enthusiasm for this sort of writing is the reason for the inferiority of our novels to those of England. And, furthermore, I think that this evasive idealism, this preference for a pretty sham instead of the truth, is evident not only in literature, but in every phase of American life. "Look at our politics! We tolerate corruption; graft goes on undisturbed, except for some sporadic attacks of conscience on the part of various communities. The ugliness of sin is there, but we prefer not to look at it. Instead of facing the evil and attacking it manfully we go after any sort of a false god that will detract our attention from our shame. Just as in literature we want the books which deal not with life as it is, but with life as it might be imagined to be lived, so in politics we want to face not hard and unpleasant facts, but agreeable illusions. "Nevertheless," said Miss Glasgow, "I think that in literature there are signs of a movement away from this evasive idealism. It is much more evident in England than in America, but I think that in the course of time it will reach us, too. We shall cease to be 'slaves of words,' as Sophocles said, and learn that the novelist's duty is to understand and interpret life. And when our novelists and our readers of novels appreciate the advisability of this attitude, then will the social and political life of the United States be more wholesome than it has been for many a year. The new movement in the novel is away from sentimental optimism and toward an optimism that is genuine and robust." "Then a novel may be at once optimistic and realistic?" I said. "That is not in accord with the generally received ideas of realism." "It is true of the work of the great realists," answered Miss Glasgow. "True realism is optimistic, without being sentimental." "What realists have been optimistic?" I asked. "Well," said Miss Glasgow, "Henry Fielding, one of the first and greatest of English realists, surely was an optimist. And there was Charles Dickens--often, it is true, he was sentimental, but at his best he was a robust optimist. "But the greatest modern example of the robust optimistic realist, absolutely free from sentimentality, is George Meredith. Galsworthy, who surely is a realist, is optimistic in such works as _The Freelands_ and _The Patricians_. And Meredith is always realistic and always optimistic. "The optimism I mean, the optimism which is a distinguishing characteristic of George Meredith's works, does not come from an evasion of facts, but from a recognition of them. The constructive novelist, the novelist who really interprets life, never ignores any of the facts of life. Instead, he accepts them and builds upon them. And he perceives the power of the will to control destiny; he knows that life is not what you get out of it, but what you put into it. This is what the younger English novelists know and what our novelists must learn. And it is their growing recognition of this spirit that makes me feel that the tendency of modern literature is toward democracy." "What is the connection between democracy and the tendency you have described?" I asked. "To me," Miss Glasgow answered, "true democracy consists chiefly in the general recognition of the truth that will create destiny. Democracy does not consist in the belief that all men are born free and equal or in the desire that they shall be born free and equal. It consists in the knowledge that all people should possess an opportunity to use their will to control--to create--destiny, and that they should know that they have this opportunity. They must be educated to the use of the will, and they must be taught that character can create destiny. "Of course, environment inevitably has its effect on the character, and, therefore, on will, and, therefore, on destiny. You can so oppress and depress the body that the will has no chance. True democracy provides for all equal opportunities for the exercise of will. If you hang a man, you can't ask him to exercise his will. But if you give him a chance to live--which is the democratic thing to do--then you put before him an opportunity to exercise his will." "But what are the manifestations of this new democratic spirit?" I asked. "Is not the war, which is surely the greatest event of our time, an anti-democratic thing?" "The war is not anti-democratic," Miss Glasgow replied, "any more than it is anti-autocratic. Or rather, I may say it is both anti-democratic and anti-autocratic. It is a conflict of principles, a deadly struggle between democracy and imperialism. It is a fight for the new spirit of democracy against the old evil order of things. "Of course, I do not mean that the democracy of France and England is perfect. But with all its imperfections it is nearer true democracy than is the spirit of Germany. We should not expect the democracy of our country to be perfect. The time has not come for that. 'Man is not man as yet,' as Browning said in _Paracelsus_. "The war is turning people away from the false standards in art and letters which they served so long. The highly artificial romantic novel and drama are impossible in Europe to-day. The war has made that sort of thing absolutely absurd. And America must be affected by this just as every other nation in the world is affected. To our novelists and to all of us must come a sense of the serious importance of actual life, instead of a sense of the beauty of romantic illusions. There are many indications of this tendency in our contemporary literature. For instance, in poetry we have the Spoon River Anthology--surely a sign of the return of the poet to real life. But the greatest poets, like the greatest novelists, have always been passionately interested in real life. Walt Whitman and Robert Browning always were realists and always were optimistic. Whitman was a most exultant optimist; he was optimistic even about dying. "Among recent books of verse I have been much impressed by Masefield's _Good Friday_. There is a work which is both august and sympathetic; Mr. Masefield's treatment of his theme is realistic, yet thoroughly reverent. There is one line in it which I think I never shall forget. It is, 'The men who suffer most endure the least.' "_Good Friday_ is a sign of literature's strong tendency toward reality. It seems to me to be a phase of the general breaking down of the barriers between the nations, the classes, and the sexes. But this breaking down of barriers is something that most of our novelists have been ignoring. Mary Watts has recognized it, but she is one of the very few American novelists to do so." "But this sort of consciousness is not generally considered to be a characteristic of the realistic novelist," I said. And I mentioned to Miss Glasgow a certain conspicuous American novelist whose books are very long, very dull, and distinguished only by their author's obsession with sex. He, I said, was the man of whom most people would think first when the word realist was spoken. "Of course," said Miss Glasgow, "we must distinguish between a realist and a vulgarian, and I do not see how a writer who is absolutely without humor can justly be called a realist. Consider the great realists--Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith--they all had humor. What our novelists need chiefly are more humor and a more serious attitude toward life. If our novelists are titanic enough, they will have a serious attitude toward life, and if they stand far enough off they will have humor. "I hope," Miss Glasgow added, "that America will produce better literature after the war. I hope that a change for the better will be evident in all branches of literary endeavor. We have to-day many novelists who start out with the serious purpose of interpreting life. But they don't interpret it. They find that it is easier to give the people what they want than to interpret life. Therefore this change in the character of our novels must come after the people themselves are awakened to a sense of the importance of real life, instead of life sentimentally and deceptively portrayed. "I think that our novels to-day are better than they were twenty-five years ago. Of course, we have no Hawthorne to-day, but the general average of stories is better than it was. We have so many accomplished writers of short stories. There is Katharine Fullerton Gerould. What an admirable artist she is! Mary E. Wilkins has written some splendid interpretations of New England life, and Miss Jewett reflected the mind and soul of a part of our country." _"CHOCOLATE FUDGE" IN THE MAGAZINES_ FANNIE HURST Only a few years ago Fannie Hurst's name was unknown to most readers. But in a surprisingly short time Miss Hurst's short stories, especially her sympathetic and poignantly realistic studies of the life of the Jewish citizens of New York, have earned for her popular as well as critical approval. Fannie Hurst's fame has been won almost entirely through the most widely circulated weekly and monthly magazines. And yet when I talked to this energetic young woman the other morning in her studio in Carnegie Hall, I found her attitude toward the magazines anything but friendly. She accused them of printing what she called "chocolate-fudge" fiction. And she said it in a way which indicated that chocolate fudge is not her favorite dish. "I do not feel," she said, "that the American magazine is exerting itself toward influencing our fiction for the better. In most cases it is content to pander to the untutored public taste instead of attempting anything constructive. "The magazine public is, after all, open to conviction. But phlegm and commercialism on the part of most of our magazines lead them to give the public what it wants rather than what is good for it. "'If chocolate-fudge fiction will sell the magazine, give 'em chocolate fudge!' say editors and publishers. Small wonder that American fiction-readers continue bilious in their demands. Authors, meanwhile, who like sweet butter on their bread--it is amazing how many do--continue to postpone that Big Idea, and American fiction pauses by the wayside." "What is the remedy for this condition, Miss Hurst?" I asked. "Would matters be better if the writers did not have to comply with the demands of the magazines--if they had some other means of making a living than writing?" Miss Hurst did not answer at once. At length she said, thoughtfully: "It would seem that to escape this almost inevitable overlapping of bread and sweet butter the writer of short stories should not depend upon the sale of his work for a living, but should endeavor to provide himself with some other source of income. "Theoretically, at least, such a condition would eliminate the pot-boilers and safeguard the serious worker from the possibility of 'misshaping' his art to meet a commercial condition. "I say theoretically because from my own point of view I cannot conceive of short-story writing as an avocation. The gentle art of short fiction consumes just about six hours of my day at the rate of from twenty to twenty-five days on a story of from eight to ten thousand words. And since I work best from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., I can think of no remunerative occupation outside those hours except cabaret work or night clerking." "What about present-day relationship between American publishers and authors?" I asked, "Do you think they are all they should be?" "American publishers and authors," Miss Hurst replied, "to-day seem to be working somewhat at cross-purposes, owing partially, I think, to the great commercial significance that has become attached to the various rights, such as motion-picture, serial, dramatic, book, etc., and which are to be reckoned with in the sale of fiction. "There is little doubt that authors have suffered at the hands of publishers on these various scores, oftener than not the publisher and not the author reaping the benefits accruing from the author's ignorance of conditions or lack of foresight. "The Authors' League has been formed to remedy just that evil--and it was a crying one. "On the other hand, it is certain that fiction-writers are better paid to-day than ever in the history of literature, and if a man is writing a seventy-five-dollar story there is a pretty good reason why. "I feel a great deal of hesitancy about the present proposed affiliation of authors with labor. There is so much to be said on both sides! "If the publisher represents capital and the author labor, my sympathies immediately veer me toward labor. But do they? That same question has recently been thrashed out by the actors, and they have gone over to labor. Scores of our most prominent American authors are of that same persuasion. "I cannot help but feel that for publisher and author to assume the relationship of employer and employee is a dangerous step. All forms of labor do not come under the same head. And I am the last to say that writing is not hard labor. But Cellini could hardly have allied himself with an iron-workers' guild. All men are mammals, but not all mammals are men! "It seems doubly unfortunate, with the Authors' League in existence to direct and safeguard the financial destiny of the author, to take a step which immediately places the author and publisher on the same basis of relationship that exists between hod-carrier and contractor. "As a matter of fact, I am almost wont to question the traditional lack of business acumen in authors. On the contrary, almost every successful author of my acquaintance not only is pretty well able to take care of himself, but owns a motor-car and a safety-deposit box at the same time. And I find the not-so-successful authors prodding pretty faithfully to get their prices up. "The Authors' League is a great institution and fills a great need. It was formed for just the purpose that seems to be prompting authors to unionize--to instruct authors in their rights and protect them against infringements. "Why unionize? Next, an author will find himself obliged to lay aside his pen when the whistle blows, and publishers will be finding themselves obliged to deal in open-shop literature." "And what effect are the moving pictures going to have on fiction?" I asked. "Will it be good or bad?" "Up to the present," Miss Hurst replied, "moving pictures have, in my opinion, been little else than a destructive force where American fiction is concerned. Picturized fiction is on a cheap and sensational level. Even classics and standardized fiction are ruthlessly defamed by tawdry presentation. With the mechanics of the motion picture so advanced, it is unfortunate that the photoplay itself is not keeping pace with that advancement. "Motion pictures are in the hands of laymen, and they show it. The scenario-writers, so-called 'staff writers,' have sprung up overnight, so to speak, and, from what I understand, when authors venture into the field they are at the mercy of the moving-picture director. "Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett could not endure to sit through the picture presentation of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, so mutilated was it. "Of course, scenario-writing is a new art, and this interesting form of expression has hardly emerged from its infancy. Except perhaps in such great spectacles as 'The Birth of a Nation,' where, after all, the play is not the thing." I asked Miss Hurst if she agreed with those who believe that Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have never been surpassed. I found that she did not. "I should say," she said, "that since Poe's time we have had masters of the short story who have equaled him. Poe is, of course, the legitimate father of the American short story, and, coupled with that fact, was possessed of that kind of self-consciousness which enabled him to formulate a law of composition which has not been without its influence upon our subsequent short fiction. "But in American letters there is little doubt that in the last one hundred years the short story has made more progress than any other literary type. We are becoming not only proficient, but pre-eminent in the short story. I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers, each of whom has contributed short-story classics to our literature. "There are Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James (if we may claim him), Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington. And I am sure that there are various others whose names do not occur to me at this moment." "You mentioned O. Henry," I said. "Then you do not share Katharine Fullerton Gerould's belief that O. Henry's influence on modern fiction is bad?" "I decidedly disagree," said Miss Hurst, with considerable firmness, "with the statement that O. Henry wrote incidents rather than short stories, and is a pernicious influence in modern letters. That his structural form is more than anecdotal can be shown by an analysis of almost any of his plots. "But it seems pedantic to criticize O. Henry on the score of structure. Admitting that the substance of his writings does rest on frail framework, even sometimes upon the trick, he built with Gothic skill and with no obvious pillars of support. "Corot was none the less a landscape artist because he removed that particular brown tree from that particular green slope. O. Henry's facetiousness and, if you will, his frail structures, are no more to be reckoned with than, for instance, the extravagance of plot and the morbid formality we find in Poe. "The smiting word and the polished phrase he quite frankly subordinated to the laugh, or the tear with a sniffle. Just as soon call red woolen underwear pernicious! "The Henry James school has put a super-finish upon literature which, it is true, gives the same satisfying sense of wholeness that we get from a Greek urn. But, after all, chastity is not the first and last requisite. O. Henry loved to laugh with life! It was not in him to regard it with a Mona Lisa smile." Miss Hurst has confined her attention so closely to American metropolitan life that I thought it would be interesting to have her opinion as to the truth of the remark, attributed to William Dean Howells, that American literature is merely a phase of English literature. In reply to my question she said: "I agree with Mr. Howells that American literature up to now has been rather a phase of English literature. His own graceful art is an example of cousinship. American literature probably will continue to be an effort until our American melting-pot ceases boiling. "_David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_ come from a people whose lineage goes back by century-plants and not by Mayflowers. Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Poole, sometimes more or less inarticulately, are preparing us for the great American novel. When we reach a proper consistency the boiling is bound to cease, and, just as inevitably, the epic novel must come." _THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY_ AMY LOWELL Miss Amy Lowell, America's chief advocate and practitioner of the new poetry, would wear, I supposed, a gown by Bakst, with many Oriental jewels. And incense would be burning in a golden basin. And Miss Lowell would say that the art of poetry was discovered in 1916. But there is nothing exotic or artificial about Miss Lowell's appearance and surroundings. Nor did the author of _Sword Blades and Poppy Seed_ express, when I talked to her the other day, any of the extravagant opinions which conservative critics attribute to the _vers libristes_. Miss Lowell talked with the practicality which is of New England and the serenity which is of Boston; she was positive, but not narrowly dogmatic; she is keenly appreciative of contemporary poetry, but she has the fullest sense of the value of the great heritage of poetical tradition that has come down to us through the ages. There is so much careless talk of _imagisme_, _vers libre_, and the new poetry in general that I thought it advisable to begin our talk by asking for a definition or a description of the new poetry. In reply to my question Miss Lowell said: "The thing that makes me feel sure that there is a future in the new poetry is the fact that those who write it follow so many different lines of thought. The new poetry is so large a subject that it can scarcely be covered by one definition. It seems to me that there are four definite sorts of new poetry, which I will attempt to describe. "One branch of the new poetry may be called the realistic school. This branch is descended partly from Whitman and partly from the prose-writers of France and England. The leading exponents of it are Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters. These two poets are different from each other, but they both are realists, they march under the same banner. "Another branch of the new poetry consists of the poets whose work shows a mixture of the highly imaginative and the realistic. Their thought verges on the purely imaginative, but is corrected by a scientific attitude of mind. I suppose that this particular movement in English poetry may be said to have started with Coleridge, but in England the movement hardly attained its due proportions. Half of literary England followed Wordsworth, half followed Byron. It is in America that we find the greatest disciple of Coleridge in the person of Edgar Allan Poe. The force of the movement then went back to France, where it showed clearly in Mallarmê and the later symbolists. To-day we see this tendency somewhat popularized in Vachell Lindsay, although perhaps he does not know it. And if I may be so bold as to mention myself, I should say that I in common with most other imagists belong to this branch, that I am at once a fantasist and a realist. "Thirdly, we have the lyrico-imaginative type of poet. Of this branch the best example that I can call to mind is John Gould Fletcher. The fourth group of the new poets consists of those who are descended straight from Matthew Arnold. They show the Wordsworth influence corrected by experience and education. Browning is in their line of descent. Characteristics of their work are high seriousness, astringency, and a certain pruning down of poetry so that redundancy is absolutely avoided. Of this type the most striking example is Edwin Arlington Robinson." "Miss Lowell," I said, "the opponents of the new poetry generally attack it chiefly on account of its form--or rather, on account of its formlessness. And yet what you have said has to do only with the idea itself. You have said nothing about the way in which the idea is expressed." "There is no special form which is characteristic of the new poetry," said Miss Lowell, "and of course 'formlessness' is a word which is applied to it only by the ignorant. The new poetry is in every form. Edgar Lee Masters has written in _vers libre_ and in regular rhythm. Robert Frost writes in blank verse. Vachell Lindsay writes in varied rhyme schemes. I write in both the regular meters and the newer forms, such as _vers libre_ and 'polyphonic prose.' "It is a mistake to suppose, as many conservative critics do, that modern poetry is a matter of _vers libre_. _Vers libre_ is not new, but it is valuable to give vividness when vividness is desired. _Vers libre_ is a difficult thing to write well, and a very easy thing to write badly. This particular branch of the new poetry movement has been imitated so extensively that it has brought the whole movement into disrepute in the eyes of casual observers. But we must remember that no movement is to be judged by its obscure imitators. A movement must be judged by the few people at its head who make the trend. There cannot be many of them. In the history of the world there are only a few supreme artists, only a small number of great artists, only a limited number of good artists. And to suppose that we in America at this particular moment can be possessed of many artists worthy of consideration is ridiculous. "Undoubtedly the fact that a great number of people are engaged to-day in producing poetry is a great stimulus and helps to create a proper atmosphere for those men whose work may live. For it is a curious fact that the artistic names that have come down to us are those of men who have lived in the so-called great artistic periods, when many other men were working at the same thing." I asked Miss Lowell to tell something of this _vers libre_ which is so much discussed and so little understood. She said: "_Vers libre_ is based upon rhythm. Its definition is 'A verse form based upon cadence rather than upon exact meter.' It is a little difficult to define cadence when dealing with poetry. I might call it the sense of balance. "The unit of _vers libre_ is the strophe, not the line or the foot, as in regular meter. The strophe is a group of words which round themselves satisfactorily to the ear. In short poems this complete rounding may take place only at the end, making the poem a unit of a single movement, the lines serving only to give the slight up-and-down effect necessary to the voice when the poem is read aloud. "In longer poems the strophe may be a group of lines. Poetry being a spoken and not a written art, those not well versed in the various poetic forms will find it simpler to read _vers libre_ poems aloud, rather than to try to get their rhythm from the printed page. For people who are used only to the exact meters, the printed arrangement of a _vers libre_ poem is a confusing process. To a certain extent cadence is dependent upon quantity--long and short syllables being of peculiar importance. Words hurried over in reading are balanced by words on which the reader pauses. Remember, also, that _vers libre_ can be either rhymed or unrhymed." "One objection," I said, "that many critics bring up against unrhymed poetry is that it cannot be remembered." "I cannot see that that is of the slightest importance," Miss Lowell replied. "The music that we whistle when we come out of the theater is not the greatest music we have heard. "Zaccheus he Did climb a tree His Lord to see is easily remembered. But I refuse to think that it is great poetry. "The enemies of _vers libre_," she continued, "say that _vers libre_ is in no respect different from oratory. Now, there is a difference between the cadence of _vers libre_ and the cadence of oratory. Lincoln's Gettysburg address is not _vers libre_, it is rhythmical prose. At the prose end of cadence is rhythmical prose; at the verse end is _vers libre_. The difference is in the kind of cadence. "Recently a writer in _The Nation_ took some of Meredith's prose and made it into _vers libre_ poems which any poet would have been glad to write. Then he took some of my poems and turned them into prose, with a result which he was kind enough to call beautiful. He then pertinently asked what was the difference. "I might answer that there is no difference. Typography is not relevant to the discussion. Whether a thing is written as prose or as verse is immaterial. But if we would see the advantage which Meredith's imagination enjoyed in the freer forms of expression, we need only compare these lyrical passages from his prose works with his own metrical poetry." I asked Miss Lowell about the charge that the new poets are lacking in reverence for the great poets of the past. She believes that the charge is unfounded. Nevertheless, she believes that the new poets do well to take the New England group of writers less seriously than conservative critics would have them take them. "America has produced only two great poets, Whitman and Poe," said Miss Lowell. "The rest of the early American poets were cultivated gentlemen, but they were more exactly English provincial poets than American poets, and they were decidedly inferior to the parent stock. The men of the New England group, with the single exception of Emerson, were cultivated gentlemen with a taste for literature--they never rose above that level. "No one can judge his contemporaries. We cannot say with certainty that the poets of this generation are better than their predecessors. But surely we can see that the new poets have more originality, more of the stuff out of which poetry is made, than their predecessors had, aside from the two great exceptions that I have mentioned." "What is the thing that American poetry chiefly needs?" I asked. "Well," said Miss Lowell, "I wish that there were a great many changes in our attitude toward literature. I wish that no man could expect to make a living by writing. I wish that the magazines did not pay for contributions--few of them do in France, you know. And I wish that the newspapers did not try to review books. But the thing that we chiefly need is informed and authoritative criticism. "We have very few critics, we have practically none who are writing separate books on contemporary verse. When I was writing my _French Poets_ I read twenty or thirty books on contemporary French poetry, serious books, written by critics who make a specialty of the poetry of their own day. "We have nothing like this in America. The men who write critical books write of the literature of a hundred years ago. No critical mind is bent toward contemporary verse. There are a few newspaper critics who pay serious attention to contemporary verse--William Stanley Braithwaite, O. W. Firkins, and Louis Untermeyer, for example--but there are only a few of them. "What is to be desired is for some one to be as interested in criticism as the poets are in poetry. It was the regularity of Sainte-Beuve's 'Causeries du Lundi' that gave it its weight. What we want is a critic like that, who is neither an old man despairing of a better job nor a young man using his newspaper work as a stepping-stone to something higher. Of course, brilliant criticisms of poetry appear from time to time, but what we need is criticism as an institution. "After all," said Miss Lowell, in conclusion, "there are only two kinds of poetry, good poetry and bad poetry. The form of poetry is a matter of individual idiosyncrasy. It is only the very young and the very old, the very inexperienced or the numbed, who say, 'This is the only way in which poetry shall be written!'" _A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY_ EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON At no time in the history of literature have the critics been able to agree upon a definition of poetry. And the recent popularity of _vers libre_ and _imagisme_ has made the definer's task harder than ever before. Is rhyme essential to poetry? Is rhythm essential to poetry? Can a mere reflection of life justly be called poetry, or must imagination be present? I put some of these questions to Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote _Captain Craig_, _The Children of the Night_, _The Town Down the River_, _The Man Against the Sky_ and _Merlin: A Poem_. And this man, whom William Stanley Braithwaite and other authoritative critics have called the foremost of American poets, this student of life, who was revealing the mysterious poetry of humanity many years before Edgar Lee Masters discovered to the world the vexed spirits that haunt Spoon River, rewarded my questioning with a new definition of poetry. He said: "Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said. "All real poetry, great or small, does this," he added. "And it seems to me that poetry has two characteristics. One is that it is, after all, undefinable. The other is that it is eventually unmistakable." "'Eventually'!" I said. "Then you think that poetry is not always appreciated in the lifetime of its maker?" Mr. Robinson smiled whimsically. "I never use words enough," he said. "It is not unmistakable as soon as it is published, but sooner or later it is unmistakable. "And in the poet's lifetime there are always some people who will understand and appreciate his work. I really think that it is impossible for a real poet permanently to escape appreciation. And I can't imagine anything sillier for a man to do than to worry about poetry that has once been decently published. The rest is in the hands of Time, and Time has more than often a way of making a pretty thorough job of it." "But why is it," I asked, "that a great poet so often is without honor in his own generation, where mediocrity is immediately famous?" "It's hard to say," said Mr. Robinson, thoughtfully regarding the glowing end of his cigar. "Many causes prevent poetry from being correctly appraised in its own time. Any poetry that is marked by violence, that is conspicuous in color, that is sensationally odd, makes an immediate appeal. On the other hand, poetry that is not noticeably eccentric sometimes fails for years to attract any attention. "I think that this is why so many of Kipling's worst poems are greatly overpraised, while some of his best poems are not appreciated. _Gunga Din_, which is, of course, a good thing in its way, has been praised far more than it deserves, because of its oddity. And the poem beginning 'There's a whisper down the field' has never been properly appreciated. It's one of the very best of Kipling's poems, although it is marred by a few lapses of taste. One of his greatest poems, by the way, _The Children of the Zodiac_, happens to be in prose. "But I am always revising my opinion of Kipling. I have changed my mind about him so often that I have no confidence in my critical judgment. That is one of the reasons why I do not like to criticise my American contemporaries." "Do you think," I asked, "that this tendency to pay attention chiefly to the more sensational poets is as characteristic of our generation as of those that came before?" "I think it applies particularly to our own time," he replied. "More than ever before oddity and violence are bringing into prominence poets who have little besides these two qualities to offer the world, and some who have much more. It may seem very strange to you, but I think that a great modern instance of this tendency is the case of Robert Browning. The eccentricities of Browning's method are the things that first turned popular attention upon him, but the startling quality in Browning made more sensation in his own time than it can ever make again. I say this in spite of the fact that Browning and Wordsworth are taken as the classic examples of slow recognition. Wordsworth, you know, had no respect for the judgment of youth. It may have been sour grapes, but I am inclined to think that there was a great deal of truth in his opinion. "I think it is safe to say that all real poetry is going to give at some time or other a suggestion of finality. In real poetry you find that something has been said, and yet you find also about it a sort of nimbus of what can't be said. "This nimbus may be there--I wouldn't say that it isn't there--and yet I can't find it in much of the self-conscious experimenting that is going on nowadays in the name of poetry. "I can't get over the impression," Mr. Robinson went on, with a meditative frown, "that these post-impressionists in painting and most of the _vers libristes_ in poetry are trying to find some sort of short cut to artistic success. I know that many of the new writers insist that it is harder to write good _vers libre_ than to write good rhymed poetry. And judging from some of their results, I am inclined to agree with them." I asked Mr. Robinson if he believed that the evident increase in interest in poetry, shown by the large sales of the work of Robert Frost and Edgar Lee Masters and Rupert Brooke, indicated a real renascence of poetry. "I think that it indicates a real renascence of poetry," he replied. "I am sufficiently child-like and hopeful to find it very encouraging." "Do you think," I asked, "that the poetry that is written in America to-day is better than that written a generation ago?" "I should hardly venture to say that," said Mr. Robinson. "For one thing, we have no Emerson. Emerson is the greatest poet who ever wrote in America. Passages scattered here and there in his work surely are the greatest of American poetry. In fact, I think that there are lines and sentences in Emerson's poetry that are as great as anything anywhere." I asked Mr. Robinson whether he thought the modern English poets were doing better work than their American contemporaries. At first he was unwilling to express an opinion on this subject, repeating his statement that he mistrusted his own critical judgment. But he said: "Within his limits, I believe that A. E. Housman is the most authentic poet now writing in England. But, of course, his limits are very sharply drawn. I don't think that any one who knows anything about poetry will ever think of questioning the inspiration of _A Shropshire Lad_." "Would you make a similar comment on any other poetry of our time?" I asked. "Well," said Mr. Robinson, reflectively, "I think that no one will question the inspiration of some of Kipling's poems, of parts of John Masefield's _Dauber_, and some of the long lyrics of Alfred Noyes. But I do not think that either of these poets gives the impression of finality which A. E. Housman gives. But the way in which I have shifted my opinion about some of Rudyard Kipling's poems, and most of Swinburne's, makes me think that Wordsworth was very largely right in his attitude toward the judgment of youth. But where my opinions have shifted, I think now that I always had misgivings. I fancy that youth always has misgivings in regard to what is later to be modified or repudiated." Then I asked Mr. Robinson if he thought that the war had anything to do with the renascence of poetry. "I can't see any connection," he replied. "The only effect on poetry that the war has had, so far as I know, is to produce those five sonnets by Rupert Brooke. I can't see that it has caused any poetical event. And there's no use prophesying what the war will or will not do to poetry, because no one knows anything about it. The Civil War seems to have had little effect on poetry except to produce Julia Ward Howe's _Battle Hymn of the Republic_, Whitman's poems on the death of Lincoln, and Lowell's 'Ode.'" "Mr. Robinson," I said, "there has been much discussion recently about the rewards of poetry, and Miss Amy Lowell has said that no poet ought to be expected to make a living by writing. What do you think about it?" "Should a poet be able to make a living out of poetry?" said Mr. Robinson. "Generally speaking, it is not possible for a poet to make a decent living by his work. In most cases it would be bad for his creative faculties for a poet to make as much money as a successful novelist makes. Fortunately, there is no danger of that. Now, assuming that a poet has enough money to live on, the most important thing for him to have is an audience. I mean that the best poetry is likely to be written when poetry is in the air. If a poet with no obligations and responsibilities except to stay alive can't live on a thousand dollars a year (I don't undertake to say just how he is going to get it), he'd better go into some other business." "Then you don't think," I said, "that literature has lost through the poverty of poets?" "I certainly do believe that literature has lost through the poverty of poets," said Mr. Robinson. "I don't believe in poverty. I never did. I think it is good for a poet to be bumped and knocked around when he is young, but all the difficulties that are put in his way after he gets to be twenty-five or thirty are certain to take something out of his work. I don't see how they can do anything else. "Some time ago you asked me," said Mr. Robinson, "how I accounted for our difficulty in making a correct estimate of the poetry of one's own time. The question is a difficult one. I don't even say that it has an answer. But the solution of the thing seems to me to be related to what I said about the quality of finality that seems to exist in all real poetry. Finality seems always to have had a way of not obtruding itself to any great extent." _LET POETRY BE FREE_ JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY Mrs. Lionel Marks--or Josephine Preston Peabody, to call her by the name which she has made famous--is a poet whose tendency has always been toward democracy. From _The Singing Leaves_, her first book of lyrics, to _The Piper_ (the dramatic poem which received the Stratford-on-Avon prize in 1910), and _The Wolf of Gubbio_, the poetic representation of events in St. Francis's life in her latest published book, she has chosen for her theme not fantastic and rare aspects of nature, nor the new answers of her own emotions, but things that are common to all normal mankind--such as love and religion. Also, without seeming to preach, she is always expressing her love for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and although she never dwells upon the overworked term, she is as devoted an adherent of the brotherhood of man as was William Morris. Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the opinion--often expressed during the past months--that poetry is becoming more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of poetry in the development of free verse, or _vers libre_, as those who write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to give up the use of rhyme and rhythm. "Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs. Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult. "But I do not think that the _vers libre_ fad has any connection with this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the _vers libristes_ concentrate their energies on Chicago and New York. "I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free--free verse that obviously has been made deliberately--that is a highly artificial sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call themselves _vers libristes_ are democratic; they are, in the worst sense of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French Revolution, aristocratic. "The canon of the _vers libristes_ is essentially aristocratic. They contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,' 'meanings'--any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal or democratic. "My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find that it has a silver lining of poetry. "Neither can I understand why the _vers libristes_ believe that their sort of writing is new. Leopardi wrote what would be called good _imagisme_, although the _imagistes_ do not seem to be aware of the fact, and the theory that rhyme is undesirable in poetry has appeared sporadically time and again in the history of poetry. When Sir Philip Sidney was alive there were pedants who argued against the use of rhyme, and some of them confuted their own arguments by writing charming lyrics in the traditional manner. By dint of reading the fine eye-cracking print in the Globe Edition of Spenser I found that the author of the _Faerie Queen_ at one time took seriously Gabriel Harvey's arguments against rhyme and made an unbelievably frightful experiment in rhymeless verse--as bad as the parodists of our band-wagon. "The other day I asked some one in the Greek department of Harvard how to read a fragment of Sappho's that I wanted to teach my children to say. He said that no one nowadays could know how certain of Sappho's poems really should be read, because the music for them had been lost, and they were all true lyrics, meant to be sung and sung by Sappho to music of her own making. So you see that poets who avowedly make verses that can appeal only to the eye, successions of images, in which the position of the words on the page is of great importance, believe that they are the successors of poets whose work was meant not to be read, but to be sung, whose verses fitted the regular measure of music. "As I said before," said Mrs. Marks, smiling, "I have no objection to free verse when it is a spontaneous expression. But I do object to free verse when it is organized into a cult that denies other freedoms to other poets! And I object to the bigotry of some of the people who are trying to impose free verse upon an uninterested world. "And also I object to the unfairness of some of the advocates of free verse. When they compare free verse, and what I suppose I must call chained verse, they take the greatest example of unrhymed poetry that they can find--the King James version of the Book of Job, perhaps--and say: 'This is better than "Yankee Doodle." Therefore, free verse is better than traditional verse.' "You see," said Mrs. Marks, "the commonest thing there is, I may say the most democratic thing, is the rhythm of the heart-beat. A true poet cannot ignore this. At the greatest times in his life, when he is filled with joy or despair, or when he has a sense of portent, man is aware of his heart, of its beat, of its recurrent tick, tick; he is aware of the rhythm of life. When we are dying, perhaps the only sense that remains with us is the sense of rhythm--the feeling that the grains of sand are running, running, running out. "The pulse-beat is a tremendous thing. It is the basis of all that men have in common. All life is locked up in its regularly recurrent rhythm. And it is that rhythm that appears in our love-songs, our war-songs, in all the poetry of the human cycle from lullabies to funeral chants. In the great moments of life men feel that they must be sharing, that they must have something in common with other men, and so their emotions crystallize into the ritual of rhythm, which is the most democratic thing that there is. "Primitive poetry, poetry that comes straight from the hearts of the people, sometimes circulating for generations without being committed to paper, is strongly traditional. The convention of regular rhyme and rhythm is never absent. What could be more conventional and more democratic than the old ballad, with its recurrent refrain in which the audience joined? Centuries ago in the Scotch Highlands the ballad-makers, like the men who wrote the 'Come-all-ye's' in our great-grandfather's time, used regular rhyme and rhythm. And if these poets were not democratic, then there never was such a thing as a democratic poet." "But is it not true," I asked, "that Whitman is considered the most democratic poet of his day, and that his avoidance of rhyme and regular rhythm is advanced as proof of his democracy?" "Whitman," said Mrs. Marks, "was a democrat in principle, but not in poetic practice. He loved humanity, but he still waits to reach his widest audience because his verse lacks strongly stressed, communal music. The only poems which he wrote that really reached the hearts of the people quickly are those which are most nearly traditional in form--_When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed_ and _Captain, My Captain!_ in which he used rhyme. "You see, nothing else establishes such a bond with memory as rhyme. "Did you ever think," said Mrs. Marks, suddenly, "that the truest exuberance of life always expresses itself rhythmically? Children are generous with the most intricate rhythms; they do not eat ice-cream in the disorderly grown-up way; they eat it in a pattern, turning the saucer around and around; they skit alternate flagstones or every third step on the stairway. Because they are overflowing with life they express themselves in rhythm. _Vers libre_ is too grown-up to be the most vital poetry; one of the ways in which the poet must be like a little child is in possessing an exuberance of life. His life must overflow. "The poets especially remember that Christ said, 'I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly.' "The rhythm of life," said Mrs. Marks, thoughtfully. "The rhythm of life. Who is conscious of his heart-beats except at the great moments of life, and who is unconscious of them then? The music of poetry is the witness of that intense moment when there is discovered to man or woman, when there reverberates through his brain and being, the tremendous rhythm and refrain whereby we live." Mrs. Marks has no patience with those who use the term "sociological" in depreciation of all poetry that is not intensely subjective and personal. "There are some critics," she said, "who would condemn the Lord's Prayer as 'sociological' because it begins 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father.' "The true poet must be a true democrat; he must, if he can, share with all the world the vision that lights him; he must be in sympathy with the people. The war has made a great many European poets aware of this fact. Think how the war changed Rupert Brooke, for instance? He had been a most aristocratic poet, making poems, some of which could only repel minds less in love with the fantastic. But he shared the great emotion of his countrymen, and so he wrote out of his deeply wakened, sudden simplicity those sonnets which they all can understand and must forever cherish. "The war will help make poetry. It has swept away the fads and cults from Europe; they find a peaceful haven in the United States, but they will not live as dogmas. In the democracy that is soon to come may all 'isms' founder and lose themselves! And may all true freedoms come into their own, with the maker, his mind and his tools." _THE HERESY OF SUPERMANISM_ CHARLES RANN KENNEDY "But, of course," said Charles Rann Kennedy, violently (he says most things rather violently), "you understand that the war's most important effect on literature was clearly evident long before the war began!" I did not understand this statement, and said so. Thereupon the author of _The Servant in the House_ and _The Terrible Meek_ said: "We have so often been told that great events cast their shadows before, that the tremendous truth of the phrase has ceased to impress us. The war which began in August, 1914, exercised a tremendous influence over the mind of the world in 1913, 1912, 1911, and 1910. The great wave of religious thought which swept over Europe and America during those years was caused by the approach of the war. The tremendous pacifist movement--not the weak, bloodless pacifism of the poltroon, but the heroic, flaming pacifism of the soldier-hearted convinced of sin--was a protest against the menacing injustice of the war; it was the world's shudder of dread. "The literature of the first decade of the twentieth century was more thoroughly and obviously influenced by the war than will be that of the decade following. Think of that amazing quickening of the conscience of the French nation, a quickening which found expression in the novels of Réné Bazin, the immortal ballads of Francis Jammes, and in the work of countless other writers! These people were preparing themselves and their fellow-countrymen for the mighty ordeal which was before them. "It is blasphemous to say that the war can only affect things that come after it; to say that is to attempt to limit the powers of God. There are, of course, some writers who can only feel the influence of a thing after it has become evident; after they have carefully studied and absorbed it. But there are others, the manikoi, the prophetic madmen, who are swayed by what is to happen rather than by what has happened. I'm one of them. "The war held me in its spell long before the German troops crossed Belgian soil. I wrote my _The Terrible Meek_ by direct inspiration from heaven in Holy Week, 1912. "I put that in," said Mr. Kennedy (who looks very much like Gilbert K. Chesterton's _Man-alive_), suddenly breaking off the thread of his discourse, "not only because I know that it is the absolute truth, but because of the highly entertaining way in which it is bound to be misinterpreted. "New York's dramatic critics, the Lord Chamberlain of England, the military authorities of Germany and Great Britain--all these people were charmingly unanimous in finding _The Terrible Meek_ blasphemous, villainous, poisonous. Even the New York MacDowell Club, after two stormy debates, decided to omit all mention of _The Terrible Meek_ from its bulletin. Perhaps this was not entirely because the play was 'sacrilegious'; the club may possibly have been influenced by the fact that its author was a loud person with long hair, who told unpleasant truths in reputable gatherings. And copies of the published book of the play, which were accompanied by friendly letters from the author, were refused by every monarch now at war in Europe! "But in 1914 and 1915 _The Terrible Meek_ suddenly found, to its own amazement, that it had become a respectable play! Its connection with the present war became evident. It has been the subject of countless leading articles; it has been read, and even acted, in thousands of churches. On the occasion of the first production of the despised play in New York City, my wife and I received a small pot of roses from a girls' school which we sometimes visit. In due time this was planted by the porch of our summer home in Connecticut. This year--three years only after its planting--the rose-tree covers three-quarters of the big porch, and last summer it bore thousands of blooms. Now these things are a parable! "No, the Lord does not have to wait until the beginnings of mighty wars for them vitally to influence the literature of the world. Upon some of us He places the burden of the coming horror years before. "Although I am and always have been violently opposed to war, I cannot help observing what this war has already commenced to do for literature. It is killing Supermanism--and I purposely call it by that name to distinguish it from the mere actual doctrine that Nietzsche may or may not have taught. The damnable heresy, as it historically happened among us, was already beginning to influence very badly most of our young writers. Clever devilism caught the trick of it too easily. Now, heresy is sin always and everywhere; and this heresy was a particularly black and deadly kind of sin. It ate into the very heart of our life. "And yet there was a reason, almost an excuse, for the power which the Superman idea got over the minds of writers after Bernard Shaw's first brilliant and engaging popularization of it. And the excuse is that Supermanism, with its emphasis on strength and courage and life, was to a great extent a healthy and almost inevitable reaction from the maudlin milk-and-water sort of theology and morals that had been apologetically handed out to us by weak-kneed religious teachers. "We had too much of the 'gentle Jesus' of the Sunday-school. In our maze of evil Protestantisms, we had lost sight of the real Son of God who is Jesus Christ. We had lost the terrible and lovely doctrine of the wrath of the Lamb. "And so a great many writers turned to Supermanism with a shout of relief. They were sick of milk and water, and this seemed to be strong wine. But Supermanism is heresy, and it rapidly spread over the world, most perniciously influencing all intellectual life. "And there were so many things to help Supermanism! There was the general acceptance of the doctrine of biological necessity as an argument for war--Bernhardi actually used that phrase, I believe--the idea that affairs of the spirit are determined exteriorly. There was the acceptance of various extraordinary interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution! Every little man called himself a scientist, and took his own little potterings-about very seriously. Everything had to be a matter of observation, these little fellows said; they would believe only what they saw. They didn't know that real scientists always begin _a priori_, that real scientists always know the truth first and then set about to prove it. "Well, all these people helped the heresy of Supermanism along. But the people who helped it along chiefly were the apologetic Christians, who should have combated it with fire and sword. It was helped along by the sort of Christian who calls himself 'liberal' and 'progressive,' the sort of Christian who says, 'Of course, I'm not orthodox.' When any one says that to me, I always answer him in the chaste little way which so endears me to my day and generation: 'Hell, aren't you? I hope I am!' "This sort of so-called Christian helps Supermanism in two ways. In the first place, the 'progressive' Christians are great connoisseurs of heresy, they simply love any new sort of blasphemous philosophy, whether it comes from Germany or Upper Tooting. They love to try to assimilate all the new mad and wicked ideas, and graft them on Christianity. I suppose it's their idea of making the Lord Jesus Christ up to date and attractive. They love to try to engrave pretty patterns on the Rock of Ages. And Supermanism was to them a new and alluring pattern. "Of course a Supermanism might be worked out on strictly Christian lines, the Superman in that case being the Christ. But that is not the way in which the theory has historically worked out. No! Mr. Superman as we've actually known him in the world recently is the Beast that was taken, and with him the false prophets that wrought miracles before him, with which he had deceived them that had received the mark of the Beast and them that had worshiped his image. And these, in the terrible symbolism of St. John, you will remember, got fire and brimstone for their pains! As now! "Then there was your Christian Supermanism that tried to get up a weak little imitation of the wrath of the Lamb. This was your bastard by theatricality and popularity out of so-called muscular Christianity. Not the virile 'muscular Christianity' of Charles Kingsley, mind you--a power he won almost alone, by blood and tears; but the 'safe' thing of the after generation, the 'all things to all men'--when success was well assured. This is your baseball Christianity, the Christianity of the 'punch,' of the piled-up heap of dollars, of the commercially counted 'conversions' and the rest of the blasphemies! Christ deliver us from it, if needs be, even by fire! "Well, Supermanism cast its shadow over all forms of literary expression. The big and the little mockers all fell under its spell--they had their fling at Christianity in their novels, their plays, their poems. In the novel Supermanism was evident not so much in direct attacks on Christianity as in a brutal and pitiless realism. Perhaps some of this hard realism was a natural reaction from the eye-piping sentimentality of some of the Victorian writers. But most of it was merely Supermanism in fiction--pessimism, egotism, fatalism, cruelty. "One thing to be said for the Christian Scientists, the Mental Healers, the New Thought people generally, is that they did a real service through all this bad time by refusing to recognize any such heresy as biological determination as applied to things spiritual. They really did teach man's freedom up there in the heavens where he properly belongs. They refused to be bound by the earth, and all the appearances and the exterior causes thereof. Their Superman, if they ever used the phrase, was at least the Healer, the spirit spent for others, not for self. "If you were to ask me what were the war's most conspicuous effects on literature just at present, I would say conviction of sin, repentance and turning to God. There can be no suggestion of Supermanism in our literature now. We have rediscovered the Christian Virtues. If a man writes something about blond-beasting through the world for his own good, all we have to do is to stick up in front of his eyes a crucifix. For the world has seen courage and self-abnegation of the kind that Christ taught--it has seen men throw their lives away. The war has shown the world that the man who will throw away his life is braver and stronger and greater than the man who plunges forward to safety over the lives of others. The world has learned that he who loses his life shall gain it. "The war has thrown a clear light upon Christianity, and now all the little apologetic 'progressive' Christians see that the world had never reacted against orthodox Christianity as such, but only against the bowelless unbelief which masqueraded as Christianity. We have had so many ministers who talked about Christ as they would have talked about kippered herrings--even with less enthusiasm. But now any one who speaks or writes about Christianity after this will have to know that he has to do with something terribly real. "Of course, during the war the only people who can write about it are those who are in the red-hot period of youth. Young men of genius write in times of stress. The war forces genius to flower prematurely--that is how we got the noble sonnets of Rupert Brooke. "And after the war will come to the making of literature the man who has conquered pain and agony. And that is the real Superman, the Christian Superman, the Superman who has always been the normal ideal of the world. Carlyle's Superman was nearer the truth than was Nietzsche's, for Carlyle's Superman idea was grounded in courage and sacrifice and love; his Superman was some one worth fighting for and dying for. And the war is showing us that this is the true Superman, if we want to save the world for nobler ends. "And the war, I believe, will do away with the tommy-rotten objection to 'message' in literature. Don't misunderstand me. Of course, we all object to the stupid 'story with a purpose' in the Sunday-school sense of that phrase. We don't want literature used as a sugar-coating around the illuminating lesson that God loves little Willie because he fed the dicky-birds and didn't say 'damn'! Yet we want literature to awake again and be as always in the great days--a message. Literature must be a direct message from the heart of the author to the heart of the world. The _Prometheus Vinctus_ was such a message. So also the _Antigone_. All Greek drama was. "All the little literary and artistic cults are dead or dying. The idea of literature as a thing distinct from life is dead. Writers can never again think of themselves as a race separate from the rest of humanity. All the artificial Bohemias have been destroyed, and can never again exist; for now at last the new world is about to dawn. Christ is coming. "And yet this war has made evident the importance of literature. It has made words real again. It has shown that men cannot live forever on a lie, written or spoken. God has come upon us like a thief in the night, and He has judged by our words. Some of us He has turned to madness and the vain babblings of heathendom. I am no wild chauvinist; though a man, English-born, it gives me no joy to speak of Germans as Huns, and to heap up hate and indignation against them. Nor in my wildest flights of romanticism can I dream that an England yet possessing Lord Northcliffe and the present Government can be all that God might call delightful. Mr. Superman has invaded England right enough, that I sadly know; and Prussianism is not all in Potsdam. "Yet it is significant, in view of the Superman's birthplace, in view of the fact that the German people have very largely accepted his doctrine and ideal, that the men who stand for speech among them, in their public manifestoes have been delivered over unto confusion and a lie. The logician has been illogical, the literary artist rendered without form and void. Their very craft has turned to impotence and self-destruction. I repeat, this is no happiness to me. Rather, I think of the Germany I have loved, and I weep for the pity of it all. I am no friend of kings and kaisers and bankers and grocers and titled newspaper editors, that I should make their bloodiness mine. But I cannot help but see the sign of God written across the heavens in words of living fire. "As I said in _The Terrible Meek_: 'There is great power in words. All the things that ever get done in the world, good or bad, are done by words.' "What we'll have to rediscover is that literature, like life, begins with the utterance of a word. And until people realize once again that a word is no mere dead thing buried in a dictionary, but the actual, awful, wonderful Life of God Himself, we shall neither have nor deserve to have a literature!" _THE MASQUE AND DEMOCRACY_ PERCY MACKAYE The community masque, _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_, is primarily intended to honor the memory of Shakespeare on the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. But its significance goes further than the purpose of commemoration. Mr. Percy MacKaye, the author, tells me that he sees his masque as part of a movement which shall bring poetry to the service of the entire community, which shall make poetry democratic, in the best sense of the word, and that the result of this movement will be to create conditions likely to produce out of the soil of America a great renascence of the drama. Mr. MacKaye undoubtedly is the busiest poet in the United States of America. When he talked to me about the significance of the community masque, rehearsals of the various groups that are to take part in it were going on all over the city. Every few minutes he was called away to confer with some of the directors of the masque, or some of the actors taking part in it. For a while Mr. John Drew was with us, talking of his appearance, in the character of Shakespeare, in epilogue. Mr. Robert Edmund Jones, the designer of the inner scenes, brought over some new drawings, and there were telephone conversations about music and costumes and other important details of the monster production. "The fact," said Mr. MacKaye, "that the masque is a poem primarily intended to be heard rather than to be read, is itself a movement toward the earlier and more democratic uses of poetry. Poetry appeals essentially to the ear, and is an art of the spoken word, yet, on account of our conditions of life, the written word is considered poetry. "This was not true in Shakespeare's time. And in the sort of work that I am doing is shown a return to the old ideal. A masque is a poem that can be visualized and acted. First of all it must be a poem, otherwise it cannot be anything but a more or less warped work of art. "With much of the new movement in the theater I am heartily in sympathy; but the movement seems to me one-sided. A large part of it has to do with visualization. Emphasis is laid on the appeal to the eye rather than the appeal to the ear, because the men of genius, like Gordon Craig, who have been leaders in the movement, have been interested in that phase of dramatic presentation. "Now I think that this one-sidedness is regrettable. When Gordon Craig called his book on dramatic visualization _The Art of the Theater_ he was wrong. He should have called it 'An Art of the Theater.' "These men have neglected part of the human soul. They have forgotten that the greatest part of the appeal of a drama is to the ear. The ear brings up the most subtle of all life's associations and connotations. By means of the ear the motions and ideas are conjured up in the mind of the audience. "Now, while the new movement in the theater is visual in character, the new movement in poetry is, so to speak, audible. The American poets are insisting more and more on the importance of the spoken word in poetry, as distinct from its shadow on the printed page. Whether they write _vers libre_ or the usual rhymed forms, they appreciate the fact that they must write poems that will be effective when read aloud. Surely this is a wholesome movement, likely to tend more and more toward definite dramatic expression on the part of the poets, whether to audiences through actors on the stage, or to audiences gathered to hear the direct utterances of the poets themselves. "This being so, the stage tending more toward visualization, and poetry tending more and more toward the spoken word, where shall we look for the co-ordinating development? I think that we shall find it in the community masque. The community masque draws out of the unlabored and untrammeled resources of our national life its inspiration and its theme. It requires our young poets to get closely in touch with our national life, with our history and with contemporary attitudes and ideals. To do this it is first of all necessary to have the poetic vision. The great need of the day is of the poet trained in the art of the theater. "The pageant and the masque offer the ideal conditions for the rendering of poetry. The poet who writes the lyric may or may not ordinarily be the one to speak it. In the masque the one who speaks the poem is the one chosen to do so because of his special fitness for the task. I have chosen my actors for the Shakespeare masque with special reference to their ability to speak poetry." "But what has this to do," I asked, "with making poetry more democratic?" "For one thing," Mr. MacKaye answered, "it gives the poet a larger audience. People who never read poetry will listen to poetry when it is presented to them in dramatic form. I have found that the result of the presentation of a community masque is to interest in poetry a large number of people who had hitherto been deaf to its appeal. In St. Louis, when I started a masque, that queer word with a 'q' in it was understood by a comparatively small number. But after the masque was produced nearly every high-school boy and girl in the town was writing masques. "No one can observe the progress of the community masque without seeing that it is surely a most democratic art form. I read my St. Louis masque before assemblies of ministers, in negro high schools, before clubs of advertising-men, at I. W. W. meetings--before men of all conditions of life and shades of opinion. It afforded them a sort of spiritual and intellectual meeting-place, it gave them a common interest. Surely that is a democratic function. "The democracy of the masque was forcefully brought to my attention again at the recent dinner by Otto Kahn to the Mayor's Honorary Committee for the New York Shakespeare Celebration. After James M. Beck had made a speech, Morris Hillquit, also a member of the committee, arose and addressed the company. He pointed out more clearly than I have heard it done before that in this cause extremes of opinion met, that art was producing practical democracy. "And yet," said Mr. MacKaye, hastily, "the masque stands for the democracy of excellence, not the democracy of mediocrity. What is art but self-government, the harmonizing of the elements of the mind? There can be no art where there is no discipline, there can be no art where there is not a high standard of excellence. "As I said," he continued, "the original appeal of poetry was to the ear as well as to the eye. In the days when poetry was a more democratic art than it has been in our time and that of our fathers, the poet spoke his poems to a circle of enthralled listeners. The masque is spoken through many mouths, but it might be spoken or chanted by the bard himself. "There has never before been so great an opportunity for the revival of the poetic drama. Ordinarily when a poetic drama is presented the cast has been drawn from actors trained in the rendition of prose. Inevitably the tendency has been for them to give a prose value to the lines of poetry. In selecting a cast for a masque, special attention is given to the ability of the actors to speak poetry, so the poem is presented as the poet intended. "It may be that the pageant and masque movement represents the full flowering of the renascence of poetry which all observers of intellectual events have recognized. But these movements are perennial; I do not like to think of a renascence of poetry because I do not think that poetry has been dead. I feel that it is desirable for the poets to become aware of the opportunities presented to them by the masque, the opportunities to combine the art of poetry with the art of the theater, and thus put poetry at the service of mankind. "I have felt that the Poetry Society of America, an organization whose activities certainly are stimulating and encouraging to every friend of the art, might serve poetry better if its members were to place more emphasis on creation and less on criticism. At their meetings now criticism is the dominant note. Poems written by the members are read aloud and criticized from the floor. This is excellent, in its place, but its effect is to lay stress on the critical function of the poet, which, after all, is not his main function. What the members of the Poetry Society should do is to seek co-operatively to create something. And for this the masque offers them a golden opportunity. "The flowering of poetry is a thing of infinite variety. There must be variety in a masque if the masque is to continue to be a worthy and popular art form. Standardization would be fatal to the masque, and I have stood out against it with all the power I possess. The masque and the pageant must not degenerate into traveling shows, done according to a fixed receipt. There must be the vision in it, and when the people see the vision they respond marvelously." Percy MacKaye is the son of Steele MacKaye, the author of _Hazel Kirke_ and other popular plays. From the very beginning of his literary career his chief ambition has seemed to be to bring about a closer _rapprochement_ between poetry and the drama. When Mr. MacKaye was graduated from Harvard, in 1897, there were in that university no courses, technical or otherwise, in the modern drama. The official acceptance of his own commencement part _On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of To-day_ was the first official sanction of the subject, which was commented upon by the _Boston Transcript_ as something unprecedented in the annals of university discussion, especially of Harvard. It was not until seven or eight years had passed that Prof. George P. Baker began his courses in dramatic technique. The development of the pageant and the masque has been for years the object of Mr. MacKaye's tireless endeavors. He has spoken of the masque as "the potential drama of democracy." Two years ago in St. Louis he had his first technical opportunity on a large scale to experiment in devising this sort of communal entertainment. There, during five performances, witnessed by half a million people, some seven thousand citizens of St. Louis took part in his masque, in association with the pageant by Thomas Wood Stevens. "The outgoing cost of the St. Louis production," said Mr. MacKaye, "was $122,000; the income, $139,000. The balance of $17,000 has been devoted to a fund for civic art. If these seem large sums, we must look back to the days of the classic Greek drama and remember that the cost of producing a single play by Sophocles at Athens was $500,000. "The St. Louis production was truly a drama of, for, and by the people, a true community masque. _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is a community masque, given as the central popular expression of some hundreds of supplementary Shakespearian celebrations. "I call this work a masque, because it is a dramatic work of symbolism, involving in its structure pageantry, poetry, and the dance. But I have not thought to relate its structure to a historic form; I have simply sought by its structure to solve a problem of the art of the theater. That problem is the new one of creating a focus of dramatic technique for the growing but groping movement vaguely called 'pageantry,' which is itself a vital sign of social evolution--the half-desire of the people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by specialists, but to take part themselves in creating it; the desire,--that is, of democracy consistently to seek expression through a drama of and by the people, not merely for the people. "Six years ago, after the pageant-masque of the city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, I wrote, in _Scribner's Magazine_, an article in which I said that I found in the three American pageant-masques which I had seen recently, the Gloucester Pageant, the Masque at Aspet, and the California Redwood Festival, the expression of community spirit focused by co-operating artists in dramatic form. I said then, what I feel even more strongly after my work with the St. Louis Pageant and the Shakespearian Masque, that pageantry is poetry for the masses. "The parade of Election Day, the processions of Antics and Horribles on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day, the May-Queen rituals of children--these make an elemental appeal to every one. What is this elemental appeal? Is it not the appeal of symbolism, the expression of life's meanings in sensuous form? Crude though it may be, pageantry satisfies an elemental instinct for art, a popular demand for poetry. This instinct and this demand, like other human instincts and demands, may be educated, refined, developed into a mighty agency of civilization. Refinement of this deep, popular instinct will result from a rational selection in correlation of the elements of pageantry. Painting, dancing, music, and sculpture (the last as applied to classic groupings) are appropriately the special arts for selecting those elements, and drama is the special art of correlating them. "The form of pageantry most popular and impressive in appeal as a fine art is that of the dramatic pageant, or masque. It is not limited to historic themes. All vital modern forces and institutions of our nation might appropriately find symbolic expression in the masque. "And in this would be seen the making of art democratic. Thus would the art of poetry and the art of the drama be put at the service of mankind. Artistic gifts, which now are individualized and dispersed, would be organized to express the labors and aspirations of communities, reviving, for the noblest humanism of our own times, the traditions of Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones. The development of the art of public masques, dedicated to civic education, would do more than any other agency to provide popular symbolic form and tradition for the stuff of a noble national drama. The present theaters cannot develop a public art, since they are dedicated to a private speculative business. The association of artists and civic leaders in the organization of public masques would tend gradually to establish a civic theater, owned by the people and conducted by artists, in every city of the nation. "I expressed these ideas," said Mr. MacKaye, "some years ago, before the pageant movement had reached its present pitch of popularity. All my experiences since that time have given me a firmer conviction that the masque is the drama of democracy, and I believe that the chief value of the Shakespearian masque is as a step forward in the progress of the co-operative dramatic and poetic expression of the people. "_Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ will be given at the City College Stadium May 23d, 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th. After its New York performance it will be available for production elsewhere on a modified scale of stage performance. After June 1st it is planned that a professional company, which will co-operate with the local communities, will take the masque on tour. "The subtitle of _Caliban by the Yellow Sands_ is _A Community Masque of the Art of the Theater_, _Devised and Written to Commemorate the Tercentenary of the Death of Shakespeare_. The dramatic-symbolic motive of the masque I have taken from Scene 2 of Act I of _The Tempest_, where Prospero says: It was mine art When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape The pine and let thee out. "The art of Prospero I have conceived as the art of Shakespeare in its universal scope--that many-visioned art of the theater, which age after age has come to liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the fetters of brute force and ignorance; that same art which, being usurped or stifled by groping part-knowledge, prudery, or lust, has been botched in its ideal aims, and has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence. Caliban is in this masque that passionate child-curious part of us all, groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane of pity and love, reason, and disciplined will, on which Miranda and Prospero commune with Ariel and his spirits. "The theme of the masque--Caliban seeking to learn the art of Prospero--is, of course, the slow education of mankind through the influences of co-operative art--that is, of the art of the theater in its full social scope. This theme of co-operation is expressed earliest in the masque through the lyric of Ariel's Spirits taken from _The Tempest_; it is sounded, with central stress, in the chorus of peace when the kings clasp hands on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and, with final emphasis, in the gathering together of the creative forces of dramatic art in the Epilogue. "So I have tried to make the masque bring that message of co-operation which I think all true art should bring. And the masque is the form which seems to me destined to bring about this desired co-operation, to bring back, perhaps, the conditions which existed in the spacious days of the great Greek drama. The growth in popularity of masques and pageants is preparing the way for a new race of poet dramatists, of poets who will use their knowledge of the art of the theater to interpret the people to themselves. And out of this new artistic democracy will come, let us hope, our new national poetry and our new national drama." THE END * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES The duplicate book title and chapter titles have been removed. Also the following misprints have been corrected: TOC: put in "Tippecanoe" without a hyphen (in "Tippecanoe County, Indiana") TOC: "Mackaye" changed to "MacKaye", as in all other instances ("Percy Mackaye was born in New York City...") p. 56: "countinent" changed to "continent" ("Yet in their time these men set the whole countinent in a roar.") p. 75: period is added after the middle initial W (ROBERT W. CHAMBERS) p. 78: period is added the following sentence: The most imaginative and fantastic romances must have their basis in real life. p. 107: put in "dive-keeper" with a hyphen (no other instance in the text) p. 112: put in "soulless" without a hyphen (no other instances in the text) p. 178: opening double quote changed to single quote ('If ye had not plowed with my heifer....) p. 218: put in "catch-words" with a hyphen (no other instances in the text) p. 243: put in "motion-picture" with a hyphen (no other instances in the text) p. 247: put in "off-hand" with a hyphen ("I can think off-hand of quite a group of writers....") p. 283: put in "Dooryards" without a hyphen ("When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloomed") p. 293: put in "everywhere" without a hyphen ("heresy is sin always and everywhere;") p. 294: "Of couse" changed to "Of course" ("Of course, I'm not orthodox.") 
3463	----	THE BOYS' LIFE OF MARK TWAIN By Albert Bigelow Paine CONTENTS PREFACE I. THE FAMILY OF JOHN CLEMENS II. THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM III. SCHOOL IV. EDUCATION OUT OF SCHOOL V. TOM SAWYER AND HIS BAND VI. CLOSING SCHOOL-DAYS VII. THE APPRENTICE VIII. ORION'S PAPER IX. THE OPEN ROAD X. A WIND OF CHANCE XI. THE LONG WAY To THE AMAZON XII. RENEWING AN OLD AMBITION XIII. LEARNING THE RIVER XIV. RIVER DAYS XV. THE WRECK OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA" XVI. THE PILOT XVII. THE END OF PILOTING XVIII. THE SOLDIER XIX. THE PIONEER XX. THE MINER XXI. THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE XXII. "MARK TWAIN" XXIII. ARTEMUS WARD AND LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO XXIV. THE DISCOVERY OF "THE JUMPING FROG" XXV. HAWAII AND ANSON BURLINGAME XXVI. MARK TWAIN, LECTURER XXVII. AN INNOCENT ABROAD, AND HOME AGAIN XXVIII. OLIVIA LANGDON. WORK ON THE "INNOCENTS" XXIX. THE VISIT TO ELMIRA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES XXX. THE NEW BOOK AND A WEDDING XXXI. MARK TWAIN IN BUFFALO XXXII. AT WORK ON "ROUGHING IT" XXXIII. IN ENGLAND XXXIV. A NEW BOOK AND NEW ENGLISH TRIUMPHS XXXV. BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER" XXXVI. THE NEW HOME XXXVII. "OLD TIMES, "SKETCHES," AND "TOM SAWYER" XXXVIII. HOME PICTURES XXXIX. TRAMPING ABROAD XL. "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" XLI. GENERAL GRANT AT HARTFORD XLII. MANY INVESTMENTS XLIII. BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY XLIV. A READING-TOUR WITH CABLE XLV. "THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN" XLVI. PUBLISHER TO GENERAL GRANT XLVII. THE HIGH-TIDE OF FORTUNE XLVIII. BUSINESS DIFFICULTIES. PLEASANTER THINGS XLIX. KIPLING AT ELMIRA. ELSIE LESLIE. THE "YANKEE" L. THE MACHINE. GOOD-BY TO HARTFORD. "JOAN" IS BEGUN LI. THE FAILURE OF WEBSTER & CO. AROUND THE WORLD. SORROW LII. EUROPEAN ECONOMIES LIII. MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS LIV. RETURN AFTER EXILE LV. A PROPHET AT HOME LVI. HONORED BY MISSOURI LVII. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE LVIII. MARK TWAIN AT SEVENTY LIX. MARK TWAIN ARRANGES FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY LX. WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN LXI. DICTATIONS AT DUBLIN, N. H. LXII. A NEW ERA OF BILLIARDS LXIII. LIVING WITH MARK TWAIN LXIV. A DEGREE FROM OXFORD LXV. THE REMOVAL TO REDDING LXVI. LIFE AT STORMFIELD LXVII. THE DEATH OF JEAN LXVIII. DAYS IN BERMUDA LXIX. THE RETURN TO REDDING LXX. THE CLOSE OF A GREAT LIFE PREFACE This is the story of a boy, born in the humblest surroundings, reared almost without schooling, and amid benighted conditions such as to-day have no existence, yet who lived to achieve a world-wide fame; to attain honorary degrees from the greatest universities of America and Europe; to be sought by statesmen and kings; to be loved and honored by all men in all lands, and mourned by them when he died. It is the story of one of the world's very great men--the story of Mark Twain. I. THE FAMILY OF JOHN CLEMENS A long time ago, back in the early years of another century, a family named Clemens moved from eastern Tennessee to eastern Missouri--from a small, unheard-of place called Pall Mall, on Wolf River, to an equally small and unknown place called Florida, on a tiny river named the Salt. That was a far journey, in those days, for railway trains in 1835 had not reached the South and West, and John Clemens and his family traveled in an old two-horse barouche, with two extra riding-horses, on one of which rode the eldest child, Orion Clemens, a boy of ten, and on the other Jennie, a slave girl. In the carriage with the parents were three other children--Pamela and Margaret, aged eight and five, and little Benjamin, three years old. The time was spring, the period of the Old South, and, while these youngsters did not realize that they were passing through a sort of Golden Age, they must have enjoyed the weeks of leisurely journeying toward what was then the Far West--the Promised Land. The Clemens fortunes had been poor in Tennessee. John Marshall Clemens, the father, was a lawyer, a man of education; but he was a dreamer, too, full of schemes that usually failed. Born in Virginia, he had grown up in Kentucky, and married there Jane Lampton, of Columbia, a descendant of the English Lamptons and the belle of her region. They had left Kentucky for Tennessee, drifting from one small town to another that was always smaller, and with dwindling law-practice John Clemens in time had been obliged to open a poor little store, which in the end had failed to pay. Jennie was the last of several slaves he had inherited from his Virginia ancestors. Besides Jennie, his fortune now consisted of the horses and barouche, a very limited supply of money, and a large, unsalable tract of east Tennessee land, which John Clemens dreamed would one day bring his children fortune. Readers of the "Gilded Age" will remember the journey of the Hawkins family from the "Knobs" of Tennessee to Missouri and the important part in that story played by the Tennessee land. Mark Twain wrote those chapters, and while they are not history, but fiction, they are based upon fact, and the picture they present of family hardship and struggle is not overdrawn. The character of Colonel Sellers, who gave the Hawkinses a grand welcome to the new home, was also real. In life he was James Lampton, cousin to Mrs. Clemens, a gentle and radiant merchant of dreams, who believed himself heir to an English earldom and was always on the verge of colossal fortune. With others of the Lampton kin, he was already settled in Missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative, John Quarles, brother-in-law to Mrs. Clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted optimist, well-loved by all who knew him. It was a June evening when the Clemens family, with the barouche and the two outriders, finally arrived in Florida, and the place, no doubt, seemed attractive enough then, however it may have appeared later. It was the end of a long journey; relatives gathered with fond welcome; prospects seemed bright. Already John Quarles had opened a general store in the little town. Florida, he said, was certain to become a city. Salt River would be made navigable with a series of locks and dams. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his business. Quarles, for that time and place, was a rich man. Besides his store he had a farm and thirty slaves. His brother-in-law's funds, or lack of them, did not matter. The two had married sisters. That was capital enough for his hearty nature. So, almost on the moment of arrival in the new land, John Clemens once more found himself established in trade. The next thing was to find a home. There were twenty-one houses in Florida, and none of them large. The one selected by John and Jane Clemens had two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen--a small place and lowly--the kind of a place that so often has seen the beginning of exalted lives. Christianity began with a babe in a manger; Shakespeare first saw the light in a cottage at Stratford; Lincoln entered the world by way of a leaky cabin in Kentucky, and into the narrow limits of the Clemens home in Florida, on a bleak autumn day--November 30, 1835--there was born one who under the name of Mark Twain would live to cheer and comfort a tired world. The name Mark Twain had not been thought of then, and probably no one prophesied favorably for the new-comer, who was small and feeble, and not over-welcome in that crowded household. They named him Samuel, after his paternal grandfather, and added Langhorne for an old friend--a goodly burden for so frail a wayfarer. But more appropriately they called him "Little Sam," or "Sammy," which clung to him through the years of his delicate childhood. It seems a curious childhood, as we think of it now. Missouri was a slave State--Little Sam's companions were as often black as white. All the children of that time and locality had negroes for playmates, and were cared for by them. They were fond of their black companions and would have felt lost without them. The negro children knew all the best ways of doing things--how to work charms and spells, the best way to cure warts and heal stone-bruises, and to make it rain, and to find lost money. They knew what signs meant, and dreams, and how to keep off hoodoo; and all negroes, old and young, knew any number of weird tales. John Clemens must have prospered during the early years of his Florida residence, for he added another slave to his household--Uncle Ned, a man of all work--and he built a somewhat larger house, in one room of which, the kitchen, was a big fireplace. There was a wide hearth and always plenty of wood, and here after supper the children would gather, with Jennie and Uncle Ned, and the latter would tell hair-lifting tales of "ha'nts," and lonely roads, and witch-work that would make his hearers shiver with terror and delight, and look furtively over their shoulders toward the dark window-panes and the hovering shadows on the walls. Perhaps it was not the healthiest entertainment, but it was the kind to cultivate an imagination that would one day produce "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn." True, Little Sam was very young at this period, but even a little chap of two or three would understand most of that fireside talk, and get impressions more vivid than if the understanding were complete. He was barely four when this earliest chapter of his life came to a close. John Clemens had not remained satisfied with Florida and his undertakings there. The town had not kept its promises. It failed to grow, and the lock-and-dam scheme that would make Salt River navigable fell through. Then one of the children, Margaret, a black-eyed, rosy little girl of nine, suddenly died. This was in August, 1839. A month or two later the saddened family abandoned their Florida home and moved in wagons, with their household furnishings, to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town, thirty miles away. There was only one girl left now, Pamela, twelve years old, but there was another boy, baby Henry, three years younger than Little Sam--four boys in all. II. THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM Hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade. It was slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead. John Clemens believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general store with Orion Clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for clerk. The little city was also an attractive place of residence. Mark Twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning, . . . the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, .... the dense forest away on the other side." The "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river were bluffs--Holliday's Hill and Lover's Leap. A distance below the town was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of Tom Sawyer knows--while out in the river, toward the Illinois shore, was the delectable island that was one day to be the meeting-place of Tom's pirate band, and later to become the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim. The river itself was full of interest. It was the highway to the outside world. Rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and down, touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing wonder to those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and railway had not yet reached. That Hannibal was a pleasant place of residence we may believe, and what an attractive place for a boy to grow up in! Little Sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave. He was still delicate--the least promising of the family. He was queer and fanciful, and rather silent. He walked in his sleep and was often found in the middle of the night, fretting with the cold, in some dark corner. Once he heard that a neighbor's children had the measles, and, being very anxious to catch the complaint, slipped over to the house and crept into bed with an infected playmate. Some days later, Little Sam's relatives gathered about his bed to see him die. He confessed, long after, that the scene gratified him. However, he survived, and fell into the habit of running away, usually in the direction of the river. "You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," his mother once said to him, in her old age. "I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested. She looked at him with the keen humor which had been her legacy to him. "No, afraid you would," she said. Which was only her joke, for she had the tenderest of hearts, and, like all mothers, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. It was chiefly on his account that she returned each year to Florida to spend the summer on John Quarles's farm. If Uncle John Quarles's farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm, and his slaves just average negroes, they certainly never seemed so to Little Sam. There was a kind of glory about everything that belonged to Uncle John, and it was not all imagination, for some of the spirit of that jovial, kindly hearted man could hardly fail to radiate from his belongings. The farm was a large one for that locality, and the farm-house was a big double log building--that is, two buildings with a roofed-over passage between, where in summer the lavish Southern meals were served, brought in on huge dishes by the negroes, and left for each one to help himself. Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens, green corn, watermelon--a little boy who did not die on that bill of fare would be likely to get well on it, and to Little Sam the farm proved a life-saver. It was, in fact, a heavenly place for a little boy. In the corner of the yard there were hickory and black-walnut trees, and just over the fence the hill sloped past barns and cribs to a brook, a rare place to wade, though there were forbidden pools. Cousin Tabitha Quarles, called "Puss," his own age, was Little Sam's playmate, and a slave girl, Mary, who, being six years older, was supposed to keep them out of mischief. There were swings in the big, shady pasture, where Mary swung her charges and ran under them until their feet touched the branches. All the woods were full of squirrels and birds and blooming flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; the fence-rows were full of wild blackberries; there were apples and peaches in the orchard, and plenty of melons ripening in the corn. Certainly it was a glorious place! Little Sam got into trouble once with the watermelons. One of them had not ripened quite enough when he ate several slices of it. Very soon after he was seized with such terrible cramps that some of the household did not think he could live. But his mother said: "Sammy will pull through. He was not born to die that way." Which was a true prophecy. Sammy's slender constitution withstood the strain. It was similarly tested more than once during those early years. He was regarded as a curious child. At times dreamy and silent, again wild-headed and noisy, with sudden impulses that sent him capering and swinging his arms into the wind until he would fall with shrieks and spasms of laughter and madly roll over and over in the grass. It is not remembered that any one prophesied very well for his future at such times. The negro quarters on Uncle John's farm were especially fascinating. In one cabin lived a bedridden old woman whom the children looked upon with awe. She was said to be a thousand years old, and to have talked with Moses. She had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt. She had seen Pharaoh drown, and the fright had caused the bald spot on her head. She could ward off witches and dissolve spells. Uncle Dan'l was another favorite, a kind-hearted, gentle soul, who long after, as Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, would win world-wide love and sympathy. Through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time Little Sam romped and dreamed and grew. He would return each summer to the farm during those early years. It would become a beautiful memory. His mother generally kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote: "I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its belongings, all its details; the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another--a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me and made me homesick and low- spirited and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it; . . . the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner, and my uncle in the other, smoking his corn-cob pipe." It is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day going to write of Tom and Huck and the rest learned there so many things that Tom and Huck would need to know. But he must have "book-learning," too, Jane Clemens said. On his return to Hannibal that first summer, she decided that Little Sam was ready for school. He was five years old and regarded as a "stirring child." "He drives me crazy with his didoes when he's in the house," his mother declared, "and when he's out of it I'm expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead." Mark Twain used to say that he had had nine narrow escapes from drowning, and it was at this early age that he was brought home one afternoon in a limp state, having been pulled from a deep hole in Bear Creek by a slave girl. When he was restored, his mother said: "I guess there wasn't much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water." Mark Twain's mother was the original of Aunt Polly in the story of Tom Sawyer, an outspoken, keen-witted, charitable woman, whom it was good to know. She had a heart full of pity, especially for dumb creatures. She refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. She would drown young kittens when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. She could be strict, however, with her children, if occasion required, and recognized their faults. Little Sam was inclined to elaborate largely on fact. A neighbor once said to her: "You don't believe anything that child says, I hope." "Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is pure gold." She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him "manners." A certain Mrs. E. Horr was selected for the purpose. Mrs. Horr's school on Main Street, Hannibal, was of the old-fashioned kind. There were pupils of all ages, and everything was taught up to the third reader and long division. Pupils who cared to go beyond those studies went to a Mr. Cross, on the hill, facing what is now the public square. Mrs. Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and the rules of conduct were read daily. After the rules came the A-B-C class, whose recitation was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no study-time. The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He wondered how nearly he could come to breaking them and escape. He experimented during the forenoon, and received a warning. Another experiment would mean correction. He did not expect to be caught again; but when he least expected it he was startled by a command to go out and bring a stick for his own punishment. This was rather dazing. It was sudden, and, then, he did not know much about choosing sticks for such a purpose. Jane Clemens had commonly used her hand. A second command was needed to start him in the right direction, and he was still dazed when he got outside. He had the forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was not easy. Everything looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a wiry look. Across the way was a cooper's shop. There were shavings outside, and one had blown across just in front of him. He picked it up, and, gravely entering the room, handed it to Mrs. Horr. So far as known, it is the first example of that humor which would one day make Little Sam famous before all the world. It was a failure in this instance. Mrs. Horr's comic side may have prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. "Samuel Langhorne Clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), "I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go and bring a switch for Sammy." And the switch that Jimmy Dunlap brought was of a kind to give Little Sam a permanent distaste for school. He told his mother at noon that he did not care for education; that he did not wish to be a great man; that his desire was to be an Indian and scalp such persons as Mrs. Horr. In her heart Jane Clemens was sorry for him, but she openly said she was glad there was somebody who could take him in hand. Little Sam went back to school, but he never learned to like it. A school was ruled with a rod in those days, and of the smaller boys Little Sam's back was sore as often as the next. When the days of early summer came again, when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the glint of the river and the purple distance beyond, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a Webster spelling-book and a cross teacher was more than human nature could bear. There still exists a yellow slip of paper upon which, in neat, old-fashioned penmanship is written: MISS PAMELA CLEMENS Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. E. HORR, Teacher. Thus we learn that Little Sam's sister, eight years older than himself, attended the same school, and that she was a good pupil. If any such reward of merit was ever conferred on Little Sam, it has failed to come to light. If he won the love of his teacher and playmates, it was probably for other reasons. Yet he must have learned somehow, for he could read, presently, and was a good speller for his age. IV. EDUCATION OUT OF SCHOOL On their arrival in Hannibal, the Clemens family had moved into a part of what was then the Pavey Hotel. They could not have remained there long, for they moved twice within the next few years, and again in 1844 into a new house which Judge Clemens, as he was generally called, had built on Hill Street--a house still standing, and known to-day as the Mark Twain home. John Clemens had met varying fortunes in Hannibal. Neither commerce nor the practice of law had paid. The office of justice of the peace, to which he was elected, returned a fair income, but his business losses finally obliged him to sell Jennie, the slave girl. Somewhat later his business failure was complete. He surrendered everything to his creditors, even to his cow and household furniture, and relied upon his law practice and justice fees. However, he seems to have kept the Tennessee land, possibly because no one thought it worth taking. There had been offers for it earlier, but none that its owner would accept. It appears to have been not even considered by his creditors, though his own faith in it never died. The struggle for a time was very bitter. Orion Clemens, now seventeen, had learned the printer's trade and assisted the family with his wages. Mrs. Clemens took a few boarders. In the midst of this time of hardship little Benjamin Clemens died. He was ten years old. It was the darkest hour. Then conditions slowly improved. There was more law practice and better justice fees. By 1844 Judge Clemens was able to build the house mentioned above--a plain, cheap house, but a shelter and a home. Sam Clemens--he was hardly "Little Sam" any more--was at this time nine years old. His boyhood had begun. Heretofore he had been just a child--wild and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. Now at nine he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys in such a community will. "Sam," as they now called him, was "grown up" at nine and wise for his years. Not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, many of them of a kind not taught at school. He had learned a good deal of natural history and botany--the habits of plants, insects, and animals. Mark Twain's books bear evidence of this early study. His plants, bugs, and animals never do the wrong things. He was learning a good deal about men, and this was often less pleasant knowledge. Once Little Sam--he was still Little Sam then--saw an old man shot down on Main Street at noon day. He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family Bible, which looked as heavy as an anvil. He thought if he could only drag that great burden away the poor old dying man would not breathe so heavily. He saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver, which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "Welshman's" house, one sultry, threatening evening--he saw that, too. With a boon companion, John Briggs, he followed at a safe distance behind. A widow with her one daughter lived there. They stood in the shadow of the dark porch; the man had paused at the gate to revile them. The boys heard the mother's voice warning the intruder that she had a loaded gun and would kill him if he stayed where he was. He replied with a tirade, and she warned him that she would count ten--that if he remained a second longer she would fire. She began slowly and counted up to five, the man laughing and jeering. At six he grew silent, but he did not go. She counted on: seven, eight, nine-- The boys, watching from the dark roadside, felt their hearts stop. There was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. The man dropped, his breast riddled. At the same instant the thunder-storm that had been gathering broke loose. The boys fled wildly, believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. That was a day and locality of violent impulse and sudden action. Happenings such as these were not infrequent in a town like Hannibal. And there were events connected with slavery. Sam once saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag, for a trifling offense. He saw an Abolitionist attacked by a mob that would have lynched him had not a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He did not remember in later years that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: "I am suspicious that it was because the thing was a commonplace spectacle and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women, chained together, lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave- market. They had the saddest faces I ever saw." Readers of Mark Twain's books--especially the stories of Huck and Tom, will hardly be surprised to hear of these early happenings that formed so large a portion of the author's early education. Sam, however, did not regard them as education--not at the time. They got into his dreams. He set them down as warnings, or punishments, intended to give him a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his conscience that made such things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her opinion in such matters. Among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious and fierce Corsican--a common terror in the town--who had chased his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious citizens got out of the way, but Jane Clemens opened her door to the fugitive; then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. The man raved, and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She stood there and shamed and defied him until he slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. Any one as brave as his mother must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought, and would know how to take care of it. In the darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life. He detested Sunday-school as much as he did day-school, and once his brother Orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar, but, as the thunder got louder, Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday without being invited. Sam's days were not all disturbed by fierce events. They were mostly filled with pleasanter things. There were picnics sometimes, and ferryboat excursions, and any day one could roam the woods, or fish, alone or in company. The hills and woods around Hannibal were never disappointing. There was the cave with its marvels. There was Bear Creek, where he had learned to swim. He had seen two playmates drown; twice, himself, he had been dragged ashore, more dead than alive; once by a slave girl, another time by a slave man--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. But he had persevered, and with success. He could swim better than any playmate of his age. It was the river that he cared for most. It was the pathway that led to the great world outside. He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it in a quietly borrowed boat, when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar. He learned to know all its moods and phases. More than anything in the world he hungered to make a trip on one of the big, smart steamers that were always passing. "You can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected, once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never take a trip on them." It was at the mature age of nine that he found he could endure this no longer. One day when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. Then the signal-bells rang, the steamer backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then it began to rain--a regular downpour. He crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. He was dragged out and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town of Louisiana, where there were Lampton relatives, who took him home. Very likely the home-coming was not entirely pleasant, though a "lesson," too, in his general education. And always, each summer, there was the farm, where his recreation was no longer mere girl plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but sports with his older boy cousins, who went hunting with the men, for partridges by day and for 'coons and 'possums by night. Sometimes the little boy followed the hunters all night long, and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning, fresh, hungry, and triumphant, just in time for breakfast. So it is no wonder that Little Sam, at nine, was no longer Little Sam, but plain Sam Clemens, and grown up. If there were doubtful spots in his education--matters related to smoking and strong words--it is also no wonder, and experience even in these lines was worth something in a book like Tom Sawyer. The boy Sam Clemens was not a particularly attractive lad. He was rather undersized, and his head seemed too large for his body. He had a mass of light sandy hair, which he plastered down to keep from curling. His eyes were keen and blue and his features rather large. Still, he had a fair, delicate complexion when it was not blackened by grime and tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile and a slow way of speaking that made him a favorite with his companions. He did not talk much, and was thought to be rather dull--was certainly so in most of his lessons--but, for some reason, he never spoke that every playmate in hearing did not stop, whatever he was doing, to listen. Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a casual remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. His mother always referred to his slow fashion of speech as "Sammy's long talk." Her own speech was even more deliberate, though she seemed not to notice it. Sam was more like his mother than the others. His brother, Henry Clemens, three years younger, was as unlike Sam as possible. He did not have the "long talk," and was a handsome, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous Sam loved to tease. Henry was to become the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though he was in every way a finer character than Sid. With the death of little Benjamin, Sam and Henry had been drawn much closer together, and, in spite of Sam's pranks, loved each other dearly. For the pranks were only occasional, and Sam's love for Henry was constant. He fought for him oftener than with him. Many of the home incidents in the Tom Sawyer book really happened. Sam did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing a fence for him; he did give painkiller to Peter, the cat. As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds, as described in the book, this was a daily matter, and his methods suited the occasions. For, of course, Tom Sawyer was Sam Clemens himself, almost entirely, as most readers of that book have imagined. However, we must have another chapter for Tom Sawyer and his doings--the real Tom and his real doings with those graceless, lovable associates, Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn. V. TOM SAWYER AND HIS BAND In beginning "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" the author says, "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," and he tells us that Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, though not from a single individual, being a composite of three boys whom Mark Twain had known. The three boys were himself, almost entirely, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper, the "Terror of the Seas." As for Huck Finn, the "Red-Handed," his original was a village waif named Tom Blankenship, who needed no change for his part in the story. The Blankenship family picked up an uncertain livelihood, fishing and hunting, and lived at first under a tree in a bark shanty, but later moved into a large, barn-like building, back of the Clemens home on Hill Street. There were three male members of the household: Old Ben, the father, shiftless and dissolute; young Ben, the eldest son--a doubtful character, with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to say, Huck, who was just as he is described in the book--a ruin of rags, a river-rat, kind of heart, and accountable for his conduct to nobody in the world. He could come and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all the things, good and bad, that other boys longed to do and were forbidden. To them he was the symbol of liberty; his knowledge of fishing, trapping, signs, and of the woods and river gave value to his society, while the fact that it was forbidden made it necessary to Sam Clemens's happiness. The Blankenships being handy to the back gate of the Hill Street house, he adopted them at sight. Their free mode of life suited him. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and Tom made cat-call signals at night that would bring Sam out on the shed roof at the back and down a little trellis and flight of steps to the group of boon companions, which, besides Tom, usually included John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the two younger Bowen boys. They were not malicious boys, but just mischievous, fun-loving boys--little boys of ten or twelve--rather thoughtless, being mainly bent on having a good time. They had a wide field of action: they ranged from Holliday's Hill on the north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods between. They explored both banks of the river, the islands, and the deep wilderness of the Illinois shore. They could run like turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them. No dog or slave patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it. They borrowed boats with or without the owner's consent--it did not matter. Most of their expeditions were harmless enough. They often cruised up to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day feasting. There were quantities of turtles and their eggs there, and mussels, and plenty of fish. Fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with incidental raiding, for adventure. Bear Creek was their swimming-place by day, and the river-front at night-fall--a favorite spot being where the railroad bridge now ends. It was a good distance across to the island where, in the book, Tom Sawyer musters his pirate band, and where later Huck found Nigger Jim, but quite often in the evening they swam across to it, and when they had frolicked for an hour or more on the sandbar at the head of the island, they would swim back in the dusk, breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or dread. They could swim all day, those little scamps, and seemed to have no fear. Once, during his boyhood, Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles as he had to go. He was seized with a cramp on the return trip. His legs became useless and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. The adventures of Sam Clemens and his comrades would fill several books of the size of Tom Sawyer. Many of them are, of course, forgotten now, but those still remembered show that Mark Twain had plenty of real material. It was not easy to get money in those days, and the boys were often without it. Once "Huck" Blankenship had the skin of a 'coon he had captured, and offered to sell it to raise capital. At Selms's store, on Wild Cat Corner, the 'coon-skin would bring ten cents. But this was not enough. The boys thought of a plan to make it bring more. Selms's back window was open, and the place where he kept his pelts was pretty handy. Huck went around to the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to Selms, who tossed it back on the pile. Then Huck came back and, after waiting a reasonable time, crawled in the open window, got the 'coon-skin, and sold it to Selms again. He did this several times that afternoon, and the capital of the band grew. But at last John Pierce, Selms's clerk, said: "Look here, Mr. Selms, there's something wrong about this. That boy has been selling us 'coonskins all the afternoon." Selms went back to his pile of pelts. There were several sheep-skins and some cow-hides, but only one 'coon-skin--the one he had that moment bought. Selms himself, in after years, used to tell this story as a great joke. One of the boys' occasional pastimes was to climb Holliday's Hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving by. Holliday's Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging downward and bound across the road with the deadly momentum of a shell. The boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give the boulder a start. Dropping behind the bushes, they would watch the sudden effect upon the party below as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was huge sport, but they carried it too far. For at last they planned a grand climax that would surpass anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. A monstrous boulder was lying up there in the right position to go down-hill, once started. It would be a glorious thing to see that great stone go smashing down a hundred yards or so in front of some peaceful-minded countryman jogging along the road. Quarrymen had been getting out rock not far away and had left their picks and shovels handy. The boys borrowed the tools and went to work to undermine the big stone. They worked at it several hours. If their parents had asked them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. Finally, while they were still digging, the big stone suddenly got loose and started down. They were not ready for it at all. Nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart; their splendid stone was going to be wasted. One could hardly call it wasted, however; they had planned for a thrilling result, and there was certainly thrill enough while it lasted. In the first place the stone nearly caught Will Bowen when it started. John Briggs had that moment quit digging and handed Will the pick. Will was about to take his turn when Sam Clemens leaped aside with a yell: "Lookout, boys; she's coming!" She came. The huge boulder kept to the ground at first, then, gathering momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the hill it struck a sapling and cut it clean off. This turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, hearing the noise and seeing the great mass come crashing in his direction, made a wild effort to whip up his mule. The boys watched their bomb with growing interest. It was headed straight for the negro, also for a cooper-shop across the road. It made longer leaps with every bound, and, wherever it struck, fragments and dust would fly. The shop happened to be empty, but the rest of the catastrophe would call for close investigation. They wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. It was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get exactly in its path. The boys stood holding their breath, their mouths open. Then, suddenly, they could hardly believe their eyes; a little way above the road the boulder struck a projection, made one mighty leap into the air, sailed clear over the negro and his mule, and landed in the soft dirt beyond the road, only a fragment striking the shop, damaging, but not wrecking it. Half buried in the ground, the great stone lay there for nearly forty years; then it was broken up. It was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. Nearly sixty years later John Briggs and Mark Twain walked across Holliday's Hill and looked down toward the river road. Mark Twain said: "It was a mighty good thing, John, that stone acted the way it did. We might have had to pay a fancy price for that old darky I can see him yet."[1] It can be no harm now, to confess that the boy Sam Clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at the time, and by no means large for his years--was the leader of this unhallowed band. In any case, truth requires this admission. If the band had a leader, it was Sam, just as it was Tom Sawyer in the book. They were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his plans. They looked to him for ideas and directions, and he gloried in being a leader and showing off, just as Tom did in the book. It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot days he could not have looked down the years and caught a glimpse of his splendid destiny. But of literary fame he could never have dreamed. The chief ambition --the "permanent ambition"--of every Hannibal boy was to be a pilot. The pilot in his splendid glass perch with his supreme power and princely salary was to them the noblest of all human creatures. An elder Bowen boy was already a pilot, and when he came home, as he did now and then, his person seemed almost too sacred to touch. Next to being a pilot, Sam thought he would like to be a pirate or a bandit or a trapper-scout--something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, where his word, his nod, would still be law. The river kept his river ambition always fresh, and with the cave and the forest round about helped him to imagine those other things. The cave was the joy of his heart. It was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led back into the bluffs and far down into the earth, even below the river, some said. Sam Clemens never tired of the cave. He was willing any time to quit fishing or swimming or melon-hunting for the three-mile walk, or pull, that brought them to its mystic door. With its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, it was exactly suitable, Sam thought, to be the lair of an outlaw, and in it he imagined and carried out adventures which his faithful followers may not always have understood, though enjoying them none the less for that reason. In Tom Sawyer, Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in real life, but was lost there once and was very weak when they found him. He was not as bad as painted in the book, though he was dissolute and accounted dangerous; and when one night he died in reality, there came a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home, in bed, was certain that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's soul. He covered his head and said his prayers with fearful anxiety lest the evil one might decide to save another trip by taking him along then. The treasure-digging adventure in the book had this foundation in fact: It was said that two French trappers had once buried a chest of gold about two miles above Hannibal, and that it was still there. Tom Blankenship (Huck) one morning said he had dreamed just where the treasure was, and that if the boys--Sam Clemens and John Briggs--would go with him and help dig, he would divide. The boys had great faith in dreams, especially in Huck's dreams. They followed him to a place with some shovels and picks, and he showed them just where to dig. Then he sat down under the shade of a pawpaw-bush and gave orders. They dug nearly all day. Huck didn't dig any himself, because he had done the dreaming, which was his share. They didn't find the treasure that day, and next morning they took two long iron rods to push and drive into the ground until they should strike something. They struck a number of things, but when they dug down it was never the money they found. That night the boys said they wouldn't dig any more. But Huck had another dream. He dreamed the gold was exactly under the little pawpaw-tree. This sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. It was hot weather, too--August--and that night they were nearly dead. Even Huck gave it up then. He said there was something wrong about the way they dug. This differs a good deal from the treasure incident in the book, but it shows us what respect the boys had for the gifts of the ragamuffin original of Huck Finn. Tom Blankenship's brother Ben was also used, and very importantly, in the creation of our beloved Huck. Ben was considerably older, but certainly no more reputable, than Tom. He tormented the smaller boys, and they had little love for him. Yet somewhere in Ben Blankenship's nature there was a fine, generous strain of humanity that provided Mark Twain with that immortal episode--the sheltering of Nigger Jim. This is the real story: A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river into Illinois. Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. It was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. Besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars--a fortune to ragged, out-cast Ben Blankenship. That money, and the honor he could acquire, must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro fished, and Ben carried him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, the facts leaked out. Some wood- choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive and chased him to what was called Bird Slough. There, trying to cross a drift, he was drowned. Huck's struggle in the book is between conscience and the law, on one side, and deep human sympathy on the other. Ben Blankenship's struggle, supposing there was one, would be between sympathy and the offered reward. Neither conscience nor law would trouble him. It was his native humanity that made him shelter the runaway, and it must have been strong and genuine to make him resist the lure of the fifty-dollar prize. There was another chapter to this incident. A few days after the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens and his band made their way to the place and were pushing the drift about, when, all at once, the negro shot up out of the water, straight and terrible, a full half-length in the air. He had gone down foremost and had been caught in the drift. The boys did not stop to investigate, but flew in terror to report their tale. Those early days seem to have been full of gruesome things. In "The Innocents Abroad," the author tells how he once spent a night in his father's office and discovered there a murdered man. This was a true incident. The man had been stabbed that afternoon and carried into the house to die. Sam and John Briggs had been playing truant all day and knew nothing of the matter. Sam thought the office safer than his home, where his mother was probably sitting up for him. He climbed in by a window and lay down on the lounge, but did not sleep. Presently he noticed what appeared to be an unusual shape on the floor. He tried to turn his face to the wall and forget it, but that would not do. In agony he watched the thing until at last a square of moonlight gradually revealed a sight that he never forgot. In the book he says: "I went away from there. I do not say that I went in any sort of hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient. I went out of the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerable agitated." Sam was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer living when the boy had reached that age. And how many things had crowded themselves into his few brief years! We must be content here with only a few of them. Our chapter is already too long. Ministers and deacons did not prophesy well for Sam Clemens and his mad companions. They spoke feelingly of state prison and the gallows. But the boys were a disappointing lot. Will Bowen became a fine river-pilot. Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank president. John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer. Huck Finn --which is to say, Tom Blankenship--died an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western town. As for Sam Clemens, we shall see what he became as the chapters pass. [1] John Briggs died in 1907; earlier in the same year the writer of this memoir spent an afternoon with him and obtained from him most of the material for this chapter. VI. CLOSING SCHOOL-DAYS Sam was at Mr. Cross's school on the Square in due time, and among the pupils were companions that appealed to his gentler side. There were the Robards boys--George, the best Latin scholar, and John, who always won the good-conduct medal, and would one day make all the other boys envious by riding away with his father to California, his curls of gold blowing in the wind. There was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John Garth, who would marry little Helen Kercheval, and Jimmy MacDaniel, whom it was well to know because his father kept a pastry-shop and he used to bring cakes and candy to school. There were also a number of girls. Bettie Ormsley, Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady were among the girls he remembered in later years, and Mary Miller, who was nearly double his age and broke his heart by getting married one day, a thing he had not expected at all. Yet through it all he appears, like Tom Sawyer, to have had one faithful sweetheart. In the book it is Becky Thatcher--in real life she was Laura Hawkins. The Clemens and Hawkins families lived opposite, and the children were early acquainted. The "Black Avenger of the Spanish Main" was very gentle when he was playing at house-building with little Laura, and once, when he dropped a brick on her finger, he cried the louder and longer of the two. For he was a tender-hearted boy. He would never abuse an animal, except when his tendency to mischief ran away with him, as in the "pain-killer" incident. He had a real passion for cats. Each summer he carried his cat to the farm in a basket, and it always had a place by him at the table. He loved flowers--not as a boy botanist or gardener, but as a companion who understood their thoughts. He pitied dead leaves and dry weeds because their lives were ended and they would never know summer again or grow glad with another spring. Even in that early time he had that deeper sympathy which one day would offer comfort to humanity and make every man his friend. But we are drifting away from Sam Clemens's school-days. They will not trouble us much longer now. More than anything in the world Sam detested school, and he made any excuse to get out of going. It is hard to say just why, unless it was the restraint and the long hours of confinement. The Square in Hannibal, where stood the school of Mr. Cross, was a grove in those days, with plum-trees and hazel-bushes and grape-vines. When spring came, the children gathered flowers at recess, climbed trees, and swung in the vines. It was a happy place enough, only--it was school. To Sam Clemens, the spelling-bee every Friday afternoon was the one thing that made it worth while. Sam was a leader at spelling--it was one of his gifts--he could earn compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name, it would seem, was regarded as descriptive. Once in a moment of inspiration Sam wrote on his late: "Cross by name and Cross by nature, Cross jumped over an Irish potato." John Briggs thought this a great effort, and urged the author to write it on the blackboard at noon. Sam hesitated. "Oh, pshaw!" said John, "I wouldn't be afraid to do it." "I dare you to do it," said Sam. This was enough. While Mr. Cross was at dinner John wrote in a large hand the fine couplet. The teacher returned and called the school to order. He looked at the blackboard, then, searchingly, at John Briggs. The handwriting was familiar. "Did you do that?" he asked, ominously. It was a time for truth. "Yes, sir," said John. "Come here!" And John came and paid handsomely for his publishing venture. Sam Clemens expected that the author would be called for next; but perhaps Mr. Cross had exhausted himself on John. Sam did not often escape. His back kept fairly warm from one "flailing" to the next. Yet he usually wore one of the two medals offered in that school--the medal for spelling. Once he lost it by leaving the first "r" out of February. Laura Hawkins was on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. If it had only been Huck Brown he would have spelled that and all the other months backward, to show off. There were moments of triumph that almost made school worth while; the rest of the time it was prison and servitude. But then one day came freedom. Judge Clemens, who, in spite of misfortune, had never lost faith in humanity, indorsed a large note for a neighbor, and was obliged to pay it. Once more all his property was taken away. Only a few scanty furnishings were rescued from the wreck. A St. Louis cousin saved the home, but the Clemens family could not afford to live in it. They moved across the street and joined housekeeping with another family. Judge Clemens had one hope left. He was a candidate for the clerkship of the surrogate court, a good office, and believed his election sure. His business misfortunes had aroused wide sympathy. He took no chances, however, and made a house-to house canvas of the district, regardless of the weather, probably undermining his health. He was elected by a large majority, and rejoiced that his worries were now at an end. They were, indeed, over. At the end of February he rode to the county seat to take the oath of office. He returned through a drenching storm and reached home nearly frozen. Pneumonia set in, and a few days later he was dying. His one comfort now was the Tennessee land. He said it would make them all rich and happy. Once he whispered: "Cling to the land; cling to the land and wait. Let nothing beguile it away from you." He was a man who had rarely displayed affection for his children. But presently he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm around her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. "Let me die," he said. He did not speak again. A little more, and his worries had indeed ended. The hard struggle of an upright, impractical man had come to a close. This was in March, 1847. John Clemens had lived less than forty-nine years. The children were dazed. They had loved their father and honored his nobility of purpose. The boy Sam was overcome with remorse. He recalled his wildness and disobedience--a thousand things trifling enough at the time, but heartbreaking now. Boy and man, Samuel Clemens was never spared by remorse. Leading him into the room where his father lay, his mother said some comforting words and asked him to make her a promise. He flung himself into her arms, sobbing: "I will promise anything, if you won't make me go to school! Anything!" After a moment his mother said: "No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart!" He gave his promise to be faithful and industrious and upright, like his father. Such a promise was a serious matter, and Sam Clemens, underneath all, was a serious lad. He would not be twelve until November, but his mother felt that he would keep his word. Orion Clemens returned to St. Louis, where he was receiving a salary of ten dollars a week--high wage for those days--out of which he could send three dollars weekly to the family. Pamela, who played the guitar and piano very well, gave music lessons, and so helped the family fund. Pamela Clemens, the original of Cousin Mary, in "Tom Sawyer," was a sweet and noble girl. Henry was too young to work, but Sam was apprenticed to a printer named Ament, who had recently moved to Hannibal and bought a weekly paper, "The Courier." Sam agreed with his mother that the printing trade offered a chance for further education without attending school, and then, some day, there might be wages. VII. THE APPRENTICE The terms of Samuel Clemens's apprenticeship were the usual thing for that day: board and clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," Mark Twain used to say. "I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, but I didn't get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I had on a circus-tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough." Another apprentice, a huge creature, named Wales McCormick, was so large that Ament's clothes were much too small for him. The two apprentices, fitted out with their employer's cast-off garments, were amusing enough, no doubt. Sam and Wales ate in the kitchen at first, but later at the family table with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and Pet McMurry, a journeyman printer. McMurry was a happy soul, as one could almost guess from his name. He had traveled far and learned much. What the two apprentices did not already know, Pet McMurry could teach them. Sam Clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was so, by the standards of boyhood. He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office. But when food was scarce, even an angel--a young printer-angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night, for raw potatoes, onions, and apples, which they cooked in the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor. Wales had a wonderful way of cooking a potato which his fellow apprentice never forgot. How one wishes for a photograph of Sam Clemens at that period! But in those days there were only daguerreotypes, and they were expensive things. There is a letter, though, written long afterward, by Pet McMurry to Mark Twain, which contains this paragraph: "If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing- office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham drug-store, mounted upon a little box at the case, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside, 'If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I kin.'" And with this portrait we must be content--we cannot doubt its truth. Sam was soon office favorite and in time became chief stand-by. When he had been at work a year, he could set type accurately, run the job press to the tune of "Annie Laurie," and he had charge of the circulation. That is to say, he carried the papers--a mission of real importance, for a long, sagging span of telegraph-wire had reached across the river to Hannibal, and Mexican-war news delivered hot from the front gave the messenger a fine prestige. He even did editing, of a kind. That is to say, when Ament was not in the office and copy was needed, Sam hunted him up, explained the situation, and saw that the necessary matter was produced. He was not ambitious to write--not then. He wanted to be a journeyman printer, like Pet, and travel and see the world. Sometimes he thought he would like to be a clown, or "end man" in a minstrel troupe. Once for a week he served as subject for a traveling hypnotist-and was dazzled by his success. But he stuck to printing, and rapidly became a neat, capable workman. Ament gave him a daily task, after which he was free. By three in the afternoon he was likely to finish his stint. Then he was off for the river or the cave, joining his old comrades. Or perhaps he would go with Laura Hawkins to gather wild columbine on the high cliff above the river, known as Lover's Leap. When winter came these two sometimes went to Bear Creek, skating; or together they attended parties, where the old-fashioned games "Ring-around-Rosy" and "Dusty Miller" were the chief amusements. In "The Gilded Age," Laura Hawkins at twelve is pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest." That was the real Laura, though her story in that book in no way resembles the reality. It was just at this time that an incident occurred which may be looked back upon now as a turning-point in Samuel Clemens's life. Coming home from the office one afternoon, he noticed a square of paper being swept along by the wind. He saw that it was printed--was interested professionally in seeing what it was like. He chased the flying scrap and overtook it. It was a leaf from some old history of Joan of Arc, and pictured the hard lot of the "maid" in the tower at Rouen, reviled and mistreated by her ruffian captors. There were some paragraphs of description, but the rest was pitiful dialogue. Sam had never heard of Joan before--he knew nothing of history. He was no reader. Orion was fond of books, and Pamela; even little Henry had read more than Sam. But now, as he read, there awoke in him a deep feeling of pity and indignation, and with it a longing to know more of the tragic story. It was an interest that would last his life through, and in the course of time find expression in one of the rarest books ever written. The first result was that Sam began to read. He hunted up everything he could find on the subject of Joan, and from that went into French history in general--indeed, into history of every kind. Samuel Clemens had suddenly become a reader--almost a student. He even began the study of languages, German and Latin, but was not able to go on for lack of time and teachers. He became a hater of tyranny, a champion of the weak. Watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark to some offender, in his slow drawling way, "You mustn't cheat that boy." And the cheating stopped, or trouble followed. VIII. ORION'S PAPER A Hannibal paper, the "Journal," was for sale under a mortgage of five hundred dollars, and Orion Clemens, returning from St. Louis, borrowed the money and bought it. Sam's two years' apprenticeship with Ament had been completed, and Orion felt that together they could carry on the paper and win success. Henry Clemens, now eleven, was also taken out of school to learn type-setting. Orion was a better printer than proprietor. Like so many of his family, he was a visionary, gentle and credulous, ready to follow any new idea. Much advice was offered him, and he tried to follow it all. He began with great hopes and energy. He worked like a slave and did not spare the others. The paper was their hope of success. Sam, especially, was driven. There were no more free afternoons. In some chapters written by Orion Clemens in later life, he said: "I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was swift and clean as a good journeyman. I gave him 'takes,' and, if he got through well, I begrudged him the time and made him work more." Orion did not mean to be unjust. The struggle against opposition and debt was bitter. He could not be considerate. The paper for a time seemed on the road to success, but Orion worked too hard and tried too many schemes. His enthusiasm waned and most of his schemes turned out poorly. By the end of the year the "Journal" was on the down grade. In time when the need of money became great, Orion made a trip to Tennessee to try to raise something on the land which they still held there. He left Sam in charge of the paper, and, though its proprietor returned empty-handed, his journey was worth while, for it was during his absence that Samuel Clemens began the career that would one day make him Mark Twain. Sam had concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. He had never written anything for print, but he believed he knew what the subscribers wanted. The editor of a rival paper had been crossed in love, and was said to have tried to drown himself. Sam wrote an article telling all the history of the affair, giving names and details. Then on the back of two big wooden letters, used for bill-printing, he engraved illustrations of the victim wading out into the river, testing the depth of the water with a stick. The paper came out, and the demand for it kept the Washington hand-press busy. The injured editor sent word that he was coming over to thrash the whole Journal staff, but he left town, instead, for the laugh was too general. Sam also wrote a poem which startled orthodox readers. Then Orion returned and reduced him to the ranks. In later years Orion saw his mistake. "I could have distanced all competitors, even then," he wrote, "if I had recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons." Sam was not discouraged. He liked the taste of print. He sent two anecdotes to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. Both were accepted --without payment, of course, in those days--and when they appeared he walked on air. This was in 1851. Nearly sixty years later he said: "Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since." However, he wrote nothing further for the "Post." Orion printed two of his sketches in the "Journal," which was the extent of his efforts at this time. None of this early work has been preserved. Files of the "Post" exist, but the sketches were unsigned and could hardly be identified. The Hannibal paper dragged along from year to year. Orion could pay nothing on the mortgage--financial matters becoming always worse. He could barely supply the plainest food and clothing for the family. Sam and Henry got no wages, of course. Then real disaster came. A cow got into the office one night, upset a type-case, and ate up two composition rollers. Somewhat later a fire broke out and did considerable damage. There was partial insurance, with which Orion replaced a few necessary articles; then, to save rent, he moved the office into the front room of the home on Hill Street, where they were living again at this time. Samuel Clemens, however, now in his eighteenth year, felt that he was no longer needed in Hannibal. He was a capable workman, with little to do and no reward. Orion, made irritable by his misfortunes, was not always kind. Pamela, who, meantime, had married well, was settled in St. Louis. Sam told his mother that he would visit Pamela and look about the city. There would be work in St. Louis at good wages. He was going farther than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her. Jane Clemens, consenting, sighed as she put together his scanty belongings. Sam was going away. He had been a good boy of late years, but her faith in his resisting powers was not strong. Presently she held up a little Testament. "I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam," she said, "and make me a promise." The slim, wiry woman of forty-nine, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, faced the fair-cheeked youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. How much alike they were! "I want you," Jane Clemens said, "to repeat after me, Sam, these words: I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone." He repeated the vow after her, and she kissed him. "Remember that, Sam, and write to us," she said. "And so," writes Orion, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and advancement, and those rewards of industry, which he had failed to find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed his labor; we all missed his abounding activity and merriment." IX. THE OPEN ROAD Samuel Clemens went to visit his sister Pamela in St. Louis and was presently at work, setting type on the "Evening News." He had no intention, however, of staying there. His purpose was to earn money enough to take him to New York City. The railroad had by this time reached St. Louis, and he meant to have the grand experience of a long journey "on the cars." Also, there was a Crystal Palace in New York, where a world's exposition was going on. Trains were slow in 1853, and it required several days and nights to go from St. Louis to New York City, but to Sam Clemens it was a wonderful journey. All day he sat looking out of the window, eating when he chose from the food he carried, curling up in his seat at night to sleep. He arrived at last with a few dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill sewed into the lining of his coat. New York was rather larger than he expected. All of the lower end of Manhattan Island was covered by it. The Crystal Palace--some distance out--stood at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue--the present site of Bryant Park. All the world's newest wonders were to be seen there--a dazzling exhibition. A fragment of the letter which Sam Clemens wrote to his sister Pamela--the earliest piece of Mark Twain's writing that has been preserved--expresses his appreciation of the big fair: "From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro--'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. "The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past one o'clock). It would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition, and I was only in a little over two hours to-night. I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the population of Hannibal. The price of admission being fifty cents, they take in about $3,000. "The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace. From it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. Immense pipes are laid across the bed of the Harlem River, and pass through the country to Westchester County, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New York. From the reservoir in the city to Westchester County reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles, and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred barrels of water a day! "I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion's going to? Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the spring. I shall save money for this. "(It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at six and am at work at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose, with a free printers' library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?" "I shall write to Ella soon. Write soon. "Truly your Brother, "SAMY. "P.S.--I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not read by it." We get a fair idea of Samuel Clemens at seventeen from this letter. For one thing, he could write good, clear English, full of interesting facts. He is enthusiastic, but not lavish of words. He impresses us with his statement that the visitors to the Palace each day are in number double the population of Hannibal; a whole river is turned from its course to supply New York City with water; the water comes thirty-eight miles, and each family could use a hundred barrels a day! The letter reveals his personal side--his kindly interest in those left behind, his anxiety for Henry, his assurance that the promise to his mother was being kept, his memory of her longing to visit her old home. And the boy who hated school has become a reader--he is reveling in a printers' library of thousands of volumes. We feel, somehow, that Samuel Clemens has suddenly become quite a serious-minded person, that he has left Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper and Huck Finn somewhere in a beautiful country a long way behind. He found work with the firm of John A. Gray & Green, general printers, in Cliff Street. His pay was four dollars a week, in wild-cat money--that is, money issued by private banks--rather poor money, being generally at a discount and sometimes worth less. But if wages were low, living was cheap in those days, and Sam Clemens, lodging in a mechanics' boarding-house in Duane Street, sometimes had fifty cents left on Saturday night when his board and washing were paid. Luckily, he had not set out to seek his fortune, but only to see something of the world. He lingered in New York through the summer of 1853, never expecting to remain long. His letters of that period were few. In October he said, in a letter to Pamela, that he did not write to the family because he did not know their whereabouts, Orion having sold the paper and left Hannibal. "I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York every day for the last two weeks," he adds, which sounds like the Mark Twain of fifty years later. Farther along, he tells of going to see Edwin Forrest, then playing at the Broadway Theater: "The play was the 'Gladiator.' I did not like part of it much, but other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last act. . . the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is real startling to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play 'Damon and Pythias,' the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night." A little farther along he says: "If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years old who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts." Sam Clemens may have followed Forrest to Philadelphia. At any rate, he was there presently, "subbing" in the composing-rooms of the "Inquirer," setting ten thousand ems a day, and receiving pay accordingly. When there was no vacancy for him to fill, he put in the time visiting the Philadelphia libraries, art galleries, and historic landmarks. After all, his chief business was sight-seeing. Work was only a means to this end. Chilly evenings, when he returned to his boarding-house, his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled a herring over their small open fire, and this was a great feast. He tried writing--obituary poetry, for the "Philadelphia Ledger"--but it was not accepted. "My efforts were not received with approval" was his comment long after. In the "Inquirer" office there was a printer named Frog, and sometimes, when he went out, the office "devils" would hang over his case a line with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of this joke, and Frog never failed to get fighting mad when he saw that dangling string with the bit of red flannel at the end. No doubt Sam Clemens had his share in this mischief. Sam found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money and send something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome. Once he inclosed a gold dollar, "to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia." Better than doubtful "wild-cat," certainly. Of his work he writes: "One man has engaged me to work for him every Sunday till the first of next April, when I shall return home to take Ma to Ky . . . . If I want to, I can get subbing every night of the week. I go to work at seven in the evening and work till three the next morning. . . . The type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois, and when one gets a good agate 'take,' he is sure to make money. I made $2.50 last Sunday." There is a long description of a trip on the Fairmount stage in this letter, well-written and interesting, but too long to have place here. In the same letter he speaks of the graves of Benjamin Franklin and his wife, which he had looked at through the iron railing of the locked inclosure. Probably it did not occur to him that there might be points of similarity between Franklin's career and his own. Yet in time these would be rather striking: each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. Orion Clemens, meantime, had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and located the family there. Evidently by this time he had realized the value of his brother as a contributor, for Sam, in a letter to Orion, says, "I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly." Meantime, he had passed his eighteenth birthday, winter was coming on, he had been away from home half a year, and the first attack of homesickness was due. "One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend," he wrote; and again. "I don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all." He declared he only wanted to get back to avoid night work, which was injuring his eyes, but we may guess there was a stronger reason, which perhaps he did not entirely realize. The novelty of wandering had worn off, and he yearned for familiar faces, the comfort of those he loved. But he did not go. He made a trip to Washington in January--a sight-seeing trip--returning to Philadelphia, where he worked for the "Ledger" and "North American." Eventually he went back to New York, and from there took ticket to St. Louis. This was in the late summer of 1854; he had been fifteen months away from his people when he stepped aboard the train to return. Sam was worn out when he reached St. Louis; but the Keokuk packet was leaving, and he stopped only long enough to see Pamela, then went aboard and, flinging himself into his berth, did not waken until the boat reached Muscatine, Iowa, thirty-six hours later. It was very early when he arrived, too early to rouse the family. He sat down in the office of a little hotel to wait for morning, and picked up a small book that lay on the writing-table. It contained pictures of the English rulers with the brief facts of their reigns. Sam Clemens entertained himself learning these data by heart. He had a fine memory for such things, and in an hour or two had those details so perfectly committed that he never forgot one of them as long as he lived. The knowledge acquired in this stray fashion he found invaluable in later life. It was his groundwork for all English history. X. A WIND OF CHANCE Orion could not persuade his brother to remain in Muscatine. Sam returned to his old place on the "Evening News," in St. Louis, where he remained until the following year, rooming with a youth named Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with literary taste, a reader of the English classics, a companionable lad, and for Samuel Clemens a good influence. By spring, Orion Clemens had married and had sold out in Muscatine. He was now located in Keokuk, Iowa. When presently Brother Sam came visiting to Keokuk, Orion offered him five dollars a week and his board to remain. He accepted. Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad named Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office; Dick and a young fellow named Brownell, who roomed above, came in for social evenings. They were pretty lively evenings. A music-teacher on the floor below did not care for them--they disturbed his class. He was furious, in fact, and assailed the boys roughly at first, with no result but to make matters worse. Then he tried gentleness, and succeeded. The boys stopped their capers and joined his class. Sam, especially, became a distinguished member of that body. He was never a great musician, but with his good nature, his humor, his slow, quaint speech and originality, he had no rival in popularity. He was twenty now, and much with young ladies, yet he was always a beau rather than a suitor, a good comrade to all, full of pranks and pleasantries, ready to stop and be merry with any that came along. If they prophesied concerning his future, it is not likely that they spoke of literary fame. They thought him just easy-going and light-minded. True, they noticed that he often carried a book under his arm--a history, a volume of Dickens, or the tales of Poe. He read more than any one guessed. At night, propped up in bed--a habit continued until his death--he was likely to read until a late hour. He enjoyed smoking at such times, and had made himself a pipe with a large bowl which stood on the floor and had a long rubber stem, something like the Turkish hubble-bubble. He liked to fill the big bowl and smoke at ease through the entire evening. But sometimes the pipe went out, which meant that he must strike a match and lean far over to apply it, just when he was most comfortable. Sam Clemens never liked unnecessary exertion. One night, when the pipe had gone out for the second time, he happened to hear the young book-clerk, Brownell, passing up to his room on the top floor. Sam called to him: "Ed, come here!" Brownell poked his head in the door. The two were great chums. "What will you have, Sam?" he asked. "Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I'm in trouble. I want somebody to light my pipe." "Why don't you light it yourself?" Brownell asked. "I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me." Brownell scratched a match, stooped down, and applied it. "What are you reading, Sam?" "Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book. One of these days I'll write a funnier book myself." Brownell laughed. "No, you won't, Sam," he said. "You're too lazy ever to write a book." Years later, in the course of a lecture which he delivered in Keokuk, Mark Twain said that he supposed the most untruthful man in the world lived right there in Keokuk, and that his name was Ed Brownell. Orion Clemens did not have the gift of prosperity, and his printing-office did not flourish. When he could no longer pay Sam's wages he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, though this was of less consequence, since his mother, now living with Pamela, was well provided for. The disorder of the office, however, distressed him. He wrote home that he could not work without system, and, a little later, that he was going to leave Keokuk, that, in fact, he was planning a great adventure--a trip to the upper Amazon! His interest in the Amazon had been awakened by a book. Lynch and Herndon had surveyed the upper river, and Lieutenant Herndon's book was widely read. Sam Clemens, propped up in bed, pored over it through long evenings, and nightly made fabulous fortunes collecting cocoa and other rare things--resolving, meantime, to start in person for the upper Amazon with no unnecessary delay. Boy and man, Samuel Clemens was the same. His vision of grand possibilities ahead blinded him to the ways and means of arrival. It was an inheritance from both sides of his parentage. Once, in old age, he wrote: "I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward . . . . When I am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think." He believed, however, that he had reflected carefully concerning the Amazon, and that in a brief time he should be there at the head of an expedition, piling up untold wealth. He even stirred the imaginations of two other adventurers, a Dr. Martin and a young man named Ward. To Henry, then in St. Louis, he wrote, August 5, 1856: "Ward and I held a long consultation Sunday morning, and the result was that we two have determined to start to Brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully into matters there and report to Dr. Martin in time for him to follow on the first of March." The matter of finance troubled him. Orion could not be depended on for any specified sum, and the fare to the upper Amazon would probably be considerable. Sam planned different methods of raising it. One of them was to go to New York or Cincinnati and work at his trade until he saved the amount. He would then sail from New York direct, or take boat for New Orleans and sail from there. Of course there would always be vessels clearing for the upper Amazon. After Lieutenant Herndon's book the ocean would probably be full of them. He did not make the start with Ward, as planned, and Ward and Martin seem to have given up the Amazon idea. Not so with Samuel Clemens. He went on reading Herndon, trying meantime to raise money enough to get him out of Keokuk. Was it fate or Providence that suddenly placed it in his hands? Whatever it was, the circumstance is so curious that it must be classed as one of those strange facts that have no place in fiction. The reader will remember how, one day in Hannibal, the wind had brought to Sam Clemens, then printer's apprentice, a stray leaf from a book about "Joan of Arc," and how that incident marked a turning-point in his mental life. Now, seven years later, it was the wind again that directed his fortune. It was a day in early November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with whirling snow; most persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, Keokuk, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against a building. Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill! He had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be having a pleasant dream. He was tempted to pocket his good fortune and keep still. But he had always a troublesome conscience. He went to a newspaper office and advertised that he had found a sum of money, a large bill. Once, long after, he said: "I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger." Another time he said, "I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day." All of which we may take with his usual literary discount --the one assigned to him by his mother in childhood. As a matter of fact, he remained for an ample time, and nobody came for the money. What was its origin? Was it swept out of a bank, or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table? Perhaps it materialized out of the unseen. Who knows? XI. THE LONG WAY TO THE AMAZON Sam decided on Cincinnati as his base. From there he could go either to New York or New Orleans to catch the Amazon boat. He paid a visit to St. Louis, where his mother made him renew his promise as to drink and cards. Then he was seized with a literary idea, and returned to Keokuk, where he proposed to a thriving weekly paper, the "Saturday Post," to send letters of travel, which might even be made into a book later on. George Reese, owner of the "Post," agreed to pay five dollars each for the letters, which speaks well for his faith in Samuel Clemens's talent, five dollars being good pay for that time and place--more than the letters were worth, judged by present standards. The first was dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and was certainly not promising literature. It was written in the ridiculous dialect which was once thought to be the dress of humor; and while here and there is a comic flash, there is in it little promise of the future Mark Twain. One extract is enough: "When we got to the depo', I went around to git a look at the iron hoss. Thunderation! It wasn't no more like a hoss than a meetin'- house. If I was goin' to describe the animule, I'd say it looked like--well, it looked like--blamed if I know what it looked like, snorting fire and brimstone out of his nostrils, and puffin' out black smoke all 'round, and pantin', and heavin', and swellin', and chawin' up red-hot coals like they was good. A feller stood in a little house like, feedin' him all the time; but the more he got, the more he wanted and the more he blowed and snorted. After a spell the feller ketched him by the tail, and great Jericho! he set up a yell that split the ground for more'n a mile and a half, and the next minit I felt my legs a-waggin', and found myself at t'other end of the string o' vehickles. I wasn't skeered, but I had three chills and a stroke of palsy in less than five minits, and my face had a cur'us brownish-yaller-greenbluish color in it, which was perfectly unaccountable. 'Well,' say I, 'comment is super-flu-ous.'" How Samuel Clemens could have written that, and worse, at twenty-one, and a little more than ten years later have written "The Innocents Abroad," is one of the mysteries of literature. The letters were signed "Snodgrass," and there are but two of them. Snodgrass seems to have found them hard work, for it is said he raised on the price, which, fortunately, brought the series to a close. Their value to-day lies in the fact that they are the earliest of Mark Twain's newspaper contributions that have been preserved--the first for which he received a cash return. Sam remained in Cincinnati until April of the following year, 1857, working for Wrightson & Co., general printers, lodging in a cheap boarding-house, saving every possible penny for his great adventure. He had one associate at the boarding-house, a lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, twice young Clemens's age, and a good deal of a mystery. Sam never could find out what Macfarlane did. His hands were hardened by some sort of heavy labor; he left at six in the morning and returned in the evening at the same hour. He never mentioned his work, and young Clemens had the delicacy not to inquire. For Macfarlane was no ordinary person. He was a man of deep knowledge, a reader of many books, a thinker; he was versed in history and philosophy, he knew the dictionary by heart. He made but two statements concerning himself: one, that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school; the other, that he knew every word in the English dictionary. He was willing to give proof of the last, and Sam Clemens tested him more than once, but found no word that Macfarlane could not define. Macfarlane was not silent--he would discuss readily enough the deeper problems of life and had many startling theories of his own. Darwin had not yet published his "Descent of Man," yet Macfarlane was already advancing ideas similar to those in that book. He went further than Darwin. He had startling ideas of the moral evolution of man, and these he would pour into the ears of his young listener until ten o'clock, after which, like the English Sumner in Philadelphia, he would grill a herring, and the evening would end. Those were fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and they did not fail to influence his later thought. It was the high-tide of spring, late in April, when the prospective cocoa-hunter decided that it was time to set out for the upper Amazon. He had saved money enough to carry him at least as far as New Orleans, where he would take ship, it being farther south and therefore nearer his destination. Furthermore, he could begin with a lazy trip down the Mississippi, which, next to being a pilot, had been one of his most cherished dreams. The Ohio River steamers were less grand than those of the Mississippi, but they had a homelike atmosphere and did not hurry. Samuel Clemens had the spring fever and was willing to take his time. In "Life on the Mississippi" we read that the author ran away, vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. But this is the fiction touch. He had always loved the river, and his boyhood dream of piloting had time and again returned, but it was not uppermost when he bade good-by to Macfarlane and stepped aboard the "Paul Jones," bound for New Orleans, and thus conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. Now he had really started on his voyage. But it was a voyage that would continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. XII. RENEWING AN OLD AMBITION A reader of Mark Twain's Mississippi book gets the impression that the author was a boy of about seventeen when he started to learn the river, and that he was painfully ignorant of the great task ahead. But this also is the fiction side of the story. Samuel Clemens was more than twenty-one when he set out on the "Paul Jones," and in a way was familiar with the trade of piloting. Hannibal had turned out many pilots. An older brother of the Bowen boys was already on the river when Sam Clemens was rolling rocks down Holliday's Hill. Often he came home to air his grandeur and hold forth on the wonder of his work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens would know as well as any one who had not tried it. Nevertheless, as the drowsy little steamer went puffing down into softer, sunnier lands, the old dream, the "permanent ambition" of boyhood, returned, while the call of the far-off Amazon and cocoa drew faint. Horace Bixby,[2] pilot of the "Paul Jones," a man of thirty-two, was looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say, "Good morning." Bixby was a small, clean-cut man. "Good morning, sir," he said, rather briskly, without looking around. He did not much care for visitors in the pilothouse. This one entered and stood a little behind him. "How would you like a young man to learn the river?" came to him in that serene, deliberate speech. The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed youth with a fair, girlish complexion and a great mass of curly auburn hair. "I wouldn't like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. A great deal more trouble than profit." "I am a printer by trade," the easy voice went on. "It doesn't agree with me. I thought I'd go to South America." Bixby kept his eye on the river, but there was interest in his voice when he spoke. "What makes you pull your words that way?" he asked--"pulling" being the river term for drawling. The young man, now seated comfortably on the visitors' bench, said more slowly than ever: "You'll have to ask my mother--she pulls hers, too." Pilot Bixby laughed. The manner of the reply amused him. His guest was encouraged. "Do you know the Bowen boys?" he asked, "pilots in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade?" "I know them well--all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy. I know Sam, too, and Bart." "Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will, especially, were my chums." Bixby's tone became friendly. "Come over and stand by me," he said. "What is your name?" The applicant told him, and the two stood looking out on the sunlit water. "Do you drink?" "No." "Do you gamble?" "No, sir." "Do you swear?" "N-not for amusement; only under pressure." "Do you chew?" "No, sir, never; but I must--smoke." "Did you ever do any steering?" "I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess." "Very well. Take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood snag." Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat on the bench where he could keep a careful eye on the course. By and by he said "There is just one way I would take a young man to learn the river--that is, for money." "What--do you--charge?" "Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever." In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port or for incidentals. His terms seemed discouraging. "I haven't got five hundred dollars in money," Sam said. "I've got a lot of Tennessee land worth two bits an acre. I'll give you two thousand acres of that." Bixby shook his head. "No," he said, "I don't want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already." Sam reflected. He thought he might be able to borrow one hundred dollars from William Moffett, Pamela's husband, without straining his credit. "Well, then," he proposed, "I'll give you one hundred dollars cash, and the rest when I earn it." Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart. His slow, pleasant speech, his unhurried, quiet manner at the wheel, his evident simplicity and sincerity--the inner qualities of mind and heart which would make the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were accepted. The first payment was to be in cash; the others were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was earning wages. During the rest of the trip to New Orleans the new pupil was often at the wheel, while Mr. Bixby nursed his sore foot and gave directions. Any literary ambitions that Samuel Clemens still nourished waned rapidly. By the time he had reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had ever been a printer. As for the Amazon and cocoa, why, there had been no ship sailing in that direction for years, and it was unlikely that any would ever sail again, a fact that rather amused the would-be adventurer now, since Providence had regulated his affairs in accordance with his oldest and longest cherished dream. At New Orleans Bixby left the "Paul Jones" for a fine St. Louis boat, taking his cub with him. This was a sudden and happy change, and Sam was a good deal impressed with his own importance in belonging to so imposing a structure, especially when, after a few days' stay in New Orleans, he stood by Bixby's side in the big glass turret while they backed out of the line of wedged-in boats and headed up the great river. This was glory, but there was sorrow ahead. He had not really begun learning the river as yet he had only steered under directions. He had known that to learn the river would be hard, but he had never realized quite how hard. Serenely he had undertaken the task of mastering twelve hundred miles of the great, changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. Nobody could realize the full size of that task--not till afterward. [2] Horace Bixby lived until 1912 and remained at the wheel until within a short time of his death, in his eighty-seventh year. The writer of this memoir visited him in 1910 and took down from his dictation the dialogue that follows. XIII. LEARNING THE RIVER In that early day, to be a pilot was to be "greater than a king." The Mississippi River pilot was a law unto himself--there was none above him. His direction of the boat was absolute; he could start or lay up when he chose; he could pass a landing regardless of business there, consulting nobody, not even the captain; he could take the boat into what seemed certain destruction, if he had that mind, and the captain was obliged to stand by, helpless and silent, for the law was with the pilot in everything. Furthermore, the pilot was a gentleman. His work was clean and physically light. It ended the instant the boat was tied to the landing, and did not begin again until it was ready to back into the stream. Also, for those days his salary was princely--the Vice-President of the United States did not receive more. As for prestige, the Mississippi pilot, perched high in his glass inclosure, fashionably dressed, and commanding all below him, was the most conspicuous and showy, the most observed and envied creature in the world. No wonder Sam Clemens, with his love of the river and his boyish fondness for honors, should aspire to that stately rank. Even at twenty-one he was still just a boy--as, indeed, he was till his death--and we may imagine how elated he was, starting up the great river as a real apprentice pilot, who in a year or two would stand at the wheel, as his chief was now standing, a monarch with a splendid income and all the great river packed away in his head. In that last item lay the trouble. In the Mississippi book he tells of it in a way that no one may hope to equal, and if the details are not exact, the truth is there--at least in substance. For a distance above New Orleans Mr. Bixby had volunteered information about the river, naming the points and crossings, in what seemed a casual way, all through his watch of four hours. Their next watch began in the middle of the night, and Mark Twain tells how surprised and disgusted he was to learn that pilots must get up in the night to run their boats, and his amazement to find Mr. Bixby plunging into the blackness ahead as if it had been daylight. Very likely this is mainly fiction, but hardly the following: Presently he turned to me and said: "What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?" I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know. "Don't know!" His manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I had to say just what I had said before. "Well, you're a smart one," said Mr. Bixby. "What's the name of the next point?" Once more I didn't know. "Well, this beats anything! Tell me the name of any point or place I told you." I studied awhile and decided that I couldn't. "Look here! What do you start from, above Twelve Mile Point, to cross over?" "I--I--don't know." "'You--you don't know,"' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. "What do you know?" "I--I--Nothing, for certain." Bixby was a small, nervous man, hot and quick-firing. He went off now, and said a number of severe things. Then: "Look here, what do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?" I tremblingly considered a moment--then the devil of temptation provoked me to say: "Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought." This was a red flag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was, because he was brimful, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I had never heard before . . . . When he closed the window he was empty. Presently he said to me, in the gentlest way: "My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A-B-C." The little memorandum-book which Sam Clemens bought, probably at the next daylight landing, still exists--the same that he says "fairly bristled with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc."; but it made his heart ache to think he had only half the river set down, for, as the watches were four hours off and four hours on, there were the long gaps where he had slept. It is not easy to make out the penciled notes today. The small, neat writing is faded, and many of them are in an abbreviation made only for himself. It is hard even to find these examples to quote: MERIWETHER'S BEND One-fourth less 3[3]--run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in the willows about 200 (ft.) lower down than last year. OUTSIDE OF MONTEZUMA Six or eight feet more water. Shape bar till high timber on towhead gets nearly even with low willows. Then hold a little open on right of low willows--run 'em close if you want to, but come out 200 yards when you get nearly to head of towhead. The average mind would not hold a single one of these notes ten seconds, yet by the time he reached St. Louis he had set down pages that to-day make one's head weary even to contemplate. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep--they are still there; and now, after nearly sixty years, the old heartache is still in them. He must have bought a new book for the next trip and laid this one away. To the new "cub" it seemed a long way to St. Louis that first trip, but in the end it was rather grand to come steaming up to the big, busy city, with its thronging waterfront flanked with a solid mile of steamboats, and to nose one's way to a place in that stately line. At St. Louis, Sam borrowed from his brother-in-law the one hundred dollars he had agreed to pay, and so closed his contract with Bixby. A few days later his chief was engaged to go on a very grand boat indeed--a "sumptuous temple," he tells us, all brass and inlay, with a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain. This part of learning the river was worth while; and when he found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully "sir'd" him, his happiness was complete. But he was in the depths again, presently, for when they started down the river and he began to take account of his knowledge, he found that he had none. Everything had changed--that is, he was seeing it all from the other direction. What with the four-hour gaps and this transformation, he was lost completely. How could the easy-going, dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as Mark Twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary to Mississippi piloting? The answer is that he loved the river, the picturesqueness and poetry of a steamboat, the ease and glory of a pilot's life; and then, in spite of his own later claims to the contrary, Samuel Clemens, boy and man, in the work suited to his tastes and gifts, was the most industrious of persons. Work of the other sort he avoided, overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was qualified by his talents or training. Piloting suited him exactly, and he proved an apt pupil. Horace Bixby said to the writer of this memoir: "Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine memory and never forgot what I told him." Yet there must have been hard places all along, for to learn every crook and turn and stump and snag and bluff and bar and sounding of that twelve hundred miles of mighty, shifting water was a gigantic task. Mark Twain tells us how, when he was getting along pretty well, his chief one day turned on him suddenly with this "settler": "What is the shape of Walnut Bend?" He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I replied respectfully and said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives ....I waited. By and by he said: "My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all that is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't got the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime." "How on earth am I going to learn it, then?" "How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it." "Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?" "On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house." "I wish I was dead!" But the reader must turn to Chapter VIII of "Life on the Mississippi" and read, or reread, the pages which follow this extract--nothing can better convey the difficulties of piloting. That Samuel Clemens had the courage to continue is the best proof, not only of his great love of the river, but of that splendid gift of resolution that one rarely fails to find in men of the foremost rank. [3] Depth of water. One-quarter less than three fathoms. XIV. RIVER DAYS Piloting was only a part of Sam Clemens's education on the Mississippi. He learned as much of the reefs and shallows of human nature as of the river-bed. In one place he writes: In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. All the different types, but most of them in the rough. That Samuel Clemens kept the promise made to his mother as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is well worth remembering. Horace Bixby, answering a call for pilots from the Missouri River, consigned his pupil, as was customary, tonne of the pilots of the "John J. Roe," a freight-boat, owned and conducted by some retired farmers, and in its hospitality reminding Sam of his Uncle John Quarles's farm. The "Roe" was a very deliberate boat. It was said that she could beat an island to St. Louis, but never quite overtake the current going down-stream. Sam loved the "Roe." She was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a family party of the owners' relations aboard, and there was a big deck for dancing and a piano in the cabin. The young pilot could play the chords, and sing, in his own fashion, about a grasshopper that; sat on a sweet-potato vine, and about-- An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem, Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem, A long time ago. The "Roe" was a heavenly place, but Sam's stay there did not last. Bixby came down from the Missouri, and perhaps thought he was doing a fine thing for his pupil by transferring him to a pilot named Brown, then on a large passenger-steamer, the "Pennsylvania." The "Pennsylvania" was new and one of the finest boats on the river. Sam Clemens, by this time, was accounted a good steersman, so it seemed fortunate and a good arrangement for all parties. But Brown was a tyrant. He was illiterate and coarse, and took a dislike to Sam from the start. His first greeting was a question, harmless enough in form but offensive in manner. "Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?"--Bixby being usually pronounced "Bigsby" in river parlance. Sam answered politely enough that he was, and Brown proceeded to comment on the "style" of his clothes and other personal matters. He had made an effort to please Brown, but it was no use. Brown was never satisfied. At a moment when Sam was steering, Brown, sitting on the bench, would shout: "Here! Where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull her down! Do you hear me? Blamed mud-cat!" The young pilot soon learned to detest his chief, and presently was putting in a good deal of his time inventing punishments for him. I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed. Instead of going over the river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure, and killed Brown. He gave up trying to please Brown, and was even willing to stir him up upon occasion. One day when the cub was at the wheel his chief noticed that the course seemed peculiar. "Here! Where you headin' for now?" he yelled. "What in the nation you steerin' at, anyway? Blamed numskull!" "Why," said Sam in his calm, slow way, "I didn't see much else I could steer for, so I was heading for that white heifer on the bank." "Get away from that wheel! And get outen this pilot-house!" yelled Brown. "You ain't fitten to become no pilot!" An order that Sam found welcome enough. The other pilot, George Ealer, was a lovable soul who played the flute and chess during his off watch, and read aloud to Sam from "Goldsmith" and "Shakespeare." To be with George Ealer was to forget the persecutions of Brown. Young Clemens had been on the river nearly a year at this time, and, though he had learned a good deal and was really a fine steersman, he received no wages. He had no board to pay, but there were things he must buy, and his money supply had become limited. Each trip of the "Pennsylvania" she remained about two days and nights in New Orleans, during which time the young man was free. He found he could earn two and a half to three dollars a night watching freight on the levee, and, as this opportunity came around about once a month, the amount was useful. Nor was this the only return; many years afterward he said: "It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark, among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one. I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sots of situations and possibilities. These things got into my books by and by, and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effects of those nights through most of my books, in one way and another." Piloting, even with Brown, had its pleasant side. In St. Louis, young Clemens stopped with his sister, and often friends were there from Hannibal. At both ends of the line he visited friendly boats, especially the "Roe," where a grand welcome was always waiting. Once among the guests of that boat a young girl named Laura so attracted him that he forgot time and space until one of the "Roe" pilots, Zeb Leavenworth, came flying aft, shouting: "The 'Pennsylvania' is backing out!" A hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a leap across several feet of open water closed the episode. He wrote to Laura, but there was no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old. She had not received his letter. Occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the "Pennsylvania." In a letter written in March, 1858, the young pilot tells of an exciting night search in the running ice for Hat Island soundings: Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well until the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars . . . . The next day was colder still. I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us . . . . The "Maria Denning" was aground at the head of the island; they hailed us; we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had been out in the yawl from four in the morning until half-past nine without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men and yawl, ropes, and everything, and we looked like rock-candy statuary. He was at the right age to enjoy such adventures, and to feel a pride in them. In the same letter he tells how he found on the "Pennsylvania" a small clerkship for his brother Henry, who was now nearly twenty, a handsome, gentle boy of whom Sam was lavishly fond and proud. The young pilot was eager to have Henry with him--to see him started in life. How little he dreamed what sorrow would come of his well-meant efforts in the lad's behalf! Yet he always believed, later, that he had a warning, for one night at the end of May, in St. Louis, he had a vivid dream, which time would presently fulfil. An incident now occurred on the "Pennsylvania" that closed Samuel Clemens's career on that boat. It was the down trip, and the boat was in Eagle Bend when Henry Clemens appeared on the hurricane deck with an announcement from the captain of a landing a little lower down. Brown, who would never own that he was rather deaf, probably misunderstood the order. They were passing the landing when the captain appeared on the deck. "Didn't Henry tell you to land here?" he called to Brown. "No, sir." Captain Klinefelter turned to Sam. "Didn't you hear him?" "Yes, sir!" Brown said: "Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind!" Henry appeared, not suspecting any trouble. Brown said, fiercely, "Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?" "I did tell you, Mr. Brown," Henry said, politely. "It's a lie!" Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He said: "You lie yourself. He did tell you!" For a cub pilot to defy his chief was unheard of. Brown was dazed, then he shouted: "I'll attend to your case in half a minute!" And to Henry, "Get out of here!" Henry had started when Brown seized him by the collar and struck him in the face. An instant later Sam was upon Brown with a heavy stool and stretched him on the floor. Then all the repressed fury of months broke loose; and, leaping upon Brown and holding him down with his knees, Samuel Clemens pounded the tyrant with his fists till his strength gave out. He let Brown go then, and the latter, with pilot instinct, sprang to the wheel, for the boat was drifting. Seeing she was safe, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon and ordered his chastiser out of the pilot-house. But Sam lingered. He had become very calm, and he openly corrected Brown's English. "Don't give me none of your airs!" yelled Brown. "I ain't goin' to stand nothin' more from you!" "You should say, `Don't give me any of your airs,'" Sam said, sweetly, "and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction." A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. Sam went down to find Captain Klinefelter. He expected to be put in irons, for it was thought to be mutiny to strike a pilot. The captain took Sam into his private room and made some inquiries. Mark Twain, in the "Mississippi" boot remembers them as follows: "Did you strike him first?" Captain Klinefelter asked. "Yes, sir." "What with?" "A stool, sir." "Hard?" "Middling, sir." "Did it knock him down?" "He--he fell, sir." "Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?" "Yes, sir." "What did you do?" "Pounded him, sir." "Pounded him?" "Yes, sir." "Did you pound him much--that is, severely?" "One might call it that, sir, maybe." "I am mighty glad of it! Hark ye--never mention that I said that! You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! Give him a good, sound thrashing, do you hear? I'll pay the expenses." In a letter which Samuel Clemens wrote to Orion's wife, immediately after this incident, he gives the details of the encounter with Brown and speaks of Captain Klinefelter's approval.[4] Brown declared he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and the captain told him to go, offering to let Sam himself run the daylight watches back to St. Louis, thus showing his faith in the young steersman. The "cub," however, had less confidence, and advised that Brown be kept for the up trip, saying he would follow by the next boat. It was a decision that probably saved his life. That night, watching on the levee, Henry joined him, when his own duties were finished, and the brothers made the round together. It may have been some memory of his dream that made Samuel Clemens say: "Henry, in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane-deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don't get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough." It was good, manly advice, but a long grief lay behind it. [4] In the Mississippi book the author says that Brown was about to strike Henry with a lump of coal, but in the letter above mentioned the details are as here given. XV. THE WRECK OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA" The "A. T. Lacy," that brought Samuel Clemens up the river, was two days behind the "Pennsylvania." At Greenville, Mississippi, a voice from the landing shouted "The 'Pennsylvania' is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island. One hundred and fifty lives lost!" It proved a true report. At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood, sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded, with fearful results. Henry Clemens had been one of the victims. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but had turned back to assist in the rescue of others. What followed could not be clearly learned. He was terribly injured, and died on the fourth night after the catastrophe. His brother was with him by that time, and believed he recognized the exact fulfilment of his dream. The young pilot's grief was very great. In a letter home he spoke of the dying boy as "My darling, my pride, my glory, my all." His heavy sorrow, and the fact that with unsparing self-blame he held himself in a measure responsible for his brother's tragic death, saddened his early life. His early gaiety came back, but his face had taken on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always wore in repose. Less than twenty-three, he had suddenly the look of thirty, and while Samuel Clemens in spirit, temperament, and features never would become really old, neither would he ever look really young again. He returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi River pilot from St. Louis to New Orleans. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all those wearisome details and acquired that confidence that made him one of the elect. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and depth in all those endless miles of shifting current, every cut-off and crossing. He could read the surface of the water by day, he could smell danger in the dark. To the writer of these chapters, Horace Bixby said: "In a year and a half from the time he came to the river, Sam was not only a pilot, but a good one. Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind; and on a dark, misty night, in a river full of snags and shifting sandbars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty." Bixby had returned from the Missouri by the time his pupil's license was issued, and promptly took him as full partner on the "Crescent City," and later on a fine new boat, the "New Falls City." Still later, they appear to have been together on a very large boat, the "City of Memphis," and again on the "Alonzo Child." XVI. THE PILOT For Samuel Clemens these were happy days--the happiest, in some respects, he would ever know. He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and could put away fully a hundred dollars a month for himself. He had few cares, and he loved the ease and romance and independence of his work as he would never quite love anything again. His popularity on the river was very great. His humorous stories and quaint speech made a crowd collect wherever he appeared. There were pilot-association rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans, and his appearance at one of these places was a signal for the members to gather. A friend of those days writes: "He was much given to spinning yarns so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. Occasionally some of his droll yarns got into the papers. He may have written them himself." Another old river-man remembers how, one day, at the association, they were talking of presence of mind in an accident, when Pilot Clemens said: "Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old man leaned out of a four-story building, calling for help. Everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders weren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I threw the old man the end of it. He caught it, and I told him to tie it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down." This was a story that found its way into print, probably his own contribution. "Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel," said Bixby, "but the best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old Isaiah Sellers. He didn't write it for print, but only for his own amusement and to show to a few of the boys. Bart Bowen, who was with him on the "Edward J. Gay" at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one of the New Orleans papers." The burlesque on Captain Sellers would be of little importance if it were not for its association with the origin, or, at least, with the originator, of what is probably the best known of literary names--the name Mark Twain. This strong, happy title--a river term indicating a depth of two fathoms on the sounding-line--was first used by the old pilot, Isaiah Sellers, who was a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the river, with a passion for airing his ancient knowledge before the younger men. Sellers used to send paragraphs to the papers, quaint and rather egotistical in tone, usually beginning, "My opinion for the citizens of New Orleans," etc., prophesying river conditions and recalling memories as far back as 1811. These he generally signed "Mark Twain." Naturally, the younger pilots amused themselves by imitating Sellers, and when Sam Clemens wrote abroad burlesque of the old man's contributions, relating a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, it was regarded as a masterpiece of wit. It appeared in the "True Delta" in May, 1859, and broke Captain Sellers's literary heart. He never wrote another paragraph. Clemens always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name afterward was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly and unintentionally wounded. Old pilots of that day remembered Samuel Clemens as a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed, even dandified, generally wearing blue serge, with fancy shirts, white duck trousers, and patent-leather shoes. A pilot could do that, for his surroundings were speckless. The pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, and the sciences. In the association rooms they often saw him poring over serious books. He began the study of French one day in New Orleans, when he had passed a school of languages where French, German, and Italian were taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty. The student was provided with a set of conversation cards for each, and was supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing his nationality at each threshold. The young pilot, with his usual enthusiasm, invested in all three languages, but after a few round trips decided that French would do. He did not return to the school, but kept the cards and added text-books. He studied faithfully when off watch and in port, and his old river note-book, still preserved, contains a number of advanced exercises, neatly written out. Still more interesting are the river notes themselves. They are not the timid, hesitating memoranda of the "little book" which, by Bixby's advice, he bought for his first trip. They are quick, vigorous records that show confidence and knowledge. Under the head of "Second high-water trip--Jan., 1861 'Alonzo Child,'" the notes tell the story of a rising river, with overflowing banks, blind passages, and cut-offs--a new river, in fact, that must be judged by a perfect knowledge of the old--guessed, but guessed right. Good deal of water all over Cole's Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank--could have gone up above General Taylor's--too much drift . . . . Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8-ft. bank on main shore Ozark chute. To the reader to-day it means little enough, but one may imagine, perhaps, a mile-wide sweep of boiling water, full of drift, shifting currents with newly forming bars, and a lone figure in the dark pilot-house, peering into the night for blind and disappearing landmarks. But such nights were not all there was of piloting. There were glorious nights when the stars were blazing out, and the moon was on the water, and the young pilot could follow a clear channel and dream long dreams. He was very serious at such times--he reviewed the world's history he had read, he speculated on the future, he considered philosophies, he lost himself in a study of the stars. Mark Twain's love of astronomy, which never waned until his last day, began with those lonely river watches. Once a great comet blazed in the sky, a "wonderful sheaf of light," and glorified his long hours at the wheel. Samuel Clemens was now twenty-five, full of health and strong in his courage. In the old notebook there remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he may have kept as a sort of creed: HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the "Child," and were the closest friends. Once the young pilot invited his mother to make the trip to New Orleans, and the river journey and a long drive about the beautiful Southern city filled Jane Clemens with wonder and delight. She no longer shad any doubts of Sam. He had long since become the head of the family. She felt called upon to lecture him, now and then, but down in her heart she believed that he could really do no wrong. They joked each other unmercifully, and her wit, never at a loss, was quite as keen as his. XVII. THE END OF PILOTING When one remembers how much Samuel Clemens loved the river, and how perfectly he seemed suited to the ease and romance of the pilot-life, one is almost tempted to regret that it should so soon have come to an end. Those trips of early '61, which the old note-book records, were the last he would ever make. The golden days of Mississippi steam-boating were growing few. Nobody, however, seemed to suspect it. Even a celebrated fortune-teller in New Orleans, whom the young pilot one day consulted as to his future, did not mention the great upheaval then close at hand. She told him quite remarkable things, and gave him some excellent advice, but though this was February, 1861, she failed to make any mention of the Civil War! Yet, a month later, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated and trouble was in the air. Then in April Fort Sumter was fired upon and the war had come. It was a feverish time among the pilots. Some were for the Union--others would go with the Confederacy. Horace Bixby stood for the North, and in time was chief of the Union river-service. A pilot named Montgomery (Clemens had once steered for him) went with the South and by and by commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet. In the beginning a good many were not clear as to their opinions. Living both North and South, as they did, they divided their sympathies. Samuel Clemens was thoughtful, and far from bloodthirsty. A pilothouse, so fine and showy in times of peace, seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. He would consider the matter. "I am not anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side," he said. "I'll go home and reflect." He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the "Uncle Sam." Zeb Leavenworth, formerly of the "John J. Roe," was one of the pilots, and Clemens usually stood the watch with him. At Memphis they barely escaped the blockade. At Cairo they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by Grant. The "Uncle Sam" came steaming up to St. Louis, glad to have slipped through safely. They were not quite through, however. Abreast of Jefferson Barracks they heard the boom of a cannon, and a great ring of smoke drifted in their direction. They did not recognize it as a thunderous "Halt!" and kept on. Less than a minute later, a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and damaging the decoration. Zeb Leavenworth tumbled into a corner. "Gee-mighty, Sam!" he said. "What do they mean by that?" Clemens stepped from the visitors' bench to the wheel and brought the boat around. "I guess--they want us--to wait a minute--Zeb," he said. They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the trip through from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain's pilot days were over. He would have grieved had he known this fact. "I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," he long afterward declared, "and I took a measureless pride in it." At the time, like many others, he expected the war to be brief, and his life to be only temporarily interrupted. Within a year, certainly, he would be back in the pilot-house. Meantime the war must be settled; he would go up to Hannibal to see about it. XVIII. THE SOLDIER When he reached Hannibal, Samuel Clemens found a very mixed condition of affairs. The country was in an uproar of war preparation; in a border State there was a confusion of sympathies, with much ignorance as to what it was all about. Any number of young men were eager to enlist for a brief camping-out expedition, and small private companies were formed, composed about half-and-half of Union and Confederate men, as it turned out later. Missouri, meantime, had allied herself with the South, and Samuel Clemens, on his arrival in Hannibal, decided that, like Lee, he would go with his State. Old friends, who were getting up a company "to help Governor `Claib' Jackson repel the invader," offered him a lieutenancy if he would join. It was not a big company; it had only about a dozen members, most of whom had been schoolmates, some of them fellow-pilots, and Sam Clemens was needed to make it complete. It was just another Tom Sawyer band, and they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill and planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as years before fierce raids had been arranged on peach-orchards and melon-patches. Secrecy was necessary, for the Union militia had a habit of coming over from Illinois and arresting suspicious armies on sight. It would humiliate the finest army in the world to spend a night or two in the calaboose. So they met secretly at night, and one mysterious evening they called on girls who either were their sweethearts or were pretending to be for the occasion, and when the time came for good-by the girls were invited to "walk through the pickets" with them, though the girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were calling on their girls, too, and were a little late getting to their posts. That night they marched, through brush and vines, because the highroad was thought to be dangerous, and next morning arrived at the home of Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, who had the army form in dress parade and made it a speech and gave it a hot breakfast in good Southern style. Then he sent out to Col. Bill Splawn and Farmer Nuck Matson a requisition for supplies that would convert this body of infantry into cavalry --rough-riders of that early day. The community did not wish to keep an army on its hands, and were willing to send it along by such means as they could spare handily. When the outfitting was complete, Lieutenant Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed in the paint-brush pattern then much worn by mules, and surrounded by variously attached articles--such as an extra pair of cowhide boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, a frying-pan, a carpet-sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella--was a fair sample of the brigade. An army like that, to enjoy itself, ought to go into camp; so it went over to Salt River, near the town of Florida, and took up headquarters in a big log stable. Somebody suggested that an army ought to have its hair cut, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. There was a pair of sheep-shears in the stable, and Private Tom Lyons acted as barber. They were not sharp shears, and a group of little darkies gathered from the farm to enjoy the torture. Regular elections were now held--all officers, down to sergeants and orderlies, being officially chosen. There were only three privates, and you couldn't tell them from officers. The discipline in that army was very bad. It became worse soon. Pouring rain set in. Salt River rose and overflowed the bottoms. Men ordered on picket duty climbed up into the stable-loft and went to bed. Twice, on black, drenching nights, word came from the farmhouse that the enemy, commanded by a certain Col. Ulysses Grant, was in the neighborhood, and the Hannibal division went hastily slopping through mud and brush in the other direction, dragging wearily back when the alarm was over. Military ardor was bound to cool under such treatment. Then Lieutenant Clemens developed a very severe boil, and was obliged to lie most of the day on some hay in a horse-trough, where he spent his time denouncing the war and the mistaken souls who had invented it. When word that "General" Tom Harris, commander of the district--formerly telegraph-operator in Hannibal--was at a near-by farm-house, living on the fat of the land, the army broke camp without further ceremony. Halfway there they met General Harris, who ordered them back to quarters. They called him familiarly "Tom," and told him they were through with that camp forever. He begged them, but it was no use. A little farther on they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. A tall, bony woman came to the door. "You're Secesh, ain't you?" Lieutenant Clemens said: "We are, madam, defenders of the noble cause, and we should like to buy a few provisions." The request seemed to inflame her. "Provisions!" she screamed. "Provisions for Secesh, and my husband a colonel in the Union Army. You get out of here!" She reached for a hickory hoop-pole [5] that stood by the door, and the army moved on. When they reached the home of Col. Bill Splawn it was night and the family had gone to bed. So the hungry army camped in the barn-yard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. Presently somebody yelled "Fire!" One of the boys had been smoking and had ignited the hay. Lieutenant Clemens, suddenly wakened, made a quick rotary movement away from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barn-yard below. The rest of the brigade seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck, and his boil was still painful, but the burning hay cured him --for the moment. He made a spring from under it; then, noticing that the rest of the army, now that the fire was out, seemed to think his performance amusing, he rose up and expressed himself concerning the war, and military life, and the human race in general. They helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. In the morning, Colonel Splawn gave the army a good breakfast, and it moved on. Lieutenant Clemens, however, did not get farther than Farmer Nuck Matson's. He was in a high fever by that time from his injured ankle, and Mrs. Matson put him to bed. So the army left him, and presently disbanded. Some enlisted in the regular service, North or South, according to preference. Properly officered and disciplined, that "Tom Sawyer" band would have made as good soldiers as any. Lieutenant Clemens did not enlist again. When he was able to walk, he went to visit Orion in Keokuk. Orion was a Union Abolitionist, but there would be no unpleasantness on that account. Samuel Clemens was beginning to have leanings in that direction himself. [5] In an earlier day, barrel hoops were made of small hickory trees, split and shaved. The hoop-pole was a very familiar article of commerce, and of household defense. XIX. THE PIONEER He arrived in Keokuk at what seemed a lucky moment. Through Edward Bates, a member of Lincoln's Cabinet, Orion Clemens had received an appointment as territorial secretary of Nevada, and only needed the money to carry him to the seat of his office at Carson City. Out of his pilot's salary his brother had saved more than enough for the journey, and was willing to pay both their fares and go along as private secretary to Orion, whose position promised something in the way of adventure and a possible opportunity for making a fortune. The brothers went at once to St. Louis for final leave-taking, and there took boat for "St. Jo," Missouri, terminus of the great Overland Stage Route. They paid one hundred and fifty dollars each for their passage, and about the end of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip, behind sixteen galloping horses, never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset over the billowy plains and snow-clad Rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo and Carson City in nineteen glorious days. But one must read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for the story of that long-ago trip--the joy and wonder of it, and the inspiration. "Even at this day," he writes, "it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine overland mornings." It was a hot dusty, August day when they arrived, dusty, unshaven, and weather-beaten, and Samuel Clemens's life as a frontiersman began. Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a wooden town with an assorted population of two thousand souls. The mining excitement was at its height and had brought together the drift of every race. The Clemens brothers took up lodgings with a genial Irishwoman, the Mrs. O'Flannigan of "Roughing It," and Orion established himself in a modest office, for there was no capitol building as yet, no government headquarters. Orion could do all the work, and Samuel Clemens, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his position, gave himself up to the study of the life about him, and to the enjoyment of the freedom of the frontier. Presently he had a following of friends who loved his quaint manner of speech and his yarns. On cool nights they would collect about Orion's office-stove, and he would tell stories in the wonderful way that one day would delight the world. Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was always "Sam" to the pioneers) was the most notable figure on the Carson streets. His great, bushy head of auburn hair, has piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress invited a second look, even from strangers. From a river dandy he had become the roughest-clad of pioneers--rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of heavy cowhide boots, this was his make-up. Energetic citizens did not prophesy success for him. Often they saw him leaning against an awning support, staring drowsily at the motley human procession, for as much as an hour at a time. Certainly that could not be profitable. But they did like to hear him talk. He did not catch the mining fever at once. He was interested first in the riches that he could see. Among these was the timber-land around Lake Bigler (now Tahoe)--splendid acres, to be had for the asking. The lake itself was beautifully situated. With an Ohio boy, John Kinney, he made an excursion afoot to Tahoe, a trip described in one of the best chapters of "Roughing It." They staked out a timber claim and pretended to fence it and to build a house, but their chief employment was loafing in the quiet luxury of the great woods or drifting in a boat on the transparent water. They did not sleep in the house. In "Roughing It" he says: "It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it." They made their camp-fires on the borders of the lake, and one evening it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fences and habitation. In a letter home he describes this fire in a fine, vivid way. At one place he says: "The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror." He was acquiring the literary vision and touch. The description of this same fire in "Roughing It," written ten years later, is scarcely more vivid. Most of his letters home at this time tell of glowing prospects--the certainty of fortune ahead. The fever of the frontier is in them. Once, to Pamela Moffett, he wrote: "Orion and I have enough confidence in this country to think that, if the war lets us alone, we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble." From the same letter we gather that the brothers are now somewhat interested in mining claims: "We have about 1,650 feet of mining-ground, and, if it proves good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in; and if not, I can get 'feet' for him in the spring." This was written about the end of October. Two months later, in midwinter, the mining fever came upon him with full force. XX. THE MINER The wonder is that Samuel Clemens, always speculative and visionary, had not fallen an earlier victim. Everywhere one heard stories of sudden fortune--of men who had gone to bed paupers and awakened millionaires. New and fabulous finds were reported daily. Cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold bricks--drove through the Carson streets. Then suddenly from the newly opened Humboldt region came the wildest reports. The mountains there were said to be stuffed with gold. A correspondent of the "Territorial Enterprise" was unable to find words to picture the riches of the Humboldt mines. The air for Samuel Clemens began to shimmer. Fortune was waiting to be gathered in a basket. He joined the first expedition for Humboldt--in fact, helped to organize it. In "Roughing It" he says: "Hurry was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining-tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.." The two young lawyers were W. H. Clagget, whom Clemens had known in Keokuk, and A. W. Oliver, called Oliphant in "Roughing It." The blacksmith was named Tillou (Ballou in "Roughing It"), a sturdy, honest man with a knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. There were also two dogs in the party--a curly-tailed mongrel and a young hound. The horses were the weak feature of the expedition. It was two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The miners rode only a little way, then got out to lighten the load. Later they pushed. Then it began to snow, also to blow, and the air became filled with whirling clouds of snow and sand. On and on they pushed and groaned, sustained by the knowledge that they must arrive some time, when right away they would be millionaires and all their troubles would be over. The nights were better. The wind went down and they made a camp-fire in the shelter of the wagon, cooked their bacon, crept under blankets with the dogs to warm them, and Sam Clemens spun yarns till they fell asleep. There had been an Indian war, and occasionally they passed the charred ruin of a cabin and new graves. By and by they came to that deadly waste known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to reach water. All day and night they pushed through that choking, waterless plain to reach camp on the other side. When they arrived at three in the morning, they dropped down exhausted. Judge Oliver, the last survivor of the party, in a letter to the writer of these chapters, said: "The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of Piute warriors. We were upon our feet in an instant. The picture of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed was in our minds. Our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head, as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and, with his inimitable drawl, said 'Boys, they have left us our scalps. Let us give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.' And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful." The Indians left them unharmed, and the prospective millionaires moved on. Across that two hundred miles to the Humboldt country they pushed, arriving at the little camp of Unionville at the end of eleven weary days. In "Roughing It" Mark Twain has told us of Unionville and the mining experience there. Their cabin was a three-sided affair with a cotton roof. Stones rolled down the mountainside on them; also, the author says, a mule and a cow. The author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed. Masses of gold and silver were not lying about. He gathered a back-load of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless. Gold in the rough did not glitter, and was not yellow. Tillou instructed the others in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel--then with drill and blasting-powder. The prospect of immediately becoming millionaires vanished. "One week of this satisfied me. I resigned," is Mark Twain's brief comment. The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver- Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims. Clemens and Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before they arrived there. Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law practice, and were elected to office. It is not known what became of the wagon and horses and the two dogs. It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson. He was not discouraged--far from it. He believed he had learned something that would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality. Within a few weeks from his return we find him at Aurora, in the Esmeralda region, on the edge of California. It was here that the Clemens brothers owned the 1,650 feet formerly mentioned. He had came down to work it. It was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a fortune by early summer. To Pamela he wrote: "I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don't say that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I expect to--you bet . . . . If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in June." He was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his sister not to get excited. "Don't you know I have only talked as yet, but proved nothing? Don't you know I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? Don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an uncongealable, sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with a 40-horse microscopic power? "But--but-- In the bright lexicon of youth, There is no such word as fail, and I'll prove it." Whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures buried in the ground--a very difficult place, indeed, to find them. His money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining claims must come out of Orion's rather modest salary. The brothers owned all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of "Brother Sam" to do the active work. He hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on. He camped with a young man named Phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie, to whom "Roughing It" would one day be dedicated. They lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their mines would be worth in the spring. Food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up. When it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the Esmeralda hills. At other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and wrote. They thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was "literary." Some of his home letters had found their way into a Keokuk paper and had come back to Orion, who had shown them to an assistant on the "Territorial Enterprise," of Virginia City. The "Enterprise" man had caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to send something to the paper direct. He signed these contributions "Josh," and one told of: "An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem, Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem, A long time ago." He received no pay for these offerings and expected none. He considered them of no value. If any one had told him that he was knocking at the door of the house of fame, however feebly, he would have doubted that person's judgment or sincerity. His letters to Orion, in Carson City, were hasty compositions, reporting progress and progress, or calling for remittances to keep the work going. On April 13, he wrote: "Work not begun on the Horatio and Derby--haven't seen it yet. It is still in the snow. Shall begin on it within three or four weeks --strike the ledge in July." Again, later in the month: "I have been at work all day, blasting and digging in one of our new claims, 'Dashaway,' which I don't think a great deal of, but which I am willing to try. We are down now ten or twelve feet." It must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges. There is no further mention of the "Dashaway," but we hear of the "Flyaway," the "Annipolitan," the "Live Yankee," and of many another, each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then passes from notice forever. Still, he was not discouraged. Once he wrote: "I am a citizen here and I am satisfied, though 'Ratio and I are 'strapped' and we haven't three days' rations in the house. I shall work the "Monitor" and the other claims with my own hands. "The pick and shovel are the only claims I have confidence in now," he wrote, later; "my back is sore and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day." His letters began to take on a weary tone. Once in midsummer he wrote that it was still snowing up there in the hills, and added, "It always snows here I expect. If we strike it rich, I've lost my guess, that's all." And the final heartsick line, "Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?" In time he went to work in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week, though it was not entirely for the money, as in "Roughing It" he would have us believe. Samuel Clemens learned thoroughly what he undertook, and he proposed to master the science of mining. From Phillips and Higbie he had learned what there was to know about prospecting. He went to the mill to learn refining, so that, when his claims developed, he could establish a mill and personally superintend the work. His stay was brief. He contracted a severe cold and came near getting poisoned by the chemicals. Recovering, he went with Higbie for an outing to Mono Lake, a ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, vividly described in "Roughing It." At another time he went with Higbie on a walking trip to the Yosemite, where they camped and fished undisturbed, for in those days few human beings came to that far isolation. Discouragement did not reach them there--amid that vast grandeur and quiet the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. Now and again that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get entirely away from humankind. In "Roughing It" Mark Twain tells the story of how he and Higbie finally located a "blind lead," which made them really millionaires, until they forfeited their claim through the sharp practice of some rival miners and their own neglect. It is true that the "Wide West" claim was forfeited in some such manner, but the size of the loss was magnified in "Roughing It," to make a good story. There was never a fortune in "Wide West," except the one sunk in it by its final owners. The story as told in "Roughing It" is a tale of what might have happened, and ends the author's days in the mines with a good story-book touch. The mining career of Samuel Clemens really came to a close gradually, and with no showy climax. He fought hard and surrendered little by little, without owning, even to the end, that he was surrendering at all. It was the gift of resolution that all his life would make his defeats long and costly--his victories supreme. By the end of July the money situation in the Aurora camp was getting desperate. Orion's depleted salary would no longer pay for food, tools, and blasting-powder, and the miner began to cast about far means to earn an additional sum, however small. The "Josh" letters to the "Enterprise" had awakened interest as to their author, and Orion had not failed to let "Josh's" identity be known. The result had been that here and there a coast paper had invited contributions and even suggested payment. A letter written by the Aurora miner at the end of July tells this part of the story: "My debts are greater than I thought for . . . . The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too . . . . Now write to the "Sacramento Union" folks, or to Marsh, and tell them that I will write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week. My board must be paid. "Tell them I have corresponded with the "New Orleans Crescent" and other papers--and the "Enterprise." "If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? I'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present, for the "Age," for $5 per week. Now it has been a long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year." This all led to nothing, but about the same time the "Enterprise" assistant already mentioned spoke to Joseph T. Goodman, owner and editor of the paper, about adding "Josh" to their regular staff. "Joe" Goodman, a man of keen humor and literary perception, agreed that the author of the "Josh" letters might be useful to them. One of the sketches particularly appealed to him--a burlesque report of a Fourth of July oration. "That is the kind of thing we want," he said. "Write to him, Barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here." Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week--a tempting sum. This was at the end of July, 1862. Yet the hard-pressed miner made no haste to accept the offer. To leave Aurora meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. He wrote Barstow, asking when he thought he might be needed. And at the same time, in a letter to Orion, he said: "I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of sixty or seventy miles through a totally uninhabited country. But do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and, in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you." He had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone, postponing the final moment of surrender--surrender that, had he known, only meant the beginning of victory. He was still undecided when he returned eight days later and wrote to his sister Pamela a letter in which there is no mention of newspaper prospects. Just how and when the end came at last cannot be known; but one hot, dusty August afternoon, in Virginia City, a worn, travel-stained pilgrim dragged himself into the office of the "Territorial Enterprise," then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulder, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue-flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers were tucked into his boot-tops; a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders; a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia City. He had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, Dennis E. McCarthy, asked the caller to state his errand. The wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently, and with deliberation: "My starboard leg seems to be unshipped. I'd like about one hundred yards of line; I think I'm falling to pieces." Then he added: "I want to see Mr. Barstow or Mr. Goodman. My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom! XXI. THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE In 1852 Virginia City, Nevada, was the most flourishing of mining towns. A half-crazy miner, named Comstock, had discovered there a vein of such richness that the "Comstock Lode" was presently glutting the mineral markets of the world. Comstock himself got very little out of it, but those who followed him made millions. Miners, speculators, adventurers swarmed in. Every one seemed to have money. The streets seethed with an eager, affluent, boisterous throng whose chief business seemed to be to spend the wealth that the earth was yielding in such a mighty stream. Business of every kind boomed. Less than two years earlier, J. T. Goodman, a miner who was also a printer and a man of literary taste, had joined with another printer, Dennis McCarthy, and the two had managed to buy a struggling Virginia City paper, the "Territorial Enterprise." But then came the hightide of fortune. A year later the "Enterprise," from a starving sheet in a leaky shanty, had become a large, handsome paper in a new building, and of such brilliant editorial management that it was the most widely considered journal on the Pacific coast. Goodman was a fine, forceful writer, and he surrounded himself with able men. He was a young man, full of health and vigor, overflowing with the fresh spirit and humor of the West. Comstockers would always laugh at a joke, and Goodman was always willing to give it to them. The "Enterprise" was a newspaper, but it was willing to furnish entertainment even at the cost of news. William Wright, editorially next to Goodman, was a humorist of ability. His articles, signed Dan de Quille, were widely copied. R. M. Daggett (afterward United States Minister to Hawaii) was also an "Enterprise" man, and there were others of their sort. Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He brought with him a new turn of thought and expression; he saw things with open eyes, and wrote of them in a fresh, wild way that Comstockers loved. He was allowed full freedom. Goodman suppressed nothing; his men could write as they chose. They were all young together--if they pleased themselves, they were pretty sure to please their readers. Often they wrote of one another--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more than mere news. It was just the school to produce Mark Twain. The new arrival found acquaintance easy. The whole "Enterprise" force was like one family; proprietors, editor, and printers were social equals. Samuel Clemens immediately became "Sam" to his associates, just as De Quille was "Dan," and Goodman "Joe." Clemens was supposed to report city items, and did, in fact, do such work, which he found easy, for his pilot-memory made notes unnecessary. He could gather items all day, and at night put down the day's budget well enough, at least, to delight his readers. When he was tired of facts, he would write amusing paragraphs, as often as not something about Dan, or a reporter on a rival paper. Dan and the others would reply, and the Comstock would laugh. Those were good old days. Sometimes he wrote hoaxes. Once he told with great circumstance and detail of a petrified prehistoric man that had been found embedded in a rock in the desert, and how the coroner from Humboldt had traveled more than a hundred miles to hold an inquest over a man dead for centuries, and had refused to allow miners to blast the discovery from its position. The sketch was really intended as a joke on the Humboldt coroner, but it was so convincingly written that most of the Coast papers took it seriously and reprinted it as the story of a genuine discovery. In time they awoke, and began to inquire as to who was the smart writer on the "Enterprise." Mark Twain did a number of such things, some of which are famous on the Coast to this day. Clemens himself did not escape. Lamps were used in the "Enterprise" office, but he hated the care of a lamp, and worked evenings by the light of a candle. It was considered a great joke in the office to "hide Sam's candle" and hear him fume and rage, walking in a circle meantime--a habit acquired in the pilothouse--and scathingly denouncing the culprits. Eventually the office-boy, supposedly innocent, would bring another candle, and quiet would follow. Once the office force, including De Quille, McCarthy, and a printer named Stephen Gillis, of whom Clemens was very fond, bought a large imitation meerschaum pipe, had a German-silver plate set on it, properly engraved, and presented it to Samuel Clemens as genuine, in testimony of their great esteem. His reply to the presentation speech was so fine and full of feeling that the jokers felt ashamed of their trick. A few days later, when he discovered the deception, he was ready to destroy the lot of them. Then, in atonement, they gave him a real meerschaum. Such things kept the Comstock entertained. There was a side to Samuel Clemens that, in those days, few of his associates saw. This was the poetic, the reflective side. Joseph Goodman, like Macfarlane in Cincinnati several years earlier, recognized this phase of his character and developed it. Often these two, dining or walking together, discussed the books and history they had read, quoted from poems that gave them pleasure. Clemens sometimes recited with great power the "Burial of Moses," whose noble phrasing and majestic imagery seemed to move him deeply. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines: By Nebo's lonely mountain, On this side Jordan's wave, In a vale in the land of Moab There lies a lonely grave. And no man knows that sepulcher, And no man saw it e'er, For the angels of God upturned the sod, And laid the dead man there. That his own writing would be influenced by the simple grandeur of this poem we can hardly doubt. Indeed, it may have been to him a sort of literary touchstone, that in time would lead him to produce, as has been said, some of the purest English written by any modern author. XXII. "MARK TWAIN" It was once when Goodman and Clemens were dining together that the latter asked to be allowed to report the proceedings of the coming legislature at Carson City. He knew nothing of such work, and Goodman hesitated. Then, remembering that Clemens would, at least, make his reports readable, whether they were parliamentary or not, he consented. So, at the beginning of the year (1863), Samuel Clemens undertook a new and interesting course in the study of human nature--the political human nature of the frontier. There could have been no better school for him. His wit, his satire, his phrasing had full swing--his letters, almost from the beginning, were copied as choice reading up and down the Coast. He made curious blunders, at first, as to the proceedings, but his open confession of ignorance in the early letters made these blunders their chief charm. A young man named Gillespie, clerk of the House, coached him, and in return was christened "Young Jefferson's Manual," a title which he bore for many years. A reporter named Rice, on a rival Virginia City paper, the "Union," also earned for himself a title through those early letters. Rice concluded to poke fun at the "Enterprise" reports, pointing out their mistakes. But this was not wise. Clemens, in his next contribution, admitted that Rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but declared his glittering technicalities were only to cover misstatements of fact. He vowed they were wholly untrustworthy, dubbed the author of them "The Unreliable," and never thereafter referred to him by any other term. Carson and the Comstock papers delighted in this foolery, and Rice became "The Unreliable" for life. There was no real feeling between Rice and Clemens. They were always the best of friends. But now we arrive at the story of still another name, one of vastly greater importance than either of those mentioned, for it is the name chosen by Samuel Clemens for himself. In those days it was the fashion for a writer to have a pen-name, especially for his journalistic and humorous work. Clemens felt that his "Enterprise" letters, copied up and down the Coast, needed a mark of identity. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He wanted something brief and strong--something that would stick in the mind. It was just at this time that news came of the death of Capt. Isaiah Sellers, the old pilot who had signed himself "Mark Twain." Mark Twain! That was the name he wanted. It was not trivial. It had all the desired qualities. Captain Sellers would never need it again. It would do no harm to keep it alive --to give it a new meaning in a new land. Clemens took a trip from Carson up to Virginia City. "Joe," he said to Goodman, "I want to sign my articles. I want to be identified to a wider audience." "All right, Sam. What name do you want to use Josh?" "No, I want to sign them Mark Twain. It is an old river term, a leadsman's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. It has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe waters." He did not mention that Captain Sellers had used and dropped the name. He was not proud of his part in that episode, and it was too recent for confession. Goodman considered a moment. "Very well, Sam," he said, "that sounds like a good name." A good name, indeed! Probably, if he had considered every combination of words in the language, he could not have found a better one. To-day we recognize it as the greatest nom de plume ever chosen, and, somehow, we cannot believe that the writer of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn" and "Roughing It" could have selected any other had he tried. The name Mark Twain was first signed to a Carson letter, February 2, 1863, and after that to all of Samuel Clemens's work. The letters that had amused so many readers had taken on a new interest--the interest that goes with a name. It became immediately more than a pen-name. Clemens found he had attached a name to himself as well as to his letters. Everybody began to address him as Mark. Within a few weeks he was no longer "Sam" or "Clemens," but Mark--Mark Twain. The Coast papers liked the sound of it. It began to mean something to their readers. By the end of that legislative session Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, had acquired out there on that breezy Western slope something resembling fame. Curiously, he fails to mention any of this success in his letters home of that period. Indeed, he seldom refers to his work, but more often speaks of mining shares which he has accumulated, and their possible values. His letters are airy, full of the joy of life and of the wild doings of the frontier. Closing one of them, he says: "I have just heard five pistolshots down the street. As such things are in my line, I will go and see about it." And in a postscript, later, he adds: "5 A.M.--The pistol-shots did their work well. One man, a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. The murderer's name is John Campbell." The Comstock was a great school for Mark Twain, and in "Roughing It" he has left us a faithful picture of its long-vanished glory. More than one national character came out of the Comstock school. Senator James G. Fair was one of them, and John Mackay, both miners with pick and shovel at first, though Mackay presently became a superintendent. Mark Twain one day laughingly offered to trade jobs with Mackay. "No," Mackay said, "I can't trade. My business is not worth as much as yours. I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now." For both these men the future held splendid gifts: for Mackay vast wealth, for Mark Twain the world's applause, and neither would have long to wait. XXIII. ARTEMUS WARD AND LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO It was about the end of 1863 that a new literary impulse came into Mark Twain's life. The gentle and lovable humorist Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) was that year lecturing in the West, and came to Virginia City. Ward had intended to stay only a few days, but the whirl of the Comstock fascinated him. He made the "Enterprise" office his headquarters and remained three weeks. He and Mark Twain became boon companions. Their humor was not unlike; they were kindred spirits, together almost constantly. Ward was then at the summit of his fame, and gave the younger man the highest encouragement, prophesying great things for ha work. Clemens, on his side, was stirred, perhaps for the first time, with a real literary ambition, and the thought that he, too, might win a place of honor. He promised Ward that he would send work to the Eastern papers. On Christmas Eve, Ward gave a dinner to the "Enterprise" staff, at Chaumond's, a fine French restaurant of that day. When refreshments came, Artemus lifted his glass, and said: "I give you Upper Canada." The company rose and drank the toast in serious silence. Then Mr. Goodman said: "Of course, Artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us Upper Canada?" "Because I don't want it myself," said Ward, gravely. What would one not give to have listened to the talk of that evening! Mark Twain's power had awakened; Artemus Ward was in his prime. They were giants of a race that became extinct when Mark Twain died. Goodman remained rather quiet during the evening. Ward had appointed him to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling much in the conversation. When Ward asked him why he did not join the banter, he said: "I am preparing a joke, Artemus, but I am keeping it for the present." At a late hour Ward finally called for the bill. It was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. "What!" exclaimed Artemus. "That's my joke," said Goodman. "But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," laughed Ward, laying the money on the table. Ward remained through the holidays, and later wrote back an affectionate letter to Mark Twain. "I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence," he said, "as all others must, or rather, cannot be, as it were." With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Mark Twain now began sending work eastward. The "New York Sunday Mercury" published one, possibly more, of his sketches, but they were not in his best vein, and made little impression. He may have been too busy for outside work, for the legislative session of 1864 was just beginning. Furthermore, he had been chosen governor of the "Third House," a mock legislature, organized for one session, to be held as a church benefit. The "governor" was to deliver a message, which meant that he was to burlesque from the platform all public officials and personages, from the real governor down. With the exception of a short talk he had once given at a printer's dinner in Keokuk, it was Mark Twain's first appearance as a speaker, and the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs on the platform. The building was packed--the aisles full. The audience was ready for fun, and he gave it to them. Nobody escaped ridicule; from beginning to end the house was a storm of laughter and applause. Not a word of this first address of Mark Twain's has been preserved, but those who heard it always spoke of it as the greatest effort of his life, as to them it seemed, no doubt. For his Third House address, Clemens was presented with a gold watch, inscribed "To Governor Mark Twain." Everywhere, now, he was pointed out as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted. Few of these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still unforgotten. At a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, he said: "Well, why am I like the Pacific Ocean?" Several guesses were made, but he shook his head. Some one said: "We give it up. Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?" "I--don't--know," he drawled. "I was just--asking for information." The governor of Nevada was generally absent, and Orion Clemens was executive head of the territory. His wife, who had joined him in Carson City, was social head of the little capital, and Brother Sam, with his new distinction and now once more something of a dandy in dress, was society's chief ornament--a great change, certainly, from the early months of his arrival less than three years before. It was near the end of May, 1864, when Mark Twain left Nevada for San Francisco. The immediate cause of his going was a duel--a duel elaborately arranged between Mark Twain and the editor of a rival paper, but never fought. In fact, it was mainly a burlesque affair throughout, chiefly concocted by that inveterate joker, Steve Gillis, already mentioned in connection with the pipe incident. The new dueling law, however, did not distinguish between real and mock affrays, and the prospect of being served with a summons made a good excuse for Clemens and Gillis to go to San Francisco, which had long attracted them. They were great friends, these two, and presently were living together and working on the same paper, the "Morning Call," Clemens as a reporter and Gillis as a compositor. Gillis, with his tendency to mischief, was a constant exasperation to his room-mate, who, goaded by some new torture, would sometimes denounce him in feverish terms. Yet they were never anything but the closest friends. Mark Twain did not find happiness in his new position on the "Call." There was less freedom and more drudgery than he had known on the "Enterprise." His day was spent around the police court, attending fires, weddings, and funerals, with brief glimpses of the theaters at night. Once he wrote: "It was fearful drudgery--soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man." It must have been so. There was little chance for original work. He had become just a part of a news machine. He saw many public abuses that he wished to expose, but the policy of the paper opposed him. Once, however, he found a policeman asleep on his beat. Going to a near-by vegetable stall, he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back, and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. He knew the paper would not publish the policeman's negligence, but he could advertise it in his own way. A large crowd soon collected, much amused. When he thought the audience large enough, he went away. Next day the joke was all over the city. He grew indifferent to the "Call" work, and, when an assistant was allowed him to do part of the running for items, it was clear to everybody that presently the assistant would be able to do it all. But there was a pleasant and profitable side to the San Francisco life. There were real literary people there--among them a young man, with rooms upstairs in the "Call" office, Francis Bret Harte, editor of the "Californian," a new literary weekly which Charles Henry Webb had recently founded. Bret Harte was not yet famous, but his gifts were recognized on the Pacific slope, especially by the "Era" group of writers, the "Golden Era" being a literary monthly of considerable distinction. Joaquin Miller recalls, from his diary of that period, having seen Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and others, all assembled there at one time--a remarkable group, certainly, to be dropped down behind the Sierras so long ago. They were a hopeful, happy lot, and sometimes received five dollars for an article, which, of course, seemed a good deal more precious than a much larger sum earned in another way. Mark Twain had contributed to the "Era" while still in Virginia City, and now, with Bret Harte, was ranked as a leader of the group. The two were much together, and when Harte became editor of the "Californian" he engaged Clemens as a regular contributor at the very fancy rate of twelve dollars an article. Some of the brief chapters included to-day in "Sketches New and Old" were done at this time. They have humor, but are not equal to his later work, and beyond the Pacific slope they seem to have attracted little attention. In "Roughing It" the author tells us how he finally was dismissed from the "Call" for general incompetency, and presently found himself in the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. But this is only his old habit of making a story on himself sound as uncomplimentary as possible. The true version is that the "Call" publisher and Mark Twain had a friendly talk and decided that it was better for both to break off the connection. Almost immediately he arranged to write a daily San Francisco letter for the "Enterprise," for which he received thirty dollars a week. This, with his earnings from the "Californian," made his total return larger than before. Very likely he was hard up from time to time--literary men are often that--but that he was ever in abject poverty, as he would have us believe, is just a good story and not history. XXIV. THE DISCOVERY OF "THE JUMPING FROG" Mark Twain's daily letters to the "Enterprise" stirred up trouble for him in San Francisco. He was free, now, to write what he chose, and he attacked the corrupt police management with such fierceness that, when copies of the "Enterprise" got back to San Francisco, they started a commotion at the city hall. Then Mark Twain let himself go more vigorously than ever. He sent letters to the "Enterprise" that made even the printers afraid. Goodman, however, was fearless, and let them go in, word for word. The libel suit which the San Francisco chief of police brought against the Enterprise advertised the paper amazingly. But now came what at the time seemed an unfortunate circumstance. Steve Gillis, always a fearless defender of the weak, one night rushed to the assistance of two young fellows who had been set upon by three roughs. Gillis, though small of stature, was a terrific combatant, and he presently put two of the assailants to flight and had the other ready for the hospital. Next day it turned out that the roughs were henchmen of the police, and Gillis was arrested. Clemens went his bail, and advised Steve to go down to Virginia City until the storm blew over. But it did not blow over for Mark Twain. The police department was only too glad to have a chance at the author of the fierce "Enterprise" letters, and promptly issued a summons for him, with an execution against his personal effects. If James N. Gillis, brother of Steve, had not happened along just then and spirited Mark Twain away to his mining-camp in the Tuolumne Hills, the beautiful gold watch given to the governor of the Third House might have been sacrificed in the cause of friendship. As it was, he found himself presently in the far and peaceful seclusion of that land which Bret Harte would one day make famous with his tales of "Roaring Camp" and "Sandy Bar." Jim Gillis was, in fact, the Truthful James of Bret Harte, and his cabin on jackass Hill had been the retreat of Harte and many another literary wayfarer who had wandered there for rest and refreshment and peace. It was said the sick were made well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin. There were plenty of books and a variety of out-of-door recreation. One could mine there if he chose. Jim would furnish the visiting author with a promising claim, and teach him to follow the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the pocket of treasure somewhere up the hillside. Gillis himself had literary ability, though he never wrote. He told his stories, and with his back to the open fire would weave the most amazing tales, invented as he went along. His stories were generally wonderful adventures that had happened to his faithful companion, Stoker; and Stoker never denied them, but would smoke and look into the fire, smiling a little sometimes, but never saying a word. A number of the tales later used by Mark Twain were first told by Jim Gillis in the cabin on Jackass Hill. "Dick Baker's Cat" was one of these, the jay-bird and acorn story in "A Tramp Abroad" was another. Mark Twain had little to add to these stories. "They are not mine, they are Jim's," he said, once; "but I never could get them to sound like Jim--they were never as good as his." It was early in December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at the humble retreat, built of logs under a great live-oak tree, and surrounded by a stretch of blue-grass. A younger Gillis boy was there at the time, and also, of course, Dick Stoker and his cat, Tom Quartz, which every reader of "Roughing It" knows. It was the rainy season, but on pleasant days they all went pocket-mining, and, in January, Mark Twain, Gillis, and Stoker crossed over into Calaveras County and began work near Angel's Camp, a place well known to readers of Bret Harte. They put up at a poor hotel in Angel's, and on good days worked pretty faithfully. But it was generally raining, and the food was poor. In his note-book, still preserved, Mark Twain wrote: "January 27 (1865). --Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back." So they spent a good deal of their time around the rusty stove in the dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp. It seemed a profitless thing to do, but few experiences were profitless to Mark Twain, and certainly this one was not. At this barren mining hotel there happened to be a former Illinois River pilot named Ben Coon, a solemn, sleepy person, who dozed by the stove or told slow, pointless stories to any one who would listen. Not many would stay to hear him, but Jim Gillis and Mark Twain found him a delight. They would let him wander on in his dull way for hours, and saw a vast humor in a man to whom all tales, however trivial or absurd, were serious history. At last, one dreary afternoon, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named Coleman, who had trained it to jump, and how the trained frog had failed to win a wager because the owner of the rival frog had slyly loaded the trained jumper with shot. It was not a new story in the camps, but Ben Coon made a long tale of it, and it happened that neither Clemens nor Gillis had heard it before. They thought it amusing, and his solemn way of telling it still more so. "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's better than any other frog," became a catch phrase among the mining partners; and, "I 'ain't got no frog, but if I had a frog, I'd bet you." Out on the claim, Clemens, watching Gillis and Stoker anxiously washing, would say, "I don't see no pints about that pan o' dirt that's any better than any other pan o' dirt." And so they kept the tale going. In his note-book Mark Twain made a brief memorandum of the story for possible use. The mining was rather hopeless work. The constant and heavy rains were disheartening. Clemens hated it, and even when, one afternoon, traces of a pocket began to appear, he rebelled as the usual chill downpour set in. "Jim," he said, "let's go home; we'll freeze here." Gillis, as usual, was washing, and Clemens carrying the water. Gillis, seeing the gold "color" improving with every pan, wanted to go on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of wet and cold. Clemens, shivering and disgusted, vowed that each pail of water would be his last. His teeth were chattering, and he was wet through. Finally he said: "Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work too disagreeable." Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. "Bring one more pail, Sam," he begged. "Jim I won't do it. I'm-freezing." "Just one more pail, Sam!" Jim pleaded. "No, sir; not a drop--not if I knew there was a million dollars in that pan." Gillis tore out a page of his note-book and hastily posted a thirty-day-claim notice by the pan of dirt. Then they set out for Angel's Camp, never to return. It kept on raining, and a letter came from Steve Gillis, saying he had settled all the trouble in San Francisco. Clemens decided to return, and the miners left Angel's without visiting their claim again. Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of dirt they had left standing on the hillside, exposing a handful of nuggets, pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, happening along, gathered it up and, seeing the claim notice posted by Jim Gillis, sat down to wait until it expired. They did not mind the rain--not under the circumstances--and the moment the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out, some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket that Mark Twain missed by one pail of water. Still, without knowing it, he had carried away in his note-book a single nugget of far greater value the story of "The Jumping Frog." He did not write it, however, immediately upon his return to San Francisco. He went back to his "Enterprise" letters and contributed some sketches to the Californian. Perhaps he thought the frog story too mild in humor for the slope. By and by he wrote it, and by request sent it to Artemus Ward to be used in a book that Ward was about to issue. It arrived too late, and the publisher handed it to the editor of the "Saturday Press," Henry Clapp, saying: "Here, Clapp, is something you can use in your paper." The "Press" was struggling, and was glad to get a story so easily. "Jim Smiley and his jumping Frog" appeared in the issue of November 18, 1865, and was at once copied and quoted far and near. It carried the name of Mark Twain across the mountains and the prairies of the Middle West; it bore it up and down the Atlantic slope. Some one said, then or later, that Mark Twain leaped into fame on the back of a jumping frog. Curiously, this did not at first please the author. He thought the tale poor. To his mother he wrote: I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward. However, somewhat later he changed his mind considerably, especially when he heard that James Russell Lowell had pronounced the story the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America. XXV. HAWAII AND ANSON BURLINGAME Mark Twain remained about a year in San Francisco after his return from the Gillis cabin and Angel's Camp, adding to his prestige along the Coast rather than to his national reputation. Then, in the spring of 1866 he was commissioned by the "Sacramento Union" to write a series of letters that would report the life, trade, agriculture, and general aspects of the Hawaiian group. He sailed in March, and his four months in those delectable islands remained always to him a golden memory--an experience which he hoped some day to repeat. He was young and eager for adventure then, and he went everywhere--horseback and afoot--saw everything, did everything, and wrote of it all for his paper. His letters to the "Union" were widely read and quoted, and, though not especially literary, added much to his journalistic standing. He was a great sight-seer in those days, and a persevering one. No discomfort or risk discouraged him. Once, with a single daring companion, he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea, racing across the burning lava, leaping wide and bottomless crevices where a misstep would have meant death. His open-air life on the river and in the mining-camps had nerved and hardened him for adventure. He was thirty years old and in his physical prime. His mental growth had been slower, but it was sure, and it would seem always to have had the right guidance at the right time. Clemens had been in the islands three months when one day Anson Burlingame arrived there, en route to his post as minister to China. With him was his son Edward, a boy of eighteen, and General Van Valkenburg, minister to Japan. Young Burlingame had read about Jim Smiley's jumping frog and, learning that the author was in Honolulu, but ill after a long trip inland, sent word that the party would call on him next morning. But Mark Twain felt that he could not accept this honor, and, crawling out of bed, shaved himself and drove to the home of the American minister, where the party was staying. He made a great impression with the diplomats. It was an occasion of good stories and much laughter. On leaving, General Van Valkenburg said to him: "California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people will be, too, no doubt." Which was certainly a good prophecy. It was only a few days later that the diplomats rendered him a great service. Report had come of the arrival at Sanpahoe of an open boat containing fifteen starving men, who had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days--sailors from the missing ship Hornet of New York, which, it appeared, had been burned at sea. Presently eleven of the rescued men were brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital. Mark Twain recognized the great importance as news of this event. It would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story in his paper. There was no cable, but a vessel was sailing for San Francisco next morning. It seemed the opportunity of a lifetime, but he was now bedridden and could scarcely move. Then suddenly appeared in his room Anson Burlingame and his party, and, almost before Mark Twain realized what was happening, he was on a cot and, escorted by the heads of two legations, was on his way to the hospital to get the precious interview. Once there, Anson Burlingame, with his gentle manner and courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of the burning of the vessel, followed by the long privation and struggle that had lasted through forty-three fearful days and across four thousand miles of stormy sea. All that Mark Twain had to do was to listen and make notes. That night he wrote against time, and next morning, just as the vessel was drifting from the dock, a strong hand flung his bulky manuscript aboard and his great beat was sure. The three-column story, published in the "Sacramento Union" of July 9, gave the public the first detailed history of the great disaster. The telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. Mark Twain and the Burlingame party were much together during the rest of their stay in Hawaii, and Samuel Clemens never ceased to love and honor the memory of Anson Burlingame. It was proper that he should do so, for he owed him much--far more than has already been told. Anson Burlingame one day said to him: "You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." This, coming to him from a man of Burlingame's character and position, was like a gospel from some divine source. Clemens never forgot the advice. It gave him courage, new hope, new resolve, new ideals. Burlingame came often to the hotel, and they discussed plans for Mark Twain's future. The diplomat invited the journalist to visit him in China: "Come to Pekin," he said, "and make my house your home." Young Burlingame also came, when the patient became convalescent, and suggested walks. Once, when Clemens hesitated, the young man said: "But there is a scriptural command for you to go." "If you can quote one, I'll obey," said Clemens. "Very well; the Bible says: `If any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him Twain.'" The walk was taken. Mark Twain returned to California at the end of July, and went down to Sacramento. It was agreed that a special bill should be made for the "Hornet" report. "How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?" asked one of the proprietors. Clemens said: "Oh, I'm a modest man; I don't want the whole 'Union' office; call it a hundred dollars a column." There was a general laugh. The bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the office for payment. "The cashier didn't faint," he wrote many years later, "but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but `no matter, pay it. It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a paper." [6] [6] "My Debut as a Literary Person." XXVI. MARK TWAIN, LECTURER In spite of the success of his Sandwich Island letters, Samuel Clemens felt, on his return to San Francisco, that his future was not bright. He was not a good, all-round newspaper man--he was special correspondent and sketch-writer, out of a job. He had a number of plans, but they did not promise much. One idea was to make a book from his Hawaiian material. Another was to write magazine articles, beginning with one on the Hornet disaster. He did, in fact, write the Hornet article, and its prompt acceptance by "Harper's Magazine" delighted him, for it seemed a start in the right direction. A third plan was to lecture on the islands. This prospect frightened him. He had succeeded in his "Third House" address of two years before, but then he had lectured without charge and for a church benefit. This would be a different matter. One of the proprietors of a San Francisco paper, Col. John McComb, of the "Alta California," was strong in his approval of the lecture idea. "Do it, by all means," he said. "Take the largest house in the city, and charge a dollar a ticket." Without waiting until his fright came back, Mark Twain hurried to the manager of the Academy of Music, and engaged it for a lecture to be given October 2d (1866), and sat down and wrote his announcement. He began by stating what he would speak upon, and ended with a few absurdities, such as: A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town, but has not been engaged. Also A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be on exhibition in the next block. A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please. Doors open at 7 o'clock. The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock. Mark Twain was well known in San Francisco, and was pretty sure to have a good house. But he did not realize this, and, as the evening approached, his dread of failure increased. Arriving at the theater, he entered by the stage door, half expecting to find the place empty. Then, suddenly, he became more frightened than ever; peering from the wings, he saw that the house was jammed--packed from the footlights to the walls! Terrified, his knees shaking, his tongue dry, he managed to emerge, and was greeted with a roar, a crash of applause that nearly finished him. Only for an instant--reaction followed; these people were his friends, and he was talking to them. He forgot to be afraid, and, as the applause came in great billows that rose ever higher, he felt himself borne with it as on a tide of happiness and success. His evening, from beginning to end, was a complete triumph. Friends declared that for descriptive eloquence, humor, and real entertainment nothing like his address had ever been delivered. The morning papers were enthusiastic. Mark Twain no longer hesitated as to what he should do now. He would lecture. The book idea no longer attracted him; the appearance of the "Hornet" article, signed, through a printer's error, "Mark Swain," cooled his desire to be a magazine contributor. No matter--lecturing was the thing. Dennis McCarthy, who had sold his interest in the "Enterprise," was in San Francisco. Clemens engaged this honest, happy-hearted Irishman as manager, and the two toured California and Nevada with continuous success. Those who remember Mark Twain as a lecturer in that early day say that on entering he would lounge loosely across the platform, his manuscript --written on wrapping-paper and carried under his arm--looking like a ruffled hen. His delivery they recall as being even more quaint and drawling than in later life. Once, when his lecture was over, an old man came up to him and said: "Be them your natural tones of eloquence?" In those days it was thought proper that a lecturer should be introduced, and Clemens himself used to tell of being presented by an old miner, who said: "Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is, I don't know why." When he reached Virginia, his old friend Goodman said, "Sam, you don't need anybody to introduce you," and he suggested a novel plan. That night, when the curtain rose, it showed Mark Twain seated at a piano, playing and singing, as if still cub pilot on the "John J. Roe:" "Had an old horse whose name was Methusalem, Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem, A long time ago." Pretending to be surprised and startled at the burst of applause, he sprang up and began to talk. How the audience enjoyed it! Mark Twain continued his lecture tour into December, and then, on the 15th of that month, sailed by way of the Isthmus of Panama for New York. He had made some money, and was going home to see his people. He had planned to make a trip around the world later, contributing a series of letters to the "Alta California," lecturing where opportunity afforded. He had been on the Coast five and a half years, and to his professions of printing and piloting had added three others--mining, journalism, and lecturing. Also, he had acquired a measure of fame. He could come back to his people with a good account of his absence and a good heart for the future. But it seems now only a chance that he arrived at all. Crossing the Isthmus, he embarked for New York on what proved to be a cholera ship. For a time there were one or more funerals daily. An entry in his diary says: "Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers. "But the winter air of the North checked the contagion, and there were no new cases when New York City was reached." Clemens remained but a short time in New York, and was presently in St. Louis with his mother and sister. They thought he looked old, but he had not changed in manner, and the gay banter between mother and son was soon as lively as ever. He was thirty-one now, and she sixty-four, but the years had made little difference. She petted him, joked with him, and scolded him. In turn, he petted and comforted and teased her. She decided he was the same Sam and always would be--a true prophecy. He visited Hannibal and lectured there, receiving an ovation that would have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. In Keokuk he lectured again, then returned to St. Louis to plan his trip around the world. He was not to make a trip around the world, however--not then. In St. Louis he saw the notice of the great "Quaker City" Holy Land excursion --the first excursion of the kind ever planned--and was greatly taken with the idea. Impulsive as always, he wrote at once to the "Alta California," proposing that they send him as their correspondent on this grand ocean picnic. The cost of passage was $1.200, and the "Alta" hesitated, but Colonel McComb, already mentioned, assured his associates that the investment would be sound. The "Alta" wrote, accepting Mark Twain's proposal, and agreed to pay twenty dollars each for letters. Clemens hurried to New York to secure a berth, fearing the passenger-list might be full. Furthermore, with no one of distinction to vouch for him, according to advertised requirements, he was not sure of being accepted. Arriving in New York, he learned from an "Alta" representative that passage had already been reserved for him, but he still doubted his acceptance as one of the distinguished advertised company. His mind was presently relieved on this point. Waiting his turn at the booking-desk, he heard a newspaper man inquire: "What notables are going?" A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names: "Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mark Twain; also, probably, General Banks." It was very pleasant to hear the clerk say that. Not only was he accepted, but billed as an attraction. The "Quaker City" would not sail for two months yet, and during the period of waiting Mark Twain was far from idle. He wrote New York letters to the "Alta," and he embarked in two rather important ventures --he published his first book and he delivered a lecture in New York City. Both these undertakings were planned and carried out by friends from the Coast. Charles Henry Webb, who had given up his magazine to come East, had collected "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," and, after trying in vain to find a publisher for them, brought them out himself, on the 1st of May, 1867.[7] It seems curious now that any publisher should have declined the little volume, for the sketches, especially the frog story, had been successful, and there was little enough good American humor in print. However, publishing was a matter not lightly undertaken in those days. Mark Twain seems to have been rather pleased with the appearance of his first book. To Bret Harte he wrote: The book is out and is handsome. It is full of . . . errors....but be a friend and say nothing about those things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a copy to pizen the children with. The little cloth-and-gold volume, so valued by book-collectors to-day, contained the frog story and twenty-six other sketches, some of which are still preserved in Mark Twain's collected works. Most of them were not Mark Twain's best literature, but they were fresh and readable and suited the taste of that period. The book sold very well, and, while it did not bring either great fame or fortune to its author, it was by no means a failure. The "hurry" mentioned in Mark Twain's letter to Bret Harte related to his second venture--that is to say, his New York lecture, an enterprise managed by an old Comstock friend, Frank Fuller, ex-Governor of Utah. Fuller, always a sanguine and energetic person, had proposed the lecture idea as soon as Mark Twain arrived in New York. Clemens shook his head. "I have no reputation with the general public here," he said. "We couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me." But Fuller insisted, and eventually engaged the largest hall in New York, the Cooper Union. Full of enthusiasm and excitement, he plunged into the business of announcing and advertising his attraction, and inventing schemes for the sale of seats. Clemens caught Fuller's enthusiasm by spells, but between times he was deeply depressed. Fuller had got up a lot of tiny hand-bills, and had arranged to hang bunches of these in the horse-cars. The little dangling clusters fascinated Clemens, and he rode about to see if anybody else noticed them. Finally, after a long time, a passenger pulled off one of the bills and glanced at it. A man with him asked: "Who's Mark Twain?" "Goodness knows! I don't." The lecturer could not ride any farther. He hunted up his patron. "Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest." Fuller assured him that things were "working underneath," and would be all right. But Clemens wrote home: "Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark." And he added that, after hiring the largest house in New York, he must play against Schuyler Colfax, Ristori, and a double troupe of Japanese jugglers, at other places of amusement. When the evening of the lecture approached and only a few tickets had been sold, the lecturer was desperate. "Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in Cooper Union that night but you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the house, Fuller. You must send out a flood of complimentaries!" "Very well," said Fuller. "What we want this time is reputation, anyway --money is secondary. I'll put you before the choicest and most intelligent audience that was ever gathered in New York City." Fuller immediately sent out complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn---a general invitation to come and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on the Sandwich Islands. There was nothing to do after that but wait results. Mark Twain had lost faith--he did not believe anybody in New York would come to hear him even on a free ticket. When the night arrived, he drove with Fuller to the Cooper Union half an hour before the lecture was to begin. Forty years later he said: "I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth Cave, and die. But when we got near the building, I saw all the streets were blocked with people and that traffic had stopped. I couldn't believe that these people were trying to get to the Cooper Institute--but they were; and when I got to the stage, at last, the house was jammed full--packed; there wasn't room enough left for a child. "I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise." So in its way this venture was a success. It brought Mark Twain a good deal of a reputation in New York, even if no financial profit, though, in spite of the flood of complimentaries, there was a cash return of something like three hundred dollars. This went a good way toward paying the expenses, while Fuller, in his royal way, insisted on making up the deficit, declaring he had been paid for everything in the fun and joy of the game. "Mark," he said, "it's all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out, you are going to be the most-talked-of man in the country. Your letters to the 'Alta' and the 'Tribune' will get the widest reception of any letters of travel ever written." XXVII. AN INNOCENT ABROAD, AND HOME AGAIN It was early in May--the 6th--that Mark Twain had delivered his Cooper Union lecture, and a month later, June 8, 1867, he sailed on the "Quaker City," with some sixty-six other "pilgrims," on the great Holy Land excursion, the story of which has been so fully and faithfully told in "The Innocent Abroad." What a wonderful thing it must have seemed in that time for a party of excursionists to have a ship all to themselves to go a-gipsying in from port to port of antiquity and romance! The advertised celebrities did not go, none of them but Mark Twain, but no one minded, presently, for Mark Twain's sayings and stories kept the company sufficiently entertained, and sometimes he would read aloud to his fellow-passengers from the newspaper letters he was writing, and invite comment and criticism. That was entertainment for them, and it was good for him, for it gave him an immediate audience, always inspiring to an author. Furthermore, the comments offered were often of the greatest value, especially suggestions from one Mrs. Fairbanks, of Cleveland, a middle-aged, cultured woman, herself a correspondent for her husband's paper, the "Herald". It requires not many days for acquaintances to form on shipboard, and in due time a little group gathered regularly each afternoon to hear Mark Twain read what he had written of their day's doings, though some of it he destroyed later because Mrs. Fairbanks thought it not his best. All of the "pilgrims" mentioned in "The Innocents Abroad" were real persons. "Dan" was Dan Slote, Mark Twain's room-mate; the Doctor who confused the guides was Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, of Chicago; the poet Lariat was Bloodgood H. Cutter, an eccentric from Long Island; "Jack" was Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey; and "Moult" and "Blucher" and "Charlie" were likewise real, the last named being Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira, N. Y., a boy of eighteen, whose sister would one day become Mark Twain's wife. It has been said that Mark Twain first met Olivia Langdon on the "Quaker City," but this is not quite true; he met only her picture--the original was not on that ship. Charlie Langdon, boy fashion, made a sort of hero of the brilliant man called Mark Twain, and one day in the Bay of Smyrna invited him to his cabin and exhibited his treasures, among them a dainty miniature of a sister at home, Olivia, a sweet, delicate creature whom the boy worshiped. Samuel Clemens gazed long at the exquisite portrait and spoke of it reverently, for in the sweet face he seemed to find something spiritual. Often after that he came to young Langdon's cabin to look at the pictured countenance, in his heart dreaming of a day when he might learn to know its owner. We need not follow in detail here the travels of the "pilgrims" and their adventures. Most of them have been fully set down in "The Innocents Abroad," and with not much elaboration, for plenty of amusing things were happening on a trip of that kind, and Mark Twain's old note-books are full of the real incidents that we find changed but little in the book. If the adventures of Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are embroidered here and there, the truth is always there, too. Yet the old note-books have a very intimate interest of their own. It is curious to be looking through them to-day, trying to realize that those penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked through Italy and climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. It required five months for the "Quaker City" to make the circuit of the Mediterranean and return to New York. Mark Twain in that time contributed fifty two or three letters to the "Alta California" and six to the "New York Tribune," or an average of nearly three a week--a vast amount of labor to be done in the midst of sight-seeing. And what letters of travel they were! The most remarkable that had been written up to that time. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the tiresome descriptive drivel of that day. They preached a new gospel in travel literature--the gospel of seeing honestly and speaking frankly--a gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during the rest of his career. Furthermore, the letters showed a great literary growth in their author. No doubt the cultivated associations of the ship, the afternoon reading aloud of his work, and Mrs. Fairbanks's advice had much to do with this. But we may believe, also, that the author's close study of the King James version of the Old Testament during the weeks of travel through Palestine exerted a powerful influence upon his style. The man who had recited "The Burial of Moses" to Joe Goodman, with so much feeling, could not fail to be mastered by the simple yet stately Bible phrase and imagery. Many of the fine descriptive passages in "The Innocents Abroad" have something almost Biblical in their phrasing. The writer of this memoir heard in childhood "The Innocents Abroad" read aloud, and has never forgotten the poetic spell that fell upon him as he listened to a paragraph written of Tangier: "Here is a crumbled wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and His disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes." Mark Twain returned to America to find himself, if not famous, at least in very high repute. The "Alta" and "Tribune" letters had carried his name to every corner of his native land. He was in demand now. To his mother he wrote: "I have eighteen offers to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts of the Union--have declined them all . . . . Belong on the "Tribune" staff and shall write occasionally. Am offered the same berth to-day on the 'Herald,' by letter." He was in Washington at this time, having remained in New York but one day. He had accepted a secretaryship from Senator Stewart of Nevada, but this arrangement was a brief one. He required fuller freedom for his Washington correspondence and general literary undertakings. He had been in Washington but a few days when he received a letter that meant more to him than he could possibly have dreamed at the moment. It was from Elisha Bliss, Jr., manager of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford, Connecticut, and it suggested gathering the Mediterranean travel-letters into a book. Bliss was a capable, energetic man, with a taste for humor, and believed there was money for author and publisher in the travel-book. The proposition pleased Mark Twain, who replied at once, asking for further details as to Bliss's plan. Somewhat later he made a trip to Hartford, and the terms for the publication of "The Innocents Abroad" were agreed upon. It was to be a large illustrated book for subscription sale, and the author was to receive five per cent of the selling price. Bliss had offered him the choice between this royalty and ten thousand dollars cash. Though much tempted by the large sum to be paid in hand, Mark Twain decided in favor of the royalty plan--"the best business judgment I ever displayed," he used to say afterward. He agreed to arrange the letters for book publication, revising and rewriting where necessary, and went back to Washington well pleased. He did not realize that his agreement with Bliss marked the beginning of one of the most notable publishing connections in American literary history. XXVIII. OLIVIA LANGDON. WORK ON THE "INNOCENTS" Certainly this was a momentous period in Mark Twain's life. It was a time of great events, and among them was one which presently would come to mean more to him than all the rest--the beginning of his acquaintance with Olivia Langdon. One evening in late December when Samuel Clemens had come to New York to visit his old "Quaker City" room-mate, Dan Slote, he found there other ship comrades, including Jack Van Nostrand and Charlie Langdon. It was a joyful occasion, but one still happier followed it. Young Langdon's father and sister Olivia were in New York, and an evening or two later the boy invited his distinguished "Quaker City" shipmate to dine with them at the old St. Nicholas Hotel. We may believe that Samuel Clemens went willingly enough. He had never forgotten the September day in the Bay of Smyrna when he had first seen the sweet-faced miniature--now, at last he looked upon the reality. Long afterward he said: "It was forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of my mind." Charles Dickens gave a reading that night at Steinway Hall. The Langdons attended, and Samuel Clemens with them. He recalled long after that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery-red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from "David Copperfield" --the death of James Steerforth; but he remembered still more clearly the face and dress and the slender, girlish figure of Olivia Langdon at his side. Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the miniature he had seen, though no longer in the fragile health of her girlhood. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and Samuel Clemens was no less her worshiper from the first moment of their meeting. Miss Langdon, on her part, was at first rather dazed by the strange, brilliant, handsome man, so unlike anything she had known before. When he had gone, she had the feeling that something like a great meteor had crossed her sky. To her brother, who was eager for her good opinion of his celebrity, she admitted her admiration, if not her entire approval. Her father had no doubts. With a keen sense of humor and a deep knowledge of men, Jervis Langdon was from that first evening the devoted champion of Mark Twain. Clemens saw Miss Langdon again during the holidays, and by the week's end he had planned to visit Elmira--soon. But fate managed differently. He was not to see Elmira for the better part of a year. He returned to his work in Washington--the preparation of the book and his newspaper correspondence. It was in connection with the latter that he first met General Grant, then not yet President. The incident, characteristic of both men, is worth remembering. Mark Twain had called by permission, elated with the prospect of an interview. But when he looked into the square, smileless face of the soldier he found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller wished something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned. "General," he said, "I seem to be slightly embarrassed. Are you?" Grant's severity broke up in laughter. There were no further difficulties. Work on the book did not go so well. There were many distractions in Washington, and Clemens did not like the climate there. Then he found the "Alta" had copyrighted his letters and were reluctant to allow him to use them. He decided to sail at once for San Francisco. If he could arrange the "Alta" matter, he would finish his work there. He did, in fact, carry out this plan, and all difficulties vanished on his arrival. His old friend Colonel McComb obtained for him free use of the "Alta" letters. The way was now clear for his book. His immediate need of funds, however, induced him to lecture. In May he wrote Bliss: "I lectured here on the trip (the Quaker City excursion) the other night; $1,600 in gold in the house; every seat taken and paid for before night." He settled down to work now with his usual energy, editing and rewriting, and in two months had the big manuscript ready for delivery. Mark Twain's friends urged him to delay his return to "the States" long enough to make a lecture tour through California and Nevada. He must give his new lecture, they told him, to his old friends. He agreed, and was received at Virginia City, Carson, and elsewhere like a returning conqueror. He lectured again in San Francisco just before sailing. The announcement of his lecture was highly original. It was a hand-bill supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of San Francisco, a mock protest against his lecture, urging him to return to New York without inflicting himself on them again. On the same bill was printed his reply. In it he said: "I will torment the people if I want to. It only costs them $1 apiece, and, if they can't stand it, what do they stay here for?" He promised positively to sail on July 6th if they would let him talk just this once. There was a good deal more of this drollery on the bill, which ended with the announcement that he would appear at the Mercantile Library on July 2d. It is unnecessary to say that the place was jammed on that evening. It was probably the greatest lecture event San Francisco has ever known. Four days later, July 6, 1868, Mark Twain sailed, via Aspinwall, for New York, and on the 28th delivered the manuscript of "The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress," to his Hartford publisher. XXIX THE VISIT TO ELMIRA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Samuel Clemens now decided to pay his long-deferred visit to the Langdon home in Elmira. Through Charlie Langdon he got the invitation renewed, and for a glorious week enjoyed the generous hospitality of the beautiful Langdon home and the society of fair Olivia Langdon--Livy, as they called her--realizing more and more that for him there could never be any other woman in the world. He spoke no word of this to her, but on the morning of the day when his visit would end he relieved himself to Charlie Langdon, much to the young man's alarm. Greatly as he admired Mark Twain himself, he did not think him, or, indeed, any man, good enough for "Livy," whom he considered little short of a saint. Clemens was to take a train that evening, but young Langdon said, when he recovered: "Look here, Clemens, there's a train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't wait until tonight; go now!" Mark Twain shook his head. "No, Charlie," he said, in his gentle drawl. "I want to enjoy your hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go to-night." That night after dinner, when it was time to take the train, a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. Young Langdon and his guest took the back seat, which, for some reason, had not been locked in its place. The horse started with a quick forward spring, and the seat with its two occupants described a circle and landed with force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt--only dazed a little for the moment. But to Mark Twain there came a sudden inspiration. Here was a chance to prolong his visit. When the Langdon household gathered with restoratives, he did not recover at once, and allowed himself to be supported to an arm-chair for further remedies. Livy Langdon showed especial anxiety. He was not allowed to go, now, of course; he must stay until it was certain that his recovery was complete. Perhaps he had been internally injured. His visit was prolonged two weeks, two weeks of pure happiness, and when he went away he had fully resolved to win Livy Langdon for his wife. Mark Twain now went to Hartford to look after his book proofs, and there for the first time met the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, who would become his closest friend. The two men, so different in many ways, always had the fondest admiration for each other; each recognized in the other great courage, humanity, and sympathy. Clemens would gladly have remained in Hartford that winter. Twichell presented him to many congenial people, including Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other writing folk. But flattering lecture offers were made him, and he could no longer refuse. He called his new lecture "The Vandal Abroad," it being chapters from the forthcoming book, and it was a great success everywhere. His houses were crowded; the newspapers were enthusiastic. His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause." He began to be recognized everywhere--to have great popularity. People came out on the street to see him pass. Many of his lecture engagements were in central New York, no great distance from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to visit the Langdon home, and went when he could. His courtship, however, was not entirely smooth. Much as Mr. Langdon honored his gifts and admired him personally, he feared that his daughter, who had known so little of life and the outside world, and the brilliant traveler, lecturer, author, might not find happiness in marriage. Many absurd stories have been told of Mark Twain's first interview with Jervis Langdon on this subject, but these are without foundation. It was an earnest discussion on both sides, and left Samuel Clemens rather crestfallen, though not without hope. More than once the subject was discussed between the two men that winter as the lecturer came and went, his fame always growing. In time the Langdon household had grown to feel that he belonged to them. It would be only a step further to make him really one of the family. There was no positive engagement at first, for it was agreed between Clemens and Jervis Langdon that letters should be sent by Mr. Langdon to those who had known his would-be son-in-law earlier, with inquiries as to his past conduct and general character. It was a good while till answers to these came, and when they arrived Samuel Clemens was on hand to learn the result. Mr. Langdon had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked, "You've heard from those gentlemen out there?" "Yes, and from another gentlemen I wrote to concerning you." "They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner." "Well, yes, some of them were." "I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took." "Oh, yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man --a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on record." The applicant had a forlorn look. "There is nothing very evasive about that," he said. Langdon reflected. "Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" "Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable." Jervis Langdon held out his hand. "You have at least one," he said. "I believe in you. I know you better then they do." The engagement of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869. To Jane Clemens her son wrote: "She is a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom." XXX. THE NEW BOOK AND A WEDDING Clemens closed his lecture tour in March with a profit of something more than eight thousand dollars. He had intended to make a spring tour of California, but went to Elmira instead. The revised proofs of his book were coming now, and he and gentle Livy Langdon read them together. Samuel Clemens realized presently that the girl he had chosen had a delicate literary judgment. She became all at once his editor, a position she held until her death. Her refining influence had much to do with Mark Twain's success, then and later, and the world owes her a debt of gratitude. Through that first pleasant summer these two worked at the proofs and planned for their future, and were very happy indeed. It was about the end of July when the big book appeared at last, and its success was startling. Nothing like it had ever been known before. Mark Twain's name seemed suddenly to be on every tongue--his book in everybody's hands. From one end of the country to the other, readers were hailing him as the greatest humorist and descriptive writer of modern times. By the first of the year more than thirty thousand volumes had been sold. It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars; the record has not been equaled since. In England also large editions had been issued, and translations into foreign languages were under way. It was and is a great book, because it is a human book --a book written straight from the heart. If Mark Twain had not been famous before, he was so now. Indeed, it is doubtful if any other American author was so widely known and read as the author of "The Innocents Abroad" during that first half-year after its publication. Yet for some reason he still did not regard himself as a literary man. He was a journalist, and began to look about for a paper which he could buy-his idea being to establish a business and a home. Through Mr. Langdon's assistance, he finally obtained an interest in the "Buffalo Express," and the end of the year 1869 found him established as its associate editor, though still lecturing here and there, because his wedding-day was near at hand and there must be no lack of funds. It was the 2d of February, 1870, that Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married. A few days before, he sat down one night and wrote to Jim Gillis, away out in the Tuolumne Hills, and told him of all his good fortune, recalling their days at Angel's Camp, and the absurd frog story, which he said had been the beginning of his happiness. In the five years since then he had traveled a long way, but he had not forgotten. On the morning of his wedding-day Mark Twain received from his publisher a check for four thousand dollars, his profit from three months' sales of the book, a handsome sum. The wedding was mainly a family affair. Twichell and his wife came over from Hartford--Twichell to assist Thomas K. Beecher in performing the ceremony. Jane Clemens could not come, nor Orion and his wife; but Pamela, a widow now, and her daughter Annie, grown to a young lady, arrived from St. Louis. Not more than one hundred guests gathered in the stately Langdon parlors that in future would hold so much history for Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon--so much of the story of life and death that thus made its beginning there. Then, at seven in the evening, they were married, and the bride danced with her father, and the Rev. Thomas Beecher declared she wore the longest gloves he had ever seen. It was the next afternoon that the wedding-party set out for Buffalo. Through a Mr. Slee, an agent of Mr. Langdon's, Clemens had engaged, as he supposed, a boarding-house, quiet and unpretentious, for he meant to start his married life modestly. Jervis Langdon had a plan of his own for his daughter, but Clemens had received no inkling of it, and had full faith in the letter which Slee had written, saying that a choice and inexpensive boarding-house had been secured. When, about nine o'clock that night, the party reached Buffalo, they found Mr. Slee waiting at the station. There was snow, and sleighs had been ordered. Soon after starting, the sleigh of the bride and groom fell behind and drove about rather aimlessly, apparently going nowhere in particular. This disturbed the groom, who thought they should arrive first and receive their guests. He criticized Slee for selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when they turned at last into Delaware Avenue, Buffalo's finest street, and stopped before a handsome house, he was troubled concerning the richness of the locality. They were on the steps when the door opened and a perfect fairyland of lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone ahead came out with greetings to lead in the bride and groom. Servants hurried forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of it all--the completeness of their possession. At last his young wife put her hand upon his arm. "Don't you understand, Youth?" she said--that was always her name for him. "Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift from father." But still he could not quite grasp it, and Mr. Langdon brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds. Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made, but either then or a little later he said: "Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It sha'n't cost you a cent." XXXI. MARK TWAIN IN BUFFALO Mark Twain remained less than two years in Buffalo--a period of much affliction. In the beginning, prospects could hardly have been brighter. His beautiful home seemed perfect. At the office he found work to his hand, and enjoyed it. His co-editor, J. W. Larned, who sat across the table from him, used to tell later how Mark enjoyed his work as he went along --the humor of it--frequently laughing as some new absurdity came into his mind. He was not very regular in his arrivals, but he worked long hours and turned in a vast amount of "copy"--skits, sketches, editorials, and comments of a varied sort. Not all of it was humorous; he would stop work any time on an amusing sketch to attack some abuse or denounce an injustice, and he did it in scorching words that made offenders pause. Once, when two practical jokers had sent in a marriage notice of persons not even contemplating matrimony, he wrote: "This deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides." In May he considerably increased his income by undertaking a department called "Memoranda" for the new "Galaxy" magazine. The outlook was now so promising that to his lecture agent, James Redpath, he wrote: "DEAR RED: I'm not going to lecture any more forever. I've got things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing. Therefore, old man, count me out." And in a second letter: "I guess I'm out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife, a lovely house bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-inspiring, nothing less; and I'm making more money than necessary, by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform! The subscriber will have to be excused, for the present season, at least." The little household on Delaware Avenue was indeed a happy place during those early months. Neither Clemens nor his wife in those days cared much for society, preferring the comfort of their own home. Once when a new family moved into a house across the way they postponed calling until they felt ashamed. Clemens himself called first. One Sunday morning he noticed smoke pouring from an upper window of their neighbor's house. The occupants, seated on the veranda, evidently did not suspect their danger. Clemens stepped across to the gate and, bowing politely, said: "My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on fire." It was at the moment when life seemed at its best that shadows gathered. Jervis Langdon had never accepted his son-in-law's playful invitation to "bring his bag and stay overnight," and now the time for it was past. In the spring his health gave way. Mrs. Clemens, who adored him, went to Elmira to be at his bedside. Three months of lingering illness brought the end. His death was a great blow to Mrs. Clemens, and the strain of watching had been very hard. Her own health, never robust, became poor. A girlhood friend, who came to cheer her with a visit, was taken down with typhoid fever. Another long period of anxiety and nursing ended with the young woman's death in the Clemens home. To Mark Twain and his wife it seemed that their bright days were over. The arrival of little Langdon Clemens, in November, brought happiness, but his delicate hold on life was so uncertain that the burden of anxiety grew. Amid so many distractions Clemens found his work hard. His "Memoranda" department in the "Galaxy" must be filled and be bright and readable. His work at the office could not be neglected. Then, too, he had made a contract with Bliss for another book "Roughing It"--and he was trying to get started on that. He began to chafe under the relentless demands of the magazine and newspaper. Finally he could stand it no longer. He sold his interest in the "Express," at a loss, and gave up the "Memoranda." In the closing number (April, 1871) he said: "For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish humorous matter, once a month, for this magazine .... To be a pirate on a low salary and with no share of the profits in the business used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier." XXXII. AT WORK ON "ROUGHING IT" The Clemens family now went to Elmira, to Quarry Farm--a beautiful hilltop place, overlooking the river and the town--the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane. They did not expect to return to Buffalo, and the house there was offered for sale. For them the sunlight had gone out of it. Matters went better at Quarry Farm. The invalids gained strength; work on the book progressed. The Clemenses that year fell in love with the place that was to mean so much to them in the many summers to come. Mark Twain was not altogether satisfied, however, with his writing. He was afraid it was not up to his literary standard. His spirits were at low ebb when his old first editor, Joe Goodman, came East and stopped off at Elmira. Clemens hurried him out to the farm, and, eagerly putting the chapters of "Roughing It" into his hands, asked him to read them. Goodman seated himself comfortably by a window, while the author went over to a table and pretended to write, but was really watching Goodman, who read page after page solemnly and with great deliberation. Presently Mark Twain could stand it no longer. He threw down his pen, exclaiming: "I knew it! I knew it! I've been writing nothing but rot. You have sat there all this time reading without a smile--but I am not wholly to blame. I have been trying to write a funny book with dead people and sickness everywhere. Oh, Joe, I wish I could die myself!" "Mark," said Goodman, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a great book!" That was enough. Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke idly of such matters. The author of "Roughing It" was a changed man--full of enthusiasm, eager to go on. He offered to pay Goodman a salary to stay and furnish inspiration. Goodman declined the salary, but remained for several weeks, and during long walks which the two friends took over the hills gave advice, recalled good material, and was a great help and comfort. In May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred manuscript pages of the new book written and was turning out from thirty to sixty-five per day. He was in high spirits. The family health had improved--once more prospects were bright. He even allowed Redpath to persuade him to lecture again during the coming season. Selling his share of the "Express" at a loss had left Mark Twain considerably in debt and lecture profits would furnish the quickest means of payment. When the summer ended the Clemens family took up residence in Hartford, Connecticut, in the fine old Hooker house, on Forest Street. Hartford held many attractions for Mark Twain. His publishers were located there, also it was the home of a distinguished group of writers, and of the Rev. "Joe" Twichell. Neither Clemens nor his wife had felt that they could return to Buffalo. The home there was sold--its contents packed and shipped. They did not see it again. His book finished, Mark Twain lectured pretty steadily that winter, often in the neighborhood of Boston, which was lecture headquarters. Mark Twain enjoyed Boston. In Redpath's office one could often meet and "swap stories" with Josh Billings (Henry W. Shaw) and Petroleum V. Nasby (David R. Locke)--well-known humorists of that day--while in the strictly literary circle there were William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bret Harte (who by this time had become famous and journeyed eastward), and others of their sort. They were all young and eager and merry, then, and they gathered at luncheons in snug corners and talked gaily far into the dimness of winter afternoons. Harte had been immediately accorded a high place in the Boston group. Mark Twain as a strictly literary man was still regarded rather doubtfully by members of the older set--the Brahmins, as they were called--but the young men already hailed him joyfully, reveling in the fine, fearless humor of his writing, his wonderful talk, his boundless humanity. XXXIII. IN ENGLAND Mark Twain closed his lecture season in February (1872), and during the same month his new book, "Roughing It," came from the press. He disliked the lecture platform, and he felt that he could now abandon it. He had made up his loss in Buffalo and something besides. Furthermore, the advance sales on his book had been large. "Roughing It," in fact, proved a very successful book. Like "The Innocents Abroad," it was the first of its kind, fresh in its humor and description, true in its picture of the frontier life he had known. In three months forty thousand copies had been sold, and now, after more than forty years, it is still a popular book. The life it describes is all gone-the scenes are changed. It is a record of a vanished time--a delightful history--as delightful to-day as ever. Eighteen hundred and seventy-two was an eventful year for Mark Twain. In March his second child, a little girl whom they named Susy, was born, and three months later the boy, Langdon, died. He had never been really strong, and a heavy cold and diphtheria brought the end. Clemens did little work that summer. He took his family to Saybrook, Connecticut, for the sea air, and near the end of August, when Mrs. Clemens had regained strength and courage, he sailed for England to gather material for a book on English life and customs. He felt very friendly toward the English, who had been highly appreciative of his writings, and he wished their better acquaintance. He gave out no word of the book idea, and it seems unlikely that any one in England ever suspected it. He was there three months, and beyond some notebook memoranda made during the early weeks of his stay he wrote not a line. He was too delighted with everything to write a book--a book of his kind. In letters home he declared the country to be as beautiful as fairyland. By all classes attentions were showered upon him--honors such as he had never received even in America. W. D. Howells writes:[8] "In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals, that spurned the rest of our nation." He could not make a book--a humorous book--out of these people and their country; he was too fond of them. England fairly reveled in Mark Twain. At one of the great banquets, a roll of the distinguished guests was called, and the names properly applauded. Mark Twain, busily engaged in low conversation with his neighbor, applauded without listening, vigorously or mildly, as the others led. Finally a name was followed by a great burst of long and vehement clapping. This must be some very great person indeed, and Mark Twain, not to be outdone in his approval, stoutly kept his hands going when all others had finished. "Whose name was that we were just applauding?" he asked of his neighbor. "Mark Twain's." But it was no matter; they took it all as one of his jokes. He was a wonder and a delight to them. Whatever he did or said was to them supremely amusing. When, on one occasion, a speaker humorously referred to his American habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he did so "because it was the only kind of an umbrella that an Englishman wouldn't steal," was repeated all over England next day as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift. He returned to America at the end of November; promising to come back and lecture to them the following year. [7] From "My Mark Twain," by W. D. Howells. XXXIV. A NEW BOOK AND NEW ENGLISH TRIUMPHS But if Mark Twain could find nothing to write of in England, he found no lack of material in America. That winter in Hartford, with Charles Dudley Warner, he wrote "The Gilded Age." The Warners were neighbors, and the families visited back and forth. One night at dinner, when the two husbands were criticizing the novels their wives were reading, the wives suggested that their author husbands write a better one. The challenge was accepted. On the spur of the moment Warner and Clemens agreed that they would write a book together, and began it immediately. Clemens had an idea already in mind. It was to build a romance around that lovable dreamer, his mother's cousin, James Lampton, whom the reader will recall from an earlier chapter. Without delay he set to work and soon completed the first three hundred and ninety-nine pages of the new story. Warner came over and, after listening to its reading, went home and took up the story. In two months the novel was complete, Warner doing most of the romance, Mark Twain the character parts. Warner's portion was probably pure fiction, but Mark Twain's chapters were full of history. Judge Hawkins and wife were Mark Twain's father and mother; Washington Hawkins, his brother Orion. Their doings, with those of James Lampton as Colonel Sellers, were, of course, elaborated, but the story of the Tennessee land, as told in that book, is very good history indeed. Laura Hawkins, however, was only real in the fact that she bore the name of Samuel Clemens's old playmate. "The Gilded Age," published later in the year, was well received and sold largely. The character of Colonel Sellers at once took a place among the great fiction characters of the world, and is probably the best known of any American creation. His watchword, "There's millions in it!" became a byword. The Clemenses decided to build in Hartford. They bought a plot of land on Farmington Avenue, in the literary neighborhood, and engaged an architect and builder. By spring, the new house was well under way, and, matters progressing so favorably, the owners decided to take a holiday while the work was going on. Clemens had been eager to show England to his wife; so, taking little Sissy, now a year old, they sailed in May, to be gone half a year. They remained for a time in London--a period of honors and entertainment. If Mark Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was hardly less than royalty now. His rooms at the Langham Hotel were like a court. The nation's most distinguished men--among them Robert Browning, Sir John Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke--came to pay their respects. Authors were calling constantly. Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins could not get enough of Mark Twain. Reade proposed to join with him in writing a novel, as Warner had done. Lewis Carroll did not call, being too timid, but they met the author of "Alice in Wonderland" one night at a dinner, "the shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remiss, I ever saw," Mark Twain once declared. Little Sissy and her father thrived on London life, but it wore on Mrs. Clemens. At the end of July they went quietly to Edinburgh, and settled at Veitch's Hotel, on George Street. The strain of London life had been too much for Mrs. Clemens, and her health became poor. Unacquainted in Edinburgh, Clemens only remembered that Dr. John Brown, author of "Rab and His Friends," lived there. Learning the address, he walked around to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Doctor Brown came forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens seemed better from the moment of his arrival. The acquaintance did not end there. For a month the author of "Rab" and the little Clemens family were together daily. Often they went with him to make his round of visits. He was always leaning out of the carriage to look at dogs. It was told of him that once when he suddenly put his head from a carriage window he dropped back with a disappointed look. "Who was it?" asked his companion. "Some one you know?" "No, a dog I don't know." Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Scotland, and his story of "Rab" had won him a world-wide following. Children adored him. Little Susy and he were playmates, and he named her "Megalopis," a Greek term, suggested by her great, dark eyes. Mark Twain kept his promise to lecture to a London audience. On the 13th of October, in the Queen's Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, he gave "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands." The house was packed. Clemens was not introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the character of a manager, announcing a disappointment. Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused, and loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and the noise subsided. Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present and will now give his lecture." The audience roared its approval. He continued his lectures at Hanover Square through the week, and at no time in his own country had he won such a complete triumph. He was the talk of the streets. The papers were full of him. The "London Times" declared his lectures had only whetted the public appetite for more. His manager, George Dolby (formerly manager for Charles Dickens), urged him to remain and continue the course through the winter. Clemens finally agreed that he would take his family back to America and come back himself within the month. This plan he carried out. Returning to London, he lectured steadily for two months in the big Hanover Square rooms, giving his "Roughing It" address, and it was only toward the end that his audience showed any sign of diminishing. There is probably no other such a lecture triumph on record. Mark Twain was at the pinnacle of his first glory: thirty-six, in full health, prosperous, sought by the world's greatest, hailed in the highest places almost as a king. Tom Sawyer's dreams of greatness had been all too modest. In its most dazzling moments his imagination had never led him so far. XXXV. BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER" It was at the end of January, 1874, when Mark Twain returned to America. His reception abroad had increased his prestige at home. Howells and Aldrich came over from Boston to tell him what a great man he had become --to renew those Boston days of three years before--to talk and talk of all the things between the earth and sky. And Twichell came in, of course, and Warner, and no one took account of time, or hurried, or worried about anything at all. "We had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round," wrote Howells, long after, and he tells how he and Aldrich were so carried away with Clemens's success in subscription publication that on the way back to Boston they planned a book to sell in that way. It was to be called "Twelve Memorable Murders," and they had made two or three fortunes from it by the time they reached Boston. "But the project ended there. We never killed a single soul," Howells once confessed to the writer of this memoir. At Quarry Farm that summer Mark Twain began the writing of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." He had been planning for some time to set down the story of those far-off days along the river-front at Hannibal, with John Briggs, Tom Blankenship, and the rest of that graceless band, and now in the cool luxury of a little study which Mrs. Crane had built for him on the hillside he set himself to spin the fabric of his youth. The study was a delightful place to work. It was octagonal in shape, with windows on all sides, something like a pilot-house. From any direction the breeze could come, and there were fine views. To Twichell he wrote: "It is a cozy nest, and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storm sweeps down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats on the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it!" He worked steadily there that summer. He would begin mornings, soon after breakfast, keeping at it until nearly dinner-time, say until five or after, for it was not his habit to eat the midday meal. Other members of the family did not venture near the place; if he was wanted urgently, a horn was blown. His work finished, he would light a cigar and, stepping lightly down the stone flight that led to the house-level, he would find where the family had assembled and read to them his day's work. Certainly those were golden days, and the tale of Tom and Huck and Joe Harper progressed. To Dr. John Brown, in Scotland, he wrote: "I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time now, .. . . and consequently have been so wrapped up in it and dead to everything else that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing." But the inspiration of Tom and Huck gave out when the tale was half finished, or perhaps it gave way to a new interest. News came one day that a writer in San Francisco, without permission, had dramatized "The Gilded Age," and that it was being played by John T. Raymond, an actor of much power. Mark Twain had himself planned to dramatize the character of Colonel Sellers and had taken out dramatic copyright. He promptly stopped the California production, then wrote the dramatist a friendly letter, and presently bought the play of him, and set in to rewrite it. It proved a great success. Raymond played it for several years. Colonel Sellers on the stage became fully as popular as in the book, and very profitable indeed. XXXVI. THE NEW HOME The new home in Hartford was ready that autumn--the beautiful house finished, or nearly finished, the handsome furnishings in place. It was a lovely spot. There were trees and grass--a green, shady slope that fell away to a quiet stream. The house itself, quite different from the most of the houses of that day, had many wings and balconies, and toward the back a great veranda that looked down the shaded slope. The kitchen was not at the back. As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was not like other houses. When asked why he built the kitchen toward the street, he said: "So the servants can see the circus go by without running into the front yard." But this was probably his afterthought. The kitchen wing extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was a harmonious detail of the general plan. Many frequenters have tried to express the charm of Mark Twain's household. Few have succeeded, for it lay not in the house itself, nor in its furnishings, beautiful as these things were, but in the personality of its occupants--the daily round of their lives--the atmosphere which they unconsciously created. From its wide entrance-hall and tiny, jewel like conservatory below to the billiard-room at the top of the house, it seemed perfectly appointed, serenely ordered, and full of welcome. The home of one of the most unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world was filled with gentleness and peace. It was Mrs. Clemens who was chiefly responsible. She was no longer the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had married. Association, study, and travel had brought her knowledge and confidence. When the great ones of the world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure, she gave welcome to them, and filled her place at his side with such sweet grace that those who came to pay their dues to him often returned to pay still greater devotion to his companion. William Dean Howells, so often a visitor there, once said to the writer: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate, wonderful tact." And again, "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular intellectual power." There were always visitors in the Clemens home. Above the mantel in the library was written: "The ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it," and the Clemens home never lacked of those ornaments, and they were of the world's best. No distinguished person came to America that did not pay a visit to Hartford and Mark Twain. Generally it was not merely a call, but a stay of days. The welcome was always genuine, the entertainment unstinted. George Warner, a close neighbor, once said: "The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings and where visitors were always welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories." As for friends living near, they usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. The two Warner famines were among these, the home of Charles Dudley Warner being only a step away. Dr. and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe were also close neighbors, while the Twichell parsonage was not far. They were all like one great family, of which Mark Twain's home was the central gathering-place. XXXVII. "OLD TIMES," "SKETCHES," AND "TOM SAWYER" The Rev. Joseph H. Twichell and Mark Twain used to take many long walks together, and once they decided to walk from Hartford to Boston--about one hundred miles. They decided to allow three days for the trip, and really started one morning, with some luncheon in a basket, and a little bag of useful articles. It was a bright, brisk November day, and they succeeded in getting to Westford, a distance of twenty-eight miles, that evening. But they were lame and foot-sore, and next morning, when they had limped six miles or so farther, Clemens telegraphed to Redpath: "We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This shows the thing can be done. Shall finish now by rail. Did you have any bets on us?" He also telegraphed Howells that they were about to arrive in Boston, and they did, in fact, reach the Howells home about nine o'clock, and found excellent company--the Cambridge set--and a most welcome supper waiting. Clemens and Twichell were ravenous. Clemens demanded food immediately. Howells writes: "I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hands a dish of those scalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress." The pedestrians returned to Hartford a day or two later--by train. It was during another, though less extended, tour which Twichell and Clemens made that fall, that the latter got his idea for a Mississippi book. Howells had been pleading for something for the January "Atlantic," of which he was now chief editor, but thus far Mark Twain's inspiration had failed. He wrote at last, "My head won't go," but later, the same day, he sent another hasty line. "I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number, for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He said, 'What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!' I hadn't thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run through three months, or six, or nine--or about four months, say?" Howells wrote at once, welcoming the idea. Clemens forthwith sent the first instalment of that marvelous series of river chapters which rank to-day among the very best of his work. As pictures of the vanished Mississippi life they are so real, so convincing, so full of charm that they can never grow old. As long as any one reads of the Mississippi they will look up those chapters of Mark Twain's piloting days. When the first number appeared, John Hay wrote: "It is perfect; no more, no less. I don't see how you do it." The "Old Times" chapter ran through seven numbers of the "Atlantic," and show Mark Twain at his very best. They form now most of the early chapters of "Life on the Mississippi." The remainder of that book was added about seven years later. Those were busy literary days for Mark Twain. Writing the river chapters carried him back, and hardly had he finished them when he took up the neglected story of "Tom and Huck," and finished that under full steam. He at first thought of publishing it in the "Atlantic", but decided against this plan. He sent Howells the manuscript to read, and received the fullest praise. Howells wrote: "It is altogether the best boy's story I ever read. It will be an immense success." Clemens, however, delayed publication. He had another volume in press--a collection of his sketches--among them the "Jumping Frog," and others of his California days. The "Jumping Frog" had been translated into French, and in this book Mark Twain published the French version and then a literal retranslation of his own, which is one of the most amusing features in the volume. As an example, the stranger's remark, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog," in the literal retranslation becomes, "I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog," and Mark Twain parenthetically adds, "If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no judge." "Sketches New and Old" went very well, but the book had no such sale as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," which appeared a year later, December, 1876. From the date of its issue it took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life, a place that to this day it shares only with "Huck Finn." Mark Twain's own boy life in the little drowsy town of Hannibal, with John Briggs and Tom Blankenship--their adventures in and about the cave and river--made perfect material. The story is full of pure delight. The camp on the island is a picture of boy heaven. No boy that reads it but longs for the woods and a camp-fire and some bacon strips in the frying-pan. It is all so thrillingly told and so vivid. We know certainly that it must all have happened. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" has taken a place side by side with "Treasure Island." XXXVIII. HOME PICTURES Mark Twain was now regarded by many as the foremost American author. Certainly he was the most widely known. As a national feature he rivaled Niagara Falls. No civilized spot on earth that his name had not reached. Letters merely addressed "Mark Twain" found their way to him. "Mark Twain, United States," was a common superscription. "Mark Twain, The World," also reached him without delay, while "Mark Twain, Somewhere," and "Mark Twain, Anywhere," in due time came to Hartford. "Mark Twain, God Knows Where," likewise arrived promptly, and in his reply he said, "He did." Then a letter addressed "The Devil Knows Where" also reached him, and he answered, "He did, too." Surely these were the farthermost limits of fame. Countless anecdotes went the rounds of the press. Among them was one which happened to be true: Their near neighbor, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran over early to say good-by. On his return Mrs. Clemens looked at him severely. "Why, Youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie." He said nothing, but went to his room, wrapped up those items in a neat package, which he sent over by a servant to Mrs. Stowe, with the line: "Herewith receive a call from the rest of me." Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said he had discovered a new principle--that of making calls by instalments, and asked whether in extreme cases a man might not send his clothes and be himself excused. Most of his work Mark Twain did at Quarry Farm. Each summer the family --there were two little girls now, Susy and Clara--went to that lovely place on the hilltop above Elmira, where there were plenty of green fields and cows and horses and apple-trees, a spot as wonderful to them as John Quarles's farm had been to their father, so long ago. All the family loved Quarry Farm, and Mark Twain's work went more easily there. His winters were not suited to literary creation--there were too many social events, though once--it was the winter of '76--he wrote a play with Bret Harte, who came to Hartford and stayed at the Clemens home while the work was in progress. It was a Chinese play, "Ah Sin," and the two had a hilarious time writing it, though the result did not prove much of a success with the public. Mark Twain often tried plays--one with Howells, among others--but the Colonel Sellers play was his only success. Grand dinners, trips to Boston and New York, guests in his own home, occupied much of Mark Twain's winter season. His leisure he gave to his children and to billiards. He had a passion for the game, and at any hour of the day or night was likely to be found in the room at the top of the house, knocking the balls about alone or with any visitor that he had enticed to that den. He mostly received his callers there, and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good. If not, so much the better; he could beat them extravagantly, and he took huge delight in such contests. Every Friday evening a party of billiard lovers--Hartford men--gathered and played, and told stories, and smoked, until the room was blue. Clemens never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness, and then go on knocking the balls about alone. But many evenings at home--early evenings--he gave to Susy and Clara. They had learned his gift as a romancer and demanded the most startling inventions. They would bring him a picture requiring him to fit a story to it without a moment's delay. Once he was suddenly ordered by Clara to make a story out of a plumber and a "bawgunstictor," which, on the whole, was easier than some of their requirements. Along the book-shelves were ornaments and pictures. A picture of a girl whom they called "Emeline" was at one end, and at the other a cat. Every little while they compelled him to make a story beginning with the cat and ending with Emeline. Always a new story, and never the other way about. The literary path from the cat to Emeline was a perilous one, but in time he could have traveled it in his dreams. XXXIX. TRAMPING ABROAD It was now going on ten years since the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," and there was a demand for another Mark Twain book of travel. Clemens considered the matter, and decided that a walking-tour in Europe might furnish the material he wanted. He spoke to his good friend, the Rev. "Joe" Twichell, and invited him to become his guest on such an excursion, because, as he explained, he thought he could "dig material enough out of Joe to make it a sound investment." As a matter of fact, he loved Twichell's companionship, and was always inviting him to share his journeys--to Boston, to Bermuda, to Washington--wherever interest or fancy led him. His plan now was to take the family to Germany in the spring, and let Twichell join them later for a summer tramp down through the Black Forest and Switzerland. Meantime the Clemens household took up the study of German. The children had a German nurse--others a German teacher. The household atmosphere became Teutonic. Of course it all amused Mark Twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student. In a brief time he had a fair knowledge of every-day German and a really surprising vocabulary. The little family sailed in April (1878), and a few weeks later were settled in the Schloss Hotel, on a hill above Heidelberg, overlooking the beautiful old castle, the ancient town, with the Neckar winding down the hazy valley--as fair a view as there is in all Germany. Clemens found a room for his work in a small house not far from the hotel. On the day of his arrival he had pointed out this house and said he had decided to work there--that his room would be the middle one on the third floor. Mrs. Clemens laughed, and thought the occupants of the house might be surprised when he came over to take possession. They amused themselves by watching "his people" and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went over that way, and, sure enough, there was a sign, "Furnished Rooms," and the one he had pointed out from the hotel was vacant. It became his study forthwith. The travelers were delighted with their location. To Howells, Clemens wrote: "Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the Neckar cul de sac, and, naturally, we spent nearly all our time in these. We have tables and chairs in them . . . . It must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord! how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for thin subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song." Twichell was summoned for August, and wrote back eagerly at the prospect: "Oh, my! Do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To begin with, I am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury!" Meantime the struggle with the "awful German language" went on. Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German, though little Clara at first would have none of it. Susy, two years older, tried, and really made progress, but one day she said, pathetically: "Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English." But presently she was writing to "Aunt Sue" (Mrs. Crane) at Quarry Farm: "I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods we see." Twichell arrived August 1st. Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set forth on a tramp through the Black Forest, excursioning as they pleased and having a blissful time. They did not always walk. They were likely to take a carriage or a donkey-cart, or even a train, when one conveniently happened along. They did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives --picturesque peasants in the Black Forest costume. In due time they crossed into Switzerland and prepared to conquer the Alps. The name Mark Twain had become about as well known in Europe as it was in America. His face, however, was less familiar. He was not often recognized in these wanderings, and his pen-name was carefully concealed. It was a relief to him not to be an object of curiosity and lavish attention. Twichell's conscience now and then prompted him to reveal the truth. In one of his letters home he wrote how a young man at a hotel had especially delighted in Mark's table conversation, and how he (Twichell) had later taken the young man aside and divulged the speaker's identity. "I could not forbear telling him who Mark was, and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so." They did not climb many of the Alps on foot. They did scale the Rigi, after which Mark Twain was not in the best walking trim; though later they conquered Gemmi Pass--no small undertaking--that trail that winds up and up until the traveler has only the glaciers and white peaks and the little high-blooming flowers for company. All day long the friends would tramp and walk together, and when they did not walk they would hire a diligence or any vehicle that came handy, but, whatever their means of travel the joy of comradeship amid those superb surroundings was the same. In Twichell's letters home we get pleasant pictures of the Mark Twain of that day: "Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in flowers. He scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them . . . . Mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish you might have heard him today. His vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw." And in another place: "He can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, Mark said, 'The fellow's got the notion that we were in a hurry.'" Another extract refers to an incident which Mark Twain also mentions in "A Tramp Abroad:" [8] "Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing so delights him as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is in the influence of its fascinations. To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture." Twichell goes on to tell how he threw some driftwood into a racing torrent and how Mark went running down-stream after it, waving and shouting in a sort of mad ecstasy. When a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below, he would jump up and down and yell. He acted just like a boy. Boy he was, then and always. Like Peter Pan, he never really grew up --that is, if growing up means to grow solemn and uninterested in play. Climbing the Gorner Grat with Twichell, they sat down to rest, and a lamb from a near-by flock ventured toward them. Clemens held out his hand and called softly. The lamb ventured nearer, curious but timid. It was a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of the game, and the silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable, but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point; the lamb finally put its nose in Mark's hand, and he was happy all the rest of the day. "In A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain burlesques most of the walking-tour with Harris (Twichell), feeling, perhaps, that he must make humor at whatever cost. But to-day the other side of the picture seems more worth while. That it seemed so to him, also, even at the time, we may gather from a letter he sent after Twichell when it was all over and Twichell was on his way home: "DEAR OLD JOE,--It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! It has been such a rich holiday for me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the time when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journey and the times when I was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Clemens had joined his family at Lausanne, and presently they journeyed down into Italy, returning later to Germany--to Munich, where they lived quietly with Fraulein Dahlweiner at No. 1a Karlstrasse, while he worked on his new book of travel. When spring came they went to Paris, and later to London, where the usual round of entertainment briefly claimed them. It was the 3d of September, 1879, when they finally reached New York. The papers said that Mark Twain had changed in his year and a half of absence. He had, somehow, taken on a traveled look. One paper remarked that he looked older than when he went to Germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray. [8] Chapter XXXIII. XL. "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" They went directly to Quarry Farm, where Clemens again took up work on his book, which he hoped to have ready for early publication. But his writing did not go as well as he had hoped, and it was long after they had returned to Hartford that the book was finally in the printer's hands. Meantime he had renewed work on a story begun two years before at Quarry Farm. Browsing among the books there one summer day, he happened to pick up "The Prince and the Page," by Charlotte M. Yonge. It was a story of a prince disguised as a blind beggar, and, as Mark Twain read, an idea came to him for an altogether different story, or play, of his own. He would have a prince and a pauper change places, and through a series of adventures learn each the trials and burdens of the other life. He presently gave up the play idea, and began it as a story. His first intention had been to make the story quite modern, using the late King Edward VII. (then Prince of Wales) as his prince, but it seemed to him that it would not do to lose a prince among the slums of modern London --he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history until he came to the little son of Henry VIII., Edward Tudor, and decided that he would do. It was the kind of a story that Mark Twain loved to read and to write. By the end of that first summer he had finished a good portion of the exciting adventures of "The Prince and the Pauper," and then, as was likely to happen, the inspiration waned and the manuscript was laid aside. But with the completion of "A Tramp Abroad"--a task which had grown wearisome--he turned to the luxury of romance with a glad heart. To Howells he wrote that he was taking so much pleasure in the writing that he wanted to make it last. "Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547 . . . . My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others." Susy and Clara Clemens were old enough now to understand the story, and as he finished the chapters he read them aloud to his small home audience--a most valuable audience, indeed, for he could judge from its eager interest, or lack of attention, just the measure of his success. These little creatures knew all about the writing of books. Susy's earliest recollection was "Tom Sawyer" read aloud from the manuscript. Also they knew about plays. They could not remember a time when they did not take part in evening charades--a favorite amusement in the Clemens home. Mark Twain, who always loved his home and played with his children, invented the charades and their parts for them, at first, but as they grew older they did not need much help. With the Twichell and Warner children they organized a little company for their productions, and entertained the assembled households. They did not make any preparation for their parts. A word was selected and the syllables of it whispered to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each group marched into the library, performed its syllable, and retired, leaving the audience of parents to guess the answer. Now and then, even at this early day, they gave little plays, and of course Mark Twain could not resist joining them. In time the plays took the place of the charades and became quite elaborate, with a stage and scenery, but we shall hear of this later on. "The Prince and the Pauper" came to an end in due season, in spite of the wish of both author and audience for it to go on forever. It was not published at once, for several reasons, the main one being that "A Tramp Abroad" had just been issued from the press, and a second book might interfere with its sale. As it was, the "Tramp" proved a successful book--never as successful as the "Innocents," for neither its humor nor its description had quite the fresh quality of the earlier work. In the beginning, however, the sales were large, the advance orders amounting to twenty-five thousand copies, and the return to the author forty thousand dollars for the first year. XLI. GENERAL GRANT AT HARTFORD A third little girl came to the Clemens household during the summer of 1880. They were then at Quarry Farm, and Clemens wrote to his friend Twichell: "DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he 'didn't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog,' I should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of an observer. . . It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the Affection Board. Four weeks ago the children put Mama at the head of the list right along, where she has always been, but now: Jean Mama Motley }cat Fraulein }cat Papa "That is the way it stands now. Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped from 4 and become No. 5. Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats 'developed' I didn't stand any more show." Those were happy days at Quarry Farm. The little new baby thrived on that summer hilltop. Also, it may be said, the cats. Mark Twain's children had inherited his love for cats, and at the farm were always cats of all ages and varieties. Many of the bed-time stories were about these pets--stories invented by Mark Twain as he went along--stories that began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely from evening to evening, trailing off into dreamland. The great humorist cared less for dogs, though he was never unkind to them, and once at the farm a gentle hound named Bones won his affection. When the end of the summer came and Clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. Clemens stooped down, put his arms about him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year. Mark Twain was for General Garfield, and made a number of remarkable speeches in his favor. General Grant came to Hartford during the campaign, and Mark Twain was chosen to make the address of welcome. Perhaps no such address of welcome was ever made before. He began: "I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built." He seemed to be at a loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to Grant. Then, as if he had been prompted by the great soldier, he straightened up and poured out a fervid eulogy on Grant's victories, adding, in an aside, as he finished, "I nearly forgot that part of my speech," to the roaring delight of his hearers, while Grant himself grimly smiled. He then spoke of the General being now out of public employment, and how grateful his country was to him, and how it stood ready to reward him in every conceivable--inexpensive--way. Grant had smiled more than once during the speech, and when this sentence came out at the end his composure broke up altogether, while the throng shouted approval. Clemens made another speech that night at the opera-house--a speech long remembered in Hartford as one of the great efforts of his life. A very warm friendship had grown up between Mark Twain and General Grant. A year earlier, on the famous soldier's return from his trip around the world, a great birthday banquet had been given him in Chicago, at which Mark Twain's speech had been the event of the evening. The colonel who long before had chased the young pilot-soldier through the Mississippi bottoms had become his conquering hero, and Grant's admiration for America's foremost humorist was most hearty. Now and again Clemens urged General Grant to write his memoirs for publication, but the hero of many battles was afraid to venture into the field of letters. He had no confidence in his ability to write. He did not realize that the man who had written "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and, later, "Let us have peace," was capable of English as terse and forceful as the Latin of Caesar's Commentaries. XLII MANY INVESTMENTS The "Prince and the Pauper," delayed for one reason and another, did not make its public appearance until the end of 1881. It was issued by Osgood, of Boston, and was a different book in every way from any that Mark Twain had published before. Mrs. Clemens, who loved the story, had insisted that no expense should be spared in its making, and it was, indeed, a handsome volume. It was filled with beautiful pen-and-ink drawings, and the binding was rich. The dedication to its two earliest critics read: "To those good-mannered and agreeable children, Susy and Clara Clemens." The story itself was unlike anything in Mark Twain's former work. It was pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of humor and humanity on every page. And how breathlessly interesting it is! We may imagine that first little audience--the "two good-mannered and agreeable children," drawing up in their little chairs by the fireside, hanging on every paragraph of the adventures of the wandering prince and Tom Canty, the pauper king, eager always for more. The story, at first, was not entirely understood by the reviewers. They did not believe it could be serious. They expected a joke in it somewhere. Some even thought they had found it. But it was not a joke, it was just a simple tale--a beautiful picture of a long-vanished time. One critic, wiser than the rest, said: "The characters of those two boys, twin in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction." Mark Twain was now approaching the fullness of his fame and prosperity. The income from his writing was large; Mrs. Clemens possessed a considerable fortune of her own; they had no debts. Their home was as perfectly appointed as a home could well be, their family life was ideal. They lived in the large, hospitable way which Mrs. Clemens had known in her youth, and which her husband, with his Southern temperament, loved. Their friends were of the world's chosen, and they were legion in number. There were always guests in the Clemens home--so many, indeed, were constantly coming and going that Mark Twain said he was going to set up a private 'bus to save carriage hire. Yet he loved it all dearly, and for the most part realized his happiness. Unfortunately, there were moments when he forgot that his lot was satisfactory, and tried to improve it. His Colonel Sellers imagination, inherited from both sides of his family, led him into financial adventures which were generally unprofitable. There were no silver-mines in the East into which to empty money and effort, as in the old Nevada days, but there were plenty of other things--inventions, stock companies, and the like. When a man came along with a patent steam-generator which would save ninety per cent. of the usual coal-supply, Mark Twain invested whatever bank surplus he had at the moment, and saw that money no more forever. After the steam-generator came a steam-pulley, a small affair, but powerful enough to relieve him of thirty-two thousand dollars in a brief time. A new method of marine telegraphy was offered him by the time his balance had grown again, a promising contrivance, but it failed to return the twenty-five thousand dollars invested in it by Mark Twain. The list of such adventures is too long to set down here. They differ somewhat, but there is one feature common to all--none of them paid. At last came a chance in which there was really a fortune. A certain Alexander Graham Bell, an inventor, one day appeared, offering stock in an invention for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. But Mark Twain had grown wise, he thought. Long after he wrote: "I declined. I said I did not want any more to do with wildcat speculation .... I said I didn't want it at any price. He (Bell) became eager; and insisted I take five hundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug- hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. But I was a burnt child, and resisted all these temptations--resisted them easily; went off with my money, and next day lent five thousand of it to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later." It was the chance of fortune thus thrown away which, perhaps, led him to take up later with an engraving process--an adventure which lasted through several years and ate up a heavy sum. Altogether, these experiences in finance cost Mark Twain a fair-sized fortune, though, after all, they were as nothing compared with the great type-machine calamity which we shall hear of in a later chapter. XLIII BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY Fortunately, Mark Twain was not greatly upset by his losses. They exasperated him for the moment, perhaps, but his violence waned presently, and the whole matter was put aside forever. His work went on with slight interference. Looking over his Mississippi chapters one day, he was taken with a new interest in the river, and decided to make the steamboat trip between St. Louis and New Orleans, to report the changes that had taken place in his twenty-one years of absence. His Boston publisher, Osgood, agreed to accompany him, and a stenographer was engaged to take down conversations and comments. At St. Louis they took passage on the steamer "Gold Dust"--Clemens under an assumed name, though he was promptly identified. In his book he tells how the pilot recognized him and how they became friends. Once, in later years, he said: "I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, where there was a big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." To heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings. The points along the river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed, but during high-water this mattered little. He was a pilot again--a young fellow in his twenties, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortunes in the stars. The river had lost none of its charm for him. To Bixby he wrote: "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever been in my life. How do you run Plum Point?" He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was a captain now, on the splendid new Anchor Line steamer "City of Baton Rouge," one of the last of the fine river boats. Clemens made the return trip to St. Louis with Bixby on the "Baton Rouge"--almost exactly twenty-five years from their first trip together. To Bixby it seemed wonderfully like those old days back in the fifties. "Sam was making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did," said Bixby, long after, to the writer of this history. Mark Twain decided to see the river above St. Louis. He went to Hannibal to spend a few days with old friends. "Delightful days," he wrote home, "loitering around all day long, and talking with grayheads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago." He took boat for St. Paul and saw the upper river, which he had never seen before. He thought the scenery beautiful, but he found a sadness everywhere because of the decay of the river trade. In a note-book entry he said: "The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god." He worked at the Mississippi book that summer at the farm, but did not get on very well, and it was not until the following year (1883) that it came from the press. Osgood published it, and Charles L. Webster, who had married Mark Twain's niece, Annie (daughter of his sister Pamela), looked after the agency sales. Mark Twain, in fact, was preparing to become his own publisher, and this was the beginning. Webster was a man of ability, and the book sold well. "Life on the Mississippi" is one of Mark Twain's best books--one of those which will live longest. The first twenty chapters are not excelled in quality anywhere in his writings. The remainder of the book has an interest of its own, but it lacks the charm of those memories of his youth--the mellow light of other days which enhances all of his better work. XLIV. A READING-TOUR WITH CABLE Every little while Mark Twain had a fever of play-writing, and it was about this time that he collaborated with W. D. Howells on a second Colonel Sellers play. It was a lively combination. Once to the writer Howells said: "Clemens took one scene and I another. We had loads of fun about it. We cracked our sides laughing over it as we went along. We thought it mighty good, and I think to this day it was mighty good." But actors and managers did not agree with them. Raymond, who had played the original Sellers, declared that in this play the Colonel had not become merely a visionary, but a lunatic. The play was offered elsewhere, and finally Mark Twain produced it at his own expense. But perhaps the public agreed with Raymond, for the venture did not pay. It was about a year after this (the winter of 1884-5) that Mark Twain went back to the lecture platform--or rather, he joined with George W. Cable in a reading-tour. Cable had been giving readings on his own account from his wonderful Creole stories, and had visited Mark Twain in Hartford. While there he had been taken down with the mumps, and it was during his convalescence that the plan for a combined reading-tour had been made. This was early in the year, and the tour was to begin in the autumn. Cable, meantime, having quite recovered, conceived a plan to repay Mark Twain's hospitality. It was to be an April-fool--a great complimentary joke. A few days before the first of the month he had a "private and confidential" circular letter printed, and mailed it to one hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's friends and admirers in Boston, New York, and elsewhere, asking that they send the humorist a letter to arrive April 1, requesting his autograph. It would seem that each one receiving this letter must have responded to it, for on the morning of April 1st an immense pile of letters was unloaded on Mark Twain's table. He did not know what to make of it, and Mrs. Clemens, who was party to the joke, slyly watched results. They were the most absurd requests for autographs ever written. He was fooled and mystified at first, then realizing the nature and magnitude of the joke, he entered into it fully-delighted, of course, for it was really a fine compliment. Some of the letters asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. Some commanded him to sit down and copy a few chapters from "The Innocents Abroad." Others asked that his autograph be attached to a check. John Hay requested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's "Night Thoughts," etc., and added: "I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have it in your handwriting." Altogether, the reading of the letters gave Mark Twain a delightful day. The platform tour of Clemens and Cable that fall was a success. They had good houses, and the work of these two favorites read by the authors of it made a fascinating program. They continued their tour westward as far as Chicago and gave readings in Hannibal and Keokuk. Orion Clemens and his wife once more lived in Keokuk, and with them Jane Clemens, brisk and active for her eighty-one years. She had visited Hartford more than once and enjoyed "Sam's fine house," but she chose the West for home. Orion Clemens, honest, earnest, and industrious, had somehow missed success in life. The more prosperous brother, however, made an allowance ample for all. Mark Twain's mother attended the Keokuk reading. Later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance (she had been a great dancer in her youth), she rose, and in spite of her fourscore, tripped as lightly as a girl. It was the last time that Mark Twain would see her in full health. At Christmas-time Cable and Clemens took a fortnight's holiday, and Clemens went home to Hartford. There a grand surprise awaited him. Mrs. Clemens had made an adaptation of "The Prince and the Pauper" for the stage, and his children, with those of the neighborhood, had learned the parts. A good stage had been set up in George Warner's home, with a pretty drop-curtain and very good scenery indeed. Clemens arrived in the late afternoon, and felt an air of mystery in the house, but did not guess what it meant. By and by he was led across the grounds to George Warner's home, into a large room, and placed in a seat directly fronting the stage. Then presently the curtain went up, the play began, and he knew. As he watched the little performers playing so eagerly the parts of his story, he was deeply moved and gratified. It was only the beginning of "The Prince and the Pauper" production. The play was soon repeated, Clemens himself taking the part of Miles Hendon. In a "biography" of her father which Susy began a little later, she wrote: "Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure he could do it . . . . I was the prince, and Papa and I rehearsed two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. He was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait--oh, such a gait!" Susy's sister, Clara, took the part of Lady Jane Gray, while little Jean, aged four, in the part of a court official, sat at a small table and constantly signed state papers and death-warrants. XLV. "THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN" Meantime, Mark Twain had really become a publisher. His nephew by marriage, Charles L. Webster, who, with Osgood, had handled the "Mississippi" book, was now established under the firm name of Charles L. Webster & Co., Samuel L. Clemens being the company. Clemens had another book ready, and the new firm were to handle it throughout. The new book was a story which Mark Twain had begun one day at Quarry Farm, nearly eight years before. It was to be a continuation of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, especially of the latter as told by himself. But the author had no great opinion of the tale and presently laid it aside. Then some seven years later, after his trip down the river, he felt again the inspiration of the old days, and the story of Huck's adventures had been continued and brought to a close. The author believed in it by this time, and the firm of Webster & Co. was really formed for the purpose of publishing it. Mark Twain took an active interest in the process. From the pages of "Life" he selected an artist--a young man named E. W. Kemble, who would later become one of our foremost illustrators of Southern character. He also gave attention to the selection of the paper and the binding--even to the method of canvassing for the sales. In a note to Webster, he wrote: "Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might . . . . If we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them." Mark Twain was making himself believe that he was a business man, and in this instance, at least, he seems to have made no mistake. Some advanced chapters of "Huck" appeared serially in the "Century Magazine," and the public was eager for more. By the time the "Century" chapters were finished the forty thousand advance subscriptions for the book had been taken, and Huck Finn's own story, so long pushed aside and delayed, came grandly into its own. Many grown-up readers and most critics declared that it was greater than the "Tom Sawyer" book, though the younger readers generally like the first book the best, it being rather more in the juvenile vein. Huck's story, in fact, was soon causing quite grown-up discussions--discussions as to its psychology and moral phases, matters which do not interest small people, who are always on Huck's side in everything, and quite willing that he should take any risk of body or soul for the sake of Nigger Jim. Poor, vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode for an immortal book! As literature, the story of "Huck Finn" holds a higher place than that of "Tom Sawyer." As stories, they stand side by side, neither complete without the other, and both certain to live as long as there are real boys and girls to read them. XLVI. PUBLISHER TO GENERAL GRANT Mark Twain was now a successful publisher, but his success thus far was nothing to what lay just ahead. One evening he learned that General Grant, after heavy financial disaster, had begun writing the memoirs which he (Clemens) had urged him to undertake some years before. Next morning he called on the General to learn the particulars. Grant had contributed some articles to the "Century" war series, and felt in a mood to continue the work. He had discussed with the "Century" publishers the matter of a book. Clemens suggested that such a book should be sold only by subscription and prophesied its enormous success. General Grant was less sure. His need of money was very great and he was anxious to get as much return as possible, but his faith was not large. He was inclined to make no special efforts in the matter of publication. But Mark Twain prevailed. Like his own Colonel Sellers, he talked glowingly and eloquently of millions. He first offered to direct the general to his own former subscription publisher, at Hartford, then finally proposed to publish it himself, offering Grant seventy per cent. of the net returns, and to pay all office expenses out of his own share. Of course there could be nothing for any publisher in such an arrangement unless the sales were enormous. General Grant realized this, and at first refused to consent. Here was a friend offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy, a thing he could not permit. But Mark Twain came again and again, and finally persuaded him that purely as business proposition the offer was warranted by the certainty of great sales. So the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. undertook the Grant book, and the old soldier, broken in health and fortune, was liberally provided with means that would enable him to finish his task with his mind at peace. He devoted himself steadily to the work--at first writing by hand, then dictating to a stenographer that Webster & Co. provided. His disease, cancer, made fierce ravages, but he "fought it out on that line," and wrote the last pages of his memoirs by hand when he could no longer speak aloud. Mark Twain was much with him, and cheered him with anecdotes and news of the advance sale of his book. In one of his memoranda of that time Clemens wrote: "To-day (May 26) talked with General Grant about his and my first great Missouri campaign, in 1861. He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two before. How near he came to playing the d-- with his future publisher." At Mount McGregor, a few weeks before the end, General Grant asked if any estimate could now be made of the sum which his family would obtain from his work, and was deeply comforted by Clemens's prompt reply that more than one hundred thousand sets had already been sold, the author's share of which would exceed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Clemens added that the gross return would probably be twice as much more. The last notes came from Grant's hands soon after that, and a few days later, July 23, 1885, his task completed, he died. To Henry Ward Beecher Clemens wrote: "One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later." In a memorandum estimate made by Mark Twain soon after the canvass for the Grant memoirs had begun, he had prophesied that three hundred thousand sets of the book would be sold, and that he would pay General Grant in royalties $420,000. This prophecy was more than fulfilled. The first check paid to Mrs. Grant--the largest single royalty check in history--was for $200,000. Later payments brought her royalty return up to nearly $450.000. For once, at least, Mark Twain's business vision had been clear. A fortune had been realized for the Grant family. Even his own share was considerable, for out of that great sale more than a hundred thousand dollars' profit was realized by Webster & Co. XLVII THE HIGH-TIDE OF FORTUNE That summer at Quarry Farm was one of the happiest they had ever known. Mark Twain, nearing fifty, was in the fullness of his manhood and in the brightest hour of his fortune. Susy, in her childish "biography," begun at this time, gives us a picture of him. She begins: "We are a happy family! We consist of Papa, Mama, Jean, Clara, and me. It is Papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful, curly, gray hair, not any too thick or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache; he has a wonderfully shaped head and profile; he has a very good figure--in short, is an extraordinarily fine-looking man." "He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper, but we all have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh, so absent-minded!" We may believe this is a true picture of Mark Twain at fifty. He did not look young for his years, but he was still young in spirit and body. Susy tells how he blew bubbles for the children, filling them with tobacco smoke. Also, how he would play with the cats and come clear down from his study to see how a certain kitten was getting along. Susy adds that "there are eleven cats at the farm now," and tells of the day's occupations, but the description is too long to quote. It reveals a beautiful, busy life. Susy herself was a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. One afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes, a still, shut-in corner not far from the study. She ran breathlessly to her aunt. "Can I have it--can Clara and I have it all for our own?" The petition was granted and the place was called Helen's Bower, for they were reading "Thaddeus of Warsaw", and the name appealed to Susy's poetic fancy. Something happened to the "bower"--an unromantic workman mowed it down--but by this time there was a little house there which Mrs. Clemens had built, just for the children. It was a complete little cottage, when furnished. There was a porch in front, with comfortable chairs. Inside were also chairs, a table, dishes, shelves, a broom, even a stove--small, but practical. They called the little house "Ellerslie," out of Grace Aguilar's "Days of Robert Bruce." There alone, or with their Langdon cousins, how many happy summers they played and dreamed away. Secluded by a hillside and happy trees, overlooking the hazy, distant town, it was a world apart--a corner of story-book land. When the end of the summer came its little owners went about bidding their treasures good-by, closing and kissing the gates of Ellerslie. Looking back now, Mark Twain at fifty would seem to have been in his golden prime. His family was ideal--his surroundings idyllic. Favored by fortune, beloved by millions, honored now even in the highest places, what more had life to give? When November 30th brought his birthday, one of the great Brahmins, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote him a beautiful poem. Andrew Lang, England's foremost critic, also sent verses, while letters poured in from all sides. And Mark Twain realized his fortune and was disturbed by it. To a friend he said: "I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold." XLVIII. BUSINESS DIFFICULTIES. PLEASANTER THINGS For the time it would seem that Mark Twain had given up authorship for business. The success of the Grant book had filled his head with plans for others of a like nature. The memoirs of General McClellan and General Sheridan were arranged for. Almost any war-book was considered a good venture. And there was another plan afoot. Pope Leo XIII., in his old age, had given sanction to the preparation of his memoirs, and it was to be published, with his blessing, by Webster & Co., of Hartford. It was generally believed that such a book would have a tremendous sale, and Colonel Sellers himself could not have piled the figures higher than did his creator in counting his prospective returns. Every Catholic in the world must have a copy of the Pope's book, and in America alone there were millions. Webster went to Rome to consult with the Pope in person, and was received in private audience. Mark Twain's publishing firm seemed on the top wave of success. The McClellan and Sheridan books were issued, and, in due time, the Life of Pope Leo XIII.--published simultaneously in six languages--issued from the press. A large advance sale had been guaranteed by the general canvassing agents--a fortunate thing, as it proved. For, strange as it may seem, the book did not prove a great success. It is hard to explain just why. Perhaps Catholics felt that there had been so many popes that the life of any particular one was no great matter. The book paid, but not largely. The McClellan and Sheridan books, likewise, were only partially successful. Perhaps the public was getting tired of war memoirs. Webster & Co. undertook books of a general sort--travel, fiction, poetry. Many of them did not pay. Their business from a march of triumph had become a battle. They undertook a "Library of American Literature," a work of many volumes, costly to make and even more so to sell. To float this venture they were obliged to borrow large sums. It seems unfortunate that Mark Twain should have been disturbed by these distracting things during what should have been his literary high-tide. As it was, his business interests and cares absorbed the energy that might otherwise have gone into books. He was not entirely idle. He did an occasional magazine article or story, and he began a book which he worked at from time to time the story of a Connecticut Yankee who suddenly finds himself back in the days of King Arthur's reign. Webster was eager to publish another book by his great literary partner, but the work on it went slowly. Then Webster broke down from two years of overwork, and the business management fell into other hands. Though still recognized as a great publishing-house, those within the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. knew that its prospects were not bright. Furthermore, Mark Twain had finally invested in another patent, the type-setting machine mentioned in a former chapter, and the demands for cash to promote this venture were heavy. To his sister Pamela, about the end of 1887, he wrote: "The type-setter goes on forever at $3,000 a month.... We'll be through with it in three or four months, I reckon" --a false hope, for the three or four months would lengthen into as many years. But if there were clouds gathering in the business sky, they were not often allowed to cast a shadow in Mark Twain's home. The beautiful house in Hartford was a place of welcome and merriment, of many guests and of happy children. Especially of happy children: during these years--the latter half of the 'eighties--when Mark Twain's fortunes were on the decline, his children were at the age to have a good time, and certainly they had it. The dramatic stage which had been first set up at George Warner's for the Christmas "Prince and Pauper" performance was brought over and set up in the Clemens schoolroom, and every Saturday there were plays or rehearsals, and every little while there would be a grand general performance in the great library downstairs, which would accommodate just eighty-four chairs, filled by parents of the performers and invited guests. In notes dictated many years later, Mark Twain said: "We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up, we looked out from the stage upon none but faces dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us." He was one of the children himself, you see, and therefore on the stage with the others. Katy Leary, for thirty years in the family service, once said to the author: "The children were crazy about acting, and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who was the best actor of all. I have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years." The plays were not all given by the children. Mark Twain had kept up his German study, and a class met regularly in his home to struggle with the problems of der, die, and das. By and by he wrote a play for the class, "Meisterschaft," a picturesque mixture of German and English, which they gave twice, with great success. It was unlike anything attempted before or since. No one but Mark Twain could have written it. Later (January, 1888), in modified form, it was published in the "Century Magazine." It is his best work of this period. Many pleasant and amusing things could be recalled from these days if one only had room. A visit with Robert Louis Stevenson was one of them. Stevenson was stopping at a small hotel near Washington Square, and he and Clemens sat on a bench in the sunshine and talked through at least one golden afternoon. What marvelous talk that must have been! "Huck Finn" was one of Stevenson's favorites, and once he told how he had insisted on reading the book aloud to an artist who was painting his portrait. The painter had protested at first, but presently had fallen a complete victim to Huck's story. Once, in a letter, Stevenson wrote: "My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read 'Roughing It' (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: 'I am frightened. It cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.'" Mark Twain had been a "mugwump" during the Blame-Cleveland campaign in 1880, which means that he had supported the independent Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland. He was, therefore, in high favor at the White House during both Cleveland administrations, and called there informally whenever business took him to Washington. But on one occasion (it was his first visit after the President's marriage) there was to be a party, and Mrs. Clemens, who could not attend, slipped a little note into the pocket of his evening waistcoat, where he would be sure to find it when dressing, warning him as to his deportment. Being presented to young Mrs. Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written, "He didn't," and asked her to sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested that she must know first what it was that he hadn't done, finally agreeing to sign if he would tell her immediately all about it, which he promised to do. She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's note. It was very brief. It said, "Don't wear your arctics in the White House." Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card mailed immediately to Mrs. Clemens. Absent-mindedness was characteristic of Mark Twain. He lived so much in the world within that to him the material outer world was often vague and shadowy. Once when he was knocking the balls about in the billiard-room, George, the colored butler, a favorite and privileged household character, brought up a card. So many canvassers came to sell him one thing and another that Clemens promptly assumed this to be one of them. George insisted mildly, but firmly, that, though a stranger, the caller was certainly a gentleman, and Clemens grumblingly descended the stairs. As he entered the parlor the caller arose and extended his hand. Clemens took it rather limply, for he had noticed some water-colors and engravings leaning against the furniture as if for exhibition, and he was instantly convinced that the caller was a picture-canvasser. Inquiries by the stranger as to Mrs. Clemens and the children did not change Mark Twain's conclusion. He was polite, but unresponsive, and gradually worked the visitor toward the front door. His inquiry as to the home of Charles Dudley Warner caused him to be shown eagerly in that direction. Clemens, on his way back to the billiard-room, heard Mrs. Clemens call him--she was ill that day: "Youth!" "Yes, Livy." He went in for a word. "George brought me Mr. B.'s card. I hope you were nice to him; the B's were so nice to us, once, in Europe, while you were gone." "The B's! Why, Livy!" "Yes, of course; and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to Hartford." "Well, he's been here." "Oh Youth, have you done anything?" "Yes, of course I have. He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I sent him over to Warner's. I noticed he didn't take them with him. Land sakes! Livy, what can I do?" "Go right after him--go quick! Tell him what you have done." He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. Warner and B. were in cheerful conversation. They had met before. Clemens entered gaily. "Oh, yes, I see! You found him all right. Charlie, we met Mr. B. and his wife in Europe, and they made things pleasant for us. I wanted to come over here with him, but I was a good deal occupied just then. Livy isn't very well, but she seems now a good deal better; so I just followed along to have a good talk, all together." He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B.'s mind faded long before the hour ended. Returning home, Clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. "George," he said, "what pictures are these that gentleman left?" "Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures! Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. The gentleman was only looking at them while he waited for you to come down." It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Mark Twain the degree of Master of Arts. He was proud of the honor, for it was recognition of a kind that had not come to him before--remarkable recognition, when we remember how as a child he had hated all schools and study, having ended his class-room days before he was twelve years old. He could not go to New Haven at the time, but later in the year made the students a delightful address. In his capacity of Master of Arts, he said, he had come down to New Haven to institute certain college reforms. By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I told the Greek Professor I had concluded to drop the use of the Greek-written character, because it is so hard to spell with and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. Let us draw the curtain there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. He said he had given advice to the mathematical department with about the same result. The astronomy department he had found in a bad way. He had decided to transfer the professor to the law department and to put a law-student in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable--also cheaper. It is true he cannot be entrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebula till he gets his hand in. It was hardly the sort of an address that the holder of a college degree is expected to make, but doctors and students alike welcomed it hilariously from Mark Twain. Not many great things happened to Mark Twain during this long period of semi-literary inaction, but many interesting ones. When Bill Nye, the humorist, and James Whitcomb Riley joined themselves in an entertainment combination, Mark Twain introduced them to their first Boston audience--a great event to them, and to Boston. Clemens himself gave a reading now and then, but not for money. Once, when Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston and Thomas Nelson Page were to give a reading in Baltimore, Page's wife fell ill, and Colonel Johnston wired to Charles Dudley Warner, asking him to come in Page's stead. Warner, unable to go, handed the telegram to Clemens, who promptly answered that he would come. They read to a packed house, and when the audience had gone and the returns were counted, an equal amount was handed to each of the authors. Clemens pushed his share over to Johnston, saying: "That's yours, Colonel. I'm not reading for money these days." Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but Clemens only said: "Never mind, Colonel; it only gives me pleasure to do you that little favor. You can pass it along some day." As a matter of fact, Mark Twain himself was beginning to be hard pressed for funds at this time, but was strong in the faith that he would presently be a multi-millionaire. The typesetting machine was still costing a vast sum, but each week its inventor promised that a few more weeks or months would see it finished, and then a tide of wealth would come rolling in. Mark Twain felt that a man with ship-loads of money almost in port could not properly entertain the public for pay. He read for institutions, schools, benefits, and the like, without charge. XLIX. KIPLING AT ELMIRA. ELSIE LESLIE. THE "YANKEE" One day during the summer of 1889 a notable meeting took place in Elmira. On a blazing forenoon a rather small and very hot young man, in a slow, sizzling hack made his way up East Hill to Quarry Faun. He inquired for Mark Twain, only to be told that he was at the Langdon home, down in the town which the young man had just left. So he sat for a little time on the pleasant veranda, and Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens, who were there, brought him some cool milk and listened to him talk in a way which seemed to them very entertaining and wonderful. When he went away he left his card with a name on it strange to them--strange to the world at that time. The name was Rudyard Kipling. Also on the card was the address Allahabad, and Sissy kept it, because, to her, India was fairyland. Kipling went down into Elmira and found Mark Twain. In his book "American Notes" he has left an account of that visit. He claimed that he had traveled around the world to see Mark Twain, and his article begins: "You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are commissioners, and some are lieutenant-governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!" But one should read the article entire--it is so worth while. Clemens also, long after, dictated an account of the meeting. Kipling came down and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before. . . When he had gone, Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said: "He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge. He knows all that can be known, and I know the rest." He was a stranger to me and all the world, and remained so for twelve months, but then he became suddenly known and universally known. . . George Warner came into our library one morning, in Hartford, with a small book in his hand, and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said "No." He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he made would be loud and continuous. . . A day or two later he brought a copy of the London "World" which had a sketch of Kipling in it and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the United States. According to the sketch he had passed through Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from India, attracted my attention--also Susy's. She went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified. A theatrical production of "The Prince and the Pauper," dramatized by Mrs. A. S. Richardson, was one of the events of this period. It was a charming performance, even if not a great financial success, and little Elsie Leslie, who played the double part of the Prince and Tom Canty, became a great favorite in the Clemens home. She was also a favorite of the actor and playwright, William Gillette, [9] and once when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a pair of slippers, in fact, embroidered by themselves. In his presentation letter to her, Mark Twain wrote: "Either of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. In fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other thought of the other one." He apologized for his delay: "You see, it was my first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly get the hang of it, along at first. And then I was so busy I couldn't get a chance to work at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. . . Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear, for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood. I've got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have . . . . Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you." For five years Mark Twain had not published a book. Since the appearance of "Huck Finn" at the end of 1884 he had given the public only an occasional magazine story or article. His business struggle and the type-setter had consumed not only his fortune, but his time and energy. Now, at last, however, a book was ready. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" came from the press of Webster & Co. at the end of 1889, a handsome book, elaborately and strikingly illustrated by Dan Beard--a pretentious volume which Mark Twain really considered his last. "It's my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently," he wrote Howells, though certainly he was young, fifty-four, to have reached this conclusion. The story of the "Yankee"--a fanciful narrative of a skilled Yankee mechanic swept backward through the centuries to the dim day of Arthur and his Round Table--is often grotesque enough in its humor, but under it all is Mark Twain's great humanity in fierce and noble protest against unjust laws, the tyranny of an individual or of a ruling class --oppression of any sort. As in "The Prince and the Pauper," the wandering heir to the throne is brought in contact with cruel injustice and misery, so in the "Yankee" the king himself becomes one of a band of fettered slaves, and through degradation and horror of soul acquires mercy and humility. The "Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a splendidly imagined tale. Edmund Clarence Stedman and William Dean Howells have ranked it very high. Howells once wrote: "Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction, it pleases me most." The "Yankee" has not held its place in public favor with Mark Twain's earlier books, but it is a wonderful tale, and we cannot afford to leave it unread. When the summer came again, Mark Twain and his family decided for once to forego Quarry Farm for a season in the Catskills, and presently found themselves located in a cottage at Onteora in the midst of a most delightful colony. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, then editor of St. Nicholas, was there, and Mrs. Custer and Brander Matthews and Lawrence Hutton and a score of other congenial spirits. There was constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent gatherings at the Inn, which was general headquarters. Susy Clemens, now eighteen, was a central figure, brilliant, eager, intense, ambitious for achievement--lacking only in physical strength. She was so flower-like, it seemed always that her fragile body must be consumed by the flame of her spirit. It was a happy summer, but it closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in August, to his mother's bedside. A few weeks later came the end, and Jane Clemens had closed her long and useful life. She was in her eighty-eighth year. A little later, at Elmira, followed the death of Mrs. Clemens's mother, a sweet and gentle woman. [9] Gillette was originally a Hartford boy. Mark Twain had recognized his ability, advanced him funds with which to complete his dramatic education, and Gillette's first engagement seems to have been with the Colonel Sellers company. Mark Twain often advanced money in the interest of education. A young sculptor he sent to Paris for two years' study. Among others, he paid the way of two colored students through college. L. THE MACHINE. GOOD-BY TO HARTFORD. "JOAN" IS BEGUN It was hoped that the profits from the Yankee would provide for all needs until the great sums which were to come from the type-setter should come rolling in. The book did yield a large return, but, alas! the hope of the type-setter, deferred year after year and month after month, never reached fulfilment. Its inventor, James W. Paige, whom Mark Twain once called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel," during ten years of persistent experiment had created one of the most marvelous machines ever constructed. It would set and distribute type, adjust the spaces, detect flaws--would perform, in fact, anything that a human being could do, with more exactness and far more swiftness. Mark Twain, himself a practical printer, seeing it in its earlier stages of development, and realizing what a fortune must come from a perfect type-setting machine, was willing to furnish his last dollar to complete the invention. But there the trouble lay. It could never be complete. It was too intricate, too much like a human being, too easy to get out of order, too hard to set right. Paige, fully confident, always believed he was just on the verge of perfecting some appliance that would overcome all difficulties, and the machine finally consisted of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which required expert workmanship and had to be fitted by hand. Mark Twain once wrote: "All other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful, mechanical miracle." This was true, and it conveys the secret of its failure. It was too much of a miracle to be reliable. Sometimes it would run steadily for hours, but then some part of its delicate mechanism would fail, and days, even weeks, were required to repair it. It is all too long a story to be given here. It has been fully told elsewhere.[10] By the end of 1890 Mark Twain had put in all his available capital, and was heavily in debt. He had spent one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the machine, no penny of which would ever be returned. Outside capital to carry on the enterprise was promised, but it failed him. Still believing that there were "millions in it," he realized that for the present, at least, he could do no more. Two things were clear: he must fall back on authorship for revenue, and he must retrench. In the present low stage of his fortunes he could no longer afford to live in the Hartford house. He decided to take the family abroad, where living was cheaper, and where he might be able to work with fewer distractions. He began writing at a great rate articles and stories for the magazines. He hunted out the old play he had written with Howells long before, and made a book of it, "The American Claimant." Then, in June, 1891, they closed the beautiful Hartford house, where for seventeen years they had found an ideal home; where the children had grown through their sweet, early life; where the world's wisest had come and gone, pausing a little to laugh with the world's greatest merrymaker. The furniture was shrouded, the curtains drawn, the light shut away. While the carriage was waiting, Mrs. Clemens went back and took a last look into each of the rooms, as if bidding a kind of good-by to the past. Then she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer, who had been with Mark Twain and his wife since their wedding-day, drove them to the station for the last time. Mark Twain had a contract for six newspaper letters at one thousand dollars each. He was troubled with rheumatism in his arm, and wrote his first letter from Aix-les-Bains, a watering-place--a "health-factory," as he called it--and another from Marienbad. They were in Germany in August, and one day came to Heidelberg, where they occupied their old apartment of thirteen years before, room forty, in the Schloss Hotel, with its far prospect of wood and hill, the winding Neckar, and the blue, distant valley of the Rhine. Then, presently, they came to Switzerland, to Ouchy-Lausanne, by lovely Lake Geneva, and here Clemens left the family and, with a guide and a boatman, went drifting down the Rhone in a curious, flat-bottomed craft, thinking to find material for one or more articles, possibly for a book. But drifting down that fair river through still September days, past ancient, drowsy villages, among sloping vineyards, where grapes were ripening in the tranquil sunlight, was too restful and soothing for work. In a letter home, he wrote: "It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days, in peace and quietness. Some of the curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it's so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. . . I want to do all the rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather." One afternoon, about fifteen miles below the city of Valence, he made a discovery. Dreamily observing the eastward horizon, he noticed that a distant blue mountain presented a striking profile outline of Napoleon Bonaparte. It seemed really a great natural wonder, and he stopped that night at the village just below, Beauchastel, a hoary huddle of houses with the roofs all run together, and took a room at the little hotel, with a window looking to the eastward, from which, next morning, he saw the profile of the great stone face, wonderfully outlined against the sunrise. He was excited over his discovery, and made a descriptive note of it and an outline sketch. Then, drifting farther down the river, he characteristically forgot all about it and did not remember it again for ten years, by which time he had forgotten the point on the river where the Napoleon could be seen, forgotten even that he had made a note and sketch giving full details. He wished the Napoleon to be found again, believing, as he declared, that it would become one of the natural wonders of the world. To travelers going to France he attempted to describe it, and some of these tried to find it; but, as he located it too far down the Rhone, no one reported success, and in time he spoke of his discovery as the "Lost Napoleon." It was not until after Mark Twain's death that it was rediscovered, and then by the writer of this memoir, who, having Mark Twain's note-book,[11] with its exact memoranda, on another September day, motoring up the Rhone, located the blue profile of the reclining Napoleon opposite the gray village of Beauchastel. It is a really remarkable effigy, and deserves to be visited. Clemens finished his trip at Arles--a beautiful trip from beginning to end, but without literary result. When he undertook to write of it, he found that it lacked incident, and, what was worse, it lacked humor. To undertake to create both was too much. After a few chapters he put the manuscript aside, unfinished, and so it remains to this day. The Clemens family spent the winter in Berlin, a gay winter, with Mark Twain as one of the distinguished figures of the German capital. He was received everywhere and made much of. Once a small, choice dinner was given him by Kaiser William II., and, later, a breakfast by the Empress. His books were great favorites in the German royal family. The Kaiser particularly enjoyed the "Mississippi" book, while the essay on "The Awful German Language," in the "Tramp Abroad," he pronounced one of the finest pieces of humor ever written. Mark Twain's books were favorites, in fact, throughout Germany. The door-man in his hotel had them all in his little room, and, discovering one day that their guest, Samuel L. Clemens, and Mark Twain were one, he nearly exploded with excitement. Dragging the author to his small room, he pointed to the shelf: "There," he said, "you wrote them! I've found it out. Ach! I did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons." Affairs were not going well in America, and in June Clemens made a trip over to see what could be done. Probably he did very little, and he was back presently at Nauheim, a watering-place, where he was able to work rather quietly. He began two stories--one of them, "The Extraordinary Twins," which was the first form of "Pudd'nhead Wilson;" the other, "Tom Sawyer Abroad," for "St. Nicholas." Twichell came to Nauheim during the summer, and one day he and Clemens ran over to Homburg, not far away. The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII.) was there, and Clemens and Twichell, walking in the park, met the Prince with the British ambassador, and were presented. Twichell, in an account of the meeting, said: "The meeting between the Prince and Mark was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince solid, erect, and soldier-like; Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait, in full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun umbrella of the most scandalous description." At Villa Viviani, an old, old mansion outside of Florence, on the hill toward Settignano, Mark Twain finished "Tom Sawyer Abroad," also "Pudd'nhead Wilson", and wrote the first half of a book that really had its beginning on the day when, an apprentice-boy in Hannibal, he had found a stray leaf from the pathetic story of "Joan of Arc." All his life she had been his idol, and he had meant some day to write of her. Now, in this weather-stained old palace, looking down on Florence, medieval and hazy, and across to the villa-dotted hills, he began one of the most beautiful stories ever written, "The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." He wrote in the first person, assuming the character of Joan's secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte, who in his old age is telling the great tale of the Maid of Orleans. It was Mark Twain's purpose, this time, to publish anonymously. Walking the floor one day at Viviani, and smoking vigorously, he said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy: "I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. People always want to laugh over what I write, and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. This is to be a serious book. It means more to me than anything else I have ever undertaken. I shall write it anonymously." So it was that the gentle Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and the tale of Joan was begun in the ancient garden of Viviani, a setting appropriate to its lovely form. He wrote rapidly when once his plan was perfected and his material arranged. The reading of his youth and manhood was now recalled, not merely as reading, but as remembered reality. It was as if he were truly the old Sieur de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out the tender, tragic tale. In six weeks he had written one hundred thousand words --remarkable progress at any time, the more so when we consider that some of the authorities he consulted were in a foreign tongue. He had always more or less kept up his study of French, begun so long ago on the river, and it stood him now in good stead. Still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes that still exist along the margin of his French authorities show the magnitude of his work. Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he stayed in the still garden with Joan. Florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people, some of them old friends. There were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, and the like always in progress, but he resisted most of these things, preferring to remain the quaint old Sieur de Conte, following again the banner of the Maid of Orleans marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. But the next spring, March, 1893, he was obliged to put aside the manuscript and hurry to America again, fruitlessly, of course, for a financial stress was on the land; the business of Webster & Co. was on the down-grade--nothing could save it. There was new hope in the old type-setting machine, but his faith in the resurrection was not strong. The strain of his affairs was telling on him. The business owed a great sum, with no prospect of relief. Back in Europe again, Mark Twain wrote F. D. Hall, his business manager in New York: "I am terribly tired of business. I am by nature and disposition unfit for it, and I want to get out of it. I am standing on a volcano. Get me out of business." Tantalizing letters continued to come, holding out hope in the business --the machine--in any straw that promised a little support through the financial storm. Again he wrote Hall: "Great Scott, but it's a long year for you and me! I never knew the almanac to drag so. . . I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the telegram saying the machine was finished --but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into 'three weeks sure,' I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much. W. don't know what sick-heartedness is, but he is in a fair way to find out." They closed Viviani in June and returned to Germany. By the end of August Clemens could stand no longer the strain of his American affairs, and, leaving the family at some German baths, he once more sailed for New York. [11] At Mark Twain's death his various literary effects passed into the hands of his biographer and literary executor, the present writer. LI. THE FAILURE OF WEBSTER & CO. AROUND THE WORLD. SORROW In a room at the Players Club--"a cheap room," he wrote home, "at $1.50 per day"--Mark Twain spent the winter, hoping against hope to weather the financial storm. His fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower even than during those bleak mining days among the Esmeralda hills. Then there had been no one but himself, and he was young. Now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down by debt. The liabilities of his firm were fully two hundred thousand dollars--sixty thousand of which were owing to Mrs. Clemens for money advanced--but the large remaining sum was due to banks, printers, binders, and the manufacturers of paper. A panic was on the land and there was no business. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He spent most of his days in his room, trying to write, and succeeded in finishing several magazine articles. Outwardly cheerful, he hid the bitterness of his situation. A few, however, knew the true state of his affairs. One of these one night introduced him to Henry H. Rogers, the Standard Oil millionaire. "Mr. Clemens," said Mr. Rogers, "I was one of your early admirers. I heard you lecture a long time ago, on the Sandwich Islands." They sat down at a table, and Mark Twain told amusing stories. Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. They became friends from that evening, and in due time the author had confessed to the financier all his business worries. "You had better let me look into things a little," Rogers said, and he advised Clemens to "stop walking the floor." It was characteristic of Mark Twain to be willing to unload his affairs upon any one that he thought able to bear the burden. He became a new man overnight. With Henry Rogers in charge, life was once more worth while. He accepted invitations from the Rogers family and from many others, and was presently so gay, so widely sought, and seen in so many places that one of his acquaintances, "Jamie" Dodge, dubbed him the "Belle of New York." Henry Rogers, meanwhile, was "looking into things." He had reasonable faith in the type-machine, and advanced a large sum on the chance of its proving a success. This, of course, lifted Mark Twain quite into the clouds. Daily he wrote and cabled all sorts of glowing hopes to his family, then in Paris. Once he wrote: "The ship is in sight now .... When the anchor is down, then I shall say: Farewell--a long farewell--to business! I will never touch it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will swim in ink!" Once he cabled, "Expect good news in ten days"; and a little later, "Look out for good news"; and in a few days, "Nearing success." Those Sellers-like messages could not but appeal, Mrs. Clemens's sense of humor, even in those dark days. To her sister she wrote, "They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved Colonel." The affairs of Webster & Co. Mr. Rogers found a bad way. When, at last, in April, 1894, the crisis came--a demand by the chief creditors for payment--he advised immediate assignment as the only course. So the firm of Webster & Co. closed its doors. The business which less than ten years before had begun so prosperously had ended in failure. Mark Twain, nearing fifty-nine, was bankrupt. When all the firm's effects had been sold and applied on the counts, he was still more than seventy thousand dollars in debt. Friends stepped in and offered to lend him money, but he declined these offers. Through Mr. Rogers a basis of settlement at fifty cents on the dollar was arranged, and Mark Twain said, "Give me time, and I will pay the other fifty." No one but his wife and Mr. Rogers, however, believed that at his age he would be able to make good the promise. Many advised him not to attempt it, but to settle once and for all on the legal basis as arranged. Sometimes, in moments of despondency, he almost surrendered. Once he said: "I need not dream of paying it. I never could manage it." But these were only the hard moments. For the most part he kept up good heart and confidence. It is true that he now believed again in the future of the type-setter, and that returns from it would pay him out of bankruptcy. But later in the year this final hope was taken away. Mr. Rogers wrote to him that in the final test the machine had failed to prove itself practical and that the whole project had been finally and permanently abandoned. The shock of disappointment was heavy for the moment, but then it was over--completely over--for that old mechanical demon, that vampire of invention that had sapped his fortune so long, was laid at last. The worst had happened; there was nothing more to dread. Within a week Mark Twain (he was now back in Paris with the family) had settled down to work once more on the "Recollections of Joan," and all mention and memory of the type-setter was forever put away. The machine stands to-day in the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is exhibited as the costliest piece of mechanism for its size ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied: "DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. If your book tells how to exterminate inventors, send me nine editions. Send them by express. "Very truly yours, "S. L. CLEMENS." Those were economical days. There was no income except from the old books, and at the time this was not large. The Clemens family, however, was cheerful, and Mark Twain was once more in splendid working form. The story of Joan hurried to its tragic conclusion. Each night he read to the family what he had written that day, and Susy, who was easily moved, would say, "Wait--wait till I get my handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and the fearful scene at Rouen had been depicted, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake!" Meaning that the book was finished. Susy herself had fine literary taste, and might have written had not her greater purpose been to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. Both Susy and her father cared more for Joan than for any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers Clemens wrote, "Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was mitten for love." It was placed serially with "Harper's Magazine" and appeared anonymously, but the public soon identified the inimitable touch of Mark Twain. It was now the spring of 1895, and Mark Twain had decided upon a new plan to restore his fortunes. Platform work had always paid him well, and though he disliked it now more than ever, he had resolved upon something unheard of in that line--nothing less, in fact, than a platform tour around the world. In May, with the family, he sailed for America, and after a month or two of rest at Quarry Farm he set out with Mrs. Clemens and Clara and with his American agent, J. B. Pond, for the Pacific coast. Susy and Jean remained behind with their aunt at the farm. The travelers left Elmira at night, and they always remembered the picture of Susy, standing under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. Mark Twain's tour of the world was a success from the beginning. Everywhere he was received with splendid honors--in America, in Australia, in New Zealand, in India, in Ceylon, in South Africa--wherever he went his welcome was a grand ovation, his theaters and halls were never large enough to hold his audiences. With the possible exception of General Grant's long tour in 1878-9 there had hardly been a more gorgeous progress than Mark Twain's trip around the world. Everywhere they were overwhelmed with attention and gifts. We cannot begin to tell the story of that journey here. In "Following the Equator" the author himself tells it in his own delightful fashion. From time to time along the way Mark Twain forwarded his accumulated profits to Mr. Rogers to apply against his debts, and by the time they sailed from South Africa the sum was large enough to encourage him to believe that, with the royalties to be derived from the book he would write of his travels, he might be able to pay in full and so face the world once more a free man. Their long trip--it had lasted a full year --was nearing its end. They would spend the winter in London--Susy and Jean were notified to join them there. They would all be reunited again. The outlook seemed bright once more. They reached England the last of July. Susy and Jean, with Katy Leary, were to arrive on the 12th of August. But the 12th did not bring them --it brought, instead, a letter. Susy was not well, the letter said; the sailing had been postponed. The letter added that it was nothing serious, but her parents cabled at once for later news. Receiving no satisfactory answer, Mrs. Clemens, full of forebodings, prepared to sail with Clara for America. Clemens would remain in London to arrange for the winter residence. A cable came, saying Susy's recovery would be slow but certain. Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed immediately. In some notes he once dictated, Mark Twain said: "That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released to-day.'" Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since they parted, and now he knew he would never see her again. The blow had found him alone and among strangers. In that day he could not even reach out to those upon the ocean, drawing daily nearer to the heartbreak. Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home. She had been well far a time at the farm, but then her health had declined. She worked continuously at her singing lessons and over-tried her strength. Then she went on a visit to Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner, in Hartford; but she did not rest, working harder than ever at her singing. Finally she was told that she must consult a physician. The doctor came and prescribed soothing remedies, and advised that she have the rest and quiet of her own home. Mrs. Crane came from Elmira, also her uncle Charles Langdon. But Susy became worse, and a few days later her malady was pronounced meningitis. This was the 15th of August, the day that her mother and Clara sailed from England. She was delirious and burning with fever, but at last sank into unconsciousness. She died three days later, and on the night that Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived was taken to Elmira for burial. They laid her beside the little brother that had died so long before, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia, written by Robert Richardson: Warm summer sun, shine kindly here; Warm southern wind, blow softly here; Green sod above, lie light, lie light! --Good night, dear heart, good night, good night. LII. EUROPEAN ECONOMIES With Clara and Jean, Mrs. Clemens returned to England, and in a modest house on Tedworth Square, a secluded corner of London, the stricken family hid themselves away for the winter. Few, even of their closest friends, knew of their whereabouts. In time the report was circulated that Mask Twain, old, sick, and deserted by his family, was living in poverty, toiling to pay his debts. Through the London publishers a distant cousin, Dr. James Clemens, of St. Louis, located the house on Tedworth Square, and wrote, offering assistance. He was invited to call, and found a quiet place--the life there simple--but not poverty. By and by there was another report--this time that Mark Twain was dead. A reporter found his way to Tedworth Square, and, being received by Mark Twain himself, asked what he should say. Clemens regarded him gravely, then, in his slow, nasal drawl, "Say--that the report of my death--has been grossly--exaggerated, "a remark that a day later was amusing both hemispheres. He could not help his humor; it was his natural form of utterance--the medium for conveying fact, fiction, satire, philosophy. Whatever his depth of despair, the quaint surprise of speech would come, and it would be so until his last day. By November he was at work on his book of travel, which he first thought of calling "Around the World." He went out not at all that winter, and the work progressed steadily, and was complete by the following May (1897). Meantime, during his trip around the world, Mark Twain's publishers had issued two volumes of his work--the "Joan of Arc" book, and another "Tom Sawyer" book, the latter volume combining two rather short stories, "Tom Sawyer Abroad," published serially in St. Nicholas, and "Tom Sawyer, Detective." The "Joan of Arc" book, the tenderest and most exquisite of all Mark Twain's work--a tale told with the deepest sympathy and the rarest delicacy--was dedicated by the author to his wife, as being the only piece of his writing which he considered worthy of this honor. He regarded it as his best book, and this was an opinion that did not change. Twelve years later--it was on his seventy-third birthday--he wrote as his final verdict, November 30, 1908: "I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well, and, besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none. MARK TWAIN." The public at first did not agree with the author's estimate, and the demand for the book was not large. But the public amended its opinion. The demand for "Joan" increased with each year until its sales ranked with the most popular of Mark Twain's books. The new stories of Tom and Huck have never been as popular as the earlier adventures of this pair of heroes. The shorter stories are less important and perhaps less alive, but they are certainly very readable tales, and nobody but Mark Twain could have written them. Clemens began some new stories when his travel book was out of the way, but presently with the family was on the way to Switzerland for the summer. They lived at Weggis, on Lake Lucerne, in the Villa Buhlegg--a very modest five-franc-a-day pension, for they were economizing and putting away money for the debts. Mark Twain was not in a mood for work, and, besides, proofs of the new book "Following the Equator," as it is now called--were coming steadily. But on the anniversary of Susy's death (August 18th) he wrote a poem, "In Memoriam," in which he touched a literary height never before attained. It was published in "Harper's Magazine," and now appears in his collected works. Across from Villa Buhlegg on the lake-front there was a small shaded inclosure where he loved to sit and look out on the blue water and lofty mountains, one of which, Rigi, he and Twichell had climbed nineteen years before. The little retreat is still there, and to-day one of the trees bears a tablet (in German), "Mark Twain's Rest." Autumn found the family in Vienna, located for the winter at the Hotel Metropole. Mrs. Clemens realized that her daughters must no longer be deprived of social and artistic advantages. For herself, she longed only for retirement. Vienna is always a gay city, a center of art and culture and splendid social functions. From the moment of his arrival, Mark Twain and his family were in the midst of affairs. Their room at the Metropole became an assembling-place for distinguished members of the several circles that go to make up the dazzling Viennese life. Mrs. Clemens, to her sister in America, once wrote: "Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc." Mark Twain found himself the literary lion of the Austrian capital. Every club entertained him and roared with delight at his German speeches. Wherever he appeared on the streets he was recognized. "Let him pass! Don't you see it is Herr Mark Twain!" commanded an officer to a guard who, in the midst of a great assemblage, had presumed to bar the way. LIII. MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS Mark Twain wrote much and well during this period, in spite of his social life. His article "Concerning the Jews" was written that first winter in Vienna--a fine piece of special pleading; also the greatest of his short stories--one of the greatest of all short stories--"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg." But there were good reasons why he should write better now; his mind was free of a mighty load--he had paid his debts! Soon after his arrival in Vienna he had written to Mr. Rogers: "Let us begin on those debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer. It totally unfits me for work." He had accumulated a large sum for the purpose, and the royalties from the new book were beginning to roll in. Payment of the debts was begun. At the end of December he wrote again: "Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than from pulling it in." A few days later he wrote to Howells that he had "turned the corner"; and again: "We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash . . . . I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled on to you that was saddled on to me, three years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it, and the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning." By the end of January, 1898, Clemens had accumulated enough money to make the final payments to his creditors. At the time of his failure he had given himself five years to achieve this result. But he had needed less than four. A report from Mr. Rogers showed that a balance of thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. Clemens had tried to keep his money affairs out of the newspapers, but the payment of the final claims could not be concealed, and the press made the most of it. Head-lines shouted it. Editorials heralded Mark Twain as a second Walter Scott, because Scott, too, had labored to lift a great burden of debt. Never had Mark Twain been so beloved by his fellow-men. One might suppose now that he had had enough of invention and commercial enterprises of every sort--that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might suppose this--but it would not be true. Within a month after his debts were paid he was negotiating with the Austrian inventor Szczepanik for the American rights in a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world. He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil to "come in"; but the plan failed to bear the test of Mr. Rogers's investigation and was heard of no more. Samuel Clemens's obligation to Henry Rogers was very great, but it was not quite the obligation that many supposed it to be. It was often asserted that the financier lent, even gave, the humorist large sums, and pointed out opportunities for speculation. No part of this statement is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money, and never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. He sometimes invested Mark Twain's own funds for him, but he never bought for him a share of stock without money in hand to pay for it in full--money belonging to, and earned by, Clemens himself. What Henry Rogers did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--favors that Mark Twain could accept without humiliation. He did accept them, and never ceased to be grateful. He rarely wrote without expressing his gratitude, and we get the size of Mark Twain's obligation when in one letter we read: "I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. Work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer." He wrote much and well, mainly magazine articles, including some of those chapters later gathered it his book on "Christian Science." He reveled like a boy in his new freedom and fortunes, in the lavish honors paid him, in the rich circumstance of Viennese life. But always just beneath the surface were unforgetable sorrows. His face in repose was always sad. Once, after writing to Howells of his successes, he added: "All those things might move and interest one. But how desperately more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'At the Back of the North Wind.' Oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!" LIV. RETURN AFTER EXILE News came to Vienna of the death of Orion Clemens, at the age of seventy-two. Orion had died as he had lived--a gentle dreamer, always with a new plan. He had not been sick at all. One morning early he had seated himself at a table, with pencil and paper, and was putting down the details of his latest project, when death came--kindly, in the moment of new hope. He was a generous, upright man, beloved by all who understood him. The Clemenses remained two winters in Vienna, spending the second at the Hotel Krantz, where their rooms were larger and finer than at the Metropole, and even more crowded with notabilities. Their salon acquired the name of the "Second Embassy," and Mark Twain was, in fact, the most representative American in the Austrian capital. It became the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, his comments, whether serious or otherwise, being always worth printing. When European disarmament was proposed, Editor William T. Stead, of the "Review of Reviews," wrote for his opinion. He replied: "DEAR MR. STEAD,--The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. MARK TWAIN." He refused offers of many sorts. He declined ten thousand dollars for a tobacco endorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough. He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical. He declined another ten thousand for ten lectures, and another offer for fifty lectures at the same rates --that is, one thousand dollars per night. He could get along without these sums, he said, and still preserve some remnants of his self-respect. It was May, 1899, when Clemens and his family left Vienna. They spent a summer in Sweden on account of the health of Jean Clemens, and located in London apartments--30 Wellington Court--for the winter. Then followed a summer at beautiful Dollis Hill, an old house where Gladstone had often visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of London. The city had not quite enclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with lily-pads, and wide spaces of grassy lawn. The place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. Writing to Twichell in mid-summer, Clemens said: "I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I am working, and deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendous defect. Levy is all so enchanted with the place and so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it." However, there was one still greater attraction than Dollis Hill, and that was America--home. Mark Twain at sixty-five and a free man once more had decided to return to his native land. They closed Dollis Hill at the end of September, and October 6, 1900, sailed on the Minnehaha for New York, bidding good-by, as Mark Twain believed, and hoped, to foreign travel. Nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the ship, he said: "If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't get away again." LV. A PROPHET AT HOME New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain. Every newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and his triumph. "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till they knew it was like Clemens." Clubs and societies vied with one another in offering him grand entertainments. Literary and lecture proposals poured in. He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures. These sensational offers did not tempt him. He was sick of the platform. He made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no lectures or readings for profit. His literary work he confined to a few magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "Harper & Brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later thirty) cents per word. He arranged with the same firm for the publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition. He wished his affairs to be settled as nearly as might be. His desire was freedom from care. Also he would have liked a period of quiet and rest, but that was impossible. He realized that the multitude of honors tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely refuse. Howells writes that Mark Twain's countrymen "kept it up past all precedent," and in return Mark Twain tried to do his part. "His friends saw that he was wearing himself out," adds Howells, and certain it is that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough. Once to Richard Watson Gilder he wrote: "In bed with a chest cold and other company. "DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain with this pencil, but in the cir--ces I will leave it all to your imagination. "Was it Grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? No, old man, no, no! "Ever yours, MARK." In the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by Mark Twain at this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose. It was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized. He still made them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too. He preached a new gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that proposes to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In one place he said: "We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been taught." He protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies. He was seldom "with the largest crowd" himself. Writing much of our foreign affairs, then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with a gun. But he was not always warlike. One of the speeches he made that winter was with Col. Henry Watterson, a former Confederate soldier, at a Lincoln birthday memorial at Carnegie Hall. "Think of it!" he wrote Twichell, "two old rebels functioning there; I as president and Watterson as orator of the day. Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank God!" The Clemens household did not go back to Hartford. During their early years abroad it had been Mrs. Clemens's dream to return and open the beautiful home, with everything the same as before. The death of Susy had changed all this. The mother had grown more and more to feel that she could not bear the sorrow of Susy's absence in the familiar rooms. After a trip which Clemens himself made to Hartford, he wrote, "I realize that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break." So they did not go back. Mrs. Clemens had seen it for the last time on that day when the carriage waited while she went back to take a last look into the vacant rooms. They had taken a house at 14 West Tenth Street for the winter, and when summer came they went to a log cabin on Saranac Lake, which they called "The Lair." Here Mark Twain wrote "A Double-barreled Detective Story," a not very successful burlesque of Sherlock Holmes. But most of the time that summer he loafed and rested, as was his right. Once during the summer he went on a cruise with H. H. Rogers, Speaker "Tom" Reed, and others on Mr. Rogers's yacht. LVI. HONORED BY MISSOURI The family did not return to New York. They took a beautiful house at Riverdale on the Hudson--the old Appleton homestead. Here they established themselves and settled down for American residence. They would have bought the Appleton place, but the price was beyond their reach. It was in the autumn of 1901 that Mark Twain settled in Riverdale. In June of the following year he was summoned West to receive the degree of LL.D. from the university of his native state. He made the journey a sort of last general visit to old associations and friends. In St. Louis he saw Horace Bixby, fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. Clemens said: "I have become an old man. You are still thirty-five." They went over to the rooms of the pilots' association, where the river-men gathered in force to celebrate his return. Then he took train for Hannibal. He spent several days in Hannibal and saw Laura Hawkins--Mrs. Frazer, and a widow now--and John Briggs, an old man, and John RoBards, who had worn the golden curls and the medal for good conduct. They drove him to the old house on Hill Street, where once he had lived and set type; photographers were there and photographed him standing at the front door. "It all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house. "A boy's home is a big place to him. I suppose if I should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a bird-house." He did not see "Huck"--Torn Blankenship had not lived in Hannibal for many years. But he was driven to all the familiar haunts--to Lover's Leap, the cave, and the rest; and Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday's Hill--the "Cardiff Hill" of "Tom Sawyer." It was just such a day, as the one when they had damaged a cooper shop and so nearly finished the old negro driver. A good deal more than fifty years had passed since then, and now here they were once more--Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper--two old men, the hills still fresh and green, the river rippling in the sun. Looking across to the Illinois shore and the green islands where they had played, and to Lover's Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said: "John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw. Down there is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. Down there on Lover's Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have gone now." John Briggs said, "Sam, do you remember the day we stole peaches from old man Price, and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with dogs, and how we made up our minds we'd catch that nigger and drown him?" And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by drove along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return. "Once near the shore I thought I would let down," he said, "but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally my knee struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I ever had." They drove by a place where a haunted house had stood. They drank from a well they had always known--from the bucket, as they had always drunk --talking, always talking, touching with lingering fondness that most beautiful and safest of all our possessions--the past. "Sam," said John, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we shall meet on earth. God bless you. Perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship." "John," was the answer, "this day has been worth a thousand dollars to me. We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now. Good-by, John. I'll try to meet you somewhere." Clemens left next day for Columbia, where the university is located. At each station a crowd had gathered to cheer and wave as the train pulled in and to offer him flowers. Sometimes he tried to say a few words, but his voice would not come. This was more than even Tom Sawyer had dreamed. Certainly there is something deeply touching in the recognition of one's native State; the return of the boy who has set out unknown to battle with life and who is called back to be crowned is unlike any other home-coming--more dramatic, more moving. Next day at the university Mark Twain, summoned before the crowded assembly-hall to receive his degree, stepped out to the center of the stage and paused. He seemed in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or only express his thanks for the honor received. Suddenly and without signal the great audience rose and stood in silence at his feet. He bowed but he could not speak. Then the vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word M-i-s-s-o-u-r-i, with a pause between each letter. It was tremendously impressive. Mark Twain was not left in doubt as to what was required of him when the chant ended. The audience demanded a speech--a speech, and he made them one--such a speech as no one there would forget to his dying day. Back in St. Louis, he attended the rechristening of the St. Louis harbor boat; it had been previously called the "St. Louis," but it was now to be called the "Mark Twain." LVII. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE Life which had begun very cheerfully at Riverdale ended sadly enough. In August, at York Harbor, Maine, Mrs. Clemens's health failed and she was brought home an invalid, confined almost entirely to her room. She had been always the life, the center, the mainspring of the household. Now she must not even be consulted--hardly visited. On her bad days--and they were many--Clemens, sad and anxious, spent most of his time lingering about her door, waiting for news, or until he was permitted to see her for a brief moment. In his memorandum-book of that period he wrote: "Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork--day and night devotion to the children and me. We did not know how to value it. We know now." And on the margin of a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his triumph over debt, he wrote: "Livy never gets her share of those applauses, but it is because the people do not know. Yet she is entitled to the lion's share." She improved during the winter, but very slowly. Her husband wrote in his diary: "Feb. 2, 1903--Thirty-third wedding anniversary. I was allowed to see Livy five minutes this morning, in honor of the day." Mrs. Clemens had always remembered affectionately their winter in Florence of ten years before, and she now expressed the feeling that if she were in Florence again she would be better. The doctors approved, and it was decided that she should be taken there as soon as she was strong enough to travel. She had so far improved by June that they journeyed to Elmira, where in the quiet rest of Quarry Farm her strength returned somewhat and the hope of her recovery was strong. Mark Twain wrote a story that summer in Elmira, in the little octagonal study, shut in now by trees and overgrown with vines. "A Dog's Tale," a pathetic plea against vivisection, was the last story written in the little retreat that had seen the beginning of "Tom Sawyer" twenty-nine years before. There was a feeling that the stay in Europe was this time to be permanent. On one of the first days of October Clemens wrote in his note-book: "To-day I place flowers on Susy's grave--for the last time, probably --and read the words, 'Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.'" They sailed on the 24th, by way of Naples and Genoa, and were presently installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace, in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. It was a beautiful spot, though its aging walls and cypresses and matted vines gave it a rather mournful look. Mrs. Clemens's health improved there for a time, in spite of dull, rainy, depressing weather; so much so that in May, when the warmth and sun came back, Clemens was driving about the country, seeking a villa that he might buy for a home. On one of these days--it was a Sunday in early June, the 5th--when he had been out with Jean, and had found a villa which he believed would fill all their requirements, he came home full of enthusiasm and hope, eager to tell the patient about the discovery. Certainly she seemed better. A day or two before she had been wheeled out on the terrace to enjoy the wonder of early Italian summer. He found her bright and cheerful, anxious to hear all their plans for the new home. He stayed with her alone through the dinner hour, and their talk was as in the old days. Summoned to go at last, he chided himself for staying so long; but she said there was no harm and kissed him, saying, "you will come back?" and he answered "Yes, to say good night," meaning at half-past nine, as was the permitted custom. He stood a moment at the door, throwing kisses to her, and she returned them, her face bright with smiles. He was so full of hope--they were going to be happy again. Long ago he had been in the habit of singing jubilee songs to the children. He went upstairs now to the piano and played the chorus and sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "My Lord He Calls Me." He stopped then, but Jean, who had come in, asked him to go on. Mrs. Clemens, from her room, heard the music and said to Katy Leary: "He is singing a good-night carol to me." The music ceased presently. A moment later she asked to be lifted up. Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. Clemens, just then coming to say good-night, saw a little group gathered about her bed, and heard Clara ask: "Katy, is it true? Oh, Katy, is it true?" In his note-book that night he wrote: "At a quarter-past nine this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her thirty-seven years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time.... I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty- four years of married life that have hurt Livy's heart." And to Howells a few days later: "To-day, treasured in her worn, old testament, I found a dear and gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 12, 1896, about our poor Susy's death. I am tired and old; I wish I were with Livy." They brought her to America; and from the house, and the rooms, where she had been made a bride bore her to a grave beside Susy and little Langdon. LVIII. MARK TWAIN AT SEVENTY In a small cottage belonging to Richard Watson Gilder, at Tyringham, Massachusetts, Samuel Clemens and his daughters tried to plan for the future. Mrs. Clemens had always been the directing force--they were lost without her. They finally took a house in New York City, No. 21 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Ninth Street, installed the familiar furnishings, and tried once more to establish a home. The house was handsome within and without--a proper residence for a venerable author and sage--a suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him. It lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart. He added presently a great Aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. Sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary played to him. He went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and intimate friends. His writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature, protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms. Once he wrote a "War Prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious, white-robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that precede the marching of the nation's armies to battle. The minister had prayed for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition that the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells, its people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land in rags and hunger. It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy, indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled. He did not print it, because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege. When summer came again, in a beautiful house at Dublin, New Hampshire, on the Monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work, and wrote that pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale." Also "Eve's Diary," which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly fantastic tale entitled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a satire in which Gulliver is outdone. He never finished it. He never could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere, and the tale was lost. Yet he always meant to get at it again some day and make order out of chaos. Old friends were dying, and Mark Twain grew more and more lonely. "My section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the great English actor Henry Irving died. Charles Henry Webb, his first publisher, John Hay, Bret Harte, Thomas B. Reed, and, indeed, most of his earlier associates were gone. When an invitation came from San Francisco to attend a California reunion he replied that his wandering days were over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his life. And in another letter: "I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left there, it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was suggested." A choice example, by the way, of Mark Twain's best humor, with its perfectly timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would have been content to end with the statement, "I could have gone earlier." Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--"it was suggested." Mark Twain was nearing seventy. With the 30th of November (1905) he would complete the scriptural limitation, and the president of his publishing-house, Col. George Harvey, of Harper's, proposed a great dinner for him in celebration of his grand maturity. Clemens would have preferred a small assembly in some snug place, with only his oldest and closest friends. Colonel Harvey had a different view. He had given a small, choice dinner to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday; now it must be something really worth while--something to outrank any former literary gathering. In order not to conflict with Thanksgiving holidays, the 5th of December was selected as the date. On that evening, two hundred American and English men and women of letters assembled in Delmonico's great banquet-hall to do honor to their chief. What an occasion it was! The tables of gay diners and among them Mark Twain, his snow-white hair a gleaming beacon for every eye. Then, by and by, presented by William Dean Howells, he rose to speak. Instantly the brilliant throng was on its feet, a shouting billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. It was a supreme moment! The greatest one of them all hailed by their applause as he scaled the mountaintop. Never did Mark Twain deliver a more perfect address than he gave that night. He began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed he had no valuable habits at all. Then, at last, came that unforgetable close: "Threescore years and ten! "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time- expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but 'lights out.' You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. "The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter, through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, 'Your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you, in your turn, shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.'" The tears that had been lying in wait were no longer kept back. If there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, they failed to mention the fact later. Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--Cable, Carnegie, Gilder, and the rest. Mr. Rogers did not speak, nor the Reverend Twichell, but they sat at his special table. Aldrich could not be there, but wrote a letter. A group of English authors, including Alfred Austin, Barrie, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Hardy, Kipling, Lang, and others, joined in a cable. Helen Keller wrote: "And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said: "'If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too little.' "Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the 'seven-terraced summit' of knowing little. So probably you are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!" Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was never a pessimist in his heart. LIX. MARK TWAIN ARRANGES FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY It was at the beginning of 1906--a little more than a month after the seventieth-birthday dinner--that the writer of these chapters became personally associated with Mark Twain. I had met him before, and from time to time he had returned a kindly word about some book I had written and inconsiderately sent him, for he had been my literary hero from childhood. Once, indeed, he had allowed me to use some of his letters in a biography I was writing of Thomas Nast; he had been always an admirer of the great cartoonist, and the permission was kindness itself. Before the seating at the birthday dinner I happened to find myself for a moment alone with Mark Twain and remembered to thank him in person for the use of the letters; a day or two later I sent him a copy of the book. I did not expect to hear from it again. It was a little while after this that I was asked to join in a small private dinner to be given to Mark Twain at the Players, in celebration of his being made an honorary member of that club--there being at the time only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving. I was in the Players a day or two before the event, and David Munro, of "The North American Review," a man whose gentle and kindly nature made him "David" to all who knew him, greeted me joyfully, his face full of something he knew I would wish to hear. He had been chosen, he said, to propose the Players' dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and beside him a copy of the Nast book. I suspect now that David's generous heart prompted Mark Twain to speak of the book, and that his comment had lost nothing in David's eager retelling. But I was too proud and happy to question any feature of the precious compliment, and Munro--always most happy in making others happy--found opportunity to repeat it, and even to improve upon it --usually in the presence of others--several times during the evening. The Players' dinner to Mark Twain was given on the evening of January 3, 19066, and the picture of it still remains clear to me. The guests, assembled around a single table in the private dining-room, did not exceed twenty-five in number. Brander Matthews presided, and the knightly Frank Millet, who would one day go down on the "Titanic," was there, and Gilder and Munro and David Bispham and Robert Reid, and others of their kind. It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who by a custom of the Players is placed at the side and not at the distant end of the long table. Regarding him at leisure, I saw that he seemed to be in full health. He had an alert, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit by the soft glow of the shaded candles, outlined against the richness of the shadowed walls, he made a figure of striking beauty. I could not take my eyes from it, for it stirred in me the farthest memories. I saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West where I had first heard the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a group had gathered around the evening lamp to hear read aloud the story of the Innocents on their Holy Land pilgrimage, which to a boy of eight had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy-tale. To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how during the thirty-six years since then no one had meant to me quite what Mark Twain had meant--in literature and, indeed, in life. Now here he was just across the table. It was a fairy-tale come true. Genung said: "You should write his life." It seemed to me no more than a pleasant remark, but he came back to it again and again, trying to encourage me with the word that Munro had brought back concerning the biography of Nast. However, nothing of what he said had kindled any spark of hope. I put him off by saying that certainly some one of longer and closer friendship and larger experience had been selected for the work. Then the speaking began, and the matter went out of my mind. Later in the evening, when we had left our seats and were drifting about the table, I found a chance to say a word to our guest concerning his "Joan of Arc," which I had recently re-read. To my happiness, he told me that long-ago incident--the stray leaf from Joan's life, blown to him by the wind--which had led to his interest in all literature. Then presently I was with Genung again and he was still insisting that I write the life of Mark Twain. It may have been his faithful urging, it may have been the quick sympathy kindled by the name of "Joan of Arc"; whatever it was, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest I was prompted to add: "May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?" And something--to this day I do not know what--prompted him to answer: "Yes, come soon." Two days later, by appointment with his secretary, I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue, and waited in the library to be summoned to his room. A few moments later I was ascending the long stairs, wondering why I had come on so useless an errand, trying to think up an excuse for having come at all. He was propped up in bed--a regal bed, from a dismantled Italian palace --delving through a copy of "Huckleberry Finn," in search of a paragraph concerning which some unknown correspondent had inquired. He pushed the cigars toward me, commenting amusingly on this correspondent and on letter-writing in general. By and by, when there came a lull, I told him what so many thousands had told him before--what his work had meant to me, so long ago, and recalled my childish impressions of that large black-and-gilt book with its wonderful pictures and adventures "The Innocents Abroad." Very likely he was willing enough to let me change the subject presently and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro had brought. I do not remember what was his comment, but I suddenly found myself saying that out of his encouragement had grown a hope (though certainly it was less), that I might some day undertake a book about himself. I expected my errand to end at this point, and his silence seemed long and ominous. He said at last that from time to time he had himself written chapters of his life, but that he had always tired of the work and put it aside. He added that he hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters, but that a biography--a detailed story of a man's life and effort--was another matter. I think he added one or two other remarks, then all at once, turning upon me those piercing agate-blue eyes, he said: "When would you like to begin?" There was a dresser, with a large mirror, at the end of the room. I happened to catch my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it, mentally "This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams." But even in a dream one must answer, and I said: "Whenever you like. I can begin now." He was always eager in any new undertaking. "Very good," he said, "the sooner, then, the better. Let's begin while we are in the humor. The longer you postpone a thing of this kind, the less likely you are ever to get at it." This was on Saturday; I asked if Tuesday, January 9, would be too soon to start. He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired as to my plan of work. I suggested bringing a stenographer to make notes of his life-story as he could recall it, this record to be supplemented by other material--letters, journals, and what not. He said: "I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer with some one to prompt me and act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. My manuscript and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed. I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictations here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key and come and go as you please." That was always his way. He did nothing by halves. He got up and showed me the warm luxury of the study, with its mass of material--disordered, but priceless. I have no distinct recollections of how I came away, but presently, back at the Players, I was confiding the matter to Charles Harvey Genung, who said he was not surprised; but I think he was. LX. WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN It was true, after all; and on Tuesday morning, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable stenographer, ready to begin. Clemens, meantime, had developed a new idea: he would like to add, he said, the new dictations to his former beginnings, completing an autobiography which was to be laid away and remain unpublished for a hundred years. He would pay the stenographer himself, and own the notes, allowing me, of course, free use of them as material for my book. He did not believe that he could follow the story of his life in its order of dates, but would find it necessary to wander around, picking up the thread as memory or fancy prompted. I could suggest subjects and ask questions. I assented to everything, and we set to work immediately. As on my former visit, he was in bed when we arrived, though clad now in a rich Persian dressing gown, and propped against great, snowy pillows. A small table beside him held his pipes, cigars, papers, also a reading-lamp, the soft light of which brought out his brilliant coloring and the gleam of his snowy hair. There was daylight, too, but it was dull winter daylight, from the north, while the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red. He began that morning with some memories of the Comstock mine; then he dropped back to his childhood, closing at last with some comment on matters quite recent. How delightful it was--his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious habits of his delicate hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed through his mind and were accepted or put aside. We were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. Time did not count. When he finished, at last, we were all amazed to find that more than two hours had slipped away. "And how much I have enjoyed it," he said. "It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table always an inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it." The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning. But it was always fascinating, and I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as indeed I was. It was not all smooth sailing, however. In the course of time I began to realize that these marvelous dictated chapters were not altogether history, but were often partly, or even entirely, imaginary. The creator of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had been embroidering old incidents or inventing new ones too long to stick to history now, to be able to separate the romance in his mind from the reality of the past. Also, his memory of personal events had become inaccurate. He realized this, and once said, in his whimsical, gentle way: "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter." Yet it was his constant purpose to stick to fact, and especially did he make no effort to put himself in a good light. Indeed, if you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it. He would give it to the last syllable, and he would improve upon it and pile up his sins, and sometimes the sins of others, without stint. Certainly the dictations were precious, for they revealed character as nothing else could; but as material for history they often failed to stand the test of the documents in the next room--the letters, notebooks, agreements, and the like--from which I was gradually rebuilding the structure of the years. In the talks that we usually had when the dictations were ended and the stenographer had gone I got much that was of great value. It was then that I usually made those inquiries which we had planned in the beginning, and his answers, coming quickly and without reflection, gave imagination less play. Sometimes he would touch some point of special interest and walk up and down, philosophizing, or commenting upon things in general, in a manner not always complimentary to humanity and its progress. I seldom asked him a question during the dictation--or interrupted in any way, though he had asked me to stop him when I found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. At first I lacked the courage to point out a mistake at the moment, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he would be likely to say: "Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me go on making a donkey of myself when you could have saved me?" So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him in time. But if it happened that I upset his thought, the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say: "Now you've knocked everything out of my head." Then, of course, I was sorry and apologized, and in a moment the sky was clear again. There was generally a humorous complexion to the dictations, whatever the subject. Humor was his natural breath of life, and rarely absent. Perhaps I should have said sooner that he smoked continuously during the dictations. His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which belongs to domestic tobacco. They were strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training that made him prefer them. Admiring friends used to send him costly, imported cigars, but he rarely touched them, and they were smoked by visitors. He often smoked a pipe, and preferred it to be old and violent. Once when he had bought a new, expensive briar-root, he handed it to me, saying: "I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me." LXI. DICTATIONS AT DUBLIN, N. H. Following his birthday dinner, Mark Twain had become once more the "Belle of New York," and in a larger way than ever before. An editorial in the "Evening Mail" referred to him as a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis, and added: "Things have reached a point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement." He loved the excitement of it, and it no longer seemed to wear upon him. Scarcely an evening passed that he did not go out to some dinner or gathering where he had promised to speak. In April, for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Society, he delivered his farewell lecture--the last lecture, he said, where any one would have to pay to hear him. It was at Carnegie Hall, and the great place was jammed. As he stood before that vast, shouting audience, I wondered if he was remembering that night, forty years before in San Francisco, when his lecture career had begun. We hoped he might speak of it, but he did not do so. In May the dictations were transferred to Dublin, New Hampshire, to the long veranda of the Upton House, on the Monadnock slope. He wished to continue our work, he said; so the stenographer and myself were presently located in the village, and drove out each morning, to sit facing one of the rarest views in all New England, while he talked of everything and anything that memory or fancy suggested. We had begun in his bedroom, but the glorious outside was too compelling. The long veranda was ideal. He was generally ready when we arrived, a luminous figure in white flannels, pacing up and down before a background of sky and forest, blue lake, and distant hills. When it stormed we would go inside to a bright fire. The dictation ended, he would ask his secretary to play the orchestrelle, which at great expense had been freighted up from New York. In that high situation, the fire and the music and the stormbeat seemed to lift us very far indeed from reality. Certain symphonies by Beethoven, an impromptu by Schubert, and a nocturne by Chopin were the selections he cared for most,[12] though in certain moods he asked, for the Scotch melodies. There was a good deal of social life in Dublin, but, the dictations were seldom interrupted. He became lonely, now and then, and paid a brief visit to New York, or to Mr. Rogers in Fairhaven, but he always returned gladly, for he liked the rest and quiet, and the dictations gave him employment. A part of his entertainment was a trio of kittens which he had rented for the summer--rented because then they would not lose ownership and would find home and protection in the fall. He named the kittens Sackcloth and Ashes--Sackcloth being a black-and-white kit, and Ashes a joint name owned by the two others, who were gray and exactly alike. All summer long these merry little creatures played up and down the wide veranda, or chased butterflies and grasshoppers down the clover slope, offering Mark Twain never-ending amusement. He loved to see them spring into the air after some insect, miss it, tumble back, and quickly jump up again with a surprised and disappointed expression. In spite of his resolve not to print any of his autobiography until he had been dead a hundred years, he was persuaded during the summer to allow certain chapters of it to be published in "The North American Review." With the price received, thirty thousand dollars, he announced he was going to build himself a country home at Redding, Connecticut, on land already purchased there, near a small country place of my own. He wished to have a fixed place to go each summer, he said, and his thought was to call it "Autobiography House." [12] His special favorites were Schubert's Op. 142, part 2, and Chopin's Op. 37, part 2. LXII A NEW ERA OF BILLIARDS With the return to New York I began a period of closer association with Mark Twain. Up to that time our relations had been chiefly of a literary nature. They now became personal as well. It happened in this way: Mark Twain had never outgrown his love for the game of billiards, though he had not owned a table since the closing of the Hartford house, fifteen years before. Mrs. Henry Rogers had proposed to present him with a table for Christmas, but when he heard of the plan, boylike, he could not wait, and hinted that if he had the table "right now" he could begin to use it sooner. So the table came--a handsome combination affair, suitable to all games--and was set in place. That morning when the dictation ended he said: "Have you any special place to lunch, to-day?" I replied that I had not. "Lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table." I acknowledged that I had never played more than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. "No matter," he said "the poorer you play the better I shall like it." So I remained for luncheon, and when it was over we began the first game ever played on the "Christmas" table. He taught me a game in which caroms and pockets both counted, and he gave me heavy odds. He beat me, but it was a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer relation between us. We played most of the afternoon, and he suggested that I "come back in the evening and play some more." I did so, and the game lasted till after midnight. I had beginner's luck--"nigger luck," as he called it--and it kept him working feverishly to win. Once when I had made a great fluke--a carom followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets, he said: "When you pick up that cue this table drips at every pore." The morning dictations became a secondary interest. Like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it seemed never to come quickly enough to suit him. I remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short that we might the sooner get up-stairs for billiards. He did not eat the midday meal himself, but he would come down and walk about the dining-room, talking steadily that marvelous, marvelous talk which little by little I trained myself to remember, though never with complete success. He was only killing time, and I remember once, when he had been earnestly discussing some deep question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was ending. "Now," he said, "we will proceed to more serious matters--it's your --shot." My game improved with practice, and he reduced my odds. He was willing to be beaten, but not too often. We kept a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed a balance in his favor. He was not an even-tempered player. When the game went steadily against him he was likely to become critical, even fault-finding, in his remarks. Then presently he would be seized with remorse and become over-gentle and attentive, placing the balls as I knocked them into the pockets, hurrying to render this service. I wished he would not do it. It distressed me that he should humble himself. I was willing that he should lose his temper, that he should be even harsh if he felt so inclined--his age, his position, his genius gave him special privileges. Yet I am glad, as I remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his humanity. Once in a burst of exasperation he made such an onslaught on the balls that he landed a couple of them on the floor. I gathered them up and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like a summer meadow when the storm has passed by. Presently he said: "This is a most amusing game. When you play badly it amuses me, and when I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you." It was but natural that friendship should grow under such conditions. The disparity of our ages and gifts no longer mattered. The pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. He invented a new game for the occasion, and added a new rule for it with almost every shot. It happened that no other member of the family was at home--ill-health had banished every one, even the secretary. Flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and a string of callers. He saw no one but a few intimate friends. We were entirely alone for dinner, and I felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. On that night, a year before, the flower of his profession had assembled to do him honor. Once between the courses, when he rose, as was his habit, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and, seating himself at the orchestrelle, began to play the beautiful "Flower Song" from Faust. It was a thing I had not seen him do before, and I never saw him do it again. He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening, and at night when we stopped playing he said: "I have never had a pleasanter day at this game." I answered: "I hope ten years from to-night we shall be playing it." "Yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth." LXIII. LIVING WITH MARK TWAIN I accompanied him on a trip he made to Washington in the interest of copyright. Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon lent us his private room in the Capitol, and there all one afternoon Mark Twain received Congressmen, and in an atmosphere blue with cigar-smoke preached the gospel of copyright. It was a historic trip, and for me an eventful one, for it was on the way back to New York that Mark Twain suggested that I take up residence in his home. There was a room going to waste, he said, and I would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. I accepted, of course. Looking back, now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room, with the brilliant green square in the center on which the gay balls are rolling, and bent over it his luminous white figure in the instant of play. Then there is the long lighted drawing-room, with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking while the rich organ tones summon for him scenes and faces which the others do not see. Sometimes he rose, pacing the length of the parlors, but oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress, heightening his brilliant coloring. He had taken up the fashion of wearing white altogether at this time. Black, he said, reminded him of his funerals. The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. He did not always talk, but he often did, and I see him clearest, his face alive with interest, presenting some new angle of thought in his vivid, inimitable speech. These are pictures that will not fade from my memory. How I wish the marvelous things he said were like them! I preserved as much of them as I could, and in time trained myself to recall portions of his exact phrasing. But even so they seemed never quite as he had said them. They lacked the breath of his personality. His dinner-table talk was likely to be political, scientific, philosophic. He often discussed aspects of astronomy, which was a passion with him. I could succeed better with the billiard-room talk--that was likely to be reminiscent, full of anecdotes. I kept a pad on the window-sill, and made notes while he was playing. At one time he told me of his dreams. "There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. Usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. Another dream I have is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. In it I am always getting up before an audience, with nothing to say, trying to be funny, trying to make the audience laugh, realizing I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." He did not return to Dublin the next summer, but took a house at Tuxedo, nearer New York. I did not go there with him, for in the spring it was agreed that I should make a pilgrimage to the Mississippi and the Pacific coast to see those few still remaining who had known Mark Twain in his youth. John Briggs was alive, also Horace Bixby, "Joe" Goodman, Steve and Jim Gillis, and there were a few others. It was a trip taken none too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted old man who sat by his fire and through one afternoon told me of the happy days along the river-front from the cave to Holliday's Hill, did not reach the end of the year. Horace Bixby, at eighty-one, was still young, and piloting a government snag-boat. Neither was Joseph Goodman old, by any means, but Jim Gillis was near his end, and Steve Gillis was an invalid, who said: "Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die." LXIV. A DEGREE FROM OXFORD On my return I found Mark Twain elated: he had been invited to England to receive the degree of Literary Doctor from the Oxford University. It is the highest scholastic honorary degree; and to come back, as I had, from following the early wanderings of the barefoot truant of Hannibal, only to find him about to be officially knighted by the world's most venerable institution of learning, seemed rather the most surprising chapter even of his marvelous fairy-tale. If Tom Sawyer had owned the magic wand, he hardly could have produced anything as startling as that. He sailed on the 8th of June, 1907, exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the "Quaker City" to win his greater fame. I did not accompany him. He took with him a secretary to make notes, and my affairs held me in America. He was absent six weeks, and no attentions that England had ever paid him before could compare with her lavish welcome during this visit. His reception was really national. He was banqueted by the greatest clubs of London, he was received with special favor at the King's garden party, he traveled by a royal train, crowds gathering everywhere to see him pass. At Oxford when he appeared on the street the name Mark Twain ran up and down like a cry of fire, and the people came running. When he appeared on the stage at the Sheldonian Theater to receive his degree, clad in his doctor's robe of scarlet and gray, there arose a great tumult--the shouting of the undergraduates for the boy who had been Tom Sawyer and had played with Huckleberry Finn. The papers next day spoke of his reception as a "cyclone," surpassing any other welcome, though Rudyard Kipling was one of those who received degrees on that occasion, and General Booth and Whitelaw Reid, and other famous men. Perhaps the most distinguished social honor paid to Mark Twain at this time was the dinner given him by the staff of London "Punch," in the historic "Punch" editorial rooms on Bouverie Street. No other foreigner had ever been invited to that sacred board, where Thackeray had sat, and Douglas Jerrold and others of the great departed. "Punch" had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon, and at this dinner the original drawing was presented to him by the editor's little daughter, Joy Agnew. The Oxford degree, and the splendid homage paid him by England at large, became, as it were, the crowning episode of Mark Twain's career. I think he realized this, although he did not speak of it--indeed, he had very little to say of the whole matter. I telephoned a greeting when I knew that he had arrived in New York, and was summoned to "come down and play billiards." I confess I went with a good deal of awe, prepared to sit in silence and listen to the tale of the returning hero. But when I arrived he was already in the billiard-room, knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. As I entered, he said: "Get your cue--I've been inventing a new game." That was all. The pageant was over, the curtain was rung down. Business was resumed at the old stand. LXV. THE REMOVAL TO REDDING There followed another winter during which I was much with Mark Twain, though a part of it he spent with Mr. Rogers in Bermuda, that pretty island resort which both men loved. Then came spring again, and June, and with it Mark Twain's removal to his newly built home, "Stormfield," at Redding, Connecticut. The house had been under construction for a year. He had never seen it --never even seen the land I had bought for him. He even preferred not to look at any plans or ideas for decoration. "When the house is finished and furnished, and the cat is purring on the hearth, it will be time enough for me to see it," he had said more than once. He had only specified that the rooms should be large and that the billiard-room should be red. His billiard-rooms thus far had been of that color, and their memory was associated in his mind with enjoyment and comfort. He detested details of preparation, and then, too, he looked forward to the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. It was the 18th of June, 1908, that he finally took possession. The Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled, for it was the plan then to use Stormfield only as a summer place. The servants, however, with one exception, had been transferred to Redding, and Mark Twain and I remained alone, though not lonely, in the city house; playing billiards most of the time, and being as hilarious as we pleased, for there was nobody to disturb. I think he hardly mentioned the new home during that time. He had never seen even a photograph of the place, and I confess I had moments of anxiety, for I had selected the site and had been more or less concerned otherwise, though John Howells was wholly responsible for the building. I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was. The morning of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool. Mark Twain was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time. The train did not leave until four in the afternoon, but our last billiards in town must begin early and suffer no interruption. We were still playing when, about three, word was brought up that the cab was waiting. Arrived at the station, a group collected, reporters and others, to speed him to his new home. Some of the reporters came along. The scenery was at its best that day, and he spoke of it approvingly. The hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles' distance seemed short. The train porters came to carry out the bags. He drew from his pocket a great handful of silver. "Give them something," he said; "give everybody liberally that does any service." There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting--a varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer gallant country welcome. It was a perfect June evening, still and dream-like; there seemed a spell of silence on everything. The people did not cheer--they smiled and waved to the white figure, and he smiled and waved reply, but there was no noise. It was like a scene in a cinema. His carriage led the way on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral procession fell in behind. Hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dogwood and laurel shone among the trees. He was very quiet as we drove along. Once, with gentle humor, looking out over a white daisy-field, he said: "That is buckwheat. I always recognize buckwheat when I see it. I wish I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat." The clear-running brooks, a swift-flowing river, a tumbling cascade where we climbed a hill, all came in for his approval--then we were at the lane that led to his new home, and the procession behind dropped away. The carriage ascended still higher, and a view opened across the Saugatuck Valley, with its nestling village and church-spire and farmhouses, and beyond them the distant hills. Then came the house--simple in design, but beautiful--an Italian villa, such as he had known in Florence, adapted here to American climate and needs. At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and presently he stepped across the threshold and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. Nothing was lacking--it was as finished, as completely furnished, as if he had occupied it a lifetime. No one spoke immediately, but when his eyes had taken in the harmony of the place, with its restful, home-like comfort, and followed through the open French windows to the distant vista of treetops and farmsides and blue hills, he said, very gently: "How beautiful it all is! I did not think it could be as beautiful as this." And later, when he had seen all of the apartments: "It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail. It might have been here always." There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and a little later at the foot of the garden some fireworks were set off by neighbors inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located in Redding. Mark Twain, watching the rockets that announced his arrival, said, gently: "I wonder why they go to so much trouble for me. I never go to any trouble for anybody." The evening closed with billiards, hilarious games, and when at midnight the cues were set in the rack no one could say that Mark Twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. LXVI LIFE AT STORMFIELD Mark Twain loved Stormfield. Almost immediately he gave up the idea of going back to New York for the winter, and I think he never entered the Fifth Avenue house again. The quiet and undisturbed comfort of Stormfield came to him at the right time of life. His day of being the "Belle of New York" was over. Now and then he attended some great dinner, but always under protest. Finally he refused to go at all. He had much company during that first summer--old friends, and now and again young people, of whom he was always fond. The billiard-room he called "the aquarium," and a frieze of Bermuda fishes, in gay prints, ran around the walls. Each young lady visitor was allowed to select one of these as her patron fish and attach her name to it. Thus, as a member of the "aquarium club," she was represented in absence. Of course there were several cats at Stormfield, and these really owned the premises. The kittens scampered about the billiard-table after the balls, even when the game was in progress, giving all sorts of new angles to the shots. This delighted him, and he would not for anything have discommoded or removed one of those furry hazards. My own house was a little more than half a mile away, our lands joining, and daily I went up to visit him--to play billiards or to take a walk across the fields. There was a stenographer in the neighborhood, and he continued his dictations, but not regularly. He wrote, too, now and then, and finished the little book called "Is Shakespeare Dead?" Winter came. The walks were fewer, and there was even more company; the house was gay and the billiard games protracted. In February I made a trip to Europe and the Mediterranean, to go over some of his ground there. Returning in April, I found him somewhat changed. It was not that he had grown older, or less full of life, but only less active, less eager for gay company, and he no longer dictated, or very rarely. His daughter Jean, who had been in a health resort, was coming home to act as his secretary, and this made him very happy. We resumed our games, our talks, and our long walks across the fields. There were few guests, and we were together most of the day and evening. How beautiful the memory of it all is now! To me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. Mark Twain walked slowly these days. Early in the summer there appeared indications of the heart trouble that less than a year later would bring the end. His doctor advised diminished smoking, and forbade the old habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. The trouble was with the heart muscles, and at times there came severe deadly pains in his breast, but for the most part he did not suffer. He was allowed the walk, however, and once I showed him a part of his estate he had not seen before--a remote cedar hillside. On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to build a study on it and call it "Markland." I think the name pleased him. Later he said: "If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine" (the Rogers table, which had been left in storage in New York), "I would turn it over to you." I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit the table, and he said: "Now that will be very good. Then when I want exercise I can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. You must build that study." So it was planned, and the work was presently under way. How many things we talked of! Life, death, the future--all the things of which we know so little and love so much to talk about. Astronomy, as I have said, was one of his favorite subjects. Neither of us had any real knowledge of the matter, which made its great facts all the more awesome. The thought that the nearest fixed star was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance to our own remote sun--gave him a sort of splendid thrill. He would figure out those appalling measurements of space, covering sheets of paper with his sums, but he was not a good mathematician, and the answers were generally wrong. Comets in particular interested him, and one day he said: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet." He looked so strong, and full of color and vitality. One could not believe that his words held a prophecy. Yet the pains recurred with increasing frequency and severity; his malady, angina pectoris, was making progress. And how bravely he bore it all! He never complained, never bewailed. I have seen the fierce attack crumple him when we were at billiards, but he would insist on playing in his turn, bowed, his face white, his hand digging at his breast. LXVII THE DEATH OF JEAN Clara Clemens was married that autumn to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist, and presently sailed for Europe, where they would make their home. Jean Clemens was now head of the house, and what with her various duties and poor health, her burden was too heavy. She had a passion for animal life of every kind, and in some farm-buildings at one corner of the estate had set up quite an establishment of chickens and domestic animals. She was fond of giving these her personal attention, and this, with her house direction and secretarial work, gave her little time for rest. I tried to relieve her of a share of the secretarial work, but she was ambitious and faithful. Still, her condition did not seem critical. I stayed at Stormfield, now, most of the time--nights as well as days --for the dull weather had come and Mark Twain found the house rather lonely. In November he had an impulse to go to Bermuda, and we spent a month in the warm light of that summer island, returning a week before the Christmas holidays. And just then came Mark Twain's last great tragedy--the death of his daughter Jean. The holidays had added heavily to Jean's labors. Out of her generous heart she had planned gifts for everybody--had hurried to and from the city for her purchases, and in the loggia set up a beautiful Christmas tree. Meantime she had contracted a heavy cold. Her trouble was epilepsy, and all this was bad for her. On the morning of December 24, she died, suddenly, from the shock of a cold bath. Below, in the loggia, drenched with tinsel, stood the tree, and heaped about it the packages of gifts which that day she had meant to open and put in place. Nobody had been overlooked. Jean was taken to Elmira for burial. Her father, unable to make the winter journey, remained behind. Her cousin, Jervis Langdon, came for her. It was six in the evening when she went away. A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of the short day was closing in. There was not the least noise, the whole world was muffled. The lanterns shone out the open door, and at an upper window, the light gleaming on his white hair, her father watched her going away from him for the last time. Later he wrote: "From my window I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old Katy--were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon." LXVIII DAYS IN BERMUDA Ten days later Mark Twain returned to Bermuda, accompanied only by a valet. He had asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield, so that the place might be ready any time for his return. We came, of course, for there was no thought other than for his comfort. He did not go to a hotel in Bermuda, but to the home of Vice-Consul Allen, where he had visited before. The Allens were devoted to him and gave him such care as no hotel could offer. Bermuda agreed with Mark Twain, and for a time there he gained in strength and spirits and recovered much of his old manner. He wrote me almost daily, generally with good reports of his health and doings, and with playful counsel and suggestions. Then, by and by, he did not write with his own hand, but through his newly appointed "secretary," Mr. Allen's young daughter, Helen, of whom he was very fond. The letters, however, were still gay. Once he said: "While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you with my own hand, so that I may use in utter freedom and without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal." He had made no mention so far of the pains in his breast, but near the end of March he wrote that he was coming home, if the breast pains did not "mend their ways pretty considerable. I do not want to die here," he said. "I am growing more and more particular about the place." A week later brought another alarming letter, also one from Mr. Allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. I went to New York and sailed the next morning, cabling the Gabrilowitsches to come without delay. I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when I arrived he was not expecting me. "Why," he said, holding out his hand, "you did not tell us you were coming?" "No," I said, "it is rather sudden. I didn't quite like the sound of your last letters." "But those were not serious. You shouldn't have come on my account." I said then that I had come on my own account, that I had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. "That's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. "Wow I'm glad to see you." His breakfast came in and he ate with appetite. I had thought him thin and pale, at first sight, but his color had come back now, and his eyes were bright. He told me of the fierce attacks of the pain, and how he had been given hypodermic injections which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "the sub-cutaneous." From Mr. and Mrs. Allen I learned how slender had been his chances, and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had already engaged passage home for April 12th. He seemed so little like a man whose days were numbered. On the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as we had done on our former visit, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. I had sold for him, for six thousand dollars, the farm where Jean had kept her animals, and he wished to use the money in erecting for her some sort of memorial. He agreed that a building to hold the library which he had already donated to the town of Redding would be appropriate and useful. He asked me to write at once to his lawyer and have the matter arranged. We did not drive out again. The pains held off for several days, and he was gay and went out on the lawn, but most of the time he sat propped up in bed, reading and smoking. When I looked at him there, so full of vigor and the joy of life, I could not persuade myself that he would not outlive us all. He had written very little in Bermuda--his last work being a chapter of amusing "Advice"--for me, as he confessed--what I was to do upon reaching the gate of which St. Peter is said to keep the key. As it is the last writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic, one or two paragraphs may be admitted here: "Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not your place to begin. "Do not begin any remark with 'Say.'" "When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. If you must talk, let the weather alone. . . "You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. He has heard that before." There were several pages of this counsel. LXIX. THE RETURN TO REDDING I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading. I noticed when he slept that his breathing was difficult, and I could see that he did not improve, but often he was gay and liked the entire family to gather about and be merry. It was only a few days before we sailed that the severe attacks returned. Then followed bad nights; but respite came, and we sailed on the 12th, as arranged. The Allen home stands on the water, and Mr. Allen had chartered a tug to take us to the ship. We were obliged to start early, and the fresh morning breeze was stimulating. Mark Twain seemed in good spirits when we reached the "Oceana," which was to take him home. As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. He was comfortable at first, and then we ran into the humid, oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and he could not breathe. It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his own mind, but he had no dread, and his sense of humor did not fail. Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: "The ship is passing the hat." I had been instructed in the use of the hypodermic needle, and from time to time gave him the "hypnotic injunction," as he still called it. But it did not afford him entire relief. He could remain in no position for any length of time. Yet he never complained and thought only of the trouble he might be making. Once he said: "I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this dying business." And a little later: "Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long!" Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. Revived by the cool, fresh air of the North, he had slept for several hours and was seemingly much better. A special compartment on the same train that had taken us first to Redding took us there now, his physicians in attendance. He did not seem to mind the trip or the drive home. As we turned into the lane that led to Stormfield he said: "Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?" The gable of the new study showed among the trees, and I pointed it out to him. "It looks quite imposing," he said. Arriving at Stormfield, he stepped, unassisted, from the carriage to greet the members of the household, and with all his old courtliness offered each his hand. Then in a canvas chair we had brought we carried him up-stairs to his room--the big, beautiful room that looked out to the sunset hills. This was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910. LXX. THE CLOSE OF A GREAT LIFE Mark Twain lived just a week from that day and hour. For a time he seemed full of life, talking freely, and suffering little. Clara and Ossip Gabrilowitsch arrived on Saturday and found him cheerful, quite like himself. At intervals he read. "Suetonius" and "Carlyle" lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up and read a page or a paragraph. Sometimes when I saw him thus--the high color still in his face, the clear light in his eyes'--I said: "It is not reality. He is not going to die." But by Wednesday of the following week it was evident that the end was near. We did not know it then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth year, Halley's comet, became visible that night in the sky.[13] On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was still fairly clear, and he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed. By Clara he sent word that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for his words were few, now, and uncertain. I assured him that I would attend to the matter and he pressed my hand. It was his last word to me. During the afternoon, while Clara stood by him, he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber and did not heed us any more. Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half-past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon, when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle. The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing for seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. In the Brick Church, New York, Mark Twain--dressed in the white he loved so well--lay, with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. Flowers in profusion were banked about him, but on the casket lay a single wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill. He was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment, gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look. That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where little Langdon and Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and then Jean, only a little while before. The worn-out body had reached its journey's end; but his spirit had never grown old, and to-day, still young, it continues to cheer and comfort a tired world. 
36661	----	file was produced from images generously made available by The Kentuckiana Digital Library) The Author's thanks are due to Mr. R. H. RUSSELL, of New York, for kind permission to reprint from _Shapes and Shadows_ four of the poems published in this volume. KENTUCKY POEMS BY MADISON CAWEIN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDMUND GOSSE NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1903 NOTE The poems included in this volume have been selected from the following volumes of the author: _Moods and Memories_, _Red Leaves and Roses_, _Poems of Nature and Love_, _Intimations of the Beautiful_, _Days and Dreams_, _Undertones_, _Idyllic Monologues_, _The Garden of Dreams_, _Shapes and Shadows_, _Myth and Romance_, and _Weeds by the Wall_. None of the longer poems have been included in this selection. CONTENTS PROLOGUE FOREST AND FIELD SUMMER TO SORROW NIGHT A FALLEN BEECH A TWILIGHT MOTH THE GRASSHOPPER BEFORE THE RAIN AFTER RAIN THE HAUNTED HOUSE OCTOBER INDIAN SUMMER ALONG THE OHIO A COIGN OF THE FOREST CREOLE SERENADE WILL O' THE WISPS THE TOLLMAN'S DAUGHTER THE BOY COLUMBUS SONG OF THE ELF THE OLD INN THE MILL-WATER THE DREAM SPRING TWILIGHT A SLEET-STORM IN MAY UNREQUITED THE HEART O' SPRING 'A BROKEN RAINBOW ON THE SKIES OF MAY' ORGIE REVERIE LETHE DIONYSIA THE NAIAD THE LIMNAD INTIMATIONS BEFORE THE TEMPLE ANTHEM OF DAWN AT THE LANE'S END THE FARMSTEAD A FLOWER OF THE FIELDS THE FEUD LYNCHERS DEAD MAN'S RUN AUGUST THE BUSH-SPARROW QUIET MUSIC THE PURPLE VALLEYS A DREAM SHAPE THE OLD BARN THE WOOD WITCH AT SUNSET MAY RAIN TO FALL SUNSET IN AUTUMN THE HILLS CONTENT HEART OF MY HEART OCTOBER MYTH AND ROMANCE GENIUS LOCI DISCOVERY THE OLD SPRING THE FOREST SPRING TRANSMUTATION DEAD CITIES FROST A NIGHT IN JUNE THE DREAMER WINTER MID-WINTER SPRING TRANSFORMATION RESPONSE THE SWASHBUCKLER SIMULACRA CAVERNS THE BLUE BIRD QUATRAINS ADVENTURERS EPILOGUE INTRODUCTION Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is no country on the civilised globe where, in theory, verse is treated with more respect and, in practice, with a greater lack of grave consideration than America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must be attempted here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set upon sharpness, ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to depreciate and to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of the arts. Hence we find that it is what is called 'humorous' verse which is mainly in fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes are most warmly welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with language, which dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and which depend most for their effect upon paradox and the negation of sober thought. It is probable that the diseased craving for what is 'smart,' 'snappy' and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything foreshortened and topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler and more graceful tastes again prevail in imaginative literature. Whatever be the cause, it is certain that this is not a moment when serious poetry, of any species, is flourishing in the United States. The absence of anything like a common impulse among young writers, of any definite and intelligible, if excessive, _parti pris_, is immediately observable if we contrast the American, for instance, with the French poets of the last fifteen years. Where there is no school and no clear trend of executive ambition, the solitary artist, whose talent forces itself up into the light and air, suffers unusual difficulties, and runs a constant danger of being choked in the aimless mediocrity that surrounds him. We occasionally meet with a poet in the history of literature, of whom we are inclined to say, Charming as he is, he would have developed his talent more evenly and conspicuously,--with greater decorum, perhaps,--if he had been accompanied from the first by other young men like-minded, who would have formed for him an atmosphere and cleared for him a space. This is the one regret I feel in contemplating, as I have done for years past, the ardent and beautiful talent of Mr. Cawein. I deplore the fact that he seems to stand alone in his generation; I think his poetry would have been even better than it is, and its qualities would certainly have been more clearly perceived, and more intelligently appreciated, if he were less isolated. In his own country, at this particular moment, in this matter of serious nature-painting in lyric verse, Mr. Cawein possesses what Cowley would have called 'a monopoly of wit,' In one of his lyrics Mr. Cawein asks-- 'The song-birds, are they flown away, The song-birds of the summer-time, That sang their souls into the day, And set the laughing hours to rhyme? No cat-bird scatters through the hush The sparkling crystals of her song; Within the woods no hermit-thrush Trails an enchanted flute along.' To this inquiry, the answer is: the only hermit-thrush now audible seems to sing from Louisville, Kentucky. America will, we may be perfectly sure, calm herself into harmony again, and possess once more her school of singers. In those coming days, history may perceive in Mr. Cawein the golden link that bound the music of the past to the music of the future through an interval of comparative tunelessness. The career of Mr. Madison Cawein is represented to me as being most uneventful. He seems to have enjoyed unusual advantages for the cultivation and protection of the poetical temperament. He was born on the 23rd of March 1865, in the metropolis of Kentucky, the vigorous city of Louisville, on the southern side of the Ohio, in the midst of a country celebrated for tobacco and whisky and Indian corn. These are commodities which may be consumed in excess, but in moderation they make glad the heart of man. They represent a certain glow of the earth, they indicate the action of a serene and gentle climate upon a rich soil. It was in this delicate and voluptuous state of Kentucky that Mr. Cawein was born, that he was educated, that he became a poet, and that he has lived ever since. His blood is full of the colour and odour of his native landscape. The solemn books of history tell us that Kentucky was discovered in 1769, by Daniel Boone, a hunter. But he first discovers a country who sees it first, and teaches the world to see it; no doubt some day the city of Louisville will erect, in one of its principal squares, a statue to 'Madison Cawein, who discovered the Beauty of Kentucky.' The genius of this poet is like one of those deep rivers of his native state, which cut paths through the forests of chestnut and hemlock as they hurry towards the south and west, brushing with the impulsive fringe of their currents the rhododendrons and calmias and azaleas that bend from the banks to be mirrored in their flushing waters. Mr. Cawein's vocation to poetry was irresistible. I do not know that he ever tried to resist it. I have even the idea that a little more resistance would have been salutary for a talent which nothing could have discouraged, and which opposition might have taught the arts of compression and selection. Mr. Cawein suffered at first, I think, from lack of criticism more than from lack of eulogy. From his early writings I seem to gather an impression of a Louisville more ready to praise what was second-rate than what was first-rate, and practically, indeed, without any scale of appreciation whatever. This may be a mistake of mine; at all events, Mr. Cawein has had more to gain from the passage of years in self-criticism than in inspiring enthusiasm. The fount was in him from the first; but it bubbled forth before he had digged a definite channel for it. Sometimes, to this very day, he sports with the principles of syntax as Nature played games so long ago with the fantastic caverns of the valley of the Green River or with the coral-reefs of his own Ohio. He has bad rhymes, amazing in so delicate an ear; he has awkwardness of phrase not expected in one so plunged in contemplation of the eternal harmony of Nature. But these grow fewer and less obtrusive as the years pass by. The virgin timber-forests of Kentucky, the woods of honey-locust and buck-eye, of white oak and yellow poplar, with their clearings full of flowers unknown to us by sight or name, from which in the distance are visible the domes of the far-away Cumberland Mountains, this seems to be the hunting-field of Mr. Cawein's imagination. Here all, it must be confessed, has hitherto been unfamiliar to the Muses. If Persephone 'of our Cumnor cowslips never heard,' how much less can her attention have been arrested by clusters of orchids from the Ocklawaha, or by the song of the Whippoorwill, rung out when 'the west was hot geranium-red' under the boughs of a black-jack on the slopes of Mount Kinnex. 'Not here,' one is inclined to exclaim, 'not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee,' but the art of the poet is displayed by his skill in breaking down these prejudices of time and place. Mr. Cawein reconciles us to his strange landscape--the strangeness of which one has to admit is mainly one of nomenclature,--by the exercise of a delightful instinctive pantheism. He brings the ancient gods to Kentucky, and it is marvellous how quickly they learn to be at home there. Here is Bacchus, with a spicy fragment of calamus-root in his hand, trampling down the blue-eyed grass, and skipping, with the air of a hunter born, into the hickory thicket, to escape Artemis, whose robes, as she passes swiftly with her dogs through the woods, startle the humming-birds, silence the green tree-frogs, and fill the hot still air with the perfumes of peppermint and pennyroyal. It is a queer landscape, but one of new natural beauties frankly and sympathetically discovered, and it forms a _mise en scène_ which, I make bold to say, would have scandalised neither Keats nor Spenser. It was Mr. Howells,--ever as generous in discovering new native talent as he is unflinching in reproof of the effeteness of European taste,--who first drew attention to the originality and beauty of Mr. Cawein's poetry. The Kentucky poet had, at that time, published but one tentative volume, the _Blooms of the Berry_, of 1887. This was followed, in 1888, by _The Triumph of Music_, and since then hardly a year has passed without a slender sheaf of verse from Mr. Cawein's garden. Among these (if a single volume is to be indicated), the quality which distinguishes him from all other poets,--the Kentucky flavour, if we may call it so,--is perhaps to be most agreeably detected in _Intimations of the Beautiful_. But it is time that I should leave the American lyrist to make his own appeal to English ears, with but one additional word of explanation, namely, that in this selection Mr. Cawein's narrative poems on mediæval themes, and in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been neglected in favour of such lyrics as would present him most vividly in his own native landscape, no visitor in spirit to Europe, but at home in that bright and exuberant West-- Where, in the hazy morning, runs The stony branch that pools and drips, Where red-haws and the wild-rose hips Are strewn like pebbles; where the sun's Own gold seems captured by the weeds; To see, through scintillating seeds, The hunters steal with glimmering guns. To stand within the dewy ring Where pale death smites the bone-set blooms, And everlasting's flowers, and plumes Of mint, with aromatic wing! And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seems A wild man murmuring in his dreams,-- And insect violins that sing! So sweet a voice, so consonant with the music of the singers of past times, heard in a place so fresh and strange, will surely not pass without its welcome from the lovers of genuine poetry. EDMUND GOSSE. PROLOGUE _There is a poetry that speaks Through common things: the grasshopper, That in the hot weeds creaks and creaks, Says all of summer to my ear: And in the cricket's cry I hear The fireside speak, and feel the frost Work mysteries of silver near On country casements, while, deep lost In snow, the gatepost seems a sheeted ghost. And other things give rare delight: Those guttural harps the green-frogs tune, Those minstrels of the falling night, That hail the sickle of the moon From grassy pools that glass her lune: Or,--all of August in its loud Dry cry,--the locust's call at noon, That tells of heat and never a cloud To veil the pitiless sun as with a shroud. The rain,--whose cloud dark-lids the moon, The great white eyeball of the night,-- Makes music for me; to its tune I hear the flowers unfolding white, The mushroom growing, and the slight Green sound of grass that dances near; The melon ripening with delight; And in the orchard, soft and clear, The apple redly rounding out its sphere. The grigs make music as of old, To which the fairies whirl and shine Within the moonlight's prodigal gold, On woodways wild with many a vine: When all the wilderness with wine Of stars is drunk, I hear it say-- 'Is God restricted to confine His wonders only to the day, That yields the abstract tangible to clay?' And to my ear the wind of Morn,-- When on her rubric forehead far One star burns big,--lifts a vast horn Of wonder where all murmurs are: In which I hear the waters war, The torrent and the blue abyss, And pines,--that terrace bar on bar The mountain side,--like lovers' kiss, And whisper words where naught but grandeur is. The jutting crags,--all iron-veined With ore,--the peaks, where eagles scream, That pour their cataracts, rainbow-stained, Like hair, in many a mountain stream, Can lift my soul beyond the dream Of all religions; make me scan No mere external or extreme, But inward pierce the outward plan And learn that rocks have souls as well as man._ FOREST AND FIELD I Green, watery jets of light let through The rippling foliage drenched with dew; And golden glimmers, warm and dim, That in the vistaed distance swim; Where, 'round the wood-spring's oozy urn, The limp, loose fronds of forest fern Trail like the tresses, green and wet, A wood-nymph binds with violet. O'er rocks that bulge and roots that knot The emerald-amber mosses clot; From matted walls of brier and brush The elder nods its plumes of plush; And, Argus-eyed with many a bloom, The wild-rose breathes its wild perfume; May-apples, ripening yellow, lean With oblong fruit, a lemon-green, Near Indian-turnips, long of stem, That bear an acorn-oval gem, As if some woodland Bacchus there,-- While braiding locks of hyacinth hair With ivy-tod,--had idly tost His thyrsus down and so had lost: And blood-root, that from scarlet wombs Puts forth, in spring, its milk-white blooms, That then like starry footsteps shine Of April under beech and pine; At which the gnarled eyes of trees Stare, big as Fauns' at Dryades, That bend above a fountain's spar As white and naked as a star. The stagnant stream flows sleepily Thick with its lily-pads; the bee,-- All honey-drunk, a Bassarid,-- Booms past the mottled toad, that, hid In calamus-plants and blue-eyed grass, Beside the water's pooling glass, Silenus-like, eyes stolidly The Mænad-glittering dragonfly. And pennyroyal and peppermint Pour dry-hot odours without stint From fields and banks of many streams; And in their scent one almost seems To see Demeter pass, her breath Sweet with her triumph over death.-- A haze of floating saffron; sound Of shy, crisp creepings o'er the ground; The dip and stir of twig and leaf; Tempestuous gusts of spices brief Borne over bosks of sassafras By winds that foot it on the grass; Sharp, sudden songs and whisperings, That hint at untold hidden things-- Pan and Sylvanus who of old Kept sacred each wild wood and wold. A wily light beneath the trees Quivers and dusks with every breeze-- A Hamadryad, haply, who,-- Culling her morning meal of dew From frail, accustomed cups of flowers,-- Now sees some Satyr in the bowers, Or hears his goat-hoof snapping press Some brittle branch, and in distress Shrinks back; her dark, dishevelled hair Veiling her limbs one instant there. II Down precipices of the dawn The rivers of the day are drawn, The soundless torrents, free and far, Of gold that deluge every star. There is a sound of brooks and wings That fills the woods with carollings; And, dashed on moss and flow'r and fern, And leaves, that quiver, breathe and burn, Rose-radiance smites the solitudes, The dew-drenched hills, the dripping woods, That twitter as with canticles Of shade and light; and wind, that smells Of flowers, and buds, and boisterous bees, Delirious honey, and wet trees.-- Through briers that trip them, one by one, With swinging pails, that take the sun, A troop of girls comes--berriers, Whose bare feet glitter where they pass Through dewdrop-trembling tufts of grass. And, oh! their laughter and their cheers Wake Echo 'mid her shrubby rocks Who, answering, from her mountain mocks With rapid fairy horns; as if Each mossy vale and weedy cliff Had its imperial Oberon, Who, seeking his Titania, hid In coverts caverned from the sun, In kingly wrath had called and chid. Cloud-feathers, oozing orange light, Make rich the Indian locks of night; Her dusky waist with sultry gold Girdled and buckled fold on fold. One star. A sound of bleating flocks. Great shadows stretched along the rocks, Like giant curses overthrown By some Arthurian champion. Soft-swimming sorceries of mist That streak blue glens with amethyst. And, tinkling in the clover dells, The twilight sound of cattle-bells. And where the marsh in reed and grass Burns, angry as a shattered glass, The flies make golden blurs, that shine Like drops of amber-scattered wine Spun high by reeling Bacchanals, When Bacchus wreathes his curling hair With vine-leaves, and from every lair His worshippers around him calls. They come, they come, a happy throng, The berriers with gibe and song; Their pails brimmed black to tin-bright eaves With luscious fruit, kept cool with leaves Of aromatic sassafras; 'Twixt which some sparkling berry slips, Like laughter, from the purple mass, Wine-swollen as Silenus' lips. III The tanned and tired noon climbs high Up burning reaches of the sky; Below the drowsy belts of pines The rock-ledged river foams and shines; And over rainless hill and dell Is blown the harvest's sultry smell: While, in the fields, one sees and hears The brawny-throated harvesters,-- Their red brows beaded with the heat,-- By twos and threes among the wheat Flash their hot scythes; behind them press The binders--men and maids that sing Like some mad troop of piping Pan;-- While all the hillsides swoon and ring Such sounds of Ariel airiness As haunted freckled Caliban. 'O ho! O ho! 'tis noon I say. The roses blow. Away, away, above the hay, To the tune o' the bees the roses sway; The love-songs that they hum all day, So low! So low! The roses' Minnesingers they.' Up velvet lawns of lilac skies The tawny moon begins to rise Behind low, blue-black hills of trees,-- As rises up, in Siren seas, To rock in purple deeps, hip-hid, A virgin-bosomed Oceanid.-- Gaunt shadows crouch by tree and scaur, Like shaggy Satyrs waiting for The moonbeam Nymphs, the Dryads white, That take with loveliness the night, And glorify it with their love. The sweet, far notes I hear, I hear, Beyond dim pines and mellow ways, The song of some fair harvester, The lovely Limnad of the grove, Whose singing charms me while it slays. 'O deep! O deep! the earth and air Are sunk in sleep. Adieu to care! Now everywhere Is rest; and by the old oak there The maiden with the nut-brown hair Doth keep, doth keep Tryst with her lover the young and fair.' IV Like Atalanta's spheres of gold, Within the orchard, apples rolled From sudden hands of boughs that lay Their leaves, like palms, against the day; And near them pears of rusty brown Lay bruised; and peaches, pink with down, And furry as the ears of Pan, Or, like Diana's cheeks, a tan Beneath which burnt a tender fire; Or wan as Psyche's with desire. And down the orchard vistas,--young, A hickory basket by him swung, A straw-hat, 'gainst the sloping sun Drawn brim-broad o'er his face,--he strode; As if he looked to find some one, His eyes far-fixed beyond the road. Before him, like a living burr, Rattled the noisy grasshopper. And where the cows' melodious bells Trailed music up and down the dells, Beside the spring, that o'er the ground Went whimpering like a fretful hound, He saw her waiting, fair and slim, Her pail forgotten there, for him. Yellow as sunset skies and pale As fairy clouds that stay or sail Through azure vaults of summer, blue As summer heavens, the wild-flowers grew; And blossoms on which spurts of light Fell laughing, like the lips one might Feign for a Hebe, or a girl Whose mouth is laughter-lit with pearl. Long ferns, in murmuring masses heaped; And mosses moist, in beryl steeped And musk aromas of the wood And silence of the solitude: And everything that near her blew The spring had showered thick with dew.-- Across the rambling fence she leaned, Her fresh, round arms all white and bare; Her artless beauty, bonnet-screened, Rich-coloured with its auburn hair. A wood-thrush gurgled in a vine-- Ah! 'tis his step, 'tis he she hears; The wild-rose smelt like some rare wine-- He comes, ah, yes! 'tis he who nears. And her brown eyes and all her face Said welcome. And with rustic grace He leant beside her; and they had Some talk with youthful laughter glad: I know not what; I know but this Its final period was a kiss. SUMMER I Hang out your loveliest star, O Night! O Night! Your richest rose, O Dawn! To greet sweet Summer, her, who, clothed in light, Leads Earth's best hours on. Hark! how the wild birds of the woods Throat it within the dewy solitudes! The brook sings low and soft, The trees make song, As, from her heaven aloft Comes blue-eyed Summer like a girl along. II And as the Day, her lover, leads her in, How bright his beauty glows! How red his lips, that ever try to win Her mouth's delicious rose! And from the beating of his heart Warm winds arise and sighing thence depart; And from his eyes and hair The light and dew Fall round her everywhere, And Heaven above her is an arch of blue. III Come to the forest, or the treeless meadows Deep with their hay or grain; Come where the hills lift high their thrones of shadows, Where tawny orchards reign. Come where the reapers whet the scythe; Where golden sheaves are heaped; where berriers blythe, With willow-basket and with pail, Swarm knoll and plain; Where flowers freckle every vale, And beauty goes with hands of berry-stain. IV Come where the dragon-flies, a brassy blue, Flit round the wildwood streams, And, sucking at some horn of honey-dew, The wild-bee hums and dreams. Come where the butterfly waves wings of sleep, Gold-disked and mottled over blossoms deep; Come where beneath the rustic bridge The green frog cries; Or in the shade the rainbowed midge, Above the emerald pools, with murmurings flies. V Come where the cattle browse within the brake, As red as oak and strong; Where far-off bells the echoes faintly wake, And milkmaids sing their song. Come where the vine-trailed rocks, with waters hoary, Tell to the sun some legend or some story; Or, where the sunset to the land Speaks words of gold; Where ripeness walks, a wheaten band Around her hair and blossoms manifold. VI Come where the woods lift up their stalwart arms Unto the star-sown skies; Knotted and gnarled, that to the winds and storms Fling mighty rhapsodies: Or to the moon repeat what they have seen, When Night upon their shoulders vast doth lean. Come where the dew's clear syllable Drips from the rose; And where the fireflies fill The night with golden music of their glows. VII Now while the dingles and the vine-roofed glens Whisper their flowery tale Unto the silence; and the lakes and fens Unto the moonlight pale Murmur their rapture, let us seek her out, Her of the honey throat, and peachy pout, Summer! and at her feet, The love of old Lay like a sheaf of wheat, And of our hearts the purest gold of gold. TO SORROW I O dark-eyed goddess of the marble brow, Whose look is silence and whose touch is night, Who walkest lonely through the world, O thou, Who sittest lonely with Life's blown-out light; Who in the hollow hours of night's noon Criest like some lost child; Whose anguish-fevered eyeballs seek the moon To cool their pulses wild. Thou who dost bend to kiss Joy's sister cheek, Turning its rose to alabaster; yea, Thou who art terrible and mad and meek, Why in my heart art thou enshrined to-day? O Sorrow say, O say! II Now Spring is here and all the world is white, I will go forth, and where the forest robes Itself in green, and every hill and height Crowns its fair head with blossoms,--spirit globes Of hyacinth and crocus dashed with dew,-- I will forget my grief, And thee, O Sorrow, gazing on the blue, Beneath a last year's leaf, Of some brief violet the south wind woos, Or bluet, whence the west wind raked the snow; The baby eyes of love, the darling hues Of happiness, that thou canst never know, O child of pain and woe. III On some hoar upland, sweet with clustered thorns, Hard by a river's windy white of waves, I shall sit down with Spring,--whose eyes are morns Of light; whose cheeks the rose of health enslaves,-- And so forget thee braiding in her hair The snowdrop, tipped with green, The cool-eyed primrose and the trillium fair, And moony celandine. Contented so to lie within her arms, Forgetting all the sear and sad and wan, Remembering love alone, who o'er earth's storms, High on the mountains of perpetual dawn, Leads the glad hours on. IV Or in the peace that follows storm, when Even, Within the west, stands dreaming lone and far, Clad on with green and silver, and the Heaven Is brightly brooched with one gold-glittering star. I will lie down beside some mountain lake, 'Round which the tall pines sigh, And breathing musk of rain from boughs that shake Storm balsam from on high, Make friends of Dream and Contemplation high And Music, listening to the mocking-bird,-- Who through the hush sends its melodious cry,-- And so forget a while that other word, That all loved things must die. NIGHT Out of the East, as from an unknown shore, Thou comest with thy children in thine arms,-- Slumber and Dream,--whom mortals all adore, Their flowing raiment sculptured to their charms: Soft on thy breast thy lovely children rest, Laid like twin roses in one balmy nest. Silent thou comest, swiftly too and slow. There is no other presence like to thine, When thou approachest with thy babes divine, Thy shadowy face above them bending low, Blowing the ringlets from their brows of snow. Oft have I taken Sleep from thy dark arms, And fondled her fair head, with poppies wreathed, Within my bosom's depths, until its storms With her were hushed and I but faintly breathed. And then her sister, Dream, with frolic art Arose from rest, and on my sleeping heart Blew bubbles of dreams where elfin worlds were lost; Worlds where my stranger soul sang songs to me, And talked with spirits by a rainbowed sea, Or smiled, an unfamiliar shape of frost, Floating on gales of breathless melody. Day comes to us in garish glory garbed; But thou, thou bringest to the tired heart Rest and deep silence, in which are absorbed All the vain tumults of the mind and mart. Whether thou comest with hands full of stars, Or clothed in storm and clouds, the lightning bars, Rolling the thunder like some mighty dress, God moves with thee; we seem to hear His feet, Wind-like, along the floors of Heaven beat; To see His face, revealed in awfulness, Through thee, O Night, to ban us or to bless. A FALLEN BEECH Nevermore at doorways that are barken Shall the madcap wind knock and the moonlight; Nor the circle which thou once didst darken, Shine with footsteps of the neighbouring moonlight, Visitors for whom thou oft didst hearken. Nevermore, gallooned with cloudy laces, Shall the morning, like a fair freebooter, Make thy leaves his richest treasure-places; Nor the sunset, like a royal suitor, Clothe thy limbs with his imperial graces. And no more, between the savage wonder Of the sunset and the moon's up-coming, Shall the storm, with boisterous hoof-beats, under Thy dark roof dance, Faun-like, to the humming Of the Pan-pipes of the rain and thunder. Oft the Satyr-spirit, beauty-drunken, Of the Spring called; and the music measure Of thy sap made answer; and thy sunken Veins grew vehement with youth, whose pressure Swelled thy gnarly muscles, winter-shrunken. And the germs, deep down in darkness rooted, Bubbled green from all thy million oilets, Where the spirits, rain-and-sunbeam-suited, Of the April made their whispering toilets, Or within thy stately shadow footed. Oft the hours of blonde Summer tinkled At the windows of thy twigs, and found thee Bird-blithe; or, with shapely bodies, twinkled Lissom feet of naked flowers around thee, Where thy mats of moss lay sunbeam-sprinkled. And the Autumn with his gypsy-coated Troop of days beneath thy branches rested, Swarthy-faced and dark of eye; and throated Songs of roaming; or with red hand tested Every nut-bur that above him floated. Then the Winter, barren-browed, but rich in Shaggy followers of frost and freezing, Made the floor of thy broad boughs his kitchen, Trapper-like, to camp in; grimly easing Limbs snow-furred and moccasined with lichen. Now, alas! no more do these invest thee With the dignity of whilom gladness! They--unto whose hearts thou once confessed thee Of thy dreams--now know thee not! and sadness Sits beside thee where, forgot, dost rest thee. A TWILIGHT MOTH All day the primroses have thought of thee, Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat; All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly Veiled snowy faces,--that no bee might greet Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;-- Keeping Sultana-charms for thee, at last, Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet. Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays Nocturns of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith; O bearer of their order's shibboleth, Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks. What dost thou whisper in the balsam's ear That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,-- A syllabled silence that no man may hear,-- As dreamily upon its stem it rocks? What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant, Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant, Some spectre of some perished flower of phlox? O voyager of that universe which lies Between the four walls of this garden fair,-- Whose constellations are the fireflies That wheel their instant courses everywhere,-- 'Mid fairy firmaments wherein one sees Mimic Boötes and the Pleiades, Thou steerest like some fairy ship-of-air. Gnome-wrought of moonbeam fluff and gossamer, Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest Mab or King Oberon; or, haply, her His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.-- Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy, That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me! And all that world at which my soul hath guessed! THE GRASSHOPPER What joy you take in making hotness hotter, In emphasising dulness with your buzz, Making monotony more monotonous! When Summer comes, and drouth hath dried the water In all the creeks, we hear your ragged rasp Filling the stillness. Or,--as urchins beat A stagnant pond whereon the bubbles gasp,-- Your switch-like music whips the midday heat. O bur of sound caught in the Summer's hair, We hear you everywhere! We hear you in the vines and berry-brambles, Along the unkempt lanes, among the weeds, Amid the shadeless meadows, gray with seeds, And by the wood 'round which the rail-fence rambles, Sawing the sunlight with your sultry saw. Or,--like to tomboy truants, at their play With noisy mirth among the barn's deep straw,-- You sing away the careless summer-day. O brier-like voice that clings in idleness To Summer's drowsy dress! You tramp of insects, vagrant and unheeding, Improvident, who of the summer make One long green mealtime, and for winter take No care, aye singing or just merely feeding! Happy-go-lucky vagabond,--'though frost Shall pierce, ere long, your green coat or your brown, And pinch your body,--let no song be lost, But as you lived into your grave go down-- Like some small poet with his little rhyme, Forgotten of all time. BEFORE THE RAIN Before the rain, low in the obscure east, Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray; Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased, Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay Like some white spider hungry for its prey. Vindictive looked the scowling firmament, In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray, Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent. The marsh-frog croaked; and underneath the stone The peevish cricket raised a creaking cry. Within the world these sounds were heard alone, Save when the ruffian wind swept from the sky, Making each tree like some sad spirit sigh; Or shook the clumsy beetle from its weed, That, in the drowsy darkness, bungling by, Sharded the silence with its feverish speed. Slowly the tempest gathered. Hours passed Before was heard the thunder's sullen drum Rumbling night's hollow; and the Earth at last, Restless with waiting,--like a woman, dumb With doubting of the love that should have clomb Her casement hours ago,--avowed again, 'Mid protestations, joy that he had come. And all night long I heard the Heavens explain. AFTER RAIN Behold the blossom-bosomed Day again, With all the star-white Hours in her train, Laughs out of pearl-lights through a golden ray, That, leaning on the woodland wildness, blends A sprinkled amber with the showers that lay Their oblong emeralds on the leafy ends. Behold her bend with maiden-braided brows Above the wildflower, sidewise with its strain Of dewy happiness, to kiss again Each drop to death; or, under rainy boughs, With fingers, fragrant as the woodland rain, Gather the sparkles from the sycamore, To set within each core Of crimson roses girdling her hips, Where each bud dreams and drips. Smoothing her blue-black hair,--where many a tusk Of iris flashes,--like the falchions' sheen Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen,-- Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk, That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk With footsteps of the flowers on the banks? Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks? Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare A festival each weed's invited to. Each bee is drunken with the honied air: And all the air is eloquent with blue. The wet hay glitters, and the harvester Tinkles his scythe,--as twinkling as the dew,-- That shall not spare Blossom or brier in its sweeping path; And, ere it cut one swath, Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare. What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade? A Dryad's lips, who slumbers in the shade? A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls? A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth doth breathe Her viewless presence near us, unafraid? Or troops of ghosts of blooms, that whitely wade The brook? whose wisdom knows no other song Than that the bird sings where it builds beneath The wild-rose and sits singing all day long. Oh, let me sit with silence for a space, A little while forgetting that fierce part Of man that struggles in the toiling mart; Where God can look into my heart's own heart From unsoiled heights made amiable with grace; And where the sermons that the old oaks keep Can steal into me.--And what better then Than, turning to the moss a quiet face, To fall asleep? a little while to sleep And dream of wiser worlds and wiser men. THE HAUNTED HOUSE I The shadows sit and stand about its door Like uninvited guests and poor; And all the long, hot summer day The grating locust dins its roundelay In one old sycamore. The squirrel leaves upon its rotting roof, In empty hulls, its tracks; And in its clapboard cracks The spider weaves a windy woof; Its cells the mud-wasp packs. The she-fox whelps upon its floor; The owlet roosts above its door; And where the musty mosses run, The freckled snake basks in the sun. II The children of what fathers sleep Beneath these melancholy pines? The slow slugs crawl among their graves where creep The doddered poison-vines. The orchard, near the meadow deep, Lifts up decrepit arms, Gray-lichened in a withering heap. No sap swells up to make it leap As once in calms and storms; No blossom lulls its age asleep; Each breeze brings sad alarms. Big, bell-round pears and apples, russet-red, No maiden gathers now; The worm-bored trunks weep gum, like tears, instead, From each decaying bough. III The woodlands around it are solitary And fold it like gaunt hands; The sunlight is sad and the moonlight is dreary, And the hum of the country is weary, so weary! And the bees go by in bands To other lovelier lands. The grasses are rotting in walk and in bower; The lonesomeness,--dank and rank As a chamber where lies for a lonely hour An old-man's corpse with many a flower,-- Is hushed and blank. And even the birds have passed it by, To sing their songs to a happier sky, A happier sky and bank. IV In its desolate halls are lying, Gold, blood-red and browned, Drifted leaves of summer dying; And the winds, above them sighing, Turn them round and round, Make a ghostly sound As of footsteps falling, flying, Voices through the chambers crying, Of the haunted house. V Gazing down in her white shroud, Shroud of windy cloud, Comes at night the phantom moon; Comes and all the shadows soon, Crowding in the rooms, arouse; Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on, Till beneath the cloud Like a ghost she's gone, In her gusty shroud, O'er the haunted house. OCTOBER I oft have met her slowly wandering Beside a leafy stream, her locks blown wild, Her cheeks a hectic flush, more fair than Spring, As if on her the sumach copse had smiled. Or I have seen her sitting, tall and brown,-- Her gentle eyes with foolish weeping dim,-- Beneath a twisted oak from whose red leaves She wound great drowsy wreaths and cast them down; The west-wind in her hair, that made it swim Far out behind, deep as the rustling sheaves. Or in the hill-lands I have often seen The marvel of her passage; glimpses faint Of glimmering woods that glanced the hills between, Like Indian faces, fierce with forest paint. Or I have met her 'twixt two beechen hills, Within a dingled valley near a fall, Held in her nut-brown hand one cardinal flower; Or wading dimly where the leaf-dammed rills Went babbling through the wildwood's arrased hall, Where burned the beech and maples glared their power. Or I have met her by some ruined mill, Where trailed the crimson creeper, serpentine, On fallen leaves that stirred and rustled chill, And watched her swinging in the wild-grape vine. While Beauty, sad among the vales and mountains, More sad than death, or all that death can teach, Dreamed of decay and stretched appealing arms, Where splashed the murmur of the forest's fountains; With all her loveliness did she beseech, And all the sorrow of her wildwood charms. Once only in a hollow, girt with trees, A-dream amid wild asters filled with rain, I glimpsed her cheeks red-berried by the breeze, In her dark eyes the night's sidereal stain. And once upon an orchard's tangled path, Where all the golden-rod had turned to brown, Where russets rolled and leaves were sweet of breath, I have beheld her 'mid her aftermath Of blossoms standing, in her gypsy gown, Within her gaze the deeps of life and death. INDIAN SUMMER The dawn is a warp of fever, The eve is a woof of fire; And the month is a singing weaver Weaving a red desire. With stars Dawn dices with Even For the rosy gold they heap On the blue of the day's deep heaven, On the black of the night's far deep. It's--'Reins to the blood!' and 'Marry!'-- The season's a prince who burns With the teasing lusts that harry His heart for a wench who spurns. It's--'Crown us a beaker with sherry, To drink to the doxy's heels; A tankard of wine o' the berry, To lips like a cloven peel's. ''S death! if a king be saddened, Right so let a fool laugh lies: But wine! when a king is gladdened, And a woman's waist and her eyes.' He hath shattered the loom of the weaver, And left but a leaf that flits, He hath seized heaven's gold, and a fever Of mist and of frost is its. He hath tippled the buxom beauty, And gotten her hug and her kiss-- The wide world's royal booty To pile at her feet for this. ALONG THE OHIO Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold; A path of gold the wide Ohio lies; Beneath the sunset, billowing manifold, The dark-blue hill-tops rise. And westward dips the crescent of the moon Through great cloud-feathers, flushed with rosy ray, That close around the crystal of her lune The redbird wings of Day. A little skiff slips o'er the burnished stream; A fiery wake, that broadens far behind, Follows in ripples; and the paddles gleam Against the evening wind. Was it the boat, the solitude and hush, That with dead Indians peopled all the glooms? That made each bank, meseemed, and every bush Start into eagle-plumes? That made me seem to hear the breaking brush, And as the deer's great antlers swelled in view, To hear the arrow twang from cane and rush, That dipped to the canoe? To see the glimmering wigwams by the waves? And, wildly clad, around the camp-fires' glow, The Shawnee chieftains with their painted braves, Each grasping his war-bow? But now the vision like the sunset fades, The ribs of golden clouds have oozed their light; And from the west, like sombre sachem shades, Gallop the shades of night. The broad Ohio glitters to the stars; And many murmurs whisper in its woods-- Is it the sorrow of dead warriors For their lost solitudes? The moon goes down; and like another moon The crescent of the river twinkles there, Unchanged as when the eyes of Daniel Boone Beheld it flowing fair. A COIGN OF THE FOREST The hills hang woods around, where green, below Dark, breezy boughs of beech-trees, mats the moss, Crisp with the brittle hulls of last year's nuts; The water hums one bar there; and a glow Of gold lies steady where the trailers toss Red, bugled blossoms and a rock abuts; In spots the wild-phlox and oxalis grow Where beech-roots bulge the loam, protrude across The grass-grown road and roll it into ruts. And where the sumach brakes grow dusk and dense, Among the rocks, great yellow violets, Blue-bells and wind-flowers bloom; the agaric In dampness crowds; a fungus, thick, intense With gold and crimson and wax-white, that sets The May-apples along the terraced creek At bold defiance. Where the old rail-fence Divides the hollow, there the bee-bird whets His bill, and there the elder hedge is thick. No one can miss it; for two cat-birds nest, Calling all morning, in the trumpet-vine; And there at noon the pewee sits and floats A woodland welcome; and his very best At eve the red-bird sings, as if to sign The record of its loveliness with notes. At night the moon stoops over it to rest, And unreluctant stars. Where waters shine There runs a whisper as of wind-swept oats. CREOLE SERENADE Under mossy oak and pine Whispering falls the fountained stream; In its pool the lilies shine Silvery, each a moonlight gleam. Roses bloom and roses die In the warm rose-scented dark, Where the firefly, like an eye, Winks and glows, a golden spark. Amber-belted through the night Swings the alabaster moon, Like a big magnolia white On the fragrant heart of June. With a broken syrinx there, With bignonia overgrown, Is it Pan in hoof and hair, Or his image carved from stone? See! her casement's jessamines part, And, with starry blossoms blent, Like the moon she leans--O heart, 'Tis another firmament. SINGS The dim verbena drugs the dusk With lemon-heavy odours where The heliotropes breathe drowsy musk Into the jasmine-dreamy air; The moss-rose bursts its dewy husk And spills its attar there. The orange at thy casement swings Star-censers oozing rich perfumes; The clematis, long-petalled, clings In clusters of dark purple blooms; With flowers, like moons or sylphide wings, Magnolias light the glooms. Awake, awake from sleep! Thy balmy hair, Down-fallen, deep on deep, Like blossoms there,-- That dew and fragrance weep,-- Will fill the night with prayer. Awake, awake from sleep! And dreaming here it seems to me A dryad's bosom grows confessed, Bright in the moss of yonder tree, That rustles with the murmurous West-- Or is it but a bloom I see, Round as thy virgin breast? Through fathomless deeps above are rolled A million feverish worlds, that burst, Like gems, from Heaven's caskets old Of darkness--fires that throb and thirst; An aloe, showering buds of gold, The night seems, star-immersed. Unseal, unseal thine eyes! O'er which her rod Sleep sways;--and like the skies, That dream and nod, Their starry majesties Will fill the night with God. Unseal, unseal thine eyes! WILL O' THE WISPS Beyond the barley meads and hay, What was the light that beckoned there? That made her sweet lips smile and say-- 'Oh, busk me in a gown of May, And knot red poppies in my hair.' Over the meadow and the wood What was the voice that filled her ears? That sent into pale cheeks the blood, Until each seemed a wild-brier bud Mown down by mowing harvesters?... Beyond the orchard, down the hill, The water flows, the water whirls; And there they found her past all ill, A plaintive face but smiling still, The cresses caught among her curls. At twilight in the willow glen What sound is that the silence hears, When all the dusk is hushed again And homeward from the fields strong men And women go, the harvesters? One seeks the place where she is laid, Where violets bloom from year to year-- 'O sunny head! O bird-like maid! The orchard blossoms fall and fade And I am lonely, lonely here.' Two stars burn bright above the vale; They seem to him the eyes of Ruth: The low moon rises very pale As if she, too, had heard the tale, All heartbreak, of a maid and youth. THE TOLLMAN'S DAUGHTER She stood waist-deep among the briers: Above in twisted lengths were rolled The sunset's tangled whorls of gold, Blown from the west's cloud-pillared fires. And in the hush no sound did mar, You almost heard o'er hill and dell, Deep, bubbling over, star on star, The night's blue cisterns slowly well. A crane, like some dark crescent, crossed The sunset, winging towards the west; While up the east her silver breast Of light the moon brought, white as frost. So have I painted her, you see, The tollman's daughter.--What an arm And throat was hers! and what a form!-- Art dreams of such divinity. What braids of night to hold and kiss! There is no pigment anywhere A man might use to picture this-- The splendour of her raven hair. A face as beautiful and bright, As rosy fair as twilight skies, Lit with the stars of hazel eyes And eyebrowed black with pencilled night. For her, I know, where'er she trod Each dewdrop raised a looking-glass To flash her beauty from the grass; That wild-flowers bloomed along the sod, And whispered perfume when she smiled; The wood-bird hushed to hear her song, Or, all enamoured, tame, not wild, Before her feet flew fluttering long. The brook went mad with melody, Eddied in laughter when she kissed With naked feet its amethyst-- And I--I fell in love; ah me! THE BOY COLUMBUS And he had mused on lands each bird,-- That winged from realms of Falerina, O'er seas of the Enchanted Sword,-- In romance sang him, till he heard Vague foam on Islands of Alcina. For rich Levant and old Castile Let other seamen freight their galleys; With Polo he and Mandeville Through stranger seas a dreamy keel Sailed into wonder-peopled valleys. Far continents of flow'r and fruit, Of everlasting spring; where fountains 'Mid flow'rs, with human faces, shoot; Where races dwell, both man and brute, In cities under golden mountains. Where cataracts their thunders hurl From heights the tempest has at mercy; Vast peaks that touch the moon, and whirl Their torrents down of gold and pearl; And forests strange as those of Circe. Let rapiered Love lute, in the shade Of royal gardens, to the Palace And Court, that haunt the balustrade Of terraces and still parade Their vanity and guile and malice. Him something calls diviner yet Than Love, more mighty than a lover; Heroic Truth that will not let Deed lag; a purpose, westward set, In eyes far-seeing to discover. SONG OF THE ELF I When the poppies, with their shields, Sentinel Forest and the harvest fields, In the bell Of a blossom, fair to see, There I stall the bumble-bee, My good stud; There I stable him and hold, Harness him with hairy gold; There I ease his burly back Of the honey and its sack Gathered from each bud. II Where the glow-worm lights its lamp, There I lie; Where, above the grasses damp, Moths go by; Now within the fussy brook, Where the waters wind and crook Round the rocks, I go sailing down the gloom Straddling on a wisp of broom; Or, beneath the owlet moon, Trip it to the cricket's tune Tossing back my locks. III Ere the crowfoot on the lawn Lifts its head, Or the glow-worm's light be gone, Dim and dead, In a cobweb hammock deep, 'Twixt two ferns I swing and sleep, Hid away; Where the drowsy musk-rose blows And a dreamy runnel flows, In the land of Faëry, Where no mortal thing can see, All the elfin day. THE OLD INN Red-winding from the sleepy town, One takes the lone, forgotten lane Straight through the hills. A brush-bird brown Bubbles in thorn-flowers, sweet with rain, Where breezes bend the gleaming grain, And cautious drip of higher leaves The lower dips that drip again.-- Above the tangled trees it heaves Its gables and its haunted eaves. One creeper, gnarled and blossomless, O'erforests all its eastern wall; The sighing cedars rake and press Dark boughs along the panes they sprawl; While, where the sun beats, drone and drawl The mud-wasps; and one bushy bee, Gold-dusty, hurls along the hall To buzz into a crack.--To me The shadows seem too scared to flee. Of ragged chimneys martins make Huge pipes of music; twittering, here They build and roost.--My footfalls wake Strange stealing echoes, till I fear I'll see my pale self drawing near, My phantom face as in a glass; Or one, men murdered, buried--where?-- Dim in gray stealthy glimmer, pass With lips that seem to moan 'Alas.' THE MILL-WATER The water-flag and wild cane grow 'Round banks whereon the sunbeams sow Fantastic gold when, on its shores, The wind sighs through the sycamores. In one green angle, just in reach, Between a willow-tree and beech, Moss-grown and leaky lies a boat The thick-grown lilies keep afloat. And through its waters, half awake, Slow swims the spotted water-snake; And near its edge, like some gray streak, Stands gaunt the still fly-up-the-creek. Between the lily-pads and blooms The water-spirits set their looms, That weave the lace-like light that dims The glimmering leaves of under limbs. Each lily is the hiding-place Of some dim wood-imp's elvish face, That watches you with gold-green eyes Where bubbles of its breathing rise. I fancy, when the waxing moon Leans through the trees and dreams of June, And when the black bat slants its wing, And lonelier the green-frogs sing; I fancy, when the whippoorwill In some old tree sings wild and shrill, With glow-worm eyes that dot the dark,-- Each holding high a firefly spark To torch its way,--the wood-imps come: And some float rocking here; and some Unmoor the lily leaves and oar Around the old boat by the shore. They climb through oozy weeds and moss; They swarm its rotting sides and toss Their firefly torches o'er its edge Or hang them in the tangled sedge. The boat is loosed. The moon is pale. Around the dam they slowly sail. Upon the bow, to pilot it, A jack-o'-lantern gleam doth sit. Yes, I have seen it in my dreams!-- Naught is forgotten! naught, it seems!-- The strangled face, the tangled hair Of the drown'd woman trailing there. THE DREAM This was my dream: It seemed the afternoon Of some deep tropic day; and yet the moon Stood round and bright with golden alchemy High in a heaven bluer than the sea. Long lawny lengths of perishable cloud Hung in a west o'er rolling forests bowed; Clouds raining colours, gold and violet, That, opening, seemed from mystic worlds to let Hints down of Parian beauty and lost charms Of dim immortals, young, with floating forms. And all about me fruited orchards grew, Pear, quince and peach, and plums of dusty blue; Rose-apricots and apples streaked with fire, Kissed into ripeness by the sun's desire And big with juice. And on far, fading hills, Down which it seemed a hundred torrent rills Flashed rushing silver, vines and vines and vines Of purple vintage swollen with cool wines; Pale pleasant wines and fragrant as late June, Their delicate tang drawn from the wine-white moon. And from the clouds o'er this sweet world there dripped An odorous music, strangely feverish-lipped, That swung and swooned and panted in mad sighs; Investing at each throb the air with eyes, And forms of sensuous spirits, limpid white, Clad on with raiment as of starry night; Fair, faint embodiments of melody, From out whose hearts of crystal one could see The music stream like light through delicate hands Hollowing a lamp. And as on sounding sands The ocean murmur haunts the rosy shells, Within whose convolutions beauty dwells, My soul became a vibrant harp of love, Re-echoing all the harmony above. SPRING TWILIGHT The sun set late; and left along the west A belt of furious ruby, o'er which snows Of clouds unrolled; each cloud a mighty breast Blooming with almond-rose. The sun set late; and wafts of wind beat down, And cuffed the blossoms from the blossoming quince; Scattered the pollen from the lily's crown, And made the clover wince. By dusky forests, through whose fretful boughs In flying fragments shot the evening's flame, Adown the tangled lane the quiet cows With dreamy tinklings came. The sun set late; but hardly had he gone When o'er the moon's gold-litten crescent there, Clean Phosphor, polished as a precious stone, Burned in fair deeps of air. As from faint stars the glory waned and waned, The crickets made the oldtime garden shrill; And past the luminous pasture-lands complained The first far whippoorwill. A SLEET-STORM IN MAY On southern winds shot through with amber light, Breathing soft balm and clothed in cloudy white, The lily-fingered Spring came o'er the hills, Waking the crocus and the daffodils. O'er the cold Earth she breathed a tender sigh-- The maples sang and flung their banners high, Their crimson-tasselled pennons, and the elm Bound his dark brows with a green-crested helm. Beneath the musky rot of Autumn's leaves, Under the forest's myriad naked eaves, Life woke and rose in gold and green and blue, Robed in the starlight of the twinkling dew. With timid tread adown the barren wood Spring held her way, when, lo! before her stood White-mantled Winter wagging his white head, Stormy his brow and stormily he said: 'The God of Terror, and the King of Storm, Must I remind thee how my iron arm Raised my red standards 'mid these conquered bowers, Turning their green to crimson?--Thou, with flowers, Thou wouldst supplant me! nay! usurp my throne!-- Audacious one!'--And at her breast he tossed A bitter javelin of ice and frost; And left her lying on th' unfeeling mould. The fragile blossoms, gathered in the fold Of her warm bosom, fell in desolate rows About her beauty, and, like fragrant snows, Covered her lovely hands and beautiful feet, Or on her lips lay like last kisses sweet That died there. Lilacs, musky of the May, And bluer violets and snowdrops lay Entombed in crystal, icy dim and fair, Like teardrops scattered in her heavenly hair. Alas! sad heart, break not beneath the pain! Time changeth all; the Beautiful wakes again.-- We should not question such; a higher power Knows best what bud is ripest or what flower, And silently plucks it at the fittest hour. UNREQUITED Passion? not hers, within whose virgin eyes All Eden lay.--And I remember how I drank the Heaven of her gaze with sighs-- She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow. So have I seen a clear October pool, Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sear Gold of the woodland, tremorless and cool, Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year. Sweetheart? not she whose voice was music sweet; Whose face was sweeter than melodious prayer. Sweetheart I called her.--When did she repeat Sweet to one hope or heart to one despair? So have I seen a rose set round with thorn, Sung to and sung to by a bird of spring, And when, breast-pierced, the bird lay all forlorn, The rose bloomed on, fair and unnoticing. THE HEART O' SPRING Whiten, oh whiten, O clouds of lawn! Lily-like clouds that whiten above, Now like a dove, and now like a swan, But never, oh never--pass on! pass on! Never so white as the throat of my love. Blue-black night on the mountain peaks Is not so black as the locks o' my love! Stars that shine through the evening streaks Over the torrent that flashes and breaks, Are not so bright as the eyes o' my love! Moon in a cloud, a cloud of snow, Mist in the vale where the rivulet sounds, Dropping from ledge to ledge below, Turning to gold in the sunset's glow, Are not so soft as her footstep sounds. Sound o' May winds in the blossoming trees, Is not so sweet as her laugh that rings; Song o' wild birds on the morning breeze, Birds and brooks and murmur o' bees, Are harsh to her voice when she laughs or sings. The rose of my heart is she, my dawn! My star o' the east, my moon above! My soul takes ship for the Avalon Of her heart of hearts, and shall sail on Till it anchors safe in its haven of love. 'A BROKEN RAINBOW ON THE SKIES OF MAY' A broken rainbow on the skies of May, Touching the dripping roses and low clouds, And in wet clouds its scattered glories lost:-- So in the sorrow of her soul the ghost Of one great love, of iridescent ray, Spanning the roses dim of memory, Against the tumult of life's rushing crowds-- A broken rainbow on the skies of May. A flashing humming-bird among the flowers, Deep-coloured blooms; its slender tongue and bill Sucking the syrups and the calyxed myrrhs, Till, being full of sweets, away it whirrs:-- Such was his love that won her heart's rich bowers To give to him their all, their honied showers, The bloom from which he drank his body's fill-- A flashing humming-bird among the flowers. A moon, moth-white, that through long mists of fleece Moves amber-girt into a bulk of black, And, lost to vision, rims the black with froth:-- A love that swept its moon, like some great moth, Across the heaven of her soul's young peace; And, smoothly passing, in the clouds did cease Of time, through which its burning light comes back-- A moon, moth-white, that moves through mists of fleece. A bolt of living thunder downward hurled, Momental blazing from the piled-up storm, That instants out the mountains and the ocean, The towering crag, then blots the sight's commotion:-- Love, love that swiftly coming bared the world, The deeps of life, 'round which fate's clouds are curled, And, ceasing, left all night and black alarm-- A bolt of living thunder downward hurled. ORGIE On nights like this, when bayou and lagoon Dream in the moonlight's mystic radiance, I seem to walk like one deep in a trance With old-world myths born of the mist and moon. Lascivious eyes and mouths of sensual rose Smile into mine; and breasts of luring light, And tresses streaming golden to the night, Persuade me onward where the forest glows. And then it seems along the haunted hills There falls a flutter as of beautiful feet, As if tempestuous troops of Mænads meet To drain deep bowls and shout and have their wills. And then I feel her limbs will be revealed Like some great snow-white moth among the trees; Her vampire beauty, waiting there to seize And dance me downward where my doom is sealed. REVERIE What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought, What walls of Parian, whiter than a rose, What towers of crystal, for the eyes of thought, Hast builded on far Islands of Repose? Thy cloudy columns, vast, Corinthian, Or huge, Ionic, colonnade the heights Of dreamland, looming o'er the soul's deep seas; Built melodies of marble, that no man Has ever reached, except in fancy's flights, Templing the presence of perpetual ease. Oft, where o'er plastic frieze and plinths of spar,-- In glimmering solitudes of pillared stone,-- The twilight blossoms with one violet star, With thee, O Reverie, I have stood alone, And there beheld, from out the Mythic Age, The rosy breasts of Cytherea--fair, Full-cestused, and suggestive of what loves Immortal--rise; and heard the lyric rage Of sun-burnt Poesy, whose throat breathes bare O'er leopard skins, fluting among his groves. Oft, where thy castled peaks and templed vales Cloud--like convulsive sunsets--shores that dream, Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas whose sails Gleam white as lilies on a lilied stream, My soul has dreamed. Or by thy sapphire sea, In thy arcaded gardens, in the shade Of breathing sculpture, oft has walked with thought, And bent, in shadowy attitude, its knee Before the shrine of Beauty that must fade And leave no memory of the mind that wrought. Who hath beheld thy caverns where, in heaps, The wines of Lethe and Love's witchery, In sealéd Amphoræ a sibyl keeps, World-old, for ever guarded secretly?-- No wine of Xeres or of Syracuse! No fine Falernian and no vile Sabine!-- The stolen fire of a demigod, Whose bubbled purple goddess feet did bruise In crusted vats of vintage, where the green Flames with wild poppies, on the Samian sod. Oh, for the deep enchantment of one draught! The reckless ecstasy of classic earth!-- With godlike eyes to laugh as gods have laughed In eyes of mortal brown, a mighty mirth. Of deity delirious with desire! To breathe the dropping roses of the shrines, The splashing wine-libation and the blood, And all the young priest's dreaming! To inspire My eager soul with beauty, 'til it shines An utt'rance of life's loftier brotherhood! So would I slumber in the old-world shades, And Poesy should touch me, as some bold Wild bee a pulpy lily of the glades, Barbaric-covered with the kernelled gold; And feel the glory of the Golden Age Less godly than my purpose, strong to dare Death with the pure immortal lips of love: Less lovely than my soul's ideal rage To mate itself with Music and declare Itself part meaning of the stars above. LETHE I There is a scent of roses and spilt wine Between the moonlight and the laurel coppice; The marble idol glimmers on its shrine, White as a star, among a heaven of poppies. Here all my life lies like a spilth of wine. There is a mouth of music like a lute, A nightingale that singeth to one flower; Between the falling flower and the fruit, Where love hath died, the music of an hour. II To sit alone with memory and a rose; To dwell with shadows of whilom romances; To make one hour of a year of woes And walk on starlight, in ethereal trances, With love's lost face fair as a moon-white rose. To shape from music and the scent of buds Love's spirit and its presence of sweet fire, Between the heart's wild burning and the blood's, Is part of life and of the soul's desire. III There is a song to silence and the stars, Between the forest and the temple's arches; And down the stream of night, like nenuphars, The tossing fires of the revellers' torches.-- Here all my life waits lonely as the stars.-- Shall not one hour of all those hours suffice For resignation God hath given as dower? Between the summons and the sacrifice One hour of love, th' eternity of an hour? IV The shrine is shattered and the bird is gone; Dark is the house of music and of bridal; The stars are stricken and the storm comes on; Lost in a wreck of roses lies the idol, Sad as the memory of a joy that's gone.-- To dream of perished gladness and a kiss, Waking the last chord of love's broken lyre, Between remembering and forgetting, this Is part of life and of the soul's desire. DIONYSIA The day is dead; and in the west The slender crescent of the moon-- Diana's crystal-kindled crest-- Sinks hillward in a silvery swoon. What is the murmur in the dell? The stealthy whisper and the drip? A Dryad with her leaf-light trip? A Naiad o'er her fountain well?-- Who with white fingers for her comb, Sleeks her blue hair, and from its curls Showers slim minnows and pale pearls, And hollow music of the foam. What is it in the vistaed ways That leans and springs, and stoops and sways?-- The naked limbs of one who flees? An Oread who hesitates Before the Satyr form that waits, Crouching to leap, that there she sees? Or under boughs, reclining cool, A Hamadryad, like a pool Of moonlight, palely beautiful? Or Limnad, with her lilied face, More lovely than the misty lace That haunts a star and gives it grace? Or is it some Leimoniad In wildwood flowers dimly clad? Oblong blossoms white as froth, Or mottled like the tiger-moth; Or brindled as the brows of death, Wild of hue and wild of breath: Here ethereal flame and milk Blent with velvet and with silk; Here an iridescent glow Mixed with satin and with snow: Pansy, poppy and the pale Serpolet and galingale; Mandrake and anemone, Honey-reservoirs o' the bee; Cistus and the cyclamen,-- Cheeked like blushing Hebe this, And the other white as is Bubbled milk of Venus when Cupid's baby mouth is pressed, Rosy to her rosy breast. And, besides, all flowers that mate With aroma, and in hue Stars and rainbows duplicate Here on earth for me and you. Yea! at last mine eyes can see! 'Tis no shadow of the tree Swaying softly there, but she!-- Mænad, Bassarid, Bacchant, What you will, who doth enchant Night with sensuous nudity. Lo! again I hear her pant Breasting through the dewy glooms-- Through the glow-worm gleams and glowers Of the starlight;--wood-perfumes Swoon around her and frail showers Of the leaflet-tilted rain. Lo! like love, she comes again Through the pale voluptuous dusk, Sweet of limb with breasts of musk. With her lips, like blossoms, breathing Honeyed pungence of her kiss, And her auburn tresses wreathing Like umbrageous helichrys, There she stands, like fire and snow, In the moon's ambrosial glow, Both her shapely loins low-looped With the balmy blossoms, drooped, Of the deep amaracus. Spiritual, yet sensual, Lo, she ever greets me thus In my vision; white and tall, Her delicious body there,-- Raimented with amorous air,-- To my mind expresses all The allurements of the world. And once more I seem to feel On my soul, like frenzy, hurled All the passionate past.--I reel, Greek again in ancient Greece, In the Pyrrhic revelries; In the mad and Mænad dance; Onward dragged with violence; Pan and old Silenus and Faunus and a Bacchant band Round me. Wild my wine-stained hand O'er tumultuous hair is lifted; While the flushed and Phallic orgies Whirl around me; and the marges Of the wood are torn and rifted With lascivious laugh and shout. And barbarian there again,-- Shameless with the shameless rout, Bacchus lusting in each vein,-- With her pagan lips on mine, Like a god made drunk with wine, On I reel; and in the revels Her loose hair, the dance dishevels, Blows, and 'thwart my vision swims All the splendour of her limbs.... So it seems. Yet woods are lonely. And when I again awake, I shall find their faces only Moonbeams in the boughs that shake; And their revels, but the rush Of night-winds through bough and brush. Yet my dreaming--is it more Than mere dreaming? Is a door Opened in my soul? a curtain Raised? to let me see for certain I have lived that life before? THE NAIAD She sits among the iris stalks Of babbling brooks; and leans for hours Among the river's lily flowers, Or on their whiteness walks: Above dark forest pools, gray rocks Wall in, she leans with dripping locks, And listening to the echo, talks With her own face--Iothera. There is no forest of the hills, No valley of the solitude, Nor fern nor moss, that may elude Her searching step that stills: She dreams among the wild-rose brakes Of fountains that the ripple shakes, And, dreaming of herself, she fills The silence with 'Iothera.' And every wind that haunts the ways Of leaf and bough, once having kissed Her virgin nudity, goes whist With wonder and amaze. There blows no breeze which hath not learned Her name's sweet melody, and yearned To kiss her mouth that laughs and says, 'Iothera, Iothera.' No wild thing of the wood, no bird, Or brown or blue, or gold or gray, Beneath the sun's or moonlight's ray, That hath not loved and heard; They are her pupils; she can say No new thing but, within a day, They have its music, word for word, Harmonious as Iothera. No man who lives and is not wise With love for common flowers and trees, Bee, bird, and beast, and brook, and breeze, And rocks and hills and skies,-- Search where he will,--shall ever see One flutter of her drapery, One glimpse of limbs, or hair, or eyes Of beautiful Iothera. THE LIMNAD I The lake she haunts gleams dreamily 'Twixt sleepy boughs of melody, Set 'mid the hills beside the sea, In tangled bush and brier; Where the ghostly sunsets write Wondrous things in golden light; And above the pine-crowned height, Clouds of twilight, rosy white, Build their towers of fire. II 'Mid the rushes there that swing, Flowering flags where voices sing When low winds are murmuring, Murmuring to stars that glitter; Blossom-white, with purple locks, Underneath the stars' still flocks, In the dusky waves she rocks, Rocks, and all the landscape mocks With a song most sweet and bitter. III Soft it sounds, at first, as dreams Filled with tears that fall in streams; Then it soars, until it seems Beauty's very self hath spoken; And the woods grow silent quite, Stars wax faint and flowers turn white; And the nightingales that light Near, or hear her through the night, Die, their hearts with longing broken. IV Dark, dim and sad o'er mournful lands, White-throated stars heaped in her hands, Like wildwood buds, the Twilight stands, The Twilight dreaming lingers; Listening where the Limnad sings Witcheries, whose beauty brings A great moon from hidden springs, Pale with amorous quiverings Feet of fire and silvery fingers. V In the vales Auloniads, On the mountains Oreads, On the leas Leimoniads, Naked as the stars that glisten, Pan, the Satyrs, Dryades, Fountain-lovely Naiades, Foam-lipped Oceanides, Breathless 'mid their seas and trees, Stay and stop and lean and listen. VI Large-eyed, Siren-like she stands, In the lake or on its sands, And with rapture from the hands Of the Night some stars are shaken; To her song the rushes swing, Lilies nod and ripples ring, Lost in helpless listening-- These will wake that hear her sing, But one mortal will not waken. INTIMATIONS I Is it uneasy moonlight On the restless field, that stirs? Or wild white meadow-blossoms The night-wind bends and blurs? Is it the dolorous water, That sobs in the woods and sighs? Or heart of an ancient oak-tree, That breaks and, sighing, dies? The wind is vague with the shadows That wander in No-Man's Land; The water is dark with the voices That weep on the Unknown strand. O ghosts of the winds that call me! O ghosts of the whispering waves! As sad as forgotten flowers That die upon nameless graves! What is this thing you tell me In tongues of a twilight race, Of death, with the vanished features, Mantled, of my own face? II The old enigmas of the deathless dawns And riddles of the all immortal eves,-- That still o'er Delphic lawns Speak as the gods spoke through oracular leaves-- I read with new-born eyes, Remembering how, a slave; They buried me, a living sacrifice, Once in a dead king's grave. Or crowned with hyacinth and helichrys, How, towards the altar in the marble gloom,-- Hearing the magadis Dirge through the pale amaracine perfume,-- 'Mid chanting priests I trod, With never a sigh or pause, To give my life to pacify a god, And save my country's cause. Again: Cyrenian roses on wild hair, And oil and purple smeared on breasts and cheeks, How, with mad torches there,-- Reddening the cedars of Cithæron's peaks,-- With gesture and fierce glance, Lascivious Mænad bands Once drew and slew me in the Pyrrhic dance, With Bacchanalian hands. III In eons of the senses, My spirit knew of yore, I found the Isle of Circe And felt her magic lore; And still the soul remembers What I was once before. She gave me flowers to smell of That wizard branches bore, Of weird and sorcerous beauty, Whose stems dripped human gore-- Their scent when I remember I know that world once more. She gave me fruits to eat of That grew upon the shore, Of necromantic ripeness, With human flesh at core-- Their taste when I remember I know that life once more. And then, behold! a serpent, That glides my face before, With eyes of tears and fire That glare me o'er and o'er-- I look into its eyeballs, And know myself once more. BEFORE THE TEMPLE I All desolate she sate her down Upon the marble of the temple's stair. You would have thought her, with her eyes of brown, Flushed cheeks and hazel hair, A dryad dreaming there. II A priest of Bacchus passed, nor stopped To chide her; deeming her--whose chiton hid But half her bosom, and whose girdle dropped-- Some grief-drowned Bassarid, The god of wine had chid. III With wreaths of woodland cyclamen For Dian's shrine, a shepherdess drew near, All her young thoughts on vestal beauty, when-- She dare not look for fear-- Behold the goddess here! IV Fierce lights on shields of bossy brass And helms of gold, next from the hills deploy Tall youths of Argos. And she sees _him_ pass, Flushed with heroic joy, On towards the siege of Troy. ANTHEM OF DAWN I Then up the orient heights to the zenith that balanced the crescent,-- Up and far up and over,--the heaven grew erubescent, Vibrant with rose and with ruby from hands of the harpist Dawn, Smiting symphonic fire on the firmament's barbition; And the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold and of gems, And a wonderful carpet unrolled for the inaccessible hems Of the glittering robes of her limbs; that, lily and amethyst, Swept glorying on and on through temples of cloud and mist. II Then out of the splendour and richness, that burned like a magic stone, The torrent suffusion that deepened and dazzled and broadened and shone, The pomp and the pageant of colour, triumphal procession of glare, The sun, like a king in armour, breathing splendour from feet to hair, Stood forth with majesty girdled, as a hero who towers afar Where the bannered gates are bristling hells and the walls are roaring war: And broad on the back of the world, like a Cherubin's fiery blade, The effulgent gaze of his aspect fell in glittering accolade. III Then billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of dawn to even: And the stars, like rafts, went down: and the moon, like a ghost-ship driven, A feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles that dotted, With pearl and cameo, bays of the day, her canvas webbed and rooted, Lay lost in the gulf of heaven: while over her mixed and melted The beautiful children of Morn, whose bodies are opal-belted; The beautiful daughters of Dawn, who, over and under and after The rivered radiance wrestled; and rainbowed heaven with laughter Of halcyon sapphire.--O Dawn! thou visible mirth, Thou hallelujah of heaven! hosanna of Earth! AT THE LANE'S END I No more to strip the roses from The rose-boughs of her porch's place!-- I dreamed last night that I was home Beside a rose--her face. I must have smiled in sleep--who knows?-- The rose aroma filled the lane; I saw her white hand's lifted rose That called me home again. And yet when I awoke--so wan, An old face wet with icy tears!-- Somehow, it seems, sleep had misdrawn A love gone thirty years. II The clouds roll up and the clouds roll down Over the roofs of the little town; Out in the hills where the pike winds by Fields of clover and bottoms of rye, You will hear no sound but the barking cough Of the striped chipmunk where the lane leads off; You will hear no bird but the sapsuckers Far off in the forest,--that seems to purr, As the warm wind fondles its top, grown hot, Like the docile back of an ocelot: You will see no thing but the shine and shade Of briers that climb and of weeds that wade The glittering creeks of the light, that fills The dusty road and the red-keel hills-- And all day long in the pennyroy'l The grasshoppers at their anvils toil; Thick click of their tireless hammers thrum, And the wheezy belts of their bellows hum; Tinkers who solder the silence and heat To make the loneliness more complete. Around old rails where the blackberries Are reddening ripe, and the bumble-bees Are a drowsy rustle of Summer's skirts, And the bob-white's wing is the fan she flirts. Under the hill, through the iron weeds, And ox-eyed daisies and milkweeds, leads The path forgotten of all but one. Where elder bushes are sick with sun, And wild raspberries branch big blue veins O'er the face of the rock, where the old spring rains Its sparkling splinters of molten spar On the gravel bed where the tadpoles are,-- You will find the pales of the fallen fence, And the tangled orchard and vineyard, dense With the weedy neglect of thirty years. The garden there,--where the soft sky clears Like an old sweet face that has dried its tears;-- The garden plot where the cabbage grew And the pompous pumpkin; and beans that blew Balloons of white by the melon patch; Maize; and tomatoes that seemed to catch Oblong amber and agate balls Thrown from the sun in the frosty falls: Long rows of currants and gooseberries, And the balsam-gourd with its honey-bees. And here was a nook for the princess-plumes, The snap-dragons and the poppy-blooms, Mother's sweet-williams and pansy flowers, And the morning-glories' bewildered bowers, Tipping their cornucopias up For the humming-birds that came to sup. And over it all was the Sabbath peace Of the land whose lap was the love of these; And the old log-house where my innocence died, With my boyhood buried side by side. Shall a man with a face as withered and gray As the wasp-nest stowed in a loft away,-- Where the hornets haunt and the mortar drops From the loosened logs of the clapboard tops;-- Whom vice has aged as the rotting rooms The rain where memories haunt the glooms; A hitch in his joints like the rheum that gnars In the rasping hinge of the door that jars; A harsh, cracked throat like the old stone flue Where the swallows build the summer through; Shall a man, I say, with the spider sins That the long years spin in the outs and ins Of his soul, returning to see once more His boyhood's home, where his life was poor With toil and tears and their fretfulness, But rich with health and the hopes that bless The unsoiled wealth of a vigorous youth; Shall he not take comfort and know the truth In its threadbare raiment of falsehood?--Yea! In his crumbled past he shall kneel and pray, Like a pilgrim come to the shrine again Of the homely saints that shall soothe his pain, And arise and depart made clean from stain! III Years of care can not erase Visions of the hills and trees Closing in the dam and race; Not the mile-long memories Of the mill-stream's lovely place. How the sunsets used to stain Mirror of the water lying Under eaves made dark with rain! Where the red-bird, westward flying, Lit to try one song again. Dingles, hills, and woods, and springs, Where we came in calm and storm, Swinging in the grape-vine swings, Wading where the rocks were warm, With our fishing-nets and strings. Here the road plunged down the hill, Under ash and chinquapin,-- Where the grasshoppers would drill Ears of silence with their din,-- To the willow-girdled mill. There the path beyond the ford Takes the woodside, just below Shallows that the lilies sword, Where the scarlet blossoms blow Of the trumpet-vine and gourd. Summer winds, that sink with heat, On the pelted waters winnow Moony petals that repeat Crescents, where the startled minnow Beats a glittering retreat. Summer winds that bear the scent Of the iron-weed and mint, Weary with sweet freight and spent, On the deeper pools imprint Stumbling steps in many a dent. Summer winds, that split the husk Of the peach and nectarine, Trail along the amber dusk Hazy skirts of gray and green, Spilling balms of dew and musk. Where with balls of bursting juice Summer sees the red wild-plum Strew the gravel; ripened loose, Autumn hears the pawpaw drum Plumpness on the rocks that bruise: There we found the water-beech, One forgotten August noon, With a hornet-nest in reach,-- Like a fairyland balloon, Full of bustling fairy speech.-- Some invasion sure it was; For we heard the captains scold; Waspish cavalry a-buzz,-- Troopers uniformed in gold, Sable-slashed,--to charge on us. Could I find the sedgy angle, Where the dragon-flies would turn Slender flittings into spangle On the sunlight? or would burn-- Where the berries made a tangle-- Sparkling green and brassy blue; Rendezvousing, by the stream, Bands of elf-banditti, who, Brigands of the bloom and beam, Drunken were with honey-dew. Could I find the pond that lay Where vermilion blossoms showered Fragrance down the daisied way? That the sassafras embowered With the spice of early May? Could I find it--did I seek-- The old mill? Its weather-beaten Wheel and gable by the creek? With its warping roof; worm-eaten, Dusty rafters worn and weak. Where old shadows haunt old places, Loft and hopper, stair and bin; Ghostly with the dust that laces Webs that usher phantoms in, Wistful with remembered faces. While the frogs' grave litanies Drowse in far-off antiphone, Supplicating, till the eyes Of dead friendships, long alone In the dusky corners,--rise. Moonrays or the splintered slip Of a star? within the darkling Twilight, where the fireflies dip-- As if Night a myriad sparkling Jewels from her hands let slip: While again some farm-boy crosses,-- With a corn-sack for the meal,-- O'er the creek, through ferns and mosses Sprinkled by the old mill-wheel, Where the water drips and tosses. THE FARMSTEAD Yes, I love the homestead. There In the spring the lilacs blew Plenteous perfume everywhere; There in summer gladioles grew Parallels of scarlet glare. And the moon-hued primrose cool, Satin-soft and redolent; Honeysuckles beautiful, Filling all the air with scent; Roses red or white as wool. Roses, glorious and lush, Rich in tender-tinted dyes, Like the gay tempestuous rush Of unnumbered butterflies, Clustering o'er each bending bush. Here japonica and box, And the wayward violets; Clumps of star-enamelled phlox, And the myriad flowery jets Of the twilight four-o'-clocks. Ah, the beauty of the place! When the June made one great rose, Full of musk and mellow grace, In the garden's humming close, Of her comely mother face! Bubble-like, the hollyhocks Budded, burst, and flaunted wide Gypsy beauty from their stocks; Morning glories, bubble-dyed, Swung in honey-hearted flocks. Tawny tiger-lilies flung Doublets slashed with crimson on; Graceful slave-girls, fair and young, Like Circassians, in the sun Alabaster lilies swung. Ah, the droning of the bee; In his dusty pantaloons Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis; In the drowsy afternoons Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea. Ah, the moaning wildwood-dove! With its throat of amethyst Rippled like a shining cove Which a wind to pearl hath kissed, Moaning, moaning of its love. And the insects' gossip thin-- From the summer hotness hid-- In lone, leafy deeps of green; Then at eve the katydid With its hard, unvaried din. Often from the whispering hills, Borne from out the golden dusk,-- Gold with gold of daffodils,-- Thrilled into the garden's musk The wild wail of whippoorwills. From the purple-tangled trees, Like the white, full heart of night, Solemn with majestic peace, Swam the big moon, veined with light; Like some gorgeous golden-fleece. She was there with me.--And who, In the magic of the hour, Had not sworn that they could view, Beading on each blade and flower Moony blisters of the dew? And each fairy of our home,-- Firefly,--its taper lit In the honey-scented gloam, Dashing down the dusk with it Like an instant-flaming foam. And we heard the calling, calling, Of the screech-owl in the brake; Where the trumpet-vine hung, crawling Down the ledge, into the lake Heard the sighing streamlet falling. Then we wandered to the creek Where the water-lilies, growing Thick as stars, lay white and weak; Or against the brooklet's flowing Bent and bathed a bashful cheek. And the moonlight, rippling golden, Fell in virgin aureoles On their bosoms, half unfolden, Where, it seemed, the fairies' souls Dwelt as perfume,--unbeholden;-- Or lay sleeping, pearly-tented, Baby-cribbed within each bud, While the night-wind, piney-scented, Swooning over field and flood, Rocked them on the waters dented. Then the low, melodious bell Of a sleeping heifer tinkled, In some berry-briered dell, As her satin dewlap wrinkled With the cud that made it swell. And, returning home, we heard, In a beech-tree at the gate, Some brown, dream-behaunted bird, Singing of its absent mate, Of the mate that never heard. And, you see, now I am gray, Why within the old, old place, With such memories, I stay; Fancy out her absent face Long since passed away. She was mine--yes! still is mine: And my frosty memory Reels about her, as with wine Warmed into young eyes that see All of her that was divine. Yes, I loved her, and have grown Melancholy in that love, And the memory alone Of perfection such whereof She could sanctify each stone. And where'er the poppies swing-- There we walk,--as if a bee Bent them with its airy wing,-- Down her garden shadowy In the hush the evenings bring. A FLOWER OF THE FIELDS Bee-bitten in the orchard hung The peach; or, fallen in the weeds, Lay rotting, where still sucked and sung The gray bee, boring to its seed's Pink pulp and honey blackly stung. The orchard-path, which led around The garden,--with its heat one twinge Of dinning locusts,--picket-bound And ragged, brought me where one hinge Held up the gate that scraped the ground. All seemed the same: the martin-box-- Sun-warped with pigmy balconies-- Still stood, with all its twittering flocks, Perched on its pole above the peas And silvery-seeded onion-stocks. The clove-pink and the rose; the clump Of coppery sunflowers, with the heat Sick to the heart: the garden stump, Red with geranium-pots, and sweet With moss and ferns, this side the pump. I rested, with one hesitant hand Upon the gate. The lonesome day, Droning with insects, made the land One dry stagnation. Soaked with hay And scents of weeds the hot wind fanned. I breathed the sultry scents, my eyes Parched as my lips. And yet I felt My limbs were ice.--As one who flies To some wild woe.--How sleepy smelt The hay-sweet heat that soaked the skies! Noon nodded; dreamier, lonesomer For one long, plaintive, forest-side Bird-quaver.--And I knew me near Some heartbreak anguish.... She had died. I felt it, and no need to hear! I passed the quince and pear-tree; where, All up the porch, a grape-vine trails-- How strange that fruit, whatever air Or earth it grows in, never fails To find its native flavour there! And she was as a flower, too, That grows its proper bloom and scent No matter what the soil: she, who, Born better than her place, still lent Grace to the lowliness she knew.... They met me at the porch, and were Sad-eyed with weeping.--Then the room Shut out the country's heat and purr, And left light stricken into gloom-- So love and I might look on her. THE FEUD Rocks, trees and rocks; and down a mossy stone The murmuring ooze and trickle of a stream Through bushes, where the mountain spring lies lone,-- A gleaming cairngorm where the shadows dream,-- And one wild road winds like a saffron seam. Here sang the thrush, whose pure, mellifluous note Dropped golden sweetness on the fragrant June; Here cat--and blue-bird and wood-sparrow wrote Their presence on the silence with a tune; And here the fox drank 'neath the mountain moon. Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush,-- Impenetrable briers, deep and dense, And wiry bushes,--brush, that seemed to crush The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence. A wasp buzzed by; and then a butterfly In orange and amber, like a floating flame; And then a man, hard-eyed and very sly, Gaunt-cheeked and haggard and a little lame, With an old rifle, down the mountain came. He listened, drinking from a flask he took Out of the ragged pocket of his coat; Then all around him cast a stealthy look; Lay down; and watched an eagle soar and float, His fingers twitching at his hairy throat. The shades grew longer; and each Cumberland height Loomed, framed in splendours of the dolphin dusk. Around the road a horseman rode in sight; Young, tall, blonde-bearded. Silent, grim, and brusque, He in the thicket aimed--The gun ran husk; And echoes barked among the hills and made Repeated instants of the shot's distress.-- Then silence--and the trampled bushes swayed;-- Then silence, packed with murder and the press Of distant hoofs that galloped riderless. LYNCHERS At the moon's down-going, let it be On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.... The red-rock road of the underbush, Where the woman came through the summer hush. The sumach high and the elder thick, Where we found the stone and the ragged stick The trampled road of the thicket, full Of footprints down to the quarry pool. The rocks that ooze with the hue of lead, Where we found her lying stark and dead. The scraggy wood; the negro hut, With its doors and windows locked and shut. A secret signal; a foot's rough tramp; A knock at the door; a lifted lamp. An oath; a scuffle; a ring of masks; A voice that answers a voice that asks. A group of shadows; the moon's red fleck; A running noose and a man's bared neck. A word, a curse, and a shape that swings; The lonely night and a bat's black wings.... At the moon's down-going, let it be On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree. DEAD MAN'S RUN He rode adown the autumn wood, A man dark-eyed and brown; A mountain girl before him stood Clad in a homespun gown. 'To ride this road is death for you! My father waits you there; My father and my brother, too,-- You know the oath they swear.' He holds her by one berry-brown wrist, And by one berry-brown hand; And he hath laughed at her and kissed Her cheek the sun hath tanned. 'The feud is to the death, sweetheart; But forward will I ride.'-- 'And if you ride to death, sweetheart, My place is at your side.' Low hath he laughed again and kissed And helped her with his hand; And they have ridd'n into the mist That belts the autumn land. And they had passed by Devil's Den, And come to Dead Man's Run, When in the brush rose up two men, Each with a levelled gun. 'Down! down! my sister!' cries the one;-- She gives the reins a twirl.-- The other shouts, 'He shot my son! And now he steals my girl!' The rifles crack: she will not wail: He will not cease to ride: But, oh! her face is pale, is pale, And the red blood stains her side. 'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart! The road is rough to ride!'-- The road is rough by gulch and bluff, And her hair blows wild and wide. 'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart! The bank is steep to ride!'-- The bank is steep for a strong man's leap, And her eyes are staring wide. 'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart! The Run is swift to ride!'-- The Run is swift with mountain drift, And she sways from side to side. Is it a wash of the yellow moss, Or drift of the autumn's gold, The mountain torrent foams across For the dead pine's roots to hold? Is it the bark of the sycamore, Or peel of the white birch-tree, The mountaineer on the other shore Hath followed and still can see? No mountain moss or leaves, dear heart! No bark of birchen gray!-- Young hair of gold and a face death-cold The wild stream sweeps away. AUGUST I Clad on with glowing beauty and the peace, Benign, of calm maturity, she stands Among her meadows and her orchard-lands, And on her mellowing gardens and her trees, Out of the ripe abundance of her hands Bestows increase And fruitfulness, as, wrapped in sunny ease, Blue-eyed and blonde she goes Upon her bosom Summer's richest rose. II And he who follows where her footsteps lead, By hill and rock, by forest-side and stream, Shall glimpse the glory of her visible dream, In flower and fruit, in rounded nut and seed: She, in whose path the very shadows gleam; Whose humblest weed Seems lovelier than June's loveliest flower, indeed, And sweeter to the smell Than April's self within a rainy dell. III Hers is a sumptuous simplicity Within the fair Republic of her flowers, Where you may see her standing hours on hours, Breast-deep in gold, soft-holding up a bee To her hushed ear; or sitting under bowers Of greenery, A butterfly a-tilt upon her knee; Or lounging on her hip, Dancing a cricket on her finger-tip. IV Ay, let me breathe hot scents that tell of you; The hoary catnip and the meadow-mint, On which the honour of your touch doth print Itself as odour. Let me drink the hue Of iron-weed and mist-flow'r here that hint, With purple and blue, The rapture that your presence doth imbue Their inmost essence with, Immortal though as transient as a myth. V Yea, let me feed on sounds that still assure Me where you hide: the brooks', whose happy din Tells where, the deep retired woods within, Disrobed, you bathe; the birds', whose drowsy lure Tells where you slumber, your warm nestling chin Soft on the pure, Pink cushion of your palm.... What better cure For care and memory's ache Than to behold you so, and watch you wake! THE BUSH-SPARROW I Ere wild-haws, looming in the glooms, Build bolted drifts of breezy blooms; And in the whistling hollow there The red-bud bends, as brown and bare As buxom Roxy's up-stripped arm; From some gray hickory or larch, Sighed o'er the sodden meads of March, The sad heart thrills and reddens warm To hear you braving the rough storm, Frail courier of green-gathering powers; Rebelling sap in trees and flowers; Love's minister come heralding-- O sweet saint-voice among bleak bowers! O brown-red pursuivant of Spring! II 'Moan' sob the woodland waters still Down bloomless ledges of the hill; And gray, gaunt clouds like harpies hang In harpy heavens, and swoop and clang Sharp beaks and talons of the wind: Black scowl the forests, and unkind The far fields as the near: while song Seems murdered and all beauty wrong. One weak frog only in the thaw Of spawny pools wakes cold and raw, Expires a melancholy bass And stops as if bewildered: then Along the frowning wood again, Flung in the thin wind's vulture face, From woolly tassels of the proud, Red-bannered maples, long and loud, 'The Spring is come! is here! her Grace! her Grace!' III 'Her Grace, the Spring! her Grace! her Grace! Climbs, beautiful and sunny browed, Up, up the kindling hills and wakes Blue berries in the berry brakes: With fragrant flakes, that blow and bleach, Deep-powders smothered quince and peach: Eyes dogwoods with a thousand eyes: Teaches each sod how to be wise With twenty wild-flowers to one weed, And kisses germs that they may seed. In purest purple and sweet white Treads up the happier hills of light, Bloom, cloudy-borne, song in her hair And balm and beam of odorous air. Winds, her retainers; and the rains Her yeomen strong that sweep the plains: Her scarlet knights of dawn, and gold Of eve, her panoply unfold: Her herald tabarded behold! Awake to greet! prepare to sing! She comes, the darling Duchess, Spring!' QUIET A log-hut in the solitude, A clapboard roof to rest beneath! This side, the shadow-haunted wood; That side, the sunlight-haunted heath. At daybreak Morn shall come to me In raiment of the white winds spun; Slim in her rosy hand the key That opes the gateway of the sun. Her smile shall help my heart enough With love to labour all the day, And cheer the road, whose rocks are rough, With her smooth footprints, each a ray. At dusk a voice shall call afar, A lone voice like the whippoorwill's; And, on her shimmering brow one star, Night shall descend the western hills. She at my door till dawn shall stand, With gothic eyes, that, dark and deep, Are mirrors of a mystic land, Fantastic with the towns of sleep. MUSIC Thou, oh, thou! Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum, thou Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow! Music, who by the plangent waves, Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars, Touchest reverberant bars Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;-- Keeping regret and memory awake, And all the immortal ache Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days In retrospection!--now, oh, now, Interpreter and heart-physician, thou Who gazest on the heaven and the hell Of life, and singest each as well, Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips, Or thy melodious lips, This sickness named my soul, Making it whole As is an echo of a chord, Or some symphonic word, Or sweet vibrating sigh, That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die On thy voluminous roll; Part of the beauty and the mystery That axles Earth with music; as a slave, Swinging it round and round on each sonorous pole, 'Mid spheric harmony, And choral majesty, And diapasoning of wind and wave; Speeding it on its far elliptic way 'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.-- O cosmic cry Of two eternities, wherein we see The phantasms, Death and Life, At endless strife Above the silence of a monster grave. THE PURPLE VALLEYS Far in the purple valleys of illusion I see her waiting, like the soul of music, With deep eyes, lovelier than cerulean pansies, Shadow and fire, yet merciless as poison; With red lips sweeter than Arabian storax, Yet bitterer than myrrh. O tears and kisses! O eyes and lips, that haunt my soul for ever! Again Spring walks transcendent on the mountains: The woods are hushed: the vales are blue with shadows: Above the heights, steeped in a thousand splendours, Like some vast canvas of the gods, hangs burning The sunset's wild sciography: and slowly The moon treads heaven's proscenium,--night's stately White queen of love and tragedy and madness. Again I know forgotten dreams and longings; Ideals lost; desires dead and buried Beside the altar sacrifice erected Within the heart's high sanctuary. Strangely Again I know the horror and the rapture, The utterless awe, the joy akin to anguish, The terror and the worship of the spirit. Again I feel her eyes pierce through and through me; Her deep eyes, lovelier than imperial pansies, Velvet and flame, through which her fierce will holds me, Powerless and tame, and draws me on and onward To sad, unsatisfied and animal yearnings, Wild, unrestrained--the brute within the human-- To fling me panting on her mouth and bosom. Again I feel her lips like ice and fire, Her red lips, odorous as Arabian storax, Fragrance and fire, within whose kiss destruction Lies serpent-like. Intoxicating languors Resistlessly embrace me, soul and body; And we go drifting, drifting--she is laughing-- Outcasts of God, into the deep's abysm. A DREAM SHAPE With moon-white hearts that held a gleam I gathered wild-flowers in a dream, And shaped a woman, whose sweet blood Was odour of the wildwood bud. From dew, the starlight arrowed through, I wrought a woman's eyes of blue; The lids that on her eyeballs lay, Were rose-pale petals of the May. Out of a rosebud's veins I drew The fragrant crimson beating through The languid lips of her, whose kiss Was as a poppy's drowsiness. Out of the moonlight and the air I wrought the glory of her hair, That o'er her eyes' blue heaven lay Like some gold cloud o'er dawn of day. I took the music of the breeze And water, whispering in the trees, And shaped the soul that breathed below A woman's blossom breasts of snow. A shadow's shadow in the glass Of sleep, my spirit saw her pass: And thinking of it now, meseems We only live within our dreams. For in that time she was to me More real than our reality; More real than Earth, more real than I-- The unreal things that pass and die. THE OLD BARN Low, swallow-swept and gray, Between the orchard and the spring, All its wide windows overflowing hay, And crannied doors a-swing, The old barn stands to-day. Deep in its hay the Leghorn hides A round white nest; and, humming soft On roof and rafter, or its log-rude sides, Black in the sun-shot loft, The building hornet glides. Along its corn-crib, cautiously As thieving fingers, skulks the rat; Or in warped stalls of fragrant timothy, Gnaws at some loosened slat, Or passes shadowy. A dream of drouth made audible Before its door, hot, smooth, and shrill All day the locust sings.... What other spell Shall hold it, lazier still Than the long day's, now tell:-- Dusk and the cricket and the strain Of tree-toad and of frog; and stars That burn above the rich west's ribbéd stain; And dropping pasture bars, And cow-bells up the lane. Night and the moon and katydid, And leaf-lisp of the wind-touched boughs; And mazy shadows that the fireflies thrid; And sweet breath of the cows, And the lone owl here hid. THE WOOD WITCH There is a woodland witch who lies With bloom-bright limbs and beam-bright eyes, Among the water-flags that rank The slow brook's heron-haunted bank. The dragon-flies, brass-bright and blue, Are signs she works her sorcery through; Weird, wizard characters she weaves Her spells by under forest leaves,-- These wait her word, like imps, upon The gray flag-pods; their wings, of lawn And gauze; their bodies, gleaming green. While o'er the wet sand,--left between The running water and the still,-- In pansy hues and daffodil, The fancies that she doth devise Take on the forms of butterflies, Rich-coloured.--And 'tis she you hear, Whose sleepy rune, hummed in the ear Of silence, bees and beetles purr, And the dry-droning locusts whirr; Till, where the wood is very lone, Vague monotone meets monotone, And slumber is begot and born, A faery child beneath the thorn. There is no mortal who may scorn The witchery she spreads around Her din demesne, wherein is bound The beauty of abandoned time, As some sweet thought 'twixt rhyme and rhyme. And through her spells you shall behold The blue turn gray, the gray turn gold Of hollow heaven; and the brown Of twilight vistas twinkled down With fireflies; and in the gloom Feel the cool vowels of perfume Slow-syllabled of weed and bloom. But, in the night, at languid rest,-- When like a spirit's naked breast The moon slips from a silver mist,-- With star-bound brow, and star-wreathed wrist, If you should see her rise and wave You welcome--ah! what thing could save You then? for evermore her slave! AT SUNSET Into the sunset's turquoise marge The moon dips, like a pearly barge Enchantment sails through magic seas To fairyland Hesperides, Over the hills and away. Into the fields, in ghost-gray gown, The young-eyed Dusk comes slowly down; Her apron filled with stars she stands, And one or two slip from her hands Over the hills and away. Above the wood's black caldron bends The witch-faced Night and, muttering, blends The dew and heat, whose bubbles make The mist and musk that haunt the brake Over the hills and away. Oh, come with me, and let us go Beyond the sunset lying low, Beyond the twilight and the night Into Love's kingdom of long light Over the hills and away. MAY The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed, That spangle the woods and dance-- No gleam of gold that the twilights hold Is strong as their necromance: For, under the oaks where the woodpaths lead, The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed Are the May's own utterance. The azure stars of the bluet bloom, That sprinkle the woodland's trance-- No blink of blue that a cloud lets through Is sweet as their countenance: For, over the knolls that the woods perfume, The azure stars of the bluet bloom Are the light of the May's own glance. With her wondering words and her looks she comes, In a sunbeam of a gown; She needs but think and the blossoms wink, But look, and they shower down. By orchard ways, where the wild bee hums, With her wondering words and her looks she comes Like a little maid to town. RAIN I Around, the stillness deepened; then the grain Went wild with wind; and every briery lane Was swept with dust; and then, tempestuous black, Hillward the tempest heaved a monster back, That on the thunder leaned as on a cane; And on huge shoulders bore a cloudy pack, That gullied gold from many a lightning-crack: One great drop splashed and wrinkled down the pane, And then field, hill, and wood were lost in rain. II At last, through clouds,--as from a cavern hewn Into night's heart,--the sun burst, angry roon; And every cedar, with its weight of wet, Against the sunset's fiery splendour set, Frightened to beauty, seemed with rubies strewn: Then in drenched gardens, like sweet phantoms met, Dim odours rose of pink and mignonette; And in the East a confidence, that soon Grew to the calm assurance of the moon. TO FALL Sad-hearted spirit of the solitudes, Who comest through the ruin-wedded woods! Gray-gowned with fog, gold-girdled with the gloom Of tawny twilights; burdened with perfume Of rain-wet uplands, chilly with the mist; And all the beauty of the fire-kissed Cold forests crimsoning thy indolent way, Odorous of death and drowsy with decay. I think of thee as seated 'mid the showers Of languid leaves that cover up the flowers,-- The little flower-sisterhoods, whom June Once gave wild sweetness to, as to a tune A singer gives her soul's wild melody,-- Watching the squirrel store his granary. Or, 'mid old orchards I have pictured thee: Thy hair's profusion blown about thy back; One lovely shoulder bathed with gypsy black; Upon thy palm one nestling cheek, and sweet The rosy russets tumbled at thy feet. Was it a voice lamenting for the flowers? A heart-sick bird that sang of happier hours? A cricket dirging days that soon must die? Or did the ghost of Summer wander by? SUNSET IN AUTUMN Blood-coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass; Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras, And broom-sedge strips of smoky-pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass. From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side, The winds,--the sowers of the Lord,--with thunderous footsteps stride; Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed, Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide. The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell; And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell. The oaks, against a copper sky--o'er which, like some black lake Of Dis, bronze clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break-- Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales that make A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take. Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane, Within its walls of storm, the West opens to hill and plain, On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train, And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night is here again. THE HILLS There is no joy of earth that thrills My bosom like the far-off hills! Th' unchanging hills, that, shadowy, Beckon our mutability To follow and to gaze upon Foundations of the dusk and dawn. Meseems the very heavens are massed Upon their shoulders, vague and vast With all the skyey burden of The winds and clouds and stars above. Lo, how they sit before us, seeing The laws that give all Beauty being! Behold! to them, when dawn is near, The nomads of the air appear, Unfolding crimson camps of day In brilliant bands; then march away; And under burning battlements Of twilight plant their tinted tents. The truth of olden myths, that brood By haunted stream and haunted wood, They see; and feel the happiness Of old at which we only guess: The dreams, the ancients loved and knew, Still as their rocks and trees are true: Not otherwise than presences The tempest and the calm to these: One, shouting on them all the night, Black-limbed and veined with lambent light; The other with the ministry Of all soft things that company With music--an embodied form, Giving to solitude the charm Of leaves and waters and the peace Of bird-begotten melodies-- And who at night doth still confer With the mild moon, that telleth her Pale tale of lonely love, until Wan images of passion fill The heights with shapes that glimmer by Clad on with sleep and memory. CONTENT When I behold how some pursue Fame, that is Care's embodiment Or fortune, whose false face looks true,-- An humble home with sweet content Is all I ask for me and you. An humble home, where pigeons coo, Whose path leads under breezy lines Of frosty-berried cedars to A gate, one mass of trumpet-vines, Is all I ask for me and you. A garden, which all summer through, The roses old make redolent, And morning-glories, gay of hue, And tansy, with its homely scent, Is all I ask for me and you. An orchard, that the pippins strew, From whose bruised gold the juices spring; A vineyard, where the grapes hang blue, Wine-big and ripe for vintaging, Is all I ask for me and you. A lane that leads to some far view Of forest or of fallow-land, Bloomed o'er with rose and meadow-rue, Each with a bee in its hot hand, Is all I ask for me and you. At morn, a pathway deep with dew, And birds to vary time and tune; At eve, a sunset avenue, And whippoorwills that haunt the moon, Is all I ask for me and you. Dear heart, with wants so small and few, And faith, that's better far than gold, A lowly friend, a child or two, To care for us when we are old, Is all I ask for me and you. HEART OF MY HEART Here where the season turns the land to gold, Among the fields our feet have known of old,-- When we were children who would laugh and run, Glad little playmates of the wind and sun,-- Before came toil and care and years went ill, And one forgot and one remembered still; Heart of my heart, among the old fields here, Give me your hands and let me draw you near, Heart of my heart. Stars are not truer than your soul is true-- What need I more of heaven then than you? Flowers are not sweeter than your face is sweet-- What need I more to make my world complete? O woman nature, love that still endures, What strength has ours that is not born of yours? Heart of my heart, to you, whatever come, To you the lead, whose love hath led me home. Heart of my heart. OCTOBER Long hosts of sunlight, and the bright wind blows A tourney-trumpet on the listed hill; Past is the splendour of the royal rose And duchess daffodil. Crowned queen of beauty, in the garden's space, Strong daughter of a bitter race and bold, A ragged beggar with a lovely face, Reigns the sad marigold. And I have sought June's butterfly for days, To find it--like a coreopsis bloom-- Amber and seal, rain-murdered 'neath the blaze Of this sunflower's plume. Here drones the bee; and there sky-daring wings Voyage blue gulfs of heaven; the last song The red-bird flings me as adieu, still rings Upon yon pear-tree's prong. No angry sunset brims with rubier red The bowl of heaven than the days, indeed, Pour in each blossom of this salvia-bed, Where each leaf seems to bleed. And where the wood-gnats dance, like some slight mist, Above the efforts of the weedy stream, The girl, October, tired of the tryst, Dreams a diviner dream. One foot just dipping the caressing wave, One knee at languid angle; locks that drown Hands nut-stained; hazel-eyed, she lies, and grave, Watching the leaves drift down. MYTH AND ROMANCE I When I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring, Just at the time of opening apple-buds, When brooks are laughing, winds are whispering, On babbling hillsides or in warbling woods, There is an unseen presence that eludes:-- Perhaps a dryad, in whose tresses cling The loamy odours of old solitudes, Who, from her beechen doorway, calls, and leads My soul to follow; now with dimpling words Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds; While here and there--is it her limbs that swing? Or restless sunlight on the moss and weeds? II Or, haply, 'tis a Naiad now who slips, Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass, While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips The moisture rains cool music on the grass. Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas! Have seen no more than the wet ray that dips The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass; But in the liquid light where she doth hide, I have beheld the azure of her gaze Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays, Among her minnows I have heard her lips, Bubbling, make merry by the waterside. III Or now it is an Oread--whose eyes Are constellated dusk--who stands confessed, As naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise, Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast: She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed Stands for a startled moment ere she flies, Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest, Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn. And is't her footfalls lure me? or the sound Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground? And is't her body glimmers on yon rise? Or dogwood blossoms snowing on the lawn? IV Now 'tis a satyr piping serenades On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades, Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance, Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance The nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades Of sun-embodied perfume.--Myth, Romance, Where'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms, Compelling me to follow. Day and night I hear their voices and behold the light Of their divinity that still evades, And still allures me in a thousand forms. GENIUS LOCI I What wood-god, on this water's mossy curb, Lost in reflections of earth's loveliness, Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb? I who haphazard, wandering at a guess, Came on this spot, wherein with gold and flame Of buds and blooms the season writes its name.-- Ah me! could I have seen him ere alarm Of my approach aroused him from his calm! As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap, Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm As a wood-rose, and filled the air with balm Of his wild breath as with ethereal sap. II Does not the moss retain some slight impress, Green-dented down, of where he lay or trod? Do not the flow'rs, so reticent, confess With conscious looks the contact of a god? Does not the very water garrulously Boast the indulgence of a deity? And, hark! in burly beech and sycamore How all the birds proclaim it! and the leaves Rejoice with clappings of their myriad hands! And shall not I believe, too, and adore, With such wide proof?--Yea, though my soul perceives No evident presence, still it understands. III And for a while it moves me to lie down Here on the spot his god-head sanctified: Mayhap some dream he dreamed may linger, brown And young as joy, around the forest side; Some dream within whose heart lives no disdain For such as I whose love is sweet and sane; That may repeat, so none but I may hear-- As one might tell a pearl-strung rosary-- Some epic that the leaves have learned to croon, Some lyric whispered in the wild-flow'r's ear, Whose murmurous lines are sung by bird and bee, And all the insects of the night and noon. IV For, all around me, upon field and hill, Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes; As if the music of a god's goodwill Had taken on material attributes In blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam, That runs its silvery scales on every stream; In sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly, A golden note, vibrates then flutters on-- Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of Pan, That have assumed a visible entity, And drugged the air with beauty so, a Faun, Behold, I seem, and am no more a man. DISCOVERY What is it now that I shall seek Where woods dip downward, in the hills; A mossy nook, a ferny creek, And May among the daffodils. Or in the valley's vistaed glow, Past rocks of terraced trumpet-vines, Shall I behold her coming slow, Sweet May, among the columbines? With red-bud cheeks and bluet eyes, Big eyes, the homes of happiness, To meet me with the old surprise, Her hoiden hair all bonnetless. Who waits for me, where, note for note, The birds make glad the forest trees? A dogwood blossom at her throat, My May among th' anemones. As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms, And dewdrops drink the moonlight's gleam, My soul shall kiss her lips' perfumes, And drink the magic of her dreams. THE OLD SPRING I Under rocks whereon the rose Like a strip of morning glows; Where the azure-throated newt Drowses on the twisted root; And the brown bees, humming homeward, Stop to suck the honey-dew; Fern and leaf-hid, gleaming gloamward, Drips the wildwood spring I knew, Drips the spring my boyhood knew. II Myrrh and music everywhere Haunt its cascades;--like the hair That a naiad tosses cool, Swimming strangely beautiful, With white fragrance for her bosom, For her mouth a breath of song:-- Under leaf and branch and blossom Flows the woodland spring along, Sparkling, singing flows along. III Still the wet wan mornings touch Its gray rocks, perhaps; and such Slender stars as dusk may have Pierce the rose that roofs its wave; Still the thrush may call at noontide And the whippoorwill at night; Nevermore, by sun or moontide, Shall I see it gliding white, Falling, flowing, wild and white. THE FOREST SPRING Push back the brambles, berry-blue: The hollowed spring is full in view: Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern Its rock-embedded, crystal urn. Not for the loneliness that keeps The coigne wherein its silence sleeps; Not for wild butterflies that sway Their pansy pinions all the day Above its mirror; nor the bee, Nor dragonfly, that passing see Themselves reflected in its spar; Not for the one white liquid star, That twinkles in its firmament; Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent Athwart it when the kindly night Beads all its grasses with the light Small jewels of the dimpled dew; Not for the day's inverted blue Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones That dance within it where it moans: Not for all these I love to sit In silence and to gaze in it. But, know, a nymph with merry eyes Looks at me from its laughing skies; A graceful glimmering nymph who plays All the long fragrant summer days With instant sights of bees and birds, And speaks with them in water words, And for whose nakedness the air Weaves moony mists, and on whose hair, Unfilleted, the night will set That lone star as a coronet. TRANSMUTATION To me all beauty that I see Is melody made visible: An earth-translated state, may be, Of music heard in Heaven or Hell. Out of some love-impassioned strain Of saints, the rose evolved its bloom; And, dreaming of it here again, Perhaps re-lives it as perfume. Out of some chant that demons sing Of hate and pain, the sunset grew; And, haply, still remembering, Re-lives it here as some wild hue. DEAD CITIES Out of it all but this remains:-- I was with one who crossed wide chains Of the Cordilleras, whose peaks Lock in the wilds of Yucatan, Chiapas and Honduras. Weeks-- And then a city that no man Had ever seen; so dim and old, No chronicle has ever told The history of men who piled Its temples and huge teocallis Among mimosa-blooming valleys; Or how its altars were defiled With human blood; whose idols there With eyes of stone still stand and stare. So old the moon can only know How old, since ancient forests grow On mighty wall and pyramid. Huge ceïbas, whose trunks were scarred With ages, and dense yuccas, hid Fanes 'mid the cacti, scarlet-starred. I looked upon its paven ways, And saw it in its kingliest days; When from the lordly palace one, A victim, walked with prince and priest, Who turned brown faces toward the east In worship of the rising sun: At night ten hundred temples' spires On gold burnt everlasting fires. Uxmal? Palenque? or Copan? I know not. Only how no man Had ever seen; and still my soul Believes it vaster than the three. Volcanic rock walled in the whole, Lost in the woods as in some sea. _I only_ read its hieroglyphs, Perused its monster monoliths Of death, gigantic heads; and read The pictured codex of its fate, The perished Toltec; while in hate Mad monkeys cursed me, as if dead Priests of its past had taken form To guard its ruined shrines from harm. FROST Magician he, who, autumn nights, Down from the starry heavens whirls; A harlequin in spangled tights, Whose wand's touch carpets earth with pearls. Through him each pane presents a scene, A Lilliputian landscape, where The world is white instead of green, And trees and houses hang in air. Where Elfins gambol and delight, And haunt the jewelled bells of flowers; Where upside-down we see the night With many moons and starry showers. And surely in his wand or hand Is Midas magic, for, behold, Some morn we wake and find the land, Both field and forest, turned to gold. A NIGHT IN JUNE I White as a lily moulded of Earth's milk That eve the moon bloomed in a hyacinth sky; Soft in the gleaming glens the wind went by, Faint as a phantom clothed in unseen silk: Bright as a naiad's leap, from shine to shade The runnel twinkled through the shaken brier; Above the hills one long cloud, pulsed with fire, Flashed like a great enchantment-welded blade. And when the western sky seemed some weird land, And night a witching spell at whose command One sloping star fell green from heav'n; and deep The warm rose opened for the moth to sleep; Then she, consenting, laid her hands in his, And lifted up her lips for their first kiss. II There where they part, the porch's steps are strewn With wind-blown petals of the purple vine; Athwart the porch the shadow of a pine Cleaves the white moonlight; and like some calm rune Heaven says to Earth, shines the majestic moon; And now a meteor draws a lilac line Across the welkin, as if God would sign The perfect poem of this night of June. The wood-wind stirs the flowering chestnut-tree, Whose curving blossoms strew the glimmering grass Like crescents that wind-wrinkled waters glass; And, like a moonstone in a frill of flame, The dewdrop trembles on the peony, As in a lover's heart his sweetheart's name. THE DREAMER Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers, And mark the loafing sunlight's lazy laugh; Or, on each season, spell the epitaph Of its dead months repeated in their flowers; Or list the music of the strolling showers, Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff, Or read the day's delivered monograph Through all the chapters of its dædal hours. Still with the same child-faith and child regard He looks on Nature, hearing at her heart, The Beautiful beat out the time and place, Through which no lesson of this life is hard, No struggle vain of science or of art, That dies with failure written on its face. WINTER The flute, whence Summer's dreamy finger-tips Drew music,--ripening the pinched kernels in The burly chestnut and the chinquapin, Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,-- Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips, And surly songs whistle around his chin; Now the wild days and wilder nights begin When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips. Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon! Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute, Which unto Winter's masculine airs doth give Thy own creative qualities of tune, Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit, Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative. MID-WINTER All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold; And through the snow the muffled waters fell; The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell, Like some old hermit whose last bead is told. At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled Aside to leave the fierce sky visible; Harsh as an iron landscape of wan hell The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold. And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at My window wailing: now a little child Crying outside my door; and now the long Howl of some starved beast down the flue. I sat And knew 'twas Winter with his madman song Of miseries on which he stared and smiled. SPRING First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips; A pursuivant who heralded a prince: And dawn put on her livery of tints, And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips: And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came, A knight, who bade the winter let him pass; And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame. And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness, Across the hills; and heav'n bent down to bless: Above her head the birds were as a lyre; And at her feet, like some strong worshipper, The shouting water pæan'd praise of her Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire. TRANSFORMATION It is the time when, by the forest falls, The touch-me-nots hang fairy folly-caps; When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps Of rocks with colour, rich as orient shawls: And in my heart I hear a voice that calls Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps, Sings the sweet Greek of Pan's old madrigals: There is a gleam that lures me up the stream-- A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light? Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream-- An Oread's footprints fragrant with her flight? And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again, Part of the myths that I pursue in vain. RESPONSE There is a music of immaculate love, That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,-- And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above, White-hearts and mandrake blooms--that look enough Like the elves' washing--white with laundering Of May-moon dews; and all pale-opening Wild-flowers of the woods are born thereof. There is no sod Spring's white foot brushes but Must feel the music that vibrates within, And thrill to the communicated touch Responsive harmonies, that must unshut The heart of Beauty for Song's concrete kin, Emotions--that are flowers--born of such. THE SWASHBUCKLER Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port; A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts, All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands, He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat. Aggression marches armies in his words; And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-à-pie; His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords; And in his carriage camp all wars to be:-- With him of battles there shall be no lack While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack. SIMULACRA Dark in the west the sunset's sombre wrack Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split, Along whose battlements the battle lit Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back, A mighty city, red with ruin and sack, Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit, Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit With Conflagration glaring at each crack.-- Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes Our dreams as real as our waking seems With recollections time can not destroy, So in the mind of Nature now awakes, Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams The stormy story of the fall of Troy. CAVERNS WRITTEN OF COLOSSAL CAVE, KENTUCKY Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores, Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips; Where everlasting silence broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo slips Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.-- Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,-- Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,-- An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell. THE BLUE BIRD From morn till noon upon the window-pane The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails, And all the afternoon the blustering gales Beat at the door with furious feet of rain. The rose, near which the lily bloom lay slain, Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails, On which the sullen slug left slimy trails-- Meseemed the sun would never shine again. Then in the drench, long, loud and full of cheer,-- A skyey herald tabarded in blue,-- A bluebird bugled ... and at once a bow Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear God's sapphire spaces crystallising through The strata'd clouds in azure tremolo. QUATRAINS POETRY Who hath beheld the goddess face to face, Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go Climbing lone mountains towards her temple's place, Weighed with song's sweet, inexorable woe. THE UNIMAGINATIVE Each form of beauty's but the new disguise Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be; Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes, Never the Earth's wild fairy-dance shall see. MUSIC God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled, With awful symphonies of flood and fire, God's name on rocking Chaos--world by world Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre. THE THREE ELEMENTS They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet Sonorous-sandalled with majestic awe; In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat, Blowing the trumpets of God's wrath and law. ROME Above the circus of the world she sat, Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride: Fierce nations, upon whom she sneered and spat, Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died. ON READING THE LIFE OF HAROUN ER RESHID Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth He steals, with golden justice for the poor: Within his palace--you shall know the truth!-- A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door. MNEMOSYNE In classic beauty, cold, immaculate, A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands, Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate, That sorrow o'er dead roses in her hands. BEAUTY High as a star, yet lowly as a flower, Unknown she takes her unassuming place At Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face. THE STARS These--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame, In which he reads his blessing or his curse-- Are syllables with which God speaks his name In the vast utterance of the universe. ECHO Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks, Daughter of Silence and old Solitude, Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood, Her only life the noises that she mocks. ADVENTURERS Seemingly over the hill-tops, Possibly under the hills, A tireless wing that never drops, And a song that never stills. Epics heard on the stars' lips? Lyrics read in the dew?-- To sing the song at our finger-tips, And live the world anew! Cavaliers of the Cortés kind, Bold and stern and strong,-- And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind To sing a new-world's song! Sailing seas of the silver morn, Winds of the balm and spice, To put the old-world art to scorn At the price of any price! Danger, death, but the hope high! God's, if the purpose fail! Into the deeds of a vaster sky Sailing a dauntless sail. EPILOGUE I O Life! O Death! O God! Have we not striven? Have we not known Thee, God As Thy stars know Heaven? Have we not held Thee true, True as thy deepest, Sweet and immaculate blue Heaven that feels Thy dew! Have we not _known_ Thee true, O God who keepest. II O God, our Father, God!-- Who gav'st us fire, To soar beyond the sod, To rise, aspire-- What though we strive and strive, And all our soul says 'live'? The empty scorn of men Will sneer it down again. And, O sun-centred high, Who, too, art Poet, Beneath Thy tender sky Each day new Keatses die, Calling all life a lie; Can this be so--and why?-- And canst Thou know it? III We know Thee beautiful, We know Thee bitter! Help Thou!--Men's eyes are dull, O God most beautiful! Make thou their souls less full Of things mere glitter. Dost Thou not see our tears? Dost Thou not hear the years Treading our hearts to shards, O Lord of all the Lords?-- Arouse Thee, God of Hosts, There 'mid Thy glorious ghosts, So high and holy! Have mercy on our tears! Have mercy on our years! Our strivings and our fears, O Lord of lordly peers, On us, so lowly! IV On us, so fondly fain To tell what mother-pain Of Nature makes the rain. On us, so glad to show The sorrow of her snow, And all her winds that blow. Us, who interpret right Her mystic rose of light, Her moony rune of night. Us, who have utterance for Each warm, flame-hearted star That stammers from afar. Who hear the tears and sighs Of every bud that dies While heav'n's dew on it lies. Who see the power that dowers The wildwood bosks and bowers With musk of sap and flowers. Who see what no man sees In water, earth, and breeze, And in the hearts of trees. Turn not away Thy light, O God!--Our strength is slight! Help us who breast the height! Have mercy, Infinite! Have mercy! Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press 
37300	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) HENRY JAMES [Illustration: Photo portrait of Henry James] HENRY JAMES By REBECCA WEST KENNIKAT PRESS, INC. / PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y. HENRY JAMES First Published in 1916 Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 67-27663 Manufactured in the United States of America AUTHOR'S NOTE _I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the bibliography to Mr James B. Pinker, Miss Wilma Meikle, and Messrs Constable; and to Messrs Macmillan for the loan of the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James._ R. W. CONTENTS PAGE I. THE SOURCES 9 II. THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION 24 III. TRANSITION 55 IV. THE CRYSTAL BOWL 86 V. THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 INDEX 127 I THE SOURCES At various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there crossed the Atlantic two Protestant Irishmen, a Lowland Scotsman, and an Englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of Mr Henry James' genius. For the essential thing about Mr James was that he was an American; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could never feel at home until he was in exile. He came of a stock that was the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. But at the time of his childhood and youth--he was born in 1843--culture was a thing that was but budding here and there in America, in such corners as were not being used in the business of establishing the material civilisation of the new country. The social life of old New York and Boston had its delicacy, its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer sort of beauty; but plainly the American people were too preoccupied by their businesses and professions to devote their money to the embellishment of _salons_ or their intelligence to the development of manners. Hawthorne and Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their friends were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor American ants were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the necessary environment for grasshoppers. "The impression of Emerson's personal history is condensed into the single word Concord," wrote Mr James later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it rich." There was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in this unfinished country Art was like a delicate lady who moves into a house before the plaster is dried on the walls; she was bound to lead an invalid existence. This incapacity of America to supply the colour of life became obvious to Henry and William James, the two charming little boys in tight trousers and brass-buttoned jackets, one of whom grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction, at a very early age. It did not escape their infant observation that the ladies and gentlemen who fascinated them by dancing on the tight-rope at Barnum's Museum always bore exotic names, and when they grew older and developed the youthful taste for anecdotic art they found it could be gratified only by such European importations as Thorwaldsen's _Christ and His Disciples_, the great white images of which were ranged round the maroon walls of the New York Crystal Palace, or Benjamin's Haydon's pictures in the Düsseldorf collection in Broadway. And when they grew older still and began to show a fine talent for painting and drawing their unfolding artistic sense found more and more intimations of the wonder of Europe. _A View of Tuscany_ that hung in the Jameses' home was pronounced by a friend who had lived much in Italy not to be of Tuscany at all. Colours in Tuscany were softer; but such brightness might be found in other parts of Italy. So Europe was as various as that--a place of innumerable changing glories like a sunrise, but better than a sunrise, inasmuch as every glory was encrusted with the richness of legend. But most powerful of all influences that made the Jameses rebel against the narrowness of Broadway and the provincial spareness of the old New York, which must have been something like a neat virgin Bloomsbury, was their father. The Reverend Henry James was wasted on young America; it had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence which guides human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians." The man who could write that should have been a strong and salutary influence on English culture, and he knew it. It is probable that when he and his wife paid what Mr James tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half"--the last clause of this sentence is unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation--he brought his babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a holy well. Thus it was that the little Jameses not only bore themselves proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies in Piccadilly, and read _Punch_ with a proprietary instinct, but were also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that comes to the ordinary child. From their father's preoccupation they gained a rationalised consciousness that America was an incomplete environment, that in Europe there were many mines of treasure which they must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the salvation of their souls. In 1855, when Henry James was twelve, the family yielded to its passion and crossed the Atlantic. The following four years were of immense importance to Mr James, and consequently to ourselves, for he had been born with a mind that received impressions as if they had been embraces and remembered them with as fierce a leaping of the blood; just as his brother William's mind acquired and created systems of thought as joyously as other men like meeting friends and establishing a family. He found London in the main jolly, rather ugly, but comfortable and full of character, just as he had seen it in _Punch_, but here and there detected--notably on a drive from London Bridge--black outcrops of Hogarth's London. "It was a soft June evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of George Cruikshank's Artful Dodger and his Bill Sykes and his Nancy, only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the Early Victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the face." He knew Paris, then being formed by the free flourish of Baron Haussmann into its present splendours of wide regularity, yet still homely with remnants of the dusty ruralism of its pre-Napoleonic state; he saw all the pretty show of the Second Empire, he stood in the Champs-Elysées and watched the baby Prince Imperial roll by to St. Cloud with his escort of blue and silver _cent-gardes_; and the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, its floors gleaming with polished wood, its walls glowing with masterpieces, and its proportions awesomely interminable and soaring, was the scene of his young imaginative life. Those were the great places; but there were also Geneva and Boulogne and Zurich and Bonn, the differences of which he savoured, and above all the richness of desultory contact with arts and persons of the various countries. He gaped at the exquisiteness of ugly Rose Chéri at the Gymnase, copied Delacroix, read _Evan Harrington_ as it came out in _Once a Week_; was at school with a straight-nosed boy called Henry Houssaye and a snub-nosed boy called Coquelin; was tutored by Robert Thompson, the famous Edinburgh teacher who was afterwards to instruct Robert Louis Stevenson and many other eminent Scots in Jacobite sympathies as well as the more usual subjects, and by M. Lerambert whose verse had been praised by Sainte-Beuve in his _Causeries_. "Impressions," writes Mr James of this period, "were not merely all right but were the dearest things in the world." And one must remember that not only were impressions much to young Henry James, they were all he had. His mental life consisted of nothing else. His natural inaptitude for acquiring systematised knowledge was probably intensified by the study of foreign languages entailed by this travel; for if a child spends its time learning several systems of naming things it plainly has less energy to spare for learning systems of arranging things. At any rate his inability to grasp the elements of arithmetic and mathematics led to his removal from the Polytechnic School at Zurich, and was the cause of despair in all his tutors. But most minds, however incapable they may be of following the exact sciences or speculative thought, have some sort of idea of the system of the universe inserted into them by early instruction in one or other of the religious faiths. This unifying influence was refused to Henry James by the circumstance that his father had found certain religious doubts that had almost driven him from the ministry solved in the works of Swedenborg, which he found not at all incredible but--as he once said in a phrase that showed him his son's own father--fairly "insipid with veracity." On this foundation of Swedenborgianism he had built up for himself a religion which was "nothing if not a philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness, nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny." This was no playground for the young intelligence, so young Henry James was told to prepare himself by drinking from such springs as seemed to him refreshing. When he was asked to what church he went he was bidden by his father to reply that "we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom, and that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that of the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find ourselves excluded." He certainly liked to exercise this privilege, but he admits that "my grounds may have been but the love of the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot of the mind." Which was to be expected; as also was the fact that he never broke his childish habit of regarding his father's religion as a closed temple standing in the centre of his family life, the general holiness of which he took for granted so thoroughly that it never occurred to him to investigate its particulars. This European visit came to an end in 1859, and William and Henry James spent the next year or so at Newport studying art under the direction of their friend John La Farge, with the result that William painted extremely well in the style of Manet, and Henry showed as little ability in this direction as he had shown in any other. In 1861 the Civil War broke out; and had it not been for an accident the whole character of Mr James' genius would have been altered. If he had seen America by the light of bursting shells and flaming forest he might never have taken his eyes off her again, he might have watched her fascinated through all the changes of tone and organisation which began at the close of the war, he might have been the Great American Novelist in subject as well as origin. But it happened, in that soft spring when he and every other young man of the North realised that there was a crisis at hand in which their honour was concerned and they must answer Lincoln's appeal for recruits, that he was one day called to help in putting out a fire. In working the fire-engine he sustained an injury so serious that he could never hope to share the Northern glory, that there were before him years of continuous pain and weakness, that ultimately he formed a curious and on the whole mischievous conception of himself. For his humiliating position as a delicate and unpromising student at Harvard Law School while his younger brothers, Wilky and Robertson, were officers in the Northern Army and William was pursuing a brilliant academic career or naturalising with Agassiz in South America, seemed a confirmation of his tutors' opinion that he was an inarticulate mediocrity who would never be able to take a hand in the business of life. And so he worked out a scheme of existence, which he accepted finally in an hour of glowing resignation when he was returning by steamer to Newport from a visit to a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, in which the one who stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, a spiritual supremacy, which--but this was perhaps a later development of the theory--would be rubbed off by participation in action. It was, therefore, with defiant industry, with the intention of proving that such as he was he had his peculiar worth, that he set to work to become a writer. His first story was published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ when he was twenty-one, and it was followed by a number of stories, travel sketches, and critical essays, some of which have been reprinted, and a few farces which have not. He also went through a necessary preface of the literary life by reading the proofs of George Eliot's novels before they appeared in the _Atlantic_ and reviewing; the profession of literature differs from that of the stage in that the stars begin instead of ending as dressers. In 1869 he went to Europe and, gaining certain impressions that had been inaccessible to him as a child, finally fixed the dye in which his talent was to be immersed for the rest of his life. He stepped for the first time into "a private park of great oaks ... where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were somehow before aught else the still reach of the remembered lines of Tennyson...." He was admitted to the homes of Ruskin, Rossetti, Morris, Darwin, and George Eliot, and allowed to see the wheels go round. But the real significance of this journey to Mr James' genius is the part it played in the last days of his beautiful cousin, Mary Temple. She should have had before her a long career of nobility, for "she was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder." She pretended not to know that she had been cheated out of this, but as she lay on the death-bed that she would not admit to be even a sick-bed, her eyes were fixed intensely on the progress of her cousin through all the experiences that should have been hers. There came a day when all illusion failed, and she died dreadfully, clinging to consciousness. Her death was felt by Henry and William James as the end of their youth. * * * * * That, as Mr James would have said, is the _donnée_. The must was trodden out, it had only to ferment, to be bottled, to be mellowed by time into the perfect wine. There is nothing in all the innumerable volumes that Mr James was to pour out in the next forty-five years of which the intimation is not present in these first adventures. II THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION It is no use turning up those first stories that appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Galaxy_ unless one has formed an affection for the literary personality of Mr James. The image they provoke of the literary prentice bending over his task with the tip of his tongue reflectively protruding like a small boy drawing on his slate, is amusing enough; but they themselves are such pale dreams as might visit a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a grey drizzling day. Where there is any richness of effect, as in _The Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, it comes from the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne. That story, which tells how a girl loved her sister's husband, waited eagerly for her death that she might marry him, and later wheedled from him the key of the chest in which the dead wife had left her finery to await her baby daughter's maturity, is seven-eighths prelude, and the catastrophe, which is the finding of the girl kneeling dead beside the chest with the mark of phantom fingers on her throat, comes with too short and small a report. But in spite of its pitiful construction it is the only one of the dozen stories which Mr James published before his visit to Europe in 1869 that shows any of the imaginative exuberance which one accepts as an earnest of coming genius. Hawthorne was not altogether a happy influence--it is due to him that Mr James' characters have "almost wailed" their way from _The Passionate Pilgrim_ to _The Golden Bowl_--but he certainly shepherded Mr James into the European environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his emotions until he had discovered his own power to build up an imaginative structure. The plot of _The Passionate Pilgrim_, with its American who comes to England to claim a cousin's estate, falls in love with the usurper's sister, is driven from the door, and dies just after the usurper's death has delivered to him all he wants, is very clumsy Hawthorne, but in those days Mr James could not draw normal events and he had to have some medium for expressing his wealth of feeling about England. It is amazing to see how rich that wealth already was, how much deeper than mere pleasure in travel was his delight in the parks and private grandeurs of England; and how, too, a fundamental fallacy was already perverting it to an almost Calvinist distrust of the activities of the present. "I entered upon life a perfect gentleman," says the American as he sits in Hampton Court. "I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them nowhere--found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... Sitting here, in this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here, not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things they'd have been true of.... This is a world I could have got on with beautifully." There you have the first statement of the persistent illusion, to which he was helped by his odd lack of the historic sense and which confused his estimate of modern life, that the past would have been a happier home for those who like himself loved fastidious living. He had a tremendous sense of the thing that is and none at all of the thing that has been, and thus he was always being misled by such lovely shells of the past as Hampton Court into the belief that the past which inhabited them was as lovely. The calm of Canterbury Close appeared to him as a remnant of a time when all England, bowed before the Church, was as calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when the Church ceased to have anything to do with England. He never perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only at this moment but at all moments; that the wine of experience always makes a raw draught when it has just been trodden out from bruised grapes by the pitiless feet of men, that it must be subject to time before it acquires suavity. The lack of this perception matters little in his early work but it is vastly important in shaping his later phases. There are no such personal revelations in _The Madonna of the Future_, nor anything, indeed, at all characteristic of Mr James. There is beauty in the tale of the American painter who dreams over a model for twenty years, while he and she grow old, and leaves at his death nothing more to show for his dreams than a cracked blank canvas; and the Florentine background is worked on diligently and affectionately. But it is admirable in quite an uncharacteristic way, like a figure picture painted with the utmost brilliance of technique and from perfect models by a painter whose real passion was for landscape. Yet it was only a year later, in _Madame de Mauves_, that Mr James found himself, both his manner and the core of the matter which was to occupy him for the happiest part of his literary life. Euphemia de Mauves, the prim young American who moves languidly through the turfy avenues of the French forest, her faith in decency of living perpetually outraged by her husband's infidelities and his odd demand that she should make him a cuckold so that at least he should not have the discomfort of looking up at her, is the first of the many exquisite women whom Mr James brought into being by his capacity to imagine characters solidly and completely, his perception of the subtle tones of life, and his extreme verbal delicacy. And she is given a still greater importance by the queer twist at the end of the story by which M. de Mauves blows his brains out for no reason at all but that he is hopelessly, helplessly, romantically in love with this cold wife who will be so unreasonable about trifles. Mr James writes her story not only as though he stood upon the Atlantic shores looking eastward at the plight of a compatriot domiciled with lewd men and light women, but also as though he sat in the company of certain gracious men and women of the world who could not get under way with their accomplishment of charm because the grim alien in the corner will keep prodding them with a disapproval as out of place in this salon as a deal plank. Madame de Mauves, in fine, is the first figure invented by Mr James to throw light upon what he called "the international situation." It took all Mr James' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an international situation, that the fact that Americans visited Europe constituted a drama. An Englishman who visited Italy did no more than take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a Landor or a Browning, an inspiration. It might reasonably be supposed that the visit to Europe of an American was no greater matter. But Mr James knew that the wealthy American was in the position of a man who has built a comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until he has crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep and eat on the floor. "One might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy...." There follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... that if these things are left out everything is left out." And, Mr James goes on to complain, "it takes so many things--such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist." He wrote novelist because at the moment he was criticising Hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on the other. Since the pilgrimage for these items of high civilisation appeared to Europeans--as innumerable contemporary allusions show it did--as mere globe-trottings, the pilgrims themselves were likely to be as misunderstood. For one thing, although they were unorganised so far as culture went, they formed at home a very cohesive moral community. The American women who came to Europe took for granted that however people might be habited--people, that is, whose manners showed them "nice"--and in whatever frivolous array they might be flounced and ribboned, they were certain to wear next their skin the hair-shirt of Puritan rectitude. The innocent freedoms which they permitted themselves because they held this supposition, and the terrifying surmises to which these gave rise in the mind of the Old World, unaware of the innocence of the New, made much material for drama. And more dramatic still was the moment, which came to so many of the travellers who formed close personal relationships with Europeans, when they realised that the moral standards to which they had nationally pledged themselves, and which they individually obeyed with extraordinary fidelity, were here regarded as simply dowdy. "Compromise!" was the cry of Latin and even English society. "Compromise on every and any of the Commandments you like! Do anything you can, in fact, to rub down those rude angles you present to human intercourse!" And yet it was not to be deduced that Europe was lax. One had only to look behind the superficial show to see that it had its own religion, perhaps a more terrible religion than any New England ever knew, and that what seemed its laziest pleasures were sometimes its most dreadful rites. This last conception of Europe is the subject of _Roderick Hudson_ (1875). _Roderick Hudson_ is not a good book. It throws a light upon the lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within a few years of each other two men of great genius--Thomas Hardy and Henry James--wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary experiment. _Roderick Hudson_ is wooden, it is crammed with local colour like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancée, that European life will be too soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described Switzerland, hurled by a _dénouement_ which has inspired Mr James to one of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!" This conception of Europe as a complex organism which would have no use, or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of America, animates _Four Meetings_ (1877), that exquisite short story which came first of all of the many masterpieces that Mr James was to produce. It is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a passion for Europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the Castle of Chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at Havre by a cousin, one of those Americans on whom Continental life has acted as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her money by his story of a runaway marriage with a Countess; returns to New England hoping to "see something of this dear old Europe yet," and has that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the said Countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old Europe" that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the story to "some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian _quatrième_--to an open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to Madame, leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee." It is one of the saddest stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. There is not one of its simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on _French Poets and Novelists_ (1878), which for some years he had been sending to America with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an attentive pupil. "Detachment" was the lesson that that period preached in its reaction against the George Sand method, whereby the author rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. We have forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an excuse for the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopædic detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but here we can recover it. The author's pity for the schoolmistress is never allowed to make his Countess sinister instead of gross, and his sense of the comic in the Countess is never allowed to make the schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has as many aspects as it would have in life. _The American_ (1877) still holds this view of Europe. Its theme, to quote Mr James in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." Christopher Newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of Mr James, as he said of Balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are better than the use he makes of them." He walks through Europe examining its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo traversing the Galerie d'Apollon might produce upon the copyists of the Louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least welcome in the world, the home of the de Bellegardes, a proud and ancient Royalist family. Thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the way things do not happen. Claire de Cintré, the widowed daughter whom Newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. And since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old family tone, one wonders where she got this beauty of character. The child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. But the series of inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting motor-bus that puts one down at Hampton Court, to an exquisite situation. Newman discovers the secret of the Marquis' murder and intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de Bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply because there can be no link--not even the link of revenge--between such as they and such as he. In all literature there is no passage so full of the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how Newman stands before the Carmelite house in the Rue d'Enfer and looks up at the blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then walks back to Notre Dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word," decides that such things as revenge "were really not his game." So it is with Mr James to the end. The foreground is as often as not red with the blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional conflagration, is always right. _The Europeans_ (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her lips is not treated as _un petit péché d'une petite femme_, but remains simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother. "Mrs Acton had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.... She passed slowly downstairs, still looking about. The broad staircase made a great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in curious old pots of blue China-ware. The yellow afternoon light came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The lower hall stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great many things. '_Comme c'est bien!_' she said to herself; such a large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs Acton was soon to withdraw from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. The hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of everything back into the house. There were high-backed chairs along the wall and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, dimly gleaming. The doors were open--into the darkened parlour, the library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty. Eugenia passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. '_Comme c'est bien!_' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a house as this when she decided to come to America. She opened the front door for herself--her light tread had summoned none of the servants--and on the threshold she gave a last look...." That is the pure note of the early James, like a pipe played carefully by a boy. It sounds as beautifully in _Daisy Miller_, that short novel which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh as sad and lovely. Daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon us from the covers of American magazines, glaringly beautiful and healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of conduct, comes to Europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. She wants to go to the Castle of Chillon, so she accepts the escort for the afternoon of a young American who is staying at the same hotel; she likes to walk in the Pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon with a certain liquid-eyed Roman. The woman who does a thing for the sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the American colony, which professes the mellow conventions of Europe with all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even lightness. They talk so bitterly that when the young American, who is half in love with Daisy, finds her viewing the Colosseum by moonlight with the Roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable woman. Why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not free for visits to the Colosseum. Poor Daisy takes in part of his meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "I don't care whether I get Roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. And the young American, "staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, learns from the Roman's lips that Daisy was "most innocent." It is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. It was interesting to note how often in the obituary notices of Mr James it was said that he had never attained popularity, for it shows how soon London forgets its gifts of fame. From 1875 to 1885 (to put it roughly) all England and America were as captivated by the clear beauty of Mr James' work as in the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of Mr Kipling's art. On London staircases everyone turned to look at the American with the long, silky, black beard which, I am told by one who met him then, gave him the appearance of "an Elizabethan sea captain." But for all the exquisiteness of _Daisy Miller_ there were discernible in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the very act of passing. The young American might have been so worked upon by his friends that he could readily believe his Daisy a light woman, but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after Daisy's return there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded menials." When one remembers the grave courtesy with which Christopher Newman treated Mlle Noémie Nioche, the little French drab who called herself _un esprit libre_, it is plain that we are no longer dealing with the same Mr James. The Mr James we are to deal with henceforth had ceased to be an American and had lost his native reactions to emotional stimuli. He was becoming a European and for several years to come was to spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was learning a new emotional language. The first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and only the cocoon of a European, present the paradoxical appearance of being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of persons and situations. _The Pension Beaurepas_ (1879), that melancholy tale of the ailing old American whose wife and daughter have dragged him off on an expensive trip to Europe, while ruin falls on his untended business in New York, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. _The Siege of London_ (1883), which is the story of a Texan adventuress of many divorces who marries into an English county family, fails to produce the designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. In _Pandora_ (1884), which describes a German diplomat's amazement that an unmarried girl can be a social success in America, we feel as bored as we would if we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding that a Pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. In _Lady Barbarina_ (1884), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries an American millionaire refuses to live in America, the American picture is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect Mr James of taking English architecture as an index of English character; he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the solidities of Grosvenor Square are the best colonising and seafaring stock in the world. In _The Reverberator_ (1888), wherein an American girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs of her French fiancé's family and is cast out by them when he publishes her prattlings in the States, we seem to see the international situation slowly fading from Mr James' immediate consciousness. In turning over its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with Americans; we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent barbarism of his compatriots. In those days he had lost America and had not yet found Europe, but he was to find it very soon. In _A London Life_ (1889), the tale of an innocent American girl who comes over to live with her sister and her aristocratic English husband, and stands appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has rendered beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. It is a sense of disgust such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. The house is being badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. That is an aspect of England; but the American onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her Americanness are dragged in with an effort. It is plain that he had lost all his love for the international situation. That Mr James continued to write about Americans in Europe long after their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. He believed that if one _knew_ a subject one could write about it; and since there was no aspect of the international situation with which he was not familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should not easily make art. The profound truth that an artist should feel passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for passionless detachment was at that date the mode in French literature, which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. The de Goncourts, Zola, and even de Maupassant thought that an artist ought to be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into popularity by his posters. But human experience, which includes a realisation of the deadness of most of the de Goncourts' and Zola's productions, proves the contrary. Unless a subject is congenial to the character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in the form of the right word, the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. Why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of M. Anatole France and Mr Wells have proved that they need not be so, if it be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive finger-tips of affection? The absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation; but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with that figure of questionable use--for the dove-like manners of the young men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an umpire--the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction than the end of _A London Life_, where the heroine, appalled at having been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with their haloes protected by mackintosh covers. III TRANSITION _Washington Square_ (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to disappear from Mr James' work. The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about inarticulate people--like _Une Vie_ and _Un Coeur Simple_--it is written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it with increasing power since _Roderick Hudson_, be stated in his own words. "I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. "'To arrive at these things is to arrive at my "story,"' he said, 'and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused of not having "story" enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them _placed_, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them--of which I dare say, alas, _que cela manque souvent d'architecture_....'" And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes _Washington Square_ the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius. It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days, when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with his mind. It was his intention to find that intellectual basis without which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use his genius with noble or permanent results. How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, can be judged from _A Little Tour in France_ (1884). That is one of the happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. _Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; but Mr James did, and it is as pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil, fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from the crevice of a Provençal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French Revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things because, as one guessed in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, his strong sight of the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman Theatre at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an idea of the _elegance_ of the interior"; but the arena at Nîmes and that vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all _exquisite_." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Château de Chenonceaux sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how the crenellated ramparts of the Château d'Amboise look down over hanging gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description. The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have produced _Madame Bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great criticism. It is true that _French Poets and Novelists_ are the best reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author gossiping in _Notes on Novelists_ (1914) about the authors he had known long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an intelligent essay on Théophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the _Antigone_ at Münich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that Flaubert's _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that book which will appeal in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has borne beautiful fruit in _Thaïs_, is merely "strange" and has no more reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there is a paper in _Essays in London_ (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes to the obvious as _Partial Portraits_ (1888) which, with the exception of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and that Daudet was a Provençal. How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he published during this period. _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881) is given a superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish Isabel's moral stuffing, _The Portrait of a Lady_ is entirely n successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world. While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in which the right answer is got by wrong working, _The Bostonians_ (1886) reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to "come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of some dead men's transitory irritations. Politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _The Princess Casamassima_ (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naïvetê, that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my life.'" There is always something doing in _The Princess Casamassima_, and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in _Great Expectations_. Dickens could never have suffused his story with so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at which the murderess screams, "_Ah! quelle infamie!_ I never stole anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime passionel_, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!" And from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. It is as though in a mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow redness of Hampton Court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of St Paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the prim front of Kensington Palace. There is M. Poupin, the exiled Communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously unmarried state, save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "I'm suffering extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore throat. There is poor Lady Aurora Langrish, the aristocratic precursor of the sad Miss Huxtables in _The Madras House_: "My father isn't rich, and there's only one of us, Eva, married, and we're not at all handsome.... They go into the country all the autumn, all the winter, when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in mackintoshes...." There is dry old Mr Vetch who plays the fiddle in the orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for Hyacinth; and there is Captain Sholto, the Piccadilly swell; and Miss Hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually affixed by the stretched string of circumstance or the glue of coincidence. And quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the account of how the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light of _Roderick Hudson_, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity, calls young Hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. It is so like that Titian in the Prado which shows, against a window looking on a park where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, Venus lying on a satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin beneath his black beard. That likeness suggests that _The Princess Casamassima_ should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine picture gallery that Mr James thought fit to add to his mental palace, already so rich in mere sane living rooms. It is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was in much that case. But already in _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1884) he had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of _Beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low a diet that _Jude the Obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. But they interest us by showing that even Mr James, who ordinarily turned aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his consciousness to the æsthetic movement which had been remotely engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde. We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two _Times_ leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach; and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, wisely set, make by their shining mental light. That the cry could not save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts. "That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows--the moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass, without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but I see now that in its international character there was an intimation that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_. What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor thing just beautifully soar?" One perceives how far this mood had gone with Mr James when the hero of _The Tragic Muse_ (1890) refuses a seat in Parliament and the hand of a wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. From Mr James, to whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. And there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation of Miriam Rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed, untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and manners. It had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its pink-paper frill. That time had gone. He had abandoned all his prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. For the next twelve years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely all right, but were the dearest things in the world." IV THE CRYSTAL BOWL In that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When he was painting _Las Hilanderas_ he knew nothing save that the weavers' flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught. And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The first tentative try at the mere impression, _The Aspern Papers_ (1888), gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the rest. Above its mere amusing story the tale breathes an elegy on the many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently inters the body. For one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such grimaces should touch the face that Jeffery Aspern kissed, the grin of senile irony with which she meets the young American who comes to wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep; with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the American that she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if you weren't a stranger...." Every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how Benvenuto Cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his exhaustion. But it was given to Mr James, perhaps because he was an American and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any other writer. It was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the Japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to shore. He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'Académie parcequ'il s'absinthe trop_; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of stories which began with _The Lesson of the Master_ (1888) and included _The Middle Years_ (1893), _The Next Time_ (1895), and _The Death of the Lion_ (1894). Save for that roaring joke, _The Coxon Fund_ (1894), where one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely children; the author of _The Middle Years_ dies with none but an acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later works--for right on to _The Golden Bowl_ (1905) he presents his characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. This sad belief, accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image; for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal. Mr James' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in _The Other House_ (1896) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen on his genius in _The Golden Bowl_, also showed him a son of New England. For it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that New England, with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. Mr James demonstrated it in no spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients and their movements. Perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely to react most valuably to it. Certainly he invented a technical trick which in its way was as important as the discovery which Ibsen was making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences. He showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple. Rose Armiger, in _The Other House_, is made much more horrible because she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of Tony Bream, just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous if it flickered its black fang from an English rose-bush. The awfulness of Ida Farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of visibility," of Beale Farange, whose vast scented beard was, since odd ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income, would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not formed a part of _What Maisie Knew_ (1897); and the ensnarement of Sir Claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a Dieppe fishwife, by the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent, would have been a matter too _louche_ for representation if Maisie had not so beautifully cared for him. The battle over _The Spoils of Poynton_ (1897), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine "things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not exquisite Fleda Vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother, loving the son. The best ghost story in the world, _The Turn of the Screw_ (1898), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the tale. And _In the Cage_ (1898) has no subject but the purity of the romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the grocer's. Her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when the handsome Guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love strikes down like a shaft of light. One pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on one's fingers, as though they were so many books by Mrs Humphry Ward or buns by Lyons. And yet what can one do? Criticism must break down when it comes to masterpieces. For if one is creative one wants to go away and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is not creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. Deep wonder, since these are not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. For although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. There is in humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not poisonously silly. Newman and the Tractarians and Monsignor Benson make the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. Sabatier makes him seem the kind of person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes _The Roadmender_. But there is a story by Henry James called _The Altar of the Dead_, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul. And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of man's mind, which is tragedy, in _The Wings of the Dove_ (1902). That story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _The Tragic Muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark portal in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to Densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art. V THE GOLDEN BOWL The signs of age appeared in Mr James' work like white streaks in a black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted decay. It became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. How much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all visions of Paradise, _The Great Good Place_ (1900). We all have our hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear text-books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies spinning below. But it is the essence of Mr James' Paradise that there is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out smells. This fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness, showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks, and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and interminable galleries than well-bred women. It was not a gain to his art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which compose the collection of short stories called _The Better Sort_ (1903), and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial _The Awkward Age_ (1899), in which the reader is perpetually confused because Nanda Brookenham, one of the most charming of Mr James' "pure in heart," is wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. And it was peculiarly unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. With sentences vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of a hen-house. The type of these unhappier efforts of Mr James' genius is _The Sacred Fount_ (1901), where, with a respect for the mere gross largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one write the author Mr Jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on _The Critique of Pure Reason_ in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. The finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased, because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like a rat nibbling at the wainscot. One takes it as significant that the unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give signals." The tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which Mr James had now forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope. But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing more trivial than the _donnée_ of _The Ambassadors_ (1903); there is no dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters, to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France, lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of _application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old "international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _The Golden Bowl_ with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James' attention. For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _The Golden Bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood: "Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo; which--as you probably don't know, however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless breasts." And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple form of diet. Decidedly _The Golden Bowl_ is not good as a novel; but what it is supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later days, Mr James used to compose his novels. He began by dictating a short draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as _The Golden Bowl_, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. For the James family had, as was shown by their father's many reported phrases, by William James' charm as a lecturer, and by the social greatness of Robertson James, a genius for conversation. For long years it had remained latent in Henry James, who had in youth suffered much from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of maturity and fame. At last it became a passion with him, and he decided to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. This was bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the essentials of which are to some extent already in the possession of the interlocutors. But once one considers them as a flow of bright things said about people Mr James knows and that one rather thinks one has met, but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr James' art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-à-brac and tossed into it, with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject--a jewel, a rose, a bit of string, a visiting-card--confident that the surrounding golden glow would lend it beauty. Indiscriminately he dropped into it his precious visions of his revisited motherland, in _The American Scene_ (1907); the dry little anecdotes of _The Finer Grain_ (1910); the tittering triviality of _The Outcry_ (1911); and his judgment of his own works in the prefaces to the New York edition of the _Novels and Tales of Henry James_ (1908-1909). Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness. And here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours chimed, which were the glory of mediæval palaces. * * * * * William James died in 1910, and Henry James, who had already begun to savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, _A Small Boy_ (1913), and _Notes of a Son and Brother_ (1914), and a third autobiographical volume which is not yet published. Then came the European War, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. By innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to French and Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since he was a student at Bonn, he had always loathed. In July, 1915, he took the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing his American citizenship and becoming a naturalised British subject; and in January, 1916, he did England the further honour of accepting the Order of Merit. And on 28th February, 1916, he died, leaving the white light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of man. A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR HENRY JAMES' PRINCIPAL WORKS [A complete bibliography of the works of Mr James would form a much thicker volume than this book. A useful bibliography up to 1906, compiled by Mr. Frederick Allen King, is included as an appendix in Miss Elisabeth Luther Cary's _The Novels of Henry James_ (Putnam); and a complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has been compiled by Mr Leroy Phillips and published by Messrs Constable. The following bibliography records only the first editions of publications in book form.] The American (_Ward, Lock_). 1877. French Poets and Novelists (_Macmillan_). 1878. The Europeans (_Macmillan_). 1878. Roderick Hudson (_Macmillan_). 1879. Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (_Macmillan_). 1879. The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves. Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (_Macmillan_). 1879. Hawthorne (_Macmillan_). Included in English Men of Letters Series, edited by John Morley. 1879. Confidence (_Chatto & Windus_). 1880. Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters (_Macmillan_). 1881. The Portrait of a Lady (_Macmillan_). 1881. Portraits of Places (_Macmillan_). 1883. Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A New England Winter (_Macmillan_). 1884. Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (_Macmillan_). 1885. The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (_Macmillan_). 1888. Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888. A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (_Macmillan_). 1889. The Tragic Muse (_Macmillan_). 1890. The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (_Macmillan_). 1892. The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon. Greville Fane (_Macmillan_). 1893. The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupré. The Visits. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. Essays in London (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1894. Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1895. Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years. The Altar of the Dead (_Heinemann_). 1895. Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The Way it Came (_Heinemann_) 1896. The Other House (_Heinemann_). 1896. The Spoils of Poynton (_Heinemann_). 1897. What Maisie Knew (_Heinemann_). 1897. In the Cage (_Duckworth_). 1898. The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (_Macmillan_). 1898. The Awkward Age (_Heinemann_). 1899. The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn. Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (_Methuen_). 1900. The Sacred Fount (_Methuen_). 1901. The Wings of the Dove (_Constable_). 1902. The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (_Methuen_). 1903. The Ambassadors (_Methuen_). 1903. William Wetmore Story and his Friends (_Blackwood_). 1903. The Golden Bowl (_Methuen_). 1905. English Hours (_Heinemann_). 1905. The American Scene (_Chapman & Hall_). 1907. Italian Hours (_Heinemann_). 1909. The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits. Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (_Methuen_). 1910. The Outcry (_Methuen_). 1911. A Small Boy (_Macmillan_). 1913. Notes of a Son and Brother (_Macmillan_). 1914. Notes on Novelists (_Dent_). 1914. A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady, Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans, Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio, The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and The Point of View, which had not before been published in England. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The following is the order:-- 1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6. The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10. The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves; A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14. Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion; The Next Time; The Figure in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe; Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead; The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl. Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to their ruin. AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY [When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title only.] A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes. Madame de Mauves (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from _The Nation_, _The Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Galaxy_ (_James R. Osgood_; present publishers, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. Roderick Hudson (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1876. The American (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1877. Watch and Ward (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1878. The Europeans (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1878. Daisy Miller (_Harper_). 1878. An International Episode (_Harper_). 1878. Hawthorne (_Harper_). 1880. The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (_Harper_). 1880. Confidence (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton Mifflin_). 1880. Washington Square. Illustrated by George du Maurier (_Harper_). 1881. The Portrait of a Lady (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1881. Daisy Miller: A Comedy. Privately printed. 1882. The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883. Portraits of Places (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883. Tales of Three Cities (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884. A Little Tour in France (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. Georgina's Reasons. The Path of Duty. Four Meetings (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1885. The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. The Aspern Papers (_Macmillan_). 1888. Partial Portraits (_Macmillan_). 1888. A London Life (_Macmillan_). 1889. The Tragic Muse (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1890. The Lesson of the Master (_Macmillan_). 1892. The Real Thing (_Macmillan_). 1893. The Private Life. Lord Beaupré. The Visits (_Harper_). 1893. The Wheel of Time. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Harper_). 1893. Picture and Text. Essays on Art (_Harper_). 1893. Essays in London (_Harper_). 1893. Theatricals (_Harper_). 1894. Theatricals: Second Series (_Harper_). 1895. Terminations (_Harper_). 1895. Embarrassments (_Macmillan_). 1896. The Other House (_Macmillan_). 1896. The Spoils of Poynton (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1897. What Maisie Knew (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1897. In the Cage (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1898. The Two Magics (_Macmillan_). 1898. The Awkward Age (_Harper_). 1899. The Soft Side (_Macmillan_). 1900. The Sacred Fount (_Scribner's_). 1901. The Wings of the Dove (_Scribner's_). 1902. The Better Sort (_Scribner's_). 1903. The Ambassadors (_Harper_). 1903. William Wetmore Story (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1903. The Golden Bowl (_Scribner's_). 1904. English Hours (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905. The Question of our Speech. The Lesson of Balzac (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905. The American Scene (_Harper_). 1907. Italian Hours (Houghton. Mifflin). 1909. The Finer Grain (_Scribner's_). 1910. The Outcry (_Scribner's_). 1911. A Small Boy (_Scribner's_). 1913. Notes of a Son and Brother (_Scribner's_). 1914. Notes on Novelists (_Scribner's_). 1914. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was published in America by Messrs Scribner's Sons. INDEX _Altar of the Dead, The_, 100 _Ambassadors, The_, 108-110 _American Scene, The_, 115 _American, The_, 38-40 _Aspern Papers, The_, 88-89 _Atlantic Monthly, The_, 21, 24 _Author of Beltraffio, The_, 78-80 _Awkward Age, The_, 106-107 _Better Sort, The_, 106 _Bostonians, The_, 71-72 Civil War, 19, 21 _Coxon Fund, The_, 92 Criticism, 63-71 _Daisy Miller_, 44-48 _Death of the Lion, The_, 92-93 Decadent Movement, 79-84, 90 Eliot, George, 22, 82 Emerson, 10, 72 _Essays in London_, 66 European War, 117 _Europeans, The_, 41-44 _Finer Grain, The_, 115 Flaubert, 58, 63, 65-66 French literature, 38, 52, 58, 91 _French Poets and Novelists_, 37, 64 _Galaxy, The_, 24 _Golden Bowl, The_, 25, 93, 95, 110-113 _Great Good Place, The_, 105 Hawthorne, 10, 24, 31 Historic sense, 60-63 International situation, 30-33, 109 _In the Cage_, 98 James, Rev. Henry, 12-13, 17-19, 114 _Lady Barbarina_, 49 _Lesson of the Master, The_, 92 _Little Tour in France, A_, 60-61 _London Life, A_, 50, 54 _Madame de Mauves_, 28-30 _Madonna of the Future, The_, 28 _Middle Years, The_, 92 Naturalisation, 117 _Next Time, The_, 92 New York Edition of, _Novels and Tales, The_, 115 _Notes of a Son and Brother_, 116 _Notes on Novelists_, 64 _Other House, The_, 96 _Outcry, The_, 115 _Pandora_, 49 _Partial Portraits_, 67 _Passionate Pilgrim, The_, 25-27, 61 _Pension Beaurepas, The_, 48 Playwriting, 108 _Portrait of a Lady, The_, 67-70 _Princess Casamassima, The_, 73-78 _Religion_, 17-19, 93, 99-101, 105-106 _Reverberator, The_, 50 _Roderick Hudson_, 33-36 _Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, 24 _Sacred Fount, The_, 107 _Siege of London, The_, 48 _Small Boy, A_, 116 _Spoils of Poynton, The_, 97 Temple, Mary, 23, 102 _Tragic Muse, The_, 84, 101 Turgeniev, 56-59, 91 _Turn of the Screw, The_, 97 Velasquez, 86 Ward, Mrs Humphry, 66 _Washington Square_, 55-59 _What Maisie Knew_, 97 _Wings of the Dove_, 101, 104 
377	----	KANSAS WOMEN IN LITERATURE By Nettie Garmer Barker TO MY NEAREST AND DEAREST-- MY SILENT PARTNERS-- MY HUSBAND AND MY MOTHER. KANSAS WOMEN IN LITERATURE. "We are proud of Kansas, the beautiful queen, And proud are we of her fields of corn; But a nobler pride than these I ween, Is our pride in her children, Kansas born!" --Ellen P. Allerton-- --Or adopted. In this galaxy of bright women, the State has a noble pride for every name, be its owner Kansas born or adopted, is a mightier force for good than its "walls of corn." EFFIE GRAHAM. The last place one would expect to find romance is in arithmetic and yet--Miss Effie Graham, the head of the Department of Mathematics in the Topeka High School, has found it there and better still, in her lecture "Living Arithmetic" she has shown others the way to find it there. Miss Graham is one of the most talented women of the state. Ex-Gov. Hoch has called her "one of the most gifted women in the state noted for its brilliant women. Her heart and life are as pure as her mind is bright." She was born and reared in Ohio, the daughter of a family of Ohio pioneers, a descendant of a Revolutionary soldier and also, of a warrior of 1812. As a student of the Ohio Northern University and later as a post-graduate worker at the University of California, Chicago University, and Harvard Summer School, she has as she says, "graduated sometimes and has a degree but never 'finished' her education." Desiring to get the school out into the world as well as the world back to the school, she has spoken and written on "Moving Into The King Row," "Other Peoples' Children," "Spirit of the Younger Generation," "Vine Versus Oak," and "The Larger Service." "Pictures Eight Hundred Children Selected," "Speaking of Automobiles," "The Unusual Thing," "The High Cost of Learning," and "Wanted--A Funeral of Algebraic Phraseology;" also, some verse, "The Twentieth Regiment Knight" and "Back to God's Country" are magazine work that never came back. School Science & Mathematics, a magazine to which she contributes and of which she is an associate editor, gives hers as the only woman's name on its staff of fifty editors. Her book, "The Passin' On Party," raises the author to the rank of a classic. To quote a critic: it is "a little like 'Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,' a little like 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' but not just like either of them. She reaches right down into human breasts and grips the heart strings." It is the busy people who find time to do things and the mother-heart of Miss Graham finds expression in her household in West Lawn, a suburb of Topeka. Among the members of her family are a niece and nephew whose High School and College education she directs. ESTHER M. CLARK. Every Kansan, homesick in a foreign land, knows the call of Kansas and every Kansan book lover knows Esther Clark's "Call of Kansas." "Sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer rains: Nearer my heart than these mighty hills are the wind-swept Kansas plains: Dearer the sight of a shy, wild rose by the roadside's dusty way Than all the splendor of poppy-fields ablaze in the sun of May. Gay as the bold poinsetta is, and the burden of pepper trees, The sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer, to me, than these. And rising ever above the song of the hoarse, insistent sea, The voice of the prairie, calling, calling me. Miss Clark was born in Neosho Co., Kansas, about twelve miles southeast of Chanute, on a farm. At seven years of age, the family moved to Chanute and her school days were spent at the old Pioneer Building, where her mother went to school before her. In 1894, she graduated here, later entering the University of Kansas for work in English. In 1906, "Verses by a Commonplace Person" was published. "The Call of Kansas and Other Verse" came out in 1909. This volume contained "My Dear" and "Good Night" which were set to music, and "Rose O' My Heart." "Rose o' my heart, to-day I send A rose or two, You love roses, Rose o' my heart, I love you. Rose o' my heart, a rose is sweet And fresh as dew. Some have thorns, but, Rose o' my heart, None have you. Rose o' my heart, this day wear My roses, do! For next to my heart, Rose o' my heart, I wear you." "My Dear" was written for her baby brother, during an absence from home, and is Miss Clark's favorite. She is in the office of the Extension Department at the University of Kansas, and has exclusive charge of club programs and does some work in package libraries. Just now she is contributing prose to some of the newspapers and doing some splendid feature work. MARY VANCE HUMPHREY. Mary Vance Humphrey of Junction City, Kansas, has written a series of short stories on the property rights of women in Kansas, a subject that was and is, still, of vital importance to the women of the state. "The Legal Status of Mrs. O'Rourke" and "King Lear in Kansas" are two of the series. When young in heart and experience, Mrs. Humphrey wrote a number of poems. Her work in later years has been only prose. Her novel, "The Squatter Sovereign" is an historical romance of pioneer days, the settlement of Kansas in the fifties. Mrs. Humphrey is one of the founders of the Kansas State Social Science Club and the Woman's Kansas Day Club and the founder of the Reading Club of Junction City. She has served as President of the State Federation and as Director of the General Federation of Women's Clubs and President of the Woman's Kansas Day Club. Her work as member of the Board of Education has done much for Junction City and her interest in libraries has done equally as much for the State of Kansas. Of her record as an official, Margaret Hill McCarter has written: "Her whole soul is in her work. She is the genuine metal, shirking nothing, cheapening nothing, and withal happy in the enjoyment of her obligation. She stands for patriotism, progress and peace. Something of the message of the shepherds heard out beyond Bethlehem that Christmas morning long ago sounds in the chords she strikes." As the wife of the late Judge James Humphrey, she proved herself the able companion of such a worthy man. KATE A. APLINGTON. The Kansas State Traveling Art Gallery owes its birth and much of its success to Kate A. Aplington, the author of that typical western story, "Pilgrims of the Plains." Since Feb., 1907, the Art Gallery has been a recognized state institution, and as its Vice-President and Superintendent and as the writer of the art lectures that accompany the work, Mrs. Aplington's broad-minded, artistic temperament and student's persistency have made the gallery truly a work of art. At present, the Aplingtons are living at Miami, Florida, but for a quarter of a century, Council Grove, the most famous spot on the Santa Fe Trail, was their home. Special investigations and researches on the subject of the old Santa Fe Trail days and lecturers on educational and literary topics resulted from years spent in that historic place. "Pilgrims of the Plains," which came out in Feb., 1913, is worthy of a place in the front rank of western stories. In July of this year, Grossett and Dunlap will bring it out in their "Popular Edition" of novels. Mrs. Aplington is now working on a book on "Art-Museums of America" and judging from the comments of prominent Museum Directors, this will be as great a success as her novel. "Florida of the Reclamation," a character story with scenes laid in and around Miami, Florida, is also in preparation. EMMA UPTON VAUGHN. The author of that versatile little book of short stories, "The Lower Bureau Drawer" is Emma Upton Vaughn, a Kansas City, Kansas teacher. These heart stories, showing keen insight of human nature--especially woman nature--deal with every day life, each one a fascinating revelation, of character and soul. Mrs. Vaughn was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her early life was spent in Kansas. She is a graduate of the Kansas University, and has taught in the public schools of the state. She wrote the "Bible and the Flag in the Public Schools" and has contributed both prose and verse to the leading magazines and newspapers. Feature articles and many good essays appear over her signature. Her "Passing From Under The Partial Eclipse" did much to give Kansas City, Kansas her recognized place commercially on the map. A novel, "The Cresap Pension," exposing a great pension fraud, is ready for the press. JESSIE WRIGHT WHITECOMB. Jessie Wright Whitcomb, a Topeka writer of juvenile books is a lawyer in active practice with her husband, Judge George H. Whitcomb and a mother of a remarkable family of five boys and one girl. The oldest son gained his A. B. in 1910 at the age of eighteen; in 1911 was appointed Rhodes scholar for Kansas; and is now a student at Oxford. His father and mother are in England at present visiting him. Mrs. Whitcomb is a contributor to the magazines and in addition, has written "Odd Little Lass," "Freshman and Senior," "Majorbanks," "His Best Friend," "Pen's Venture," "Queer As She Could Be," and "Curly Head." She is a graduate of the University of Vermont and the Boston University Law School and was the first woman to lecture before a man's law school. MYRA WILLIAMS JARRELL. Myra Williams Jarrell, the daughter of the late Archie L. Williams, for thirty years, the attorney for the Union Pacific Railway in Kansas, and the grand-daughter of Judge Archibald Williams, the first United States Circuit Judge of Kansas, appointed by Lincoln, comes of a literary family. All of the men and some of the women on the father's side of the family and also, on the mother's to a great extent, had literary talent. As a child, she cherished an ambition to write and when occasionally one of her letters to St. Nicholas saw publication, she felt she had crossed the Alps of her desire. Her first real story, however, was written as she rocked the cradle of her first born. The day, when she first saw her "stuff" in print, stands out in her memory second only to the hallowed days of her personal history, her wedding day and the days upon which her children were born. Since then, Mrs. Jarrell has contributed to almost all the high class magazines and has furnished special feature articles to newspapers. Some years ago, a small book, "Meg, of Valencia," was written and now, a novel, "The Hand of The Potter" is ready for publication. In 1894, Myra Williams and J. F. Jarrell were married. This union was blest with four children, three sons and one daughter. Mr. Jarrell is Publicity Agent of the Santa Fe. A number of years ago, he bought the Holton Signal and in trying to help her husband put some individuality into the paper, Mrs. Jarrell began a department headed "Ramblings." Later this was syndicated and finally issued in book form. Last winter, a play, "The Plain Clothes Man," was produced by the North Brothers Stock Co., at the Majestic Theatre, Topeka. This well written play, with its novel and original characterization and its effective comedy lines, is now in the hands of two New York play brokers. Before many months, Mrs. Jarrell will be enjoying a royalty. In preparation, are two plays, as yet nameless; also, a play in collaboration with Mr. North of the North Stock Co. With her brother, Burus L. Williams, of Kansas City, Mo., Mrs. Jarrell has written an opera, "The Mix Up in the Kingdom of Something-Like," which awaits only the lyrics Mr. Williams is writing and the music. An opera, "The Kingdom of Never Come True," also, in collaboration with Mr. Williams, is being set to music by Arthur Pryor, the bandmaster. A serial story, "John Bishop, Farmer," a collaboration with Albert T. Reed, the artist, is to be published soon in the Kansas Farmer. Later, this will appear in book form. A novel, which Mrs. Jarrell believes will be her best work, is in construction and is clamoring to be written. ELLEN PALMER ALLERTON. Ellen Palmer Allerton, the sweet and gentle poetess, beloved of Kansas, lived at Padonia, in Brown County, when she wrote her famous poem, "Wall of Corn." She was past her prime when she came to Kansas from the Wisconsin home, the subject of many of her noble gems. As she grew older, she grew stronger in poetic strength. Three volumes of poems have been published, "Walls of Corn and Other Poems," "Annabel and Other Poems," and "Poems of the Prairie." Her "Walls of Corn," written in 1884, famous from the first, as used as railroad immigration advertising, was translated in several languages and distributed all over Europe. This and her "Trail of Forty-nine" are her best, although the classic beauty of "Beautiful Things" is unsurpassed by any other American writer. "Beautiful twilight, at set of sun, Beautiful goal, with race well run, Beautiful rest, with work well done." is a fitting close to the beautiful, useful life of the author. Mrs. Allerton was born in Centerville. New York, in 1835 and began writing verse at the age of seventeen. Much as she has written, yet writing was only a pastime. She never let it interfere with her housework. Thoroughly practical, she did all her own work, just because she loved to do it. Her flowers of which she had many, in doors and out, resulted in many noble, inspiring lines. In 1862, she was married to A. B. Allerton of Wisconsin, coming to Kansas in 1865. She was best appreciated for her social qualities and her interest in charity--that broader charity that praises the beauty and ignores the blemishes. Her last poem, "When Days Grow Dark" is a beautiful pen picture of her sweetness and resignation in her growing blindness and her love and trust in him who had been her companion down the years. "You take the book and pour into my ear In accent sweet, the words I cannot see; I listen charmed, forget my haunting fear, And think with you as with your eyes I see. In the world's thought, so your dear voice be left, I still have part, I am not all bereft. And if this darkness deepens, when for me The new moon bends no more her silver rim, When stars go out, and over land and sea Black midnight falls, where now is twilight dim, O, then may I be patient, sweet and mild, While your hands lead me like a little child!" She died in 1893, at Padonia, and was buried in a bed of her favorite white flowers, donated by loving friends. In the little graveyard at Hamlin, one reads "Beautiful Things" on a modest stone at the head of her little bed. EMMA TANNER WOOD. Mrs. Emma Tanner Wood (Caroline Cunningham), a Topeka woman, began newspaper work in 1872. The result of those early years' work was "Spring Showers," a volume of prose. After thirty years of study and experience among the defectives, she wrote "Too Fit For The Unfit," advocating surgery for the feeble-minded. The story of Mrs. Benton, one of the characters, led Mrs. Wood to introduce a law preventing children being sent to the poor house. This was the first law purely in the interest of children ever passed in Kansas. Later, a law preventing traveling hypnotists from using school children as subjects in public exhibitions was drawn up by Mrs. Wood and passed. Several years ago, a book on hypnotism, far in advance of the public thought, was written and is to be published this year. Mrs. Wood is seventy years young and as she says: "finds age the very sweetest part of life. It is no small satisfaction to laugh at the follies of others and know that you are past committing them. It is equally delightful to be responsible only to one's self and order one's life as one chooses. Every day is a holy day to me now and the sweetness of common things, grass, flowers, neighborly love, grand-children, and home comforts fill me with satisfaction. To think kindly of all things under the sun (but sin); to speak kindly to all; to do little kindly acts is a greater good to the world at large than we think while we are in the heat of battle." CORNELIA M. STOCKTON. A cheerful little room in the East wing of St. Margaret's Hospital, Kansas City, Kansas; an invalid chair wheeled up to a window over looking the street; and the eager, expectant face and the warm hand clasp of the occupant, Mrs. Cornelia M. Stockton, assures the visitor of a hearty welcome. Greatly enfeebled by long illness and with impaired sight, this bright, little woman's keen interest in current events and the latest "best seller" puts to shame the half-hearted zeal of the average woman. For four years, Mrs. Stockton has lived at St. Margaret's, depending upon the visits of friends and the memory of an eventful life to pass the days. Prominence in club work in her earlier years has brought reward. The History Club of Kansas City, Kansas, of which she was once a member, each week sends a member to read to her and these are red letter days to this brave, patient, little woman. Mrs. Stockton began writing very young. When a little girl, back in the village of Walden, New York, she stole up to the pulpit of the church and wrote in her pastor's Bible: "I have not seen the minister's eyes, And cannot describe his glance divine, For when he prays he shuts them up And when he preaches he shuts mine." She was born in 1833 in Shawangunk, New York, and came to Kansas City in 1859, living in Missouri some years but most of the time in Kansas City, Kansas. In 1892, she published a limited edition of poems, "The Shanar Dancing Girl and Other Poems." dedicated to Mrs. Bertha M. Honore Palmer, her ideal of the perfect type of gracious and lovely womanhood. "The Shanar Dancing Girl" was first written for the Friends in Council, a literary club of Kansas City, Mo. It has received the encomiums of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John J. Ingalls and others for its beauty of expression and dramatic qualities. "Invocation," an April idyl; "The Sea-shell;" and "Mountain Born" sing of the love of nature. "In the Conservatory;" "My Summer Heart;" and "Tired of the Storm" hint of sorrow and unrest and longing. Then in 1886, "Compensation" was written. "Irma's Love For The King" is a favorite; also, "'Sold'--A Picture," written for her daughter, "yes, but she never came. "The Sorrowful Stone" Mrs. Stockton considers her best. "The story without a suspicion of rhyme, And dim with the mists of the morning of Time, Is told of a goddess, who, wandering alone, Did go and sit down on the Sorrowful Stone. We find our Gethsemane somewhere, though late; The Angel of Shadows throws open the gate. We creep with our burden of pain, to atone, For all of life's ills, to the Sorrowful Stone. Above is the vault of the pitiless stars; The trees stretch their arms all blackened with scars; The gales of lost Paradise are faintly blown To where we sit down on the Sorrowful Stone." "From a Poem 'Vagaries'" warns of * * * --the product of the age and clime, We do too much! grow old before our time, Yet--would we stray to Morning Hills again? Unlearn sad prophecies, and dream as then! Ah, no! with sense of peace the shadows creep, There droppeth on tired eyes the spell of sleep-- We left the dawn long leagues behind, and stand, Waiting and wistful in the Evening Land! The patient Nurse of Destiny, at best, Leads us like children to the needed rest! A ghostly wind puts out our little light, And we have bid the busy world "Good Night!" Mrs. Stockton was married twice. Her first husband was the father of her two sons, one of whom, Dr. Henry M. Downs, in his practice, came often to St. Margaret's. The second marriage, as the wife of the late Judge John S. Stockton, was a very happy one. Last year, a brother the only surviving member of her family, died, leaving Mrs. Stockton the last of a family of five children. The two sons have also passed into the Great Beyond. In her younger days, she contributed many poems and some prose to newspapers and magazines over the name of Cora M. Downs. Ex-Gov. St. John appointed her one of the regents of the University of Kansas. Her beautiful poem: "In Memoriam" to Sarah Walter Chandler Coates was her last. "'We seem like children,' she was wont to say, 'Talking of what we cannot understand,' And in the dark or daylight, all the way, Holding so trustfully a Father's hand. And this was her religion, not to dwell On tenets, creeds, or doctrines, but to live On a pure faith, and striving to do well The simple duties that each hour should give." MARGARET HILL McCARTER. The most successful Kansas woman writer financially and the most prolific is Margaret Hill McCarter of Topeka. From the advent of her little book in 1901, "A Bunch of Things, Tied Up With Strings" to the hearty reception of her latest novel every step of the way spells success. Margaret Hill was born in Indiana and came to Kansas in 1888 to teach English in the Topeka High School. Two years later, she became the wife of Dr. William McCarter. Of this union there are two daughters, students at Baker University and the Topeka High School and a young son, his mother's literary critic. A wife and a mother first, a Kansas woman second, and an author third is the way Mrs. McCarter rates herself. She is capable of and does do all her housework. Her love for literature she owes to her mother, who believed in higher education and taught Margaret to prize the few books that came her way. After leaving the school room, the teacher instinct still strong within her, she argued if she could teach out of books written by others, why not out of books of her own? Then followed poems, short stories, biography, textbooks, the editing of Crane Classics, "One Hundred Kansas Women" and miscellanies. In 1902, "Cuddy and Other Folks" was written and in 1903, "The Cottonwood's Story." This same year, "The Overflowing Waters," the story of the 1903 flood, and one of her best bits of heart writing paid for the school books of almost a thousand unfortunate children. "Cuddy's Baby" appeared in 1908, followed the next year with "In Old Quivera," a thread of Coronado history. "The Price of The Prairies," three weeks after publication in the fall of 1910, became Kansas' best seller. "The Peace of The Solomon Valley" came out in 1911 and proved a popular gift book. "The Wall of Men," Mrs. McCarter's 1912 offering should be one of the required books in Kansas schools. It is authentic history and the close of the story leaves every Kansan with a greater respect and love for the state and the heroic pioneers who stood as a living wall between Kansas and the slave question. 1913 gave us the "Master's Degree," considered by many her best work. This year we have "Winning The Wilderness." Mrs. McCarter founded the Club Member and organized the Sorosis, serving as president seven years and two terms as president of the Topeka Federation of Women's Clubs. Baker University, at Baldwin, Kansas, gave her an honorary Master's Degree in 1909, its semi-centennial anniversary. BESSIE MAY BELLMAN. and JUNE BELLMAN HENTHORNE. Bessie May Bellman and June Bellman Henthorne, her daughter, hail from Winfield. They write both prose and verse and Mrs. Henthorne was a reporter for years. Mrs. Bellman, when a girl, lived five years on a cattle ranch and to those five lonely years she credits her habit of introspection, meditation and writing. Much of her poetry and short stories are used in platform work. Red Leaves. Red leaves-- Aflame in the air, aflame in the trees. Blue streams, smoky hills-- Gold, gold the sunlight spills-- Red leaves! Dead Leaves-- A swirl in the air-asleep 'neath the trees. Gone every lark and swallow-- Haunting echoes bid me follow-- Dead leaves! Bessie May Bellman-- Mrs. Henthorne's "If" is published in a New York reader. "If, in a bird-heart, beating 'neath the gray There chants a song, no matter what the day. If, in a bird-heart happy sunbeams shine, Why not in mine? If, in a flower-face, beat down by rain, The hope of clear skies be in spite of pain-- If, in a flower-face a great hope shine, Why not in mine?" AMANDA T. JONES. One of the few Kansas women to have a place in "Who's Who" was the late Amanda T. Jones of Junction City. She was one of the most prolific poets of Kansas. Her "Atlantic" is a story of the rebellion; "Utah and Other Poems;" "A Prairie Idyl;" "Flowers and a Weed;" and "Rubaiyat of Solomon Valley" are volumes of verse. Her prose: "Children's Stories," "Fairy Arrows" and "The White Blackbird;" "A Psychic Autobiography," published in 1908; "Man and Priest," a story of psychic detection; "Mother of Pioneers," and a novel ready for publication, "A Daughter of Wall St." Miss Jones originated a working women's home and patented many inventions, mostly household necessities. * * * * * CHARLOTTE F. WILDER. Charlotte Frances Wilder, Manhattan, has been writing half a century and it has won for her a place in Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, "entitled to go down to posterity, her lifework preserved as information for future generations." She has written "Land of The Rising Sun," "Sister Ridenour's Sacrifice," "Christmas Cheer In All Lands," "Easter Gladness," "Mission Ships," "The Child's Own Book" and "The Wonderful Story of Jesus." Her essays, alone, would make a volume, original and interesting. She has written for the press since sixteen years of age and has been a Bible teacher forty years. ANNA L. JANUARY. Osawatomie claims Anna L. January, the author of "Historic Souvenir of Osawatomie, Kansas," "John Brown Battle Grounds," "Calvin Monument," and "Lookout and Park;" also, numerous poems. Mrs. January is a native of Wilmington, Ohio, coming to Kansas in 1898. She taught school three years and in 1901 married D. A. January of Osawatomie. They have one child, a son of four years. An active worker in the Congress of Mothers and interested in temperance and suffrage work, Mrs. January still finds time to write many short poems. HATTIE HORNER LOUTHAN. Hattie Horner Louthan, a former White Water, Kansas girl, is the author of five books and many contributions to newspapers and first class magazines. After graduation at the Normal School, Emporia, in 1883, Miss Horner engaged in teaching and literary work. Ten years later, she became the wife of Overton Earl Louthan, who died in 1906. She is editor of the Great Southwest and a member of the staff of the Denver Republican. Her first volume of poems came out in 1885; the next year, "Some Reasons For Our Choice." "Not At Home," a book of travels, was published in 1889; "Collection of Kansas Poetry," in 1891; and "Thoughts Adrift," in 1902. Her work is versatile; the rhyme easy flowing and strong. GEORGIANA FREEMAN McCOY. and MARY FREEMAN STARTZMAN. Georgiana Freeman McCoy, Wichita, has taught music in Kansas longer than any other teacher in the state and incidentally writes verse. She remodeled Elizabeth Browning's "A Drama of Exile" and wrote the musical setting for Simon Buchhalter, the Viennese pianist and composer. A sister, Mary Freeman Startzman, while living in Fort Scott, wrote a volume of poems, "Wild Flowers." EVA MORLEY MURPHY. Eva Morley Murphy of Goodland, recent candidate for Congress, is author of two books: "The Miracle on the Smoky and Other Stories," and "Lois Morton's Investment." She is a descendant of Nathaniel Perry of Revolutionary fame, and of Rodger Williams; an active temperance worker; and one of the women who made equal suffrage possible in Kansas. SALLIE F. TOLER. Mrs. Sallie F. Toler, Wichita, has written on every subject from pigs and pole cats to patriotism. She is the author of several plays and three vaudeville sketches. A comedy, a racing romance, "Handicapped;" "Thekla," a play in three acts; "On Bird's Island," a four-act play; and "Waking Him Up," a farce, are played in stock now. Mrs. Toler contributes to many papers and lectures on "The Short Story" and "The Modern Drama." MARGARET PERKINS. As a 1914 Christmas offering, Margaret Perkins, a Hutchinson High School teacher, gave us her volume of beautiful poems. "The Love Letters of a Norman Princess" is the love story, in verse, of Hersilie, a ward and relative of William, The Conqueror, and Eric, a kinsman of the unfortunate King Harold. "I thought once, in a dream, that Love came near With silken flutter of empurpled wings That wafted faint, strange fragrance from the things Abloom where age and season never sear. The joy of mating birds was in my ear, And flamed my path with dancing daffodils Whose splendor melted into greening hills Upseeking, like my spirit, to revere." "Before you came, this heart of mine A fairy garden seemed With lavender and eglantine; And lovely lilies gleamed Above the purple-pansy sod Where ruthless passion never trod." "If Heaven had been pleased to let you be A keeper of the sheep, a peasant me, Within a shepherd's cottage thatched with vine Now might we know the bliss of days divine." --"We are part of Heaven's scheme, You and I: Child of sunshine and the dew I was earthly--born as you. "Yet my little hour I go, Troubled maid, Even where the storm blasts blow, Unafraid; Confident that from the sod All things upward wend to God." "Dear heart, the homing hour is here, The task is done. Toilers, and they who course the deer Turn, one by one, At day's demise, Where dwells a deathless glow In loving eyes. I hear them hearthward go To castle, or to cottage on the lea; But him I love comes never home to me." The peaks that rift the saffron sheen Of sunset skies In purple loveliness, when seen By nearer eyes, Are bleakly bare. To brave those boulders gray No climbers dare. O, in some future may This mountain mass of unfulfilled desires Be unto me as yonder haloed spires!" Miss Perkins is the compiler of "Echoes of Pawnee Rock," and writes short stories and poems for the magazines. Some of her verse is published in Woolard's "Father." ANNA E. ARNOLD. Anna E. Arnold, Cottonwood Falls, Superintendent of Chase County Schools, is a thorough Kansan, and a farm product. She was born at Whiting, Jackson County, but when a very small child, her parents moved to Chase and all her life since has been spent in that county. Until the last few years, she lived on a farm. She is a graduate of the State University and has taught in the grade and high schools. In 1905, she became a candidate for Superintendent of Schools of Chase County. Her success and her unusual ability as a teacher were rewarded by a two to one majority on a close county ticket. At the second term, she had no opposition and out of 1214 votes cast, she received all but 29. The present year, after four elections, is her seventh continuous year as Superintendent of Chase County. In addition to her official duties, Miss Arnold has written two text-books. Her "Civics and Citizenship" in 1912 was adopted as the state text-book on civil government for use in the public schools of Kansas. It is being used by a large number of womens' clubs. Many outlines for club work on civic subjects have come from Miss Arnold's pen. Her second textbook, "A History of Kansas," the first book printed under the new State Publication Law, has also been adopted by the text-book commission. Miss Arnold is considered one of the foremost educational leaders of the state. Topeka gives us Anna Deming Gray, a writer of negro dialect stories, stories for children, and some verse. Elizabeth Barr Arthur, has written a number of books, histories of several Kansas counties and some volumes of poems, "Washburn Ballads." Mrs. Sarah E. Roby is a writer of both prose and verse. A granddaughter, Marjory Roby, has written a number of stories and plays. Eva Bland Black contributes poems and song lyrics to the magazines. She served her apprenticeship as reporter and city editor of the Journal and Evening News of Garnett and as associate editor of the Concordia "Magnet." Mrs. Isabel McArthur is a natural poet and song writer. She has published one volume of verse, "Every Body Loves a Lover." Her last song, "When The Bloom Is On The Cherry At Sardou" is widely sung. Edna E. Haywood is author of "Fifty Common Birds Around the Capital." Mrs. Mary A. Cornelius, while a resident of Topeka, wrote four books, "Little Wolf," "Uncle Nathan's Farm," "The White Flame," and "Why? A Kansas Girl's Query." Another book is ready for publication. Mrs. Mary Worrall Hudson, wife of the late General J. K. Hudson, former editor of the Topeka Capital, is author of "Two Little Maids And Their Friends," "Esther, The Gentile," and many short stories and poems. Her classic prose-poem: "In The Missouri Woods" is considered her masterpiece. Mrs. Sara Josephine Albright, formerly of Topeka, now of Leavenworth, is a sweet singer of childlife. Her volume of verse, "With The Children" is lullabies and mother-love poems. A book of stories for children will soon be ready for publication. Jessie Lewellyn Call, deceased, the clever and beautiful daughter of the first Populist governor of Kansas, was a well-known essayist and short story writer. For many years she was one of the editors of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Lawrence claims Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a writer of both fiction and text-books and many short stories. She is the author of "Corneille And Racine In England," "English Rhetoric And Composition," "What Shall We Do Now," "Gunhild," "The Squirrel Cage" and "The Montessori Mother." Louise C. Don Carlos has written "A Battle In The Smoke," one of the best Kansas works on fiction. She did special work on the Nashville Tennessee Banner and writes a great deal of magazine verse. Mrs. Anna W. Arnett, a Lawrence teacher, writes verse and songs. In addition, she has issued a primer, the Kansas text-book and a primary reading chart for which she has a United States patent. Margaret Lynn, one of the faculty of Kansas University, is a writer of short stories and "A Step-Daughter Of The Prairies." Mrs. A. B. Butler of Manhattan wrote "The Trial And Condemnation of Jesus Christ From a Lawyer's Point of View;" a novel, "Ad Astra Per Aspera;" and much newspaper work. Mrs. Elizabeth Champney, a former teacher in the Kansas State Agricultural College, is the author of more than twenty books and many short stories. "Three Vassar Girls Abroad," "Witch Winnie Series," "Dames And Daughters of Colonial Days," "Romance of French Abbeys," "Romance of Italian Villas," and "Romance of Imperial Rome" are her most popular works. Sadie E. Lewis, Hutchinson, is the author of "Hard Times In Kansas" and other verse. Her daughter, Ida Margaret Glazier, is a poet and song writer. Mrs Alice McAllily wrote "Terra-Cotta" and many other books. Lillian W. Hale, Kansas City, is author of verse, short stories, and a novel. Another novel will be ready for publication this autumn. Lois Oldham Henrici, a one-time Sabetha and Parsons woman, is the author of "Representative Women" and many good short stories. Laura D. Congdon, a Newton pioneer, is a verse and short story writer. Mary H. Finn, Sedgwick, writes beautiful verse and much prose. Jennie C. Graves, Pittsburg, writes poetry and moving picture plays. Mrs. Johannas Bennett, another Pittsburg woman, has written an historical novel, "La Belle San Antone." Florence L. Snow, Neosho Falls, is an artistic and finished writer of verse and prose. She is the author of "The Lamp of Gold." Sharlot M. Hall, Lincoln, writes prose and verse. A volume of poems, "Cactus And Pine," "History of Arizona," "A Woman of the Frontier," "The Price of The Star" and short stories are her important works. Mrs. A. S. McMillan, Lyons, a poetess, song writer and licensed preacher, writes clever verse, much of which has been set to music. "Land Where Dreams Come True" is her best known poem. Kittie Skidmore Cowen, a former Columbus woman, is author of "An Unconditional Surrender," a civil war story. "The Message of Hagar," a study of the Mormon question will be in the press soon. Miss Mary E. Upshaw, McPherson, wrote verse at the age of seven and published her first story at fifteen. She has a book in preparation which she expects to publish at an early date. Jeanette Scott Benton, formerly of Fort Scott, writes short stories novelettes, and stories for children. May Belleville Brown of Salina, has a very clever pen, as has, also Mrs. Lulu R. Fuhr of Meade, the author of "Tenderfoot Tales." Mrs. E. M. Adams, Mound City, writes exquisite verse and in the past, had many short stories to her credit. Mrs. C. W. Smith, Stockton, writes both prose and verse. Cara A. Thomas Hoover, formerly of Halstead, Harvey County, now living in Rialto, California, writes prose and beautiful verse. Rose Hartwick Thorpe, the author of "Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night," was a Kansan in the early sixties. She lived at Wilmington. Miss Margaret Stevenson, Olathe, is a writer of books for the blind. She has some short stories, nature and text-books published. Lelia Hardin Bugg, Wichita, has written "The Prodigal Daughter," "The People of Our Parish," and "Orchids." Edna Thacher Russ, also of Wichita, writes short stories and educational articles. Mrs. E. Hamilton Myers, Englewood, is a dramatic writer and a poet of rare talents. Being a musician, much of her verse is used for songs. Mrs. Myers contributes to the English papers. Her first story was published by a magazine which had accepted writings of her mother's. Other than literature proper, we have Mrs. Lillian M. Mitchner, of Topeka, a scientific writer; Mrs. Lumina C. R. Smythe, a writer of verse, also of Topeka, who is co-author with her late husband in the revised "Flora And Check List of Kansas." Among the clever newspaper women of the state are Margie Webb Tennal, Sabetha; Maud C. Thompson, Howard; Frances Garside, formerly of Atchison, now with the New York Journal; Mrs. E. E. Kelley, Toronto; Anna Carlson, Lindsborg; Mrs. Mary Riley, Kansas City; and Isabel Worrel Ball, a Larned woman, who bears the distinction of being the only woman given a seat in the congressional press gallery. Grace D. Brewer, Girard, has been a newspaper woman and magazine short story writer for ten years. Among the early Kansas writers are Clarinda Howard Nichols, Mrs. A. B. Bartlett, Lucy B. Armstrong, Sarah Richart, Mrs. Porter Sherman, and Mary Tenny Gray, all of Wyandotte and Mrs. C. H. Cushing of Leavenworth. Sara T. D. Robinson, the wife of the first governor of Kansas, was one of the very first women writers of the state. Her "Kansas, Interior And Exterior" was published in 1856 and went through ten editions up to 1889. INDEX. Adams, Mrs. E. M. Albright, Sara Josephine Allerton, Ellen Palmer Aplington, Kate A. Armstrong, Lucy B. Arnett, Anna W. Arnold, Anna E. Arthur, Elizabeth Barr Ball, Isabel Warrel Bartlett, Mrs. A. B. Bellman, Bessie May Bennett, Mrs. Johannas Benton, Jeanette Scott Black, Eva Bland Brewer, Grace D. Brown, May Bellville Bugg, Leila Hardin Butler, Mrs. A. B. Call, Jessie Lewellyn Carlson, Anna Champney, Elizabeth Clark, Esther M. Congdon, Laura D. Cornelius, Mary A. Cowen, Kittie Skidmore Cushing, Mrs. C. H. Don Carlos, Louise C. Finn, Mary H. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Fuhr, Lulu R. Garside, Frances Glazier, Ida Margaret Graham, Effie Graves, Jennie C. Gray, Anna Deming Gray, Mary Tenny Hale, Lillian W. Hall, Sharlot M. Haywood, Edna E. Henrici, Lois Oldham Henthorne, June Bellman Hoover, Cara A. Thomas Hudson, Mary Worrell Humphrey, Mary Vance January, Anna L. Jarrell, Myra Williams Jones, Amanda T. Kelley, Mrs. E. E. Lewis, Sadie E. Louthan Hattie Horner Lynn, Margaret McAllily, Alice McArthur, Isabel McCarter, Margaret Hill McCoy, Georgiana Freeman McMillan, Mrs. A. S. Mitchner, Lillian W. Murphy, Eva Morley Myers, Mrs. E. Hamilton Nichols, Clarinda Howard Perkins, Margaret Richart, Sarah Riley, Mary Robinson, Sara T. D. Roby, Marjory Roby, Sara E. Russ, Edna Thatcher Sherman, Mrs. Porter Smith, Mrs. C. W. Smythe, Lumina C. R. Snow, Florence L. Startzman, Mary Freeman Stevenson, Margaret Stockton, Cornelia M. Tennal, Margie Webb Thompson, Maude C. Thorpe, Rose Hartwick Toler, Sallie F. Upshaw, Mary E. Vaughn, Emma Upton Whitcomb, Jessie Wright Wilder, Charlotte F. Wood, Emma Tanner 
37878	----	[Illustration: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.] LIFE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES BY E.E. BROWN Author of "LIFE OF GARFIELD," "LIFE OF WASHINGTON," "FROM NIGHT TO LIGHT," ETC., ETC. CHICAGO NEW YORK THE WERNER COMPANY COPYRIGHT 1884 BY D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT 1895 BY THE WERNER COMPANY Holmes OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE. I. ANCESTRY 9 II. BOYHOOD 20 III. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS 30 IV. OTHER REMINISCENCES 40 V. ABROAD 49 VI. CHANGE IN THE HOME 60 VII. THE PROFESSOR 67 VIII. THE LECTURER 74 IX. NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE 83 X. ELSIE VENNER 92 XI. FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE 107 XII. FAVORITES OF SONG 114 XIII. THE MAN OF SCIENCE 136 XIV. THE HOLMES BREAKFAST 152 XV. ORATIONS AND ESSAYS 171 XVI. THE HOME CIRCLE 208 XVII. LOVE OF NATURE 227 XVIII. THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 240 XIX. TOKENS OF ESTEEM 284 XX. IN LATER YEARS 302 XXI. LAST DAYS 320 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY. In a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that once stood on Cambridge Common, Oliver Wendell Holmes--poet, professor, "beloved physician"--was born, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1809. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, was the pastor of the "First Church" in Cambridge-- That ancient church whose lofty tower, Beneath the loftier spire, Is shadowed when the sunset hour Clothes the tall shaft in fire. Here, in Revolutionary times, General Washington frequently worshiped, and the old homestead itself was the headquarters of the American army during the siege of Boston. "It was a great happiness," writes the _Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, "to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it, to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality.... "The gambrel-roofed house was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors opens directly upon the Green, always called the Common; the other faces the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk on the other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas. "The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible, companionable, holding its hand out to all--comfortable, respectable, and even in its way dignified, but not imposing; not a house for his Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like the leaves of the forest." The house was not originally built for a parsonage. It was first the residence of a well-to-do tailor, who sold it to Jonathan Hastings, a prosperous farmer whom the college students used to call "Yankee Jont.," and whose son was the college steward in 1775. It was long known in Cambridge as the "Hastings House," but about the year 1792 it was sold to Eliphalet Pearson, the Hebrew Professor at Harvard, and in 1807 it passed into the hands of the Rev. Abiel Holmes. For forty years the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes ministered to his Cambridge parish, revered and loved by all who knew him. He was a man of marked literary ability, as his _Annals of America_ shows--"full of learning," as some one has said, "but never distressing others by showing how learned he was." Said T.W. Higginson, at the Holmes Breakfast: "I should like to speak of that most delightful of sunny old men, the father of Doctor Holmes, whom I knew and loved when I was a child.... I was brought up in Cambridge, my father's house being next door to that of Doctor Holmes' gambrel-roofed house, and the library I most enjoyed tumbling about in was the same in which his infant gambols had first disturbed the repose of the books. I shall always remember a certain winter evening, when we boys were playing before the fire, how the old man--gray, and gentle, and kindly as any old German professor, and never complaining of our loudest gambols--going to the frost-covered window, sketched with his pen-knife what seemed a cluster of brambles and a galaxy of glittering stars, and above that he wrote, _Per aspera ad astra_: 'Through difficulties to the stars.' He explained to us what it meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet winter evening and the sweet talk of that old man." The good pastor was a graduate of Yale College, and before coming to Cambridge had taught at his _Alma Mater_, and preached in Georgia. He was the son of Doctor David Holmes, a physician of Woodstock, Ct., who had served as captain in the French and Indian wars, and afterward as surgeon in the Revolutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor David Holmes was one of the original settlers of Woodstock.[1] The genealogy of the Holmes family of Woodstock dates from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of Gray's Inn, London. In 1686, John Holmes, one of his descendants, joined a colony from Roxbury, Mass., and settled in Woodstock, Conn. His son David married a certain "Bathsheba," who had a remarkable reputation as nurse and doctress. In the great storm of 1717, when the settlers' houses were almost buried in the snow, it is said that she climbed out of an upper-story window and travelled on snow-shoes through almost impassable drifts to Dudley, Mass., to visit a sick woman. The son of this noble Bathsheba was "Dr. David," the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1790, Abiel Holmes was married to the daughter of President Stiles of Yale, who died without children. His second wife, and the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a daughter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent lawyer. He was descended from various Wendells, Olivers, Quinceys, and Bradstreets--names that belonged to the best blue blood of New England--and his wife was Mary Jackson, a daughter of Dorothy Quincy, the "Dorothy Q." whom Doctor Holmes has immortalized in his poem. And just here, lest some of my readers may have forgotten some parts of this delicious bit of family portraiture, I am tempted to give the entire poem: Grandmother's mother, her age I guess, Thirteen summers or something less; Girlish bust, but womanly air, Smooth square forehead, with uprolled hair, Lips that lover has never kissed, Taper fingers and slender wrist, Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade-- So they painted the little maid. On her hand a parrot green Sits unmoving and broods serene; Hold up the canvas full in view-- Look, there's a rent the light shines through. Dark with a century's fringe of dust, That was a Redcoat's rapier thrust! Such is the tale the lady old, Dorothy's daughter's daughter told. Who the painter was none may tell-- One whose best was not over well; Hard and dry, it must be confessed, Flat as a rose that has long been pressed; Yet in her cheek the hues are bright, Dainty colors of red and white; And in her slender shape are seen Hint and promise of stately mien. Look not on her with eyes of scorn-- Dorothy Q. was a lady born! Ay, since the galloping Normans came, England's annals have known her name; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear is that ancient name's renown, For many a civic wreath they won, The youthful sire and the gray-haired son. O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q., Strange is the gift that I owe to you; Such a gift as never a king Save to daughter or son might bring-- All my tenure of heart and hand, All my title to house and land; Mother and sister, and child and wife, And joy and sorrow, and death and life. What if a hundred years ago Those close-shut lips had answered, no, When forth the tremulous question came That cost the maiden her Norman name; And under the folds that look so still The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill Should I be I, or would it be One tenth another to nine tenths me? Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes; Not the light gossamer stirs with less; But never a cable that holds so fast, Through all the battles of wave and blast, And never an echo of speech or song That lives in the babbling air so long! There were tones in the voice that whispered then You may hear to-day in a hundred men. O lady and lover, how faint and far Your images hover, and here we are, Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, Edward's and Dorothy's--all their own-- A goodly record for time to show Of a syllable spoken so long ago! Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive, For the tender whisper that bade me live? It shall be a blessing, my little maid, I will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade, And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, And gild with a rhyme your household name, So you shall smile on us, brave and bright, As first you greeted the morning's light, And live untroubled by woes and fears, Through a second youth of a hundred years. This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to note, was the aunt of a second Dorothy Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The Wendells were of Dutch descent. Evert Jansen Wendell, who came from East Friesland in 1645, was the original settler in Albany. From the church records, we find that he was the _Regerendo Dijaken_ in 1656, and upon one of the windows of the old Dutch church in Albany, the arms of the Wendells--a ship riding at two anchors--were represented in stained glass. Very little is known of these early ancestors, but the name is still an influential one among the old Knickerbocker families. Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell in love with his future wife, the daughter of Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so impressed by her beauty and grace that, like the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight of years. Twelve children blessed this happy union, and the youngest daughter married William Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the father of Wendell Phillips. Fair cousin, Wendell P., says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1881: Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee; Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we, And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v. Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the richest merchants of Boston; was a member of the City Council and colonel of the Boston regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of Doctor Holmes), was born in 1733, and after his graduation at Harvard, in 1753, he went into business with his father. He still continued his studies, however, and preferring a professional life to that of a business man, he afterwards graduated at the Law School, was admitted to the bar, and soon after appointed Judge of Probate for Suffolk County. In Drake's _Old Landmarks of Boston_, we find that Judge Wendell was a selectman during the siege of Boston, and was commissioned by General Washington to raise a company of men to watch the British after the evacuation, so that no spies might pass between the two armies. The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old Charter Governor, who married Governor Dudley's daughter Anne.[2] This accomplished lady, the first New England poetess, and frequently called by her contemporaries "The Tenth Muse," was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's great-great-grandmother.[3] With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes surely fulfils all the conditions of "a man of family," and who will not readily agree with the _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, when he writes as follows: "I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-five cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two. I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy." FOOTNOTES: [1] From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes. [2] In the Harvard College Library may be seen a copy of Anne Bradstreet's poems, which passed through eight editions. The extraordinary title of her world-renowned book reads as follows: "Several poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight, wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies, viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and beginning of the Roman Commonweal to the end of their last king: with diverse other pleasant and serious poems. By a gentlewoman in New England." This talented lady was the ancestress not only of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but also of the Channings, Danas and Phillipses. [3] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD. In a curious little almanac for 1809 may still be seen against the date of August 29, the simple record, "Son b." Twice before had good Parson Holmes recorded in similar manner the births of his children, for Oliver Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was his third child; but this was the first time he could write "son." A few years later another son came--the "brother John" whose wit and talents have gladdened so many hearts--and, last of all, another daughter came to brighten the family circle for a few brief years. The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered child, highly imaginative and extremely sensitive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, and of certain superstitious fancies that always clung to him, he says: "I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret; ... There was a dark store-room, too, on looking through the keyhole of which I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables and other four-footed things, which seemed to me to have rushed in there frightened, and in their fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were killed at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. Then the lady's portrait up-stairs with the sword-thrusts through it--marks of the British officers' rapiers--and the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats--confound them for smashing its mate!--and the deep, cunningly-wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing; he was a gentleman, and always had it covered with a large _peignoir_ to save the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room down-stairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder where you may now observe a granite obelisk, the study in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men, sometimes filled with soldiers. Come with me, and I will show you the 'dents' left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country boys that came to live in our service brought with them--of contracts written in blood and left out over night not to be found the next morning (removed by the Evil One who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use), of dreams coming true, of death-signs, of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies." What some of these fancies were, he tells us elsewhere: "I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long. One other source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them. "As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain particular things or spots--Doctor Johnson's special weakness--I got the habit of at a very early age. "With these follies mingled sweet delusions which I loved so well I would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you. "The firing of the great guns at the Navy Yard is easily heard at the place where I was born and lived. 'There is a ship of war come in,' they used to say, when they heard them. Of course I supposed that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence, suddenly as falling stones, and that the great guns roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the bay with her cut-water. Now, the sloop-of-war the _Wasp_, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the _Reindeer_ and the _Avon_, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and of course for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were _years_ during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy Yard without saying to myself, 'the _Wasp_ has come!' and almost thinking I could see her as she rolled in, crumpling the waters before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This was one of those dreams that I mused and never told. Let me make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight, and the long unspoken words have articulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, _The Wasp has come!_ "Yes; children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little? What do I mean? Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them. So, too, you must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up. O.T. quitted our household carrying with him the passionate regrets of the more youthful members. He was an ingenious youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above with great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they were all gone, but the other day, I found them on a certain door. How it surprised me to find them so near the ground! I had thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O.T., when he went, made a solemn promise to two of us. I was to have a ship, and the other a martin house (last syllable pronounced as in the word _tin_). Neither ever came; but oh! how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner--the cars pass close by it at this time--and looked up that long avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure as I turned to look northward that there he would be, trudging toward me, the ship in one hand and the mar_tin_ house in the other!" At an early age the merry, restless little fellow was sent to a neighboring school, kept by Ma'am Prentiss, a good, motherly old dame, who ruled her little flock, not with a scourge of birches, but with a long willow rod that reached quite across the schoolroom, "reminding,[4] rather than chastening." Among her pupils was Alfred Lee, afterwards the beloved Bishop of Delaware. "It is by little things," says the Autocrat, "that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trivial. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low studded schoolroom where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children. Thirst belongs to humanity everywhere, in all ages, but that white-pine pail and that brown mug belong to me in particular." The next school to which the Cambridge pastor sent his little son was kept by William Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and much native wit. Five years were spent at a school in Cambridgeport, which was kept by several successive teachers, and it was here, as schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes first met Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana. "I was moderately studious," says Doctor Holmes, "and very fond of reading stories, which I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond also of whispering, and my desk bore sad witness to my passion for whittling. For these misdemeanors I sometimes had a visitation from the ferule, and once when a Gunter's scale was used for this purpose, it flew to pieces as it came down on my palm."[5] It was about this time, doubtless, that the _Autocrat_ learned that important fact about the "hat." "I was once equipped," he says, "in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to the metropolis. On my way I was met by a 'Port-Chuck,' as we used to call the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue ensued: "_The Port-Chuck_: 'Hullo, you sir, joo know th' wus goin' to be a race to-morrah?' "_Myself_: 'No. Who's goin' to run, 'n' wher' 's't goin' to be?' "_The Port-Chuck_: 'Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Williams, round the brim o' your hat.' "These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the Port-Chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article ever since. The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument." FOOTNOTES: [4] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. [5] From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. CHAPTER III. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. Of the boyhood of Doctor Holmes we have many delightful glimpses. "Like other boys in the country," he tells us, "I had my patch of ground to which in the springtime I intrusted the seeds furnished me with a confident trust in their resurrection and glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the gauntlet of as many foes and trials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would not blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their condemned caps, without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disfigured with monstrous protrusions through their very centres, something that looked like a second bud pushing through the middle of the corolla; lettuces and cabbages would not head; radishes knotted themselves until they looked like centenarians' fringes; and on every stem, on every leaf, and both sides of it, and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part, and help murder the whole attempt at vegetation.... Yet Nature is never wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs, and lupins, lady's delights--plebeian manifestations of the pansy--self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks; the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas, all whispered to the winds blowing over them that some caressing presence was around me. "Beyond the garden was the field, a vast domain of four acres or thereabouts by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless chasm--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its _drapeau rouge_, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures which make it look like a cattle-market. "Beyond, as I looked round, were the colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished, the burial ground where the dead presidents stretched their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks, the district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called in those days, but rather 'ten-footer'; then houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance, and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it; _terra veteribus cognita_, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy." "When I was of smallest dimensions," he says at another time, "and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village town and stop opposite a low, brown, gambrel-roofed cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and bending over her flower bed, would gather a 'posy,' as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard, with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-bed, posies, grenadier-like rows of seeding-onions--stateliest of vegetables--all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me." Of Cambridge at this time, James Russell Lowell, in his _Fireside Travels_, tells us: "It was still a country village with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond's Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose fathers they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward.... We called it 'the Village' then, and it was essentially an English village--quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Boston commonwealth, and a fitting one it was. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive, or capable of rousing democratic envy; and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. Was it possible for us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than the president of the University, in his square doctor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge?" The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Calvanist, not indeed of the severest cast, but still strictly "orthodox" in all his religious views, and when Oliver, his elder son, was fifteen years of age, he sent him to the Phillips Academy in Andover, thinking that the religious atmosphere there was less heretical than at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where Arminian tendencies were just beginning to show themselves. "I have some recollections of Andover, pleasant and other," says Doctor Holmes. "I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country. He swore (ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly), that the children were dying by the dozen of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking. At the foot of the hill, down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks (_Credab Hahnucmannus_), and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood." The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is strikingly depicted in the following revelation: "The first unequivocal act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this: refusing a small favor asked of me--nothing more than telling what had happened at school one morning. No matter who asked it; but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no heart to speak; I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost. "What remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there to the best of my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, if I had but won that first battle!" And what a charming picture he gives us of the peaceful, hallowing influences about him in that quiet old parsonage! "The Puritan 'Sabbath,' as everybody knows, began at 'sundown' on Saturday evening. To such observances of it I was born and bred. As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again beneath the horizon. "It was in the stillness of the world without and of the soul within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself most distinctly heard--so that I well remember I used to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamps, _was peculiar to Saturday evenings_. I don't know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange, childish fancy." Had all the clergymen who visited the parsonage been as true to their profession as his own dear father, the thoughtful, impressible boy might, very possibly, have devoted his brilliant talents to the ministry. "It was a real delight," he says, "to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday with us, and I can remember one whose advent made the day feel almost like 'Thanksgiving.' But now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other direction. I remember one in particular who twitted me so with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black children, that he did more in that one day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian out of an infant Hottentot. I might have been a minister myself for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an undertaker." An exercise written while at Andover, shows at what an early age he attempted versification. It is a translation from the first book of Virgil's �neid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of Pope. The following extract shows the angry god giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus: Is this your glory in a noble line, To leave your confines and to ravage mine? Whom I--but let these troubled waves subside-- Another tempest and I'll quell your pride! Go bear our message to your master's ear, That wide as ocean I am despot here; Let him sit monarch in his barren caves! I wield the trident and control the waves. CHAPTER IV. OTHER REMINISCENCES. In his vacations the inquiring mind of the young student had made "strange acquaintances" in a certain book infirmary up in the attic of the gambrel-roofed house. "_The Negro Plot at New York_," he says, "helped to implant a feeling in me which it took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root out. _Thinks I to myself_, an old novel which has been attributed to a famous statesman, introduced me to a world of fiction which was not represented on the shelves of the library proper, unless perhaps by _Caelebs in search of a Wife_, or allegories of the bitter tonic class." Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy book, with the manuscript annotations of some ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he says, "I had a vague notion that I might find the mighty secret of the _Lapis Philosophorum_, otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green Lion, the _Quinta Essentia_, the Soap of Sages, the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all manner of odd _aliases_, as I am assured by the plethoric little book before me, in parchment covers browned like a meerschaum with the smoke of furnaces, and the thumbing of dead gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty slumber on the shelves of the _bonquiniste_." "I have never lost my taste for alchemy," he adds, "since I first got hold of the _Palladium Spagyricum_ of Peter John Faber, and sought--in vain, it is true--through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of. "One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own. I have seen all this played over again in adult life, the same delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous promises of this or that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic chamber." There are other reminiscences of these days that show us not only the outward surroundings, but the inner workings of the boy's mind. "The great Destroyer," he says, "had come near me, but never so as to be distinctly seen and remembered during my tender years. There flits dimly before me the image of a little girl whose name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea until one day I climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial ground and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it. "When the lid was closed, and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in black who was crying and wringing her hands went off with the other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death, and should never forget him." There were certain sounds too, he tells us, that had "a mysterious suggestiveness" to him. One was the "creaking of the woodsleds, bringing their loads of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them along over the complaining snow in the cold, brown light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath no friend, no brother there.' "Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard only at times, a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast; a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used to wonder what this might be. Could it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves after a high wind breaking on the long beaches many miles distant." After a year's study at Andover, he was fully prepared to enter Harvard University. In the Charlestown Navy Yard, at this time, was the old frigate _Constitution_, which the government purposed to break up as unfit for service, thoughtless of the desecration: There was an hour when patriots dared profane The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain, And one, who listened to the tale of shame, Whose heart still answered to that sacred name, Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tides Thy glorious flag, our brave _Old Ironsides!_ From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn, Thus mocked the spoilers with his schoolboy scorn: Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar; The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more! Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor's tread, Or know the conquered knee; The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea. Oh, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every thread-bare sail, And give her to the god of storms The lightning and the gale! This stirring poem--the first to make him known--was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1830, "with a pencil in the White Chamber _Stans pede in uno_, pretty nearly," and was published in the Boston _Advertiser_. From these columns it was extensively copied by other newspapers throughout the country, and handbills containing the verses were circulated in Washington. The eloquent, patriotic outburst not only brought instant fame to the young poet, but so thoroughly aroused the heart of the people that the grand old vessel was saved from destruction. The "schoolboy" had already entered Harvard College, and among his classmates in that famous class of 1829, were Benjamin R. Curtis, afterwards Judge of the Supreme Court, James Freeman Clarke, Chandler Robbins, Samuel F. Smith (the author of "My country, 'tis of thee"), G.T. Bigelow (Judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts), G.T. Davis, and Benjamin Pierce. In the class just below him (1830) was Charles Sumner; and his cousin, Wendell Phillips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Harvard during his Junior year. George Ticknor was one of his instructors, and Josiah Quincy became president of the college before he graduated. Throughout his whole college course Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained an excellent rank in scholarship. He was a frequent contributor to the college periodicals, and delivered several poems upon a variety of subjects. One of these was given before the "Hasty Pudding Club," and another entitled "Forgotten Days," at an "Exhibition." He was the class poet; was called upon to write the poem at Commencement, and was one of the sixteen chosen into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[6] After his graduation, he studied law one year in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It was at this time that _The Collegian_, a periodical published by a number of the Harvard under-graduates, was started at Cambridge. To this paper the young law student sent numerous anonymous contributions, among them "Evening, by a Tailor," "The Height of the Ridiculous," "The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The Spectre Pig." A brilliant little journal it must have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of wit, "Lochfast's" (William H. Simmons) translations from Schiller, and the numerous pen thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Habersham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote under the respective signatures of "Charles Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and "Geoffery La Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occasional contributor to _The Collegian_, and his brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes and Epes Sargent, in 1833, in writing a gift book called "The Harbinger," the profits of which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for the blind. FOOTNOTES: [6] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes. CHAPTER V. ABROAD. After a year's study of law, during which time the Muses were constantly tempting him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," young Holmes determined to take up the study of medicine, which was much more congenial to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his associates were his instructors for the following two years and a half; and then before taking his degree of M.D., he spent three years in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. Of this European tour, we find occasional allusions scattered throughout his writings. Listen, for instance, to this grand description of Salisbury Cathedral: "It was the first cathedral we ever saw, and none has ever so impressed us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five or six foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes.... These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison, what are best worth seeing of man's handiwork in Europe." "Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side," he says at another time. "A scene or incident in _undress_ often affects us more than one in full costume." Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all? Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta mænia Romæ_--rose before me, and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or since. "I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase, like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the 16--, and how during the celebration of its re-opening, two girls of the parish (_filles de la paroisse_), fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the _Te Deum_. All the crowd gone but these two _filles de la paroisse_--gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day. "Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang of struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzäpfli's restive horse sprang with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears and all else. I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick--the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle--and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water--which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life." Again he says: "I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane,' a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a cat-o'-nine tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward, I think he said some feet. "Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long after I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an old journal--the '_Magazin Encyclopédique_'--for _l'an troiséme_ (1795), when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it), swinging like a reed in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing happening in a stone spire." Nor does he forget that dear little child he saw and heard in a French hospital. "Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully businesslike; but the child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at this moment. '_C'est tout comme unserin_,' said the French student at my side." [Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.] The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes in another place, and now and then some incident that happened in England or Scotland, may be found among his writings; but when, after three years' absence, he returns to Cambridge and delivers his poem before the "Phi Beta Kappa Society," he begs his classmates to-- Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide, But take the leaflets gathered at your side. How affectionately his thoughts turned homeward is strikingly shown in the very first lines of the poem: Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire! Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre! Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear, Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year; Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow, If leaf or blossom still is fresh below! Long have I wandered; the returning tide Brought back an exile to his cradle's side; And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold, So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time, I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme; O more than blest, that all my wanderings through, My anchor falls where first my pennons flew! And read yet again in another place this loving tribute to the home of his childhood: "To what small things our memory and our affections attach themselves! I remember when I was a child that one of the girls planted some Star of Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner of our front yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after many years, as I looked in the little front yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Stars of Bethlehem in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. "Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom. The glossy, faintly-streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf. "Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone, with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. "This intersusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit of grape-like masses of crystalline matter. "But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the Stars of Bethlehem, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest home-feeling." To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, modestly termed by the author "A Metrical Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty appreciation of it in his _Fable for Critics_: There's _Holmes_, who is matchless among you for wit, A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flit The electrical tingles of hit after hit. In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites A thought of the way the new telegraph writes, Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully, As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully. And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning Would flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning. He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre, But many admire it, the English pentameter, And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse. With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse. Nor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praise As the tribute of Holmes to the grand _Marseillaise_. You went crazy last year over Bulwer's _New Simon_; Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on, Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes! His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes That are trodden upon, are your own or your foes. This tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise is indeed one of the finest passages in a poem abounding in point and vigor, as well as in fancy and feeling. Who can read these stirring lines without a sympathetic thrill for the watching, weeping Rouget de l'Isle, composing in one night both music and words of the nameless song? The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance, Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France, And all was hushed save where the footsteps fell On some high tower, of midnight sentinel. But one still watched; no self-encircled woes Chased from his lids the angel of repose; He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears; His country's sufferings and her children's shame Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame, Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong, Rolled through his heart and kindled into song; His taper faded; and the morning gales Swept through the world the war song of Marseilles! In this same Phi Beta Kappa poem may be found that beautiful pastoral, _The Cambridge Churchyard_, and Since the lyric dress Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness, the stirring verses on _Old Ironsides_ are here repeated. Said one who heard young Holmes deliver this poem in the college church: "Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling over with the mingled humor and pathos that have always marked his poetry, and sparkling with the coruscations of his peculiar genius, he delivered the poem with a clear, ringing enunciation which imparted to the hearers his own enjoyment of his thoughts and expressions." CHAPTER VI. CHANGE IN THE HOME. In 1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes took his degree of M.D. The following year was made sadly memorable to the happy family at the parsonage by the death of the beloved father. He had reached his threescore years and ten, but still seemed so vigorous in mind and body that neither his family nor the parish were prepared for the sad event. Mary and Ann, the two eldest daughters, were already married; the one to Usher Parson, M.D., the other to Honorable Charles Wentworth Upham. Sarah, the youngest, had died in early childhood, and only Oliver Wendell and his brother John remained of the once large family at the parsonage. Mrs. Holmes still continued to reside with her two sons in the old gambrel-roofed house which her father, Judge Oliver Wendell, had bought for her at the time of her marriage. The _Poet at the Breakfast-Table_ thus describes the delightful old dwelling now used as one of the College buildings: "The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.... Now the old house had wainscots behind which the mice were always scampering, and squeaking, and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long, white, potato-shoots went feeling along the floor if happily they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night for a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them. "Let us look at the garret as I can reproduce it from memory. It has a flooring of lath, with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling. "Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of the broadaxes, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped, as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroudlike cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces. There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and the empty churn with its idle dasher which the Nancys and Phebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinningwheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hanging the Salem witches. "Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had histories.... The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are sacred to silent memories. "Let us go down to the ground floor. I retain my doubts about those dents on the floor of the right-hand room, the study of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood, laid them to. That military consultations were held in that room when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition--all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted.... "In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion. Whether like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make us afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess; but they always seemed to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house before which they stood sentries. "Not so with the row of elms you may see leading up towards the western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose _liaison_ with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous. "The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of a woman is a glory to her, so are these green tresses that bank themselves against the sky in thick clustered masses, the ornament and the pride of the classic green.... "There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun." "Ah me!" he exclaims at another time, "what strains of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses." CHAPTER VII. THE PROFESSOR. In 1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth College, and pleasantly describes in _The Professor_, his "Autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes." The little country tavern where he stayed while delivering his lectures, he calls "that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions." And what a charming description this of the little town of Hanover, "where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance and the 'hills of Beulah' rolled up the opposite horizon in soft, climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he (the Professor) used to look through his old 'Dollond' to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried him by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of his harmless stroll, the spreading beech-tree." In 1840, Doctor Holmes was married to Amelia Lee Jackson, a daughter of Hon. Charles Jackson, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The first home of the young couple was at No. 8, Montgomery Place, the house at the left-hand side of the court, and next the farther corner. Here Doctor Holmes resided for about eighteen years,[7] and here all his children were born. "When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time, and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling in that little court where he lived in gay loneliness so long." In order to devote himself more strictly to his practice in Boston, Doctor Holmes resigned his professorship at Dartmouth College soon after his marriage. During the summer months, however, he delivered lectures before the Berkshire Medical School at Pittsfield, Mass., and established his summer residence "up among those hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic, in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow--a home," he adds, "where seven blessed summers were passed which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer." The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, including some twenty-four thousand acres, was bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob Wendell, about the year 1734. It was on a small part of this large possession that "Canoe Place," the pleasant summer home of Doctor Holmes, was built. Hawthorne was then living at Lenox, which is only a few miles from Pittsfield, and in his contribution to Lowell's magazine, _The Pioneer_, in 1843, he describes in his _Hall of Fantasy_, the poets he saw "talking in groups, with a liveliness of expression, or ready smile, and a light, intellectual laughter which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to and fro among them. In the most vivacious of these," he adds, "I recognized Holmes." Beside Hawthorne, there was Herman Melville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by on those "maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfrequently joined the brilliant circle in their summer trips to the Stockbridge hills. In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor--a man whose "generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars could ever spoil." Both young men were members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and after the death of Motley, Holmes became his biographer. Charles Sumner formed another of this pleasant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an amiable, blameless young man; pleasant, affable and cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was assaulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a public dinner in Boston, denounced in strong language, the shameful outrage as an assault not only upon the man, but upon the Union. At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of wit and wisdom they always were, though often composed upon the spur of the moment. Here is a part of one of them: Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame, Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame! With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap, She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap. Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes, And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains, Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives. Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please, Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese, And leave 'the old lady that never tell lies,' To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes. Ye healers of men, for a moment decline Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line; While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go The old roundabout road, to the regions below. You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens, And whose head is an anthill of units and tens, Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill. Poor drudge of the city! how happy he feels With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels! No _dodger_ behind, his bandannas to share, No constable grumbling "You mustn't walk there!" In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear; The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots. There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old church That tree at its side had the flavor of birch; O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks, Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks." By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps, The boots fill with water as if they were pumps; Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed, With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head. At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine poem entitled _Terpsichore_. Three years later he delivered _Urania, A Rhyme Lesson_ before the Boston Mercantile Library Association. "To save a question that is sometimes put," remarks the poet, "it is proper to say that in naming these two poems after two of the Muses, nothing more was intended than a suggestion of their general character and aim." FOOTNOTES: [7] From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes. CHAPTER VIII. THE LECTURER. When Doctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in 1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the preaching; and of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance to see the men they read about--to see the lions--for the lecturer is also a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred times a year." Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on the _English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother poets of this later day could not have the benefit of just such a clear, microscopic analysis! What the Autocrat himself thought of these lecturing tours through the country we have in his own words: "I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' before many audiences," he says; "more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of _buffos_. I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses in the exercise of my histrionic vocation. I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation." Of his audiences he writes again as follows: "Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the 'remarkably intelligent audience' of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats, a few old folks--shiny-headed--slant up best ear toward the speaker--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people--happy, but not always very attentive. Boys in the background more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there--in how many places! I don't say dull _people_, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. "Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated--a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other." "Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums--as he used to say--goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours after the lectur, jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'." To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes Breakfast. "I well remember," he said, "the first time I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House, which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of their flocks and districts.... I was in the large stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh, which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no nonsense about him, and I was not surprised, when, a few years later, I learned that he had become an Autocrat. "On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of the world." In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the _Boylston Prize Dissertation_, and in 1842, _Homoeopothy and its kindred Delusions_. The Boylston prizes were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these prizes, and the _Dissertations_, one of which was upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838. When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave a dinner to Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed the distinguished visitor in the following beautiful song: The stars their early vigils keep, The silent hours are near, When drooping eyes forget to weep-- Yet still we linger here; And what--the passing churl may ask-- Can claim such wondrous power, That Toil forgets his wonted task, And Love his promised hour? The Irish harp no longer thrills, Or breathes a fainter tone; The clarion blast from Scotland's hills Alas! no more is blown. And Passion's burning lip bewails Her Harold's wasted fire, Still lingering o'er the dust that veils The Lord of England's lyre. But grieve not o'er its broken strings, Nor think its soul hath died, While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, As once o'er Avon's side;-- While gentle summer sheds her bloom, And dewy blossoms wave, Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb And Nelly's nameless grave. Thou glorious island of the sea! Though wide the wasting flood That parts our distant land from thee, We claim thy generous blood. Nor o'er thy far horizon springs One hallowed star of fame. But kindles, like an angel's wings, Our western skies in flame! CHAPTER IX. NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. In the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publication in Boston, of a new literary magazine. They were fortunate in securing James Russell Lowell as editor, and one condition he made upon accepting the office was, that his friend, Doctor Holmes, should be one of the chief contributors. It was the latter, also, who was called upon to name the new magazine. Thus was the _Atlantic Monthly_ launched upon the great sea of literature--a periodical that has never lost its first high prestige. When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his first article for the new magazine, he remembered that some twenty-five years before, he had begun a series of papers for a certain _New England Magazine_, published in Boston, by J. T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. Curious, as he says, to try the experiment of shaking the same bough again and finding out if the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early wind-falls, he took the same title for his new articles. "The man is father to the boy that was," he adds, "and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the _New England Magazine_." To show the reader some family traits of this "young autocrat," we quote from these earlier articles the following fine extracts: "When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more eloquent analogy. "Once on a time, a notion was started that if all the people in the world would shout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the projectors agreed it should be done in just ten years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers were distributed to the selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the great occasion. When the time came everybody had their ears so wide open to hear the universal ejaculation of boo--the word agreed upon--that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so still since the creation." At the close of the year when the twelve numbers of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ were completed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and published in book form, the _British Review_ wrote of the illustrious author as follows: "Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long known in this country as the author of some poems written in stately classic verse, abounding in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of fancy, such as this, for example: The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred, Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard. And this first glint of spring-- The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, Naked and shivering with his cup of gold. He is also known as the writer of many pieces which wear a serious look until they break out into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last line, as with those on _Lending a Punch Bowl_, a cunning way of the writer's; just as the knot is tied in the whip cord at the end of the lash to enhance the smack. "But neither of these kinds of verse prepared us for anything so good, so sustained, so national, and yet so akin to our finest humorists, as _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_; a very delightful book--a handy book for the breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy chair; a musical chime of cups and saucers, fragrance of tea and toast within, and those flowers of frost fading on the windows without as though old Winter just looked in, but his cold breath was melted, and so he passed by. A book to possess two copies of; one to be read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared; and one to stand up in its pride of place with the rest on the shelves, all ranged in shining rows, as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding acquaintances. "Not at all like that ponderous and overbearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness and lovability. He is as true a lover of elegance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt; he has more wordly sense without the moral languor; but there is the same boy-heart beating in a manly breast, beneath the poet's singing robe. For he is a poet as well as a humorist. Indeed, although this book is written in prose, it is full of poetry, with the 'beaded bubbles' of humor dancing up through the true hippocrene and 'winking at the brim' with a winning look of invitation shining in their merry eyes. "The humor and the poetry of the book do not lie in tangible nuggets for extraction, but they are there; they pervade it from beginning to end. We cannot spoon out the sparkles of sunshine as they shimmer on the wavelets of water; but they are there, moving in all their golden life and evanescent grace. "Holmes may not be so recognizably national as Lowell; his prominent characteristics are not so exceptionally Yankee; the traits are not so peculiar as those delineated in the _Biglow Papers_. But he is national. One of the most hopeful literary signs of this book is its quiet nationality. The writer has made no straining and gasping efforts after that which is striking and peculiar, which has always been the bane of youth, whether in nations or individuals. He has been content to take the common, homespun, everyday humanity that he found ready to hand--people who do congregate around the breakfast table of an American boarding-house; and out of this material he has wrought with a vivid touch and truth of portraiture, and won the most legitimate triumph of a genuine book.... "Holmes has the pleasantest possible way of saying things that many people don't like to hear. His tonics are bitter and bland. He does not spare the various foibles and vices of his countrymen and women. But it is done so good-naturedly, or with a sly puff of diamond dust in the eyes of the victims, who don't see the joke which is so apparent to us. As good old Isaak Walton advises respecting the worm, he impales them tenderly as though he loved them." * * * * * How vividly every personage around that delightful "Breakfast-Table" is photographed upon the reader's mind! Can you not see the dear "Old Gentleman" just opposite the "Autocrat," as he suddenly surprises the company by repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in childhood? And the pale sweet "Schoolmistress" in her modest mourning dress? no wonder the eyes of the Autocrat frequently wandered to that part of the table and certain remarks are addressed to her alone! To tell the truth, we can't help falling in love with her ourselves! What a fine foil to this "soft-voiced little woman," is the landlady's daughter--that "tender-eyed blonde, with her long ringlets, cameo pin, gold pencil-case on a chain, locket, bracelet, album, autograph book, and accordion--who says 'Yes?' when you tell her anything, and reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb Junior, while her mother makes the puddings!" Then there is the "poor relation" from the country--"a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with parchment forehead and a dry little frizette shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, and a black dress too rusty for recent grief." Can you not hear the very tones of her high-pitched voice as she remarks that "Buckwheat is skerce and high." "The Professor" under chloroform--"the young man whom they call John," appropriating the three peaches in illustration of the Autocrat's metaphysics--the boy, Benjamin Franklin, poring over his French exercises--the Poet, who had to leave town when the anniversaries came round--and the divinity student whose head the Autocrat tries occasionally, "as housewives try eggs," all these are so real to the reader that he can but feel they were something more than imaginary characters to the writer. Among the poems that close each number of the _Autocrat_, are some of the finest in our language. _The Chambered Nautilus_, _The Living Temple_, _The Voiceless_, and _The Two Armies_, are full of inspiring thought and deep pathos, while _The Deacon's Masterpiece_, _Parson Turell's Legacy_, _The Old Man's Dream_, and _Contentment_, sparkle with the Autocrat's own peculiar humor. "When we think of the familiar confidences of the Autocrat," says Underwood, "we might liken him to Montaigne. But when the parallel is being considered, we come upon passages so full of tingling hits or of rollicking fun, that we are sure we are mistaken, and that he resembles no one so much as Sidney Smith. But presently he sounds the depths of our consciousness, explores the concealed channels of feeling, flashes the light of genius upon our half-acknowledged thoughts, and we see that this is what neither the great Gascon nor the hearty and jovial Englishman could have attempted, ... when the world forgets the sallies that have set tables in a roar, and even the lyrics that have set a nation's heart on fire, Holmes' picture of the ship of pearl will preserve his name forever." CHAPTER X. ELSIE VENNER. The _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was followed in 1859 by _The Professor_, a series of similar essays, in which we are introduced to "Iris" and "Little Boston," and begin to realize Doctor Holmes' inimitable skill in dramatic effect as well as in character painting. _The Story of Iris_ has been printed by itself in Rossiter Johnson's _Little Classics_, and reads like an exquisite prose poem; but after all, we like best to follow the delicate thread of narrative just as the professor himself has introduced it--a dainty aria whose harmony runs under and over and all through the deep philosophy and sparkling table talk of the book. It prepares us, too, for _Elsie Venner_, the "Professor's Story"--a novel whose weird conception holds us spell-bound from beginning to end, in spite of the sadness--"the pity of it." At the very first introduction to Elsie we have a hint of the strange hereditary curse that throws its blight over her whole nature: "Who and what is that," asks the new master, "sitting a little apart there--that strange, wild-looking girl?" The lady teacher's face changed; one would have said she was frightened or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up; she was winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie. Miss Dailey drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide her lips. "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she whispered softly, "that is Elsie Venner." The more we read of her, the more her sad beauty fascinates us. "She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its stony apathy the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love." The mother of Elsie, some months before the birth of her child, had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The instant use of powerful antidotes seemed to arrest the fatal poison, but death ensued a few weeks after the birth of her little girl. "There was something not human looking out of Elsie's eyes.... There were two warring principles in that superb organization and proud soul. One made her a woman, with all a woman's powers and longings. The other chilled all the currents of outlets for her emotions. It made her tearless and mute, when another woman would have wept and pleaded. And it infused into her soul something--it was cruel to call it malice--which was still and watchful and dangerous--which waited its opportunity, and then shot like an arrow from its bow out of the coil of brooding premeditation." But the cloud--"the ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien element in Elsie's nature"--is mercifully lifted just before her death. She had fallen into a light slumber, and when she awoke and looked up into her father's face, she seemed to realize his tenderness and affection as never before. "Elsie dear," he said, "we were thinking how much your expression was, sometimes, like that of your sweet mother. If you could but have seen her so as to remember her!" The tender look and tone, the yearning of the daughter's heart for the mother she had never seen, save only with the unfixed, undistinguishable eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps the understanding that she might soon rejoin her in another state of being,--all came upon her with a sudden overflow of feeling which broke through all the barriers between her heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed to her father as if the malign influence--evil spirit it might almost be called--which had pervaded her being, had at least been driven forth or exorcised, and that these tears were at once the sign and pledge of her redeemed nature. But now she was to be soothed and not excited. After her tears she slept again, and the look her face wore was peaceful as never before. While "Elsie Venner" is a purely imaginary conception, the author tells us that after beginning the story he received the most striking confirmation of the possibility of the existence of such a character. The reader is awakened to new views of human responsibility in the perusal of Elsie's life, and with good old pastor Honeywood learns a lesson of patience with his fellow creatures in their inborn peculiarities and of charity in judging what seem to him wilful faults of character. The Professor's story while centring the interest upon Elsie, gives numerous side glances of New England village life; and old Sophy, Helen Darley, Silas Peckham, Bernard Langdon, Dick Venner, and the good Doctor are portrayed in vivid colors. There is a deal of psychology throughout the book, and not a little theology--good wholesome theology too, as the following brief extract shows: "The good minister was as kind-hearted as if he had never groped in the dust and ashes of those cruel old abstractions which have killed out so much of the world's life and happiness. 'With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;' a man's love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad company here or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart, with divine love in it, beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes!" The pathos of poor Elsie's story is relieved now and then by humorous descriptions of country manners and customs. The Sprowles' party and the Widow Rowen's "tea-fight" give a vein of light comedy that rests the sympathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon a grave and troubled face. _The Guardian Angel_, the second novel of Doctor Holmes, was not published until 1867, but it is interesting to compare the two stories, for there is a strong family likeness between them. Both show the power of inherited tendencies, though Myrtle Hazard, the heroine of _The Guardian Angel_, has no alien element in her blood like that which tormented poor Elsie. With Myrtle "it was as when several grafts, bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her father and mother, but various ancestors came uppermost in their time before the absolute and total result of their several forces had found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting, some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life was to be fought between them, God helping her in her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other." The scene opens in a quiet New England village which is roused from its usual lethargy by the startling announcement in the weekly paper of a lost child. This is none other than the little orphan, Myrtle Hazard, who after a few dreary years in the dismal Wither's homestead, escapes by night in her little boat, is rescued by a young student from a frightful death at the rapids, and brought back to her distressed Aunt Silence by good old Byles Gridley--the true "Guardian Angel" of her life. When old Doctor Hurlbut "ninety-two, very deaf, very feeble, yet a wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases," comes to prescribe for the young girl, he says to his son: "I've seen that look on another face of the same blood--it's a great many years ago, and she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look, and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some danger of a brain fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.... I've been through it all before in that same house. Live folks are only dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face.--Handsome Judith to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother--there's where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood in her--look out for that--look out for that. ... Four generations--four generations, man and wife--yes, five generations before this Hazard child I've looked on with these old eyes. And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em in this child's face--it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice before--yes, yes--as long ago as when I was first married." Aside from the interest of the story there is a strange fascination in tracing the development of these various ancestral traits. "This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles Gridley in his _Thoughts on the Universe_--dead book that was destined to so grand a resurrection! Surely no one can deny the successive development of inherited bodily aspects and habitudes, and the same thing happens, the author avers, "in the mental and moral nature, though the latter may be less obvious to common observation." _The Guardian Angel_ while a deep study of the Reflex Function in its higher sphere, is not without its lighter, more mirthful side. Says _The London News_, "the story is exceedingly humorous and comic in the less serious chapters. There is no such minor poet in the whole range of fiction as the immortal Gifted Hopkins. In the character of Hopkins all the foibles and vanities of the literary nature are exemplified in the most mirthful manner. If Doctor Holmes has more characters like Gifted Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two continents is not in much danger of being extinguished." Here is a glimpse of the young poet when racked with jealousy: "He retired pensive from the interview, and flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he began thus: Another's! Another's! O the pang, the smart! Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge-- The barbed fang has rent a heart Which--which-- judge--judge--no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge--what a disgusting language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as grudge! And an impassioned moment arrested in full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme! Judge--budge--drudge nudge--oh!--smudge--misery!--fudge. In vain--futile--no use--all up for to-night!'" The next day the dejected poet "wandered about with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed his mother.... The most touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional on the result of accident was not evident--was a _broken heart_, which he left upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the language of flowers. His thoughts were gloomy, running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with visions of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw something of this, and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors--an affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from this point of view by those who have the natural outlet of verse to relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may be considered as implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who meditate an imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to write or a proof to be corrected." Gifted Hopkins survives the ordeal, and completes his volume of poems, _Blossoms of the Soul_. Good old master Gridley, who foresees what the end will be, offers to accompany the young poet in his visit to the city publisher. What a world of pathos there is in the fond mother's preparations for the momentous journey: She brings down from the garret "a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered with leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the cunning disposition of which, also, the paternal initials stood out on the rounded lid, in the most conspicuous manner. It was his father's trunk, and the first thing that went into it, as the widow lifted the cover, and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old chord of associations, was a single tear-drop. How well she remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young husband, and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits! O dear, dear! "But women decant their affections, sweet and sound, out of the old bottles into the new ones--off from the lees of the past generation, clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive it. Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She had not only the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring, but she felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his genius, and thought proudly of the time when some future biographer would mention her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance as that of the mother of Hopkins." The description of the various articles that went into the trunk is humorous enough. "Best clothes and common clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels and linens, socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the pickpockets busy for a week, with a paper of gingerbread and some lozenges for gastralgia, and 'hot drops,' and ruled paper to write letters on, and a little Bible and a phial with _hiera piera_, and another with paregoric, and another with 'camphire' for sprains and bruises. Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed against every malady from ague to zoster." The poet's interview with the publisher is one of the best things in the book, but to be thoroughly enjoyed, it must be read entire. The genial, kindly nature of Doctor Holmes is strikingly shown throughout the whole volume. Good, quaint Byles Gridley endears himself more and more to the reader, Gifted Hopkins finds in his heart's choice an appreciative, admiring audience of at least one, Cyprian Eveleth and young Doctor Hurlbut are most happily disposed of, Clement Lindsay receives his reward, Myrtle Hazard emerges from the conflict of mingled lives in her blood with the dross of her nature burned away, aunt Silence throws off her melancholy, Miss Cynthia Badlam repents of her evil manoeuvrings and dies "with the comfortable assurance that she is going to a better world," the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker learns to appreciate his patient wife--even Murray Bradshaw, the acknowledged villain of the book, is not without a few redeeming traits, and we close the volume with a sense of hearty goodwill and fervent charity toward all mankind. CHAPTER XI. FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. Between the writing of _Elsie Venner_ and _The Guardian Angel_, Doctor Holmes wrote a number of essays for the _Atlantic Monthly_, some of which were afterwards collected in the volume entitled _Soundings from the Atlantic_. _Currents and Counter-currents_ was published in 1861, and _Border-lines of Knowledge_ in 1862. The two latter books deal with scientific subjects, but are written in such an attractive style that they have been extremely popular not only with students but with the whole reading public. _Songs in many Keys_, a volume of poems dedicated to his mother, was published by Doctor Holmes in 1862. _Mechanism in Thoughts and Morals_ appeared in 1871, the same year that _The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_ was running as a serial in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and numerous stray poems were also written in this prolific decade. In 1872 the poet's breakfast talk was published in book form. It is interesting to compare these three volumes--The Autocrat, the Professor, and the Poet. As a series they are as necessary to one another as the three strands of a cable, and yet each volume is, in a certain way, completed in itself. Where in the whole range of the English language, or indeed, of any language, will you find such an overflow of spontaneous wit and humor? While in no sense a story or even a narrative, the breakfast talk is enlivened by wonderfully life-like characters. We can easily imagine ourselves sitting beside them at the social table, and just as it is in real life, these chance acquaintances touch us at different points, awaken various degrees of interest, and are at all times quite distinct from the observer's own individuality. There is not a page without its sparkle of humor, and nugget of sound philosophy beneath, which the reader appropriates to himself in a delightfully unconscious manner--for the time being, it is he who is the Autocrat, the Professor, the Poet! As some one has truly said, "It is our thoughts which Doctor Holmes speaks; it is our humor to which he gives expression; it is the pictures of our own fancy that he clothes in words, and shows us what we ourselves thought, and only lacked the means of expressing. We never realized until he taught us by his magic power over us, how much each of us had of genius and invention and expression." Each book has its little romance, and the "Poet" introduces a poor gentlewoman whose story interests us quite as much as does that of the two lovers. "In a little chamber," he says, "into which a small thread of sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month or six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to content itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without wronging any others of our company, I may call, as she is very generally called in the household, the Lady.... "From an aspect of dignified but undisguised economy which showed itself in her dress as well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a story of shipwrecked fortune, and determined to question our Landlady. That worthy woman was delighted to tell the history of her most distinguished boarder. She was, as I had supposed, a gentlewoman whom a change of circumstances had brought down from her high estate.--Did I know the Goldenrod family?--Of course I did.--Well, the lady was first cousin to Mrs. Midas Goldenrod. She had been here in her carriage to call upon her--not very often.--Were her rich relations kind and helpful to her?--Well, yes; at least they made her presents now and then. Three or four years ago they sent her a silver waiter, and every Christmas they sent her a bouquet--it must cost as much as five dollars, the Landlady thought. "And how did the Lady receive these valuable and useful things? "Every Christmas she got out the silver waiter and borrowed a glass tumbler and filled it with water, and put the bouquet in it and set it on the waiter. It smelt sweet enough and looked pretty for a day or two, but the Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em if they'd sent a piece of goods for a dress, or at least a pocket handkercher or two, or something or other that she could 'a' made use of.... "What did she do?--Why, she read, and she drew pictures, and she did needlework patterns, and played on an old harp she had; the gilt was mostly off, but it sounded very sweet, and she sung to it, sometimes, those old songs that used to be in fashion twenty or thirty years ago, with words to 'em that folks could understand.... "Poor Lady! She seems to me like a picture that has fallen face downward on the dusty floor. The picture never was as needful as a window or a door, but it was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see it there again, and I for one, should be thankful to have the Lady restored by some turn of fortune to the position from which she has been so cruelly cast down." Before the Poet closes his breakfast talk, the poor Lady has, through the efforts of another boarder, the Register of Deeds, recovered her property. Mrs. Midas Goldenrod makes frequent and longer calls--"the very moment her relative, the Lady of our breakfast table, began to find herself in a streak of sunshine she came forward with a lighted candle to show her which way her path lay before her. "The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how painfully! yet she exercised a true charity for the weakness of her relative. Sensible people have as much consideration for the frailties of the rich as for those of the poor. "The Lady that's been so long with me is going to a house of her own," said the Landlady, "one she has bought back again, for it used to belong to her folks. It's a beautiful house, and the sun shines in at the front windows all day long. She's going to be wealthy again, but it doesn't make any difference in her ways. I've had boarders complain when I was doing as well as I knowed how for them, but I never heerd a word from her that wasn't as pleasant as if she'd been talking to the Governor's lady." The strange little man, denominated "Scarabee," who had grown to look so much like the beetles he studied; the "Member of the House" with his Down East phrases; the little "Scheherazade" who furnishes a new story each week for the newspapers;--the good looking, rosy-cheeked salesman "of very polite manners, only a little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits, as one in the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of a customer;" the good old Master of Arts who makes so many sage remarks;--the young Astronomer with his heart confessions in the _Wind-clouds and Star-drifts_--all these are new acquaintances whom we are loth to part with, when the Landlady announces her intention of giving up the famous boarding-house, and the Poet drops the curtain. Would that the Old Master could yet be induced to give to the public those "notes and reflections and new suggestions" of his marvellous "interleaved volume!" CHAPTER XII. FAVORITES OF SONG. When we come to consider Doctor Holmes on the poet side of his many-sided nature, his own words at the famous Breakfast-Table are vividly brought to mind: "The works of other men live, but their personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself in his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity with all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his song.... A single lyric is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect one of those jewels fit to sparkle on the stretched forefinger of all time." In the poems of Doctor Holmes we are quite sure there are many just such lyrics that the world will not willingly let die. _The Last Leaf, The Voiceless, The Chambered Nautilus, The Two Armies, The Old Man's Dream, Under the Violets, Dorothy Q._--but where shall we stop in the long enumeration of popular favorites like these? Oliver Wendell Holmes touches the heart as well as the intellect, and that aside from his power as a humorist, is one great secret of his success. Listen, for instance, to this exquisite bit: Yes, dear departed, cherished days Could Memory's hand restore Your Morning light, your evening rays From Time's gray urn once more,-- Then might this restless heart be still, This straining eye might close, And Hope her fainting pinions fold, While the fair phantoms rose. But, like a child in ocean's arms, We strive against the stream, Each moment farther from the shore Where life's young fountains gleam;-- Each moment fainter wave the fields, And wider rolls the sea; The mist grows dark,--the sun goes down,-- Day breaks,--and where are we? And what a dainty touch is given to this _Song of the Sun-Worshipper's Daughter_! Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn Blushing into life new born! Send me violets for my hair And thy russet robe to wear, And thy ring of rosiest hue Set in drops of diamond dew! * * * * * Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light, Kiss my lips a soft good-night! Westward sinks thy golden car; Leave me but the evening star And my solace that shall be Borrowing all its light from thee. And where will you find a more pathetic picture than that of the old musician in _The Silent Melody_? Bring me my broken harp, he said; We both are wrecks--but as ye will-- Though all its ringing tones have fled, Their echoes linger round it still; It had some golden strings, I know, But that was long--how long!--ago. I cannot see its tarnished gold; I cannot hear its vanished tone; Scarce can my trembling fingers hold The pillared frame so long their own; We both are wrecks--a while ago It had some silver strings, I know. But on them Time too long has played The solemn strain that knows no change, And where of old my fingers strayed The chords they find are new and strange-- Yes; iron strings--I know--I know-- We both are wrecks of long ago. With pitying smiles the broken harp is brought to him. Not a single string remains. But see! like children overjoyed, His fingers rambling through the void! They gather softly around the old musician. Rapt in his tuneful trance he seems; His fingers move; but not a sound! A silence like the song of dreams.... "There! ye have heard the air," he cries, "That brought the tears from Marian's eyes!" The poem closes with these fine stanzas: Ah, smile not at his fond conceit, Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain; To him the unreal sounds are sweet, No discord mars the silent strain Scored on life's latest, starlit page The voiceless melody of age. Sweet are the lips of all that sing, When Nature's music breathes unsought, But never yet could voice or string So truly shape our tenderest thought, As when by life's decaying fire Our fingers sweep the stringless lyre! Though entirely different in style, _Bill and Joe_ is another of those heart-reaching, tear-starting poems. Listen, for instance, to these few verses: Come, dear old comrade, you and I Will steal an hour from days gone by; The shining days when life was new, And all was bright with morning dew, The lusty days of long ago When you were Bill and I was Joe. * * * * * You've won the judge's ermined robe, You've taught your name to half the globe, You've sung mankind a deathless strain; You've made the dead past live again; The world may call you what it will, But you and I are Joe and Bill. * * * * * How Bill forgets his hour of pride, While Joe sits smiling at his side; How Joe, in spite of time's disguise Finds the old schoolmate in his eyes,-- Those calm, stern eyes that melt and fill, As Joe looks fondly up at Bill. Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame? A fitful tongue of leaping flame; A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust That lifts a pinch of mortal dust; A few swift years and who can show Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe? The weary idol takes his stand, Holds out his bruised and aching hand, While gaping thousands come and go,-- How vain it seems, his empty show! Till all at once his pulses thrill: 'Tis poor old Joe's God bless you, Bill! The earlier poems of Doctor Holmes are frequently written in the favorite measures of Pope and Hood. This is not at all strange when we remember that in the boyhood of Doctor Holmes these two poets were the most popular of all the English bards. In his later poems, however, we find an endless variety of rhythms, and the careful reader will notice in every instance, a wonderful adaptation of the various poetical forms to the particular thought the poet wishes to convey. How well Doctor Holmes understands the "mechanism" of verse may be seen from his _Physiology of Versification and the Harmonies of Organic and Animal Life_, a valuable article published in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_ of January 7, 1875. "Respiration," he says, "has an intimate relation to the structure of metrical compositions, and the reason why octosyllabic verse is so easy to read aloud is because it follows more exactly than any other measure the natural rhythm of the respiration.... "The ten syllable, or heroic line has a peculiar majesty from the very fact that its pronunciation requires a longer respiration than is ordinary. "The cæsura, it is true, comes in at irregular intervals and serves as a breathing place, but its management requires care in reading, and entirely breaks up the natural rhythm of breathing. The reason why the 'common metre' of our hymn books and the fourteen syllable line of Chapman's Homer is such easy reading is because of the short alternate lines of six and eight syllables. One of the most irksome of all measures is the twelve-syllable line in which Drayton's Polyolbion is written. While the fourteen syllable line can be easily divided in half in reading, the twelve syllable one is too much for one expiration and not enough for two, and for this reason has been avoided by poets. "There is, however, the personal equation to be taken into account. A person of quiet temperament and ample chest may habitually breathe but fourteen times in a minute, and the heroic measure will therefore be very easy reading to him; a narrow-chested, nervous person, on the contrary, who breathes oftener than twenty times a minute, may prefer the seven-syllable verse, like that of Dyer's _Grongar Hill_, to the heroic measure, and quick-breathing children will recite Mother Goose melodies with delight, when long metres would weary and distract them. "Nothing in poetry or in vocal music is widely popular that is not calculated with strict reference to the respiratory function. All the early ballad poetry shows how instinctively the reciters accommodated their rhythm to their breathing: _Chevy Chace_, or _The Babes in the Wood_ may be taken as an example for verse. _God save the King_, which has a compass of some half a dozen notes, and takes one expiration, economically used, to each line, may be referred to as the musical illustration. "The unconscious adaptation of voluntary life to the organic rhythm is perhaps a more pervading fact than we have been in the habit of considering it. One can hardly doubt that Spenser breathed habitually more slowly than Prior, and that Anacreon had a quicker respiration than Homer. And this difference, which we conjecture from their rhythmical instincts, if our conjecture is true, probably, almost certainly, characterized all their vital movements." So much for the bare _vehicle_ of verse, but the poet himself, as Doctor Holmes says in his review of "Exotics," is a medium, a clairvoyant. "The will is first called in requisition to exclude interfering outward impressions and alien trains of thought. After a certain time the second state or adjustment of the poet's double consciousness (for he has two states, just as the somnambulists have) sets up its own automatic movement, with its special trains of ideas and feelings in the thinking and emotional centres. As soon as the fine frenzy, or _quasi_ trance-state, is fairly established, the consciousness watches the torrent of thoughts and arrests the ones wanted, singly with their fitting expression, or in groups of fortunate sequences which he cannot better by after treatment. As the poetical vocabulary is limited, and its plasticity lends itself only to certain moulds, the mind works under great difficulty, at least until it has acquired by practice such handling of language that every possibility of rhythm or rhyme offers itself actually or potentially to the clairvoyant perception simultaneously with the thought it is to embody. Thus poetical composition is the most intense, the most exciting, and therefore the most exhausting of mental exercises. It is exciting because its mental states are a series of revelations and surprises; intense on account of the double strain upon the attention. The poet is not the same man who seated himself an hour ago at his desk with the dust-cart and the gutter, or the duck-pond and the hay-stack, and the barnyard fowls beneath his window. He is in the forest with the song-birds; he is on the mountain-top with the eagles. He sat down in rusty broadcloth, he is arrayed in the imperial purple of his singing robes. Let him alone, now, if you are wise, for you might as well have pushed the arm that was finishing the smile of a Madonna, or laid a veil before a train that had a queen on board, as thrust your untimely question on this half-cataleptic child of the Muse, who hardly knows whether he is in the body or out of the body. And do not wonder if, when the fit is over, he is in some respects like one who is recovering after an excess of the baser stimulants." As a writer of humorous poetry, it is safe to say that Oliver Wendell Holmes is without a peer. _The Height of the Ridiculous_, _The September Gale_, _The Hot Season_, _The Deacon's Master-piece_, _Nux Postcoenatica_, _The Stethoscope Song_, how many a "cobweb" have they shaken from the tired brain! And where in the whole range of humorous literature will you find a more delightful morsel than the "_Parting Word_," that follows?-- I must leave thee, lady sweet! Months shall waste before we meet; Winds are fair and sails are spread, Anchors leave their ocean bed; Ere this shining day grows dark, Skies shall guide my shoreless bark; Through thy tears, O lady mine, Read thy lover's parting line. When the first sad sun shall set, Thou shalt tear thy locks of jet; When the morning star shall rise Thou shalt wake with weeping eyes; When the second sun goes down Thou more tranquil shalt be grown, Taught too well that wild despair Dims thine eyes, and spoils thy hair. All the first unquiet week Thou shalt wear a smileless cheek; In the first month's second half Thou shalt once attempt to laugh; Then in _Pickwick_ thou shalt dip, Lightly puckering round the lip, Till at last, in sorrow's spite, Samuel makes thee laugh outright. While the first seven mornings last, Round thy chamber bolted fast Many a youth shall fume and pout, "Hang the girl, she's always out!" While the second week goes round, Vainly shall they sing and pound; When the third week shall begin, "Martha, let the creature in!" Now once more the flattering throng Round thee flock with smile and song, But thy lips unweaned as yet, Lisp, "O, how can I forget!" Men and devils both contrive Traps for catching girls alive; Eve was duped, and Helen kissed, How, O how can you resist? First, be careful of your fan, Trust it not to youth or man; Love has filled a pirate's sail Often with its perfumed gale. Mind your kerchief most of all, Fingers touch when kerchiefs fall; Shorter ell than mercers clip Is the space from hand to lip. Trust not such as talk in tropes Full of pistols, daggers, ropes; All the hemp that Russia bears Scarce would answer lovers' prayers; Never thread was spun so fine, Never spider stretched the line, Would not hold the lovers true That would really swing for you. Fiercely some shall storm and swear, Beating breasts in black despair; Others murmur with a sigh You must melt or they will die; Painted words on empty lies, Grubs with wings like butterflies; Let them die, and welcome, too; Pray what better could they do? Fare thee well, if years efface From thy heart love's burning trace, Keep, O keep that hallowed seat From the tread of vulgar feet; If the blue lips of the sea Wait with icy kiss for me, Let not thine forget that vow, Sealed how often, love, as now! In his _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, Doctor Holmes reveals one of the secrets of humorous writing. "The poet," he says, "sits down to his desk with an odd conceit in his brain; and presently his eyes filled with tears, his thought slides into the minor key, and his heart is full of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work, saying-- "'To-night I would have tears;' and before he rises from his table he has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humor. These strange hysterics of the intelligence which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible nature; and all this is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely self-evolved by a hidden, organic process, as are the changing moods of the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation _ab extra_; and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration." Of Doctor Holmes' inimitable _vers d'occasion_ we select the following: At the reception given to Harriet Beecher Stowe on her seventieth birthday, at Governor Claflin's beautiful summer residence in Newtonville, Doctor Holmes read the following witty and characteristic poem: If every tongue that speaks her praise For whom I shape my tinkling phrase Were summoned to the table, The vocal chorus that would meet Of mingling accents harsh or sweet From every land and tribe would beat The polyglots of Babel. Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo Would shout, "We know the lady." Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom And her he learned his gospel from Has never heard of Moses; Full well the brave black hand we know That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe That killed the weed that used to grow Among the Southern roses. When Archimedes, long ago, Spoke out so grandly "_dos pou sto_,-- Give me a place to stand on, I'll move your planet for you, now," He little dreamed or fancied how The _sto_ at last should find its _pou_ For woman's faith to land on. Her lever was the wand of art, Her fulcrum was the human heart Whence all unfailing aid is; She moved the earth! its thunders pealed, Its mountains shook, its temples reeled, The blood-red fountains were unsealed, And Moloch sunk to Hades. All through the conflict, up and down Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown, One ghost, one form ideal, And which was false and which was true. And which was mightier of the two, The wisest sibyl never knew, For both alike were real. Sister, the holy maid does well Who counts her beads in convent cell, Where pale devotion lingers; But she who serves the sufferer's needs, Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds May trust the Lord will count her beads As well as human fingers. When Truth herself was Slavery's slave Thy hand the prisoned suppliant gave The rainbow wings of fiction. And Truth who soared descends to-day Bearing an angel's wreath away, Its lilies at thy feet to lay With heaven's own benediction. The following poem was read by Doctor Holmes at the Unitarian Festival, June 2, 1882. The waves upbuild the wasting shore: Where mountains towered the billows sweep: Yet still their borrowed spoils restore And raise new empires from the deep. So, while the floods of thought lay waste The old domain of chartered creeds, The heaven-appointed tides will haste To shape new homes for human needs. Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled The change an outworn age deplores; The legend sinks, but Faith shall build A fairer throne on new-found shores, The star shall glow in western skies, That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine, And once again the temple rise That crowned the rock of Palestine. Not when the wondering shepherds bowed Did angels sing their latest song, Nor yet to Israel's kneeling crowd Did heaven's one sacred dome belong-- Let priest and prophet have their dues, The Levite counts but half a man, Whose proud "salvation of the Jews" Shuts out the good Samaritan! Though scattered far the flock may stray, His own the shepherd still shall claim,-- The saints who never learned to pray,-- The friends who never spoke his name. Dear Master, while we hear thy voice, That says, "The truth shall make you free," Thy servant still, by loving choice, O keep us faithful unto Thee! Doctor Holmes being unable to attend the annual reunion of the Harvard Club in New York City, February 21, 1882, sent the following letter and sonnet which were read at the banquet: DEAR BROTHERS ALUMNI: As I am obliged to deny myself the pleasure of being with you, I do not feel at liberty to ask many minutes of your time and attention. I have compressed into the limits of a sonnet the feelings I am sure we all share that, besides the roof that shelters us we have need of some wider house where we can visit and find ourselves in a more extended circle of sympathy than the narrow ring of a family, and nowhere can we seek a truer and purer bond of fellowship than under the benignant smile of our _Alma Mater_. Let me thank you for the kindness which has signified to me that I should be welcome at your festival. In all the rewards of a literary life none is more precious than the kindly recognition of those who have clung to the heart of the same nursing mother, and will always flee to each other in the widest distances of space, and let us hope in those unbounded realms in which we may not utterly forget our earthly pilgrimage and its dear companions. Very sincerely yours, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. SONNET. Yes, home is sweet! and yet we needs must sigh, Restless until our longing souls have found Some realm beyond the fireside's narrow bound, Where slippered ease and sleepy comfort lie, Some fair ideal form that cannot die, By age dismantled and by change uncrowned, Else life creeps circling in the self-same round, And the low ceiling hides the lofty sky. Ah, then to thee our truant hearts return, Dear mother, Alma, Casta--spotless, kind! Thy sacred walls a larger home we find, And still for thee thy wandering children yearn, While with undying fires thine altars burn, Where all our holiest memories rest enshrined. POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHITTIER CELEBRATION. I believe that the copies of verses I've spun, Like Scheherazade's tales, are a thousand and one, You remember the story--those mornings in bed-- 'Twas the turn of a copper--a tale or a head. A doom like Scheherazade's falls upon me In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree; I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say If I came to a banquet without my bouquet? It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose, The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring, And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string. Yes, 'the style is the man,' and the nib of one's pen Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten; It is so in all matters, if truth may be told; Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould. How we all know each other! No use in disguise; Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the eyes; We can tell by his--somewhat--each one of our tribe, As we know the old hat which we cannot describe. Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw, you write, Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night, Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod, Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod. We shall say, 'You can't cheat us--we know it is you-- There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two. _Maëstro_, whose chant like the dulcimer rings; And the woods will be hushed when the nightingale sings. And he, so serene, so majestic, so true, Whose temple hypæthral the planets shine through, Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen We should know our one sage from all children of men. And he whose bright image no distance can dim, Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him, Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge (With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge. Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain? Do you know your old friends when you see them again? Hosea was Sancho! you Dons of Madrid, But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid! And the wood-thrush of Essex--you know whom I mean, Whose song echoes round us when he sits unseen, Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill. So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure, We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure-- Thee cannot elude us--no further we search-- 'Tis Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church! We think it the voice of a cherub that sings-- Alas! we remember that angels have wings-- What story is this of the day of his birth? Let him live to a hundred! we want him on earth! One life has been paid him (in gold) by the sun; One account has been squared and another begun; But he never will die if he lingers below Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe! CHAPTER XIII. THE MAN OF SCIENCE. "What decided me," says Doctor Holmes, "to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine, I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon my law studies as an experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself introduced to new scenes and new companionships. "I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences. The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined, just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass and scythe, used to glare upon me in my childhood from the _New England Primer_. The white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own cheeks which lost their color as I looked upon them. All this had to pass away in a little time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet all its aspects until they lost their power over my sensibility.... "After attending two courses of lectures in the School of the University, I went to Europe to continue my studies. I can hardly believe my own memory when I recall the old practitioners and professors who were still going round the hospitals when I mingled with the train of students in the �cole de Médicine." Of the famous Baron Boyer, author of a nine-volumed book on surgery, Doctor Holmes says, "I never saw him do more than look as if he wanted to cut a good collop out of a patient he was examining." Baron Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Napoleon, he describes as a short, square, substantial man, with iron-gray hair, red face, and white apron. To go round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaign of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannon of Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo. Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "_ce grand homme de lautre côté de la rivièrè_,--with his high, full-doomed head and oracular utterances; Lisfrance, the great drawer of blood and hewer of members; Velpeau, who, coming to Paris in wooden shoes, and starving, almost, at first, raised himself to great eminence as surgeon and author; Broussais, the knotty-featured, savage old man who reminded one of a volcano, which had well-nigh used up its fire and brimstone, and Gabriel Audral, the rapid, fluent, fervid and imaginative speaker. "The object of our reverence, however, I might almost say idolatry," adds Doctor Holmes, "was Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, a tall, rather spare, dignified personage, of serene and grave aspect, but with a pleasant smile and kindly voice for the student with whom he came into personal relations. "If I summed up the lessons of Louis in two expressions, they would be these: First, always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the matter you are considering. Second, always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible.... "Yes, as I say, I look back on the long hours of the many days I spent in the wards and in the autopsy room of La Pitié, where Louis was one of the attending physicians--yes, Louis did a great work for practical medicine. Modest in the presence of nature, fearless in the face of authority, unwearying in the pursuit of truth, he was a man whom any student might be happy and proud to claim as his teacher and his friend. And yet, as I look back on the days when I followed his teachings, I feel that I gave myself up too exclusively to his methods of thought and study. There is one part of their business that certain medical practitioners are too apt to forget; namely, that what they should most of all try to do is to ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to preserve life, or at least to prolong it if possible. It is not of the slightest interest to the patient to know whether three or three and a quarter inches of his lungs are hepatized. His mind is not occupied with thinking of the curious problems which are to be solved by his own autopsy, whether this or that strand of the spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form of degeneration. He wants something to relieve his pain, to mitigate the anguish of dyspnæa, to bring back motion and sensibility to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neuralgia. What is it to him that you can localize and name by some uncouth term, the disease which you could not prevent and which you can not cure? an old woman who knows how to make a poultice and how to put it on, and does it _tuto_, _cito_, _jucunde_, just when and where it is wanted, is better--a thousand times better in many cases--than a staring pathologist who explores and thumps and doubts and guesses and tells his patient he will be better to-morrow, and so goes home to tumble his books over and make out a diagnosis. "But in those days I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much more of 'science' than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had followed some of the courses of men like Rousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis--it would have been better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did learn in the wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of diseases get well of themselves, without any special medication--the great fact formulated, enforced and popularized by Doctor Jacob Bigelow." It is well known that Doctor Holmes detests the habit of drugging practised by so many physicians of the "old school," and in his address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, entitled Currents and Counter Currents in Medical Science, he makes a severe attack upon the inordinate use of medicines. "What is the honest truth," he says at another time, "about the medical art? By far the largest number of diseases which physicians are called to treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of reasonably bad treatment. Of the other fraction, a certain number will inevitably die, whatever is done: there remains a small margin of cases where the life of the patient depends on the skill of the physician. Drugs now and then save life; they often shorten disease and remove symptoms; but they are second in importance to food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic influences. That was a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the occasion of his attack after bathing. He asked three days to prepare his medicine. Time is the great physician as well as the great consoler. Sensible men in all ages have trusted most to nature." Of quacks and other humbugs, Doctor Holmes had an undisguised, wholesome contempt. "Shall we try," he says, "the medicines advertised with the certificates of justices of the peace, of clergymen, or even members of Congress? Certainly, it may be answered, any one of them which makes a good case for itself. But the difficulty is, that the whole class of commercial remedies are shown by long experience, with the rarest exceptions, to be very sovereign cures for empty pockets, and of no peculiar efficacy for anything else. You may be well assured that if any really convincing evidence was brought forward in behalf of the most vulgar nostrum, the chemists would go at once to work to analyze it, the physiologists to experiment with it, and the young doctors would all be trying it on their own bodies, if not on their patients. But we do not think it worth while, as a general rule, to send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets to be tested for gold. We know they are made to sell, and so with the pills and potions.... Think how rapidly any real discovery is appropriated and comes into universal use. Take anæsthetics, take the use of bromide of potassium, and see how easily they obtained acceptance. If you are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has brought forward any new remedy of value which the medical profession has been slow to accept, ask any fancy practitioner to name it. Let him name one,--the best his system claims,--not a hundred, but one. A single new, efficient, trustworthy remedy which the medical profession can test as they are ready to test before any scientific tribunal, opium, quinine, ether, the bromide of potassium. There is no such remedy on which any of the fancy practitioners dare stake his reputation. If there were, it would long ago have been accepted, though it had been flowers of brimstone from the borders of Styx or Cocytus." Homoeopathy is classed by Doctor Holmes among such "Kindred Delusions" as the Royal Cure for the King's Evil, the Weapon Ointment, the Sympathetic Powder, the Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley, and the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinsism. In making a direct attack upon the pretentions of Homoeopathy, Doctor Holmes declares at the outset that he shall treat it not by ridicule, but by argument; with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language. _Similia similibus curantur._ Like cures like, is one of the fundamental principles of Homoeopathy, and "improbable though it may seem to some," says Doctor Holmes with his usual impartial fairness, "there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that under certain circumstances, the very medicine which from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an over-tasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that _every_ cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician, that the Homoeopathy axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, "the _sole_ law of nature in therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent and pregnant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breath and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions." Among the many facts of which great use has been made by the Homoeopathists, is that found in the precept given for the treatment of parts which have been frozen, by friction with snow, etc. "But," says Doctor Holmes, "we deceive ourselves by names, if we suppose the frozen part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. The snow may even be actually _warmer_ than the part to which it is applied. But even if it were at the same temperature when applied, it never did and never could do the least good to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulating the application of what? of _heat_. But the heat must be applied _gradually_, just as food must be given a little at a time to those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm room, heat would be applied _very rapidly_, were not something interposed to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain frozen up until doomsday. Now the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy." Another supposed illustration of the Homoeopathic law is the alleged successful management of burns, by holding them to the fire. "This is a popular mode of treating those burns which are of too little consequence to require any more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably get well of themselves, without any trouble being bestowed upon them. It produces a most acute pain in the part, which is followed by some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye after exposure to strong light, and the ear after being subjected to very intense sounds. This is all it is capable of doing, and all further notions of its efficacy must be attributed merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this example affords any comfort to the Homoeopathist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it as it would be to convince the mistress of the smoke-jack or the flatiron that the fire does not literally draw the fire out, which is her hypothesis. "But if it were true that frost-bites were cured by cold and burns by heat, it would be subversive, so far as it went, of the great principle of Homoeopathy. For you will remember that this principle is that _Like_ cures _Like_, and not that _Same_ cures _Same_; that there is _resemblance_ and not _identity_ between the symptoms of the disease and those produced by the drug which cures it, and none have been readier to insist upon this distinction than the Homoeopathists themselves. For if _Same_ cures _Same_, then every poison must be its own antidote,--which is neither a part of their theory nor their so-called experience. They have been asked often enough, why it was that arsenic could not cure the mischief which arsenic had caused, and why the infectious cause of small-pox did not remedy the disease it had produced, and then they were ready enough to see the distinction I have pointed out. "O no! it was not the hair of the same dog, but only of one very much like him!" The belief in and employment of the "Infinitesimal doses," Doctor Holmes handles with the same fairness and acumen; but the absurd idea affirmed by Hahnemann that Psora is the cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, he treats as it deserves, with unqualified contempt. In conclusion, he says, "As one humble member of a profession which for more than two thousand years has devoted itself to the pursuit of the best earthly interests of mankind always assailed and insulted from without by such as are ignorant of its infinite perplexities and labors, always striving in unequal contest with the hundred armed giants who walk in the noonday and sleep not in the midnight, yet still toiling not merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted up my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike or to injure." Upon the contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, Doctor Holmes wrote an able treatise some forty years ago. This was reprinted with some additions, in 1855, and in an introductory note which accompanies the still later addition (1883), Doctor Holmes says, "The subject of this Paper has the same profound interest for me at the present moment as it had when I was first collecting the terrible evidence out of which, as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of reason could not help shaping the truth it involved. It is not merely on account of the bearing of the question--if there is a question--on all that is most sacred in human life and happiness that the subject cannot lose its interest. It is because it seems evident that a fair statement of the facts must produce its proportion of well-constituted and unprejudiced minds." The essay, a most valuable one, is republished without the change of a word or syllable, as the author upon reviewing finds that it anticipates and eliminates those secondary questions which cannot be for a moment entertained until the one great point of fact is peremptorily settled. There are but very few subjects, indeed, in medical science, that Doctor Holmes has not investigated, and investigated, too, most thoroughly.... In his article on "Reflex Vision," published in Volume IV. of the Proceedings of the American Academy, will be found a very interesting account of his experiments in optics. One, indeed, that will both interest and instruct. To him, as is well known, we are indebted for numerous improvements in the stereoscope; and in microscopes also, he has done some original and important work. Said an admirer of Doctor Holmes in referring to his career as a medical professor: "He always makes people attentive, and I have been told that there is no professor whom the students so much like to listen to. In one of his books he says that every one of us is three persons, and I think that if the statement is true in regard to ordinary men and women, Doctor Holmes himself is at least half a dozen persons. He lectures so well on anatomy that his students never suspect him to be a poet, and he writes verses so well that most people do not suspect him of being an authority among scientific men. Though he illustrates his medical lectures by quotations of the most appropriate and interesting sort, from a wonderful variety of authors, he has never been known to refer to his own writings in that way." In celebrating the silver anniversary year of his wedding with the Muse of the monthlies--meaning his reappearance in the _Atlantic_--he observed that during the larger part of his absence, his time had been in a great measure occupied with other duties. "I never forgot the advice of Coleridge," he said, "that a literary man should have a regular calling. I may say, in passing, that I have often given the advice to others, and too often wished that I could supplement it with the words, "And confine himself to it.'" CHAPTER XIV. THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. As the seventieth birthday of Doctor Holmes drew near, the publishers of the _Atlantic Monthly_ resolved to give a "Breakfast" in his honor. The twenty-ninth of August, 1879, was, of course, the true anniversary, but knowing it would be difficult to bring together at that season of the year the friends and literary associates of Doctor Holmes, Mr. Houghton decided to postpone the invitations until the thirteenth of November. Upon that day a brilliant company assembled at noon in the spacious parlors of the Hotel Brunswick, in Boston. Doctor Holmes and his daughter, Mrs. Sargent, received the guests, who numbered in all about one hundred. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John G. Whittier assisted in this ceremony, and after a couple of hours spent in sparkling converse, the company adjourned to the dining-room, where a sumptuous "Breakfast" was served to the "Autocrat" and his friends. At the six tables were seated writers of eminence in every department of literature. Grace was said by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., and after the cloth was removed, Mr. H.O. Houghton introduced the guest of the day in a few happily-chosen words. The company then rose and drank the health of the poet, after which Doctor Holmes read the following beautiful poem: THE IRON GATE. Where is the patriarch you are kindly greeting? Not unfamiliar to my ear his name, Not yet unknown to many a joyous meeting In days long vanished,--is he still the same, Or changed by years forgotten and forgetting, Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought, Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting, Where all goes wrong and nothing as it ought? Old age, the gray-beard! Well, indeed, I know him,-- Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey; In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem, Oft have I met him from my earliest day. In my old �sop, toiling with his bundle,-- His load of sticks,--politely asking Death, Who comes when called for,--would he lug or trundle His fagot for him?--he was scant of breath. And sad "Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher," Has he not stamped the image on my soul, In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl? Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance, And now my lifted door-latch shows him here; I take his shrivelled hand without resistance, And find him smiling as his step draws near. What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us, Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime, Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us, The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time! Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant, Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep, Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant, Life's flow less noisy, but the stream how deep! Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender, Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain, Hands get more helpful, voices grown more tender, Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain. Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers, Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past, Spreads its thin hands above the whitening embers That warm its creeping life-blood till the last. Dear to its heart is every loving token That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold, Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken, Its labors ended, and its story told. Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices, For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh, And through the chorus of its jocund voices Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry. As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying From some far orb I track our watery sphere, Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying, The silvered globule seems a glistening tear. But Nature lends her mirror of illusion To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes, And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion The wintery landscape and the summer skies. So when the iron portal shuts behind us, And life forgets us in its noise and whirl, Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us, And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl. I come not here your morning hour to sadden A limping pilgrim leaning on his staff,-- I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh. If word of mine another's gloom has brightened, Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came; If hand of mine another's task has lightened, It felt the guidance that it dares not claim. But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers, These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release; These feebler pulses bid me leave to others The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace. Time claims his tribute; silence now is golden; Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre; Though to your love untiring still beholden, The curfew tells me--cover up the fire. And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful, And warmer heart than look or word can tell, In simplest phrase--these traitorous eyes are tearful-- Thanks, Brothers, Sisters,--Children, and farewell! After the reading of the poem, the following reminiscence from Doctor Holmes' pen, was read by Mr. Houghton:-- "The establishment of the _Atlantic Monthly_ was due to the liberal enterprise of the then flourishing firm of Phillips & Sampson. Mr. Phillips, more especially, was most active and sanguine. The publishers were fortunate enough to secure the services of Mr. Lowell as editor. Mr. Lowell had a fancy that I could be useful as a contributor, and woke me from a kind of literary lethargy in which I was half slumbering, to call me to active service. Remembering some crude contributions of mine to an old magazine, it occurred to me that their title might serve for some fresh papers, and so I sat down and wrote off what came into my head under the title _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_. This series of papers was not the result of an express premeditation, but was, as I may say, dipped from the running stream of my thoughts. Its very kind reception encouraged me, and you know the consequences, which have lasted from that day to this. "But what I want especially to say here is, that I owe the impulse which started my second growth, to the urgent hint of my friend Mr. Lowell, and that you have him to thank, not only for his own noble contributions to our literature, but for the spur which moved me to action, to which you owe any pleasure I may have given, and I am indebted for the crowning happiness of this occasion. His absence I most deeply regret for your and my own sake, while I congratulate the country to which in his eminent station he is devoting his services." As Mr. Whittier had been obliged to leave the company before this, Mr. James T. Fields read his fine poem entitled "Our Autocrat," from which we quote the last verses: What shapes and fancies, grave or gay, Before us at his bidding come! The Treadmill tramp, the "One Hoss Shay," The dumb despair of Elsie's doom! The tale of Aris and the Maid, The plea for lips that cannot speak, The holy kiss that Iris laid On Little Boston's pallid cheek! Long may he live to sing for us His sweetest songs at evening time, And like his Chambered Nautilus To holier heights of beauty climb! Though now unnumbered guests surround The table that he rules at will, Its Autocrat, however crowned, Is but our friend and comrade still. The world may keep his honored name, The wealth of all his varied powers; A stronger claim has love than fame And he himself is only ours! Mr W.D. Howells then took the chair and was introduced to the company as the representative of the "mythical editor." In his remarks, Mr. Howells paid the following tribute to the Autocrat: "The fact is known to you all, and I will not insist upon it, but it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who not only named, but who made the _Atlantic_. How did he do this? Oh, very simply! He merely invented a new kind of literature, something so beautiful and rare and fine that while you were trying to determine its character as monologue or colloquy, prose or poetry, philosophy or humor, it was gradually penetrating your consciousness with a sense that the best of all these had been fused in one--a perfect form, an exquisite wisdom, an unsurpassable grace. This, and much more than any poor words of mine can say, was the Autocrat, followed by the Professor, and then by the Poet, at the same Breakfast-Table. We pledge him by all these names to-day, not only with the wine in our cups, but with the pride and love in our hearts, where we have enshrined him immortally young, in spite of the birthdays that come and go, and where we defy the future that lies in wait for our precious things, to know his quality better, or value his genius more highly than we." Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was then called upon to respond to the toast, "The girls we have _not_ left behind us," and after a few words in reply, she read a fine poem in honor of the illustrious guest. Charles Dudley Warner was then introduced, and after a short speech, read a poem by H. H., "To Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his seventieth birthday." In these charming lines almost every poem of Doctor Holmes is mentioned with rare tact and skill. At the close of the poem, President Eliot of Harvard, rose and said: "It seems to me that it is my duty to remind all these poets, essayists and story-tellers who are gathered here, that the main work of our friend's life has been of an altogether different nature. I know him as the professor of anatomy and physiology in the Medical School of Harvard University for the last thirty-two years, and I know him to-day as one of the most active and hard-working of our lecturers. Some of you gentlemen, I observe, are lecturers by profession, at least during the winter months. Doctor Holmes delivers four lectures every week for eight months of the year. I am sure the lecturers by profession will understand that this task requires an extraordinary amount of mental and physical vigor. And I congratulate our friend on the weekly demonstration of that vigor which he gives in our medical school. Most of you have perhaps the impression that Doctor Holmes chiefly enjoys a pretty couplet, a beautiful verse, an elegant sentence. It has fallen to me to observe that he has other great enjoyments. I never heard any other mortal exhibit such enthusiasm over an elegant dissection. And perhaps you think it is the pen with which Doctor Holmes is chiefly skilful. I assure you that he is equally skilful with scalpel and with microscope. And I think that none of us can understand the meaning and scope of Doctor Holmes' writing, unless we have observed that the daily work of his life has been to study and teach a natural science, the noble science of anatomy. It is his to know with absolute exactness the form of every bone in this wonderful body of ours, the course of every artery, and vein, and nerve, the form and function of every muscle, and not only to know it, but to describe it with a fascinating precision and enthusiasm. When I read his writings I find the traces of this life-work of his on every page. There are three thousand men scattered through New England at this moment who will remember Doctor Holmes through their lives, and transmit to their children the memory of him, as student and teacher of exact science. And let us honor him to-day, not forgetting--they can never be forgotten--his poems and essays, as a noble representative of the profession of the scientific student and teacher." Mr. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) followed President Eliot. "I would have travelled," he began, "a much greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest--Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new, a friend of mine said, 'The dedication is very neat.' 'Yes,' I said, 'I thought it was.' My friend said, 'I always admired it even before I saw it in _The Innocents Abroad_.' I naturally said, 'What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?' 'Well, I saw it some years ago, as Doctor Holmes' dedication to his _Songs in Many Keys_.' Of course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a bookstore and he did prove it. I had really stolen that dedication almost word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened, for I knew one thing for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing out and solved the mystery. Two years before I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and re-read Doctor Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously stole it. Perhaps I unconsciously stole the rest of the volume, too, for many people have told me that my book was pretty poetical in one way or another. Well, of course I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along right from the start. "I have met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he said--however, I am wandering away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do, that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that Doctor Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life; and as age is not determined by years, but by trouble and by infirmities of mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any one can truthfully say, 'He is growing old.'" Mr. Howells then introduced Mr. J.W. Harper of New York, who gave in his remarks a delightful pen portrait of Doctor Holmes, the lyceum lecturer, which we have elsewhere quoted. Mr. E.C. Stedman followed Mr. Harper with a brief speech and graceful poem. Mr. T.B. Aldrich spoke of the "inexhaustible kindness of Doctor Holmes to his younger brothers in literature," and Mr. William Winter paid his tribute to the honored guest by "The Chieftain," a poem which he named for the occasion _Hearts and Holmes_. Mr. J.T. Trowbridge then read a poem entitled "Filling an Order," in which Nature compounds for Miss Columbia "three geniuses A 1.," to grace her favorite city. She concludes her mixture as follows: Says she, "The fault I'm well aware, with genius is the presence Of altogether too much clay with quite too little essence, And sluggish atoms that obstruct the spiritual solution; So now instead of spoiling these by over-much dilution With their fine elements I'll make a single rare phenomenon, And of three common geniuses concoct a most uncommon one, So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal, Such poesy and pleasantry, packed in so small a parcel. So said, so done; the three in one she wrapped, and stuck the label _Poet, Professor, Autocrat of Wit's own Breakfast-Table._" C.P. Cranch then read a fine sonnet, and Colonel T.W. Higginson followed with felicitous remarks, a portion of which referring to the father of Doctor Holmes we have quoted elsewhere in the book. Letters of regrets were then read from R. B. Hayes, John Holmes, the poet's brother, George William Curtis and George Bancroft. Among others unable to be present, but who sent regrets, were Rebecca Harding Davis, Carl Schurz, Edwin P. Whipple, Noah Porter, George Ripley, Henry Watterson, George H. Boker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Maria Child, Gail Hamilton, Parke Godwin, Donald G. Mitchell, John J. Piatt, Richard Grant White, D.C. Gilman, J.W. DeForest, Frederick Douglass, J.G. Holland, George W. Childs, John Hay and W.W. Story. Mr. James T. Fields was obliged to fulfil a lecture engagement soon after the speaking began, else he would have read the following fairy tale:-- Once upon a time a company of good-natured fairies assembled for a summer moonlight dance on a green lawn in front of a certain picturesque old house in Cambridge. They had come out for a midnight lark, and as their twinkling feet flew about among the musical dewdrops they were suddenly interrupted by the well-known figure of the village doctor, which, emerging from the old mansion, rapidly made its way homeward. "Another new mortal has alighted on our happy planet," whispered a fairy gossip to her near companion. "Evidently so," replied the tiny creature, smiling good-naturedly on the doctor's footprints in the grass. "That is the minister's house," said another small personage, with a wink of satisfaction. "Perhaps it is a boy," ejaculated Fairy Number One. "I _know_ it is a boy!" said Fairy Number Two. I read it in the Doctor's face when the moon lighted up his countenance as he shut the door so softly behind him. "It _is_ a boy!" responded the Fairy Queen, who always knew everything, and that settled the question. "If that is the case," cried all the fairies at once, "let us try what magic still remains to us in this busy, bustling New England. Let us make that child's life a happy and a famous one if we can." "Agreed," replied the queen; "and I will lead off with a substantial gift to the little new-comer. I will crown him with Cheerfulness, a sunny temperament, brimming over with mirth and happiness." "And I will second your Majesty's gift to the little man," said a sweet-voiced creature, "and tender him the ever-abiding gift of Song. He shall be a perpetual minstrel to gladden the hearts of all his fellow-mortals." "And I," said another, "will shower upon him the subtle power of Pathos and Romance, and he shall take unto himself the spell of a sorcerer whenever he chooses to scatter abroad his wise and beautiful fancies." "And I," said a very astute-looking fairy, "will touch his lips with Persuasion; he shall be a teacher of knowledge, and the divine gift of eloquence shall be at his command, to uplift and instruct the people." "And I," said a quaint, energetic little body, "will endow him with a passionate desire to help forward the less favored sons and daughters of earth, who are struggling for recognition and success in their various avocations." "And I," said a motherly-looking, amiable fairy, "will see that in due time he finds the best among women for his companionship, a helpmeet indeed, whose life shall be happily bound up in _his_ life." "Do give me a chance," cried a beautiful young fairy "and I will answer for his children, that they may be worthy of their father, and all a mother's heart may pray that Heaven will vouchsafe to her." And after seventy years have rolled away into space, the same fairies assembled on the same lawn at the same season of the year, to compare notes with reference to their now famous _protégé_. And they declared that their magic had been thoroughly successful, and that their charms had all worked without a single flaw. Then they took hands, and dancing slowly around the time-honored mansion, sang this roundelay, framed in the words of their own beloved poet:-- Strength to his hours of manly toil! Peace to his star-lit dreams! He loves alike the furrowed soil, The music-haunted streams! Sweet smiles to keep forever bright The sunshine on his lips, And faith that sees the ring of light Round Nature's last eclipse! CHAPTER XV. ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. In _Pages from an old Volume of Life_, one of the latest books published by Doctor Holmes, we have a collection of most delightful orations and essays. Some of them we recognize as old, familiar friends. "Bread and the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly those sad, terribly earnest days when the civil war was rending not only our land but our hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers to read--these we must have, no matter what else we had to give up! War taught us, as nothing else could, what we really were. It exalted our manhood and our womanhood, and showed us our substantial human qualities for a long time kept out of sight, it may be, by the spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or literature. Those who had called Doctor Holmes "an aristocrat," "a Tory," forgot all their bitter feelings when he said, "We are finding out that not only 'patriotism is eloquence,' but that heroism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of a masked battery. The plain artisan, or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can show of the heroes of Crécy and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor. In _The Inevitable Trial_, an oration delivered on the 4th of July, 1863, before the City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes who had been falsely classed among the enemies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as follows:-- "Long before the accents of our famous statesmen resounded in the halls of the Capitol, long before the _Liberator_ opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line of clearage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the Union was to be endangered by slavery not through its interests, but through the change of character it was bringing about in the people of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that 'by an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.' "The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama. "The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The descendants of the men, 'daily exercised in tyranny,' the 'petty tyrants,' as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness." In this same grand oration occur also these eloquent words:-- "Whether we know it or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die; wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we must bring to it all the power with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast from heaven." In his _Hunt after the Captain_, we realize how near the "dull dead ghastliness of War" came to the fond father's heart as he sought his wounded hero through those dreary hospital wards! He knew of what he spake when appealing so eloquently to his fellow-patriots:-- "Sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the clover blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds with strange Southern wild flowers blooming over them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men everywhere, and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples." It will be remembered that this heart-stirring oration, _The Inevitable Trial_, from which the above is quoted, was delivered at one of the most discouraging periods of the war; when Lee was in Pennsylvania, and just before the capture of Vicksburg. Among the other essays and orations in _Pages from an old Volume of Life_, we find the _Physiology of Walking_, which contains many interesting facts concerning the human wheel, with its spokes and felloes. "Walking," says Doctor Holmes, "is a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early period of life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs, and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves forward. "Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man is shorter when he is walking than when at rest. We have found a very simple way of showing this by having a rod or stick placed horizontally, so as to touch the top of the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In walking rapidly beneath it, even if the eyes are shut, the top of the head will not even graze the rod. The other fact is, that one side of a man always tends to outwalk the other side, so that no person can walk far in a straight line, if he is blindfolded. _The Seasons_, and _The Human Body and its Management_, were originally published in the Atlantic Almanac. _Cinders from the Ashes_ gives some exceedingly interesting reminiscences. Richard Henry Dana, the schoolboy, is described by Doctor Holmes as ruddy, sturdy, quiet and reserved; and of Margaret Fuller he says, "Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the schoolgirls of unlettered origin, by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age. She came with the reputation of being 'smart,' as we should have called it; clever, as we say nowadays. Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance; as if she had other thoughts than theirs, and was not of them. She was a great student and a great reader of what she used to call 'náw-véls;' I remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aquamarine lustre in her light eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine. "A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, _de haut en bas_, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the Viraginian aspect." A composition of Margaret's was one day taken up by the boy Oliver. "It is a trite remark," she began. Alas! the embryo-poet did not know the meaning of the word trite. "How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," he exclaims, "after such a crushing discovery of her superiority?" Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, Doctor Holmes has given us numerous pen portraits. The old Academy building had a dreary look to the homesick boy, but he soon recovered from his "slightly nostalgic" state, and found not a few congenial spirits in his new surroundings. One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had a school discussion upon Mary, Queen of Scots, and for whom he has always cherished a lasting friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas Barnes. Another little fellow, with black hair and very black eyes, studying with head between his hands, and eyes fastened to his book as if reading a will that made him heir to a million, was the future professor, Greek scholar and Bible Commentator, Horatio Balch Hackett. One of the masters was the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and lovable man," says Doctor Holmes, "who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he describes as "tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, and great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and manner. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and his toga,--that is, his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever might have been the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his throat; and Doctor Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and had the firm fibre of a theological athlete. But none of the preceptors, it may be presumed, was so closely watched as the one to whom a dream had come that he should drop dead when praying. "More than one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about, with the expectation, let us not say hope, of seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later." In _Mechanism in Thought and Morals_, we find a deal of psychology as well as science. "It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, "that materialism has worked the strangest confusion. In various forms, under imposing names and aspects, it has thrust itself into the moral relations, until one hardly knows where to look for any first principles without upsetting everything in searching for them. "The moral universe includes nothing but the exercise of choice: all else is machinery. What we can help and what we cannot help are on two sides of a line which separates the sphere of human responsibility from that of the Being who has arranged and controls the order of things. "The question of the freedom of the will has been an open one, from the days of Milton's demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay of Mr. Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. It still hangs suspended between the seemingly exhaustive strongest motive argument and certain residual convictions. The sense that we are, to a limited extent, self-determining; the sense of effort in willing; the sense of responsibility in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in review of the past,--all of these are open to the accusation of fallacy; but they all leave a certain undischarged balance in most minds. We can invoke the strong arm of the _Deus in machina_, as Mr. Hazard, and Kant and others, before him have done. Our will may be a primary initiating cause or force, as unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief as the _oeternitas a parte ante_. The divine foreknowledge is no more in the way of delegated choice than the divine omnipotence is in the way of delegated power. The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it choose so to do." With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes rejects "the mechanical doctrine which makes me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, whether it work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of Buckle; whether it come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism." But he claims, too, the right to eliminate all mechanical ideas which have crowded into the sphere of intelligent choice between right and wrong. "The pound of flesh," he declares, "I will grant to Nemesis; but in the name of human nature, not one drop of blood,--not one drop." And this leads us to speak of Doctor Holmes' religious views. He attended King's Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal-minded of the Unitarian creed. When chairman of the Boston Unitarian Festival, in 1877, he gave the following list of certain theological beliefs that he has always delighted to combat. "May I," he begins, "without committing any one but myself, enumerate a few of the stumbling blocks which still stand in the way of some who have many sympathies with what is called the liberal school of thinkers? "The notion of sin as a transferable object. As philanthropy has ridded us of chattel slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all its logical consequences. "The notion that what we call sin is anything else than inevitable, unless the Deity had seen fit to give every human being a perfect nature, and develop it by a perfect education. "The oversight of the fact that all moral relations between man and his Maker are reciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's enlightened conscience before he can render true and heartfelt homage to the power that called him into being, and is not the greatest obligation to all eternity on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest power? "The notion that the Father of mankind is subject to the absolute control of a certain malignant entity known under the false name of justice, or subject to any law such as would have made the father of the prodigal son meet him with an account-book and pack him off to jail, instead of welcoming him back and treating him to the fatted calf. "The notion that useless suffering is in any sense a satisfaction for sin, and not simply an evil added to a previous one." In reviewing the life and the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Doctor Holmes with his usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all mankind, declares that the spiritual nature seems to be a natural endowment, like a musical ear. "Those who have no ear for music must be very careful how they speak about that mysterious world of thrilling vibrations which are idle noises to them. And so the true saint can be appreciated only by saintly natures. Yet the least spiritual man can hardly read the remarkable 'Resolutions' of Edwards without a reverence akin to awe for his purity and elevation. His beliefs and his conduct we need not hesitate to handle freely. The spiritual nature is no safeguard against error of doctrine or practice; indeed it may be doubted whether a majority of all the spiritual natures in the world would be found in Christian countries. Edwards' system seems, in the light of to-day, to the last degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived a hundred years later, and breathed the air of freedom, he could not have written with such old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic sermons.... "There is no sufficient reason for attacking the motives of a man so saintly in life, so holy in aspirations, so patient, so meek, so laborious, so thoroughly in earnest in the work to which his life was given. But after long smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of his thought, one cannot help asking, is this,--or anything like this,--the accepted belief of any considerable part of Protestantism? If so, we must say with Bacon, 'It were better to have no opinion of God than such an opinion as is unworthy of him.'" In speaking of the old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them together there were two atheists, Doctor Holmes pertinently remarks: "There is, undoubtedly, a strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity. "On the other hand, the physician has often been renounced for piety as well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity, led upward by what he sees the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that song of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this heathen could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical 'atheists.'" In coming back again as a regular contributor to the magazine which Doctor Holmes was so prominently identified with a quarter of a century ago, he indulges in a few entertaining reflections. "When I sat down to write the first paper I sent to the _Atlantic Monthly_," he says, "I felt somewhat as a maiden of more than mature effloresence may be supposed to feel as she passes down the broad aisle in her bridal veil and wealth of orange blossoms. I had written little of late years. I was at that time older than Goldsmith was when he died, and Goldsmith, as Doctor Johnson says, was a plant that flowered late. A new generation had grown up since I had written the verses by which, if remembered at all, I was best known. I honestly feared that I might prove the superfluous veteran who has no business behind the footlights. I can as honestly say that it turned out otherwise. I was most kindly welcomed, and now I am looking back on that far-off time as the period--I will not say of youth--for I was close upon the five-barred gate of the _cinquantaine_, though I had not yet taken the leap--but of marrowy and vigorous manhood. Those were the days of unaided vision, of acute hearing, of alert movements, of feelings almost boyish in their vivacity. It is a long cry from the end of a second quarter of a century in a man's life to the end of the third quarter. His companions have fallen all around him, and he finds himself in a newly peopled world. His mental furnishing looks old-fashioned and faded to the generation which is crowding about him with its new patterns and fresh colors. Shall he throw open his apartments to visitors, or is it not wiser to live on his memories in a decorous privacy, and not risk himself before the keen young eyes and relentless judgment of the new-comers, who have grown up in strength and self-reliance while he has been losing force and confidence. If that feeling came over me a quarter of a century ago, it is not strange that it comes back upon me now. Having laid down the burden, which for more than thirty-five years I have carried cheerfully, I might naturally seek the quiet of my chimney corner, and purr away the twilight of my life, unheard beyond the circle of my own fireplace. But when I see what my living contemporaries are doing, I am shamed out of absolute inertness and silence. The men of my birth year are so painfully industrious at this very time that one of the same date hardly dares to be idle. I look across the Atlantic and see Mr. Gladstone, only four months younger than myself, and standing erect with patriots' grievances on one shoulder, and Pharaoh's pyramids on the other--an Atlas whose intervals of repose are paroxysms of learned labor; I listen to Tennyson, another birth of the same year, filling the air with melody long after the singing months of life are over; I come nearer home, and here is my very dear friend and college classmate, so certain to be in every good movement with voice or pen, or both, that, where two or three are gathered together for useful ends, if James Freeman Clarke is not with them, it is because he is busy with a book or a discourse meant for a larger audience; I glance at the placards on the blank walls that I am passing, and there I see the colossal head of Barnum, the untiring, inexhaustible, insuperable, ever-triumphant and jubilant Barnum, who came to his atmospheric life less than a year before I began to breathe the fatal mixture, and still wages his Titanic battle with his own past superlatives. How can one dare to sit down inactive with such examples before him? One must do something, were it nothing more profitable than the work of that dear old Penelope, of almost ninety years, whom I so well remember hemming over and over again the same piece of linen, her attendant scissors removing each day's work at evening; herself meantime being kindly nursed in the illusion that she was still the useful martyr of the household." An author, in Doctor Holmes' opinion, should know that the very characteristics which make him the object of admiration to many, and endear him to some among them, will render him an object of dislike to a certain number of individuals of equal, it may be of superior, intelligence. The converse of all this is very true. "There will be individuals--they may be few, they may be many--who will so instantly recognize, so eagerly accept, so warmly adopt, even so devoutly idolize, the writer in question, that self-love itself, dulled as its palate is by the hot spices of praise, draws back overcome by the burning stimulants of adoration. I was told, not long since, by one of our most justly admired authoresses, that a correspondent wrote to her that she had read one of her stories fourteen times in succession." There is a deep meaning in these elective affinities. Each personality is more or less completely the complement of some other. Doctor Holmes thinks it should never be forgotten by the critic that "every grade of mental development demands a literature of its own; a little above its level, that it may be lifted to a higher grade, but not too much above it, so that it requires too long a stride--a stairway, not a steep wall to climb. The true critic is not the sharp _captator verborum_; not the brisk epigrammatist, showing off his own cleverness, always trying to outflank the author against whom he has arrayed his wits and his learning. He is a man who knows the real wants of the reading world, and can prize at their just value the writings which meet those wants." There is also another side of the picture. Doctor Holmes does not forget the trials of authorship. The writer who attains a certain measure of popularity "will be startled to find himself the object of an embarrassing devotion, and almost appropriation, by some of his parish of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, as he reads the extravagances of expression which pour over him like the oil which ran down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down to the skirts of his garments--an extreme unction which seems hardly desirable. We ought to have his photograph as he reads one of those frequent missives, oftenest traced, we may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which betrays the slender fingers of the sympathetic sisterhood. "A slight sense of the ridiculous at being made so much of qualifies the placid tolerance with which the rhymester or the essayist sees himself preferred to the great masters in prose and verse, and reads his name glowing in a halo of epithets which might belong to Bacon or Milton. We need not grudge him such pleasure as he may derive from the illusion of a momentary revery, in which he dreams of himself as clad in royal robes and exalted among the immortals. The next post will probably bring him some slip from a newspaper or critical journal, which will strip him of his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of his illustrations, has disrobed and denuded the grand monarque. He saw himself but a moment ago a colossal figure in a drapery of rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Emperor, as Bernini would clothe him. The image breaker has passed by, belittling him by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, levelling his most prominent feature, or even breaking a whole ink bottle against him as the indignant moralist did on the figure in the vestibule of the opera house--the shortest and most effective satire that ever came from that fountain of approval and commendation. Such are some of the varied experiences of authorship." Out of his literary career as a successful writer, Doctor Holmes was able to formulate many rules for the self-protection of authors, which were adopted unanimously at an authors' association which was held in Washington last September, and the remainder of his "talk" is devoted to extracts from their proceedings. Appended are a few of them: Of visits of strangers to authors. These are not always distinguishable from each other, and may justly be considered together. The stranger should send up his card if he has one; if he has none, he should, if admitted, at once announce himself and his object, without circumlocution, as thus; "My name is M. or N., from X. or Y. I wish to see and take the hand of a writer whom I have long admired for his," etc., etc. Here the author should extend his hand, and reply in substance as follows: "I am pleased to see you, my dear sir, and very glad that anything I have written has been a source of pleasure or profit to you." The visitor has now had what he says he came for, and, after making a brief polite acknowledgment, should retire, unless, for special reasons, he is urged to stay longer. Of autograph-seekers. The increase in the number of applicants for autographs is so great that it has become necessary to adopt positive regulations to protect the author from the exorbitant claims of this class of virtuosos. The following propositions were adopted without discussion: No author is under any obligation to answer any letter from an unknown person applying for his autograph. If he sees fit to do so, it is a gratuitous concession on his part. No stranger should ask for more than one autograph. No stranger should request an author to copy a poem, or even a verse. He should remember that he is one of many thousands; that one thousand fleas are worse than one hornet, and that a mob of mosquitoes will draw more blood than a single horse leech. Every correspondent applying for an autograph should send a card or blank paper, in a stamped envelope, directed to himself (or herself). If he will not take the trouble to attend to all this, which he can just as well as to make the author do it, he must not expect the author to make good his deficiencies. [Accepted by acclamation]. Sending a stamp does not constitute a claim on an author for answer. [Received with loud applause]. The stamp may be retained by the author, or, what is better, devoted to the use of some appropriate charity, as for instance, the asylum for idiots and feeble-minded persons. Albums. An album of decent external aspect may, without impropriety, be offered to an author, with the request that he will write his name therein. It is not proper, as a general rule, to ask for anything more than the name. The author may, of course, add a quotation from his writings, or a sentiment, if so disposed; but this must be considered as a work of supererogation, and an exceptional manifestation of courtesy. Bed-quilt autographs. It should be a source of gratification to an author to contribute to the soundness of his reader's slumbers, if he cannot keep him awake by his writings. He should therefore cheerfully inscribe his name on the scrap of satin or other stuff (provided always that it be sent him in a stamped and directed envelope), that it may take its place in the patchwork mosaic for which it is intended. Letters of admiration. These may be accepted as genuine, unless they contain specimens of the writer's own composition, upon which a critical opinion is requested, in which case they are to be regarded in the same light as medicated sweetmeats, namely, as meaning more than their looks imply. Genuine letters of admiration, being usually considered by the recipient as proofs of good taste and sound judgment on the part of his unknown correspondent, may be safely left to his decision as to whether they shall be answered or not. The author of _Elsie Venner_ thus excuses himself for opening the budget of the grievances of authors. "In obtaining and giving to the public this abstract of the proceedings of the association, I have been impelled by the same feelings of humanity which led me to join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, believing that the sufferings of authors are as much entitled to sympathy and relief as those of the brute creation." The birthday of the Emperor of Japan is the principal holiday of the year among his subjects, and as Saturday, November 3d, 1883, was the thirty-third anniversary of the birthday of Mutsuhito Tenno, the reigning Emperor, it was appropriately celebrated by the Japanese gentlemen in Boston. The Japanese department at the Foreign Exhibition was closed, and in the evening a banquet was given at the Parker House, about sixty gentlemen assembling in response to the invitation of Mr. S.R. Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese commission to the Boston Foreign Exhibition. The entrance to the banquet rooms was decorated with the Japanese and American colors, and at the head of the hall were portraits of the Emperor and Empress of Japan, with the colors of that country between them. The occasion was a very enjoyable one, and was especially interesting as it was a departure from the custom at ordinary dinners here, several gentlemen dividing with the presiding officer the duty of proposing the toasts. One of the most delightful orations of the evening given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was as follows: "I have heard of 'English' as she is spoke," being taught in ten lessons, but I never heard that a nation's literature could have justice done to it in ten minutes. An ancestress of mine--one of my thirty-two great-great-great-great-grandmothers--a noted poetess in her day, thus addressed her little brood of children: Alas! my birds, you wisdom want Of perils you are ignorant; Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight, Sore accidents on you may light; Oh, to your safety have an eye, So happy may you live and die. "In accepting your kind invitation, I confess that I was ignorant of my perils. I did not follow the counsel of my grandmamma with the four g's in having an eye to my own safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of being called on to answer for American literature, one of those 'previous engagements,' which crop out so opportunely, would have stood between me and my present trying position. I had meant, if called upon, to say a few words about a Japanese youth who studied law in Boston, a very cultivated and singularly charming young person, who died not very long after his return to his native country. Some of you may remember young Enouie--I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I know that I cannot pronounce it properly; for from his own lips it was as soft as an angel's whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, the loveliness of his character, captivated all who knew him. We loved him, and we mourned for him as if he had been a child of our own soil. But of him I must say no more. "In speaking of American literature we naturally think first of our historical efforts. We see that books hold but a small part of American history. The axe and the ploughshare are the two pens with which our New World annals have been principally written, with schoolhouses as notes of interrogation, and steeples as exclamation points of pious adoration and gratitude. Within half a century the railroad has ruled our broad page all over, and rewritten the story, with States for new chapters and cities for paragraphs. This is the kind of history which he who runs may read, and he must run fast and far if he means to read any considerable part of it. "But we must not forget our political history, perishable in great measure as to its form, long enduring in its results. This literature is the index of our progress--in both directions--forward and the contrary. From the days of Washington and Franklin to the times still fresh in our memory, from the Declaration of Independence to the proclamation which enfranchised the colored race, our political literature, with all its terrible blunders and short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest expression the world has yet seen of what a free people and a free press have to say and to show for themselves. "But besides 'Congressional Documents' and the like, the terror of librarians and the delight of paper-makers, we do a good deal of other printing. We make some books, a good many books, a great many books, so many that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's gospel would hardly be an extravagance in speaking of them. And among these are a number of histories which hold an honorable place on the shelves of all the great libraries of Christendom. Why should I enumerate them? For history is a Boston specialty. From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to those of Motley and Parkman, we have always had an historian or two on hand, as they used always to have a lion or two in the Tower of London. "Next to the historians naturally come the story-tellers and romancers. The essential difference is--I would not apply the rough side of the remark to historians like the best of our own, but it is very often the fact--that history tells lies about real persons and fiction tells truth through the mouths of unreal ones. England threw open the side doors of its library to Irving. The continent flung wide its folding doors to Cooper. Laplace was once asked who was the greatest mathematician of Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' he answered. 'I thought Gauss was,' the questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined Laplace, 'who was the greatest mathematician of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathematician of Europe.' So, I suppose we might say _The Pilot_ is or was the most popular book ever written in America, but _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is the most popular story ever published in the world. And if _The Heart of Mid Lothian_ added a new glory of romance to the traditions of Auld Reekie, _The Scarlet Letter_ did as much for the memories of our own New England. I need not speak of the living writers, some of whom are among us, who have changed the old scornful question into 'Who _does not_ read an American book?' "As to poetical literature, I must confess that, except a line or two of Philip Freneau's, I know little worthy of special remembrance before the beginning of this century, always excepting, as in duty bound, the verses of my manifold grandmother. The conditions of the country were unfavorable to the poetical habit of mind. The voice that broke the silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth baritone, if I may borrow a musical term, with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and manly quality. Then came Longfellow, the poet of the fireside, of the library, of all gentle souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed a soft contralto that was melody itself, and Emerson, with notes that reached an octave higher than any American poet--a singer whose Voice fell like a falling star. Like that of the bird addressed by Wordsworth-- At once far off and near, it was a Cry Which made [us] look a thousand ways, In bush and tree and sky; for whether it soared from the earth or dropped from heaven, it was next to impossible to divine. "I will not speak of the living poets of the old or the new generation. It belongs to the young to give the heartiest welcome to the new brood of singers. Samuel Rogers said that when he heard a new book praised, he read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his later essays, advises us never to read a book that is not a year old. This I will say, that every month shows us in the magazines, and even in the newspapers, verse that would have made a reputation in the early days of the _North American Review_, but which attracts little more notice than a breaking bubble. "A great improvement is noticeable in the character of criticism, which is leaving the hands of the 'general utility' writers and passing into the hands of experts. The true critic is the last product of literary civilization. It costs as great an effort to humanize the being known by that name as it does to make a good church-member of a scalping savage. Criticism is a noble function, but only so in noble hands. We have just welcomed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English representative; we could not secure our creditors more handsomely than we have done by leaving Mr. Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe return. "One more hopeful mark of literary progress is seen in our cyclopædias, our periodicals, our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. I would commend to the attention of our enlightened friends such works as Mr. Pool's great _Index to Periodical Literature_, Mr. Alibone's _Dictionary of Authors_, and the _Index Medicus_, now publishing at Washington--a wonderful achievement of organized industry, still carried on under the superintendence of Doctor Billings, and well deserving examination by all scholars, whatever their calling. "We have learned so much from our Japanese friends, that we should be thankful to pay them back something in return. With art such as they have, they must also have a literature showing the same originality, grace, facility and simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will carry away something of our intellectual products, as well as those good wishes which follow them wherever they show their beautiful works of art and their pleasant and always welcome faces." CHAPTER XVI. THE HOME CIRCLE. Doctor Holmes has two sons and one daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, his eldest child, was born in 1841. When a young lad, he attended the school of Mr. E.S. Dixwell, in Boston, and it was here that he met his future wife, Miss Fannie Dixwell. In his graduating year at Harvard College (1861), he joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, commanded by Major Thomas G. Stevenson. The company was at that time stationed at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, and it was there that young Holmes wrote his poem for Class Day. He served three years in the war, and was wounded first in the breast at Ball's Bluff, and then in the neck at the Battle of Antietam. In Doctor Holmes' _Hunt after the Captain_, we have not only a vivid picture of war times, but a most touching revelation of fatherly love and solicitude. The young captain was wounded yet again at Sharpsburgh, and was afterwards brevetted as Lieutenant-Colonel. During General Grant's campaign of 1864 he served as aide-de-camp to Brigadier-General H.G. Wright. After the war he entered the Harvard Law School, and in 1866 received the degree of LL. B. Since then he has practised law in Boston, and has written many valuable articles upon legal subjects. His edition of Kent's _Commentaries on American Law_, to which he devoted three years of careful labor, has received the highest encomiums, and his volume on _The Common Law_ forms an indispensable part of every law student's library. In 1882, he was appointed Professor in the Harvard Law School, and a few weeks later was elected Justice in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. At the Lawyers' Banquet, given January 30th, 1883, at the Hotel Vendome, Honorable William G. Russell thus introduced the father of the newly-appointed judge: "We come now to a many-sided subject, and I know not on which side to attack him with any hope of capturing him. I might hail him as our poet, for he was born a poet; they are all born so. If he didn't lisp in numbers, it was because he spoke plainly at a very early age. I might hail him as physician, and a long and well-spent life in that profession would justify it; but I don't believe it will ever be known whether he has cured more cases of dyspepsia and blues by his poems or his powders and his pills. I might hail him as professor, and as professor _emeritus_ he has added a new wreath to his brow. I might hail him as Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for there he had a long reign. He will defend himself with courage, for he never showed the white feather but once, and that is, that he does not dare to be as funny as he can. A tough subject, surely, and I must try him on the tender side, the paternal. I give you the father who went in search of a captain, and, finding him, presents to us now his son, the judge." On rising, Doctor Holmes held up a sheet of paper, and said, "You see before you" (referring to the paper) "all that you have to fear or hope. For thirty-five years I have taught anatomy. I have often heard of the roots of the tongue, but I never found them. The danger of a tongue let loose you have had opportunity to know before, but the danger of a scrap of paper like this is so trivial that I hardly need to apologize for it." His Honor's father yet remains, His proud paternal posture firm in; But, while his right he still maintains To wield the household rod and reins, He bows before the filial ermine. What curious tales has life in store, With all its must-bes and its may-bes! The sage of eighty years and more Once crept a nursling on the floor,-- Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies. The fearless soldier, who has faced The serried bayonets' gleam appalling, For nothing save a pin misplaced The peaceful nursery has disgraced With hours of unheroic bawling. The mighty monarch, whose renown Fills up the stately page historic, Has howled to waken half the town, And finished off by gulping down His castor oil or paregoric. The justice, who, in gown and cap, Condemns a wretch to strangulation, Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap, And sprawled across his mother's lap For wholesome law's administration. Ah, life has many a reef to shun Before in port we drop our anchor, But when its course is nobly run Look aft! for there the work was done. Life owes its headway to the spanker! Yon seat of justice well might awe The fairest manhood's half-blown summer; There Parsons scourged the laggard law, There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw,-- What ghosts to hail the last new-comer! One cause of fear I faintly name,-- The dread lest duty's dereliction Shall give so rarely cause for blame Our guileless voters will exclaim, "No need of human jurisdiction!" What keeps the doctor's trade alive? Bad air, bad water; more's the pity! But lawyers walk where doctors drive, And starve in streets where surgeons thrive, Our Boston is so pure a city. What call for judge or court, indeed, When righteousness prevails so through it Our virtuous car-conductors need Only a card whereon they read "Do right; it's naughty not to do it!" The whirligig of time goes round, And changes all things but affection; One blessed comfort may be found In heaven's broad statute which has bound Each household to its head's protection. If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused, A sire may claim a son's devotion To shield his innocence abused, As old Anchises freely used His offspring's legs for locomotion. You smile. You did not come to weep, Nor I my weakness to be showing; And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap, Have served their simple use,--to keep A father's eyes from overflowing. Doctor Holmes' daughter, who bore her mother's name, Amelia Jackson, married the late John Turner Sargent. In her _Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club_, we have some pithy remarks of Doctor Holmes'. To speak without premeditation, he says, on a carefully written essay, made him feel as he should if, at a chemical lecture, somebody should pass around a precipitate, and when the mixture had become turbid should request him to give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies continually rising in such a discussion from the want of a proper understanding of terms, always made him feel as if quicksilver had been substituted for the ordinary silver of speech. The only true way to criticize such an essay was to take it home, slowly assimilate it, and not talk about it until it had become a part of one's self. Edward, the youngest son of Doctor Holmes, had chosen the same profession as his brother. It was at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly Farms, that Doctor Holmes passed most of his summers. The pretty, cream-colored house, with its broad veranda in front, can be easily seen from the station; but to appreciate the charms of this pleasant country home, one should catch a glimpse of the cosey interior. Robert Rantoul, John T. Morse and Henry Lee were neighbors of Doctor Holmes at Beverly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home was not far distant. After eighteen years' residence at No. 8 Montgomery Place, Doctor Holmes moved to 164 Charles street, where he lived about twelve years. His home in Boston was at No. 296 Beacon street. "We die out of houses," says the poet, "just as we die out of our bodies.... The body has been called the house we live in; the house is quite as much the body we live in.... The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes around it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose, outside wrapper.... Our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer nature. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is." The poet's home on Beacon street well illustrates the above extract. I shall not soon forget the charming picture that greeted me, one gray winter day, as I was ushered into the poet's cheerful study. A blazing wood fire was crackling on the hearth, and the ruddy glow was reflected now on the stately features of "Dorothy Q.," now on the Copley portrait of old Doctor Cooper, and now with a peculiar Rembrandt effect upon the low rows of books, the orderly desk, and the kind, cordial face of the poet himself. An "Emerson Calendar" was hanging over the mantel, and after calling my attention to the excellent picture upon it of the old home at Concord, Doctor Holmes began to talk of his brother poet in terms of warmest affection. [Illustration: Hand written Poem signed by Oliver Wendell Holmes] As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth Century Club, the difference between Emerson's poetry and that of others with whom he might naturally be compared, was that of algebra and arithmetic. The fascination of his poems was in their spiritual depth and sincerity and their all pervading symbolism. Emerson's writings in prose and verse were worthy of all honor and admiration, but his manhood was the noblest of all his high endowments. A bigot here and there might have avoided meeting him, but if He who knew what was in men had wandered from door to door in New England, as of old in Palestine, one of the thresholds which "those blessed feet" would have crossed would have been that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson. The view from the broad bay window in Doctor Holmes' study, recalled his own description: Through my north window, in the wintry weather, My airy oriel on the river shore, I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together, Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar. The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen, Lets the loose water waft him as it will; The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden, Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still. A microscopical apparatus placed under another window in the study, reminds the visitor of the "man of science," while the books-- A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time That talk all tongues and breathe of every clime-- speak in eloquent numbers of the "man of letters." There is the Plato on the lower shelf, with the inscription, Ezra Stiles, 1766, to which Doctor Holmes alludes in his tribute to the New England clergy. Here is the hand-lens imported by the Reverend John Prince, of Salem, and just before us, in the "unpretending row of local historians," is Jeremy Belknap's _History of New Hampshire_, "in the pages of which," says Doctor Holmes, "may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man in many respects, among all the older clergymen,--preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. This manifold individual," adds Doctor Holmes, "was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler." [Illustration: DR. HOLMES' LIBRARY, BEACON ST.] Here is the _Aëtius_ found one never-to-be-forgotten rainy day, in that dingy bookshop in Lyons, and here the vellum-bound _Tulpius_, "my only reading," says Doctor Holmes, "when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to this day still fresh in my memory." Here, too, is the _Schenckius_,--"the folio filled with _casus rariores_, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall on the boulevard--and here the noble old _Vesalius_, with its grand frontispiece not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old _Ambroise Parié_, long waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius, with his eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of all would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian _Berengarius Carpensis_," and many other rare volumes, dear to the heart of every bibliophile. Glancing again from the window, I catch a glimpse of the West Boston Bridge, and recall the poet's description of the "crunching of ice at the edges of the river as the tide rises and falls, the little cluster of tent-like screens on the frozen desert, the excitement of watching the springy hoops, the mystery of drawing up life from silent, unseen depths." With his opera glass he watches the boys and men, black and white, fishing over the rails of the bridge "as hopefully as if the river were full of salmon." At certain seasons, he observes, there will now and then be captured a youthful and inexperienced codfish, always, however, of quite trivial dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no sooner gone abroad than the enthusiasts of the art come flocking down to the river and cast their lines in side by side, until they look like a row of harp-strings for number. "That a codfish is once in a while caught," says Doctor Holmes, "I have asserted to be a fact; but I have often watched the anglers, and do not remember ever seeing one drawn from the water, or even any unequivocal symptom of a bite. The spring sculpin and the flabby, muddy flounder are the common rewards of the angler's toil. The silhouette figures on the white background enliven the winter landscape, but now the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over and the whole study is aglow with light! Truly "winter _is_ a cheerful season to people who have open fireplaces;" and who will not agree with our poet-philosopher when he says, "A house without these is like a face without eyes, and that never smiles. I have seen respectability and amiability grouped over the air-tight stove; I have seen virtue and intelligence hovering over the register; but I have never seen true happiness in a family circle where the faces were not illuminated by the blaze of an open fireplace." A well-known journalist writes as follows of Doctor Holmes "at home." "All who pay their respects to the distinguished Autocrat will find the genial, merry gentleman whose form and kindly greeting all admirers have anticipated while reading his sparkling poems. He is the perfect essence of wit and hospitality--courteous, amiable and entertaining to a degree which is more easily remembered than imparted or described. If the caller expects to find blue-blood snobbishness at 296 Beacon street, he will be disappointed. It is one of the most elegant and charming residences on that broad and fashionable thoroughfare, but far less pretentious, both inwardly and outwardly, than many of the others. For an uninterrupted period of forty-seven years, Doctor Holmes has lived in Boston, and for the last dozen years he has occupied his present residence on Beacon street. "The chief point of attraction in the present residence--for the visitor as well as the host--is the magnificent and spacious library, which may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's workshop. It is up one flight, and seemingly occupies the entire rear half of the whole building on this floor. It is a very inviting room in every respect, and from the spacious windows overlooking the broad expanse of the Charles River, there can be had an extensive view of the surrounding suburbs in the northerly, eastern and western directions. On a clear day there can be more or less distinctly described the cities and towns of Cambridge, Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Malden, Revere, Everett, Chelsea, Charlestown and East Boston. Even in the picture can be recognized the lofty tower of the Harvard Memorial Hall, which is but a few steps from the doctor's birthplace and first home. Arthur Gilman, in his admirable pen and pencil sketches of the homes of the American poets, makes a happy and appropriate allusion to the Autocrat's library. 'The ancient Hebrew,' he says, 'always had a window open toward Jerusalem, the city about which his most cherished hopes and memories clustered, and this window gives its owner the pleasure of looking straight to the place of his birth, and thus of freshening all the happy memories of a successful life.' "In renewing his old-time acquaintance with the _Atlantic_ family circle, the Autocrat recognized the modern invention of the journalistic interviewer, and submitted some plans for his regulation, to be considered by the various local governments. His idea is that the interviewer is a product of our civilization, one who does for the living what the undertaker does for the dead, taking such liberties as he chooses with the subject of his mental and conversational manipulations, whom he is to arrange for public inspection. 'The interview system has its legitimate use,' says Doctor Holmes, 'and is often a convenience to politicians, and may even gratify the vanity and serve the interests of an author.' He very properly believes, however, that in its abuse it is an infringement of the liberty of the private citizen to be ranked with the edicts of the council of ten, the decrees of the star chamber, the _lettres de cachet_, and the visits of the Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, becomes an enemy, and has the columns of a newspaper at his service in which to revenge himself. If admitted, the interviewed is at the mercy of the interviewer's memory, if he is the best meaning of men; of his accuracy, if he is careless; of his malevolence, if he is ill-disposed; of his prejudices, if he has any, and of his sense of propriety, at any rate. "Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the following restrictions: 'A licensed corps of interviewers, to be appointed by the municipal authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a conspicuous position, a number and a badge, for which the following emblems and inscriptions are suggested: Zephyrus, with his lips at the ear of Boreas, who holds a speaking trumpet, signifying that what is said by the interviewed in a whisper will be shouted to the world by the interviewer through that brazen instrument. For mottoes, either of the following: _Fænum halct in cornu_; _Hunc tu Romane caveto_. No person to be admitted to the corps of interviewers without a strict preliminary examination. The candidate to be proved free from color blindness and amblyopia, ocular and mental strabismus, double refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity of more than average dimensions, and tendency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral and religious character to be vouched for by three orthodox clergymen of the same belief, and as many deacons who agree with them and each other. All reports to be submitted to the interviewed, and the proofs thereof to be corrected and sanctioned by him before being given to the public. Until the above provisions are carried out no record of an alleged interview to be considered as anything more than the untrustworthy gossip of an irresponsible impersonality.'" "What business have young scribblers to send me their verses and ask my opinion of the stuff?" said Doctor Holmes one day, annoyed by the officiousness of certain would-be aspirants to literary fame. "They have no more right to ask than they have to stop me on the street, run out their tongues, and ask what the matter is with their stomachs, and what they shall take as a remedy." At another time he made the remark: "Everybody that writes a book must needs send me a copy. It's very good of them, of course, but they're not all successful attempts at bookmaking, and most of them are relegated to my hospital for sick books up-stairs." But once a young writer sent from California a sample of his poetry, and asked Holmes if it was worth while for him to keep on writing. It was evident that the doctor was impressed by something decidedly original in the style of the writer, for he wrote back that he should keep on, by all means. Some time afterward a gentleman called at the home of Professor Holmes in Boston and asked him if he remembered the incident. "I do, indeed," replied Holmes. "Well," said his visitor, who was none other than Bret Harte, "I am the man." CHAPTER XVII. LOVE OF NATURE. It is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms the fitting frame of any pen-picture one might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet even his prose writings are full of all a poet's love for country sights and sounds. Listen, for instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening spring: "A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, with strange, far-off clamor, are the heralds of April; the flowers are opening fast; the leaves are springing bright green upon the currant bushes; dark, almost livid, upon the lilacs; the grass is growing apace, the plants are coming up in the garden beds, and the children are thinking of May-day.... "The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, brown thrushes, the various kinds of swallows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links, whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, hummingbirds, are busy in establishing their new households. The bumble-bee comes in with his 'mellow, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy minstrels. "And now June comes in with roses in her hand ... the azalea--wild honeysuckle--is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are beginning to blow, the white lilies are getting ready to open, the fireflies are seen now and then flitting across the darkness; the katydids, the grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard; the bull-frogs utter their tremendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the air vocal with melody." How like Thoreau the following passage reads: "O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of taller bushes, with bayberry leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of, and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near!... I wonder if others have noticed what an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know how many other flavors in it--if you think a little, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps you will believe that it, and all the fruits it tastes of, may have come from a common progenitor." And there is the poet's beautiful picture of Indian summer. "It is the time to be in the woods or on the seashore,--a sweet season that should be given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb everlasting, and smelling at its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless reveries outside of space and time. There is little need of painting the still, warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; there are many states that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be reproduced by music, and the mood this season produces is of that nature. By and by, when the white man is thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the process), some native Hayden will perhaps turn the Indian summer into the loveliest _andante_ of the new 'Creation.'" And again: "To those who know the Indian summer of our Northern States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the planet were _sleeping_ like a top, before it begins to rock with the storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse by his winter fireside." At another time, when revisiting the scenes of his old schooldays at Andover, he gives us the following vivid description of mountain scenery: "Far to the north and west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in a long encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the sky. I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there, listening to what the winds have to say, and getting angry with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to those who seek its companionship. But these still, serene, unchanging mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name recalls! and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children, I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. How delightful all those reminiscences, as he wanders, "the ghost of a boy" by his side, now by the old elm that held, buried in it by growth, iron rings to keep the Indians from destroying it with their tomahawks; and now through the old playground sown with memories of the time when he was young. "A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, "the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with _facilis descensus_ on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating _sed revocare gradum_. I wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the 'Indian Ridge,' much wondering at that vast embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies. The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimac, the right arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll." Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate, when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely." Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader, he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in Cambridge. "There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them--hyacinths, pushing their green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips, coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiæ, one was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies, butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces (so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white, blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and gorgeous holyhocks. "With these upper-class plants were blended, in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of the working sort;--beets, handsome with dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant filigree foliage, parsnips that cling to the earth like mandrakes; radishes, illustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil underground emissary of the powers of darkness; onions, never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a communicative and companionable vegetable, with a real genius for soups; squash vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones that will hang up 'ag'in the chimbly' by and by--the summer ones, vase like, as Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and delicate, when they are yet new-born, that one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vegetables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind;--these, with melons, promising as 'first scholars,' but apt to put off ripening until the frost came and blasted their vines and leaves, as if it had been a shower of boiling water, were among the customary growths of the Garden." Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, an account of the reconstruction of the dear old Garden. "Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in their turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. In the meantime changes had been going on under our old gambrel roof, and the Garden had been suffered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature. The haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the perfumed roses, had yielded their place to suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, plantain, sorrel, purslane; the gravel walks, which were to nature as rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned over with the million threaded needles of her grasses until nothing was left to show that a garden had been there. "But the Garden still existed in my memory; the walks were all mapped out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid down as if on a chart. "By that pattern I reconstructed the Garden, lost for a whole generation as much as Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our good Abraham it was once more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It was not much to look upon for a stranger; but when the flowers came up in their old places, the effect on me was something like what the widow of Nain may have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon her. "Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all the little tokens of her affection she had kept so long. The same delegates from the underground fauna ate up my early radishes; I think I should have been disappointed if they had not. The same buff-colored bugs devoured my roses that I remembered of old. The aphids and the caterpillar and the squash-bug were cordial as ever; just as if nothing had happened to produce a coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. But the butterflies came back too, and the bees and the birds." Says a well-known writer: "Though born and reared beneath the shadow of the great city, yet Doctor Holmes has ever found great delight in spending a portion of each year in the country. The last few summers he has made his home at Beverly Farms, but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer home was in Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. His recollections of the scenes and people in that charming town are pleasant and abundant. The villa which he built was upon a round knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housatonic, winding in its serpentine way through the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound of Long Island. Yielding to his own good nature and the soft persuasion of a committee of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once contributed a couple of poems to a fancy fair which was being held in the town during his residence there. They do not appear in any of the published collections, which is the one reason, above all others, why we print them now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an envelope bearing a motto; and the right to a second choice, guided by these, was disposed of in a raffle, to the no small emolument of the objects of the fair. The two pieces are even to this day represented by at least a square yard of the quaint ecclesiastical heraldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel window of the St. Stephen's church in Pittsfield. The motto of the first envelope ran thus: Faith is the conquering angels' crown; Who hopes for grace must ask it; Look shrewdly ere you lay me down; I'm Portia's leaden casket. The following verses were found within: Fair lady, whosoe'er thou art, Turn this poor leaf with tenderest care, And--hush, oh, hush thy beating heart; The one thou lovest will be there. Alas, not loved by thee alone, Thine idol ever prone to range; To-day all thine, to-morrow flown, Frail thing, that every hour may change. Yet, when that truant course is done, If thy lost wanderer reappear, Press to thy heart the only one That nought can make more truly dear. Within this paper was a smaller envelope containing a one dollar bill, and this explanation of the poet's riddle: Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell If this is not a truthful letter; This is the (1) thou lovest well, And nought (0) can make thee love it better (10) Though fickle, do not think it strange That such a friend is worth possessing; For one that gold can never change Is Heaven's own dearest earthly blessing. CHAPTER XVIII. THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. Upon the seventeenth of October, 1883, the centennial anniversary of the Harvard Medical School, the new building upon the Back Bay was dedicated. The fine, commodious structure is situated upon the corner of Boylston and Exeter streets, and is at nearly equal distances from the Massachusetts General Hospital, the City Hospital, the Boston Dispensary and the Children's Hospital with their stores of clinical material, available for the purposes of teaching. Close by, also, are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the museums of the Society of Natural History and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Library Association. The building has a frontage of one hundred and twenty-two feet toward the north on Boylston street, and of ninety feet toward the west on Exeter street, and its corner position, together with the reservation of a large open area on the east, will always insure good light and good air. The dedication exercises were divided into two parts, the opening addresses being given in Huntington Hall, at the Institute of Technology, and the remainder of the programme in the new building. Upon the platform, in Huntington Hall, were seated President Eliot, of Harvard University, the faculty of the Medical School, and numerous invited guests. Upon the walls just back of the platform, against a background of maroon-colored drapery, and directly over the head of the original, hung a portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes. Beneath this portrait was a fine marble bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow, who was seated beside Doctor Holmes. President Eliot opened the exercises with the interesting address which follows: "We are met to celebrate the beginning of the second century of the Medical School's existence, and the simultaneous completion of its new building. It is a hundred years since John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse and Aaron Dexter were installed as professors of anatomy and surgery, theory and practice, and _materia medica_ respectively, and without the aid of collections or hospitals began to lecture in some small, rough rooms in the basement of Harvard Hall, and in a part of little Holden Chapel, at Cambridge. From that modest beginning the school has gradually grown until it counts a staff of forty-seven teachers, ten professors, six assistant professors, nine instructors, thirteen clinical instructors, and nine assistants--working in the spacious and well-equipped building, which we are shortly to inspect, and commanding every means of instruction and research which laboratories, dispensaries and hospitals can supply. Out of our present strength and abundance we look back to the founding of the school and to its slow and painful development. We bear in our hearts the three generations of teachers who have served this school with disinterested diligence and zeal. We recall their unrequited labors, their frequent anxieties and conflicts and their unfulfilled hopes; we bring to mind the careful plantings and the tardy harvests, reaped at last, but not by them that sowed. We meet, indeed, to rejoice in present prosperity and fair prospects, but we would first salute our predecessors and think with reverence and gratitude of their toils and sacrifices, the best fruits of which our generation has inherited. "The medical faculty of to-day have strong grounds for satisfaction in the present state of the school; for they have made great changes in its general plan and policy, run serious risks, received hearty support from the profession and the community, and now see their efforts crowned with substantial success. By doubling the required period of study in each year of the course, instituting an admission examination, strengthening the examinations at the end of each year, and establishing a voluntary fourth year of instruction, which clearly indicates that the real standard of the faculty cannot be reached in three years, they have taken step after step to increase their own labors, make the attainment of the degree more difficult, and diminish the resort of students to the school. They have deliberately sacrificed numbers in their determination to improve the quality of the graduates of the school. At the same time they have successfully carried out an improvement in medical education which required large expenditures. This improvement is the partial substitution, by every student, of personal practice in laboratories for work upon books, and attendance at lectures. The North Grove street building, erected in 1846-47, contained only one small laboratory for students, that of anatomy. The new building contains a students' laboratory for each of the five fundamental subjects--anatomy, physiology, chemistry, histology and pathology--and that a large part of the building is devoted to these working rooms. It was a grave question whether the profession, the community and the young men who year by year aspire to become physicians and surgeons would support the faculty in making these improvements. The answer can now be recorded. "The school has received by gift and bequest three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in ten years; it has secured itself in the centre of the city for many years to come by the timely purchase of a large piece of land; it has paid about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a spacious, durable and well-arranged building; it has increased its annual expenditure for salaries of teachers from twenty thousand dollars in 1871-72, to thirty-six thousand dollars in 1882-83; its receipts have exceeded its expenses in every year since 1871-72, and its invested funds now exceed those of 1871 by more than one hundred thousand dollars. At the same time the school has become a centre of chemical, physiological, histological and sanitary research, as well as a place for thorough instruction; its students bring to the school a better education than ever before; they work longer and harder while in the school, and leave it prepared, so far as sound training can prepare them to enter, not the over-crowded lower ranks of the profession, but the higher, where there is always room. "The faculty recognize that the generosity of the community and the confidence of the students impose upon them reciprocal obligations. They gladly acknowledge themselves bound to teach with candor and enthusiasm, to observe and study with diligence that they may teach always better and better, to illustrate before their students the pure scientific spirit, and to hold all their attainments and discoveries at the service of mankind. Certainly the medical faculty have good reason to ask to-day for the felicitations of the profession and the public. "Nevertheless, the governors, teachers, graduates and friends of this school have no thought of resting contented with its present condition. Instructed by its past, they have faith in its future. They hope they know that the best fruits of their labors will be reaped by later generations. The medical profession is fortunate among the learned professions in that a fresh and boundless field of unimaginable fertility spreads out before it. Its conquests to come are infinitely greater than those already achieved. The great powers of chemistry and physics, themselves all new, have only just now been effectively employed in the service of medicine and surgery. The zoölogist, entomologist, veterinarian and sanitarian have just begun to contribute effectively to the progress of medicine. "The great achievements of this century in medical science and the healing art are all prophetic. Thus, the measurable deliverance of mankind from small-pox is an earnest of deliverance from measles, scarlatina, and typhoid fever. Within forty years anæsthetics and antiseptics have quadrupled the chances of success in grave surgical operations and have extended indefinitely the domain of warrantable surgery; but in value far beyond all the actual benefits which have thus far accrued to mankind from these discoveries is the clear prophecy they utter of greater blessing to come. A medical school must needs be always expecting new wonders. "How is medical science to be advanced? First, by the devoted labors of men, young and old, who give their lives to medical observations, research and teaching; secondly, by the gradual aggregation in safe hands of permanent endowments for the promotion of medical science and of the sciences upon which medicine rests. Neither of these springs of progress is to fail us here. Modern society produces the devoted student of science as naturally and inevitably as mediæval society produced the monk. Enthusiastic devotion to unworldly ends has not diminished; it only manifests itself in new directions. So, too, benevolence and public spirit, when diverted by the teachings of both natural and political science from many of the ancient forms of benevolent activity, have simply found new and better modes of action. "With thankfulness for the past, with reasonable satisfaction in the present, and with joyful hope in the future, the medical faculty celebrate this anniversary festival, welcoming their guests, thanking their benefactors, and exchanging with their colleagues, their students, and the governing boards mutual congratulations and good wishes as the school sets bravely out upon its second century." At the close of his address President Eliot turned to the large audience, and said: "I have now the pleasure of presenting to you our oldest professor and our youngest; our man of science, and our man of letters; our teacher and our friend, Doctor Holmes." From the delightful and characteristic address of Doctor Holmes, we are permitted to give the following extracts: "We are in the habit of counting a generation as completed in thirty years, but two lives cover a whole century by an easy act of memory. I, who am now addressing you, distinctly remember the Boston practitioner who walked among the dead after the battle of Bunker Hill, and pointed out the body of Joseph Warren among the heaps of the slain. Look forward a little while from that time to the period at which this medical school was founded. Eight years had passed since John Jeffries was treading the bloody turf on yonder hillside. The independence of the United States had just been recognized by Great Britain. The lessons of the war were fresh in the minds of those who had served as military surgeons. They knew what anatomical knowledge means to the man called upon to deal with every form of injury to every organ of the body. They knew what fever and dysentery are in the camp, and what skill is needed by those who have to treat the diseases more fatal than the conflicts of the battlefield. They know also, and too well, how imperfectly taught were most of those to whom the health of the whole community was entrusted.... "And now I will ask you to take a stride of half a century, from the year 1783 to the year 1833. Of this last date I can speak from my own recollection. In April, 1833, I had been more than two years a medical student attending the winter lectures of this school, and have therefore a vivid recollection of the professors of that day. I will only briefly characterize them by their various merits, not so much troubling myself about what may have been their short-comings. The shadowy procession moves almost visibly by me as I speak: John Collins Warren, a cool and skilful operator, a man of unshaken nerves, of determined purpose, of stern ambition, equipped with a fine library, but remarkable quite as much for knowledge of the world as for erudition, and keeping a steady eye on professional and social distinctions, which he attained and transmitted. "James Jackson, a man of serene and clear intelligence, well instructed, not over book-fed, truthful to the centre, a candid listener to all opinions; a man who forgot himself in his care for others and his love for his profession; by common consent recognized as a model of the wise and good physician. Jacob Bigelow, more learned, far more various in gifts and acquirements than any of his colleagues; shrewd, inventive, constructive, questioning, patient in forming opinions, steadfast in maintaining them; a man of infinite good nature, of ready wit, of a keen sense of humor, and a fine literary taste; one of the most accomplished of American physicians; I do not recall the name of one who could be considered his equal in all respects. Walter Channing, meant by nature for a man of letters, like his brothers, William Ellery and Edward; vivacious, full of anecdote, ready to make trial of new remedies, with the open and receptive intelligence belonging to his name as a birthright; esteemed in his specialty by those who called on him in emergencies. The professor of chemistry of that day was pleasant in the lecture room; rather nervous and excitable, I should say, and judiciously self-conservative when an explosion was a part of the programme." Speaking of the new building, Doctor Holmes said: "You will enter or look into more amphitheatres and lecture-rooms than you might have thought were called for. But if you knew what it is to lecture and be lectured to, in a room just emptied of its preceding audience, you would be thankful that any arrangement should prevent such an evil. The experimental physiologists tell us that a bird will live under a bell glass until he has substituted a large amount of carbonic acid for oxygen in the air of the bell glass. But if another bird is taken from the open air and put in with the first, the new-comer speedily dies. So when the class I was lecturing to, was sitting in an atmosphere once breathed already, after I have seen head after head gently declining, and one pair of eyes after another emptying themselves of intelligence, I have said, inaudibly, with the considerate self-restraint of Musidora's rural lover: "'Sleep on, dear youth; this does not mean that you are indolent, or that I am dull; it is the partial coma of commencing asphyxia.' "You will see extensive apartments destined for the practical study of chemistry and of physiology. But these branches are no longer studied as of old, by merely listening to lectures. The student must himself perform the analyses which he used to hear about. He must not be poisoned at his work, and therefore he will require a spacious and well-ventilated room to work in. You read but the other day of an esteemed fellow-citizen who died from inhaling the vapors of a broken demijohn of a corrosive acid. You will be glad to see that every precaution is taken to insure the safety and health of our students. "Physiology, as now studied, involves the use of much delicate and complex machinery. You may remember the balance at which Sanctorius sat at his meals, so that when he had taken in a certain number of ounces the lightened table and more heavily weighted philosopher gently parted company. You have heard, perhaps, of Pettenkofer's chamber, by means of which all the living processes of a human body are made to declare the total consumption and product during a given period. Food and fuel supplied; work done. Never was the human body as a machine so understood, never did it give such an account of itself, as it now does in the legible handwriting of the cardiograph, the sphygmograph, the myograph, and other self-registering contrivances, with all of which the student of to-day is expected to be practically familiar. ... Among the various apartments destined to special uses one will be sure to rivet your attention; namely, the Anthropotomic Laboratory, known to plainer speech as the dissecting room. The most difficult work of a medical school is the proper teaching of practical anatomy. The pursuit of that vitally essential branch of professional knowledge has always been in the face of numerous obstacles. Superstition has arrayed all her hobgoblins against it. Popular prejudice has made the study embarrassing and even dangerous to those engaged in it. The surgical student was prohibited from obtaining the knowledge required in his profession, and the surgeon was visited with crushing penalties for want of that necessary knowledge. Nothing is easier than to excite the odium of the ignorant against this branch of instruction and those who are engaged in it. It is the duty and interest of all intelligent members of the community to defend the anatomist and his place of labor against such appeals to ignorant passion as will interfere with this part of medical education, above all, against such inflammatory representations as may be expected to lead to mid-day mobs or midnight incendiarism. "The enlightened legislation of Massachusetts has long sanctioned the practice of dissection, and provided means for supporting the needs of anatomical instruction, which managed with decent privacy and discretion, have served the beneficent purpose intended by the wise and humane law-givers, without doing wrong to those natural sensibilities which are always to be respected. "During the long period in which I have been a professor of anatomy in this medical school, I have had abundant opportunities of knowing the zeal, the industry, the intelligence, the good order and propriety with which this practical department has been carried on. The labors superintended by the demonstrator and his assistants are in their nature repulsive, and not free from risk of diseases, though in both these respects modern chemistry has introduced great ameliorations. The student is breathing an air which unused senses would find insufferable. He has tasks to perform which the chambermaid and the stable-boy would shrink from undertaking. We cannot wonder that the sensitive Rousseau could not endure the atmosphere of the room in which he had began a course of anatomical study. But we know that the great painters, Michael Angelo, Leonardo and Raphael must have witnessed many careful dissections; and what they endured for art our students can endure for science and humanity. "Among the large number of students who have worked in the department of which I am speaking during my long term of service--nearly two thousand are on the catalogue as students--there must have been some who were thoughtless, careless, unmindful of the proprieties. Something must be pardoned to the hardening effect of habit. Something must be forgiven to the light-heartedness of youth, which shows itself in scenes that would sadden and solemnize the unseasoned visitor. Even youthful womanhood has been known to forget itself in the midst of solemn surroundings. I well remember the complaint of Willis, a lover of the gentle sex, and not likely to have told a lie against a charming young person; I quote from my rusty memory, but I believe correctly: She trifled! ay, that angel maid, She trifled where the dead was laid. "Nor are older persons always so thoughtful and serious in the presence of mortality as it might be supposed they would show themselves. Some of us have encountered Congressional committees attending the remains of distinguished functionaries to their distant place of burial. They generally bore up well under their bereavement. One might have expected to find them gathered in silent groups in the parlors of the Continental Hotel or the Brevoort House; to meet the grief-stricken members of the party smileless and sobbing as they sadly paced the corridors of Parker's, before they set off in a mournful and weeping procession. It was not so; Candor would have to confess that it was far otherwise; Charity would suggest that Curiosity should withdraw her eye from the key-hole; Humanity would try to excuse what she could not help witnessing; and a tear would fall from the blind eye of oblivion and blot out their hotel bills forever. "You need not be surprised, then, if among this large number of young men there should have been now and then something to find fault with. Twice in the course of thirty-five years I have had occasion to rebuke the acts of individual students, once in the presence of the whole class on the human and manly sympathy of which I could always safely rely. I have been in the habit of considering myself at liberty to visit the department I am speaking of, though it had its own officers; I took a part in drawing up the original regulations which governed the methods of work; I have often found fault with individuals or small classes for a want of method and neatness which is too common in all such places. But in the face of all peccadilloes and of the idle and baseless stories which have been circulated, I will say, as if from the chair I no longer occupy, that the management of the difficult, delicate and all important branch committed to the care of a succession of laborious and conscientious demonstrators, as I have known it through more than the third of a century, has been discreet, humane, faithful, and that the record of that department is most honorable to them and to the classes they have instructed. "But there are better things to think of and to speak of than the false and foolish stories to which we have been forced to listen. While the pitiable attempt has been making to excite the feelings of the ignorant against the school of the university, hundreds of sufferers throughout Christendom--throughout civilization--have been blessing the name of Boston and the Harvard Medical School as the source from which relief has reached them for one of the gravest injuries, and for one of the most distressing of human maladies. I witnessed many of the experiments by which the great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Harvard University, has made the world his debtor. Those poor remains of mortality of which we have heard so much, have been of more service to the human race than the souls once within them ever dreamed of conferring. Doctor Bigelow's repeated and searching investigations into the anatomy of the hip joint showed him the band which formed the chief difficulty in reducing dislocations of the thigh. What Sir Astley Cooper and all the surgeons after him had failed to see, Doctor Bigelow detected. New rules for reduction of the dislocation were the consequence, and the terrible pulleys disappeared from the operating amphitheatre. "Still more remarkable are the results obtained by Doctor Bigelow in the saving of life and the lessening of suffering in the new method of operation for calculus. By the testimony of those renowned surgeons, Sir Henry Thompson and Mr. Erichsen, by the award to Doctor Bigelow of a sexennial prize founded by the Marquis d' Argenteuil, and by general consent, this innovation is established as one of the great modern improvements in surgery. I saw the numerous and patient experiments by which that priceless improvement was effected, and I cannot stop to moan over a scrap of integument, said to have been made imperishable, when I remember that for every lifeless body which served for these experiments, a hundred died or a thousand living fellow creatures have been saved from unutterable anguish, and many of them from premature death. "You will visit the noble hall soon to be filled with the collections left by the late Professor John Collins Warren, added to by other contributors, and to the care and increase of which the late Doctor John Jackson of precious memory gave many years of his always useful and laborious life. You may expect to find there a perfect Golgotha of skulls and a platoon of skeletons open to the sight of all comers. You will find portions of every human organ. You will see bones softened by acid and tied in bowknots; other bones burned until they are light as cork and whiter than ivory, yet still keeping their form; you will see sets of teeth from the stage of infancy to that of old age, and in every intermediate condition, exquisitely prepared and mounted; you will see preparations that once formed portions of living beings now carefully preserved to show their vessels and nerves; the organ of hearing exquisitely carved by French artists; you will find specimens of human integument, showing its constituent parts in different races; among the rest, that of the Ethiopian, with its cuticle or false skin turned back to show that God gave him a true skin beneath it as white as our own. Some of these specimens are injected to show their blood vessels; some are preserved in alcohol; some are dried. There was formerly a small scrap, said to be human skin, which had been subjected to the tanning process, and which was not the least interesting of the series. I have not seen it for a good while, and it may have disappeared as the cases might happen to be open while unscrupulous strangers were strolling through the museum. If it has, the curator will probably ask the next poor fellow who has his leg cut off, for permission to have a portion of its integument turned into leather. He would not object, in all probability, especially if he were promised that a wallet for his pocket or a slipper for his remaining foot, should be made from it. "There is no use in quarrelling with the specimens in a museum because so many of them once formed a part of human beings. The British Government paid fifteen thousand pounds for the collection made by John Hunter, which is full of such relics. The Huntarian Museum is still a source of pride to every educated citizen in London. Our foreign visitors have already learned that the Warren Anatomical Museum is one of the sights worth seeing during their stay among us. Charles Dickens was greatly interested in looking through its treasures, and that intelligent and indefatigable hard worker, the Emperor of Brazil, inspected its wonders with as much curiosity as if he had been a professor of anatomy. May it ever remain sacred from harm in the noble hall of which it is about taking possession. If violence, excited by false outcries, shall ever assail the treasure-house of anthropology, we may tremble lest its next victim shall be the home of art, and ignorant passions once aroused, the archives that hold the wealth of literature perish in a new Alexandrian conflagration. This is not a novel source of apprehension to the thoughtful. Education, religious, moral, intellectual, is the only safeguard against so fearful a future. "To one of the great interests of society, the education of those who are to be the guardians of its health, the stately edifice which opens its doors to us for the first time to-day is devoted. It is a lasting record of the spirit and confidence of the young men of the medical profession, who led their elders in the brave enterprise, an enduring proof of the liberality of the citizens of Boston and of friends beyond our narrow boundaries, a monument to the memory of those who, a hundred years ago, added a school of medicine to our honored, cherished, revered university, and to all who have helped to sustain its usefulness and dignity through the century just completed. "It stands solid and four square among the structures which are the pride of our New England Venice--our beautiful metropolis, won by well-directed toil from the marshes and creeks and lagoons which were our inheritance from nature. The magnificent churches around it let in the sunshine through windows stained with the pictured legends of antiquity. The student of nature is content with the white rays that show her just as she is; and if ever a building was full of light--light from the north and the south; light from the east and the west; light from above, which the great concave mirror of sky pours down into it--this is such an edifice. The halls where Art teaches its lessons and those where the sister Sciences store their collections, the galleries that display the treasures of painting, and sculpture, are close enough for agreeable companionship. It is probable that in due time the Public Library, with its vast accumulations, will be next door neighbor to the new domicile of our old and venerated institution. And over all this region rise the tall landmarks which tell the dwellers in our streets and the traveller as he approaches that in the home of Science, Arts, and Letters, the God of our Fathers is never forgotten, but that high above these shrines of earthly knowledge and beauty, are lifted the towers and spires which are the symbols of human aspiration ever looking up to Him, the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible." At the conclusion of this noble address, the portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes was presented to the Medical School by Doctor Minot, in the happily-chosen words that follow: "Many alumni of the school, together with some of its present students, have desired that a permanent memorial of their beloved teacher, Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, should be placed in the new college building, in token of their gratitude for the great services which he has rendered to many generations of his pupils. By his eminent scientific attainments, his sound method of teaching, his felicity of illustration, and his untiring devotion to all the duties of his chair, he inspired those who were so fortunate as to come under his instruction with the importance of a thorough knowledge of anatomy, the foundation of medical science. In the name of the alumni and students of this college, I have the pleasure of presenting to the medical faculty a portrait of Professor Holmes, painted by Mr. Alexander, to be placed in the college in remembrance of his invaluable services to Harvard University, to the medical profession and to the community." The bust of Professor Bigelow was then presented to the school by Hon. Samuel Green, in the following words: "The pleasant duty has been assigned me, Mr. President, to present to you, as the head of the corporation of Harvard College, in behalf of his many friends, this animated bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow. The list of subscribers comprises about fifty names, and includes nearly all the surgeons of the two great hospitals in this city; several gentlemen not belonging to the medical profession, but warm personal friends of Doctor Bigelow; a few ladies who had been his patients; and all the surgical house pupils who had ever been connected with the Massachusetts General Hospital during his long term of service at that institution, so far as they could easily be reached by personal application. The bust is given on the condition that it shall be placed permanently in the new surgical lecture room, which corresponds to the scene of Doctor Bigelow's long labors in the old building. It has been made by the eminent sculptor, Launt Thompson of New York, and is a most faithful representation of the distinguished surgeon. It outlines with such accuracy and precision the features of his face and the pose of his head that nothing is wanted, in the opinion of his friends, to make it a correct likeness. "I need not, in the presence of this audience, name the various steps by which Doctor Bigelow has reached the high position which is conceded to him as freely and fully in Europe as it is in America; but I cannot forbear an allusion to some of his original researches. His mechanism of the reduction of a dislocated femur by manipulation was a great discovery in surgical science, and follows as a simple corollary to the anatomical facts which he has so clearly and minutely demonstrated. His operation of rapid lithotrity has deprived a painful disease of much of its terror as well as of its danger. Nor should I overlook on this occasion his quick and ready discernment of the importance of Doctor Morton's demonstration of the use of ether as a safe anæsthetic, which took place at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the autumn of 1846. The discovery of this greatest boon to the human family since the invention of printing, was fraught with such immense possibilities that the world was slow to realize its magnitude; but by the clear foresight and prudent zeal of Doctor Bigelow, shown in many ways, the day was hastened when its use became well nigh universal. "Doctor Bigelow has filled the chair of surgery in this medical school during thirty-three years, a period of professional instruction that rarely falls to the lot of any teacher; and he now leaves it with the honored title of professor emeritus. During this long term of service he has taught, through his lectures, probably not fewer than one thousand eight hundred students, who have graduated at the Harvard Medical School, and perhaps seven thousand five hundred more who have taken their degrees elsewhere; and by these thousands of physicians now scattered throughout the land, those of them who survive, Doctor Bigelow is remembered as most eminently a practical teacher. Active in his profession, clear in his instruction, and enthusiastic in his investigations, he always had the happy faculty of imparting to his students a kindred spirit and zeal. _Haud inexpertus loquor._" The remainder of the exercises took place in the new building. The dedicatory prayer was offered by Rev. Doctor Peabody, who consecrated the building "to science, humanity and charity, to Christian tenderness and love, and to all the ministries that can enrich humanity." President Eliot then said: "In behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard University, and of the Medical School, I declare this building to be devoted to medical science and the art of healing." Professor Henry W. Williams, in behalf of the medical faculty, said: "Friends of the Harvard Medical School: For a hundred years the medical faculty of Harvard College have earnestly sought to discover, and striven faithfully to teach, whatever might exalt the condition, relieve the woes and prolong the service of those minds and bodies through which man lives, and moves, and is. Year by year they have seen their horizon of knowledge extended and their sphere of duty enlarged. But, though zeal and self-sacrifice have not been wanting, their efforts to be useful have been continually hindered because of imperfect facilities and scanty resources. All is changed. In this more wonderful than Aladdin's palace, risen from the sea,[8] and which has already endured the wrath and mercy of the flames, we see a fulfilment of our hopes, and the means and assurance of success. Thanks to generous benefactors, there will no longer be a lack of room or of appliances for our needs; our work will go on under fairer auspices, and we can offer to disciples of the healing art fitter opportunities and ampler aid in their studies. "As spokesman of the faculty on this occasion, so full of felicitation and of promise, I would I could give to their message a host of tongues, to adequately thank those whose great flood of bounty has thus favored and endowed us. In occupying this beautiful and convenient structure, we shall ever feel that the place is dignified by the givers' deed. And we rejoice the more, because we know that this gift of three hundred thousand dollars has been bestowed by those who are accustomed to use their own eyes in their estimation of desert, and that it signifies a hearty approval of our endeavors, and an intent that medical science, as it is to be here embodied and taught, shall have a warm and generous support. "In accepting this more than princely gift as a token that the value and necessity of well-educated physicians to every community is felt and acknowledged, we hail the privilege of goodly fellowship in which the donors and ourselves have become co-workers, to the end that blessings to the whole land may arise and be memorized in this institution; and we trust that the efforts of the faculty to advance the knowledge, train the judgment and perfect the skill of those entering our profession will ever continue to deserve countenance and help. Colonel Henry Lee's address was the next to follow: Mr. President: Thanks for your invitation to be present on this interesting occasion--the hundredth anniversary of your medical school and the dedication of a new building of fair proportions, well adapted to your wants, as far as a non-professional can judge. You have assigned to me the honorable task of speaking for the contributors to the building fund. I little thought, as I used to gaze with awe at that prim, solitary, impenetrable little building in Mason Street, and with imaginative companions conjure up the mysteries within, that I should ever dare to enter and explore its interior; nor have I yet acquired that relish for morbid specimens which characterized my lamented kinsman, who devoted so many years to accumulating and illustrating your pathological collection. It is an ordeal to a layman, Mr. President, especially to one who has reached the sixth age, to be so forcibly reminded, as one is here, of the last scene of all That ends this strange, eventful history, _Sans_ teeth, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ taste, _sans_ everything, and it is a further ordeal to assume to speak for others, whose motives for aiding you I may not adequately set forth. This I can say, that we are citizens of no mean city; that private frugality and public liberality have distinguished the inhabitants of this 'Old Town of Boston,' from the days of the good and wise John Winthrop, whose own substance was consumed in founding this colony, to the present time. Down through these two centuries and a half the multiform and ever-increasing needs of the community have been discovered and supplied, not by Government, but by patriotic citizens, who have given of their time and substance to promote the common weal, remembering 'that the body is not one member, but many, and that the members should have the same care, one for another.' It is this public spirit, manifested in its heroic form in our civil war, that has made this dear old Commonwealth what we all know it to be, despite foul slanders. Far distant be the day when this sense of brotherhood shall be lost. Purple and fine linen are well, if one can afford them; but let not Dives forget Lazarus at his gate. Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. "Whatever doubts may arise as to some of our benevolent schemes, our safety and progress rest upon the advancement of sound learning, and we feel assured that the increased facilities furnished by this ample building, for acquiring and disseminating knowledge of our fearful and wonderful frame, will be improved by your brethren. Some of the papers read before the International Medical College, in London, two years ago, impressed me deeply with the many wants of the profession. And who are more likely to have their wants supplied? for the physician is not regarded here, as in some countries, as the successor to the barber surgeon, and his fees slipped into his upturned palm as if he were a mendicant or a menial. Dining with two Englishmen, one an Oxford professor, the other the brother of a lord, a few years since, I was surprised to hear their views of the social standing of the medical profession, and could not help contrasting their position here, where, if not all autocrats, they are all constitutional, and some of them hereditary, monarchs, accompanied by honor, love, obedience, troops of friends. But however ranked, physicians have the same attributes the world over. I have had occasion to see a good deal of English, French, German and Italian physicians under very trying circumstances, and have been touched by their affectionate devotion to their patients. The good physician is our earliest and our latest friend; he listens to our first and our last breath; in all times of bodily distress and danger we look up to him to relieve us. 'Neither the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday, deters him.' Alike to him is time, or tide, December's snow or July's pride; Alike to him is tide, or time, Moonless midnight, or matin prime. "The faithful pursuit of any profession involves sacrifice of self; but the man who calls no hour his own, who consecrates his days and nights to suffering humanity, treads close in the footsteps of his Master. No wonder, then, that the bond between them and their patients is so strong; no wonder that we respond cheerfully to their call, in gratitude for what they have, and in sorrow for what they have not, been able to do to preserve the lives and to promote the health of those dear to us. And how could money be spent more economically than to promote the further enlightenment of the medical profession? What better legacy can we leave our children, and our children's children, than an illumined medical faculty?" After these addresses a reception was given to the subscribers to the building fund by President Eliot and the faculty of the Medical School. In referring to Doctor Holmes' brave, outspoken words, an eminent Boston clergyman wrote as follows: "The only qualification which we have heard of the universal and enthusiastic appreciation of the sage, the vivacious and the rich utterance of our admired doctor and foremost man of letters on this occasion, was in a somewhat regretful feeling that he should have turned the full power of his humor and of his caustic satire upon the mean and contemptible effort of an unprincipled demagogue to defame the Harvard Medical School. We do not sympathize with even this qualified stricture on the remarks of Doctor Holmes here referred to. True, his address was an historical one, designed for an historical review of the past of the institution. But it is also to serve the uses of history for the future, especially as a record of the aspects of the institution and of the interest and confidence of our living community in it during the year marking such a conspicuous event for it as the inauguration of the new edifice prepared for it by the munificence of those who appreciate its almost divine offices of mercy and benevolence. And during this very year, an assault of the most dastardly character has been made upon it by one who, high in office and with vast power of influence over an ignorant and easily prejudiced constituency, knows as well as any one among us the utter and wicked falsity of his allegations. "Doctor Holmes was forced to make some recognition of these slanders addressed to the uninformed, credulous and gullible portion of our community. He would have been generally censured if he had passed them by. The only question for him and for a critically judging community would concern the true spirit and way in which he should recognize them. We can conceive of no more fitting and effective course than that which the sagacious doctor followed. The occasion was one in which it was for him, in defining and greeting the steady advance made during a century in medical and surgical science among us, to remind his hearers that those to whom we are indebted for this advancement, have had, with their own noble, personal devotion and effort, to triumph over and fight their way against all the prejudices and obstructions which popular ignorance, prejudice and superstition have engaged to annoy and withstand them. In scarcely any one of the multiplied interests of average society have popular weaknesses and follies more mischievously asserted themselves than in opposition to hospitals and medical schools. When that noble institution, the Massachusetts General Hospital, was devised, about three quarters of a century ago, the most besotted folly and suspicion were engaged against those who planned and fostered it. It was charged that under the guise of benevolent service for homeless sufferers and for the victims of accident or special maladies, it was really to be artfully used for the trial of new medicines and risky experiments on the poor and humble, that practitioners might have the benefit of the knowledge thus gained in dealing with their rich patients. Let any one visit the wards of that institution to-day, or read its annual reports, noting the thousands of cases of its work of mercy in restoration or relief of all classes of sufferers, and then recall the asinine abuse visited upon its projectors. The millions of money which have been poured into its treasury, mostly from the private benevolence of our own citizens, is the crown of glory for that institution. An appeal of the most artful and atrocious sort to this same popular ignorance and passion has been made this year for purposes which we need not search the dictionary to characterize with fitting epithets. How could Doctor Holmes on this great occasion pass it by? How could he have treated the offence and the offender with a more fitting combination of wit and scorn? Most happy also was his suggestive allusion to the self mastery by which practitioners at the dissecting table have to control, in the interest of their high service, revulsions and shrinkings incident to disgusting offices unknown even to chambermaids and stable boys. "But as Doctor Holmes well said, there are more attractive and instructive matters to engage our most grateful interest in the occasion to which he gave such a grand interpretation. The century of medical history which he sketched with such a naïve and vigorous narrative has its most suggestive incidents lettered on the walls on the main stairway of the imposing edifice just opened for use. Little Holden Hall in Cambridge; the obscure structure on Mason street; the melancholy building on Grove street, with its tragic history, in which the donor of its site was turned to a use by no means serviceable to science, make up the genealogical, architectural ancestry of the new hall. The development in the material fabric is no inadequate symbol of the progress in every quality, accomplishment and attainment characteristic of the advance of the profession in the last hundred years." The name of Doctor Holmes will always be so intimately connected with the Harvard Medical School that we give below a brief sketch of its past history. In the year 1780, the Boston Medical Society voted "that Doctor John Warren be desired to demonstrate a course of anatomical lectures the ensuing winter." The course of lectures proved so popular that the corporation of the college asked Doctor Warren to draw up a plan for a Medical School in connection with Harvard College. At the commencement of the school, October 7th, 1783, there were three professors: Doctor John Warren, who lectured on anatomy and surgery; Doctor Aaron Dexter, who took the department of chemistry and materia medica; and Doctor Benjamin Waterhouse, instructor in the theory and practice of medicine. During the first year of its establishment the attendance was rather small, consisting of members of the senior class of the college and those students who could procure the consent of their parents. The name of the first graduate recorded was that of John Fleet, in 1788, and he seems to have been the only graduate of that class. In 1806, Doctor John Collins Warren, son of Doctor John Warren, was appointed assistant professor of anatomy and surgery. He proved a most enthusiastic laborer in behalf of the school and to it he gave his large anatomical collection, which was considered the most complete in the country. In his will he bequeathed his body to the interest of science, and provided that his skeleton be prepared and mounted, to serve the uses of the demonstrators on anatomy. It was he, also, who took the first steps that led to the establishment of the Medical School in Boston. At 49 Marlborough street, he opened a room for the demonstration of practical anatomy, and here a course of lectures was started in the autumn of 1810 by Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Waterhouse. In 1816, the "Massachusetts Medical College" was formally inaugurated in a building erected on Mason street by a special grant from the Commonwealth. At this time the faculty consisted of Doctors Jackson, Warren, Gorham, Jacob Bigelow and Walter Channing. In 1821 the Massachusetts General Hospital on Allan street, was established; the two institutions have since been intimately connected as the resources afforded students by the Hospital are here given to members of the Medical School. In 1836, Doctor Jackson resigned his position, and Doctor John Ware, the assistant professor of theory and practice was appointed in the chair. Eleven years later Doctor John Collins Warren resigned, having served the interests of the school for forty-one years. In 1847, through the liberality of Doctor George C. Shattuck, Sr., a professorship of pathological anatomy was established, and Doctor John Barnard Swett Jackson was appointed to fill the chair. It was during this year that Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes was chosen Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology. In 1849 Doctor Henry J. Bigelow was appointed to the chair of surgery left vacant by the resignation of Doctor George Hayward, and in 1854, Doctor Walter Channing was succeeded by Doctor David Humphreys Storer. In 1855 Doctor Jacob Bigelow resigned, and was succeeded by Doctor Edward Hammond Clarke. The building on North Grove street, erected by a grant of the State upon land donated by Doctor George Parkman, was first occupied by the school in 1846. In this building, which was considered amply commodious at that time, were stored the Warren Anatomical Museum, the physiological library founded by George Woodbury Swett, the gifts to the chemical department by Doctor John Bacon, and the collection of microscopes given by Doctor Ellis. Since then the number of medical students has constantly increased and the accommodations becoming inadequate, steps were taken for the erection of the new building. FOOTNOTES: [8] The site occupied by the medical college was once covered by the tides. CHAPTER XIX. TOKENS OF ESTEEM. Said one of the medical students in Doctor Holmes' last class at Harvard: "We always welcomed Professor Holmes with enthusiastic cheers when he came into the class room, and his lectures were so brimful of witty anecdotes that we sometimes forgot it was a lesson in anatomy we had come to learn. But the instruction--deep, sound and thorough--was there all the same, and we never left the room without feeling what a fund of knowledge and what a clear insight upon difficult points in medical science had been imparted to us through the sparkling medium!" The position of Parkman Professor of Anatomy in Harvard University, was resigned by Doctor Holmes in the autumn of 1882, that he might give his time more exclusively to literary pursuits. He was immediately appointed Professor Emeritus by the college, and Doctor Thomas Dwight, a teacher in the Medical School, succeeded him in the active duties of the chair. The last lecture of Doctor Holmes before his students, was delivered in the anatomical room, on the twenty-eighth of November. As he entered the room, a storm of applause greeted him, and then as it died away, one of the students came forward and presented him, in behalf of his last class, with an exquisite "Loving Cup." On one side of this beautiful souvenir was the happy quotation from his own writings: "Love bless thee, joy crown thee, God speed thy career." Doctor Holmes was so deeply affected by this delicate token of esteem that, afterwards, in acknowledging the cup by letter, he said that the tribute was so unexpected it made him speechless. He was quite sure, however, that they did not mistake _aphasia_ for _acardia_--his heart was in its right place, though his tongue forgot its office. In the address to his class, the Professor gave an interesting review of his thirty-five years' connection with the school. Then he referred to his early college days, and to his studies in Paris, and added many delightful reminiscences of the famous French savants whose lectures he attended at that time. A full report of this address may be found in the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, for December 7, 1882. This, one of his most interesting essays, is also reprinted in one of Doctor Holmes' later volumes, entitled _Medical Essays_. On the evening of April 12, 1883, a complimentary dinner was given Doctor Holmes at Delmonico's, by the medical profession of New York City. The reception opened at about half-past six, and soon after that hour Doctor Holmes entered the rooms with Doctor Fordyce Barker. The guests, numbering some two hundred and twenty-five in all, were seated at six tables, the table of honor occupying the upper end of the room, and decorated with banks of choice flowers. The _menus_ were cleverly arranged in the form of small books bound in various-colored plush. A dainty design in gilt, representing a scalpel and pen, surrounded by a laurel wreath, adorned the covers, and inside was the stanza: A few can touch the magic string, And noisy fame is proud to win them, Alas, for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them. At the top of the leaf containing the bill of fare were the lines: You know your own degree; sit down; at first and last a hearty welcome. at the end: Prithee, no more; thou dost talk nothing to me. A few minutes before the coffee was brought in, each guest received what purported to be a telegram from Boston, dated April 1, 1883. The message read as follows: The dinner bell, the dinner bell Is ringing loud and clear, Through hill and plain, through street and lane It echoes far and near. I hear the voice! I go, I go! Prepare your meat and wine; They little heed their future need Who pay not when they dine. --_O.W.H._ The back of the despatch was decorated with two pictures; one showing Doctor Fordyce Barker ringing a dinner bell and brandishing a knife and fork, the other Doctor Holmes hurrying to answer the bell, with a pile of books under one arm and a bundle of bones under the other. Among the guests present were George William Curtis, Hon. William M. Evarts, Bishop Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, Sayre, Billing, Vanderpoel Metcalfe, Detmoold Draper, Doremus, Hammond, St. J. Roosa, Flint, Dana, Peabody, Ranney, Jacobi, Austin, and many others. The first toast was as follows: The hour's now come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear Obey, and be attentive. --_The Tempest._ After a few brief words of introduction, Doctor Barker called upon Doctor A.H. Smith to complete the greeting, which he did in the following happy lines: You've heard of the deacon's one hoss shay Which, finished in Boston the self-same day That the City of Lisbon went to pot, Did a century's service, and then was not. But the record's at fault which says that it burst Into simply a heap of amorphous dust, For after the wreck of that wonderful tub Out of the ruins they saved a hub; And the hub has since stood for Boston town, Hub of the universe, note that down. But an orderly hub as all will own, Must have something central to turn upon, And, rubber-cushioned, and true and bright We have the axle here to-night. Thrice welcome then to our festal board The doctor-poet, so doubly stored With science as well as with native wit, _Poeta nascitur_, you know, _non fit_, Skilled to dissect with knife or pen His subjects dead or living men; With thought sublime on every page To swell the veins with virtuous rage, Or with a syringe to inject them With sublimate to disinfect them; To show with demonstrator's art The complex chambers of the heart, Or armed with a diviner skill To make it pulsate at his will; With generous verse to celebrate The loaves and fishes of some giver; And then proceed to demonstrate The lobes and fissures of the liver; To soothe the pulses of the brain With poetry's enchanting strain. Or to describe to class uproarious _Pes hippocampi accessorious_; To nerve with fervor of appeal The sluggish muscles into steel, Or, pulling their attachments, show Whence they arise and where they go; To fire the eye by wit consummate, Or draw the aqueous humor from it; In times of peril give the tone To public feeling, called backbone, Or to discuss that question solemn, The muscles of the spinal column. And now I close my artless ditty As per agreement with committee, And making place for those more able I leave the subject on the table. The toast "Our Guest," was prefaced by the following quotation from Emerson: "One would say here is a man with such an abundance of thought! He is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for." As Doctor Holmes rose, the room fairly shook with applause. Without any prefatory remarks, he then read the following poem: Have I deserved your kindness? Nay, my friends; While the fair banquet its illusion lends, Let me believe it, though the blood may rush And to my cheek recall the maiden blush That o'er it flamed with momentary blaze When first I heard the honeyed words of praise; Let me believe it while the roses wear Their bloom unwithering in the heated air; Too soon, too soon their glowing leaves must fall, The laughing echoes leave the silent hall, Joy drop his garland, turn his empty cup, And weary labor take his burden up,-- How weigh that burden they can tell alone Whose dial marks no moment as their own. Am I your creditor? Too well I know How Friendship pays the debt it does not owe, Shapes a poor semblance fondly to its mind, Adds all the virtues that it fails to find, Adorns with graces to its heart's content, Borrows from love what nature never lent, Till what with halo, jewels, gilding, paint, The veriest sinner deems himself a saint. Thus while you pay these honors as my due, I owe my value's larger part to you; And in the tribute of the hour I see Not what I am, but what I ought to be. Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song; Full well I know the strong heroic line Has lost its fashion since I made it mine; But there are tricks old singers will not learn, And this grave measure still must serve my turn, So the old bird resumes the self-same note His first young summer wakened in his throat; The self-same tune the old canary sings, And all unchanged the bobolink's carol rings; When the tired songsters of the day are still, The thrush repeats his long-remembered trill; Age alters not the crow's persistent caw, The Yankee's "Haow," the stammering Briton's "Haw;" And so the hand that takes the lyre for you Plays the old tune on strings that once were new, Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride The straight-backed measure with its stately stride; It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope: It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope; In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain, Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain; I smile to listen while the critic's scorn Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn; Bid each new rhymer try his dainty skill And mould his frozen phrases as he will; We thank the artist for his neat device-- The shape is pleasing though the stuff is ice. Fashions will change--the new costume allures-- Unfading still the better type endures; While the slashed doublet of the cavalier Gave the old knight the pomp of chanticleer, Our last-hatched dandy with his glass and stick Recalls the semblance of a new-born chick (To match the model he is aiming at He ought to wear an eggshell for a hat), Which of these objects would a painter choose, And which Velasquez or Vandyke refuse? When your kind summons reached my calm retreat, Who are the friends, I questioned, I shall meet? Some in young manhood, shivering with desire To feel the genial warmth of Fortune's fire-- Each with his bellows ready in his hand To puff the flame just waiting to be fanned; Some heads half-silvered, some with snow-white hair; A crown ungarnished glistening here and there, The mimic moonlight gleaming on the scalps As evening's empress lights the shining Alps. But count the crowds that throng your festal scenes-- How few that knew the century in its teens! Save for the lingering handful fate befriends, Life's busy day the Sabbath decade ends; When that is over, how with what remains Of Nature's outfit--muscle, nerve and brains? Were this a pulpit, I should doubtless preach; Were this a platform, I should gravely teach; But to no solemn duties I pretend In my vocation at the table's end, So as my answer let me tell instead What Landlord Porter--rest his soul--once said. A feast it was that none might scorn to share; Cambridge and Concord demigods were there-- And who were they? You know as well as I The stars long glittering in our Eastern sky-- The names that blazon our provincial scroll Ring round the world with Britain's drumbeat roll! Good was the dinner, better was the talk; Some whispered, devious was the homeward walk; The story came from some reporting spy-- They lie, those fellows--Oh, how they do lie! Not ours those foot tracks in the new fallen snow-- Poets and sages never zigzagged so! Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe, Master, nay, monarch, in his proper sphere, Though to belles-lettres he pretended not, Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what; And having bards, philosophers and such To eat his dinner, put the finest touch His art could teach, those learned mouths to fill With the best proofs of gustatory skill; And finding wisdom plenty at his board, Wit, science, learning, all his guests had stored, By way of contrast, ventured to produce, To please their palates, an inviting goose. Better it were the company should starve Than hands unskilled that goose attempt to carve; None but the master artist shall assail The bird that turns the mightiest surgeon pale. One voice arises from the banquet hall,-- The landlord answers to the pleading call; Of stature tall, sublime of port he stands, His blade and trident gleaming in his hands; Beneath his glance the strong-knit joints relax As the weak knees before the headsman's axe. And Landlord Porter lifts his glittering knife As some stout warrior armed for bloody strife; All eyes are on him; some in whispers ask-- What man is he who dares this dangerous task? When, lo! the triumph of consummate art, With scarce a touch the creature drops apart! As when the baby in his nurse's lap Spills on the carpet a dissected map. Then the calm sage, the monarch of the lyre, Critics and men of science all admire, And one whose wisdom I will not impeach, Lively, not churlish, somewhat free of speech, Speaks thus: "Say, master, what of worth is left In birds like this, of breast and legs bereft?" And Landlord Porter, with uplifted eyes, Smiles on the simple querist, and replies-- "When from a goose you've taken legs and breast, Wipe lips, thank God, and leave the poor the rest!" Kind friends, sweet friends, I hold it hardly fair With that same bird your minstrel to compare, Yet in a certain likeness we agree-- No wrong to him, and no offence to me; I take him for the moral he has lent, My partner--to a limited extent. When the stern landlord, whom we all obey, Has carved from life its seventh great slice away, Is the poor fragment left in blank collapse A pauper remnant of unvalued scraps? I care not much what Solomon has said, Before his time to nobler pleasures dead; Poor man! he needed half a hundred lives With such a babbling wilderness of wives! But is there nothing that may well employ Life's winter months--no sunny hour of joy? While o'er the fields the howling tempests rage, The prisoned linnet warbles in his cage; When chill November through the forest blows The greenhouse shelters the untroubled rose, Round the high trellis creeping tendrils twine, And the ripe clusters fill with blameless wine, We make the vine forget the winter's cold, But how shall age forget it's growing old? Though doing right is better than deceit, Time is a trickster it is fair to cheat; The honest watches ticking in your fobs Tell every minute how the rascal robs. To clip his forelock and his scythe to hide, To lay his hour-glass gently on its side, To slip the cards he marked upon the shelf, And deal him others you have marked yourself, If not a virtue, cannot be a sin, For the old rogue is sure at last to win. What does he leave when life is well-nigh spent To lap its evening in a calm content? Art, Letters, Science, these at least befriend Our day's brief remnant to its peaceful end-- Peaceful for him who shows the setting sun A record worthy of his Lord's "well done!" When he, the Master whom I will not name, Known to our calling, not unknown to fame, At life's extremest verge half-conscious lay, Helpless and sightless, dying day by day, His brain, so long with varied wisdom fraught, Filled with the broken enginery of thought, A flitting vision often would illume His darkened world and cheer its deepening gloom,-- A sunbeam struggling through the long eclipse,-- And smiles of pleasure play around his lips. He loved the Art that shapes the dome and spire; The Roman's page, the ring of Byron's lyre, And oft, when fitful memory would return To find some fragment in her broken urn, Would wake to life some long-forgotten hour, And lead his thought to Pisa's terraced tower, Or trace in light before his rayless eye The dome-crowned Pantheon printed on the sky; Then while the view his ravished soul absorbs And lends a glitter to the sightless orbs, The patient watcher feels the stillness stirred By the faint murmur of some classic word, Or the long roll of Harold's lofty rhyme, "Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime,"-- Such were the dreams that soothed his couch of pain, The sweet nepenthe of the worn-out brain. Brothers in art, who live for others' needs In duty's bondage, mercy's gracious deeds, Of all who toil beneath the circling sun Whose evening rest than yours more fairly won? Though many a cloud your struggling morn obscures, What sunset brings a brighter sky than yours? I, who your labors for a while have shared, New tasks have sought, with new companions fared, For Nature's servant far too often seen A loiterer by the waves of Hippocrene; Yet round the earlier friendship twines the new; My footsteps wander, but my heart is true, Nor e'er forgets the living or the dead Who trod with me the paths where science led. How can I tell you, O my loving friends, What light, what warmth, your joyous welcome lends To life's late hour? Alas! my song is sung, Its fading accents falter on my tongue. Sweet friends, if shrinking in the banquet's blaze, Your blushing guest must face the breath of praise, Speak not too well of one who scarce will know Himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is--chiefly--true, Remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still! The next toast was to "The Clergy." He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading. --_King Henry VIII._ Bishop Clark of Rhode Island responded. "We honor," he said, "the high priesthood of science and art. We honor the man who has brought life and joy to many weary dwellings, and therefore we extend the right hand of fellowship to him." When after tracing the lineage of the guest, he reviewed his life, quoted from his writings, and said in conclusion, that he stood side by side with Oliver Goldsmith. The toast to "The Bar"-- Why might that not be the skull Of a lawyer? Where be his quidet's now? --_Hamlet._ was answered by Hon. Wm. M. Evarts, in a witty and characteristic address. Doctor T. Gaillard Thomas responded to the toast, "The Medical Profession"-- She honors herself in honoring a favorite son,-- and George William Curtis followed in an address, answering to the toast "Literature"-- A kind of medicine in itself. --_Measure for Measure._ All factions, he declared, claimed Oliver Wendell Holmes, and all peoples spoke of him in praise. He then mentioned many of the poet's songs, reciting a stanza occasionally and commenting on them in a touching manner. The next toast was "The Press"-- But words are things, and a small drop of ink Falling like dew upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. --_Byron._ This was responded to by Whitelaw Reid in a humorous address in which he closely connected Doctor Holmes with the profession of journalism. It was a late hour when the company separated, and the last toast given, found a hearty, though silent response from all present-- Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be to-morrow. --_Romeo and Juliet._ * * * * * Before closing this long chapter of "honors to Doctor Holmes," we cannot refrain from giving the following cordial tribute from John Boyle O'Reilly: "Oliver Wendell Holmes:--the wise, the witty, the many ideald, philosopher, poet, physician, novelist, essayist, professor, but, best of all, the kind, the warm heart. A man of unexpected tastes, ranging in all directions from song to science, and from theology to boatracing. Me met one day on Tremont street an acquaintance fond of athletic exercise, and he stopped himself with a pathetic little sigh. "'Ah, you send me back fifty years,' he said. 'As you walked then with a swing, you reminded me of an old friend who was dead before you were born; and he was a good man with his hands, too.' "Never was a more healthy, natural, lovable man than Doctor Holmes." CHAPTER XX. IN LATER YEARS. It was not until the spring of 1886 that Doctor Holmes made his second trip to Europe. A whole half century had elapsed since his return home from the three years spent abroad when he was completing his medical studies. In this second European tour he was accompanied by his daughter, Mrs. Sargent; and he gives his own delightful account of it in "One Hundred Days in Europe," which first appeared as a serial in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and has since been published in book form, with a charming dedication to his daughter. "The Sailing of the Autocrat" was celebrated by T.B. Aldrich in a fine poem, from which we quote a few lines as embodying the tender love and ardent admiration of the whole American people:-- "O Wind and Wave, be kind to him! For him may radiant mornings break From out the bosom of the deep, And golden noons above him bend, And fortunate constellations keep Bright vigils to his journey's end! Take him, green Erin, to thy breast! Keep him, gray London--for a while! _In him we send thee of our best, Our wisest word, our blithest smile_-- Our epigram, alert and pat, That kills with joy the folly hit-- Our Yankee Tzar, our Autocrat Of all the happy realms of wit! Take him and keep him--but forbear To keep him more than half a year.... His presence will be sunshine there, His absence will be shadow here!" We delight to recall with what distinguished honors he was received abroad from the highest dignitaries of church and state, as well as from his own literary compeers. It was during this visit in England that the London _Spectator_ wrote, "No literary American--unless it be Mr. Lowell, and we should not except even him--occupies precisely the same place as Doctor Holmes in Englishmen's regard. They have the feeling for him which they had for Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, in which admiration somewhat blends into and is indistinguishable from affectionateness." The Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge all conferred their honorary degrees upon him, and he has given us his own inimitable description of the manner in which he was entertained by Carlyle and by Tennyson. At a club dinner given to him in London, he said to the bishop of Gloucester: "I think we are all unconsciously conscious of each other's brain waves at times. The fact is that words and even signs are a very poor sort of language, compared with the direct telegraphy between souls. The mistake we make is to suppose that the soul is circumscribed and imprisoned by the body. Now, the truth is, I believe I extend a good way outside my body. Well, I should say at least three or four feet all round, and so do you, and it is our extensions that meet. Before words pass or we shake hands, our souls have exchanged impressions, and they never lie." In reply to a toast at the farewell banquet given him in Liverpool by the Medical Society of London, he said: "I cannot do justice to the manner in which I have been everywhere received. Any phrase of mine would be a most inadequate return for the months of loving and assiduous attentions through which I have been living. You need not ask me, therefore, the almost stereotyped question, how I like England and Scotland. I cannot help loving both, and I only regret I could not accept the welcome awaiting me from my friends in warmhearted Ireland." Fresh in mind still is the enthusiastic ovation given to our beloved Autocrat when the hundred days had passed, and "Wind and Wave" brought safely home again "our wisest word, our blithest smile." But grim Death, that had "rained through every roof save his," was soon to send a cruel shaft into the poet's happy home. On the 6th of February, 1888, the dear companion and helpmeet of his life for nearly half a century-- "Stole with soft step the shining archway through And left the past years' dwelling for the new." Mrs. Holmes was a remarkably gifted woman, and singularly fitted to be the wife of a man of genius. She was devoted to her home and family, and the charm of her sweet womanliness will long be remembered by those who had the privilege of knowing her intimately. Doctor Holmes has himself told us that her simple, reticent "I think so," was valued by him as a far more encouraging sanction for action, than the dogmatic advice of a more arbitrary adviser. When the Civil War broke out, Mrs. Holmes was one of the first Boston women to enter actively into the work of the United States Sanitary Commission. "She impressed us all," says one of her fellow workers, "as being so strong, steady, clear, and firm. There was not one among the whole body with whom we were so united as with her. And the strange thing about her was that she really had the executive ability and the clear mind, as well as the gentle and amiable spirit. She shirked no labor, even of the most menial, and was one of those who gave up almost all her time to the work. Her eldest son was at this time in the war, and went through six battles; and this, although she never complained, was a constantly harrowing pain to her." The younger son of Doctor Holmes, Edward Jackson Holmes, died in 1884, leaving one son who bears the same name; and in 1889, his only daughter, Mrs. Sargent, passed away. The aching void left in heart and home by these sad bereavements was felt still more keenly as, one after another, the old friends of his youth were laid to rest. "I do not think," he said upon one of his last birthdays, "that one of the companions of my early years, of my boyhood, is left. When a man reaches my age, and then looks back fifty years, why, even that distance into the past to such a man leaves a pretty good gap behind it. Half a century from eighty years leaves a 'gap' of thirty years, and thirty years are a good many to most men." At one of the Saturday Club dinners, when fewer members than usual were present, Doctor Holmes remarked, "This room is full of ghosts to me. I can see so many faces here that used to be here years ago, and that have since passed from this life. They are all real to me here, and I think if I were the only living person at one of these dinners, I could sit here and talk to those I see about me, and dine pleasantly, even alone." Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and Lowell--all lifelong friends of Holmes--had already "passed on." To other dearly-loved comrades, also, the great last summons had come. Ticknor, Prescott, Fields, Benjamin Pierce, James Freeman Clarke, Francis Parkman--all were gone. "I feel," he often said with a sigh, "that I am living in another age and generation." Little, indeed, did the young Oliver realize when he wrote that pathetic poem, "The Last Leaf," that he was the one of our five great poets destined to be the "last upon the tree!" Upon his eightieth birthday, he remarked, "I have worn well, but you cannot cheat old age. The difficulty with me now in writing is that I don't like to start on anything. I always feel that people must be saying, 'Are you not rash at eighty years of age to write for young people who think a man old at forty?'" But in his delightful series of papers, "Over the Teacups," we mark the same brilliant flashes of wit, the same keen intuition, the same warmhearted sympathy with all phases of human nature, that our beloved Autocrat showed in the Breakfast Table chats. As Doctor Holmes himself says: "In sketching the characters, I have tried to make just the difference one would naturally find in a breakfast and a tea table set." Another volume of poems, "Before the Curfew," and a series of essays entitled "Our New Portfolio," were published soon after. The last poem of Doctor Holmes printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ was written in his eighty-fourth year and dedicated to the memory of Francis Parkman. Some of its verses, however, pay a loving tribute also to his old friends Prescott and Motley: "One wrought the record of a royal pair Who saw the great discoverer's sail unfurled, Happy his more than regal prize to share, The spoils, the wonders of the sunset world. There, too, he found his theme; upreared anew Our eyes beheld the vanished Aztec shrines, And all the silver splendors of Peru That lured the conqueror to her fatal mines. Nor less remembered he who told the tale Of empire wrested from the strangling sea; Of Leyden's woe, that turned his readers pale, The price of unborn freedom yet to be; Who taught the new world what the old could teach; Whose silent hero, peerless as our own, By deeds that mocked the feeble breath of speech Called up to life a State without a throne. As year by year his tapestry unrolled, What varied wealth its growing length displayed! What long processions flamed in cloth of gold! What stately forms their glowing robes arrayed!" Contrasting with Prescott's and Motley's the subject of Parkman's histories, the poet says, "Not such the scenes our later craftsman drew, Not such the shapes his darker pattern held; A deeper shadow lent its sombre hue, A sadder tale his tragic task compelled. He told the red man's story; far and wide He searched the unwritten records of his race; He sat a listener at the sachem's side, He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase. * * * * * Soon o'er the horizon rose the cloud of strife, Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize; Which swarming host should mould a nation's life, Which royal banner flout the western skies. Long raged the conflict; on the crimson sod Native and alien joined their hosts in vain; The lilies withered where the lion trod, Till peace lay panting on the ravaged plain." In the extracts given from this fine poem, with its stately, majestic rhythm, it is plain to see that, even at the age of eighty-four, our autocrat poet had lost none of the vigor and fire of youth. In the closing verses he speaks most tenderly of Parkman's patient, untiring energy, "While through long years his burdening cross he bore," and concludes with this fine eulogy: "A brave, bright memory! his the stainless shield No shame defaces and no envy mars! When our far future's record is unsealed His name will shine among its morning stars." It was in January, 1889, that Doctor Holmes sent to Doctor Richard M. Hodges, who was at that time president of the Boston Medical Library Association, the following characteristic letter: MY DEAR SIR: I have transferred my medical library to the hall of the Boston Medical Library Association. Please accept it as a gift from its late president. As there is no provision for its reception, and as I liked the idea of keeping together the books which had been so long together, I have provided a new set of shelves in which they can be properly and conveniently arranged. Your very truly, O.W. HOLMES. To show how highly Doctor Holmes valued this library, which consisted of nine hundred and sixty-eight extremely rare volumes, Doctor Chadwick, the librarian, said: "All these books have been collected by him in his fifty years of experience, and it is fitting that we should realize it is the result of years of labor. He has been ready on every occasion to deliver addresses on topics having a wide scope. He carried off with honor three of the four Boylston prizes, and this alone shows the range of his studies. He has contributed to the funds of the association in various ways, and now gives us his most valuable library. In this act, as well as his continuing the position as president of the association several years after he had relinquished all other connection with the profession, he has designated our institution as the one in which he takes the greatest pride; in whose future he has the greatest confidence." In reply, Doctor Holmes then said: "The books I have offered the association, and which you have kindly accepted, constitute my own medical library, with the exception of a few volumes which, for several reasons, I have retained. It has grown by a slow process of accretion. The first volume of it was 'Bell's Anatomy,' and the last was 'Elements of Pharmacy.' The oldest book was written in 1490, and the latest in 1887, so it can be seen that the library covers the space of four centuries." After reviewing the better books of the library, and alluding to the private library that a practitioner should keep, Doctor Holmes added: "These books are dear to me; a twig from some one of my nerves runs to every one of them, and they mark the progress of my study and the stepping-stones of my professional life. If any of them can be to others as they have been to me, I am willing to part with them, even if they are such old and beloved companions." Doctor Holmes' warm interest in everything connected with education was shown most emphatically in one of the last public addresses he delivered. It was at that memorable reception given at the Vendome, February 28, 1893, by the Boston publishers to Doctor Holmes and other authors, and to the members of the National Educational Association. Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps-Ward, with Mr. Henry O. Houghton and Mr. Edwin Ginn, gave welcome to the many distinguished guests. When Doctor Holmes was called upon to address the large company assembled, he began: "Surely the Autocrat never felt more powerless than he does at this moment. I meant to come here and say a few almost careless words. I was saying to myself, 'You know very well what you've got to talk about, and you can soon say it.' But," and here the Autocrat's bright face grew serious, "at half-past ten this morning there came to me an elegantly engraved copper-plate invitation to appear here, with a formality and a style about it which showed that I had deceived myself in thinking I could utter a few careless words. There was but one refuge for me, and that was the old one. I can only hold up a copy of verses," and he waved the manuscript deprecatingly. "But not one word, not one thought of it was in my head before half-past ten to-day. There are things in literature," and here Dr. Holmes dropped his voice to a confidential key, "that are christened 'impromptus,' the authenticity of which I am inclined to doubt. I have the idea that a good many impromptus have cost their authors many sleepless nights. "I shall tell you what I would have spoken about. I should have said, in the first place, that I have a great sympathy with instructors. I have been an instructor myself. I was for thirty-five years professor in Harvard College, and two years before that professor in Dartmouth College. I enjoyed very much the relations I had with my students in both places. Many of them have lasted up to the present time, and it is pleasant for me every now and then to have a bald-headed man come up to me and tell me he was one of my boys thirty or forty years ago. "A great many changes have taken place since that time, but two of them are especially interesting. One is the sub-division of teaching. There were six of us who taught the medical graduates of Harvard College during a considerable part of the time when I was professor there. There are now seventy. How much better they are taught I do not know. I presume they are taught well. But a wicked thought came into my head just now--it is not every animal that has the most legs who crawls the fastest. It reminds me of the sirloin of beef one day, which was mince-meat on the second." All these pleasantries were given in the Autocrat's happiest manner, amidst many interruptions of laughter and applause from his audience. "I don't mean, however," he added, "to deprecate that which I accomplished by the sub-division into specialties. What I say is rather playful than serious. The next point is the education of women, which I have regarded at a distance, to be sure. But, occasionally visiting Wellesley and the Cambridge Annex, it has been a great delight to me to see how the intellects of the fair sex matched with those of the sterner. I then thought I should say something of the importance of implanting ideas on all the most important subjects at a very early period of life, and I was going to recall my theology which came out of the little primer, and my patriotism which was kindled at the shrine of Dr. Dwight's 'Columbia, Queen of the World.' But all these things I would prefer to leave, and what else I would have said I will defer until the next occasion, I also wish to say here, personally, that it was most unwillingly that I appeared before an audience like this. I felt it was, at my age, more becoming that I should be a listener rather than a speaker." Here he was interrupted by cries of "No! No!" but he shook his head determinedly, saying, "I am speaking seriously now, however difficult it may be to do that. These little verses I have written, and which I am going to read, are really impromptu. They are poorly scrawled, for my hand was unsteady." Then in a clear, strong voice he read: "Teachers of teachers! yours the task, Noblest that noble minds can ask, High up Aonia's murmurous mount To watch, to guard the sacred fount That feeds the stream below. To guide the hurrying flood that fills A thousand silvery, rippling rills In ever widening flow. Rich is the harvest from the fields That bounteous nature kindly yields; But fairer growths enrich the soil Ploughed deep by thought and wearied toil, In learning's broad domain. And where the leaves, the flowers, the fruits, Without your watering at the roots To fill each branching vein? Welcome! the author's firmest friends, Your voice the surest Godspeed lends. Of you the growing mind demands The patient care, the guiding hands Through all the mists of morn. And knowing well the future's need, Your prescient wisdom sows the seed To flower in years unborn." It will be remembered that the last time Doctor Holmes appeared in public to read a poem was on May 28, 1893, when he attended the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reorganization of the Boston Young Men's Christian Union. The beautiful hymn he wrote for this occasion is the sweet, simple expression of his own lifelong creed: "Our Father! while our hearts unlearn The creeds that wrong thy name, Still let our hallowed altars burn With faith's undying flame. Not by the lightning's gleam of wrath Our souls thy face shall see, The star of love must light the path That leads to heaven and thee. Help us to read our Master's will Through every darkening stain That clouds his sacred image still, And see him once again, The brother man, the pitying friend Who weeps for human woes, Whose pleading words of pardon blend With cries of raging foes. If, 'mid the gathering storms of doubt Our hearts grow faint and cold, The strength we cannot live without, Thy love will not withhold. Our prayers accept; our sins forgive; Our youthful zeal renew; Shape for us holier lives to live, And nobler work to do!" CHAPTER XXI. LAST DAYS. The eighty-fifth birthday of Doctor Holmes was quietly spent at his pleasant country home in Beverly. "The burden of years sits lightly upon me," he remarked to a friend that day, "but after fourscore years the encroachments of time make themselves felt with rapidly increasing progress. The twelfth septennial period has always seemed to me as one of the natural boundaries of life. One who has lived to complete his eighty-fourth year has had his full share, even of an old man's allowance. Whatever is granted over that is a prodigal indulgence of nature. When one can no longer hear the lark, when he can no longer recognize the faces he passes on the street, when he has to watch his steps, when it becomes more and more difficult for him to recall names, he is reminded at every moment that he must spare himself, or nature will not spare him the penalties she exacts for overtaxing his declining powers." In spite of these words, that seem prophetic to us now, the sunny-hearted Autocrat declared he was "eighty-five years _young_" that day, and all the friends who came with loving gifts and congratulations fully agreed with him. His conversation sparkled with all the wit of his younger days, and he talked with animation of his daily walks through the town, and of his long drives into the country in search of "big trees." Near the base of "Woodbury's Hill" in Beverly, he had recently found a mammoth elm that he considered finer than all his other favorites in Essex county; for, in addition to its great size, the wide spreading branches were covered with unusually thick rich foliage. "I call all trees mine," said the Autocrat, "that I have put my wedding-ring on--that is, my thirty-foot tape-measure!" Having been slightly troubled with writers' cramp, Doctor Holmes was advised by one of his callers that day to try a typewriter. This remark brought forth a smile from the man who had moved the people of the world with his pen; and he said, with a merry laugh, that he did not propose to forsake an old friend for a new one at that late time in life. In speaking of his birthday, Doctor Holmes alluded to the great men who were born that same year, 1809. "Yes," he said, "I was particularly fortunate in being born the same year with four of the most distinguished men of the age, and I really feel flattered that it so happened. Now, in England, there were Tennyson, Darwin, and Gladstone--Gladstone being, I think, four months younger than myself. That is a most remarkable trio, isn't it? Just contemplate the greatness of those three men, and then remember that in the same year Abraham Lincoln was born in this country. Most remarkable!" And when the visitor added, "You have forgotten to mention the fifth, doctor; there was also Oliver Wendell Holmes," Doctor Holmes quickly retorted in his own inimitable way: "Oh! that does not count; I 'sneaked in,' as it were!" Doctor Holmes remained at his country home in Beverly until late in September, this last year of his life, and his health seemed steadily to improve with the bracing autumn weather. On his return to the city, however, he had a severe attack of the asthmatic trouble from which he had suffered all his life. A severe cold, and the "weight of years" aggravated what seemed at first but a slight indisposition; and the poet, with his accurate medical knowledge, realized that the end was not far distant. But as he grew weaker and weaker, his sunshiny spirit shone all the brighter. With playful jests he tried to soothe the sad hearts of his dear ones, and to make them feel that the pain of parting was the only sting of death. He seldom, indeed, made any reference to the dark shadow he felt so near; but one morning, three or four days before his death, he said to his son: "Well, Wendell, what is it? King's Chapel?" "Oh, yes, father," said Judge Holmes. "Then I am satisfied. That is all I am going to say about it." On Sunday morning, October 7th, he seemed so much easier that his physician and intimate friend, Doctor Charles P. Putnam, went out of town to make a professional visit, leaving his brother, Doctor James Putnam, in charge. About noon Doctor Holmes had a sudden spasm, and his breathing became so labored that he asked to be moved into his favorite armchair. "That is better, thank you. That rests me more," he said to his son, who stood beside him. These were his last words. Painlessly and peacefully, with all the dear ones of his home around him, his life flowed away like the ebbing of a tide. To the world outside, the tidings of Doctor Holmes' death, that bright October day, came with a terrible shock. As late as Thursday of the preceding week he had been down town, and was intending to be present at the meeting of the Saturday Morning Club. Not even his nearest friends realized that the end was so near. "It is as if a long accustomed element had gone out of the air!" exclaimed one Boston citizen. "While Doctor Holmes lived we felt as if we were still bound by a living tie to the Titanic age of American literature." "The death of Doctor Holmes," said Charles Eliot Norton, "marks the close of an epoch in American literature. He was the sole survivor of the five great New England authors, and he has no successor. This group was a remarkable one. They grew up, as it were, together, and are the product of our New England life in the first half century. Their writings were contemporaneous, and they were bound in the closest ties of friendship. Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes--no other section of the country can show such a group." "Boston without Doctor Holmes!" exclaimed another friend. "What will it be like? There has been but one 'Autocrat,'--there will never be another!" Yet not only Boston--the whole world mourned the departure of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Within his domain his genius was imperial, and his bright cheery nature endeared him to all humanity. It seemed fitting that Nature herself should weep on the sad burial day of one whose life had embodied her sunshine! The wind mourned, the rain fell continuously, as loving hands bore into King's Chapel, upon Wednesday, October 10, all that was mortal of our famous poet. The simple funeral rites began just at noon. The casket, upon which rested wreaths of pansies and laurels, was borne up the aisle to the wailing organ strains of Händel's "Dead March in Saul." Rev. Edward Everett Hale led the sad procession, reciting in his clear, sympathetic voice, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." All the seats upon the middle aisle were reserved and occupied by the poet's immediate family and intimate friends, members of the Massachusetts Medical Society, representatives of Harvard College, and delegations from the numerous other societies of which the poet and physician was a member. A beautiful wreath of laurel hung from the south gallery, marking with mute eloquence the vacant pew of the dead poet. The Chapel was filled with a notable assembly, representing the best life of Boston--its intellect, culture, and heart. And probably never at one time had the ancient church held so many venerable personages. Rev. S.F. Smith, the author of "America," and Rev. Samuel May of Leicester, the only surviving classmates of Doctor Holmes, were present, in spite of the inclement weather. Judge Rockwood Hoar, fast nearing the fourscore milestone, Doctor Bartol, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe--all the great poet's friends and contemporaries were there to pay their last tribute. After the reading of passages from the Bible, and a prayer by Rev. Edward Everett Hale, a selection from Mendelssohn's "Elijah," "Oh, rest in the Lord," was sung by Miss Lena Little, followed by a chant, "The Lord is my Shepherd," and a hymn, "O Paradise," by the choir. Then the strains of the "Dead March" again rolled from the organ, and the funeral procession left the Chapel. The services at the grave were attended by only the relatives and most intimate friends. It was the wish of Doctor Holmes and his family that he should rest beside his wife in the Jackson lot at Mt. Auburn. It is in the immediate vicinity of the Holmes' lot, amidst the beautiful oaks that the poet loved; and only a few yards distant rest Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. * * * * * The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes spanned nearly the whole nineteenth century; and to the very last he kept abreast of the feeling, the thought, the movement, of the day. He was one of the few men of our generation who raised the American name in the esteem of the whole world. Comparing Doctor Holmes with his four illustrious contemporaries in literature, Professor Norton says:-- "Emerson was the deepest thinker of them all; Longfellow possessed in a rare degree the power of felicitous expression, and gave us thoughts couched in the most beautiful poetry; Whittier was the apostle of freedom, fearless, and moved by an untiring purpose; Lowell was a man of versatile genius, as great in the field of poetry as he was in that of prose. "Holmes was one who wrote without effort. His was a ready genius. His thoughts came unbidden, and he had but to give them expression in words. Apt, vivacious, animated, pure, happy, he always was at once a wit and a humorist, but greater in his wit than in his humor. Whatever his subject, he wrote of it with equal ability, and his books are remarkable for the variety of topics which he has treated so easily." Of all his poems, Doctor Holmes ranked "The Chambered Nautilus" highest. "I wrote that poem," he said, "at white heat. When it was finished I took it to my wife, who was sewing in an adjoining room, and said, 'I think I have the best poem here that I have ever written.' And I have never changed my mind about it." By universal consent, indeed, "The Chambered Nautilus" is considered the gem of Doctor Holmes' beautiful lyrics. The poet always kept in his study specimens of the nautilus shell, cut entirely across, to show the spiral ascent of its curious inhabitant. He delighted to show these shells to his visitors; and, as he replaced them on the shelves, he would often repeat the last stanza of his beautiful poem:-- Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll; Leave thy low-vaulted past; Let each new temple, loftier than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea. Among the poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes are seven that may truly be called "Hymns;" and it is well to remember that the test of the use and value of a hymn is not the occasion for which it was written, but its adoption into hymnal collections, and its use thereafter. "We were singing one of Doctor Holmes' hymns in our church," said Rev. Minot Savage, "that Sunday morning when the great singer was passing into the higher choir. "Doctor Holmes was manly in his religion, and his songs show the bright and noble spirit that dominated his life. He was worshipful and trustful, and always hopeful. He was a firm, even passionate, believer in an existence after death, and found the ground of his trust in the dissecting-room. As a scientist he faced everything, and then believed that the soul was more than the body." Of these seven hymns of Doctor Holmes', the familiar one beginning,-- Lord of all being, throned afar, Thy glory flames from star to star, the poet appropriately characterized his "Sunday Hymn." It first appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of December, 1859, and the "Professor" prefaced it with these words:-- "Peace be to all such as may have been vexed by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the difference in the lines of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the Light we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all brothers." In the many heartfelt tributes to Doctor Holmes, it is interesting to note that his spiritual character was appreciated and approved by men differing from him very widely in religious belief. Indeed, it would be impossible for any one to hold communion with him through his writings without growing more kindly, more loving toward his fellow-men, and more reverent, more filial, towards his Heavenly Father. "And personally," remarked an intimate friend, "Doctor Holmes was as delightful a character as he is in his books. His best thoughts came full flood, as it were, from a richly stocked mind. His most characteristic traits were his extreme kindliness and his animation. The mirth and vivacity which bubble forth from his books was the same which came spontaneously from his lips in conversation. He was a delightful companion, and a true friend to those who were so fortunate as to know him and be known by him." Oliver Wendell Holmes taught that life is good and sweet, and worth the living. There is not in all his writings a single morbid note. The world is brighter and happier and better for the rare gift of such a life. His wit has been the solvent of bigotry. He has done for the religious thought of the century what Whittier did for the political; and his bright optimism has pierced many an old-time error with the potency of the sunbeam. "It is clearly seen in the perspective," says Charles Dudley Warner, "that Doctor Holmes' life gives us the kind of reputation that is of value to one's native land, and shows us that, after all the parade of official station and the notoriety of politics and money, those names only endure in honor and love which are borne by men of high intellectual and moral qualities. When we sum up all our sources and achievements, it is to him and his few compeers that we must point for our distinction." * * * * * Transcribers notes: Maintained original spelling and punctuation. 
38132	----	A Hundred and Sixty Books by Washington Authors Some other writers who are contributors to periodical literature Lines worth knowing by heart In paper thirty-five cents In cloth fifty cents Printed for the Compiler Copyright 1916 by SUSAN WHITCOMB HASSELL Everett, Wash. Printers Lowman & Hanford Co. Seattle CONTENTS Page A Hundred and Sixty Books History 6-10 Travel and Description 10-13 Scientific and Technical 14-16 Fiction 16-20 Juvenile 20-21 Poetry 22-23 Unclassified Prose 23-26 Other Writers 27-28 Lines Worth Knowing by Heart 29-36 Index to Writers 37-40 FOREWORD Our state literature is strongest in local lines. First in early history and narration of personal adventure. Fortunately our most important histories are written by men who have long been residents. Meany, Lyman, Durham, Snowden and Bagley have themselves been a part of the story and have learned much at first-hand. Their pages have a flavor of personal interest which some histories lack. The adventures of today become the history of tomorrow. Even the most commonplace narration of experience in a new country has its value. Those original documents, whether diary, letters, memoir or autobiography are the delight of one who has the true historian's instinct. The mythology of the tribes that eighty years ago held possession of this territory is native romance, a literary asset which has been well developed. Lyman has collected the myths and legends of the peoples on the Columbia. Williams tells those that cluster about Mount Rainier. Meany, Curtis and other historians have enlivened their text by these romances and Miss Judson has made the field her own. A second treasure supply of the state lies in its natural wonders and beauties. What other state can boast of charms so varied? No other country has scenery surpassing in grandeur our mountains and forests, or more beautiful than our inland sea with its emerald shores and islands. Williams is not alone in exploiting this rich treasure. A score of others have found in it the source of mood for their songs or the frame for a story or romance. In philosophic essay and the higher forms of pure belles-lettres the proportion of writings is not so large as in the old literary centers. Thought and time are still requisitioned for the founding of institutions. Few are the leisure-class people who pursue writing as an art. Yet one who cares to investigate will discover that no other state while so young has shown a richer output of literature, in content, in scope or in character. Perhaps this first published list will add to the number of those who do care to investigate. Perhaps too it will result in a wider acquaintance among those who are following the same undying art. Some day Washington writers will band together for mutual benefit. HISTORY =1. Blazing the Way.= (1909.) Emily Inez Denny. Pioneer home-life pictured by the daughter of the early settler who wrote No. 21. =2. Columbia River, Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce.= (1909.) William Dennison Lyman. Fully descriptive and reciting personal adventures. Professor Lyman, long-time teacher of history in Whitman College, has lived his whole life in the country he describes. The book contains many Indian legends. Eighty illustrations. =3. The Conquerors.= (1907.) Rev. A. Atwood. Dedicated to Jason Lee and the pioneer missionaries who laid the foundations of American institutions in old Oregon. Much about Lee whose missionary labors antedated Marcus Whitman's by two years. To some extent it touches the so-called Whitman controversy, a discussion due in part to the fact that the admirers of Whitman claimed too much for a patriot whose services needed no exaggeration. It has the endorsement of the Washington State Historical Society. =4. Glimpses in Pioneer Life on Puget Sound.= (1903.) Same author. A history of the Methodist Episcopal Church on the Pacific Coast. =5. David S. Maynard and Catherine T. Maynard.= (1906.) T. W. Prosch. Biography of two of the immigrants of 1850. Mrs. Maynard is honored in Seattle as the founder of a free reading room which grew into the Young Men's Christian Association of the city. =6. Gettysburg.= (1911.) Captain R. K. Beecham. An account of the great battle. Acknowledged to be most complete and accurate as to facts and it is written with the fire of a patriot and a poet. The veteran returns to visit the battle-field where as a youth half a century before he fought for the flag. Through his eyes and memories the reader sees events. =7. History of Puget Sound Country.= (1903.) Colonel William Farland Prosser. The late president of the State Historical Society compiled this work in two large volumes, a painstaking and valuable reference work. =8. History of Seattle.= (1916.) Clarence B. Bagley. Three large volumes. Very comprehensive. The third volume is wholly biographical. =9. In the Beginning.= (1905.) Same author. A sketch of events in Western Washington while it was still a part of old Oregon. Published separately, also in the 1909 edition of Meeker's "Pioneer Reminiscences." =10. History of the State of Washington.= (1909.) Edmond S. Meany. The most accurate and complete history of the state. In some measure it covers the whole Pacific slope. It is intended for school use but will interest any one who likes to study or read history. The story is divided into discovery, exploration, occupation, territorial days and statehood, each treated clearly and fully. The author, professor of history in the University of Washington, is a hero-worshipper and extolls the daring of the adventurer and the patience and courage of the pioneer. =11. Vancouver's Discovery of Puget Sound.= (1907.) Same author. Largely the journal of the discoverer with extensive notes, many portraits and biographies of the men whose names were given to geographic features of the Northwest. A most important piece of historic research. A fitting supplement to this work is =12. A New Vancouver Journal on the Discovery of Puget Sound, by a Member of the Chatham's Crew.= (1915.) Edited by Professor Meany. =13. United States History for Schools.= (1912.) Shows the development of America as part of world history. This has met with general approval as a text-book. =14. History of Washington, The Rise and Progress of an American State.= (1909-1911.) Clinton A. Snowden. Four elegant volumes in half-leather and rich in illustrations. Two later volumes issued as supplements are wholly biographical. =15. The Iron Way.= (1907.) Sarah Pratt Carr. The story of the building of the Central Pacific, the first transcontinental railway. =16. The Cost of Empire.= Same author. The record of the Whitman massacre. It was made the basis of the opera "Narcissa" of which Mrs Carr's daughter, Mary Carr Moore, wrote the music. =17. Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens.= (1900.) Hazard Stevens. The two volumes contain much information about the early Indian wars, councils and treaties. They show the simplicity of official form during the life of the first Governor of the Territory. =18. Marcus Whitman, Pathfinder and Patriot.= (1909.) Rev. Myron Eells. The author is son of Rev. Cushing Eells, founder of Whitman College and personal friend and co-worker with Whitman. =19. Fathers Eells, or the Results of 55 Years of Missionary Labor in Washington and Oregon=, by the same author, is a biography of the father. =20. Memoirs of Orange Jacobs.= (1908.) Written by himself after a life of eighty years, fifty-six of them spent in Oregon and Washington. It contains a good account of the Seattle fire of 1889. =21. Pioneer Days on Puget Sound.= (1888 and 1908.) Arthur A. Denny. An interesting autobiography and valuable for its story of the founding of Seattle. =22. Pioneer Reminiscences of Puget Sound, The Tragedy of Leschi. (1905.) Ezra Meeker. An account of the coming of the first whites, their encounters with the red race, the first treaties with the Indians, the war that followed, and the cruise of the author on Puget Sound fifty years ago. One edition contains Bagley's In the Beginning. =23. The Ox Team; or The Old Oregon Trail.= (1906.) The story of a slow and eventful journey by ox team from the Middle West to this territory more than sixty years ago. Mr. Meeker and his oxen have been a conspicuous feature of several western expositions and are a picturesque relic of the fast-fading pioneer life. Today, Ezra Meeker, eighty-four years old, is crossing the continent in a "schoonermobile," a motor car built on the lines of the old-time prairie schooner. It contains a bed, a stove and a hunting outfit. He is retracing the journey of the ox cart. =24. Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850, An Account of the Expeditions Made by the Russians Along the Pacific.= Frank Alfred Golder. In January 1914 the author was sent to St. Petersburg to catalogue the materials in the Russian archives relating to America. The work was done for the Carnegie Institute, department of historical research. Professor Golder is one of the few American historians who are familiar with the Russian language and his selection was complimentary to him and to the State College. =25. The Siwash, Their Life, Legends and Tales.= (1895.) J. A. Costello, an old resident of Puget Sound. The material was gathered chiefly from the Indians themselves. This book contains a good description of Chief Seattle. Out of print. =26. Spokane and The Inland Empire.= (1912.) Mr. N. W. Durham. In three large volumes. =27. Syllabus of Continental European History from Fall of Rome to 1870.= (1904.) Oliver Huntington Richardson. =28. Tillicum Tales of Thurston County.= (1914.) Mrs. George Blankenship. Full of historical material of more than local value and interest. =29. Washington and Its Swedish Population.= (1905.) Ernst Teofil Skarsteadt. The author has been a resident of the state fourteen years. As newspaper man and contributor to Eastern journals he has well covered the life of his fellow-countrymen in this state. He has written on subjects sociological, historical, agricultural and biographical. =30. Our Heroes of the Pen.= Mr. Skarsteadt considers this his most valuable work. TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION Books on Alaska would fill a long shelf. Three are particularly entertaining and rich in description. =31. Alaska, an Empire in the Making.= (1913.) John Jasper Underwood. Written after fourteen years continuous residence in Alaska and the Yukon Territory. The writer, a newspaper man, sees things from the impersonal viewpoint of the journalist with a keen appetite for news. For a time he ran the "farthest north" newspaper, which sold for "ivory, gold-dust and skins." These words are characteristic of his wide-sweeping vision: "Here is a land of 25,000 miles of coastline and with 6,000 miles of navigable waterways." The United States bureau of education has put this on the list as a standard work on Alaska. =32. Alaska, Its Meaning to the World, Its Resources, Its Opportunities.= (1914.) Charles R. Tuttle. A good deal of space is given to the history of the Government railway legislation. It lauds the energy of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce which conducted a successful lobby in Washington city during the anxious months while the Alaska railway bill hung fire in Congress. =33. Alaska, the Great Country.= (1908.) Ella Higginson. This third book is by a lady whom many love to call "our foremost story-teller and sweetest singer." It is most personal, crowded with real adventures, some of them humorous, which the reader shares vividly. Mrs. Higginson says, "No one writer has ever described Alaska. No one writer can ever describe it, but each must do his share according to the spell the country casts upon him." Her description is bright and fascinating. She is now revising it and bringing it up to date for a new edition. =34. American Fur Trade of the Far West.= (1902.) Hiram Martin Chittenden. =35. Yellowstone National Park, Historical and Descriptive.= Same author. No. 34 is a history of the pioneer trading posts and early fur companies of the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains and of overland commerce. No. 35 is the author's best known work. A fifth edition was published in 1905. No man has had a better opportunity to know the Yellowstone than Gen. Chittenden who was in charge of the government work there and no writer more evenly combines the scientific mind of the practical engineer with the charm of a poetic and artistic observer. To read this is next best to seeing the park. =36. The City That Made Itself; A Literary and Pictorial Record of the Building of Seattle.= (1914.) Welford Beaton. Printed in a choice leatherbound silk-lined finely illustrated edition of three hundred copies which readily found their way to the libraries of the well-to-do. The book tells of the hills that have been laid low, of the valleys that have been filled, the tide flats that have been redeemed, of the street car lines and electric development. One chapter on the "Ladies Library Association" shows how women laid the foundation of the public library. Another chapter describes the architecture of the metropolis "from log cabin to sky scraper." =37. Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage.= (1911.) Carrie Adell Strahorn. A woman's unique experience during thirty years of pathfinding and pioneering from the Missouri River to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico. An unusually interesting narration of the days when travel was beset with different if not more dangers than today. The book is put out attractively with 350 illustrations. =38. Guardians of the Columbia.= (1912.) John H. Williams. =39. The Mountain That Was God.= (1910.) Same author. =40. Yosemite and the High Sierras.= (1914.) Same author. They are books of rare value, occupying a field by themselves. They are full of fascinating word pictures of mountain scenes. The first is of Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens. The city librarian of a Massachusetts city wrote to Mr. Williams "We have a radiopticon in our library. I shall mount the illustrations from your book and use the text for short talks on the mountains." No. 39 pictures Rainier which is called "Rainier-Tacoma." John Muir wrote "The glorious mountain is indebted to you for your magnificent book and so is every mountaineer." This contains the "flora of the mountain slopes" by J. B. Flett. The third book is dedicated to the Sierra Club with an introductory poem by Robert Service. =41. The North American Indian.= (1908-1915.) Edward S. Curtis. It is doubtful if any book which has to do with our state has attracted to it so much notice as these ten volumes of Indian lore illustrated by superb photographs taken by the author. He spent years in getting first hand acquaintance with some of the tribes and in securing the pictures which have made him famous. Theodore Roosevelt wrote the preface and J. Pierpont Morgan subscribed $3,000 as an advance guarantee. =42. Rambles in Colonial Byways.= (1900.) Rufus Rockwell Wilson. =43. Romance of Feudal Chateaux.= (1900.) Elizabeth Williams Champney. This is one of a delightful series written in part before the author was a resident of the state. The others are =44. Romance of French Abbeys.= (1905.) =45. Romance of Italian Villas.= (1906.) =46. Romance of Renaissance Chateaux.= (1907.) =47. Romance of Bourbon Chateaux.= (1907.) =48. Romance of Roman Villas.= (1908.) =49. Romance of Imperial Rome.= (1910.) Mrs. Champney also wrote Great Grandmothers' Girls in New France and Three Vassar Girls. =50. Romance of Old Belgium, from Caesar to Kaiser.= (1915.) Elizabeth Williams Champney and Frere Champney. A choice story full of the romance of truth. The illustrations are from Rubens' paintings, photographs and original pen and ink drawings. =51. Seven Weeks in Hawaii.= (1913.) Minnie Leola Crawford. =52. Seven Weeks in the Orient.= (1914.) Same author. Vacation letters, written by a business girl who was enjoying her trip to the full, were sent to the mother at home. They were passed on to be read by friends who saw that there was more than a personal interest in them and insisted on their publication. A Chicago publisher readily accepted them. Another vacation trip led to the second volume. The style is sprightly and original and photographs of the author's own taking illustrate both books. =53. Seven Years on the Pacific Slope.= (1914.) Mrs. Hugh Fraser and Hugh C. Fraser. The writers lived in Okanogan County in a little village on the Methow River near its junction with the Columbia. They tell of ordinary events but give a clear picture of the development of that region from 1905 to 1912. =54. Reminiscences of a Diplomatist's Wife.= (1912.) Either alone or in collaboration Mrs. Fraser has published ten volumes. SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL =55. Birds of Washington.= William Leon Dawson and John Hooper Bowles. Two elegant volumes describing 372 species. There are three hundred original halftone illustrations. An analytical key for identification, by Lynds Jones. =56. Digest of the Decisions of the Supreme Court of Washington.= Arthur Remington. Two volumes and supplement. =57. Remington and Ballinger's Annotated Codes and Statutes of Washington.= Two volumes and supplement. (1913.) =58. Remington's 1915 Codes and Statutes of Washington.= (1916.) Two volumes. =59. Elementary Flora of the Northwest.= (1914.) Theodore Christian Frye and George B. Rigg. =60. Encyclopaedia of Practical Horticulture.= (1915.) Granville Lowther and William Worthington. Three large volumes. =61. English Literature from Widsith to the Death of Chaucer. A Source Book.= (1916.) Allen Rogers Benham. It pictures the literary world in which Englishmen lived from early times to the year 1400 and represents ten years' work by the author. =62. Essentials of Character.= (1910.) Edward O. Sisson. A practical study of education in moral character. =63. Flora of the State of Washington.= (1906.) Charles V. Piper. Published by the Smithsonian Institution. Based on study of plants of the state during a period of twenty years. The most complete and accurate outline of the flora of the state. =64. Flora of the Northwest Coast.= (1915.) Charles V. Piper and Rolla Kent Beattie. =65. Forests and Reservoirs in Relation to Stream-flow.= Hiram M. Chittenden. =66. Law, Legislative and Municipal Reference Libraries.= John B. Kaiser. An elaboration of lectures delivered before library classes in the University of Illinois. Valuable to the student of library work and to library investigators. =67. Memorabilia Mathematica.= (1914.) Robert Edouard Moritz. It contains no mathematics at all but a remarkable collection of facts and sayings and incidents about mathematics and mathematicians. Of its 2160 selections a surprising number are interesting and many are even humorous. =68. Multiple Money Standard.= (1896.) J. Allen Smith. =69. Spirit of the American Government.= (1907.) Same author. =70. Outlines of General Chemistry.= (1915.) Horace G. Byers. =71. Parliamentary Procedure.= (1898.) Adele M. Fielde. =72. Political Primer for New York City and State.= (1900.) Same author. The first book, which had been used by many classes in parliamentary law, was reprinted in Seattle in 1914. Chinese Fairy Stories has also been reprinted. Miss Fielde has issued more than 200,000 pieces of literature intended for the education of Washington women. The most of them have been distributed without cost. Her chosen subjects were social hygiene, temperance, and direct legislation. In earlier years she wrote on the life of the ant. =73. Practical treatise on Sub-Aqueous Foundations.= (1914.) Charles Evan Fowler. =74. Principles of Education.= (1911.) Frederick Elmer Bolton. =75. Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of the Origin of Mankind.= John C. Stallcup. =76. Regulation.= (1913.) W. G. Barnard. A series of essays on political economy. An optimistic view of the difficulties of the economic situation, encouraging the student to believe that "there is a remedy for every evil." There are chapters on land, wages, interest, profits and money. FICTION =77. Black Bear.= (1910.) William H. Wright. =78. Grizzly Bear.= (1909.) Same author. =79. The Bridge of the Gods.= Frederick Balch. The writer grew up in Klickitat county. When a boy he resolved to write about the Indians of the Columbia and began collecting material by haunting their camps for days at a time. A lady who has lived in the state sixty-four years says "It is the only story that tells accurately of the early life of those Indians." =80. Chaperoning Adrienne; Through the Yellowstone.= (1907.) Alice Harriman. This lady has distinguished herself in several ways, first as poetess and contributor to magazines, then as book publisher. Other books she wrote are Stories of Montana, Men Two Counties, besides poems and one juvenile work. Her house has a number of first class books to its credit. She brought out Lafcadio Hearne's Temptations of St. Anthony. She took special pride in bringing out books on western topics, as the narratives of the two Dennys and the story which become the opera Narcissa. =81. Club Stories.= (1915.) Members of federated clubs. Written in competition for a prize offered by the State Federation of Women's Clubs. Of twenty-two stories submitted the twelve receiving highest rank were published. The scene of each is laid in Washington so they are full of local color and have a value apart from their literary merit. First prize was won by Mrs. Robert J. Fisher. =82. Every Child.= (1915.) Gertrude Fulton Tooker. The author had previously published a few poems but when she was busier than ever before in her life, caring for two children, she found time to write this pleasing allegory. It deserves a welcome by all people who remember the visions and dreams of child-life. =83. Forest Orchid and Other Stories.= (1902.) Ella Higginson. =84. From the Land of the Snow Pearls.= (1897.) Same author. =85. Mariella of Out-west.= (1902.) Same author. These are the stories of one who is widely known as our first story writer. Her name became known when she won, over a thousand competitors, a McClure prize for five hundred dollars. That story was "The Takin' in of old Miss Lane," 1894. Since then she has written scores of stories which have appeared in many different magazines. She has handled some types which are accepted in the far east as representative of the west and are not complimentary to the good taste and social polish of this longitude. But no author of the state has been ranked so high by the reviewers and critics. All her literary work has been done in this state. She shows constantly increasing strength. =86. Ginsey Krieder.= Sarah Endicott Ober, nom de plume, Huldah Herrick. =87. Little Tommy, or Ma'am Duffy's Lesson.= (1891.) Same author. =88. Stacy's Room, or One Year's Building.= (1888.) Same author. =89. Happy Valley.= Ann Shannon Monroe. Tells of homesteading experiences in the sage-brush country where the author lived the life of a settler. She first attracted attention by her story, Making a Business Woman, which appeared in Saturday Evening Post. It is said that she has a hand in the editorial columns of the Ladies Home Journal. =90. Heart of the Red Firs.= (1908.) Ada Woodruff Anderson. =91. Strain of White.= (1909.) Same author. =92. Rim of the Desert.= (1914.) Same author. The last of these three has scenes laid in Alaska, on the Sound, at Scenic and in the Wenatchee valley. The development of the desert by irrigation into the fertile fields and the productive orchard, the tragedy of homesickness and starvation in Alaska, the fatal avalanche in the Cascades in the winter of 1909-1910 at Wellington, all are woven into the story. It includes also an attack on the Roosevelt-Pinchot conservation policy which reflects the sentiment somewhat widely held on the Pacific Coast. These features have helped to give the story a wide reading near home but it is a good seller the country over. Very speedily it reached a fourth edition and in its first year sales reached fifty thousand. Mrs. Anderson is the daughter of a Washington pioneer. Those who know her tell us that her home-making and family-raising are as successful as her story-writing. Some one said "She is good for several things and good at them all." =93. The Hired Man.= Florence Roney Weir. =94. Busher's Girl.= Same author. =95. In Hampton Roads.= (1899.) Charles Eugene Banks. A novel of the Civil War. =96. Child of the Sun.= (1900.) Same author. =97. Man with a Scar.= Ella Holly and Jessie Hoskins; noms de plume, Warren and Alice Fones. A little story from the Christian Science viewpoint. =98. Mary of Magdala.= (1909.) Harriette Gunn Roberson. A fascinating story of Rome and Alexandria and Jerusalem. Told with real dramatic power. Mrs. Roberson has for two years edited a page in one of the publications of the Baptist Church under the title, Heart Talks to Girls on Making the Most of Life. As speaker on the Chautauqua platform she has made many friends through the Northwest. =99. Preliminaries and Other Stories.= (1912.) Cornelia Atwood Pratt Comer. =100. The Daughter of a Stoic.= (1896.) Same author, before marriage. =101. A Daughter of Martyrs.= (1906.) Same author. These are short story collections. Mrs. Corner has of late done a good deal of magazine work of a high order, her contributions usually appearing in the Atlantic. Once when asked for a biography she replied, "I really haven't any. I doubt if any one ever got along so comfortably with so little biography since the world began." Of the town where she used to live she said, "It was a kind of a town which drives one into the inner world in search of excitement." When a publisher asked for a photograph she wrote "I have no photographs of myself except some very old ones in storage and no time to get any new ones." =102. A Rocky Mountain Sketch.= Lou Gertrude Diven. It introduces some characters drawn beautifully and clearly as by a master of fiction, yet there is evidence that compels the reader to feel that it is a true narrative. Many stories and essays by Mrs. Diven are in print. =103. Tillicum Tales.= (1907.) Seattle Writers' Club. A collection of short stories contributed by members of the club. =104. Unrest, a Story of the Struggle for Bread.= (1915.) W. R. Parr. A tale of industrial order, the subject treated from a socialistic standpoint. =105. The Woman Who Went to Alaska.= Mrs. Mary L. Kellogg. She has written several books on Alaska under the nom de plume May Kellogg Sullivan. Her home is near Matanuska in Southwestern Alaska where she has spent seven seasons. JUVENILE =106. Billy Tomorrow.= (1909.) Sarah Pratt Carr. =107. Billy Tomorrow in Camp.= (1910.) Same author. =108. Billy Tomorrow Stands the Test.= Same author. The scene of each of the series is laid in Washington. =109. Fingers That See.= (1914.) Nancy Buskett. Dedicated to her blind friends all over the world. It is the story of a blind girl. One learns to love the child who asks, "Can people who see, see 'round corners?" and says, "Lovin' isn't just feelin'. Its sometimes doin' things for people." The author was once musical director in a school for the blind. At another time she edited the Cynthia Grey department in four northwestern dailies. =110. His Tribute.= (1909.) Florence Martin Eastland. Illustrates the value of good cheer. =111. Matt of the Waterfront.= (1909.) Same author. A story of patriotism. Both have a Seattle setting. =112. Montana the Land of Shining Mountains.= (1909.) Katherine Berry Judson. The early history of Montana, intended for school children. =113. Early Days in Old Oregon.= (1916.) This, Miss Judson's latest book, contains much material from sources never before made accessible. =114. Mrs. Spring Fragrance.= (1912.) Edith M. Eaton (Sui Sin Far, nom de plume). Chinese stories told in a charming way. =115. Redcoat and Redskin.= Alice Harriman. A boy's story of the early days of the Royal Northwest mounted police of Canada. =116. The Yankee Doodle Book.= (1914.) Gertrude D. Best. (Nom de plume Gertrude Optimus.) For very little people. When the author wanted to buy some Christmas books for her little friends she did not find what she liked. She was not pleased with the idea of filling children's heads with nonsense rhymes, good only to be forgotten, and the crazy pictures of children's books were not all of them to her liking. Like the president of a California University, she too made a book for little people. He did it by writing rhymes still more nonsensical and impossible. She did it by putting into jingle form some facts of United States history. The pictures are attractive and true to period. The rhymes are as catchy as Simple Simon and Jack Horner, but when a child has sung these over for a few weeks he knows for keeps some people and some happenings in American history. POETRY =117. Blue Grass Ballads.= William Lightfoot Visscher. =118. Harp of the South.= Same author. =119. In Childland Straying.= (1895.) Carrie Shaw Rice. Her most popular poems are Where the Rhododendrons Grow, and The Rare Old, Fair Old State of Washington, read before the State Press Association. =120. Lyrics of Fir and Foam.= Alice Rollit Coe. =121. Quiet Music.= (1892.) Charles Eugene Banks. =122. Where Brooks Go Softly.= (1896.) Same author. Mr. Banks is more than "the poet." He is a polished writer of essays, and a discriminating critic of the drama and the stage. =123. The Silesian Horseherd.= (1903.) A translation by Oscar Augustus Fechter from the German of Max Mueller. =124. Songs from Puget Sea.= (1898.) Herbert Bashford. Written while Mr. Bashford was state librarian. =125. Song of the City.= Anna Louise Strong. =126. Storm Songs.= Same author. These volumes contain poems revealing a strong character and a finely trained mind. Miss Strong has written many other verses and many essays, among them On the Eve of Home Rule and Psychology and Prayer. She has been director of Child Welfare exhibits in American cities and in Dublin, Ireland. At present, 1915-1916, she is exhibit expert connected with the Children's Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor. =127. Songs o' the Sound.= Alice Harriman. =128. Songs of the Olympics.= Same author. =129. Told in the Garden.= (1902.) Alice Lockhart Hughes. Lyrics by Mrs. Hughes have been set to music by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, Sans Souci and de Koven. =130. Voice of April Land.= Ella Higginson. =131. When the Birds Go North Again.= Same author. This contains the Four-Leaf Clover, her best known poem, which has been set to music by several composers and sung the country over. UNCLASSIFIED PROSE =132. Among Student Friends.= (1914.) Martha E. Libby. =133. Alaskaland, A Curious Contradiction.= (1914.) Mrs. Isabel Ambler Gilman. Now a practicing lawyer in Alaska. A collection of prose and poetry some of which had appeared in Northwest Journal of Education, Westerner, Post-Intelligencer, Alaska-Yukon Magazine and Alaska papers. =134. By Order of the Prophet, A Tale of Utah.= (1902.) Alfred Hylas Henry. =135. The Danger in the Movement Toward Direct Legislation.= Same author. =136. Clean and Strong.= Rev. E. A. King. =137. Friendship.= Margaret Goodrich. =138. Life's Common Way.= Same author. These are collections of well chosen sentiments. The first was re-published a few months ago. =139. George Dana Boardman Pepper.= (1914.) A biography. Frederick Morgan Padelford. The life of a New England college president. It is one of many works which have earned for Professor Padelford a high place in the list of authors of pure literature. =140. Samuel Osborn, Janitor, A Sketch.= (1913.) Same author. =141. Early Sixteenth Century Lyrics.= (1907.) Same author. =142. Greek Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry.= Same author. =143. Translations from Scaliger's Poetics.= (1905.) Same author. =144. Old English Musical Terms.= (1900.) Same author. The Atlantic Monthly published the Pedigree of Pegasus; Cornhill Magazine, Browning Out West and Did Browning Whistle or Sing?; Suwanee Review published The Simple Life as Shakespeare Viewed It; and American Journal of Sociology the Civic Control of Architecture. =145. Hawaiian Idylls of Love and Death.= (1908.) Herbert H. Gowen. Eleven myths, beautifully told "In the hope that the sketches may show that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, which obliterates the distinction between white and black, between East and West, between the man of yesterday and the man of today." Dr. Gowen is a thorough scholar and a literary artist. During twenty years' residence in the state he has written oriental history, theology, travel, biography, fiction, (Chinese), and poetry. =146. Outline History of China.= (1913.) Covers the country from the earliest times to the recognition of the Republic. =147. The Life of Adele M. Fielde=, in preparation by Helen Norton Stevens. As a permanent memorial to Miss Fielde, four thousand copies will be placed in public and college libraries, women's headquarters, and educational centers for girls and young women. The remaining one thousand copies will be sold by subscription. =148. The Mark in Europe and America.= Dr. Enoch A. Bryan. =149. Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest.= Catherine Berry Judson. The author is first authority in this romantic field, at least as a collector. This book treats especially of the legends of Washington and Oregon. =150. Myths and Legends of Alaska.= (1911.) Same author. =151. Myths and Legends of California and Old Southwest.= (1913.) Same author. =152. Myths and Legends of the Great Plains.= (1914.) Same author. =153. When Forests Are Ablaze.= Same author. Is dedicated to the Mountaineers, whose aim it is "to preserve the beauties of the Pacific Northwest and who are yearly appalled by the havoc of forest fires." =154. The Old Home.= (1912.) Susan Whitcomb Hassell. Memories of home and village life in the early years of Iowa and of Grinnell College. =155. Prophets of the Soul: the Pioneers of Life.= (1915.) Dr. Lester L. West. Sermons, like editorials and addresses and quantities of other good literature, are not included in these outlines even when published in book form. Here is an exception. One Christmas some friends of Dr. West brought out a volume of his sermons,--five of them--under this title. They are the work of a poetic mind, choice in literary finish and with a strong spiritual appeal. =156. Story of a Mother-love.= (1913.) Annette Fitch-Brewer. This tells a remarkable experience. When Mr. and Mrs. Brewer were divorced the court gave the custody of their one child to the father. The mother fought, not the divorce, but for a share at least in the care of her boy. While he was spending a few days with her she fled. For five years she evaded the father's efforts to trace them while he spent large sums in detective work posting photographs of the two all over the country as "fugitives from justice." Finally the arm of the law reached her, living in a little village under an assumed name. The law took the boy from his mother and in her loneliness she wrote this book. It is the experience of a bright observer who wandered thousands of miles with all her senses on the alert. =157. That Something.= (1914.) William Witherspoon Woodbridge. A progressive form of mental science put in a new and original style. The writer believes in himself. What is rarer, he is teaching other people to believe in themselves. The book has met with great results. The publisher reports sales to every state in the union but three and a larger sale than any book ever published west of Chicago. =158. Skooting Skyward.= (1912.) An earlier book by the same writer met with moderate success, perhaps because of the atrocious Josh Billings spelling which should have been buried with its originator. =159. War or Peace.= (1911.) Hiram Martin Chittenden. A philosophical treatment of the theme. A splendidly optimistic, logical and sane chapter is on "the future hope." =160. Ye Towne Gossip.= (1914.) Kenneth C. Beaton. A sparkling book, the first publication in book form by "K. C. B." He made a wide acquaintance by fourteen years of newspaper work in the state. Then in the daily Post-Intelligencer developed this form which gave him fame. Many readers turned first each morning to his column on the third page to see what "K. C. B." had to say. That little morning story was always an appeal to the heart, sometimes as a fountain of tears, sometimes as a wellspring of joy. A friend writes of him "He is a temperamental freak in that he is an emotional Britisher and is not the least bit ashamed of his emotions." OTHER WRITERS Throughout the state are men and women whose pens have brought them distinction though their names have not appeared on the back of a book. Some are contributors, occasional or regular, to periodical literature. Some are regular staff-writers. The three we name first are on the P.-I. Tom Dillon wrote for Mother's Day an exquisite prayer which was widely copied and was read into the Congressional Record of 1914. Full of fine feeling. Joseph Blethen has published many short stories and wrote the libretto for "The Alaskan," an opera produced in New York City. Jack Bechdolt has had boys' adventure stories in the Youth's Companion, articles in Technical World, Popular Mechanics and Leslie's. From general editor of a Sunday edition and author of feature stories in this state he has recently been called to become feature editor of the Kansas City Star. Frederick Ritchie Bechdold has had articles in McClure, American Magazine and Harpers Weekly. Bernice E. Newell, a newspaper woman of many years experience, has written exquisite bits of prose and verse. The Mountain, a poem first published in Review of Reviews was later bound constituting the first book published in Tacoma. She was regular contributor to the Northwest Magazine and has been in Sunset, Woman's Home Companion and The Kindergarten. Bertha Knatvold Mallett has written for Colliers and Century. I. Newton Greene has done feature and special stories for Harpers Weekly, Success, Life, Technical World, Smart Set, and Pacific Motor Boat. Human interest stories. Editorials. R. P. Wood has appeared in Life and in the London Daily Mail. Warren Judson Brier, who has done substantial literary work before coming to the West, recently had published in the National Magazine The Incarceration of Ambrose Broadhead, a strong appeal for needed reform. He has now in preparation an American literature designed for class-room use. Adele M. Ballard, of Town Crier staff, has won an enviable reputation as art and music critic and is often quoted by Chicago and New York journals. Writes short stories, verses and special articles which have appeared in The Lady, (London), Collier's and Reedy's Mirror. Her poems, Pierrot and The Concert, are of high order. Ruth Dunbar, formerly on Seattle Times, has contributions in Woman's Home Companion and Vogue, and is now on the staff of Every Week, New York City. M. Pelton White has contributed to over fifty publications, Collier's and various magazines, women's and children's periodicals, farm journals and religious publications. An order for forty children's stories was recently finished. Last year's sales numbered fifty-three. Goldie Funk Robertson has been most successful in her articles on child problems and home economics. She is now on the staff of the Mothers' Magazine, and has made frequent contributions to Woman's Home Companion, Life, Table Talk, Etude and Modern Priscilla, sometimes using the names Jane Wakefield and Louise St. Clair. Sara Byrne Goodwin, in competition with hundreds of story writers, took a Ladies Home Journal prize. Rosalind Larson won an American Magazine prize. Elizabeth Young Wead has contributed articles to Lippincott's, The Independent, and Country Gentleman. She has just ready for publication a lineage book of the Van Patten family. Anna Brabham Osborne won a prize in the Club Stories contest. In ten years she has sold sixty-four short stories, seven serials, and nine feature articles. They appear in the Youths' Companion, Overland Magazine, New England Magazine, American Magazine, Christian Endeavor World and the various church publications for young people. Harry L. Dillaway, lover of birds and bears, has contributed to Shield's Magazine, Recreation, and Pacific Sportsman. For a syndicate of papers he edited "Bird-lore," creating an interest which culminated in a great bird-house building contest by children. Pictures of this enterprise were shown in the Ladies Home Journal of July, 1916. Harry J. Miller's humorous verses easily find their way into many newspapers of the state. Lines worth knowing: THE EVERGREEN PINE The rivers to the ocean flow, The sunsets burn and flee; The stars come to the darkling sky, The violets to the lea; But I stay in one lone sweet place And dream of the blue sea. The harebell blooms and is away, The salmon spawns and dies; The oriole nests and is on the wing, Calling her sweet good-bys.... But I, when blossom and fruit are gone, Yearn, steadfast, to the skies. I am a prayer and a praise, A sermon and a song; My leaf-chords thrill at the wind's will To nocturnes deep and strong; Or the sea's far lyric melodies Echo and prolong. When April newly decks my form In silken green attire, I light my candles, tall and pale, With holy scarlet fire-- And straight their incense mounts to God, Pure as a soul's desire. My branches poise upon the air, Like soft and level wings; My trembling leaves the wind awakes To a harp of emerald strings-- Or thro' the violet silences A golden vesper sings. I am a symbol and a sign.... Thro' blue or rose or gray; Thro' rain and dark; thro' storms of night; Thro' opaline lights of day-- Slowly and patiently up to God I make my beautiful way. --Higginson. ENSHRINED "My son" .... Her tone was soft with wistfulness-- "Would now be twenty-one ... If he had lived." A silence fell ... And thought sped swiftly back Through years of fulness and content-- Save for one gray thread of loneliness. For she had never parted company With him, Who left her arms bereft Of her man-child. "And so," Again she spoke, "I watch the youths Who grow apace with him in years, And all their winning traits I seize upon, invest my son with them, And love all youth the more Because I too Hold in my heart A vivid memory." Again the silence fell ... I turned away-- For I had glimpsed the sanctuary Of a mother's soul, In which a spirit was enshrined For all Eternity. --Adele M. Ballard Long hours we toiled up through the solemn wood, Beneath moss-banners stretched from tree to tree; At last upon a barren hill we stood, And, lo, above loomed Majesty. --Herbert Bashford NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN Thou hear'st the star songs clear, When all is silent here, And I, asleep. Spheres, ringing music rare Through upper realms of air, 'Round thy crowned head, may dare Their vigils keep. --Bernice E. Newell "Great Mountain, who once to a pagan race meant God, Make us to realize our shame, That, failing to sing praises to thy wondrous form, We stoop to quarrel o'er a name." --Anon. "The mountain-lover does not always gaze at Rainier and Olympus. He has learned that the foot-hills have a charm and an interest of their own. And they too point upward." --Club Stories UP, MY HEART The dark, dark night is gone, The lark is on the wing, From black and barren fields he soars, Eternal hope to sing. And shall I be less brave, Than you sweet lyric thing? From deeps of failure and despair Up, up, my heart, and sing. The dark, dark year is gone; The red blood of the spring Will quicken nature's pulses soon, So up, my heart, and sing. --Ella Higginson THAT SOMETHING A man's success depends alone on That Something. That Something of his soul. Abraham Lincoln found it and it warmed the cold floor on which he lay and studied. It added light to the flickering glow of the wood fire, that he might see to read. It spurred him on and on and on. That Something is an awful force. It made of a puny Corsican the Ruler of the World. It made of a thin-chested bookkeeper the money king of his age. It made of Edison the great man of a great country. It made Carnegie. It made Woodrow Wilson. It made Roosevelt. It can make you. And it is now in your soul. Awake it now. "That Something." "No, it can't be done, it can't be done," murmured the professor. "I have drunk deeply of the cup of life, and I am now drinking of the dregs. The cup is filled but once, and when it's gone there's nothing left but old age and poverty." "You fool," cried Randolph, leaning forward and shaking the little man roughly. "You almost had That Something within your power, and now you sing it back to sleep with your silly song of pessimism. It's the false philosophy, that such as you sing, which has kept men in the ruts of their own digging for centuries past. Wake man, wake That Something within your soul." --W. W. Woodbridge THE GAME "I win," cried Death with a triumphant grin. "My body, yes, but not the soul within." --Harriman MY MOTHER--A PRAYER For the body you gave me, the bone and the sinew, the heart and the brain that are yours, my mother, I thank you. I thank you for the light in my eyes, the blood in my veins, for my speech, for my life, for my being. All that I am is from you who bore me. For your smile in the morning and your kiss at night, my mother, I thank you. I thank you for the tears you shed over me, the songs that you sung to me, the prayers you said for me, for your vigils and ministerings. All that I am is by you who reared me. For the faith you had in me, the hope you had for me, for your trust and your pride, my mother, I thank you. I thank you for your praise and your chiding, for the justice you bred into me and the honor you made mine. All that I am you taught me. For the times that I hurt you, the times I had no smile for you, the caresses that I did not give you, my mother forgive me. For your lessons I did not learn, for your wishes I did not heed, for the counsels I did not obey, my mother, forgive me. Forgive me my pride in my youth and my glory in my strength that forgot the holiness of your years and the veneration of your weakness,--for my neglect, for my selfishness, for all the great debts of your love that I have not paid, mother, sweet mother, forgive me. And may the peace and the joy that passeth all understanding be yours, my mother, forever and ever. Amen. --Tom Dillon It is not too much to believe that a permanent organization can be formed which will take over to itself the whole business of the regulation of international affairs. --Chittenden "Why should we ridicule, think very droll, Indian legends and carved totem pole, When we, in blindness are equally odd In misconception of life and of God?" --Harriman A NEW LEAF He came to my desk with a quivering lip,-- The lesson was done, "Dear Teacher, I want a new leaf," he said, "I have spoiled this one." I took the old leaf, stained and blotted, And gave him a new one, all unspotted, And into his sad eyes' smiled; "Do better now, my child." I went to the throne with a quivering soul,-- The old year was done, "Dear Father, hast thou a new leaf for me? I have spoiled this one." He took the old leaf, stained and blotted, And gave me a new one all unspotted, And into my sad heart smiled, "Do better, now, my child." --Carrie Shaw Rice THE TOILER'S FEAR There is one thing I fear. Not death, nor sharp disease, Nor loss of friends I hold most dear, Nor pain nor want,--not these. But the life of which men say, "The world has given him bread, And what gives he to the world as pay For the loaf on which he fed?" --Anna Louise Strong The only territory the United States has ever acquired by discovery, exploration and settlement; the only territory that cost us nothing in cash by way of purchase, or by the use of military, or naval force. --Snowden DON'T WORRY Don't hurry or worry; Be still and keep cool, For hurry and worry But make you Time's fool. Don't b'lieve what they tell you 'Bout Time's flowing stream, 'Tis Eternity now, dear, All else is a dream. Don't seek for a heaven In far distant skies. It lies all around you Just open your eyes. Henry Victor Morgan. Toot, toot, toot, Everything a-quiver Toot, toot, toot, Look up the North River. Toot, toot, toot, Something new afloat. Toot, toot, toot, The first steamboat. Yankee Doodle Book. "If we believe that people are mostly dishonest, ungenerous, selfish, gossiping, troublesome, we would better be looking at ourselves and trying to find out what is the matter with us." --Lou G. Diven "I venture to say that if there is one lesson written more plainly than any other across the pages of human history it is this, that God cannot be forgotten with impunity,--but for all that the popular tendency is to leave God out of account. I plead for the bringing of God back into touch with human life." --Keator OPTIGRAMS The good we can think of is always possible. To dole out a few turkeys at Christmas is good; but to have a social order where every man can buy his own turkey is vastly better. Real sympathy is motional as well as emotional; energetic, as well as pathetic, taking no pleasure in "tears, idle tears." Some people seem to enjoy giving publicity to their disappointments. Women understand men better than men understand women. The only personalities who hold permanently the devotion and admiration of humanity are the idealists. You can preach the gospel through a handshake, a glance, a laugh, a lifting word. What we don't know, never frightens us; it is what we half-know which is the fertile seed-plot of fear. Golf is an artificial substitute for man's native need for work in the open air. What we really care for in people is not their social standing nor the fashionableness of their haberdashery, but their kindness, reliability and integrity. God has no stepchildren. Naked, brutal force has never settled anything yet. Stoning Stephen to death only gave him a more distinguished immortality. We do not want "peace at any price." We want to pay justice, truth, trust and good will for it. --Hugh Elmer Brown A little cloud of blue came out And settled on the sod. Then one cried "Oh, forget-me-nots." One bowed and murmured, "God." --Higginson AUTHORS NAMED IN TEXT Place where part or all of literary work was done Anderson, Ada Woodruff, Seattle, 18 Atwood, Rev. A., Seattle, 6 Bagley, Clarence B., Seattle, 5, 7, 8 Balch, Frederick H., 16 Ballard, Adele M., Seattle, 28, 30 Ballinger, Richard A., Seattle, 14 Banks, Charles Eugene, Seattle, 19, 22 Barnard, W. G., Seattle, 16 Bashford, Herbert, Tacoma, 22, 30 Beaton, Kenneth C., Seattle, 26 Beaton, Welford, Seattle, 11 Beattie, Rolla Kent, Pullman, 15 Bechdolt, Frederick Ritchie, Seattle, 27 Bechdolt, Jack, Seattle, 27 Beecham, R. K., Everett, 6 Benham, Allen Rogers, Seattle, 14 Best, Gertrude D., Everett, 21, 35 Blankenship, Mrs. George, Olympia, 9 Blethen, Joseph, Olympia, 27 Bolton, Frederick Elmer, Olympia, 16 Bowles, John Hooper, Tacoma, 14 Brier, Prof. Warren Judson, Everett, 27 Brown, Hugh Elmer, Seattle, 36 Bryan, Dr. Enoch A., Pullman, 24 Buskett, Nancy, Seattle, 20 Byers, Horace G., Seattle, 15 Carr, Sarah Pratt, Seattle, 8, 20 Champney, Elizabeth Williams, Seattle, 13 Champney, Frere, Seattle, 13 Chittenden, General Hiram Martin, Seattle, 11, 15, 26, 33 Club Women of Washington, 17 Coe, Alice Rollit, Seattle, 22 Comer, Cornelia Atwood Pratt, Seattle, 19 Costello, J. A., 19 Crawford, Minnie Leola, Tacoma, 13 Curtis, Edward S., Seattle, 5, 12 Dawson, William Leon, Seattle, 14 Denny, Arthur A., Seattle, 8 Denny, Emily Inez, Seattle, 6 Dillaway, Harry, Everett, 28 Dillon, Thomas J., Seattle, 27, 33 Diven, Lou Gertrude, Olympia, 19, 35 Dunbar, Ruth, Olympia, 28 Durham, N. W., Spokane, 5, 9 Eastland, Florence Martin, Seattle, 20 Eaton, Edith M., Seattle, 21 Eells, Myron, Twana, 8 Fechter, Oscar Augustus, North Yakima, 22 Fielde, Adele M., Seattle, 15, 24 Fisher, Mrs. Robert J., Seattle, 17 Fitch-Brewer, Annette, Lake Stevens, 25 Flett, E. B., Longmire's, 12 Fones, Warren and Alice (noms de plume), 19 Fowler, Charles Evan, Seattle, 16 Fraser, Mrs. Hugh, Winthrop, 13 Fraser, Hugh C., Winthrop, 13 Frye, Theodore Christian, Seattle, 14 Gilman, Isabel Ambler, Olympia, 23 Golder, Frank Alfred, Pullman, 9 Goodrich, Margaret, Seattle, 23 Goodwin, Sara Byrne, Seattle, 28 Gowen, Herbert H., Seattle, 24 Greene, I. Newton, Everett, 27 Harriman, Alice, Seattle, 16, 21, 22, 32, 33 Hassell, Susan Whitcomb, Everett, 25 Henry, Alfred Hylas, North Yakima, 23 Herrick, Huldah (nom de plume), 18 Higginson, Ella, Bellingham, 10, 17, 23, 29, 31, 36 Holly, Ella, Spokane, 19 Hoskins, Jessie, Spokane, 19 Hughes, Alice Lockhart, Seattle, 23 Jacobs, Orange, Seattle, 8 Judson, Katharine Berry, Seattle, 5, 21, 24, 25 Kaiser, John B., Tacoma, 15 Keator, Rt. Rev. F. W., Tacoma, 35 Kellogg, Mary L., Seattle, 20 King, Rev. E. A., North Yakima, 23 Knatvold, Bertha (Mallett), Tacoma, 27 Larson, Rose, North Yakima, 28 Libby, Martha E., Spokane, 23 Lowther, Granville, North Yakima, 14 Lyman, William Dennison, Walla Walla, 5, 6 Mallett, Bertha Knatvold, Tacoma, 27 Meany, Edmond S., Seattle, 5, 7 Meeker, Ezra, Puyallup, 8, 9 Miller, Harry J., Everett, 28 Monroe, Ann Shannon, Tacoma, 18 Morgan, Henry Victor, Tacoma, 35 Moritz, Robert Edouard, Seattle, 15 Newell, Bernice E., Tacoma, 27, 31 Ober, Sarah Endicott, 18 Optimus, Gertrude (nom de plume), 21 Osborne, Anna Brakham, Puyallup, 28 Padelford, Frederick Morgan, Seattle, 23, 24 Parr, W. R., Granite Falls, 20 Piper, Charles V., Pullman, 14, 15 Prosch, T. W., Seattle, 6 Prosser, Colonel William Farland, Seattle, 7 Remington, Arthur, Olympia, 14 Rice, Carrie Shaw, Tacoma, 22, 34 Richardson, Oliver Huntington, Seattle, 9 Rigg, George B., Seattle, 14 Roberson, Harriett Gunn, Spokane, 19 Robertson, Mrs. Goldie Funk, Olympia, 28 Seattle Writers' Club, 20 Sisson, Edward O., Seattle, 14 Skarsteadt, Ernst Teofil, East Sound, 10 Smith, J. Allen, Seattle, 15 Snowden, Clinton A., Tacoma, 5, 7, 34 Stallcup, John C., Tacoma, 16 Stevens, Hazard, 8 Stevens, Helen Norton, Seattle, 24 Strahorn, Carrie Adell, Spokane, 11 Strong, Anna Louise, Seattle, 22, 34 Sui Sin Far (nom de plume), 21 Sullivan, May Kellogg (nom de plume), 20 Tooker, Gertrude Fulton, Seattle, 17 Tuttle, Charles R., Seattle, 10 Underwood, John Jasper, Seattle, 10 Visscher, William Lightfoot, Tacoma, 22 Washington State Federation of Women's Clubs, 17 Wead, Elizabeth Young, Orting, 28 Weir, Florence Roney, Seattle, 18 West, Dr. Lester L., Everett, 25 White, M. Pelton, Seattle, 28 Williams, John H., Tacoma, 5, 12 Wilson, Rufus Rockwell, Seattle, 12 Wood, R. P., Everett, 27 Woodbridge, William Witherspoon, Tacoma, 26, 32 Worthington, William, North Yakima, 14 Wright, William H., Spokane, 16 Writers' Club of Seattle, 20 TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: Text in bold is surrounded with equals signs: =bold=. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
37834	----	AUTHORS AND WRITERS ASSOCIATED WITH MORRISTOWN WITH A CHAPTER ON HISTORIC MORRISTOWN BY JULIA KEESE COLLES 1893 VOGT BROS. MORRISTOWN, N. J. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1893, by JULIA KEESE COLLES of Morristown, New Jersey, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. [Illustration: Painted by CHARLES WETMORE. 1815. Owned by HON. AUG. W. CUTLER. OLD MORRISTOWN. Pen and ink sketch by Miss S. Howell, from original painting.] _DEDICATION._ TO THE MEN AND WOMEN, OF EARLY AND OF LATER YEARS, WHO HAVE SCATTERED THEIR PEARLS OF BEAUTY AND OF WISDOM ALONG THE DUSTY PATHS OF OUR HISTORIC CITY, THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED WITH AFFECTIONATE ADMIRATION BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. This long-promised volume, the first of its kind, so far as known, ever given to the world, is now offered to the public. It is the result of a lecture given about three and a half years ago, which was repeated by request, and finally promised for publication, with the endorsement of one hundred and fifty subscribers. No effort has been spared to have every statement in the book accurate; nor has any name been omitted which has presented a title to notice, in spite of the fact that the number of "Authors and Writers," has nearly doubled since the work of publication was undertaken. Any suggestion or criticism, however, will be gladly received by the author, as having a bearing on possible future work in this direction. Morristown, New Jersey, February, 1893. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PREFACE. POEM--MORRISTOWN. HISTORIC MORRISTOWN. GEORGE WASHINGTON. POETS-- PAGE. WM. AND STEPHEN V. R. PATERSON 33 MRS. ELIZABETH CLEMENTINE KINNEY 40 ALEXANDER NELSON EASTON 42 FRANCIS BRET HARTE 45 MRS. M. VIRGINIA DONAGHE MCCLURG 48 CHARLTON T. LEWIS, LL. D. 54 MISS EMMA F. R. CAMPBELL 58 MRS. ADELAIDE S. BUCKLEY 63 REV. OLIVER CRANE, D. D., LL. D. 63 REV. J. LEONARD CORNING, D. D. 68 MRS. MARY LEE DEMAREST 69 HON. ANTHONY Q. KEASBEY 72 MAJOR LINDLEY HOFFMAN MILLER 76 MISS HENRIETTA HOWARD HOLDICH 79 WILLIAM TUCKEY MEREDITH 81 MISS HANNAH MORE JOHNSON 84 MISS MARGARET H. GARRARD 87 MISS JULIA E. DODGE 89 CHARLES D. PLATT 90 MRS. JULIA R. CUTLER 96 MISS FRANCES BELL COURSEN 99 MISS ISABEL STONE 100 REV. G. DOUGLASS BREWERTON 102 MRS. ALICE D. ABELL 104 GEORGE WETMORE COLLES, JR. 105 HYMNODIST-- JOHN R. RUNYON 107 NOVELISTS AND STORY WRITERS-- FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON 109 FRANCIS BRET HARTE 118 MISS HENRIETTA HOWARD HOLDICH 131 MRS. MIRIAM COLES HARRIS 141 MISS MARIA MCINTOSH 146 MRS. MARIA MCINTOSH COX 149 DAVID YOUNG 155 MRS. NATHANIEL CONKLIN 165 MRS. CATHARINE L. BURNHAM 171 HON. JOHN WHITEHEAD 179 MRS. GEORGEANNA HUYLER DUER 181 MADAME DE MEISSNER 186 MISS ISABEL STONE 188 AUGUSTUS WOOD 193 CHARLES P. SHERMAN 193 MISS HELEN M. GRAHAM 193 OTHER NOVELISTS AND STORY WRITERS 195 TRANSLATORS-- MRS. ADELAIDE S. BUCKLEY 197 MISS MARGARET H. GARRARD 202 OTHER TRANSLATORS 203 LEXICOGRAPHER-- CHARLTON T. LEWIS, LL. D. 205 HISTORIANS AND ESSAYISTS-- WILLIAM CHERRY, ANCIENT CHRONICLER 207 REV. JOSEPH F. TUTTLE, D. D. 209 HON. EDMUND D. HALSEY 215 HON. JOHN WHITEHEAD 218 BAYARD TUCKERMAN 221 LOYAL FARRAGUT 227 JOSIAH COLLINS PUMPELLY 229 MISS HANNAH MORE JOHNSON 233 MRS. JULIA MCNAIR WRIGHT 237 MRS. EDWINA L. KEASBEY 239 MRS. MARIAN E. STOCKTON 243 TRAVELS AND PERSONAL REMINISCENCES-- MARQUIS DE CHASTELLUX 247 REV. JOHN L. STEPHENS 254 HON. CHARLES S. WASHBURNE 255 GENERAL JOSEPH WARREN REVERE 257 HENRY DAY 260 THEOLOGIANS-- REV. TIMOTHY JOHNES, D. D. 264 REV. JAMES RICHARDS, D. D. 270 REV. ALBERT BARNES 271 REV. SAMUEL WHELPLEY 275 STEVENS JONES LEWIS 278 REV. RUFUS SMITH GREEN, D. D. 279 REV. WM. DURANT 282 REV. J. MACNAUGHTAN, D. D. 286 REV. C. DEWITT BRIDGMAN 291 REV. J. T. CRANE, D. D. 293 REV. H. A. BUTTZ, D. D., LL. D. 296 REV. J. K. BURR, D. D. 297 REV. J. E. ADAMS 299 REV. JAMES M. BUCKLEY, D. D., LL. D. 300 REV. JAMES M. FREEMAN, D. D. 308 REV. KINSLEY TWINING, D. D., LL. D. 310 REV. THEODORE L. CUYLER, D. D. 314 RT. REV. WM. INGRAHAM KIP, D. D., LL. D. 319 REV. WILLIAM STAUNTON, D. D. 323 REV. ARTHUR MITCHELL, D. D. 327 REV. CHARLES E. KNOX, D. D. 332 REV. ALBERT ERDMAN, D. D. 334 REV. JOSEPH M. FLYNN, R. D. 337 REV. GEORGE H. CHADWELL 338 REV. WILLIAM M. HUGHES, S. T. D. 345 PUBLIC SPEAKERS AND LAWYERS-- HON. JACOB W. MILLER 351 HON. WILLIAM BURNET KINNEY 355 HON. THEODORE F. RANDOLPH 358 HON. EDWARD W. WHELPLEY 360 HON. JACOB VANATTA 362 HON. GEORGE T. WERTS 364 JOSEPH F. RANDOLPH 365 EDWARD Q. KEASBEY 367 SCIENTISTS-- SAMUEL F. B. MORSE, LL. D. 368 ALFRED VAIL 371 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, LL. D. 376 ELWYN WALLER, PH. D. 380 GEORGE W. MAYNARD, PH. D. 382 EMORY MCCLINTOCK, LL. D. 383 ANDREW F. WEST, LL. D. 384 SEÑOR JOSÉ GROS 386 MEDICAL AUTHORS AND WRITERS-- CONDICT W. CUTLER, M. S., M. D. 388 PHANET C. BARKER, M. D. 390 HORACE A. BUTTOLPH, M. D., LL. D. 392 AUTHORS AND WRITERS ON ART-- THOMAS NAST 395 REV. JARED BRADLEY FLAGG, D. D. 398 REV. J. LEONARD CORNING, D. D. 400 GEORGE HERBERT MCCORD, A. N. A. 401 DRAMATIST-- WILLIAM G. VAN TASSEL SUTPHEN 403 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE. FRONTISPIECE--OLD MORRISTOWN. ORIGINAL FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 1738, 17 OLD ARNOLD TAVERN, 25 FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 97 WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS, 209 PLAN OF FORT NONSENSE, 305 SPEEDWELL IRON WORKS, 369 OLD FACTORY AT SPEEDWELL, 377 POEM. BY WILLIAM PATERSON. MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY. These are the winter quarters, this is where The Patriot Chieftain with his army lay, When frosty winds swept down and chilled the air, And long, cold nights closed out the shorter day. The bell still rings within the white church spire, Rising toward heaven upon the village green, Whose chimes then called the people, pastor, choir, To praise and pray each Sabbath morn and e'en. And there with them, the Christian soldier sealed The common covenant which a dying Lord, To those who broke bread with him last revealed, And bade them ever thus His love record. A country hamlet then, nor did it lose Its rural charms and beauties for long years; The stranger would its quiet glories choose, Far from the toils and strifes of daily cares. The people, too, were simple in their ways, And dwelt contented in their humble sphere, The morning and the evening of their days, Passing the same with every closing year. There were the Deacons, solemn, sober, staid, Beneath the pulpit each Communion Sunday, They never smiled, but sung there psalms and prayed; And then made whiskey at the still on Monday. Perhaps you smile just here, I only say, Men did not deem it then a heinous crime; Such was the common custom of the day, As those can tell who recollect the time. For further proof of this, look up the tract Of Deacon Giles and his distillery, Where you will find that for this very fact, He was set up high in the pillory. Young life for me began its early spring, Here in the freshness of the Mountain air, When nature seemed in fullest tune to sing, And all the world was beautiful and fair. And Death--Who stays to think of him, till age Comes stealing on with sure and silent tread? Nor even then can he the thoughts engage, Till his cold fingers touch the dying bed. He called one then in withered leaf and sere, And sent a warning, so wiseacres said, By causing apple blossoms to appear In winter, and the old man soon was dead. The Guinea Chieftain too, a century old, Born a young Prince beneath his native sky, Who with his banjo sang rare tales of gold-- I saw him strive and struggle, gasp and die. A child was brought one evening, lived, and died, Almost before its eyes beheld the day; The infant and the old men, side by side, Were in the quiet churchyard laid away. I learned of Life and Death, but know no more Of their mysterious secrets now than then; No sesame can open wide the door, That veils those mysteries from the light of men. Upon the summit of the rock-bound hill That looks down on the lowland plains afar, Are seen the outlines of the earthworks still Remaining there, rude vestiges of war. That was a day to be remembered long, When crowds were gathered on the village green, To welcome with warm hearts and floral song, Him who a friend in war's dark hour had been. And not while nature's suns shall pour their light, Will Freedom's sons that honored name forget, Nor cease to, until worlds shall pass from sight, Keep green the memory of Lafayette. Hark, on the air tolls out the passing bell, Fourscore and ten and yet again fourscore; Tread lightly now, it is the parting knell For two great spirits gone out evermore. Together they had lived, together died As Freedom's Bell rang in her natal day, And what than this could be more mete beside That twinned in death, their souls should pass away? There comes a memory of the bugle horn, Winding a blast, as with their daily load, The prancing coach-steeds dashed out in the morn To run the toll-gates of the turnpike road. Behold the change? now brakes are whistled down, And screaming engines wake the Mountain air; There is no longer, as of old, a Town Committee, but a Council and a Mayor. Go where the lake sleeps in the summer night, Kissed by the winds that on its bosom play, When the round moon sends down her fullest light, And evening glories in soft splendor lay. And you can almost fancy then that over, The moonlit mirror of the tranquil tide, You see the water spirits rise and hover, And on the sheen in laughing lightness glide. And I have seen those waters as they flow, Down on their course past bridge and wheel and mill, Where we as boys would "in-a-swimming go;" Do the boys swim in "Sunnygony" still? Oh, fellow scholar who along with me Learned the first rudiments of ball and book Within the grounds of the Academy, In vain for that old landmark now you look. Gone with the Master, yet a memory lingers, And will forever consecrate the spot, Nor can the power of Time's effacing fingers, While life shall last, the recollection blot. Teacher and pupils, few remain, and they Far on in years, lean on a slender staff; The school-house, all you see of that to-day Is shown you there upon its photograph. Change is on all things, and I see it here; Land that then grew the turnip and "potater," Now blooms in flowers and costs exceeding dear, Bringing some thousand dollars by the acre! And villas crown the rising hill-tops round, And stately mansions stand adorned with art, And liveried coaches roll with rumbling sound Where once jogged on the wagon-wheel and cart. Hail to the future, ages come and go, And men are borne upon the sweeping tide; Wave follows wave in ever ceaseless flow, The present stays not by the dweller's side. I stand to-day far down the farthest slope, And up the lengthened pathway turn and look, Where on the summit once stood Youth and Hope, Now soon to turn the last leaf of the Book. And I am glad that while there come to me These fragrant memories of life's early scene, That still in robes of purest white I see The Church Spire rising on the village green. HISTORIC MORRISTOWN. Throughout our country, there is no spot more identified with the story of the Revolution, and the personality of Washington, than Morristown. Nestled among its five ranges of hills, its impregnable position no doubt first attracted the attention of the commander-in-chief and that of his trusted quartermaster, General Nathaniel Greene. Besides, the enthusiastic patriotism of the men and women of this part of New Jersey was noted far and wide, and the powder-mill of Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., on the Whippany river, where "good merchantable powder," was in course of manufacture,--some of which had probably already been tested at Trenton, Princeton and elsewhere,--was also among the attractions. It was on December 20th, 1776, that Washington wrote to the President of Congress: "I have directed the three regiments from Ticonderoga, to halt at Morristown, in Jersey (where I understand about eight hundred Militia have collected) in order to inspirit the inhabitants and as far as possible to cover that part of the country." (Quoted by Rev. Dr. Tuttle in his paper on "Washington in Morris County," in the Historical Magazine for June 1871.) These were regiments from New England. The British, who were always trying to gain "the pass of the mountains," had made an attempt on the 14th of December, but had been repulsed by Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., with his militia, at Springfield. At this time the village numbered about 250 inhabitants with a populous community of thriving farmers surrounding it. To the north of the town were the estates of the Hathaway and Johnes families; to the east, those of the Fords, who had just erected the building now known as the Headquarters; to the south, those of General John Doughty and to the west, those of Silas Condict and his brothers. Morris county was settled "about 1710," by families of New England ancestry, who were attracted by the iron ore in the mountains round about and who came from Newark and Elizabethtown. The Indian name for the country round, seems to have been "Rockciticus" as late as the arrival of Pastor Johnes in 1742, according to the traditions in his family. The original name of the settlement of Morristown was West Hanover, and in court records this name is found as late as 1738. It was also called New Hanover. The present name was adopted when the county court held its first meeting here at the house of Col. Jacob Ford, on March 25th, 1740. The town was named for the county and the county was named for Governor Lewis Morris, who was Governor of New Jersey from 1738 to 1746. Evidently this was to be the county town of Morris County. At the time of the Revolution the church, the "Court House and Jail" and the Arnold Tavern were the most important buildings. The Magazine also, a temporary structure, stood on South street, near the "Green". To it casks of powder were constantly taken and sometimes casks of _sand_ to deceive the spies who were always hanging about. The "Court House and Jail" was famous as the common prison of Tories caught in Morris and the adjoining counties. It was built in 1755 and stood on the northwest corner of the village "Green" as shown in the picture of Old Morristown. It was a plain wooden structure with a cupola and bell. Its sides and roof were shingled. One of the illustrations of this book is of the Arnold Tavern, as it appeared in Washington's time. The picture is from a pen-and-ink sketch by Miss S. Howell, made originally and recently for the Washington Association of N. J., under careful direction from study of the time, by one of its members. Taverns were dotted all about the country in those days and most of the public meetings were held in their spacious rooms. Whether it was this fact or because of certain qualities possessed by the early proprietors of taverns, we find that many of them eventually became the most eminent men of the community. The erection of the First Church building was begun in 1738 and finished in 1740, although the organization had existed from 1733. The first pastor, Rev. Timothy Johnes found it ready for his reception on his arrival in 1742 and for his installation, the following year. We are indebted to our young artist, Miss Emma H. Van Pelt, for a painting of this early church, from the only outline that remains to us, and to Miss S. Howell, for the pen-and-ink sketch, from the painting, for this book. This outline was embroidered upon a sampler owned by Miss Martha Emmell, and, according to family history, is a faithful representation of the building and the only suggestion other than traditional of Morristown's first place of worship. Miss Van Pelt's picture of the old church also follows in all respects her own, and the study of others, from the ancient records of the time. The structure stood about a rod east of the present building, facing upon Morris street and was always known as the "Meetin' House." It was originally of a somewhat plain and barn-like exterior, nearly square, with shingled sides, and windows let into the sloping roof. It was twice altered. In 1764, it was enlarged and two other entrances, besides the main entrance, were provided. A steeple also was erected in which was hung the bell in use at the present time. This bell was a gift, according to traditional history from the King of Great Britain to the church at Morristown. It had upon it the impress of the British crown and the name of the makers, "Lister & Pack, of London _fecit_." It was re-cast about thirty years ago. This early church and the Baptist church, which stood on the site occupied by the one quite recently removed, (because of the fine new building in course of erection), have honorable record for unselfish devotion to the cause of the patriots. Both buildings were nobly given up for the use of the soldiers, suffering with small-pox, in the terrible winter of 1777. Washington first came to Morristown, with his staff and army, three days after the battle of Princeton, on January 7th, 1777, and remained until May of that year. He made his Headquarters at the Arnold Tavern, then kept by Colonel Jacob Arnold, a famous officer of the "Light Horse Guards", whose grandsons are now residents of Morristown. This historic building stood on the west side of the Green, where now, a large brick building, "The Arnold", has been erected on its site. The old building with its many associations was about to be destroyed, when it was rescued, at the suggestion of the author of this book, and restored upon its present site on the Colles estate, on Mt. Kemble avenue, the old Baskingridge road of the Revolution. It has recently been purchased and occupied for a hospital by the All Souls' Hospital Association. Though extended and enlarged, it is still the same building and retains many of the distinctive features which characterized it when the residence of Washington. Here is still the bedroom which Washington occupied, the parlor, the dining-room and the ball-room where he received his generals, Greene, Knox, Schuyler, Gates, Lee, de Kalb, Steuben, Wayne, Winds, Putnam, Sullivan and others, besides distinguished visitors from abroad, all of whom met here continually during the winter of 1777. One of these visitors and one of our authors, the Marquis de Chastellux, gives an interesting account of his experience and impressions. In one of the bedrooms of this old house, has been seen within a few years, between the floor and the ceiling below, a long case for guns, above which was painted on the floor, in very large squares, covering the entire opening, a checkerboard about which, in an emergency, evidently the soldiers expected to sit and so conceal from the enemy the trap door of their arsenal. About this ancient building many traditions linger and from it have gone forth Washington's commands and some of his most important letters. The road taken by Washington and his army, on coming first to Morristown, was, according to Dr. Tuttle, "through Pluckamin, Baskingridge, New Vernon, thence by a grist mill near Green Village, around the corner and thence along the road leading from Green Village to Morristown and over the ground which had been selected for an encampment in the valley bearing the beautiful Indian name of Lowantica, now called Spring Valley." It was here that the terrible scourge of small-pox broke out among the soldiers. One cannot but wonder continually at Washington's courage and serenity in the midst of such overwhelming difficulties. He had hardly entered his winter home, in the Arnold Tavern, when the loss was announced to him of the brave and noble Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., his right-hand man, upon whom he had depended. He was buried, by Washington's orders, with the honors of war, and the description of that funeral cortege is one of the most picturesque pages out of traditional history. Then came the alarm about small-pox, the first death occurring on the same day as Col. Ford's funeral. Washington himself was taken ill, says tradition, with quinsy sore throat, and great fears were felt for his life. It is interesting to know that being asked who should succeed him in command of the army, should he not recover, he at once pointed to Gen. Nathaniel Greene. It was during this time of residence at the Arnold Tavern, that Washington joined Pastor Johnes and his people in their semi-annual communion after receiving the good pastor's assurance: "Ours is not the Presbyterian table, but the Lord's table, and we give the Lord's invitation to all his followers of whatever name." This is said to be the only occasion in his public career, when it is certainly known that Washington partook of the Sacrament. The hollow is still shown behind the house of Pastor Johnes, on Morris street, (purchased Feb. 3rd, 1893, of Mrs. Eugene Ayers, for the Morristown Memorial Hospital,) where a grove of trees then stood, when this historic event took place in the open air, while the church building was taken up with the soldiers sick of small-pox. Of this fact, in addition to the confirmation of Rev. Timothy Johnes's granddaughter, now living, Mrs. Kirtland, we have the following from Mr. Frederick G. Burnham, who says, (Oct 12th, 1892); "My Aunt, Huldah Lindsley, sister of Judge Silas Condict, and born in Morristown, gave me, in the most distinct and definite manner an account of General Washington's having communed with the Presbyterian Church on the occasion of the encampment in Morristown. My aunt told me that the congregation sat out of doors, even in the winter, but were shielded from the severe winds by surrounding high ground, that benches were placed in a circular position, that the pastor occupied a central point and that it was in this out-of-door place, muffled in their thickest clothing and many of them warmed by foot-stoves and other arrangements for keeping the feet warm, with nothing overhead but the wintry sky, that the congregation, among them General Washington, partook of the Lord's Supper." Early in December 1779, came Washington once more, with his army, to Morristown, and remained until the following June, the guest of Mrs. Theodosia Ford, widow of the gallant Col. Jacob Ford, Jr., at her home now known as the "Headquarters." The story of the purchase and preservation of this building for the state and country, by the Washington Association of New Jersey, is given farther on. "It is still," says the orator of Fort Nonsense (the Rev. Dr. Buckley), "the most charming residence which Morristown contains and historically inferior only in interest to Mount Vernon and far superior to it in beauty of location and surrounding scenery." Among the treasures of the Headquarters is the original Commission to Washington, as Commander-in-chief of the Army. At the opening ceremonial of the Washington Headquarters on July 5th, 1875, Governor Theodore F. Randolph, in an eloquent address, said as follows: "Under this roof have been gathered more characters known to the Military history of our Revolution than under any other roof in America. Here the eloquent and brilliant Alexander Hamilton lived during the long winter of 1779-'80 and here he met and courted the lady he afterwards married--the daughter of General Schuyler. Here too was Greene--splendid fighting Quaker as he was--and the great artillery officer, Knox, the stern Steuben, the polished Kosciusko, the brave Schuyler, gallant Light-horse Harry Lee, old Israel Putnam, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and, last to be named of all, that brave soldier, but rank traitor--Benedict Arnold." Many authenticated stories are extant of Washington, himself, and of the other distinguished inmates of the Headquarters during this memorable winter. Of the women of Morris County too, and the country round, many historic tales are told. If possible, they seem to have been even more patriotic than the men, whom, on several occasions, they upheld when wavering with doubt or fear. They had knitting and sewing circles for the soldiers in camp upon the Wicke Farm. These were presided over by Mrs. Ralph Smith, on Smith's Hummock, by Mrs. Anna Kitchell at Whippany, and by Mrs. Counselor Condict and Mrs. Parson Johnes, in Morristown. In all this sympathetic work, Martha Washington led, and we hear of her that after coming through Trenton on December 28th, in a raging snow storm, to spend New Year's Day in the Ford Mansion, some of the grand ladies of the town came to call upon her, dressed in their most elegant silks and ruffles, and "so", says one of them, "we were introduced to her ladyship, and don't you think we found her with a _speckled homespun apron on, and engaged in knitting a stocking_? She received us very handsomely and then again resumed her knitting. In the course of the conversation, she said, very kindly to us, whilst she made her needles fly, that 'American ladies should be patterns of industry to their country-women * * * * we must become independent of England by doing without these articles which we can make ourselves. Whilst our husbands and brothers are examples of patriotism, we must be examples of industry'. 'I do declare,' said one of the ladies afterwards, 'I never felt so ashamed and rebuked in my life!'" (Rev. Dr. Tuttle.) The "Assembly Balls," a subscription entertainment, no doubt arranged to keep up the spirits of the army officers, were held that winter at the O'Hara Tavern, says Dr. Tuttle, a house facing the Green and on or adjoining the lot where now stands Washington Hall,--and probably also at the Arnold Tavern. In the meadow, in front of the headquarters, Washington's body-guard was encamped, originally a select troop of about one hundred Virginians. [Illustration: Painted by MISS EMMA H. VAN PELT. From Pen and Ink Sketch by MISS S. HOWELL. ORIGINAL FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 1738.] Martha Washington was a fine horsewoman and the General a superb horseman, as are all Virginians of the present day. Many were the rides they took together over the country, one of the most frequent, being to a certain elevation on the Short Hills, from which the General with his glass could see every movement of the enemy. Here was stationed the giant alarm-gun, an eighteen-pounder, and here was the main centre of the system of beacon-lights on the hills around. From this point can be seen the entire sea-board in the vicinity of New York City, which was of great importance when it was not known whether Howe would move towards West Point or Philadelphia. There is also a view of the entire region west of the mountain, "to the crown of the hills which lie back of Morristown, and extending to Baskingridge, Pluckamin and the hills in the vicinity of Middlebrook on the South, and over to Whippany, Montville, Pompton, Ringwood, and, across the State-line among the mountains of Orange County, N. Y., on the north." On our road to Madison, we may call up in imagination, the vision, which in those days was no unusual sight, says Dr. Tuttle, of "Washington and his accomplished lady, mounted on bay horses and accompanied by their faithful mulatto, 'Bill,' and fifty or sixty mounted Life-guards, passing on their way to or from their quarters in Morristown." At these times "the 'star spangled banner' was sure to float from the village liberty-pole, while our ancestors congregated along the highway where he was to pass and around the village inn, to do honor to the man to whose fidelity and martial skill all eyes were turned for the salvation of our country." Sometimes this cavalcade would pass along the Baskingridge Road, (now Mt. Kemble Avenue), perhaps stop at General Doughty's house, or, galloping on, stop at the Kemble mansion, (afterwards the Hoyt residence and now that of Mr. McAlpin), four miles from town, or turning the corner up Kemble Hill to the Wicke farm, and Fort Hill, to view the soldiers' encampment, they would clatter back again, down the precipitous Jockey Hollow road, past the Hospital-field, or burial place of the soldiers, stopping at the Headquarters of General Knox, off the Mendham road, about two miles from town, for Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Washington were close friends. Returning, they might slacken rein at the house of Pastor Johnes, (Mrs. Eugene Ayers') on Morris Street, where a ring still remains at the side of the piazza, to which Washington's horse was tied, under an elm tree's shade; or, they would stop at Quartermaster Lewis's (Mr. Wm. L. King's) where they would find Lafayette, after his return from France, if he happened to be in Morristown,--then at Dr. Jabez Campfield's house, on Morris Street, the east corner of Oliphant Lane,--the Headquarters of General Schuyler. Again the General, with his Life-guards, would set out to attend some appointed meeting of the "Council of Safety" at the house of its president, Silas Condict. This was about a mile out on the Sussex Turnpike, where the house still stands, on the west side of the old cross-road leading from that turnpike to Brant's paper-mill. Here he would meet the high-minded and dauntless Governor Livingston and perhaps his son-in-law, Judge Symmes, who lived near by, and whom the Governor frequently visited; all were men whose lives were sought for, by the British. Nearly all these homes are standing now and representatives of these families remain with us. Stories and traditions also relating to these homes and people have come down to us. Silas Condict, the bold, the brave, the honored patriot, member of the Provincial Legislature and of the Continental Congress besides filling other high places of trust, is represented by his great-grandson, Hon. Aug. W. Cutler, who now occupies the second house this ancestor built. General John Doughty's interesting old house, with its curious interior, and many a secret closet, stands as of old, on Mt. Kemble Avenue, at the head of Colles Avenue. "He might be called," says Mr. Wm. L. King, "the most distinguished resident of Morristown, at whose house Washington was a frequent visitor and no doubt often dined." He is represented by a great-nephew, Mr. Thomas W. Ogden, who has written an important paper on General Doughty, for the Washington Association, which is published by them. General Doughty was the third in command of the American Army, and succeeded General Knox. A descendant of General Knox is with us,--Mr. Reuben Knox, of Western Avenue. General Schuyler's Headquarters has a romantic interest as the scene of the courtship between Miss Elizabeth Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. Of Pastor Johnes descendants, three generations are now with us to some of whom we have referred in the sketch of this distinguished man. Out on the Wicke farm, stands the house as it was in those old days when Tempe Wicke took her famous ride ahead of the pursuing soldiers and saved her favorite horse by concealing him for three weeks in the guest chamber, until every man of the army had gone to fight his country's battles on the banks of the Hudson. This house is near Fort Hill from which is the magnificent view which embraces Schooley's Mountain to the westward and a line of broken highlands to the South, among which is the town of Baskingridge where General Lee was captured. On the northern slope of this hill, as late as 1854, 66 fireplaces of the encampment were counted in regular rows and in a small space were found 196 hut chimneys. Going up a long, high street, not far from the Park, gradually ascending over rocks, and rough winding pathways, we come upon an open plateau on which is "Fort Nonsense," so named, on leaving it, by Washington, says tradition, because the soldiers had here been employed in constructing an octagonal earthwork, only to occupy them and to keep them from that idleness which was certain to breed discontent when added to their poverty, poor shelter, hopelessness, and homelessness. Here, on a bright afternoon of April, 1888, a monument to commemorate the site, was unveiled with appropriate ceremonies by the Washington Association. Long will be remembered the strange and startling effect upon those who sat waiting, as the procession drew near at a quickstep, up the hill, and led by the Fairchild Continental Drum Corps, in characteristic dress. Nearer and nearer came the tramp of many feet, to the sound of fife and drum playing Yankee Doodle, and, as they emerged from the trees upon the hill, it seemed as if Time's clock had been turned back more than a hundred years. Standing upon the stone, the orator of the occasion, Rev. Dr. Buckley, made a memorable address, in the course of which he mentioned that this monument, though small, is higher, measured from the level of the sea, than the great Washington Monument, which is declared to be the wonder of the world. The plan of the Fort, drawn by Major J. P. Farley, U. S. A., is now at the Headquarters and the illustration in this volume, is given from an engraving of the Messrs. Vogt, by their kind permission. Probably no Author will again record the presence of the second "First Church", which has measured its hundred years and more, in its old familiar place upon the Park. Soon it will be replaced by a modern structure. In October, 1891, prolonged and interesting services were held to celebrate the centennial of its erection. Closely involved with all the history of Morristown, the influences of this old church are felt and shown all through this book. The picture we give of it and the Soldiers' Monument, is as we look upon both to-day. (For the use of the engraving, we are again indebted to the Messrs. Vogt). Sorrowfully, we note the passing of the old church building and number it among the things we would not lose, but which soon shall be no more. Behind it, is the old historic cemetery, where have been laid to rest the forms of many of the patriots and honored dead of the century gone by. The "Old Academy" was an outcome of the First Church organization, and its early history is recorded in the "Trustees Book," of the church. Its centennial was observed on February 13th, 1891, on which occasion, among others, Hon. John Whitehead, of Morristown, and Judge William Paterson, of Perth Amboy, told its story, and the "Old Bell", placed upon the stage, was rung by Mr. Edward Pierson, who attended the Academy in 1820. In 1825, Lafayette came again, from France, to revisit the scenes of the Revolution. It was on July 14th, about six o'clock in the evening, that coming from Paterson, he arrived at Morristown. The Morris Brigade under General Darcy was paraded on the Green and the firing of cannon and ringing of church bells announced his coming. General Doughty was Grand Marshal of the day and an eloquent address was made, in behalf of the town, by Hon. Lewis Condict. Lafayette dined at the Ogden House, the home of Jonathan Ogden, a large brick building corner of Market street and the Green (shown in the picture). He attended a ball given in his honor, at the Sansay House (now Mrs. Revere's, on DeHart street), and stayed over night with Mr. James Wood, in the white house, corner of South and Pine streets. Two of Morristown's citizens have given their reminiscences of this event to the author of this book, as follows: Mr. Edward Pierson, January 10th, 1893, says: "I remember well each member of the Committee who received Lafayette, but two. I remember very well the visit of General Lafayette to Morristown, in the year 1825. There was a delegation went from Morristown, in carriages and on horseback, to meet him beyond Morristown and escort him here. They came in by the Morris street road, past the Washington Headquarters. At that time there was only one small house on the north side of the street, below the present Manse of the First Church to the foot of the hill. The ground sloped from the graveyard to the street and was filled with people to see the procession come in. A reception was given and Lafayette was taken to the James Wood house (white house on the east corner of Pine and South streets, opposite my residence), to spend the night. I well remember the next morning seeing them start off with the General and his party in a four-horse carriage." Mr. A. H. Condict, well-known as a resident of Morristown, writes from Mansfield, Ohio, (January 12th, 1893): "My eldest sister has related to me that when I was about a year old, General Lafayette was given a public reception at Morristown, in an elegant brick building then standing on the corner of the Park and Market street; that suitable addresses were made on the occasion and that while he was being observed by the great crowd of people, she held me up and that I looked at him. This would fix the time in the Summer of 1825, which corresponds with my notes gathered from the various histories." Morristown has always been a centre, not only geographically, but a centre of influence from the time when it received its name. We have seen how, midway between West Point and Philadelphia, with roads radiating in every direction and with high hills well fitted for beacon-lights and commanding far-reaching views, Washington soon discovered it was the point for him to select for watching the movements of Lord Howe in New York, who might at any moment start up the Hudson for West Point, or Southwards, for Philadelphia. [Illustration: THE ORIGINAL ARNOLD TAVERN. FROM PEN AND INK SKETCH BY MISS S. HOWELL.] In the early religious movements of the country, Morristown was conspicuous, having among its theologians some of the most brilliant thinkers of the period. Recently we find, in the published minutes of the Synod of New Jersey, Oct. 1892, the significant fact recorded that after the division of the Presbytery of New York, into that of New York and of New Jersey, the "Presbytery of Jersey at its first meeting in Morristown, April 24th, 1810, did appoint supplies for fourteen Sabbaths from May to September, to the pulpit of the vacant Brick Church in the City of New York". One of the first Sunday Schools, if not the first,--in New Jersey was started here, by Mrs. Charlotte Ford Condict of Littleton, the grandmother of Henry Vail Condict, now a resident of Morristown, and this was said to be the beginning of the great revival under Albert Barnes. In a scientific direction, Morristown was the cradle of perhaps the greatest invention of the age, the electric telegraph. Also at the Speedwell Iron Works were manufactured the first tires, axles and cranks of American locomotives and a part of the machinery of the "Savannah," the first steamship that crossed the ocean. Morristown also reflected the superstitions of the period; the people largely believed in witchcraft in those early days, and here was enacted, for about a year, the most remarkable ghostly drama that was ever published to the world, or influenced the best citizens of a community. The story of the Morristown Ghost will go down to future ages. For philanthropy, from Revolutionary times, Morristown has been famed, since Martha set the example of knitting the stockings for the needy soldiers and good Hannah Thompson voiced the hearts of her sisters round about, when she gave food to a starving company of them, saying: "Eat all you want; you are engaged in a good cause, and we are willing to share with you what we have as long as it lasts." This old centre of patriotism and Revolutionary enthusiasm has radiated philanthropic movements which influence not only the conditions of the whole State but the welfare of humanity. Here was commenced that voluntary work of the State Charities Aid Association, which considers, and practically carries out, through its counselors, measures for reform among the pauper and criminal classes in the State institutions, and out of them, and which will undoubtedly influence for good all future generations. This work is on much the same plan that was originally thought out and organized by Miss Louisa Lee Schuyler, of New York, the great-granddaughter of General Philip Schuyler whose noble devotion to his Commander-in-chief is memorable during those days in Morristown. So we see how the old life of the Revolutionary period connects itself with the new life of progression. The principles then so nobly maintained take new forms in new projects. Everywhere, we find the old and the new combined, for even the streets bear the names, with those of Schuyler, Hamilton and Washington, of Farragut and McCullough. In the Park there stands a granite shaft surmounted by a full length figure of a Morris County Volunteer, commemorating the lives of the noble men who fell in those hard-won fields, fighting to preserve the nationality which had been secured by their forefathers. Everything is significant of either noble deeds in the past or of honored names of later day and of private citizens whose personal influence has added moral dignity to this City of many associations. George Washington. Among the first notable writings associated with Morristown are the letters of Washington written from the old Arnold Tavern, and from the Ford Mansion, during the two memorable winters of 1777 and of 1779-'80. These noble letters are acknowledged on all sides to have been supremely efficient in promoting our national independence, filled as they are with the personality of Washington himself. They are very numerous. Many of them are published; some are in our "Headquarters", and many still are scattered over the Country, in the possession of individuals. All are interesting and none appear to reveal what we would wish had not been known, as in the case of so many other published letters. Of the man himself, our authors speak, here and there, throughout this volume. It is certain that no name, no face or character is more familiar to us than that of Washington, and no name in history has received a greater tribute than to be called, as he was, by the nation, at the end of his very difficult career, the "Father of his Country." Here is Lafayette's first impression, as he attends a dinner in Philadelphia, given by Congress in honor of the Commander-in-Chief. He says: "Although surrounded by officers and citizens, Washington was to be recognized at once by the majesty of his countenance and his figure." And this is Lafayette's tribute to Washington, when the two men have parted: "As a private soldier, he would have been the bravest; as an obscure citizen, all his neighbors would have respected him. With a heart as just as his mind he always judged himself as he judged circumstances. In creating him expressly for this revolution, Nature did honor to herself; and to show the perfection of her work, she placed him in such a position that each quality must have failed, had it not been sustained by all the others." (Quoted by Bayard Tuckerman in his "Life of Lafayette.") In the portrait of Washington which Chastellux gives us, occur these words: "His strongest characteristic is the perfect union which reigns between the physical and moral qualities which compose the individual, one alone will enable you to judge of all the rest. If you are presented with medals of Cæsar, Trajan or Alexander, on examining their features, you will still be led to ask what was their stature and the form of their persons; but if you discover, in a heap of ruins, the head or the limb of an antique Apollo, be not anxious about the other parts, but rest assured that they all were conformable to those of a God. * * * This will be said of Washington, '_At the end of a long civil war, he had nothing with which he could reproach himself._'" Thatcher, in his Military Journal, speaks of Washington as he appeared at a great entertainment given by General Knox, in celebration of the alliance with France: "His tall, noble stature and just proportions, his fine, cheerful countenance, simple and modest deportment, are all calculated to interest every beholder in his favor and to command veneration and respect. He is feared even when silent and beloved even while we are unconscious of the motive." The first French minister, M. Gerard, tells us, referring to Washington: "It is impossible for me briefly to communicate the fund of intelligence which I have derived from him. I will now say only that I have formed as high an opinion of the powers of his mind, his moderation, patriotism and of his virtues, as I had before from common report conceived of his military talents, and of the incalculable services he had rendered to his country." (Quoted by A. D. Mellick in his "Story of an Old Farm.") We see the General in his evening dress of "black velvet, with knee and shoe buckles and a steel rapier; his hair thickly powdered, drawn back from his forehead and gathered in a black silk bag adorned with a rosette" walking gracefully and with dignity through the figures of a quadrille. We see him devoted to his wife and courteous to every woman, high and low. Greene writes from the Headquarters: "Mrs. Washington is extremely fond of the General and he of her; they are happy in each other." We see him, with his tender sympathy among the soldiers and so find the key to the wonderful devotion of the soldiers to their chief, and his influence over them. As an old soldier tells the story to the Rev. O. L. Kirtland: "There was a time when all our rations were but a single _gill of wheat_ a day. Washington used to come round and look into our tents, and he looked so kind and he said so tenderly. 'Men, can you bear it?' 'Yes, General, yes we can,' was the reply; 'if you wish us to act give us the word and we are ready!'" Many were the letters he wrote in their behalf to Congress, who neglected them, and to Lord Howe in New York, because of his cruelty to the prisoners in his power. Another key we have to his calm and self-reliant bearing, even in his darkest hours, so that, says Tuttle, "there seemed to be something about this man, which inspired his enemies, even when victorious, with dread." It is expressed in a letter of Washington when heartsick at the round of misfortunes at the outset of the Revolution, and after the capture of Fort Washington by the enemy. He writes: "It almost overcomes me to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast and that the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited with slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?" (Quoted by Dr. Tuttle from Sparks.) A touching letter is written on the 8th of January, 1780, from the Ford Mansion, to the Morris County authorities, about the hungry, destitute soldiers, to which he receives at once so warm and generous a response that he writes again: "The exertions of the magistrates and inhabitants of the State were great and cheerful for our relief." (Quoted by Dr. Tuttle from Sparks.) Though a warm Episcopalian, his broad Christian feeling is shown when he says: "Being no bigot, myself, I am disposed to indulge the professors of Christianity in the Church with that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct, the plainest and easiest and least liable to objections." (Dr. Tuttle, quoted from Sparks.) And again, in reply to the Address of the Clergy of different denominations, in and about Philadelphia; "Believing as I do, that _Religion_ and _Morality are the essential_ pillars of society, I view with unspeakable pleasure, that harmony and brotherly love which characterize the clergy of different denominations, as well in this, as in other parts of the United States, exhibiting to the world a new and interesting spectacle, at once the pride of our Country and the surest basis of universal harmony." (Quoted by Dr. Tuttle from Dr. Green's Autobiography.) What man, after arriving at such a height of power and influence over men, has been able to take up, with content again, his life of a country gentleman? Wonderfully appropriate were the last words that fell from his lips: "It is well." Of Washington it may be said as of no other, in the words of Henry Lee, in his Eulogy of December 26th, 1799: "To the memory of the man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." POETS. William and Stephen V. R. Paterson. A curious circumstance surrounds the poetic work of the two Paterson brothers--William and Stephen Van Rensselaer Paterson--and gives it a unique interest apart from its especial merits. The survivor of the two brothers says, in the short and highly interesting introduction to their poems, published in 1882 and called "Poems of Twin Graduates of the College of New Jersey": "The title explains itself, and shows that the writers were born under the sign of the Gemini. They lived under that sign for rising fifty years, when one was taken and the other left. Two of us came into existence within the same hour of time, and passing through the early part of education together, entered the world-life as twin graduates of the collegiate institution bearing the name of the State of which they were natives. This dual species of psychology was something of a curiosity because outside of common experience. Pleasure and pain seemed to flow like electric currents from the same battery. In a certain sense, we could feel at once, and think at once and act at once. It is problematical whether this proceeded from a real elective affinity, or was mechanical. It was most marked, however, at first, and particularly in the beginning or rudiments of learning. Both then went along exactly at the same rate, and one never was in advance of the other. Both always worked and played together, and whichever discovered something new, would communicate it in an untranslatable language to his companion. "This dual character, to a greater or less extent, pervaded the joint lives of the writers of these pieces. Not that the similarity extended to the business or pursuits, the tastes or habits of life, for in many respects they were different and apart as those bearing a single relation. Still the influence of the mystic tie, whatever it was or may have been, remained till nature loosed, as it had woven, the bond." Although Judge William Paterson was born in Perth Amboy and now resides there, his associations with Morristown, as related in a letter under his signature, are those of early boyhood passed on the farm, now occupied by Mrs. Howland. "Morristown was then but a village hamlet," he says, and "the old Academy and the Meeting House on the village green were the only places in which services were held." Still, we gather, that at Morristown, the two poets received their "scholastic and agricultural training." Here, too, was laid the foundation of their "political and religious faith," the latter under the administration of Albert Barnes, and, what may be a noted event in their lives, they heard Mr. Barnes preach the sermon on the "Way of Salvation," which caused the division of the Presbyterian Church. Judge Paterson is a graduate of Princeton, which is in a double sense his Alma Mater, inasmuch as members of his family were among the first graduates, soon after the removal of the College from Newark and "when that village, then a hamlet amid the primeval forests had become the permanent site for the Academy incorporated by royal charter." Various positions of importance in the community have been held by Judge Paterson. In 1882, he was made Lay Judge of the Court of Errors and Appeals of the State; he was also Mayor of Newark for ten years, at different times from 1846 to 1878, filling important and non-important municipal and county offices. Thus his work has been mostly legal and political, save, when he has made dashes into the more purely literary fields, rather, perhaps, through inspiration and for recreation from the dry details of practical work. More than once has Judge Paterson told to amused and interested audiences in Morristown his recollections of boyhood and youth spent here. Notably, many remember his recent graphic address on the occasion of the Centennial of the Morristown Academy. In 1888, our author published a valuable "Biography of the Class of 1835 of Princeton College," the class in which he graduated. The "Poems" were published in 1882. Looking through the latter volume, which contains many treasures, we wonder how, many of the poems--written as they were under the influence of a higher inspiration than ordinary rhythmic influences--should not earlier have found their way, in book form, from the writer's secret drawers to the readers of the outside world. Many of these poems are connected with experiences and memories of Academic days in Princeton and, among them all we would mention "The Close of the Centennial;" "Living on a Farm," which refers to Mrs. Howland's farm, long the poet's home in boyhood; "14th February, 1877;" "The Hickory Tree," and "Polly," in which the writer has caught wonderfully the bright, playful spirit of the child. The poem "Morristown," a pictorial reminiscence, we have selected to open this book. Quite recently, (in September, 1892) has been published and bound in true orange color, _An Address_, read before the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, on February 12th, 1892, on the life and public services of _William Paterson_, his honored grandfather, who was "Attorney-General of New Jersey during the Revolution, a framer of the Federal Constitution, Senator of the United States from New Jersey, Governor of that State, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States at the time of his death, September 9th, 1806." "He was the first Alumnus of Princeton," says the writer, "who was tendered a place in the Cabinet or on the Federal Judiciary, the Attorney-General, the first one being William Bradford, also an Alumnus, a classmate of Madison, and Collegemate of Burr, then not constituting part of the Executive household." "He began the study of legal science and practice under the instruction of Richard Stockton, who was an Alumnus of the first Class that went forth from the College of New Jersey, then located in Newark, and who, though young, comparatively, was rising fast to the forefront of his profession, and, afterward, to become of renowned judicial and revolutionary fame." The publication is full of interest, graphic description and notice of men and events of the period. Here is a letter to Aaron Burr, between whom while a student in the College at Princeton, and Mr. Paterson, then established in the practice of his profession, had sprung up a strong friendship which continued during life: "Princeton, January 17th, 1772. DEAR BURR: I am just ready to leave and therefore cannot wait for you. Be pleased to accept of the enclosed notes on _dancing_. If you pitch upon it as the subject of your next discourse, they may furnish you with a few hints, and enable you to compose with greater facility and despatch. To do you any little service in my power, will afford me great satisfaction, and I hope you will take the liberty--it is nothing more, my dear Burr, than the freedom of a friend--to call upon me whenever you may think I can. Bear with me when I say, _that you cannot speak too slow_. Every word should be pronounced distinctly; one should not be sounded so highly as to drown another. To see you shine as a speaker, would give great pleasure to your friends in general and to me in particular. You certainly are capable of making a good speaker. "Dear Burr, adieu. WM. PATERSON." The writer pays a beautiful tribute to Ireland, the land of his ancestors: "Irish Nationality," he says, "is no empty dream; it goes back more than two thousand years, is as old as Christianity, and is attested by the existence of towers and monuments, giving evidence of greater antiquity than is to be found in the annals of any other country in all Europe. For centuries, Ireland sent missionaries of learning throughout the continent to herald the advent of civilization and stay the advance of barbarism, and her story is one running over with great deeds and glorious memories, with associations of poetry and art and bards, and a civilization, ante-dating that of almost any other Christian community. It cannot be claimed that the rude exploits of her early inhabitants are classic in story or in song. They acquired no territory; their island domain is but a speck of green verdure amid the waste of ocean waters, and the flash of an electric light, located on the hills where stood the ancient psaltery, could be sent throughout its length and breadth. They conquered no worlds. No manifest destiny led them to seek for wealth, applause or gain, beyond the limits of their narrow bounds. They did not so much as pass over the seas that wash their either shore. But yet in the absence of all the achievements that can gratify ambition, with no record of pomp or pageantry or power, her people bear a character more like a dream of fancy than a thing of real life, and to-day they stand as remnants of national greatness, though you may look in vain in their annals or traditions for any evidence of usurpation or of subjugation by sceptre or by sword." Mrs. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney. Mrs. Kinney, the mother of the poet, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and daughter of David L. Dodge of New York city, was for several years a resident of Morristown, and will long be remembered with interest and affection by her many friends. Her husband, Mr. William Burnet Kinney, not only resided here in later years, but was born at Speedwell, then a suburb of Morristown, and passed a part of his early boyhood there. To him we shall refer, in the grouping of _Editors and Orators_. Mr. Kinney was a brilliant literary man and about this home in Morristown unusual talent and genius naturally grouped themselves. To it came and went the poet Stedman: in the group, we find two gifted women, daughters of Mrs. Kinney, and later on, the same genius developing itself in the son of one of these, the boy Easton, of the third generation. Mrs. Kinney published in 1855, "Felicita, a Metrical Romance;" a volume of "Poems" in 1867; and, a few years later, a stirring drama, a tragedy in blank verse, entitled "Bianco Cappello." This tragedy is founded upon Italian history and was written during her residence abroad in 1873. While abroad, Mrs. Kinney's letters to _The Newark Daily Advertiser_ gave her a wide reputation and were largely re-copied in London and Edinburgh journals from copies in the New York papers. Among the "Poems," the one "To an Italian Beggar Boy" is perhaps most highly spoken of and has been chosen by Mr. Stedman to represent his mother in the "Library of American Literature." A favorite also is the "Ode to the Sea." Both pieces are strong and dramatic. The poem on "The Flowers" has been translated into three languages. It opens: "Where'er earth's soil is by the feet Of unseen angels trod, The joyous flowers spring up to greet These messengers of God." Mrs. Kinney's sonnets are peculiarly good. Her sonnet on "Moonlight in Italy," which we give to represent her, was written at ten o'clock at night in Italy by moonlight, and has been much praised. Mr. Kingston James, the English translator of Tasso, repeated it once at a dinner table, as a sample of "in what consisted a true sonnet." MOONLIGHT IN ITALY. There's not a breath the dewy leaves to stir; There's not a cloud to spot the sapphire sky; All nature seems a silent worshipper: While saintly Dian, with great, argent eye, Looks down as lucid from the depths on high, As she to earth were Heaven's interpreter: Each twinkling little star shrinks back, too shy Its lesser glory to obtrude by her Who fills the concave and the world with light; And ah! the human spirit must unite In such a harmony of silent lays, Or be the only discord in this night, Which seems to pause for vocal lips to raise The sense of worship into uttered praise. Alexander Nelson Easton. In the third generation in the line of Mrs. Kinney, appears a boy, now seventeen years of age, of unusual promise as a poet--Alexander Nelson Easton, grandson of William Burnet and Elizabeth C. Kinney. He has written and published several poems. He took the $50 prize offered by the _Mail and Express_ for the best poem on a Revolutionary incident, written by a child of about twelve years. It was entitled "Mad Anthony's Charge." Young Easton was born in Morristown, and spent his early years in this place, in the house on the corner of Macculloch Avenue and Perry Street, belonging to Mrs. Brinley. He began to write at eight years when a little prose piece called "The Council of the Stars," found its way into print, out in California. His next was in verse, written at ten years on "The Oak." That was also published and copied. A "Ballad" followed "A Scottish Battle Song," written in dialect, which was published also. Then came the prize poem, "Mad Anthony's Charge," above referred to. He has composed two stories since, one of which, "Ben's Christmas Present," has been accepted by the New York _World_ and is to appear with a sketch of this young writer, in their Christmas number. At twelve years, he wrote a monody on "The Burial of Brian Boru," which is given below. The literary efforts of Easton, so far, have been spontaneous and spasmodic, but contain certain promise for the future. After studying for some time at the Morristown Academy, Easton went as a student to the Bordentown Military Institute from which he has graduated and has now passed on to Princeton College. At Bordentown he won golden opinions, and gave the prize essay at the June Commencement. This was an oration of considerable importance on "The Value of Sacrifice," but withal his gifts are essentially poetic. THE BURIAL OF BRIAN BORU. Slowly around the new-made grave Gathers the mourner throng; Women and children, chieftains brave, Numb'ring their hundreds strong. Glitter beneath the sun's bright ray Helmet and axe and spear; Sadness and sorrow reign to-day, Dark is the land and drear! Yesterday leading his men to fight, Now lies he beneath their feet, Clad in his armor, strong and bright, 'Tis his only winding sheet. Close to his grave stand his warriors grim, Bravest and best of his reign; They, who through danger have oft followed him, Mourn the wild "Scourge of the Dane." Look! from the throng with martial stride Steps an old chief of his clan, Pauses and halts at the deep grave's side, Halts as but warriors can. White is the hair beneath his cap, Withered the hand he holds on high; Standing, beside the open gap, Speaks he without a pause or sigh. "_Brian Boru_ the brave! _Brian Boru_ the bold! Lay we thee in thy grave; Deep is it, dark and cold. Bravest of ev'ry chief Erin has ever known; Hurling the foes in grief, Fiercest of Danes o'erthrown. Youth and old age alike Found thee in war array; Wielding the sword and pike, E'er in the thick o' the fray! Erin is freed and blest, Freed by thy mighty arm; Well hast thou earned thy rest, Take it! secure from harm. Friend of our hearts! Our king! Generous, kind and true! Out let our praises fling-- Shout we for _Brian Boru_." Bursts the wild song from a thousand throats, Sounding through wood and plain, While the mountains echo the dying notes, Ringing them out again. Francis Bret Harte. As a poet, we represent Bret Harte by his "Plain Language from Truthful James," better known as "The Heathen Chinee." The main reference to his writings follows, in the next classification of _Novelists and Story Writers_. PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES, BETTER KNOWN AS "THE HEATHEN CHINEE." TABLE MOUNTAIN, 1870. Which I wish to remark,-- And my language is plain,-- That for ways that are dark, And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar. Which the same I would rise to explain. Ah Sin was his name; And I shall not deny In regard to the same What that name might imply, But his smile it was pensive and child-like, As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye. It was August the third; And quite soft was the skies; Which it might be inferred That Ah Sin was likewise; Yet he played it that day upon William And me in a way I despise. Which we had a small game, And Ah Sin took a hand: It was Euchre. The same He did not understand; But he smiled as he sat by the table, With the smile that was child-like and bland. Yet the cards they were stocked In a way that I grieve, And my feelings were shocked At the state of Nye's sleeve: Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive. But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made, Were quite frightful to see,-- Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me. Then I looked up at Nye, And he gazed upon me; And he rose with a sigh, And said, "Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,"-- And he went for that heathen Chinee. In the scene that ensued I did not take a hand, But the floor it was strewed Like the leaves on the strand With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, In the game "he did not understand." In his sleeves, which were long, He had twenty-four packs,-- Which was coming it strong, Yet I state but the facts; And we found on his nails, which were taper, What is frequent in tapers--that's wax. Which is why I remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark, And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar,-- Which the same I am free to maintain. Mrs. M. Virginia Donaghe McClurg. Mrs. McClurg, the niece of our honored townsman, Mr. Wm. L. King, is better known to us by her maiden name of M. Virginia Donaghe. Although endowed with varied gifts, having been editor, newspaper correspondent, story-writer, biographer and local historian, her talent is essentially poetic, therefore we place her among our poets. A proud moment of Mrs. McClurg's life was, when a child, she received four dollars and a half from _Hearth and Home_ for a story called "How did it Happen," written in the garret, the author tells us, without the knowledge of any one. Next, were written occasional letters and verses and short stories for the New York _Graphic_, including some burlesque correspondence for a number of papers, one of which was the _Richmond State_. The writer then went to Colorado for her health and accepted the position of editor on the _Daily Republic_ of Colorado Springs, for three years. She wrote a political leader for the paper every day. It happened that many distinguished men died during those years, and she did in consequence biographical work. She also wrote book reviews, dramatic and musical reviews, condensed the state news every day from all the papers of the state and edited the Associated Press dispatches. In addition, all proofs were brought to her for final reading. For the first year she had private pupils and broke down with brain fever. In 1885, she went into the Indian country to explore the cliff-dwellings of Mancos Cañon, in the reservation of the Southern Utes. They were only known through meagre accounts in the official government reports, and Miss Donaghe was the first woman who ever visited them, so far as known. On this occasion, she had an escort of United States troops and spent a few days there. She however made a second visit, fully provided for a month's trip, the result of which was a series of archæological sketches contributed to a prominent paper, the _Great Divide_, under the title of "Cliff-Climbing in Colorado." These ten papers gave to Miss Donaghe a reputation in the west as an archæologist. The following year she published, in the _Century_, one of the best of her sonnets, "The Questioner of the Sphinx," afterwards contained in her book, "Seven Sonnets of Sculpture." The same year she published her first book, "Picturesque Colorado," also a popular sonnet called "The Mountain of the Holy Cross." The Colorado mountain of the Holy Cross has crevices filled with snow which represent always on its side a cross. The little sand lily of Colorado blossoms at the edges of the highways in the dust, in the Spring, and looks like our star of Bethlehem. Of these sand lilies an artist friend made a picture which harmonized with the sonnet referred to. These were published together as an Easter card and a large edition sold. The sonnet begins; "In long forgotten Springs, where He who taught Amid the olive groves of Syrian hills,"-- And ends: "The lilies bloom upon the prairie wide A stainless cross is reared by nature's hand, And plain and height alike keep Easter-tide." In 1887, the _Century_ published a "Sonnet on Helen Hunt's Grave," with a picture of the grave. About this time Miss Donaghe was writing a series of letters which were published in a Southern newspaper, _The Valley Virginian_, and were widely copied. These were on Utah, when the Mormon hierarchy was in its power. Then appeared a book on "Picturesque Utah," making one of a group with "Picturesque Colorado" and "Colorado Favorites." The last is made up of six poems on Colorado flowers, illustrated by water colors of the blossoms, by Alice Stewart, and was the first book published. The author was married to Mr. Gilbert McClurg of Chicago, one of the family of the publishing house of that name, in Morristown, on June 13th, 1889. Since then Mrs. McClurg has been both editor and newspaper correspondent, and, within the last two years, a valuable assistant to her husband in the preparation of his department of the official history of Colorado, which included several county histories. In the _Cosmopolitan_ of June, 1891, a sonnet appeared, "The Life Mask," and was reprinted in the _Review of Reviews_. Two of Mrs. McClurg's songs were set to music by Albert C. Pierson in the summer of 1890; "Lithe Stands my Lady"; "Je Reste et Tu T'en Vas"; the latter with a French refrain, the rest in English. The last poem of Mrs. McClurg was published in the _Banner_, of Morristown, Dec. 24th, 1891, written to Mr. William L. King on his 85th Thanksgiving Day, and based on the Oriental salutation, "O King! Live forever". Among the writings of Mrs. McClurg are also two articles on the Washington Headquarters of Morristown; being "quotations, comments and descriptions on two Order Books of the Revolution, daily records of life in camp and at Headquarters, in the year 1780." A passage from this is given in the opening chapter of this book. The "Seven Sonnets of Sculpture" came out in 1889 and 1890. This book was widely and favorably noticed by some of the largest and most important journals. Says the writer in the Chicago _Daily News_: "It was a happy inspiration that led Mrs. McClurg to the idea realized in the publication of her latest volume 'Seven Sonnets of Sculpture'. The work is artistic from cover to cover, but the conception of equipping each one of the stanzas it contains with a photograph of the piece of sculpture which suggested it, was unique. * * To translate a work of art from its original form to another, to find the hidden sense of a conception imbedded in stone and revive it in words, to endue marble with speech, is in its nature a delicate task and one that demands the keenest of perceptions and sensibilities." The author says, in her dedication that seven was a Hebrew symbol of perfection. The sonnet we select from these, to represent Mrs. McClurg, is "The Questioner of the Sphinx". This sonnet was written from the impression received from Elihu Vedder's engraving of the Sphinx and the artist expressed in a letter to the author, his appreciation of the fidelity of the interpretation in verse of his picture. His criticism is perhaps the best that could be given. "I think it," he wrote, "good and strong and shall treasure it among the few good things that have been suggested by my work. My idea in the Sphinx was the hopelessness of man before the cold immutable laws of nature. Could the Sphinx speak, I am sure its words would be, 'look within,' for to his working brain and beating heart man must look for the solution of the great problem." THE QUESTIONER OF THE SPHINX. (SUGGESTED BY ELIHU VEDDER'S PICTURE.) Behold me! with swift foot across the land, While desert winds are sleeping, I am come To wrest a secret from thee; O thou, dumb, And careless of my puny lip's command. Cold orbs! _mine_ eyes a weary world have scanned, Slow ear! in _mine_ rings ever a vexed hum Of sobs and strife. Of joy mine earthly sum Is buried as thy form in burning sand. The wisdom of the nations thou has heard; The circling courses of the stars hast known. Awake! Thrill! By my feverish presence stirred, Open thy lips to still my human moan, Breathe forth one glorious and mysterious word, Though I should stand, in turn, transfixed,--a stone! Charlton T. Lewis, L.L. D. A sketch of Dr. Lewis will be found under the grouping of _Lexicographer_. The poem from which we select (reluctantly we take a part instead of the whole, for lack of space), is an embodiment of the story taken from Theodoret. The poet has found in the beautiful tradition, meagre though it is, a lovely theme for his divine song of spiritual love and Christian martyrdom. The following is the translation of the Greek passage which heads the poem: "A certain Telemachus embraced the self-sacrificing life of a monk, and, to carry out this plan, went to Rome, where he arrived during the abominable shows of gladiators. He went down into the arena, and strove to stop the conflicts of the armed combatants. But the spectators of the bloody games were indignant, and the gladiators themselves, full of the spirit of battle, slew the apostle of peace. When the great Emperor learned the facts he enrolled Telemachus in the noble army of martyrs, and put an end to the murderous shows." _Theodoret. Eccl. Hist. v. 26._ The scene is Rome,--the place the Coliseum. It is the time of the games. There are the crowds of eager people; the Emperor Honorius; the horrible Stilicho. Lowly and beautiful in his great love for Christ, Telemachus follows onward to the Coliseum to meet his sorrowful fate; holding in his voice the power that "stilled the fire and dulled the sword and stopped the crushing wine-press." He followed, silently, consecrated and alone, to "do the will of God." TELEMACHUS. I mused on Claudian's tinseled eulogies, And turned to seek in other dusty tomes, Through the wild waste of those degenerate days, Some living word, some utterance of the heart; Till as when one lone peak of Jura flames With sudden sunbeams breaking through the mist, So from the dull page of Theodoret A flash of splendor rends the clouds of life, And bares to view the awful throne of love. The bishop's tale is meagre, but as leaven, It works in thoughts that rise and fill the soul. *....*....*....*....* He felt the soil, long drenched with martyr's blood, Send healing through his feet to all his frame. He drank the air that trembled with the joys Of opening Paradise, and bared his soul To spirits whispering, "Come with us to-day!" The longings of his life were satisfied, He stood at last in Rome, Christ's Capital, The gate of heaven and not the mouth of hell. Suddenly, rudely, comes disastrous change. He starts and gazes, as the glory of the saints Fades round him and the angel songs are stilled: A world of hatred hides the throne of love; Hell opens in the gleam of myriad eyes Hungry for slaughter, in a hush that tells How in each heart a tiger pants for blood. Into the vast arena files a band Of Goths, the prisoners of Pollentia,-- Freemen, the dread of Rome, but yesterday, Now doomed as slaves to wield those terrible arms In mutual murder, kill and die, amid The exultation of their nation's foes. Pausing before the throne, with well-taught lips They utter words they know not; but Rome hears; "Cæsar, we greet thee who are now to die!" Then part and line the lists; the trumpet blares For the onset, sword and javelin gleam, and all Is clash of smitten shields and glitter of arms. Without the tumult, one of mighty limb And towering frame stands moveless; never yet A nobler captive had made sport for Rome. Throngs watch that eye of Mars, Apollo's grace, The thews of Hercules, in cruel hope That ten may fall before him ere he falls. They bid him charge; he moves not; shield and sword Sink to his feet; his eyes are filled with light That is not of the battle. Three draw near Whose valor or despair has cut a path Through the thick mass of combat, and their swords, Reeking with carnage, seek a victim new The glory of whose death may win them grace With that fierce multitude. Telemachus Gazes, and half the horror turns to joy As the fair Goth undaunted bares his breast Before the butchers, and awaits the blow With peaceful brow, a firm and tender lip Quivering as with a breath of inward prayer, And hands that move as mindful of the cross. And with a mighty cry, "Christ! he is thine! He is my brother! Help!" The monk leaps forth, Gathers in hands unarmed the points of steel, Throws back the startled warriors, and commands, "In Christ's name, hold! Ye people of Rome give ear! God will have mercy and not sacrifice. He who was silent, scourged at Pilate's bar, And smitten again in those he died to save, Is silent now in his great oracles. The throne of Constantine and Peter's chair, Speaks thus through me:--'In Rome, my capital, Let love be Lord, and close the mouth of hell. I will have mercy and not sacrifice.'" The slaughter paused, he ceased, and all was still, But baffled myriads with their cruel thumbs Point earthward, and the bloody three advance: Their swords meet in his heart. Honorius Cries "Save,"--too late, he is already safe,-- And turns, with tears like Peter's, to proclaim, The festival dissolved: nor from that hour Ever again did Rome, Christ's capital, Make holiday with blood, but hand in hand The throne of Constantine and Peter's chair Honored the martyr--Saint Telemachus, And love was Lord and closed the mouth of hell. Miss Emma F. R. Campbell. In our midst is a quiet, gentle woman who passes in and out among us without noise or ostentation. Yet upon her has fallen the great honor of being the author of an immortal hymn. In the _Canada Presbyterian_ of Feb. 9th, 1887, appeared an article entitled "A Great Modern Hymn." Also, it is said, that in a volume soon to be published on "The Great Hymns of the Church" will appear a paper on "Jesus of Nazareth Passeth By." From the first named, we cannot do better than quote: "Among all the hymns used in recent revivals of religion, none has been more honored and owned by God, than this--none so often called for, none so inspiring, none bearing so many seals of the divine approval. This is the testimony of the great evangelist of these days, Mr. Moody, and this testimony will surprise no one who has ever heard it sung by his companion in the ministry, Mr. Sankey, who, under God, has done so much to send forth light and truth into dark minds and break up the fountains of the great deep, amid the masses of godless men. * * * * * "As to the origin of the hymn--the circumstances of its birth--we have to invite the reader to go back some twenty-three years, to the Spring of 1864--to a great season of religious awakening in the city of Newark, N. J. The streets were crowded from day to day and the largest churches were too small to contain the growing numbers. Among those most deeply moved by the impressive scenes and services was a young girl, a Sabbath School teacher, one who for the first time realized the powers of the world to come, and the grandness of the great salvation. As descriptive of what was passing around her but with no desire for publicity, still, with the great desire of reaching some soul unsaved, especially among her youthful charge, she wrote the lines beginning with, 'What means this eager, anxious throng?'" The hymn was first published under the signature "Eta", the author having sometimes appended to her writings the Greek letter, using that character instead of her English name. We quote again from the same source: "Soon it rose into popularity and it is spreading still, not only in the English language, but in other languages--even the languages of India--(think of a recent account of an assembly of 500 Hindus enthusiastically using this hymn in the Mahrati and the Syrian children singing it in their own vernacular)--as the author thinks of all these things, she can only say with a thankful and an adoring heart: 'It is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in mine eyes!'" Miss Campbell has also written many other poems of beauty and articles in prose, which however, are all so eclipsed by this "Great Hymn" that perhaps they are not known or noticed as they otherwise would be. One in particular, we would mention, "A New Year Thought," published December, 1888. Miss Campbell belongs also in the group of _Novelists_, _Story-Writers_, _and Moralists_. She has written a number of books for the young, among which are "Green Pastures for Christ's Little Ones"; "Paul Preston"; "Better than Rubies"; and "Toward the Mark". Miss Campbell wrote by request, at the time of the Centennial Celebration of the First Presbyterian Church in October, 1891, a beautiful hymn for the occasion which was read by Mr. James Duryee Stevenson. "JESUS OF NAZARETH PASSETH BY." What means this eager, anxious throng, Pressing our busy streets along, These wondrous gatherings day by day, What means this strange commotion, pray? Voices in accents hushed reply "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by?" E'en children feel the potent spell, And haste their new-found joy to tell; In crowds they to the place repair Where Christians daily bow in prayer, Hosannas mingle with the cry "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Who is this Jesus? Why should He The city move so mightily? A passing stranger, has He skill To charm the multitude at will? Again the stirring tones reply "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Jesus! 'tis He who once below Man's pathway trod mid pain and woe: And burdened hearts where'er He came Brought out their sick and deaf and lame. Blind men rejoiced to hear the cry "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Again He comes, from place to place His holy footprints we can trace. He passes at _our_ threshold--nay He enters,--condescends to stay! Shall we not gladly raise the cry-- "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Bring out your sick and blind and lame, 'Tis to restore them Jesus came. Compassion infinite you'll find, With boundless power in Him combined. Come quickly while salvation's nigh, "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Ye sin-sick souls who feel your need, He comes to you, a friend indeed. Rise from your weary, wakeful couch. Haste to secure His healing touch; No longer sadly wait and sigh.-- "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by!" Ho all ye heavy-laden, come! Here pardon, comfort, rest, a home Lost wanderer from a Father's face, Return, accept his proffered grace. Ye tempted, there's a refuge nigh Jesus of Nazareth passeth by! Ye who are buried in the grave Of sin, His power alone can save. His voice can bid your dead souls live, True spirit-life and freedom give. Awake! arise! for strength apply, Jesus of Nazareth passeth by! But if this call you still refuse And dare such wondrous love abuse, Soon will He sadly from you turn Your bitter prayer in justice spurn. "Too late! too late!" will be your cry, "Jesus of Nazareth has passed by!" Mrs. Adelaide S. Buckley. Mrs. Buckley will appear again among _Translators_. The following verses were inspired by a painting of Cornelia and the Gracchi: Purest pearls from the sea, Diamonds outshining the sun, Sapphires which vie with heaven, With pride to Cornelia are shown. Clasping her dark-eyed boys, Fairer could be no other, "These my jewels are" Said the noble Roman mother. Rev. Oliver Crane, D. D., LL. D. Before coming to Morristown, in 1871, Dr. Crane's life had been a very active one, including extensive traveling in Turkey, Europe, Egypt and Palestine. Twice he had been a missionary in Turkey acquiring the Turkish language and doing efficient work there, first for five years, then for three. In the seven years interval of his return he accepted two pastorates in this country. On coming to Morristown, having resigned his ministerial charge at Carbondale, Pennsylvania, he devoted himself mainly to literary work, and with General H. B. Carrington wrote the "Battles of the Revolution" which has since become a standard work. Nine years later as secretary of his college class, he prepared an exhaustive biographical record of every member of the class. The book was a pioneer in this class of publications. In 1888, he published his translation of Virgil's Æneid and the following year a small volume of poems entitled "Minto and Other Poems", in which the "Rock of the Passaic Falls" is conspicuous as relating to Washington and Lafayette "who," says the poet, "visited together these Falls while their troops were stationed at Totawa (as the spot was then called) in the Winter of 1780. The initials G. W. are still to be seen cut in the rock below the cataract." The _Translation of Virgil's Æneid_, "literally, line by line into English Dactyllic Hexameter," is Dr. Crane's great work and has absorbed much of his time for years. It is a singular fact that, although for more than four hundred years the learned have been giving to the English reader, through the press, specimen translations of this old classic, this is the first complete version in the original measure. In the very interesting preface, Dr. Crane gives a careful review of the translations of Virgil, noticing the singular and severe prejudice that has always debarred any desire to render this classic in the metre of the original, and discussing the advantage of translating in the style of verse chosen by the author himself. In fact, he tells us, Longfellow had, from his own admirable translations, become thoroughly convinced of its utility, if not of its indispensability in giving the classic epics a fitting setting in English. The following is an extract taken from Book X., lines 814 to 842 of Dr. Crane's literal English translation of _Virgil's Æneid_, which describes the hand to hand contest of Æneas with the youth Lausus, who insists upon fighting Æneas in opposition to his father's wishes and in the face of every effort made by Æneas to avoid the conflict: TRANSLATION OF VIRGIL'S ÆNEID. BOOK X, LINES 814 TO 842. The destinies now are for Lausus the last threads Gathering in; for Æneas his powerful scimitar ruthless 815 Drives through the midst of the youth, and buries it wholly within him, Right through the menacer's targe, and his delicate armor, the keen blade Passed through the tunic his mother had woven in tissue of gold thread For him, and blood filled all of his bosom; then life on the breezes Mournful withdrew to the shades, and abandoned his body untimely. 820 But as the son of Anchises in truth on the visage and features Gazed of the dying--the features, becoming amazingly pallid-- Pitying deeply he sighed and instinctively tendered his right hand, Fresh as the image recurred to his mind of regard for a father: "What to thee now, O pitiable boy, for these laudable efforts, 825 What shall the pious Æneas, befitting such nobleness render? Keep it--thine armor, in which thou rejoicest, and I to thy parents' Shades and their ashes, if this could be any requital, remit thee; Yet thou in this, though unlucky, canst solace thy sorrowful exit, That by the hand of the mighty Æneas thou fallest." Abruptly 830 Chides he his faltering comrades, as gently from earth he uplifts him, Soiling his ringlets with blood, that were combed in the comeliest fashion. Meanwhile, his father was down by the wave of the stream of the Tiber Staunching his wound with its waters, and resting his body, reclining Close by the trunk of a tree. At a distance his coppery helmet 825 Hangs on its boughs, and at rest on the sod is his cumbersome armor: Standing around are his warriors chosen; he sickly and panting Eases his neck, as his out-combed beard streamed down on his bosom; Often he asks after Lausus, and many a messenger sends he Back to recall him, and bear him his sorrowful parent's injunctions: 840 But on his armor his comrades were weepingly bearing the lifeless Lausus away--a hero o'ercome by the wound of a hero. Rev. J. Leonard Corning, D. D. Dr. Corning, who, with his family, was for some years a resident of Morristown and is now abroad, is represented later in the volume, among the writers on Art. We give here his beautiful poem, "The Ideal". THE IDEAL. Awake, asleep, in dreams, amid the din of mortal striving, I feel thee ever near, vision of fancy's sweet contriving: The setting sun and twilight glow Thou art the music sweet and low. When on the sands, at dead of night, Dark waves are breaking in their might, While, through the billowy crests, the wild winds roar, Thou art the gull who over all dost soar. Amid the storm and lightning flash, The pelting rain and thunder crash, When faces blanch, and none can will, Thou, heavenly bow, art faithful still. 'Tis not the kiss, the touch, the sigh, That bringeth love from earth to sky; For motions strange about the heart Reveal the inner nature of thy part. Mrs. Mary Lee Demarest. Mrs. Augustus W. Cutler has kindly given us the following monograph: "In a Memorial of the late Mrs. Mary Lee Demarest occurs the following passage: 'For two hundred and fifty years, the English readers of the Bible were obliged to content themselves with the phrase, 'They seek a country'. It was not the whole thought. It was reserved for a corps of learned revisers to light upon the happy phrase, 'They are seeking a country of their own'.' But a score of years before the wise grammarians reached this line, a youthful poetess, seeing and greeting the Heavenly promise from afar, wrote simply and sweetly: "'I'll ne'er be fu' content, until mine een do see The shining gates o' Heaven, an' _my ain countree_'. "This youthful poetess was Mary Lee, afterwards Mrs. T. F. C. Demarest. "Before her marriage, in 1870, she spent several years in Morristown and became identified with the place and its interests; and there are many persons living here who remember her sweet face and gentle ways. "A taste for the Scotch dialect is said to have been acquired from an old Scotch nurse who lived a long time in the family, when the children were young. The girl caught it so completely, that when deeply moved, she was wont to drop into it, for the more vigorous expression of her feelings. 'Somehow', said she, 'the Scotch is more homely, less formal to me'. Thus, in the poem alluded to, could the thoughts contained in it, have been expressed as beautifully and tenderly in the mother tongue? "Again, there is a little poem in the same dialect, entitled 'My Mither', which appeals to every heart. "Though many of her poems and prose writings are of a devotional character, yet she had a keen sense also of the humorous side of life as the verses entitled 'Allen Graeme', will testify. "Mrs. Demarest traveled extensively throughout our own country, and also abroad. Two volumes of her writings have been published--one entitled 'Gathered Writings', a collection of short stories, fragments of foreign travel and reflections". MY AIN COUNTREE. I am far frae my hame, an' I'm weary afterwhiles, For the langed-for hame-bringing an' my Father's welcome smiles; I'll ne'er be fu' content, until mine een do see, The shining gates o' heaven an' my ain countree. The earth is fleck'd wi' flowers, mony tinted fresh and gay, The birdies warble blithely, for my Father made them sae; But these sights an' these soun's will as naething be to me, When I hear the angels singing in my ain countree. I've His gude word o' promise that some gladsome day, the King To his ain royal palace His banished hame will bring; Wi' een an' wi' hearts running owre, we shall see The King in His beauty, in our ain countree; My sins hae been mony, an' my sorrows hae been sair, But there they'll never vex me, nor be remembered mair; His bluid has made me white--His hand shall dry mine e'e, When he brings me hame at last, to mine ain countree. Sae little noo I ken, o' yon blessed, bonnie place, I ainly ken its Hame, whaur we shall see His face; It wud surely be eneuch forever mair to be In the glory o' His presence in our ain countree. Like a bairn to its mither, a wee birdie to its nest, I wad fain be ganging noo, unto my Saviour's breast, For he gathers in His bosom witless, worthless lambs like me, An' carries them Himsel', to His ain countree. He's faithfu' that has promised, He'll surely come again, He'll keep his tryst wi' me, at what hour I dinna ken; But he bids me still to wait, an' ready aye to be To gang at ony moment to my ain countree. So I'm watching aye, and singing o' my hame as I wait, For the soun'ing o' His footfa' this side the gowden gate, God gie His grace to ilk ane wha' listens noo to me, That we a' may gang in gladness to our ain countree. Hon. Anthony Q. Keasbey. We cannot do better than quote the words of Dr. Thomas Dunn English, the well-known author of "Ben Bolt", now living in Newark, N. J.,--with regard to Mr. Keasbey. "Here, in Newark", says he, "we have a lawyer of distinction, Anthony Q. Keasbey, who occasionally throws off some polished verses, as he excuses them, by way of 'safety plugs for high mental pressure,' and these are always smooth and scholarly. They are mostly privately printed for the amusement of the poet and a few chosen friends. One of these, however, has such a vein of tenderness and so much heart music that it deserves to become public property and to remain as much the favorite with others as it is with me." The poem referred to is, "My Wife's Crutches." "Unquestionably", continues Dr. English, "Mr. Keasbey stands well in his profession, and for years, under several Federal administrations, filled the office of United States District Attorney with credit to himself and advantage to the public; but this little tender poem does more honor to his intellect than his legal acquirements, however eminent they may be, and gives him a still stronger claim to the regard of his many friends." Among Mr. Keasbey's published collected poems are "Palm Sunday", of which Mr. Stedman once said he had put it away among some fine hymns; also "May", published in England and set to music by Faustina Hodges. These verses were inspired by the falling of the cherry blossoms on the grave of little May, and are most sweet and touching. One of the best is "The Dirge for Old St. Stephen's", written while they were demolishing the church built on Mr. Keasbey's ground, where now a "mart and home" have taken its place as was anticipated by the poet. Mr. Keasbey has published numberless papers in prominent journals and magazines. Some of these are to be collected and published in book form. His address on "The Sun: How Man has Regarded it in Different Ages", is well worthy of preservation in more permanent form than that in which it appears at present; also "The Sale of East New Jersey at Auction", an address delivered February 1st, 1862, before the New Jersey Historical Society at Trenton, on the Bi-Centennial of the Sale. This is full of interesting information, told in a charming way and is valuable for reference. The paper on "The Sun", was inspired by Mr. Keasbey's reading with great interest, the papers of Professor Norman Lockyer, the great astronomer, describing his researches into the constitution of the sun, through the medium of the spectroscope and the photograph. Mr. Keasbey had been interested in observing the extent to which modern science had reached with respect to the actual condition of the sun and the materials of which it is composed. This led him to the thoughts of how very recent had been any such attempts to understand its true nature and, from that reflection, he was led to consider, as a subject of a paper, how human eyes in all ages have looked upon the sun and in what manner they have regarded it. This published address was delivered before the Brooklyn Historical Society, a brilliant audience present, and Rev. Dr. Storrs, presiding. A book on Florida, "From the Hudson to the St. John's", describing a month's journey to Florida and the St. John's River was published in 1875; also, more recently, a small book on "Isthmus Transit by Chiriqui and Golfo Dulce", with a view of describing the Chiriqui mountain rib or back bone of Darien and all the executive and legislative action, with respect to the region between Panama and Nicaragua, with reference to railroad communication across the isthmus from the harbor of Chiriqui on the coast to the Pacific. In the _Hospital Review_, of July, 1882, is a very striking and powerful paper on the "Tragedy of the Lena Delta", where De Long and his companions so heroically met their fate in the Arctic snows. Below is the favorite of Dr. English among the Poems: MY WIFE'S CRUTCHES. Ye solemn, gaunt, ungainly crutches, That serve her frame such slippery tricks, Were you within my lawful clutches, I'd fling you back in River Styx. Ye grew beside the Boat of Charon, In murky fens of Stygian gloom, Nor ever, like the rod of Aaron, Shall your grim spindles burst in bloom. Your reeds were tuned for groans rheumatic, And croaking sighs from gouty man; Nor e'er shall thrill with tones ecstatic, As did the pipes of ancient Pan. Avaunt you, then, ye helpers dismal! Offend my eyes and ears no more; Go stalking back to realms abysmal And guide the ghosts on Lethe's shore. But see! while yet my words upbraid them, Her crutches bud with blossoms fair, And Patience, Love and Faith have made them Than Aaron's rod, more rich and rare. And hark! from out their hollows slender, No dismal groans or sighs proceed,-- But tones of joy more sweet and tender Than swelled from Pan's enchanted reed. Then stay! your use her worth discloses, Your ghastly frames her worth transmutes, From withered sticks, to stems of roses-- From creaking reeds, to magic flutes. Major Lindley Hoffman Miller. Major Miller, a brother of our well-known townsman, Henry W. Miller, was among the first of the 7th Regiment of New York City, who answered the call of the government to march to Washington for the protection of the Capitol. He served in that regiment through the riots in New York, and afterwards joined a Colored Regiment and was promoted to the rank of Major. He served in this position at Memphis and elsewhere through the South. In this campaign he lost his health and came home to die. He died in June, 1864, and was laid in old St. Peter's churchyard. Mr. Miller was a man of brilliant mind and unusual genius. His fugitive poems are very beautiful. They were published in various journals of the time, and one we will add to this short sketch of his brief but valuable life, "The Skater's Song", full of spirit and dash, and gay with the heart of youth. THE SKATER'S SONG, BY MOONLIGHT! Come away, from your blazing hearths! Come away, in the gleaming night, Where the radiant sky is peering down With a million eyes of light! Heigho! for the glancing ice, For the realm of the old Frost King! We'll shake the chain of the bounding stream Till all its fetters ring! Then away! my boys, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Come away, from your cheerless books! Come away, in the clear, cold air! And read in the deeps of the starry night God's endless volume there. Ho! now we're flashing along, At the snow-flake's drifting rate! Did ever anything stir the pulse Like a glimmering moonlight skate? Then away! my boys, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Come away, from the ball-room's glare! Come away, to a merrier dance,-- To a hall, whose floor is the flashing ice, Whose light is the stars' pure glance! Now we're watching the moon in her dreams, Now we dash at our speed again; While the stream groans under the icy links Which the frost has forged for his chain! Then away! my boys, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Come away, each lady fair! Come, add to the magical sight! And mingle the silvery tones of your words With the echoing "voices of night"! Heigho! for the frozen plain! Here's a glancing mirror, I ween, Reflecting all the beautiful forms That move in our fairy-like scene. Away! my lady, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Come away, from your sorrow and grief, All you that are gloomy and sad! Unwrinkle your brows to the whistling wind, Till your hearts grow merry and glad! Ho! Hark! how the laughter in peals, Is shaking the tides of the air, And shouting aloud to drown with its joy The muttering murmurs of care! Then away! my boys, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Come, one and all, then, away! Come, cheerily join in our song, And mingle with music the ring of the steel, Keep in time, as we're sweeping along! Heigho! for the throne of the Frost! We'll frighten the phantoms of night, And serenade, far under the depths, The river's listening sprite! Then away! my boys, away! Far over the ice we'll sweep, And wake the slumbering echo's voice From the gloom of its winter sleep! Miss Henrietta Howard Holdich. Miss Holdich, poetess and story-writer, has been a resident of Morristown, since 1878, and has written at various periods since she was seventeen years of age. Her poems, stories, and other writings have appeared from time to time in _Harper's Magazine_ and other important publications. We would like to give Miss Holdich's beautiful and thoughtful poem, "In Holy Ground", suggested by a Russian Legend, but, as we give her Centennial story entire, our space does not allow. She is represented, instead, by a few lovely lines written for a golden wedding and sent to the happy pair with a basket of flowers and fruit. LINES WRITTEN FOR A GOLDEN WEDDING. Orange buds a maiden wears On the blissful wedding morn; Snowy buds on golden hair Tell of love and faith new born. Ripened now the perfect fruit, Fifty sunny years have passed; Golden fruit on snowy hair Tells of love and faith that last. William Tuckey Meredith. Mr. Meredith, a Philadelphian by birth, and also a banker in New York City, is also one of our summer residents, his main interest in Morristown coming, as he says, from the fact that his grandmother was a Morristown Ogden. He served as an officer in the United States Navy with Farragut at the battle of Mobile Bay and was afterwards his secretary. Mr. Meredith is perhaps best known by his spirited poem, entitled "Farragut", which appeared in _The Century_, in 1890, and heads the group of "Various Poems" in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature. Besides this, Mr. Meredith has written for _The New York Times_ and other journals and publications at various times. He wrote for _The Century_ a War article on "Farragut's Capture of New Orleans", which may be found in Volume IV of the published series. A novel appeared with his name, in 1890, entitled "Not of Her Father's Race", in which the "Fox Hunt" is, the author tells us, a study of a bag chase in which he took part some years ago near Morristown, although he has laid the scene in Newport. We give the poem, "Farragut". FARRAGUT. MOBILE BAY, 5 AUGUST, 1864. Farragut, Farragut, Old Heart of Oak, Daring Dave Farragut, Thunderbolt stroke, Watches the hoary mist Lift from the bay, Till his flag, glory-kissed, Greets the young day. Far, by gray Morgan's walls, Looms the black fleet. Hark, deck to rampart calls With the drum's beat! Buoy your chains overboard, While the steam hums; Men! to the battlement, Farragut comes. See, as the hurricane Hurtles in wrath Squadrons of cloud amain Back from its path! Back to the parapet, To the guns' lips, Thunderbolt Farragut Hurls the black ships. Now through the battle's roar Clear the boy sings, "By the mark fathoms four," While his lead swings. Steady the wheelmen five "Nor' by East keep her," "Steady" but two alive: How the shells sweep her! Lashed to the mast that sways Over red decks, Over the flame that plays Round the torn wrecks, Over the dying lips Framed for a cheer, Farragut leads his ships, Guides the line clear. On by heights cannon-browed, While the spars quiver; Onward still flames the cloud Where the hulks shiver. See, yon fort's star is set, Storm and fire past. Cheer him, lads--Farragut, Lashed to the mast! Oh! while Atlantic's breast Bears a white sail, While the Gulf's towering crest Tops a green vale; Men thy bold deeds shall tell, Old Heart of Oak, Daring Dave Farragut Thunderbolt stroke! Hannah More Johnson. Miss Johnson, the niece of Mr. J. Henry Johnson, one of Morristown's old residents, and the last preceptor of the old Academy, will be found again among "Historians". She has written and published a large number of poems, besides, and from them we select the following: THE CHRISTMAS TREE. Shall I tell you a story of Christmas time? Of what Nellie found by her Christmas tree? If I tell it at all, it must be in rhyme For it seems like a song to Nellie and me That ripples along to a breezy tune, Like a brook that sings through the woods in June; And yet it was dark November weather When song and story began together. "Papa", said Nellie, with wistful tone, "When God sends little children here, Do beautiful angels flutter down As once when they brought our Saviour dear? Don't they sing in the sky, where we can't see And listen up there to Harry and me? 'Cause I prayed last night for the bestest things Heavenly Father sends us, and Harry said I might ask for a sister who hadn't wings A dear little sister to sleep in my bed; For my other one went away, you know, To sing with the angels long ago, And I want another to stay with me A dear little sister like Daisy Lee. So high, Papa! Look, don't you see? Just up to my chin. Heavenly Father knows 'Bout her dress and her shoes and her curly hair 'Cause I told him all, and so I s'pose The first little sister He has to spare He'll send her down here, oh won't she be A dear little sister for Harry and me!" "Yes, my Nellie", her father said, One gentle hand on the curly head With tender caress and whispered word Too low for her ear, 'though a Bright-one heard And passed it up, meet signal given From love on earth to love in heaven; "Yes, my Nellie, wait and see! We are all in our Heavenly Father's care And He'll send what is best for you and me When we look to Him with a loving prayer". The days passed on. 'Twas that happy time When bells ring out with their Christmas chime; There were people at work all over the land Busy for Santa Claus, heart and hand, And some in cabin and work-shop dim Who wouldn't have work if it wasn't for him; And Harry and Nellie?--There were none In that Christmas time had a gayer tree. Papa was at work at early dawn And the children all tip-toe to see; But the dark December day wore on E'er the door was opened noiselessly, And the light streamed out in the dusky hall From a beautiful cedar bright and tall. Starry tapers were gleaming there, Toy and trumpet and banner fair, The topmost flag on the ceiling bore While the laden branches swept the floor; While gay little Rover frisking in, Led the children in frolic and din As they spied each treasure and in their glee Shouted with joy round the Christmas tree, While Papa stood back in a corner to see. "Oh! Harry", said Nellie, "I do declare Here's a basket for me!" She opened the lid And pulled back the blanket folded there And what d'ye think was safely hid But a dear live baby so fast asleep That it never waked up with the children's shout Till Nellie asked, "is it ours to keep?" And kissed its hand as she stood in doubt. "Of course," said Harry, "don't angels know When God has told them which way to go? That's our little sister we wanted so!" "Little sister", said Nellie, "I'm very glad, I know you're the best Heavenly Father had And now you're ours and you're going to stay 'Cause the angels have left you and gone away". "No, my Nellie", a voice replied, As Papa drew near to Nellie's side, "Let us pray they may watch over this little one Day by day, till life is done, That she may be glad through eternity She was ever left 'neath our Christmas tree". Miss Margaret H. Garrard. Our gifted young townswoman, Miss Garrard, who has often entertained us with her rare dramatic talent, has contributed, for a number of years, articles in prose and verse to well-known magazines and journals, notably to _Lippincott's Magazine_ and _Life_. In _Lippincott_ for June, 1890, we find a very pretty poem embodying a clever thought and entitled "A Coquette's Motto". In a previous number appears "A Trip to Tophet", which is a sparkling and graphic description of a descent into a silver-mine at Virginia City, California. In it occurs the following picture of the visitor's surroundings: "The next few minutes will always be a haunting memory to me. The long, dark passages, the burning atmosphere, the scattered lights, the weird figures of the miners appearing, only to vanish the next moment in the surrounding gloom, all recur like some infernal dream". We select to represent Miss Garrard, the first poem she published in _Life_: THE PLAQUE DE LIMOGES. You hang upon her boudoir wall, Plaque de Limoges! She prizes you above them all Plaque de Limoges! Yet do your blossoms never move, Although she looks on them with love, And treasures your hard buds above The gathered bloom of field and grove, Insensate, cold Limoges! Brilliant in hue your every flower, Plaque de Limoges! Copied from some French maiden's bower, Plaque de Limoges! But still you let my lady stand-- The fairest lady in the land-- Caressing you with her soft hand, Nor breathe, nor stir at her command, Cold-hearted clay--Limoges! Would that I in your place might be, Plaque de Limoges! That she might stand and gaze on me, Plaque de Limoges! I'd live in love a little space, Then--fling my flowers from their place, At her dear feet to sue for grace, Until she'd raise them to her face, Happy, but crushed Limoges! Miss Julia E. Dodge. Though Miss Dodge finds her place naturally and kindly in the society of our poets, all readers of _The Century_ will remember a charming prose paper of hers called "An Island of the Sea", beautifully illustrated by Thomas Moran and published in 1877. Before and since that time, her pen has not been idle, for short, prose articles have been scattered here and there, in various periodicals, and it is difficult to select from the number of thoughtful and delicate poems now before us, one to represent her. The poem, "A Legend of St. Sophia in 1453", is full of spirit and fire. It was written in 1878, when the advance of the Russian forces towards Constantinople seemed to point to the fulfillment of ancient prophecy and the restoration of Christian dominion over the stronghold of Islam. The poem entitled "Satisfied" was first published in _The Churchman_ and afterwards placed, without the author's knowledge, in a collection called "The Palace of the King", published by Randolph & Co. Among the other poems are: "Our Daily Bread", "Spring Song", "Telling Fortunes", "September Memories", and "To a Night-Blooming Cereus", which last we give principally because, besides being a beautiful expression of a beautiful thought, it was written under the inspiration of a flower sent to the writer from an ancient plant in a Morristown conservatory. TO A NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS. O fleeting wonder, glory of a night, Only less evanescent than the gleam That marks the lightning's track, or some swift dream That comes and, vanishing, eludes our sight! How canst thou be content, thy whole rich stream Of life to lavish on this hour's delight, And perish ere one morning's praise requite Thy gift of peerless splendor? It doth seem Thou art a type of that pure steadfast heart Which hath no wish but to perform His will Who called it into being, no desire But to be fair for Him; no other part Doth choose, but here its fragrance to distil For one brief moment ere He bid "Come higher"! Charles D. Platt. Mr. Platt, the faithful principal of our Morris Academy, has of late, "at odd moments and in vacations," as he says, written verses of local reference and others, upon various subjects, which have been published in our local papers and elsewhere. Born at Elizabeth, N. J., Mr. Platt lived there until 1883. He was graduated at Williams' College in 1877, taught in the Rev. J. F. Pingry's School in Elizabeth for six years, came to Morristown and took charge of the Morris Academy in 1883, and has retained that position to the present time. Among the poems which refer to local interests are "Fort Nonsense," which we give in the opening chapter on "Historic Morristown"; "The Old First Church"; "The Lyceum" and "The Washington Headquarters", which last will follow this short sketch, as embodying so much that is interesting of that historic building and its surroundings. Other of the poems might, perhaps, for some special qualities, better represent Mr. Platt than this; there is the excellent and gay little parody, which we would like to give, of "That Old Latin Grammar". "The Wild Lily" is charming. Then there are "Memorial Day"; "Easter Song"; "Modern Progress"; "A Myth"; and "John Greenleaf Whittier", the last written and published upon the occasion of the poet's death September 16th, 1892. Besides these, there are the "Ballades of the Holidays" which form a series by themselves, dealing in part with the subject of popular maxims, and including poems for Christmas, New Year's Day, Discovery Day and other holidays. We give THE WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS, MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY. What mean these cannon standing here, These staring, muzzled dogs of war? Heedless and mute, they cause no fear, Like lions caged, forbid to roar. _This_ gun[A] was made when good Queen Anne Ruled upon Merry England's throne; Captured by valiant Jerseymen Ere George the Third our rights would own. "Old Nat",[B] the little cur on wheels, Protector of our sister city, Was kept to bite the British heels, A yelping terror, bold and gritty. _That_ savage beast, the old "Crown Prince",[C] A British bull-dog, glum, thick-set, At Springfield's fight was made to wince, And now we keep him for a pet. Upon this grassy knoll they stand, A venerable, peaceful pack; Their throats once tuned to music grand, And stained with gore their muzzles black. But come, that portal swinging free, A welcome offers, as of yore, When, sheltered 'neath this old roof-tree, Our patriot-chieftain trod this floor. And with him in that trying day Was gathered here a glorious band; This house received more chiefs, they say, Than any other in our land.[D] Hither magnanimous Schuyler came, And stern Steuben from o'er the water; Here Hamilton, of brilliant fame, Once met and courted Schuyler's daughter. And Knox, who leads the gunner-tribes, Whose shot the trembling foeman riddles, A roaring chief,[E] his cash subscribes To pay the mirth-inspiring fiddles.[F] The "fighting Quaker", General Greene, Helped Knox to foot the fiddlers' bill; And here the intrepid "Put." was seen, And Arnold--black his memory still. And Kosciusko, scorning fear, Beside him noble Lafayette; And gallant "Light Horse Harry" here His kindly chief for counsel met. "Mad Antony" was here a guest,-- Madly he charged, but shrewdly planned; And many another in whose breast Was faithful counsel for our land. Among these worthies was a dame Of mingled dignity and grace; Linked with the warrior-statesman's fame Is Martha's comely, smiling face. But look around, to right to left; Pass through these rooms, once Martha's pride, The dining hall of guests bereft, The kitchen with its fire-place wide. See the huge logs, the swinging crane, The Old Man's seat by chimney ingle, The pots and kettles, all the train Of brass and pewter, here they mingle. In the large hall above, behold The flags, the eagle poised for flight: While sabres, bayonets, flint-locks old, Tell of the struggle, and the fight. Old faded letters bear the seal Of men who battled for a stamp; A cradle and a spinning-wheel Bespeak the home behind the camp. Apartments opening from the hall Show chairs and desks of quaint old style, And curious pictures on the wall Provoke a reverential smile. Musing, we loiter in each room And linger with our vanished sires; We hear the deep, far-echoing boom That spoke of old in flashing fires. But deepening shadows bid us go, The western sun is sinking fast; We take our leave with footsteps slow, Farewell, ye treasures of the past. A century and more has gone, Since these old relics saw their day; That day was but the opening dawn Of one that has not passed away. Our banner is no worthless rag, With patriot pride hearts still beat high; And there, above, still waves the flag For which our fathers dared to die. [Footnote A: Inscription on this Cannon:-- Gun made in Queen Anne's time. Captured with a British vessel by a party of Jerseymen in the year 1780, near Perth Amboy. Presented by the township of Woodbridge, New Jersey, in 1874.] [Footnote B: Inscription on "Old Nat:"-- This cannon was furnished Capt. Nathaniel Camp by Gen. George Washington for the protection of Newark N. J. against the British. Presented to the Association by Mr. Bruen H. Camp, of Newark, N. J.] [Footnote C: The inscription upon it is as follows:-- The "Crown Prince Gun." Captured from the British at Springfield. Used as an alarm gun at Short Hills to end of Revolutionary War. Given in charge by General Benoni Hathaway to Colonel Wm. Brittin on the last training at Morristown, and by his son, Wm. Jackson Brittin, with the consent of the public authorities, presented to the Association in the year 1890.] [Footnote D: The list of officers of the Revolutionary army mentioned in the poem is taken from a printed placard which hangs in the hall of the Headquarters.] [Footnote E: Knox is called a roaring chief because when crossing the Delaware with Washington his "stentorian lungs" did good service in keeping the army together.] [Footnote F: The reference to the fiddlers is based upon an old subscription paper for defraying the expenses of a "Dancing Assembly," signed by several persons, among them Nathaniel Greene and H. Knox, each $400, PAID. This paper may be seen in the collection made by Mrs. J. W. Roberts.] Mrs. Julia R. Cutler. Mrs. Cutler's graceful pen has already contributed to this volume the sketch of Mrs. Mary Lee Demarest and also another to follow of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright. Her pen has been busy at occasional intervals from girlhood, when as a school-girl her essays were, as a rule, selected and read aloud in the chapel, on Friday afternoons, and a poem securing the gold medal crowned the success. Living since her marriage, in the old historic house of Mr. Cutler's great-grandfather, the Hon. Silas Condict, fearless patriot of the Revolution, and President of the Council of Safety during the whole of that period that "tried men's souls", it is little wonder that the traditions of '76 clinging about the spot should nurture and develop the poetic spirit of the girl. It was in 1799, after Mr. Condict's return from Congress that he built the present house familiar to us all, but the old house stands near by, full of the most interesting stories and traditions of revolutionary days. Mrs. Cutler has written many articles, often by request, for papers or magazines, and verses prompted by circumstances or surroundings, or composed when strongly impressed upon an especial subject. [Illustration: FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 1791, SESSION HOUSE AND MANSE. MORRIS COUNTY SOLDIER'S MONUMENT, 1871.] Before us lies a lovely poem of childhood, entitled "Childish Faith", founded on fact, but we select from the many poems of Mrs. Cutler, the Centennial Poem given below and written on the occasion of the Centennial of the old First Church. CENTENNIAL FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH. The moon shines brightly down, o'er hill and dale As it shone down, One Hundred years ago, On these same scenes. The stars look down from Heaven As they did then, as calm, serene, and bright-- Fit emblems of the God, who changes not. Only in him can we find sure repose 'Mid change, decay and death, who is the same To-day as yesterday, forevermore. Through the clear air peal forth the silvery notes, Of thy old Bell, thou venerable pile, Thou dear old Church, whose birthday rare, We come to celebrate with tender love. One Hundred years! How long; and yet, how short When counted with the centuries of the past That help to make the ages of the world: How long when measured by our daily cares, The joys, the sorrows that these years have brought To us and ours. "Our fathers, where are they?" The men of strength, one hundred years ago, As full of courage, purpose, will, as we, Have gone to join the "innumerable throng" That worship in the Father's House above. Their children, girls and boys, like the fair flowers, Have blossomed, faded, and then passed away, Leaving their children and grandchildren, too, To fill their places, take their part in life. How oft, dear Church, these walls have heard the vows That bound two hearts in one. How oft the tread Of those that bore the sainted dead to rest. How oft the voices, soft and low, of those Who, trusting in a covenant-keeping God Gave here their little ones to God. A faith Which He has blessed, as thou canst truly tell, In generations past, and will in days to come. How many servants of the most high God, Beneath thy roof have uttered words divine, Taught by the Spirit, leading souls to Christ And reaping, even here, their great reward. Many of these have entered into rest Such as remains for those who love the Lord. Others to-day, have gathered here to tell What God has done in years gone by, and bear Glad testimony to the truth, that in this place His name has honored been.--'Tis sad to say Farewell. But 'tis decreed, that thou must go. Time levels all; and it will lay thee low. But o'er thy dust full many a tear shall fall, And many a prayer ascend, that the true God, Our Father's God, will, with their children dwell, And that the stately pile which soon shall rise, Where now, thou art, a monument shall be Of generations past, recording all The truth and mercies of a loving God. Oct. 14th, 1891. Miss Frances Bell Coursen. The rhythmic, airy verses of Miss Coursen, full of the spirit of trees, flowers, the clouds, the winds and the insinuating and lovely sounds of nature, charm us into writing the author down as one of Morristown's young poets. The verses have attractive titles which in themselves suggest to us musical thoughts, such as "To the Winds in January"; "June Roses"; "In the Fields"; and "What the Katydids Say". We quote the latter for its bright beauty. WHAT THE KATYDIDS SAY. "Katy did it!" "Katy didn't!" Doesn't Katy wish she had? "Katy did!" that sounds so pleasant, "Katy didn't" sounds so bad. Katy didn't--lazy Katy, Didn't do her lessons well? Didn't set her stitches nicely? Didn't do what? Who can tell? But the livelong autumn evening Sounds from every bush and tree, So that all the world can hear it, "Katy didn't" oh dear me! Who would like to hear forever Of the things they hadn't done In shrill chorus, sounding nightly, From the setting of the sun. But again, who wouldn't like it If they every night could hear, "Yes she did it, Katy did it", Sounding for them loud and clear? So if you've an "awful lesson", Or "a horrid seam to sew", Just you stop and think a minute, Don't decide to "let it go". In the evening, if you listen, All the Katydids will say "Yes she did it, did it, did it!" Or, "she didn't". Now which way? Miss Isabel Stone. Miss Stone, long a resident of Morristown, has published many poems in prominent journals and magazines, also stories, but always under an assumed name. She will take a place in another group, that of _Novelists and Story-Writers_. She is represented here by her poem on "Easter Thoughts". EASTER THOUGHTS. Sometimes within our hearts, the good lies dead, Slain by untoward circumstances, or by our own free will, And through the world we walk with bowèd head; Or with our senses blinded to our choice, Thinking that "good is evil--evil good;" Or, with determined pride to still the voice That whispers of a "Resurrection morn." This is that morn--the resurrection hour Of all the good that has within us died, The hour to throw aside with passionate force The cruel bonds of wrong and blindness--pride-- And rise unto a level high of power, Of strength--of purity--while those we love rejoice With "clouds of angel witnesses" above, And all the dear ones, who before have gone. And we ascend, in the triumphant joy And peace, and rapture of a changèd self That now transfigured stands--no more the toy Of circumstance--or pride, or sin, to blight-- Until we reach sublimest heights-- And stand erect, eyes fixed upon the Right-- Strong in the strength that wills all wrong to still, Will--pointing upwards to th' ascended Lord, Bless, aye, thrice bless, this fair, sweet Easter Dawn. Rev. G. Douglass Brewerton. The Rev. Mr. Brewerton was pastor of the Baptist Church in Morristown in 1861, and during the early years of our Civil War. He was very patriotic and public-spirited and founded a Company of boy Zouaves in the town, which is well remembered, for at that time the war-spirit was the order of the day. He wrote a number of poems which were published in the Morristown papers and others. Of these, the following is one, published January 30, 1861. OUR SOLDIERS WITH OUR SAILORS STAND. A NATIONAL SONG RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO THE VOLUNTEERS OF BOTH SERVICES, BY ONE WHO ONCE WORE THE UNIFORM OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Our soldiers with our sailors stand, A bulwark firm and true, To guard the banner of our land, The Red, the White, the Blue. The forts that frown along the coast, The ramparts on the steep, Are held by men who never boast, But true allegiance keep. While still in thunder tones shall speak Our giants on the tide, Rebuking those who madly seek To tame the eagle's pride. While breezes blow or sounding sea Be whitened by a sail, The banner of the brave and true Shall float, nor fear the gale. While Ironsides commands the fleet, Shall patriot vows be heard, Where pennants fly or war drums beat, True to their oaths and word. Then back, ye traitors! back, for shame! Nor dare to touch a fold; We'll guard it till the sunshine wane And stars of night grow old. Thus ever may that flag unrent At peak and staff be borne, Nor e'er from mast or battlement By traitor hands be torn. Mrs. Alice D. Abell. Mrs. Abell has for several years contributed poems and articles to various papers and magazines. From the poems we select the following, which was copied in a Southern paper as well as in two others, from _The New York Magazine_ in which it first appeared: BEHIND THE MASK. Behind the mask--the smiling face Is often full of woe, And sorrow treads a restless pace Where wealth and beauty go. Behind the mask--who knows the care That grim and silent rests, And all the burdens each may bear Within the secret breast? Behind the mask--who knows the tears That from the heart arise, And in the weary flight of years How many pass with sighs? Behind the mask--who knows the strain That each life may endure, And all its grief and countless pain That wealth can never cure? Behind the mask--we never know How many troubles hide, And with the world and fashion show Some spectre walks beside. Behind the mask--some future day, When all shall be made plain; Our burdens then will pass away And count for each his gain. George Wetmore Colles, Jr. The following is by one of the young writers of Morristown, written at Yale University and published in the _Yale Courant_ of February, 1891: TO A MOUNTAIN CASCADE. To him who, wearied in the noontide glare, Seeks cool refreshment in thy quiet shade, In all thy beauteous rainbow tints arrayed, How sweet! O dashing brook, thy waters are! Sure, such a glen fair Dian with her train Chose to disport in, when Actæon bold That sight with mortal eyes dared to behold Which mortals may not see and life retain. To such a glen I, too, at noonday creep, Leaving the dusty road and haunts of men, To quaff thy purling, sparkling ripples; then To plunge within thy clear, cold basin deep. Alone in Nature's lap (this mossy sod) I lie; feel her sweet breath upon me blow; Hear her melodious woodland voice, and know Her passing love, the eternal love of God! HYMNODIST. John R. Runyon. Our fellow townsman of old New Jersey name, whose enthusiastic love for music, and especially for church music, is well known, has manifested his interest in this direction by compiling a collection of hymns known as "Songs of Praise. A Selection of Standard Hymns and Tunes". It is published by Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, and "meets", says the compiler, "a universally acknowledged want for a collection of Hymns to be used in Sunday Schools and Social Meetings". Says Charles H. Morse in _The Christian Union_ of August 20th, 1892: "If music is a pattern and type of Heaven, then, indeed, are those whose mission is to provide the music for our worship burdened with a weight of responsibility and called to a blessed ministry second only to that of the pastor who stands at the desk to speak the words of Life". To compile from various sources a collection of hymns acceptable to varied classes of minds, requires much discernment, great care and large range of knowledge on the subject, as well as a comprehension of what is needed which comes from long and wide experience, study and observation, in addition to natural genius. NOVELISTS AND STORY-WRITERS. Francis Richard Stockton. Although born in Philadelphia, Mr. Stockton belongs to an old and distinguished New Jersey family, and he has, after many wanderings, at last selected his home in the State of his ancestors. Within a few years he has purchased and fitted up a quaint and attractive mansion in the suburbs of Morristown, overlooking the beautiful Loantika Valley, where in the Revolutionary days the tents of the suffering patriots were pitched or their log huts constructed for the bitter winter. Beyond the long and narrow valley, the homes of prominent residents of Morristown appear on the Western limiting range of hills, and are charmingly picturesque. This home Mr. Stockton has named "The Holt" and his legend, taken from Turberville, an old English poet, is painted over the fire-place in his Study which is over the Library on the South corner of the House: "Yee that frequent the hilles and highest holtes of all, Assist me with your skilful quilles and listen when I call." Mr. Stockton and Richard Stockton, the signer of the Declaration of Independence, are descended from the same ancestor, Richard Stockton, who came from England in 1680 and settled in Burlington County, New Jersey. Much fine and interesting criticism from various directions, has been called out by Mr. Stockton's works. Edmund Gosse, the well-known Professor of Literature in England, said just before leaving our shores: "I think Mr. Stockton one of the most remarkable writers in this country. I think his originality, his extraordinary fantastic genius, has not been appreciated at all. People talk about him as if he were an ordinary purveyor of comicality. I do not want to leave this country without giving my _personal tribute_, if that is worth anything, to his genius." "More than half of Mr. Stockton's readers, without doubt", says another critic, "think of him merely as the daintiest of humorists; as a writer whose work is entertaining in an unusual degree, rather than weighed in a critical scale, or considered seriously as a part of the literary _expression_ of his time". It is acknowledged that Americans are masters, at the present day, of the art of writing short stories and these, as a rule, are like the French, distinctly realistic. In this art Mr. Stockton excels. Among his short stories, "The Bee Man of Orn" and "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" represent his power of fancy. "The Hunting Expedition" in "Prince Hassak's March" is particularly jolly, and in "The Stories of the Three Burglars", we find a specimen of his realistic treatment. In the last, he makes the young house-breaker, who is an educated man, say: "I have made it a rule never to describe anything I have not personally seen and experienced. It is the only way, otherwise we can not give people credit for their virtues or judge them properly for their faults." Upon this, Aunt Martha exclaims: "I think that the study of realism may be carried a great deal too far. I do not think there is the slightest necessity for people to know anything about burglars." And later she says, referring to this one of the three: "I have no doubt, before he fell into his wicked ways, he was a very good writer and might have become a novelist or a magazine author, but his case is a sad proof that the study of realism is carried too far." No critic seems to have observed or noticed the very remarkable manner in which Mr. Stockton renders the negro dialect on the printed page. In this respect he quite surpasses Uncle Remus or any other writer of negro folk-lore. He spells the words in such a way as to give the sense and sound to ears unaccustomed to negro talk as well as to those accustomed to it. This we especially realize in "The Late Mrs. Null". But besides the qualities we have noticed in Mr. Stockton's writings, there is a subtle fragrance of purity that exhales from one and all, which is in contrast to much of the novel-writing and story-telling of the present day. We have reason to welcome warmly to our homes and to our firesides, one who, by his pure fun and drollery, can charm us so completely as to make us forget, for a time, the serious problems and questions which agitate and confront the thinking men and women of this generation. So varied and voluminous are the writings of Mr. Stockton, they may be grouped as _Juveniles_, _Novels_, _Novelettes_ and _Collected Short Stories_. Besides, there are magazine stories constantly appearing, and still to be collected. Most prominent among the volumes are "The Lady or The Tiger?"; "Rudder Grange" and its sequel, "The Rudder Grangers Abroad"; "The Late Mrs. Null"; "The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine"; "The Hundredth Man"; "The Great War Syndicate"; "Ardis Claverden"; "Stories of the Three Burglars"; "The House of Martha" and "The Squirrel Inn". After considering what Mr. Stockton has accomplished and the place which by his genius and industry he has made for himself in Literature, we do not find it remarkable that in July, 1890, he was elected by the readers of _The Critic_ into the ranks of the _Forty Immortals_. We give to represent Mr. Stockton, an extract from his novel of "Ardis Claverden", containing one of those clever conversations so characteristic of the author, and success in which marks a high order of dramatic genius, in making characters express to the listener or reader their own individuality through familiar talk. EXTRACT FROM "ARDIS CLAVERDEN." Mr. and Mrs. Chiverly were artists. * * * * * The trouble with Harry Chiverly was that he had nothing in himself which he could put into his work. He could copy what he could see, but if he could not see what he wanted to paint, he had no mental power which would bring that thing before him, or to transform what he saw into what it ought to be. * * * * * The trouble with Mrs. Chiverly was that she did not know how to paint. With her there was no lack of artistic imagination. Her brain was full of pictures, which, if they could have been transferred to the brain of her husband, who did know how to paint, would have brought fame and fortune. At one end of her brush was artistic talent, almost genius; at the other was a pigment mixed with oil. But the one never ran down to the other. The handle of the brush was a non-conductor. We pass on to a scene in the studio. An elderly man enters, a stranger, to examine pictures, and stops before Mr. Chiverly's recently finished canvass. "Madam," said he, "can you tell me where the scene of this picture is laid? It reminds me somewhat of the North and somewhat of the South, and I am not sure that it does not contain suggestions of the East and the West." "Yes," thought Ardis at her easel, "and of the North-east, and the Sou-sou'-west, and all the other points of the compass." Mrs. Chiverly left her seat and approached the visitor. She was a little piqued at his remark. "Some pictures have a meaning," she said, "which is not apparent to every one at first sight." "You are correct, madam," said the visitor. "This painting, for instance," continued Mrs. Chiverly, "represents the seven ages of trees." And then with as much readiness as Jacques detailed the seven ages of man to the duke, she pointed out in the trees of the picture the counterparts of these ages. "Madam," said the visitor, "you delight me. I admit that I utterly failed to see the point of this picture; but now that I am aware of its meaning I understand its apparent incongruities. Meaning despises locality." "You are right," said Mrs. Chiverly, earnestly. "Meaning is above everything." "Madam," said the gentleman, his eyes still fixed upon the canvass, "as a student of Shakespeare, as well as a collector, in a small way, of works of art, I desire to have this picture, provided its price is not beyond my means." Mrs. Chiverly gazed at him in an uncertain way. She did not seem to take in the import of his remark. From her easel Ardis now named the price which Mr. Chiverly had fixed upon for the picture. He never finished a painting without stating very emphatically what he intended to ask for it. "That is reasonable," said the gentleman, "and you may consider the picture mine." And he handed Mrs. Chiverly his card. Then, imbued with a new interest in the studio, he walked about looking at others of the pictures. "This little study," said he, "seems to me as if it ought to have a significance, but I declare I am again at fault." "Yes," said Mrs. Chiverly, "it ought to have a significance. In fact there is a significance connected with it. I could easily tell you what it is, but if you were afterwards to look at the picture you would see no such meaning in it." "Perhaps this is one of your husband's earlier works" said the gentleman, "in which he was not able to express his inspirations." "It is not one of my husband's works," said Mrs. Chiverly; "it is mine." * * * * * The moment that the gentleman had departed Ardis flew to Mrs. Chiverly and threw her arms around her neck. "Now my dearest," she exclaimed, "you know your vocation in life. You must put meanings to Mr. Chiverly's pictures." When the head of the house returned he was, of course, delighted to find that his painting had been sold. "That is the way with us!" he cried, "we have spasms of prosperity. One of our works is bought, and up we go. Let us so live that while we are up we shall not remember that we have ever been down. And now my dear, if you will give me the card of that exceptional appreciator of high art, I will write his bill and receipt instantly, so that if he should again happen to come while I am out there may be nothing in the way of an immediate settlement." Mrs. Chiverly stood by him as he sat at the desk. "You must call the picture," she said, "'The Seven Ages of Trees.'" "Nonsense!" exclaimed Mr. Chiverly, turning suddenly and gazing with astonishment at his wife. "That will do for a bit of pleasantry, but the title of the picture is 'A Scene on the Upper Mississippi.' You don't want to deceive the man, do you?" "No, I do not," said Mrs. Chiverly, "and that is one reason why I did not give it your title. It is a capitally painted picture, and as a woodland 'Seven Ages' it is simply perfect. That was what it sold for; and for that and nothing else will the money be paid." Mr. Chiverly looked at her for a moment longer, and then bursting into a laugh he returned to his desk. "You have touched me to the quick," he said. "Money has given title before and it shall do so now. There is the receipted bill!" he cried, pushing back his chair. Francis Bret Harte. Bret Harte, so far as we can discover, has written the only story of Revolutionary times in Morristown, and the only story of those times in New Jersey except Miss Holdich, who follows, and James Fenimore Cooper, whose "Water Witch" is located about the Highlands of New Jersey. By a passage from his story of "Thankful Blossom" we shall represent him at the close of this sketch. Between 1873 and 1876 Bret Harte lived in Morristown, in several locations: in the picturesque old Revere place on the Mendham Road, the very home for a Novelist, now owned and occupied by Mr. Charles G. Foster; in the Whatnong House for one summer, near which are located old farms, which seem to us to have many features of the "Blossom Farm" and to which we shall refer; in the Logan Cottage on Western Avenue and in the house on Elm Street now owned and occupied by Mr. Joseph F. Randolph. The steps by which Bret Harte climbed to the eminence that he now occupies, are full of romantic interest. Left early by his father, who was a Professor in an Albany Seminary and a man of culture, to struggle with little means, the boy, at fifteen, had only an ordinary education and went in 1854, with his mother, to California. He opened a school in Sonora, walking to that place from San Francisco. Fortune did not favor him either in this undertaking or in that of mining, to which, like all young Californians in that day, he resorted as a means to live. He then entered a printing office as compositor and began his literary career by composing his first articles in type while working at the case. Here he had editorial experiences which ended abruptly in consequence of the want of sympathy in the miners with his articles. He returned to San Francisco and became compositor in the office of _The Golden Era_. His three years experience among the miners served him in good stead and his clever sketches describing those vivid scenes, soon placed him in the regular corps of writers for the paper. _The Californian_, a literary weekly, then engaged Harte as associate manager and, in this short-lived paper appeared the "Condensed Novels" in which Dickens' "Christmas Stories", Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre", Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables", and other prominent and familiar writings of distinguished authors are most cleverly taken off. These have amused and delighted the reading world since their first appearance. During the next six years, he filled the office of Secretary of the United States Branch Mint, and also wrote for California journals, many of his important poems, among them, "John Burns of Gettysburg", and "The Society upon the Stanislau", which attracted wide attention by their originality and peculiar flavor of the "Wild West". In July, 1868, Harte organized, and became the editor of, what is now a very successful journal, _The Overland Monthly_. For this journal he wrote many of his most characteristic stories and poems and introduced into its pages, "The Luck of Roaring Camp"; "The Outcasts of Poker Flat", and others having that peculiar pseudo-dialect of Western mining life of which he was the pioneer writer. He had now taken a great step towards high and artistic work. At this point his reputation was established. As for Revolutionary New Jersey poems, abundant as the material is for inspiration, Bret Harte's "Caldwell of Springfield" seems to be one of very few. At the luncheon of the Daughters of the American Revolution held in May of 1892, a prominent member of the Association recited "Parson Caldwell" and mentioned, that strange to say, it was as far as she had been able to ascertain, the only poem on Revolutionary times in New Jersey that had ever been written, though she had searched thoroughly. In addition to this, we find only, besides the two poems of Mr. Charles D. Platt, given in this volume, (and others of his referred to) one or two of the sort in a volume published years ago, privately, by Dr. Thomas Ward, of New York (a great uncle of Mrs. Luther Kountze). Very few copies of his poems were printed and all were given to his friends, not sold. We must not forget the very beautiful poem of "Alice of Monmouth", by Edmund Clarence Stedman, and also, perhaps, might be included his spirited "Aaron Burr's Wooing". There was also an early writer, Philip Freneau, of Monmouth County, who lived in Colonial and Revolutionary times, and wrote some quaint and charming poems of that period. If there are any others we would be glad to be informed. In this book, "Plain Language From Truthful James", better known as "The Heathen Chinee", represents Mr. Harte among the poets, in our group of writers, for the reason that it is so widely known as a satire upon the popular prejudices against the Chinese, who were at that time pursued with hue and cry of being shiftless and weak-minded. From 1868, Harte became a regular contributor to the _Atlantic Monthly_ and he also entered the lecture field. It was during this period that he lived in Morristown. In 1878 he went to Crefeld, Germany, as United States Consul, and here began his life abroad. Two years later he went, as Consul, to Glasgow, Scotland, since which time he has remained abroad, engaged in literary pursuits. The Contributor's Club, of the _Atlantic Monthly_, gives a curious little paper on "The Value of a Name", in which the writer insists that Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Dante Rossetti and others owe a part of their success, at least, to the phonic value of their names. He says that "much time and thought are spent in selecting a name for a play or novel, for it is known that success is largely dependent on it" and he therefore censures parents who are "so strangely careless and unscientific in giving names to their children." Bret Harte's publications include besides "Condensed Novels", "Thankful Blossom", and others already mentioned, several volumes of Poems issued at different periods: among them are "Songs of the Sierras" and "Echoes of the Foot Hills". Then there are "Tales of the Argonauts and Other Stories"; "Drift from Two Shores"; "Twins of Table Mountain"; "Flip and Found at Blazing Star"; "On the Frontier"; "Snow Bound at Eagle's"; "Maruja, a Novel"; "The Queen of the Pirate Isle", for children; "A Phyllis of the Sierras"; "A Waif of the Plains" and many others, besides his collected works in five volumes published in 1882. Writing to Bret Harte in London, for certain information about the story of "Thankful Blossom", the author of this volume received the following reply: 15 UPPER HAMILTON TERRACE, N. W., 31st May, '90. _Dear Madam:_ In reply to your favor of the 14th inst., I fear I must begin by saying that the story of "Thankful Blossom", although inspired and suggested by my residence at Morristown at different periods was not _written_ at that place, but in another part of New Jersey. The "Blossom Farm" was a study of two or three old farm houses in the vicinity, but was not an existing fact so far as I know. But the description of Washington's Head-Quarters was a study of the actual house, supplemented by such changes as were necessary for the epoch I described, and which I gathered from the State Records. The portraits of Washington and his military family at the Head-Quarters were drawn from Spark's "Life of Washington" and the best chronicles of the time. The episode of the Spanish Envoy is also historically substantiated, and the same may be said of the incidents of the disaffection of the "Connecticut Contingent." Although the heroine, "Thankful Blossom", as a _character_ is purely imaginary, the _name_ is an actual one, and was borne by a (chronologically) remote maternal relation of mine, whose Bible with the written legend, "Thankful Blossom, her book", is still in possession of a member of the family. The contour of scenery and the characteristics of climate have, I believe, changed but little since I knew them between 1873 and 1876 and "Thankful Blossom" gazed at them from the Baskingridge Road in 1779. I remain, dear madam, Yours very sincerely, BRET HARTE. Two of the farms from which Bret Harte _may_ have drawn the inspiration for the surroundings of his story, may be seen on the Washington Valley road as you turn to the right from the road to Mendham. Turning again to the left,--before you come to the junction of the road which crosses at right angles to the Whatnong House, where Mr. Harte passed a summer,--you come upon the Carey Farm, the house built by the grandfather of the present occupants. There you see the stone wall,--crumbling now,--over which the bewitching Mistress Thankful talked and clasped hands with Captain Allen Brewster of the Connecticut Contingent. The elm-tree, upon whose bark was inscribed "the effigy of a heart, divers initials and the legend 'Thine Forever'", has been lately cut down and the trunk decorated with growing plants and flowers. We see the black range of the Orange Hills over which the moon slowly lifted herself as the Captain waited for his love, "looking at him, blushing a little, as if the appointment were her own". We see also the faintly-lit field beyond,--the same field in which, further on in the story after Brewster's treachery, Major Van Zandt and Mistress Thankful picked the violets together and doing so, revealed their hearts' love to one another on that 3rd of May, 1780. The orchard is there, still bearing apples, but the "porch" and the "mossy eaves" evidently belong to the next farm house, which we find exactly on the corner at the junction of the two roads. It is the old Beach farm. The original house has a brick addition, with the inscription among the bricks, "1812". It is on the wooden part built earlier and evidently an ancient structure, that we see the "porch and eaves". We select from "Thankful Blossom" the very fine pen portrait of Washington and his military family at the Headquarters. THANKFUL BLOSSOM. _A Romance of the Jerseys, 1779._ CHAPTER III. The rising wind, which had ridden much faster than Mistress Thankful, had increased to a gale by the time it reached Morristown. It swept through the leafless maples, and rattled the dry bones of the elms. It whistled through the quiet Presbyterian churchyard, as if trying to arouse the sleepers it had known in days gone by. It shook the blank, lustreless windows of the Assembly Rooms over the Freemason's Tavern, and wrought in their gusty curtains moving shadows of those amply petticoated dames and tightly hosed cavaliers who had swung in "Sir Roger," or jigged in "Money Musk," the night before. But I fancy it was around the isolated "Ford Mansion," better known as the "Headquarters," that the wind wreaked its grotesque rage. It howled under its scant eaves, it sang under its bleak porch, it tweaked the peak of its front gable, it whistled through every chink and cranny of its square, solid, unpicturesque structure. Situated on a hillside that descended rapidly to the Whippany River, every summer zephyr that whispered through the porches of the Morristown farm houses charged as a stiff breeze upon the swinging half doors and windows of the "Ford Mansion"; every wintry wind became a gale that threatened its security. The sentinel who paced before its front porch knew from experience when to linger under its lee, and adjust his threadbare outer coat to the bitter North wind. Within the house something of this cheerlessness prevailed. It had an ascetic gloom, which the scant fire-light of the reception room, and the dying embers on the dining room hearth, failed to dissipate. The central hall was broad, and furnished plainly with a few rush-bottomed chairs, on one of which half dozed a black body-servant of the commander-in-chief. Two officers in the dining-room, drawn close by the chimney corner, chatted in undertones, as if mindful that the door of the drawing-room was open, and their voices might break in upon its sacred privacy. The swinging light in the hall partly illuminated it, or rather glanced gloomily from the black polished furniture, the lustreless chairs, the quaint cabinet, the silent spinet, the skeleton-legged centre-table, and finally upon the motionless figure of a man seated by the fire. It was a figure since so well known to the civilized world, since so celebrated in print and painting, as to need no description here. Its rare combination of gentle dignity with profound force, of a set resoluteness of purpose with a philosophical patience, have been so frequently delivered to a people not particularly remarkable for these qualities, that I fear it has too often provoked a spirit of playful aggression, in which the deeper underlying meaning was forgotten. So let me add that in manner, physical equipoise, and even in the mere details of dress, this figure indicated a certain aristocratic exclusiveness. It was the presentment of a king,--a king who by the irony of circumstances was just then waging war against all kingship; a ruler of men, who just then was fighting for the right of these men to govern themselves, but whom by his own inherent right he dominated. From the crown of his powdered head to the silver buckle of his shoe he was so royal that it was not strange his brother George of England and Hanover--ruling by accident, otherwise impiously known as the "grace of God"--could find no better way of resisting his power than by calling him "Mr. Washington." The sound of horses' hoofs, the formal challenge of sentry, the grave questioning of the officer of the guard, followed by footsteps upon the porch, did not apparently disturb his meditation. Nor did the opening of the outer door and a charge of cold air into the hall that invaded even the privacy of the reception room, and brightened the dying embers on the hearth, stir his calm pre-occupation. But an instant later there was the distinct rustle of a feminine skirt in the hall, a hurried whispering of men's voices, and then the sudden apparition of a smooth, fresh-faced young officer over the shoulder of the unconscious figure. "I beg your pardon, general," said the officer doubtingly, "but"---- "You are not intruding, Colonel Hamilton," said the general quietly. "There is a young lady without who wishes an audience of your Excellency. 'Tis Mistress Thankful Blossom,--the daughter of Abner Blossom, charged with treasonous practice and favoring the enemy, now in the guard-house at Morristown." "Thankful Blossom?" repeated the general interrogatively. "Your Excellency doubtless remembers a little provincial beauty and a famous toast of the countryside--the Cressida of our Morristown epic, who led our gallant Connecticut Captain astray"---- "You have the advantages, besides the better memory of a younger man, colonel," said Washington, with a playful smile that slightly reddened the cheek of his aide-de-camp. "Yet I think I _have_ heard of this phenomenon. By all means, admit her--and her escort." "She is alone, general," responded the subordinate. "Then the more reason why we should be polite," returned Washington, for the first time altering his easy posture, rising to his feet, and lightly clasping his ruffled hands before him. "We must not keep her waiting. Give her access, my dear colonel, at once; and even as she came,--alone." The aide-de-camp bowed and withdrew. In another moment the half opened door swung wide to Mistress Thankful Blossom. She was so beautiful in her simple riding-dress, so quaint and original in that very beauty, and, above all, so teeming with a certain vital earnestness of purpose just positive and audacious enough to set off that beauty, that the grave gentleman before her did not content himself with the usual formal inclination of courtesy, but actually advanced, and, taking her cold little hand in his, graciously led her to the chair he had just vacated. "Even if your name were not known to me, Mistress Thankful," said the commander-in-chief, looking down upon her with grave politeness, "nature has, methinks, spared you the necessity of any introduction to the courtesy of a gentleman. But how can I especially serve you?" Miss Henrietta Howard Holdich. It is a curious fact that although New Jersey was the theatre of some of the most stirring scenes of the Revolution, only two stories seem to have been written, founded on the events of those times, if we except the "Water Witch", by J. Fenimore Cooper, in which we find the location of Alderman Van Beverout's house, the villa of the "Lust in Rust" to be on the Atlantic Highlands, between the Shrewsbury river and the sea. This spot is pointed out to-day and was associated with the smugglers of that period. The other two stories are "Thankful Blossom", by Bret Harte, and "Hannah Arnett's Faith", a Centennial Story, by Miss Holdich, which latter, as a singular history attaches to it, we shall give at length. Miss Holdich was born at Middletown, Conn., but left there too young to remember much about it and she lived in New York until 1878 when she came to Morristown. When she was not quite two years of age her mother discovered she could read and since she was seventeen, she has written for various well-known papers and periodicals, more children's stories than anything else, she tells us, but also a good many stories for _Harpers' Magazine_ and _Bazar_,--also poems, by one of which she is represented in our group of poets. "Hannah Arnett's Faith" is a true story of the author's great grandmother, familiar to all the family from infancy; In 1876 Miss Holdich published it, as a Centennial story, in _The New York Observer_. In 1890, a lady of Washington published it as her own in _The Washington Post_, (she asserts that she did not intend it as a plagiarism but used it merely as a historical incident). The story was recognized and letters written to, and published in, _The Post_, giving Miss Holdich's name, as the true author. However, this publication of the story led to a curious result, and gave the story a wide celebrity. In a published statement, Miss Mary Desha (one of the Vice Presidents of the D. A. R.) announces that "the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution sprang from this story". "On July 21st", Miss Desha says, after the publication of the story in _The Washington Post_, accompanied by an appeal for a woman's organization to commemorate events of the Revolution in which women had bravely borne their part,--"a letter from William O. McDowell of New Jersey, was published, in which he said that he was the great-grandson of Hannah Arnett and called on the women of America to form a society of their own, since they had been excluded from the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution at a meeting held in Louisville, Kentucky, April 30th, 1890". Miss Holdich soon after this was urgently requested to become Regent of the Morristown Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which position she accepted and holds to-day. HANNAH ARNETT'S FAITH. _A Centennial Story._ 1776-1876. The days were at their darkest and the hearts of our grandfathers were weighed down with doubt and despondency. Defeat had followed defeat for the American troops, until the army had become demoralized and discouragement had well-nigh become despair. Lord Cornwallis, after his victory at Fort Lee, had marched his army to Elizabethtown (Dec. 1776) where they were now encamped. On the 30th of November the brothers Howe had issued their celebrated proclamation, which offered protection to all who within sixty days should declare themselves peaceable British subjects and bind themselves neither to take up arms against their Sovereign, nor to encourage others to do so. It was to discuss the advisability of accepting this offered protection that a group of men had met in one of the large old houses of which Elizabethtown was, at that time, full. We are apt to think of those old times as days of unmitigated loyalty and courage; of our ancestors as unfaltering heroes, swerving never in the darkest hours from the narrow and thorny path which conscience bade them tread. Yet human nature is human nature in all ages, and if at times the "old fashioned fire" burned low even in manly hearts, and profound discouragement palsied for a time the most ardent courage, what are we that we should wonder at or condemn them? Of this period Dr. Ashbel Green wrote: "I heard a man of some shrewdness once say that when the British troops over-ran the State of New Jersey, in the closing part of the year 1776, the whole population could have been bought for eighteen-pence a head." The debate was long and grave. Some were for accepting the offered terms at once; others hung back a little, but all had at length agreed that it was the only thing to be done. Hope, courage, loyalty, faith, honor--all seemed swept away upon the great flood of panic which had overspread the land. There was one listener, however, of whom the eager disputants were ignorant, one to whose heart their wise reasoning was very far from carrying conviction. Mrs. Arnett, the wife of the host, was in the next room, and the sound of the debate had reached her where she sat. She had listened in silence, until, carried away by her feelings, she could bear no more, and springing to her feet she pushed open the parlor door and confronted the assembled group. Can you fancy the scene? A large low room, with the dark, heavily carved furniture of the period, dimly lighted by the tall wax candles and the wood fires which blazed in the huge fire place. Around the table, the group of men--pallid, gloomy, dejected, disheartened. In the doorway the figure of the woman, in the antique costume with which, in those latter days, we have become so familiar. Can you not fancy the proud poise of her head, the indignant light of her blue eyes, the crisp, clear tones of her voice, the majesty and defiance and scorn which clothed her as a garment? The men all started up at her entrance; the sight of a ghost could hardly have caused more perturbation than did that of this little woman. Her husband advanced hastily. She had no business here; a woman should know her place and keep it. Questions of politics and political expediency were not for them; but he would shield her as far as possible, and point out the impropriety of her conduct afterwards, when they should be alone. So he went quickly up to her with a warning whisper: "Hannah! Hannah! this is no place for you. We do not want you here just now;" and would have taken her hand to lead her from the room. She was a docile little woman and obeyed his wishes in general without a word: but now it seemed as if she scarcely saw him, as with one hand she pushed him gently back and turned to the startled group. "Have you made your decision, gentlemen?" she asked. "Have you chosen the part of men or of traitors?" It was putting the question too broadly,--so like a woman, seeing only the bare, ugly facts, and quite forgetting the delicate drapery which was intended to veil them. It was an awkward position to put them in, and they stammered and bungled over their answer, as men in a false position will. The reply came at last, mingled with explanations and excuses and apologies. "Quite hopeless; absurd for a starving, half-clothed, undisciplined army like ours to attempt to compete with a country like England's unlimited resources. Repulsed everywhere--ruined; throwing away life and fortune for a shadow;"--you know the old arguments with which men try to prop a staggering conscience. Mrs. Arnett listened in silence until the last abject word was spoken. Then she inquired simply: "But what if we should live, after all?" The men looked at each other, but no one spoke. "Hannah! Hannah!" urged her husband. "Do you not see that these are no questions for you? We are discussing what is best for us, for you, for all. Women have no share in these topics. Go to your spinning-wheel and leave us to settle affairs. My good little wife, you are making yourself ridiculous. Do not expose yourself in this way before our friends." His words passed her ear like the idle wind; not even the quiver of an eyelash showed that she heard them. "Can you not tell me?" she said in the same strangely quiet voice. "If, after all, God does not let the right perish,--if America should win in the conflict, after you have thrown yourself upon British clemency, where will you be then?" "Then?" spoke one hesitating voice. "Why, then, if it ever _could_ be, we should be ruined. We must leave the country forever. But it is absurd to think of such a thing. The struggle is an utterly hopeless one. We have no men, no money, no arms, no food and England has everything." "No," said Mrs. Arnett; "you have forgotten one thing which England has not and which we have--one thing which outweighs all England's treasures, and that is the Right. God is on our side, and every volley from our muskets is an echo of His voice. We are poor and weak and few; but God is fighting for us. We entered into this struggle with pure hearts and prayerful lips. We had counted the cost and were willing to pay the price, were it our heart's blood. And now--now, because for a time the day is going against us, you would give up all and sneak back, like cravens, to kiss the feet that have trampled upon us! And you call yourselves men--the sons of those who gave up home and fortune and fatherland to make for themselves and for dear liberty a resting-place in the wilderness? Oh, shame upon you, cowards!" Her words had rushed out in a fiery flood, which her husband had vainly striven to check. I do not know how Mrs. Arnett looked, but I fancy her a little fair woman, with kindly blue eyes and delicate features,--a tender and loving little soul, whose scornful, blazing words must have seemed to her amazed hearers like the inspired fury of a pythoness. Are we not all prophets at times--prophets of good or evil, according to our bent, and with more power than we ourselves suspect to work out the fulfillment of our own prophecies? Who shall say how far this fragile woman aided to stay the wave of desolation which was spreading over the land? "Gentlemen," said good Mr. Arnett uneasily, "I beg you to excuse this most unseemly interruption to our council. My wife is beside herself I think. You all know her and know that it is not her wont to meddle with politics, or to brawl and bluster. To-morrow she will see her folly, but now I pray your patience." Already her words had begun to stir the slumbering manhood in the bosoms of those who heard her. Enthusiasm makes its own fitting times. No one replied; each felt too keenly his own pettiness, in the light cast upon them by this woman's brave words. "Take your protection, if you will," she went on, after waiting in vain for a reply. "Proclaim yourselves traitors and cowards, false to your country and your God, but horrible will be the judgment you will bring upon your heads and the heads of those that love you. I tell you that England will never conquer. I know it and feel it in every fibre of my heart. Has God led us so far to desert us now? Will He, who led our fathers across the stormy winter sea, forsake their children who have put their trust in Him? For me, I stay with my country, and my hand shall never touch the hand, nor my heart cleave to the heart of him who shames her." She flashed upon her husband a gaze which dazzled him like sudden lightning. "Isaac, we have lived together for twenty years, and for all of them I have been a true and loving wife to you. But I am the child of God and of my country, and if you do this shameful thing, I will never again own you for my husband." "My dear wife!" cried the husband aghast, "you do not know what you are saying. Leave me, for such a thing as this?" "For such a thing as this?" she cried scornfully. "What greater cause could there be? I married a good man and true, a faithful friend and a loyal Christian gentleman, and it needs no divorce to sever me from a traitor and a coward. If you take your protection you lose your wife, and I--I lose my husband and my home!" With the last words the thrilling voice broke suddenly with a pathetic fall and a film crept over the proud blue eyes. Perhaps this little touch of womanly weakness moved her hearers as deeply as her brave, scornful words. They were not all cowards at heart, only touched by the dread finger of panic, which, now and then, will paralyze the bravest. Some had struggled long against it and only half yielded at last. And some there were to whom old traditions had never quite lost their power, whose superstitious consciences had never become quite reconciled to the stigma of _Rebel_, though reason and judgment both told them that, borne for the cause for which they bore it, it was a title of nobility. The words of the little woman had gone straight to each heart, be its main-spring what it might. Gradually the drooping heads were raised and the eyes grew bright with manliness and resolution. Before they left the house that night, they had sworn a solemn oath to stand by the cause they had adopted and the land of their birth, through good or evil, and to spurn the offers of their tyrants and foes as the deadliest insults. Some of the names of those who met in that secret council were known afterwards among those who fought their country's battles most nobly, who died upon the field of honor, or rejoiced with pure hearts when the day of triumph came at last. The name of the little woman figured on no heroic roll, but was she the less a heroine? This story is a true one, and, in this Centennial year, when every crumb of information in regard to those old days of struggle and heroism is eagerly gathered up, it may not be without interest. Mrs. Miriam Coles Harris. Mrs. Harris was well known during her stay in Morristown and is remembered as a charming woman. "In Morristown", she writes, she found "restoration to health, many friends, and much enjoyment",--adding "I think I shall always love the place". Mrs. Harris has been a voluminous writer of stories and novels. Her first work, "Rutledge", published without her name, excited immediate and wide attention and established her reputation. Since then, she has given to the world, among others, the following volumes: "Louie's Last Term at St. Mary's"; "The Sutherlands"; "Frank Warrington"; "St. Philip's"; "Round-hearts" (for children); "Richard Vandermarck"; "A Perfect Adonis"; "Missy"; "Happy-go-Lucky"; "Phoebe"; "A Rosary For Lent" and "Dear Feast of Lent". The selection given to represent Mrs. Harris in Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature" is a chapter from her novel, "Missy". An appropriate selection for this volume would be an extract from her chapter on "Marrowfat" (Morristown) in her novel, "Phoebe", published in 1884. The two principal characters of the book, Barry and Phoebe, lately married, are described in Marrowfat, going to church on Sunday morning: EXTRACT FROM "PHOEBE." They were rather late; that is, the bell had stopped ringing, and the pews were all filled, and the clergyman was just entering from the sacristy, when they reached the door. It was an old stone church, with many vines about it, greensward and fine trees. * * The organist was playing a low and unobtrusive strain; the clergyman, having just entered, was on his knees, where unfortunately, the congregation had not followed him. They were all ready to criticise the young people who now walked down the silent aisle; very far down, too, they were obliged to walk. It was the one moment in the week when they would be most conspicuous. * * Barry looked a greater swell than ever, and his wife was so much handsomer than anybody else in Marrowfat that it was simple nonsense to talk of ignoring the past. If one did not want to be walked over by these young persons they must be put down; self preservation joined hands with virtuous indignation; to cancel the past would be to sacrifice the future. Scarce a mother in Marrowfat but felt a bitter sense of injury as she thought of Barry. Not only had he set the worst possible example to her sons, but he had overlooked the charms of her daughters; not only had he outraged public opinion, but he had disappointed private hopes. Society should hold him to a strict account; Marrowfat was not to be trifled with when it came to matters of principle. It was an old town, with ante-Revolutionary traditions; there was no mushroom crop allowed to spring up about it. New people were permitted but only on approbation of the old. It was not the thing to be very rich in Marrowfat, it was only tolerated; it was the thing to be a little cultivated, a little clever, very well born, and very loyal to Marrowfat. It was not exactly provincial; it was too near the great city and too much mixed up with it to be that; but it was very local and it had its own traditions in an unusual degree. That people grew a little narrow and very much interested in the affairs of the town, after living there awhile, was not to be wondered at. It is always the result of suburban life, and one finds it difficult to judge, between having one's nature green like a lane, even if narrow, or hard and broad like a city pavement, out of which all the greenness has been trampled and all the narrowness thrown down. The climate of the place was dry and pure; it was the fashion for the city doctors to send their patients there; and many who came to cough, remained to build. The scenery was lovely; you looked down pretty streets and saw blue hills beyond; the sidewalks were paved and the town was lit by gas, but the pavements led you past charming homes to bits of view that reminded you of Switzerland, and the inoffensive lamp-posts were hidden under great trees by day, and by night you only thought how glad you were to see them. The drives were endless, the roads good; there were livery-stables, hotels, skilled confectioners, shops of all kinds, a library, a pretty little theatre, churches of every shade of faith, schools of every degree of pretension; lectures in winter, concerts in summer, occasional plays all the year; two or three local journals, the morning papers from the city at your breakfast table; fast trains, telegraphs, telephones, all the modern amenities of life under your very hand; and yet it was the country, and there were peaceful hills and deep woods, and the nights were as still as Paradise. Can it be wondered at that, like St. Peter's at Rome, it had an atmosphere of its own, and defied the outer changes of the temperature? Marrowfat certainly was a law unto itself. Why certain people were great people, in its view, it would be difficult to say. Why the telegraphs, and the telephones, and the fashionable invalids from the city and the rich people who bought and built in its neighborhood, did not change its standards of value one can only guess. But it had a stout moral sentiment of its own; it had resisted innovations and done what seemed it good for a long while; and when you have made a good moral sentiment the fashion, or the fact by long use, you have done a good thing. Marrowfat never tolerated married flirtations, looked askance on extremes in dress or entertainment, dealt severely with the faults of youth. All these things existed more or less within its borders, of course, but they were evil doings and not approved doings. In a certain sense, Marrowfat was the most charitable town in the world; in another the most uncharitable. If you were to have any misfortune befall you, Marrowfat was the place to go to have it in; if you lost your money, if you broke your back, if your children died, if your house burned down, Marrowfat swathed you in flowers, bathed you in sympathy, took you out to drive, came and read to you, if need were took up subscriptions for you. But if you did anything disgraceful or discreditable, it is safe to say you would better have done it in any other place. Miss Maria McIntosh. Miss McIntosh was born in the little village of Sunbury, Georgia, in 1804. She was educated by an old Oxford tutor who was teacher and pastor combined and she led the class of boys with whom she studied. After her mother's death, (her father had died in her infancy), she came to the north, wholly for the purpose of studying and improving herself. Her first stories were for children. Then appeared two very successful tales for youth; "Conquest and Self-Conquest," and "Praise and Principle". "To Seem and To Be"; "Charms and Counter-Charms", and their successors followed on during a period of twenty years. Several of her books were translated into both French and German and all were widely read abroad, but the joy in her work lay in the rich harvest for good which was constantly made known to her. In the year before her death, many letters came to her from women then married and heads of families, thanking her for first impulses to better things arising from her words. Not long ago, Marion Harland, (Mrs. Terhune), wrote to a dear friend of this author, that she owed to Miss McIntosh the strongest influences of her young life and those which had determined its bent and development. Miss McIntosh was intensely interested in the maintenance of Republican simplicity and purity of morals and wrote a strong address, which was widely circulated, to the "Women of America" which led to a correspondence with the then Duchess of Sutherland and other English women who were interested in the elevation of women and of the family life. She died in Morristown, at the residence of her devoted niece and namesake, Mrs. James Farley Cox, and soothed by her loving ministrations,--after a protracted illness, lasting over a year. Mrs. Cox tells us, "she loved Morristown and said amidst great pain, that her last year, was, despite all, the happiest of her life". "Lofty and Lowly"; "Charms and Counter-Charms", and "To Seem and To Be", are all alike noble books. Miss McIntosh seems a woman of strong creative powers, with a delicacy of feeling and a fine touch of womanliness, united to a certain delicate perception of character. She did not write from what we now so grandly call _types_, or, for the sake of displaying a surgical dissection of character; but her books are groupings of individuals as real as those we meet in daily life. There are no strained situations, no fanciful make-ups, and no unnatural poses. There are the lovely Alice Montrose with a strangely beautiful blending of delicate refinement and womanly strength, rising to meet every requirement of her varied life; Mr. Gaston, the New England merchant; Richard Grahame the hero of "Lofty and Lowly", with some telling contrasts in the way of villians and weaker characters. Beside this, Miss McIntosh has a strong sympathy for nature and all through her stories she stops, as it were to show us the flowering fields and summer skies and as she draws us to her, we feel the beatings of her own warm human heart going out as it does to the young and inexperienced. Again, Miss McIntosh gives in her stories faithful representations of life both north and south, before the war, forty years ago. These pictures are of peculiar value as few books preserve pictorial records of that condition of life now passed away forever. She had a power in massing details and binding them by a thread of common interest and common action. She seemed in her writings, like one who had been spiritually "lifted higher" and like all such spirits she could not but draw others after her. Her books in past years have had wide and lasting influence and it is a pity they could not now be substituted for much of the miserable literature which only pleases a passing hour or teaches false views of life. Mrs. Maria McIntosh Cox. Mrs. Cox, long a resident of Morristown, was named for the dear aunt to whom the preceding sketch relates, and, as is often the case with namesakes for some unexplained reason, the mantle of Miss McIntosh's genius fell upon her. From girlhood, Mrs. Cox has written for various papers and magazines. Some years ago, the Appletons published a little volume of hers for very young children, called "A year with Maggie and Emma", which was afterwards translated into French. "Raymond Kershaw", published in 1888, is a volume of larger size. To this we shall refer later. In March, 1890, _The Youth's Companion_ published a short story founded on an adventure of the author's father with Lafitte, the famous pirate. It was entitled "A Brave Middy", and won a prize of $500, in a contest of similar tales. In the current numbers of _Wide Awake_ from December to June 1891-'92 appeared a story of ten chapters called "Jack Brereton's Three Months' Service", which, in August, 1892, was brought out in book form by D. Lothrop & Co., Boston. The idea most prominent in this story, the "motif", is the reflex action of a soldier's enlistment on his deserted family. "I chanced", says the author, "to thoroughly see and know what sudden _three months'_ calls entailed on the volunteer and those who fought the battle out at home, and I enjoyed telling what is, in spirit and in most details, a true story, though not as connected with such people as the story describes". "Brave Ben Broughton", written by request for the McClure Syndicate, and a Folk Lore story are the latest from the pen of Mrs. Cox. "Raymond Kershaw; a Story of Deserved Success", was published by Roberts Brothers in 1888. The story is a touching one commencing in pathos and ending in heroism; a lesson to every boy and girl who, plunged suddenly and unexpectedly into difficulty, have to face the hard realities of life. There is an extremely fine passage in this book. Winthrop, the author of "John Brent", could not have done it better. It is the description of a maddened bull, "Meadow King", which Paul Potter might have painted. It needs no comment. Spirited and full of life, every actor in the scene performs his or her part with a truthfulness which is wonderful. Many a more voluminous writer than Mrs. Cox has done far less superior work than this truly great scene exhibits in its dramatic attitudes. EXTRACT FROM "RAYMOND KERSHAW." After country fashion, every farmer for miles around came to look at "Kershaw's new bull". Without mistake they saw a royal animal. Without a spot to mar his jet-black coat, through which the great veins were visible like netted cords, his small, strong, sinewy legs, all muscle and bone, carried his heavy body as lightly as if he were a horse, and his flanks and shoulders, when James pushed up his supple skin with his hand, felt as if he wore a velvet coat over an iron frame; his neck, not too short for grace, was still very heavy and muscular, with wrinkles like necklaces encircling it, and his fiery eyes glowed, far apart, under his tight-curled poll, from which those mischievous horns, sharp, long and slightly out-curving, stood in beautiful harmony with the whole outline; and his great lashing tail, with its tasselated end, completed his perfections. All went well for a fortnight, after which, on a hot Sunday morning all drove off to church leaving Mrs. Kershaw and Mary at home together. (Mrs. Kershaw, the sweet and tenderly-loved invalid mother, was half-lying in her chair and Mary sat, Bible in hand, on the first step of the piazza near her, when) Suddenly a roar struck upon their ears with horror; and, filled with one of those blind accesses of rage to which his race is so strangely subject, tearing, bellowing along, up the hillside came Meadow King. As he halted for a breath behind the fence, he was like one's night-dreams of such a creature,--an ideal of pure brute force and wrath. His head tossed high, he gave a prolonged bellow, and leaped the high bars without an effort. Mary rose without a word, and laying her Bible on Mrs. Kershaw's lap, stood white as the dead to watch him; destroying the delicate things in his way, he ran madly towards the sheds. Mary gave silent thanks that he had not taken to the road. The high gates of the cow-yards stood wide open, and through them he rushed. "Miss Kershaw, I've got to shut them gates!" said Mary. "Oh, don't think of it, Mary!" said Mrs. Kershaw, her hands clasped and trembling. "Are you not afraid?" "Skeered!" said Mary,--"I'm skeered out of my life; _but them gates has got to be shut!_" Down in the yard the voice kept up its dreadful din. Mary rushed down the steps like a flash, and as suddenly back again. "Miss Kershaw, would you mind just kissing me _once_?" A quick warm touch on her pale lips, and she was gone; it was all in the space of a long breath. * * Her way was down a slight inclination and her swift, light feet carried her with incredible speed. One terrified glance at the open gate showed her the enemy lashing himself at the farther end of the enclosure, with the scattered dust and leaves rising about him as he pawed the ground. The gates were heavy and wide apart; the right-hand leaf swung shut, and then, darting across the opening, she pushed the left forward and clasped it, and springing up drew down the heavy cross-bar, and the gates were shut! * * "He's in, Miss Kershaw," said Mary, "but the worst is to come! How under the sun can they ketch him? Can you keep still if I go up the road and watch for 'em? They're most sure to drive in by the farm-yard gate if they come Chester way, and if they come upon him unbeknownst, Heaven help 'em!" "Go Mary, _go_; don't think about me at all," said Mrs. Kershaw. * * * "Not until you are in your chair, and promise to stay there, ma'am," said Mary. "Young Doctor's got trouble enough on his hands without your bein' hurt. If you hear Meadow King tearing the gates down, and me a-screechin' my life out, don't you stir!" (Mary goes to warn them and stops their entrance. James the farmer takes command. Raymond carries an axe and Bob a stick. They open the gates Mary had closed. The brute rushes forward. At this moment James with a rope he had carried, undertakes to lasso the bull but misses and falls back, facing the foe but pinioned in the angle of a beam and the side-wall; one of the mad King's horns imbedded in the beam, the other projecting in terrible proximity, while the unspeakably angry, brutal face of the beast is only a few inches from his chest. At this moment, Ray seized his axe.) His hat had fallen off and his face was stern and ghastly white as he watched like a lion his gigantic prey; until coming with long powerful steps close enough to strike, he gave an agonizing look of dread at James, and then brought down one tremendous crashing blow, straight, strong and true, between those cruel horns, and the Meadow King sank like a loosened rock upon the floor, pulling his head loose by his own weight. David Young. "Why, as to that, said the engineer, Ghosts ain't things we are apt to fear, Spirits don't fool with levers much, And throttle-valves don't take to such; And as for Jim,-- What happened to him Was one-half fact and t'other half whim!" --_Bret Harte._ David Young is principally known as the reviser and publisher of "The Morristown Ghost" in 1826, but he was also the compiler of the well-known "Farmer's Almanac", published first in 1834, and he wrote a poem of thirty-four pages in two parts, entitled "The Contrast". The original volume of "The Morristown Ghost" was published in 1792, by whom, it is not certainly known. It gave the names of the "Society of eight", their places of meeting, and all the proceedings of the Society. The copies were bought up and destroyed, says tradition, by the son of one of its members, one lone volume not being obtainable, but this cannot be distinctly traced at present. There was published in 1876, by the Messrs. L. A. and B. H. Vogt, a fac-simile copy of the original history of "The Morristown Ghost" without the names of the original members, "with an appendix compiled from the county records". The following is the title page: "The Morristown Ghost; an Account of the Beginning, Transactions and Discovery of Ransford Rogers, who seduced many by pretended Hobgoblins and Apparitions and thereby extorted Money from their pockets. In the County of Morris and State of New Jersey, in the Year 1788. Printed for every purchaser--1792". In the copy of 1826, the title page is as follows: "The Wonderful History of the Morristown Ghost; thoroughly and carefully revised. By David Young, Newark. Published by Benjamin Olds, for the author. I. C. Totten, Printer, 1826." The author tells us in his preface he has "very scrupulously followed the sense of the original." He continues: "The truth of this history will not, I presume, be called in question by the inhabitants of Morris and the adjacent counties. The facts are still fresh in the memories of many among us; and some survive still who bore an active part in the scenes herein recorded." He continues: "For the further satisfaction of the distant reader, on this point, I would inform him that I am myself a native of the County of Morris; that I was seven years and seven months old when Rogers first emigrated to this county; and that I well remember hearing people talk of these affairs during their progress. Every reader may rest assured that if the truth of this narrative had been doubtful, I should have taken no pains to rescue it from oblivion." There seems to have been also another intermediate publication. From an ancient copy of this curious story, found in an old, discolored volume in our Morristown library, in which are compiled papers on various subjects, (among them a "Review on Spiritual Manifestations"), we copy the title page: "The Morristown Ghost, or Yankee Trick, being a True, Interesting and Strange Narrative. This circumstance has excited considerable laughter and no small degree of surprize. Printed for purchasers, 1814." The man who conducted the plot was Ransford Rogers, of Connecticut. He was a plausible man who had the power of inspiring confidence, and though somewhat illiterate, was ambitious to be thought learned and pretended, it is said, to possess deep knowledge of "chymistry" and the power to dispel good and evil spirits. It will be remembered that Washington Irving remarks, in his description of the family portrait gallery, of Bracebridge Hall at twilight, when he almost hears the rustling of the brocade dresses of the ladies of the manor as they step out from their frames,--"There is an element of superstition in the human mind". It seems there had long been a conviction prevailing that large sums of money had been buried during the Revolutionary War by tories and others in Schooley's Mountain, near by. There also seemed to be something of the New England belief in witchcraft throughout the community. Says the Preface of the early volume; "It is obvious to all who are acquainted with the county of Morris, that the capricious notions of witchcraft have engaged the attention of many of its inhabitants for a number of years and the existence of witches is adopted by the generality of the people." And we read on page 213 of the "Combined Registers of the First Presbyterian Church," a record as follows: "Dr. John Johnes' servant Pompey, d. 17 July, 1833, aet. 81; frightened to death by ghosts." To obtain the treasure of Schooley's Mountain, then, was the occasion of the occurrences related in this story. Two gentlemen who had long been in search of mines, taking a tour through the country in 1788, "providentially," says David Young, fell in with Rogers at Smith's Clove, and discovered him to be the man they were in search of, and one who could "reveal the secret things of darkness," for they, too, were "covetous of the supposed treasure of Schooley's Mountain." A society was organized by Ransford which at first numbered "about eight" but afterwards was increased to about forty. His first object was to convince them of the existence of the hidden treasure lying dormant in the earth at Schooley's Mountain. It seems repeated efforts had before been made to obtain the treasure, but all had proved abortive, for whenever they attempted to break the ground, it was said, "there would many hobgoblins and apparitions appear which in a short time obliged them to evacuate the place". Rogers called a meeting of the eight and "communicated to them the solemnity of the business and the intricacy of the undertaking and the fact that there had been several persons murdered and buried with the money in order to retain it in the earth. He likewise informed them that those spirits must be raised and conversed with before the money could be obtained. He declared he could by his art and power raise these apparitions and that the whole company might hear him converse with them and satisfy themselves there was no deception. This was received with belief and admiration by the whole company without ever investigating whether it was probable or possible. This meeting therefore terminated with great assurance, they all being confident of the abilities, knowledge and powers of Rogers". To confirm the illusion of his supernatural power, Rogers had made chemical compositions of various kinds, of which, "some, by being buried in the earth for many hours, would break and cause great explosions which appeared dismal in the night and would cause great timidity. The company were all anxious to proceed and much elevated with such uncommon curiosities". A night was therefore appointed for the whole company to convene. The scene which the author proceeds to describe is worthy of Washington Irving in his "Legends of Sleepy Hollow", (see page 25 Young's edition, 1826). The night was dark and the circle "illumined only by candles caused a ghastly, melancholy, direful gloom through the woods". The company marched round and round in (concentric) circles as directed, "with great decorum" until suddenly shocked by "a most impetuous explosion from the earth a short distance from them". Flames rose to a considerable height, "illuminating the circumambient atmosphere and presenting to the eye many dreadful objects, from the supposed haunted grove, which were again instantaneously involved in obscurity". Ghosts made their appearance and hideous groans were heard. These were invisible to the rest of the company but conversed with Rogers in their hearing and told of the vast treasures in their possession which they would not resign except under certain conditions, one of which was "every man must deliver to the spirits twelve pounds in money". The procession continued 'till three o'clock in the morning, and "the whole company looked up to Rogers for protection from the raging spirits. This was in the month of November 1788". It will be noticed that the money required had to be advanced in "nothing but silver or gold" for which the paper money circulated in New Jersey could only be exchanged at twenty-five per cent. discount. Yet there was a sort of emulation among them, "who should be the first in delivering the money to the spirits." A frequent place of meeting for this company was what is now known as the Hathaway house on Flagler street, the first house on the left after entering Flagler street from Speedwell avenue. A little distance back of this house may be seen the stump of a tree beneath which tree, it is said, the money was left for the spirits. Another field used for the midnight marches is behind the Aber house on the Piersonville Road, and still another on the road between Piersonville and Rogers' school house, the location of which is known. Other localities are also known, by old residents, of the events recorded in this story. Mt. Kemble avenue has often been the actual scene of ghostly flittings to and fro as well as of the famous imaginary ride to the Headquarters of "Thankful Blossom". Rogers was in the habit of wrapping himself up in a sheet, going to the house of a certain gentleman in the night, and calling him up by rapping at the doors and windows, and conversing in such sleek disguise that the gentleman thought he was a spirit; ending his conversation also with the words: "I am the spirit of a just man, and am sent to give you information how to proceed, and to put the conducting of it into your hands; I will be ever with you, and give you directions when you go amiss; therefore fear not, but go to Rogers and inform him of your interview with me. Fear not I am ever with you". It must be remembered that this company, at the first, was composed of the best and most highly honored citizens of Morristown, also that toward the last, "the numbers increased daily of aged, abstemious, (at first material spirits were freely used at the nightly meetings) honest, judicious, simple church members." What led finally to the discovery of the plot, was, that it was ordained, "a paper of sacred powder, said to be some of the dust of the bodies of the spirits, was to be kept by every member, and to be preserved inviolate. One of the aged members, having occasion to leave home for a short time on some emergency, through forgetfulness left his paper in one of his pockets at home. His wife happened to find it, and out of curiosity, broke it open; but, perceiving the contents, she feared to touch it, lest peradventure it should have some connection with witchcraft. She went immediately to Rev. Mr. ----, the pious clergyman of the congregation for his advice on the subject; who, not knowing its composition, was unwilling to touch it, lest it might have some operation upon him, and knew not what advice to give her. Her husband returning declared she had ruined him forever by breaking open that paper, which increased her anxiety to know its contents. Upon her promising not to divulge anything, he then related to her the whole of their proceedings, whereupon she declared they were serving the devil and it was her duty notwithstanding her promise to put an end to such proceedings. Great disturbance was thereby caused in the company." It was at the house of one of the members, which is now standing, that Rogers was discovered in the following manner, as the story is told. Rogers, taking his sheet with him, rode, on a certain evening to this house, for the purpose of conversing with the gentleman, as a spirit. Having drank too freely he committed several blunders in his conversation, and was not so careful as usual about the ghostly costume. The good wife, whose suspicions had been aroused, managed to peep and listen during the interview, and after the ghost had left the house she remarked to her husband, says tradition: "My dear, do spirits wear shoe buckles? Those were very like Ransford Rogers' buckles". Rogers' foot-tracks were followed to the fence where his horse was tied, and the tracks of his horse to the house where he lived and hence to another house where he was found. He was apprehended and committed to prison, where he asserted his innocence so persistently that "in a few days he was bailed out", says our author, "by a gentleman, whom I shall call by the name of Compassion." A second time he was apprehended, when "he acknowledged his faults and confessed" the whole matter. He, however, "absconded, and under the auspices of Fortune saved himself by flight from the malice of a host." So ends the, perhaps, most famous historic ghost story of modern times. Mrs. Nathaniel Conklin. (JENNIE M. DRINKWATER.) Mrs. Conklin has been a voluminous writer of novels and stories, published by Robert Carter & Brothers and by the Presbyterian Board. Before her marriage she was widely known as Miss Jennie M. Drinkwater, and her latest book, "Dorothy's Islands," published in Boston, August, 1892, bears that name of authorship. She has written for many papers and magazines, besides the books she has published, and of these there are twenty and more. Among them are "Tessa Wadsworth's Discipline", a love story of high order and well told; "Rue's Helps", for boys and girls, and "Electa", in which we find a certain quality of naturalness in the people, and the scenes described,--a literary quality which is prominent in Mrs. Conklin's works. "They introduce the reader", says a critic, "to agreeable people, provide an atmosphere which is tonic and healthful and enlist interest in every page." Then there are "The Story of Hannah Marigold"; "Wildwood"; "The Fairfax Girls"; "From Flax to Linen" and "David Strong's Errand", besides others, and the last one published to which we have referred, and from which we shall quote. Several years ago, Mrs. Conklin being out of health, had her attention called to the special needs of invalids for sympathy from the active world about them, and organized a society, now world-wide and well-known, called the "Shut-In Society". It is an organization of invalids throughout the country, and now extending beyond it, who cheer each other with correspondence, send letters to prisoners in jails and sufferers in hospitals, and do other good work. Nine-tenths of its membership never see each other, but they help make each other's lives to be as cheery as possible in affliction. The amount of comfort and consolation carried by this organization to many a bed-ridden or helpless invalid, is beyond description, and the good that goes out also from those quiet chambers of sickness to the souls who seek them, mostly by _letter_, is greater than would be easily imagined. Mrs. Conklin was president of the Society for four years from its organization in 1885, and it now numbers several thousand members. We quote from "Dorothy's Islands", Mrs. Conklin's latest book. Dorothy was a child taken from a New York orphan asylum and adopted by a lighthouse keeper and his wife. She grows up supposing them to be her own father and mother, but the mother and child are antagonistic, and it is impossible for them to attract one another. This peculiarity of nature is very well given in the first chapter. EXTRACT FROM "DOROTHY'S ISLANDS." "When I grow up," said Dorothy "I am going to find an island all green and beautiful in winter as well as in summer. All around it the sand will be as golden as sunshine, and the houses--the happy houses--will be hidden away in green things, and flowers of yellow and scarlet and white. And then, father, after I find it, I will come and get you, and we will sing, and learn poems, and do lovely things all day long." "You are going to do wonderful things when you grow up," replied the amused, tender voice overhead. "Don't all grown-up people do wonderful things?" questioned child Dorothy. "I never did," answered the voice, not now either tender or amused. "No, you never _did_," broke in a woman's voice with harsh force. "I think father does _beautiful_ things," said Dorothy in her warm voice. "He brought the sea-bird home to me, and we loved it so, but you threw it off with its wounded wing." "Let nature take care of her own things," responded the voice that had nothing of love in its quality. "I'm nature's thing," Dorothy laughed; "father said so to-day. He said I was made out of nature and poetry." "It's he who puts the poetry in you; some day I'll send those poetry books adrift, and then you will both find something practical in your finger ends." The child looked at the chubby ends of her brown fingers. Her nine-year-old hands, under her mother's sharp teaching, had learned to do many practical things. The only "practical thing" she loathed--and that was her own name for it--was mending Cousin Jack's pea-jacket. One room in the lighthouse was packed with boxes containing her father's books. The "poetry box" was the only one that had been opened since their stay on the island. "It was one of your father's beautiful things to strand us on this desert island. I told him I wouldn't come." "But you _did_," said the child. "It's the last time he will have his own way," remarked the woman, with the heavy frown that marred her handsome face. "Oh, don't say that!" cried Dorothy distressed. "I never like your way." "You have got to like my way some day, miss, or it will be the worse for one of us. Don't hang any longer around your father; poetry enough has oozed out of him to spoil you already; go and pick those beans over, and put them in soak for to-morrow--a quart, mind you, and pick them over clean." * * * * * She liked to pick beans when her father sat near reading aloud to her. He had promised to read to-night "How the water comes down from Lodore," but she knew her mother's mood too well to hope for such a pleasure to-night. When her mother was cross, she wasn't willing for anybody to have anything. But she couldn't take away what she had learned of it; the child hugged herself with the thought repeating gleefully:-- "Then first came one daughter, And then came another, To second and third The request of their brother, And to hear how the water Comes down at Lodore, With its rush and its roar--" "Dorothy, stop!" commanded her mother. "That muttering makes me wild. It sounds like a lunatic." Dorothy's mouth shut itself tight; the flash of defiance from the big brown eyes her mother missed; her father's observant eyes noted it. There was always a sigh in his heart for Dorothy, for her naughtiness, and for the misery she was growing up to. The misery was as inevitable as the growing up. Once in his agony he had prayed the good Father to take the child before her heart was rent, or his own. After the gleeful music ceased the chubby fingers moved wearily, the brown head drooped; there were tears as well as sleep in the eyes that seemed made to hold nothing but sunshine. (Dorothy is in bed for the night.) "Will you keep the door open so I can hear voices?" pleaded Dorothy. "Why child, what ails you?" said the mother. "The wind ails me, and it is so black, black, black out over the water. When I find my island there shall be sunshine on the sea." "But night _has_ to come." "Perhaps there will be stars there," said hopeful Dorothy. "You may learn a Bible verse to-morrow,--'There shall be no night there.'" "I'll say it now: 'There shall be no night there.' Where _is_ 'there'?" But her mother had left her to her new Bible verse and the candle-light; and Dorothy went to sleep, hoping "there" did not mean heaven, for then what _would_ she do when she was sleepy? Mrs. Catharine L. Burnham. A valuable contributor to the literature for children and young people, is Mrs. Burnham. Her volume of "Bible Stories in Words of One Syllable", has been of great use and influence and has no doubt led to the writing of other historical narratives in the same manner. Count Tolstoi gives a most interesting account of his own experience in the use of the Bible in teaching children. He says "I tried reading the Bible to them", speaking of the children in his peasant's school, "and it took complete possession of them. They grew to love the book, love study and love me. For the purpose of opening a new world to a pupil and of making him love knowledge before he has knowledge, there is no book like the Bible." Mrs. Burnham has also written a number of children's story-books which have been warmly received and still continue to please and benefit the young. Among them are "Ernest"; "The Story of Maggie" and the three volumes of the "Can and Can't Series"; "I Can"; "I Can't", and "I'll Try". "Ernest" is quite a wonderful little book and has done much good among a large class of children. Mr. A. D. F. Randolph, the New York publisher, who took it through several editions, gave it high praise to a friend just before the last edition, about three years ago, and Rev. Dr. Tyng the elder, late of St. George's Church, New York, gave it also very high praise. We do not always fully realize that a peculiar talent is required for this department in literature. In talking, some years ago, with a young man who has now become an important editor in New York, he said: "It is my greatest ambition to be a good and interesting author of children's books; not only because it requires the best writing and the best thought, but because no literature has a more extended influence and involves higher responsibilities." In addition to these volumes, Mrs. Burnham has for many years, been an occasional contributor to the _Churchman_, _Christian Union_ and other important papers. The following extract is selected: EXTRACT FROM "I'LL TRY." CHAPTER VIII. _Society._ "Our Daisy is a singular girl," said Mrs. Bell to her husband the evening after Mrs. Lane's party, as they sat alone over the library fire, after all the young people had retired, and fell to talking about their children, as parents will. "Is she? I think most parents would be glad to have a daughter as 'singular.'" "Yes, I knew you would say that; and I appreciate her as highly as you do; but nevertheless, sometimes I am puzzled to know what to do with her. If she gets an idea into that quiet little head of hers, it is hard to modify it." "Well, what is it now?" "It's just this. I don't believe she will ever be willing to go out anywhere, or even have company at home. I proposed to her to-day that we should have a little company next week, and she looked absolutely pained, and said, 'O, mamma, if we could get along without it, I should be so glad--unless you wish it very much. Or, perhaps, I could stay up stairs.' I was quite provoked for the moment, and said, 'No, indeed, you couldn't. I should insist on your entertaining our friends.' And then she was so sorry she had offended me. She is so good and conscientious, that I can't bear to thwart her; and yet I am sure it will not be good for her to shut herself up entirely." "Oh, well dear," said Mr. Bell, who had the most utter confidence in his wife's ability to train her children, as he might well have, "she will get over it in time. Let her go out a little and she will soon learn to like it." "No, I am afraid not. Everything she does is done on principle, and unless I can make society a matter of principle, I am afraid she will never enter into it at all, her diffidence makes it a positive pain to her to meet strangers." "Well, get a principle into it, then, somehow," said Mr. Bell. "You can manage it; you understand all these matters. I am sure Daisy is just like you in requiring a principle for everything." "She is not a bit like me," said Mrs. Bell; but she could not help smiling nevertheless, and the conversation turned to something else. But the mother, who was in real difficulty about this matter, carried her perplexities where she always did, to the throne of grace, and there obtained light to show her how to act. She knew that nothing in her children's lives was unimportant in the eyes of the Heavenly Father, and prayed for wisdom to guide her young daughter aright at this important time of her life. The next time that Daisy brought her work basket to her mother's room, for a "good quiet sit-down," as she expressed it, Mrs. Bell resolved to open the subject that was on her mind; but the young girl anticipated her design by saying, "Now, mamma, before we begin the second volume of our Macauley (how tempting it looks and what lovely readings we will have!) I want to ask you something." "Well, dear?" "I know I troubled you yesterday when you spoke about having company, dear mamma. I was so sorry afterwards; but if you knew how I dread it, I don't think you would blame me. I have been thinking about it a great deal since, and now I want to ask you a question and get one of your real good answers--a _settling_ answer, mamma. Do you think it is _my duty_ to go into company? Now begin, please, and tell me all about it;" and Daisy took up her work and assumed the attitude of a listener, as though she had referred her question to an oracle, and was waiting for a response. The mother smiled a happy and gratified smile before she answered. It was very pleasant to her to see how her sweet daughter deferred to her opinion; and kissing the fair cheek she said: "I can't answer you in one word, darling. What do you mean by 'going into company?' Of course you know that I have no desire to see you absorbed in a round of parties, or even going often to companies." "Oh, I know that, mamma; I mean quiet parties, such as you and papa go to; reading and talking parties, and big sewing societies and musicals." "You mean going anywhere out of your own family?" "Yes'm, that is just it. I am so happy at home. I have plenty to do, and all I want to enjoy. With you and papa and Nelly and our pet Lucy, and the boys coming home Sundays, what could one wish for more? I am perfectly happy, mamma." "And would you never care to make acquaintances, then--to make and receive calls?" "Oh, no'm. I dislike calls of all things, except, of course, to go and see Mrs. Lane, for she asked me to come and see her, mamma, and to go over to Fanny's to play duets, and to a few other places." "You are a singular girl, Daisy." "I know I am," said Daisy, earnestly, dropping her work, "and that's the very reason why I think it's just as well for me to stay at home. Now, last night, I'm sure there wasn't a girl there thought of such a thing as being frightened; except me; but I didn't really enjoy the last part very much; it was so disagreeable being among so many strangers; and even during the reading, I wished myself back in our old composition room, where I could hear Mrs. Lane without being dressed up, and being surrounded by girls dressed even more than I was." "And would you like, then, always to live retired at home?" "Indeed I should, mamma! and I can't see why I may not. We are told not to love the world," said Daisy in a lower tone. "Why is it not better to keep out of it entirely?" "I will tell you, darling, why it is not," said Mrs. Bell, seriously. "Because our Master did not do so, and we cannot follow His example perfectly, if we do." "Was it not the poor and sick that He visited, mamma, chiefly?" "Yes, dear, and so it should be with us; but He visited, too, the rich and the high. He seems to have gone wherever His presence was desired, to make that presence felt by all classes of people, and we ought to imitate Him in this as in all other things." "Do you think we can do that?" "Yes, I think we can in some measure. At any rate, I am sure we ought to try. Suppose, Daisy, that every one adopted your rule--that every house was a castle, and no one in it cared for anybody outside. What a selfish world this would be! Our Christian love would be limited to our own family." "But I would visit the poor, mamma." "Yes, and that is by far the most important. But, dear, you have gifts of mind and heart and education that enable you to do good in other ways than in ministering to the poor and the ignorant. There are other hearts to reach, over whom you can have even greater influence, because they sympathize more entirely with you. You can show forth the love of Christ, and set a Christian example in your own sphere, darling, where you were born and brought up, and it would be wrong for my daughter to hide the talents God has given her under a bushel, and not to care for anyone or anything outside of these four walls." Daisy had left her seat and taken her favorite place at her mother's feet, and now looking up into her face, she said, earnestly, "You are right, mamma, as you always are. But poor me! I would rather face an army, it seems to me, than a roomful of people. I know what you are going to say--all the more my duty--and I shall try with all my might." "My darling, in every roomful of people there are some whom you can cheer and please; and even Christ pleased not Himself. Think of that, and it will give you strength to overcome your timidity. You can serve your Master in some way, be sure of it. And you can learn much from others. You would not develop all round, but would be a one-sided character, if you had only books and your own family for companions." "Mamma, let us have the company. I am ashamed that I have been so cowardly. You shall see how hard I will try." Hon. John Whitehead. Our grave and reverend scholar and historian, taking his place later among _Historians_, has surprised and delighted us all by appearing suddenly in a new character, writing a very lively, graphic, and, of course, instructive story for boys; "A Fishing Trip to Barnegat", which we find in the _St. Nicholas_ for August, 1892. The following is an extract: FROM "A FISHING TRIP TO BARNEGAT." "Now this fish of yours, Jack," said the uncle, "is not only called the toad-fish and the oyster-fish, but, sometimes, the grunting toad-fish. There are species of it found all over the world, but this is the regular American toad-fish. "This fish of mine is called the weakfish. Notice its beautiful colors, brownish blue on its back, with irregular brown spots, the sides silvery, and the belly white. It grows from one to three feet long and is a very sharp biter. When one takes the hook, there is no difficulty in knowing when to pull in. Why it is called the weakfish, I do not know, unless because when it has been out of the water its flesh softens and soon becomes unfit for food. When eaten soon after it is caught, it is very good." Just as Uncle John finished his little lecture, an exclamation from Will, who had baited with a piece of the crab, and dropped his line into the water, attracted their attention. Not quite so impetuous as Jack, he landed his prize more carefully, and stood looking at it with wonder, hardly knowing what to say. At last he called out: "Well, what have I caught?" It was a beautiful fish, though entirely different from Uncle John's. It had a small head and the funniest little tail that ever was seen. Its back was of a bright, brown color, but its belly was almost pure white; it was quite round and flat, with a rough skin. "Turn him over on his back, and rub him gently," said the captain. "Do it softly, and watch him." Will complied and gently rubbed him. Immediately the fish began swelling and as Will continued the rubbing it grew larger and larger until Will feared that the fish would burst its little body. "Well," he said, "I never saw anything like that, Captain! Do tell me what this is." "This we call, here in Barnegat, the balloon-fish. It is elsewhere called the puffer, swell-fish, and globe-fish. One kind is called the sea-porcupine, because of its being covered with short, sharp spines. It is of no value for food." Jack thought his time had come to catch another prodigy, and when his hook had been re-baited by the skipper, he dropped his line into the water, and was soon rewarded by another bite. Using more caution this time, he landed his fish securely on deck instead of over the sail, and exclaimed: "Wonders will never cease! I don't know what I've got now, but I suppose that Captain John can tell!" Mrs. John King Duer. Mrs. Duer, whose family as well as herself has long been associated with Morristown, has published, in Morristown, in 1880, a short story entitled "The Robbers of the Woods, by Grandmother". It is a pretty, fascinating tale for children, in which the winsome innocence of two loving boys charm away all the cruelty of the "Robbers of the Woods". It is only thirty minutes reading and yet the story leaves after it an impression of the tender beauty of childhood. The following extract is expressive both of the touching pathos and of a certain nicety of description which belongs pre-eminently to Mrs. Duer. FROM "THE ROBBERS OF THE WOODS." The sun was up and the room quite light when Carl opened his eyes at the touch of a hand on his shoulder. "It is daylight now my little man and we must be getting you on your way home ere long, but first come and get some breakfast." The boys were soon dressed, and after saying a short prayer in which they thanked God for his goodness in making the robbers so kind to them, they opened the door and found themselves again in the hall and with a substantial meal before them. Having eaten enough and all being ready, the man who found them in the woods now came near, and putting his large brown hand gently on Carl's arm, he said, "My boys, before I can open that door you must let me tie a cloth over your eyes, and consent to let it be there till we tell you to take it off. No harm shall come to you, for I myself am going to take you through the woods and not leave you till I put you on the road that leads to your mother's door." When Eddie first heard that his eyes were to be blindfolded, he began to cry and clung tightly to his brother, fearing to look about him "lest one of the robbers should be there to cut my poor little head off," as he whispered to Carl. But when Carl said, "Eddie, you must be good and believe what these men say. They are not going to harm us and we are going straight home to mother. See I will put the bandage on your eyes myself, and will sit close to you and hold your hand all the time." He then tied a clean handkerchief, which the man gave him, close over Eddie's eyes and allowed the man to do the same to him. They then were led out of the hall. They heard the heavy door close after them, and felt the cool, morning air blow over their faces, then the boys knew they were outside the stone wall. Soon they were lifted up, and put in a wagon, and a man's voice close to them said: "Boys, I am going to put your little cart in the wagon too, so that you may get it home safely." When all was ready, the wagon began to move away, and as they drove off, they heard the voices of the robbers calling after them, "good-bye, brave boys, we wish you good luck." Little Eddie sat quite still beside Carl; as they drove away he held tight fast to his brother, and neither of them spoke a word. They were astonished at all they had seen and heard, while they were in the robbers' castle, and now they were once more in the free and open woods, they could not do as they pleased, but sat with their eyes bound up, not knowing where they were going. Carl did not doubt the words of the men who told him that no harm should come to him, but at times he had to comfort and assure poor little Eddie, for he sat trembling with fear. After they had driven several miles, and the man who was with them had answered their questions as to how far they were from home now, the wagon stopped and the man got out saying, "Now boys, you are on the road that leads direct to your home and I am going to leave you very soon, but before I go you must promise me not to untie the bandage from your eyes, till you hear a long whistle, which will blow from my horn, after leaving you; you will then undo the bandage, and find something beside you to take to your mother." Saying this, the man took the boys from the wagon, and setting them carefully down, he lifted their cart out also and shaking hands with the still astonished boys, and wishing them good-bye, he sprang into the wagon and they heard him drive rapidly along the road. They sat for some time very quiet, until the loud, long whistle from a distant horn told them the time of their captivity was at an end, and hastily tearing off the bandage from their eyes they looked eagerly around on all sides. Not a vestige of the wagon could be seen. It had been turned just at the spot where they had been left, and whether it went back the same way, or took another road, they never knew. But what was their surprise, when they turned to look for their own little cart, to see beside it a pile of wood cut just so as to fit in, and on top of the pile a package containing many pieces of money in bright shining gold. This was the present they were told to "take back to their mother." Carl's heart gave a great bound of joy, for he knew how sorely his dear mother needed help, and he knew now that these men were her friends, and would never harm them. They had scarcely recovered from their surprise, and had just begun to load the little cart with the well-cut wood, when sounds of voices were heard, and the boys could distinctly hear their own names called. They knew it was the neighbors who were out searching for them, and soon saw them coming out in the open space where they stood. * * * * * The neighbors were heartily glad to find the boys safe and well, and surprised at the wonderful things they had to tell of all that had befallen them. Madame de Meisner. Many Morristonians will remember well Miss Sophie Radford, first as a little girl, living in the old Doughty House on Mt. Kemble avenue, then owned and occupied by her grandfather, Mr. Joseph Lovell, who purchased it of the Doughty estate and lived in it for a long period of time. Afterwards, Miss Radford is recalled as a charming girl and a belle in Washington Society, whence her father, Rear Admiral Radford, U. S. N., went from here, and where she met and married the handsome and elegant Secretary of the Russian Legation, M. de Meisner. Their marriage was performed first in the Episcopal church and afterwards with the ceremony of the Greek church, at her father's house, it being a law of Russia, with regard to every officer of the Empire, that the marriage ceremony of the Greek church shall be always used, a law like "that of the Medes and Persians, that altereth not". Both M. and Mme. de Meisner were in Morristown a few years ago and met many friends. It is since then, that they went to Russia and there, after a delightful reception and experience, Mme. de Meisner was inspired with the idea of writing "The Terrace of Mon Désir". It was published in the fall of 1886, by Cuppies, Upham & Co., of Boston. A curious fact about this book is that it was Mme. de Meisner's first appearance in the field of literature and she had never before contributed even the briefest article to the press. "The Terrace of Mon Désir" is a pretty love story, gracefully written. The opening scenes are laid in Peterhoff, near St. Petersburg, and where is the summer residence of the Czar. The author thus finds an opportunity of describing a charming social life among the higher classes, with which, though an American girl, but married to a Russian, she seems to be and is perfectly at home, having it is evident taken kindly to the new and interesting situations of her adopted country. The characters are delightfully and simply natural and the combinations are vivacious and sparkling, by which quality American women are distinguished, and in which characteristic foreigners find an indescribable charm. Mme. de Meisner herself has a bright animation in conversation. Some authors talk well only on paper, but to this observation the author of "The Terrace of Mon Désir" is a marked exception, as all those who know her graceful, easy flow of language will recognize. The continuity of the story forbids an extract. Miss Isabel Stone. Miss Stone who has long lived and moved in our society, has written, beside the poem already given, many bright papers and stories for children which have been published in various magazines and journals, among them _The Observer_; _Life_; _Little Ones in the Nursery_, edited by Oliver Optic; _The Press_, of Philadelphia; _The Troy Press_ and _The Christian Weekly_. These stories and other writings were published under an assumed name. In 1885, she published a very clever booklet entitled Who Was Old Mother Hubbard? A Modern Sermon from the _Portsmouth_ (Eng.) _Monitor_ and a Refutation by an M. M. C., New York; G. P. Putnam Sons. This booklet had a very large sale and went through several editions. The story of this publication is interesting. "The Modern Sermon" appeared anonymously, first in one of our prominent magazines. It was written in England and traced to its origin. This was read at a meeting of the Mediæval Club, (a literary club of some celebrity in Morristown), at the house of Mr. John Wood, one of its members. Miss Stone was at once inspired to write the "Refutation"; which was read at her own house by Mr. John Wood, arrayed in characteristic costume for the occasion. (For the benefit of those who may not know him, we may add that Mr. John Wood is one of Morristown's best readers and amateur actors.) We give the "Refutation" which is a clever dissection of the subject. As "A Modern Sermon illustrates the method upon which some Parsons Construct their Discourses", so "A Refutation" appears "in the Combative, Lucid and Argumentative Style of Some Others". REFUTATION. MY DEAR HEARERS: It is my purpose this evening to give to you the result of many hours of thought and consultation of various authors regarding the subject to which our attention has been lately called. While I hesitate to engage in the controversial spirit of the day, I feel it my duty to expound to you the truth and to unmask any heresy that may be gaining ground. The discourse to which I allude was upon the text,-- "Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, To get her poor dog a bone; But when she got there the cupboard was bare, And so the poor dog got none." I propose to prove to you this evening that all its arguments were founded on false premises; that the _whole picture_ drawn of the subject of our text--viz., old Mother Hubbard--was diametrically the reverse of the reality; in short, to give _a complete refutation of the text_ to all those who listened to those first erroneous statements. _Firstly_, Old Mother Hubbard was _not_ a widow. I am at a loss to understand why our learned brother should so have drawn upon his imagination as to represent her as such, when, as I shall endeavor to set before you _conclusively_ this evening, it is _distinctly_ stated in the text that she was the wife of an _ogre_! My friends, in those days _men_ and _husbands_ were designated by the term "poor dog;" and, indeed, the lightest scholar knows that the term has descended to the present day and is often appropriated by a man himself under certain existing circumstances. Now, that this "poor dog" of a husband was an ogre is abundantly proved by the fact that Mother Hubbard provided for him bones. Yes! bones! my friends; but--_they_--_were_--_human_--bones! Deep research has convinced me of this fact. I find that in those days ogres did not catch and kill their own meat, as is commonly supposed. They were but human, my friends, and, like the rest of humanity, preferred rather to purchase labor than perform it. They, therefore, employed their own individual butchers; but, with rare wisdom, they chose some carnivorous animal to supply their table. In proof of this, we come, _Secondly_, to the word cupboard, as mentioned in the text,-- "Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, To get her poor dog a bone." This word cupboard is in our present version misspelt, owing to some fault in copying from the original, and thus is rendered c-u-p-b-o-a-r-d; but the word properly should be spelt c-u-b-b-e-d. This is a compound word, derived from cub--a young bear--and bed, or deposit, as we speak of the bed of a river. This was a _bone_ deposit--a place where the ogre's food was deposited by the cub. A young cub was a less expensive butcher than a bear, as nowadays labor is cheaper from the young aspirant than from the assured professional. Therefore they were the usual employees. But this ogre, though evidently in the habit of employing a cub in this department, had now become dissatisfied and procured the more satisfactory service of an old bear; for, if you will carefully examine the text, you will see that the meaning is _obvious_, for, as though to insure all its readers from misunderstanding, you will see that it is _distinctly_ stated that-- "The cub-bed was _bear_." Now we come _Thirdly_ to the word "none." "And so the poor dog got none." This word in the original stands for two things--first, n-o-n-e, meaning nothing, which was the heretical sense deducted by my opponent, and the other and correct sense being n-u-n--a woman with black veil, generally of tender years; and Mother Hubbard, who intended to supply her lord's table with one small bone, found that instead the bear had secured the bones of a _whole nun_! _Fourthly_ and lastly, it is clear from the words "poor dog," that the ogre was poor, but _not_ Mother Hubbard. No, my hearers, _evidently_ she was _rich_, evidently _she_ held the purse-strings, and the ogre had stealthily supplied his table with a luxury, and his house with a steward, for which he individually was incapable of providing the means. This is _clearly_ the fact from the words of the text, for you will notice that it was _when_ she got there--not _before_, but _when_ she got there, that she found the change that had been made in the household arrangements. And then, doubtless, ensued a scene such as some "poor dogs" nowadays understand only too well! And now, my friends, we come to the moral. It is _not_ to beware of widows as my opponent tried to prove, but for you, my hearers, on one hand, to beware of marrying a poor but extravagant dog, and you, on the other, to beware of marrying a rich but penurious wife. Augustus Wood. Charles P. Sherman. Miss Helen M. Graham. It is scarcely necessary to state the fact that Mr. Augustus Wood is a native of Morristown, belonging as he does to a very old and well-known family, or that he is the author of a little volume entitled "Cupid on Crutches". This is a summer story of life at Narragansett Pier and makes one of a group of light novels which we will give in succession. "A BACHELOR'S WEDDING TRIP." BY "HIMSELF." "Himself" we recognize as Mr. Charles Sherman, then a bachelor, who cleverly dedicates the book in these words: "To the Unmarried: as Instance of the Bliss which may be Theirs, and to the Married, as Reminiscent of THE trip, These Threaded Sketches are Fraternally Dedicated by the Author". The third of the group is GUY HERNDON OR "A TALE OF GETTYSBURG." BY "ELAYNE." Elayne, we know, is Miss Helen M. Graham, one of Morristown's Society girls who spends much of her time in New York. This "Tale of Gettysburg" is the first venture of Miss Graham into the field of literature. Her choice of subject indicates that she is in touch with the growing realization among our novelists of how wide and fruitful a field is presented to them in the events of our civil war. The few graphic pictures already given by them of the social and other conditions of those stirring times, will be more and more valued by the present generation, and by those to come, as the years go on. Other Novelists and Story Writers. Among the poets, we have already mentioned as writers also of stories, many of them for children and young people,-- _Mrs. M. Virginia Donaghe McClurg_, _Miss Emma F. R. Campbell_, _Miss Hannah More Johnson_, And _Mr. William T. Meredith_, the last being the author of a summer novel, "Not of Her Father's Race". _Rev. James M. Freeman, D. D._, who, in addition to his editorial work and more serious writing, has published more than thirty small juvenile works, written under the name of "Robin Ranger", and which are all very great favorites with children, and _Mrs. Julia McNair Wright_, who, besides her many volumes on many subjects, has written novels, among them, "A Wife Hard Won," published by Lippincott, and a large number of stories for young people, found in many Sunday School libraries, as well as stories on the subject of Temperance, which are found in the collected libraries of Temperance societies. TRANSLATORS. Mrs. Adelaide S. Buckley. Mrs. Buckley, who has already been numbered among our _Poets_, has translated a German story called "Sought and Found" from the original work of Golo Raimund, which has passed to its second edition. The translator says, in her four line preface, "This romance was translated because of its rare simplicity and beauty, and is published that those who have not seen it in the original may enjoy it also." One never takes up these charming little German stories without exclaiming, no other country-people ever write in the same sweet, simple way! The reason is evident to those who have lived among Germans and experienced their unaffected hospitality. There is a peculiar simplicity of home life even among the nobility. A friend says: "I so well remember now, a lovely morning visit, in particular, to a little, gentle German lady in her beautiful drawing-room which contained the treasures of centuries. No one, I am sure, could have helped being struck by her gentle simplicity and unaffected courtesy. She came in dressed in the plainest of black dresses, a white apron tied around her waist, and on her head the simplest of morning caps. But her sweet German language,--how beautiful it seemed, as in the low, musical voice which bespoke her breeding, she talked of her own German poets; of Walther von der Vogelweide and the great Goethe and Schiller, of Auerbach and Richter and modern story writers." Afterwards, in speaking of the charm and beauty of such simplicity, the friend added, "Yes, and she belongs to one of the oldest noble, hereditary families of Germany, and carries the sixteen quarterings upon the family shield, which, to those who understand German heraldry, means the longest unmixed German descent. We could not help contrasting such quiet manners with many of the artificial assumptions and the aggressive boldness found that winter in Dresden." Therefore we always hail with pleasure translations of these stories of German life among all classes. Though to translate requires no creative power, translating is in some respects more difficult than creating, for the reason that to translate demands a quick comprehension and intuitive discernment of the spirit of a foreign language, of the conception of the writer and of the national life which the language embodies. And we must remember that it is in the power of interpretation that woman especially excels. This little story is essentially well rendered, with the animation and vivacity of the original, and it has great merit in preserving its German spirit, that sentiment which is so marked and so unlike any other people. What Dr. Johnson said of translation had a ring of truth as had all his mighty utterances, namely: "Philosophy and science may be translated perfectly and history, so far as it does not reach oratory, but poetry can never be translated without losing its most essential qualities." It would seem then that to know the poetry of a people one must read it in the original language, which every one surely cannot do. Mrs. Buckley however, recognizing this subtle quality of the poetry of a language, has left the little verses of the story untouched, wisely giving the translation at the bottom of the page. A very lovely translation it is however and after a short passage from the book, "Sought and Found", we shall give another poetic translation of the poem "Im Arm der Liebe", by Georg Scheurlin. The following is a short passage from the story: EXTRACT FROM "SOUGHT AND FOUND." TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF GOLO RAIMUND. Upon the table lay Veronica's picture, which in the meantime had been sent. The flowers, painted by her hand, appeared to him like a friendly greeting. He took it up and regarded it a long time; then, followed a sudden inspiration, he wrote upon the back: (Here follows the German verse, the translation below:) Thy merry jest is gentle as the May, Thy tender heart a lily of the dell; Fragrant as the rose thy inmost soul, Thy wondrous song a sweet-toned bell. As in sport he subscribed his name; and then, as this homage, which had so long existed in his heart, suddenly expressed in words, stood before him, black upon white it was to him as if another had opened his eyes and he must guard the newly discovered secret. He placed the picture in a portfolio, in order to lock it in his writing-desk, and his eye fell upon the journal which had so singularly come into his hands. He laid the portfolio beside it. Did they not belong together? Did not the mysterious author resemble Veronica? Like a revelation it flashed over him and so powerfully affected his imagination that the blood mounted hotly to his temples, and, in spite of the severe cold, he threw open the window that he might have more air. "If it were she!" thought he; restlessly striding up and down, and yet exultant that he had now found a trace which could be followed. THE ARM OF LOVE. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF GEORG SCHEURLIN. A young wife sits by a cradle nest, Her fair boy smiling on her breast; In the quiet room draws on the night, And she rocks and sings by the soft lamplight; On mother bosom the rest is deep; In the arm of love--so fall asleep. In the cool vale, 'neath sunny sky, We sit alone, my own and I; A song of joy wells in my breast, Ah, heart to heart, how sweet the rest! The brooklets ripple, the breezes sweep; In the arm of love--so fall asleep. From the churchyard tolls the solemn bell, For the pilgrim has finished his journey well; Here lays he down the staff, long pressed; In the bosom of earth, how calm the rest! Above the casket the earth they heap; In the arm of love--so fall asleep. Miss Margaret N. Garrard. It must be a poet who shall translate a poet and so naturally we find Miss Garrard as well as Mrs. Buckley, already in our group of "Poets". The difficulty of reproducing well, in metrical forms, thoughts from the poetry of another language, is so great, that we give with pride the translation of Miss Garrard of one of Goethe's sweet wild-wood songs, in which he excelled. THE BROOK. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF GOETHE. Little brook, where wild flowers drink, Rushing past me, swift and clear-- Thoughtful stand I on the brink-- "Where's thy home? Whence com'st thou here?" I come from out the rock's dark gloom, My way lies o'er the flower-strewn plain; And in my bosom there is room To mirror heaven's sweet face again. Pain, sorrow, trouble have I none; I wander onward, blithe and free-- He who has called me from the stone Will to the end my guardian be. Other Translators. _Hon. John Whitehead_ has translated considerably from the French and German, having used these translations in several of his writings, but individually they have not been published. He aided in translating the "History of the War of the Rebellion in North Western Virginia", which was written in German by Major F. J. Mangold, of the Prussian Army. The book was a monograph published by Major Mangold in Germany, but never published here. This translation was largely used by Judge Whitehead in his published articles on "The Fitz John Porter Case." _Miss Karch_, a German lady long a resident of Morristown, was also a translator, but it has not been possible to procure the details of her work. It is nine years since Miss Karch returned to Heilbronn, Germany, where she is now living. For the fifteen years preceding her return, she had been a resident of Morristown as a teacher of the German and French languages. Says a friend: "She was a conscientious, accomplished and true woman, intensely loyal as a true German, self-sacrificing, patient and kindly generous in bestowing her softening and refining influences, upon those who needed them." LEXICOGRAPHER. Charlton T. Lewis, LL. D. The great work of Dr. Lewis is his Latin Dictionary, published in 1879, as "Lewis and Short's Revision of Andrew's Freund". This is recognized as the most useful and convenient modern Latin-English Lexicon. Quite recently Dr. Lewis has brought out a Latin Dictionary for _schools_, which is not an abridgement of the larger work, but an original work on a definite plan of its own. "It has the prestige", says a critic, "of having been accepted in advance by the Clarendon Press of Oxford, and adopted among their publications in place of a similar lexicon projected and begun by themselves. Thus it may be said to be published in England under the official patronage of the University of Oxford". Dr. Lewis also published in 1886 "A History of Germany From the Earliest Times". He ranks among the first Greek scholars of the country, having been for many years a member of the well-known Greek Club of New York, of which the late Rev. Howard Crosby D. D. was pioneer and president. He also ranks high as a Shakesperian scholar and critic, and as a poet. From his poem of "Telemachus", some lines are transcribed among the poetical selections of this book. Dr. Lewis has made a profound study of the subject of prison reform and has been, and is, an active worker in that direction, in the New York Prison Association, being on the Executive Board of that Association. In Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature", Dr. Lewis is represented by a paper on the "Influence of Civilization on Duration of Life". HISTORIANS AND ESSAYISTS. William Cherry. ANCIENT CHRONICLER. William Cherry is a veritable "Old Mortality", judging from a unique volume found in the Morristown Library. This ancient sexton of the First Presbyterian Church, was a true wanderer among graves. It is said by those who remember, or who had it from their fathers, that the old house adjoining the Lyceum Building is the one in which Mr. Cherry lived and no doubt reflected on the uncertainty of life, while he compiled his melancholy record. The following is the title of the old volume published by him and printed by Jacob Mann in the year 1806: "Bill of Mortality: Being a Register of all the Deaths, which have occurred in the Presbyterian and Baptist Congregations of Morristown, New Jersey; For Thirty-Eight Years Past, Containing (with but few exceptions) the Cause of every Disease. This Register, for the First Twenty-Two Years, was kept by the Rev. Dr. Johnes, since which Time, by _William Cherry_, the Present Sexton of the Presbyterian Church at Morris-Town". "Time brushes off our lives with sweeping wings."--_Hervey._ Some of the causes of disease given are as follows: "Decay of Nature"; "Teething"; "Old Age"; "A Swelling"; "Mortification"; "Sudden"; "Phrenzy"; "Casual"; "Poisoned by Night-Shade Berries"; "Lingering Decay", &c. We find no mention of "Heart Failure". This curious and valuable volume needs no further comment. [Illustration: THE WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS. FROM GARDEN AND FOREST. Copyright 1892, by the GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO.] Rev. Joseph F. Tuttle, D. D. To the Rev. Joseph F. Tuttle, D. D. we are indebted for the invaluable chronicles of events, of the life of the people, and of Washington and his army in Morristown during the Revolutionary period. Apparently, all this interesting story, in its details, would have been lost to us, except for his indefatigable zeal in collecting from the lips of living men and women, the eye-witnesses of what he relates, or from their immediate descendants, the story he gives us with such pictorial charm and beauty, warm from his own imaginary dwelling in the period of which he writes. For the following sketch of this author we are indebted to the historian who follows, the Hon. Edmund D. Halsey. Rev. Joseph F. Tuttle, D. D., son of Rev. Jacob and Elizabeth Ward Tuttle, was born at Bloomfield, N. J., March 12th, 1818. Fitted for college principally at Newark Academy, he graduated at Marietta College with first honors of his class in 1841. He entered Lane Seminary and was licensed to preach in 1844. In 1847 he was called to pastorate of church at Rockaway, N. J., as associate to his aged father-in-law, Rev. Dr. Barnabas King. He left Rockaway to accept the Presidency of Wabash College in 1862, and, after thirty years in that position, resigned in 1892. During his fifteen years in this county he was a most voluminous and acceptable writer for the press--writing for the _Observer_, _Evangelist_, _Tribune_ and other papers. But he is principally remembered more for his work as a local historian. He wrote, "The Early History of Morris County"; "Biographical Sketch of Gen. Winds"; "Washington in Morris County"; "History of the Presbyterian Church at Rockaway"; "Life of William Tuttle"; "Revolutionary Fragments", (a series of articles published in _The Newark Sentinel of Freedom_); "Early History of Presbyterianism in Morris County", and other shorter articles. At the time his Revolutionary articles were published there were still men living who had personal knowledge of the events of that era and he gathered an immense amount of material which but for him would have been lost. The following from the pen of Dr. Tuttle appeared in _The Newark Daily Advertiser_ of April, 1883: A FINE RELIC AND A FINE POEM. Thirty years ago and more my surplus energy was devoted to the innocent delights of hunting up places, people, facts and traditions associated with the American Revolution as preserved in Morris County. Some very charming rides were taken to Pompton, Mendham, Baskingridge, Spring Valley, Kimball Mountain, Singack, and other places. My rides made me certain that Morris County is both rich in beautiful scenery and historic associations. The results of these rides appeared in a series of "Revolutionary Fragments" printed in the _Advertiser_, as also in some elaborate papers before the Historical Society. One day I visited the Ford Mansion, and met that polished and elegant gentleman, the late Henry A. Ford, Esq., then its proprietor. He was the son of Judge Gabriel H. Ford, grandson of Colonel Jacob Ford, Jr., whose widow was the hostess of Washington, the Winter of 1779-80, great-grandson of Colonel Jacob Ford, Sr., who built the "Ford Mansion," and great-great-grandson of John Ford, of Hunterdon County, whose wife was Elizabeth who was brought to Philadelphia from Axford, England, when she was a child a year old. Her father was drowned by falling from the plank on which he was walking from the ship to the shore. Philadelphia then had but one house in it. Mrs. Ford's second husband was Lindsley, and "the widow Elizabeth Lindsley died at the house of her son, Col. Jacob Ford, Sr., April 21, 1772, aged ninety-one years and one month," and so the courtly master of the "Ford Mansion," when I called to visit it, was of the fifth generation from the child-emigrant, whose father was drowned in the Delaware, in 1682. The pleasure of the visit was greatly enhanced by the attentions of Miss Louisa, daughter of the gentleman named. She afterward became the wife of Judge Ogden of Paterson. The father and daughter with delightful courtesy took me over the famous house and associated in my memory the rooms and halls, and even the antique furniture with the family's most illustrious guest. I was especially interested in the old mirror that had hung in Washington's bedroom. Miss Ford produced a poem on that mirror, written, I think, by an aunt, and at my request she read it. She was a charming reader and promised me a copy. Under date of Paterson, October 31st, 1856, Mrs. Ogden was kind enough to send me the promised copy with a note apologizing for the delay and adding: "I think, however, you will find the poetry has not spoiled by keeping." I have not ceased to be thankful that my first visit to the Ford Mansion was so pleasantly associated with the attentions of the father and daughter, both of whom have since died. The mirror is a fine relic still to be seen with other elegant old furniture, belonging to the Ford family, at the "Washington Quarters" at Morristown, and I am sure all will regard the poem which pleased me so much thirty years ago as "one that has not spoiled by keeping." ON AN OLD MIRROR USED BY WASHINGTON AT HIS HEADQUARTERS IN MORRISTOWN. Old Mirror! speak and tell us whence Thou comest, and then, who brought thee thence. Did dear old England give thee birth? Or merry France, the land of mirth? In vain another should we seek At all like thee--thou thing antique. Of the old mansion thou seem'st part; Indeed, to me, its very heart; For in thy face, though dimmed with age, I read my country's brightest page. Five generations, all have passed, And yet, old Mirror, thou dost last; The young, the old, the good, the bad, The gay, the gifted and the sad Are gone; their hopes, their sighs, their fears Are buried deep with smiles and tears. Then speak; old Mirror! thou hast seen Full many a noble form, I ween; Full many a soldier, tall and brave, Now lying in a nameless grave; Full many a fairy form and bright Hath flitted by when hearts were light; Full many a bride--whose short life seemed Too happy to be even dreamed; Full many a lord and titled dame, Bearing full many an honored name; And tell us, Mirror, how they dressed-- Those stately dames, when in their best? If robes and sacques the damsels wore, And sweeping skirts in days of yore? But tell us, too, for we _must_ hear Of _him_ whom all the world revere. Thou sawest him when the times so dark Had made upon his brow their mark; Those fearful times, those dreary days, When all seemed but a tangled maze; His noble army, worn with toils, Giving their life blood to the soils. Disease and famine brooding o'er, His country's foe e'en at his door; But ever saw him noble, brave, Seeking her freedom or his grave. His was the heart that never quailed; His was the arm that never failed! Old Mirror! thou hast seen what we Would barter all most dear to see; The great, the good, the _noblest_ one; Our own _immortal Washington_! Well may we gaze--for now in thee Relies of the great past we see, Well may we gaze--for ne'er again, Old Mirror, shall we see such men; And when we too have lived our day, Like those before us passed away, Still, valued Mirror, may'st thou last To tell our children of the past; Still thy dimmed face, thy tarnished frame Thy honored house and time proclaim; And ne'er may sacrilegious hand, While Freedom claims this as her land One stone or pebble rashly throw To lay thee, honored Mirror, low. Y. F. Hon. Edmund D. Halsey. Mr. Halsey, historian, biographer, as well as lawyer, has published our most valuable "History of Morris County", and is considered an authority upon that subject, his accuracy being unquestioned. By his sterling integrity and superior intellectual ability, he has, in the practice of his profession, gained the entire confidence of the community in which, as a lawyer, he has passed the greater part of his life. Included in his literary work are "Personal Sketches" of Governor Mahlon Dickerson, Colonel Joseph Jackson, and others; "The Revolutionary Army in Morris County in 1779-'80"; and a brief sketch of the Washington Headquarters entitled "History of the Washington Association of New Jersey", published in Morristown in 1891. Mr. Halsey also assisted Mr. William O. Wheeler in the publication of a book of unique interest and of unusual value, especially to genealogists and antiquarians, the title of which reads "Inscriptions on Tombstones and Monuments in the Burying Grounds of the First Presbyterian Church and St. John's Church at Elizabeth, New Jersey". Mr. Halsey is a prominent member of the "Historical Society of New Jersey", as well as of the "Washington Association of New Jersey". We quote from his "History of the Washington Association" the following "brief history of the title of the property". FROM "HISTORY OF THE WASHINGTON ASSOCIATION OF NEW JERSEY." Colonel Jacob Ford, Senior--prominent as a merchant, iron manufacturer, and land owner, who was president Judge of the County Court from the formation of the County in 1740 until his death in 1777, and who presided over the meeting, June 27, 1774, which appointed the first "Committee of Correspondence"--conveyed the tract of 200 acres surrounding the house to his son, Jacob Ford, junior, March 24, 1762. In 1768 he conveyed to him the Mount Hope mines and meadows where the son built the stone mansion still standing. In 1773 Jacob Ford, junior, rented this Mount Hope property for fifty years to John Jacob Faesch and David Wrisbery, and these men proceeded to build the furnace afterward useful to the patriot army in supplying it with cannon and cannon-balls. Colonel Jacob Ford, junior, after making this lease returned to Morristown, and, probably with his father's aid, began at once the erection of these Headquarters, and had just completed the building when the war broke out. He was made Colonel of the Eastern Battalion of the Morris County Militia and was detailed to cover Washington's retreat across New Jersey in the "mud rounds" of 1776--a service accomplished with honor and success. In this or in similar service, Colonel Ford contracted pneumonia, of which he died January 10, 1777, and was buried with military honors by order of Washington. He left a widow, Theodosia Ford, and five young children. She was the daughter of Rev. Timothy Johnes, whose pastorate of the First church extended from 1742 to 1794, and who is said to have administered the Communion to Washington. This lady in 1779-80 offered to Washington the hospitality of her house, and here was his Headquarters from about December 1, 1779 to June 1780. In 1805, Judge Gabriel H. Ford, one of the sons of Colonel Jacob, purchased his brothers' and sister's interest in the property and made it his home until his death in 1849. By his will dated January 27, 1848, Gabriel H. Ford, devised this, his homestead to his son, Henry A. Ford, who continued to occupy it until his death, which occurred April 22, 1872. From the heirs of Henry A. Ford title was derived to the four gentlemen who organized the Association, namely: Governor Theodore F. Randolph, Hon. George A. Halsey, General N. N. Halsted, and William Van Vleck Lidgerwood, Esq. Hon. John Whitehead. BIOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN. Of Mr. Whitehead's new departure into the field of romance, we have already spoken and a portion of his story "A Fishing Trip to Barnegat", is given to represent him among "Novelists and Story Writers". His literary work of many years covers a variety of departments in literature. In the _Northern Monthly Magazine_ which began some years ago, as a periodical of high order we find running through several numbers a "History of the English Language", contributed by Mr. Whitehead, in which he starts from a true and philosophic premise. It is this: "It would be difficult to separate any one creation from the whole universe and pronounce that it is not subject to law." The reader discovers that these magazine articles contain the germs of all that has been written in many exhaustive works on the philosophy and growth of language. For a number of years, Mr. Whitehead was editor of _The Record_, a small sheet opened by the First Presbyterian Church of Morristown, the value of which historically increases with each year. For this, he wrote largely, sketches of prominent men of Revolutionary times and of others connected with the congregation of the church. Some important papers were contributed by him to the local press, including "A Review of Fitz John Porter's Case", in the Morristown _Banner_, also "Sketches of Morris County Lawyers". A series of "Sketches" was also published in the _Newark Sunday Call_, entitled "Newark Aforetime", referring to Newark and Newark people, fifty years ago. Many of Mr. Whitehead's speeches and addresses have been published, among them, those given at the Centennial Celebration of the First Presbyterian Church of Morristown; at the Centennial Celebration of the Presbyterian Church at Springfield, N. J.; two or three addresses before the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, and an address delivered two or three years ago before the Washington Association of N. J. Of the latter Association, Mr. Whitehead is an honored member as well as of the Historical Society of New Jersey. In the course of his study and writing, we have already mentioned among "Translators," Mr. Whitehead has made several valuable translations from German and French authors. We must not overlook one principal labor which is far more herculean than we, who are so greatly benefited by it, perhaps fully comprehend, namely, the Catalogue, in two volumes, of the Library, in which Morristown justly takes so much pride. This was a voluntary work. Mr. Whitehead is now engaged on a "History of Morris County", to form one chapter in a new illustrated "History of New Jersey," to be published by Colonel U. S. Sharp. He has also in preparation the "History of the First Presbyterian Church" of Morristown, in which will appear the interesting proceedings of the Centennial exercises, recently held there. A series of fine articles on "The Supreme Court of New Jersey" are now appearing in _The Green Bag_ of Boston. This _Green Bag_ is a magazine published in the interests of the legal fraternity, as from its significant name we see, and this magazine is the nearest approach so far made by Americans towards the traditional appendage of the English barrister, everywhere seen over the border in Canada, by which, it is well known, he is always accompanied when he goes to court and while he remains there in attendance. This bag contains his briefs, papers and other impedimenta connected with trials. It is not surprising, but it is touching, to find Boston holding on to this last hope of accomplishing that for which so many frantic efforts have been made in this country, only to meet with failure. The last article in this magazine, of the series on "The Supreme Court of New Jersey", is delightful in expression and in form; it has a fine large type, is illustrated with well-executed portraits of the judges, in group and singly, and is altogether most attractive and interesting. Bayard Tuckerman. Mr. Tuckerman, who resided for some time in Morristown, and whose ancestry is associated with artistic and literary taste and genius, is the author of "The Life of General Lafayette", published in 1889, during his residence in Morristown, and, a copy of which was presented by the author, in person, to the Morristown Library. Before this, he published a "History of English Prose Fiction", in 1882, and after it, in 1889 again, he edited "The Diary of Philip Hone". This author is now engaged on another book, to be published in the spring in the "Makers of America" series, with the title of "Peter Stuyvesant". "The Diary of Philip Hone" is a charming book, especially to those familiar with old New York. The editorship of any life requires a talent for selection and a gift for combining and drawing together much desultory matter, but when we consider that the two volumes, into which Mr. Tuckerman compressed his material were less than one-fourth the original diary, which fills twenty-eight quarto manuscript volumes, the herculean task is at once apparent. A critic in one of the popular journals says of it: "As a rule the diary needs little interpretation and it may be welcomed as an agreeable, gossipy contribution to civic annals, and as a pleasant record of a citizen of some distinction, parts and usefulness in his generation". In the "Life of General Lafayette", Mr. Tuckerman has evinced his superior love of industrious, conscientious study. The book is acknowledged to be essentially truthful and exceptionally just above anything ever written of Lafayette. It has been truly said of Mr. Tuckerman that "he tells the story of Lafayette's life in such a way that the interest increases as it proceeds" and that "he shows his skill as a biographer in this as in making both the narrative itself and his own criticism of the subject heighten our sympathy". He has not allowed himself to be turned from the actual statement of fact by that peculiar sentiment of the romantic side of Lafayette's career which has more or less colored the opinions of so many other biographers. Mr. Tuckerman himself says that "Lafayette's name has suffered more from the admiration of his friends than from the detraction of his enemies." FROM THE "LIFE OF GENERAL LAFAYETTE." The visit to America was supplemented in the following summer of 1785 by a journey through Germany and Austria. * * * * * Many distinguished officers were met. At one camp, as he (Lafayette) wrote to Washington, he found Lord Cornwallis, Colonels England, Abercrombie, and Musgrave; "on our side" Colonel Smith, Generals Duportail and Gouvion; "and we often remarked, Smith and I, that if we had been unfortunate in our struggle, we would have cut a poor figure there." Again; Writing from Valley Forge to the Comte de Broglie, he gave a sad picture of the poverty and sufferings of the army. "Everything here", he said, "combines to inspire disgust. At the smallest sign from you I shall return home". But the misery of Valley Forge never abated one jot of Lafayette's enthusiasm. The privations which he saw and shared only made him put his hand the more often into his own pocket, and redouble his efforts to obtain aid from the treasury of France. * * * * * To Lafayette, the happiest portion of this voyage to America was the time passed in the company of Washington. Hastening from New York immediately on his arrival, he allowed himself to be delayed only at Philadelphia. "There is no rest for me," he wrote thence to Washington, "until I go to Mt. Vernon. I long for the pleasure to embrace you, my dear general; in a few days I shall be at Mt. Vernon, and I do already feel delighted with so charming a prospect." Two weeks of a proud pleasure were then passed in the society of the man who was always to remain his beau ideal. To walk about the beautiful grounds of Mt. Vernon with its honored master, discussing his agricultural plans; to sit with him in his library, and listen to his hopes regarding the nation for which he had done so much, were honors which Lafayette fully appreciated. He has left on record the feelings of admiration with which he saw the man who had so long led a great people in a great struggle retire to private life, with no thought other than satisfaction at duty performed. And it was a legitimate source of pride to himself that he had enlisted under his standard before fortune had smiled upon it, and had worked with all his heart to crown it with victory. The two men thoroughly knew each other. The words of Lafayette will be found, in this volume, in the paper on "George Washington." * * * * * He (Washington) responded to Lafayette's demonstrative regard by a sincere paternal affection. Later in the summer, Lafayette met Washington again, and visited in his company some of the scenes of the late war. When the time for parting had come, Washington accompanied his guest as far as Annapolis in his carriage. There the two friends separated, not to meet again. On his return to Mt. Vernon, Washington added to his words of farewell, a letter in which occur the following passages; "In the moment of our separation, upon the road as I travelled, and every hour since, I have felt all that love, respect, and attachment for you, with which length of years, close connection and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages separated, whether that was the last sight I ever should have of you, and though I wished to say no, my fears answered yes. I called to mind the days of my youth, and found they had long since fled, to return no more; that I was now descending the hill I had been fifty-two years climbing, and that, though I was blest with a good constitution, I was of a short-lived family, and might soon expect to be entombed in the mansion of my fathers. These thoughts darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the picture, and consequently to my prospect of seeing you again. But I will not repine; I have had my day. * * * * It is unnecessary, I persuade myself, to repeat to you, my dear Marquis, the sincerity of my regards and friendship; nor have I words which could express my affection for you, were I to attempt it. My fervent prayers are offered for your safe and pleasant passage, happy meeting with Madame de Lafayette and family, and the completion of every wish of your heart." To these words Lafayette replied from on board the "Nymphe," on the eve of his departure for France: "Adieu, adieu, my dear general. It is with inexpressible pain that I feel I am going to be severed from you by the Atlantic. Everything that admiration, respect, gratitude, friendship, and filial love can inspire is combined in my affectionate heart to devote me most tenderly to you. In your friendship I find a delight which words cannot express. Adieu, my dear general. It is not without emotion that I write this word, although I know I shall soon visit you again. Be attentive to your health. Let me hear from you every month. Adieu, adieu." Loyall Farragut. BIOGRAPHER. With Morristown is associated the beautiful memoir of our great Admiral, in honor of whom one of the streets of our city is named. In the old house now removed from its original position to the end of Farragut Place, this honored commander once visited for several days, walking over the ground now occupied by the houses of many families, delighted as a boy with everything in nature; noticing and observing the smallest detail of what was going on around him and interesting himself equally in the humblest individual who crossed his path and in the most distinguished visitor who asked to be presented. The "Life of David Glasgow Farragut" was written according to the admiral's expressed wish, by his only son, Loyall Farragut, who for a short time had, in Morristown, his summer home, and who presented to the Morristown Library a copy of his book. The Farraguts came from the island of Minorca, where the name is now extinct. In the volume referred to, we find these words: "George Farragut, father of the admiral was sent to school at Barcelona, but was seized with the spirit of adventure, and emigrated to America at an early age. He arrived in 1776, promptly sided with the colonists, and served gallantly in the struggle for independence, as also in the war of 1812. It is said that he saved the life of Colonel Washington in the battle of Cowpens." In reading this volume one is transported to the times and scenes described, and everywhere is felt the grandeur, beauty and simplicity of character of this truly great and lovable man. In the touching letter to his devoted wife, on the eve of the great battle, is seen, as an example to all men of future generations, the realization of a man's fidelity to the woman of his choice, even in the moment of greatest extremity, and the possibility of the tenderest heart existing side by side with the daring courage of one of the bravest men the world has ever seen. Wonderfully stirring are the descriptions given of the river fight on the Mississippi and of the battle of Mobile Bay, after which Admiral Farragut received from Secretary Welles the following congratulatory letter: "In the success which has attended your operations, you have illustrated the efficiency and irresistible power of a naval force led by a bold and vigorous mind and the insufficiency of any batteries to prevent the passage of a fleet thus led and commanded. You have, first on the Mississippi and recently in the bay of Mobile, demonstrated what had previously been doubted,--the ability of naval vessels, properly manned and commanded, to set at defiance the best constructed and most heavily armed fortifications. In these successive victories, you have encountered great risks, but the results have vindicated the wisdom of your policy and the daring valor of our officers and seamen." Josiah Collins Pumpelly. Mr. Pumpelly, long a resident of Morristown, claims our attention as a writer, rather than an author, as he has not been a publisher of books, beyond a collection of three Addresses in pamphlet form entitled "Our French Allies in the Revolution and Other Addresses". Several sketches entitled "Reminiscences of Colonial Days", and others of the same character, all involve considerable research and add to our literary possessions in connection with historic Morristown. His "Address on Washington", delivered before the Washington Association of New Jersey, at the Morristown Headquarters, February 22, 1888, was published by the Association, and has long been for sale there. Of this, the writer says, "I rejoice that even in this slight way, I can be of service to an Association whose faithful care of this home of Washington in the trying winter of 1779 and '80 deserves the lasting gratitude of every loyal Jerseyman." In closing this address, Mr. Pumpelly said, quoting from our favorite historian, Rev. Dr. Tuttle, "each old parish in our County had its heroes, and each old church was a shrine at which brave men and women bowed in God's fear, consecrating their all to their country." Mr. Pumpelly adds: "So instead of referring our children to Greek and Roman patriots, we have but to call up for them the names of our own men and women, who have here amid the hills of Morris, wrought out for us this heritage, so much grander, so much nobler than they themselves ever dreamed." This address is now bound in a larger pamphlet with "Our French Allies", to which we have referred and which was read before the New Jersey Historical Society, at Trenton, January 22d, 1889 and "Fort Stanwix and Battle of Oriskany", an address delivered before the Society of the Sons of the Revolution, in New York City, Dec. 3, 1888. There was an important paper read by Mr. Pumpelly before the New Jersey Society of the Sons of the Revolution, on June 10th, 1889, and by them adopted in their meeting of that date, and afterwards published, on "The Birthplace of our Immortal Washington and the Grave of his Illustrious Mother, shall they not be Sacredly Preserved?" Another address followed on "Joseph Warren" before the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, on April 18th, 1890, on the occasion of the 114th Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington. He was then President of the New Jersey Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. A paper was read by request on "Mahlon Dickerson, Industrial Pioneer and old time Patriot," on January 27, 1891, before the New Jersey Historical Society. Mr. Pumpelly has also given much time and literary effort in philanthropic and sanitary directions. Many articles have appeared from time to time from his pen in behalf of reforms in the treatment of our dependent, delinquent, and defective classes, all tending to social economic improvement and, at one time, assisting materially the advance of the State Charities Aid Association of New Jersey of which he was for several years an active member. His attention is now being turned to the story of the Huguenots in this country. He is just completing a quite exhaustive paper upon the Huguenots in New Jersey, which is to be given by request before the Genealogical Society of New York, in January 1893, after which the subject is to be prepared by him for use in a school text-book. In _The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record_, of April 1892, is "A Short Sketch of the Character and Life of John Paul Jones", written in a most interesting and delightful manner and given before the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, January 8, 1892. We quote from WHAT DOES THE CAUSE OF HUMAN FREEDOM OWE TO THE HUGUENOT? In looking back over the milestones which mark in history the relapse and advance, the failure and the successes, of the principles of civilization, we note that at a certain period it was the Teutonic Nations which broke loose from Rome and the Latin Nations who adhered to the Pope. Also, that in France, opposition to Rome was early and considerable. Thus the Waldenses, Albigenses, and Lefevre and his colleagues were Huguenots and lovers of human freedom before the name itself was known--Calvinists before Calvin, Lutherans before Luther, Wiclyfites before Wiclyf. That great movement for the liberty of conscience and personal freedom, civil and religious, was not in France an importation, for God had deposited the first principles of the work in a few brave hearts of Picardy and Dauphiny before it had begun in any other country of the globe. Not to Switzerland nor to Germany belongs the honor of having been first in the work, but to France and the Huguenot. It was the voice of Lefevre, of Etaples, France, a man of great nobility of soul as well as genius of mind, which was to give the signal of the rising of this morning star of liberty. He it was who taught Farel, the great French reformer and "master-builder" with Luther. Hannah More Johnson. Miss Johnson's poem, "The Christmas Tree", has taken its place in our Poet's corner. She is also mentioned among _Novelists and Story-Writers_ for her well-known stories of "Lost Willie"; "Ella Dutton"; "Snow Drifts"; "Signal Lights", and "First the Blade" published by A. D. F. Randolph and by the Presbyterian Board. But perhaps her most important work is "Mexico, Past and Present", an excellent and charmingly written history of Mexico, a book of interest and importance, with sixty three maps and illustrations, treating not only the history, but the present condition and prospects of that country. This work is found in many libraries, and places Miss Johnson among our _Historians_. Miss Johnson is the daughter of Mr. Jacob Johnson and niece of our townsman, Mr. J. Henry Johnson, who was the last preceptor of the old Morris Academy. Though long a resident of Morristown, she now makes her home in Philadelphia where she is editor of a Missionary Publication. "I first thought of myself as a writer", says Miss Johnson, "when I saw my name for the first time in print and nearly fainted with fright. I have never recovered from that shock and not until I had had more than one collision with publishers have I consented to give my name to articles." Last September (1892) "Bible Lights in Mission Paths" was published: "The long interval between my first and my last book," says the author, "was filled with what seems to me the true work of my life." And it is curious how this work of life came to her quite unsought and unexpectedly. Let us hear it in her own words. "About twelve years ago," she tells us, "a relative became proprietor of a small religious weekly in Philadelphia, _The Presbyterian Journal_. I had the entire charge of the missionary department. Shortly afterward, the Presbyterian Alliance met in our city and the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, (of which I was and still am a Director), held in connection with that great convocation in the Academy of Music, an all-day meeting in one of the churches. Presbyterian women were there from every quarter of the world beside others from sister churches. At noon as I sat, talking over the programme for the afternoon with Mrs. A----, she said regretfully, 'I am afraid that we shall not be able to get these women to speak loud enough to be heard all over this great church. It would be delightful if we could have a full report.' 'I think I could get one up, Mrs. A----,' said I. 'I have been taking notes of the speeches all the morning and this afternoon we are to have written reports and papers.' 'I can get them all for you,' she said quickly. That night I went home laden with documents, three-fourths of them from the Old World. The _Journal_ publishers offered to send out an extra and send it to any address I gave. Within a week, this extra was mailed to every mission station throughout the world, which had been in any way represented at this woman's meeting or mentioned in its reports. Ever since that busy, busy week with French, English, Scotch, German, Italian, Belgian and Irish women, I have been a constant reporter of Missionary meetings. This led to a series of articles for Monthly Concerts, proposed for the use of pastors and other leaders of missionary meetings. Twelve articles a year for about four years, each one of which had cost months of research and study, I had time for nothing else. It was weary work. All roads led to Rome and I couldn't pick up a book or a daily that didn't give me an item or a suggestion. The nameless writer was generally supposed to be some Doctor of Divinity shelved with a sore throat or other ministerial disability. I remember one time when a carefully prepared article (of mine) on Siam appeared in _The Gospel of all Lands_, credited to _The London Missionary News_. It had been taken from the magazine in which it was first published, profusely illustrated and sent out as an English production." Besides this Miss Johnson has furnished monthly articles for various papers and occasional poems, for magazines. Thus we see her very busy life has been fruitful of unusual results. Mrs. Julia McNair Wright. Mrs. Wright has already been mentioned among _Novelists and Story-Writers_. For the following graphic sketch, we are indebted to one of our writers, Mrs. Julia R. Cutler. "One of the authors whose sojourn in our 'beautiful little town', as she calls it, was of a comparatively brief period, from 1881-'83, but whose writings, as showing deep research in many fields of thought, both scientific and historical, entitle her to more than a brief mention, is Mrs. Julia McNair Wright. "Her husband, the Rev. Dr. William J. Wright, is President of and, Professor of Metaphysics, in a Western College. Much of Mrs. Wright's time is spent in visiting different large cities, at home and abroad, where she can have access to libraries and gain information on various subjects connected with her books. "While in Morristown, she wrote, at the request of the Presbyterian Board of Publication, her book on "The Alaskans" and also a short work on the religious life, called "Mr. Standfast's Journey", besides preparing for the press a book entitled "Bricks from Babel", which she had previously written while visiting London and the British museum. The Rev. Joseph Cook fully endorses this book, and calls it 'a most admirable compendium of ethnography.' A set of religious biographies were, also, about this time, published in Arabic. "These works written and prepared for the press while she was occupying her quiet cottage home on Morris Plains, would alone have entitled her to a prominent place among the authors of whom Morristown has reason to be proud. But these are but a small portion of her literary labors. Judging from the number of books which appear over her signature, she must indeed be gifted with the 'pen of a ready writer.' "Among the more prominent works are 'The Early Church in Britain'; 'The Complete Home', of which over one hundred thousand copies have been sold; 'Saints and Sinners of the Bible'; 'Almost a Nun'; 'The Priest and Nun'; 'A Wife Hard Won', a novel published by Lippincott; 'The Making of Rasmus'; 'Rasmus a Made Man'; and 'Rag Fair and May Fair'. The last deals with social questions in England, and is being re-published in London, as indeed a number of her other books have been, as well as translated into the French language. "Mrs. Wright's latest work, completed during a recent visit to the British museum, is a Series of Readers on Natural Science, called 'Nature Readers, Seaside and Wayside', which are having a large run in this country, in England and in Canada and which are a new invention in school books. They have been more warmly received than any books for our schools, for the past twenty-five years. "Very few persons have the talent of dealing with so many subjects and doing it so well. Even the Temperance cause owes much to Mrs. Wright, as its earnest advocate, and many of her thrilling stories on this subject have touched the hearts and inspired the actions of those who have read them. Nor has she, amid her multitude of duties, forgotten the young, as the large number of volumes on the shelves of our Sabbath School libraries, bearing her name can testify. "May the pen Mrs. Wright has so wisely and deftly used, in the cause of education and humanity, long continue through her skillful hand, to trace its characters upon the hearts and minds of those with whom it comes in contact!" Mrs. Edwina L. Keasbey. Though Mrs. Keasbey has published a most attractive and useful book, full of practical thoughts idealized, yet we place her and Mrs. Stockton in this grouping for the reason that a large part of her writing was of this character, on the whole. Much of it was graphically descriptive of scenes in foreign lands and at home, usually accompanied with reflections which indicate the _Essay_ character. Like others of our writers, there is a variety in her writing and choice of subjects which makes it somewhat difficult to place her with exactness. Most of Mrs. Keasbey's writing was originally done for _The Hospital Review_, a paper edited by her, during eleven years, for the St. Barnabas Hospital, which was founded largely through her efforts and influence and was a work to which she devoted her life. For this was written a series of papers entitled "A Lame Woman's Tramp through some Alpine Passes", and "Bits of English Scenery Sketched by a Lame Hand", among which is a fine and vivid picture of the first sight of Durham Cathedral. So, for this _Hospital Review_ were originally written the papers now collected and bound in one of the prettiest little volumes one could desire, convenient in size, artistic in design and with clear, large type and broad margins. This is entitled "The Culture of the Cradle". In the education of children, Mrs. Keasbey has found the key and basis of all true and reasonable training, in the development of the child's individuality. The object of this book is to suggest the meaning and purpose of true culture and to show how it must begin with the cradle and, says the author, "to give some suggestions and leaves from experience that may be of use to those who are striving to begin, in the right way, the education of their children." The book, published in 1886, has had a large sale and the entire proceeds have been devoted to the Hospital of St. Barnabas, which the author so much loved. Mrs. Keasbey was the eldest daughter of the Hon. J. W. Miller, and she inherited well her intense love of good works from her honored mother, who was so long identified with Morristown's philanthropic and charitable work. She was born in the old Macculloch mansion on Macculloch Avenue and lived there till her marriage in 1854, after which her literary qualities and rare executive abilities went to adorn the city of Newark where she will be tenderly remembered, and where her works live after her. FROM "THE CULTURE OF THE CRADLE." As I sit by my window on this beautiful spring day, preparing my article upon "The Nurture of Infants," a pair of little birds are building their nest in the vine that grows about my piazza, so I take my text from them. How busy they are, how absorbed in their work! The whole world contains for them no other point of interest, but only this little crotch in the vine which they have chosen to build their cradle in for their future little ones. We may be quite sure that it is the best spot in the whole vine, not too shady or too sunny, just happily out of the reach of cruel cat or mischievous boys, and then the cradle will be so perfect, strong enough to resist the winds that shake the vine, and covered enough to withstand the spring rains, and warm enough to shelter the little ones as they crack the shell; and so comfortable with its soft padding of cotton and down to cherish and protect the little tender bodies when they come into this cold world. I think it is nearly finished to-day, for the little mother has settled herself down into it and nestled herself in it and picked off her own soft down, and stuffed it in with the cotton that she had lined the nest with. She looks so satisfied and content, as if she would say, "it is quite ready now for my little darlings." With this little mother there is no word of complaint or selfish murmur though she is going to sit in that nest for many a long day and dark night, through storm and sunshine, until the little ones come forth from their eggs to gladden her heart and repay her care and work of preparation. Can we mothers have a better teacher or a wiser example than this little bird, whose lessons in motherhood have come to her direct from her Creator? Mrs. Marian E. Stockton. As to Mrs. Stockton's charming pen, we must reluctantly refrain from noticing her many essays and writings in various directions, principally prepared at the request of literary societies and other organizations,--always read by some one else, owing to the writer's great dislike for coming into public notice, and always published, and sent about, by the Society or group of people for whom they were written. The title of this book compels us, however, to mention this gifted woman's name, and we give below an extract from one delightful paper, written as usual by request for an important occasion, read by a distinguished literary woman, and as usual published. FROM "HOME AND SOCIETY." It may help to a proper understanding of the line of thought followed in this paper if I state in the beginning that it is, chiefly, an attempt to get a definite answer to the question so often asked: What is Society? It is an effort to arrive at a conclusion which the majority of American women may be willing to accept. Otherwise we shall find ourselves so beset with perplexities that we shall not be able to get anything out of our subject. For most persons have very vague ideas regarding society, and would find it difficult to express them. I have tried to get at the ideas of a few persons who might be supposed to know, with but small result. One says: "It is a limited company of persons of wealth and leisure who give up their time chiefly to entertainments and pleasure." This view of the subject suggests the familiar advertisements of a certain soap, reversing the sign; for taking out the pure article--_i. e._, the persons composing this society--we would have 99 44-100 of the people of the United States with no society at all. _So very little_ of the pure article will, I think, scarcely suffice to float this definition. Another says: "It is a collection of the best people in a city or neighborhood who give a tone to the place." This is better, but calls forth other questions. Whom do you mean by the "best people"? What is "tone"? What sort of "tone" do they give? New York, New Orleans, and Poker Flat would give widely different answers to these questions. Another defines it as "a number, large or small, of cultured people." This conveys a charming idea to the mind, but it is too limited, for we are considering to-day society in its broadest as well as its best aspects; and, surely, we would none of us be willing to deny to good-hearted, honest, decent people, the pleasure of forming a society of their own kind, and enjoying it in a rational--if uncultured--fashion. We want to-day to get hold of a comprehensive idea of society. Last summer, at a fashionable resort, I heard some New York ladies speaking, with admiration, of another lady in the hotel, and one exclaimed: "What a pity she is not in Society!" To this they all agreed, and another kindly asked: "Can't we do something to help her to know people?" As I knew this lady, and was aware of the fact that, when she returned to the city at the beginning of every season, she sent out cards to six hundred people, I was much surprised; for, if visiting and being visited by six hundred people is not being "in society", I do not know what is. Therefore, I could only infer that she was not in their special coterie. A very intelligent woman once told me frankly, that she could not imagine anything that could be called society outside the City of New York. Again I was told, some time ago, by a literary lady who was then residing in this city (but who is not here now): "Literary people are not recognized in New York society." I use her own words and they puzzled me. Soon after, there chanced to fall in my way a description of New York life by a Frenchman who had been entertained by all sorts of people. He stated that the most charming society in this city is the literary society, and he proceeded to paint it in glowing colors. Between the literary lady on one side and Max O'Rell on the other, I gave up that conundrum. These few examples of misconceptions and wrong-headedness in regard to what society really is will suffice to show how necessary it is to get a clear and comprehensive definition for it. To get this we must disentangle ourselves from all these figments, go back, and enter through the gate which naturally leads into society. TRAVELS AND PERSONAL REMINISCENCES. Marquis de Chastellux. The Marquis de Chastellux, counted in France a clever historian, is considered by us as a traveler, for he was one of the earliest French travelers in North America and, on his return to France, published a book entitled "Travels in North America in the years 1780, 1781 and 1782, by the Marquis de Chastellux, one of the Forty Members of the French Academy, and Major General in the French Army, serving under the Count de Rochambeau." This book was published in 1787 in London. In it we find the most graphic descriptions of the soldiers and officers of the Revolution, of West Point in its character of a military outpost; of the road between it and Morristown; of the beauty and grandeur of the Hudson River, as it burst for the first time upon his vision; of several interviews, visits and dinners with Washington and Lafayette, always giving his impressions in a unique and original way and with a sprinkle of humor which keeps a continuous smile upon the lips of the reader as he progresses in this remarkable narrative. It is really most difficult to choose from this fascinating book, for the short space we can allow. In speaking of his arrival here he refers to the _Arnold Tavern_, which may still be seen, removed from its original location but restored with great care, (though enlarged), and is now standing on Mt. Kemble Avenue, the old "Baskingridge Road" of the Revolution. He says: "I intended stopping at Morris Town only to bait my horses, for it was only half past two, but on entering the inn of Mr. Arnold, I saw a dining room adorned with looking glasses and handsome mahogany furniture and a table spread for twelve persons. I learnt that all this preparation was for me and what affected me more nearly was to see a dinner corresponding with the appearances, ready to serve up. I was indebted for this to the goodness of General Washington and the precautions of Colonel Moyland who had sent before to acquaint them with my arrival. It would have been very ungenerous to have accepted this dinner at the expenses of Mr. Arnold who is an honest man and a good Whig and who has not a particle in common with Benedict Arnold; it would have been still more awkward to have paid for the banquet without eating it. I therefore instantly determined to dine and sleep in this comfortable inn. The Vicomte de Noailles, the Comte de Damas, &c., were expected to make up the dozen." Chastellux apparently came as a passing traveler and seems to have been induced to prolong his stay and during that time gives us very graphic and interesting glimpses, to which we have referred, of the General and his officers, dinners at which he was present, reviews of troops, the army itself and its condition, with passing reflections about the country and the manners and customs of the time. Among the latter remarks, he observes: "Here, as in England, by _gentleman_ is understood a person possessing a considerable _freehold_, or land of his own." Of the officers, he says: "I must observe on this occasion the General Officers of the American Army have a very military and a very becoming carriage; that even all the officers, whose characters were brought into public view, unite much politeness to a great deal of capacity; that the headquarters of this army, in short, neither present the image of want nor inexperience. When one sees the battalion of the General's Guards encamped within the precincts of his house; nine waggons, destined to carry his baggage, ranged in his court; a great number of grooms taking care of very fine horses belonging to the General Officers and their Aides de Camp; when one observes the perfect order that reigns within these precincts, where the guards are exactly stationed, and where the drums beat an alarm, and a particular retreat, one is tempted to apply to the Americans what Pyrrhus said of the Romans: _Truly these people have nothing barbarous in their discipline._" Of his coming to Morristown, he says: "I pursued my journey, sometimes through fine woods at others through well cultivated lands and villages inhabited by Dutch families. One of these villages, which forms a little township bears the beautiful name of _Troy_. Here the country is more open and continues so to _Morris-Town_. This town celebrated by the winter quarters of 1779, is about three and twenty miles from Peakness, the name of the headquarters from whence I came: It is situated on a height, at the foot of which runs the rivulet called Vipenny River; the houses are handsome and well built, there are about sixty or eighty round the meeting-house." The Marquis tells of his reception at the Camp of Lafayette and, in giving us his picture, he gives us also what is of value to us in this day,--a Frenchman's impression of Lafayette in America: "Whilst they were making this slight repast, I went to see the Camp of the _Marquis_, it is thus they call M. de La Fayette: the English language being fond of abridgments and titles uncommon in America." Here, our eye is attracted to a note of the Translator, (an Englishman residing in America,)--who says, with much more besides: "It is impossible to paint the esteem and affection with which this French nobleman is regarded in America. It is to be surpassed only by the love of their illustrious chief." "The rain appearing to cease," continues the Marquis, "or inclined to cease for a moment, we availed ourselves of the opportunity to follow his Excellency to the Camp of the Marquis; we found all his troops in order of battle, on the heights on the left, and himself at their head; expressing by his air and countenance, that he was happier in receiving me there, than at his estate in Auvergne. The confidence and attachment of the troops, are for him invaluable possessions, well acquired riches, of which no body can deprive him; but what, in my opinion, is still more flattering for a young man of his age, is the influence, the consideration he has acquired amongst the political, as well as the military order; I do not fear contradictions when I say that private letters from him have frequently produced more effect on some states than the strongest exhortations of the Congress. On seeing him one is at a loss which most to admire, that so young a man as he should have given such eminent proofs of talents, or that a man so tried, should give hopes of so long a career of glory." His impression of the Hudson at West Point, will interest us all: "I continued my journey in the woods, in a road hemmed in on both sides by very steep hills which seemed admirably adapted for the dwelling of bears, and where, in fact, they often make their appearance in Winter. We availed ourselves at length of a less difficult part of these mountains to turn to the westward and approach the river but which is still invisible. Descending them slowly, at the turning of the road, my eyes were struck with the most magnificent picture I had ever beheld. It was a view of the North River, running in a deep channel, formed by the mountains, through which, in former ages it had forced its passage. The fort of West Point and the formidable batteries which defend it fix the attention on the Western bank, but on lifting your eyes, you behold on every side lofty summits, thick set with redoubts and batteries." One more passage we must give in this day of Morristown's horsemanship; in this year of '92 when all young Morristown is jumping fences and ditches in pursuit of the fox or the fox's representative. It is Chastellux's reference to Washington's horsemanship: "The weather being fair, on the 26th I got on horseback, after breakfasting with the General. He was so attentive as to give me the horse he rode on the day of my arrival, which I had greatly commended; I found him as good as he is handsome; but above all perfectly well broke, and well trained, having a good mouth, easy in hand, and stopping short in a gallop without bearing the bit. I mention these minute particulars, because it is the General himself who breaks all his own horses; and he is a very excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences, and going extremely quick, without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild; circumstances which our young men look upon as so essential a part of English horsemanship, that they would rather break a leg or an arm than renounce them." John L. Stephens. Over fifty years ago, a traveler in Central America, Mr. John L. Stephens, records a curious and interesting allusion to Morristown, which we give below, from one of his two volumes of "Incidents of Travel in Central America and Yucatan"; 12th Edition; published in 1856. He says: "In the midst of the war rumours, the next day, which was Sunday, was one of the most quiet I passed in Central America. It was at the hacienda of Dr. Drivon, about a league from Zonzonate. This was one of the finest haciendas in the country. The doctor had imported a large sugar mill, which was not yet set up, and was preparing to manufacture sugar upon a larger scale than any other planter in the country. He was from the island of St. Lucie and, before settling in this out-of-the-way place, had travelled extensively in Europe and the West India Islands and knew America from Halifax to Cape Horn, but surprised me by saying that he looked forward to a cottage in Morristown, New Jersey, as the consummation of his wishes." Hon. Charles S. Washburn. Mr. Washburn who lived for several years in Morristown, was the brother of our late Minister to France. His most popular work is "The History of Paraguay," in two volumes, written while he was Commissioner and Minister Resident of the United States at Asuncion from 1861 to 1868. The writer may truly add on his title page, "Reminiscences of Diplomacy under Difficulties." As is well known, Mr. Washburn was minister to Paraguay under Lopez, one of the three most noted tyrants of South America, whose character is admirably brought out in this history of the country. His description of Lopez is most graphic. The work is so exhaustive that we get up from it with a feeling, "We know Paraguay". Besides this "History of Paraguay", Mr. Washburn has also written "Gomery of Montgomery", in two volumes and "Political Evolution from Poverty to Competence". At the close of the first volume, we find a masterly summing up of the singular character of Lopez, in these words: "Previous to the death of Lopez, history furnishes no example of a tyrant so despicable and cruel that at his fall he left no friend among his own people; no apologist or defender, no follower or participant of his infamies, to utter one word in palliation of his crimes; no one to regret his death, or who cherished the least spark of love for his person or his memory; no one to utter a prayer for the repose of his soul. In this respect, Lopez had surpassed all tyrants who ever lived. No sooner was he dead, than all alike, the officer high in command, the subaltern who applied the torture, the soldier who passively obeyed, the mother who bore him, and the sisters who once loved him, all joined in denouncing him as an unparalleled monster; and of the whole Paraguayan nation there is perhaps not one of the survivors who does not curse his name, and ascribe to his folly, selfishness, ambition and cruelty all the evils that his unhappy country has suffered. Not a family remains which does not charge him with having destroyed the larger part of its members and reduced the survivors to misery and want. Of all those who were within reach of his death-dealing hand during the last years of his power, there are but two persons living to say a word in mitigation of the judgment pronounced against him by his countrymen and country-women." General Joseph Warren Revere. The late General Revere, one of Morristown's old and well-known residents, wrote, at the close of his military and naval career, a graphic and interesting book of travels entitled "Keel and Saddle; a Retrospect of Forty Years of Military and Naval Service"; published in 1872 by James R. Osgood of Boston. Another book appeared later, called "A Tour of Duty in California." General Revere tells us in "Keel and Saddle" that he entered the United States Navy at the age of fourteen years as a midshipman and, after a short term spent at the Naval School at the New York Navy Yard, he sailed on his first cruise to the Pacific Ocean on board the frigate "Guerrière", "bearing the pennant of Com. Charles C. B. Thompson, in the summer of the year 1828." For three years he served in the Pacific Squadron. After cruising in many waters and experiencing the various vicissitudes of naval life, in 1832 he passed his examination for lieutenant and sailed in the frigate "Constitution" for France. During this Mediterranean cruise, when he made his first visit to Rome, he saw Madame Letitia, mother of the first Napoleon, by whom he was received with a small party of American officers. We shall give this scene as he describes it. In this book, "Keel and Saddle", (page 140) occurs a very fine description of a great oceanic disturbance known to mariners in Southern seas as a "comber", or great wave. Suddenly encountered, it causes the destruction of many vessels. Of Madame Letitia, in 1832 he writes as follows: "Madame Mère or Madame Letitia, as she was usually called, being requested to grant an interview to a small party of American officers, of which I was one, graciously assented, and fixed a day for the reception at the palace she occupied. "Repairing thither at the hour appointed, after a short detention in a spacious ante-chamber, we were ushered into one of those lofty saloons common to Italian palaces, handsomely, not gorgeously furnished, and opening by spacious windows into a beautiful garden. There, with her back towards the subdued light from the windows, we saw an elderly lady reclining on a sofa, in a graceful attitude of repose. She was attended by three ladies, who all remained standing during our visit. In the recess of one of the windows, on a tall pedestal of antique marble, stood a magnificent bust of the emperor; while upon the walls of the saloon, in elegant frames, were hung the portraits of her children, all of whom had been kings and queens--of royal rank though not of royal lineage. Madame Letitia received us with perfect courtesy, without rising from her reclining position; motioning us gracefully to seats with a polite gesture of a hand and arm still of noble contour and dazzling whiteness. It was easy to see where the emperor got his small white hands, of which he was so vain, as we are told; while the classic regularity of his well-known features was clearly traceable in the lineaments of the lady before us. Her head was covered with a cap of lace; and her somewhat haughty but expressive face, beaming with intelligence, was framed in clustering curls _a l'antique_. Her eyes were brilliant, large and piercing, (I think they could hardly have been more so in her youth); and the lines of her mouth and chin gave an expression of firmness, courage and determination to a fine physiognomy perfectly in character with the historical antecedents and attributes of Letitia Ramolini. Of the rest of her dress, we saw but little; her bust being covered by a lace handkerchief crossed over the bosom, and her dark silk robe partially concealed by a superb cashmere shawl thrown over the lower part of her person. She opened the conversation by making some complimentary remark about our country; asking after her son Joseph, who resided then at Bordentown, N. J.; and seemed pleased at receiving news of him from one of our party, who had seen him not long before. She asked this officer whether the King (_le roi d'Espagne_) still resembled the portrait in her possession which was a very fine one; and upon our asking permission to examine the bust of the emperor, the greatest of her sons, told us that it was considered a fine work of art, it being, indeed, from the chisel of Canova; adding, I fancied with a little sigh of melancholy, 'Il resemble beaucoup a l'empereur.' After some further commonplaces, she signified in the most delicate and dignified manner, more by looks than by words, addressed to the ladies of our party, referring to her rather weak state of health, that the interview should terminate; and, having made our obeisance, we left her." Henry Day. In 1874, an interesting volume of travels appeared, entitled "A Lawyer Abroad. What to See and How to See: by Henry Day, of the Bar of New York." Mr. Day's house "On the Hill", with its superb view, is occupied only in summer; but year after year, with the birds and the spring sunshine, he returns to us from his home in New York, so he is thoroughly associated with Morristown. His book, unlike a large majority of "Travels" is not merely a "Tourist's Guide" or a series of descriptive sketches hung together by commonplace reflections, and interlarded with meaningless drawing-room or roadside dialogue. Evidently, it is written with a high purpose and it is rich in valuable information concerning men and things, as if the writer himself were in living touch with the best interests of humanity whether found in the cities of Egypt, among the learned and polished minds of Edinburgh or in the Wynds of Glasgow, of which he so graphically says: "They are now long filthy, airless lanes, packed with buildings on each side and each building packed with human beings; and, geographically as well as morally they receive the drainage of all the surrounding city of Glasgow." Here it was in the old Tron Church that Dr. Chalmers did his finest preaching and his most effective practical work. Mr. Day has an evident loving sympathy with the great Scotch preacher, quite apart from the intellectual qualities of his gigantic mind. In these few condensed pages, Mr. Day has given us a more compact idea of Dr. Chalmer's work than may be found in many elaborated chapters of his life. The chapter upon "The Lawyers and Judges of England" is one of exceptional interest to those in the profession, as well as to those out of it, and this is one unique quality of the book--that we have given to us the impressions of a traveler from a lawyer's standpoint, not only in England, but in Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and the Holy Land. And, not only from a lawyer's standpoint does he see the world, but evidently from the standpoint of a man of high general culture whose spiritual and religious sentiments and principles enlighten and illuminate his understanding. In the chapter on "The Early Life of Great Men", speaking of Edinburgh, he says: "Everything gives you the feeling that you are among the most learned and polished minds of the present and past generations. It is not business or wealth that has given to Edinburgh its prominence. It is learning; it is its great men." One of Mr. Day's finest descriptions is found in his chapter on the Nile. In 1877 this author published, through Putnams' Sons, a book having the title "From the Pyrenees to the Pillars of Hercules", giving sketches of scenery, art and life in Spain. Mr. Day has also written a good deal for a few years past for publication in the _New York Evangelist_ on the great questions now agitating the Presbyterian church, namely, the revision of its creed called "The Confession of Faith" and also on the Briggs case and the Union Theological Seminary case. Mr. Day wisely says; "this newspaper writing can hardly be called authorship although the articles are more important than the books." THEOLOGIANS. Rev. Timothy Johnes, D. D. Of the historic characters of Morristown, none are more prominent than the Rev. Dr. Johnes, who began his pastorate in the old Meeting House of Morristown which was probably reared before his coming. His labors began August 13th, 1742. He was ordained and installed February 9th, 1743, and continued pastor through the scenes of the Revolution till his death in 1791. He was the friend of Washington and supported him effectually in many of the measures he adopted in which his strong influence with the community was of great weight and value. It was the daughter of Rev. Dr. Johnes, Theodosia, who married Col. Jacob Ford, jr., who lived at what is now known as the Washington Headquarters and offered the hospitality of her mansion to Washington during his second winter at Morristown. He also offered the Presbyterian church building for hospital use during the terrible scourge of small-pox,--himself acting as chief nurse to the soldiers,--and, with his congregation, worshipped for many months in the open air, on a spot still shown behind his house, on Morris street, which is standing to-day, and now owned and occupied by Mrs. Eugene Ayers. It was on this spot, in a natural basin which the congregation occupied as being somewhat sheltered from the bitter winds of winter, and which may still be seen, that good Pastor Johnes administered the Communion to Washington. "This was the only time," says Rev. Dr. Green, in his "Morristown" in the "History of Morris County", after his entrance upon his public career, that Washington is certainly known to have partaken of the Lord's Supper. In _The Record_ for June and August, 1880, we find a full account of this historic incident. As the Communion time drew near, Washington sought good Pastor Johnes, we are told, and inquired of him, if membership of the Presbyterian church was required "As a term of admission to the ordinance." To this the doctor replied, "ours is not the Presbyterian table, but the Lord's table, and we hence give the Lord's invitation to all his followers of whatever name." "On the following Sabbath," says Dr. Green, "in the cold air, the General was present with the congregation, assembled in the orchard in the rear of the parsonage", on the spot before referred to, "and joined with them in the solemn service of Communion." In the family of good Pastor Johnes, a granddaughter of whom, Mrs. O. L. Kirtland, is with us still, the last of a large number of brothers and sisters, it has been known for generations that they originated in Wales. We have from Mrs. Kirtland's granddaughter the following interesting record: "Rev. Timothy Johnes came to Morristown, N. J., from Southampton about 1742. His great-great-grandfather, Richard Johnes, of Somerset, Eng., descended from a younger branch of the Johnes of Dolancotlie in Caemarthenshire, Wales, came over and settled in Charleston, Mass., in 1630, was made constable, and had 'Mr.' before his name, an honor in those days. He went to live at Southampton, L. I., in 1644, and he and his descendants held important positions there for nearly two hundred years. Burke's _Landed Gentry_ states that the Johnes were descended from Urien Reged, one of King Arthur's Knights, and who built the Castle Caer Caenin, and traced descent back to Godebog, King of Britain. But accurate record must begin at a later date, when William Johnes, in the reign of Elizabeth, was Commander on the 'Crane' and killed in a battle against the Spanish Armada." Rev. Timothy Johnes, D. D., was the great-great-grandson of the first Johnes who arrived in this country. Rev. Timothy graduated at Yale in 1737; was born in 1717 and died in 1794. He received many ordination calls while at Southampton, Long Island, and was perplexed as to which one to accept, so "he referred the matter, says the great-great-granddaughter before referred to," to Providence, deciding to accept the next one made. He had not risen from his knees more than twenty minutes, when two old men came to his house and asked him to become pastor of a small congregation that had collected at Morristown, then called by the Indian tongue Rockciticus. When nearly here, after traveling long in the forest, he inquired of his guides: "Where is Rockciticus?" "Here and there and every where," was the reply, and so it was, scattered through the woods. Of Dr. Johnes' children,--Theodosia, as we have stated, was the hostess of Washington at the Ford mansion, her home, and now the Washington Headquarters. Anna, the eldest daughter, married Joseph Lewis and is the ancestress of one of our distinguished authors, the Rev. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, D. D. The daughter of this Anna Lewis, married Charles Morrell and they occupied the house of Mr. Wm. L. King on Morris St., and there entertained Lafayette as their guest in the winter of '79 and '80. Their daughter, Louisa married Ledyard Cuyler and they had a son, Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, well-known to us and to all the world. Mary Anna, a grand daughter, married Mr. Williams, of Newburg, and others of the family followed there. They pronounce the name _John_-es, giving up the long _o_ (Jones), of the old Doctor's sounding of the name. A grandson, Frank, went west and had a large family who are more or less distinguished in Decatur, Illinois. They omit the _e_ in the name and call themselves Johns. It is only in Morristown that the family retain the original spelling of Johnes and pronunciation of _Jones_. The son of the old Doctor, William, remained in the old house, and there brought up a large family of whom the above two, named, were members, also Mrs. Kirtland, who is still with us, with her daughter and grandchildren, and Mrs. Alfred Canfield, who long lived among us but has passed away. One of the old Doctor's sons was named, as we might expect, George Washington and was the grandfather of Mrs. Theodore Little, and built the old house on the hill near our beautiful Evergreen Cemetery. This house was built soon after Washington's occupation of Morristown, and the large place including the ancient house has lately been sold and will soon be laid out in streets and lots, as the demand comes from the increasing population of our city. Fortunate are we to have so many of the old land-marks left to us! Mrs. Woodruff, the step-mother, honored and beloved, of Mrs. Whelpley Dodge, was also a daughter of old Doctor Johnes. Another son of the old Doctor was Dr. John B. Johnes, who built the house with columns opposite the old place, still standing, and there he lived and died, high in his profession, greatly honored and beloved. His daughter Margaret, was the step-mother of another of our distinguished men and writers, the Rev. Arthur Mitchell, D. D. And so we find this ancient family from Wales, the land of the poetic Celts, and many of whom are yet living in that corner of the world from which these came, still sending on their influence and maintaining their high standard of principle and honor, which characterized good Pastor Johnes, during the fifty-four years of his ministry in Morristown. Rev. James Richards, D. D. The Rev. Dr. Richards, who was settled as the third pastor over the First Church of Morristown, May 1st, 1795, was a theological author, many of whose sermons and other writings are published, and later, he was professor of theology in the Auburn theological seminary. Dr. Richards, like Dr. Johnes, was of Welsh descent. His salary was $440, in quarterly payments, the use of the parsonage, and firewood. To supplement this income, resort was had to a "wood-frolick", which was, we are told, a great event in the parish and to which the men brought the minister's years' supply of fuel and for which the ladies prepared a supper. The "spinning visit" was another feature of his pastorate, on which occasion were brought various amounts of "linen thread, yard and cloth". The thread brought, being not always of the same texture and size, it was often a puzzle indeed to the weaver to "make the cloth and finish it alike". At last the meagreness of this pastor's salary proved so great a perplexity, especially as his expenses were increasing with his growing family, that he gave up the problem, and went to Newark, N. J., accepting a call from the First Presbyterian Church there, from which, after fifteen years, he went as professor of theology to the Auburn Seminary, where he remained until his death in 1843. Rev. Albert Barnes. Fifth in order of these early divines of the Morristown's First Church, is the Rev. Albert Barnes. He occupied this pastorate from 1825 to June 1830. It was here that he preached, in 1829, that remarkable sermon, "The Way of Salvation", which was the entering wedge that prepared the way for the unfortunate division among the Presbyterians into the two schools Old and New, which division and the names attached to each side, it may gladly be said, came to an end by a happy union of the two branches, a few years ago. The Rev. Albert Barnes was also a pioneer of the Temperance movement in Morristown and his eloquence and influence in this cause resulted in the closing of several distilleries. From Morristown he was called to Philadelphia, where he passed through his severest trials. It is needless to mention that he was a voluminous writer and that he has made a world-wide reputation by his valuable "Notes on the Gospels", so well-known to all Biblical scholars. Rev. Mr. Henderson of London says: "I consider Barnes 'Notes on the New Testament' to be one of the most valuable boons bestowed in these latter days upon the Church of Christ." And the Rev. David King of Glasgow says: "The primary design of the Rev. Albert Barnes' books is to furnish Sunday School teachers with plain and simple explanations of common difficulties." We are impressed with the rare modesty of so eminent a writer and distinguished divine when he read that the Rev. Albert Barnes several times refused the title of "D. D.", from conscientious motives. Among the celebrated sermons and addresses published by this author was one very powerful sermon on "The Sovereignty of God", and also an "Address delivered July 4th, 1827," at the Presbyterian church, Morristown. In the "Advertisement" or preface, to the former, the author says in pungent words: "It was written during the haste of a weekly preparation for the Sabbath and is not supposed to contain anything new on the subject. * * * The only wonder is that it (the very plain doctrine of the Bible) should ever have been called in question or disputed--or that in a world where man's life and peace and hopes, all depend on the truth that GOD REIGNS, such a doctrine _should have ever needed any demonstration_." The condition of Morristown when Mr. Barnes came into the pastorate, in respect of intemperance was almost beyond the power of imagination, serious, as the evil seems to us at the present day. He found "drinking customs in vogue and distilleries dotted all over the parish." Fearlessly he set himself to stem this evil, which indeed he did succeed in arresting to a large extent. His "Essays on Temperance" are marvellous productions, as full of fire and energy and the power of conviction to-day as when first issued from the press, and these addresses were so powerful in their effect on the community that "soon," says our historian, Rev. Dr. Green, "seventeen (of the 19) distilleries were closed and not long after his departure, the fires of the other two went out." In the course of one of his arguments, he says: "There are many, flitting in pleasure at an imagined rather than a real distance, who may be saved from entering the place of the wretched dying, and of the horrid dead. Here I wish to take my stand. I wish to tell the mode in which men become abandoned. In the language of a far better moralist and reprover than I am (Dr. Lyman Beecher), I wish to lay down a chart of this way to destruction, and to rear a monument of warning upon every spot where a wayfaring man has been ensnared and destroyed. "I commence with the position that no man probably ever became designedly a drunkard. I mean that no man ever sat down coolly and looked at the redness of eyes, the haggardness of aspect, the weakness of limbs, the nausea of stomach, the profaneness and obscenity and babbling of a drunkard and deliberately desired all these. I shall be slow to believe that it is in human nature to wish to plunge into all this wretchedness. Why is it then that men become drunkards? I answer it is because the vice steals on them silently. It fastens on them unawares, and they find themselves wallowing in all this corruption, before they think of danger." The power and beauty of Mr. Barnes' most celebrated sermon on "The Way of Salvation", impresses the reader, from page to page. Towards the close, he says: FROM "THE PLAN OF SALVATION." "The scheme of salvation, I regard, as offered to the _world_, as free as the light of heaven, or the rains that burst on the mountains, or the full swelling of broad rivers and streams, or the heavings of the deep. And though millions do not receive it--though in regard to them the benefits of the plan are lost, and to them, in a certain sense, the plan may be said to be in vain, yet I see in this the hand of the same God that pours the rays of noonday on barren sands and genial showers on desert rocks, and gives life, bubbling springs and flowers, where no man is in _our_ eyes, yet not to _His, in vain_. So is the offer of eternal life, to every man here, to every man everywhere, sincere and full--an offer that though it may produce no emotions in the sinner's bosom _here_, would send a thrill of joy through all the panting bosoms of the suffering damned." Rev. Samuel Whelpley. Rev. Mr. Whelpley became Principal of the Morristown Academy in 1797 and remained until 1805. He came from New England and was originally a Baptist, but in Morristown he gave up the plan which he had cherished of becoming a Baptist minister and united with the Presbyterian church. In 1803, he gave his reasons for this change of views, publicly, in a "Discourse delivered in the First Church" and published. His "Historical Compend" is one of his important works. It contains, "A brief survey of the great line of history from the earliest time to the present day, together with a general view of the world with respect to Civilization, Religion and Government, and a brief dissertation on the importance of historical knowledge." This was issued in two volumes "By Samuel Whelpley, A. M., Principal of Morris Academy" and was printed by Henry P. Russell and dedicated to Rev. Samuel Miller, D. D. This author was not, by-the-way, the father of Chief Justice Whelpley, of Morristown, who also is noticed in this book, but was the cousin of his father, Dr. William A. Whelpley, a practicing physician here. "Lectures on Ancient History, together with an allegory of Genius and Taste" was another of Mr. Whelpley's books. Among his works, perhaps the most celebrated was, and is, "The Triangle", a theological work which is "A Series of numbers upon Three Theological Points, enforced from Various Pulpits in the City of New York." This was published in 1817, and a new edition in 1832. In this work, says Hon. Edmund D. Halsey, the leaders and views of what was long afterward known as the Old School Theology were keenly criticised and ridiculed. The book caused a great sensation in its day and did not a little toward hastening the division in the Presbyterian Church into Old and New School. This book was published without his name, by "Investigator". In it the author says: FROM "THE TRIANGLE." "You shall hear it inculcated from Sabbath to Sabbath in many of our churches, and swallowed down, as a sweet morsel, by many a gaping mouth, that a man ought to feel himself actually guilty of a sin committed six thousand years before he was born; nay, that prior to all consideration of his own moral conduct, _he ought to feel himself deserving of eternal damnation for the first sin of Adam_. * * * No such doctrine is taught in the Scriptures, or can impose itself on any rational mind, which is not trammeled by education, dazzled by interest, warped by prejudice and bewildered by theory. This is one corner of the triangle above mentioned. "This doctrine perpetually urged, and the subsequent strain of teaching usually attached to it, will not fail to drive the incautious mind to secret and practical, or open infidelity. An attempt to force such monstrous absurdities on the human understanding, will be followed by the worst effects. A man who finds himself condemned for that of which he is not guilty will feel little regret for his real transgressions. "I shall not apply these remarks to the purpose I had in view, till I have considered some other points of a similar character;--or, if I may resort to the metaphor alluded to, till I have pointed out the other two angles of the triangle." Stevens Jones Lewis. Mr. Lewis was a grandson of Rev. Dr. Timothy Johnes and great uncle of the Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, D. D. He was a theologian whose writings made a ripple in the orthodox stream of thought, and was disciplined in the First church for his doctrines. He published two pamphlets in justification of his peculiar views. The first was on "The Moral Creation the peculiar work of Christ. A very different thing from that of the Physical Creation which is the exclusive work of God", printed in Morristown by L. B. Hull, in 1838. Also there was one entitled "Showing the manner in which they do things in the Presbyterian church in the Nineteenth Century". "For the rulers had agreed already that if any man did confess that Jesus was Christ ('was Christ, not God Almighty'), he should be put out of the synagogue." "Morristown, N. J., Printed for the author, 1837." Rev. Rufus Smith Green, D. D. The Rev. Dr. Green, so much esteemed by the people of all denominations in Morristown, has a claim to honorable mention among our authors, having written largely and to good purpose. His "History of Morristown," a division of the book entitled the "History of Morris County", published by Munsell & Co., New York, in 1882, is a valuable contribution to our literature, combining in delightful form, a large amount of information from many sources, which has cost the writer much labor. As a book of reference it is in constant demand in the "Morristown Library" now, and one of the books which is not allowed long to remain out, for that reason. This fact carries its own weight without further comment. Dr. Green succeeded the Rev. John Abbott French in June, 1877, to the pastorate of the First Presbyterian Church of Morristown, and remained until 1881, when he accepted the charge of the Lafayette St. Presbyterian Church of Buffalo, N. Y., and removed to that city. After his graduation at Hamilton College, N. Y., in 1867, Dr. Green went abroad and was a student in the Berlin University during 1869 and '70. During this period he gained complete command of the German language, which has been vastly helpful to him in his writing as well as, in many instances, in his pastoral work. He was graduated from the Auburn Theological Seminary in 1873. He then accepted a charge at Westfield, N. Y., and in 1877 came to Morristown. During his Morristown pastorate, he began the publication of _The Record_, a monthly periodical devoted to historical matter connected with the First Church in particular, but also with Morristown generally and Morris County as well,--the First Church, in its history, striking it roots deep, and radiating in many directions. This was continued for the years 1880 and 1881, 24 numbers. Rev. Wm. Durant, Dr. Green's successor in the pastorate of the First Church, resumed the work in January 1883, and continued its publication until January 1886. It is an invaluable contribution to the early history of the town and county. Another of Dr. Green's publications is "Both Sides, or Jonathan and Absalom", published in 1888 by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, Philadelphia. This is a volume of sermons to young men, the aim of which can be seen from the preface which we quote entire: "It would be difficult to find two characters better fitted than those of Jonathan and Absalom to give young men right views of life--the one, in its nobleness and beauty, an inspiration; the other, in its vanity and wicked self-seeking, an awful warning. The two present both sides of the picture, and from opposite points of view teach the same lessons never more important than at the present time. It has been the author's purpose to enforce these lessons rather than to write a biography. May they guide many a reader to the choice of the right side!" In writing of the friendship of Jonathan and David the author says: "The praises of Friendship have been sung by poets of all ages,--orator's have made it a theme for their eloquence,--philosophers have written treatises upon it,--historians have described its all too rare manifestations. No stories from the far off Past are more charming than those which tell of Damon and Pythias,--of Orestes and Pylades--of Nisus and Euryalus--but better and more inspiring than philosophic treatise or historic description, more beautiful even than song of poet, is the Friendship of which the text speaks,--the love of Jonathan for David. It is one of the world's ideal pictures, all the more prized, because it is not only ideal but real. It was the Divine love which made the earthly friendship so pure and beautiful." For _Our Church at Work_, a monthly periodical of many years' standing connected with the Lafayette Street church, of Buffalo, Dr. Green has largely written. An important pamphlet on "The Revised New Testament" was published in 1881, by the _Banner_ Printing Office, of Morristown, and, in addition to these, fugitive sermons, and numerous articles for newspapers and periodicals have passed from his pen to print. When Dr. Green left Morristown, this was the tribute given him at the final service in the old church where hundreds of people were turned away for want of room. These were the words of the speaker on that occasion: "Dr. Green came to a united people; he has at all times presided over a united people and he leaves a united people." Rev. William Durant. Rev. Wm. Durant followed the Rev. Dr. Green in his ministry in the First Presbyterian Church in Morristown, May 11th, 1883, remaining in this charge until May, 1887, when he resigned, to accept the call of the Boundary Avenue Church, Baltimore, Md. He took up also, with Hon. John Whitehead as editor, at first, the onerous though very interesting work of _The Record_, which labor both he and Rev. Dr. Green as well as Mr. Whitehead, gave "as a free will offering to the church and the community". Rev. Mr. Durant was born in Albany, N. Y., and prepared for college at the Albany Academy. He then travelled a year in Europe, studied theology at Princeton and was graduated from that college in 1872. The same year he took charge of the First Presbyterian Church in Milwaukee, for the summer only, after which he traveled through the west, and was then ordained to the ministry, in Albany, and installed pastor of the Sixth Presbyterian Church of that city, from which, in 1883, he came to Morristown, as we have said. While in Albany he edited "Church Polity", a selection of articles contributed by the Rev. Charles Hodge, D. D., to the _Princeton Review_; Scribner's Sons, publishers. Afterwards, in Morristown, he published a "History of the First Presbyterian Church, Morristown," with genealogical data for 13,000 names on its registers; a part of this only has been published. "A Letter from One in Heaven; An Allegory", is a booklet of singular interest as the title would suggest. One or two short stories of his have been published among numerous contributions to religious papers on subjects of ecclesiology and practical religion, also a score or more of sermons in pamphlet form. He is at present preparing, for publication, a "Durant Genealogy", to include all now in this country of the name and descent. This was begun in the fall of 1886. In the opening number of _The Record_ for January 1883, after the suspension of the publication for two years, we print the following paper of "Congratulations" from Rev. Wm. Durant, which as it concerns the spirit of Morristown, we give in full: "CONGRATULATIONS", ON THE REVIVAL OF "THE RECORD". The season is propitious. _The Record_ awakes from a long nap--not as long as Rip Van Winkle's--to greet its readers with a Happy New Year. But where is the suggestion of those garments all tattered and torn? We mistake. It is not Rip Van Winkle, but the Sleeping Beauty who comes to us, by fairy enchantment, decked in the latest fashion. Sleep has given her new attractions. Happy we who may receive her visits with the changing moons, and scan her treasures new and old. Her bright look shows a quick glance to catch flashes of present interest. And there is depth, too, a far offness about her glance. Its gleam of the present is the shimmer that lies on the surface of a deep well of memory. What stories she can tell us of the past! Though so youthful her appearance, she romped with our grandmothers and made lint for the hospital and blankets for the camps, that winter Washington was here, when his bare-foot soldiers shivered in the snows on Mount Kemble or lay dying by scores in the old First Church. Yes, she was a girl of comely parts, albeit of temper to enjoy a tiff with her good mother of Hanover, when our city was a frontier settlement, full only of log cabins and primitive hardships in the struggle against wild nature. For a maiden still, and one who has seen so many summers, marvelous is her cheery, youthful look. Ponce de Leon made the mistake of his life when he sought his enchanted fountain in Florida instead of where Morristown was to be. It is not on the Green, for the aqueduct folks now hold the title. From lips still ruddy with youth, is it not delicious to hear the gossip of olden time! And our maiden knows it all, for she was present at all the baptisms, danced at all the weddings, thrilled with heavenly joy when our ancestors confessed the Son of Man before the high pulpit, and stood with tears in her eyes when one after another they were laid in the graves behind. Their names are still on her tongues' end, and it is with loving recollection that she tells of the long lists like the one she brings this month. But her gossip is not all of names. What she will tell of events and progress, of the unwritten history that has given character to families, to State or Nation, there is no need of predicting, we have only to welcome her at our fireside and listen while she speaks. Rev. J. Macnaughtan, D. D. Dr. Macnaughtan, present pastor of the First Presbyterian Church and successor of Rev. Wm. Durant, a profound scholar and thinker and most interesting writer, has not entered largely into the world of letters as an author or a publisher of his writings. Some papers of his, and some articles have, however, been published from time to time and a sermon now and then, notably, within two years, one on "Revision: Its Spirit and Aims", and the Centennial Sermon that was delivered on Sunday, October 11th, 1891, on the memorable occasion of the Centennial of the erection of the present First Church building. This sermon was published in the _Banner_, of Morristown, and is to appear again, with all the interesting addresses and sketches, given on that day and on the following days of the celebration,--in the book which Mr. Whitehead is preparing on "The History of the First Presbyterian Church". Dr. Macnaughtan's pastorate will always be associated with this time of historic retrospection and also with the passing away of the old building and the introduction of the new. Of this old building, endeared to many of Morristown's people, this book will probably be the last to make mention while it stands. An old-time resident touchingly says of the coming event: "There have been great changes within my remembrance (in Morristown). I was born in 1813 and have always lived where I do now. My memory goes back to the time when there were only two churches in the town; the First Presbyterian and the Baptist. The latter is now being removed for other purposes, and our old church, that has stood through its 100 years, will soon be removed, to make place for a new one. I was in hopes it would remain during my days, but the younger generation wants something new, more in the present style." FROM THE "CENTENNIAL SERMON." Ask now of the days that are past. --_Deuteronomy 4:32._ One hundred years ago on the 20th of last September (1891), a very stirring and animated scene could have been witnessed on this spot where we are so quietly assembled this morning for our Sabbath worship. On the morning of that day, some 200 men were assembled here, with the implements of their calling, and the task of erecting this now venerable structure was begun. The willing hands of trained mechanics and others, under the direction of Major Joseph Lindsley and Gilbert Allen, both elders of the church, lifted aloft these timbers, and the work of creating this sanctuary was begun. When one inspects the timbers forming the frame of this structure, great masses of hewn oak, and enough of it to build two structures of the size of this edifice, as such buildings are now erected, one sees how necessary it was that so great a force of men should be on hand. One can well believe that the animation of the scene was only equalled by the excited emotions of the people, in whose behalf the building was being erected. The task begun was a gigantic one for that time. The plans contemplated the erection of a structure which, "for strength, solidity and symmetry of proportion," should "not be excelled by any wooden building of that day in New Jersey." But it was not alone the generosity of the plan of the structure that made it a gigantic enterprise, but the material circumstances of the people who had undertaken the work. The men of a hundred years ago were rich for the most part only in faith and self-sacrifice. But looking at this house as it stands to-day, and remembering the generations who under this roof have been reproved, guided, comforted, and pointed to the supreme ends of being, who shall say that they who are rich only in faith and self-sacrifice are poor? Out of their material poverty our fathers builded this house through which for a century God has been sending to our homes and into our lives the rich messages of his grace and salvation--where from week to week our souls have been fronted with the invisible and eternal, and where by psalm and hymn, and the solemn words of God's grand Book, and the faithful preaching of a long line of devoted and consecrated men, we have been reminded of the seriousness and awfulness of life, of the sublime meanings of existence, and the grand ends which it is capable of conserving; where multitudes have confessed a Saviour found, and have consecrated their souls to their new found Lord; where doubts have been dispelled, where sorrow has been assuaged, where grief has found its antidote and the burdened heart has found relief; where thought has been lifted to new heights of outlook, and the heart has been enriched with conceptions of God and duty that have given a new grandeur to existence, where the low horizons of time have been lifted and pushed outward, till the soul has felt the thrill of a present eternity. Our heritage has indeed been great in the possession of this old white Meeting-House. (Several points Dr. Macnaughtan makes as follows): In scanning the life that has been lived here during the last hundred years, I find it, first of all, to have been _a consistent life_. It is a life that has been true to the great principles of religious truth for which the name of Presbyterian stands. * * I find, in the second place, that the life that has been lived here has been _an evangelistic life_. * * In the third place, it has been an _expansive life_. * * * * Here has been nourished the mother hive from which has gone forth, to the several churches in the neighborhood, the men and women who have made these churches what they are to-day. * * * In the fourth place, it has been _a beneficent life_. The voices that have rung out from this place have but one accent--Righteousness. Rev. C. DeWitt Bridgman. The Baptist Church is the second of our Morristown churches in point of age. It was formed August 11, 1752. It was the Rev. Reune Runyon who was its pastor during those terrible days of the Revolution, when the scourge of small pox prevailed. All honor to him, for a "brave man and true", as says our historian, "loyal to his country as well as faithful to his God." He, with good Parson Johnes, upheld the arm of Washington and both offered, for their congregations, their church buildings, to shelter the poor, suffering soldiers, in their conflict with the dread disease. This constancy is all the more creditable when we consider that two of his immediate predecessors had already fallen victims to the disease, each, after a very short pastorate. Rev. C. DeWitt Bridgman claims our attention as a writer. A friend writing of the Rev. Mr. Bridgman, at the present time, says: "The Baptist Church at Morristown was the first pastorate of the Rev. C. DeWitt Bridgman and I think was filled to the entire satisfaction of his friends and admirers who were and _are_ many. His brilliant oratory and rare gifts as an eloquent, scholarly and polished speaker are well-known. A life-long friend of my family, I dwell on the lovable and loyal characteristics which have made him dear to us." In a letter received by the author of this book, from the Rev. Mr. Bridgman, we find a little retrospect which is interesting. "I went to Morristown," he says, "immediately after graduating from the Baptist Theological Seminary, in Rochester, in 1857. The Baptist Church had a membership of about 130, all but five or six of them living outside the village. The House of Worship was small and uncomfortable, but at once was modernized and enlarged, and the congregation soon after grew to the measure of its capacity. As I was then but 22 years old, the success was in some measure due, I must believe, to the sympathy which the young men of the village had for one with their ardor. However that may be, the church, for the first time, seemed to be recognized as in touch with the life of the village, and it was the opening of a new chapter in the history of the church." Rev. Mr. Bridgman made the oration at the 4th of July county celebration, soon after his arrival, in the First Presbyterian church. For two and a half years, he remained in this charge when he removed to Jamaica Plain, Mass. Subsequently he was pastor for fifteen years, of Emmanuel Baptist church, Albany, then for thirteen years of the Madison Avenue church in New York, when he entered the Episcopal church and became rector of "Holy Trinity," on Lenox avenue and 122nd St., New York, a position which he still occupies. Articles from this writer's pen have appeared from time to time during this long career, in the religious press, besides occasional sermons of power and impressiveness. In the letter above referred to, Mr. Bridgman says he remembers very pleasantly many acquaintances among those not connected with his church as well as those in its membership and "it will be a great pleasure," he adds, "to recall the old faces and the old days, over the pages of your book, when it shall have been issued." _Rev. G. D. Brewerton_, who is already among our Poets, followed the Rev. Mr. Bridgman, in 1861, for a short pastorate. Rev. J. T. Crane, D. D. The Methodist Episcopal church was the third in order among our local churches and was organized in 1826. Among the many pastors of this church, the Rev. Dr. Crane demands our notice as an author. It was he who laid the corner-stone, while pastor in 1866, of the third church building, a superb structure, which is mostly the generous gift of the Hon. George T. Cobb, who gave to it $100,000. We find in our Morristown library, an interesting and valuable volume entitled "Arts of Intoxication; the Aim and the Results." By Rev. J. T. Crane, D. D., author of "Popular Amusements", "The Right Way", &c. This author was a voluminous writer, and recognized as one of the ablest in the Conference. This book was published in 1870 and in it the author says: "The great problem of the times is, 'What shall be done to stay the ravages of intoxication?' The evil pervades every grade of civilization as well as all depths of barbarism, the degree of its prevalence in any locality being determined apparently more by the facilities for indulgence than by climate, race or religion. "In heathen China the opium vice is working death. On the eastern slopes of the Andes, the poor remnants of once powerful nations are enslaved by the coca-leaf, and the thorn-apple, and thus are fixed in their fallen estate. In Europe and America the nations who claim to be the leaders of human progress are fearfully addicted to narcotic indulgences which not only impose crushing burdens upon them, wasting the products of their industry and increasing every element of evil among them, but render even their friendship dangerous to the savage tribes among whom their commerce reaches. Italy, France, Germany, England and the United States are laboring beneath a mountain weight of crime, poverty, suffering and wrong of every description, and no nation on either continent is fully awake to the peril of the hour. Questions of infinitely less moment create political crises, make wars, and overthrow dynasties." Then, Dr. Crane proceeds to show that the "Art of Intoxication" is not a device of modern times, and quotes from the Odyssey, in illustration; he discusses the mystery of it and notices the mutual dependence of the body and spirit upon one another. He tells the story of the coca-leaf, thorn-apple and the betel-nut, also of tobacco and treats of the tobacco habit and the question generally; of the hemp intoxicant and the opium habit and, finally, of alcohol,--its production, its delusions, its real effect, the hereditary effect, the wrong of indulgence, the folly of beginning, the strength of the enemy, the damage done and remedial measures. It is the most picturesque and attractive little book on the subject that we have seen. Rev. Henry Anson Buttz, D. D., LL. D. Rev. Dr. Buttz, President of Drew Theological Seminary, ministered in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Morristown from 1868 to 1870. While preaching in Morristown he was elected Adjunct Professor of Greek in Drew Theological Seminary, filling the George T. Cobb professorship. This chair he occupied until December 7, 1880, when he was unanimously elected to succeed Bishop Hurst. He received the degree of A. M. in 1861 from Princeton College and in 1864 from Wesleyan University, and that of D. D. from Princeton in 1875. Dr. Buttz is without doubt one of the most distinguished men of the Methodist Episcopal Church. His preaching, always without notes, is impressive and of the style usually designated as expository. His contributions to English literature have been to a large extent, fugitive articles on many subjects in various church periodicals, but his greatest published work is probably a Greek text book, "The Epistle to the Romans", which is regarded by scholars as one of the most accurate and critical guides to the study of that letter of St. Paul. It is announced by him that all the New Testament Epistles are to be published on the same plan. "The entire work, when completed," says a writer in the Mt. Tabor _Record_, "will be a valuable contribution to Biblical literature, and an enduring monument to the genius and research of the author." Rev. Jonathan K. Burr, D. D. Rev. Dr. Burr, one of the most distinguished divines of the Methodist Episcopal church, was stationed at Morristown in 1870-2. He was born in Middletown, Conn., on Sept. 21st, 1825; was graduated at Wesleyan University in 1845; studied in Union Theological Seminary in New York city in 1846; in 1847 he entered the ministry, occupying some of the most important pulpits within the Newark Conference of the M. E. Church. He was also professor of Hebrew and Exegetical Theology in Drew Theological Seminary, while pastor of Central church, Newark, N. J. He was author of the Commentary on the Book of Job, in the Whedon series, and a member of the Committee of Revision of the New Testament. He received the degree of D. D. from Wesleyan in 1872; also, in that year, he was delegate to the General Conference of the M. E. church. For many years he was a trustee of the Wesleyan University and also of Hackettstown Seminary. He wrote the articles upon Incarnation and Krishna in McClintock and Strong's Biblical Cyclopædia and also made occasional contributions to the religious journals. In 1879 his health failed and he was obliged to retire from the ministry. His death followed on April 24th, 1882. From his "Commentary on the Book of Job" we take the following paragraph out of an Excursus on the passage, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," &c.: FROM "COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF JOB." In the earlier ages truth was given in fragments. It was isolated, succinct, compressed, not unlike the utterances of oracles. The reader will be reminded of the gospel given in the garden, the prediction by Enoch of a judgment to come, the promise of Shiloh and the prophecies through the Gentile Balaam. They, who thus became agents for the transmission of divine truth, may have failed to comprehend it in all its bearings, but the truth is on that account none the less rich and comprehensive. In the living God who shall stand upon the dust, Job may not have seen Christ in the fulness of the atonement; nor in the view of God "from the flesh", have grasped the glories of the resurrection morn; but the essential features of these two cardinal doctrines of Scripture are these, identical with those we now see in greater completeness; even as the outlines of a landscape, however incompletely sketched, are still one with those of the rich and perfected picture. Rev. J. E. Adams. Rev. Mr. Adams, the present pastor of the Morristown Methodist Episcopal Church, entered upon this charge in May, 1889, succeeding the Rev. Oliver A. Brown, D. D. He was transferred, by Bishop Merrill, from the Genesee Conference to the Newark Conference for that purpose, the church having invited him and he having accepted a few months previously. He came directly from the First Methodist Church of Rochester, N. Y., to Morristown. Dr. Adams is a clever and thoughtful writer. He says himself: "I have done nothing in authorship that is worthy of record. I have only written newspaper and magazine articles occasionally and published a few special sermons. I am fond of writing and have planned quite largely for literary work, including several books, but very exacting parish work has thus far delayed execution." Some of his sermons published are as follows: "St. Paul's Veracity in Christian Profession Sustained by an Infallible Test. Text: Romans 1:16. Published in New Brunswick, N. J., 1877." "The Final Verdict in a Famous Case. A Bible Sermon Preached Before the Monmouth County Bible Society, and published by that Society in 1883." "The Golden Rule. A Discussion of Christ's Words in Matthew 7:12, in the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Rochester, N. Y. Published in Rochester, 1886." "Human Progress as a Ground of Thanksgiving. A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached in Morristown, N. J., 1889, and published by request." Rev. James Munroe Buckley, D.D., LL. D. At this point, three theologians and editors present themselves, not occupying definite pulpits, but often taking a place in one or another, as opportunity for usefulness occurs. These are the Rev. James M. Buckley, D. D. and the Rev. James M. Freeman, D. D., of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Rev. Kinsley Twining, D. D., of the Congregational. Of the genius of Dr. Buckley, it may be said, it is so all-embracing that it would be difficult to tell what he is not, in distinctive literary capacity. First of all certainly, he is a theologian, then editor, orator, scientist, traveler and so on among our classifications. One is led to apply to him the familiar saying that "he who does one thing well, can do all things well." It is pleasant to note that a man of such keen observation and well balanced judgment as Dr. Buckley, after extensive travel in our own country and abroad can state, as many of us have heard him, that, of all the beautiful spots he has seen in one country and another, none is so beautiful, so attractive and so desirable, in every respect, as Morristown. Dr. Buckley is a true Jerseyman, for he was born in Rahway, N. J., and educated at Pennington, N. J. Seminary. He studied theology, after one year at Wesleyan University, at Exeter, N. H., and joined the New Hampshire Methodist Episcopal Conference on trial, being stationed at Dover in that state. In 1864 he went to Detroit and in 1866 to Brooklyn, N. Y. In 1881, he was elected to the Methodist Ecumenical Conference in London and also in that year was elected editor of the New York _Christian Advocate_, which position he has held to the present time. The degree of D. D. was conferred upon him by Wesleyan University in 1872 and LL. D. by Emory and Henry College, Virginia. As a traveler, Dr. Buckley is represented by his work on "The Midnight Sun and the Tsar and the Nihilist" being a book of "Adventures and Observations in Norway, Sweden and Russia". This book is full as we might expect of information communicated in the most entertaining manner, full of very graphic descriptions, original comments, spices of humor, with a clever analysis of the people and conditions of life around the author--all of which characteristics give us a feeling that we are making with him this tour of observation. In the chapters on "St. Petersburg" and "Holy Moscow", we see these qualities especially evidenced. Here is a short paragraph quite representative of the author, who is writing of the Cathedral of the Assumption, Moscow, an immense building in the Byzantine style of architecture, in which a service of the Greek church is going on: "The monks sang magnificently, but there was not a face among them that exhibited anything but the most profound indifference. Some of the young monks fixed their eyes upon the ladies who accompanied me from the hotel, and kept them there even while they were singing the prayers, which they appeared to repeat like parrots, without any internal consciousness or recognition of the meaning of the words, but in most melodious tones." Again, the author visits a Tartar Mosque where he and his party are told "with oriental courtesy, that they may be permitted to remain outside the door, looking in, while the service progresses: "Here," he says, "I was brought for the first time in direct contact with that extraordinary system of religion which, without an idol, an image, or a picture, holds one hundred and seventy million of the human race in absolute subjection, and whose power, after the lapse of twelve hundred years, is as great as at the beginning." Of the summoning of the people to prayers from the minaret, he writes: "Dr. J. H. Vincent for many years employed at Chatauqua the late A. O. Van Lennep, who went upon the summit of a house at evening time, dressed in the Turkish costume, and called the people to prayer. "I supposed when I heard him that he was over-doing the matter as respects the excruciating tones and variations of voice which he employed, or else he had an extraordinary qualification for making hideous sounds, whereby he out-Turked the Turks, and sometimes considered whether Dr. Vincent did not deserve to be expostulated with for allowing such frightful noises to clash with the ordinary sweet accords of Chatauqua. Worthy Mr. Van Lennep will never appear there again, but I am able to vindicate him from such unworthy suspicion as I cherished. He did his best to produce the worst sounds he could, but his worst was not bad enough to equal the reality. With his hands on his ears, the Mohammedan priest of the great mosque of Moscow emitted, for the space of seven minutes or thereabouts, a series of tones for which I could find no analogy in anything I had ever heard of the human voice. There seemed occasionally a resemblance to the smothered cries of a cat in an ash-hole; again to the mournful wail of a hound tied behind a barn; and again to the distant echo of a tin horn on a canal-boat in a section where the canal cuts between the mountains. The reader may think this extravagant, but it is not, and he will ascertain if ever he hears the like." Dr. Buckley's published writings are, besides his great work as editor of _The Christian Advocate_, in editorials and in many directions,--and besides the book we have already mentioned, "The Midnight Sun, the Tsar and the Nihilist"; "Oats versus Wild Oats"; "Christians and the Theatre"; "Supposed Miracles", and "Faith Healing, Christian Science, and Kindred Phenomena", published quite recently (in October, 1892). Among magazine articles, may be especially mentioned "Two Weeks in the Yosemite", and in pamphlet form have appeared some letters worthy of mention, about "A Hereditary Consumptive's Successful Battle for Life". [Illustration: PLAN OF FORT NONSENSE. FROM PEN AND INK SKETCH BY MAJOR J. P. FARLEY, U. S. A.] As a philanthropist, Dr. Buckley is widely interested in all questions concerning humanity, and he responds continually with his time and thought to the appeals made to him from one direction and another. Our own State Charities Aid Association of New Jersey owes much to Dr. Buckley for his warm and earnest co-operation in its early struggles in Morristown for existence, and in its work, since then. As an orator, all who have heard Dr. Buckley feel that he has what is called the magnetic power of controlling and carrying with him his audience, and a remarkable capacity for mastering widely different subjects. The beautiful spring day (April 27, 1888), will long be remembered, when the people of Morristown had the opportunity of hearing his eloquent address at the unveiling of the Soldiers Monument on Fort Nonsense. In Dr. Buckley's last book on "Faith Healing; Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena," published by the Century Company, quite lately, (October, 1892), the subjects of Astrology, Coincidences, Divinations, Dreams, Nightmares and Somnambulism, Presentiments, Visions, Apparitions and Witchcraft are treated. Papers have been contributed by him on these subjects at intervals for six years with reference to this book, but the contents of the latter are not identical, _i. e._ they have been improved and added to. From this we give the following extract: EXTRACT FROM "FAITH HEALING, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND KINDRED PHENOMENA." The relation of the Mind Cure movement to ordinary medical practice is important. It emphasizes what the most philosophical physicians of all schools have always deemed of the first importance, though many have neglected it. It teaches that medicine is but occasionally necessary. It hastens the time when patients of discrimination will rather pay more for advice how to live and for frank declarations that they do not need medicine, than for drugs. It promotes general reliance upon those processes which go on equally in health and disease. But these ethereal practitioners have no new force to offer; there is no causal connection between their cures and their theories. _What_ they believe has practically nothing to do with their success. If a new school were to arise claiming to heal diseases without drugs or hygiene or prayer, by the hypothetical odylic force invented by Baron Reichenbach, the effect would be the same, if the practice were the same. Recoveries as remarkable have been occurring through all the ages, as the results of mental states and nature's own powers. * * * * * The verdict of mankind excepting minds prone to vagaries on the border-land of insanity, will be that pronounced by Ecclesiasticus more than two thousand years ago: "THE LORD HATH CREATED MEDICINES OUT OF THE EARTH; AND HE THAT IS WISE WILL NOT ABHOR THEM. MY SON, IN THY SICKNESS BE NOT NEGLIGENT; BUT PRAY UNTO THE LORD AND HE WILL MAKE THEE WHOLE. LEAVE OFF FROM SIN AND ORDER THY HANDS ARIGHT, AND CLEANSE THY BREAST FROM ALL WICKEDNESS. THEN GIVE PLACE TO THE PHYSICIAN, FOR THE LORD HATH CREATED HIM; LET HIM NOT GO FROM THEE, FOR THOU HAST NEED OF HIM. THERE IS A TIME WHEN IN THEIR HANDS THERE IS GOOD SUCCESS. FOR THEY ALSO SHALL PRAY UNTO THE LORD, THAT HE WOULD PROSPER THAT WHICH THEY GIVE FOR EASE AND TO PROLONG LIFE." Rev. James M. Freeman, D. D. Dr. Freeman is the second of the trio of theologians and editors, whose homes are in Morristown. For the last twenty years, he has been associate editor of "Sunday School Books and Periodicals and of Tracts" of the Methodist Episcopal Church. His Biblical studies are well known. His "Hand-Book of Bible Manners and Customs" was compiled with great care after years of research and published in 1877. This "Hand-Book" has been invaluable to Bible students and in it a large amount of information is given in small space, and in an interesting and entertaining manner. Another important volume is "A Short History of the English Bible". Both these works are in the Morristown Library, presented by the author. Many years ago, Dr. Freeman published, under the name of Robin Ranger, some charming story-books "for the little ones", in sets of ten tiny volumes. This work has placed him already in our group of _Story-Writers_. Besides these, there are two Chautauqua Textbooks, viz., "The Book of Books" and "Manners and Customs of Bible Times", also "The Use of Illustration in Sunday School Teaching". The "Hand-Book of Bible Manners and Customs", in particular, and the "Short History of the English Bible" are books which one can not look into without desiring to own. In the former, the author says in his short but admirable preface: "Though the Bible is adapted to all nations, it is in many respects an Oriental book. It represents the modes of thought and the peculiar customs of a people who, in their habits, widely differ from us. One who lived among them for many years has graphically said: 'Modes, customs, usages, all that you can set down to the score of the national, the social, or the conventional, are precisely as different from yours as the east is different from the west. They sit when you stand; they lie when you sit; they do to the head what you do to the feet; they use fire when you use water; you shave the beard, they shave the head; you move the hat, they touch the breast; you use the lips in salutation, they touch the forehead and the cheek; your house looks outwards, their house looks inwards; you go _out_ to take a walk, they go _up_ to enjoy the fresh air; you drain your land, they sigh for water; you bring your daughters out, they keep their wives and daughters in; your ladies go barefaced through the streets, their ladies are always covered'. "The Oriental customs of to-day are, mainly, the same as those of ancient times. It is said by a recent writer that 'the Classical world has passed away. We must reproduce it if we wish to see it as it was.' While this fact must be remembered in the interpretation of some New Testament passages, it is nevertheless true that many ancient customs still exist in their primitive integrity. If a knowledge of Oriental customs is essential to a right understanding of numerous Scripture passages, it is a cause of rejoicing that these customs are so stereotyped in their character that we have but to visit the Bible lands of the present day to see the modes of life of patriarchal times." Therefore, the author undertakes and undertakes with remarkable success, to illustrate the Bible by an explanation of the Oriental customs to which it refers. Rev. Kinsley Twining, D. D., LL. D. Rev. Dr. Twining, up to 1879, devoted his time and attention entirely to the ministry and charge of two large city Congregational churches, one in Providence, R. I. While in the latter city, he published a book of "Hymns and Tunes", for his church there, which was acceptable and popular among the people, and contributed largely to develop the hearty congregational singing for which end it was compiled. While in this charge, he was for some time abroad, and mingled considerably in the literary life of Germany, and also in the musical life of that country. Hence, he is a fine theorist in music. Since 1879 he has been literary editor of _The Independent_, and during these years he has written enough valuable editorials and reviews to fill many books. Many of his lectures, addresses, essays and other writings have appeared in magazines and other publications, notably a charming description of an "Ascent of Monte Rosa" in the _American Journal of Science and Arts_, of May, 1862. We find in a book entitled "Boston Lectures, 1872", a chapter given to one on "The Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Rev. Kinsley Twining, Cambridge, Mass.", in which the argument is, as might be expected, keen and clear. One of his more recent published papers was read by him at one of the Literary Reunions at Mr. Bowen's in Brooklyn, N. Y., and attracted much attention. It has since been given in Morristown: subject, "The Wends, or a Queer People Surviving in Prussia". Dr. Twining has made a special study of Shakespeare and holds a high rank as a Shakesperian critic and scholar. With regard to editorial work, it may be said an editor has a maximum of influence, the minimum of recognition,--for nobody knows who does it. It is certain that powerful editorials sometimes turn the tide of public opinion or actually establish certain results which affect the progress of the world, and at least make a mark in the world's advance. Who, indeed, can compute or measure the power of the press at the present day? We choose for Dr. Twining, some paragraphs from his editorial which has already acquired some celebrity in _The Independent_ of Sept. 15, 1892, on John Greenleaf Whittier. The death of the poet occurred on the 7th of the same September and he had been one of the earliest and most regular contributors to that paper since 1851. FROM EDITORIAL ON JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. It has been said that every man of genius makes a class distinct by himself, out of relation and out of comparison with everybody else. At all events poets do, the first born in the progeny of genius; and of none of them is this truer than of the four great American poets, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. In what order of merit they stand in their great poetic square, the distinct individuality of genius bestowed on each makes it needless to inquire. They have been our lights for half a century, and now that they have taken their permanent place in the galaxy of song, will continue to shine there, to use the phrase which Whittier himself invented for Dr. Bowditch's sun-dial, as long as there is need of their "light above" in our "shade below." * * * * * Whittier is the ballad-master and legend singer of the American people. Had he known the South and the West as he knew New England, he would have sung their legends as he has sung those of New England. The meaning of all this is that he is the minstrel of our people. This he has been, and this he will remain. Whether it is in the solemn wrath of the great ballad, "Skipper Ireson's Ride," one of the greatest in modern literature, in the high patriotic strain of "Barbara Frietchie," in the pathos of "The Swan Song," of "Father Avery," "The Witch's Daughter," or in the grim humor of "The Double-Headed Snake of Newberry." "One in body and two in will," it matters little what the subject is, or from whence it comes, the poem has in it some reflection of the common humanity, and as such speaks and will speak to the hearts of men. It has been the fashion to write of Victor Hugo as the poet of democratic humanity. We shall not dispute his claim. There is a certain epic grandeur in his work which entitles him to a seat alone. But to those who believe the world is moving toward a democracy whose ideals are the realization of the Sermon on the Mount, whose essence is ethical, and whose laws are gentleness, usefulness and love, Greenleaf Whittier will be the true democratic poet whose heart beats most nearly with the pulses of the democratic age, and who best represents the principles which are to give it permanence. Rev. Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, D. D. The Rev. Dr. Cuyler should immediately follow the group of editors and theologians, as he has been a regular writer for the religious press, as well as for the secular, for many years. To the former he has contributed more than 3,000 articles, many of which have been re-published and translated into foreign languages. In reply to a request for certain information, Dr. Cuyler, in a letter dated from Brooklyn, January 13, 1890, and written "in a sick room, where he was laid up with the 'Grip'", a disease of the present day which we hope may become historic,--replies to the author of this book as follows: "Probably no American author has a _longer_ association with Morristown than I have; for my ancestors have laid in its church-yards for more than a century. "My great-great-grandfather, Rev. Dr. Timothy Johnes, preached in the 1st Presbyterian Church for 50 years and administered the Communion to General Washington. "My great-grandfather, Mr. Joseph Lewis, was a prominent citizen of Morristown and an active friend and counsellor of Washington. "My grandmother, Anna B. Lewis, was born in Morristown. "My mother, Louisa F. Morrell, was also born in Morristown (in 1802) in the old family "Lewis Mansion" in which Mr. William L. King now lives. "I was at school in Morristown in 1835 and it was my favorite place for visits for _many, many_ years. I have often preached or spoken there. "The man most familiar with my literary work is Dr. J. M. Buckley, the editor of the _Christian Advocate_--who now resides in Morristown." This letter was signed with his name, as "Pastor of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church." Less than a month later he announced to his astonished congregation, his intention of resigning his charge among them on the first Sabbath of the following April, when it would be exactly thirty years since he came to a small band of 140 members, which then composed his flock. At the close of his remarks on that occasion he said: "It only remains for me to say that after forty-four years of uninterrupted ministerial labors it is but reasonable to ask for some relief from a strain that may soon become too heavy for me to bear." During the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his pastorate, in 1885, he told his congregation that during that time he had preached over 2,300 discourses, had made over 1,000 addresses, officiated at about 600 marriages, baptized 800 children, received into the church 3,700 members, of whom about 1,600 were converts, and had lost but one Sunday for sickness. Probably few men are more widely known for their literary and oratorical powers and extended usefulness both in the pulpit and out of it. Few, if any, have accomplished more in the same number of years or made a wider circle of warm and earnest friends both at home and abroad. Among the latter is the Hon. Wm. E. Gladstone, and was, the late John Bright. In his sermons and addresses, the personality of Dr. Cuyler is so marked that to hear him once is to remember him always. In England he has been especially popular as a preacher and temperance advocate. The latter cause he has espoused most warmly during his entire life. Dr. Cuyler was born in the beautiful village of Aurora, N. Y., upon Cayuga Lake, of which his great-grandfather, General Benjamin Ledyard, was the founder. He was graduated at Princeton in 1841, and at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1846. Two years later, he was ordained into the Presbyterian Ministry, and was installed pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of Trenton, N. J., then of the Market St. Reformed Dutch Church of New York City, and in April 1860, of the Brooklyn Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. Among the author's books are the following, nearly all of which have been reprinted in London and have a very wide circulation in Great Britain. Five or six of them have been translated into Dutch and Swedish: "Stray Arrows", "The Cedar Christian", "The Empty Crib", a small book published many years ago after the death of one of his children and full of solace and consolation to the hearts of sorrowing parents; "Heart Life"; "Thought Hives"; "From the Nile to Norway"; "God's Light on Dark Clouds"; "Wayside Springs", and "Eight to the Point," of the "Spare Minute Series". Dr. Cuyler himself says that he considered his _chief_ literary work to have been the preparation of over 3,000 articles for the leading religious papers of America. There might be added to this the publication of a large number of short and popular tracts. Here again we find, as in several instances before recorded in this book, a man of long experience and good judgment placing in the highest rank of writings, useful to mankind, those done for the religious or secular newspapers. We give a short passage FROM, "GOD'S LIGHT ON DARK CLOUDS." There is only one practical remedy for this deadly sin of anxiety, and that is to _take short views_. Faith is content to live "from hand to mouth," enjoying each blessing from God as it comes. This perverse spirit of worry runs off and gathers some anticipated troubles and throws them into the cup of mercies and turns them to vinegar. A bereaved parent sits down by the new-made grave of a beloved child and sorrowfully says to herself, "Well, I have only one more left, and one of these days he may go off to live in a home of his own, or he may be taken away; and if he dies, my house will be desolate and my heart utterly broken." Now who gave that weeping mother permission to use that word "if"? Is not her trial sore enough now without overloading it with an imaginary trial? And if her strength breaks down, it will be simply because she is not satisfied with letting God afflict her; she tortures herself with imagined afflictions of her own. If she would but take a short view, she would see a living child yet spared to her, to be loved and enjoyed and lived for. Then, instead of having two sorrows, she would have one great possession to set over against a great loss; her duty to the living would be not only a relief to her anguish, but the best tribute she could pay to the departed. Rt. Rev. Wm. Ingraham Kip, D.D., LL.D. Bishop Kip, since 1853, Bishop of California, was called to old St. Peter's Church, Morristown, immediately after his taking orders in 1835. "The first time the service of the Protestant Episcopal Church was used in Morristown, so far as known," says our historian, "was in the Summer of 1812. At that time Bishop Hobart of New York was visiting Mr. Rogers at Morristown, and by invitation of the officers of the First Presbyterian Church, he officiated one Sunday in their church, preaching and using the Episcopal service." For two years, 1820 and '21, the service was held on Sundays, at the house of George P. McCulloch, and finally on Dec. 4th, 1828, the church building was consecrated which has stood until quite recently. Now a superb stone edifice covers the ground of the old church. In the ancestry of Bishop Kip we have a link with the far off story of France, for he is descended from Ruloff de Kype of the 16th Century, who was a native of Brittany and warmly espoused the part of the Guises in the French civil war between Protestants and Papists. After the downfall of his party, this Ruloff fled to the Low Countries; his son Ruloff became a Protestant and settled in Amsterdam and _his_ son Henry made one of the Company which organized in 1588 to explore a northeast passage to the Indies. He came with his family, to America in 1635, but returned to Holland leaving here his two sons Henry and Isaac. Henry was a member of the first popular assembly in New Netherlands and Isaac owned the property upon which now stands the City Hall Park of New York. In 1831, the young William Ingraham, was graduated at Yale College and after first studying law and then divinity was admitted to orders and at once became the third rector of St. Peter's, at Morristown, remaining from July 13th, 1835, until November of the following year. Columbia bestowed upon him in 1847, the degree of S. T. D. Between the rectorship of St. Peter's and the bishopric of California, he served as assistant at Grace Church, New York, and was rector of St. Paul's, at Albany. Bishop Kip has published a large number of books, many of which have gone through several editions. In addition he has written largely for the _Church Review_ and the _Churchman_ and several periodicals. Among his books are "The Unnoticed Things of Scripture", (1868); "The Early Jesuit Missions" (2 Vols., 6 editions, 1846); "Catacombs of Rome", (8 editions, 1853); "Double Witness of the Church", (27 editions, 1845); Lenten "Fast", (15 editions, 1845); the last two were published in both England and America as was also "Christmas Holydays in Rome", (1846). Besides these are "Early Conflicts of Christianity", (6 editions); "Church of the Apostles"; "Olden Times in New York"; "Early Days of My Episcopate", (1892). EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE OF THE "EARLY JESUIT MISSIONS." There is no page of our country's history more touching and romantic than that which records the labors and sufferings of the Jesuit Missionaries. In these western wilds they were the earliest pioneers of civilization and faith. The wild hunter or the adventurous traveler, who, penetrating the forests, came to new and strange tribes, often found that years before, the disciples of Loyola had preceded him in that wilderness. Traditions of the "Black-robes" still lingered among the Indians. On some moss-grown tree, they pointed out the traces of their work, and in wonder he deciphered, carved side by side on its trunk, the emblem of our salvation and the lilies of the Bourbons. Amid the snows of Hudson's Bay--among the woody islands and beautiful inlets of the St. Lawrence--by the council fires of the Hurons and the Algonquins--at the sources of the Mississippi, where first of the white men, their eyes looked upon the Falls of St. Anthony, and then traced down the course of the bounding river, as it rushed onward to earn its title of "Father of Waters"--on the vast prairies of Illinois and Missouri--among the blue hills which hem in the salubrious dwellings of the Cherokees--and in the thick canebrakes of Louisiana--everywhere were found the members of the Society of Jesus. Marquette, Joliet, Brebeuf, Jogues, Lallemand, Rasles and Marest,--are the names which the West should ever hold in remembrance. But it was only by suffering and trial that these early labours won their triumphs. Many of them too were men who had stood high in camps and courts, and could contrast their desolate state in the solitary wigwam with the refinement and affluence which had waited on their early years. But now, all these were gone. Home--the love of kindred--the golden ties of relationship--all were to be forgotten by these stern and high-wrought men, and they were often to go forth into the wilderness, without an adviser on their way, save their God. Through long and sorrowful years, they were obliged to "sow in tears" before they could "reap in joy." Rev. William Staunton, D. D. With this author, the fifth rector of old St. Peter's Church, in Morristown, we go back in association to the ancient city of Chester, England, where he was born and where his grandfather on his mother's side was a leading dissenting minister and the founder of Queen's Street Chapel, Chester. His father, an intellectual man and well read in Calvinistic theology, also affiliated with the Independents, but was often led by his fine musical taste to attend with his son the services of the Cathedral. It was in this Cathedral of Chester, which is noted for the beauty and majesty with which the Church's ritual is rendered,--that the boy acquired that love of music which placed him in after life in the front rank of church musicians. One who knew him well has said of him in this respect: "This knowledge of music was profound and comprehensive. He was not simply a musical critic or a composer of hymn tunes and chants, but he had followed out through all its intricacies the science of music. So well known was he for his learning and taste in this department that it was a common thing for professional musicians of distinction to go to him for advice and to submit their compositions to him, before publication. Much of his own music has been published. But his musical accomplishments are best attested by the work which he did as associate editor of Johnson's Encyclopedia." He was in particular, the musical editor of this work and wrote nearly all of the articles relating to music in it. He was also a prolific writer for church reviews and other periodicals. Among his publications in book form are: "A Dictionary of the Church", (1839); "An Ecclesiastical Dictionary", (1861); "The Catechist's Manual", a series of Sunday School instruction books; "Songs and Prayers"; "Book of Common Prayer"; "A Church Chant Book", and "Episodes of Clerical and Parochial Life". Dr. Staunton came with his father and the family, when fifteen years of age, to Pittsburg, Pa. He was closely associated with the Rev. Mr. Hopkins, afterward the Bishop of Vermont. His first ministerial charge was that of Zion Church, Palmyra, N. Y., and it was in 1840 he accepted the rectorship of St. Peter's Church, Morristown, which position he held for seven years. He then organized in Brooklyn, N. Y., a much needed parish, which he named St. Peter's after the parish he had just relinquished. "Dr. Staunton," says the present rector of St. Peter's, the Rev. Robert N. Merritt, D. D., who took up the work of the parish in 1853, and to whose untiring exertions, the parish and the people of Morristown are largely indebted for the erection of the massive and beautiful stone structure that stands on the site of the church of Dr. Staunton's time,--"Dr. Staunton was no ordinary man, though he never obtained the position in the church to which his abilities entitled him. Besides being above the average clergyman in theological attainments, he was a scientific musician, a good mechanic, well read in general literature, and so close an observer of the events of his time that much information was always to be gained from him. His retiring nature and great modesty kept him in the back ground." The following interesting reminiscence comes to us, in a letter, from one of the boys who was under his ministration when rector for seven years of old St. Peter's. "I remember", says this parishioner, "Dr. Staunton very distinctly and with much affection as well as regard and gratitude, for the training I had from him in the doctrines and ordinances of the church. He was for those days a very advanced churchman, being among the first to yield to the influence the Oxford movement was exercising and to adopt the advance it inaugurated in the ritual and service of the liturgy informing strictly however himself and teaching his people to recognize the authority of the rubrics. He maintained this, I think, till his death, and was ranked then as a conservative rather than a high churchman, though when he was here, the same attitude made him to be thought by some as almost dangerously ultra. "He was not eloquent nor what might be called an attractive preacher, but wrote well and accomplished a great deal as a careful and impressive teacher of sound doctrine and Christian morality. "Dr. Staunton was an accomplished scholar in scientific as well as ecclesiastical learning, was skilled as a draughtsman and designed, I remember, the screen of old St. Peter's when the chancel stood at the South street end; and it was wonderfully good and effective of its kind. He was also a trained musician, and at one time instructed a class of young ladies in thorough-bass, among them being the two Misses Wetmore, my eldest sister, and others, and, in addition to this, he made the choir while he was here, both in the music used and its efficiency, a vast improvement upon what it had been. He was a tall man, fully six feet, of a severe countenance and rather austere manner, leading him to be thought sometimes cold and unsympathetic, though really he was most kind and considerate, and in all respects a devoted and watchful pastor. He published, I think, a church dictionary later in life which is still a standard book and authority. "These are my impressions of Dr. Staunton received principally as a very young boy, though confirmed by an acquaintance continued till his death, and I retain the most sincere gratitude for the abiding faith in the sound doctrine of the Episcopal Church which he, after my mother, so trained me in that I have accepted them ever since as impregnable; and for this I am sure there are many others of his pupils and parishioners besides myself to 'call him blessed.'" Rev. Arthur Mitchell, D. D. Rev. Dr. Mitchell was the third pastor of the South Street Presbyterian Church, which was the fifth, says our historian, "in our galaxy of churches." The time of his ministration, during which the church was greatly enlarged, both internally and externally, was from 1861 to 1868. Dr. Mitchell is the son of Matthew and Susan Swain Mitchell, and was born in Hudson, N. Y. He was graduated at Williams College in 1853, was tutor in Lafayette College, Pa., for one year, and then traveled for a year in Europe and the East. Returning he entered the Union Theological Seminary of New York City and was graduated from there in 1859. In this year he accepted the charge of the Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Va., and in Oct. 1861, he became pastor of what was then called, the "Second Presbyterian Church" in Morristown. The first Presbyterian Church of Chicago, Ill., claimed him in 1868 and in 1880 the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1884, Dr. Mitchell became Secretary of the Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church to which position he had been called fifteen years before, but had felt constrained to decline. This important office, which from his intense and life-long interest in the great cause of Christian missions to the heathen world, he was remarkably qualified to fill, he has held to the present time. In all his ministrations, in each individual church which he has served, he has succeeded in imparting his own love of, and interest in, Foreign Missions and his position as Secretary of this department of the church organization has enabled him to stimulate the great congregations and masses of individuals throughout the denomination. Dr. Mitchell's eloquence in the pulpit and on the platform, is so well-known that it seems hardly worth while to refer to it. Mastering his subject completely as he does, he has the rare power of condensing clearly and giving out his thoughts in language and in tones of voice which hold and attract his audience to the end. He has published no books, only sermons and addresses in pamphlet form and innumerable articles in magazines and newspapers. To the great value of this sort of literary work, several of our distinguished authors have already testified. In the _Church at Home and Abroad_, we find the most exhaustive articles from Dr. Mitchell's pen, on the missions and conditions of the various countries of the earth which he has also recently visited in a trip around the world. These are all written from so large a standpoint that they are about as interesting to the general reader as to the specialist. In the publication, the "Concert of Prayer" many of these valuable papers are found and a considerable number of his addresses, articles, &c., are bound among those of other writers, in large volumes. In the next generation we find a writer also, in Dr. Mitchell's daughter, Alice, who does not desire mention for the reason that her writings are so fragmentary and scattered. Nevertheless, her literary work has been considerable and cannot be easily measured or described. One who knows her well, says: "Not many ladies are better read in missionary annals." In an article of hers, of great interest, published in the _Concert of Prayer for Church Work Abroad_, and entitled "The Martyrs of Mexico," we come upon the story of the Rev. John L. Stephens, previously mentioned in this book among "Travels", &c., and who, Miss Mitchell tells us, was one of the earliest missionaries of the Congregational church to Mexico. We have already mentioned that Mr. Matthew Mitchell, the father of our writer, lived in Morristown for many years and married for his second wife, Miss Margaret, the daughter of the good Doctor John Johnes, and the granddaughter of the good Pastor Johnes. We give a short passage from the opening of Dr. Mitchell's Memorial Sermon on James A. Garfield, delivered in the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday, Sept. 25, 1881, and published by a number of prominent men who requested the privilege: FROM THE "MEMORIAL SERMON" ON JAMES A. GARFIELD. We share, my friends, to-day, the greatest grief America has ever known. It is no exaggeration to say that no one stroke of Providence has ever spread throughout all our land such poignant and universal pain, or has been so widely felt as a shock and a sorrow in every portion of the earth. I am not using words without care. I do not forget those dreadful days of April, sixteen years ago, when the slow procession passed from State to State, bearing the remains of the beloved Lincoln to the tomb. But there was one whole section of our land, it will be remembered, which had never acknowledged him as their ruler, and had never viewed him alas! except as their foe. Innumerable noble hearts there discussed the crime that laid him low; but although they abhorred the assassin's crime, around his victim their sentiments of confidence and admiration and loyalty had never been gathered. I do not forget the horror which smote the nation when Hamilton fell, the universal pall of sorrow of which our fathers tell us,--the metropolis of the country draped in black, the vast and solemn cortège, which amidst weeping throngs, followed Hamilton through its chief avenue to the grave. And as one heart, the hearts of Americans mourned for Washington. There were friends of liberty who wept with them in every part of the world. But liberty itself had not then so many friends on earth as now. By one great nation Washington was held to have drawn a rebel sword. And against another, our earlier ally, he had unsheathed it and stood prepared for war. And even by the countrymen of Washington it could not be forgotten that he had nearly fulfilled the allotted years of man. His work was done. His years of war had won for his country the full liberty she sought. His eight glorious years of Presidential life had organized the Government, established its relations to foreign powers and made its bulwarks strong. At his death it was even said that he had "deliberately dispelled the enchantment of his own great name;" with wonderful unselfishness he himself placed the helm in other hands, looked on for a time at the prosperity which he had taught others to supply, and "convinced his country that she depended less on him than either her enemies or her friends believed." And then he died in the peaceful retirement of his home. It was the death of a venerated father whose work was done. Rev. Charles E. Knox, D. D. For six or eight months in the midst of the Rev. Arthur Mitchell's pastorate, a distinguished scholar of the Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Charles E. Knox, D. D., filled Dr. Mitchell's place as pastor of the South Street Church, Morristown, while the latter was absent in Europe and Palestine. This period was from September 1863 to May 1864. When Dr. Mitchell resigned in 1868, the present pastor, Rev. Dr. Erdman, was called at Dr. Knox's suggestion. From 1864 to 1873, Dr. Knox was pastor of the church at Bloomfield, N. J., and since that time has been President of the German Theological School of Newark, which is located in Bloomfield. Dr. Knox says, in writing of his sojourn in Morristown: "I had a happy time with the good South street people and have retained always the liveliest interest in all that belongs to them." "A Year with St. Paul" had just been published when the charge of this South Street Church was undertaken. It has since been translated into Arabic at Beirut, Syria. "It is in good part," says the author, "a compilation and condensation of Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul", (then in two large and expensive volumes), with some original matter. It has a chapter for every Sunday of the year. Dr. Knox began in Morristown a series of "Graduated Sunday School Text Books,"--Primary Year, Second Year, Third Year, Fourth Year and Senior Year. This was an introduction of the secular graded system into Sunday School Teaching. It introduced the Quarterly Review which has since been followed. "David the King," a life of David with section maps inserted in the page and a location of the Psalms in his life, was published later at Bloomfield. Rev. Albert Erdman, D. D. The Rev. Dr. Erdman is entitled to honorable mention among Morristown writers. He has been the faithful pastor of the South Street Presbyterian Church since May 1869, following the Rev. Arthur Mitchell, D. D. It was during his ministry that in 1877, the church edifice was totally consumed by fire, and the beautiful new building located on its site, in the late Byzantine style. It is said by one who knows and appreciates Dr. Erdman's work that "few men read more or digest better their reading." For several years, he has prepared "Notes on the International Sunday School Lessons", for a monthly periodical published in Toronto, Canada. A number of sermons have been published by request, among them the "Sermon on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the South Street Presbyterian Church". Addresses on "Prophetic and other Bible Studies" have been printed in Annual Reports of the Bible Conference at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and, besides these, many fugitive newspaper articles of value and importance. Dr. Erdman has been largely interested in the general welfare, and especially the philanthropies, of the town, outside of his immediate church, and by this public spirit, earnestly and fearlessly manifested, in many instances, he has no doubt greatly extended his sphere of influence. He has been a warm supporter of, and has given much time and personal attention to the establishment of the Morris County Charities Aid Association and of the State Association which followed, carefully studying the questions of pauper and criminal reform for which purpose this organization exists. In the Semi-Centennial Sermon we find the following remarkable record: EXTRACT FROM THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL SERMON ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHURCH'S ORGANIZATION. I must note the unique fact that the history of these fifty years of Church life is the history of uninterrupted prosperity. Even that which seemed at the time to be against us--the destruction by fire of the former house of worship--proved to be, as are all the Lord's afflictions, a blessing in disguise; for the history of the church since is that of continued and ever-increasing prosperity, if growing numbers and enlarged usefulness be criterion of success. A spirit of harmony and goodwill mark its whole course, and it is, therefore, with unmingled pleasure and gratitude to God, we may recall the past. No roots of bitterness and strife to be covered up, no rocks of offense to be carefully avoided! * * * * * How the memories of the past throng around us--the saintly lives of fathers and mothers, the godly service and earnest prayers of pastors and people, the fervent appeals from pulpit and teacher's chair,--surely it would seem there could be no valid reason why any should be still unsaved or unwilling to take up the duties of Christian service. Finally, as we here recall the story of the past and rejoice in the prosperity of the present, and while we look forward to still larger service and blessing in the days to come, let us, with a deep sense of our unworthiness and dependence, say, with the Psalmist: "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us; but unto Thy name be all glory." Rev. Joseph M. Flynn, R. D. The Roman Catholic Church in Morristown erected its first building in 1847. It was a small wooden structure, with seating capacity for about 300 people and is now used by the parish school. It was in 1871 that the first priest in full charge, Rev. James Sheeran, was stationed here, and at his death in 1881, the Rev. Joseph M. Flynn succeeded, who has continued in charge of the parish to the present time. He was named "Dean of the Catholics in Morris and Sussex Counties" about six years ago. This author has recently published a book, (Morristown, N. J., 1892), "The Story of a Parish" from the first chapter of which we quote. Also he has written some magazine articles and a brochure on "Lent and How to Spend it." He is now preparing for publication a volume of short sermons. "The Story of a Parish" is the story of the foundation and development of this parish of the Church of the Assumption, in Morristown. In the opening chapter, the author says: "We know that Raphael, Bramante, and Michel Angelo threw into St. Peter's the very heart and soul of their inspiration, to erect to the living God such a temple as the eye of man had never gazed upon. "But there are other monuments which thrill no less the beholder, and the names of their creators sleep in an impenetrable obscurity. The cross-crowned fane, lifting to the highest heaven the sign of man's redemption, may tell us neither of him whose genius conceived nor of the toilers whose strong arm and cunning eye, in the burning heats of Summer, or in the chilling blasts of Winter, unfolded to the wondering crowds who daily watched their labors, step by step, inch by inch, the beauties whose finished product Time has preserved to us in many a shire of Britain; by the glistening lakes and verdant vales of Erin; in sunny Italy, in fair France, and in the hallowed soil bathed by our own Potomac. To the humble laborer who dug the trenches, to the artist whose chisel carved foliage or cusp or capital, a share in our grateful memory is due." Rev. George Harris Chadwell. The group of people who originated the idea of forming a second Episcopal Church in Morristown, perfected their plans in 1852. The following year the church building was erected. The first rector, Rev. J. H. Tyng, assumed his duties in September, 1852. The Rev. W. G. Sumner accepted a call to the parish in 1870. As he is now Professor of Political Economy at Yale University--he will come, with his specialty, into a later group. In 1880, Rev. George H. Chadwell became rector of the parish, coming from Brooklyn where he had been assistant to the Rev. Charles Hall, D. D., rector of Trinity Church of that City. Mr. Chadwell courageously undertook the removal of the church edifice from the spot where it had stood since 1854, on the corner of Morris and Pine streets, to its present site on South street, on which occasion he delivered one of his important "Addresses" which was published and largely distributed. He lived to see his aim accomplished and not long after gave, in the church again, on what proved to be the last Sunday of his life, a sermon, which was also published under the title of "A Farewell Discourse." Mr. Chadwell also published a monthly paper during his rectorship, called _The Rector's Assistant_, and wrote in other directions. In the "Address on the Occasion of the Re-opening of the Edifice for Divine service," August 22, 1886, we find a reference to the interesting history of the land on which the building now stands, and its association with many of the old families of Morristown, as follows: "Originally the ground we are now occupying belonged to the first Presbyterian Church, which at that date constituted the only religious society in the town, and owned all the land on the east side of South street as far down as Pine street. This plot of ours formed a part of what was designated the parsonage lot. The first sale of it took place in November of 1795, the same year the white church on the Green was dedicated and opened for Divine worship. The consideration was one hundred and twenty pounds, money worth about $300 in the currency of the United States. The Trustees whose names appear in the deed are Silas Condict, Benjamin Lindsley, Jonathan Ford, John Mills, Richard Johnson, Jonathan Ogden and Benjamin Pierson--names which are still represented in our community. The purchaser was the Rev. James Richards. This gentleman was at the time the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, being the third in succession to that office. His ministry covered a period of fourteen years and was remarkably successful. * * * * * "On his departure from Morristown Dr. Richards sold the property we are now describing. The price realized was $4,000. From which I infer that there had been erected upon it the house which we propose to convert into a rectory. Otherwise I can not account for so great an increase in the value of the land as took place. * * * The new owner proved to be the Rev. Samuel Fisher, the successor of Dr Richards in the pastorate of the church. Mr. Fisher was the son of Jonathan Fisher, a native of this town. * * * In 1813, under his auspices, the Female Charitable Society of Morristown, our most venerable eleemosynary institution, was founded, Mr. Fisher's wife being elected to the honored position of its first President. * * * It was somewhere about this time that Mrs. Wetmore, the widow of a British officer, opened on this site a private school for girls." (Mrs. Wetmore was the mother of Mrs. James Colles who long lived, in summer, upon the large estate now opened to the city, in streets and avenues, and largely built upon. She was also the mother of Charles Wetmore, the artist who painted the picture of "Old Morristown," in 1815, now in possession of Hon. Augustus W. Cutler, to whose courtesy we are indebted for the privilege of having made from it the fine pen and ink sketch of Miss Suzy Howell, for the frontispiece of this book.) "From 1814 to 1829, our property passed through the hands successively of Israel Canfield, James Wood and Silas Condict. During this period, or rather a portion of it, one of New Jersey's most promising lawyers resided on this spot. I refer to Mr. William Miller, an older brother of our late United States Senator, the Hon. J. W. Miller. * * * A citizen of Morristown who was personally acquainted with him has lately written me: 'The noble character and the brilliant career of this young lawyer, which were cut short by his untimely death, are still remembered with lively interest by some of our oldest inhabitants.' "In 1829 the property again changed hands, the purchaser being Miss Mary Louisa Mann. Her father was the editor of _The Morris County Gazette_ afterwards known as _The Genius of Liberty_, and of _The Palladium of Liberty_, the first newspapers issued in Morristown. He also published in 1805 an edition of the Holy Scriptures, which gained considerable notoriety as 'The Armenian Bible,' from the error occurring in Heb. vi:4, 'For it is possible for those who have once been enlightened ... if they shall fall away to renew them again unto repentance.' Miss Mann, now Mrs. Lippincott, of Succasunna, together with her sister, Miss Sarah, put up the building which is to serve us hereafter as a Sunday School room and church parlor. It was erected to meet the wants of a female seminary established by them in 1822, and which had grown under their efficient management so popular that its advantages were sought by pupils from all quarters. Since the close of the school the buildings occupied by it have been used as a boarding house. As such their hospitality has been enjoyed by numbers whose names are familiar to us in connection with important features of our national existence, finance, war and art. I mention in particular the Belmonts, the Perrys, the Rogers, the Enningers. And here in the front parlor of this same boarding house in the summer of 1851, when it had been determined to found a new parish, the first meeting of its originators was held. 'In that room,' to quote the language of one present on the occasion, 'the infant Church was christened The Church of the Redeemer, and from that day it lived; very feebly at first, not a very strong child, but tenderly nurtured, always slowly gaining, until now, after thirty-four years, it promises to grow in strength and to have a powerful future.' Our immediate predecessor in the title to the land was Mr. George W. King, who acquired it in 1854 for the sum of $8,000." Of the character of the church, Rev. Mr. Chadwell says: "This Church then, I may observe, has always been conservative in its character. Those who founded it gave to it this tone. They were men opposed in mind and temperament to that mediaeval type of theology which had begun to prevail in their day, and which has since become popular in various quarters. They were out of sympathy with the movement which was then aiming, and which has since succeeded in undoing much the reforming divines of the sixteenth century accomplished. They were averse, for example, to everything that savors of sacerdotalism--to the doctrines which convert the ambassador of Christ into a sacrificing priest, the communion table into a veritable altar, and the eucharist into a sacrifice and constant miracle. Elaborate rites and ceremonies, in which some find a delight, and perhaps a help, were distasteful to them. They felt themselves unable to derive edification from these sources. On the other hand, they were in harmony with what may be denominated the protestant tendencies of our Communion. Of the name itself of protestant they had not learned to be ashamed. They believed in the principles of the great Reformation of three centuries ago. They did not judge its promoters deluded men, nor pronounce them to have 'died for a cause not worth dying for.' They honored them as God-enlightened, and venerated them as heroes and martyrs. The changes these effected in dogma and in ritual they regarded not as mistakes, but as advances in the right direction--from error towards truth. They looked to Christ as their only priest, to His cross as their only altar and to his death thereon as the only atonement for their sin. They loved simplicity of worship and cultivated it in their public devotions. In fine, they were content and best satisfied with that plain system of teaching and practice which the Prayer Book as we have it now seems most naturally to favor. At least this is the impression of these men which I have received from reading the record and memorials of themselves they have left behind. So when they organized this parish it was along these lines which I have indicated. And from its inception to the present moment it has retained, with perhaps some unessential modifications, the stamp they gave it." Rev. William M. Hughes, S. T. D. The Rev. Dr. Hughes, who succeeded the Rev. George H. Chadwell, in 1887, as rector of the Church of the Redeemer should have followed our little group--within this group--of editors and theologians, except that he has present charge of a parish, which they have not. He was officially on the editorial staff and in the editorial department of _The Churchman_ during 1887 and 1888, and has written for editorial and other departments both before and since. For _The Church Journal_ also, as well as other, and secular papers, he has written articles and editorials on various topics, from time to time. Dr. Hughes was born at Little Falls, New York, and losing both parents early in life, removed to Frankfort, Kentucky, among his mother's relatives. From boarding-school in Ohio, he entered Kenyon College, Class of '71. At the end of Freshman year he went to Hobart College and was graduated there at the head of his class in 1871. During 1871-'72, he studied in Berlin, Germany, and was graduated in 1875 from the General Theological Seminary, New York. The same year he became rector of St. John's Church, Buffalo, N. Y., one of the most important parishes of the diocese of Western New York. This charge he resigned in 1883, to accept a position of honor to which he had been unanimously elected, in Hobart College, Geneva, N. Y.,--namely, the Chaplaincy of the College and Professorship of "Philosophy and Christian Evidences," the latter department having been hitherto held by the President of the College. It was with great regret, that the people of Buffalo as well as the people of St. John's parish, parted with both Dr. and Mrs. Hughes, if we may judge from all that was expressed in the press on the occasion of their departure. "Here," says one writer, "they will be missed, not only by those with whom they were closely associated in church or neighborhood relationship, but more especially by the sick, the humble, the troubled, and the needy, for whose consolation and comfort they have so unselfishly labored, in many parts of the city, during the last seven years. A thousand blessings follow them." In 1887, Dr. Hughes became an associate editor of _The Churchman_ and Rector of the Church of the Redeemer, Morristown. He is a member of the Executive Council of the Church Temperance Society and Corresponding Secretary of the _University Board of Regents_ and originator of the scheme. Among Dr. Hughes' writings is an important brochure on Boys' Guilds, published under the auspices of the Church Temperance Society, and entitled "Hints for the Formation of Bands of Young Crusaders." In this he discusses "one of the most practical questions before the Church, and the one which the busy rector often asks in sheer bewilderment, if not despair: 'What shall be done with the boys of the Church, from the ages of ten to seventeen?'" He also offers the solution in a plan of organization for one, among many works, which may interest and occupy them, thus training them as the boys of the Church to become the men of the Church. In the _Magazine of Christian Literature_ for September 1892, we find the leading article to be from the pen of Dr. Hughes, on "The Convergence of Darwinism and the Bible." "The conclusions here reached," the author tells us, "have been subjected, during the past eight years, to efficient criticism and repeated examinations." It is proposed that these articles shall continue and finally appear in book form. Of this article, a prominent clergyman of the Church, whose opinion weighs for much, and whose words we have asked the privilege of giving, writes Rev. Dr. Hughes, as follows: "I am deeply moved in recognizing the penetration, the sublimity and sweetness of your essay in the September number of the _Magazine of Christian Literature_. I trust No. 1. is prophetic of future numbers. "You have made a great discovery and you disclose it with great power and beauty. How wonderful is this converging witness of Nature and the Spirit, Faith and Science to the approaching Day of the Son of Man. No question, the Day is swiftly coming. Its light is on the hills. The many signs of His approach and His appearing seem to fill the air and make the spirit tremble with holy fear and gladness. The Lord hasten the Day. Let us prepare ourselves with joy to greet Him. Meantime, we may greet one another in the full assurance of faith, as I you, brother, by these presents." * * * * * From a Paper in _The Magazine of Christian Literature_ of September 1892, on-- "THE CONVERGENCE OF DARWINISM AND THE BIBLE CONCERNING MAN AND THE SUPREME BEING." Science and religion are in reality dealing with the same phenomena. Immense human and personal interests are involved in them. Neither can be discussed in the absolutely "dry light" of sheer intellectuality. Consequences of immense import to the individual character, to the social well-being, and to eternal hopes flow directly from each. If, by scientific methods, which are plainly sound, conclusions are reached that are directly at variance with the religious faith of the vast majority, both a social and an intellectual as well as an ethical revolution is threatening. Or if by religious methods traditions are established which deny room to the conclusions of progressive human thought, religion inevitably invites scepticism, the casting off of all traditions, and the unfortunate disclaim of that which is forever true in faith. There are not a few of us to whom our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is dearer far than the most acute thinker in the domain of human speculation or the profoundest student of the world as it is. If it come to an attack or a logical denial of that which He is and teaches, we do not hesitate to make a personal matter of it. If Darwinism, _e. g._, as a system of ultimate postulates demands that we yield up the Lord of Life to be crucified afresh by the powers of the world, Darwinism, as such, will get no quarter. Getting no quarter, it will give none, and it becomes an internecine strife that knows no truce and admits no peace until the one or the other lies dead on the field of contest. But if, as a matter of fact, such a conflict is really illogical, hasty, and essentially inimical to both modern science, and to the Christian faith, then much is gained not only for peace, but still more for truth. It is the direct object of this article to demonstrate, so far as demonstration is possible, that the theory of Darwin, instead of antagonizing, tends irresistibly to affirm the most fundamental truths of the Bible as commonly held by the so-called orthodox Christian world. Nay, more, not only to affirm, but to give them greater power. PUBLIC SPEAKERS AND LAWYERS. At this point, we must confess to a sensation of being overwhelmed with an embarrassment of riches, for what shall we do with the distinguished men who follow, and bring our little book within its covers? That we may have no more continuous extracts from their works, reluctantly we find ourselves compelled to realize. Hon. Jacob W. Miller. We are indebted to Edward Q. Keasbey, Esq., grandson of Mr. Miller, for the facts and data of the following brief sketch. The Hon. Jacob W. Miller was born in November, 1800, in German Valley, Morris County, N. J. He studied law in Morristown with his brother, William W. Miller from 1818 to 1823, when he was licensed to practice as attorney. He was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court as counsellor in 1826 and in 1837 he was called to the degree of Sergeant at Law and he was one of the last to whom the degree was given. He had a large practice in Morristown and was one of the leading advocates at the circuit in Sussex and Warren as well as Morris Counties. Mr. Elmer in his reminiscences says: "He was distinguished not only as a fervent and impressive speaker, but for patient industry, faithfulness and tact. He was distinguished also for that sound common sense which is above all other sense, and was, by its exhibition in public and private, a man of great personal influence." In 1838 he was elected a member of the Council, as the State Senate was then called, and in 1840, he was elected by the Whig party to the Senate of the United States. He was elected again in 1846, and remained in the Senate until 1852. He did not speak very often, but when he spoke it was after a careful study of the subject and his words carried the greater weight. He spoke with wisdom and eloquence. A large number of these speeches are published in scattered pamphlets or in volumes among others. They have never been collected. One of the earliest of these important speeches was on the resolutions of the day in favor of a protective tariff. On May 23, 1844, Mr. Miller delivered a speech against the treaty for annexing Texas to the United States. The objections to the treaty as stated by him, are of considerable interest in the present day. He opposed the annexation on the ground that it was using the National Government to give an advantage to the Slave States. "Slavery," he said was "a matter to be regulated and controlled by the States, and neither to be interfered with nor extended by the National Government. New Jersey had abolished slavery herself and did not ask any territory into which to send her slaves." On Feb'y 21, 1850, he spoke upon the "Proposition to Compromise the Slavery Question" and in favor of the admission of California into the Union. Among others of his speeches, were those "On the Exploration of the Interior of Africa and in favor of the Independence of Liberia", delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 1853; "In Defence of the American Doctrine of Non-Intervention", delivered in the Senate of the U. S. Feb. 26, 1852; "On the Mexican War and the Mode of Bringing it to a Speedy and Favorable Conclusion", Feb. 2, 1847; "On the Ten Regiments Bill", Feb. 8, 1848, against the prosecution of the Mexican War. Mr. Miller worked and spoke earnestly in favor of "Establishing and Encouraging an American Line of Steamers". On April 22, 1852, he delivered a carefully prepared speech in favor of sustaining the Collins line of Mail Steamers, and advocated the policy of a subsidy for carrying the mails, which was successful then and has now again been adopted, already resulting in the restoration of the American flag to the transatlantic steamers. Besides these speeches in the Senate, Mr. Miller delivered a good many addresses and orations. Among these was an oration delivered in Morristown on the Fourth of July, 1851. Even then he foreboded the attempt to break up the Union and, speaking of Secession as rebellion, he maintained the power of the Nation under the Constitution to defend the Union. Several addresses were delivered before historical societies and some in the direction of the agricultural interests of the country. Before the New Jersey Historical Society in Trenton, he spoke of "The Iron State, Its Natural Position, Power and Wealth", Jan. 19, 1854. Before the Bristol Agricultural Society at New Bedford, Mass., Sept. 28, 1854, he spoke on "American Agriculture; its Development and Influence at Home and Abroad". Hon. William Burnet Kinney. Mr. Kinney, whose wife, Elizabeth C. Kinney and whose grandson, Alexander Nelson Easton, have already been represented among our poets, may be claimed by Morristown, for his associations of boyhood and of many years in later life. A man of unusual culture, no one who knew him could forget the charm of his courtly manners and delightful conversation. He founded _The Newark Daily Advertiser_, in 1833. It was then the only daily newspaper in the State, and uniting with it _The Sentinel of Freedom_, a long established weekly paper, he gave to the journal a tone so high that it was said of him, "his literary criticisms, contained in it, had more influence upon the opinions of literary men than those of any other journalist of the time." He was fortunate in having an accomplished son, Thomas T. Kinney, Esq., of Newark, N. J., to follow in his footsteps and continue the editorial work he had begun in this leading New Jersey paper. From Mr. Thomas T. Kinney we have a few words of reminiscence written in reply to the question of a friend as to what his father's early associations with Morristown might have been. "My father," he says, "was born at Speedwell, Morris County (in the edge of Morristown). I think it was in the house afterwards owned and occupied by the late Judge Vail, and the same in which his son Alfred lived. He invented the telegraph alphabet of dots and lines, which made Morse's system practicable, and it is still used. "Speedwell is on a stream upon which there were mill-sites, owned and worked by my father's ancestry and there is a tradition in the family that his uncle in trying to save a mill during a freshet lost his life and the body was afterwards found through a dream by another member of the family. The lake at Speedwell was a picturesque spot and Sully, the artist, painted his great picture of the 'Lady of the Lake' there, the subject being Lucretia Parsons, a beautiful girl whose family came from the West Indies and settled in the neighborhood. Lucretia married a Mr. Charles King who lived at the Park House in Newark and had the original sketch from which Sully painted the head in the picture. My father was intimate in the family and I think that some of his ancestry rest in the burial ground of the old Presbyterian Church at Morristown,--from all of which we may infer that many of his youthful days were passed there." Mr. Kinney studied under Mr. Whelpley, author of "The Triangle", and subsequently studied under Joseph C. Hornblower, of Newark. In 1820 he began his editorial life in Newark, which he continued with slight interruption until his appointment in 1851, as United States Minister to Sardinia. "In this position of honor," it is said, "he represented his country with rare ability." With Count Cavour and other men of eminence in Sardinia, he discussed the movement for the unification of Italy. For important services rendered to Great Britain, Lord Palmerston sent him a special despatch of acknowledgment and by his own foresight, judgment and prompt action in the case of the exiled Kossuth, he saved the United States from enlisting in a foreign complication. During his life abroad, at the expiration of his term of office as Minister to Sardinia, while residing in Florence, Mr. Kinney became deeply interested in the romantic history of the Medici family. He began a historical work on this subject, to be entitled, "The History of Tuscany", which promised to be of great importance, but although carried far on to completion, it was not finished when his life ended. In Florence Mr. and Mrs. Kinney were constantly in the society of the Brownings, the Trollopes and others of literary distinction. Mr. Kinney, besides his editorial writing, delivered, by request, a number of important orations which were published. The last of these, "On the Bi-Centennial of the Settlement of Newark", and delivered on the occasion of that celebration, we find in a volume published in 1866, entitled "Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society". Hon. Theodore F. Randolph Theodore F. Randolph was born in New Brunswick June 24, 1826. His father, James F. Randolph, for thirty-six years publisher and editor of _The Fredonian_, was of Revolutionary stock, belonging to the Virginia family, and for eight years represented the Whig Party in Congress. The son received a liberal education and was admitted to the bar in 1848. He frequently contributed articles to his father's paper when still a youth. In 1850 he took up his residence in Hudson County, where he resided twelve years and until he removed to Morristown. In 1852 he married a daughter of Hon. W. B. Coleman, of Kentucky, and a granddaughter of Chief Justice Marshall. In 1860 he with others of the American party formed a coalition with the Democrats to whom he ever after adhered. In 1861 he was elected to the State Senate for unexpired term and in the following year he was re-elected and served till 1865. In 1867, he was made President of the Morris and Essex Railroad and continued to act as such until the lease was made to the Delaware and Lackawanna Company. In 1868, he was elected Governor of the State and proved a most able and independent Chief Magistrate. In January, 1875, he was elected to the United States Senate in which he served a full term of six years. In 1873 he was one of the four who formed and carried out the design of making the Washington Headquarters "a historic place". His sudden death on the seventh day of November, 1883, shocked the whole community in whose affections he filled so large a place. Gov. Randolph was a man of most genial manner, honorable in all his business transactions and most liberal-minded and fearless as a legislator. Says one who knew him intimately: "He filled well all the duties to which his fellow-citizens called him." But it is as a writer that his name appears here. His messages to the Legislature while Governor and his speeches in the United States Senate are known of all and bear the impress of his character. These are scattered through numerous public documents and have never yet been collected in book form. His many contributions to the press were mostly political. In 1871, he pronounced an oration at the dedication of the Soldiers' Monument on our public square, which was published in our County papers, and on July 5, 1875, at the celebration of the National holiday at Headquarters, he made the eloquent address, which is the best specimen of his skill. This address is given, entire, in Hon. Edmund D. Halsey's "History of the Washington Association of New Jersey". Hon. Edward W. Whelpley. Chief Justice Whelpley, by the high order of his judicial qualities rose rapidly from the Bar to the Bench. He was the only son of Dr. William A. Whelpley, a native of New England and a practicing physician in Morristown. Dr. Whelpley was a cousin of the Rev. Samuel Whelpley who wrote "The Triangle". The mother of Judge Whelpley was a daughter of General John Dodd of Bloomfield, N. J., and a sister of the distinguished Amzi Dodd, Prosecutor of Morris County. He was graduated, at Princeton, with distinction, at the early age of sixteen; studied law with his uncle, Amzi Dodd and began its practice in Newark, N. J. In 1841 he removed to Morristown and became a partner of the late Hon. J. W. Miller. He was first appointed to the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and in a few years became Chief Justice. The late Attorney-General Frelinghuysen said of him: "Chief Justice Whelpley's most marked attributes of character were intellectual. The vigorous thinking powers of his mother's family were clearly manifest in him. No one could have known his uncle, Amzi Dodd, without being struck with the marked resemblance between them. The Chief Justice was well read in his profession, familiar with books, and yet he was a thinker rather than a servile follower of precedent. He was a first class lawyer. He sought out and founded himself on principles. He did not stick to the mere bark of a subject. He had confidence in his conclusions and he had a right to have it, for they logically rested upon fundamental truths. But while his intellectual characteristics were most marked, he had admirable moral traits. He felt the responsibilities of life and met them. He was no trifler. He had integrity, which, at the bar and on the bench, was beyond all suspicion". And Courtlandt Parker, his intimate and life-long friend said of him: "Intellectually, his qualities were rare. He was made for a Judge. Judicial position was his great aim and desire, and when he attained it, his whole mind was devoted to its duties; they were enjoyment to him; he felt his strength, and was determined not merely to be a judge, but such a judge as would honor his exaltation, and exercise eminently that high usefulness which belongs to that office". Chief Justice Whelpley may be justly ranked among important writers of the legal profession. His legal opinions found in the Law Reports are characterized by strength, independence and knowledge of the principles of law. Hon. Jacob Vanatta. In a city so honored in the number of its distinguished legal minds, it need not be a surprise to find such a man as Jacob Vanatta, but of only a few can it be said as was truly remarked of him: "His practice grew until, at the time of his death, it was probably the largest in the State. His reputation advanced with his practice, and for years he stood at the head of the New Jersey Bar, as an able, faithful, conscientious and untiring advocate and counsel. He may be truly called one of the greatest of corporation lawyers. He was for years the regular Counsel of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company, of the Central Railroad Company, and more or less of many other corporations, and his engagements have carried him frequently before the highest Courts of New York, Pennsylvania and of the United States Supreme Court". The Rev. Rufus S. Green, D. D., said, in his beautiful funeral discourse: "Mr. Vanatta died at the age of fifty-four--an old man worn out by overwork". "Be warned", he continues, "by the sad example of him whom to-day you sincerely mourn of an exhausted brain and prematurely enfeebled body. Take needed rest, cessation from labor, and frequent holidays". The character of Mr. Vanatta's talent was wholly different from that of Judge Whelpley. The one rose brilliantly and suddenly, driven out by the force of an inborn genius, the other attained to what he was through untiring industry and plodding labor. "More than any man I have ever known, from his clerkship to his death", says Mr. Theodore Little, into whose office Mr. Vanatta entered a student in the year 1845, "he seemed to have engraved on his very heart the motto, '_Perseverantia vincit omnia_,' and in that sign he conquered and achieved his success". Mr. Vanatta's published writings are mostly articles on political questions and many speeches and addresses, which were often reprinted. One of these in particular, made a profound impression. It was delivered at Rahway, when our civil war was threatening, and contained a strong argument and appeal for the Union. Hon. George T. Werts. Our present Governor of New Jersey, Hon. George T. Werts, was born at Hackettstown, N. J., March 24th, 1846, and was admitted to the bar in 1867. He was Recorder of Morristown from May 1883 to 1885, and was elected Mayor in May 1886, again in 1888 and in 1890. During the session of the State Senate in 1889, he served as President of the Senate, and was re-elected Senator in the same year. During his time as Senator, he served on many of the most important Committees and the new Ballot Reform Law and the new License Law were both drafted by him; laws which embrace, perhaps, the most radical change of any recently enacted. While Mayor of Morristown some of the most important ordinances of the city were of his drafting; indeed while Mayor, he paid particular attention to every ordinance drafted. Early in 1892 he was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, resigning the offices of State Senator and Mayor of Morristown to accept this honor, and he resigned the position of Judge to accept that of Governor, to which office he was elected in November, 1892. Many speeches and addresses of Governor Werts have been published in the metropolitan and State papers, and in pamphlet form. Several are scattered through large volumes containing the speeches and addresses of others. These are mostly political, but some are on other subjects, and have been delivered before juries and at reunions, in the Senate, and on other occasions. Among these published papers are also opinions and decisions while Judge of the Supreme Court. Joseph Fitz Randolph. Mr. Randolph has issued a valuable work, known to us as "Jarman on Wills", 1881 and 1882, being the fifth American edition by Mr. Randolph and Mr. William Talcott. This work adds a third volume to a famous two-volume English book. In 1888, was issued "Randolph on Commercial Paper", which work is of three volumes and contains 3,300 pages on bills, notes, &c., and is considered by the legal profession to be quite exhaustive of the subject. "These", says the author, "are legal monsters into which lawyers dig and delve and which settle knotty questions no doubt, but which probably will not be thoroughly investigated by women, until Fashion or Famine shall drive them into the legal profession". Again we may quote the author's words, when he says in his usual happy vein of humor, about all his important legal productions, that "they are a necessary nuisance to the maker's friends and the unwilling buyers, that there is no end of making many such, and that they might be written down in line, on a heavy page with some of his brother writers on other abstruse subjects and set in a minor key". Edward Q. Keasbey. In one of the large New York dailies of August 1892, we read the following: "Mr. Keasbey, the well known New Jersey lawyer, has some hundred pages on 'Electric Wires in Streets and Highways,' a new subject of growing importance." This refers to a law book published by Mr. Keasbey entitled "The Law of Electric Wires in streets and Highways", Callaghan and Co., Chicago. Mr. Keasbey has also edited _The New Jersey Law Journal_ since 1879 and _The Hospital Review_ since 1888. SCIENTISTS. Samuel Finley Breese Morse, LL. D. Nothing could be more romantic than the story of the Telegraph, the practical application of which began in Morristown, for it is morally certain that without the enthusiastic confidence in its success generously manifested by Alfred Vail, the young inventor, and his father Judge Stephen Vail, who freely contributed of his means to the experiments of Professor Morse, this great gift to the world would have been indefinitely delayed. [Illustration: SPEEDWELL IRON WORKS, AS REPRESENTED ON AN ANCIENT INVOICE.] Morse was poor. He had exhausted his means by the necessary time and thought given to the development of his conception, when the value of this work was realized by these two men. It was as an artist, that Morse went first to Speedwell, on October 29, 1837, to observe the progress of his new machinery which was being prepared there at the Speedwell Iron Works belonging to Judge Vail, by Alfred Vail and his assistant, William Baxter. Morse had accepted a commission, doubtless given him as a means of relieving his pecuniary stress, to paint the portraits of several members of Judge Vail's household. It will be remembered, that besides his great invention, Professor Morse was an artist of considerable reputation, as well as an author. In his youth, it is said, he was more strongly marked by his fondness for art than for science. He was a pupil of Washington Allston, a member of the Royal Academy, and studied with Benjamin West. He painted the portraits of many distinguished men, among them the then President of the United States, James Monroe, for the city of Charleston; and, later, Fitz Greene Halleck and Chancellor Kent, now in the Astor Library, and the full length portrait of Lafayette for the city of New York. He was one of the founders and was first President of the National Academy of Design, and it was on his return from the pursuit of his renewed study of art abroad that he met with the remarkable experience which turned his attention from art to invention and gave him his life work. In a letter written to Alfred Vail by Professor Morse, and given in Mr. Vail's book on "The American Electro-Magnetic Telegraph", (page 153), we find the following account: "In 1826, the lectures before the New York Atheneum, of Dr. J. F. Dana, who was my particular friend, gave to me the first knowledge ever possessed of electro magnetism, and some of the properties of the electro magnet; a knowledge which I made available in 1832, as the basis of my own plan of an electro telegraph. I claim to be the original suggestor and inventor of the electric magnetic telegraph, on the 19th of October, 1832, on board the packet ship Sully, on my voyage from France to the United States and, consequently, the inventor of the first really _practicable telegraph on the electric principle_. The plan then conceived and drawn out in all its essential characteristics, is the one now in successful operation." Professor Morse had more honors and medals than perhaps any American living. He belonged to a distinguished literary family. His two brothers founded _The New York Observer_ in 1823. This is now the oldest weekly in New York and the oldest religious paper in the State. As an author, he wielded the pen of a ready writer. He not only published controversial pamphlets concerning the telegraph, but contributed articles and poems to many magazines and edited the works of Lucretia Maria Davidson, accompanying them by a personal memoir. He published in 1835, a book entitled, "Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States; Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws, by an American". Later were published "Confessions of a French Catholic Priest, to which are added Warnings to the People of the United States, by the Same Author", (edited and published with an introduction, 1837), and "Our Liberties Defended, the Question Discussed, is the Protestant or Papal System most favorable to Civil and Religious Liberty". Alfred Vail. To Alfred Vail belongs a place of honor, as the author of a valuable book on "The American Electro-Magnetic Telegraph", and a place of honor, also, as having been the man to perceive, at a critical moment, the importance to the world of the great invention of Professor Morse. He was among the spectators who witnessed the first operation of the electro-magnetic telegraph at the New York University and saw then, for the first time, the apparatus. Of this occasion he writes as follows: "I was struck with the rude machine, containing, as I believed, the germ of what was destined to produce great changes in the condition and relations of mankind." Again, he says, "I rejoiced to carry out the plans of Professor Morse. I promised him assistance, provided he would admit me to a share of the invention,--to which proposition he assented. I returned to my rooms, locked my door, threw myself upon the bed and gave myself up to the reflections upon the mighty results which were certain to follow the introduction of this new agent in serving the wants of the world". With this intense conviction, young Vail communicated his enthusiasm to his father, Judge Stephen Vail, who owned the Speedwell Iron Works and who generously supplied the means by which the plans for the electric telegraph were put into successful operation. It is an interesting fact that these same Speedwell Iron Works are variously connected with the history of the country, for "here was forged the shaft of the _Savannah_, the first steamship that crossed the Atlantic and here were manufactured the tires, axles and cranks of the first American locomotives." In _The Century_ for April 1888, is a most interesting article, entitled "The American Inventors of the Telegraph, with Special Reference to the Services of Alfred Vail". This is exhaustive of the subject, was written by Franklin Leonard Pope, and was supervised by Mrs. Alfred Vail, as she tells us, and the statements fortified by documents, correspondence and designs. To _The Century_ editors and to Mr. James Cummings Vail, of Morris Plains, son of Alfred Vail, we are indebted for the use of the plate of the Speedwell Iron Works, redrawn from an ancient invoice, the age of which is not known. The illustration of the "Factory" in which the first successful trial and, afterwards, the first public exhibition, of the electric telegraph took place, is from a photograph of the building as it stands at the present day, on the lot in which stands the homestead house, now occupied by Mrs. Lidgerwood. "I have always understood", says Mr. J. C. Vail, (Jan'y 5, 1893), "that the room in which my father and Baxter (his young assistant) worked and called the 'work shop', was in an old stone building within the Iron Works enclosure, between the bridge and Morristown and is still standing, and is the only stone building within that enclosure." Of these buildings and associations, Mrs. John H. Lidgerwood, the granddaughter of Judge Vail, now living on the place, at Speedwell, writes as follows, Dec. 12, 1892: "My grandfather makes but three entries in his diary: "'1838, January 6th. Dr. Gale came this morning. They (Prof. Morse, Alfred Vail, and the Dr.) have worked the Tellegraph in the Factory this evening for the first time.' "'10th. Mr. Morse and Alfred are working and showing the Tellegraph.' "'11th. A hundred came to see the Tellegraph work.' "The old house", continues Mrs. Lidgerwood, "in which my grandfather then lived, still remains near the foot of the hill nearest the town. The interior has been entirely changed and I never knew the room occupied by Professor Morse. "The shop, in which the machine was constructed, and which was called the 'work shop', has also been rebuilt. Its four walls are all that are left of the original building. The floor of that room was taken away to make a one story building and the windows were put in the roof. It is now entirely vacant and stands on the side of the dam opposite the saw mill, the gable end of the old shop facing the road. One end of the foundation was partly torn away by the freshet that destroyed the old bridge. The experiments were made in a building called 'The Factory', which is at the foot of our lawn. It was built for a Cotton Factory, but only used for making buttons, owing, I believe, to some fault in its construction. "My grandfather has told me frequently that the machine was placed on the first floor, and about three miles of copper wire, insulated by being wound with cotton yarn, was wound around the walls of the second story. There are some hooks still in the side walls but I do not know if they are the same. I have still a small portion of the original wire used in the experiments. I do not know the age of any of these buildings. The works were probably here long before the Revolution. I have heard my grandfather say there was a forge here at that time." The machine used on the occasion to which Judge Vail refers in his diary, and on which he himself had sent the first message of all, "a patient waiter is no loser," is now loaned by the family to the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D. C. From the time the first telegraphic message was sent by Alfred Vail from the "Factory" at Speedwell and received by Professor Morse two miles away, and the next experiment when Morse and Vail operated with complete success through ten miles of space,--to the final triumph at Washington, many and great were the perils and moments of anguish through which the inventors passed. It was on the 24th of May, 1844, when the supreme test of the telegraph was made at Washington and the message was sent to Mr. Vail in Baltimore, in the words selected by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth and taken from Numbers xxiii: 23, "What hath God wrought." During these years Alfred Vail, it is claimed, had "not only become a full partner in the ownership of the invention, but had supplied the entire resources and facilities for obtaining patents and for constructing the apparatus for exhibition at Washington; and more than this, he had introduced essential improvements not only in the mechanism, but in the fundamental principles of the telegraph." Vail felt that Morse had not acknowledged, as he expected, his (Vail's) part in the invention or fully recognized his rights of partnership. Of this, the Hon. Amos Kendall, the friend and associate of both, has said: "If justice is done, the name of Alfred Vail will forever stand associated with that of Samuel F. B. Morse in the history and introduction into public use of the electro-magnetic telegraph." Mr. Vail's book, which has place in most of the prominent libraries of Europe and America, was published in 1845 and is entitled "The American Electro-Magnetic Telegraph with the Reports of Congress and a description of all Telegraphs known, employing Electricity or Galvinism". It is illustrated by eighty-one wood engravings. [Illustration: FACTORY AT SPEEDWELL. IN WHICH THE FIRST EXHIBITION OF THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH TOOK PLACE.] William Graham Sumner, LL. D. Professor Sumner is a New Jersey man, born at Paterson. He inherited from his father, Thomas Sumner, who came to this country from England in 1836, several important qualities which those who know the son will recognize. Thomas Sumner, we are told, was a man of the strictest integrity, of indefatigable industry, of sturdy common sense and possessing the courage of his convictions. Two of Professor Sumner's early teachers in Hartford, one of them Mr. S. M. Capron, in the classical department, had also great influence upon his character. He was graduated from Yale College in 1863. In the summer of that year, he went abroad, studied French and Hebrew in Geneva, after which he spent two years at the University of Göttingen, in the study of ancient languages, history, especially church history, and biblical science. Here, he tells us, he was "taught rigorous and pitiless methods of investigation and deduction. Their analysis was their strong point. Their negative attitude toward the poetic element, their indifference to sentiment, even religious sentiment, was a fault, seeing that they studied the Bible as a religious book and not for philology and history only; but their method of study was nobly scientific, and was worthy to rank, both for its results and its discipline, with the best of the natural science methods." Mr. Sumner went to Oxford in 1866, with the intention and desire of reading English literature on the same subjects which he had pursued at Göttingen. "I expected," he says, "to find it rich and independent. I found that it consisted of second-hand adaptation of what I had just been studying." Returning to this country, while tutor in Yale College, in 1866, Mr. Sumner published a translation of Lange's "Commentary on Second Kings". In 1867, he was ordained deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church, and two years later, he received full ordination in New York and became assistant to Rev. Dr. Washburn at Calvary Church, New York, under whom he was made editor of a broad church paper. In September, 1870, he became rector of the Church of the Redeemer at Morristown, N. J., from which event he claims our attention as an author. With regard to the course of his young ministry in this parish he says; "When I came to write sermons, I found to what a degree my interest lay in topics of social science and political economy. There was then no public interest in the currency and only a little in the tariff. I thought that these were matters of the most urgent importance, which threatened all the interests, moral, social and economic, of the nation, and I was young enough to believe that they would all be settled in the next four or five years. It was not possible to preach about them, but I got so near to it that I was detected sometimes, as, for instance, when a New Jersey banker came to me, as I came down from the pulpit, and said: 'There was a great deal of political economy in that sermon.'" In September, 1872, Mr. Sumner accepted the chair of Political and Social Science at Yale College, in which he has so highly distinguished himself. Of this he says: "I had always been very fond of teaching and knew that the best work I could ever do in the world would be in that profession; also that I ought to be in an academical career. I had seen two or three cases of men who, in that career, would have achieved distinguished usefulness, but who were wasted in the parish and pulpit". In 1884, Prof. Sumner received the degree of LL. D. from the University of Tennessee. A distinguished American economist well acquainted with Prof. Sumner's work has given to a writer from whom we quote, the following estimate of his method and of his position and influence as a public teacher: "For exact and comprehensive knowledge Prof. Sumner is entitled to take the first place in the ranks of American economists; and as a teacher he has no superior. His leading mental characteristic he has himself well stated in describing the characteristics of his former teachers at Göttingen; namely, as 'bent on seeking a clear and comprehensive conception of the matter "or truth" under study, without regard to any consequences whatever,' and further, when in his own mind Prof. Sumner is fully satisfied as to what the truth is, he has no hesitation in boldly declaring it, on every fitting occasion, without regard to consequences. If the theory is a 'spade', he calls it a spade, and not an implement of husbandry." Professor Sumner has published, besides Lange's "Commentary on the Second Book of Kings", the "History of American Currency"; "Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States"; "Life of Andrew Jackson", in the American Statesmen Series; "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other"; "Economic Problems"; "Essays on Political and Social Science"; "Protectionism"; "Alexander Hamilton", in the Makers of America Series, (1890); "The Financier (Robert Morris) and the Finances of the American Revolution", (1891); besides a large number of magazine articles on the same line of subjects. Elwyn Waller, Ph. D. Three writers now present themselves, each of whom is distinguished in his department, one of Chemistry, one of Mining and Metallurgy, and one of Mathematics. The Author's Club would exclude these brilliant men from recognition, but here the clause of our title, "and Writers", saves us. Prof. Waller amusingly expresses the position when he says, "I supposed that reference in your book would be made to those who had achieved more or less distinction in what has sometimes been termed 'polite literature.' While I am not ready to admit that the literature of my profession (chemistry) is 'impolite', it probably is too technical to come within the scope of your work." Like many of our residents, Dr. Waller's time is divided between New York and Morristown, being Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Columbia School of Mines, New York. He has written much of value; innumerable pamphlets and articles for various magazines, for chemical periodicals and Sanitary Reports and for journals far and wide, both technical and general in character, among which are _The Century_ and _The Engineering and Mining Journal_. He has written certain articles for Johnson's Encyclopædia, and has edited articles in other books all of which are to be reckoned as technical, but valuable contributions to current chemical literature. He has completed a book on "Quantitative Chemical Analysis", from the MSS. of one of his Colleagues, which was left unfinished in 1879 and he is now engaged in revising and practically re-writing the same work. Besides, he has written gossipy letters for _The Evening Post_, and _The Evening Mail_, of New York, from various far-off islands and inland points, where he has usually made one of a scientific party. One series of letters was written while a member of the U. S. St. Domingo Expedition. George W. Maynard, Ph. D. Another scientific man, ranking high in his department of Mining and Engineering, is Professor George W. Maynard, who is just now principally engaged in Colorado, passing back and forth between that State and his home in Morristown. He has had extensive travels over our own country and continent, and abroad. He is a close observer and many of us are familiar with his graphic descriptions of the scenes which he has witnessed, notably in Mexico, also with the illustrated lectures on these and other subjects, which he has generously given from time to time. Professor Maynard is a graduate of Columbia College, New York, and was Demonstrator in Chemistry in that College for a year. He then studied abroad at Göttingen, Clousthal and Berlin, and was for four years Professor of Mining and Metallurgy in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, of Troy, N. Y. His published writings, which have mostly been of a technical character, have appeared in various technical journals and in the "Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers", and in _The Journal_ of the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain. Of the above mentioned societies, he is an active member and also of the New York Academy of Sciences. Emory McClintock, LL. D. The third of our group of specialists is Dr. Emory McClintock, whom one of his brother scientists warns us we should "not forget to mention as he is one of the most eminent mathematicians in the United States". As associated with Morristown, in his beautiful home on Kemble Hill, high overlooking the Lowantica valley and scenes full of memories of the Revolution, we claim him with pride, in spite of his saying that his writings have all been records of scientific researches and not literary in any sense and that he has never written a book, big or little, nor even a magazine article. It remains, that his many writings are of great value as published in pamphlet form or in periodicals of technical character, such as _The Bulletin of the New York Mathematical Society_, which is "A Historical and Critical Review of Mathematical Science"; or, _The American Journal of Mathematics_ from which a large pamphlet is reprinted on _The Analysis of Quintic Equations_, or, in the direction of his art or specialty as a life insurance actuary, where appears, among other writings, a large pamphlet on _The Effects of Selection_--being "An Actuarial Essay," in which we find very interesting matter for the general reader. Andrew F. West, LL. D. Professor West, of Princeton College, is well remembered as a resident of Morristown for two years, (1881-1883). He was at that time, the predecessor of Mr. Charles D. Platt, at the Morris Academy, and mingled largely in the literary, social and musical circles of the city. He, like Dr. McClintock, is a Pennsylvanian, and was born at Pittsburg. Since Mr. West accepted a professorship at Princeton College, which was the occasion of his leaving Morristown, he has written largely on classical and medieval subjects. His last book, just published, by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1892, is entitled "Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools." It appears in the Series of "The Great Educators", edited by Nicholas Murray Butler. It is a volume of 205 pages, and contains a sketch of Alcuin at York and at Tours, also treating of his educational writings, his character, his pupils, and his later influence. Various literary, philological and educational articles in reviews have been contributed by Professor West, and two books additional to the one mentioned, have been published by him. These are, "The Andria and Heauton Timorumenos, of Terence," edited with introduction and notes, and published by Harper and Brothers (1888); and "The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury," edited from the manuscripts, translated and annotated. The latter is in three volumes: I., The Latin Text; II., The English Version; III., Introduction and Notes Printed by Theodore De Vienne for the Grolier Club of New York, (1889). José Gros. From the shores of Spain, has come to us one of our advanced thinkers and writers, Señor José Gros. He is a disciple of Henry George and, on one occasion, introduced that distinguished man to a Morristown audience, in our Lyceum Hall, giving, to a large number of people assembled, the opportunity of listening to his own exposition of the views about which so wide and warm a controversy has raged. Señor Gros was born and educated in Spain. He has traveled extensively through Italy, France, Germany, England, and a portion of our own country, finally taking a position in a commercial house in New York, in 1859, in which he remained until 1870, when he retired to Morristown. Since then, in his own words, he has "dedicated most of his time to the study of history and science, more especially social science," for which he has been writing articles for western magazines and journals and also for one or more of our local papers. In the _Locomotive Firemen's Magazine_, of Terre Haute, Indiana, a large number of these articles have appeared. They go with this magazine to all the States and Territories of the Union, to parts of Canada and Mexico, and they are connected with over 500 Labor Clubs. The subject of one series of these papers is "Civilization With its Problems". Other subjects are, "The Struggle for Existence"; "Confusion in Economic Thought"; "Governments by Statics or Dynamics"; "Congested Civilizations"; "Social Skepticism", and a series on "To-day's Problems". In all his arguments, Señor Gros considers as vital to advance in Social Science the principles of the Christian religion. "No system," he says, "can save us from disasters without clear perceptions of duty on what I call 'Christian citizenship.'" MEDICAL AUTHORS AND WRITERS. Condict W. Cutler, M. S., M. D. Dr. Cutler claims through his father, the Hon. Augustus W. Cutler, as ancestor, the Hon. Silas Condict, one of the most renowned patriots of the Revolution, and his childhood and boyhood was spent in the house which was built, in 1799, by this great-great-grandfather and occupied by him. It has been owned and occupied since then, and is now, by Hon. Augustus W. Cutler. The old house, in which Silas Condict previously lived, is still standing about a mile west of the present Cutler residence. Many historic incidents and traditions cluster about this place. Dr. Cutler has done credit to this ancestor's memory in his exceptionally successful career. A member of many societies, and associate editor of _The New York Epitome of Medicine_, he has written largely for journals and magazines, besides publishing three books, which are entitled "Differential Medical Diagnosis"; "Differential Diagnosis of the Diseases of the Skin", and "Essentials of Physics and Chemistry." These, say the medical and surgical critics, are prepared with care and thoroughness and show a wise use of standard text-books and the exercise of critical judgment guided by practical experience. Many may think that the books belonging to Materia Medica, being of technical character, do not come directly within our province, but we may say _everything_ in the line of authorship is within our broad range, and we are glad to say emphatically that nothing, not even theological questions, concern mankind more deeply than just this great question upon which Dr. Cutler has expended so much thought and labor and which too is the result of his experience as a medical man,--namely, the Differential Diagnosis of Disease. When we take into consideration the fact, that no disease can be successfully treated until it is _known_ and as it cannot be known without being properly diagnosed, and as successful diagnoses depend upon just such principles and relations as Dr. Cutler demonstrates, we can see the value of the work even though we may not belong to the medical fraternity. More than all, we can see the benefit which such a work confers upon mankind at large and not alone upon the healers of diseased and afflicted humanity. Let any one go into the houses of the poor; the streets and the alleys, and into the overflowing hospitals and witness the immensity of the evil of that terrible phase of disease, "The Skin Diseases" of which Dr. Cutler treats, and he will realize what earnest thanks we owe to a man whose life work is to devote his time and brains to the alleviation of this type of human suffering. Phanet C. Barker, M. D. Dr. Barker, of Morristown, has for twenty-five years past written more or less, from time to time, for medical journals published in New York and Philadelphia. The majority of these contributions have been of a practical character and consequently rather brief. Some of them have been formal studies of practical questions, such as "The Vaccination Question", questions connected with Sanitary Science, &c. Of the latter, one we would mention in particular, entitled, "The Germ Theory of Disease and its Relations to Sanitation". In this the writer tells us: "The germ theory of disease is destined to hold a place in literature as the romance of medicine, and if it stands the test of time, and the scrutiny which is certain to be bestowed upon it, the theory will mark an epoch for all time to come. The present century has been distinguished in many and various ways, which need not be alluded to in this connection. Among the discoveries and improvements of the age, Sanitary Science occupies an important, a commanding position, that can hardly be exaggerated. Indeed it has contributed more to civilization and to the well-being of the human race than steam, electricity or any other scientific or economic discovery." Then the writer refers to the condition of Englishmen who lived in the fourteenth century, and traces the ravages of the Black Death to the people's mode of living. He sketches the epidemics that have prevailed in the world at various periods, and asserts that even "chronology has been changed and the fate of great and powerful peoples like those of Athens, of Rome and of Florence, has been sealed by the direct or indirect effects of what we now term preventible diseases." Such contributions as Dr. Barker has made to general literature have had relation to economic questions generally, although the preparation of a few papers on "Popular Astronomy", "Meteorological Observations" and "Fishing in Remote Canadian Waters" have served, as he says, "to rest and refresh his mind, when harassed by anxieties incident to the practice of his profession." These papers have been published,--the former in New York City or in our local papers, and the latter in _The Forest and Stream_. One of the pamphlet publications on popular astronomy is unusually attractive and is entitled "The Stars and the Earth". Horace A. Buttolph, M. D., LL. D. Dr. Buttolph, whose professional life, as connected with the care and treatment of the insane in three large institutions, in New York and New Jersey, covering a period of forty-two years, although devoted so exclusively to administrative, professional and personal details, that little time was left to engage in writing for the press, beyond the preparation of the usual annual Reports of such institutions, has, nevertheless turned that little time to good account. The State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown was under the superintendence of Dr. Buttolph from its opening in August 1876 to the last day of the year 1884, when he tendered his resignation. Previous to this he had been in charge of the Trenton Asylum from May 1848 to April 1876, making a period of unbroken service in New Jersey of more than thirty-seven years, during which time these buildings were organized on his plan, and that of Morris Plains, with its extensive machinery, was mostly planned by him. One specialty in the line of machinery in both institutions, in use for many years,--that of making aerated or unfermented bread, which is most cleanly, healthful and economical, is probably not in use in any institution in the world, outside of New Jersey. Dr. Buttolph was born in Dutchess County, N. Y., and was graduated from the Berkshire Medical Institution at Pittsfield, Mass., in 1835. Having been early attracted to the study of insanity, he made it a specialty and accepted a position in the new State Lunatic Asylum, at Utica, N. Y., in 1843. This he retained until 1847 when he went as Medical Superintendent to the State Lunatic Asylum near Trenton, N. J. During the previous year, while still attached to the Utica Asylum, he went abroad to study the architecture and management of other institutions and visited thirty or more of the principal asylums in Great Britain, France and Germany. At this time very few institutions for the insane had been established in this country and all sorts of problems had to be worked out. Dr. Buttolph soon came to be a very high authority and, in that recognized capacity, he was chosen to direct the Asylum at Morris Plains, which is the largest in the United States and one of the best equipped in the world. It was a matter of very great regret to his large circle of friends in Morristown, and out of it, when he found it impossible to remain longer in the charge he had filled so faithfully and well. Dr. Buttolph's writings have been on insanity or mental derangement; also on the organization and management of hospitals for the insane; the classification of the insane with special reference to the most natural and satisfactory method of their treatment, etc. These writings have been published in many magazines and journals, and a large number in pamphlet form. Also addresses, delivered on important occasions or before societies, have been published in pamphlet form. Of these, one is widely-known, given before the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, at Saratoga, N. Y., June 17, 1885, on "The Physiology of the Brain and its Relations in Health and Disease to the Faculties of the Mind." AUTHORS AND WRITERS ON ART. Thomas Nast. Mr. Nast, who has for so long been identified with Morristown, may be designated both as artist and bookmaker. In the true sense of the term, author, he may then be fairly presented, as probably no living man has wielded a greater influence through his power of expression. Many readers of this sketch will remember the consternation that prevailed upon the revelation of the Tweed Ring scandals and at the question of Tweed himself as he defied the City of New York,--"What are you going to do about it?" They will remember how Mr. Nast with wonderful courage and grasp of the situation, came to the front and at great personal risk to himself and family, threw with steady aim, the stone which killed that Goliath of Gath and put to rout the Philistines. They will remember Tweed's exclamation: "I can stand anything but those pictures!" Mr. Nast, then, is a hero in our history, and the fact cannot be forgotten. When the Washington Headquarters was first purchased from the Ford family, the original owners, by a few gentlemen who organized the Washington Association to preserve the historic building and grounds, for a national possession, many will remember how Mr. Nast entered into the spirit of the Centennial Celebration there in 1875, when so many of the prominent men and women of Morristown took part, wearing the dress of the Revolution and working hard to accomplish the end of fitting up the building by the proceeds of the entertainment. All were astonished by the result in sales of tickets, collation, and little hatchets, of between eleven and twelve hundred dollars in one single afternoon and evening; so much, that the amount was divided between the Headquarters and the "Library" of Morristown, then in its beginning. Mr. Nast had much to do with this success. He worked early and late at the decorations and filled one of the largest rooms with his immense and humorous cartoons of scenes in the Revolution and the stories of George Washington. The book published by Mr. Nast is now in our library, "Miss Columbia's Public School", and is a clever satire on the Northern and Southern boy and the general condition of Miss Columbia's pupils in the time of our Civil War. It was issued in 1871. Another charming publication of Mr. Nast was brought out by the Harper Brothers for Christmas, 1889, under the title of "Thomas Nast's Christmas Drawings for the Human Race". Of this says one of the critics of the time: "His Santa Claus, jolly vagabond that he is, seems to radiate a warmth more genial than tropic airs, and a gayety that overbears the sadness of experience. 'What a mug' does he show us on the title page; so kindly, so roguish, so venerable, so comical, so shrewd, so pugnaciously cheerful! How seriously he takes himself, and yet what a wink in those twinkling eyes, as who should say, 'Confidentially, of course, we admit the fraud, but mum's the word where the children are concerned!'" Thomas Nast came from Bavaria, with his father, at the age of six, and at fourteen was a pupil for a few months of Theodore Kaufmann, soon after beginning his career, as draughtsman on an illustrated paper. In 1860, as special artist for a New York weekly paper, he went abroad and while there, followed Garibaldi in Italy, making sketches for London, Paris and New York illustrated papers. His war sketches appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ on his return in 1862. The political condition of national affairs gave him opportunity for manifesting his peculiar gift for representing in condensed form, a powerful thought. His first political caricature established his reputation. It was an allegorical design which gave a powerful blow to the peace party. Besides the _Harper's Weekly_ sketches, Mr. Nast has contributed to other papers and has illustrated books in addition to those mentioned, in particular Petroleum V. Nasby's book. For many years, he brought out "Nast's Illustrated Almanac". In the principal cities of the United States, Mr. Nast has lectured, illustrating his lectures with rapidly executed caricature sketches, in black and white, and in colored crayons. It is said by a contemporary writer that "in the particular line of pictorial satire, Thomas Nast stands in the foremost rank." Rev. Jared Bradley Flagg, D. D. The Rev. Dr. Flagg, recently a resident of Morristown, has just published a delightful and important book on the "Life and Letters of Washington Allston", Scribner's Sons, November, 1892. It is illustrated by reproductions from Allston's paintings. Many remember the very striking full length portraits of Wm. H. Vanderbilt, Mr. Evarts and others, which were shown in Dr. Flagg's gallery in Morristown, on the occasion of a reception given at his residence here, a few years ago. In addition to the book above mentioned, Dr. Flagg has written a great deal as a clergyman. He belongs to an artistic family, of New Haven, Conn. His brother, George, was considered in his youth a prodigy and his pictures and portraits attained celebrity. His style resembles the Venetian School, like that of his uncle, Washington Allston, with whom he studied. Dr. Flagg studied with both his brother and his uncle, and began as an artist at an early age, painting professionally and earning a living at sixteen. At twenty, "his love of letters, and fear of Hell," as he says, led him to connect himself with Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and to study for the church. After an active ministry of ten years, during eight of which he was rector of Grace Church, Brooklyn Heights, his health broke down, and he devoted what strength he had left to artistic and literary pursuits, in which he is still engaged and in which, he tells us, he finds increasing interest with declining years. Rev. J. Leonard Corning, D. D. Dr. Corning has already been represented, in our group of poets. He has passed much of his life abroad and has made a special study of art, upon which he is an authority. He was for several years a regular contributor to _The Independent_ and _The Christian Union_ on art subjects, and wrote for _The Manhattan Magazine_, a series of articles, among them, on the "Luther Monument at Worms", "William Lübke" and "Women Artists of the Olden Time". The fruits of his art study have largely been put into the form of popular lectures, which he has delivered in many of the large American cities. It is remembered that some years ago, during his residence in Morristown, Dr. Corning gave a series of art lectures with illustrations, for the benefit of the Morristown Library. The proceeds were devoted to the purchase of books on art and the volumes thus added were selected by Dr. Corning. In this way, the library is indebted to him for very valuable additions. George Herbert McCord, A. N. A. Mr. McCord, of the National Academy, is best known to us as an artist, bringing before us, with his magic brush, historic scenes of England, picturesque views of Canada, on the St. Lawrence and elsewhere, and many of our own country, among them spots of beauty about Morristown, which other eyes perhaps have not discovered until shown to them by him. But, he is also an art critic and one of those writers of out of door life, who find, like Hamerton, both rest and recreation among the scenes which he transfers to his canvas. Often he contributes to our papers and magazines current news from the art world to which he so essentially belongs. Sometimes, in his contributions to _The Richfield News_, for which he writes, he gives us a bit of word painting that is scarcely less poetic than the creations of his canvas. More than all, Mr. McCord is not a croaker. He never comes before us with that chronic wail of the neglect of American art. On the contrary, he tells us cheerfully that the most prominent dealers in foreign art productions are buying and selling works of American art. We like such cheerful summer writers, bringing bright visions of the future to our world of art. Mr. McCord's beautiful picture, "The Old Mill Race", transfers to canvas a scene on the Whippany River. It also makes a fine addition to a little collection of "Choice Bits in Etching", published by Mr. Ritchie. DRAMATIST William G. Van Tassel Sutphen. Mr. Sutphen, who is now permanently engaged in journalism, is no less a successful dramatist and, from the first, has shown those most attractive and rare qualities which are essentially requisite to reach dramatic success. A list of his more important published works will show that he is no idler, and includes several bright clever farces contributed to _Harper's Bazar_, among them, "The Reporter"; "Hearing is Believing"; "Sharp Practice", and "A Soul Above Skittles". Not long ago appeared a romantic opera entitled "Mary Phillipse; An Historical and Musical Picture, in Four Scenes." This is founded on certain events in the history of the city of Yonkers, Westchester County, New York, between the years 1760 and 1776. It was set to music by George F. Le Jeune, and produced with marked success, June 30, 1892, at Yonkers and on succeeding dates. "Hearing is Believing" was performed twice in Morristown in the same winter. Mr. Sutphen has only lately published in the July number of _Scribner's Magazine_ (1892), a poem entitled "To Trojan Helen" and containing some fine verses. This is worthy of high place in Mr. Sutphen's intellectual work. Another poem of merit, "Insciens", appeared also in _Scribner's Magazine_. In addition to these, miscellaneous verses and sketches have been contributed to _Puck_, _Life_, _Time_ and other periodicals, and in most cases, anonymously. For the past eight years, Mr. Sutphen has had charge of the weekly edition of _The New York World_. While at Princeton College he was one of the editors of the _Nassau Literary Magazine_, and one of the founders and first editor of the _Princeton Tiger_, an illustrated weekly, modeled on the _Harvard Lampoon_. "Condensed Dramas" and "Latterday Lyrics" should also be mentioned, a series of light sketches and verses contributed to _Time_ during the existence of that periodical. It is, however, by his dramatic talent, that we wish to represent Mr. Sutphen, and for this reason we expected and would be glad to give in full, were it possible, "The Guillotine; a Condensed Drama", which first appeared in _The Argonaut_, a San Francisco Journal. This is an extremely clever and witty comedy, perhaps the best of his dramatic writings, to which an extract will hardly do justice. We are thankful to Mr. Sutphen for contributing a little of the laughter element to the condensed mass, included in this volume, of theology, history, philosophy, poetry, romance, mathematics, medicine, art and science. EXTRACT FROM "THE GUILLOTINE." _Scene: The Public Square in a French Town. In the centre of the square is seen a guillotine. Enter venerable gentleman of scientific aspect reading a newspaper._ (In the first scene the professor, finding himself alone with the guillotine and seeing a notice of an execution to take place three hours later, is impelled to examine the instrument. He adjusts the axe and works the spring until he masters the mechanism, and finds the spring on the right releases the knife, spring on the left, the head. Finally he decides to put his own head on the block to try the sensation. Horrible! he cannot remember which is his right hand and which his left. While in this position, a party of tourists come along, armed with Baedekers and accompanied by a guide.) GUIDE (_gesticulating_)--Zare, ladies and gentlemans. Ze cathedral! Ah! ciel! Look at him. Magnifique! (_Chorus of "ahs" from tourists and general opening of Baedekers._) GUIDE--Ze clock-tower ees of a colossity excessive. It elevates himself three hundred and eighty-six feet. (_Immense enthusiasm._) At ze terminality of ze wall statue ze great Charlemagne. Superbe! Chuck-a-block to him, Dagobert, Clovis and Voila! (_Catching hold of elderly tourist._) Le bon Louis. (_The tourists take notes with painful accuracy and minuteness._) ELDERLY TOURIST--Very interesting. Rose, my child, have you got all that down. How old is the cathedral, guide? GUIDE--It has seven hundred and feefty-six years. SPINSTER AUNT (_Severely_)--Baedeker says seven hundred and fifty-five. GUIDE (_politely_)--It ees hees one mistake. (_An exclamation from Rose. Everybody turns._) ROSE (_pointing to guillotine_)--Oh, do look there! SPINSTER AUNT--It looks as though an execution were in progress. Baedeker says-- ELDERLY TOURIST (_eagerly_)--Is it really so, guide? GUIDE (_indifferently_)--Yes, but zare ees no fee and zarefore no objection in seeing it. It ees modern--vat you call him--cheap-John. We will now upon ze clock-tower upheave ourselves. Zare are two hundred and one steps. ELDERLY TOURIST--But we want to see the execution. GUIDE--You enjoy ze ferocity? Bah! you shall have him. For one franc zare ees to see picture S. Sebastian--ver' fine, all shot full wiz burning arrows. ELDERLY TOURIST--Never mind, we will wait. Do you think, guide, I would have time to go back and get my wife? I am sure she would enjoy it! 
38889	----	Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 38889-h.htm or 38889-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38889/38889-h/38889-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38889/38889-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/literaryshrinesh00wolfrich Transcriber's note: Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). Superscripted characters are indicated with a carat followed by the superscripted character(s) in curly braces. LITERARY SHRINES FIFTH EDITION * * * * * * _BY DR. WOLFE_ Uniform with this volume A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE HAUNTS OF SOME FAMOUS BRITISH AUTHORS _Treating descriptively and reminiscently of the homes and resorts of English writers from the time of Chaucer to the present, and of the scenes commemorated in their works_ 262 pages. Illustrated with four photogravures. $1.25 A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AND LITERARY SHRINES Two volumes in a box, $2.50 * * * * * * [Illustration: THE WAYSIDE, CONCORD] LITERARY SHRINES The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors by THEODORE F. WOLFE M.D. PH.D. Author of A Literary Pilgrimage etc. J. B. Lippincott Company Philadelphia. MDCCCXCV Copyright, 1895, By Theodore F. Wolfe. Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A. TO MY WIFE, MY SYMPATHETIC AND APPRECIATIVE COMPANION IN PILGRIMAGES TO MANY LITERARY SHRINES IN THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD, THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. PREFACE For some years it has been the delightful privilege of the writer of the present volume to ramble and sojourn in the scenes amid which his best-beloved authors erst lived and wrote. He has made repeated pilgrimages to most of the shrines herein described, and has been, at one time or another, favored by intercourse and correspondence with many of the authors adverted to or with their surviving friends and neighbors. In the ensuing pages he has endeavored to portray these shrines in pen-pictures which, it is hoped, may be interesting to those who are unable to visit them and helpful and companionable for those who can and will. If certain prominent American authors receive little more than mention in these pages, it is mainly because so few objects and places associated with their lives and writings can now be indisputably identified: in some instances the writer has expended more time upon fruitless quests for shrines which proved to be non-existent or of doubtful genuineness than upon others which are themes for the chapters of this booklet. T. F. W. CONTENTS THE CONCORD PILGRIMAGE PAGE I. A VILLAGE OF LITERARY SHRINES. _Abodes of Thoreau--The Alcotts--Channing--Sanborn--Hudson--Hoar-- Wheildon--Bartlett--The Historic Common--Cemetery--Church_ 17 II. THE OLD MANSE. _Abode of Dr. Ripley--The Emersons--Hawthorne--Learned Mrs. Ripley--Its Famed Study and Apartments--Grounds--Guests--Ghosts-- A Transcendental Social Court_ 28 III. A STORIED RIVER AND BATTLE-FIELD. _Where Zenobia Drowned--Where Embattled Farmers Fought--Thoreau's Hemlocks--Haunts of Hawthorne--Channing--Thoreau--Emerson, etc._ 39 IV. THE HOME OF EMERSON. _An Intellectual Capitol and Pharos--Its Grounds, Library, and Literary Workshop--Famous Rooms and Visitants--Relics and Reminiscences of the Concord Sage_ 45 V. THE ORCHARD HOUSE AND ITS NEIGHBORS. _Ellery Channing--Margaret Fuller--The Alcotts--Professor Harris--Summer School of Philosophy--Where Little Women was written and Robert Hagburn lived--Where Cyril Norton was slain_ 52 VI. HAWTHORNE'S WAYSIDE HOME. _Sometime Abode of Alcott--Hawthorne--Lathrop--Margaret Sidney-- Storied Apartments--Hawthorne's Study--His Mount of Vision--Where Septimius Felton and Rose Garfield dwelt_ 58 VII. THE WALDEN OF THOREAU. _A Transcendental Font--Emerson's Garden--Thoreau's Cove--Cairn--Beanfield--Resort of Emerson--Hawthorne--Channing-- Hosmer--Alcott, etc._ 68 VIII. THE HILL-TOP HEARSED WITH PINES. _Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious Concord Company--Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs_ 75 IN AND OUT OF LITERARY BOSTON IN BOSTON _A Golden Age of Letters--Literary Associations--Isms--Clubs--Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived--The Corner Book-store--Home of Fields--Sargent--Hilliard--Aldrich--Deland--Parkman--Holmes-- Howells--Moulton--Hale--Howe--Jane Austin, etc._ 83 OUT OF BOSTON I. CAMBRIDGE: ELMWOOD: MOUNT AUBURN. _Holmes's Church-yard--Bridge--Smithy, Chapel, and River of Longfellow's Verse--Abodes of Lettered Culture--Holmes-- Higginson--Agassiz--Norton--Clough--Howells--Fuller-- Longfellow--Lowell--Longfellow's City of the Dead and its Precious Graves_ 103 II. BELMONT: THE WAYSIDE INN: HOME OF WHITTIER. _Lowell's Beaver Brook--Abode of Trowbridge--Red Horse Tavern-- Parsons and the Company of Longfellow's Friends--Birthplace of Whittier--Scenes of his Poems--Dwelling and Grave of the Countess--Powow Hill--Whittier's Amesbury Home--His Church and Tomb_ 117 III. SALEM: WHITTIER'S OAK-KNOLL AND BEYOND. _Cemetery of Hawthorne's Ancestors--Birthplace of Hawthorne and his Wife--Where Fame was won--House of the Seven Gables-- Custom-House--Where Scarlet Letter was written--Main Street and Witch Hill--Sights from a Steeple--Later Home of Whittier-- Norman's Woe--Lucy Larcom--Parton, etc.--Rivermouth--Thaxter_ 128 IV. WEBSTER'S MARSHFIELD: BROOK FARM, ETC. _Scenes of the Old Oaken Bucket--Webster's Home and Grave--Where Emerson won his Wife--Home of Miss Peabody--Parkman--Miss Guiney--Aldrich's Ponkapog--Farm of Ripley's Community--Relics and Reminiscences_ 141 IN BERKSHIRE WITH HAWTHORNE I. THE GRAYLOCK AND HOOSAC REGION. _North Adams and about--Hawthorne's Acquaintances and Excursions-- Actors and Incidents of Ethan Brand--Kiln of Bertram the Lime-Burner--Natural Bridge--Graylock--Thoreau--Hoosac Mountain--Deerfield Arch--Williamstown--Bryant_ 155 II. LENOX AND MIDDLE BERKSHIRE. _Beloved of the Littérateurs--La Maison Rouge--Where The House of the Seven Gables was written--Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Scenes-- The Bowl--Beecher's Laurel Lake--Kemble--Bryant's Monument Mountain--Stockbridge--Catherine Sedgwick--Melville's Piazza and Chimney--Holmes--Longfellow--Pittsfield_ 176 A DAY WITH THE GOOD GRAY POET _Walk and Talk with Socrates in Camden--The Bard's Appearance and Surroundings--Recollections of his Life and Work--Hospital Service--Praise for his Critics--His Literary Habit, Purpose, Equipment, and Style--His Religious Bent--Readings_ 201 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Wayside, Concord _Frontispiece._ The Thoreau-Alcott House,--Present Appearance 21 The Grave of Emerson 78 Where Longfellow lived 108 THE CONCORD PILGRIMAGE I. A Village of Literary Shrines II. The Old Manse III. Storied River and Battle-field IV. The Home of Emerson V. Alcott's Orchard House, etc. VI. Hawthorne's Wayside Home VII. The Walden of Thoreau VIII. The Hill-top Hearsed with Pines I A VILLAGE OF LITERARY SHRINES _Abodes of Thoreau--The Alcotts--Channing--Sanborn--Hudson--Hoar-- Wheildon--Bartlett--The Historic Common--Cemetery--Church._ If to trace the footsteps of genius and to linger and muse in the sometime haunts of the authors we read and love, serve to bring us nearer their personality, to place us _en rapport_ with their aspirations, and thus to incite our own spiritual development and broaden and exalt our moral nature, then the Concord pilgrimage should be one of the most fruitful and beneficent of human experiences. Familiarity with the physical stand-point of our authors, with the scenes amid which they lived and wrote, and with the objects which suggested the imagery of their poems, the settings of their tales, and which gave tone and color to their work, will not only bring us into closer sympathy with the writers, but will help us to a better understanding of the writings. A plain, straggling village, set in a low country amid a landscape devoid of any striking beauty or grandeur, Concord yet attracts more pilgrims than any other place of equal size upon the continent, not because it holds an historic battle-field, but because it has been the dwelling-place of some of the brightest and best in American letters, who have here written their books and warred against creeds, forms, and intellectual servitude. It is another Stratford, another Mecca, to which come reverent pilgrims from the Old World and the New to worship at its shrines and to wander through the scenes hallowed by the memories of its illustrious _littérateurs_, seers, and evangels. To the literary prowler it is all sacred ground,--its streets, its environing hills, forests, lakes, and streams have alike been blessed by the loving presence of genius, have alike been the theatres and the inspirations of noble literary achievement. Our way lies by historic Lexington, and thence, through a pleasant country and by the road so fateful to the British soldiery, we approach Concord. It is a placid, almost somnolent village of villas, abounding with delightful lawns and gardens, with great elms shading its old-fashioned thoroughfares and drooping their pliant boughs above its comfortable homes. Elizabeth Hoar has said, "Concord is Thoreau's monument, adorned with inscriptions by his hand;" of the circle of brilliant souls who have given the town its world-wide fame, he alone was native here; he has left his imprint upon the place, and we meet some reminder of him at every turn. By the historic village Common is the quondam home of his grandfather, where his father was reared, and where the "New England Essene" himself lived some time with the unmarried aunt who made the ample homespun suit he wore at Walden. The house of his maternal grandmother, where Henry David Thoreau was born, stood a little way out on a by-road to Lexington, and a daughter of this home--Thoreau's winsome aunt Louisa Dunbar--was ineffectually wooed by the famous Daniel Webster. At the age of eight months the infant Thoreau was removed to the village, in which nearly the whole of his life was passed. Believing that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm "by the study of which the whole world could be comprehended," this wildest of civilized men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. Alcott declared that Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord. On the south side of the elm-shaded Main street of the village we find a pleasant and comfortable, old-fashioned wooden dwelling,--the home which, in his later years, the philosopher, poet, and mystic shared with his mother and sisters. About it are great trees which Thoreau planted; a stairway and some of the partition walls of the house are said to have been erected by him. In the second story of an extension at the back of the main edifice, some of the family worked at their father's trade of pencil-making. In the large room at the right of the entrance, afterward the sitting-room of the Alcotts, some of Thoreau's later writing was done, and here, one May morning of 1862, he breathed out a life all too brief and doubtless abbreviated by the storms and drenchings endured in his pantheistic pursuits. In this house Thoreau's "spiritual brother," John Brown of Osawatomie, was a welcome guest, and more than one wretched fugitive from slavery found shelter and protection. From his village home Thoreau made, with the poet Ellery Channing, the journey described in his "Yankee in Canada," and several shorter "Excursions,"--shared with Edward Hoar, Channing, and others,--which he has detailed in the delightful manner which gives him a distinct position in American literature. [Illustration: THE THOREAU-ALCOTT HOUSE] After the removal of Sophia, the last of Thoreau's family, his friend Frank B. Sanborn occupied the Thoreau house for some years, and then it became the home of the Alcott family. Here Mrs. Alcott, the "Marmee" of "Little Women," died; here Bronson Alcott was stricken with the fatal paralysis; here commenced the malady which contributed to the death of his illustrious daughter Louisa; here lived "Meg," the mother of the "Little Men" and widow of "John Brooke" of the Alcott books; and here now lives her son, while his brother, "Demi-John," dwells just around the corner in the next street. In the room at the left of the hall, fitted up for her study and workshop, Louisa Alcott wrote some of the tales which the world will not forget. An added apartment at the right of the sitting-room was long the sick-room of the Orphic philosopher and the scene of Louisa's tender care. Here the writer saw them both for the last time: Alcott helpless upon his couch, his bright intelligence dulled by a veil of darkness; the daughter at his bedside, sedulous of his comfort, devoted, hopeful, helpful to the end. A cherished memento of that interview is a photograph of the Thoreau-Alcott mansion, made by one of the "Little Men," and presented to the writer, with her latest book, by "Jo" herself. The front fence has since been removed, and the illustration shows the present view. In Thoreau's time, a modest dwelling, with a low roof sloping to the rear,--now removed to the other side of the street,--stood directly opposite his home, and was for some time the abode of his friend and earliest biographer, the sweet poet William Ellery Channing. Thoreau thought Channing one of the few who understood "the art of taking walks," and the two were almost constant companions in saunterings through the countryside, or in idyllic excursions upon the river in the boat which Thoreau kept moored to a riverside willow at the foot of Channing's garden. The beneficent influence of their comradeship is apparent in the work of both these recluse writers, and many of the most charming of Channing's stanzas are either inspired by or are poetic portrayals of the scenes he saw with Thoreau,--the "Rudolpho" and the "Idolon" of his verse. Thoreau's last earthly "Excursion" was with this friend to Monadnoc, where they encamped some days in 1860. To this home of Channing came, in 1855, Sanborn, who was welcomed to Concord by all the literary galaxy, and quickly became a familiar associate of each particular star. To go swimming together seems to have been, among these earnest and exalted thinkers, the highest evidence of mutual esteem, and so favored was Sanborn that he is able to record, "I have swum with Alcott in Thoreau's Cove, with Thoreau in the Assabet, with Channing in every water of Concord." In this home Sanborn entertained John Brown on the eve of his Virginia venture; here escaping slaves found refuge; here fugitives from the Harper's Ferry fight were concealed; here Sanborn was arrested for supposed complicity in Brown's abortive schemes, and was forcibly rescued by his indignant neighbors. This modest dwelling gave place to the later residence of Frederic Hudson, the historian of journalism, who here produced many of his contributions to literature. Professor Folsom, of "Translations of the Four Gospels," and the popular authoress Mrs. Austin have also lived in this neighborhood. For some years Sanborn had a famous select school on a street back of Thoreau's house, not far from the recent hermit-home of his friend Channing, at whose request Hawthorne sent some of his children to this school, in which Emerson's daughter--the present Mrs. Forbes--was a beloved pupil, and where, also, the daughters of John Brown were for some time placed. A few rods westward from his former dwelling we find Sanborn in a tasteful modern villa,--spending life's early autumn among his books. He abounds with memories of his friends of the by-gone time, and his reminiscences and biographies of some of them have largely employed his pen in his pleasant study here. Some time ago the sweet singer Channing suffered in his hermitage a severe illness, which prompted his appreciative friend Sanborn to take him into his own home; so we find two surviving witnesses or participants in the moral, intellectual, and political renaissance dwelling under the same roof. In the kindly atmosphere of this home, the shy poet--who in his age is more recluse than ever, and scarce known to his neighbors--so far regained physical vigor that he has resumed his frequent visits to the Boston library, long time a favorite haunt of his. The world refused to listen to this exquisite singer, and now "his songs have ceased." He has been celebrated by Emerson in the "Dial," by Thoreau in his "Week," by Hawthorne in "Mosses" and "Note-Books," by the generous and sympathetic Sanborn in many ways and places; but even such poems as "Earth-Spirit," "Poet's Hope," and "Reverence" found few readers,--the dainty little volumes fewer purchasers. Below the Thoreau-Alcott house on the village street was a prior home of Thoreau, from which he made, with his brother, the voyage described in his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and from which, in superb disdain of "civilization" and social conventionalities, he went to the two years' hermitage of "Walden." Nearly opposite the earlier residence of the stoic is the home of the Hoars, where lived Thoreau's comrade Edward Hoar, and Edward's sister,--styled "Elizabeth the Wise" by Emerson, of whom she was the especial friend and favorite, having been the _fiancée_ of his brother Charles, who died in early manhood. The adjacent spacious mansion was long the home of Wheildon, the historian, essayist, and pamphleteer. Nearer the village Common lived John A. Stone, dramatist of "The Ancient Briton" and of the "Metamora" in which Forrest won his first fame. In this part of the village the eminent correspondent "Warrington," author of "Manual of Parliamentary Law," was born and reared; and in Lowell Street, not far away, lives the gifted George B. Bartlett, of the "Carnival of Authors,"--poet, scenic artist, and local historian. In the public library we find copies of the printed works of the many Concord authors, and portraits or busts of most of the writers. Among the treasures of the institution are priceless manuscripts of Curtis, Motley, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others. Among the thickly-strewn graves on the hill-side above the Common repose the ashes of Emerson's ancestors; about them lie the fore-fathers of the settlement,--some of them asleep here for two centuries, reckless alike of the resistance to British oppression and of the later struggle for freedom of thought which their townsmen have waged. A tree on the Common is pointed out as that beneath which Emerson made an address at the dedication of the soldiers' monument, and Bartlett records the tradition that the grandfather of the Concord sage stood on the same spot a hundred years before to harangue the "embattled farmers" on the morning of the Concord fight. Near by is the ancient church where Emerson's ancestors preached, and within whose framework the Provincial Congress met. Of the religious services here Emerson was always a supporter, often an attendant; here he sometimes preached in early manhood; here his children were christened by the elder Channing,--"the first minister he had known who was as good as they;" here Emerson's daughter is a devout worshipper. The comparatively few of the transcendental company who prayed within a pew came to this temple, but here all were brought at last for funeral rites: here lay Thoreau among his thronging townsmen while Emerson and Bronson Alcott made their touching eulogies and Ellery Channing read a dirge in a voice almost hushed with emotion; here James Freeman Clarke, who had married Hawthorne twenty-two years before, preached his funeral sermon above the lifeless body which bore upon its breast the unfinished "Dolliver Romance;" before the pulpit here lay the coffined Emerson,--"his eyes forever closed, his voice forever still,"--while a vast concourse looked upon him for the last time, and his neighbor Judge Hoar pronounced one of the most impressive panegyrics that ever fell from human lips, and the devoted Alcott read a sonnet. II THE OLD MANSE _Abode of Dr. Ripley--The Emersons--Hawthorne--Learned Mrs. Ripley--Its Famed Study and Apartments--Grounds--Guests--Ghosts--A Transcendental Social Court._ Northward from the village Common, a delightful stroll along a shaded highway, less secluded now than when Hawthorne "daily trudged" upon it to the post-office or trundled the carriage of "baby Una," brings us to the famous "Old Manse" about which he culled his "Mosses." This antique mansion was first tenanted by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandsire, and next by Dr. Ezra Ripley, who married the previous occupant's widow and became guardian of her children,--born under its roof,--of whom Emerson's father was one. When his father died Emerson found a secondary home here with Dr. Ripley. The Manse was again the abode of Emerson and his mother in 1834-35, when he here wrote his first volume. In 1842, the year following the demise of the good Dr. Ripley, the Manse was profaned by its first lay occupant, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He brought here his bride, lovely Sophia Peabody (who, with the gifted Elizabeth and Mrs. Horace Mann, formed a famous triune sisterhood), and for four years lived here the ideal life of which his "Note-Books" and "Mosses" give us such delicious glimpses. Hawthorne's landlord, Samuel Ripley, was related to the George Ripley with whom Hawthorne had recently been associated at Brook Farm. He was uncle of Emerson, and preached his ordination sermon; was himself reared in the old Manse, and succeeded Hawthorne as resident there. His widow, born Sarah Bradford, and celebrated as "the most learned woman ever seen in New England," the close friend of Emerson and of the brilliant Concord company, survived here until 1876. She made a valuable collection of lichens, and sometimes trained young men for Harvard University. Conway records that a _savant_ called here one day and found her hearing at once the lesson of one student in Sophocles and that of another in Differential Calculus, while rocking her grandchild's cradle with one foot and shelling peas for dinner. The place is now owned by her daughters, who reside in Cambridge, and is rented in summer. It is little changed since the time Emerson's ancestor hurried thence to the gathering of his parishioners by his church-door before the Concord battle,--still less changed since the halcyon days when the great wizard of romance dwelt--the "most unknown of authors"--within its shades. It is still the unpretentious Eden, "the El Dorado for dreamers," which so completely won the heart of the sensitive Hawthorne. The picturesque old mansion stands amid greensward and foliage, its ample grounds divided from the highway by a low wall. The gate-way is flanked by tall posts of rough-hewn stone, whence a grass-grown avenue, bordered by a colonnade of overarching trees, leads to the house. Within the scattered sunshine and shade of the avenue, a row of stone slabs sunken in the turf like gravestones paves the path paced by Ripley, Emerson, and Hawthorne as they pondered and planned their compositions. Of the trees aligned upon either side, some, gray-lichened and broken, are survivors of Hawthorne's time; others are set to replace fallen patriarchs and keep the stately lines complete. At the right of the broad _allée_ and extending away to the battle-ground is the field, waving now with lush grass, where Hawthorne and Thoreau found the flint arrow-heads and other relics of an aboriginal village. Upon the space which skirts the other side of the avenue, Hawthorne had the garden which engaged so much of his time and thought, and where he produced for us abundant crops of something better than his vegetables. Here his Brook-Farm experience was useful. Passing neighbors would often see the darkly-clad figure of the recluse hoeing in this "patch," or, as often, standing motionless, gazing upon the ground so fixedly and so long--sometimes for hours together--that they thought him daft. Of the delights of summer mornings spent here with his peas, potatoes, and squashes, he gives us many glimpses in his record of that happy time; but the "Note-Books" show us, alas! that this simple pleasure was not without alloy, for, although his "garden flourished like Eden," there are hints of "weeds," next "more weeds," then a "ferocious banditti of weeds" with which "the other Adam" could never have contended. But a greater woe came with the foes who menaced his artistic squashes,--"the unconscionable squash-bugs," "those infernal squash-bugs," against which he must "carry on continual war." For the moments that we contemplate the scene of his entomic warfare, the greater battle-field, a few rods away, seems hardly more impressive. Few of the trees which in Hawthorne's time stood nearest the house remain; the producers of the peaches and "thumping pears" have gone the way of all trees. So has Dr. Ripley's famous willow--celebrated in Emerson's and Channing's exquisite verse and in Hawthorne's matchless prose--which veiled the western face of the mansion and through which Hawthorne's study-windows peeped out upon orchard, river, and mead. In the orchard that has borne such luscious fruit of fancy, some of the contorted and moss-grown trees, whose branches--"like withered hands and arms"--hold out the sweet blossoms on this June day, are the same that Hawthorne pictures among his "Mosses," and beneath which he lay in summer reverie. Few vines now clamber upon the house-walls, lilacs still grow beneath the old study-window, and a tall mass of their foliage screens a corner of the venerable edifice, which time has toned into perfect harmony with its picturesque environment. It is a great, square, wooden structure of two stories, with added attic rooms beneath an overwhelming gambrel roof, which is the conspicuous feature of the edifice and contributes to its antique form. The heavy roof settles down close upon the small, multipaned windows. From above the door little convex glasses, like a row of eyes, look out upon the visitor as he applies for admission. A spacious central hall, rich in antique panelling and sombre with grave tints, extends through the house. From its dusk and coolness we look out upon the bright summer day through its open doors; through one we see the "hill of the Emersons" beyond the highway, the other frames a pleasing picture of orchard and sward with glimpses of the river shining through its bordering shrubbery. The quaint apartments are darkly wainscoted and low-ceiled, with massive beams crossing overhead. Some of these rooms Hawthorne has shown us. The one at the left, which the novelist believed to have been the sleeping-room of Dr. Ripley, was the parlor of the Hawthornes, and--decked with a gladsome carpet, pictures, and flowers daily gathered from the river-bank--Hawthorne averred it was "one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in the whole world." To this room then came the sage Emerson "with a sunbeam in his face;" the "cast-iron man" Thoreau, "long-nosed, queer-mouthed, ugly as sin," but with whom to talk "is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest tree;" Ellery Channing, with his wife and her illustrious sister, Margaret Fuller; the gifted George William Curtis, then tilling a farm not far from the Manse, long before he lounged in an "Easy Chair;" genial Bradford, relative of Ripley, and associate and firm friend of Hawthorne; Horatio Bridge, of the "African Cruiser" and of the recent Hawthorne "Recollections;" the critic George Hillard, at whose house Hawthorne was married; "Prince" Lowell, the large-hearted; Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne's life-long friend. Concerning the discussion of things physical and metaphysical, to which these old walls then listened, the host gives us little hint. Sometimes the guests were "feasted on nectar and ambrosia" by the new Adam and Eve; sometimes they "listened to the music of the spheres which, for private convenience, is packed into a music-box,"--left here by Thoreau when he went to teach in the family of Emerson's brother; once here before this wide fireplace they sat late and told ghost stories,--doubtless suggested by the clerical phantom whose sighs they used to hear in yonder dusky corner, and whose rustling gown sometimes almost touched the company as he moved about among them. In this room Dr. Ripley penned, besides his "History of the Concord Fight" and "Treatise on Education," three thousand of his protracted homilies,--a fact upon which Hawthorne found it "awful to reflect,"--and here in our day the gifted George B. Bartlett wrote some part of his Concord sketches, etc. Here, too, and in the larger room opposite, the erudite and versatile Mrs. Samuel Ripley held her social court and received the exalted Concord conclave, with other earnest leaders of thought. In the front chamber at the right Hawthorne's first child, the hapless Una,--named from Spenser's "Faerie Queene,"--was born. Behind this is the "ten-foot-square" apartment which was Hawthorne's study and workshop. Two windows of small, prismatic-hued panes look into the orchard, and upon one of these Hawthorne has inscribed,-- "Nath^{l}. Hawthorne. This is his study, 1843." Below this another hand has graven,-- "Inscribed by my husband at Sunset Apr 3^{d} 1843 In the gold light S. A. H. Man's accidents are God's purposes. SOPHIA A. HAWTHORNE 1843." From its north window, said to have been cracked by the explosions of musketry in the conflict, we see the battle-field and a reach of the placid river. This room had been the study of Emerson's grandfather; from its window his wife watched the fight between his undrilled parishioners and the British veterans. His daughter Mary--aunt of our American Plato and herself a gifted writer--used to boast "she was in arms at the battle," having been held up at this window to see the soldiery in the highway. Years later Emerson himself came into possession of this room, and here wrote his "Nature," antagonizing many of the orthodox tenets. Perhaps it was well for the moral serenity of his ancestor--to whom the transcendental movement would have seemed arrant March-madness--that he could not foresee the composition of such a volume here within the sanctity of his old study. The book was published anonymously, and Sanborn says that when inquiry was made, "Who is the author of 'Nature?'" a Concord wit replied, "God and Waldo Emerson." Next, the dreamy Hawthorne succeeded to the little study, and here, with the sunlight glimmering through the willow boughs, he worked in solitude upon his charming productions for three or four hours of each day. Here, besides the copious entries in his journals, he prepared most of the papers of his "Mosses," wrote many articles for the "Democratic Review" and other magazines, edited "Old Dartmoor Prisoner" and Horatio Bridge's "African Cruiser." It is note-worthy that the "Celestial Railroad," in which Hawthorne records his condemnation of the spiritual renaissance by substituting the "terrible giant Transcendentalist" (who feeds upon pilgrims bound for the Celestial City) in place of the Pope and Pagan of Bunyan's allegory, was written in the same room with Emerson's volume, which inaugurated the great transcendental movement in the Western World. Among the recesses of the great attic of the Manse we may still see the "Saints' Chamber," with its fireplace and single window; but it is tenanted by sprouting clergymen no longer. The atmosphere of theological twilight and mustiness--acquired from generations of clerical inhabitants--which pervaded the place in Hawthorne's time has been dissipated by the larger and happier home-life of Mrs. Samuel Ripley and the blithe and brilliant company that gathered about her here. Dismayed by these beneficent influences, the ghosts have indignantly deserted the mansion: even the persistive clerical, who sighed in Hawthorne's parlor and noisily turned his sermon-leaves in the upper hall, has not disturbed the later occupants of the Manse. One might muse and linger long about the old place which, as his "Mosses" and journals show, Hawthorne made a part of his very life. Its air of antiquity, its traditional associations, its seclusion, and all its peaceful environment were pleasing to the shy and susceptible nature of the subtle romancer, and accorded well with his introspective habit. Besides, it was "the first home he ever had," and it was shared with his "new Eve." No wonder is it that he could here declare, "I had rather be on earth than in the seventh heaven, just now." It is saddening to remember that, from this paradise, poverty drove him forth. III A STORIED RIVER AND BATTLE-FIELD _Where Zenobia Drowned--Where Embattled Farmers Fought--Thoreau's Hemlocks--Haunts of Hawthorne--Channing--Thoreau--Emerson, etc._ Behind Hawthorne's "Old Manse"--its course so tortuous that Thoreau suggested for Concord's escutcheon "a field verdant with the river circling nine times round," so noiseless that he likened it to the "moccasined tread" of an Indian, so sluggish that Hawthorne had dwelt some weeks beside it before he determined which way its current lies--flows the Concord, "river of peace." This placid stream is the aboriginal "Musketaquid" of Emerson's poem,--sung of Thoreau, Channing, and many another bard, beloved of Hawthorne and pictured in rapturous phrase in his "Note-Books" and "Mosses from an Old Manse." It was the delightful haunt of Hawthorne's leisure, the scene of the occurrence which inspired the most thrilling and high-wrought chapter of his romance. A grassy path, shaded by orchard trees, leads from the west door of the Manse to the river's margin at the place where Hawthorne kept his boat under the willows. The boat had before been the property of Thoreau, built by his hands and used by him on the famous voyage described in his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." Hawthorne named the craft "Pond-Lily," because it brought so many cargoes of that beautiful flower to decorate his home. In it, alone or accompanied by Thoreau or Ellery Channing, he made the many delightful excursions he has described. Embarking on the slumberous stream, we follow the course of Hawthorne's boat to many a scene made familiar by that dreamful romancer and by the poets and philosophers of Concord. First to the place, below the bridge of the battle, where one dark night Hawthorne and Channing assisted in recovering from the water the ghastly body of the girl-suicide, an incident which made a profoundly horrible impression upon the sensitive novelist, and which he employed as the thrilling termination of the tale of Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance,"--portraying it with a tragic power which has never been surpassed. Thence we paddle up the placid stream, as it slumbers along its winding course between the meadows, kisses the tangled grasses and wild flowers that fringe its margins, bathes the roots and boughs of the elders and dwarf willows which overhang its surface as if to gaze upon the reflections of their own loveliness mirrored there. The reach of river--"from Nashawtuc to the Cliff"--above the confluence of the two branches was most beloved and frequented of Thoreau; here he sometimes brought Emerson, as on that summer evening when the sage's diary records, "the river-god took the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau and introduced me to the riches of his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream," etc. The deeper portion of the river near the Manse was Hawthorne's habitual resort for bathing and fishing, but his longer solitary voyages and his "wild, free days" with Ellery Channing were upon the beautiful and sheltered North Branch,--the Assabeth of the "Mosses,"--which flows into the Concord a half-mile above the Manse. Into this branch we turn our boat, and through sunshine and shade we follow the winsome course of the lingering stream, finding new and delightful seclusion at every turn. A railway now lies along one lofty bank, but its unsightliness is concealed by long lines of willows planted by the loving hands of poet and artist,--Bartlett and French,--and the infrequent trains little disturb the seclusion of the place. Giant trees, standing with "their feet fixed in the flood," bend their bright foliage above the softly-flowing stream and fleck its surface with shadows; pond-lilies are still up-borne by its dreaming waters, and cardinal flowers bedeck its banks; its barer reaches are ribbons of reflected sky. The spot on the margin locally known as "The Hemlocks," and noted by Hawthorne as being only less sacred in his memory than the household hearth, remains itself undisturbed. Here a clump of great evergreens projects from the base of the lofty bank above and across the stream, and forms on the shore a shaded bower, carpeted by the brown needles which have fallen through many a year. This was a favorite haunt of Hawthorne and Channing in blissful days; here they prepared their sylvan noontide feasts; here they lounged and dreamed; here their "talk gushed up like the babble of a fountain." As we recline in their accustomed resting-place beside the sighing stream, and look up at the azure heaven through the boughs where erstwhile often curled the smoke of their fire, we vainly try to imagine something of what would be the converse, merry or profound, of such starry spirits amid such an inspiring scene, and we more than ever regret that neither the gentle poet nor the subtle romancer has chosen to share that converse with his readers. Long and lovingly we loiter in this consecrated spot, and then slowly float back to Hawthorne's landing-place by his orchard wall. A few rods distant, at the corner of his field, is the site of the "rude bridge that arched the flood," and the first battle-ground of the American Revolution. On the farther side a colossal minute-man in bronze, modelled by the Concord sculptor French, surmounts a granite pedestal inscribed with Emerson's immortal epic, and marks the spot where stood the irregular array of the "embattled farmers" when they here "fired the shot heard round the world." The statue replaces a bush which sprang from the soil fertilized by the blood of Davis, and which Emerson imaged as the "burning bush where God spake for his people." The position of the British regulars on the hither shore is indicated by the "votive stone" of Emerson's poem,--a slender obelisk of granite,--and near it, close under the wall of the Manse enclosure, is the rude memorial that marks the grave of the British soldiers who were slain on this spot. The current tradition that a lad who, after the battle, came, axe in hand, from the Manse wood-pile, found one of the soldiers yet alive and dispatched him with the axe, was first related to Hawthorne by James Russell Lowell, as they stood together above this grave. The effect of this story upon the feelings of the susceptible Hawthorne is told on a page of "The Old Manse," and--a score of years later and in different shape--is related in the romance of "Septimius Felton." IV THE HOME OF EMERSON _An Intellectual Capitol and Pharos--Its Grounds, Library, and Literary Workshop--Famous Rooms and Visitants--Relics and Reminiscences of the Concord Sage._ Following the direction of the British retreat from the historic Common, we come, beyond the village, to the modest mansion which was for half a century the abode of the princely man who was not only "the Sage of Concord," but, in the esteem of some contemporaries, "was Concord itself." Emerson declares, "great men never live in a crowd,"--"a scholar must embrace solitude as a bride, must have his glees and glooms alone." Of himself he says, "I am a poet and must therefore live in the country; a sunset, a forest, a river view are more to me than many friends, and must divide my day with my books;" and this was the consideration which finally determined his withdrawal from the storm and fret of the city to his chosen home here by Walden woods and among the scenes of his childhood. It was his retirement to this semi-seclusion which called forth his much-quoted poem, "Good-by, proud world! I'm going home." To him here came the afflatus he had before lacked, here his faculties were inspirited, and here his literary productiveness commenced. Behind a row of dense-leaved horse-chestnuts ranged along the highway, the quondam home of Emerson nestles among clustering evergreens which were planted by Bronson Alcott and Henry D. Thoreau for their friend. A copse of pines sighs in the summer wind close by; an orchard planted and pruned by Emerson's hands, and a garden tended by Thoreau, extend from the house to a brook flowing through the grounds and later joining the Concord by the famous old Manse; beyond the brook lies the way to Walden. At the left of the house is a narrow open reach of greensward on the farther verge of which erst stood the unique rustic bower--with a wind-harp of untrimmed branches above it--which was fashioned by the loving hands of Alcott. The mansion is a substantial, square, clapboarded structure of two stories, with hip-roofs; a square window projects at one side; a wing is joined at the back; covered porches protect the entrances; light paint covers the plain walls which gleam through the bowering foliage, and the whole aspect of the place is delightfully attractive and home-like. Its pleasant and unpretentious apartments more than realize the comfortable suggestion of the exterior. Adjoining the hall on the right is the plain, rectangular room which was the philosopher's library and workshop. The cheerful fireplace and the simple furnishings of the room are little changed since he here laid down his pen for the last time; the heavy table held his manuscript, his books are ranged upon the shelves, the busts and portraits he cherished adorn the walls, his accustomed chair is upon the spot where he sat to write. Emerson's afternoons were usually spent abroad, but his mornings were habitually passed among his books in this small corner-room--"the study under the pines"--recording, in "a pellucid style which his genius made classic," the truths which had come to him as he mused by shadowy lake or songful stream, in deep wood glade or wayside path. Most of all his pen produced, of divinest poetry, of gravest philosophy, of grandest thought, was minted into words and inscribed in this simple apartment. The adjoining parlor--a spacious, pleasant, home-like room, furnished forth with many mementos of illustrious friends and guests--is scarcely less interesting than the library. This house was the intellectual capitol of the village; to it freely came the Concord circle of shining ones,--Thoreau, Channing, Sanborn, the Alcotts, the Hoars,--less frequently, Hawthorne. For a long time Mrs. Samuel Ripley habitually passed her Sabbath evenings here. The Delphic Margaret Fuller, who was as truly the "blood of transcendentalism" as Emerson "was its brain," was here for months an honored guest. For long periods Thoreau, whose fame owes much to Emerson's generosity, was here an inmate and intimate. In Emerson's parlor were held the more formal _séances_ of the Concord galaxy; here met the short-lived "Monday Evening Club," which George William Curtis whimsically describes as a "congress of oracles," who ate russet-apples and discoursed celestially while Hawthorne looked on from his corner,--"a statue of night and silence;" here were held many of Bronson Alcott's famous "conversations," as well as those of that disciple of Platonism, Dr. Jones. Emerson belonged not to Concord only, but to the whole world,--"his thought was the thought of Christendom." To these plain rooms as to an intellectual court came, from his own and other lands, hundreds famed in art, literature, and politics. Here came Curtis and Bartol to sit at the feet of the sage; Charles Sumner and Moncure Conway to bear hence--as one of them has said--"memories like those Bunyan's pilgrim must have cherished of the Interpreter." Here "came Theodore Parker from the fight for free thought," and Wendell Phillips and John Brown from the conflict for free men; here came Howells, bearing the line from Hawthorne, "I find this young man worthy;" here came Whittier, Agassiz, Hedge, Longfellow, Bradford, Lowell, Colonel Higginson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe, as to a fount of wisdom and purity. In this unpretentious parlor have gathered such guests as Stanley, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, Henry James, Louis Kossuth, Arthur Clough, Lord Amberley, Jones Very, Fredrika Bremer, Harriet Martineau, and many others who, like these, would have felt repaid for their journey over leagues of land and sea by a hand-clasp and an hour's communion with the intellect that has been the beacon of thousands in mental darkness and storm. With these came another class of pilgrims, the great army of impracticables, "men with long hair, long beards, long collars,--many with long ears, each in full chase after the millennium," and each intent upon securing the endorsement of Emerson for his own pet scheme. The wonder is that the little library saw any work accomplished, so many came to it and claimed the time of the master; for to every one--scholar, tradesman, and "crank"--were accorded his never-failing courtesy and kindly interest. Any one might be the bearer of a divine message, so he listened to all,--the most uncouth and _outré_ visitant might be the coming man for whom his faith waited, therefore all were admitted. Here all were "assayed, not analyzed." Emerson's habitual quest for only the divinest traits and his quickened perception of the best in men enabled him to recognize excellencies which were yet unseen by others. While Hawthorne, the shy hermit at the Manse, was unheeded by the world and thought crazed by his neighbors, Emerson knew and proclaimed his transcendent genius. He first recognized the inspiration of Ellery Channing, and made for his exquisite verse exalted claims which have been fully justified, and which the world may yet allow. While to others Henry Thoreau was yet only an eccentric egotist, Emerson knew him as a poet and philosopher, and made him the "forest seer, the heart of all the scene," in his lyrical masterpiece "Wood-Notes." He promptly hailed Walt Whitman as a true poet while many of us were yet wondering if it were not charitable to think him insane. Emerson's cordiality won for him the honor which prophets rarely enjoy in their own country; the objects and places once associated with him here are still esteemed sacred by his old neighbors. We find among them at this day many who can know nothing of his books, but who, for memory of his simple kindness, go far from their furrow or swath to show us spots he loved and frequented in woodland or meadow, on swelling hill-side or by winding river. To his home here Emerson brought his bride sixty years ago; here he lived his fruitful life and accomplished his work; here he rose to the zenith of poesy and prophecy; to him here came the "great and grave transition which may not king or priest or conqueror spare;" from here his wife, lingering behind him in the eternal march, went a year or two ago to rejoin him on the piny hill-top; and here his unmarried daughter--of "saint-like face and nun-like garb"--inhabits his home and cherishes its treasures. Emerson's son and biographer some time ago relinquished his medical practice in Concord, and has since devoted himself to art. He has a residence a mile or so out of the village, but spends much of his time abroad. Last year he lectured in London upon the lives and writings of some of the Concord authors. V THE ORCHARD HOUSE AND ITS NEIGHBORS _Ellery Channing--Margaret Fuller--The Alcotts--Professor Harris--Summer School of Philosophy--Where Little Women was written and Robert Hagburn lived--Where Cyril Norton was slain._ A plain little cottage by the road, not far from Emerson's home, was for some time the abode of the companion of many of his rambles through the countryside,--the poet Ellery Channing. It was to this simple dwelling, as the author of "Little Women" once told the writer, that Channing brought his young wife--sister of Margaret Fuller--before the Alcotts had come to live in their hill-side home under the wooded ridge, and it was here he commenced the sequestered life so suited to his nature and tastes. Some of his descriptive poems of Concord landscapes were written in this little cottage. The scenes of one of his earlier winters in the neighborhood--when he chopped wood in a rude clearing--are portrayed in the exquisite lines of his "Woodman." In those days he thought his poems "too sacred to be sold for money," and they were kept for his circle of friends. Of the poet's modest home Miss Fuller--that "dazzling woman with the flame in her heart"--was a frequent inmate; it was from Concord that she went to live in the family of Horace Greeley in New York. At the time of her visits at Channing's cottage Thoreau was sojourning with Emerson, and we may be sure that the quartette of starry souls, thus _juxtaposé_, held much soulful and edifying converse. But those of us who deplore our lack of the supreme transcendental spirit which we ascribe to the Concord circle may find consolation in reflecting that some of this gifted company had also earthly tastes, and found even discourse concerning the "over-soul" sometimes tiresome. The "strained pitch of intellectual intensity" was, upon occasion, gladly relaxed; thus we discover the exalted Channing sometime profanely inviting Hawthorne--"the gentlest man that kindly Nature ever drew"--to visit him in Concord, alluring the novelist with prospects of strong-waters, pipes and tobacco without end, and urging, as the utmost inducement, "Emerson is gone and there is nobody here to bore you." A few furlongs farther eastward, under the high-soaring elms of the Lexington road, we come to the "Orchard House" of Bronson Alcott, "the grandfather of the 'Little Women.'" The tasteful dwelling stands several rods back from the street, nestling cosily at the foot of a pine-crowned slope, and having a wide, sunny outlook in front. Embowered in orchards and vines, and shaded by the overreaching arms of giant elms, it seems a most delightful home for culture and contemplative study. The cottage itself is a low, wide, gabled, picturesquely irregular edifice, which our Pythagorean mystic evolved from a forlorn, box-like farm-house which he found here when he purchased the place. The rustic fence he set along the highway is replaced by an ambitious modern structure. On this hill-side Alcott, the "most transcendent of the transcendentalists," lived for nearly thirty years,--but not all of that time in this house,--coming here first after the failure of his "Fruitlands" community in 1845, and finally twelve years later. Prior to this he had been assisted by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody in his renowned Boston Temple School, which was a failure in a financial sense only, since it furnished a theme for Miss Peabody's "Record of a School," and Louisa Alcott's girlish recollections of it provided her a model for the delightful "Plumfield" of her books. Alcott's treatise on "Early Education," his "Gospels" and "Orphic Sayings," had been published, and his "very best contribution to literature"--his daughter Louisa--was also extant before he came to this home, but it was here that his maturer works and most of his charming essays and "Conversations" were produced. In this house were held the early sessions of the Summer School of Philosophy, of which Alcott was the leading spirit; here his daughter, the "Beth" of "Jo's" books, died. The interior of the "Orchard House" is roomy and quaint and abounds in surprising nooks and cosy recesses. In the corner-room Louisa wrote "Little Women" and other delicious books; in the room behind it, May, "our Madonna,"--who died Madame Nieriker,--had her studio and practised the art which made her famous before her untimely end. In the great attic under the sloping roof the "Little Women" acted the "comic tragedies" written by "Jo" and "Meg" (some of them now published in a volume with a "Foreword" by "Meg") until the increasing audiences of Concord children caused the removal of the mimic stage to the big barn on the hill-side. Hawthorne makes this house the abode of Robert Hagburn in "Septimius Felton." Along the brow of the tree-clad ridge which overlooks the place, and to which Bronson Alcott resorted for the morning and evening view, the patriots hastened to intercept the retreat of the British troops, "blackened and bloody." In the depression of the ridge just back of the house we find the spot where "Septimius Felton" shot the young officer, Cyril Norton, and buried him under the trees. On the grave here "Septimius" sat with Rose Garfield and the half-crazed Sibyl Dacy; here grew the crimson flower which he distilled in his "elixir of immortality," and here Sibyl came to die after her draught of the compound. After the removal of the Alcotts to the Thoreau house in the village, "Apple Slump"--as Louisa sometimes called this orchard home--became the property and residence of that disciple of Hegel, Professor Harris,--once principal of the Summer School of Philosophy, and now the head of the National Bureau of Education at Washington,--who sometimes comes here in summer. The "Hillside Chapel," erected by Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York, for the sessions of the Summer Philosophers, is placed among the trees of the orchard adjoining Alcott's old home. It is a plain little structure of wood, tasteful in design, with pointed gables and vine-draped porch and windows. Its embowered walls, unpainted and unplastered, seem "scarcely large enough to contain the wisdom of the world," but they have held assemblages of such lights as Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Bartol, McCosh, Holland, Porter, Lathrop, Stedman, Wilder, Hedge, Dr. Jones, Elizabeth Peabody, Ward Howe, Ednah Cheney, and other like seekers and promoters of fundamental truth. VI HAWTHORNE'S WAYSIDE HOME. _Sometime Abode of Alcott--Hawthorne--Lathrop--Margaret Sidney--Storied Apartments--Hawthorne's Study--His Mount of Vision--Where Septimius Felton and Rose Garfield dwelt._ On the Lexington road, a little way beyond the Orchard House, is the once Wayside home of Hawthorne, the dwelling in which, at a tender age, Louisa M. Alcott made her first literary essay. It is a curious, wide, straggling, and irregular structure, of varying ages, heights, and styles. The central gambrel-roofed portion was the original house of four rooms, described as the residence of "Septimius Felton;" other rooms have been added at different periods and to serve the need of successive occupants, until an architecturally incongruous and altogether delightful mansion has been produced. To the ugly little square house which Alcott found here in 1845 and christened "Hillside" he added a low wing at each side, the central gable in the front of the old roof, and wide rustic piazzas across the front of the wings. No additions were made during Hawthorne's first residence here, nor during the occupancy of Mrs. Hawthorne's brother, while the novelist was abroad; but when Hawthorne returned to it in 1860, with "most of his family twice as big as when they left," he enlarged one wing by adding the barn to it, heightened the other side-wing, erected two spacious apartments at the back, and crowned the edifice with a square third-story study, which, with its great chimney and many gables, overtops the rambling roofs like an observatory, and may have been suggested by the tower of the Villa Montauto, where he wrote "The Marble Faun." No important changes have been made by the subsequent owners of the place. Hawthorne's widow left the Wayside in 1868. It was afterward occupied by a school for young ladies; then by Hawthorne's daughter Rose--herself a charming writer--with her husband, the gifted and versatile George Parsons Lathrop; later it was purchased by the Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop, and has since been the summer home of his widow, who is widely known as "Margaret Sidney," the creator of "Five Little Peppers," and writer of many delightful books. Hawthorne said, anent his visit to Abbotsford, "A house is forever ruined as a home by having been the abode of a great man,"--a truth well attested by the present amiable mistress of his own Wayside, whose experience with a legion of unaccredited, intrusive, and often insolent persons who come at all hours of the day, and sometimes in the night, demanding to be shown over the place, would be more ludicrous were it less provoking. Some details of the interior have been beautified by the æsthetic taste of Mrs. Lothrop, but an appreciative reverence for Hawthorne leads her to preserve his home and its belongings essentially unchanged. At the right of the entrance is an antique reception-room, which was Hawthorne's study during his first residence here, as it had long before been the study of "Septimius Felton" in the tale. It is a low-studded apartment with floor of oaken planks, heavy beams strutting from its ceiling, a generous fireplace against a side wall, and with two windows looking out upon the near highway. In this room Hawthorne wrote "Tanglewood Tales" and "Life of Franklin Pierce;" and here that creature of his imagination, "Septimius," brooded over his doubts and questions. Through yonder windows "Septimius" saw the British soldiery pass and repass; above this oaken mantel--now artistically fitted and embellished with rare pottery--he hung the sword of the officer he had slain; before this fireplace he pored over the mysterious manuscript his dying victim had given him; on this hearth he distilled the mystic potion, and here poor Sibyl quaffed it. The spacious room at the left, across the hall, was at first Hawthorne's parlor; but after he enlarged the dwelling this became the library, where he read aloud to the assembled family on winter evenings, and where his widow afterward transcribed his "Note-Books" for publication. The sunny room above this was the chamber of the unfortunate Una; Hawthorne's own sleeping apartment, on the second floor, is entered from the hall through the narrowest of door-ways. In the upper hall a little wall-closet was the repository of Hawthorne's manuscripts, and here, to the surprise of all, an entire unpublished romance was found after his death. From this hall a narrow stairway, so steep that one need cling to the iron rail at the side in order to scale it, ascends to Hawthorne's study in the tower, a lofty room with vaulted ceiling. On one side wall is the Gothic enclosure of the stairs, against which once stood his plain oaken writing-desk; upon it the bronze inkstand he brought from Italy, where it held the ink for "The Marble Faun." In this inkstand, he declared, lurked "the little imp" which sometimes controlled his pen. Attached to a side of the staircase was the high desk or shelf upon which he often wrote standing. Book-closets filled the corners at the back, and a little fireplace with a plain mantel was placed between two of the windows. Loving hands have neatly decorated the ceiling, and painted upon the walls mottoes commemorative of the master who wrought here. The views he beheld through the windows of this sanctum when he lifted his eyes from his book or manuscript are tranquil and soothing: across his roofs in one direction he looked upon the sunny grasslands of the valley; in another he saw placid slopes of darkly-wooded hills and a reach of the elm-bordered road; in a third direction, smiling fields and the vineyards where the famous Concord grape first grew met his vision; and through his north windows appeared the thick woods that crowned his own hill-top,--so near that he "could see the nodding wild flowers" among the trees and breathe the woodland odors. Local tradition declares that, to prevent intrusion into this den, Hawthorne habitually sat upon a trap-door in the floor, which was the only entrance. Without this precaution he found in this eyrie the seclusion he coveted, and here, among the birds and the tree-tops, remote from the tumult of life and above ordinary distracting influences, he could linger undisturbed in that border-land between shadow and substance which was his delight, could evoke and fix upon his pages the weird creatures of his fancy. Several hours of each day he passed here alone in musing or composition, and here, besides some papers for the "Atlantic," he wrote "Our Old Home," "Grimshaw's Secret," "Septimius Felton," and the "Dolliver Romance" fragment. Years before, Thoreau told him, the Wayside had once been inhabited by a man who believed he would never die. The thus suggested idea, of a deathless man associated with this house, seems to have clung to Hawthorne in his last years, and was embodied in both his later works,--the scene of "Septimius Felton" being laid here at the Wayside. No one knew aught of its composition, and the author, rereading the tale in the solitude of this study and finding it in some way lacking the perfection of his ideal, laid it away in his closet, and, in weariness and failing health, commenced and vainly tried to finish the "Dolliver Romance" from the same materials. The house is separated from the highway by a narrow strip of sward, out of which grow elms planted by Bronson Alcott and clustering evergreens rooted by Hawthorne himself. The greater part of his domain lies along the dark slope and the wooded summit of the ridge which rises close behind the house. At the extremity of the grounds nearest the Orchard House, a depression in the turf marks the site of the little house where dwelt the Rose Garfield of "Septimius." Hawthorne planted sunflowers in this hollow, and Julian, his son, remembers seeing the novelist stand here and contemplate their wide disks above the old cellar. On the steep hill-side remain the rough terraces Alcott fashioned when he occupied the place, and many of the flowering locusts and fruit-trees he and Thoreau planted. Here, too, are the sombre spruces and firs which Hawthorne sent from "Our Old Home" or planted after his return, and all are grown until they overshadow the whole place and fairly embower the house with their branches. Along the hill-side are the famous "Acacia path" of Mrs. Hawthorne and other walks planned by the novelist, some of them having been opened by him in the last summer of his life. By one path, once familiar to his feet, we find our way up the steep ascent among the locusts to the "Mount of Vision,"--as Mrs. Hawthorne named the ridge to which the novelist daily resorted for study and meditation. The hill-top is clothed with a tangled growth of trees which hides it from the lower world and renders it a fitting trysting-place for the wizard romancer and the mystic figures which abound in his tales. Along the brow we trace, among the ferns, vestiges of the pathway worn by his feet. In the safe seclusion of this spot he spent delectable hours, lying under the trees "with a book in his hands and an unwritten book in his thoughts," while the pines murmured to him of the mystery and shadow he loved. More often he sat on a rustic seat between yonder pair of giant trees, or paced his foot-path hour after hour, as he pondered his plots and worked out the mystic details of many romances, some of them never to be written. Walking here with Fields he unfolded his design of the "Dolliver" tale, which he left half told. Here he composed the weird story of "Septimius Felton," while trudging on the very path he describes as having been worn by his hero,--Hawthorne himself habitually walking, with hands clasped behind him and with eyes bent on the ground, in the very attitude he ascribes to "Septimius" as Rose saw him "treading, treading, treading, many a year," on this foot-path by the grave of the officer he had slain. In this refuge Hawthorne remained a whole day alone with his grief, when tidings came to him of the loss of his sister in the burning of the "Henry Clay." Here he sat with Howells one memorable afternoon. In the last years his wife was often with him here, sometimes walking, but more frequently sitting, with him,--as did Rose with "Septimius,"--and looking out, through an opening in the foliage near the western end of his path, upon the restful landscape, not less charming to-day than when his eyes lovingly lingered upon it. We see the same broad, sun-kissed meadows awave with lush grass and flecked with fleeting cloud-shadows, and beyond, the dark forests of Thoreau's Walden and the gentle outlines of low-lying hills which shut in the valley like a human life. For some months after the election to the Presidency of his friend Franklin Pierce, the Wayside was frequented by office-seekers; but ordinarily Hawthorne had few visitors besides his Concord friends. Fields, Holmes, Hilliard, Whipple, Longfellow, Howells, Horatio Bridge, the poet Stoddard, Henry Bright, came to him here. The visits of "Gail Hamilton" (Miss Abigail Dodge), mentioned by Hawthorne as "a sensible, healthy-minded woman," were especially enjoyed by him. His own visits were very infrequent; "Orphic" Alcott said that in the several years he lived next door Hawthorne came but twice into his house: the first time he quickly excused himself "because the stove was too hot," next time "because the clock ticked too loud." The Wayside was the only home Hawthorne ever owned. To it he came soon after his removal from the "little red house" in Berkshire, and to it he returned from his sojourn abroad; here, with failing health and desponding spirits, he lived in the gloomy war-days,--writing in his study or, with steps more and more uncertain, pacing his hill-top; from here he set out with his life-long friend Pierce on the last sad journey which ended so quickly and quietly. VII THE WALDEN OF THOREAU _A Transcendental Font--Emerson's Garden--Thoreau's Cove--Cairn-- Beanfield--Resort of Emerson--Hawthorne--Channing--Hosmer--Alcott, etc._ One long-to-be-remembered day we follow the shady foot-paths, once familiar to the sublimated Concord company, through their favorite forest retreats to "the blue-eyed Walden,"--sung by many a bard, beloved by transcendental saint and seer. After a delightful stroll of a mile or more, we emerge from the wood and see the lovely lakelet "smiling upon its neighbor pines." We find it a half-mile in diameter, with bold and picturesquely irregular margins indented with deep bays and mostly wooded to the pebbles at the water's edge. From this setting of emerald foliage it scintillates like a gem: its wavelets lave a narrow pebbly shore within which a bottom of pure white sand gleams upward through the most transparent water ever seen. At one point where the railway skirts the margin, the woods are disfigured with pavilions and tables for summer pleasure-seekers, and a farther wooded slope has recently been ravaged by fire; but most of the shore has escaped both profanation and devastation, so that the literary pilgrim will find the shrines he seeks little disturbed since the Concord luminaries here had their haunt. From the summit of the forest ledge which rises from the southern shore, the lakelet seems a foliage-framed patch of the firmament. This rocky eminence affords a wide and enchanting prospect, and was the terminus and object of many excursions of Emerson and the other "Walden-Pond-Walkers," as the transcendentalists were styled by their more prosy and orthodox neighbors. It was upon this elevation in the midst of a portion of his estate which he celebrates in his poetry as "My Garden"--whose "banks slope down to the blue lake-edge"--that Emerson proposed to erect a lodge or retreat for retirement and thought. A mossy path, once trodden almost daily by the philosopher and his friends, brings us to the beautiful and secluded cove where Emerson and Thoreau kept a boat, and where the shining ones often came to bathe in this limpid water. Ablution here seems to have been a sort of transcendent baptism, and many a visitor, eminent in art, thought, or letters, has boasted that he walked and talked with Emerson in Walden woods and bathed with him in Walden water. In this romantic nook Thoreau spent much time during his hermitage, sitting in reverie on its banks or afloat on its glassy surface, fishing or playing his flute to the charmed perch. On the shore of this cove he procured the stones for the foundations and the sand for the plastering of his cabin. From the water's edge an obscure path, bordered by the wild flowers he loved, winds among the murmuring pines up to the site of Thoreau's retreat, on a gentle hill-side which falls away to the shore a few rods distant. A cairn of small stones, placed by reverent pilgrims, stands upon or near the spot where he erected his dwelling at an outlay of twenty-eight dollars and lived upon an income of one dollar per month. The hermit would hardly know the place now; his young pines are grown into giants that allow but glimpses of the shimmering lake; even the "potato hole" he dug under his cabin, whence the squirrels chirped at him from beneath the floor as he sat to write, and where he kept his winter store,--the "beans with the weevil in them" and the "potatoes with every third one nibbled by chipmunks,"--is obliterated and overgrown with the glabrous sumach. His near-by field, where he learned to "know beans" and gathered relics of a previous and aboriginal race of bean-hoers, is covered by a growth of pines and dwarf oaks, in places so dense as to be almost impassable. Some one has said, "Thoreau experienced Nature as other men experience religion." Certainly the life at Walden, which he depicted in one of the most fascinating of books, was in all its details--whether he was ecstatically hoeing beans in his field or dreaming on his door-step, floating on the lake or rambling in forest and field--that of an ascetic and devout worshipper of Nature in all her moods. Thoreau "built himself in Walden woods a den" in 1845,--after his return from tutoring in the family of Emerson's brother at Staten Island; here he wrote most of "Walden" and the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and much more that has been posthumously published; from here he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his poll, from here he made the excursion described in "The Maine Woods." He finally removed from Walden in the autumn of 1847, to reside in the house of Emerson during that sage's absence in Europe. An old neighbor of Thoreau's, who had often watched his "stumpy" figure as he hoed the beans, and had even once or twice assisted him in that celestial agriculture, tells us that Thoreau's hut was removed by a gardener to the middle of the bean-field and there occupied for some years. Later it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles distant, where it has decayed and gone to pieces. In Concord it is not difficult to identify the personages associated with Thoreau's life at Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The "landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on which Thoreau was "a squatter," was Waldo Emerson; the owner of the axe which the hermit borrowed to hew the frame of his hut was Bronson Alcott; the "honorable raisers" of the structure were Emerson, Curtis the Nile "Howadji," Alcott, Hosmer, and others; the lady who made the sketch of the hermitage which appears on the title-page of "Walden" was the author's sister Sophia. Of the hermit's visitors here, "the one who came oftenest" was Emerson; "the one who came farthest" was also the poet whom the hermit "took to board for a fortnight," Ellery Channing; the "long-headed farmer," who had "donned a frock instead of a professor's gown," was Thoreau's neighbor and life-long friend Edmund Hosmer, who is celebrated in the poetry of Emerson and Channing; the "last of the philosophers," the "Great Looker--great Expecter," who "first peddled wares and then his own brains," was Bronson Alcott, who spent long evenings here in converse with the hermit, or in listening to chapters from his manuscript. Here came Hawthorne to talk with his "cast-iron man" about trees and arrow-heads; here came George Hilliard and James T. Fields, and others,--sometimes so many that the hut would scarce contain them; the only complaint heard from Thoreau anent the narrowness of his quarters being that there was not room for the words to ricochet between him and his guests. Here, too, came humbler visitors, hunted slaves, who were never denied the shelter of the hermitage nor the sympathy and aid of the hermit. Another generation of visitors comes now to this spot,--pilgrims from far, like ourselves, to the shrine of a "stoic greater than Zeno or Xenophanes,"--a man whose "breath and core was conscience." We linger till the twilight, for the genius of this shrine seems very near us as we muse in the place where he dwelt incarnate alone with Nature, and there is for us a hint of his healthful spirit in the odor of his pines and of the wild flowers beside his path,--a vague whisper of his earnest, honest thought in the murmur of the clustering boughs and in the lapping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand. We bring from the shore a stone--the whitest we can find--for his cairn, and place with it a bright leaf, like those his callers in other days left for visiting cards upon his door-step, and then, through the wondrous half-lights of the summer evening, we walk silently away. VIII THE HILL-TOP HEARSED WITH PINES _Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious Concord Company--Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs._ During Hawthorne's habitation of the "Old Manse" and his first residence at the Wayside, his favorite walk was to the "Sleepy Hollow," a beautifully diversified precinct of hill and vale which lies a little way eastward from the village. His habitual resting-place here was a pine-shaded hill-top where he often met Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, Mrs. Ripley, or Margaret Fuller,--for all that sublimated company loved and frequented this spot. More often Hawthorne lounged and mused or chatted here alone with his lovely wife. Their letters and journals of this period make frequent mention of the walks to this place and of "our castle,"--a fanciful structure which, in their happy converse here under the pines, they planned to erect for their habitation on this hill-top. In their pleasant conceit, the terraced path which skirts the verge of the hollow and thence ascends the ridge was the grand "chariot-road" to their castle. This park has become a cemetery,--at its dedication Emerson made an oration and Frank B. Sanborn read a beautiful ode,--and on their beloved hill-top nearly all the transcendent company whom Hawthorne used to meet there, save Margaret Fuller who rests beneath the sea, lie at last in "the dreamless sleep that lulls the dead." First came Thoreau, to lie among his kindred under the wild flowers and the fallen needles of his dear pines, in a grave marked now by a simple stone graven with his name and age. Next came Hawthorne: with his "half-told tale" and a wreath of apple-blossoms from the "Old Manse" resting on his coffin, and with Emerson, Longfellow, Fields, Ellery Channing, Agassiz, Hoar, Lowell, Whipple, Alcott, Holmes, and George Hilliard walking mournfully by his side, he was borne, through the flowering orchards and up the hill-side path,--which was to have been his "chariot-road,"--to a grave on the site of the "castle" of his fancy; where his dearest friend Franklin Pierce covered him with flowers and James Freeman Clarke committed his mortal part to the lap of earth. Alas, that the beloved cohabitant of his dream-castle must lie in death a thousand leagues away! in no dream of his would such a separation from her have seemed possible. She tried to mark his tomb by a leafy monument of hawthorn shrubbery, but the rigorous climate prevented; now a low marble, inscribed with the one word "Hawthorne," stands at either extremity of his grave, and a glossy growth of periwinkle covers the spot where sleeps the great master of American romance. Some smaller graves are beside his: in one lies a child of Julian Hawthorne; in another, Rose--the daughter of Hawthorne's age--laid the son which her husband, Parsons Lathrop, commemorates in the lines of "The Flown Soul." Next Mrs. Ripley and Elizabeth Hoar were borne to this "God's acre," and then Emerson--followed by a vast concourse and mourned by all the world--was brought to "give his body back to earth again," in this loved retreat, near Hawthorne and his own "forest-seer" Thoreau. A gigantic pine towers above him here, and a massive triangular boulder of untooled pink quartz--already marred by the vandalism of relic-seekers--is placed to mark the grave of the great "King of Thought." It bore no inscription or device of any sort until a few months ago, when a bronze plate inscribed with his name and years and the lines-- "The passive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned"-- was set in the rough surface of the stone. By Emerson lie his wife, his mother, two children of his son and biographer Dr. Emerson, and his own little child,--the "wondrous, deep-eyed boy" whom Emerson mourned in his matchless "Threnody." "O child of paradise, Boy who made dear his father's home, In whose deep eyes Men read the welfare of the times to come,-- I am too much bereft." Six years after Emerson, Bronson Alcott and his illustrious daughter Louisa were laid here, within a few yards of Hawthorne and the rest, on a spot selected by the "Beth" of the Alcott books who was herself the first to be interred in it. Now all the "Little Women" repose here with their parents and good "John Brooke,"--"Jo" being so placed as to suggest to her biographer that she is still to take care of parents and sisters "as she had done all her life." [Illustration: THE GRAVE OF EMERSON] No other spot of earth holds dust more precious than does this "hill-top hearsed with pines." We are pleased to find the native beauty of the place little disturbed,--the trees, the indigenous grasses, ferns, and flowers remaining for the most part as they were known and loved by those who sleep beneath them. The contour of the ground and the foliage which clusters upon the slopes measurably shut out the view of other portions of the enclosure from this secluded hill-top, and, as we sit by the graves under the moaning pines, we seem to be alone with these _our_ dead. Through the boughs we have glimpses of the motionless deeps of a summer sky; the patches of sunshine which illumine the graves about us are broken by foliate shadows sometimes as still as if painted upon the turf. No discordant sound from the haunts of men disturbs our meditations; the silence is unbroken save by the frequent sighs of the mourning pines. As we linger, the pervading quiet becomes something more than mere silence, it acquires the air and sense of reserve: the impression is borne into our thought that these asleep here, who once freely gave us their richest and best, are withholding something from us now,--some newly-learned wisdom, some higher thought. Does "an awful spell bind them to silence," or are they vainly repeating to us in the tender monotone of the pines a message we cannot hear or cannot bear? Or have they ceased from all ken or care for earthly things? Do they no longer love this once beloved spot? Do they not rejoice in the beauty of this summer day and the sunshine that falls upon their windowless palace? Are they conscious of our reverent tread on the turf above them, of our low words of remembrance and affection? Do they care that we have come from far to bend over them here? "For knowledge of all these things, we must"--as the greatest of this transcendent circle once said--"wait for to-morrow morning." IN AND OUT OF LITERARY BOSTON IN BOSTON OUT OF BOSTON I. Cambridge; Elmwood, etc. II. Belmont; Wayside Inn; Homes of Whittier III. The Salem of Hawthorne; Whittier's Oak Knoll IV. Webster's Marsh-field; Brook Farm and other Shrines IN BOSTON _A Golden Age of Letters--Literary Associations--Isms--Clubs--Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived--The Corner Book-store--Home of Fields--Sargent--Hilliard--Aldrich--Deland--Parkman--Holmes--Howells-- Moulton--Hale--Howe--Jane Austin, etc._ Of the cisatlantic cities our "modern Athens" is, to the literary pilgrim, the most interesting; for, whatever may be the claims of other cities to the present literary primacy, all must concede that Boston was long the intellectual capital of the continent and its centre of literary culture and achievement. If the pilgrim have attained to middle life and be loyal to the literary idols of his youth, his regard for the Boston of to-day must be largely reminiscential of a past that is rapidly becoming historic; for, of the constellation of brilliant authors and thinkers who first gained for the place its pre-eminence in letters, few or none remain alive. The requirements of labor and trade are transforming the old streets; the sedate and comfortable dwellings, once the abodes or the resorts of the _littérateurs_, are giving place to palatial shops or great factories; the neighborhood where Bancroft, Choate, Winthrop, Webster, and Edward Everett dwelt within a few rods of each other was long ago surrendered to merchandise and mammon; yet for us the busy scenes are haunted by memories and peopled by presences which the spirit of trade is powerless to exorcise. To tread the streets which have daily echoed the foot-falls of the illustrious company who created here a golden age of learning and culture were alone a pleasure, but the city holds many closer and more personal mementos of her dead prophets, as well as the homes of a present generation who worthily strive to sustain her place and prestige. Interwoven with the older Boston are literary associations hardly less memorable and enduring than its history: in the belfry of its historic holy of holies--Old South Church--was the study of the historian Dr. Belknap, and the dove that nested beneath the church-bell is preserved in the poetry of N. P. Willis; King's Chapel, the sanctuary where the beloved Dr. Holmes worshipped for so many years, and whence he was not long ago sadly borne to his burial, figures in the fiction of Fenimore Cooper; historic Copp's Hill is also a scene in a tale of the same novelist; the court-house occupies the site of the "beetle-browed" prison of Hester Prynne of "The Scarlet Letter;" the storied old State-house marked the place of her pillory; the theatre of the Boston Massacre is the scene of the thrilling episode of Hawthorne's "Gray Champion;" his "Legends of Province House" commemorate the ancient structure which stood nearly opposite the Old South Church; the Tremont House, where the "Jacobins' Club" used to assemble with Ripley, Channing, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Peabody, and the extreme reformers, was the resort of Hawthorne's "Miles Coverdale," as it was of the novelist himself, and on the street here he saw "ragamuffin Moodie" of "The Blithedale Romance." On the site of Bowdoin School, Charles Sumner was born; at one hundred and twenty Hancock Street he lived and composed the early orations which made his fame; at number one Exeter Place, Theodore Parker, the Vulcan of the New England pulpit, forged his bolts and wrote the "Discourses of Religion;" in Essex Street lived and wrote Wendell Phillips, at thirty-seven Common Street he died; at thirty-one Hollis Street the gifted Harriet Martineau was the guest of Francis Jackson; at the corner of Congress and Water Streets Lloyd Garrison wrote and published "The Liberator." In this older city, antedating the luxury of the Back Bay district of the new Boston, Mather wrote the "Magnalia," Paine sang his songs, Allston composed his tales, Buckminster wrote his homilies, Bowditch translated La Place's "_Mécanique céleste_." Here Emerson, Motley, Parkman, and Poe were born; here Bancroft lived, Combe wrote, Spurzheim died. Here Maffit, Channing, and Pierpont preached; Agassiz, Phillips, and Lyell lectured; Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Fuller taught. Here Sargent wrote "Dealings with the Dead," Sprague his "Curiosity," Prescott his "Ferdinand and Isabella;" here Margaret Fuller held the "Conversations" which attracted and impressed the leading spirits of the time, and Bronson Alcott favored elect circles with his Orphic and oracular utterances; here lived Melvill, pictured in Holmes's "Last Leaf;" here Emerson preached Unitarianism "until he had carried it to the jumping-off-place," as one of his quondam parishioners avers, and here commenced his career as philosopher and lecturer. Here, besides those above mentioned, Dwight, Brisbane, Quincy, Ripley, Graham, Thompson, Hovey, Loring, Miller, Mrs. Folsom, and others of similar ability or zeal, discoursed and wrote in advocacy of the various reforms and "isms" in vogue half a century or more ago. It has been said that, according to the local creed, whoso is born in Boston needs not to be born again, but some decades ago a literary prowler, like ourselves, discovered that "nobody is born in Boston," the people who have made its fame in letters and art being usually allured to it from other places. This is true in less degree of the present age, since Hale, Robert Grant, Ballou,--of "The Pearl of India,"--Bates, Guiney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others are "to the manor born;" but, if Boston has few birthplaces, she cherishes the homes and haunts of two generations of adult intellectual giants. Prominent among the literary landmarks is the "Corner Book-store"--once the shop of the father of Dr. Clarke--at School and Washington Streets, which, like Murray's in London, has long been the rendezvous of the _littérateurs_. Here appeared the first American edition of "The Opium Eater" and of Tennyson's poems. Here was the early home of the "Atlantic," then edited by James T. Fields, who was the literary partner of the firm and the presiding genius of the old store. This lover of letters and sympathetic friend of literary men--always kind of heart and generous of hand--drew to him here the foremost of that galaxy who first achieved for America a place in the world of letters. To this literary Rialto, as familiar loungers, came in that golden age George Hilliard, Emerson, Ticknor, Saxe, Whipple, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Agassiz, the "Autocrat," and the rest, to loiter among and discuss the new books, or, more often, to chat with their friend Fields at his desk, in the nook behind the green baize curtain. The store is altered some since Fields left it; the curtained back-corner, which was the domain of the Celtic urchin "Michael Angelo" and the trysting spot of the literary fraternity, has given place to shelves of shining books. The side entrance--used mostly by the authors because it brought them more directly to Fields's desk and den--is replaced by a window which looks out upon the spot where, as we remember with a thrill, Fields last shook Hawthorne's hand and stood looking after him as--faltering with weakness--he walked up this side street with Pierce to start upon the journey from which he never returned. Literary tourists come to the store as to a shrine: thus in later years Matthew Arnold, Cable, Edmund Gosse, Professor Drummond, Dr. Doyle, and others like them, have visited the old corner. Nor is it deserted by the authors of the day; Holmes was often here up to the time of his death, and the visitor may still see, turning the glossy pages, some who are writers as well as readers of books: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Scudder, Alger, Robert Grant,--whose "Reflections" and "Opinions" have been so widely read,--Miss Winthrop, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and Mrs. Coffin are among those who still come to the familiar place. Near by, in Washington Street, Hawthorne's first romance, "Fanshawe," was published in 1828. From Fields's famous store the transition to the staid old mansion which was long his home, and in which his widow still lives, is easy and natural. We find it pleasantly placed below the western slope of Beacon Hill, overlooking an enchanting prospect of blue waters and sunset skies. It is one of those dignified, substantial, and altogether comfortable dwellings--with spacious rooms, wide halls, easy stairways, and generous fireplaces--which we inherit from a previous generation. Here Fields, hardly less famed as an author than as the friend of authors, and his gifted wife--who is still a charming writer--created in their beautiful home an atmosphere which attracted to it the best and highest of their kind, and made it what it has been for more than forty years, a centre and ganglion of literary life and interest. The old-fashioned rooms are aglow with most precious memories and teem with artistic and literary treasures, many of them being _souvenirs_ of the illustrious authors whom the Fields have numbered among their friends and guests. The letters of Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, and others reveal the quality of the hospitality of this house and show how it was prized by its recipients. For years this was the Boston home of Hawthorne; to it came Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier almost as freely as to their own abodes; here Holmes, Lowell, Charles Sumner, Greene, Bayard Taylor, Joseph Jefferson, were frequent guests; and here we see a quaintly furnished bedchamber which has at various times been occupied by Dickens, Trollope, Arthur Clough, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Cushman, and others of equal fame. Of the delights of familiar intercourse with the starry spirits who frequented this house, of their brilliant discussions of men and books, their scintillations of wit, their sage and sober words of wisdom, Mrs. Annie Fields affords but tantalizing hints in her reminiscences and the glimpses she occasionally allows us of her husband's diary and letters. Fields's library on the second floor--described as "My Friend's Library"--is a most alluring apartment, where we see, besides the "Shelf of Old Books" of which Mrs. Fields gives such a sympathetic account, other shelves containing numerous curious and uniquely precious volumes,--among them the few hundreds of worn and much annotated books which constituted the library of Leigh Hunt. In this room Emerson, while awaiting breakfast, wrote one of his poems, to which the hostess gave title. In later years a younger generation of writers came to this mansion: Celia Thaxter was a frequent guest; the princess-like Sarah Orne Jewett, beloved by Whittier as a daughter, has made it her Boston home; Aldrich comes to see the widow of his friend; Miss Preston, Mrs. Ward, and other luminous spirits may be met among the company who assemble in these memory-haunted rooms. For several years Holmes lived in the same street, within a few doors of Fields's house. At number fifty-four in quaint Pinckney Street, around the corner from Mrs. Fields's and near the former residence of Aldrich, we find the house in which the brilliant George Hilliard lived and died, scarcely changed since the time James Freeman Clarke here married Hawthorne to the lovely Sophia Peabody. Upon the opposite side, at number eleven, dwells Mrs. E. P. Whipple, widow of the eminent author and critic,--herself a lady of refined critical tastes,--who keeps unchanged the home in which her husband died. In his lifetime a select circle of friends usually assembled here on Sunday evenings,--a circle in which Fields, Bronson Alcott, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Dr. Bartol, Ole Bull, Lucretia Hale, Edwin Booth, and others of similar eminence in letters or art were included. Just around the corner, in Louisburg Square, Bronson Alcott died in the house of his daughter Mrs. Pratt,--the "Meg" of Louisa Alcott's books. On Beacon Hill, in the next--Mount Vernon--street, we find near the "hub of the Hub" a tall, deep-roomed dwelling, surmounted by an observatory which commands a charming view of the city and its environs, and this is the elegant city home of the poet, novelist, and prince of conversationalists, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His library, full of treasures, is on a lower floor, but the study in which he pens his delightful compositions is high above the distractions of the world. As one sees the author of "Marjorie Daw" and the recent "Unguarded Gates" among his books, there is no hint of his sixty years in his fresh, ruddy face, with its carefully waxed moustache, nor in his sprightly speech and manner. In the same street, the spacious mansion of ex-Governor Claflin was long a resort of a wise, earnest, and dazzling company of sublimated intellects. This house was in later years the usual haven of Whittier, the gentle Quaker bard, during his visits to Boston; and here, protected by the hostess from the eager kindness of his numerous friends, he spent many restful days when rest was most needed. Near by, on the same hill-side, the talented authoress of "John Ward, Preacher" inhabits a many-windowed home of sober brick. Within, we find everywhere evidences of the fastidious personality of Mrs. Margaret Deland. In her parlors are dainty articles of furniture and bric-à-brac, wide fireplaces, deep windows full of flowers, many pictures, many more books. In her study and work-room, her desk stands near another fireplace, about it are still more flowers, pictures and books galore; here, not long ago, that tragedy of selfishness--"Philip and His Wife"--was written. At the sumptuous home of the Sargents in the adjoining street have been held some of the _séances_ of the noted Radical Club, in which, as Mrs. Moulton says, "somebody read a paper and everybody else pulled it to pieces." At these sessions such spirits as Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Holmes, Edward Everett Hale, Carl Schurz, the genial Colonel Higginson, the serene James Freeman Clarke, the mystic Dr. Bartol,--who still lives in retirement in his old home,--and other representatives of advanced thought have discussed the ethics of life as well as of letters. A plain brick house of three stories in the same quiet street was the abode of Francis Parkman's sister, where, after the death of his wife, the historian spent his winters, his study here being a simple front room on the upper floor, with open fireplace and book-lined walls. In Park Street, above the Common, the ample mansion of George Ticknor--the chronicler of "Spanish Literature" and the autocrat of literary taste--was during many years a haunt of the best of Boston culture. We find its stately walls still standing, but the interior has been surrendered to the Philistines. On Beacon Street, but a door or two removed from the birthplace of Wendell Phillips, in a house whose number the poet-lover said he "remembered by thinking of the Thirty-Nine Articles," Longfellow won Miss Appleton to be his wife. Just across the Common, in Carver Street, Hawthorne's son was born. At many of the homes here mentioned were held the assemblages of the Ladies' Social Club. Among its readers were Agassiz, Emerson, Greene, Whipple, Clarke, and E. E. Hale. It was ironically styled the "Brain Club," and died after many years because, according to one ex-member, "the newer members brought into it too much Supper and Stomach and no Brain at all." A successor has been the Round Table Club, with Colonel Higginson for first president,--its meetings for essays and discussions being held in the homes of its literary or artistic members. Boston's Belgravia occupies a district which has been reclaimed from the waters of the "Back Bay" of the Charles River,--on whose shore Hawthorne placed the shunned and isolated thatched cottage of Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter," and the windows of many of Boston's Four Hundred overlook the same delightful vista of water, hills, and western skies which to the sad eyes of Hester and little Pearl were a daily vision. On the water side of Beacon Street, within this select region, is the four-floored, picturesque mansion of brick--its front embellished with a growth of ivy which clusters about the bay-windows--where not long ago we found the gentle and genial Holmes sitting among his books, serene in the golden sunset of life, happy in the love of friends and in the benedictions of the thousands his work has uplifted and beatified. The mansion is redolent of literary associations, and throughout its apartments were tastefully disposed articles of virtu, curios, and mementos--literary, artistic, or historic--of affection and regard from Holmes's many friends at home and abroad. His study was a large room at the back of the house, occupying the entire width of the second floor. Its broad window commands a sweep of the Charles, with its tides and its many craft, beyond which the poet could see, as he said, Cambridge where he was born, Harvard where he was educated, and Mount Auburn where he expected to lie in his last sleep. We last saw the "Autocrat" in his easy-chair, among the treasures of this apartment, with a portrait of his ancestress "Dorothy Q" looking down at him from a side wall. His hair was silvered and his kindly face had lost its smoothness,--for he was eighty-five "years young," as he would say,--but his faculties were keen and alert, and, in benign age, his greeting was no less cordial and his outlook upon men and affairs was no less cheery and optimistic than in the flush and vigor of early manhood. In this luxurious study were written several of his twenty-five volumes,--"Over the Teacups" being the most popular of those produced here,--and we found him still devoting some hours of each day to light literary tasks, oftenest dictating materials for his memoirs, which are yet to be published. Above the study, and overlooking the river on which he used to row and the farther green hills, is the chamber immortalized in "My Aviary;" and here, as he sat in his favorite chair, surrounded by his family, death came to him, and his spirit peacefully passed into the eternal silence. Then the "Last Leaf" had fallen, to be mourned by all the world. A door or two from Holmes sometime dwelt the versatile novelist, poet, playwright, and "Altrurian Traveller." A popular print of "Howells in his Library" is an interior of his Beacon Street house; the view of the glassy river-basin, with the roofs and spires of Cambridge rising from banks and bowers of foliage beyond,--which he pictures from the new house of "Silas Lapham" on this street,--is the one Howells daily beheld from his study window here. His latest Boston home was in the same district on the superb Commonwealth Avenue, near the statue of Garrison, and here, in a sumptuous, six-storied, bow-fronted mansion, he wrote "The Shadow of a Dream" and other widely read books. A modest, old-fashioned house on Beacon Street has long been the home of the poet and starry genius Julia Ward Howe, writer of the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic." Other members of her singularly gifted family have sojourned here, and the "home of the Howes" has been frequented by men and women eminent for culture and thought and for achievement in literature or art. In the adjacent Marlborough Street recently died the polished author and orator Robert C. Winthrop, and here, too, was the home of Dr. Ellis, the friend of Lowell's father. Farther away in this newer Boston of luxury and culture is the charming and hospitable home of the poet, essayist, novelist, and critic Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, whose American admirers complain that in late years she remains too much in London. When at home, she inhabits a delightful dwelling which, from entrance to attic, teems with pictures, rare books, curios, and other _souvenirs_ of her many friends in many lands. In her library, where much of "Garden of Dreams," "Swallow Flights," and other books was written, and where more of all "the work nearest her heart" was accomplished, are preserved many autograph copies of books by recent writers--several of them dedicated to Mrs. Moulton--and a priceless collection of letters from illustrious literary workers. In her drawing-rooms one may meet many of the famed authors of the day,--Higginson, Wendell, Horsford, Bynner, Nora Perry of the charming books for girls, Miss Conway, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney, Mrs. Howe, Arlo Bates, Adams, the jocosely serious Robert Grant, and others of Boston's newer lights of literature. If we "drive on down Washington Street" with "Silas Lapham," we shall find in Chester Square the "Nankeen Square" where he dwelt in his less ambitious days, and the pretty oval green with the sturdy trees which the worthy colonel saw grow from saplings. In a pleasant dwelling on the contiguous street lives and works the bright and busy Lucretia P. Hale, sister of the author-divine. She was the favorite scholar of Miss Elizabeth Peabody; and she has, through her writings and her classes, acquired an influence and discipleship little smaller than that which Margaret Fuller once possessed. Farther south, in the Roxbury district, we seek the abode of the famed author of "The Man without a Country." Sauntering along the shady and delectable Highland Street, we interrogate a uniformed guardian of the law, who heartily rejoins, "Dr. Hale's is a temple on the right a block further on: and if any man's fit to live in a temple, it's him." As we walk the "block further on" we think that, however defective his grammar, the policeman's estimate of Hale is beyond criticism and agrees with that of the thousands of readers and friends of the indefatigable author, lecturer, preacher, editor, reformer, and promoter of all good. We find the house--very like a Greek temple--standing back from the street in the midst of an ample lawn, shaded by noble trees and decked with a wealth of shrubbery and bloom. The mansion is a large square edifice, with great dormer-windows in its roofs, surmounted by a cupola, and having in front a lofty portico upheld by heavy Ionic pillars, between which interlacing woodbine forms a leafy screen. Within is a wide hall, and opening out of it are generously proportioned rooms, some of them lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of books. The study is a commodious room, with a "pamphlet-annex" adjoining it on the garden side, and is crammed with book-shelves and drawers, while piles of books, magazines, portfolios, manuscripts, and memoranda are disposed on cases, tables, and stands about the apartment. Everything is obviously arranged for convenient and ready use, and well it may be so, for this is the work-room and "thinking-shop" of the hardest-working literary man in America. The books which made his first fame were written before he came to this house; of all the works produced in this study, the numerous poems, romances, histories, essays, editorials, reviews, discussions, translations,--to say nothing of the many hundreds of well-considered and carefully written sermons,--we may not here mention even the names, for no writer since Voltaire is more fruitful of finished and masterly work. It is notable that Hale regards "In His Name" as his best work from a literary point of view; of his other productions, he thinks some of the poems of the latest collection, "For Fifty Years," as good as anything,--"always excepting his sermons." Among the abundant treasures of his study, Hale has a most interesting and valuable collection of autograph letters, of which he is justly proud. His father was Nathan Hale of the Boston "Advertiser," his mother was sister to Edward Everett and herself an author and translator, his wife is niece to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, his son Robert has already acquired a reputation in the domain of letters. The doctor himself has been a writer from childhood, his earliest contributions being to his father's paper. His illustrious sister declares that in their nursery days she and her brother used to take their meals with the "Advertiser" pinned under their chins,--a practice to which their literary precocity has been attributed. We find Hale at the age of seventy-three blithe and hopeful, working as much and manifestly accomplishing more than ever before. A little farther out on the same street is the dwelling where William Lloyd Garrison spent his last years, and in this neighborhood lived Mrs. Blake, poet of "Verses Along the Way." Here also are the early home of Miss Guiney and the school to which she was first sent,--or rather "carried neck and heels," because she refused to walk. Close by we find the pleasant home in which Jane G. Austin wrote some of her famed colonial tales and where she died not many months ago; and in the same delightful suburb, a half-mile beyond Hale's house, is the retreat where the beloved author of "Little Women" breathed out her too brief life. OUT OF BOSTON I CAMBRIDGE: ELMWOOD: MOUNT AUBURN _Holmes's Church-yard--Bridge, Smithy, Chapel, and River of Longfellow's Verse--Abodes of Lettered Culture--Holmes--Higginson--Agassiz-- Norton--Clough--Howells--Fuller--Longfellow--Lowell--Longfellow's City of the Dead and its Precious Graves._ Crossing the Charles by "The Bridge" of Longfellow's popular poem, a stroll along elm-shaded streets brings us to the ancient Common of Cambridge and a vicinage which has much besides its historic traditions to allure the literary pilgrim. For centuries the site of a celebrated college and a conspicuous centre of learning, it has long been the abiding-place of representatives of the best and foremost in American culture and mental achievement. Close by the Common, and opposite the remains of the elm beneath which Washington assumed the command of the patriot army, stood the old gambrel-roofed house in which that "gentlest of autocrats," Holmes, was born and reared, and upon whose door-post was first displayed his "shingle," on which he whimsically proposed to inscribe "The Smallest Fevers Thankfully Received;" across the college grounds is the home-like edifice where lived the erudite Professor Felton, loved by Dickens and oft mentioned in his letters; not far away, at the corner of Broadway, was the home of Agassiz, since occupied by his son; and a few rods eastward is the picturesque residence of the witty and profound Colonel Higginson,--poet, essayist, novelist, and reformer. In the adjacent Kirkland Street dwelt the delightful Dr. Estes Howe, brother-in-law to Lowell, with whom the poet sometime lived and whom he celebrated as "the Doctor" in the "Fable for Critics." Dr. C. C. Abbott formerly lived in this neighborhood, and the collections on which his best-known books are founded are preserved in the near-by Peabody Museum, beyond which we find the tasteful abode of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, the friend and literary executor of Lowell. Near the Common, too, dwelt for a year or so that rare poet Arthur Clough, author of "The Bothie" and "Qua Cursum Ventus;" and the sweet singer Charlotte Fiske Bates--the intimate friend of Longfellow--had her habitation in the same neighborhood. Opposite the southern end of the Common is the ancient village cemetery celebrated in the poetry of Holmes and Longfellow; a little way westward, Howells lived in a delightful rose-embowered cottage and pleasantly pictured many features of the old town in the "Charlesbridge" of his "Suburban Sketches." Two or three furlongs distant, within the grounds of the Botanic Garden, long lived the American Linnæus, Professor Asa Gray. Of all the Cambridge thoroughfares, the shady and venerable Brattle Street, which curves westward from the University Press, is most interesting and attractive. Near the Press building stands the historic Brattle House,--its beautiful stairway and other antique features preserved by the Social Club, to whom the property now belongs,--where Margaret Fuller, the priestess and queen of modern Transcendentalism, passed much of her youth and young womanhood, and where her sister, wife to the poet Ellery Channing, was reared. Margaret, who is said to have stood for the Theodora of Beaconsfield's "Lothair," first saw the light in a modest little dwelling in Main Street nearer the Boston bridge, and here attended school with Holmes and Richard Henry Dana; but it was in this Brattle House that her marvellous, and in some respects unique, intellectual career commenced. Here she acquired the moral and mental equipment which fitted her for leadership in the most vital epoch of American culture and thought, and here she attracted and attached all the wisest and noblest spirits within her range. To her here came Theodore Parker, the older Channing, Harriet Martineau, James Freeman Clarke,--the earnest, brilliant, and thoughtful of all ages and conditions. One noble soul who knew her here speaks of her friendship as a "gift of the gods," and some eminent in thought and achievement testify that they have ever striven toward standards set up for them by her in that early period of her residence here. Close by Miss Fuller's home, "under a spreading chestnut-tree" at the intersection of Story Street, stood the smithy of Pratt, who was immortalized by Longfellow as "The Village Blacksmith." To the poet, passing daily on the way between his home and the college, the "mighty man" at his anvil in the shaded smithy was long a familiar vision. The tree--a horse-chestnut--has been removed, the shop has given place to a modern dwelling, and years ago the worthy smith rejoined his wife, "singing in Paradise." A few steps westward from the site of the smithy is the "Chapel of St. John" of another sweet poem of Longfellow; and just beyond this we find, bowered by lilacs and environed by acres of shade and sward, the colonial Cragie House, once the sojourn of Washington, but holding for us more precious associations, since Sparks, Worcester, and Everett have lived within its time-honored walls, and our popular poet of grace and sentiment for near half a century here had his home, and from here passed into the unknown. The picturesque mansion wears the aspect of an old acquaintance, and the interior, with its princely proportioned rooms, spacious fireplaces, wide halls, curious carvings and tiles, has much that Longfellow has shared with his readers. On the entrance door is the ponderous knocker; a landing of the broad stairway holds "The Old Clock on the Stairs;" the right of the hall is the study, with its priceless mementos of the tender and sympathetic bard who wrought here the most and best of his life-work, from early manhood onward into the mellow twilight of sweet and benign age. Here is his chair, vacated by him but a few days before he died; his desk; his inkstand which had been Coleridge's; his pen with its "link from the chain of Bonnivard;" the antique pitcher of his "Drinking Song;" the fireplace of "The Wind over the Chimney;" the arm-chair carved from the "spreading chestnut-tree" of the smithy, which was presented to him by the village children and celebrated in his poem "From my Arm-Chair." About us here are his cherished books, his pictures, his manuscripts, all his precious belongings, and from his window we see, beyond the Longfellow Memorial Park, the river so often sung in his verse, "stealing onward, like the stream of life." In this room Washington held his war councils. Of the many intellectual _séances_ its walls have witnessed we contemplate with greatest pleasure the Wednesday evening meetings of the "Dante Club," when Lowell, Howells, Fields, Norton, Greene, and other friends and scholars sat here with Longfellow to revise the new translation of Dante. The book-lined apartment over the study--once the bedchamber of Washington and later of Talleyrand--was occupied by Longfellow when he first lived as a lodger in the old house. It was here he heard "Footsteps of Angels" and "Voices of the Night," and saw by the fitful firelight the "Being Beauteous" at his side; here he wrote "Hyperion" and the earlier poems which made him known and loved in every clime. Later this room became the nursery of his children, and some of the grotesque tiles which adorn its chimney are mentioned in his poem "To a Child:" "The lady with the gay macaw, The dancing-girl, the grave bashaw. The Chinese mandarin." [Illustration: WHERE LONGFELLOW LIVED] Along the western façade of the mansion stretches a wide veranda, where the poet was wont to take his daily exercise when "the goddess Neuralgia" or "the two Ws" (Work and Weather) prevented his walking abroad. In this stately old house his children were born and reared, here his wife met her tragic death, and here his daughter--the "grave Alice" of "The Children's Hour"--abides and preserves its precious relics, while "laughing Allegra" (Anna) and "Edith with golden hair"--now Mrs. Dana and Mrs. Thorp--have dwellings within the grounds of their childhood home, and their brother Ernst owns a modern cottage a few rods westward on the same street. In Sparks Street, just out of Brattle, dwelt the author Robert Carter,--familiarly, "The Don,"--sometime secretary to Prescott and long the especial friend of Lowell, with whom he was associated in the editorship of the short-lived "Pioneer." Carter's home here was the rendezvous of a circle of choice spirits, where one might often meet "Prince" Lowell,--as his friends delighted to call him,--Bartlett of "Familiar Quotations," and that "songless poet" John Holmes, brother of the "American Montaigne." A short walk under the arching elms of Brattle Street brings us to Elmwood, the life-long home of Lowell. The house, erected by the last British lieutenant-governor of the province, is a plain, square structure of wood, three stories in height, and is surrounded by a park of simple and natural beauty, whose abundant growth of trees gives to some portions of the grounds the sombreness and apparent seclusion of a forest. A gigantic hedge of trees encloses the place like a leafy wall, excluding the vision of the world and harboring thousands of birds who tenant its shades. Some of the aquatic fowl of the vicinage are referred to in Longfellow's "Herons of Elmwood." In the old mansion, long the home of Elbridge Gerry, Lowell was born and grew to manhood, and to it he brought the bride of his youth, the lovely Maria White, herself the writer of some exquisite poems; here, a few years later, she died in the same night that a child was born to Longfellow, whose poem "The Two Angels" commemorates both events. Here, too, Lowell lost his children one by one until a daughter, the present Mrs. Burnett,--now owner and occupant of Elmwood,--alone remained. During the poet's stay abroad, his house was tenanted by Mrs. Ole Bull and by Lowell's brother-bard Bailey Aldrich, who in this sweet retirement wrought some of his delicious work. To the beloved trees and birds of his old home Lowell returned from his embassage, and here, with his daughter, he passed his last years among his books and a chosen circle of friends. Here, where he wished to die, he died, and here his daughter preserves his former home and its contents unchanged since he was borne hence to his burial. Until the death of his father, Lowell's study was an upper front room at the left of the entrance. It is a plain, low-studded corner apartment, which the poet called "his garret," and where he slept as a boy. Its windows now look only into the neighboring trees, but when autumn has shorn the boughs of their foliage the front window commands a wide level of the sluggish Charles and its bordering lowlands, while the side window overlooks the beautiful slopes of Mount Auburn, where Lowell now lies with his poet-wife and the children who went before. His study windows suggested the title of his most interesting volume of prose essays. In this upper chamber he wrote his "Conversations on the Poets" and the early poems which made his fame,--"Irene," "Prometheus," "Rhoecus," "Sir Launfal,"--which was composed in five days,--and the first series of that collection of grotesque drolleries, "The Biglow Papers." Here also he prepared his editorial contributions to the "Atlantic." His later study was on the lower floor, at the left of the ample hall which traverses the centre of the house. It is a prim and delightful old-fashioned apartment, with low walls, a wide and cheerful fireplace, and pleasant windows which look out among the trees and lilacs upon a long reach of lawn. In this room the poet's best-loved books, copiously annotated by his hand, remain upon his shelves; here we see his table, his accustomed chair, the desk upon which he wrote the "Commemoration Ode," "Under the Willows," and many famous poems, besides the volumes of prose essays. In this study he sometimes gathered his classes in Dante, and to him here came his friends familiarly and informally,--for "receptions" were rare at Elmwood: most often came "The Don," "The Doctor," Norton, Owen, Bartlett, Felton, Stillman,--less frequently Godkin, Fields, Holmes, Child, Motley, Edmund Quincy, and the historian Parkman. While the older trees of the place were planted by Gerry, the pines and clustering lilacs were rooted by Lowell or his father. All who remember the poet's passionate love for this home will rejoice in the assurance that the old mansion, with its precious associations and mementos, and the acres immediately adjoining it, will not be in any way disturbed during the life of his daughter and her children. At most, the memorial park which has been planned by the literary people of Boston and Cambridge will include only that portion of the grounds which belonged to the poet's brothers and sisters. A narrow street separates the hedges of Elmwood from the peaceful shades of Mount Auburn,--the "City of the Dead" of Longfellow's sonnet. Lowell thought this the most delightful spot on earth. The late Francis Parkman told the writer that Lowell, in his youth, had confided to him that he habitually went into the cemetery at midnight and sat upon a tombstone, hoping to find there the poetic afflatus. He confessed he had not succeeded, and was warned by his friend that the custom would bring him more rheumatism than inspiration. Dr. Ellis testified that at this period his friend Dr. Lowell often expressed to him his anxiety "lest his son James would amount to nothing, because he had taken to writing poetry." In the sanctuary of Mount Auburn we find many of the names mentioned in these chapters,--names written on the scroll of fame, blazoned on title-pages, borne in the hearts of thousands of readers in all lands,--now, alas! inscribed above their graves. From the eminence of Mount Auburn, we look upon Longfellow's river "stealing with silent pace" around the sacred enclosure; the verdant meads along the stream; the distant cities, erst the abodes of those who sleep about us here,--for whom life's fever is ended and life's work done. Near this summit, Charlotte Cushman rests at the base of a tall obelisk, her favorite myrtle growing dense and dark above her. By the elevated Ridge Path, on a site long ago selected by him, Longfellow lies in a grave decked with profuse flowers and marked by a monument of brown stone. On Fountain Avenue we find a beautiful spot, shaded by two giant trees, which was a beloved resort of Lowell, and where he now lies among his kindred, his sepulchre marked by a simple slab of slate: "Good-night, sweet Prince!" Not far away is the beautiful Jackson plot, where not long ago the beloved Holmes was tenderly laid in the same grave with his wife beneath a burden of flowers. Some of the blossoms we lately saw upon this grave were newly placed by the creator of "Micah Clarke" and "Sherlock Holmes," Dr. Conan Doyle. By a great oak near the main avenue is the sarcophagus of Sumner, and one shady slope bears the memorial of Margaret Fuller and her husband,--buried beneath the sea on the coast of Fire Island. Near by we find the grave of "Fanny Fern,"--wife of Parton and sister of N. P. Willis,--with its white cross adorned with exquisitely carved ferns; the pillar of granite and marble which designates the resting-place of Everett; the granite boulder--its unchiselled surface overgrown with the lichens he loved--which covers the ashes of Agassiz; the simple sarcophagus of Rufus Choate; the cenotaph of Kirkland; the tomb of Spurzheim; and on the lovely slopes about us, under the dreaming trees, amid myriad witcheries of bough and bloom, are the enduring memorials of affection beneath which repose the mortal parts of Sargent, Quincy, Story, Parker, Worcester, Greene, Bigelow, William Ellery Channing, Edwin Booth, Phillips Brooks, and many like them whom the world will not soon forget. In this sweet summer day, their place of rest is so quiet and beautiful,--with the birds singing here their lowest and tenderest songs, the soft winds breathing a lullaby in the leafy boughs, the air full of a grateful peace and calm, the trees spreading their great branches in perpetual benediction above the turf-grown graves,--it seems that here, if anywhere, the restless wayfarer might learn to love restful death. OUT OF BOSTON II BELMONT: THE WAYSIDE INN: HOME OF WHITTIER _Lowell's Beaver Brook--Abode of Trowbridge--Red Horse Tavern--Parsons and the Company of Longfellow's Friends--Birthplace of Whittier-- Scenes of his Poems--Dwelling and Grave of the Countess--Powow Hill-- Whittier's Amesbury Home--His Church and Tomb._ A few miles westward from the classic shades of Cambridge we found, perched upon a breezy height of Belmont, a picturesque, red-roofed villa, for some years the summer home of our "Altrurian Traveller." From its verandas he overlooked a slumberous plain, diversified with meads, fields, country-seats, and heavy-tinted copses, and bordered by a circle of verdant hills; while on the eastern horizon rises the distant city, crowned by the resplendent dome of the capitol. In his dainty white study here, with its gladsome fireplace and curious carvings and mottoes, Howells wrote--besides other good things--his "Lady of the Aroostook," in which some claim to have discerned an answer to Henry James's "Daisy Miller." In this neighborhood is the valley of "Beaver Brook," a favorite haunt of Lowell, to which he brought the English poet Arthur Clough. The old mill is removed, but we find the water-fall and the other romantic features little changed since the poet depicted the ideal beauties of this dale, in what has been adjudged one of the most artistic poems of modern times. In a charming retreat among the hills of Arlington, scarce a mile away from Howells's sometime Belmont home, dwells and writes that genial and gifted poet and novelist, John T. Trowbridge, whose books--notably his war-time tales--have found readers round the world. [Sidenote: Longfellow's Wayside Inn] Westward again from Belmont, a prolonged drive through a delightful country brings us to "Sudbury town" and the former hostelry of 'Squire Howe,--the "Wayside Inn" of Longfellow's "Tales." Our companion and guide is one who well knew the old house and its neighborhood in the halcyon days when Professor Treadwell, Parsons,--the poet of the "Bust of Dante,"--and the quiet coterie of Longfellow's friends came, summer after summer, to find rest and seclusion under its ample roof and sheltering trees, among the hills of this remote region. The environment of fragrant meadow and smiling field, of deep wood glade and forest-clad height, is indeed alluring. About the ancient inn remain some of the giant elms and the "oak-trees, broad and high," shading it now as in the day when the "Tales" immortalized it with the "Tabard" of Chaucer; while through the near meadow circles the "well-remembered brook" of the poet's verse, in which his friends saw the inverted landscape and their own faces "looking up at them from below." The house is a great, old-fashioned, bare and weather-worn edifice of wood,--"somewhat fallen to decay."--standing close upon the highway. Its two stories of spacious rooms are supplemented by smaller chambers in a vast attic; two or three chimneys, "huge and tiled and tall," rise through its gambrel roofs among the bowering foliage; a wing abuts upon one side and imparts a pleasing irregularity to the otherwise plain parallelogram. The wide, low-studded rooms are lighted by windows of many small panes. Among the apartments we find the one once occupied by Major Molineaux, "whom Hawthorne hath immortal made," and that of Dr. Parsons, the laureate of this place, who has celebrated it in the stanzas of "Old House at Sudbury" and other poems. But it is the old inn parlor which most interests the literary visitor,--a great, low, square apartment, with oaken floors, ponderous beams overhead, and a broad hearth, where in the olden time blazed a log fire whose ruddy glow filled the room and shone out through the windows. It is this room which Longfellow peoples with his friends, who sat about the old fireplace and told his "Tales of a Wayside Inn." The "rapt musician" whose transfiguring portraiture we have in the Prelude is Ole Bull; the student "of old books and days" is Henry Wales; the young Sicilian, "in sight of Etna born and bred," is Luigi Monti, who dined every Sunday with Longfellow; the "Spanish Jew from Alicant" is Edrelei, a Boston Oriental dealer; the "Theologian from the school of Cambridge on the Charles" is Professor Daniel Treadwell; the Poet is T. W. Parsons, the Dantean student and translator of "Divina Commedia;" the Landlord is 'Squire Lyman Howe, the portly bachelor who then kept this "Red Horse Tavern," as it was called. Most of this goodly circle have been here in the flesh, and our companion has seen them in this old room, as well as Longfellow himself, who came here years afterward, when the Landlord was dead and the poet's company had left the old inn forever. In this room we see the corner where stood the ancient spinet, the spot on the wall where hung the highly colored coat of arms of Howe and the sword of his knightly grandfather near Queen Mary's pictured face, the places on the prismatic-hued windows where the names of Molineaux, Treadwell, etc., had been inscribed by hands that now are dust. Descendants of the woman who died of the "Shoc o' Num Palsy" are said to live in the neighborhood, as well as some other odd characters who are embalmed in Parsons's humorous verse. But the ancient edifice is no longer an inn; the Red Horse on the swinging sign-board years ago ceased to invite the weary wayfarer to rest and cakes and ale; the memory-haunted chambers, where starry spirits met and tarried in the golden past, were later inhabited by laborers, who displayed the rooms for a fee and plied the pilgrim with lies anent the former famed occupants. The storied structure has recently passed to the possession of appreciative owners,--Hon. Herbert Howe being one of them,--who have made the repairs needful for its preservation and have placed it in the charge of a proper custodian. A longer way out of Boston, in another direction, our guest is among the haunts of the beloved Quaker bard. On the bank of the Merrimac--his own "lowland river"--and among darkly wooded hills of hackmatack and pine, we find the humble farm-house, guarded by giant sentinel poplars, where eighty-eight years agone Whittier came into the world. [Sidenote: Scenes of Whittier's Poems] Among the plain and bare apartments, with their low ceilings, antique cross-beams, and multipaned windows, we see the lowly chamber of his birth; the simple study where his literary work was begun; the great kitchen, with its brick oven and its heavy crane in the wide fireplace, where he laid the famous winter's evening scene in "Snow-Bound," peopling the plain "old rude-furnished room" with the persons he here best knew and loved. We see the dwelling little changed since the time when Whittier dwelt--a dark-haired lad--under its roof; it is now carefully preserved, and through the old rooms are disposed articles of furniture from his Amesbury cottage, which are objects of interest to many visitors. All about the place are spots of tender identification of poet and poem: here are the brook and the garden wall of his "Barefoot Boy;" the scene of his "Telling the Bees;" the spring and meadow of "Maud Muller;" not far away, with the sumachs and blackberries clustering about it still, is the site of the rude academy of his "School Days;" and beyond the low hill the grasses grow upon the grave of the dear, brown-eyed girl who "hated to go above him." We may still loiter beneath the overarching sycamores planted by poor Tallant,--"pioneer of Erin's outcasts,"--where young Whittier pondered the story of "Floyd Ireson with the hard heart." Delightful rambles through the country-side bring us to many scenes familiar to the tender poet and by him made familiar to all the world. Thus we come to the "stranded village" of Aunt Mose,--"the muttering witch-wife of the gossip's tale,"--where Whittier found the materials out of which he wrought the touching poem "The Countess," and where we see the poor low rooms in which pretty, blue-eyed Mary Ingalls was born and lived a too brief life of love, and her sepulchre--now reclaimed from a tangle of brake and brier--in the lonely old burial-ground that "slopes against the west." Her grave is in the row nearest the dusty highway, and is marked by a mossy slab of slate, which is now protected from the avidity of relic-gatherers by a net-work of iron, bearing the inscription, "The Grave of the Countess." Thus, too, we come to the ruined foundation of the cottage of "Mabel Martin, the Witch's Daughter," and look thence upon other haunts of the beloved bard, as well as upon his river "glassing the heavens" and the wave-like swells of foliage-clad hills which are "The Laurels" of his verse. In West Newbury, the town of his "Northman's Written Rock," we find the comfortable "Maplewood" homestead where lived and lately died the supposed sweetheart of the poet's early manhood. [Sidenote: Whittier's Amesbury Cottage] Whittier's beloved Amesbury, the "home of his heart," is larger and busier than he knew it, but, as we dally on its dusty avenues, we find them aglow with living memories of the sweet singer. In Friend Street stands--still occupied by Whittier's former friends--the plain little frame house which was so long his home. A bay window has been placed above the porch, but the place is otherwise little changed since he left it; the same noble elms shade the front, the fruit-trees he planted and pruned and beneath which the saddened throng sat at his funeral are in the garden; here too are the grape-vines which were the especial objects of his loving care,--one of them grown from a rootlet sent to him in a letter by Charles Sumner. Within, we see the famous "garden room," which was his sanctum and workshop, and where this gentle man of peace waged valiant warfare with his pen for the rights of man. In this room, with its sunny outlook among his vines and pear-trees, he kept his chosen books, his treasured souvenirs; and here he welcomed his friends,--Longfellow, Fields, Sumner, Lowell, Colonel Higginson, Bayard Taylor, Mrs. Thaxter, Mrs. Phelps-Ward, Alice Cary, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jewett, and many another illustrious child of genius. A quaint Franklin fireplace stood by one side wall,--usually surmounted in summer by a bouquet; in the nook between this and the sash-door was placed an old-fashioned writing-desk, and here he wrote many of the poems which brought him world-wide fame and voiced the convictions and the conscience of half the nation. Here are still preserved some of his cherished books. Above the study was Whittier's bedchamber, near the rooms of his mother, his "youngest and dearest" sister, and the "dear aunt" (Mercy) of "Snow-Bound," who came with him to this home and shared it until their deaths. After the others were gone, the brother and sister long dwelt here alone, later a niece was for some years his house-keeper, and at her marriage the poet gave up most of the house to some old friends, who kept his study and chamber in constant readiness for his return upon the prolonged sojourns which were continued until his last year of life,--this being always his best-loved home. Near by are the "painted shingly town-house" of his verse, where during many years he failed not to meet with his neighbors to deposit "the freeman's vote for Freedom," and the little, wooden Friends' meeting-house, where he loved to sit in silent introspection among the people of his faith. The trees which now shade its plain old walls with abundant foliage were long ago planted by his hands. The "Powow Hill" of his "Preacher" and "The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall" rises steeply near his home, and was a favorite resort, to which he often came, alone or with his guests. One who has often stood with Whittier there pilots us to his accustomed place on the lofty rounded summit, whence we overlook the village, the long reach of the "sea-seeking" river, and the entrancing scene pictured by the poet in the beautiful lines of "Miriam." [Sidenote: Whittier's Tomb] From these precious haunts our pilgrim shoon trace the revered bard to the peaceful precincts of the God's-acre--just without the town--where, in a sequestered spot beneath a dark cedar which sobs and soughs in the summer wind, his mortal part is forever laid, with his beloved sister and kindred, within "the low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings." OUT OF BOSTON III SALEM: WHITTIER'S OAK-KNOLL AND BEYOND _Cemetery of Hawthorne's Ancestors--Birthplace of Hawthorne and his Wife--Where Fame was won--House of the Seven Gables--Custom-House-- Where Scarlet Letter was written--Main Street and Witch Hill--Sights from a Steeple--Later Home of Whittier--Norman's Woe--Lucy Larcom-- Parton, etc.--Rivermouth--Thaxter._ [Sidenote: Hawthorne's Salem] A half-hour's jaunt by train brings us to the shaded streets of quaint old Salem and the scenes of Hawthorne's early life, work, and triumph. Here we find on Charter Street, in the old cemetery of "Dr. Grimshaw's Secret" and "Dolliver Romance," the sunken and turf-grown graves of Hawthorne's mariner ancestors, some of whom sailed forth on the ocean of eternity nearly two centuries ago. Among the curiously carved gravestones of slate we see that of John Hathorn, the "witch-judge" of Hawthorne's "Note-Books." Close at hand repose the ancestors of the novelist's wife, and the Doctor Swinnerton who preceded "Dolliver" and who was called to consider the cause of Colonel Pyncheon's death in the opening chapter of "The House of the Seven Gables." The sombre house which encroaches upon a corner of the cemetery enclosure--with the green billows surging about it so closely that its side windows are within our reach from the gravestones--was the home of the Peabodys, whence Hawthorne wooed the amiable Sophia, and where, in his tales, he domiciled Grandsir "Dolliver" and also "Doctor Grimshaw" with Ned and Elsie. We found it a rather depressing, hip-roofed, low-studded, and irregular edifice of wood, standing close upon the street, and obviously degenerated a little from the degree of respectability--"not sinking below the boundary of the genteel"--which the romancer ascribed to it. The little porch or hood protects the front entrance, and the back door communicates with the cemetery,--a circumstance which recalls the novelist's fancy that the dead might get out of their graves at night and steal into this house to warm themselves at the convenient fireside. Not many rods distant, in Union Street, stands the little house where Captain Hathorn left his family when he went away to sea, and where the novelist was born. The street is small, shabby, shadeless, dispiriting,--its inhabitants not select. The house--builded by Hawthorne's grandfather and lately numbered twenty-seven--stands close to the sidewalk, upon which its door-stone encroaches, leaving no space for flower or vine; the garden where Hawthorne "rolled on a grass-plot under an apple-tree and picked abundant currants" is despoiled of turf and tree, and the wooden house walls rise bare and bleak. It is a plain, uninviting, eight-roomed structure, with a lower addition at the back, and with a square central chimney-stack rising like a tower above the gambrel roof. The rooms are low and contracted, with quaint corner fireplaces and curiously designed closets, and with protuberant beams crossing the ceilings. From the entrance between the front rooms a narrow winding stair leads to an upper landing, at the left of which we find the little, low-ceiled chamber where, ninety years ago, America's greatest romancer first saw the light. It is one of the most cheerless of rooms, with rude fireplace of bricks, a mantel of painted planks, and two small windows which look into the verdureless yard. In a modest brick house upon the opposite side of the street, and but a few rods distant from the birthplace of her future husband, Hawthorne's wife was born five years subsequent to his nativity. [Sidenote: The Manning House] Abutting upon the back yard of Hawthorne's birthplace is the old Manning homestead of his maternal ancestors, the home of his own youth and middle age and the theatre of his struggles and triumph. It is known as number twelve Herbert Street, and is a tall, unsightly, erratic fabric of wood, with nothing pleasing or gracious in its aspect or environment. The ugly and commonplace character of his surroundings here during half his life must have been peculiarly depressing to such a sensitive temperament as Hawthorne's, and doubtless accounts for his mental habits. That he had no joyous memories of this old house his letters and journals abundantly show. Its interior arrangement has been somewhat changed to accommodate the several families of laborers who have since inhabited it, and one front room seems to have been used as a shop; but it is not difficult to identify the haunted chamber which was Hawthorne's bed-room and study. This little, dark, dreary apartment under the eaves, with its multipaned window looking down into the room where he was born, is to us one of the most interesting of all the Hawthorne shrines. Here the magician kept his solitary vigil during the long period of his literary probation, shunning his family, declining all human sympathy and fellowship, for some time going abroad only after nightfall; here he studied, pondered, wrote, revised, destroyed, day after day as the slow months went by; and here, after ten years of working and waiting for the world to know him, he triumphantly recorded, "In this dismal chamber FAME was won." Here he wrote "Twice-Told Tales" and many others, which were published in various periodicals, and here, after his residence at the old Manse,--for it was to this Manning house that he "always came back, like the bad halfpenny," as he said,--he completed the "Mosses." This old dwelling is one of the several which have been fixed upon as being the original "House of the Seven Gables," despite the novelist's averment that the Pyncheon mansion was "of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air." The pilgrim in Salem will be persistently assured that a house which stands near the shore by the foot of Turner Street, and is known as number thirty-four, was the model of Hawthorne's structure. It is an antique edifice of some architectural pretensions, displays five fine gables, and has spacious wainscoted and frescoed apartments, with quaint mantels and other evidences of colonial stateliness. It was an object familiar to the novelist from his boyhood,--he had often visited it while it was the home of pretty "Susie" Ingersol,--and it may have suggested the style of architecture he employed for the visionary mansion of the tale. The names Maule and Pyncheon, employed in the story, were those of old residents of Salem. [Sidenote: Hawthorne's Custom-House] But a few rods from Herbert Street is the Custom-House where Hawthorne did irksome duty as "Locofoco Surveyor," its exterior being--except for the addition of a cupola--essentially unchanged since his description was written, and its interior being even more somnolent than of yore. The wide and worn granite steps still lead up to the entrance portico; above it hovers the same enormous specimen of the American eagle, and a recent reburnishing has rendered even more evident the truculent attitude of that "unhappy fowl." The entry-way where the venerable officials of Hawthorne's time sat at the receipt of customs has been renovated, the antique chairs in which they used to drowse, "tilted back against the wall," have given place to others of more modern and elegant fashion, and the patriarchal dozers themselves--lying now in the profounder slumber of death--are replaced by younger and sprightlier successors, who wear their dignities and pocket their emoluments. At the left we find the room, "fifteen feet square and of lofty height," which was Hawthorne's office during the period of his surveyorship: it is no longer "cobwebbed and dingy," but is tastefully refitted and refurnished, and the once sanded floor, which the romancer "paced from corner to corner" like a caged lion, is now neatly carpeted. The "exceedingly decrepit and infirm" chairs, and the three-legged stool on which he lounged with his elbow on the old pine desk, have been retired, and the desk itself is now tenderly cherished among the treasures of the Essex Institute, on Essex Street, a few blocks distant, where the custodian proudly shows us the name of Hawthorne graven within the lid, in some idle moment, by the thumb-nail of the novelist. Some yellow documents bearing his official stamp and signature are preserved at the Custom-House, and the courteous official who now occupies Hawthorne's room displays to us here a rough stencil plate marked "Salem N Hawthorne Surr 1847," by means of which knowledge of Hawthorne's existence was blazoned abroad "on pepper-bags, cigar-boxes, and bales of dutiable merchandise," instead of on title-pages. The arched window, by which stood his desk, commands a view upon which his vision often rested, and which seems to us decidedly more pleasing and attractive than he has led us to expect. The picturesque old wharf in the foreground, the white-sailed shipping, and a shimmering expanse of water extending to the farther bold headlands of the coast form, we think, a pleasant picture for the lounger here. The apartment opposite to Hawthorne's was, in his day, occupied by the brave warrior General James Miller, who is graphically described as the "old Collector" in the introduction to "Scarlet Letter;" the room directly above it--which is the private office of the present chief executive, the genial Collector Waters--a portrait of the hero of Lundy's Lane now looks down from the wall upon the visitor; but no picture of Hawthorne is to be found in the edifice. An ample room at the right of the hall on the second floor, now handsomely fitted and furnished, was in Hawthorne's time open and unfinished, its bare beams festooned with cobwebs and its floor lumbered with barrels and bundles of musty official documents; and it was here that he discovered, among the accumulated rubbish of the past, the "scarlet, gold-embroidered letter," and the manuscript of Surveyor Prue,--Hawthorne's ancient predecessor in office,--which recorded the "doings and sufferings" of Hester Prynne. A short walk from the Custom-House brings us to the spot where, with "public notices posted upon its front and an iron goblet chained to its waist," stood that "eloquent monologist," the town-pump of Hawthorne's famous "Rill." Already its locality, at the corner of Essex and Washington Streets, is pointed out with pride as being among the sites memorable in the town's history, and thus the playful prophecy with which Hawthorne terminates the sketch of his official life is more than fulfilled. The spacious and well-preserved old frame house at number fourteen Mall Street--a neighborhood superior to that of his former residences--was Hawthorne's abode for three or four years. It was here that he, on the day of his official death, announced to his wife, "Well, Sophie, my head is off, so I must write a book;" and here, in the ensuing six months, disturbed and distressed by illness of his family, by the death of his mother, and by financial needs, he wrote our most famous romance, "The Scarlet Letter." A bare little room in the front of the third story was his study here, and while he wrote in solitude his wife worked in a sitting-room just beneath, decorating lamp-shades whose sale helped to sustain the household. [Sidenote: Salem--Witch Hill] As we saunter along the "Main Street" of Hawthorne's sketch and the other shady avenues he knew so well, the curious old town, which in his discontent he called tame and unattractive, seems to our eyes picturesque and beautiful, with its wide elm-bordered streets, its grassy waysides, its many gardens and square, embowered dwellings, not greatly changed since he knew them. If we follow "the long and lazy street" to the Witch Hill, which the novelist describes in "Alice Doane's Appeal," we may behold from that unhappy spot, where men and women suffered death for imagined misdoing, the whole of Hawthorne's Salem, with the environment he pictures in "Sights from a Steeple." We see the house-roofs of the town--half hidden by clustering foliage--extending now from the slopes of the fateful hill to the glinting waters of the harbor; the farther expanse of field and meadow, dotted with white villages and scored with shadowy water-ways; the craggy coast, with the Atlantic thundering endlessly against its headlands. Yonder is the steeple of Hawthorne's vision, beyond is the scene of the exquisite "Footprints in the Sand," and across the blue of the rippling sea we behold the place of the fierce fight in which the gallant Lawrence lost at once his ship and his life. Not far from Salem is Oak-Knoll, where the white-souled Whittier, "wearing his silver crown," passed "life's late afternoon" with his devoted relatives. It is a delightful, sheltered old country-seat, with wide lawns, and scores of broad acres wooded with noble trees, beneath which the poet loved to stroll or sit, soothed and inspirited by the gracious and generous beauty of the scene about him. One spot in the glimmering shade of an overarching oak is shown as his favorite resort. Close by the house is a circular, green-walled garden, where, in summer mornings, he delighted to work with rake and hoe among the flowers. The mansion is a dreamful, old-fashioned edifice, with wide and lofty piazzas, whose roofs are upheld by massive columns; and, with its grand setting of trees, it presents a pleasing picture. Whittier's study--a pleasant, cheerful room, with a delightful outlook and sunny exposure, a friendly-looking fireplace, and a glass door opening upon the veranda--was especially erected for him in a corner of the house, and here his later poems were penned. A bright and ample chamber above the parlor was his sleeping-apartment. [Sidenote: Whittier--Longfellow, etc.] The sweet poetess Miss Preston and the sprightly and versatile "Gail Hamilton" dwelt in the neighborhood and came often to this room to talk with the "transplanted prophet of Amesbury." Lucy Larcom and that "Sappho of the isles," Celia Thaxter, came less frequently. The place is still occupied by the relatives Whittier loved, who have preserved essentially unchanged the scenes he here inhabited. A little farther up the rock-bound coast are the scene of Lucy Larcom's touching poem "Hannah's at the Window Binding Shoes;" the hearth-stone where Longfellow saw his "Fire of Drift-Wood;" and the bleak sea-side home of "Floyd Ireson" of Whittier's verse. Beyond these lie the sometime summer homes of the poet Dana, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Fields, and Whipple, with that Mecca of the tourist, the savage reef of Norman's Woe,--celebrated in Longfellow's pathetic poem as the scene of "The Wreck of the Hesperus,"--not far away; while across the harbor a summer resort of the gifted Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward stands--an "Old Maid's Paradise" no longer--among the rocks of the shore. By the mouth of Whittier's "lowland river" we find the birthplace of Lloyd Garrison, the ancestral abode of the Longfellows, the tomb of Whitefield beneath the spot where he preached, the once sojourn of Talleyrand. Here, too, still inhabited by his family, we find the large, three-storied corner house in which Parton spent his last twenty years of busy life, and the low book-lined attic study where, in his cherished easy-chair with his manuscript resting upon a lap-board, he did much of his valuable work. Still farther northward, we come to the ancient town of Aldrich's "Bad Boy"-hood,--immortalized as the "Rivermouth" of his prose,--the place of Longfellow's "Lady Wentworth," the home of Hawthorne's Sir William Pepperell; and to the picturesque island realm of that "Princess of Thule," Celia Thaxter, and her gifted poet-brother Laighton;--but these shrines are worthy of a separate pilgrimage. OUT OF BOSTON IV WEBSTER'S MARSHFIELD: BROOK FARM, ETC _Scenes of the Old Oaken Bucket--Webster's Home and Grave--Where Emerson won his Wife--Home of Miss Peabody--Parkman--Miss Guiney--Aldrich's Ponkapog--Farm of Ripley's Community--Relics and Reminiscences._ One day's excursion out of Boston is southward through the birthplace and ancestral home of the brilliant essayist Quincy to the boyhood haunts of Woodworth and the scenes which inspired his sweetest lyric. In Scituate, by the village of Greenbush, we find the well of the "Old Oaken Bucket" remaining at the site of the dwelling where the poet was born and reared. Most of the "loved scenes" of his childhood--the wide-spreading pond, the venerable orchard, the flower-decked meadow, the "deep-tangled wildwood"--may still be seen, little changed since he knew them; but the rock of the cataract has been removed and the cascade itself somewhat altered by the widening of the highway; the "cot of his father" has given place to a modern farm-house; and the "moss-covered bucket that hung in the well" has been supplanted by a convenient but unpoetical pump. [Sidenote: Webster's Home and Grave] A few miles beyond this romantic spot we come to the Marshfield home of Daniel Webster, set in the midst of a pleasant rural region, not far from the ancient abode of Governor Winslow of the Plymouth colony. On the site of Webster's farm-house of thirty rooms--destroyed by fire some years ago--his son's widow erected a pretty and tasteful modern cottage, in which she preserved many relics of the illustrious statesman and orator, which had been rescued from the flames. Some of the relics were afterward removed to Boston, and, the family becoming extinct with the death of Mrs. Fletcher Webster, the place found an appreciatory proprietor in Mr. Walton Hall, a Boston business-man who was reared in this neighborhood, where Webster's was "a name to conjure by." The objects connected with the memory of the statesman have been as far as possible preserved, and we find the cottage partially furnished with his former belongings. Here we see his writing-table, covered with ink-stained green baize; his phenomenally large arm-chair with seat of leather; the andirons from his study fireplace; the heavy cane he used in his walks about the farm; portraits of the great _genius loci_--one of them representing him in his coarse farm attire--and of members of his family; a fine cabinet of beetles and butterflies presented to him by the Emperor of Brazil; and a number of paintings, articles of furniture, and bric-à-brac which had once been Webster's. Near the house stand the great memorial elms, each planted by Webster's hand at the death of one of his children. His favorite tree, beneath which his coffined figure lay at his funeral, was injured by the fire and has since been removed. Behind the house is a pretty lakelet, on whose surface--by his desire--lights were kept burning at night during his last illness, so that he might see them from his bed in the Pink Room where he died. His study window looked out through a colonnade of trees upon the hill-side cemetery--a furlong distant--where he now sleeps in a spot he loved and chose for his sepulchre. His tomb, on the brow of the hill, is marked by a huge mound of earth crowned by a ponderous marble slab. The memorial stones about it were erected by him to commemorate his family, already sleeping in the vault here before he came to lie among them:--all save one, and that one died at Bull Run. Not far away lie Governor Winslow and the Peregrine White who was born on the Mayflower. From among the neglected graves we look abroad upon the acres Webster tilled, the creeks he fished, the meadows he hunted, the haunts of his leisure during many years: on the one hand, we see a stretch of verdant pastures and lowly hills dotted by white cottages and bounded by distant forests; on the other hand, across the wave-like dunes and glistening sands we see a silver rim flecked with white sails,--the ocean, whose low-sounding monotone, eternally responding to some whisper of the infinite, mayhap lulls the dreamless sleepers beneath our feet. Southward again, we come to historic old Plymouth, with its many Puritan shrines and associations, which did not prevent its becoming a shire-town of Transcendentalism. Here we see the house (framed in England, and erected here upside down) where Emerson, the fountain-head of that great "wave of spirituality," wooed and won Miss Jackson to be his wife; and not far away the lovely spot where, among his gardens, groves, and orchards, Marston Watson had his "Hillside" home,--to which resorted Emerson, Theodore Parker, Peabody, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, and which the latter celebrated in a sonnet. Here, too, we find the church where Kendall preached, and the farm of Morton, the earliest historian of the Western world. [Sidenote: Miss Peabody] In the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain we find, near the station, the modest apartments where Miss Elizabeth Peabody--the "Saint Elizabeth" of her friends--passed her later years, and where, not many months ago, she died, having survived nearly all her associates in the earlier struggle for the enlargement of the bounds of spiritual freedom. She had been the intimate friend of Emerson, Channing, Theodore Parker, and the rest; and of the wider spirituality which they proclaimed she was esteemed a prophetess. Most of her literary work was done before she came to this home; and the latest literary effort of her life, her autobiography (which was undertaken here in age and weariness), was frustrated by her increasing infirmities. [Sidenote: Parkman] In the same delightful suburb was the ideally beautiful home of the historian Francis Parkman. His wide and tasteful dwelling surmounted an elevation overlooking a pretty lakelet, and was environed by ample grounds filled with choicest shrubbery and flowers, where there were roods of the roses and lilies he loved and studied. In this place he lived thirty-four years, and, although practically blind and rarely free from torturing pain, he here produced many volumes and accomplished the work which places him among the foremost historians of the age. In this home he died a year or so ago: his grounds having been taken for a public park, it is now proposed to erect here a bronze memorial of the great historian amid the floral beauty he created and cherished. In the remoter region of Canton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich has a sometime summer home, erected among enchanting landscapes, where he has pondered and written much of his dainty prose and daintier poesy. The curious name of this rural retreat is preserved in the title of his entertaining volume of travel-sketches, "From Ponkapog to Pesth." The tree near his door was the home of the pair of birds he described in the delightful sketch "Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog." [Sidenote: Miss Guiney] A morning's drive westward through the shade and sheen of a delectable urban district conveys us to the village of Auburndale, where we find the tasteful cottage home of Louise Imogen Guiney, with its French roofs, wide windows, square tower, and embosoming foliage. Here, if we come properly accredited, we may (or might before she became the village postmistress) see the gifted poetess of "White Sail" and "Roadside Harp" and essayist of "English Gallery" and "Prose Idyls"--a _petite_ and attractive young lady--at her desk, surrounded by her treasures of books and bric-à-brac and with the portraits of many friends looking down upon her from the walls of the square upper room where she writes. She has little to say concerning her own work,--fascinating as it is to her,--but discourses pleasantly on many topics and narrates _con amore_ the history of the precious tomes and the literary relics she has gathered here, and describes the traits and lineage of her beloved canine pets, who have been execrated by some of her neighbors. [Sidenote: Brook Farm] Nearer Jamaica Plain is the quiet corner of West Roxbury, where the exalted community of Brook Farmers attempted to realize in external and material fashion their high ideals and to inaugurate the precursor of an Arcadian era. In this season, "the sweet o' the year," we find the farm a delightful spot, fully warranting Hawthorne's eulogium in "Blithedale Romance." The songful stream which gives the place its name is margined by verdant and sun-kissed meads which slope away to the circling Charles; on either side, fields and picturesque pastures--broken here and there by rocky ledges and copse-covered knolls--swell upward to feathery acclivities of pine and oak, with rugged escarpments of rock. From the elevation about the farm-house we overlook most of the domain of these social reformers,--the many acres of woodlands, the orchards and fields where Ripley, George William Curtis, Hawthorne, Dwight, Bedford, Pratt, Dana, and other transcendental enthusiasts held sublimated discourse while they performed the coarsest farm drudgery, applied uncelestial fertilizers, "belabored rugged furrows," or delved for the infinite in a peat-bog. Curtis has said "there never were such witty potato-patches, such sparkling corn-fields; the weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson and Browning." The farm-house stands above the highway, and is shaded by giant trees planted by Ripley and his associates. It is a commodious, antiquated structure of weather-worn wood, two stories in height, with a vast attic beneath the sloping roofs and an extension which has been recently enlarged. The original edifice is a ponderous fabric of almost square form, with an entrance in the middle of the front, massive chimneys at either end, and contains four spacious lower rooms, besides an outer scullery. Here we see the sitting-room of the reformers, where at first Channing sometimes preached and the now "Nestor of American journalism" sang bass in the choir; their refectory, where Dana served as head-waiter; and their brick-paved kitchen, where the erudite Mrs. Ripley and the soulful Margaret Fuller sometimes helped to prepare the bran bread and baked beans for the exalted brotherhood. Adjoining is the old "wash-room," where some who have since become famous in literature or politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead with a heavy wooden pestle; and just without is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles A. Dana (who certainly was the most popular member of the community), and the genial Curtis were sometimes seen hanging the moist garments upon the lines, a truly edifying spectacle for gods and men. It was from Curtis's pockets that the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during the evening dances. Some of the trees yet to be seen near the house were rooted from the nursery established here by Dana. This old house was the original "Hive" of the community, who added the extensive wing at the back, but increasing numbers soon forced a portion of the company to swarm, and other dormitories were erected. Of these we find vestiges of the "Eyrie"--which was also used as a school-house--upon a commanding ledge at a little distance from the house, and nearer the grove where the rural festivals of the association were held. Of the "Nest," the little house where Miss Ripley lived, the "Cottage," where Margaret Fuller lodged during her sojourns at the farm, the large barn, where social _séances_ were held while the starry company prepared vegetables for the market, and the other steading erected by the community, only the cellars and broken foundations remain. In the wood at some distance from the house is the "Eliot's Pulpit" of Coverdale's narrative, a mass of rock crowning a knoll and having a great fissure through its core; in the forest beyond we may find "Coverdale's Walk," and the "Hermitage" where he heard by accident the colloquy of Westervelt and Zenobia. After the day of Ripley's brilliant colony the broad acres of Brook Farm were tilled by the town poor, and--"to what base uses!"--the pretty cottage of Margaret Fuller became a loathsome small-pox pest-house; the rooms of the "Hive," after six years of familiarity with ideal refiners and reformers, became the abode of paupers, and at this day are aswarm with an odorous multitude of German orphans, wards of a Lutheran society that now owns the place. While the pilgrim may find but few traces of the physical labors of the choice spirits who once inhabited this spot, the beneficent results of the mental and moral work here accomplished--especially among the young--are manifest and ineffaceable. These infertile fields yielded but scant returns for the manual toil of the optimistic philosophers, but their earnest strivings toward social and mental emancipation have borne abundant fruit. IN BERKSHIRE WITH HAWTHORNE I. The Graylock and Hoosac Region II. Lenox and Middle Berkshire I THE GRAYLOCK AND HOOSAC REGION _North Adams and about--Hawthorne's Acquaintances and Excursions--Actors and Incidents of Ethan Brand--Kiln of Bertram the Lime-Burner--Natural Bridge--Graylock--Thoreau--Hoosac Mountain--Deerfield Arch-- Williamstown--Bryant._ The Hawthorne pilgrimage has drawn us to many shrines: the sunny scenes of "The Marble Faun," the peaceful landscapes of "Our Old Home," the now busy city of "The Scarlet Letter," the elm-shaded Salem of "Dr. Grimshaw" and "The House of the Seven Gables," the Manse of the "Mosses," the Wayside of "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance,"--these and many another resort of the subtile romancer, in the Old World and the New, have held our lingering feet. Amid the splendors of a New England September we follow him into the "headlong Berkshire" of "Ethan Brand" and "Tanglewood Tales." Hawthorne was more than most writers influenced by environment; the situations and circumstances under which his work was produced often determined its tone and color, while the persons, localities, and occurrences observed by his alert senses in the real world about him were skilfully wrought into his romance. His residence in Berkshire affected not only the books written there, but some subsequently produced, and the scenery of this loveliest corner of New England supplied the setting for many of his tales. Some of the best passages of his "American Note-Books" are records of his observations in this region,--sundry scenes, characters, and incidents being afterward literally transcribed therefrom into his fiction,--while a few of his shorter stories seem to have been suggested by legends once current in Berkshire. It passes, therefore, that for us the greatest charm of this realm of delights is that all its beauties--the grandeur of its mountains, the enchantment of its valleys, the glamour of its autumn woods, the sheen of its lakelets, the sapphire of its skies--serve to bring us into closer sympathy with Hawthorne, to whom these beauties were once a familiar vision. He first came to Berkshire in the summer of 1838. For thirteen years he had bravely "waited for the world to know" him. His "Twice-Told Tales" had brought him little fame or money, but they had procured him the friendship of the Peabodys, and it would appear that he and the lovely Sophia already loved each other. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth, written early in the summer, Sophia says, "Hawthorne came one morning for a take-leave call, looking radiant. He said he was not going to tell any one, not even his mother, where he should be for the next months; he thought he should change his name, so that if he died no one would be able to find his gravestone. We asked him to keep a journal while he was gone. He at first said he would not write anything, but finally concluded it would suit very well for hints for future stories." It was from his journal of these months of mysterious retirement that, forty years later, the gentle Sophia--then his widow--transcribed those pages of the "Note-Books" which contain the account of his sojourn in upper Berkshire and of his observations and meditations there. How far the journal furnished "hints for future stories" the literary world well knows. A few days after this "take-leave call" we find Hawthorne at Pittsfield, where his Berkshire saunterings (and ours) fitly began. We follow him northward along a curving valley hemmed by mountains that slope upward to the azure; on the right rise the rugged Hoosacs in "Wave-like walls that block the sky With tints of gold and mists of blue;" on the left loom the darkly-wooded domes of the Taconics above the bright upland pastures, while before us grand old "Graylock" uprears his head "shaggy with primeval forest,"--his gigantic shape forming the culmination of the superb landscape. Hawthorne's superlative pleasure of beholding this grandeur and beauty from the driver's seat of a stage and being regaled at the same time by the converse of the driver is denied to us, but we enjoy quite as much as did Hawthorne the little "love-pats" and passages of a newly-wedded pair of our fellow-passengers. The stage has disappeared, the driver and the high-stepping steeds which served him "in wheel and in whoa" have given place to the engineer and the locomotive; the changes of the half-century since Hawthorne journeyed here have well-nigh overturned the world; only the eternal beauty of these hills and the bewraying demeanor of the newly-married remain evermore unchanged. [Sidenote: Hawthorne at North Adams] [Sidenote: Characters of his Fiction] At North Adams, which the magician, "liking indifferent well, made his head-quarters," we have lodgings near the place of his on the Main Street and in the domicile of one who, as a lad of fourteen years, had known Hawthorne during his stay here. Apparently he did not attempt to carry out his plan of concealing his identity; he certainly was known to some of the villagers as the author of "Twice-Told Tales," and a descendant of one of Hawthorne's "seven doctors of the place" recalls his delight on being told that the "Whig Tavern boarder" was the creator of "The Gentle Boy;" and he remembers his subsequent and consequent worshipful espionage of the wonderful being. To this espionage we are indebted for some edifying details of Hawthorne's sojourn in upper Berkshire. The world has known few handsomer men than Hawthorne was at this period of his life,--he had been styled Oberon at college,--and our informant recollects him as "the most brilliantly handsome person he ever beheld," tall, dark, with an expressive mobile face and a lustrous eye which held something "indescribably more than keenness" in its quick glances. (Charles Reade said Hawthorne's eye was "like a violet with a soul in it.") As remembered here, his expression was often abstracted, sometimes despondent. He would sit for hours at a time on the broad porch of the old "North Adams House," or in a corner of the bar-room, silently smoking and apparently oblivious to his surroundings, yet, as we know, vigilant to note the oddities of character and opinion he encountered. It is certain that he did not drink immoderately at this time. There were a few persons--_not_ the model men of the community--to whom he occasionally unbent and whom he admitted to a sort of comradeship, which, as his diary shows, often became confessionary upon their part. With these he held prolonged converse upon the tavern porch,--his part in the conversations being mainly suggestions calculated to elicit the whimsical conceits or experiences of his companions,--sitting the while in the posture of the venerable custom-house officials, described in the sketch introductory to the "Scarlet Letter," with "chair tipped on its hind legs" and his feet elevated against a pillar of the porch. Among those remembered to have been thus favored was Captain C----, called Captain Gavett in the "Note-Books," who dispensed metaphysics and maple sugar from the tavern steps, and a jolly blacksmith named Wetherel, described by Hawthorne as "big in the paunch and enormous in the rear," who came regularly to the bar for his stimulant. Another was the "lath-like, round-backed, rough-bearded, thin-visaged" stage-driver, Platt, whom Hawthorne honors as "a friend of mine" in the diary, and whose acquaintance he made during the ride from Pittsfield. In later years Platt's pride in having known Hawthorne eclipsed even his sense of distinction in being "the first and only man to drive an ox-team to the top of Graylock, sir." He had once been employed to haul the materials for an observatory up that mountain's steep inclines. Of the other "hangers-on" who were wont to infest the bar-room and porch fifty years ago and whom Hawthorne depicts in his journal and his fiction, few of the present generation of loungers in the place have ever heard. Orrin ----, the sportive widower whose peccadilloes are hinted at in the "Note-Books," is remembered by older residents of the town, and the "fellow who refused to pay six dollars for the coffin in which his wife was buried" may still be named as the personification of meanness. The maimed and dissolute Daniel Haines--nicknamed "Black Hawk"--was then a familiar figure in the village streets, and his unique history and appearance could not escape the notice of the great romancer nor be soon forgotten by the towns-people. As Hawthorne says, "he had slid down by degrees from law to the soap-vat." Once a reputable lawyer, his bibulous habits and an accident--his hand being "torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine"--had so reduced him that at the time Hawthorne saw him he maintained himself by boiling soap and practising phrenology. It is remembered that he used to "feel of bumps" for the price of a drink, and that, Hawthorne's head being submitted to his manipulation, he gravely assured the tavern company, "This man was created to shine as a bank president," and then privately advised the landlord to "make that chap pay in advance for his board." A resident tells us that this dirty and often drunken Haines used to make biweekly visits to his father's house, with a cart drawn by disreputable-looking dogs, to receive fat in exchange for soap. The novelist touches this odd character many times in his journal, and utilizes it in the romance of "Ethan Brand," where it is the "Lawyer Giles, the elderly ragamuffin," who, with the rest of the lazy regiment from the village tavern, came in response to the summons of the "boy Joe" to see poor Brand returned from his long search after the Unpardonable Sin. This "boy Joe," son of "Bertram the lime-burner," was also a bar-room character, noted here by Hawthorne, but obviously for a different use than that made of him in "Ethan Brand,"--a reference to him in the "Note-Books" being supplemented by this memorandum: "take this boy as the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country _roué_, to spend a wild and brutal youth, ten years of his prime in prison and his old age in the poor-house." This sketch may have been written in the spirit of prophecy, so exactly has the life of one bar-room boy coincided with Hawthorne's outline; the career of another lad whom he here saw and possibly had in mind was happier. [Sidenote: Characters and Scenes] A modern hotel has replaced the "Whig Tavern" of Hawthorne's time, and a new set of _habitués_ now frequent its bar-room; another generation of fat men has succeeded the individuals whose breadth of back was a marvel to the novelist, and in the increased population of the place the "many obese" would no longer provoke comment. The lapsing decades have expanded the pretty and busy factory-village he found into a prettier and busier factory-city without materially changing its prevailing air. The vigorous young city has not wholly out-grown the "hollow vale" walled in by towering mountains; the aspect of its grand environment is therefore essentially unaltered, and it chances that there is scarcely a spot, in or about the town, which received the notice of Hawthorne which may not still be identified. It is our crowning pleasure in the resplendent autumn days to follow his thoughtful step and dreamy vision through town and country-side to the spots he frequented and described, thus sharing, in a way, his companionship and beholding through his eyes the beauties which he has depicted of mountain and vale, forest and stream. On the summit of a hill in the village cemetery, where white gravestones gleam amid the evergreens, the grave of a child at whose burial Hawthorne assisted is pointed out by one who was present with him. The well-known author-divine Washington Gladden, sometime preached in a near-by church. The ever-varying phases of the heights which look down upon the town--the wondrous play of light and shade upon the great sweeps of foliage which clothe the mountain-sides, the shadows chasing each other along the slopes and changing from side to side as the day declines, until the vale lies in twilight while the near summits are gilded with sunset gold, the exquisite cloud-effects as the fleecy masses drift above the ridges or cling to the higher peaks--were a never-failing source of pleasure to Hawthorne, as they are to the loiterer of this day. Every shifting of the point of view as we stroll in the town reveals a new aspect of its mountain ramparts and arouses fresh delight. Hawthorne thought the village itself most beautiful when clouds deeply shaded the mountains while sunshine flooded the valley and, by contrast, made streets and houses a bright, rich gold. [Sidenote: Hawthorne's Rambles] The investing mountains give to the place the "snug and insular" air which Hawthorne observed; from many points it seems completely severed from the rest of the world. On some dark days sombre banks of cloud settle along the ridges and apparently so strengthen and heighten the beleaguering walls that we recall Hawthorne's fancy that egress is impossible save by "climbing above the clouds." However, the railways tunnel the base of one mountain and curve around the flanks of others, while "Old roads winding, as old roads will," find easy grades about and over the ramparts, so that the bustling "Tunnel-city" is by no means isolated from the outside world. The rambles among and beyond these investing mountains, by which Hawthorne made himself and "Eustace Bright" of "Wonder-Book" and "Tanglewood Tales" familiar with "rough, rugged, broken, headlong" Berkshire, were usually solitary. The before-mentioned admirer of the "Gentle Boy" sometimes offered to guide the novelist to places of interest in the vicinage, but he usually preferred to be alone with nature and his own reveries. Once when the lad proposed to pilot him to the peak of Graylock, Hawthorne replied he "did not care to soar so high; the Bellows-Pipe was sightly enough for him." He visited the latter point many times; it is a long walk from the village, and once he returned so late that the hotel was closed for the night and our lad pommelled the door for him until the landlord descended, in wrath and confidentially scant attire, to admit the novelist. [Sidenote: Ethan Brand] One starless night we were guided to the kiln of "Bertram the lime-burner" which Hawthorne visited with Mr. Leach,--one of several kilns high up on the steep slope without the town, where the marble of the mountain is converted into snow-white lime. The graphic imagery of the tale may all be realized here upon the spot where it is laid. Amid the darkness, the iron door which encloses the glowing limestone apparently opens into the mountain-side, and seems a veritable entrance to the infernal regions whose lurid flames escape by every crevice. The dark and silent figure, revealed to us by the weird light, sitting and musing before the kiln, is surely "Ethan Brand" on his solitary vigil, intent on perilous thoughts as he looks into the flame, or mutely listening to the fiend he has evoked from the fire to tell him of the Unpardonable Sin; or it is the same Brand returned to the foot of Graylock after eighteen years of weary searching abroad, to find the Sin in his own heart and to burn that heart into snowy whiteness and purity in the kiln he had watched so long. As we ponder the scene we would scarce be surprised to witness the approach of the village rabble led by Joe, the old Jew exhibiting his "peep-show" at the foot of the kiln, and the self-pursuing cur violently chasing his own shortened tail, or to hear the demoniac laughter of Brand which scattered the terror-stricken rabble in the surrounding darkness. Certain it is that, thirteen years before he wrote the tale, Hawthorne saw here, at a kiln on the foot-hill of Graylock, his "Bertram," and heard the legend of a demented creature who threw himself into the midst of the circle of fire. The name "Ethan Brand" was that of an old resident of Hawthorne's Salem. [Sidenote: Graylock] The summit of Graylock, whose rugged beauty has been sung by Holmes, Thoreau, Bryant, and Fanny Kemble, had for Hawthorne a sort of fascination. From the streets of the village, from all the ways by which he sauntered through the country-side, his eyes were continually turning to that lofty height, observant of its ever-changing aspects. His diary of the time abounds with records of its phases, presented in varying conditions of cloud and sunshine and from different places of prospect, and of the fanciful impressions suggested to his subtile thought by each fresh and unfamiliar appearance. A walk repeatedly enjoyed by him is along a primitive road on the mountain-side to the southern end of The Notch,--"where it slopes upward to the skies,"--whence he could see most of the enchanting valley of Berkshire--with its lakes, embowered villages, and billowy expanses of upland and mead--extending between mountain-borders to the great Dome which looms across it sixty miles away. In the distance he could see the crags of Bryant's Monument Mountain--the "headless sphinx" of his own "Wonder-Book"--rising above the gleaming lake whose margin was to be his later home. Our route to the peak of Graylock is that taken by Hawthorne and Thoreau through the savage cleft of The Notch. We follow up a dashing mountain-stream past a charming cascade beneath darkening hemlocks, then along a rough road by the houses whose inhabitants Hawthorne thought "ought to be temperance people" from the quality of the water they gave him to drink. In the remoter parts of the glen a stranger-pedestrian is still a wonder, and will be regarded as curiously as was the romancer. From the extremity of The Notch, Graylock rises steeply, his sides clothed with forests, through which we climb to the summit and our reward. From the site of Thoreau's bivouac, where Fanny Kemble once declaimed Romeo and Juliet to a picnic party, we behold a scene of unrivalled vastness and beauty,--on every side peak soaring beyond peak until the shadowy outlines blend with the distant sky. The view ranges from Grand Monadnock and the misty Adirondacks to the Catskills, the Dome of Mount Washington, and the far-away hills of Connecticut, while at our feet smiles the bright valley, as beautiful as that in which Rasselas dwelt. [Sidenote: Natural Bridge] A mile from the town we find one of the most picturesque spectacles in New England, the Natural Bridge, to which Hawthorne came again and again during his sojourn in this region. Amid a grove of pines apparently rooted in the solid rock, a tributary of the Hoosac has, during measureless eons of time, worn in the white marble a chasm sixty feet deep and fifteen feet wide, spanned at one point by a beautifully arched mass which forms a bridge high above the stream which frets along the rock-strewn floor of the canyon. Within the ravine the brook falls in a rainbow-crowned cascade, and below this is a placid pool with margins of polished marble, where Hawthorne once meditated a bath, but, alarmed by the approach of visitors, he hastily resumed his habiliments, "not caring to be to them the most curious part of the spectacle." From the deep bed of the brook the gazer looks heavenward between lofty walls of crystalline whiteness which seem to converge as they rise, whose surmounting crags jutting from the verge are crowned by sombre evergreens which overhang the chasm and almost shut out the sky. As we traverse the gorge whose wildness so impressed Hawthorne and listen to the re-echoing roar of the now diminished stream, we are reminded of his conceit that the scene is "like a heart that has been rent asunder by a torrent of passion which has raged and left ineffaceable traces, though now there is but a rill of feeling at the bottom." Our way back to the town is along a riotous stream which took strong hold upon the liking of the novelist, by which he often walked and in whose cool depths he bathed. His brief descriptions of its secluded and turbulent course, through resounding hollows, amid dark woods, under pine-crowned cliffs,--"talking to itself of its own wild fantasies in the voice of solitude and the wilderness,"--although written at the time but for his own perusal, are among the gems of the language. Farther down, the boisterous stream is now subdued and harnessed by man and made to turn wheels of factories; its limpid waters are discolored by dye-stuffs; its beauty is lost with its freedom; it becomes useful and--ugly. [Sidenote: Incidents and Characters of Tales] One day our excursion is into the romantic valley of the Deerfield by the old stage-road over the Hoosac range, the route which Hawthorne took with his friends Birch and Leach. The many turns by which the road accomplishes the ascent afford constantly varying vistas of the valley out of which we rise, and progressively widening prospects of the forest-clad mountains beyond. At the summit we are in the centre of the magnificent panorama of mountains--glowing now with autumnal crimson and gold--which extorted from Henry Clay the declaration that he had "never beheld anything so beautiful." On the bare and wind-swept plain which lies along the summit are a few farm-dwellings. Among these at the time of Hawthorne's visit--before the great tunnel had pierced the mountain and superseded the stage-route--was a homely wayside inn, afterward a farm-house, at whose bar passengers were wont to "wet their whistles." It may be assumed that the romancer and his companions failed not to conform to this time-honored custom, for it was in that rude bar-room--since a farm-kitchen--that Hawthorne met the itinerant Jew with a diorama of execrable scratchings which he carried upon his back and exhibited as "specimens of the fine arts;" in that room also the novelist witnessed the whimsical performance of the usually sensible and sedate old dog, who periodically broke out in an infuriated pursuit of his own tail, "as if one half of his body were at deadly enmity with the other." These incidents were carefully noted at the time for possible future use, and in such choice diction that when, many years afterward, he wove them into the fabric of a tale of "The Snow Image" volume, he transcribed them from his diary to his manuscript essentially unchanged. This instance illustrates the method of this consummate literary artist and his alertness to perceive and utilize the details of real life. His journals abundantly show that he was by no means the aphelxian dreamer he has been adjudged. [Sidenote: Deerfield Arch] As we descend into the deep valley we find a wild gulf where a brooklet from the top of Hoosac falls a hundred feet into a rock-bordered pool, whence it hastens to lose itself in the river; and a mile or two farther along the Deerfield we come to the Natural Arch which Hawthorne visited. It is in one of the wildest parts of the picturesque valley, where mountain-walls rise a thousand feet on either side. Through a mass of rock projecting from the margin the stream has wrought for itself a symmetrically arched passage as large as and very like the door-way of an Old-World cathedral. The summit of the arch and the water-worn pillars upon either side display "pot-holes" and other evidences of erosion, and in the bed of the current lie fragments of similarly attrite rocks which seem to indicate that at some period a series of arches spanned the entire space from mountain to mountain. Hawthorne's pleasing fancy makes this arch the entrance to an enchanted palace which has all vanished except the door-way that "now opens only into nothingness and empty space." [Sidenote: Williamstown] On other days our saunterings follow Hawthorne's to beautiful Williamstown and through the picturesque scenery which environs it. Within the park-like village the alma mater of Bryant, Garfield, and Hawthorne's "Eustace Bright" stands embowered in noble elms and overlooked by mighty Graylock. Viewed from here, Emerson thought Graylock "a serious mountain." Thoreau considered its proximity worth at least "one endowed professorship; it were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mount as in more classic shades. Some will remember not only that they went to the college but that they went to the mountain." Hawthorne visited both. At the college commencement we find him more attentive to the eccentric characters in the assemblage without the church than to the literary exercises within, as evidenced by his piquant description of the enterprising pedler with the "heterogeny" of wares, the gingerbread man, the negroes, and other oddities of the out-door company. [Sidenote: Bryant--Emerson] About us here lie the scenes which stirred in William Cullen Bryant that intense love of nature which inspired his best stanzas. A winsome walk brings us to a sequestered glen where a brooklet winds amid moss-covered rocks and dainty ferns, and mirrors in its clear pools the overhanging boughs and the patches of azure; this was a favorite haunt of the youthful Bryant, and here he pondered or composed his earlier poems, including some portion of the matchless "Thanatopsis." Here Emerson, lingering under the spell of the spot, was moved to recite Wordsworth's "Excursion" to a companion, who must evermore feel an enviable thrill when he recalls the exquisite lines falling from the lips of the "great evangel and seer" amid the loveliness of such a scene. II LENOX AND MIDDLE BERKSHIRE _Beloved of the Littérateurs--La Maison Rouge--Where The House of the Seven Gables was written--Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Scenes--The Bowl--Beecher's Laurel Lake--Kemble--Bryant's Monument Mountain-- Stockbridge--Catherine Sedgwick--Melville's Piazza and Chimney-- Holmes--Longfellow--Pittsfield._ We have only to accompany Eustace Bright of "Wonder-Book" from Williams College to his home, where Catherine Sedgwick's "Stockbridge Bowl" nestles among the summer-enchanted hills of central Berkshire, to find the abode of Hawthorne during the most fertile period of his life. This region of inspiring landscapes has long been a favorite residence of _littérateurs_. Here Jonathan Edwards compiled his predestined treatises; here Catherine Sedgwick wrote the romances which charmed her generation; here Elihu Burritt "the Learned Blacksmith," wrought out the "Sparks" that made him famous; here Bryant composed his best stanzas and made Monument Mountain and Green River classic spots; here Henry Ward Beecher indited many "Star Papers;" here Herman Melville produced his sea-tales and brilliant essays; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow, Curtis and James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederika Bremer, the gifted sisters Goodale, and many other shining spirits, have had home or haunt and have invested the scenery with the splendors of their genius. Half a score of this galaxy were in Berkshire at the time of Hawthorne's residence there. After his sojourn in northern Berkshire he returned to Salem, where he married the lovely Sophia Peabody, endured some years of custom-house drudgery, and wrote the "Scarlet Letter," which made him famous: he then sought again the seclusion of the mountains. [Sidenote: Hawthorne's Return to Berkshire] Poverty, which he had long and bravely endured, has been assigned as the cause of his removal to the humble Berkshire abode in 1850; one writer refers to the slenderness of his larder here, another says the rent for his poor dwelling was paid by his friends, another that the rent was remitted by the owner, who was his friend. But the success of the "Scarlet Letter" had relieved the necessitous condition of its author; and his landlord here--Tappan of "Tanglewood"--testifies and Hawthorne's letters show that he was able to pay his rent. His motive in returning to Berkshire is stated in a letter to Bridge: "I have taken a house in Lenox--I long to get into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two of labor in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right." Doubtless, too, he hoped to find the quiet and seclusion of the place favorable for his work. [Sidenote: His Home and Study] The habitation to which he brought his family he describes as "the very ugliest little bit of an old red farm-house you ever saw," "the most inconvenient and wretched hovel I ever put my head in." His wife's letters characterize it, "the reddest and smallest of houses," with such a low stud that she "fears to be crushed." In later years we have found it scarcely changed since Hawthorne's occupancy; it was indeed of the humblest and plainest,--a low-eaved, one-and-a-half-storied structure, with a lower wing at the side, dingy red in color, with window-shutters of green. The interior was cosy and more commodious than the exterior would indicate, and one could readily conceive that the artistic taste and deft fingers of Mrs. Hawthorne might create here the idyllic home her letters portray. We have been indebted to the courtesy of Hawthorne's friend Tappan for glimpses of the rooms which Mrs. Hawthorne had already made familiar to us: the tiny reception-room, where she "sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;" the drawing-room, where she disposed "the embroidered furniture," and where, in the farther corner, stood "Apollo with his head tied on;" the dining-room, where the "Pembroke table stood between the windows;" the small boudoir, with its enchanting outlook; the "golden chamber" where the baby Rose was born; the room of the "little lady Una;" and the low, dingy apartment which was the study of the master-genius. Of this room she says, "it can boast of nothing but his presence in the morning and the picture out of the window in the evening." His secretary was so placed that as he sat at his work he could look out upon a landscape of forest and meadow, lake and mountain, as beautiful as a poet's dream. It was the exquisite loveliness of this scene--which Hawthorne thought surpassed all others in Berkshire--that for a time reconciled him to the deficiencies of his situation here. Monument Mountain, looming almost across the valley, is the most prominent feature of this view, and it was from his study window that he noted most of its varying aspects which are depicted in the "Wonder-Book" and in his letters and journals. Its contour is to him that of a "huge, headless sphinx," and when--as on the days we beheld it from his window--it blazes from base to summit with the resplendent hues of autumn, his fancy suggested that "the sphinx is wrapped in a rich Persian shawl;" with the sunshine upon it, "it has the aspect of burnished copper;" now it has "a fleece of sun-brightened mist," again it seems "founded on a cloud;" on other days it is "enveloped as if in the smoke of a great battle." Upon the pane through which he had looked upon these changeful phases his hand inscribed, "Nathaniel Hawthorne, February 9, 1851." [Sidenote: Site of his Little Red House] He could scarcely have found a lovelier location for his home. The valley, which sometimes seemed to him "a vast basin filled with sunshine as with wine," is enclosed by groups of mountains piled and terraced to the horizon. As we behold them in the splendor of the October days, great patches of sunshine and sable cloud-shadows flit along the glowing slopes in the sport of the wind. On the one side, the ground sweeps upward from the cottage site to the "Bald Summit" of the "Wonder-Book;" on the other, a meadow--as long as the finger of the giant of "Three Golden Apples"--slopes to the lake a furlong distant. That beautiful water, sung by Sigourney, Sedgwick, and Fanny Kemble, stretches its bays three miles among the hills to the southward and mirrors its own wooded margins and the farther mountains. Beyond the lake, rising in mid-air like a great gray wall, are the sheer precipices of Monument Mountain, and in the hazy distance the loftier Taconics uprear their grand Dome in the illimitable blue. Of "La Maison Rouge" of Hawthorne's letters, the pilgrim of to-day finds only the blackened and broken foundation walls: a devouring fire, from which Tappan saved little of his furniture, has laid it low. These walls (which remain only because relic-hunters cannot easily carry them away) measurably indicate the form and dimensions of the cottage and its general arrangement. Its site is close upon the highway, from which it is partially screened by evergreen trees. The gate of the enclosure is of course an unworthy successor to that upon which Fields found Hawthorne swinging his children, but these near-by elms have shaded the great romancer, the tallest of the evergreens is the tree his wife thought "full of a thousand memories," and all about the spot cluster reminders of the simple, healthful life Hawthorne led here. Here are the garden ground he tilled and where he buried the pet rabbit "Bunny;" the "patch," ploughed for him by Tappan, where he raised beans for himself and corn for his hens (he had learned something of agriculture at Brook Farm, albeit it was said there he could do nothing but feed the hogs); the now great fruit-trees whose leaden labels little Julian destroyed, as Tappan remembers; the place of the "scientific hennery," fitted up by the "Man of Genius and the Naval Officer,"--Hawthorne and Horatio Bridge; the long declivity where the novelist as well as his Eustace Bright used to coast "in the nectared air of winter" with the children of the "Wonder-Book;" the leafy woods--his refuge from visitors--where he walked with his children and where Bright nutted with the little Pringles; the lake-shore where Hawthorne loitered or lay extended in the shade during summer hours, "smoking cigars, reading foolish novels, and thinking of nothing at all," while the children played about him or covered his chin and breast with long grasses to make him "look like the mighty Pan." Near by are other friends he has made known to us. Yonder copse shades a narrow glen whose braes border a brooklet winding and chattering on its way to the lake; this glen was a summer haunt of Hawthorne, where he doubtless pondered much of his work. Here he brought his children "to play with the brook" and helped them to build water-falls, or reclined in the shade and told them stories as described in the "Wonder-Book,"--for this is the "dell of Shadow-Brook," where the children picnicked with Bright and where he told them the story of "The Golden Touch" on such an afternoon as this, on which we behold the dell thickly strewn with golden leaves, as if King Midas had newly emptied his coffers there. [Sidenote: Tanglewood and Wonder-Book Scenes] Yonder mansion of Hawthorne's landlord, just beyond the highway, is "Tanglewood,"--place of the Pringles' home and still the abode of Tappan's daughters,--where Bright spent his vacations and where Hawthorne makes him tell many of the "Tales." The view described on the porch, where the "Gorgon's Head" was narrated, is the one Hawthorne saw from his study window. Glimpses of various rooms of the mansion which Tappan then inhabited and called "Highwood" are prefixed to the stories told in them. Beyond "Tanglewood" steeply rises an eminence whose bare acclivity Hawthorne often climbed with his family,--the "Bald Summit" where the Pringles listened to the tale of "The Chimera." We ascend by the novelist's accustomed way "through Luther Butler's orchard," and are repaid by a view extending from the mountains of Vermont to the Catskills and deserving the high praise Hawthorne bestowed. A golden cloud floating close to Graylock's shaggy head reminds us of Hawthorne's conceit that a mortal might step from the mountain to the cloud and thus ascend heavenly heights. The farther ranges enclose a valley of wave-like hills,--which look as if a tumultuous ocean had been transfixed and solidified,--dotted with farmsteads and picturesque villages whose white spires rise from embowering trees. At our feet the "Bowl" ripples and scintillates, farther away the "Echo Lake" of Christine Nilsson and many smaller lakelets "open their blue eyes to the sun," while the placid stream, fringed by overhanging willows, circles here and there through the valley like a shining ribbon. Here we may realize the immensity of Hawthorne's giant in the "Three Golden Apples," who was so tall he "might have seated himself on Taconic and had Monument Mountain for a footstool." [Sidenote: Resorts and Reminiscences] [Sidenote: Fanny Kemble] Not far away, near another shore of the shimmering "Bowl," that versatile genius "Carl Benson"--Charles Astor Bristed--dwelt for some time in a quaint old farm-house which has since been destroyed by fire, and here accomplished some of his literary work. Laurel Lake (the Scott's Pond of Hawthorne's "Note-Books"), where Beecher "bought a hundred acres to lie down upon,"--and called them Blossom Farm in the "Star Papers" written there,--was another resort of Hawthorne. We find it a pretty water, although its margins are mostly denuded of large trees. A bright matron of the vicinage, who, when a child, thought the author of the "Wonder-Book" the "greatest man in the world save only Franklin Pierce," lived then by Hawthorne's road to Laurel Lake. Her admiration for him (heightened by his intimacy with Pierce) led her to daily watch the road by which he would come from Tanglewood, and when she saw him approaching--which would be twice a week in good weather--she would go into the yard and reverently gaze at him until his swift gait had carried him out of sight. To her he was a tall, dark man with a handsome clean-shaven face and lustrous eyes which saw nothing but the ground directly before him, habitually dressed in black, with a wide-brimmed soft hat. Usually his walk was solitary, but sometimes Herman Melville, who was well known in the neighborhood, was his companion, and one autumn he was twice or thrice accompanied by "a light spare man,"--the poet Ellery Channing. Once Hawthorne strode past toward the lake when Fanny Kemble, who lived near by, rode her black steed by his side and "seemed to be doing all the talking"--she was capable of that--and "was talking politics." Having secured a Democratic auditor, she doubtless "improved the occasion" with her habitual vivaciousness. A neighbor of Hawthorne's tells us this incident of the following year, when the novelist's friend Pierce had been named for the Presidency. One dark night this neighbor went on foot to a campaign lecture at Lenox Furnace. At its close, he essayed to shorten the homeward walk by a "short cut" across the fields, and, of course, lost his way. Descrying a light, he directed his steps toward it, but found himself involved in a labyrinth of obstacles, and had to make so many détours that when he finally reached the house whence the light proceeded, and when in response to his hail the door was opened by Kemble herself, he was so distraught and amazed at being lost among his own farms that he could hardly explain his plight; but she quickly interrupted his incoherent account: "Yes, I see, poor benighted man! you've been to a Democratic meeting; no wonder you are bewildered! Now I'll lend you a good Whig lantern that will light you safe home." We find Mrs. Kemble-Butler's "Perch"--as she named her home here--a little enlarged, but not otherwise changed since the time of her occupancy. She was a general favorite, and her dark steed, which had cost her the proceeds of a volume of her poems, used to stop before every house in the vicinage. She often came, habited in a sort of bloomer costume which shocked some of her friends, to fish in the "Bowl" at the time Hawthorne dwelt by its shore. The death of Louis Kossuth, some time ago, reminded her former neighbors here that she led the dance with him at a ball in Lenox, when the exiled patriot was a guest of the Sedgwicks. [Sidenote: Monument Mountain] Our approach to Monument Mountain is along one of those sequestered by-ways which Hawthorne loved, with "an unseen torrent roaring at an unseen depth" near by. A rift in the morning mists which enshroud the valley displays the mountain summit bathed in sunshine. We ascend by Bryant's "path which conducts up the narrow battlement to the north," the same along which Hawthorne and his friends--Holmes, James T. Fields, Sedgwick, and the rest--were piloted by the historian Headley on a summer's day more than forty years ago. Standing upon the beetling verge, which is scarred and splintered by thunderbolts and overhangs a precipice of five hundred feet or more, we look abroad upon a landscape of wondrous expanse and beauty. Here we may realize all the prospect Bryant portrayed as he stood upon this spot: "A beautiful river Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads; On either side The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond, Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise The mighty columns with which earth props heaven." In the middle distance, across the Bowl, which gleams a veritable "mountain mirror," we see the site of the home whence Hawthorne so often looked upon these cliffs. Yonder detached pinnacle, rising from the base of the precipice beneath us, is the "Pulpit Rock" which Catherine Sedgwick christened when Hawthorne's party picnicked here; from the crag projecting from the verge Fanny Kemble declaimed Bryant's poem, and Herman Melville, bestriding the same rock for a bowsprit, "pulled and hauled imaginary ropes" for the amusement of the company. Among these splintered masses the company lunched that day and drank quantities of Heidsieck to the health of the "dear old poet of Monument Mountain." On the east, almost within sight from this eminence, is the spot where he was born, near the birthplaces of Warner and the gifted Mrs. Howe. [Sidenote: Hawthorne at Stockbridge] Another day we follow the same brilliant party of Hawthorne's friends through the Stockbridge Ice Glen,--a narrow gorge which cleaves a rugged mountain from base to summit, its riven sides being apparently held asunder by immense rocky masses hurled upon each other in wild confusion. Beneath are weird grottos and great recesses which the sun never penetrates, and within these we make our way--clambering and sliding over huge boulders--through the heart of the mountain. One of Hawthorne's company here testifies that in all the extemporaneous jollity of the scramble through the glen the usually silent novelist was foremost, and, being sometimes in the dark, dared use his tongue,--"calling out lustily and pretending that certain destruction threatened us all. I never saw him in better spirits than throughout this day." From the glen we trace Hawthorne to the staid old house of Burr's boyhood, where lived and wrote Jonathan Edwards, and the statelier dwelling whence Catherine Sedgwick gave her tales to the world. Near by we find the grave where she lies amid the scenes of her own "Hope Leslie," and not far from the sojourn of her gifted niece whose translation of Sand's "Fadette" has been so well received. Overlooking the village is the summer residence of Field of the "Evangelist,"--author of the delightful books of travel. Farther away is a little farm-house, with a "huge, corpulent, old Harry VIII. of a chimney," to which Hawthorne was a frequent visitor,--the "Arrow-Head" of Herman Melville. "Godfrey Graylock" says the friendship between Hawthorne and Melville originated in their taking refuge together, during an electric shower, in a narrow cleft of Monument Mountain. They had been coy of each other on account of Melville's review of the "Scarlet Letter" in Duyckinck's _Literary World_, but during some hours of enforced intercourse and propinquity in very contracted quarters they discovered in each other a correlation of thought and feeling which made them fast friends for life. Thereafter Melville was often at the little red house, where the children knew him as "Mr. Omoo," and less often Hawthorne came to chat with the racy romancer and philosopher by the great chimney. Once he was accompanied by little Una--"Onion" he sometimes called her--and remained a whole week. This visit--certainly unique in the life of the shy Hawthorne--was the topic when, not so long agone, we last looked upon the living face of Melville in his city home. March weather prevented walks abroad, so the pair spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn,--Hawthorne usually lounging upon a carpenter's bench. When he was leaving, he jocosely declared he would write a report of their psychological discussions for publication in a volume to be called "A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn," the title being a travesty upon that of Thoreau's then recent book, "A Week on Concord River," etc. [Sidenote: Melville's Arrow-Head] Sitting upon the north piazza, of "Piazza Tales," at Arrow-Head, where Hawthorne and his friend lingered in summer days, we look away to Graylock and enjoy "the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza" which Melville so whimsically describes. At Arrow-Head, too, we find the astonishing chimney which suggested the essay, still occupying the centre of the house and "leaving only the odd holes and corners" to Melville's nieces, who now inhabit the place in summer; the study where Hawthorne and Melville discussed the plot of the "White Whale" and other tales; the great fireplace, with its inscriptions from "I and my Chimney;" the window-view of Melville's "October Mountain,"--beloved of Longfellow,--whose autumn glories inspired that superb word-picture and metaphysical sketch. On a near knoll, commanding a view of the circle of mountains and the winding river, stands the sometime summer residence of Holmes among his ancestral acres, where Hawthorne and Fields came to visit him. His "den," in which he did much literary work, overlooks the beautiful meadows, and is now expanded into a large library, while the trees he planted are grown to be the crowning beauty of the place, which the owner calls Holmesdale. It was the hereditary home of the Wendells. [Sidenote: Pittsfield] Beyond, at the edge of the town of Pittsfield, is the mansion where Longfellow found his wife and his famous "Old Clock on the Stairs." At the Athenæum in the town some thousands of Holmes's books will soon be placed, and here is preserved the secretary from Hawthorne's study in the little red house,--a time-worn mahogany combination of desk, drawers, and shelves, at which he wrote "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," "The Snow Image," and part of "The Blithedale Romance." Pittsfield was long the home of "Godfrey Graylock;" here the gifted Rose Terry Cooke passed her closing years of life with her husband, and not far away Josh Billings, "the Yankee Solomon," was born and reared as Henry Savage Shaw. One day we trace from Pittsfield the footsteps of Hawthorne and Melville across the Taconics to the whilom home of "Mother Ann" and to the higher Hancock peaks. Hawthorne's daily walk to the post-office was past the later residence of Charlotte Cushman, and by the church where the older Channing delivered his last discourse and where twenty years ago Parkhurst was preacher. In the church-tower Fanny Kemble's clock still tells the hours above the lovely spot where she desired to be buried. [Sidenote: Hawthorne's Habit of Meditation] These various excursions compass the range of Hawthorne's rambles in this region: he was never ten miles away from the little red house during his residence here. Obviously he preferred short and solitary strolls which allowed undisturbed meditation upon the work in hand. The quantity and finish of the writing done here indicate that much thought was expended upon it outside his study. We may be sure that upon "The House of the Seven Gables" were bestowed, besides the five months of daily sessions at his desk, other months of study and thought as he strolled the country roads and loitered by the lake-side or in the dell of "Blossom-Brook." He avowed himself a shameless idler in warm weather, declaring he was "good for nothing in a literary way until after the autumnal frosts" brightened his imagination as they did the foliage about him here; yet the meditations of one summer in Berkshire produced his masterpiece, and the next summer accomplished "The Wonder-Book," quickly followed by "The Snow Image" and "Blithedale." During this summer also he had a voluminous correspondence with the many "Pyncheon jackasses" who thought themselves aggrieved by his use of their name in "The House of the Seven Gables." [Sidenote: Life in the Little Red House] Of the simple home-life at the little red house, Hawthorne's diaries and letters, as well as some of the books written here, afford pleasing glimpses. The "Violet" and "Peony" of the "Snow Image" story are the novelist's own little Una and Julian, and the tale was suggested by some occurrence in their play; the incidents related of Eustace Bright and the young Pringles, which are prefixed to the "Wonder-Book" stories, are merely experiences of Hawthorne and his children, and during the composition of these tales he delighted these children--as one of them remembers--by reading to them each evening the work of the day. A grim-visaged negress named Peters, who was the servant here in the little red house, is said to have suggested the character of Aunt Keziah in "Septimius Felton." Hawthorne's chickens receive notice as members of the family in his diary,--thus: "Seven chickens hatched, J. T. Headley called--eight chickens;" "ascended a mountain with my wife, eight more chickens hatched." In a letter to Horatio Bridge, "Our children grow apace and so do our chickens;" "we are so intimate with every individual chicken that it seems like cannibalism to think of eating one of them." Hawthorne's daily walk with pail in hand to Luther Butler's, the next farm-house, he speaks of as his "milky way." Butler lives now two miles distant. The novelist thus announces to his friend Bridge the birth of the present gifted poetess, Mrs. Lathrop, the daughter of his age: "Mrs. Hawthorne has published a little work which still lies in sheets, but makes some noise in the world; it is a healthy miss with no present pretensions to beauty." Five cats were cherished by the novelist and his children; a snowy morning after Hawthorne's removal, three of the cats came to a neighboring house, where their descendants are still petted and cherished. A few visitors came to the little red house--Kemble, James, Lowell, Holmes, E. P. Whipple, and the others already mentioned--in whose presence the "statue of night and silence" was wont to relax, but for the most part his life was that of a recluse. Here, as elsewhere, his thoughts dwelt apart in "a twilight region" where the company of his kind was usually a perturbing intrusion. For companionship, his family, the lake, the woods, his own thoughts, sufficed; he seldom sought any other, and therefore was unpopular in the neighborhood. It is hardly to be supposed that the creator of Zenobia, Hester Prynne, and the Pyncheons would greatly enjoy the society of his rural neighbors, but they were not therefore the less displeased by his habitually going out of his way--sometimes across the fields--to avoid meeting them. Some of them had a notion that he was the author of "a poem, or an arithmetic, or some other kind of a book,"--as he makes "Primrose Pringle" to say of him in the tale,--but to most he was incomprehensible, perhaps a little uncanny, and the great genius of romance is yet mentioned here as "a queer sort o' man that lived in Tappan's red house." [Sidenote: Reasons for leaving Berkshire] His son records that after Hawthorne had freed himself from Salem "he soon wearied of any particular locality;" after a time he tired even of beautiful Berkshire. Its obtrusive scenery "with the same strong impressions repeated day after day" became irksome; then he grew tired of the mountains and "would joyfully see them laid flat." He writes to Fields, "I am sick of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here." Doubtless the region which we behold in the glamour of the early autumn seemed very different to Hawthorne in the season when he had daily "to trudge two miles to the post-office through snow or slush knee-deep." Ellery Channing--who had knowledge of the winter here--in his letters to Hawthorne calls Berkshire "that satanic institution of Spitzbergen," "that ice-plant of the Sedgwicks." A more cogent reason for Hawthorne's discontent here is found in his failing health. He writes to Pike, "I am not vigorous as I used to be on the coast;" to Fields, "For the first time since boyhood I feel languid and dispirited. Oh, that Providence would build me the merest shanty and mark me out a rood or two of garden near the coast." For these and other reasons Hawthorne finally left Berkshire at the end of 1851, going first to West Newton and a few months later to "the Wayside," while his friend Tappan occupied the thenceforth famous little red house. The world of readers owes much to Hawthorne's residence among the mountains. Besides the material here gathered and the exquisite settings for his tales these landscapes afforded, we are indebted to his environment in Berkshire for the quality of the work here accomplished and for its quantity as well; for he responded so readily to the inspiriting influence of his surroundings that he produced more during his stay here than at any similar period of his life. The soulful beauty and the seclusion of the haunts to which we here trace him, suiting well his solitary mood, may measurably account to us for his habit of thought and for the manner of expression by which nature was here portrayed and life expounded by the great master of American romance. A DAY WITH THE GOOD GRAY POET A DAY WITH THE GOOD GRAY POET _Walk and Talk with Socrates in Camden--The Bard's Appearance and Surroundings--Recollections of his Life and Work--Hospital Service-- Praise for his Critics--His Literary Habit, Purpose, Equipment, and Style--His Religious Bent--Readings._ "How can you find him? Nothing is easier," quoth the Philadelphia friend who some time before Whitman's death brought us an invitation from the bard; "you have only to cross the ferry and apply to the first man or woman you meet, for there is no one in Camden who does not know Walt Whitman or who would not go out of his way to bring you to him." The event justifies the prediction, for when we make inquiry of a tradesman standing before a shop, he speedily throws aside his apron, closes his door against evidently needed customers, and--despite our protest--sets out to conduct us to the home of the poet. This is done with such obvious ardor that we hint to our guide that he must be one of the "Whitmaniacs," whereupon he rejoins, "I never read a word Whitman wrote. I don't know why they call him Socrates, but I do know he never passes me without a friendly nod and a word of greeting that warms me all through." We subsequently find that it is this sort of "Whitmania," rather than that Swinburne deplores, which pervades the vicinage of the poet's home. Our conductor leaves us at the door of three hundred and twenty-eight Mickle Street, a neat thoroughfare bordered by unpretentious frame dwellings, hardly a furlong from the Delaware. The dingy little two-storied domicile is so disappointingly different from what we were expecting to see that the confirmatory testimony of the name "W. Whitman" upon the door-plate is needed to convince us that this is the oft-mentioned "neat and comfortable" dwelling of one of the world's celebrities. We are kept waiting upon the door-step long enough to observe that the unpainted boards of the house are weather-worn and that the shabby window-shutters and the cellar-door, which opens aslant upon the sidewalk, are in sad need of repair, and then we are admitted by the "good, faithful, young Jersey woman who," as he lovingly testifies, "cooks for and vigilantly sees to" the venerable bard. A moment later we are in his presence, in the spacious second-story room which is his sleeping apartment and work-room. "You are good to come early while I am fresh and rested," exclaims Walt Whitman, rising to his six feet of burly manhood and advancing a heavy step or two to greet us; "we are going to have a talk, and we have something to talk about, you know," referring to a literary venture of ours which had procured us the invitation to visit him. When he has regained the depths of his famous and phenomenal chair, the "Jersey woman" hands him a score of letters, which he offers to lay aside, but we insist that he shall read them at once, and while he is thus occupied we have opportunity to observe more closely the bard and his surroundings. [Sidenote: Whitman's Personal Appearance] We see a man made in massive mould, stalwart and symmetrical,--not bowed by the weight of time nor deformed by the long years of hemiplegia; a majestic head, large, leonine, Homeric, crowned with a wealth of flowing silvery hair; a face like "the statued Greek" (Bucke says it is the noblest he ever saw); all the features are full and handsome; the forehead, high and thoughtful, is marked by "deep furrows which life has ploughed;" the heavy brows are highly arched above eyes of gray-blue which in repose seem suave rather than brilliant; the upper lid droops over the eye nearly to the pupil,--a condition which obtains in partial ptosis,--and we afterward observe that when he speaks of matters which deeply move him his eyelids have a tendency to decline still farther, imparting to his eyes an appearance of lethargy altogether at variance with the thrilling earnestness and tremor of his voice. A strong nose, cheeks round and delicate, a complexion of florid and transparent pink,--its hue being heightened by the snowy whiteness of the fleecy beard which frames the face and falls upon the breast. The face is sweet and wholesome rather than refined, vital and virile rather than intellectual. Joaquin Miller has said that, even when destitute and dying, Whitman "looked like a Titan god." We think the habitual expression of his face to be that of the sage benignity that comes with age when life has been well lived and life's work well done. The expression bespeaks a soul at ease with itself, unbroken by age, poverty, and disease, unsoured by calumny and insult. Certainly his bufferings and his brave endurance of wrong have left no record of malice or even of impatience upon his kindly face. His manly form is clad in a loosely fitting suit of gray; his rolling and ample shirt-collar, worn without a tie, is open at the throat and exposes the upper part of his breast; all his attire, "from snowy linen to burnished boot," is scrupulously clean and neat. [Sidenote: His Study and Surroundings] His room is of generous proportions, occupying nearly the entire width of the house, and lighted by three windows in front. The floor is partly uncarpeted, and the furniture is of the simplest; his bed, covered by a white counterpane, occupies a corner; there are two large tables; an immense iron-bound trunk stands by one wall and an old-fashioned stove by another; a number of boxes and uncushioned seats are scattered through the apartment; on the walls are wardrobe-hooks, shelves, and many pictures,--a few fine engravings, a print of the Seminole Osceola, portraits of the poet's parents (his father's face is a good one) and sisters, and of "another--not a sister." There are many books here and there, some of them well worn; one corner holds several Greek and Latin classics and copies of Burns, Tennyson, Scott, Ossian, Emerson, etc. On the large table near his chair are his writing materials, with the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, and the Iliad within reach. Bundles of papers lie in odd places about the room; piles of books, magazines, and manuscripts are heaped high upon the tables, litter the chairs, and overflow and encumber the floor. This room holds what Whitman has called the "storage collection" of his life. "And now you are to tell me about yourself and your work," says the poet, pushing aside his letters. But, although he is the best of listeners, we are intent to make him talk, and a fortunate remark concerning one of his letters which had seemed to interest him more than the others--it came from a friend of his far-away boyhood--enables us to profit by the reminiscential mood the letter has inspired. In his low-toned voice he pictures his early home, his parents, and his first ventures into the world; with evident relish he narrates his ludicrous experience when he--a stripling school-master--"went boarding 'round." Than this, there was but one happier period of his life, and that was when he drove among the farms and villages distributing his _Long Islander_: "that was bliss." Later he was a politician and "stumped the island" for the Democratic candidates, but the enactment of the fugitive slave law disgusted him, and he declared his political emancipation in the poem "Blood-Money." At odd times he has done "a deal of newspaper drudgery" and other work, but his "forte always was loafing and writing poetry,--at least until the war." He began early to clothe his thought in verse, and was but a lad when a poem of his was accepted for publication in the New York _Mirror_, and he depicts for us the surprised delight with which he beheld his stanzas in that fashionable journal. [Sidenote: His Recollections] A pleasure of those early years was the companionship of Bryant, and he details to us the "glorious walks and talks" they had together along the North Shore in sweet summer days. This, he says with a sigh, was the dearest of the friendships lost to him by the publication of "Leaves of Grass;" "but there were compensations, Emerson and Tennyson." Of later events he speaks less freely. Of the years of devoted service to the wounded and dying in army hospitals, when day and night he literally gave himself for others,--living upon the coarsest fare that he might bestow his earnings upon "his sick boys,"--of these years he speaks not at all, save as to the causation of his "war paralysis." "Yes, it made an old man of me; but I would like to do it all again if there were need." Of his long years of suffering and his brave and patient confronting of pain, poverty, and imminent death, his "Specimen Days" is the fitting record. Replying to a question concerning a dainty volume of his poems which lay near us, and which we have been secretly coveting, he says, "You know I have never been the fashion; publishers were afraid of me, and I have sold the books myself, though I always advise people not to buy them, for I fear they are worthless." But when he writes his name and ours upon the title-page, and lays within the cover several portraits taken at different periods of his life, we wonder if he can ever know how very far from "worthless" the book will be to us. We tender in payment a bank-note of larger denomination than we could be supposed to possess, with a deprecating remark upon the novelty of an author's handling a fifty-dollar note, whereupon he laughs heartily: "A novelty to you, is it? I tell you it's an impossibility to me; why, my whole income from my books during a recent half-year was only twenty-two dollars and six cents: don't forget the six cents," he adds, with a twinkle. Then he assures us that he is not in want, and that his "shanty," as he calls his home, is nearly paid for. [Sidenote: Popularity with his Neighbors] He proposes a walk,--"a hobble" it must be for him,--which may afford opportunity to change the note; and as we saunter toward the river, he leaning heavily upon his cane, it is a pleasure to observe the evident feeling of liking and camaraderie which people have for him. They go out of their way to meet him and to receive merely a friendly nod, for he stops to speak with none save the children who leave their play to run to him. He seems mightily amused when one wee toddler calls him "Mister Socrates," and he tells us this is the first time he has been so addressed, although he understands that some of his friends speak of him among themselves by the name of that philosopher. So far as he knows, the name was first applied to him in Buchanan's lines "To Socrates in Camden." Everywhere we go, on the ferry, at the hotel where we lunch, he receives affectionate greeting from people of every rank, yet he is not loquacious, certainly not effusive. He shakes hands but once while we are out, and that is with an unknown man, and because he _is_ unknown, as Whitman afterward tells us. During luncheon we speak of a recent visit to Mrs. Howarth (the poetess "Clementine"). Whitman is at once interested, and questions until he has drawn out the pathetic story of her struggles with poverty, disease, and impeding environment, and then declares he will go to see her as soon as he is able. He declines to receive a copy of her poems, saying he is far more interested in her than he could possibly be in her books, and that he "nowadays religiously abstains from reading poetry." Confirmation of this latter statement occurs in our subsequent conversation. A friend of ours had met Swinburne, and had been assured by that erratic (please don't print it erotic) bard that he thinks Whitman, next to Hugo, the best of recent poets. When we tell our poet of this, and endeavor to ascertain if the admiration be reciprocal, we find him unfamiliar with Swinburne's recent works. Reference to the latter's retraction of his first praise elicits the pertinent observation, "The trouble with Swinburne seems to be he don't know his own mind," but this is followed by warm encomiums upon "Atalanta" and its gifted author. Whitman had seen Emerson for the last time when the philosopher's memory had failed and all his powers were weakening: instead of being shocked by this condition, Whitman thinks it fit and natural, "nature gradually reclaiming the elements she had lent, work all nobly done, soul and senses preparing for rest." Mentioning George Arnold,-- "Doubly dead because he died so young,"-- we find that Whitman loved and mourned him tenderly. He expresses an especial pleasure and pride in the successes of the poet Richard Watson Gilder,--"young Gilder," as he familiarly calls him. He loves Browning, and laments that "Browning never took to" him. He thinks our own country is fortunate in having felt the clean and healthful influences of four such natures as Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow. [Sidenote: His Good Word for Everybody] Indeed, he has a good word for everybody, and discerns laudable qualities in some whom the world has agreed to contemn and cast out. He has glowing expressions of affection for his devoted friends in all lands, and only words of excuse for his enemies. Of the pharisaic Harlan, who dismissed him from a government clerkship solely because he had, ten years before, published the poems of "Enfans d'Adam," he charitably says, "No doubt the man thought he was doing right." Concerning his harshest critics, including the author of the choice epithet "swan of the sewers," he speaks only in justification: from their stand-point, their denunciations of him and his book were deserved; "he never dreamt of blaming them for not seeing as he sees." After our return to his "shanty" we read to him a laudatory notice from the current number of one of our great magazines, in which one of his poems is mentioned with especial favor; whereupon he produces from his trunk a note written some years before from the same magazine, contemptuously refusing to publish that very poem. Evidences like this of a change in popular opinion are not needed to confirm Whitman's faith in his own future, nor in that of the great humanity of which he is the prophet and exponent. Questioned concerning his habits and methods of literary work, he says he carries some sheets of paper loosely fastened together and pencils upon these "the rough draft of his thought" wherever the thought comes to him. Thus, "Leaves of Grass" was composed on the Brooklyn ferry, on the top of stages amid the roar of Broadway, at the opera, in the fields, on the sea-shore. "Drum Taps" was written amid war scenes, on battle-fields, in camps, at hospital bedsides, in actual contact with the subjects it portrays with such tenderness and power. The poems thus born of spontaneous impulse are finally given to the world in a crisp diction which is the result of much study and thought; every word is well considered,--the work of revision being done "almost anywhere" and without the ordinary aids to literary composition. In late years he wrote mostly upon the broad right arm of his chair. Complete equipment for his work was derived from contact with Nature in her abounding moods, from sympathetic intimacy with men and women in all phases of their lives, and from life-long study of the best books; these--Job, Isaiah, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare--have been his teachers, and possibly his models, although he has never consciously imitated any of them. His matter and manner are alike his own; he has not borrowed Blake's style, as Stedman believed, to recast Emerson's thoughts, as Clarence Cook alleged. His style would naturally resemble that of the Semitic prophets and Gaelic bards,--"the large utterance of the early gods,"--because inspired by familiarity with the same objects: the surging sea, the wind-swept mountain, the star-decked heaven, the forest primeval. [Sidenote: His Literary Work--Its Aims] His purpose, the moral elevation of humanity, he trusts is apparent in every page of his book. By his book he means "Leaves of Grass," the real work of his life, representing the truest thoughts and the highest imaginings of forty years, to which his other work has been incidental and tributary. After its eight periods of growth, "hitches," he calls them, he completes them with the annex, "Good-bye my Fancy," and thinks his record for the future is made up; "hit or miss, he will bother himself no more about it." When questioned concerning the lines whose "naked naturalness" has been an offence to many, he impressively avers that he has pondered them earnestly in these latest days, and is sure he would not alter or recall them if he could. [Sidenote: His Religious Trust] While not professing a moral regeneration or confessing the need of it, he yet assures us, "No array of words can describe how much I am at peace about God and about death." The author of "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cannot be an irreverent person; the impassioned "prayer"-- "That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted With ray of light, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee. For that, O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees, Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.... I will cling to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me. Thee, Thee, at least, I know"-- is not the utterance of an irreligious heart. One who has known Whitman long and well testifies that he was always a religious _exalté_, and his stanzas show that his musings on death and immortality are inspired by fullest faith. As we listen to him, calmly discoursing upon the great mysteries,--which to him are now mysteries no longer,--we wonder how many of those who call him "beast" or "atheist" can confront the vast unknown with his lofty trust, to say nothing of actual thanksgiving for death itself! "Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy, for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love,--but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." We who survive him will not forget his peaceful yielding of himself to "the sure-enwinding arms," nor the abounding trust breathed in his last message, sent back from the mystic frontier of the shadowy realm: "Tell them it makes no difference whether I live or die." [Sidenote: Readings] In our chat he discloses a surprising knowledge of men and things, and a more surprising lack of knowledge of his own poetry. More than once it strangely appears that the visitor is more familiar with the lines under discussion than is their author. When this is commented upon he laughingly says, "Oh, yes, my friends often tell me there is a book called 'Leaves of Grass' which I ought to read." So when we, about to take leave, ask him to recite one of his shorter poems, he assures us he does not remember one of them, but will read anything we wish. We ask for the wonderful elegy, "Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking," and afterward for the night hymn, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," and his compliance confers a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. He reads slowly and without effort, his voice often tremulous with emotion, the lines gaining new grandeur and pathos as they come from his lips. And this--alas that it must be!--is our final recollection of one of the world's immortals: a hoar and reverend bard,--"old, poor, and paralyzed," yet clinging to the optimistic creeds of his youth,--throned in his great chair among his books, with the waning light falling like a benediction upon his uplifted head, his face and eyes suffused with the exquisite tenderness of his theme, and all the air about him vibrating with the tones of his immortal chant to Death,--the "dark mother always gliding near with soft feet." Another hand-clasp, a prayerful "God keep you," and we have left him alone in the gathering twilight. [Sidenote: His Future Fame] We will not here discuss his literary merits. The encomiums of Emerson, Thoreau, Burroughs, Sanborn, Stedman, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Buchanan, Sarrazin, etc., show what he is to men of their intellectual stature; but will he ever reach the great, struggling mass for whose uplifting he wrought? His own brave faith is contagious, and we may discern in the wide-spread sorrow over his death, in the changed attitude of critics and reviewers, as well as in the largely increased demand for his books, evidences of his general acceptance. His day is coming,--is come. He died with its dawn shining full upon him. INDEX Abbot, C. C., 104. Agassiz, 49, 104, 115. Alcott, Bronson, 21, 73, 78, 92, 144; Orchard House, 54; Wayside, 58. Alcott, L. M., 21, 54, 102; Grave, 78; Homes, 21, 55. Aldrich, 91, 111, 140; In Boston, 92; Ponkapog, 146. Amesbury, 124. Auburndale, 146. Austin, J. G., 102. Bartlett, G. B., 25, 34, 41. Bartol, Dr., 48, 94. Beecher, H. W., 176, 185. Benson, Carl, 184. Berkshire, 155-198. Billings, Josh, 193. Boston, 83-102. Bridge, Horatio, 34, 182. Brook Farm, 147. Brown, John, 20, 23. Bryant, W. C., 174, 188, 189, 207. Burritt, Elihu, 176. Cambridge, 103. Carter, Robert, 109. Channing, W. E., 24, 41, 50, 72, 186; Homes, 22, 24, 52. Clarke, J. F., 27, 76. Clough, Arthur, 49, 104, 118. Concord, 17-80; Battle-Field, 43; River, 39. Conway, Moncure, quoted, 29, 48. Cooke, Rose Terry, 193. Corner Book-Store, Boston, 87. Curtis, G. W., 33, 48, 148, 149. Cushman, Charlotte, 114, 193. Dana, C. A., 149. Dana, R. H., 105. Danvers, Oak-Knoll, 138. Day with Walt Whitman, 201. Deerfield Arch, 173. Deland, Margaret, 93. Elmwood, 110. Emerson, R. W., 26, 27, 28, 36, 41, 43, 69, 86, 144, 175; Grave, 77; Home, 45. Emerson, William, 26, 29, 35. Ethan Brand, 166. Fanny Fern's Grave, 115. Felton, Professor, 104. Field, H. M., 190. Fields, Annie, 89, 91. Fields, J. T., 65, 87; Home, 89. Fuller, Margaret, 48, 53, 86, 115, 149; Brattle House, 105. Gail Hamilton, 66, 139. Garrison, W. L., 85, 102, 139. Gilder, R. W., 211. Gladden, Washington, 164. Grant, Robert, 89, 99. Gray, Asa, 105. Graylock, 158, 167, 174, 184. Guiney, L. I., 99, 102; Home, 146. Hale, E. E., 94; Study and Abode, 100. Hale, Lucretia P., 99. Hamilton, Gail, 66, 139. Harris, Professor, 56. Haverhill, 122. Hawthorne, 27, 41, 50, 53, 85, 88, 91; Berkshire, 155-198; Brook Farm, 149; Manse, 28-39; Salem, 128-138; Sleepy Hollow, 75-77; Wayside, 59-67. Headley, J. T., 187, 195. Higginson, T. W., 94, 99, 104. Hilliard, George, 34, 66, 91. Hoar, Elizabeth, 25. Hoar, Judge, 27. Holmes, 84; Boston Abodes, 91, 95; Cambridge, 103; Grave, 114; Pittsfield, 192. House of the Seven Gables, 132, 193, 194. Howarth, Clementine, 209. Howe, Julia W., 98. Howells, 49, 66; Homes, 97, 105, 117. Jamaica Plain, 145. Jewett, Sarah Orne, 91. Kemble, Fanny, 169, 186, 188, 193. Kossuth, Louis, 49, 187. Larcom, Lucy, 139. Lathrop, G. P., 59. Lathrop, Rose H., 195. Laurel Lake, 185. Lenox (Hawthorne), 176-198. Little Men, 21. Little Women, 21, 55, 78. Longfellow, 106, 110, 139, 192; Grave, 114; Home, 107; Wayside Inn, 118. Lowell, J. R., 43, 118; Elmwood, 110; Mount Auburn, 113. Marshfield, 142. Martineau, Harriet, 85, 106. Melville, Herman, 177, 185, 188; Arrow-Head, 190. Monument Mountain, 168, 179, 187. Moulton, L. C., 93, 98. Mount Auburn, 113. Natural Bridge, 169. North Adams, 158-171. Norton, Professor, 104. Oak-Knoll, 138. Old Manse, 28-39. Orchard House, 53-56. Parker, Theodore, 49, 85. Parkman, Francis, 94, 113; Home, 145. Parsons, T. W., 118, 119, 120. Parton, James, 115; Study, 140. Peabody, Elizabeth, 29, 54, 145. Phelps-Ward, Mrs., 91, 125, 139. Phillips, Wendell, 49, 85. Pittsfield, 190-193. Plymouth, 144. Prescott, W. H., 86. Ripley, Ezra, 28, 33, 34. Ripley, Mrs. Samuel, 29, 35, 48. Salem, 128. Sanborn, F. B., 20-24. Scarlet Letter, 95, 135, 136. Sedgwick, Catherine, 176, 189, 190. Septimius Felton, 55, 60-65. Silas Lapham, 97, 99. Sleepy Hollow, 75-80. Sprague, Charles, 86. Stockbridge, 189; Bowl, 176, 181; Glen, 189. Stone, J. A., 25. Sudbury, 118. Summer School of Philosophy, 55, 56. Sumner, Charles, 85, 92, 124. Swinburne, A. C., 210. Tanglewood, 183. Thaxter, Celia, 91, 139, 140. Thoreau, 19, 22, 27, 33, 41, 50, 63, 76, 169, 174; Abodes, 20, 24; Walden, 68-74. Ticknor, George, 94. Walden Pond, 68. Wayside, The, 58. Wayside Inn, The, 118. Webster, Daniel, 19; Marshfield, 142. Wheildon, William, 25. Whipple, E. P., 66, 76, 91. Whitefield, George, 140. Whitman, Walt, 50; A Day with, 201; Leaves of Grass, 212, 213. Whittier, 90, 93; Homes, 122, 124, 138; Scenes, 122, 123, 124, 126; Sepulchre, 127. Williamstown, 173. Willis, N. P., 84, 115. Woodworth; Old Oaken Bucket, 141. Zenobia, 40, 150. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. 
34940	----	THE LIFE OF BRET HARTE [Illustration: Bret Harte] The Gale Library of Lives and Letters American Writers Series THE LIFE OF BRET HARTE WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE CALIFORNIA PIONEERS BY HENRY CHILDS MERWIN WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1911 REPUBLISHED BY GALE RESEARCH COMPANY, BOOK TOWER, DETROIT, 1967 COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HENRY CHILDS MERWIN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED _Published September 1911_ Library of Congress Card Number: 67-23887 TO Anne Amory Merwin THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED PREFACE It is a pleasure for the Author of this book to record his indebtedness to others in preparing it. Mrs. T. Edgar Pemberton, and Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Limited, the publishers of Pemberton's Life of Bret Harte, have kindly consented to the quotation from that interesting book of several letters by Mr. Harte that throw much light upon his character. Similar permission was given by Mr. Howells and his publishers, the Messrs. Harper and Brothers, to make use of Mr. Howells' account of Bret Harte's visit to him at Cambridge; and of this permission the Author has availed himself with a freedom which the Reader at least will not regret. Professor Raymond Weeks, President of the American Dialect Society, Professor C. Alphonso Smith, Mr. Albert Matthews, and others whose names are mentioned on page 326, have lent their aid in regard to the Pioneer language, and Ernest Knaufft, Bret Harte's nephew, has not only furnished the Author with some information about his uncle's early life, but he has also read the proofs, and has made more than one valuable suggestion which the Author was glad to adopt. It is only fair to add that Mr. Knaufft does not in all respects agree with the Author's estimate of Bret Harte's character. Another critic, Prescott Hartford Belknap, has put his fine literary taste at the service of the book, and has saved its writer from some mistakes which he now shudders to contemplate. Most of all, however, the Author is indebted to his accomplished friend, Edwin Munroe Bacon, who, though much engaged with important literary work of his own, has read the book twice, once in MS. and once in print,--a signal, not to say painful proof of friendship which the Author acknowledges with gratitude, and almost with shame. H. C. M. CONTENTS I. BRET HARTE'S ANCESTRY 1 II. BRET HARTE'S BOYHOOD 13 III. BRET HARTE'S WANDERINGS IN CALIFORNIA 18 IV. BRET HARTE IN SAN FRANCISCO 32 V. THE PIONEER MEN AND WOMEN 53 VI. PIONEER LIFE 85 VII. PIONEER LAW AND LAWLESSNESS 120 VIII. WOMEN AND CHILDREN AMONG THE PIONEERS 140 IX. FRIENDSHIP AMONG THE PIONEERS 157 X. GAMBLING IN PIONEER TIMES 168 XI. OTHER FORMS OF BUSINESS 181 XII. LITERATURE, JOURNALISM AND RELIGION 192 XIII. BRET HARTE'S DEPARTURE FROM CALIFORNIA 214 XIV. BRET HARTE IN THE EAST 220 XV. BRET HARTE AT CREFELD 251 XVI. BRET HARTE AT GLASGOW 266 XVII. BRET HARTE IN LONDON 274 XVIII. BRET HARTE AS A WRITER OF FICTION 293 XIX. BRET HARTE AS A POET 308 XX. BRET HARTE'S PIONEER DIALECT 321 XXI. BRET HARTE'S STYLE 330 INDEX 347 ILLUSTRATIONS BRET HARTE (PHOTOGRAVURE) _Frontispiece._ From a photograph by Hollyer taken in 1896. BERNARD HART, BRET HARTE'S GRANDFATHER 6 From a painting in the possession of Messrs. Arthur Lipper & Co., New York. SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER, 1844 24 After a sketch by J. C. Ward. BRET HARTE IN 1861 32 The facsimile of Bret Harte's handwriting is taken from the back of the photograph in the possession of Miss Elizabeth Benton Frémont. STORESHIP APOLLO, USED AS A SALOON 40 After a drawing by W. Taber. GRAND PLAZA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1852 60 From an old print. THE FIRST HOTEL AT SAN FRANCISCO 86 After a drawing by W. Taber. MINERS' BALL 94 After a drawing by A. Castaigne. THE TWO OPPONENTS CAME NEARER 114 After a drawing by Frederic Remington illustrating "The Iliad of Sandy Bar." SACRAMENTO CITY IN 1852 120 From an old print. THE POST-OFFICE, SAN FRANCISCO, 1849-50 144 After a drawing by A. Castaigne. HE LOOKED CURIOUSLY AT HIS REFLECTION 166 After a drawing by E. Boyd Smith, illustrating "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain." DENNISON'S EXCHANGE, AND PARKER HOUSE, DECEMBER, 1849, BEFORE THE FIRE 178 After a drawing by W. Taber. MAIN STREET, NEVADA CITY, 1852 196 From a photograph in the possession of Colonel Thomas L. Livermore. THE BELLS, SAN GABRIEL MISSION 212 From a photograph. I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF 248 After a drawing by Denman Fink, illustrating "Lanty Foster's Mistake." THE HOME OF "TRUTHFUL JAMES," JACKASS FLAT, TUOLUMNE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA 310 From a photograph. THE LIFE OF BRET HARTE BRET HARTE CHAPTER I BRET HARTE'S ANCESTRY Francis Brett Harte was born at Albany in the State of New York, on August twenty-fifth, 1836. By his relatives and early friends he was called Frank; but soon after beginning his career as an author in San Francisco he signed his name as "Brett," then as "Bret," and finally as "Bret Harte." "Bret Harte," therefore, is in some degree a _nom de guerre_, and it was commonly supposed at first, both in the Eastern States and in England, to be wholly such. Our great New England novelist had a similar experience, for "Nathaniel Hawthorne" was long regarded by most of his readers as an assumed name, happily chosen to indicate the quaint and poetic character of the tales to which it was signed. Bret Harte's father was Henry Hart;[1] but before we trace his ancestry, let us endeavor to see how he looked. Fanny Kemble met him at Lenox, in the year 1875, and was much impressed by his appearance. In a letter to a relative she wrote: "He reminded me a good deal of our old pirate and bandit friend, Trelawney, though the latter was an almost orientally dark-complexioned man, and Mr. Bret Harte was comparatively fair. They were both tall, well-made men of fine figure; both, too, were handsome, with a peculiar expression of face which suggested small success to any one who might engage in personal conflict with them." In reality Bret Harte was not tall, though others beside Mrs. Kemble thought him to be so; his height was five feet, eight and a half inches. His face was smooth and regular, without much color; the chin firm and well rounded; the nose straight and rather large, "the nose of generosity and genius"; the under-lip having what Mr. Howells called a "fascinating, forward thrust." The following description dates from the time when he left California: "He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, and although his oval face was slightly marred by scars of small-pox, and his abundant dark hair was already streaked with gray, he carried his slight, upright figure with a quiet elegance that would have made an impression, even when the refinement of face, voice and manner had not been recognized." Mr. Howells says of him at the same period: "He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time could say to him, 'Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare about small-pox?' 'No! madam!' he said, in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, 'I bear a charmèd life.'" Almost every one who met Bret Harte was struck by his low, rich, well-modulated voice. Mr. Howells speaks of "the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other." His handwriting was small, firm and graceful. Chance acquaintances made in England were sometimes surprised at Bret Harte's appearance. They had formed, writes Mme. Van de Velde, "a vague, intangible idea of a wild, reckless Californian, impatient of social trammels, whose life among the Argonauts must have fashioned him after a type differing widely from the reality. These idealists were partly disappointed, partly relieved, when their American writer turned out to be a quiet, low-voiced, easy-mannered, polished gentleman, who smilingly confessed that precisely because he had roughed it a good deal in his youth he was inclined to enjoy the comforts and avail himself of the facilities of an older civilization, when placed within his reach." Bret Harte's knowledge of these disappointed expectations may have suggested the plot of that amusing story _Their Uncle from California_, the hero of which presents a similar contrast to the barbaric ideal which had been formed by his Eastern relatives. The photographs of Bret Harte, taken at various periods in his life, reveal great changes, apart from those of age. The first one, at seventeen, shows an intellectual youth, very mature for his age, with a fine forehead, the hair parted at one side, and something of a rustic appearance. In the next picture, taken at the age of thirty-five or thereabout, we see a determined-looking man, with slight side-whiskers, a drooping mustache, and clothes a little "loud." Five years afterward there is another photograph in which the whiskers have disappeared, the hair seems longer and more curly, the clothes are unquestionably "loud," and the picture, taken altogether, has a slight tinge of Bohemian-like vulgarity. In the later photographs the hair is shorter, and parted in the middle, the mustache subdued, the dress handsome and in perfect taste, and the whole appearance is that of a refined, sophisticated, aristocratic man of the world, dignified, and yet perfectly simple, unaffected and free from self-consciousness. In a measure Bret Harte seems to have undergone that process of development which Mr. Henry James has described in "The American." The Reader may remember how the American (far from a typical one, by the way) began with sky-blue neckties and large plaids, and ended with clothes and adornments of the most chastened, correct and elegant character. Actors are apt to go through a similar process. The first great exponent of the "suppressed emotion" school began, and in California too, as it happened, by splitting the ears of the groundlings and sawing the air with both arms. Bret Harte had something of a Hebrew look, and not unnaturally so, for he came of mixed English, Dutch and Hebrew stock. To be exact, he was half English, one quarter Dutch, and one quarter Hebrew. The Hebrew strain also was derived from English soil, so that with the exception of a Dutch great-grandmother, all his ancestors emigrated from England, and not very remotely. The Hebrew in the pedigree was his paternal grandfather, Bernard Hart. Mr. Hart was born in London, on Christmas Day, 1763 or 1764, but as a boy of thirteen he went out to Canada, where his relatives were numerous. These Canadian Harts were a marked family, energetic, forceful, strong-willed, prosperous, given to hospitality, warm-hearted, and pleasure-loving. One of Bernard Hart's Canadian cousins left behind him at his death no less than fourteen families, all established in the world with a good degree of comfort, and with a sufficient degree of respectability. Now the impropriety, to say nothing about the extravagance, of maintaining fourteen separate families is so great that no Reader of this book (the author feels confident) need be warned against it; and yet it indicates a large, free-handed, lordly way of doing things. It was no ordinary man, and no ordinary strain of blood that could produce such a record. Bernard Hart remained but three years in Canada, and in 1780 moved to New York where, although scarcely more than a boy, he acted as the business representative of his Canadian kinsfolk. The Canadian Harts had many commercial and social relations with the metropolis, and there was much "cousining," much going back and forth between the two places. Bernard Hart lived in New York for the rest of his life, and attained a high rank in the community. "Towering aloft among the magnates of the city of the last and present century," writes a local historian, "is Bernard Hart." He was successful in business, very active in social and charitable affairs, and prominent in the synagogue. In 1802 he formed a partnership with Leonard Lispenard, under the name of Lispenard and Hart. They were commission merchants and auctioneers, and did a large business. In 1803 the firm was dissolved, and Mr. Hart continued in trade by himself. In 1831 he became Secretary to the New York Stock Exchange Board, and held that office for twenty-two years, resigning at the age of eighty-nine. In 1795, the year of the yellow fever plague, Bernard Hart rendered heroic service, as is testified by a contemporary annalist. "Mr. Hart and Mr. Pell, who kept store at 108 Market Street, a few doors from Mr. Hart, were unceasing in their exertions. Night and day, hardly giving themselves time to sleep or eat, they were among the sick and dying, relieving their wants. They were angels of mercy in those awful days of the first great pestilence." Bernard Hart was also a military man, and in 1797 became quartermaster of a militia regiment, composed wholly of citizens of New York. That he was a "clubable" man, too, is very apparent. It was an era of clubs, and Bernard Hart founded the association known as "The Friary." It met on the first and third Sundays of every month at 56 Pine Street. He was also President of The House of Lords, a merchants' club, which met at Baker's City Tavern every week-day night, at 7 o'clock, adjourning at 10 o'clock. Each member was allowed a limited quantity of liquor, business was discussed, contracts were made, and sociability was promoted. He was, too, a member of the St. George Society, and is said, also, to have been a Mason, belonging to Holland Lodge No. 8, of which John Jacob Astor was master in 1798. Bernard Hart was a devout Jew, and his name frequently appears in the records of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, known as the Congregation Shearith Israel, the first synagogue established in New York. He lived in various houses,--at 86 Water Street, at 24 Cedar Street, at 12 Lispenard Street, at 20 Varick Street, and finally at 23 White Street. A picture of him still hangs in the counting-room of Messrs. Arthur Lipper and Co., in Broad Street. How came it that this orthodox Jew, this pillar of the synagogue, married a Christian woman? The romance, if there was one, is imperfectly preserved even in the family traditions. It is known only that in 1799 Bernard Hart married Catharine Brett, a woman of good family; that after living together for a year or less, they separated; that there was one son, Henry Hart, born February 1, 1800, who lived with his mother, and who became the father of Bret Harte. A few years later, in 1806, Bernard Hart married Zipporah Seixas, one of the sixteen children, eight sons and eight daughters, born to Benjamin Mendez Seixas. These young women were noted for their beauty and amiability, and so strong was the impression which they produced that it lasted even until the succeeding generation. The marriage ceremony was performed by Gershom Mendez Seixas, a brother of the bride's father, and rabbi of the synagogue already mentioned. From this marriage came numerous sons and daughters, whose careers were honorable. Emanuel B. Hart was a merchant and broker, an alderman, a member of Congress in 1851 and 1852, and Surveyor of the Port of New York from 1859 to 1861. Benjamin I. Hart was a broker in New York. David Hart, a teller in the Pacific Bank, fought gallantly at the battle of Bull Run and was badly wounded there. Theodore and Daniel Hart were merchants in New York. [Illustration: BERNARD HART Bret Harte's Grandfather] One of Bernard Hart's sons by the Hebrew wife was named Henry. He was born in 1817, and died of consumption in his father's house in White Street on November 16, 1850. He was unmarried. Bernard Hart himself died in 1855, at the age of ninety-one. His wife was then living at the age of seventy-nine. None of his descendants on the Hebrew side knew of his marriage to Catharine Brett or of the existence of his son, the first Henry Hart, until some years after Bret Harte's death. It seems almost incredible that this Hebrew merchant, prominent as he was in business and social life, in clubs and societies, in the militia and the synagogue, should have been able to keep the fact of his first marriage so secret that it remained a secret for a hundred years; it seems very unlikely that a woman of good English birth and family should in that era have married a Jew; it is highly improbable that a father should give to a son by a second marriage the same name already given to his son by a former marriage. And yet all these things are indisputable facts. There are members of Bret Harte's family still living who remember Bernard Hart, and his occasional visits to the family of Henry Hart, his son by Catharine Brett, whom he assisted with money and advice so long as he lived. Bret Harte himself remembered being taken to the New York Stock Exchange by his father, who there pointed out to him his grandfather, Bernard Hart. It may be added that between the descendants of Bernard Hart and Catharine Brett and those of Bernard Hart and Zipporah Seixas there is a marked resemblance. How far was the venerable Jew from suspecting that the one fact in his life which he was so anxious to conceal was the very fact which would rescue his name from oblivion, and preserve it so long as English literature shall exist! Even if the marriage to Catharine Brett, a Christian woman, had been known it would not, according to Jewish law, have invalidated the second marriage, but it would doubtless have prevented that marriage. What rendered the long concealment possible was, of course, the deep gulf which then separated Jew from Gentile. Catharine Brett had been warned by her father that he would cast her off if she married the Jew; and this threat was fulfilled. Thenceforth, she lived a lonely and secluded life, supported, it is believed, by her husband, but having no other relation with him. The marriage was so improbable, so ill-assorted, so productive of unhappiness, and yet so splendid in its ultimate results, that it seems almost atheistic to ascribe it to chance. Is the world governed in that haphazard manner! But who was this unfortunate Catharine Brett? She was a granddaughter of Roger Brett, an Englishman, and, it is supposed, a lieutenant in the British Navy, who first appears in New York, about the year 1700, as a friend of Lord Cornbury, then Governor of the Province. The coat of arms which Roger Brett brought over, and which is still preserved on a pewter placque, is identical with that borne by Judge, Sir Balliol Brett, before his elevation to the peerage as Viscount Esher. Roger Brett was a vestryman of Trinity Church from 1703 to 1706. In November, 1703, he married Catharyna Rombout, daughter of Francis Rombout, who was one of the early and successful merchants in the city of New York. Her mother, Helena Teller, daughter of William Teller, a captain in the Indian wars, was married three times, Francis Rombout being her third husband. Schuyler Colfax, once Vice-President of the United States, was descended from her. Francis Rombout was born at Hasselt in Belgium, and came to New Amsterdam while it still belonged to the Dutch. He was an elder in the Dutch Church, served as lieutenant in an expedition against the Swedes, was Schepen under the Dutch municipal government, alderman under the reorganized British government, and, in 1679, became the twelfth Mayor of New York. Francis Rombout left to his daughter, Roger Brett's wife, an immense estate on the Hudson River, which included the Fishkills, and consisted chiefly of forest land. There, in 1709, the young couple built for their home a manor house, which is still standing and is occupied by a descendant of Roger Brett, to whom it has come down in direct line through the female branch. A few years later, at least before 1720, Roger Brett was drowned at the mouth of Fishkill Creek in the Hudson River. Catharyna, his widow, survived him for many years. She was a woman of marked character and ability, known through all that region as Madame Brett. She administered her large estate, leased and sold much land to settlers, controlled the Indians who were numerous, superintended a mill to which both Dutchess County and Orange County sent their grist, owned the sloops which were the only carriers between this outpost of the Colony and the city of New York, and was one of the founders of the Fishkill Dutch Church. In that church, a tablet to her memory was recently erected by the Rombout-Brett Association, formed a few years ago by her descendants. The tablet is inscribed as follows:-- _In memory of Catharyna Brett, widow of Lieutenant Roger Brett, R.N., and daughter of Francis Rombout, a grantee of Rombout patent, born in the city of New York 1687, died in Rombout Precinct, Fishkill, 1764. To this church she was a liberal contributor, and underneath its pulpit her body is interred. This tablet was erected by her descendants and others interested in the Colonial history of Fishkill, A. D. 1904._ Roger Brett had four sons, of whom two died young and unmarried, and two, Francis and Robert, married, and left many children. Whether the Catharine Brett who married Bernard Hart was descended from Francis or from Robert is not certainly known. Francis Brett's wife was a descendant of Cornelius Van Wyck, one of the earliest settlers on Long Island. Robert Brett's wife was a Miss Dubois. Such was the ancestry of Bret Harte's paternal grandmother. Her son, Henry Hart,[2] lived with her until, on May 5, 1817, he entered Union College, Schenectady, as a member of the class of 1820. He remained in college until the end of his Senior year, and passed all his examinations for graduation, but failed to receive his degree because a college bill amounting to ninety dollars had not been paid. The previous bills were paid by his mother, "Catharine Hart." Alas! the non-payment of this bill was an omen of the future. Henry Hart and his illustrious son were both the reverse of thrifty or economical. Money seemed to fly away from them; they had no capacity for keeping it, and no discretion in spending it. Unpaid bills were the bane of their existence. Henry Hart's improvidence is ascribed, in part, by those who knew him, to the irregular manner in which his father supplied him with money, Bernard Hart being sometimes very lavish and sometimes very parsimonious with his son. Henry Hart was a well-built, athletic-looking man, with rather large features, and dark hair and complexion. His height was five feet ten inches, and his weight one hundred and seventy pounds. He was an accomplished scholar, speaking French, Spanish and Italian, and being well versed in Greek and Latin. He passed his short life as school-teacher, tutor, lecturer and translator. On May 16, 1830, he married Elizabeth Rebecca, daughter of Henry Philip Ostrander, an "upstate" surveyor and farmer, who belonged to a prominent Dutch family which settled at Kingston on the Hudson in 1659. It will be remembered that the hero of Bret Harte's story, _Two Americans_, is Major Philip Ostrander. The mother of Elizabeth Ostrander, Henry Hart's wife, was Abigail Truesdale, of English descent. Henry Hart was brought up by his mother in the Dutch Reformed faith, but soon after leaving college, owing to what influence is unknown, he became a Catholic, and remained such until his death. His wife was an Episcopalian, and his children were of that, if of any persuasion. In 1833 we find Henry Hart at Albany, and there he remained until 1836, the year of Bret Harte's birth. In 1833 and 1834, he was instructor in the Albany Female Academy, a girls' school, famous in its day, where he taught reading and writing, rhetoric and mathematics. Early in 1835 he left the Academy, and for two years he conducted a private school of his own at 15 Columbia Street, but this appears not to have been successful, for he ceased to be a resident of the city in the latter part of 1836, or early in 1837. One event in Henry Hart's life at Albany is significant. In December, 1833, a meeting was held in the Mayor's Court Room to organize a Young Men's Association, which proved to be a great success, and which has played an important part in the life of the city down to the present day. Henry Hart, though a comparative stranger in Albany, was chosen to explain the objects of the Association at this meeting, and at the next meeting he was elected one of the Managers. When Bret Harte came East from California, he went to Albany and addressed the Association, upon the invitation of its members. After leaving Albany the family led an unsettled, uncomfortable life, going from place to place, with occasional returns to the home of an Ostrander relative in Hudson Street in the city of New York. The late Mr. A. V. S. Anthony, the well-known engraver, was a neighbor of Bret Harte in Hudson Street, and played and fought with him there, when they were both about seven or eight years old. Afterward they met in California, and again in London. From Albany the Henry Hart family went to Hudson, where Mr. Hart acted as principal of an academy; and subsequently they lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey; in Philadelphia; in Providence, Rhode Island; in Lowell, Massachusetts; in Boston and elsewhere. A few years before her death Mrs. Hart read the life of Bronson Alcott, and when she laid down the book she remarked that the troubles and privations endured by the Alcott family bore a striking resemblance to those which she and her children had undergone. Some want of balance in Henry Hart's character prevented him, notwithstanding his undoubted talents, his enthusiasm, and his accomplishments, from ever obtaining any material success in life, or even a home for his family and himself. But he was a man of warm impulses and deep feeling. When Henry Clay was nominated for the Presidency in 1844, Henry Hart espoused his cause almost with fury. He gave up all other employment to electioneer in behalf of the Whig candidate, and the defeat of his idol was a crushing blow from which he never recovered. It was the first time that a really great man, as Clay certainly was, had been outvoted in a contest for the Presidency by a commonplace man, like Polk; and Clay's defeat was regarded by his adherents not only as a hideous injustice, but as a national calamity. It is not given to every one to take any impersonal matter so seriously as Henry Hart took the defeat of his political chieftain; and his death a year later, in 1845, may justly be regarded as a really noble ending to a troubled and unsuccessful life. CHAPTER II BRET HARTE'S BOYHOOD After the death of Henry Hart, his widow remained with her children in New York and Brooklyn until 1853. They were supported in part by her family, the Ostranders, and in part by Bernard Hart. There were four children, two sons and two daughters. Eliza, the eldest, who is still living, and to whom the author is indebted for information about the family, was married in 1851 to Mr. F. F. Knaufft, and her life has been passed mainly in New York and New Jersey. Mr. Ernest Knaufft, editor of the "Art Student," and well known as a critic and writer, is her son. Unfortunately, Mrs. Knaufft's house was burned in 1868, and with it many letters and papers relating to her father and his parents, and also the MSS. of various lectures delivered by him. The younger daughter, Margaret B., went to California with Bret Harte, and preceded him as a contributor of stories and sketches to the "Golden Era," and other papers in San Francisco. She married Mr. B. H. Wyman, and is still a resident of California. Bret Harte's sisters are women of distinguished appearance, and remarkable for force of character. Bret Harte's only brother, Henry, had a short but striking career, which displayed, even more perhaps than did the career of Bret Harte himself, that intensity which seems to have been their chief inheritance from the Hebrew strain. The following account of him is furnished by Mrs. Knaufft: "My brother Henry was two years and six months older than his brother Francis Brett Harte. Henry began reading history when he was six years old, and from that time until he was twelve years of age, he read history, ancient and modern, daily, sometimes only one hour, at other times from two to three hours. What interested him was the wars; he would read for two or three hours, and then if a battle had been won by his favorite warriors, he would spring to his feet, shouting, 'Victory is ours,' repeatedly. He would read lying on the floor, and often we would say ridiculous and provoking things about him, and sometimes pull his hair, but he never paid the slightest attention to us, being perfectly oblivious of his surroundings. His memory was phenomenal. He read Froissart's Chronicles when he was about ten years old, and could repeat page after page accurately. One evening an old professor was talking with my mother about some event in ancient history, and he mentioned the date of a decisive battle. Henry, who was listening intently, said, 'I beg pardon, Professor, you are wrong. That battle was fought on such a date.' The professor was astonished. 'Where did you hear about that battle?' he asked. 'I read that history last year,' replied Henry. "When the boy was twelve years old, he came home from school one day, and rushing into his mother's room, shouted, 'War is declared! War is declared!' 'What in the name of common sense has that got to do with you?' asked my mother. 'Mother,' said Henry, 'I am going to fight for my country; that is what I was created for.' "After some four or five months of constant anxiety, caused by Henry's offering himself to every captain whose ship was going to or near Mexico, a friend of my mother's told Lieutenant Benjamin Dove of the Navy about Henry, and he became greatly interested, and finally, through his efforts, Henry was taken on his ship. Henry was so small that his uniform had to be made for him. The ship went ashore on the Island of Eleuthera, to the great delight of my brother, who wrote his mother a startling account of the shipwreck. I cannot remember whether the ship was able to go on her voyage, or whether the men were all transferred to Commander Tatnall's ship the 'Spitfire.' I know that Henry was on Commander Tatnall's ship at the Bombardment of Vera Cruz, and was in the fort or forts at Tuxpan, where the Commander and Henry were both wounded. Commander Tatnall wrote my mother that when Henry was wounded, he exclaimed, 'Thank God, I am shot in the face,' and that when he inquired for Henry, he was told that he was hiding because he did not want his wound dressed. When the Commander found Henry, he asked him why he did not want his wound dressed. With tears in his eyes Henry said, 'Because I'm afraid it won't show any scar if the surgeon dresses it.' "When my brother returned from Mexico, he became very restless. The sea had cast its spell about him, and finally a friend, captain of a ship, took Henry on a very long voyage, going around Cape Horn to California. When they arrived at San Francisco, my brother, who was then just sixteen, was taken in charge by a relative. I never heard of his doing anything remarkable during his short life. As the irony of fate would have it, he died suddenly from pneumonia, just before the Civil War." Bret Harte was equally precocious, and he was precocious even in respect to the sense of humor, which commonly requires some little experience for its development. It is a family tradition that he burlesqued the rather bald language of his primer at the age of five; and his sisters distinctly remember that, a year later, he came home from a school exhibition, and made them scream with laughter by mimicking the boy who spoke "My name is Norval." He was naturally a very quiet, studious child; and this tendency was increased by ill health. From his sixth to his tenth year, he was unable to lead an active life. At the age of six he was reading Shakspere and Froissart, and at seven he took up "Dombey and Son," and so began his acquaintance with that author who was to influence him far more than any other. From Dickens he proceeded to Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett, Cervantes, and Washington Irving. During an illness of two months, when he was fourteen years old, he learned to read Greek sufficiently well to astonish his mother. If the Hart family resembled the Alcott family in the matter of misfortunes and privations, so it did, also, in its intellectual atmosphere. Mrs. Hart shared her husband's passion for literature; and she had a keen, critical faculty, to which, the family think, Bret Harte was much indebted for the perfection of his style. Henry Hart had accumulated a library surprisingly large for a man of his small means, and the whole household was given to the reading not simply of books, but of the best books, and to talking about them. It was a household in which the literary second-rate was unerringly, and somewhat scornfully, discriminated from the first-rate. When Bret Harte was only eleven years old he wrote a poem called _Autumnal Musings_ which he sent surreptitiously to the "New York Sunday Atlas," and the poem was published in the next issue. This was a wonderful feat for a boy of that age, and he was naturally elated by seeing his verses in print; but the family critics pointed out their defects with such unpleasant frankness that the conceit of the youthful poet was nipped in the bud. Many years afterward, Bret Harte said with a laugh, "I sometimes wonder that I ever wrote a line of poetry again." But the discipline was wholesome, and as he grew older his mother took his literary ambitions more seriously. When he was about sixteen, he wrote a long poem called _The Hudson River_. It was never published, but Mrs. Hart made a careful study of it; and at her son's request, wrote out her criticisms at length. It will thus be seen that Bret Harte, as an author, far from being an academic, was strictly a home product. He left school at the age of thirteen and went immediately into a lawyer's office where he remained about a year, and thence into the counting-room of a merchant. He was self-supporting before he reached the age of sixteen. In 1851, as has already been mentioned, his older sister was married; and in 1853 his mother went to California with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her home there with her elder son, Henry. She had intended to take with her the other two children, Margaret and Francis Brett; but as the daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in February, 1854. They travelled by the Nicaragua route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San Francisco.[3] No mention of their arrival was made in the newspapers; no guns were fired; no band played; but the youth of eighteen who thus slipped unnoticed into California was the one person, out of the many thousands arriving in those early years, whose coming was a fact of importance. CHAPTER III BRET HARTE'S WANDERINGS IN CALIFORNIA Bret Harte and his sister arrived at San Francisco in March, 1854, stayed there one night, and went the next morning to Oakland, across the Bay, where their mother and her second husband, Colonel Andrew Williams, were living. In this house the boy remained about a year, teaching for a while, and afterward serving as clerk in an apothecary's shop. During this year he began his career as a professional writer, contributing some stories and poems to Eastern magazines. Bret Harte, like Thackeray, was fortunate in his stepfather, and if, according to the accepted story, Thackeray's stepfather was the prototype of Colonel Newcome, the two men must have had much in common. Colonel Williams was born at Cherry Valley in the State of New York, and was graduated at Union College with the Class of 1819. Henry Hart's class was that of 1820, but the two young men were friends in college. Colonel Williams had seen much of the world, having travelled extensively in Europe early in the century, and he was a cultivated, well-read man. But he was chiefly remarkable for his high standard of honor, and his amiable, chivalrous nature. He was a gentleman of the old school in the best sense, grave but sympathetic, courtly but kind. His generosity was unbounded. Such a man might appear to have been somewhat out of place in bustling California, but his qualities were appreciated there. He was the first Mayor of Oakland, in the year 1857, and was re-elected the following year. Colonel Williams built a comfortable house in Oakland, one of the first, if not the very first in that city in which laths and plaster were used; but land titles in California were extremely uncertain, and after a long and stubborn contest in the courts, Colonel Williams was dispossessed, and lost the house upon which he had expended much time and money. He then took up his residence in San Francisco, where he lived until his return to the East in the year 1871. His wife, Bret Harte's mother, died at Morristown, New Jersey, April 4, 1875, and was buried in the family lot at Greenwood, New York. The following year he went back to California for a visit to Bret Harte's sister, Mrs. Wyman, but soon after his arrival died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six. The San Francisco and Oakland papers spoke very highly of Colonel Williams after his death, and one of them closed an account of his life with the following words: "Colonel Williams had that indefinable sweetness of manner which indicates innate refinement and nobility of soul. There was a touch of the antique about him. He seemed a little out of time and place in this hurried age of ours. He belonged to and typified the calmer temper of a former generation. A gentler spirit never walked the earth. He personified all the sweet charities of life. His heart was great, warm and tender, and he died leaving no man in the world his enemy. Colonel Williams was the stepfather of Bret Harte, between whom and himself there existed the most affectionate relations." It was during his first year in California that Bret Harte had that gambling experience which he has related in his _Bohemian Days in San Francisco_, and which throws so much light on his character that it should be quoted here in part at least:-- "I was watching roulette one evening, intensely absorbed in the mere movement of the players. Either they were so preoccupied with the game, or I was really older looking than my actual years, but a bystander laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and said, as to an ordinary _habitué_, 'Ef you're not chippin' in yourself, pardner, s'pose you give _me_ a show.' Now, I honestly believe that up to that moment I had no intention, nor even a desire, to try my own fortune. But in the embarrassment of the sudden address I put my hand in my pocket, drew out a coin and laid it, with an attempt at carelessness, but a vivid consciousness that I was blushing, upon a vacant number. To my horror I saw that I had put down a large coin--the bulk of my possessions! I did not flinch, however; I think any boy who reads this will understand my feeling; it was not only my coin but my manhood at stake.... I even affected to be listening to the music. The wheel spun again; the game was declared, the rake was busy, but I did not move. At last the man I had displaced touched me on the arm and whispered, 'Better make a straddle and divide your stake this time.' I did not understand him, but as I saw he was looking at the board, I was obliged to look, too. I drew back dazed and bewildered! Where my coin had lain a moment before was a glittering heap of gold. "... 'Make your game, gentlemen,' said the croupier monotonously. I thought he looked at me--indeed, everybody seemed to be looking at me--and my companion repeated his warning. But here I must again appeal to the boyish reader in defence of my idiotic obstinacy. To have taken advice would have shown my youth. I shook my head--I could not trust my voice. I smiled, but with a sinking heart, and let my stake remain. The ball again sped round the wheel, and stopped. There was a pause. The croupier indolently advanced his rake and swept my whole pile with others into the bank! I had lost it all. Perhaps it may be difficult for me to explain why I actually felt relieved, and even to some extent triumphant, but I seemed to have asserted my grown-up independence--possibly at the cost of reducing the number of my meals for days; but what of that!... The man who had spoken to me, I think, suddenly realized, at the moment of my disastrous _coup_, the fact of my extreme youth. He moved toward the banker, and leaning over him whispered a few words. The banker looked up, half impatiently, half kindly,--his hand straying tentatively toward the pile of coin. I instinctively knew what he meant, and, summoning my determination, met his eyes with all the indifference I could assume, and walked away." In 1856, being then twenty years old, young Harte left Colonel Williams's house, and thenceforth shifted for himself. His first engagement was as tutor in a private family at Alamo in the San Ramon Valley. There were several sons in the family, and one or two of them were older than their tutor. The next year he went to Humboldt Bay in Humboldt County, on the upper coast of California, about two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. Thence he made numerous trips as express messenger on stages running eastward to Trinity County, and northward to Del Norte, which, as the name implies, is the extreme upper county in the State. The experience was a valuable one, and it was concerning this period of Bret Harte's career that his friend, Charles Warren Stoddard, wrote: "He bore a charmed life. Probably his youth was his salvation, for he ran a thousand risks, yet seemed only to gain in health and spirits." The post of express messenger was especially dangerous. Bret Harte's predecessor was shot through the arm by a highwayman; his successor was killed. The safe containing the treasure carried by Wells, Fargo and Company, who did practically all the express business in California, was always heavily chained to the box of the coach, and sometimes, when a particularly large amount of gold had to be conveyed, armed guards were carried inside of the coach. For the stage to be "held up" by highwaymen was a common occurrence, and the danger from breakdowns and floods was not small. In the course of a few months between the towns of Visalia and Kern River the overland stage broke the legs of three several drivers. It was a frequent thing for the stage to cross a stream, suddenly become a river, with the horses swimming, a strong current running through the coach itself, and the passengers perched on the seats to escape being swept away.[4] With these dangers of flood and field to encounter, with precipices to skirt, with six half-broken horses to control, and with the ever-present possibility of serving as a target for "road-agents," it may be imagined that the California stage-driver was no common man, and the type is preserved in the character of Yuba Bill. He can be compared only with Colonel Starbottle and Jack Hamlin, and Jack Hamlin was one of the few men whom Yuba Bill condescended to treat as an equal. Their meeting in _Gabriel Convoy_ is historic: "'Barkeep--hist that pizen over to Jack. Here's to ye agin, ole man. But I'm glad to see ye!' The crowd hung breathless over the two men--awestruck and respectful. It was a meeting of the gods. None dared speak." "Yuba Bill," writes Mr. Chesterton, "is not convivial; it might almost be said that he is too great even to be sociable. A circle of quiescence and solitude, such as that which might ring a saint or a hermit, rings this majestic and profound humorist. His jokes do not flow from him, like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling and continual like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and capriciously, like a crash of avalanche from a great mountain. Tony Weller has the noisy humor of London. Yuba Bill has the silent humor of the earth." Then the critic quotes Yuba Bill's rebuke to the passenger who has expressed a too-confident opinion as to the absence of the expected highwaymen: "'You ain't puttin' any price on that opinion, air ye?' inquired Bill politely. "'No.' "'Cos thar's a comic paper in 'Frisco pays for them things, and I've seen worse things in it.'" Even better, perhaps, is Yuba Bill's reply to Judge Beeswinger, who rashly betrayed some over-consciousness of his importance as a member of the State Assembly. "'Any political news from below, Bill?' he asked, as the latter slowly descended from his lofty perch, without, however, any perceptible coming down of mien or manner. 'Not much,' said Bill, with deliberate gravity. 'The President o' the United States hezn't bin hisself sens you refoosed that seat in the Cabinet. The gin'ral feelin' in perlitical circles is one o' regret.'" "To be rebuked thus," Mr. Chesterton continues, "is like being rebuked by the pyramids or by the starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm, a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressibly increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte paints so powerfully,--the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge, dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humor." After his service as expressman, Bret Harte went to a town called Union, about three hundred miles north of San Francisco, where he learned the printer's trade in the office of the "Humboldt Times." He also taught school again in Union, and for the second time acted as clerk in a drug store. Speaking of his experience in this capacity, Mr. Pemberton, his English biographer, gravely says, "I have heard English physicians express wonder at his grasp of the subject." One wonders, in turn, if Bret Harte did not do a little hoaxing in this line. "To the end of his days," writes Mr. Pemberton, "he could speak with authority as to the virtues and properties of medicines." Young Harte had a wonderful faculty of picking up information, and no doubt his two short terms of service as a compounder of medicines were not thrown away upon him. But Bret Harte was the last person in the world to pose as an expert, and it seems probable that the extent of his knowledge was fairly described in the story _How Reuben Allen Saw Life in San Francisco_. That part of this story which deals with the drug clerk is so plainly autobiographical, and so characteristic of the author, that a quotation from it will not be out of place:-- "It was near midnight, the hour of closing, and the junior partner was alone in the shop. He felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop, that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris root--which always reminded him of the Arabian nights--was affecting him. He yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind the counter, took down a jar labelled 'Glycyrr. Glabra,' selected a piece of Spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it.... "He was just nineteen, he had early joined the emigration to California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament.... A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy's acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. He knew the difference between acids and alkalis and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination. But he was excessively deliberate, painstaking and cautious. There was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent 'case' might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy.... In those days the 'heroic' practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were 'record' doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query." [Illustration: SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER, 1844 J. C. Ward, del.] It was doubtless Bret Harte's experience in the drug store which suggested the story of Liberty Jones, whose discovery of an arsenical spring in the forest was the means of transforming that well-made, but bony and sallow Missouri girl into a beautiful woman, with well-rounded limbs, rosy cheeks, lustrous eyes and glossy hair. It has been a matter of some discussion whether Bret Harte ever worked as a miner or not; and the evidence upon the point is not conclusive. But it is hard to believe that he did not try his luck at gold-seeking, when everybody else was trying, and his narrative _How I Went to the Mines_ seems to have the ear-marks of an autobiographical sketch. It is regarded as such by his sisters; and the modest, deprecating manner in which the storyteller's adventures are related, serves to confirm that impression. Of all his experiences in California, those which gave him the most pleasure seem to have been his several short but fruitful terms of service as schoolmaster and tutor. His knowledge of children, being based upon sympathy, became both acute and profound. How many thousand million times have children gone to school of a morning and found the master awaiting them, and yet who but Bret Harte has ever described the exact manner of their approach! "They came in their usual desultory fashion--the fashion of country school-children the world over--irregularly, spasmodically, and always as if accidentally; a few hand-in-hand, others driven ahead of or dragged behind their elders; some in straggling groups more or less coherent and at times only connected by far-off intermediate voices scattered over a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business in hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless détours--seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school!"[5] Bret Harte realized the essential truth that children are not little, immature men and women, but rather infantile barbarians, creatures of an archaic type, representing a period in the development of the human race which does not survive in adult life. Hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. There are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do; as, for example, to bear without telling any pains that may be inflicted upon him by his mates or by older boys. For a thousand years or more fathers and mothers have held a different code upon these points, but with how little effect upon their children! Johnny Filgee illustrated upon a truly Californian scale these boyish qualities of reticence and endurance. When he had accidentally been shot in the duel between the Master and Cressy's father (the child being perched in a tree), he refrained from making the least sound, although a word or an outcry would have brought the men to his assistance. "A certain respect to himself and his brother kept him from uttering even a whimper of weakness." Left alone in the dark woods, unable to move, Johnny became convinced that his end was near, and he pleased himself by thinking that "they would all feel exceedingly sorry and alarmed, and would regret having made him wash himself on Saturday night." And so, having composed himself, "he turned on his side to die, as became the scion of an heroic race!" Then follows a sentence in which the artist, with one bold sweep of his brush, paints in Nature herself as a witness of the scene; and yet her material immensity does not dwarf or belittle the spiritual superiority of the wounded youngster in the foreground: "The free woods, touched by an upspringing wind, waved their dark arms above him, and higher yet a few patient stars silently ranged themselves around his pillow." That other Johnny, for whom _Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_, Richelieu Sharpe in _A Phyllis of the Sierras_, John Milton Harcourt in the _First Family of Tasajara_, Leonidas Boone, the _Mercury of the Foot-Hills_, and John Bunyan Medliker, the _Youngest Prospector in Calaveras_,--all illustrate the same type, with many individual variations. Another phase of the archaic nature of children is their extreme sensitiveness to impressions. Just as a squirrel hears more acutely than a man, and the dog's sense of smell is keener, so a child, within the comparatively small range of his mental activity, is more open to subtle indications. Bret Harte often touches upon this quality of childhood, as in the following passage: "It was not strange, therefore, that the little people of the Indian Spring School knew perhaps more of the real relations of Cressy McKinstry to her admirers than the admirers themselves. Not that the knowledge was outspoken--for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense, or even communicate by words intelligent to the matured intellect. A whisper, a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of merriment in which the whole class joined--and that the adult critic set down to 'animal spirits'--a quality much more rare with children than is generally supposed--was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery happily oblivious to older perceptions." This acuteness of perception, seen also in some men of a simple, archaic type, puts children in close relationship with the lower animals, unless, indeed, it is counteracted by that cruelty which is also a quality of childhood. When Richelieu Sharpe retired to rest, it was in company with a whole retinue of dependents. "On the pillow near him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur--the helpless bulk of a squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion of her sex; on the shelf above him a loathsome collection of flies and tarantulas in dull green bottles, a slab of gingerbread for light nocturnal refreshment, and his sister's pot of bear's grease.... The sleeper stirred slightly and awoke. At the same moment, by some mysterious sympathy, a pair of beady bright eyes appeared in the bulk of fur near his curls, the cat stretched herself, and even a vague agitation was heard in the bottles on the shelf."[6] That last touch, intimating some community of feeling between Richelieu and his insects, is, as the Reader will grant, the touch of genius. Bridging the gulf impassable for an ordinary mind, it assumes a fact which, like the shape of Donatello's ears, is true to the imagination, and not so manifestly impossible as to shock the reason. It is sometimes said that California in the Fifties represented the American character in its most extreme form,--the quintessence, as it were, of energy and democracy. This statement would certainly apply to the California children, in whom the ordinary forwardness of the American child became a sort of elfish precocity. Such a boy was Richelieu Sharpe. His gallantries, his independence, his self-reliance, his adult ambitions,--these qualities, oddly assorted with the primeval, imaginative nature of the true child, made Richelieu such a youngster as was never seen outside of the United States, and perhaps never seen outside of California. The English child of the upper classes, as Bret Harte knew him in after years, made a strange contrast to the Richelieu Sharpes and John Bunyan Medlikers that he had learned to love in California. In a letter to his wife written from the house of James Anthony Froude, in 1878, he said: "The eldest girl is not unlike a highly-educated Boston girl, and the conversation sometimes reminds me of Boston. The youngest daughter, only ten years old, told her sister, in reference to some conversation Froude and I had, that 'she feared' (this child) 'that Mr. Bret Harte was inclined to be sceptical!' Doesn't this exceed any English story of the precocity of American children? The boy, scarcely fourteen, acts like a boy of eight (an American boy of eight) and talks like a man of thirty, so far as pure English and facility of expression go. His manners are perfect, yet he is perfectly simple and boy-like. The culture and breeding of some English children are really marvellous. But somehow--and here comes one of my 'buts'--there's always a suggestion of some repression, some discipline that I don't like."[7] Bret Harte's last employment during this wandering life was that of compositor, printer's devil, and assistant editor of the "Northern California," published at Eureka, a seacoast town in Humboldt County. Here he met Mr. Charles A. Murdock, who gives this interesting account of him: "He was fond of whist, genial, witty, but quiet and reserved, something of a 'tease'" (the Reader will remember that Mr. Howells speaks of this trait) "and a practical joker; not especially popular, as he was thought to be fastidious, and to hold himself aloof from 'the general'; but he was simply a self-respecting, gentlemanly fellow, with quiet tastes, and a keen insight into character. He was no roisterer, and his habits were clean. He was too independent and indifferent to curry favor, or to counterfeit a liking." During a temporary absence of the editor Bret Harte was entrusted with the conduct of the paper, and about that time a cowardly massacre of Indians was perpetrated by some Americans in the vicinity. This was no uncommon event, and the usual attitude of the Pioneers toward the Indians may be gathered from the following passage in a letter written to a newspaper in August, 1851, from Rogue River: "During this period we have been searching about in the mountains, disturbing villages, destroying all the males we could find, and capturing women and children. We have killed about thirty altogether, and have about twenty-eight now in camp." At the Stanislaus Diggings, in 1851, a miner called to an Indian boy to help him catch a loose horse. The boy, not understanding English, and being frightened by the man's gestures, ran away, whereupon the miner raised his gun and shot the boy dead. Nobody hated injustice or cruelty more than Bret Harte, and in his editorial capacity he scathingly condemned the murder of Indians which occurred in the neighborhood of Eureka. The article excited the anger of the community, and a mob was collected for the avowed purpose of wrecking the newspaper office and hanging or otherwise maltreating the youthful writer. Bret Harte, armed with two pistols, awaited their coming during an evening which was probably the longest of his life. But the timely arrival of a few United States cavalrymen, sent for by some peace-lovers in the town, averted the danger; and the young journalist suffered no harm beyond an abrupt dismissal upon the hasty return of the editor. This event ended his life as a wanderer, and he went back to San Francisco. There is not the slightest reason to think that during this period Bret Harte had any notion of describing California life in fiction or otherwise; and yet, if that had been his object, he could not have ordered his movements more wisely. He had lived on the seacoast and in the interior; he had seen cities, ranches, villages, and mines; he had been tutor, school-teacher, drug clerk, express messenger, printer, and editor. The period was less than two years, and yet he had accumulated a store of facts, impressions and images sufficient to last him a lifetime. He was of a most receptive nature; he was at a receptive age; the world was new to him, and he lived in it and observed it with all the zest of youth, of inexperience, of health and genius. CHAPTER IV BRET HARTE IN SAN FRANCISCO Bret Harte returned to San Francisco in 1857, and his first occupation was that of setting type in the office of the "Golden Era." To this paper his sister, Mrs. Wyman, had been a contributor for some time, and it was through her that Bret Harte obtained employment on it as a printer. The "Golden Era" had been established by young men. "It was," writes Mr. Stoddard, "the cradle and the grave of many a high hope. There was nothing to be compared with it on that side of the Mississippi; and though it could point with pride--it never failed to do so--to a somewhat notable list of contributors, it had always the fine air of the amateur, and was most complacently patronizing. The very pattern of paternal patronage was amiable Joe Lawrence, its Editor. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker, a pillar of cloud, as he sat in his editorial chair, an air of literary mystery enveloping him. He spoke as an oracle, and I remember his calling my attention to a certain anonymous contribution just received, and nodding his head prophetically, for he already had his eye on the fledgling author, a young compositor on the floor above. It was Bret Harte's first appearance in the 'Golden Era,' and doubtless Lawrence encouraged him as he had encouraged me when, out of the mist about him, he handed me secretly, and with a glance of caution--for his business partner, the marble-hearted, sat at his ledger not far away--he handed me a folded paper on which he had written this startling legend! 'Write some prose for the "Golden Era," and I will give you a dollar a column.'" [Illustration: BRET HARTE IN 1861] It was not long before Bret Harte was promoted from the compositor's stand to the editorial room of the paper, and thus began his literary career. Among the sketches which he wrote a few years later, and which have been preserved in the complete edition of his works, are _In a Balcony_, _A Boy's Dog_, and _Sidewalkings_. Except for a slight restraint and stiffness of style, as if the author had not quite attained the full use of his wings, they show no indications of youth or crudity. _M'liss_ also appeared in the "Golden Era," illustrated by a specially designed woodcut; and some persons think that this, the first, is also the best of Bret Harte's stories. At all events, the early _M'liss_ is far superior to the author's lengthened and rewritten _M'liss_ which was included in the collected edition of his works. When it is added that the _Condensed Novels_, or at least the first of them, were also published in the "Golden Era," it will be seen with what astonishing quickness his literary style matured. He wrote at first anonymously; afterward, gaining a little self-confidence, he signed his stories "B," and then "Bret." It was while engaged in writing for the "Golden Era," namely, on August 11, 1862, that Bret Harte was married to Miss Anna Griswold, daughter of Daniel S. and Mary Dunham Griswold of the city of New York. The marriage took place at San Raphael. In 1864 he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office which he held for six years and until he left California. For this position he was indebted to Mr. R. B. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, a friend and parishioner of the Reverend Mr. King, who in that way became a friend of Bret Harte. Mr. Swain had a great liking for the young author, and made the official path easy for him. In fact, the position seems to have been one of those sinecures--or nearly that--which are the traditional reward of men of letters, but which a reforming and materialistic age has diverted to less noble uses. In San Francisco, both before and after his marriage, Bret Harte lived a quiet, studious life, going very little into society. Of the time during which he was Secretary of the Mint, Mr. Stoddard writes: "He was now a man with a family; the resources derived from literature were uncertain and unsatisfactory. His influential friends paid him cheering visits in the gloomy office at the Mint where he leavened his daily loaves; and at his desk, between the exacting pages of the too literal ledger, many a couplet cropped out, and the outlines of now famous sketches were faintly limned. His friends were few, but notable. Society he ignored in those days. He used to accuse me of wasting my substance in riotous visitations, and thought me a spendthrift of time. He had the precious companionship of books, and the lives of those about him were as an open volume wherein he read 'curiously and to his profit.'" Of the notable friends alluded to by Mr. Stoddard, the most important were the Reverend Thomas Starr King, and Mrs. Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of Senator Benton, and wife of that Captain, afterward General Frémont, who became the first United States Senator from California, and Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1856, but who is best known as The Pathfinder. His adventures and narratives form an important part of California history. Mrs. Frémont was an extremely clever, kind-hearted woman, who assisted Bret Harte greatly by her advice and criticism, still more by her sympathy and encouragement. Bret Harte was always inclined to underrate his own powers, and to be despondent as to his literary future. On one occasion when, as not seldom happened, he was cast down by his troubles and anxieties, and almost in despair as to his prospects, Mrs. Frémont sent him some cheering news, and he wrote to her: "I shall no longer disquiet myself about changes in residence or anything else, for I believe that if I were cast upon a desolate island, a savage would come to me next morning and hand me a three-cornered note to say that I had been appointed Governor at Mrs. Frémont's request, at a salary of $2400 a year." How much twenty-four hundred a year seemed to him then, and how little a few years later! A Pioneer who knew them both writes: "Mrs. Frémont helped Bret Harte in many ways. In turn he marvelled at her worldly wisdom,--being able to tell one how to make a living. He named her daughter's pony 'Chiquita,' after the equine heroine of his poem." It was by Mrs. Frémont's intervention that Bret Harte first appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," for, some years before he achieved fame, namely in 1863, _The Legend of Monte del Diablo_ was published in that magazine. The story was gracefully, even beautifully written, but both in style and treatment it was a reflection of Washington Irving, who at that time rivalled Dickens as a popular author. Many interesting letters were received by Mrs. Frémont from Bret Harte,--letters, her daughter thinks, almost as entertaining as his published writings; but unfortunately these treasures were destroyed by a fire in the city of New York. Starr King, Bret Harte's other friend, was by far the most notable of the Protestant ministers in California. The son of a Universalist minister, he was born in the city of New York, but was brought up mainly in Charlestown, now a part of Boston. Upon leaving school he became first a clerk, then a school-teacher, and finally a Unitarian minister, preaching first at his father's old church in Charlestown, and afterward at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston. He obtained a wide reputation as preacher and lecturer, and as author of "The White Hills," still the best book upon the mountains of New England. In 1860, at the very time when his services were needed there, he became the pastor of a church in San Francisco, and to him is largely ascribed the credit of saving California to the Union. He was a man of deep moral convictions, and his addresses stirred the heart and moved the conscience of California. The Southern element was very strong on the Pacific Slope, and it made itself felt in politics especially. Nearly one third of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in September, 1849, were Southern men, and they acted as a unit under the leadership of W. M. Gwinn, afterward a member of the United States Senate. The ultimate design of the Southern delegates was the division of California into two States, the more southern of which should be a slave State. Slavery in California was openly advocated. But the Southern party was a minority, and the State Constitution declared that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this State." The Constitution did, however, exclude the testimony of colored persons from the courts; and when, in 1852, the negroes in San Francisco presented a petition to the House of Representatives asking for this right or privilege, the House refused to receive the petition, a majority of the members taking it as an insult. One member seriously proposed that it should be thrown out of the window. In May, 1852, the "San Francisco Daily Herald" declared that the delay in admitting California as a State was due to Northern Abolitionists, of whom it said, with characteristic mildness: "Take the vile crowd of Abolitionists from the Canadian frontier to the banks of the Delaware, and you cannot find one in ten thousand of them who from philanthropy cares the amount of a dollar what becomes of the colored race. What they want is office." It does not seem to have occurred to the writer that in espousing the smallest and most hated political party in the whole country, the Abolitionists had not taken a very promising step in the direction of office-holding. There was even talk of turning California into a "Pacific Republic," in the event of a dissolution of the Union. And that event was longed for by at least one California paper on the ground that "it would shut down on the immigration of these vermin," _i. e._ the Chinese. How far Southern effrontery went may be gathered from the fact that even the sacred institution of Thanksgiving Day was ridiculed by another California paper as an absurd Yankee notion. From 1851 until the period of the Civil War the Democratic Party ruled the State of California under the leadership of Gwinn. Northern men constituted a majority of the party, but they submitted to the dictation of the Southerners, just as the Democratic Party in the North submitted to the dictation of the Southern leaders. The only California politician who could cope with Gwinn was Broderick,--a typical Irishman, trained by Tammany Hall. Not without difficulty was California saved to the Union; in fact, until the rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, the real sentiment of the State was unknown. Bret Harte has touched upon this episode. In _Mrs. Bunker's Conspiracy_, the attempt of the extreme Southern element to seize and fortify a bluff commanding the city of San Francisco is foiled by a Northern woman; and in _Clarence_ we have a glimpse of the city as it appeared after news came of the first act of open rebellion: "From every public building and hotel, from the roofs of private houses and even the windows of lonely dwellings, flapped and waved the striped and starry banner. The steady breath of the sea carried it out from masts and yards of ships at their wharves, from the battlements of the forts, Alcatraz and Yerba Buena.... Clarence looked down upon it with haggard, bewildered eyes, and then a strange gasp and fulness of the throat. For afar a solitary bugle had blown the reveille at Fort Alcatraz." At this critical time, a mass meeting was held in San Francisco, and, at the suggestion of Starr King, Bret Harte wrote a poem to be read at the meeting. The poem was called _The Reveille_, but is better known as _The Drum_. The first and last stanzas are as follows:-- Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands, And of armèd men the hum; Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered Round the quick alarming drum,-- Saying, "Come, Freemen, Come! Ere your heritage be wasted," said the quick alarming drum. * * * * * Thus they answered,--hoping, fearing, Some in faith, and doubting some, Till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming, Said, "My chosen people, come!" Then the drum Lo! was dumb, For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, "Lord, we come!" As these last words were read, the great audience rose to its feet, and with a mighty shout proclaimed the loyalty of California. Emerson, as Mr. John Jay Chapman has finely said, sent a thousand sons to the war; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bret Harte's noble poem fired many a manly heart in San Francisco. When the war began, Starr King was active in establishing the California branch of the Sanitary Commission. He died of diphtheria in March, 1864, just as the tide of battle was turning in favor of the North. It will thus be seen that his career in California exactly covered, and only just covered, that short period in the history of the State when the services of such a man were, humanly speaking, indispensable. _The Reveille_ was followed by other patriotic poems, and after Mr. King's death Bret Harte wrote in memory of him the poem called _Relieving Guard_, which indicates, one may safely say, the high-water mark of the author's poetic talent. In the year following Mr. King's death Bret Harte's second son was born, and received the name of Francis King. On May 25, 1864, the first number of "The Californian" appeared. This was the famous weekly edited and published by the late Charles Henry Webb, and written mainly by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Webb himself, Prentice Mulford, and Mr. Stoddard. It was of "The Californian" that Mr. Howells wittily said: "These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly coöperated to its early extinction." It is an interesting coincidence that Bret Harte and Mark Twain both began their literary careers in San Francisco, and at almost the same time. Bret Harte was engaged upon "The Californian," and Mark Twain was a reporter for the "Morning Call," when they were introduced to each other by a common friend, Mr. George Barnes. Bret Harte thus describes his first impression of the new acquaintance:-- "His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye--an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me--of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed under the signature of 'Mark Twain.' We talked on different topics, and about a month afterward Clemens dropped in upon me again. He had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the mean time. In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and 'swop lies.' He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for 'The Californian.' He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint." The first article that appeared in "The Californian" was Bret Harte's _Neighborhoods I have Moved From_, and next his _Ballad of the Emeu_, but neither was signed. Both of these are in the collected edition of his works. The _Condensed Novels_ were continued in "The Californian," and Bret Harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. Some of these were unsigned; some were signed "B" or "Bret," and occasionally the signature was his full name. [Illustration: STORESHIP APOLLO Old Ship used as a Saloon Copyright, Century Co.] No reader who appreciates the finished workmanship of Bret Harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer. There is much interesting testimony on this point. Mr. Howells says: "His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.... When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens." Noah Brooks wrote as follows: "Scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but I have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as Bret Harte. His writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. Even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day's work must be abandoned. My editorial rooms in San Francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, I knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. 'It's no use, Brooks,' he would say. 'Everything goes wrong; I cannot write a line. Let's have an early dinner at Martini's.' As soon as I was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly. "Harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. He never let the air in upon his story or his verses. Once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[8] would last a given number of persons. This was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of Poker Flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. I used to save for him the Eastern and English newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: 'These fellows see a heap of things in my stories that I never put there.'" Mr. Stoddard recalls this incident: "One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy,--I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Thus he perfected his prose." In the sketch entitled _My First Book_, printed in volume ten of his works, Bret Harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of California poems edited by him, and published in 1866. His selection as Editor, he says, "was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect." After narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of California, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. It sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book. "People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly 'Got a new book of California poetry out, haven't you?' purchase it, and quietly depart." "There were as yet," the Editor continues, "no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell;" and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: "'The Hogwash and "purp" stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. ---- and Co., of 'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice, and called "A Compilation of Californian Verse," might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a steamboat ticket to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "Californian," it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted "Yellowhammer," whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the "Jay Hawk." That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California's greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'" Other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. "The big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection ... and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal.... It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion." A year later, not, as Bret Harte himself states, in 1865, but in 1867, the first collection of his own poems was published. The volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the title-page reading as follows: "The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. By Fr. Bret Harte, San Francisco. Tame and Bacon, Printers, 1867." Most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works. In the same year were published the _Condensed Novels_ and the _Bohemian Papers_, reprinted from "The Bulletin" and "The Californian," and making, as the author himself said, "a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer's first book of prose." He adds that "during this period," _i. e._ from 1862 to 1867, he produced "_The Society upon the Stanislaus_, and _The Story of M'liss_,--the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,--a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the 'Overland Monthly,' he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the poem of the _Heathen Chinee_." The "Overland Monthly" was founded in July, 1868, by Anton Roman, a bookseller on Montgomery Street, and later on Clay Street. Mr. Roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. "He had thought and talked about the Magazine," he declared, "until it was in his bones." Bret Harte became the first Editor, and it was he who selected the name. The "Overland" was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track. There was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by Mark Twain in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: "Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte's brain? It was this: When they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the 'Overland,' a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus: [Illustration] "As a bear, he was a success--he was a good bear.--But then, it was objected, that he was an _objectless_ bear--a bear that _meant_ nothing in particular, signified nothing,--simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing--and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that--none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no _point_ to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of Californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive! [Illustration] "I think that was nothing less than inspiration itself." In the same letter Mark Twain pays the following magnanimous tribute to his old friend: "Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land,--and this grateful remembrance of mine ought to be worth its face, seeing that Bret broke our long friendship a year ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of." The Editor had no prose article of his own in the first number of the "Overland," but he contributed two poems, the noble lines about San Francisco, which, with characteristic modesty he placed in the middle of the number, and the poem entitled _Returned_[9] in the "Etc." column at the end. And now we come to the publication which first made Bret Harte known upon the Atlantic as well as upon the Pacific coast. The opening number of the "Overland" had contained no "distinctive Californian romance," as Bret Harte expressed it, and none such being offered for the second number, the Editor supplied the omission with _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. But the printer, instead of sending the proof-sheets to the writer of the story, as would have been the ordinary course, submitted them to the publisher, with a statement that the matter was so "indecent, irreligious and improper" that his proofreader, a young lady, had with difficulty been induced to read it. Then followed many consultations between author, publisher, and various high literary authorities whose judgment had been invoked. Opinions differed, but the weight of opinion was against the tale, and the expediency of printing it. Nevertheless, the author--conceiving that his fitness as Editor was now in question--stood to his guns; the publisher, though fearful of the result, stood by him; and the tale was published without the alteration of a word. It was received very coldly by the secular press in California, its "singularity" being especially pointed out; and it was bitterly denounced by the religious press as being immoral and unchristian. But there was a wider public to hear from. The return mail from the East brought newspapers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of Californian literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[10] The mail brought also a letter from the Editor of the "Atlantic Monthly" with a request "upon the most flattering terms" that he would write a story for the "Atlantic," similar to the _Luck_. It should be recorded, as an interesting contrast to the impression made by the _Luck_ upon the San Francisco young woman, that it was also a girl, Miss Susan M. Francis, a literary assistant with the publishers of the "Atlantic Monthly," who, struck by the freshness and beauty of the tale, brought it to the attention of Mr. James T. Fields, then the Editor of the magazine, with the result which Bret Harte has described. Nor should the attitude of the California young person, and of San Francisco in general, excite surprise. The Pioneers could not be expected to see the moral beauty that lay beneath the rough outward aspect of affairs on the Pacific Slope. The poetry of their own existence was hidden from them. But California, though crude, was self-distrustful, and it bowed to the decision of the East. Bret Harte was honored, even if not understood or appreciated. The "Overland" was well received, and the high character of the first two numbers was long maintained. Aside from Bret Harte's work, many volumes of prose and verse have been republished from the magazine, and most of them deserved the honor. In the early Fifties the proportion of really educated men to the whole population was greater in California than in any other State, and probably this was true even of the period when the "Overland" was founded. Scholarship and cultivation were concealed in rough mining towns, in lumber camps, and on remote ranches. Among the women, especially, were many who, like the Sappho of Green Springs, gathered from their lonely, primitive lives a freshness and originality which perhaps they never would have shown in more conventional surroundings. This class furnished numerous readers and a few writers. Officers of the Army and Navy stationed in California contributed some interesting scientific and literary articles to the early numbers of the "Overland." Notwithstanding the success of his first story, Bret Harte was in no haste to rush into print with another. He had none of that disposition to make hay while the sun shines which has spoiled many a story-writer. Six months elapsed before the _Luck_ was followed by _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_. Meanwhile he was carefully and patiently discharging his duties as Editor. Mr. Stoddard has thus described him in that capacity: "Fortunately for me he took an interest in me at a time when I was most in need of advice, and to his criticism and his encouragement I feel that I owe all that is best in my literary efforts. He was not afraid to speak his mind, and I know well enough what occasion I gave him: yet he did not judge me more severely than I judged myself.... I am sure that the majority of the contributors to the 'Overland Monthly' profited as I did by his careful and judicious criticism. Fastidious to a degree, he could not overlook a lack of finish in the manuscript offered to him. He had a special taste in the choice of titles, and I have known him to alter the name of an article two or three times in order that the table of contents might read handsomely and harmoniously." One of the most frequent contributors to the "Overland" was Miss Ina B. Coolbrith, author of many polished and imaginative poems and stories. In a recent letter Miss Coolbrith thus speaks of Bret Harte as an Editor: "To me he was unfailingly kind and generous, looking out for my interests as one of his contributors with as much care as he accorded to his own. I can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author, friend and man." The poem entitled _Plain Language from Truthful James_, or the _Heathen Chinee_, as it is popularly known, and as Bret Harte himself afterward called it, first appeared in the "Overland" for September, 1870. Within a few weeks it had spread over the English-speaking world. _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ gave Bret Harte a literary reputation, but this poem made him famous. It was copied by the newspapers almost universally, both here and in England; and it increased the circulation of the "Overland" so much that, two months after its appearance, a single news company in New York was selling twelve hundred copies of the magazine. Almost everybody had a clipping of these verses tucked into his waistcoat pocket or carried in his purse. Quotations from it were on every lip, and some of its most significant lines were recited with applause in the National House of Representatives. It came at a fortunate moment when the people of this country were just awaking to the fact that there was a "Chinese problem," and when interest in the race was becoming universal in the East as well as in the West. Says that acute critic, Mr. James Douglas: "There is an element of chance in the fabrication of great poems. The concatenation comes, the artist puts the pieces into their places, and the result is permanent wonder. The _Heathen Chinee_ in its happy felicity is quite as unique as 'The Blessed Damozel.'" The _Heathen Chinee_ is remarkable for the absolutely impartial attitude of the writer. He observes the Chinaman neither from the locally prejudiced, California point of view, nor from an ethical or reforming point of view. His part is neither to approve nor condemn, but simply to state the fact as it is, not indeed with the coldness of an historian but with the sympathy and insight of a poet. But this is not all, in fact, as need hardly be said, it is not enough to make the poem endure. It endures because it has a beauty of form which approaches perfection. It is hackneyed, and yet as fresh as on the day when it was written.[11] Truthful James himself who tells the story was a real character,--nay is, for, at the writing of these pages, he still lived in the same little shanty where he was to be found when Bret Harte knew him. At that time, in 1856, or thereabout, Bret Harte was teaching school at Tuttletown, a few miles north of Sonora, and Truthful James, Mr. James W. Gillis, lived over the hill from Tuttletown, at a place called Jackass Flat. Mr. Gillis was well known and highly respected in all that neighborhood, and he figures not only in Bret Harte's poetry, but also in Mark Twain's works, where he is described as "The Sage of Jackass Hill." It is a proof both of Bret Harte's remarkable freedom from vanity, and of the keen criticism which he bestowed upon his own writings, that he never set much value upon the _Heathen Chinee_, even after its immense popularity had been attained. When he wrote it, he thought it unworthy of a place in the "Overland" and handed it over to Mr. Ambrose Bierce, then Editor of the "News Letter,"[12] a weekly paper, for publication there. Mr. Bierce, however, recognizing its value, unselfishly advised Bret Harte to give it a place in the "Overland," and this was finally done. "Nevertheless," says Mr. Bierce, "it was several months before he overcame his prejudice against the verses and printed them. Indeed he never cared for the thing, and was greatly amused by the meanings that so many read into it. He said he meant nothing whatever by it." We have Mark Twain's word to the same effect. "In 1866," he writes, "I went to the Sandwich Islands, and when I returned, after several years, Harte was famous as the author of the _Heathen Chinee_. He said that the _Heathen Chinee_ was an accident, and that he had higher literary ambitions than the fame that could come from an extravaganza of that sort." "_The Luck of Roaring Camp_," Mr. Clemens goes on to say, "was the salvation of his literary career. It placed him securely on a literary road which was more to his taste." Bret Harte, indeed, frequently held back for weeks poems which he had completed, but with which he was not content. As one of his fellow-workers declared, "He was never fully satisfied with what he finally allowed to go to the printer." His position in San Francisco was now assured. He had been made professor of recent literature in the University of California; he retained his place at the Mint, he was the successful Editor of the "Overland," and he was happy in his home life. One who knew him well at this period speaks of him as "always referring to his wife in affectionate terms, and quoting her clever speeches, and relating with fond enjoyment the funny sayings and doings of his children." Let us, for the moment, leave Bret Harte thus happily situated, and glance at that Pioneer life which he was now engaged in portraying. Said a San Francisco paper in 1851, "The world will never know, and no one could imagine the heart-rending scenes, or the instances of courage and heroic self-sacrifice which have occurred among the California Pioneers during the last three years!" And yet when these words were penned there was growing up in the East a stripling destined to preserve for posterity some part, at least, of those very occurrences which otherwise would have remained "unrecorded and forgot." CHAPTER V THE PIONEER MEN AND WOMEN When Bret Harte first became famous he was accused of misrepresenting Pioneer society. A California writer of great ability--no less a person than Professor Royce, the eminent philosopher--once spoke of the "perverse romanticism" of his tales; and after Mr. Harte's death these accusations, if they may be called such, were renewed in San Francisco with some bitterness. It is strange that Californians themselves should have been so anxious to strip from their State the distinction which Bret Harte conferred upon it,--so anxious to prove that its heroic age never existed, that life in California has always been just as commonplace, respectable and uninteresting as it is anywhere else in the world. But, be this as it may, the diaries, letters and narratives written by Pioneers themselves, and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published in San Francisco and elsewhere from 1849 to 1855, fully corroborate Bret Harte's assertion that he described only what actually occurred. "The author has frequently been asked," he wrote, "if such and such incidents were real,--if he had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, _correcting some of the minor details of his facts_, and inclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination." Even that bizarre character, the old Frenchman in _A Ship of '49_, was taken absolutely from the life, except that the real man was of English birth. His peculiarities, mental and physical, his dress, his wig, his residence in the old ship were all just as they are described by Bret Harte.[13] This is not to say that everybody in California was a romantic person, or that life there was simply a succession of startling incidents. Ordinary people were doing ordinary things on the Pacific Slope, just as they did during the worst horrors of the French Revolution. But the exceptional persons that Bret Harte described really existed; and, moreover, they existed in such proportion as to give character and tone to the whole community. The fact is that Bret Harte only skimmed the cream from the surface. To use his own words again, "The faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of Jason." They were picked men placed in extraordinary circumstances, and how could that combination fail to result in extraordinary characters, deeds, events, and situations! The Forty-Niners,[14] and those who came in the early Fifties, were such men as enlist in the first years of a war. They were young men. Never, since Mediæval days when men began life at twenty and commonly ended it long before sixty, was there so youthful a society. A man of fifty with a gray beard was pointed out in the streets of San Francisco as a curiosity. In the convention to organize the State which met at Monterey, in September, 1849, there were forty-eight delegates, of whom only four were fifty years or more; fifteen were under thirty years of age; twenty-three were between thirty and forty. These were the venerable men of the community, selected to make the laws of the new commonwealth. A company of California emigrants that left Virginia in 1852 consisted wholly of boys under twenty.[15] The Pioneers were far above the average in vigor and enterprise, and in education as well. One ship, the "Edward Everett," sailed from Boston in January, 1849, with one hundred and fifty young men on board who owned both ship and cargo; and the distinguished gentleman for whom they had named their ship gave them a case full of books to beguile the tedium of the voyage around Cape Horn. William Grey, who wrote an interesting account of California life,[16] sailed from New York with a ship-load of emigrants. He describes them as a "fine-looking and well-educated body of men,--all young"; and he gives a similar description of the passengers on three other ships that came into the port of Rio Janeiro while he was there. He adds that on his ship there were only three bad characters, a butcher from Washington Market and his two sons. They all perished within a year of their arrival in California. The father died while drunk, one of the sons was hanged, and the other was killed in a street row. The Pioneers were handsome men.[17] They were tall men. Of the two hundred grown men in the town of Suisun, twenty-one stood over six feet high. Many of the Pioneers were persons for whom a career is not easily found in a conservative, sophisticated society; who, in such a society, fail to be successful as much because of their virtues as of their defects; men who lack that combination of cunning and ferocity which leads most directly to the acquisition of wealth; magnanimous, free-handed, and brave, but unthrifty and incapable of monotonous toil; archaic men, not quite broken in to the modern ideal of drudging at one task for six days in the week and fifty weeks in the year. Who does not know the type! The hero of novels, the idol of mothers, the alternate hope and despair of fathers, the truest of friends, the most ideal and romantic, but perhaps not the most constant of lovers. From the Western and Southwestern States there came across the Plains a different type. These men were Pioneers already by inheritance and tradition, somewhat ignorant, slow and rough, but of boundless courage and industry, stoical as Indians, independent and self-reliant. Most of Bret Harte's tragic characters, such as Tennessee's Partner, Madison Wayne, and the Bell-Ringer of Angel's, were of this class. Many of these emigrants, especially those who crossed the Mountains before the discovery of gold, were trappers and hunters,--stalwart, bearded men, clad in coats of buffalo hide, with faces deeply tanned and wrinkled by long exposure to wind and weather. Perhaps the best known among them was "old Greenwood," a tall, raw-boned, muscular man, who at the age of eighty-three was still vigorous and active. For thirty years he made his home among the Crow Indians, and he had taken to wife a squaw who bore him four handsome sons. His dress was of tanned buckskin, and one observer, more squeamish than the ordinary Pioneer, noted the seeming fact that it had never been removed since first he put it on. His heroic calibre may be estimated from the fact that he was capable of eating ten pounds of meat a day. This man used to boast that he had killed more than a hundred Indians with his own hand. But all that killing had been done in fair fight; and when a cowardly massacre of seven Indians, captured in a raid led by Greenwood's sons, took place near Sacramento in 1849,--one of many such acts,--the Greenwood family did their best to save the victims. After the deed had been done, "Old Greenwood," an eye-witness relates, "raved around his cabin, tossed his arms aloft with violent denunciation, and, stooping down, gathered the dust in his palms, and sprinkled it on his head, swearing that he was innocent of their blood." Another hero of the Pacific Slope in those large, early days was Peg-leg Smith. He derived his nickname from a remarkable incident. While out on the Plains with a wagon-load of supplies, Smith--plain Smith at that time--was accidentally thrown from his seat, and the heavy wheel passed over his leg below the knee, crushing it so that amputation became necessary. There was no surgeon within hundreds of miles; but if the amputation were not performed, it was plain that mortification and death would soon result. In this emergency, Smith hacked out a rude saw from a butcher's knife which he had with him, built a fire and heated an iron bolt that he took from the wagon, and then, with his hunting knife and his improvised saw, cut off his own leg. This done, he drew the flesh down over the wound, and seared it with the hot iron to prevent bleeding. He recovered, procured a wooden leg, and lived to take part in many succeeding adventures. We owe California primarily to these hunters, trappers and adventurous farmers who crossed the Mountains on their own account, or, later, as members of Frémont's band: Stern men, with empires in their brains. They firmly believed that it was the "manifest destiny" of the United States to spread over the Continent; and this conviction was not only a patriotic, but in some sense a religious one. They were mainly descendants of the Puritans, and as such had imbibed Old Testament ideas which justified and sanctioned their dreams of conquest. We have seen how the venerable Greenwood covered his head with dust as a symbolic act. The Reverend Mr. Colton records a significant remark made to him by a Pioneer, seventy-six years old, who had four sons in Frémont's company, and who himself joined the Volunteers raised in California. "I asked him if he had no compunction in taking up arms against the native inhabitants, the moment of his arrival. He said he had Scripture example for it. The Israelites took the promised land of the East by arms, and the Americans must take the promised land of the West in the same way." And Mr. Colton adds: "I find this kind of parallel running in the imagination of all the emigrants. They seem to look upon this beautiful land as their own Canaan, and the motley race around them as the Hittites, the Hivites and Jebusites whom they are to drive out."[18] But, it need hardly be said, the Biblical argument upon which they relied was in the nature of an afterthought--the justification, rather than the cause of their actions. What really moved them, although they did not know it, was that primeval instinct of expansion, based upon conscious superiority of race, to which have been due all the great empires of the past. Many of these people were deeply religious in a Gothic manner, and Bret Harte has touched lightly upon this aspect of their natures, especially in the case of Mr. Joshua Rylands. "Mr. Joshua Rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class, 'found grace' at the age of sixteen, while still in the spiritual state of 'original sin,' and the political one of Missouri.... When, after the Western fashion, the time came for him to forsake his father's farm, and seek a new 'quarter section' on some more remote frontier, he carried into the secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of pioneer life--which has been the foundation of so much strong Western character--more than the usual religious feeling." Exactly the same kind of man is described in that once famous story, Mr. Eggleston's "Circuit-Rider"; and it is still found in the mountains of Kentucky, where the maintenance of ferocious feuds and a constant readiness to kill one's enemies at sight are regarded as not inconsistent with a sincere profession of the Christian religion. The reader of Bret Harte's stories will remember how often the expression "Pike County" or "Piker" occurs; and this use is strictly historical. As a very intelligent Pioneer expressed it, "We recognize in California but two types of the Republican character, the Yankee and the Missourian. The latter term was first used to represent the entire population of the West; but Pike County superseded, first the name of the State, and soon that of the whole West." How did this come about? Pike County, Missouri, was named for Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the discoverer of Pike's Peak, and the officer who was sent by the United States Government to explore the upper part of the Mississippi River. He was killed in the War of 1812. The territory was first settled in 1811 by emigrants from Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana; and it was incorporated as a county in 1818. It borders on the Mississippi River, about forty miles north of St. Louis; and its whole area is only sixty square miles. It was and is an agricultural county, and in 1850 the population amounted to only thirteen thousand, six hundred and nine persons, of whom about half were negroes, mostly slaves. The climate is healthy, and the soil, especially on the prairies, is very fertile, being a rich, deep loam.[19] Pike County, it will thus be seen, is but a small part, both numerically and geographically, of that vast Western territory which contributed to the California emigration; and it owes its prominence among the Pioneers chiefly to a copy of doggerel verses. In 1849, Captain McPike, a leading resident of the County, organized a band of two hundred Argonauts who crossed the Plains. Among them was an ox-driver named Joe Bowers, who soon made a reputation in the company as a humorist, as an "original," as a "greenhorn," and as a "good fellow" generally. Joe Bowers was poor, he was in love, he was seeking a fortune in order that he might lay it at the feet of his sweetheart; and the whole company became his confidants and sympathizers. Another member of the party was a certain Frank Swift, who afterward attained some reputation as a journalist; and one evening, as they were all sitting around the camp-fire, Swift recited, or rather sang to a popular air, several stanzas of a poem about Joe Bowers, which he had composed during the day's journey. It caught the fancy of the company at once, and soon every member was singing it. The poem grew night by night, and long before they reached their destination it had become a ballad of exasperating length. The poet, looking forward in a fine frenzy, describes the girl as proving faithless to Joe Bowers and marrying a red-haired butcher. This bad news comes from Joe's brother Ike in a letter which also states the culminating fact of the tragedy, as the following lines reveal:-- It told me more than that, Oh! it's enough to make me swear. It said Sally had a baby, And the baby had red hair! [Illustration: GRAND PLAZA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1852] Upon their arrival in California, the two hundred men who composed this party dispersed in all directions, and carried the ballad with them. It was heard everywhere in the mines, and in 1856 it was printed in a cheap form in San Francisco, and was sung by Johnson's minstrels at a hall known as the Old Melodeon. Joe Bowers thus became the type of the unsophisticated Western miner, and Pike County became the symbol of the West. Crude as the verses are they are sung to this day in the County which gave them birth, and "Joe Bowers" is still a familiar name in Missouri, if not in the West generally. This ballad which came across the Plains had its counterpart in a much better song produced by Jonathan Nichols, a Pioneer who sailed on the bark "Eliza" from Salem, Massachusetts, in December, 1848. The first stanza is as follows:-- TUNE, _Oh! Susanna_. (Key of G.) I came from Salem city, With my washbowl on my knee, I'm going to California, The gold dust for to see. It rained all night the day I left, The weather, it was dry, The sun so hot I froze to death, Oh! brothers, don't you cry, Oh! California, That's the land for me! I'm going to Sacramento With my washbowl on my knee. Under the title of the "California Song" these verses soon became the common property of every ship sailing from Atlantic ports for San Francisco, and later they were heard in the mines almost as frequently as "Joe Bowers." But, as hope diminished and homesickness increased, both ballads--so an old miner relates--gave place to "Home, Sweet Home," "Ole Virginny," and other sad ditties. Pike County seems to have had a natural tendency to burst into poetry. In the story called _Devil's Ford_, Bret Harte gives us two lines from a poem otherwise unknown to fame,-- "'Oh, my name it is Johnny from Pike, I'm hell on a spree or a strike.'" In the story of _The New Assistant at Pine Clearing School_, three big boys from Pike County explained to the schoolmistress their ideas upon the subject of education, as follows: "'We ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don't want no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo'nin'. We reckon to do our sums and our figgerin', and our sale and barter, and our interest tables and weights and measures when the time comes, and our geograffy when it's on, and our readin' and writin' and the American Constitution in regular hours, and then we calkillate to git up and git afore the po'try and the Boston airs and graces come round.'" The "Sacramento Transcript," of June 11, 1850, tells a story about a minister from Pike County which has a similar ring. "A miner took sick and died at a bar that was turning out very rich washings. As he happened to be a favorite in the camp, it was determined to have a general turn-out at his burial. An old Pike County preacher was engaged to officiate, but he thought it proper to moisten his clay a little before his solemn duty. The parson being a favorite, and the grocery near by, he partook with one and another before the services began, until his underpinning became quite unsteady. Presently it was announced that the last sad rites were about to be concluded, and our clerical friend advanced rather unsteadily to perform the functions of his office. After an exordium worthy of his best days, the crowd knelt around the grave, but as he was praying with fervency one of the party discovered some of the shining metal in the dirt thrown from the grave, and up he jumped and started for his pan, followed by the crowd. The minister, opening his eyes in wonder and seeing the game, cried out for a share; his claim was recognized and reserved for him until he should get sober. In the mean time, another hole was dug for the dead man, that did not furnish a like temptation to disturb his grave, and he was hurriedly deposited without further ceremony." Bret Harte's best and noblest character, Tennessee's Partner, might have been from Pike County,--he was of that kind; and Morse, the hero of the story called _In the Tules_, certainly was:-- "The stranger stared curiously at him. After a pause he said with a half-pitying, half-humorous smile:-- "'Pike--aren't you?' "Whether Morse did or did not know that this current California slang for a denizen of the bucolic West implied a certain contempt, he replied simply:-- "'I'm from Pike County, Mizzouri.'" To the same effect is the historian: "To be catalogued as from Pike County seems to express a little more churlishness, a little more rudeness, a greater reserve when courtesy or hospitality is called for than I ever found in the Western character at home."[20] The type thus indicated was a very marked one, and was often spoken of with astonishment by more sophisticated Pioneers. Some of these Missouri men had never seen two houses together, until they came to California, so that even a little village in the mines appeared to them as a marvel of civilization and luxury. Their dress was home-made and by no means new or clean. Over their shoulders they wore strips of cotton or cloth as suspenders, and their coats were tight-waisted, long-tailed surtouts such as were fashionable in the eighteenth century. Their inseparable companion was a long-barrelled rifle, with which they could "draw a bead" on a deer or a squirrel or the white of an Indian's eye with equal coolness and certainty of killing. Bayard Taylor describes the same type as he met it in the ship which carried him from New Orleans to Panama in '49. "Long, loosely-jointed men, with large hands, and awkward feet and limbs; their faces long and sallow; their hair long, straight and black; their expression one of settled melancholy. The corners of their mouths curved downward, and their upper lips were drawn tightly over their lower ones, thus giving to their faces that look of ferocity which is peculiar to Indians. These men chewed tobacco incessantly, drank copiously, were heavily armed with knives and pistols, and breathed defiance to all foreigners."[21] These long, sallow-faced men were probably sufferers from that fever and ague, or malaria, as we now call it, which was rife in all the "bottom lands" of the Western States; and the greater part of Pike County was included in that category. Much, indeed, of the emigration from Missouri and Illinois to California was inspired less by the love of gold than by the desire to escape from disease. Bret Harte, in many places, speaks of these fever-ridden Westerners, especially in _An Apostle of the Tules_, where he describes a camp-meeting, attended chiefly by "the rheumatic Parkinsons, from Green Springs; the ophthalmic Filgees, from Alder Creek; the ague-stricken Harveys, from Martinez Bend; and the feeble-limbed Steptons, from Sugar Mill." "These," he adds, "might in their combined families have suggested a hospital, rather than any other social assemblage." But these sickly or ague-smitten people formed only a small part of the Pioneers. The greater number represented the youth and strength of both the Western and Eastern States. In 1852, an interior newspaper called the "San Andreas Independent" declared, "We have a population made up from the most energetic of the civilized earth's population"; and the boast was true. Moreover, the Pioneers who reached California had been winnowed and sifted by the hardships and privations which beset both the land and the sea route. Thousands of the weaker among them had succumbed to starvation or disease, and their bones were whitening the Plains or lying in the vast depths of the Pacific Ocean. There was scarcely a village in the West or South, or even in New England, which did not mourn the loss of some brave young gold-seeker whose unknown fate was a matter of speculation for years afterward. The length of the voyage from Atlantic ports to San Francisco was from four to five months, but most of the Pioneers who came by sea avoided the passage around Cape Horn, and crossed the Isthmus of Nicaragua, or, more commonly, of Panama. This, in either case, was a much shorter route; but it added the horrors of pestilence and fever, and of possible robbery and murder, to the ordinary dangers of the sea. All the blacklegs, it was noticed, took the shorter route, deeming themselves, no doubt, incapable of sustaining the prolonged ennui of a voyage around the Cape. Passengers who crossed the Isthmus of Panama disembarked at Chagres, a port so unhealthy that policies of life insurance contained a clause to the effect that if the insured remained there more than one night, his policy would be void. Chagres enjoyed the distinction of being the dirtiest place in the world. The inhabitants were almost all negroes, and one Pioneer declared that a flock of buzzards would present a favorable comparison with them. From Chagres there was, first, a voyage of seventy-five miles up the river of the same name to Gorgona, or to Cruces, five miles farther. This was accomplished in dugouts propelled by the native Indians. Thence to Panama the Pioneers travelled on foot, or on mule-back, over a narrow, winding bridle-path through the mountains, so overhung by trees and dense tropical growths that in many places it was dark even at mid-day. This was the opportunity of the Indian muleteer, and more than one gold-seeker never emerged from the gloomy depths of that winding trail. Originally, it was the work of the Indians; but the Spaniards who used the path in the sixteenth century had improved it, and in many places had secured the banks with stones. Now, however, the trail had fallen into decay, and in spots was almost impassable. But the tracks worn in the soft, calcareous rock by the many iron-shod hoofs which had passed over it, still remained; and the mule that bore the American seeking gold in California placed his feet in the very holes which had been made by his predecessors, painfully bearing the silver of Peru on its way to enrich the grandees of Spain. Bad as the journey across the Isthmus was or might be, the enforced delay at Panama was worse. The number of passengers far exceeded the capacity of the vessels sailing from that port to San Francisco, and those who waited at Panama were in constant danger of cholera, of the equally dreaded Panama fever, and sometimes of smallpox. The heat was almost unbearable, and the blacks were a source of annoyance, and even of danger. "There is not in the whole world," remarked a contemporary San Francisco paper, "a more infamous collection of villains than the Jamaica negroes who are congregated at Panama and Chagres." In their eagerness to get away from Panama, some Pioneers paid in advance for transportation in old rotten hulks which were never expected or intended to reach San Francisco, but which, springing a leak or being otherwise disabled, would put into some port in Lower California where the passengers would be left without the means of continuing their journey, and frequently without money. Both on the voyage from Panama and also on the long route around Cape Horn, ship-captains often saved their good provisions for the California market, and fed their passengers on nauseous "lobscouse" and "dunderfunk." Scurvy and other diseases resulted. An appeal to the United States consul at Rio Janeiro, when the ship touched there, was sometimes effectual, and in other cases the passengers took matters into their own hands and disciplined a rapacious captain or deposed a drunken one. In view of these uprisings, some New York skippers declined to take command of ships about to sail for California, supposing that passengers who could do such an unheard-of thing as to rebel against the master of a vessel must be a race of pirates. Great pains were taken to secure a crew of determined men for these ships, and a plentiful supply of muskets, handcuffs and shackles was always put on board. But such precautions proved to be ridiculously unnecessary. There was no case in which the Pioneers usurped authority on shipboard without sufficient cause; and in no case was an emigrant brought to trial on reaching San Francisco. In the various ports at which they stopped much was to be seen of foreign peoples and customs; and not infrequently the Pioneers had an opportunity to show their mettle. At Santa Catharina, for example, a port on the lower coast of Brazil, a young American was murdered by a Spaniard. The authorities were inclined to treat the matter with great indifference; but there happened to be in the harbor two ship-loads of passengers en route for San Francisco, and these men threatened to seize the fortress and demolish it if justice was not done. Thereupon the murderer was tried and hung. Many South Americans in the various ports along the coast got their first correct notion of the people of the United States from these chance encounters with sea-going Pioneers. Still more, of course, was the overland journey an education in self-reliance, in that resourcefulness which distinguishes the American, and in that courage which was so often needed and so abundantly displayed in the early mining days. Independence in the State of Missouri was a favorite starting-point, and from this place there were two routes, the southern one being by way of Santa Fé, and the northern route following the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall, and thence ascending the course of the Humboldt River to its rise in the Sierra Nevadas. At Fort Hall some large companies which had travelled from the Mississippi River, and even from States east of that, separated, one half going to Oregon, the other turning westward to California; and thus were broken many ties of love and friendship which had been formed in the close intimacy of the long journey, especially between the younger members of the company. Old diaries and letters reveal suggestions of romance if not of tragedy in these separations, and in the choice which the emigrant maiden was sometimes forced to make between the conflicting claims of her lover and her parents. In the year 1850 fifty thousand crossed the Plains. In 1851 immigration fell off because even at that early date there was a business "depression," almost a "panic" in California, but in 1852 it increased again, and the Plains became a thoroughfare, dotted so far as the eye could see with long trains of white-covered wagons, moving slowly through the dust. In one day a party from Virginia passed thirty-two wagons, and during a stop in the afternoon five hundred overtook them. In after years the course of these wagons could easily be traced by the alien vegetation which marked it. Wherever the heavy wheels had broken the tough prairie sod there sprang up, from the Missouri to the Sierras, a narrow belt of flowering plants and familiar door-yard weeds,--silent witnesses of the great migration which had passed that way. Multitudes of horsemen accompanied the wagons, and other multitudes plodded along on foot. Banners were flying here and there, and the whole appearance was that of an army on the march. At night camp-fires gleamed for miles through the darkness, and if the company were not exhausted the music of a violin or a banjo floated out on the still air of the prairies. But the fatigue of the march, supplemented by the arduous labors of camping out, was usually sufficient to send the travellers to bed at the earliest possible moment. The food consisted chiefly of salt pork or bacon,--varied when that was possible with buffalo meat or venison,--beans, baked dough called bread, and flapjacks. The last, always associated with mining life in California, were made by mixing flour and water into a sort of batter, seasoning with salt, adding a little saleratus or cooking soda, and frying the mixture in a pan greased with fat. Men ate enormously on these journeys. Four hundred pounds of sugar lasted four Pioneers only ninety days. This inordinate appetite and the quantity of salt meat eaten frequently resulted in scurvy, from which there were some deaths. Another cause of illness was the use of milk from cows driven along with the wagon-trains, and made feverish by heat and fatigue. Many of the emigrants, especially those who undertook the journey in '49 or '50, were insufficiently equipped, and little aware of the difficulties and dangers which awaited them. Death in many forms hovered over those heavy, creaking, canvas-covered wagons--the "prairie-schooners," which, drawn sometimes by horses, sometimes by oxen, sometimes by mules, jolted slowly and laboriously over two thousand miles and more of plain and mountain,--death from disease, from want of water, from starvation, from Indians, and, in crossing the Sierras, from raging snow-storms and intense cold. Rivers had to be forded, deserts crossed and a thousand accidents and annoyances encountered. Some men made the long journey on foot, even from points east of the Mississippi River. One gray-haired Pioneer walked all the way from Michigan with a pack on his back. Another enthusiast obtained some notoriety among the emigrants of 1850 by trundling a wheelbarrow, laden with his goods, from Illinois to Salt Lake City. Bret Harte, as we have seen, reached California by sea, and there is no record of any journey by ox-cart that he made; and yet in _A Waif of the Plains_ he describes such a journey with a particularity which seems almost impossible for one who knew it only by hearsay. Thus, among many other details, he speaks of "a chalky taste of dust on the mouth and lips, a gritty sense of earth on the fingers, and an all-pervading heat and smell of cattle." And in the same description occurs one of those minute touches for which he is remarkable: "The hoofs of the draught-oxen, occasionally striking in the dust with a dull report, sent little puffs like smoke on either side of the track." Often the cattle would break loose at night and disappear on the vast Plains, and men in search of them were sometimes lost, and died of starvation or were killed by Indians. Simply for the sake of better grazing oxen have been known to retrace their steps at night for twenty-five miles. The opportunities for selfishness, for petulance, for obstinacy, for resentment were almost innumerable. Cooking and washing were the labors which, in the absence of women, proved most vexatious to the emigrants. "Of all miserable work," said one, "washing is the worst, and no man who crossed the Plains will ever find fault again with his wife for scolding on a washing day." All the Pioneers who have related their experiences on the overland journey speak of the bad effect on men's tempers. "The perpetual vexations and hardships keep the nerves in a state of great irritability. The trip is a sort of magic mirror, exposing every man's qualities of heart, vicious or amiable."[22] The shooting affairs which occurred among the emigrants were usually the result of some sudden provocation, following upon a long course of irritation between the persons concerned. Those who crossed the Plains in the summer of 1853, or afterward, might have passed a grave with this inscription: BEAL SHOT BY BOLSBY, JUNE 15, 1853. And, a day's journey further, they would have noticed another grave thus inscribed: BOLSBY SHOT FOR THE MURDER OF BEAL, JUNE 16, 1853. This murder, to call it such, was the consequence of some insult offered to Bolsby by the other. Bolsby was forthwith tried by the company, and condemned to be shot the next morning at sunrise. He had been married only about a year before, and had left his wife and child at their home in Kentucky. For the remainder of the day he travelled with the others, and the short hours of the summer night which followed were spent by him in writing to his wife and to his father and mother. Of all the great multitude, scattered over the wide earth, who passed that particular night in sleepless agony of mind, perhaps none was more to be pitied. When morning came he dressed himself neatly in his wedding suit, and was led out to execution. With rare magnanimity, he acknowledged that his sentence was a just one, and said that he had so written to his family, and that he had been treated with consideration; but he declared that if the thing were to happen again, he would kill Beal as before. He then knelt on his blanket, gave the signal for shooting, and fell dead, pierced by six bullets. The misfortunes of the Donner party began with a homicide. This is the party whose sufferings are described by Bret Harte without exaggeration in _Gabriel Conroy_. It included robbers, cannibals, murderers and heroes; and one interesting aspect of its experience is the superior endurance, both moral and physical, shown by the women. In the small detachment which, as a forlorn hope, tried to cross the Mountains in winter without provisions, and succeeded, there were twelve men and five women. Of the twelve men five died, of the five women none died![23] Indians were often encountered on the Great Plains and in the valleys of the Colorado and Rio Grande. They were well-disposed, at first, and soon acquired some familiarity with the ordinary forms of speech used by the Pioneers. Thus one traveller reports the following friendly salutation from a member of the Snake Tribe: "How de do--Whoa haw! G--d d--n you!" On another occasion when a party of Pioneers were inquiring of some Indians about a certain camping-ground ahead of them, they were assured that there would be "plenty of grass there for the whoa haws, but no water for the g--d d--ns." Later, however, owing chiefly to unprovoked attacks by emigrants, the Indians became hostile and dangerous. Many Pioneers were robbed and some were killed by them. The Western Indian was a figure at once grotesque and terrible; and Bret Harte's description of him, as he appeared to the emigrant boy lost on the Plains, gives the reader such a pleasant thrill of horror as he may not have experienced since Robinson Crusoe made his awful discovery of a human footprint in the sand. "He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself between him and the horizon!... A human figure, but so dishevelled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and puerile in its extravagance that it seemed the outcome of a childish dream. It was a mounted figure, yet so ludicrously disproportionate to the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and brimless, a castaway of civilization, surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of some distant point.... Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony's legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that mysterious part of the horizon. There was no mistaking it now! The painted Hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! It was an Indian!"[24] There were some cases of captivity among the Indians the details of which recall the similar occurrences in New England in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most remarkable case was that of Olive Oatman, a young girl from Illinois, who was carried off by one tribe of Indians, was sold later to another, nearly died of starvation, and, finally, after a lapse of six years, was recovered safe and sound. Her brother, a boy of twelve, was beaten with clubs by the Indians, and left for dead with the bodies of his father and mother; but he revived, and succeeded in making his way back for a distance of seventy miles, when he met a party of Pima Indians, who treated him with kindness. Forty-five miles of that lonely journey lay through a desert where no water could be obtained. Abner Nott's daughter, Rosey, the attractive heiress of the Pontiac, was made of the same heroic stuff. "The Rosey ez I knows," said her father, "is a little gal whose voice was as steady with Injuns yellin' round her nest in the leaves on Sweetwater ez in her purty cabin up yonder." Lanty Foster, too, was of "that same pioneer blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, ... whose father's rifle had been levelled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside." It was from these Western and Southwestern emigrants that Bret Harte's nobler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The "great West" furnished his heroic characters,--California was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep. The Pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte himself occasionally points out. "She brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath--as soft and warm as the Southwest trades--stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry as it was perhaps from educated delicacy."[25] And yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte's women, and of his men as well, give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one of his characters, "He had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;" and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. In fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of Bret Harte's Pioneers, and perhaps, moreover, explains some obscure points in his own life. Be this as it may, the defects of Bret Harte's heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis, is founded the greatness of nations. A sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte "did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman." No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte's best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to be inseparable in man or beast from the capacity for deep affection. They have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear common-sense, the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than American, which certainly is not a part of the typical American woman as we know her in the Eastern States. Perhaps the final test of nobility in man or woman is the capacity to value _something_, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself; and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte's heroines. They are as ready to die for love as Juliet was, and along with this _abandon_ they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman's nature in the age that produced Shakspere's "unlessoned girl." Bret Harte's heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both Tourgueneff and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. They love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. There is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. This is the way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander--economical, poverty-stricken man--stand aghast. In Russia this type of woman is frequently found, as Tourgueneff, and to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper classes, which have retained a pristine quality long since bred out of the corresponding classes in England and in the United States. For women of the same type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper classes. Women of this kind sometimes fail in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality. After all, chastity is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. The chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love. It is to be observed, however, that Bret Harte's women do not need this defence, for his heroines, with the single exception of the faithful Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose women in Bret Harte's stories are the obviously bad women, the female "villains" of the play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan, in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, the wives of Brown of Calaveras and The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs. Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in _A Mercury of the Foot-Hills_--these very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand, in Thomas Hardy and Tourgueneff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of Bret Harte's stories in this respect. It is due, not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in California, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city of San Francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the State the standard of feminine virtue was high. Perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men reacting upon the women,--to that feeling which Bret Harte himself called "the Western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex," and, again, "the innate Far-Western reverence for women." In all European societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference between this attitude of men to women and that which Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he says somewhere, "thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives' superior fortune." They married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence. The complement of this feeling, on the woman's side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret Harte's heroines invariably show. No mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was "the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub." Bret Harte's heroines are almost all of the robust type. A companion picture to the Rose is that of Jinny in the story _When the Waters Were Up at "Jules'."_ "Certainly she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. She lifted the big molasses can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a Greek water-bearer. She upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm of an Egyptian caryatid." Trinidad Joe's daughter, too, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and white teeth. It was of her that the Doctor said, "If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she was a goddess." Something more, however, goes to the making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle. Bret Harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of beauty and refinement among the Western and Southwestern people. Kitty, for example, as the Reader will remember, "was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of the Boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien." In _A Vision of the Fountain_, Bret Harte, half humorously, suggested an explanation. He speaks of the hero as "a singularly handsome young fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in Western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier."[26] It seems more likely, however, that a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty, a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings which have either the beauty of art or the beauty of nature. These are the very advantages which, with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the daughters of a nobility. On the other hand, they are the very advantages with which the middle class in cities, the cockney class, is almost always obliged to dispense, and that class is conspicuously deficient in beauty. Perhaps no one thing is more conducive to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations known as "social superiors." Imagine a society in which it would be impossible to make anybody understand what is meant by the word "snob"! And yet such was, and to a considerable extent still is, the society of the Far West and of rural New England. Bret Harte himself glanced at this subject in describing the Blue-Grass Penelope. "Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the County judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter." No less obvious is the connection of repose with beauty. Beauty springs up naturally among people who know the luxury of repose, and yet are vigorous enough to escape the dangers of sloth. Salomy Jane was lazy as well as handsome, and when we first catch a glimpse of her she is leaning against a door-post, engaged in the restful occupation of chewing gum. The same repose, amounting indeed to indolence, formed the chief charm of Mr. MacGlowrie's Widow. Whether or not the landscape plays a part in the production of womanly beauty is a question more open to dispute. Not many persons feel this influence, but, as experience will show, the proportion of country people who feel it is greater than that of city people, although they have considerably less to say upon the subject. The wide, open spaces, the distant horizon, the gathering of storms, the changing green of Spring and Summer, the scarlet and gold of Autumn, the vast expanse of spotless snow glistening in Midwinter,--these things must be seen by the countryman, his eyes cannot escape them, and in some cases they will be felt as well as seen. Whoever has travelled a New England country road upon a frosty, moonless night in late October, and has observed the Northern Lights casting a pale, cold radiance through the leafless trees, will surely detect some difference between that method of illumination and a kerosene lantern. A New England farmer whose home commanded a noble view of mountain, lake and forest was blessed with two daughters noted for their beauty. They grew up and married, but both died young; and many years afterward he was heard to say, as he looked dreamily out from his doorway, "I have often thought that the reason why my girls became beautiful women was that from their earliest childhood they always had this scene before their eyes." And yet he had never read Wordsworth or Ruskin! Bret Harte's heroines enjoyed all the advantages just enumerated as being conducive to beauty, and they escaped contamination from civilization. They were close to nature, and as primitive in their love-affairs as the heroines of Shakspere. "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight!" John Ashe's betrothed and Ridgeway Dent had known each other a matter of two hours or so, before they exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the lives of both. Two brief meetings, and one of those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and clever young deputy sheriff the affections of Lanty Foster. In _A Jack and Jill of the Sierras_, a handsome girl from the East tumbles over a precipice, and falls upon the recumbent hero, part way down, with such violence as to stun him. This is hardly romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which they make together furnishes the required opportunity. Ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is the girl's character indicated by a few masterly strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result. And yet there is nothing that savors of coarseness, much less of levity, in these abrupt romances. When Bret Harte's heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other. It is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression is as deep as it is sudden. What said Juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour? "Go, ask his name: if he be marrièd My grave is like to be my wedding bed." So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed to Dr. Ruysdael, "I'll go with you or I'll die!" It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte's love-affairs. Genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop. "There they stood alone. There was no sound or motion in earth or woods or heaven. They might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created. And seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss." But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other's presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in "an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone." Could any country in the world except our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and class; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged. Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others. It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy's father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband's and her daughter's innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will remember, "looked upon her daughter's studies and her husband's interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... 'The old man's worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,' she had explained." Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to "Kam" as Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it. Thus he said to the Schoolmaster: "'I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin' stock or fightin' stakes with them Harrisons that she was a-settin' in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin' to them and to you. Mebbe there's been a little too many scrimmages goin' on round the ranch sence she's been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin' more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.' "The master was silent. Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter's needs better than he?" Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England! Bret Harte's stories of the Western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them. They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature. CHAPTER VI PIONEER LIFE To be successful and popular among the Pioneers was something really to a man's credit. Men were thrown upon their own resources, and, as in Mediæval times, were their own police and watchmen, their own firemen, and in most cases their own judge and jury. There was no distribution of the inhabitants into separate classes: they constituted a single class, the only distinction being that between individuals. There was not even the broad distinction between those who worked with their heads and those who worked with their hands. Everybody, except the gamblers, performed manual labor; and although this condition could not long prevail in San Francisco or Sacramento, it continued in the mines for many months. In fact, any one who did not live by actual physical toil was regarded by the miners as a social excrescence, a parasite.[27] An old miner, after spending a night in a San Francisco lodging house, paid the proprietor with gold dust. While waiting for his change he seemed to be studying the keeper of the house as a novel and not over-admirable specimen of humanity. Finally he inquired of him as follows: "Say, now, stranger, do you do nothing else but just sit there and take a dollar from every man that sleeps in these beds?" "Yes," was the reply, "that is my business." "Well, then," said the miner after a little further reflection, "it's a damned mean way of making your living; that's all I can say." Even those who were not democratic by nature became so in California. All men felt that they were, at last, free and equal. Social distinctions were rubbed out. A man was judged by his conduct, not by his bank account, nor by the set, the family, the club, or the church to which he belonged.[28] All former records were wiped from the slate; and nobody inquired whether, in order to reach California, a man had resigned public office or position, or had escaped from a jail. "Some of the best men," says Bret Harte, "had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless, Puritan pedigree. 'The boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round,' said Mr. John Oakhurst one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who was conscious of his ability to win my money, 'and there is no knowing whether a man will turn out knave or king.'" This, perhaps, sounds a little improbable, and yet here, as always, Bret Harte has merely stated the fact as it was. One of the most accurate contemporary historians says: "The man esteemed virtuous at home becomes profligate here, the honest man dishonest, and the clergyman sometimes a profane gambler; while, on the contrary, the cases are not few of those who were idle or profligate at home, who came here to be reformed."[29] "It was a republic of incognitos. No one knew who any one else was, and only the more ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. Gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism."[30] [Illustration: THE FIRST HOTEL AT SAN FRANCISCO Copyright, Century Co.] "Have you a letter of introduction?" wrote a Pioneer to a friend in the East about to sail for California. "If you have, never present it. No one here has time to read such things. No one cares even to know your name. If you are the right sort of a man, everything goes smoothly here." "What is your partner's last name?" asked one San Francisco merchant of another in 1850. "Really, I don't know," was the reply; "we have only been acquainted three or four weeks." A miner at Maryville once offered to wager his old blind mule against a plug of tobacco that the company, although they had been acquainted for some years, could not tell one another's names; and this was found upon trial to be the case. Men were usually known, as Bret Harte relates, by the State or other place from which they came,--with some prefix or affix to denote a salient characteristic. Thus one miner, in a home letter, speaks of his friends, "Big Pike, Little Pike, Old Kentuck, Little York, Big York, Sandy, and Scotty." Men originally from the East, and long supposed to be dead, turned up in California, seeking a new career. In fact, there seems to have been a general inclination among the Pioneers to strike out in new directions. "To find a man here engaged in his own trade or profession," wrote a Forty-Niner, "is a rare thing. The merchant of to-day is to-morrow a doctor; lawyers turn bankers, and bankers lawyers. The miners are almost continually on the move, passing from one claim to another, and from the Southern to the Northern mines, or _vice versa_." Bret Harte was startled by meeting an old acquaintance in a strange situation. "At my first breakfast in a restaurant on Long Wharf I was haunted during the meal by a shadowy resemblance which the waiter who took my order bore to a gentleman to whom in my boyhood I had looked up as to a mirror of elegance, urbanity, and social accomplishment. Fearful lest I should insult the waiter--who carried a revolver--by this reminiscence, I said nothing to him; but a later inquiry of the proprietor proved that my suspicions were correct. 'He's mighty handy,' said this man, 'and can talk elegant to a customer as is waiting for his cakes, and make him kinder forget he ain't sarved.'" Bret Harte relates another case. "An Argonaut just arriving was amazed at recognizing in the boatman who pulled him ashore, and who charged him the modest sum of fifty dollars for the performance, a classmate at Oxford. 'Were you not,' he asked eagerly, 'Senior Wrangler in '43?' 'Yes,' said the other significantly, 'but I also pulled stroke against Cambridge.'" A Yale College professor was hauling freight with a yoke of oxen; a Yale graduate was selling peanuts on the Plaza at San Francisco; an ex-governor was playing the fiddle in a bar-room; a physician was washing dishes in a hotel; a minister was acting as waiter in a restaurant; a lawyer was paring potatoes in the same place. Lawyers, indeed, were doing a great deal of useful work in California. One kept a mush and milk stand; another sold pies at a crossing of the American River; a third drove a team of mules. John A. McGlynn, one of the best known and most successful Forty-Niners, began by hitching two half-broken mustangs to an express wagon, and acting as teamster. He was soon chosen to enforce the rules regulating the unloading of vessels and the cartage of goods. All the drivers obeyed him, except one, a native of Chili, a big, powerful man, with a team of six American mules. McGlynn ordered him into line; he refused; and McGlynn struck him with his whip. In an instant both men had leaped from their wagon-seats to the ground. The Chileno rushed at McGlynn, with his bowie-knife in his hand; but the American was left-handed, for which the Chileno was not prepared; and with his first blow McGlynn stretched his antagonist on the ground. There he held him until the fellow promised good behavior. On regaining his feet the defeated man invited all hands to drink, and became thenceforth a warm friend of the victor. The judge of the Court for Santa Cruz County kept a hotel, and after court adjourned, he would take off his coat and wait on the table, serving jurors, attorneys, criminals and sheriffs with the same impartiality which he exhibited on the bench. A brief term of service as waiter in a San Francisco restaurant laid the foundation of the highly successful career of another lawyer, a very young man. One day a merchant upon whom he was waiting remarked to a companion: "If I only had a lawyer who was worth a damn, I could win that suit." "I am a lawyer," interposed the waiter, "and I am looking for a chance to get into business. Try me." The merchant did so; the suit was won; and the former waiter was soon in full legal practice. Acquaintances were formed, and the beginning of a fortune was often made, by chance meetings and incidents. Men got at one another more quickly than is possible in an old and conservative society. One who became a distinguished citizen of California began his career by accepting an offer of humble employment when he stepped into the street on his first morning in San Francisco. "Look here, my friend," said a merchant to him, "if you won't get mad about it, I'll offer you a dollar to fill this box with sand." "Thank you," said the young fellow, "I'll fill it all day long on those terms, and never become angry in the least." He filled the box, and received payment. "Now," he said, "we'll go and take a drink with this dollar." The merchant acquiesced with a laugh, and thus began a life-long connection between the two men. There were some recognitions of old acquaintances as remarkable as the making of new friends. Two brothers, Englishmen from the Society Islands, met in a mining town, and were not aware of their relationship until a chance conversation between them disclosed it. A merchant from Cincinnati arrived in San Francisco with the intention of settling there. One of the first persons whom he met was a prosperous business man who had absconded some years before with ten thousand dollars of his money. He recovered the ten thousand dollars and interest, without making the matter public, and went back to Ohio well satisfied. A lawyer of note in San Francisco remarked, in 1850, that the last time he saw Ned McGowan, previous to his arrival in California, McGowan stood in the criminal dock of a Philadelphia court where he was receiving a sentence to the State prison for robbery. Subsequently he was pardoned by the Governor of Pennsylvania, on condition that he should leave the State. When this lawyer settled in San Francisco, he was employed to defend some persons who had been arrested for drunkenness; and upon entering the court room he was thunderstruck by the appearance of the magistrate upon the bench. After a careful survey of the magistrate and a pinch of the flesh to make sure that he was not dreaming, he exclaimed:-- "Ned McGowan, is that you?" "It is," was the cool reply. "Well, gentlemen," said the lawyer, turning to his clients, "you had better toll down heavy, for I can do you no good with such a judge." Tolling down heavy was probably a practice which the judge encouraged, for, a year later, upon the organization of the Vigilance Committee, Ned McGowan fled from San Francisco, if not from California. California, from 1849 to 1858, was a meeting ground for all the nations of the earth. One of the first acts of the Legislature was to appoint an official translator. The confusion of languages resulted in many misunderstandings and some murders. A Frenchman and a German at Moquelumne Hill had a controversy about a water-privilege, and being unable to understand each other, they resorted first to pantomime, and then to firearms, with the unfortunate result that the German was killed. A trial which occurred at San José illustrates the multiplicity of tongues in California. A Spaniard accused a Tartar of assaulting him, but as the Tartar and his witnesses could not speak English the proceedings were delayed. At last another Tartar, called Arghat, was found who could speak Chinese, and then a Chinaman, called Alab, who could speak Spanish; and with these as interpreters the trial began. Another difficulty then arose, namely, the swearing of the witnesses. The court, having ascertained that the Tartar mode of swearing is by lifting a lighted candle toward the sun, adopted that form. The judge administered the ordinary oath to the English and Spanish interpreters; the latter then swore Arghat as Tartar and Chinese interpreter, and he, in turn, swore Alab, by the burning candle and the sun, as Chinese and Spanish interpreter; and the trial then proceeded in four languages. The first newspaper was printed half in English, half in Spanish. Sermons were preached by Catholic priests both in English and in Spanish. The Fourth of July was celebrated at San José in 1850 by one oration in English and another in Spanish. German and Italian weekly papers were published in San Francisco. The French population of the city was especially large. They made _rouge-et-noir_ the fashion. "Where there are Frenchmen," remarks a Pioneer, "you will find music, singing and gayety." A French benevolent society was established at San Francisco in 1851. Many of the best citizens of California were Englishmen. There was a famous ale-house in San Francisco, called the Boomerang, where sirloins of beef could be washed down with English ale, and followed by Stilton cheese; where the London "Times," "Punch" and "Bell's Life" were taken in. Australia and New South Wales contributed a considerable and by no means the best part of the population. The "Sydney Ducks" who infested the dark lanes and alleys of San Francisco, and lurked about the wharves at night, lived mainly by robbery; and they often murdered in order to rob. An English traveller said of them: "I have seen vice in almost every form, and under almost every condition in the Old World, but never did it appear to me in so repulsive and disgusting a shape as it exists among the lower orders of Sydney, and generally in New South Wales."[31] But not all of the immigrants from English colonies were of this character. Many were respectable men, and succeeded well in California. An Australian cabman, for example, brought a barouche, a fine pair of horses, a tall hat and a livery coat all the way across the Pacific, and made a fortune by hiring out at the rate of twenty dollars an hour. There were many Jews in San Francisco, but none in the mines;--they alone of all the nations gathered in California kept to their ordinary occupations, chiefly the selling of clothes, and never looked for gold. Even their dress did not change. "They are," writes a Pioneer, "exactly the same unwashed-looking, slobbery, slipshod individuals that one sees in every seaport town." But the Jew prospered, and was a good citizen. Another Pioneer, who could look beneath the surface, said, "The Jew does honor to his name here. The pressure which elsewhere bows him to the earth is removed."[32] The variety and mixture of races in California were without precedent, and San Francisco especially prided itself upon the barbaric aspect of its streets. Perhaps the Chinese were the most striking figures. The low-caste Chinamen wore full jackets and breeches of blue calico, and on their heads a huge wicker-work hat that would have made a good family clothes-basket. The aristocratic Chinaman displayed a jacket of gay-colored silk, yellow satin breeches, a scarlet skull-cap with a gold knob on top, and, in cold weather, a short coat of Astrakhan fur. There was, of course, a Chinese quarter, and a district known as little Chili, where South Americans of every country could be found, with a mixture of Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands, and negroes from the South Seas. In July, 1850, there arrived a ship-load of Hungarian exiles, and somewhat later a company of Bayonnais from the south of France, the men wild and excitable in appearance, the women dark-skinned, large-eyed, and graceful in their movements. There was a Spanish quarter where, as Bret Harte said, "three centuries of quaint customs, speech and dress were still preserved; where the proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in the language of Cervantes, and the high-flown allusions of the La Manchian knight still a part of the Spanish Californian hidalgo's dream." The Spanish women were usually attended by Indian girls, and their dress was coquettish and becoming. Their petticoats, short enough to display a well-turned ankle, were richly laced and embroidered, and striped and flounced with gaudy colors, of which scarlet was the most common. Their tresses fell in luxuriant plaits down their backs; and, in all the little accessories of dress, such as earrings, and necklaces, their costume was very rich. Its chief feature, the _reboso_, was a sort of scarf, like the mantilla of old Spain. This was sometimes twined around the waist and shoulders, and at other times hung in pretty festoons about the figure. It was only in respect to their diversions that the Spanish had any influence upon the Americans. The gambling houses and theatres were largely in Spanish hands at first, and the _fandango_ was the national amusement in which the American miners soon learned to join.[33] And yet the fundamental gravity of the Spanish nature, a gravity which is epitomized and immortally fixed in the famous portrait of Admiral Pareja by Velasquez, was as marked in California as at home. It is thus that Bret Harte describes Don José Sepulvida, the Knight Errant of the Foot-Hills: "The fading glow of the western sky through the deep, embrasured windows lit up his rapt and meditative face. He was a young man of apparently twenty-five, with a colorless, satin complexion, dark eyes, alternating between melancholy and restless energy, a narrow, high forehead, long straight hair, and a lightly pencilled mustache." One is struck by the resemblance between Don José Sepulvida, and Culpeper Starbottle, the Colonel's nephew, whose tragic death the Reader will remember. Bret Harte thus depicts him: "The face was not an unprepossessing one, albeit a trifle too thin and lank and bilious to be altogether pleasant. The cheek-bones were prominent, and the black eyes sunken in their orbits. Straight black hair fell slantwise off a high but narrow forehead, and swept part of a hollow cheek. A long, black mustache followed the perpendicular curves of his mouth. It was on the whole a serious, even quixotic face, but at times it was relieved by a rare smile of such tender and even pathetic sweetness, that Miss Jo is reported to have said that, if it would only last through the ceremony, she would have married the possessor on the spot. 'I once told him so,' added that shameless young woman; 'but the man instantly fell into a settled melancholy, and has not laughed since.'"[34] [Illustration: MINERS' BALL A. Castaigne, del.] There were, in fact, many things in common between the Southerner and the Spaniard. They lived in similar climates, and the fundamental ideas of their respective communities were very much the same. The Southerner was almost as deeply imbued as the Spaniard with extreme, aristocratic notions of government and society; and he, like the Spaniard, was conservative, religious, dignified, courteous, chivalrous to women, brave, narrow-minded and indolent. In _The Secret of Sobriente's Well_, this resemblance suddenly occurs to Larry Hawkins, who, in describing to Colonel Wilson, from Virginia, the character of his Spanish predecessor, the former owner of the _posada_ in which the Colonel lived, said: "He was that kind o' fool that he took no stock in mining. When the boys were whoopin' up the place and finding the color everywhere, he was either ridin' round lookin' up the wild horses he owned, or sittin' with two or three lazy peons and Injuns that was fed and looked after by the priests. Gosh! Now I think of it, it was mighty like you when you first kem here with your niggers. That's curous, too, ain't it?" The hospitality of the Spanish Californian was boundless. "There is no need of an orphan asylum in California," wrote the American Alcalde at Monterey. "The question is not who shall be burdened with the care of an orphan, but who shall have the privilege of rearing it. An industrious man of rather limited means applied to me to-day for the care of _six_ orphan children. He had fifteen of his own;" and when the Alcalde questioned the prudence of his offer, the Spaniard replied, "The hen that has twenty chickens scratches no harder than the hen that has one." A Pioneer, speaking from his own experience, said: "If you are sick there is nothing which sympathy can divine which is not done for you. This is as true of the lady whose hand has only figured her embroidery or swept her guitar, as of the cottage-girl wringing from her laundry the foam of the mountain stream; and all this from the heart!"[35] Generosity and pride are Spanish traits. "The worst and weakest of them," remarks an English Pioneer, "has that indefinable something about him that lifts so immeasurably the beggar of Murillo above the beggar of Hogarth."[36] The Reader will remember how cheerfully and punctiliously Don José Sepulvida paid the wagers of his friend and servant, Bucking Bob. A gambling debt was regarded by the Spaniards in so sacred a light that if he who incurred it was unable to pay, then, for the honor of the family, any relative, a godfather, or even one who had the misfortune to be connected by marriage with the debtor, was bound to discharge the obligation. Some Americans basely took advantage of this sentiment; and, in one case, an old Spanish lady was deprived of a vineyard, her only means of support, in order to preserve the reputation of a scapegrace nephew who had lost to an American at faro a greater sum than he possessed. Some convenient and becoming articles of Spanish dress were adopted by the Americans, notably the sombrero and the serapé, or horseman's cloak. Jack Hamlin, as the Reader will remember, sometimes went a little further. Thus, when he started on his search for the Sappho of Green Springs, he "modified his usual correct conventional attire by a tasteful combination of a roquero's costume, and in loose white bullion-fringed trousers, red sash, jacket and sombrero, looked infinitely more dashing and picturesque than his original." The profuse wearing of jewelry, even by men, was another foreign fashion which Americans adopted in the early years; so much so, in fact, that to appear in a plain and unadorned state was to be conspicuous. The jewelry thus worn was not of the conventional kind, but a sort of miner's jewelry, significant of the place and time. Ornaments were made from the gold in its native state by soldering into one mass many small nuggets, without any polish or other embellishment. Everybody carried a gold watch, and watch-chains were constructed upon a massive plan, the links sometimes representing dogs in pursuit of deer, horses at full speed, birds in the act of flight, or serpents coiled and hissing. Scarf-pins were made from lumps of gold retaining their natural form and mixed with quartz, rose-colored, blue-gray, or white, according to the rock from which they were taken. The big "specimen ring" worn by the hero of _A Night on the Divide_ was an example. Some Americans adhered to their usual dress which, in the Eastern States, was a sober suit of black; but usually the Pioneers discarded all conventional clothes, and appeared in a rough and picturesque costume much like that of a stage pirate. Indeed, it was impossible for any man in '49 to make his dress sufficiently bizarre to attract attention. The prevailing fashion included a red or blue flannel shirt, a "wide-awake" hat of every conceivable shape and color, trousers stuffed into a huge pair of boots coming up above the knee, and a belt decorated with pistols and knives. More than one Pioneer landed in San Francisco with a rifle slung on his back, a sword-cane in his hand, two six-shooters and a bowie-knife in his belt, and a couple of small pistols protruding from his waistcoat pockets. In the rainy season of '49, long boots were so scarce, and so desirable on account of the mud, that they sold for forty dollars a pair in San Francisco, and higher yet in Stockton. Learning of this, Eastern merchants flooded the market with top-boots a year later; but by that time the streets had been planked, the miner's costume was passing out of fashion, and long boots were no longer in demand. These changes were greatly regretted by unconventional Pioneers, and even so early as 1850 they were lamenting "the good old times,"--just one year back,--before the tailor and the barber were abroad in the land. Local celebrations were marked by more color and display than are usually indulged in by Americans. In 1851, on Washington's Birthday, there was a procession in San Francisco headed by the Mayor in a barouche drawn by four white horses. Next came the fire engines of the city, each with a team of eight gray horses, and followed by a long train of firemen in white shirts and black trousers. Then came a company of teamsters mounted on their draught horses, and carrying gay banners; and finally a delegation of Chinamen, preceded by a Chinese band and bearing aloft a huge flag of yellow silk. Horsemen, more or less intoxicated, and shouting like wild Indians, charged up and down the streets at all hours of the day and night, to the great discomfort of many and the fatal injury of some pedestrians. "On Sundays especially, one would imagine," a local newspaper remarks, "that a horde of Cossacks or Tartars had taken possession of the city." "The Spaniard," Bret Harte says, "taught the Americans horsemanship, and they rode off with his cattle." The Americans usually adopted the Spanish equipment, consisting of a huge saddle, with cumbrous leather saddle-flaps, stirrups carved from solid oak, heavy metal spurs, a bridle jingling with ornaments, and a cruel curb bit,--the whole paraphernalia being designed to serve the convenience and vanity of the rider without the least regard to the comfort of his beast. The Spanish manner of abrupt stopping, made possible by the severe bit, was also taken up by young Americans who loved to charge down upon a friend, halting at the last possible moment, in a cloud of dust, with the horse almost upon his haunches. This was Jack Hamlin's habit. A popular figure in the streets of San Francisco was a black pony, the property of a constable, that stood most of the day, saddled and bridled, in front of his master's office. The pony's favorite diversion was to have his hoofs blacked and polished, and whenever a coin was placed between his lips, he would carry it to a neighboring boot-black, put, first, one fore-foot, and then the other, on the foot-rest, and, after receiving a satisfactory "shine," would walk gravely back to his usual station. Even the dumb animals felt that something unusual was expected of them in California. There were no harness horses or carriages in San Francisco in the early part of '49; and when they were introduced toward the end of that year, a touch of barbaric splendor marked the fashionable equipage of the hour. A pair of white horses with gilt trappings, drawing a light, yellow-wheeled buggy, was once a familiar sight in the streets of the city. The _demi-monde_ rode on horseback, in parties of two or three, and even of six or more, and the pace which they set corresponded with that of California life in general. The appearance of one of the most noted of these women is thus described by a Pioneer, the wife of a sea-captain: "I have seen her mounted on a glossy, lithe-limbed race-horse, one that had won for her many thousands on the race-course, habited in a close-fitting riding-dress of black velvet, ornamented with one hundred and fifty gold buttons, a hat from which depended magnificent sable plumes, and over her face a short, white lace veil of the richest texture, so gossamer-like one could almost see the fire of passion flashing from the depths of her dark, lustrous eyes."[37] Even the climate, the dry, bracing air, the cool nights, the aromatic fragrance of the woods, tended to quicken the pulse of the Argonauts, and to heighten the general exuberance of feeling. Central California, the scene of Bret Harte's stories, is a great valley bounded on the west by the Coast Range of hills or mountains, which rise from two thousand to four thousand, and in a few places to five thousand feet, and on the east by the Foot-Hills. After the immigration, this valley furnished immense crops of wheat, vegetables and fruit; but in '49 it was a vast, uncultivated plain, free from underbrush or other small growth, and studded by massive, spreading oaks, by tall plane trees, and occasionally by a gigantic redwood, sending its topmost branches two and even three hundred feet into the air. In the dry season, the surface was brown and parched, but as soon as the rains began, the wild grasses and wild oats gave it a rich carpet of green, sparkling with countless field flowers. The resemblance of the valley, in the rainy season at least, to an English park, was often spoken of by Pioneers who found in it a reminder of home. On the eastern side this great central valley gradually merges into the Foot-Hills, the vanguards of the lofty mountain range which separates central California from Nevada. The Foot-Hills form what is perhaps the most picturesque part of the State, watered in the rainy season by numerous rocky, swift-flowing streams, the tributaries of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, and broken into those deep, narrow glens so often described in Bret Harte's poetry and prose. This was the principal gold-bearing region. The Foot-Hills extend over a space about five hundred miles long and fifty wide, and from them arise, sometimes abruptly, and sometimes gradually, the snow-crowned Sierras. Such is central California. A region extending from latitude 32° 30´ in the South to 42° in the North, and rising from the level of the Pacific Ocean to mountain peaks fifteen thousand feet high, must needs present many varieties of weather; but on the whole the State may be said to have a mild, dry, breezy, healthy climate. Except in the mountains and in the extreme northeast, snow never lies long, the earth does not freeze, and Winter is like a wet Spring during which the cattle fare much better than they do in Summer. The passing of one season into the other was thus described by Bret Harte: "The eternal smile of the California Summer had begun to waver and grow fixed; dust lay thick on leaf and blade; the dry hills were clothed in russet leather; the trade winds were shifting to the south with an ominous warm humidity; a few days longer, and the rains would be here." San Francisco has a climate of its own. Ice never forms there, and geraniums bloom throughout the Winter; but during the dry season, which lasts from May or June until September or October, a strong, cold wind blows in every afternoon from the ocean, dying down at sunset. The mercury falls with the coming of the wind, the rays of the sun seem to have no more warmth than moonbeams, the sand blows up in clouds, doors and windows rattle, and the city is swept and scourged. But fifty miles inland the air is still and balmy, and residents of San Francisco leave the city in Summer not to escape unpleasant heat, but to enjoy the relaxation of a milder and less stimulating climate. "In the interior one bright, still day follows another, as calm, as dreamy, as disconnected from time and space as was the air which lulled the lotus-eaters to rest."[38] This evenness of temperature was amazing and delightful to the weather-beaten Pioneers from New England. The Midsummer days are often intensely hot in the interior, but the nights are cool, and the atmosphere is so dry that the heat is not enervating. Men have been seen hard at work digging a cellar with the thermometer at 125° F. in the shade; and sunstrokes, though not unknown, are extremely rare. Nothing decays or becomes offensive. Fresh meat hung in the shade does not spoil. Dead animal or vegetable matter simply dries up and wastes away. In 1849 the rains were uncommonly severe, to the great discomfort of the Pioneers; and Alvarado, the former Spanish governor, explained the fact in all sincerity by saying that the Yankees had been accompanied to California by the devil himself. This explanation was accepted by the natives generally, without doubt or qualification. The streets of San Francisco, in that year, were like the beds of rivers. It was no uncommon thing to see, at the same time, a mule stalled in the middle of the highway, with only his head showing above the road, and an unfortunate pedestrian, who had slipped off the plank sidewalk, in process of being fished out by a companion. At the corner of Clay and Kearney Streets there once stood a sign, erected by some joker, inscribed as follows,-- This street is impassable, Not even jackassable! But the rainy season is usually neither long nor constant. The fall of rain on the Pacific Slope is only about one third of the rainfall in the Atlantic States; and, before water was supplied artificially, the miner was often obliged to suspend operations for want of it. Frequently a day's rain would have been cheaply bought at the price of a million dollars; and even a good shower gave an impetus to business which was felt by the merchants and gamblers of San Francisco and Sacramento. It was observed that after a long drought dimes took the place of gold slugs upon the roulette and faro tables. Thus, even the weather was a speculation in Pioneer times. And yet, notwithstanding the general mildness of the climate, extremes of cold, at high levels, are close at hand. Snow often falls to a depth of one or two feet within fifty miles of San Francisco. Near the head-waters of the Feather River the snow is sometimes twelve and even fifteen feet deep; and in December, 1850, eighteen men out of a party of nineteen, and sixty-eight of their seventy mules froze to death in one night. A snow-storm came up so suddenly, and fell with such fury, that their firewood became inaccessible, and they were obliged to burn their cabin; but even that did not save them. Bret Harte has described a California snow-storm not only in _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, but in several other stories, notably in _Gabriel Conroy_, _Snow-Bound at Eagle's_, and _A Night on the Divide_. It is interesting to know, as Mr. Pemberton tells us, that the description of the snow-storm in _Gabriel Conroy_ was written on a hot day in August. Poker Flat was in Sierra County, and in March, 1860, the snow was so deep in that county that tunnels were dug through it as a picturesque and convenient means of access to local saloons. The storm which overwhelmed the Outcasts was no uncommon event. But when these storms clear off, the cold, though often intense, is not disagreeable, owing to the dryness of the air. "We are now working every fair day," wrote a miner in January, 1860, "and have been all the Winter without inconvenience. The long, sled-runner Norwegian snow-shoes are used here by nearly everybody. I have seen the ladies floating about, wheeling and soaring, with as much grace and ease of motion as swans on the bosom of a placid lake or eagles in the sun-lit air." On the summit of the mountains the snow is perpetual, and on the easterly slopes it often attains the almost incredible depth, or height, of fifty feet. In _A Tale of Three Truants_, Bret Harte has described an avalanche of snow, carrying the Three Truants along with it, in the course of which they "seemed to be going through a thicket of underbrush, but Provy Smith knew that they were the tops of pine trees." On the whole, the climate of California justified the enthusiasm which it aroused in the Pioneers, and which sometimes found an amusing expression. The birth of twins to an immigrant and his wife, who had been childless for fifteen years, was triumphantly recorded by a San José paper as the natural result of even a short residence on the Pacific Slope. Large families and long life marked not only the Spaniards, but also the Mexicans and Indians. Families of fifteen, twenty, and even twenty-five children excited no surprise and procured no rewards of merit for the parents. In 1849 there was a woman living at Monterey whose children, all alive and in good health, numbered twenty-eight. We read of an Indian, blind but still active at the age of one hundred and forty; and of a squaw "very active" at one hundred and twenty-six. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner[39] a speaks of "Don Antonio Serrano, a tall, spare man, who rides with grace and vigor at ninety-three," and of an Indian servant "who was a grown man, breaking horses, when Don Antonio was an infant. This man is still strong enough to mount his horse and canter about the country. He is supposed to be about one hundred and eighteen." This wonderful longevity was ascribed by Mr. Warner to the equable climate and a simple diet. Ancient Mexicans and Indians figure occasionally in Bret Harte's stories. There is, for example, Concepcion, "a wrinkled Indian woman, brown and veined like a tobacco leaf," who acts as servant to the Convert of the Mission; and, at the Mission of San Carmel, Sanchicha, in the form of a bundle, is brought in and deposited in a corner of the room. "Father Pedro bent over the heap, and distinguished in its midst the glowing black eyes of Sanchicha, the Indian centenarian of the Mission. Only her eyes lived. Helpless, boneless, and jelly-like, old age had overtaken her with a mild form of deliquescence." But it was not length of days,--it was feverish energy that the climate produced in the new race which had come under its influence. The amount of labor performed by the Pioneers was prodigious. "There is as much difference," wrote the Methodist preacher, Father Taylor, "between the muscular action of the California miner and a man hired to work on a farm, as between the aimless movements of a sloth and the pounce of the panther." "We have," declared a San Francisco paper, "the most exhilarating atmosphere in the world. In it a man can do more work than anywhere else, and he feels under a constant pressure of excitement. With a sun like that of Italy, a coast wind as cool as an Atlantic breeze in Spring, an air as crisp and dry as that of the high Alps, people work on without let or relaxation, until the vital cord suddenly snaps. Few Americans die gradually here or of old age; they fall off without warning." So late as 1860 it was often said that there were busy men in San Francisco who had never taken a day's vacation, or even left the city to cross the Bay, from the hour of their arrival in 1849 until that moment. Even this record has been eclipsed. A Pioneer of German birth, named Henry Miller, who accumulated a fortune of six million dollars, is said to have lived, or at least to have existed, in San Francisco for thirty-five years without taking a single day's vacation. It was even asserted at first that the climate neutralized the effect of intoxicating liquor, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, to get really drunk in California. Possibly a somewhat lax definition of drunkenness accounted in part for this theory. A witness once testified in a San Francisco court that he did not consider a man to be drunk so long as he could move. But the crowning excellence of the California climate remains to be stated. It was observed by the Pioneers,--and they had ample opportunity to make observations upon the subject,--that in that benign atmosphere gunshot wounds healed rapidly. With a climate exhilarating and curative; with youth, health, courage, and the prospect of almost immediate wealth; with new and exciting surroundings, it is no wonder that the Pioneers enjoyed their hour. In San Francisco, especially, a kind of pleasant madness seized upon every newcomer. "As each man steps his foot on shore," writes one adventurer, "he seems to have entered a magic circle in which he is under the influence of new impulses." And another, in a letter to a friend says, "As soon as you reach California you will think every one is crazy; and without great caution, you will be crazy yourself." Still another Pioneer wrote home even more emphatically on this point: "You can form no conception of the state of affairs here. I do believe, in my soul, everybody has gone mad,--stark, staring mad."[40] To the same effect is the narrative of Stephen J. Field, afterward, and for many years, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Field, who arrived in San Francisco as a very young man, thus describes his first experience:-- "As I walked along the streets, I met a great many persons whom I had known in New York, and they all seemed to be in the highest spirits. Every one in greeting me said, 'It is a glorious country!' or 'Isn't it a glorious country?' or 'Did you ever see a more glorious country?' In every case the word 'glorious' was sure to come out.... I caught the infection, and though I had but a single dollar in my pocket, no business whatever, and did not know where I was to get my next meal, I found myself saying to everybody I met, 'It is a glorious country!'"[41] "The exuberance of my spirits," Judge Field continues, "was marvellous"; and the readers of his interesting reminiscences will not be inclined to dispute the fact when they learn that four days after his arrival, having made the sum of twenty dollars by selling a few New York newspapers, he forthwith put down his name for sixty-five thousand dollars' worth of town lots, and received the consideration due to a capitalist bent upon developing the resources of a new country. The most extravagant acts appeared reasonable under the new dispensation. Nobody was surprised when an enthusiastic miner offered to bet a friend that the latter could not hit him with a shotgun at the distance of seventy-eight yards. As a result the miner received five shots, causing severe wounds, beside losing the bet, which amounted to four drinks. After the first State election, a magistrate holding an important office fulfilled a wager by carrying the winner a distance of three miles in a wheelbarrow. A characteristic scene in a Chinese restaurant is described as follows in the "Sacramento Transcript" of October 8, 1850:-- "One young man called for a plate of mutton chops, and the waiter, not understanding, asked for a repetition of the order. "'Mutton chops, you chuckle head,' said the young gentleman. "'Mutton chops, you chuckle head,' shouted the Chinaman to the kitchen. "The joke took among the customers, and presently one of them called out, 'A glass of pigeon milk, you long-tailed Asiatic.' "'A glass of pigeon milk, you long-tailed satic,' echoed the waiter. "'A barrel of homoeopathic soup, old smooth head,' shouted another. "'Arrel homepatty soup, you old smooth head,' echoed the waiter. "'A hatful of bricks,' shouted a fourth. "'Hatter bricks,' repeated the waiter. "By this time the kitchen was in a perfect state of confusion, and the proprietor in a stew of perplexity rushed into the dining-room. 'What you mean by pigeon milk, homepatty soup, and de brick? How you cooking, gentlemen?' "A roar burst from the tables, and the shrewd Asiatic saw in a moment that they were hoaxing his subordinates. 'The gentlemen make you all dam fools,' said he, rushing again into the smoky recess of the kitchen." At a dinner given in San Francisco a local orator thus discoursed upon the glories of California: "Look at its forest trees, varying from three hundred to one thousand feet in height, with their trunks so close together [drawing his knife and pantomiming] that you can't stick this bowie-knife between them; and the lordly elk, with antlers from seventeen to twenty feet spread, with their heads and tails up, ambling through these grand forests. It's a sight, gentlemen"-- "Stop," cried a newcomer who had not yet been inoculated with the atmosphere. "My friend, if the trees are so close together, how does the elk get through the woods with his wide-branching horns?" The Californian turned on the stranger with a look of thorough contempt and replied, "That's the elk's business"; and continued his unvarnished tale, no more embarrassed than the sun at noonday. "There was a spirit of off-hand, jolly fun in those days, a sort of universal free and easy cheerfulness.... The California Pioneer that could not give and take a joke was just no Californian at all. It was this spirit that gives the memory of those days an indescribable fascination and charm."[42] The very names first given to places and situations show the same exuberant spirit; such, for example, as Murderer's Alley, Dead Man's Bar, Mad Mule Cañon, Skunk Flat, Whiskey Gulch, Port Wine Diggins, Shirt-Tail Hollow, Bloody Bend, Death Pass, Jackass Flat, and Hell's Half Acre. Even crime took on a bold and original form. A scapegrace in Sacramento stole a horse while the owner still held the bridle. The owner had stepped into a shop to ask a question, but kept the end of the reins in his hand, when the thief gently slipped the bridle from the horse's head, hung it on a post, and rode off with steed and saddle. Bizarre characters from all parts of the world, drawn as by a magnet, took ship for California in '49 and '50 and became wealthy, or landed in the Police Court, as fate would have it. The latter was the destination of one Murphy, an Irishman presumably, and certainly a man of imagination, who described himself as a teacher of mathematics, and acknowledged that he had been drunk for the preceding six years. He added, for the benefit of the Court, that he had been at the breaking of every pane of glass from Vera Cruz to San Francisco, that he had smoked a dozen cigars in the halls of the Montezumas, and that there were as many persons contending for his name as there were cities for the birth of Homer. The Court gave him six months. Two residents of San Francisco, one a Frenchman, the other a Dutchman, were so enthusiastic over their new and republican surroundings that they slept every night under the Liberty Pole on the Plaza; and seldom did they fail to turn in patriotically drunk, shouting for freedom and equality. Prize-fighters, as a matter of course, were attracted to a place where sporting blood ran so high. In June, 1850, news came that Tom Hyer (of whose celebrity the Reader is doubtless aware) was shortly expected with "his lady" at Panama; and he must have arrived in due course, for in August, Tom Hyer was tried in the Police Court of San Francisco for entering several saloons on horseback, in one case performing the classic feat of riding up a flight of steps. The defence set up that this was not an uncommon method of entering saloons in San Francisco, and the Court took "judicial notice" of the fact, his honor having witnessed the same thing himself on more than one occasion. However, as Mr. Hyer was somewhat intoxicated, and as the alleged offence was committed on a Sunday, the Judge imposed a small fine. In the same year, Mr. T. Belcher Kay, another famous prize-fighter from the East, narrowly escaped being murdered while returning from a ball before daylight one Sunday morning; and subsequently Mr. Kay was tried, but acquitted, on a charge of burglary. In that strange collection of human beings drawn from all parts of the earth, for the most part unknown to one another, but almost all having this fundamental trait in common, namely, that they were close to nature, it was inevitable that incidents of pathos and tragedy, deeds of rascality and cruelty, and still more deeds of unselfishness and heroism, should continually occur. Some Pioneers met good fortune or disaster at the very threshold. One young man, upon landing in San Francisco, borrowed ten dollars, went immediately to a gambling saloon, won seven thousand dollars, and with rare good sense took the next steamer for home. Another newcomer, who brought a few hundred dollars with him, wandered into the gambling rooms of the Parker House soon after his arrival, won twenty thousand dollars there, and went home two days later. A Pioneer who had just crossed the Plains fell into a strange experience upon his arrival at Placerville. He was a poor man, his only property being a yoke of oxen which he sold almost immediately for one hundred dollars in gold dust. Shortly before that a purse containing the same quantity of gold had been stolen; and when, a few hours later, the newly-arrived teamster took out his pocket-book to pay for a small purchase, a man immediately stepped forward and accused him of the robbery. He was, of course, arrested, and a jury to try him was impanelled on the spot. The quality of the gold in his purse corresponded exactly with the quality of the stolen gold. It was known that he had only just arrived from the Plains and could not have obtained the gold dust by mining. The man to whom he sold his cattle had gone, and he was unable to prove how he had come by the treasure. Under these circumstances, the jury found him guilty, and sentenced him to receive thirty lashes on the bare back, which were thereupon administered, the unfortunate man all the time protesting his innocence. After he was whipped, he procured a pistol, walked deliberately up to the person who first accused him, placed the pistol at his head, and declared that he believed him to be the guilty man, and that if he did not then and there confess that he had stolen the money he would blow his brains out. The fellow could not stand the power of injured innocence. He became frightened, acknowledged that he was the thief, and drew the identical stolen money out of his pocket. The enraged crowd instantly set upon him, bore him to the nearest tree, and hung him. A subscription was then started, and about eighteen hundred dollars were raised in a few minutes for the sagacious teamster, who departed forthwith for his home in the East.[43] Of the many thousand Pioneers at work in the mines very few reaped a reward at all commensurate with their toils, privations and sufferings,--much less with their expectations. The wild ideas which prevailed in some quarters as to the abundance of the gold may be gathered from the advice given to one young Argonaut by his father, on the eve of his departure from Illinois. The venerable man urged his son not to work too hard, but to buy a low chair and a small iron rake, and, taking his seat comfortably, to rake over the sand, pick up the nuggets as they came to view, and place them in a convenient box. In reality, the miners' earnings, after deducting necessary living expenses, are computed to have averaged only about three times the wages of an unskilled day-laborer in the East. Few of them saved anything, for there was every temptation to squander their gains in dissipation; and men whose income is subject to wide fluctuations are notoriously unthrifty. The following is a typical experience: "Our diet consists of hard bread, flour which we eat half-cooked, and salt pork, with occasionally a salmon which we purchase of the Indians. Vegetables are not to be procured. Our feet are wet all day, while a hot sun shines down upon our heads, and the very air parches the skin like the hot air of an oven. Our drinking water comes down to us thoroughly impregnated with the mineral substances washed through the thousand cradles above us. The hands and feet of the novice become painfully blistered and the limbs are stiff. Besides all these causes of sickness, many men who have left their wives and children in far-distant States are homesick, anxious and despondent."[44] Many a family in the East was desolated and reduced to poverty by the untimely death of a husband and father; and in other cases long absence was as effectual in this respect as death itself. The once-common expression "California widow" is significant. Some Eastern men took informal wives on the Pacific Slope; others, who had succeeded, put off their home-coming from month to month, and even from year to year, hoping for still greater success; others yet, who had failed, were ashamed to go home in poverty, and lingered in California until death overtook them. This phase of Pioneer life is treated by Bret Harte in the stories _How Old Man Plunkett went Home_, and _Jimmy's Big Brother from California_. Of those who were lucky enough to find gold in large quantities, many were robbed, and some of these unfortunates went home, or died, broken-hearted. But as a rule, the Pioneers rose superior to every blow that fate could deal them. Men met misfortune, danger, even death with composure, and yet without bravado. A traveller being told that a man was about to be lynched, proceeded to the spot and found a large gathering of miners standing around in groups under the trees, and quietly talking. Seeing no apparent criminal there, he stepped up to one person who stood a little apart from the others, and asked him which was the man about to be hung. The person addressed replied, without the slightest change of countenance, "I believe, Sir, it's me." Half an hour later he was dead. There was a battle at Sacramento in 1850 between a party of "Squatters" on one side, and city officials and citizens on the other. Among the latter was one J. F. Hooper from Independence in Missouri. Hooper, armed only with a pistol, discharged all his cartridges, then threw the weapon at his advancing opponents, and calmly faced them, crossing his hands over his breast as a protection. They fired at him, notwithstanding his defenceless situation, and one ball piercing his right hand inflicted a wound, but not a mortal one, in his side. Four men were killed and several others badly wounded in this fight. When a father and son were arrested by a vigilance committee at Santa Clara for horse-stealing, and were sentenced to receive thirty-six lashes apiece, the son begged that he might take his father's share as well as his own. Men died well in California. In November, 1851, two horse-thieves were hung by a vigilance committee at Stockton. One of them, who was very young, smoked a cigar up to the last moment, and made a little speech in which he explained that the act was not dictated by irreverence, but that he desired to die like a man. When Stuart, a noted robber and horse-thief was being tried for his life by the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco, he complained that the proceedings were "tiresome," and asked for a chew of tobacco. [Illustration: THE TWO OPPONENTS CAME NEARER From "The Iliad of Sandy Bar" Frederic Remington, del.] The death of this man was one of the most impressive scenes ever witnessed upon this blood-stained earth. Sentence having been passed upon the prisoner the Committee, numbering one thousand men, came down from the hall where they met and formed in the street, three abreast. They comprised, with some exceptions, the best, the most substantial, the most public-spirited citizens of San Francisco. In the centre was Stuart, handcuffed and pinioned, but perfectly self-possessed and cool. A gallows had been erected some distance off, and the procession moved up Battery Street, followed by a great throng of men. There was no confusion, no outcry, no apparent excitement,--not a sound, indeed, except the tread of many feet upon the planked streets, every footfall sounding the prisoner's knell. It was of this event that Bret Harte wrote in his _Bohemian Days in San Francisco_: "Under the reign of the Committee the lawless and vicious class were more appalled by the moral spectacle of several thousand black-coated, serious-minded business men in embattled procession than by mere force of arms." When they reached the gallows, a rope was placed around the prisoner's neck, and even then, except for a slight paleness, there was no change in his appearance. Amid the breathless silence of the whole assemblage Stuart, standing under the gallows, said, "I die reconciled. My sentence is just." His crimes had been many, and he seemed to accept his death as the proper and almost welcome result of his deeds. He was a man of intellect, and, hardened criminal though he was, the instinct of expiation asserted itself in his breast. In July, 1851, a Spanish woman was tried and condemned by an impromptu vigilance committee for killing an American who, she declared, had insulted her. Being sentenced to be hanged forthwith, she carefully arranged her dress, neatly coiled her hair, and walked quietly and firmly to the gallows. There she made a short speech, saying that she would do the same thing again if she were permitted to live, and were insulted in the same way. Then she bade the crowd farewell, adjusted the noose with her own hands, and so passed bravely away. A few years later at Moquelumne Hill, a young Welshman, scarcely more than a boy, met death in a very similar manner, and for a similar offence. On the scaffold he turned to one of the by-standers, and said, "Did you ever know anything bad of me before this affair occurred?" The answer was, "No, Jack." "Well," said the youth, "tell those Camp Saco fellows that I would do the same thing again and be hung rather than put up with an insult." Men like these died for a point of honor, as much as did Alexander Hamilton. But far higher was the heroism of those who suffered or died for others, and not for themselves. No event, not even the discovery of gold, stirred California more profoundly than did the death of James King. In 1856, King, the editor of the "Bulletin," was waging single-handed a vigorous warfare against the political corruption then rife in California, and especially against the supineness of the city officials in respect to gambling and prostitution. He had given out that he would not accept a challenge to a duel, but he was well aware of the risk that he ran. San Francisco, even at that time, indulged in an easy toleration of vice, and only some striking, some terrible event could have aroused the conscience of the public. Among the city officials whose hatred Mr. King had incurred was James Casey, a typical New York politician, and a former convict, yet not wholly a bad man. The two men, King and Casey, really represented two stages of morality, two kinds of government. Their personal conflict was in a condensed form the clashing of the higher and the lower ideals. Casey, meeting King on the street, called upon him to "draw and defend himself"; but King, being without a weapon, calmly folded his arms and faced his enemy. Casey fired, and King fell to the ground, mortally wounded. "It was expedient that one man should die for the people"; and the death of King did far more than his life could have done to purify the political and social atmosphere of California. On the day following the murder, a Vigilance Committee was organized, and an Executive Committee, consisting chiefly of those who had managed the first Vigilance Committee in 1851, was chosen as the practical ruler of the city. It was supported by a band of three thousand men, distributed in companies, armed, officered and well drilled. For two months and a half the Executive Committee remained in office, exercising its power with marked judgment and moderation. Four men were hung, many more were banished, and the city was purged. Having accomplished its work the Committee disbanded, but its members and sympathizers secured control of the municipal government through the ordinary legal channels, and for twenty years administered the affairs of the city with honesty and economy. The task in 1851 had been mainly to rid the city of Australian convicts; in 1856 it was to correct the political abuses introduced by professional politicians from the East, especially from New York; and in each case the task was successfully accomplished, without unnecessary bloodshed, and even with mercy. Nor was Casey's end without pathos, and even dignity. On the scaffold he was thinking not of himself, but of the old mother whom he had left in New York. "Gentlemen," he said, "I stand before you as a man about to come into the presence of God, and I declare before Him that I am no murderer! I have an aged mother whom I wish not to hear that I am guilty of murder. I am not. My early education taught me to repay an injury, and I have done nothing more. The 'Alta California,' 'Chronicle,' 'Globe,' and other papers in the city connect my name with murder and assassination. I am no murderer. Let no newspaper in its weekly or monthly editions dare publish to the world that I am one. Let it not get to the ears of my mother that I am. O God, I appeal for mercy for my past sins, which are many. O Lord Jesus, unto thee I resign my spirit. O mother, mother, mother!" The sinking of the steamer, "Central America," off the coast of Georgia, in 1857, is an event now almost forgotten, and yet it deserves to be remembered forever. The steamer was on her way from Aspinwall to New York, with passengers and gold from San Francisco, when she sprang a leak and began to sink. The women and children, fifty-three in all, were taken off to a small brig which happened to come in sight, leaving on board, without boats or rafts, five hundred men, all of whom went down, and of whom all but eighty were drowned. Though many were armed, and nearly all were rough in appearance, they were content that the women and children should be saved first; and if here and there a grumble was heard, it received little encouragement. Never did so many men face death near at hand more quietly or decorously.[45] And yet the critic tells us about the "perverse romanticism" of Mr. Bret Harte's California tales! One incident more, and this brief record of California heroism, which might be extended indefinitely, shall close. Charles Fairfax, the tenth Baron of that name,[46] whose family have lived for many years in Virginia, was attacked without warning by a cowardly assassin, named Lee. This man stabbed Fairfax twice, and he was raising his arm for a third thrust when his victim covered him with a pistol. Lee, seeing the pistol, dropped his knife, stepped back, and threw up his hands, exclaiming, "I am unarmed!" "Shoot the damned scoundrel!" cried a friend of Fairfax who stood by. Fairfax, holding the pistol, with the blood streaming from his wounds, said: "You are an assassin! You have murdered me! Your life is in my hands!" And then, after a moment, gazing on him, he added, "But for the sake of your poor sick wife and of your children, I will spare you." He then uncocked the pistol, and fell fainting in the arms of his friend. All California rang with the nobility of the deed. CHAPTER VII PIONEER LAW AND LAWLESSNESS California certainly contained what Borthwick describes as "the élite of the most desperate and consummate scoundrels from every part of the world"; but they were in a very small minority, and the rather common idea that the miners were a mass of brutal and ignorant men is a wild misconception. An English writer once remarked, somewhat hysterically, "Bret Harte had to deal with countries and communities of an almost unexampled laxity, a laxity passing the laxity of savages, the laxity of civilized men grown savage." Far more accurate is the observation of that eminent critic, Mr. Watts-Dunton: "Bret Harte's characters are amenable to no laws except the improvised laws of the camp, and the final arbiter is either the six-shooter or the rope of Judge Lynch. And yet underlying this apparent lawlessness there is that deep law-abiding-ness which the late Grant Allen despised as being the Anglo-Saxon characteristic." The almost spontaneous manner in which mining laws came into existence, and the ready obedience which the miners yielded to them, show how correct is the view taken by Mr. Watts-Dunton. What constituted ownership of a claim; how it must be proved; how many square feet a claim might include; how long and by what means title to a claim could be preserved without working it; when a "find" should become the property of the individual discoverer, and when it should accrue to the partnership of which he was a member,--all these matters and many more were regulated by a code quickly formed, and universally respected. Thus a lump of gold weighing half an ounce or more, if observed before it was thrown into the cradle, belonged to the finder, and not to the partnership. [Illustration: SACRAMENTO CITY IN 1852] In the main, mining rules were the same throughout the State, but they varied somewhat according to the peculiar circumstances of each "diggings"; and the custom was for the miners to hold a meeting, when they became sufficiently numerous at any point, and make such laws as they deemed expedient. If any controversy arose under them it was settled by the Alcalde. In respect to this office, again, the miners showed the same instinct for law and order, and the same practical readiness to make use of such means as were at hand.[47] The Alcalde (Al Cadi) was originally a Spanish official, corresponding in many respects with our Justice of the Peace. But in the mining camps, the Alcalde, usually an American, was often given, by a kind of tacit agreement, very full, almost despotic powers, combining the authority of a Magistrate with that of a Selectman and Chief of Police. The first Alcalde of Marysville was the young lawyer already mentioned, Stephen J. Field, and he administered affairs with such firmness that the town, although harboring many desperate persons,--this was in 1850,--gamblers, thieves and cut-throats, was as orderly as a New England village. He caused the streets and sidewalks to be kept clean and in repair; he employed men to grade the banks of the river so as to facilitate landing, and he did many other things for the good of the community, but really with no authority except that of common consent. Sitting as a judge, he did not hesitate to sentence some criminals to be flogged. There was no law for it; but it was the only punishment that was both adequate and practicable, for the town contained no prison or "lock-up." And yet, so far as was possible, Alcalde Field observed the ancient forms with true Anglo-Saxon scrupulosity. "In civil cases," he relates, "I always called a jury if the parties desired one; and in criminal cases when the offence was of a high grade I went through the form of calling a grand jury, and having an indictment found; and in all cases I appointed an attorney to represent the people, and also one to represent the accused, when that was necessary." Spanish and Mexicans, as well as Americans, reaped the benefit of the change in government. Property, real estate especially, rose in value at once, and justice was administered as it never had been administered before. An entry in the diary of the Reverend Walter Colton, Chaplain in the United States Navy, and Alcalde of Monterey, whose book has already been cited, runs as follows:-- "_September 4, 1849._ I empanelled to-day the first jury ever summoned in California. One third were Californians, one third Mexicans, one third Americans. The trial was conducted in three languages and lasted six hours. The result was very satisfactory. The inhabitants who witnessed the trial said it was what they liked,--that there could be no bribery in it,--that the opinion of twelve honest men should set the case forever at rest. And so it did.... If there is anything on earth for which I would die, beside religion, it is the right of trial by jury." At first no one quite knew what laws were in force in California. The territory became a part of the United States by means of the treaty with Mexico which was proclaimed on July 4, 1848, but California was not admitted as a State until 1850, and in the mean time it was a question whether the laws of Mexico still prevailed, or the common law, or what. In this situation the Alcaldes usually fell back upon common sense and the laws of the State from which they happened to come. Others had recourse to an older dispensation. Thus, on one occasion the Alcalde of Santa Cruz had before him a man who was found guilty of shaving the hair from the tail of a fine American horse, and the sentence of the court was that the criminal should have his own head shaved. The young attorney who represented the defendant thereupon sprang to his feet, and, with great indignation, demanded to be told what law or authority there was for so unusual a punishment. "I base that judgment," said the Alcalde with solemnity, "on the oldest law in the world, on the law of Moses. Go home, young man, and read your Bible." In another case a Spaniard was suing for a divorce from his wife on the ground of infidelity; but the Alcalde, an American, refused it, inasmuch as the man was unable to swear that he had been faithful himself. "Is that United States law?" asked the suitor in naïve amazement. "I don't know about that," replied the Alcalde; "but it is the law by which I am governed,--the law of the Bible, and a good law too." The Alcalde of Placerville very properly refused to marry a certain man and woman, because the woman was already married to a man who had been absent for three months. But another Alcalde who happened to be present intervened. "Any man in California," he declared, "who has a wife, and so fine looking a wife as I see here before me, and who remains absent from her for three months, must be insane, Mr. Alcalde, or dead; and in either case the lady is free to marry again. I am Alcalde of Santa Cruz, and will with great pleasure make you man and wife. Step forward, madam, step forward; I feel sure you will get through this trying occasion without fainting, if you make the effort, and do not give way to your natural shyness. Step forward, my dear sir, by the side of your blushing bride, and I will make you a happy man." One other case that was tried in an Alcalde's court is so illustrative of California life that the Reader will perhaps pardon its insertion at length. "Bill Liddle, conductor of a mule train of eight large American mules, had just started from Sacramento for a mining camp far in the interior. He was obliged to pass a dangerous trail about two miles long, cut in the side of a steep cliff overhanging the river. The trail was only wide enough for a loaded mule to walk on. In the lead was 'Old Kate,' a heavy, square-built, bay mule. Bill always said that she understood English, and he always spoke to her as if that were the fact, and we were often forced to laugh at the wonderful intelligence she showed in understanding and obeying him. Sometimes she broke into the stable, unlatching the door, went to the bin where the barley was kept in sacks, raised the cover, took out a sack, set it up on one end, ripped the sewing as neatly as Bill could, and then helped herself to the contents. On such occasions Bill would shake his head, and exclaim, 'I wonder who Kate is! Oh, I wish I knew, for of course she is some famous woman condemned to live on earth as a mule!' "The train had advanced about a quarter of a mile on the trail just described, Bill riding behind, when he was startled by hearing a loud bray from Kate, and all the mules stopped. Ahead was a return train of fifteen Californian mules, approaching on a jog trot. The two trains could not pass, and there was not space for Bill's large and loaded mules to turn around. Bill raised himself in his saddle and furiously called on the other conductor to stop. He did so, but refused to turn his mules around, although Bill explained to him the necessity. At last, after much talk, the other conductor started up his mules, shouting and cracking his whip and urging them on. Meanwhile Old Kate stood in the centre of the trail, her fore-legs well apart, her nose dropped lower than usual, and her long, heavy ears thrown forward as if aimed at the head mule of the other train, while her large bright eyes were fixed on his motions. Seeing the danger, Bill called out, 'Kate, old girl, go for them; pitch them all, and the driver with them, to hell!' Thereupon Kate gave an unearthly bray, dropped on her knees with her head stretched out close along the rocks, her neck and lower jaw rubbing the trail, and received the leading mule across her neck. In a second more that mule was thrown into the air, and fell into the river far below. "Two or three times the conductor of the other train made a similar attempt, urging his mules forward, and did not stop until five of his mules had gone into the river. Then he said, 'Well, I will go back, but when we get out of this trail you and I will settle accounts.' Bill drew his revolver and his knife, made sure that they were all right, and as soon as they emerged from the cliff rode up to the other conductor with his revolver in his hand, and said, 'Shall we settle this business here, or shall we go before the Alcalde of the next diggings?' The man looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said, 'Damn me if you don't look like that she-devil of a mule of yours that threw my mules down the cliff. Are you and she any blood relation that you know of?' Not at all offended, Bill answered, 'I can't say positively that we are, but one thing I can say: I would rather be full brother to a mule that would act as Kate did to-day, than a forty-second cousin to a man that would act as you did.' 'Well,' said the other, 'put up your revolver, and let us settle matters before the Alcalde.' "The mule-drivers found the Alcalde working in the bottom of a shaft which he was sinking. They asked him to come up, but he said that was unnecessary, as he could hear and settle the case where he was. Accordingly, he turned a bucket upside down, sat down on it, and lit a cigar, leaning his back against the wall of the shaft. The two conductors then kissed a Bible which the Alcalde had sent for, and swore to tell the truth; and they gave their testimony from the top of the shaft, the driver of the unloaded mules asking for six hundred dollars damages, five hundred dollars for his mules and one hundred dollars for the pack saddles lost with them. When they had finished, the Alcalde said, 'I know the trail well, and I find for the defendant, and order the plaintiff to pay the costs of court, which are only one ounce.' Thereupon the Alcalde arose, turned up his bucket and began to shovel the earth into it. As he worked on, he told the plaintiff to go to the store kept by one Meyer not far off, and weigh out the ounce of dust and leave it there for him. This was done without hesitation. Bill went along, treated the plaintiff to a drink, and paid for a bottle of the best brandy that Meyer had, to be given in the evening to the Alcalde and his partner as they returned from work."[48] California magistrates were somewhat informal for several years. On one occasion, during a long argument by counsel, the Alcalde interrupted with the remark that the point in question was a difficult one, and he would like to consult an authority; whereupon, the clerk, understanding what was meant, produced a demijohn and glasses from a receptacle beneath the bench, and judge and counsel refreshed themselves. A characteristic story is told of Judge Searls, a San Francisco magistrate who had several times fined for contempt of court a lawyer named Francis J. Dunn. Dunn was a very able but dissipated and eccentric man, and apt to be late, and on one such occasion the judge fined him fifty dollars. "I did not know that I was late, your Honor," said Mr. Dunn, with mock contrition; "I have no watch, and I shall never be able to get one if I have to pay the fines which your Honor imposes upon me." Then, after a pause of reflection, he looked up and said: "Will your Honor _lend_ me fifty dollars so that I can pay this last fine?" "Mr. Clerk," said the judge, leaning over the bench, "remit that fine: the State can afford to lose the money better than I can." But informality is not inconsistent with justice. The Pioneers did not like to have men, though they were judges, take themselves too seriously; but the great majority of them were law-abiding, intelligent, industrious and kind-hearted. It was, as has been said already, a picked and sifted population. The number of professional men and of well-educated men was extraordinary. They were a magnanimous people. As the Reverend Dr. Bushnell remarked, "With all the violence and savage wrongs and dark vices that have heretofore abounded among the Pioneers, they seldom do a mean thing." An example of this magnanimity was the action of California in regard to the State debt amounting to five million dollars. It was illegal, having been contracted in violation of the State Constitution, and the money had been spent chiefly in enriching those corrupt politicians and their friends who obtained possession of the California government in the first years. But the Pioneers were too generous and too proud of the good name of their State to stand upon their legal rights. They were as anxious to pay this unjust debt as Pennsylvania and Mississippi had been in former years to repudiate their just debts. The matter was put to popular vote, and the bonds were paid. Stephen J. Field remarked in his old age, "I shall never forget the noble and generous people that I found in California, in all ranks of life." Another Pioneer, Dr. J. D. B. Stillman, wrote, "There are more intelligence and generous good feeling here than in any other country that I have ever seen."[49] "The finest body of men ever gathered together in the world's history," is the declaration of another Pioneer,[50] and even this extreme statement is borne out by the contemporary records. That there was a minority equally remarkable for its bad qualities, is also unquestionable. Moreover, many men who at home would have been classed as good citizens gave way in California to their avarice or other bad passions. Whatever depravity there was in a man's heart showed itself without fear and without restraint. The very Pioneer, Dr. Stillman, who has just been quoted to the effect that California had, on the whole, the best population in the world, gives us also the other side of the picture: "Last night I saw a man lying on the wet ground, unknown, unconscious, uncared for, and dying. Money is the all-absorbing object. There are men who would hang their heads at home at the mention of their heartless avarice. What can be expected from strangers when a man's own friends abandon him because he sickens and becomes an encumbrance!" Mrs. Bates, whose account of California is never exaggerated, tells us of a miner who, night after night, deserted his dying brother for a gambling house, leaving him unattended and piteously crying for water until, at last, he expired alone. It must be remembered, also, that the moral complexion of California changed greatly from year to year. The first condition was almost an idyllic one. It was a period of honesty and good-will such as never existed before, except in the imagination of Rousseau. There were few doors, and no locks. Gold was left for days at a time unguarded and untouched. "A year ago," said the "Sacramento Transcript," in October, 1850, "a miner could have left his bag of dust exhibited to full view, and absent himself a week. His tools might have remained unmolested in any ravine for months, and his goods and chattels, bed and bedding might have remained along the highway for an indefinite period without being stolen." There was much drinking, much gambling, and some murders were committed in the heat of passion; but nowhere else in the world, except perhaps in the smaller villages of the United States, was property so safe as it was in California. "I have not heard," wrote Dr. Stillman in 1849, "of a theft or crime of any sort. Firearms are thrown aside as useless, and are given away on the road." Grave disputes involving the title to vast wealth were settled by arbitration without the raising of a voice in anger or controversy. Even in Sacramento and San Francisco, merchants left their goods in their canvas houses and tents, open to any who might choose to enter, while they went to church or walked over the hills on Sundays. Their gold was equally unguarded, and equally safe. "It was wonderful," said a Pioneer early in the Fifties, "how well we got on in '49 without any sort of government beyond the universally sanctioned action of the people, and I have often since questioned in my own mind if we might not have got on just the same ever since, and saved all the money we have paid out for thieving legislation and selfish office-holders."[51] The change came in the late Summer and early Autumn of 1850, and was chiefly owing to the influx of convicts from Australia and elsewhere,--"low-browed, heavy-featured men, with cold, steel-gray eyes." In a less degree the change was also due to the deterioration of a small minority of Americans and Europeans, whose moral stamina was not equal to life in a lawless community, although at first that community was lawless only in the strict sense of the word;--it had no laws and needed none. As one Pioneer wrote, "There is no law regarded here but the natural law of justice." Beginning with the Autumn of 1850, things went from bad to worse until February, 1851, when robbery and murder in San Francisco were stopped by the first Vigilance Committee; and in the mines the same drastic remedy was applied, but not always with the same moderation. A Sacramento paper said in December, 1850: "It is an undeniable fact that crime of almost every description is on the increase in California, especially horse-stealing, robbery, arson and murder. In the city of Sacramento alone, since last April, we should judge there have been at least twenty murders committed, and we are not aware that any murderer has suffered capital punishment, or any other kind of punishment. We have got used to these things, and look upon it as a matter of course that somebody will be killed and robbed as often as once a week at least; and yet notwithstanding all this our people generally are composed of the most orderly, respectable citizens of the United States. The laws furnish us no protection because they are not enforced." But the Reader may ask, why were the laws not enforced? The answer is that the Pioneers were too busy to concern themselves with their political duties or to provide the necessary machinery for the enforcement of the laws. State officers, municipal officers, sheriffs, constables and even judges were chosen, not because they were fit men, but because they wanted the job, and no better candidates offered themselves. Moreover, the Pioneers did not expect to become permanent residents of California; they expected to get rich, off-hand, and then to go home, and why should they bother themselves about elections or laws? In short, an attempt was made to do without law, and, as we have seen, it succeeded for a year or so, but broke down when criminals became numerous. A letter from the town of Sonora, written in July, 1850, said: "The people are leaving here fast. This place is much deeper in guilt than Sodom or Gomorrah. We have no society, no harmony. Gambling and drunkenness are the order of the day." In four years there were one thousand two hundred homicides in California. Almost every mile of the travelled road from Monterey, in the southern part of the State, to San Francisco, was the scene of some foul murder in those eventful years. There was more crime in the southern mines than in the northern, because the Mexicans were more numerous there. In Sonora County, in 1850, there were twenty-five murders in a single month, committed mainly by Mexicans, Chilians, and British convicts from the penal colonies. A night patrol was organized. Every American tent had a guard around it, and mining almost ceased. Murder and robbery had reached the stage at which they seriously interfered with business. This was not to be endured; and at a mass meeting held at Sonora on August 3, the following resolution was passed: "Resolved: That for the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of this portion of the country, notice shall be given immediately ordering all Mexicans and South Americans to remove from township No. 2 in one week from this date." The consequence was a melancholy exodus of men, women and children, which included the just and the unjust. Many of them were destitute, and, as respects the Mexicans, many were being banished from the place of their birth. "We fear," remarked a contemporary citizen, "that the money-making, merry old times in Sonora are gone forever." This was a characteristic Pioneer remark. The "old times" meant were somewhat less than a year back; and their "merry" quality was, as we have seen, considerably modified by robbery and murder. The point of view is much like that of the landlord of a hotel in Virginia City, where Bret Harte was once a guest. After a night disturbed by sounds of shouting, scuffling and pistol shots, Mr. Harte found his host behind the counter in the bar-room "with a bruised eye, a piece of court-plaster extending from his cheek to his forehead, yet withal a pleasant smile upon his face. Taking my cue from this, I said to him, 'Well, landlord, you had rather a lively time here last night.' 'Yes,' he replied, pleasantly, 'it _was_ rather a lively time.' 'Do you often have such lively times in Virginia City?' I added, emboldened by his cheerfulness. 'Well, no,' he said reflectively; 'the fact is we've only just opened yer, and last night was about the first time that the boys seemed to be gettin' really _acquainted_!'" The absence of police, and, to a great extent, of law, led to deeds of violence, and to duelling; but it also tended to make men polite. The civility with which cases were conducted in court, and the restraint shown by lawyers in their comments upon one another and upon the witnesses were often spoken of in California. The experience of Alcalde Field in this regard is interesting:--"I came to California with all those notions in respect to acts of violence which are instilled into New England youth; if a man were rude, I would turn away from him. But I soon found that men in California were likely to take very great liberties with a person who acted in such a manner, and that the only way to get along was to hold every man responsible, and resent every trespass upon one's rights."[52] Accordingly, young Field bought a brace of pistols, had a sack-coat made with pockets appropriate to contain them, and practised the useful art of firing the pistols with his hands in his pockets. Subsequently he added a bowie-knife to his private arsenal, and he carried these weapons until the Summer of 1854. "I found," he says, "that the knowledge that pistols were generally worn created a wholesome courtesy of manner and language." Even the members of the State Legislature were armed. It was a thing of every-day occurrence for a member, when he entered the House, to take off his pistols and lay them in the drawer of his desk. Such an act excited neither surprise nor comment. At one time Mr. Field sent a challenge to a certain Judge Barbour who had grossly insulted him. Barbour accepted the challenge, but demanded that the duel should be fought with Colt's revolvers and bowie-knives, that it should take place in a room only twenty feet square, and that the fight should continue until at least one of the principals was dead. Mr. Field's second, horrified by these savage proposals, was for rejecting them; but Field himself insisted that they should be accepted, and the result was what he had anticipated. Judge Barbour, of his own motion, waived, first the knives, then the small room, and finally declined the meeting altogether. But the very next day, when Field had stepped out of his office, and was picking up an armful of wood for his stove, Barbour crept up behind him, and putting a pistol to his head, called upon Field to draw and defend himself. Field did not turn or move, but spoke somewhat as follows: "You infernal scoundrel, you cowardly assassin,--you come behind my back, and put your revolver to my head, and tell me to draw! You haven't the courage to shoot,--shoot and be damned!" And Barbour slunk away. Shooting at sight, especially in San Francisco and the larger towns, was as common as it is represented by Bret Harte. For the few years, beginning with and succeeding 1850, the newspapers were full of such events. On November 25, 1851, the "Alta California" said: "Another case of the influenza now in fashion occurred yesterday. We allude to a mere shooting-match in which only one of the near by-standers was shot down in his tracks." Even so late as August, 1855, the "San Francisco Call" was able to refer in a modest way to the "two or three shooting encounters per week" which enlivened its columns.[53] Duels were common, and in most cases very serious affairs, the battle being waged with destructive weapons and at close range. As a rule, they took place in public. Thus, at a meeting between D. C. Broderick, leader of the Democratic Party in the State, and one J. Cabot Smith, seventy or eighty persons were present. Broderick was wounded, and would have been killed had not the bullet first struck and shattered his watch. These California duels must be ascribed mainly to the Southern element, which was strong numerically, and which, moreover, exerted an influence greater than its numbers warranted. One reason, perhaps the main reason, for this predominance of the Southerners was that the aristocratic, semi-feudal system which they represented had a more dignified, more dashing aspect than the plain democratic views in which the Northern and Western men had been educated. It made the individual of more importance. Upon this point Professor Royce makes an acute remark: "The type of the Northern man who has assumed Southern fashions, and not always the best Southern fashions, has often been observed in California life. The Northern man frequently felt commonplace, simple-minded, undignified, beside his brother from the border or the plantation.... The Northern man admired his fluency, his vigor, his invective, his ostentatious courage, his absolute confidence about all matters of morals, of politics, of propriety, and the inscrutable union in his public discourse of sweet reasonableness with ferocious intolerance." The extreme type of Southerner, as he appeared in California, is immortalized in Colonel Starbottle. The moment when this strange planet first swam into Bret Harte's ken seems to have been seized and recorded with accuracy by his friend, Mr. Noah Brooks. "In Sacramento he and I met Colonel Starbottle, who had, of course, another name. He wore a tall silk hat and loosely-fitting clothes, and he carried on his left arm by its crooked handle a stout walking-stick. The Colonel was a dignified and benignant figure; in politics he was everybody's friend. A gubernatorial election was pending, and with the friends of Haight he stood at the hotel bar, and as they raised their glasses to their lips he said, 'Here's to the Coming Event!' Nobody asked at that stage of the canvass what the coming event would be, and when the good Colonel stood in the same place with the friends of Gorham, he gave the same toast, 'The Coming Event!'" This may have been a certain Dr. Ruskin, a Southern politician, who is described by a Pioneer as wearing "a white fur plug hat, a blue coat with brass buttons, a buff-colored vest, white trousers, varnished boots, a black satin stock, and, on state occasions, a frilled shirt front. He always carried a cane with a curved handle."[54] This, the Reader need not be reminded, is the exact costume of Colonel Starbottle,--the "low Byronic collar," which Bret Harte mentions, being the only item omitted. From this person Bret Harte undoubtedly derived an idea as to the appearance and carriage of Colonel Starbottle, and it is not unlikely that in drawing the character he had also in mind the notorious Judge David S. Terry. Terry, a native of Texas, was a fierce, fighting Southerner, a brave and honest man, but narrow, prejudiced, abusive, and ferocious. He was a leading Democrat, a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and a bitter opponent of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee. He nearly killed an agent of the Committee who attempted to arrest one of his companions, and was himself in some danger of being hung by the Committee on that account. Later, Terry killed Senator Broderick, of whom mention has just been made, in a duel which seems to have had the essential qualities of a murder, and which was forced upon Broderick in much the same way that the fatal duel was forced upon Alexander Hamilton. Later still, Terry became involved in the affairs of one of his clients, a somewhat notorious woman, whom he married,--clearly showing that mixture of chivalrous respect for women, combined with a capacity for misunderstanding them, and of being deluded by them, which was so remarkable in Colonel Starbottle. In the course of litigation on behalf of his wife, Terry bitterly resented certain action taken by Mr. Justice Field of the Supreme Court of the United States,--the same Field who began his judicial career as Alcalde of Marysville. Terry's threats against the Justice, then an old man, were so open and violent, and his character was so well known, that, at the request of the court officials in San Francisco, a deputy marshal was assigned as a guard to the Justice while he should be hearing cases on the California circuit. At a railroad station, one day, Terry and the Justice met; and as Terry was, apparently, in the act of drawing a weapon, the deputy marshal shot and killed him. It was Judge Terry who remarked of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, which was mainly composed of business men,--the lawyers holding aloof,--that they were "a set of damned pork-merchants,"--a remark so characteristic of Colonel Starbottle that it is difficult to attribute it to anybody else. Colonel Starbottle was as much the product of slavery as Uncle Tom himself, and he exemplified both its good and its bad effects. His fat white hand and pudgy fingers indicated the man who despised manual labor and those who performed it. His short, stubby feet, and tight-fitting, high-heeled boots conveyed him sufficiently well from office to bar-room, but were never intended for anything in the nature of a "constitutional." His own immorality did not prevent him from cherishing a high ideal of feminine purity; but his conversation was gross. He was a purveyor, Bret Harte relates, "of sprightly stories such as Gentlemen of the Old School are in the habit of telling, but which, from deference to the prejudices of gentlemen of a more recent school, I refrain from transcribing here." He had that keen sense of honor, and the determination to defend it, even, if need be, at the expense of his life, which the Southern slave-holder possessed, and he had also the ferocity which belonged to the same character. One can hardly recall without a shudder of disgust the "small, beady black eyes" of Colonel Starbottle, especially when they "shone with that fire which a pretty woman or an affair of honor could alone kindle." The Reader will remember that the Colonel was always ready to hold himself "personally responsible" for any consequences of a hostile nature, and that by some irreverent persons he was dubbed "Old Personal Responsibility." The phrase was not invented by Bret Harte. On the contrary, it was almost a catchword in California society; it was a Southern phrase, and indicated the Southerner's attitude. In a leading article published in the "San Francisco Bulletin" in 1856, it is said, "The basis of many of the outrages which have disgraced our State during the past four years has been the 'personal responsibility' system,--a relic of barbarism." Colonel Starbottle's lack of humor was also a Southern characteristic. The only humorists in the South were the slaves; and the reason is not far to seek. The Southerner's political and social creed was that of an aristocrat; and an aristocrat is too dignified and too self-absorbed to enter curiously into other men's feelings, and too self-satisfied to question his own. Dandies are notoriously grave men. The aristocratic, non-humorous man always takes himself seriously; and this trait in Colonel Starbottle is what makes him so interesting. "It is my invariable custom to take brandy--a wineglass-full in a cup of strong coffee--immediately on rising. It stimulates the functions, sir, without producing any blank derangement of the nerves." There is another trait, exemplified in Colonel Starbottle, which often accompanies want of humor, namely, a tendency to be theatrical. It would seem as if the ordinary course of human events was either too painful or too monotonous to be endured. We find ourselves obliged to throw upon it an aspect of comedy or of tragedy, by way of relief. The man of humor sees the incongruity,--in other words, the jest in human existence; and the non-humorous, having no such perception, represents it to himself and to others in an exaggerated or theatrical form. The one relies upon understatement; the other upon overstatement. Colonel Starbottle was always theatrical; his walk was a strut, and "his colloquial speech was apt to be fragmentary incoherencies of his larger oratorical utterances." But we cannot help feeling sorry for the Colonel as his career draws to a close, and especially when, after his discomfiture in the breach of promise case, he returns to his lonely chambers, and the negro servant finds him there silent and unoccupied before his desk. "''Fo' God! Kernel, I hope dey ain't nuffin de matter, but you's lookin' mighty solemn! I ain't seen you look dat way, Kernel, since de day pooh Massa Stryker was fetched home shot froo de head.' 'Hand me down the whiskey, Jim,' said the Colonel, rising slowly. The negro flew to the closet joyfully, and brought out the bottle. The Colonel poured out a glass of the spirit, and drank it with his old deliberation. 'You're quite right, Jim,' he said, putting down his glass, 'but I'm--er--getting old--and--somehow--I am missing poor Stryker damnably.'" This is the last appearance of Colonel Starbottle. He represents that element of the moral picturesque,--that compromise with perfection which, in this imperfect and transitory world, is universally craved. Even Emerson, best and most respectable of men, admitted, in his private diary, that the irregular characters who frequented the rum-selling tavern in his own village were indispensable elements, forming what he called "the fringe to every one's tapestry of life."[55] Such men as he had in mind mitigate the solemnity and tragedy of human existence; and in them the virtuous are able to relax, vicariously, the moral tension under which they suffer. This is the part which Colonel Starbottle plays in literature. CHAPTER VIII WOMEN AND CHILDREN AMONG THE PIONEERS The chief source of demoralization among the Pioneers was the absence of women and children, and therefore of any real home. "Ours is a bachelor community," remarked the "Alta California," "but nevertheless possessing strong domestic propensities." Most significant and pathetic, indeed, is the strain of homesickness which underlies the wild symphony of Pioneer life. "I well remember," writes a Forty-Niner, "the loneliness and dreariness amid all the excitement of the time." The unsuccessful miner often lost his strength by hard work, exposure, and bad food; and then fell a prey to that disease which has slain so many a wanderer--homesickness. At the San Francisco hospital it was a rule not to give letters from the East to patients, unless they were safely convalescent. More than once the nurses had seen a sick man, after reading a letter from home, turn on his side and die. In the big gambling saloons of San Francisco, when the band played "Home, Sweet Home," hundreds of homeless wanderers stood still, and listened as if entranced. The newspapers of '49 and '50 are full of lamentations, in prose and in verse, over the absence of women and children. In 1851 the "Alta California" exclaimed, "Who will devise a plan to bring out a few cargoes of respectable women to California?" On those rare occasions when children appeared in the streets, they were followed by admiring crowds of bearded men, eager to kiss them, to shake their hands, to hear their voices, and humbly begging permission to make them presents of gold nuggets and miners' curiosities. In the autumn of 1849 a beautiful flaxen-haired little girl, about three years old, was frequently seen playing upon the veranda of a house near the business centre of San Francisco, and at such times there was always on the opposite side of the street a group of miners gazing reverently at the child, and often with tears running down their bronzed cheeks. The cry of a baby at the theatre brought down a tumultuous encore from the whole house. The chief attraction of every theatrical troupe was a child, usually called the "California Pet," whose appearance on the stage was always greeted with a shower of coins. Next to the Pet, the most popular part of the entertainment was the singing of ballads and songs relating to domestic subjects. In '49 a woman in the streets of San Francisco created more excitement than would have been caused by the appearance of an elephant or a giraffe. Once at a crowded sale in an auction room some one cried out, "Two ladies going along the sidewalk!" and forthwith everybody rushed pell-mell into the street, as if there had been a fire or an earthquake. A young miner, in a remote mountain camp, borrowed a mule and rode forty miles in order to make a call upon a married woman who had recently arrived. He had a few minutes' conversation with her, and returned the next day well satisfied with his trip. At another diggings, when the first woman resident appeared, she and the mule upon which she rode, were raised from the ground by a group of strong-armed, enthusiastic miners, and carried triumphantly to the house which her husband had prepared for her. When the town where Stephen J. Field purchased his corner lots was organized, the first necessity was of course a name. Various titles, suggested by the situation, or by the imagination of hopeful miners, were proposed, such as Yubaville and Circumdoro; but finally a substantial, middle-aged man arose and remarked that there was an American lady in the place, the wife of one of the proprietors, that her name was Mary, and that in his opinion, the town should be called Marysville, as a compliment to her. No sooner had he made this suggestion than the meeting broke out in loud huzzahs; every hat made a circle around its owner's head, and the new town was christened Marysville without a dissenting voice. The lady, Mrs. Coullard, was one of the survivors of the Donner party, and the honor was therefore especially fitting. Doubts have been cast upon the story of the bar surmounted by a woman's sunbonnet, to which every customer respectfully lifted his glass before tossing off its contents; but the fact is substantiated by the eminent engraver, Mr. A. V. S. Anthony, who, as a young man, drank a glass of whiskey at that very bar, in the early Fifties, and joined in the homage to the sunbonnet. There is really nothing unnatural in this incident, or in that other story of some youthful miners coming by chance upon a woman's cast-off skirt or hat, spontaneously forming a ring and dancing around it. In both cases, the motive, no doubt, was partly humorous, partly amorous, and partly a vague but intense longing for the gentle and refining influence of women's society. This feeling of the miners, roughly expressed in the incidents of the sunbonnet and skirt, was poetically treated by Bret Harte in the story called _The Goddess of Excelsior_,--another example of that "perverse romanticism" which has been discovered in his California tales. Said the "Sacramento Transcript," in April, 1850, "May we not hope soon to see around us thousands of happy homes whose genial influences will awaken the noble qualities that many a wanderer has allowed to slumber in his heart while absent from the objects of his affection!" In the same strain, but in the more florid style which was common in the California newspapers, another writer thus anticipated the coming of women and children: "No longer will the desolate heart seek to drown its loneliness in the accursed bowl. But the bright smiles of love will shed sunshine where were dark clouds and fierce tornadoes, and the lofty spire, pointing heavenward, will remind us in our pilgrimage here of the high destiny we were created to fulfil." This has the ring of sincerity, and yet, as we read it, we cannot help thinking that when the writer laid down his pen, he went out and took one more drink from the "accursed bowl"; and who could blame him! A loaf of home-made cake sent all the way around Cape Horn from Brooklyn to San José was reverently eaten, a portion being given to the local editor who duly returned thanks for the same. The arrival of the fortnightly mail steamer was always the most important event of those early years; and Bret Harte thus described it: "Perhaps it is the gilded drinking saloon into which some one rushes with arms extended at right angles, and conveys in that one pantomimic action the signal of the semaphore telegraph on Telegraph Hill that a side-wheel steamer has arrived, and that there are letters from home. Perhaps it is the long queue that afterward winds and stretches from the Post Office half a mile away. Perhaps it is the eager men who, following it rapidly down, bid fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, and even five hundred dollars for favored places in the line. Perhaps it is the haggard man who nervously tears open his letter, and falls senseless beside his comrade."[56] Thus far Bret Harte. In precisely the same vein, and with a literary finish almost equal, is the following paragraph from a contemporary newspaper: "This other face is well known. It is that of one who has always been at his post on the arrival of each steamer for the past six months, certain at each time that he will get a letter. His eye brightens for a moment as the clerk pauses in running over the yellow-covered documents, but the clerk goes on again hastily, and then shakes his head, and says 'No letter.' The brightened eye looks sad again, the face pales, and the poor fellow goes off with a feeling in his heart that he is forgotten by those who knew and loved him at home."[57] Anxious men sometimes camped out on the steps of the Post Office, the night before a mail steamer was due, in order that they might receive the longed-for letter at the earliest possible moment. The coming of three women on a steamer from New York in 1850 was mentioned by all the newspapers as a notable event. In May of that year the "Sacramento Transcript" contained an advertisement, novel for California, being that of a "_Few_ fashionably-trimmed, Florence braid velvet and silk bonnets." A month later a Sydney ship arrived at San Francisco, having on board two hundred and sixty passengers, of whom seventy were women. As soon as this vessel had anchored, there was a rush of bachelors to the Bay, and boat-loads of them climbed the ship's side, trying to engage housekeepers. In 1851 women began to arrive in somewhat larger numbers, and the coming of wives from the East gave rise to many amusing, many pathetic and some tragic scenes. "You could always tell a month beforehand," said a Pioneer, "when a man was expecting the arrival of his real or intended wife. The old slouch hat, checked shirt and coarse outer garments disappeared, and the gentleman could be seen on Sunday going to church, newly rigged from head to foot, with fine beaver hat, white linen, nice and clean, good broadcloth coat, velvet vest, patent-leather boots, his long beard shaven or neatly shorn,--he looked like a new man. As the time drew near many of his hours were spent about the wharves or on Telegraph Hill, and every five minutes he was looking for the signal to announce the coming of the steamer. If, owing to some breakdown or wreck, there was a delay of a week or two, the suspense was awful beyond description."[58] [Illustration: THE POST-OFFICE, SAN FRANCISCO, 1849-50 A. Castaigne, del. Copyright by the Century Co.] The great beards grown in California were sometimes a source of embarrassment. When a steamer arrived fathers might be seen caressing little ones whom they now saw for the first time, while the children, in their turn, were frightened at finding themselves in the arms of such fierce-looking men. Wives almost shared the consternation of the children. "Why don't you kiss me, Bessie?" said a Pioneer to his newly arrived wife. She stood gazing at the hirsute imitation of her husband in utter astonishment. At last she timidly ejaculated, "I can't find any place." In March, 1852, forty four women and thirty-six children arrived on one steamer. The proportion of women Pioneers in that year was one to ten. By 1853, women were one in five of the population, and children one in ten. Even so late as 1860, however, marriageable women were very scarce. In November of that year the "Calaveras Chronicle" declared: "No sooner does a girl emerge from her pantalettes than she is taken possession of by one of our bachelors, and assigned a seat at the head of his table. We hear that girls are plenty in the cities below, but such is not the case here." The same paper gives an account of the first meeting between a heroine of the Plains, and a Calaveras bachelor. "One day this week a party of immigrants came down the ridge, and the advance-wagon was driven by a young and pretty woman--one of General Allen's maidens. When near town the train was met by a butcher's cart, and the cart was driven by a young 'bach.' He, staring at the lovely features of the lady, neglected to rein his horse to one side of the road, and the two wagons were about to come in collision, when a man in the train, noticing the danger, cried out to the female driver, 'Gee, Kate, Gee!' Said Kate, 'Ain't I a-tryin', but the dog-gone horses won't gee!'" Mrs. Bates speaks of two emigrant wagons passing through Marysville one day in 1850, "each with three yoke of oxen driven by a beautiful girl. In their hands they carried one of those tremendous, long ox-whips which, by great exertion, they flourished to the admiration of all beholders. Within two weeks each one was married." But it was seldom that a woman who had crossed the Plains presented a comely appearance upon her arrival. The sunken eyes and worn features of the newcomers, both men and women, gave some hint of what they had endured.[59] A letter from Placerville, written in September, 1850, describes a female Pioneer who had not quite reached the goal. "On Tuesday last an old lady was seen leading a thin, jaded horse laden with her scanty stores. The heat of the sun was almost unbearable, and the sand ankle deep, yet she said that she had travelled in the same way for the last two hundred miles." And then comes a figure which recalls that of Liberty Jones on her arrival in California: "By the side of one wagon there walked a little girl about thirteen years old, and from her appearance she must have walked many hundreds of miles. She was bare-footed and haggard, and she strode on with steps longer than her years would warrant, as though in the tiresome journey she had thrown off all grace, and had accustomed herself to a gait which would on the long marches enable her with most ease to keep up with the wagon." The long journey across the Plains without the comforts and conveniences, and sometimes without even the decencies of life, the contact with rough men, the shock of hardships and fatigues under which human nature is apt to lose respect for itself and consideration for others,--these things inevitably had a coarsening effect upon the Pioneer women. Only those who possessed exceptional strength and sweetness of character could pass through them unscathed. As one traveller graphically puts it: "A woman in whose virtue you might have the same confidence as in the existence of the stars above would suddenly horrify you by letting a huge oath escape from her lips, or by speaking to her children as an ungentle hostler would to his cattle, and perhaps listening undisturbed to the same style of address in reply."[60] The callousness which Liberty Jones showed at the death of her father was not in the least exaggerated by Bret Harte. And yet these defects shrink almost to nothing when we contrast them with the deeds of love and affection silently performed by women upon those terrible journeys, and often spoken of with emotion by the Pioneers who witnessed them. A few of those deeds are chronicled in this book, many more may be found in the narratives and newspapers of the day, but by far the greater number were long since buried in oblivion. They are preserved, if preserved at all, only in the characters of those descended from the women who performed them. Upon one thing the Pioneer women could rely,--the universal respect shown them by the men. In the roughest mining camp in California an unprotected girl would not only have been safe, she would have been treated with the utmost consideration and courtesy. Such was the society of which the English critic declared that "its laxity surpassed the laxity of savages!"[61] In this respect, if in no other, the Pioneers insisted that foreigners should comply with their notions. Nothing, indeed, gave more surprise to the "Greasers" and Chilenos than the fact that they were haled into court and punished for beating their wives. As to the Mexican and Chilean women themselves, it must be admitted that they contributed more to the gaiety than to the morality or peacefulness of California life. "Rowdyism and crime," remarked the "Alta California" in October, 1851, "increase in proportion to the increase in the number of Señoritas. This is true in the mines as well as in the city." At a horse-race that came off that year in San Francisco, we hear of the Señoritas as freely backing their favorite nags with United States money, though how it came into their possession, as a contemporary satirist remarked, "is matter of surmise only." This species of woman is portrayed by Bret Harte in the passionate Teresa, who met her fate, in a double sense, in _The Carquinez Woods_, finding there both a lover and her death. The Spanish woman of good family is represented by Doña Rosita in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, by Enriquez Saltello's charming sister, Consuelo, and by Concepcion,[62] the beautiful daughter of the Commandante, who, after the death of her lover, the Russian Envoy, took the veil, and died a nun at Benicia. Even before the discovery of gold a few Americans had married into leading Spanish families of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey and Sonoma. The first house erected on the spot which afterward became San Francisco was built in 1836 by Jacob P. Leese, an American who had married a sister of General Vallejo. It was finished July 3, and on the following day was "dedicated to the cause of freedom." There is something of great interest in the union of races so diverse, and Bret Harte has touched upon this aspect of California life in the character of that unique heroine, Maruja. "'Hush, she's looking.' She had indeed lifted her eyes toward the window. They were beautiful eyes, and charged with something more than their own beauty. With a deep, brunette setting, even to the darkened cornea, the pupils were blue as the sky above them. But they were lit with another intelligence. The soul of the Salem whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother, and was resistless." Chapter and verse can always be given to confirm Bret Harte's account of California life, and even Maruja can be authenticated. A Lieutenant in the United States Navy, who visited the Coast in 1846, gave this description of the reigning belle of California: "Her father was an Englishman, her mother a Spanish lady. She was brunette, with an oval face, magnificent grey eyes, the corners of her mouth slightly curved downward, so as to give a proud and haughty expression to the face. She was tall, graceful, well-shaped, with small feet and hands, a dead shot, an accomplished rider, and amiable withal. I never saw a more patrician style of beauty and native elegance."[63] California was always the land of romance, and Bret Harte in his poems and stories touched upon its whole history from the beginning. Even the visit of Sir Francis Drake in 1578 was not overlooked. In _The Mermaid of Light-House Point_, Bret Harte quotes a footnote, perhaps imaginary, from an account of Drake's travels, as follows: "The admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion, who were supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the inhospitable interior or by the hands of savages. But later voyagers have suggested that the deserters married Indian wives, and there is a legend that a hundred years later a singular race of half-breeds, bearing unmistakable Anglo-Saxon characteristics, was found in that locality." This was the origin of the blue-eyed and light-haired mermaid of the story; and it is only fair to add that the tradition of which the author speaks was current among the Nicasio Indians who inhabited the valley of that name, about fifteen miles eastward of Drake's Bay. Among the women who first arrived from the East by sea, there were many of easy virtue; but even these women--and here is disclosed a wonderful compliment to the sex--were held by observing Pioneers to have an elevating influence upon the men. "The bad women," says one careful historian, "have improved the morals of the community. They have banished much barbarism, softened many hard hearts, and given a gentleness to the men which they did not have before."[64] If this was the effect of the bad, what must have been the influence of the good women! Let the same writer tell us: "Soon after their arrival, schools and churches began to spring up; social circles were formed; refinement dawned upon a debauched and reckless community; decorum took the place of obscenity; kind and gentle words were heard to fall from the lips of those who before had been accustomed to taint every phrase with an oath; and smiles displayed themselves upon countenances to which they had long been strangers." And then the author pays a tribute to woman which could hardly be surpassed: "Had I received no other benefit from my trip to California than the knowledge I have gained, inadequate as it may be, of woman's many virtues and perfections, I should account myself well repaid." In a ship-load of Pioneers which sailed from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1850 there was just one woman; and yet her influence upon the men was so marked and so salutary that it was often spoken of by the Captain. The effect of their peculiar situation upon the married women was not good. They were apt to be demoralized by the attentions of their men friends, and they were too few in number to inflict upon improper females that rigid ostracism from society, which, some cynics think, is the strongest safeguard of feminine virtue. Women in California were released from their accustomed restraints, they were much noticed and flattered; and, then, as a San Francisco belle exclaimed, "The gentlemen are so rich and so handsome, and have such superb whiskers!" In a single issue of the "Sacramento Transcript," in July, 1850, are the following two items: "A certain madam now in this town buried her husband, and seventy-four hours afterward she married another." "One of our fair and lovely damsels had a quarrel with her husband. He took the stage for Stockton, and the same day she married another man." Even those Pioneers who were fortunate enough to have their wives with them did not always appreciate the blessing. Being absorbed in business they often felt hampered by obligations from which their bachelor rivals were free, or perhaps, they chafed at the wholesome restraint imposed upon a married man in a community of unmarried persons. There was a dangerous tendency among California husbands to permit their friends to look after their wives. On this subject Professor Royce very acutely remarks: "The family grows best in a garden with its kind. When family life does not involve healthy friendship with other families, it is likely to be injured by unhealthy if well-meaning friendships with wanderers." This is a sentiment which Brown of Calaveras would have echoed. Men with attractive wives were apt to be uncomfortably situated in California. It is matter of history how The Bell-Ringer of Angel's protected his young and pretty spouse from dangerous communications: "When I married my wife and brought her down here, knowin' this yer camp, I sez: 'No flirtin', no foolin', no philanderin' here, my dear! You're young and don't know the ways o' men. The first man I see you talking with, I shoot.'" In 1851, there was a man named Crockett whose predicament was something like that of the Bell-Ringer, and still more like that of Brown of Calaveras, for he not only had a very handsome wife, but it was his additional misfortune to keep a tavern on the road between Sacramento and Salmon Falls. It was not unusual for a dozen or more bearded miners to be gazing at Mrs. Crockett or watching for an opportunity to speak with her. This kept Crockett in a continual state of jealous irritation. He was a very small man, and he carried ostentatiously a very large pistol, which he would often draw and exhibit. A guest who stopped at the tavern for breakfast at a time when miners along the road had been more numerous than usual, found Crockett "charging around like a madman, and foaming at the mouth." However, he received the guest with hospitality, informed him that "he (Crockett) was a devilish good fellow when he was right side up," and finally set before him an excellent meal. Mrs. Crockett presided at the table, "but in a very nervous manner, as if she were in expectation of being at almost any minute made a target of." If life in California during the earlier years was bad for women, it was still worse for children. In San Francisco there was no public school until the autumn of 1851. Before that time there had been several small private schools, and one free school supported by charity, but in 1851 this was given up for want of funds. In the cities and towns outside of San Francisco there was even greater delay in establishing public schools. In 1852 there were many children at Marysville who were receiving no instruction, and others, fourteen years old and even older, were only just learning to read. Horace Greeley visited California in the year 1859, and he wrote, "There ought to be two thousand good common schools in operation this winter, but I fear there will not be six hundred."[65] Partly in consequence of this lack of schools, partly on account of the general demoralization and ultra freedom of California society, boys grew up in the streets, and were remarkable for their precocious depravity. Even the climate contributed to this result, for, except in the rainy season, the shelter of a house could easily be dispensed with by night as well as by day. "It was the voice of a small boy, its weak treble broken by that preternatural hoarseness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature self-assertion can give. It was the face of a small boy, a face that might have been pretty and even refined but that it was darkened by evil knowledge from within, and by dirt and hard experience from without."[66] It was no uncommon thing, in San Francisco especially, to see small boys drinking and gambling in public places. A Pioneer describes "boys from six upward swaggering through the streets, begirt with scarlet sashes, cigar in mouth, uttering huge oaths, and occasionally treating men and boys at the bar." Miners not more than ten years old were washing for gold on their own account, and obtaining five or ten dollars a week, which they spent chiefly on drinks and cigars. Bret Harte's Youngest Prospector in Calaveras was not an uncommon child. An instance of precocity was the attempted abduction in May, 1851, of a girl of thirteen by two boys a little older. They were all the children of Sydney parents, and the girl declared that she loved those boys, and had begged them to take her away, and she thought it very hard to be compelled to return to her home. This incident may recall to the Reader the precocious love affairs of Richelieu Sharpe, whose father thus explained his absence from supper: "'Like ez not, he's gone over to see that fammerly at the summit. There's a little girl there that he's sparkin', about his own age.' "'His own age!' said Minty indignantly, 'why, she's double that, if she's a day. Well--if he ain't the triflinest, conceitedest little limb that ever grew!'" The son of a tavern-keeper at Sacramento, a boy only eight years old, was described as a finished gambler. Upon an occasion when he was acting as dealer, all the other players being men, one of them accused him of cheating. The consequence was a general fight: two men were shot, one fatally, and the man who killed him was hung the next day by a vigilance committee. Even Bret Harte's "perverse romanticism" never carried him quite so far in delineation of the California child. The word "hoodlum," meaning a youthful, semi-criminal rough, originated in San Francisco. But there is another side to this picture of childhood on the Pacific Slope, and we obtain a glimpse of it occasionally. There was a Sunday-school procession at Sacramento in July, 1850, upon which the "Sacramento Transcript" remarked, "We have seen no sight here which called home so forcibly to our minds with all its endearments." Three years later in San Francisco, there was a May-Day procession of a thousand children, each one carrying a flower. Even Bret Harte's story of the adoption of a child by the city of San Francisco[67] had a solid foundation in fact, though perhaps he was not aware of it. In July, 1851, the City Fathers charged themselves with the support and protection of an orphan girl, and on the thirteenth of that month a measure providing for her maintenance was introduced in the Board of Aldermen. The scarcity, or rather, as we have seen, the almost total absence at first of women and children, of wives and sweethearts, led to the adoption by the Pioneers of a great number and variety of pet animals. Dogs and cats from all quarters, parrots from over-seas, canaries brought from the East, bears from the Sierras, wolves from the Plains, foxes and raccoons from the Foot-Hills,--all these were found in miners' cabins, in gambling saloons and in restaurants. They occupied the waste places in the hearts of the Argonauts, and furnished an object, if an inadequate one, for those affections which might otherwise have withered at the root. One miner was accompanied in all his wanderings by a family consisting of a bay horse, two dogs, two sheep and two goats. These California pets had their little day, perished, and are forgotten,--all save one. Who can forget the bear cub that Bret Harte immortalized under the name of Baby Sylvester! "He was as free from angles as one of Leda's offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.... He takes the only milk that comes to the settlement--brought up by Adams' Express at seven o'clock every morning." CHAPTER IX FRIENDSHIP AMONG THE PIONEERS In Bret Harte's stories woman is subordinated to man, and love is subordinated to friendship. This is a strange reversal of modern notions, but it was the reflection of his California experience,--reinforced, possibly, by some predilection of his own. There is a significant remark in a letter written by him from a town in Kansas where he once delivered a lecture: "Of course, as in all such places, the women contrast poorly with the men--even in feminine qualities. Somehow, a man here may wear fustian and glaring colors, and paper collars, and yet keep his gentleness and delicacy, but a woman in glaring 'Dolly-Vardens,' and artificial flowers, changes natures with him at once." Friendship between one man and another would seem to be the most unselfish feeling of which a human being is capable. The only sentiment that can be compared with it in this respect is that of patriotism, and even in patriotism there is an instinct of self-preservation, or at least of race-preservation. In modern times the place which the friend held in classic times is taken by the wife; but in California, owing to the absence of women and the exigencies of mining, friendship for a brief and brilliant period, never probably to recur, became once more an heroic passion. That there was no exaggeration in Bret Harte's pictures of Pioneer friendship might be shown by many extracts from contemporary observers, but one such will suffice:--"Two men who lived together, slept in the same cabin, ate together, took turns cooking and washing, tended on each other in sickness, and toiled day in and day out side by side, and made an equal division of their losses and gains, were regarded and generally regarded themselves as having entered into a very intimate tie, a sort of band of brotherhood, almost as sacred as that of marriage. The word 'partner,' or 'pard' as it was usually contracted, became the most intimate and confidential term that could be used."[68] Even in the cities friendship between men assumed a character which it had nowhere except in California. Partners in business were partners in all social and often in all domestic matters. They took their meals and their pleasures together, and showed that interest in each other's welfare which, at home, they would have expended upon wives and children. The withdrawal of one member from a firm seemed like the breaking up of a family. The citizens of San Francisco and Sacramento were all newcomers, they were mostly strangers to one another; and every partnership, though established primarily for business purposes, became a union of persons bound together by a sense of almost feudal loyalty, confident of one another's sympathy and support under all circumstances, and forming a coherent group in a chaotic community. In the mines the partnership relation was even more idyllic. Gold was sought at first by the primitive method of pan-mining. The miners travelled singly sometimes, but much more often in pairs, with knapsacks, guns and frying-pans; and they used a wooden bowl, or a metal pan, and sometimes an Indian wicker basket for washing the gravel or sand which was supposed to contain gold. Even a family bread-pan might be made to serve this purpose, and that was the article which the youthful miner, Jack Fleming, borrowed from beautiful Tinka Gallinger, and so became possessed in the end, not indeed of gold, but of something infinitely more valuable,--Tinka herself, the Treasure of the Redwoods. The operation of washing was thus described by a Pioneer: "The bowl is held in both hands, whirled violently back and forth through a half circle, and pitched this way and that sufficiently to throw off the earth and water, while the gold mixed with black sand settles to the bottom. The process is extremely tiresome, and involves all the muscles of the frame. In its effect it is more like swinging a scythe than any other labor I ever attempted." This work was much less laborious when the miner had access to a current of water, and in later times it was assisted by the use of a magnet to draw away the iron of which the black sand was largely composed. The bowl or pan stage was the first stage, and its tendency was to arrange the miners in couples like that of Tennessee and his Partner. Next came the use of the rocker or cradle,--the "golden canoe," as the Indians called it. The rocker was an oblong box, open at the lower end, the upper end being protected by a screen or grating. The screen intercepted all pebbles and gravel, and the finer material, earth and sand, was swept through the screen by the action of water thrown or directed against it. The same water carried the earth through the box, and out at the lower end; but the heavy sand, containing the gold, sank and was intercepted by cleats nailed across the inside of the box. A rough cradle, formed from a hollow log, would sell at one time for two hundred dollars. This process required the services of four or five men, and in pursuing it the miner ceased to be a vagrant. He acquired a habitation, more or less permanent, and entered into various relationships with his fellows, which finally included the lynching of a small portion of them. This is the life described by Bret Harte in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, and many other stories. The rocker period lasted only about a year, and was succeeded by that of the sluice, a sort of magnified rocker, fifty or even a hundred feet long. The necessary stream of water was diverted from some river, or was supplied by an artificial reservoir. It was the bursting of such a reservoir, as the Reader may remember, that precipitated the romance in the life of the Youngest Miss Piper. But the evolution of the industry was not yet complete. The next step was to explore the bed of a river by laboriously turning the stream aside. This was accomplished by constructing a dam across the river, and directing the water into a canal or flume prepared for it, thus leaving the bed of the river bare, perhaps for miles. These operations required the labor of many hands, and were extremely arduous and difficult. The dam could be built, of course, only in the dry season, and the first autumnal rains would be sure to send the stream back to its old channel. The coming of the rainy season in California is extremely uncertain, and river-bed mining was correspondingly precarious. Sometimes, great perseverance in these attempts was rewarded by great success. In November, 1849, the Swett's Bar Company, composed of seventy miners, succeeded in damming and diverting the Sonora River after fifteen days of extreme exertion. Five hours later the dam was swept away by a flood. The following summer the same company, reduced to sixty members, constructed a second and larger dam, which required sixty-nine days' labor. This also was swept away on the very day of its completion. But the miners did not give up. The next morning they began anew, the directors leading the way into the now ice-cold water, and the rest of the company following, some fairly shrieking with the contact. The dam was rebuilt as quickly as possible,--and, again, the river brushed it aside. The third year, a remnant of the company, some twenty-seven stubborn souls, for the fourth time completed a dam. This time it stood fast, and before the rains set in the persevering miners had obtained gold enough to make them all rich. Men who had struggled, side by side, through such difficulties and disappointments were bound by no common tie,--and the tie was a still closer one when, as in the first idyllic days, the partnership consisted of two members only. Bret Harte has devoted to friendship four of his best stories, namely, _Tennessee's Partner_, _Captain Jim's Friend_, _In the Tules_, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_. The subject is touched upon also in the story called _Under the Eaves_. Unquestionably the best of these stories is the first one, and if we should also set this down as the best of all Bret Harte's stories, we could not go far wrong. The author himself is said to have preferred it. It is a complete tale and a dramatic one, and yet it has the simplicity of an incident. There is not, one makes bold to say, a superfluous word in it, and perhaps only one word which an exacting reader could wish to change. The background of scenery that the story requires is touched in with that deep but restrained feeling for nature, with that realization of its awful beauty, when contrasted with the life of man, which is a peculiar trait of modern literature. The Reader will remember that rough, mean, kerosene-lighted, upper room in which the trial took place. "And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter, passionless stars." The pathos of _Tennessee's Partner_ consists chiefly in the fact that Tennessee, so far as we can judge him, was unworthy of his partner's devotion. He was courageous and good-humored, to be sure, but he was a robber, something of a drunkard, and inconsiderate enough to have run off with his partner's wife. Had Tennessee been a model of all the virtues, his partner's affection for him would have been a bestowal only of what was due. It would not have been, as it was in fact, the spontaneous outpouring of a generous and affectionate character. Whether we consider that the partner saw in Tennessee something which was really there, some divine spark or quality, known only to the God who created and to the friend who loved him, or that in Tennessee he beheld an ideal of his own creation, something different from the real man,--in either case his affection is equally disinterested and noble. Those who do not give the first place to _Tennessee's Partner_ would probably assign it either to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ or _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_; but in both of those stories the element of accident is utilized, though not improbably. It was more or less an accident that the Luck was swept away by a flood; it was an accident that the Outcasts were banished on the eve of a storm. But in _Tennessee's Partner_, there is no accident. Given the characters, all the rest followed inevitably. An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the "Bookman,"[69] presents the case against the _Luck_ and the _Outcasts_ in its most extreme form: "There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte's best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prostitute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. He lets her die, while her child survives. That is not so good. It is the pathos of accident. He sends the miners in to see the child. That is good art. He makes the presence of the child work a revolution in the camp. Strong men wash their faces and wear clean shirts in order to be worthy of the child. That is not good art." But here let us interrupt Mr. Douglas for a moment. It should be remembered that the clean faces and clean shirts were not spontaneous improvements. "Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding the Luck." Moreover, the miners of Roaring Camp, like the miners generally in California, were no strangers to clean shirts or clean faces. With few exceptions, they had been brought up to observe the decencies of life, and if, in the wild freedom of the mining camp, some of those decencies had been cast off, it was not difficult to reclaim them. However, let us hear Mr. Douglas out: "Finally he drowns the child and his readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. That is bad art.... The _Outcasts_ might be analyzed in the same way. The whole tableau is arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. You feel that there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the Outcasts, in the snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. And even Miggles, I fear, will hardly bear a close examination. The assault and battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. We like to be outflanked nowadays, and the old-fashioned frontal attack melts away before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory. M'liss, alas! no longer moves us. We prefer 'What Maisie Knew' to what M'liss didn't know." But at this point the Reader may become a little impatient. What attention should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of Henry James to the wholesome pathos of Bret Harte! And the man himself seems to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with admirable frankness, "Perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not Bret Harte's, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of our nerves." One or two obvious remarks are suggested by Mr. Douglas's canon of romance against realism. If it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would be made with established reputations. All the great tragedians from Æschylus to Shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from Haroun al Raschid to Daniel Defoe would suffer. Antigone, Juliet and Robinson Crusoe were all the victims of accident. Moreover, without the element of accident, or romance as Mr. Douglas calls it, life could not truly be represented. What might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens. Many a "Kentuck" was swept away by floods in California. To perish in a snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. It was on the twenty-third of November, 1850, that the Outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in the snow while endeavoring to walk from Poor Man's Creek to Grass Valley. One week later a miner from Virginia was frozen to death a few miles north of Downieville; and Poker Flat and Downieville are in the same county.[70] To know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art. But the substratum of truth in Mr. Douglas's view seems to be this, that a tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results wholly, or in part, from accident. If human passion can work out the destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common law as "the act of God," why so much the better. From this point of view, we may fairly place _Tennessee's Partner_ even above _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_. It only remains to add that like most of Bret Harte's stories, as we have seen, _Tennessee's Partner_ was suggested by a real incident, which, however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the California newspapers in June, 1903:-- "J. A. Chaffee, famous as the original of _Tennessee's Partner_, has been brought to an Oakland Sanatorium. He has been living since 1849 in a small Tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, Chamberlain. In the early days he saved Chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to Judge Lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim's throat. It was the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in such a case. Chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners' gold, but Chaffee cleared him, as every one believed Chaffee. The two men settled down to live where they have remained ever since, washing out enough placer gold to maintain them. Professor Magee of the University of California found Chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to come to Oakland for treatment. Chamberlain was left behind. Both men are over eighty." One who witnessed Chaffee's rescue of his partner gives some details of the affair, which show how closely Bret Harte kept to the facts until he saw occasion to depart from them. Chaffee had a donkey and a cart--the only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before the vigilance committee, "hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck." Of the four stories especially devoted to friendship, the second is _Captain Jim's Friend_, published in the year 1887. This is almost a _reductio ad absurdum_ of _Tennessee's Partner_, for Captain Jim's friend, Lacy Bassett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. In the end, Captain Jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he thinks, Bassett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. And yet, when Bassett commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and benefactor, the heroic Captain Jim feels not only that his own reputation for "foolishness" is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed. The third story, _In the Tules_, is a recurrence to the theme of _Tennessee's Partner_, the two leading characters being almost a repetition of those in the earlier story. _In the Tules_ has not the spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but it is a noble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare episodes which raise one's idea of human nature. In the fourth story, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, published much later, Bret Harte takes the subject in a lighter vein. The sacrifice made to friendship is not of life, but of fortune; and though, unquestionably, some men would lay down their lives more easily than they would give up their property, yet the sacrifice does not wear so tragic an aspect. In _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, among the very best of the later stories, we have a little group of miners held together, inspired, and redeemed from selfishness by the youngest of their number, affectionately spoken of as "The Old Man," one of those brilliant, fine, lovable natures, rare but not unknown in real life, to which all the virtues seem to come as easily as vice and weakness come to the generality of men.[71] [Illustration: HE LOOKED CURIOUSLY AT HIS REFLECTION From "Left Out on Lone Star Mountain" E. Boyd Smith, del.] The hero of this story plays a part much resembling that of the late James G. Fair, United States Senator from California, and a leading man in the State. Mr. Fair, who was of Scotch-Irish descent, crossed the Plains in 1850 with a company of men who were demoralized by their privations and misfortunes. Though the youngest of the party, being but eighteen years old, Fair, by mere force of natural fitness, became their leader; and it was owing to his determined good nature, energy and high spirits that they finally reached the Pacific Slope. A member of the band afterward wrote: "My comrades became so peevish from the wear upon the system, and ... the absence of accustomed comforts, that they were more like children than men, and at times it was as much as the boy could do to keep them from killing one another."[72] The moral of Bret Harte's stories, it has often been said, is that even bad men have a good side, and are frequently capable of performing noble acts. But this, surely, is only a small part of the lesson, or rather of the inspiration to be derived from his works. In fact most of his heroes are not bad men, but good men. Would it not be far more true to say that the moral of Bret Harte's stories is very nearly the same as the moral of the New Testament, namely, that the best thing a man can do with his life or anything else that he has, is to give it up,--for love, for honor, for a child, for a friend! CHAPTER X GAMBLING IN PIONEER TIMES Doubts have sometimes been cast upon Bret Harte's description of the gambling element in California life, but contemporary accounts fully sustain the picture which he drew. One reason for the comparative respectability of gambling among the Pioneers was that most of the California gamblers came from the West and South, especially from States bordering upon the Mississippi River, and in those quarters the status of the gambler was far higher than in the Eastern or Middle parts of the country. Early in 1850 a whole ship-load of gamblers arrived from New Orleans. They stopped, _en route_, at Monterey, went ashore for a few hours, and, as a kind of first-fruits of their long journey, relieved the Spaniards and Mexicans resident there of what loose silver and gold they happened to have on hand. These citizens of Monterey, like all the native Californians, were inveterate gamblers; but an American who was there at the time relates that they were like children in the hands of the men from New Orleans;--and thus we have one more proof of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Nor does Bret Harte's account lack direct confirmation. "The gamblers," says a contemporary historian, "were usually from New Orleans, Louisville, Memphis, Richmond, or St. Louis. Not infrequently they were well-born and well-educated, and among them were as many good, honest, square-dealing men as could be found in any other business; and they were, as a rule, more charitable and more ready to help those in distress."[73] A certain William Thornton, a gambler from St. Louis, known as "Lucky Bill," had many of the traits associated with Bret Harte's gamblers. He was noted for his generosity, and, though finally hanged by a vigilance committee, he made a "good end," for, on the scaffold, he exhorted his son who was among the spectators, to avoid bad company, to keep away from saloons, and to lead an industrious and honest life. No surprise need be felt, therefore, that in California a gambler like Jack Hamlin should have the qualities and perform the deeds of a knight-errant. Bret Harte himself records the fact that it was the generous gift of a San Francisco gambler which started the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War, so far at least as California was concerned. The following incident occurred in the town of Coloma in the summer of 1849. Two ministers, a Mr. Roberts and a Mr. Dawson, preached there one Sunday to a company of miners, and one of them held forth especially against the sin of gambling. When the collection had been made, a twenty dollar and a ten dollar gold piece were found, carefully wrapped in paper, and on the paper was written: "I design the twenty dollars for Mr. Roberts because he fearlessly dealt out the truth against the gamblers. The ten dollars are for Mr. Dawson." The paper was signed by the leading gambler in the town. The principal building in the new city, the Parker House, a two-story, wooden affair, with a piazza in front, was erected in 1849 at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, and was rented almost immediately at fifteen hundred dollars a month for games of chance. Almost everybody played, and in '49 and '50 the gambling houses served as clubs for business and professional men. As Bret Harte wrote in the Introduction to the second volume of his works:--"The most respectable citizens, though they might not play, are to be seen here of an evening. Old friends who, perhaps, parted at the church door in the States, meet here without fear and without reproach. Even among the players are represented all classes and conditions of men. One night at a faro table a player suddenly slipped from his seat to the floor, a dead man. Three doctors, also players, after a brief examination, pronounced it disease of the heart. The coroner, sitting at the right of the dealer, instantly impanelled the rest of the players, who, laying down their cards, briefly gave a verdict in accordance with the facts, and then went on with their game!" A similar but much worse scene is recorded as occurring in a Sacramento gambling house. A quarrel arose in the course of which a man was shot three times, each wound being a mortal one. The victim was placed in a dying condition on one of the tables; but the orchestra continued to play, and the gambling went on as before in the greater part of the room. A notorious woman, staggering drunk, assailed the ears of the dying man with profane and obscene remarks, while another by-stander endeavored to create laughter by mimicking the contortions that appeared in his face, as he lay there gasping in his death agony upon a gambler's table.[74] In San Francisco the principal gambling houses were situated in the very heart of the city, and they were kept open throughout the whole twenty-four hours. At night, the brilliantly lighted rooms, the shifting crowd of men, diverse and often picturesque in costume and appearance, the wild music which arose now and then, and which, except for the jingling of gold and silver, was almost the only sound,--all this, as a youthful spectator recalled in after years, "was a rapturous and fearful thing." The rooms were gorgeously furnished, with a superabundance of gilt frames, sparkling chandeliers, and ornaments of silver. Behind the long bar were more mirrors, gold clocks, ornamental bottles and decanters, china vases, bouquets of flowers, and glasses of many colors and fantastic shapes. The atmosphere was often hazy with tobacco smoke and redolent of the fumes of brandy; but perfect order prevailed, and in the pauses of the music not a sound could be heard except the subdued murmur of voices, and the ceaseless chink of gold and silver. It was the fashion for those who stood at the tables to have their hands full of coins which they shuffled backward and forward, like so many cards. The noise of a cane falling upon the marble floor would cause everybody to look up. If a voice were raised in hilarity or altercation, the by-standers would frown upon the offender with a stare of virtuous indignation. Every gambling house, even the most squalid resort on Long Wharf, had its music, which might be that of a single piano-player or fiddler, or an orchestra of five or six performers. In the large gambling halls the music was often very good. Two thousand dollars a month for a nightly performance was the sum once offered to a violin-player by a San Francisco gambler; and, to the honor of the artist be it said, the offer was declined. All California, sooner or later, was seen in the gambling rooms of San Francisco: Mexicans wrapped in their blankets, smoking cigarettes, and watching the game intently from under their broad-brimmed hats; Frenchmen in their blouses, puffing at black pipes; countrymen fresh from the mines, wearing flannel shirts and high boots, with pistols and knives in their belts; boys of ten or twelve years, smoking big cigars, and losing hundreds of dollars at a play, with the nonchalance of veterans; low-browed, villainous-looking convicts from Australia; thin, glassy-eyed men, in the last stages of a misspent life, clad in the greasy black of a former gentility. The professional gamblers usually had a pale, careworn look, not uncommon, by the way, in California; but no danger or excitement could disturb their equanimity. In this respect the players strove hard to imitate them, though not always with success. The most popular games were _monte_, usually conducted by Mexicans, and faro, an American game. The French introduced _rouge-et-noir_, _roulette_, _lansquenet_, and _vingt-et-un_. In the larger halls the custom was to rent different parts of the room to different proprietors, each of whom carried on his own game independently. Most of the proprietors were foreigners, and many of them were women. These women included some of great beauty, and they were all magnificently attired, their rustling silks, elaborately dressed hair and glittering diamonds contrasting strangely with the hairy faces, slouch hats and flannel shirts of the miners. That gambling was looked upon at first as a legitimate industry is plain from the surprising fact that the local courts in Sacramento upheld gambling debts as valid, and authorized their collection by process of law. But these decisions--almost sufficient to make Blackstone rise from his grave--were reversed the following year. Indeed, a healthy public opinion against gambling developed very soon. Even in 1850, the grand jury sitting at San Francisco condemned the practice; and in 1851 gambling on Sunday was forbidden in that city by an ordinance which the authorities enforced in so far that open gambling on that day was no longer permitted. In December, 1850, an ordinance against gaming in the streets was passed by the city council of Sacramento. By the end of 1851 there was a perceptible decrease in both gaming and drinking in all the larger towns of California. "Gambling with all the attractions of fine saloons and tastefully dressed women is on the wane in Marysville," a local observer reported; and the same thing was noticed in San Francisco. The gambling house, as a general _rendez-vous_, was succeeded by the saloon, and that, in turn, by the club. Gambling houses continued to be licensed in San Francisco until 1856, but public opinion against them steadily grew. "They are tolerated," said the "San Francisco Herald," "for no other reason that we know of except that they are charged heavily for licenses. Almost all of them are owned by foreigners." By the end of the year 1855, the "Bulletin" was condemning the gamblers as among the worst elements of society; and the death of the "Bulletin's" heroic Editor in the following year marked the close of the gambling era in San Francisco. When Bret Harte's first stories were written the type represented by John Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin had begun to pass away, and those worthies would soon have been forgotten. But who can forget them now! "Bret Harte," said the "Academy," after his death, "was the Homer of Gamblers. Gamblers there had been before, but they were of the old sullen type." In making his gamblers good-looking, Bret Harte only followed tradition, and the tradition is founded on fact. The one essential trait of the gambler is good nerves. These are largely a matter of good health and physique, and good looks have much the same origin. It follows that gamblers having good nerves should also have good looks. It is natural, too, that they should have excellent manners. The habit of easy shooting and of being shot at is universally recognized as conducive to politeness, and, moreover, a certain persuasiveness of manner, a mingling of suavity and authority, is part of the gambler's stock-in-trade. An American of wide experience once declared that he had met but one fellow-countryman whose manners could fairly be described as "courtly," and he was a professional gambler of Irish birth. Good looks and good manners, the former especially, were very common among the California Pioneers, and it is but natural that Oakhurst and Hamlin should have had an unusual share of these attractions. Mr. Oakhurst appears in only a few of the stories, but there is a certain intensity in the description of him which makes one almost certain that he, like most of Bret Harte's characters, was drawn from life. "There was something in his carriage, something in the pose of his beautiful head, something in the strong and fine manliness of his presence, something in the perfect and utter control and discipline of his muscles, something in the high repose of his nature--a repose not so much a matter of intellectual ruling as of his very nature,--that go where he would and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand." In this description one cannot help perceiving the Author's effort, not quite successful perhaps, to lay his finger upon the essential trait of a real and striking personality. In two stories only does he play the part of hero, these being _A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst_, and the immortal _Outcasts of Poker Flat_. The former story closes with a characteristic remark. Two weeks after the duel in which his right arm was disabled, Mr. Oakhurst "walked into his rooms at Sacramento, and in his old manner took his seat at the faro table. 'How's your arm, Jack?' asked an incautious player. There was a smile following the question, which, however, ceased as Jack looked up quietly at the speaker. 'It bothers my dealing a little, but I can shoot as well with my left.' The game was continued in that decorous silence which usually distinguished the table at which Mr. John Oakhurst presided." It has been objected by one critic that Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin are too much alike; but if we imagine one of these characters as placed in the situation of the other, we cannot help seeing how very different they are. Jack Hamlin could never have been infatuated, as Oakhurst was, by Mrs. Decker,--or indeed by any woman. Oakhurst was too simple, too solid, too grave a person to understand women. He lacked the humor, the sympathy, the cynicism, and the acute perceptive powers of Hamlin. One of the best scenes in all Bret Harte is that in which Oakhurst bursts in upon Mrs. Decker, recounts her guilt and treachery, and declares his intention to kill her and then himself. "She did not faint, she did not cry out. She sat quietly down again, folded her hands in her lap, and said calmly,-- "'And why should you not?' "Had she recoiled, had she shown any fear or contrition, had she essayed an explanation or apology, Mr. Oakhurst would have looked upon it as an evidence of guilt. But there is no quality that courage recognizes so quickly as courage, there is no condition that desperation bows before but desperation; and Mr. Oakhurst's power of analysis was not so keen as to prevent him from confounding her courage with a moral quality. Even in his fury he could not help admiring this dauntless invalid."[75] Jack Hamlin's power of analysis was far more keen; and Mrs. Decker would never have deceived him. The two men were equally brave, equally desperate, but perhaps Oakhurst was the more heroic. The simplicity of his nature was more akin to heroism than was the dashing, mercurial, laughter-loving temperament of Jack Hamlin. Hamlin is almost always represented with companions, male or female, but Oakhurst was a solitary man in life as in death. His dignity, his reserve, even his want of humor tended to isolate him. Bret Harte, it will be noticed, almost always speaks of him as "Mr." Oakhurst. Though he was numbered among the outcasts of Poker Flat, he was far from being one of them. There is a classic simplicity, not only in Bret Harte's account of Oakhurst, but in the whole telling of the story, and a depth of feeling which is more than classic. Every line of that marvellous tale seems to thrill with anticipation of the tragedy in which it closes; and every incident is described in the tense language of real emotion. "Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave it,--snow!" Then comes the catastrophe of the snow-storm. We may condemn Oakhurst, on this or that ground, for his act of self-destruction, but we cannot regard it as weak or cowardly. To be capable of real despair is the mark of a strong character. A weaker man will shuffle, disguise the truth in his own mind, and hope not only against hope but against reason. Oakhurst, when he saw that the cards were absolutely against him, having done all that he could do for his helpless companions, decorously withdrew, and, in the awful solitude of the forest and the storm, forever renounced that game of life which he had played with so much courage and skill, and yet with so little success. Jack Hamlin figures much more extensively than Oakhurst in the stories, and he would probably be regarded by most readers of Bret Harte as the Author's best creation, surpassing even Colonel Starbottle;--and, as Mr. Chesterton exclaims, "How terrible it is to speak of any character as surpassing Colonel Starbottle!" His traits are now almost as familiar as those of George Washington; but the type was a new one, and it completely revolutionized the ideal of the gambler which had long obtained both in fiction and on the stage. As a London critic very neatly said, "With this dainty and delicate California desperado, Bret Harte vanquished forever the turgid villains of Ainsworth and Lytton." In his _Bohemian Days in San Francisco_ Bret Harte gives an account of the real person who was undoubtedly Jack Hamlin's prototype. He speaks of his handsome face, his pale Southern look, his slight figure, the scrupulous elegance and neatness of his dress,--his genial manner, and the nonchalance with which he set out for the duel that ended in his death. In the representation of Jack Hamlin there are some seeming discrepancies. Such, for instance, is Hamlin's arrogant treatment of the ostler in _Brown of Calaveras_, and still more his conduct toward Jenkinson, the tavern-keeper, whom Don José Sepulvida, with contrasting Spanish courtesy, described as "our good Jenkinson, our host, our father." The barkeeper in _A Sappho of Green Springs_ fares no better at his hands; and in _Gabriel Conroy_, Bret Harte, falling into the manner of Dickens at his very worst, represents Jack Hamlin as concluding a tirade against a servant by "intimating that he would forcibly dislodge certain vital and necessary organs from the porter's body." Even less excusable is his retort to the country youth in _The Convalescence of Jack Hamlin_; and in one story he is actually guilty of rudeness to a woman, the unfortunate Heiress of Red Dog. In these passages Bret Harte might be accused of admiring Jack Hamlin in the wrong place. But was he not rather consciously depicting the bad points of what would seem to have been his favorite character? Hamlin had several imperfections. Bret Harte does not even represent him as a gentleman, but only as an approach to one. In the story which first brings us face to face with him, the gambler is described as lounging up and down "with that listless and grave indifference of his class which was perhaps the next thing to good breeding." That there should be any doubt as to the author's attitude upon this point shows how carefully Bret Harte keeps his own personality in the background. He does not sit in judgment upon his characters; he seldom says even a word of praise or blame in regard to them. All that he leaves to the reader. Moreover, he has a rare power of perceiving the defects of his own heroes and heroines. Occasionally, in fact, the reader of Bret Harte is a little shocked by his admission of some moral or intellectual blemish in the person whom he is sketching; and yet, after a moment's reflection, one is always forced to agree that the blemish is really there, and that without it the portrait would be incomplete and misleading. A fine example of this subtlety of art is found in _Maruja_, where the author frankly declares that his heroine could not quite appreciate the delicacy shown by Captain Carroll when he abstained from any display of affection, lest he should presume upon the fact that he had just undertaken a difficult service at her request. "Maruja stretched out her hand. The young man bent over it respectfully, and moved toward the door. She had expected him to make some protestation--perhaps even to claim some reward. But the instinct which made him forbear even in thought to take advantage of the duty laid upon him, which dominated even his miserable passion for her, and made it subservient to his exaltation of honor, ... all this, I grieve to say, was partly unintelligible to Maruja, and not entirely satisfactory.... He might have kissed her! He did not." Bret Harte did not describe perfect characters or mere types, destitute of individual peculiarities, but real men and women. Let us, therefore, be thankful for Maruja's lack of delicacy and for Jack Hamlin's petulance and arrogance. His failings in this respect were a part of the piquancy of his character, and in part, also, they resulted from his discontent with himself. [Illustration: DENNISON'S EXCHANGE, AND PARKER HOUSE, DECEMBER, 1849, BEFORE THE FIRE Copyright, Century Co.] This discontent is hidden by his more obvious traits, his love of music and of children, the facile manner in which he charmed and subdued horses, dogs, servants, women, and all the other inferior animals, as Bret Harte somewhere puts it; his scorn of all meanness, his chivalrous defence of all weakness; his iron nerve; his self-confidence and easy, graceful assurance; his appreciation of the refinements and niceties of existence. These are his obvious qualities; but behind them all was something more important and more original, namely, an undertone of self-condemnation which ran through his life, and gave the last touch of recklessness and _abandon_ to his character. We never quite realize what Jack Hamlin was until we come to that scene in the story of his protegée where, grasping by the shoulders the two blackguards who had discovered his secret and were attempting to take advantage of it, he forced them beyond the rail, above the grinding paddle-wheel of the flying steamer, and threatened to throw himself and them beneath it. "'No,' said the gambler, slipping into the open space with a white and rigid face in which nothing seemed living but the eyes,--'No; but it's telling you how two d--d fools who didn't know when to shut their mouths might get them shut once and forever. It's telling you what might happen to two men who tried to "play" a man who didn't care to be "played,"--a man who didn't care much what he did, when he did it, or how he did it, but would do what he'd set out to do--even if in doing it he went to hell with the men he sent there.' He had stepped out on the guards, beside the two men, closing the rail behind him. He had placed his hands on their shoulders; they had both gripped his arms; yet, viewed from the deck above, they seemed at that moment an amicable, even fraternal group, albeit the faces of the three men were dead white in the moonlight." One might draw a parallel, not altogether fanciful, between those three figures standing in apparent quietude on the verge of what was worse than a precipice, and those other three that compose the immortal group of the Laocoön. The tragedy of Jack Hamlin's life, that which formed a dark background to his gay and adventurous career, was his own deep dissatisfaction with his lawless and predatory manner of existence. In this respect, his experience was the universal experience intensified; and that is why one can find in Hamlin something of that representative character which readers of many different races and kinds have found in Hamlet. Who that has passed the first flush of youth, and has ever taken a single glance at his own heart will fail to sympathize with Jack Hamlin's self-disgust! It is this feeling that goes as far as anything can go to reconcile a man to death, for death ends the struggle. There is no remorse in the grave. CHAPTER XI OTHER FORMS OF BUSINESS "Two years ago," said the "Alta California" in 1851, "trade was a wild unorganized whirl." Staple goods went furiously up and down in price like wild-cat mining stocks. There was no telegraph by which supplies could be ordered from the East or inquiries could be answered, and several months must elapse before an order sent by mail to New York could be filled. A merchant at Valparaiso once paid twenty thousand dollars for the information contained in a single letter from San Francisco. Consignors in the East were almost wholly ignorant as to what people needed in California, and how goods should be stowed for the long voyage around the Cape. Great quantities of preserved food--it was before the days of canning--were spoiled _en route_. Coal was shipped in bulk without any ventilating appliances, and it often took fire and destroyed the vessels in which it was carried. One unfortunate woman, the wife of a Cape Cod sea-captain, was wrecked thrice in this way, having been transferred from one coal-laden schooner to another, and later to a third, all of which were set on fire by the heating of the coal, and burned to the water's edge. In one of these adventures she was lashed to a chair on deck, where she spent five days, in a rough sea, with smoke and gas pouring from the ship at every seam. Her final escape was made in a row-boat which landed at a desolate spot on the coast of Peru. Elaborate gold-washing machines which proved to be useless and ready-made houses that nobody wanted were among the articles shipped to San Francisco. The rate of interest was very high, capital being scarce, and storage in warehouses was both insecure, from the great danger of fire, and extremely expensive. It was, therefore, nearly impossible for the merchants to hold their goods for a more favorable market. In July, 1849, lumber sold at the enormous rate of five hundred dollars a thousand feet,--fifty times the New England price; but in the following Spring, immense shipments having arrived, it brought scarcely enough to pay the freight bills. Tobacco, which at first sold for two dollars a pound, became so plentiful afterward that boxes of it were used for stepping stones, and in one case, as Bret Harte has related, tobacco actually supplied the foundation for a wooden house. Holes in the sidewalk were stopped with bags of rice or beans, with sacks of coffee, and, on one occasion, with three barrels of revolvers, the supply far exceeding even the California demand for that article. Potatoes brought sixty dollars a bushel at wholesale in 1849, but were raised so extensively in California the next year that the price fell to nothing, and whole cargoes of these useful vegetables, just arrived from the East, were dumped into the Bay. In some places near San Francisco it was really feared that a pestilence would result from huge piles of superfluous potatoes that lay rotting on the ground. Saleratus, worth in New York four cents a pound, sold at San Francisco in 1848 for fifteen dollars a pound. The menu of a breakfast for two at Sacramento in the same year was as follows:-- 1 box of sardines, $16.00 1 pound of hard bread, 2.00 1 pound of butter, 6.00 1/2 pound of cheese, 3.00 2 bottles of ale, 16.00 ------ Total, $43.00 Flour in the mining camps cost four and even five dollars a pound, and eggs were two dollars apiece. A chicken brought sixteen dollars; a revolver, one hundred and fifty dollars; a stove, four hundred dollars; a shovel, one hundred dollars. Laudanum was one dollar a drop, brandy twenty dollars a bottle; and dried apples fluctuated from five cents to seventy-five cents a pound. It is matter of history that a bilious miner once gave fifteen dollars for a small box of Seidlitz powders, and at the Stanislaus Diggings a jar of raisins, regarded as a cure for the scurvy then prevailing, sold for their weight in gold, amounting to four thousand dollars. As showing the dependence of California upon the East for supplies, it is significant that even so late as 1853 six thousand tons of hard bread were imported annually from New York. Wages and prices were high, but nobody complained of them. There was in fact a disdain of all attempts to cheapen or haggle. Gold dust poured into San Francisco from the launches and schooners which plied on the Sacramento River, and almost everybody in California seemed to have it in plenty. "Money," said a Pioneer in a letter written at the end of '49, "is about the most valueless article that a man can have in his possession here." As an illustration of the lavish manner in which business was transacted, it may be mentioned that the stamp box in the express office of Wells, Fargo and Company was a sort of common treasury. Clerks, messengers and drivers dipped into it for change whenever they wanted a lunch or a drink. There was nothing secret about this practice, and if not sanctioned it was at least winked at by the superior officers. Huge lumps of gold were exhibited in hotels and gambling houses, and the jingling of coins rivalled the scraping of the fiddle as the characteristic music of San Francisco. The first deposit in the United States Mint of gold from California was made on December 8, 1848, and between that date and May 1, 1850, there were presented for coinage gold dust and nuggets valued at eleven million four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. A lot of land in San Francisco rose from fifteen dollars in price to forty thousand dollars. In September, 1850, bricklayers receiving twelve dollars a day struck for fourteen dollars, and obtained the increase. The wages of carpenters varied from twelve dollars to twenty dollars a day. Those who did best in California were, as a rule, the small traders, the mechanics and skilled workmen, and the professional men who, resisting the temptation to hunt for gold, made money by being useful to the community. "It may truly be said," remarked the "San Francisco Daily Herald" in 1852, "that California is the only spot in the world where labor is not only on an equality with capital, but to a certain extent is superior to it." Women cooks received one hundred dollars a month, and chambermaids and nurses almost as much. Washerwomen made fortunes and founded families. A resident of San Francisco went to the mines for four weeks, and came back with a bag of gold dust which, he thought, would astonish his wife, who had remained in the city; but meanwhile she had been "taking in washing," at the rate of twelve dollars a dozen; and he was crestfallen to find that her gains were twice as much as his. It was cheaper to have one's clothes sent to China or the Sandwich Islands to be laundered, and some thrifty and patient persons took that course. A valuable trade sprang up between China and San Francisco. The solitude became a village, and the village a city, with startling rapidity. In less than a year, twelve thousand people gathered at Sacramento where there had not been a single soul. Events and changes followed one another so rapidly that each year formed an epoch by itself. In 1853 men spoke of 1849 as of a romantic and half-forgotten past. An old citizen was one who had been on the ground a year. When Stephen J. Field offered himself as a candidate for the newly-created office of Alcalde at Marysville, the supporters of a rival candidate objected to Field as being a newcomer. He had been there only three days. His opponent had been there six days. But in 1851 the material progress of California received a great, though only a temporary, check. As commerce adjusted itself to the needs of the community prices and wages fell. A drink cost fifteen cents (the half of "two bits"), instead of fifty cents, which had been the usual price, and the wages of day laborers shrank to five dollars a day. The change was thus humorously described by an editor, obviously of Southern extraction: "About this time the Yankees began to pour into San Francisco, to invest in corner lots, and speculate in wooden gingerbread, framed houses and the like. Prices gradually came down, and money which was once thrown about so recklessly has now come to be regarded as an article of considerable importance." In San Francisco there was almost a commercial panic. The city was heavily in debt, many private fortunes were swept away, property was insecure, and robbery and murder were common events. Delano relates that a young man of his acquaintance, a wild and daring fellow, was offered at this time a salary of seven hundred dollars a month, to steal horses and mules in a large, systematic and business-like manner.[76] The tone of the San Francisco papers in 1851 was by no means cheerful. The following is the description which the "Alta California" gave of the city in December of that year: "Our city is certainly an unfortunate one in the matter of public accommodation. Her wharves are exposed to tempestuous northers and to the ravages of the worm; the piles that are driven into the mud for houses to rest upon are forced out of their perpendicular and crowded over by pressure of sand used in filling in other water lots against them; a most valuable portion of the city survey is converted into a filthy lake or salt water _laguna_ filled with garbage, dead animals and refuse matter from the streets; the streets are narrow and are constructed with sidewalks so irregular, miserable, and behampered as to drive off passengers into the middle of the street to take the chance of being ridden over and trampled under foot by scores of recklessly driven mules and horses; with drays, wagons and carriages without number to deafen, confuse and endanger the unfortunate pedestrian. A few thin strips of boards, pieces of dry-goods boxes or barrel staves constitute the sidewalks in some of our most important thoroughfares, and even this material is so irregularly and insecurely laid that the walks are shunned as stumbling places full of man-traps; more than all this, the sidewalks of the principal streets in the city are strewn and obstructed with shop wares." The first Vigilance Committee of 1851 checked crime and restored order for a short period, and the second Vigilance Committee of 1856, together with the election which followed it, effected a most decided and lasting improvement in the government of San Francisco, and especially in the management of its police. In the brief account already given of James King and his career, this episode in California life has been touched upon. The fires which successively overran the cities of California, and especially San Francisco, were another source of disaster to the business world. There were many small fires in San Francisco and six conflagrations, all within two years. The first of these occurred in December, '49, the loss being about one million dollars. A characteristic act at this fire was that of a merchant whose shop had been burned, but who had saved several hundred suits of black clothes. Having no place for storing them, and seeing that they would be stolen or ruined, he gave them away to the bystanders. "Help yourselves, gentlemen!" he cried. The invitation was accepted, and the next day an unusual proportion of the citizens of San Francisco were observed to be in mourning. In May, and again in June, 1850, there were large fires, and it was after these disasters that the use of cloth for the sides and roofs of buildings was prohibited by law. Up to that time the shops of the city had been constructed very commonly of that highly inflammable material. In September, 1850, there was another but less destructive fire, and on May 4, 1851, occurred the "great fire," in which the loss of property was at least seven million dollars. It was estimated at the time at fifteen million dollars. This conflagration produced a night of horror such as even California had not seen before. The fire started at eleven P. M., and the flames were fanned by a strong, westerly breeze. The glow in the sky was seen at Monterey,--one hundred miles distant. So rapidly did the flames spread that merchants in some cases removed their stock of goods four or five times, and yet had them overtaken and destroyed in the end. Since the burning of Moscow no other city had suffered so much from fire. Delicate women, driven from their homes at midnight, were wandering through the streets, with no protection from the raw wind except their nightclothes. A sick man was carried from his bed in a burning house, and placed in the street, where, amid all the turmoil of the scene, the roaring of the flames, the shouts, cries and imprecations of men, amid falling sparks and cinders, and jostled by the half-frenzied passers-by, he breathed his last. Among the brave acts performed at this fire was that of a clerk who picked up a burning box which contained canisters of powder, carried it a block on his shoulder, and threw it into a pool of water. It was during this fire, also, that an American flag, released by the burning of the cord which held it, soared away, above the flames and smoke, while a cry that was half a cheer and half a sob, burst from the throats of the crowd beneath it. But, great as this disaster was, the merchants rallied from it with true California courage. "One year here," wrote the Reverend Mr. Colton, "will do more for your philosophy than a lifetime elsewhere. I have seen a man sit and quietly smoke his cigar while his house went heavenward in a column of flame." This was exemplified in the great fire. Men began to fence in their lots although the smouldering ruins still emitted an almost suffocating heat. Contracts for new stores were made while the old ones were yet burning; and in many cases the ground was cleared, and temporary buildings went up before the ashes of the burned buildings had cooled. Lumber, fortunately, was abundant, and the morning after the fire every street and lane leading to the ruined district was crowded with wagons full of building tools and material. The city resembled a hive of bees after it has been rifled of its honey. The smaller cities suffered almost as severely from fire. Sacramento was burned twice and flooded three times before the year 1854. In _The Reincarnation of Smith_, Bret Harte describes the appearance of the city when the river upon which it is situated suddenly burst its banks and "a great undulation of yellow water" swept through the streets of the city. Two other stories, _In the Tules_ and _When the Waters Were Up at "Jules',"_ deal with the floods of 1854 and of 1860, and in the first of these the escape of Martin Morse, the solitary inhabitant of the river-bank, is described. "But one night he awakened with a start. His hand, which was hanging out of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. He had barely time to spring to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door fell out as from inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed like a pack of cards. But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against it, and thence out into what might have been another world! For the rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable expanse of water! As his frail raft swept under a cottonwood he caught at one of the overhanging limbs, and, working his way desperately along the bough, at last reached a secure position in the fork of the tree." Martin Morse was saved eventually; but another victim of the same flood, and not a fictitious one, was found dead from exposure and exhaustion in the tree which he had reached by swimming. So close, even in small incidents, are Bret Harte's stories to the reality of California life! During this freshet a man and his wife, who occupied a ranch on the Feather River, had an experience more remarkable than that of Martin Morse. They took refuge, first, on the roof of their house, and then, when the house floated off, they clung to a piece of timber, and so drifted to a small island. But here they found a prior occupant in the person of a grizzly bear, and to escape him they climbed a tree, whence they were rescued the next morning. What with fire and flood added to the uncertainties and vicissitudes of trade carried on thousands of miles from the base of supplies, with no telegraphic communication and only a fortnightly mail; what with land values rising and falling; with cities and towns springing up like mushrooms and often withering as quickly;--under these circumstances, and in a stimulating climate, it is no wonder that the Californians lived a feverish, and often a reckless life. The Pioneers could recount more instances of misfortune and more triumphs over misfortune than any other people in the world. But suicides were frequent,--they numbered twenty-nine in San Francisco in a single year,--and one of the first public buildings erected by the State was an Insane Asylum at Stockton. It was quickly filled. Nevertheless, contemporary with the feverish life of the mining camp and the city was the life of the farm and the vineyard; and this, too, was not neglected by Bret Harte. The agricultural resources of California were beginning to be known even before the discovery of gold, and many of those who crossed the Plains in '49 and '50 were bent not upon mining but upon farming. Others, who failed as miners, or who were thrown out of business by the hard times of '51 and '56, turned to the fertile valleys and hillsides for support. Monterey, on the lower coast of central California, was the sheep county; and flocks of ten thousand from Ohio and of one hundred thousand from Mexico were grazing there before 1860. In that year it was said to contain more sheep than could be found in any other county in the United States. Tasajara was known as a "cow county." An immigrant from New Jersey, in 1850, brought thirty thousand fruit trees; and by 1859 the Foot-Hills in the counties of Yuba, Nevada, El Dorado and Sacramento were covered with vineyards, interspersed with vine-clad cottages, where, a few years before, there had been only the rough and scattered huts of a few miners. Immense quantities of wheat were raised, especially in Humboldt County on the northern coast of the State, where we hear of crops averaging sixty bushels to the acre. In 1860 the surplus of wheat, the quantity, that is, available for exportation, exceeded three million bushels; and the barley crop was still larger. The Stanislaus and Santa Clara Valleys, not far from San Francisco, and southeast of the city, were also grain-growing districts, as is recorded in Bret Harte's story _Through the Santa Clara Wheat_. He describes his heroine as following her guide between endless rows of stalks, rising ten and even twelve feet high, like "a long, pillared conservatory of greenish glass." "She also discovered that the close air above her head was continually freshened by the interchange of lower temperature from below,--as if the whole vast field had a circulation of its own,--and that the adobe beneath her feet was gratefully cool to her tread. There was no dust; what had at first half suffocated her seemed to be some stimulating aroma of creation that filled the narrow green aisles, and now imparted a strange vigor and excitement to her as she walked along." So early as 1851 the newspapers began to publish articles about the opportunities for farming, and soon afterward the "California Farmer," an excellent weekly, was started at Sacramento, and supplied the community with news in general as well as with agricultural information. One can imagine the relief with which in those strenuous days the reader of the "Farmer" turned from accounts of robbery, murder, suicide and lynching to gentle disquisitions upon the rearing of calves, the merits of Durham steers, and the most approved method of fattening sheep in winter. The Hubbard squash, then a novelty, was treated by the "Farmer" as seriously as the Constitutional Convention, or the expulsion of foreigners from the mines. Practical subjects, as for instance, subsoil ploughs, remedies for smut, and recipes for rhubarb wine, were carefully discussed by this Pioneer agriculturist; and not infrequently he rose to higher themes, such as "The Age of the Earth," and "The Influence of Females on Society." CHAPTER XII LITERATURE, JOURNALISM AND RELIGION Most of the newspaper men in the early days of California were Southerners or under Southern influence, as is plain from many indications. For example, duelling and shooting at sight were common editorial functions.[77] Bret Harte, in _An Episode of Fiddletown_, gives an instance: "An unfortunate _rencontre_ took place on Monday last between the Honorable Jackson Flash, of the 'Dutch Flat Intelligencer,' and the well-known Colonel Starbottle of this place, in front of the Eureka Saloon. Two shots were fired by the parties without injury to either, although it is said that a passing Chinaman received fifteen buckshot in the calves of his legs from the Colonel's double-barrelled shotgun which were not intended for him. John will learn to keep out of the way of Melican man's firearms hereafter." This fictitious incident can be paralleled almost exactly from the California papers of the day. In July, 1851, a certain Colonel Johnston pulled the nose of the Editor of the "Marysville Times," whereupon the Editor drew a pistol, and the Colonel ran away. In September of the same year the "Alta California" announced that a duel between one of the proprietors of that paper and a brother to the Governor of the State had been prevented by the police. In March, 1851, two Sacramento Editors had a dispute in the course of which one endeavored to shoot the other. In May of the same year, the Editor of the "Calaveras Chronicle" fought a duel with another citizen of that town, and was dangerously wounded. In November, 1860, the Editor of the "Visalia Delta" was killed in a street affray. In San Francisco a duel took place between ex-Governor McDougall and the Editor of "The Picayune," "A. C. Russell, Esq." This use of "Esquire," by the way, was an English custom imported to California by way of the South, and many humorous examples of it may be found in Bret Harte. Thus, in the "Star's" account of "Uncle Ben" Dabney's sudden elevation to wealth and to a more aristocratic name, we read: "Benjamin Daubigny, Esq., who left town for Sacramento on important business, not entirely unconnected with his new interests in Indian Springs, will, it is rumored, be shortly joined by his wife, who has been enabled by his recent good fortune to leave her old home in the States, and take her proper proud position by his side.... Mr. Daubigny was accompanied by his private secretary, Rupert, the eldest son of H. G. Filgee, Esq.,"--"H. G. Filgee, Esq." being a species of bar-room loafer. Another indication of the Southern origin of Californian Editors is the Starbottlian lack of humor which they often display. In August, 1850, the junior Editor of the "Alta California" published an extremely long letter in that paper describing his personal difficulties with two acquaintances, and concluding as follows: "I had simply intended in our interview to pronounce Messrs. Crane and Rice poltroons and cowards, and spit in their faces; and had they seen fit to resent it on the spot, I was prepared for them."--Nothing more. The "Sacramento Transcript" concluded the account of a funeral as follows: "She was buried in a neat mahogany coffin, furnished by Mr. Earle Youmans at one half the established price." The "San Francisco Daily Herald" of June 21, 1852, contains a very long, minute, and extremely technical account of a prize-fight, written with evident relish, but concluding with a wholly unexpected comment as follows: "Thus ended this brutal exhibition!" The editorial tone, especially in San Francisco, was distinguished by great solemnity, but it was the assumed solemnity of youth, for the Editors, like everybody else in California, were young. None but a youthful journalist could have written a leading article, published one Monday in a San Francisco paper, describing a sermon which the writer had heard on the preceding Sunday, giving the name of the preacher, and complaining bitterly, not that he was heterodox or bigoted, but that he was stupid and uninteresting! In fact, the California Editors, despite the solemnity of their tone, showed a decided inclination to deal with the amusing, rather than with the serious, aspects of life. The "Sacramento Transcript" in August, 1850, contained a column letter, in large type, minutely describing "an alleged difficulty" which occurred at the American Fork House, between Mr. Gelston of Sacramento, and Mr. Drake, "who has been stopping at this place for his health,"--with poor results, it is to be feared. In another issue of the same paper two columns are devoted to an account of a practical joke played upon a French barber in San Francisco. Most of all, however, did the California journalists betray their youth, and their Southern origin as well, by the ornate style and the hyperbole in which the early papers indulged, and which are often satirized by Bret Harte. An editorial article dealing with the prospects of California began as follows: "When the eagle, emblem of model Republican liberty, winged its final flight westward from its home where Atlantic surges chafe our shores, and sought the sunny clime of the mild Pacific Strand, it bore in its strong talons," and so forth for a sentence of one hundred and twenty words. But the California newspapers, though often crude and provincial, were almost wholly free from vulgarity. In this respect they far excelled the average newspaper of to-day. There was nothing of the Philistine about them. They give the impression of having been written "by gentlemen and for gentlemen." These California writers were, indeed, very young gentlemen, as we have seen, and they often lacked breadth of view, self-restraint, and knowledge of the world, but they were essentially men of honor, and in public matters they took high ground. The important part played by the "Bulletin" and its Editor, James King, has already been described. Nor did they lack literary skill, as is sufficiently shown by some of the passages from San Francisco papers already quoted. A correspondent of the "Sacramento Transcript," writing in July, 1850, from the northern mines, gives an account of the destruction by fire of a store and restaurant owned by a Mr. Cook, concluding as follows: "With the recuperative energy so peculiar to American character, Mr. Cook has already gone down to your city to purchase a new stock, having reëstablished his boarding-house before leaving. The son of Ethiopia who conducts the culinary department is not the darker for 'the cloud which has lowered o'er our house,' and deprived him of many of the instruments of his office." The delicate humor of the last sentence does not seem out of place in the "Sacramento Transcript" of that date. The same paper published on the fourth of July, 1850, a patriotic leader which closed with these words,--they appear far from extravagant now, but at that time they must have sounded like a rash and audacious prophecy: "'God Save the Queen' and 'Yankee Doodle' will blend in unison around the world." The first newspaper published in California was a small sheet called "The Californian," started at Monterey in the Fall of 1846, and printed half in English, half in Spanish. Needless to say, its conductors were Americans.[78] They had discovered in the ruins of the Mission, and used for this purpose, an old press which the Spaniards had imported in the day of their rule for printing the edicts of the Governor. In the following year "The Californian" was removed to San Francisco. Many other newspapers sprang into existence after the discovery of gold, especially the "Alta California," which became the leading journal on the Pacific Slope. By the end of 1850 there were fifteen newspapers in the State, including six daily papers in San Francisco, and that excellent home and farm weekly, the "California Farmer." As for the buoyant, confident tone of these Pioneer papers, exaggerated though it was, it only reflected the general feeling. So early as November, 1851, a meeting was held in San Francisco to advocate the building of a railroad which should connect the Atlantic with the Pacific. In June, 1850, the "Sacramento Transcript" warned Europe as follows: "The present is the most remarkable period the world has ever been called upon to pass through.... The nations are centering hitherward. Europe is poor, California is rich, and equilibrium is inevitable. Four years will pass, and ours will be the most popular State in the Union. She is putting in the Keystone of Commerce, and concentrating the trade of the world." Moreover, busy as the Pioneers were, their reading was not confined to newspapers. Bret Harte said of them: "Eastern magazines and current Eastern literature formed their literary recreation, and the sale of the better class of periodicals was singularly great. Nor was their taste confined to American literature. The illustrated and satirical English journals were as frequently seen in California as in Massachusetts; and the author records that he has experienced more difficulty in procuring a copy of 'Punch' in an English provincial town than was his fortune at 'Red Dog' or 'One-Horse Gulch.'" [Illustration: MAIN STREET, NEVADA CITY, 1852 From a photograph in the possession of Colonel Thomas L. Livermore] This statement has been questioned, but it is borne out by the contemporary records and publications. The "Atlantic Monthly," for example, was regularly advertised in the California papers, and the "Atlantic" at that time was essentially a literary magazine. In the list of its contributors published in the "California Farmer" are the names of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Parsons, Whittier, Prescott, Mrs. Stowe, Motley, Herman Melville, C. C. Felton, F. J. Child, Edmund Quincy, J. T. Trowbridge, and G. W. Curtis. The London "Illustrated News" had a particularly large sale among the Pioneers, although the California price was a dollar a copy. The shifting character of the population, and the fact, already mentioned, that, almost to a man, the Pioneers expected to return to the East within a few months, or, at the latest, within a year or two,--these reasons discouraged the founding of permanent institutions such as libraries and colleges; but even in this direction something was done at an early date. The rush of immigration began in the Spring of 1849, and within less than a year a meeting had been held at San Francisco to establish a State college; a State library had been founded at San José; mercantile library associations had been started both in San Francisco and Sacramento, and an auction sale of books had been held in the latter city. In September, 1850, an audience gathered at Stockton to hear a lecture upon so recondite a subject as the "State of Learning from the Fall of Rome to the Fall of Constantinople." In June, 1851, a San Francisco firm advertised the receipt by the latest steamer of ten thousand new books, including the complete works of Dickens and Washington Irving. In November, 1851, a literary society called The California Institute was organized in San Francisco, and in April, 1856, some one entertained a hall full of people by giving an account of a lecture which Cardinal Wiseman had delivered in London upon the Perception of Natural Beauty by the Ancients and Moderns. Before the close of 1856 numerous boarding-schools had been established, such as the Alameda Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, the Stockton Female Seminary, the Female Institute at Santa Clara, the Collegiate Institute at Benicia, the Academy of Notre Dame at San José. The "legitimate drama," and even Shakspere, flourished in California. In the Summer of 1850 Charles R. Thorne was playing at Sacramento, and in the Autumn "Richard III" and "Macbeth" were on the boards there. In the Fall of 1851 two theatres were open in San Francisco, "Othello" being the play at one, "Ernest Maltravers" at the other. In 1852 "The Hunchback" was performed in the same city with Miss Baker, the once-famous Philadelphia actress, in the leading part. There was no exaggeration in the remark made by the "Sacramento Transcript" in May, 1850: "Nowhere have we seen more critical theatrical audiences than those which meet nightly in Sacramento.... Every mind is wide awake, and the discriminating eye of an impartial public easily selects pure worth from its counterfeit." An amusing incident, which would have delighted Charles Lamb, and which shows the youthfulness, the humor, and, equally, the decorum of the California audience, is thus related by an eye-witness: "One night at the theatre a countryman from Pike, sitting in the 'orchestra' near the stage, and becoming uncomfortably warm, took off his coat. Thereupon the gallery-gods roared and hissed,--stopping the play until the garment should be resumed. Some one touched the man on the shoulder and explained the situation. The hydra watched and waited. Shirt-sleeves appeared to be refractory, and a terrific roar came from the hydra. Shirt-sleeves, quailing at the sound, and at the angry looks and gestures of those who sat near him, started up with an air of coerced innocence, and resumed his _toga virilis_. The yell of triumph that arose from the 'gods' in their joyful sense of victory was beyond the description of tongue or pen."[79] It was remarked at an early date that nothing really satisfied the Pioneers unless it was the best of its kind that could be obtained, whether that kind were good or bad. Thus San Francisco, as many travellers observed, had the prettiest courtesans, the truest guns and pistols, the purest cigars and the finest wines and brandies to be found in the United States. The neatness and good style which marked the best hotels and restaurants prove the natural refinement of the people. Bret Harte has spoken of the old family silver which figured at a certain coffeehouse in San Francisco; and the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, who, being a minister, may perhaps be cited as an expert on this subject, was impressed by the good food and the excellent service which the traveller in California enjoyed:-- "Passing hither and thither on the little steamers to Marysville, to Stockton, to the towns north of the Bay, where often the number of passengers did not exceed thirty, we have seen again and again a table most neatly set, the silver bright and clean, the meals well prepared and good, without any nonsense of show dishes, the servants tidy, quiet and respectful,--the whole entertainment more rational and better than we have ever seen on Mississippi steamboats, or on those of the Atlantic Coast."[80] The steamers that plied up and down the Sacramento were "fast, elegant, commodious." In July, 1851, some one gave an aristocratic evening party in the heart of the mountains, fifty miles from Marysville. A long artificial bower had been constructed under which were spread tables ornamented with flowers, and loaded with delicious viands, turkeys at twenty dollars apiece, pigs as costly, jellies, East India preserves, and ice cream. Some of the guests came from a great distance, ten, twenty, and even thirty miles. "No gamblers were present," said the local paper which gave an account of the affair, thus showing how quickly the social line was drawn. But even if we regard the beginnings of education and literature in California as somewhat meagre, it is otherwise with religion. Those who have looked upon the early California society as essentially lawless and immoral will be surprised to find how large and how potent was the religious element. Churches sprang up almost as quickly as gambling houses. The Baptists have the credit of erecting, in the Summer of '49, the first church building; but Father William Taylor, the Methodist, was a close second. Father Taylor set out to build a church with his own hands. Every morning he crossed the Bay from San Francisco to San Antonio Creek and toiled with his axe in a grove of redwoods until he had cut down and hewn into shape the needed timber. This he transported in a sloop to the city, and then, with the aid of his congregation, constructed the church which was finished in October, '49. By September, 1850, the following congregations had been formed in San Francisco: one Catholic, four Methodist (one being for negroes), one Presbyterian, one Congregational, one Baptist, one Episcopal, one Union Church. Three separate services were held at the Catholic Church, which was the largest, one in English, one in Spanish, one in French. Two years later a Jewish synagogue was established. In July, 1850, five Episcopal clergymen met at San Francisco to create the diocese of California, and in the following month Dr. Horatio Southgate was elected Bishop. In the same year the San Francisco Bible Society was formed, and the next year, the "California Christian Advocate," a Methodist paper, began publication. At Sacramento, in the Spring of 1850, the Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians were holding regular services, and church building had begun. In July, 1851, a Methodist College at San José was incorporated; and in the same month the San Francisco papers have a long and enthusiastic account of a concert given by the children of the Baptist church there. "It was like an oasis in the desert for weary travellers," remarked one of them. A Sacramento paper speaking of a school festival in that city said: "No bull-fight, horse-race or card-table ever gave so much pleasure to the spectators." A miner, writing from Stockton on a Sunday morning in October, 1851, says, "The church bell is tolling, and gayly-dressed ladies are passing by the window." The congregations at the early religious meetings were extremely impressive, being composed almost wholly of men, and of men young, vigorous and sincere. As Professor Royce remarks: "Nobody gained anything by hypocrisy in California, and consequently there were few hypocrites. The religious coldness of a larger number who at home would have seemed to be devout did not make the progress of the churches in California less sure." And he speaks of the impression which these early congregations of men made upon his mother. "She saw in their countenances an intensity of earnestness that made her involuntarily thank God for making so grand a being as man." It has often been remarked that in times of unbelief and lax morality there is always found a small element in the community which maintains the standard of faith and conduct with a strictness wholly alien to the period. Such was the case in the Roman Empire just before and just after the advent of the Christian religion. So, in the English Church, in its most idle, most worldly, most unspiritual days, as before the Evangelical movement, and again before the Tractarian movement, there was a small body of priests and laymen, chiefly, as in the Roman Empire, isolated persons living in the country, who preserved the torch of faith, humility and self-denial, and served as a nucleus for the new party which was to revive and reform the Church. Extremes can be met only by extremes. Intense worldliness can be vanquished only by intense unworldliness; unbelief fosters faith among a few; and the more loose the habits of the majority, the more severe will be the practice of the minority. This was abundantly seen in California. As Bret Harte himself said: "Strangely enough, this grave materialism flourished side by side with--and was even sustained by--a narrow religious strictness more characteristic of the Pilgrim Fathers of a past century than the Western Pioneers of the present. San Francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to which the leading men and merchants belonged. The lax Sundays of the dying Spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the rigors of the Puritan Sabbath. With the Spaniard and his Sunday afternoon bull-fight scarcely an hour distant, the San Francisco pulpit thundered against Sunday picnics. One of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the practice of Sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in his best Sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from that threshold of perdition." An example of this narrow, not to say Pharisaic point of view was commented upon as follows by the "San Francisco Daily Herald" of February 3, 1852: "Of all countries in the world California is the least favorable to cant and bigotry.... It is not surprising that a general feeling of loathing should have been created by an article which recently appeared in a so-called religious newspaper having the title of the 'Christian Advocate,' commenting in terms of invidious and slanderous malignity on the fact of Miss Coad, recently attached to the American Theatre, being engaged to sing in the choir of the Pacific Church." This is well enough, though put in an extravagant and rather boyish way; but the writer then goes on in the true Colonel Starbottle manner as follows: "With the conductors of a clerical press it is difficult to deal. Under the cloak of piety they do not hesitate to libel and malign, and at the same time not recognizing the responsibility of gentlemen [Colonel Starbottle's phrase], and being therefore not fit subjects of attack in retort, one feels almost ashamed in checking their stupidity or reproving their falsehood." And so on at great length. Nevertheless, the Puritan minority, reinforced by the good sense of a majority of the Pioneers, very quickly succeeded in modifying the free and easy life of San Francisco, and later of the mining regions. Gamblers of the better sort, and business men in general, welcomed and supported the churches as tending to the peace and prosperity even of the Pacific Slope. "I have known five men," wrote the Reverend Mr. Colton, "who never contributed a dollar in the States for the support of a clergyman, subscribe here five hundred dollars each per annum, merely to encourage, as they termed it, 'a good sort of a thing in a community.'"[81] The steps taken in 1850 and 1851 to prohibit or restrain gambling have already been noticed. In August, 1850, the Grand Jury condemned bull-baiting and prize-fighting at any time, and theatrical and like exhibitions on Sunday. In September of the same year, the "Sacramento Transcript" said, "The bull-fights we have had in this city have been barbarous and disgusting in the extreme, and their toleration on any occasion is disgraceful." This sentiment prevailed, and shortly afterward bull-fights in Sacramento were forbidden by city ordinance. A year later gambling houses and theatres, both in San Francisco and Sacramento, were closed on Sunday, and we find the "Alta California" remarking on a Monday morning in May, "Yesterday all was like Sunday in the East, as quiet as the fury of the winds would allow. Two years ago under similar circumstances many hundreds of men would have forgotten the day, and the busy hum of business would have rung throughout the land." In the mines Sunday, at first, was almost wholly disregarded; but abstention from work on that day was soon found to be a physical necessity. Thus an English miner wrote home, "We have all of us given over working on Sundays, as we found the toil on six successive days quite hard enough." Men who stood by their principles in California never lost anything by that course. A merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, came up the Sacramento River with a cargo of goods in December, 1848. Early on the morning after his arrival three men with three mules appeared on the bank of the river to purchase supplies for the mines. It being Sunday, however, the man from Salem refused to do business on that day, but, after the New England fashion, accommodated his intending customers with a little good advice. This they resented in a really violent manner, and went off in a rage, swearing that they would never trade with such a Puritanical hypocrite. Yet they came back the next morning, purchased goods then, and on various later occasions, and finally made the Sabbath-keeper their banker, depositing in his safe many thousands of dollars. Even a matter so unpopular as that of temperance reform was not neglected by the religious people. A temperance society was organized at Sacramento in June, 1850, addresses were made in the Methodist chapel, and numerous persons, including some city officials, signed a total abstinence pledge. "The subject is an old one," the "Sacramento Transcript" naïvely remarked; "but this is a new country. Temperance is rather a new idea here, and its introduction among us seems almost like a novel movement." In the same month and year a similar society was formed in San Francisco, and arrangements were made to celebrate the Fourth of July "on temperance principles." The most genuine, the most thorough-going kind of religion found in California was that of the Western Pioneers, who were mainly Methodists and Baptists of a rude, primitive sort. Nothing could be further from Bret Harte's manner of thinking, and yet he has depicted the type with his usual insight, though perhaps not quite with his usual sympathy. Joshua Rylands, in _Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation_ (a story already mentioned), is one example of it, and Madison Wayne, in _The Bell-Ringer of Angel's_, is another. Of all Bret Harte's stories this is the most tragic, a terrible fate overtaking every one of the four characters who figure in it. Madison Wayne is a Calvinistic Puritan,--a New Englander such as has not been seen in New England for a hundred years, but only in that Far West to which New England men penetrated, and in which New England ideas and beliefs, protected by the isolation of prairie and forest, survived the scientific and religious changes of two centuries. In _A Night at Hays'_ we have the same character under a more morose aspect. "Always a severe Presbyterian and an uncompromising deacon, he grew more rigid, sectarian, and narrow day by day.... A grim landlord, hard creditor, close-fisted patron, and a smileless neighbor who neither gambled nor drank, old Hays, as he was called, while yet scarce fifty, had few acquaintances and fewer friends." In _An Apostle of the Tules_ Bret Harte has described a camp-meeting of Calvinistic families whose gloom was heightened by malaria contracted from the Stockton marshes. "One might have smiled at the idea of the vendetta-following Ferguses praying for 'justification by faith'; but the actual spectacle of old Simon Fergus, whose shotgun was still in his wagon, offering up that appeal with streaming eyes and agonized features, was painful beyond a doubt." As for Bret Harte's own religious views, it can scarcely be said that he had any. He was indeed brought up with some strictness as an Episcopalian, his mother being of that faith; and when he returned from her funeral with his sisters, he seemed deeply moved by the beauty of the Episcopal burial service, and expressed the hope that it would be read at his own grave. His friends in this country remember that he declined to take part in certain amusements on Sunday, remarking that, though he saw no harm in them, he could not shake off the more strict notions of Sunday observance in which he had been trained as a child. Through life he had a horror of gambling, and always refused even to play cards for money. In San Francisco he used to attend the church where his friend Starr King preached, and in New York he was often present at another Unitarian church, that of the Reverend O. B. Frothingham; but this seems to have been the extent of his church-going, and of his connection, external or internal, with any form of Christianity. Nor, so far as one can judge from his writings, and from such of his letters as have been published, was he one who thought much or cared much about those mysteries of human existence with which religion is supposed to deal. Even as a child, Bret Harte had no sense of sin,--no sense of that hideous discrepancy between character and ideals, between conduct and duty, which ought to oppress all men, and which, at some period of their lives, does oppress most men. Everybody, from the Digger Indian up, has a standard of right and wrong; everybody is aware that he continually falls below that standard; and from these two facts of consciousness arise the sense of sin, remorse, repentance, and the instinct of expiation. Perhaps this is religion, or the fundamental feeling upon which religion is based. To be deficient in this feeling is a great defect in any man, most of all in a man of powerful intellect. In a letter, Bret Harte, speaking of "Pilgrim's Progress," says that he read it as a boy, but that the book made no impression upon him, except that the characters seemed so ridiculous that he could not help laughing at them. This statement gives a rather painful shock even to the irreligious reader. The truth is, Bret Harte had the moral indifference, the spiritual serenity of a Pagan, and, as a necessary concomitant, that superficial conception of human life and destiny which belongs to Paganism. Benjamin Jowett, speaking of the Mediæval hymns, said, "We seem to catch from them echoes of deeper feelings than we are capable of." That Mediæval, Gothic depth of feeling, that consciousness of sin and mystery hanging over and enveloping man's career on earth, survives even in some modern writers, as in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tolstoi, and, by a kind of negation, in Thomas Hardy; and it gives to their stories a sombre and imposing background which is lacking in the tales of Bret Harte and of Kipling. It is owing partly to this defect, and partly to the unfortunate character of most of the ministers who reached California before 1860, that the clerical element fares but ill in Bret Harte's stories.[82] His most frequent type is the smooth, oily, self-seeking hypocrite. Such is the Reverend Joshua McSnagley whose little affair with Deacon Parnell's "darter" is sarcastically mentioned in _Roger Catron's Friend_, and who comes to a violent end in _M'liss_. The Reverend Mr. Staples who meanly persecutes the Youngest Prospector in Calaveras, is McSnagley under another name; and the same type briefly appears again in the Reverend Mr. Peasley, who greets the New Assistant at Pine Clearing School "with a chilling Christian smile"; in the Reverend Mr. Belcher, who attempts the reform of Johnnyboy; and still again in Parson Greenwood, who profits by the Convalescence of Jack Hamlin to learn the mysteries of poker, and of whom the gambler said that, when he had successfully "bluffed" his fellow-players, "there was a smile of humble self-righteousness on his face that was worth double the money." A much less conventional and more interesting type is that of the jovial, loud-voiced hypocrite who conceals a cold heart and a selfish nature with an affectation of frankness and geniality. Such are the Reverend Mr. Windibrook in _A Belle of Cañada City_, and Father Wynn, described in _The Carquinez Woods_. It was Father Wynn who thus addressed the newly-converted expressman, to the great disgust and embarrassment of that youth: "'Good-by, good-by, Charley, my boy, and keep in the right path; not up or down, or round the gulch, you know, ha, ha! but straight across lots to the shining gate.' "He had raised his voice under the stimulus of a few admiring spectators, and backed his convert playfully against the wall. 'You see! We're goin' in to win, you bet. Good-by! I'd ask you to step in and have a chat, but I've got my work to do, and so have you. The gospel mustn't keep us from that, must it, Charley? Ha, ha!'" James Seabright, the amphibious minister who is responsible for the Episode of West Woodlands, is rather good than bad, and so is Stephen Masterton, the ignorant, fanatical, but conscientious Pike County revivalist who, yielding to the combined charms of a pretty Spanish girl and the Catholic Church, becomes a Convert of the Mission.[83] Of another Protestant minister, the Reverend Mr. Daws, it is briefly mentioned in _The Iliad of Sandy Bar_ that "with quiet fearlessness" he endeavored to reconcile those bitter enemies, York and Scott. "When he had concluded, Scott looked at him, not unkindly, over the glasses of his bar, and said, less irreverently than the words might convey, 'Young man, I rather like your style; but when you know York and me as well as you do God Almighty, it'll be time enough to talk.'" But of all Bret Harte's Protestant ministers the only one who figures in the least as a hero is Gideon Deane, the Apostle of the Tules. Gideon Deane, it will be remembered, first ventures his own life in an effort to save that of a gambler about to be lynched, and then, making perhaps a still greater sacrifice, declines the church and the parsonage and the fifteen hundred dollars a year offered to him by Jack Hamlin and his friends, and returning to the lonely farmhouse and the poverty-stricken, unattractive widow Hiler, becomes her husband, and a father to her children. The story is not altogether satisfactory, for Gideon Deane is in love with a young girl who loves him, and it is not perfectly clear why her happiness, as well as that of the preacher himself, should be sacrificed to the domestic necessities of the widow and her children. Nor is the hero himself made quite so real as are Bret Harte's characters in general. We admire and respect him, but he does not excite our enthusiasm, and this is probably because the author failed to get that imaginative, sympathetic grasp of his nature which, as a rule, makes Bret Harte's personages seem like living men and women. There is a rather striking resemblance in the matter of ministers between Bret Harte and Rhoda Broughton. Both have the same instinctive antipathy to a parson that boys have to a policeman; both have the same general notion that ministers are mainly canting hypocrites; both, being struck apparently by the idea of doing full justice to the cloth, have set themselves to describe one really good and even heroic minister, and in each case the type evolved is the same, and not convincing. Gideon Deane has the slender physique, the humility, the courage, the self-sacrificing spirit, the melancholy temperament of the Reverend James Stanley, and, it may be added, the same unreality, the same inability to stamp his image upon the mind of the reader. Bret Harte's treatment of the Spanish priest in California is very different. He pokes a little fun at his Reverence, now and then. He shows us Father Felipe entering the _estudio_ of Don José Sepulvida "with that air of furtive and minute inspection common to his order"; and in the interview with Colonel Parker, Don José's lawyer, there is a beautiful description of what might be called an ecclesiastical wink. "The Padre and Colonel Parker gazed long and gravely into each other's eyes. It may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight through the window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the pupil of the affable lawyer at the same moment that, probably from the like cause, there was a slight nervous contraction of the left eyelid of the pious father." Father Sobriente, again, "was a polished, cultivated man; yet in the characteristic, material criticism of youth, I am afraid that Clarence chiefly identified him as a priest with large hands whose soft palms seemed to be cushioned with kindness, and whose equally large feet, encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly--rather than to ostentatiously crush--the obstacles that beset the path of the young student.... In the midnight silence of the dormitory, he was often conscious of the soft, browsing tread and snuffy, muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor." But the simplicity, the unaffected piety, and the sweet disposition of the Spanish priest are clearly shown in Bret Harte's stories. The ecclesiastic with whom he has made us best acquainted is Padre Esteban of the Mission of Todos Santos, that remote and dreamy port in which the Crusade of the Excelsior ended. And yet even there the good priest had learned how to deal with the human heart, as appeared when he became the confidant of the unfortunate Hurlstone. "'A woman,' said the priest softly. 'So! We will sit down, my son.' He lifted his hand with a soothing gesture--the movement of a physician who has just arrived at an easy diagnosis of certain uneasy symptoms. There was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if even the seclusion of Todos Santos had not been entirely free from the invasion of the primal passion." The Reader need not be reminded how often Bret Harte speaks of Junipéro Serra, the Franciscan Friar who founded the Spanish Missions in California. Father Junipéro was a typical Spaniard of the religious sort, austere, ascetic,--a Commissioner of the Inquisition. He ate little, avoiding all meat and wine. He scourged himself in the pulpit with a chain, after the manner of St. Francis, and he was accustomed, while reciting the confession, to hold aloft the Crucifix in his left hand, and to strike his naked breast with a heavy stone held in his right hand. To this self-punishment, indeed, was attributed the disease of the lungs which ultimately caused his death. [Illustration: THE BELLS, SAN GABRIEL MISSION Copyright, Detroit Photographic Co.] Each Mission had its garrison, for the intention was to overcome the natives by arms, if they should offer resistance to Holy Church. But the California Indians were a mild, inoffensive people, lacking the character and courage of the Indians who inhabited the Plains, and they quickly succumbed to that combination of spiritual authority and military force which the Padres wielded. At the end of the eighteenth century there were eighteen Missions in California, with forty Padres, and a neophyte Indian population of about thirteen thousand. But all this melted away when the Missions were secularized. In 1822 Mexico became independent of Spain, and thenceforth California was an outlying, neglected Mexican province. From that time the office-holding class of Mexicans were intriguing to get possession of the Mission lands, flocks and herds; and in 1833 they succeeded. The Missions were broken up, the Friars were deprived of all support; and many of the Christian Indians were reduced to a cruel slavery in which their labor was recompensed chiefly by intoxicating liquors. Little better was the fate of the others. Released from the strict discipline in which they had been held by the priests, they scattered in all directions, and quickly sank into a state of barbarism worse than their original state. But the Missions were not absolutely deserted. In some cases a small monastic brotherhood still inhabited the buildings once thronged by soldiers and neophytes; and these men were of great service. They ministered to the spiritual needs of Spanish and Mexicans; they instructed the sons and daughters of the ranch-owners; they kept alive religion, and to some extent learning in the community; and, finally,--if one may say so without irreverence,--they contributed that Mediæval element which, otherwise, would have been the one thing lacking to complete the picturesque contrasts of Pioneer life. The Missions had been the last expression of the instinct of conquest upon the part of a decaying nation; and the Angelus that nightly rang from some fast-crumbling tower sounded the knell of Spanish rule in America. CHAPTER XIII BRET HARTE'S DEPARTURE FROM CALIFORNIA Bret Harte, as we have seen, was, for a few years at least, well placed in San Francisco, but, as time went on, he had many causes of unhappiness. There were heavy demands upon his purse from persons not of his immediate family, which he was too generous to refuse, although they distressed, harassed and discouraged him. His own constitutional improvidence added to the difficulties thus created. Mr. Noah Brooks, who knew Bret Harte well, has very truly described this aspect of his life: "It would be grossly unjust to say that Harte was a species of Harold Skimpole, deliberately making debts that he did not intend to pay. He sincerely intended and expected to meet every financial obligation that he contracted. But he was utterly destitute of what is sometimes called the money sense. He could not drive a bargain, and he was an easy mark for any man who could. Consequently he was continually involved in troubles that he might have escaped with a little more financial shrewdness." The theory, thus stated by Mr. Brooks, is supported by an unsolicited letter, now first published, but written shortly after Mr. Harte's death:-- ... After going abroad, Mr. Harte from time to time--whenever able to do so--sent through the business house of my husband and son money in payment of bills he was yet owing,--and this when three thousand miles removed from the pressure of payment,--which too many would have left unpaid. Life was often hard for him, yet he met it uncomplainingly, unflinchingly and bravely. A kindly, sweet soul, one without gall, bitterness or envy, has gone beyond the reach of our finite voices, leaving the world to us who knew and loved him darker and poorer in his absence. MRS. CHARLES WATROUS Hague, N. Y. May 26, 1902. Moreover, there was much friction between Bret Harte and the new publisher of the "Overland," who had succeeded Mr. Roman; and finally, the moral and intellectual atmosphere of San Francisco was uncongenial to him. The early, generous, reckless days of California had passed, and now, especially in San Francisco, a commercial type of man was coming to the front. In _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, Bret Harte has depicted "Ezekiel Corwin, ... a shrewd, practical, self-sufficient and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later California emigration." More than once Bret Harte had run counter to California sentiment. As we have seen already, he was dismissed from his place as assistant Editor of a country newspaper because he had chivalrously espoused the cause of the friendless Indian. His first contribution to the "Overland," as also we have seen, was that beautiful poem in which he laments the shortcomings of the city. Had the same thing been said in prose, the business community would certainly have resented it. I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard, high lust, and wilful deed, And all thy Glory loves to tell Of specious gifts material. Drop down, O Fleecy Fog, and hide Her sceptic sneer and all her pride! And yet, with characteristic optimism, the poet looks forward to a time-- When Art shall raise and Culture lift The sensual joys and meaner thrift. Later, but in the same year, Bret Harte incurred the enmity of some leading men in San Francisco by his gentle ridicule of their attempts to explain away--for the sake of Eastern capitalists--the destructive earthquake which shook the city in October, 1868. An old Californian thus relates the story: "As soon as the first panic at this disturbance had subsided, and while lesser shocks were still shaking the earth, some of the leading business men of San Francisco organized themselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and visited all the newspaper offices. They strictly enjoined that the story of the earthquake be treated with conservatism and understatement;--it would injure California if Eastern people were frightened away by exaggerated reports of _el temblor_; and a similar censorship was exercised over the press despatches sent out from San Francisco at that time. "This greatly amused Bret Harte, and in his 'Etc.' in the November number of the 'Overland,' he treated the topic jocularly, saying that, according to the daily papers, the earthquake would have suffered serious damage if the people had only known it was coming. Harte's pleasantry excited the wrath of some of the solid men of San Francisco, and when, not long after that, it was proposed to establish a chair of recent literature in the University of California and invite Bret Harte to occupy it, one of the board of regents, whose word was a power in the land, temporarily defeated the scheme by swearing roundly that a man who had derided the dispute between the earthquake and the newspapers should never have his support for a professorship. Subsequently, however, this difficulty was overcome, and Harte received his appointment." San Francisco was then a crude, commercial, restless town, caring little for art or literature, religious in a narrow way, confident of its own ideals, and as content with the stage through which it was passing as if human history had known, and human imagination could conceive, nothing higher or better. In _A Jack and Jill of the Sierras_ Bret Harte makes the youthful hero reproach himself by saying, or rather thinking, "He had forgotten them for those lazy, snobbish, purse-proud San Franciscans--for Bray had the miner's supreme contempt for the moneyed trading classes." Bret Harte, whose view of life was mainly derived from eighteenth-century literature, shared that contempt, and expressed his own feeling, no doubt, in the sentiment which he attributes to the two girls in _Devil's Ford_. "It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil's Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than the citizens who imitated a civilization which they were unable yet to reach." No wonder, then, that, with tempting offers from the East, harassed with debts, disputes, cares and anxieties, disgusted with the atmosphere in which he was living,--no wonder Bret Harte felt that the hour for his departure had struck. Had he remained longer, his art would probably have suffered. A nature so impressionable as Bret Harte's, so responsive, would insensibly have been affected by his surroundings, and the more so because he had in himself no strong, intellectual basis. His life was ruled by taste, rather than by conviction; and taste is a harder matter than conviction to preserve unimpaired. Of all the criticisms passed upon Bret Harte there has been nothing more true than Madame Van de Velde's observations upon this point: "It was decidedly fortunate that he left California when he did, never to return to it; for his quick instinctive perceptions would have assimilated the new order of things to the detriment of his talent. As it was, his singularly retentive memory remained unbiassed by the transformation of the centres whence he drew his inspiration. California remained to him the Mecca of the Argonauts." Bret Harte left many warm friends in California, and they were much hurt, in some cases much angered, because they never had a word from him afterward. And yet it is extremely doubtful if he expected any such result. Certainly it was not intended. Kind and friendly feelings may still exist, although they are not expressed in letters. Bret Harte was indolent and procrastinating about everything except the real business of his life, and into that all his energy was poured. And there was another reason for the failure to communicate with his old friends, which has probably occurred to the Reader, and which is suggested in a private letter from one of the very persons who were aggrieved by his silence. "He went away with a sore heart. He had cares, difficulties, hurts here, _many_, and they may have embittered him against all thoughts of the past." This, no doubt, is true. The California chapter in Bret Harte's life was closed, and it would have been painful for him to reopen it even by the writing of a letter. To say this, however, is not to acquit him of all blame in the matter. The night before he left California a few of his more intimate friends gave him a farewell dinner which, in the light of all that followed, now wears an almost tragic aspect. It is thus described by one of the company: "A little party of us, eight, all working writers, met for a last symposium. It was one of the veritable _noctes ambrosianae_; the talk was intimate, heart-to-heart, and altogether of the shop. Naturally Harte was the centre of the little company, and he was never more fascinating and companionable. Day was breaking when the party dispersed, and the ties that bound our friend to California were sundered forever." Bret Harte left San Francisco in February, 1871. Seventeen years before he had landed there, a mere boy, without money or prospects, without trade or profession. Now he was the most distinguished person in California, and his departure marked the close of an epoch for that State. Who can imagine the mingled feelings, half-triumphant, half-bitter, with which he must have looked back upon the slow-receding, white-capped Sierras that had bounded his horizon for those seventeen eventful years! CHAPTER XIV BRET HARTE IN THE EAST Before Bret Harte left California he had been in correspondence with some persons in Chicago who proposed to make him Editor and part proprietor of a magazine called the "Lakeside Monthly." A dinner was arranged to take place soon after his arrival in Chicago at which Mr. Harte might meet the men who were to furnish the capital for this purpose. But the guest of the evening did not appear. Many stories were told in explanation of his absence; and Bret Harte's own account is thus stated by Mr. Noah Brooks:--"When I met Harte in New York I asked him about the incident, and he said: 'In Chicago I stayed with relations of my wife's, who lived on the North Side, or the East Side, or the Northeast Side, or the Lord knows where, and when I accepted an invitation to dinner in a hotel in the centre of the city, I expected that a guide would be sent me. I was a stranger in a strange city; a carriage was not easily to be obtained in the neighborhood where I was, and, in utter ignorance of the way I should take to reach the hotel, I waited for a guide until the hour for dinner had passed, and then sat down, as your friend S. P. D. said to you in California "_en famille_, with my family." That's all there was to it.'" Mr. Pemberton, commenting on this explanation says, "I can readily picture Bret Harte, as the unwelcome dinner hour approached, making excuses to himself for himself and conjuring up that hitherto unsuggested 'guide.'" That Mr. Pemberton was right as to the "guide" being an afterthought, is proved by the following account, for which the author of this book is indebted to Mr. Francis F. Browne, at that time editor of the "Lakeside Monthly": "I remember quite clearly Mr. Harte's visit to my office,--a small,[84] rather youthful looking but alert young man of pleasing manners and conversation. We talked of the literary situation, and he seemed impressed with the opportunity offered by Chicago for a high-class literary enterprise. A day or two after his arrival here Mr. Harte was invited to a dinner at the house of a prominent citizen, to meet the gentlemen who were expected to become interested in the magazine project with him. Mr. Harte accepted the invitation. There is no doubt that he intended going, for he was in my office the afternoon of the dinner, and left about five o'clock, saying he was going home to dress for the occasion. But he did not appear at the dinner; nor did he send any explanation whatever. There being then no telephones, no explanation was given until the next day, and it was then to the effect that he had supposed a carriage would be sent for him, and had waited for it until too late to start. A friend of the author tells me that he had previously asked Mr. Harte whether he should call for him and take him to the dinner; but Harte assured him that this was not at all necessary, that he knew perfectly well how to find the place. The other members of the party, however, were on hand, and after waiting, with no little surprise, for the chief guest to appear, they proceeded to eat their dinner and disperse; but Mr. Harte and the project of a literary connection with him in Chicago no longer interested them." It is evident that for some reason, unknown outside of his own family, Bret Harte could not or would not attend the dinner, and simply remained away. The result was thus stated by the author himself in a letter to a friend in California: "I presume you have heard through the public press how nearly I became editor and part owner of the 'Lakeside,' and how the childishness and provincial character of a few of the principal citizens of Chicago spoiled the project." Bret Harte, therefore, continued Eastward, leaving Chicago on February 11, "stopping over" a few days in Syracuse, and reaching New York on February 20. His stories and poems--especially the _Heathen Chinee_--had lifted him to such a pinnacle of renown that his progress from the Pacific to the Atlantic was detailed by the newspapers with almost as much particularity as were the movements of Admiral Dewey upon his return to the United States after the capture of Manilla. The commotion thus caused extended even to England, and a London paper spoke humorously, but kindly, of the "Bret Harte circular," which recorded the daily events of the author's life. "The fame of Bret Harte," remarked the "New York Tribune," as the railroad bore him toward that city, "has so brilliantly shot to the zenith as to render any comments on his poems a superfluous task. The verdict of the popular mind has only anticipated the voice of sound criticism." In New York Mr. Harte and his family went immediately to the house of his sister, Mrs. F. F. Knaufft, at number 16 Fifth Avenue; and with her they spent the greater part of the next two years. Three days after their arrival in New York the whole family went to Boston, Mr. Harte being engaged to dine with the famous Saturday Club, and being desirous of seeing his publishers. He arrived in Boston February 25, his coming having duly been announced by telegrams published in all the papers. Upon the morning of his arrival the "Boston Advertiser" had the following pleasant notice of the event. "He will have a hearty welcome from many warm friends to whom his face is yet strange; and after a journey across the continent, in which his modesty must have been tried almost as severely as his endurance by the praises showered upon him, we hope that he will find Boston so pleasant, even in the soberest dress which she wears during the year, that he may tarry long among us." In Boston, or rather at Cambridge, just across Charles River, Bret Harte was to be the guest of Mr. Howells, then the assistant Editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," James Russell Lowell being the Editor-in-Chief. Mr. Howells' account[85] of this visit is so interesting, and throws so much light upon Bret Harte's character, that it is impossible to refrain from quoting it here:-- "When the adventurous young Editor who had proposed being his host for Boston, while Harte was still in San Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress Eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell, as if he perhaps had committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this dear son of memory, great heir of fame, his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco? Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the express to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. "However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most winning in the world. The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with them. Their host heard them with misgiving for the world of romance which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that great early day have gone back to live amidst the scenes which inspired and prospered them. "Before they came in sight of the Editor's humble roof he had mocked himself to his guest at his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, 'Why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,' and no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented. "Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. "It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and then into the carriage, where a good deal of final buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gayety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned. "Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There was never a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's word which goes far to establish for a man the character of born humorist. "It must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid him, he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that 'broke up the Society upon the Stanislaus.'" Of his personal appearance at this time Mr. Howells says: "He was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating forward thrust of the under-lip, its fine eyes and good forehead, then thickly covered with black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark, the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dyeing." It can easily be imagined, although Mr. Howells does not say so, that the atmosphere of Cambridge was far from being congenial to Bret Harte. University towns are notorious for taking narrow, academic views of life; and in Cambridge, at least during the period in question, the college circle was complicated by some remnants of colonial aristocracy that looked with suspicion upon any person or idea originating outside of England--Old or New. Bret Harte, as may be imagined, was not awed by his new and highly respectable surroundings. "It was a little fearsome," writes Mr. Howells, "to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The Cathedral.' But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he Runs down a brook of laughter in the air. That, Bret Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and Lowell smoked, well content with the phrase. Yet they were not men to get on well together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte had none. Afterward, in London, they did not meet often or willingly." Bret Harte was taken to see Emerson at Concord, but probably without much profit on either side, though with some entertainment for the younger man. "Emerson's smoking," Mr. Howells relates, "amused Bret Harte as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson proposed having a 'wet night' with him, over a glass of sherry, and urged the wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar." "Longfellow, alone," Mr. Howells adds, "escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity of Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness." Bret Harte and Longfellow met at an evening party in Cambridge, and walked home together afterward; and when Longfellow died, in 1882, Bret Harte wrote down at some length his impressions of the poet.[86] It had been a characteristic New England day in early Spring, with rain followed by snow, and finally clearing off cold and still. "I like to recall him at that moment, as he stood in the sharp moonlight of the snow-covered road; a dark mantle-like cloak hiding his evening dress, and a slouched felt hat covering his full silver-like locks. The conventional gibus or chimney-pot would have been as intolerable on that wonderful brow as it would be on a Greek statue, and I was thankful there was nothing to interrupt the artistic harmony of the most impressive vignette I ever beheld.... I think I was at first moved by his voice. It was a very deep baritone without a trace of harshness, but veiled and reserved as if he never parted entirely from it, and with the abstraction of a soliloquy even in his most earnest moments. It was not melancholy, yet it suggested one of his own fancies as it fell from his silver-fringed lips 'Like the water's flow Under December's snow.' Yet no one had a quicker appreciation of humour, and his wonderful skill as a _raconteur_, and his opulence of memory, justified the saying of his friends that 'no one ever heard him tell an old story or repeat a new one.'... Speaking of the spiritual suggestions in material things, I remember saying that I thought there must first be some actual resemblance, which unimaginative people must see before the poet could successfully use them. I instanced the case of his own description of a camel as being 'weary' and 'baring his teeth,' and added that I had seen them throw such infinite weariness into that action after a day's journey as to set spectators yawning. He seemed surprised, so much so that I asked him if he had seen many--fully believing he had travelled in the desert. He replied simply, 'No,' that he had 'only seen one once in the _Jardin des Plantes_.' Yet in that brief moment he had noticed a distinctive fact, which the larger experience of others fully corroborated." Mr. Pemberton also contributes this interesting reminiscence: "With his intimate friends Bret Harte ever delighted to talk enthusiastically of Longfellow, and would declare that his poems had greatly influenced his thoughts and life. Hiawatha he declared to be 'not only a wonderful poem, but a marvellously true descriptive narrative of Indian life and lore.' I think he knew it all by heart." Bret Harte and his family stayed a week with Mr. Howells, and one event was the Saturday Club dinner which Mr. Howells has described. "Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there was nothing but careless stories, carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be." One of the guests, unused to the society of literary men, Mr. Howells says, had looked forward with some awe to the occasion, and Bret Harte was amused at the result. "'Look at him!' he said from time to time. '_This is the dream of his life_'; and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion, and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal's mind." The "commensal," as appears from a subsequent essay by Mr. Howells, was Mark Twain, who, like Bret Harte, had recently arrived from the West. Somehow, the account of this dinner as given by Mr. Howells leaves an unpleasant impression. The atmosphere of Boston was hardly more congenial to Bret Harte than that of Cambridge. Boston was almost as provincial as San Francisco, though in a different way. The leaders of society were men and women who had grown up with the bourgeois traditions of a rich, isolated commercial and colonial town; and they had the same feeling of horror for a man from the West that they had for a Methodist. The best part of Boston was the serious, well-educated, conscientious element, typified by the Garrison family; but this element was much less conspicuous in 1871 than it had been earlier. The feeling for art and literature, also, was neither so widespread nor so deep as it had been in the thirty-five years preceding the Civil War. Moreover, the peculiar faults of the Boston man, his worship of respectability, his self-satisfied narrowness, his want of charity and sympathy,--these were the very faults that especially jarred upon Bret Harte, and it is no wonder that the man from Boston makes a poor appearance in his stories. "It was a certain Boston lawyer, replete with principle, honesty, self-discipline, statistics, authorities, and a perfect consciousness of possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their market values. I think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner, gently waiving all argument on any topic, frequently distrusting my facts, generally my deductions, and always my ideas. In conversation he always appeared to descend only halfway down a long moral and intellectual staircase, and always delivered his conclusions over the balusters."[87] And yet, with characteristic fairness, Bret Harte does not fail to portray the good qualities of the Boston man. The Reader will remember the sense of honor, the courage and energy, and even--under peculiar circumstances--the capacity to receive new ideas, shown by John Hale, the Boston man who figures in _Snow-Bound at Eagle's_, and who was of the same type as the lawyer just described. Henry Hart and his family spent a year in Boston when Bret Harte was about the age of four, but, contrary to the general impression, Bret Harte never lived there afterward, although he once spent a few weeks in the city as the guest of the publisher, Mr. J. R. Osgood, then living on Pinckney Street, in the old West End. A small section of the north side of Pinckney Street forms the northern end of Louisburg Square; and this square, as it happens, is the only place in Boston which Bret Harte depicts. Here lived Mr. Adams Rightbody, as appears from the brief but unmistakable description of the place in _The Great Deadwood Mystery_. A telegram to Mr. Rightbody had been sent at night from Tuolumne County, California; and its progress and delivery are thus related: "The message lagged a little at San Francisco, laid over half an hour at Chicago, and fought longitude the whole way, so that it was past midnight when the 'all-night' operator took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark, snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered, rayless houses to a certain formal square, ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob that, somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without--as he ought." That Bret Harte made no mistake in selecting Louisburg Square as the residence of that intense Bostonian, Mr. Rightbody, will be seen from Mr. Lindsay Swift's description in his "Literary Landmarks of Boston." "This retired spot is the quintessence of the older Boston. Without positive beauty, its dignity and repose save it from any suggestion of ugliness. Here once bubbled up, it is fondly believed, in the centre of the iron-railed enclosure, that spring of water with which First Settler William Blackstone helped to coax Winthrop and his followers over the river from Charlestown. There is no monument to Blackstone, here or anywhere, but in this significant spot stand two statues, one to Columbus and one to Aristides the Just, both of Italian make, and presented to the city by a Greek merchant of Boston." After the week's stay in Cambridge, with, of course, frequent excursions to Boston, Bret Harte and his family returned to New York. The proposals made to him by publishing houses in that city were, Mr. Howells reports, "either mortifyingly mean or insultingly vague"; and a few days later Bret Harte accepted the offer of James R. Osgood and Company, then publishers of "The Atlantic," to pay him ten thousand dollars during the ensuing year for whatever he might write in the twelve months, be it much or little. This offer, a munificent one for the time, was made despite the astonishing fact that of the first volume of Bret Harte's stories, issued by the same publishers six months before, only thirty-five hundred copies had then been sold. The arrangement did not, of course, require Mr. Harte's residence in Boston, and for the next two Winters he remained with his sister in New York, spending the first Summer at Newport. It has often been stated that the rather indefinite contract which the publishers made with Bret Harte turned out badly for them, and that he wrote but a single story, as it is sometimes put, during the whole year. But the slightest investigation will show that these statements do our author great injustice. The year of the contract began with July, 1871, and ended with June, 1872; and the two volumes of the "Atlantic" covering that period, No. 28 and No. 29, contain the following stories by Bret Harte:-- _The Poet of Sierra Flat, Princess Bob and Her Friends, The Romance of Madroño Hollow, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_; And the following poems: _A Greyport Legend, A Newport Romance, Concepcion de Arguello, Grandmother Tenterden, The Idyl of Battle Hollow_. Surely, this was giving full measure, and it represents a year of very hard work, unless indeed it was partly done in California. One of the stories, _How Santa Clans Came to Simpson's Bar_, is, as every reader of Bret Harte will admit, among the best of his tales, inferior only to _Tennessee's Partner_, _The Luck_, and _The Outcasts_. It is noticeable that all these "Atlantic Monthly" stories deal with California; and an amusing illustration of Bret Harte's literary habits may be gathered from the fact that in every case his story brings up the rear of the magazine, although it would naturally have been given the place of honor. Evidently the manuscript was received by the printers at the last possible moment. One of the poems, the _Newport Romance_, seems to lack those patient, finishing touches which it was his custom to bestow. For the next seven years of Bret Harte's life there is not much to record. During the greater part of the time New York was his winter home. From his Summer at Newport resulted the poems already mentioned, _A Greyport Legend_ and _A Newport Romance_. Hence also a scene or two in _Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands_, published in 1872. But the poems deal with the past, and neither in them nor in any story did the author attempt to describe that luxurious, exotic life, grafted upon the Atlantic Coast, over which other romancers have fondly lingered. Two or three Summers were spent by Bret Harte and his family in Morristown, New Jersey. Here he wrote _Thankful Blossom_, a pretty story of Revolutionary times, describing events which occurred at the very spot where he was living, but lacking the strength and originality of his California tales. "Thankful Blossom" was not an imaginary name, but the real name of one of his mother's ancestors, a member of the Truesdale family; and it should be mentioned that before writing this story Bret Harte, with characteristic thoroughness, made a careful study of the place where Washington had his headquarters at Morristown, and of the surrounding country. One other Summer the Harte family spent at New London, in Connecticut, and still another at Cohasset, a seashore town about twenty miles south of Boston. Here he became the neighbor and friend of the actors, Lawrence Barrett and Stuart Robson, for the latter of whom he wrote the play called _Two Men of Sandy Bar_. This was produced in September, 1876, at the Union Square Theatre in New York, but, although not a failure, it did not attain permanent success. The principal characters were Sandy Morton, played by Charles R. Thorne, and Colonel Starbottle, taken by Stuart Robson. John Oakhurst, the Yankee Schoolmistress (from _The Idyl of Red Gulch_), a Chinaman, an Australian convict, and other figures taken from Bret Harte's stories, also appeared in the piece. The part of Hop Sing, the Chinaman, was played by Mr. C. T. Parsloe, and with so much success that afterward, in collaboration with Mark Twain, Bret Harte wrote a melodrama for Mr. Parsloe called _Ah Sin_; but this, too, failed to keep the boards for long. Mr. Pemberton speaks of another play in respect to which Bret Harte sought the advice of Dion Boucicault; but this appears never to have been finished. It was a cause of annoyance and disgust to Bret Harte after he had left this country, that a version of _M'liss_ converting that beautiful story into a vulgar "song and dance" entertainment was produced on the stage and in its way became a great success. Bret Harte was unable to prevent these performances in the United States, but he did succeed, by means of a suit, threatened if not actually begun, in preventing their repetition in England. A very inferior theatrical version of _Gabriel Conroy_, also, was brought out in New York without the author's consent, and much against his will. Bret Harte had a lifelong desire to write a notable play, and made many attempts in that direction. One of them succeeded. With the help of his friend and biographer, Mr. Pemberton, he dramatized his story, _The Judgment of Bolinas Plain_; and the result, a melodrama in three acts, called _Sue_, was produced in New York in 1896, and was well received both by the critics and the audience. Afterward the play was successfully performed on a tour of the United States; and in 1898 it was brought out in London, and was equally successful there. The heroine's part was taken by Miss Annie Russell, of whom Mr. Pemberton gracefully says, "How much the writers owed to her charming personality and her deft handling of a difficult part they freely and gratefully acknowledged." But even this play has not become a classic. Of his experience as a fellow-worker with Bret Harte, Mr. Pemberton gives this interesting account. "Infinite painstaking, I soon learned, was the essence of his system. Of altering and re-altering he was never tired, and though it was sometimes a little disappointing to find that what we had considered as finished over-night, had, at his desire, to be reconsidered in the morning, the humorous way in which he would point out how serious situations might, by a twist of the pen, or by incompetent acting, create derisive laughter, compensated for double or even treble work. No one realized more keenly than he did that to most things there is a comic as well as a serious side, and it seemed to make him vastly happy to put his finger on his own vulnerable spots." Mr. Pemberton speaks of several other plays written by Bret Harte and himself, and of one written by Bret Harte alone for Mr. J. L. Toole. But none of these was ever acted. It is needless to say that Bret Harte loved the theatre and had a keen appreciation of good acting. In a letter to Mr. Pemberton, he spoke of John Hare's "wonderful portrayal of the Duke of St. Olpherts in 'The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.' He is gallantly attempting to relieve Mrs. Thorpe of the tray she is carrying, but of course lacks the quickness, the alertness, and even the actual energy to do it, and so follows her with delightful simulation of assistance all over the stage, while she carries it herself, he pursuing the form and ignoring the performance. It is a wonderful study." Bret Harte had not been long in the East, probably he had not been there a month, before he began to feel the pressure of those money difficulties from which neither he, nor his father before him, was ever free. Doubtless he would often have been at a loss for ready money, even if he had possessed the wealth of all the Indies. He left debts in California, and very soon had acquired others in New York and Boston. Mr. Noah Brooks, who was intimate with Bret Harte in New York as well as in San Francisco, wrote, after his death: "I had not been long in the city before I found that Harte had already incurred many debts, chiefly for money borrowed. When I said to Bowles[88] that I was anxious on Harte's account that a scandal should not come from this condition of things, Bowles said, with his good-natured cynicism, 'Well, it does seem to me that there ought to be enough rich men in New York to keep Harte a-going.' "One rich man, a banker and broker, with an ambition to be considered a patron of the arts and literature, made much of the new literary lion, and from him Harte obtained a considerable sum, $500 perhaps, in small amounts varying from $5 to $50 at a time. One New Year's day Harte, in as much wrath as he was ever capable of showing, spread before me a note from our friend Dives in which the writer, who, by the way, was not reckoned a generous giver, reminded Harte that this was the season of the year when business men endeavored to enter a new era with a clean page in the ledger; and, in order to enable his friend H. to do that, he took the liberty of returning to him sundry I. O. U.'s which his friend H. had given him from time to time. 'Damn his impudence!' exclaimed the angry artist. "'What are you going to do about it?' I asked, with some amusement. 'Going to do about it!' he answered with much emphasis on the first word. 'Going! I have made a new note for the full amount of these and have sent it to him with an intimation that I never allow pecuniary matters to trespass on the sacred domain of friendship.' Poor Dives was denied the satisfaction of giving away a bad debt." "Once, while we were waiting on Broadway for a stage to take him down town, he said, as the lumbering vehicle hove in sight, 'Lend me a quarter; I haven't money enough to pay my stage fare.' Two or three weeks later, when I had forgotten the incident, we stood in the same place waiting for the same stage, and Harte, putting a quarter of a dollar in my hand, said: 'I owe you a quarter and there it is. You hear men say that I never pay my debts, but [this with a chuckle] you can deny the slander.' While he lived in Morristown, N. J., it was said that he pocketed postage stamps sent to him for his autographs, and these applications were so numerous that with them he paid his butcher's bill. A bright lady to whom this story was told declared that the tale had been denied, 'on the authority of the butcher.' Nobody laughed more heartily at this sally than Harte did when it came to his ears." "Never," says Mr. Howells, to the same effect, "was any man less a _poseur_. He made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself." And then Mr. Howells relates the following incident: "In the course of events which in his case were so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the ante-room at the lecture-hall, and on the platform where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, 'Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition: this is the Fleet business over again,' he joyously smote his thigh and cried out: 'Yes; that's it; we can see it all now,--the Fleet Prison with Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the rest of the old masters in a bunch!'" It is highly probable that in his own mind, though perhaps half unconsciously, Bret Harte excused himself by the "old literary tradition" for his remissness in paying his debts. And for such a feeling on his part there would be, the present writer makes bold to say, some justification. It is a crude method of collecting from the community a small part of the compensation due to the author for the pleasure which he has conferred upon the world in general. The method, it must be admitted, is imperfectly just. The particular butcher or grocer to whom a particular poet is indebted may have a positive distaste for polite literature, and might naturally object to paying for books which other people read. Nevertheless there is an element of wild justice in the attitude of the poet. The world owes him a living, and if the world does not pay its debt, why, then, the debt may fairly be levied upon the world in such manner as is possible. This at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man like Bret Harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an ordinary person. We should be ashamed not to show some consideration, even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the race is entitled to a similar indulgence. Soon after Bret Harte's arrival in the East his friends urged him to give public lectures on the subject of life in California. The project was extremely distasteful to him, for he had an inborn horror of notoriety,--even of publicity; and this feeling, it may be added, is fully shared by the other members of his family. But his money difficulties were so great, and the prospect held out to him was so flattering that he finally consented. He prepared two lectures; the first, entitled _The Argonauts_, is now printed, with some changes, as the Introduction to the second volume of his collected works. This lecture was delivered at Albany, New York, on December 3, 1872, at Tremont Temple in Boston on the thirteenth of the same month, on December 16 at Steinway Hall in New York, and at Washington on January 7, 1873. From Washington the lecturer wrote to his wife: "The audience was almost as quick and responsive as the Boston folk, and the committee-men, to my great delight, told me they made money by me.... I called on Charlton at the British Minister's, and had some talk with Sir Edward Thornton, which I have no doubt will materially affect the foreign policy of England. If I have said anything to promote a better feeling between the two countries I am willing he should get the credit of it. I took a carriage and went alone to the Capitol of my country. I had expected to be disappointed, but not agreeably. It is really a noble building,--worthy of the republic,--vast, magnificent, sometimes a little weak in detail, but in intent always high-toned, grand and large principled."[89] The same lecture was delivered at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9, 1873, and at Ottawa and Montreal in March of that year. From Montreal he wrote to Mrs. Harte as follows:[90]-- "In Ottawa I lectured twice, but the whole thing was a pecuniary failure. There was scarcely enough money to pay expenses, and of course nothing to pay me with. ---- has no money of his own, and although he is blamable for not thoroughly examining the ground before bringing me to Ottawa, he was evidently so completely disappointed and miserable that I could not find it in my heart to upbraid him. So I simply told him that unless the Montreal receipts were sufficient to pay me for my lecture there, and a reasonable part of the money due me from Ottawa, I should throw the whole thing up. To-night will in all probability settle the question. Of course there are those who tell me privately that he is no manager, but I really do not see but that he has done all that he could, and that his only fault is in his sanguine and hopeful nature. "I did not want to write of this disappointment to you so long as there was some prospect of better things. You can imagine, however, how I feel at this cruel loss of time and money--to say nothing of my health, which is still so poor. I had almost recovered from my cold, but in lecturing at Ottawa at the Skating Rink, a hideous, dismal damp barn, the only available place in town, I caught a fresh cold and have been coughing badly ever since. And you can well imagine that my business annoyances do not add greatly to my sleep or appetite. "Apart from this, the people of Ottawa have received me very kindly. They have vied with each other in social attention, and if I had been like John Gilpin, 'on pleasure bent,' they would have made my visit a success. The Governor-General of Canada invited me to stay with him at his seat, Rideau Hall, and I spent Sunday and Monday there. Sir John and Lady Macdonald were also most polite and courteous. "I shall telegraph you to-morrow if I intend to return at once. Don't let this worry you, but kiss the children for me and hope for the best. I would send you some money but _there isn't any to send_, and maybe I shall only bring back myself.--Your affectionate "FRANK. "P. S.--26th. "DEAR NAN,--I did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the result of last night's lecture. It was a _fair_ house and ---- this morning paid me one hundred and fifty dollars, of which I send you the greater part. I lecture again to-night, with fair prospects, and he is to pay something on account of the Ottawa engagement besides the fee for that night. I will write again from Ogdensburg.--Always yours, "FRANK." This lecture trip in the Spring of 1873 was followed in the Autumn by a similar trip in the West, with lectures at St. Louis, Topeka, Atchison, Lawrence, and Kansas City. From St. Louis he wrote to his wife as follows:-- "MY DEAR ANNA,--As my engagement is not until the 21st at Topeka, Kansas, I lie over here until to-morrow morning, in preference to spending the extra day in Kansas. I've accepted the invitation of Mr. Hodges, one of the managers of the lecture course, to stay at his house. He is a good fellow, with the usual American small family and experimental housekeeping, and the quiet and change from the hotel are very refreshing to me. They let me stay in my own room--which by the way is hung with the chintz of our 49th Street house--and don't bother me with company. So I was very good to-day and went to church. There was fine singing. The contralto sang your best sentences from the _Te Deum_, 'We believe that Thou shalt come,' &c., &c., to the same minor chant that I used to admire. "The style of criticism that my lecture--or rather myself as a lecturer--has received, of which I send you a specimen, culminated this morning in an editorial in the 'Republic,' which I shall send you, but have not with me at present. I certainly never expected to be mainly criticised for being _what I am not_, a handsome fop; but this assertion is at the bottom of all the criticism. They may be right--I dare say they are--in asserting that I am no orator, have no special faculty for speaking, no fire, no dramatic earnestness or expression, but when they intimate that I am running on my good looks--save the mark! I confess I get hopelessly furious. You will be amused to hear that my gold studs have again become 'diamonds,' my worn-out shirts 'faultless linen,' my haggard face that of a 'Spanish-looking exquisite,' my habitual quiet and 'used-up' way, 'gentle and eloquent languor.' But you will be a little astonished to know that the hall I spoke in was worse than Springfield, and _notoriously_ so--that the people seemed genuinely pleased, that the lecture inaugurated the 'Star' course very handsomely, and that it was the first of the first series of lectures ever delivered in St. Louis." In a letter dated Lawrence, Kansas, October 23, 1873, he relates an interesting experience. "MY DEAR ANNA,--I left Topeka--which sounds like a name Franky might have invented--early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night--an hour before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o'clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse--there was no vehicle to be had--and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy--who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure--with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after. "I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night, and d----d them inwardly in his heart. And yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and I had been told that Atchison was a rough place--energetic but coarse. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison. I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, Nan, to buy 'Minxes' with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled. "Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I've been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read everything I have written--and appear to appreciate the best. Think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue shirt repeating to me _Conception de Arguello_! Their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior--even their tact--are wonderful to me. They are 'Kentucks' and 'Dick Bullens' with twice the refinement and tenderness of their California brethren.... "I've seen but one [woman] that interested me--an old negro wench. She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical--so full of breadth and goodness that I went outside and talked to her while she was scrubbing the stones. She laughed as a canary bird sings--because she couldn't help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-tuned. She had been a slave. "I expected to have heard from you here. I've nothing from you or Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct this to Eliza's care, as I do not even know where you are. Your affectionate "FRANK."[91] The same lecture was delivered in London, England, in January, 1879, and in June, 1880. Bret Harte's only other lecture had for its subject _American Humor_, and was delivered in Chicago on October 10, 1874, and in New York on January 26, 1875.[92] The money return from these lectures was slight, and the fatigue and exposure of the long journeys in the West had, his relatives think, a permanently bad effect upon Bret Harte's health. In the Autumn of 1875 we find him at Lenox, in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Lenox has its place in literature, for Hawthorne spent a year there, and in adjoining towns once lived O. W. Holmes, Catherine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, and G. P. R. James. _Gabriel Conroy_, Bret Harte's only novel, and on the whole, it must be admitted, a failure, though containing many exquisite passages, was published in "Scribner's Magazine" in 1876. The poems and stories which Bret Harte wrote during his seven years' residence in the Eastern part of the United States did not deal with the human life of that time and place. They either concerned the past, like _Thankful Blossom_ and the Newport poems, or they harked back to California, like _Gabriel Conroy_ and the stories published in the "Atlantic." The only exceptions are the short and pathetic tale called _The Office-Seeker_, and the opening chapter of that powerful story, _The Argonauts of North Liberty_. North Liberty is a small town in Connecticut, and the scene is quickly transferred from there to California; but Joan, the Connecticut woman, remains the chief figure in the story. It is seldom that Bret Harte fails to show some sympathy with the men and women whom he describes, or at least some relenting consciousness that they could not help being what they were. But it is otherwise with Joan. She and her surroundings had a fascination for Bret Harte that was almost morbid. The man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us nearly as much as the person whom we love. An acute critic declares that Thackeray's wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants is due to the fact that he had almost a horror of them, and was abnormally sensitive to their criticisms,--the more felt for being unspoken. So Joan represents what Bret Harte hated more than anything else in the world, namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded Puritanism. Her character is not that of a typical New England woman; its counterpart would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly consistent character, most accurately worked out. Joan combines a prim, provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual nature,--an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. She might, perhaps, be called the female of that species which Hawthorne immortalized under the name of Judge Pyncheon. Joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. Was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives? Her intimates did not know. One of the finest strokes in the story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband. "For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some bewildering word." New England people at their best did not attract Bret Harte. That Miltonic conception of the universe upon which New England was built seemed to him simply ridiculous, and he did not appreciate the strength of character in which it resulted. Moreover, the crudity of New England offended his æsthetic taste as much as its theology offended his reason and his charity. North Liberty on a cold, stormy Sunday night in March is described with that _gusto_, with that minuteness of detail which could be shown only by one who loved it or by one who hated it. And yet it would be unjust to say that Bret Harte had no conception of the better type of New England women. The schoolmistress in _The Idyl of Red Gulch_, one of his earliest and best stories, is as pure and noble a maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as Hilda herself. The Reader will remember the description of Miss Mary as she appeared playing with her pupils in the woods. "The color came faintly into her pale cheeks.... Felinely fastidious and entrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came ..." upon Sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale. In the culminating scene of this story, the interview between Miss Mary and the mother of Sandy's illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to take the child with her to her home in the East, although she is still under the shock of the discovery that Sandy is the boy's father,--in this scene the schoolmistress exhibits true New England restraint, and a beautiful absence of heroics. It was just at sunset. "The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss Mary's eyes with something of its glory, nickered and faded and went out. The sun had set in Red Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary's voice sounded pleasantly, 'I will take the boy. Send him to me to-night.'" One can hardly help speculating about Bret Harte's personal taste and preferences in regard to women. Cressy and the Rose of Tuolumne were both blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. Even his blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. The Treasure of the Redwoods disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet "a pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow." One associates a contralto voice with a brunette, and Bret Harte's heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have contralto voices. Not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. Even the slight and blue-eyed Tinka Gallinger "sang in a youthful, rather nasal contralto." Bret Harte's wife had a contralto voice and was a good singer. As to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a "tender gray" and a "reddish brown." Ailsa Callender's hair was "dark with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished metallic lustre in their brown pupils." Mrs. MacGlowrie was "a fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry." A small foot with an arched instep was a _sine qua non_ with Bret Harte, and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the Southwestern girl. He believed in breeding, and all his heroines were well-bred,--not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of coming from sound, courageous, self-respecting, self-improving stock. Within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including some that are often excluded from that category. He is rather partial to widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an indulgent eye. Can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still retain her preëminence as heroine? Yes, Bret Harte's genius is equal even to that. "Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the shock of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook-and-eye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve-cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious." [Illustration: I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF From "Lanty Foster's Mistake" Denman Fink, del.] Red-haired women have been so popular in fiction during recent years that it was perhaps no great feat for Bret Harte in the _Buckeye Hollow Inheritance_ to make a heroine out of a red-haired girl, and a bad-tempered one too; but what other romancer has ever dared to represent a young and lovely woman as "hard of hearing"! There can be no question that The Youngest Miss Piper was not quite normal in this respect, although, for purposes of coquetry and sarcasm no doubt, she magnified the defect. In her memorable interview with the clever young grocery clerk (whom she afterward married) she begins by failing to hear distinctly the title of the book which he was reading when she entered the store; and we have this picture: "Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers around her pink ear: 'Did you say the first principles of geology or politeness? You know I am so deaf; but of course it couldn't be that.'" The one kind of woman that did not attract Bret Harte as a subject for literature was the conventional woman of the world. He could draw her fairly well, for we have Amy Forester in _A Night on the Divide_, Jessie Mayfield in _Jeff Briggs's Love Story_, Grace Nevil in _A Mæcenas of the Pacific Slope_, Mrs. Ashwood in _A First Family of Tasajara_, and Mrs. Horncastle in _Three Partners_. But these women do not bear the stamp of Bret Harte's genius. His Army and Navy girls are better, because they are redeemed from commonplaceness by their patriotism. Miss Portfire in _The Princess Bob and her Friends_, and Julia Cantire in _Dick Boyle's Business Card_, represent those American families, more numerous than might be supposed, in which it is almost an hereditary custom for the men to serve in the Army or Navy, and for the women to become the wives and mothers of soldiers and sailors. In such families patriotism is a constant inspiration, to a degree seldom felt except by those who represent their country at home or abroad. Bret Harte was patriotic, as many of his poems and stories attest, and his long residence in England did not lessen his Americanism. "Apostates" was his name for those American girls who marry titled foreigners, and he often speaks of the susceptibility of American women to considerations of rank and position. In _A Rose of Glenbogie_, after describing the male guests at a Scotch country house, he continues: "There were the usual half-dozen smartly-frocked women who, far from being the females of the foregoing species, were quite indistinctive, with the single exception of an American wife, who was infinitely more Scotch than her Scotch husband." And in _The Heir of the McHulishes_ the American Consul is represented as being less chagrined by the bumptiousness of his male compatriots than by "the snobbishness and almost servile adaptability of the women. Or was it possible that it was only a weakness of the sex which no Republican nativity or education could eliminate?" CHAPTER XV BRET HARTE AT CREFELD The sums that Bret Harte received for his stories and lectures did not suffice to free him from debt, and he suffered much anxiety and distress from present difficulties, with no brighter prospects ahead. An additional misfortune was the failure of a new paper called "The Capital," which had been started in Washington by John J. Piatt. There is an allusion to this in a letter written by Bret Harte to his wife from Washington.[93] "Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful letter. I have been very sick, very much disappointed; but I'm better now, and am only waiting for some money to return. I should have, for the work that I have done, more than would help us out of our difficulties. But it doesn't come, and even the money I've expected from the 'Capital' for my story is seized by its creditors. That hope and the expectations I had from the paper and Piatt in the future amount to nothing. I have found that it is bankrupt. "Can you wonder, Nan, that I have kept this from you? You have so hard a time of it there, and I cannot bear to have you worried if there is the least hope of a change in my affairs as they look, day by day. Piatt has been gone nearly a month, was expected to return every day, and only yesterday did I know positively of his inability to fulfil his promises. ---- came here three days ago, and in a very few moments I learned from him that I need expect nothing for the particular service I had done him. I've been vilified and abused in the papers for having received compensation for my services, when really and truly I have only received less than I should have got from any magazine or newspaper for my story. I sent you the fifty dollars by Mr. D----, because I knew you would be in immediate need, and there is no telegraph transfer office on Long Island. It was the only fifty I have made since I've been here. "I am waiting to hear from Osgood regarding an advance on that wretched story. He writes me he does not quite like it. I shall probably hear from him to-night. When the money comes I shall come with it. God bless you and keep you and the children safe for the sake of "FRANK." Bret Harte's friends, however, were aware of his situation, and they procured for him an appointment by President Hayes as United States Commercial Agent at Crefeld in Prussia. The late Charles A. Dana was especially active in this behalf. Bret Harte, much as he dreaded the sojourn in a strange country, gladly accepted the appointment, and leaving his family for the present at Sea Cliff, Long Island, he sailed for England in June, 1878, little thinking that he was never to return. Crefeld is near the river Rhine, about thirty miles north of Cologne. Its chief industry is the manufacture of silks and velvets, in respect to which it is the leading city in Germany, and is surpassed by no other place in Europe except Lyons. This industry was introduced in Crefeld by Protestant refugees who fled thither from Cologne in the seventeenth century in order to obtain the protection of the Prince of Orange. A small suburb of Philadelphia was settled mainly by emigrants from Crefeld, and bears the same name. The Prussian Crefeld is a clean, spacious place, with wide streets, substantial houses, and all the appearance of a Dutch town. At this time it contained about seventy-five thousand inhabitants. Bret Harte arrived at Crefeld on the morning of July 17, 1878, after a sleepless journey of twelve hours from Paris, and on the same day he wrote to his wife a very homesick letter. "I have audaciously travelled alone nearly four hundred miles through an utterly foreign country on one or two little French and German phrases, and a very small stock of assurance, and have delivered my letters to my predecessor, and shall take possession of the Consulate to-morrow. Mr. ----, the present incumbent, appears to me--I do not know how I shall modify my impression hereafter--as a very narrow, mean, ill-bred, and not over-bright Puritanical German. It was my intention to appoint him my vice-Consul--an act of courtesy suggested both by my own sense of right and Mr. Leonard's advice, but he does not seem to deserve it, and has even received my suggestion of it with the suspicion of a mean nature. But at present I fear I may have to do it, for I know no one else here. I am to all appearance utterly friendless; I have not received the first act of kindness or courtesy from any one, and I suppose this man sees it. I shall go to Bavaria to-morrow to see the Consul there, who held this place as one of his dependencies, and try to make matters straight."[94] This letter shows that the craving for sympathy and companionship, which is associated with artistic natures, was intensely felt by Bret Harte, more so, perhaps, than would have been expected in a man of his self-reliant character. His despondent tone is almost child-like. The letter goes on: "It's been up-hill work ever since I left New York, but I shall try to see it through, please God! I don't allow myself to think over it at all, or I should go crazy. I shut my eyes to it, and in doing so perhaps I shut out what is often so pleasant to a traveller's first impressions; but thus far London has only seemed to me a sluggish nightmare through which I have waked, and Paris a confused sort of hysterical experience. I had hoped for a little kindness and rest here.... At least, Nan, be sure I've written now the worst; I think things must be better soon. I shall, please God, make some friends in good time, and will try and be patient. But I shall not think of sending for you until I see clearly that I can stay myself. If the worst comes to the worst I shall try to stand it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin anew there. But I could not stand it to see you break your heart here through disappointment, as I mayhap may do." The tone of this letter is so exaggerated that it might seem as if Bret Harte had been a little theatrical and insincere,--that he had endeavored to create an impression which was partly false. But such a conjecture would be erroneous, for under the same date, with the addition of the word "midnight," we find him writing a second letter to correct the effect of the first, as follows:-- "MY DEAR NAN,--I wrote and mailed you a letter this afternoon that I fear was rather disconsolate, so I sit down to-night to send another, which I hope will take a little of the blues out of the first. Since I wrote I have had some further conversation with my predecessor, Mr. ----, and I think I can manage matters with him. He has hauled in his horns considerably since I told him that the position I offered him--so far as the honor of it went--was better than the one he held. For the one thing pleasant about my office is that the dignity of it has been raised on my account. It was only a dependence--a Consular Agency--before it was offered to me.[95] "I feel a little more hopeful, too, for I have been taken out to a 'fest'--or a festival--of one of the vintners, and one or two of the people were a little kind. I forced myself to go; these German festivals are distasteful to me, and I did not care to show my ignorance of their language quite so prominently, but I thought it was the proper thing for me to do. It was a very queer sight. About five hundred people were in an artificial garden beside an artificial lake, looking at artificial fireworks, and yet as thoroughly enjoying it as if they were children. Of course there were beer and wine. Here as in Paris everybody drinks, and all the time, and nobody gets drunk. Beer, beer, beer; and meals, meals, meals. Everywhere the body is worshipped. Beside them we are but unsubstantial spirits. I write this in my hotel, having had to pass through a mysterious gate and so into a side courtyard and up a pair of labyrinthine stairs, to my dim 'Zimmer' or chamber. The whole scene, as I returned to-night, looked as it does on the stage,--the lantern over the iron gate, the inn strutting out into the street with a sidewalk not a foot wide. I know now from my own observation, both here and in Paris and London, where the scene-painters at the theatres get their subjects. Those impossible houses--those unreal silent streets all exist in Europe." On one of those first, melancholy days at Crefeld, the new Consul, walking listlessly along the main street of the town, happened to throw a passing glance at the window of a bookseller's shop, and there he saw on the back of a neat little volume the familiar words "Bret Harte." It was a German translation of his stories, and it is easy to imagine how the sight refreshed and comforted the homesick exile. After that, he felt that to some extent, at least, he was living among friends. Translations of Bret Harte's poems and stories had appeared before this in German magazines, and later his stories were reproduced in Germany, in book form, as fast as they were published in England. In fact, his books have been printed in every language of Europe, and translations of his stories have appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in the "Moscow Gazette," and in periodicals of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden. In 1878 a translation of six of Bret Harte's tales was published in the Servian language, with an enthusiastic preface in German, by the translator, Ivan B. Popovitch. The impression that Bret Harte received from Europe,--and it is the one that every uncontaminated American must receive,--may be gathered from a letter written by him to his younger son, then a small boy: "We drove out the other day through a lovely road, bordered with fine poplar trees, and more like a garden walk than a country road, to the Rhine, which is but two miles and a half from this place. The road had been built by Napoleon the First when he was victorious everywhere, and went straight on through everybody's property, and even over their dead bones. Suddenly to the right we saw the ruins of an old castle, vine-clad and crumbling, exactly like a scene on the stage. It was all very wonderful. But Papa thought, after all, he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet quite _pure_, and _sweet_ and _good_; not in one where every field seems to cry out with the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people have lived and suffered, that to-night, under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to throng the road and dispute our right of way. Be thankful, my dear boy, that you are an American. Papa was never so fond of his country before, as in this land that has been so great, so powerful, and so very, very hard and wicked."[96] Bret Harte, though disclaiming any knowledge of music, had a real appreciation of it, and wrote as follows to his wife who was a connoisseur: "I have been several times to the opera at Dusseldorf, and I have been hesitating whether I should slowly prepare you for a great shock or tell you at once that musical Germany is a humbug. My first operatic experience was 'Tannhäuser.' I can see your superior smile, Anna, at this; and I know how you will take my criticism of Wagner, so I don't mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly monotonous performance I ever heard. I shall say nothing about the orchestral harmonies, for there wasn't anything going on of that kind, unless you call something that seemed like a boiler factory at work in the next street, and the wind whistling through the rigging of a channel steamer, harmony.... But what I wanted to say was that even my poor uneducated ear detected bad instrumentation and worse singing in the choruses. I confided this much to a friend, and he said very frankly that I was probably right, that the best musicians and choruses went to America.... "Then I was awfully disappointed in 'Faust,' or, as it is known here in the playbills, 'Marguerite.' You know how I love that delicious idyl of Gounod's, and I was in my seat that night long before the curtain went up. Before the first act was over I felt like leaving, and yet I was glad I stayed. For although the chorus of villagers was frightful, and Faust and Mephistopheles spouted and declaimed blank verse at each other--whole pages of Goethe, yet the acting was superb. I have never seen such a Marguerite. But think of my coming to Germany to hear opera badly sung, and magnificently acted!"[97] Having put the affairs of the Consular office upon a proper footing, Bret Harte returned to England about the middle of August for a short vacation, which proved, however, to be a rather long one. His particular object was a visit to James Anthony Froude at his house in Devonshire. Bret Harte had a great admiration for Froude's writings; and when the two men met they formed a friendship which was severed only by death. From Froude's home Bret Harte wrote to his wife as follows: "Imagine, if you can, something between 'Locksley Hall,' and the High Walled Garden, where Maud used to walk, and you have some idea of this graceful English home. I look from my windows down upon exquisite lawns and terraces, all sloping toward the sea wall, and then down upon the blue sea below.... I walk out in the long, high garden, past walls hanging with netted peaches and apricots, past terraces looking over the ruins of an old feudal castle, and I can scarcely believe I am not reading an English novel or that I am not myself a wandering ghost. To heighten the absurdity, when I return to my room I am confronted by the inscription on the door, 'Lord Devon' (for this is the property of the Earl of Devon, and I occupy his favourite room), and I seem to have died and to be resting under a gilded mausoleum that lies even more than the average tombstone does. Froude is a connection of the Earl's, and has hired the house for the Summer. "But Froude--dear old noble fellow--is splendid. I love him more than I ever did in America. He is great, broad, manly,--democratic in the best sense of the word, scorning all sycophancy and meanness, accepting all that is around him, yet more proud of his literary profession than of his kinship with these people whom he quietly controls. There are only a few literary men like him here, but they are kings. So far I've avoided seeing any company here; but Froude and I walk and walk, and talk and talk. They let me do as I want, and I have not been well enough yet to do aught but lounge. The doctor is coming to see me to-day, and if I am no better I shall return in a day or two to London, and then to Crefeld."[98] Bret Harte's health seems at all times to have been easily upset, and he was particularly subject to colds and sore throats. This letter was written in August, but it was the first week in November before he was on his way back to Crefeld. While in London he had arranged for a lecture tour in England during the next January (1879), and in that month a volume of his stories and poems was published in England with the following Introduction by the author:-- "In offering this collection of sketches to the English public, the author is conscious of attaching an importance to them that may not be shared by the general reader, but which he, as an American writer on English soil, cannot fail to feel very sensibly. The collection is made by himself, the letter-press revised by his own hand, and he feels for the first time that these fugitive children of his brain are no longer friendless in a strange land, entrusted to the care of a foster-mother, however discreet, but are his own creations, for whose presentation to the public in this fashion he is alone responsible. Three or four having been born upon English soil may claim the rights of citizenship, but the others he must leave to prove their identity with English literature on their own merits." The lecture on the Argonauts, delivered the first time at the Crystal Palace, was very well received both by the hearers and the press; but financially it was a disappointment. Bret Harte was in England three weeks, lectured five times, and made only two hundred dollars over and above his expenses. A second lecture tour, however, carried out in March of the same year, was successful in every way. The audiences were enthusiastic, and the payment was liberal. It was during this visit to England that Bret Harte became involved in a characteristic tangle. He had received the compliment of being asked to respond for Literature at the Royal Academy banquet in 1879, and, with his constitutional unwillingness to give a point-blank refusal, had promised or half-promised to be present. Meanwhile, he had returned to Crefeld, and the prospect of speaking at the dinner loomed more and more horrific in his imagination, while the uncertainty in which he left the matter was a source of vexation in London. Letters and telegrams from his friends remained unanswered, until finally, Sir Frederic Leighton, the President of the Academy, sent him a message, the reply to which was prepaid, saying, "In despair; cannot do without you. Please telegraph at once if quite impossible." This at last drew from Bret Harte a telegram stating that the pressure of official business would render it impossible for him to leave Crefeld. But the matter was not quite ended yet. In a day or two Bret Harte received a letter from Froude, good-naturedly reminding him that a note as well as a telegram was due to Sir Frederic Leighton. "The President of the Royal Academy," he wrote, "is a sacred person with the state and honors of a sovereign on these occasions." And after some further delay Bret Harte did write to Sir Frederic, and received in reply the following polite but possibly somewhat ironical note: "Dear Mr. Bret Harte,--It was most kind of you to write to me after your telegram. I fully understand the impossibility of your leaving your post, and sincerely regret my loss." A year later, however, in 1880, Bret Harte answered the toast to Literature at the Royal Academy dinner, and his brief speech on that occasion is included in the volume of lectures by him recently published.[99] In October of this year, 1879, Bret Harte wrote to Washington stating that his health had suffered at Crefeld, and requesting leave of absence for sixty days in order that he might follow the advice of his physician, and seek a more favorable climate. He also asked for a reply by telegraph; and in the same letter he made application for a better Consular position, mentioning, as one reason for the exchange, that the business of the Agency at Crefeld had greatly increased during his tenure. His request for leave of absence was immediately granted, and in November he wrote to the State Department acknowledging the receipt of its telegram and letter, but adding, "Neither my affairs nor my health have enabled me yet to avail myself of the courtesy extended to me by the Department. When I shall be able to do so, I shall, agreeably to your instructions, promptly inform you." He took this leave of absence in the following January and April. So far as can be judged from his communications to the State Department, Bret Harte discharged the duties of the Agency in a very business-like manner. For one thing, he reduced the time consumed in passing upon invoices of goods intended for exportation to the United States from twenty-four hours to three hours, greatly to the convenience of the Crefeld manufacturers. The increase in the value of the silks and velvets shipped to this country during Bret Harte's term amounted to about two hundred thousand dollars quarterly; but perhaps the demands of trade had something to do with this. Two of the reports to the State Department from our Agent at Crefeld deserve to be rescued from their official oblivion. The first is dated, October 8, 1879, and it accompanies a table showing the rainfall, snowfall, and thunderstorms occurring in the district from July 1, 1878, to June 30, 1879. The Agent states:-- "The table is compiled from the observations of a competent local meteorologist. In mitigation of the fact that it has rained in this district in the ratio of every other day in the year, it may be stated that the general gloom has been diversified and monotony relieved by twenty-nine thunderstorms and one earthquake." The second communication, dated October 10, 1879, is in response to an official inquiry. "In reference to the Department Circular dated August 27, 1879, I have the honor to report that upon careful inquiry of the local authorities of this district I find that there is not now and never has been any avowed Mormon emigration from Crefeld, nor any emigration of people likely to become converts to that faith. Its name as well as its tenets are unknown to the inhabitants, and only to officials through the Department Circular. "The artisans and peasants of this district--that class from which the Mormon ranks are supposed to be recruited--are hard-working, thrifty, and home-loving. They are averse to emigration for any purpose, and as Catholics to any new revealed religion. A prolific household with _one_ wife seems to exclude any polygamous instinct in the manly breast, while the woman, who works equally with her husband, evinces no desire to share any division of the affections or the profits. The like may be predicated of the manufacturers, with the added suggestion that a duty of 60 per cent _ad valorem_ by engaging the fullest powers of the intellect in its evasion, leaves little room for the play of the lower passions. In these circumstances I did not find it necessary to report to the Legation at Berlin." The literary product of Bret Harte's two years at Crefeld was _A Legend of Sammtstadt_, in which there is a pleasant blending of the romantic and the humorous, _The Indiscretion of Elsbeth_, the _Views from a German Spion_, and _Unser Karl_. _Unser Karl_, however, was not written, or at least was not published, until several years later. Perhaps the most valuable impression which Bret Harte carried away from Crefeld was that of the German children. Children always interested him, and in Prussia he found a new variety, which he described in the _Views from a German Spion_: "The picturesqueness of Spanish and Italian childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime and the conscious attitudinizing of the Latin races. German children are not exuberant or volatile; they are serious,--a seriousness, however, not to be confounded with the grave reflectiveness of age, but only the abstract wonderment of childhood. These little creatures I meet upon the street--whether in quaint wooden shoes and short woollen petticoats, or neatly booted and furred, with school knapsacks jauntily borne on little square shoulders--all carry likewise in their round chubby faces their profound wonderment and astonishment at the big busy world into which they have so lately strayed. If I stop to speak with this little maid, who scarcely reaches to the top-boots of yonder cavalry officer, there is less of bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little face than of grave wonder at the foreign accent and strange ways of this new figure obtruded upon her limited horizon. She answers honestly, frankly, prettily, but gravely. There is a remote possibility that I might bite; and with this suspicion plainly indicated in her round blue eyes, she quietly slips her little red hand from mine, and moves solemnly away." The Continental practice of making the dog a beast of burden shocked Bret Harte, as it must shock any lover of the animal. "Perhaps it is because I have the barbarian's fondness for dogs, and for their lawless, gentle, loving uselessness that I rebel against this unnatural servitude. It seems as monstrous as if a child were put between the shafts and made to carry burdens; and I have come to regard those men and women, who in the weakest, perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents.... I fancy the dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is _play_; and I have seen a little collie running along, barking and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, before a load that any one out of this locality would have thought the direst cruelty. Nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to become accustomed to it." And then comes an example of that extraordinary keenness of observation with which Bret Harte was gifted:--"I have said that the dog was generally sincere in his efforts. I recall but one instance to the contrary. I remember a young collie who first attracted my attention by his persistent barking. Whether he did this, as the plough-boy whistled, 'for want of thought,' or whether it was a running protest against his occupation, I could not determine, until one day I noticed that, in barking, he slightly threw up his neck and shoulders, and that the two-wheeled barrow-like vehicle behind him, having its weight evenly poised on the wheels by the trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled him by this movement to cunningly throw the centre of gravity and the greater weight on the man,--a fact which the less sagacious brute never discerned.... I cannot help thinking that the people who have lost this gentle, sympathetic, characteristic figure from their domestic life and surroundings have not acquired an equal gain through his harsh labors." Of his Consular experiences at Crefeld the following is the only one which found its way into literature: "The Consul's chief duty was to uphold the flag of his own country by the examination and certification of divers invoices sent to his office by the manufacturers. But, oddly enough, these messengers were chiefly women,--not clerks, but ordinary household servants, and on busy days the Consulate might have been mistaken for a female registry office, so filled and possessed it was by waiting Mädchen. Here it was that Gretchen, Liebchen, and Clarchen, in the cleanest of gowns, and stoutly but smartly shod, brought their invoices in a piece of clean paper, or folded in a blue handkerchief, and laid them, with fingers more or less worn and stubby from hard service, before the Consul for his signature. Once, in the case of a very young Mädchen, that signature was blotted by the sweep of a flaxen braid upon it as the child turned to go; but generally there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense of responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant origin, which, equally with their sisters of France, were unknown to the English or American woman of any class." Bret Harte remained nearly two years at Crefeld, but his wife did not join him there, and, so far as the world knows, they never met again. In May, 1880, he was transferred to the much more lucrative and more desirable Consulship at Glasgow. It was one of the last cases in which government bestowed public office as a reward for literary excellence,--a custom so hallowed by age and association that every lover of literature will look back upon it with fond regret. CHAPTER XVI BRET HARTE AT GLASGOW After a month in London, Bret Harte took possession of the Consulate at Glasgow in July, 1880, and remained there five years. His annual salary was three thousand dollars. In September he wrote to a friend: "As I am trying to get up a good reputation here, I stay at my post pretty regularly, occasionally making a cheap excursion. This is a country for them. The other day I went to Staffa. It was really the only 'sight' in Europe that quite filled all my expectations. But alas! that magnificent, cathedral-like cave was presently filled with a howling party of sandwich-eating tourists, splashing in the water and climbing up the rocks. One should only go there alone, or with some sympathetic spirit."[100] How far the Consul's good intentions were fulfilled it is difficult to say. London attracted Bret Harte as it attracts everybody of Anglo-Saxon descent. That vast and sombre metropolis may weary the body and vex the soul of the visitor, but, after all, it remains the headquarters of the English-speaking race, and the American, as well as the Canadian or the Australian, returns to it again and again with a vague longing, never satisfied, but never lost. Another reason for the absenteeism of the Consul was that he lectured now and again in different parts of England, and that he paid frequent visits to country houses. Mr. Pemberton quotes a letter from him which contains an amusing illustration of the English boy's sporting spirit:-- "MY DEAR PEMBERTON,--Don't be alarmed if you should hear of my nearly having blown the top of my head off. Last Monday I had my face badly cut by the recoil of an overloaded gun. I do not know yet beneath these bandages whether I shall be permanently marked. At present I am invisible, and have tried to keep the accident a secret. When the surgeon was stitching me together, the son of the house, a boy of twelve, came timidly to the door of my room. 'Tell Mr. Bret Harte it's all right,' he said, '_he killed the hare_.'" However, the reports made by the Consul to the State Department seem to indicate more attention to his duties than has commonly been credited to him. One of these communications, dated May 4, 1882, gives a detailed account of the peculiar Glasgow custom according to which the several flats or floors of tenement houses are owned by separate persons, usually the occupants, each owner of a floor being a joint proprietor, with the other floor-owners, of the land on which the building stands, of the roof, the staircase and the walls. Another letter states, in answer to a question by the Department, that there were at the time probably not more than six American citizens resident in Glasgow, and that only one such was known to the Consul or to his predecessor. This, in an English-speaking city of six hundred thousand people, seems extraordinary. The most interesting of Bret Harte's communications to the State Department is perhaps the following:-- "On a recent visit to the Island of Iona, within this Consular District, I found in the consecrated ground of the ruined Cathedral the graves of nineteen American seamen who had perished in the wreck of the 'Guy Mannering' on the evening of the 31st of December, 1865, on the north coast of the island. The place where they are interred is marked by two rows of low granite pediments at the head and feet of the dead, supporting, and connected by, an iron chain which encloses the whole space. This was done by the order and at the expense of the Lord of the Manor, the present Duke of Argyle. * * * * * "I venture to make these facts known to the Department, satisfied that such recognition of the thoughtful courtesy of the Duke of Argyle as would seem most fit and appropriate to the Department will be made, and that possibly a record of the names of the seamen will be placed upon some durable memorial erected upon the spot. * * * * * "In conclusion I beg to state that should the Department deem any expenditure by the Government for this purpose inexpedient, I am willing, with the permission of the Department, to endeavor to procure by private subscription a sufficient fund for the outlay." It is a pleasure to record that these suggestions were adopted by the State Department. A letter of acknowledgment and thanks was sent to the Duke of Argyle, and a shaft or obelisk with the names of the seamen inscribed thereon was erected by the United States Government in the latter part of the year 1882. Bret Harte's Consular experiences with seamen recall those of Hawthorne at Liverpool, and he appears to have acted with an equal sense of humanity. In one case he insisted that two sailors who had been convicted of theft should nevertheless receive the three months' pay due them, without which they would have been penniless on their discharge from prison. He took the ground that conviction of this offence was not equivalent to desertion, and therefore that the wages were not forfeited. He adds: "The case did not appear to call for any leniency on the part of the Government toward the ship-owners. The record of the ship's voyage was one of unseaworthiness, brutality and inefficiency." In another case, the Consul supplied from his own pocket the wants of a shipwrecked American sailor, and procured for him a passage home, there being no government fund available for the purpose. A glimpse of his Consular functions is given in the opening paragraph of _Young Robin Gray_:-- "The good American bark Skyscraper was swinging at her moorings in the Clyde, off Bannock, ready for sea. But that good American bark--although owned in Baltimore--had not a plank of American timber in her hulk, nor a native American in her crew, and even her nautical 'goodness' had been called in serious question by divers of that crew during her voyage, and answered more or less inconclusively with belaying-pins, marlin-spikes, and ropes' ends at the hands of an Irish-American Captain and a Dutch and Danish Mate. So much so, that the mysterious powers of the American Consul at St. Kentigern[101] had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand, and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. In the exercise of his functions, the Consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat alongside. It was with a feeling of relief at the end of the interview that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and bilge-water and came on deck." When the Consul reached the deck he saw, for the first time, Ailsa Callender, one of the most charming of his heroines, and as characteristically Scotch as M'liss was characteristically Western. The Reader will not be sorry to recall the impression that Ailsa Callender subsequently made upon the young American, Robert Gray:-- "'She took me to task for not laying up the yacht on Sunday that the men could go to "Kirk," and for swearing at a bargeman who ran across our bows. It's their perfect simplicity and sincerity in all this that gets me! You'd have thought that the old man was my guardian, and the daughter my aunt.' After a pause he uttered a reminiscent laugh. 'She thought we ate and drank too much on the yacht, and wondered what we could find to do all day. All this, you know, in the gentlest, caressing sort of voice, as if she was really concerned, like one's own sister. Well, not exactly like mine,'--he interrupted himself grimly,--'but, hang it all, you know what I mean. You know that our girls over there haven't got _that_ trick of voice. Too much self-assertion, I reckon; things made too easy for them by us men. Habit of race, I dare say.' He laughed a little. 'Why, I mislaid my glove when I was coming away, and it was as good as a play to hear her commiserating and sympathizing and hunting for it as if it were a lost baby.' "'But you've seen Scotch girls before this,' said the Consul. 'There were Lady Glairn's daughters whom you took on a cruise.' "'Yes, but the swell Scotch all imitate the English, as everybody else does, for the matter of that, our girls included; and they're all alike.'" The shrewd, solid, genial, even religious Sir James MacFen, in _The Heir of the McHulishes_, and the porter in _A Rose of Glenbogie_, are native to the soil, and have no counterparts in America, east or west. These three stories dealing with Scotch scenes and people prove the falsity of the assertion sometimes made that Bret Harte could write only about California:--he could have gone on writing about Scotland all his life, had he continued to live there, and the tales would have been as readable, if not so nearly unique, as those which deal with California. He liked the Scotch people, and was received by them with great kindness and hospitality. "On my birthday," he wrote, "which became quite accidentally known to a few friends in the hotel, my table was covered with bouquets of flowers and little remembrances from cigar-cases to lockets." At this period Bret Harte made the acquaintance of William Black and Walter Besant, and with the former he became very intimate. In the life of William Black by his friend, Sir Wemyss Reid, there are many references to Bret Harte. The two story-writers first met as guests of Sir George Wombwell, who had invited them and a few others, including Mr. Shepard, the American vice-Consul at Bradford, to make a driving trip to the ruined abbeys of Eastern Yorkshire. The party dined together at the Yorkshire Club in York, which was the meeting point. "I remember few more lively evenings than that," writes Sir Wemyss Reid. "Black and Bret Harte, whose acquaintance he had just made, vied with each other in the good stories they told and the repartees they exchanged." Shortly afterward Black wrote to Reid, "Bret Harte went down to us at Brighton, and if we didn't amuse him he certainly amused us. He is coming again next week." Later he wrote again from the Reform Club in London, to Reid: "In a few weeks' time don't be surprised if Bret Harte and I come and look in upon you--that is, if he is not compelled for mere shame's sake to go to his Consular duties ( ! ! ! ) at once. He is the most extraordinary globule of mercury--comet--aerolite gone drunk--flash of lightning doing Catherine wheels--I ever had any experience of. Nobody knows where he is, and the day before yesterday I discovered here a pile of letters that had been slowly accumulating for him since February, 1879. It seems he never reported himself to the all-seeing Escott [the hall porter], and never asked for letters when he got his month's honorary membership last year. People are now sending letters to him from America addressed to me at Brighton! But he is a mystery and the cause of mystifications." In the following July there is another mention of Bret Harte in one of Black's letters. "Bret Harte was to have been back from Paris last night, but he is a wandering comet. The only place he is sure not to be found in is the Glasgow Consulate." But the Consul's wanderings were not so frequent as Mr. Black supposed. Bret Harte had almost a monomania for not answering letters; and his absence from Glasgow could not safely be inferred from his failure to acknowledge communications addressed to him there. A rumor as to the Consul's prolonged desertion of his post had reached the State Department at Washington, and in November, 1882, the Department wrote to him requesting a report on the subject. He replied that he had not been away from Glasgow beyond the usual limit of ten days,[102] at any one time, except on holidays and Sundays. This report appears to have been accepted as satisfactory, and the incident was closed. At one time Bret Harte was to have dined with Sir Wemyss Reid and William Black at the Reform Club; "but in his place," says the biographer, "came a telegram in which I was invited to ask Black and Lockyer, who had just spent a few days with him in Scotland, their opinion of the game of poker--evidence that they had not spent all their time in Scotland in viewing scenery." The damp climate of Glasgow did not agree with Bret Harte, and so early in his residence there as July, 1881, he wrote to the State Department requesting leave of absence for three months, with permission to visit the United States, on the ground that the state of his health was such that he might require a complete change of scene and air. The request was granted, but the Consul did not return to his native country. In March, 1885, Bret Harte wrote to Black as follows:-- "My DEAR BLACK,--I was in the far South, trying to get rid of an obstinate cold, when your note reached me, and haven't been in London for some time. I expected you to drop in here on your way up to 'Balnagownie's arms'--whoever she may be. I'm afraid I don't want any 'Ardgay' in mine, thank you. Why any man in this damp climate should want to make himself wetter by salmon-fishing passes my comprehension. Is there no drier sport to be had in all Great Britain? I shudder at the name of a river, and shiver at the sight of any fish that isn't dried. I hear, too, that you are in the habit of making poetry on these occasions, and that you are dropping lines all over the place. How far is that place--anyway? I shall be in Glasgow until the end of March, and if you'll dry yourself thoroughly and come in and dine with me at that time, I'll show you how 'the laboring poor' of Glasgow live. Yours always, "BRET HARTE." But, alas for Bret Harte! when this letter was written, his labors at Glasgow were about to cease. In the year 1885 a new Administration entered upon its duties at Washington, and many Consuls were superseded, perhaps for good cause. Bret Harte was removed in July, and another man of letters, Mr. Frank Underwood of Boston, reigned in his stead. CHAPTER XVII BRET HARTE IN LONDON In 1880, during one of his many visits to London, Bret Harte made the acquaintance of M. Arthur and Mme. Van de Velde, who were already enthusiastic readers of his works, and it was not long before they became his most intimate friends in England if not in the world. From 1885, when he went to London to live, until the death of M. Van de Velde in 1895, he was an inmate of their house for a great part of the time. Afterward, Bret Harte took rooms at number 74 Lancaster Gate, which remained his headquarters for the rest of his life; but he was often a guest at Mme. Van de Velde's town house, and at her country home, The Red House at Camberley in Sussex. M. Van de Velde was a Belgian whose life had been spent in the diplomatic service of his country. For many years he was Councillor of Legation in London. Mme. Van de Velde, his second wife, is of Italian birth, an accomplished woman of the world, and a writer of reputation. She translated many of Bret Harte's stories into French, and is the author of "Random Recollections of Court and Society," "Cosmopolitan Recollections," and "French Fiction of To-day." A quotation has already been made from her discriminating essay on Bret Harte. Her influence upon him was an important factor in the last twenty years of his life. Mme. Van de Velde led him to take himself and his art more seriously than he had done since coming to England. He settled down to his work, put his shoulder to the wheel, and kept it there during the remainder of his life. For a man naturally indolent and inclined to underrate his own writings, this well-sustained industry was remarkable. Bret Harte was always more easily influenced by women than by men. He showed his best side to them, and they called out the gentleness and chivalry of his nature. No woman ever spoke ill of him, and among his most grateful admirers to-day are the California women who contributed to the "Overland Monthly," and who testify to the uniform kindness and consideration with which he treated them. Bret Harte's habits were regular and simple. He smoked a good deal, drank very little, and took exercise every day. At one time he played golf, and at another he was somewhat interested in amateur photography. But his real recreation, as well as his labor, was found in that imaginary world which sprang to life under his pen. He was often a guest at English country houses, and was familiar with the history of English cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and historical ruins. He made a pilgrimage to Macbeth's country in Scotland and to Charlotte Brontë's home in Yorkshire. He loved Byron's poetry, and was once a guest at Newstead Abbey. He frequently visited Lord Compton, later Marquis of Northampton, at Compton Wyngates in Warwickshire near the battleground of Edgehill, and at Castle Ashby at Northampton. Reminiscences of these visits may be found in _The Desborough Connections_ and _The Ghosts of Stukeley Castle_. He belonged to various clubs, such as The Beefsteak, The Rabelais, The Kinsmen; but during the last few years of his life he frequented only the Royal Thames Yacht Club. "This selection seemed to me so odd," writes Mr. Pemberton, "for he had no love of yachting, that I questioned him concerning it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said, 'don't you see? I never use a club until I am tired of my work and want relief from it. If I go to a literary club I am asked all sorts of questions as to what I am doing, and my views on somebody's last book, and to these I am expected to reply at length. Now my good friends in Albemarle Street talk of their yachts, don't want my advice about them, are good enough to let me listen, and I come away refreshed by their conversation.'"[103] So Hawthorne, it will be remembered, cared little for the meetings of the Saturday Club in Boston, and was often an absentee, but he delighted in the company of the Yankee sea-captains at Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house in Liverpool. "Captain Johnson," he wrote, "assigned as a reason for not boarding at this house that the conversation made him sea-sick; and indeed the smell of tar and bilge-water is somewhat strongly perceptible in it." The truth is that an aversion to the society of purely literary men should naturally be looked for in writers of a profound or original stamp of mind. Something may be learned and some refreshment of spirit may be obtained from almost any man who knows almost anything at first hand,--even from a market-gardener or a machinist; and if his subject is what might be called a natural one, such as ships, horses or cows, it is bound to have a certain intellectual interest. But the ordinary, clever, sophisticated littérateur is mainly occupied neither with things nor with ideas, but with forms of expression, and consequently he is a long way removed from reality. It may be doubted if any society in the world is less profitable than his. Mr. Moncure Conway, in his autobiography, gives an amusing reminiscence of Bret Harte's proneness to escape from what are known as "social duties." Mrs. Conway "received" on Monday afternoons, and Bret Harte had told her that he would be present on a particular Monday, but he failed to appear,--much to the regret of some persons who had been invited for the occasion. "When chancing to meet him," writes Mr. Conway, "I alluded to the disappointment; he asked forgiveness and said, 'I will come next Monday--_even though I promise_.'" He had a constant dread that his friendship or acquaintance would be sought on account of his writings, rather than for himself. A lady who sat next to him at dinner without learning his name, afterward remarked, "I have always longed to meet him, and I would have been so different had I only known who my neighbor was." This, unfortunately, being repeated to Bret Harte, he exclaimed, "Now, why can't a woman realize that this sort of thing is insulting?... If Mrs. ---- talked with me, and found me uninteresting as a man, how could she expect to find me interesting because I was an author?" During the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Bret Harte seldom went far from home. He never visited Switzerland until September, 1895, and even then he carried his manuscript with him, and devoted to it part of each day. He took great delight in the Swiss mountains, often spoke of his vacation there, and was planning to go again during the summer of his death. From Lucerne he wrote to a friend[104] as follows: "Strangest of all, I find my heart going back to the old Sierras whenever I get over three thousand feet of Swiss altitude, and--dare I whisper it?--in spite of their pictorial composition, I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for one hundred thousand kilometres of the picturesque Vaud." Of Geneva he wrote to the same correspondent: "I thought I should not like Geneva, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau, and the De Staëls and Mme. de Warens still lingered there." But he did like Geneva; and of the lake, as he viewed it from his hotel window, he wrote, "Ask him if he ever saw an expanse of thirty miles of water exactly the color of the inner shell of a Mother-of-Pearl oyster." Of Geneva itself he wrote again: "It is gay, brilliant, and even as _pictorial_ as the end of Lake Leman; and as I sit by my hotel window on the border of the lake I can see Mont Blanc--thirty or forty miles away--framing itself a perfect vignette. Of course I know the whole thing was arranged by the Grand Hotel Company that run Switzerland. Last night as I stood on my balcony looking at the great semi-circle of lights framing the quay and harbor of the town, a great fountain sent up a spray from the lake three hundred feet high, illuminated by beautifully shaded 'lime lights,' exactly like a 'transformation scene.' Just then, the new moon--a pale green sickle--swung itself over the Alps! But it was absolutely too much! One felt that the Hotel Company were overdoing it! And I wanted to order up the hotel proprietor and ask him to take it down. At least I suggested it to the Colonel,[105] but he thought it would do as well if we refused to pay for it in the bill." The same correspondent, by the way, quotes an amusing letter from Bret Harte, written in 1888, from Stoke Pogis, near Windsor Castle: "I had the honor yesterday of speaking to a man who had been in personal attendance upon the Queen for fifty years. He was naturally very near the point of translation, and gave a vague impression that he did not require to be born again, but remained on earth for the benefit of American tourists." Bret Harte's reasons for remaining so long in England have already been explained in part. The chief cause was probably the pecuniary one, for by living in England he was able to obtain more from his writings than he could have obtained as a resident of the United States. He continued to contribute to the support of his wife, although after his departure from this country Mrs. Harte and he did not live together. The cause of their separation was never made known. On this subject both Mr. Harte and his wife maintained an honorable silence, which, it is to be hoped, will always be respected. A few years before her husband's death, Mrs. Harte came to England to live. The older son, Griswold Harte, died in the city of New York, in December, 1901, leaving a widow and one daughter. The second son, Francis King Harte, was married in England some years ago, and makes his home there. He has two children. Bret Harte was often a visitor at his son's house. The older daughter, Jessamy, married Henry Milford Steele, an American, and lives in the United States. The younger daughter, Ethel, is unmarried, and lives with her mother. Beyond the pecuniary reason which impelled Bret Harte to live in England were other reasons which every American who has spent some time in that country will understand, and which are especially strong in respect to persons of nervous temperament. The climate is one reason; for the English climate is the natural antidote to the American; and perhaps the residents of each country would be better if they could exchange habitats every other generation. England has a soothing effect upon the hustling American. He eats more, worries less, and becomes a happier and pleasanter animal. A similar change has been observed in high-strung horses taken from the United States to England. And so of athletes--the English athlete, transported to this country, gains in speed, but loses endurance; whereas our athletes on English soil gain endurance and lose speed. The temperament and manners of the English people have the same pleasant effect as the climate upon the American visitor. Why is John Bull always represented as an irascible animal? Perhaps he is such if his rights, real or assumed, are invaded, or if his will is thwarted; but as the stranger meets him, he is civil and good-natured. In fact, this is one of the chief surprises which an American experiences on his first visit to England. More important still, perhaps, is the ease of living in a country which has a fixed social system. The plain line drawn in England between the gentleman and the non-gentleman class makes things very pleasant for those who belong to the favored division. It gives the gentleman a vantage ground in dealing with the non-gentleman which proves as convenient, as it is novel, to the American. The fact that it must be inconvenient for the non-gentleman class, which outnumbers the other some thousands to one, never seems to trouble the Englishman, although the American may have some qualms. Furthermore, strange as it may seem, the position of an author, _per se_ is, no doubt, higher in London (though perhaps not elsewhere in England) than it is in the United States. With us, the well-to-do publisher has a better standing in what is called "society" than the impecunious author. In London the reverse would be the case. New York and Boston looked askance upon Bret Harte, doubting if he were quite respectable; but London welcomed him. Bret Harte was often asked to lecture in England, and especially to speak or write upon English customs or English society; but he always refused, being unwilling, as Thackeray was in regard to the United States, either to censure a people from whom he had received great hospitality, or to praise them at the expense of truth. Nor was his belief in America and the American social system weakened in the least by his long residence in England or by his enjoyment of the amenities of English life. An English author wrote of him, while he was yet living: "Time has not dulled Bret Harte's instinctive affection for the land of his birth, for its institutions, its climate, its natural beauties, and, above all, the character and moral attributes of its inhabitants. Even his association with the most aristocratic representatives of London society has been impotent to modify his views or to win him over to less independent professions. He is as single-minded to-day as he was when he first landed on British soil. A general favorite in the most diverse circles, social, literary, scientific, artistic, or military, his strong primitive nature and his positive individuality have remained intact. Always polite and gentle, neither seeking nor evading controversy, he is steadfastly unchangeable in his political and patriotic beliefs." Another English writer relates that "At the time when there was some talk of war between Britain and America, he, while deploring even the suggestion of such a catastrophe, earnestly avowed his intention of instantly returning to his own country, should hostilities break out." No two men could be more opposed in many respects than Hawthorne and Bret Harte. Nevertheless they had some striking points of resemblance. Both were men who united primitive instincts with consummate refinement; and different as is the subject-matter of their stories, the style and attitude are not unlike. They had the same craving for beauty of form, the same self-repression, the same horror of what is prolix or tawdry, the same love of that simplicity which is the perfection of art. Long residence in England seems to have had much the same effect upon both men. It heightened their feeling for their native country almost in proportion as it pleased their own susceptibilities. Hawthorne's fondness for England was an almost unconscious feeling. When he returned to America, there to live for the remainder of his days, he did not find himself at home in the manner or to the degree which he had expected. "At Rome," his son writes, "an unacknowledged homesickness affected him, an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but when at last we returned there, he still looked backward toward England." That a man should find it more agreeable to live in one country, and yet be firmly convinced that the social system of another country was superior, is nothing remarkable. It is the presence of equality in the United States and its absence in England which make the chief difference between them. Even that imperfect equality to which we have attained has rendered the American people the happiest and the most moral in the world. To the superficial visitor, indeed, who has seen only a few great cities in the United States, it might seem that equality is not much more prevalent here than it is in England; but let him tarry a while in the smaller cities, in the towns and villages of the Union, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he will reach a different conclusion. An English writer of unusual discernment speaks of "that conscious independence, that indefinable assertion of manhood, which is the key to the American character." One result of Bret Harte's long residence in England was the circulation in this country of many false reports and statements about him which galled his sensitive nature. He had many times declined to be "interviewed," and probably made enemies in that way. "But when," writes Mme. Van de Velde, "in a moment of good nature he yielded to pressing solicitations, and allowed himself to be questioned, the consequences were, on the whole, to his disadvantage. From that moment the door was opened to a flood of apocryphal statements of various length and importance; sometimes entirely false, sometimes tinged with a dangerous verisimilitude; often grotesque, occasionally malicious, but one and all purporting to be derived from unquestionable sources." Mr. Pemberton hints at more serious troubles which afflicted Bret Harte's last years. "If he, in common with many of us, had his deep personal disappointments and sorrows, he bore them with the chivalry of a Bayard and a silence as dignified as it was pathetic. To a man of his sensitive nature, the barbed shafts of 'envy and calumny and hate and pain' lacerated with a cruelty that at times must have seemed unendurable. Under such torments he often writhed, but he suffered all things with a quiet patience that afforded a glorious example to those friends who, knowing of his wounds, had to be silent concerning them, and could offer him no balm." During the year 1901 Bret Harte's health was failing, although he still kept at work. His disease was cancer of the throat. He hoped to go abroad the following summer, and he had written in a letter to a friend, "Alas! I have never been light-hearted since Switzerland." But early in 1902 his condition became serious, and he went to stay with Mme. Van de Velde at Camberley. The Spring was cold and sunless, and he grew worse as it advanced. Nevertheless he was engaged in writing a play with Mr. Pemberton, and was meditating a new story which should reintroduce that favorite of the public, Colonel Starbottle. In March a surgical operation was performed on his throat, but the relief was slight and temporary; and from that time forward Bret Harte must have known that his fate was sealed, although he said nothing to his friends and with them appeared to be in good, even high spirits. April 17, feeling somewhat better, he sat down to begin his new tale. He headed it, "A Friend of Colonel Starbottle's," and wrote the opening sentence and part of another sentence. Dissatisfied with this beginning, he tried again, and taking a fresh sheet of paper, he wrote the title and one sentence. There the manuscript ends. He was unable to continue it, although after this date he wrote a few letters to friends. On May 5 he was sitting in the morning, at his desk, thus engaged, when a hemorrhage of the throat suddenly attacked him. He was put to bed, and doctors were sent for. He rallied from this attack, but a second hemorrhage, late in the afternoon, rendered him partly unconscious, and soon afterward he died peacefully in the presence of Mme. Van de Velde and her attendants. There is something sad in the death of any man far from home and country, with no kith or kin about him, though ministered to by devoted friends. Even Bret Harte's tombstone bears the name of one who was a stranger to his blood and race. We cannot help recalling what Tennessee's Partner said. "When a man has been running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do? Why, to come home." Alas! there was no home-coming for Bret Harte; and if, as may have been the case, he felt little or no regret at his situation, the sadness of it would only be intensified by that circumstance. Some deterioration is inevitable when a husband and father foregoes, even unwillingly, those feelings of responsibility and affection which centre in the family,--feelings so natural that to a considerable degree we share them even with the lower animals. That Bret Harte's separation from his family was in part, at least, his own fault seems highly probable from his character and career. He abhorred sentimentality in literature, and the few examples of it in his writings may be ascribed to the influence of Dickens. Nevertheless, with all his virility, it must be admitted that his nature was that of a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is one who obeys the natural good impulses of the human heart, but whose virtue does not go much beyond that. He has right feelings and acts upon them, but in cases where there is nothing to provoke the right feeling he falls short. He is strong in impulse, but weak in principle. When we see a fellow-being in danger or distress our instinct is to assist him. If we fail to do so, it is because we hearken to reason rather than to instinct; because we obey the selfish, second thought which reason suggests, instead of obeying the spontaneous impulse which nature puts into our hearts. But suppose that the person to be succored makes no appeal to the heart: suppose that he is thousands of miles away: suppose that one dislikes or even hates him: suppose that it is a question not of bestowing alms, or of giving assistance or of feeling sympathy, but of rendering bare justice. In such cases the sentimentalist lacks a sufficient spur for action: he feels no impulse: his heart remains cold: he makes excuses to himself; and having no strong sense of duty or principle to carry him through the ordeal, he becomes guilty of an act (or, more often, of a failure to act) which in another person would excite his indignation. In this sense Bret Harte was a sentimentalist. He would have risked his life for a present friend, but was capable of neglecting an absent one. This contradiction, if it be such, affords a clue to his character. In spite of his amiability, kindness, generosity, there was in Bret Harte an element of cruelty. Even his natural improvidence in money matters can hardly excuse him for selling the copyright of all his stories as they came out, leaving no income to be derived from them after his death. The sentimentalist, being a creature of impulse, gets in the habit of obeying his impulses, good or bad, and is apt to find some difficulty at last in distinguishing between them. He easily persuades himself that the thing which he wishes to do is the right thing for him to do. This was a trait of Bret Harte's character, and it naturally accompanies that lack of introspection which was so marked in him. There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. Even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned wholly with the concrete; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. The note of sincerity is wanting. An instance will be found in the _General Introduction_ which he wrote for the first volume of his collected stories, where he answers the charge that he had "confused recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often criminality with a single, solitary virtue." After describing this as "the cant of too much mercy," he goes on to say:-- "Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this from the housetops." This is simply Dickens both in manner and substance, and the tone of the whole passage is insincere and exaggerated, almost maudlin. Lamentable, but perhaps not strange, that in the one place where Bret Harte explained and defended what might be called the prevailing moral of his stories, he should fall so far short of the reader's expectation! The truth is that Bret Harte took nothing seriously except his art, and apparently went through life with as little concern about the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind as it would be possible for any member of that unfortunate species to feel. And yet there was a noble side to his character. He possessed in an unusual degree what is, perhaps, the most rare of all good qualities, namely, magnanimity. No man was ever more free from envy and jealousy; no writer was ever more quick to perceive and to praise excellence in others, or more slow to disparage or condemn. He used to say, and really seemed to believe, that Mr. John Hay's imitations of his own dialect poems were better than the originals. All the misconstruction and unkind criticism of which he was the subject never drew from him a bitter remark. He had a tenderness for children and dumb animals, especially for dogs, and his sympathy with them gave him a wonderful insight into their natures. Who but Bret Harte could have penned this sentence which the Reader will recognize as occurring in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_: "He [Dick Demorest] had that piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many charming women,--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference which it has learned to expect." In breadth and warmth of sympathy for his fellow-men Bret Harte had what almost might be described as a substitute for religion; what indeed has been described as religion itself. Long ago, an author who afterward became famous, touched with the fervor of youthful enthusiasm for his vocation, declared that "literature fosters in its adherents a sympathy with all that lives and breathes which is more binding than any form of religion." A more recent thinker, Mr. Henry W. Montague, has finely said that "The most important function of Christianity is not to keep man from sinning, but to widen the range and increase the depth of his sympathies." Judged by these standards, Bret Harte could not be described as an irreligious writer. Who, more than he, has warmed the heart and suffused the eyes of his readers with pity for the unfortunate, with admiration for the heroic? "A kind thought is a good deed," remarked an oriental sage. The doctrine is a dangerous one; but if it is true of any man, it is true of an author. His kind thoughts live after him, and they have the force and effect of deeds. Bret Harte's stories are a legacy to the world, as full of inspiration as of entertainment. It was not by accident or as the result of mere literary taste that he selected from the chaos of California life the heroic and the pathetic incidents. Those who know California only through his tales and poems naturally think that the aspect of it which Bret Harte presents was the only aspect; that the Pioneer life would have impressed any other observer just as it impressed him, the single difference being that Bret Harte had the ability to report what he saw and heard. But such is not the case. Bret Harte's representation of California is true; there is no exaggeration in it; but there were other aspects of life there which would have been equally true. If we were to call up in imagination the various story-writers of Bret Harte's day, it would be easy to guess what features of life on the Golden Slope would have attracted them, had they been there in the days of the Pioneers: how the social peculiarities of San Francisco, with its flamboyant _demi-monde_ and its early appeal to the divorce court, would have interested one; how the adventures of outlaws and robbers would have filled the mind of another; and how a third would have been content to describe the picturesque traits of the Spanish inheritors of the soil. Bret Harte does indeed touch upon all these points and upon many others,--not a phase of California life escaped him,--but he does not dwell upon them. His main theme is those heroic impulses of loyalty, of chivalry, of love, of pure friendship, which are strong enough to triumph over death and the fear of death, and which, nevertheless, are often found where, except to the discerning eye of sympathy, their existence would be wholly unsuspected. For this selection the world owes Bret Harte a debt of gratitude; and none the less because it was made instinctively. The actions of a really perfect character would all be instinctive and spontaneous. In such a man conscience and inclination would coincide. His taste and his sense of duty would be one and the same thing. A mean, an unkind, an unjust act would be a solecism as impossible for him as it would be to eat with his knife. The struggle would have been over before he was born, and his ancestors would have bequeathed to him a nature in harmony with itself. The credit for his good deeds would belong, perhaps, rather to his ancestors than to himself, but we should see in him the perfection of human nature, the final product of a thousand imperfect natures. Something of this spontaneousness and finality belonged to the character of Bret Harte. If he was weak in conviction and principle, he was strong in instinct. If he yielded easily to certain temptations, he was impregnable to others, because he was protected against them by the whole current of his nature. It would be as impossible to imagine Bret Harte taking sides against the oppressed, as it would be to imagine him performing his literary work in a slovenly manner. Both his good and bad traits were firmly rooted, and, it may be, inextricably mingled. Mr. Howells said of him that "If his temperament disabled him from certain experiences of life, it was the sure source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent." Bret Harte's stories are sufficient proof that he was at bottom a good man, although he had grave faults. His faults, moreover, were those commonly found in men of genius, and for that reason they should be treated with some tenderness. When one considers that the whole progress of the human race, mental and spiritual, as well as mechanical, is due to the achievements of a few superior individuals, whom the world has agreed to designate as men of genius,--considering this, one should be slow to pronounce with anything like confidence or finality upon the character of one who belongs in that class. We know that such men are different from other men intellectually, and we might expect to find, and we do find that they are different from them emotionally, if not morally. A certain egotism, for example, is notoriously associated with men of genius; and a kind of egotistic or unconscious selfishness was Bret Harte's great defect. Popular opinion, a safe guide in such matters, has always recognized the fact that the genius is a species by himself. It is only the clever men of talent who have discovered that there is no essential difference between men of genius and themselves. Writers of this description might be named who have summed up Bret Harte's life and character with amazing condescension and self-assurance. Meagre as are the known facts of his career, especially those relating to his private life, these critics have assigned his motives and judged his conduct with a freedom and a certainty which they would hardly feel in respect to their own intimates. The very absence of information about Bret Harte makes misconstruction easy. Why he lived apart from his family, why he lived in England, why he continued to draw his subjects from California,--these are matters as to which the inquisitive world would have been glad to be informed, but as to which he thought it more fitting to keep silence; and from that silence no amount of misrepresentation could move him. Mr. Pemberton has recorded the congenial scorn with which Bret Harte used to repeat the motto upon the coat of arms of some Scottish earl. _They say! What say they? Let them say!_ And yet, if a writer has greatly moved or pleased us, we have a natural desire, especially after his death, to know what manner of man he was. Most of all, we long to ask that familiar question, the only question which, at the close of a career, seems to have any relevance or importance,--Was he a good man? In the present case, such answer as this book can give has already been made; and if any Reader should be inclined to a different conclusion, let him weigh well the peculiar circumstances of Bret Harte's life, and make due allowance for the obscurity in which his motives are veiled. Upon one aspect of his career there can be no difference of opinion. His devotion to his art was unwavering and extreme. Pagan though he may have been in some respects, in this matter he was as conscientious a Puritan as Hawthorne himself. Every plot, every character, every sentence, one might almost say, every word in his books, was subjected to his own relentless criticism. The manuscript that Bret Harte consigned to the waste-basket would have made the reputation of another author. No "pot-boiler" ever came from his hand, and, whatever his pecuniary difficulties, he never dreamed of escaping from them by that dashing-off of salable stories which is a common practice among popular writers of fiction. Such he was at the beginning, and such he continued to be until the end. Six months elapsed, after the publication of his first successful story, before Bret Harte made his second appearance in the "Overland Monthly." His friends in California have given us a picture of him, a youthful author in his narrow office at the Mint, slowly and painfully elaborating those masterpieces that made him famous. It was the same forty years afterward when the fatal illness overtook him at his desk in an English country-house. The pen that dropped from his reluctant fingers had been engaged in writing and re-writing the simple, opening sentences of a story that was never to be finished. Bret Harte was one of that select band to whom the gods have vouchsafed a glimpse of perfection. All his life, from mere boyhood, he was inspired by a vision of that ideal beauty which is at once the joy and the despair of the true artist. Whoever realizes that vision, even though in an imperfect manner, has overcome the limitations of time and space, and has obtained a position among the immortals which may be denied to better and even greater men. CHAPTER XVIII BRET HARTE AS A WRITER OF FICTION Bret Harte's faculty was not so much that of imagining as of apprehending human character. Some writers of fiction, those who have the highest form of creative imagination, are able from their own minds to spin the web and woof of the characters that they describe; and it makes small difference where they live or what literary material lies about them. Even these authors do not create their heroes and heroines quite out of whole cloth,--they have a shred or two to begin with; but their work is mainly the result of creation rather than perception. The test of creative imagination is that the characters portrayed by it are subjected to various exigencies and influences: they grow, develop, yes, even change, and yet retain their consistency. There is a masterly example of this in Trollope's "Small House at Allington," where he depicts the slow, astounding, and yet perfectly natural disintegration of Crosby's moral character. The aftermath of love-making between Pendennis and Blanche Amory is another instance. This has been called by one critic the cleverest thing in all Thackeray; but still more clever, though clever is too base a word for an episode so beautifully conceived, is that dawning of passion, hopeless and quickly quenched, between Laura Pendennis and George Warrington, the two strongest characters in the book. Only the hand of creative genius can guide its characters safely through such labyrinths of feeling, such back-eddies of emotion. A few great novels have indeed been written by authors who did not possess this faculty, especially by Dickens, in whom it was conspicuously lacking; but no long story was ever produced without betraying its author's deficiency in this respect if the deficiency existed. _Gabriel Conroy_, Bret Harte's only novel, is so bad as a whole, though abounding in gems, its characters are so inconsistent and confused, its ending so incomprehensible, that it produces upon the reader the effect of a nightmare. In fact, the nearer Bret Harte's stories approach the character of an episode the better and more dramatic they are. Of the longer stories, the best, as everybody will admit, is _Cressy_, and that is little more than the expansion of a single incident. As a rule, in reading the longer tales, one remembers, as he progresses, that the situations and the events are fictitious; they have not the spontaneous, inevitable aspect which makes the shorter tales impressive. _Tennessee's Partner_ is as historical as Robinson Crusoe. Bret Harte had something of a weakness for elaborate plots, but they were not in his line. Plots and situations can hardly be satisfactory or artistic unless they form the means whereby the characters of the persons in the tale are developed, or, if not developed, at least revealed to the reader. The development or the gradual revelation of character is the _raison d'être_ for the long story or novel. But this capacity our author seems to have lacked. It might be said that he did not require it, because his characters appear to us full-fledged from the start. He has, indeed, a wonderful power of setting them before the reader almost immediately, and by virtue of a few masterly strokes. After an incident or two, we know the character; there is nothing more to be revealed; and a prolongation of the story would be superfluous. But here we touch upon Bret Harte's weakness as a portrayer of human nature. It surely indicates some deficiency in a writer of fiction if with the additional scope afforded by a long story he can tell us no more about his people than he is able to convey by a short story. The deficiency in Bret Harte was perhaps this, that he lacked a profound knowledge of human nature. A human being regarded as material for a writer of fiction may be divided into two parts. There is that part, the more elemental one, which he shares with other men, and there is, secondly, that part which differentiates him from other men. In other words, he is both a type of human nature, and a particular specimen with individual variations. The ideal story-writer would be able to master his subject in each aspect, and in describing a single person to depict at once both the nature of all men and also the nature of that particular man. Shakspere, Sterne, Thackeray have this power. Other writers can do the one thing but not the other; and in this respect Hawthorne and Bret Harte stand at opposite extremes. Hawthorne had a profound knowledge of human nature; but he was lacking in the capacity to hit off individual characteristics. Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester, even Miriam and Hilda, are not real to us in the sense in which Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp are real. Hawthorne's figures are somewhat spectral; they lack flesh and blood. His forte was not observation but reflection. He worked from the inside. Bret Harte, on the other hand, worked from the outside. He had not that faculty, so strong in Hawthorne, of delving into his own nature by way of getting at the nature of other men; but he had the faculty of sympathetic observation which enabled him to perceive and understand the characteristic traits that distinguish one man from another. _Barker's Luck_ and _Three Partners_, taken together, illustrate Bret Harte's limitations in this respect. Each of these stories has Barker for its central theme, the other personages being little more than foils to him. In the first story, _Barker's Luck_, the plot is very simple, the incidents are few, and yet we have the character of the hero conveyed to us with exquisite effect. In _Three Partners_ the theme is elaborated, a complicated plot is introduced, and Barker appears in new relations and situations. But we know him no better than we did before. _Barker's Luck_ covered the ground; and _Three Partners_, a more ambitious story, is far below it in verisimilitude and in dramatic effect. In the same way, _M'liss_, in its original form, is much superior to the longer and more complex story which its author wrote some years afterward, and which is printed in the collected edition of his works, to the exclusion of the earlier tale. In one case, however, Bret Harte did succeed in showing the growth and development of a character. The trilogy known as _A Waif of the Plains_, _Susy_, and _Clarence_, is almost the same as one long story; and in it the character of Clarence, from boyhood to maturity, is skilfully and consistently traced. Upon this character Bret Harte evidently bestowed great pains, and there are some notable passages in his delineation of it, especially the account of the duel between Clarence and Captain Pinckney. Not less surprising to Clarence himself than to the reader is the calm ferocity with which he kills his antagonist; and we share the thrill of horror which ran through the little group of spectators when it was whispered about that this gentlemanly young man, so far removed in appearance from a fire-eater, was the son of Hamilton Brant, the noted duellist. The situation had brought to the surface a deep-lying, inherited trait, of which even its possessor had been ignorant. In this character, certainly in this incident, Bret Harte goes somewhat deeper than his wont. We have his own testimony to the fact that his genius was perceptive rather than creative. In those Scotch stories and sketches in which the Consul appears, very much in the capacity of a Greek chorus, the author lets fall now and then a remark plainly autobiographical in character. Thus, in _A Rose of Glenbogie_, speaking of Mrs. Deeside, he says, "The Consul, more _perceptive_ than analytical, found her a puzzle." This confirms Bret Harte's other statement, made elsewhere, that his characters, instead of being imagined, were copied from life. But they were copied with the insight and the emphasis of genius. The ability to read human nature is about the most rare of mental possessions. How little do we know even of those whom we see every day, and whom, perhaps, we have lived with all our lives! Let a man ask himself what his friend or his wife or his son would do in some supposable emergency; how they would take this or that injury or affront, good fortune or bad fortune, great sorrow or great happiness, the defection of a friend, a strong temptation. Let him ask himself any such question, and, in all probability, he will be forced to admit that he does not know what would be the result. Who, remembering his college or schoolboy days, will fail to recognize the truth of Thoreau's remark, "One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public"! These surprises occur not because human nature is inconsistent,--the law of character is as immutable as any other law;--it is because individual character eludes us. But it did not elude Bret Harte. He had a wonderful faculty both for understanding and remembering its outward manifestations. His genius was akin to that of the actor; and this explains, perhaps, his lifelong desire to write a successful play. Mr. Watts-Dunton has told us with astonishment how Bret Harte, years after a visit to one of the London Music Halls, minutely recounted all that he had heard and seen there, and imitated all the performers. That he would have made a great actor in the style of Joseph Jefferson is the opinion of that accomplished critic. The surprising quickness with which he seized and assimilated any new form of dialect was a kind of dramatic capacity. The Spanish-English, mixed with California slang, which Enriquez Saltello spoke, is as good in its way as the immortal Costigan's Irish-English. "'To confer then as to thees horse, which is not--observe me--a Mexican plug. Ah, no! you can your boots bet on that. She is of Castilian stock--believe me and strike me dead! I will myself at different times overlook and affront her in the stable, examine her as to the assault, and why she should do thees thing. When she is of the exercise I will also accost and restrain her. Remain tranquil, my friend! When a few days shall pass much shall be changed, and she will be as another. Trust your oncle to do thees thing! Comprehend me? Everything shall be lovely, and the goose hang high.'" Bret Harte's short stay in Prussia, and later in Scotland, enabled him to grasp the peculiarities of nature and speech belonging to the natives. Peter Schroeder, the idealist, could have sprung to life nowhere except upon German soil. "Peter pondered long and perplexedly. Gradually an explanation slowly evolved itself from his profundity. He placed his finger beside his nose, and a look of deep cunning shone in his eyes. 'Dot's it,' he said to himself triumphantly, 'dot's shoost it! Der Rebooplicans don't got no memories. Ve don't got nodings else.'" What character could be more Scotch, and less anything else, than the porter at the railway station where the Consul alighted on his way to visit the MacSpaddens. "'Ye'll no be rememberin' me. I had a machine in St. Kentigern and drove ye to MacSpadden's ferry often. Far, far too often! She's a strange, flagrantitious creature; her husband's but a puir fule, I'm thinkin', and ye did yersel' nae guid gaunin' there.'" Mr. Callender, again, Ailsa's father, in _Young Robin Gray_, breathes Scotch Calvinism and Scotch thrift and self-respect in every line. "'Have you had a cruise in the yacht?' asked the Consul. "'Ay,' said Mr. Callender, 'we have been up and down the loch, and around the far point, but not for boardin' or lodgin' the night, nor otherwise conteenuing or parteecipating.... Mr. Gray's a decent enough lad, and not above instruction, but extraordinar' extravagant.'" Even the mysteries of Franco-English seem to have been fathomed by Bret Harte, possibly by his contact with French people in San Francisco. This is how the innkeeper explained to Alkali Dick some peculiarities of French custom: "'For you comprehend not the position of _la jeune fille_ in all France! Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen her--pretty, charming, fascinating--alone with the young man. But here, no, never! Regard me, my friend. The French mother, she say to her daughter's fiancé, "Look! there is my daughter. She has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,--not even with you. Take her for your wife!" It is monstrous! It is impossible! It is so!'" The moral complement of this rare capacity for reading human nature was the sympathy, the tenderness of feeling which Bret Harte possessed. Sympathy with human nature, with its weaknesses, with the tragedies which it is perpetually encountering, and above all, with its redeeming virtues,--this is the keynote of Bret Harte's works, the mainspring of his humor and pathos. He had the gift of satire as well, but, fortunately for the world, he made far less use of it. Satire is to humor as corporal punishment is to personal influence. A satire is a jest, but a cutting one,--a jest in which the victim is held up to scorn or contempt. Humor is a much more subtle quality than satire. Like satire, it is the perception of an incongruity, but it must be a newly discovered or invented incongruity, for an essential element in humor is the pleasurable surprise, the gentle shock which it conveys. A New Jersey farmer was once describing in the presence of a very humane person, the great age and debility of a horse that he had formerly owned and used. "You ought to have killed him!" interrupted the humane person indignantly. "Well," drawled the farmer, "we did,--almost." Satire is merely destructive, whereas sentiment is constructive. The most that satire can do is to show how the thing ought _not_ to be done. But sentiment goes much further, for it supplies the dynamic power of affection. Becky Sharp dazzles and amuses; but Colonel Newcome softens and inspires. There is often in Bret Harte a subtle blending of satire and humor, notably in that masterpiece of satirical humor, the _Heathen Chinee_. The poet beautifully depicts the naïve indignation of the American gambler at the duplicity of the Mongolian,--a duplicity exceeding even his own. "'We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'" Another instance is that passage in _The Rose of Tuolumne_, where the author, after relating how a stranger was shot and nearly killed in a mining town, records the prevailing impression in the neighborhood "that his misfortune was the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger." So, in _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, when the punishment of Mr. Oakhurst was under consideration, "A few of the Committee had urged hanging him as a possible example and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the money he had won from them. 'It's agin justice,' said Jim Wheeler, 'to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp--an entire stranger--carry away our money.' But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice." Even in these passages humor predominates over satire. In fact,--and it is a fact characteristic of Bret Harte,--the only satire, pure and simple, in his works is that which he directs against hypocrisy. This was the one fault which he could not forgive; and he especially detested that peculiar form of cold and calculating hypocrisy which occasionally survives as the dregs of Puritanism. Bret Harte was keenly alive to this aspect of New England character; and he has depicted it with almost savage intensity in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_. Ezekiel Corwin, a shrewd, flinty, narrow Yankee, is not a new figure in literature, but an old figure in one or two new situations, notably in his appearance at the mining camps as a vender of patent medicines. "That remarkably unfair and unpleasant-spoken man had actually frozen Hanley's Ford into icy astonishment at his audacity, and he had sold them an invoice of the Panacea before they had recovered; he had insulted Chipitas into giving an extensive order in bitters; he had left Hayward's Creek pledged to Burne's pills--with drawn revolvers still in their hands." Even here, however, the bitterness of the satire is tempered by the humor of the situation. But in Joan, the heroine of the story, we have a really new figure in literature, and it is drawn with an absence of sympathy, of humor and of mitigating circumstances which is very rare, if not unique, in Bret Harte.[106] One other example of pure satire may be found in his works, and that is Parson Wynn, the effusive, boisterous hypocrite who plays a subordinate part in _The Carquinez Woods_.[107] With these few exceptions, however, Bret Harte was a writer of sentiment, and that is the secret of his power. Sentiment may take the form of humor or of pathos, and, as is often remarked, these two qualities shade off into each other by imperceptible degrees. Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache. A consummate example of this blending of humor and pathos is found in the story _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_. The boy Johnny, after greeting the Christmas guests in his "weak, treble voice, broken by that premature harshness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature self-assertion can give," and after hospitably setting out the whiskey bottle, with crackers and cheese, creeps back to bed, and is thus accosted by Dick Bullen, the hero of the story:-- "'Hello, Johnny! You ain't goin' to turn in agin, are ye?' "'Yes, I are,' responded Johnny decidedly. "'Why, wot's up, old fellow?' "'I'm sick.' "'How sick?' "'I've got a fevier, and childblains, and roomatiz,' returned Johnny, and vanished within. After a moment's pause he added in the dark, apparently from under the bedclothes,--'And biles!' "There was an embarrassing silence. The men looked at each other and at the fire." How graphically in this story are the characters of the Old Man and his boy Johnny indicated by a few strokes of humor and pathos! Perhaps this is the greatest charm of humor in literature, namely, that it so easily becomes the vehicle of character. Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield are revealed to us mainly by those humorous touches which display the foibles, the eccentricities, and even the virtues of each. Wit, on the other hand, being a purely intellectual quality, is a comparatively uninteresting gift. How small is the part that wit plays in literature! Personality is the charm of literature, as it is of life, and humor is always a revelation of personality. The Essays of Lamb amount almost to an autobiography. Goldsmith had humor, Congreve wit; and probably that is the main reason why "She Stoops to Conquer" still holds the stage, whereas the plays of Congreve are known only to the scholar. California was steeped in humor, and none but a humorist could have interpreted the lives of the Pioneers. They were, in the main, scions of a humorous race. Democracy is the mother of humor, and the ideal of both was found in New England and in the Western States, whence came the greater part of the California immigration. In passing from New England to the isolated farms of the Far West, American humor had undergone some change. The Pioneer, struggling with a new country, and often with chills and fever, religious in a gloomy, emotional, old-fashioned way, leading a lonely life, had developed a humor more saturnine than that of New England. Yuba Bill, in all probability, was an emigrant from what we now call the Middle West. Upon this New England and Western humor as a foundation, California engrafted its own peculiar type of humor, which was the product of youth, courage and energy wrestling with every kind of difficulty and danger. The Pioneers had something of the Mark Tapley spirit, and triumphed over fate by making a jest of the worst that fate could do to them. Nothing short of great prosperity could awe the miner into taking a serious view of things. His solemnity after a "strike" was remarkable. In '52 and '53 a company of miners had toiled fruitlessly for fourteen months, digging into solid rock which, from its situation and from many other indications, had promised to be the hiding-place of gold. At last they abandoned the claim in despair, except that one of their number lingered to remove a big, loose block of porphyry upon which he had long been working. Behind that block he found sand and gravel containing gold in such abundance as, eventually, to enrich the whole company. The next day happened to be Sunday, and for the first time in those fourteen months they all went to church. A "find" like this was a gift of the gods, something that could not be depended upon. It imposed responsibilities, and suggested thoughts of home. But hardship, adversity, danger and sudden death,--these were all in the day's work, and they could best be endured by making light of them. California humor was, therefore, in one way, the reverse of ordinary American humor. In place of grotesque exaggeration, the California tendency was to minimize. The Pioneer was as euphemistic in speaking of death as was the Greek or Roman of classic times. "To pass in his checks," was the Pacific Slope equivalent for the more dignified _Actum est de me_. This was the phrase, as the Reader will remember, that Mr. Oakhurst immortalized by writing it on the playing card which, affixed to a bowie-knife, served that famous gambler for tombstone and epitaph. He used it in no flippant spirit, but in the sadly humorous spirit of the true Californian, as if he were loath to attribute undue importance to the mere fact that the unit of his own life had been forever withdrawn from the sum total of human existence. Of this California minimizing humor, frequent also in the pages of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, there is an example in Bret Harte's poem, _Cicely_:-- I've had some mighty mean moments afore I kem to this spot,-- Lost on the Plains in '50, drownded almost and shot; But out on this alkali desert, a-hunting a crazy wife, Was r'aly as on-satis-factory as anything in my life. There is another familiar example in these well-known lines by Truthful James:-- Then Abner Dean of Angels raised a point of order, when A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen, And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor, And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. This was typical California humor, and Bret Harte, in his stories and poems, more often perhaps in the latter, gave frequent expression to it; but it was not typical Bret Harte humor. The humor of the passage just quoted from _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_, the humor that made Bret Harte famous, and still more the humor that made him beloved, was not saturnine or satirical, but sympathetic and tender. It was humor not from an external point of view, but from the victim's point of view. The Californians themselves saw persons and events in a different way; and how imperfect their vision was may be gathered from the fact that they stoutly denied the truth of Bret Harte's descriptions of Pioneer life. They were too close at hand, too much a part of the drama themselves, to perceive it correctly. Bret Harte had the faculty as to which it is hard to say how much is intellectual and how much is emotional, of getting behind the scenes, and beholding men and motives as they really are. That brilliant critic, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, declares that Bret Harte was a genuine American, that he was also a genuine humorist, but that he was not an American humorist; and then he proceeds to support this very just antithesis as follows: "American humor is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte's humor was sympathetic and analytical. The wild, sky-breaking humor of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities,--reverence and sympathy. And these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humor. Mark Twain's story ... about an organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great spirit, 'We'll all get blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home' is an instance.... If Bret Harte had described that scene it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the scene. You would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was funny." No excuse need be offered for quoting further what Mr. Chesterton has to say about the parodies of Bret Harte, for it covers the whole ground: "The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. Mere derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through one process first: he must admire it and even reverence it. Bret Harte had a real power of imitating great authors.... This means and can only mean that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë. In his imitation of Hugo, Bret Harte has a passage like this: 'M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an angel. M. Madeline was a good man.' I do not know whether Victor Hugo ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it and thanked his stars for it, if he had thought of it. This is real parody, inseparable from imitation." The optimism for which Bret Harte was remarkable had its root in that same sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. The unsympathetic critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. This is apparent in social, moral, and even political matters. A typical reformer, such as the late Mr. Godkin, gazing horror-struck at Tammany and the Tammany politician, discerns no hope for the future. But the Tammany man himself, knowing the virtues as well as the vices of his people, is optimistic to the point of exuberance. After all, there is something in the human heart, amid all its vileness, which ranges mankind on the side of the angels, not of the devils. The sympathetic critic perceives this, and therefore he has confidence in the future of the race; and may even indulge the supreme hope that from this terrible world we shall pass into another and better state of existence. CHAPTER XIX BRET HARTE AS A POET Whether Bret Harte will make his appeal to posterity mainly as a poet or as a prose writer is a difficult question, upon which, as upon all similar matters relating to him, the critics have expressed the most diverse opinions. There is perhaps more unevenness in his poetry than in his prose, and certainly more facility in imitating other writers. _Cadet Grey_ is, in form, almost a parody of "Don Juan." _The Angelus_ might be ascribed to Longfellow (though he never could have written that last stanza), _The Tale of a Pony_ to Saxe or Barham, a few others to Praed, one to Campbell, and one to Calverley. Even that very beautiful poem, _Conception de Arguello_, a thing almost perfect in its way, strikes no new note. And yet who could forget the picture which it draws of the deserted maiden, grieving,-- Until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown, And at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down. Hardly less pathetic is the description of the grim Commander, her father, striving vainly to comfort the maid with "proverbs gathered from afar," until at last ... the voice sententious faltered, and the wisdom it would teach Lost itself in fondest trifles of his soft Castilian speech; And on "Concha," "Conchitita," and "Conchita," he would dwell With the fond reiteration which the Spaniard knows so well. So with proverbs and caresses, half in faith and half in doubt, Every day some hope was kindled, flickered, faded, and went out. Few, indeed, are the poets who have surpassed the tender simplicity and pathos of these lines; and yet there is nothing very original about them either in form or substance. But there are several poems by Bret Harte, perhaps half a dozen, which do bear the mark of original genius, and which, from the perfection of their form, seem destined to last forever. The _Heathen Chinee_, little as Bret Harte himself thought of it, is certainly one of these. This poem, says Mr. James Douglas, "is merely an anecdote, an American anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred other American anecdotes. But it is cast in an imperishable mould of style.... Mr. Swinburne's noble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. The rhythm of a melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence. The sadness and the sighing of Meleagar became the bland iniquity of Ah Sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of Bill Nye. It was a miracle of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously associated ideas." Too much, however, can easily be made of the part played by the metre of the _Heathen Chinee_. _Artemis in Sierra_ is as good in its way as the _Heathen Chinee_, and the very different metre employed in that poem is made equally effective as the vehicle of irony and burlesque. Mr. Douglas goes on to say that the Atalanta metre failed in the poem called _Dow's Flat_, "because there was no exquisite discord between the sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason." But did it fail? Let these two specimen stanzas answer:-- For a blow of his pick Sorter caved in the side, And he looked and turned sick, Then he trembled and cried. For you see the dern cuss had struck--"Water?"--Beg your parding, young man,--there you lied! It was _gold_,--in the quartz, And it ran all alike; And I reckon five oughts Was the worth of that strike; And that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't bad for a Pike. Almost all of Bret Harte's dialect poems have this same perfection of form, and in the whole range of literature it would be difficult to find any verses which tell so much in so small a compass. The poems are short, the lines are usually short, the words are short; but with the few strokes thus available, the poet paints a picture as complete as it is vivid. The thing is so simple that it seems easy, and yet where shall we find its counterpart? These poems not only please for the moment, but they are read with pleasure over and over again, and year after year. Perhaps their most striking quality is their dramatic quality. They tell a story, and often depict a person. Truthful James, for example, is known to us only as the narrator of a few startling tales; and yet even by his manner of telling them he gives us a fair notion of his own character. The opening lines of _The Spelling Bee at Angels_ are an example:-- Waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids, and gather round my knee, And drop them books and first pot-hooks, and hear a yarn from me. I kin not sling a fairy tale of Jinnys fierce and wild, For I hold it is unchristian to deceive a simple child; But as from school yer driftin' by, I thowt ye'd like to hear Of a "Spelling Bee" at Angels that we organized last year. As for Miss Edith, her character is shown in every line. You think it ain't true about Ilsey? Well, I guess I know girls, and I say There's nothing I see about Ilsey to show she likes you, anyway! I know what it means when a girl who has called her cat after one boy Goes and changes its name to another's. And she's done it--and I wish you joy! [Illustration: THE HOME OF "TRUTHFUL JAMES," JACKASS FLAT, TUOLUMNE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA Copyright, Century Co.] But these dramatic poems of Bret Harte are surpassed by his lyrical poems,--surpassed, at least, in respect to that moral elevation which lyrical poetry seems to have in comparison with dramatic poetry. Lyrical poetry strikes the higher note. It is the fusion in the poet's own experience of thought and feeling;--it is _his_ experience; a first-hand report of one man's impression of the universe. Whereas dramatic poetry, with all the splendor of which it is capable, is, after all, only a second-hand report, a representation of what other men have thought or felt, or said or done. Not Shakspere himself has so elevated mankind, raised his moral standard, or enlarged his conceptions of the universe, as have the great lyrical poets. Bret Harte cannot, of course, be ranked with these; nor, in saying that his lyrical poems are his best poems, do we necessarily assert for him any high degree of lyrical power. Perhaps, indeed, the chief defect in his poetry is an absence of the personal or lyrical element. He gives us exquisite impressions of human character and of nature, but there is little of that brooding, reflective quality, which affords the deepest and most lasting charm of poetry. His poetry lacks atmosphere; it lacks the pensive, religious note. Bret Harte, one would think, must have been a romantic and imaginative lover, and yet in his poetry there is little, if anything, to indicate that he was ever deeply in love. Of romantic devotion to a woman, as to a superior being, we find no trace either in his stories or in his poetry. How far removed from Bret Harte is that mingled feeling of love and veneration which, originating in the Middle Ages, has lasted, in poetry at least, almost down to our own time, as in these lines from a writer who was contemporary with Bret Harte:-- When thy cheek is dewed with tears On some dark day when friends depart, When life before thee seems all fears And all remembrance one long smart, Then in the secret sacred cell Thy soul keeps for her hour of prayer, Breathe but my name, that I may dwell Part of thy worship alway there. Bret Harte was cast in a different mould. No doubts or fears distracted him. So far as we know, he asked no questions about the universe, and troubled himself very little about the destiny of mankind. He was essentially unreligious, unphilosophic, true to his own instincts, but indifferent to all matters that lay beyond them. And yet within that range he had a depth and sincerity of feeling which issued in real poetry. Bret Harte, with all the refinement, love of elegance, reserve and self-restraint which characterized him, was a very natural man. He possessed in full degree what one philosopher has called the primeval instincts of pity, of pride, of pugnacity. He loved his fellow-man, he loved his country, he loved nature, and these passions, curbed by that unerring sense of artistic form and clothed in that beauty of style which belonged to him, were expressed in a few poems that seem likely to last forever. It was not often that he felt the necessary stimulus, but when he did feel it, the response was sure. Of these immortal poems, if we may make bold to call them such, probably the best known is that on the death of Dickens. This is the last stanza:-- And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine![108] Still better is the poem on the death of Starr King. It is very short; let us have it before us. RELIEVING GUARD THOMAS STARR KING. OBIIT MARCH 4, 1864. Came the relief. "What, sentry, ho! How passed the night through thy long waking?" "Cold, cheerless, dark,--as may befit The hour before the dawn is breaking." "No sight? no sound?" "No; nothing save The plover from the marshes calling, And in yon western sky, about An hour ago, a star was falling." "A star? There's nothing strange in that." "No, nothing; but above the thicket, Somehow it seemed to me that God Somewhere had just relieved a picket." What impresses the reader most, or at least first, in this poem is its extreme conciseness and simplicity. The words are so few, and the weight of suggestion which they have to carry so heavy, that the misuse of a single word,--a single word not in perfect taste, would have spoiled the beauty of the whole. Long years ago the "Saturday Review"--the good old, ferocious Saturday--sagely remarked: "It is not given to every one to be simple"; and only genius could have achieved the simplicity of this short poem. "The relief came" would have been prose. "Came the relief" is poetry, not merely because the arrangement of the words is unusual, but because this short inverted sentence strikes a note of abruptness and intensity which prepares the reader for what is to come, and which is maintained throughout the poem;--had it not so been maintained, an anti-climax would have resulted. Moreover, short and simple as this poem is, it seems to contain three distinct strands of feeling. There is, first, the personal feeling for Thomas Starr King; and although he was a minister and not a soldier, there is a suitability in connecting him with the picket, for, as we have seen, it was owing to him, more than to any other man, that California was saved to the Union in the Civil War. Secondly, there is the National patriotic feeling which forms the strong under-current of the poem, nowhere expressed, but unmistakably implied, and present in the minds of both poet and reader. Possibly, we may even find in "the hour before the dawn" an allusion to the period when Mr. King died and the poem was written; for that was the final desperate period of the war, darkened by a terrible expenditure of human life and suffering, and lightened only by a prospect of the end then slowly but surely coming into view. Thirdly, there is the feeling for nature which the poem exhibits in its firm though scanty etching of the sombre night, the lonely marshes, and the distant sky. The poem is a blending of these three feelings, each one enhancing the other;--and even this does not complete the tale, for there is the final suggestion that the death of a man may be of as much consequence in the mind of the Creator, and as nicely calculated, as the falling of a star. The truth is that Bret Harte's national poems, with which this tribute to Starr King may properly be classed, have a depth of personal feeling not often found elsewhere in his poetry. In common with all men of primitive impulses, he was genuinely patriotic. "America was always 'my country' with him," writes one who knew him in England; "and I remember how he flushed with almost boyish pleasure when, in driving through some casual rural festivities, his quick eye noted a stray American flag among the display of bunting." This patriotic feeling gave to his national poems the true lyrical note. Among the best of these is that stirring song of the drum, called _The Reveille_, which was read at a crowded meeting held in the San Francisco Opera House immediately after President Lincoln had called for one hundred thousand volunteers. In this poem the student of American history, and especially the foreign student, will find an expression of that National feeling which animated the Northern people, and which sanctified the horrors of the Civil War,--one of the few wars recorded in history that was waged for a pure ideal,--the ideal of the Union. With these poems may be classed some stanzas from _Cadet Grey_ describing the life of the West Point cadet, and this one in particular:-- Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave, Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame, Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave; Bred to fear nothing but reproach and blame, Ascetic dandies o'er whom vestals rave, Clean-limbed young Spartans, disciplined young elves, Taught to destroy, that they may live to save, Students embattled, soldiers at their shelves, Heroes whose conquests are at first themselves. It has been said that one function of literature, and especially of poetry, is to enable a nation to understand and appreciate, and thus more completely to realize, the ideals which it has instinctively formed; and in the lines just quoted Bret Harte has done this for West Point. The poem on San Francisco glows with patriotic and civic feeling, and it expressed a sentiment which, at the time when it was written, hardly anybody in the city, except the poet himself, entertained. San Francisco in 1870 was dominated by that cold, hard, self-satisfied, commercial spirit which Bret Harte especially hated, and which furnished one reason, perhaps the main reason, for his departure from the State. Drop down, O fleecy Fog, and hide Her sceptic sneer and all her pride! Wrap her, O Fog, in gown and hood Of her Franciscan Brotherhood. Hide me her faults, her sin and blame; With thy gray mantle cloak her shame! And yet it was impossible for Bret Harte, with his deep, abiding faith in the good instincts of mankind, not to look forward to a better day for San Francisco, When Art shall raise and Culture lift The sensual joys and meaner thrift, And all fulfilled the vision we Who watch and wait shall never see. There is also a strong lyrical element in Bret Harte's treatment of nature in his poetry, as well as in his prose. What he always gives is his own impression of the scene, not a mere description of it, although this impression may be conveyed by a few slight touches, sometimes even by a single word. The opening stanza of the poem on the death of Dickens is an illustration:-- Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, The river sang below; The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting Their minarets of snow. Ruskin somewhere analyzes the difference between real poetry and prose in a versified form, and quoting a few lines from Byron, he points out the single word in them which makes the passage poetic. In the lines just quoted from Bret Harte, the word "sang" has the same poetic quality; and no one who has ever heard the sound which the poet here describes can fail to recognize the truth of his metaphor.[109] This is always Bret Harte's method. He reproduces the emotional effect of the scene upon himself, and thus exhibits nature to the reader as she appeared to him. Emotion, it need not be said, is transmitted much more effectively than ideas or information. In fact, an objective, detailed description of a landscape, however accurate or exhaustive, will leave the reader almost as it found him; whereas a single word which enables him to share the emotion inspired by the scene in the breast of the writer will transport him at a bound to the spot itself. The charm of life in California consisted largely in this, that it was lived in the open air. It was almost a perpetual camping out, made delightful by the mildness of the climate and the beauty of the surroundings. Even the cheerful fires of pine or of scrub oak which burn so frequently in the cabins of Bret Harte's miners, are kindled mainly to offset the dampness of the rainy season; and though the fire blazes merrily on the hearth the door of the hut is usually open. The Reader knows how "Union Mills" indolently left one leg exposed to the rain on the outside of the threshold, the rest of his body being under cover inside. Bret Harte in his poems and stories availed himself of this out-door life to the fullest extent. When the Rose of Tuolumne was summoned from her bedroom, at two o'clock in the morning, to entertain her father's guest, the youthful poet, she met him, not in the stuffy sitting-room of the house, but in the moonlight outside, with the snow-crowned Sierras dimly visible in the distance, and "quaint odors from the woods near by perfuming the warm, still air." The young Englishman, Mainwaring, and Louise Macy, the Phyllis of the Sierras, could not help being confidential sitting in the moonlight on that unique veranda which overhung the Great Cañon, two thousand feet deep, as many wide, and lined with tall trees, dark and motionless in the distance. If the Outcasts of Poker Flat had met their fate in ordinary surroundings, victims either of the machinery of the law or of man's violence, we should think of them only as criminals; but with nature herself as their executioner, and the scene of their death that remote, wooded amphitheatre in the mountains, they regain their lost dignity as human beings. How vast is the difference between John Oakhurst shooting himself in a bedroom at some second-class hotel, and performing the same act at the head of a snow-covered ravine and beneath the lofty pine tree to which he affixed the playing card that contained his epitaph! In _Tennessee's Partner_, the whole tragedy is transacted in the open air, excepting the trial scene; and even the little upper room which serves as a court house for the lynching party is hardly a screen from the landscape. "Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." Nature, thank God, does not share our emotions, and, so far as we know, is swayed by no emotions of her own. But she inspires certain emotions in us, and is a visible, tangible representation of strength and serenity. Those who delight in nature are a long way from regarding her as they would a brick or a stone. A certain pantheism, such as Wordsworth was accused of, can be attributed to everybody who loves the landscape. There is a mystery in the beautiful inanimate world, as there is in every other phase of the universe. "A forest," said Thoreau, "is in all mythologies a sacred place"; and it must ever remain such. Let anybody wander alone upon some mountain-side or hilltop, and watch the wind blowing through the scanty, unmown grass, and it will be strange if the vague consciousness of some presence other than his own does not insinuate itself into his mind. He will begin to understand how it was that the Ancients peopled every bush and stream with nymphs or deities. Richard Jeffries went even further than Wordsworth. "Though I cannot name the ideal good," he wrote, "it seems to me that it will be in some way closely associated with the ideal beauty of nature." Bret Harte did not trouble himself much about the ideal good; but he had in full degree the modern feeling for nature, and found in her a mysterious charm and solace,--"that profound peace," to use his own language, "which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed children." In one of the stories, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, he describes the unlucky and unhappy miner going to the door of his cabin at midnight. "In the feverish state into which he had gradually worked himself it seemed to him impossible to await the coming of the dawn. But he was mistaken. For even as he stood there all nature seemed to invade his humble cabin with its free and fragrant breath, and invest him with its great companionship. He felt again, in that breath, that strange sense of freedom, that mystic touch of partnership with the birds and beasts, the shrubs and trees, in this greater home before him. It was this vague communion that had kept him there, that still held these world-sick, weary workers in their rude cabins on the slopes around him; and he felt upon his brow that balm that had nightly lulled him and them to sleep and forgetfulness. He closed the door, crept into his bunk, and presently fell into a profound slumber." This kind of communion with nature depends upon a certain degree of solitude, and the mere suggestion of a crowd puts it to flight at once. Even the magnificence of the Swiss mountains is almost spoiled for the real lover of nature by those surroundings from which only the skilled mountain-climber is able to escape. Mere solitude, on the other hand, provided that it be out of doors, is almost always beautiful and certainly beneficent in itself. He who lives in a desert or in a wood, on a mountain top, like the Twins of Table Mountain, or in an unpeopled prairie, may have many faults and vices, but there are some from which he will certainly be free. He will be serene and simple, if nothing more. "It is impossible," as Thomas Hardy remarks, "for any one living upon a heath to be vulgar"; and the reason is obvious. Vulgarity, as we all know, is merely a form of insincerity. To be vulgar is to say and do things not naturally and out of one's own head, but in the attempt to be or to appear something different from the reality. There can be no vulgarity on the heath, on the farm, or in the mining camp, for there everybody's character and circumstances are known; there is no opportunity for deceit, and there is no motive for pretence. Moreover, the primitive simplicity of the mining and the logging camp, or even that of an isolated farming community, is not essentially different from the cultivated simplicity of the aristocrat. The laboring man and the aristocrat have very much the same sense of honor and the same ideals; and those writers who are at home with one are almost always at home with the other. Sir Walter Scott and Tolstoi are examples. But between these two extremes, which meet at many points, comes the citified, trading, clerking class, which has lost its primitive, manly instincts, and has not yet regained them in the chastened form of convictions. It is no exaggeration to say that the society which Bret Harte enjoyed in London was more akin to that of the mining camp than to that of San Francisco. In both cases the charm which attracted him was the charm of simplicity; in the mining camp, the simplicity of nature, in London the simplicity of cultivation and finish. CHAPTER XX BRET HARTE'S PIONEER DIALECT Occasionally Bret Harte uses an archaic word, not because it is archaic, but because it expresses his meaning better than any other, or gives the needed stimulus to the imagination of the reader. Thus, in _A First Family of Tasajara_ we read that "the former daughters of Sion were there, _burgeoning_ and expanding in the glare of their new prosperity with silver and gold." Often, of course, the employment of an archaic expression confers upon the speaker that air of quaintness which the author wishes to convey. Johnson's Old Woman, for example, "'Lowed she'd use a doctor, ef I'd fetch him." The verb to _use_, in this sense, may still be heard in some parts of New England as well as in the West. "I never use sugar in my tea" is a familiar example. Many other words which Bret Harte's Pioneer people employ are still in service among old-fashioned country folk, although they have long since passed out of literature, and are never heard in cities. Thus Salomy Jane was accused by her father of "honeyfoglin' with a hoss-thief"; and the blacksmith's small boy spoke of Louise Macy as "philanderin'" with Captain Greyson. These good old English words are still used in the West and South. In the same category is "'twixt" for between. Dick Spindler spoke of "this yer peace and good-will 'twixt man and man." "Far" in the sense of distant is another example: "The far barn near the boundary." "Mannerly" in the sense of well-mannered has the authority of Shakspere and of Abner Nott in _A Ship of '49_. One of Bret Harte's Western girls speaks of hunting for the plant known as "Old Man" (southernwood), because she wanted it for "smellidge." "Smellidge" has the appearance of being a good word, and it was formerly used in New England and the West, but it is excluded from modern dictionaries. Some expressions which might be regarded as original with Bret Harte were really Pioneer terms of Western or Southern use. "Johnson's Old Woman," for "Johnson's wife" was the ordinary phrase in Missouri, Indiana, Alabama, and doubtless all over the West and South. Thus a Missouri farmer is quoted as saying: "My old woman is nineteen years old to-day." "You know fust-rate she's dead" is another quaint expression used by Bret Harte, but not invented by him, for this use of "fust-rate" in the sense of very well was not uncommon in the West. In the poem called _Jim_, there are two or three words which the casual reader might suppose to be inventions of the poet. What makes you star', You over thar? Can't a man drop 'S glass in yer shop But you must r'ar? This use of r'ar or rear, meaning to become angry, to rave, was frequent in Arkansas and Indiana, if not elsewhere. The next stanza runs:-- Dead! Poor--little--Jim! Why, thar was me, Jones, and Bob Lee, Harry and Ben,-- No-account men: Then to take _him_! "No-account" in this sense was a common Western term; and so was "ornery," from ordinary, meaning inferior, which occurs in the next and final stanza. When Richelieu Sharpe excused himself for wearing his best "pants" on the ground that his old ones had "fetched away in the laig," he was amply justified by the dialect of his place and time. So when little Johnny Medliker complained of the parson that "he hez been nigh onter pullin' off my arm," he used the current Illinois equivalent for "nearly." Mr. Hays' direction to his daughter, "Ye kin put some things in my carpet-bag agin the time when the sled comes round," was also strictly in the vernacular. No verbal error is more common than that of using superfluous prepositions. "To feed up the horses," for instance, may still be heard almost anywhere in rural New England. On the same principle, Mr. Saunders, in _The Transformation of Buckeye Camp_, ruefully admits that he and his companion were thrown out of the saloon, "with two shots into us, like hounds ez we were." This substitution of into for in, though common in the West, is probably now extinct in the Eastern States; but a purist, writing in the year 1814, quoted the following use as current at that time in New York: "I have the rheumatism into my knees." A few words were taken by the Pioneers from the Spanish. "Savey," a corruption of _sabe_, was one of these, and Bret Harte employed it. "Hedn't no savey, hed Briggs." The wealth of dialect in Bret Harte's stories is not strange, considering that it was culled from Pioneers who represented every part of the country. But, it may be asked, how could there be such a thing as a California dialect:--all the Pioneers could not have learned to talk alike, coming as they did from every State in the Union! The answer is, first, that, in the main, the dialect of the different States was the same, being derived chiefly from the same source, that is, from England, directly or indirectly; and, secondly, the dialect of what we now call the Middle West--of Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois--tended to predominate on the Pacific Slope, because the Pioneers from that part of the country were in the majority. It is almost impossible to find a dialect word used in one Western State, and not in another. There are, however, some Western, and more especially some Southern words which never became domiciled in New England. The word allow or 'low, in the sense of declare or state, is one of these, and Bret Harte often used it. "Then she _'lowed_ I'd better git up and git, and shet the door to. Then I _'lowed_ she might tell me what was up--through the door." And here is another example:-- "Rowley Meade--him ez hed his skelp pulled over his eyes at one stroke, foolin' with a she-bear over on Black Mountain--_allows_ it would be rather monotonous in him attemptin' any familiarities with her." ("Rowley Meade," by the way, is an example of Bret Harte's felicity in the choice of names. No common fate could be reserved for one bearing a name like that.) Lowell employs the word allow in its corrupted sense in the "Biglow Papers"; but he adds in a footnote that it was a use not of New England, but of the Southern and Middle States; and to prove the antiquity of the corruption he cites an instance of it in Hakluyt under the date of 1558. "Cahoots" is another example. When the warlike Jim Hooker said to Clarence, "Young fel, you and me are cahoots in this thing," he was using a common Western expression derived remotely from the old English word cahoot, signifying a company or partnership, but not known, it is believed, in New England. "When we rose the hill," "put to" (_i. e._ harness) the horse, "cavortin' round here in the dew," and "What yer yawpin' at ther'?" are found in almost every State, East or West. But "I ain't kicked a fut sens I left Mizzouri" is a Southern expression. "Blue mange" for _blanc mange_ is probably original with Bret Harte. One of Bret Harte's most effective dialect words is "gait" in the sense of habit, or manner. "He never sat down to a square meal but what he said, 'If old Uncle Quince was only here now, boys, I'd die happy.' I leave it to you, gentlemen, if that wasn't Jackson Wells's gait all the time." And Rupert Filgee, impatient at Uncle Ben Dabney's destructive use of pens, exclaimed, "Look here, what you want ain't a pen, but a clothes-pin and split nail! That'll about jibe with your dilikit gait." "Gait" is a very old term in thieves' lingo, meaning occupation or calling, from which the transition to "habit" is easy; and it is interesting to observe that in one place Bret Harte uses the word in a sense which is about half-way between the two meanings. Thus, when Mr. McKinstry was severely wounded in the duel, he apologized for requesting the attendance of a physician by saying, "I don't gin'rally use a doctor, but this yer is suthin' outside the old woman's regular gait." Bret Harte's adoption of the word as a Pioneer expression is confirmed by Richard Malcolm Johnston, the recognized authority on Georgia dialect, for he makes one of his characters say:-- "After she got married, seem like he got more and more restless and fidgety in his mind, and in his gaits in general." The ridiculous charge has been made that Bret Harte's dialect is not Californian or even American, but is simply cockney English. The only reason ever given for this statement is that Bret Harte uses the word "which" in its cockney sense, and that this use was never known in America. Which I wish to remark, And my language is plain, is the most familiar instance, and others might be cited. Thus, in _Mr. Thompson's Prodigal_ we have this dialogue between the father of the prodigal and a grave-digger:-- "'Did you ever in your profession come across Char-les Thompson?' "'Thompson be damned,' said the grave-digger, with great directness. "'Which, if he hadn't religion, I think he is,' responded the old man." This use of "which" is indeed now identified with the London cockney, but it may still be heard in the eastern counties of England, whence, no doubt, it was imported to this country. Though far from common in the United States, it is used, according to the authorities cited below, in the mountainous parts of Virginia,[110] in West Virginia,[111] in the mountain regions of Kentucky,[112] especially in Eastern Kentucky,[113] and in the western part of Arkansas.[114] Professor Edward A. Allen of the University of Missouri says that this use of "which" is "not Southern, but Western." Moreover, upon this point also we can cite the authority of Richard Malcolm Johnston, for the cockney use of "which" frequently occurs in his tales of Middle Georgia; as, for instance, in these sentences:-- "And which I wouldn't have done that nohow in the world ef it could be hendered." "Which a man like you that's got no wife." "Howbeever, as your wife is Nancy Lary, which that she's the own dear sister o' my wife." "And which I haven't a single jubous doubt that, soon as the breath got out o' her body, she went to mansion _in_ the sky same as a bow-'n'-arrer, or even a rifle-bullet." Another authority on this point is the well-known writer of stories, Alfred Henry Lewis, a native of Arkansas. In his tales we find these expressions:-- "Which his baptismal name is Lafe." "Which if these is your manners." "Which, undoubted, the barkeeps is the hardest-worked folks in camp." "Which it is some late for night before last, but it's jest the shank of the evening for to-night." No writer ever knew Virginia better than did the late George W. Bagby, and he attributes the cockney "which" to a backwoodsman from Charlotte County in that State. "And what is this part of the country called? Has it any particular name?" "To be sho. Right here is Brilses, _which_ it is a presink; but this here ridge ar' called 'Verjunce Ridge.'" Mark Twain's authority on a matter of Western dialect will hardly be questioned, and this same use of "which" is not infrequent in his stories. Here, for instance, is an example from "Tom Sawyer": "We said it was Parson Silas, and we judged he had found Sam Cooper drunk in the road, which he was always trying to reform him." Finally, that well-known Pioneer, Mr. Warren Cheney, an early contributor to the "Overland," testifies that "which" as thus used "is perfectly good Pike."[115] The rather astonishing fact is that Bret Harte uses dialect words and phrases to the number, roughly estimated, of three hundred, and a hasty investigation has served to identify all but a few of these as legitimate Pioneer expressions. A more thorough search would no doubt account satisfactorily for every one of them. However, that dialect should be authentic is not so important as that it should be interesting. Many story-writers report dialect in a correct and conscientious form, but it wearies the reader. Dialect to be interesting must be the vehicle of humor, and the great masters of dialect, such as Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott, are also masters of humor. Bret Harte had the same gift, and he showed it, as we have seen, not only in Pioneer speech, but also in the Spanish-American dialect of Enriquez Saltello and his charming sister, in the Scotch dialect of Mr. Callender, in the French dialect of the innkeeper who entertained Alkali Dick, and in the German dialect of Peter Schroeder. For one thing, a too exact reproduction of dialect almost always has a misleading and awkward effect. The written word is not the same as the spoken word, and the constant repetition of a sound which would hardly be noticed in speech becomes unduly prominent and wearisome if put before our eyes in print. In the following passage it will be seen how Bret Harte avoids the too frequent occurrence of "ye" (which Tinka Gallinger probably used) by alternating it with "you":-- "'No! no! ye shan't go--ye mustn't go,' she said, with hysterical intensity. 'I want to tell ye something! Listen!--you--you--Mr. Fleming! I've been a wicked, wicked girl! I've told lies to dad--to mammy--to you! I've borne false witness--I'm worse than Sapphira--I've acted a big lie. Oh, Mr. Fleming, I've made you come back here for nothing! Ye didn't find no gold the other day. There wasn't any. It was all me! I--I--_salted that pan_!'" Bret Harte's writings offer a wide field for the study of what might be called the psychological aspect of dialect, especially so far as it relates to pronunciation. What governs the dialect of any time and place? Is it purely accidental that the London cockney says "piper" instead of paper, and that the Western Pioneer says "b'ar" for bear,--or does some inner necessity determine, or partly determine, these departures from the standard pronunciation? This, however, is a subject which lies far beyond our present scope. Suffice it to say that it would be difficult to convince the reader of Bret Harte that there is not some inevitable harmony between his characters and the dialect or other language which they employ. Who, for example, would hesitate to assign to Yuba Bill, and to none other, this remark: "I knew the partikler style of damn fool that you was, and expected no better." CHAPTER XXI BRET HARTE'S STYLE In discussing Bret Harte, it is almost impossible to separate substance from style. The style is so good, so exactly adapted to the ideas which he wishes to convey, that one can hardly imagine it as different. Some thousands of years ago an Eastern sage remarked that he would like to write a book such as everybody would conceive that he might have written himself, and yet so good that nobody else could have written the like. This is the ideal which Bret Harte fulfilled. Almost everything said by any one of his characters is so accurate an expression of that character as to seem inevitable. It is felt at once to be just what such a character must have said. Given the character, the words follow; and anybody could set them down! This is the fallacy underlying that strange feeling, which every reader must have experienced, of the apparent easiness of writing an especially good conversation or soliloquy. The real difficulty of writing like Bret Harte is shown by the fact that as a story-teller he has no imitators. His style is so individual as to make imitation impossible. And yet occasionally the inspiration failed. It is a peculiarity of Bret Harte, shown especially in the longer stories, and most of all perhaps in _Gabriel Conroy_, that there are times when the reader almost believes that Bret Harte has dropped the pen, and some inferior person has taken it up. Author and reader come to the ground with a thud. Mr. Warren Cheney has remarked upon this defect as follows:-- "With most authors there is a level of general excellence along which they can plod if the wings of genius chance to tire for a time; but with Mr. Harte the case is a different one. His powers are impulsive rather than enduring. Ideas strike him with extraordinary force, but the inspiration is of equally short duration. So long as the flush of excitement lasts, his work will be up to standard; but when the genius flags, he has no individual fund of dramatic or narrative properties to sustain him." But of these lapses there are few in the short stories, and none at all in the best stories. In them the style is almost flawless. There are no mannerisms in it; no affectations; no egotism; no slang (except, of course, in the mouths of the various characters); nothing local or provincial, nothing which stamps it as of a particular age, country or school,--nothing, in short, which could operate as a barrier between author and reader. But these are only negative virtues. What are the positive virtues of Bret Harte's style? Perhaps the most obvious quality is the deep feeling which pervades it. It is possible, indeed, to have good style without depth of feeling. John Stuart Mill is an example; Lord Chesterfield is another; Benjamin Franklin another. In general, however, want of feeling in the author produces a coldness in the style that chills the reader. Herbert Spencer's autobiography discloses an almost inhuman want of feeling, and the same effect is apparent in his dreary, frigid style. On the other hand, it is a truism that the language of passion is invariably effective, and never vulgar. Grief and anger are always eloquent. There are men, even practised authors, who never write really well unless something has occurred to put them out of temper. Good style may perhaps be said to result from the union of deep feeling with an artistic sense of form. This produces that conciseness for which Bret Harte's style is remarkable. What author has used shorter words, has expressed more with a few words, or has elaborated so little! His points are made with the precision of a bullet going straight to the mark, and nothing is added. How effective, for example, is this dialogue between Helen Maynard, who has just met the one-armed painter for the first time, and the French girl who accompanies her: "'So you have made a conquest of the recently acquired but unknown Greek statue?' said Mademoiselle Renée lightly. "'It is a countryman of mine,' said Helen simply. "'He certainly does not speak French,' said Mademoiselle mischievously. "'Nor think it,' responded Helen, with equal vivacity." Possibly Bret Harte sometimes carries this dramatic conciseness a little too far,--so far that the reader's attention is drawn from the matter in hand to the manner in which it is expressed. To take an example, _Johnson's Old Woman_ ends as follows:-- "'I want to talk to you about Miss Johnson,' I said eagerly. "'I reckon so,' he said with an exasperating smile. 'Most fellers do. But she ain't _Miss_ Johnson no more. She's married.' "'Not to that big chap over from Ten Mile Mills?' I said breathlessly. "'What's the matter with _him_,' said Johnson. 'Ye didn't expect her to marry a nobleman, did ye?' "I said I didn't see why she shouldn't,--and believed that she _had_." This is extremely clever, but perhaps its very cleverness, and its abruptness, divert the reader's interest for a moment from the story to the person who tells it. One other characteristic of Bret Harte's style, and indeed of any style which ranks with the best, is obvious, and that is subtlety. It is the office of a good style to express in some indefinable manner those _nuances_ which mere words, taken by themselves, are not fine enough to convey. Thoughts so subtle as to have almost the character of feelings; feelings so well defined as just to escape being thoughts; attractions and repulsions; those obscure movements of the intellect of which the ordinary man is only half conscious until they are revealed to him by the eye of genius;--all these things it is a part of style to express, or at least to imply. Subtlety of style presupposes, of course, subtlety of thought, and possibly also subtlety of perception. Certainly Bret Harte had both of these capacities; and many examples might be cited of his minute and sympathetic observation. For instance, although he had no knowledge of horses, and occasionally betrays his ignorance in this respect, yet he has described the peculiar gait of the American trotter with an accuracy which any technical person might envy. "The driver leaned forward and did something with the reins--Rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to _lengthen herself_ and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, shimmering green hedge. So perfect was the mare's action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort.... So superb was the reach of her long, easy stride that Rose could scarcely see any undulations in the brown, shining back on which she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly."[116] Equally correct is the description of the "great, yellow mare" Jovita, that carried Dick Bullen on his midnight ride:[117] "From her Roman nose to her rising haunches, from her arched spine hidden by the stiff _manchillas_ of a Mexican saddle, to her thick, straight bony legs, there was not a line of equine grace. In her half-blind but wholly vicious white eyes, in her protruding under lip, in her monstrous color, there was nothing but ugliness and vice." Jovita, plainly, was drawn from life, and she must have been of thoroughbred blood on one side, for her extraordinary energy and temper could have been derived from no other source. Such a mare would naturally have an unusually straight hind leg; and Bret Harte noticed it. As to his heroines, he had such a faculty of describing them that they stand before us almost as clearly as if we saw them in the flesh. He does not simply tell us that they are beautiful,--we see for ourselves that they are so; and one reason for this is the sympathetic keenness with which he observed all the details of the human face and figure. Thus Julia Porter's face "appeared whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of tiny freckles like grains of pepper." There are subtleties of coloring that have escaped almost everybody else. Who but Bret Harte has really described the light which love kindles upon the face of a woman? "Yerba Buena's strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint Alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color." And so of Cressy, as the Schoolmaster saw her at the dance. "She was pale, he had never seen her so beautiful.... The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw." The forehead, the temples, and more especially the eyebrows of his heroines--these and the part which they play in the expression of emotion, are described by Bret Harte with a particularity which cannot be found elsewhere. Even the eyelashes of his heroines are often carefully painted in the picture. Flora Dimwood "cast a sidelong glance" at the hero, "under her widely-spaced, heavy lashes." Of Mrs. Brimmer, the fastidious Boston woman, it is said that "a certain nervous intensity occasionally lit up her weary eyes with a dangerous phosphorescence, under their brown fringes." The eyes and eyelashes of that irrepressible child, Sarah Walker, are thus minutely and pathetically described: "Her eyes were of a dark shade of burnished copper,--the orbits appearing deeper and larger from the rubbing in of habitual tears from long wet lashes." Bret Harte has the rare faculty of making even a tearful woman attractive. The Ward of the Golden Gate "drew back a step, lifted her head with a quick toss that seemed to condense the moisture in her shining eyes, and sent what might have been a glittering dewdrop flying into the loosened tendrils of her hair." The quick-tempered heroine is seen "hurriedly disentangling two stinging tears from her long lashes"; and even the mannish girl, Julia Porter, becomes femininely deliquescent as she leans back in the dark stage-coach, with the romantic Cass Beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. "How much softer her face looked in the moonlight!--How moist her eyes were--actually shining in the light! How that light seemed to concentrate in the corner of the lashes, and then slipped--flash--away! Was she? Yes, she was crying." There is great subtlety not only of perception but of thought in the description of the Two Americans at the beginning of their intimacy:-- "Oddly enough, their mere presence and companionship seemed to excite in others that tenderness they had not yet felt themselves. Family groups watched the handsome pair in their innocent confidence and, with French exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of Love. Something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. And when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and Helen, inclining her brown head toward her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced in getting gumbo soup, rice and chicken, corn cakes, or any of her favorite home dishes in Paris, an exhausted but gallant boulevardier rose from a contiguous bench, and, politely lifting his hat to the handsome couple, turned slowly away from what he believed were tender confidences he would not permit himself to hear." Without this subtlety, a writer may have force, even eloquence, as Johnson and Macaulay had those qualities, but he is not likely to have an enduring charm. Subtlety seems to be the note of the best modern writers, of the Oxford school in particular, a subtlety of language which extracts from every word its utmost nicety of meaning, and a subtlety of thought in which every faculty is on the alert to seize any qualification or limitation, any hint or suggestion that might be hovering obscurely about the subject. Yet subtlety, more perhaps than any other quality of a good style, easily becomes a defect. If it is the forte of some writers, it is the foible, not to say the vice, of others. The later works of Henry James, for instance, will at once occur to the Reader as an example. Bret Harte himself is sometimes, but rarely, over-subtle, representing his characters as going through processes of thought or speech much too elaborate for them, or for the occasion. There is an example of this in _Susy_, where Clarence says: "'If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet woman, I should believe you were trying to insult me as you have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in _her_ house by leaving it now and forever.'" And again, in _A Secret of Telegraph Hill_, where Herbert Bly says to the gambler whom he has surprised in his room, hiding from the Vigilance Committee: "'Whoever you may be, I am neither the police nor a spy. You have no right to insult me by supposing that I would profit by a mistake that made you my guest, and that I would refuse you the sanctuary of the roof that covers your insult as well as your blunder.'" And yet the speaker is not meant to be a prig. There is another characteristic of Bret Harte's style which should perhaps be regarded as a form of subtlety, and that is the surprising resources of his vocabulary. He seems to have gathered all the words and idioms that might become of service to him, and to have stored them in his memory for future use. If a peculiar or technical expression was needed, he always had it at hand. Thus when the remorseful Joe Corbin told Colonel Starbottle about his sending money to the widow of the man whom he had killed in self-defence, the Colonel's apt comment was, "A kind of expiation or amercement of fine, known to the Mosaic, Roman and old English law." And yet his reading never took a wide range. His large vocabulary was due partly, no doubt, to an excellent memory, but still more to his keen appreciation of delicate shades in the meaning of words. He had a remarkable gift of choosing the right word. In the following lines, for example, the whole effect depends upon the discriminating selection of the verbs and adjectives:-- Bunny, thrilled by unknown fears, Raised his soft and pointed ears, Mumbled his prehensile lip, Quivered his pulsating hip. Depth of feeling, subtlety of perception and intellect,--these qualities, supplemented by the sense of form and beauty, go far to account for the charm of Bret Harte's style. He had an ear for style, just as some persons have an ear for music; and he could extract beauty from language just as the musician can extract it from the strings of a violin. This kind of beauty is, in one sense, a matter of mere sound; and yet it is really much more than that. "Words, even the most perfect, owe very much to the spiritual cadence with which they are imbued."[118] A musical sentence, made up of words harmoniously chosen, and of sub-sentences nicely balanced, must necessarily deepen, soften, heighten, or otherwise modify the bare meaning of the words. In fact, it clothes them with that kind and degree of feeling which, as the writer consciously or unconsciously perceives, will best further his intention. Style, in short, is a substitute for speech, the author giving through the medium of his style the same emotional and personal color to his thoughts which the orator conveys by the tone and inflections of his voice. Hence the saying that the style is the man. If we were looking for an example of mere beauty in style, perhaps we could find nothing better than this description of Maruja, after parting from her lover: "Small wonder that, hidden and silent in her enwrappings, as she lay back in the carriage, with her pale face against the cold, starry sky, two other stars came out and glistened and trembled on her passion-fringed lashes." No less beautiful in style are these lines:-- Above the tumult of the cañon lifted, The gray hawk breathless hung, Or on the hill a winged shadow drifted Where furze and thorn-bush clung.[119] And yet, so exact is the correspondence between thought and word here, that we find ourselves doubting whether the charm of the passage lies in its form, or in the mere idea conveyed to the reader with the least possible interposition of language; and yet, again, to raise that very doubt may be the supreme effect of a consummate style. Bret Harte was sometimes a little careless in his style, careless, that is, in the way of writing obscurely or ungrammatically, but very seldom so careless as to write in a dull or unmusical fashion. To find a harsh sentence anywhere in his works would be almost, if not quite, impossible. A leading English Review once remarked, "It was never among Mr. Bret Harte's accomplishments to labor cheerfully with the file"; and again, a few years later, "Mr. Harte can never be accused of carelessness." Neither statement was quite correct, but the second one comes very much nearer the truth than the first. Beside these occasional lapses in the construction of his sentences, Bret Harte had some peculiarities in the use of English to which he clung, either out of loyalty to Dickens, from whom he seems to have derived them, or from a certain amiable perversity which was part of his character. He was a strong partisan of the "split infinitive." A Chinaman "caused the gold piece and the letter to instantly vanish up his sleeve." "To coldly interest Price"; "to unpleasantly discord with the general social harmony"; "to quietly reappear," are other examples. The wrong use of "gratuitous" is a thoroughly Dickens error, and it almost seems as if Bret Harte went out of his way to copy it. In the story of _Miggles_, for example, it is only a few paragraphs after Yuba Bill has observed the paralytic Jim's "expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity," that his own features "relax into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness." "Aggravation" in the sense of irritation is another Dickens solecism which also appears several times in Bret Harte. Beside these, Bret Harte had a few errors all his own. In _The Story of a Mine_, there is a strangely repeated use of the awkward expression "near facts," followed by a statement that the new private secretary was a little dashed as to his "near hopes." Diligent search reveals also "continued on" in one story, "different to" in another, "plead" for "pleaded," "who would likely spy upon you" in an unfortunate place, and "too occupied with his subject" somewhere else. This short list will very nearly exhaust Bret Harte's errors in the use of English; but it must be admitted, also, that he occasionally lapses into a Dickens-like grandiloquence and cant of superior virtue. There are several examples of this in _The Story of a Mine_, especially in that part which relates to the City of Washington. The following paragraph is almost a burlesque of Dickens: "The actors, the legislators themselves, knew it and laughed at it; the commentators, the Press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great American people, knew it and laughed at it. And nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, might be different." Still worse is this description of the Supreme Court, which might serve as a model of confused ideas and crude reasoning, only half believed in by the writer himself: "A body of learned, cultivated men, representing the highest legal tribunal in the land, still lingered in a vague idea of earning the scant salary bestowed upon them by the economical founders of the government, and listened patiently to the arguments of counsel, whose fees for advocacy of the claims before them would have paid the life income of half the bench." That exquisite sketch, _Wan Lee, the Pagan_, is marred by this Dickens-like apostrophe to the clergy: "Dead, my reverend friends, dead! Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine, by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian school-children!" In the description of an English country church, which occurs in _A Phyllis of the Sierras_, we find another passage almost worthy of a "condensed novel" in which some innocent crusaders, lying cross-legged in marble, are rebuked for tripping up the unwary "until in death, as in life, they got between the congregation and the Truth that was taught there." Bret Harte has been accused also of "admiring his characters in the wrong place," as Dickens certainly did; but this charge seems to be an injustice. A scene in _Gabriel Conroy_ represents Arthur Poinsett as calmly explaining to Doña Dolores that he is the person who seduced and abandoned Grace Conroy; and he makes this statement without a sign of shame or regret. "If he had been uttering a moral sentiment, he could not have been externally more calm, or inwardly less agitated. More than that, there was a certain injured dignity in his manner," and so forth. This is the passage cited by that very acute critic, Mr. E. S. Nadal. But there is nothing in it or in the context which indicates that Bret Harte admired the conduct of Poinsett. He was simply describing a type which everybody will recognize; but not describing it as admirable. Bret Harte depicted his characters with so much _gusto_, and at the same time was so absolutely impartial and non-committal toward them, that it is easy to misconceive his own opinion of them or of their conduct.[120] From another fault, perhaps the worst fault of Dickens, namely, his propensity for the sudden conversion of a character to something the reverse of what it always has been, Bret Harte--with the single exception of Mrs. Tretherick, in _An Episode of Fiddletown_--is absolutely free. It should be remembered, moreover, that Bret Harte's imitations of Dickens occur only in a few passages of a few stories. When Bret Harte nodded, he wrote like Dickens. But the better stories, and the great majority of the stories, show no trace of this blemish. Bret Harte at his best was perhaps as nearly original as any author in the world. On the whole, it seems highly probable--though the critics have mostly decided otherwise--that Bret Harte derived more good than bad from his admiration for Dickens. The reading of Dickens stimulated his boyish imagination and quickened that sympathy with the weak and suffering, with the downtrodden, with the waifs and strays, with the outcasts of society, which is remarkable in both writers. The spirit of Dickens breathes through the poems and stories of Bret Harte, just as the spirit of Bret Harte breathes through the poems and stories of Kipling. Bret Harte had a very pretty satirical vein, which might easily, if developed, have made him an author of satire rather than of sentiment. Who can say that the influence of Dickens, coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may not have turned the scale? That Dickens surpassed him in breadth and scope, Bret Harte himself would have been the first to acknowledge. The mere fact that one wrote novels and the other short stories almost implies as much. If we consider the works of an author like Hawthorne, who did both kinds equally well, it is easy to see how much more effective is the long story. Powerful as Hawthorne's short stories are--the "Minister's Black Veil," for example--they cannot rival the longer-drawn, more elaborately developed tragedy of "The Scarlet Letter." The characters created by Dickens have taken hold of the popular imagination, and have influenced public sentiment in a degree which cannot be attributed to the characters of Bret Harte. Dickens, moreover, despite his vulgarisms, despite even the cant into which he occasionally falls, had a depth of sincerity and conviction that can hardly be asserted for Bret Harte. Dickens' errors in taste were superficial; upon any important matter he always had a genuine opinion to express. With respect to Bret Harte, on the other hand, we cannot help feeling that his errors in taste, though infrequent, are due to a want of sincerity, to a want of conviction upon deep things. And yet, despite the fact that Dickens excelled Bret Harte in depth and scope, there is reason to think that the American author of short stories will outlast the English novelist. The one is, and the other is not, a classic writer. It was said of Dickens that he had no "citadel of the mind,"--no mental retiring-place, no inward poise or composure; and this defect is shown by a certain feverish quality in his style, as well as by those well-known exaggerations and mannerisms which disfigure it. Bret Harte, on the other hand, in his best poems and stories, exhibits all that restraint, all that absence of idiosyncrasy as distinguished from personality, which marks the true artist. What the world demands is the peculiar flavor of the artist's mind; but this must be conveyed in a pure and unadulterated form, free from any ingredient of eccentricity or self-will. In Bret Harte there is a wonderful economy both of thought and language. Everything said or done in the course of a story contributes to the climax or end which the author has in view. There are no digressions or superfluities; the words are commonly plain words of Anglo-Saxon descent; and it would be hard to find one that could be dispensed with. The language is as concise as if the story were a message, to be delivered to the reader in the shortest possible time. One other point of much importance remains to be spoken of, although it might be difficult to say whether it is really a matter of style or of substance. Nothing counts for more in the telling of a story, especially a story of adventure, than the author's attitude toward his characters; not simply the fact that he blames or praises them, or abstains from doing so, but his unspoken attitude, his real feeling, disclosed between the lines. Too much admiration on the part of the author is fatal to a classic effect, even though the admiration be implied rather than expressed. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of Mr. Kipling. That a man should be a gentleman is always, strangely enough, a matter of some surprise to that conscientious author, and that he should be not only a gentleman, but actually brave in addition, is almost too much for Mr. Kipling's equanimity. His heroes, those gallant young officers whom he describes so well, are exhibited to the reader with something of that pride which a showman or a fond mother might pardonably display. Mr. Kipling knows them thoroughly, but he is not of them. He is their humble servant. They are, he seems to feel, members of a species to which he, the author, and probably the reader also, are not akin. Now, almost everybody who writes about fighting or heroic men in these days,--about highwaymen, cow-boys, river-drivers, woodsmen, or other primitive characters,--imitates Mr. Kipling, very seldom Bret Harte. Partly, no doubt, this is because Mr. Kipling's mannerisms are attractive, and easily copied. That little trick, for example, of beginning sentences with the word "also," is a familiar earmark of the Kipling school. But a stronger reason for imitating Mr. Kipling is that the attitude of frank admiration which he assumes is the natural attitude for the ordinary writer. Such a writer falls into it unconsciously, and does not easily rise above it. The author is a "tenderfoot," discoursing to another tenderfoot, the reader, about the brave and wonderful men whom he has met in the course of his travels; and the reader's astonishment and admiration are looked for with confidence. Vastly different from all this is the attitude of Bret Harte. He takes it for granted that the Pioneers in general had the instincts of gentlemen and the courage of heroes. His characters are represented not as exceptional California men, but as ordinary California men placed in rather exceptional circumstances. Brave as they are, they are never brave enough to surprise him. He is their equal. He never boasts of them nor about them. On the contrary, he gives the impression that the whole California Pioneer Society was constructed upon the same lofty plane,--as indeed it was, barring a few renegades. When Edward Brice, the young expressman, "set his white lips together, and with a determined face, and unfaltering step," walked straight toward the rifle held in Snapshot Harry's unerring hands, the incident astonishes nobody,--except perhaps the reader. Certainly it does not astonish the persons who witness or the author who records it. It evokes a little good-humored banter from Snapshot Harry himself, and a laughing compliment from his beautiful niece, Flora Dimwood, but nothing more. We have been told that Shakspere cut no great figure in his own time because his contemporaries were cast in much the same heroic mould,--greatness of soul being a rather common thing in Elizabethan days. For a similar reason, the heroes of Bret Harte are accepted by one another, by the minor characters, and, finally, by the author himself, with perfect composure and without visible surprise. Bret Harte makes the reader feel that he is describing not simply a few men and women of nobility, but a whole society, an epoch, of which he was himself a part; and this gives an element of distinction, even of immortality, to his stories. Had only one man died at Thermopylæ, the fact would have been remembered by the world, but it would have lost its chief significance. The death of three hundred made it a typical act of the Spartan people. The time will come when California, now strangely unappreciative of its own past, and of the writer who preserved it, will look back upon the Pioneers as the modern Greek looks back upon Sparta and Athens. THE END Footnotes: [1] The final _e_ was added to Henry Hart's name in the last years of his life, and the family tradition is that this was done to distinguish him from another Henry Hart who, like himself, was very active in the political campaign of the year 1844. [2] For the spelling of Henry Hart's name, see the footnote on page 1. [3] The _Crusade of the Excelsior_ contains some reminiscences of the voyage. [4] The following account of a ride in a California stage is given by Borthwick: "All sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and dexterity of the driver as he circumvented every obstacle without going one inch farther out of his way than was necessary to save us from perdition. With his right foot he managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his body from side to side, to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair of wheels, now on the left, he cut the outside edge round a stump or a rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult manoeuvre on a slanting piece of ground, he trimmed the wagon, as we would a small boat in a squall, and made us all crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize." [5] _Cressy._ The paragraph quoted is only a part of the description. [6] _A Phyllis of the Sierras._ [7] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 102. [8] Side-meat is the thin flank of a pig, cured like a ham. It was the staple article of food in the Southwest. [9] This poem is included in the author's collected poems under the title, _The Return of Belisarius_. [10] Bret Harte in the General Introduction to his works. [11] The proof-sheets of the _Heathen Chinee_ are preserved in the University of California, and they show many changes in Bret Harte's writing. See "Bret Harte's Country," an interesting illustrated article by Will. M. Clemens, in "The Bookman," vol. xiii, p. 224. [12] _The Society upon the Stanislaus_ first appeared in the "News Letter." [13] See Hittell's "History of California." This book, the best and fullest on the subject, contains ample evidence of our author's accuracy. [14] A Forty-Niner, as defined by the California Society of Pioneers, is an immigrant who, before midnight of December 31, 1849, was within the State of California, or on shipboard within three miles of the coast, that being the extent of the maritime jurisdiction of the State. [15] There was, however, a miner of seventy at Sonoma who had left a wife and six children at home in the East; and on October 1, 1850, there arrived in Sacramento a veteran of the Revolutionary War, ninety years of age. He had come all the way from Illinois to seek the fortune which fate had hitherto denied him. Unfortunately, he was so feeble that it became necessary to send him to a hospital, and history does not record his subsequent career, if indeed he survived to have one. [16] "Pioneer Times in California." [17] Mr. Kipling, who visited California in the year 1898, speaks of "the remarkable beauty" of the women of San Francisco,--descendants in most cases of the Pioneers. [18] The Reverend Walter Colton, "Three Years in California." [19] Just across the river, in the State of Illinois, is another Pike County, similar in soil and population; and this Illinois county was the scene of John Hay's "Pike County Ballads." [20] Eliza W. Farnham, "California, Indoors and Out." [21] Bayard Taylor, "El Dorado." [22] Edwin Bryant, "California." [23] See Thornton's "Oregon and California in 1848." [24] _A Waif of the Plains._ [25] _When the Waters Were Up at "Jules'."_ [26] In _A First Family of Tasajara_ he gives the same explanation for the beauty of Clementina, which is described as "hopelessly and even wantonly inconsistent with her surroundings." [27] "The coarse, the horny-handed, the bull-throated were the most successful. They set the fashion, those great men of the pickaxe and the pistol, and a fine, fire-eating, antediluvian, reckless fashion it was."--W. M. Fisher, "The Californians." [28] How long this continued to be the California point of view is shown by an interesting reminiscence of Professor Royce's. "I reached twenty years of age without ever becoming clearly conscious of what was meant by judging a man by his antecedents, a judgment that in an older and less isolated community is natural and inevitable, and that, I think, in most of our Western communities grows up more rapidly than it has grown up in California, where geographical isolation is added to the absence of tradition." [29] D. B. Woods, "Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings." [30] G. K. Chesterton, in "The Critic." [31] "Perils, Pastimes and Pleasures of an Emigrant," by J. W. [32] Eliza W. Farnham, "California, Indoors and Out." [33] Dancing was a common amusement among the miners even when there were no women to be had as partners. "It was a strange sight to see a party of long-bearded men, in heavy boots and flannel shirts, going through all the steps and figures of the dance with so much spirit, and often with a great deal of grace; hearty enjoyment depicted on their dried-up, sun-burned faces, and revolvers and bowie-knives glancing in their belts; while a crowd of the same rough-looking customers stood around, cheering them on to greater efforts, and occasionally dancing a step or two quietly on their own account."--Borthwick's "Three Years in California." [34] _The Romance of Madroño Hollow._ [35] The Reverend Walter Colton, "Three Years in California." [36] W. M. Fisher, "The Californians." [37] Mrs. D. B. Bates, "Incidents on Land and Water." [38] J. M. Letts, "California Illustrated." [39] "Our Italy." [40] This quality seems to have persisted, if we can trust Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who wrote in the year 1899: "San Francisco is a mad city.... Recklessness is in the air. I can't explain where it comes from, but there it is. The roaring winds off the Pacific make you drunk, to begin with." [41] Stephen J. Field, "Personal Reminiscences of California." [42] William Grey, "Pioneer Times in California." [43] See the San Francisco "Herald" of May 19, 1856. [44] D. B. Woods, "Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings." [45] The Captain calmly directed the transfer of the women and children, kept his place on the paddle-box, and went down with the others. He was James Lewis Herndon, a Commander in the United States Navy, and the explorer of the Amazon. A monument to his memory was erected by brother officers in the grounds of the Naval Academy at Annapolis. The steamer was bringing $2,000,000 in gold, and the loss of this treasure increased the commercial panic then prevailing in the Atlantic States. [46] Baron Fairfax of Cameron in the Peerage of Scotland. Many stories are told of his adventures in California. [47] Bayard Taylor, who visited the mining camps in the winter of '49, found them well organized under the rule of an Alcalde. "Nothing in California," he wrote, "seemed more miraculous to me than this spontaneous evolution of social order from the worst elements of anarchy." [48] William Grey, "Pioneer Times in California." [49] "Seeking the Golden Fleece." [50] Shucks, "Bench and Bar of California." [51] William Grey, "Pioneer Times in California." [52] S. J. Field, "Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California." [53] Journalistic affrays were frequent. See page 192 _infra_. [54] C. W. Haskins, "The Argonauts of California." [55] "Emerson in Concord," page 94. [56] Introduction to volume ii of Bret Harte's works. [57] "Alta California" of July 21, 1851. [58] The Reverend William Taylor, "California Life." [59] In one day two women, crazed by the sufferings of their children, drowned themselves in the Humboldt River. [60] E. W. Farnham, "California Indoors and Out." [61] Before the Civil War, the treatment of women, even in the Eastern cities, was almost invariably courteous and respectful. It was the exception, in New York or Boston, when a man neglected to give up his seat in a public conveyance to a woman; whereas, nowadays the exception is the other way. Profound respect shown to woman as woman is incompatible with a society founded upon an aristocratic, plutocratic, or caste system. It was never known in England. It is the product of a real democracy and of that alone; and in this country, as we become more and more plutocratic, the respect for women diminishes. The great cities of the United States are fast approaching, in this regard, the brutality of London, Paris and Berlin. [62] In the poem, _Concepcion de Arguello_. [63] H. A. Wise, "Los Gringos." [64] H. R. Helper, "The Land of Gold." [65] Horace Greeley, "An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco." [66] _How Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar._ [67] _A Ward of the Golden Gate._ [68] S. C. Upham, "Scenes in El Dorado." [69] Volume xv, page 466. [70] See also page 103, _supra_. [71] The late Sherman Hoar of Concord, whose name is inscribed on the tablet in Memorial Hall devoted to those Harvard Graduates who lost their lives in the Spanish War, was almost exactly such a character as Bret Harte described,--long to be remembered with affection. [72] H. H. Bancroft, "Chronicles of the Builders." [73] C. W. Haskins, "The Argonauts of California." [74] Benton, "The California Pilgrim." [75] _A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst._ [76] Delano, "Life on the Plains." [77] "The Virginia Editor is a young, unmarried, intemperate, pugnacious, gambling gentleman."--George W. Bagby, "The Old Virginia Gentlemen and Other Sketches." [78] They were the Reverend Walter Colton, Chaplain in the United States Navy, and Alcalde, as already mentioned, and Dr. Robert Semple, a well-known Pioneer politician. [79] "Men and Memories of San Francisco," by Barry and Patten. [80] "California: its Characteristics and Prospects." [81] See also _supra_, p. 169. [82] It must be admitted that the ministers were placed in a difficult situation, being obliged to cope with the hardy, humorous materialism of Pioneer life. The following dialogue is an authentic illustration:-- "Mr. Small, do not you believe in the overruling Providence of God?" "Which God?" "There is but one God." "I don't see it, Parson. On this yere Pacific Coast gods is numerous--Chinee gods, Mormon gods, Injin gods, Christian gods, _an' the Bank o' Californy_!"--"The Californians," by W. M. Fisher. [83] A traveller passing through Dolores in Mexico was the witness of a marriage like that of Stephen Masterton: "Whilst stopping here I saw a smart-looking Yankee and a Spanish girl married by the priest, whose words were interpreted to the bridegroom as the ceremony proceeded. The lady was of rather dark complexion but extremely pretty; and although she knew scarcely a word of English, and the bridegroom knew still less of Spanish, it was evident from the eloquence of the glances which passed between them, that they were at no loss to make themselves understood."--"Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California," W. R. Ryan. [84] Mrs. Kemble, on the other hand, as the Reader may remember, described him as "tall." His real height, already mentioned, was five feet, eight inches. [85] W. D. Howells, "Literary Friends and Acquaintance." [86] See Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 228. [87] _My Friend the Tramp_, written in 1872. [88] Samuel Bowles, famous as Editor of the "Springfield Republican." [89] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 133. [90] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 136. [91] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," pp. 137-142. [92] These lectures, with a short address delivered in London, have recently been published in a volume entitled "The Lectures of Bret Harte," by Charles Meeker Kozlay, New York. [93] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 145. [94] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," pp. 168-170. [95] It was now a Commercial Agency, the grade next below that of a Consulship. [96] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 173. [97] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 186. [98] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 181. [99] See footnote on page 244, _supra_. [100] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," p. 265. [101] St. Kentigern established a Bishopric in the year 560 in the place which afterward became Glasgow, and thus he is regarded as the founder of the city. His monument is shown beneath the choir of the Cathedral where his body was interred A. D. 601. [102] By the regulations then in force Consuls were forbidden to be absent from their posts for a period exceeding ten days, without first obtaining leave from the President. [103] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 334. [104] Mary Stuart Boyd. See "Harper's Magazine," vol. 105, page 773. [105] His friend and travelling companion, Colonel Arthur Collins. [106] See _ante_, page 245. [107] See _ante_, page 209. [108] When news of the death of Dickens reached Bret Harte he was camping in the Foot-Hills, far from San Francisco, but he sent a telegram to hold back for a day the printing of the "Overland," then ready for the press, and his poem was written that night and forwarded the next morning. A week or two later Bret Harte received a cordial letter from Dickens, written just before his death, complimenting the California author, and requesting him to write a story for "All the Year Round." [109] A miner, writing in August, 1850, from the Middle Fork of the American River, said: "When I came up here, the river was a roaring torrent, and its _sombre music_ could plainly be heard upon the tops of the mountains rising to a height of about three thousand feet." [110] G. H. Denny, President of Washington and Lee University. [111] Thomas E. Cramblet, President of Bethany College. [112] Gerard Fowke, author of the "Archæological History of Ohio." [113] R. H. Crossfield, President of Transylvania University. [114] J. I. D. Hinds, Dean of the University of Nashville. [115] For the meaning of "Pike," see _supra_, page 59. [116] _Through the Santa Clara Wheat._ [117] _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar._ [118] R. L. Stevenson. [119] The author had described this scene before in prose, though he may have forgotten it. In the story called _Who Was My Quiet Friend?_ he wrote: "The pines in the caftan below were olive gulfs of heat, over which a hawk here and there drifted lazily, or, rising to our level, cast a weird and gigantic shadow of slowly moving wings on the mountain-side." [120] See page 178, _supra_. INDEX "Abner Nott," 74, 321. "Academy," the London, on Bret Harte's portrayal of gamblers, 173. "Ah Sin," a play by Bret Harte and Mark Twain, 234. "Ailsa Callender," 248, 269, 270, 299. Alamo, 21. Albany, birthplace of Bret Harte, 1; Henry Hart's occupations in, 11; Young Men's Association, 11; 12; lecture by Bret Harte in, 239. Albany Female Academy, Henry Hart an instructor in, 11. Alcaldes, the, duties of, 121; decisions by, 123, 124, 125-126. Alcott, Bronson, 12. Alcott family, resemblance of the Harte family to, 12, 16. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 45. "Alkali Dick," 328. Allen, Edward A., 326. "Allow," "'low," in the sense of declare or say, 324. "Alta California," The, cited, 134, 140, 144, 148, 181, 185-186, 192, 193, 196, 204. Alvarado, Spanish governor, 102. _American Humor_, 244. _Angelus, The_, 308. Anthony, A. V. S., boy-neighbor of Bret Harte in Hudson Street, New York, 11-12; after-meetings with in California and in London, 12; recollections of California in the '50s, 142. _Apostle of the Tules, An_, 64, 206. Archaic words in Bret Harte, 321, 324, 325. Argonauts, 2, 60, 155, 218. "Argonauts, The," Bret Harte's lecture on, 239, 259. "Argonauts of California, The," cited, 135, 168. _Argonauts of North Liberty, The_, 77, 148, 215, 245, 287, 301. Argyle, Duke of, 267, 268. Arnold, Matthew, 83. "Art Student," 13. _Artemis in Sierra_, 309. "Arthur Poinsett," 341. Astor, John Jacob, 5. Atchison, Bret Harte's lecture in, 241. "Atlantic Monthly," the, Bret Harte's first appearance in, 35, 47; sale of in early California, 197; 223; Bret Harte's contributions to, 232, 233, 245. _Autumnal Musings_, 16. "Baby Sylvester," 156. Bagby, George W., 327; his "The Old Virginia Gentlemen and Other Sketches," cited, 192 _n._ Baker's City Tavern, New York, 5. _Ballad of the Emeu_, 40. Bancroft, H. H., his "Chronicles of the Builders," cited, 167. Barbour, Judge, 133. _Barker's Luck_, 295, 296. Barnes, George, 39. Barrett, Lawrence, 234. Barry and Patten, their "Men and Memories of San Francisco," cited, 198, 199. Bates, Mrs. D. B., her "Incidents on Land and Water," cited, 100, 128, 146. Beauty, in women, its development, 79; of Bret Harte's women, 334, 335; beauty in literary style, 338. Beefsteak Club, London, 275. _Bell-Ringer of Angels, The_, 56, 77, 152, 205. _Belle of Cañada City, A_, 209. "Bench and Bar of California," cited, 128. Benicia, 149, 198. Besant, Walter, Bret Harte's acquaintance with, 271. Bierce, Ambrose, 51, 304. "Biglow Papers," 324. Black, William, Bret Harte's intimacy with, 271; first meeting of the two, 271; 272, 273. Blondes, among Bret Harte's women, 247. "Blue-Grass Penelope, A," 79. _Bohemian Days in San Francisco_, 19, 115, 177. _Bohemian Papers_, 44. "Bookman, The," 50 _n._, 162. Borthwick, J. D., his "Three Years in California," cited, 22 _n._, 94, 120. Boston, 12; Bret Harte in, 222, 223, 224, 229, 230, 231; its characteristics, 229-230; lecture by Bret Harte in, 239. "Boston Daily Advertiser," the, 223. Bowers, Joe, 60, 61. Bowles, Samuel, 236, 236 _n._ Boy gamblers, 154. _Boy's Dog, A_, 33. Boyd, Mary Stuart, paper of, cited, 277. "Bret Harte's Country," cited, 50 _n._ Bret Harte's gamblers, 173. Bret Harte's women, 157. See also "Women." Brett, Sir Balliol, later Viscount Esher, 8. Brett, Catharine. See Hart, Catharine (Brett). Brett, Catharyna (Rombout), grandmother of Catharine (Brett) Hart, 8; estate of on the Hudson River, 9; sketch of, 9; a founder of the Fishkill Dutch Church, 9; tablet to her memory, 9. Brett, Francis, 9, 10. Brett, Robert, 9, 10. Brett, Roger, grandfather of Catharine (Brett) Hart, 8, 9. Broderick, David C., 37; duels of, 134, 136. Brontë, Charlotte, 275. Brooks, Noah, 41, 135, 214, 220, 236. Broughton, Rhoda, her treatment of ministers, 210. "Brown of Calaveras," 77, 152, 177. Browne, Francis F., editor of "Lakeside Monthly," 221. Brunettes, preferred by Bret Harte, 247. Bryant, Edwin, his "California," cited, 71. _Buckeye Hollow Inheritance, The_, 248. "Bucking Bob," 96. Bull-fights, 202, 204. "Burgeoning," 321. Bushnell, the Rev. Dr., his "California: its Characteristics and Prospects," cited, 127, 199, 200. Byron, Lord, 275. _Cadet Grey_, 308, 315. "Cahoots," 324. "Calaveras Chronicle," the, cited, 145; editor of in a duel, 193. California, at the outbreak of the Civil War, 36, 37, 38; climate of, 100-106; society of, 148, 149; precocity of the early California boy, 154; the gambling element in, 160-180; lavish manner of transacting business in the early days, 181-184; "trade a wild unorganized whirl," 181; soaring prices, 182-184; "washerwomen made fortunes and founded families," 184; reaction in 1851, with quick fall in prices, 185; losses by fire and flood, 186-187, 188-189; first public building erected in, an Insane Asylum, 190; life of the farm and the vineyard, 190; dealt with in Bret Harte's stories, 190; literature, journalism, and religion of, 192-213; newspaper men of, 192; churches in, 200-202; California children, 201; Bret Harte's representation of true, 288, 289, 291; open-air life in, 317-319. "California," cited, 71. "California: its Characteristics and Prospects," cited, 200. "California Christian Advocate," the, 201, 203. "California Farmer," the, 191, 196. "California Illustrated," cited, 102. "California Indoors and Out," cited, 63, 93, 147. "California Life," cited, 145. California newspapers, early. See Newspapers. "California Pet," the, 141. California pets, 155; the bear cub "Baby Sylvester," 156. California pioneers. See Pioneers. California saloons, the bar surmounted by a woman's sunbonnet, 142. "California Song, The," 61. "Californian, The," 39, 40, 44, 196. "Californians, The," cited, 85 _n._, 96, 208 _n._ Camberley, Sussex, the Red House at, 274, 283. Cambridge, Mass., Bret Harte in, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227; 229, 232. Canada, relatives of Bret Harte in, 4; Bernard Hart in, 4. Canadian Harts, the, 4. Cape Horn, voyage around, 55, 65, 67, 143, 151, 181. "Capital, The," failure of, 251. "Captain Carroll," 178. _Captain Jim's Friend_, 161, 166. _Carquinez Woods, The_, 148, 209, 302. Casey, James, career and death of, 116, 117-118. "Cass Beard," 335. Castle Ashby, 275. "Cavortin'," 324. "Central America," the, sinking of, 118. Central California, 100, 101, 190. Chaffee, J. A., the original of _Tennessee's Partner_, 165-166. Chagres, 65, 66. Chamberlain, partner of Chaffee, the original of _Tennessee's Partner_, 165. Chapman, John Jay, 38. Cheney, Warren, 327, 330. "Cherokee Sal," 162. Chesterfield, Lord, his style, 331. Chesterton, G. K., on Yuba Bill, 22-23; 86, 87; on Bret Harte's humor, 22, 305; on Colonel Starbottle, 176; on Bret Harte's parodies, 306. Chicago, Bret Harte in, 220, 221, 222, 223; lectures in, 244. Children, Bret Harte's, 26, 29; his impression of English children, 29; California children, 153-155, 201; his impression of German children, 262, 263. Chilenos, 148. Chinese in California, 92. Chinese restaurant, scene in, 108. "Chronicles of the Builders," cited, 167. Churches in early California, 200-202. _Cicely_, 304-305. "Circuit-Rider, The," cited, 59. Civil War, California's part in, 37, 38; Bret Harte's poems relating to, 38, 314. _Clarence_, 37, 296. Clemens, Samuel L. See Mark Twain. Clemens, Will. M., 50 _n._ "Clementina," 79. Climate of California, 100-106, 317. Clubs, London, to which Bret Harte belonged, 275. Cohasset, Mass., Bret Harte in, 234. Colfax, Schuyler, 8. Collins, Col. Arthur, 278 _n._ Coloma, traits of gamblers of, 169. "Colonel Newcome," 18. "Colonel Starbottle," 22, 83, 135-139, 176, 192; reintroduced in Bret Harte's last, unfinished tale, 283; 337. "Colonel Wilson," 95. Colton, the Rev. William, his "Three Years in California," cited, 58, 96, 122, 188, 203; conductor of first newspaper in California, 196 _n._ Commercial agent, Bret Harte as, at Crefeld, 252, 261-262. Compton Wyngates, 275. "Concepcion," 105, 149. _Conception de Arguello_, 149, 232, 308. Concord, Mass., 227. _Condensed Novels_, the, 33, 40, 44, 306. Congregation Shearith Israel, New York, 6. "Consuelo," 148. Consul, Bret Harte as, at Glasgow, 267-273; the consul in Bret Harte's stories, 297. Contraltos, preferred by Bret Harte, 247. _Convalescence of Jack Hamlin, The_, 177. Convicts, English, 117, 129. Conway, Moncure, on Bret Harte's avoidance of "social duties," 276. Coolbrith, Miss Ina B., 49. Cornbury, Lord, 8. Coullard, Mrs., for whom Marysville was named, 142. Cramblet, Thomas E., 326. Crefeld, 252; Bret Harte at, 252-256, 260-265. "Cressy," 26, 28, 78, 82, 83, 247, 294, 324. Crime in California, increase in, 129, 130. "Critic, The," 87. Crossfield, R. H., 326. Cruces, 65, 66. _Crusade of the Excelsior, the_, 17, 212. "Culpeper Starbottle," the nephew, 94. Dana, Charles A., 252. Del Norte, 21. Delano, A., his "Life on the Plains," cited, 185. _Demi-monde_ in San Francisco, 99. Denny, G. H., 326. _Desborough Connections, The_, 275. _Devil's Ford_, 62, 217. Dialect, Bret Harte's dialect poems, 310; his Pioneer and other dialect, 321-329; masters of, 328; humor essential to, 328; psychology of, 329. _Dick Boyle's Business Card_, 249. "Dick Demorest," 287. Dickens, Charles, his influence on Bret Harte, 177, 284, 286, 339-342; his letter to Bret Harte, 312 _n._; Bret Harte's poem on, 312; compared with Bret Harte, 342, 343. Dogs, as beasts of burden, 263-264; Bret Harte's tenderness for, 287. "Don José Sepulvida," 94, 96, 177, 211. Donner Party, the, 72, 142. "Doña Rosita," 148. Douglas, James, 50, 162-165, 309. _Dow's Flat_, 309-310. Downieville, 164. "Dr. Ruysdael," 82. Drake, Sir Francis, 150. Drake's Bay, 150. Drama, the, in Pioneer California, 198. "Drum, The," 38. Dubois, Miss, 10. Duels, 132, 133, 134, 192, 193. Dumb animals, in Pioneer California, 99, 155; Bret Harte's tenderness for, 287. Earthquake in San Francisco, 216. Editors, in Pioneer California, Southern origin of, 192, 193. Education in Pioneer California, 197, 198, 200. "Edward Brice," 345. "Edward Everett," ship, 55. Eggleston, Edward, his "The Circuit-Rider," cited, 59. "El Dorado," cited, 64. El Dorado County, vineyards in, 190. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 139; Bret Harte's meeting with, 227. "Emerson in Concord," cited, 139. England, 1, 2; Bret Harte's lectures in, 244, 244 _n._, 259; publication of his stories in, 259; visiting country houses in, 266; his last years in, 274-284. English, the, in Pioneer California, 92. English children, 29. English convicts, 92. "Enriquez Saltello," 148, 298, 328. Episcopalianism in early San Francisco, 201. _Episode of Fiddletown, An_, paralleled in contemporary newspapers, 192; 342. "Episode of West Woodlands," the, 209. "Esquire," the use of, in Pioneer California, 193; Bret Harte's humorous examples of, 193. Eureka, 30. Everett, Edward, 55. Expulsion of Mexicans and South Americans, 131. Eye-lashes, and Eye-brows, Bret Harte's description of, 334, 335. "Ezekiel Corwin," 215, 301. Fair, James G., 167. Fairfax, Charles, heroism of, 119; 119 _n._ "Far," in the sense of distant, 321. Farnham, Eliza W., her "California Indoors and Out," cited, 63, 93, 147. "Father Felipe," 211. "Father Pedro," 105. "Father Sobriente," 211. "Father Wynn," 209. Feather River, 103, 189. "Fetched away," for torn, 323. Field, Stephen J., 107; his "Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California," cited, 107, 121, 122, 127, 132; first Alcalde of Marysville, 121; 122; his duelling experience, 133; his experience with Terry, 136; at the beginning of Marysville, 141, 185. Fields, James T., 47. Firearms, carrying of, 132, 133. _First Family of Tasajara, A_, 27, 79 _n._, 249, 321. Fisher, W. M., his "The Californians," cited, 85 _n._, 96, 208 _n._ Fishkill Dutch Church, 9. "Flora Dimwood," 335, 345. Foot-Hills, 94, 100, 101; foxes and raccoons from the, as pets, 155; 190. Fort Hall, 68. "Forty-Niner," definition of, 54, 54 _n._ See also Pioneers. Fowke, Gerard, 326. Francis, Miss Susan M., 47. Franklin, Benjamin, his style, 331. Frémont, Mrs. Jessie Benton, 34, 35. Frémont, John C., 34, 57, 58. French, the, in California, 92. Friary, The, club, New York, 5. _Friend of Colonel Starbottle's, A_, Bret Harte's last MS., 283-284. Frontiersmen, the, 56. See also Pioneers. Frothingham, the Rev. O. B., 207. Froude, James Anthony, his daughter, 29; Bret Harte's visit to, 257, 258. "Fust-rate," for very well, 322. "Gabriel Conroy," 22, 72, 103, 177, 234, 244, 245, 294, 330, 341. "Gait," in the sense of habit or manner, 325. Gamblers, boy gamblers, 154; Bret Harte's gamblers, 173. See also Gambling in California. Gambling in California, 19, 20, 160-180; Bret Harte's pictures of and contemporary accounts, 168-169; the gambling era in Sacramento, 170, 172; in San Francisco, 170-172; development of public opinion and laws against, 172. George Eliot, 208. German children, 262, 263. _Ghosts, The, of Stukeley Castle_, 275. "Gideon Deane," 210, 211. Gillis, James W., 50, 51. See also "Truthful James." Glasgow, Bret Harte appointed consul at, 265; his five years in, 266-273; his reports, 267-268; his friendships in 271; departure from, 273. _Goddess of Excelsior, The_, 142. Godkin, E. L., 307. Golden canoe, the, 159. "Golden Era," the, 13, 32, 33. _Grandmother Tenterden_, 232. Grass Valley, 164. "Gratuitous," 339. "Greasers," 148. _Great Deadwood Mystery, The_, 231. Greeley, Horace, his "Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco," cited, 153. Grey, William, his "Pioneer Times in California," cited, 55, 109, 126, 129. _Greyport Legend, A_, 232, 233. Griswold, Miss Anna, her marriage to Bret Harte, 33. Griswold, Daniel S., 33. Griswold, Mary Dunham, 33. Gwinn, W. M., 36, 37. Hardy, Thomas, 76, 77, 208, 320. Hare, John, 235. "Harper's Magazine," 277. Hart, Benjamin I., 6. Hart, Bernard, paternal grandfather of Bret Harte, 4-7; career of, 4-6; secretary to the New York Exchange Board, 5; prominent in the Synagogue, 5, 6; in the militia, 5; member of clubs and societies, 5; homes of 6, 7; portrait of, 6; marriage of, to Catharine Brett, 6; marriage of, to Zipporah Seixas, 6; family of, 6-7; death of, 7; 10, 13. Hart, Catharine (Brett), paternal grandmother of Bret Harte, 6; marriage of, to Bernard Hart, 6; the marriage kept a secret by Bernard Hart, 7; her lonely and secluded life, 8; her ancestry and family connections, 8-10. Hart, Daniel, 6. Hart, David, 6. Hart, Elizabeth Rebecca (Ostrander), mother of Bret Harte, 10; her religious faith, 11, 12; life of, after Henry Hart's death, 13; her passion for literature, 16; moves to California, 17; death of, at Morristown, N. J., 19; 233. Hart, Emanuel B., 6. Hart [Harte], Henry, father of Bret Harte, 1; final _e_ added to name of, 1 _n._; birth of, 6; 7; at Union College, 10, 18; description of, 10; career of, 10, 11; marries Elizabeth Ostrander, 10; 11; homes of, in New York City, 11; brought up in the Dutch Reformed faith, becomes a Catholic, 11; principal of an academy in Hudson, N. Y., 12; other places of residence, 11; ardently espouses the cause of Henry Clay, 12; death of, 12; his library and its use by his household, 16; 230. Hart, Henry, son of Bernard Hart by his Hebrew wife, 7. Hart, Theodore, 6. Hart, Zipporah (Seixas), Hebrew wife of Bernard Hart, 6; her marriage and family, 6; 7. Harts, the, in Canada, 4. Harte, Francis Brett, birthplace of, 1; ancestry of, 1, 4; father of, 1, 6; evolution of his signature as an author, 1; descriptions of, 1-3, 4; his voice, 2; his handwriting, 2; pictures of, 3; paternal grandfather of, 4-7; numerous relatives of, in Canada, 4; mother of, 10-11, 16, 17, 19; boyhood homes of, in New York City, 11; in various places, 12, 13; boyhood life after his father's death, 13; his precocity, 15; his early studies and writings, 16; arrival in California, 17, 18; begins his career as a professional writer, 18; gambling experience, 19; as express messenger, 21; as tutor and schoolmaster, 21, 24, 26; as druggist's clerk, 24, 25; as printer, 24, 30, 32; as editor, 30, 31, 48; appointed secretary of the Mint, 33; marriage, 33; his manner of working, 40-42; editor of book of poems, 40-42; his first published book, 44; first editor of the "Overland Monthly," 45; the publication that first made him known on the Atlantic coast, 46-47; his _Heathen Chinee_ makes him famous, 49-50; professor in the University of California, 51; accuracy of his account of Pioneer life, 53-54, 56, 149, 150, 155, 189, 192; fidelity of his pictures of Pioneer friendship, 157; four stories devoted to friendship, 161-167; moral of his stories, 167; his portrayal of gambling in Pioneer California sustained by contemporary accounts, 168; his gamblers, a new type in fiction, 176; John Oakhurst and Jack Hamlin compared, 174-177; his attitude toward his characters, 178; his religious views, 206, 207; departure from California, 214, 217, 218, 219; in Chicago, 220-222; his Eastern reception, 222; visit to Boston and Mr. Howells, 223-227, 229; meeting with Lowell, 226-227, with Longfellow, 227, with Emerson, 227; in Boston, 229-231; his contract with James R. Osgood & Co., 232; at Newport, 232; his literary habits, 233; as a playwright, 234-235; his money troubles, 236, 237, 238, 240, 251; his lectures, 238, 239, 244; his letters to his wife, 239-244, 251, 253, 254, 256, 258; impression of Western people, 243; his health, 244, 259, 260; his dislike of New England, 246; his women characters, 247-250; his patriotism, 249; appointed U. S. commercial agent at Crefeld, 252; translations of his works, 255, 256; his impressions of German music and acting, 257; visit to Froude, 258; his lectures in England, 259; publication of his stories in England, 259; as commercial agent, 261, 262, 264; impressions of German children, 262, 263; as consul, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272; in Glasgow, 266-273; his reports, 267; causes the erection of a memorial over the graves of wrecked sailors, 268; glimpse of his consular functions given in _Young Robin Gray_, 269; his stories dealing with Scotch scenes and people, 270; his friendships with William Black and Walter Besant, 271; his monomania for not answering letters, 272; granted leave of absence, 273; superseded in the Glasgow consulship, 273; last years in London, 274-292; his friendship with M. and Mme. Van de Velde, 274; Mme. Velde's influence upon his work, 274; his later rooms at No. 74 Lancaster Gate, 274; membership in various London clubs, 275; his habits in later life, 275; his real recreations, 275; his proneness to escape "social duties," 276, 277; visits Switzerland, 277-278; reasons that impelled him to live in England, 279-280; yet ever a devoted American, 281; false reports about him circulated in America, 282; his disinclination to be "interviewed," 282; his character, 284-292; was he a sentimentalist? 284-286; his separation from his family in his latter years, 284; at work until the end, 283; his last MS., 283; his last illness, 283; his last letters, 284; death, at Camberley, May 5th, 1902, 284; his faults and his good qualities, 287, 290; his devotion to his art, 291; the manner of man he was, 291, 312, 320; as a writer of fiction, 293-307; his knowledge of human nature, 297; his dialect, 298; his humor, 300; his satire, 300-302; his optimism, 307, 316; his poetry, 308-316; his poem on Dickens, 312, 316; influence of Dickens on him, 340-342; compared with Dickens, 342-343; his poem on Starr King, 313; his patriotic poems, 314-316; his treatment of nature, 316-319; his style, 309, 330-346; his style in poetry, 309, 313, 337-338; defects of his style, 330, 336, 339; virtues of his style, 331, 333-338, 343-346; his vocabulary, 337-338; his attitude toward his characters, 345, 346. Harte, Mrs. Francis Brett, her marriage, 33; her voice, 247; removes to England before Bret Harte's death, 279. Harte, Eliza. See Knaufft, Eliza (Harte). Harte, Ethel, Bret Harte's younger daughter, 279. Harte, Francis King, Bret Harte's second son, 39, 279. Harte, Griswold, Bret Harte's elder son, 279. Harte, Henry, Bret Harte's brother, 13-15, 17. Harte, Jessamy. See Steele, Jessamy (Harte). Harte, Margaret B. See Wyman, Margaret B. (Harte). Haskins, C. W., his "The Argonauts of California," cited, 135, 168. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 83, 208, 244, 245, 268, 276, 295, 342. Hawthorne and Bret Harte compared, 281, 291. Hay, John, 60, 287. Hayes, President, appoints Bret Harte as U. S. commercial agent at Crefeld, 252. _Heathen Chinee, The_, 44, 49, 50, 50 _n._, 51, 222, 300, 309. _Heir, The, of the McHulishes_, 250, 270. "Heiress of Red Dog," the, 177. "Helen Maynard," 332. Helper, H. R., his "The Land of Gold," cited, 150. "Herbert Bly," 337. Herndon, James Lewis, 118 _n._ Heroines, Bret Harte's, 74-84, 246-249, 334. Hinds, J. I. D., 326. Hittell's "History of California," cited, 54. Hoar, Sherman, his resemblance to the hero in _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, 167 _n._ "Honeyfoglin'," 321. "Honorable Jackson Flash, The," 192. Hoodlum, 155. Hooper, J. F., 114. Horses, in San Francisco, 99; Bret Harte's description of, 333. House of Lords, The, club, New York, 5. _How I Went to the Mines_, 25. _How Old Man Plunkett went Home_, 113. _How Reuben Allen Saw Life in San Francisco_, 24. _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_, 27, 154, 232, 233, 302, 305, 333. Howells, William Dean, his account of Bret Harte, 2, 30, 39, 41, 223-227; 229, 237-238, 290. Hudson, N. Y., home of the Hartes in, 11. _Hudson River, The_, 16. Humboldt Bay, 21. Humboldt County, 21, 30; wheat crops, 190. Humboldt River, 68, 146 _n._ "Humboldt Times," 24. Humor and pathos, 300; California humor, 303, 304; Western and New England humor, 303. Hyer, Tom, 110. _Idyl of Battle Hollow, The_, 232. _Idyl of Red Gulch, The_, 234, 246. _Iliad of Sandy Bar, The_, 209. "Illustrated News," London, sale of, in Pioneer California, 197. Imagination, creative, 293, 294. _In a Balcony_, 33. _In the Tules_, 63, 161, 166, 188. "Incidents on Land and Water," cited, 100, 128. Independence, in Missouri, 68. Indians, 30, 56, 70, 72; Bret Harte's description of, 73; the Californian, 30, 105, 212-213. _Indiscretion of Elsbeth, The_, 262. Insane Asylum, an, the first public building erected by the State of California, 190. "Into," for in, 323. Irving, Washington, 35. "J. W.," "Perils, Pastimes and Pleasures of an Emigrant," by, cited, 92. "Jack Fleming," 158. "Jack Hamlin," 22, 83; his dress, 97; 99; 169, 173, 175; compared with "John Oakhurst," 176-177; his prototype, 177; his character, 178-180. _Jack and Jill of the Sierras_, A, 81, 217. Jackass Flat, 50. James, Henry, 3, 163; his style, 336. "James Seabright," 209. _Jeff Briggs's Love Story_, 249. Jeffries, Richard, 319. Jewelry, miners', 97. Jewett, Sarah O., 83. Jews in Pioneer California, 92. _Jim_, 322. _Jimmy's Big Brother from California_, 113. "Jinny," 78. "Joan," 77, 245, 246, 301. "Joe Corbin," 337. "John Ashe," 81. "John Bunyan Medliker," 27. "John Hale," 230. "John Milton Harcourt," 27. "John Oakhurst, Mr.," 86, 173, 174; compared with "Jack Hamlin," 176; 300, 304, 318. "Johnny," 302. Johnson, Samuel, 336. _Johnson's Old Woman_, 321, 322, 332. Johnston, Richard Malcolm, 325, 326. "Joshua Rylands," 58, 205. "Jovita," 333-334. Jowett, Benjamin, 207. _Judgment of Bolinas Plain, The_, 235. "Julia Cantire," 249. "Julia Porter," 334, 335. Jury, the first in California, 122. "Kam," 83. Kansas, Bret Harte's lectures in, 241, 242, 243. Kay, T. Belcher, 111. Kemble, Fanny, her description of Bret Harte, 1; 2, 221 _n._ "Kicked a fut," 325. King, James, career and tragic death of, 116-117, 186, 195. King, the Rev. Thomas Starr, 33, 34, 35-36, 38, 39, 207; Bret Harte's poem upon him, 313, 314. Kingston-on-the-Hudson, 10. Kinsmen Club, London, 275. Kipling, Rudyard, 55, 107 _n._, 208, 342, 344. "Kitty," 78. Knaufft, Eliza (Harte), Bret Harte's sister, 13, 17, 222, 232. Knaufft, Ernest, 13. Knaufft, F. F., 13. Kozlay, Charles M., publisher of Bret Harte's lectures, 244 _n._ "Lacy Bassett," 166. "Lakeside Monthly," the, Bret Harte's connection with, 220, 221, 222. "Land of Gold, The," cited, 150. "Lanty Foster," 74, 81. "Larry Hawkins," 95. Lawrence, Ks., Bret Harte's lecture in, 241, 242. Lawyer, the Boston, 231. Lectures, by Bret Harte, 238, 239-244; edited by Kozlay, 244 _n._; in England, 259. Leese, Jacob P., 149. _Left Out on Lone Star Mountain_, 160, 166. _Legend of Monte del Diablo, The_, 35. _Legend of Sammtstadt, A_, 262. Leighton, Sir Frederic, 260. Lenox, Mass., 1; Bret Harte's stay there, 244. "Leonidas Boone," 27. Letters by Bret Harte, to his wife, 239-244, 251, 253, 254, 256, 258; letter to his son, 256; to Mr. Pemberton, 267; from Switzerland, 277. Letts, J. M., his "California Illustrated," cited, 102. Lewis, Alfred Henry, 327. "Liberty Jones," 25, 82, 146, 147. "Life on the Plains," cited, 185. Lipper, Arthur & Co., New York, 6. Lispenard, Leonard, 5. Lispenard & Hart, merchants, in New York, 5. "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," cited, 223. "Literary Landmarks of Boston," cited, 231. Literature among the Pioneers, 196, 197, 198, 200. London, Bret Harte in. See England. Longevity, of Spanish Californians, 104; of Indians, 105. Longfellow, H. W., Bret Harte's meeting with, 227-228; Bret Harte's opinion of, 228, 229. Los Angeles, 149. "Los Gringos," cited, 150. _Lost Galleon, The, and Other Tales_, 44. Louisburg Square, in Boston, 231. Love, for women, 78, 311, 312. "'Low," in the sense of declare or say, 324. Lowell, James Russell, 223, 227, 324. Lowell, Mass., home of the Hartes in, 12. Lower California, 67. _Luck of Roaring Camp, The_, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 159, 162, 165, 233. Macaulay, his style, 331, 336. McDougall, ex-governor, duel with a San Francisco editor, 193. McGlynn, John A., 88, 89. McGowan, "Ned," 90. McPike, Capt., 60. "Madison Wayne," 56, 205. _Mæcenas of the Pacific Slope, A_, 249. Magee, Prof., 165. Magistrates, California, 122-127. "Major Philip Ostrander," 11. "Mannerly," 321. Mark Twain, Bret Harte's first meeting with, 39, 40; 45, 46, 51, 229, 234, 304, 306, 327. "Martin Morse," 188, 189. "Maruja," 149, 178, 338. Marysville, Alcalde of, 121, 122, 185; origin of name of, 142; 146, 153; gambling in, 173. "Marysville Times, The," 192. "Men and Memories of San Francisco," cited, 199 _n._ _Mercury of the Foot-Hills, A_, 27, 77. _Mermaid of Light-House Point, The_, 150. Mexicans, expulsion from the mines, 131. Mexican and Chilean women in early California, 148. "Miggles," 77, 163, 330, 339. Mill, John Stuart, his style, 331. Miller, Henry, 106. Miners, the, 85; their gains, 112, 113; their laws, 120, 121; the miners of Roaring Camp, 163. See also Pioneers. Mining, primitive methods of, 158-160. See Pan-mining; Rocker, the; Sluce, the; River-bed mining. Mining laws, 120, 121. Ministers, in Pioneer California, 208, 302; Bret Harte's ministers, 208-212, 302. Mint, the U. S., California, Bret Harte as secretary of, 33; 34, 42, 52, 292. "Miss Edith," 310. "Miss Jo," 95. "Miss Mary," 246, 247. Missions, the Spanish, 212, 213. Missouri, its emigrants to California, 59, 63, 64. "M'liss," 33, 163, 208, 234, 269, 296. Montague, Henry W., 288. Monterey, 54, 149, 166, 187, 195. Monterey County, the sheep county, 190. Montreal, Bret Harte at, 240, 241. Morristown, N. J., 19; Bret Harte at, 233, 234, 237. "Mr. Adams Rightbody," 231. "Mr. Callender," 299, 328. _Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation_, 205. "Mr. John Oakhurst." See "John Oakhurst." "Mr. McKinstry," 83. _Mr. Thompson's Prodigal_, 326. "Mrs. Brimmer," 335. _Mrs. Bunker's Conspiracy_, 37. "Mrs. Burroughs," 77. "Mrs. Decker," 77, 175. "Mrs. MacGlowrie," 80, 248. "Mrs. McKinstry," 83, 84. _Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands_, 233. Mulford, Prentice, 39. Murders, frequency of, 130-131. Murdock, Charles A., 30. _My First Book_, 42. _My Friend the Tramp_, 230. Nadal, E. S., 341. Nature, as treated by Bret Harte, 27, 316-319; influence of, 80, 318. _Neighborhoods I have Moved From_, 40. Nevada County, vineyards in, 190. _New Assistant of Pine Clearing School, The_, 62. New Brunswick, N. J., home of the Hartes in, 12. New England, 245, 246; its humor, 303. New London, Conn., Bret Harte at, 234. New Orleans, ship-load of gamblers from, arrive in California, 168. New York City, Bernard Hart in, 4-6; the Congregation Shearith Israel in, 6; homes of Bernard Hart in, 6; sons of in, 6, 7; 9; boyhood home of Bret Harte, 11; Bret Harte in, 222, 232; lectures in, 239, 244. New York State, 1, 10. New York Stock Exchange Board, Bernard Hart secretary to, 5, 7. "New York Sunday Atlas," 16. New York "Tribune," 222. Newport, R. I., Bret Harte in, 232. _Newport Romance, A_, 232, 233. "News Letter," the, 51, 51 _n._ Newspapers, the first in California, 91, 195; editors of the early, 134, 192, 193, 194; tone of, 194, 195, 196. See under their respective titles. Newstead Abbey, Bret Harte a guest at, 275. Nicaragua, 17, 65. Nicasio Indians, the, 150. Nichols, Jonathan, 61. "Nigh onter," for nearly, 323. _Night at Hays', A_, 206. _Night on the Divide, A_, 97, 103, 249. "No-account," 322. "North Liberty," 245, 246. "Northern California," the, 30. "Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The," 236. Oakland, Cal., 18, 19, 165. Oatman, Olive, 73. _Office-Seeker, The_, 245. "Old Greenwood," 56, 57, 58. "Old Personal Responsibility," 137. "Old Virginia Gentlemen, The, and Other Sketches," cited, 192 _n._ "Old woman," for wife, 322. Oregon, 68. "Oregon and California in 1848," cited, 72. Oregon Trail, 68. "Ornery," 322. Osgood, James R., 231; contract with Bret Harte, 232. Ostrander, Elizabeth Rebecca. See Hart, Elizabeth Rebecca. Ostrander, Henry Philip, 10. Ostranders, home of, in New York, 11, 13. Ottawa, Bret Harte's lecture and stay there, 240. "Our Italy," cited, 104. _Outcasts of Poker Flat, The_, 48, 103, 162, 163, 165, 174, 233, 300, 317. "Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco," cited, 153. "Overland Monthly," the, 44, 46; Bret Harte its first editor, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52; its bear, 45; 215, 216, 275, 292, 312 _n._, 327. Oxford School of writers, 336. Padre Esteban, 212. Pan-mining, 158-159. Panama, 65, 66, 67. "Pard," 158. Parody in Bret Harte, 306. Parsloe, C. T., 234. "Parson Wynn," 302. _Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, A_, 174, 175. Pathos, 302. Peg-Leg Smith, 57. Pell, Mr., merchant, New York, 5. Pemberton, T. Edgar, on Bret Harte, 220, 229; his account of Bret Harte as a playwright, 234, 235; letter of Bret Harte to him, 267; collaborates with, as a dramatist, 286. Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," extracts from, 24, 29, 103, 228, 229, 239-244, 251, 253, 266, 275-276, 283, 291. "Pendennis," 293. "Perils, Pastimes and Pleasures of an Emigrant," cited, 92. "Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California," cited, 209. "Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California," cited, 107, 121, 122, 127, 132. "Peter Schroeder," 298, 328. Philadelphia, home of the Hartes in, 12. "Philandering," 321. _Phyllis of the Sierras, A_, 27, 28, 317, 341. Piatt, John J., 251. "Picayune," The, editor of in a duel, 193. Pike, Lieut. Zebulon M., 59. Pike County, "Piker," 59, 60, 62-64. "Pike County Ballads," 60. "Pioneer Times in California," cited, 55, 109, 126, 129. Pioneers, the, 30, 47, 52, 54-213; their youthfulness, 54; their good looks, 55; their intelligence, 55; their descendants, 55 _n._; their sufferings _en route_, 65; crossing the Plains, 65, 68-71; by sea, 66-68; their food, 69; their quarrels, 71, 72; their women and children, 74-84, 78, 140-151; varied employments of, 86-89; multiplicity of tongues among, 91; dress of, 97-98; energy of, 105; exuberance of, 106-109; misfortunes of, 111-113; courage of, 114-119; law-abidingness, 120-121; magnanimity, 127, 129; long beards of, 145; friendships among, 157-167; good manners common among, 173-174; literature among, 196-197; good taste of, 199; their humor, 303, 304; their dialect, 323-324. Pioneer women, 74-84; beauty in, 79; small feet of, 248. Pittsburgh, Bret Harte's lecture in, 240. Placerville, 111, 123, 146. _Plain Language from Truthful James_, 49. Plains, The, crossing them, 56, 60, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 167; a heroine of, 145; effect of the long journey upon women, 146, 147; wolves from the, as pets, 155. _Poet of Sierra Flat, The_, 232. Poker Flat, 103, 164, 176. Poor Man's Creek, 164. Prairie schooners, 70. Prepositions, superfluous, 323. Priests, the Spanish, 211, 213. _Princess Bob and Her Friends, The_, 232, 249. Prize-fights, and prize-fighters, 194. Providence, R. I., home of the Hartes in, 12. Publishers, Bret Harte's relations with, 232. "Punch," 197. Puritanism in California, 202, 203. "Put to," for harness, 324. Rabelais Club, London, 275. Rain, fall of, 103. Rainy season, 102, 103. "R'ar," 322. Reform Club, London, 271, 272. Reid, Sir Wemyss, 271; references to Bret Harte in his life of William Black, 271, 272. _Reincarnation, The, of Smith_, 188. _Relieving Guard_, 39, 313. Religion among the Pioneers, 200-202, 204, 205-206, 208. _Return of Belisarius, The_, 46 _n._ _Returned_, 46, 46 _n._ "Rev. Mr. Daws, the," 209. _Reveille, The_, 38, 39, 314. "Richelieu Sharpe," 27, 28, 29; the precocious love affairs of, 154. "Ridgway Dent," 81. River-bed mining, 160-161. "Rise," for ascend, 324. Road-agents, 22. Robson, Stuart, 234. Rocker, or cradle, the, in mining, 159. _Roger Catron's Friend_, 208. Rogue River, 30. Roman, Anton, 44, 45, 215. _Romance of Madroño Hollow, The_, 95, 232. Rombout, Francis, 8, 9. Rombout, Helena (Teller), 8. Rombout-Brett Association, 9. _Rose of Glenbogie, A_, 250, 270, 297. "Rose of Tuolumne," the, 78, 247, 300, 317. "Rosey Nott," 74. "Rowley Meade," 324. Royal Academy Banquet, Bret Harte's speech at, 259, 260. Royal Thames Yacht Club, London, 275. Royce, Josiah, Prof., 53, 86 _n._, 134, 152, 201. Ruskin, 316. "Russian Envoy, The," 149. Ryan, W. R., his "Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California," cited, 209. Sabe, savey, 323. Sacramento, 57, 152, 154, 155, 158; gambling in, 170, 172; fires and floods in, 188, 191; fighting editors of, 192; literature in, 197. Sacramento County, vineyards in, 190. Sacramento River, 200, 204. "Sacramento Transcript," the, 63, 108, 129, 142, 144, 151, 155, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 204, 205. St. George Society, 5. St. Kentigern, 269, 269 _n._ St. Louis, "Lucky Bill," a gambler from, 169; Bret Harte in, 241, 242. Salmon Falls, 152. "Salomy Jane," 80, 321. San Francisco, at the outbreak of the Civil War, 37, 38; Bret Harte in, 32; processions in, 98; animals in, 99; climate of, 101, 102; politics in, 116, 117; scarcity of women in, in '49, 141; the "hoodlum," 155; early citizens, 158; the gambling era in, 170-173; early development of public opinion and laws against gambling, 172-173; panic of 1851 in, 185; increase of crime in, 185; Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856 in, 186; great fires in, and incidents of, 186-187; 29 suicides in a single year, 190; its later atmosphere, 215, 217; Bret Harte's representation of, true, 288; Bret Harte's poem upon, 215, 315. "San Francisco Bulletin," the, 44, 138, 173, 195; tragic death of its editor, 116-117, 173. "San Francisco Call," the, 39, 134. "San Francisco Daily Herald," the, 36, 112 _n._, 173, 184, 193, 203. San Francisco gambling saloons, 140, 170. San Francisco horse races, 148. San Francisco hospital, 140. San José, 91, 143, 197, 198, 201. San Ramon Valley, 21. San Raphael, 33. Sanitary Commission, 38; the, and the gambler, 169. Santa Barbara, 149. Santa Clara, 198. Santa Clara Valley, 190. Santa Cruz, 123. Santa Cruz County, 89. Santa Fé, route to California, 68. _Sappho of Green Springs, A_, 177. "Sarah Walker," 335. Satire, 300. Saturday Club, the Boston, Dinner, 222, 229, 276. "Saturday Review," the, 313. "Scenes from El Dorado," cited, 158. Scotch characters of Bret Harte, 298. Scott, Sir Walter, 320, 328. "Scribner's Magazine," 244. Sea Cliff, Long Island, 252. Searls, Judge, 126. _Secret of Sobriente's Well, The_, 95. _Secret of Telegraph Hill, A_, 337. "Seeking the Golden Fleece," cited, 128, 129. Seixas, Benjamin Mendez, 6. Seixas, Gershom Mendez, rabbi, 6. Seixas, Zipporah. See Hart, Zipporah (Seixas). Semple, Dr. Robert, 196 _n._ Señoritas, 148. "Sepulvida, Don José," 94, 96. Serra, Father Junipéro, 212. Shakspere, in California, 198; his apprehension of human nature, 295; 321. Shepard, vice-consul, at Bradford, 271. _Ship of '49, A_, 54, 321. Shuck, O. T., his "Bench and Bar of California," cited, 128. _Sidewalkings_, 33. Sierra County, 103. Sierras, the, 68, 69; bears from the, as pets, 155, 161; 219. Simplicity, 313; compared with cultivation, 320. "Sir James Mac Fen," 270. "Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings," cited, 86, 113. Slavery, prohibited in California, 36. Sluce, the, in mining, 160. "Smellidge," 322. Smith, J. Cabot, 134. "Snapshot Harry," 345. Snow in California, 103, 104, 164. _Snow-Bound at Eagle's_, 103, 230. _Society upon the Stanislaus, The_, 44, 51 _n._ Solitude, 319, 320. Sonora, 131. Sonora County, 131. Sonora River, 160. Sopranos, absence of, among Bret Harte's heroines, 247. South-Western girl, the, 248. Southerners in California, 36, 37; resemblance to Spanish, 94, 95; 134, 135, 192. Southgate, Dr. Horatio, elected bishop, 201. Spanish in California, 93, 94; gravity of, 94; resemblance to Southerners, 94, 95; qualities of, 96; their longevity, 105; horsemanship, 199; the Spanish priest, 211, 212, 213. _Spelling Bee at Angels, The_, 310. Spencer, Herbert, his style, 331. Split infinitive, the, 339. "Springfield Republican," the, 236 _n._ Squatters, 114. Stage-Coaching in California, 21, 22, 22 _n._ Stanislaus Diggings, 30. Stanislaus Valley, the, 190. Starbottle, Col. See Colonel Starbottle. Steele, Henry Milford, 279. Steele, Jessamy (Harte), Bret Harte's older daughter, 279. "Stephen Masterton," 209, 209 _n._ Sterne, Lawrence, 295. Stevenson, R. L., 338. Stillman, Dr. J. D. B., his "Seeking the Golden Fleece," cited, 128, 129. Stockton, 98, 151, 190, 197, 198, 201. Stoddard, Charles W., 21, 32, 34, 39, 42, 48. _Story of M'liss, The_, 44. _Story of a Mine, The_, 340. Stuart, the robber, death of, 114-115. Style, Bret Harte's, 330-346; defects of, 330, 332, 336, 339; virtues of, 333-338, 343-346; his subtlety, 333-337; his style in poetry, 309, 313, 337-338; beauty in style, 338. Subtlety, as a quality of style, 333-336; Bret Harte's, 333-337; over-subtlety, 336, 337. _Sue_, produced in New York, 235. Sunday in California, 204. Supreme Court, Bret Harte's description of, 340. _Susy_, 296, 336. Swain, R. B., 33. Swett's Bar Company, 160. Swift, Frank, 60. Swift, Lindsay, his "Literary Landmarks of Boston," cited, 231. Swinburne, his metre copied by Bret Harte, 309. "Sydney Ducks," 92. _Tale of a Pony, The_, 308. _Tale of Three Truants, A_, 104. Tasajara County, the "cow county," 190. Tatnall, Commander, letter from to Bret Harte's mother, 15. Taylor, Bayard, his "El Dorado," cited, 64, 121. Taylor, the Rev. William, his "California Life," cited, 145. Tearful women, as described by Bret Harte, 335. Telegraph Hill, 143; pioneers watching from for the fortnightly mail-steamer, 145. Teller, William, 8. Temperance in early California, 205. "Tennessee," 159, 161-162, 318. _Tennessee's Partner_, 56, 63, 159, 161, 162, 165; the story suggested by a real incident, 165; 166, 233, 284, 294, 318. "Teresa," 148. Terry, Judge David S., 136. Thackeray, 18, 245; his creative imagination, 293, 295; 328. _Thankful Blossom_, 233, 245. Theatres in California, 198, 199. _Their Uncle from California_, 3. Thoreau, Henry D., 297, 318. Thorne, Charles R., 198. Thornton, William, alias "Lucky Bill," gambler, 169. Thornton, J. Quinn, his "Oregon and California in 1848," cited, 72. _Three Partners_, 249, 295, 296. "Three Years in California," Borthwick's, cited, 22 _n._, 94, 120; Colton's, cited, 58, 96, 122, 188, 203. _Through the Santa Clara Wheat_, 190, 333. "Tinka Gallinger," 158, 159, 247, 328. Tolstoi, 76, 208, 320. Toole, J. L., collaborates with Bret Harte, 235. Topeka, Bret Harte's lecture at, 241. Tourgueneff, 76, 77. _Transformation of Buckeye Camp, The_, 323. _Treasure of the Redwoods, A_, 159. "Trinidad Joe's" daughter, 78. Trinity Church, New York, 8. Trinity County, 21. Trollope, Anthony, 293. Truesdale, Abigail, 11. "Truthful James," 50, 305, 310. Tuolumne County, 165. Tuttletown, 50. "'Twixt," for between, 321. _Two Americans, The_, 11, 335. _Two Men of Sandy Bar_, produced in New York, 234. "Uncle Ben Dabney," 193. _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, 161, 166, 319. Underwood, Francis H., 273. Union, 24. Union College, Henry Hart at, 10, 18. "Union Mills," 317. University of California, 51, 216. _Unser Karl_, 262. Upham, S. C., his "Scenes in El Dorado," cited, 158. "Use," in the sense of employ, 321. Vallejo, Gen., 149. Van de Velde, Arthur, 274. Van de Velde, Mme., 2-3; her view of Bret Harte's departure from California, 217; in London, 274; translator of Bret Harte's stories, 274; her influence upon him and his art, 274; 282; her country seat at Camberley where he died, 283, 284. Van Wyck, Cornelius, 10. _Views from a German Spion_, 262, 263. Vigilance Committees, 90, 114, 115, 116, 117, 130, 136, 186, 216, 337. Virginia City, 132. "Visalia Delta, The," editor of, killed in street affray, 193. _Vision of the Fountain, A_, 79. Vocabulary, Bret Harte's, 321, 337. Voices, of Bret Harte's women, 247; his own voice, 2. Voyage to California, 65, 67. Vulgarity, definition of, 320. _Waif of the Plains, A_, 70, 73, 296. _Wan Lee, the Pagan_, 341. _Ward of the Golden Gate, A_, 155, 335. Warner, Charles Dudley, his "Our Italy," cited, 104, 105. Washington, Bret Harte lectures in, 239; his account of the Capitol at, 239. Watrous, Mrs. Charles, letter from, 215. Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 120, 297. Webb, Charles Henry, 39. West, the, its humor, 303. Western people, Bret Harte's impressions of, 243. West Point, 315. _When the Waters Were Up at "Jules',"_ 74, 78, 188. "Which," in the cockney sense, as used by Bret Harte, 326-327. _Who was my Quiet Friend?_ 338 _n._ Widows in Bret Harte's stories, 248. Wilkins, Mary, 83. Williams, Col. Andrew, Bret Harte's stepfather, 18-19. Wise, H. A., his "Los Gringos," cited, 150. Wombwell, Sir George, 271. Women, the Pioneer, 74-84, 150-151; respect for women in America, 77, 147, 148; development of beauty among the pioneer, 79; Bret Harte's literary treatment of, 247-250; his conventional women, 249; his army and navy women, 249; snobbishness of women, 250; Bret Harte's keen observation of, 334-336; his descriptions of beauty in, 334, 335. Woods, D. B., his "Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings," cited, 86, 113. Wyman, Margaret B. (Harte), Bret Harte's sister, 13, 17, 19, 32. "Yawpin'," 324. "Yerba Buena," 334. Yorkshire Club, York, Eng., first meeting of Bret Harte and William Black at, 271. Young Men's Association in Albany, 11. _Young Robin Gray_, 269, 270, 299. "Youngest Miss Piper," the, 160, 249. "Youngest Prospector in Calaveras," the, 27; not an uncommon child, 154; 208. "Yuba Bill," 22, 23, 83, 303, 329, 339. Yuba County, vineyards in, 190. Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. Punctuation has been corrected without note. The following misprints have been corrected: "newpapers" corrected to "newspapers" (page 17) "Fremont" standardized to "Frémont" (page 34) "beside" corrected to "besides" (page 80) Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. 
36720	----	produced from images generously made available by The Kentuckiana Digital Library) [Illustration: (cover)] [Illustration: George Cary Eggleston] RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1910 Copyright, 1910 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY _Published March, 1910_ TO MARION MY WIFE I DEDICATE THESE RECOLLECTIONS OF A LIFE THAT SHE HAS LOYALLY SHARED, ENCOURAGED, AND INSPIRED CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Introductory 1 II. The Country as I First Knew It--Intensity of Its Americanism--The Lure of New Orleans 2 III. Provincialism--A Travel Center--Road Conditions-- Mails--The Estrangement of Communities and Other Isolating Conditions 4 IV. The Composite West--Dialect--The Intellectual Class 7 V. The Sturdy Kentuckians and Their Influence 9 VI. A Poor Boy's Career 13 VII. "Shooting Stock" 14 VIII. A Limitless Hospitality 16 IX. Industrial Independence and Thrift 18 X. Early Railroads--A Precocious Skeptic--Religious Restriction of Culture 20 XI. Culture by Stealth 24 XII. Civilization on Wheels 26 XIII. A Breakfast Revolution 28 XIV. A Bathroom Episode 30 XV. Western School Methods 32 XVI. "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"--A Bit of Literary History 34 XVII. The Biggest Boy--A Vigorous Volunteer Monitor--Charley Grebe 38 XVIII. What's in a Name? 42 XIX. A Buttermilk Poet 43 XX. Removal to Virginia--Impressions of Life There--The Contradiction of the Critics in Their Creative Incredulity 45 XXI. The Virginian Life 48 XXII. The Virginian Attitude Toward Money--Parson J----'s Checks--The Charm of Leisureliness 49 XXIII. The Courtesy of the Virginians--Sex and Education--Reading Habits--Virginia Women's Voices 55 XXIV. The Story of the West Wing--A Challenge to the Ghosts--The Yellow-Gray Light--And Breakfast 60 XXV. Authors in Richmond--G. P. R. James, John Esten Cooke, Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie, John R. Thompson, etc.--John Esten Cooke, Gentleman--How Jeb Stuart Made Him a Major 66 XXVI. The Old Life in the Old Dominion and the New--An Old Fogy's Doubts and Questionings 72 XXVII. Under Jeb Stuart's Command--The Legend of the Mamelukes--The Life of the Cavaliers--Tristram Shandy Does Bible Duty--The Delights of the War Game and the Inspiration of It 76 XXVIII. Fitz Lee and an Adventure--A Friendly Old Foe 81 XXIX. Pestilence 86 XXX. Left Behind--A Gratuitous Law Practice Under Difficulties--The Story of Tom Collins--A Death-Bed Repentance and Its Prompt Recall 87 XXXI. Sharp-Shooter Service--Mortar Service at Petersburg--The Outcome of a Strange Story 93 XXXII. The Beginning of Newspaper Life--Theodore Tilton and Charles F. Briggs 99 XXXIII. Theodore Tilton 107 XXXIV. Further Reminiscences of Tilton 111 XXXV. The Tilton-Beecher Controversy--A Story as Yet Untold 115 XXXVI. My First Libel Suit 116 XXXVII. Libel Suit Experiences--The Queerest of Libel Suits--John Y. McKane's Case 119 XXXVIII. Early Newspaper Experiences--Two Interviews with President Grant--Grant's Method 123 XXXIX. Charlton T. Lewis 129 XL. Hearth and Home--Mary Mapes Dodge--Frank R. Stockton--A Whimsical View of Plagiary 131 XLI. Some Plagiarists I Have Known--A Peculiar Case of Plagiary--A Borrower from Stedman 139 XLII. The "Hoosier Schoolmaster's" Influence--Hearth and Home Friendships and Literary Acquaintance--My First Book--Mr. Howells and "A Rebel's Recollections"--My First After-Dinner Speech--Mr. Howells, Mark Twain, and Mr. Sanborn to the Rescue 145 XLIII. A Novelist by Accident--"A Man of Honor" and the Plagiarists of Its Title--A "Warlock" on the Warpath and a Lot of Fun Lost 151 XLIV. John Hay and the Pike County Ballads--His Own Story of Them and of Incidents Connected with Them 157 XLV. A Disappointed Author--George Ripley's Collection of Applications for His Discharge--Joe Harper's Masterpiece--Manuscripts and Their Authors--Mr. George P. Putnam's Story 166 XLVI. Joaquin Miller--Dress Reform à la Stedman 172 XLVII. Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration--Accident's Part in the Literary Life--My First Boys' Book--How One Thing Leads to Another 179 XLVIII. The First Time I Was Ever Robbed--The _Evening Post_ Under Mr. Bryant--An Old-Fashioned Newspaper--Its Distinguished Outside Staff--Its Regard for Literature--Newspaper Literary Criticism and the Critics of That Time--Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Idea of New York as a Place of Residence--My Own Appointment and the Strange Manner of It 186 XLIX. A Study of Mr. Bryant--The Irving Incident 194 L. Mr. Bryant's Tenderness Towards Poets--A Cover Commendation--How I Grieved a Poet--Anonymous Literary Criticism 199 LI. A Thrifty Poet's Plan--Mr. Bryant and the Poe Article--The Longfellow Incident--The Tupper Embarrassment 205 LII. Mr Bryant's _Index Expurgatorius_--An Effective Blunder in English--Mr. Bryant's Dignified Democracy--Mr. Cleveland's Coarser Method--Mr. Bryant and British Snobbery 209 LIII. The Newspaper Critic's Function--A Literary News "Beat"--Mr. Bryant and Contemporary Poets--Concerning Genius--The True Story of "Thanatopsis" 217 LIV. An Extraordinary Case of Heterophemy--The Demolition of a Critic 222 LV. Parke Godwin--"A Lion in a Den of Daniels"--The Literary Shop Again--Literary Piracy--British and American 227 LVI. The Way of Washington Officials--A Historical Discovery--A Period Out of Place--A Futile Effort to Make Peace--The "Intelligent Compositor" at His Worst--Loring Pacha--War Correspondents--The Tourist Correspondent--Loring's Story of Experience 234 LVII. "A Stranded Gold Bug"--Results of a Bit of Humor 247 LVIII. Mrs. Custer's "Boots and Saddles"--The Success and Failure of Books 252 LIX. Letters of Introduction--The Disappointment of Lily Browneyes--Mark Twain's Method--Some Dangerous Letters of Introduction--Moses and My Green Spectacles 255 LX. English Literary Visitors--Mr. Edmund Gosse's Visit--His Amusing Misconceptions--A Question of Provincialism--A Literary Vandal 265 LXI. The Founding of the Authors' Club--Reminiscences of Early Club Life--John Hay and Edwin Booth on Dime Novels 272 LXII. The Authors Club--Its Ways and Its Work--Watch-Night Frolics--Max O'Rell and Mark Twain--The Reckless Injustice of the Humorists--Bishop Potter's Opinion--The Club's Contribution of Statesmen and Diplomats--The Delight of the Authors Club "After the Authors Have Gone Home"--"Liber Scriptorum," the Club's Successful Publishing Venture 277 LXIII. In Newspaper Life Again--Editing the _Commercial Advertiser_--John Bigelow's Discouraging Opinion--Henry Marquand and Some of My Brilliant "Cubs"--Men Who Have Made Place and Name for Themselves--The Dread Task of the Editor-in-Chief--Yachting with Marquand and the Men I Met on Deck--Parke Godwin--Recollections of a Great and Good Man--A Mystery of Forgetting 286 LXIV. Newspapers Then and Now--The Pulitzer Revolution--The Lure of the _World_--A Little Dinner to James R. Osgood 300 LXV. Service on the _World_--John A. Cockerill--An Editorial Perplexity--Editorial Emergencies--In Praise of the Printers--Donn Piatt--"A Syndicate of Blackguards"--An Unmeant Crime 307 LXVI. First Acquaintance with Joseph Pulitzer--His Hospitality, Courtesy, Kindliness, and Generosity--His Intellectual Methods--The Maynard Case--Bryan's Message and Mr. Pulitzer's Answer--Extraordinary Political Foresight 319 LXVII. A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the Government--The Power of the Press 327 LXVIII. Recollections of Carl Schurz 333 LXIX. The End of Newspaper Life 337 LXX. My Working Ways--Extemporary Writing--The Strange Perversity of the People in Fiction--The Novelist's Sorest Perplexity--Working Hours and Working Ways--My Two Rules as to Literary Style 339 RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE I Mr. Howells once said to me: "Every man's life is interesting--to himself." I suppose that is true, though in the cases of some men it seems a difficult thing to understand. At any rate it is not because of personal interest in my own life that I am writing this book. I was perfectly sincere in wanting to call these chapters "The Autobiography of an Unimportant Man," but on reflection I remembered Franklin's wise saying that whenever he saw the phrase "without vanity I may say," some peculiarly vain thing was sure to follow. I am seventy years old. My life has been one of unusually varied activity. It has covered half the period embraced in the republic's existence. It has afforded me opportunity to see and share that development of physical, intellectual, and moral life conditions, which has been perhaps the most marvelous recorded in the history of mankind. Incidentally to the varied activities and accidents of my life, I have been brought into contact with many interesting men, and into relation with many interesting events. It is of these chiefly that I wish to write, and if I were minded to offer an excuse for this book's existence, this would be the marrow of it. But a book that needs excuse is inexcusable. I make no apology. I am writing of the men and things I remember, because I wish to do so, because my publisher wishes it, and because he and I think that others will be interested in the result. We shall see, later, how that is. This will be altogether a good-humored book. I have no grudges to gratify, no revenges to wreak, no debts of wrath to repay in cowardly ways; and if I had I should put them all aside as unworthy. I have found my fellow-men in the main kindly, just, and generous. The chief pleasure I have had in living has been derived from my association with them in good-fellowship and all kindliness. The very few of them who have wronged me, I have forgiven. The few who have been offensive to me, I have forgotten, with conscientiously diligent care. There has seemed to me no better thing to do with them. II It is difficult for any one belonging to this modern time to realize the conditions of life in this country in the eighteen-forties, the period at which my recollection begins. The country at that time was all American. The great tides of immigration which have since made it the most cosmopolitan of countries, had not set in. Foreigners among us were so few that they were regarded with a great deal of curiosity, some contempt, and not a little pity. Even in places like my native town of Vevay, Indiana, which had been settled by a company of Swiss immigrants at the beginning of the century, the feeling was strong that to be foreign was to be inferior. Those who survived of the original Swiss settlers were generously tolerated as unfortunates grown old, and on that account entitled to a certain measure of respectful deference in spite of their taint. [Sidenote: The Lure of New Orleans] To us in the West, at least, all foreigners whose mother tongue was other than English were "Dutchmen." There is reason to believe that this careless and inattentive grouping prevailed in other parts of the country as well as in the West. Why, otherwise, were the German speaking people of Pennsylvania and the mountain regions south universally known as "Pennsylvania Dutch?" And yet, in spite of the prevailing conviction that everything foreign was inferior, the people of the Ohio valley--who constituted the most considerable group of Western Americans--looked with unapproving but ardent admiration upon foreign life, manners, and ways of thinking as these were exemplified in New Orleans. In that early time, when the absence of bridges, the badness of roads, and the primitive character of vehicular devices so greatly emphasized overland distances, New Orleans was the one great outlet and inlet of travel and traffic for all the region beyond the mountain barrier that made the East seem as remote as far Cathay. Thither the people of the West sent the produce of their orchards and their fields to find a market; thence came the goods sold in the "stores," and the very money--Spanish and French silver coins--that served as a circulating medium. The men who annually voyaged thither on flat-boats, brought back wondering tales of the strange things seen there, and especially of the enormous wickedness encountered among a people who had scarcely heard of the religious views accepted among ourselves as unquestioned and unquestionable truth. I remember hearing a whole sermon on the subject once. The preacher had taken alarm over the eagerness young men showed to secure employment as "hands" on flat-boats for the sake of seeing the wonderful city where buying and selling on the Sabbath excited no comment. He feared contamination of the youth of the land, and with a zeal that perhaps outran discretion, he urged God-fearing merchants to abandon the business of shipping the country's produce to market, declaring that he had rather see all of it go to waste than risk the loss of a single young man's soul by sending him to a city so unspeakably wicked that he confidently expected early news of its destruction after the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah. The "power of preaching" was well-nigh measureless in that time and region, but so were the impulses of "business," and I believe the usual number of flat-boats were sent out from the little town that year. The merchants seemed to "take chances" of the loss of souls when certain gain was the stake on the other side, a fact which strongly suggests that human nature in that time and country was very much the same in its essentials as human nature in all other times and countries. III [Sidenote: A Travel Center] The remoteness of the different parts of the country from each other in those days is difficult to understand, or even fairly to imagine nowadays. For all purposes of civilization remoteness is properly measured, not by miles, but by the difficulty of travel and intercourse. It was in recognition of this that the founders of the Republic gave to Congress authority to establish "post offices and post roads," and that their successors lavished money upon endeavor to render human intercourse easier, speedier, and cheaper by the construction of the national road, by the digging of canals, and by efforts to improve the postal service. In my early boyhood none of these things had come upon us. There were no railroads crossing the Appalachian chain of mountains, and no wagon roads that were better than tracks over ungraded hills and quagmire trails through swamps and morasses. Measured by ease of access, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were at a greater distance from the dwellers in the West than Hong Kong or Singapore is now, while Boston was remoter than the mountains of the moon. There were no telegraphs available to us; the mails were irregular, uncertain, and unsafe. The wagons, called stagecoaches, that carried them, were subject to capture and looting at the hands of robber bands who infested many parts of the country, having their headquarters usually at some town where roads converged and lawlessness reigned supreme. One such town was Napoleon, Indiana. In illustration of its character an anecdote was related in my boyhood. A man from the East made inquiry in Cincinnati concerning routes to various points in the Hoosier State, and beyond. "If I want to go to Indianapolis, what road do I take?" he asked. "Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the road northwest." "If I want to go to Madison?" "Go to Napoleon, and take the road southwest." "Suppose I want to go to St. Louis?" "Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the national road west." And so on, through a long list, with Napoleon as the starting point of each reply. At last the man asked in despair: "Well now, stranger, suppose I wanted to go to Hell?" The stranger answered without a moment's hesitation, "Oh, in that case, just go to Napoleon, and stay there." That is an episode, as the reader has probably discovered. To return to the mails. It was not until 1845, and after long agitation, that the rate on letters was reduced to five cents for distances less than three hundred miles, and ten cents for greater distances. Newspaper postage was relatively even higher. The result of these conditions was that each quarter of the country was shut out from everything like free communication with the other quarters. Each section was isolated. Each was left to work out its own salvation as best it might, without aid, without consultation, without the chastening or the stimulation of contact and attrition. Each region cherished its own prejudices, its own dialect, its own ways of living, its own overweening self-consciousness of superiority to all the rest, its own narrow bigotries, and its own suspicious contempt of everything foreign to itself. In brief, we had no national life in the eighteen-forties, or for long afterwards,--no community of thought, or custom, or attitude of mind. The several parts of the country were a loose bundle of segregated and, in many ways, antagonistic communities, bound together only by a common loyalty to the conviction that this was the greatest, most glorious, most invincible country in the world, God-endowed with a mental, moral, and physical superiority that put all the rest of earth's nations completely out of the reckoning. We were all of us Americans--intense, self-satisfied, self-glorifying Americans--but we had little else in common. We did not know each other. We had been bred in radically different ways. We had different ideals, different conceptions of life, different standards of conduct, different ways of living, different traditions, and different aspirations. The country was provincial to the rest of the world, and still more narrowly provincial each region to the others. IV [Sidenote: The Composite West] I think, however, that the West was less provincial, probably, and less narrow in its views and sympathies than were New England, the Middle States, and the South at that time, and this for a very sufficient reason. The people in New England rarely came into contact with those of the Middle and Southern States, and never with those of the West. The people of the Middle States and those of the South were similarly shut within themselves, having scarcely more than an imaginary acquaintance with the dwellers in other parts of the country. The West was a common meeting ground where men from New England, the Middle States, and the South Atlantic region constituted a varied population, representative of all the rest of the country, and dwelling together in so close a unity that each group adopted many of the ways and ideas of the other groups, and correspondingly modified its own. These were first steps taken toward homogeneity in the West, such as were taken in no other part of the country in that time of little travel and scanty intercourse among men. The Virginians, Carolinians, and New Englanders who had migrated to the West learned to make and appreciate the apple butter and the sauerkraut of the Pennsylvanians; the pie of New England found favor with Southerners in return for their hoecake, hominy, chine, and spareribs. And as with material things, so also with things of the mind. Customs were blended, usages were borrowed and modified, opinions were fused together into new forms, and speech was wrought into something different from that which any one group had known--a blend, better, richer, and more forcible than any of its constituent parts had been. In numbers the Virginians, Kentuckians, and Carolinians were a strong majority in the West, and the so-called "Hoosier dialect," which prevailed there, was nearly identical with that of the Virginian mountains, Kentucky, and the rural parts of Carolina. But it was enriched with many terms and forms of speech belonging to other sections. Better still, it was chastened by the influence of the small but very influential company of educated men and women who had come from Virginia and Kentucky, and by the strenuous labors in behalf of good English of the Yankee school-ma'ams, who taught us by precept to make our verbs agree with their nominatives, and, per contra, by unconscious example to say "doo," "noo," and the like, for "dew," "new," etc. The prevalence of the dialect among the uneducated classes was indeed, though indirectly, a ministry to the cause of good English. The educated few, fearing contamination of their children's speech through daily contact with the ignorant, were more than usually strict in exacting correct usage at the hands of their youngsters. I very well remember how grievously it afflicted my own young soul that I was forbidden, under penalty, to say "chimbly" and "flanner" for "chimney" and "flannel," to call inferior things "ornery," to use the compromise term "'low"--abbreviation of "allow,"--which very generally took the place of the Yankee "guess" and the Southern "reckon," and above all to call tomatoes "tomatices." It is of interest to recall the fact that this influential class of educated men and women, included some really scholarly persons, as well as a good many others who, without being scholarly, were educated and accustomed to read. Among the scholarly ones, within the purview of my memory, were such as Judge Algernon S. Stevens, Judge Algernon S. Sullivan, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, the Hendrickses, the Stapps, the Rev. Hiram Wason, my own father, and Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, a very brilliant woman, who taught school for love of it and wrote books that in our time would have given her something more than the provincial reputation she shared with Alice and Phoebe Cary, and some others. V [Sidenote: The Sturdy Kentuckians] Of still greater consequence, perhaps, so far as influence upon their time and country was concerned, were the better class of Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio to become sharers in the future of the great Northwest. These were mostly men of extraordinary energy--physical and mental--who had mastered what the Kentucky schoolmasters could teach them, and had made of their schooling the foundation of a broader education the dominant characteristic of which was an enlightenment of mind quite independent of scholarly acquisition. These men were thinkers accustomed, by habit and inheritance, to look facts straight in the face, to form their own opinions untrammeled by tradition, unbiased by fine-spun equivocation, and wholly unrestrained in their search for truth by conventional hobbles of any kind. Most of them had more or less Scotch-Irish blood in their veins, and were consequently wholesome optimists, full of courage, disposed to righteousness of life for its own sake, and resolutely bent upon the betterment of life by means of their own living. Most of them numbered one or more Baptist or Methodist preachers among their ancestry--men of healthy minds and open ones, men to whom religion was far less a matter of emotion than of conduct, men who did the duty that lay next to them--be it plowing or praying, preaching or fighting Indians or Englishmen--with an equal mind. Men of such descent were educated by environment in better ways than any that schools can furnish. From infancy they had lived in an atmosphere of backwoods culture,--culture drawn in part from such books as were accessible to them, and in greater part from association with the strong men who had migrated in early days to conquer the West and make of it a princely possession of the Republic. The books they had were few, but they were the very best that English literature afforded, and they read them over and over again with diligence and intelligence until they had made their own every fecundative thought the books suggested. Then they went away, and thought for themselves, with untrammeled freedom, of the things thus presented to their minds. I have sometimes wondered if their method of education, chiefly by independent thinking, and with comparatively little reverence for mere "authority," might not have been better, in its character-building results at least, than our modern, more bookish process. That question does not concern us now. What I wish to point out is the fact that the country owes much to the influence of these strong men of affairs and action, whose conviction that every man owes it to his fellow-men so to live that this may be a better world for other men to live in because of his having lived in it, gave that impulse to education which later made Indiana a marvel and a model to the other states in all that concerns education. Those men believed themselves and their children entitled to the best in schooling as in everything else, and from the very beginning they set out to secure it. [Sidenote: Early Educational Impulses] If a wandering schoolmaster came within call, they gave him a schoolhouse and a place to live in, and bade him "keep school." When he had canvassed the region round about for "scholars," and was ready--with his ox gads--to open his educational institution, the three or four of these men whose influence pervaded and dominated the region round about, said a word or two to each other, and made themselves responsible for the tuition fees of all the boys and girls in the neighborhood whose parents were too poor to pay. In the same spirit, years later, when an effort was made to establish colleges in the state, these men or their children who had inherited their impulse, were prompt to furnish the money needed, however hard pressed they might be for money themselves. I remember that my mother--the daughter of one of the most conspicuous of the Kentuckians--when she was a young widow with four children to bring up on an income of about $250 a year, subscribed $100 to the foundation of Indiana Asbury University, becoming, in return, the possessor of a perpetual scholarship, entitling her for all time to maintain a student there free of tuition. It was with money drawn from such sources that the colleges of Indiana were founded. Under the influence of these Kentuckians, Virginians, and men of character who in smaller numbers had come out from New England and the Middle States, there was from the first an impulse of betterment in the very atmosphere of the West. Even the "poor whites" of the South who had migrated to the Northwest in pursuit of their traditional dream of finding a land where one might catch "two 'possums up one 'simmon tree," were distinctly uplifted by the influence of such men, not as a class, perhaps, but in a sufficient number of individual cases to raise the average level of their being. The greater number of these poor whites continued to be the good-natured, indolent, unthrifty people that their ancestors had always been. They remained content to be renters in a region where the acquisition of land in independent ownership was easy. They continued to content themselves with an inadequate cultivation of their crops, and a meager living, consequent upon their neglect. They continued to give to shooting, fishing, and rude social indulgences the time they ought to have given to work. But their children were learning to read and write, and, better still, were learning by observation the advantages of a more industrious living, and when the golden age of steamboating came, they sought and found profitable employment either upon the river or about the wharves. The majority of these were content to remain laborers, as deckhands and the like, but in some of them at least ambition was born, and they became steamboat mates, pilots, and, in some cases, the captains and even the owners of steamboats. On the whole, I think the proportion of the class of people who thus achieved a higher status, bettering themselves in enduring ways was quite as large as it ever is in the history of an unfortunate or inferior class of men. In the generations that have followed some at least of the descendants of that "poor white" class, whose case had always been accounted hopeless, have risen to distinction in intellectual ways. One distinguished judge of our time, a man now of national reputation, is the grandson of a poor white who negligently cultivated land rented from a relative of my own. His father was my schoolmate for a season, and was accounted inferior by those of us who were more fortunately descended. So much for free institutions in a land of hope, opportunity, and liberty, where the "pursuit of happiness" and betterment was accounted an "unalienable right." VI [Sidenote: A Poor Boy's Career] In another case that comes home to me for reasons, the betterment was more immediate. My maternal grandfather, the old Kentuckian, George Craig, whose name is preserved in many ways in the geographical nomenclature of Southern Indiana, had an abundantly large family of children. But with generously helpful intent it was his habit to adopt bright boys and girls whose parents were poverty-stricken, in order to give them such education as was available in that time and country, or, in his favorite phrase, to "give them a show in the world." One of these adopted boys was the child of parents incredibly poor. When he came to my grandfather the boy had never seen a tablecloth or slept in a bed. He knew nothing of the uses of a knife and fork. A glass tumbler was to him a wonder thing. He could neither read nor write, though he was eleven years of age. The towel given to him for use on his first introduction to the family was an inscrutable mystery until one of the negro servants explained its uses to him. Less than a score of years later that boy was a lawyer of distinction, a man of wide influence, a state senator of unusual standing, and chairman of the committee that investigated and exposed the frauds perpetrated upon the state in the building of the Madison and Indianapolis railroad--the first highway of its kind constructed within the state. In one sense, he owed all this to George Craig. In a truer sense he owed it to his own native ability, which George Craig was shrewd enough to discover in the uncouth and ignorant boy, and wise enough to give its opportunity. VII It was a common practice of the thrifty and well-to-do of that time, thus to adopt the children of their poorer neighbors and bring them up as members of their own families. Still more common was the practice of taking destitute orphans as "bound boys" or "bound girls." These were legally bound to service, instead of being sent to the poorhouse, but in practical effect they became members of the families to whose heads they were "bound," and shared in all respects the privileges, the schooling, and everything else that the children of the family enjoyed. They were expected to work, when there was work to be done, but so was every other member of the family, and there was never the least suggestion of servile obligation involved or implied. I remember well the affection in which my mother's "bound girls" held her and us children, and the way in which, when they came to be married, their weddings were provided for precisely as if they had been veritable daughters of the house. On one of those occasions it was rumored in the village, that a "shiveree"--Hoosier for charivari--was to mark the event. My father, whose Virginian reverence for womanhood and marriage and personal dignity, was prompt to resent that sort of insult, went to a neighbor and borrowed two shotguns. As he carried them homeward through the main street of the village, on the morning before the wedding, he encountered the ruffian who had planned the "shiveree," and was arranging to carry it out. The man asked him, in surprise, for my father was a studious recluse in his habits, if he were going out after game. [Sidenote: "Shooting Stock"] "No," my father replied. "It is only that a very worthy young woman, a member of my family, is to be married at my house to-night. I hear that certain 'lewd fellows of the baser sort' are planning to insult her and me and my family with what they call a 'shiveree.' If they do anything of the kind, _I am going to fire four charges of buckshot into the crowd_." As my father was known to be a man who inflexibly kept his word, there was no "shiveree" that night. That father of mine was a man of the gentlest spirit imaginable, but at the same time a man of resolute character, who scrupulously respected the rights and the dignity of others, and insistently demanded a like respect for his own. Quite episodically, but in illustration of the manners of the time, I may here intrude an incident, related to me many years afterwards by Judge Taylor, a venerable jurist of Madison. My father was looking about him for a place in which to settle himself in the practice of law. He was temporarily staying in Madison when a client came to him. The man had been inveigled into a game of cards with some sharpers, and they had worked off some counterfeit money upon him. He purposed to sue them. My father explained that the law did not recognize the obligation of gambling debts, and the man replied that he knew that very well, but that he wanted to expose the rascals, and was willing to spend money to that end. The case came before Judge Taylor. My father made an eloquently bitter speech in exposition of the meanness of men who--the reader can imagine the rest. It was to make that speech that the client had employed the young lawyer, and, in Judge Taylor's opinion he "got his money's worth of gall and vitriol." But while the speech was in progress, the three rascals became excited and blustering under the castigation, and he, the judge, overheard talk of "shooting the fellow"--to wit my father. Just as the judge was meditating measures of restraint that might be effective at a time when most men were walking arsenals, he heard one of them hurriedly warn his fellows in this wise: "Say--you'd better not talk too much about shooting--they tell me that young lawyer comes from Virginia, and he _may be of shooting stock_." The Virginians had a reputation for quickness on trigger in that region. The warning was sufficient. The three gamblers took their punishment and slunk away, and there was no assassination. VIII The readiness with which the well-to-do men of that region adopted or otherwise made themselves responsible for the bringing up of destitute children, was largely due to the conditions of life that prevailed in that time and country. There was no considerable expense involved in such adoption. The thrifty farmer, with more land than he could possibly cultivate, produced, easily, all the food that even a multitudinous family could consume. He produced also the wool, the flax, and the cotton necessary for clothing, and these were carded, spun, woven, and converted into garments for both sexes by the women folk of the home. Little, if anything, was bought with actual money, and in the midst of such abundance an extra mouth to feed and an extra back to clothe counted for next to nothing, while at that time, when work, on everybody's part, was regarded quite as a matter of course, the boy or girl taken into a family was easily able to "earn his keep," as the phrase was. Nevertheless, there was a great-hearted generosity inspiring it all--a broadly democratic conviction that everybody should have a chance in life, and that he who had should share with his brother who had not, freely and without thought of conferring favor. [Sidenote: A Limitless Hospitality] It was upon that principle, also, that the hospitality of that time rested. There was always an abundance to eat, and there was always a bed to spare for the stranger within the gates; or if the beds fell short, it was always easy to spread a pallet before the fire, or, in extreme circumstances, to make the stranger comfortable among a lot of quilts in a corn-house or hay-mow. It was my grandfather's rule and that of other men like him, to provide work of some sort for every one who asked for it. An extra hoe in summer was always of use, while in winter there was corn to be shelled, there were apples to be "sorted," tools to be ground, ditches to be dug, stone fences to be built, wood to be chopped, and a score of other things to be done, that might employ an extra "hand" profitably. Only once in all his life did George Craig refuse employment to a man asking for it. On that occasion he gave supper, lodging, and breakfast to the wayfarer; but during the evening the man complained that he had been walking all day with a grain of corn in his shoe, and, as he sat before the fire, he removed it, to his great relief but also to his undoing as an applicant for permanent employment. For the energetic old Kentuckian could conceive of no ground of patience with a man who would walk all day in pain rather than take the small trouble of sitting down by the roadside and removing the offending grain of corn from his shoe. "I have no use," he said, "for a man as lazy as that." Then his conscience came to the rescue. "I can't hire a lazy fellow like you for wages," he said; "but I have a ditch to be dug. There will be fifteen hundred running feet of it, and if you choose, I'll let you work at it, at so much a foot. Then if you work you'll make wages, while if you don't there'll be nothing for me to lose on you but your keep, and I'll give you that." The man decided to move on. IX The life of that early time differed in every way from American life as men of the present day know it. The isolation in which every community existed, compelled a degree of local self-dependence the like of which the modern world knows nothing of. The farmers did most things for themselves, and what they could not conveniently do for themselves, was done for them in the villages by independent craftsmen, each cunningly skilled in his trade and dependent upon factories for nothing. In my native village, Vevay, which was in nowise different from other Western villages upon which the region round about depended for supplies, practically everything wanted was made. There were two tinsmiths, who, with an assistant or two each, in the persons of boys learning the trade, made every utensil of tin, sheet-iron, or copper that was needed for twenty-odd miles around. There were two saddlers and harnessmakers; two or three plasterers; several brick masons; several carpenters, who knew their trade as no carpenter does in our time when the planing mill furnishes everything already shaped to his hand, so that the carpenter need know nothing but how to drive nails or screws. There was a boot- and shoe-maker who made all the shoes worn by men, women, and children in all that country, out of leather bought of the local tanner, to whom all hides were sold by their producers. There was a hatter who did all his own work, whose vats yielded all the headgear needed, from the finest to the commonest, and whose materials were the furs of animals caught or killed by the farmers' boys and brought to town for sale. There was even a wireworker, who provided sieves, strainers, and screenings of every kind, and there was a rope walk where the cordage wanted was made. [Sidenote: Industrial Independence] In most households the women folk fashioned all the clothes worn by persons of either sex, but to meet the demand for "Sunday bests" and that of preachers who must wear broadcloth every day in the week, and of extravagant young men who wished to dazzle all eyes with "store clothes," there was a tailor who year after year fashioned garments upon models learned in his youth and never departed from. No such thing as ready-made clothing or boots or shoes--except women's slippers--was known at the time of which I now write. Even socks and stockings were never sold in the shops, except upon wedding and other infrequent occasions. For ordinary wear they were knitted at home of home-spun yarn. The statement made above is scarcely accurate. Both socks and stockings were occasionally sold in the country stores, but they were almost exclusively the surplus products of the industry of women on the farms round about. So were the saddle blankets, and most of the bed blankets used. Local self-dependence was well-nigh perfect. The town depended on the country and the country on the town, for nearly everything that was eaten or woven or otherwise consumed. The day of dependence upon factories had not yet dawned. The man who knew how to fashion any article of human use, made his living by doing the work he knew how to do, and was an independent, self-respecting man, usually owning his comfortable home, and destined by middle age to possess a satisfactory competence. Whether all that was economically or socially better than the system which has converted the independent, home-owning worker into a factory hand, living in a tenement and carrying a dinner pail, while tariff tribute from the consumer makes his employer at once a millionaire and the more or less despotic master of a multitude of men--is a question too large and too serious to be discussed in a book of random recollections such as this. But every "strike" raises that question in the minds of men who remember the more primitive conditions as lovingly as I do. As a matter of curious historical interest, too, it is worth while to recall the fact that Henry Clay--before his desire to win the votes of the Kentucky hemp-growers led him to become the leading advocate of tariff protection--used to make eloquent speeches in behalf of free trade, in which he drew horrifying pictures of life conditions in the English manufacturing centers, and invoked the mercy of heaven to spare this country from like conditions in which economic considerations should ride down social ones, trample the life out of personal independence, and convert the home-owning American workman into a mere "hand" employed by a company of capitalists for their own enrichment at cost of his manhood except in so far as the fiat of a trades union might interpose to save him from slavery to the employing class. Those were interesting speeches of Henry Clay's, made before he sacrificed his convictions and his manhood to his vain desire to become President. X [Sidenote: The Early Railroad] At the time of my earliest recollections there was not a mile of railroad in Indiana or anywhere else west of Ohio, while even in Ohio there were only the crudest beginnings of track construction, on isolated lines that began nowhere and led no whither, connecting with nothing, and usually failing to make even that connection. He who would journey from the East to the West, soon came to the end of the rails, and after that he must toilsomely make his way by stagecoach across the mountains, walking for the most part in mud half-leg deep, and carrying a fence rail on his shoulder with which to help the stalled stagecoach out of frequent mires. Nevertheless, we heard much of the railroad and its wonders. It was our mystery story, our marvel, our current Arabian Nights' Entertainment. We were told, and devoutly believed, that the "railcars" ran at the rate of "a mile a minute." How or why the liars of that early period, when lying must have been in its infancy as an art, happened to hit upon sixty miles an hour as the uniform speed of railroad trains, I am puzzled to imagine. But so it was. There was probably not in all the world at that time a single mile of railroad track over which a train could have been run at such a speed. As for the railroads in the Western part of this country, they were chiefly primitive constructions, with tracks consisting of strap iron--wagon tires in effect--loosely spiked down to timber string pieces, over which it would have been reckless to the verge of insanity to run a train at more than twelve miles an hour under the most favorable circumstances. But we were told, over and over again, till we devoutly believed it--as human creatures always believe what they have been ceaselessly told without contradiction--that the "railcars" always ran at the rate of a mile a minute. The first railroad in Indiana was opened in 1847. A year or two later, my brother Edward and I, made our first journey over it, from Madison to Dupont, a distance of thirteen miles. Edward was at that time a victim of the faith habit; I was beginning to manifest a skeptical, inquiring tendency of mind which distressed those responsible for me. When Edward reminded me that we were to enjoy our first experience of traveling at the rate of a mile a minute, I borrowed his bull's-eye watch and set myself to test the thing by timing it. When we reached Dupont, alter the lapse of ninety-six minutes, in a journey of thirteen miles, I frankly declared my unbelief in the "mile a minute" tradition. There was no great harm in that, perhaps, but the skeptical spirit of inquiry that had prompted me to subject the matter to a time test, very seriously troubled my elders, who feared that I was destined to become a "free thinker," as my father had been before me, though I was not permitted to know that. I was alarmed about my skeptical tendencies myself, because I believed the theology and demonology taught me at church, having no means of subjecting them to scientific tests of any kind. I no longer believed in the "mile a minute" tradition, as everybody around me continued to do, but I still believed in the existence and malign activity of a personal devil, and I accepted the assurance given me that he was always at my side whispering doubts into my ears by way of securing the damnation of my soul under the doctrine of salvation by faith. The tortures I suffered on this account were well-nigh incredible, for in spite of all I might do or say or think, the doubts continued to arise in my mind, until at last I awoke to the fact that I was beginning to doubt the doctrine of salvation by faith itself, as a thing stultifying to the mind, unreasonable in itself, and utterly unjust in its application to persons like myself, who found it impossible to believe things which they had every reason to believe were not true. [Sidenote: A Precocious Skeptic] Fortunately I was young and perfectly healthy, and so, after a deal of psychological suffering I found peace by reconciling myself to the conviction that I was foreordained to be damned in any case, and that there was no use in making myself unhappy about it. In support of that comforting assurance I secretly decided to accept the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination instead of the Methodist theory of free will in which I had been bred. I had to make this change of doctrinal allegiance secretly, because its open avowal would have involved a sound threshing behind the smoke-house, with perhaps a season of fasting and prayer, designed to make the castigation "take." I remember that when I had finally made up my mind that the doctrine of predestination was true, and that I was clearly one of those who were foreordained to be damned for incapacity to believe the incredible, I became for a time thoroughly comfortable in my mind, very much as I suppose a man of business is when he receives his discharge in bankruptcy. I felt myself emancipated from many restraints that had sat heavily on my boyish soul. Having decided, with the mature wisdom of ten or a dozen years of age, that I was to be damned in any case, I saw no reason why I should not read the fascinating books that had been forbidden to me by the discipline of the Methodist Church, to which I perforce belonged. In that early day of strenuous theological requirement, the Methodist Church disapproved of literature as such, and approved it only in so far as it was made the instrument of a propaganda. Its discipline required that each person upon being "received into full membership"--the Methodist equivalent of confirmation--should take a vow not "to read such books or sing such songs as do not pertain to the glory of God." I quote the phrase from memory, but accurately I think. That prohibition, as interpreted by clerical authority at the time, had completely closed to me the treasures of the library my scholarly father had collected, and to which, under his dying instructions, my mother had added many scores of volumes of the finest English literature, purchased with the money for which his law books had been sold after his death. I had read a little here and there in those books, and had been fascinated with the new world they opened to my vision, when, at the ripe age of ten or twelve years, I was compelled by an ill-directed clerical authority to submit myself to the process of being "received into full membership," under the assumption that I had "reached the age of responsibility." After that the books I so longed to read were forbidden to me--especially a set entitled "The British Drama," in which appeared the works of Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a long list of other classics, filling five thick volumes. By no ingenuity of construction could such books be regarded as homilies in disguise, and so they were Anathema. So was Shakespeare, and so even was Thiers' "French Revolution," of which I had devoured the first volume in delight, before the inhibition fell upon me, blasting my blind but eager aspiration for culture and a larger knowledge of the world and of human nature. XI [Sidenote: Culture by Stealth] After I made up my mind to accept damnation as my appointed portion, I felt myself entirely free to revel at will in the reading that so appealed to my hungry mind; free, that is to say, so far as my own conscience was concerned, but no freer than before so far as the restraints of authority could determine the matter. I had no hesitation in reading the books when I could do so without being caught at it, but to be caught at it was to be punished for it and, worse still, it was to have the books placed beyond my reach, a thing I dreaded far more than mere punishment. Punishment, indeed, seemed to me nothing more than a small advance upon the damnation I must ultimately suffer in any case. The thing to be avoided was discovery, because discovery must lead to the confiscation of my books, the loss of that liberty which my acceptance of damnation had given to me. To that end I practised many deceits and resorted to many subterfuges. I read late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I smuggled books out into the woods and hid them there under the friendly roots of trees, so that I might go out and read them when I was supposed to be engaged in a search for ginseng, or in a hunt for the vagrant cow, to whose unpunctuality in returning to be milked I feel that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired. The clerical hostility to literature endured long after the period of which I have been writing, long after the railroad and other means of freer intercourse had redeemed the West from its narrow provincialism. Even in my high school days, when our part of the country had reached that stage of civilization that hangs lace curtains at its windows, wears store clothes of week days, and paints garden fences green instead of white, we who were under Methodist dominance were rigidly forbidden to read fiction or anything that resembled fiction, with certain exceptions. The grown folk of our creed permitted themselves to read the inane novels of the Philadelphia tailor, T. S. Arthur; the few young men who "went to college," were presumed to be immune to the virus of the Greek and Latin fictions they must read there--probably because they never learned enough of Greek or Latin to read them understandingly--and finally there were certain polemic novels that were generally permitted. Among these last the most conspicuous example I remember was a violently anti-Roman Catholic novel called "Danger in the Dark," which had a vogue that the "best-sellers" of our later time might envy. It was not only permitted to us to read that--it was regarded as our religious duty in order that we might learn to hate the Catholics with increased fervor. The religious animosities of that period, with their relentless intolerance, their unreason, their matchless malevolence, and their eagerness to believe evil, ought to form an interesting and instructive chapter in some history of civilization in America, whenever a scholar of adequate learning and the gift of interpretation shall undertake that work. But that is a task for some Buckle or Lecky. It does not belong to a volume of random reminiscences such as this is. XII [Sidenote: Civilization on Wheels] Though the railroads, when at last they came to us, failed utterly in their promise of transportation at the rate of "a mile a minute," they did something else, presently, that was quite as remarkable and far worthier in its way. They ran down and ran over, and crushed out of existence a provincialism that had much of evil promise and very little of present good in it. With their coming, and in some degree in advance of their coming, a great wave of population poured into the West from all quarters of the country. The newcomers brought with them their ideas, their points of view, their convictions, their customs, and their standards of living. Mingling together in the most intimate ways, socially and in business pursuits, each lost something of his prejudices and provincialism, and gained much by contact with men of other ways of thinking and living. Attrition sharpened the perceptions of all and smoothed away angles of offense. A spirit of tolerance was awakened such as had never been known in the Western country before, and as the West became populous and prosperous, it became also more broadly and generously American, more truly national in character, and more accurately representative of all that is best in American thought and life than any part of the country had ever been. It represented the whole country and all its parts. The New Englanders, the Virginians, the Pennsylvanians, the Carolinians, the Kentuckians, who were thus brought together into composite communities with now and then an Irish, a French, a Dutch, or a German family, a group of Switzers, and a good many Scotchmen for neighbors and friends, learned much and quickly each from all the others. Better still, each unlearned the prejudices, the bigotries, and the narrownesses in which he had been bred, and life in the great West took on a liberality of mind, a breadth of tolerance and sympathy, a generous humanity such as had never been known in any of the narrowly provincial regions that furnished the materials of this composite population. It seems to me scarcely too much to say that real Americanism, in the broad sense of the term, had its birth in that new "winning of the West," which the railroads achieved about the middle of the nineteenth century. With the coming of easier and quicker communication, not only was the West brought into closer relations with the East, but the West itself became quickly more homogeneous. There was a constant shifting of population from one place to another, much traveling about, and a free interchange of thought among a people who were eagerly alert to adopt new ideas that seemed in any way to be better than the old. As I recall the rapid changes of that time it seems to me that the betterments came with a rapidity rarely if ever equaled in human history. A year or two at that time was sufficient to work a revolution even in the most conservative centers of activity. Changes of the most radical kind and involving the most vital affairs, were made over-night, as it were, and with so little shock to men's minds that they ceased, almost immediately, to be topics of conversation. The old had scarcely passed away before it was forgotten, and the new as quickly became the usual, the ordinary, the familiar order of things. XIII I do not mean to suggest that the West, or indeed any other part of the country, at once put aside all its crudities of custom and adopted the ways of living that we are familiar with in this later time. All that has been a thing of gradual accomplishment, far slower in its coming than most people realize. I remember that when Indianapolis became a great railroad center and a city of enormous proportions--population from 15,000 to 20,000, according to the creative capacity of the imagination making the estimate--a wonderful hotel was built there, and called the Bates House. Its splendors were the subject of wondering comment throughout the West. It had washstands, with decorated pottery on them, in all its more expensive rooms, so that a guest sojourning there need not go down to the common washroom for his morning ablution, and dry his hands and face on a jack-towel. There were combs and brushes in the rooms, too, so that if one wanted to smooth his hair he was not obliged to resort to the appliances of that sort that were hung by chains to the washroom walls. [Sidenote: A Breakfast Revolution] Moreover, if a man going to the Bates House for a sojourn, chose to pay a trifle extra he might have a room all to himself, without the prospect of being waked up in the middle of the night to admit some stranger, assigned by the hotel authorities to share his room and bed. All these things were marvels of pretentious luxury, borrowed from the more "advanced" hostelries of the Eastern cities, and as such they became topics of admiring comment everywhere, as illustrations of the wonderful progress of civilization that was taking place among us. But all these subjects of wonderment shrank to nothingness by comparison, when the proprietors of the Bates House printed on their breakfast bills of fare, an announcement that thereafter each guest's breakfast would be cooked after his order for it was given, together with an appeal for patience on the part of the breakfasters--a patience that the proprietors promised to reward with hot and freshly prepared dishes. This innovation was so radical that it excited discussion hotter even than the Bates House breakfasts. Opinions differed as to the right of a hotel keeper to make his guests wait for the cooking of their breakfasts. To some minds the thing presented itself as an invasion of personal liberty and therefore of the constitutional rights of the citizen. To others it seemed an intolerable nuisance, while by those who were ambitious of reputation as persons who had traveled and were familiar with good usage, it was held to be a welcome advance in civilization. In approving it, they were able to exploit themselves as persons who had not only traveled as far as the state capital, but while there had paid the two dollars a day, which the Bates House charged for entertainment, instead of going to less pretentious taverns where the customary charge of a dollar or a dollar and a half a day still prevailed, and where breakfast was put upon the table before the gong invited guests to rush into the dining room and madly scramble for what they could get of it. In the same way I remember how we all wondered over the manifestation of luxury made by the owners of a newly built steamboat of the Louisville and Cincinnati Mail Line, when we heard that the several staterooms were provided with wash-basins. That was in the fifties. Before that time, two common washrooms--one for men and the other for women--had served all the passengers on each steamboat, and, as those washrooms had set-bowls with running water, they were regarded as marvels of sumptuousness in travel facilities. It was partly because of such luxury, I suppose, that we called the steamboats of that time "floating palaces." They seemed so then. They would not impress us in that way now. Perhaps fifty years hence the great ocean liners of the present, over whose perfection of equipment we are accustomed to wonder, will seem equally unworthy. Such things are comparative and the world moves fast. XIV [Sidenote: A Bathroom Episode] The crudities here referred to, however, are not properly to be reckoned as belonging exclusively to the West, or as specially indicative of the provincialism of the West. At that time and for long afterward, it was usual, even in good hotels throughout the country, to assign two men, wholly unacquainted with each other, to occupy a room in common. It was expected that the hotel would provide a comb and brush for the use of guests in each room, as the practice of carrying one's own toilet appliances of that kind had not yet become general. Hotel rooms with private bathrooms adjoining, were wholly unknown before the Civil War, and the practice of taking a daily bath was very uncommon indeed. A hotel guest asking for such a thing would have been pointed out to bystanders as a curiosity of effete dandyism. Parenthetically, I may say that as late as 1886 I engaged for my wife and myself a room with private bath on the first floor of the Nadeau House, then the best hotel in Los Angeles, California. The man at the desk explained that the bathroom did not open directly into the room, but adjoined it and was accessible from the dead end of the hallway without. We got on very well with this arrangement until Saturday night came, when, as I estimated the number, all the unmarried men of the city took turns in bathing in my private bathroom. When I entered complaint at the desk next morning, the clerk evidently regarded me as a monster of arrogant selfishness. He explained that as I had free use of the bathroom every day and night of the week, I ought not to feel aggrieved at its invasion by other cleanly disposed persons on "the usual night for taking a bath." The experience brought two facts to my attention: first, that in the opinion of the great majority of my fellow American citizens one bath a week was quite sufficient, and, second, that the fixed bathtub, with hot and cold water running directly into it, is a thing of comparatively modern use. I suppose that in the eighteen-fifties, and quite certainly in the first half of that decade, there were no such appliances of luxurious living in any but the very wealthiest houses, if even there. Persons who wanted an "all-over bath," went to a barber shop for it, if they lived in a city, and, if they lived elsewhere, went without it, or pressed a family washtub into friendly service. So, too, as late as 1870, in looking for a house in Brooklyn, I found it difficult to get one of moderate rent cost, that had other water supply than such as a hydrant in the back yard afforded. XV To return to the changes wrought in the West by the construction of railroads and the influx of immigration from all parts of the country. In nothing else was the improvement more rapid or more pronounced than in education. Until the early fifties, and even well into them, educational endeavors and educational methods were crude, unorganized, wasteful of effort, and utterly uncertain of result. From the very beginning the desire for education had been alert and eager in the West, and the readiness to spend money and effort in that behalf had been unstinted. But the means were lacking and system was lacking. More important still there was lack of any well-considered or fairly uniform conception of what education ought to aim at or achieve. In the rural districts schools were sporadic and uncertain. When a "master" was available "school kept," and its chief activity was to teach the spelling of the English language. Incidentally it taught pupils to read and the more advanced ones--ten per cent. of all, perhaps, to write. As a matter of higher education rudimentary arithmetic had a place in the curriculum. Now and then a schoolmaster appeared who essayed other things in a desultory way but without results of any consequence. In the villages and towns the schools were usually better, but even there the lack of any well-ordered system was a blight. [Sidenote: School Methods] The schoolmasters were frequently changed, for one thing, each newcoming one bringing his own notions to bear upon problems that he was not destined to remain long enough to solve. Even in the more permanent schools, kept by very young or superannuated preachers, or by Irish schoolmasters who conducted them on the "knock down and drag out" system, there was no attempt to frame a scheme of education that should aim at well conceived results. In every such school there were two or three boys taking "the classical course," by which was meant that without the least question or consideration of their fitness to do so, they had dropped all ordinary school studies and were slowly plodding along in rudimentary Latin, in obedience to some inherited belief on the part of their parents that education consists in studying Latin, that there is a benediction in a paradigm, and that fitness for life's struggle is most certainly achieved by the reading of "Historia Sacra," "Cornelius Nepos," and the early chapters of "Cæsar's Commentaries on the Gallic War." Other pupils, under the impression that they were taking a "scientific course," were drilled in Comstock's Physiology and Natural Philosophy, and somebody's "Geography of the Heavens." The rest of the school--plebeians all--contented themselves with reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and a vain attempt to master the mysteries and mists of Kirkham's Grammar. The railroads quickly changed all this. They brought into the West men and women who knew who Horace Mann was, and whose conceptions of education in its aims and methods were definite, well ordered, and aggressive. These set to work to organize graded school systems in the larger towns, and the thing was contagious, in a region where every little town was confidently ambitious of presently becoming the most important city in the state, and did not intend in the meantime to permit any other to outdo it in the frills and furbelows of largeness. With preparatory education thus organized and systematized, and with easy communication daily becoming easier, the ambition of young men to attend colleges and universities was more and more gratified, so that within a very few years the higher education--so far as it is represented by college courses--became common throughout the country, while for those who could not achieve that, or were not minded to do so, the teaching of the schools was adapted, as it never had been before, to the purpose of real, even if meager education. Even in the remotest country districts a new impetus was given to education, and the subjection of the schools there to the supervision of school boards and professional superintendents worked wonders of reformation. For one thing the school boards required those who wished to serve as teachers to pass rigid examinations in test of their fitness, so that it was no longer the privilege of any ignoramus who happened to be out of a job to "keep school." In addition to this the school boards prescribed and regulated the courses of study, the classification of pupils, and the choice of text-books, even in country districts where graded schools were not to be thought of, and this supervision gave a new and larger meaning to school training in the country. XVI It was my fortune to be the first certified teacher under this system in a certain rural district where the old haphazard system had before prevailed, and my experience there connects itself interestingly, I think, with a bit of literary history. It was the instigation of my brother, Edward Eggleston's, most widely popular story, "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," which in its turn was the instigation of all the fascinating literature that has followed it with Hoosier life conditions for its theme. [Sidenote: "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"] My school district lay not many miles from the little town in which my family lived, and as I had a good pair of legs, well used to walking, I went home every Friday night, returning on Monday morning after a four o'clock breakfast. On these week-end visits it was my delight to tell of the queer experiences of the week, and Edward's delight to listen to them while he fought against the maladies that were then threatening his brave young life with early extinction. Years afterwards he and I were together engaged in an effort to resuscitate the weekly illustrated newspaper _Hearth and Home_, which had calamitously failed to win a place for itself, under a number of highly distinguished editors, whose abilities seemed to compass almost everything except the art of making a newspaper that people wanted and would pay for. Of that effort I shall perhaps have more to say in a future chapter. It is enough now to say that the periodical had a weekly stagnation--it will not do to call it a circulation--of only five or six thousand copies, nearly half of them gratuitous, and it had netted an aggregate loss of many thousands of dollars to the several publishers who had successively made themselves its sponsors. It was our task--Edward's and mine--to make the thing "pay," and to that end both of us were cudgeling our brains by day and by night to devise means. One evening a happy thought came to Edward and he hurriedly quitted whatever he was doing to come to my house and submit it. "I have a mind, Geordie," he said, "to write a three number story, called 'The Hoosier Schoolmaster,' and to found it upon your experience at Riker's Ridge." We talked the matter over. He wrote and published the first of the three numbers, and its popularity was instant. The publishers pleaded with him, and so did I, to abandon the three number limitation, and he yielded. Before the serial publication of the story ended, the subscription list of _Hearth and Home_ had been many times multiplied and Edward Eggleston was famous. He was far too original a man, and one possessed of an imagination too fertilely creative to follow at all closely my experiences, which had first suggested the story to him. He made one or two personages among my pupils the models from which he drew certain of his characters, but beyond that the experiences which suggested the story in no way entered into its construction. Yet in view of the facts it seems to me worth while to relate something of those suggestive experiences. I was sixteen years old when I took the school. Circumstances had compelled me for the time to quit college, where, despite my youthfulness, I was in my second year. The Riker's Ridge district had just been brought under supervision of the school authorities at Madison. A new schoolhouse had been built and a teacher was wanted to inaugurate the new system. I applied for the place, stood the examinations, secured my certificate, and was appointed. [Sidenote: The Riker's Ridge District] On my first appearance in the neighborhood, the elders there seemed distinctly disappointed in the selection made. They knew the school history of the district. They remembered that the last three masters had been "licked" by stalwart and unruly boys, the last one so badly that he had abandoned the school in the middle of the term. They strongly felt the need, therefore, of a master of mature years, strong arms, and ponderous fists as the person chosen to inaugurate the new system. When a beardless boy of sixteen presented himself instead, they shook their heads in apprehension. But the appointment had been made by higher authority, and they had no choice but to accept it. Appreciating the nature of their fears, I told the grave and reverend seigniors that my schoolboy experience had shown my arms to be stronger, my fists heavier, and my nimbleness greater perhaps than they imagined, but that in the conduct of the school I should depend far more upon the diplomatic nimbleness of my wits than upon physical prowess, and that I thought I should manage to get on. There was silence for a time. Then one wise old patriarch said: "Well, may be so. But there's Charley Grebe. You wouldn't make a mouthful for him. Anyhow, we'll see, we'll see." Charley Grebe was the youth who had thrashed the last master so disastrously. Thus encouraged, I went to my task. The neighborhood was in no sense a bad one. There were none of the elements in it that gave character to "Flat Creek" as depicted in "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." The people were all quiet, orderly, entirely reputable folk, most of them devotedly pious. They were mainly of "Pennsylvania Dutch" extraction, stolid on the surface but singularly emotional within. But the school traditions of the region were those of the old time, when the master was regarded as the common enemy, who must be thwarted in every possible way, resisted at every point where resistance was possible, and "thrashed" by the biggest boy in school if the biggest boy could manage that. There was really some justification for this attitude of the young Americans in every such district. For under the old system, as I very well remember it, the government of schools was brutal, cruel, inhuman in a degree that might in many cases have excused if it did not justify a homicidal impulse on the part of its victims. The boys of the early time would never have grown into the stalwart Americans who fought the Civil War if they had submitted to such injustice and so cruel a tyranny without making the utmost resistance they could. XVII I began my work with a little friendly address to the forty or fifty boys and girls who presented themselves as pupils. I explained to them that my idea of a school was quite different from that which had before that time prevailed in that region; that I was employed by the authorities to teach them all I could, by way of fitting them for life, and that I was anxious to do that in the case of every boy and girl present. I expressed the hope that they in their turn were anxious to learn all I could teach them, and that if any of them found their studies too difficult, I would gladly give my time out of school hours to the task of discovering the cause of the difficulty and remedying it. I explained that in my view government in a school should have no object beyond that of giving every pupil opportunity to learn all he could, and the teacher opportunity to teach all he could. I frankly abolished the arbitrary rule that had before made of whispering a grave moral offense, and substituted for it a request that every pupil should be careful not to disturb the work of others in any way, so that we might all make the most of our time and opportunity. It was a new gospel, and in the main it fell upon deaf ears. A few of the pupils were impressed by its reasonableness and disposed to meet the new teacher half way. The opinion of the majority was expressed by one boy whom I overheard at recess when he said to one of his fellows: [Sidenote: The Biggest Boy] "He's skeered o' Charley Grebe, an' he's a-tryin' to soft-sawder us." The first day or two of school were given to the rather perplexing work of classifying pupils whose previous instruction had been completely at haphazard. During that process I minutely observed the one foe against whom I had received more than one warning--Charley Grebe. He was a young man of nearly twenty-one, six feet, one or two inches high, broad-shouldered, muscular, and with a jaw that suggested all the relentless determination that one young man can hold. When I questioned him with a view to his classification, he was polite enough in his uninstructed way, but exceedingly reserved. On the whole he impressed me as a young man of good natural ability, who had been discouraged by bad and incapable instruction. After he had told me, rather grudgingly I thought, what ground his studies had covered, he suddenly changed places with me and became the questioner. "Say," he broke out, interrupting some formal question of mine, "Say, do you know anything in fact? Do you know Arithmetic an' Algebra an' Geometry and can you really teach me? or are you just pretending, like the rest?" I thought I understood him and I guessed what his experience had been. I assured him that there was nothing in Arithmetic that I could not teach him, that I knew my Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and could help him to learn them, if he really desired to do so. Then adopting something of his own manner I asked: "What is it you want me to do, Charley? Say what you have to say, like a man, and don't go beating about the bush." For reply, he said: "I want to talk with you. It'll be a long talk. I want you to go home with me to-night. Father said I might invite you. Will you come?" There was eager earnestness in his questions, but there was also a note of discouragement, if not quite of despair in his tone. I agreed at once to go with him for the night, and, taking the hand he had not thought of offering, I added: "If there is any way in which I can help you, Charley, I'll do it gladly." Whether it was the unaccustomed courtesy, or the awakening of a new hope, or something else, I know not, but the awkward, overgrown boy seemed at once to assume the dignity of manhood, and while he had never been taught to say "thank you" or to use any other conventionally polite form of speech, he managed to make me understand by his manner that he appreciated my offer, and a few minutes later, school having been dismissed, he and I set out for his home. There he explained his case to me. He wanted to become a shipwright--a trade which, in that time of multitudinous steamboat building on the Western rivers, was the most inviting occupation open to a young man of energy. He had discovered that a man who wished to rise to anything like a mastery in that trade must have a good working knowledge of Arithmetic, elementary Algebra, Geometry, and at least the rudiments of Trigonometry. He had wanted to learn these things and some of his previous schoolmasters had undertaken to teach them, with no result except presently to reveal to him their own ignorance. His father permitted him six months more of schooling. He had "sized me up," he said, and he believed I could teach him what he wanted to learn. But could he learn it within six months? That was what he wanted me to tell him. I put him through a close examination in Arithmetic that night--consuming most of the night--and before morning I had satisfied myself that he was an apt pupil who, with diligence and such earnest determination as he manifested, could learn what he really needed of mathematics within the time named. [Sidenote: A Vigorous Volunteer Monitor] "You can do it, Charley, if you work hard, and I'll help you, in school hours and out," was my final verdict. "It's a bargain," he said, and that was all he said. But a day or two later a boy in school--a great, hulking fellow whose ugliness of disposition I had early discerned--made a nerve-racking noise by dragging his pencil over his slate in a way that disturbed the whole school. I bade him cease, but he presently repeated the offense. Again I rebuked him, but five minutes or so later he defiantly did the thing again, "just to see if the master dared," he afterward explained. Thereupon Charley Grebe arose, seized the fellow by the ear, twisted that member until its owner howled with pain, and then, hurling him back into his seat, said: "_You heard the master! You'll mind him after this or I'll make you._" The event fairly appalled the school. The thought that Charley Grebe was on the master's side, and actively helping him to maintain discipline, seemed beyond belief. But events soon confirmed it. There was a little fellow in the school whom everybody loved, and whose quaint, childish ways afterwards suggested the character of "Shocky" in "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." There was also a cowardly brute there whose delight it was to persecute the little fellow on the playground in intolerable ways. I sought to stop the thing. To that end I devised and inflicted every punishment I could think of, short of flogging, but all to no purpose. At last I laid aside my convictions with my patience, and gave the big bully such a flogging as must have impressed his mind if he had had anything of the kind about his person. That day, at the noon recess, the big bully set to work to beat the little boy unmercifully in revenge for what I had done for his protection. I was looking out through a Venetian blind, with intent to go to the rescue, when suddenly Charley Grebe, who was playing town ball threw down the bat, seized the fellow, threw him across his knees, pinioned his legs with one of his own, and literally wore out a dozen or more thick blue ash shingles over that part of his victim's body which was made for spanking. When at last he released the blubbering object of his wrath he slapped his jaws soundly and said: "Don't you go a-whining to the master about this. If you do it'll be a good deal wuss for you. I'm a-takin' this here job off the master's hands." I gave no hint that I had seen or heard. But from that hour forth no boy in the school ever gave me the smallest trouble by misbehavior. The school perfectly understood that Charley Grebe was "a-takin' this here job off the master's hands," and the knowledge was sufficient. After that only the big girls--most of them older than I was--gave me trouble. I met it with the explanation that I could never think of punishing a young woman, and that I must trust to their honor and courtesy, as girls who expected presently to be ladies, for their behavior. The appeal was a trifle slow in eliciting a response, but in the end it answered its purpose. XVIII [Sidenote: What's in a Name?] While I was enrolling and classifying the pupils, I encountered a peculiarly puzzling case. There were five John Riddels in the school, and I found that all of them were sons of the same man, whose name also was John Riddel. No one of them had a middle name or any other sort of name by which he might be distinguished from his brothers. On the playground they were severally known as "Big John Riddel," "John Riddel," "Johnny Riddel," "Little John Riddel," and "Little Johnny Riddel," while their father was everywhere known as "Old John Riddel," though he was a man under fifty, I should say. He lived near, in a stone house, with stone barns and out-houses, an ingeniously devised milk-house, and a still more ingeniously constructed device for bringing water from the spring under the hill into his dwelling. In brief his thrift was altogether admirable, and the mechanical devices by which he made the most of every opportunity, suggested a fertilely inventive mind on the part of a man whose general demeanor was stolid to the verge of stupidity. When I was taking supper at his house one night by special invitation, I asked him why he had named all his sons John. For reply he said: "John is a very good name," and that was all the explanation I ever got out of him. XIX One pupil I had at Riker's Ridge, was Johnny G. His people had some money and Johnny had always dressed better than the rest of us could afford to do, when several years before, he and I had been classmates in the second or third grade of the Grammar School in Madison. Johnny had never got out of that grade, and even when I was in my second year in college, he gave no promise of ever making a scholastic step forward. But he had relatives on Riker's Ridge, and when he heard that I was to be the teacher there he promised his people that he would really make an effort if they would let him live with his relatives there and become my pupil. It was so arranged, and Johnny came to me, with all his dazzling waistcoats and trousers with the latest style of pockets, and all the rest of the upholstery with which he delighted to decorate his person. I think he really did make an effort to master the rudimentary school studies, and I conscientiously endeavored to help him, not only in school but of evenings. For a time there seemed to be a reasonable promise of success in lifting Johnny to that level of scholastic attainment which would permit him to return to Madison and enter the High School. But presently all this was brought to naught. Johnny was seized by a literary ambition that completely absorbed what mind he had, and made his school studies seem to him impertinent intrusions upon the attention of one absorbed in higher things. He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him, intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons. "I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine." "Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much of it have you written?" "I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the tune to it myself." "Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it." "Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got much of it done yet--only one line, in fact." [Sidenote: A Buttermilk Poet] Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded: "Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is." "Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm.' Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm'--why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'--don't it sing? 'With a _pit_-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a _pit_-cher of _but_-termilk--un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!" I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what became of that buttermilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if I were minded to be cynical--as I am not--I might mention a few magazine poets whose pitchers of buttermilk seem to me--but all that is foreign to the purpose of this book. Before quitting this chapter and the period and region to which it relates, I wish to record that Charley Grebe mastered the mathematics he needed, and entered hopefully upon his apprenticeship to a ship carpenter. I hope he rose to the top in the trade, but I know nothing about it. XX Not many months after my school-teaching experience came to an end, circumstances decreed that my life should be changed in the most radical way possible in this country. I quitted the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West, and became a dweller upon the old family plantation in Virginia, where my race had been bred and nurtured ever since 1635 when the first man of my name to cross the seas established himself there and possessed himself of lavishly abundant acres which subsequent divisions among his descendants had converted into two adjoining plantations--the ancestral homes of all the Egglestons, so far, at least, as I knew them or knew of them. I suppose I was an imaginative youth at seventeen, and I had read enough of poetry, romance, and still more romantic history, to develop that side of my nature somewhat unduly. At any rate it was strongly dominant, and the contrast between the seething, sordid, aggressive, and ceaselessly eager life of the West, in which I had been bred and the picturesquely placid, well-bred, self-possessed, and leisurely life into which the transfer ushered me, impressed me as nothing else has ever done. It was like escaping from the turmoil of battle to the green pastures, and still waters of the Twenty-third Psalm. It was like passing from the clamor of a stock exchange into the repose of a library. I have written much about that restful, refined, picturesque old Virginia life in essays and romances, but I must write something more of it in this place at risk of offending that one of my critics who not long ago discovered that I had created it all out of my own imagination for the entertainment of New England readers. He was not born, I have reason to believe, until long after that old life had passed into history, but his conviction that it never existed, that it was _a priori_ impossible, was strong enough to bear down the testimony of any eye-witness's recollection. [Sidenote: Creative Incredulity] It has often been a matter of chastening wonder and instruction to me to observe how much more critics and historians can learn from the intuitions of their "inner consciousness" than was ever known to the unfortunates who have had only facts of personal observation and familiar knowledge to guide them. It was only the other day that a distinguished historian of the modern introspective, self-illuminating school upset the traditions of many centuries by assuring us that the romantic story of Antony and Cleopatra is a baseless myth; that there never was any love affair between the Roman who has been supposed to have "madly flung a world away" for worship of a woman, and the "Sorceress of the Nile"--the "star-eyed Egyptian" who has been accused of tempting him to his destruction; that Cleopatra merely hired of Antony the services of certain legions that she needed for her defense, and paid him for them in the current money of the time and country. Thus does the incredulous but infallible intuition of the present correct the recorded memory of the past. I have no doubt that some day the country will learn from that sort of superior consciousness that in the Virginia campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor, where men are now believed to have fought and marched so heroically with empty bellies and often with unshod feet, there were in fact no such discomforts incident to the discussion; that Grant and Lee like the courteous commanders they were, suspended the argument of arms at the dinner hour each day in order that their men might don evening clothes and patent leather shoes and sit down to banquets of eleven courses, with _pousse cafés_ and cigars at the end. Nevertheless, I shall write of the old Virginia life as I remember it, and let the record stand at that until such time as it shall be shown by skilled historical criticism that the story of the Civil War is a sun myth and that the old life which is pictured as having preceded it was the invention of the romance writers. XXI The first thing that impressed me in that old life, when I was thrust into it, was its repose, the absence of stress or strain or anxious anticipation, the appreciation of to-morrow as the equal of to-day for the doing of things and the getting of things done. My trunks had missed connection somewhere on the journey, and I thought of telegraphing about the matter. My uncle, the master of the plantation and head of the family, discouraged that, and suggested that I should go fishing in a neighboring creek instead. The telegraph office was six miles away. He had never sent a telegram in his life. He had no doubt the trunks would come along to-morrow or next day, and the fish in the creek were just then biting in encouraging fashion. That was my first lesson, and it impressed me strongly. Where I had come from nobody would have thought of resting under the uncertainty or calmly contemplating the unwarranted delay. Here nobody thought of doing anything else, and as the trunks did in fact come the next day without any telegraphing or hurry or worry, I learned that it was just as well to go fishing as to go fussing. [Sidenote: The Virginian Way] The restful leisureliness of the life in Virginia was borne in upon me on every hand, I suppose my nerves had really been upon a strain during all the seventeen years that I had lived, and the relief I found in my new surroundings doubtless had much to do with my appreciation of it all. I had been used to see hurry in everything and everybody; here there was no such thing as hurry. Nobody had a "business engagement" that need interfere with anything else he was minded to do. "Business," indeed, was regarded as something to be attended to on the next court day, when all men having affairs to arrange with each other were sure to meet at the Court-House--as the county seat village was usually called. Till then it could wait. Nobody was going to move away. Everybody was "able to owe his debts." Why bother, then, to make a journey for the settlement of a matter of business which could wait as well as not for next court day to come round? It was so much pleasanter to stay at home, to entertain one's friends, to ride over the plantation, inspecting and directing crop work, to take a gun and go after squirrels or birds or turkeys, to play backgammon or chess or dominoes in the porch, to read the new books that everybody was talking about, or the old ones that Virginians loved more--in brief, there was no occasion for hurry, and the Virginians wasted none of their vital force in that way. The very houses suggested repose. They had sat still upon their foundations for generations past, and would go on doing so for generations to come. The lawns were the growth of long years, with no touch of recent gardeners' work about them. The trees about the house grounds had been in undisputed possession there long before the grandfathers of the present generation were born. There was nowhere any suggestion of newness, or rawness, of change actual or likely to come. There were no new people--except the babies--and nobody ever dreamed of changing his residence. XXII Another thing that peculiarly impressed me, coming as I did from a region where the mart was the center about which all life's activities circled, was the utter absence of talk about money or the things that relate to money. Practically there was no money in use among the planter folk, except when a journey to distant points required the lining of a purse. Except in the very smallest way the planters never used money in their daily lives. They rarely bought anything directly, and they never thought of selling anything except in planter fashion through accredited agencies. Once a year they shipped the tobacco and the wheat their fields had produced, to the city, for a commission merchant to sell. The commission merchant held a considerable part of the proceeds to the planter's credit, and when the planter wanted anything of consequence he simply wrote to the commission merchant to buy it for him. The rest of the money from the sale of the plantation products was deposited in bank to the planter's account. If the women folk went to town on a shopping expedition, they bought whatever they wanted in the stores and had it "charged," for every planter's credit was limitless in the shops. When the bill was rendered, which was never in a hurry, the planter drew a check in discharge of it. He had no "blank check" book. No such thing was known in that community. He simply wrote his check at top of a sheet of foolscap, stating in it what it was for, and courteously asking the bank "please" to pay the amount. Then he carefully cut off the remainder of the sheet and put it away as an economy of paper. The next time he drew a check or anything of the sort, he took a fresh sheet of paper for the purpose and carefully laid away all that was not used of it. Thus was his instinct of economy gratified, while his lordly sense of liberality in the use of material things was not offended. When he died, the drawers filled with large and small fragments of foolscap sheets were cleared out and left for his successor to fill in his turn. [Sidenote: Parson J----'s Checks] This custom of paying by check so strongly commended itself to a certain unworldly parson of my time, that he resorted to it on one occasion in entire ignorance and innocence of the necessity of having a bank deposit as a preliminary to the drawing of checks. He went to Richmond and bought a year's supplies for his little place--it was too small to be called a plantation--and for each purchase he drew a particularly polite check. When the banks threw these out, on the ground that their author had no account, the poor old parson found the situation a difficult one to understand. He had thought that the very purpose of a bank's being was to cash checks for persons who happened to be short of money. "Why, if I'd had the money in the bank," he explained, "I shouldn't have written the checks at all; I should have got the money and paid the bills." Fortunately the matter came to the knowledge of a well-to-do and generous planter who knew parson J. and who happened to be in Richmond at the time. His indorsement made the checks good, and saved the unworldly old parson a deal of trouble. The planters were not all of them rich by any means. Hardly one of those in Virginia had possessions that would to-day rank him even among moderately rich men. But they were scrupulously honorable men, they were men of reasonable property, and their credit rested firmly upon the fact that they were able to pay and the equally important fact that they meant to pay. They lived lavishly, but the plantation itself furnished most of the materials of the lavishness, so that there was no extravagance in such living. For the rest they had a sufficient regard for those who were to come after them to keep the total volume of the debt upon the estate within such limits as the estate could easily stand. What I wish to emphasize here is that the methods of their monetary transactions were such as to make of money a very infrequent subject of consideration in their lives and conversations. Economically it would have been better for them if things had been otherwise, but socially, the utter absence of pecuniary flavor from their intercourse, lent a peculiar charm to it, especially in the eyes and mind of a youth brought up as I had been in an atmosphere positively grimy with the soot of monetary considerations. There was hardly one of those plantations whose utterly waste products were not worth more in the markets near at hand than were the tobacco and wheat which alone the planters sold. When I came into the practice of law a few years later, and had charge of the affairs of a number of estates, I brought this matter of waste to the attention of my clients, with all the earnestness I could put into my pleading. I showed them prices current to prove that if they chose to market their surplus apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lambs, pigs, poultry, and dairy products, all of which they gave away or suffered to go to waste, they might discharge their hereditary debts at once and build up balances in bank. They had sagacity enough to understand the facts, but not one of them would ever consent to apply them practically. It would be "Yankee farming," was the ready reply, and that was conclusive. It was not the custom of the planters to sell any but staple products, and they were planters, not farmers. [Sidenote: The Charm of Leisureliness] All these things helped, when I first came into relations with them, to impress my young mind with the poise, the picturesqueness, the restful leisureliness of the Virginian life, and the utter absence from it of strenuousness, and still more of sordidness. For the first time in my life I was living with people who thought of money only on those annual or other occasions when they were settling their affairs and paying their debts by giving notes for their sum; people who regarded time not as something to be economized and diligently utilized for the sake of its money value, but as a means of grace, if I may so speak without irreverence; as an opportunity of enjoyment, for themselves and for others; as a thing to be spent with the utmost lavishness in the doing of things agreeable, in the reading of books that pleased, in the riding of horses that put the rider upon his metal to match their tameless spirit, in the cultivation of flowers, in the improvement of trees by grafting and budding, and even in the idler pleasures of tossing grace hoops, or hotly maintaining an indoor contest at battledore and shuttlecock when it rained heavily. These and a score of other pastimes seemed good in the eyes of the Virginian men and women. The men went shooting or fox hunting or hare coursing, or fishing, each in its season. The women embroidered and knitted nubias, and made fancy work, and they walked long miles when not riding with escorts, and dug much in the ground in propagation of the flowers they loved. They kept house, too, with a vigilance born of the fact that in keeping house they were also keeping plantation. For they must not only supervise the daily dispensation of foodstuffs to all the negroes, but they must visit and personally care for the sick, the aged, the infirm, and the infantile among the black people. They must put up fruits and jams and pickles and ketchups and jellies and shrubs and cordials enough to stock a warehouse, in anticipation of the plantation needs. They must personally cut out and direct the making of all the clothing to be worn by the blacks on the plantation, for the reason that the colored maids, seamstresses and dressmakers who were proud to fashion the gowns of their young mistresses, simply would not "work for de field hands,"--meaning the negroes of the plantation. Yet with it all these women were never hurried, never scant of time in which to do anything that might give pleasure to another. I never knew one of them to plead preoccupation as a reason for not going riding or walking, or rendering some music, or joining in a game, or doing anything else that others wanted her to do. The reason for all this was simple enough. The young women who kept house--and it was usually the young women who did so--were up and at it before the dawn. By the time that the eight-thirty or nine o'clock breakfast was served, all their necessary work was done for the day; often it was done in time to let them take a ride before breakfast if the young man suggesting it happened to be an agreeable fellow. After all was done upon which that day's conduct of the house and the plantation depended, the gentlewomen concerned adopted the views of their masculine mentors and exemplars. They accepted to-morrow as a good enough stalking horse for to-day, and, having laid out their work well in advance, they exacted of their servitors that the morrow's morning should begin with a demonstration of to-day's work well done. So they, too, had leisure, just as the meal hours had. I had been brought up on five or six o'clock breakfasts, eleven-thirty or twelve o'clock dinners, and early suppers. Here the breakfast hour was eight thirty at the earliest and nine usually; "snack" was served about one to those who chose to come to it, dinner at three or four, with no hurry about it, and supper came at nine--the hour at which most people in the West habitually went to bed. The thing suited me, personally, for I had great ambitions as a student and habitually dug at my mathematics, Latin, and Greek until two in the morning. I was always up by daylight, and after a plunge into the cold water provided for me in a molasses barrel out under the eaves, I usually took a ride in company with the most agreeable young woman who happened to be staying in the house at the time. Sometimes I had two to escort, but that was rare. Usually there was another young man in the house, and usually, under such circumstances, I saw to it that he did not lie long abed. And even when there was no such recourse, the "other girl" was apt to conjure up some excuse for not wishing to ride that morning. XXIII [Sidenote: The Courtesy of the Virginians] Indeed, one of the things that most deeply impressed me among the Virginians was the delicacy and alert thoughtfulness of their courtesy. The people of the West were not ill-mannered boors by any means, but gentle, kindly folk. But they were not versed in those little momentary courtesies of life which create a roseate atmosphere of active good will. In all that pertained to courtesy in the larger and more formal affairs of social life, the people of the West were even more scrupulously attentive to the requirements of good social usage than these easy-going Virginians were, with their well-defined social status and their habit of taking themselves and each other for granted. But in the little things of life, in their alertness to say the right word or do the trifling thing that might give pleasure, and their still greater alertness to avoid the word or act that might offend or incommode, the Virginians presented to my mind a new and altogether pleasing example of courtesy. In later years I have found something like this agreeably impressed upon me when I go for a time from New York to Boston. Courtesy could not be finer or more considerate among people of gentle breeding who know each other than it is in New York. But in their considerate treatment of strangers, casually encountered in public places, the Boston people give a finer, gentler, more delicate flavor to their courtesy, and it is a delightful thing to encounter. In Virginia this quality of courtesy was especially marked in the intercourse of men and women with each other. The attitude of both was distinctly chivalrous. To the woman--be she a child of two, a maiden of twenty, or a gentlewoman so well advanced in years that her age was unmentionable--the man assumed an attitude of gentle consideration, of deference due to sex, of willingness to render any service at any cost, and of a gently protective guardianship that stopped at nothing in the discharge of its duty. To the man, be he old or young, the woman yielded that glad obedience that she deemed due to her protector and champion. I had never seen anything like this before. In the West I had gone to school with all the young women I knew. I had competed with them upon brutally equal terms, in examinations and in struggles for class honors, and the like. They and we boys had been perfectly good friends and comrades, of course, and we liked each other in that half-masculine way. But the association was destructive of romance, of fineness, of delicate attractiveness. There was no glamor left in the relations of young men and young women, no sentiment except such as might exist among young men themselves. The girls were only boys of another sort. Our attitude toward them was comradely but not chivalric. It was impossible to feel the roseate glow of romance in association with a young woman who had studied in the same classes with one, who had stood as a challenge in the matter of examination marks, and who met one at any hour of the day on equal terms, with a cheery "good-morning" or "good-evening" that had no more of sentiment in it than the clatter of a cotton mill. [Sidenote: Sex and Education] In my judgment, that is the conclusive objection to co-education, except perhaps among the youngest children. It robs the relations of the sexes of sentiment, of softness, of delicacy. It makes of girls an inferior sort of boys, and of boys an inferior sort of girls. It cannot completely negative sex, but it can and does sufficiently negative it to rob life of one of its tenderest charms. In Virginia for the first time I encountered something different. There the boys were sent to old field schools where in rough and tumble fashion, they learned Latin and robust manliness, Greek and a certain graciousness of demeanor toward others, the absence of which would have involved them in numberless fights on the playgrounds. The girls were tenderly dame-nurtured at home, with a gentlewoman for governess, with tutors to supplement the instruction of the governess, and with a year or two, perhaps, for finishing, at Le Febre's or Dr. Hoge's, or some other good school for young women. Both the young men and the young women read voluminously--the young men in part, perhaps, to equip themselves for conversational intercourse with the young women. They both read polite literature, but they read history also with a diligence that equipped them with independent convictions of their own, with regard to such matters as the conduct of Charlotte Corday, the characters of Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre, the ungentlemanly treatment given by John Knox to Mary, Queen of Scots, and all that sort of thing. Indeed, among the Virginia women, young and old, the romantic episodes of history, ancient, mediæval, and modern, completely took the place, as subjects of conversation, of those gossipy personalities that make up the staple of conversation among women generally. Let me not be misunderstood. These women did not assume to be "learned ladies." It was only that they knew their history and loved it and were fond of talking about it, quite as some other women are fond of talking about the interesting scandal in the domestic relations of the reigning matinée hero. The intercourse between men and women thus educated was always easy, gracious, and friendly, but it was always deferential, chivalric, and imbued with that recognition of sex which, without loss of dignity on either side, holds man to be the generously willing protector, and woman the proudly loyal recipient of a protection to which her sex entitles her, and in return for which she gladly yields a submission that has nothing of surrender in it. There was a fascination to me in all this, that I find it impossible to describe and exceedingly difficult even to suggest. I may add that I think the young women of that time in Virginia were altogether the best educated young women I have ever encountered in any time or country. And, best of all, they were thoroughly, uncompromisingly feminine. Of the men I need only say that they were masculine, and fit mates for such women. I do not at all think they were personally superior to men of other parts of the country in those things that pertain to character and conduct, but at least they had the advantage of living in a community where public opinion was all-dominant, and where that resistless force insisted upon truth, integrity, and personal courage as qualities that every man must possess if he expected to live in that community at all. It was _noblesse oblige_, and it inexorably controlled the conduct of all men who hoped for recognition as gentlemen. The sentiment took quixotic forms at times, perhaps, but no jesting over these manifestations can obscure the fact that it compelled men to good behavior in every relation of life and made life sweeter, wholesomer, and more fruitful of good than it otherwise would have been. [Sidenote: The Voices of Virginia Women] I must add a word with respect to that most fascinating of all things, the Virginia girl's voice. This was music of so entrancing a sort that I have known young men from other parts of the country to fall in love with a voice before they had seen its possessor and to remain in love with the owner of it in spite of her distinct lack of beauty when revealed in person. Those girls all dropped the "g"s at the end of their participles; they habitually used double negatives, and, quite defiantly of dictionaries, used Virginian locutions not sanctioned by authority. If challenged on the subject their reply would have been that which John Esten Cooke gave to an editor who wanted to strike a phrase out of one of his Virginia romances, on the ground that it was not good English. "It's good Virginian," he answered, "and for my purpose that is more important." But all such defects of speech--due not to ignorance but to a charming wilfulness--were forgotten in the music of the voices that gave them utterance. There are no such voices now, even in Virginia, I regret to say. Not of their own fault, but because of contact with strangely altered conditions, the altogether charming Virginia girls I sometimes meet nowadays, have voices and intonations not unlike those of women in other parts of the country, except that they preserve enough of the old lack of emphasis upon the stronger syllables to render their speech often difficult to understand. There is compensation for that in the gentle, laughing readiness with which they repeat utterances not understood on their first hearing. XXIV It was during the roseate years of the old Virginia life not long before the war that I had my first and only serious experience of what is variously and loosely called the "occult" and the "supernatural." It is only in answer to solicitation that I tell the story here as it has been only in response to like solicitation that I have orally told it before. In order that I may not be misunderstood, in order that I may not be unjustly suspected of a credulity that does not belong to me, I wish to say at the outset that I am by nature and by lifelong habit of mind a skeptic. I believe in the natural order, in cause and effect, in the material basis of psychological phenomena. I have no patience with the mystical or the mysterious. I do not believe in the miraculous, the supernatural, the occult--call it what you will. And yet the experience I am about to relate is literally true, and the story of it a slavishly faithful record of facts. I make no attempt to reconcile those facts with my beliefs or unbeliefs. I venture upon no effort at explanation. I have set forth above my intellectual attitude toward all such matters; I shall set forth the facts of this experience with equal candor. If the reader finds the facts irreconcilable with my intellectual convictions, I must leave him to judge as he may between the two, without aid of mine. The facts are these: I was one of a house party, staying at one of the most hospitable of Virginia mansions. I was by courtesy of Virginia clannishness "cousin" to the mistress of the house, and when no house party was in entertainment I was an intimate there, accustomed to go and come at will and to reckon myself a member of the family by brevet. [Sidenote: The Story of the West Wing] At the time now considered, the house was unusually full, when a letter came announcing the immediate coming of still other guests. In my close intimacy with the mistress of the plantation I became aware of her perplexity. She didn't know where and how to bestow the presently coming guests. I suggested that I and some others should take ourselves away, a suggestion which her hospitable soul rejected, the more particularly in my case, perhaps, because I was actively planning certain entertainments in which she was deeply interested. Suddenly it occurred to me that during my long intimacy in the house I had never known anybody to occupy the room or rooms which constituted the second story of the west wing of the building. I asked why not bring that part of the spacious mansion into use in this emergency, thinking that its idleness during all the period of my intimacy there had been due only to the lack of need in a house so large. "Cousin Mary," with a startled look of inquiry upon her face, glanced at her husband, who sat with us alone on a piazza. "You may as well tell him the facts," he said in reply to the look. "He won't talk." Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superstition. Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the lawyer finished, even to sign the document; that he placed it under his pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it, changing only one clause in such fashion as to defeat the long cherished purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old man executed that instead of the other. "Now I'm not superstitious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly, "but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result." "It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?" "They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered, "though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had been." "What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity. "Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other, but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten years we permitted no repetition of the experiment, but a year ago my brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs with barely enough strength to cling to the balustrades, and in such an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again." [Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts] "Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked. "Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered more." "Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with your permission." "You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to permit a further trifling with it." "Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that nobody can question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been." Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night. I seized upon the occasion to give a warning. "I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes." The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no trespass upon my privacy. "With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may make to drive me out." It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of the eight great windows of the room. I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with brass knobs. The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a spacious closet which I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that the closets were entirely empty. Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways, and went to sleep. [Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light] After a time I suddenly waked to find the room dimly pervaded by that yellowish-gray or grayish-yellow light that had so disturbed the slumbers of others in that apartment. My awakening was so complete that all my faculties were alert at once. I felt under my pillow and found my weapon there. I looked to its chambers and found the charges undisturbed. The caps were in place, and I felt myself armed for any encounter. But I had resolved in advance, to be deliberate, self-possessed, and calm, whatever might happen, and I kept faith with myself. Instead of hastily springing from the bed I lay there for a time watching the weird light as it slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in intensity, and trying to decide whether they were right who had described as "yellowish gray" or they who had called it "grayish yellow." I decided that the gray distinctly predominated, but in the meanwhile the steady increase in the light and in its pervasiveness warned me, and I slipped out of bed, taking my pistol with me, to the dressing case on the other side of the room--the side on which the great oaken door opened. The rain was still beating heavily against the window blinds, and the strange, yellowish gray light was still slowly but steadily increasing. I was resolute, however, in my determination not to be disturbed or hurried by any manifestation. In response to that determination I glanced at the mirror and decided that the mysterious light was sufficient for the purpose, and I resolved I would shave. Having done so, I bathed--a little hurriedly, perhaps, because of the rapidly increasing light. I was deliberate, however, in donning my clothing, and not until I was fully dressed did I turn to leave the room. Glancing at every object in it--all now clearly visible, though somewhat shadowy in outline--I decided at last upon my retreat. I turned the key, and the bolt in the lock shot back with sound enough to startle calmer nerves than mine. I turned the knob, but the door refused to open! For a moment I was puzzled. Then I remembered that it was a double lock. A second later I was out of that chamber, and the oaken door of it was securely shut behind me. I went down the great stairway, slowly, deliberately, in pursuance of my resolution; I entered the large hallway below, and thence passed into the oak-wainscoted dining-room, where I sat down to breakfast with the rest of the company. It was nine o'clock of a dark, rainy morning. XXV In Virginia at the time of which I am writing, everybody, men, women, and children, read books and talked about them. The annual output of the publishers was trifling then, as compared with the present flood of new books, and as a consequence everybody read all the new books and magazines, and everybody talked about them as earnestly as of politics or religion. Still more diligently they read old books, the classics of the language. Literature was regarded as a vital force in human affairs, and books which in our time might relieve the tedium of a railway journey and be forgotten at its end, were read with minute attention and discussed as earnestly as if vital interests had depended upon an accurate estimation of their quality. As a consequence, authorship was held in strangely glamorous esteem. I beg pardon of the English language for making that word "glamorous"; it expresses my thought, as no other term does, and it carries its meaning on its face. [Sidenote: The "Solitary Horseman"] I remember that in my student days in Richmond there came a visitor who had written one little book--about Rufus Choate, I think, though I can find no trace of it in bibliographies. I suspect that he was a very small author, indeed, in Boston, whence he came, but he was an AUTHOR--we always thought that word in capital letters--and so he was dined and wined, and entertained, and not permitted to pay his own hotel bills or cab charges, or anything else. Naturally a people so disposed made much of their own men of letters, of whom there was quite a group--if we reckon their qualifications as generously as the Virginians did. Among them were three at least whose claim to be regarded as authors was beyond dispute. These were John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and the English novelist, G. P. R. James, who at that time was serving as British consul at Richmond. And there was Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, who played the part of literary queen right royally. Mr. James was a conspicuous figure in Richmond. He was a robust Englishman in his late fifties, rather short and rather stout. The latter impression was aided by the fact that in his afternoon saunterings about the town, he usually wore a sort of roundabout, a coat that ended at his waist and had no tails to it. To the ribald and the jocular he was known as "the Solitary Horseman" because of his habit of introducing novels or chapters with a lonely landscape in which a "solitary horseman" was the chief or only figure. To those of us who were disposed to be deferential he was known as "the Prince Regent," in memory of the jest perpetrated by one of the wits of the town. Mr. James's three initials, which prompted John G. Saxe to say that he "got at the font his strongest claims to be reckoned a man of letters"--stood for "George Payne Rainsford," but he rarely used anything more than the initials--G. P. R. When a certain voluble gentlewoman asked Tom August what the initials stood for he promptly replied: "Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name." The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends from that hour forth. John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition. He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter. Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class. When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because of the fact. [Sidenote: John Esten Cooke--Gentleman] Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel "The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines and the like. The matter of getting a living was a difficult one to him then, for the reason that with a pride of race which some might think quixotic, he had burdened his young life with heavy obligations not his own. His father had died leaving debts that his estate could not pay. As the younger man got nothing by inheritance, except the traditions of honor that belonged to his race, he was under no kind of obligation with respect to those debts. But with a chivalric loyalty such as few men have ever shown, John Esten Cooke made his dead father's debts his own and little by little discharged them with the earnings of a toilsome literary activity. His pride was so sensitive that he would accept no help in this, though friends earnestly pressed loans upon him when he had a payment to meet and his purse was well-nigh empty. At such times he sometimes made his dinner on crackers and tea for many days together, although he knew he would be a more than welcome guest at the lavish tables of his many friends in Richmond. It was a point of honor with him never to accept a dinner or other invitation when he was financially unable to dine abundantly at his own expense. The reviewer of one of my own stories of the old Virginia life, not long ago informed his readers that of course there never were men so sensitively and self-sacrificingly honorable as those I had described in the book, though my story presented no such extreme example of the man of honor as that illustrated in Mr. Cooke's person and career. I knew him intimately at that time, his immediate friends being my own kindred. Indeed, I passed one entire summer in the same hospitable house with him. Some years after the war our acquaintance was renewed, and from that time until his death he made my house his abiding place whenever he had occasion to be in New York. Time had wrought no change in his nature. He remained to the end the high-spirited, duty-loving man of honor that I had known in my youth; he remained also the gentle, affectionate, and unfailingly courteous gentleman he had always been. He went into the war as an enlisted man in a Richmond battery, but was soon afterward appointed an officer on the staff of the great cavalier, J. E. B. Stuart. "I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching, just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays." [Sidenote: How Jeb Stuart Made a Major] Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice. On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did it. "You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in the chest." "Yes, I am," answered Cooke. "Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping for a boxing match. "Try that on." Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it a fit. "Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow." When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity. The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was entitled to ease and comfort as his reward. XXVI The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record of facts. It was not a life that our modern notions of economics can approve, but it ministered to human happiness, to refinement of mind, to culture, and to the maintenance of high ideals of manhood and womanhood. It bred a race of men who spoke the truth, lived uprightly, and met every duty without a shadow of flinching from personal consequences. It reared a race of women fit to be the wives and mothers of such men. Under its spell culture was deemed of more account than mere education; living was held in higher regard than getting a living; refinement meant more than display; comfort more than costliness, and kindliness in every word and act more than all else. [Sidenote: A Plantation Modernized] I know an old plantation where for generations a family of brave men and fair women dwelt in peace and ministered in gracious, hospitable ways to the joy of others. Under their governance there was never any thought of exploiting the resources of the plantation for the sake of a potential wealth that seemed superfluous to people of contented mind who had enough. The plantation supported itself and all who dwelt upon it--black and white. It educated its sons and daughters and enabled them to maintain a generous hospitality. More than this they did not want or dream of wanting. There are twenty-two families living on that plantation now, most of them growing rich or well-to-do by the cultivation of the little truck farms into which the broad acres have been parceled out. The woodlands that used to shelter the wild flowers and furnish fuel for the great open fireplaces, have been stripped to furnish kindling wood for kitchen ranges in Northern cities. Even the stately locust trees that had shaded the lawns about the old mansion have been converted into policemen's clubs and the like, and potatoes grow in the soil where greensward used to carpet the house grounds. Economically the change means progress and prosperity, of course, but to me the price paid for it seems out of proportion to the goods secured. But then I am old-fashioned, and perhaps, in spite of the strenuous life I have led, I am a sentimentalist,--and sentiment is scorned as silly in these days. There is another aspect of the matter that deserves a word, and I have a mind to write that word even at risk of anathema from all the altars of sociology. At seventy years of age one is less sensitive to criticism than at thirty. All the children of the twenty-two truck farming families on that old plantation go to school. They are taught enough to make out bills, add up columns of figures, and write business letters to their commission merchants. That is what education means now on that plantation and on hundreds of others that have undergone a like metamorphosis. No thought or dream of culture enters into the scheme. Under the old system rudimentary instruction was merely a stepping stone by which to climb up to the education of culture. Under the theories of economics it is a great gain thus to substitute rudimentary instruction for all in the place of real education and culture for a class. But is it gain? Is the world better off with ten factory hands who can read, write, and cipher, than with one Thomas Jefferson or George Wythe or Samuel Adams or Chancellor Livingston who knows how to think? Are ten factory girls or farmers' wives the full equivalent of one cultured gentlewoman presiding gracefully and graciously over a household in which the amenities of life are more considered than its economics? Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming. But is the world richer or poorer for the change? It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps. However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women--once admired throughout the land--are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and "reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peacock in which they speak, not that of the dove. [Sidenote: An Old Fogy's Questionings] Whenever I ask myself the questions set down above, I find it necessary to the chastening of my mind to recite my creed: I believe that every human being born into this world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as in doing as he pleases he does not interfere with the equal right of any other human being to do as he pleases; I believe in the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; I believe that it is the sole legitimate function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone. Nevertheless, I cannot escape a tender regret when I reflect upon what we have sacrificed to the god Progress. I suppose it is for the good of all that we have factories now to do the work that in my boyhood was done by the village carpenter, tanner, shoemaker, hatter, tailor, tin-smith, and the rest; but I do not think a group of factory "hands," dwelling in repulsively ugly tenement buildings and dependent upon servitude to the trade union as a means of escaping enslavement by an employing corporation, mean as much of human happiness or signify as much of helpful citizenship as did the home-owning, independent village workmen of the past. In the same way I do not think the substitution of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture of a class has been altogether a gain. As I see young men flocking by thousands to our universities, where in earlier times there were scant hundreds in attendance, I cannot avoid the thought that most of these thousands have just enough education of the drill sort to pass the entrance examinations and that they go to the universities, not for education of the kind that brings enlargement of mind, but for technical training in arts that promise money as the reward of their practice. And I cannot help wondering if the change which relegates the Arts course to a subordinate place in the university scheme is altogether a change for the better. Economically it is so, of course. But economics, it seems to me, ought not to be all of human life. Surely men and women were made for something more than mere earning capacity. But all this is blasphemy against the great god Progress and heresy to the gospel of Success. Its voice should be hushed in a land where fame is awarded not to those who think but to those who organize and exploit; where men of great intellect feel that they cannot afford to serve the country when the corporations offer them so much higher salaries; and where it is easier to control legislation and administration by purchase than by pleading. The old order changed, both at the North and at the South when the war came, and if the change is more marked in the South than at the North it is only because the South lost in the struggle for supremacy and suffered desolation in its progress. XXVII I have elsewhere pointed out in print that Virginia did not want war, or favor secession. Her people, who had already elected the avowed emancipationist, John Letcher, to be their governor, voted by heavy majorities against withdrawal from the Union. In her constitutional convention, called to consider what the old mother state should do after the Cotton States had set up a Southern Confederacy, the dominant force was wielded by such uncompromising opponents of secession as Jubal A. Early, Williams C. Wickham, Henry A. Wise, and others, who when war came were among the most conspicuous fighters on the Southern side. It is important to remember that, as Farragut said, Virginia was "dragooned out of the Union," in spite of the abiding unwillingness of her people. [Sidenote: Under Jeb Stuart's Command] I was a young lawyer then, barely twenty-one years of age. I spoke and voted--my first vote--against the contemplated madness. But in common with the Virginians generally, I enlisted as soon as war became inevitable, and from the 9th of April, 1861, to the 9th of April, 1865--the date of Lee's surrender--I was a soldier in active service. I was intensely in earnest in the work of the soldier. As I look back over my seventy years of life, I find that I have been intensely in earnest in whatever I have had to do. Such things are temperamental, and one has no more control over his temperament than over the color of his eyes and hair. Being intensely in earnest in the soldier's work, I enjoyed doing it, just as I have keenly enjoyed doing every other kind of work that has fallen to me during a life of unusually varied activity. I went out in a company of horse, which after brief instruction at Ashland, was assigned to Stuart's First Regiment of Virginia Cavalry. The regiment was composed entirely of young Virginians who, if not actually "born in the saddle," had climbed into it so early and lived in it so constantly that it had become the only home they knew. I suppose there was never gathered together anywhere on earth a body of horsemen more perfectly masters of their art than were the men of that First Regiment, the men whom Stuart knew by their names and faces then, and whose names and faces he never afterward forgot, for the reason, as he often said to us, that "You First Regiment fellows made me a Major-General." Even after he rose to higher rank and had scores of thousands of cavaliers under his command, his habit was, when he wanted something done of a specially difficult and dangerous sort, to order a detail from his old First Regiment to do it for him. The horsemanship of that regiment remained till the end a model for emulation by all the other cavalry, and, in view of the demonstrations of it in the campaign preceding Manassas (Bull Run) it is no wonder that when the insensate panic seized upon McDowell's army in that battle the cry went up from the disintegrated mob of fugitives that they could not be expected to stand against "thirty thousand of the best horsemen since the days of the Mamelukes." The "thirty thousand" estimate was a gross exaggeration, Stuart's command numbering in fact only six or seven hundred, but the likening of its horsemanship to that of the Mamelukes was justified by the fact. As a robust young man who had never known a headache I keenly enjoyed the life we cavalrymen led that summer. It was ceaselessly active--for Stuart's vocabulary knew not the word "rest"--and it was all out of doors in about as perfect a summer climate as the world anywhere affords. We had some tents, in camp, in which to sleep after we got tired of playing poker for grains of corn; but we were so rarely in camp that after a little while we forgot that we owned canvas dwellings, and I cannot remember, if I ever knew, what became of them at last. For the greater part of the time we slept on the ground out somewhere within musket shot of the enemy's lines, and our waking hours were passed in playing "tag" with the enemy's scouting parties, encountered in our own impertinent intrusions into the lines of our foeman. A saddle was emptied now and then, but that was only a forfeit of the game, and the game went on. [Sidenote: The Life of the Cavaliers] It must have been a healthy life that we led. I well remember that during that summer my company never had a man on the sick list. When the extraordinary imbecility of the Confederate commissary department managed to get rations of flour to us, we wetted it with water from any stream or brook that might be at hand, added a little salt, if we happened to have any, to the putty-like mass, fried the paste in bacon fat, and ate it as bread. According to all the teachings of culinary science the thing ought to have sent all of us to grass with indigestions of a violent sort; but in fact we enjoyed it, and went on our scouting ways utterly unconscious of the fact that we were possessed of stomachs, until the tempting succulence of half-ripened corn in somebody's field set appetite a-going again and we feasted upon the grain without the bother of cooking it at all. Of course, we carried no baggage with us during the days and weeks when we were absent from camp. We had a blanket apiece, somewhere, we didn't know where. When our shirts were soiled we took them off and washed them in the nearest brook, and if orders of activity came before they were dried, we put them on wet and rode away in full confidence that they would dry on our persons as easily as on a clothesline. One advantage that I found in this neglect of impedimenta was that I could always carry a book or two inside my flannel shirt, and I feel now that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired to the reading done by bivouac fires at night and in the recesses of friendly cornfields by day. There were many stories current among the good women at home in those days of men's lives being saved by Bibles carried in their clothes and opportunely serving as shields against bullets aimed at their wearers' hearts. I do not know how much truth there may have been in these interesting narratives, nor have I any trustworthy information upon which to base an estimate of the comparative armorplate efficacy of Bibles and other books. But one day, as I well remember, the impact of a bullet nearly knocked me off my horse, and I found afterward that the missile had deeply imbedded itself in a copy of "Tristram Shandy" which lay in the region of my transverse colon. A Bible of equal thickness would doubtless have served as well, but it was the ribald romance of Laurence Sterne that stopped a bullet and saved my life that day. It may be worth while to add that the young woman from whom I had borrowed the book never would accept the new copy I offered to provide in exchange for the wounded one. This cavalry service abounded in adventures, most of them of no great consequence, but all of them interesting at the time to those who shared in them. It was an exciting game and a fascinating one to a vigorous young man with enough imagination to appreciate it as I did. I enjoyed it intensely at the time and, as the memory of it comes back to me now, I find warmth enough still in my blood to make me wish it were all to do over again, with youth and health and high spirits as an accompaniment. [Sidenote: Delights of the War Game] War is "all hell," as General Sherman said, and as a writer during many years of peace, I have endeavored to do my part in making an end of it. I have printed much in illustration of the fact that war is a cruel, barbarous, inhuman device for settling controversies that should be settled and could be settled by more civilized means; I have shown forth its excessive costliness and its unspeakable cruelty to the women and children involved as its victims. I have no word of that to take back. But, as I remember the delights of the war game, I cannot altogether regret them. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that war, with all its inhuman cruelty, its devastation, and its slaughter, calls forth some of the noblest qualities of human nature, and breeds among men chivalric sentiments that it is well worth while to cherish. And the inspiration of it is something that is never lost to the soul that has felt it. When the Spanish-American troubles came, and we all thought they portended a real war instead of the ridiculous "muss" that followed, the old spirit was so strong upon me that I enlisted a company of a hundred and twenty-four men and appealed to both the state and the national governments for the privilege of sharing in the fighting. So much for psychology. XXVIII Among my experiences in the cavalry service was one which had a sequel that interested me. Stuart had been promoted and Fitzhugh Lee, or "Fitz Lee" as we called him, had succeeded to the command of the First Regiment. One day he led a party of us on a scouting expedition into the enemy's lines. In the course of it we charged through a strong infantry picket numbering forty or fifty men. As our half company dashed through, my horse was shot through the head and sank under me. My comrades rode on and I was left alone in the midst of the disturbed but still belligerent picket men. I had from the first made up my mind that I would never become a prisoner of war. I had stomach for fighting; I was ready to endure hardship; I had no shrinking from fatigue, privation, exposure, or anything else that falls to the lot of the soldier. But I was resolute in my determination that I would never "go to jail"--a phrase which fitly represented my conception of capture by the enemy. So, when my horse dropped me there in the middle of a strong picket force, I drew both my pistols, took to a friendly tree, and set to work firing at every head or body I could see, with intent to sell my life for the very largest price I could make it command. This had lasted for less than two minutes when my comrades, pursued by a strong body of Federal cavalry, dashed back again through the picket post. As they came on at a full run Fitz Lee saw me, and, slackening speed slightly, he thrust out his foot and held out his hand--a cavalry trick in which all of us had been trained. Responding, I seized his hand, placed my foot upon his and swung to his crupper. A minute later a supporting company came to our assistance and the pursuing cavalrymen in blue retired. The incident was not at all an unusual one, but the memory of it came back to me years afterwards under rather peculiar circumstances. In 1889 there was held in New York a spectacular celebration of the centennial of Washington's inauguration as president. A little company of us who had organized ourselves into a society known as "The Virginians," gave a banquet to the commissioners appointed to represent Virginia on that occasion. It so fell out that I was called upon to preside at the banquet, and General Fitzhugh Lee, then Governor of Virginia, sat, of course, at my right. Somewhere between the oysters and the entrée I turned to him and said: "It seemed a trifle odd to me, General, and distinctly un-Virginian, to greet you as a stranger when we were presented to each other a little while ago. Of course, to you I mean nothing except a name heard in introduction; but you saved my life once and to me this meeting means a good deal." [Sidenote: Fitz Lee] In answer to his inquiries I began to tell the story. Suddenly he interrupted in his impetuous way, asking: "Are you the man I took on my crupper that day down there by Dranesville?" And with that he pushed back his plate and rising nearly crushed my hand in friendly grasp. Then he told me stories of other meetings with his old troopers,--stories dramatic, pathetic, humorous,--until I had need of General Pryor's reminder that I was presiding and that there were duties for me to do, however interesting I might find Fitzhugh Lee's conversation to be. From that time until his death I saw much of General Lee, and learned much of his character and impulses, which I imagine are wholly undreamed of by those who encountered him only in his official capacities. He had the instincts of the scholar, without the scholar's opportunity to indulge them. "It is a matter of regret," he said to me in Washington one day, "that family tradition has decreed that all Lees shall be soldiers. I have often regretted that I was sent to West Point instead of being educated in a more scholarly way. You know I have Carter blood and Mason blood in my veins, and the Carters and Masons have had intellects worth cultivating." I replied by quoting from Byron's "Mazeppa" the lines: "'Ill betide The school wherein I learned to ride.' Quoth Charles: 'Old Hetman, wherefore so, Since thou hast learned the art so well?'" Instantly he responded by continuing the quotation: "''Twere long to tell, And we have many a league to go With every now and then a blow;' That is to say, I'm still Consul-General at Havana, and I have an appointment to see the President on official business this morning." As we were sitting in my rooms at the Arlington and not in his quarters at the Shoreham, this was not a hint of dismissal, but an apology for leaving. The conversation awakened surprise in my mind, and ever since I have wondered how many of the world's great men of action have regretted that they were not men of thought instead, and how far the regret was justified. If Fitz Lee had been educated at Yale or Harvard, what place would he have occupied in the world? Would he have become a Virginian lawyer and perhaps a judge? or what else? Conjecture in such a case is futile. "If" is a word of very uncertain significance. The story told in the foregoing paragraphs reminds me of another experience. When the war ended it became very necessary that I should go to Indiana with the least possible delay. But at Richmond I was stopped by a peremptory military order that forbade ex-Confederates to go North. The order had been issued in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, and the disposition to enforce it rigidly was very strong. In my perplexity I made my way into the office of the Federal chief of staff of that department. There I encountered a stalwart and impressive officer, six feet, four or five inches high--or perhaps even an inch or two more than that--who listened with surprising patience while I explained my necessity to him. When I had done, he placed his hand upon my shoulder in comradely fashion and said: "You didn't have anything to do with Mr. Lincoln's assassination. I'll give you a special pass to go North as soon as you please." I thanked him and took my leave. [Sidenote: A Friendly Old Foe] In 1907--forty-two years later--some one in the Authors Club introduced me to "our newest member, Mr. Curtis." I glanced at the towering form, and recognized it instantly. "_Mr._ Curtis be hanged," I answered, "I know General Newton Martin Curtis, and I have good reason to remember him. He is the man who let me out of Richmond." Since that time I have learned to know General Curtis well, and to cherish him as a friend and club comrade as heartily as I honored him before for his gallantry in war and for his ceaseless and most fruitful efforts since the war in behalf of reconciliation and brotherhood between the men who once confronted each other with steel between. Senator Daniel of Virginia has written of him that no other man has done so much as he in that behalf, and I have reason to know that the statement is not an exaggerated one. The kindliness he showed to me in Richmond when we were utter strangers and had only recently been foemen, inspired all his relations with the Virginians during all the years that followed, and there is no man whose name to-day awakens a readier response of good will among Virginians than does his. XXIX Late in the autumn of that first year of war there was reason to believe that the armies in Virginia were about to retire into the dull lethargy of winter-quarters' life, and that the scene of active war was to be transferred to the coast of South Carolina. The Federals had concentrated heavy forces there and in a preparatory campaign had seized upon the Sea Islands and their defensive works at Beaufort and elsewhere. General Lee had already been sent thither to command and defend the coast, and there seemed no doubt that an active winter campaign was to occur in that region. I wanted to have a part in it, and to that end I sought and secured a transfer to a battery of field artillery which was under orders for the South. As a matter of fact, the active campaign never came, and for many moons we led the very idlest life down there that soldiers in time of war ever led anywhere. But the service, idle as it was, played greater havoc in our ranks than the most ceaseless battling could have done. For example, we were sent one day from Charleston across the Ashley river, to defend a bridge over Wappoo Cut. We had a hundred and eight men on duty--all well and vigorous. One week later eight of them were dead, eight barely able to answer to roll call, and all the rest in hospital. In the meanwhile we had not fired a gun or caught sight of an enemy. On another occasion we encamped in a delightful but pestilential spot, and for ten days afterward our men died at the rate of from two to six every twenty-four hours. During the term of our service on that coast we were only once engaged in what could be called a battle. That was at Pocotaligo on the 22nd of October, 1862. In point of numbers engaged it was a very small battle, indeed, but it was the very hottest fight I was ever in, not excepting any of the tremendous struggles in the campaign of 1864 in Virginia. My battery went into that fight with fifty-four men and forty-five horses. We fought at pistol-shot range all day, and came out of the struggle with a tally of thirty-three men killed and wounded, and with only eighteen horses alive--all of them wounded but one. General Beauregard with his own hand presented the battery a battle flag and authorized an inscription on it in memory of the event. In all that we rejoiced with as much enthusiasm as a company of ague-smitten wretches could command, but it is no wonder that our Virginia mountaineers took on a new lease of life when at last we were ordered to rejoin the Army of Northern Virginia, as a part of Longstreet's artillery. XXX [Sidenote: Left Behind] At the end of the campaign of 1863 we found ourselves unhorsed. We had guns that we knew how to use, and caissons full of ammunition, but we had no horses to draw either the guns or the caissons. So when Longstreet was ordered south to bear a part in the campaign of Chickamauga, we were left behind. After a time, during which we were like the dog in the express car who had "chawed up his tag," we were assigned for the winter to General Lindsay Walker's command--the artillery of A. P. Hill's corps. We belonged to none of the battalions there, and therefore had no field officers through whom to apply for decent treatment. For thirteen wintry days we lay at Lindsay's Turnout, with no rations except a meager dole of cornmeal. Then one day a yoke of commissary oxen, starved into a condition of hopeless anemia, became stalled in the mud near our camp. By some hook or crook we managed to buy those wrecks of what had once been oxen. We butchered them, and after twenty-four or thirty-six hours of continual stewing, we had meat again. Belonging to no battalion in the corps to which we were attached, we were a battery "with no rights that anybody was bound to respect," and presently the fact was emphasized. We were appointed to be the provost company of the corps. That is to say, we had to build guardhouses and do all the duties incident to the care of military prisoners. The arrangement brought welcome occupation to me. As Sergeant-Major I had the executive management of the military prisons and of everything pertaining to them. As a lawyer who could charge no fees without a breach of military etiquette, I was called upon to defend, before the courts-martial, all the more desperate criminals under our care. These included murderers, malingerers, robbers, deserters, and men guilty of all the other crimes possible in that time and country. They included no assailants of women. I would not have defended such in any case, and had there been such our sentinels would have made quick work of their disposal. [Sidenote: A Gratuitous Law Practice] The rest, as I was convinced, were guilty, every man of them. But equally I was convinced that a court-martial, if left to deal with them in its own way, would condemn them whether guilty or not. To a court-martial, as a rule, the accusation--in the case of a private soldier--is conclusive and final. If not, then a very little evidence--admissible or not--is sufficient to confirm it. It is the sole function of counsel before a court-martial to do the very little he can to secure a reasonably fair trial, to persuade the officers constituting the court that there is a difference between admissible evidence and testimony that should not be received at all, and finally, to put in a written plea at the end which may direct the attention of the reviewing officers higher up to any unfairness or injustice done in the course of the trial. Theoretically a court-martial is bound by the accepted rules of evidence and by all other laws relating to the conduct of criminal trials; but practically the court-martial, in time of war at least, is bound by nothing. It is a tribunal organized to convict, and its proceedings closely resemble those of a vigilance committee. But the proceedings of every court-martial must be reduced to writing and approved or disapproved by authorities "higher up." Sometimes those authorities higher up have some glimmering notion of law and justice, and it is in reliance upon that chance that lawyers chiefly depend in defending men before courts-martial. But no man is entitled to counsel before a court-martial. It is only on sufferance that the counsel can appear at all, and he is liable to peremptory dismissal at any moment during the trial. It was under these conditions that I undertook the defense of TOM COLLINS Tom was an old jailbird. He had been pardoned out of the Virginia penitentiary on condition that he would enlist--for his age was one year greater, according to his account of it, than that at which the conscription law lost its force. Tom had been a trifle less than two months in service when he was caught trying to desert to the enemy. Conviction on such a charge at that period of the war meant death. In response to a humble request I was permitted to appear before the court-martial as Tom Collins's counsel. My intrusion was somewhat resented as a thing that tended to delay in a perfectly clear case, when the court had a world of business before it, and my request was very grudgingly granted. I managed, unluckily, to antagonize the court still further at the very outset. I found that Tom Collins's captain--who had preferred the charges against him--was a member of the court that was to try him. Against that indecency I protested, and in doing so perhaps I used stronger language than was advisable. The officer concerned, flushed and angry, asked me if I meant to impugn his honor and integrity. I answered, in hot blood: "That depends upon whether you continue to sit as judge in a case in which you are the accuser, or whether you have the decency to retire from the court until the hearing in this case is ended." "Are you a man responsible for his words?" he flashed back in reply. "Entirely so," I answered. "When this thing is over I will afford you any opportunity you like, captain, to avenge your honor and to wreak satisfaction. At present I have a duty to do toward my client, and a part of that duty is to insist that you shall withdraw from the court during his trial and not sit as a judge in a case in which you are the accuser. After that my captain or any other officer of the battery to which I belong will act for me and receive any communication you may choose to send." At this point the presiding officer of the court ordered the room cleared "while the court deliberates." Half an hour later I was admitted again to the courtroom to hear the deliberate judgment of the court that it was entirely legitimate and proper for Tom's captain to sit in his case. [Sidenote: Court Martial Evidence] Then we proceeded with the trial. The proof was positive that Tom Collins had been caught ten miles in front, endeavoring to make his way into the enemy's lines. In answer, I called the court's attention to the absence of any proof that Tom Collins was a soldier. There are only three ways in which a man can become a soldier, namely, by voluntary enlistment, by conscription, or by receiving pay. Tom Collins was above the conscription age and therefore not a conscript. He had not been two months in service, and by his captain's admission, had not received soldier's pay. There remained only voluntary enlistment, and, I pointed out, there was no proof of that before the court. Thereupon the room was cleared again for consultation, and a little later the court adjourned till the next morning. When it reassembled the judge advocate triumphantly presented a telegram from Governor Letcher, in answer to one sent to him. It read: "Yes. I pardoned Collins out of penitentiary on condition of enlistment." Instantly I objected to the reception of the despatch as evidence. There was no proof that it had in fact come from Governor Letcher; it was not made under oath; and finally, the accused man was not confronted by his accuser and permitted to cross-examine him. Clearly that piece of paper was utterly inadmissible as testimony. The court made short work of these "lawyer's quibbles." It found Tom Collins guilty and condemned him to death. I secured leave of the court to set forth my contentions in writing so that they might go to the reviewing officers as a part of the proceedings, but I had very little hope of the result. I frankly told Tom that he was to be shot on the next Saturday but one, and that he must make up his mind to his fate. The good clergyman who acted as chaplain to the military prison then took Tom in hand and endeavored to "prepare him to meet his God." After a while the reverend gentleman came to me with tears of joy in his eyes, to tell me that Tom Collins was "converted"; that never in the course of his ministry had he encountered "a case in which the repentance was completer or more sincere, or a case more clearly showing the acceptance of the sinner by his merciful Saviour." My theological convictions were distinctly more hazy than those of the clerical gentleman, and my ability to think of Tom Collins as a person saturated with sanctity, was less than his. But I accepted the clergyman's expert opinion as unquestioningly as I could, and Tom Collins confirmed it. When I visited him in the guard-house I found him positively ecstatic in the sunlight of Divine acceptance which illuminated the Valley of the Shadow of Death. When I mentioned the possibility that my plea in his behalf might even yet prove effective, and that the sentence which condemned him to death the next morning might still be revoked, he replied, with apparent sincerity: "Oh, I hope not! For then I must wait before entering into joy! But the Lord's will be done!" The next morning was the one appointed for Tom Collins's death. His coffin was ready and a shallow grave had been dug to receive his body. The chaplain and I mounted with him to the cart, and rode with him to the place of execution, where three other men were to die that day. Tom's mood was placidly exultant. And the chaplain alone shed tears in his behalf. [Sidenote: "Death Bed Repentance"] When the place of execution was reached, an adjutant came forward and read three death warrants. Then he held up another paper and read it. It was a formal document from the War Department, sustaining the legal points submitted in Tom Collins's case, disapproving the finding and sentence, and ordering the man formally enlisted and returned to duty. The chaplain fell into a collapse of uncontrollable weeping. Tom Collins came to his relief with the injunction: "Oh, come, now, old snuffy, cheer up! I'll bet you even money I beat you to Hell yet." That clergyman afterward confided to me his doubts of "deathbed repentances," at least in the case of habitual criminals. XXXI In the spring of 1864, the battery to which I belonged mutinied--in an entirely proper and soldierlike way. Longstreet had returned, and the Army of Northern Virginia was about to encounter Grant in the most stupendous campaign of the war. We were old soldiers, and we knew what was coming. But as we had no horses to draw our guns, and as the quartermaster's department seemed unable to find horses for us, we were omitted from the orders for the advance into the region of the Wilderness, where the fighting was obviously to begin. We were ordered to Cobham Station, a charming region of verdure-clad hills and brawling streams, where there was no soldiers' work to do and no prospect of anything less ignoble than provost duty. Against this we revolted, respectfully and loyally. We sent in a protest and petition asking that if horses could not be furnished for our guns, we should be armed with Enfield rifles and permitted to march with our battalion as a sharpshooting support. The request was granted and from the Wilderness to Petersburg we marched and fought and starved right gallantly, usually managing to have a place between the guns at the points of hottest contest in every action of the campaign. At Petersburg we found artillery work of a new kind to do. No sooner were the conditions of siege established than our battery, because of its irregularly armed condition, was chosen to work the mortars which then for the first time became a part of the offensive and defensive equipment of the Army of Northern Virginia. All the fragments of batteries whose ranks had been broken up and whose officers had been killed, wounded, or captured during that campaign of tremendous fighting, were assigned to us for mortar service, so that our numbers were swelled to 250 or 300 men. The number was fluctuating from day to day, as the monotonous murder of siege operations daily depleted our ranks on the one hand while almost daily there were additions made of men from disintegrated commands. I have no purpose here to write a history of that eight months of siege, during which we were never for one moment out of fire by night or by day, but there is one story that arose out of it which I have a mind to tell. I had been placed in command of an independent mortar fort, taking my orders directly from General E. P. Alexander--Longstreet's chief of artillery--and reporting to nobody else. Infantry officers from the lines in front--colonels and such--used sometimes to come to my little row of gun-pits and give me orders in utter ignorance of the conditions and limitations of mortar firing. The orders were not binding upon me and, under General Alexander's instructions, I paid no heed to them, wherefore I was often in a state of friction with the intermeddlers. After a little I discovered a short and easy method of dealing with them. There was a Federal fort known to us as the Railroad Iron Battery, whose commanding officer seemed a person very fond of using his guns in an offensive way. He had both mortars and rifled field guns, and with all of them he soon got my range so accurately that all his rifle shells cut my parapet at the moment of exploding, and all his mortar shells fell among my pits with extraordinary precision. In order to preserve the lives of my men I had to take my stand on top of the mound over my magazine whenever he began bombarding me. From that point I watched the course of his mortar shells, and when one of them seemed destined to fall into one of my little gun-pits, I called out the number of the pit and the men in it ran into their bomb-proof till the explosion was over. In dealing with the annoyance of intruding infantry officers, I took advantage of the Railroad Iron Battery's extraordinary readiness to respond to the smallest attention at my hands. A shell or two hurled in that direction always brought on a condition of things which prompted all visitors to my pits to retreat to a covered way and hasten to keep suddenly remembered engagements on their own lines. [Sidenote: Gloaming Visitors] Once my little ruse did not produce the intended effect. It was after sunset of a day late in August. Two officers came out of the gloaming and saluted me politely. They were in fatigue uniforms. That is to say, they wore the light blue trousers that were common to both armies, and white duck fatigue jackets that bore no insignia of rank upon their collars. At the moment I was slowly bombarding something--I forget what or why--but I remember that I was getting no response. Presently one of my visitors said: "You seem to be having the shelling all to yourself." I resented the remark, thinking it a criticism. "We'll see," I said. Then turning to my brother, who was my second in command, I quietly gave the order: "Touch up the Railroad Iron Battery, Joe." Thirty seconds later the storm was in full fury about us, but my visitors did not seem to mind it. Instead of retiring to the covered way, they nonchalantly stood there by my side on the mound of the magazine. Every now and then, between explosions, one of them would ask a question as to the geography of the lines to our right and left. "What battery is that over there?" "What is the Federal work that lies in front of it?" "What is the lay of the land," etc., etc. Obviously they were officers new to this part of our line and as they offered no criticism upon the work of my guns, and gave me no orders, I put aside the antagonism I had felt, and in all good-fellowship explained the military geography of the region round about. Meanwhile, Joe had quietly stopped the fire on the Railroad Iron Battery, and little by little that work ceased its activity. Finally my visitors politely bade me good evening and took their leave. I asked Joe who they were, but he did not know. I inquired of others, but nobody knew. Next morning I asked at General Gracie's headquarters what new troops had been brought to that part of the line, and learned that there had been no changes. There and at General Bushrod Johnson's headquarters I minutely described my visitors, but nobody knew anything about them, and after a few days of futile conjecture I ceased to think of them or their visit. In July, 1865, the war being over, I took passage on the steamer "Lady Gay," bound from Cairo to New Orleans. There were no women on board, but there was a passenger list of thirty men or so. Some of us were ex-Confederates and some had been Federal soldiers. [Sidenote: The Outcome of a Strange Story] The two groups did not mingle. The members of each were polite upon accidental occasion to the members of the other, but they did not fraternize, at least for a time--till something happened. I was talking one morning with some of my party when suddenly a man from the other group approached as if listening to my voice. Presently he asked: "Didn't you command a mortar fort at Petersburg?" I answered that I did, whereupon he asked: "Do you remember----" and proceeded to outline the incident related above. "Yes," I answered in astonishment, "but how do you happen to know anything about it?" "I was one of your visitors on that occasion. I thought I couldn't be mistaken in the voice that commanded, 'Touch up the Railroad Iron Battery, Joe.'" "But I don't understand. You were a Federal officer, were you not?" "Yes." "Then what were you doing there?" "That is precisely what my friend and I were trying to find out, while you kept us for two hours under a fire of hell from our own batteries." Then he explained: "You remember that to the left of your position, half a mile or so away, there lay a swamp. It was utterly impassable when the lines were drawn, and both sides neglected it in throwing up the breastworks. Well, that swamp slowly dried up during the summer, and it left something like a gap in both lines, but the gap was so well covered by the batteries on both sides that neither bothered to extend earthworks across it. My friend and I were in charge of pickets and rifle-pits that day, and we went out to inspect them. Somehow--I don't know how--we got lost on the swamplands, and, losing our bearings, we found ourselves presently within the Confederate lines. To say that we were embarrassed is to put it mildly. We were scared. We didn't know how to get back, and we couldn't even surrender for the reason that we were not in uniform but in fatigue dress, and therefore technically, at least, in disguise. There was nothing about us to show to which army we belonged. As an old soldier, you know what that meant. If we had given ourselves up we should have been hanged as spies caught in disguise within your lines. In our desperate strait we went to you and stood there for an hour or two under the worst fire we ever endured, while we extracted from you the geographical information that enabled us to make our way back to our own lines under cover of darkness." At that point he grasped my hand warmly and said: "Tell me, how is Joe? I hope he is 'touching up' something that responds as readily as the Railroad Iron Battery did that evening." From that hour until we reached New Orleans, four days later, there was no barrier between the two groups of passengers. We fraternized completely. We told stories of our several war experiences that had no touch or trace of antagonism in them. Incidentally, we exhausted the steamer "Lady Gay's" supplies of champagne and cigars, and when we reached New Orleans we had a dinner together at the St. Charles hotel, no observer of which would have suspected that a few months before we had been doing our best to slaughter each other. XXXII [Sidenote: The Beginning of Newspaper Life] Let me pass hurriedly over the years that immediately followed the end of the war. I went West in search of a living. In Cairo, Illinois, I became counsel and attorney "at law and in fact," for a great banking, mining, steamboating, and mercantile firm, whose widely extending interests covered the whole West and South. The work was uncongenial and by way of escaping from it, after I had married, I removed to Mississippi and undertook the practice of law there. That work proved still less to my liking and in the summer of 1870 I abandoned it in the profoundest disgust. With a wife, one child, a little household furniture, and no money at all, I removed to New York and secured work as a reporter on the Brooklyn _Union_, an afternoon newspaper. I knew nothing of the business, art, or mystery of newspaper making, and I knew nothing of the city. I find it difficult to imagine a man less well equipped for my new undertaking than I was. But I had an abounding confidence in my ability to learn anything I wanted to learn, and I thought I knew how to express myself lucidly in writing. For the rest I had tireless energy and a good deal of courage of the kind that is sometimes slangily called "cheek." This was made manifest on the first day of my service by the fact that while waiting for a petty news assignment I wrote an editorial article and sent it in to Theodore Tilton, the editor, for use. I had an impulse of general helpfulness which was left unrestrained by my utter ignorance of the distinctions and dignities of a newspaper office. I had a thought which seemed to me to deserve editorial utterance, and with the mistaken idea that I was expected to render all the aid I could in the making of the newspaper, I wrote what I had to say. Theodore Tilton was a man of very hospitable mind, and he cared little for traditions. He read my article, approved it, and printed it as a leader. Better still, he sent for me and asked me what experience I had had as a newspaper man. I told him I had had none, whereupon he said encouragingly: "Oh well, it doesn't matter much. I'll have you on the editorial staff soon. In the meantime, learn all you can about the city, and especially about the shams and falsities of its 'Society' with a big 'S.' Study state politics, and equip yourself to comment critically upon such things. And whenever you have an editorial in your mind write it and send it to me." The _Union_ had been purchased by Mr. Henry C. Bowen, the owner of the New York _Independent_, then the most widely influential periodical of its class in America. Theodore Tilton was the editor of both. [Sidenote: An Old School Man of Letters] Theodore Tilton was at the crest of the wave of success at that time, and he took himself and his genius very seriously. Concerning him I shall write more fully a little later on. At present I wish to say only that with all his self-appreciation he had a keen appreciation of other men's abilities, and he sought in every way he could to make them tributary to his own success in whatever he undertook. To that end he had engaged some strong men and women as members of his staff on the _Union_, and among these the most interesting to me was Charles F. Briggs, the "Harry Franco" of an earlier literary time, the associate and partner of Edgar Allan Poe on the _Broadway Journal_, the personal friend or enemy of every literary man of consequence in his time, the associate of George William Curtis and Parke Godwin in the conduct of _Putnam's Monthly_; the coadjutor of Henry J. Raymond on the _Times_, the novelist to whom Lowell dedicated "The Fable for Critics," and whose personal and literary characteristics Lowell set forth with singular aptitude in that poem. In brief, he was in his own person a representative and embodiment of the literary life of what I had always regarded as the golden age of American letters. He talked familiarly of writers who had been to me cloud-haloed demigods, and made men of them to my apprehension. Let me add that though the literary life of which he had been a part was a turbulent one, beset by jealousies and vexed by quarrels of a bitter personal character, such as would be impossible among men of letters in our time of more gracious manners, I never knew him to say an unjust thing about any of the men he had known, or to withhold a just measure of appreciation from the work of those with whom he had most bitterly quarreled. Perhaps no man among Poe's contemporaries had juster reason to feel bitterness toward the poet's memory than had Mr. Briggs. Yet during my intimacy with him, extending over many years, I never heard him say an unkind word of Poe. On the other hand, I never knew him to fail to contradict upon occasion and in his dogmatic fashion--which was somehow very convincing--any of the prevalent misapprehensions as to Poe's character and life which might be mentioned in his presence. It was not that he was a meekly forgiving person, for he was, on the contrary, pugnacious in an unusual degree. But the dominant quality of his character was a love of truth and justice. Concerning Poe and the supposed immorality of his life, he once said to me, in words that I am sure I remember accurately because of the impression they made on my mind: "He was not immoral at all in his personal life or in his work. He was merely _un_moral. He had no perception of the difference between right and wrong in the moral sense of those words. His conscience was altogether artistic. If you had told him you had killed a man who stood annoyingly in the way of your purposes, he would have thought none the worse of you for it. He would have reflected that the man ought not to have put himself in your way. But if you had been guilty of putting forth a false quantity in verse, he would have held you to be a monster for whom no conceivable punishment could be adequate." Often Mr. Briggs's brusquerie and pugnacity were exaggerated, or even altogether assumed by way of hiding a sentiment too tender to be exhibited. Still more frequently the harshest things he said to his friends--and they were sometimes very bitter--were prompted, not by his displeasure with those who were their victims, but by some other cause of "disgruntlement." On such occasions he would repent him of his fault, and would make amends, but never in any ordinary way or after a fashion that anybody else would have chosen. One morning he came into the editorial room which he and I jointly occupied. I bade him good-morning as usual, but he made no reply. After a little while he turned upon me with some bitter, stinging utterance which, if it had come from a younger man, I should have hotly resented. Coming from a man of his age and distinction, I resented it only by turning to my desk and maintaining silence during the entire morning. When his work was done, he left the office without a word, leaving me to feel that he meant the break between us--the cause of which I did not at all understand--to be permanent, as I certainly intended that it should. But when he entered the room next morning he stood still in the middle of the floor, facing my back, for I had not turned my face away from my desk. [Sidenote: Mr. Briggs Explains] "Good-morning!" he said. "Are you ready to apologize to me?" I turned toward him with an involuntary smile at the absurdity of the suggestion, and answered: "I don't know what I should apologize for, Mr. Briggs." "Neither do I," he answered. "My question was prompted by curiosity. It usually happens that apologies come from the person offended, you know. Are you going to write on this affair in the Senate, or shall I take it up?" From that moment his manner was what it always had been during our association. Beyond what he had said he made no reference to the matter, but after our work was finished he, in fact, explained his temper of the day before, while carefully avoiding every suggestion that he meant to explain it or that there was any connection between the explanation and the thing explained. "What do you think of servants?" he asked abruptly. I made some answer, though I did not understand the reason for his question or its occasion. "When I was in the Custom House," he resumed, "I had an opportunity to buy, far below the usual price, some of the finest wines and brandies ever imported. I bought some Madeira, some sherry, and some brandy--ten gallons of each, in five-gallon demijohns--and laid them away in my cellar, thinking the stock sufficient to last me as long as I lived. I rejoiced in the certainty that however poor I might become, I should always be able to offer a friend a glass of something really worthy of a gentleman's attention. Night before last I asked my daughter to replenish a decanter of sherry which had run low. She went to the cellar and presently returned with a look on her face that made me think she had seen a burglar. She reported that there wasn't a drop of anything left in any of the demijohns. I sent for some detectives, and before morning they solved the riddle. A servant girl who had resigned from our service a week or two before had carried all the wine and brandy--two bottlefuls at a time--to a miserable, disreputable gin mill, and sold it for what the thievish proprietor saw fit to give. When I learned the facts I lost my temper, which was a very unprofitable thing to do. I'm late," looking at his watch, "and must be off." Mr. Briggs had a keen sense of humor, which he tried hard to disguise with a shaggy seeming of dogmatic positiveness. He would say his most humorous things in the tone and with the manner of a man determined to make himself as disagreeable as possible. I sat with him at a public dinner one evening. He took the wines with the successive courses, but when later some one, on the other side of the table, lifted his glass of champagne and asked Mr. Briggs to drink with him, he excused himself for taking carbonic water instead of the wine, by saying: "I'm a rigid 'temperance' man." When we all smiled and glanced at the red and white wine glasses he had emptied in the course of the meal, he turned upon us savagely, saying: "You smile derisively, but I repeat my assertion that I'm a strict 'temperance' man; I never take a drink unless I want it." He paused, and then added: "Temperance consists solely in never taking a drink unless you want it. Intemperance consists in taking drinks when some other fellow wants them." [Sidenote: Mr. Briggs's Generosity] He was peculiarly generous of encouragement to younger men, when he thought they deserved it. I may add that he was equally generous of rebuke under circumstances of an opposite kind. I had entered journalism without knowing the least thing about the profession, or trade--if that be the fitter name for it, as I sometimes think it is--and I had not been engaged in the work long enough to get over my modesty, when one day I wrote a paragraph of a score or two lines to correct an error into which the New York _Tribune_ had that morning fallen. Not long before that time a certain swashbuckler, E. M. Yerger, of Jackson, Mississippi, had committed a homicide in the nature of a political assassination. The crime and the assassin's acquittal by reason of political influence had greatly excited the indignation of the entire North. There lived at the same time in Memphis another and a very different E. M. Yerger, a judge whose learning, uprightness, and high personal character had made him deservedly one of the best loved and most honored jurists in the Southwest. At the time of which I now write, this Judge E. M. Yerger had died, and his funeral had been an extraordinary manifestation of popular esteem, affection, and profound sorrow. The _Tribune_, misled by the identity of their names, had confounded the two men, and had that morning "improved the occasion" to hurl a deal of editorial thunder at the Southern people for thus honoring a fire-eating assassin. By way of correcting the error I wrote and printed an editorial paragraph, setting forth the facts simply, and making no comments. When Mr. Briggs next entered the office he took my hand warmly in both his own, and said: "I congratulate you. That paragraph of yours was the best editorial the _Union_ has printed since I've been on the paper." "Why, Mr. Briggs," I protested, "it was only a paragraph----" "What of that?" he demanded in his most quarrelsome tone. "The Lord's Prayer is only a paragraph in comparison with some of the 'graces' I've heard distinguished clergymen get off at banquets by way of impressing their eloquence upon the oysters that were growing warm under the gaslights, while they solemnly prated." "But there was nothing in the paragraph," I argued; "it only corrected an error." "Why, sir, do you presume to tell me what is and what isn't in an article that I've read for myself? You're a novice, a greenhorn in this business. Don't undertake to instruct my judgment, sir. That paragraph was excellent editorial writing, because it corrected an error that did a great injustice; because it gave important and interesting information; because it set forth facts of public import not known to our readers generally, and finally, because you put that final period just where it belonged. Don't contradict me. Don't presume to argue the matter. I won't stand it." With that he left the room as abruptly as he had entered it, and with the manner of a man who has quarreled and has put his antagonist down. I smilingly recalled the lines in which Lowell so aptly described and characterized him in "A Fable for Critics": "There comes Harry Franco, and as he draws near, You find that's a smile which you took for a sneer; One half of him contradicts t'other; his wont Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt; His manner's as hard as his feelings are tender, And a _sortie_ he'll make when he means to surrender; He's in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest, When he seems to be joking be sure he's in earnest; He has common sense in a way that's uncommon, Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman, Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak, Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke; Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-Outer, Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her; Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art, Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart, And though not a poet, yet all must admire In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar." XXXIII [Sidenote: Theodore Tilton] When I first knew Theodore Tilton as my editor-in-chief, on the _Union_, he was in his thirty-fifth year. His extraordinary gifts as an effective writer and speaker had won for him, even at that early age, a country-wide reputation. He was a recognized force in the thought and life of the time, and he had full possession of the tools he needed for his work. The _Independent_ exercised an influence upon the thought and life of the American people such as no periodical publication of its class exercises in this later time of cheap paper, cheap illustrations, and multitudinous magazines. Its circulation of more than three hundred thousand exceeded that of all the other publications of its class combined, and, more important still, it was spread all over the country, from Maine to California. The utterances of the _Independent_ were determinative of popular thought and conviction in an extraordinary degree. Theodore Tilton had absolute control of that great engine of influence, with an editorial staff of unusually able men for his assistants, and with a corps of contributors that included practically all the most desirable men and women writers of the time. In addition to all this, it was the golden age of the lecture system, and next to Mr. Beecher, Tilton was perhaps the most widely popular of the lecturers. In the midst of such a career, and possessed of such influence over the minds of men, at the age of thirty-five, it is no wonder that he had a good conceit of himself, and it was to his credit that he manifested that conceit only in inoffensive ways. He was never arrogant, dogmatic, or overbearing in conversation. His courtesy was unfailing, except in strenuous personal controversy, and even there his manner was polite almost to deference, however deadly the thrusts of his sarcastic wit might be. He fought with a rapier always, never with a bludgeon. His refinement of mind determined that. It was an era of "gush," of phrase making, of superlatives, and in such arts Tilton was peculiarly gifted. In his thinking he was bold to the limit of audacity, and his aptness in clothing his thought in captivating forms of speech added greatly to its effectiveness and his influence. Radicalism was rampant at that time when the passions aroused by the recent Civil War had not yet begun to cool, and Tilton was a radical of radicals. So extreme was he in his views that during and after the orgies of the Commune and the petroleuses in Paris, he openly espoused their cause, justified their resistance to everything like orderly government, and glorified those of them who suffered death for their crimes, as martyrs to human liberty. He and I were talking of these things one day, when something that was said prompted me to ask him his views of the great French revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He quickly replied: "It was a notable movement in behalf of human liberty; it was overborne by military force at last only because the French people were unworthy of it. Robespierre was an irresolute weakling who didn't cut off heads enough." [Sidenote: Tilton's Characteristics] Added to his other gifts, Tilton had an impressive and attractive personality. Tall, well formed, graceful in every motion, he had a head and face so handsome and so unlike the common as to make him a man to be looked at more than once in every company. His manner accorded with his appearance and emphasized it. It was a gracious combination of deference for others with an exalted self-esteem. There was a certain joyousness in it that was very winning, combined with an insistent but unobtrusive self-assertion which impressed without offending. His wit was always at his command, for offense or for defense, or for mere entertainment. I remember that in my first association with him I had a sort of fear at each moment that he would knock me down the next with an epigram. I have seen him do that repeatedly with men with whom he was at the time in deadly controversy, but in my own case the fear of it was soon banished by the uniform kindliness with which he treated me, and the personal affection with which he seemed to regard me. I have often wondered over his attitude toward me. I was an ex-rebel soldier, and in 1870 he was still mercilessly at war with Southern men and Southern ideas. My opinions on many subjects were the exact opposite of his own, and I was young enough then to be insistent in the expression of my opinions, especially in conversation with one to whom I knew my views to be _Anathema Maranatha_. Yet from the first hour of our meeting Theodore Tilton was always courteous and genial toward me, and after our acquaintance had ripened a bit, he became cordial and even enthusiastic in his friendship. It was his habit to rise very early, drink a small cup of coffee and, without other breakfast, walk down to the office of the _Union_. There he wrote his editorials, marked out the day's work for his subordinates, and received such callers as might come, after which he would walk home and take his breakfast at noon. His afternoons were spent in the doing of another day's work in the _Independent_ office. After our acquaintance ripened into friendship, he used to insist upon my going with him to his midday breakfast, whenever my own work in any wise permitted. As I also was apt to be early at the office, I was usually able to accept his breakfast invitations, so that we had an hour's uninterrupted intercourse almost every day. And unlike other editorial chiefs with whom I have had intimate social relations in their own homes, Mr. Tilton never thrust editorial or other business matters into the conversation on these occasions. Indeed, he did not permit the smallest reference to such subjects. If by accident such things obtruded, he put them aside as impertinent to the time and place. It was not that he thought less or cared less for matters of such import than other great editors do, but rather that he had a well-ordered mind that instinctively shrank from confusion. When engaged with editorial problems, he gave his whole attention to their careful consideration and wise solution. When engaged in social intercourse he put all else utterly out of his mind. I cannot help thinking that his method as to that was a wiser one than that of some others I have known, who carried the problems and perplexities of their editorial work with them into their parlors, to their dinner tables, and even to bed. Certainly it was a method more agreeable to his associates and guests. XXXIV [Sidenote: The Swarm of Gadflies] At that time Tilton was "swimming on a sea of glory." His popularity was at its height, with an apparently assured prospect of lasting fame to follow. His work so far had necessarily been of an ephemeral sort--dealing with passing subjects in a passing way--but he had all the while been planning work of a more permanent character, and diligently preparing himself for its doing. One day, in more confidential mood than usual, he spoke to me of this and briefly outlined a part at least of what he had planned to do. But there was a note of the past tense in what he said, as if the hope and purpose he had cherished were passing away. It was the first intimation I had of the fact that those troubles were upon him which later made an end of his career and sent him into a saddened exile which endured till the end of his ruined life. At that time I knew nothing and he told me nothing of the nature of his great trouble, and I regarded his despondency as nothing more than weariness over the petty annoyances inflicted upon him by some who were jealous of his success and popularity. With some of these things I was familiar. His growing liberality of thought in religious matters, and the absence of asceticism from his life, had brought a swarm of gadflies round his head, whose stings annoyed him, even if they inflicted no serious hurt. He was constantly quizzed and criticised, orally, by personal letter, and in print, as to his beliefs, his conduct, his tastes, his habits, and even his employment of terms, quite as if he had been a woman or a clergyman responsible to his critics and subject to their censure. He maintained an appearance of good temper under all this carping--most of which was clearly inspired by "envy, malice, and all uncharitableness"--but, as I had reason to know, it stung him sorely. He said to me one day: "It isn't the criticism that annoys me so much as the fact that I am supposed to be answerable in such small ways to the bellowings of Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart. I seem not to be regarded as a free man, as other men are." I reminded him that something of that kind was the penalty that genius and popularity were usually required to pay for their privileges. I illustrated my thought by adding: "If Byron had not waked up one morning and found himself famous, he would never have been hounded out of his native land by what Macaulay calls British morality in one of its periodic spasms of virtue, and if Poe had never written 'The Raven,' 'The Bells,' and 'Annabel Lee,' nobody would ever have bothered to inquire about his drinking habits." I strongly urged him to ignore the criticism which was only encouraged by his replies to it. But in that he was not amenable to counsel, partly because his over-sensitive nature was more severely stung by such criticism than that of a better balanced man would have been, but still more, I think, because his passion for epigrammatic reply could not resist the temptation of opportunity which these things presented. Often his replies were effective for the moment, by reason of their wit or their sparkling audacity, but incidentally they enlarged the circle of persons offended. Thus on one occasion, when he was challenged in print by an adversary, to say that he did not drink wine, he replied in print: "Mr. Tilton does drink wine upon sacramental and other proper occasions." His readers smiled at the smartness of the utterance, but many of the more sensitive among them were deeply aggrieved by what they regarded as its well-nigh blasphemous character. [Sidenote: The Fulton Controversy] I was myself present at one of his most perplexing conferences concerning these matters, not as a participant in the discussion, but as a friendly witness. The quarrel--for it had developed into the proportions of a quarrel--was with the Rev. Dr. Fulton, who at that time occupied a large place in public attention--as a preacher of great eloquence, his friends said, as a reckless sensationalist and self-advertiser, his enemies contended. He had accused Tilton of drinking wine, and had publicly criticised him for it, with great severity. Tilton had replied in an equally public way, with the statement that on a certain occasion which he named, he and Dr. Fulton had walked up street together after a public meeting; that at Dr. Fulton's suggestion they had gone into a saloon where between them they had drunk a considerable number of glasses of beer (he gave the number, but I forget what it was), adding: "Of which I did not drink the major part." Dr. Fulton was furiously angry, of course, and demanded an interview. Tilton calmly invited him to call at his editorial room in the _Union_ office. He came at the appointed time, bringing with him the Rev. Dr. Armitage and two other persons of prominence. I do not now remember who they were. Tilton at once sent me a message asking me to come to his room. When I entered he introduced me to his visitors and then said: "Mr. Eggleston, Dr. Fulton has called to discuss with me certain matters of personal import. The discussion may result in some issues of veracity--discussions with Dr. Fulton often do. It is in view of that possibility, I suppose," smiling and bowing to Dr. Fulton, who sat stiff in his chair making no response by word or act, "that Dr. Fulton has brought with him Dr. Armitage and these other gentlemen, as witnesses to whatever may be said between us. I have the profoundest respect, and even reverence for those gentlemen, but it seems to me proper that I should have at least one witness of my own selection present also. I have therefore sent for you." Instantly Dr. Fulton was on his feet protesting. In a loud voice and with excited gesticulations, he declared that he would not be drawn into a trap--that he would abandon the purpose of his visit rather than discuss the matters at issue with one of Tilton's reporters present to misrepresent and ridicule him in print. Tilton, who never lost his self-possession, waited calmly till the protest was fully made. Then he said: "I have no reporter present. Mr. Eggleston was promoted a week ago to the editorial writing staff of the paper. He will report nothing. You, Dr. Fulton, have brought with you three friends who are of your own selection, to hear the discussion between us. I claim the right to have one friend of my own present also. It is solely in that capacity that I have asked Mr. Eggleston to be present." "But I will not discuss confidential matters in the presence of any newspaper man," protested Dr. Fulton. "Then in my turn," said Tilton, "I must decline to discuss the questions between us, in the presence of any clergyman." At that point Dr. Armitage and his companions remonstrated with Dr. Fulton, declaring his position to be unreasonable and unfair, and telling him that if he persisted in it, they would at once withdraw. Fulton yielded, and after an hour's angry sparring on his part and placidly self-possessed sword play of intellect on Tilton's side, Dr. Fulton submitted a proposal of arbitration, to which Tilton assented, with one qualification, namely, that if the finding of the arbitrators was to be published, in print, from the pulpit, or otherwise, he, Tilton, should be privileged to publish also a verbatim report of the _testimony_ upon which it was founded. Dr. Fulton rejected this absolutely, on the ground that he did not want his name to figure in "a newspaper sensation." Still cool, self-possessed, and sarcastic, Tilton asked: "Do I correctly understand you to mean, Dr. Fulton, that you shrink from sensationalism?" "Yes, sir, that is exactly what I mean." "Quite a new attitude of mind to you, isn't it, Doctor? I fear it will rob your preaching of much of its 'drawing' quality." Dr. Fulton's advisers urged him to assent to Tilton's proposal as an entirely reasonable one, but he persistently refused, and the conference ended with nothing accomplished. I know nothing to this day of the merits of the controversy. I have given this account of the meeting called to settle it solely because it serves the purpose of illustrating the methods of the two men. XXXV [Sidenote: Later Acquaintance with Tilton] About a year later, or a little less, my editorial connection with the _Union_ ceased, and with it my official association with Mr. Tilton. But he and I lived not far apart in Brooklyn and from then until the great trouble broke--two or three years--I saw much of him, at his home and mine, on the street, and at many places in New York. With the first open manifestation of the great trouble he began consulting with me about it. I gave him a deal of good advice in response to his eager demands for counsel. He seemed to appreciate and value it, but as he never acted upon it in the smallest degree, I gradually ceased to give it even when requested. I have every reason to believe that in the course of these consultations I learned, from him and from all the others directly connected with the terrible affair, the inner and true story of the events that culminated in the great and widely demoralizing scandal. It is a story that has never been told. At the time of the trial both sides were careful to prevent its revelation, and there were certainly most imperative reasons why they should. I have no purpose to tell that story in these pages. I mention it only because otherwise the abrupt termination of my reminiscences of Mr. Tilton at this point might seem to lack explanation. XXXVI When I joined the staff of the _Union_, in the summer of 1870, I had had no newspaper experience whatever. I had written for newspapers occasionally, but only as an amateur. I had published one or two small things in magazines, but I knew absolutely nothing of professional newspaper work. Mr. Tilton and his managing editor, Kenward Philp, were good enough to find in my earliest work as a reporter some capacity for lucid expression, and a simple and direct narrative habit which pleased them, so that in spite of my inexperience they were disposed to give me a share in the best assignments. I may say incidentally that among the reporters I was very generally pitied as a poor fellow foredoomed to failure as a newspaper man for the reason that I was what we call educated. At that time, though not for long afterwards, education and a tolerable regularity of life were regarded as serious handicaps in the newsrooms of most newspapers. [Sidenote: My First Libel Suit] Among my earliest assignments was one which brought me my first experience of newspaper libel suits, designed not for prosecution but as a means of intimidating the newspaper concerned. The extent to which the news of the suit appalled me was a measure of my inexperience, and the way in which it was met was a lesson to me that has served me well upon many later occasions of the kind. A man whom I will call Amour, as the use of his real name might give pain to innocent persons even after the lapse of forty years, was express agent at a railway station in the outskirts of Brooklyn. His reputation was high in the community and in the church as a man of exemplary conduct and a public-spirited citizen, notably active in all endeavors for the betterment of life. It was a matter of sensational, popular interest, therefore, when his wife instituted divorce proceedings, alleging the most scandalous conduct on his part. The _Union_ was alert to make the most of such things and Kenward Philp set me to explore this case and exploit it. He told me frankly that he did so because he thought I could "write it up" in an effective way, but he thought it necessary to caution my inexperience that I must confine my report rigidly to the matter in hand, and not concern myself with side issues of any kind. In the course of my inquiry, I learned much about Amour that was far more important than the divorce complications. Two or three business men of high repute in Brooklyn told me without reserve that he had abstracted money from express packages addressed to them and passing through his hands. When detected by them he had made good the losses, and in answer to his pleadings in behalf of his wife and children, they had kept silence. But now that he had himself brought ruin and disgrace upon his family they had no further reason for reserve. I secured written and signed statements of the facts from each of them, with permission to publish if need be. But all this was aside from the divorce matter I had been set to investigate, and, mindful of the instructions given me, I made no mention of it in the article. When I reached the office on the morning after that article was published, I met Kenward Philp at the entrance door of the building, manifestly waiting for me in some anxiety. Almost forgetting to say "good-morning," he eagerly asked: "Are you sure of your facts in that Amour story--can they be proved?" "Yes, absolutely," I replied. "But why do you ask?" "Oh, only because Amour has served papers on us in a libel suit for fifty thousand dollars damages." My heart sank at this, as it had never done before, and has never done since. I regarded it as certain that my career in the new profession I had adopted was hopelessly ended at its very beginning, and I thought, heart-heavily, of the wife and baby for whom I saw no way to provide. "Why, yes," I falteringly repeated, "every statement I made can be supported by unimpeachable testimony. But, believe me, Mr. Philp, I am sorry I have got the paper into trouble." "Oh, that's nothing," he replied, "so long as you're sure of your facts. One libel suit more or less is a matter of no moment." Then, by way of emphasizing the unworthiness of the man I had "libeled" I briefly outlined the worse things I had learned about him. Philp fairly shouted with delight: "Keno!" he exclaimed. "Hurry upstairs and _libel him some more_! Make it strong. Skin him and dress the wound with _aqua fortis_--I say--and rub it in!" I obeyed with a will, and the next morning Amour was missing, and the express company was sending descriptions of him to the police of every city in the country. It is a fixed rule with the great express companies to prosecute relentlessly every agent of their own who tampers with express packages. It is a thing necessary to their own protection. So ended my first libel suit. XXXVII [Sidenote: Later Libel Suit Observations] During the many years that I passed in active newspaper work after that time, observation and experience taught me much, with regard to newspaper libel suits, which is not generally known. It may be of interest to suggest some things on the subject here. I have never known anybody to get rich by suing newspapers for libel. The nearest approach to that result that has come within my knowledge was when Kenward Philp got a verdict for five thousand dollars damages against a newspaper that had accused him of complicity in the forging of the celebrated Morey letter which was used to General Garfield's hurt in his campaign for the Presidency. There have been larger verdicts secured in a few other cases, but I suspect that none of them seemed so much like enrichment to those who secured them, as that one did to Philp. It was not Mr. Philp's habit to have a considerable sum of money in possession at any time. His temperament strongly militated against that, and I think all men who knew him well will agree with me in doubting that he ever had one-half or one-fourth the sum this verdict brought him, in his possession at any one time in his life, except upon that occasion. In suing newspapers for libel it is the custom of suitors to name large sums as the measure of the damages claimed, but this is a thing inspired mainly by vanity and a spirit of ostentation. It emphasizes the value of the reputation alleged to have been damaged; it is in itself a boastful threat of the punishment the suitor means to inflict, and is akin to the vaporings with which men of rougher ways talk of the fights they contemplate. It is an assurance to the friends of the suitor of his determined purpose to secure adequate redress and of his confidence in his ability to do so. Finally, it is a "don't-tread-on-me" warning to everybody concerned. Inspired by such motives men often sue for fifty thousand dollars for damages done to a fifty-cent reputation. It costs no more to institute a suit for fifty thousand dollars than to bring one for one or two thousand. In many cases libel suits are instituted without the smallest intention of bringing them to trial. They are "bluffs," pure and simple. They are meant to intimidate, and sometimes they accomplish that purpose, but not often. I remember one case with which I had personally to deal. I was in charge of the editorial page of the New York _World_ at the time, and with a secure body of facts behind me I wrote a severe editorial concerning the malefactions of one John Y. McKane, a Coney Island political boss. I specifically charged him with the crimes he had committed, cataloguing them and calling each of them by its right name. The man promptly served papers in a libel suit against the newspaper. A timid business manager hurriedly came to me with the news, asking if I couldn't write another article "softening" the severity of the former utterance. I showed him the folly of any such attempt in a case where the libel, if there was any libel, had already been published. "But even if the case were otherwise," I added, "the _World_ will do nothing of that cowardly kind. The man has committed the crimes we have charged. Otherwise we should not have made the charges. I shall indite and publish another article specifically reiterating our accusations, as our reply to his attempt at intimidation." I did so at once. I repeated each charge made and emphasized it. I ended the article by saying that the man had impudently sued the paper for libel in publishing these truths concerning him, and adding that "it is not as plaintiff in a libel suit that he will have to meet these accusations, but as defendant in a criminal prosecution, and long before his suit for libel can be brought to trial, he will be doing time in prison stripes with no reputation left for anybody to injure." The prediction was fulfilled. The man was prosecuted and sentenced to a long term in state's prison. So ended that libel suit. [Sidenote: The Queerest of Libel Suits] The queerest libel proceeding of which I ever had personal knowledge, was that of Judge Henry Hilton against certain members of the staff of the New York _World_. It was unusual in its inception, in its character, and in its outcome. The _World_ published a series of articles with regard to Judge Hilton's relations with the late A. T. Stewart, and with the fortune left by Mr. Stewart at his death. I remember nothing of the merits of the matter, and they need not concern us here. The _World_ wanted Judge Hilton to bring a libel suit against it, in the hope that at the trial he might take the witness-stand and submit himself to cross-examination. To that end the paper published many things which were clearly libelous if they were not true. But Judge Hilton was not to be drawn into the snare. He instituted no libel suit in his own behalf; he asked no redress for statements made about himself, but he made complaint to the District Attorney, Colonel John R. Fellows, that the _World_ had criminally libeled the _memory of A. T. Stewart_, and for that offense Col. Fellows instituted criminal proceedings against John A. Cockerill and several other members of the _World's_ staff, who thus learned for the first time that under New York's queer libel law it is a crime to say defamatory things of Benedict Arnold, Guy Fawkes, or the late Judas Iscariot himself unless you can prove the truth of your charges. The editors involved in this case were held in bail, but as no effort of their attorneys to secure their trial could accomplish that purpose, it seems fair to suppose that the proceedings against them were never intended to be seriously pressed. Finally, when the official term of Colonel Fellows drew near its end, Mr. De Lancy Nicoll was elected to be his successor as District Attorney. As Mr. Nicoll had been the attorney of the _World_ and of its accused editors, the presence of these long dormant cases in the District Attorney's office threatened him with a peculiarly sore embarrassment. Should he find them on his calendar upon taking office, he must either become the prosecutor in cases in which he had been defendants' counsel, or he must dismiss them at risk of seeming to use his official authority to shield his own former clients from due responsibility under the criminal law. It was not until the very day before Mr. Nicoll took office that the embarrassing situation was relieved by Colonel Fellows, who at the end of his term went into court and asked for the dismissal of the cases. One other thing should be said on this subject. There are cases, of course, in which newspapers of the baser sort do wantonly assail reputation and should be made to smart for the wrong done. But these cases are rare. The first and most earnest concern of every reputable newspaper is to secure truth and accuracy in its news reports, and every newspaper writer knows that there is no surer way of losing his employment and with it his chance of securing another than by falsifying in his reports. The conditions in which newspapers are made render mistakes and misapprehensions sometimes unavoidable; but every reputable newspaper holds itself ready to correct and repair such mistakes when they injure or annoy innocent persons. Usually a printed retraction with apology in fact repairs the injury. But I have known cases in which vindictiveness, or the hope of money gain, has prompted the aggrieved person to persist in suing for damages and rejecting the offer of other reparation. In such cases the suitors usually secure a verdict carrying six cents damages. In one case that I remember the jury estimated the damages at one cent--leaving the plaintiff to pay the costs of the proceeding. XXXVIII [Sidenote: Early Newspaper Experiences] During the early days of my newspaper service there came to me an unusual opportunity, involving a somewhat dramatic experience. The internal revenue tax on distilled spirits was then so high as to make of illicit distilling an enormously profitable species of crime. The business had grown to such proportions in Brooklyn that its flourishing existence there, practically without interference by the authorities, gave rise to a very damaging political scandal. In the region round the Navy Yard there were illicit stills by scores, producing spirits by thousands of gallons daily. They were owned by influential men of standing, but operated by men of desperate criminal character to whom homicide itself seemed a matter of indifference so long as its perpetration could conceal crime or secure protection from punishment by means of the terror the "gang" held over the heads of all who might interfere with its members or their nefarious business. It was a dangerous thing to meddle with, and the officers of the law--after some of them had been killed and others severely beaten--were in fact afraid to meddle with it. There were warrants in the United States Marshal's office for the arrest of nearly a score of the offenders, but the papers were not served and there was scarcely a pretense made of effort to serve them. It was made my duty to deal with this matter both in the news columns and editorially. Every day we published a detailed list of the stills that had been in operation during the preceding night, together with the names of the men operating each and detailed information as to the exact locality of each. Every day we printed editorial articles calling upon the officers of the law to act, and severely criticising their cowardice in neglecting to act. At first these editorial utterances were admonitory and critical. With each day's added demonstration of official weakness they grew severer and more denunciatory of the official cowardice or corruption that alone could have inspired the inactivity. Presently the officer chiefly responsible, whom the newspaper singled out by name as the subject of its criticism, and daily denounced or ridiculed, instituted the usual libel suit for purposes of intimidation only. It had no such effect. The newspaper continued its crusade, and the scandal of official neglect grew daily in the public mind, until presently it threatened alarming political results. I do not know that political corruption was more prevalent then than now, but it was more open and shameless, and as a consequence men of upright minds were readier to suspect its existence in high places. At this time such men began rather insistently to ask why the authorities at Washington did not interfere to break up the illicit stills and why the administration retained in office the men whose neglect of that duty had become so great a scandal. It was freely suggested that somebody at Washington must be winking at the lawlessness in aid of political purposes in Brooklyn. [Sidenote: An Interview with President Grant] It was then that Theodore Tilton, with his constitutional audacity, decided to send me to Washington to interview President Grant on the subject. I was provided with letters from Tilton, as the editor of the Republican newspaper of Brooklyn, from the Republican Postmaster Booth, and from Silas B. Dutcher and other recognized leaders of the Republican party in Brooklyn. These letters asked the President, in behalf of Republicanism in Brooklyn, to give me the desired interview, assuring him of my integrity, etc. So armed I had no difficulty in securing audience. I found General Grant to be a man of simple, upright mind, unspoiled by fame, careless of formalities and the frills of official place, in no way nervous about his dignity--just a plain, honest American citizen, accustomed to go straight to the marrow of every subject discussed, without equivocation or reserve and apparently without concern for anything except truth and justice. He received me cordially and dismissed everybody else from the room while we talked. He offered me a cigar and we had our conference without formality. In presenting my credentials, I was moved by his own frankness of manner to tell him that I was an ex-Confederate soldier and not a Republican in politics. I was anxious not to sail under false colors, and he expressed himself approvingly of my sentiment, assuring me that my personal views in politics could make no difference in my status on this occasion. After I had asked him a good many questions about the matter in hand, he smilingly asked: "Why don't you put the suggestions so vaguely mentioned in these letters, into a direct question, so that I may answer it?" It had seemed to me an impossible impudence to ask the President of the United States whether or not his administration was deliberately protecting crime for the sake of political advantage, but at his suggestion I formulated the question, hurriedly putting it in writing for the sake of accuracy in reporting it afterwards. He answered it promptly and directly, adding: "I wish you would come to me again a week from today. I may then have a more conclusive answer to give you. Come at any rate." When the interview was published, my good friend, Dr. St. Clair McKelway, then young in the service on the Brooklyn _Eagle_ which has since brought fame to him and extraordinary influence to the newspaper which he still conducts, said to me at a chance meeting: "I think your putting of that question to General Grant was the coolest and most colossal piece of impudence I ever heard of." So it would have been, if I had done the thing of my own motion or otherwise without General Grant's suggestion, a thing of which, of course, no hint was given in the published interview. When I saw the President again a week later, he needed no questioning on my part. He had fully informed himself concerning matters in Brooklyn, and knew what he wanted to say. Among other things he mentioned that he had had a meeting with the derelict official whom we had so severely criticised and who had responded with a libel suit. All that the President thought it necessary to say concerning him was: [Sidenote: Grant's Method] "He must go. You may say so from me. Say it in print and positively." The publication of that sentence alone would have made the fortune of my interview, even without the other utterances of interest that I was authorized to publish as an assurance that the administration intended to break up the illicit distilling in Brooklyn even if it required the whole power of the government to do it. In relation to that matter the President said to me: "Now for your own reassurance, and not for publication, I may tell you that as soon as proper preparations can be made, the distilling district will be suddenly surrounded by a cordon of troops issuing from the Navy Yard, and revenue officers, under command of Jerome B. Wass, whom you know, I believe, will break up every distillery, carry away every still and every piece of machinery, empty every mash-tub into the gutters, and arrest everybody engaged in the business." I gave my promise not to refer to this raid in any way in advance of its making, but asked that I might be permitted to be present with the revenue officers when it should be made. General Grant immediately sent for Mr. Wass, who was in the White House at the time, and directed him to inform me when he should be ready to make the raid, and to let me accompany him. To this he added: "Don't let any other newspaper man know of the thing." The raid was made not long after that. In the darkness of the end of a night--a darkness increased by the practice of the distillers of extinguishing all the street lamps in that region--a strong military force silently slipped out of a remote gate in the Navy Yard inclosure, and before the movement was suspected, it had completely surrounded the district, under orders to allow no human being to pass in or out through the lines. I had with me an assistant, whom I had found the night before at a ball that he had been assigned to report, and under the strict rule laid down for the military, he and I were the only newspaper men within the lines, or in any wise able to secure news of what was going on--a matter that was exciting the utmost curiosity throughout the city. On the other hand, the rigidity of the military cordon threatened to render our presence within the lines of no newspaper use to us. Ours was an afternoon newspaper and our "copy," of which we soon made many columns, must be in the office not very long after midday if it was to be of any avail. But we were not permitted to pass the lines with it, either in person or by messenger. At last we secured permission of the Navy Yard authorities to go down to the water front of the Yard and hail a passing tug. With our pockets stuffed full of copy, we passed in that way to the Manhattan shore and made our way thence by Fulton ferry to the office, where we were greeted as heroes and victors who had secured for the paper the most important "beat" that had been known in years. There are victories, however, that are more disastrous to those who win them than defeat itself. For a time this one threatened to serve me in that way. Mr. Bowen, the owner of the paper, whom I had never before seen at the _Union_ office, presented himself there the next morning, full of enthusiasm. He was particularly impressed by the way in which I had secured advance information of the raid and with it the privilege of being present to report the affair. Unfortunately for me, he said in his enthusiasm, "that's the sort of man we make a general and not a private of, in journalism." Newspaper employments of the better sort were not easy to get in those days, and my immediate superiors in the office interpreted Mr. Bowen's utterance to mean that he contemplated the removal of some one or other of them, to make a commanding place for me. He had even suggested, in plain words, that he would like to see me made managing editor. In that suggestion he was utterly wrong. I knew myself to be unfit for the place for the reason that I knew little of the city and almost nothing of journalism, in which I had been engaged for no more than a few weeks. Nevertheless, Mr. Bowen's suggestion aroused the jealousy of my immediate superiors, and they at once began a series of persecutions intended to drive me off the paper, a thing that would have been calamitous to a man rather inexperienced and wholly unknown in other newspaper offices. Theodore Tilton solved the problem by removing me from the news department and promoting me to the editorial writing staff. XXXIX [Sidenote: A Free Lance] After somewhat more than a year's service on the Brooklyn newspaper my connection with it was severed, and for a time I was a "free lance," writing editorials and literary articles of various kinds for the New York _Evening Post_ in the forenoons, and devoting the afternoons to newswork on the _Tribune_--writing "on space" for both. At that time Mr. William Cullen Bryant was traveling somewhere in the South, I think, so that I did not then become acquainted with him. That came later. The _Evening Post_ was in charge of the late Charlton T. Lewis, with whom, during many later years, I enjoyed an intimate acquaintance. Mr. Lewis was one of the ripest scholars and most diligent students I have ever known, but he was also a man of broad human sympathies, intensely interested in public affairs and in all else that involved human progress. His knowledge of facts and his grasp of principles in the case of everything that interested him seemed to me not less than extraordinary, and they seem so still, as I remember the readiness with which he would turn from consideration of some nice question of Greek or Latin usage to write of a problem of statesmanship under discussion at Washington, or of some iniquity in municipal misgovernment which occupied the popular mind. His eyes were often red after the scholarly vigils of the midnight, but they were wide open and clear-sighted in their survey of all human affairs, from the Old Catholic movement to police abuses. His scholarship in ancient literatures in no way interfered with his alert interest in the literature of his own language, his own country, and his own time, or with his comprehensive acquaintance with it. He was as much at home on the rostrum as at the desk, and his readiness and force in speaking were as marked as the effectiveness of his written words. More remarkable still, perhaps, was the fact that his oral utterances, however unexpectedly and extemporaneously he might be called upon to speak, were as smoothly phrased, as polished, and as perfectly wrought in every way as if they had been carefully written out and laboriously committed to memory. Personally he was genial, kindly, and courteous, not with the courtesy of courtliness, which has considerations of self for its impulse, but with that of good-fellowship, inspired by concern for the happiness of those with whom he came in contact. XL [Sidenote: Hearth and Home] The service on the _Evening Post_ interested me particularly. My impulse was strongly toward the literary side of newspaper work, and it was on that side chiefly that the _Evening Post_ gave me opportunity. But I was working there only on space and devoting the greater part of my time to less congenial tasks. In a little while I gave up both these employments to accept the position of managing editor of a weekly illustrated publication called _Hearth and Home_. The paper had been very ambitious in its projection, very distinguished in the persons of its editors and contributors, and a financial failure from the beginning. There were several reasons for this. The mere making of an illustrated periodical in those days was excessively expensive. There were no photographic processes for the reproduction of pictures at that time. Every illustration must be drawn on wood and engraved by hand at a cost ten or twenty times as great as that now involved in the production of a similar result. A second difficulty was that _Hearth and Home_ was originally designed to meet a demand that did not exist. It was meant to be a country gentleman's newspaper at a time when there were scarcely any country gentlemen--in the sense intended--in America. Its appeals were largely to a leisure-class of well-to-do people, pottering with amateur horticulture and interested in literature and art. It had for its first editors Donald G. Mitchell (Ik Marvel), Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge. Mrs. Dodge was the only one of the company who had the least capacity as an editor, and her work was confined to the children's pages. The others were brilliant and distinguished literary folk, but wholly without either experience or capacity as editors. The publication had lost a fortune to its proprietors, when it was bought by Orange Judd & Company, the publishers of the _American Agriculturist_. They had changed its character somewhat, but not enough to make it successful. Its circulation--never large--had shrunk to a few thousands weekly. Its advertisements were few and unremunerative; and its total income was insufficient to cover one-half the cost of making it. My brother, Edward, and I were employed to take control of the paper and, if possible, resuscitate it. We found a number of "Tite Barnacles" there drawing extravagant salaries for which their services made no adequate return. To rid the paper of these was Edward's first concern. We found the pigeonholes stuffed with accepted manuscripts, not one in ten of which was worth printing. They were the work of amateurs who had nothing to say and didn't at all know how to say it. These must be paid for, as they had been accepted, but to print them would have been to invite continued failure. By my brother's order they were dumped into capacious waste baskets and better materials secured from writers of capacity--among them such persons as Dr. Edward Everett Hale, Asa Gray, George E. Waring, Jr., Charles Barnard, Mrs. Runkle, Helen Hunt, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sara Orne Jewett, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose Terry, and others of like ability. [Sidenote: Mary Mapes Dodge] Mrs. Dodge continued her well-nigh matchless work as editor of the children's pages, until a year or so later, when she left _Hearth and Home_ to create the new children's magazine, _St. Nicholas_. She was a woman of real genius--a greatly overworked word, but one fitly applied in her case. Her editorial instincts were alert and unfailing. Her gift of discovering kernels of value in masses of chaff was astonishing, and her skill in revising and reconstructing so as to save the grain and rid it of the chaff was such as I have never known in any other editor. Her industry was at times almost appalling in its tireless energy, yet it seemed to make no draughts upon her vitality that her singularly buoyant nature could not meet without apparent strain. She had also a rare gift of recognizing ability in others, judging it accurately, and setting it to do its proper work. One of the greatest services she rendered _Hearth and Home_ was in suggesting Frank R. Stockton for employment on the staff when we found ourselves in need of an assistant. He had not begun to make his reputation then. Such newspaper work as he had found to do had afforded his peculiar gifts no adequate opportunity and outside a narrow circle he was wholly unknown. But Mrs. Dodge was right in her reckoning when she advised his employment, and equally right in her perception of the kind of opportunity he needed. The friendship between Stockton and myself, which was begun during the time of our association on _Hearth and Home_, endured and increased to the end of his life. The fame that those later years brought to him is a matter of familiar knowledge to all who are likely to read this book. It is not of that that I wish to write here, or of the character of the work by which that fame was won. It is only of Stockton the man that I need set down anything in these pages. He was the best of good company always, as I found out early in our association, in those days when we went out together for our luncheon every day and enjoyed an hour of relaxation between the long morning's work and that of the longer afternoon. He never failed to be ready to go when the luncheon hour came. His work was always in shape and he carried no care for it with him when we quitted the office together. He never talked shop. I cannot remember that he ever mentioned anything respecting his work or asked a question concerning it between the time of our leaving the office and that of our return. Not that he was indifferent to it, for on the contrary I never knew a more conscientious worker, or one who more faithfully attended to every detail. When his "copy" was laid on my desk I knew perfectly that every sentence was as he had intended it to be, that every paragraph break was made at the point he desired it to be, and that every comma was marked in its proper place. While engaged in doing his work he gave his undivided attention to it, but when he went with me to the Crooked Stoop house in Trinity Alley for his luncheon, he gave equal attention to the mutton and potatoes, while his conversation was of things light, airy, and not strenuous. I spoke of this to him one day many years after the time of our editorial association, and for answer he said: "I suppose there are men who can part their hair and polish their boots at the same time, but I am not gifted in that way." I never saw Stockton angry. I doubt that he ever was so. I never knew him to be in the least degree hurried, or to manifest impatience in any way. On the other hand, I never knew him to manifest enthusiasm of any kind or to indulge in any but the most moderate and placid rejoicing over anything. Good or ill fortune seemed to have no effect whatever upon his spirits or his manner, so far as those who were intimately acquainted with him were able to discover. Perhaps it was only that his philosophy taught him the injustice of asking others to share his sorrows or his rejoicings over events that were indifferent to them. [Sidenote: Frank R. Stockton] He was always frail in health, but during all the years of my acquaintance with him I never once heard him mention the fact, or discovered any complaint of it in his tone or manner. At one time his weakness and emaciation were so great that he walked with two crutches, not because of lameness for he had none, but because of sheer physical weakness. Yet even at that time his face was a smiling one and in answer to all inquiries concerning his health he declared himself perfectly well. His self-possessed repression of enthusiasm is clearly manifest in his writings. In none of his stories is there a suggestion of anything but philosophic calm on the part of the man who wrote them. There is humor, a fascinating fancy, and an abounding tenderness of human sympathy of a placidly impersonal character, but there is no passion, no strenuosity, nothing to suggest that the author is anywhere stirred to enthusiasm by the events related or the situations in which his imaginary personages are placed. He one day said to me that he had never regarded what is called "love interest" as necessary to a novel, and in fact he never made any very earnest use of that interest. In "The Late Mrs. Null" he presented the love story with more of amusement than of warmth in his manner, while in "Kate Bonnet" the love affair is scarcely more than a casual adjunct to the pirate story. In "The Hundredth Man" he manifested somewhat greater sympathy, but even there his tone is gently humorous rather than passionate. Many of the whimsical conceits that Stockton afterward made the foundations of his books were first used in the more ephemeral writings of the _Hearth and Home_ period. It has often interested me in reading the later books to recall my first acquaintance with their germinal ideas. It has been like meeting interesting men and women whom one remembers as uncouth boys or as girls in pantalettes. For _Hearth and Home_ he wrote several playful articles about the character of eating houses as revealed in what I may call their physiognomies. The subject seemed to interest and amuse him, as it certainly interested and amused his readers, but at that time he probably did not dream of making it a considerable part of the structure of a novel, as he afterwards did in "The Hundredth Man." In the same way in a series of half serious, half humorous articles for the paper, he wrote of the picturesque features of piracy on the Spanish Main and along our own Atlantic coast. He gave humor to the historical facts by looking at them askance--with an intellectual squint as it were--and attributing to Blackbeard and the rest emotions and sentiments that would not have been out of place in a Sunday School. These things he justified in his humorously solemn way, by challenging anybody to show that the freebooters were not so inspired in fact, and insisting that men's occupations in life constitute no safe index to their characters. "We do not denounce the novelists and story writers," he one day said, "and call them untruthful persons merely because they gain their living by writing things that are not so. In their private lives many of the fiction writers are really estimable persons who go to church, wear clean linen, and pay their debts if they succeed in borrowing money enough for that purpose." Here clearly was the thought that afterward grew into the novel of "Kate Bonnet." About that time he wrote a little manual for Putnam's Handy Book Series, in which he undertook to show how to furnish a home at very small cost. All his readers remember what fun he made of that performance when he came to write "Rudder Grange." [Sidenote: A Whimsical View of Plagiary] I do not think this sort of thing is peculiar to Stockton's work. I find traces of it in the writings of others, especially of those humorous writers who have the gift of inventing amusingly whimsical conceits. It seems easily possible, for example, to find in "The Bab Ballads" the essential whimsicalities which afterward made the fortunes of Mr. W. S. Gilbert's most famous comic operas. Stockton's whimsical logic was brought to bear upon everything; so much so that I have often wondered how he would have regarded a "hold up" of his person for the sake of his purse if such a thing had happened to him. One day a man submitted a manuscript to me for sale. It was an article on Alice and Phoebe Cary. The subject was interesting and the article was pleasingly brief, so that I thought it promising. When I began to read it, the sentences seemed strangely familiar. As I read on I recognized the thing as an editorial I had myself written for the _Evening Post_ on the day of Phoebe Cary's funeral. To verify my impression I went at once to the office of the _Evening Post_, compared the manuscript with the printed article, and found it to be a verbatim copy. I was perhaps a little severe in my judgments of such things in those days, and when the plagiarist came back to learn the fate of his manuscript my language was of a kind that might have been regarded as severe. After the fellow had left, breathing threats of dire legal things that he meant to do to me for keeping his manuscript without paying for it, Stockton remonstrated with me for having lost my temper. "It seems to me," he said, "that you do not sufficiently consider the circumstances of the case. That man has his living to make as a writer, and nature has denied him the ability to create literature that he can sell. What is more reasonable, then, than that he should select marketable things that other people have written and sell them? His creative ability failing him, what can he do but use his critical ability in its stead? If he is not equal to the task of producing salable stuff, he at least knows such stuff when he sees it, and in the utilization of that knowledge he finds a means of earning an honest living. "Besides in selecting an article of yours to 'convey,' he has paid you a distinct compliment. He might have taken one of mine instead, but that his critical judgment saw the superiority of yours. You should recognize the tribute he has paid you as a writer. "Still again what harm would have been done if he had succeeded in selling the article? It had completely served its purpose as an editorial in the _Evening Post_, why should it not serve a larger purpose and entertain a greater company of readers? "Finally I am impressed with the illustration the case affords of the vagaries of chance as a factor in human happenings. There are thousands of editors in this country to whom that man might have offered the article. You were the only one of them who could by any possibility have recognized it as a plagiarism. According to the doctrine of chances he was perfectly safe in offering the manuscript for sale. The chances were thousands to one against its recognition. It was his ill-luck to encounter the one evil chance in the thousands. The moral of that is that it is unsafe to gamble. Still, now that he knows the one editor who can recognize it, he will no doubt make another copy of the article and sell it in safety to some one else." This prediction was fulfilled. The article appeared not long afterward as a contribution to another periodical. In the meanwhile Stockton's whimsical view of the matter had so amused me as to smooth my temper, and I did not think it necessary to expose the petty theft. XLI [Sidenote: Some Plagiarists I Have Known] The view taken by Stockton's perverse humor was much the same as that entertained by Benjamin Franklin with greater seriousness. He tells us in his Autobiography that at one time he regularly attended a certain church whose minister preached able sermons that interested him. When it was discovered that the sermons were borrowed, without credit, from some one else, the church dismissed the preacher and put in his place another whose sermons, all his own, did not interest Franklin, who thereupon ceased to attend the church, protesting that he preferred good sermons, plagiarized, to poor ones of the preacher's own. I have since learned what I did not know at the time of the incident related, that there is a considerable company of minor writers hanging as it were on the skirts of literature and journalism, who make the better part of their meager incomes by copying the writings of others and selling them at opportune times. Sometimes these clever pilferers copy matter as they find it, particularly when its source is one not likely to be discovered. Sometimes they make slight alterations in it for the sake of disguise, and sometimes they borrow the substance of what they want and change its form somewhat by rewriting it. Their technical name for this last performance is "skinning" an article. I have since had a good deal of experience with persons of this sort. When Horace Greeley died one of them--a woman--sold me a copy of the text of a very interesting letter from him which she assured me had never been seen by any one outside the little group that cherished the original. I learned later that she had simply copied the thing from the _Home Journal_, where it had been printed many months before. One day some years later I had a revelation made to me of the ethics of plagiarism accepted by a certain class of writers for the minor periodicals. I found in an obscure magazine a signed article on the heroism of women, or something of that sort, the first paragraphs of which were copied verbatim from a book of my own, in which I had written it as a personal recollection. When the writer of the article was questioned as to his trespass upon my copyright, he wrote me an exceedingly gracious letter of apology, saying, by way of explanation, that he had found the passage in an old scrapbook of his own, with no memorandum of its authorship attached. He had thought it no harm, he said, to make the thing his own, a thing, he assured me, he would not have done had he known whose the passage was. This explanation seemed to satisfy his conscience completely. I wonder what he would have thought himself privileged to do with a horse or a cow found wandering along a lane without the escort of its owner. [Sidenote: A Peculiar Case of Plagiary] Sometimes the plagiarist is far more daring in his thefts, taking as his own much greater things and more easily recognized ones than scrapbooks are apt to hold. The boldest thing of the sort with which I ever came into personal contact happened in this wise. As literary editor of the _Evening Post_ during the late seventies it was a part of my duty to look out for interesting correspondence. One day there came to me a particularly good thing of the kind--two or three columns of fascinating description of certain phases of life in the Canadian Northwest. The writer proposed to furnish us a series of letters of like kind, dealing with the trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, life among the trappers, Indians, and half-breeds, and the like. The letter submitted was so unusually good, both in its substance and in its literary quality, that I agreed to take the series on the terms proposed. A number of the letters followed, and the series attracted the pleased attention of readers. Presently, in addition to his usual letter our correspondent sent us a paper relating to the interesting career of a quaint personage who flourished in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in their territorial days. He was known as "Johnny Appleseed," because of his habit of carrying a bag of apple seeds in his wanderings and distributing them among the pioneers by way of inducing them to plant orchards. Unfortunately that article had been written by some one other than our correspondent and published long before in _Harper's Magazine_. When my suspicion was thus aroused with regard to the integrity of the correspondent, I instituted an inquiry which revealed the fact that the letters we had so highly valued were plagiarized from a book which had been published in England but not reprinted here. The daring of the man appalled me, but the limit of his assurance had not yet been revealed. When I wrote to him telling him of my discovery of the fraud and declining to send a check for such of the letters as had been printed and not yet paid for, he responded by sending me a number of testimonials to the excellence of his character, furnished by the clergymen, bankers, and leading men generally of the town in which he lived. Having thus rehabilitated his character, he argued that as the letters had proved interesting to the readers of the paper, we had got our money's worth, and that it made no difference in the quality of the literature furnished whether he had written it himself or had transcribed it from a book written by another person. Curiously enough there was a tone of assured sincerity in all this which was baffling to the understanding. I can explain it only by thinking that he plagiarized that tone also. It was about that time that my work as literary editor of the _Evening Post_ brought to my attention two cases of what I may call more distinguished plagiarism. Mrs. Wister, a gifted scholar and writer, was at that time rendering a marked service to literature by her exceedingly judicious adaptations of German fiction to the use of American readers. She took German novels that were utterly too long and in other ways unfit for American publication, translated them freely, shortened them, and otherwise saved to American readers all that was attractive in novels which, if directly translated, would have had no acceptability at all in this country. The results were quite as much her own as those of the German authors of the books thus treated. I had recently read and reviewed one of the cleverest of these books of hers, when there came to me for review an English translation of the same German novel, under another title. That translation was presented as the work of an English clergyman, well known as one of the most prolific writers of his time. As I looked over the book I discovered that with the exception of a few initiatory chapters, it was simply a copy of Mrs. Wister's work. In answer to the charge of plagiarism the reverend gentleman explained that he had set out to translate the book, but that when he had rendered a few chapters of it into English Mrs. Wister's work fell into his hands and he found her version so good that he thought it best to adopt it instead of making one of his own. He omitted, however, to explain the ethical conceptions that had restrained him from practising common honesty in a matter involving both reputation and revenue. That was at a time when English complaints of "American piracy" were loudest. [Sidenote: A Borrower from Stedman] The other case was a more subtle one, and incidentally more interesting to me. As literary editor of the _Evening Post_, under the editorship of Mr. Bryant, who held the literary side of the paper's work to be of more consequence than all the rest of it put together, I had to read everything of literary significance that appeared either in England or in America. One day I found in an English magazine an elaborate article which in effect charged Tennyson with wholesale plagiary from Theocritus. The magazinist was disposed to exploit himself as a literary discoverer, and he presented his discoveries with very little of that delicacy and moderation which a considerate critic would regard as the due of so distinguished a poet as Tennyson. I confess that his tone aroused something like antagonism in my mind, and I rather rejoiced when, upon a careful reading of his article, I found that he was no discoverer at all. Practically all that he had to say had been much better said already by Edmund C. Stedman first in a magazine essay and afterwards in a chapter of the "Victorian Poets." The chief difference was that Stedman had written with the impulse and in the tone and manner of a scholarly gentleman, while the other had exploited himself like a prosecuting attorney. The obvious thing to do was to get Stedman, if that were possible, to write a signed article on the subject for the _Evening Post_. With that end in view I went at once to his office in Broad Street. I knew him well, in literary and social ways, but I had never before trespassed upon his banker existence, and the visit mightily interested me, as one which furnished a view of an unfamiliar side of the "manyest-sided man"--that phrase I had learned from Mr. Whitelaw Reid--whom I ever knew. It was during Stock Exchange hours that I made my call, and I intended to remain only long enough to secure an appointment for some other and less occupied time. But the moment I indicated the matter I wished to consult with him about, Stedman linked his arm in mine and led me to his "den," a little room off the banking offices, and utterly unlike them in every detail. Here were books--not ledgers; here were all the furnishings of the haunt of a man of letters, without a thing to suggest that the man of letters knew or cared for anything relating to stocks, bonds, securities, loans, discounts, dividends, margins, or any other of the things that are alone considered of any account in Wall Street. "This is the daytime home of the literary side of me," he explained. "When I'm out there"--pointing, "I think of financial things; when I enter here I forget what a dollar mark looks like." "I see," I said. "Minerva in Wall Street--Athene, if you prefer the older Greek name." "Say Apollo instead--for if there is anything I pride myself upon it is my masculinity. 'Male and female created he them, and God saw that it was good,' but the garments of one sex do not become the other, and neither do the qualities and attributes." He had a copy of "The Victorian Poets" in the den and together we made a minute comparison of his study of Tennyson's indebtedness to Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus with the magazinist's article. For result we found that beyond a doubt the magazinist had "skinned" his article out of Stedman's chapter--in other words, that he had in effect plagiarized his charge of plagiary and the proofs of it. Stedman refused to write anything on the subject, deeming it not worth while, a judgment which I am bound to say was sound, though I did not like to accept it because my news instinct scented game and I wanted that article from Stedman's pen. His scholarly criticism was literature of lasting importance and interest. The magazine assault upon Tennyson's fame is utterly forgotten of those who read it. XLII [Sidenote: "The Hoosier Schoolmaster's" Influence] It was early in our effort to achieve a circulation for _Hearth and Home_ that my brother decided to write for it his novel, "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." I have elsewhere related the story of the genesis of that work, and I shall not repeat it here. Its success was immediate and astonishing. It quickly multiplied the circulation of _Hearth and Home_ many times over. It was reprinted serially in a dozen or more weekly newspapers in the West and elsewhere, and yet when it was published in a peculiarly unworthy and unattractive book form, its sales exceeded fifty thousand copies during the first month, at a time when the sale of ten thousand copies all told of any novel was deemed an unusual success. The popularity of the story did not end even there. Year after year it continued to sell better than most new novels, and now nearly forty years later, the demand for it amounts to several thousand copies per annum. It was translated into several foreign languages--in spite of the difficulty the translators must have encountered in rendering an uncouth dialect into languages having no such dialect. It was republished in England, and the French version of it appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. But great as its popularity was and still is, I am disposed to regard that as a matter of less significance and less consequence than the influence it exercised in stimulating and guiding the literary endeavors of others. If I may quote a sentence from a book of my own, "The First of the Hoosiers," Edward Eggleston was "the very first to perceive and utilize in literature the picturesqueness of the Hoosier life and character, the first to appreciate the poetic and romantic possibilities of that life and to invite others to share with him his enjoyment of its humor and his admiration for its sturdy manliness." While Edward was absorbed in the writing of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and its quickly following successor, "The End of the World," he more and more left the editorial conduct of the paper to me, and presently he resigned his editorial place, leaving me as his successor. The work was of a kind that awakened all my enthusiasm. My tastes were literary rather than journalistic, whatever may have been the case as to my capacities, and in the conduct of _Hearth and Home_ my work was far more literary in character than any that had fallen to me up to that time in my service on daily newspapers. More important still, it brought me into contact, both personally and by correspondence, with practically all the active literary men and women of that time, with many of whom I formed friendships that have endured to this time in the case of those who still live, and that ended only with the death of those who are gone. The experiences and the associations of that time were both delightful and educative, and I look back upon them after all these years with a joy that few memories can give me. I was a mere apprentice to the literary craft, of course, but I was young enough to enjoy and, I think, not too conceited to feel the need of learning all that such associations could teach. It was during this _Hearth and Home_ period that my first books were written and published. They were the results of suggestions from others rather than of my own self-confidence, as indeed most of the thirty-odd books I have written have been. Mr. George P. Putnam, the Nestor of American book publishing, the friend of Washington Irving and the discoverer of his quality, returned to the work of publishing about that time. In partnership with his son, George Haven Putnam, then a young man and now the head of a great house, he had set up a publishing firm with a meager "list" but with ambition to increase it to a larger one. [Sidenote: My First Book] In that behalf the younger member of the firm planned a series of useful manuals to be called "Putnam's Handy Book Series," and to be sold at seventy-five cents each. With more of hopefulness than of discretion, perhaps, he came to me asking if I could not and would not write one or two of the little volumes. The immediate result was a little book entitled "How to Educate Yourself." In writing it I had the advantage of comparative youth and of that self-confident omniscience which only youth can have. I knew everything then better than I know anything now, so much better indeed that for a score of years past I have not dared open the little book, lest it rebuke my present ignorance beyond my capacity to endure. Crude as the thing was, it was successful, and it seems to have satisfied a genuine need, if I may judge by the numberless letters sent to me by persons who felt that it had helped them. Even now, after the lapse of more than thirty-eight years, such letters come to me occasionally from men in middle life who say they were encouraged and helped by it in their youth. I once thought of rewriting it with more of modesty than I possessed when it had birth, but as that would be to bring to bear upon it a later-acquired consciousness of ignorance rather than an enlarged knowledge of the subject, I refrained, lest the new version should be less helpful than the old. The Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler once said to me: "If one gets printer's ink on his fingers when he is young, he can never get it off while he lives." The thought that suggested that utterance had prompt illustration in this case. Not long after this poor little first book was published, I went to Boston to secure literary contributions for _Hearth and Home_. In those days one had to go to Boston for such things. Literary activity had not yet transferred its dwelling place to New York, nor had Indiana developed its "school." While I was in Boston Mr. Howells called on me, and in his gentle way suggested that I should write my reminiscences of Southern army life in a series of articles for the _Atlantic Monthly_, of which he was then the editor. The suggestion, coming from such a source, almost made me dizzy. I had vaguely and timidly cherished a secret hope that some day--after years of preparatory practice in smaller ways--I might have the honor and the joy of seeing some article of mine in one or other of the great magazines. But that hope was by no means a confident one, and it looked to a more or less remote future for its fulfilment. Especially it had never been bold enough to include the _Atlantic Monthly_ in the list of its possibilities. That was the magazine of Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, and their kind--the mouthpiece of the supremely great in our literature. The thought of ever being numbered among the humblest contributors to that magazine lay far beyond the utmost daring of my dreams. And the supremacy of the _Atlantic_, in all that related to literary quality, was at that time very real, so that I am in nowise astonished even now that I was well-nigh stunned when Mr. Howells suggested that I should write seven papers for publication there, and afterward embody them in a book together with two others reserved from magazine publication for the sake of giving freshness to the volume. I did not accept the suggestion at once. I was too greatly appalled by it. I had need to go home and cultivate my self-conceit before I could believe myself capable of writing anything on the high level suggested. In the end I did the thing with great misgiving, but with results that were more than satisfactory, both to Mr. Howells and to me. [Sidenote: "A Rebel's Recollections"] The passions aroused by the war of which I wrote had scarcely begun to cool at that time and there was a good deal of not very friendly surprise felt when the _Atlantic's_ constituency learned that the great exponent of New England's best thought was to publish the war memories of a Confederate under the seemingly self-assertive title of "A Rebel's Recollections." That feeling seems to have been alert in protest. Soon after the first paper was published Mr. Howells wrote me that it had "brought a hornets' nest about his ears," but that he was determined to go on with the series. After the second paper appeared he wrote me that the hornets had "begun to sing psalms in his ears" because of the spirit and temper in which the sensitive subject was handled. On the evening of the day on which the "Recollections" appeared in book form, there was a banquet at the Parker House in Boston, given in celebration of the _Atlantic's_ fifteenth birthday. Without a moment's warning I was toasted as the author of the latest book from the Riverside Press, and things were said by the toast-master about the spirit in which the book was written--things that overwhelmed me with embarrassment, by reason of the fact that it was my first experience of the kind and I was wholly unused to the extravagantly complimentary eloquence of presiding officers at banquets. I had never been made the subject of a toast before. I had never before attempted to make an after-dinner speech, and I was as self-conscious as a schoolboy on the occasion of his first declamation before an outside audience. But one always does stumble through such things. I have known even an Englishman to stammer out his appreciation and sit down without upsetting more than one or two of his wine glasses. In the same way I uttered some sort of response in spite of the embarrassing fact that George Parsons Lathrop, who had been designated as the "historian of the evening and chronicler of its events," sat immediately opposite me, manifestly studying me, I thought, as a bugologist might study a new species of beetle. I didn't know Lathrop then, as I afterward learned to know him, in all the friendly warmth and good-fellowship of his nature. When the brief ordeal was over and I sat down in full conviction that I had forever put myself to shame by my oratorical failure, Mr. Howells left his seat and came to say something congratulatory--something that I attributed to his kindly disposition to help a man up when he is down--and when he turned away Mark Twain was there waiting to say something on his own account. "When you were called on to speak," he said, "I braced myself up to come to your rescue and make your speech for you. I thought of half a dozen good things to say, and now they are all left on my hands, and I don't knew what on earth to do with them." Then came Mr. Frank B. Sanborn to tell me of a plan he and some others had hurriedly formed to give me a little dinner at Swampscott, at which there should be nobody present but "original abolitionists" and my rebel self. I was unable to accept this attention, but it ended all doubt in my mind that I had written my "Recollections" in a spirit likely to be helpful in the cultivation of good feeling between North and South. The reviews of the book, especially in the New England newspapers, confirmed this conviction, and I had every reason to be satisfied. XLIII [Sidenote: A Novelist by Accident] Before "A Rebel's Recollections" appeared, I had written and published my first novel, "A Man of Honor." That book, like the others, was the result of accident and not of deliberate purpose. The serial story had become a necessary feature of _Hearth and Home_, and we had made a contract with a popular novelist to furnish us with such a story to follow the one that was drawing to a close. Almost at the last moment the novelist failed us, and I hurriedly visited or wrote to all the rest of the available writers in search of a suitable manuscript. There were not so many novelists then as there are now. The search proved futile, and the editorial council was called together in something like panic to consider the alarming situation. The story then running was within a single instalment of its end, and no other was to be had. It was the unanimous opinion of the council--which included a member of the publishing firm as its presiding officer--that it would be disastrous to send out a single number of the paper without an instalment of a serial in it, and worse still, if it should contain no announcement of a story to come. The council, in its wisdom, was fully agreed that "something must be done," but no member of it could offer any helpful suggestion as to what that "something" should be. The list of available story writers had been completely exhausted, and it was hopeless to seek further in that direction. Even my old-time friend, John Esten Cooke, whose fertility of fiction was supposed to be limitless, had replied to my earnest entreaties, saying that he was already under contract for two stories, both of which were then in course of serial publication, and neither of which he had finished writing as yet. "Two sets of clamorous printers are at my heels," he wrote, "and I am less than a week ahead of them in the race between copy and proof slips." As we sat in council, staring at each other in blank despair, I said, without really meaning it: "If worse comes to worst, I'll write the story myself." Instantly the member of the publishing firm who presided over the meeting answered: "That settles the whole matter. Mr. Eggleston will write the story. The council stands adjourned," and without waiting for my remonstrance, everybody hurried out of the room. I had never written a story, long or short. I hadn't the remotest idea what I should or could write about. I had in my mind neither plot nor personages, neither scene nor suggestion--nothing whatever out of which to construct a story. And yet the thing must be done, and the printers must have the copy of my first instalment within three days. I turned the key in my desk and fled from the office. I boarded one of the steamers that then ran from Fulton Ferry to Harlem. I wanted to think. I wanted quietude. When the steamer brought me back, I had in my mind at least a shadowy notion--not of the story as a whole, but of its first chapter, and I had decided upon a title. Hurrying home I set to work to write. About nine o'clock the artist who had been engaged to illustrate the story called upon me and insisted upon it that he must decide at once what he should draw as the first illustration. He reminded me that the drawing must be made on wood, and that it would take two or three days to engrave it after his work upon it should be finished. I pushed toward him the sheets I had written and bade him read them while I went on writing. Before he left a telegram came from the office asking what the title of the story was to be, in order that the paper, going to press that night, might carry with it a flaming announcement of its beginning in the next number. [Sidenote: "A Man of Honor"] From beginning to end the story was written in that hurried way, each instalment going into type before the next was written. Meanwhile, I had the editorial conduct of the paper to look after and the greater part of the editorial page to write each week. The necessary result was a crude, ill-considered piece of work, amateurish in parts, and wholly lacking in finish throughout. Yet it proved acceptable as a serial, and when it came out in book form ten thousand copies were sold on advance orders. The publishers were satisfied; the public seemed satisfied, and as for the author, he had no choice but to rest content with results for which he could in no way account then, and cannot account now. The nearest approach to an explanation I have ever been able to imagine is that the title--"A Man of Honor"--was a happy one. Of that there were many proofs then and afterwards. The story had been scarcely more than begun as a serial, when Edgar Fawcett brought out a two or three number story with the same title, in _Appletons' Journal_, I think. Then Dion Boucicault cribbed the title, attached it to a play he had "borrowed" from some French dramatist, and presented the whole as his own. Finally, about a dozen years later, a curious thing happened. I was acting at the time as a literary adviser of Harper & Brothers. There was no international copyright law then, but when a publisher bought advance sheets of an English book and published it here simultaneously or nearly so with its issue in England, a certain courtesy of the trade forbade other reputable publishing houses to trespass. The Harpers kept two agents in London, one of them to send over advance sheets for purchase, and the other to send books as they were published. One day among the advance sheets sent to me for judgment I found a novel by Mrs. Stannard, the lady who wrote under the pen name of John Strange Winter. It was a rather interesting piece of work, but it bore my title, "A Man of Honor." In advising its purchase I entered my protest against the use of that title in the proposed American edition. Of course the protest had no legal force, as our American copyright law affords no protection to titles, but with an honorable house like the Harpers the moral aspect of the matter was sufficient. The situation was a perplexing one. The Harpers had in effect already bought the story from Mrs. Stannard for American publication. They must publish simultaneously with the English appearance of the novel or lose all claim to the protection of the trade courtesy. There was not time enough before publication day for them to communicate with the author and secure a change of title. In this perplexity Mr. Joseph W. Harper, then the head of the house and a personal friend of my own, asked me if I would consent to the use of the title if he should print a footnote on the first page of the book, setting forth the fact of my prior claim to it and saying that the firm was indebted to my courtesy for the privilege of using it. I readily consented to this and the book appeared in that way. A little later, in a letter, Mrs. Stannard sent me some pleasant messages, saying especially that she had found among her compatriots no such courteous reasonableness in matters of the kind as I had shown. By way of illustration she said that some years before, when she published "Houp-la," she had been compelled to pay heavy damages to an obscure writer who had previously used the title in some insignificant provincial publication, never widely known and long ago forgotten. In the case of "A Man of Honor" the end was not yet. Mrs. Stannard's novel with that title and the footnote was still in its early months of American circulation when one day I found among the recently published English novels sent to me for examination one by John Strange Winter (Mrs. Stannard) entitled, "On March." Upon examining it I found it to be the same that the Harpers had issued with the "Man of Honor" title. I suppose that after the correspondence above referred to, Mrs. Stannard had decided to give the English edition of her work this new title, but had omitted to notify the Harpers of the change. [Sidenote: A "Warlock" on the Warpath] Mention of this matter of trouble with titles reminds me of a rather curious case which amused me at the time of its occurrence and may amuse the reader. In the year 1903 I published a novel entitled "The Master of Warlock." During the summer of that year I one day received a registered letter from a man named Warlock, who wrote from somewhere in Brooklyn. The missive was brief and peremptory. Its writer ordered me to withdraw the book from circulation instantly, and warned me that no more copies of it were to be sold. He offered no reason for his commands and suggested no explanation of his authority to give them. I wrote asking him upon what ground he assumed to interfere, and for reply he said briefly: "My grounds are personal and legal." Beyond that he did not explain. He had written in the same way to the publishers of the book, who answered him precisely as I had done. A month later there came another registered letter from him. In it he said that a month had passed since his demand was made and that as I had paid no heed to it, he now repeated it. He said he was armed with adequate proof that many copies of the book had been sold during that month--a statement which I am glad to say was true. There must now be a prompt and complete withdrawal of the novel from the market, he said. This time the peremptory gentleman graciously gave me at least a hint of the ground upon which he claimed a right to order the suppression of the novel. He said I ought to know that I had no right to make use of any man's surname in fiction, especially when it was a unique name like his own. As I was passing the summer at my Lake George cottage, I sent him a note saying that I should continue in my course, and giving him the address of a lawyer in New York who would accept service for me in any action he might bring. For a time thereafter I waited anxiously for the institution of his suit. I foresaw a great demand for the book as a consequence of it, and I planned to aid in that. I arranged with some of my newspaper friends in New York to send their cleverest reporters to write of the trial. Charles Henry Webb--"John Paul," who wrote the burlesques, "St. Twelvemo" and "Liffith Lank"--proposed to take up on his own account Mr. Warlock's contention that the novelist has no right to use any man's surname in a novel, and make breezy fun of it by writing a novelette upon those lines. In his preface he purposed to set forth the fact that there is scarcely any conceivable name that is not to be found in the New York City directory, and that even a name omitted from that widely comprehensive work, was pretty sure to belong to somebody somewhere, so that under the Warlock doctrine its use must involve danger. He would show that the novelist must therefore designate his personages as "Thomas Ex Square," "Tabitha Twenty Three," and so on with a long list of mathematical impersonalities. Then he planned to give a sample novel written in that way, in which the dashing young cavalier, Charles Augustus + should make his passionate addresses to the fascinating Lydia =, only to learn from her tremulous lips that she was already betrothed to the French nobleman, Compte [Symbol: cube root]y. Unhappily Mr. Warlock never instituted his suit; John Paul lost an opportunity, and the public lost a lot of fun. By way of completing the story of this absurdity, it is worth while to record that the novel complained of had no personage in it bearing the name of Warlock. In the book that name was merely the designation by which a certain Virginia plantation was known. XLIV [Sidenote: "Pike County Ballads"] During our early struggles to secure a place for _Hearth and Home_ in popular favor, I was seized with a peculiarly vaulting ambition. John Hay's "Pike County Ballads" were under discussion everywhere. Phrases from them were the current coin of conversation. Critics were curiously studying them as a new and effective form of literature, and many pious souls were in grave alarm over what they regarded as blasphemy in Mr. Hay's work, especially the phrase "a durned sight better business than loafin' round the throne," at the end of "Little Breeches." I knew Mr. Hay slightly. Having ceased for a time to hold diplomatic place, he was a working writer then, with his pen as his one source of income. I made up my mind to secure a Pike County Ballad for _Hearth and Home_ even though the cost of it should cause our publishers the loss of some sleep. Knowing that his market was a good one for anything he might choose to write, I went to him with an offer such as few writers, if any at that time, had ever received, thinking to outbid all others who might have designs upon his genius. It was of no use. He said that the price offered "fairly took his breath away," but told me with the emphasis of serious assurance, that he "could not write a Pike County Ballad to save his life." "That was what they call a 'pocket mine,'" he added, "and it is completely worked out." He went on to tell me the story of the Ballads and the circumstances in which they were written. As he told me the same thing more in detail many years later, adding to it a good many little reminiscences, I shall draw upon the later rather than the earlier memory in writing of the matter here. It was in April, 1902, when he was at the height of his brilliant career as Secretary of State that I visited him by invitation. In the course of a conversation I reminded him of what he had told me about thirty years before, concerning the genesis of the ballads, and said: "I wonder if you would let me print that story? It seems to me something the public is entitled to share." He responded without hesitation: "Certainly. Print it by all means if you wish, and in order that you may get it right after all these years, I'll tell it to you again. It came about in this way: I was staying for a time at a hospitable country house, and on a hot summer Sunday I went with the rest to church where I sleepily listened to a sermon. In the course of it the good old parson--who hadn't a trace of humorous perception in his make-up, droned out a story substantially the same as that in 'Little Breeches.' "As I sat there in the sleepy sultriness of the summer Sunday, in an atmosphere that seemed redolent of roasting pine pews and scorching cushion covers, I fell to thinking of Pike County methods of thought, of what humor a Pike County dialect telling of that story would have, and of what impression the story itself, as solemnly related by the preacher, would make upon the Pike County mind. There are two Pike Counties, you know--one in Illinois and the other confronting it across the river, in Missouri. But the people of the two Pike Counties are very much alike--isomeric, as the chemists say--and they have a dialect speech, a point of view, and an intellectual attitude in common, and all their own. I have encountered nothing else like it anywhere. [Sidenote: John Hay's Own Story of the Ballads] "When I left the church that Sunday, I was full to the lips of an imaginary Pike County version of the preacher's story, and on the train as I journeyed to New York, I entertained myself by writing 'Little Breeches.' The thing was done merely for my own amusement, without the smallest thought of print. But when I showed it to Whitelaw Reid he seized upon the manuscript and published it in the _Tribune_. "By that time the lilt and swing of the Pike County Ballad had taken possession of me. I was filled with the Pike County spirit, as it were, and the humorous side of my mind was entertained by its rich possibilities. Within a week after the appearance of 'Little Breeches' in print all the Pike County Ballads were written. After that the impulse was completely gone from me. There was absolutely no possibility of another thing of the kind. When you asked me for something of that kind for _Hearth and Home_, I told you truly that I simply could not produce it. There were no more Pike County Ballads in me, and there never have been any since. "Let me tell you a queer thing about that. From the hour when the last of the ballads was written until now, I have never been able to feel that they were mine, that my mind had had anything to do with their creation, or that they bore any trace of kinship to my thought or my intellectual impulses. They seem utterly foreign to me--as foreign as if I had first encountered them in print, as the work of somebody else. It is a strange feeling. Of course every creative writer feels something of the sort with regard to much of his work, but I, at least, have never had the feeling one-tenth so strongly with regard to anything else I ever did. "Now, let me tell you," Mr. Hay continued, "of some rather interesting experiences I have had with respect to the ballads. One day at the Gilsey House, in New York, I received the card of a gentleman, and when he came to my room he said: "'I am the son of the man whom you celebrated in one of your ballads as Jim Bludso, the engineer who stuck to his duty and declared he would "hold her nozzle agin the bank till the last galoot's ashore."'" Mr. Hay added: "This gave me an opportunity. Mark Twain had criticised the ballad, saying that Jim Bludso must have been a pilot, and not an engineer, for the reason that an engineer, having once set his engines going, could have no need to stay by them. In view of this criticism, I asked my visitor concerning it, telling him of what Mark Twain had said. For answer the caller assured me that the original Jim Bludso was in fact an engineer. He explained that as a Mississippi River steamboat has two engines, each turning an independent wheel, and as the current of the river is enormously swift, it was necessary for the engineer to remain at his post, working one engine and then the other, backing on one sometimes and going ahead on the other, if her nozzle was to be held 'agin the bank till the last galoot's ashore.'" [Sidenote: Some Anecdotes from John Hay] For reply to this I told Mr. Hay that I had seen in a Memphis cemetery a tombstone erected to a pilot, and inscribed with the story of his heroic death in precisely Jim Bludso's spirit. At the time that I read the inscription on it, "Jim Bludso" had not been written, but the matter interested me and I made inquiry for the exact facts. The story as I heard it was this: The boat being afire the pilot landed her, head-on against a bank that offered no facilities for making her fast with cables. The only way to get the "galoots ashore" was for the pilot to remain at his post and ring his engine bells for going ahead and backing, so as to "hold her nozzle agin the bank." But the flames were by that time licking the rear of the pilot house, and the captain frantically entreated the pilot to leap from the forward part of the structure to the deck below. This the heroic fellow refused to do so long as the safety of the passengers required his presence at his post. He stood there, calmly smoking his cigar and coolly ringing his bells as occasion required till at last every other human being on board had been saved. By that time the flames had completely enveloped the pilot-house, and there was left no possible way of escape. Then relinquishing his hold upon the wheel, the pilot folded his arms and stood like a statue until the floor beneath him gave way and he sank to a cruel death in the furnace-like fire below. The details of the story were related to me by Captain John Cannon, of the steamer "Robert E. Lee," and the weather-beaten old navigator was not ashamed of the tears that trickled down his cheeks as he told the tale. When I had finished, Mr. Hay said: "That only means that we have two heroes to revere instead of one. Jim Bludso was an engineer." Continuing his talk of coincidences, Mr. Hay said: "I once went up to my native village, and as I walked along the street I accidentally jostled a man. When I apologized, he turned to me and said: "'I ought to know you and you ought to know me, for your name's John Hay and mine's Jim Bludso. But I'm not the fellow you wrote that poetry about. He's very dead and you see I'm very much alive.'" Then Mr. Hay told me of another curious encounter that connected itself with the Pike County Ballads. "You remember," he said, "that it was from the sermon of an old minister that I got the story told in 'Little Breeches.' Well, when I was in California in company with President McKinley, I was one day visited by a venerable man who proved to be none other than the preacher from whose lips I had heard the original and authoritative prosaic version of that miracle story. It is curious how these coincidences occur." The substance of this conversation with Mr. Hay was embodied in an article of mine in the New York _Herald_ for April 27, 1902. Proofs of the interview were sent to Mr. Hay in advance of publication, with my request that he should make such corrections in them as he saw fit. He returned the slips to me without an alteration and with a note saying; "I have no suggestions to make. Your report of our conversation is altogether accurate. I only wish I might have said something better worth printing." That was the last time I saw John Hay. It was the end of an acquaintance which had been cordial, though not intimate, and which had extended over a period of thirty years. As I was leaving he stopped me. He took up a copy of the pamphlet containing his splendid tribute to the memory of President McKinley, inscribed it with his autograph, and handed it to me, saying, with a touch of sadness which was not quite melancholy: "You care for my literary work. Perhaps in the coming years you will care to have, from my own hand, this copy of my latest and probably my last essay in that department of human endeavor." The event verified his prophecy. He soon afterward fell ill, and in the year 1905 he died, affectionately regretted by every one who had ever known him personally and by scores of thousands who had known him only through his work. [Sidenote: Mr. Hay's Personality] John Hay's personal character was the foundation upon which all his successes, whether in journalism, literature, or statecraft were built. He was utterly sincere, as instinctively truthful as a child, and as gentle of spirit as any woman ever was. Those who knew him personally were never at a loss to account for the ease with which, in diplomatic matters, he won men to his wish and persuaded them to his point of view. Every one who came into contact with him was constrained by his gentle reasonableness to agree with him. His whole nature was winning in an extraordinary degree. Strong as he was in his own convictions, his assertion of them never took the form of antagonism. I really suppose that John Hay never said a thing in his life which aroused resentment--and that not because of any hesitation on his part to utter his thought but because of the transparent justice of the thought, and of his gently persuasive way of uttering it. His convictions were strong and there was enough of apostleship in his nature to prompt him to urge them on all proper occasions: but he urged them soothingly, convincingly, never by arrogant assertion or with obnoxious insistence. Feeling no disposition to quarrel with anybody on his own account, he was always alert to make an end of other people's quarrels when opportunity of pacification came to him. I remember an instance of this that fell under my own notice. During a prolonged absence of Mr. Whitelaw Reid from the country, Mr. Hay was left in control of the _Tribune_. I was not connected with any newspaper at the time, but was "running a literary shop" of my own, as Mr. Hay expressed it--writing books of my own, editing other people's books, advising a publishing firm, and writing for various newspapers and magazines. Now and then, when some occurrence suggested it, I wrote an editorial article for the _Tribune_, as I had done occasionally for a good many years before. One day Mr. Hay asked me to call upon him with reference to some work he wanted me to do. After we had arranged all the rest of it, he picked up Jefferson Davis's "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," which had just been published. "That is a subject," Mr. Hay said, "on which you can write as an expert. I want you, if you will, to review the book for the _Tribune_." I objected that my estimate of Mr. Davis was by no means a flattering one, and that in a cursory examination which I had already given to his book, I had discovered some misrepresentations of fact so extraordinary that they could not be passed over in charitable silence. I cited, as one of these misrepresentations, Mr. Davis's minute account--expunged from later editions of the book, I believe--of the final evacuation of Fort Sumter and the city of Charleston--in which he gave an account of certain theatrical performances that never occurred, and of impassioned speeches made by an officer who was not there and had not been there for eight months before the time of the evacuation. "So far as that is concerned," said Mr. Hay, "it makes no difference. As a reviewer you will know what to say of such things. Mr. Davis has put forward a book. It is subject to criticism at the hands of any capable and honest reviewer. Write of it conscientiously, and with as much of good temper as you can. That is all I desire." I then suggested another difficulty. For a considerable time past there had been some ill feeling between the editor of the _Tribune_ and the publishers of Mr. Davis's book. The _Tribune_ did not review or in any way mention books published by that firm. On one occasion, when I had been asked to review a number of books for the paper, one of them was withdrawn on that account. I suggested to Mr. Hay that perhaps a review of Mr. Davis's book by one who had been thus warned of the situation might be a displeasing impertinence. He replied: "I have had no instructions on that head. I know nothing about the ill feeling. Perhaps you and I may make an end of the trouble by ignoring it. Write your review and I will publish it." [Sidenote: Mr. Hay and "The Breadwinners"] One other thing I may mention here as perhaps of interest. When the anonymous novel, "The Breadwinners," appeared, it excited a good deal of comment because of the freedom with which the author presented prominent persons under a disguise too thin to conceal identity. The novel was commonly and confidently attributed to Mr. Hay, and some of the critics ventured to censure him for certain features of it. One night at the Authors Club, at a time when talk of the matter was in everybody's mouth, and when Mr. Hay's authorship of the work had well-nigh ceased to be in doubt, he and I were talking of other things, when suddenly he said to me: "I suppose you share the general conviction with regard to the authorship of 'The Breadwinners.' Let me tell you that I did not write that book, though I confess that some things in it seem to justify the popular belief that I did." The peculiar form of words in which he couched his denial left me in doubt as to its exact significance, and to this day that doubt has never been resolved. Of course I could not subject him to a cross-examination on the subject. XLV I have wandered somewhat from the chronology of my recollections, but this record is not a statistical table, and so it matters not if I wander farther still in pursuit of vagrant memories. The mention of Mr. Hay's old preacher who had no sense of humor in his composition reminds me of another of like kind, who was seized with an ardent desire to contribute--for compensation--a series of instructive moral essays to _Hearth and Home_. When asked by a member of the publishing firm to let him do so, I replied that I did not think the paper was just then in pressing need of instructive moral essays, but that the reverend gentlemen might send one as a sample. He sent it. It began thus: "Some philosopher has wisely observed that 'every ugly young woman has the comforting assurance that she will be a pretty old woman if she lives long enough.' Doubtless the philosopher meant that a young woman destitute of physical beauty, with all its temptations, is sure to cultivate those spiritual qualities which give beauty and more than beauty to the countenance in later years." And so the dear, innocent old gentleman went on for a column or so, utterly oblivious of the joke he had accepted as profound philosophy. I had half a mind to print his solemn paper in the humorous column entitled, "That Reminds Me," but, in deference to his age and dignity, I forbore. As is often the case in such matters, my forbearance awakened no gratitude in him. In answer to his earnest request to know why I thought his essay unworthy, I was foolish enough to point out and explain the jocular character of his "philosopher's" utterance, whereupon he wrote to my publishers, strongly urging them to employ a new editor, for that "the young man you now have is obviously a person of frivolous mind who sees only jests in utterances of the most solemn and instructive import." As the publishers did not ask for my resignation, I found it easy to forgive my adversary. [Sidenote: The Disappointed Author] In view of the multitude of cases in which the writers of rejected contributions and the victims of adverse criticism are at pains to advise publishers to change their editors, I have sometimes wondered that the editorial fraternity is not continually a company of literary nomads, looking for employment. In one case, I remember, a distinguished critic reviewing a rather pretentious book, pointed out the fact that the author had confounded rare old Ben Jonson with Dr. Samuel Johnson in a way likely to be misleading to careless or imperfectly informed readers, whereupon not only the author but all his friends sent letters clamoring for the dismissal of a reviewer so lacking in sympathetic appreciation of sincere literary endeavor. When I told Mr. George Ripley of the matter he replied: "Oh, that is the usual thing. I am keeping a collection of letters sent to Mr. Greeley demanding my discharge. I think of bequeathing it to the Astor Library as historical material, reflecting the literary conditions of our time." In one case of the kind that fell to my share there was a rather dramatic outcome. I was acting as a literary adviser for Harper & Brothers, when there came to me for judgment the manuscript of a novel in which I found more of virility and strong human interest than most novels possess, together with a well constructed plot, a pleasing literary style, and some unusually well conceived and well portrayed characters. The work was so good indeed that it was with very sincere regret that I found myself obliged to condemn it. I had to do so because it included, as an inseparable part of its structure, a severe and even a bitter assault upon the work and the methods of Mr. Moody and all the other "irregular troops" in the army of religion, not sparing even the "revival" methods of the Methodists and Baptists. It was a rigid rule of the Harpers not to publish books of that kind, and I might with propriety have reported simply that the novel included matters which rendered it unavailable for the Harper list. But I was so interested in it and so impressed with its superior quality as a work of fiction that instead of a brief recommendation of rejection, I sent in an elaborate critical analysis of it, including a pretty full synopsis of its plot. The "opinion" filled many pages of manuscript--more than I had ever before written in that way concerning any book submitted to me. A week or so later I happened to call at the Harper establishment, as it was my custom to do occasionally. Seeing me, Mr. Joseph W. Harper, Jr.--"Brooklyn Joe" we called him--beckoned to me, and, with a labored assumption of solemnity which a mirthful twinkle in his eye completely spoiled, said: "I have a matter which I must bring to your attention, greatly to my regret. Read that." With that he handed me a letter from the author of the novel, an Episcopalian clergyman of some distinction. The writer explained that his vanity was in no way offended by the rejection of his work. That, he said, was to be expected in the case of an unknown author (a flattering unction with which unsuccessful authorship always consoles itself), but that he felt it to be his duty as a clergyman, a moralist, and a good citizen, to report to the house that their reader was robbing them to the extent of his salary. He had incontrovertible proof, he said, that the reader had not read a single page or line of his manuscript before rejecting it. "There," said Joe Harper when I had finished the letter. "I really didn't think you that sort of a person." "What did you say to him by way of reply?" I asked. [Sidenote: Joe Harper's Masterpiece] "I'll show you," he said, taking up his letter-book. "I inclosed a copy of that intolerably long opinion of yours and wrote this." Then he let me read the letter. In it he thanked the gentleman for having brought the dereliction of the reader to the attention of the house, but suggested that before proceeding to extreme measures in such a case, he thought it well to be perfectly sure of the facts. To that end, he wrote, he inclosed an exact copy of the "opinion" on which the novel had been declined, and asked the author to read it and report whether or not he still felt certain that the writer of the opinion had condemned the work unread. The entire letter was written in a tone of submissive acceptance of the rejected author's judgment in the case. As a whole it seemed to me as withering a piece of sarcasm as I ever read, and in spite of the injustice he had sought to do me. I was distinctly sorry for the man to whom it was addressed. I suppose Mr. Harper felt in the same way, but all that he said, as he put the letter-book upon his desk, was: "I hope he prepares his sermon early in the week, for that letter of mine must have reached him about Friday morning, and it may have created a greater or less disturbance in his mind." A few days later there came a reply. The author said that an examination of the "opinion" left no room for doubt that the work had been read with care throughout, but that he had confidently believed otherwise when he wrote his first letter. He explained that before sending the manuscript he had tied a peculiar cord around it, inside the wrapper, and that when it came back to him with the same cord tied about it, he thought it certain that the package had never been opened. He was sorry he had made a mistake, of course, but he had been entirely sincere, etc., etc. Mr. Harper indulged himself in an answer to all this. If I had not been permitted to read it, I should never have believed that anything so caustic could have been uttered by a man so genially good-tempered as I knew Mr. Harper to be. It was all the more effective because from beginning to end there was no trace of excitement, no touch of anger, no word or phrase in it that could be criticised as harsh or intemperate. Beneath the complaint made by the clerical author in that case there was a mistaken assumption with which every publisher and every editor is familiar--the assumption, namely, that the publisher or editor to whom unsolicited manuscripts are sent is under some sort of moral obligation to read them or have them read. Of course no such obligation exists. When the publisher or editor is satisfied that he does not wish to purchase a manuscript, it makes no manner of difference by what process he has arrived at that conclusion. The subject of the book or article may be one that he does not care to handle; the author's manner, as revealed in the early pages of his manuscript, may justify rejection without further reading. Any one of a score of reasons may be conclusive without the necessity of examining the manuscript in whole or even in part. I once advised the rejection of a book without reading it, on the ground that the woman who wrote it used a cambric needle and milk instead of a pen and ink, so that it would be a gross immorality to put her manuscript into the hands of printers whose earnings depended upon the number of ems they could set in a day. [Sidenote: Manuscripts and Their Authors] But the conviction is general among the amateur authors of unsolicited manuscripts that the editors or publishers to whom they send their literary wares are morally bound not only to examine them, but to read them carefully from beginning to end. They sometimes resort to ingenious devices by way of detecting the rascally editors in neglect of this duty. They slenderly stick the corners of two sheets together; or they turn up the lower corner of a sheet here and there as if by accident but so carefully as to cover a word or two from sight; or they place a sheet upside down, or in some other way set a trap that makes the editor smile if he happens to be in good temper, and causes him to reject the thing in resentment of the impertinence if his breakfast has not agreed with him that day. I was speaking of these things one day, to Mr. George P. Putnam, Irving's friend and the most sympathetically literary of publishers then living, when he suddenly asked me: "Do you know the minimum value of a lost manuscript?" I professed ignorance, whereupon he said: "It is five hundred dollars." Presently, in answer to a question, he explained: "In the old days of _Putnam's Monthly_, one of the multitude of unsolicited manuscripts sent in would now and then be mislaid. I never knew a case of the kind in which the author failed to value the manuscript at five hundred dollars or more, no matter what its subject or its length or even its worthlessness might be. In one case, when I refused to pay the price fixed upon by the author, he instituted suit, and very earnestly protested that his manuscript was worth far more than the five hundred dollars demanded for it. He even wrote me that he had a definite offer of more than that sum for it. To his discomfiture somebody in the office found the manuscript about that time and we returned it to the author. He sent it back, asking us to accept it. I declined. He then offered it for two hundred and fifty dollars, then for two hundred, and finally for seventy-five. I wrote to him that he needn't trouble to reduce his price further, as the editors did not care to accept the paper at any price. I have often wondered why he didn't sell it to the person who, as he asserted, had offered him more than five hundred dollars for it; but he never did, as the thing has never yet been published, and that was many years ago." XLVI It was during my connection with _Hearth and Home_ that I first met two men who greatly interested me. One of them was the newest of celebrities in American literature; the other was old enough to have been lampooned by Poe in his series of papers called "The Literati." The one was Joaquin Miller, the other Thomas Dunn English. [Sidenote: Joaquin Miller] Joaquin Miller had recently returned in a blaze of glory from his conquest of London society and British literary recognition. He brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder of the _Century_ or _Scribner's Monthly_ as I think the magazine was still called at that time. He wore a broad-brimmed hat of most picturesque type. His trousers--London made and obviously costly--were tucked into the most superior looking pair of high top boots I ever saw, and in his general make-up he was an interesting cross or combination of the "untutored child of nature" fresh from the plains, and the tailor-made man of fashion. More accurately, he seemed a carefully costumed stage representation of the wild Westerner that he professed to be in fact. I do not know that all this, or any of it, was affectation in the invidious sense of the term. I took it to be nothing more than a clever bit of advertising. He was a genuine poet--as who can doubt who has read him? He had sagacity and a keen perception both of the weakness and the strength of human nature. He wanted a hearing, and he knew the shortest, simplest, surest way to get it. Instead of publishing his poems and leaving it to his publisher to bring them to attention by the slow processes of newspaper advertising, he went to London, and made himself his own advertisement by adopting a picturesque pose, which was not altogether a pose, though it was altogether picturesque, and trusting the poems, to which he thus directed attention, to win favor for themselves. In saying that his assumption of the rôle of untutored child of nature was not altogether an assumption, I mean that although his boyhood was passed in Indiana schools, and he was for a time a college student there, he had nevertheless passed the greater part of his young manhood in the wilds and among the men of the wilderness. If he was not in fact "untutored," he nevertheless owed very little to the schools, and scarcely anything to the systematic study of literature. His work was marked by crudenesses that were not assumed or in any wise fictitious, while the genuineness of poetic feeling and poetic perception that inspired it was unquestionably the spontaneous product of his own soul and mind. In my editorial den he seated himself on my desk, though there was a comfortable chair at hand. Was that a bit of theatrical "business"? I think not, for the reason that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the least affected of men, used nearly always to bestride a reversed chair with his hands resting upon its back, when he visited me in my office, as he sometimes did, to smoke a pipe in peace for half an hour and entertain me with his surprising way of "putting things," before "going off to suffer and be good by invitation," as he once said with reference to some reception engagement. London had accepted Joaquin Miller's pose without qualification. Even the London comic journals, in satirizing it, seemed never to doubt its genuineness. But on this side of the water we had begun to hear rumors that this son of the plains and the mountains, this dweller in solitudes whose limitless silence he himself suggested in the lines: "A land so lone that you wonder whether The God would know it should you fall dead," was after all a man bred in civilization and acquainted with lands so far from lone that the coroner would be certain to hear of it promptly if death came to one without the intervention of a physician. As he addressed me by my first name from the beginning, and in other ways manifested a disposition to put conventionalities completely aside, I ventured to ask him about one of these rumors, which particularly interested me. "I hear, Mr. Miller," I said, "that you are my compatriot--that you are a Hoosier by birth, as I am--is it true?" He sat in meditation for a time; then he said: "George, I've told so many lies about my birth and all that, that there may be inconsistencies in them. I think I'd better not add to the inconsistencies." I did not press the question. I asked him, instead, to let me have a poem for _Hearth and Home_. [Sidenote: Joaquin Miller's Notions of Dress] "I can't," he replied, "I haven't a line of unsold manuscript anywhere on earth, and just now I am devoting myself to horseback riding in Central Park. I've got a seven hundred dollar saddle and I must use it, and you, as an old cavalryman, know how utterly uninspiring a thing it is to amble around Central Park on a horse trained to regard a policeman as a person to be respected, not to say feared, in the matter of speed limits and the proper side of the trail, and all that sort of thing. But that saddle and these boots must be put to the use for which they were built, so I must go on riding in the park till they grow shabby, and I can't think in meter till I get away somewhere where the trees don't stand in rows like sentinels in front of a string of tents, and where the people don't all dress alike. Do you know that is the worst tomfoolery this idiotic world ever gave birth to? It is all right for British soldiers, because there must be some way in which the officers can tell in a crowd who is a soldier and who is not, and besides, regular soldiers aren't men anyhow. They're only ten-pins, to be set up in regular order by one man and bowled over by another. "But what sense is there in men dressing in that way? You and I are tall and slender, but our complexions are different. We are free American citizens. Why should anybody who invites us both to dinner, expect that we shall wear the same sort of clothes? And not only that, why should they expect us to put on precisely the same sort of garments that the big-bellied banker, who is to be our fellow-guest, is sure to wear? It's all nonsense, I tell you. It is an idea born of the uninventive genius of an inane society whose constituent members are as badly scared at any suggestion of originality or individuality as a woman is at the apparition of a mouse in her bedchamber." I told him I did not agree with him. "The social rule in that respect seems to me a peculiarly sensible and convenient one," I said. "When a man is invited to anything, he knows exactly what to wear. If it be a daytime affair he has only to put on a frock coat with trousers of a lighter color; if it be an evening function a sparrowtailed coat, black trousers, a low cut vest, and a white tie equip him as perfectly as a dozen tailors could. In either case he need not give a thought to his clothes in order to be sure that his costume will be not only correct but so exactly like everybody's else that nobody present will think of it at all. It is a great saving of gray matter, and of money, too, and more important still, it sets men free. The great majority of us couldn't afford to go to any sort of function, however interesting, if we had to dress individually and competitively for it, as women do." "Oh, of course," he answered, "the thing has its advantages, but it is dreadfully monotonous--what the children call 'samey, samey.'" "By which you mean that it deprives one of all excuse for making himself conspicuous by his dress--and that is precisely what most of us do not want to do in any case. Besides, one needn't submit himself to the custom if he objects to it." "That is so," he answered; "at any rate I don't." His practice in the matter was extreme, of course. Even ten years after that he visited the Authors Club with his trousers in his boots, but at the time of my first meeting with him the rule of the "dress coat" was by no means confirmed. It was still a matter of choice with men whether they should wear it or not at evening functions, and its use at other times of day was still possible without provoking ridicule. At almost every banquet, dinner, or other evening function in those days there were sure to be a number of frock coats worn, and I remember that at the memorable breakfast given in Boston in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth birthday in 1879, there were a few guests who wore evening dress, although we sat down to the breakfast at one o'clock and separated before the sun went down. I observed the same thing at two of the breakfasts given to Mr. Edmund Gosse in New York in the early eighties. It was not until near the middle of that decade that the late William Henry Hurlbut authoritatively laid down the law that "a gentleman must never appear without evening dress after six o'clock P.M., and never, _never_ wear it before that hour, even at a wedding--even at his own wedding." [Sidenote: Dress Reform à la Stedman] I remember an incident that grew out of this once vexed question, which is perhaps worth recalling. When the Authors Club was founded in 1882, our chief concern was to make it and keep it an informal, brotherly organization of literary men by excluding from its rules and its practices everything that might impose restraint upon social liberty. We aimed at the better kind of Bohemianism--the Bohemianism of liberty, not license; the Bohemianism which disregards all meaningless formalities but respects the decencies and courtesies of social intercourse. Edmund Clarence Stedman was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy. He was beset, he told me at the time, by a great fear that the club might go the way of other organizations with which he was connected; that it might lose its character as an association of authors in sympathy with each other's work and aspirations, and become merely an agency of fashion, a giver of banquets and receptions at which men should be always on dress parade. By way of averting that degeneracy he proposed for one thing that the members of the club should address each other always by their first names, as schoolboys do. This proved to be impracticable in a club which included such men as Dr. Drisler, Dr. Youmans, President Noah Porter, Bishop Hurst, Parke Godwin, James Russell Lowell, and others of like dignity--together with a lot of younger men who made their first acquaintance with these in the club itself. But another of Stedman's suggestions met with ready acceptance. He proposed that we should taboo evening dress at our meetings. In playful humor he suggested that if any member should appear at a meeting of the club in that conventional garb, he should be required to stand up before all the company, explain himself, and apologize. We laughingly adopted the rule, and the first person who fell a victim to it was Stedman himself. About ten o'clock one night he entered the club in full dinner dress. Instantly he was arraigned and, standing in the midst of what he called "the clamorous mob," entered upon his explanation. He had come, he said, directly from a philistine dinner at which the garb he wore was as inexorably necessary as combed hair or polished boots or washed hands; his home was far away, and he had been forced to choose between coming to the club in evening dress and not coming at all. Of the two calamities he had chosen the former as the primrose path--a path he had always followed instead of the stormy and thorny one, he said, whenever liberty of choice had been his. Then by way of "fruits meet for repentance," he drew from his pocket a black cravat and in the presence of the club substituted it for the white one he had been wearing. At that time no other than a white cravat was permitted with evening dress, so that by this substitution of a black one, he took himself out of the category of the condemned and became again a companion in good-fellowship over the punch and pipes. XLVII [Sidenote: Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration] It was during the early seventies that the inevitable happened, or at least began to happen, with regard to newspaper illustration. The excessive cost of illustrating periodicals by wood engraving, and the time required for its slow accomplishment, together with the growing eagerness of the people for pictures, set a multitude of men of clever wits at work to devise some cheaper and speedier process of reproducing drawings and photographic pictures. I myself invented a very crude and imperfect process of that kind, which I thought susceptible of satisfactory development. I engaged a certain journalist of irregular habits and large pretensions, who was clever with his pencil, to join me in the development and exploitation of the process, he to furnish such drawings of various kinds as I needed, and I to experiment in reproduction. Of course I had to explain my process to him, and he, being a shrewd young man whose moral character was far less admirable than his always perfect costume, mastered my secret and sold it for a trifling sum to a man who promptly patented it and, with a few changes which I had not the cleverness to make, brought it into use as his own. I said some ugly things to my dishonest coadjutor, whose manner of receiving them convinced me that he was well used to hear himself characterized in that way. Then I laughed at myself, went home and read about Moses and the green spectacles, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and so calmed my spirit. But mine was an extremely unsatisfactory process, even after the inventor who had bought it from my rascally associate had improved it to the limit of his capacity, and there were far cleverer men at work upon the same problem. By 1874 one of them had so far succeeded that an enterprising firm, owning his patents, decided to set up in New York a daily illustrated newspaper, the _Graphic_. The failure of the enterprise was freely predicted from the beginning, and in the end failure came to it, but not for the reasons given by the prophets. The _Graphic_ failed chiefly because it never had an editor or manager who knew how to make a newspaper. An additional cause of its failure was its inability to get itself into that great news-gathering trust, the Associated Press, whose agents, local and general, covered the whole country and the whole world with a minuteness that no single newspaper could hope to approach. But while the projectors of the _Graphic_ enterprise were full of their first hopefulness, they bought the good will and the subscription list of _Hearth and Home_, in order to make of that periodical the weekly edition of their illustrated daily newspaper. This left me "out of a job," but altogether happy. I was very tired. I had had but one week's vacation during my arduous service on _Hearth and Home_. I had removed to an old Dutch farmhouse in New Jersey because of the impaired health of one dear to me. I had become a contributor to all the great magazines of that time, and a writer of successful books. I was pleased, therefore, to be freed from the Sisyphean labors of the editorial office. I decided to give up newspaper work in all its forms and to devote my future years to literature alone. I retired to my library, the windows of which were overhung by sweet-scented lilacs and climbing roses, beyond which lay an orchard of varied fruits surrounding the old farmhouse. There, I thought I would pass the remainder of my days--that phrase felt good in the mind of a work-weary man of thirty-four or about that--in quiet literary work, unvexed by intruding exigencies of any kind. Of course I would write editorials for those great metropolitan dailies for which I was accustomed to do that sort of work from time to time as impulse and opportunity permitted, but I was resolved never again to undertake editorial responsibility of any kind. [Sidenote: Accident's Part in Literary Life] As illustrative of the part that accident or unforeseen circumstance plays in determining the career of a working man-of-letters, I may relate the story of how I became at that time a writer of boys' fiction as a part of my employment. I was writing at the time for the _Atlantic_, the _Galaxy_, _Appleton's Journal_, and other magazines, and my time was fully occupied, when there came to me a letter asking me upon what terms I would furnish a serial story of adventure for a magazine that made its appeal to boys and girls. Why the editor had thought of me in that connection I cannot imagine. I had never written a boys' story--long or short. I had never written a story of adventure of any sort. I said so in my reply declining to consider the suggestion. A second letter came promptly, urging me to reconsider and asking that I should at any rate name the terms on which I would do the work. Thinking that this opened an easy and certain road of escape, I decided to name terms that I was confident my editor-correspondent would regard as wholly beyond consideration. I wrote him that I would do the story if he would pay me, for serial rights alone, the same price per thousand words that the great magazines were paying me, I to retain the right of book publication, and to have, without charge, the plates of any illustrations the magazine might make for use with my text. Having thus "settled the matter," as I supposed, I dismissed the subject from my mind as a thing done for. Twenty-four hours later there came a telegram from the editor, saying: "Terms accepted. Write story. Contracts go by mail for execution." Those ten telegraphic words determined my career in an important particular. Also they appalled me. They put me under a contract that I had never thought of making. They placed me under obligation to do a species of literary work which I had never dreamed even of trying to do, and for which I felt myself utterly unfit. It was not only that I had never written a boys' story or thought of writing one; I had never acquainted myself with that sort of literature; I "knew not the trick of it," as the poor fellow in "Hamlet" says when urged to play upon a pipe. Nevertheless, I must do the thing and that immediately, for the correspondence had named a date only three weeks off for the delivery of the first instalment of the manuscript. There was no way of escape. I must set to work upon the story. But what should it be about? Where should its scene be laid? What should be its plot and who its personages? I had not so much as the shadowy ghost of an idea, and during the next twenty-four sleepless hours all my efforts to summon one from the vasty deep or elsewhere brought no result. [Sidenote: My First Boys' Book] While I was thus searching a mind vacant of suggestion, my two little boys climbed upon my knees and besought me to tell them "an Injun story." I was in the habit of entertaining their very juvenile minds with exceedingly juvenile fictions manufactured on the spur of the moment, fictions without plot, without beginning or ending of any recognizable sort. Sometimes these "stories" were wholly imaginary; sometimes I drew upon some boyish experience of my own for a subject. This time the specific demand of my exigent little masters for "an Injun story" led me to think of the Creek War in Alabama and Mississippi. It so happened that some years before the time of this story telling, I had lived for a good many weeks among the Cherokees, Muscogees, and Choctaws in the Indian Territory, hunting with them by day and sleeping with them around a camp-fire by night. I had in that way become interested in their very dramatic history, and on my return to civilization I had read all the literature I could find on the subject of the war in which their power in our Southern states was overthrown, and they themselves, taken by the neck and heels, as it were, out of the very hopefully advancing civilisation they had in part borrowed but in greater part wrought out for themselves, and thrown back into the half-savage life from which they had struggled to escape. As I told my little fellows the story they wanted, it occurred to me that here was my subject and inspiration for the larger story I had agreed to write. Within a week or two "The Big Brother" was done and its manuscript delivered. Its serial publication was never completed. When about half the chapters had been printed, the new and ambitious juvenile magazine, _St. Nicholas_, bought and suppressed the periodical that was publishing it. The Putnams brought my story out in book form, and its success prompted them to ask me for further boys' books, and as the subject of the Creek War was by no means exhausted, I drew upon it for the materials of "Captain Sam" and "The Signal Boys," thus making a trilogy that covered the entire period between the massacre at Fort Mims and the battle of New Orleans. Then I decided that my wholly unintended incursion into the field of youths' fiction should end there. I had never intended to write literature of that kind, and now that I had exhausted the subject of the Creek War, I had no impulse to hunt for other themes for such use. Besides, I had by that time become absorbed in newspaper work again, and had no time for the writing of books of any sort. It was not until the eighties that I wrote another book of juvenile fiction, and that also came about by accident rather than intention. I had again given up newspaper work, again meaning never to return to it. I was conducting a literary shop of my own in Brooklyn, writing for the magazines, reading for the Harpers, editing the books of other people whose work needed that sort of attention, and doing other things of the kind. One night I was entertaining the younger of the two boys who had suggested the subject of my first work in juvenile fiction. I was telling him of some adventures of my own and others' on the Carolina coast, when suddenly he asked: "Why can't we put all that into a story book?" That evening I received a letter from Mr. George Haven Putnam, saying that while my three "Big Brother" books were still selling pretty well, it would stimulate them helpfully if I could add a new one to the series. In brief, he wanted me to write a new boys' story, and the proposal fitted in so nicely with the suggestion of my little boy that I called the child to me and said: "I think we'll write that story book, if you'll help me." He enthusiastically agreed. I can best tell the rest of that book's story by quoting here from the brief prefatory dedication I wrote for it when it was published in 1882, under the title of "The Wreck of the Redbird": "I intended to dedicate this book to my son, Guilford Dudley Eggleston, to whom it belonged in a peculiar sense. He was only nine years old, but he was my tenderly loved companion, and was in no small degree the creator of this story. He gave it the title it bears; he discussed with me every incident in it; and every page was written with reference to his wishes and his pleasure. There is not a paragraph here which does not hold for me some reminder of the noblest, manliest, most unselfish boy I have ever known. Ah, woe is me! He who was my companion is my dear dead boy now, and I am sure that I only act for him as he would wish, in inscribing the story that was so peculiarly his to the boy whom he loved best, and who loved him as a brother might have done." [Sidenote: One Thing Leads to Another] It was eighteen years after that that I next wrote a work of fiction for youth, and again the event was the result of suggestion from without. "The Wreck of the Redbird" seems to have made a strong impression upon Elbridge S. Brooks, at that time the literary editor of the Lothrop Publishing Company of Boston, and in the year 1900 he wrote to me asking on what terms I would write for that firm "a boys' story as good as 'The Wreck of the Redbird.'" I had no story in mind at the time. For eighteen years my attention had been absorbed by newspaper work and by literary activities of a sort far removed from this. Moreover, I was at the time working night and day as an editorial writer on the staff of the New York _World_, with a good deal of executive duty and responsibility added. But the thought of calling a company of boy readers around me again and telling them a story appealed to my imagination, and, as the terms I suggested were accepted, I employed such odd moments as I could find between other tasks in writing "The Last of the Flatboats." Its success led to other books of the kind, so that since this accidental return to activities of that sort, I have produced six books of juvenile fiction in the intervals of other and more strenuous work. Perhaps an apology is needed for this setting forth of affairs purely personal. If so, it is found in the fact that the illustration given of the part that accident and external suggestion play in determining the course and character of a professional writer's work, seems to me likely to interest readers who have never been brought into close contact with such things. I have thought it of interest to show visitors through the literary factory and to explain somewhat its processes. XLVIII After a year and a half of leisurely work in the old orchard-framed, New Jersey farmhouse, I was suddenly jostled out of the comfortable rut in which I had been traveling. A peculiarly plausible and smooth-tongued publisher, a gifted liar, and about the most companionable man I ever knew, had swindled me out of every dollar I had in the world and had made me responsible for a part at least of his debts to others. I held his notes and acceptances for what were to me large sums, and I hold them yet. I held his written assurances, oft-repeated, that whatever might happen to his business affairs, his debt to me was amply and effectually secured. I hold those assurances yet--more than thirty-five years later--and I hold also the showing made by his receiver, to the effect that he had all the while been using my money to secure a secret partner of his own, a highly respectable gentleman who in the course of the settlement proceedings was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison for fraud. But the conviction did not uncover any money with which the debt to me might he liquidated in whole or in part, and the man who had robbed me of all I had in the world had so shrewdly managed matters as to escape all penalties. The last I heard of him he was conducting one of the best-known religious newspapers in the country, and winning laurels as a lecturer on moral and religious subjects, and especially as a Sunday School worker, gifted in inspiring youth of both sexes with high ethical principles and aspirations. When this calamity befel I had no ready money in possession or within call, and no property of any kind that I could quickly convert into money. I was "stripped to the buff" financially, but I knew my trade as a writer and newspaper man. It was necessary that I should get back to the city at once, and I had no money with which to make the transfer. In this strait I sat down and wrote four magazine articles, writing night and day, and scarcely sleeping at all. The situation was not conducive to sleep. I sent off the articles as fast as they were written, in each case asking the editors for an immediate remittance. They were my personal friends, and I suppose all of them had had experiences not unlike my own. At any rate they responded promptly, and within a week I was settling myself in town and doing such immediate work as I could find to do, while looking for better and more permanent employment. [Sidenote: The _Evening Post_ under Mr. Bryant] Almost immediately I was summoned to the office of the _Evening Post_, where I accepted an appointment on the editorial staff. Thus I found myself again engaged in newspaper work, but it was newspaper work of a kind that appealed to my tastes and tendencies. Under Mr. Bryant the _Evening Post_ was an old-fashioned newspaper of uncondescending, uncompromising dignity. It loathed "sensation" and treated the most sensational news--when it was obliged to treat it at all--in a dignified manner, never forgetting its own self-respect or offending that of its readers. It resolutely adhered to its traditional selling price of five cents a copy, and I am persuaded that the greater number of its constituents would have resented any reduction, especially one involving them in the necessity of giving or taking "pennies" in change. It did not at all engage in the scramble for "news." It belonged to the Associated Press; it had two or three reporters of its own, educated men and good writers, who could be sent to investigate and report upon matters of public import. It had a Washington correspondent and such other news-getting agents as were deemed necessary under its rule of conduct, which was to regard nothing as published until it was published in the _Evening Post_. It was the completest realization I have ever seen of the ideal upon which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ professed to conduct itself--that of "a newspaper conducted by gentlemen, for gentlemen." It could be trenchant in utterance upon occasion, and when it was so its voice was effective--the more so because of its habitual moderation and reserve. Sometimes, when the subject to be discussed was one that appealed strongly to Mr. Bryant's convictions and feelings, he would write of it himself. He was an old man and one accustomed to self-control, but when his convictions were stirred, there was not only fire but white-hot lava in his utterance. The lava streams flowed calmly and without rage or turbulence, but they scorched and burned and consumed whatever they touched. More frequently great questions were discussed by some one or other of that outer staff of strong men who, without direct and daily contact with the newspaper, and without salary or pay of any kind, were still regarded by themselves and by the public as parts of the great intellectual and scholarly force in conduct and control of the _Evening Post_--such men, I mean, as Parke Godwin and John Bigelow--men once members of that newspaper's staff and still having free access to its columns when they had aught that they wished to say on matters of public concern. [Sidenote: Old-Time Newspaper Standards] Best of all, so far as my tastes and inclinations were concerned, the _Evening Post_, under Mr. Bryant's and later Mr. Parke Godwin's control, regarded and treated literature and scholarship as among the chief forces of civilized life and the chief concerns of a newspaper addressing itself to the educated class in the community. Whatsoever concerned literature or scholarship, whatsoever was in any wise related to those things, whatever concerned education, culture, human advancement, commanded the _Evening Post's_ earnest attention and sympathy. It discussed grave measures of state pending at Washington or Albany or elsewhere, but it was at no pains to record the gossip of great capitals. Personalities had not then completely usurped the place of principles and policies in the attention of newspapers, and the _Evening Post_ gave even less attention to such things than most of its contemporaries did. The time had not yet come among newspapers when circulation seemed of greater importance than character, when the details of a divorce scandal or a murder trial seemed of more consequence than the decisions of the Supreme Court, or when a brutal slugging match between two low-browed beasts in human form was regarded as worthy of greater newspaper space than a discussion of the tariff on art or the appearance of an epoch-making book by Tennyson or Huxley or Haeckel. In brief, the newspapers of that time had not learned the baleful lesson that human society is a cone, broadest at bottom, and that the lower a newspaper cuts into it the broader its surface of circulation is. They had not yet reconciled themselves to the thought of appealing to low tastes and degraded impulses because that was the short road to multitudinous "circulation," with its consequent increase in "advertising patronage." Most of the newspapers of that time held high standards, and the _Evening Post_, under Mr. Bryant's control, was the most exigent of all in that respect. Another thing. The "book notice" had not yet taken the place of the capable and conscientious review. It had not yet occurred to editors generally that the purpose of the literary columns was to induce advertisements from publishers, and that anybody on a newspaper staff who happened to have nothing else to do, or whose capacities were small, might be set to reviewing books, whether he happened to know anything about literature or not. It was the custom of the better newspapers then, both in New York and elsewhere, to employ as their reviewers men eminent for literary scholarship and eminently capable of literary appreciation. Among the men so employed at that time--to mention only a few by way of example--were George Ripley, Richard Henry Stoddard, E. P. Whipple, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, R. R. Bowker, W. C. Wilkinson, Charles F. Briggs, and others of like gifts and accomplishments. Mr. Bryant himself had exercised this function through long years that won distinction from his work for his newspaper. As advancing years compelled him to relinquish that toil, he surrendered it cautiously into other hands, but in whatever hands it might be, Mr. Bryant followed it more minutely and with a more solicitous interest than he gave to any other part of the newspaper. At the time when I joined the staff there was a sort of interregnum in the literary department. John R. Thompson, who had held the place of literary editor for some years, was dead, and nobody had been found who could fill the place to Mr. Bryant's satisfaction. There were men who wrote with grace and discretion, and whose familiarity with current literature was adequate, but Mr. Bryant objected that they were altogether men of the present, that they knew little or nothing of the older literature of our language, and hence, as he contended, had no adequate standards of comparison in their minds. Of one who essayed the work he said that his attitude of mind was too flippant, that he cared more for what he himself wrote about books under review than for what the authors of those books had written. Another, he said, lacked generosity of sympathy with halting but sincere literary endeavor, and so on with others. My own editorial work was exigent at the time and there was added to it the task of finding a satisfactory person to become literary editor. I knew Mr. Bryant very slightly at the time, and I doubt that he knew me at all, in person, but he knew how wide my acquaintance among literary men had become in the course of my experience on _Hearth and Home_, and he bade the managing editor, Mr. Watson R. Sperry, make use of it in the search. In common with most other men in the newspaper business, I regarded the position of literary editor of the _Evening Post_ as the most desirable one in American journalism. I frankly told Mr. Sperry that I should myself like the appointment if Mr. Bryant could in any wise be satisfied of my fitness. I was at the time writing all the more important book reviews by way of helping in the emergency. Mr. Sperry replied that Mr. Bryant had already suggested my appointment, as he was pleased with my work, but that he, Mr. Sperry, did not want to spare me from certain other things that I was doing for him, and further, that he thought the literary editor of the _Evening Post_ should be a man whose reputation and position as a recognized man of letters were well established, as mine were not. [Sidenote: Aldrich's View of New York] I agreed with him in that opinion and went on with my quest. Among those to whom I wrote was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. I set forth to him as attractively as I could, the duties of the place, the dignity attaching to it, the salary it carried, and everything else of a persuasive sort that I could call to mind. For reply Mr. Aldrich wrote that the position was one in every way to be coveted, and added: "But, my dear Eggleston, what can the paper offer to compensate one for having to live in New York?" Years afterward I tried to extract from him some apology to New York for that fling, but without success. One day, while I was still engaged in this fruitless search, Mr. Bryant entered the library--off which my little den opened--and began climbing about on a ladder and turning over books, apparently in search of something. I volunteered the suggestion that perhaps I could assist him if he would tell me what it was he was trying to find. "I think not," he answered, taking down another volume from the shelves. Then, as if conscious that his reply might have seemed ungraciously curt, he turned toward me and said: "I'm looking for a line that I ought to know where to find, but do not." He gave me the substance of what he sought and fortunately I recognized it as a part of a half-remembered passage in one of Abraham Cowley's poems. I told Mr. Bryant so, and while he sat I found what he wanted. Apparently his concern for it was gone. Instead of looking at the book which I had placed in his hands open at the desired page, he turned upon me and asked: "How do you happen to know anything about Cowley?" I explained that as a youth, while idling time away on an old Virginia plantation, where there was a library of old books, as there was on every other ancestral plantation round about, I had fallen to reading all I could find at home or in neighboring houses of the old English literature, of which I had had a maddening taste even as a little boy; that I had read during those plantation summers every old book I could find in any of the neglected libraries round about. [Sidenote: By Order of Mr. Bryant] My work for the day lay unfinished on my desk, but Mr. Bryant gave no heed to it. He questioned me concerning my views of this and that in literature, my likes and dislikes, my estimates of classic English works, and of the men who had produced them. Now and then he challenged my opinions and set me to defend them. After a while he took his leave in his usual undemonstrative fashion. "Good-afternoon," was absolutely his only word of parting, and after he had gone I wondered if I had presumed too much in the fearless expression of my opinions or in combating his own, or whether I had offended him in some other way. For I knew him very slightly then and misinterpreted a reticence that was habitual with him--even constitutional, I think. Still less did I understand that during that talk of two hours' duration he had been subjecting me to a rigid examination in English literature. The _Evening Post_ of that afternoon published my review of an important book, which I had tried to treat with the care it deserved. I learned afterwards that the article pleased Mr. Bryant, but whether or not it had any influence upon what followed I do not know. What followed was this: the next day a little before noon, Mr. Sperry came into my den with a laugh and a frown playing tag on his face. "Mr. Bryant has just been in," he said. "He walked into my room and said to me: 'Mr. Sperry, I have appointed Mr. Eggleston literary editor. Good-morning, Mr. Sperry.' And with that he left again, giving me no time to say a word. In a way, I'm glad, but I shall miss you from your other work." I reassured him, telling him I could easily do those parts of that other work for which he most needed me, and so the matter was "arranged to the satisfaction of everybody concerned," as the dueling people used to say when two blustering cowards had apologized instead of shooting each other. XLIX Thus began an acquaintance with Mr. Bryant that quickly became as intimate as I suppose any acquaintance with him ever did--or at any rate any acquaintance begun after the midyears of his life. Once in a while I passed a Sunday with him at his Roslyn home, but chiefly such converse as I enjoyed with him was held in the office of the _Evening Post_, and of course it was always of his seeking, as I scrupulously avoided intruding myself upon his attention. Our interviews usually occurred in this way: he would enter the library, which communicated with my little writing room by an open doorway, and after looking over some books, would enter my room and settle himself in a chair, with some remark or question. The conversation thus began would continue for such time as he chose, ten minutes, half an hour, two hours, as his leisure and inclination might determine. It was always gentle, always kindly, always that of two persons interested in literature and in all that pertains to what in the culture-slang of this later time is somewhat tiresomely called "uplift." It was always inspiring and clarifying to my mind, always encouraging to me, always richly suggestive on his part, and often quietly humorous in a fashion that is nowhere suggested in any of Mr. Bryant's writings. I have searched them in vain for the smallest trace of the humor he used to inject into his talks with me, and I think I discover in its absence, and in some other peculiarities of his, an explanation of certain misjudgments of him which prevailed during his life and which endure still in popular conception. [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant's Reserve--Not Coldness] The reader may perhaps recall Lowell's criticism of him in "A Fable for Critics." The substance of it was that Mr. Bryant was intensely cold of nature and unappreciative of human things. I wish to bear emphatic witness that nothing could be further from the truth, though Lowell's judgment is the one everywhere accepted. The lack of warmth usually attributed to Mr. Bryant, I found to be nothing more than the personal reserve common to New Englanders of culture and refinement, plus an excessive personal modesty and a shyness of self-revelation, and self-intrusion, which is usually found only in young girls just budding into womanhood. Mr. Bryant shrank from self-assertion even of the most impersonal sort, as I never knew any other human being to do. He cherished his own opinions strongly, but he thrust them upon nobody. His dignity was precious to him, but his only way of asserting it was by withdrawal from any conversation or company that trespassed upon it. Above all, emotion, to him, was a sacred thing, not to be exploited or even revealed. In ordinary intercourse with his fellow-men he hid it away as one instinctively hides the privacies of the toilet. He could no more lay his feelings bare to common scrutiny than he could have taken his bath in the presence of company. In the intimate talks he and I had together during the last half dozen years of his life, he laid aside his reserve, so far as it was possible for a man of his sensitive nature to do, and I found him not only warm in his human sympathies, but even passionate. If we find little of this in his writings, it is only because in what he wrote he was addressing the public, and shyly withholding himself from revelation. Yet there is passion and there is hot blood, even there, as who can deny who has read "The Song of Marion's Men," or his superb interpretation of Homer? There is a bit of literary history connected with "The Song of Marion's Men," which may be mentioned here as well as anywhere else. The venerable poet one day told me the facts concerning it. When Mr. Bryant issued the first collected edition of his poems, English publication was very necessary to the success of such a work in America, which was still provincial. Accordingly Mr. Bryant desired English publication. Washington Irving was then living in England, and Mr. Bryant had a slight but friendly acquaintance with him. It was sufficient to justify the poet in asking the great story teller's friendly offices. He sent a copy of his poems to Irving, asking him to secure a London publisher. This Irving did, with no little trouble, and in the face of many obstacles of prejudice, indifference, and the like. When half the book was in type the publisher sent for Irving in consternation. He had discovered, in "The Song of Marion's Men," the lines: "The British soldier trembles When Marion's name is told." It would never, never do, he explained, for him to publish a book with even the smallest suggestion in it that the British soldier was a man to "tremble" at any danger. It would simply ruin him to publish this direct charge of cowardice against Tommy Atkins. [Sidenote: The Irving Incident] For the time Irving was at a loss to know what to do. Mr. Bryant was three thousand miles away and the only way of communicating with him was by ocean mails, carried by sailing craft at long intervals, low speed, and uncertain times of arrival. To write to him and get a reply would require a waste of many weeks--perhaps of several months. In his perplexed anxiety to serve his friend, Irving decided to take the liberty of making an entirety innocent alteration in the words, curing them of their offensiveness to British sensitiveness, without in the least altering their significance. Instead of: "The British soldier trembles When Marion's name is told," he made the lines read: "The foeman trembles in his tent When Marion's name is told." "So far as I was concerned," said Mr. Bryant in telling me of the matter, "what Irving did seemed altogether an act of friendly intervention, the more so because the acquaintance between him and me was very slight at that time. He was a warm-hearted man, who in doing a thing of that kind, reckoned upon a slight friendship for justification, as confidently as men of natures less generous might reckon upon a better established acquaintance. He always took comradery for granted, and where his intentions were friendly and helpful, he troubled himself very little with formal explanations that seemed to him wholly unnecessary. I had asked him to secure the publication of my poems in England, a thing that only his great influence there could have accomplished at that time. He had been at great pains and no little trouble to accomplish my desire. Incidentally, it had become necessary for him either to accept defeat in that purpose or to make that utterly insignificant alteration in my poem. I was grateful to him for doing so, but I did not understand his careless neglect to write to me promptly on the subject. I did not know him then as I afterwards learned to do. The matter troubled me very little or not at all; but possibly I mentioned his inattention in some conversation with Coleman, of the _Evening Post_. I cannot now remember whether I did so or not, but at any rate, Coleman, who was both quick and hot of temper, and often a trifle intemperate in criticism, took the matter up and dealt severely with Irving for having taken the liberty of altering lines of mine without my authority. "The affair gave rise to the report, which you have perhaps heard--for it persists--that Irving and I quarreled and became enemies. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were friends to the day of his death." Inasmuch as different versions of the Irving-Bryant affair are extant, it seems proper to say that immediately after the conversation ended I put into writing all that I have here directly quoted from Mr. Bryant. I did not show the record of it to him for verification, for the reason that I knew him to be sensitive on the subject of what he once referred to as "the eagerness of a good many persons to become my literary executors before I am dead." That was said with reference to the irksome attempts a certain distinguished literary hack was making to draw from Mr. Bryant the materials for articles that would sell well whenever the aged poet should die. After a séance with that distinguished toady one day, Mr. Bryant came to me, in some disturbance of mind, to ask for a volume of verse that I had just reviewed--to soothe his spirit, he said. Then he told me of the visitation he had had, and said: "I tried to be patient, but I fear I was rude to him at the last. There seemed to be no other way of getting rid of him." Alas, even rudeness had not baffled the bore; for when Mr. Bryant died the pestilent person published a report of that very interview, putting into the poet's mouth many utterances directly contrary to Mr. Bryant's oft-expressed opinions. L [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant's Tenderness of Poets] Exigent and solicitous as he was with reference to every utterance in the _Evening Post_ concerning literature, Mr. Bryant never interfered with my perfect liberty as literary editor, except in the one matter of the treatment of poets and poetry. "Deal gently--very gently, with the poets," he said to me at the time of my assumption of that office. "Remember always, that the very sensitiveness of soul which makes a man a poet, makes him also peculiarly and painfully susceptible to wounds of the spirit." I promised to bear his admonition in mind, and I did so, sometimes perhaps to the peril of my soul--certainly at risk of my reputation for critical acumen and perhaps for veracity. One day, however, I encountered a volume of verse so ridiculously false in sentiment, extravagant in utterance, and inane in character, that I could not refrain from poking a little fun at its absurdity. The next day Mr. Bryant came to see me. After passing the time of day, he said: "Mr. Eggleston, I hope you will not forget my desire that you shall deal gently with the poets." I replied that I had borne it constantly in mind. "I don't know," he answered, shaking his head; "what you said yesterday about X. Y. Z.'s volume did not seem to me very gentle." "Considered absolutely," I replied, "perhaps it wasn't. But considered in the light of the temptation I was under to say immeasurably severer things, it was mild and gentle in an extreme degree. The man is not a poet, but a fool. He not only hasn't the smallest appreciation of what poetry is or means, but he hasn't the ability to entertain a thought of any kind worthy of presentation in print or in any other way. I should have stultified myself and the _Evening Post_ if I had written more favorably of his work than I did. I should never have thought of writing of it at all, but for the _Evening Post's_ rule that every book offered here for review must be mentioned in some way in the literary columns. Here is the book. I wish you would glance at the alleged poems and tell me how I could have said anything concerning them of a more considerately favorable character than what in fact I printed." He took the book from my hand and looked it over. Then he laid it on my desk, saying: "It is indeed pretty bad. Still, I have always found that it is possible to find something good to say about a poet's work." A little later a still worse case came to my lot. It was a volume of "verse," with no sense at all in it, without even rhythm to redeem it, and with an abundance of "rhymes" that were not easily recognizable even as assonances. It was clumsily printed and "published" at some rural newspaper office, and doubtless at the expense of the author. Finally the cover attempt at decoration had resulted in a grotesque combination of incompatible colors and inconsequent forms. In brief, the thing was execrably, hopelessly, irredeemably bad all over and clear through. I was puzzling over the thing, trying to "find something good to say" of it, when Mr. Bryant came into my den. I handed him the volume, saying: "I wish you would help me with a suggestion, Mr. Bryant. I'm trying to find something good that I can say of that thing, and I can't--for of course you do not want me to write lies." "Lies? Of course not. But you can always find something good in every volume of poems, something that can be truthfully commended." "In this case I can't regard the sprawlings of ill-directed aspiration as poems," I replied, "and it seems to me a legitimate function of criticism to say that they are not poems but idiotic drivel--to discriminate between poetry in its unworthiest form and things like that. However, the man calls his stuff poetry. I wish you would help me find something good that I may say of it without lying." [Sidenote: Commending a Cover] He took the book and looked through it. Finally he said: "It is pretty sorry stuff, to be sure. It is even idiotic, and it doesn't suggest poetic appreciation or poetic impulse or poetic perception on the part of its author. Still, the man aspires to recognition as a poet, and he is doubtless sensitively conscious of his own shortcomings. Let us deal gently with him." "But what can I say, Mr. Bryant?" "Well, of course, there is nothing _inside_ the book that you can praise," he answered, "but you might commend the cover--no, that is an affront to taste and intelligence,"--looking it over with an expression of disgust--"but at any rate you can commend the publishers for _putting it on well_." With that--apparently dreading further questioning--he left the room. I proceeded to review the book by saying simply that the cover was put on so strongly that even the most persistent and long continued enjoyment or critical study of the text was not likely to detach or loosen it. I am disposed to think that Mr. Bryant's excessive tenderness toward poets was lavished chiefly upon the weaklings of that order. For a little while later a poet of genuine inspiration, who afterwards did notable work, put forward his first volume of verse. I found an abundance of good things to say about it, but there was one line in one of his poems that was so ridiculously inconsequent and absurd, that I could not refrain from poking fun at it. I am convinced that the poet in question, with his larger experience and the development that afterward came to his critical faculties, would not have permitted that line to stand if it had occurred in a poem of a later period. It appealed to him then by its musical quality, which was distinctly marked, but when subjected to the simplest analysis it was obvious and arrant nonsense. Mr. Bryant was interested in the review I wrote of the volume, and in talking with me about it, he distinctly chuckled over my destructive analysis of the offending line. There was no suggestion in what he said, that he regarded the criticism as in the least a transgression of his injunction to "deal gently with the poets." Unfortunately, the poet criticised seemed less tolerant of the criticism. He was a personal friend of my own, but when next I saw him his mood was that of one cruelly injured, and for many years thereafter he manifested this sense of injury whenever he and I met. I think he afterward forgave me, for we later became the best of friends, and I am glad to believe there was no rancor in his heart toward me when he died a little while ago. [Sidenote: Anonymous Criticism] In these cases I was at a peculiar disadvantage--though I think it not at all an unjust one--in every indulgence in anything like adverse criticism. I may best explain this, perhaps, by telling of an incident that happened soon after I assumed my position. I had been lucky enough to secure from Richard Henry Stoddard a very brilliant review of a certain book which he was peculiarly the fittest man in all the land to write about. I had the review in type, when I mentioned to Mr. Bryant my good fortune in securing it. "Is it signed?" he asked in his gentlest manner. I answered that it was not, for the reason that Stoddard was under a certain assertion of obligation which he refused to recognize but which I could not ask him to repudiate, not to write things of that character for other than a particular publication. "Then I request that you shall not use it," said Mr. Bryant. "But really, Mr. Bryant, there is not the smallest obligation upon him in the matter. He is perfectly free----" "It is not of that that I was thinking," he interrupted. "That is a matter between him and his own conscience, and you and I have nothing whatever to do with it. My objection to your use of the article is that _I regard an anonymous literary criticism as a thing quite as despicable, unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter_. It is something that no honorable man should write, and no honorably conducted newspaper should publish." "But my own reviews in the _Evening Post_ are all of them anonymous," I suggested. "Not at all," he answered. "When you were appointed literary editor the fact was communicated to every publisher in the country. I directed that and saw that it was done, so that every publisher and, through the publishers, every author, should know that every literary criticism in the _Evening Post_ was your utterance. In veritable effect, therefore, everything you print in our literary columns is signed, just as every critical article in the great British reviews is. When Jeffrey ridiculed 'Hours of Idleness,' and later, when he seriously criticised 'Cain,' Byron had no need to inquire who his critic was. The work was responsibly done, as such work should be in every case. The reasons seem to me obvious enough. In the first place, anonymous literary criticism may easily become a cowardly stabbing in the back under cover of darkness. In the second place, the reader of such criticism has no means of knowing what value to place upon it. He cannot know whether the critic is a person competent or incompetent, one to whose opinions he should defer or one whose known incapacity would prompt him to dismiss them as unworthy of consideration because of their source. In the third place, anonymous literary criticism opens wide the door of malice on the one hand, and of undue favoritism on the other. It is altogether despicable, and it is dangerous besides. I will have none of it on the _Evening Post_." I suggested that I had myself read the book that Stoddard had reviewed, and that I was ready to accept his criticism as my own and to hold myself responsible for it. "Very well," he replied. "In that case you may print it as your own, but I had much rather you had written it yourself." I have often meditated upon these things since, and I have found abundant reason to adopt Mr. Bryant's view that an anonymous literary criticism is as despicable as an anonymous letter. About a year ago I was startled by the utterance of precisely the same thought in nearly identical words, by Professor Brander Matthews. I was sitting between him and Mr. Howells at a banquet given by Colonel William C. Church to the surviving writers for that best and most literary of American magazines, _The Galaxy_, and when Matthews uttered the thought I turned to Mr. Howells and asked him what his opinion was. "I have never formulated my thought on that question, even in my own mind," he replied. "I don't know how far it would be just to judge others in the matter, but for myself, I think I never wrote a literary criticism that was not avowedly or ascertainably my own. Without having thought of the ethical question involved, my own impulse is to shrink from the idea of striking in the dark or from behind a mask." LI [Sidenote: A Thrifty Poet's Plan] On one occasion Mr. Bryant's desire to "deal gently with the poets" led to an amusing embarrassment. Concerning a certain volume of verse "made in Ohio" and published by its author, I had written that "this is the work of a man who seems to have an alert appreciation of the poetic side of things, but whose gift of poetic interpretation and literary expression is distinctly a minus quantity." Soon afterward Mr. Bryant entered my den with an open letter in his hand and a look of pained perplexity on his face. "What am I to do with that?" he asked, handing me the letter to read. I read it. The poet, knowing Mr. Bryant to be the editor of the _Evening Post_, evidently supposed that he wrote everything that appeared in the columns of that newspaper. Assuming that Mr. Bryant had written the review of his book, he wrote asking that he might be permitted to use the first half of my sentence as an advertisement, with Mr. Bryant's name signed to it. To facilitate matters he had prepared, on a separate sheet, a transcript of the words: "This is the work of a man who seems to have an alert appreciation of the poetic side of things." This he asked Mr. Bryant to sign and return to him for use as an advertisement, explaining that "Your great name will help me to sell my book, and I need the money. It cost me nearly two hundred dollars to get the book out, and so far I haven't been able to sell more than twenty-seven copies of it, though I have canvassed three counties at considerable expense for food, lodging, and horse-feed." I saw how seriously distressed Mr. Bryant was by this appeal, and volunteered to answer the letter myself, by way of relieving him. I answered it, but I did not report the nature of my answer to Mr. Bryant, for the reason that in my personal letter I dealt by no means "gently" with this particular poet. For the further distraction of Mr. Bryant's mind from a matter that distressed him sorely, I told him of the case in which a thrifty and shifty London publisher turned to good advertising account one of the _Saturday Review's_ most murderous criticisms. The _Review_ had written: "There is much that is good in this book, and much that is new. But that which is good is not new, and that which is new is not good." The publisher, in his advertisements, made display of the sentence: "There is much that is good in this book, and much that is new.--_Saturday Review_." One thing leads to another in conversation and I went on--by way of the further diversion of Mr. Bryant's mind--to illustrate the way in which the _Saturday Review_, like many other publications, sometimes ruined its richest utterances by dilution. I cited a case in which that periodical had begun a column review of a wishy-washy book by saying: "This is milk for babes, with water superadded. The milk is pure and the water is pure, but the diet is not invigorating." As a bit of destructive criticism, this was complete and perfect. But the writer spoiled it by going on to write a column of less trenchant matter, trampling, as it were, and quite needlessly, upon the corpse of the already slain offender. The habit of assuming that the distinguished editor of a newspaper writes everything of consequence that appears in its columns, is not confined to rural poets in Ohio, as three occurrences during my service on the _Evening Post_ revealed to me. [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant and My Poe Article] When a great Poe celebration was to be held in Baltimore, on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument or something of that kind, Mr. Bryant was earnestly urged to send something to be read on the occasion and published as a part of the proceedings. He had no stomach for the undertaking. It was said among those who knew him best that his personal feelings toward Poe's memory were of a bitterly antagonistic kind. However that may be--and I do not know whether it was true or not--he was resolute in his determination to have no part or lot in this Poe celebration. In reply to the urgent invitations sent him, he wrote a carefully colorless note, excusing himself on the plea of "advancing age." When the day of the celebration came, however, I wrote a long, critical appreciation of Poe, with an analysis of his character, borrowed mainly from what Charles F. Briggs had said to me. My article was published as an editorial in the _Evening Post_, and straightway half a dozen prominent newspapers in different cities reprinted it under the headline of "William Cullen Bryant's Estimate of Poe." Fearing that Mr. Bryant might be seriously annoyed at being thus made responsible for an "estimate of Poe" which he had been at pains not to write, I went to his room to speak with him about the matter. "Don't let it trouble you, my dear boy," he said in his most patient manner. "We are both paying the penalty of journalistic anonymity. I am held responsible for utterances not my own, and you are robbed of the credit due you for a very carefully written article." Again, on the occasion of Longfellow's seventieth birthday, Mr. Bryant resisted all entreaties for any utterance--even the briefest--from him. I was assigned to write the necessary editorial article, and when it appeared, one of the foremost newspapers in the country reprinted it as "One Great Poet's Tribute to Another," and in an introductory paragraph explained that, while the article was not signed, it was obviously from Mr. Bryant's pen. During the brief time that I remained on the _Evening Post's_ staff after Mr. Carl Schurz became its editor, I wrote a rather elaborate review of Colonel Theodore Dodge's book, "The Campaign of Chancellorsville." The _Springfield Republican_ reprinted it prominently, saying that it had special importance as "the comment of General Schurz on a campaign in which he had borne a conspicuous part." [Sidenote: A Tupper Trepidation] When it was given out that Martin Farquhar Tupper intended to visit America during the Centennial Exposition of 1876, I wrote a playful article about the "Proverbial Philosophy" man and handed it to the managing editor for publication as a humorous editorial. Mr. Sperry was amused by the article, but distressingly perplexed by apprehensions concerning it. He told me of the difficulty. It seems that some years before that time, during a visit to England, Mr. Bryant had been very hospitably entertained by Tupper, wherefore Sperry feared that Mr. Bryant might dislike the publication of the article. At the same time he was reluctant to lose the fun of it. "Why not submit the question to Mr. Bryant himself?" I suggested, and as Mr. Bryant entered at that moment Sperry acted upon the suggestion. Mr. Bryant read the article with many manifestations of amusement, but when he had finished he said: "I heartily wish, Mr. Sperry, you had printed this without saying a word to me about it, for then, when Mr. Tupper becomes my guest, as he will if he comes to America, I could have explained to him that the thing was done without my knowledge by one of the flippant young men of my staff. Now that you have brought the matter to my attention, I can make no excuse." Sperry pleaded that Tupper's coming was not at all a certainty, adding: "And at any rate, he will not be here for several months to come, and he'll never know that the article was published or written." "Oh, yes he will," responded Mr. Bryant. "Some damned, good-natured friend will be sure to bring it to his attention." As Mr. Bryant never swore, the phrase was of course a quotation. LII There has been a deal of nonsense written and published with respect to Mr. Bryant's _Index Expurgatorius_, a deal of arrogance, and much cheap and ill-informed wit of a certain "superior" sort expended upon it. So far as I have seen these comments, they have all been founded upon ignorance of the facts and misconception of Mr. Bryant's purpose. In the first place, Mr. Bryant never published the index and never intended it to be an expression of his views with respect to linguistic usage. He prepared it solely for office use, and it was meant only to check certain tendencies of the time so far as the _Evening Post_ was concerned. The reporters on more sensational newspapers had come to call every big fire a "carnival of flame," every formal dinner a "banquet," and to indulge in other verbal exaggerations and extravagances of like sort. Mr. Bryant catalogued these atrocities in his _Index_ and forbade their use on the _Evening Post_. He was an intense conservative as to the English language, and his conscience was exceedingly alert to preserve it in its purity, so far as it was within his power to do so. Accordingly he ruled out of _Evening Post_ usage a number of things that were creeping into the language to its corruption, as he thought. Among these were the use of "numerous" where "many" was meant, the use of "people" for "persons," "monthly" for "monthly magazine," "paper" for "newspaper," and the like. He objected to the phrase "those who," meaning "those persons who," and above all his soul revolted against the use of "such" as an adverb--as in the phrase "such ripe strawberries" which, he contended, should be "so ripe strawberries" or "strawberries so ripe." The fact that Webster's and Worcester's dictionaries recognized many of the condemned usages, made not the smallest impression on his mind. "He must be a poor scholar," he once said in my hearing, "who cannot go behind the dictionaries for his authority." We had a copy of Johnson's dictionary in the office, and it was the only authority of that kind I ever knew Mr. Bryant to consult. Even in consulting that he gave small attention to the formal definitions. He searched at once the passages quoted from classic English literature as illustrations of usage, and if these did not justify the particular locution under consideration, he rejected and condemned it. [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant's "Index"] For another thing, the _Index_ as it has been quoted for purposes of cheap ridicule, held much that Mr. Bryant did not put into it, and for which he was in no way responsible. The staff of the _Evening Post_ was composed mainly of educated men, and each of them was free to add to the _Index_ such prohibitions as seemed to him desirable. Some of these represented mere crotchets, but they were all intended to aid in that conservation of English undefiled which was so dear a purpose to Mr. Bryant. In the main the usages condemned by the _Index_ were deserving of condemnation, but in some respects the prohibitions were too strait-laced, too negligent of the fact that a living language grows and that usages unknown to one generation may become altogether good in another. Again some of the prohibitions were founded upon a too strict regard for etymology, in forgetfulness of the fact that words often change or modify and sometimes even reverse their original significance. As an example, Shakespeare uses the expression "fearful adversaries," meaning badly scared adversaries, and that is, of course, the etymological significance of the word. Yet we now universally use it in a precisely opposite sense, meaning that the things called "fearful" are such as fill us with fear. Finally, it is to be said that Mr. Bryant neither intended nor attempted to enforce the _Index_ arbitrarily, or even to impose its restrictions upon any but the least educated and least experienced of the writers who served his newspaper. I used to violate it freely, and one day I mentioned the fact to Mr. Bryant. He replied: "My dear Mr. Eggleston, the _Index_ was never intended to interfere with scholarly men who know how to write good English. It is meant only to restrain the inconsiderate youngsters and start them in right paths." His subordinates were less liberal in their interpretation of the matter. The man whose duty it was to make clippings from other newspapers to be reprinted in the _Evening Post_, was expected so to edit and alter them as to bring them within _Index_ requirements, and sometimes the alterations were so considerable as to make of the extracts positive misquotations. I have often wondered that none of the newspapers whose utterances were thus "edited" out of their original forms and still credited to them ever complained of the liberties taken with the text. But so far as I know none of them ever did. When Mr. Bryant and I were talking of the _Index_ and of the license I had to violate it judiciously, he smilingly said to me: "After all a misuse of words is sometimes strangely effective. In the old days when I wrote more for the editorial columns than I do now, I had a friend who was deeply interested in all matters of public concern, and whose counsel I valued very highly because of the abounding common sense that always inspired it. His knowledge of our language was defective, but he was unconscious of the fact, and he boldly used words as he understood them, without the smallest fear of criticism before his eyes. Once when some subject of unusual public importance was under popular consideration, I wrote a long and very careful article concerning it. I did my best to set forth every consideration that in any wise bore upon it, and to make clear and emphatic what I regarded as the marrow of the matter. My friend was deeply interested, and came to talk with me on the subject. [Sidenote: An Effective Blunder in English] "'That is a superb article of yours, Mr. Bryant,' he said, 'but it will do no manner of good.' I asked him why, and he answered: 'Because you have exhausted the subject, and won't come back to it. That never accomplishes anything. If you want to produce an effect you must keep hammering at the thing. I tell you, Mr. Bryant, it is _reirritation_ that does the business.' "I thought the matter over and saw that he was right, not only in his idea but still more in the word he had mistakenly chosen for its expression. In such cases it is not only reiteration, but _reirritation_ that is effective." There are other indexes in other newspaper offices. Those of them that I have seen represent crass ignorance quite as often as scholarship. One of them absolutely forbids the use of the pronoun "which." Another which I saw some years ago, put a ban on the conjunctions "and" and "but." This prohibition, I am informed, was designed to compel the use of short sentences--a very desirable thing, of course, but one which may easily be pushed to extremes. Imagine a reporter having to state that "X and Y were caught in the act of firing a tenement house, and arrested by two policemen, officers A and B, but that X escaped on the way to the station-house after knocking policeman B down and seriously if not fatally injuring him." If the reader will try to make that simple statement without the use of the four "ands" and the one "but" in the sentence, he will have a realizing sense of the difficulty the writers on that newspaper must have had in their efforts to comply with the requirements of the index. In still another case the unscholarly maker of the index, having learned that it is incorrect to say "on to-day," "on yesterday," and "on to-morrow," has made a blanket application of what he has mistaken for a principle, and has decreed that his writers shall not say "on the fourth of March" or "on Wednesday of next week," or anything else of the kind. The ignorance shown in that case is not merely a manifestation of a deficient scholarship; it means that the maker of the index knew so little of grammar as not to know the difference between an adverb and a noun. Yet every one of the newspapers enforcing these ignorant index requirements has made fun of Mr. Bryant's scholarly prohibitions. Reserved, dignified, self-conscious as he was, Mr. Bryant was always a democrat of the proud old conservative sort. He never descended to undue familiarity with anybody. He patted nobody on the back, and I have never been able to imagine what would have happened if anybody had taken familiar liberties of that kind with him. Certainly nobody ever ventured to find out by practical experiment. He never called even the youngest man on his staff by his given name or by his surname without the prefix "Mr." In that respect he differed radically and, to my mind, pleasingly from another distinguished democrat. When Mr. Cleveland was for the third time a candidate for the Presidency, I called on him by Mr. Pulitzer's request just before sailing for Paris, where Mr. Pulitzer was then living. I entered the reception room at his hotel quarters and sent in my card. Mr. Cleveland came out promptly and greeted me with the exclamation: "Why, hello, Eggleston! How are you? I'm glad to see you." There was no harm in it, I suppose, but it disagreeably impressed me as the greeting of a politician rather than that of a distinguished statesman who had been President of the United States and hoped to be so again. Had I been an intimate personal friend who could say "Hello, Cleveland!" in response, I should have accepted his greeting as a manifestation of cordiality and good-fellowship. I was in fact only slightly acquainted with him, and in view of all the circumstances his familiarity of address impressed me as boorish. Years afterwards I learned how easy it was for him to do boorish things--how much restraint, indeed, he found it necessary to impose upon himself in order to avoid the doing of boorish things. [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant on British Snobbishness] But while Mr. Bryant never indulged in undue familiarity with anybody, he never lost sight of the dignity of those with whom he conversed, and above all, he never suffered shams to obscure his perception of realities. One Sunday at his home in Roslyn he told me the story of his abrupt leaving of England during a journey to Europe. I will tell it here as nearly as possible in his own words. "English society," he said, "is founded upon shams, falsehoods, and arrogant pretenses, and the falsehoods are in many ways insulting not only to the persons whom they directly affect, but to the intelligence and manhood of the casual observer who happens to have an honest and sincere mind. When I was over there I was for a time the guest of a wealthy manufacturer, a man of education, refinement, and culture, whose house in the country was an altogether delightful place to visit and whose personality I found unusually pleasing. One day as he and I were walking through his grounds a man came up on horseback and my host introduced us. It seems he was the head of one of the great 'county families,' as they call themselves and are called by others. He explained that he was on his way to my host's house to call upon me, wherefore we turned back in his company. During the call he asked me to be his guest at dinner on a day named, and I accepted, he saying that he would have a number of 'the best county people' to meet me. As the evening of the dinner day approached, I asked my host: 'When shall we dress for the dinner?' He looked at his watch and replied: 'It is time for _you_ to begin dressing now.' I observed the stress he laid upon the word 'you' and asked: 'Isn't it time for you, also?' "'Oh, I am not invited,' he replied. "'Not invited? Why, what can you mean?' I asked. "'Why, of course I'm not invited. Those are county people and I am only a manufacturer--a man in trade. They would never think of inviting me to dinner.' "I was surprised and shocked. "'Do you mean to tell me,' I asked, 'that that man came into your house where I am a guest, and invited me to dinner, to meet his friends, without including you, my host, in the invitation?' "'Why, yes, of course,' he replied. 'You must remember that they are county families, aristocrats, while I am a man in trade. They would not think of inviting me, and I should never expect it.' "I was full of disgust and indignation. I asked my host to let one of his servants carry a note for me to the great man's house. "'But why?' he asked. 'You will be going over there yourself within the hour.' "'I am not going,' I replied. 'I will not be a party to so gross an affront to my host. I shall send a note, not of apology but of unexplained declination.' "I did so, and as soon thereafter as I could arrange it, I quitted England in disgust with a social system so false, so arbitrary, and so arrogant that one may not even behave like a gentleman without transgressing its most insistent rules of social exclusiveness. "The worst of the matter was the meek submissiveness of my host to the affront put upon him. He was shocked and distressed that I should decline to go to the dinner. He could not understand that the smallest slight had been put upon him, and I could not make him understand it. That showed how completely saturated the English mind is with the virus of arbitrary caste. I am told that there has been some amelioration of all this during recent years. I do not know how much it amounts to. But did you ever hear an English _grande dame_ crush the life out of a sweet and innocent young girl by calling her 'that young person'? If not, you cannot imagine what measureless contempt can be put into a phrase, or how much of cruelty and injustice may be wrought by the utterance of three words." LIII [Sidenote: The Newspaper Critic's Function] During my service as a literary editor, I held firmly to the conviction that the function of the newspaper book reviewer is essentially a news function; that it is not his business to instruct other people as to how they should write, or to tell them how they ought to have written, but rather to tell readers what they have written and how; to show forth the character of each book reviewed in such fashion that the reader shall be able to decide for himself whether or not he wishes to buy and read it, and that in the main this should be done in a helpful and generously appreciative spirit, and never carpingly, with intent to show the smartness of the reviewer--a cheap thing at best. The space allotted to book reviews in any newspaper is at best wholly insufficient for anything like adequate criticism, and very generally the reviewer is a person imperfectly equipped for the writing of such criticism. In accordance with this conception of my functions, I always held the news idea in mind. I was alert to secure advance sheets of important books, in order that the _Evening Post_ might be the first of newspapers to tell readers about them. Usually the publishers were ready and eager to give the _Evening Post_ these opportunities, though the literary editors of some morning newspapers bitterly complained of what they regarded as favoritism when I was able to anticipate them. On one very notable occasion, however, great pains were taken by the publishers to avoid all grounds of complaint. When Tennyson's "Harold" was published in 1876, there had been no previous announcement of its coming. The greatest secrecy, indeed, had been maintained. Neither in England nor in America had any hint been given that any poem by Tennyson was presently forthcoming. On the day of publication, precisely at noon, copies of "Harold" were laid upon the desks of all the literary editors in England and America. My book reviews for that day were already in type and in the forms. One hour later the first edition of the paper--the latest into which book reviews could go--must go to press. I knew that my good friends, the literary editors of the morning newspapers, would exploit this great literary news the next morning, and that the evening papers would have it in the afternoon following. I resolved to be ahead of all of them. I hurriedly sent for the foreman of the composing room and enlisted his coöperation. With the aid of my scissors I got two columns of matter ready, consisting mainly of quotations hastily clipped from the book, with a connective tissue of comment, and with an introductory paragraph or two giving the first news of the publication of an important and very ambitious dramatic poem by Tennyson. At one o'clock the _Evening Post_ went to press with this literary "beat" displayed upon its first page. It proved to be the first announcement of the poem's publication either in England or in America, and it appeared twelve or fifteen hours in advance of any other publication either by advertisement or otherwise. [Sidenote: Mr. Bryant and His Contemporaries] On that occasion I tried to draw from Mr. Bryant some expression of opinion regarding Tennyson's work and the place he would probably occupy among English poets when the last word should be said concerning him. I thought to use the new poem and a certain coincidence connected with it--presently to be mentioned--as a means of drawing some utterance of opinion from him. It was of no avail. In reply to my questioning, Mr. Bryant said: "It is too soon to assign Tennyson to his permanent place in literature. He may yet do things greater than any that he has done. And besides, we are too near to judge his work, except tentatively. You remember Solon's dictum--'Call no man happy until death.' It is especially unsafe to attempt a final judgment upon the works of a poet while the glamor of them is still upon us. Moreover, I have never been a critic. I should distrust any critical judgment of my own." That reminded me that I had never heard Mr. Bryant express his opinion with regard to the work of any modern poet, living or dead. The nearest approach to anything of the kind that I can recall was in a little talk I had with him when I was about leaving for Boston to attend the breakfast given in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth year. The subject of Holmes's work arose naturally, and in talking of it Mr. Bryant said: "After all, it is as a novelist chiefly that I think of him." "You are thinking of 'Elsie Venner'?" I asked. "No,--of 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,'" he answered. "Few persons care for anything in that except the witty wisdom of it, and I suppose Dr. Holmes wrote it for the sake of that. But there is a sweet love story in the book--hidden like a bird in a clump of obtrusively flowering bushes. It is a sweet, wholesome story, and the heroine of it is a very natural and very lovable young woman." The coincidence referred to above was this. Almost exactly at the time of the publication of Tennyson's "Harold," some American whose name I have forgotten, to my regret, brought out a dramatic poem on the same subject, with the same hero, and in a closely similar form. It was entitled "The Son of Godwin," and, unless my memory plays me a trick, it was a work of no little merit. It was completely overshadowed, of course, by Tennyson's greater performance, but it had enough of virility and poetic quality in it to tempt me to write a carefully studied comparison of the two works. While Mr. Bryant shrank from the delivery of opinions concerning the moderns, his judgments of the older writers of English literature were fully formed and very positive. He knew the classic literature of our language--and especially its poetic literature--more minutely, more critically, and more appreciatively than any other person I have ever known, and he often talked instructively and inspiringly on the subject. On one of those periodically recurring occasions when the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's works is clamorously contended for by ill-balanced enthusiasts, Mr. Bryant asked me if I had it in mind to write anything about the controversy. I told him I had not, unless he particularly wished me to do so. "On the contrary," he answered; "I particularly wish otherwise. It is a sheer waste of good brain tissue to argue with persons who, having read anything avowedly written by Bacon, are still able to persuade themselves that the least poetical and most undramatic of writers could have written the most poetical and most dramatic works that exist in any language." "It seems to me," I answered, "that the trouble with such persons is that they are futilely bothering their brains in an attempt to account for the unaccountable. Shakespeare was a genius, and genius is a thing that can in nowise be measured, or weighed, or accounted for, while genius itself accounts for anything and everything it may do. It is subject to no restrictions, amenable to no law, and restrained by no limitations whatsoever." "That is an excellent way of putting an obvious truth," he answered. "I wish you would write it down precisely as you have uttered it orally, and print it as the _Evening Post's_ sole comment upon the controversy." Then he sat musing for a time, and after a while added: "Genius exists in varying degrees in different men. In Shakespeare it was supreme, all-inspiring, all-controlling. In lesser men it manifests itself less conspicuously and less constantly, but not less positively. No other poet who ever lived could have written Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' yet Coleridge could no more have written 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' or 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' than any child in pinafores could. When poetry is genuine, it is inspired, as truly as any sacred Scripture ever was. Without inspiration there may be cleverness, beauty, and grandeur in metrical composition, but genuine poetry is the result of inspiration always, and inspiration is genius." "Whence comes the inspiration?" I ventured to ask, hoping to draw something further from him. "I do not know," he answered. "Whence comes the color of the rose or the violet or the dandelion? I am not a theologian, to dogmatize about things that are beyond the ken of human intelligence. I only know that the inspiration is there, just as I know that the colors of the flowers are there--in both cases because the thing perceived is obvious." [Sidenote: Genius and "Thanatopsis"] One day I asked Mr. Bryant about "Thanatopsis." When I made my first acquaintance with that poem in a school reader, it was printed with some introductory lines in smaller type, and I had never been able to discover the relation of those lines to the poem or to the thought that inspired it. In answer to my questions Mr. Bryant explained that the lines in question really had no relation to the poem and no possible connection with it. "I was a mere boy," he said, "when 'Thanatopsis' was written. It bore no title in my manuscript--that was supplied by an editor who knew Greek, a language of which I did not then know even the alphabet. My father got possession of the poem, took it to Boston, and had it published, all without my knowledge. With the manuscript of it he found some other lines of mine and assumed that they belonged to the poem, as they did not. The editor printed them at top in smaller type, and they got into the schoolbooks in that way. That is the whole story." LIV During my service on the _Evening Post_, I made a curious blunder which circumstances rendered it necessary for others to exploit. The thing grievously annoyed me at the time, but later it only amused me as an illustration of a psychological principle. Mr. Richard Grant White, writing in some newspaper or magazine in opposition to the proposed adoption of the metric system of weights and measures, had made an amusing blunder. He wrote that the old system was so fixed in men's minds as to admit of no possible mistake. He added something like this: "Nobody has any difficulty in remembering that two gills make one pint, two pints one quart, four quarts one gallon, etc." I cannot pretend to quote his utterance exactly, but that is the substance of it, the marrow of the matter being that in the very act of showing that nobody could have the least trouble in remembering the table of liquid measure, he himself got it wrong. [Sidenote: A Case of Heterophemy] The derisive comments of all the newspapers upon his blunder may be easily imagined. For reply he invented a word of Greek derivation, "heterophemy." He contended that it was a common thing for one to speak or write one thing when quite another thing was in his mind, and when the speaker or writer perfectly knew the thing he sought to say. He explained that when the mind has once slipped into an error of that kind it is usually unable, or at least unlikely, to detect it in the revision of proofs, or in any other survey of the utterance. His exposition was very learned, very ingenious, and very interesting, but it had no effect in silencing the newspaper wags, who at once adopted his newly-coined word, "heterophemy," and made it the butt of many jests. About that time Mr. Alexander H. Stephens published in one of the more dignified periodicals of the time--the _North American Review_, perhaps--a very learned essay in which he sought to fix the authorship of the letters of Junius upon Sir Philip Francis. Mr. Stephens brought to the discussion a ripe scholarship and a deal of fresh and original thought that gave importance to his paper, and I reviewed it in the _Evening Post_ as carefully and as fully as if it had been a book. I was deeply concerned to have my review of so important a paper in all respects the best I could make it, and to that end I read my proofs twice, with minute attention, as I thought, to every detail. The next day, if I remember correctly, was Sunday. At any rate, it was a day on which I remained at home. When I opened my morning newspapers, the first thing that attracted my attention was a letter in one of them from Richard Grant White, of which my article was the subject. Here, he said, was a conspicuous and unmistakable example of heterophemy, which could not be attributed to ignorance or inattention or anything else, except precisely that tendency of the human mind which he had set forth as the source of mistakes otherwise unaccountable. He went on to say that mine was an article founded upon adequate scholarship and evidently written with unusual care; that its writer obviously knew his subject and had written of it with the utmost attention to accuracy of statement in every detail; that he had evidently read his proofs carefully as not a slip appeared in the printed copy of the article, not even so much as a typographical error; and yet that in two or three instances this careful critic had written "Sir Philip Sidney" instead of "Sir Philip Francis." He pointed out that these slips could not have been due to any possible confusion in my mind of two Sir Philips who lived two hundred years apart, chronologically, and whose careers were as wholly unlike as it was possible to conceive; for, he pointed out, my article itself bore ample witness to my familiarity with Sir Philip Francis's history. Here, Mr. White insisted, was the clearest possible case of heterophemy, untainted by even a possible suspicion of ignorance or confusion of mind. Further, he urged, the case illustrated and confirmed his contention that, having written a word or name or phrase not intended, the writer is extremely unlikely to discover the slip even in the most careful reading of proofs. For in this case every appearance indicated a careful proofreading on the part of the author of the article. When I read Mr. White's letter I simply could not believe that I had made the slips he attributed to me. Certainly there was no confusion in my mind of Sir Philip Francis with Sir Philip Sidney. I was familiar with the very different histories of the two altogether dissimilar men, and it seemed inconceivable to me that I had written the name of the one for that of the other even once in an article in which the right name was written perhaps a dozen times. [Sidenote: Richard Grant White's Triumph] It was a troubled and unhappy "day off" for me. I had no copy of the _Evening Post_ of the preceding day in the house, and a diligent inquiry at all the news-stands in the remote quarter of Brooklyn in which I then lived, failed to discover one. But as I thought of the matter in troubled fashion, I became more and more convinced that Mr. White had misread what I had written, in which case I anticipated a good deal of fun in exposing and exploiting his error. As the day waned I became positively certain in my mind that no such mistake had been made, that no mention of Sir Philip Sidney could by any possibility have crept into my article concerning Sir Philip Francis. But when I arrived at the office of the _Evening Post_ next morning, I found the facts to be as Mr. White had represented them. I had written "Sir Philip Francis" throughout the article, except in two or three places, where the name appeared as "Sir Philip Sidney." I was so incredulous of the blunder that I went to the composing room and secured my manuscript. The error was there in the written copy. I asked the chief proofreader why he had not observed and queried it in view of the fact that my use of the name had been correct in most instances, but he was unable to offer any explanation except that his mind had accepted the one name for the other. The foreman of the composing room, a man of education and large literary knowledge, had read the proofs merely as a matter of interest, but he had not observed the error. I had no choice but to accept Mr. Richard Grant White's interpretation of the matter and call it a case of heterophemy. There are blunders made that are not so easily accounted for. A leading New York newspaper once complained of Mr. Cleveland's veto messages as tiresome and impertinent, and asked why he persisted in setting forth his reasons for disapproving acts of Congress, instead of sending them back disapproved without reasons. The _Evening Post_ found it necessary to direct the newspaper's attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States expressly requires the President, in vetoing a measure, to set forth his reasons for doing so. In a like forgetfulness of Constitutional provisions for safeguarding the citizen, the same newspaper complained of the police, when Tweed escaped and went into hiding, for not searching every house in New York till the malefactor should be found. It was Parke Godwin who cited the Constitution in answer to that manifestation of ignorance, and he did it with the strong hand of a master to whom forgetfulness of the fundamental law seemed not only inexcusable, on the part of a newspaper writer, but dangerous to liberty as well. Perhaps the worst case I ever knew of ignorance assuming the critical functions of expert knowledge, was one which occurred some years later. William Hamilton Gibson published a superbly illustrated work, which won commendation everywhere for the exquisite perfection of the drawings, both in gross and in minute detail. A certain art critic who had made a good deal of noise in the world by his assaults upon the integrity of art treasures in the Metropolitan Museum, assailed Gibson's work in print. Finding nothing in the illustrations that he could criticise, he accused Gibson of sailing under false colors and claiming credit for results that were not of his creation. He said that nearly everything of value in the illustrations of Gibson's book was the work not of the artist but of the engraver who, he declared, had "added increment after increment of value" to the crude original drawings. [Sidenote: The Demolition of a Critic] In a brief letter to the newspaper which had printed this destructive criticism without its writer's name appended to it, Mr. Gibson had only to direct attention to the fact that the pictures in question were not engravings at all, but slavish photographic reproductions of his original drawings, and that no engraver had had anything whatever to do with them. The criticism to which so conclusive a reply was possible was anonymous, and its author never acknowledged or in any way sought to atone for the wanton wrong he had sought to inflict under cover of anonymity. But his agency in the matter was known to persons "on the inside" of literature, art, and journalism, and the shame of his deed rankled in the minds of honest men. He wrote little if anything after that, and the reputation he had made faded out of men's memory. LV When Mr. Bryant died, Mr. Parke Godwin assumed editorial control of the _Evening Post_, and his attention promptly wrought something like a miracle in the increased vigor and aggressiveness of its editorial conduct. Mr. Godwin was well advanced in middle life at that time; he was comfortably provided with this world's goods, and he was not anxious to take up again the strenuous journalistic work in which he had already achieved all there was to achieve of reputation. But in his own interest and in the interest of Mr. Bryant's heirs, it seemed necessary for him to step into this breach. Moreover, he had abated none of his interest in public affairs or in those things that make for culture, enlightenment, and human betterment. He had never ceased to write for the _Evening Post_ upon matters of such kind when occasion called for strong, virile utterance. In his declining years Mr. Bryant had not lost interest in these things, but he had abated somewhat his activity with reference to them. He had more and more left the conduct of the newspaper to his subordinates, trusting to what he used to call his "volunteer staff"--Parke Godwin, John Bigelow, Samuel J. Tilden, and other strong men, to furnish voluntarily all that was needed of strenuosity in the discussion of matters closely concerning the public weal. I do not know that Mr. Tilden was ever known to the public even as an occasional writer for the _Evening Post_. He was a man of singularly secretive temperament, and when he wrote anything for the _Evening Post_ its anonymity was guarded with a jealousy such as I have never known any other person to exercise. What he wrote--on the infrequent occasions of his writing at all--was given to Mr. Bryant and by him handed in with instructions for its publication and without a hint to anybody concerning its authorship. It was only by accident that I learned whence certain articles came, and I think that knowledge was not usually shared with any other member of Mr. Bryant's staff. Mr. Godwin pursued a different course. These occasional contributions did not satisfy his ideas of what the _Evening Post_ should be in its editorial utterances. He set to work to stimulate a greater aggressiveness on the part of the staff writers, and he himself brought a strong hand to bear upon the work. [Sidenote: "A Lion in a Den of Daniels"] When Mr. Godwin died, a few years ago, Dr. Titus Munson Coan, in an obituary sketch read before the Authors Club, said with reference to this part of his career that in the _Evening Post_ office "he was a lion in a den of Daniels," and the figure of speech was altogether apt. He had gifts of an uncommon sort. He knew how to say strong things in a strong way. He could wield the rapier of subtle sarcasm, and the bludgeon of denunciation with an equally skilled hand. Sometimes he brought even a trip-hammer into play with startling effect. I remember one conspicuous case of the kind. Sara Bernhardt was playing one of her earliest and most brilliant engagements in New York. Mr. Godwin's alert interest in every form of high art led him not only to employ critics of specially expert quality to write of her work, but himself now and then to write something of more than ordinary appreciation of the great Frenchwoman's genius as illustrated in her performance. Presently a certain clergyman of the "sensational" school, who had denounced the theater as "the door of hell and the open gateway of damnation," sent to the _Evening Post_ an intemperate protest against the large space it was giving to Sara Bernhardt and her art. The letter was entitled "Quite Enough of Sara Bernhardt," and in the course of it the writer declared the great actress to be a woman of immoral character and dissolute life, whom it was a shame, a disgrace, and a public calamity for the _Evening Post_ even to name in its columns. Mr. Godwin wrote an answer to the tirade. He entitled it "Quite Enough of X"--the "X" standing here for the clergyman's name, which he used in full. It was one of the most effective bits of criticism and destructive analysis I ever saw in print, and it left the critic of Sara Bernhardt with not a leg to stand upon, and with no possibility of reply. Mr. Godwin pointed out that Sara Bernhardt had asked American attention, not as a woman, but solely as an artist; that it was of her art alone, and not of her personality that the _Evening Post_ had written; that she had neither asked admission to American society nor accepted it when pressed upon her; and that her personal character and mode of life had no more to do with the duty of considering her art than had the sins of any old master when one viewed his paintings and sought to interpret the genius that inspired them. So far Mr. Godwin was argumentative and placative. But he had other arrows in his quiver. He challenged the clergyman to say how he knew that the actress was a person of immoral character and dissolute life, and to explain what right he had to make charges of that kind against a woman without the smallest evidence of their truth. And so on to the end of a chapter that must have been very bitter reading to the offender if he had been a person of normal sensitiveness, as he was not. I have cited this occurrence merely by way of explaining the fact that Mr. Godwin had many critics and many enemies. A man of sincere mind and aggressive temper upon proper occasion, and especially one possessed of his gift of vigorous expression, must needs make enemies in plenty, if he edits a newspaper or otherwise writes for publication. But on the other hand, those who knew him best were all and always his devoted friends--those who knew his sturdy character, his unflinching honesty of mind, and his sincere devotion to the right as he saw it. My acquaintance with him, before his assumption of control on the _Evening Post_, was comparatively slight, and in all that I here write of his character and mind, I am drawing upon my recollection of him during a later intimacy which, beginning on the _Evening Post_, was drawn closer during my service on another newspaper, and endured until his death. After a brief period of editorship Mr. Godwin sold a controlling interest in the _Evening Post_ to a company of men represented by Messrs. Horace White, E. L. Godkin, and Carl Schurz--Mr. Schurz becoming the titular editor for a time. When Mr. Godwin learned, after the sale was agreed upon, that Mr. Godkin was one of the incoming group, he sought to buy Mr. Godkin's weekly newspaper, _The Nation_, and as the negotiation seemed for a time to promise well, he arranged to make me editor of that periodical. This opened to me a prospect of congenial work, more agreeable to me than any that a daily newspaper could offer. But in the end Mr. Godkin declined to sell the _Nation_ at any price that Mr. Godwin thought fair, and made it instead the weekly edition of the _Evening Post_. [Sidenote: The Literary Shop Again] Accordingly, I again quitted the newspaper life, fully intending to enter it no more. Literary work of many kinds was open to me, and it was my purpose to devote myself exclusively to it, maintaining a literary workshop in my own home. I became an adviser of the Harper publishing house, with no office attendance required of me, no working time fixed, and no interference of any kind with my entire liberty. I was writing now and then for the editorial pages of the great newspapers, regularly for a number of magazines, and occasionally writing a book, though that was infrequent for the reason that in the absence of international copyright, there was no encouragement to American authors to write books in competition with reprints that cost their publishers nothing. In mentioning this matter of so-called "piracy," I do not mean to accuse the reputable American publishers of English books of any wrong, for they were guilty of none. They were victims of the lack of law as truly as the authors on either side were. They were as eager as the authors--English or American--could be, for an international copyright law. For lack of it their profits were cut short and their business enterprises set awry. The reputable publishing houses in this country actually purchased the American publishing rights of many English books with no other protection of what they had purchased than such as was afforded by the "courtesy of the trade"--a certain gentlemen's agreement under which no reputable American publisher would reprint a book of which another publisher had bought the advance sheets. This protection was uncertain, meager, and often ineffective for the reason that there were disreputable publishers in plenty who paid no heed to the "courtesy of the trade" but reprinted whatsoever they thought would sell. In the case of such works as those of Herbert Spencer and some others, I believe I am correctly informed that the American publishers paid larger royalties to the authors--larger in gross amount, at least--than those authors received from their English publishers. In the same way American publishers of the better class paid liberally for advance sheets of the best foreign fiction, often at heavy loss to themselves because the books they had bought were promptly reprinted in very cheap form by their less scrupulous competitors. In the case of fiction of a less distinguished kind, of which no advance sheets were offered, they had no choice but to make cheap reprints on their own account. It is proper to say also that if this was "piracy," the American publishers were by no means the worst pirates or the most conspicuous ones, though the complaints made were chiefly of English origin and were all directed against the Americans. [Sidenote: Piracy--British and American] I shall never forget the way in which my brother, Edward Eggleston --himself an active worker for international copyright--met the complaints of one English critic who was more lavish and less discriminative in his criticism in a company of Americans than Edward thought good manners justified. The critic was the son of an English poet, whose father's chief work had won considerable popularity in America. The young man was a guest at one of the receptions of the Authors Club, every member of which was directly or indirectly a sufferer by reason of the lack of international copyright. He seized upon the occasion for the delivery of a tirade against the American dishonesty which, he said, threatened to cut short his travel year by depriving his father of the money justly due him as royalty on the American reprints of his books. My brother listened in silence for a time. Then that pinch of gunpowder that lies somewhere in every human make-up "went off." "The American publishers of your father's poem," he said, "have paid him all they could afford to pay in the present state of the law, I believe?" "Yes--but what is it? A mere fraction of what they justly owe him," the young man answered. "Now listen," said Edward. "You call that American piracy, and you overlook the piracy on the other side. Your father's book has sold so many thousand copies in America"--giving the figures. "The English reprint of my 'Hoosier Schoolmaster' has sold nearly ten times that number, according to the figures of the English 'pirates' who reprinted it and who graciously sent me a 'tip,' as I call it, of one hundred dollars--less than a fraction, if I may so call it, of what American publishers have voluntarily paid your father. But dropping that smaller side of the matter, let me tell you that every man in this company is a far greater sufferer from the barbaric state of the law than your father or any other English author ever was. We are denied the opportunity to practise our profession, except under a paralysing competition with stolen goods. What chance has an American novel, published at a dollar or more, in competition with English fiction even of an inferior sort published at ten cents? We cannot expect the reader who reads only for amusement to pay a dollar or a dollar and a half for an American novel when he can fill his satchel with reprints of English novels at ten cents apiece. But that is the very smallest part of our loss. The whole American people are inestimably losers because of this thing. They are deprived of all chance of a national literature, reflecting the life of our country, its ideas, its inspirations, and its aspirations. You Englishmen are petty losers in comparison with us. Your losses are measurable in pounds, shillings, and pence. Ours involve things of immeasurably greater value." I have quoted here, as accurately as memory permits, an utterance that met the approval of every author present, because I think that in our appeals to Congress for international copyright only the smaller, lower, and less worthy commercial aspects of the matter have been presented, and that as a consequence the American people have been themselves seriously and hurtfully misled as to the higher importance of a question involving popular interests of far more consequence than the financial returns of authorship can ever be. LVI In connection with my work for the Harpers it fell to my lot to revise and edit a good many books. Among these were such books of reference as Hayden's Dictionary of Dates, which I twice edited for American readers, putting in the dates of important American affairs, and, more importantly, correcting English misinterpretations of American happenings. For example, under the title "New York" I found an entry, "Fall of O'Kelly," with a date assigned. The thing probably referred to John Kelly, but the event recorded, with its date, had never occurred within the knowledge of any American. There were many other such things to cut out and many important matters to put in, and the Harpers paid me liberally--after their fashion in dealing with men of letters--for doing the work. In the course of it I had to spend a considerable amount of their money in securing the exact information desired. In one case I applied by letter to one of the executive departments at Washington for exact information concerning a certain document. For answer I received a letter, written by a clerk, doubtless, but signed by a chief of bureau, embodying a copy of the document. In that copy I found a line thrice repeated, and I was unable to make out whether the repetition was in the original or was the work of a copying clerk asleep at his post. I wrote to inquire, but the chief of bureau replied that he had no authority to find out, wherefore I had to make a journey to Washington at the expense of Harper and Brothers, to ascertain the facts. I came out of that expedition with the conviction, which still lingers in my mind, that the system that gives civil service employees a tenure of office with which their chiefs have no power to interfere by peremptory discharge for inefficiency or misconduct, as the managing men of every successful business enterprise may do, is vicious in principle and bad in outcome. [Sidenote: The Way at Washington] That and other experiences in dealing with executive departments at Washington have made an old fogy of me, I suppose. At any rate they have convinced me that the government's business could and would be better done by half the force now employed, if that half force worked under a consciousness of direct responsibility, each man to an immediate chief who could discharge him for incompetency or inattention. Furthermore, my experience with clerks in the departments at Washington convinces me that the method of selection and promotion by competitive examination, results almost uniformly in the appointment and in the promotion of inferior and often incompetent men. Certainly no great bank, no great business enterprise of any kind would ever consent to such a method of selecting or promoting its employees--a method which excludes from consideration the knowledge every chief of bureau or department must necessarily have of the qualifications of his subordinates. The clerk who repeated that line three times in making an official transcript of an official document had been for several years in the public service, and I suppose he is there yet, if he isn't dead. How long would a bookkeeper in a bank hold his place after making a similar blunder? But then, banks are charged with an obligation to remain solvent, and must appoint and discharge employees with due reference to that necessity. The government is not subject to that requirement, and it recognizes a certain obligation to heed the vagaries of the theorists who regard themselves as commissioned--divinely or otherwise--to reform the world in accordance with the suggestions of their own inner consciousness and altogether without regard to the practical experience of humankind. Mainly, however, the books I was employed to edit were those written by men whose connection with affairs of consequence rendered their utterances important, but whose literary qualifications were small. When such works were presented to the Harpers, it was their practice to accept the books on condition that the authors of them should pay for such editing as was necessary, by some person of literary experience to be selected by the Harpers themselves. In every such case, where I was asked to be the editor and see the book through the press, I stipulated that I was to make no effort to improve literary style, but was to confine myself to seeing that the English was correct--whether elegant or otherwise--and that the book as it came from the hands of its author should be presented with as little editorial alteration as was possible. I assumed the function of correcting errors and offering advice, not of writing the books anew or otherwise putting them into the literary form I thought they should have. Even with this limitation of function, I found plenty of work to do in every case. [Sidenote: A Historical Discovery] It was under a contract of this kind that I undertook to see through the press the volumes published under the title of "The Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War between the States." The work bore the name of Colonel Alfred Roman, as its author, but on every page of it there was conclusive evidence of its direct and minute inspiration by General Beauregard himself. It was with him rather than with Colonel Roman that negotiations were had respecting my editorial work on the book. He was excessively nervous lest I should make alterations of substance, a point on which I was the better able to reassure him because of the fact that my compensation was a sum certain and in no way dependent upon the amount of time or labor I should give to the work. I succeeded in convincing him that I was exceedingly unlikely to undertake more of revision than the contract called for, and as one man with another, I assured him that I would make no alteration of substantial consequence in the work without his approval. In editing the book I made a discovery which, I think, is of some historical interest. Throughout the war there was something like a standing quarrel between General Beauregard and Mr. Jefferson Davis, emphasized by the antagonism of Mr. Davis's chief adviser, Judah P. Benjamin to General Beauregard. Into the merits of that quarrel I have no intention here to inquire. It does not come within the purview of this volume of reminiscences. But in editing General Beauregard's book I discovered an easy and certainly correct explanation of the bitterest phase of it--that phase upon which General Beauregard laid special stress. Sometime after the battle of Shiloh, General Beauregard, whose health was seriously impaired, decided to take a little furlough for purposes of recuperation. There was neither prospect nor possibility of active military operations in that quarter for a considerable time to come, so that he felt himself free to go away for a few weeks in search of health, leaving General Bragg in temporary command but himself keeping in touch with his army and in readiness to return to it immediately in case of need. He notified Mr. Davis of his intended course, by telegraph. Mr. Davis almost immediately removed him from command and ordered General Bragg to assume permanent control in that quarter. Mr. Davis's explanation, when his act was challenged, was that General Beauregard had announced his purpose to be absent himself "for four months," and that he, Mr. Davis, could not regard that as anything else than an abandonment of his command. General Beauregard insisted that he had made no such announcement and had cherished no such purpose. The thing ultimately resolved itself into a question of veracity between the two, concerning which each had bitter things to say of the other in public ways. [Sidenote: A Period Out of Place] In editing General Beauregard's book, I discovered that there was really no question of veracity involved, but merely an error of punctuation in a telegraphic despatch, a thing very easy at all times and particularly easy in days of military telegraphing when incompetent operators were the rule rather than the exception. The case was this: General Beauregard telegraphed: "I am leaving for a while on surgeon's certificate. For four months I have delayed obeying their urgent recommendations," etc. As the despatch reached Mr. Davis it read: "I am leaving for a while on surgeon's certificate for four months. I have delayed," etc. The misplacing of a punctuation mark gave the statement, as received by Mr. Davis, a totally different meaning from that which General Beauregard had intended. In explaining his action in removing Beauregard from command, Mr. Davis stated that the General had announced his purpose to absent himself for four months. General Beauregard denied that he had done anything of the kind. Hence the issue of veracity, in which the text of the despatch as sent, sustained General Beauregard's contention, while the same text as received, with its error of punctuation, equally sustained the assertions of Mr. Davis. With the beatitude of the peacemakers in mind, I brought my discovery to the attention of both parties to the controversy, in the hope at least of convincing each that the other had not consciously lied. The attempt proved futile. When I pointed out to General Beauregard the obvious origin of the misapprehension, he flushed with suppressed anger and declared himself unwilling to discuss a matter so exclusively personal. He did discuss it, however, to the extent of pointing out that his use of the phrase "for a while" should have enabled Mr. Davis to correct the telegraph operator's error of punctuation, "if there really was any such error made--which I am not prepared to believe." In answer to my letter to Mr. Davis, some one wrote for him that in his advancing years he did not care to take up again any of the matters of controversy that had perplexed his active life. I have never since that time made the smallest attempt to reconcile the quarrels of men who have been engaged in the making of history. I have learned better. So far as Mr. Davis was concerned there was probably another reason for unwillingness to consider any matter that I might lay before him. He and I had had a little controversy of our own some years before. In one of those chapters of "A Rebel's Recollections," which were first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_, I made certain statements with regard to Mr. Davis's conduct at a critical moment. Mr. Davis sent his secretary to me--or at any rate some one calling himself his secretary came to me--to assure me that the statements I and others had made concerning the matter were without foundation in fact, and to ask me not to include them in the forthcoming book. I replied that I had not made the statements thoughtlessly or without satisfying myself of the correctness of my information; that I could not, therefore, consent to omit them from the book; but that if Mr. Davis would send me a categorical denial of them over his own signature, I would publish it as a part of my text. This proposal was rejected, and I let the matter stand as originally written. I had in my possession at that time a letter from General Robert E. Lee to John Esten Cooke. It was written in answer to a direct question of Mr. Cooke's, and in it General Lee stated unequivocally that the facts were as Mr. Cooke understood them and as I had reported them. But General Lee forbade the publication of his letter unless Mr. Davis should at any time publicly deny the reports made. In that case he authorized the publication "in the interest of truthful history." Mr. Cooke had placed that letter in my hands, and had Mr. Davis furnished me with the suggested denial, it was my purpose to print that and General Lee's letter in facsimile, leaving it for every reader to choose between them. To my regret Mr. Davis declined to put his denial into writing, so that General Lee's letter, which I returned to Mr. Cooke, has never been published, and now never can be. [Sidenote: A Futile Effort to Make Peace] On another point I found General Beauregard more amenable to editorial suggestion, though reluctantly so. In discussing his defense of Charleston with utterly inadequate means--a defense everywhere recognized as the sufficient foundation of a military fame--his book included a chapter or so of masterly military criticism, intended to show that if the commanders on the other side at Charleston had been as alert and capable as they should have been, there was no time when they could not have taken Charleston with ease and certainty. I pointed out to him that all this was a discrediting of himself; that it attributed to the enemy's weakness a success which military criticism attributed to his own military and engineering strength, thus stripping him of credit at the very point at which his credit was least open to dispute or question. I advised the elimination or material alteration of this part of the book, and after due consideration he consented, though with sore reluctance, for the reason that the modification made involved the sacrifice of a very brilliant essay in military criticism, of which any writer might well have been proud, and which I should have advised any other writer to publish as a distinguished feature of his work. To descend from large things to small ones, it was in seeing this work through the press that I encountered the most extreme case I have ever known of dangerous interference with copy on the part of the "intelligent compositor," passed by the "alert proofreader." The printing department of the Harpers was as nearly perfect, in its organization and in the supervision given to it by the two highly-skilled superintendents of its rival composing rooms, as any printing department well can be. And yet it was there that the error occurred. Of course I could not read the revised proofs of the book "by copy,"--that is to say with a helper to read the copy aloud while I followed him with the revises. That would have required the employment of an additional helper and a considerably increased payment to me. Moreover, all that was supposed to be attended to in the composing rooms so that revised proofs should come to me in exact conformity with the "copy" as I had handed it in. In reading them I was not expected to look out for errors of the type, but solely for errors in the text. In reading a batch of proofs one night--for the man of letters who would keep his butcher and grocer on good terms with him must work by night as well as by day--although I was in nowise on the alert to discover errors of type, my eye fell upon an error which, if it had escaped me, would forever have ruined my reputation as an editor. Certain of General Beauregard's official despatches, quoted in the book, were dated "Fiddle Pond, near Barnwell C. H., South Carolina," the letters "C. H." standing, of course, for "Court House"--the name given to rural county seats in the South. The intelligent compositor, instead of "following copy," had undertaken to interpret and translate the letters out of the depths of his own intuitions. Instead of "Fiddle Pond, near Barnwell C. H.," he had set "Fiddle Pond, near Barnwell, Charleston Harbor," thus playing havoc at once with geography and the text. The case was so extreme, and the liberty taken with the text without notice of any kind, involved so much danger to the accuracy of the work that I had no choice but to report the matter to the house with a notification that unless I could be assured that no further liberties of any kind would be taken with the text, I must decline to go further with the undertaking. This cost a proofreader and a printer or two their employments, and I regretted that, but they deserved their punishment, and the matter was one that demanded drastic measures. Without such measures it would have been dangerous to publish the book at all. [Sidenote: Loring Pacha] One other ex-Confederate general with whom this sort of editorial work brought me into association was Loring Pacha--otherwise General W. W. Loring, a man of extraordinarily varied experiences in life, a man of the gentlest temper and most genial impulses, who had been, nevertheless, a fighter all his life, from boyhood up. His fighting, however, had all been done in the field and professionally, and he carried none of its animosities into private life. I remember his saying to me once: "Of course the war ended as it ought to have done. It was best for everybody concerned that the Union should be restored. The only thing is that I don't like the other fellows to 'have the say' on us." Loring became a private soldier in the United States Army while yet a boy. He so far distinguished himself for gallantry in the Florida War that he was offered a Presidential appointment to West Point, which he declined. He was appointed to a lieutenancy in the regular army, where he won rapid promotion and gained a deal of experience, chiefly in fighting Indians and leading troops on difficult expeditions across the plains of the far West. In the Mexican War he was several times promoted and brevetted for conspicuous gallantry, and he lost an arm at one of the gates of the City of Mexico, as he was leading his regiment as the head of the column into the town, seizing an opportunity without orders. On that occasion General Scott visited him in hospital and said to him: "Loring, I suppose I ought to court-martial you for rushing into that breach without orders; but I think I'll recommend you for promotion instead." In the Confederate Army Loring became a Major-General, and a few years after the close of that struggle he was invited by the Khedive of Egypt to become his chief of staff. After a military service there which extended over a number of years, he returned to America and wrote a book founded upon his experience there and the studies he had made in Egyptian manners, history, archæology, and the like. I was employed to edit that book, which was published by Dodd, Mead & Co., I think, and in the course of my work upon it Loring became not only a valued personal friend, but an easy-going intimate in my household. At first he came to see me only for purposes of consultation concerning the work. Later he used to come "just because he wanted to," he said. His visits were made, in Southern fashion, at whatever hour he chose, and he took with us whatever meals were served while he was there. In conversation one day I happened to ask Loring something about the strained relations that frequently exist between commanding officers in the field and the newspaper war correspondents sent out to report news of military operations. I think my question was prompted by some reference to William Swinton's criticisms of General Grant, and General Grant's peremptory dealing with him. "I don't know much about such things," Loring answered. "You see, at the time of the Mexican War and of all my Indian campaigns, the newspapers hadn't yet invented the war correspondent. Then in the Confederacy everybody was a soldier, as you know, and the war correspondents carried muskets and answered to roll calls. Their newspaper work was an avocation, not a vocation. You see I am learning English under your tuition." This little jest referred to the fact that a few days before, in running through the manuscript of a lecture he was preparing, I had changed the word "avocation" to "vocation," explaining to him the difference in meaning. [Sidenote: Concerning War Correspondents] "Then in Egypt we were not much troubled with war correspondents--perhaps they had the bowstring and sack in mind--but I have an abiding grudge against another type of correspondent whom I encountered there. I mean the tourist who has made an arrangement with some newspaper to pay the expenses of his trip or a part of them in return for letters to be sent from the places visited. He is always an objectionable person, particularly when he happens to be a parson out of a job, and I always fought shy of him so far as possible, usually by turning him over to my dragoman, to be shown about and 'stuffed' as only a dragoman can 'stuff' anybody. You see the dragoman has learned that every Western tourist in the East is hungry for information of a startling sort, and the dragoman holds himself ready to furnish it without the smallest regard for truth or any respect at all for facts. On one occasion one of these scribbling tourists from England visited me. One of the Khedive's unoccupied palaces had been assigned to me for my headquarters, and I was exceedingly busy with preparations for a campaign then in contemplation. Stone Pacha and I were both up to our eyes in work, trying to mobilize an army that had no mobility in it. Accordingly I turned the tourist over to my dragoman with orders to show him everything and give him all the information he wanted. "The palace was divided as usual. There was a public part and a part called the harem--which simply means the home or the family apartments. During my occupancy of the place that part of it was empty and closed, as I am a bachelor. But as the dragoman showed him about the tourist asked to see that part of the palace, whereupon the dragoman replied: "'That is the harem. You cannot gain entrance there.' "'The harem? But I thought Loring was an American and a Christian,' was the astonished reply. "'He was--but he is a pacha, now,' answered the dragoman with that air of mysterious reserve which is a part of his stock in trade. Then the rascal went on to tell the tourist that I now had forty wives--which would have been a shot with the long bow even if I had been a born Mohammedan of the highest rank and greatest wealth. "When I heard of the affair I asked the dragoman why he had lied so outrageously and he calmly replied: "'Oh, I thought it polite to give the gentleman what he wanted.' [Sidenote: A Scribbling Tourist's Mischief-Making] "I dismissed the matter and thought no more of it until a month or so later, when somebody sent me marked copies of the _Manchester Guardian_, or whatever the religious newspaper concerned was called. The tourist had told the story of my 'downfall' with all the horrifying particulars, setting forth in very complimentary phrases my simple, exemplary life as an American soldier and lamenting the ease with which I and other Western men, 'nurtured in the purity of Christian family life,' had fallen victims to the lustful luxury of the East. I didn't give the matter any attention. I was too busy to bother--too busy with plans and estimates and commissary problems, and the puzzles of transportation and all the rest of the things that required attention in preparation for a campaign in a difficult, inaccessible, and little known country. I wasn't thinking of myself or of what wandering scribes might be writing about me in English newspapers. But presently this thing assumed a new and very serious aspect. Some obscure American religious newspaper, published down South somewhere, copied the thing, and my good sisters, who live down that way, read it. It isn't much to say they were horrified; they were well-nigh killed by the revelation of my infamy and they suffered almost inconceivable tortures of the spirit on my account. For it never entered their trustful minds to doubt anything printed in a great English religious paper over the signature of a dissenting minister and copied into the American religious journal which to them seemed an authoritative weekly supplement to the holy scriptures. "I managed to straighten the thing out in the minds of my good sisters, but I have never ceased to regret that that correspondent never turned up at my headquarters again. If he had I should have made him think he had fallen in with a herd of the wild jackasses of Abyssinia." LVII Mention of Loring's experience reminds me of an amusing one of my own that occurred a little later. In the autumn of 1886 I made a leisurely journey with my wife across the continent to California, Oregon, Mexico, and all parts of the golden West. On an equally leisurely return journey we took a train at Marshall, Texas, for New Orleans, over the ruins of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, which Jay Gould had recently "looted to the limit," as a banker described it. Besides myself, my wife, and our child, the only passengers on the solitary buffet sleeping car were Mr. Ziegenfust of the San Francisco _Chronicle_, and a young lady who put herself under my wife's chaperonage. If Mr. Ziegenfust had not been there to bear out my statements I should never have told the story of what happened. There was no conductor for the sleeping car--only a negro porter who acted as factotum. When I undertook to arrange with him for my sleeping car accommodations, I offered him a gold piece, for in drawing money from a San Francisco bank for use on the return journey, I had received only gold. The negro seemed startled as I held out the coin. "I can't take dat, boss," he said. "'Taint worf nuffin." I made an effort to explain to him that American gold coin was not only the supreme standard by which all values were measured in this country, but that as mere metal it was worth the sum stamped upon it in any part of the earth. Mr. Ziegenfust supported me in these statements, but our combined assurances made no impression upon the porter's mind. He perfectly knew that gold coin was as worthless as dead forest leaves, and he simply would not take the twenty-dollar piece offered him. We decided that the poor fellow was a fool, and after a search through all the pockets on the car we managed to get together the necessary number of dollars in greenbacks with which to pay for my accommodations. As for what we might want to eat from the buffet--for there were no dining cars in those days--the porter assured me he would "trust me" till we should get to New Orleans, and call upon me at my hotel to receive his pay. Next morning we found ourselves stranded at Plaquemine, by reason of a train wreck a few miles ahead. Plaquemine is the center of the district to which the banished Acadians of Longfellow's story fled for refuge, and most of the people there claim descent from Evangeline, in jaunty disregard of the fact that that young lady of the long ago was never married. But Plaquemine is a thriving provincial town, and when I learned that we must lie there, wreck-bound, for at least six hours, I thought I saw my opportunity. I went out into the town to get some of my gold pieces converted into greenbacks. [Sidenote: "A Stranded Gold Bug"] To my astonishment I found everybody there like-minded with the negro porter of my sleeping car. They were all convinced that American gold coin was a thing of no value, and for reason they told me that "the government has went back on it." It was in vain for me to protest that the government had nothing to do with determining the value of a gold piece except to certify its weight and fineness; that the piece of gold was intrinsically worth its face as mere metal, and all the rest of the obvious facts of the case. These people knew that "the government has went back on gold"--that was the phrase all of them used--and they would have none of it. In recognition of the superior liberality of mind concerning financial matters that distinguishes the barkeeper from all other small tradesmen, I went into the saloon of the principal hotel of the town, and said to the man of multitudinous bottles: "It's rather early in the morning, but some of these gentlemen," waving my hand toward the loafers on the benches, "may be thirsty. I'll be glad to 'set 'em up' for the company if you'll take your pay out of a twenty-dollar gold piece and give me change for it." There was an alert and instant response from the "gentlemen" of the benches, who promptly aligned themselves before the bar and stood ready to "name their drinks," but the barkeeper shook his head. "Stranger," he said, "if you must have a drink you can have it and welcome. But I can't take gold money. 'Taint worth nothin'. You see the government has went back on it." I declined the gratuitous drink he so generously offered, and took my departure, leaving the "gentlemen" of the benches thirsty. Finally, I went to the principal merchant of the place, feeling certain that he at least knew the fundamental facts of money values. I explained my embarrassment and asked him to give me greenbacks for one or more of my gold pieces. He was an exceedingly courteous and kindly person. He said to me in better English than I had heard that morning: "Well, you may not know it, but the government has gone back on gold, so that we don't know what value it may have. But I can't let a stranger leave our town under such embarrassment as yours seems to be, particularly as you have your wife and child with you. I'll give you currency for one of your gold pieces, and _take my chances of getting something for the coin_." I tried to explain finance to him, and particularly the insignificance of the government's relation to the intrinsic value of gold coin, but my words made no impression upon his mind. I could only say, therefore, that I would accept his hospitable offer to convert one of my coins into greenbacks, with the assurance that I should not think of doing so if I did not perfectly know that he took no risk whatever in making the exchange. In New Orleans I got an explanation of this curious scare. When the Civil War broke out there was a good deal of gold coin in circulation in the Plaquemine region. During and after the war the coins passed freely and frequently from hand to hand, particularly in cotton buying transactions. Not long before the time of my visit, some merchants in Plaquemine had sent a lot of this badly worn gold to New Orleans in payment of duties on imported goods--a species of payment which was then, foolishly, required to be made in gold alone. The customs officers had rejected this Plaquemine gold, because it was worn to light weight. Hence the conviction in Plaquemine that the government had "went back" on gold. [Sidenote: Results of a Bit of Humor] At that time the principal subject of discussion in Congress and the newspapers was the question of free silver coinage, the exclusive gold standard of values, or a double standard, and all the rest of it, and those who contended for an exclusive gold standard were stigmatized as "gold bugs." I was then editor-in-chief of the _New York Commercial Advertiser_, and in my absence my brilliant young friend, Henry Marquand, was in charge of the paper. Thinking to amuse our readers I sent him a playful letter recounting these Plaquemine experiences, and he published it under the title of "A Stranded Goldbug." The humor of the situation described was so obvious and so timely that my letter was widely copied throughout the country, and a copy of it fell into the hands of a good but too serious-minded kinswoman of mine, an active worker in the W. C. T. U. She was not interested in the humor of my embarrassment, but she wrote me a grieved and distressed letter, asking how I could ever have gone into the saloon of that Plaquemine hotel, or any other place where alcoholic beverages were sold, and much else to the like effect. I was reminded of Loring's experience, and was left to wonder how large a proportion of those who had read my letter had missed the humor of the matter in their shocked distress over the fact that by entering a hotel café I had lent my countenance to the sale of beer and the like. I had not then learned, as I have since done, how exceedingly and even exigently sensitive consciences of a certain class are as to such matters. Not many years ago I published a boys' book about a flat-boat voyage down the Mississippi. At New Orleans a commission merchant, anxious to give the country boys as much as he could of enjoyment in the city, furnished tickets and bade them "go to the opera to-night and hear some good music." Soon after the book came out my publishers wrote me that they had a Sunday School Association's order for a thousand copies of the book, but that it was conditioned upon our willingness to change the word "opera" to "concert" in the sentence quoted. LVIII As a literary adviser of the Harpers, I very earnestly urged them to publish Mrs. Custer's "Boots and Saddles." In my "opinion" recommending its acceptance, I said that their other readers would probably be unanimous in advising its rejection, and would offer excellent reasons in support of that advice. I added that those very reasons were the promptings of my advice to the contrary. When all the opinions were in--all but mine being adverse--Mr. Joe Harper sent copies of them to me, asking me to read them carefully and, after consideration, to report whether or not I still adhered to my opinion in favor of the book. I promptly replied that I did, giving my reasons, which were based mainly on the very considerations urged by the other readers in behalf of rejection. In my earnestness I ventured, as I had never done before, upon a prediction. I said that in my opinion the book would reach a sale of twenty thousand copies--a figure then considered very great for the sale of any current book. [Sidenote: "Boots and Saddles"] A month after "Boots and Saddles" was published, I happened to be in the Harper offices, and Mr. Joe Harper beckoned me to him. With a very solemn countenance, which did not hide the twinkle in his eye, he said: "Of course, when you make a cock-sure prediction as to the sale of a book, and we accept it on the strength of your enthusiastic advice, we expect you to make the failure good." "To what book do you refer?" I asked. "Mrs. Custer's. You predicted a sale of twenty thousand for it, and it has now been out a full month and----" "What are the figures for the first month, Mr. Harper?" I interrupted. "Well, what do you think? It is the first month that sets the pace, you know. What's your guess?" "Ten thousand," I ventured. "What? Of that book? In its first month? Are you a rainbow chaser?" I had caught the glint in his eye, and so I responded: "Oh, well, if that guess is so badly out I'll double it, and say twenty thousand." "Do you mean that--seriously?" he asked. "Yes, quite seriously. So seriously that I'll agree to pay the royalties on all copies short of twenty thousand, if you'll agree to give me a sum equal to the royalties on all copies sold in excess of that number." He chuckled inwardly but audibly. Then, picking up a paper from his desk, he passed it to me, saying; "Look. There are the figures." The sales had amounted to some hundred more than the twenty thousand I had guessed, and there were no indications of any early falling off of the orders that were daily and hourly coming in. I mention this case of successful prediction because it gives me a text for saying that ordinarily there is nothing so utterly impossible as foresight, of any trustworthy sort, concerning the sale of a book. In this case the fact that "Boots and Saddles" was the very unliterary, and altogether winning tribute of a loving wife to her dead hero husband, afforded a secure ground of prediction. The book appealed to sentiments with which every human heart--coarse or refined, high, low, or middle class--is in eternal sympathy. Ordinarily there is no such secure ground upon which to base a prediction of success for any book. The plate-room of every publisher is the graveyard of a multitude of books that promised well but died young, and the plates are their headstones. Every publisher has had experiences that convince him of the impossibility of discovering beforehand what books will sell well and what will "die a-borning." Every publisher has had books of his publishing succeed far beyond his expectations, and other books fail, on the success of which he had confidently reckoned. And the worst of it is that the quality of a book seems to have little or nothing to do with the matter, one way or the other. One night at the Authors Club, I sat with a group of prolific and successful authors, and as a matter of curious interest I asked each of them to say how far their own and their publishers' anticipations with respect to the comparative success of their several books had been borne out by the actual sales. Almost every one of them had a story to tell of disappointment with the books that were most confidently expected to succeed, and of the success of other books that had been regarded as least promising. The experience is as old as literature itself, doubtless. Thomas Campbell came even to hate his "Pleasures of Hope," because its fame completely overshadowed that of "Gertrude of Wyoming" and some other poems of his which he regarded as immeasurably superior to that work. He resented the fact that in introducing him or otherwise mentioning him everybody added to his name the phrase "Author of the 'Pleasures of Hope,'" and he bitterly predicted that when he died somebody would carve that detested legend upon his tombstone. In the event, somebody did. A lifelong intimate of George Eliot once told me that bitterness was mingled with the wine of applause in her cup, because, as she said: "A stupid public persists in neglecting my poems, which are far superior to anything I ever wrote in prose." In the same way such fame as Thomas Dunn English won, rested mainly upon the song of "Ben Bolt." Yet one day during his later years I heard him angrily say in response to some mention of that song: "Oh, damn 'Ben Bolt.' It rides me like an incubus." LIX [Sidenote: Letters of Introduction] While I was conducting my literary shop at home, there came to me many persons bearing letters of introduction which I was in courtesy bound to honor. Some of these brought literary work of an acceptable sort for me to do. Through them a number--perhaps a dozen or so--of books were brought to me to edit, and in the course of the work upon such books I made a few familiar friends, whose intimacy in my household was a pleasure to me and my family while the friends in question lived. They are all dead now--or nearly all. But mainly the bearers of letters of introduction who came to me at that time were very worthy persons who wanted to do literary work, but had not the smallest qualification for it. Some of them had rejected manuscripts which they were sure that I, "with my influence," could easily market to the replenishment of their emaciated purses. For the conviction that the acceptance of manuscripts goes chiefly by favor is ineradicable from the amateur literary mind. I have found it quite useless to explain to such persons that favor has nothing to do with the matter, that every editor and every publisher is always and eagerly alert to discern new writers of promise and to exploit them. The persons to whom these truths are told, simply do not believe them. They _know_ that their own stories or essays or what not, are far superior to those accepted and published. Every one of their friends has assured them of that, and their own consciousness confirms the judgment. Scores of them have left my library in full assurance that I was a member of some "literary ring," that was organized to exclude from publication the writings of all but the members of the ring. It was idle to point out to them the introduction of Saxe Holm, of Constance Fenimore Woolson, of Mrs. Custer, of Charles Egbert Craddock, or of any other of a dozen or more new writers who had recently come to the front. They were assured that each of these had enjoyed the benefits of "pull" of some sort. One charming young lady of the "Society" sort brought me half a dozen letters of introduction from persons of social prominence, urging her upon my attention. She had written a "Society novel," she told me, and she wanted to get it published. She was altogether too well informed as to publishing conditions, to send her manuscript to any publisher without first securing "influence" in its behalf. She was perfectly well aware that I was a person possessed of influence, and so she had come to me. Wouldn't I, for a consideration, secure the acceptance of her novel by some reputable house? I told her that "for a consideration"--namely, fifty dollars--I would read her manuscript and give her a judgment upon its merits, after which she might offer it to any publisher she saw fit, and that that was all I could do for her. [Sidenote: The Disappointment of Lily Browneyes] "But you are 'on the inside' at Harpers'," she replied, "and of course your verdict is conclusive with them." "In some cases it is," I answered. "It has proved to be so in one peculiar case. I recently sold the Harpers a serial story of my own for their _Young People_. Afterwards a story of Captain Kirk Munroe's came to me for judgment. It covered so nearly the same ground that mine did, that both could not be used. But his story seemed to me so much better than my own, for the use proposed, that I advised the Harpers to accept it and return to me my own already accepted manuscript. They have acted upon my advice and I am a good many hundreds of dollars out of pocket in consequence. Now, my dear Miss Browneyes," I added, "you see upon what my influence with the Harpers rests. In so far as they accept literary productions upon my advice, they do so simply because they know that my advice is honest and represents my real judgment of the merits of things offered for publication. If I should base my recommendations upon any other foundation than that of integrity and an absolutely sincere critical judgment, I should soon have no more influence with the Harpers than any truckman in the streets can command. I will read your manuscript and give you my honest opinion of it, for fifty dollars, if you wish me to do so. But I do not advise you to do that. Judging of it in advance, from what I have seen of you, and from what I know of the limitations of the Society life you have led, I strongly advise you not to waste fifty dollars of your father's money in that way. It is scarcely conceivable that with your very limited knowledge of life, and your carefully restricted outlook, you can have written a novel of any value whatever. You had better save your fifty dollars to help pay for your next love of a bonnet." "I'm awfully disappointed," she said. "You see it would be so nice to have all my Society friends talking about 'Lily Browneyes's book,' and perhaps that ought to be considered. You see almost every one of my Society friends would buy the book 'just to see what that little chatterbox, Lily Browneyes, has found to write about.' I should think, that would make the fortune of the book." "How many Society friends have you, Miss Browneyes?" I asked. "Oh, heaps of them--scores--dead oodles and scads of 'em, as we girls say." "But really, how many?" I persisted. "Suppose your book were published, how many of your Society friends could you confidently reckon upon as probable purchasers? Here's paper and a pencil. Suppose you set down their names and tot them up." She eagerly undertook the task, and after half an hour she had a list of forty-odd persons who would pretty surely buy the book--"if they couldn't borrow it," she added. I explained the matter to her somewhat--dwelling upon the fact that a sale of two thousand copies would barely reimburse the publisher's outlay. She said I had been "very nice" to her, but on the whole she decided to accept my advice and not pay me fifty dollars for a futile reading of the manuscript. I was glad of that. For it seemed like breaking a butterfly to disappoint so charming a young girl. The letters Lily Browneyes brought me had at least the merit of sincerity. They were meant to help her accomplish her purpose, and not as so many letters of the kind are, to get rid of importunity by shifting it to the shoulders of some one else. I remember something that illustrates my meaning. I presided, many years ago, at a banquet given by the Authors Club to Mr. William Dean Howells. Nothing was prearranged. There was no schedule of toasts in my hand, no list of speakers primed to respond to them. With so brilliant a company to draw upon I had no fear as to the results of calling up the man I wanted, without warning. In the course of the haphazard performance, it occurred to me that we ought to have a speech from some publisher, and accordingly I called upon Mr. J. Henry Harper--"Harry Harper," we who knew and loved him called him. His embarrassment was positively painful to behold. He made no attempt whatever to respond but appealed to me to excuse him. [Sidenote: Mark Twain's Method] At that point Mark Twain came to the rescue by offering to make Mr. Harper's speech for him. "I'm a publisher myself," he explained, "and I'll speak for the publishers." A roar of applause welcomed the suggestion, and Mr. Clemens proceeded to make the speech. In the course of it he spoke of the multitude of young authors who beset every publisher and beseech him for advice after he has explained that their manuscripts are "not available" for publication by his own firm, with its peculiar limitations. Most publishers cruelly refuse, he said, to do anything for these innocents. "I never do that," he added. "I always give them good advice, and more than that, I always do something for them--_I give them notes of introduction to Gilder_." I am persuaded that many scores of the notes of introduction brought to me have been written in precisely that spirit of helpless helpfulness. Sometimes, however, letters of introduction, given thoughtlessly, are productive of trouble far more serious than the mere waste of a busy man's time. It is a curious fact that most persons stand ready to give letters of introduction upon acquaintance so slender that they would never think of personally introducing the two concerned, or personally vouching for the one to whom the letter is given. When I was editing _Hearth and Home_ Theodore Tilton gave a young Indiana woman a letter of introduction to me. He afterwards admitted to me that he knew nothing whatever about the young woman. "But what can one do in such a case?" he asked. "She was charming and she wanted to know you; she was interested in you as a Hoosier writer"--the Indiana school of literature had not established itself at that early day--"and when she learned that I knew you well she asked for a letter of introduction. What could I do? Could I say to her, 'My dear young lady, I know very little about you, and my friend, George Cary Eggleston, is so innocent and unsophisticated a person that I dare not introduce you to him without some certificate of character?' No. I could only give her the letter she wanted, trusting you to discount any commendatory phrases it might contain, in the light of your acquaintance with the ways of a world in which letters of introduction are taken with grains of salt. Really, if I mean to commend one person to another, I always send a private letter to indorse my formal letter of introduction, and to assure my friend that there are no polite lies in it." [Sidenote: Some Dangerous Letters of Introduction] In this case the young woman did nothing very dreadful. Her character was doubtless above reproach and her reformatory impulses were no more offensive than reformatory impulses that concern others usually are. My only complaint of her was that she condemned me without a hearing, giving me no opportunity to say why sentence should not be pronounced upon me. In her interview, she was altogether charming. She was fairly well acquainted with literature, and was keenly appreciative of it. We talked for an hour on such subjects, and then she went away. A week or so later she sent me a copy of the Indiana newspaper for which she was a correspondent. In it was a page interview with me in which all that I had said and a great deal that I had not said was set forth in detail. There was also a graphic description of my office surroundings. Among these surroundings was my pipe, which lay "naked and not ashamed" on my desk. Referring to it, the young woman wrote that one saddening thing in her visit to me was the discovery that "this gifted young man is a victim of the tobacco habit." Worse still, she emphasized that lamentable discovery in her headlines, and made so much of her compassionate regret that if I had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, demented by the use of absinthe or morphine, her pity could hardly have been more active. I do not know that this exhibition of reformatory ill manners did me any serious harm, but it annoyed me somewhat. When I was serving as literary editor of the _Evening Post_, a very presentable person came to me bearing a note of introduction from Richard Henry Stoddard. Mr. Stoddard introduced the gentleman as James R. Randall, author of "My Maryland" and at that time editor of a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia. Mr. Randall was a person whom I very greatly wanted to know, but it was late on a Saturday afternoon, and I had an absolutely peremptory engagement that compelled me to quit the office immediately. Accordingly, I invited the visitor to dine with me at my house the next day, Sunday, and he accepted. Sunday came and the dinner was served, but Mr. Randall was not there. Next morning I learned that on the plea of Saturday afternoon and closed banks he had borrowed thirty-five dollars from one of my fellow-editors before leaving. This, taken in connection with his failure to keep his dinner engagement with me, aroused suspicion. I telegraphed to Augusta, asking the newspaper with which Mr. Randall was editorially connected whether or not Mr. Randall was in New York. Mr. Randall himself replied saying that he was not in New York and requesting me to secure the arrest of any person trying to borrow money or get checks cashed in his name. He added: "When I travel I make my financial arrangements in advance and don't borrow money of friends or strangers." When I notified Stoddard of the situation, so that he might not commend his friend, "Mr. Randall," to others, I expressed the hope that he had not himself lent the man any money. In reply he said: "Lent him money? Why, my dear George Cary Eggleston, what a creative imagination you must have! 'You'd orter 'a' been a poet.' Still, if I had had any money, as of course I hadn't, I should have lent it to him freely. As he didn't ask for it--probably he knew my chronic impecuniosity too well to do that--I didn't know he was 'on the borrow.' Anyhow, I'm going to run him to earth." [Sidenote: Moses and My Green Spectacles] And he did. It appeared in the outcome that the man had called upon Edmund Clarence Stedman, bearing a letter from Sidney Lanier--forged, of course. Stedman had taken him out to lunch and then, as he expressed a wish to meet the literary men of the town, had given him a note of introduction to Stoddard together with several other such notes to men of letters, which were never delivered. The man proved to be the "carpetbag" ex-Governor Moses, who had looted the state of South Carolina to an extent that threatened the bankruptcy of that commonwealth. He had saved little if anything out of his plunderings, and, returning to the North, had entered upon a successful career as a "confidence man." He was peculiarly well-equipped for the part. Sagacious, well-informed, educated, and possessed of altogether pleasing manners, he succeeded in imposing himself upon the unsuspecting for many years. At last, some years after my first encounter with him, he was "caught in the act" of swindling, and sent for a term to the Massachusetts state prison. On his release, at the end of his sentence, he resumed his old business of victimizing the unsuspicious--among whom I was one. It was only a few years ago when he rang my door bell and introduced himself as a confidential employee of the Lothrop Publishing Company of Boston, who were my publishers. He had seen me, he said, during the only visit I had ever made to the offices of the company, but had not had the pleasure of an introduction. Being in New York he had given himself the pleasure of calling, the more because he wished to consult me concerning the artistic make-up of a book I then had in preparation at the Lothrops'. His face seemed familiar to me, a fact which I easily accounted for on the theory that I must have seen him during my visit to the publishing house. For the rest he was a peculiarly agreeable person, educated, refined, and possessed of definite ideas. We smoked together, and as an outcome of the talk about cigars, I gave him something unusual. An indiscreetly lavish friend of mine had given me a box of gigantic cigars, each of which was encased in a glass tube, and each of which had cost a dollar. I was so pleased with my visitor that I gave him one of these, saying that it didn't often happen to a man who had anything to do with literature to smoke a dollar cigar. At the end of his visit he somewhat casually mentioned the fact that he and his wife were staying at the Astor House, adding: "We were anxious to leave for Boston by a late train to-night but I find it impracticable to do so. I've suffered myself to run short of money and my wife has made the matter worse by indulging in an indiscreet shopping tour to-day. I have telegraphed to Boston for a remittance and must wait over till it comes to-morrow. It is a very great annoyance, as I am needed in Boston to-morrow, but there is no help for it." I asked him how much money was absolutely necessary to enable him to leave by the late train, which there was still time to catch, and after a moment of mental figuring, he fixed upon the sum of sixteen dollars and fifty cents as sufficient. It was Sunday night and I had only a dollar or so in my pocket, but with a keenly realizing sense of his embarrassment, I drew upon my wife's little store of household change, and made up the sum required. He seemed very grateful for the accommodation, but before leaving he asked me to let him take one of those dollar cigars, to show to a friend in Boston. About half an hour after he had left, I suddenly remembered him and identified him as Moses--ex-carpetbag governor of South Carolina, ex-convict, and _never_ ex-swindler. A few calls over the telephone confirmed my conviction and my memory fully sustained my recollection of the man. A day or two later he was arrested in connection with an attempted swindle, but I did not bother to follow him up. I acted upon the dictum of one of the most successful men I ever knew, that "it's tomfoolery to send good money after bad." LX [Sidenote: English Literary Visitors] It was during the period of my withdrawal from newspaper work that Mr. Edmund Gosse made his first visit to this country. At that time he had not yet made the reputation he has since achieved for scholarship and literary accomplishment. As a scholar he was young and promising rather than a man of established reputation. As a writer he was only beginning to be known. But he was an Englishman of letters and an agreeable gentleman, wherefore we proceeded to dine him and wine him and make much of him--all of which helped the success of his lecture course. I interrupt myself at this point to say that we do these things more generously and more lavishly than our kin beyond sea ever think of doing them. With the exception of Mark Twain, no living American author visiting England is ever received with one-half, or one-quarter, or one-tenth the attention that Americans have lavished upon British writers of no greater consequence than our own. If Irving Bacheller, or Charles Egbert Craddock, or Post Wheeler, or R. W. Chambers, or Miss Johnston, or Will Harben, or Thomas Nelson Page, or James Whitcomb Riley, or any other of a score that might be easily named should visit London, does anybody imagine that he or she would receive even a small fraction of the attention we have given to Sarah Grand, Mr. Yeats, Max O'Rell, B. L. Farjeon, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. Locke, and others? Would even Mr. Howells be made to feel that he was appreciated there as much as many far inferior English writers have been in New York? Are we helplessly provincial or hopelessly snobbish? Or is it that our English literary visitors make more skilful use of the press agent's peculiar gifts? Or is it, perhaps, that we are more generous and hospitable than the English? Mr. Gosse, at any rate, was worthy of all the attention he received, and his later work has fully justified it, so that nothing in the vagrant paragraph above is in any way applicable to him. Mr. Gosse had himself carefully "coached" before he visited America. When he came to us he knew what every man of us had done in literature, art, science, or what not, and so far he made no mistakes either of ignorance or of misunderstanding. "Bless my soul!" said James R. Osgood to me at one of the breakfasts, luncheons or banquets given to the visitor, "he has committed every American publishers' catalogue to memory, and knows precisely where each of you fellows stands." Upon one point, however, Mr. Gosse's conceptions were badly awry. He bore the Civil War in mind, and was convinced that its bitternesses were still an active force in our social life. One night at the Authors Club I was talking with him when my brother Edward came up to us and joined in the conversation. Mr. Gosse seemed surprised and even embarrassed. Presently he said: "It's extremely gratifying, you know, but this is a surprise to me. I understand that you two gentlemen held opposite views during the war, and one of the things my mentors in England most strongly insisted upon was that I should never mention either of you in talking with the other. It is very gratifying to find that you are on terms with each other." "On terms?" said Edward. "Why, Geordie and I have always been twins. I was born two years earlier than he was, but we've been twin brothers nevertheless, all our lives. You see, we were born almost exactly on the line between the North and the South, and one fell over to one side and the other to the other. But there was never anything but affection between us." [Sidenote: An Amusing Misconception] On another occasion Mr. Joe Harper gave a breakfast to Mr. Gosse at the University Club. There were seventy or eighty guests--too many for anything like intimate converse. To remedy this Mr. Harper asked about a dozen of us to remain after the function was over, gather around him at the head of the table--tell all the stories we could remember, and "give Mr. Gosse a real insight into our ways of thinking," he said. Gordon McCabe and I were in the group, and Mr. Gosse, knowing perfectly what each of us had written, knew, of course, that McCabe and I had fought on the Southern side during the Civil War. If he had not known the fact in that way he must have discovered it from the stories we told of humorous happenings in the Confederate service. Yet here we were, on the most cordial terms with men who had been on the other side. It was all a bewildering mystery to Mr. Gosse, and presently he ventured to ask about it. "Pardon me," he said to Mr. Harper, "it is all very gratifying, I'm sure, but I don't quite understand. I think Mr. Eggleston and Mr. McCabe were in active service on the Southern side during the war?" "Yes," answered Mr. Harper, "and they have told us all about it in their books." "And the rest of you gentlemen sided with the North?" "Yes." "Well, it's very gratifying, of course, but it is astonishing to a stranger to find you all on such terms of friendship again." "Isn't it?" broke in Mr. Harper. "Here we are, having champagne together quite like old friends, while we all know that only a dozen years or so ago, McCabe and Eggleston were down there at Petersburg trying with all their might to _kill our substitutes_." The company laughed heartily at the witticism. Mr. Gosse smiled and a little later, in an aside, he asked me to explain just what Mr. Harper had meant by "substitutes." Mr. Gosse left a sweet taste in our mouths when he sailed for home. The attentions he had received here had in no way spoiled him. From beginning to end of his stay he never once manifested the least feeling of superiority, and never once did his manner suggest that British condescension, which is at once so amusing and so insulting to Americans. The same thing was true of Matthew Arnold, who, I remember, made himself a most agreeable guest at a reception the Authors Club gave him in the days of its extreme poverty. But not all English men of letters whom I have met have been like-minded with these. A certain fourth- or fifth-rate English novelist, who was made the guest of honor at a dinner at the Lotus Club, said to me, as I very well remember: "Of course you have no literature of your own and you must depend for your reading matter upon us at home." The use of "at home" meaning "in England," was always peculiarly offensive in my ears, but my interlocutor did not recognize its offensiveness. "But really, you know, your people ought to pay for it." He was offering this argument to me in behalf of international copyright, my interest in which was far greater than his own. For because of the competition of ten-cent reprints of English books, I was forbidden to make a living by literature and compelled to serve as a hired man on a newspaper instead. A few of our English literary visitors have come to us with the modest purposes of the tourist, interested in what our country is and means. The greater number have come to exploit the country "for what there is in it," by lecturing. Their lecture managers have been alert and exceedingly successful in making advertising agencies of our clubs, our social organizations, and even our private parlors, by way of drawing money into the purses of their clients. [Sidenote: A Question of Provincialism] Did anybody ever hear of an American author of equal rank with these going to England on a lecture or reading tour, and getting himself advertised by London clubs and in London drawing-rooms in the like fashion? And if any American author--even one of the highest rank--should try to do anything of the sort, would his bank account swell in consequence as those of our British literary visitors do? Are we, after all, provincial? Have we not yet achieved our intellectual and social independence? I am persuaded that some of us have, though not many. One night at a club I asked Brander Matthews if I should introduce him to a second-rate English man of letters who had been made a guest of the evening. He answered: "No--unless you particularly wish it, I'd rather talk to you and the other good fellows here. He hasn't anything to say that would interest me, unless it is something he has put into the lectures he's going to deliver, and he can't afford to waste on us any of that small stock of interesting things." But as a people, have we outgrown our provincialism? Have we achieved our intellectual independence? Have we learned to value our own judgments, our own thinking, our own convictions independently of English approval or disapproval? I fear we have not, even in criticism. When the novel "Democracy" appeared I wrote a column or two about it in the _Evening Post_, treating it as a noteworthy reflection of our own life, political and social--not very great but worthy of attention. The impulse of my article was that the literature of a country should be a showing forth of its life, its thought, its inspirations, its aspirations, its character, its strength, and its weaknesses. That anonymous novel seemed to me to be a reflection of all these things in some degree and I said so in print. All the other newspapers of the country dismissed the book in brief paragraphs, quite as if it had had no distinctive literary quality of its own. But a year or so later the English critics got hold of the novel and wrote of it as a thing of significance and consequence. Thereupon, the American newspapers that had before given it a paragraph or so of insignificant reference, took it up again and reviewed it as a book that meant something, evidently forgetting that they had ever seen it before. This is only one of many incidents of criticism that I might relate in illustration of the hurtful, crippling, paralyzing provincialism that afflicts and obstructs our literary development. A few years ago the principal of a great and very ambitious preparatory school whose function it was to fit young men for college, sent me his curriculum "for criticism," he said,--for approval, I interpreted. He set forth quite an elaborate course in what he called "The Literature of the English Language." Upon looking it over I found that not one American book was mentioned in the whole course of it, either as a required study or as "collateral reading"--a title under which a multitude of second- or third-rate English works were set down. For criticism I suggested that to the American boy who was expected to become an American man of culture, some slight acquaintance with Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Prescott, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Poe, Parkman, Lowell, Mark Twain, Mr. Howells, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, James Whitcomb Riley, Bret Harte, John Hay, and some other American writers might really be of greater advantage than familiarity with many of the English authors named. His answer was conclusive and profoundly discouraging. It was his function, he said, to prepare boys for their entrance examinations in our great colleges and universities, "and not one of these," he added, "names an American author in its requirement list." I believe the colleges have since that time recognized American literature in some small degree, at least, though meagerly and with no adequate recognition of the fact that a nation's literature is the voice with which it speaks not only to other countries and to posterity but to its own people in its own time, and that acquaintance with it ministers, as no other scholarship does, to good, helpful, patriotic citizenship. [Sidenote: A Library Vandal] One of the English writers who came to this country possibly for his own country's good, gave me some trouble. I was editing _Hearth and Home_ at the time, and he brought me for sale a number of unusually good things, mainly referring to matters French and Italian. He was absolute master of the languages of both those countries, and his acquaintance with their literature, classical, medieval, and modern, was so minute that he knew precisely where to find any literary matter that seemed salable. With a thrift admirable in itself, though misdirected, it was his practice to go to the Astor Library, find what he wanted in rare books or precious foreign newspaper files, translate it, and then tear out and destroy the pages he had plundered. In that irregular fashion he made quite a literary reputation for himself, though after detection he had to retire to Philadelphia, under the orders of Mr. Saunders, Librarian of the Astor Library, who decreed banishment for him as the alternative of prosecution for the mutilation of books. He carried the thing so far, at last, that I regarded it as my duty to expose him, and I did so in my capacity as literary editor of the _Evening Post_. I was instantly threatened with a libel suit, but the man who was to bring it left at once on a yachting trip to the West Indies, and so far as I can learn has never reappeared either in America or in Literature. It is one of the abiding regrets of my life that the papers in that libel suit were never served upon me. LXI In the autumn of 1882 a little group of literary men, assembled around Richard Watson Gilder's fireside, decided to organize an Authors Club in New York. They arranged for the drafting of a tentative constitution and issued invitations for twenty-five of us to meet a little later at Lawrence Hutton's house in Thirty-fourth Street to organize the club. We met there on the 13th of November and, clause by clause, adopted a constitution. It was obvious in that little assemblage itself, that some such organization of authors was badly needed in New York. For, though there were only twenty-five of us there, all selected by the originating company, every man of us had to be introduced to some at least of the others present. The men of letters in New York did not know each other. They were beset by unacquaintance, prejudices, senseless antagonisms, jealousies, amounting in some cases to hatreds. They had need to be drawn together in a friendly organization, in which they could learn to know and like and appreciate each other. [Sidenote: The Founding of the Authors Club] So great were the jealousies and ambitions to which I have referred that early in the meeting Mr. Gilder--I think it was he--called three or four of us into a corner and suggested that there was likely to be a fight for the presidency of the club, and that it might result in the defeat of the entire enterprise. At Mr. Gilder's suggestion, or that of some one else--I cannot be sure because all of us in that corner were in accord--it was decided that there should be no president of the club, that the government should be vested in an executive council, and that at each of its meetings the council should choose its own chairman. In later and more harmonious years, since the men of the club have become an affectionate brotherhood, it has been the custom for the council to elect its chairman for a year, and usually to reëlect him for another year. But at the beginning we had conditions to guard against that no longer exist--now that the literary men of New York know and mightily like each other. The eligibility clause of the constitution as experimentally drawn up by the committee, prescribed that in order to be eligible a man must be the author of "at least one book proper to literature," or--and there followed a clause covering the case of magazine editors and the like. As a reader for a publishing house, I scented danger here. Half in play, but in earnest also, I suggested that the authorship of at least one book proper to literature would render pretty nearly the entire adult male population of the United States eligible to membership in the club, unless some requirement of publication were added. My manuscript reading had seemed to me at least to suggest that, and, as a necessary safeguard, I moved to insert the word "published" before the word "book," and the motion was carried with the laughter of the knowing for its accompaniment. The club was very modest in its beginnings. As its constituent members were mainly persons possessed of no money, so the club had none. For a time our meetings were held at the houses of members--Lawrence Hutton's, Dr. Youmans's, Richard Grant White's, and so on. But as not all of us were possessed of homes that lent themselves to such entertainment, we presently began meeting at Sieghortner's and other restaurants. Then came a most hospitable invitation from the Tile Club, offering us the use of their quarters for our meetings. Their quarters consisted, in fact, of a kitchen in the interior of a block far down town--I forget the number of the street. The building served Edwin A. Abbey as a studio--he had not made his reputation as an artist then--and the good old Irishwoman who cared for the rooms lived above stairs with her daughter for her sole companion. This daughter was Abbey's model, and a portrait of her, painted by his hand, hung in the studio, with a presentation legend attached. The portrait represented one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. It was positively ravishing in its perfection. One day I had occasion to visit the place to make some club arrangement, and while there I met the young lady of the portrait. She was of sandy complexion, freckled, and otherwise commonplace in an extreme degree. Yet that exquisitely beautiful portrait that hung there in its frame was an admirably faithful likeness of the girl, when one studied the two faces closely. Abbey had not painted in the freckles; he had chosen flesh tints of a more attractive sort than the sandiness of the girl's complexion; he had put a touch of warmth into the indeterminate color of her pale red hair; and above all, he had painted intelligence and soul into her vacuous countenance. Yet the girl and the portrait were absolutely alike in every physical detail. I have not wondered since to learn that the husbands of high-born English dames, and the fathers of English maidens have been glad to pay Abbey kings' ransoms for portraits of their womankind. Abbey has the gift of interpretation, and I do not know of any greater gift. [Sidenote: Dime Novels] The rear building in which we met by virtue of the Tile Club's hospitality was approached through an alleyway, or covered gallery rather, concerning which there was a tradition that two suicides and a murder had been committed within its confines. "How inspiring all that is!" said John Hay one night after the traditions had been reported in a peculiarly prosaic fashion by a writer of learned essays in psychology and the like, who had no more imagination than an oyster brings to bear upon the tray on which it is served. "It makes one long to write romantic tragedies, and lurid dramas, and all that sort of thing," Mr. Hay went on. "I'm sorely tempted to enter upon the career of the dime novelist." This set us talking of the dime novel, a little group of us assembled in front of the fire. Some one started the talk by saying that the dime novel was an entirely innocent and a very necessary form of literature. There John Hay broke in, and Edwin Booth, who was also present, sustained him. "The dime novel," Mr. Hay said, "is only a rude form of the story of adventure. If Scott's novels had been sufficiently condensed to be sold at the price, they would have been dime novels of the most successful sort. Your boy wants thrill, heroics, tall talk, and deeds of derring-do, and these are what the dime novelist gives him in abundance, and even in lavish superabundance. I remember that the favorite book of my own boyhood was J. B. Jones's 'Wild Western Scenes.' His 'Sneak' was to me a hero of romance with whom Ivanhoe could in no way compare." "But dime novels corrupt the morals of boys," suggested some one of the company. "Do they?" asked Mr. Hay. Then a moment later he asked: "Did you ever read one of them?" The interrupter admitted that he had not. "Till you do," said Mr. Hay, "you should hesitate to pass judgment. The moral standards of the dime novel are always of the highest. They are even heroic in their insistence upon honor and self-sacrifice in behalf of the right. They are as chivalric as the code of honor itself. There is never anything unclean in the dime novel, never anything that even squints at toleration of immorality. The man beset by foes is always gallantly supported by resolute fellows with pistols in their hands which they are ready to use in behalf of righteousness. The maiden in trouble has champions galore, whose language may not always square itself with Sunday School standards, but whose devotion to the task of protecting innocence is altogether inspiring." "What about their literary quality?" asked some one in the group. "It is very bad, I suppose," answered Edwin Booth, "but that isn't the quality they put to the front. I have read dozens, scores, hundreds of them, and I have never challenged their literary quality, because that is something to which they lay no claim. Their strength lies in dramatic situations, and they abound in these. I must say that some of them are far better, stronger, and more appealing than are many of those that have made the fortune of successful plays." "Do you read them for the sake of the dramatic situations, Mr. Booth?" some one asked. "No. I read them for the sake of sleep," he replied. "I read them just as I play solitaire--to divert my mind and to bring repose to me." LXII [Sidenote: The Authors Club] It was not long after that that the Authors Club secured quarters of its own in Twenty-fourth Street, and became an established social organization. For it was never a literary club, but always strictly a social one, having a literary basis of eligibility to membership. From the beginning we refused to read papers at each other, or in any other way to "improve our minds" on club evenings by any form of literary exercise. As the carpenter, who dresses lumber and drives nails and miters joints for his daily bread does not seek his evening recreation by doing those things for amusement, so we who were all hard-working men of letters, earning our living with the pen, had no mind to do as amateurs that which we were daily and hourly doing as professionals. In the same way we decided at the outset to eschew every form of propagandism. The club has had no cause to advocate, no doctrine to promulgate, no "movement" to help or hinder. It has been and still is strictly a social club composed of men of letters, and having for its guests interesting men of all other professions. Hence it has prospered and its members have become intimates with no trace or suggestion of friction between them. I think I am safe in saying that no other organization has done so much for the amelioration of the literary life, the removal of prejudices and bitternesses and spites and jealousies, and for the upbuilding of cordial friendship among writers. I think there is no man in the club who doesn't count every other man there his friend. The point emphasized above--that the club is a social, not a literary organization--is important. Neglect of it has led to a good deal of ill-informed and misdirected criticism. At the very beginning, on the night of the club's organization, we made up a list of somewhat more than a score of literary men who should be made members upon the invitation of our Executive Council without the formality of proposal and election. From that list we excluded--by unanimous vote--one man whose literary work abundantly qualified him for membership, but whose cantankerous self-satisfaction rendered him, in the general opinion, a man not "clubbable." The trouble with him was not so much that he regarded himself, as he once avowed in company that he did, as "a greater than Shakespeare," but that he was disposed to quarrel with everybody who failed to recognize the assumption as a fact. If ours had been a literary club, he must have been admitted to membership without question. As it was a social club, we didn't want him, and three several efforts that he afterwards made to secure admission failed. The like has happened in the cases of two or three other men whose literary work rendered them eligible, but whose personal peculiarities did not commend them. Chiefly, however, the club has been criticised for its failure to admit women to membership. Paul Leicester Ford said to me on that subject one day: "I'll have nothing to do with your club. You arrogantly refuse to admit women, though women are doing quite as much as men in American literature." [Sidenote: Why Women Are Not Eligible] I explained several things to him. I reminded him that the Authors Club set up no pretension to be completely representative of American literary activity; that it was merely a club formed by gentlemen who felt the need of it, for the purpose of bringing literary men together for social intercourse over their pipes and sandwiches; that the admission of women would of necessity defeat this solitary purpose, and that their exclusion was no more a slight than that which he put upon his nearest friends whenever he gave a dinner or a theater party to which he could not invite everybody on his eligible list. Then I pointed out another difficulty and a supreme one. If we should admit women on the same terms of eligibility that we insisted upon in the case of men, a host of writing women would become eligible, while our own wives and daughters would in most cases be ineligible. If, in order to cover that difficulty we should admit the wives and daughters of male members, we should be obliged to admit also the husbands, sons, and fathers of our female members, so that presently we should become a mob of men and women, half or more of whom were ineligible under our original conception of the club and its reason for being. There is also the consideration that every club must and does exclude more than it includes; that in requiring New England birth or descent for membership, the New England Society excludes perhaps nine-tenths of the people of New York, while without that requirement the Society would lose its distinctive character and be no New England Society at all. Mr. Ford was so far convinced that he authorized me to propose his name for membership, but before I had opportunity to do so, the tragedy that ended his life had befallen. The club has found ways of marking its appreciation of the literary equality of women without destroying its own essential being. In February and March of each year it gives four afternoon receptions to women. In so far as it can find them out, the club's Executive Council invites to all of these receptions, besides the wives and daughters of its own members, every woman in the land whose literary work would render her eligible to membership if she were a man. In addition to this, every member of the club has the privilege of inviting any other women he pleases. I do not think the club is deficient in gallantry, nor do I find any such thought prevalent among the pleasing throng of gentlewomen who honor us by accepting our invitations. Our first quarters were meagerly furnished, of course. It took every dollar we had to furnish them even in the plainest way. There was neither a sofa nor an upholstered chair in our rooms. Cheap, straight-backed, cane-seated chairs alone were there. One night when General Sherman was a guest, some one apologized for our inability to offer him a more comfortable seat. The sturdy old soldier always had an opinion ready made to suit every emergency. "Comfortable?" he responded. "Why, what do you call these chairs if they are not comfortable? I don't believe in cushions. They are unnatural; they are devices of self-indulgence and luxury. The law ought to forbid their existence. They make men limp and flabby when they ought to be strong and vigorous and virile. The best chair in the world is one with a raw bull's hide for a seat, and with leathern thongs to tighten it with when it stretches. Next best is the old-fashioned, wooden-bottomed kitchen chair that cost forty cents when I was a boy. I don't suppose they make 'em now. People are too luxurious to know when they are well off." Presently some one spoke to him of his "March to the Sea," and he instantly replied: "It's all romantic nonsense to call it that. The thing was nothing more nor less than a military change of base--a thing familiar to every student of tactics; but a poet got hold of it, nicknamed it the 'March to the Sea,' and that's what everybody will call it, I suppose, till the crack of doom, unless it is forgotten before that time." Perhaps the hard-fighting veteran's appreciation of the romantic aspect of great achievements was less keen than that of a company of creative writers. Perhaps his modesty got the better of him. [Sidenote: The First "Watch Night"] It happened early in the history of the Authors Club that the regular meeting night fell one year on the thirty-first of December. At first it was suggested that the date be changed, but some one remembered the old custom of the Methodists who held "Watch Night" meetings, seeing the old year out and the new year in with rejoicing and fervent singing. Why shouldn't we have a "Watch Night" after our own fashion? The suggestion was eagerly accepted. No programme was arranged, no order of exercises planned. Nothing was prearranged except that with friendship and jollity and the telling of stories we should give a farewell to the old year and a welcome to the new. Fortunately, Mark Twain was called upon to begin the story telling, and he put formality completely out of countenance at the very outset. Instead of standing as if to address the company, he seized a chair, straddled it, and with his arms folded across its back, proceeded to tell one of the most humorous of all his stories. Frank Stockton followed with his account of the "mislaid corpse" and before the new year had an hour or two of age, there had been related enough of exquisitely humorous incident--real or fanciful--to make the fortune of two or three books of humor. At midnight we turned out the gas and sang a stanza or two of "Auld Lang Syne" by way of farewell to the old year. Then, with lights all ablaze again, we greeted the new year in the familiar "He's a jolly good fellow." Max O'Rell was my guest on one of these occasions, and in one of his later books he gave an account of it. After recording the fact that "at precisely twelve o'clock the lights are turned out," he added a footnote saying in solemn fashion: "A clock is _borrowed for the occasion_." I saw a good deal of that witty Frenchman during his several visits to America. I wrote an introduction to the American edition of his "John Bull, Jr.," and it served to protect that work with a copyright entry. He never paid me a cent for the service. That was because I refused to accept the remuneration he pressed upon me. I offer that as a jest which he would have appreciated keenly. He was a man of generous mind, whose humor sometimes impressed others as cynical, a judgment that I always regarded as unjust, for the reason that the humorist must be allowed a certain privilege of saying severer things than he really feels, if he is to be a humorist at all. When Max O'Rell says of a certain type of stupid British boy of the "upper class," that he ultimately enters the army and fights his country's enemies, and then adds: "And whether he kills his country's enemy or his country's enemy kills him, his country is equally benefited," he does not really mean what he says. He once confessed to me that he had had an abiding affection for every such boy, but that the temptation to make a jest at his expense was irresistible in the case of a writer whose bread and butter were dependent upon his ability to excite smiles. In the same way, as everybody must have observed, the humor that has made the reputation of many newspaper editors is largely leveled at women in their various relations with men and at the sacred things of life. Much of it would be cruelly unjust if it were seriously meant, as ordinarily it is not. I have sometimes wondered whether the injustice did not outweigh the humor--whether the smile excited by the humor was worth the wound inflicted by the injustice. [Sidenote: Habitual Humorists] The professional humorist, whether with pen, pencil, or tongue, is the victim of a false perspective. He is so intent upon his quip or quibble or jest, that he loses sight of more serious things. He does not hesitate to sacrifice even truth and justice, or the highest interest of whatever sort, for the sake of "making his point." He perhaps mistakenly believes that his reader or the person studying his caricature will regard his jest lightly and without loss of respect for the more serious things that lie behind. As a matter of fact, this rarely happens. The reader of the jest accepts it as a setting forth of truth, or at any rate is affected by it in some such fashion. On the whole, therefore, I cannot help regarding the confirmed humorist in literature or art as a detrimental force. I do not mean to include in this condemnation such genial literary humorists as Charles Battell Loomis, and Frank R. Stockton, and Charles Dudley Warner, who made things funny merely by looking at them with an intellectual squint that deceived nobody and misled nobody. I refer only to the habitual jokers of the newspapers and the like,--men who, for a wage, undertake to make a jest of everything that interests the popular mind, and who, for the sake of their jest, would pervert the Lord's Prayer itself to a humorous purpose. These people lose all sense of propriety, proportion, perspective, and even of morality itself. They make their jests at so much per line, and at all hazards of truth, justice, and intelligence. In literature these mountebanks impress me as detrimental impertinents--in conversation they seem to me nuisances. I cannot forget one occasion on which the late Bishop Potter and a distinguished judge of the Supreme Court were discussing a question of the possibility of helpful reform in a certain direction. There was a humorist present--a man whose sole idea of conversation was sparkle. He insisted upon sparkling. He interrupted the gravest utterances with his puns or his plays upon words, or his references to humorous things remembered. The thing became so intolerable that some one present slipped his arms into those of the Bishop and the Judge, and led them away with the suggestion that there was a quiet corner in the club where he would like to seat them and hear the rest of their conversation. As they turned their backs on the humorist and moved away, the Bishop asked: "What did you say the name of that mountebank is?" The Judge replied: "I knew at the time. I'm glad to have forgotten it." "It is just as well," answered the Bishop. "There are many things in this life that are better forgotten than remembered." There is one thing worthy of note in connection with the Authors Club. Almost from the hour of its inception it has furnished the country with a very distinguished proportion of its most eminent diplomats and statesmen. To mention only a few: James Russell Lowell, Andrew D. White, David Jayne Hill, William L. Wilson, Carl Schurz, General Horace Porter, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar S. Straus, Edward M. Shepard, and a dozen others easily mentioned, may be cited as illustrations of the extent to which a club of only about 180 members in all has been drawn upon by the national government for its needs in diplomacy and statesmanship. The Authors Club idea of a watch night meeting has been borrowed by a number of other organizations, but I think in none of them has it become so well recognized an event of the year. At any rate, it throngs our rooms to the point of suffocation on the night of every thirty-first of December. Another habit of the club has been for a considerable number of members and guests to linger after its regular meetings until the small hours of the morning, telling stories or discussing matters of intellectual interest. This has become a feature of the club meetings since Charles Henry Webb--better known in literature as "John Paul"--said one night at two o'clock: "Upon my soul, the Authors Club is one of the very pleasantest places I know--_after_ the authors have gone home." [Sidenote: "Liber Scriptorum"] Soon after the club took its quarters in Twenty-fourth Street, three of us--Rossiter Johnson, John D. Champlin, and myself--were impressed with the need of more funds and better furnishings. We suggested the publication of a unique book, as a means of securing the funds and providing the furnishings. Our plan contemplated a sumptuous volume, in an edition limited to two hundred and fifty-one copies--one for the club, and the rest for sale at one hundred dollars a copy. We proposed that the members of the club should furnish the poems, stories, and essays needed; that each of them should agree never to publish his contribution elsewhere, and that each poem, story, or essay should be signed by its author in pen and ink in each copy of the book. We were met with prompt discouragement on every hand. The older men among the members of the club were confident that we could never secure the papers desired. Our friends among the publishers simply knew in advance and positively, that even if we could make the book, we could never sell it. Mr. Joe Harper offered to bet me a hat that we could never sell twenty-five of the two hundred and fifty copies. I lived to wear that hat and rejoice in it, for we not only made the book--"Liber Scriptorum"--but we realized something more than twenty thousand dollars on its sale, as a fund with which to provide leather-covered morris chairs, soft rugs, handsome bookcases, and other luxuries for our friends the doubters to rejoice in. Authors are supposed to be an unbusinesslike set, who do not know enough of affairs to manage their personal finances in a way to save themselves from poverty. Perhaps the judgment is correct. But the Authors Club is the only club I know in New York which has no dollar of debt resting upon it, and has a comfortable balance to its credit in bank. The case is not singular. It has been written of William Pitt that while he was able to extricate the British exchequer from the sorest embarrassment it ever encountered, he could not keep the duns from his own door. LXIII I had been operating my little literary shop successfully for three or four years after quitting the _Evening Post_, when Mr. Parke Godwin came to me to say that he and some friends were about buying a controlling interest in the newspaper called _The New York Commercial Advertiser_, and that he wanted me to join his staff. I told him I had no desire to return to journalism, that I liked my quiet literary life at home, and that I was managing to make enough out of it to support my family. He replied that at any rate I might undertake the literary editorship of his newspaper; that it would involve no more than a few hours of office attendance in each week, and need not interfere in any way with my literary undertakings of other kinds. I had a very great personal regard for Mr. Godwin; a very great admiration for his character, and an abiding affection for him as a man. When he pressed this proposal upon me, insisting that its acceptance would relieve him of a burden, I decided to undertake what he wanted. I was the readier to do so for a peculiar reason. In those days pretty nearly all books, American or English, were first offered to the Harpers, and I had to examine them all, either in manuscript, if they were American, or in proof sheets if they were English. Consequently, whether they were published by the Harpers or by some one else, I was thoroughly familiar with them long before they came from the press. I foresaw that it would be easy for me to review them from the acquaintance I already had with their contents. [Sidenote: In Newspaper Life Again] I was resolutely determined not to be drawn again into the newspaper life, but I foresaw no danger of that in making the literary arrangement suggested. Accordingly, I became literary editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_ under Mr. Godwin's administration as the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. The paper had never been conducted upon the lines he proposed or upon any other well-defined lines, so far as I could discover, and I foresaw that he had a hard task before him. All the reputation the paper had was detrimental rather than helpful. I was eager to help him over the first hurdles in the race, and so, in addition to my literary duties I not only wrote editorials each day, but helped in organizing a news staff that should at least recognize news when it ran up against it in the street. Mr. Godwin was himself editor-in-chief, and the vigor of his utterances made a quick impression. But his managing editor lacked--well, let us say some at least of the qualifications that tend to make a newspaper successful. Mr. Godwin was an exceedingly patient man, but after a while he wearied of the weekly loss the paper was inflicting upon him. In the meanwhile, I discovered that my attention to the newspaper was seriously interfering with my literary work, and that the fifty dollars a week which the paper paid me did not compensate me for the time I was giving to it at the expense of my other undertakings. I wrote to Mr. Godwin, recommending a very capable young man to take my place, and asking to be released from an engagement that was anything but profitable to me. For reply I had a prompt letter from Mr. Godwin asking me to see him at his home. There he asked and urged me to become managing editor of the paper from that hour forth. He told me he was losing money in large sums upon its conduct, and appealed to me to come to his rescue, urging that he was "too old and too indolent" himself to put life into the enterprise. The question of salary was not mentioned between us. He appealed to me to help him and I stood ready to do so at any sacrifice of personal interest or convenience. But when the board of directors of the corporation met a month later, he moved an adequate salary for me and suggested that it should be dated back to the day on which I had taken control. A certain excessively small economist on the board objected to the dating back on the ground that no bargain had been made to that effect and that he was "constitutionally opposed to the unnecessary squandering of money." Instantly Mr. Godwin said: "The salary arranged for our managing editor is the just reward of the service he is rendering. He has been giving us that service from the hour of his entrance upon office. He is as justly entitled to compensation for that time as for the future. Either the board must pay it or I will pay it out of my own pocket. We are neither beggars nor robbers, and we take nothing that we do not pay for." There spoke the great, honest-minded man that Parke Godwin always was. It was a difficult task I had undertaken. There were many obstacles in the way. The chief of these was pointed out by Mr. John Bigelow when he said to me: "You're going to make yours a newspaper for the educated classes. It is my opinion that there are already too many newspapers for the educated classes." I am disposed to think the old journalist and statesman had a prophetic vision of the early coming time when success in newspaper editing would be measured by the skill of newspaper proprietors in making their appeal to the uneducated classes--to the million instead of the few thousands. [Sidenote: An Editor's Perplexities] A more perplexing difficulty beset me, however. I had a definitely fixed and wholly inadequate sum of money to expend weekly in making the paper, and when I came to look over my payroll I found that the greater part of the sum allowed me went to pay the salaries of some very worthy men, whose capacity to render effective service to a "live" modern newspaper was exceedingly small. I had sore need of the money these men drew every week, with which to employ reporters who could get news and editors who knew how to write. The men in question held their places by virtue of Mr. Godwin's over-generous desire to provide a living for them. I represented the case to him in its nakedness. I told him frankly that whatever he might be personally able to afford, the newspaper's earnings at that time did not justify the maintenance of such a pension roll. Either I must discharge all these men and use the money that went to pay their salaries in a more fruitful way, or I must decline to go on with the task I had undertaken. He solved the problem by calling the board together, resigning his editorship, and making me editor-in-chief, with unrestricted authority. With all the gentleness I could bring to bear I detached the barnacles and freed myself to make a newspaper. I had the good fortune in all this to have the support of Mr. Godwin's two sons, who were large stockholders in the newspaper, and of Mr. Henry Marquand, who was also the owner of an important interest. I had also the good fortune to secure the services of some reporters and some editorial assistants whose energies and capacities were of the utmost value to me. Many of them are dead now--as, alas! most other persons are with whom I have been closely associated. But those of them who are living have made place and reputation for themselves in a way that justifies the pride I used to feel in their abilities, their energies, and their conscientious devotion to duty when they worked with me. Indeed, as I contemplate the careers of these men, most of whom came to me as "cubs" fresh from college, I am disposed to plume myself not only upon my sagacity in discovering their untried abilities, but also upon the tutelage I gave them in journalism. The eagerness with which other newspapers have since sought them out for important employments, and the rapidity of their promotion on those other newspapers have always been a source of pride to me--pride which is not, I think, vainglorious or unduly personal. Perhaps the reader will permit me here to pay tribute to those loyal men who so willingly stood by me when the most that I was permitted to pay them was less than one-half--sometimes less than one-third what they might have earned upon other newspapers. [Sidenote: Some of My Brilliant "Cubs"] Among them was Charles E. Russell, who has since earned high literary place for himself. Another was Timothy Shaler Williams, who has since been lured from literature, for which his gifts were great, to affairs, and who for many years has been president of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. I had Earl D. Berry for my managing editor, and I could have had none more capable. In the news department were De François Folsom--dead long years ago--Edward Fales Coward, who has since made a distinguished place for himself; Hewitt, the author of Dixey's song, "So English, You Know"; Sidney Strother Logan, one of the shrewdest news explorers I have ever known,--dead years ago, unfortunately,--and George B. Mallon, who came to me fresh from college and whose work was so good as to confirm my conviction that even in a newspaper's reporting room an educated mind has advantages over mere native shrewdness and an acquaintance with the slang and patter of the time. Mr. Mallon's work was so good, indeed, that I personally assigned him to tasks of peculiar difficulty. The New York _Sun_ has since confirmed my judgment of his ability by making him its city editor, a post that he has held for seven years or more. Another of my "cubs" was Henry Armstrong, whose abilities have since won for him a place on the brilliant editorial writing staff of the _Sun_. Still another was Henry Wright, who is now editor-in-chief of the paper on which he "learned his trade,"--though the paper has since changed its name to the _Globe_. Another was Nelson Hirsh, who afterwards became editor of the _Sunday World_. On my editorial staff were Henry R. Elliot--dead now,--James Davis, who carried every detail of a singularly varied scholarship at his finger-tips, ready for instant use, and whose grace as a writer, illuminated as it was by an exquisitely subtle humor, ought to have made him famous, and would have done so, if death had not come to him too soon. Doubtless there were others whom I ought to mention here in grateful remembrance, but the incessant activities of the score and more of years that have elapsed since my association with them ended have obliterated many details from my memory. Let me say that to all of them I render thanks for loyal and highly intelligent assistance in the difficult task I then had to wrestle with. With a staff like that we were able to get the news and print it, and we did both in a way that attracted attention in other newspaper offices as well as among newspaper readers. With such writers as those mentioned and others, the editorial utterances of the paper attracted an attention that had never before been accorded to them. So far as its books of account gave indication, the _Commercial Advertiser_ had never earned or paid a dividend. At the end of the first year under this new régime it paid a dividend of fifty per cent. At the end of its second year it paid its stockholders one hundred per cent. The earnings of the third year were wisely expended in the purchase of new presses and machinery. Before the end of the fourth year I had resigned its editorship to become an editorial writer on _The World_. I intensely enjoyed the work of "making bricks without straw" on the _Commercial Advertiser_--by which I mean that with a staff of one man to ten on the great morning newspapers, and with one dollar to expend where they could squander hundreds, we managed not only to keep step but to lead them in such news-getting enterprises as those incident to the prosecution of the boodle Aldermen and Jake Sharp, the Diss de Barr case, and the other exciting news problems of the time. The strain, however, was heart-breaking, and presently my health gave way under it. A leisurely wandering all over this continent restored it somewhat, but upon my return the burden seemed heavier than ever--especially the burden of responsibility that made sleep difficult and rest impossible to me. In the meanwhile, of course, my literary work had been sacrificed to the Moloch of journalism. I had canceled all my engagements of that sort and severed connections which I had intended to be lifelong. In a word, I had been drawn again into the vortex of that daily journalism, from which I had twice escaped. I was worn, weary, and inexpressibly oppressed by the duties of responsible editorship--a responsibility I had never sought, but one which circumstances had twice thrust upon me. [Sidenote: The Dread Task of the Editor] I wonder if the reader can understand or even faintly imagine what all this means. I wonder if I can suggest some shadow of it to his mind. Think of what it means to toil all day in the making of a newspaper, and to feel, when all is done that the result is utterly inadequate. Think of what it means to the weary one to go home with the next day's task upon his mind as a new burden, and with the discouraging consciousness that all he has done on one day's issue is dead so far as the next day is concerned. Think what it means to a sensitive man to feel that upon his discretion, his alertness, his sagacity, depends not only the daily result of a newspaper's publication, but the prosperity or failure of other men's investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the value of a newspaper depends from day to day upon its conduct. It is a matter of good will. If the editor pleases his constituency, the investment of the owners remains a profitable property. If he displeases that constituency the newspaper has nothing left to sell but its presses and machinery, representing a small fraction of the sum invested in it. That responsibility rested upon me as an incubus. All my life until then I had been able to sleep. Then came sleeplessness of a sort I could not shake off. At my usual hour for going to bed, I was overcome by sleep, but after five minutes on the pillows there came wakefulness. I learned how to fight it, by going to my library and resolutely sitting in the dark until sleep came, but the process was a painful one and it left me next morning crippled for my day's work. In the meanwhile, as I have said, I enjoyed my work as I suppose a man condemned to death enjoys the work of writing his "confessions." I enjoyed my very intimate association with Henry Marquand, one of the most companionable men I ever knew, for the reason that his mind was responsive to every thought one might utter, and that there was always a gentle humor in all that he had to say. He had a most comfortable schooner yacht on board which I many times saved my life or my sanity by passing a Sunday outside on blue water, with nothing more important to think of than the cob pipes we smoked as we loafed in our pajamas on the main hatch. Marquand had a habit of inviting brilliant men for his guests, such men as Dr. Halsted, now of Johns Hopkins; Dr. Tuttle, who has since made fame for himself; Dr. Roosevelt, who died a while ago; James Townsend, Dr. William Gilman Thompson, then a comparatively young man but now one of the supreme authorities in medical science, and others of like highly intellectual quality. Now and then there were "ladies present," but they were an infrequent interruption. I don't mean that ungallantly. But rest and women do not usually go together. It was our habit to board the yacht down Staten Island way on Saturday afternoon, sail out to the lightship and back, and anchor in the Horseshoe for dinner and the night. On Sunday we sailed out toward Fire Island or down toward Long Branch, or wherever else we chose. We were intent only upon rest--the rest that the sea alone can give, and that only the lovers of the sea ever get in this utterly unrestful world of ours. On deck in the afternoon and evening, and in the saloon at dinner and other meals, we talked, I suppose, of intellectual things. At sea we rested, and smoked, and were silent, and altogether happy. I have always enjoyed the sea. I have crossed the ocean many times, and I have sailed in all sorts of craft over all sorts of seas, with delight in every breath that the ocean gave to me; but I think I may truly say that no other voyage I ever made gave me so much pleasure as did those little yachting trips on the "Ruth" in company with men whose very presence was an intellectual inspiration. [Sidenote: Parke Godwin] But the most abiding recollection I have of my service on the _Commercial Advertiser_ is that which concerns itself with Parke Godwin. He was a man of great thought impulses, only half expressed. That which he gave to the world in print was no more than the hem of his intellectual garment. A certain constitutional indolence, encouraged by his too early acquisition of sufficient wealth to free him from the necessity of writing for a living, prevented him from giving to the world the best that was in him. He would have a great thought and he would plan to write it. Sometimes he would even begin to write it. But in the end he preferred to talk it to some appreciative listener. I remember one case of the kind. He had several times invited me to visit him at his Bar Harbor summer home. Always I had been obliged by the exigencies of my editorial work to forego that delight. One summer he wrote to me, saying: "I wonder if you could forget the _Commercial Advertiser_ long enough to spend a fortnight with me here at Bar Harbor. You see, I don't like to issue invitations and have them 'turned down,' so I'm not going to invite you till you write me that you will come." In answer to that invitation I passed a fortnight with him. From beginning to end of the time he forbade all mention of the newspaper of which he was chief owner and I the responsible editor. But during that time he "talked into me," as he said at parting, a deal of high thinking that he ought to have put into print. His mind had one notable quality in common with Emerson's--the capacity to fecundate every other mind with which it came into close contact. One came away, from a conference with him, feeling enriched, inspired, enlarged, not so much by the thought he had expressed as by the thinking he had instigated in his listener's mind. It was so with me on that occasion. I came away full of a thought that grew and fruited in my mind. Presently--an occasion offering--I wrote it into a series of articles in the newspaper. These attracted the attention of Dr. William M. Sloane, now of Columbia University, then professor of history at Princeton and editor of the _Princeton Review_. At his instigation I presented the same thought in his _Review_, and a little later by invitation I addressed the Nineteenth Century Club on the subject. I called it "The American Idea." In substance it was that our country had been founded and had grown great upon the idea that every man born into the world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal right of any other man to do as he pleases, and that in a free country it is the sole function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone. The idea seemed to be successful in its appeal to men's intelligence at that time, but many years later--only a year or so ago, in fact--I put it forward in a commencement address at a Virginia College and found it sharply though silently antagonized by professors and trustees on the ground that it seemed to deny to government the right to enact prohibitory liquor laws, or otherwise to make men moral by statute. The doctrine was pure Jeffersonianism, of course, and the professors and trustees sincerely believed themselves to be Jeffersonians. But the doctrine had gored their pet ox, and that made a difference. [Sidenote: Some Recollections of Mr. Godwin] One day Mr. Godwin expressed himself as delighted with all I had written on the American Idea. I responded: "That is very natural. The idea is yours, not mine, and in all that I have written about it, I have merely been reporting what you said to me, as we stood looking at the surf dashing itself to pieces on the rocks at Bar Harbor." "Not at all," he answered. "No man can expound and elaborate another man's thought without putting so much of himself into it as to make it essentially and altogether his own. I may have dropped a seed into your mind, but I didn't know it or intend it. The fruitage is all your own. My thinking on the subject was casual, vagrant, unorganized. I had never formulated it in my own mind. You see we all gather ideas in converse with others. That is what speech was given to man for. But the value of the ideas depends upon the use made of them." Mr. Godwin had been at one time in his life rather intimately associated with Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and statesman. As all old newspaper men remember, Kossuth had a habit of dying frequently. News of his death would come and all the newspapers would print extended obituary articles. Within a day or two the news would be authoritatively contradicted, and the obituaries would be laid away for use at some future time. On one of these occasions Mr. Godwin wrote for me a singularly interesting article, giving his personal reminiscences of Kossuth. Before I could print it despatches came contradicting the news of the old Hungarian's death. I put Mr. Godwin's manuscript into a pigeonhole and both he and I forgot all about it. A year or so later Kossuth did in fact die, and in looking through my papers to see what I might have ready for printing on the subject, I discovered Mr. Godwin's paper. It was not signed, but purported to be the personal recollections of one who had known the patriot well. I hurried it into print, thus gaining twelve or fourteen hours on the morning newspapers. The next morning Mr. Godwin called upon me, declaring that he had come face to face with the most extraordinary psychological problem he had ever encountered. "The chapter of Kossuth reminiscences that you printed yesterday," he said, "was as exact a report of my own recollections of the man as I could have given you if you had sent a reporter to interview me on the subject; and the strangest part of it is that the article reports many things which I could have sworn were known only to myself. It is astonishing, inexplicable." "This isn't a case of talking your thought into another person," I answered, referring to the former incident. "This time you put yourself down on paper, and what I printed was set from the manuscript you gave me a year or so ago." This solved the psychological puzzle and to that extent relieved his mind. But there remained the further difficulty that, cudgel his brain as he might, he could find in it no trace of recollection regarding the matter. [Sidenote: A Mystery of Forgetting] "I remember very well," he said, "that I often thought I ought to write out my recollections of Kossuth, but I can't remember that I ever did so. I remember taking myself to task many times for my indolence in postponing a thing that I knew I ought to do, but that only makes the case the more inexplicable. When I scourged myself for neglecting the task, why didn't my memory remind me that I had actually discharged the duty? And now that I have read the reminiscences in print, why am I unable to recall the fact that I wrote them? The article fills several columns. Certainly I ought to have some recollection of the labor involved in writing so much. Are you entirely certain that the manuscript was mine?" I sent to the composing room for the "copy" and showed it to him. As he looked it over he said: "'Strange to say, on Club paper.' You remember Thackeray's Roundabout paper with that headline? It has a bearing here, for this is written on paper that the Century Club alone provides for the use of its members. I must, therefore, have written the thing at the Century Club, and that ought to resurrect some memory of it in my mind, but it doesn't. No. I have not the slightest recollection of having put that matter on paper." At that point his wonderfully alert mind turned to another thought. "Suppose you and I believed in the occult, the mystical, the so-called supernatural, as we don't," he said, "what a mystery we might make of this in the way of psychical manifestation--which usually belongs to the domain of psycho-pathology. Think of it! As I chastised myself in my own mind for my neglect to put these things on paper, your mind came under subjection to mine and you wrote them in my stead. So complete was the possession that your handwriting, which is clear and legible, became an exact facsimile of mine, which is obscure and difficult. Then you, being under possession, preserved no memory of having written the thing, while I, knowing nothing of your unconscious agency in the matter, had nothing to remember concerning it. Isn't that about the way the mysticists make up their 'facts' for the misleading of half-baked brains?" In later years I related this incident to a distinguished half-believer in things mystical, adding Mr. Godwin's laughingly conjectural explanation of it, whereupon the reply came: "May not that have been the real explanation, in spite of your own and Mr. Godwin's skepticism?" I was left with the feeling that after all what Mr. Godwin had intended as an extravagant caricature was a veritable representation of a credulity that actually exists, even among men commonly accounted sane, and certainly learned. The reflection was discouraging to one who hopes for the progress of mankind through sanity of mind. LXIV In the days of which I have hitherto written there was a dignity, reserve, contentment--call it what you will--in the conduct of newspapers of established reputation. There was rivalry among them in their endeavors to publish the earliest news of public events, but it was a dignified rivalry involving comparatively little of that self-glorification which has since come to be a double-leaded feature in the conduct of many newspapers. The era of illustration and exploitation by the use of pictures had not yet been born of cheapened reproductive processes. Newspapers were usually printed directly from type because stereotyping was then a costly process and a slow one. As a consequence, newspapers were printed in regular columns consecutively arranged, and articles begun in one column were carried forward in the next. There were no such legends as "continued on page five," and the like. Headlines were confined to the column that began the article. The art of stretching them halfway or all the way across the page and involving half a dozen of them in gymnastic wrestlings with each other for supremacy in conspicuity had not then been invented, and in its absence the use of circus poster type and circus poster exaggeration of phrase was undreamed of. Now and then an advertiser anxious for conspicuity would pay a heavy price to have column rules cut so that his announcement might stretch over two or more columns, but the cost of that was so great that indulgence in it was rare even among ambitious advertisers, while in the reading columns the practice was wholly unknown. [Sidenote: The Price of Newspapers] Another thing. It was then thought that when a copy of a newspaper was sold, the price paid for it ought to be sufficient at least to pay the cost of its manufacture, plus some small margin of profit. All the great morning newspapers except the _Sun_ were sold at four cents a copy; the _Sun_, by virtue of extraordinary literary condensation, used only about half the amount of paper consumed by the others, and was sold at two cents. The afternoon newspapers were sold at three cents. The publishers of newspapers had not then grasped the idea that is now dominant, that if a great circulation can be achieved by selling newspapers for less than the mere paper in them costs, the increase in the volume and price of advertising will make of them enormously valuable properties. That idea was not born suddenly. Even after the revolution was established, the cost of the white paper used in making a newspaper helped to determine the price of it to the public. It was not until the phenomenal success of cheap newspapers years afterwards tempted even more reckless adventurers into the field that publishers generally threw the entire burden of profit-making upon the advertising columns and thus established the business office in the seat before occupied by the editor and made business considerations altogether dominant over utterance, attitude, and conduct. There were in the meantime many attempts made to establish a cheaper form of journalism, but they were inadequately supported by working capital; they were usually conducted by men of small capacity; they had no traditions of good will behind them, and above all, they could not get Associated Press franchises. For the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the facts, I explain that the Associated Press is an organization for news-gathering, formed by the great newspapers by way of securing news that no newspaper could afford to secure for itself. It maintains bureaus in all the great news centers of the world, and these collect and distribute to the newspapers concerned a great mass of routine news that would be otherwise inaccessible to them. If a president's message, or an inaugural address, or any other public document of voluminous character is to be given out, it is obvious that the newspapers concerned cannot wait for telegraphic reports of its contents. By way of saving time and telegraphic expense, the document is delivered to the Associated Press, and copies of it are sent to all the newspapers concerned, with a strict limitation upon the hour of its publication. Until that hour comes no newspaper in the association is privileged to print it or in any way, by reference or otherwise, to reveal any part of its contents. But in the meanwhile they can put it into type, and with it their editorial comments upon it, so that when the hour of release comes, they can print the whole thing--text and comment--without loss of time. The newspaper not endowed with an Associated Press franchise must wait for twenty-four hours or more for its copy of the document. Hardly less important is the fact that in every city, town, and village in the country, the Associated Press has its agent--the local editor or the telegraph operator, or some one else--who is commissioned to report to it every news happening that may arise within his bailiwick. Often these reports are interesting; sometimes they are of importance, and in either case the newspaper not allied with a press association must miss them. At the time of which I am writing, the Associated Press was the only organization in the country that could render such service, and every newspaper venture lacking its franchise was foredoomed to failure. [Sidenote: The Pulitzer Revolution] But a newspaper revolution was impending and presently it broke upon us. In 1883 Mr. Joseph Pulitzer bought the _World_ and instituted a totally new system of newspaper conduct. His advent into New York journalism was called an "irruption," and it was resented not only by the other newspapers, but even more by a large proportion of the conservative public. In its fundamental principle, Mr. Pulitzer's revolutionary method was based upon an idea identical with that suggested by Mr. John Bigelow when he told me there were too many newspapers for the educated class. Mr. Pulitzer undertook to make a newspaper, not for the educated class, but for all sorts and conditions of men. He did not intend to overlook the educated class, but he saw clearly how small a part of the community it was, and he refused to make his appeal to it exclusively or even chiefly. The results were instantaneous and startling. The _World_, which had never been able to achieve a paying circulation or a paying constituency of advertisers, suddenly began selling in phenomenal numbers, while its advertising business became what Mr. Pulitzer once called a "bewildering chaos of success, yielding a revenue that the business office was imperfectly equipped to handle." It is an interesting fact, that the _World's_ gain in circulation was not made at the expense of any other newspaper. The books of account show clearly that while the _World_ was gaining circulation by scores and hundreds of thousands, no other morning newspaper was losing. The simple fact was that by appealing to a larger class, the _World_ had created a great company of newspaper readers who had not before been newspaper readers at all. Reluctantly, and only by degrees, the other morning newspapers adopted the _World's_ methods, and won to themselves a larger constituency than they had ever enjoyed before. All this had little effect upon the afternoon newspapers. They had their constituencies. Their province was quite apart from that of the morning papers. A circulation of ten or twenty thousand copies seemed to them satisfactory; any greater circulation was deemed extraordinary, and if at a time of popular excitement their sales exceeded twenty thousand they regarded it not only as phenomenal but as a strain upon their printing and distributing machinery which it would be undesirable to repeat very often. But the revolution was destined to reach them presently. At that time none of the morning newspapers thought of issuing afternoon editions. The game seemed not worth the candle. But presently the sagacity of Mr. William M. Laffan--then a subordinate on the _Sun's_ staff, later the proprietor and editor of that newspaper--saw and seized an opportunity. The morning papers had learned their lesson and were making their appeal to the multitude instead of the select few. The afternoon newspapers were still addressing themselves solely to "the educated class." Mr. Laffan decided to make an afternoon appeal to the more multitudinous audience. Under his inspiration the _Evening Sun_ was established on the seventeenth day of March, 1887, and it instantly achieved a circulation of forty thousand--from twice to four times that of its more conservative competitors. [Sidenote: The Lure of the World] A little later an evening edition of the _World_ was established. Its success at first was small, but Mr. Pulitzer quickly saw the reason for that. The paper was too closely modeled upon the conservative and dignified pattern of the established afternoon newspapers. To his subordinates Mr. Pulitzer said: "You are making a three-cent newspaper for a one-cent constituency. I want you to make it a one-cent newspaper." What further instructions he gave to that end, I have never heard, but whatever they were they were carried out with a success that seemed to me to threaten the very existence of such newspapers as the one I was editing. I was satisfied that if the newspaper under my control was to survive it must adopt the new methods of journalism, broaden its appeal to the people, and reduce its price to the "penny" which alone the people could be expected to pay when the _Evening Sun_ and the _Evening World_ could be had for that price. The board of directors of the newspaper could not be induced to take this view, and just then one of the editors of the _World_, acting for Mr. Pulitzer, asked me to take luncheon with him. He explained to me that Mr. Pulitzer wanted an editorial writer and that he--my host--had been commissioned to engage me in that capacity, if I was open to engagement. In the end he made me a proposal which I could not put aside in justice to myself and my family. My relations with Mr. Godwin and his associates were so cordial, and their treatment of me had been always so generous, that I could not think of leaving them without their hearty consent and approval. The summer was approaching, when the members of the board of directors would go away to their summer homes or to Europe. The last regular meeting of the board for the season had been held, and nothing had been done to meet the new conditions of competition. I was discouraged by the prospect of addressing a steadily diminishing audience throughout the summer, with the possibility of having no audience at all to address when the fall should come. I hastily called the board together in a special meeting. I told them of the proposal made to me by the _World_ and of my desire to accept it unless they could be induced to let me adopt the new methods at an expense much greater than any of the established afternoon newspapers had ever contemplated, and much greater than my board of directors was willing to contemplate. I said frankly that without their cordial consent, I could not quit their service, but that if we were to go on as before, I earnestly wished to be released from a responsibility that threatened my health with disaster. They decided to release me, after passing some very flattering resolutions, and in early June, 1889, I went to the _World_ as an editorial writer free from all responsibility for the news management of the paper, free from all problems of newspaper finance, and free from the crushing weight of the thought that other men's property interests to the extent of many hundreds of thousands of dollars were in hourly danger of destruction by some fault or failure of judgment on my part. As I rejoiced in this sense of release, I recalled what James R. Osgood, one of the princes among publishers, had once said to me, and for the first time I fully grasped his meaning. At some public banquet or other he and I were seated side by side and we fell into conversation regarding certain books he had published. They were altogether worthy books, but their appeal seemed to me to be to so small a constituency that I could not understand what had induced him to publish them at all. I said to him: "I sometimes wonder at your courage in putting your money into the publication of such books." He answered: "That's the smallest part of the matter. Think of my courage in putting _other people's money_ into their publication!" It was not long after that that Osgood's enterprises failed, and he retired from business as a publisher to the sorrow of every American who in any way cared for literature. [Sidenote: The Little Dinner to Osgood] When Osgood went to London as an agent of the Harpers, some of us gave him a farewell dinner, for which Thomas Nast designed the menu cards. When these were passed around for souvenir autographs, Edwin A. Abbey drew upon each, in connection with his signature, a caricature of himself which revealed new possibilities in his genius--possibilities that have come to nothing simply because Mr. Abbey has found a better use for his gifts than any that the caricaturist can hope for. But those of us who were present at that little Osgood dinner still cherish our copies of the dinner card on which, with a few strokes of his pencil, Abbey revealed an unsuspected aspect of his genius. In view of the greatness of his more serious work, we rejoice that he went no further than an after-dinner jest, in the exercise of his gift of caricature. Had he given comic direction to his work, he might have become a Hogarth, perhaps; as it is, he is something far better worth while--he is Abbey. LXV I shall write comparatively little here of the eleven years I remained in the service of the _World_. The experience is too recent to constitute a proper subject of freehand reminiscence. My relations with Mr. Pulitzer were too closely personal, too intimate, and in many ways too confidential to serve a purpose of that kind. But of the men with whom my work on the _World_ brought me into contact, I am free to write. So, too, I am at liberty, I think, to relate certain dramatic happenings that serve to illustrate the Napoleonic methods of modern journalism and certain other things, not of a confidential nature, which throw light upon the character, impulses, and methods of the man whose genius first discovered the possibilities of journalism and whose courage, energy, and extraordinary sagacity have made of those possibilities accomplished facts. It has been more than ten years since my term of service on the _World_ came to an end, but it seems recent to me, except when I begin counting up the men now dead who were my fellow-workmen there. I did not personally know Mr. Pulitzer when I began my duties on the _World_. He was living in Europe then, and about to start on a long yachting cruise. John A. Cockerill was managing editor and in control of the paper, subject, of course, to daily and sometimes hourly instructions from Paris by cable. For, during my eleven years of service on the _World_, I never knew the time when Mr. Pulitzer did not himself actively direct the conduct of his paper wherever he might be. Even when he made a yachting voyage as far as the East Indies, his hand remained always on the helm in New York. [Sidenote: John A. Cockerill] Colonel Cockerill was one of the kindliest, gentlest of men, and at the same time one of the most irascible. His irascibility was like the froth that rises to the top of the glass and quickly disappears, when a Seidlitz powder is dissolved--not at all like the "head" on a glass of champagne which goes on threateningly rising long after the first effervescence is gone. When anything irritated him the impulse to break out into intemperate speech seemed wholly irresistible, but in the very midst of such utterance the irritation would pass away as suddenly as it had come and he would become again the kindly comrade he had meant to be all the while. This was due to the saving grace of his sense of humor. I think I never knew a man so capable as he of intense seriousness, who was at the same time so alertly and irresistibly impelled to see the humorous aspects of things. He would rail violently at an interfering circumstance, but in the midst of his vituperation he would suddenly see something ridiculous about it or in his own ill-temper concerning it. He would laugh at the suggestion in his mind, laugh at himself, and tell some brief anecdote--of which his quiver was always full--by way of turning his own irritation and indignation into fun and thus making an end of them. He was an entire stranger to me when I joined the staff of the _World_, but we soon became comrades and friends. There was so much of robust manhood in his nature, so much of courage, kindliness, and generous good will that in spite of the radical differences between his conceptions of life and mine, we soon learned to find pleasure in each other's company, to like each other, and above all, to trust each other. I think each of us recognized in the other a man incapable of lying, deceit, treachery, or any other form of cowardice. That he was such a man I perfectly knew. That he regarded me as such I have every reason to believe. After our friendship was perfectly established he said to me one day: "You know I did all I could to prevent your engagement on the _World_. I'm glad now I didn't succeed." "What was your special objection to me?" I asked. "Misconception, pure and simple, together with ill-informed prejudice. That's tautological, of course, for prejudice is always ill-informed, isn't it? At any rate, I had an impression that you were a man as utterly different from what I now know you to be as one can easily imagine." "And yet," I said, "you generously helped me out of my first difficulty here." "No, did I? How was that?" "Why, when the news went out that I had been engaged as an editorial writer on the _World_, a good many newspapers over the country were curious to know why. The prejudice against the _World_ under its new management was still rampant, and my appointment seemed to many newspapers a mystery, for the reason that my work before that time had always been done on newspapers of a very different kind. Even here on the _World_ there was curiosity on the subject, for Ballard Smith sent a reporter to me, before I left the _Commercial Advertiser_, to ask me about it. The reporter, under instructions, even asked me, flatly, whose place I was to take on the _World_, as if the _World_ had not been able to employ a new man without discharging an old one." "Yes--I know all about that," said Cockerill. "You see, you were editor-in-chief of a newspaper, and some of the folks on the _World_ had a hope born into their minds that you were coming here to replace me as managing editor. Some others feared you were coming to oust them from snug berths. Go on. You didn't finish." "Well, among the speculative comments made about my transfer, there was one in a Springfield paper, suggesting that perhaps I had been employed 'to give the _World_ a conscience.' All these things troubled me greatly, for the reason that I didn't know Mr. Pulitzer then, nor he me, and I feared he would suspect me of having inspired the utterances in question--particularly the one last mentioned. I went to you with my trouble, and I shall never forget what you said to me. 'My dear Mr. Eggleston, you can trust Joseph Pulitzer to get to windward of things without any help from me or anybody else.'" "You've found it so since, haven't you?" he asked. "Yes, but I didn't know it then, and it was a kindly act on your part to reassure me." [Sidenote: An Extraordinary Executive] Cockerill's abilities as a newspaper editor were very great, but they were mainly executive. He had no great creative imagination. He could never have originated the Napoleonic revolution in journalism which Mr. Pulitzer's extraordinary genius wrought. But Mr. Pulitzer was fortunate in having such a man as Cockerill to carry out his plans. His alert readiness in grasping an idea and translating it into achievement amounted to genius in its way. But during all the years of my intimate association with him, I never knew Cockerill to originate a great idea. With a great idea intrusted to him for execution, his brain was fertile of suggestions and expedients for its carrying out, and his industry in translating the ideas of his chief into action was ceaseless, tireless, sleepless. He would think of a thousand devices for accomplishing the purpose intended. He would hit upon scores of ways in which a campaign projected by another mind could be carried out effectively. There was at one time a good deal of speculation as to whose brain had made the phenomenal success of the all-daring _World_ experiment in journalism. I think I know all about that, and my judgment is unhesitating. Mr. Pulitzer was often and even generally fortunate in his multitudinous lieutenants, and that good fortune was chiefly due to his sagacity in the selection of the men appointed to carry out his plans. But the plans were his, just as the choice of lieutenants was, and the creative genius that revolutionized journalism and achieved results unmatched and even unapproached, was exclusively that of Joseph Pulitzer. I do not mean that every valuable idea or suggestion which contributed to the result was originally his, though on broad lines that was true. But it was part and parcel of his genius to induce ideas and call forth suggestions at the hands of others, to make them his own, and to embody them in the policy of the _World_. So readily did he himself appreciate this necessity of getting ideas from whatever source they might come, that he often offered premiums and rewards for helpful suggestions. And when any member of his staff voluntarily offered suggestions that appealed to him, he was always ready and very generous in acknowledging and rewarding them. But it was Joseph Pulitzer's genius that conceived the new journalism; it was his brain that gave birth to it all; it was his gift of interpreting, utilizing, and carrying out the ideas of others that made them fruitful. I emphasize this judgment here because there has been much misapprehension regarding it, and because I knew the facts more intimately and more definitely perhaps than any other person now living does. I feel myself free to write of the subject for the reason that it has been more than a decade of years since my connection with the _World_ ceased, and the personal friendship I once enjoyed with Mr. Pulitzer became a matter of mere reminiscence to both of us. My relations with Cockerill were not embarrassed by any question of control or authority. Cockerill had general charge of the newspaper, but the editorial page was segregated from the other sheets, and so far as that was concerned, William H. Merrill was in supreme authority. Whenever he was absent his authority devolved upon me, and for results I was answerable only to Mr. Pulitzer. I shall never forget my introduction to my new duties. It was arranged between Merrill and me, that I should take a week off, between the severance of my connection with the _Commercial Advertiser_ and the beginning of my work on the _World_, in order that I might visit my family and rest myself at my little place on Lake George. I was to report for duty on the _World_ on a Sunday morning, when Merrill would induct me into the methods of the newspaper, preparatory to his vacation, beginning two or three days later. [Sidenote: An Editorial Perplexity] Unfortunately, Merrill had greater confidence in my newspaper skill and experience than I had, and so when I reported for duty on Sunday, Merrill was already gone on his vacation and I was left responsible for next day's editorial page. I knew nothing of the _World's_ staff or organization or methods. There were no other editorial writers present in the office and upon inquiry of the office boys I learned that no others were expected to present themselves on that day. I sent to the foreman of the composing room for the "overproofs"--that is to say, proofs of editorial matter left over from the day before. He reported that there were none, for the reason that Merrill, before leaving on the preceding day, had "killed" every editorial galley in the office. Cockerill was not expected at the office until nine or ten o'clock that night, and there was nobody else there who could tell me anything about the matter. Obviously, there was only one thing to do. I sat down and wrote an entire editorial page, for a newspaper whose methods and policy I knew only from the outside. When I had done that, and had got my matter into type, and had read my revised proofs, messengers arrived bearing the manuscripts of what the other editorial writers--men unknown to me--had written at their homes during the day, after the Sunday custom that then prevailed but which I abolished a little later when Merrill went to Europe upon Mr. Pulitzer's invitation and I was left in control of the editorial page. I have related this experience thinking that it may interest readers unfamiliar with newspaper work, as an exemplification of the emergency problems with which newspaper men have often to deal. These are of frequent occurrence and of every conceivable variety. I remember that once some great utterance seemed necessary, and Mr. Pulitzer telegraphed it from Bar Harbor. It filled the entire available editorial space, so that I provided no other editorial articles whatever. I had "made up" the page and was only waiting for time before going home, when news despatches came that so completely changed the situation treated in the editorial as to compel its withdrawal. It was after midnight, and I hadn't a line of editorial matter on the galleys with which to fill the void. The editorial page must go to the stereotypers at half-past one, and I had no soul to help me even by writing twaddle with which to fill space. The situation was imperative and the case was clear. The case was that I must write two or three columns of editorial matter and get it into type, proof-read, and corrected, before one-thirty of the clock--or one-forty-five, as the foreman of the composing room, a royal good fellow, Mr. Jackson, volunteered to stretch the time limit by some ingenious device of his own. I wish to say here, lest no other opportunity offer, that in the thirty years of my newspaper service, I have found no better or more loyal friends than the men of the composing room, whether in high place or low; that I have never known them to hesitate, in an emergency, to help out by specially strenuous endeavor and by enduring great inconvenience on their own part. So great is my gratitude for their comradely good-fellowship that even now--ten years after a final end came to my newspaper work--one of the first parts of the establishment I visit when I have occasion to go to the _World_ office is the composing room, where old friends greet me cordially on every hand. Great--very great--are the printers. They do their work under a stress of hurry, noise, and confusion that would drive less well-made men frantic, and they do it mightily well. To one who knows, as I do, what the conditions are, every printed newspaper page is a miracle of human achievement under well-nigh inconceivable difficulties. [Sidenote: Donn Piatt] It was soon after my service on the _World_ began that I became acquainted with a man of brilliant gifts, often erratically employed, and of singularly interesting personality--Donn Piatt. From that time until his death I saw much of him in a quiet club-corner way, and listened with interest while he set forth his views and conclusions, always with a suggestion of humor in them and often in perverse, paradoxical ways. One day some question arose between us as to the failure of a certain book to achieve the success we both thought it deserved. Donn Piatt's explanation was ready: "It is because we have altogether too much education in this country," he said. "You see, our schools are turning out about a million graduates every year, under the mistaken belief that they are educated. All these boys and girls have been taught how to read, but they haven't the smallest notion of what to read, or why to read. They regard reading as you and I might regard a game of solitaire--as a convenient means of relaxing the mind, diverting the attention from more serious things--in brief, they read for amusement only, and have no notion of any other possible purpose in reading. That's why every sublimated idiot who makes a mountebank of himself as a 'humorist' wins his public instantly and easily. The great majority of readers are that way minded, and of course the publishers must cater to the taste of the multitude. They'd be worse idiots than their customers if they didn't. It's the same way with plays. The people who go to the theater want to be amused without the necessity of doing even a little thinking. Why, a few years ago when Wallack was running such things as 'She Stoops to Conquer,' 'School for Scandal,' 'London Assurance,' and the like, in his old Thirteenth Street theater, with Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, Harry Montague, John Gilbert, Harry Beckett, and a lot of other really great actors in the casts, he played to slender houses, while just around the corner there wasn't standing room when 'Pink Dominoes' was on." My acquaintance with Donn Piatt began in a rather curious way. Some time before, there had appeared in one of the magazines a series of letters signed "Arthur Richmond." They were political philippics, inspired chiefly by a reckless, undiscriminating spirit of attack. They were as mysterious in their origin as the letters of Junius, but otherwise they bore little if any of the assumed and intended resemblance to that celebrated series. There was little of judgment, discretion, or discrimination in them, and still less of conscience. But they attracted widespread attention and the secret of their authorship was a matter of a good deal of popular curiosity. A number of very distinguished men were mentioned as conjectural possibilities in that connection. Even after the letters themselves had ceased to be of consequence, a certain measure of curiosity as to their authorship survived, so that any newspaper revelation of the secret was exceedingly desirable. One day somebody told me that Donn Piatt had written them. Personally I did not know him, but in the freemasonry of literature and journalism every man in the profession knows every other man in it well enough at least for purposes of correspondence. So I wrote a half playful letter to Donn Piatt, saying that somebody had charged him with the authorship of that "iniquitous trash"--for so I called it--and asking him if I might affirm or deny the statement in the _World_. He replied in a characteristic letter, in which he said: [Sidenote: "A Syndicate of Blackguards"] "I was one of a syndicate of blackguards engaged to write the 'Arthur Richmond' letters and I did write some of them. You and I ought to know each other personally and we don't. Why won't you come up to the ---- Club to-night and help me get rid of one of the infamous table d-hôte dinners they sell there for seventy-five cents? Then I'll tell you all about the 'Arthur Richmond' letters and about any other crimes of my commission that may interest you. Meanwhile, I'm sending you a letter for publication in answer to your inquiry about that particular atrocity." As we talked that night and on succeeding occasions, Donn Piatt told me many interesting anecdotes of his career as a newspaper correspondent much given to getting into difficulty with men in high place by reason of his freedom in criticism and his vitriolic way of saying what he had to say in the most effective words he could find. "You see the dictionary was my ruin," he said after relating one of his anecdotes. "I studied it not wisely but too well in my youth, and it taught me a lot of words that have always seemed to me peculiarly effective in the expression of thought, but to which generals and statesmen and the other small fry of what is called public life, seem to have a rooted objection. By the way, did you ever hear that I once committed arson?" I pleaded ignorance of that incident in his career, and added: "I shall be interested to hear of that crime if you're sure it is protected by the statute of limitations. I shouldn't like to be a witness to a confession that might send you to the penitentiary." "Oh, I don't know that that would be so bad," he interrupted. "I'm living with my publisher now, you know, and a change might not prove undesirable. However, the crime is outlawed by time now. And besides, I didn't myself set fire to the building. I'm guilty only under the legal maxim 'Qui facit per alium facit per se.' The way of it was this: When I was a young man trying to get into a law practice out in Ohio, and eager to advertise myself by appearing in court, a fellow was indicted for arson. He came to me, explaining that he had no money with which to pay a lawyer, but that he thought I might like to appear in a case so important, and that if I would do the best I could for him, he stood ready to do anything for me that he could, by way of recompense. I took the case, of course. It was a complex one and it offered opportunities for browbeating and 'balling up' witnesses--a process that specially impresses the public with the sagacity of a lawyer who does it successfully. Then, if by any chance I should succeed in acquitting my client, my place at the bar would be assured as that of 'a sharp young feller, who had beaten the prosecuting attorney himself.' "But in telling my client I would take his case the demon of humor betrayed me. Just across the street from my lodging was a negro church, and there was a 'revival' going on at the time. They 'revived' till two o'clock or later every night with shoutings that interfered with my sleep. With playful impulse I said to the accused man: "'You seem to be an expert in the arts of arson. If you'll burn that negro church I'll feel that you have paid me full price for my service in defending you.' "I defended him and, as the witnesses against him were all of shady character, I succeeded in securing his acquittal. About four o'clock the next morning a fire broke out under all four corners of that negro church, and before the local fire department got a quart of water into action, it was a heap of smouldering ashes--hymn-books and all. A week or so later I received a letter from my ex-client. He wrote from St. Louis, 'on his way west,' he said. He expressed the hope that I was 'satisfied with results,' and begged me to believe that he was 'a man of honor who never failed to repay an obligation or reward a service.'" With Donn Piatt's permission I told that story several times. Presently I read it in brief form in a newspaper where the hero of it was set down as "Tom Platt." I suppose the reporter in that case confused the closely similar sounds of "Donn Piatt" and "Tom Platt." At any rate, it seems proper to say that the venerable ex-Senator from New York never practiced law in Ohio and never even unintentionally induced the burning of a church. The story was Donn Piatt's and the experience was his. LXVI [Sidenote: First Acquaintance with Mr. Pulitzer] I first made Mr. Pulitzer's personal acquaintance in Paris, where he was living at that time. I had been at work on the _World_ for a comparatively brief while, when he asked me to visit him there--an invitation which he several times afterwards repeated, each time with increased pleasure to me. On the occasion of my first visit to him, he said to me one evening at dinner: "I have invited you here with the primary purpose that you shall have a good time. But secondly, I want to see you as often as I can. We have luncheon at one o'clock, and dinner at seven-thirty. I wish you'd take luncheon and dinner with me as often as you can, consistently with my primary purpose that you shall have a good time. If you've anything else on hand that interests you more, you are not to come to luncheon or dinner, and I will understand. But if you haven't anything else on hand, I sincerely wish you'd come." In all my experience--even in Virginia during the old, limitlessly hospitable plantation days--I think I never knew a hospitality superior to this--one that left the guest so free to come on the one hand and so entirely free to stay away without question if he preferred that. I, who have celebrated hospitality of the most gracious kind in romances of Virginia, where hospitality bore its most gorgeous blossoms and its richest fruitage, bear witness that I have known no such exemplar of that virtue in its perfect manifestation as Joseph Pulitzer. Years afterwards, at Bar Harbor, I had been working with him night and day over editorial problems of consequence, and, as I sat looking on at a game of chess in which he was engaged one evening, he suddenly ordered me to bed. "You've been overworking," he said. "You are to go to bed now, and you are not to get up till you feel like getting up--even if it is two days hence. Go, I tell you, and pay no heed to hours or anything else. You shall not be interrupted in your sleep." I was very weary and I went to bed. The next morning--or I supposed it to be so--I waked, and looked at my watch. It told me it was six o'clock. I tried to woo sleep again, but the effort was a failure. I knew that breakfast would not be served for some hours to come, but I simply could not remain in bed longer. I knew where a certain dear little lad of the family kept his fishing tackle and his bait. I decided that I would get up, take a cold plunge, pilfer the tackle, and spend an hour or two down on the rocks fishing. [Sidenote: Mr. Pulitzer's Kindly Courtesy] With this intent I slipped out of my room, making no noise lest I should wake some one from his morning slumber. The first person I met was Mr. Pulitzer. He gleefully greeted me with congratulations upon the prolonged sleep I had had, and after a brief confusion of mind, I found that it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and that my unwound watch had misled me. In his anxiety that I should have my sleep out, Mr. Pulitzer had shut off the entire half of the building in which my bedroom lay, and had stationed a servant as sentinel to prohibit intrusion upon that part of the premises and to forbid everything in the nature of noise. Mr. Pulitzer himself never rested, in the days of my association with him. His mind knew no surcease of its activity. He slept little, and with difficulty. His waking hours, whether up or in bed, were given to a ceaseless wrestling with the problems that belong to a great newspaper's conduct. I have known him to make an earnest endeavor to dismiss these for a time. To that end he would peremptorily forbid all reference to them in the conversation of those about him. But within the space of a few minutes he would be in the midst of them again, and completely absorbed. But he recognized the necessity of rest for brains other than his own, and in all kindly ways sought to secure and even to compel it. I remember once at Bar Harbor, when for two or three days and nights in succession I had been at work on something he greatly wanted done, he said to me at breakfast: "You're tired, and that task is finished. I want you to rest, and, of course, so long as you and I remain together you can't rest. Your brain is active and so is mine. If we stay in each other's company we shall talk, and with us talk means work. In five minutes we'll be planning some editorial crusade, and you'll get to work again. So I want you to go away from me. Let Eugene drive you to the village, and there secure an open carriage and a pair of good horses--the best you can get--and drive all over this interesting island. Get yourself rested. And when you come back, don't let me talk newspaper with you, till you've had a night's sleep." It was in that kindly spirit that Mr. Pulitzer always treated his lieutenants when he invited them to pass a time with him. So long as he and they were together, he could not help working them almost to death. But, when he realized their weariness, he sent them off to rest, on carriage drives or yachting voyages or what not, with generous consideration of their inability to carry weight as he did night and day and every day and every night. Sometimes his eagerness in work led him to forget his own kindly purpose. I remember once when I had been writing all day and throughout most of the night in execution of his prolific inspiration, he suddenly became aware of the fact that I must be weary. Instantly he said: "You must rest. You must take a carriage or a boat and go off somewhere. Think out where it shall be, for yourself. But you sha'n't do another thing till you've had a good rest." Then, as we strolled out into the porch and thence to the sea wall against which the breakers were recklessly dashing themselves to pieces, he suddenly thought of something. In a minute we were engaged in discussing that something, and half an hour later I was busy in my room, with books of reference all about me, working out that something, and it was three o'clock next morning before I finished the writing of what he wanted written on that theme. At breakfast next morning I was late, and the fact reminded him of the plans he had formed twenty-four hours before for a rest for me. He refused even to light a cigar until I should be gone. "If we smoke together," he said, "we shall talk. If we talk we shall become interested and you'll be set to work again. Get you hence. Let me see no more of you till dinner to-night. In the meantime, do what you will to rest yourself. That's my only concern now. Drive, sail, row, loaf, play billiards--do whatever will best rest you." I relate these things by way of showing forth one side of the character of a man who has wrought a revolution in the world. I have other things to relate that show forth another side of that interestingly complex nature. [Sidenote: The Maynard Case] In his anxiety to secure terseness of editorial utterance he at one time limited all editorials to fifty lines each. As I had final charge of the editorial page on four nights of the week, I found myself obliged, by the rule, to spoil many compact articles written by other men, by cutting out a line or two from things already compacted "to the limit." I said this to Mr. Pulitzer one day, and he replied: "Well, just to show you that I have no regard for cast-iron rules, I am going to ask you now to write four columns on a subject of public importance." The subject was the nomination of Judge Maynard for Justice of the Court of Appeals. Judge Maynard stood accused of--let us say questionable--conduct in judicial office in relation to certain election proceedings. The details have no place here. Judge Maynard had never been impeached, and his friends indignantly repudiated every suggestion that his judicial conduct had been in any wise influenced by partisan considerations. His enemies--and they were many, including men of high repute in his own party--contended that his judicial course in that election matter unfitted him for election to the higher office. I have every reason to believe--every reason that eleven years of editorial association can give--that in every case involving the public welfare, or public morality, or official fitness, Mr. Pulitzer sincerely desires to ascertain the facts and to govern his editorial course accordingly. I have never been able to regard him as a Democrat or a Republican in politics. He has impressed me always as an opportunist, caring far more for practical results than for doctrinaire dogmas. In this Maynard case the contentions were conflicting, the assertions contradictory, and the facts uncertain so far at least as the _World_ knew them. "I want you to go into the Maynard case," said Mr. Pulitzer to me, "with an absolutely unprejudiced mind. We hold no brief for or against him, as you know. I want you to get together all the documents in the case. I want you to take them home and study them as minutely as if you were preparing yourself for an examination. I want you to regard yourself as a judicial officer, oath-bound to justice, and when you shall have mastered the facts and the law in the case, I want you to set them forth in a four-column editorial that every reader of the _World_ can easily understand." This was only one of many cases in which he set me or some other lieutenant to find out facts and determine what justice demanded, in order that justice might be done. In 1896, when the Democratic party made its surrender to populism and wild-eyed socialism by nominating Bryan, I was at the convention in Chicago, telegraphing editorial articles. I foreshadowed the nomination as inevitable, contrary to the predictions of the _World's_ newsgatherers in the convention. Instantly, and before the nomination was made, Mr. Pulitzer telegraphed me from Bar Harbor, to come to him at once. By the time I got there the nomination was a fact accomplished. Mr. Pulitzer said to me: "I'm not going to tell you what my own views of the situation are, or what I think ought to be the course of the _World_, as a foremost Democratic newspaper, under the circumstances. No"--seeing that I was about to speak--"don't say a word about your own views. They are necessarily hasty and ill-considered as yet, just as my own are. I want you to take a full twenty-four hours for careful thought. At the end of that time I want you to write out your views of the policy the _World_ ought to adopt, giving your reasons for every conclusion reached." Mr. Pulitzer did not adopt precisely the policy I recommended on that occasion. But the _World_ refused to support the Bryan candidacy with its fundamental idea of debasing the currency by the free coinage of silver dollars intrinsically worth only fifty cents apiece or less. [Sidenote: Bryan's Message and the Reply] While I was still his guest on that mission, there came to Bar Harbor an emissary from Mr. Bryan, who asked for an interview with Mr. Pulitzer in Mr. Bryan's behalf. As I happened to know the young man, Mr. Pulitzer asked me to see him in his stead and to receive his message. Armed with full credentials as Mr. Pulitzer's accredited representative, I visited the young ambassador, and made careful notes of the message he had to deliver. It was to this effect: Mr. Bryan was unselfishly anxious to save the reputation of the newspaper press as a power in public affairs. His election by an overwhelming majority, he said, was certain beyond all possibility of doubt or question. But if it should be accomplished without the support of the _World_ or any other of the supposedly influential Democratic newspapers, there must be an end to the tradition of press power and newspaper influence in politics. For the sake of the press, and especially of so great a newspaper as the _World_, therefore, Mr. Bryan asked Mr. Pulitzer's attention to this danger to prestige. When I delivered this message to Mr. Pulitzer, he laughed. Then he gave me a truly remarkable exhibition of his masterful knowledge of American political conditions, and of his sagacious prescience. He asked me to jot down some figures as he should give them to me. He named the states that would vote for Bryan with the number of electoral votes belonging to each. Then he gave me the list of states that would go against Bryan, with their electoral strength. When I had put it all down, he said: "I don't often predict--never unless I know. But you may embody that table in an editorial, predicting that the result of the election four months hence will be very nearly, if not exactly, what those lists foreshadow. Let that be our answer to Mr. Bryan's audacious message." The campaign had not yet opened. Mr. Bryan had just been nominated with positively wild enthusiasm. The movement which afterwards put Palmer in the field as an opposing Democratic candidate had not yet been thought of. All conditions suggested uncertainty, and yet, as we sat there in his little private porch at Bar Harbor, Mr. Pulitzer correctly named every state that would give its electoral vote to each candidate, and the returns of the election--four months later--varied from his prediction of results by only two electoral votes out of four hundred and forty-seven. And that infinitesimal variation resulted solely from the fact that by some confusion of ballots in California and Kentucky each of those states gave one vote to Bryan and the rest to his opponent. I have known nothing in the way of exact political prescience, long in advance of the event, that equaled this or approached it. I record it as phenomenal. LXVII [Sidenote: A Napoleonic Conception] Ever since the time when he bought two St. Louis newspapers, both of which were losing money, combined them, and made of them one of the most profitable newspaper properties in the country, Mr. Pulitzer's methods have been Napoleonic both in the brilliancy of their conception and in the daring of their execution. I may here record as a personal recollection the story of one of his newspaper achievements. The fact of it is well enough known; the details of its dramatic execution have never been told, I think. In February, 1895, the government of the United States found it necessary to issue $62,300,000 in four per cent., thirty-year bonds, to make good the depletion of the gold reserve in the treasury. The bonds were sold to a syndicate at the rate of 104-3/4. Once on the market, they quickly advanced in price until they were sold by the end of that year at 118, and, if any bank or investor wanted them in considerable quantities, the price paid was 122 or more. At the beginning of the next year it was announced that the treasury would sell $200,000,000 more of precisely the same bonds, printed from the same plates, payable at the same time, and in all respects undistinguishable from those of the year before--at that time in eager popular demand at 118 to 122. It was also announced that the treasury had arranged to sell these bonds--worth 118 or more in the open market--to the same old Morgan syndicate "at about the same price" (104-3/4), at which the preceding issue had been sold. Mr. Pulitzer justly regarded this as a scandalous proposal to give the syndicate more than twenty-six millions of dollars of the people's money in return for no service whatever. The banks and the people of the country wanted these bonds at 118 or more, and banks and bankers in other countries were equally eager to get them at the same rate. It seemed to him, as it seemed to every other well-informed person, that this was a reckless waste of the people's money, the scandalous favoring of a syndicate of speculators, and a damaging blow to the national credit. But, unlike most other well-informed persons, Mr. Pulitzer refused to regard the situation as one beyond saving, although it was given out from Washington that the bargain with the syndicate was already irrevocably made. Mr. Pulitzer set his editorial writers at work to make the facts of the case clear to every intelligent mind; to show forth the needlessness of the proposed squandering; to emphasize the scandal of this dealing in the dark with a gang of Wall Street bettors upon a certainty; and to demonstrate the people's readiness and even eagerness to subscribe for the bonds at a much higher rate than the discrediting one at which the Treasury had secretly agreed to sell them to the syndicate. When all this had been done, to no purpose so far as I could see, inasmuch as the response from Washington was insistent to the effect that the sale was already agreed upon, Mr. Pulitzer one afternoon summoned me to go at once to Lakewood, where he was staying at the time. The train by which alone I could go was to arrive at Lakewood after the departure of the last train thence for New York that evening, and I mentioned that fact over the telephone. For reply I was asked to come anyhow. When I got there night had already fallen, and as I was without even so much as a handbag, I anticipated a night of makeshift at the hotel. But as I entered Mr. Pulitzer's quarters he greeted me and said: "Come in quickly. We must talk rapidly and to the point. You think you're to stay here all night, but you're mistaken. As this is your night to be in charge of the editorial page, you must be in the office of the _World_ at ten o'clock. I've ordered a special train to take you back. It will start at eight o'clock and run through in eighty minutes. Meanwhile, we have much to arrange, so we must get to work." [Sidenote: A Challenge to the Government] E. O. Chamberlin, the managing editor of the news department of the _World_, was there and had already received his instructions. To me Mr. Pulitzer said: "We have made our case in this matter of the bond issue. We have presented the facts clearly, convincingly, conclusively, but the Administration refuses to heed them. We are now going to compel it to heed them on pain of facing a scandal that no administration could survive. "What we demand is that these bonds shall be sold to the public at something like their actual value and not to a Wall Street syndicate for many millions less. You understand all that. You are to write a double-leaded article to occupy the whole editorial space to-morrow morning. You are not to print a line of editorial on any other subject. You are to set forth, in compact form and in the most effective way possible, the facts of the case and the considerations that demand a popular or at least a public loan instead of this deal with a syndicate, suggestive as it is of the patent falsehood that the United States Treasury's credit needs 'financing.' You are to declare, with all possible emphasis that the banks, bankers, and people of the United States stand ready and eager to lend their government all the money it wants at three per cent. interest, and to buy its four per cent. bonds at a premium that will amount to that." He went on in this way, outlining the article he wanted me to write. "Then, as a guarantee of the sincerity of our conviction you are to say that the _World_ offers in advance to take one million dollars of the new bonds at the highest market price, if they are offered to the public in open market. "In the meanwhile, Chamberlin has a staff of men sending out despatches to every bank and banker in the land, setting forth our demand for a public loan instead of a syndicate dicker, and asking each for what amount of the new bonds it or he will subscribe on a three per cent. basis. To-morrow morning's paper will carry with your editorial its complete confirmation in their replies, and the proposed loan will be oversubscribed on a three per cent. basis. Even Mr. Cleveland's phenomenal self-confidence and Mr. Carlisle's purblind belief in Wall Street methods will not be able to withstand such a demonstration as that. It will _compel a public loan_. If it is true that the contract with the syndicate has already been made, _they must cancel it_. The voice of the country will be heard in the subscription list we shall print to-morrow morning, and the voice of the country has compelling power, even under this excessively self-confident administration. Now, you're faint with hunger. Hurry over to the hotel and get a bite to eat. You have thirty minutes before your special train leaves." I hurried to the hotel, but I spent that thirty minutes, not in eating but in making a written report, for my own future use, of Mr. Pulitzer's instructions. The memorandum thus made is the basis of what I have written above. The climax of the great national drama thus put upon the stage was worthy of the genius that inspired it. The responses of the banks and bankers--sent in during the night--showed a tremendous oversubscription of the proposed loan at a price that would yield to the government many millions more than the syndicate sale offered, and there remained unheard from the thousands and tens of thousands of private persons who were eager to buy the bonds as investment securities. In the face of the facts thus demonstrated, it would have been political suicide for the men in control at Washington to refuse a public loan and to sell the bonds to the syndicate for millions less than the people were eager to pay for them. The administration yielded to moral force, but it did so grudgingly and with manifest reluctance. It cut down the proposed loan to the minimum that the Treasury must have, and it hedged it about with every annoying device that might embarrass willing investors and prevent the subscriptions of others than banks and bankers. In spite of all such efforts to minimize the administration's defeat, the bond issue was promptly taken up at a price that saved many millions to the Treasury, and within a brief while the very bonds that Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Carlisle had so insistently desired to sell to the syndicate at 104-3/4 were very hard to get in the open market at 133 or more. [Sidenote: The Power of the Press] I have related this incident with some fullness because I know of no other case in which the "power of the press"--which being interpreted means the power of public opinion--to control reluctant political and governmental forces, has been so dramatically illustrated. The only other case comparable with it was that in which not one newspaper but practically all the newspapers in the land with a united voice saved the country from chaos and civil war by compelling a wholly unwilling and very obstinate Congress to find a way out of the electoral controversy between Tilden and Hayes. No newspaper man who was in Washington at any time during that controversy doubts or can doubt that the two Houses of Congress would have adhered obstinately to their opposing views until the end, with civil war as a necessary consequence, but for the ceaseless insistence of all the newspapers of both parties that they should devise and agree upon some peaceful plan by which the controversy might be adjusted. At the time when the prospect seemed darkest I asked Carl Schurz for his opinion of the outcome. He replied, with that intense earnestness in his voice and words which his patriotism always gave to them in times of public danger: "If left to the two Houses of Congress to decide--and that is where the Constitution leaves it--the question will not be decided; on the contrary, the more they discuss it, the more intense and unyielding their obstinate determination not to agree will become. If it isn't settled before the fourth of March, God only knows what the result will be--civil war and chaos are the only things to be foreseen. But if left alone, as I say, the two Houses of Congress will to the end refuse to agree upon any plan of adjustment. The outlook is very gloomy, very discouraging, very black. Only a tremendous pressure of public opinion can save us from results more calamitous than any that the human mind can conceive. If the newspapers can be induced to see the danger and realize its extent--if they can persuade themselves to put aside their partisanship and unite in an insistent demand that Congress shall find a way out, a peaceful result may be compelled. Fortunately, the Southern men in both houses are eager for the accomplishment of that. They and their constituents have had enough and to spare of civil war. They may be easily won to the support of any plan that promises to bring about a peaceful solution of the controversy. But public opinion, as reflected in the newspapers, must compel Congress, or nothing will be done." LXVIII [Sidenote: Recollections of Carl Schurz] This mention of Mr. Schurz reminds me of some other occasions on which I had intercourse with him. He and I many times served together on committees that had to do with matters of public interest. We were members of the same clubs, and we saw much of each other at private dinners and in other social ways, so that I came to know him well and to appreciate at its full value that absolute honesty of mind which I regard as his distinguishing characteristic. Without that quality of sincerity, and with a conscience less exigent and less resolute than his, Carl Schurz's political career might have compassed any end that ambition set before him. That is perhaps a reflection on public life and the men engaged in it. If so, I cannot help it. As it was, he never hesitated for a moment to "quarrel with his bread and butter" if his antagonism to wrong, and especially to everything that militated against human liberty, called for such quarreling. He was above all things a patriot in whose estimation considerations of the public welfare outweighed, overrode, and trampled to earth all other considerations of what kind soever. Party was to him no more than an implement, a tool for the accomplishment of patriotic ends, and he gave to party no allegiance whatever beyond the point at which it ceased to serve such ends. He was always ready to quarrel with his own party and quit it for cause, even when it offered him high preferment as the reward of continued allegiance. In the same way, he held the scales true in all his judgments of men. Mr. Lincoln once wrote him a letter--often quoted by his enemies--which any "statesman" of the accepted type would have regarded as an unforgivable affront. Yet in due time Mr. Schurz wrote an appreciative estimate of Lincoln which has no fit fellow in the whole body of Lincoln literature. His judgments of men and measures were always the honest conclusions of an honest mind that held in reverence no other creed than that of truth and preached no other gospel than that of human liberty. One evening I sat with him at a little dinner given by Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the historian. Paul Leicester Ford sat between him and me, while on my right sat our hostess and some other gentlewomen. Our hostess presently asked me what I thought of a certain distinguished personage whose name was at that time in everybody's mouth, and whose popularity--chiefly won by genial, humorous, after-dinner speaking--was wholly unmatched throughout the country. I do not mention his name, because he still lives and is under a cloud. I answered that I thought him one of the worst and most dangerous of popular public men, adding: "He has done more than any other man living to corrupt legislatures and pervert legislation to the service of iniquitous corporations." Mr. Schurz, who was talking to some one at the other end of the table, caught some hint of what I had said. He instantly turned upon me with a demand that I should repeat it. I supposed that a controversy was coming, and by way of challenging the worst, I repeated what I had said, with added emphasis. Mr. Schurz replied: "You are right so far as your criticism goes. The man has done all that you charge in the way of corrupting legislatures and perverting legislation. He has made a business of it. But that is the very smallest part of his offense against morality, good government, and free institutions. His far greater sin is that he has _made corruption respectable_, in the eyes of the people. And those who invite him to banquets and set him to speak there, and noisily applaud him, are all of them partners in his criminality whether they know it or not." [Sidenote: Mr. Schurz's Patriotism] One other conversation with Mr. Schurz strongly impressed me with his exalted character and the memory of it lingers in my mind. In the summer of the year 1900, when Mr. Bryan was nominated for the second time for President, on a platform strongly reaffirming his free silver policy and everything else for which he had stood in 1896, it was given out that Carl Schurz, who had bitterly and effectively opposed him in 1896, intended now to support him. I had finally withdrawn from the _World's_ service, and from newspaper work of every kind, and was passing the summer in literary work at my cottage on Lake George. But the _World_ telegraphed me asking me to see Mr. Schurz, who was also a Lake George cottager, and get from him some statement of his reasons for now supporting the man and the policies that he had so strenuously opposed four years before. I had no idea that Mr. Schurz would give me any such statement for publication, but he and I had long been friends, and a call upon him would occupy a morning agreeably, with the remote chance that I might incidentally render a service to my friends of the _World_ staff. Therefore, I went. Mr. Schurz told me frankly that he could give me nothing for publication, just as I had expected that he would do. "I am going to make one or two speeches in this campaign," he said, "and anything I might give you now would simply take the marrow out of my speeches. But personally I shall be glad to talk the matter over with you. It seems to me to be one of positively vital importance--not to parties, for now that I have come to the end of an active life I care nothing for parties--but to our country and to the cause of human liberty." "You think human liberty is involved?" I asked. "Yes, certainly. Those conceptions upon which human liberty rests in every country in the world had their birth in the colonies out of which this nation was formed and they were first effectively formulated in the Declaration of Independence and enacted into fundamental law in our Constitution. The spectacle of a great, free, rich, and powerful nation securely built upon those ideas as its foundation has been an inspiration to all other peoples, and better still, a compulsion upon all rulers. If that inspiration is lost, and that compulsion withdrawn, the brutal military force that buttresses thrones will quickly undo all that our influence has accomplished in teaching men their rights and warning monarchs of their limitations." In answer to further questions he went on to say: "The spirit of imperialism--which is the arch-enemy of human liberty--is rampant in the land, and it seems to me the supreme duty of every man who loves liberty to oppose it with all his might, at whatever sacrifice of lesser things he may find to be necessary. I am as antagonistic to Mr. Bryan's free silver policy and to some other policies of his as I was four years ago. But the time has come when men on the other side jeer at the Declaration of Independence and mock at the Constitution itself. There is danger in this--a danger immeasurably greater than any that financial folly threatens. It seems to me time for a revolution--not a revolution of violence or one which seeks overthrow, but a revolution of public opinion designed to restore the landmarks and bring the country back to its foundations of principle. Financial folly, such as Mr. Bryan advocates, threatens us with nothing worse than a temporary disturbance of business affairs. Imperialism threatens us with the final destruction of those ideas and principles that have made our country great in itself and immeasurably greater in its influence upon thought and upon the welfare of humanity in every country on earth." I have recorded Mr. Schurz's words here, as nearly as a trained memory allows me to do, not with the smallest concern for the political issues of nine years ago, but solely because his utterances on that occasion seem to me to have shown forth, as nothing else could have done, the high inspiration of his patriotism, and to explain what many have regarded as the inconsistencies of his political attitude at various periods of his life. That so-called inconsistency was in fact a higher consistency. His allegiance was at all times given to principles, to ideas, to high considerations of right and of human liberty, and in behalf of these he never hesitated to sacrifice his political prospects, his personal advantage, or anything else that he held to be of less human consequence. LXIX [Sidenote: The End of Newspaper Life] In the spring of the year 1900 I finally ceased to be a newspaper worker. I was weary, almost beyond expression, of the endless grind of editorial endeavor. My little summer home in the woodlands on Lake George lured me to the quiet, independent, literary life that I had always desired. There was an accumulation in my mind of things I longingly desired to do, and the opportunity to do them came. Above all, I wanted to be free once more--to be nobody's "hired man," to be subject to no man's control, however generous and kindly that control might be. Life conditions at my place, "Culross," were ideal, with no exacting social obligations, with plenty of fishing, rowing, and sailing, with my giant pines, hemlocks, oaks, and other trees for companions, and with the sweetest air to breathe that human lungs could desire. I had just published a boys' book that passed at once into second and successive editions. The publishers of it had asked me for more books of that kind, and still more insistently for novels, while with other publishers the way was open to me for some historical and biographical writings and for works of other kinds, that I had long planned. Under these favorable circumstances I joyously established anew the literary workshop which had twice before been broken up by that "call of the wild," the lure of journalism. This time, the summer-time shop consisted, and still consists, of a cozy corner in one of the porches of my rambling, rock-perched cottage. There, sheltered from the rain when it came and from the fiercer of the winds, I spread a broad rug on the floor and placed my writing table and chair upon it, and there for ten years I have done my work in my own way, at my own times, and in all other ways as it has pleased me to do it. In that corner, I have only to turn my head in order to view the most beautiful of all lakes lying almost at my feet and only thirty or forty feet away. If I am seized with the impulse to go fishing, my fishing boat with its well-stocked bait wells is there inviting me. If I am minded to go upon the water for rest and thought--or to be rid of thought for a time--there are other boats in my dock, boats of several sorts and sizes, among which I am free to choose. If the weather is inclement, there are open fireplaces within the house and an ample stock of wood at hand. [Sidenote: Life at Culross] For ten years past I have spent all my summers in these surroundings-- staying at "Culross" four or five or even six months in each year and returning to town only for the period of winter stress. During the ten years in which that corner of the porch has been my chief workshop, I have added twenty-odd books to the dozen or so published before, besides doing other literary work amounting to about an equal product, and if I live, the end is not yet. I make this statistical statement as an illustration of the stimulating effect of freedom upon the creative faculty. The man who must do anything else--if it be only to carry a cane, or wear cuffs, or crease his trousers, or do any other thing that involves attention and distracts the mind, is seriously handicapped for creative work of any kind. I have worked hard, of course. He who would make a living with his pen must do that of necessity. But the work has been always a joy to me, and such weariness as it brings is only that which gives added pleasure to the rest that follows. LXX Every literary worker has his own methods, and I have never known any one of them to adopt the methods of another with success. Temperament has a good deal to do with it; habit, perhaps, a good deal more, and circumstance more than all. I have always been an extemporaneous writer, if I may apply the adjective to writers as we do to speakers. I have never been able to sit down and "compose" anything before writing it. I have endeavored always to master the subjects of my writing by study and careful thought, but I have never known when I wrote a first sentence or a first chapter what the second was to be. I think from the point of my pen, so far at least as my thinking formulates itself in written words. I suppose this to be a consequence of my thirty-odd years of newspaper experience. In the giddy, midnight whirl of making a great newspaper there is no time for "first drafts," "outline sketches," "final revisions," and all that sort of thing. When the telegraph brings news at midnight that requires a leader--perhaps in double leads--the editorial writer has an hour or less, with frequent interruptions, in which to write his article, get it into type, revise the proofs, and make up the page that contains it. He has no choice but to write extemporaneously. He must hurriedly set down on paper what his newspaper has to say on the subject, and send his sheets at once to the printers, sometimes keeping messenger boys at his elbow to take the pages from his hand one after another as fast as they are written. His only opportunity for revision is on the proof slips, and even in that he is limited by the necessity of avoiding every alteration that may involve the overrunning of a line. In this and other ways born of necessity, the newspaper writer learns the art of extemporaneous writing, which is only another way of saying that he learns how to write at his best in the first instance, without lazily depending upon revision for smoothness, clearness, terseness, and force. He does not set down ill-informed or ill-considered judgments. Every hour of every day of his life is given to the close study of the subjects upon which he is at last called upon to write under stress of tremendous hurry. He knows all about his theme. He has all the facts at his fingers' ends. He is familiar with every argument that has been or can be made on the questions involved. He knows all his statistics, and his judgments have been carefully thought out in advance. His art consists in the ability to select on the instant what phases of the subject he will treat, and to write down his thought clearly, impressively, convincingly, and in the best rhetorical form he can give it. [Sidenote: Extemporaneous Writing] I think that one who has acquired that habit of extemporaneous writing about things already mastered in thought can never learn to write in any other way. Both experience and observation have convinced me that men of that intellectual habit do more harm than good to their work when they try to improve it by revision. Revision in every such case is apt to mean elaboration, and elaboration is nearly always a weakening dilution of thought. I am disposed to think that whatever saves trouble to the writer is purchased at the expense of the reader. The classic dictum that "easy writing makes hard reading" is as true to-day as it was when Horace made laborious use of the flat end of his stylus. For myself, at any rate, I have never been able to "dictate," either "to the machine," or to a stenographer, with satisfactory results, nor have I ever known anybody else to do so without some sacrifice to laziness of that which it is worth a writer's while to toil for. The stenographer and the typewriter have their place as servants of commerce, but in literature they tend to diffusion, prolixity, inexactitude, and, above all, to carelessness in that choice of words that makes the difference between grace and clumsiness, lucidity and cloud, force and feebleness. In the writing of novels, I have always been seriously embarrassed by the strange perversity of fictitious people. That is a matter that has puzzled and deeply interested me ever since I became a practising novelist. The most ungrateful people in the world are the brain-children of the novelist, the male and female folk whose existence is due to the good will of the writer. Born of the travail of the novelist's brain, and endowed by him with whatever measure of wit, wisdom, or wealth they possess; personally conducted by him in their struggles toward the final happiness he has foreordained for them at the end of the story; cared for; coddled; listened to and reported even when they talk nonsense, and not infrequently when they only think it; laboriously brought to the attention of other people; pushed, if possible, into a fame they could never have achieved for themselves; they nevertheless obstinately persist in thwarting their creator's purpose and doing as they wickedly please to his sore annoyance and vexation of spirit. In truth, the author of a story has very little control over its course after he has once laid its foundations. The novel is not made--it grows, and the novelist does little more than plant the seed and keep the growth unchoked by weeds. He is as powerless to make it other than what it tends to be as the gardener is to grow tomatoes on corn-stalks or cucumbers on pea-vines. He may create for the story what manner of people he pleases, just as the gardener may choose the seed he will plant; but once created these fictitious people will behave according to their individual natures without heed to the wishes of the author of their being. In other words, the novelist is under bond to his conscience to represent his personages as talking and acting precisely as such personages would talk and act under the circumstances in which he has placed them. It often happens that their sentiments, their utterances, and their conduct do not fit into the author's preconceived arrangement of happenings, so that he must alter his entire story or important parts of it to make it true. I have borrowed the last few paragraphs from a playful paper I wrote for an obscure magazine thirty-odd years ago, because they suggest a trouble that must come to every conscientious novelist many times during the writing of every story. There come times when the novelist doesn't know what happened, and must toilsomely explore his consciousness by way of finding out. [Sidenote: Working Hours and Working Ways] My working hours are determined by circumstances--morning, afternoon, evening, or late at night. When there is a "must" involved, I work when I must; when I am free I work when I choose or when I feel that I can. I never carry my work to bed with me, and I never let it rob me of a moment's sleep. To avoid that I usually play a game or two of solitaire --perhaps the least intellectual of all possible occupations--between work and bedtime; and I usually take a walk in the open air just before going to bed, whatever the weather may be. But whatever else happens, I long ago acquired the art of absolutely dismissing the subject of my work from my mind, whenever I please, and the more difficult art of refusing to let any other subject of interest take its place. I do that when I go to bed, and when I do that nothing less than positive physical pain can keep me from going to sleep. I have always been fond of fishing and boating. In summer, at my Lake George cottage, I have a little fleet of small boats moored within twenty paces of my porch-placed writing table. If my mind flags at my work I step into my fishing boat and give an hour or two to a sport that occupies the attention without fatiguing it. If I am seriously perplexed by any work-problem, I take a rowboat, with a pair of eight-foot oars, and go for a ten-mile spin. On my return I find that my problem has completely wrought itself out in my mind without conscious effort on my part. I am fond of flower gardening and, without the least technical skill in it, I usually secure astonishingly good results. The plants seem to respond generously to my uninstructed but kindly attention. In my infancy my mother taught me to begin every day with a plunge into water as cold as I could get, and I have kept up the habit with the greatest benefit. I find it a perfect tonic as well as a luxurious delight. I have always enforced upon myself two rules with respect to literary style: First, to utter my thought simply and with entire sincerity, and, second, never consciously to write or leave a sentence in such form that even a blundering reader might mistake its meaning. Here let me bring to an end these random recollections of a life which has involved hard work, distressing responsibility, and much of disappointment, but which has been filled from the beginning with that joy of success which is the chief reward of endeavor to every man who loves his work and puts conscience into it. THE END INDEX =A= Abbey, Edwin A., 274, 307 Accident, its part in literary work, 181-185 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 174, 191, 192 Alexander, Gen. E. P., 94 America. _See_ United States American authors visiting England, 265, 269 "American Idea," 296, 297 American life, 1840-50, 18-20 American literature provincial, 269-271 Americanism, birthplace of, 27 Amour, 117 Anonymous literary criticism, 203-205 "Appleseed, Johnny," 141 _Appleton's Journal_, 153, 181 Armitage, Rev. Dr., 113-115 Armstrong, Henry, 291 Army of Northern Virginia, 87, 93, 94 Arnold, Matthew, 268 Arthur, T. S., novels of, 25 Ashland, Va., 77 Associated Press, 180, 188, 302, 303 Astor Library, books mutilated, 271 _Atlantic Monthly_, 148, 149, 181 Authors, and editors, 167-172; Virginian, 66-70 Authors Club, organized, 272; presidency, 273; eligibility, 273; meeting-places, 274, 275; in Twenty-fourth Street, 277; social in character, 277, 278; women, 278-280; plainness of quarters, 280; Watch Night, 281, 284; diplomats and statesmen, 284; "Liber Scriptorum," 285, 286. Also 85, 176-178, 228, 232, 254, 258 Authorship, esteemed in Virginia, 66, 67 "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," Holmes's, 219 =B= "Bab Ballads," Gilbert's, 137 Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, 220 Bar Harbor, 295, 320-326 "Barnwell C. H.," 242 Bates House, Indianapolis, 28, 29 Bath, American habits as to, 30, 31 Beauregard, Gen., 87, 237-241 Beecher, Henry Ward, 108 "Ben Bolt," 255 Benjamin, Judah P., 237 Bernhardt, Sara, 229, 230 Berry, Earl D., 290 "Big Brother, The," 181-183 Bigelow, John, 188, 228, 289, 303 Bludso, Jim, 160-162 Blunders, compositors', 241-243; literary, 222-227; telegrapher's, 238, 239 Bohemianism, 177 Book-editing, 234-237 Book notices, 190 Book reviewers, 190 Book reviewing, newspaper, 217 Book sales, predicting, 252-254 Book titles, 154-157 Books, mutilation of, 271; in Virginia, 66 Booth, Edwin, 275, 276 Booth, Postmaster of Brooklyn, 125 "Boots and Saddles," Mrs. Custer's, 252-254 Boston, literary center, 148 Boucicault, Dion, 153 Bound boys and girls, 14, 16 Bowen, Henry C., 100, 128 Boys' stories, 181-185 Bragg, Gen., 238 "Breadwinners, The," 165 Briars, The, 71 Briggs, Charles F., 100-107 British authors visiting America, 265, 268, 269 British condescension, 268 _Broadway Journal_, 100 Brooklyn. N. Y., 31, 99, 115, 117 Brooklyn _Daily Eagle_, 126 Brooklyn _Union_, 99, 100, 105, 107, 110, 113, 115, 116, 128 Brooks, Elbridge S., 185 "Browneyes, Lily," 256-258 Bryan, Wm. J., and the _World_ in 1896, 324-326. Also 335-337 Bryant, Wm. C., 68, 129, 143; conduct of the N. Y. _Evening Post_, 187-189; as a reviewer of books, 190; appoints G. C. Eggleston literary editor of the _Evening Post_, 192-194; character, 194-196; relations with Washington Irving, 196-198; consideration for poets, 199-202, 205, 206; views of anonymous literary criticism, 203-205; estimate of Poe, 207; _Index Expurgatorius_, 209-213; his democracy, 214; opinion of English society, 215-217; estimate of Tennyson and other modern poets, 219; his judgment of English literature, 220, 221 Bull Run, 78 Byron, quoted, 83, 84 =C= Cairo, Ills., 96, 99 "Campaign of Chancellorsville," Dodge's, 208 Campbell, Thomas, 254 Cannon, Capt. John, 161 "Captain Sam," 183 Cary, Alice and Phoebe, 137 Carlisle, John G., 330, 331 Catholicism, 26 Cavalry life, 77-81 Chamberlin, E. O., 329, 330 Champlin, John D., 285 Chance, its part in literary work, 181-185 Charleston, S. C., 86, 164, 241 Checks, bank, in Virginia, 50 Children's stories. _See_ Boys' stories Church, Col. Wm. C., 204 Civil service system, 235 Civil War, changes wrought in Virginia, 73-76 Clay, Henry, 20 Clemens, Samuel L., 150, 160, 259, 265, 281 Cleveland, President, 214, 226, 330, 331 Coan, Dr. Titus Munson, quoted, 228 Cobham Station, 93 Cockerill, John A., 122, 308-312 Co-education, 57 Colman, Mr., 198 Collins, Tom, 89-93 _Commercial Advertiser._ _See under_ New York Compositors, 314, 315 Condescension, British, 268 Congress, U. S., in Tilden-Hayes controversy, 331-333 Constitution, U. S., 226, 336 Conversion, religious, 92 Cooke, John Esten, 59, 67, 69-72, 151, 240 Copy, following, 241-243 Copyright, 153, 154, 231-234, 268 Corruption, political, 124-126, 334, 335 Courtesy in Boston, New York, Virginia, 55, 56 Court-martial, 88, 89 Coward, Edward Fales, 291 Cowley, Abraham, 192 Craig, George, 13, 17 Creek War, 183 Criticism. _See_ Literary criticism "Culross," 338-344 Curtis, George William, 100 Curtis, Gen. Newton Martin, 85 Custer, Mrs., 252-254 Cuyler, Dr. Theo. L., quoted, 147 =D= "Danger in the Dark," 26 Daniel, Senator, of Virginia, 85 Davis, James, 291 Davis, Jefferson, 164, 165, 237-241 Death-bed repentance, 93 Democracy, Bryant's, 214; Cleveland's, 214 "Democracy," 269 Dictation, 341 Dictionaries, 210 Dime novel, 275, 276 Dodd, Mead, and Co., 244 Dodge, Mary Mapes, 131, 132 Dodge, Col. Theodore, 208 Dranesville, Va., 83 Dress, Joaquin Miller on, 175, 176; men's evening, 175-178 Drinking habits. _See_ Temperance Dumont, Mrs. Julia L., 9 Dupont, Ind., 21 Dutcher, Silas B., 125 "Dutchmen," 3 =E= _Eagle_, Brooklyn. _See under_ Brooklyn Early, Jubal A., 76 Editorial responsibility, 207-209 Editorial writing, 110, 313-315, 323, 340 Editors and authors, 167-172 Education, backwoods, 9, 10; modern, 75, 76; present and past in Virginia, 73-76; western, in 1850, 32-34. _See also_ Schools and school-teaching Eggleston, Edward, 21, 22; origin of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," 34-36; connection with _Hearth and Home_, 132; first to utilize in literature the Hoosier life, 145, 146; resigns editorship of _Hearth and Home_, 146; quoted on copyright, 232-234; relations with his brother, 266, 267 Eggleston, George Cary, early recollections, life in the West in the eighteen-forties, 1-20; first railroad journey, 21; free-thinking, 22; early theological thought and reading, 22-26; school-teaching, 34-45; Virginia life, 46-59; occultism, experience of, 60-66; creed, 75; army life, 77; cavalry, 77-81; two experiences, 81-85; artillery, 86, 87; Army of Northern Virginia, 87-96; legal practice, 99; Brooklyn _Union_, 99-129; New York _Evening Post_, 129-131; _Hearth and Home_, 131-135, 145, 146, 148, 151, 180; first books, 146; first novel, 151-155; New Jersey home, 180, 186; boys' stories, 181-185; financial troubles, 186, 187; connection with New York _Evening Post_, 187-231; acquaintance with W. C. Bryant, 192-228; adviser of Harper and Brothers, 231, 234, 236; literary editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_, 287; managing editor, 288; editor-in-chief, 289; health, 292, 306; editorial writer for the _World_, 306-337; retires from journalism, 337; literary habits, 338-344 Eggleston, Guilford Dudley, 184 Eggleston, Joseph, 96, 98 Eggleston, Joseph Cary, 9, 14, 15 Eggleston, Mrs. Mary Jane, 11 Eggleston, Judge Miles Cary, 8 Eggleston family, home of, 46 Election results, predicting, 326 Eliot, George, 255 Elliot, Henry R., 291 "End of the World," E. Eggleston's, 146 English, Thomas Dunn, 172, 255 English authors. _See_ British authors English language, N. Y. _Evening Post's_ standard, 210-214; Virginia usage, 59; Western usage, 8 English society, 215-217 _Evening Post, The._ _See under_ New York Extemporaneous writing, 339-341 =F= "Fable for Critics," 101, 106, 195 Familiarity, President Cleveland contrasted with W. C. Bryant, 214 Farragut, Admiral, quoted, 77 Fawcett, Edgar, 153 Fellows, Col. John R., 121, 122 Fiction, place in 1840-50, 25, 26; writing of, 341, 342 "First of the Hoosiers," quoted, 145 First Regiment of Virginia Cavalry, 77, 78, 81 "Flat Creek," 37 Florida War, 243 Folsom, Dr. François, 291 Ford, Paul Leicester, 278, 279, 334 Foreigners, American attitude toward, 1840-50, 2, 3 Francis, Sir Philip, 223-225 "Franco, Harry," 100, 106 Franklin, Benj., 1, 139 Free-thinking, 22 Free-trade and protection, 20 French Revolution, 108, 109 Fulton, Rev. Dr., 113-115 =G= G., Johnny, 43-45 _Galaxy_, 181, 204 Garfield, Gen., 119 George Eliot, 255 George, Lake, 335, 337. _See also_ "Culross" Ghost story, 60-66 Gilbert, W. S., 137 Gilder, R. W., 172, 272, 273 Godkin, E. L., 230, 231 Godwin, Parke, 100, 188, 189, 227-230, 286-289, 295-300, 305 Gold coin in Plaquemine in 1886, 248-251 Gosse, Edmund, 177, 265-268 Gracie, Gen., 96 Grant, President, 93, 125, 126, 127, 244 _Graphic, The._ _See under_ New York Grebe, Charley, 37, 39-45 Greeley, Horace, 139, 167 =H= Halsted, Dr. Wm. S., 294 "Harold," Tennyson's, 218 Harper and Brothers, 153, 154, 155, 167, 168, 231, 236, 241, 252, 257, 287, 307 Harper, J. Henry, 259 Harper, Joseph W., Jr., 154, 168, 252, 253, 267, 285 _Harper's Magazine_, 141 Hay, John, 157-166, 275, 276 Hayden's "Dictionary of Dates," 234 Hayes-Tilden controversy, 332 _Hearth and Home_, 35, 36, 131-135, 145, 146, 148, 151, 157, 180 Hendrickses, the, 8 "Henry St. John, Gentleman," 69 _Herald, The._ _See under_ New York "Heterophemy," 223-225 Hewitt, Mr., 291 Hill, A. P., 87 Hilton, Judge Henry, 121 Hirsh, Nelson, 291 Historical intuition, 47 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 177; Bryant's estimate of, 219 _Home Journal_, 140 Hoosier dialect, 8, 14 Hoosier life, 145, 146 "Hoosier Schoolmaster, The," 34-36, 37, 41, 145; in England, 233 Hospitality, 17, 320 Hotels in 1840-50, 28-31 "Houp-la," Mrs. Stannard's, 154 "How to Educate Yourself," 147 Howells, Wm. D., 1, 148-150, 204, 258 Humor, newspaper, 282-284 "Hundredth Man," Stockton's, 135, 136 Hurlbut, Wm. Hen., 177 Hutton, Laurence, 272, 274 =I= Ideas, 297, 312 Ignorance in criticism, 226, 227 Illicit distilling in Brooklyn, 123-128 Illustration, newspaper, 179, 180 Imperialism, 336, 337 Independence, personal, 1840-50, 18-20 _Independent, The._ _See under_ New York _Index Expurgatorius_, Bryant's, 209-213 Indian Territory, 183 Indiana, a model in education, 10, 11 Indiana Asbury University, 11 Indianapolis, Ind., 28 Intolerance, 26, 251 Introductions, 255-264 Intuition, historian's, 47 Irving, Washington, relations with Bryant, 196-198 =J= Jackson, Mr., 314 James, G. P. R., 67, 68 Jeffersonianism, 296 John, a good name, 42, 43 "John Bull, Jr.," O'Rell's, 282 Johnson, Gen. Bushrod, 96 Johnson, Rossiter, 285 Johnson's Dictionary, 210 Jokes. _See_ Humor Jones, J. B., 275 Journalism, 116, 292, 293. _See also_ Newspapers, Pulitzer Judd, Orange, and Co., 132 Junius letters, authorship, 223 =K= "Kate Bonnet," Stockton's, 135, 136 Kelly, John, 234 Kentuckians in the Northwest, 9-11 Khedive, 244 Kossuth, Louis, 297, 298 =L= "Lady Gay," steamer, 96-98 Laffan, Wm. M., 304 Lakewood, 328-330 Language. _See_ English language Lanier, Sidney, 262 "Last of the Flatboats, The," 185 "Late Mrs. Null," Stockton's, 135 Lathrop, George Parsons, 150 Latin, 33 Laziness, 17 Lecture system, 108 Lee, Fitzhugh, 81-84, 86 Lee, Gen. Robert E., 240 Lee family, 83 Letcher, John, 76, 91 Letters of introduction, 255-264 Lewis, Charlton T., 129, 130 Libel, 117-124, 272 "Liber Scriptorum," 285 Liberty, 296, 336 "Liffith Lank," 156 Lincoln, President, 84, 85, 334 Lindsay's Turnout, 88 Literary aspirants, 255-259 Literary criticism, anonymous, 203-205; of the _Saturday Review_, 206; ignorance displayed in, 226, 227 Literary work, 339. _See also_ Editorial writing "Literati," Poe's, 172 Literature, place in 1840-50, 23-26 "Little Breeches," 157-159 Local independence, 1840-50, 18 Logan, Sidney Strother, 291 London, and Joaquin Miller, 173, 174 Longfellow, Henry W., 208 Longstreet, Gen., 87, 93, 94 Loomis, Charles Battell, 283 Loring, Gen. W. W., 243-247 Los Angeles, Cal., 31 Lothrop Publishing Company, 185, 263 Louisville and Cincinnati Mail Line, 30 Lowell, James Russell, 101, 106, 195 =M= McCabe, Gordon, 267 McKane, John Y., 120 McKelway, Dr. St. Clair, 126 McKinley, President, 162 Madison, Ind., 15, 21, 36, 43, 44 Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, 13 Mallon, George B., 291 "Man of Honor, A," 151-155 "Man of Honor, A," Mrs. Stannard's, 154, 155 Manassas, 71, 78 Mann, Horace, 33 Manufactures, 1840-50, 18-20 Manuscripts for publication, 171, 172 "Manyest-sided man," 143 Marquand, Henry, 251, 290, 294 "Master of Warlock, The," 155-157 Matthews, Brander, 204, 269 Maynard, Judge, 323, 324 Mazeppa, quoted, 83, 84 Merrill, Wm. M., 312-314 Methodism and literature, 23-26 Mexican War, 243 "Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War between the States," Roman's, 237 Military prisoners, 88 Miller, Joaquin, 172-176 Mims, Fort, 183 Mitchell, Donald G., 131 Model, artist's, 274 Money, its place in Virginia, 49-52 Munroe, Capt. Kirk, 257 Moody, Dwight, 168 Morey letter, 119 Morgan Syndicate, 1895-6, 327-329 Mortar service at Petersburg, 94, 95 Moses, ex-Governor, 262-264 Myths, 47 =N= Nadeau House, Los Angeles, 31 Napoleon, Ind., 5 Nash, Thomas, 307 _Nation, The_, 231 New Orleans, 3, 4, 96, 98, 183 New York authors in 1882, 272 New York _Commercial Advertiser_, 251, 286-292 New York _Evening Sun_, 304 New York _Evening Post_, 68, 129, 131, 137, 140, 142, 143; character under Bryant and Godwin, 187-189; G. C. Eggleston literary editor, 192-194; use of English, 209-213; book reviews, 217, 218; Godwin editor, 227; writers, 228; change of ownership, 230 New York _Graphic_, 180 New York _Herald_, 162 New York _Independent_, 100, 107, 110 New York _Sun_, 291, 301, 304 New York _Times_, 101 New York _Tribune_, 105, 129, 159, 164, 165 New York _World_, 120, 121, 122, 185, 291, 292, 303-331 Newspaper book reviews, 217 Newspaper correspondents, 245-247 Newspaper illustration, 179, 180 Newspaper libel suits, 117-124 Newspapers, character, 189; earlier methods, 300-303; revolution in conducting, 303; emergency problems, 313-315; power in politics, 327-332 Nicoll, De Lancy, 122 Nineteenth Century Club, 296 _North American Review_, 223 Novels _See_ Fiction, Scott. Dime novel =O= Occultism, 60-66, 299 "On March," Mrs. Stannard's, 155 O'Rell, Max, 287, 282 Osgood, James R., 306, 307 =P= _Pall Mall Gazette_, 188 "Paul, John," 285 Personalities in newspapers, 189 Petersburg, 94-98 Philp, Kenward, 116-119 Piatt, Donn, 315-319 "Pike County Ballads," 157-159 Piracy, of American publishers, 231, 232; of English publishers, 233 Plagiarism, 137-144; Stockton on, 137, 138; Franklin on, 139 Planter's life in Virginia, 50-53 Plaquemine, 248-251 Platt, Tom, 319 Pocotaligo, 87 Poe, Edgar Allan, 100-102, 172, 207 Poetic ambition, 44, 45 Poetry, bad, 199-202, 205, 206; genuine, 221 Political corruption, 124-126, 334, 335 Political prescience, 326 "Poor Whites" in the Northwest, 11, 12 Potter, Bishop, 283, 284 Poverty in Indiana, 1840-50, 13 Preachers, stories of, 158, 162, 166, 167 Predicting election results, 326 Press. _See_ Newspapers, Journalism "Prince Regent," 67, 68 _Princeton Review_, 296 Printers. _See_ Compositors, Copy Prisoners, military, 88 Progress, 75, 76 Prohibition, 296 Proof-reading, 241-243 "Proverbial Philosophy," Tupper's, 208, 209 Provincialism of American literature, 269-271 Publishing, uncertainties, 254 Pulitzer, Joseph, 214, 303-305, 308, 311, 312, 314, 319-331 Punctuation, serious result of error, 238, 239 Putnam, George Haven, 147, 184 Putnam, George P., 146, 171 "Putnam's Handy Book Series," 136, 147 _Putnam's Monthly_, 101, 171 =R= Radicalism after Civil War, 108 Railroad Iron Battery, 95, 96-98 Railroads, early, in the West, 20-22, 26, 27, 32-34 Randall, James R., 261, 262 Raymond, Henry J., 101 "Rebel's Recollections," 148-150, 240 Reid, Whitelaw, 143, 159, 164 "Reirritation," 213 Religious intolerance, 1840-50, 26 Restfulness of life in Virginia, 48, 49 Reviewing. _See under_ Book Revision of manuscript, 341 Revivals, 168 _Revue des Deux Mondes_, publishes "Hoosier Schoolmaster," 145 Rhodes, James Ford, 334 Richmond, Arthur, 316, 317 Richmond, Va., 67, 68, 69, 84, 85 Riddel, John, 42, 43 Riker's Ridge, 35-45 Ripley, George, 167 "Rise and fall of the Confederate Government," Davis's, 164, 165 Ritchie, Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, 67 "Robert E. Lee," steamer, 161 Roman, Col. Alfred, 237 Roman Catholicism. _See_ Catholicism Roosevelt, Dr., 294 "Rudder Grange," Stockton's, 136 Russell, Charles E., 290 "Ruth," yacht, 295 =S= St. Louis newspapers, 327 _St. Nicholas_, 132, 183 "St. Twelvemo," 156 Sanborn, Frank B., 150 _Saturday Review_, 206 Schools and school-teaching, 1850, 32-34, 45; Western, 1840-50, 10, 11 Schurz, Carl, 208, 230, 332-337 Scotch-Irish, 9 Scott's novels, 275 Scott, Gen., 243, 244 Sexes, relations in Virginia, 53-59 Shakespeare, 220, 221 Shams of English society, 215-217 Sherman, Gen., his March to the Sea, 280; quoted, on war, 80 Shiloh, battle, 238 "Shiveree," 14, 15 "Shocky," 41 Shooting, 14-16 Sidney, Sir Philip, 224, 225 Sieghortner's, 274 "Signal Boys, The," 183 "Skinning," 139, 144 Sloane, Dr. Wm. M., 296 Smith, Ballard, 309 Social conditions, 1840-50, 18-20 "Solitary Horseman," 67 "Son of Godwin, The," 220 "Song of Marion's Men," Bryant's, 196 _Southern Literary Messenger_, 68 Spanish-American War, 81 Sperry, Watson R., 191, 193, 208, 209 _Springfield Republican_, 208 Stannard, Mrs., 154, 155 Stapps, the, 8 Steamboats, 1850, 30 Stedman, E. C., 143, 144, 177, 178, 262 Stephens, Alexander H., 223 Stevens, Judge Algernon S., 8 Stewart, A. T., 121, 122 Stockton, Frank R., 133-139, 281, 283 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 202, 261, 262 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 131 "Stranded Goldbug," 251 Stuart, J. E. B., 70, 71, 77, 78, 81 Sullivan, Judge Algernon S., 8 Sumter, Fort, 164 _Sun, The._ _See under_ New York Supernatural. _See_ Occultism Surnames in fiction, 156 "Surrey of Eagle's Nest," 69 Swinton, William, 244 =T= Tariff. _See_ Free trade and protection Taylor, Judge, of Madison, 15 Temperance, 104, 112. _See also_ Prohibition Tennyson, 143-145, 218 "Thanatopsis," Bryant's, 221, 222 Thompson, John R., 67, 68, 190 Thompson, Wm. Gilman, 294 Tilden, Samuel J., 228 Tilden-Hayes controversy, 332 Tile Club, 274, 275 Tilton, Theodore, 99, 100, 107-116, 125, 129, 259 _Times, The._ _See under_ New York Titles, book, 154-157 Travel, 1840-50, 20, 21, 28-30 _Tribune, The._ _See under_ New York "Tristram Shandy," saves life, 80 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 208, 209 Tuttle, Dr., 294 Twain, Mark, 150, 160, 259, 265, 281 Tweed, Wm. M., 226 =U= _Union_, Brooklyn. _See under_ Brooklyn United States, lack of nationality, 1840-50, 6, 7 United States Government, bond issue, 1895-6, and the N. Y. _World_, 327-331; departments, 235, 236 United States Treasury, 327-331 =V= Vevay, Ind., 2, 18 "Victorian Poets," Stedman's, on Tennyson's plagiarism, 143, 144 Virginia, home of the Egglestons, 46; life in, 48, 49, 72; present conditions, 73-76; in the Civil War, 76, 77 "Virginia Comedians, The," 69 Virginian English, 59 "Virginians, The," society, 82 Voice, Virginia girls', 59 =W= Walker, Gen. Lindsay, 87 Wappoo Cut, 86 War, 70, 71, 80, 81 War correspondents, 244, 245 Warlock, Mr., 155-157 Warner, Charles Dudley, 283 Washington executive departments, 235, 236 Wason, Rev. Hiram, 8 Wass, Jerome B., 127 Waste, saving, 52 Webb, Charles Henry, 156, 285 Wedding customs in Indiana, 1840-50, 14, 15 West, the, homogeneity in eighteen-forties, 7; most representative of the country, 7, 27; remoteness, 1840-50, 4, 5 White, Horace, 230 White, Richard Grant, 222-225, 274 Wickham, Williams C., 77 "Wild Western Scenes," Jones's, 275 Wilderness, 93 Will, story of a, 61, 62 Williams, Timothy Shaler, 290 Willis, N. P., 68 Winter, John Strange, 154, 155 Wise, Henry A., 77 Wister, Mrs., 142 Women, deference to, 56, 57; in Virginia, 53-59 _World, The._ _See under_ New York "Wreck of the Redbird, The," 184, 185 Wright, Henry, 291 =Y= Yachting, 294 Yerger, E. M., of Jackson, Miss., 105 Yerger, Judge E. M., of Memphis, Tenn., 105 Youmans, Dr., 274 =Z= Ziegenfust, Mr., 247, 248 * * * * * JANE G. PERKINS'S THE LIFE OF THE HONOURABLE MRS. NORTON With portrait, 8vo. $3.50 net; by mail, $3.68. 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406	----	Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis by Various Authors of Some Repute APPRECIATIONS Gouverneur Morris Booth Tarkington Charles Dana Gibson E. L. Burlingame Augustus Thomas Theodore Roosevelt Irvin S. Cobb John Fox, Jr Finley Peter Dunne Winston Churchill Leonard Wood John T. McCutcheon R. H. D. BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS "And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid." He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his other brother was Peter Pan. Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the taking of sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns, and medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry. I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in "The Bar Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is nothing to hunt." Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most exciting of all sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some of them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and he was another. To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have dusted every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in which he played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at top speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water (for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole truth with lightning flashes of wit and character building and admiration or contempt. Until the invention of moving pictures the world had nothing in the least like his talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind, exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived. The history of the last thirty years, its manners and customs and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written truthfully without reference to the records which he has left, to his special articles and to his letters. Read over again the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March of the Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is dead, the world can never be the same again. But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity. One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it. Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from the receiver there poured into you affection and encouragement. But the great times, of course, were when he came in person, and the temperature of the house, which a moment before had been too hot or too cold, became just right, and a sense of cheerfulness and well-being invaded the hearts of the master and the mistress and of the servants in the house and in the yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and the baby, who had been fretting because nobody would give her a double-barrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about the disappointments of this uncompromising world. He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a little afraid of them. He was afraid perhaps that they wouldn't find out how much he loved them. But when they showed him that they trusted him, and, unsolicited, climbed upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then the loveliest expression came over his face, and you knew that the great heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed with an exquisite bliss, akin to anguish. One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine received a telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And I thank God that little Miss Hope is too young to know what an appalling loss she has suffered. . . . Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter was allowed to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could wait on the table (and though I say it, that shouldn't, she could do this beautifully, with dignity and without giggling), and perhaps the dinner was good, or R. H. D. thought it was, and in that event he must abandon his place and storm the kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in for praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't the iris, it was the man behind the iris. And then back he would come to us, with a wonderful story of his adventures in the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and leaving behind him a cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of life, and a gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the Actinidia vines. It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways. Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where there were children. Before he came that first year our house had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend." Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first days of the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't draw all the time, but we pretended that it did, and with much pretense came faith. From the fireplace that smoked to the serious things of life we extended our pretendings, until real troubles went down before them--down and out. It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spiraeas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke because of pretending) and talked until the next morning. He was one of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest pleasure not in looking backward or forward, but in what is going on at the moment. Weeks did not have to pass before it was forced upon his knowledge that Tuesday, the fourteenth (let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew it the moment he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday sunshine making patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before breakfast there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life. That day began with attentions to his physical well-being. There were exercises, conducted with great vigor and rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous singing of ballads. At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands flat upon the floor. The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had written and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and admire in that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a half-column of unsigned print; R. H. D. would find you out, and find time to praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from his room at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy, and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters and telegrams. Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things were as important as sausages and thick cream. Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom. He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of corresponding, "The German March through Brussels," was probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not, he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the reader one of those, swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned. But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do. Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch. A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing, often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar. He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used all the smoke there was in it. He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He had toward food and drink the Continental attitude; namely, that quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from the champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he moved resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and, although that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples. Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same conscience that he had for himself. His great gift of eyesight and observation failed him in his judgments upon his friends. If only you loved him, you could get your biggest failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven, without any trouble at all. And of your molehill virtues he made splendid mountains. He only interfered with you when he was afraid that you were going to hurt some one else whom he also loved. Once I had a telegram from him which urged me for heaven's sake not to forget that the next day was my wife's birthday. Whether I had forgotten it or not is my own private affair. And when I declared that I had read a story which I liked very, very much and was going to write to the author to tell him so, he always kept at me till the letter was written. Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was away from her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift scrawl at that, for, no matter how crowded and eventful the day, he wrote her the best letter that he could write. That was the only habit he had. He was a slave to it. Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence. They threw their arms about each other and rocked to and fro for a long time. And it hadn't been a long absence at that. No ocean had been between them; her heart had not been in her mouth with the thought that he was under fire, or about to become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been away upon a little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's skull and a broken arrowhead, and R. H. D. had been absent from his mother for nearly two hours and a half. I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail to give more than a few hints of what he was like. There isn't much more space at my command, and there were so many sides to him that to touch upon them all would fill a volume. There were the patriotism and the Americanism, as much a part of him as the marrow of his bones, and from which sprang all those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers: those trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and dexterous exposures of this and that, from an absolutely unexpected point of view. He was a quickener of the public conscience. That people are beginning to think tolerantly of preparedness, that a nation which at one time looked yellow as a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White, and Blue is owing in some measure to him. R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He thought that peace at the price which our country has been forced to pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of those who have gradually taught this country to see the matter in the same way. I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the surface of my subject. And that is a failure which I feel keenly but which was inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to say of those deplorable "personal interviews" which appear in the newspapers, and in which the important person interviewed is made by the cub reporter to say things which he never said, or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a fifteen-dollar-a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain." There is, however, one question which I should attempt to answer. No two men are alike. In what one salient thing did R. H. D. differ from other men--differ in his personal character and in the character of his work? And that question I can answer off-hand, without taking thought, and be sure that I am right. An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the Recording Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to which even his brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent mechanism as a writer are subordinate; and to which, as a man, even his sense of duty, his powers of affection, of forgiveness, of loving-kindness are subordinate, too; and that characteristic is cleanliness. The biggest force for cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of the world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where "Nobody hunts us and there is nothing to hunt." BY BOOTH TARKINGTON To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the "beau ideal of jeunesse doree," a sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but already an editor--already publishing books! His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed, and we cut an exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion to see the world at lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard Harding Davis came into the Palm Room--then, oh, then, our day was radiant! That was the top of our fortune: we could never have hoped for so much. Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see. The boys of those days left college to work, to raise families, to grow grizzled; but the glamour remained about Davis; HE never grew grizzled. Youth was his great quality. All his writing has the liveliness of springtime; it stirs with an unsuppressible gayety, and it has the attraction which companionship with him had: there is never enough. He could be sharp; he could write angrily and witheringly; but even when he was fiercest he was buoyant, and when his words were hot they were not scalding but rather of a dry, clean indignation with things which he believed could, if they would, be better. He never saw evil but as temporary. Following him through his books, whether he wrote of home or carried his kind, stout heart far, far afield, we see an American writing to Americans. He often told us about things abroad in terms of New York; and we have all been to New York, so he made for us the pictures he wished us to see. And when he did not thus use New York for his colors he found other means as familiar to us and as suggestive; he always made us SEE. What claims our thanks in equal measure, he knew our kind of curiosity so well that he never failed to make us see what we were most anxious to see. He knew where our dark spots were, cleared up the field of vision, and left us unconfused. This discernment of our needs, and this power of enlightening and pleasuring his reader, sprang from seeds native in him. They were, as we say, gifts; for he always had them but did not make them. He was a national figure at twenty-three. He KNEW HOW, before he began. Youth called to youth: all ages read him, but the young men and young women have turned to him ever since his precocious fame made him their idol. They got many things from him, but above all they live with a happier bravery because of him. Reading the man beneath the print, they found their prophet and gladly perceived that a prophet is not always cowled and bearded, but may be a gallant young gentleman. This one called merrily to them in his manly voice; and they followed him. He bade them see that pain is negligible, that fear is a joke, and that the world is poignantly interesting, joyously lovable. They will always follow him. THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF DAVIS BY CHARLES DANA GIBSON Dick was twenty-four years old when he came into the smoking-room of the Victoria Hotel, in London, after midnight one July night--he was dressed as a Thames boatman. He had been rowing up and down the river since sundown, looking for color. He had evidently peopled every dark corner with a pirate, and every floating object had meant something to him. He had adventure written all over him. It was the first time I had ever seen him, and I had never heard of him. I can't now recall another figure in that smoke-filled room. I don't remember who introduced us--over twenty-seven years have passed since that night. But I can see Dick now dressed in a rough brown suit, a soft hat, with a handkerchief about his neck, a splendid, healthy, clean-minded, gifted boy at play. And so he always remained. His going out of this world seemed like a boy interrupted in a game he loved. And how well and fairly he played it! Surely no one deserved success more than Dick. And it is a consolation to know he had more than fifty years of just what he wanted. He had health, a great talent, and personal charm. There never was a more loyal or unselfish friend. There wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental and physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and sometimes shy. He often tried to conceal these last two qualities, but never succeeded in doing so from those of us who were privileged really to know and love him. His life was filled with just the sort of adventure he liked the best. No one ever saw more wars in so many different places or got more out of them. And it took the largest war in all history to wear out that stout heart. We shall miss him. BY E. L. BURLINGAME One of the most attractive and inspiring things about Richard Harding Davis was the simple, almost matter-of-course way in which he put into practice his views of life--in which he acted, and in fact WAS, what he believed. With most of us, to have opinions as to what is the right thing to do is at the best to worry a good deal as to whether we are doing it; at the worst to be conscious of doubts as to whether it is a sufficient code, or perhaps whether it isn't beyond us. Davis seemed to have neither of these wasters of strength. He had certain simple, clean, manly convictions as to how a man should act; apparently quite without self-consciousness in this respect, whatever little mannerisms or points of pride he may have had in others--fewer than most men of his success and fastidiousness--he went ahead and did accordingly, untormented by any alternatives or casuistries, which for him did not seem to exist. He was so genuinely straightforward that he could not sophisticate even himself, as almost every man occasionally does under temptation. He, at least, never needed to be told "Go put your creed into your deed Nor speak with double tongue." It is so impossible not to think first of the man, as the testimony of every one who knew him shows, that those who have long had occasion to watch and follow his work, not merely with enjoyment but somewhat critically, may well look upon any detailed discussion of it as something to be kept till later. But there is more to be said than to recall the unfailing zest of it, the extraordinary freshness of eye, the indomitable youthfulness and health of spirit--all the qualities that we associate with Davis himself. It was serious work in a sense that only the more thoughtful of its critics had begun of late to comprehend. It had not inspired a body of disciples like Kipling's, but it had helped to clear the air and to give a new proof of the vitality of certain ideals--even of a few of the simpler ones now outmoded in current masterpieces; and it was at its best far truer in an artistic sense than it was the fashion of its easy critics to allow. Whether Davis could or would have written a novel of the higher rank is a useless question now; he himself, who was a critic of his own work without illusions or affectation, used to say that he could not; but it is certain that in the early part of "Captain Macklin" he displayed a power really Thackerayan in kind. Of his descriptive writing there need be no fear of speaking with extravagance; he had made himself, especially in his later work, through long practice and his inborn instinct for the significant and the fresh aspect, quite the best of all contemporary correspondents and reporters; and his rivals in the past could be easily numbered. BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS One spring afternoon in 1889 a member brought into the Lambs Club house--then on Twenty-sixth Street--as a guest Mr. Richard Harding Davis. I had not clearly caught the careless introduction, and, answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated the surname. He did not pronounce it as would a Middle Westerner like myself, but more as a citizen of London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given phonetically. Several other words containing _a_ long a were sounded by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a related eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time many of Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was an affectation. I mention the peculiarity, which after years convinced me was as native to him as was the color of his eyes, because I am sure that it was a barrier between him and some persons who met him only casually. At that time he was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper, and in appearance was what he continued to be until his death, an unassertive but self-respecting, level-eyed, clean-toothed, and wholesome athlete. The reporter developed rapidly into the more serious workman, and amongst the graver business was that of war correspondent. I have known fraternally several war correspondents--Dick Davis, Fred Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and others--and it seems to me that, while differing one from another as average men differ, they had in common a kind of veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant world wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the quality. And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated the reporter sense. He had insight--the faculty of going back of appearances. He saw the potential salients in occurrences and easily separated them from the commonplace--and the commonplace itself when it was informed by a spirit that made it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness. That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when adherence to duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree of pressure that gave it test conditions and he had an unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water appreciation of it. I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked enthusiastically to write of men doing men's work and doing it man fashion with full-blooded optimism. At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall. He had a boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages not inconsistent with his admiration of their medals. By temperament he was impulsive and partisan, and if he was your friend you were right until you were obviously very wrong. But he liked "good form," and had adopted the Englishman's code of "things no fellow could do"--therefore his impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was not quarrelsome. In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he could himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the humor of MacWilliams. In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the younger man if the poster smirching Stuart's relation to Madame Alvarez is true, it is Davis talking through both men, and when, standing alone, Clay lifts his hat and addresses the statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his best. Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre, but modern criticism in that respect is immature and wrong. The soliloquy exists. Any one observing the number of business men who, talking aloud to themselves, walk Fifth Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the soliloquy was not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place for it. When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick and a deserved popularity. It was cheerily North American in its viewpoint of the sub-tropical republics and was very up to date. The outdoor American girl was not so established at that time, and the Davis report of her was refreshing. Robert Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he would have tried to do--Captain Stuart was the English officer that Davis had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better side of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis would draw out. Alice and King were the half-spoiled New Yorkers as he knew them at the dinner-parties. At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It was his first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the skill that he developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I was called in by the manager as an older carpenter and craftsman to make another dramatic version. Dick and I were already friends and he already liked plays that I had done, but that alone could not account for the heartiness with which he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself. Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could do that. Only native modesty could explain the absence of the usual author pride and sensitiveness. The play was immediately successful. It would have been a dull hack, indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage material as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the welding of additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time enough to cool, he sent me a first copy of the Playgoers' edition of the novel, printed in 1902, with the inscription: TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS: Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely. RICHARD HARDING DAVIS. And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below: DEAR GUS, If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play, I would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others. So for the sake of the public try to like it. DICK. In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where, twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company. With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his published tales. At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there were his helpful suggestions of work and make-up to the actors, and on the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal. That picture enterprise he has described in an article, entitled "Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in Scribner's Magazine. The element that he could not put into the account, and which is particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of "Soldiers of Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with intention and unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes. For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our evenings together at a cafe table over looking "the great square," which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and Stuart dine there: "At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace." Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had gone between. From one long silence he said: "I think I'll come back here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of months." What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background! And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from the dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it as so much larger"--indicating the square--"until I saw it again when we came down with the army." A tolerant smile--he might have explained that it is always so on revisiting scenes that have impressed us deeply in our earlier days, but he let the smile do that. One of his charms as companion was that restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too. The picture people began their film with a showing of the "mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water." That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago. "The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape, and yet how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book! We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads, and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead. Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked his grave. One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob its surprises by reminiscence--but I refrain. Yet it is only justice to point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for the "Men of Zanzibar," "Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly," and his other books, he got his structure and his color at first hand. He was a writer and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in his writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a young fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel the wind in his face. Like water at the source, it is undefiled. DAVIS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT I knew Richard Harding Davis for many years, and I was among the number who were immediately drawn to him by the power and originality of "Gallegher," the story which first made his reputation. My intimate association with him, however, was while he was with my regiment in Cuba, He joined us immediately after landing, and was not merely present at but took part in the fighting. For example, at the Guasimas fight it was he, I think, with his field-glasses, who first placed the trench from which the Spaniards were firing at the right wing of the regiment, which right wing I, at that time, commanded. We were then able to make out the trench, opened fire on it, and drove out the Spaniards. He was indomitably cheerful under hardships and difficulties and entirely indifferent to his own personal safety or comfort. He so won the esteem and regard of the regiment that he was one of the three men we made honorary members of the regiment's association. We gave him the same medal worn by our own members. He was as good an American as ever lived and his heart flamed against cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book of Americanism which all our people would do well to read at the present time. BY IRVIN S. COBB Almost the first letter I received after I undertook to make a living by writing for magazines was signed with the name of Richard Harding Davis. I barely knew him; practically we were strangers; but if he had been my own brother he could not have written more generously or more kindly than he did write in that letter. He, a famous writer, had gone out of his way to speak words of encouragement to me, an unknown writer; had taken the time and the pains out of a busy life to cheer a beginner in the field where he had had so great a measure of success. When I came to know him better, I found out that such acts as these were characteristic of Richard Harding Davis. The world knew him as one of the most vivid and versatile and picturesque writers that our country has produced in the last half-century, but his friends knew him as one of the kindest and gentlest and most honest and most unselfish of men--a real human being, firm in his convictions, steadfast in his affections, loyal to the ideals by which he held, but tolerant always in his estimates of others. He may or may not have been a born writer; sometimes I doubt whether there is such a thing as a born writer. But this much I do know--he was a born gentleman if ever there was one. As a writer his place is assured. But always I shall think of him as he was in his private life--a typical American, a lovable companion, and a man to the tips of his fingers. BY JOHN FOX, JR. During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis was always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand, in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident youth--and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot think of him as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell about it. We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the back of his head--no card that was not face up on the table. Every thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him. Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was incomprehensible to him. He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the Japanese equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor. Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite childishly. Of course, he was courageous--absurdly so--and, in spite of his high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso hill, the day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for tree-trunks when a few bullets whistled near; but Dick stalked out in the open and with his field-glasses searched for the supposed sharpshooters in the trees. Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I saw Dick going unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have been content with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where Dick lay with a soldier. "That hit you?" asked Dick. The soldier grunted "No," looked sidewise at Dick, and muttered an oath of surprise. Dick had not taken his glasses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on the ground with sciatica during that campaign, like a snake, but pulling his twisted figure straight and his tortured face into a smile if a soldier or stranger passed. He was easily the first reporter of his time--perhaps of all time. Out of any incident or situation he could pick the most details that would interest the most people and put them in a way that was pleasing to the most people; and always, it seemed, he had the extraordinary good judgment or the extraordinary good luck to be just where the most interesting thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one must, laid final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and clean mind of the man. R. H. D. never wrote a line that cannot be given to his little daughter when she is old enough to read, and I never heard a word pass his lips that his own mother could not hear. There are many women in the world like the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and of these Dick himself was one. BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his death, the personality of the man seems to overshadow the merit of the author. In dealing with the individual the writers overlook the fact that we have lost one of the best of our story-tellers. This is but natural. He was a very vivid kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all parts of the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and those who knew him were less interested in the books than in the man himself--the generous, romantic, sensitive individual whose character and characteristics made him a conspicuous figure everywhere he went--and he went everywhere. His books were sold in great numbers, but it might be said in terms of the trade that his personality had a larger circulation than his literature. He probably knew more waiters, generals, actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the people he knew best are not the people who read books. They write them or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew Richard Davis you knew his books. He translated himself literally, and no expurgation was needed to make the translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was the identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic marriage. Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness of his mind, which was still fresh at an age when most men find avarice or golf a substitute for former pastimes. He not only refused to grow old himself, he refused to write about old age. There are a few elderly people in his books, but they are vague and shadowy. They serve to emphasize the brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the time for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in this country who have read his books, and they know, even better than those who were acquainted with him personally, how good a friend they have lost. I happened to read again the other day the little collection of stories--his first, I think--which commences with "Gallegher" and includes "The Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales. His first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and was stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher" is a fine story, and is written in that eager, breathless manner which was all his own, and which always reminds me of a boy who has hurried home to tell of some wonderful thing he has seen. Of course it is improbable. Most good stories are and practically all readable books of history. No old newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing from one hand could escape detection even in a remote country village. Greed would have urged the constable to haul to the calaboose every stranger who wore gloves. But he managed to attach so many accurate details of description to the romance that it leaves as definite an impression of realism as any of Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene in the newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture of toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray overcoats with pearl buttons (like most good story-tellers he was strong on the tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and policemen, the swiftness of the way the story is told, as if he were in a hurry to let his reader know something he had actually seen--create such an impression of truth that when the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of the judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious infant, and whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the hand of the sister of the sporting editor in marriage. To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of writers, but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance of the truth to situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then filled in the story with human details, so that the reader came away with an impression that all these heroic deeds were performed by people just like the reader himself, which was exactly the truth. It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers and the stupidity of the French and English prevented him from seeing the actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene is an ugly one, a wallow of blood and mire. But so probably were Agincourt and Crecy when you come to think of it, and Davis, you may be sure, would have illuminated the foul battle-field with a reflection of the glory which must exist in the breasts of the soldiers. The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes, which reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging. A man is blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some people the world of men is a confused and undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a simple and pleasant pattern--good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind and cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad, the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are modest, the brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers humorous; where the Prodigal returns to dine in a borrowed dinner-jacket at Delmonico's with his father, and where always the Young Man marries the Girl. And this is the world as much as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world as you see it. BY WINSTON CHURCHHILL On that day when I read of Mr. Davis's sudden death there came back to me a vivid memory of another day, some eighteen years ago, when I first met him, shortly after the publication of my first novel. I was paying an over-Sunday visit to Marion, that quaint waterside resort where Mr. Davis lived for many years, and with which his name is associated. On the Monday morning, as the stage started out for the station, a young man came running after it, caught it, and sat down in the only empty place--beside me. He was Richard Harding Davis. I recognized him, nor shall I forget that peculiar thrill I experienced at finding myself in actual, physical contact with an author. And that this author should be none other than the creator of Gallegher, prepossessing, vigorous, rather than a dry and elderly recluse, made my excitement the keener. It happened also, after entering the smoking-car, that the remaining vacant seat was at my side, and here Mr. Davis established himself. He looked at me, he asked if my name was Winston Churchill, he said he had read my book. How he guessed my identity I did not discover. But the recollection of our talk, the strong impression I then received of Mr. Davis's vitality and personality, the liking I conceived for him--these have neither changed nor faded with the years, and I recall with gratitude to-day the kindliness, the sense of fellowship always so strong in him that impelled him to speak as he did. A month before he died, when I met him on the train going to Mt. Kisco, he had not changed. His enthusiasms, his vigor, his fine passions, his fondness for his friends, these, nor the joy he found in the pursuit of his profession, had not faded. And there come to me now, as I think of him filled with life, flashes from his writings that have moved me, and move me indescribably still. "Le Style," as Rolland remarks, "c'est l'ame." It was so in Mr. Davis's case. He had the rare faculty of stirring by a phrase the imaginations of men, of including in a phrase a picture, an event--a cataclysm. Such a phrase was that in which he described the entry of German hosts into Brussels. He was not a man, when enlisted in a cause, to count the cost to himself. Many causes will miss him, and many friends, and many admirers, yet his personality remains with us forever, in his work. BY LEONARD WOOD The death of Richard Harding Davis was a real loss to the movement for preparedness. Mr. Davis had an extensive experience as a military observer, and thoroughly appreciated the need of a general training system like that of Australia or Switzerland and of thorough organization of our industrial resources in order to establish a condition of reasonable preparedness in this country. A few days before his death he came to Governor's Island for the purpose of ascertaining in what line of work he could be most useful in building up sound public opinion in favor of such preparedness as would give us a real peace-insurance. His mind was bent on devoting his energies and abilities to the work of public education on this vitally important subject, and few men were better qualified to do so, for he had served as a military observer in many campaigns. Throughout the Cuban campaign he was attached to the headquarters of my regiment in Cuba as a military observer. He was with the advanced party at the opening of the fight at Las Guasimas, and was distinguished throughout the fight by coolness and good conduct. He also participated in the battle of San Juan and the siege of Santiago, and as an observer was always where duty called him. He was a delightful companion, cheerful, resourceful, and thoughtful of the interests and wishes of others. His reports of the campaign were valuable and among the best and most accurate. The Plattsburg movement took very strong hold of him. He saw in this a great instrument for building up a sound knowledge concerning our military history and policy, also a very practical way of training men for the duties of junior officers. He realized fully that we should need in case of war tens of thousands of officers with our newly raised troops, and that it would be utterly impossible to prepare them in the hurry and confusion of the onrush of modern war. His heart was filled with a desire to serve his country to the best of his ability. His recent experience in Europe pointed out to him the absolute madness of longer disregarding the need of doing those things which reasonable preparedness dictates, the things which cannot be accomplished after trouble is upon us. He had in mind at the time of his death a series of articles to be written especially to build up interest in universal military training through conveying to our people an understanding of what organization as it exists to-day means, and how vitally important it is for our people to do in time of peace those things which modern war does not permit done once it is under way. Davis was a loyal friend, a thoroughgoing American devoted to the best interests of his country, courageous, sympathetic, and true. His loss has been a very real one to all of us who knew and appreciated him, and in his death the cause of preparedness has lost an able worker and the country a devoted and loyal citizen. WITH DAVIS IN VERA CRUZ, BRUSSELS, AND SALONIKA BY JOHN T. McCRUTCHEON In common with many others who have been with Richard Harding Davis as correspondents, I find it difficult to realize that he has covered his last story and that he will not be seen again with the men who follow the war game, rushing to distant places upon which the spotlight of news interest suddenly centres. It seems a sort of bitter irony that he who had covered so many big events of world importance in the past twenty years should be abruptly torn away in the midst of the greatest event of them all, while the story is still unfinished and its outcome undetermined. If there is a compensating thought, it ties in the reflection that he had a life of almost unparalleled fulness, crowded to the brim, up to the last moment, with those experiences and achievements which he particularly aspired to have. He left while the tide was at its flood, and while he still held supreme his place as the best reporter in his country. He escaped the bitterness of seeing the ebb set in, when the youth to which he clung had slipped away, and when he would have to sit impatient in the audience, while younger men were in the thick of great, world-stirring dramas on the stage. This would have been a real tragedy in "Dick" Davis's case, for, while his body would have aged, it is doubtful if his spirit ever would have lost its youthful freshness or boyish enthusiasm. It was my privilege to see a good deal of Davis in the last two years. He arrived in Vera Cruz among the first of the sixty or seventy correspondents who flocked to that news centre when the situation was so full of sensational possibilities. It was a time when the American newspaper-reading public was eager for thrills, and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the correspondents in Vera Cruz were tried to the uttermost to supply the demand. In the face of the fiercest competition it fell to Davis's lot to land the biggest story of those days of marking time. The story "broke" when it became known that Davis, Medill McCormick, and Frederick Palmer had gone through the Mexican lines in an effort to reach Mexico City. Davis and McCormick, with letters to the Brazilian and British ministers, got through and reached the capital on the strength of those letters, but Palmer, having only an American passport, was turned back. After an ominous silence, which furnished American newspapers with a lively period of suspense, the two men returned safely with wonderful stories of their experiences while under arrest in the hands of the Mexican authorities. McCormick, in recently speaking of Davis at that time, said that, "as a correspondent in difficult and dangerous situations, he was incomparable--cheerful, ingenious, and undiscouraged. When the time came to choose between safety and leaving his companion he stuck by his fellow captive even though, as they both said, a firing-squad and a blank wall were by no means a remote possibility." This Mexico City adventure was a spectacular achievement which gave Davis and McCormick a distinction which no other correspondents of all the ambitious and able corps had managed to attain. Davis usually "hunted" alone. He depended entirely upon his own ingenuity and wonderful instinct for news situations. He had the energy and enthusiasm of a beginner, with the experience and training of a veteran. His interest in things remained as keen as though he had not been years at a game which often leaves a man jaded and blase. His acquaintanceship in the American army and navy was wide, and for this reason, as well as for the prestige which his fame and position as a national character gave him, he found it easy to establish valuable connections in the channels from which news emanates. And yet, in spite of the fact that he was "on his own" instead of having a working partnership with other men, he was generous in helping at times when he was able to do so. Davis was a conspicuous figure in Vera Cruz, as he inevitably had been in all such situations. Wherever he went he was pointed out. His distinction of appearance, together with a distinction in dress, which, whether from habit or policy, was a valuable asset in his work, made him a marked man. He dressed and looked the "war correspondent," such a one as he would describe in one of his stories. He fulfilled the popular ideal of what a member of that fascinating profession should look like. His code of life and habits was as fixed as that of the Briton who takes his habits and customs and games and tea wherever he goes, no matter how benighted or remote the spot may be. He was just as loyal to his code as is the Briton. He carried his bath-tub, his immaculate linen, his evening clothes, his war equipment--in which he had the pride of a connoisseur--wherever he went, and, what is more, he had the courage to use the evening clothes at times when their use was conspicuous. He was the only man who wore a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his particular table in the crowded "Portales," at the Hotel Diligencia, he was to be seen, as fresh and clean as though he were in a New York or London restaurant. Each day he was up early to take the train out to the "gap," across which came arrivals from Mexico City. Sometimes a good "story" would come down, as when the long-heralded and long-expected arrival of Consul Silliman gave a first-page "feature" to all the American papers. In the afternoon he would play water polo over at the navy aviation camp, and always at a certain time of the day his "striker" would bring him his horse and for an hour or more he would ride out along the beach roads within the American lines. After the first few days it was difficult to extract real thrills from the Vera Cruz situation, but we used to ride out to El Tejar with the cavalry patrol and imagine that we might be fired on at some point in the long ride through unoccupied territory; or else go out to the "front," at Legarto, where a little American force occupied a sun-baked row of freight-cars, surrounded by malarial swamps. From the top of the railroad water-tank we could look across to the Mexican outposts a mile or so away. It was not very exciting, and what thrills we got lay chiefly in our imagination. Before my acquaintanceship with Davis at Vera Cruz I had not known him well. Our trails didn't cross while I was in Japan in the Japanese-Russian War, and in the Transvaal I missed him by a few days, but in Vera Cruz I had many enjoyable opportunities of becoming well acquainted with him. The privilege was a pleasant one, for it served to dispel a preconceived and not an entirely favorable impression of his character. For years I had heard stories about Richard Harding Davis--stories which emphasized an egotism and self-assertiveness which, if they ever existed, had happily ceased to be obtrusive by the time I got to know him. He was a different Davis from the Davis whom I had expected to find; and I can imagine no more charming and delightful companion than he was in Vera Cruz. There was no evidence of those qualities which I feared to find, and his attitude was one of unfailing kindness, considerateness, and generosity. In the many talks I had with him I was always struck by his evident devotion to a fixed code of personal conduct. In his writings he was the interpreter of chivalrous, well-bred youth, and his heroes were young, clean-thinking college men, heroic big-game hunters, war correspondents, and idealized men about town, who always did the noble thing, disdaining the unworthy in act or motive. It seemed to me that he was modelling his own life, perhaps unconsciously, after the favored types which his imagination had created for his stories. In a certain sense he was living a life of make believe, wherein he was the hero of the story, and in which he was bound by his ideals always to act as he would have the hero of his story act. It was a quality which only one could have who had preserved a fresh youthfulness of outlook in spite of the hardening processes of maturity. His power of observation was extraordinarily keen, and he not only had the rare gift of sensing the vital elements of a situation, but also had, to an unrivalled degree, the ability to describe them vividly. I don't know how many of those men at Vera Cruz tried to describe the kaleidoscopic life of the city during the American occupation, but I know that Davis's story was far and away the most faithful and satisfying picture. The story was photographic, even to the sounds and smells. The last I saw of him in Vera Cruz was when, on the Utah, he steamed past the flagship Wyoming, upon which I was quartered, and started for New York. The Battenberg cup race had just been rowed, and the Utah and Florida crews had tied. As the Utah was sailing immediately after the race, there was no time in which to row off the tie. So it was decided that the names of both ships should be engraved on the cup, and that the Florida crew should defend the title against a challenging crew from the British Admiral Craddock's flagship. By the end of June, the public interest in Vera Cruz had waned, and the corps of correspondents dwindled until there were only a few left. Frederick Palmer and I went up to join Carranza and Villa, and on the 26th of July we were in Monterey waiting to start with the triumphal march of Carranza's army toward Mexico City. There was no sign of serious trouble, abroad. That night ominous telegrams came, and at ten o'clock on the following morning we were on a train headed for the States. Palmer and Davis caught the Lusitania, sailing August 4 from New York, and I followed on the Saint Paul, leaving three days later. On the 17th of August I reached Brussels, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to find Davis already there. He was at the Palace Hotel, where a number of American and English correspondents were quartered. Things moved quickly. On the 19th Irvin Cobb, Will Irwin, Arno Dosch, and I were caught between the Belgian and German lines in Louvain; our retreat to Brussels was cut, and for three days, while the vast German army moved through the city, we were detained. Then, the army having passed, we were allowed to go back to the capital. In the meantime Davis was in Brussels. The Germans reached the outskirts of the city on the morning of the 20th, and the correspondents who had remained in Brussels were feverishly writing despatches describing the imminent fall of the city. One of them, Harry Hansen, of the Chicago Daily News, tells the following story, which I give in his words: "While we were writing," says Hansen, "Richard Harding Davis walked into the writing-room of the Palace Hotel with a bunch of manuscript in his hand. With an amused expression he surveyed the three correspondents filling white paper. "'I say, men,' said Davis, 'do you know when the next train leaves?' "'There is one at three o'clock,' said a correspondent, looking up. "'That looks like our only chance to get a story out,' said Davis. 'Well, we'll trust to that.' "The story was the German invasion of Brussels, and the train mentioned was considered the forlorn hope of the correspondents to connect with the outside world--that is, every correspondent thought it to be the OTHER man's hope. Secretly each had prepared to outwit the other, and secretly Davis had already sent his story to Ostend. He meant to emulate Archibald Forbes, who despatched a courier with his real manuscript, and next day publicly dropped a bulky package in the mail-bag. Davis had sensed the news in the occupation of Brussels long before it happened. With dawn he went out to the Louvain road, where the German army stood, prepared to smash the capital if negotiations failed. His observant eye took in all the details. Before noon he had written a comprehensive sketch of the occupation, and when word was received that it was under way, he trusted his copy to an old Flemish woman, who spoke not a word of English, and saw her safely on board the train that pulled out under Belgian auspices for Ostend." With passes which the German commandant in Brussels gave us the correspondents immediately started out to see how far those passes would carry us. A number of us left on the afternoon of August 23 for Waterloo, where it was expected that the great clash between the German and the Anglo-French forces would occur. We had planned to be back the same evening, and went prepared only for an afternoon's drive in a couple of hired street carriages. It was seven weeks before we again saw Brussels. On the following day (August 24) Davis started for Mons. He wore the khaki uniform which he had worn in many campaigns. Across his breast was a narrow bar of silk ribbon indicating the campaigns in which he had served as a correspondent. He so much resembled a British officer that he was arrested as a British derelict and was informed that he would be shot at once. He escaped only by offering to walk to Brand Whitlock, in Brussels, reporting to each officer he met on the way. His plan was approved, and as a hostage on parole he appeared before the American minister, who quickly established his identity as an American of good standing, to the satisfaction of the Germans. In the following few months our trails were widely separated. I read of his arrest by German officers on the road to Mons; later I read the story of his departure from Brussels by train to Holland--a trip which carried him through Louvain while the town still was burning; and still later I read that he was with the few lucky men who were in Rheims during one of the early bombardments that damaged the cathedral. By amazing luck, combined with a natural news sense which drew him instinctively to critical places at the psychological moment, he had been a witness of the two most widely featured stories of the early weeks of the war. Arrested by the Germans in Belgium, and later by the French in France, he was convinced that the restrictions on correspondents were too great to permit of good work. So he left the European war zone with the widely quoted remark: "The day of the war correspondent is over." And yet I was not surprised when, one evening, late in November of last year, he suddenly walked into the room in Salonika where William G. Shepherd, of the United Press, "Jimmy Hare," the veteran war photographer, and I had established ourselves several weeks before. The hotel was jammed, and the city, with a normal capacity of about one hundred and seventy-five thousand, was struggling to accommodate at least a hundred thousand more. There was not a room to be had in any of the better hotels, and for several days we lodged Davis in our room, a vast chamber which formerly had been the main dining-room of the establishment, and which now was converted into a bedroom. There was room for a dozen men, if necessary, and whenever stranded Americans arrived and could find no hotel accommodations we simply rigged up emergency cots for their temporary use. The weather in Salonika at this time, late November, was penetratingly cold. In the mornings the steam coils struggled feebly to dispel the chill in the room. Early in the morning after Davis had arrived, we were aroused by the sound of violent splashing, accompanied by shuddering gasps, and we looked out from the snug warmth of our beds to see Davis standing in his portable bath-tub and drenching himself with ice-cold water. As an exhibition of courageous devotion to an established custom of life it was admirable, but I'm not sure that it was prudent. For some reason, perhaps a defective circulation or a weakened heart, his system failed to react from these cold-water baths. All through the days he complained of feeling chilled. He never seemed to get thoroughly warmed, and of us all he was the one who suffered most keenly from the cold. It was all the more surprising, for his appearance was always that of a man in the pink of athletic fitness--ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, and full of tireless energy. On one occasion we returned from the French front in Serbia to Salonika in a box car lighted only by candles, bitterly cold, and frightfully exhausting. We were seven hours in travelling fifty-five miles, and we arrived at our destination at three o'clock in the morning. Several of the men contracted desperate colds, which clung to them for weeks. Davis was chilled through, and said that of all the cold he had ever experienced that which swept across the Macedonian plain from the Balkan highlands was the most penetrating. Even his heavy clothing could not afford him adequate protection. When he was settled in his own room in our hotel he installed an oil-stove which burned beside him as he sat at his desk and wrote his stories. The room was like an oven, but even then he still complained of the cold. When he left he gave us the stove, and when we left, some time later, it was presented to one of our doctor friends out in a British hospital, where I'm sure it is doing its best to thaw the Balkan chill out of sick and wounded soldiers. Davis was always up early, and his energy and interest were as keen as a boy's. We had our meals together, sometimes in the crowded and rather smart Bastasini's, but more often in the maelstrom of humanity that nightly packed the Olympos Palace restaurant. Davis, Shepherd, Hare, and I, with sometimes Mr. and Mrs. John Bass, made up these parties, which, for a period of about two weeks or so, were the most enjoyable daily events of our lives. Under the glaring lights of the restaurant, and surrounded by British, French, Greek, and Serbian officers, German, Austrian, and Bulgarian civilians, with a sprinkling of American, English, and Scotch nurses and doctors, packed so solidly in the huge, high-ceilinged room that the waiters could barely pick their way among the tables, we hung for hours over our dinners, and left only when the landlord and his Austrian wife counted the day's receipts and paid the waiters at the end of the evening. One could not imagine a more charming and delightful companion than Davis during these days. While he always asserted that he could not make a speech, and was terrified at the thought of standing up at a banquet-table, yet, sitting at a dinner-table with a few friends who were only too eager to listen rather than to talk, his stories, covering personal experiences in all parts of the world, were intensely vivid, with that remarkable "holding" quality of description which characterizes his writings. He brought his own bread--a coarse, brown sort, which he preferred to the better white bread--and with it he ate great quantities of butter. As we sat down at the table his first demand was for "Mastika," a peculiar Greek drink distilled from mastic gum, and his second demand invariably was "Du beurre!" with the "r's" as silent as the stars; and if it failed to come at once the waiter was made to feel the enormity of his tardiness. The reminiscences ranged from his early newspaper days in Philadelphia, and skipping from Manchuria to Cuba and Central America, to his early Sun days under Arthur Brisbane; they ranged through an endless variety of personal experiences which very nearly covered the whole course of American history in the past twenty years. Perhaps to him it was pleasant to go over his remarkable adventures, but it could not have been half as pleasant as it was to hear them, told as they were with a keenness of description and brilliancy of humorous comment that made them gems of narrative. At times, in our work, we all tried our hands at describing the Salonika of those early days of the Allied occupation, for it was really what one widely travelled British officer called it--"the most amazingly interesting situation I've ever seen"--but Davis's description was far and away the best, just as his description of Vera Cruz was the best, and his wonderful story of the entry of the German army into Brussels was matchless as one of the great pieces of reporting in the present war. In thinking of Davis, I shall always remember him for the delightful qualities which he showed in Salonika. He was unfailingly considerate and thoughtful. Through his narratives one could see the pride which he took in the width and breadth of his personal relation to the great events of the past twenty years. His vast scope of experiences and equally wide acquaintanceship with the big figures of our time, were amazing, and it was equally amazing that one of such a rich and interesting history could tell his stories in such a simple way that the personal element was never obtrusive. When he left Salonika he endeavored to obtain permission from the British staff to visit Moudros, but, failing in this, he booked his passage on a crowded little Greek steamer, where the only obtainable accommodation was a lounge in the dining-saloon. We gave him a farewell dinner, at which the American consul and his family, with all the other Americans then in Salonika, were present, and after the dinner we rowed out to his ship and saw him very uncomfortably installed for his voyage. He came down the sea ladder and waved his hand as we rowed away. That was the last I saw of Richard Harding Davis. 
40898	----	_The_ FRIENDLY CLUB & OTHER PORTRAITS FRANCIS PARSONS [Illustration: JOEL BARLOW From an Engraving by Durand After the Portrait by Robert Fulton] The FRIENDLY CLUB And OTHER PORTRAITS _By_ Francis Parsons "_Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile._" --YOUNG'S _Night Thoughts_ [Illustration] Edwin Valentine Mitchell Hartford, Connecticut 1922 Copyright, 1922, By Edwin Valentine Mitchell _First Edition_ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER NOTE THE thanks of the author are due to Mr. Charles Hopkins Clark, Editor of "The Hartford Courant," in which most of the following essays originally appeared anonymously, for permission to republish them in the revised, enlarged and sometimes entirely re-written form in which they are here presented. "The Friendly Club," "The Mystery of the Bell Tavern" and "Our Battle Laureate" have not been previously printed. Citation of authorities, except so far as they appear in the text, has been considered inappropriate in the case of such informal articles as these. It would be ungracious, however, to omit mention of the writer's indebtedness in connection with the second essay to Mr. Charles Knowles Bolton's "The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery," which is the latest and most comprehensive document on this baffling incident of New England social history. F. P. CONTENTS PAGE I The Friendly Club 13 II The Mystery of the Bell Tavern 47 III The Hemans of America 69 IV Whom the Gods Love 83 V An Eccentric Visitor 95 VI Who Was Peter Parley? 107 VII A Preacher of the Gospel 121 VIII A Friend of Lincoln 135 IX Our Battle Laureate 147 X The Temple of the Muses 161 XI The Friend of Youth 181 XII The Christmas Party 191 XIII The Fabric of a Dream 201 XIV The Quiet Life 213 ILLUSTRATIONS JOEL BARLOW _Frontispiece_ From the engraving by Durand after the portrait by Robert Fulton LEXINGTON MONUMENT AND BELL TAVERN, DANVERS 64 From Barber's "Massachusetts Historical Collections" THE SIGOURNEY MANSION 75 From an old woodcut LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY 78 From a miniature in the Colt Collection by permission of the Wadsworth Atheneum INSCRIPTION TO DANIEL WADSWORTH IN J. G. C. BRAINARD'S HAND 91 TITLE PAGE OF BRAINARD'S "OCCASIONAL PIECES OF POETRY" 92 THE WATKINSON LIBRARY 166 Drawing by Seth Talcott SILHOUETTE OF DANIEL WADSWORTH 170 By permission of The Connecticut Historical Society _I: The Friendly Club_ A HARVARD man, not exempt from the complacency sometimes attributed to graduates of his university, once observed, according to Barrett Wendell, that the group of forgotten litterateurs, who toward the close of the eighteenth century attained a brief measure of fame as the "Hartford Wits," represents the only considerable literary efflorescence of Yale. The remark did not fail to provoke the rejoinder, doubtless from a Yale source, that nevertheless at the time when the Hartford Wits flourished no Harvard man had produced literature half so good as theirs. How good this literature was considered in its day is not readily understood by the modern reader, for from the Hudibrastic imitations and heroic couplets of these writers, whose brilliance was dimmed so long ago, the contemporary flavor has long since evaporated. Indeed there is no modern reader in the general sense. It is only the antiquarian, the literary researcher, the casual burrower among the shelves of some old library who now opens these yellow pages and follows for a few moments the stilted lines that seem to him a diluted imitation of Pope, Goldsmith and Butler. Professor Beers of Yale ventures the surmise that he may be the only living man who has read the whole of Joel Barlow's "Columbiad." Yet in their time this coterie of poets, who gathered in the little Connecticut town after the close of the war for independence, became famous not only in their own land but abroad, and the community where most of them lived and met at their "friendly club"--was it at the Black Horse Tavern or the "Bunch of Grapes"?--shone in reflected glory as the literary center of America. No Boswell was among them to record the sparkling epigrams, the jovial give and take, the profound "political and philosophical" debates of those weekly gatherings. Yet imagination loves to linger on the old friendships, the patriotic aspirations, the common passion for creative art, the wooing of the Muses of an older world, thus dimly shadowed forth against the background of the raw young country just embarking on its mysterious experiment. Do not doubt that these personages whose individualities are now so effectually concealed behind the veil of their sounding and artificial cantos were real young men who cherished their dreams and their hopes. One can see them gathered around the great wood fire in the low ceiled room redolent of tobacco, blazing hickory and hot Jamaica rum. Here is Trumbull, the lawyer, the author of "M'Fingal" which everybody has read and which has been published in England and honored with the criticism of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. He is a little man, rather frail, rather nervous, not without impatience, with a ready wit that sometimes bites deep. Here is Lemuel Hopkins, the physician, whose lank body, long nose and prominent eyes are outward manifestations of his eccentric genius. His presence lends a fillip to the gathering for he is an odd fish and no one can tell what he will do or say next. Threatened all his life with tuberculosis he is nevertheless a man of great muscular strength and during his days as a soldier he used to astonish his comrades by his ability to fire a heavy king's arm, held in one hand at arm's length. In his verses he castigates shams and humbugs of all kinds, whether the nostrums of medical quacks or the irreverent vaporings of General Ethan Allen-- "Lo, Allen, 'scaped from British jails His tushes broke by biting nails, Appears in hyperborean skies, To tell the world the Bible lies." Perhaps Colonel David Humphreys, full of war stories and anecdotes of his intimacy with General Washington, on whose staff he served, is in Hartford for the evening. A well dressed, hearty, sophisticated traveler and man of the world is Colonel Humphreys, who would be recognized at first glance as a soldier, though not as a poet. Nevertheless he is addicted to the writing of verse which is apt to run in the vein of comedy or burlesque when it is not earnestly patriotic. To look at him one would know that he enjoys a good dinner, a good story and a bottle of port. We may be sure that Joel Barlow is here, the vacillating, visionary Barlow who has tried, or is to try his hand at many pursuits besides epic poetry--the ministry, the law, bookselling, philosophy, journalism and diplomacy--but who is pre-occupied now, as all his life, with his magnum opus, "The Vision of Columbus," later elaborated into "The Columbiad." He is a good looking, if somewhat self-centered young man, a favorite in the days of his New Haven residence with the young ladies of that town. Perhaps it was there that he first met the charming and talented Elizabeth Whitman, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Elnathan Whitman, sometime pastor of the South Congregational Church in Hartford, who often visited her friend Betty Stiles, the daughter of the president of Yale College. A few of Elizabeth Whitman's letters that have survived--the packet bearing an endorsement in Barlow's handwriting--are evidence that he made her a confidante of his literary schemes and hopes and welcomed her assistance with his great epic. A strong friendship and entire harmony seem to have existed between her and Ruth Baldwin of New Haven, whom Barlow married during the war, and who is said to have "inspired in the poet's breast a remarkable passion, one that survived all the mutations of a most adventurous career, and glowed as fervently at fifty as at twenty-five." For nearly a year the marriage was kept a secret, but parental forgiveness was at last secured and Barlow has now brought his wife to Hartford where he is continuing his legal studies, begun in his college town. But the law will not engross him long. Soon, with his friend Elisha Babcock, he is to start a new journal, "The American Mercury," of which his editorship, like all of Barlow's early enterprises, is to be brief, though the paper is to continue till 1830. A tall, slender man, Noah Webster by name, a class-mate of Barlow at Yale, though four years his junior, sits near him, relaxing for the moment in the informality of these surroundings his strangely intense powers of mental application, divided just now between the law and the preparation of his "Grammatical Institute." To the "poetical effusions" of his friends he contributes nothing, but he was an intimate of them all and no doubt often attended their gatherings. Perhaps, now and later, something of the poet's license in the matter of chronology may be granted. Let us assume, then, that young Dr. Mason Cogswell is in town for a day or two, looking over the ground with a view of settling here in the practice of medicine and surgery in which he is now engaged at Stamford, after his training in New York where he served with his brother James at the soldiers' hospital. It is true that the fragments of his diary, which by a fortunate chance were rescued from destruction, do not mention any visit to Hartford as early as this, though his journal does describe a short sojourn here a few years later. Still, his presence is by no means impossible. He is a companionable youth, as popular with the young ladies as Barlow, but with an easier manner, a readier humor. Delighted at this opportunity to sit for an evening at the feet of the older celebrities, he is a welcome guest, for already he has a reputation for versatility and culture and the fact that he was valedictorian of the Yale Class of 1780--and its youngest member--is not forgotten. Richard Alsop, book-worm, naturalist and linguist, who is beginning to dip into verse, has locked up his book shop for the night and is here. Near him sits a man who is, or is soon to be, his brother-in-law, a tall, dark youth, Theodore Dwight, the brother of the more famous Timothy, whose pastoral duties detain him at Greenfield Hill, but who is sometimes numbered as one of this group. Theodore is now studying law, but he has a flair for writing and makes an occasional adventure into the gazettes. These more youthful aspirants have their spurs to win. A little later they, with their friend Dr. Elihu Smith, who published the first American poetic anthology, are to get into print in a vein of satirical verse ridiculing the prevalent literary affectation and bombast. After journalistic publication these satires will appear in book form under the title of "The Echo," in the introduction to which the anonymous authors state that the poems "owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness." "The Echo" was "Printed at the Porcupine Press by Pasquin Petronius." That particular sportive moment is still in the future. Now it is sufficient for these younger men to shine in the reflected luster of the established luminaries. These greater lights are worthy indeed of the worship of the lesser stars. Three of them have achieved, or are soon to acquire, an international as well as a national reputation. That "M'Fingal" had provoked discussion in England has been noted. Humphreys's "Address to the Armies of America," written in camp at Peekskill, and dedicated to the Duke de Rochefoucault, was issued with an introductory letter by the poet's friend, the Marquis de Chastellux, in a French translation in Paris, after its publication in England where the Monthly and Critical Reviews gave it a fair amount of praise, though they could not refrain from the statement that the poem was "not a very pleasing one to a good Englishman." Barlow's "Vision of Columbus" was published almost simultaneously in Hartford and London in 1787. In short these men had attained a genuine intellectual eminence in their generation. They were the cognoscenti of their day. Like most young intellectuals their gospel concerned itself with reform, with the ridicule of shams, with the refusal to accept the popularity of new doctrines as a final test of their value. Trumbull and Barlow, both Yale graduates, had fought with their friend Timothy Dwight their first reform campaign which was an effort to introduce into the somewhat archaic and outworn body of the Yale curriculum the breath of the humanities and of modern thought. Trumbull, according to Moses Coit Tyler, was an example of a "new tone coming into American letters--urbanity, perspective, moderation of emphasis, satire, especially on its more playful side--that of irony." Their interests were not only literary. They were publicists, political satirists, social philosophers, not without their religious theories. In all these matters their search was for the true standards and as champions of causes and enthusiasts of ideals they exhibited a variation from type in that their warfare was waged, not against the recognized conventions in government, religion and society, but in favor of them. Priding themselves on untrammelled and direct thinking, their reasoning led them to support the established, the orderly, the stable. Temperamentally aristocrats, theoretically republicans--in the broad sense of the term--they were practically federalists. "The Anarchiad," a series of poems they were contributing anonymously about this time to "The New Haven Gazette," dealt satirically with the dangers of national unrest and instability, of selfish aggrandizement and of a fictitious currency. In these verses Hesper addresses "the Sages and Counsellors at Philadelphia" as follows: "But know, ye favor'd race, one potent head Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread." And in the same passage occur some lines, attributed to Hopkins, that Daniel Webster may have read: "Through ruined realms the voice of UNION calls; On you she calls! Attend the warning cry: YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED, DIE!" They ridiculed unsparingly the dangers hidden under the cloak of "Democracy"--dangers imminent and menacing in the days following the end of the war in which most of them had served. In fighting these perils they were sagacious in making use of the means frequently employed by advocates of radicalism--invective, irony and ridicule. For these methods secured, as they naturally would secure if cleverly managed, a wide appeal. Yet the efficiency of such weapons depends very largely upon the occasion. Their potency is contemporary with the events against which they are directed and with the passing years their force weakens. Who reads nowadays the political diatribes of Swift, the tracts of Defoe, or the letters of Junius? Here perhaps is in part an explanation of the great temporary influence of the Hartford Wits, as well as of their complete modern obscuration. The brilliant blade they wielded had a biting edge, but the rust of a century and a half has dulled it. This general leaning toward the established canons, this impatience with the new doctrines that in the judgment of these men made for disunion and disaster, should be qualified, at least in the religious aspect, in two interesting particulars, each contradictory to the other. Hopkins began adult life as a sceptic but became a defender of the Christian philosophy. Barlow, on the other hand, deserted in later life the orthodox ideals of his youth, never, perhaps, very enthusiastically championed, and during his sojourn in France became a rationalist and free-thinker. In general, however, the Hartford Wits fought for the established order against the forces of innovation and disintegration and thus when they sat down to unburden their minds of their visions of their country's future greatness, or of their impatience with demagoguery and political short-sightedness, it was natural that their sense of tradition and order should lead their thoughts to seek expression in the verse forms lifted into fame by the masters of an older and greater literature and accepted as the conventional vehicle of poetic expression. Here is another reason, if they must be catalogued, for the forgetfulness of the Hartford Wits. These balanced, formal lines, so expressive of the artificial modes and manners of the subjects of Queen Anne and her successors, are to us prosy, old-fashioned and imitative. Their charm has fled. Can you imagine Miss Amy Lowell reading Hudibras? And we must admit that "M'Fingal," though it has given to literature some still remembered aphorisms, such as-- "No man e'er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law"-- is, on the whole, poorer reading than its model. ii It is significant that the distinction of the individuals united in the "friendly club" was not confined to their literary activities. In an age sometimes esteemed narrow and limited in its cultural aspects they are refreshing in their versatility. Trumbull was a well-known lawyer and served on the bench for eighteen years, part of his legal training having been pursued in the office of John Adams. It was a strange combination, not unprecedented but nevertheless arresting, of this talent for the law associated with the artistic temperament. For with all his practical attributes Trumbull was essentially an artist. His early poem entitled "An Ode to Sleep," says Tyler, "is a composition resonant of noble and sweet music and making, if one may say so, a nearer approach to genuine poetry than had then [1773] been achieved by any living American except Freneau." And in the following bit of autobiography, quoted by Tyler, may be discerned the self-distrust and depression to which no soul that longs and strives for the beautiful in this imperfect world is entirely a stranger: "Formed with the keenest sensibility and the most extravagantly romantic feelings . . . . I was born the dupe of imagination. My satirical turn was not native. It was produced by the keen spirit of critical observation, operating on disappointed expectation, and revenging itself on real or fancied wrongs." This is an extraordinary item of self-revelation to come from a man who at various times held office as State's Attorney for Hartford County, member of the General Assembly and Judge of the Superior and Supreme Courts of his State. It may not be an entirely fanciful surmise to attribute a partial cause of the delicate health that followed Trumbull all his long life to the warring elements that strove to unite in his brilliant mentality. With Dr. Hopkins poetizing was distinctly a by-product. His chief concern was the practice of medicine and in his profession he won a reputation that is not entirely forgotten today by members of the faculty, for he was probably the first American physician to assert that tuberculosis was curable and his success as a specialist in this field was so marked that, says Dr. Walter R. Steiner in a monograph upon him, "patients with this disease came to him for treatment from a great distance--one being recorded to have made the trip all the way from New Orleans." In his treatment he was unique in his day in very largely discarding the use of drugs and relying more upon pure air, good diet and moderate exercise when strength permitted. His theory that fresh air was better for colds than the warm air of houses was revolutionary, but so was almost everything he did--or so it seemed to his contemporaries. At one time he evidently considered that New York City might offer a wider field of practice than the Connecticut capital, for in December, 1789, Trumbull wrote to Oliver Wolcott, "Dr. Hopkins has an itch of running away to New York, but I trust his indolence will prevent him. However if you should catch him in your city, I desire you to take him up or secure him so that we may have him again, for which you shall have sixpence reward and all charges." In spite of his malady he lived till almost fifty-one, dying in April, 1801, the head of the medical profession in Connecticut. It is to be noted that though Dr. Cogswell was one of the chief contributors to "The Echo" his main business in life was as a surgeon rather than a poet, and he became one of the most skillful surgical practitioners in the country, being the first to introduce into the United States the operation for cataracts and the first to tie the carotid artery. Closely associated with him is the pathetic memory of his daughter Alice who became stone deaf in early childhood and whose infirmity led to the establishment at Hartford of the first school in this country for the education of the deaf. Of this institution Dr. Cogswell was one of the founders and he was a leader in other philanthropic enterprises. He lived till 1830. To the last he wore the knee breeches and silk stockings customary in his youth and which he considered the only proper dress for a gentleman. His death broke the heart of his daughter Alice, to whom he had been a never-failing protection and support, and she died within a fortnight after her father. In contrast with the activities of their colleagues, the careers of Theodore Dwight and Alsop are associated solely with the product of their pens. Dwight, however, was more of a publicist and editor than a creative literary worker. He had the brains with which nature had endowed his family and his history of the unjustly maligned Hartford Convention is a thoughtful and able piece of work--an original historical document that is illuminating and suggestive. Such distinction as Alsop attained was strictly literary, yet one gets the impression that he worked at writing rather as an amateur than a professional. He was really a student, a scholar, a research worker, and seems to have sought his reward more in the pleasure of following his interests than in the quest of public recognition. Much that he wrote was never published. There was a great deal in life that Colonel Humphreys enjoyed besides composing verses and a great many activities other than poetry for which he may be remembered. Not the least hint of any paralyzing self-distrust, no subtle questionings as to whether it was all worth while, disturbed his equanimity. And fate rewarded his zest in life by furnishing him with a variety of experiences. They began in the war from which he emerged with a reputation for gallantry and daring and, what was perhaps more valuable, with the firm friendship of George Washington. He participated in the raid into Sag Harbor by Colonel Meigs in '77 and the next year raided the Long Island shore on his own account, burning three enemy ships and getting away without the loss of a man. It was only a freak of the weather that perhaps withheld from him a more glorious exploit for on Christmas night, 1780, he headed a desperate venture that had for its object no less an achievement than the capture of Sir Henry Clinton at his headquarters in New York. The rising of the wintry northwest gale drove the boats of the little group of adventurers away from the intended landing near the foot of Broadway and swept them down through the British shipping in the harbor to Sandy Hook. After Yorktown he was ordered by Washington to carry the captured colors to Congress which in the enthusiasm of the moment voted him a handsome sword. "See Humphreys, glorious from the field retire. Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre," wrote Barlow in his "Vision of Columbus," The lyre accompanied songs in praise of his country, tributes to his commander-in-chief, political satires, and even love lyrics-- "Enough with war my lay has sung A softer theme awakes my tongue 'Tis beauty's force divine; Can I resist that air, that grace, The charms of motion, figure, face? For ev'ry charm is thine." But this was by the way. Appointed secretary to the commission, consisting of Franklin, John Adams and Jefferson, sent to negotiate treaties of commerce and amity with European nations, he no doubt thoroughly enjoyed his two years in London and Paris. In theory the nobility of Europe may have been anathema to a patriotic citizen of a republic, but practically there were many persons among them whose acquaintance was agreeable to an amiable and gallant gentleman of sensibility like Colonel Humphreys and there was, no doubt, a certain gratification in dedicating one's poems to a duke and in having them reviewed by a marquis who incidentally disclosed the fact that he was an old companion in arms. Also it was pleasant to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society. On Colonel Humphreys's return he spent some time as a member of the family at Mount Vernon where Washington encouraged him in his project of writing a history of the war which, however, never got any further in print than a memorial of his old general, Putnam. At Mount Vernon he wrote an ode celebrating his great and good friend whose friendship we may reasonably infer constituted one of his chief conversational assets: "Let others sing his deeds in arms, A nation sav'd, and conquest's charms: Posterity shall hear, 'Twas mine, return'd from Europe's courts To share his thoughts, partake his sports And sooth his partial ear." It is clear that European life had its attractions for Colonel Humphreys. At all events he returned to it, serving as minister to Portugal and later to Spain whence he imported his famous merino sheep to his acres at Humphreysville, now Seymour. Here, and in the adjoining town of Derby, he projected and to a creditable extent realized, an ideal patriarchal manufacturing and farming community, instructing his operatives and husbandmen in improved industrial methods, in scientific agriculture and stock raising, athletics, poetry and the drama in which one of his productions was actually presented on the stage. At least he accomplished his wish, voiced in his poem "On the Industry of the United States of America"-- "Oh, might my guidance from the downs of Spain Lead a white flock across the western main, . . . . . Clad in the raiment my merinos yield, Like Cincinnatus, fed from my own field: . . . . . There would I pass, with friends, beneath my trees, What rests from public life, in letter'd ease." iii Though the friends grouped around the tavern fire are united in two sympathetic qualities--devotion to the Muses and a proud conviction, singularly justified by events, of the destiny of their country--it is manifest that the membership of the little club furnishes only another illustration of the truism that human personality is the most varying thing in the world and that life has different lessons for each of us. The most baffling individuality of them all, the man whose story seems to have been a quest for some mysterious, unattained goal, was Joel Barlow. In early life everything he attempted went to pieces. His chaplaincy in the army was a _tour de force_ which he dropped as soon as possible. The law proved a mistake almost as soon as begun and his editorship of "The American Mercury" was abandoned after less than a year. Perhaps it was with renewed hope, perhaps it was with something of desperation, that he persuaded himself to embark on an entirely new undertaking and to accept a proposal to journey overseas to procure settlers for the Ohio lands which the Scioto Land Company desired to sell to unsuspecting Frenchmen. It is an established fact that Barlow was unsuspecting himself, but after he had procured the settlers and shipped them off with golden promises the project turned out to be a gigantic fraud. Personal humiliation was added to general discouragement. Yet somehow he survived the mortification. It may be that at this particular time mundane affairs did not seem to be of the utmost importance. He was dwelling somewhat in the clouds, in a vision--the "Vision of Columbus," which he proposed to amplify and republish in a form more fitting the great theme than the first modest edition of the original poem. He was pre-occupied with the millenium he foresaw. To the present day reader it is of the highest interest to note that the "Vision" foretold the Panama Canal, and that the climax of the poem is a congress of the nations. "Hither the delegated sires ascend, And all the cares of every clime attend. . . . . . . To give each realm its limits and its laws Bid the last breath of dire contention cease, And bind all regions in the leagues of peace." Indeed with the break-down of his career as a promoter the tide began to turn. Barlow's friends knew he was innocent of complicity in the land swindle. In Paris he found himself at last in an environment where freedom of thought was encouraged, where the ambitions of a poet were regarded with respect and admiration. He was always an idealist and he caught the contagion in the mental atmosphere of Paris as the revolution came on. Perhaps it seemed to him that his dream of the millenium was coming true. He became a Girondist and a political writer, supporting himself mainly by his pen, with the re-writing of the "Vision" always in the back of his mind. Was this the real Barlow--or was it a phase, a manifestation of a kind of philosophic idealism, fostered by the air of Paris, so favorable to the blossoming of this new flower of liberty and universal human brotherhood which centered on France the minds of all the dreamers of the world? What did he now think, we wonder, of his dedication of the first edition of his epic, published the year before he sailed for France, to Louis the Sixteenth whom, as one commentator has noted, he soon indirectly assisted in sending to the guillotine? He had gone a long way from the militant conservatism of the brilliant companions of his youth--from the days when he had preached the gospel to American soldiers and had collaborated with Timothy Dwight, at the request of the General Association of the Connecticut Clergy, in getting out an edition of Isaac Watts's metrical versions of the Psalms--to which he had added a few poetical renderings of his own. For the following years his residence alternated between Paris and London where he found congenial souls among the artists and poets who were members of the Constitutional Society. His "Advice to the Privileged Orders" was attacked by Burke, praised by Fox, proscribed by the British government and translated into French and German. In 1792 he presented to the National Convention of France a treatise on government which was in fact a remarkable state paper, combining profound philosophic theories of government with practical administrative and executive suggestions. As a result he was made a citizen of France--an honor he shared among Americans with only Washington and Hamilton. Defeat for election as a deputy from Savoy and his repugnance to the excesses of the Revolution appear to have thrown him out of practical politics for a time. And then a strange thing happened. This visionary poet and idealist attempted to retrieve his fortunes in commerce and speculation and actually succeeded. During his consulship at Algiers, from which he anticipated he might never return, he left a letter for his wife in which he stated that his estate might amount to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars if French funds rose to par. This appointment came to him in a pleasant way. One day in the summer of 1795 he returned from a business trip to the Low Countries to find an old friend waiting for him. Colonel Humphreys, now minister at Lisbon, had arrived at the request of the administration to ask Barlow to accept this mission to Algiers where for a year and a half he was to labor, succeeding in the end in liberating imprisoned countrymen and in effecting a treaty that composed troublesome difficulties. It must have been an interesting reunion. Humphreys was too much of a cosmopolitan, too generous in spirit, to make Barlow's growing liberalism of thought a personal grievance. Here for the exiled American was first-hand news of the old Connecticut friends--that Trumbull, between ill health and the pressure of public affairs, was neglecting the Muses; that Noah Webster was said to be working on a great lexicon; that Dr. Cogswell had settled in Hartford and married a daughter of Colonel William Ledyard who was killed at Fort Griswold with his own sword in the act of surrender; that a play by Dr. Elihu Smith had been acted at the John Street Theatre in New York; that Timothy Dwight would probably succeed Dr. Stiles as President of Yale--and much besides. Very likely Humphreys confided to his friend his growing interest in Miss Ann Bulkley, an English heiress, whom he had met in Lisbon and who soon afterward was to become his wife, and Barlow no doubt found a sympathetic listener to his great project of enlarging and re-publishing the "Vision." His return from Algiers found French consols rising with the Napoleonic successes and Barlow lived as became a man of wealth and distinction. Robert Fulton, who made his home with him, painted his portrait in the intervals of experimenting with submarine boats and torpedoes in the Seine and the harbor at Brest. Indeed Barlow had now acquired so strong an influence with the Directory and the French people that his biographer attributes to him the chief part in averting war between France and the United States in the tense days after 1798. Then followed a return to his own country where he had an ambition to found a national institution for education and the advancement of science. He built a beautiful home, not in New England, be it noted, but near Washington--the "Holland House of America"--and began, but never finished, a history of the United States. He did, however, at last complete "The Columbiad," which was published in Philadelphia in 1807--"the finest specimen of book-making ever produced in America." Did the great moment hold something of disillusion and disappointment, when, amid the somewhat perfunctory adulation, came the bitter criticism of the Federalists and the expressed conviction of some of his old Yale and Hartford friends that he was an apostate in politics and religion? To him it was clear that they did not understand. How could it be expected that Timothy Dwight, for example, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, with all of New England's conservatism and provincialism in his blood, could understand? Yet Barlow's ancestral background was the same--but who can fathom the depths of personality, or solve the complexity of motive and aspiration? Perhaps there were times when the returned wanderer grew homesick for Paris. At last the chance to return to the land that had adopted him came--a chance for notable service in an honorable capacity. War was again in the air and in 1811 Barlow went back to France as minister plenipotentiary, charged with the duty of again averting conflict and negotiating a treaty embodying a settlement of the differences. In the French capital he took his old house. His old servants came back to him with tears of joy. Old friends gathered about him. It was not easy, however, to clinch the treaty. The Emperor was involved in momentous affairs. The Russian expedition was on foot. The ministers procrastinated. There is an intimation in the record that the poet and political theorist was out-maneuvered in the negotiations by players of a game that had nothing to do with poetry or abstract questions but that concerned itself, persistently and relentlessly, with very definite but not entirely obvious purposes. Yet it does not seem that this inference is conclusively supported by the evidence. However that may be, it was given out that Barlow had secured, and he unquestionably believed that he had secured, an agreement as to the provisions of the proposed treaty. At any rate the Emperor consented to meet the American envoy if he would come to Vilna in West Russia. So in that dreary winter he set out with a high hope of achieving his greatest service to his country, but what would have happened at Vilna we shall never know, for on Barlow's approach to that town an incredible and stupendous piece of news awaited him. The invincible Grand Army was retreating, apparently in some demoralization. Everything was in confusion. Where the Emperor was, no one knew. Obviously nothing could now be done and the American minister started to return. Somewhere on those frozen roads the Emperor passed him, racing for Paris to save his dynasty and himself. In the exposure and hardship Barlow fell ill. At the little village of Zarnovich, near Cracow, it became evident that he could travel no further and there, in the midst of that historic cataclysm, he died. It was a strange ending for one of the old Hartford coterie. In the clairvoyance said sometimes to accompany the supreme moment did he realize that if his great epic might not live forever he had at least given form in his day to a dream of which civilization would never let go? Did any intimation come to him that his "Ode to Hasty Pudding," written off-hand at a Savoyard inn, held more real emotion than all the balanced cadences of his monumental work? No doubt his delirious fancies sometimes went back to the old days. Perhaps he saw once more the faces of his old companions of the friendly club, not clouded now with misunderstanding or disapproval. From beyond the frosted panes came intermittently the confused noises of the great retreat, with all their implications of selfish ambition, human suffering and the continual warfare of the world. Was his belief in the final triumph of the fraternity of mankind shaken by that sinister monotone? It is idle to conjecture, but let us hope that he was comforted by a lingering faith, revived in this hour of his extremity from the days of his youth, that he would soon learn as to the truth of his vision and that he would find as well the answers to the other riddles that had puzzled him all his life. _II: The Mystery of the Bell Tavern_ THE investigator of early American fiction will find that a peculiar interest attaches to two novels, both published in the last decade of the eighteenth century, both following Richardson in their epistolary form and both founded on fact. One of these was called "Charlotte Temple, or a Tale of Truth." In the graveyard of Trinity Church in New York, at the head of Wall Street, is a large stone, flush with the ground, bearing the name of the heroine of this now forgotten story which in its day attained an astonishing popularity. The tale is of a young girl who during the War of the American Revolution eloped from an English school with a British officer who abandoned her in New York where she died soon after the birth of a daughter. The tradition runs that more than a century ago the daughter, grown to womanhood, caused her mother's body to be removed to an English churchyard, but the stone still marks the first resting place and when the writer last saw it two wreaths lay upon it. In 1797--seven years after the date of the first edition of "Charlotte Temple"--the second of our two novels appeared. It was called "The Coquette" and was written by Mrs. Hannah Foster, the wife of a Brighton, Massachusetts, minister. For many years it was read and re-read throughout the country, the latest edition appearing in 1866. Like "Charlotte Temple" its theme was the tragedy of abandonment. It seems, indeed, that the writer who wished to intrigue the interest of our ancestors of this period was compelled to hang his plot on the judiciously interwoven threads of sentiment and gloom. Perhaps no further proof of this is needed than the example of Charles Brockden Brown's portentous and sinister romances, with their undeniable flashes of genius. But it is well to remember, too, that these were the days when "The Castle of Otranto," "Clarissa Harlowe," and "The Vicar of Wakefield" were all popular, and all exhibited varying phases of the literary vogue of the day. In other words, though the prevailing mode of thought found expression in different forms, the imaginative impulses beneath the various manifestations were the same. Therefore it is not surprising to find little relief from the tragic note in "The Coquette." It is true that the author endeavors to present the heroine, Eliza Wharton, as a worldly and volatile young woman, but these touches of lightness have lost with the passing years whatever approaches to polite comedy they may have once implied. One must confess that regarded strictly as a piece of fiction the book makes rather hard reading today. But examined with some knowledge of the mystery upon which it is founded, the old novel becomes a genuine human document. Mrs. Foster was a family connection of Elizabeth Whitman, the original of "Eliza Wharton," and may have known her. Whatever the shortcomings of her portrayal may be, it is clear that the authoress was endeavoring to set forth in her book the character, as she estimated it, of the charming and gifted girl, the tragedy of whose death is still unexplained. It is true that the accuracy of the portrait in all respects may be doubted. For example, the few letters of Elizabeth Whitman that have been preserved are far more spontaneous and delightful than any of Eliza Wharton's epistles which constitute so large a part of the story. Evidently they are the letters of a different person, as well as a more attractive one, than Mrs. Foster's heroine. Then, too, Mrs. Foster's tale has something of the effect of a tract, of a moral effort. She is driving home an ethical lesson and Eliza is the example to be shunned, whereas modern speculation, grown more tolerant, is apt to question the pre-judgment which guided the novelist's pen. He who today seeks to penetrate the old secret realizes that he is furnished with only half of the evidence. On that incomplete data how can a verdict of condemnation be fairly based? Elizabeth's own story has never been told. Nevertheless, here, for what it is worth, is Mrs. Foster's notion, adapted to her fictional purposes, of the kind of person the real Elizabeth was, and from this reflection, faint and clouded though it may be, of a genuine and appealing character, the old novel today gathers its greatest interest. For against the somewhat somber background of her New England period this Hartford girl stands forth with a flash of brilliancy and charm. In the midst of a somewhat limited and narrow social life, she was an individualist, an exotic. In contrast with her Puritan environment she seems almost Hellenic--yet one fancies that there is something about her more Gallic than Greek. She was the eldest of the three daughters of the Rev. Elnathan Whitman, D.D., a Fellow of Yale College, and pastor from 1732 till his death in 1777 of the Second Church in Hartford. It is a singular coincidence that through her mother, born Abigail Stanley, she traced kinship to the Charlotte Stanley who was the original of "Charlotte Temple." Her father was a grandson of that noted divine, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, who, it will be remembered, was the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. John Trumbull, the poet and judge, was a cousin and so was Aaron Burr. Besides these, the Pierreponts, the Whitneys, the Ogdens, the Russells, the Wadsworths, were all kin or connected by marriage. Fairly early in life Elizabeth became engaged to be married to the Rev. Joseph Howe, a Yale graduate, and for a while a tutor at the college, whose chief pastorate was at the New South Church in Boston. During the siege he was compelled to flee from the city and, his health failing, he died at Hartford, probably in 1776. In that rare volume, "American Poems, Selected and Original," published at Litchfield, 1793, is "An Ode, Addressed to Miss--. By the late Rev. Joseph Howe, of Boston." Its occasion was the departure, by sea, of the young woman to whom it was addressed. "Nor less to heaven did I prefer, For thy dear sake, my pious prayer. O winds, O waves, agree! Winds gently blow, waves softly flow, Ship move with care, for thou dost bear The better part of me." It is possible, indeed probable, that Elizabeth Whitman, who visited occasionally in Boston, inspired these lines, but it appears that on her part this love affair was of only moderate intensity and that her father's death, which occurred in the year following the death of her betrothed, affected her far more than that of the young minister she was to have married. Not long after Mr. Whitman died, while Elizabeth was visiting in New Haven at the home of Dr. Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, whose daughter Betsy was her intimate friend, her second love affair developed. The Rev. Joseph Buckminster was also a Yale graduate and tutor, later settling at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in Dr. Stiles's old parish, where his life was spent. He was considered an exceptionally brilliant and promising young man and he seems to have loved and wooed Elizabeth ardently. It appears that she had a deep affection for him, but also an intense dread of the harrowing melancholia from which he at times suffered. There is an intimation, too, as to her own growing doubts of future happiness in the somewhat limited rôle of a New England minister's wife. Would her free and eager spirit find satisfaction in a lifetime of parochial routine? She was discussing her final decision in this matter with her cousin Jeremiah Wadsworth in the arbor of her mother's garden when Buckminster, who did not like Colonel Wadsworth, suddenly appeared and, misunderstanding the situation, went away in great anger. Are the following lines from a letter of Elizabeth to Joel Barlow, written at Hartford, February 19, 1779, references to this affair? ". . . . to find yourself quite out of Ambition's way, and in the very bosom of content,--this certainly is agreeable, and never more than when one has met with trouble in a busier place. I felt myself no longer afraid when a certain subject was started. I neither trembled nor turned pale, but sat at my ease and felt as if nobody would hurt me. I know you will laugh at me for a pusillanimous creature for being ever so afraid as you have seen me; but I cannot help it. . . . "As to Mr. Baldwin, if he were at the door, I would not run into the cupboard to avoid him. He may mean well, in writing all to Buckminster and nothing to me; but I do not think it." After the encounter in the garden Elizabeth wrote Buckminster explaining the matter, and, we may infer, telling him that her decision would have been unfavorable. His reply was the announcement of his approaching marriage, but in spite of this rapid _volte face_ he is said to have cherished Elizabeth's memory during all of his life. Mrs. Dall in her "Romance of the Association" tells the story of his burning the first copy of "The Coquette" he read, which he found on a parishioner's table. "It ought never to have been written," he said, "and shall never be read--at least, not in my parish. Bid the ladies take notice, wherever I find a copy I shall treat it in the same way." Familiar letters are always a fairly clear indication of character, and it is from these letters of Elizabeth Whitman, printed in part in her little book by Mrs. Dall, that we may obtain our most direct knowledge of her personality. After reading them one closes the book with the conviction that here was a rare and lovely woman. Here is wit, originality, sympathy--one is almost tempted to say a certain tenderness--encouragement, good sense and good advice. The writer obviously had that quality that will forever be wholly captivating to the masculine mind--the ability to enter whole-heartedly into the aspirations and ambitions of a friend, to make them her own, and to supply the comforting assurance and admiration that the male sex so frequently craves and that is so often the spur to high endeavor. There is something very winning about this affectionate sympathy as displayed in these old letters, all, with one exception, written to Joel Barlow at the time when he was striving for accomplishment and recognition as a poet. Yet the writer's praise is not blind or overdone, for she does not hesitate to criticise adversely, though in a most engaging way, some of Barlow's verses that he sends to her for her comment: "There are so many beauties in your elegies, that it looks like envy or ill-nature to pass them and dwell upon the few faults; but you know that I do not leave them unnoticed or unadmired. If you will have me find fault, I can do it in a few instances with the expression. The sentiments are everywhere beautiful, just and above all criticism. . . . Why are you gloomy? You must not be. Expect everything, hope everything, and do everything to make your circumstances agreeable." Perhaps Elizabeth did not feel incompetent to assume the rôle of a critic and literary adviser, for she herself had the true artist's desire for self-expression and this found relief in her own poetry which usually took the form of the heroic couplet. It is inevitable that the reader of these letters should ask himself: Was there anything more than friendship between Barlow and Elizabeth? Doubtless the answer is in the negative. When Elizabeth Whitman first met the poet he was engaged to be married to Ruth Baldwin who always remained one of Elizabeth's closest friends and who through all of Barlow's strange career was his faithful and beloved wife. Yet it is evident that in his correspondent Barlow's wavering and self-centered spirit found a steadying and assuring solace that he could never have forgotten. Is it possible that he knew the secret of the final mystery? Of love affairs, other than those here indicated, that may have transpired in Elizabeth's experience before the catastrophe, we know little or nothing. No doubt certain emotional adventures occurred as the years passed. She was exceptionally cultivated and entertaining and all accounts agree that she was beautiful, though her exact type of beauty is a matter of speculation, for her portrait which for years after her death hung in her old home was destroyed in 1831, when the house was burned--perhaps with much memoranda which would have given us a clue to her secret. The following well-rounded sentence from Mrs. Locke's historically inaccurate but emotionally true preface to the edition of 1866 of "The Coquette" is not without its character-illuminating quality. "By her exceeding personal beauty and accomplishments," wrote Mrs. Locke of Elizabeth, of whose personality she seems to have had some reliable evidence, "added to the wealth of her mind, she attracted to her sphere the grave and the gay, the learned and the witty, the worshippers of the beautiful, with those who reverently bend before all inner graces." For a young woman of the period her life was reasonably varied and her acquaintance extensive. At President Stiles's home, and elsewhere in New Haven, where she often visited, she met many men of distinction. She and Betsy Stiles both spoke French fluently and it is said that Elizabeth was greatly admired by several of the French officers who had known Dr. Stiles at Newport and who called upon him from time to time at New Haven. Certain, it must be confessed rather indefinite, "foreign secretaries" are alleged to have fallen victims to her charms. There is an intimation that after her father's death she did not always find life at home congenial. This is an inference--though not entirely an inference--that one may readily accept. There was an irony in the fate that placed this vivid creature in a New England parsonage in the last half of the eighteenth century. Paris or Florence in the days of the Renaissance--in such a setting one can visualize her. But, alas! there was little in common between the New England of 1780 and the France or Italy of three hundred years before. And yet one thing was common--as it is common wherever individuals of the human race abide. When the great passion overwhelmed her and swept her away from all that she had known to a mysterious end, Elizabeth Whitman was no longer a young girl. She was a woman of experience, knowing the ways of her world as well as any one of her day and time. The love that broke down all restraints, that surrendered everything, that threw the world away, was no ordinary affair of the heart. It was, in truth, the irresistible, the incredible, the historic passion. It was of a piece with the substance of which the great dramas of the world are made and against the New England scene it now became the motif of a tragedy. On a day late in May, 1788, Elizabeth took the stage at Hartford for Boston where she was to visit her friend, Mrs. Henry Hill. No doubt her family knew that something was wrong. They knew, among other things, that she had spent all the preceding night alone in the starlight on the roof of William Lawrence's house on the north side of the old State House square. It was a strange proceeding, but their daughter and sister was, after all, a strange, temperamental creature whose impulses and mental processes they seldom understood and frequently disapproved. Of how much more they were aware we do not know--they must have had their suspicions--but at least they were ignorant of her purpose in her journey. From the moment when she drove away in the stage neither they nor any one of her Hartford friends saw her again--nor did she reach her destination. On Tuesday, July 29, 1788, the Salem "Mercury" printed the following notice: "Last Friday, a female stranger died at the Bell Tavern, in Danvers; and on Sunday her remains were decently interred. The circumstances relative to this woman are such as to excite curiosity, and interest our feelings. She was brought to the Bell in a chaise, from Watertown, as she said, by a young man whom she had engaged for that purpose. After she had alighted, and taken a trunk with her into the house, the chaise immediately drove off. She remained at this inn till her death, in expectation of the arrival of her husband, whom she expected to come for her, and appeared anxious at his delay. She was averse to being interrogated concerning herself or connections; and kept much retired to her chamber, employed in needlework, writing, etc. She said, however, that she came from Westfield [Wethersfield?], in Connecticut; that her parents lived in that state; that she had been married only a few months; and that her husband's name was Thomas Walker,--but always carefully concealed her family name. Her linen was all marked E. W. About a fortnight before her death, she was brought to bed of a lifeless child. When those who attended her apprehended her fate, they asked her, whether she did not wish to see her friends. She answered, that she was very desirous of seeing them. It was proposed that she should send for them; to which she objected, hoping in a short time to be able to go to them. From what she said, and from other circumstances, it appeared probable to those who attended her, that she belonged to some country town in Connecticut. Her conversation, her writings, and her manners, bespoke the advantage of a respectable family and good education. Her person was agreeable; her deportment, amiable and engaging; and, though in a state of anxiety, and suspense, she preserved a cheerfulness which seemed to be not the effect of insensibility, but of a firm and patient temper. She was supposed to be about 35 years old. Copies of letters, of her writing, dated at Hartford, Springfield, and other places, were left among her things. This account is given by the family in which she resided; and it is hoped that the publication of it will be a means of ascertaining her friends of her fate." The hope of the editor of the "Mercury" was realized. This notice, coming to the attention of Mrs. Hill, finally resulted in the identification of the mysterious lady of the Belt Tavern as Elizabeth Whitman. [Illustration: Monument and Bell Tavern, Danvers.] And that, really, is the whole story. The succinct newspaper statement, with its contemporary note and its effect of reality, furnishes a more effective climax than the phrases of any modern chronicler. Yet one cannot quite close the record without mention of a few incidents of the last days. The copies of letters mentioned as found among Elizabeth's belongings evidently escaped her, for, fearful of the outcome of her illness, she burned, as she supposed, all her papers. A poem and part of a letter, both clearly addressed to her lover or husband, though no name was given, escaped her. "Must I die alone?" she wrote in those final days. "Shall I never see you more? I know that you will come, but you will come too late: This is, I fear, my last ability. Tears fall so, I know not how to write. Why did you leave me in so much distress? But I will not reproach you: All that was dear I left for you: but do not regret it.--May God forgive in both what was amiss:--When I go from hence, I will leave you some way to find me:--if I die, will you come and drop a tear over my grave?" There is a legend, perhaps apocryphal, that one afternoon she wrote in chalk on the inn door, or on the flagging before it, her initials or other sign, which a small boy rubbed out without her knowledge. That evening, the legend runs, an officer in uniform rode into the town on horseback looking carefully at all the doors and walks, but speaking to no one. Not finding what he evidently sought, he is said to have ridden despondently away. During all her stay at Danvers, Elizabeth wore a wedding ring and at her request it was buried with her. As to the identity of the man whom Elizabeth loved there have been many speculations. A cousin of hers, an able man, distinguished in the history of his time, has often been assumed to have been the cause of her tragedy, but it is fair to his memory to say that he denied this assumption vehemently. The late Charles Hoadly, State Librarian of Connecticut, had a theory that the man was a prominent member of the Yale class of 1776, but no evidence for this belief is given. Another supposition is that Elizabeth, against the wishes of her family, had contracted a marriage with a French Romanist who, had he acknowledged this union, would have forfeited his inheritance. Probably Jeremiah Wadsworth, who was her friend and adviser, knew the secret, but if so it perished with him. Her brother William, who was eight years younger than she, long survived her, dying in Hartford on Christmas Day, 1846, at the age of eighty-six. In the old man, who was one of the last in his city to wear the knee breeches of the preceding century, it would have been difficult to recognize Elizabeth's "little rogue of a brother" whom she frequently commended to Joel Barlow's care while at Yale. Through a slight knowledge of medicine he acquired the title of "Doctor," but he was also admitted to the bar and for some time was Town Clerk, and Clerk of the City Court. In his later years he became something of an antiquary and after the Wadsworth Atheneum was built he found in that castellated home of the humanities, particularly in the library, a grateful refuge from the world, where he was always ready to converse with other visitors upon incidents of days long gone by. One subject, however, was universally accepted as unapproachable. With his son, who died unmarried in Philadelphia in 1875, the line of the Rev. Elnathan Whitman became extinct. After Elizabeth's death her brother is not known to have mentioned her name outside of the family, but for many years he made an annual pilgrimage to her grave with his sister Abigail. The letter of an old resident tells us that after Elizabeth died the door of her room in the Whitman home was kept locked and nothing disturbed till fire destroyed the building. _III: The Hemans of America_ IN 1866, the year after her death, Timothy Dwight, later beloved president of Yale University, contributed to "The New Englander" an article on Mrs. Sigourney in the form of a review of her posthumous autobiography, entitled "Letters of Life." This article deserves to be remembered because, for one thing, it reflects from its author's mind a sense of humor which Mrs. Sigourney never, even in her most inspired moments, displayed. We all recall the old story of the Hartford personage who achieved a certain measure of fame by remarking that Mrs. Sigourney's personal obituary poems had added a new terror to death. Dr. Dwight's paper begins with a reference to this same phase of the poetess. "Whenever any person has died in our country," he says, "during the last score of years, who was of public reputation sufficient to justify it . . . a kind of calm and peaceful confidence has rested in our minds, that, within a brief season, a poetical obituary would appear in the public prints from the well-known pen of Mrs. Sigourney. Indeed so general has been this confidence among the people of Connecticut, that some persons, who, from peculiar modesty or from some other reason, have desired to escape the notice of the great world after death, have been beset by a kind of perpetual fear that she might survive them, and thus, having them at a great disadvantage, might send out their names unto all the earth." And later on in the essay he mentions the reported story of the man who was unwilling to travel from New Haven to Hartford on the same train with the distinguished Hartford lady lest in case of a railroad accident she might put him into rhyme. Though it is doubtful if the author of "The Anthology of Spoon River" ever heard of these obituary poems, they form a strange precedent for that original collection of verse. Some of them were gathered by their authoress in a volume entitled "The Man of Uz, and Other Poems," published at Hartford in 1862, where the literary antiquarian may still peruse them. If they originally possessed any poetry it is now extinct, and the only interest remaining is the personal one. To those for whom the older Hartford still has its appeal such names as those of Colonel Samuel Colt, Samuel Tudor, "The Brothers Buell," Harvey Seymour, D. F. Robinson, Judge Thomas S. Williams, Deacon Normand Smith, Governor Joseph Trumbull, and Mary Shipman Deming--to mention only a few--have their memories and possibly their family associations. Perhaps it is not strange that such a considerable part of Mrs. Sigourney's facile effusions related to the tomb for hers was the age of pensive sentiment. It was the time when the weeping willow was popular in all forms of art, from the tombstone to the mezzotint illustration, when young ladies sang captivatingly, to the harp, of an early death, when funeral sermons were printed, widely circulated and even read, and when everybody was wondering whether they were numbered among the "elect" or--not. Yet it would be a mistake to give the impression that all the sentiment of the time, or all of Mrs. Sigourney's poetry, partook of gloom. Far from it. Though there was, to be sure, a kind of background of agreeable melancholy, and such alluring titles of her books as "Whisper to a Bride" and "Water Drops" (a plea for temperance) were doubtless not intentionally humorous, Mrs. Sigourney could be playful at times and she invariably painted the immediate scene in colors of the rose. She was, in fact, an idealist. She so far idealized her early surroundings in Norwich, where she was born, that Dr. Dwight, who also knew Norwich in his boyhood, finds difficulty in identifying places and people. She even idealized the Park River, sometimes known in her day, as in ours, by a less euphonious title, alluding to it as "the fair river that girdled the domain [her home on what is now known as Asylum Hill] from which it was protected by a mural parapet." Who other than Mrs. Sigourney could have transformed an ordinary stone wall into a "mural parapet"? [Illustration: THE SIGOURNEY MANSION] Speaking of the Park River, Mrs. Sigourney, in the course of describing the pastoral surroundings of what was then her country home, confesses that she could never understand why pigs were unmentionable in polite society--though we think she herself refrained from referring to them by their ordinary term. "Such treatment," she asserts "is peculiarly ungrateful in a people who allow this scorned creature to furnish a large part of their subsistence, to swell the gains of commerce and to share with the monarch of ocean the honor of lighting the evening lamp." Here are two other references, quoted by Dr. Dwight, to this rural "domain" of which the dwelling house, it will be remembered, is still standing: "Two fair cows, with coats brushed to a satin sleekness, ruminated at will, and filled large pails with creamy nectar." And again, the poultry "munificently gave us their eggs, their offspring and themselves." But even this idealized Sabine farm was not exempt from the troubles that lie in wait for all of us, and we must be chivalrous enough to admit that Mrs. Sigourney bore the sorrows that came to her with grace and dignity. Soon after the poetess and her husband took up their residence here Mr. Sigourney was overtaken by business troubles, which his wife translates into "obstructions in the course of mercantile prosperity," and she cheerfully undertook various economies, among which was "prolonging the existence of garments by transmigration." Later the family moved to a less pretentious home on High street where the latter part of the life of Mrs. Sigourney, who survived her husband, was spent. Later still this house became a kind of shrine, and a distinguished Yale teacher and poet, whose people, back in his undergraduate days of the sixties, dwelt for a time in the poetess's old home, has told the writer how nice old ladies from the country used to make pilgrimages thither to pluck a spray of lilac from the garden where the poetess was wont to walk and to see the room where she "mused." The fact is that she appears to have dwelt in a world of the mind that, however real to her, was in reality distinctly artificial, like most of her poetic writings. In these faded verses there now appears to be little real thought, still less real poetry. The only stanzas about which any flavor of poetic eloquence still clings are those entitled "The Return of Napoleon from St. Helena" and "Indian Names." Compare her "Niagara" and "The Indian Summer" with the poems on the same subjects by J. G. C. Brainard, another now almost forgotten Hartford poet of her time, whose early death prevented the flowering of a fame that was just beginning to unfold, and the reader grasps at once the difference between a certain graceful turn of thought and facility of phrase on the one hand, and genuine poetic genius on the other. [Illustration: LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY FROM A MINIATURE IN THE COLT COLLECTION BY PERMISSION OF THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM] And yet in her day she had a prodigious vogue and the reference to her as "The Hemans of America," while now holding a certain facetious implication, was gravely accepted at the time. Her journey abroad after her husband's death was in its way a sort of mild ovation. She met Queen Victoria and it is significant as well as amusing to find that our Hartford citizeness alluded to the Queen as "a sister woman." Her verses were translated into several languages and she received presents and letters of commendation from the King of Prussia, the Empress of Russia and the Queen of France. The explanation of her contemporary popularity must lie in the state of mind of the period. In that era "sensibility" was the passport to literary success and Mrs. Sigourney certainly possessed sensibility, if nothing else, to a high degree. Those sentimental, yearly gift books known as "annuals" were a phenomenon of the time, and no "annual" was complete without one or more of her poems. It is time that some qualified person gave to the world a study of this old "annual" literature, so sentimental, so romantic, and so generally languishing. The most delightful appreciation that comes to mind at the moment, of the "annual" as a literary curio is contained in Professor Beers's life of Willis in the American Men of Letters series--or in his essay on Percival in "The Ways of Yale." There is a certain pathos in the fact that the years have denied this Hartford poetess's gentle claim to immortality, because the impossibility of granting this claim has led the world to neglect two very definite and admirable characteristics she possessed. One is that she was a remarkably good woman. She carried her Christian precepts into her daily practice in a way that few of us seem to succeed in doing. In spite of a little harmless vanity, everyone who came in contact with her appears to have admired and loved her. In the social life of the old city she was a leading and popular figure. Samuel G. Goodrich in his "Recollections of a Life Time" describing Hartford in the second decade of the nineteenth century says of Mrs. Sigourney, then Miss Huntley: "Noiselessly and gracefully she glided into our social circle and ere long was its presiding genius. . . . Mingling in the gayeties of our social gatherings and in no respect clouding their festivity, she led us all toward intellectual pursuits and amusements. We had even a literary cotery under her inspiration, its first meetings being held at Mr. Wadsworth's." Before the writer lie a half dozen of Mrs. Sigourney's letters written in her distinct and regular handwriting. They relate to business matters, to social engagements, and a few are letters of consolation. Perhaps they seem a little stilted and formal, but in all the personal notes there is evident a very genuine and very charming spirit of sympathy and kindliness. The other trait that has been largely forgotten is that she was a natural teacher of youth. In her early days in Hartford she conducted a school for girls on singularly successful and somewhat original lines. This she relinquished on her marriage, but for nearly half a century those of her old pupils who lived never failed to meet annually with her in remembrance of their early association. Clearly, she inspired in them all an ardent and lasting affection. On the writer's desk, among her letters, lies an ancient school copy-book containing the transcript of an address she made to her old scholars August 17, 1822, "on their meeting to form a Charitable and Literary Society." It is characteristic that the greater part of this composition is concerned with affectionate and what now seem rather pathetic sketches of the five young girls of her flock who had died. The address confirms what we know from other sources--that her school was started in 1814, soon after she came from Norwich to Hartford. The old manuscript abounds in unimpeachable moral aphorisms. One may, perhaps, smile at the carefully balanced phraseology of this: "Some sciences are more attractive to ambition, more congenial with fame, more omnipotent over wealth, but I know of none so closely connected with happiness as the science of doing good." Yet most of us would be better men and women if we applied that maxim in our lives as constantly as did this gentle "lady of old years." In her teaching "the science of doing good" was not a theoretical matter alone. It was directed to practical ends. "During a period of somewhat less than two years and a half," she says, "you completed for the poor 160 garments of different descriptions, many of which were carefully altered and repaired from your own--among them 35 pairs of stockings, knit without sacrifice of time during the afternoon reading and recitation of history. You likewise contributed ten dollars to the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, five dollars to the schools then established among the Cherokees, and distributed religious books to an amount exceeding ten dollars, among the children of poverty and ignorance. . . . Some of you were accustomed to gain time for these extra employments by rising an hour earlier in the morning." Had Mrs. Sigourney continued her school it is not by any means preposterous to believe that her fame as an educator might have outlasted her reputation in literature, and that she might have shared with Miss Beecher of the old Hartford Female Seminary a certain degree of distinction in connection with the early education of women in this country. _IV: Whom the Gods Love_ IN the year 1822 there drifted into the friendly social life of the old town a short, odd looking young man who, it developed, had come to take editorial charge of "The Connecticut Mirror," a weekly newspaper, strongly federal in politics, which had been established in 1809 by Charles Hosmer and which, at this time, had just been bought by Messrs. Goodsell and Wells, whose place of business was at the corner of Main and Asylum streets. The name of this young man was John Gardiner Calkins Brainard and he was twenty-six years old. Those who inquired about him learned that he was a native of New London and the son of Judge Jeremiah G. Brainard of the Superior Court. In 1815 he had been graduated at Yale--a classmate of that strange genius James Gates Percival, poet, physician, geologist. After studying law in his brother's office he had practiced for a time in Middletown, but it was rumored that his tastes were literary rather than legal, and that the law had not proved very successful. In spite of his rather uncouth appearance this newcomer soon became a favorite among the young people. He was clever--any one could see that. His frequent witty and amusing sayings gathered an arresting emphasis from their contrast with intervals of quietness and even of apparent depression. Perhaps this hint of an underlying seriousness had its especial charm for the young ladies. Remember that in those days Byron was in fashion. But there was something about this young man that attracted also friends of his own sex. "The first time I ever saw him," says a writer in the "Boston Statesman," quoted by Whittier in his memoir of Brainard, "I met him in a gay and fashionable circle. He was pointed out to me as the poet Brainard--a plain, ordinary looking individual, careless in his dress, and apparently without the least claim to the attention of those who value such advantages(?). But there was no person there so much or so flatteringly attended to. . . . He was evidently the idol, not only of the poetry-loving and gentler sex--but also of the young men who were about him. . . ." We can picture young Mr. Brainard as one of the leading figures in that "literary cotery," which Goodrich describes and which was presided over by Mrs. Sigourney. It was in a room adjoining Goodrich's at Ripley's Tavern that Brainard soon took up his abode and the two became fast friends. The discovery was soon made that young Mr. Brainard was by way of being a poet--if, indeed, the fact was not already known. Verses, obviously from his pen, appeared constantly in his newspaper. Indeed some of the paper's readers may have recognized the new editor's hand through their familiarity with the verse he had sometimes written for the "Mirror" before his official connection with that journal. His first contribution to the paper in his new capacity appeared in the issue for February 25, 1822, in which the change of ownership and the new editor were announced. This contribution was in the form of a poem "On the Birthday of Washington."--"Behold the moss'd cornerstone dropp'd from the wall," ran the first line. It was not a great poem, but it sounded a sincere, patriotic note, had a genuine poetic touch and far excelled most newspaper verse of the day. And so this original young man, with his light brown hair, rather pale face, large eyes and obvious "temperament" began to acquire the character and reputation of a poet. We fancy that this reputation was somewhat limited until on a sudden impulse he wrote "The Fall of Niagara." This piece of blank verse, though now largely forgotten in the lapse of years, had in its time a tremendous vogue. It was copied far and wide, took its place in school readers and for years was declaimed by youthful orators before committees and admiring parents at school exhibitions. We do not know the exact date of its composition, but it must have been before 1825, for it appeared in the author's first collection of verse published in that year. It was written one raw March evening in an emergency, to make copy for the next morning's paper. Goodrich tells the story. Brainard was half ill with a cold and Goodrich went over with him to the "Mirror" office and started a fire in the Franklin stove, while his companion, miserable and depressed, talked at random, abhorring the compulsion that made writing a necessity and his procrastination that had postponed his work, till the last moment. "Some time passed," says Goodrich, "in similar talk, when at last Brainard turned suddenly, took up his pen and began to write. I sat apart and left him to his work. Some twenty minutes passed, when, with a radiant smile on his face, he got up, approached the fire, and, taking the candle to light his paper, he read as follows: THE FALL OF NIAGARA. 'The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain, While I look upward to thee. It would seem As if God pour'd thee from his 'hollow hand.' And hung his bow upon thy awful front; And spoke in that loud voice, which seem'd to him Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour's sake, 'The sound of many waters'; and had bade Thy flood to chronicle the ages back. And notch his cent'ries in the eternal rocks.' "He had hardly done reading when the [printer's] boy came. Brainard handed him the lines--on a small scrap of rather coarse paper--and told him to come again in half an hour. Before this time had elapsed, he had finished, read me the following stanza: 'Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we, That hear the question of that voice sublime? Oh, what are all the notes that ever rung From war's vain trumpet by thy thundering side? Yea, what is all the riot man can make, In his short life, to thy unceasing roar? And yet, bold babbler, what art thou to Him Who drown'd a world, and heap'd the waters far Above its loftiest mountains?--a light wave, That breathes and whispers of its Maker's might.' "These lines having been furnished, Brainard left his office and we returned to Miss Lucy's parlor. He seemed utterly unconscious of what he had done. . . . The lines went forth and produced a sensation of delight over the whole country." It is not too much to say that Niagara brought Brainard fame. To the modern ear inured to free verse its lines may sound perhaps a trifle over sonorous and formal. But it has real poetic eloquence and inspiration. Brainard had never been within less than five hundred miles of the great falls. The Niagara is the first poem in that collection of the poet's verses published in 1825, alluded to above. Before the writer at the moment lies a copy of this rather rare volume. Goodrich arranged for its publication with Bliss and White of New York and with difficulty persuaded Brainard to do the necessary work of collection and revision. It was the only collection of his verses that was published during the poet's life. Two others were issued after his death--one in 1832, with a memoir by Whittier, and one, with a prefatory sketch by the Rev. Dr. Robbins, in 1842. The copy of the first collection, now on the writer's desk, bears on the fly-leaf this inscription in the author's handwriting: [Illustration: Handwritten: Will you allow this a place in your Library and oblige Yours very respectfully JGCBrainard To/D Wadsworth Esq] The thin little book has the title, "Occasional Pieces of Poetry," which is peculiarly appropriate, for most of Brainard's poems were suggested by incidents of daily life that came to his attention. For example, the stage coach from Hartford to New Haven falls through a bridge and two lives are lost--the occurrence prompts him to write the "Lines on a Melancholy Accident;" the visit of Lafayette to this country in 1824 occasions some verses to "the only surviving general of the Revolution;" the death of two persons who were struck by lightning during a religious service in Montville suggests "The Thunder Storm;" the humorous verses entitled "The Captain" result from the genuinely amusing situation that arose in New London harbor when the wreck of the Norwich Methodist meeting house, that had come down the river in a freshet, collided with an anchored schooner. [Illustration: OCCASIONAL PIECES OF POETRY. BY JOHN G. C. BRAINARD. Some said, "John, print it;" others said, "Not so,"-- Some said, "It might do good;" others said, "No." _Bunyan's Apology_ NEW-YORK: PRINTED FOR K. BLISS AND E. WHITE _Clayton & Van Norden, Printers._ 1825.] The fact that the poet took many every-day affairs as the immediate occasion for his versifying accounts for the trivial character of some of his work. On the other hand it illustrates the theory he held of the need of a genuine American literature. Though he read eagerly Byron and Scott, he deprecated in the columns of the "Mirror" the imitation of foreign writers by American men of letters, holding that our own history, traditions and environment gave inspiration enough. He welcomed the appearance of Cooper with enthusiasm, and a story which ran in the "Mirror" under the title of "Letters from Fort Braddock" and which was largely in the Cooper manner was written by him though published anonymously. Indeed a great part of his work dealt with local matters. "Matchit Moodus" expresses a fantastic legend of the "Moodus noises." "The Black Fox of Salmon River" embodies in verse another grim local tradition. "The Shad Spirit" and "Lines to the Connecticut River" are other similar examples of his use of the folk-lore of the Connecticut valley. Professor Beers of Yale cites the exquisite little lyric beginning "The dead leaves strew the forest walk," as about the best example of his work. Goodrich says it was written after the departure from Hartford of a young lady from Savannah to whom the poet had been devoted during her visit. Very attractive, too, are the lines on "Indian Summer." The blank verse entitled "The Invalid on the East End of Long Island," has a melancholy note but deserves remembrance. It was there that Brainard spent the few weeks just before the end. He was too sensitive and unaggressive a soul both for the law and for the political wrangling which attended the newspaper controversies of the day. In the practical life of his country and his time, which had small place for artistic aspiration or expression, he was an anomaly simply because he was a real poet. To this situation may be attributed no doubt in large measure the sense of failure, unquestionably exaggerated, which he often expressed. "Don't expect too much of me," he said to Goodrich at their first meeting, "I never succeeded in anything yet. I could never draw a mug of cider without spilling more than half of it." His frequent depression, however, was not all temperament--it had a physical basis. In the spring of 1827 incipient tuberculosis compelled him to give up his work on the "Mirror," and on September 26, 1828, a month before his thirty-second birthday, he died at his home in New London. His death called forth the customary poetic obituary from his friend Mrs. Sigourney--one of the best she ever wrote--voicing a sincere and generous appreciation. Whittier, with other poets of the day, added his word of memory and praise. Perhaps a line from Snelling best expresses in a few words the whole story-- "The falchion's temper ate the scabbard through." _V: An Eccentric Visitor_ WE may be permitted to take a certain pride in the fact that most strangers who sojourn for a time among us express admiration and liking for the town. There has been, however, one historic and notable exception. A young man named Percival who visited us in 1815, the year of his graduation from Yale College, did not care for Hartford at all and, moreover, did not hesitate to proclaim his distaste in some of the verses he was then engaged in writing. However, poor Percival did not like any spot very well. It is with a sense of faint amusement or, when we know his history, of compassion, rather than with any shade of resentment, that we now read the stanzas in which he published his sentiments to an unappreciative world: "Ismir! Fare thee well forever! From thy walls with joy I go, Every tie I freely sever, Flying from thy den of woe. * * * * Ismir! Land of cursed deceivers, Where the sons of darkness dwell Hope, the cherub's base bereavers,-- Hateful city! Fare thee well." When he wrote this James Gates Percival was twenty years old. Some of the emotion of these lines arose simply from uncurbed youthful reaction from disappointment. Most of it, however, was individual and characteristic temperament--the same uncomfortable mental constitution that seemed to make it impossible for him to withhold the vitriolic verses he wrote and printed on the character of a clergyman who had objected to Percival's suit for his daughter's hand. The young poet had come to Hartford on the invitation of his classmate, Horace Hooker, who later entered the ministry and whose wife wrote for the young a number of very instructive and very pious stories which in their day attained a considerable popularity. It was hoped that in the literary atmosphere which at that time existed in Hartford this odd young man, with his undoubted poetic strain and his dreamy and contemplative nature, would find a congenial milieu. The visit, however, was a failure. Young Percival was not popular. "He was too shy and modest," says his biographer, "to adapt himself to different circles. He wanted confidence, and at social gatherings [in Hartford] he talked at great length on single subjects, but in so low a tone that people could not hear him. He was not treated as he expected to be; it seemed to him that he was not appreciated, and he came away in disgust." This charge against us of lack of appreciation finds some mitigation in the fact that the poet departed from many places in the same frame of mind and for the same reason. Percival was one of those pathetic spirits who find the world an unhappy abiding place. His constitutional wretchedness was in fact so extreme that he is said in early life to have attempted self-destruction and one of his best poems, as well as one of the gloomiest in the language, reflects his moods at this period under the title of "The Suicide." Fortune aggravated the disadvantage of one unfitted at the best to cope with the world by allotting to him a life of penury. For many years he lived as a recluse in the State Hospital Building in New Haven where he was allowed the use of three rooms which he never permitted visitors to enter--on one occasion even refusing to admit Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is related that at another time a somewhat pompous gentleman, accompanied by two ladies, was visiting the building and, learning that the poet lived there, rapped at his door and then stood waiting, a lady on each side of him. The door opened a crack and Percival's face appeared. "I am extremely happy and rejoiced," began the visitor, with a great deal of manner, "that I have the honor of addressing the poet Percival--" But he got no further, for Percival instantly ejaculated "Boo!" and slammed the door. This seems to have been his customary manner of excusing himself to callers. Percival's lack of means was in a way his own fault--or at least it was the result of his peculiar disposition which, in its sensitiveness to purely imaginary slights and its impossibility of concession or adaptation, worked constantly against his prosperity. His friends were faithful and long-suffering and often came to the rescue. In spite of his oddities there seems to have been a singular charm about the man like the charm of an unexpectedly original child. When the bane of an intense bashfulness was removed and he was alone with one or two intimates, his talk is said to have been delightful. He became absolutely absorbed in any topic in which he was interested and brought to bear upon it a wealth of allusion and comment of which few minds were capable. As a poet he is now forgotten, yet it is a suggestive and significant fact that in 1828, when a project was in hand to publish a group picture of nine living American poets, Percival was to occupy the center of the stage, while such minor lights as Bryant, Irving and Halleck, with others, were to surround him. But the fame he longed for and, with an almost childlike naïveté, claimed as his due, was short-lived. It barely touched him and passed him by. Yet he deserves remembrance, if only for his versatility. While it is chiefly as a poet that mention is made of him in encyclopedias and other books of reference, he was capable, but for his temperamental disabilities, of shining in many lines and in one pursuit other than poetry he has left a lasting memorial. He studied law, was admitted to the bar and never practiced. He served his medical apprenticeship under his good friend Dr. Eli Ives of New Haven, took his degree, practiced a little and, though he was always afterward known as "Doctor," abandoned the profession--except that later in life he was post surgeon at Boston till his abhorrence of examining recruits compelled him to relinquish the work. At one time he thought of entering the ministry and he was always an authority on theology and dogma. He gave up his appointment as a professor of chemistry at the Military Academy at West Point because in going to his quarters he had to use the same hallway with other officers. He was a learned botanist and a linguist of rare attainments. In 1827 he carried through successfully the immense task of correcting the proofs and supervising the publication of Webster's unabridged dictionary--and seems to have been happier in this work of enormous detail than at any other time of his life. But it was as a geologist that his most valuable practical work was done. His "Report on the Geology of Connecticut," published in 1842, was the result of five years of arduous labor and is a sufficient monument for any man. "While engaged in this survey," he wrote, "I can confidently say that I have been laborious and diligent. While traveling, it was my practice to rise early, in the longer days generally at dawn; in the shorter generally I got my breakfast and was on my way by daybreak, I continued, scarcely with any relaxation, as long as I had daylight and then was generally obliged to sit up till midnight, not unfrequently till one o'clock A. M. in order to complete my notes and arrange my specimens. This was continued, not only week after week, but month after month, almost without cessation." Under the law Percival could not be paid till his report had been approved by the governor. It is characteristic of the whimsical geologist that he refused to submit to this approval by one whom he considered incompetent to pass upon his labors and it was only by the ruse of a friend who got possession of the report and presented it to the governor, who at once approved it, that Percival secured his pay. This work brought Percival a high reputation as a geologist. He was engaged by the American Mining Company to investigate the lead deposits in Wisconsin and this in turn resulted in his employment by that state to make a geological survey similar to that of Connecticut. He had made his first report and was engaged upon his second when he became ill and in May, 1856, he died and was buried in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. "Eminent as a Poet," runs his epitaph, "rarely accomplished as a Linguist, learned and acute in Science, a Man without Guile." During his employment in Wisconsin his friends had bought a lot and built a house for him in New Haven. It was a queer structure, built after the poet's own plans, with the entrance at the rear, blind windows at the front, and of only one story in height. He was looking forward to spending here his last years, close to his college, with his few intimate friends, surrounded by his books. During an interval in his Wisconsin employment he came to New Haven to inspect his future home and is said to have broken down completely as he was compelled to leave by the duty that called him westward. He was a strange creature, impossible to get along with, handicapped by an over-sensitiveness that led him into resentments that often held the implication of ingratitude, and with a constant grudge against the world. He should have been endowed and relieved of all the detail of life. Even then it is doubtful if he would have produced great poetry, unless he had been rigorously trained by some dominant master to condense, revise and work over again and again his diffuse, sentimental and dreamy verses. A few of them retained for a time a certain vogue and then gradually passed into oblivion. Perhaps the two that were longest remembered were "To Seneca Lake" and "The Coral Grove." It is an odd thing, but some selections from a boyish effort entitled "Seasons of New England," hitherto generally cited as evidence of his youthful absurdities, would make excellent examples of the free verse that nowadays is taken so seriously. In this respect, at least, he was ahead of his time. In his review of the "Life and Letters" Lowell seems rather dogmatic and intolerant, but with his inevitable insight and art of statement he crystalizes into one sentence the whole trouble with Percival. "He appears," writes Lowell, "as striking an example as could be found of the poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious qualities which make the poetic faculty." It should be recorded that children loved this old bachelor in spite of his eccentricities and that with them he seemed to feel unrestrained and free, forgetting the shyness that formed an insuperable barrier to ready friendship with adults. In our Connecticut history he should not be forgotten and if any of the spirits of the departed revisit the glimpses of the moon this strange apparition ought sometimes to be met, driving his phantom buggy through forgotten lanes of the state he loved, or with his hammer and bag of specimens, climbing on foot the hills and ledges he knew so well. _VI: Who Was Peter Parley?_ IF your great-grandmother were living, dear reader, she would be appalled at your ignorance in propounding this question. Everybody knew the identity of "Peter Parley." In his day his name was as familiar a _nom de plume_ as Mark Twain. He was, of course, Samuel G. Goodrich. And who--alas for the question!--was Samuel G. Goodrich? "Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame? A fitful tongue of leaping flame; A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust, That lifts a pinch of mortal dust; A few swift years, and who can show Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?" He does not deserve to be forgotten. Born at Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1793, he died at New York City in 1860. For twenty-four hours his body lay in state in St. Bartholomew's Church where crowds passed his bier and at Southbury, Connecticut, where he was buried, groups of children preceded the coffin and strewed flowers in its path. It was a fitting and touching ceremony, for all his life he had been the friend of children. It was almost entirely for them that he wrote his two hundred books, of which he estimated, five years before his death, that seven million copies had then been sold, including, we assume, those editions that had been translated into nearly every modern language, even Greek and Persian. Rummage among the top shelves of any old library and you will be pretty sure to discover some of these almost forgotten volumes--Parley's "Tales of the Sea," "Tales About the Sun, Moon and Stars," tales about New York, about ancient Rome, about Great Britain, about animals, about almost everything in this interesting world and outside of it. Of his "Natural History" George Du Maurier says--"Last, but not least of our library, was Peter Parley's 'Natural History,' of which we knew every word by heart," and a writer in the "Congregationalist" a quarter of a century ago ventured the opinion, "We have no doubt, were it needed, that 1,000 aged people could rise and repeat the widely famous lines, 'The world is round and, like a ball, seems swinging in the air.'" You will find as a frontispiece for some of these well worn books a picture of a kindly old gentleman in a cocked hat, with a crutch and a gouty foot, his pockets bulging with good things for children. This was the mythical "Peter Parley", and Goodrich tells an amusing story of how, during a visit in the South, his host's little grandson, after cautiously inspecting the visitor who had been introduced to him as Peter Parley, took his grandfather aside and warned him that the guest must be an impostor, for his foot wasn't bound up and he didn't walk with a crutch. Perhaps in your search on the dusty shelves you will be fortunate enough to find a copy of Goodrich's verses entitled "The Outcast, and Other Poems," printed in 1841, or an odd number of "The Token," an "annual," which Goodrich published from 1828 till 1842 and in which were first given to the world some of the early productions of such young literary sparks as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. During the course of an eventful life Goodrich came into relations more or less intimate with many famous people. A few of them, beside those just mentioned, were Daniel Webster (who had a great admiration for his writings), James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Whittier, Jeffery, founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, Sir Walter Scott and Lockhart his son-in-law and biographer. Goodrich was an eye-witness in Paris of the Revolution of '48 and he draws a vivid portrait of the third Napoleon on the eve of the Coup d'Etat. His daughter tells of an informal celebration in Florence, planned in his honor by Charles Lever, at which there were present the Brownings, the Tennysons, (she liked Frederic the best) the Storys, Gibson and Powers the sculptors, Lowell, Lamartine, Longfellow, Trollope, Buchanan Read and others--surely a brilliant company of which to be the center. In London he was present at the ceremonies attendant upon the return of Byron's body from Greece. He heard Clay, Calhoun, John Randolph and other celebrities of the day speak in the Senate. He was a guest at levees at the White House and gives a dramatic account of a meeting there between Jackson and John Quincy Adams on the night of the former's defeat for the presidency by the latter. He saw John Marshall presiding over the Supreme Court. He presents a minute description of President Monroe whom he encountered both at Washington and also at Hartford during a ceremony at the School for the Deaf, and whose personal appearance he thought far from prepossessing. In fact, there are few persons who attained distinction during the first half of the nineteenth century of whom the reader will not find an entertaining and graphic sketch in Goodrich's "Recollections of a Life Time." It is a book well worth reading for not only is it written in an amusing and racy style and enlivened by anecdote and delightful comment, but it is a historic review of the politics, literature, international relations and social life of the time, put together by a writer eminently qualified for the task. We are chiefly concerned, however, with Goodrich's picture of life in the old town a century ago. He came here as a youth of seventeen in 1811 and Hartford was his home, though he was frequently absent in Europe and elsewhere, till 1826 when he moved to Boston. The city when he arrived was, he says, "a small commercial town, of four thousand inhabitants, dealing in lumber and smelling of molasses and Old Jamaica--for it had still some trade with the West Indies. . . . There was a high tone of general intelligence and social respectability about the place, but it had not a single institution, a single monument that marked it as even a provincial metropolis of taste, in literature, art, or refinement." In this latter respect things were changed before he left. Trinity (then Washington) College, the American School for the Deaf, the Retreat for the Insane and other philanthropic and educational institutions were established during his residence in the provincial capital. On his arrival he worked as a clerk in a dry goods store and his intimate friend was George Sheldon, "favored clerk" in the "ancient and honored firm" of Hudson & Goodwin, publishers of the "Connecticut Courant," Webster's Spelling Book, and much besides. Mr. Goodwin, of this firm, he describes as "a large, hale, comely old gentleman, of lively mind and cheerful manners. There was always sunshine in his bosom and wit upon his lip. He turned his hand to various things, though chiefly to the newspaper, which was his pet. His heaven was the upper loft in the composition room; setting type had for him the sedative charms of knitting work to a country dame." At the home of his uncle, Senator Chauncey Goodrich, he met all the prominent members of the famous "Hartford Convention," which finds in him a vigorous defender against the charge of unpatriotism. During the War of 1812 he served at New London as a member of a Hartford artillery battery, a sort of _corps d'élite_, under the command of Captain Nathan Johnson, a well known lawyer who afterward became general of militia. Though he was for a few brief moments under the bombardment of the British ships that were blockading Decatur, Biddle and Jones in the Thames, his service was bloodless and he narrates it with humor and gusto. He began his career as a publisher in partnership with Sheldon whose early death terminated that enterprise. Goodrich himself, however, here published by subscription the poems of John Trumbull, whom he knew well, eight volumes of the Waverly novels, then arousing intense interest, and several school books and "toy books," as he calls them, for children. He was a leading member of a literary club which included Bishop J. M. Wainwright, Isaac Toucey, William M. Stone, Jonathan Law and S. H. Huntington. Another literary "cotery," of which Mrs. Sigourney was the presiding genius, met generally at Daniel Wadsworth's home. Some of the poems and papers read at the first of these clubs were published by Goodrich in a short-lived periodical called "The Round Table." We find gossipy sketches of Jeremiah Wadsworth, Dr. Cogswell and his deaf and dumb daughter Alice, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Theodore Dwight, the poets Brainard and Percival, Dr. Strong, pastor of the "Middle Brick" (the Center) Church, Colonel John Trumbull, the artist and his beautiful wife, who was supposed to be the daughter of an English earl but about whose lineage there was an impenetrable mystery. Many others of the old Hartford characters live again in these pages which furnish us what is doubtless a very accurate, as well as a very charming impression of the social life of the old town one hundred years ago. But the great world called the future "Peter Parley" and his ambitions and love of variety drew him away from the place of his earliest literary experience to foreign residence and travel and to the little brown house that he afterward built at Jamaica Plain. Later in life he returned again to Europe and for two years was American Consul at Paris. He had his failures as well as his successes, his days of financial losses, as well as of affluence. He experienced, too, his periods of feeble health. But he possessed the courage that ancestry like his often seems to breed and one cannot fail to accord a hearty tribute to the resolution with which, in an impaired physical condition, he set himself, like Mr. Clemens, to overcome adversity with hard work, with his pen. His Parley books were the outgrowth of two impulses or characteristics--his innate love of children and his personal rebellion on the one hand against the dull school books of his boyhood and on the other against what he considered such ridiculous and deleterious old fairy stories as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack the Giant Killer." He did not think the climax of "Little Red Riding Hood" was healthy reading for children and he did not at all approve of Jack the Giant Killer's morals. In his opinion there was no particular sense in the Mother Goose jingles. And so he tried to give children, in the guise of perfectly proper but at the same time interesting stories and verses, the information and a good deal of the education they required. He may have carried his theory to some extremes, but he was one of the first among us to realize that with children effective educational methods must take into consideration the securing at the outset of interest and attention. What extraordinary success he achieved has already been intimated. Yet it is pathetic to note that he himself was the first to acknowledge the fact that his fame would be temporary. "I have written too much," he says at the height of his reputation, "and have done nothing really well. You need not whisper it to the public, at least until I am gone; but I know, better than anyone can tell me, that there is nothing in this long catalogue [of his books] that will give me a permanent place in literature." Yet it is safe to say that as long as the human mind loves to dip into the past and to re-create in familiar surroundings the scenes and people of long ago his "Recollections of a Life Time" will have its readers. And many of us would cheerfully relinquish any hope of immortal memory could we be assured of the love of the countless children to whom "Peter Parley" was a dear friend and companion. _VII: A Preacher of the Gospel_ IT is not often claimed that the small city or country town produces proportionately more of the human phenomena popularly denominated "characters" than does the larger municipality. Whether this is indeed a fact, or whether the truth is that in the small group variations from type are more conspicuous, is perhaps immaterial. At all events the memories and traditions of pronounced personalities seem to be frequently associated with the less populous communities, especially in New England. In any review of the personages that lived in the capital of Connecticut in the last century the individuality of one of the life-long pastors of its oldest church stands forth as a shining example of the capricious and at the same time engaging forms in which humanity may be clothed. Above all else the Rev. Doctor Joel Hawes was a "character." To begin with, his personal appearance was sufficiently extraordinary. Tall, gaunt, awkward, with large hands and feet, he would have attracted attention--and did attract attention--anywhere. His face was homely and in repose unprepossessing, but when he became interested in talk his expression gathered from the play of thought an animation which caused his listeners to forget the essential unattractiveness of his features. In many respects there was something Lincoln-like about him, though he lacked the fine eyes, the wistful, haunting look, that distinguish the later portraits of his great contemporary. Like Lincoln, too, he came from the common stock and was trained in a rough school. The story of his tacking loose leaves from the Bible on the walls of the store, where in his youth he worked, and memorizing verses between visits of customers recalls somewhat similar methods of self-education employed by the boy who became president. With no money, with no friends except of his own making, with no "advantages" or "background," with not even a fair start, he early developed a tremendous courage and determination; when to this was added a sense that the hand of God was upon him nothing could stop him. That in his day he should become one of the foremost divines in the country was inevitable. It was his earnestness and force that made him what he was and not, it must be confessed, any outstanding brilliancy of mind. His fellow-citizen, Doctor Bushnell, far excelled him in mental power, in breadth and originality of thought, in versatility and imagination. In Horace Bushnell was always something of the poet, much of the mystic. His books are bought today and his name remembered, while Dr. Hawes, except in his old church and city, is forgotten. Yet it is to be doubted whether, considering Joel Hawes's early difficulties and his moderate mental equipment, one could find a better example than his life furnished of what may be accomplished by a man who cherishes a conviction of personal destiny. He became assured that God intended him to preach the gospel and he proceeded to do just exactly that with confidence, single-mindedness and consequent success during a long life. His last sermon was delivered three days before his death. Here is his theory of the preacher's mission: "Truth, God's truth especially, is _eternally_, and _must_ be, interesting to the mind of man; and, if I can succeed in getting that truth before the minds of my people, I shall not fail to interest and instruct all classes of them, be their cultivation and tastes and habits ever so dissimilar. This, then, shall be the great, leading object of my preaching: I will get as much of God's truth into my sermons as I can" . . . . Might not this principle be adopted to advantage by many a modern clergyman? It was in a rough-shod manner, regardless of obstacles, that Doctor Hawes plowed his way through life. He did not know how to compromise. Tact, adaptability, adjustment, finesse,--these words were not included in his vocabulary. He paid little attention to the amenities of existence, but went directly to his object, as on the occasion when in prayer meeting, after lamenting the fact that ordinarily only a few persons took active part in these gatherings, he suddenly called upon one diffident attendant, whose voice had never been heard, with the peremptory request, "Brother Jones, will you lead us in prayer--and we won't take any excuse." He spoke the plain truth as he saw it, regardless of whether it was appropriate, or sometimes whether it hurt. A distinguished lawyer, no longer living, once told the writer that when he was a small boy the doctor met him one day in the street, stopped him, put his hand on his head, and, after gazing intently at him for so long that the child became rather frightened, at last ejaculated, "Charles, you remind me so much of your grandfather--_he_ was a hard-featur'd man!" This absolute sincerity, this disdain of any pretense or artificiality, this almost childlike naïveté, while they furnished many amusing and sometimes embarrassing incidents, had no small part in endearing the good man in the hearts of his people. Indeed the significant thing about the numerous anecdotes of him that are still occasionally quoted is that while so many of them turn on his peculiarities and eccentricities, none of them seems to detract from the affection and esteem in which the man and his memory are held in the traditions of his church. Doubtless the reason is that these stories essentially serve to delineate and illumine the portrait of an intensely earnest, able and vigorous servant of God and his fellow men. His humor was not all unconscious. He had his own notions of the incongruous and diverting. On one of his journeys abroad he wrote of the tombs in Westminster Abby--"There lie in promiscuous assemblage kings, queens, statesmen, warriors, poets, scholars, prostitutes, and villains, each, by his epitaph, now in heaven, but all awaiting the decisions of the last day, which, in a great majority of cases, will, it cannot be doubted, reverse forever the judgment of man." There was, too, another side to him. Hidden in the uncouth body was a kindly and sympathetic heart. Children, at first awed and possibly repelled by his appearance and manners, soon grew to love him. His biographer quotes him as saying that he could never go past a hand-organ in the street without stopping to listen with the children and see the monkey. Sorrow and suffering found in him an instant response and the instinctive impulse to comfort and help. Generally these traits, while partly inherent, are emphasized and made of value to others, as well as to one's self, by experience. Doctor Hawes's life had its tragic sorrows and these were translated into a singular ability to comfort and help. Then, too, while he would never compromise for an instant with temptation, weakness and sin, he could understand. As in the case of most forceful, passionate natures, his early days, before he discovered the Bible, had their period of wildness, brief though it was. In the practical conduct of life he was no theorist, no amateur. He had struggled against poverty and loneliness, as he had fought and conquered the devil in his own life, and he recognized his old adversary and knew how to deal with him when he saw the fight going on in the experience of others. Perhaps it was all this as much as anything that constituted the foundation for his interest in the youth of his church and city. In 1827 this interest resulted in a series of "Lectures to Young Men" delivered on successive Sunday evenings to crowded and enthusiastic assemblies in his own church, and later repeated at Yale College where subsequently he became a member of the corporation. The following year the lectures were published "at the united request" of his hearers and instantly became famous. "Few books," says Doctor Walker in his history of the First Church, "attained a like circulation." Nearly a hundred thousand copies, in various editions, were issued in this country and more in Great Britain. One Scotch publisher alone, asserts Doctor Walker, printed fifty thousand copies. Reading these lectures today, nearly a century after their composition, one is impressed by the fact that here is a compendium, as valuable now as at the time of delivery, of practical rules for a good and useful life. The titles of the five original addresses indicate the subject matter--"Claims of Society on Young Men;" "Dangers of Young Men;" "Importance of Established Principles;" "Formation and Importance of Character;" "Religion the Chief Concern." The lectures deal with plain, fundamental truths, in a straightforward business-like way. There is as little ornament as imagination about them; they have more vigor than originality, but they are bristling with common sense and set forth with tremendous earnestness the principles of a practical Christian philosopher. Epigrammatic touches, indeed, are not wanting. "A lover of good books," says the lecturer, "can never be in want of good society;" and again, "He who cares not for others will soon find that others will not care for him." "The Gospel may be neglected," he asserts, "but it cannot be understandingly disbelieved." "Character is power; character is influence," he says, "and he who has character, though he may have nothing else, has the means of being eminently useful, not only to his immediate friends, but to society, to the church of God, and to the world." Today the mind of youth is questioning. It is seeking not only rules for the conduct of life but a rational interpretation of religious creed and aspiration that will prove a guide in explorations on ground that perhaps Doctor Hawes would have considered forbidden. He was not a meta-physician. To him the way was plain. The fundamental truths, the orthodox acceptances, were good enough for him. The questions that for long troubled Doctor Bushnell not only did not worry Doctor Hawes--he did not understand why one should ask them. Doctor Bushnell was ahead of his time. He began where Doctor Hawes left off, and soon about the younger man gathered a school of disciples who shared in sympathy, if not with equality of intellectual penetration, the tenets of the religious philosopher, the visions of the seer and poet. It was inevitable that two such divergent personalities as Hawes and Bushnell, laborers in the same field, living in the same city, should come into conflict. The story of that famous difference, of the struggles to find common ground and of the final reconciliation, have today a note of pathos. For the lay reader it is not easy at first glance to see what it is all about, and yet what feeling and bitterness were aroused! There is no space here to go into the details of that old dispute. The letters the two ministers exchanged, like all sincere letters, are typical of their respective characters and a memorialist of Doctor Hawes finds nothing for which to apologize in his side of the correspondence. His letters, indeed, evidence what a modern theologian might consider his speculative limitations, but they show, too, beneath his determination to adhere to his principles, a genuine grief at the separation and a hope that the two churches might be "rooted and grounded in the truth, and their pastors as happily united in fellowship and love." The church of which Doctor Hawes was minister was, and still is, something more than an ecclesiastical organization. It is a civic institution. It founded the town. Its minister takes rank as a public personage. In this character Dr. Hawes was interested in many local activities. An example of this was his connection with the famous Hartford Female Seminary--and this may serve also as another illustration of his interest in young people. On the Seminary's organization he was chosen a trustee--an office he held till his death. For many years he was its president. At the reunion of its graduates in 1892, a speaker who had been one of his "boys," and who was the executor of his will, gave a little address on his old pastor which is one of the best portraits of him that remains. ". . . the Hartford Female Seminary," said this speaker, "was his especial delight. To its principals he was a devoted friend; its teachers were his protegés and assistants; the pupils his spiritual garden. It was to him the nursery of all that was best in womanhood. I do not know how his sober judgment would have ranked, in relative importance, Yale College, the A. B. C. F. M., and the Seminary; but I know that in his affection this school had the warmest place. How regularly on Monday morning he opened its sessions with fervent prayer; how benignantly his benediction fell on the school as he took his departure, you all know who were in attendance in his time. And although you may have smiled at his peculiarities, I do not believe a doubt ever crossed one of your minds that Joel Hawes was a loving, faithful friend, and truly a man of God." _VIII: A Friend of Lincoln_ IN the Spring of 1869 Gideon Welles, who had been appointed Secretary of the Navy by Lincoln and had served to the end of the Johnson administration, returned to Hartford where he lived till his death in 1878. His diary for May 2, 1869, contains the following entry: "We left New York at 3 P. M. and reached Hartford at seven, stopping at the Allyn House. Nearly four years have passed since I have been here, more than eight since I left and took up my residence in Washington. . . . Hartford itself has greatly altered--I might say improved--for it has been beautified and adorned by many magnificent buildings, and the population has increased. These I see and appreciate; but I feel more sensibly than these, other changes which come home to my heart. A new and different people seem to move in the streets. Few, comparatively, are known to me. A new generation which knows not Joseph is here." Perhaps it was natural that the retiring secretary of the navy, returning quietly and unannounced and with possibly a trace of the depression that comes with the relinquishment of great affairs, should fancy a certain lack of enthusiasm in his welcome. But a little later, when he had bought the house, now No. 11 Charter Oak Place, which was to be his future home, and his presence was more widely known, he found his friends more appreciative. "During the week," he writes some days later, "old friends have called and welcomed me back. . . . My old friend, Calvin Day, was absent from the city when I arrived and did not get home till midnight on Saturday. As soon as he knew I was here, on Monday morning, he called. H. A. Perkins, Mrs. Colt, Beach, Seymour, etc., etc., called. Mark Howard is absent. Governor Hawley saw me at breakfast on Wednesday last and immediately came and greeted me." It is not without interest to note that the servant question was at the time a great problem. This, and the confusion of getting settled, of unpacking loads of furniture, of arranging the contents of two hundred and twenty-four boxes that arrived from Washington, while Mrs. Welles was confined to her room as the result of a fall, "have made me," he writes, "unused as I am to these matters, exceedingly uncomfortable." Nevertheless, there is some mitigation, as this entry shows: "Met Mr. Hamersley--who invited me to his store, where we had an hour, on political subjects chiefly. It is somewhere about fifteen years since we have had such and so long a conversation. So far as I have met and seen old friends, I have had every reason to be satisfied. Though not very demonstrative or forward in calling, they have without exception been cordial and apparently sincere." During the nine remaining years of his life Mr. Welles lived quietly, devoting most of his time to writing, his chief pieces of work being an elaborate article claiming for the navy, which he felt had never received its proper share of the credit, the most important part in the capture of New Orleans, and a little volume entitled "Lincoln and Seward." The career which he looked back upon in these last years was one which should have brought to any man the satisfactions that come from important work well done. There were, of course, elements that would naturally interfere with such satisfactions--and these a man like Gideon Welles took to heart more seriously than another might have done. No one could have served as he did in high administration during those eight eventful years without a sense of the blundering, the waste, the cross-purposes, the petty motives, and even the treachery that were exhibited in such a disheartening fashion to those behind the scenes. But through all this he pursued steadfastly his honest and able way, not exempt from bitter criticism, like all his colleagues, nor from spiteful intrigue. He seems such a unique and stalwart figure that one is led to inquire, as one reads his history and his personal record, why he was not more famous in his day and time. Perhaps one reason is that while he had a remarkable gift of common sense, he lacked a sense of humor and the sense of proportion that accompanies it. His diary, it is quite true, is at times what one would call humorous reading, but the humor is either unconscious or partakes of sarcasm. He took life pretty seriously--and indeed he had occasion to do so. Then one infers another characteristic which is so difficult to define and in its way so subtle that one hesitates to be dogmatic about it. Yet reading between the lines of the diary, which is one of the frankest human documents in the world, one reader at least gains the impression that the author, perhaps realizing the innate tendency, which the diary shows, to pronounce judgment, felt before the world the necessity of putting a curb upon this propensity. In public he never seems to have asserted himself in the Rooseveltian manner. He had decided opinions of his own and was altogether an independent, fearless person, but he appears to have been one of the rather reticent members of the cabinet. A friend tells him on one occasion that he should have been more forward in expressing his views and the diary has many references to times when he judged silence the better course--as very likely it was--for with him silence never went so far as to constitute consent to anything he disapproved. Far more single-minded and straightforward than some of the other cabinet ministers, he apparently lacked the art, which many men of smaller caliber possessed, of getting his personality in a large way before the country. One feels that here was a capable and high-minded public servant, with many qualities which in another personality would have produced a great leader of men. But there was always this reticence. Was it possibly the inheritance of a New England ancestry? However, if in his life-time Gideon Welles lacked the gift for individual prominence that with some of his contemporaries seemed to be the main object of life, the publication of his remarkable "Diary" has, long after his death, immortalized him. In this journal we have both a revelation of personal character that is illuminating and a historic document that is invaluable. It is fortunate for us that when Gideon Welles sat down to his diary all restraint and repression disappeared. His clarity of vision, his firmness in his belief of what was just and right, his devotion to duty, his singular ability to estimate men and to portray character--all this gives even a casual reader a very clear conception of what manner of man he himself was. As for others, the figures that live forever in these pages are real people, wrestling in their various characteristic ways with portentous problems, the solutions of which we now look back upon as historic matters long since worked out, but which in many instances presented very different aspects at the time from those which now are obvious to us. It is remarkable how the judgment of posterity as to individuals has confirmed Welles's contemporary estimate. To cite these portraits in detail would be to give a catalogue of the prominent characters of the day. At once the greatest and, to the modern reader the most interesting, is that of Abraham Lincoln. His personality does not appear complete and finished in any one description, but is a composite of comment, conversation and action recounted from time to time in the pages covering the period that elapsed before his death. Thus we see the gradual growing appreciation of his character from that early day when Welles noted that "much had been said and was then uttered by partisans of the incompetency of Mr. Lincoln and his unfitness," to that later cloudy morning when, by the bed on which the murdered President had to be laid diagonally because of his great height, Welles "witnessed the wasting life of the good and great man who was expiring before me." Any reader of the diary who is also familiar with the latest study of the war President--that by Lord Charnwood--and who has read or seen Drinkwater's "Lincoln," is instantly aware of the value of this journal to the historian and the dramatist. Perhaps the ability to depict personality is the most conspicuous trait of Gideon Welles as a writer. In this respect he adds to his ability to gauge character the expressive qualities of the literary artist. While his estimates of men are startlingly frank and definite, he is always fair, even toward those whom he disliked. Even in those biting, incisive phrases relating to his _bête noir_, Senator John P. Hale, there is something of the inevitable, impersonal condemnation of a court. The suggestions of a certain reserve in public must not be interpreted as implying any hesitation to express the diarist's convictions when he considered that the occasion called for them. Far otherwise. Read, for example, the careful recitals of those deliberate, overwhelming, sledgehammer conversational blows the secretary inflicted on the head of Senator Hale when the opportunity at last came of loosing long pent-up emotions. The senator must have emerged from that interview a stunned, if wiser, man. And very early in their mutual official connection the Secretary of State discovered that Mr. Welles, and only Mr. Welles, was going to run the Navy Department. When Seward attempted to interfere surreptitiously with the naval expedition to relieve Sumter he found himself in a great deal of trouble, the net result of which may be summarized in the following quotation from the diary: "On our way thither [to see the President] Mr. Seward remarked that, old as he was, he had learned a lesson from this affair, and that was, he had better attend to his own business and confine his labors to his own department. To this I cordially assented." The return of the Secretary to Hartford brought many memories of old times--days, when as editor of the "Hartford Times" he had worked for Jackson's election, later days when, slavery being injected as a moral issue into politics, he had abandoned the democratic creed and adopted the republican. Then there were the years when he had served as postmaster, as member of the general assembly, as state comptroller--and, again, that searching period when for the sake of his convictions he was willing to face sure defeat as republican candidate for governor. For eight years he had served as a member of the republican national committee and he was chairman of his state delegation to the convention that nominated for the presidency the man who was to be afterward his chief and his staunch friend--Abraham Lincoln. We have Lincoln's own word for it, as reported verbatim in the diary, that there was no wire-pulling in connection with Gideon Welles's appointment. The fact that he was a New England man may have had something to do with it, but the real consideration was his record. It was a life full of service for his country and of devotion to the faith that was in him, that the old man looked back upon in the closing years. _IX: Our Battle Laureate_ ABOUT six months before Gideon Welles returned to his old home, an ensign in that navy of which Mr. Welles was, under the President, commander-in-chief, landed in the port of New York on the U. S. steam frigate "Franklin". The "Franklin" bore the flag of Admiral Farragut, who was returning from a two-year command of our European Squadron, and the ensign, Henry Howard Brownell, of East Hartford, was a member of the great sailor's personal staff on which he had served during the war. It was the end of Brownell's service and travels. Four years later, on October 31, 1872, at the height of the Grant-Greeley campaign, he died at the family homestead after a long and distressing illness. He had been born in 1820. Seven years before his death Dr. Holmes, in a review in the "Atlantic" of one of his slim volumes of verse, had called him "Our Battle Laureate." Uneven as his verse was, he was a true poet. A spark of the divine fire had fallen upon him. Other activities had been attempted, but for him there clearly was in them no satisfaction. As a youth he tried mercantile life in New York, but abandoned it after less than a year. Teaching seems to have been the practical--if poetry is not "practical"--pursuit which proved most congenial and it is singular that his first work as a teacher was in Mobile near which the great experience of his life later occurred. This short sojourn in the South came after his graduation in 1841 from Trinity College and was followed by study of the law in Hartford where he was admitted to the bar and for a short time practiced in partnership with his brother Charles. But the law was not for him. The poetic muse was always whispering in his ear. He saw visions and dreamed dreams--witness his "Song of the Archangels." Yet he was rather a direct and rugged sort of poet. Subtlety and indirection, fine shadings, carefully wrought lines, had little place in his methods. He appears to have been impatient of revision. He felt deeply and the need of expression was instant. Often he wrote, as he states in the preface to "Lyrics of a Day," _currente calamo_, and most of his verses were seen first in the pages of the Hartford newspapers. In the light of modern technique many of them seem already a little old-fashioned. Perhaps the present-day undergraduate would call some of them "simple." Yet any of our young intellectuals might be proud of having written "In Articulo Mortis"; surely there is nothing very simple about "The Sphinx." And one is occasionally startled by lines that have the perfect, the inevitable phrase--as in these from "The Tomb of Columbus"-- ". . . . the fragrant breath Of unknown tropic flowers came o'er my path, Wafted--how pleasantly! for I had been Long on the seas, and their soft, waveless glare Had made green fields a longing." It would be difficult to improve on that last line. Again--to most readers there will come a swift and dramatic vision from the two stanzas of "Qu'il Mourut"-- "Not a sob, not a tear be spent For those who fell at his side-- But a moan and a long lament For him--who might have died! "Who might have lain, as Harold lay, A King, and in state enow-- Or slept with his peers, like Roland In the Straits of Roncesvaux." In all his early verse there is much that is haunting and memorable, together with much that is trivial and even flippant, It was the coming of the Civil War that made Henry Brownell known as a poet. Indeed he published little before that time. In our own day we have had great moral issues in war and we have known what the response to them could be. These issues were, however, involved with many other peoples, their application was, in a way, diffused; to different races they presented different aspects. But the Civil War was our _own_ war, its issues were concentrated; it not only involved national honor, it concerned, and vitally concerned, the question whether the nation should live. To these portentous messages and alarms, borne on every breath of the wandering breezes of those tense days, the spirit of Henry Brownell responded with an intuitive instinct, a poetic eloquence, akin to that of the seers and the prophets. "World, art thou 'ware of a storm? Hark to the ominous sound, How the far-off gales their battle form, And the great sea swells feel ground!" In 1860, the Hartford papers were full of his "fiery lyrics" and the writer--was it Hawley or Warner?--of an appreciation of Brownell in the "Courant" shortly after his death tells how well he remembered the day in the anxious winter of 1860-61 when Brownell brought into the office of the old "Evening Press" the manuscript of "Annus Memorabilis"--verses breathing a resolution and exaltation of courage that brought a generous measure of fame. There is something about "Annus Memorabilis"--not only the meter which is the same--that suggests Macaulay's "Naseby," something, too, remotely suggestive of Kipling. Into this mood of exaltation there ran occasionally a vein of humor that only deserves mention in the case of the verses "Let Us Alone," inspired by Jefferson Davis's statement in his inaugural address, "All we want is to be left alone." Though of little poetic merit these lines caught the popular fancy and were long remembered and quoted. And so the war came on, and the poet's vision, which had been laughed at by some readers, was justified by events. There came defeats, almost countless deaths, occasional victories, doubts of final victory--all the ebb and flow and waste of war--and to it all the sensitive but vigorous spirit responded in many chords. Of the gentler lays, the most winning to the writer are the verses called "The Battle Summers." Here are a few of the stanzas-- "All vain--Fair Oaks and Seven Pines! A deeper hue than dying Fall May lend, is yours!--yet over all The mild Virginian autumn smiles, . . . . . "We pass--we sink like summer's snow-- Yet on the mighty Cause shall move, Though every field a Cannae prove, And every pass a Roncesvaux. "Through every summer burn anew A battle summer,--though each day We name a new Aceldema, Or some dry Golgotha re-dew." On the whole, however, it was the magnificence, the drama, of the struggle that possessed him--sometimes the realization of the tremendous stakes for which the game was played, sometimes the actual, objective romance of events, as in the beginning of the famous "River Fight"-- "Would you hear of the River Fight? It was two of a soft spring night-- God's stars looked down on all, And all was clear and bright. But the low fog's chilling breath-- Up the River of Death Sailed the Great Admiral." His own participation in the fighting came about in a strange way. He paraphrased in verse, first published in the "Evening Press," the rather dramatic general orders preparatory to the "River Fight." Poetically it was not a great performance, but in some way it came to the attention of Farragut who was greatly impressed. The acquaintance thus begun resulted in the unusual appointment of Brownell as master's mate on Farragut's staff and, shortly thereafter, as ensign, with the duties of secretary. One can fancy the lift and glory in the heart of this rather retiring poet and teacher, with a hitherto unsatisfied thirst for action and drama, as he stood on the quarter-deck of the "Hartford" fighting her way up Mobile Bay on that early August morning in 1864. At last he was in the midst of great events. This was his crowded hour--and the gods gave him full measure. Even in plain prose it is a gallant story. What a life-time must have been lived in those moments when Craven's monitor "Tecumseh", off to port, making for the Confederate ram "Tennessee", struck a torpedo and went down; when the "Brooklyn", leading the column, just ahead of the "Hartford", backed down upon the flag-ship, in fear of more torpedoes; when Farragut, lashed in the rigging, saw his line doubling up in confusion close under the Confederate batteries! It was then occurred the famous colloquy and order. "What is the trouble?" was asked of the "Brooklyn" by the flag-ship and the answer--"Torpedoes." "Damn the torpedoes!" shouted the Admiral. "Captain Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed!" And the "Hartford," increasing speed rapidly, passed under the stern of the "Brooklyn" and took the lead, firing her starboard batteries as fast as the men could work. One did not need to be a poet to secure a thrill from such a situation, but what must it have meant to the creative imagination that till then had pictured such scenes only in fancy! And this was only the early part of the fight. Through it all Brownell took notes, as he had been ordered, of the progress of the action and literally wrote at least one stanza of "The Bay Fight." During the battle he dropped one of his papers which was later found and returned to him with an expression of admiration that he could write so legibly in the midst of such excitement. "If I were killed," he replied, "I didn't want any of you to think I'd been afraid." Probably "The Bay Fight" was Brownell's most famous poem, though "The River Fight" is generally classed with it. The ballad has its faults. It is too long and too detailed for modern taste. It is ragged in places--the poet made his own versification much of the time. But it has vigor, vividness and sincere emotion, and through it all runs the turmoil and thunder of the battle. "The Bay Fight" has been compared to the work of Campbell, Drayton and Tennyson--yet no one has suggested a special likeness in temper and methods, in its narrative portions, to "The Ballad of the Revenge" of which it reminded one reader. At the close, where the meter changes to a quieter rhythm, there are a tenderness and aspiration and felicity of phrasing that arrest even the casual reader-- "To-day the Dahlgren and the drum Are dread Apostles of his name; His Kingdom here can only come By chrism of blood and flame. "Be strong; already slants the gold Athwart these wild and stormy skies; From out this blackened waste, behold, What happy homes shall rise! . . . . . . "And never fear a victor foe-- Thy children's hearts are strong and high, Nor mourn too fondly--well they know On deck or field to die." The verse of the Great War and that of the Civil War show one marked contrast. The best poetry of the recent titanic struggle is individualistic. It reflects the re-actions of personality to the stress and tension, the long-drawn, desperate drudgery, the tragedy, and sometimes the humor, of the strange experience. It pictures the dreams of home and peace. Most of the best of it has been written by young soldiers, many of whom were novices in the poetic rôle. On the whole the well-known poets did not come up to expectations. There were of course exceptions, but most of this recent verse, appealing and beautiful as it is, misses the higher vision, perhaps because the immediate scene and the personal experience were so overwhelming. The poets of our Civil War, however, were obsessed with the meaning of it all, with the hopes and fears for the country's future. Have we as yet anything in American verse about the Great War that we can place beside the best war poetry of Holmes and Whittier? Can we find sustained poetic inspiration that compares with Lowell's "Commemoration Ode"? Whereas to this recent conflict is the lyric power of the "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? And, coming down to mere narrative and descriptive verse, what incident of this modern Armageddon has found among us its immortal ballad, as the battle of Mobile Bay found its eloquent poetic record in "The Bay Fight"? _X: The Temple of the Muses_ TO older citizens the Wadsworth Atheneum has an especial and peculiar charm. Doubtless more recent residents also feel this attraction, but it is natural that to those who as children lived in its shadow, as it were, the appeal should be strongest. Here we were wont to go on rainy afternoons to look at the illustrated papers in the reading room. In the historical society's quarters upstairs it used to give one a peculiar thrill to sit on the link of the chain which during the Revolution was stretched across the Hudson at West Point, and which we had read about in the "Boys of 'Seventy-Six." There was, too, a certain ghastly emotional experience to be derived from an inspection of the sword holes, just over the heart, in the waistcoat and shirt of Colonel Ledyard. Then there were those Saturday mornings spent with the good friend of all children in the weekly proceedings at the Atheneum of the old "Agassiz Association." In those days we were reading "Kenilworth" and "Woodstock" and the castellated structure acquired in our minds a quality of mystery and romance. Certain precincts of the building were denied us and an impression gained credence that somewhere in the edifice, the plan of which we never fathomed, were secret rooms, passages and staircases. Certainly if ghosts walked anywhere the place where you would be most likely to find them was on some Hallowe'en midnight among these relics of the past. But we never got in at midnight--in fact nothing could have persuaded us to attempt such an entry. More mature experience removed something of the mystery, but the charm never entirely vanished. It came, however, to be exercised in different ways. Perhaps it was necessary during vacations to supplement college reading by the use of the historical society's library, then installed in the delightful quarters that had been the first home of the Watkinson collection. In many ways it seems a pity that this old library, with its oak bookshelves, arranged in alcoves, its galleries and delightful little staircases, has been abandoned for modern, but less atmospheric quarters. It was a charming room and the only place of its kind in the state, except the old library at Yale, the proposed alteration of which recently created such a storm of opposition. It was discovered, however, that the newer and larger Watkinson Library also offered a quiet refuge when one wanted to study or read without interruption. Here, too, were and still are alcoves, galleries and staircases, but loftier, more imposing and triumphant than in the intimate and friendly and older library. The main room of the Watkinson is, however, an alluring spot where one may escape from the financial implications of the immediate environment into a world with which money and business have little to do. Increasing years brought an interest in the old portraits. Our childhood acquaintance with the pictorial features of the Atheneum was chiefly confined to Trumbull's paintings of the Revolutionary battles. These seemed to us at the time perfect representations of what really happened at Bunker Hill, Princeton and Quebec. But the inevitable development of a more catholic artistic sense led us to dwell with a growing interest on the work of some of the great masters displayed in the art gallery. With these the portraits of state and local worthies in the historical society's rooms could not compete very successfully from the standpoint of workmanship, but these local portraits acquired a new importance as the story of the state and the old town took its place in our enlarging appreciation of relative values. At least we could gather from them some idea of what the people looked like who had walked the streets where we had played as children and who had taken their parts in the building of the city, the state and the nation. We heard the story of Elizabeth Whitman and the portraits of her father and mother became something more than merely faded old pictures. Oliver Ellsworth was no longer only a name--there he was, sitting at a table with his wife, his familiar house visible in the distance. And when curiosity grew as to Daniel Wadsworth, the founder of the Atheneum, we were able to satisfy this in some degree by hunting up the two portraits of him--one as a boy, leaning on his father's shoulder, the other Ingham's painting of him in middle life. [Illustration: THE WATKINSON LIBRARY] ii It is strange that so little has been written about Daniel Wadsworth. He was the original Maecenas of Hartford. But he had no Horace to celebrate him and he would have abhorred the publicity which the Roman patron of the arts and letters seems rather to have enjoyed. His modesty is well illustrated by the fact that he requested that Dr. Hawes should at his funeral services attempt no formal eulogy, in the fashion of the day. He died at ten minutes past one on the morning of July 28, 1848, a few days before his seventy-seventh birthday. Though he lived to this advanced age his health was always frail and this fact may account, in part, for his rather retiring disposition. He was, however, by no means a recluse. His home, altered, but still standing at the southwest corner of Prospect Street and Atheneum Street--formerly "Wadsworth's Alley,"--now laboring under the alliterative title of "Atheneum Annex," was the center of a simple and delightful social life. In its notice of Mr. Wadsworth after his death the "Courant" said of this home that it "has remained for half a century a scene of cheerful hospitality, where persons of humble worth as well as those of distinction, have been received with kindness and courtesy, and cheered by the unclouded sunshine of Mrs. Wadsworth's benevolence and lovely manners." Mrs. Wadsworth was the daughter of the second Governor Trumbull. "Her mind," says Dr. Hawes, in the funeral sermon which in his wife's case Mr. Wadsworth did not prohibit, "was sprightly, inquisitive, well-balanced and excellently cultivated; her temper was uncommonly mild, affectionate and cheerful, often exhibiting a pleasant playfulness of spirit, enlivening conversation and intercourse, but never light, censorious or severe; her heart replete with tenderness, and alive to every social and sympathetic feeling." She died two years before her husband. Their married life extended over fifty-three years. After her death a Miss Sarah McClellan, who seems to have been a connection of Mrs. Wadsworth, appeared in the character of secretary for Mr. Wadsworth, who was very feeble during the last two years of his life. She kept a diary, now in the possession of the Connecticut Historical Society, through which we get contemporary glimpses of the kindly life of the old street, though most of the references are in the nature of a catalogue of visits paid and received, such as,-- "Jan. 1, 1848. Received a beautiful book as a New Year's present from Mrs. Sigourney . . . Judge Ellsworth, Doctor Grant, Mr. Clair [Clerc?] and Mr. Barnard called in the morning. P. M. Judge Williams, Mr. Smith [Alfred?], Mr. Roswell and John Parsons called. Went down to see Mrs. Hudson--found her better." On another occasion she records how Dr. Grant brought to the house four children, aged from nine to thirteen, known as the "Apollonians," who were to give a concert in the evening and who sang to Mr. Wadsworth at his home as he was not well enough to attend the concert. After they had left Miss McClellan went to Dr. Grant's "and took a galvanic shock for my painful arm." The most valuable part of the diary historically, however, relates to the last illness of Mr. Wadsworth and his death on a night of midsummer thunderstorms, and this is rather long and rather intimate for quotation. In fact most of our knowledge of the founder of the Atheneum comes more from memories and traditions than from exact data. These legends picture him as a fragile man with a stoop, fond of wearing even in the house, an artist's cap and a cloak, partly to protect himself from drafts, of which he had an exaggerated dread, partly, we fancy, to exemplify in his person his artistic ideals. [Illustration: DANIEL WADSWORTH BY PERMISSION OF THE CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL SOCIETY] For art was his great interest in life and his wealth enabled him to gratify his artistic inclinations and to perpetuate in the city he loved a center for the humanities which to him seemed so far above riches. In a way he was a cosmopolitan, for he had been educated in France and England, accompanying his father, Jeremiah Wadsworth, there when he was twelve years old. Many of the paintings and prints, of which he was an inveterate collector, came from Europe--as most examples of good art then did. He was himself an illustrator and painter. The illustrations of his friend's--Professor Benjamin Silliman's--"Tour From Hartford to Quebec," are by him and they include two views of his beautiful country seat, "Monte Video," on Talcott Mountain. It is characteristic of Professor Silliman's regard for what were doubtless his friend's wishes that Mr. Wadsworth's name is not mentioned in his description of the spot. We know of at least one home, and there are probably several, where attractive and interesting sketches and paintings by Mr. Wadsworth are still cherished. As the years increased upon him the care of his health seems to have become something of a pre-occupation. It is related that he had a series of capes of differing colors and sizes which he superimposed one upon another, as the weather grew colder, attracting thus considerable attention in his walks abroad. In his big yellow coach he installed a stove in cold weather, and a smoke-stack, which may have caused our fellow citizens of that day to wonder whether they were beholding a steamboat on wheels--or even a motor vehicle of the period. Into his pew in the southwest corner of the Center Church he invariably had a foot stove carried when attending service in winter. Looking back through the years the life of his time seems to have had a more friendly and neighborly element than our urgent affairs today appear to permit. Perhaps there is something of fancy in this, but it is not all fancy to believe that in the institution that bears his name Daniel Wadsworth has transmitted to succeeding generations a flavor and memory of this old life, as well as an opportunity to know the refreshment of certain things that can not be measured in money--the things of the mind and the spirit. iii On the whole, the portion of the Atheneum that was the most popular with the children of an older day, and became through familiarity the least mysterious, was the reading room. In retrospect this room seems to have had a distinct quality of its own. For one thing it appears, in memory, to have been characterized by a pervading aroma of wet umbrellas, rubbers and damp clothing. Probably this is due to the fact that one generally frequented it on rainy days when out-of-door pursuits were impossible. Somebody was always opening a window to let in a little air. At that time the room was in the northeast corner of the main building. Its chief furnishings were the many rows of oak reading desks, shaped like inverted V's, raised on standards to a convenient height. To these slanting surfaces the papers were clamped by wooden contrivances which materially interfered with a comprehensive view of all double page pictures. Nevertheless one rather approved of these old oak reading desks. They gave a studious air to the room and separated the floor space into sections that contributed a certain effect of privacy. Also they concealed the upper portions of readers on opposite sides, or in different sections, from one another. It was rather diverting to peek underneath and endeavor to construct mentally from the shoes, trousers and skirts--they were long enough in those days--thus visible, the respectively corresponding upper sections of anatomy. After a creative effort of this kind it was interesting to move around to the other side and see how nearly right you were. On the whole the English illustrated papers were the most popular of the periodicals and sometimes in the attempt to secure exclusive possession of these there was a good deal of squabbling which had to be terminated by the young woman in charge, who, however, was reasonably tolerant and far more popular than the dragon who guarded the historical museum upstairs. The first real war any of us remembered was then in progress and the "Illustrated London News" and the London "Graphic" were full of pictures of British warships bombarding Alexandria and of charging Highlanders at Tel-el-Kebir. Though soon supplanted by our own "Life," "Punch," too, was something of a favorite, with its drawings by Du Maurier of tall, wasp-waisted, beautiful ladies with remarkable coiffures and trailing skirts, and of men with Dundreary whiskers, frock coats, top hats and monocles--all engaged in what seemed to us singularly inane conversation. Most of us had "St. Nicholas" at home and of the other American publications "Harper's Young People" easily held first place, with "Harper's Weekly" a close second. The girls were often discovered poring over "Harper's Bazaar"--an inexplicable thing to the masculine mind. That seemed to us a silly paper. In time certain habitués of the reading room became familiar to us--by sight, that is. There was, of course, the nondescript crowd of persons out of employment, or idlers, who came in to get warm or to pass an hour or two. These were the floating population, as it were, and the individuals varied with the seasons. Some of them seemed to be searching the advertising columns of the dailies for a job. Others read strange technical papers--engineering magazines or trade journals. One has often wondered since what perennial hopes, what latent ambitions, what undiscovered geniuses, were concealed amid this rather drab clientele of the reading room. But that some definite purposes animated certain devotees could not be doubted--though what the exact individual motives were was not always apparent. There was, for example, the queer old man--short, stocky, with gray beard and spectacles--whose specialty seemed to be the New York papers and the political and economic magazines. He was generally supposed to be a little "off" and he had Doctor Johnson's habit when walking along the street of tapping with his stick every post and tree he passed. If he abstractedly missed one he would go back and rap it. We often noticed unkind urchins of our own age following him and reminding him of any omissions, for the intense joy of seeing him invariably return and perform this rite. Let us hope that none of us attempted this, though it can not be asserted that the temptation was always resisted, even if no memory of succumbing to it remains. Then there was another frequenter of the reading room who was generally supposed to be not quite normal mentally. He was a kindly, gentle soul, however, and it is pleasant to remember that he was never the subject of ridicule. Indeed his deprecating manner, his invariable courtesy, even to children, effectually disarmed any suggestion of the sort. We all liked him and perhaps he did not dislike us. He would come softly in, with bent head and humble air, put his umbrella in the rack, look about to ascertain what favorite papers of his had not been pre-empted, slide with the effect of an apology into some empty place, put on his spectacles, get out his note book and pencil and begin to transcribe. During each of his visits he was continually taking notes and the imagination is appalled at any effort to compute the number of note books he must have filled, for he was a constant visitor. The occupation was of course an obsession, a phase, no doubt, of various mental vagaries he harbored. Probably as children we missed something of the pathos of the fine mind thus clouded, but it is a comfort to remember that we did not altogether fail in appreciation of the spirit of the gentleman. There comes dimly to memory the figure of a rather elderly woman who wore an old-fashioned bonnet and rather odd clothing of a bygone style. She was a busy person, flitting from paper to paper, forever in quest of some apparently elusive data. It seemed to be necessary for her to hold frequent consultations with the attendant. These were carried on, for her part, in loud, hissing whispers that were far more penetrating and distracting than ordinary conversation would have been and the good-natured presiding genius of the room spent much of her time looking up references for this curious and acquisitive visitor. What she was seeking we never knew, but, though it was manifestly of the utmost importance to her, one could not escape the impression of futility. Surely a public reference or reading room is an excellent place in which to study the caprices of the human mind. This person's audible conferences with the attendant bring to mind the notice that was prominently posted in various parts of the room,-- LOUD TALKING OR PROLONGED CONVERSATION WILL NOT BE ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM Now that the statute of limitations has barred civil, if not criminal proceedings, the writer will confess that some years later, when an undergraduate of Yale College, he abstracted, after the unoriginal fashion of his kind, one of these notices and took great pride in displaying it in a prominent place on the wall of his room at college where its apt and ironic message aroused great envy and admiration. But to return to our memories of the reading room's habitués--there was Cousin George. This vicarious relative was an unattached Congregational minister who sojourned in the city from time to time. The nomadic character of his ministry was due partly to principle, partly to a kind of wanderlust. In this old bachelor there was a wandering streak--he was not happy for long in one place. But he had a strong social instinct and a keen interest in and affection for his friends and was greatly beloved by them. A great purveyor of news, he was an insatiable reader of the papers and toward the middle of the morning he invariably came into the reading room, as into a club, to look through the news of the day. His soft, black hat, overcoat with short shoulder cape, eyeglasses with black ribbon and mutton-chop whiskers gave a distinct individuality to his appearance. About his looks there was an effect of oddity--and indeed, like most of us, he had his whimseys and peculiarities. There was little externally to indicate his kindly sympathy, his talent for friendship, his thoughtfulness for others, particularly for the sick. For that reason, doubtless, it was not until maturer years that that side of his character fully dawned on one. There was nothing to denote this in the picture of him, seated in a good reading light, in one corner of the room, his cape-overcoat thrown back on his shoulders, his thin legs crossed, absorbed in last night's "New York Evening Post." Like the others we have mentioned he will never come to the reading room again. Did they, we wonder, surmise that certain small eyes were observing them, that certain youthful personalities were conferring about them, that certain immature minds were striving to grasp what manner of men and women they were? Truly memories of us all may live long in unsuspected places. _XI: The Friend of Youth_ IT was announced the other day in the public prints that the Private Coachman's Benevolent Association had filed its certificate of dissolution. Over this laconic statement in the morning paper one reader, at least, paused and let his thoughts wander. To him there seemed a significant and, indeed, a rather melancholy interest in the announcement. The incident thus briefly mentioned not only marked the end of an ancient brotherhood; it furnished a striking commentary on changing social conditions. As a type the private coachman is disappearing, and with him vanish the coaches, landeaus and victorias, the well-matched pairs of reliable family horses with shining harnesses and jingling chains, the snappy trotters, the buggy rides and the horse in general as a voucher of social responsibility and standing. The possession of a motor car and the services of a chauffeur, though generally involving more financial outlay than a stable and coachman necessitated, somehow do not quite confer the reflected glory in which the employer of a coachman used to shine. Everybody has a motor and the very prevalence and numerousness of the chauffeur, capable and loyal soul though he be, necessarily detract from the distinction which the rarer coachman used to give. One usually stood rather in awe of the coachman--particularly in boyhood, the period with which he is chiefly associated in the memories of most of us. He was a person of strange and exalted attainments. He held mysterious and telepathetic communication with his horses. He understood them, and they him. He had theories about shoeing, he could prescribe for most of their ailments, he hissed at them queerly as he groomed them. Moreover, he had the real sporting spirit. He knew all about the performances of Maud S. and John L. Sullivan. He called the firemen and policemen by their first names and the fire bell would send him running out of the stable at any hour. If the boy wanted to acquire a puppy he got the coachman to select it and to clip its ears (without anæsthetic) behind the stable--or, if the coachman was wise, he persuaded a friend to do this surgical work at some livery stable, out of earshot of the family. Probably when the puppy was grown the coachman surreptitiously staged fights with him against rival dogs, chaperoned by brother coachmen, late at night after the boy and his elders were asleep, thus occasionally providing a precarious addition to his wages if the dog came up to expectation. To tell the truth, it was generally selected for its fighting qualities. He had strange tales of adventure, many of them doubtless fictitious, but showing the swift imagination of the race from which he generally sprang. The great event of his life was his trip to Philadelphia at the time of the Centennial when he was temporarily a soldier and had charge of the major's horse. For years brilliant lithographs of the exhibition buildings were tacked to the stable wall above the shelf where stood bottles of horse liniment and harness dressing. He had seen men and cities and out of his experience had grown a practical and homely wisdom that was by no means lost upon his young admirers. He was the friend of youth. And now it seems that the guild is officially extinct. Hail and farewell, private coachman! Though legally dissolved you are not forgotten, but remain ever enshrined in our memories of an older and simpler day. In those memories the coachman assumes multiform incarnations. The individuals varied as the years of childhood lengthened, but they all conformed to type. At the end of one of those dim vistas of childish recollections, illumined by the mellow light that always plays about our earliest remembrances, stands the figure of Patrick, the first coachman of them all. His first appearance was so very long ago--as a life-time is measured--that the vision, emerging from the mists in which the first consciousness of the world is enveloped, is painted somewhat vaguely on the retina of the mind. How much of it is real, how much an idealized memory, can not perhaps be definitely determined. After all, it is only a picture and a feeling. One seems to remember being enthroned on a rug spread on the grass of the garden, beneath the big apple tree, in the level sunlight of a late afternoon in spring. It must have been spring for the apple tree was in bloom. About one, seated on the grass, was grouped a circle of the maids of the household and their visitors. No experience of later years has ever given the slightest intimation that one could possibly be or became such a center of interest and admiration as that microcosm of dawning intelligence then consciously was to that laudatory audience. There was a distinct sense of being the source of the happiness and laughter that composed the mental atmosphere of that golden afternoon. Such an assurance that the world was entirely good and beautiful has not since been attained. Then, suddenly, Patrick was added to the circle--a smooth-shaven, apple-cheeked, merry man--having doubtless strolled over from the neighboring stable yard. Was it partly because a masculine note of admiration was added to the feminine chorus that the effect of general well-being and of mirth seemed, with his arrival, to be emphasized and confirmed? At all events there was an instinctive perception between Patrick and the center of interest that they understood each other, and Patrick was welcomed from the rug with evidences of the recognition of this bond which precipitated another wave of delightful worship. It was the beginning of a firm friendship. Patrick soon shared with the nurse of those Elysian days the early confidences, the awakening and absurd aspirations, of the childish mind. In the first cloud of trouble, which after some years grew from the marriage and departure of the nurse, he was a never failing solace. He received with serious consideration a carefully thought-out plan to compel her return by engaging one of the hook and ladder companies to pull down her new home, thus presumably leaving her without any abiding place but the parental roof. Seated on the front seat of the old carriage with his young friend, taking the air about the city, he assisted in plotting the details of this scheme. It was so subtly diluted by other interests, and disappeared so gradually, that no particular disillusion resulted. Why Patrick left and when remain a mystery. He was succeeded by a Scotchman with reddish whiskers and for long was lost to sight. Then, unexpectedly, he re-appeared. One afternoon, years afterward, while calling at a friend's home and talking over old days, it developed that Patrick was still alive--a very old man now--that he was employed by these friends as gardener--that, as a matter of fact, he was at the moment at work in the garden. It was, indeed, possible to see him from the window. What was the meaning of that instant sense of doubt as to whether it would be well to walk over to the window? At least this hesitancy did not prevail and there, in a far corner, raking among the shrubbery, could be discerned the figure of a little, bowed old man in blue denim overalls and a weather-beaten felt hat. One could not see his face--his back was toward the window. How small he looked! Why, Patrick had been a fine figure of a young Irishman, not tall, perhaps, but of a respectable height. The suggestion was inevitable that it would be interesting to go over and talk to him. Indeed a start was made, but again came that impulse of hesitation, stronger this time and not to be gainsaid. Was Patrick well--was he happy? On the whole the answer was in the affirmative. He had, it appeared, touches of rheumatism, but he could still do light work, and he liked to putter about the lawns and the flower beds. At home he was comfortable. Generally speaking, it seemed that life had treated him not too harshly. It was clear that he was with kindly people--and there one left him. After all, it is comforting to realize that the picture of Patrick that is best remembered is not of a bent old man, leaning somewhat heavily upon his rake, but of the figure that takes shape out of the mists of childhood--a figure that somehow always personifies the attributes of kindliness and sympathy--standing in a long vanished garden, beneath an apple tree in bloom. _XII: The Christmas Party_ WE always stood rather in awe of Raymond's Uncle Horace because it was said he had once taught Latin in a boys' school. Any one who had ever wielded the power of a teacher was a person with a background of authority and importance whom one could not approach too familiarly. Indeed, it would have been difficult to be familiar with Raymond's Uncle Horace under any conceivable circumstances, for he was essentially a dignified and aloof person. It was understood that the abandonment of teaching had been caused by failing health and to the same origin was perhaps due the reserve and apparent preoccupation that militated against any real intimacy with his nephew's young friends. There was some vague story of a young wife who had died years before, but an experience of that sort was so far beyond our comprehension that the rumor added but little to the isolation in which Raymond's uncle seemed to dwell. He was never really an actor in the drama of our young lives. Sometimes appearing in the wings, more often in the critic's seat, he was an onlooker rather than a participant. One remembers him chiefly as walking back and forth on the old street between Raymond's grandfather's house and certain indefinite rooms he dwelt in which were probably in the edifice then known as the Charter Oak building. The impression that persists is of one very carefully wrapped up against the weather. He wore a long ulster, a seal-skin cap, with a visor, and about his neck, under his iron-gray beard, a muffler was efficiently disposed. His large, gold-rimmed spectacles gave him the customary owlish, peering expression, but in spite of them he could not seem to recognize us, or any one else, except when close at hand. He carried a stout walking stick, the point of which he never raised from the ground, but dragged after him between alternate steps and he stood so straight that he appeared to lean a little backward. It would seem that in the warmer seasons this habitual manner of dress must have been modified, but there is no recollection of any other costume. A tradition of immense learning clung about him. It was said that in his mysterious rooms the walls were lined with books which he spent all his time in reading. It was even whispered that he read Latin and Greek for fun--and no higher intellectual achievement than this could be imagined. There was something facile and careless, too, about the idea of reading for pleasure dead languages with which we had as yet no acquaintance but which loomed as educational obstacles in the not distant future. This casual facility appealed to our youthful sporting spirit and compelled a reluctant admiration. Whatever Raymond's uncle's shortcomings as an intimate might be, he had at least reached the point where matters that were soon to be weighty problems to us were to him merely a question of amusement. Raymond's grandparents lived in an old house around the corner from the old street. Their home was, in fact, one of the oldest houses in the city. They were people of wealth for that day and the house had been brought up to date in the fashion of that time when the finer harmonies of the antique were not as yet appreciated. Plate glass windows had replaced the small panes, hard wood floors covered the fine oak planking and varnished inside shutters had supplanted the dignified panelling of the originals. But our aesthetic appreciations, like those of our elders, noticed no incongruity. To us the old house was the acme of contemporary good taste, as well as the abode of comfort and even luxury. It was here that Raymond's grandparents gave their annual Christmas party for their grandson and his friends. This was a festival famous in the young life of that neighborhood. Its celebrity was chiefly due to the Gargantuan amount of delightful food available. There was a tree, of course, but the presents were of the edible, rather than the permanent kind, and no less appreciated on that account. Nowhere else was there to be found such an amount and variety of candy, fruit, ice cream, cake, nuts, raisins, chicken salad, sandwiches, jellies, jams, _pâté de foies gras_, and other pleasing forms of nourishment--to say nothing of lemonade and various kinds of "shrub"--as at Raymond's Christmas party. At the close of each of these events it did not seem that we could ever eat again, yet there was a certain assurance of the continuance of the fête in carrying home a paper bag containing an orange, an apple and a generous selection of sweets. After the assembly had been fed there were games--"Drop the Handkerchief," "Still Pond, No More Moving," that perennial juvenile pastime where the participants chant the memorable chorus beginning "Oats, peas, beans and barley grow," and sometimes, much against the sentiments of the boys, that embarrassing game where the player who became "It" was compelled to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the prettiest and kiss the one you love best." The boys decided early in their social experience that no self-respecting male ought to play this game and it soon fell into disrepute, though the girls fought for its continuance for a time. Youthful spirits rise with food as rapidly as does a thermometer under the sun's rays and a good deal of noise and romping invariably accompanied these games. Raymond's dear old grandfather and grandmother enjoyed all these manifestations of young life as keenly, so far as we could see, as did the children themselves, but Uncle Horace, it was evident, did not like noise and confusion. Memory pictures him standing in the background of the party, as in the background of life, a quiet spectator, blinking shortsightedly but not unkindly, through his big spectacles, and vanishing altogether as the excitement increased. Once one of the youthful guests, while the festivities were at their height, wandered into a remote part of the house in search of some accessory required for an approaching game and entered by a rear door a room where Uncle Horace had been reading. He had put his book down in his easy chair and was now discovered standing in the other doorway, his back to the room. An intense curiosity to look at one of Uncle Horace's learned volumes took possession of the interloper and at that age it did not occur to him that delicacy might demand some hesitation. He tiptoed over to the chair expecting to see on the cushion some calf-bound, ancient tome written in characters that were hieroglyphics to him. But a complete reversal of his ideas about Uncle Horace was at hand. The book that lay there was in blue-and-gold cloth binding and was a copy of the first edition of "Huckleberry Finn." The intruder looked in some astonishment at the spare figure of Raymond's uncle and perceived that there was no danger of discovery for the attitude was that of a man completely absorbed. He was listening intently. At this distance the general hubbub was softened and there was a rather wistful quality in the childish voices rising and falling with the lilting old refrain: "Thus the farmer sows his seeds. Thus he stands and takes his ease, Stamps his foot (bang!) and claps his hand (smack!) And looks around to view the land." After the lapse of a good many years it is this picture of Raymond's Uncle Horace that is the most vivid. There was some implication in the listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one hand resting on the casing of the doorway, that carried, even to a childish mind, a suggestion of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather lonely widower's personality. At the time it was all very vague and unformulated and later speculation has hesitated somewhat before the privacy thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one could not help at least wondering what visions of his own childhood he saw as he listened to the silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed down through so many generations and bearing their little testimony to the continuity of experience. A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last in the youthful visitor's mind--an understanding that he did not belong there. He slipped out as quietly as he had entered, but he took with him a dawning appreciation of a new incarnation of Raymond's Uncle Horace. _XIII: The Fabric of a Dream_ "_And that night . . . . a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did for him the office of a finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place . . . . the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season. . . ._" --THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE. COUSIN MARY'S home was a little, old, brick house standing flush with the street. A woodshed where the cat slept in summer extended easterly from the house and in the angle thus formed was a diminutive garden where such old-fashioned flowers as holly-hocks, bachelors' buttons, sweet william and larkspur seemed to bloom earlier and last longer than elsewhere. Everything about Cousin Mary's home was on a small scale. She herself was a very small and slight old lady, but she had inherited from the hardy New England race from which she sprang a certain tradition of vitality and longevity which she lived long enough to exemplify in her own person. Other family legends of uncomfortable eccentricity and general worrisomeness she utterly disproved, for never was there a kindlier or more placid soul than she. Of course she wore a cap with lavender ribbons and gowns of black bombazine for every day and black silk with lace at the throat for great occasions. She seldom ventured out of doors, except into her garden, or, on such annual celebrations as Thanksgiving and Christmas, to a neighboring relative's home where she was with difficulty persuaded to take at dinner a glass of port or Madeira, though she always protested that she did not really need it. Most of her life was spent in the southeast downstairs sitting-room, where she used to sit in the smallest, oldest rocking-chair ever seen. On memorable occasions she would take possession of the kitchen, against the protests of Drusilla, her companion, and make gingerbread that was famous in the neighborhood, especially among the children. To childish imaginations there always seemed something mysterious about the rooms in Cousin Mary's house--doubtless merely because we never visited them,--except the sitting-room and the kitchen. The sitting-room communicated with another room--I think it was called the "parlor"--by folding doors. These were generally open, but in there the blinds were always closed and the room was in a kind of perpetual dusky twilight. We could dimly see within, but no recollection of entering remains, though there is a faint memory of an obscure marble-topped center-table--were there not wax flowers on it under a glass cover?--and ancient mahogany chairs. We never reached the upper floors, at least till after Cousin Mary's death, when it seems as if there was an expedition to the attic in company with some older person of authority. It was a brief and somewhat nervous experience. Those were the days when all ghost stories might possibly be true and the attic, like the "parlor," was dark. The visit was long enough to leave only a memory of dim corners, piles of old horse-hide trunks, a remarkable collection of ancient cooking utensils adapted for use over the open fires of colonial and Revolutionary days--where, we wonder, has all this old kitchen equipage gone?--and rafters from which hung dried roots and leaves of one kind and another. It was a distinct relief to get out of doors again. But of course the mysterious qualities we attributed to certain precincts of Cousin Mary's house existed entirely in our youthful minds. No one could be imagined who had less to conceal than this serene old lady. Yet it was natural that there should be romantic stories about her. She had never married and it was not strange that speculations about her past should concern themselves with early love affairs. These fancies crystallized into the quite customary tradition that she had been engaged in her early youth to a young man whose future was then so uncertain that her parents objected to the match. The years have dimmed recollection of the details of the story--there were other romantic complications--but at all events the young man afterwards married another and lived to disprove the early doubts of sceptical parents as to his chance of success in life. But Cousin Mary remained true to her early love. Many years after her death one of the children who used occasionally to call upon her, and to whom even now the odor of certain old-fashioned flowers will bring back a vivid picture of that little garden, had a curious dream about her. He was again in that familiar sitting-room, but in some way he was invisible to the other two occupants. One was of course Cousin Mary--but quite a different Cousin Mary. Youth had come back to her. She was a young girl again--and one of the prettiest young girls the dreamer had ever seen. Her hair was dressed high at the back of her head. A great comb was in it. Curls hung down over her cheeks, as sitting in the familiar diminutive rocking-chair she bent her head forward listening to the words of her visitor. Old lace was about her throat which was of a singular whiteness and beauty. Her gown was of some shimmering stuff, high-waisted, with many flounces. Her whole figure gave the beholder a sense of delicate and rather fragile beauty. She was a creature of race--a thoroughbred. Seated close before her and talking softly and eagerly was a good-looking young man in the uniform of a naval officer of, I should guess, the period of the second war with Great Britain. His sword and cap lay on the floor beside his chair. Incongruities in dreams are generally accepted without surprise, but in this case the sleeper afterward recalled a sense of astonishment at the character of this stranger. Who was he? So far as was known no sailor had ever been associated with Cousin Mary's life. Even in dreams a sense of the proprieties sometimes follows one and it was evident to the dreamer that his presence was superfluous. He turned to the dark "parlor" and for the first time entered. It was a queer place. All sorts of curios from the East were scattered about it--yet "scattered" is not the right word for there was a method in the arrangement, grotesque though it was. The dreamer, however, had little opportunity to observe all this for he was drawn at once to a corner where was a strange, spiral staircase, built of some light Indian wood, and leading through the ceiling to the story above. He ascended and emerged into the unknown region overhead. It was a wonderful place. The details are gone--one recalls only an impression of happiness, sunshine, scents of exotic flowers, the singing of innumerable birds, the tinkling sound of a hidden fountain. It was no longer a room--it was a new country. Here, it seemed, dwelt peace, content, beauty. A fragment of a familiar poem drifted into the dreamer's fancies-- "It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles And see the great Achilles whom we knew--" And there was more than a sense of well-being. There was, for a little moment, a fantastic sensation of fulfillment in one's presence there. There was a feeling of power. Here, one was somehow assured, ambitions would be accomplished, hopes would come true. Here could be done the things one always wanted to do. The dreamer wished to go on, to explore, to find the happy secret of this region, but this, for some reason, was denied him. Some all-powerful influence compelled him to go back, to descend the little staircase into the darkened parlor. Standing there he looked through the open folding doors into the well-known sitting-room and the picture he saw halted him. Cousin Mary and her sailor lover were standing in the middle of the room. His arms were about her, her hands were on his shoulders, her face raised to his. . . . Almost as soon as it was perceived the vision began to fade, receding slowly into the formless, tenuous clouds of semi-consciousness. In a moment the sleeper awoke. For an instant it was difficult to disassociate from the spirit of his dream the golden light of the early spring morning, the twittering of birds, the light drip from the eaves of the brief rain left by the vanished April shower. * * * * * The later history of the spot where Cousin Mary dwelt offers its commentary on a fast changing civilization. Soon after her death the little brick house was pulled down and the cubic space it occupied was filled with heavy machinery which daily filled with its reverberations this place which was once the very epitome of quietude. Now, in their turn, the huge presses have given way to one corner of a vast office building where an army of busy clerks pursues the urgent and exacting routine of a great corporation. The Latin poets liked to believe that every locality had its own peculiar divinity--the "genius of the place." What has become of the goddess who for so long dedicated to peacefulness this abode of a benign old age? Is it that she was so closely identified with the one who dwelt there that when that life ceased the guardian angel fled with the departing spirit to some still fairer abode--or is the genius of the place really called Memory, who, in the minds of those who cherish her, effectually preserves against any merely material desecration the places she once held dear? _XIV: The Quiet Life_ "_More than half a century of life has taught me that most of the wrong and folly which darkens earth is due to those who cannot possess their souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness._" --THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT. WITH the thoughtless cruelty of childhood we used to call him "Thermometer" Tatlock because he was forever watching the temperature. The tradition was that whenever he went down cellar to look at the furnace he arrayed himself in overcoat, fur cap, muffler and arctics. Nicknames are not always brutal and the cruelty of this case lay only in the peculiar features of the situation--the fact, in short, that the subject of our joke was such a gentle, retiring, almost apologetic old gentleman. He was deprecatory even toward us children. To adult reflection it seems ruthless to have made any fun of him at all. Yet there was no doubt about the fact that he was an odd character. The incarnation of bashfulness, he was, like most bashful persons, persistent and consistent in doing just exactly as he liked so far as the demands of a world, not primarily constituted for people of his stripe, allowed. It must be confessed that, in modern parlance, he got away with it pretty successfully. Probably this was because he was wise enough not to demand very much. It did not seem that either the rise and fall of nations or of the stock market gave him very much concern. Doubtless he did not disturb himself greatly over the question of who was to be the next president. His chief worry seemed to be the weather, though why he should have troubled himself about this, when most of his life was spent indoors, remains a mystery. Memory seems to recall some story of ill-health in early life which perhaps inculcated a habit of consulting weather conditions that lasted as long as life itself--and he lived to a green old age. The spacious brick mansion that was his home stood sideways, as it were, to the street, behind a tall fence with panelled posts and blunt, rounded pickets, like large broomsticks of alternating heights. Both the main front door and what we should now call the service entrance were reached by a gravelled driveway with a flag walk beside it that terminated around in the rear of the house at the stable. Narrow flights of steps with wrought-iron railings, topped here and there with brass balls, led to the two doors. The entrance hall was almost square, a passage way running off toward the kitchen from the left-hand farther corner and the staircase ascending on one's left as one entered. At the landing, halfway up, was a large window, opening to the north, which illumined the hall and stair-well with an even, rather bare light. Somewhere in the wall was a recess in which stood a bust of Cicero, of which the eyes, formed without indication of the pupils after the fashion of its period of sculpture, gave an effect of blindness fascinating to the childish imagination. On the right was a little room where Mr. Tatlock's sister, a dear old lady who always wore a little flat lace cap with a black bow, generally sat knitting. Straight ahead was the parlor where occasionally, when Mr. Tatlock's niece was visiting at the house, there were subdued children's parties. On these occasions he was never visible. His own room was the library, east of the parlor, with a southern exposure toward the garden. Here we never entered, but once or twice we caught a glimpse of the interior through the door left unguardedly open by some momentary oversight. The picture thus presented had as its background the south wall of the room with its two windows between which stood the chimney piece. Above the mantle, which was supported by miniature Ionic columns, hung a portrait of a gentleman with a great deal of hair and shirt frill, and below a bright fire burned, partly concealed by a fire screen, beside which, reading in a large easy chair, was Mr. Tatlock. Recollection is still vivid of the startled, rather furtive glance, the look of a timid animal whose place of refuge had been discovered, directed toward us as we peeked in. What was the old man reading as he sat there day after day and year after year, while presidents were elected, national policies inaugurated and abandoned, the maps of the world changed here and there, automobiles invented, and the children grew up, went to college, got married and left the old street? Probably no one knows for a certainty, but we should be willing to guess that his favorites were Burke, the Spectator, Boswell's Johnson, Pope, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and perhaps Gibbon. Did he, we wonder, ever read a novel? If so, it is doubtful whether he got much beyond Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell. The house had a lovely old garden that stretched away to the east, down a slope that was broken into two or three terraces. At the eastward end was a level portion where the box-lined gravel walk from the house made a circle around an old oak tree under which was a bench. There were a good many old fashioned flowers and shrubs in the garden and some pear trees, but who took care of the pruning and gardening, except Mr Tatlock's sister who assuredly could not do it all, is still unexplained. There was a hired man whom we called "Mister" O'Neil who sometimes went to the post office and may have done other errands, but as his title implies he seems to have been above gardening. At any rate there is no recollection of seeing him at work in the garden. In spite of his name there was nothing in his appearance that indicated Irish extraction. He was not a hired man at all in the New England sense; he was more the type of the confidential servant of the English novelists. He was dark, wore a beard, dressed habitually in black and looked like a particularly doleful undertaker. We never saw Mr. Tatlock and "Mister" O'Neil together and yet imagination--perhaps it is only imagination--somehow groups them as a pair of confidants. In a way their characteristics were similar. Both were inscrutable, quiet persons, content to remain in the background. For all of them the world might wag. In our imaginations at least, "Mister" O'Neil knew all about Mr. Tatlock. He accepted the other's peculiar reticences, so like his own, as a matter of course; he knew his innocent secrets; he even could tell, if he wished, what books he read there before the fire that burned from September to June. With this taciturn individual we doubted if Mr. Tatlock was bashful. Possibly their mutual congeniality of temperament centered about the furnace, for they both watched it. "Mister" O'Neil could have revealed, we believe, what the shock was that we all decided Mr. Tatlock must have received early in life. The girls were convinced that this shock was emotional--an unhappy love affair, or the death of some dear friend. The boys, on the other hand, were inclined to talk about a purely physical catastrophe--a runaway accident, perhaps, or a blow on the head from a highway robber. For all of these surmises we had not the slightest foundation, except in fancy, and mature reflection leads to the conclusion that probably we were entirely in error. It seems now much more likely that this old bachelor's oddities were due to life-long frail health. And yet one can never be sure and somehow one glimpse of Mr. Tatlock which it was permitted one of the children to catch hinted, inexplicably and without any particular warrant, at other possibilities. It was the only out-of-door memory of him that is left. The boy, who still remembers well that spring day, was in the next yard, hanging over the fence looking into Mr. Tatlock's garden when he suddenly became aware that Mr. Tatlock himself was sitting on the bench in the circle the path made around the old tree. The old gentleman did not see the small spectator who had been betrayed into an unaccustomed quietness by the absence of companions and some subtle and unacknowledged influence of the first warm afternoon of the year. Nothing whatever happened, Mr. Tatlock sat there, looking up from time to time at the young leaves above him, tapping his stick on the soft turf and smiling to himself. Of what long-gone springs was he dreaming? It was clear that whatever his thoughts were, they were happy ones. Probably to most boys the ideal life is one that comprises "the joy of eventful living." Here for the first time it dawned upon this youthful interloper that one could be happy in quietness and seclusion. There were, it appeared, certain satisfactions in other careers than those of the cowboy and the soldier. Up to this time the boy had never been able to understand why heaven was so often spoken of as a place of rest. He did not understand wholly now, but a later comprehension had here its inception. And so let us remember Mr. Tatlock sitting, lost in meditation, in his garden. After all he was not without influence in his environment, unobtrusive soul that he was. He made himself felt in his little world. He counted. The boy who watched him over the fence that day thought of him again when he read in a recent essay: "The truth is that a man's life is the expression of his temperament and that what eventually matters is his attitude and relation to life . . . . not only his performance." * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Repeated chapter titles were deleted. Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Page 31, "activites" changed to "activities" (activities of their colleagues) Page 57, "orginality" changed to "originality" (wit, originality, sympathy) Page 71, "Englandler" changed to "Englander" (contributed to "The New Englander") Page 73, "Willaims" changed to "Williams" (S. Williams, Deacon Normand) Page 103, "geolological" changed to "geological" (to make a geological) Page 228, "abondoned" changed to "abandoned" (and abandoned, the maps) 
45523	----	available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 45523-h.htm or 45523-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45523/45523-h/45523-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45523/45523-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/famousauthersmen00harkrich FAMOUS AUTHORS--MEN [Illustration: Reproduced, by permission, from "A Pair of Patient Lovers."--Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.] FAMOUS AUTHORS (MEN) by E. F. HARKINS Author of "Famous Authors (Women)," "The Schemers," etc. Illustrated L·C·Page·&·Company Boston Publishers Copyright, 1901 By L. C. Page & Company (Incorporated) All rights reserved Fourth Impression, February, 1906 Colonial Press Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, U.S.A. PREFACE _The aim of this book is to present to the reading public sketches of some of its American literary heroes. There are heroes young and old; but in literature, especially, age has little to do with favorites. At the same time, it will be noted that the subjects of these sketches occupy places in or near the centre of the literary stage. The lately dead, like Maurice Thompson; the hero of the last generation, like Edward Everett Hale; the young man who has made his first successful flight--these do not come within the scope of the present work. So, if some reader miss his favorite, let him understand that at least there was no malice in the exclusion._ _A part of the aim has been to present the social or personal as well as the professional side of the authors. Many of the anecdotes commonly told of well-known novelists are apocryphal or imaginary. Care, therefore, has been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. Wherever it was possible, preference has been given the statements of the authors themselves._ _The sketches are arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of the authors' first publications. No other arrangement, indeed, would seem fair among so gifted and popular a company, writing for a public that discriminates while it encourages and enjoys._ CONTENTS _Page_ Preface 5 William Dean Howells 11 Bret Harte 27 Mark Twain 43 "Lew" Wallace 59 George W. Cable 75 Henry James 91 Francis Richard Stockton 107 Joel Chandler Harris 123 S. Weir Mitchell 139 Robert Grant 155 F. Marion Crawford 169 James Lane Allen 185 Thomas Nelson Page 201 Richard Harding Davis 215 John Kendrick Bangs 231 Hamlin Garland 247 Paul Leicester Ford 263 Robert Neilson Stephens 279 Charles D. G. Roberts 299 Winston Churchill 317 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _Page_ William Dean Howells _Frontispiece_ Bret Harte 27 George W. Cable 75 Francis Richard Stockton 107 S. Weir Mitchell 139 Robert Grant 155 F. Marion Crawford 169 James Lane Allen 185 Thomas Nelson Page 201 Richard Harding Davis 215 John Kendrick Bangs 231 Hamlin Garland 247 Robert Neilson Stephens 279 Charles G. D. Roberts 299 Winston Churchill 317 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS Mr. Howells has reached that point of life and success where he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil. William Dean Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He has therefore reached the ripe age of sixty-four. When he was three years old his father moved from Martin's Ferry to Hamilton and bought _The Intelligencer_, a weekly paper. Nine years afterward he sold _The Intelligencer_ and moved to Dayton, becoming proprietor of the _Dayton Transcript_. This paper had been a semi-weekly, but Mr. Howells changed it to a daily; and his son William went to work for him. It was William's business to rise at four in the morning and sell the paper about town. But the _Transcript_ proved a failure, so the Howells family left Dayton and moved into the country on the banks of the Miami, where for a year a log-cabin was their home. Mr. Howells tells a characteristic story of those struggling days, "When I was a boy," he said some years ago, "I worked on my father's paper. Among other things, I set type. Those were days of great struggle for all of us. The paper was not profitable, and ours was a large family. My tastes and ambitions were all literary, and I wanted to write a story. Instead of writing it and then setting it up in type, I composed it at the case and put it in type as I invented it. We printed a chapter of it weekly in the paper, and so it was published as fast as I got it up. I tried to get three or four chapters ready in advance, but I could not do it. All I could possibly accomplish was to have one installment ready every time the paper went to press. This went on for a long while, and that story became a burden to me. It stretched out longer and longer, but I could see no way to end it. Every week I resolved that that story should be finished in the next week's paper; every week it refused to be finished. Finally I became positively panic stricken, and ended it somehow or other. The experience discouraged me to some extent. I made up my mind that I could not invent." In 1851, when William was fourteen, the family moved from the country to Columbus, where his father got employment as a clerk in the House of Representatives, and also as a compositor on the _Ohio State Journal_. William went to work as a reporter on the _Journal_. Five years later he became the Columbus correspondent of the _Cincinnati Gazette_. In 1859 he took the position of news editor of the _Ohio State Journal_. Later that same year Howells senior, from whom the son evidently inherited his industry and ambition, bought the _Ashtabula Sentinel_ and transferred the property to Jefferson, whither the family moved. William took the position of subeditor of the _Sentinel_. From time to time poems by young Howells had appeared in the Ohio newspapers. Some of his verses, too, had even been published by _The Atlantic Monthly_. In 1860, in collaboration with John J. Piatt, he published his first volume of verse--"Poems by Two Friends." In 1860, also, Howells's "Life of Abraham Lincoln" was published. With the earnings of this immediately popular work our author journeyed to the East by way of Canada. In Boston he first met James Russell Lowell, who was then editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. Afterward he visited the publishers, Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, primarily in connection with one of his poems which _The Atlantic_ then had in hand, "The Pilot's Story." Mr. Fields introduced Howells to Mr. Ticknor, "who, I fancied," says Howells in his "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," "had not then read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, 'I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold.'" While making his residence in Boston, Howells met Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne and Emerson. Emerson rather discouraged him by remarking as they were saying good-bye to each other, that one might very well give a pleasant hour to poetry "now and then." When the young Ohioan met Mr. Fields again he proposed himself as assistant editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. Mr. Fields replied that if the post had not just been filled the intrepid poet certainly should have had it. "He was charmingly kind," writes Mr. Howells of the interview; "he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something he asked with dancing eyes, "'Why, how old are you?' "'I am twenty-three,' I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again. "'Well,' he said, 'you begin young, out there!'" From 1861 to 1865, during the War of the Rebellion, Mr. Howells was United States Consul at Venice, which position was a reward for his life of Lincoln. In Venice he wrote occasionally for American newspapers; and there he also wrote the articles of which, eventually, his delightful "Venetian Life" and "Italian Journeys" were composed. Returning to this country, he re-entered the newspaper world, working mostly for the _New York Tribune_ and the _New York Times_; and he also became a regular contributor to _The Nation_. In 1866 he achieved his great ambition, Mr. Fields appointing him assistant editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. From that year until 1886, when he moved to New York, he lived on terms of enviable intimacy with the group of great writers which made Boston the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen. However, this success did not come until after many defeats. Mr. Howells's letters from Venice were published regularly in the _Boston Advertiser_; but elsewhere, for the most part, the young author had met little encouragement. It was only just before he left Venice, when Lowell, then, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the _North American Review_, accepted Howells's article on "Recent Italian Comedy," that the cloud broke. Lowell accepted the manuscript in "one of his loveliest letters," as Mr. Howells says. "His message" the author confesses, "came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the _Advertiser_ had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief in Vienna; but I valued my admission to the _North American_ peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor." Financially, the encouragement was slight. The _North American_ was "as poor as it was proud"; and it paid Howells for his article at the rate of only two dollars a page. From the _Advertiser_ he had been paid at the rate of about a dollar a thousand words. It was on March 19, 1866, his twenty-ninth birthday, that the vagrant author began his work on _The Atlantic_ at a salary of fifty dollars a week. "The whole affair," Mr. Howells writes, "was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly." It was a most delicate position which he occupied on _The Atlantic_ from 1866 to 1872, when Fields withdrew and Mr. Howells became sole editor. In the beginning, as he says himself, he ventured to distinguish mediocrity in some verses by Whittier. "He sent me a poem," says Howells, "and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it, and printed it, and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them." At another time, when a choice was accidentally enforced between a poem by Holmes and a poem by Emerson, Mr. Howells had the courage to request Emerson that his poem might be held over for the next number. Emerson wrote back to "return the proofs and break up the forms." "I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine," says Mr. Howells, "but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds." From 1872 until 1880 Mr. Howells was sole editor of _The Atlantic_; and the rich social and literary experience which he gained during that term he has embodied in that most delightful of American bookmen's chronicles, "Literary Friends and Acquaintance." Mr. Howells's first piece of fiction, "Their Wedding Journey," was published in 1872, the year that he became sole editor of _The Atlantic_. Seven years ago in a newspaper interview, Mr. Howells made this statement in regard to this work: "I wrote 'Their Wedding Journey' without intending to make it a piece of fiction or considering it to be one after I had finished it. It was simply a book of American travel, which I hoped to make attractive by a sugar coating of romance. I was very familiar with the route over which I had taken the bridal couple, and I knew it was beautiful, and, like most American scenery, was not appreciated. The book was more of a success than I expected it to be. I attributed its success to the descriptions of American scenery and places. I gave it to a family friend and asked her to mark those parts of it which she thought real incidents. I was very much astonished and greatly pleased to find, when she returned it, that she had marked some passages which were purely invention. This made me ask myself if I might not hope to write a novel some day." The question was evidently answered in the affirmative, for after 1872 Mr. Howells's output of fiction became regular and profuse. His novels have all been more or less popular. He is fondest himself of "A Modern Instance," we are told; and he regards "A Hazard of New Fortunes" as his best novel. It may safely be said that the book which it was the greatest pleasure to him to write is "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," published late last year. Altogether his works number about seventy-five. Mr. Howells is a plodder. "I believe," he once said to an interviewer, "in the inspiration of hard work." As a rule all successful authors have held this belief. Mr. Howells resigned from _The Atlantic_ in 1880 to engage in general literary work. Six years later he formally transferred his allegiance from Boston to New York by accepting charge of "The Editor's Study" in _Harper's_. Afterward, for a time, he was editor of _The Cosmopolitan_. Late in 1900 he resumed his editorial connection with _Harper's_. Although admired the world over, and dignified with the title of Doctor of Laws, which he got from Yale in 1871, Mr. Howells is hospitable and genial, just as Dr. Holmes was; and many young writers with more or less glittering names owe much to his counsel and his encouragement. [Illustration: BRET HARTE.] BRET HARTE Bret Harte has been called the writer of the best short stories in the English language. A literary court of arbitration would doubtless find that the best of his short stories are without superiors. It should not be forgotten that the reading public is still under the magic spell which Mr. Harte wove more than a third of a century ago with "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Plain Language from Truthful James," "Tennessee's Partner," "Miggles" and the other works which first called attention to the author's still unquestioned genius. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "Under the Redwoods" mark the present extremes of one of the most romantic chapters in our literary history. Some years ago, when the popular writer and his wife were spending the summer at Newport, a woman said confidentially to Mrs. Harte, "What is your husband's real name?" It evidently did not seem natural to the inquirer that an author could always have borne such a crisp and striking name; and the same idea, that the name must be simply a happy pseudonym, has, we believe, struck many others. The idea is partly wrong and partly right. Francis Brett Harte was his name originally. That form was changed to Francis Bret Harte, then to F. Bret Harte, and finally to the attractive form which long ago endeared itself to the whole English-reading world. For it is well known, undoubtedly, that the Bret Harte stories are quite as popular in England and in the British colonies as in the United States; that Germany yields to none in her admiration for them; and that one of them, "Gabriel Conroy," has been printed in at least fourteen languages. Indeed, a quarter of a century ago the name of Bret Harte was as powerful the world over as was Mr. Kipling's a few years since. Perhaps the felicitous brevity of the name was one of the elements of that power. Bret Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., on August 25, 1839. His father was at that time a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. Bret was still in boyhood when his father died. The boy, who had received an ordinary public school education, went to California with his mother in 1854. The Golden State was then one enormous mining-camp. The laws were largely unwritten. A passion either for gold or for adventure had taken possession of thousands of persons and thrown them together in one of the wildest parts of the world. In this exciting school of life young Harte studied his first lessons of life. For three years he was thrown hither and thither, with his eyes and his ears wide open, and with his mind sponging up the lively incidents which, through his skillful pen, have since become the idyls of the pioneer West, with all its vice and virtue, its heroes and cravens, its showy wealth and its heart-touching poverty. For a year he was an express rider, with a route lying among the ravines and gulches of the northern part of the State; and what he had not learned by his own observation he learned during this period from other observers. This was the time when Yuba Bill and the other heroic road-agents took form in his imagination. At another time he picked up the trade of compositor in a newspaper office in Eureka; and at still another time he went out prospecting, and there was a sign of later days in the fact that before the three years of his uncertainty came to an end he taught school for a short while. It was then that, for the first time, he indulged the literary instincts awakened by his experience in the newspaper office in Eureka. This budding age is outlined in "M'liss." In 1857 the young man settled down in San Francisco as a compositor in the office of the _Golden Era_, a weekly periodical. A few round-about-town sketches called "A Boy's Dog," "Sidewalkings," and "In a Balcony," submitted most humbly and respectfully to the editor, brought to the ambitious printer the reward of an invitation to join the editorial staff. With the acceptance of the invitation began a most brilliant literary career. We are indebted to a friend of the author's for the statement: "Those were busy days, and much of the matter ground out in that time of probation is as pregnant with genius and wit as any that he has seen fit to retain in his complete edition." But the edition is not yet complete, we may remark. When, not long afterward, a weekly called _The Californian_ was established in San Francisco, the new writer went over to it enthusiastically. In the columns of this periodical and of some of the daily papers appeared the poems and the sketches which rounded out Mr. Harte's "time of probation." _The Californian_ was the means of acquainting him with Mark Twain, also a new figure on the literary horizon. Indeed, it has been said by men who knew the little group of enthusiasts connected with _The Californian_ that it was Harte who induced the Mississippi pilot first to put to use his genius as a humorist. This catch-penny work of the days of _The Californian_ was profitable to Harte simply as experience. Like many another story-teller, he came to the conclusion that steady employment, with a few leisure hours in the day, would do more to advance him than anything else, and so he found work, first in the United States Surveyor General's office, then with the United States Marshal, and later in the mint. Shortly before going to the mint he was introduced to Easterners by a sketch in _The Atlantic Monthly_, "The Legend of Monte Diablo," which introduction was due largely to the patronage of Jessie Benton Fremont, one of the most cultivated women in California. His secretaryship at the mint, which began in 1864, led to a very productive period, some of the fruits of which are "John Burns of Gettysburg," "The Pliocene Skull," "The Society on the Stanislow" and the remarkable "Condensed Novels," in the writing of which, as one of the old-time critics remarked "a new set of faculties was required." At this point naturally comes in the question, What was Bret Harte's first book? The question was answered last year by the author himself, in this statement: "When I say that my first book was not my own, and contained beyond the title page not one word of my own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of plagiary. But the fact remains that in priority of publication the first book for which I became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since, was a small compilation of California poems indited by other hands. There was an ominous calm when the book reached the market. Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly, which I will poetically veil under the title of the Red Dog _Jay Hawk_, was the first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsuspecting quarry as follows: 'The hog wash and "purp" stuff ladled out from the slop bucket of Messrs. ---- and Company, of 'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice and called "A Compilation of Californian Verses," might be passed over as far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "Californian," it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted Yellow Hammer, whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the _Jay Hawk_. That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and the thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make allusion to California's greatest bard, is rather a confession of idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'" There were other bolts quite as forceful, but as a sample of the literary criticism found in California in the great mining days, and also of the reins that kept editorial enterprise in check, the foregoing will suffice. In 1868, while Mr. Harte was still working in the mint and quietly hitching his literary wagon to a star, Mr. Roman, an ambitious San Francisco publisher, projected _The Overland Monthly_, a periodical that has had considerable influence on the literary growth of the far West. He invited the secretary of the mint to be its editor. The invitation was accepted, and the editor-to-be at once went to work on a story for the first number, which was to appear in July. The scheme of the magazine was thoroughly Eastern, but the editor decided that, for the honor of the West, his story should have a strong local flavor. He called it "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and, without a thought of any impropriety, had it put into type. For the sake of accuracy we take the liberty of relating the consequences as they were related in the old days: "The first intimation that it was likely to arouse criticism of any kind, good or bad, came to him in the form of a protest from the young woman who read proof on the paper. She sent word to him that if matter as indecent as 'The Luck of Roaring Camp' was to be printed in _The Overland Monthly_ she could not retain her place as an employee of the paper. Harte read the story over again in proof to see where the indecencies were, but could find none. Then he took it to the owner of the paper, and asked his opinion of it. The owner took it home and read it to his wife. It made her cry, and she thought it was a powerful production, but she agreed with the proof-reader that it was too daring in its conception, and too frank in its details even for the not-over particular society which inhabited California. Harte heard her judgment with amazement. He was utterly unable to see anything improper in the story. Finally the owner of the paper so far went over to the side of the story's critics as to say that he thought the story would have to be left out. Harte took a day and a night to think the matter over, and then he announced his own decision. He said that if the story was left out of that month's issue of _The Overland Monthly_ he would himself insist on being left out of all connection with the paper in the future. There was no quarrel. He simply was certain that his judgment was good, and felt that if it was considered bad on this occasion by the owner, he would never be able to suit him in the future. Finally, after the matter had been placed on this definite basis, the owner made up his mind to let the story run." We have met the account of the momentous difficulty in a slightly different form, but the account which we have repeated may be accepted as substantially correct. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" did not please the Californians, and it seemed for some time as if the censure of the feminine critics would be justified popularly; but when the flattering opinions of the Eastern readers were reported, the gold hunters changed their minds. No doubt they were astonished to hear that a Boston publishing house, at that time the most powerful organization of its kind in the land, had offered to accept anything the author might offer at his own terms. Harte was busy sending provisions to the snowbound camps in the Sierras in the fall of 1868, so that his next story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," made its appearance as late as January, 1869. That same year, too, "Plain Language from Truthful James," popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee," came to delight the reading public; and since that time Bret Harte's fame has remained more or less brilliant. For a time he filled the chair of Modern Literature in the University of California. In 1871 he came East. The journey was a triumph. Nothing like it ever occurred before, or has occurred since. Once in the East, _The Atlantic Monthly_ agreed to pay him one thousand dollars a month for a poem and a short story; but the author soon found the agreement irksome. He lectured and wrote at his leisure in this country until 1878, when he was appointed United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and two years later he was sent to Glasgow. His term there closed in 1885, and ever since he has made London his home. However, he has always been Californian in his stories. His latest offering, "Under the Redwoods," is as reflective of the growing days of the West as are early masterpieces like "Tennessee's Partner" and "Miggles." His star may be a trifle lower in the heavens than it was when he went abroad, but it is still of the first magnitude. MARK TWAIN Mark Twain's real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. There is a story to the effect that one of his ancestors, by name Gregory Clement, an adherent of Cromwell, added his voice to the condemnation of Charles I. and was beheaded for it by Charles II. However, it is neither as Clement nor as Clemens that the most celebrated of contemporaneous American authors is, or has been, popularly known, but by the pen-name of Mark Twain, which he adopted when he was piloting on the Mississippi, more than forty years ago. In fun or in earnest--it is hard to fathom his moods--Mr. Clemens said lately that he was working on an autobiography which must not be opened until he has been in his grave for a century. So far as the main facts are concerned, however, the humorist's autobiography is already an open book. It has been chronicled piece by piece in a hundred magazines and in a thousand newspapers since 1868, when "Innocents Abroad" appeared, up to the present day. Probably no other living author has been so beset by the requests of editors and the importunities of reporters; and assuredly no other living author has been more amiable or more liberal in his responses. No, a good portion of the autobiography of Mr. Clemens, or Mark Twain,--we shall use each name impartially,--will be submitted to the public within a hundred hours after his death--and may that inevitable conclusion be far, far off! As a man and as a writer Mr. Clemens has invariably carried the colors of the typical American. A stern sense of duty and of honor, a seldom absent sense of humor, inexhaustible energy, dauntless pluck, unfeigned simplicity and abiding sympathy and fidelity, are the salient characteristics of the typical American--of Mr. Clemens. At the same time, above and beyond the writer's unexcelled powers of observation and richness of imagination is his fine sense of artistry. "Mark Twain's humor will live forever," Mr. Howells is reported to have said some years ago, "because of its artistic qualities. Mark Twain portrays and interprets real types, not only with exquisite appreciation and sympathy, but with a force and truth of drawing that makes them permanent." So fastidious a critic as Prof. Barrett Wendell has lately dwelt on the constant and irresistible charm of Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Clemens was born in a little Missouri village named Florida on Nov. 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens, of a good Virginia family, was one of the pioneers who, early in the century, crossed the Alleghanies and sought new fortunes in the unsettled West. His mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Lampton, also, like her husband, came of good English stock. Her forefathers had plunged into the wilds with Daniel Boone; and she herself has been described as "one of those beautiful, graceful, and vivacious Kentucky girls who have contributed so much to the reputation of that fortunate State." A cousin of Mr. Clemens, by the way, who was one of the humorist's playmates sixty years ago, is the Rev. Eugene Joshua Lampton, who, by some of the people in Missouri, is called "the Bishop of the diocese." Elder Lampton is the possessor of the original subscription list which Mr. Clemens carried when he was a newspaper boy in Hannibal. But this is reaching ahead a little. They say that Mr. Clemens's mother was not only remarkably winsome but remarkably intelligent. When the author was a youngster one of his relatives said of him: "He's a perfect little human kaleidoscope." "Yes," added another, "and he gets that from his mother." Samuel's mother could "write well," which was no small accomplishment in the south-west in the thirties. When Samuel was about nine years old his father decided to move to Hannibal, in the same State. The prime cause of this immigration was the failure of the elder Clemens to make Salt River navigable; hence, as one writer has suggested, the probable origin of the old synonym for disaster, "gone up Salt River." Young Clemens was sent to school in Hannibal. Some of his schoolmates are living in the old town to-day. He seems to have enjoyed the rule of two teachers, Miss Newcomb and Miss Lucy Davis. Physically, he was not a strong boy, but intellectually he seems always to have been more than a match for any boy of his age. He had two brothers, Orion, who was considerably older, and Henry, who was the youngest of them all. Samuel attended school until his father died in 1847. The death of the father, who had just been elected county judge, was a hard blow to the family. After the death of his father, the subject of our sketch went to work for the local newspaper as a carrier. Afterward he served as "devil" and type-setter, and then, having completed his apprenticeship and thinking to better himself elsewhere, he set off on foot for the East. Doing odd jobs at the case and the press, he finally reached Philadelphia. Thence he went to New York. But the East did not please him, and at seventeen he was back in Hannibal. He was now on his uppers, as the phrase is, and, in addition to its adventurous side, the financial side of steamboat life on the Mississippi magnetized him. There, for instance, was the pilot, the guide of the great smoking craft, a man who knew everything thought worth knowing, a man looked up to by every merchant, every traveler and every desperado. Samuel determined to become a pilot, and the picturesque Capt. Horace E. Bixby took him under his wing. In his "Life on the Mississippi" Mark Twain describes with all his eloquence the interesting and exciting life of a pilot on the treacherous river. And was not the pilot's a great and attractive post for a young man? "If you will take," says Mark, "the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky-black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street-crossing, the character, size and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs on that long street and _change their places_ once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi." The life on the river, with its ever-changing dramatic and entertaining incidents, awoke the young man's sleeping imagination--gave him a strong desire to put to use the modest literary methods which he had acquired as an itinerant printer. Mr. Howells, too, it will be noticed, first had the passion for authorship aroused in him by the types and the presses. The first sketches which Mr. Clemens sent to the local papers were signed "Iosh," a meaningless signature, which quickly made the young author desire something better. The improvement came to him when one day he heard a "big black negro" who was taking soundings call out "Mark twain!" which meant that there were two fathoms of water. The call struck the pilot's fancy, and he kept it in mind for future use. Mr. Clemens served in the pilot-house--one of the best school-houses in the world, it may be said--until the war broke out. Then he ran blockades for a while, and for two weeks he carried a gun in the Confederate army, under General Harris. The two weeks' service cooled his ardor, and he went farther west with his brother Orion, who, as a sympathizer with the Union side, had received an appointment as Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. Samuel was to act as his brother's secretary, but as in this office he did nothing and earned nothing, he, after an attempt at prospecting, joined the staff of the _Virginia City Enterprise_. It was as the _Enterprise's_ correspondent at the capital of the Territory, Carson City, that Mr. Clemens first used the striking pseudonym "Mark Twain." But he had no taste for routine work; or, rather, his manner of garnishing, often with his stinging satire, his routine work, did not suit the taste of the editor of the _Enterprise_, and at the end of six months Mark Twain stamped the dust of Nevada from his shoes and struck out for California, where he readily secured employment on the _Union_. In the spring of 1865 he took an interest with Bret Harte in a short-lived weekly called _The Californian_, and some of the humorous articles which he wrote for that publication were widely copied in the East. Later the _Union_ sent him to the Hawaiian Islands to describe the sugar industry. His work as a correspondent was very successful, and so was the lecture tour which he made in California when he returned. Major Pond, by the way, relates that Mark Twain committed his lecture to memory and was entirely confident of success; still, desiring to forestall even the possibility of failure, he arranged with some friend of his--Major Pond has forgotten her name--to sit in a box and start the applause if he should look in her direction and stroke his mustache. "Instead of failing, however," the Major reports, "the lecture started propitiously, and that caused Mark to forget his instructions to the lady. By and by, unconsciously, when the audience was filled to the neck with pleasure and sore with laughter, he unwittingly turned to the box where his friend sat and pulled his mustache. At the time he was saying nothing particularly good or funny, but the anxious lady took his action for the signal, and almost broke her fan on the edge of the box in a fury of applause." It took all the nerve which Mark had accumulated among the gamblers and crevasses of the Mississippi to pass through the embarrassment. In 1867 Mr. Clemens published his first book, "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," of which about four thousand copies were sold. That same year he went to Europe with the excursionists aboard the Quaker City. This excursion proved to be the turning point in his career. He had a commission to write sketches of the journey for the _Alta Californian_. The sketches were duly published, and were then collected and offered to a publisher for marketing in book form. The material did not appeal to the publisher; it was startlingly uncut and undried. But Mark was insistent, and by and by the book appeared under the title of "Innocents Abroad." That book established Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist. During the thirty-three years which have intervened between that day and the present, Mark Twain's reputation has been maintained at a matchless height. No one has been deemed worthy by the reading public--which, after all, is the Supreme Court in literary matters--to be called his rival. And since the publication of "Innocents Abroad" Mark Twain's career has been public property, with no signs, no fences, not even a dog therein to bark at night. Mark Twain's career stands unequalled in the literary history of America. He has been honored as an author and as a lecturer in almost every part of the world. He made a fortune and lost it; and now he is making another. The literary historian must record in his case the prodigious achievement of an author remaining for at least thirty-three years--and who knows how many more will follow?--in almost steady demand in print and on the platform. But in more than a literary sense was that excursion to Europe on the Quaker City the turning-point in Mark Twain's career, for it was on that memorable journey that he met Miss Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, N. Y., who afterward became his wife; who is the subject of the most eloquent words which he ever penned, and who, if we are to believe their long-termed friend, Major Pond, "makes his works so great." "LEW" WALLACE Gen. "Lew" Wallace is the author of the most popular story ever written by an American. "Ben Hur" has been translated into every language which can boast of a literature. In the summer of 1900 it was estimated that nine hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold. It is safe to say that by this time the million mark has been reached. This literary phenomenon is enlarged by the fact that "Ben-Hur" has never appeared in a cheap, that is, a paper-covered, edition. The General has been urged repeatedly to authorize the publication of such an edition, but his refusal has been firm from the first. A friend of his who once heard the author repeat his refusal, exclaimed: "Good for you!" It is a question whether this friendly enthusiasm served any high purpose. If, as has often been reported, "Ben Hur" has converted many readers to Christianity, then its circulation might well be furthered in every way possible. We mention this circumstance because of the half-sacred nature which, not simply in the minds of emotional readers but also in the mind of the stern-charactered author himself, the book has been gradually assuming. A few years ago General Wallace, while on a lecture tour among the big cities, related how "Ben Hur" was conceived and brought forth. He frankly admitted that prior to its conception, his religious views were unstable. But as the ideas took hold of him, as chapter followed chapter, as the central figure emerged under his pen from the mist of the early years in Bethlehem into the divine glow of the later years around Jerusalem, his own life underwent changes, until at length, when the work was done, he stepped forth a militant Christian for the first time in his life. We have heard many authors describe the manner in which their books were born, but Lew Wallace's description of the birth of "Ben Hur," for impressiveness and for entertainment, stands alone. If the General had done nothing else but write the tale of Christ his fame would be certain of outlasting generations. But, as a matter of fact, the wonderful book represents only one of his many qualifications to sit among the Immortals, as we shall see presently. The author was born in Brookville, Ind., on April 10, 1827. His father was David Wallace, who, after graduation from West Point and a two years' service in the army, adopted the profession of law and went to live in the little Indiana town. Six years after Lewis was born his father was elected lieutenant governor by the Whigs, and three years later he was elected governor. From 1841 to 1843 Governor Wallace represented his district in Congress. His political career was brought to a close simply, it is said, because he voted for an appropriation to assist Professor Morse to establish telegraph communication between Baltimore and Washington. Lewis's mother was Esther Test, a daughter of a well-known Indiana judge, who is described as a woman of marked beauty and culture, and to whom may be traced the son's artistic and literary genius. She died in 1837, but her children were fortunate to be reared and trained by a woman of extraordinarily strong character, Zerelda Saunders, the daughter of an Indianapolis doctor, who, when she had devotedly completed her performance of the none too attractive duties of a stepmother, worked for the causes of temperance and equal suffrage, according to a woman who knew her well, with "eloquence, dignity, enthusiasm and conscientiousness." General Wallace avoided school. Thus he missed the basis which erudition demands, but he at least improved his passion for art and for literature. What he enjoyed most was to stroll out of town to the wild-grown fields and woods, and there he would read his favorite books and study nature. Not one of our authors knows nature more intimately. In fact, in those juvenile days he thought seriously of becoming an artist; and though, if the thought had ever been realized, literature would have lost much, still art might have gained in equal proportion. For at the General's home in Crawfordsville are some excellent examples of his skill with the brush. One of his notable pictures represents the conspirators concerned in the assassination of President Lincoln. Another equally remarkable work of art is his portrait of the Sultan of Turkey. Many of the General's friends have valuable samples of his artistic genius. We mention these facts to show that there was once good ground for the author's ambition to be an artist. Yet at the age of eighteen, just when one would expect such a talent to exert itself irresistibly, young Wallace enlisted to fight against Mexico. He was made a second lieutenant and ordered to guard the stores at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In Mexico he found the material for "The Fair God," his first novel, on which he worked occasionally for twenty years. At the end of the Mexican war he returned to Indiana to study law, in which respect, it will be noticed, he followed in the footsteps of his father. Three years after his admission to the bar he married Susan Elston, of Crawfordsville, herself of no mean literary gifts, as her three collections of charming sketches, "The Land of the Pueblos," "The Storied Sea," and "The Repose in Egypt," attest. The Wallaces lived in Crawfordsville until the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion. Thereupon the young lawyer went straight to Indianapolis and offered his services to the governor. For a while he served as adjutant-general. Then he took the colonelcy of a regiment of zouaves, and with such vigor and success that early in September, 1861, he was brevetted brigadier-general. For gallantry at Fort Donelson he was afterwards brevetted major-general. At the close of the war he was one of the most distinguished soldiers in the land. As a recognition of his great services--in July, 1864, according to Secretary Stanton and General Grant, he had saved Washington from destruction--he was appointed to the commission which tried the assassins of Lincoln. That duty done, he returned to Crawfordsville. This return home signalized the real beginning of his literary career. He was now not far from forty years of age, and he was not content to live on his military reputation. Law had little power over him. So he turned to the manuscript which had been growing slowly for many years; and 1873 saw the publication of "The Fair God," the souvenir of the author's service in the Mexican war. Compared with the average romance, "The Fair God" possesses exceptional power and originality. "Ben-Hur" appeared in 1880; but it must not be supposed that General Wallace gave this second book his exclusive attention for the seven years that had passed. It was half written when, in 1878, President Hayes appointed the distinguished Indianian Governor of New Mexico. The visitor at the Wallace homestead in Crawfordsville will be shown the beech tree in the shade of which the work was done. To the way in which he works we shall turn later. The concluding half of the tale was written at spare moments in the governor's palace in Santa Fé, which Mrs. Wallace has described as "the last rallying-place of the Pueblo Indians." At first the more captious of the critics accented their discovery that "Ben-Hur" showed no rhetorical improvement over "The Fair God"; and, though they were right, they erred sadly in trying to measure the book with narrow rules. It has defects, as the most sympathetic critic must admit; but the impartial critic must also admit that in boldness and grandeur of conception and in vigor and beauty of style, the story stands unequalled in American literature, and, in parts, unexcelled in the romantic literature of any nation. Here and there are unbalanced sentences, graceless phrases, misplaced words, and interpolations that detract from the unity of effect desirable in all works of art; but here and there, too, especially in the chapters descriptive of the Grove of Daphne and of the chariot race, is a vivid power at once more charming and more thrilling than anything to be found in any other English novel. "A great historical romance," as one of our critics remarked many years ago, "is not to be made with reference to the square and the compass. It must be a vivid historical impression, and at the same time a wisely considered story of life." "Ben-Hur" adequately fulfills these two fundamental conditions. Moreover it perfectly fulfills, delicately yet impressively, the great moral purpose which the author imposed upon himself. As we recall the author's narrative of the writing of the tale, this moral purpose, beginning gently, gradually acquired a force that mastered him completely. It was like a flood that first trickles through the seam in the dam, and then, gathering in volume, sweeps all before it. The characters themselves, from Christ to the faithful steward, display the highest flight of imagination to be found in any American novel. Indeed, many of the landscape features themselves are so wonderfully vivid that the same praise awarded Tom Moore for his imaginative descriptions of the East may judiciously be extended to General Wallace. We have heard the General say that a scene which he had regarded as purely fictitious or imaginative appeared in surprising reality when, years after the book was published, he first visited Palestine. Of the tremendous sensation which "Ben-Hur" made when it appeared, and of the phenomenal success which it has maintained even down to the present time, it is, we presume, unnecessary to speak. The author, as we noted before, has guarded its fame diligently, jealously; in fact, although Lawrence Barrett urged him years ago to allow the book to be dramatized, he did not yield to solicitation in this form until 1900. This circumstance reminds us that the General once wrote a play called "Commodus," but its multiplicity of leading characters has kept it in his desk. It would bankrupt any manager in America, they told him. "The Prince of India," the romance published in 1893, suffered, as it must have suffered, by comparison with "Ben-Hur." Judged by itself, it is delightful. It exemplifies the writer's remarkable creative force and his ever-youthful enthusiasm. Probably the last notable work from the General's pen will be the autobiography on which he has been at work for the last few years. General Wallace's diplomatic experience at Constantinople is worthy of a chapter, but we must content ourselves with saying that it added brilliancy to the honors which he had earned as a soldier and as an author. Of late the General has been living a semi-pastoral life at his estate in Indiana. He has himself described his daily habits: "I begin to write at about 9 A.M. Keep at work till noon. Resume about 1.30 P.M., and leave my studio about 4. I then exercise for two hours. I walk or ride horseback, according to the weather. When it rains I put on a heavy pair of boots and trudge five to seven miles across the country. I usually ride about a dozen miles. To this habit of taking regular exercise I attribute my good health. I eat just what I want and as much as I want. When night comes I lie down and sleep like a child, never once waking until morning. I usually retire at 9.30 and rise at 7.30, aiming to secure nine hours' sleep. I smoke at pleasure, a pipe or a cigar, but never a cigarette, which I consider the deadliest thing a person can put in his mouth. The amount of work I produce in a day varies greatly. Sometimes I write four hundred and sometimes twelve hundred words. What I write to-day in the rough, to-morrow I revise, perhaps reducing it to twenty words, perhaps striking out all the day's work and beginning at the same point once more. That constitutes my second copy. When proofs come from the publisher another revision takes place. It consists chiefly of condensation and expurgation." He was asked once what he considered the secret of his success. "Work," he answered, "and, as an author, the doing it myself with my own hand, not by means of a typewriter, or amanuensis or stenographer. To work I would add universal reading." "Who is your favorite novelist?" the questioner went on. "Sir Walter Scott." "What is your favorite novel?" "'Ivanhoe.'" "And your favorite poem?" "'Idylls of the King.'" "What do you consider the sublimest poetry in the world?" "You will find it in the Psalms and Job, in Homer, in Milton and in Shakespeare." "Who, in your judgment, are the three greatest warriors the world has produced?" "Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon." "Who, in your opinion, were the greatest American statesmen?" "George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Alexander Hamilton is, in my judgment, the father of the American Constitution. But that Constitution would never have been adopted save for the support given it by the great name of George Washington." We have said, after all, far too little of this distinguished man, but all that we might say would hardly give the right emphasis to the greatness of his manifold deeds and to the charm of his personal character. [Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE.] GEORGE W. CABLE During his visit to this country a few years ago Mr. J. M. Barrie said to the students at Smith College that no American novelist merits a higher rank than Mr. George W. Cable. True as, in the abstract, this foreign estimate of Mr. Cable's worth is, it would awaken a rather feeble echo among the devourers of our colonial literature. Yet one of the Southerner's characteristic stories, "The Grandissimes," for instance, or "Posson Jone," or "Madame Delphine," is deserving of a recommendation to the liveliest admirer of eighteenth century heroes and heroines. At bottom, there is much in common between Mr. Barrie and Mr. Cable, and this circumstance may account for the Scotchman's enthusiastic utterance at Smith College. Each has a poetical love for nature; each has portrayed a picturesque corner of the world with the kindest intention, the broadest sympathy and the choicest skill; each has been the object of misunderstanding at home and of warm admiration abroad, and each has led where others may only follow. It is perfectly natural that two such lovable and loving men should clasp hands across the sea. We must admit that the writer who has pictured New Orleans as vividly as Balzac pictured his beloved Paris was better known, say, ten years ago, than he is to-day. Then he had fewer distractions than he has to-day. Then he had reached the climax of his literary productivity. Then he was personally endearing himself to his fellow-countrymen with his inimitably delightful recitations and songs. There have been authors who drew larger audiences, and who, to use a homely phrase, made more noise on their tours, but there has never been an author whose readings from his works gave sweeter pleasure; and, as for his manner of singing the Creole folksongs, it was indescribably charming. Mr. John Fox, Jr., is the only other American author who has ventured to sing folk-songs publicly; and we may say, without fear of suggesting the odious comparison, that the younger man has been very successful, too. "Many years ago," Mr. Cable once said, "when I discovered that these folk-songs of the slaves of former Louisiana Creoles had a great charm of their own and were preserved by tradition only, I was induced to gather them and reduce them to notation. I found that others were so strongly interested in the songs that, without pretending to any musical authority or original charm of voice, I was tempted to sing one or two of them before public audiences. The first time I did so was in Boston, and since then I have rarely been allowed to leave them out of my entertainment, when the length of my literary program left room for them." But we must look back farther. To start at the very beginning, George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844. His father was of Virginian descent; his mother of New England. They were married in Indiana ten years before George was born, and they moved to New Orleans after the hard times of 1837. The father died in 1859, and then George, at the age of fifteen, went to work to help support the family. He was a very small boy for his age; and indeed it is related that in 1863, when the family was sent outside the Union lines for refusing to take the oath of allegiance, his sisters had no difficulty in obtaining permission to have their "little brother" accompany them. The "little brother," however, was not so harmless as he looked. He volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, and was mustered into the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, then in Gen. Wirt Adams's brigade. For a time after the war he rolled cotton on the New Orleans levees and carried a surveyor's chain along the banks of the Atchafalaya; and by and by he found a place on the _New Orleans Picayune_. He is therefore to be counted among the authors whose literary career started in the reporter's room. His strong taste for culture and his zeal for the public welfare soon made an outlet for themselves in short articles touching on current topics; and, though the articles were much enjoyed by the readers of the _Picayune_, the young writer before long felt the distaste for newspaper work which, early or late, comes to almost every journalist with high literary aims. Journalism is the best school of experience in the world, but it can be attended too long. Cable resisted the fascinations of journalism firmly and wisely. At the height of his success he left the _Picayune_ and went into the counting-room of a cotton house. He had a good eye for the picturesque features of daily life, the features met commonly in the daily papers, and at his leisure he wrote a few short stories based on New Orleans characters. One day these stories, which he had made no attempt to sell, came into the hands of an agent of the old _Scribner's Monthly_, who happened to visit Louisiana in connection with the well-remembered Great South papers. This agent, by name Edward King, praised the stories, and, at the author's request, sent one of them to New York. The story, for some reason, came back; but the next one sent, "Sieur George," brought a note of acceptance and encouragement from Richard Watson Gilder, Doctor Holland's associate. A few years later a volume of these Louisiana sketches was published under the title of "Old Creole Days." It was immediately recognized as a notable addition to our short story literature. Nevertheless, the author stuck to his desk in the counting-room. Many another ambitious young writer, in the circumstances, would have given up his position and leaned entirely upon his pen. Young Cable had a cool head. He knew that he was moving forward handsomely, and that if he yielded to the excitement of the situation for a moment he might fall back. So his pen rusted for two years, when he accepted an order for a serial story. This turned out to be "The Grandissimes," a clear and entertaining exposition of the author's views of the old-fashioned Southern life, a happy mingling of fact and fiction, of fun and sobriety, of calm appreciation of the Louisiana aristocracy and a warm toleration of the struggles of the poor negro slaves. Of course, this attitude added nothing to the author's popularity among Southerners. To illustrate this, a Southern woman, who happened to visit Northampton, where of late Mr. Cable has made his home, was asked if she ever read his stories. "Of course not," she indignantly answered; "I wouldn't think of looking at them." However, she was persuaded to look at them after a while; and it is a peculiar tribute to their delicate yet powerful charm that the woman expressed regret that she had misconceived his work and opposed his ideas. "The Grandissimes" was so successful that the publishers are said to have sent the author a check for five hundred dollars more than the contract price. This first long tale was followed by another much the same in vein and in atmosphere, "Madame Delphine," which is the story-teller's own favorite. The subject and the style are equally delightful. In 1879, when Mr. Cable was thirty-five years old, the business house in which he had worked to keep his feet on earth dissolved, and the clerk had to choose between returning to journalism and devoting himself entirely to literature. By this time he seems to have been more self-reliant and more confident. At any rate, he chose literature. The first thing he did was to decline to write for more than one publisher. It must be said again that a steadier head never produced a story. A strong sense of duty, in fact, early established control of his work. His interests were not permitted to grow narrow. He realized that he possessed exceptionally abundant resources for the production of miscellaneous literature touching on the development of the middle South, and he determined to make the most of his possessions. In 1880, for example, we find him engaged in a special article on New Orleans for the Census Bureau, and his native city was also the theme of an article which he wrote for the "Encyclopedia Britannica." One of his critics has said: "Since Hawthorne's Custom House reports, few pages of the Government documents have been enriched by so discriminating a pen as in the exhaustive census monograph upon the past and present of the Southern metropolis." This paper led to a series of articles entitled "The Creoles of Louisiana," written for _The Century_, in which the reader will note an artistic combination of dry history and vivid imagination. That such a painstaking, conscientious, dutiful writer should ever be charged with falling into an anachronism may seem preposterous; but although the charge has been made, we find no instance in which it has been sustained. A writer who once visited him brushed the charge aside vigorously: "Mr. Cable's plan of work," he said, "is unusually methodical, for his counting-room training has stood him in good stead. All his notes and references are carefully indexed and journalled, and so systematized that he can turn, without a moment's delay, to any authority he wishes to consult. In this respect, as in many others, he has not, perhaps, his equal among living authors. In making his notes, it is his usual custom to write in pencil on scraps of paper. These notes are next put into shape, still in pencil, and the third copy, intended for the press, is written in ink on note-paper--the chirography exceedingly neat, delicate and legible. He is always exact, and is untiring in his researches.... Before attempting to write upon any historical point, he gathers together all available material without reckoning time or trouble; and, under such conditions, nothing is more unlikely than that he should be guilty of error." The business life which fortunately imposed so valuable a system upon him incidentally inspired his second novel, "Dr. Sevier," many of the scenes in which are faithful pictures of his own experiences as a youth. As in the historical sketches, so in this second novel the poetic imagination of the author fairly rivals his grasp of the prosaic relations existing between man and man. But such relations were supremely vital from his viewpoint, and his third novel, "Bonaventure," was written in moments stolen from the discussion of the questions of elections, prison systems, and the future of the negro. The reader will note in the hero of this story the personification of the practical strengthening and yet spiritualizing gospel which the author has enunciated in his private and public religious work. For it is important to chronicle that Mr. Cable has done as much to Christianize several communities as the most energetic minister would be expected to do; and from his scrupulous performance of not merely the ordinary Christian duties but also of duties self-imposed, he has never allowed literature or society to beguile him. Naturally his social and political studies drew many invitations to address public meetings. It was at Johns Hopkins University, while lecturing on literary art, that, upon the suggestion of President Gilman, he ventured for the first time to read selections from his own stories. The delight of the audience was no less a surprise to him than the realization of his own elocutionary skill. This he set about to cultivate, and with such success that for years afterward he was enthusiastically welcomed to the great cities. It was once estimated that in his busiest years on the platform he traveled more than ten thousand miles every twelve months. For various reasons, particularly that he might be able to write of the South impartially and that he might be nearer the literary market, he moved to Simsbury, Conn., in 1884, and the next year to Northampton, Mass., where he has lived ever since. But he has never lost sight of his native concern in the progress of the South; and as for his philanthropy, in Northampton it has spread wider and wider. There, on the edge of one of the quietest and loveliest towns in Massachusetts, he has had built for himself a home suited to all his excellent tastes, and there he lives, intent always on making someone happy, and writing simply enough to maintain the brilliancy and popularity of his name. HENRY JAMES Henry James has been at pains, lately, to put a stop to a report that he proposes to return to America, yet by descent and at heart he is undoubtedly as loyal an American as his neighbor in England, Bret Harte. Even a cosmopolite may be patriotic. Mr. James has been called the first American cosmopolitan author. It is an unusually interesting fact that, like Mr. Harte, who also lives in England, James was born in Albany, N. Y., the date of his birth being April 15, 1843. His grandfather, William James, who made a fortune in the Syracuse salt works, had settled in Albany soon after his immigration from Ireland. His millions were divided among eleven children, one of whom was Henry James, Sr., the novelist's father. This branch of the James family moved to Germany when our author was a boy; and there he and his brothers and sister were educated for some years. It used to be said that, like his distinguished contemporaries, Howells and Aldrich, James never enjoyed the advantages of a college education; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that the James children were thoroughly educated. Henry James, Sr., intellectually, was a remarkable man, and Miss Walsh of New York, whom he married, has been described as "his complement in the possession of sterling practical qualities and the sustaining common sense of woman." Besides, there were the educational advantages of travel which the James children enjoyed. When the Jameses returned to this country they settled in Cambridge. It was there that Howells made the acquaintance of the elder James. We are tempted to quote extensively from Howells's memories of Henry James, Sr., but we shall confine our quotation to a single paragraph: "At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said: 'He _spasmed_ to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.' His written style had traits of the same adventurousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore." Henry James, Jr., is one of five children. Equally as celebrated as Henry, both at home and abroad, is William James, a professor at Harvard. In March, 1865, a month before his twenty-second year, Henry James made his first appearance in literature with a contribution to _The Atlantic Monthly_, entitled "A Story of a Year," which naturally had to do with the War of the Rebellion. It was _The Atlantic_ which also published his first serial story, "Poor Richard," which ran through three numbers. Later followed "Gabrielle de Bergerac" and "Watch and Ward," each a little more ambitious than its predecessors; and finally came his first long story, "Roderick Hudson," which lasted through twelve numbers of _The Atlantic_. The stories aroused a great deal of comment, most of which was favorable. This encouraged him to abandon all thought of law, which he had studied at Harvard, and make literature his profession. About the same time he went to England, where he has since spent most of his time. Like Harte, James has suffered from the charge of expatriation. The very fact that the English reading public, which is a most discerning public, was quick to appreciate the rare quality of James's style has been sufficient to keep some American critics in bad temper--as if the mere matter of residence has any intimate connection with literature! If James were an utter snob, if he slurred Americans or disclaimed any acquaintance with them, if his cynicism were not well founded, or if his satire were simply burlesque, he might justly be attacked; but as, personally, he is gentle and unassuming, as his cynicism is not a mania, and as his satire is more or less truthful, the belligerent critics have been largely wasting their ammunition. Probably no story of his has ever stirred up bitterer talk than "Daisy Miller," with its unconventional American heroine; yet it was only justice, not to mention literary acumen, which prompted so spirited an American as Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his "Short Studies of American Authors," to say of the author of "Daisy Miller" that "he has achieved no greater triumph than when, in this last-named book, he succeeds in holding our sympathy and even affection, after all, for the essential innocence and rectitude of the poor wayward girl whose follies he has so mercilessly portrayed." It is a singular commentary on the injustice of the denouncers of "Daisy Miller" that the young lady of Boston whom gossip made the original of the story was "cut" by society. His friends and enemies were still further divided by "The American" and "The Portrait of a Lady," and we suspect that the author was poking a little fun at the hostile camp when he had the American woman journalist in the latter story say, "I was going to bring in your cousin--the alienated American. There is a great demand now for the alienated American, and your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely." Mr. James's friends say that he went to England, originally, for the benefit of his health. It cannot be gainsaid that he has a temperament which makes itself at home in all lands. He is, indeed, as much a citizen of Paris as of London, and his stories in French have been warmly praised by French critics. But it may be that, after all, he saw the wisdom of writing reminiscently, of writing at a distance from his subjects. Mr. Cable, for example, saw it when he moved North from New Orleans; and, furthermore, we know that many an author has been condemned unjustly for telling the truth. The great novelist is not the idealist, with his world of prize-baby angels and impossible saints; he is a photographer, and his mind and his hand are a camera that cannot lie. Mr. Warner once said that the object of the novel is to entertain; Mr. James has said that it is to represent life. James Lane Allen, we remember, joined the two statements thus: "The object of the novel is to entertain by representing life." James's reach is transatlantic. Americans and Britons alike share prominence in his works. Then, too, of late, his characters have grown more and more ethereal and ghostly; they have such faint connection with the world of chalk-cliffs and prairies that the question of their citizenship is insignificant. Physically they appear to us only in episodes; intellectually they are universal types. But, really, the last word on Henry James's art was said long ago by _The Spectator_: "Mr. Henry James is certainly a very remarkable illustration of the tendency of our age to subdivide, in the finest way, the already rather extreme division of labor, till a very high perfection is attained in producing articles of the most curiously specialized kind, though apparently without the power of producing anything outside that kind. For a long time we have had novelists who are wonderfully skillful in a particular form of novels, but who seem unable to master more than one form for themselves. But Mr. Henry James, though he has attained a very great perfection in his own line, seems not to aim at anything quite so considerable as a story of human life of any sort. He eschews a story. What he loves is an episode, i. e., something which by the nature of the case is rather a fragment cut out of life, and _not_ a fair or average specimen of it, nor even such a part of it as would give you the best essence of the whole,--but rather an eddy in it, which takes you for an interval out of its main current, and only ends as you get back into the main current again, or at least at the point at which you might get back into the main current again, if some event (accidental, in relation to the art of the story) did not occur to cut off abruptly the thread of the narrative.... One might perhaps say that Mr. Henry James has discerned in relation to literature what has long been known in relation to art--that with artists of any genius, 'sketches' are apt to be more satisfying than finished pictures. But then the sketches we like so much in artists' studios are, though unfinished pictures, still pictures of what the painter has been most struck with, pictures in which he has given all that struck him most, and left only what did not strike him to be filled in by the fancy of the public. Now, Mr. Henry James does not give us sketches of the most striking features in what he sees of human life and passion, so much as finished pictures of the little nooks and bays into which human caprice occasionally drifts, when the main current of life's deeper interests has left us for a moment on one side, and rushed past us.... Mr. Henry James is not so much a novelist as an episodist, if such a term be allowable. But he is a wonderful episodist." All in all, that is the keenest and fairest criticism of James's works ever written. It should be taken with every one of his stories, just as soda is taken with brandy. Such a criticism is not fugacious; it is complementary. It brings to mind the amusing criticism of "The Sacred Fount," notably Carolyn Wells's "Verbarium Tremens," published in _The Critic_, with its bright termination-- The mad gush of "The Sacred Fount" is ringing in my ear, Its dictional excitements are obsessing me, I fear. For its subtle fascination makes me read it, then, alack, I find I have the James-james, a very bad attack! James is an exceedingly neat man, and this side of him at once strikes every visitor to his home. The only known exception to this characteristic neatness is his handwriting, which is said to be as vexatious as Horace Greeley's was. "I have a letter from him before me now," says one of his correspondents. "The signature I know to be 'Henry James.' You might take it for Henryk Sienkiewicz." The same correspondent relates a story which throws a new light on his personality: "You will be astonished, possibly, to know that his income from his writing is a scant three hundred pounds a year, though in spite of this there has never come a man in need to Henry James to whom he has not offered a part of what he calls his own. "Not so long ago a novelist in England died. He left two little children, absolutely alone in the world. One of that man's friends put by a little sum for them, and, out of the kindness of his heart, wrote to other literary men soliciting their help. He sought a maker of books who lives in a castle ... whom he knew to have an income of over twenty thousand pounds from his literary work. "'Won't you aid these little folk?' he asked. Not a cent was forthcoming. "Henry James was written in the matter. By return mail came a check for fifty pounds, one-tenth of his whole year's income." We have been informed that this estimate of Mr. James's income is rather small; but, even if his income be as large as that of the "maker of books who lives in a castle," the fact remains that Mr. James proved his generosity handsomely. James has acquired his extraordinarily brilliant style at the expense of incessant and determined effort. The dazzling spontaneities are really the product of toilsome hours. He works mostly in the morning, writing slowly, and his stories are written again and again before they go off to his publisher's. With him writing is a profession, a task; he is not the child of moods. Occasionally he visits friends--old friends, like Marion Crawford--but the greater part of the year he spends quietly and almost reclusely in England. [Illustration: Photo by Parker, Morristown. FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON.] FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON At a dinner given in honour of Mr. Frank R. Stockton by the Author's Club of New York, early in the year 1901, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the Editor of _The Century_, is reported to have told the following story: "A young man once came to me and said that he would like to contribute to _The Century_ every month. I asked him what he wanted to write. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'd like to send you each month a story like "The Lady or the Tiger?"'" Mr. Gilder, we are told, said at the end of his speech that night: "When I think of the immense amount of pleasure Mr. Stockton brought into the life of Stevenson it seems to me that alone would be to him a benediction forever." The Editor of _The Century_ thus happily illustrated the attitude of the reading world toward Mr. Stockton: on one side is an eager desire to emulate him, and on the other an equally eager desire to go to him for pleasure or for comfort. There is a natural grace about his stories which has often deceived the inexpert into an attempt to rival him, while the sweet and simple comedy of the stories has for more than a quarter of a century been the delight of young and old. The young man who visited Mr. Gilder, and the brilliant novelist solacing himself with the acquaintance of Pomona, Ardis Claverden, Mrs. Null, and Chipperton, are types. The object of this variety of admiration was born in Philadelphia on April 5, 1834. He belongs to the Stockton family of New Jersey, but not, he has informed us, to the Princeton branch. His father, William S. Stockton, was a well-known writer on church government. On the matter of his ancestry Mr. Stockton has given us this interesting information: "The ancestor of the Stockton family in New Jersey came from Flushing, L. I., in 1690, and purchased a tract of several thousand acres, to which he gave the Indian name of Oneanickon. His oldest son, Richard, did not settle here, but went to Stony Brook, afterward Princeton, where he founded that illustrious line of Stocktons, among whom were the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Commodore Stockton, to whom this country owes, in great part, the possession of California, and to whom the negro race owes Liberia. My ancestor was the second son, John Stockton, and his descendants, like himself, were generally yeomen, or farmers; but they remained true to Oneanickon, and that estate, shorn of many of its acres, but still containing the site of the old homestead of Richard and Abigail Stockton, now remains in the possession of my branch of the family, where it has been for 211 years, a pretty long stretch for America." The story-writer's father married twice, and his second wife was the mother of Francis Richard. She was a Virginian, and from her side of the family tree was derived the name Ardis found in "Ardis Claverden." There is a Stocktonian touch in the familiar story that the author's Christian name was imposed upon him by one of his half-sisters, who borrowed a part of it from Francis I. of France and a part from Richard Coeur de Lion. The same relative gave Francis's sister the full name of Napoleon's second wife. Strange to say, Mr. Stockton has avowed a difficulty in giving his characters names. The boy first was sent to a private school in West Philadelphia. Later he attended the public schools, and at the age of eighteen was graduated from the Central High School with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was noticed at school that his bent was to literature. In fact, this was obvious to his parents when he was only ten, for at that age he began to scribble verses. In spite of this proclivity, however, Francis, after leaving the high school, took up engraving as a profession. Just one bond was left existing between himself and the world of letters, and that was his membership in an organization of young men called the "Forensic and Literary Circle." Upon this slight basis has been erected an exceptionally successful career, for it was to the Circle that the "Ting-a-ling Stories" were first read. The Circle also heard "Kate" as soon as it was written. This tale and "The Story of Champaigne" were published by the _Southern Messenger_; and it is sufficient to relate that they created a demand for more like them. Thereafter, until 1874, Stockton wrote many short stories, his star all the time rising a little higher above the horizon. But in 1874 the star blazed forth wondrously with the appearance of the first part of "Rudder Grange." From that day the author's place among the foremost American humorists has been secure. "Rudder Grange" is undoubtedly his most popular work, for it is in demand even at this late day. We have heard it said that among many of Mr. Stockton's admirers--and who, by the way, would attempt to number those happy beings?--it is regarded as his masterpiece. We shall let the statement pass without examination, believing as we do that in this case comparisons would be particularly odious. However, it is no backhanded compliment to say that upon the profusion and the quaintness of the humour of "Rudder Grange" the author has never improved. Meantime, we should say here, the young Pennsylvanian had definitely adopted literature as a profession. He had served an apprenticeship on the _Philadelphia Morning Post_; later he had joined Edward Eggleston on _Hearth and Home_; then he had become a member of the editorial staff of _Scribner's Monthly_. It was while occupying this last position that he wrote "Rudder Grange." Afterward he cast his lot with the editors of _St. Nicholas_. In 1880, determining to devote his time entirely to story-writing, he abandoned editorial work for good and all. Even more remarkable than the success of "Rudder Grange" was the success of "The Lady or the Tiger?" How the reading public has pondered that cunningly made mystery! How it has written and talked about it! Truly it has been--and is to-day, indeed--one of the nine wonders of the literary world! It still is unsolved. Mr. Stockton himself cannot, or perhaps will not, offer any solution. So much has been said of the puzzle that doubtless by this time the subject is distasteful to him. He has declared repeatedly that he does not know whether the Lady or the Tiger----. But there! We are raking a fire that perhaps had better be allowed to go out. Just for the sake of history we will add that a comic opera based on the story was produced in 1889. During the last twenty years Mr. Stockton has written the stories that make up the greater part of the familiar Shenandoah edition. He always dictates his manuscript for publication, and he does his work in the morning. In the early days he dictated to his wife, who was Miss Marian E. Tuttle, of Amelia County, Virginia; but in recent years he has employed a stenographer. We have seen the statement that when the author has his subject well in mind he delivers fifteen hundred words before the morning is over. A few years ago Stockton moved from Convent Station, New Jersey, to Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia. The estate, named Claymont, embraces one hundred and fifty acres, and it was once a part of a large estate owned by Washington. There the author spends the pleasant seasons of the year, taking his vacation in the winter. In answer to a question as to his recreations, the famous humorist has informed us: "I generally spend my afternoons out-of-doors, and my recreation is driving--doing the driving myself. For a good many years I have driven every afternoon. I lately calculated (the date of his letter is Dec. 4, 1901) that in the eight months I usually spend in the country I have driven as many miles as would take me across the continent. Wherever I am I explore every road within a radius of a dozen miles or more. My mare, Kitty, used to be my traveling companion, but now Kitty is old and I drive a pair of younger animals. But in wandering through the fields and woods Kitty still goes with me, caring no more for roads and regular ways than a poet does for the market reports. My wife and I are very fond of the country, and in all our married life, except for one month when we hired a furnished house in Washington, we have never kept house in a city. "I am not a farmer, but I have a farm, and it is a great pleasure to me to overlook its operations; but I have inherited from my ancestors a great love of gardening, and to my garden of two acres and a half I give my special attention. Under my study windows I also have a little walled garden, thirty feet square, which is crowded with flowers from the tulip season to the days of the hardy marigold and the enduring cosmos. I very much enjoy the woods and fields about my present home. "I used to be an enthusiastic fisherman, and have fished for many years in many waters, but of late I have not lived near any suitable stream or body of water, and in my outdoor hours I prefer the whip to the rod." In appearance Mr. Stockton is small and spare, with partly white hair. At first glance he might be taken for a sad man, and judging by his portrait one would hardly associate him with humor--ah! and such quaint, original humor. That is the author in repose. Animated, he is another man. "The big, dark eyes, full of patient, weary expression, are luminous," says one who knew him years ago; "the mouth, close and discouraged, expands into smiling curves, sweet and sympathetic; the whole soul is in the face, and, from head to foot, Frank Stockton is the genial, responsive man. It is like a brilliant burst of sunshine following a cloud, suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore more delicious in surprise and beauty." No one, it is said, by the way, has ever heard Stockton laugh, but he is reputed to be a "beautiful smiler." Mr. George Cary Eggleston once spoke of the author of "Rudder Grange" as "the greatest story-teller America has ever produced." Certainly America has produced no more delightful or more original humorist. He has given an immense amount of pleasure to the young and to the old. Now the critic is constrained to acclaim him as a spring of purest humor, and again to question whether he is not an incomparable spinner of fairy-tales. From the very first (note "The Ting-a-ling Stories") he has been very happy in his tales for children--whimsical and fanciful, but never artificial or clownish. He is always master of the situation, and he can be dignified, and even imposing, in his drollest adventures. His stories are not a mere day's tickling. They will refresh and entertain generations to come. This is no prophecy; it is rather an opinion derived from the history of his successes up to date. His early productions are no less popular than his later ones. Stockton is no stylist; he is a plain humorist. Style may be acquired, but humor must be born in a man. To be sure, there are several kinds of humor, and each kind has its devotees, some choosing Chicago slang, others the laboriously exaggerated bad spelling, and still others that vulgar offshoot colloquially known as "freshness;" but we think that they are wiser and happier who choose the odd, sweet, and charming kind developed by the creator of Pomona, Mrs. Lecks, and Mrs. Aleshine. The characters in Mr. Stockton's books are one of the best companies to be met in our literature. Unlike most American writers, Frank R.--as he has called himself ever since his literary beginning--has drawn back from personal contact with the reading public, for, as we have said, he is a shy man. It must be hoped by his idealizing admirers that he will never overcome that shyness. Some authors are to be seen and heard--though few of them are to the platform manner born, like Mr. Cable or John Fox, Jr. We would have this beloved story-teller of the present moment remain where he has ever been--in the background, close to Wonderland. There, we like to imagine, he dwells only to conjure up the inimitable children of his brain and send them forth to give us pleasure. What a beautiful life--to ease the troubled, to cheer the downcast, to amuse all sorts and conditions of men and women and children!--to be conscious of all that and yet to continue unaffectedly simple and genial! In the portrait accompanying this sketch the reader will see the kindliness of the eyes. It is the direct reflection of kindliness of the heart. Yes, in that heart, freshened daily perhaps by the waters of some fountain of perpetual youth, is kindliness (we have testimony to that effect before us), sweetness, and unlimited cheerfulness--enough, indeed, to re-create all those who seek his heart in his books. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS In an article published by _The Bookman_ not very long ago Mr. James Lane Allen remarked that Uncle Remus was one of the two names in American fiction which have attained anything like universality of acceptance, the other name being, of course, Uncle Tom. And yet fame was thrust upon Mr. Joel Chandler Harris. It happened in this wise. Mr. Harris went to work for the _Atlanta Constitution_ as an editorial writer in 1876, succeeding Mr. Samuel W. Small, who has since prefixed to his name the title of Reverend. Mr. Small had made a success with sketches dealing with a character called Uncle Si, and Capt. Evan P. Howell, the editor of the _Constitution_, desired to have the success maintained in some form. So he approached Mr. Harris with the suggestion that he should try his hand at negro sketches. The young writer was diffident. He pleaded inexperience, incapability; but Captain Howell wouldn't listen to the excuses. In a good-natured way he pursued his associate, requesting, begging, entreating, encouraging. If Mr. Harris would only put into black-and-white those plantation stories with which he was accustomed to entertain the staff! If he would only get his courage up! Finally, the young man yielded and put some of the memories of his boyhood in Putnam County, Georgia, into the mouth of a negro named Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus he has been ever since the publication of the first sketch--Uncle Remus, famous and beloved throughout the land. Captain Howell is said to have gone to the editors' room the morning of the first appearance of Uncle Remus and shouted: "Well, Harris, you're a trump! If you just keep up that lick your fortune is made. Everybody is talking about Uncle Remus, so give us another story." It was given willingly. Mr. Harris was born in 1848 in what used to be known as Middle Georgia. Like many another of our well-established authors, he received a good part of his education at the printer's case in a country newspaper office. It was at the case--just as in the story of Howells and of Mark Twain--that the Georgian acquired his love of journalism--a love which often very naturally develops into a love for higher and more durable literature. He joined the staff of the _Atlanta Constitution_ at the age of eighteen. For a time he served as dramatic critic, in addition to his other service; but he soon found that he had no taste for the theatre. It must be that it was his hard lot to fall among poor actors, for it was not long before he gave up the work and formed a determination to visit the theatre as seldom as possible. Thereafter, he was virtually permitted by the editor of the _Constitution_ to follow his own bent. But the story is moving along a little too fast. It should be said that Mr. Harris was fortunate in his birthplace. Eatonton, the capital of Putnam County, was not a lively spot, in a mercantile sense, in the days before the war, but it could boast of an excellent school, Eatonton Academy. Speaking of Eatonton, the _Baltimore American_, some thirteen or fourteen years ago, printed this strange biography of Mr. Harris under the title of "A Humorist's Sad Romance": "Joel C. Harris, the famous humorist, of the _Atlanta_ (Ga.) _Constitution_, has had a strangely romantic career. His father was a missionary, and it was at the small town of Boog-hia, on the southern coast of Africa, that Joel was born. He was educated by his father, and is a profound Sanscrit scholar, besides being thoroughly versed in Hebraic and Buddhist literature. Just before the Civil War he emigrated to America, and taught school in a village near Lake Teeteelootchkee, Fla. There he fell in love with Sallie O. Curtis, daughter of a wealthy planter, and soon was engaged by Colonel Curtis as a private tutor. The parents made no objection to their daughter's choice of a husband, but the war came on before the marriage could take place, and so Colonel Curtis and Mr. Harris went away to the war. The Colonel lost all his property during the strife, and at the battle of Columbia, S. C., a grape shot tore his leg into shreds. When the war closed Miss Sallie died of yellow fever, and Mr. Harris became the support and comfort of the maimed sire of his dead sweetheart. The two yet live together in a vine-covered cottage near Atlanta. Mr. Harris is hardly forty years of age, but his snow-white hair tells the sorrow of his life. He is noted for his generosity, his amiability and his tenderness." The fact is that from the time of his birth until General Sherman swept toward the sea after burning Atlanta, Mr. Harris lived in Eatonton. When he was six years old he could read, and it is said that a stray copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield," met in his juvenile days, did much to develop his taste for good literature. Joel attended Eatonton Academy for a few terms, and at the age of twelve went to work for Colonel Turner, the publisher of a weekly called _The Countryman_. It was the boy's own enterprise and ambition which brought this about. It was Joel himself who heard that Colonel Turner was in need of a boy with "willing hands" to learn the printer's trade, and who went unbidden and unendorsed to apply for a job. The publisher and the youngster took a liking to each other on sight, and young Harris was put to work forthwith. Those were unquestionably among the happiest days of the humorist's life. This is not saying, of course, that his cup of happiness is not brimming over to-day; but those were days of new contentment. The young printer's work was not burdensome; but the happiest fact of all is that his employer, Colonel Turner, had a rich library, in which his youngest workman was free to browse in leisure moments. The acorn of taste for good books which the boy had cultivated at home here developed into an oak; and the soil in which the acorn took root was fertile, and there was ample room for the spread of every growing limb and bough. At first the lad delved among the Elizabethans. Sir Thomas Browne, too, became one of his favorite authors--nowadays Mr. Harris leans toward Thackeray, Stevenson, Scott, Kipling and James Whitcomb Riley--a good catholic taste. Few boys ever enjoyed a more advantageous course of reading. Gradually the juvenile printer drifted from his books into writing, just as a student one day quits the gallery and starts to paint some work of his own. Colonel Turner responded to the ambition of his protégé most generously. He praised the little works judiciously, and before long young Harris was prompted to doff his anonymity and stand up to be judged by himself. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to _The Countryman_--which was truly rustic in scope as well as in title--and the name of Harris began to be spoken throughout Georgia. This pleasant existence was interrupted by the war, which to the editor and his assistant was indeed the fulfilment of an ancient threat. When Sherman left Atlanta to march to the sea, he shaped his course through Eatonton, and before him fled the loyal Southerners. Among the last to leave the town was the proprietor of _The Countryman_. Young Harris remained behind to look after the property. Little damage was done in Eatonton, but the budding author, finding the state of affairs chaotic, started, when the war was over, to make his fortune elsewhere. He found employment on various newspapers, first in Macon, then in New Orleans, then in Forsyth, and then in Savannah. In Savannah he secured an editorial position on the _Morning News_, of which W. T. Thompson, the author of "Major Jones's Courtship," and other once popular humorous writings, was then the general manager. In Savannah, the vagrant Eatontonian married Miss La Rose, and there he lived, with ever-increasing success, until 1876, when yellow fever swept through the town. Then he moved to Atlanta and went to work for the _Constitution_. And here we shall take up the original thread of this article. In 1880, four years after the beginning of Mr. Harris's connection with the _Constitution_, the Uncle Remus sketches, which meantime had won much praise throughout the country, were numerous enough to make a book of, and "Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings" was published by the Appletons. The book solidified the author's fame. It had the good fortune to be reprinted in England. Even then, more than twenty years ago, it was reasonable to say that Uncle Remus was one of the foremost characters in American fiction. In 1883, "Nights with Uncle Remus," was published; the following year "Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White"; in 1887, "Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches." Up to date, Harris's books number at least sixteen. But we must not lose sight of the fact that all the time the successful story-teller kept up his editorial work on the paper to whose fame he was contributing so materially. Indeed, until his retirement from newspaper work, in 1900, his chief title was that of a "hard-working journalist." It was his habit until within recent years to give his mornings and afternoons to the _Constitution_ work, and his evenings to miscellaneous literary work. He was able to maintain this arduous program for so long a time because of his apparently inexhaustible good nature and his simple manner of life; and, moreover, attention to duties at hand soon became second nature in him. In recent years, however, he gave only his mornings to his editorial labors. "His habit," says an Atlanta correspondent, "was to come down to the office at nine o'clock in the morning, get his editorial assignments for the day, and then go home and do his work, sending his copy down early in the afternoon." Such was his spirit of independence that if the editor chanced to be late in coming down to the office he would not waste time in waiting for him, but would pick up his bundle of newspapers and start for home. Nevertheless, he would send in his copy without fail. On making his morning visit to the office Mr. Harris was never out of sorts. His good humor was perennial, and he never failed to impart it to his co-workers. Though it was his lot to write editorials on political topics, he never enjoyed the rancor of partisan politics, and he managed to put into his editorials enough of humor to make the work pleasant to himself as well as to others. At the same time, the idol of the _Constitution_ staff, it is said, never took a hearty interest in politics; he simply bowed to the fact that as an editorial writer he could hardly eschew politics entirely. But he felt that he owed much to the _Constitution_ for the opportunity it had given him to make his reputation; and he allowed this circumstance to outweigh his personal inclinations until the time came when he found that he would either have to give up his editorial work or neglect his literary contracts. So, finally, on Sept. 6, 1900, he departed from the office of the _Constitution_ for good, taking with him the tearful love of all his associates. As a sort of legacy, he left two sons on the paper, Julian, the managing news editor, and Evelyn, the city editor. And then, almost at the end of his fifty-second year, the dearest Georgian of them all entered upon an unembarrassed literary career, with every promise of doing more work and better work than ever. But even if this promise should rest unfulfilled--which seems almost out of question--we have with us Uncle Remus and Aunt Minervy Ann, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, creations unsurpassed in originality and in delightfulness. Mr. Harris's work is done at his home in West End, one of the suburbs of Atlanta, and few visitors are permitted to interrupt him. Not that he is gruff; he is simply retiring. He prefers to be known by his books. They who know him intimately--and they are not many--say that he is remarkably kind and hospitable. We respect his desire for privacy. We will not even knock on the door and beg one glimpse of his private life. With the whole reading public we shall be content to note his boundless cheerfulness and rare enjoyableness as a story-teller. [Illustration: DR. S. WEIR MITCHELL.] S. WEIR MITCHELL About sixty years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, taking dinner one night in Philadelphia with his friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, was so pleased with one of Dr. Mitchell's boys, by name Silas Weir, then a little more than ten years old, that he gave the boy a copy of his famous ballad on the frigate Constitution. Some seventeen years later, in 1856, when Silas was a young doctor, with a brand-new degree, he showed Dr. Holmes a book of poems which he hoped to have published. Dr. Holmes advised the young man to put the poems away until he was forty, and then to reconsider his determination to have them published. "The publication of these verses at this time," said the genial but shrewd Autocrat, "will do you no good. They will not help you in your life as a physician, and they cannot stand alone." The soundness of Dr. Holmes's judgment was later proved by the circumstance that the young man blossomed into one of the most distinguished physicians of his time. Dr. Mitchell's volume of poems, "The Hill of Stones," published about four years ago, contains just one of the poems offered to the Boston poet in 1856, namely, "Herndon." As an author, Dr. Mitchell is less celebrated than his friendly counsellor; but as a doctor he is far more celebrated than was Dr. Holmes in his palmiest days. S. Weir Mitchell, one of the six sons of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, was born in Philadelphia on February 16, 1829. His father was then a leader in his profession. He was one of the first Americans to investigate scientifically "animal magnetism," as hypnotism was called in the early part of the last century; and, moreover, he was a highly valued contributor to the medical periodicals of the day. It is noteworthy that he had a taste for literature. Two of his lyrics, "The Old Song and the New Song" and "Prairie Lea," had a wide popularity in their day. At the age of fifteen Weir Mitchell entered the University of Pennsylvania. There he spent three years; and afterward he entered Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in which his father was a professor. One of the severest disappointments in the son's life came in 1870, twenty years after graduation, when, notwithstanding the solicitation of influential friends, he failed of election to a professorship in Jefferson College. However, this disappointment, like the one which he met when he consulted Dr. Holmes about his first book of poems, worked eventually to his greater glory. After graduation from Jefferson College Dr. Mitchell, as we shall call our author henceforth, went to Paris, whence, owing to an attack of smallpox, he was obliged to return in less than two years. By this time the young doctor had lost sight of his literary star. His ambition was to teach medicine. The first article from his pen appeared in the _American Journal of Medical Science_. Other articles followed with quick regularity, but to none of these early writings, we believe, does Dr. Mitchell attach much importance. From 1858 until 1862, when he enlisted as an army surgeon, the doctor devoted his spare hours to the study of poisons, particularly snake poisons. Not long after the Civil War, by the way, one of the largest rattlesnakes ever sent to him died of cold. Dr. Mitchell had the skin preserved and tanned, and he sent it to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with the suggestion that it might make a worthy binding for "Elsie Venner." "I thank you for it," Dr. Holmes wrote back, "especially because it makes an attractive binding, and I know that its bark is better than its bite." It would be interesting to pursue Dr. Mitchell's scientific achievements, but such a pursuit would be too long to agree with the purpose of this sketch. However, his career as a war surgeon is worth looking at, for it had something to do with his subsequent advent as a writer of fiction. Dr. Mitchell and his associates made a deep study not only of the effects of certain wounds but also of the effects of environment. Much of the curious information thus derived was given to the world through the medical papers. It was undoubtedly the study followed during this period which formed the base of Dr. Mitchell's now universally recognized success as a neurologist. The universality of his fame as a specialist in nervous diseases has two substantial witnesses. One is the oration delivered at Edinburgh University in 1895, when he received the title of Doctor of Laws. In that oration he was spoken of as "the chief ornament to medical science in the new world." The other witness is the story of his visit some years ago to Dr. Charcot, one of the great French authorities on nervous diseases. Dr. Mitchell did not give his name; he merely said that he was from Philadelphia, and that there was something the matter with his nerves. "Why," said Dr. Charcot, "you should never have come beyond Philadelphia for advice for such an ailment. You have a physician in your own city better qualified to manage your case than I am." "Indeed," the visitor is said to have remarked; "and who may he be?" "Dr. S. Weir Mitchell," replied Dr. Charcot; "and as I know him by correspondence I will venture to give you a letter to him. You should consult him upon your return home." "No, thanks," said the American smiling, "I am Dr. S. Weir Mitchell." Certainly a handsome compliment for Dr. Mitchell! And certainly a remarkable piece of professional modesty on the part of Dr. Charcot! Perhaps it is well to say at this point that, in 1896, Harvard University also honored Dr. Mitchell with the title of Doctor of Laws; that he is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Clinical Society of London, the London Medical Society, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome, and a corresponding member of many other foreign medical societies; and that he was once President of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. In 1888 the University of Bologna conferred on him the title of Doctor of Medicine. Dr. Mitchell's entrance into romantic literature was made anonymously and, it might be said, accidentally. Soon after the close of the Civil War, the story goes, he and some professional associates one day discussed all sides of the question whether the loss of the limbs involves the loss of the victim's individuality. As a result of that discussion Dr. Mitchell wrote the story of the fictitious case of one George Dedlow, who had suffered the loss of his arms and his legs. The story, which, as they who have read it know, is an intensely interesting complication of romance and science, came to the hands of the Rev. Dr. Furness, one of Dr. Mitchell's friends, who took the liberty of sending it to Edward Everett Hale, in Boston. Dr. Hale, who, at that time, was at the height of his literary power, saw that the story was rare material, and he submitted it forthwith to the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It was promptly accepted, and the first Dr. Mitchell knew of what had happened was when he received a proof of the story, together with a good-sized check and a note complimenting him on the freshness and attractiveness of his article. "The Case of George Dedlow," indeed, was described so realistically that, according to tradition, subscriptions were raised for the poor victim's support and comfort. The newspapers, too, started a discussion of the prodigy, and it was a long time before the public became persuaded that the tale was utter fiction, put together with extraordinary skill. Dr. Mitchell's first book was "Children's Hours," a collection of fairy tales, illustrated by Dr. John Packard. The book was in no sense a great literary effort; it was intended to serve, and did serve, a charitable purpose. His first novel was "In War Times," published serially in _The Atlantic Monthly_ in 1885. Between that time and the publication of "Hugh Wynne" in 1897, the Philadelphian wrote a number of works, the most notable among which were a few dramatic poems. The poems delighted the critical; they were caviare to the general. Dr. Mitchell is not a poet of the "golden clime" of which Tennyson speaks; he has simply found in poetry the fittest vehicle for the expression of some attractive and stirring ideas. His verse reveals his fine sympathy with the true poets rather than his intimate association with them. Unqualified success came to the veteran author with the publication in 1897 of "Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker," which will be remembered in years to come as one of the choicest of American novels. The writing of "Hugh Wynne," which was done at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1896, in less than two months, took years of preparation. It is said that he wrote to a woman "for the name and a full description of every article of apparel worn by a lady in America in the years before and about the time" of the Revolution. Moreover: "One will find on the shelves of his library at home," says a casual biographer, "great rows of books consulted in the preparation of the novel, and among them, as samples, will be noticed Keith's 'Provincial Councillors of Pennsylvania,' Watson's 'Annals,' Trumble's 'The Knightly Soldier,' Fiske's 'Critical Period of American History,' 'The True George Washington,' by Ford; Professor McMaster's 'History of the United States,' 'The Cannoneer,' by Buell, and scores of others, some of them very rare." We find it also said that every chapter of importance in the story was written at least twice, and that some chapters were written even three times, before the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Nothing which Dr. Mitchell has written since shows a power equal to the power of "Hugh Wynne." That novel, therefore, must be regarded as his supreme literary effort. "The Adventures of François" proved entertaining and nothing more; its early popularity was an echo of the immense popularity of the Revolutionary story. "Dr. North and His Friends" is not, as many suppose, an autobiography; but it may fairly be said that by means of Dr. North the author relates some of his most remarkable personal impressions and personal experiences. Dr. Holmes was once a little disturbed, and much amused, at the same time, by a reference to his "medicated writings." The careful reader will note a strong pathological element in most of Dr. Mitchell's works; not enough, however, to warrant describing them as "medicated." The fact is, Dr. Mitchell has made good use of his rare scientific knowledge in the development of many of his characters. One of his intimate friends is reported to have said once that the doctor is constantly studying human characteristics, especially the characteristics of singular persons. "He picks out their brains in a very fine and delicate way," said the friend. "Thus he studies human nature, much in that same synthetical manner in which he dissects a physical malady." Personally the author of "Hugh Wynne" is described as gentle, cordial, and, in convivial company, very entertaining. It has frequently been said of him that he appears to be what he is,--a scholar and a scientist. Some years ago, when Dr. Mitchell was a guest in one of the semi-literary clubs in London, he and the circle around him fell into a discussion of problem novels, which finally resolved itself into a discussion of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," then in the heyday of its popularity. Dr. Mitchell took his ground on two points: he expressed admiration of Mr. Hardy as an artist, but utter dislike of the scheme of "Tess." A man who had meantime joined the circle entered quietly and unobtrusively into the conversation, admitting the force of some of Dr. Mitchell's general objections to problem novels, but maintaining the ethical and artistic merits of the plan of Judge Hardy's new book. The newcomer showed such an intimate knowledge of the construction of "Tess" that the American paid more than ordinary attention to him. At length, when the company was dispersing, Dr. Mitchell's host, with an innocent smile, proceeded to make the two debaters formally acquainted with each other. "This is a friend of mine, Doctor," he said to his guest, "about whose work you know a great deal. Allow me to introduce to you Thomas Hardy, with whom you can hardly find any fault for defending poor Tess." The acquaintance thus curiously begun has since ripened into a rich friendship. Dr. Mitchell does most of his literary work at Bar Harbor, in the summer. There is no sign of the end of this pure labor of love; but the work which exists already is sufficient, in itself, to show that a man burdened with the gravest interests of medical science may give profitable and brilliant employment to his imagination. [Illustration: ROBERT GRANT.] ROBERT GRANT Robert Grant leads the American satirists. Many writers, unnamed paragraphers and critics of high degree, have pursued him relentlessly; but he will not surrender. Contrariwise, it is more likely that they will yet surrender to him. He has Napoleon's way of turning upon pursuers. The satirist is not always clearly understood. For some of this misunderstanding the satirist himself is to blame. Mr. Grant, for example, has never yet explained what he meant by saying in "The Art of Living" that a satisfactory life demands an income of ten thousand a year. On the other hand, some of the misunderstanding is due to a lack of humor among his critics. And at the bottom of the misunderstanding is the natural inconsistency which prompted Mr. Aldrich to write in "Marjorie Daw"--"I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all." An incident which took place not long ago illustrates Judge Grant's sincerity. The statement had been made in a periodical now defunct that "a sufficiency of money has made things pretty pleasant for our literary philosopher." Although averse, unlike many professional writers, to taking advantage of opportunities for controversy, the Judge made this reply to the statement: "It is true that for some years I have had a comfortable income; but if I have been able to command the advantages of modern life at the rate of $10,000 a year, it is because I have earned the money by the sweat of my brow through literary and legal work, and not because my 'judicial seat' is 'padded' with inherited stocks and bonds.... It may interest those who have convinced themselves that my philosophy is founded on a patrimony, to know that from the time I left the Law School in 1879 the yearly income which I have received from vested property has been so small as barely to pay for the life insurance which I carry, and that I have acquired the money which I spend or save by my own exertions. It is true that I was brought up in comfort and given every opportunity to follow my tastes, but this is all I owe to family income." The incident is worth recalling for the light which it throws on the novelist's economical position. The man who is competent to make ten thousand a year is welcome to his enjoyment of it. Robert Grant first earned some celebrity as a writer while at Harvard, which he entered after his graduation from the Boston Latin School in 1869, when he was seventeen years old. His literary career began with his contributions to the college papers, notably _The Lampoon_. That his literary skill was recognized at Harvard is proved by his election to the office of class poet at graduation, in 1873. That summer, while abroad, he seems to have determined upon following his first taste, to use his own expression; for at the end of the summer he went back to Harvard for a three years' course in English and foreign literature, upon the completion of which he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Why he decided to choose another profession has never been divulged, but, anyhow, at the end of the summer of 1876, he entered the Harvard Law School. Three years afterward he was graduated from it, and forthwith he became a member of the Bar and an active practitioner. Mr. Grant left Harvard with a budding reputation. In company with Mr. F. J. Stimson ("J. S. of Dale"), Barrett Wendell (now professor of English at Harvard), F. G. Attwood, whose untimely death has bereft our literature of one of its happiest decorators, and Mr. John T. Wheelwright, now a lawyer in Boston, he had polished _The Lampoon_ considerably. Perhaps his most popular work at this time was "The Little Tin Gods on Wheels; or, Society in our Modern Athens," a burlesque after the Greek manner, which appeared in _The Lampoon_, with illustrations by Attwood. In fact, it was to be found in a book published by Sever, together with the young satirist's other promising works, "The Wall Flowers," "The Chaperons," and "Oxygen, a Mt. Desert Pastoral," squibs dealing with the foibles of fashionable society. Thus favorably introduced to the reading public, he lost no time in striking the iron while it was hot, and in 1880 gave out his first novel, "The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl," which, by reason of its remarkable exposition of the character of the leading lady, as she may be called, and its popular attractiveness, won immediate success at home and abroad. Three years later his second book, "The Knave of Hearts," the autobiography of a ruthless young man, was published; and the same year appeared in _The Century_ the articles which make up "An Average Man," and a satire on Wall Street entitled "The Lambs, a Tragedy." In 1883, too, it may be mentioned, Mr. Grant read at the Phi Beta Kappa reunion at Harvard a poem called "Yankee Doodle." In 1885 "A Romantic Young Lady," another skit on fashionable life, made its appearance; and that year he also served as the poet of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Boston Latin School. The following year, 1886, he finished what, up to that time, was by far his most serious work, "Face to Face," which was published anonymously. In it Anglomania and the labor problem are touched on boldly and brilliantly, and even to-day the points of the book are fresh and sparkling. Later came "The Reflections of a Philosopher," "The Opinions of a Married Man," "Searchlight Letters," "The Art of Living," and, last of all, "Unleavened Bread." "He says," once remarked a man, "what you have thought and wanted to say yourself"; and a better compliment could hardly be paid his philosophy. A writer who went to see Judge Grant some years ago said: "He has cultivated to a rare degree the faculty which is of the utmost importance to every literary man, namely, that of concentration. The greater part of his writing is done during the intervals of business in the morning hours at his office. There, the casual visitor is almost certain to find him, seated at his desk, with his manuscript spread out before him. He will drop his pen, upon the instant, to consider some point of legal technique, with which imagination has nothing whatever to do, listen attentively, take notes or give advice, as though this were the sole object of his existence; then, when the interruption ceases, he will turn back to his unwritten page, finishing that and another too, it may be, before the morning goes, if he is in the vein. This power of leaving off and beginning again quickly was not easily acquired. It is the result of long training in years of practical experience. But, like every true artist, Mr. Grant really carries his work with him wherever he goes. He is always recording and storing up impressions, taking mental notes, or working out details of construction, even when these matters seem to be the farthest from his thoughts; and he is accustomed to say that the actual writing of a story troubles him very little since, with him, when writing begins, the most difficult part of the task is already accomplished. But, in spite of his fluent pen, he has learned to look at his work objectively, and he is extremely self-critical, having destroyed more than once a tale half told, from conviction that it failed to do him justice." In 1882 Mayor Green of Boston selected Mr. Grant as his private secretary, and in 1888 Mayor O'Brien of Boston appointed him a member of the board of water commissioners. This latter post he held until a few years ago, when he was appointed a Judge in the Probate Court of Suffolk County, sitting in Boston. There, almost every day, he may be seen by anyone visiting Boston, a medium-sized, delicate-looking man, with shrewd features, an eye sharp as a detective's, a somewhat brisk manner, and a faint but pleasant voice, to which the most learned counsel lend eager ears. Since his appointment to the Bench he has limited his literary activity to two hours a day, which short but productive period he has been wont to spend generally at the Athenæum Library on Beacon Street, a stone's throw from the Court House. Judge Grant is very happy in his children, and this circumstance may account for his delightful books for boys, "Jack Hall" and "Jack in the Bush." He is a keen though perhaps not enthusiastic sportsman. Every few years he and his wife, who was Miss Galt, the eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Tillock Galt, the Canadian statesman, go bicycling in Europe. This excursive disposition does not narrow his enjoyment of what is best in town life. It has been said of him: "He is not only an admirable talker with a nimble wit, apt at repartee, but he is also a genial sympathetic listener, thus combining very happily the qualities which make a man hail-fellow-well met wherever he goes; and no one meeting Mr. Grant for the first time can fail to recognize and delight in that quick sense of humor which is so characteristic of his writing." A few years ago he was interviewed regarding his likes and dislikes. He said that his favorite prose authors were Thackeray and Balzac, his favorite poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, his favorite book, "Vanity Fair," his favorite play, "Hamlet," his favorite heroines in fiction, Becky Sharp and Eugénie Grandet, his favorite heroes in fiction, Santa Claus and Brer Rabbit; and he admires truth most in men and loving sympathy in women. His strength as a writer lies in an unsurpassed ability to detect and delineate shams, and this ability shines brilliantly in the character of Selma White, the heroine of "Unleavened Bread." The book is a protest against superficiality; the character of Selma White is a monument of vanity. We have all met Selmas, rampant women--there are men like them, of course--who flatter themselves that they are born to grace every resting-place and brush aside difficulties that would have staggered Napoleon or Catherine de Medici. The author has contradicted the opinion that Selma is a shaft aimed at women's clubs. "It is simply that modern women's clubs are the best medium for that kind of women," he says "that I depicted Selma as a prime mover in some of them. But she exists outside of women's clubs probably more plentifully than in them." It has been said that Judge Grant is timid about forcing his way into public attention. The reply quoted from early in this article was an exception to an apparently firmly established rule. At the time when comment on his ten-thousand-a-year proposition was severest Judge Grant wrote to a friend for advice, and he was very easily persuaded to give no heed to his critics. At the same time, if what he had thought of saying would have blown the fog away, it would have been better for him then to have settled the question decisively. But, he was content for the nonce to have his retiring disposition approved; and a philosopher of this type rather invites than forbids attack. But, after all, even his harshest critics praise his rare skill in the exposition of character, his remarkable fertility of wit, and his complete mastery of the technique of literature. Nor is it to be gainsaid that his career has illustrated the wisdom of his lines in "The Lambs": Success is Labor's prize Work is the mother of fame. And who on a boom shall rise To the height of an honest name? The bee by industry reapeth The stores which enrich the hives. All that is thrifty creepeth, For toil is the law of lives, And he who reaps without sowing, A bitter harvest reaps; The law of gradual growing Is the law that never sleeps. [Illustration: F. MARION CRAWFORD.] F. MARION CRAWFORD Since 1893, when he made his first tour through the country as a lecturer, F. Marion Crawford has become a somewhat familiar figure to many Americans, who have noted his athletic form, his handsome face, his melodious voice, his polished deportment. He is easily the best known of the American authors who make their homes abroad. In Major Pond's "Reminiscences," by the way, they who have heard Mr. Crawford read from his novels or recite his description of Pope Leo XIII, will find a very interesting account of the author's experiences during his American tours. Mr. Crawford is a cosmopolite of the first rank. He was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, August 2, 1854. His father was Thomas Crawford, the famous sculptor, who, born in the west of Ireland and reared in America, had, some years before, been sent to Rome to master his profession. He had finished studying with the great Thorwaldsen, and had made a reputation of his own, when he met and married Miss Louisa Ward, who was visiting Rome with Dr. Samuel G. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe. Marion was the youngest of four children. One of his sisters, Mrs. Fraser, has made no small name for herself as a writer. At the age of two, Marion was sent to live for awhile with kinsfolk in Bordentown, N. J. "Among the earliest things that I remember," he said once to an interviewer, "is my great delight in watching the coming and going of the trains as they shot across the farm near the old house." His father died in 1857, and then Marion was taken back to Italy, where he spent his early days. "Most of my boyhood," he said, to an interviewer, when he was in this country on his first lecture tour, "was spent under the direction of a French governess. Not only did I learn her language from her, but all of my studies, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, were taught me in French, and I learned to write it with great readiness, as a mere boy, because it was the language of my daily tasks. The consequence is that to this day I write French with the ease of English. There have been times when I know that I have lost some of my facility in speaking French through long absence from the country, but the acquirement of writing is always with me, which shows the value of early impressions in that direction." When twelve years old Marion was sent to St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., where he remained for two years. Readers familiar with his portraits will remember that in most of them he is represented as smoking. This inveterate habit he acquired during his first year's residence at St. Paul's. The age of fifteen found the migrant youth back in Rome again, where he took up the study of Greek and mathematics. Later he studied with a private tutor at Hatfield Broadoak, in Essex, England, and from this school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he passed four terms. There he perfected himself in German, Swedish and Spanish. He found German of good use when, later, he studied at Karlsruhe and at Heidelberg. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Rome to study at the University of Rome. There one of the professors interested him in Buddhism and the other Oriental mysteries. This professor, who recognized the young pupil's aptitude in languages, advised him to go to India and study Sanscrit, and then returning, he could readily obtain a professorship. The advice appealed to young Crawford, and he borrowed a hundred pounds and sailed for Bombay. There he occasionally wrote articles for one of the newspapers, but his employment was uncertain, and two pounds represented all his worldly possessions when the editor of the _Bombay Gazette_ informed him that the editor of the _Allahabad Indian Herald_ was in need of a "good man." Would he take the position? "Would a duck swim?" said Mr. Crawford; and off he went to Allahabad, a thousand miles away. There he learned that the "good man" was supposed to fill the posts of reporter, managing editor and editorial writer, with now and then a turn at type-setting. Thus none of the sixteen hours of the working day would be wasted. But Mr. Crawford couldn't afford to grumble. Instead he buckled down to what he describes as the hardest eighteen months' work of his life. In 1880, at the age of twenty-six, with no valuable possessions except his experience, he returned to Rome, and thence, early in 1881, he set out for America. The old steamship in which he took passage broke down in mid-ocean, and Mr. Crawford's great physical strength and nervous energy were in constant demand. As the only cabin passenger on board, he had the honor of alternating on deck with the captain and the mates. At Bermuda, where the ship put in for repairs, he narrowly escaped drowning. Finally, at the end of two months, the ship reached New York. In this country he made his home at times with his uncle, Samuel Ward, the Horace of "Dr. Claudius," and at times with his aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. He had not been long in the country before he entered Harvard College, where he took a special course in Sanscrit under Prof. Charles Lanman. He left Harvard in a state of uncertainty. He was ready to do anything to earn a living. He tried unsuccessfully to place some articles on philology. He reviewed books, principally for the _New York Times_. He lectured on "The Origin of Sacrifice." He won a small sum of money with an article on the silver question. One day early in May, 1882, his kind uncle, Samuel Ward, asked him to dinner at the New York Club, which was then situated in Madison Square. But here is where Mr. Crawford should come in to tell his own interesting story: "As was perfectly natural, we began to exchange stories while smoking, and I told him (Mr. Ward), with a great deal of detail, my recollections of an interesting man whom I met in Simla. When I had finished, he said to me: 'That is a good two-part magazine story, and you must write it out immediately.' He took me around to his apartments, and that night I began to write the story of 'Mr. Isaacs.' Part of the first chapter was written afterward, but the rest of that chapter and several succeeding chapters are the story I told to Uncle Sam. I kept at it from day to day, getting more interested in the work as I proceeded, and from time to time I would read a chapter to Uncle Sam. When I got through the original story I was so amused with the writing of it that it occurred to me that I might as well make Mr. Isaacs fall in love with an English girl, and then I kept on writing to see what would happen. By and by I remembered a mysterious Buddhist whom I had met once in India, and so I introduced him, still further to complicate matters. I went to Newport to visit my aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, while I was in the midst of the story, and continued it there. It was on June 13, 1882, while in her home, that I finished the last chapter of 'Mr. Isaacs,' and, Uncle Sam appearing in Newport at that time, I read him the part of the story which he had not heard. 'You will give it to me,' he said, 'and I shall try to find a publisher.' He had for many years frequented the bookstore of Macmillan, and was well acquainted with the elder George Brett. He took the manuscript to Mr. Brett, who forwarded it to the English house, and in a short time it was accepted. "Having tasted blood, I began, very soon after finishing 'Mr. Isaacs,' to write another story for my own amusement, 'Dr. Claudius.' Late in November I was advised by the Messrs. Macmillan that in order to secure an English copyright, as well as an American copyright, I must be on English soil on the day of publication. So I went to St. John, New Brunswick, where I had a very pleasant time, and continued to write the story of 'Dr. Claudius,' which I finished in December. 'Mr. Isaacs' was published on December 6, and I, of course, knew nothing about its reception. However, toward the end of the month I started on my return journey to the United States, and when I arrived in Boston on the day before Christmas, and stepped out of the train, I was surprised beyond measure to find the railway news stand almost covered with great posters announcing 'Mr. Isaacs.' The next morning, at my hotel, I found a note awaiting me from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, asking me for an interview, at which he proposed that I write a serial for his magazine. I felt confident then, and do now, that 'Dr. Claudius' would not be a good serial story. However, I promised that Mr. Aldrich should have a serial, and began soon after to write 'A Roman Singer,' which was completed in February, 1883." That is Mr. Crawford's own story of his start as a novelist, told to us nine years ago in a Boston hotel. The original of Mr. Isaacs was a diamond dealer in Simla named Jacobs. We have heard it related that the chief figure in "A Roman Singer" was partly sketched from a musician now resident in Boston, whom the novelist had known intimately in Rome. The American scenery of "Dr. Claudius" was, of course, fresh in the author's mind. Mr. Crawford said last year: "What a novelist needs in order to succeed is energy above all else. But he also needs to be very poor. No man with money will work hard enough when he is young to succeed. He needs to begin early, work hard, and sit long in one place. If he has money he won't sit long in one place." Mr. Crawford had no money when he started, but he had abundant energy, and he could sit for a day in one place. Hence his success. In "The Three Fates" the close reader will discern a glimpse of the foundation of Mr. Crawford's literary career. In May, 1883, the rising author went back to Italy, where he wrote "To Leeward" and "Saracinesca." The next year he spent in Constantinople, and there he was married to Miss Elizabeth Berdan, the daughter of General Berdan. In 1885 he settled permanently at Sorrento. "Villa Crawford," his home, stands on a high bluff, overlooking the Bay of Naples. There, in a room padded to keep out sound, the author of "Mr. Isaacs" has done most of his literary work for the last fifteen years. Mr. Crawford has frequently been called "a born novelist," and we have yet to find a critic who, judging him by all that he has done, is inclined to deny him the right to that high title. His dialogue is vivid, his problems, as a rule, logically worked out, his dramatic situations strong and timely. Not all his works, however, are of even power or attractiveness; and no one recognizes this fact more clearly than the novelist himself. He has said that the book which he enjoyed writing most is "Mr. Isaacs"; the book which has for him the most reality is "Pietro Ghisleri," and the book of the most polish is "Zoroaster." In years gone by "Zoroaster" was studied in the English departments of many colleges. "I believe," said Mr. Crawford, last year, "that the novelist is the result of a demand. Consequently, I believe that it is the province of the novel to amuse, to cultivate, mainly to please. I do not believe that the novel should instruct. The story is the great thing. Therefore, I do not believe in problem novels, or what they call realism. It is disagreeable to the people." Yet, in his thirty-six works, he has said, to use his own words, some "pretty tall things." Mr. Crawford attributes much of his skill in writing English to the letters which his mother used to write to him when he was away at school. After she had married Mr. Terry, her home in Rome, the Palazzo Odescalchi, became the meeting-place of many brilliant men and women. Artists, poets and literarians crowded her house every Wednesday afternoon, and this choice admiration of her ended only with her death. Of French, German, and, of course Italian, her brilliant son is as sure a master as he is of English; he writes Turkish and Russian readily, and he converses fluently in most of the Eastern tongues. His recreation is yachting. Indeed he holds a shipmaster's certificate entitling him to navigate sailing vessels on the high seas. Five years ago he proved his seamanship by navigating his yacht, an old New York pilot boat, across the seas to Sorrento. All in all, a delightful and accomplished author and gentleman-at-large. [Illustration: Photo by Hollinger, N. Y. JAMES LANE ALLEN.] JAMES LANE ALLEN A few novelists know the world which renews its youth every spring and that dies every autumn, as intimately as Thoreau knew it. One of these novelists is Thomas Hardy, whose description of Egdon Heath in "The Return of the Native" has long been in use as a model in the English Department at Harvard. One of these also is James Lane Allen, the Kentucky schoolmaster. The chapter entitled "Hemp" in "The Reign of Law," contains abundant evidence of this loving power. Here is a random choice: "One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come, season of scales and balances, when the earth, brought to judgment for its fruits, says, 'I have done what I could--now let me rest!' "Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook below. The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little dust paths made by sheep, in the hot months, when they had sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time when they shall rise again as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land." Mr. Mabie, writing once in _The Outlook_, dwelt on what has been called the "landscape beauty" of Mr. Allen's work. "No American novelist," he said "has so imbedded his stories in Nature as has James Lane Allen; and among English novels one recalls only Mr. Hardy's three classics of pastoral England, and among French novelists George Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the background of many charming American stories, and finds delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse...." And when James MacArthur was editing _The Bookman_ he said: "Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, 'the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science,'--that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art--unfailing in its inspiration, unfaltering in its classic accent." It was Mr. MacArthur, who, speaking of "The Choir Invisible," said that "it would be difficult to recall any other novel since 'The Scarlet Letter' that has touched the same note of greatness, or given to one section of our national life, as Hawthorne's classic did to another, a voice far beyond singing." Mr. MacArthur's remark that Mr. Allen came forth from "his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art" is largely true. Although born about half a century ago, it was not until 1884 that he settled down to writing. Not many of our distinguished writers passed thirty before tasting the bitter-sweet fruit of authorship. Mr. Allen was born on a farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, a few miles from Lexington; and on the farm he spent his early childhood. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster. Her parents, who were of the Scotch-Irish stock which settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, had found a permanent home in Mississippi. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Virginians who formed the Kentucky pioneers. The son was graduated from Kentucky University--which has been pictured in the history of his latest hero, David,--in 1872. For several years afterward he taught in district schools, at first near his home, and later in Missouri. Still later he became a private tutor; then he took a professorship in his alma mater; and at length he brought his career as a teacher to a close while at Bethany College, West Virginia. That very year, 1884, he moved to New York, put away his text-books, and plunged into the sea of literature. One who knew him in those days has described him as "a blond young giant with a magnificent head and a strong, kindly face." From the day of his decision to be a writer until the present time Mr. Allen has worked industriously and successfully. Fifteen years ago the chief literary and critical magazines published many of his essays, and from time to time his short stories appeared in _Harper's Magazine_ and _The Century Magazine_. These short stories were afterward collected and published under the title of "Flute and Violin." Then appeared at irregular intervals "The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," "A Kentucky Cardinal" and its sequel, "Aftermath," "A Summer in Arcady," "The Choir Invisible," and, latest of all, "The Reign of Law." The author's high reputation was firmly established by "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Aftermath." "In these two books," said one critic, looking backward, "Nature was interwoven benignantly with the human nature resting on her bosom, leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influences to the human lover, and, when bereft of human love, receiving him back into her healing arms." The books made as deep an impression upon Englishmen as upon Americans; indeed, as late as the spring of 1900 the _London Academy_ devoted a page to a flattering and most sympathetic review of them. The gentle, playful humor, the healthy joyousness, the rare tenderness displayed by Mr. Allen in these two books, are irresistible. Months, and even years, after laying the books down, the reader must remember the many delightful sketches of which they are made. "And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his coat-tails and crying out to me, 'Hello! Adam, what were you made for?' 'You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine,' I answer, 'You have one May; I have twenty-five!' He didn't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open arms and the sound of a kiss." What charming sport! What uncommon perception! And here is one of his choice, frank, bucolic sentiments: "The longer I live here the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man." "Summer in Arcady" shocked many who had fallen in love with the pastoral simplicity and spiritual delicacy of the two preceding books; but it was generally admitted that the book showed an advance in the author's powers, particularly in his power of vivid dialogue. In his first novel Mr. Allen had written that "The simple, rural, key-note of life is still the sweetest," and a change to another key-note, tremulous with pathos and tragedy, surprised the reading public; but the opinion that it was likely to prove a stepping-stone to higher things found general favor. Nor was this opinion unsound, for "The Choir Invisible" lifted its author for the time above the heads of all his contemporaries. Both here and in England the book fairly leaped to success; both here and in England it was praised almost unqualifiedly. An American critic, writing of it, said: "Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. 'The Choir Invisible' will solidify a reputation already established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand." An English critic noted that it was "highly praised, and with reason." "It is written," he said, "with singular delicacy, and has an old-world fragrance which seems to come from the classics we keep in lavender." The book succeeded so immensely that an attempt was made to dramatize it, but the attempt failed. The atmosphere of the book proved to be too ethereal, too spiritual, for dramatization. That "The Choir Invisible" solidified Mr. Allen's reputation was demonstrated by the eagerness of the demand for "The Reign of Law." In some respects this is Mr. Allen's greatest work: it reveals even a deeper knowledge of nature than he ever revealed before, and it deals more intimately with things which have revolved around his own career. Fame has little to do with the sale of books. If "The Kentucky Cardinal," "The Choir Invisible," and "The Reign of Law" had not been sold by the thousands, Mr. Allen's fame would still be of more than transient quality. There is nothing ephemeral about these stories: they are, strictly speaking, a part of our classical literature. The vividness of the pictures will always be fresh and interesting. Taking too literally Mr. Allen's remark in "The Reign of Law" that Kentucky University is a ruin and will always remain a ruin, the reading public has generally decided, we have found, that the university, the author's alma mater, does not exist. It does exist, but, apparently, not in the condition in which the author would have it. Before "The Reign of Law" had been long on the market, he and the president of Kentucky University fell into a controversy which makes an interesting chapter in the academic side of the history of the Blue Grass State. Mr. Allen works slowly and carefully, as may be inferred from the number and the character of his books. And he lives quietly, modestly. He is not in the least given to the exploitation of his habits and his manners, even so far as they may be connected with his literary work. Little has ever been heard of him by the thousands who hurry to read his books, and who read them only to praise him. Some time ago his publishers issued a brochure dealing with his career, and the vital facts contained in it, if put together, would not cover more than twenty or thirty ordinary lines. It should be said before ending, however, that the author of "The Reign of Law" is looked up to almost filially by the younger writers of the middle West. They are never weary of applauding him and of indicating, publicly as well as privately, his extraordinary reputation. Traces of his style, notably as it appears in his Corot-like pictures of nature, may be found in their writings. Indeed, it is quite likely that nothing would please one of these fine young men more than to have it said of his work that it resembles the masterly work of James Lane Allen. [Illustration: Photo by Davis & Sanford. THOMAS NELSON PAGE.] THOMAS NELSON PAGE Thomas Nelson Page first came into national prominence seventeen years ago through the publication by _The Century Magazine_ of the short story called "Marse Chan." He received eighty dollars for the story. A few years ago, in conversation with Mr. Frank G. Carpenter, the author related the incidents which led to the writing of "Marse Chan." At the bottom was a letter which a friend had shown him. "This letter," said Mr. Page, "was from an illiterate girl in Georgia to her soldier sweetheart. The letter was poorly written and poorly spelled, but full of pathos. The girl had, it seems, trifled with the man, but after he had left for the war she had realized her great love for him and written to him. She wrote: 'I know I have treated you mean. I ain't never done right with you all the time. When you asked me to marry you, I laughed, and said I wouldn't have you, and it makes me cry to think you are gone away to the war. Now, I want you to know that I love you, and I want you to git a furlow and come home and I'll marry you.' With a few words of affection the letter closed, but a postscript was added: 'Don't come home without a furlow, for unless you come home honorable I won't marry you.' This letter was received by the soldier only a few days before the battle of Seven Pines, and after he was shot it was found in his breast pocket, just over his heart. The pathos of it struck me so forcibly that out of it came the story of 'Marse Chan.'" Thomas Nelson Page was thirty-one when "Marse Chan" appeared, and at that time his shingle was new outside his office in Richmond. Mr. Page was born in Hanover County, Virginia, on April 23, 1853, and is consequently now in his forty-ninth year. A description of the house in which he was born--Oakland, it was called--may be found in "Two Little Confederates." On both sides he is a lineal descendant of Gen. Thomas Nelson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that there is scarcely an old family in all Virginia to which the author is not related in some degree. One of his cousins is the Princess Troubetskoy, Amélie Rives before her marriage, whose first husband was John Armstrong Chanler. At the time of the birth of Thomas the Pages were comparatively wealthy, but later, during the war, they lost most of their wealth. Thomas's first reading lessons, in the Waverley novels, were given him by an aunt, who also taught him to read the Episcopal prayer-book. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the war, for his father accepted a commission in the Confederate army. Occasionally the boy visited his father in camp, when the troops were on the road from Oakland to Richmond. Once he witnessed a bombardment. Happily, he was old enough to appreciate the gossip of the war which passed around the negro cabins. Like all the slaveholders, the Pages were much reduced in riches when the war ended, but, nevertheless, at the age of sixteen, Thomas was sent to Washington and Lee University. Of his college days he once said: "My standing was not high. I don't know that I had much ambition to be one of the first honor men. At any rate, I got no medals of any kind. I suppose I was a fair average student, but I hear that I devoted myself more to outside reading than to my studies. I was a member of the literary society, and for a time was the editor of the college paper. Contrary to the usual custom, I wrote short articles instead of long essays, and from this got the nick-name of 'The Short-Article Editor.' I wrote, I suppose, much for the pleasure of seeing myself in print. I was very bashful in those days, and I know that I trembled when I first got up to speak in the literary society. I had a chum at college who is now one of the most famous lawyers of the country. He excels as a debater. He was also bashful, and during our college days he joined with me in a method of improving our oratorical powers. We would get together in a room, and, having closed the doors, would debate with each other, upon some question. One would stand on one side of the table and one on the other and we would declaim away, each having a fifteen minutes' speech and a like time for answers. This practice helped me materially in my work as a lawyer." After his graduation from Washington and Lee University, Mr. Page secured employment as a teacher in a private school in Kentucky, not far from Louisville. There he taught for a year, and he says that he enjoyed it very much. He kept his pen at work steadily. The influential paper in the part of the country where he was teaching, was, of course, _The Louisville Courier-Journal_. The young teacher was intensely interested in Ik Marvel's books, and he wrote some essays in imitation of Marvel and sent them to the _Courier-Journal_. They were rejected. From what he has said since, their rejection was not a source of much discouragement to him. At the end of a year the rebuffed essayist returned to his home in Virginia, and, soon after, deciding to study law, he entered the law school of the University of Virginia. Greatly to his credit, he got his degree in a year. Meantime, however, he kept up his interest in literature. While at the University of Virginia he contributed to the college paper. It was also his habit, while at home, to write stories on slates for the entertainment of his friends, and erase the stories after he had read them. At school, too, he began to write stories in the negro dialect, and he continued this practice in his law office in Richmond. At his office he wrote the first of his works accepted by the magazines, a poem called "Unc' Gabe's White Folks," which was published in _Scribner's_ in 1876. He received fifteen dollars for it. He was very proud of that unpretentious check. Later he wrote a historical article relating to the centennial celebration in old Yorktown, and then he sent out his first story, "Marse Chan." It was paid for promptly, but, like many another story sent to the magazines, particularly stories from unknown authors, it remained unpublished for several years. Finally, overcome by impatience, the author wrote to ascertain what had become of it, and shortly afterward he received a proof of it. With its publication in 1884 came instant popularity. But at no time previous to his moving to Washington was literature first in Page's mind. In the beginning, at Richmond, he wrote only at night, when his day's work was done; and for a time he actually ceased writing fiction entirely lest it might interfere with the practice of his profession. For, as a matter of fact, he has been a very successful lawyer. Six months after he had settled down in Richmond he was able to support himself with his earnings at the bar, and during the eighteen years which followed, that is, up to the time of his settling down in Washington, his income was chiefly from law. So, it was some time before "Marse Chan" was succeeded by "Meh Lady," "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Polly" and "Ole 'Stracted." It was said in those days that the stories were like variations on a single theme; but we are inclined to agree with the critic who said: "For this we feel no disposition to quarrel with Mr. Page, being eager to hear the tale as often as he may find ways to tell it, and grateful to him for such beautiful and faithful pictures of a society now become portion and parcel of the irrevocable past." To Mr. Page and his equally delightful contemporary, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, the reading public is indebted for no small number of the most charming features of American literature. It may please those who enjoy particulars to know that the popular writer regards "Unc' Edinburgh Drowndin'," which was first to follow "Marse Chan," as his best picture of Virginia life. Mr. Page, in 1886, married Miss Anne Seddon Bruce, the daughter of Charles Bruce of Charlotte County, Virginia, largely for whose entertainment he had written his early stories; and before the death of Mrs. Page in 1888 Mr. Page had written "Meh Lady" and had published "In Ole Virginia," a collection of his works, all in dialect. In those days, by the way, his work was often compared by the critics with the work of Mr. Harris. Perhaps the fairest comparison was made by Mr. Coleman, who admired the two authors quite equally. "Mr. Page," said the critic, "enjoys the reputation of having written the most exquisite story of the war that has yet appeared ("Marse Chan"). In comparison with the works of Joel Chandler Harris, though both authors deal with the negro, the one in no wise interferes with the proper appreciation of the other. In Uncle Remus Mr. Harris has given us the truer insight into the character of the type to which he belongs, while the venerable family servant is somewhat idealized by Mr. Page, and, moreover, is made to tell a story possessing a value and interest of its own not entirely dependent upon the personality of the narrator and his race peculiarities. In the matter of dialect, Mr. Page has the advantage, though this may be due, in part, to the difference between the Virginia negro and his brother of Georgia." The Virginian has portrayed the sweeter side of the old slavery days, in direct contrast to Mrs. Stowe's picture of the harsher side. In the master he has delineated forbearance, confidence, protection; in the slave, respect, devotion and fidelity. Without a scruple he has felt constrained to make one of his characters say of the days before the war: "Dem wuz good ole times, marster--de bes' Sam ever see! De wuz, in fac'! Niggers did n' hed nothin' 't all to do--jes' hed to 'ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do; an' when dey wuz sick, dey had things sent 'em out de house, an' de same doctor came to see 'em whar 'ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. Dyah war n' no trouble nor nuthin." A few years ago Mr. Page was asked if he wrote rapidly. "Yes and no," he replied. "I write the first draft as rapidly as I can and then go over it very carefully in the revision. I try to simplify my writings as much as possible. The more simple it is, I think, the better it is. I find, however, that the revision often takes away the spirit from the first draft. I lay away the manuscript, and looking at it several weeks later, I can see that the first draft is truer to nature than the more stilted revision. I think I do more careful work now than I have done in the past. My ideal is far above anything I have ever done, and I sometimes despair of approaching it. There is one thing I do, however, which I think is a good plan for any writer. That is, I always give the best I have in me to the story which I am writing. I do not save anything which I think might perhaps be of use to me in the future. The cream, if you could use that expression, always goes to the present." In 1891 the author of "Marse Chan" left Richmond and went to New York to succeed Charles Dudley Warner in the conduct of "The Drawer" in _Harper's Monthly_, Mr. Warner succeeding Mr. Howells, who at that time left _Harper's_ for the _Cosmopolitan_, in the conduct of "The Study." That same year Mr. Page appeared as a public reader. Two years later he married Mrs. Henry Field of Chicago, a granddaughter of Governor Barbour of Virginia, and since then, for the most part, he has lived and worked in Washington. By far his most ambitious work is "Red Rock," a novel which has done much to affect favorably the old attitude of the North toward the South. Not many of our writers rest their fame on fewer works. [Illustration: RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.] RICHARD HARDING DAVIS A great many persons, indeed, a great many critics, have called Richard Harding Davis superficial. They obviously had one thing in mind and said another. Perhaps they may have meant to say that sometimes Mr. Davis dealt in superficialities. We lean toward Professor Harry Thurston Peck's opinion. "Mr. Davis, in fact," he says, "because of the predominance in him of the journalistic motive, is a photographer rather than an artist; but he is a very skillful and adept photographer." No person of superficial temperament could have described with so much humor Van Bibber's attempt to practice economy, or could have given us the affecting conclusion of "Princess Aline," or could have written many paragraphs of "The Exiles." No sympathetic human being who has ever read "The Exiles" will forget the picture of the outlawed boodle alderman in Tangier, saying to a visitor about to return to New York with a clean conscience and a strong hunger to see the familiar sights: "'I'll tell you what you _can_ do for me, Holcombe. Some night I wish you would go down to Fourteenth Street, some night this spring, when the boys are sitting out on the steps in front of the Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed. Lally's; just for luck. Will you? That's what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing better than Fourteenth Street of a summer evening, with all the people crowding into Pastor's, on one side of the Hall, and the Third Avenue L-cars running by on the other. That's a gay sight, ain't it now? With all the girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the sidewalks crowded. One of them warm nights when they have to have the windows open, and you can hear the music in at Pastor's, and the audience clapping their hands. That's great, isn't it? Well,' he laughed and shook his head, 'I'll be back there some day, won't I,' he said, wistfully, 'and hear it for myself?'" It would be hard to find in fiction a more affecting picture done with fewer strokes and with closer fidelity to human nature. It is a picture which must strike the attentive reader, and particularly the attentive New York reader, full on the heart strings. Mr. Davis has the habit of looking at the odd things in life. Without this habit no man can be a first-class reporter; and our author has proved himself a first-class reporter in many parts of the world and for many papers. Like every well-trained reporter, Mr. Davis is continually "seeing things." As he said to his friend Mr. Sangree, some months ago: "I never walk one city block that I do not see twenty things to interest me. I tire my friends sometimes by pointing them out. Their minds run in different channels. But this ability to see things is my greatest joy in life, incidentally my living. I cultivated it when I began reporting, and to this day if I see a man turn in a car to look out the window I unconsciously turn with him. He may have observed something that escaped me--something that contains an element of human interest, and I hold no effort wasted that may add to this general cargo of life's impressions." No able reporter could have worked long under Charles A. Dana and escaped the objective habit. In fact, a story which Mr. Sangree tells of his friend's experience on _The Evening Sun_ illustrates the point. "At eight o' clock one spring morning," says Mr. Sangree, "the blotter at police headquarters recorded a trifling fire on the East Side. News being dull, Davis was sent to cover it. He found a rickety tenement house in which fire had little more than singed the top floor. The crowd had left, a few ashes were smouldering, and the insurance adjusters were examining the place. "'Nothing here,' said the policeman on watch. 'Only five hundred dollars damage and a bum lodger asphyxiated. He's in that room.' "The reporters peeped, saw the blackened face and rigid form, a man unnamed and forgotten--and wrote a paragraph. _The Evening Sun_ reporter, in mousing about saw an alarm clock by the dead man's side with the hand pointing to seven o' clock. "'What time did you break in here?' he asked. "'Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember because that alarm was going off just as I got inside.' "'That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and vivid, simply with: 'The man died at six-thirty. The alarm went off at seven. It was just half an hour too late.'" "What impressed me," said the author, discussing the story subsequently, "was that impotent alarm clock jangling away when the owner was dead. A man's existence had been cut off because that fifty-cent clock could not give its alarm a few minutes earlier." This illustrates what was meant when we said that Mr. Davis takes an objective view of life. His experience as a reporter was invaluable to him; and he took Dr. Hale's advice, and ended the experience at the right time. Doubtless many good writers have been spoiled by indulging too long in the fascinations of newspaper work. A large part of his training as a reporter the creator of Van Bibber obtained in his native city, during his service on the _Philadelphia Press_, for which paper he went to work when he was a little more than twenty. There is a portrait of him taken at the age of twenty-three, in the disguise in which he worked while getting the information which drove the nest of thieves out of Wood street. While Davis was working for the _Philadelphia Press_, by the way, he and his associates in the reporters' room fell in love with one of Stevenson's thrilling short stories, "A Lodging for the Night." They could not restrain their admiration; so they wrote an enthusiastic letter to the gentle sick man off there in Samoa. And to the spokesman of the admiring crew Stevenson replied: _Dear Sir:_ Why, thank you very much for your frank, agreeable and natural letter. It is certainly very pleasant that all you young fellows wholly enjoy my work, and get some good out of it; and it was very kind in you to write and tell me so. The tale of the suicide is excellently droll; and your letter, you may be sure, will be preserved. If you are to escape, unhurt, out of your present business, you must be very careful, and you must find in your heart much constancy. The swiftly done work of the journalist, and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when I say 'writing'--O, believe me, it is re-writing that I have chiefly in my mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you some day. Please excuse this sermon from Your obliged ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. This letter, brought to light a short while ago by Mr. Sangree, in a magazine article, discloses an exchange of sentiments creditable to all the correspondents concerned. For a time the promising journalist was overmastered by an ambition to be an editor, and he established a short-lived dramatic periodical called _The Stage_. In 1889 he reported the Johnstown flood for a Philadelphia paper, and then, the following summer, went abroad with the All-Philadelphia cricket team. Upon his return to this country, New York charmed him, and there, for the most part, he has lived ever since. At first he was connected with _The Evening Sun_. During this connection he wrote his delightful "Van Bibber" stories. But these were not his first stories. His first stories were written while he was editor of a paper at Lehigh College, in his student days. The stories numbered about a dozen, and Mr. Davis collected them and paid ninety dollars to have them published in book form. The book has scarcely ever been heard of since. Later, while at Johns Hopkins University, he wrote his first accepted story, "Richard Carr's Baby," a sort of foot-ball tale, which was published in St. Nicholas. However, the "Van Bibber" stories were his first work of any serious account; they were the first work to bring him popularity. After the "Van Bibber" sketches came his most sparkling gem, "Gallegher," a newspaper story which was refused by three editors and then published, with immediate success, in _Scribner's Magazine_. Later appeared in quick succession "The Other Woman," "An Unfinished Story," "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegan," and the other short stories which soon made their author's name familiar to the reading public on both sides of the ocean. In 1890 Davis became editor of _Harper's Weekly_. This position he left a year or so later to travel across the continent, with "The West Through a Car Window" as the result. Then he went to London, and described the life there; and then he went to Egypt and wrote "The Rulers of the Mediterranean." He was now fairly well started; and since then his pen has never been idle. Since Mr. Davis's advent as a serious writer of fiction he has been subjected on one side to the most extravagant praise and on the other to the most merciless censure. The critics on both sides have made matters worse by dropping the subject at hand and bringing out for public inspection vast quantities of personal anecdotes about the unfortunate author, most of which stories are probably apocryphal. In fact, at one time the newspaper comments were so vulgar that the helpless victim said to a friend who visited him in New York: "If I thought I was like the man the newspapers make me out to be, I would not only cut my own acquaintance; I'd cut my own throat." But, so far as the public ever found out, he took the slings and arrows philosophically. He could afford to. One by one his new works have prospered. It was at the height of this hypercritical hostility that, in 1897, Davis was suddenly missed. About the same time the stories in the _London Times_ on the war between Turkey and Greece began to attract universal attention. The _Times_, said one of the New York newspapers, which had shown especial bitterness toward its former reporter, has discovered a brilliant war correspondent. It seemed that people all over the world were asking, Who is he? It was Mr. Davis, proving, under the cloak of the _Times'_ traditional anonymity his right to be respected as a descriptive writer of the first quality. He repeated this success the next year in Cuba, during the Spanish war, when his extraordinary skill in the description of picturesque incidents was favored by the circumstance that the generals and admirals themselves were sending home virtually all the news. When, last year, Mr. Davis went to South Africa it was commonly expected that he would take sides with the British. Never was public expectation more emphatically at fault. In a moment he took the measure of the British cause and the British tactics; both of these things disgusted him. He put Mr. Kipling himself to shame by serving "the God of Things as They Are"; and as a result he forfeited many friendships which he had made in England. But he won the hearts of his countrymen. His courageous honesty destroyed in this country the last vestige of captious hostility. To-day, at the age of thirty-eight, just at the entrance to full-blown life, Mr. Davis is widely admired and honored. He has pleased the light-hearted with his pretty romantic tales, and he has satisfied the strong of heart with his many examples of an unerring sense of the true comedy and the true pathos of life, and, moreover, of his remarkable personal fearlessness. Perhaps the term which a friend applied to him is most fitting--perhaps he may best be called a "sublimated reporter"; for your sublimated reporter must be at once an imperturbable philosopher and an artist holding the mirror up to nature. * * * * * The author's marriage to Miss Cecil Clark of Chicago, at Marion, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1899, was an event remarkable for its jollity. Last year Mrs. Davis accompanied her husband to South Africa. She is said to be as skillful with the pencil as he is with the pen. [Illustration: Photo by Hollinger, N. Y. JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.] JOHN KENDRICK BANGS A dozen years or so ago, when Mr. Bangs faced at home an audience, which had gathered to hear his address on "The Evolution of the Humorist," he said: "I was born in and have resided in Yonkers for a number of years; I have braved the perils of life in this community, and have endured, without a murmur, the privations common to all of us." A modest biography, and withal an illustration of Mr. Bangs's philosophy. He takes things as they come--and leaves his imprint on them. Comparisons of skill aside, no man could do more. John Kendrick Bangs was born in Yonkers, New York, in May, 1862. His father, Francis N. Bangs, was a prominent New York lawyer, in fact, one of the most prominent lawyers the New York bar has ever known. His grandfather was the Rev. Nathan Bangs, D.D., the first historian of the Methodist Church in this country, the first editor of a Methodist paper, and for many years president of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. In 1883, after receiving such an education as any New York boy of a well-to-do New York family receives, young Bangs was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy from the School of Political Science of Columbia University, New York. For a year and a half afterward he studied law in his father's office--studied at "long range," as he has said himself. But all the time he was impatient to go into literature. "I was more of a fighter," he says, "and it seemed to me that a man has enough battles of his own to wage without rushing after the battles of other people." Gradually his inherited fondness for literature smothered his zeal as a student of law. While contributing in his undergraduate days to the college paper, _Acta Columbiana_, he had enjoyed a taste of literary glory. So, between dips into his father's dry volumes, he wrote little sketches in his characteristic vein. These tentative works introduced him favorably to the managers of _Life_, and, late in 1884, he became associated with Mr. Mitchell in the editorship of that entertaining periodical. In addition to his editorial work he undertook to maintain the attractive "By the Way" page, and to this valuable feature of _Life_ he contributed an extraordinary amount of original matter. What would not have been asked of many other men was requested of the new humorist in the most casual manner, for he quickly proved that, besides possessing a keen literary instinct and that kindly and delightful insight into human nature which, brought together, double the value of a comic paper, he also possessed remarkable energy and power of application. In 1887, while still connected with _Life_, and shortly after his marriage, young Bangs went abroad, and during this absence from editorial work his first book, "Roger Camorden, a Strange Story," was published. It was an unusual and very promising tale of hallucination, and its success was encouraging. That same year, in collaboration with his friend and classmate, Frank Dempster Sherman, he produced a series of satirical and humorous pieces, which were put into a volume under the title of "New Waggings of old Tales." Soon afterward he resigned from _Life_, in order to devote more time to larger work. The first product of the rising author's independent career was a travesty on "The Taming of the Shrew" called "Katherine," which he wrote for a dramatic association connected with the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard. It followed the Shakespearean construction rather closely, and, with its many quips and gags and jolly songs, made a first-rate libretto for a comic opera. The popularity of the travesty advertised the fame of Bangs from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. The following year, for the same organization, he wrote another travesty, "Mephistopheles, a Profanation"; and this, too, won much popularity and further brightened its author's name. The happy results of his experience as the father of three boys were noticeable in the book which Mr. Bangs published in 1891, "Tiddledywink Tales," the first of a series of amusing stories for children. The other divisions of this series are "In Camp with a Tin Soldier," "The Tiddledywink Poetry Book," and "Half Hours with Jimmie-Boy," books that have endeared their author to half the grown-up children in the land. It was by means of these books that he became a most welcome contributor to Harper's Round Table and to the juvenile departments of various literary syndicates. A novel, "Toppleton's Client," appeared in 1893, and in that year also appeared his first widely successful work, "Coffee and Repartee," a collection of Idiot papers, which has been described, and with good reason, as a mixture of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bill Nye. Those were not, compared with the present time, enthusiastic literary days, and yet in a few years fifty thousand copies of the little book were sold. "Coffee and Repartee" was followed at regular intervals by "The Water-Ghost," "The Idiot," "Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica," and by the other books whose names have at some time, been on every liberal reader's tongue. One of the most entertaining of the New Yorker's books is "Ten Weeks in Politics," behind the writing of which is a story worth telling. In 1894 Mr. Bangs was nominated by the Democrats for Mayor of Yonkers. "No candidate, I sincerely believe," says his friend Mr. Corbin, "ever entered a political campaign with greater seriousness or with a more strenuous desire to devote himself to the public good; and except for any one of half a dozen accidents he would have been elected. To begin with, one of the cleverest of New York newspapers, the editorial policy of which has been suspected of personal prejudice, appeared to bear a grudge against Mr. Bangs, and persecuted him in prose and in verse with the implication that he was making a farce of politics. But the real cause of his defeat, as he explains with a quiet smile, was the fact that he refused one midnight to turn his house into a beer garden for the benefit of a local German band that serenaded him; and in point of fact the votes of the musicians and their heelers were enough to turn the scale. Though Mr. Bangs is always willing to laugh at the figure he cut as a politician, he has never lost the sense of his duty as a citizen. His victorious rival had the magnanimity, which in such cases is scarcely to be distinguished from political wisdom, to offer him a subordinate position in his administration--on the Board of Education, I think. Mr. Bangs had the magnanimity, which could not have contained the least scruple of policy, to accept the position and to fill it to the best of his ability, even while he was writing his 'Ten Weeks in Politics.' This episode is thoroughly characteristic." Mr. Bangs has spoken of that defeat as the greatest blessing that he ever met. "In later years," he says, "when I saw how I would have been forced to abandon my chosen profession for politics, when I learned that the mayoralty would have taken every moment of my time, I was glad that I had been defeated. I saw, for the first time, the truth in the saying that a man can do more to bring success within his grasp by standing by his original proposition, even if it be a humorous one. And politics and humor do not mix, unless you happen to be a cartoonist." Politics and humor mix well enough in the right man; but it is not to be doubted that literature has been the gainer by the result of that election in Yonkers. The defeated candidate would probably have made an excellent Mayor. He certainly would have made a conscientious Mayor; and by reason of this conscientiousness the reading public would have missed books which have made us certain that Mr. Bangs is a gifted humorist. Mr. Corbin, by the way, tells another interesting story of his friend's characteristic activity. "Once when I went to Yonkers," says Mr. Corbin, "he appeared as the proprietor of a livery stable. He explained that the business had been running down when he took it, and that by charging himself a thousand or two a year for cab hire he was making a 'go' of it; and that moreover, as he paid his account to himself it did not cost him anything to ride. The plain fact seemed to be that his ready purse and his business sense had saved a humble neighbor from misfortune." Before closing the political chapter of Mr. Bangs's career it may prove interesting to quote from a "send-off" which a Yonkers paper gave him on March 10, 1894, just before the German band episode. "Mr. Bangs," it said, "is a Democrat of the strictest kind, and can always be relied upon to care for and advance the interests of his party, while at the same time he will so guard and guide the municipal ship as to avoid the rocks of reckless expenditure, and pass safely into the harbor of wise economy. With such a candidate the Democracy believes it can surely recapture the mayoralty, and at the same time secure for the city a young, able, and in all respects a competent, honest, and faithful chief magistrate. "Mr. Bangs is popular in the club life of the city, being a member of the old Palisade Boat Club and the Yonkers Lawn Tennis Club. In the latter he is the Chairman of the Entertainment Committee, and also a member of the Building and Book Committees. He is not only one of the best lawn tennis players in the club, but in the alleys of the boat club has proved himself a skillful bowler, having figured conspicuously in the recent annual tournament. He recently proved himself a public speaker of no mean order when he delivered his lecture on 'The Evolution of the Humorist from Adam to Bill Nye,' for a charitable object. He also took prominent part in the last charity ball, which is the social event of the season in this city." How that catalogue of social and athletic qualifications must have appealed to a man of the victim's sense of humor! Mr. Bangs takes his own medicine. He firmly believes that humor sweetens life. "Show me a man who does not appreciate humor," he said once, "and I will show you a man who is morbid, cynical, unresponsive to every fine impulse of nature. Such a man is worse than a pessimist, and more to be pitied. Take some of the greatest and most successful men in the world. Humor has always played an important part in their lives. Often a funny incident has marked the turning-point of a great man's career; often some ridiculous position has been the impetus of a new start in life. Humor is as necessary to the home as is the cooking stove. I mean good, healthy humor. It eases the mind and it becomes an educator; it fills and makes pleasant many a long night; it gives encouragement to the wanderer; it relieves the tired mother of the burden of her cares; it encourages men and women to look on the bright side of life, and the bright side is the only side which should be exposed to view. Literature is the best vehicle of humor. In literature it lives the longest, and in literature it can be studied and appreciated to the best advantage. Someone has said that literature robs humor of its spontaneity! A mistake! A great mistake! A good, solid humorous book, or passage in a book, can be appreciated a hundred times over. The mind retains fun longer than it retains cold facts. You will hear a man repeat something funny that he read, years after, when he couldn't, for his life, tell you the rudiments of the mathematical problems which he spent years in trying to master. A good man looks upon a good book as a friend. He goes to it for consolation whenever he feels blue and sullen, whenever nostalgia claims him as her own. How quickly do the careworn, the tired, the strugglers, the successful ones as well, find rest in the realms of humor!" In the course of his busy life--to give some facts not to be found in the Yonkers eulogy--Mr. Bangs has been vestryman of a church, a purchaser of books for a public library, a journalist, and a director of a private school. At present he is giving brilliant service as editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Meantime, his pen, or his typewriter, is not idle at home, as the publication a few months ago of "The Idiot at Home" attests. [Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND.] HAMLIN GARLAND Hamlin Garland is Western in every sense of that broad term. To him the West has been birthplace, playground, battlefield. Not only as a writer but also as a man he takes that far-seeing, keen, sincere, unconventional view of things in general that distinguishes the thoroughbred Westerner. Like Jim Matteson, the hero of his latest novel, he sympathizes with the elements. He might appear to be at home in an Eastern drawing-room, but we think that he would prefer to live in his own country. There might be some dissent from the opinion that he is the foremost of our Western novelists; but there can hardly be any dissent from the opinion that he occupies an unique place in American literature, for not only has he sounded a new, vibrant, resonant chord in our literature, but he also has been our one fearless and unchangeable literary impressionist. "I believe," he said once, to illustrate his rule of work, "that the beauty disease has been the ruin of much good literature. It leads to paint and putty--to artificiality. If a thing is beautiful, well and good; but I do not believe in an artist using literary varnish in writing of sordid things. He can discover the beauty in sordid lives not by varnishing them, but by sympathetic interpretation of them." The West has been his birthplace and his playground. He was born in the beautiful La Crosse Valley, Wisconsin, in September, 1860. His parents were of Scotch Presbyterian stock, which fact, together with his early environment, must account for his radical and aggressive mental outfit. "My dear old parents," he says, "brought me up like a Spartan soldier. I owe so much to my mother; to the goodness and patient sympathy with which she trained and softened my blustering boyish nature." If you look at the dedication of "Main-Travelled Roads" you will find an echo of this eulogy: "To my father and mother, whose half-century pilgrimage on the main-travelled road of life has brought them only trial and deprivation, this book is dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." This appreciation of his parents' more than dutiful sacrifices constantly finds expression in the author's work; it is a salient feature of his individuality. Seven years after his birth the family moved to Winneshiek County, Iowa, a spot typical of the primeval West; and it was here that Garland first got the vivid impressions of nature which he has so successfully pictured in his stories. There is, for instance, in "Up the Coulé," a little picture worthy of Millet. "A farm in the valley. Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sideways in the blast. The ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and sticky, with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his cheeks was watching cattle, a dog seated near, his back to the gale." But did Garland take any part in such experiences? He did, indeed. "I ploughed seventy acres of land when I was ten years old," he says, "and more each year after that. I was so small that I had to reach up to catch hold of the handles of the plough, but I did it. I can remember well how I felt when I started out for my first ploughing in the spring. My muscles were then tender, my feet sank down into the soil, throwing my weight on the ankles and the tendons of the feet. By the end of the first day I was almost ready to drop with pain, but I had to go on. And how my bones did ache the next morning when I was called to go to work! I worked right along, however, going to school in the winter until I was fifteen." But not all the work was at the plough. With his brother Frank he worked out on the prairies, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes scouting for the neighbors. Indeed, somewhere, we believe, the author has said that almost half his life has been spent in the meadows and on horseback. Many recollections of these days are to be found in "Prairie Songs," which book, in fact, is almost a complete reflection of his boyhood days. And on the prairies, too, he met the grangers,--we use the word in its dignified sense--"those incessant toilers who experience, in all its bareness, the rough and bitter side of the great 'main-travelled road.'" But the school in which he got the bulk of his education was Cedarville Academy, in Mitchell County, just a little westward from his home. There he made a special study of history and English composition; and there, for the first time in his life, he had the use of a library. He was graduated from the academy at the age of twenty-one. The following two years he spent teaching and lecturing in the East. The list of the subjects of his lectures show us the breadth of mind which he had reached just as he entered citizenhood; it attests, too, his remarkable intellectual energy and his sympathy with his times. These are some of the literary topics: The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau; The Balladists, with readings from Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes; Walt Whitman, the Prophet of the New Age; The Epic of the Age, the Novel, the American Novel; Americanism in the Novel, with reference to William Dean Howells and Henry James; The Pioneers, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller; Some Representative Names, Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, Miss Baylor, Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke; the City in Fiction and the Drama; The Future of Poetry and Fiction; The Art of Edwin Booth; Shakespeare and Browning. There is something truly Western in the fact that Garland was attracted to Dakota by the land boom of 1883. He soon learned, however, that the boom was not for him; indeed, his only profit from it was experience. In 1884, consequently, he took up the study of English literature in the Boston Public Library. He had intended to take a course in literature and oratory at some college, preliminary to returning to the West to teach. But it is significant of his mental make-up that he found college methods "too scholastic and too dry," and, in general, opposed to his own convictions. This brings to mind what a man who met him early in the nineties said: "It would be impossible for any conventional critic to kill Mr. Garland with scholarly criticism; he has a buoyancy of indifference to obstacles as free as a cyclone from one of his own Iowa prairies; he would joyously tell the most learned professors of Harvard College that the universities as at present conducted in America are the bulwarks of conservatism and the foes of progress; the people who hear him talk about realism and naturalism and truth usually confess an exhilaration at 'finding someone now-a-days' who believes the things he does believe with most consuming fervor." Naturally his unconventional method of studying English literature had an unusual result. To quote from remarks that he made in Boston a few years ago: "The whole perspective of English literature changed with me. Chaucer was no longer great simply because someone had said that he was; Crabbe was not dry because some professor of English literature had said so. I went into the philosophic development of English literature from the earliest myth, through the drama--which, by the way, I found to be a continuous chain, and not a miracle--up to distinctively modern literature. Throughout, I gave to my reading a modern man's comments. If I didn't like an author's work I didn't try to like it. So, you see, after all, my work in the library was mainly a process fitting me for teaching." But all the time, as a matter of fact, he was moving farther away from the teacher's desk. As he studied American literature it occurred to him that the Western side of it might be still further developed. That side certainly lacked anything corresponding to his fresh and deep impressions of it. It was only a step from the thought to the deed. _Harper's Weekly_ published his first poem, "Lost in the Norther," a description of a man lost in a blizzard, and paid him twenty-five dollars for it. With characteristic generosity, he spent the money on his parents, buying a copy of Grant's "Memoirs" for his father and a silk dress for his mother. His mother, too, by the way, received half the money paid for his first bit of fiction. This is the story that Garland told in Washington five or six years ago: "I had been studying in Boston for several years, when I went out to Dakota to visit my parents. The night after I arrived I was talking with mother about old times and old friends. She told me how one family had gone to New York for a visit and had returned only too happily to their Western home. As she told the story the pathos of it struck me. I went into another room and began to write. The story was one of the best chapters of my book 'Main-Travelled Roads.' I read it to mother, and she liked it, and upon telling her that I thought it was worth at least seventy-five dollars she replied: 'Well, if that is so I think you ought to divvy with me, for I gave you the story.' 'I will,' said I, and so when I got my seventy-five dollars I sent her a check for half. I got many good suggestions during that trip to Dakota. I wrote poems and stories. Some of the stories were published in _The Century Magazine_, and I remember that I received six hundred dollars within two weeks from its editors. It was perhaps a year later before I published my first book." This first book is "Main-Travelled Roads," which by some is still regarded as his best book. During the past ten years he has been almost restlessly busy with novels, poems, essays, and plays, in all of which there is more or less evidence of his magnificent unconventionality. For if there be anything magnificently unconventional in American literature it is such works as "A Spoil of Office" and "Crumbling Idols." "I am," said Garland, in a letter written in 1891, "an impressionist, perhaps, rather than a realist. I believe, with Monet, that the artist should be self-centred, and should paint life as he sees it. If the other fellow doesn't see the violet shadows on the road, so much the worse for him. A whole new world of color is opening to the eyes of the present generation, exemplifying again that all beauty, all mystery, is under our spread hand--waiting to be grasped. I believe, also, that there is the same wealth of color-mystery in the facts of our daily lives, and that within a single decade a race of dramatists and novelists will demonstrate the truth of my inference." The decade has come and gone, but the new race of dramatists and novelists is still absent. Mr. Garland is even now far ahead of the crowd. He once described his manner of working to Mr. Walter Blackburn Harte, another radical, but not so fortunate, thinker. He said that he never writes under pressure. "I work precisely as some painters do. I have unfinished pictures lying around my workshop. After breakfast each morning I go into my writing-room, and whichever picture chimes in with my mood, after a glance around, claims me for that morning. I work on it as long as I find great pleasure in it, and I stop the moment I am conscious of it becoming a grind. If I have any power left, I turn to something else; if not, I quit and turn to recreation--reading, study; or I go out for a walk. I do all my writing on blocks of manuscript paper, and I have stacks of these lying around, as many as forty or fifty in various stages of completion. I never write on any one thing day after day just with the purpose of getting it done. I believe thoroughly in moods, although I do not wait for any particular mood, for I am in the mood every morning for something. All my work interests me supremely, or I should not do it." Mr. Garland was married a few years ago to Miss Zuleme Taft, of Chicago, who has achieved some fame as a sculptor. PAUL LEICESTER FORD In 1876, when Paul Leicester Ford was eleven years old, he published "The Webster Genealogy," a genealogy of Noah Webster, with notes and corrections of his own. When he was seventeen he published "Websteriana, a catalogue of books by Noah Webster, collated from the library of Gordon L. Ford." At nineteen he also became the author of "Bibliotheca Chaunciana: a list of the writings of Charles Chauncy," the second president of Harvard College. So much, at least, Ford accomplished before he was out of his 'teens. Yet, considering his environment, this record is not a matter of wonder. Ford's father was Gordon L. Ford, a successful lawyer, a diligent student of American history, and, in the great Greeley's day, publisher of the _New York Tribune_; and, which is more to the point, the collector and owner of one of the largest and richest private libraries in the United States. Little beyond these facts is known by those who had not the privilege of Gordon Ford's acquaintance. Mr. Lindsay Swift speaks of him as "an idealist of the type which does not readily pursue other than the highest ends, and which cannot throw open the reserves of its nature." Paul was born on March 23, 1865. On his mother's side he is descended from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, the author of the precious manuscript in the State House at Boston. On this side, too, he is the great-great-great-grandson of the aforementioned Chauncy and the great-grandson of the aforementioned Webster, the lexicographer, and the grandson of Professor Fowler of Amherst College. Paul's brother, Worthington Chauncy Ford, by the way, is already famous, though in a quieter way, as a statistician and publicist. Paul was a delicate child; his very delicacy gave him the opportunity to cultivate, under extremely favorable circumstances, his endowment of strong mental faculties. He was educated in his father's library. It is said that the Ford house, which stood in Clark Street, Brooklyn, was fairly walled with books. At the time these books were transferred to the New York Public Library their number was given out as one hundred thousand. The library itself was a room some fifty feet square. There the Ford boys were educated under the supervision of their cultured parents. Ford is by nature a student; and under his father's guidance this disposition was sedulously cultivated. As a child he learned to set type, and as a child, also, he assisted his father in historiographical work. The father and the two sons established the Historical Printing Club, issuing books and pamphlets relating to American history and bibliography. This club was maintained until after the father's death. Among its products were the papers to which we have already referred. Mr. Lindsay Swift has written an interesting description of the famous bibliographical arena in which Ford developed his genius. The description, of course antedates the memorable transfer. The room, "over fifty feet square, and reached from the main floor by a short flight of steps," he says, "is well but not glaringly lighted by a lantern at the top, while the sides, with the exception of a few small windows, of no great utility owing to the tallness of surrounding buildings, are fully taken up with books to the height of eight feet. The floor is covered in part by large rugs; the walls and ceilings are of serious tint; a fireplace is opposite the entrance; while sofas of most dissimilar pattern and meant seemingly to hold any burden but a human one, are placed 'disposedly' about; chairs, easy but not seductive, are in plenty, but like the sofas give notice that here is a government not of men but of books--here is no library built for the lust of the flesh and pride of the eye, but for books and for those who use them. I cannot suppose that those smitten of bibliophily would thrill over the Ford library, since it exists for the practical and virile, although it is, in parts, exceedingly choice. Roughly classified to suit the easy memories of the owners, it presents an appearance urbane and unprecise rather than military and commanding. At irregular intervals loom huge masses of books, pamphlets, papers, proof-sheets and engravings in cataclysmic disorder and apparently suspended in mid air, like the coffin of the False Prophet, but, in fact, resting on tables well hidden by the superincumbent piles. In this room the father slowly accumulated this priceless treasure, mostly illustrative of American history and its adjuncts, thereby gratifying his own accurate tastes and hoping, as we may suppose, that his children would ultimately profit by his foresight." No doubt the father had such a hope, and before he died he lived to enjoy the fullest realization of it. At any rate, that room was Paul Ford's college, and, later, his literary workshop. It might dull the reader's interest to enter into a detailed account of all the early work that Ford did in his father's library, but we may say that between 1886 and 1896 he published more than twenty pamphlets and books bearing on American historiography and bibliography, besides the bulk of "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson." As evidence of his prodigious capacity for energy, we offer the list of works which he published in the single year 1889: "The Franklin Bibliography: a list of books written by or relating to Benjamin Franklin," "List of Some Briefs in Appeal Cases Which Relate to America Tried Before the Lords Commissioners of Appeals of Prize Cases of His Majesty's Privy Council, 1736-1758," "Check-List of American Magazines Printed in the Eighteenth Century," "Check-List of Bibliographies, Catalogues, Reference Lists, and Lists of Authorities of American Books and Subjects," "Some Materials for a Bibliography of the Official Publications of the Continental Congress for 1774," "The Ideals of the Republic; or Great Words from Great Americans," and "Who was the Mother of Franklin's Son?" His most notable historical works are "The True George Washington," which excited so much comment when it appeared in 1896, and "The Many-Sided Franklin," published serially in _The Century Magazine_ a few years ago. Though he may take advantage of moods, he does not wait for moods. They say that Alphonse Daudet was such a man of moods that two months would pass sometimes and leave the paper before him still blank. Ford is Daudet's antithesis in this respect. His pen is always ready. Perhaps this characteristic is one of the advantages of pursuing diverse interests. Yet, notwithstanding the immense amount of literature which he has produced already, the New Yorker is as painstaking as one of those Japanese artists who will labor for years on a single vase. Once, when half-way through a book, he discovered that he was reaching the wrong conclusion, so he destroyed what he had done and began again. Only a writer with a heroic disregard of time and effort, and with a sincere purpose and unlimited zeal, would make such a sacrifice. It is what we should expect of every master-craftsman, yet we fear that the deed is uncommon enough. Mr. Ford's high reputation as a novelist was established by "The Honorable Peter Stirling." Much of the success of the novel was due without doubt to the report that the hero of it was none other than the Hon. Grover Cleveland. Technically the story has only a slight value; or perhaps it is fairer to say that its literary merit rises and falls. There are passages that drag; there are clumsy passages; there are amusing unrealities; and there are scenes photographic in their portrayal of metropolitan life. Then, again, the broad theme naturally interested the public--that great led and leading mass of humanity with its mercurial temper and shifting whims and deep sympathies. The strength and the weakness of the book--its literary dimness and its popular attractiveness--are illustrated in Stirling's speech at the Coldman trial. "The event of the trial came, however, when Peter summed up. He spoke quietly, in the simplest language, using few adjectives and no invectives. But as the girl at the Pierce's dinner had said: 'He describes things so that one sees them.' He told of the fever-stricken cows, and he told of the little fever-stricken children in such a way that the audience sobbed; his clients almost had to be ordered out of court; the man next Dummer mopped his eyes with his handkerchief; the judge and jury thoughtfully covered their eyes (so as to think better); the reporters found difficulty (owing to the glary light) in writing the words, despite their determination not to miss one; and even the prisoner wiped his eyes in his sleeve. Peter was unconscious that he was making a great speech; great in its simplicity, and great in its pathos. He afterward said that he had not given it a moment's thought and had merely said what he felt. Perhaps his conclusion indicated why he was able to speak with the feeling he did. For he said: "'This is not merely the case of the State _versus_ James Coldman. It is the case of the tenement-house children against the inhumanity of man's greed.'" A vivid picture sketched crudely, judged from the artistic view-point; but a picture to touch the heart of the people. This human element in the story, together with the popular idea that the hero was the distinguished statesman now resident in Princeton, made "The Honorable Peter Stirling" one of the most successful books of its day. In a greater or less degree these merits and defects are reflected in "The Story of an Untold Love" and in "The Great K. & A. Train Robbery," but "Janice Meredith" reveals marked literary improvement. Janice is unquestionably the least artificial of all his female characters. In "Janice Meredith," too, the author is on familiar ground. One has only to compare his Washington with the Washington whom Thackeray pictured in "The Virginians" to realize fully that while the English novelist was the abler writer the American is the closer student. It would be absurd for even the author's warmest admirer to set up the claim that "Janice Meredith" is the great American historical novel; and although some of the friendly critics have vaguely hinted as much, no one, we believe, has boldly gone to the extremity of a proclamation. But it must in all justice be said that the book contains some of the elements which one day will entitle a story to that phenomenal distinction. Notable among these elements are a glowing imaginativeness and a rare faithfulness of historical portraiture. Mr. Swift has fortunately given us a description of the author with his pen in hand. "A spirit of restlessness takes hold upon Mr. Ford when he is hardest at work," he says, "and he shifts at pleasure from one to another of his several desks or tables. I should imagine that the curiosity hunter of the future who might wish to possess the desk at which or the chair on which the author of 'Peter Stirling' sat when he penned that book, might comfortably fill a storage-warehouse van with new-found joys. Like most good fellows who write, Mr. Ford knows the value of the night and often works to best advantage when honest folk have been long abed." Again, Ford is described as being alive to every issue of the day and of the hour. He is brilliant at conversation, and perhaps more brilliant at controversy, "for," says Mr. Swift, "I can imagine no opposing argument so bristling with facts as to prevent his making a cavalry charge on a whole table of unsympathetic listeners. Life is at its keenest pitch when one is privileged to hear his urgent voice, with no little command withal in its notes, and to see the invincible clearness and dominance in his black-brown eyes." We can conclude with no happier remark than that, so far as fiction is concerned, at least, Mr. Ford seems destined to win still greater honors than those already in his possession. [Illustration: ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS.] ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS As we write this sketch, we have in mind the familiar picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, stretched out on a couch in his Samoan home, ailing, working. There is a sad sweetness in the sharpened face, and in the eyes is a gleam of bravery or determination. The Scot whom the entire reading world still loves so dearly, and will continue to love, it seems, when the babes of to-day are trembling graybeards, knew the strenuous life much more intimately than most of its new advocates; but it was a part of his art, and the artist conceals his art. Stevenson's sentences glitter, for they are gems of literature; but the glitter was given them at the expense of sublime patience and infinite pains. Unconsciously he presented an example of heroism; consciously he showed the young writers of his day that anything approaching perfection must be the product of scrupulous industry. Like the diamond polisher, he was never satisfied with a merely smooth facet: the facet dazzled or he was not content. We have Stevenson in mind at this time for many reasons. In the first place, the subject of this chapter, Robert Neilson Stephens, may know of the letter of congratulation which, when he was writing for the _Philadelphia Press_, some of the young men of that journal sent to the distinguished writer on the Pacific island; and possibly he may have seen the answer that Stevenson sent--an answer filled with modest thanks and sound advice and sincere good wishes. The letter ended with the remark that if the young Philadelphians labored skillfully and ambitiously they would surely make their mark. If Stevenson had lived he would have congratulated Robert Neilson Stephens four years ago. You will notice that there is a certain similarity between the features of the author of "The Master of Ballantrae" and the author of "Philip Winwood"--the same delicacy, the same lurking kindness, the same suggestion of indomitable intellectuality. And the resemblance extends beyond the features, also. Stevenson, in his youth, suffered from poverty; so did Stephens. The Scotchman for a long time dipped his pen in water, making no impression, receiving no encouragement, entertaining no luck; so, also, did the American. It is a story almost as old as the world, a story illustrated occasionally in the skies. Astronomers tells us that light, fast as it travels, takes years upon years to come to us. Often it is the same with men of genius: they blaze long before our narrow vision gives any sign of recognition. Someone, by the way, once sympathized with Stephens on his ill health. Yes, he was far from strong, he admitted; "but," he said, "they may say what they please--those who have never been poor--I would rather be ill and well-to-do, as I am, than poor and in good health, as I was for many years. I have had many sorrows, but hardly a sorrow that was not aggravated, if not caused, by poverty, or that very moderate wealth would not have ameliorated or prevented. The difference between pecuniary ease and poverty is oftentimes simply as the difference between heaven and hell." We may not all agree with the sentiment suggested, that riches in most circumstances or under most conditions are preferable to poverty with good health, but no one can fail to discern in the sentiment the bitter memory of a man who has been acquainted with great distress. At any rate, his is a philosophy based on experience. To experience, also, we may ascribe Stephens's animadversion regarding friendship. "When a man makes any kind of success, however small," he says, "he finds that his old friends resolve themselves into three classes. The first class turn sullen, and show their envy in many mean ways. The second class wax more friendly than ever, and come showering their attentions. The third class show a reasonable pleasure at your success, and remain just as they were before. God bless the last kind! God mend the second! and God pity the first!" Before generalizing farther it might be better to reveal some of Stephens's career. Robert Neilson Stephens, a descendant of the Jacobite fugitive who was grandfather of Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, was born on July 22, 1867, in New Bloomfield, a little town in Central Pennsylvania. The house in which he was born lay a stone's throw from the academy founded by his grandfather and conducted by his father. The first distressful event came into Robert's life when, at the age of nine, some seven years after the family had moved from New Bloomfield to Huntingdon, on the Juniata River, his father died. His mother, to support her children, took a position as a school teacher. Notwithstanding the lack of wealth, however, Robert went through the public high school. After leaving school he went to work, for three dollars and a half a week, in a bookstore connected with a stationery factory. Aside from his pride and his poverty, which seem to have influenced him to no small extent, he was a delicate youth, and his steadiest companions were books. Besides, he cultivated assiduously the faculty of observation. This cultivation shows itself in his books. He is unsurpassed among the novelists of the day for mastery of the life of bygone periods. The work in the bookstore was distasteful to him in many ways. The narrowness and the ignorance of the factory hands chafed his delicate sensibilities; the nature of the work itself jarred on his always strengthening mental equipment. He looked about him for a means of escape from this sort of prison, incarceration in which was little sweetened by the fact that in the second year his salary was raised to four dollars and a half. One of the modes of escape which he attempted was stenography. By assiduous practice he acquired such facility in this branch of writing that the Hon. John Scott, solicitor-general of the Pennsylvania Railroad, aided by Mr. William B. Wilson, an old friend of the boy's father, before long secured him a position in the railroad company's office in Philadelphia. When settled down, Robert brought his mother and brother to the city on the Delaware. But, pleasant as its environment was, the young stenographer saw in his new position no very rosy future. It was not--as it is not to-day--his disposition to confound mere comfort with success. We have quoted his remark that he would rather be rich and sick than poor and well; but we venture to think that the riches of Mr. Rockefeller would fail to give him absolute satisfaction so long as the feeling of professional success were absent from him. At any rate, we judge by his present pursuits and aims that his ideal is nearer to the revered and affluent workman, like Zola, for example, than like to a man whose sole object is the enjoyment and disbursement of dollars and cents. From the Pennsylvania road he went to the _Philadelphia Press_, which in those days was a veritable cradle of authors. Here his literary instinct took hold of him. It had taken hold of him once before, in Huntingdon, one vacation, when he had worked as printer's devil in the office of a weekly newspaper, and, as often happens to "devils," had been stricken down with what may be called typographical fever. The great are not alone in the enjoyment of authorship. We believe that Mr. Stephens's first literary offering, an article describing the joys and woes of budding printers, appeared in that Huntingdon weekly. That, however, was a mere juvenile spasm. It was nothing like the powerful impulse that came to him just previous to his début as a writer of theatrical notices for the _Press_. He showed so marked an aptitude for this employment that within a year he was virtually in full charge of the paper's important dramatic column. Stephens's career on the _Press_ was as varied as that of the average newspaper man, and, consequently, as interesting and precious. For the patience that, like the steam-drill, bores its way through every obstacle; for accumulative industry, for tireless zeal, for unaffected modesty dashed with power, for knowledge of the overt and covert ways of men--for such a unique mixture of crude virtue and wisdom combined commend us to the enthusiastic journalist. Stephens unconsciously heeded Stevenson's caution and retired from journalism before its hypnotic spell had taken complete possession of him. One of the reasons for his retirement from journalism was the singular rule made by the _Press_ that members of its staff must not write for any other periodical. Stephens had been fortunate in placing his extra work, and naturally he felt that the rule shut out promising opportunities. Besides, in 1889, he had married--Mrs. Stephens was, before her marriage, Miss Maude Helfenstein, of Chicago--and there were other reasons for his practical view of the situation. There was no risk in the retirement, for he had made many friends while on the _Press_, especially among the inhabitants of the theatrical world. He received and accepted, in 1893, an offer to become general agent for a firm of theatrical managers. Incidentally he was required to write cheap plays--plays for the vulgar public that Gautier despised and ridiculed. These dutiful efforts are hardly noteworthy, but we must mention "On the Bowery," a melodrama which afforded the picturesque and withal good-hearted Steve Brodie a chance to be heroic some sixty-four times a week. But although this grade of work was uncongenial to the author, it opened the way to a better field, and, in September, 1896, his play, "An Enemy to the King," written during the winter of 1894-95, was produced in New York by E. H. Sothern. As this was his first ambitious production, the author displayed some lack of nerve. Instead of accompanying his wife to the theatre, he shrank back to a nearby comfortable refuge, whither, between the acts, a friend brought him tidings of the performance. The call for him was led by Richard Harding Davis and DeWolf Hopper, who, running across him outside the theatre, half suffocated him with congratulatory embraces. By and by Mr. Sothern took the successful play to Boston; and there happened the circumstance which established the author's fame. The play was seen in Boston by Mr. L. Coues Page, the Boston publisher, who, recognizing in it the elements which constitute a popular semi-historical romance, and foreseeing the extensive demand for that branch of literature, sought the author and proposed that he should make a novel out of his play. The proposal was readily accepted; in fact the contract was signed twenty-four hours after the author and publisher had first met. The instantaneous popularity of the book, which was published in the fall of 1897, had a two-sided effect: it induced the author to abandon hack-work entirely and devote his best energy and proficiency to fiction. It is deeply to be regretted that Stephens's health declined simultaneously with his procession to the seats of the famous, yet these distressing conditions are hardly discernible in either the quantity or the quality of his work. In April, 1898, his second novel, "The Continental Dragoon," appeared, and in the following June the latest of his plays, "The Ragged Regiment," was produced at the Herald Square Theatre, New York. In October of that year appeared his third novel, "The Road to Paris"; in May, 1899, "A Gentleman Player"; in May, 1900, his highly popular Revolutionary romance, "Philip Winwood," written almost entirely in England, and published on the same day in England, Canada, and the United States. His latest novel, "Captain Ravenshaw," in which he returns to the scene of "A Gentleman Player"--Elizabethan London--has just reached the public. Shortly after the publication of "A Gentleman Player," the novelist, in the assurance of a handsome income and of consequent ease, went abroad with his wife. Abroad he has lived ever since. This fall, we understand, he will spend traveling on the Continent. The first part of the winter he plans to pass in Italy or in Sicily, the second part on the Riviera. The spring of 1902 will find him in Paris, whence, by the end of spring, he expects to start for home. We say "home" purposely, for we are told that his protracted residence abroad has served if anything to deepen and enliven his loyalty to his native land. We have been privileged to read the preface to "Captain Ravenshaw." The main part of it is a spirited and well-pointed defence of the neo-romanticists against the eccentric assault of Mr. William Dean Howells. Then, referring to the book itself, Stephens goes on to say: "Now, as to this little attempt at romance in a certain kind, I wish merely to say, for the benefit of those who turn over the first leaves of a novel in a bookstore or library, before deciding whether to take it or leave it, that it differs from the usual adventure story in being concerned merely with private life and unimportant people. Though it has incidents enough, and perils enough, it deals neither with war nor with state affairs. It contains no royal person; not even a lord--nor a baronet, indeed, for baronets had not yet been invented at the period of the tale. The characters are every-day people of the London of the time, and the scenes in which they move are the street, the tavern, the citizen's house and garden, the shop, the river, the public resort--such places as the ordinary reader would see if a miracle turned back time and transported him to London in the closing part of Elizabeth's reign. The atmosphere of that place and time, as one may find it best in the less known and more realistic comedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in prose narratives and anecdotes, and in the records left of actual transactions, strike us of the twentieth century as a little strange, somewhat of a world which we can hardly take to be real. If I have succeeded in putting a breath of this strangeness, this (to us) seeming unreality, into this busy tale, and yet have kept the tale vital with a human nature the same then as now, I have done something not altogether bad. Bad or good, I have been a long time about it, for I have grown to believe that though novel-reading properly comes under the head of play, novel-writing properly comes under the head of work. My work herein has not gone to attain the preciosity of style which distracts attention from the story, or the brilliancy of dialogue which--as the author of 'John Inglesant' says, 'declares the glory of the author more pregnantly than it increases reality of effect.' My work has gone, very much, to the avoidance of anachronisms. This is a virtue possessed by few novels which deal with the past, as only the writers of such novels know. It may be a virtue not worth achieving, but it was a whim of mine to achieve it. Ill health forbade fast writing, the success of my last previous work permitted slow writing, and I resolved to utilize the occasion by achieving one merit which, as it required neither genius nor talent, but merely care, was within my powers. The result of my care must appear as much in what the story omits as in what it contains. The reader may be assured at the outset, if it matters a straw to him, that the author of this romance of Elizabethan London (and its neighborhood) is himself at home in Elizabethan London; if he fails to make the reader also a little at home there in the course of the story, it is only because he lacks the gift, or skill of imparting." Months ago the demand for "Captain Ravenshaw" was so great that the publishers were forced to issue an unprecedentedly large first edition. The present circumstance is an eloquent commentary on the increase of the author's power and popularity. That power and that popularity seem destined to grow larger book by book. The master of a most graceful style and of diction unsurpassed for simplicity and clearness; a trained observer, as every successful writer must be; a diligent and uncommonly perspicacious student of the periods from which he takes his characters, the author of "Captain Ravenshaw" promises ably to sustain his already high reputation. As the fulfilment of this promise depends largely on the state of his health, we wish him well, confident that in expressing the wish we but echo the sentiment of his wide circle of admirers. [Illustration: CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.] CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS "Professor" Roberts he is still called by his old friends in New Brunswick, and, so far as we know, "Old Man" he is still called by his literary companions. "The 'Old Man,'" said Richard Hovey a few years ago, "he is fondly called by the poets who are his companions, not that he is so much the elder of the group, but perhaps because he had already achieved a certain measure of reputation and was a full-fledged man of letters when the others were just beginning their callow boy-bows to the Muse. And the name, given at the outset in a comic, mock-filial mood, has stuck to him as a term of endearment." Hovey--may he rest in peace!--loved and admired Roberts. He said so in writing; he said so o' nights in the company of his old friends in Boston. Hovey had a manner that would remind one of the rivers branching off Roberts's familiar Bay of Fundy. At first, a stranger, you found it empty; in a few moments, if he offered you the right hand of fellowship, it was flooding with a warm tide. We could readily go on for a page or two speaking of the lamented singer, and of what it meant to know him as a friend--to share his hospitality and his sympathy. But it occurs to us that some reader may be inquiring why the professor from New Brunswick has been brought into a book on American authors. We might answer, with a smile, to incite him to become as loyal an American as General Wallace or Mark Twain. Or we might repeat as an answer a statement made to us not long ago by an observant inhabitant of this part of the literary world--"Professor Roberts is quite as good an American as Henry James." But, using American in its fullest sense, Roberts easily comes in under that head. The shadow of the Stars and Stripes falls near his birthplace. His public is largely a purely American public. His residence for the last four years has been New York City. He is perhaps the most gifted author reared in late decades by our lovely neighbor, the Dominion of Canada, his alma mater-- O child of nations, giant-limbed, Who stand'st among the nations now Unheeded, unadored, unhymned, With unanointed brow! Speaking of Roberts in _The Writer_ once, his friend Hovey said: "All his excursions include a return ticket to the Maritime Provinces, and 'Up and Away in the Morning' is always for the sake of 'Home, Home in the Evening.'" This statement has been contradicted by Roberts's life during the last few years. He is to be found in New York winter and summer. At the same time we should be stultifying ourselves to deny his loyalty to his native land. It lives in many of his pages; it is kept aflame by ties of family and of friendship. The beautiful part of the world northeast of New England has been to him nursery, academy and studio. Indeed, one who knew him well has said: "He is neither Briton nor American, but assertively Canadian; and, if history ever make his dream a reality, his own poems will not have been an entirely negligible factor in bringing it to pass." Charles George Douglass Roberts, M.A., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L., was born in Douglas, at the mouth of the Keswick River, near Fredericton, New Brunswick, on January 10, 1860. His father, the Rev. G. Goodridge Roberts, M.A., the son of Professor George Roberts, Ph.D., is the rector of the English church in Fredericton, and also the canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His mother, Emma Wetmore Bliss Roberts, comes of what used to be known as United Empire Loyalist stock--the same stock, by the way, that Emerson's mother came of. Her ancestors left the colonies for the provinces at the outbreak of the American Revolution. There were many influential families among the Loyalists, and, on the whole, their headstrong flight has been beneficial to the land 'way down East. The novelist's mother, it should be said, is a sister of Bliss Carman's mother, which makes the two young writers, Roberts and Carman, cousins by blood as well as brothers by profession. A strong intellectual ancestry has Roberts, it will be seen, an ancestry that fully accounts for the circumstance that his sister and his two younger brothers are skillful at versification. The first fourteen years of Roberts's life were spent in Woodstock, of which parish his father was then the rector, and up to the end of these fourteen years Charles's education had been personally supervised by his father. Fortunate conditions!--as they who have missed such supervision can most eloquently testify. Ideal conditions, if we are to accept the well-digested opinion of scholastic as well as of medical experts. The Robertses moved from Woodstock to Fredericton in 1874. At Fredericton, Charles attended the Collegiate School. Chief among those who fitted the boy for college was Dr. George R. Parkin, who, although now the head of Upper Canada College, Toronto, has perhaps been most prominent as an Imperial Federationist advocate. In 1876 young Roberts was matriculated at the University of New Brunswick. As for his progress there, no more need be said than that he won the Douglas silver medal for Latin and Greek, the alumni gold medal for the Latin essay, and a classical scholarship. In 1879 he was graduated with honors in ethics, metaphysics and political economy. That same year he was appointed head master of the Chatham (N. B.) Grammar School. The next year, 1880, chronicled two notable events--his marriage, and the publication of his first book, "Orion and Other Poems." In 1881, at the University of New Brunswick, he took his degree of Master of Arts for Greek and higher mathematics. During the next two years he taught school in Fredericton. Then there came a brief excursion which may have illustrated his doubts about a career. He left off teaching and went to Toronto. There, with the assistance of Goldwin Smith, he established _The Week_, the most important of the Canadian literary periodicals. He relinquished this work the following year to take the chair of English and French literature in King's College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1887 he abandoned the French department for the department of Economics and International Law. At Windsor he lived in a house in the balmy woods--"Kingscroft," he called it--and there he planned three books--"The Forge in the Forest," his first Acadian romance; "The Book of the Native," and "A History of Canada." These plans compelled the abandonment of teaching, so, in 1895, Roberts left King's College and returned to Fredericton. At the age of thirty-five, therefore, he formally adopted the profession of literature. Early in 1897 he moved to New York, where for eight months he was associate editor of _The Illustrated American_. Since then he has directed his efforts wholly to authorship. And with the utmost justification. In narrative and in descriptive power he shines brilliantly among his contemporaries. Hovey would not answer the question: "Who is the greatest poet born on Canadian soil?"--"but," he writes, "when I say that Roberts is _par excellence_ the 'Poet of Canada,' I have little fear that anyone will contradict me." There is his noble hymn, "Canada," there is "Autochthon," there is "Kinship," there is "Origins"--poems of faultless grace and deep-founded sentiment and what one critic has termed "chiselled, Parnassian calm." For example: The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane. Space, in the dim predestined hour, Shall crumble like a ruined tower. I only, with unfaltering eye, Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by. Hovey, whom we may accept as an accomplished judge of symbolist literature, put "Do Seek their Meat from God" and "The Young Ravens that call upon Him," two sketches in "Earth's Enigmas," and "Savory Meats," a story published in the _Chap-Book_, together, and said that they "form an altogether unique and extraordinary triptych. I am inclined to think these three pieces," he says, "Roberts's most notable contribution to literature. The problem of the struggle for existence, of the preying of life on life, is treated with an inexorable fidelity to the fact, a catholic sympathy, a sense of universality and mystery, and a calm acceptance, that reaches the level of 'pathos' in the highest Greek usage of the word. There is a finality in these three prose poems that is known only to the greatest art." As for Robert's novels, they are full of the perfumed freshness, the vigorous life and the romantic wealth which constituted, and to a small extent still constitute, the salient characteristics of the lands in which he spent his youth. We have noted his narrative and descriptive power. Let us take from "A Sister to Evangeline" one of Paul Grande's visions of Yvonne de Lamourie. "In one of these I saw her as she stood a certain morning in the orchard, prying with insistent little finger-tips into the heart of a young apple-flower, while I watched and said nothing. I know not to this day whether she were thinking of the apple-flower or wondering at the dumbness of her cavalier; but she feigned, at least, to concern herself with only the blossom's heart. Her wide white lids downcast over her great eyes, her long lashes almost sweeping the rondure of her cheek, she looked a Madonna. The broad, low forehead; the finely chiselled nose, not too small for strength of purpose; the full, firm chin--all added to this sweet dignity, which was of a kind to compel a lover's worship. There was enough breadth to the gracious curve below the ear to make me feel that this girl would be a strong man's mate. But the mouth, a bow of tenderness, with a wilful dimple at either delectable corner always lurking, spoke her all woman, too laughing and loving to spend her days in sainthood. Her hair--very thick and of a purply-bronze, near to black--lay in careless fullness over her little ears. On her head, though in all else she affected the dress of Grand Pré maids, she wore, not the Acadian linen cap, but a fine shawl of black Spanish lace, which became her mightily. Her bodice was of linen homespun, coarse, but bleached to a creamy whiteness; and her skirt, of the same simple stuff, was short after the Acadian fashion, so that I could see her slim ankles, and feet of that exceeding smallness and daintiness which may somehow tread heavily upon a man's heart." And there is a strong resemblance to Thomas Hardy in at least one of the paragraphs narrating Paul Grande's race with death toward the Anderson farm--the paragraph dealing with the idle things that then incongruously concerned the hero: "Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight for an instant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver; I see the shadow of a dead, gnarled branch cast upon a mossy open in startling semblance to a crucifix--so clear, I cannot but stoop and touch it reverently as I pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a company of tall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming to float toward me, a squadron of small, light wings; I hear the smooth swish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant creak of the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp crackle of dry twigs as we thread the aisles of older forest; I hear, from the face of a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournful _Whóo-hu-hu--Hóo-oo_ of the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper, of bruised snakeroot, and of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy breath of unseen _linoea_; and once at the fringed brink of a rivulet, the pungent fragrance of wild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings of branches on my face; I feel the strong prickles of the fir, the cool, flat frondage of the spruce and hemlock, the unresisting, feathery spines of the young hackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey web upon my face, and the abhorrence with which I dash off the fat spider that clings to my chin; I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I tread upon a humped and swollen gathering of toad-stools." More than one judicious critic has remarked that few men of his years have achieved--and deservedly!--the literary renown which Professor Roberts's published works warrant. These works are as follows: "Orion and Other Poems" (1880), "In Divers Tones" (1887), "The Canadians of Old" (a translation from the French of de Gaspé, 1889), Appleton's "Canadian Guide Book" (1890), "Ave, An Ode for the Shelley Centenary" (1892), "Songs of the Common Day" (1893), "The Raid of Beauséjour" (1894), "Reub Dare's Shad Boat" (1895), "Around the Camp Fire" (1896), "Earth's Enigmas" (1896), "A History of Canada" (1897), "The Forge in the Forest" (1897), "The Book of the Native" (1897), "New York Nocturnes" (1898), "A Sister to Evangeline" (1898), "By the Marshes of Minas" (1900), "The Heart of the Ancient Wood" (1900). However, notwithstanding this long and excellent literary record, we are assured that Roberts "has a keen fondness for athletics. He is an enthusiastic football and tennis player, canoeist and fisherman, and is equally as skilled in these as he is in the pursuits of literature." Another novel from his pen, "Barbara Ladd," appears this fall. "I consider it," he writes, "a sort of cross between 'The Heart of the Ancient Wood' and a historical-psychological romance." As for the future, he says: "Next will probably appear a collection of poems, and a collection of animal stories. Then another romance, planned but not yet named; and then, if the Fates are very good to me, I'll take time for a long lyrical drama on which I have been engaged off and on for some years." [Illustration: Photo by Strauss. WINSTON CHURCHILL.] WINSTON CHURCHILL Late in the year 1900 it suddenly became plain to some of the mystified inhabitants of the literary world that there were two Winston Churchills. It is indeed remarkable how long the error lived which confounded Winston L. S. Churchill, war correspondent and politician, and eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, with plain Winston Churchill, the author of "Richard Carvel." The error cropped out soon after the beginning of the South African war, when the Englishman, at a place called Estcourt, took gallant part in the defence of an armored train bound to the relief of Ladysmith. It was the result of one of the sentences in the report of the action: "Winston Churchill's brilliant behavior is compared with the gallant action in the Tirah campaign, which won the Victoria cross for Lord Fincastle, who was also acting as a newspaper correspondent." Immediately some persons, who should have known better, jumped to the conclusion that this Winston Churchill was the author of a book then extremely popular in this country. It is a notable commentary on the persistency of false ideas that the two Churchills were not, in certain quarters, positively distinguished from each other until they met in Boston the middle of last December. It was an interesting meeting, as we gather from the notes of a witness. "The young, light-haired Englishman was in bed, in his room at the Touraine, shortly after noon, when Major J. B. Pond arrived with a heavily built six-footer, smooth-shaven, dark-complexioned, a pair of merry black eyes, and a rather thick body encased in a raglan of dark gray. "'Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill,' said the Major. The man on the bed turned over on his side and held out his hand. "'I'm sorry to find that you are ill,' said the Churchill in the raglan, as he caught the outstretched hand. "'Nothing serious, I guess,' said the other; 'been travelling, you know. But, I say, how came you by that name?' "The author of 'Richard Carvel' smiled. "'The first trace of it I can find in the family,' he said, 'is about 1851. It seems that there have been Winston Churchills over here for a good many years.' "Then there was an exchange of bouquets. Winston Churchill said that he had always been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with his namesake, and the other Churchill said something in the same strain. "'I was interested when I read your first book,' said the Englishman. 'Didn't think a great deal of that book; but the other one, "Richard Carvel," I was willing to become responsible for that.' "Then it developed that each had been responsible for the other to a greater or less extent. For this reason it was inevitable that they should meet." As a matter of fact, mail for the Englishman, simply directed "Winston Churchill, Boston, Mass.," had been sent to his namesake's residence on Beacon Street. Later it was told that the American met the same embarrassment in London. "When I was staying at Brown's Hotel," he said to the Parliamentarian, "I found it almost impossible to get my mail. They compelled me to sign for it personally." The Englishman, by the way, is the author of a romance in regard to which the London critics seem to hold an opinion similar to that which he admittedly holds in regard to the American's first novel--"The Celebrity." Speaking of "The Celebrity" reminds us of the still prevalent notion that its contemptible hero is Mr. Richard Harding Davis. In fact we believe that the author was openly charged with having written the satire merely to pay a private grudge. We heard an echo of the charge as late as this year. Yet, more than two years ago Mr. Churchill, in a public letter, took pains specifically to deny the imputation. "The Celebrity" he said, in effect, was entirely an imaginary work. No one at all resembling the chief character had ever been met by him. So far from paying grudges, he had no grudge to pay. Indeed, the young writer grew so tender on the subject that the Colonial atmosphere of "Richard Carvel" was attributed to his desire to avoid contemporary themes. But the truth is, he completed "The Celebrity" while temporarily short of historical material for use in the history of Richard and his Dorothy. Twice he thoroughly revised "The Celebrity" before sending it to the publishers. And who is this Winston Churchill? He is the son of Spalding Churchill of Maine and Emma Bell Blaine of St. Louis, and he was born in the Missouri metropolis on Nov. 10, 1871. The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his birthplace; and there, at Smith Academy, he prepared for college. The college proved to be the Naval Academy at Annapolis. As a boy he was inclined to be uncommonly studious, but at the Naval Academy he developed a strong inclination towards athletics. It was largely owing to his energy and his enthusiasm that the cadets revived rowing. Like most other cadets, he learned to fence expertly; and you will find an intimate knowledge of this accomplishment in his treatment of one of the most dramatic scenes in "Richard Carvel." He took to horseback riding, also to golf and to tennis, in short, to all the pastimes that strengthen the body and enliven the mind. It is his devotion to physical exercise which has enabled him to work long and hard without distress. He felt, before his graduation from Annapolis, that his place was at the writing table, not on the deck of a man-o'-war. Apropos of which he has said: "When a man is being trained for a definite career, it helps him to make up his mind as to his tastes and abilities. If he is sure he doesn't want to do that particular thing, he must know pretty definitely what he does want to do. When he throws over a certainty for a chance his heart must be firmly set on the kind of work involved in the chance. For this reason a technical school helps some men to find their vocation better than four years at a university, where the training is general." In 1894 he became editor of the _Army and Navy Journal_. The following year he joined the staff of the _Cosmopolitan_ at Irvington-on-the-Hudson. While working for the magazine he took as wife Miss Mabel Harlakenden Hall of St. Louis, whose fortune induced him to give up magazine work altogether and devote himself to the realization of his dreams. Now if Churchill lacked either determination or genius the wealth that through marriage he became a sharer in would have have availed him little. He might have attracted some attention as a dilettante, or he might have done the things that a wealthy person alone can do--establish another _Anglo-Saxon Review_, for example, or publish small thoughts in editions de luxe. He would have succeeded if his wife had never brought him a copper. It would have taken him longer to succeed, that is all. Art is long, and life is short only to the poor fellow who must ascend the ladder round by round. But not all the money in the world can ease the labor of the brain. Churchill's ambition, from the first moment that he felt the literary impulse, was to write a historical novel. Annapolis had fired his imagination. "Seeing those old houses," he once said, "which used to be the scenes of the gayest and happiest social life before the Revolution--they look as if the people had just gone out of them--and reading the history of the town as it used to be, interested me greatly in a certain aspect of the life of the colonial planters, which had not, it seemed to me, been fully and truthfully expressed in a novel. What I wanted to do in 'Richard Carvel' was to give a picture of the life of colonial Maryland and Virginia, with special reference to Annapolis, and to contrast the people who made it with the corresponding element in England. One of the things I wanted to bring out strongly was that, although the leading men in business, in professional life, and in politics, in both Maryland and London, came from the same stock, a few generations back, politically, the British had sunk into a state of gross corruption and degradation, while the Americans were men of the highest integrity and the cleanest motives, mindful of their legal and moral debt to Great Britain, but resolute not to endure more than a certain amount of injustice." And how do you suppose Mr. Churchill prepared for the big task of writing a historical novel? He has answered the question himself: "By visiting all the places concerned in the story, and by reading biographies, histories, memoirs, letters, old newspapers--in fact, everything which could give me an insight into the life of those days, or into the character of the people like John Paul Jones and Charles Fox, whom I desired to introduce. Of course I read a great deal too much; a great many books gave me no direct help and added nothing to what I had already learned; but I have no doubt that all this reading counted in the way of letting me into the spirit and the atmosphere and the ideas and the business methods and the modes of life and thought of those days. Of course, I took voluminous notes, and had no end of trouble to keep them arranged so that I could use them, in spite of the effort I made to keep notes on costumes in one volume, manners and customs in another, unusual words and turns of expression in another, incidents in another, character in another, history in another and so on." "Richard Carvel" was begun in St. Louis not long after the author's marriage. It was written over again for the fifth time between October, 1898, and April, 1899, at a little town on the Hudson, an hour's journey from New York. Yet it is a proof of Churchill's zeal and industry that in those six months he visited the metropolis only five times. His habit is to work from early breakfast until one in the afternoon, and then, after luncheon, for a few hours more, after which he takes some physical exercise; and after dinner he picks up the thread of the story again. You see, his literary methods are very simple; they mean work early and late, work done doggedly, and as scrupulously as if the keenest critic were looking over his shoulder. The furore which "Richard Carvel" excited is too well remembered, we think, to particularize on. The author was made a lion of everywhere, truly, and exhibited in all the gilded cages of the East. We recall that the mere announcement of his purpose to go to the theatre in New York was sufficient to insure a big audience. Not another one of our American authors whose fame is of recent acquirement, and whose inclination is to keep far from the madding crowd has been followed about by so many hero-worshippers as the author of "Richard Carvel" was during the twelvemonth following the publication of the book. Was the attention justly merited? Undoubtedly. "Richard Carvel" is an extraordinarily powerful story. Its atmosphere is vivid; its characters are excellently drawn; its plot is skillfully laid; its action is vigorous and delightfully varied. "Richard Carvel" was the first of a series of historical novels which Churchill planned just after leaving Annapolis. It has been followed lately by the second member of the series, "The Crisis," the writing of which occupied nearly two years. While thus engaged the author declined to be interrupted. Naturally, after bounding to the top of the ladder, anything which he might have offered would have been accepted by some publishers. "You have no idea," he once remarked, "of the temptations that are put in the way of a man whose book has been accorded a popular success." The temptations he brushed aside; he made up his mind to pursue a straight road. And wisely, for, as he argues, "When a man makes a great reputation by a single book, and then allows succeeding books to go from his hands which do not represent the very best work of which he is capable, the public finds it out at once. No matter if there is good work in these hastily written books, people ignore them. I think it is the worst thing a man can do for his reputation to write books too fast. Of course, it is the worst possible thing he can do for his lasting reputation, which is the thing really worth working for, but what I mean is that it is the worst thing he can do in the short run as well as in the long run. Why, even speaking commercially, which is the lowest and the least and the last way in which one can look at these things, it is a fatal mistake. And I think a novelist makes a great mistake if he confines himself to one period or writes several books on one epoch, though it is more or less the practice to-day. I think we ought to go in more for versatility." Mr. Churchill is seen in New York and Boston in the winter; in the summer he is to be found only by traveling 'way down East. In Boston, particularly, the Churchills have become very well known. There Mr. Churchill puts up at the most aristocratic clubs, and Mrs. Churchill graces the most fashionable receptions. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact. 
45610	----	https://archive.org/details/littlepilgrimage00harkiala LITTLE PILGRIMAGES AMONG THE MEN WHO HAVE WRITTEN FAMOUS BOOKS * * * * * * _Book Lovers' Series_ [Illustration] _Little Pilgrimages Among the Men Who Have Written Famous Books_ _Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books_ [Illustration] _L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 200 Summer Street Boston, Mass._ * * * * * * [Illustration: Reproduced, by permission, from "A Pair of Patient Lovers."--Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.] LITTLE PILGRIMAGES AMONG THE MEN WHO HAVE WRITTEN FAMOUS BOOKS by E. F. Harkins Illustrated [Illustration] Boston L. C. Page & Company MDCCCCII Copyright, 1901, by L. C. Page & Company (Incorporated) All rights reserved Typography by The Heintzemann Press Boston Presswork by The Colonial Press C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston PREFACE _The aim of this book is to present to the reading public sketches of some of its American literary heroes. There are heroes young and old; but in literature, especially, age has little to do with favorites. At the same time, it will be noted that the subjects of these sketches occupy places in or near the centre of the literary stage. The lately dead, like Maurice Thompson; the hero of the last generation, like Edward Everett Hale; the young man who has made his first successful flight--these do not come within the scope of the present work. So, if some reader miss his favorite, let him understand that at least there was no malice in the exclusion._ _A part of the aim has been to present the social or personal as well as the professional side of the authors. Many of the anecdotes commonly told of well-known novelists are apocryphal or imaginary. Care, therefore, has been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. Wherever it was possible, preference has been given the statements of the authors themselves._ _The sketches are arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of the authors' first publications. No other arrangement, indeed, would seem fair among so gifted and popular a company, writing for a public that discriminates while it encourages and enjoys._ CONTENTS _Page_ Preface 5 William Dean Howells 11 Bret Harte 27 Mark Twain 43 "Lew" Wallace 59 George W. Cable 75 Henry James 91 Francis Richard Stockton 107 Joel Chandler Harris 123 S. Weir Mitchell 139 Robert Grant 155 F. Marion Crawford 169 James Lane Allen 185 Thomas Nelson Page 201 Richard Harding Davis 215 John Kendrick Bangs 231 Hamlin Garland 247 Paul Leicester Ford 263 Robert Neilson Stephens 279 Charles D. G. Roberts 299 Winston Churchill 317 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _Page_ William Dean Howells _Frontispiece_ Bret Harte 27 Mark Twain 43 "Lew" Wallace 59 George W. Cable 75 Francis Richard Stockton 107 Joel Chandler Harris 123 S. Weir Mitchell 139 Robert Grant 155 F. Marion Crawford 169 James Lane Allen 185 Thomas Nelson Page 201 Richard Harding Davis 215 John Kendrick Bangs 231 Hamlin Garland 247 Paul Leicester Ford 263 Robert Neilson Stephens 279 Charles G. D. Roberts 299 Winston Churchill 317 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS Mr. Howells has reached that point of life and success where he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil. William Dean Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He has therefore reached the ripe age of sixty-four. When he was three years old his father moved from Martin's Ferry to Hamilton and bought _The Intelligencer_, a weekly paper. Nine years afterward he sold _The Intelligencer_ and moved to Dayton, becoming proprietor of the _Dayton Transcript_. This paper had been a semi-weekly, but Mr. Howells changed it to a daily; and his son William went to work for him. It was William's business to rise at four in the morning and sell the paper about town. But the _Transcript_ proved a failure, so the Howells family left Dayton and moved into the country on the banks of the Miami, where for a year a log-cabin was their home. Mr. Howells tells a characteristic story of those struggling days, "When I was a boy," he said some years ago, "I worked on my father's paper. Among other things, I set type. Those were days of great struggle for all of us. The paper was not profitable, and ours was a large family. My tastes and ambitions were all literary, and I wanted to write a story. Instead of writing it and then setting it up in type, I composed it at the case and put it in type as I invented it. We printed a chapter of it weekly in the paper, and so it was published as fast as I got it up. I tried to get three or four chapters ready in advance, but I could not do it. All I could possibly accomplish was to have one installment ready every time the paper went to press. This went on for a long while, and that story became a burden to me. It stretched out longer and longer, but I could see no way to end it. Every week I resolved that that story should be finished in the next week's paper; every week it refused to be finished. Finally I became positively panic stricken, and ended it somehow or other. The experience discouraged me to some extent. I made up my mind that I could not invent." In 1851, when William was fourteen, the family moved from the country to Columbus, where his father got employment as a clerk in the House of Representatives, and also as a compositor on the _Ohio State Journal_. William went to work as a reporter on the _Journal_. Five years later he became the Columbus correspondent of the _Cincinnati Gazette_. In 1859 he took the position of news editor of the _Ohio State Journal_. Later that same year Howells senior, from whom the son evidently inherited his industry and ambition, bought the _Ashtabula Sentinel_ and transferred the property to Jefferson, whither the family moved. William took the position of subeditor of the _Sentinel_. From time to time poems by young Howells had appeared in the Ohio newspapers. Some of his verses, too, had even been published by _The Atlantic Monthly_. In 1860, in collaboration with John J. Piatt, he published his first volume of verse--"Poems by Two Friends." In 1860, also, Howells's "Life of Abraham Lincoln" was published. With the earnings of this immediately popular work our author journeyed to the East by way of Canada. In Boston he first met James Russell Lowell, who was then editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. Afterward he visited the publishers, Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, primarily in connection with one of his poems which _The Atlantic_ then had in hand, "The Pilot's Story." Mr. Fields introduced Howells to Mr. Ticknor, "who, I fancied," says Howells in his "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," "had not then read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, 'I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold.'" While making his residence in Boston, Howells met Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne and Emerson. Emerson rather discouraged him by remarking as they were saying good-bye to each other, that one might very well give a pleasant hour to poetry "now and then." When the young Ohioan met Mr. Fields again he proposed himself as assistant editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. Mr. Fields replied that if the post had not just been filled the intrepid poet certainly should have had it. "He was charmingly kind," writes Mr. Howells of the interview; "he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something he asked with dancing eyes, "'Why, how old are you?' "'I am twenty-three,' I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again. "'Well,' he said, 'you begin young, out there!'" From 1861 to 1865, during the War of the Rebellion, Mr. Howells was United States Consul at Venice, which position was a reward for his life of Lincoln. In Venice he wrote occasionally for American newspapers; and there he also wrote the articles of which, eventually, his delightful "Venetian Life" and "Italian Journeys" were composed. Returning to this country, he re-entered the newspaper world, working mostly for the _New York Tribune_ and the _New York Times_; and he also became a regular contributor to _The Nation_. In 1866 he achieved his great ambition, Mr. Fields appointing him assistant editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. From that year until 1886, when he moved to New York, he lived on terms of enviable intimacy with the group of great writers which made Boston the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen. However, this success did not come until after many defeats. Mr. Howells's letters from Venice were published regularly in the _Boston Advertiser_; but elsewhere, for the most part, the young author had met little encouragement. It was only just before he left Venice, when Lowell, then, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the _North American Review_, accepted Howells's article on "Recent Italian Comedy," that the cloud broke. Lowell accepted the manuscript in "one of his loveliest letters," as Mr. Howells says. "His message" the author confesses, "came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the _Advertiser_ had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief in Vienna; but I valued my admission to the _North American_ peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor." Financially, the encouragement was slight. The _North American_ was "as poor as it was proud"; and it paid Howells for his article at the rate of only two dollars a page. From the _Advertiser_ he had been paid at the rate of about a dollar a thousand words. It was on March 19, 1866, his twenty-ninth birthday, that the vagrant author began his work on _The Atlantic_ at a salary of fifty dollars a week. "The whole affair," Mr. Howells writes, "was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly." It was a most delicate position which he occupied on _The Atlantic_ from 1866 to 1872, when Fields withdrew and Mr. Howells became sole editor. In the beginning, as he says himself, he ventured to distinguish mediocrity in some verses by Whittier. "He sent me a poem," says Howells, "and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it, and printed it, and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them." At another time, when a choice was accidentally enforced between a poem by Holmes and a poem by Emerson, Mr. Howells had the courage to request Emerson that his poem might be held over for the next number. Emerson wrote back to "return the proofs and break up the forms." "I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine," says Mr. Howells, "but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds." From 1872 until 1880 Mr. Howells was sole editor of _The Atlantic_; and the rich social and literary experience which he gained during that term he has embodied in that most delightful of American bookmen's chronicles, "Literary Friends and Acquaintance." Mr. Howells's first piece of fiction, "Their Wedding Journey," was published in 1872, the year that he became sole editor of _The Atlantic_. Seven years ago in a newspaper interview, Mr. Howells made this statement in regard to this work: "I wrote 'Their Wedding Journey' without intending to make it a piece of fiction or considering it to be one after I had finished it. It was simply a book of American travel, which I hoped to make attractive by a sugar coating of romance. I was very familiar with the route over which I had taken the bridal couple, and I knew it was beautiful, and, like most American scenery, was not appreciated. The book was more of a success than I expected it to be. I attributed its success to the descriptions of American scenery and places. I gave it to a family friend and asked her to mark those parts of it which she thought real incidents. I was very much astonished and greatly pleased to find, when she returned it, that she had marked some passages which were purely invention. This made me ask myself if I might not hope to write a novel some day." The question was evidently answered in the affirmative, for after 1872 Mr. Howells's output of fiction became regular and profuse. His novels have all been more or less popular. He is fondest himself of "A Modern Instance," we are told; and he regards "A Hazard of New Fortunes" as his best novel. It may safely be said that the book which it was the greatest pleasure to him to write is "Literary Friends and Acquaintance," published late last year. Altogether his works number about seventy-five. Mr. Howells is a plodder. "I believe," he once said to an interviewer, "in the inspiration of hard work." As a rule all successful authors have held this belief. Mr. Howells resigned from _The Atlantic_ in 1880 to engage in general literary work. Six years later he formally transferred his allegiance from Boston to New York by accepting charge of "The Editor's Study" in _Harper's_. Afterward, for a time, he was editor of _The Cosmopolitan_. Late in 1900 he resumed his editorial connection with _Harper's_. Although admired the world over, and dignified with the title of Doctor of Laws, which he got from Yale in 1871, Mr. Howells is hospitable and genial, just as Dr. Holmes was; and many young writers with more or less glittering names owe much to his counsel and his encouragement. [Illustration: BRET HARTE.] BRET HARTE Bret Harte has been called the writer of the best short stories in the English language. A literary court of arbitration would doubtless find that the best of his short stories are without superiors. It should not be forgotten that the reading public is still under the magic spell which Mr. Harte wove more than a third of a century ago with "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "Plain Language from Truthful James," "Tennessee's Partner," "Miggles" and the other works which first called attention to the author's still unquestioned genius. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "Under the Redwoods" mark the present extremes of one of the most romantic chapters in our literary history. Some years ago, when the popular writer and his wife were spending the summer at Newport, a woman said confidentially to Mrs. Harte, "What is your husband's real name?" It evidently did not seem natural to the inquirer that an author could always have borne such a crisp and striking name; and the same idea, that the name must be simply a happy pseudonym, has, we believe, struck many others. The idea is partly wrong and partly right. Francis Brett Harte was his name originally. That form was changed to Francis Bret Harte, then to F. Bret Harte, and finally to the attractive form which long ago endeared itself to the whole English-reading world. For it is well known, undoubtedly, that the Bret Harte stories are quite as popular in England and in the British colonies as in the United States; that Germany yields to none in her admiration for them; and that one of them, "Gabriel Conroy," has been printed in at least fourteen languages. Indeed, a quarter of a century ago the name of Bret Harte was as powerful the world over as was Mr. Kipling's a few years since. Perhaps the felicitous brevity of the name was one of the elements of that power. Bret Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., on August 25, 1839. His father was at that time a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. Bret was still in boyhood when his father died. The boy, who had received an ordinary public school education, went to California with his mother in 1854. The Golden State was then one enormous mining-camp. The laws were largely unwritten. A passion either for gold or for adventure had taken possession of thousands of persons and thrown them together in one of the wildest parts of the world. In this exciting school of life young Harte studied his first lessons of life. For three years he was thrown hither and thither, with his eyes and his ears wide open, and with his mind sponging up the lively incidents which, through his skillful pen, have since become the idyls of the pioneer West, with all its vice and virtue, its heroes and cravens, its showy wealth and its heart-touching poverty. For a year he was an express rider, with a route lying among the ravines and gulches of the northern part of the State; and what he had not learned by his own observation he learned during this period from other observers. This was the time when Yuba Bill and the other heroic road-agents took form in his imagination. At another time he picked up the trade of compositor in a newspaper office in Eureka; and at still another time he went out prospecting, and there was a sign of later days in the fact that before the three years of his uncertainty came to an end he taught school for a short while. It was then that, for the first time, he indulged the literary instincts awakened by his experience in the newspaper office in Eureka. This budding age is outlined in "M'liss." In 1857 the young man settled down in San Francisco as a compositor in the office of the _Golden Era_, a weekly periodical. A few round-about-town sketches called "A Boy's Dog," "Sidewalkings," and "In a Balcony," submitted most humbly and respectfully to the editor, brought to the ambitious printer the reward of an invitation to join the editorial staff. With the acceptance of the invitation began a most brilliant literary career. We are indebted to a friend of the author's for the statement: "Those were busy days, and much of the matter ground out in that time of probation is as pregnant with genius and wit as any that he has seen fit to retain in his complete edition." But the edition is not yet complete, we may remark. When, not long afterward, a weekly called _The Californian_ was established in San Francisco, the new writer went over to it enthusiastically. In the columns of this periodical and of some of the daily papers appeared the poems and the sketches which rounded out Mr. Harte's "time of probation." _The Californian_ was the means of acquainting him with Mark Twain, also a new figure on the literary horizon. Indeed, it has been said by men who knew the little group of enthusiasts connected with _The Californian_ that it was Harte who induced the Mississippi pilot first to put to use his genius as a humorist. This catch-penny work of the days of _The Californian_ was profitable to Harte simply as experience. Like many another story-teller, he came to the conclusion that steady employment, with a few leisure hours in the day, would do more to advance him than anything else, and so he found work, first in the United States Surveyor General's office, then with the United States Marshal, and later in the mint. Shortly before going to the mint he was introduced to Easterners by a sketch in _The Atlantic Monthly_, "The Legend of Monte Diablo," which introduction was due largely to the patronage of Jessie Benton Fremont, one of the most cultivated women in California. His secretaryship at the mint, which began in 1864, led to a very productive period, some of the fruits of which are "John Burns of Gettysburg," "The Pliocene Skull," "The Society on the Stanislow" and the remarkable "Condensed Novels," in the writing of which, as one of the old-time critics remarked "a new set of faculties was required." At this point naturally comes in the question, What was Bret Harte's first book? The question was answered last year by the author himself, in this statement: "When I say that my first book was not my own, and contained beyond the title page not one word of my own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of plagiary. But the fact remains that in priority of publication the first book for which I became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since, was a small compilation of California poems indited by other hands. There was an ominous calm when the book reached the market. Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly, which I will poetically veil under the title of the Red Dog _Jay Hawk_, was the first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsuspecting quarry as follows: 'The hog wash and "purp" stuff ladled out from the slop bucket of Messrs. ---- and Company, of 'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice and called "A Compilation of Californian Verses," might be passed over as far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture "Californian," it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted Yellow Hammer, whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the _Jay Hawk_. That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and the thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make allusion to California's greatest bard, is rather a confession of idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'" There were other bolts quite as forceful, but as a sample of the literary criticism found in California in the great mining days, and also of the reins that kept editorial enterprise in check, the foregoing will suffice. In 1868, while Mr. Harte was still working in the mint and quietly hitching his literary wagon to a star, Mr. Roman, an ambitious San Francisco publisher, projected _The Overland Monthly_, a periodical that has had considerable influence on the literary growth of the far West. He invited the secretary of the mint to be its editor. The invitation was accepted, and the editor-to-be at once went to work on a story for the first number, which was to appear in July. The scheme of the magazine was thoroughly Eastern, but the editor decided that, for the honor of the West, his story should have a strong local flavor. He called it "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and, without a thought of any impropriety, had it put into type. For the sake of accuracy we take the liberty of relating the consequences as they were related in the old days: "The first intimation that it was likely to arouse criticism of any kind, good or bad, came to him in the form of a protest from the young woman who read proof on the paper. She sent word to him that if matter as indecent as 'The Luck of Roaring Camp' was to be printed in _The Overland Monthly_ she could not retain her place as an employee of the paper. Harte read the story over again in proof to see where the indecencies were, but could find none. Then he took it to the owner of the paper, and asked his opinion of it. The owner took it home and read it to his wife. It made her cry, and she thought it was a powerful production, but she agreed with the proof-reader that it was too daring in its conception, and too frank in its details even for the not-over particular society which inhabited California. Harte heard her judgment with amazement. He was utterly unable to see anything improper in the story. Finally the owner of the paper so far went over to the side of the story's critics as to say that he thought the story would have to be left out. Harte took a day and a night to think the matter over, and then he announced his own decision. He said that if the story was left out of that month's issue of _The Overland Monthly_ he would himself insist on being left out of all connection with the paper in the future. There was no quarrel. He simply was certain that his judgment was good, and felt that if it was considered bad on this occasion by the owner, he would never be able to suit him in the future. Finally, after the matter had been placed on this definite basis, the owner made up his mind to let the story run." We have met the account of the momentous difficulty in a slightly different form, but the account which we have repeated may be accepted as substantially correct. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" did not please the Californians, and it seemed for some time as if the censure of the feminine critics would be justified popularly; but when the flattering opinions of the Eastern readers were reported, the gold hunters changed their minds. No doubt they were astonished to hear that a Boston publishing house, at that time the most powerful organization of its kind in the land, had offered to accept anything the author might offer at his own terms. Harte was busy sending provisions to the snowbound camps in the Sierras in the fall of 1868, so that his next story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," made its appearance as late as January, 1869. That same year, too, "Plain Language from Truthful James," popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee," came to delight the reading public; and since that time Bret Harte's fame has remained more or less brilliant. For a time he filled the chair of Modern Literature in the University of California. In 1871 he came East. The journey was a triumph. Nothing like it ever occurred before, or has occurred since. Once in the East, _The Atlantic Monthly_ agreed to pay him one thousand dollars a month for a poem and a short story; but the author soon found the agreement irksome. He lectured and wrote at his leisure in this country until 1878, when he was appointed United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and two years later he was sent to Glasgow. His term there closed in 1885, and ever since he has made London his home. However, he has always been Californian in his stories. His latest offering, "Under the Redwoods," is as reflective of the growing days of the West as are early masterpieces like "Tennessee's Partner" and "Miggles." His star may be a trifle lower in the heavens than it was when he went abroad, but it is still of the first magnitude. [Illustration: MARK TWAIN. (S. L. Clemens.)] MARK TWAIN Mark Twain's real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. There is a story to the effect that one of his ancestors, by name Gregory Clement, an adherent of Cromwell, added his voice to the condemnation of Charles I. and was beheaded for it by Charles II. However, it is neither as Clement nor as Clemens that the most celebrated of contemporaneous American authors is, or has been, popularly known, but by the pen-name of Mark Twain, which he adopted when he was piloting on the Mississippi, more than forty years ago. In fun or in earnest--it is hard to fathom his moods--Mr. Clemens said lately that he was working on an autobiography which must not be opened until he has been in his grave for a century. So far as the main facts are concerned, however, the humorist's autobiography is already an open book. It has been chronicled piece by piece in a hundred magazines and in a thousand newspapers since 1868, when "Innocents Abroad" appeared, up to the present day. Probably no other living author has been so beset by the requests of editors and the importunities of reporters; and assuredly no other living author has been more amiable or more liberal in his responses. No, a good portion of the autobiography of Mr. Clemens, or Mark Twain,--we shall use each name impartially,--will be submitted to the public within a hundred hours after his death--and may that inevitable conclusion be far, far off! As a man and as a writer Mr. Clemens has invariably carried the colors of the typical American. A stern sense of duty and of honor, a seldom absent sense of humor, inexhaustible energy, dauntless pluck, unfeigned simplicity and abiding sympathy and fidelity, are the salient characteristics of the typical American--of Mr. Clemens. At the same time, above and beyond the writer's unexcelled powers of observation and richness of imagination is his fine sense of artistry. "Mark Twain's humor will live forever," Mr. Howells is reported to have said some years ago, "because of its artistic qualities. Mark Twain portrays and interprets real types, not only with exquisite appreciation and sympathy, but with a force and truth of drawing that makes them permanent." So fastidious a critic as Prof. Barrett Wendell has lately dwelt on the constant and irresistible charm of Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Clemens was born in a little Missouri village named Florida on Nov. 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens, of a good Virginia family, was one of the pioneers who, early in the century, crossed the Alleghanies and sought new fortunes in the unsettled West. His mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Lampton, also, like her husband, came of good English stock. Her forefathers had plunged into the wilds with Daniel Boone; and she herself has been described as "one of those beautiful, graceful, and vivacious Kentucky girls who have contributed so much to the reputation of that fortunate State." A cousin of Mr. Clemens, by the way, who was one of the humorist's playmates sixty years ago, is the Rev. Eugene Joshua Lampton, who, by some of the people in Missouri, is called "the Bishop of the diocese." Elder Lampton is the possessor of the original subscription list which Mr. Clemens carried when he was a newspaper boy in Hannibal. But this is reaching ahead a little. They say that Mr. Clemens's mother was not only remarkably winsome but remarkably intelligent. When the author was a youngster one of his relatives said of him: "He's a perfect little human kaleidoscope." "Yes," added another, "and he gets that from his mother." Samuel's mother could "write well," which was no small accomplishment in the south-west in the thirties. When Samuel was about nine years old his father decided to move to Hannibal, in the same State. The prime cause of this immigration was the failure of the elder Clemens to make Salt River navigable; hence, as one writer has suggested, the probable origin of the old synonym for disaster, "gone up Salt River." Young Clemens was sent to school in Hannibal. Some of his schoolmates are living in the old town to-day. He seems to have enjoyed the rule of two teachers, Miss Newcomb and Miss Lucy Davis. Physically, he was not a strong boy, but intellectually he seems always to have been more than a match for any boy of his age. He had two brothers, Orion, who was considerably older, and Henry, who was the youngest of them all. Samuel attended school until his father died in 1847. The death of the father, who had just been elected county judge, was a hard blow to the family. After the death of his father, the subject of our sketch went to work for the local newspaper as a carrier. Afterward he served as "devil" and type-setter, and then, having completed his apprenticeship and thinking to better himself elsewhere, he set off on foot for the East. Doing odd jobs at the case and the press, he finally reached Philadelphia. Thence he went to New York. But the East did not please him, and at seventeen he was back in Hannibal. He was now on his uppers, as the phrase is, and, in addition to its adventurous side, the financial side of steamboat life on the Mississippi magnetized him. There, for instance, was the pilot, the guide of the great smoking craft, a man who knew everything thought worth knowing, a man looked up to by every merchant, every traveler and every desperado. Samuel determined to become a pilot, and the picturesque Capt. Horace E. Bixby took him under his wing. In his "Life on the Mississippi" Mark Twain describes with all his eloquence the interesting and exciting life of a pilot on the treacherous river. And was not the pilot's a great and attractive post for a young man? "If you will take," says Mark, "the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky-black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street-crossing, the character, size and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs on that long street and _change their places_ once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi." The life on the river, with its ever-changing dramatic and entertaining incidents, awoke the young man's sleeping imagination--gave him a strong desire to put to use the modest literary methods which he had acquired as an itinerant printer. Mr. Howells, too, it will be noticed, first had the passion for authorship aroused in him by the types and the presses. The first sketches which Mr. Clemens sent to the local papers were signed "Iosh," a meaningless signature, which quickly made the young author desire something better. The improvement came to him when one day he heard a "big black negro" who was taking soundings call out "Mark twain!" which meant that there were two fathoms of water. The call struck the pilot's fancy, and he kept it in mind for future use. Mr. Clemens served in the pilot-house--one of the best school-houses in the world, it may be said--until the war broke out. Then he ran blockades for a while, and for two weeks he carried a gun in the Confederate army, under General Harris. The two weeks' service cooled his ardor, and he went farther west with his brother Orion, who, as a sympathizer with the Union side, had received an appointment as Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. Samuel was to act as his brother's secretary, but as in this office he did nothing and earned nothing, he, after an attempt at prospecting, joined the staff of the _Virginia City Enterprise_. It was as the _Enterprise's_ correspondent at the capital of the Territory, Carson City, that Mr. Clemens first used the striking pseudonym "Mark Twain." But he had no taste for routine work; or, rather, his manner of garnishing, often with his stinging satire, his routine work, did not suit the taste of the editor of the _Enterprise_, and at the end of six months Mark Twain stamped the dust of Nevada from his shoes and struck out for California, where he readily secured employment on the _Union_. In the spring of 1865 he took an interest with Bret Harte in a short-lived weekly called _The Californian_, and some of the humorous articles which he wrote for that publication were widely copied in the East. Later the _Union_ sent him to the Hawaiian Islands to describe the sugar industry. His work as a correspondent was very successful, and so was the lecture tour which he made in California when he returned. Major Pond, by the way, relates that Mark Twain committed his lecture to memory and was entirely confident of success; still, desiring to forestall even the possibility of failure, he arranged with some friend of his--Major Pond has forgotten her name--to sit in a box and start the applause if he should look in her direction and stroke his mustache. "Instead of failing, however," the Major reports, "the lecture started propitiously, and that caused Mark to forget his instructions to the lady. By and by, unconsciously, when the audience was filled to the neck with pleasure and sore with laughter, he unwittingly turned to the box where his friend sat and pulled his mustache. At the time he was saying nothing particularly good or funny, but the anxious lady took his action for the signal, and almost broke her fan on the edge of the box in a fury of applause." It took all the nerve which Mark had accumulated among the gamblers and crevasses of the Mississippi to pass through the embarrassment. In 1867 Mr. Clemens published his first book, "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," of which about four thousand copies were sold. That same year he went to Europe with the excursionists aboard the Quaker City. This excursion proved to be the turning point in his career. He had a commission to write sketches of the journey for the _Alta Californian_. The sketches were duly published, and were then collected and offered to a publisher for marketing in book form. The material did not appeal to the publisher; it was startlingly uncut and undried. But Mark was insistent, and by and by the book appeared under the title of "Innocents Abroad." That book established Mark Twain's reputation as a humorist. During the thirty-three years which have intervened between that day and the present, Mark Twain's reputation has been maintained at a matchless height. No one has been deemed worthy by the reading public--which, after all, is the Supreme Court in literary matters--to be called his rival. And since the publication of "Innocents Abroad" Mark Twain's career has been public property, with no signs, no fences, not even a dog therein to bark at night. Mark Twain's career stands unequalled in the literary history of America. He has been honored as an author and as a lecturer in almost every part of the world. He made a fortune and lost it; and now he is making another. The literary historian must record in his case the prodigious achievement of an author remaining for at least thirty-three years--and who knows how many more will follow?--in almost steady demand in print and on the platform. But in more than a literary sense was that excursion to Europe on the Quaker City the turning-point in Mark Twain's career, for it was on that memorable journey that he met Miss Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, N. Y., who afterward became his wife; who is the subject of the most eloquent words which he ever penned, and who, if we are to believe their long-termed friend, Major Pond, "makes his works so great." [Illustration: "LEW" WALLACE.] "LEW" WALLACE Gen. "Lew" Wallace is the author of the most popular story ever written by an American. "Ben Hur" has been translated into every language which can boast of a literature. In the summer of 1900 it was estimated that nine hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold. It is safe to say that by this time the million mark has been reached. This literary phenomenon is enlarged by the fact that "Ben-Hur" has never appeared in a cheap, that is, a paper-covered, edition. The General has been urged repeatedly to authorize the publication of such an edition, but his refusal has been firm from the first. A friend of his who once heard the author repeat his refusal, exclaimed: "Good for you!" It is a question whether this friendly enthusiasm served any high purpose. If, as has often been reported, "Ben Hur" has converted many readers to Christianity, then its circulation might well be furthered in every way possible. We mention this circumstance because of the half-sacred nature which, not simply in the minds of emotional readers but also in the mind of the stern-charactered author himself, the book has been gradually assuming. A few years ago General Wallace, while on a lecture tour among the big cities, related how "Ben Hur" was conceived and brought forth. He frankly admitted that prior to its conception, his religious views were unstable. But as the ideas took hold of him, as chapter followed chapter, as the central figure emerged under his pen from the mist of the early years in Bethlehem into the divine glow of the later years around Jerusalem, his own life underwent changes, until at length, when the work was done, he stepped forth a militant Christian for the first time in his life. We have heard many authors describe the manner in which their books were born, but Lew Wallace's description of the birth of "Ben Hur," for impressiveness and for entertainment, stands alone. If the General had done nothing else but write the tale of Christ his fame would be certain of outlasting generations. But, as a matter of fact, the wonderful book represents only one of his many qualifications to sit among the Immortals, as we shall see presently. The author was born in Brookville, Ind., on April 10, 1827. His father was David Wallace, who, after graduation from West Point and a two years' service in the army, adopted the profession of law and went to live in the little Indiana town. Six years after Lewis was born his father was elected lieutenant governor by the Whigs, and three years later he was elected governor. From 1841 to 1843 Governor Wallace represented his district in Congress. His political career was brought to a close simply, it is said, because he voted for an appropriation to assist Professor Morse to establish telegraph communication between Baltimore and Washington. Lewis's mother was Esther Test, a daughter of a well-known Indiana judge, who is described as a woman of marked beauty and culture, and to whom may be traced the son's artistic and literary genius. She died in 1837, but her children were fortunate to be reared and trained by a woman of extraordinarily strong character, Zerelda Saunders, the daughter of an Indianapolis doctor, who, when she had devotedly completed her performance of the none too attractive duties of a stepmother, worked for the causes of temperance and equal suffrage, according to a woman who knew her well, with "eloquence, dignity, enthusiasm and conscientiousness." General Wallace avoided school. Thus he missed the basis which erudition demands, but he at least improved his passion for art and for literature. What he enjoyed most was to stroll out of town to the wild-grown fields and woods, and there he would read his favorite books and study nature. Not one of our authors knows nature more intimately. In fact, in those juvenile days he thought seriously of becoming an artist; and though, if the thought had ever been realized, literature would have lost much, still art might have gained in equal proportion. For at the General's home in Crawfordsville are some excellent examples of his skill with the brush. One of his notable pictures represents the conspirators concerned in the assassination of President Lincoln. Another equally remarkable work of art is his portrait of the Sultan of Turkey. Many of the General's friends have valuable samples of his artistic genius. We mention these facts to show that there was once good ground for the author's ambition to be an artist. Yet at the age of eighteen, just when one would expect such a talent to exert itself irresistibly, young Wallace enlisted to fight against Mexico. He was made a second lieutenant and ordered to guard the stores at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In Mexico he found the material for "The Fair God," his first novel, on which he worked occasionally for twenty years. At the end of the Mexican war he returned to Indiana to study law, in which respect, it will be noticed, he followed in the footsteps of his father. Three years after his admission to the bar he married Susan Elston, of Crawfordsville, herself of no mean literary gifts, as her three collections of charming sketches, "The Land of the Pueblos," "The Storied Sea," and "The Repose in Egypt," attest. The Wallaces lived in Crawfordsville until the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion. Thereupon the young lawyer went straight to Indianapolis and offered his services to the governor. For a while he served as adjutant-general. Then he took the colonelcy of a regiment of zouaves, and with such vigor and success that early in September, 1861, he was brevetted brigadier-general. For gallantry at Fort Donelson he was afterwards brevetted major-general. At the close of the war he was one of the most distinguished soldiers in the land. As a recognition of his great services--in July, 1864, according to Secretary Stanton and General Grant, he had saved Washington from destruction--he was appointed to the commission which tried the assassins of Lincoln. That duty done, he returned to Crawfordsville. This return home signalized the real beginning of his literary career. He was now not far from forty years of age, and he was not content to live on his military reputation. Law had little power over him. So he turned to the manuscript which had been growing slowly for many years; and 1873 saw the publication of "The Fair God," the souvenir of the author's service in the Mexican war. Compared with the average romance, "The Fair God" possesses exceptional power and originality. "Ben-Hur" appeared in 1880; but it must not be supposed that General Wallace gave this second book his exclusive attention for the seven years that had passed. It was half written when, in 1878, President Hayes appointed the distinguished Indianian Governor of New Mexico. The visitor at the Wallace homestead in Crawfordsville will be shown the beech tree in the shade of which the work was done. To the way in which he works we shall turn later. The concluding half of the tale was written at spare moments in the governor's palace in Santa Fé, which Mrs. Wallace has described as "the last rallying-place of the Pueblo Indians." At first the more captious of the critics accented their discovery that "Ben-Hur" showed no rhetorical improvement over "The Fair God"; and, though they were right, they erred sadly in trying to measure the book with narrow rules. It has defects, as the most sympathetic critic must admit; but the impartial critic must also admit that in boldness and grandeur of conception and in vigor and beauty of style, the story stands unequalled in American literature, and, in parts, unexcelled in the romantic literature of any nation. Here and there are unbalanced sentences, graceless phrases, misplaced words, and interpolations that detract from the unity of effect desirable in all works of art; but here and there, too, especially in the chapters descriptive of the Grove of Daphne and of the chariot race, is a vivid power at once more charming and more thrilling than anything to be found in any other English novel. "A great historical romance," as one of our critics remarked many years ago, "is not to be made with reference to the square and the compass. It must be a vivid historical impression, and at the same time a wisely considered story of life." "Ben-Hur" adequately fulfills these two fundamental conditions. Moreover it perfectly fulfills, delicately yet impressively, the great moral purpose which the author imposed upon himself. As we recall the author's narrative of the writing of the tale, this moral purpose, beginning gently, gradually acquired a force that mastered him completely. It was like a flood that first trickles through the seam in the dam, and then, gathering in volume, sweeps all before it. The characters themselves, from Christ to the faithful steward, display the highest flight of imagination to be found in any American novel. Indeed, many of the landscape features themselves are so wonderfully vivid that the same praise awarded Tom Moore for his imaginative descriptions of the East may judiciously be extended to General Wallace. We have heard the General say that a scene which he had regarded as purely fictitious or imaginative appeared in surprising reality when, years after the book was published, he first visited Palestine. Of the tremendous sensation which "Ben-Hur" made when it appeared, and of the phenomenal success which it has maintained even down to the present time, it is, we presume, unnecessary to speak. The author, as we noted before, has guarded its fame diligently, jealously; in fact, although Lawrence Barrett urged him years ago to allow the book to be dramatized, he did not yield to solicitation in this form until 1900. This circumstance reminds us that the General once wrote a play called "Commodus," but its multiplicity of leading characters has kept it in his desk. It would bankrupt any manager in America, they told him. "The Prince of India," the romance published in 1893, suffered, as it must have suffered, by comparison with "Ben-Hur." Judged by itself, it is delightful. It exemplifies the writer's remarkable creative force and his ever-youthful enthusiasm. Probably the last notable work from the General's pen will be the autobiography on which he has been at work for the last few years. General Wallace's diplomatic experience at Constantinople is worthy of a chapter, but we must content ourselves with saying that it added brilliancy to the honors which he had earned as a soldier and as an author. Of late the General has been living a semi-pastoral life at his estate in Indiana. He has himself described his daily habits: "I begin to write at about 9 A.M. Keep at work till noon. Resume about 1.30 P.M., and leave my studio about 4. I then exercise for two hours. I walk or ride horseback, according to the weather. When it rains I put on a heavy pair of boots and trudge five to seven miles across the country. I usually ride about a dozen miles. To this habit of taking regular exercise I attribute my good health. I eat just what I want and as much as I want. When night comes I lie down and sleep like a child, never once waking until morning. I usually retire at 9.30 and rise at 7.30, aiming to secure nine hours' sleep. I smoke at pleasure, a pipe or a cigar, but never a cigarette, which I consider the deadliest thing a person can put in his mouth. The amount of work I produce in a day varies greatly. Sometimes I write four hundred and sometimes twelve hundred words. What I write to-day in the rough, to-morrow I revise, perhaps reducing it to twenty words, perhaps striking out all the day's work and beginning at the same point once more. That constitutes my second copy. When proofs come from the publisher another revision takes place. It consists chiefly of condensation and expurgation." He was asked once what he considered the secret of his success. "Work," he answered, "and, as an author, the doing it myself with my own hand, not by means of a typewriter, or amanuensis or stenographer. To work I would add universal reading." "Who is your favorite novelist?" the questioner went on. "Sir Walter Scott." "What is your favorite novel?" "'Ivanhoe.'" "And your favorite poem?" "'Idylls of the King.'" "What do you consider the sublimest poetry in the world?" "You will find it in the Psalms and Job, in Homer, in Milton and in Shakespeare." "Who, in your judgment, are the three greatest warriors the world has produced?" "Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon." "Who, in your opinion, were the greatest American statesmen?" "George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Alexander Hamilton is, in my judgment, the father of the American Constitution. But that Constitution would never have been adopted save for the support given it by the great name of George Washington." We have said, after all, far too little of this distinguished man, but all that we might say would hardly give the right emphasis to the greatness of his manifold deeds and to the charm of his personal character. [Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE.] GEORGE W. CABLE During his visit to this country a few years ago Mr. J. M. Barrie said to the students at Smith College that no American novelist merits a higher rank than Mr. George W. Cable. True as, in the abstract, this foreign estimate of Mr. Cable's worth is, it would awaken a rather feeble echo among the devourers of our colonial literature. Yet one of the Southerner's characteristic stories, "The Grandissimes," for instance, or "Posson Jone," or "Madame Delphine," is deserving of a recommendation to the liveliest admirer of eighteenth century heroes and heroines. At bottom, there is much in common between Mr. Barrie and Mr. Cable, and this circumstance may account for the Scotchman's enthusiastic utterance at Smith College. Each has a poetical love for nature; each has portrayed a picturesque corner of the world with the kindest intention, the broadest sympathy and the choicest skill; each has been the object of misunderstanding at home and of warm admiration abroad, and each has led where others may only follow. It is perfectly natural that two such lovable and loving men should clasp hands across the sea. We must admit that the writer who has pictured New Orleans as vividly as Balzac pictured his beloved Paris was better known, say, ten years ago, than he is to-day. Then he had fewer distractions than he has to-day. Then he had reached the climax of his literary productivity. Then he was personally endearing himself to his fellow-countrymen with his inimitably delightful recitations and songs. There have been authors who drew larger audiences, and who, to use a homely phrase, made more noise on their tours, but there has never been an author whose readings from his works gave sweeter pleasure; and, as for his manner of singing the Creole folksongs, it was indescribably charming. Mr. John Fox, Jr., is the only other American author who has ventured to sing folk-songs publicly; and we may say, without fear of suggesting the odious comparison, that the younger man has been very successful, too. "Many years ago," Mr. Cable once said, "when I discovered that these folk-songs of the slaves of former Louisiana Creoles had a great charm of their own and were preserved by tradition only, I was induced to gather them and reduce them to notation. I found that others were so strongly interested in the songs that, without pretending to any musical authority or original charm of voice, I was tempted to sing one or two of them before public audiences. The first time I did so was in Boston, and since then I have rarely been allowed to leave them out of my entertainment, when the length of my literary program left room for them." But we must look back farther. To start at the very beginning, George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844. His father was of Virginian descent; his mother of New England. They were married in Indiana ten years before George was born, and they moved to New Orleans after the hard times of 1837. The father died in 1859, and then George, at the age of fifteen, went to work to help support the family. He was a very small boy for his age; and indeed it is related that in 1863, when the family was sent outside the Union lines for refusing to take the oath of allegiance, his sisters had no difficulty in obtaining permission to have their "little brother" accompany them. The "little brother," however, was not so harmless as he looked. He volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, and was mustered into the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, then in Gen. Wirt Adams's brigade. For a time after the war he rolled cotton on the New Orleans levees and carried a surveyor's chain along the banks of the Atchafalaya; and by and by he found a place on the _New Orleans Picayune_. He is therefore to be counted among the authors whose literary career started in the reporter's room. His strong taste for culture and his zeal for the public welfare soon made an outlet for themselves in short articles touching on current topics; and, though the articles were much enjoyed by the readers of the _Picayune_, the young writer before long felt the distaste for newspaper work which, early or late, comes to almost every journalist with high literary aims. Journalism is the best school of experience in the world, but it can be attended too long. Cable resisted the fascinations of journalism firmly and wisely. At the height of his success he left the _Picayune_ and went into the counting-room of a cotton house. He had a good eye for the picturesque features of daily life, the features met commonly in the daily papers, and at his leisure he wrote a few short stories based on New Orleans characters. One day these stories, which he had made no attempt to sell, came into the hands of an agent of the old _Scribner's Monthly_, who happened to visit Louisiana in connection with the well-remembered Great South papers. This agent, by name Edward King, praised the stories, and, at the author's request, sent one of them to New York. The story, for some reason, came back; but the next one sent, "Sieur George," brought a note of acceptance and encouragement from Richard Watson Gilder, Doctor Holland's associate. A few years later a volume of these Louisiana sketches was published under the title of "Old Creole Days." It was immediately recognized as a notable addition to our short story literature. Nevertheless, the author stuck to his desk in the counting-room. Many another ambitious young writer, in the circumstances, would have given up his position and leaned entirely upon his pen. Young Cable had a cool head. He knew that he was moving forward handsomely, and that if he yielded to the excitement of the situation for a moment he might fall back. So his pen rusted for two years, when he accepted an order for a serial story. This turned out to be "The Grandissimes," a clear and entertaining exposition of the author's views of the old-fashioned Southern life, a happy mingling of fact and fiction, of fun and sobriety, of calm appreciation of the Louisiana aristocracy and a warm toleration of the struggles of the poor negro slaves. Of course, this attitude added nothing to the author's popularity among Southerners. To illustrate this, a Southern woman, who happened to visit Northampton, where of late Mr. Cable has made his home, was asked if she ever read his stories. "Of course not," she indignantly answered; "I wouldn't think of looking at them." However, she was persuaded to look at them after a while; and it is a peculiar tribute to their delicate yet powerful charm that the woman expressed regret that she had misconceived his work and opposed his ideas. "The Grandissimes" was so successful that the publishers are said to have sent the author a check for five hundred dollars more than the contract price. This first long tale was followed by another much the same in vein and in atmosphere, "Madame Delphine," which is the story-teller's own favorite. The subject and the style are equally delightful. In 1879, when Mr. Cable was thirty-five years old, the business house in which he had worked to keep his feet on earth dissolved, and the clerk had to choose between returning to journalism and devoting himself entirely to literature. By this time he seems to have been more self-reliant and more confident. At any rate, he chose literature. The first thing he did was to decline to write for more than one publisher. It must be said again that a steadier head never produced a story. A strong sense of duty, in fact, early established control of his work. His interests were not permitted to grow narrow. He realized that he possessed exceptionally abundant resources for the production of miscellaneous literature touching on the development of the middle South, and he determined to make the most of his possessions. In 1880, for example, we find him engaged in a special article on New Orleans for the Census Bureau, and his native city was also the theme of an article which he wrote for the "Encyclopedia Britannica." One of his critics has said: "Since Hawthorne's Custom House reports, few pages of the Government documents have been enriched by so discriminating a pen as in the exhaustive census monograph upon the past and present of the Southern metropolis." This paper led to a series of articles entitled "The Creoles of Louisiana," written for _The Century_, in which the reader will note an artistic combination of dry history and vivid imagination. That such a painstaking, conscientious, dutiful writer should ever be charged with falling into an anachronism may seem preposterous; but although the charge has been made, we find no instance in which it has been sustained. A writer who once visited him brushed the charge aside vigorously: "Mr. Cable's plan of work," he said, "is unusually methodical, for his counting-room training has stood him in good stead. All his notes and references are carefully indexed and journalled, and so systematized that he can turn, without a moment's delay, to any authority he wishes to consult. In this respect, as in many others, he has not, perhaps, his equal among living authors. In making his notes, it is his usual custom to write in pencil on scraps of paper. These notes are next put into shape, still in pencil, and the third copy, intended for the press, is written in ink on note-paper--the chirography exceedingly neat, delicate and legible. He is always exact, and is untiring in his researches.... Before attempting to write upon any historical point, he gathers together all available material without reckoning time or trouble; and, under such conditions, nothing is more unlikely than that he should be guilty of error." The business life which fortunately imposed so valuable a system upon him incidentally inspired his second novel, "Dr. Sevier," many of the scenes in which are faithful pictures of his own experiences as a youth. As in the historical sketches, so in this second novel the poetic imagination of the author fairly rivals his grasp of the prosaic relations existing between man and man. But such relations were supremely vital from his viewpoint, and his third novel, "Bonaventure," was written in moments stolen from the discussion of the questions of elections, prison systems, and the future of the negro. The reader will note in the hero of this story the personification of the practical strengthening and yet spiritualizing gospel which the author has enunciated in his private and public religious work. For it is important to chronicle that Mr. Cable has done as much to Christianize several communities as the most energetic minister would be expected to do; and from his scrupulous performance of not merely the ordinary Christian duties but also of duties self-imposed, he has never allowed literature or society to beguile him. Naturally his social and political studies drew many invitations to address public meetings. It was at Johns Hopkins University, while lecturing on literary art, that, upon the suggestion of President Gilman, he ventured for the first time to read selections from his own stories. The delight of the audience was no less a surprise to him than the realization of his own elocutionary skill. This he set about to cultivate, and with such success that for years afterward he was enthusiastically welcomed to the great cities. It was once estimated that in his busiest years on the platform he traveled more than ten thousand miles every twelve months. For various reasons, particularly that he might be able to write of the South impartially and that he might be nearer the literary market, he moved to Simsbury, Conn., in 1884, and the next year to Northampton, Mass., where he has lived ever since. But he has never lost sight of his native concern in the progress of the South; and as for his philanthropy, in Northampton it has spread wider and wider. There, on the edge of one of the quietest and loveliest towns in Massachusetts, he has had built for himself a home suited to all his excellent tastes, and there he lives, intent always on making someone happy, and writing simply enough to maintain the brilliancy and popularity of his name. HENRY JAMES Henry James has been at pains, lately, to put a stop to a report that he proposes to return to America, yet by descent and at heart he is undoubtedly as loyal an American as his neighbor in England, Bret Harte. Even a cosmopolite may be patriotic. Mr. James has been called the first American cosmopolitan author. It is an unusually interesting fact that, like Mr. Harte, who also lives in England, James was born in Albany, N. Y., the date of his birth being April 15, 1843. His grandfather, William James, who made a fortune in the Syracuse salt works, had settled in Albany soon after his immigration from Ireland. His millions were divided among eleven children, one of whom was Henry James, Sr., the novelist's father. This branch of the James family moved to Germany when our author was a boy; and there he and his brothers and sister were educated for some years. It used to be said that, like his distinguished contemporaries, Howells and Aldrich, James never enjoyed the advantages of a college education; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that the James children were thoroughly educated. Henry James, Sr., intellectually, was a remarkable man, and Miss Walsh of New York, whom he married, has been described as "his complement in the possession of sterling practical qualities and the sustaining common sense of woman." Besides, there were the educational advantages of travel which the James children enjoyed. When the Jameses returned to this country they settled in Cambridge. It was there that Howells made the acquaintance of the elder James. We are tempted to quote extensively from Howells's memories of Henry James, Sr., but we shall confine our quotation to a single paragraph: "At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said: 'He _spasmed_ to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.' His written style had traits of the same adventurousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore." Henry James, Jr., is one of five children. Equally as celebrated as Henry, both at home and abroad, is William James, a professor at Harvard. In March, 1865, a month before his twenty-second year, Henry James made his first appearance in literature with a contribution to _The Atlantic Monthly_, entitled "A Story of a Year," which naturally had to do with the War of the Rebellion. It was _The Atlantic_ which also published his first serial story, "Poor Richard," which ran through three numbers. Later followed "Gabrielle de Bergerac" and "Watch and Ward," each a little more ambitious than its predecessors; and finally came his first long story, "Roderick Hudson," which lasted through twelve numbers of _The Atlantic_. The stories aroused a great deal of comment, most of which was favorable. This encouraged him to abandon all thought of law, which he had studied at Harvard, and make literature his profession. About the same time he went to England, where he has since spent most of his time. Like Harte, James has suffered from the charge of expatriation. The very fact that the English reading public, which is a most discerning public, was quick to appreciate the rare quality of James's style has been sufficient to keep some American critics in bad temper--as if the mere matter of residence has any intimate connection with literature! If James were an utter snob, if he slurred Americans or disclaimed any acquaintance with them, if his cynicism were not well founded, or if his satire were simply burlesque, he might justly be attacked; but as, personally, he is gentle and unassuming, as his cynicism is not a mania, and as his satire is more or less truthful, the belligerent critics have been largely wasting their ammunition. Probably no story of his has ever stirred up bitterer talk than "Daisy Miller," with its unconventional American heroine; yet it was only justice, not to mention literary acumen, which prompted so spirited an American as Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his "Short Studies of American Authors," to say of the author of "Daisy Miller" that "he has achieved no greater triumph than when, in this last-named book, he succeeds in holding our sympathy and even affection, after all, for the essential innocence and rectitude of the poor wayward girl whose follies he has so mercilessly portrayed." It is a singular commentary on the injustice of the denouncers of "Daisy Miller" that the young lady of Boston whom gossip made the original of the story was "cut" by society. His friends and enemies were still further divided by "The American" and "The Portrait of a Lady," and we suspect that the author was poking a little fun at the hostile camp when he had the American woman journalist in the latter story say, "I was going to bring in your cousin--the alienated American. There is a great demand now for the alienated American, and your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely." Mr. James's friends say that he went to England, originally, for the benefit of his health. It cannot be gainsaid that he has a temperament which makes itself at home in all lands. He is, indeed, as much a citizen of Paris as of London, and his stories in French have been warmly praised by French critics. But it may be that, after all, he saw the wisdom of writing reminiscently, of writing at a distance from his subjects. Mr. Cable, for example, saw it when he moved North from New Orleans; and, furthermore, we know that many an author has been condemned unjustly for telling the truth. The great novelist is not the idealist, with his world of prize-baby angels and impossible saints; he is a photographer, and his mind and his hand are a camera that cannot lie. Mr. Warner once said that the object of the novel is to entertain; Mr. James has said that it is to represent life. James Lane Allen, we remember, joined the two statements thus: "The object of the novel is to entertain by representing life." James's reach is transatlantic. Americans and Britons alike share prominence in his works. Then, too, of late, his characters have grown more and more ethereal and ghostly; they have such faint connection with the world of chalk-cliffs and prairies that the question of their citizenship is insignificant. Physically they appear to us only in episodes; intellectually they are universal types. But, really, the last word on Henry James's art was said long ago by _The Spectator_: "Mr. Henry James is certainly a very remarkable illustration of the tendency of our age to subdivide, in the finest way, the already rather extreme division of labor, till a very high perfection is attained in producing articles of the most curiously specialized kind, though apparently without the power of producing anything outside that kind. For a long time we have had novelists who are wonderfully skillful in a particular form of novels, but who seem unable to master more than one form for themselves. But Mr. Henry James, though he has attained a very great perfection in his own line, seems not to aim at anything quite so considerable as a story of human life of any sort. He eschews a story. What he loves is an episode, i. e., something which by the nature of the case is rather a fragment cut out of life, and _not_ a fair or average specimen of it, nor even such a part of it as would give you the best essence of the whole,--but rather an eddy in it, which takes you for an interval out of its main current, and only ends as you get back into the main current again, or at least at the point at which you might get back into the main current again, if some event (accidental, in relation to the art of the story) did not occur to cut off abruptly the thread of the narrative.... One might perhaps say that Mr. Henry James has discerned in relation to literature what has long been known in relation to art--that with artists of any genius, 'sketches' are apt to be more satisfying than finished pictures. But then the sketches we like so much in artists' studios are, though unfinished pictures, still pictures of what the painter has been most struck with, pictures in which he has given all that struck him most, and left only what did not strike him to be filled in by the fancy of the public. Now, Mr. Henry James does not give us sketches of the most striking features in what he sees of human life and passion, so much as finished pictures of the little nooks and bays into which human caprice occasionally drifts, when the main current of life's deeper interests has left us for a moment on one side, and rushed past us.... Mr. Henry James is not so much a novelist as an episodist, if such a term be allowable. But he is a wonderful episodist." All in all, that is the keenest and fairest criticism of James's works ever written. It should be taken with every one of his stories, just as soda is taken with brandy. Such a criticism is not fugacious; it is complementary. It brings to mind the amusing criticism of "The Sacred Fount," notably Carolyn Wells's "Verbarium Tremens," published in _The Critic_, with its bright termination-- The mad gush of "The Sacred Fount" is ringing in my ear, Its dictional excitements are obsessing me, I fear. For its subtle fascination makes me read it, then, alack, I find I have the James-james, a very bad attack! James is an exceedingly neat man, and this side of him at once strikes every visitor to his home. The only known exception to this characteristic neatness is his handwriting, which is said to be as vexatious as Horace Greeley's was. "I have a letter from him before me now," says one of his correspondents. "The signature I know to be 'Henry James.' You might take it for Henryk Sienkiewicz." The same correspondent relates a story which throws a new light on his personality: "You will be astonished, possibly, to know that his income from his writing is a scant three hundred pounds a year, though in spite of this there has never come a man in need to Henry James to whom he has not offered a part of what he calls his own. "Not so long ago a novelist in England died. He left two little children, absolutely alone in the world. One of that man's friends put by a little sum for them, and, out of the kindness of his heart, wrote to other literary men soliciting their help. He sought a maker of books who lives in a castle ... whom he knew to have an income of over twenty thousand pounds from his literary work. "'Won't you aid these little folk?' he asked. Not a cent was forthcoming. "Henry James was written in the matter. By return mail came a check for fifty pounds, one-tenth of his whole year's income." We have been informed that this estimate of Mr. James's income is rather small; but, even if his income be as large as that of the "maker of books who lives in a castle," the fact remains that Mr. James proved his generosity handsomely. James has acquired his extraordinarily brilliant style at the expense of incessant and determined effort. The dazzling spontaneities are really the product of toilsome hours. He works mostly in the morning, writing slowly, and his stories are written again and again before they go off to his publisher's. With him writing is a profession, a task; he is not the child of moods. Occasionally he visits friends--old friends, like Marion Crawford--but the greater part of the year he spends quietly and almost reclusely in England. [Illustration: Photo by Parker, Morristown. FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON.] FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON At a dinner given in honour of Mr. Frank R. Stockton by the Authors' Club of New York, early in the year 1901, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of _The Century_, said: "A young man once came to me and said he would like to contribute to the magazine every month. I asked him what he wanted to write. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'd like to send you each month a story like The Lady or the Tiger?'" Mr. Gilder said at the end of his speech: "When I think of the immense amount of pleasure Mr. Stockton brought into the life of Stevenson it seems to me that alone would be to him a benediction forever." The editor of _The Century_ thus happily illustrated the attitude of the reading world toward Mr. Stockton: on one side is an eager desire to emulate him, and on the other an equally eager desire to go to him for pleasure or for comfort. There is a natural grace about his stories which has often deceived the inexpert into an attempt to rival him, while the sweet and simple comedy of the stories has for more than a quarter of a century been the delight of young and old. The young man who visited Mr. Gilder, and the brilliant novelist solacing himself with the acquaintance of Pomona, Ardis Claverden, Mrs. Null, and Chipperton, are types. The object of this variety of admiration was born in Philadelphia on April 5, 1834. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Richard Stockton who signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was notable chiefly for his religious zeal. He married twice, and his second wife was the author's mother. She was a Virginian; and from her side of the family tree was derived the name Ardis, found in "Ardis Claverden." There is a Stocktonian touch in the familiar story that the Christian name of Francis Richard was imposed upon Mr. Stockton by one of his half-sisters, who borrowed half of it from Francis I. of France and half from Richard Coeur de Lion. Some readers will doubtless remember Louise Stockton, Francis's sister, who was given the name of Napoleon's second wife. It is remarkable, by the way, that with a sister so ready in the choice of names the novelist should himself find denomination a troublesome phase of his art. "The hardest work I have," he once said, "is naming my characters. Many of them are completely made up, others are suggested by something, others are but slightly changed from real names. I seldom use a name that in itself is a description of the character. That was Dickens's way, you remember. Nevertheless, sometimes one of my names does describe the character. Take Tippengray of 'The Squirrel Inn.' Tippengray was a man whose hair was slightly tipped with gray. I always liked that name. Chipperton in 'A Jolly Fellowship' is very descriptive also." Francis Richard first went to a private school in West Philadelphia. Later he attended the public school, and at the age of eighteen was graduated from the Central High School with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was noticed at school that his bent was literary. In fact, this was obvious to his parents when he was only ten, for at that age he began to scribble verses. In spite of this proclivity, however, the boy, after leaving the high school, took up wood-carving as a profession. Just one bond existed between himself and the world of letters, and that was his membership in a high school organization called the "Literary and Forensic Circle." Upon this slight basis has been erected an exceptionally brilliant career, for it was to the Circle that the Ting-a-Ling stories were first read. These stories were collected for his first book. The Circle also heard "Kate" as soon as it was written. This story and "The Story of Champaigne" were published by the _Southern Messenger_; and it is sufficient to say that they created a demand for more like them. Thereafter, until 1874, Stockton wrote many short stories, his star all the time rising a little higher above the horizon. But in 1874 the star blazed forth wondrously with the appearance of the first part of "Rudder Grange." From that day the author's place among the famous American humorists has been secure. The primary effect of the remarkable success of the first part of "Rudder Grange" was to encourage the author to write a second part; its next effect was to persuade him to abandon wood-carving for literature. There was an extraordinary infantile tangle connected with the popular story. In the original papers in _Scribner's_ there was no baby; in the first edition of the book there was one baby; in the second edition there were three babies; in the third edition there were two. The author finally let Pomona's baby disappear, for it would have embarrassed her trip abroad. The author tells a story about this baby. "I had planned out the book of Pomona's travels," he says, "and was about ready to write it. I was in Philadelphia at the time, and had a business appointment with my dentist, an old friend. By the way, you should never change your dentist any more than you should your plumber. Both will want to take out the work of their predecessors, swearing that it was done very badly. Well, while in the chair I got to talking with this dentist friend about my new book. I told him I had serious thoughts of killing the baby. He was very much interested. We talked over the advisability of doing this, and, while he was not convinced, he in the main agreed with me. "I had been finished with, and clasping his hand went into the waiting room on my way out. This waiting-room was filled with women. As I passed through the door I heard him call: "'Then you have positively decided to kill that baby?' "'Positively,' I replied. "You should have seen the women stare. It was not until I got well out in the hallway that I realized what they must, of course, have thought." Pomona, the heroine, existed in real life. She was a charity girl whom the Stocktons had taken into the family. She was incorrigibly careless, however, and back to the charitable institution she was sent. She was stage-struck, too, and for all we know--Mr. Stockton veils the matter, half mysteriously,--she may have escaped from her guardians and won bouquets for herself before the footlights. While we are on the subject of characters real and imaginary we may add that Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine enjoyed actual existence under more common names. It has always been a source of affected trouble to Stockton that some people will persist in calling the former Mrs. Leeks and the latter Mrs. Al-e-shi-ne, instead of Aleshine. The author's success with these two characters recalls the criticism that he was ignorant of the way in which young folks make love. "It is much more to my liking," he says, "to write about middle-aged women than young women. The older ones have more character; you can make them do more amusing things." But, to revert to the main line, "Rudder Grange" carved its writer's name in the Hall of Fame. It is undoubtedly his most popular work, for there is a call for it even at this late day. Some of his admirers call it his masterpiece. It is no backhanded compliment to say that he has never improved upon the profusion or the quaintness of its humor. We have said that the success of "Rudder Grange" induced Stockton to abandon everything but literature. He worked first for the _Philadelphia Morning Post_; later he joined Edward Eggleston on _Hearth and Home_; by and by he cast his lot with _Scribner's Monthly_, and finally he settled down on the editorial staff of _St. Nicholas_. In this position he remained until, in 1880, he gave up editorial work altogether. Thereafter he devoted himself entirely to fiction. Even more sensational than the luck of "Rudder Grange" was the luck of "The Lady or the Tiger?" The story had a phenomenal sale--for those days--in this country, and it has been translated into a few foreign languages. "Perhaps the most interesting thing about 'The Lady or the Tiger?'" says the humorist, "is its great popularity among the savage races. It has been told again and again by the story-tellers of Burmah. A missionary once told the story to a tribe of Karens up in the north of Burmah. When she came back a year later the tribe surrounded her and wanted to know if she had found out whether-- "I cannot answer the question, for I have no earthly idea myself. I really have never been able to decide whether the Lady or the Tiger came out of that door. Yet I must defend myself. People for years have upbraided me for leaving it a mystery; some used to write me that I had no right to impose upon the good nature of the public in that manner. However, when I started in to write the story, I really intended to finish it. But it would never let itself be finished. I could not decide. And to this day, I have, I assure you, no more idea than anyone else." It used to be said that Mr. Stockton was a short-story writer and nothing more, as if that were not the most difficult branch of fiction; but he silenced these reckless critics with "The Late Mrs. Null," which, in the beginning, had the biggest circulation of all his books. Since then book has followed book, regularly but not hurriedly. The author of "Rudder Grange" does not follow the plan of Trollope; he does not work so many hours a day, mood or no mood. Sometimes up to luncheon time not a word has been put on paper. He never writes; he dictates. In his early days he dictated to his wife, but in recent years he has employed a stenographer. At any appointed hour in the morning the young woman trips downstairs from the room at the top of the house to which she and her noisy typewriter have been banished, and if the author have his subject well in mind he delivers one thousand five hundred words before the morning is over. From this first draft the secretary makes the draft for the printer, which seldom is revised. The fact is, Stockton shapes his delightful stories in his mind as effectively as most other authors shape theirs on paper; and, therefore, when a story has been dictated, he is done with it. Mrs. Stockton, of whom we spoke as his first amanuensis, was Miss Marian E. Tuttle of Amelia County, Virginia, visits to whose home gave the novelist the impressions of negro life which he has described so felicitously. At present the Stocktons live near Charlestown, West Virginia. The estate, named Claymont, comprises one hundred and fifty acres of a wide-spreading piece of land once owned by Washington. The house is said to have been planned by the first President himself. At any rate, it was built by the immortal patriot's grandnephew, and it takes its name from the Washington homestead in England. Very appropriately the edition of Mr. Stockton's works has been given the title of Shenandoah. Personally the fanciful story-teller is small, spare, and shy. His is an elusive personality. "A personality more winsome and delightful," says one of his friends, "it would be difficult to find. It is a small man that sits before you, a keen-eyed man, whose eyes you know miss nothing, a man whose mustache is iron-gray and whose hair is almost white. His photographs give no hint of the man; they do not even mirror his personal appearance. Nothing save a talk with him gives you that." Another friend has said: "The big dark eyes, full of patient, weary expression, are luminous; the mouth close and discouraged, expands into smiling curves, sweet and sympathetic; the whole soul is in the face, and from head to foot, Frank Stockton is the genial responsive man. It is like a brilliant burst of sunshine following a cloud, suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore more delicious in surprise and beauty." Everyone under this charmer's spell will, we are sure, say with Edmund Clarence Stedman: I have stayed at the Rudder Grange Just after the wedding chime, Though that jolliest lodge--how strange!-- Is of age at this very time; I have roamed in the Squirrel Inn (With my vouchers from Germantown); To the House of Martha I've been, And more than once have gone down In the queerest of all queer wrecks, And have argued and taken my tea With Mesdames Aleshine and Lecks, All up to our necks in the sea; I have solved, with my private elf, That Lady-and-Tiger riddle That routed the Sphinx herself And parted the world in the middle; And all this fellowship jolly, With a wizard that led me around Through wonder and sweetest folly, From first to last I have found His fancy more passing rare Than that of mask or mummer Since Puck and Oberon wove the snare In a night's dream of midsummer; So I'll roam with him and his throng, Wherever the course meander, Though he frolic a century long. And outlive by a year the sage vizier Of the Two-Horned Alexander. [Illustration: JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.] JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS In an article published by _The Bookman_ not very long ago Mr. James Lane Allen remarked that Uncle Remus was one of the two names in American fiction which have attained anything like universality of acceptance, the other name being, of course, Uncle Tom. And yet fame was thrust upon Mr. Joel Chandler Harris. It happened in this wise. Mr. Harris went to work for the _Atlanta Constitution_ as an editorial writer in 1876, succeeding Mr. Samuel W. Small, who has since prefixed to his name the title of Reverend. Mr. Small had made a success with sketches dealing with a character called Uncle Si, and Capt. Evan P. Howell, the editor of the _Constitution_, desired to have the success maintained in some form. So he approached Mr. Harris with the suggestion that he should try his hand at negro sketches. The young writer was diffident. He pleaded inexperience, incapability; but Captain Howell wouldn't listen to the excuses. In a good-natured way he pursued his associate, requesting, begging, entreating, encouraging. If Mr. Harris would only put into black-and-white those plantation stories with which he was accustomed to entertain the staff! If he would only get his courage up! Finally, the young man yielded and put some of the memories of his boyhood in Putnam County, Georgia, into the mouth of a negro named Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus he has been ever since the publication of the first sketch--Uncle Remus, famous and beloved throughout the land. Captain Howell is said to have gone to the editors' room the morning of the first appearance of Uncle Remus and shouted: "Well, Harris, you're a trump! If you just keep up that lick your fortune is made. Everybody is talking about Uncle Remus, so give us another story." It was given willingly. Mr. Harris was born in 1848 in what used to be known as Middle Georgia. Like many another of our well-established authors, he received a good part of his education at the printer's case in a country newspaper office. It was at the case--just as in the story of Howells and of Mark Twain--that the Georgian acquired his love of journalism--a love which often very naturally develops into a love for higher and more durable literature. He joined the staff of the _Atlanta Constitution_ at the age of eighteen. For a time he served as dramatic critic, in addition to his other service; but he soon found that he had no taste for the theatre. It must be that it was his hard lot to fall among poor actors, for it was not long before he gave up the work and formed a determination to visit the theatre as seldom as possible. Thereafter, he was virtually permitted by the editor of the _Constitution_ to follow his own bent. But the story is moving along a little too fast. It should be said that Mr. Harris was fortunate in his birthplace. Eatonton, the capital of Putnam County, was not a lively spot, in a mercantile sense, in the days before the war, but it could boast of an excellent school, Eatonton Academy. Speaking of Eatonton, the _Baltimore American_, some thirteen or fourteen years ago, printed this strange biography of Mr. Harris under the title of "A Humorist's Sad Romance": "Joel C. Harris, the famous humorist, of the _Atlanta_ (Ga.) _Constitution_, has had a strangely romantic career. His father was a missionary, and it was at the small town of Boog-hia, on the southern coast of Africa, that Joel was born. He was educated by his father, and is a profound Sanscrit scholar, besides being thoroughly versed in Hebraic and Buddhist literature. Just before the Civil War he emigrated to America, and taught school in a village near Lake Teeteelootchkee, Fla. There he fell in love with Sallie O. Curtis, daughter of a wealthy planter, and soon was engaged by Colonel Curtis as a private tutor. The parents made no objection to their daughter's choice of a husband, but the war came on before the marriage could take place, and so Colonel Curtis and Mr. Harris went away to the war. The Colonel lost all his property during the strife, and at the battle of Columbia, S. C., a grape shot tore his leg into shreds. When the war closed Miss Sallie died of yellow fever, and Mr. Harris became the support and comfort of the maimed sire of his dead sweetheart. The two yet live together in a vine-covered cottage near Atlanta. Mr. Harris is hardly forty years of age, but his snow-white hair tells the sorrow of his life. He is noted for his generosity, his amiability and his tenderness." The fact is that from the time of his birth until General Sherman swept toward the sea after burning Atlanta, Mr. Harris lived in Eatonton. When he was six years old he could read, and it is said that a stray copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield," met in his juvenile days, did much to develop his taste for good literature. Joel attended Eatonton Academy for a few terms, and at the age of twelve went to work for Colonel Turner, the publisher of a weekly called _The Countryman_. It was the boy's own enterprise and ambition which brought this about. It was Joel himself who heard that Colonel Turner was in need of a boy with "willing hands" to learn the printer's trade, and who went unbidden and unendorsed to apply for a job. The publisher and the youngster took a liking to each other on sight, and young Harris was put to work forthwith. Those were unquestionably among the happiest days of the humorist's life. This is not saying, of course, that his cup of happiness is not brimming over to-day; but those were days of new contentment. The young printer's work was not burdensome; but the happiest fact of all is that his employer, Colonel Turner, had a rich library, in which his youngest workman was free to browse in leisure moments. The acorn of taste for good books which the boy had cultivated at home here developed into an oak; and the soil in which the acorn took root was fertile, and there was ample room for the spread of every growing limb and bough. At first the lad delved among the Elizabethans. Sir Thomas Browne, too, became one of his favorite authors--nowadays Mr. Harris leans toward Thackeray, Stevenson, Scott, Kipling and James Whitcomb Riley--a good catholic taste. Few boys ever enjoyed a more advantageous course of reading. Gradually the juvenile printer drifted from his books into writing, just as a student one day quits the gallery and starts to paint some work of his own. Colonel Turner responded to the ambition of his protégé most generously. He praised the little works judiciously, and before long young Harris was prompted to doff his anonymity and stand up to be judged by himself. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to _The Countryman_--which was truly rustic in scope as well as in title--and the name of Harris began to be spoken throughout Georgia. This pleasant existence was interrupted by the war, which to the editor and his assistant was indeed the fulfilment of an ancient threat. When Sherman left Atlanta to march to the sea, he shaped his course through Eatonton, and before him fled the loyal Southerners. Among the last to leave the town was the proprietor of _The Countryman_. Young Harris remained behind to look after the property. Little damage was done in Eatonton, but the budding author, finding the state of affairs chaotic, started, when the war was over, to make his fortune elsewhere. He found employment on various newspapers, first in Macon, then in New Orleans, then in Forsyth, and then in Savannah. In Savannah he secured an editorial position on the _Morning News_, of which W. T. Thompson, the author of "Major Jones's Courtship," and other once popular humorous writings, was then the general manager. In Savannah, the vagrant Eatontonian married Miss La Rose, and there he lived, with ever-increasing success, until 1876, when yellow fever swept through the town. Then he moved to Atlanta and went to work for the _Constitution_. And here we shall take up the original thread of this article. In 1880, four years after the beginning of Mr. Harris's connection with the _Constitution_, the Uncle Remus sketches, which meantime had won much praise throughout the country, were numerous enough to make a book of, and "Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings" was published by the Appletons. The book solidified the author's fame. It had the good fortune to be reprinted in England. Even then, more than twenty years ago, it was reasonable to say that Uncle Remus was one of the foremost characters in American fiction. In 1883, "Nights with Uncle Remus," was published; the following year "Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White"; in 1887, "Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches." Up to date, Harris's books number at least sixteen. But we must not lose sight of the fact that all the time the successful story-teller kept up his editorial work on the paper to whose fame he was contributing so materially. Indeed, until his retirement from newspaper work, in 1900, his chief title was that of a "hard-working journalist." It was his habit until within recent years to give his mornings and afternoons to the _Constitution_ work, and his evenings to miscellaneous literary work. He was able to maintain this arduous program for so long a time because of his apparently inexhaustible good nature and his simple manner of life; and, moreover, attention to duties at hand soon became second nature in him. In recent years, however, he gave only his mornings to his editorial labors. "His habit," says an Atlanta correspondent, "was to come down to the office at nine o'clock in the morning, get his editorial assignments for the day, and then go home and do his work, sending his copy down early in the afternoon." Such was his spirit of independence that if the editor chanced to be late in coming down to the office he would not waste time in waiting for him, but would pick up his bundle of newspapers and start for home. Nevertheless, he would send in his copy without fail. On making his morning visit to the office Mr. Harris was never out of sorts. His good humor was perennial, and he never failed to impart it to his co-workers. Though it was his lot to write editorials on political topics, he never enjoyed the rancor of partisan politics, and he managed to put into his editorials enough of humor to make the work pleasant to himself as well as to others. At the same time, the idol of the _Constitution_ staff, it is said, never took a hearty interest in politics; he simply bowed to the fact that as an editorial writer he could hardly eschew politics entirely. But he felt that he owed much to the _Constitution_ for the opportunity it had given him to make his reputation; and he allowed this circumstance to outweigh his personal inclinations until the time came when he found that he would either have to give up his editorial work or neglect his literary contracts. So, finally, on Sept. 6, 1900, he departed from the office of the _Constitution_ for good, taking with him the tearful love of all his associates. As a sort of legacy, he left two sons on the paper, Julian, the managing news editor, and Evelyn, the city editor. And then, almost at the end of his fifty-second year, the dearest Georgian of them all entered upon an unembarrassed literary career, with every promise of doing more work and better work than ever. But even if this promise should rest unfulfilled--which seems almost out of question--we have with us Uncle Remus and Aunt Minervy Ann, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, creations unsurpassed in originality and in delightfulness. Mr. Harris's work is done at his home in West End, one of the suburbs of Atlanta, and few visitors are permitted to interrupt him. Not that he is gruff; he is simply retiring. He prefers to be known by his books. They who know him intimately--and they are not many--say that he is remarkably kind and hospitable. We respect his desire for privacy. We will not even knock on the door and beg one glimpse of his private life. With the whole reading public we shall be content to note his boundless cheerfulness and rare enjoyableness as a story-teller. [Illustration: DR. S. WEIR MITCHELL.] S. WEIR MITCHELL About sixty years ago Oliver Wendell Holmes, taking dinner one night in Philadelphia with his friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, was so pleased with one of Dr. Mitchell's boys, by name Silas Weir, then a little more than ten years old, that he gave the boy a copy of his famous ballad on the frigate Constitution. Some seventeen years later, in 1856, when Silas was a young doctor, with a brand-new degree, he showed Dr. Holmes a book of poems which he hoped to have published. Dr. Holmes advised the young man to put the poems away until he was forty, and then to reconsider his determination to have them published. "The publication of these verses at this time," said the genial but shrewd Autocrat, "will do you no good. They will not help you in your life as a physician, and they cannot stand alone." The soundness of Dr. Holmes's judgment was later proved by the circumstance that the young man blossomed into one of the most distinguished physicians of his time. Dr. Mitchell's volume of poems, "The Hill of Stones," published about four years ago, contains just one of the poems offered to the Boston poet in 1856, namely, "Herndon." As an author, Dr. Mitchell is less celebrated than his friendly counsellor; but as a doctor he is far more celebrated than was Dr. Holmes in his palmiest days. S. Weir Mitchell, one of the six sons of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, was born in Philadelphia on February 16, 1829. His father was then a leader in his profession. He was one of the first Americans to investigate scientifically "animal magnetism," as hypnotism was called in the early part of the last century; and, moreover, he was a highly valued contributor to the medical periodicals of the day. It is noteworthy that he had a taste for literature. Two of his lyrics, "The Old Song and the New Song" and "Prairie Lea," had a wide popularity in their day. At the age of fifteen Weir Mitchell entered the University of Pennsylvania. There he spent three years; and afterward he entered Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in which his father was a professor. One of the severest disappointments in the son's life came in 1870, twenty years after graduation, when, notwithstanding the solicitation of influential friends, he failed of election to a professorship in Jefferson College. However, this disappointment, like the one which he met when he consulted Dr. Holmes about his first book of poems, worked eventually to his greater glory. After graduation from Jefferson College Dr. Mitchell, as we shall call our author henceforth, went to Paris, whence, owing to an attack of smallpox, he was obliged to return in less than two years. By this time the young doctor had lost sight of his literary star. His ambition was to teach medicine. The first article from his pen appeared in the _American Journal of Medical Science_. Other articles followed with quick regularity, but to none of these early writings, we believe, does Dr. Mitchell attach much importance. From 1858 until 1862, when he enlisted as an army surgeon, the doctor devoted his spare hours to the study of poisons, particularly snake poisons. Not long after the Civil War, by the way, one of the largest rattlesnakes ever sent to him died of cold. Dr. Mitchell had the skin preserved and tanned, and he sent it to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with the suggestion that it might make a worthy binding for "Elsie Venner." "I thank you for it," Dr. Holmes wrote back, "especially because it makes an attractive binding, and I know that its bark is better than its bite." It would be interesting to pursue Dr. Mitchell's scientific achievements, but such a pursuit would be too long to agree with the purpose of this sketch. However, his career as a war surgeon is worth looking at, for it had something to do with his subsequent advent as a writer of fiction. Dr. Mitchell and his associates made a deep study not only of the effects of certain wounds but also of the effects of environment. Much of the curious information thus derived was given to the world through the medical papers. It was undoubtedly the study followed during this period which formed the base of Dr. Mitchell's now universally recognized success as a neurologist. The universality of his fame as a specialist in nervous diseases has two substantial witnesses. One is the oration delivered at Edinburgh University in 1895, when he received the title of Doctor of Laws. In that oration he was spoken of as "the chief ornament to medical science in the new world." The other witness is the story of his visit some years ago to Dr. Charcot, one of the great French authorities on nervous diseases. Dr. Mitchell did not give his name; he merely said that he was from Philadelphia, and that there was something the matter with his nerves. "Why," said Dr. Charcot, "you should never have come beyond Philadelphia for advice for such an ailment. You have a physician in your own city better qualified to manage your case than I am." "Indeed," the visitor is said to have remarked; "and who may he be?" "Dr. S. Weir Mitchell," replied Dr. Charcot; "and as I know him by correspondence I will venture to give you a letter to him. You should consult him upon your return home." "No, thanks," said the American smiling, "I am Dr. S. Weir Mitchell." Certainly a handsome compliment for Dr. Mitchell! And certainly a remarkable piece of professional modesty on the part of Dr. Charcot! Perhaps it is well to say at this point that, in 1896, Harvard University also honored Dr. Mitchell with the title of Doctor of Laws; that he is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Clinical Society of London, the London Medical Society, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome, and a corresponding member of many other foreign medical societies; and that he was once President of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. In 1888 the University of Bologna conferred on him the title of Doctor of Medicine. Dr. Mitchell's entrance into romantic literature was made anonymously and, it might be said, accidentally. Soon after the close of the Civil War, the story goes, he and some professional associates one day discussed all sides of the question whether the loss of the limbs involves the loss of the victim's individuality. As a result of that discussion Dr. Mitchell wrote the story of the fictitious case of one George Dedlow, who had suffered the loss of his arms and his legs. The story, which, as they who have read it know, is an intensely interesting complication of romance and science, came to the hands of the Rev. Dr. Furness, one of Dr. Mitchell's friends, who took the liberty of sending it to Edward Everett Hale, in Boston. Dr. Hale, who, at that time, was at the height of his literary power, saw that the story was rare material, and he submitted it forthwith to the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It was promptly accepted, and the first Dr. Mitchell knew of what had happened was when he received a proof of the story, together with a good-sized check and a note complimenting him on the freshness and attractiveness of his article. "The Case of George Dedlow," indeed, was described so realistically that, according to tradition, subscriptions were raised for the poor victim's support and comfort. The newspapers, too, started a discussion of the prodigy, and it was a long time before the public became persuaded that the tale was utter fiction, put together with extraordinary skill. Dr. Mitchell's first book was "Children's Hours," a collection of fairy tales, illustrated by Dr. John Packard. The book was in no sense a great literary effort; it was intended to serve, and did serve, a charitable purpose. His first novel was "In War Times," published serially in _The Atlantic Monthly_ in 1885. Between that time and the publication of "Hugh Wynne" in 1897, the Philadelphian wrote a number of works, the most notable among which were a few dramatic poems. The poems delighted the critical; they were caviare to the general. Dr. Mitchell is not a poet of the "golden clime" of which Tennyson speaks; he has simply found in poetry the fittest vehicle for the expression of some attractive and stirring ideas. His verse reveals his fine sympathy with the true poets rather than his intimate association with them. Unqualified success came to the veteran author with the publication in 1897 of "Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker," which will be remembered in years to come as one of the choicest of American novels. The writing of "Hugh Wynne," which was done at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1896, in less than two months, took years of preparation. It is said that he wrote to a woman "for the name and a full description of every article of apparel worn by a lady in America in the years before and about the time" of the Revolution. Moreover: "One will find on the shelves of his library at home," says a casual biographer, "great rows of books consulted in the preparation of the novel, and among them, as samples, will be noticed Keith's 'Provincial Councillors of Pennsylvania,' Watson's 'Annals,' Trumble's 'The Knightly Soldier,' Fiske's 'Critical Period of American History,' 'The True George Washington,' by Ford; Professor McMaster's 'History of the United States,' 'The Cannoneer,' by Buell, and scores of others, some of them very rare." We find it also said that every chapter of importance in the story was written at least twice, and that some chapters were written even three times, before the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Nothing which Dr. Mitchell has written since shows a power equal to the power of "Hugh Wynne." That novel, therefore, must be regarded as his supreme literary effort. "The Adventures of François" proved entertaining and nothing more; its early popularity was an echo of the immense popularity of the Revolutionary story. "Dr. North and His Friends" is not, as many suppose, an autobiography; but it may fairly be said that by means of Dr. North the author relates some of his most remarkable personal impressions and personal experiences. Dr. Holmes was once a little disturbed, and much amused, at the same time, by a reference to his "medicated writings." The careful reader will note a strong pathological element in most of Dr. Mitchell's works; not enough, however, to warrant describing them as "medicated." The fact is, Dr. Mitchell has made good use of his rare scientific knowledge in the development of many of his characters. One of his intimate friends is reported to have said once that the doctor is constantly studying human characteristics, especially the characteristics of singular persons. "He picks out their brains in a very fine and delicate way," said the friend. "Thus he studies human nature, much in that same synthetical manner in which he dissects a physical malady." Personally the author of "Hugh Wynne" is described as gentle, cordial, and, in convivial company, very entertaining. It has frequently been said of him that he appears to be what he is,--a scholar and a scientist. Some years ago, when Dr. Mitchell was a guest in one of the semi-literary clubs in London, he and the circle around him fell into a discussion of problem novels, which finally resolved itself into a discussion of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," then in the heyday of its popularity. Dr. Mitchell took his ground on two points: he expressed admiration of Mr. Hardy as an artist, but utter dislike of the scheme of "Tess." A man who had meantime joined the circle entered quietly and unobtrusively into the conversation, admitting the force of some of Dr. Mitchell's general objections to problem novels, but maintaining the ethical and artistic merits of the plan of Judge Hardy's new book. The newcomer showed such an intimate knowledge of the construction of "Tess" that the American paid more than ordinary attention to him. At length, when the company was dispersing, Dr. Mitchell's host, with an innocent smile, proceeded to make the two debaters formally acquainted with each other. "This is a friend of mine, Doctor," he said to his guest, "about whose work you know a great deal. Allow me to introduce to you Thomas Hardy, with whom you can hardly find any fault for defending poor Tess." The acquaintance thus curiously begun has since ripened into a rich friendship. Dr. Mitchell does most of his literary work at Bar Harbor, in the summer. There is no sign of the end of this pure labor of love; but the work which exists already is sufficient, in itself, to show that a man burdened with the gravest interests of medical science may give profitable and brilliant employment to his imagination. [Illustration: ROBERT GRANT.] ROBERT GRANT Robert Grant leads the American satirists. Many writers, unnamed paragraphers and critics of high degree, have pursued him relentlessly; but he will not surrender. Contrariwise, it is more likely that they will yet surrender to him. He has Napoleon's way of turning upon pursuers. The satirist is not always clearly understood. For some of this misunderstanding the satirist himself is to blame. Mr. Grant, for example, has never yet explained what he meant by saying in "The Art of Living" that a satisfactory life demands an income of ten thousand a year. On the other hand, some of the misunderstanding is due to a lack of humor among his critics. And at the bottom of the misunderstanding is the natural inconsistency which prompted Mr. Aldrich to write in "Marjorie Daw"--"I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all." An incident which took place not long ago illustrates Judge Grant's sincerity. The statement had been made in a periodical now defunct that "a sufficiency of money has made things pretty pleasant for our literary philosopher." Although averse, unlike many professional writers, to taking advantage of opportunities for controversy, the Judge made this reply to the statement: "It is true that for some years I have had a comfortable income; but if I have been able to command the advantages of modern life at the rate of $10,000 a year, it is because I have earned the money by the sweat of my brow through literary and legal work, and not because my 'judicial seat' is 'padded' with inherited stocks and bonds.... It may interest those who have convinced themselves that my philosophy is founded on a patrimony, to know that from the time I left the Law School in 1879 the yearly income which I have received from vested property has been so small as barely to pay for the life insurance which I carry, and that I have acquired the money which I spend or save by my own exertions. It is true that I was brought up in comfort and given every opportunity to follow my tastes, but this is all I owe to family income." The incident is worth recalling for the light which it throws on the novelist's economical position. The man who is competent to make ten thousand a year is welcome to his enjoyment of it. Robert Grant first earned some celebrity as a writer while at Harvard, which he entered after his graduation from the Boston Latin School in 1869, when he was seventeen years old. His literary career began with his contributions to the college papers, notably _The Lampoon_. That his literary skill was recognized at Harvard is proved by his election to the office of class poet at graduation, in 1873. That summer, while abroad, he seems to have determined upon following his first taste, to use his own expression; for at the end of the summer he went back to Harvard for a three years' course in English and foreign literature, upon the completion of which he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Why he decided to choose another profession has never been divulged, but, anyhow, at the end of the summer of 1876, he entered the Harvard Law School. Three years afterward he was graduated from it, and forthwith he became a member of the Bar and an active practitioner. Mr. Grant left Harvard with a budding reputation. In company with Mr. F. J. Stimson ("J. S. of Dale"), Barrett Wendell (now professor of English at Harvard), F. G. Attwood, whose untimely death has bereft our literature of one of its happiest decorators, and Mr. John T. Wheelwright, now a lawyer in Boston, he had polished _The Lampoon_ considerably. Perhaps his most popular work at this time was "The Little Tin Gods on Wheels; or, Society in our Modern Athens," a burlesque after the Greek manner, which appeared in _The Lampoon_, with illustrations by Attwood. In fact, it was to be found in a book published by Sever, together with the young satirist's other promising works, "The Wall Flowers," "The Chaperons," and "Oxygen, a Mt. Desert Pastoral," squibs dealing with the foibles of fashionable society. Thus favorably introduced to the reading public, he lost no time in striking the iron while it was hot, and in 1880 gave out his first novel, "The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl," which, by reason of its remarkable exposition of the character of the leading lady, as she may be called, and its popular attractiveness, won immediate success at home and abroad. Three years later his second book, "The Knave of Hearts," the autobiography of a ruthless young man, was published; and the same year appeared in _The Century_ the articles which make up "An Average Man," and a satire on Wall Street entitled "The Lambs, a Tragedy." In 1883, too, it may be mentioned, Mr. Grant read at the Phi Beta Kappa reunion at Harvard a poem called "Yankee Doodle." In 1885 "A Romantic Young Lady," another skit on fashionable life, made its appearance; and that year he also served as the poet of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Boston Latin School. The following year, 1886, he finished what, up to that time, was by far his most serious work, "Face to Face," which was published anonymously. In it Anglomania and the labor problem are touched on boldly and brilliantly, and even to-day the points of the book are fresh and sparkling. Later came "The Reflections of a Philosopher," "The Opinions of a Married Man," "Searchlight Letters," "The Art of Living," and, last of all, "Unleavened Bread." "He says," once remarked a man, "what you have thought and wanted to say yourself"; and a better compliment could hardly be paid his philosophy. A writer who went to see Judge Grant some years ago said: "He has cultivated to a rare degree the faculty which is of the utmost importance to every literary man, namely, that of concentration. The greater part of his writing is done during the intervals of business in the morning hours at his office. There, the casual visitor is almost certain to find him, seated at his desk, with his manuscript spread out before him. He will drop his pen, upon the instant, to consider some point of legal technique, with which imagination has nothing whatever to do, listen attentively, take notes or give advice, as though this were the sole object of his existence; then, when the interruption ceases, he will turn back to his unwritten page, finishing that and another too, it may be, before the morning goes, if he is in the vein. This power of leaving off and beginning again quickly was not easily acquired. It is the result of long training in years of practical experience. But, like every true artist, Mr. Grant really carries his work with him wherever he goes. He is always recording and storing up impressions, taking mental notes, or working out details of construction, even when these matters seem to be the farthest from his thoughts; and he is accustomed to say that the actual writing of a story troubles him very little since, with him, when writing begins, the most difficult part of the task is already accomplished. But, in spite of his fluent pen, he has learned to look at his work objectively, and he is extremely self-critical, having destroyed more than once a tale half told, from conviction that it failed to do him justice." In 1882 Mayor Green of Boston selected Mr. Grant as his private secretary, and in 1888 Mayor O'Brien of Boston appointed him a member of the board of water commissioners. This latter post he held until a few years ago, when he was appointed a Judge in the Probate Court of Suffolk County, sitting in Boston. There, almost every day, he may be seen by anyone visiting Boston, a medium-sized, delicate-looking man, with shrewd features, an eye sharp as a detective's, a somewhat brisk manner, and a faint but pleasant voice, to which the most learned counsel lend eager ears. Since his appointment to the Bench he has limited his literary activity to two hours a day, which short but productive period he has been wont to spend generally at the Athenæum Library on Beacon Street, a stone's throw from the Court House. Judge Grant is very happy in his children, and this circumstance may account for his delightful books for boys, "Jack Hall" and "Jack in the Bush." He is a keen though perhaps not enthusiastic sportsman. Every few years he and his wife, who was Miss Galt, the eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Tillock Galt, the Canadian statesman, go bicycling in Europe. This excursive disposition does not narrow his enjoyment of what is best in town life. It has been said of him: "He is not only an admirable talker with a nimble wit, apt at repartee, but he is also a genial sympathetic listener, thus combining very happily the qualities which make a man hail-fellow-well met wherever he goes; and no one meeting Mr. Grant for the first time can fail to recognize and delight in that quick sense of humor which is so characteristic of his writing." A few years ago he was interviewed regarding his likes and dislikes. He said that his favorite prose authors were Thackeray and Balzac, his favorite poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, his favorite book, "Vanity Fair," his favorite play, "Hamlet," his favorite heroines in fiction, Becky Sharp and Eugénie Grandet, his favorite heroes in fiction, Santa Claus and Brer Rabbit; and he admires truth most in men and loving sympathy in women. His strength as a writer lies in an unsurpassed ability to detect and delineate shams, and this ability shines brilliantly in the character of Selma White, the heroine of "Unleavened Bread." The book is a protest against superficiality; the character of Selma White is a monument of vanity. We have all met Selmas, rampant women--there are men like them, of course--who flatter themselves that they are born to grace every resting-place and brush aside difficulties that would have staggered Napoleon or Catherine de Medici. The author has contradicted the opinion that Selma is a shaft aimed at women's clubs. "It is simply that modern women's clubs are the best medium for that kind of women," he says "that I depicted Selma as a prime mover in some of them. But she exists outside of women's clubs probably more plentifully than in them." It has been said that Judge Grant is timid about forcing his way into public attention. The reply quoted from early in this article was an exception to an apparently firmly established rule. At the time when comment on his ten-thousand-a-year proposition was severest Judge Grant wrote to a friend for advice, and he was very easily persuaded to give no heed to his critics. At the same time, if what he had thought of saying would have blown the fog away, it would have been better for him then to have settled the question decisively. But, he was content for the nonce to have his retiring disposition approved; and a philosopher of this type rather invites than forbids attack. But, after all, even his harshest critics praise his rare skill in the exposition of character, his remarkable fertility of wit, and his complete mastery of the technique of literature. Nor is it to be gainsaid that his career has illustrated the wisdom of his lines in "The Lambs": Success is Labor's prize Work is the mother of fame. And who on a boom shall rise To the height of an honest name? The bee by industry reapeth The stores which enrich the hives. All that is thrifty creepeth, For toil is the law of lives, And he who reaps without sowing, A bitter harvest reaps; The law of gradual growing Is the law that never sleeps. [Illustration: F. MARION CRAWFORD.] F. MARION CRAWFORD Since 1893, when he made his first tour through the country as a lecturer, F. Marion Crawford has become a somewhat familiar figure to many Americans, who have noted his athletic form, his handsome face, his melodious voice, his polished deportment. He is easily the best known of the American authors who make their homes abroad. In Major Pond's "Reminiscences," by the way, they who have heard Mr. Crawford read from his novels or recite his description of Pope Leo XIII, will find a very interesting account of the author's experiences during his American tours. Mr. Crawford is a cosmopolite of the first rank. He was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, August 2, 1854. His father was Thomas Crawford, the famous sculptor, who, born in the west of Ireland and reared in America, had, some years before, been sent to Rome to master his profession. He had finished studying with the great Thorwaldsen, and had made a reputation of his own, when he met and married Miss Louisa Ward, who was visiting Rome with Dr. Samuel G. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe. Marion was the youngest of four children. One of his sisters, Mrs. Fraser, has made no small name for herself as a writer. At the age of two, Marion was sent to live for awhile with kinsfolk in Bordentown, N. J. "Among the earliest things that I remember," he said once to an interviewer, "is my great delight in watching the coming and going of the trains as they shot across the farm near the old house." His father died in 1857, and then Marion was taken back to Italy, where he spent his early days. "Most of my boyhood," he said, to an interviewer, when he was in this country on his first lecture tour, "was spent under the direction of a French governess. Not only did I learn her language from her, but all of my studies, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, were taught me in French, and I learned to write it with great readiness, as a mere boy, because it was the language of my daily tasks. The consequence is that to this day I write French with the ease of English. There have been times when I know that I have lost some of my facility in speaking French through long absence from the country, but the acquirement of writing is always with me, which shows the value of early impressions in that direction." When twelve years old Marion was sent to St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., where he remained for two years. Readers familiar with his portraits will remember that in most of them he is represented as smoking. This inveterate habit he acquired during his first year's residence at St. Paul's. The age of fifteen found the migrant youth back in Rome again, where he took up the study of Greek and mathematics. Later he studied with a private tutor at Hatfield Broadoak, in Essex, England, and from this school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he passed four terms. There he perfected himself in German, Swedish and Spanish. He found German of good use when, later, he studied at Karlsruhe and at Heidelberg. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Rome to study at the University of Rome. There one of the professors interested him in Buddhism and the other Oriental mysteries. This professor, who recognized the young pupil's aptitude in languages, advised him to go to India and study Sanscrit, and then returning, he could readily obtain a professorship. The advice appealed to young Crawford, and he borrowed a hundred pounds and sailed for Bombay. There he occasionally wrote articles for one of the newspapers, but his employment was uncertain, and two pounds represented all his worldly possessions when the editor of the _Bombay Gazette_ informed him that the editor of the _Allahabad Indian Herald_ was in need of a "good man." Would he take the position? "Would a duck swim?" said Mr. Crawford; and off he went to Allahabad, a thousand miles away. There he learned that the "good man" was supposed to fill the posts of reporter, managing editor and editorial writer, with now and then a turn at type-setting. Thus none of the sixteen hours of the working day would be wasted. But Mr. Crawford couldn't afford to grumble. Instead he buckled down to what he describes as the hardest eighteen months' work of his life. In 1880, at the age of twenty-six, with no valuable possessions except his experience, he returned to Rome, and thence, early in 1881, he set out for America. The old steamship in which he took passage broke down in mid-ocean, and Mr. Crawford's great physical strength and nervous energy were in constant demand. As the only cabin passenger on board, he had the honor of alternating on deck with the captain and the mates. At Bermuda, where the ship put in for repairs, he narrowly escaped drowning. Finally, at the end of two months, the ship reached New York. In this country he made his home at times with his uncle, Samuel Ward, the Horace of "Dr. Claudius," and at times with his aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. He had not been long in the country before he entered Harvard College, where he took a special course in Sanscrit under Prof. Charles Lanman. He left Harvard in a state of uncertainty. He was ready to do anything to earn a living. He tried unsuccessfully to place some articles on philology. He reviewed books, principally for the _New York Times_. He lectured on "The Origin of Sacrifice." He won a small sum of money with an article on the silver question. One day early in May, 1882, his kind uncle, Samuel Ward, asked him to dinner at the New York Club, which was then situated in Madison Square. But here is where Mr. Crawford should come in to tell his own interesting story: "As was perfectly natural, we began to exchange stories while smoking, and I told him (Mr. Ward), with a great deal of detail, my recollections of an interesting man whom I met in Simla. When I had finished, he said to me: 'That is a good two-part magazine story, and you must write it out immediately.' He took me around to his apartments, and that night I began to write the story of 'Mr. Isaacs.' Part of the first chapter was written afterward, but the rest of that chapter and several succeeding chapters are the story I told to Uncle Sam. I kept at it from day to day, getting more interested in the work as I proceeded, and from time to time I would read a chapter to Uncle Sam. When I got through the original story I was so amused with the writing of it that it occurred to me that I might as well make Mr. Isaacs fall in love with an English girl, and then I kept on writing to see what would happen. By and by I remembered a mysterious Buddhist whom I had met once in India, and so I introduced him, still further to complicate matters. I went to Newport to visit my aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, while I was in the midst of the story, and continued it there. It was on June 13, 1882, while in her home, that I finished the last chapter of 'Mr. Isaacs,' and, Uncle Sam appearing in Newport at that time, I read him the part of the story which he had not heard. 'You will give it to me,' he said, 'and I shall try to find a publisher.' He had for many years frequented the bookstore of Macmillan, and was well acquainted with the elder George Brett. He took the manuscript to Mr. Brett, who forwarded it to the English house, and in a short time it was accepted. "Having tasted blood, I began, very soon after finishing 'Mr. Isaacs,' to write another story for my own amusement, 'Dr. Claudius.' Late in November I was advised by the Messrs. Macmillan that in order to secure an English copyright, as well as an American copyright, I must be on English soil on the day of publication. So I went to St. John, New Brunswick, where I had a very pleasant time, and continued to write the story of 'Dr. Claudius,' which I finished in December. 'Mr. Isaacs' was published on December 6, and I, of course, knew nothing about its reception. However, toward the end of the month I started on my return journey to the United States, and when I arrived in Boston on the day before Christmas, and stepped out of the train, I was surprised beyond measure to find the railway news stand almost covered with great posters announcing 'Mr. Isaacs.' The next morning, at my hotel, I found a note awaiting me from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, asking me for an interview, at which he proposed that I write a serial for his magazine. I felt confident then, and do now, that 'Dr. Claudius' would not be a good serial story. However, I promised that Mr. Aldrich should have a serial, and began soon after to write 'A Roman Singer,' which was completed in February, 1883." That is Mr. Crawford's own story of his start as a novelist, told to us nine years ago in a Boston hotel. The original of Mr. Isaacs was a diamond dealer in Simla named Jacobs. We have heard it related that the chief figure in "A Roman Singer" was partly sketched from a musician now resident in Boston, whom the novelist had known intimately in Rome. The American scenery of "Dr. Claudius" was, of course, fresh in the author's mind. Mr. Crawford said last year: "What a novelist needs in order to succeed is energy above all else. But he also needs to be very poor. No man with money will work hard enough when he is young to succeed. He needs to begin early, work hard, and sit long in one place. If he has money he won't sit long in one place." Mr. Crawford had no money when he started, but he had abundant energy, and he could sit for a day in one place. Hence his success. In "The Three Fates" the close reader will discern a glimpse of the foundation of Mr. Crawford's literary career. In May, 1883, the rising author went back to Italy, where he wrote "To Leeward" and "Saracinesca." The next year he spent in Constantinople, and there he was married to Miss Elizabeth Berdan, the daughter of General Berdan. In 1885 he settled permanently at Sorrento. "Villa Crawford," his home, stands on a high bluff, overlooking the Bay of Naples. There, in a room padded to keep out sound, the author of "Mr. Isaacs" has done most of his literary work for the last fifteen years. Mr. Crawford has frequently been called "a born novelist," and we have yet to find a critic who, judging him by all that he has done, is inclined to deny him the right to that high title. His dialogue is vivid, his problems, as a rule, logically worked out, his dramatic situations strong and timely. Not all his works, however, are of even power or attractiveness; and no one recognizes this fact more clearly than the novelist himself. He has said that the book which he enjoyed writing most is "Mr. Isaacs"; the book which has for him the most reality is "Pietro Ghisleri," and the book of the most polish is "Zoroaster." In years gone by "Zoroaster" was studied in the English departments of many colleges. "I believe," said Mr. Crawford, last year, "that the novelist is the result of a demand. Consequently, I believe that it is the province of the novel to amuse, to cultivate, mainly to please. I do not believe that the novel should instruct. The story is the great thing. Therefore, I do not believe in problem novels, or what they call realism. It is disagreeable to the people." Yet, in his thirty-six works, he has said, to use his own words, some "pretty tall things." Mr. Crawford attributes much of his skill in writing English to the letters which his mother used to write to him when he was away at school. After she had married Mr. Terry, her home in Rome, the Palazzo Odescalchi, became the meeting-place of many brilliant men and women. Artists, poets and literarians crowded her house every Wednesday afternoon, and this choice admiration of her ended only with her death. Of French, German, and, of course Italian, her brilliant son is as sure a master as he is of English; he writes Turkish and Russian readily, and he converses fluently in most of the Eastern tongues. His recreation is yachting. Indeed he holds a shipmaster's certificate entitling him to navigate sailing vessels on the high seas. Five years ago he proved his seamanship by navigating his yacht, an old New York pilot boat, across the seas to Sorrento. All in all, a delightful and accomplished author and gentleman-at-large. [Illustration: Photo by Hollinger, N. Y. JAMES LANE ALLEN.] JAMES LANE ALLEN A few novelists know the world which renews its youth every spring and that dies every autumn, as intimately as Thoreau knew it. One of these novelists is Thomas Hardy, whose description of Egdon Heath in "The Return of the Native" has long been in use as a model in the English Department at Harvard. One of these also is James Lane Allen, the Kentucky schoolmaster. The chapter entitled "Hemp" in "The Reign of Law," contains abundant evidence of this loving power. Here is a random choice: "One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come, season of scales and balances, when the earth, brought to judgment for its fruits, says, 'I have done what I could--now let me rest!' "Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook below. The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little dust paths made by sheep, in the hot months, when they had sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time when they shall rise again as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land." Mr. Mabie, writing once in _The Outlook_, dwelt on what has been called the "landscape beauty" of Mr. Allen's work. "No American novelist," he said "has so imbedded his stories in Nature as has James Lane Allen; and among English novels one recalls only Mr. Hardy's three classics of pastoral England, and among French novelists George Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the background of many charming American stories, and finds delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse...." And when James MacArthur was editing _The Bookman_ he said: "Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, 'the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science,'--that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art--unfailing in its inspiration, unfaltering in its classic accent." It was Mr. MacArthur, who, speaking of "The Choir Invisible," said that "it would be difficult to recall any other novel since 'The Scarlet Letter' that has touched the same note of greatness, or given to one section of our national life, as Hawthorne's classic did to another, a voice far beyond singing." Mr. MacArthur's remark that Mr. Allen came forth from "his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art" is largely true. Although born about half a century ago, it was not until 1884 that he settled down to writing. Not many of our distinguished writers passed thirty before tasting the bitter-sweet fruit of authorship. Mr. Allen was born on a farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, a few miles from Lexington; and on the farm he spent his early childhood. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster. Her parents, who were of the Scotch-Irish stock which settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, had found a permanent home in Mississippi. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Virginians who formed the Kentucky pioneers. The son was graduated from Kentucky University--which has been pictured in the history of his latest hero, David,--in 1872. For several years afterward he taught in district schools, at first near his home, and later in Missouri. Still later he became a private tutor; then he took a professorship in his alma mater; and at length he brought his career as a teacher to a close while at Bethany College, West Virginia. That very year, 1884, he moved to New York, put away his text-books, and plunged into the sea of literature. One who knew him in those days has described him as "a blond young giant with a magnificent head and a strong, kindly face." From the day of his decision to be a writer until the present time Mr. Allen has worked industriously and successfully. Fifteen years ago the chief literary and critical magazines published many of his essays, and from time to time his short stories appeared in _Harper's Magazine_ and _The Century Magazine_. These short stories were afterward collected and published under the title of "Flute and Violin." Then appeared at irregular intervals "The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," "A Kentucky Cardinal" and its sequel, "Aftermath," "A Summer in Arcady," "The Choir Invisible," and, latest of all, "The Reign of Law." The author's high reputation was firmly established by "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Aftermath." "In these two books," said one critic, looking backward, "Nature was interwoven benignantly with the human nature resting on her bosom, leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influences to the human lover, and, when bereft of human love, receiving him back into her healing arms." The books made as deep an impression upon Englishmen as upon Americans; indeed, as late as the spring of 1900 the _London Academy_ devoted a page to a flattering and most sympathetic review of them. The gentle, playful humor, the healthy joyousness, the rare tenderness displayed by Mr. Allen in these two books, are irresistible. Months, and even years, after laying the books down, the reader must remember the many delightful sketches of which they are made. "And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his coat-tails and crying out to me, 'Hello! Adam, what were you made for?' 'You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine,' I answer, 'You have one May; I have twenty-five!' He didn't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open arms and the sound of a kiss." What charming sport! What uncommon perception! And here is one of his choice, frank, bucolic sentiments: "The longer I live here the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man." "Summer in Arcady" shocked many who had fallen in love with the pastoral simplicity and spiritual delicacy of the two preceding books; but it was generally admitted that the book showed an advance in the author's powers, particularly in his power of vivid dialogue. In his first novel Mr. Allen had written that "The simple, rural, key-note of life is still the sweetest," and a change to another key-note, tremulous with pathos and tragedy, surprised the reading public; but the opinion that it was likely to prove a stepping-stone to higher things found general favor. Nor was this opinion unsound, for "The Choir Invisible" lifted its author for the time above the heads of all his contemporaries. Both here and in England the book fairly leaped to success; both here and in England it was praised almost unqualifiedly. An American critic, writing of it, said: "Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. 'The Choir Invisible' will solidify a reputation already established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand." An English critic noted that it was "highly praised, and with reason." "It is written," he said, "with singular delicacy, and has an old-world fragrance which seems to come from the classics we keep in lavender." The book succeeded so immensely that an attempt was made to dramatize it, but the attempt failed. The atmosphere of the book proved to be too ethereal, too spiritual, for dramatization. That "The Choir Invisible" solidified Mr. Allen's reputation was demonstrated by the eagerness of the demand for "The Reign of Law." In some respects this is Mr. Allen's greatest work: it reveals even a deeper knowledge of nature than he ever revealed before, and it deals more intimately with things which have revolved around his own career. Fame has little to do with the sale of books. If "The Kentucky Cardinal," "The Choir Invisible," and "The Reign of Law" had not been sold by the thousands, Mr. Allen's fame would still be of more than transient quality. There is nothing ephemeral about these stories: they are, strictly speaking, a part of our classical literature. The vividness of the pictures will always be fresh and interesting. Taking too literally Mr. Allen's remark in "The Reign of Law" that Kentucky University is a ruin and will always remain a ruin, the reading public has generally decided, we have found, that the university, the author's alma mater, does not exist. It does exist, but, apparently, not in the condition in which the author would have it. Before "The Reign of Law" had been long on the market, he and the president of Kentucky University fell into a controversy which makes an interesting chapter in the academic side of the history of the Blue Grass State. Mr. Allen works slowly and carefully, as may be inferred from the number and the character of his books. And he lives quietly, modestly. He is not in the least given to the exploitation of his habits and his manners, even so far as they may be connected with his literary work. Little has ever been heard of him by the thousands who hurry to read his books, and who read them only to praise him. Some time ago his publishers issued a brochure dealing with his career, and the vital facts contained in it, if put together, would not cover more than twenty or thirty ordinary lines. It should be said before ending, however, that the author of "The Reign of Law" is looked up to almost filially by the younger writers of the middle West. They are never weary of applauding him and of indicating, publicly as well as privately, his extraordinary reputation. Traces of his style, notably as it appears in his Corot-like pictures of nature, may be found in their writings. Indeed, it is quite likely that nothing would please one of these fine young men more than to have it said of his work that it resembles the masterly work of James Lane Allen. [Illustration: Photo by Davis & Sanford. THOMAS NELSON PAGE.] THOMAS NELSON PAGE Thomas Nelson Page first came into national prominence seventeen years ago through the publication by _The Century Magazine_ of the short story called "Marse Chan." He received eighty dollars for the story. A few years ago, in conversation with Mr. Frank G. Carpenter, the author related the incidents which led to the writing of "Marse Chan." At the bottom was a letter which a friend had shown him. "This letter," said Mr. Page, "was from an illiterate girl in Georgia to her soldier sweetheart. The letter was poorly written and poorly spelled, but full of pathos. The girl had, it seems, trifled with the man, but after he had left for the war she had realized her great love for him and written to him. She wrote: 'I know I have treated you mean. I ain't never done right with you all the time. When you asked me to marry you, I laughed, and said I wouldn't have you, and it makes me cry to think you are gone away to the war. Now, I want you to know that I love you, and I want you to git a furlow and come home and I'll marry you.' With a few words of affection the letter closed, but a postscript was added: 'Don't come home without a furlow, for unless you come home honorable I won't marry you.' This letter was received by the soldier only a few days before the battle of Seven Pines, and after he was shot it was found in his breast pocket, just over his heart. The pathos of it struck me so forcibly that out of it came the story of 'Marse Chan.'" Thomas Nelson Page was thirty-one when "Marse Chan" appeared, and at that time his shingle was new outside his office in Richmond. Mr. Page was born in Hanover County, Virginia, on April 23, 1853, and is consequently now in his forty-ninth year. A description of the house in which he was born--Oakland, it was called--may be found in "Two Little Confederates." On both sides he is a lineal descendant of Gen. Thomas Nelson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that there is scarcely an old family in all Virginia to which the author is not related in some degree. One of his cousins is the Princess Troubetskoy, Amélie Rives before her marriage, whose first husband was John Armstrong Chanler. At the time of the birth of Thomas the Pages were comparatively wealthy, but later, during the war, they lost most of their wealth. Thomas's first reading lessons, in the Waverley novels, were given him by an aunt, who also taught him to read the Episcopal prayer-book. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the war, for his father accepted a commission in the Confederate army. Occasionally the boy visited his father in camp, when the troops were on the road from Oakland to Richmond. Once he witnessed a bombardment. Happily, he was old enough to appreciate the gossip of the war which passed around the negro cabins. Like all the slaveholders, the Pages were much reduced in riches when the war ended, but, nevertheless, at the age of sixteen, Thomas was sent to Washington and Lee University. Of his college days he once said: "My standing was not high. I don't know that I had much ambition to be one of the first honor men. At any rate, I got no medals of any kind. I suppose I was a fair average student, but I hear that I devoted myself more to outside reading than to my studies. I was a member of the literary society, and for a time was the editor of the college paper. Contrary to the usual custom, I wrote short articles instead of long essays, and from this got the nick-name of 'The Short-Article Editor.' I wrote, I suppose, much for the pleasure of seeing myself in print. I was very bashful in those days, and I know that I trembled when I first got up to speak in the literary society. I had a chum at college who is now one of the most famous lawyers of the country. He excels as a debater. He was also bashful, and during our college days he joined with me in a method of improving our oratorical powers. We would get together in a room, and, having closed the doors, would debate with each other, upon some question. One would stand on one side of the table and one on the other and we would declaim away, each having a fifteen minutes' speech and a like time for answers. This practice helped me materially in my work as a lawyer." After his graduation from Washington and Lee University, Mr. Page secured employment as a teacher in a private school in Kentucky, not far from Louisville. There he taught for a year, and he says that he enjoyed it very much. He kept his pen at work steadily. The influential paper in the part of the country where he was teaching, was, of course, _The Louisville Courier-Journal_. The young teacher was intensely interested in Ik Marvel's books, and he wrote some essays in imitation of Marvel and sent them to the _Courier-Journal_. They were rejected. From what he has said since, their rejection was not a source of much discouragement to him. At the end of a year the rebuffed essayist returned to his home in Virginia, and, soon after, deciding to study law, he entered the law school of the University of Virginia. Greatly to his credit, he got his degree in a year. Meantime, however, he kept up his interest in literature. While at the University of Virginia he contributed to the college paper. It was also his habit, while at home, to write stories on slates for the entertainment of his friends, and erase the stories after he had read them. At school, too, he began to write stories in the negro dialect, and he continued this practice in his law office in Richmond. At his office he wrote the first of his works accepted by the magazines, a poem called "Unc' Gabe's White Folks," which was published in _Scribner's_ in 1876. He received fifteen dollars for it. He was very proud of that unpretentious check. Later he wrote a historical article relating to the centennial celebration in old Yorktown, and then he sent out his first story, "Marse Chan." It was paid for promptly, but, like many another story sent to the magazines, particularly stories from unknown authors, it remained unpublished for several years. Finally, overcome by impatience, the author wrote to ascertain what had become of it, and shortly afterward he received a proof of it. With its publication in 1884 came instant popularity. But at no time previous to his moving to Washington was literature first in Page's mind. In the beginning, at Richmond, he wrote only at night, when his day's work was done; and for a time he actually ceased writing fiction entirely lest it might interfere with the practice of his profession. For, as a matter of fact, he has been a very successful lawyer. Six months after he had settled down in Richmond he was able to support himself with his earnings at the bar, and during the eighteen years which followed, that is, up to the time of his settling down in Washington, his income was chiefly from law. So, it was some time before "Marse Chan" was succeeded by "Meh Lady," "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Polly" and "Ole 'Stracted." It was said in those days that the stories were like variations on a single theme; but we are inclined to agree with the critic who said: "For this we feel no disposition to quarrel with Mr. Page, being eager to hear the tale as often as he may find ways to tell it, and grateful to him for such beautiful and faithful pictures of a society now become portion and parcel of the irrevocable past." To Mr. Page and his equally delightful contemporary, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, the reading public is indebted for no small number of the most charming features of American literature. It may please those who enjoy particulars to know that the popular writer regards "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," which was first to follow "Marse Chan," as his best picture of Virginia life. Mr. Page, in 1886, married Miss Anne Seddon Bruce, the daughter of Charles Bruce of Charlotte County, Virginia, largely for whose entertainment he had written his early stories; and before the death of Mrs. Page in 1888 Mr. Page had written "Meh Lady" and had published "In Ole Virginia," a collection of his works, all in dialect. In those days, by the way, his work was often compared by the critics with the work of Mr. Harris. Perhaps the fairest comparison was made by Mr. Coleman, who admired the two authors quite equally. "Mr. Page," said the critic, "enjoys the reputation of having written the most exquisite story of the war that has yet appeared ("Marse Chan"). In comparison with the works of Joel Chandler Harris, though both authors deal with the negro, the one in no wise interferes with the proper appreciation of the other. In Uncle Remus Mr. Harris has given us the truer insight into the character of the type to which he belongs, while the venerable family servant is somewhat idealized by Mr. Page, and, moreover, is made to tell a story possessing a value and interest of its own not entirely dependent upon the personality of the narrator and his race peculiarities. In the matter of dialect, Mr. Page has the advantage, though this may be due, in part, to the difference between the Virginia negro and his brother of Georgia." The Virginian has portrayed the sweeter side of the old slavery days, in direct contrast to Mrs. Stowe's picture of the harsher side. In the master he has delineated forbearance, confidence, protection; in the slave, respect, devotion and fidelity. Without a scruple he has felt constrained to make one of his characters say of the days before the war: "Dem wuz good ole times, marster--de bes' Sam ever see! De wuz, in fac'! Niggers did n' hed nothin' 't all to do--jes' hed to 'ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do; an' when dey wuz sick, dey had things sent 'em out de house, an' de same doctor came to see 'em whar 'ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. Dyah war n' no trouble nor nuthin." A few years ago Mr. Page was asked if he wrote rapidly. "Yes and no," he replied. "I write the first draft as rapidly as I can and then go over it very carefully in the revision. I try to simplify my writings as much as possible. The more simple it is, I think, the better it is. I find, however, that the revision often takes away the spirit from the first draft. I lay away the manuscript, and looking at it several weeks later, I can see that the first draft is truer to nature than the more stilted revision. I think I do more careful work now than I have done in the past. My ideal is far above anything I have ever done, and I sometimes despair of approaching it. There is one thing I do, however, which I think is a good plan for any writer. That is, I always give the best I have in me to the story which I am writing. I do not save anything which I think might perhaps be of use to me in the future. The cream, if you could use that expression, always goes to the present." In 1891 the author of "Marse Chan" left Richmond and went to New York to succeed Charles Dudley Warner in the conduct of "The Drawer" in _Harper's Monthly_, Mr. Warner succeeding Mr. Howells, who at that time left _Harper's_ for the _Cosmopolitan_, in the conduct of "The Study." That same year Mr. Page appeared as a public reader. Two years later he married Mrs. Henry Field of Chicago, a granddaughter of Governor Barbour of Virginia, and since then, for the most part, he has lived and worked in Washington. By far his most ambitious work is "Red Rock," a novel which has done much to affect favorably the old attitude of the North toward the South. Not many of our writers rest their fame on fewer works. [Illustration: RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.] RICHARD HARDING DAVIS A great many persons, indeed, a great many critics, have called Richard Harding Davis superficial. They obviously had one thing in mind and said another. Perhaps they may have meant to say that sometimes Mr. Davis dealt in superficialities. We lean toward Professor Harry Thurston Peck's opinion. "Mr. Davis, in fact," he says, "because of the predominance in him of the journalistic motive, is a photographer rather than an artist; but he is a very skillful and adept photographer." No person of superficial temperament could have described with so much humor Van Bibber's attempt to practice economy, or could have given us the affecting conclusion of "Princess Aline," or could have written many paragraphs of "The Exiles." No sympathetic human being who has ever read "The Exiles" will forget the picture of the outlawed boodle alderman in Tangier, saying to a visitor about to return to New York with a clean conscience and a strong hunger to see the familiar sights: "'I'll tell you what you _can_ do for me, Holcombe. Some night I wish you would go down to Fourteenth Street, some night this spring, when the boys are sitting out on the steps in front of the Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed. Lally's; just for luck. Will you? That's what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing better than Fourteenth Street of a summer evening, with all the people crowding into Pastor's, on one side of the Hall, and the Third Avenue L-cars running by on the other. That's a gay sight, ain't it now? With all the girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the sidewalks crowded. One of them warm nights when they have to have the windows open, and you can hear the music in at Pastor's, and the audience clapping their hands. That's great, isn't it? Well,' he laughed and shook his head, 'I'll be back there some day, won't I,' he said, wistfully, 'and hear it for myself?'" It would be hard to find in fiction a more affecting picture done with fewer strokes and with closer fidelity to human nature. It is a picture which must strike the attentive reader, and particularly the attentive New York reader, full on the heart strings. Mr. Davis has the habit of looking at the odd things in life. Without this habit no man can be a first-class reporter; and our author has proved himself a first-class reporter in many parts of the world and for many papers. Like every well-trained reporter, Mr. Davis is continually "seeing things." As he said to his friend Mr. Sangree, some months ago: "I never walk one city block that I do not see twenty things to interest me. I tire my friends sometimes by pointing them out. Their minds run in different channels. But this ability to see things is my greatest joy in life, incidentally my living. I cultivated it when I began reporting, and to this day if I see a man turn in a car to look out the window I unconsciously turn with him. He may have observed something that escaped me--something that contains an element of human interest, and I hold no effort wasted that may add to this general cargo of life's impressions." No able reporter could have worked long under Charles A. Dana and escaped the objective habit. In fact, a story which Mr. Sangree tells of his friend's experience on _The Evening Sun_ illustrates the point. "At eight o' clock one spring morning," says Mr. Sangree, "the blotter at police headquarters recorded a trifling fire on the East Side. News being dull, Davis was sent to cover it. He found a rickety tenement house in which fire had little more than singed the top floor. The crowd had left, a few ashes were smouldering, and the insurance adjusters were examining the place. "'Nothing here,' said the policeman on watch. 'Only five hundred dollars damage and a bum lodger asphyxiated. He's in that room.' "The reporters peeped, saw the blackened face and rigid form, a man unnamed and forgotten--and wrote a paragraph. _The Evening Sun_ reporter, in mousing about saw an alarm clock by the dead man's side with the hand pointing to seven o' clock. "'What time did you break in here?' he asked. "'Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember because that alarm was going off just as I got inside.' "'That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and vivid, simply with: 'The man died at six-thirty. The alarm went off at seven. It was just half an hour too late.'" "What impressed me," said the author, discussing the story subsequently, "was that impotent alarm clock jangling away when the owner was dead. A man's existence had been cut off because that fifty-cent clock could not give its alarm a few minutes earlier." This illustrates what was meant when we said that Mr. Davis takes an objective view of life. His experience as a reporter was invaluable to him; and he took Dr. Hale's advice, and ended the experience at the right time. Doubtless many good writers have been spoiled by indulging too long in the fascinations of newspaper work. A large part of his training as a reporter the creator of Van Bibber obtained in his native city, during his service on the _Philadelphia Press_, for which paper he went to work when he was a little more than twenty. There is a portrait of him taken at the age of twenty-three, in the disguise in which he worked while getting the information which drove the nest of thieves out of Wood street. While Davis was working for the _Philadelphia Press_, by the way, he and his associates in the reporters' room fell in love with one of Stevenson's thrilling short stories, "A Lodging for the Night." They could not restrain their admiration; so they wrote an enthusiastic letter to the gentle sick man off there in Samoa. And to the spokesman of the admiring crew Stevenson replied: _Dear Sir:_ Why, thank you very much for your frank, agreeable and natural letter. It is certainly very pleasant that all you young fellows wholly enjoy my work, and get some good out of it; and it was very kind in you to write and tell me so. The tale of the suicide is excellently droll; and your letter, you may be sure, will be preserved. If you are to escape, unhurt, out of your present business, you must be very careful, and you must find in your heart much constancy. The swiftly done work of the journalist, and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when I say 'writing'--O, believe me, it is re-writing that I have chiefly in my mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you some day. Please excuse this sermon from Your obliged ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. This letter, brought to light a short while ago by Mr. Sangree, in a magazine article, discloses an exchange of sentiments creditable to all the correspondents concerned. For a time the promising journalist was overmastered by an ambition to be an editor, and he established a short-lived dramatic periodical called _The Stage_. In 1889 he reported the Johnstown flood for a Philadelphia paper, and then, the following summer, went abroad with the All-Philadelphia cricket team. Upon his return to this country, New York charmed him, and there, for the most part, he has lived ever since. At first he was connected with _The Evening Sun_. During this connection he wrote his delightful "Van Bibber" stories. But these were not his first stories. His first stories were written while he was editor of a paper at Lehigh College, in his student days. The stories numbered about a dozen, and Mr. Davis collected them and paid ninety dollars to have them published in book form. The book has scarcely ever been heard of since. Later, while at Johns Hopkins University, he wrote his first accepted story, "Richard Carr's Baby," a sort of foot-ball tale, which was published in St. Nicholas. However, the "Van Bibber" stories were his first work of any serious account; they were the first work to bring him popularity. After the "Van Bibber" sketches came his most sparkling gem, "Gallegher," a newspaper story which was refused by three editors and then published, with immediate success, in _Scribner's Magazine_. Later appeared in quick succession "The Other Woman," "An Unfinished Story," "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegan," and the other short stories which soon made their author's name familiar to the reading public on both sides of the ocean. In 1890 Davis became editor of _Harper's Weekly_. This position he left a year or so later to travel across the continent, with "The West Through a Car Window" as the result. Then he went to London, and described the life there; and then he went to Egypt and wrote "The Rulers of the Mediterranean." He was now fairly well started; and since then his pen has never been idle. Since Mr. Davis's advent as a serious writer of fiction he has been subjected on one side to the most extravagant praise and on the other to the most merciless censure. The critics on both sides have made matters worse by dropping the subject at hand and bringing out for public inspection vast quantities of personal anecdotes about the unfortunate author, most of which stories are probably apocryphal. In fact, at one time the newspaper comments were so vulgar that the helpless victim said to a friend who visited him in New York: "If I thought I was like the man the newspapers make me out to be, I would not only cut my own acquaintance; I'd cut my own throat." But, so far as the public ever found out, he took the slings and arrows philosophically. He could afford to. One by one his new works have prospered. It was at the height of this hypercritical hostility that, in 1897, Davis was suddenly missed. About the same time the stories in the _London Times_ on the war between Turkey and Greece began to attract universal attention. The _Times_, said one of the New York newspapers, which had shown especial bitterness toward its former reporter, has discovered a brilliant war correspondent. It seemed that people all over the world were asking, Who is he? It was Mr. Davis, proving, under the cloak of the _Times'_ traditional anonymity his right to be respected as a descriptive writer of the first quality. He repeated this success the next year in Cuba, during the Spanish war, when his extraordinary skill in the description of picturesque incidents was favored by the circumstance that the generals and admirals themselves were sending home virtually all the news. When, last year, Mr. Davis went to South Africa it was commonly expected that he would take sides with the British. Never was public expectation more emphatically at fault. In a moment he took the measure of the British cause and the British tactics; both of these things disgusted him. He put Mr. Kipling himself to shame by serving "the God of Things as They Are"; and as a result he forfeited many friendships which he had made in England. But he won the hearts of his countrymen. His courageous honesty destroyed in this country the last vestige of captious hostility. To-day, at the age of thirty-eight, just at the entrance to full-blown life, Mr. Davis is widely admired and honored. He has pleased the light-hearted with his pretty romantic tales, and he has satisfied the strong of heart with his many examples of an unerring sense of the true comedy and the true pathos of life, and, moreover, of his remarkable personal fearlessness. Perhaps the term which a friend applied to him is most fitting--perhaps he may best be called a "sublimated reporter"; for your sublimated reporter must be at once an imperturbable philosopher and an artist holding the mirror up to nature. * * * * * The author's marriage to Miss Cecil Clark of Chicago, at Marion, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1899, was an event remarkable for its jollity. Last year Mrs. Davis accompanied her husband to South Africa. She is said to be as skillful with the pencil as he is with the pen. [Illustration: Photo by Hollinger, N. Y. JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.] JOHN KENDRICK BANGS A dozen years or so ago, when Mr. Bangs faced at home an audience, which had gathered to hear his address on "The Evolution of the Humorist," he said: "I was born in and have resided in Yonkers for a number of years; I have braved the perils of life in this community, and have endured, without a murmur, the privations common to all of us." A modest biography, and withal an illustration of Mr. Bangs's philosophy. He takes things as they come--and leaves his imprint on them. Comparisons of skill aside, no man could do more. John Kendrick Bangs was born in Yonkers, New York, in May, 1862. His father, Francis N. Bangs, was a prominent New York lawyer, in fact, one of the most prominent lawyers the New York bar has ever known. His grandfather was the Rev. Nathan Bangs, D.D., the first historian of the Methodist Church in this country, the first editor of a Methodist paper, and for many years president of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. In 1883, after receiving such an education as any New York boy of a well-to-do New York family receives, young Bangs was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy from the School of Political Science of Columbia University, New York. For a year and a half afterward he studied law in his father's office--studied at "long range," as he has said himself. But all the time he was impatient to go into literature. "I was more of a fighter," he says, "and it seemed to me that a man has enough battles of his own to wage without rushing after the battles of other people." Gradually his inherited fondness for literature smothered his zeal as a student of law. While contributing in his undergraduate days to the college paper, _Acta Columbiana_, he had enjoyed a taste of literary glory. So, between dips into his father's dry volumes, he wrote little sketches in his characteristic vein. These tentative works introduced him favorably to the managers of _Life_, and, late in 1884, he became associated with Mr. Mitchell in the editorship of that entertaining periodical. In addition to his editorial work he undertook to maintain the attractive "By the Way" page, and to this valuable feature of _Life_ he contributed an extraordinary amount of original matter. What would not have been asked of many other men was requested of the new humorist in the most casual manner, for he quickly proved that, besides possessing a keen literary instinct and that kindly and delightful insight into human nature which, brought together, double the value of a comic paper, he also possessed remarkable energy and power of application. In 1887, while still connected with _Life_, and shortly after his marriage, young Bangs went abroad, and during this absence from editorial work his first book, "Roger Camorden, a Strange Story," was published. It was an unusual and very promising tale of hallucination, and its success was encouraging. That same year, in collaboration with his friend and classmate, Frank Dempster Sherman, he produced a series of satirical and humorous pieces, which were put into a volume under the title of "New Waggings of old Tales." Soon afterward he resigned from _Life_, in order to devote more time to larger work. The first product of the rising author's independent career was a travesty on "The Taming of the Shrew" called "Katherine," which he wrote for a dramatic association connected with the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard. It followed the Shakespearean construction rather closely, and, with its many quips and gags and jolly songs, made a first-rate libretto for a comic opera. The popularity of the travesty advertised the fame of Bangs from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. The following year, for the same organization, he wrote another travesty, "Mephistopheles, a Profanation"; and this, too, won much popularity and further brightened its author's name. The happy results of his experience as the father of three boys were noticeable in the book which Mr. Bangs published in 1891, "Tiddledywink Tales," the first of a series of amusing stories for children. The other divisions of this series are "In Camp with a Tin Soldier," "The Tiddledywink Poetry Book," and "Half Hours with Jimmie-Boy," books that have endeared their author to half the grown-up children in the land. It was by means of these books that he became a most welcome contributor to Harper's Round Table and to the juvenile departments of various literary syndicates. A novel, "Toppleton's Client," appeared in 1893, and in that year also appeared his first widely successful work, "Coffee and Repartee," a collection of Idiot papers, which has been described, and with good reason, as a mixture of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bill Nye. Those were not, compared with the present time, enthusiastic literary days, and yet in a few years fifty thousand copies of the little book were sold. "Coffee and Repartee" was followed at regular intervals by "The Water-Ghost," "The Idiot," "Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica," and by the other books whose names have at some time, been on every liberal reader's tongue. One of the most entertaining of the New Yorker's books is "Ten Weeks in Politics," behind the writing of which is a story worth telling. In 1894 Mr. Bangs was nominated by the Democrats for Mayor of Yonkers. "No candidate, I sincerely believe," says his friend Mr. Corbin, "ever entered a political campaign with greater seriousness or with a more strenuous desire to devote himself to the public good; and except for any one of half a dozen accidents he would have been elected. To begin with, one of the cleverest of New York newspapers, the editorial policy of which has been suspected of personal prejudice, appeared to bear a grudge against Mr. Bangs, and persecuted him in prose and in verse with the implication that he was making a farce of politics. But the real cause of his defeat, as he explains with a quiet smile, was the fact that he refused one midnight to turn his house into a beer garden for the benefit of a local German band that serenaded him; and in point of fact the votes of the musicians and their heelers were enough to turn the scale. Though Mr. Bangs is always willing to laugh at the figure he cut as a politician, he has never lost the sense of his duty as a citizen. His victorious rival had the magnanimity, which in such cases is scarcely to be distinguished from political wisdom, to offer him a subordinate position in his administration--on the Board of Education, I think. Mr. Bangs had the magnanimity, which could not have contained the least scruple of policy, to accept the position and to fill it to the best of his ability, even while he was writing his 'Ten Weeks in Politics.' This episode is thoroughly characteristic." Mr. Bangs has spoken of that defeat as the greatest blessing that he ever met. "In later years," he says, "when I saw how I would have been forced to abandon my chosen profession for politics, when I learned that the mayoralty would have taken every moment of my time, I was glad that I had been defeated. I saw, for the first time, the truth in the saying that a man can do more to bring success within his grasp by standing by his original proposition, even if it be a humorous one. And politics and humor do not mix, unless you happen to be a cartoonist." Politics and humor mix well enough in the right man; but it is not to be doubted that literature has been the gainer by the result of that election in Yonkers. The defeated candidate would probably have made an excellent Mayor. He certainly would have made a conscientious Mayor; and by reason of this conscientiousness the reading public would have missed books which have made us certain that Mr. Bangs is a gifted humorist. Mr. Corbin, by the way, tells another interesting story of his friend's characteristic activity. "Once when I went to Yonkers," says Mr. Corbin, "he appeared as the proprietor of a livery stable. He explained that the business had been running down when he took it, and that by charging himself a thousand or two a year for cab hire he was making a 'go' of it; and that moreover, as he paid his account to himself it did not cost him anything to ride. The plain fact seemed to be that his ready purse and his business sense had saved a humble neighbor from misfortune." Before closing the political chapter of Mr. Bangs's career it may prove interesting to quote from a "send-off" which a Yonkers paper gave him on March 10, 1894, just before the German band episode. "Mr. Bangs," it said, "is a Democrat of the strictest kind, and can always be relied upon to care for and advance the interests of his party, while at the same time he will so guard and guide the municipal ship as to avoid the rocks of reckless expenditure, and pass safely into the harbor of wise economy. With such a candidate the Democracy believes it can surely recapture the mayoralty, and at the same time secure for the city a young, able, and in all respects a competent, honest, and faithful chief magistrate. "Mr. Bangs is popular in the club life of the city, being a member of the old Palisade Boat Club and the Yonkers Lawn Tennis Club. In the latter he is the Chairman of the Entertainment Committee, and also a member of the Building and Book Committees. He is not only one of the best lawn tennis players in the club, but in the alleys of the boat club has proved himself a skillful bowler, having figured conspicuously in the recent annual tournament. He recently proved himself a public speaker of no mean order when he delivered his lecture on 'The Evolution of the Humorist from Adam to Bill Nye,' for a charitable object. He also took prominent part in the last charity ball, which is the social event of the season in this city." How that catalogue of social and athletic qualifications must have appealed to a man of the victim's sense of humor! Mr. Bangs takes his own medicine. He firmly believes that humor sweetens life. "Show me a man who does not appreciate humor," he said once, "and I will show you a man who is morbid, cynical, unresponsive to every fine impulse of nature. Such a man is worse than a pessimist, and more to be pitied. Take some of the greatest and most successful men in the world. Humor has always played an important part in their lives. Often a funny incident has marked the turning-point of a great man's career; often some ridiculous position has been the impetus of a new start in life. Humor is as necessary to the home as is the cooking stove. I mean good, healthy humor. It eases the mind and it becomes an educator; it fills and makes pleasant many a long night; it gives encouragement to the wanderer; it relieves the tired mother of the burden of her cares; it encourages men and women to look on the bright side of life, and the bright side is the only side which should be exposed to view. Literature is the best vehicle of humor. In literature it lives the longest, and in literature it can be studied and appreciated to the best advantage. Someone has said that literature robs humor of its spontaneity! A mistake! A great mistake! A good, solid humorous book, or passage in a book, can be appreciated a hundred times over. The mind retains fun longer than it retains cold facts. You will hear a man repeat something funny that he read, years after, when he couldn't, for his life, tell you the rudiments of the mathematical problems which he spent years in trying to master. A good man looks upon a good book as a friend. He goes to it for consolation whenever he feels blue and sullen, whenever nostalgia claims him as her own. How quickly do the careworn, the tired, the strugglers, the successful ones as well, find rest in the realms of humor!" In the course of his busy life--to give some facts not to be found in the Yonkers eulogy--Mr. Bangs has been vestryman of a church, a purchaser of books for a public library, a journalist, and a director of a private school. At present he is giving brilliant service as editor of _Harper's Weekly_. Meantime, his pen, or his typewriter, is not idle at home, as the publication a few months ago of "The Idiot at Home" attests. [Illustration: HAMLIN GARLAND.] HAMLIN GARLAND Hamlin Garland is Western in every sense of that broad term. To him the West has been birthplace, playground, battlefield. Not only as a writer but also as a man he takes that far-seeing, keen, sincere, unconventional view of things in general that distinguishes the thoroughbred Westerner. Like Jim Matteson, the hero of his latest novel, he sympathizes with the elements. He might appear to be at home in an Eastern drawing-room, but we think that he would prefer to live in his own country. There might be some dissent from the opinion that he is the foremost of our Western novelists; but there can hardly be any dissent from the opinion that he occupies an unique place in American literature, for not only has he sounded a new, vibrant, resonant chord in our literature, but he also has been our one fearless and unchangeable literary impressionist. "I believe," he said once, to illustrate his rule of work, "that the beauty disease has been the ruin of much good literature. It leads to paint and putty--to artificiality. If a thing is beautiful, well and good; but I do not believe in an artist using literary varnish in writing of sordid things. He can discover the beauty in sordid lives not by varnishing them, but by sympathetic interpretation of them." The West has been his birthplace and his playground. He was born in the beautiful La Crosse Valley, Wisconsin, in September, 1860. His parents were of Scotch Presbyterian stock, which fact, together with his early environment, must account for his radical and aggressive mental outfit. "My dear old parents," he says, "brought me up like a Spartan soldier. I owe so much to my mother; to the goodness and patient sympathy with which she trained and softened my blustering boyish nature." If you look at the dedication of "Main-Travelled Roads" you will find an echo of this eulogy: "To my father and mother, whose half-century pilgrimage on the main-travelled road of life has brought them only trial and deprivation, this book is dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism." This appreciation of his parents' more than dutiful sacrifices constantly finds expression in the author's work; it is a salient feature of his individuality. Seven years after his birth the family moved to Winneshiek County, Iowa, a spot typical of the primeval West; and it was here that Garland first got the vivid impressions of nature which he has so successfully pictured in his stories. There is, for instance, in "Up the Coulé," a little picture worthy of Millet. "A farm in the valley. Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sideways in the blast. The ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away, black and sticky, with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his cheeks was watching cattle, a dog seated near, his back to the gale." But did Garland take any part in such experiences? He did, indeed. "I ploughed seventy acres of land when I was ten years old," he says, "and more each year after that. I was so small that I had to reach up to catch hold of the handles of the plough, but I did it. I can remember well how I felt when I started out for my first ploughing in the spring. My muscles were then tender, my feet sank down into the soil, throwing my weight on the ankles and the tendons of the feet. By the end of the first day I was almost ready to drop with pain, but I had to go on. And how my bones did ache the next morning when I was called to go to work! I worked right along, however, going to school in the winter until I was fifteen." But not all the work was at the plough. With his brother Frank he worked out on the prairies, sometimes herding cattle, sometimes scouting for the neighbors. Indeed, somewhere, we believe, the author has said that almost half his life has been spent in the meadows and on horseback. Many recollections of these days are to be found in "Prairie Songs," which book, in fact, is almost a complete reflection of his boyhood days. And on the prairies, too, he met the grangers,--we use the word in its dignified sense--"those incessant toilers who experience, in all its bareness, the rough and bitter side of the great 'main-travelled road.'" But the school in which he got the bulk of his education was Cedarville Academy, in Mitchell County, just a little westward from his home. There he made a special study of history and English composition; and there, for the first time in his life, he had the use of a library. He was graduated from the academy at the age of twenty-one. The following two years he spent teaching and lecturing in the East. The list of the subjects of his lectures show us the breadth of mind which he had reached just as he entered citizenhood; it attests, too, his remarkable intellectual energy and his sympathy with his times. These are some of the literary topics: The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau; The Balladists, with readings from Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes; Walt Whitman, the Prophet of the New Age; The Epic of the Age, the Novel, the American Novel; Americanism in the Novel, with reference to William Dean Howells and Henry James; The Pioneers, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller; Some Representative Names, Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, Miss Baylor, Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke; the City in Fiction and the Drama; The Future of Poetry and Fiction; The Art of Edwin Booth; Shakespeare and Browning. There is something truly Western in the fact that Garland was attracted to Dakota by the land boom of 1883. He soon learned, however, that the boom was not for him; indeed, his only profit from it was experience. In 1884, consequently, he took up the study of English literature in the Boston Public Library. He had intended to take a course in literature and oratory at some college, preliminary to returning to the West to teach. But it is significant of his mental make-up that he found college methods "too scholastic and too dry," and, in general, opposed to his own convictions. This brings to mind what a man who met him early in the nineties said: "It would be impossible for any conventional critic to kill Mr. Garland with scholarly criticism; he has a buoyancy of indifference to obstacles as free as a cyclone from one of his own Iowa prairies; he would joyously tell the most learned professors of Harvard College that the universities as at present conducted in America are the bulwarks of conservatism and the foes of progress; the people who hear him talk about realism and naturalism and truth usually confess an exhilaration at 'finding someone now-a-days' who believes the things he does believe with most consuming fervor." Naturally his unconventional method of studying English literature had an unusual result. To quote from remarks that he made in Boston a few years ago: "The whole perspective of English literature changed with me. Chaucer was no longer great simply because someone had said that he was; Crabbe was not dry because some professor of English literature had said so. I went into the philosophic development of English literature from the earliest myth, through the drama--which, by the way, I found to be a continuous chain, and not a miracle--up to distinctively modern literature. Throughout, I gave to my reading a modern man's comments. If I didn't like an author's work I didn't try to like it. So, you see, after all, my work in the library was mainly a process fitting me for teaching." But all the time, as a matter of fact, he was moving farther away from the teacher's desk. As he studied American literature it occurred to him that the Western side of it might be still further developed. That side certainly lacked anything corresponding to his fresh and deep impressions of it. It was only a step from the thought to the deed. _Harper's Weekly_ published his first poem, "Lost in the Norther," a description of a man lost in a blizzard, and paid him twenty-five dollars for it. With characteristic generosity, he spent the money on his parents, buying a copy of Grant's "Memoirs" for his father and a silk dress for his mother. His mother, too, by the way, received half the money paid for his first bit of fiction. This is the story that Garland told in Washington five or six years ago: "I had been studying in Boston for several years, when I went out to Dakota to visit my parents. The night after I arrived I was talking with mother about old times and old friends. She told me how one family had gone to New York for a visit and had returned only too happily to their Western home. As she told the story the pathos of it struck me. I went into another room and began to write. The story was one of the best chapters of my book 'Main-Travelled Roads.' I read it to mother, and she liked it, and upon telling her that I thought it was worth at least seventy-five dollars she replied: 'Well, if that is so I think you ought to divvy with me, for I gave you the story.' 'I will,' said I, and so when I got my seventy-five dollars I sent her a check for half. I got many good suggestions during that trip to Dakota. I wrote poems and stories. Some of the stories were published in _The Century Magazine_, and I remember that I received six hundred dollars within two weeks from its editors. It was perhaps a year later before I published my first book." This first book is "Main-Travelled Roads," which by some is still regarded as his best book. During the past ten years he has been almost restlessly busy with novels, poems, essays, and plays, in all of which there is more or less evidence of his magnificent unconventionality. For if there be anything magnificently unconventional in American literature it is such works as "A Spoil of Office" and "Crumbling Idols." "I am," said Garland, in a letter written in 1891, "an impressionist, perhaps, rather than a realist. I believe, with Monet, that the artist should be self-centred, and should paint life as he sees it. If the other fellow doesn't see the violet shadows on the road, so much the worse for him. A whole new world of color is opening to the eyes of the present generation, exemplifying again that all beauty, all mystery, is under our spread hand--waiting to be grasped. I believe, also, that there is the same wealth of color-mystery in the facts of our daily lives, and that within a single decade a race of dramatists and novelists will demonstrate the truth of my inference." The decade has come and gone, but the new race of dramatists and novelists is still absent. Mr. Garland is even now far ahead of the crowd. He once described his manner of working to Mr. Walter Blackburn Harte, another radical, but not so fortunate, thinker. He said that he never writes under pressure. "I work precisely as some painters do. I have unfinished pictures lying around my workshop. After breakfast each morning I go into my writing-room, and whichever picture chimes in with my mood, after a glance around, claims me for that morning. I work on it as long as I find great pleasure in it, and I stop the moment I am conscious of it becoming a grind. If I have any power left, I turn to something else; if not, I quit and turn to recreation--reading, study; or I go out for a walk. I do all my writing on blocks of manuscript paper, and I have stacks of these lying around, as many as forty or fifty in various stages of completion. I never write on any one thing day after day just with the purpose of getting it done. I believe thoroughly in moods, although I do not wait for any particular mood, for I am in the mood every morning for something. All my work interests me supremely, or I should not do it." Mr. Garland was married a few years ago to Miss Zuleme Taft, of Chicago, who has achieved some fame as a sculptor. [Illustration: Photo by Hollinger, N. Y. PAUL LEICESTER FORD.] PAUL LEICESTER FORD In 1876, when Paul Leicester Ford was eleven years old, he published "The Webster Genealogy," a genealogy of Noah Webster, with notes and corrections of his own. When he was seventeen he published "Websteriana, a catalogue of books by Noah Webster, collated from the library of Gordon L. Ford." At nineteen he also became the author of "Bibliotheca Chaunciana: a list of the writings of Charles Chauncy," the second president of Harvard College. So much, at least, Ford accomplished before he was out of his 'teens. Yet, considering his environment, this record is not a matter of wonder. Ford's father was Gordon L. Ford, a successful lawyer, a diligent student of American history, and, in the great Greeley's day, publisher of the _New York Tribune_; and, which is more to the point, the collector and owner of one of the largest and richest private libraries in the United States. Little beyond these facts is known by those who had not the privilege of Gordon Ford's acquaintance. Mr. Lindsay Swift speaks of him as "an idealist of the type which does not readily pursue other than the highest ends, and which cannot throw open the reserves of its nature." Paul was born on March 23, 1865. On his mother's side he is descended from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, the author of the precious manuscript in the State House at Boston. On this side, too, he is the great-great-great-grandson of the aforementioned Chauncy and the great-grandson of the aforementioned Webster, the lexicographer, and the grandson of Professor Fowler of Amherst College. Paul's brother, Worthington Chauncy Ford, by the way, is already famous, though in a quieter way, as a statistician and publicist. Paul was a delicate child; his very delicacy gave him the opportunity to cultivate, under extremely favorable circumstances, his endowment of strong mental faculties. He was educated in his father's library. It is said that the Ford house, which stood in Clark Street, Brooklyn, was fairly walled with books. At the time these books were transferred to the New York Public Library their number was given out as one hundred thousand. The library itself was a room some fifty feet square. There the Ford boys were educated under the supervision of their cultured parents. Ford is by nature a student; and under his father's guidance this disposition was sedulously cultivated. As a child he learned to set type, and as a child, also, he assisted his father in historiographical work. The father and the two sons established the Historical Printing Club, issuing books and pamphlets relating to American history and bibliography. This club was maintained until after the father's death. Among its products were the papers to which we have already referred. Mr. Lindsay Swift has written an interesting description of the famous bibliographical arena in which Ford developed his genius. The description, of course antedates the memorable transfer. The room, "over fifty feet square, and reached from the main floor by a short flight of steps," he says, "is well but not glaringly lighted by a lantern at the top, while the sides, with the exception of a few small windows, of no great utility owing to the tallness of surrounding buildings, are fully taken up with books to the height of eight feet. The floor is covered in part by large rugs; the walls and ceilings are of serious tint; a fireplace is opposite the entrance; while sofas of most dissimilar pattern and meant seemingly to hold any burden but a human one, are placed 'disposedly' about; chairs, easy but not seductive, are in plenty, but like the sofas give notice that here is a government not of men but of books--here is no library built for the lust of the flesh and pride of the eye, but for books and for those who use them. I cannot suppose that those smitten of bibliophily would thrill over the Ford library, since it exists for the practical and virile, although it is, in parts, exceedingly choice. Roughly classified to suit the easy memories of the owners, it presents an appearance urbane and unprecise rather than military and commanding. At irregular intervals loom huge masses of books, pamphlets, papers, proof-sheets and engravings in cataclysmic disorder and apparently suspended in mid air, like the coffin of the False Prophet, but, in fact, resting on tables well hidden by the superincumbent piles. In this room the father slowly accumulated this priceless treasure, mostly illustrative of American history and its adjuncts, thereby gratifying his own accurate tastes and hoping, as we may suppose, that his children would ultimately profit by his foresight." No doubt the father had such a hope, and before he died he lived to enjoy the fullest realization of it. At any rate, that room was Paul Ford's college, and, later, his literary workshop. It might dull the reader's interest to enter into a detailed account of all the early work that Ford did in his father's library, but we may say that between 1886 and 1896 he published more than twenty pamphlets and books bearing on American historiography and bibliography, besides the bulk of "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson." As evidence of his prodigious capacity for energy, we offer the list of works which he published in the single year 1889: "The Franklin Bibliography: a list of books written by or relating to Benjamin Franklin," "List of Some Briefs in Appeal Cases Which Relate to America Tried Before the Lords Commissioners of Appeals of Prize Cases of His Majesty's Privy Council, 1736-1758," "Check-List of American Magazines Printed in the Eighteenth Century," "Check-List of Bibliographies, Catalogues, Reference Lists, and Lists of Authorities of American Books and Subjects," "Some Materials for a Bibliography of the Official Publications of the Continental Congress for 1774," "The Ideals of the Republic; or Great Words from Great Americans," and "Who was the Mother of Franklin's Son?" His most notable historical works are "The True George Washington," which excited so much comment when it appeared in 1896, and "The Many-Sided Franklin," published serially in _The Century Magazine_ a few years ago. Though he may take advantage of moods, he does not wait for moods. They say that Alphonse Daudet was such a man of moods that two months would pass sometimes and leave the paper before him still blank. Ford is Daudet's antithesis in this respect. His pen is always ready. Perhaps this characteristic is one of the advantages of pursuing diverse interests. Yet, notwithstanding the immense amount of literature which he has produced already, the New Yorker is as painstaking as one of those Japanese artists who will labor for years on a single vase. Once, when half-way through a book, he discovered that he was reaching the wrong conclusion, so he destroyed what he had done and began again. Only a writer with a heroic disregard of time and effort, and with a sincere purpose and unlimited zeal, would make such a sacrifice. It is what we should expect of every master-craftsman, yet we fear that the deed is uncommon enough. Mr. Ford's high reputation as a novelist was established by "The Honorable Peter Stirling." Much of the success of the novel was due without doubt to the report that the hero of it was none other than the Hon. Grover Cleveland. Technically the story has only a slight value; or perhaps it is fairer to say that its literary merit rises and falls. There are passages that drag; there are clumsy passages; there are amusing unrealities; and there are scenes photographic in their portrayal of metropolitan life. Then, again, the broad theme naturally interested the public--that great led and leading mass of humanity with its mercurial temper and shifting whims and deep sympathies. The strength and the weakness of the book--its literary dimness and its popular attractiveness--are illustrated in Stirling's speech at the Coldman trial. "The event of the trial came, however, when Peter summed up. He spoke quietly, in the simplest language, using few adjectives and no invectives. But as the girl at the Pierce's dinner had said: 'He describes things so that one sees them.' He told of the fever-stricken cows, and he told of the little fever-stricken children in such a way that the audience sobbed; his clients almost had to be ordered out of court; the man next Dummer mopped his eyes with his handkerchief; the judge and jury thoughtfully covered their eyes (so as to think better); the reporters found difficulty (owing to the glary light) in writing the words, despite their determination not to miss one; and even the prisoner wiped his eyes in his sleeve. Peter was unconscious that he was making a great speech; great in its simplicity, and great in its pathos. He afterward said that he had not given it a moment's thought and had merely said what he felt. Perhaps his conclusion indicated why he was able to speak with the feeling he did. For he said: "'This is not merely the case of the State _versus_ James Coldman. It is the case of the tenement-house children against the inhumanity of man's greed.'" A vivid picture sketched crudely, judged from the artistic view-point; but a picture to touch the heart of the people. This human element in the story, together with the popular idea that the hero was the distinguished statesman now resident in Princeton, made "The Honorable Peter Stirling" one of the most successful books of its day. In a greater or less degree these merits and defects are reflected in "The Story of an Untold Love" and in "The Great K. & A. Train Robbery," but "Janice Meredith" reveals marked literary improvement. Janice is unquestionably the least artificial of all his female characters. In "Janice Meredith," too, the author is on familiar ground. One has only to compare his Washington with the Washington whom Thackeray pictured in "The Virginians" to realize fully that while the English novelist was the abler writer the American is the closer student. It would be absurd for even the author's warmest admirer to set up the claim that "Janice Meredith" is the great American historical novel; and although some of the friendly critics have vaguely hinted as much, no one, we believe, has boldly gone to the extremity of a proclamation. But it must in all justice be said that the book contains some of the elements which one day will entitle a story to that phenomenal distinction. Notable among these elements are a glowing imaginativeness and a rare faithfulness of historical portraiture. Mr. Swift has fortunately given us a description of the author with his pen in hand. "A spirit of restlessness takes hold upon Mr. Ford when he is hardest at work," he says, "and he shifts at pleasure from one to another of his several desks or tables. I should imagine that the curiosity hunter of the future who might wish to possess the desk at which or the chair on which the author of 'Peter Stirling' sat when he penned that book, might comfortably fill a storage-warehouse van with new-found joys. Like most good fellows who write, Mr. Ford knows the value of the night and often works to best advantage when honest folk have been long abed." Again, Ford is described as being alive to every issue of the day and of the hour. He is brilliant at conversation, and perhaps more brilliant at controversy, "for," says Mr. Swift, "I can imagine no opposing argument so bristling with facts as to prevent his making a cavalry charge on a whole table of unsympathetic listeners. Life is at its keenest pitch when one is privileged to hear his urgent voice, with no little command withal in its notes, and to see the invincible clearness and dominance in his black-brown eyes." We can conclude with no happier remark than that, so far as fiction is concerned, at least, Mr. Ford seems destined to win still greater honors than those already in his possession. [Illustration: ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS.] ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS As we write this sketch, we have in mind the familiar picture of Robert Louis Stevenson, stretched out on a couch in his Samoan home, ailing, working. There is a sad sweetness in the sharpened face, and in the eyes is a gleam of bravery or determination. The Scot whom the entire reading world still loves so dearly, and will continue to love, it seems, when the babes of to-day are trembling graybeards, knew the strenuous life much more intimately than most of its new advocates; but it was a part of his art, and the artist conceals his art. Stevenson's sentences glitter, for they are gems of literature; but the glitter was given them at the expense of sublime patience and infinite pains. Unconsciously he presented an example of heroism; consciously he showed the young writers of his day that anything approaching perfection must be the product of scrupulous industry. Like the diamond polisher, he was never satisfied with a merely smooth facet: the facet dazzled or he was not content. We have Stevenson in mind at this time for many reasons. In the first place, the subject of this chapter, Robert Neilson Stephens, may know of the letter of congratulation which, when he was writing for the _Philadelphia Press_, some of the young men of that journal sent to the distinguished writer on the Pacific island; and possibly he may have seen the answer that Stevenson sent--an answer filled with modest thanks and sound advice and sincere good wishes. The letter ended with the remark that if the young Philadelphians labored skillfully and ambitiously they would surely make their mark. If Stevenson had lived he would have congratulated Robert Neilson Stephens four years ago. You will notice that there is a certain similarity between the features of the author of "The Master of Ballantrae" and the author of "Philip Winwood"--the same delicacy, the same lurking kindness, the same suggestion of indomitable intellectuality. And the resemblance extends beyond the features, also. Stevenson, in his youth, suffered from poverty; so did Stephens. The Scotchman for a long time dipped his pen in water, making no impression, receiving no encouragement, entertaining no luck; so, also, did the American. It is a story almost as old as the world, a story illustrated occasionally in the skies. Astronomers tells us that light, fast as it travels, takes years upon years to come to us. Often it is the same with men of genius: they blaze long before our narrow vision gives any sign of recognition. Someone, by the way, once sympathized with Stephens on his ill health. Yes, he was far from strong, he admitted; "but," he said, "they may say what they please--those who have never been poor--I would rather be ill and well-to-do, as I am, than poor and in good health, as I was for many years. I have had many sorrows, but hardly a sorrow that was not aggravated, if not caused, by poverty, or that very moderate wealth would not have ameliorated or prevented. The difference between pecuniary ease and poverty is oftentimes simply as the difference between heaven and hell." We may not all agree with the sentiment suggested, that riches in most circumstances or under most conditions are preferable to poverty with good health, but no one can fail to discern in the sentiment the bitter memory of a man who has been acquainted with great distress. At any rate, his is a philosophy based on experience. To experience, also, we may ascribe Stephens's animadversion regarding friendship. "When a man makes any kind of success, however small," he says, "he finds that his old friends resolve themselves into three classes. The first class turn sullen, and show their envy in many mean ways. The second class wax more friendly than ever, and come showering their attentions. The third class show a reasonable pleasure at your success, and remain just as they were before. God bless the last kind! God mend the second! and God pity the first!" Before generalizing farther it might be better to reveal some of Stephens's career. Robert Neilson Stephens, a descendant of the Jacobite fugitive who was grandfather of Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, was born on July 22, 1867, in New Bloomfield, a little town in Central Pennsylvania. The house in which he was born lay a stone's throw from the academy founded by his grandfather and conducted by his father. The first distressful event came into Robert's life when, at the age of nine, some seven years after the family had moved from New Bloomfield to Huntingdon, on the Juniata River, his father died. His mother, to support her children, took a position as a school teacher. Notwithstanding the lack of wealth, however, Robert went through the public high school. After leaving school he went to work, for three dollars and a half a week, in a bookstore connected with a stationery factory. Aside from his pride and his poverty, which seem to have influenced him to no small extent, he was a delicate youth, and his steadiest companions were books. Besides, he cultivated assiduously the faculty of observation. This cultivation shows itself in his books. He is unsurpassed among the novelists of the day for mastery of the life of bygone periods. The work in the bookstore was distasteful to him in many ways. The narrowness and the ignorance of the factory hands chafed his delicate sensibilities; the nature of the work itself jarred on his always strengthening mental equipment. He looked about him for a means of escape from this sort of prison, incarceration in which was little sweetened by the fact that in the second year his salary was raised to four dollars and a half. One of the modes of escape which he attempted was stenography. By assiduous practice he acquired such facility in this branch of writing that the Hon. John Scott, solicitor-general of the Pennsylvania Railroad, aided by Mr. William B. Wilson, an old friend of the boy's father, before long secured him a position in the railroad company's office in Philadelphia. When settled down, Robert brought his mother and brother to the city on the Delaware. But, pleasant as its environment was, the young stenographer saw in his new position no very rosy future. It was not--as it is not to-day--his disposition to confound mere comfort with success. We have quoted his remark that he would rather be rich and sick than poor and well; but we venture to think that the riches of Mr. Rockefeller would fail to give him absolute satisfaction so long as the feeling of professional success were absent from him. At any rate, we judge by his present pursuits and aims that his ideal is nearer to the revered and affluent workman, like Zola, for example, than like to a man whose sole object is the enjoyment and disbursement of dollars and cents. From the Pennsylvania road he went to the _Philadelphia Press_, which in those days was a veritable cradle of authors. Here his literary instinct took hold of him. It had taken hold of him once before, in Huntingdon, one vacation, when he had worked as printer's devil in the office of a weekly newspaper, and, as often happens to "devils," had been stricken down with what may be called typographical fever. The great are not alone in the enjoyment of authorship. We believe that Mr. Stephens's first literary offering, an article describing the joys and woes of budding printers, appeared in that Huntingdon weekly. That, however, was a mere juvenile spasm. It was nothing like the powerful impulse that came to him just previous to his début as a writer of theatrical notices for the _Press_. He showed so marked an aptitude for this employment that within a year he was virtually in full charge of the paper's important dramatic column. Stephens's career on the _Press_ was as varied as that of the average newspaper man, and, consequently, as interesting and precious. For the patience that, like the steam-drill, bores its way through every obstacle; for accumulative industry, for tireless zeal, for unaffected modesty dashed with power, for knowledge of the overt and covert ways of men--for such a unique mixture of crude virtue and wisdom combined commend us to the enthusiastic journalist. Stephens unconsciously heeded Stevenson's caution and retired from journalism before its hypnotic spell had taken complete possession of him. One of the reasons for his retirement from journalism was the singular rule made by the _Press_ that members of its staff must not write for any other periodical. Stephens had been fortunate in placing his extra work, and naturally he felt that the rule shut out promising opportunities. Besides, in 1889, he had married--Mrs. Stephens was, before her marriage, Miss Maude Helfenstein, of Chicago--and there were other reasons for his practical view of the situation. There was no risk in the retirement, for he had made many friends while on the _Press_, especially among the inhabitants of the theatrical world. He received and accepted, in 1893, an offer to become general agent for a firm of theatrical managers. Incidentally he was required to write cheap plays--plays for the vulgar public that Gautier despised and ridiculed. These dutiful efforts are hardly noteworthy, but we must mention "On the Bowery," a melodrama which afforded the picturesque and withal good-hearted Steve Brodie a chance to be heroic some sixty-four times a week. But although this grade of work was uncongenial to the author, it opened the way to a better field, and, in September, 1896, his play, "An Enemy to the King," written during the winter of 1894-95, was produced in New York by E. H. Sothern. As this was his first ambitious production, the author displayed some lack of nerve. Instead of accompanying his wife to the theatre, he shrank back to a nearby comfortable refuge, whither, between the acts, a friend brought him tidings of the performance. The call for him was led by Richard Harding Davis and DeWolf Hopper, who, running across him outside the theatre, half suffocated him with congratulatory embraces. By and by Mr. Sothern took the successful play to Boston; and there happened the circumstance which established the author's fame. The play was seen in Boston by Mr. L. Coues Page, the Boston publisher, who, recognizing in it the elements which constitute a popular semi-historical romance, and foreseeing the extensive demand for that branch of literature, sought the author and proposed that he should make a novel out of his play. The proposal was readily accepted; in fact the contract was signed twenty-four hours after the author and publisher had first met. The instantaneous popularity of the book, which was published in the fall of 1897, had a two-sided effect: it induced the author to abandon hack-work entirely and devote his best energy and proficiency to fiction. It is deeply to be regretted that Stephens's health declined simultaneously with his procession to the seats of the famous, yet these distressing conditions are hardly discernible in either the quantity or the quality of his work. In April, 1898, his second novel, "The Continental Dragoon," appeared, and in the following June the latest of his plays, "The Ragged Regiment," was produced at the Herald Square Theatre, New York. In October of that year appeared his third novel, "The Road to Paris"; in May, 1899, "A Gentleman Player"; in May, 1900, his highly popular Revolutionary romance, "Philip Winwood," written almost entirely in England, and published on the same day in England, Canada, and the United States. His latest novel, "Captain Ravenshaw," in which he returns to the scene of "A Gentleman Player"--Elizabethan London--has just reached the public. Shortly after the publication of "A Gentleman Player," the novelist, in the assurance of a handsome income and of consequent ease, went abroad with his wife. Abroad he has lived ever since. This fall, we understand, he will spend traveling on the Continent. The first part of the winter he plans to pass in Italy or in Sicily, the second part on the Riviera. The spring of 1902 will find him in Paris, whence, by the end of spring, he expects to start for home. We say "home" purposely, for we are told that his protracted residence abroad has served if anything to deepen and enliven his loyalty to his native land. We have been privileged to read the preface to "Captain Ravenshaw." The main part of it is a spirited and well-pointed defence of the neo-romanticists against the eccentric assault of Mr. William Dean Howells. Then, referring to the book itself, Stephens goes on to say: "Now, as to this little attempt at romance in a certain kind, I wish merely to say, for the benefit of those who turn over the first leaves of a novel in a bookstore or library, before deciding whether to take it or leave it, that it differs from the usual adventure story in being concerned merely with private life and unimportant people. Though it has incidents enough, and perils enough, it deals neither with war nor with state affairs. It contains no royal person; not even a lord--nor a baronet, indeed, for baronets had not yet been invented at the period of the tale. The characters are every-day people of the London of the time, and the scenes in which they move are the street, the tavern, the citizen's house and garden, the shop, the river, the public resort--such places as the ordinary reader would see if a miracle turned back time and transported him to London in the closing part of Elizabeth's reign. The atmosphere of that place and time, as one may find it best in the less known and more realistic comedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in prose narratives and anecdotes, and in the records left of actual transactions, strike us of the twentieth century as a little strange, somewhat of a world which we can hardly take to be real. If I have succeeded in putting a breath of this strangeness, this (to us) seeming unreality, into this busy tale, and yet have kept the tale vital with a human nature the same then as now, I have done something not altogether bad. Bad or good, I have been a long time about it, for I have grown to believe that though novel-reading properly comes under the head of play, novel-writing properly comes under the head of work. My work herein has not gone to attain the preciosity of style which distracts attention from the story, or the brilliancy of dialogue which--as the author of 'John Inglesant' says, 'declares the glory of the author more pregnantly than it increases reality of effect.' My work has gone, very much, to the avoidance of anachronisms. This is a virtue possessed by few novels which deal with the past, as only the writers of such novels know. It may be a virtue not worth achieving, but it was a whim of mine to achieve it. Ill health forbade fast writing, the success of my last previous work permitted slow writing, and I resolved to utilize the occasion by achieving one merit which, as it required neither genius nor talent, but merely care, was within my powers. The result of my care must appear as much in what the story omits as in what it contains. The reader may be assured at the outset, if it matters a straw to him, that the author of this romance of Elizabethan London (and its neighborhood) is himself at home in Elizabethan London; if he fails to make the reader also a little at home there in the course of the story, it is only because he lacks the gift, or skill of imparting." Months ago the demand for "Captain Ravenshaw" was so great that the publishers were forced to issue an unprecedentedly large first edition. The present circumstance is an eloquent commentary on the increase of the author's power and popularity. That power and that popularity seem destined to grow larger book by book. The master of a most graceful style and of diction unsurpassed for simplicity and clearness; a trained observer, as every successful writer must be; a diligent and uncommonly perspicacious student of the periods from which he takes his characters, the author of "Captain Ravenshaw" promises ably to sustain his already high reputation. As the fulfilment of this promise depends largely on the state of his health, we wish him well, confident that in expressing the wish we but echo the sentiment of his wide circle of admirers. [Illustration: CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.] CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS "Professor" Roberts he is still called by his old friends in New Brunswick, and, so far as we know, "Old Man" he is still called by his literary companions. "The 'Old Man,'" said Richard Hovey a few years ago, "he is fondly called by the poets who are his companions, not that he is so much the elder of the group, but perhaps because he had already achieved a certain measure of reputation and was a full-fledged man of letters when the others were just beginning their callow boy-bows to the Muse. And the name, given at the outset in a comic, mock-filial mood, has stuck to him as a term of endearment." Hovey--may he rest in peace!--loved and admired Roberts. He said so in writing; he said so o' nights in the company of his old friends in Boston. Hovey had a manner that would remind one of the rivers branching off Roberts's familiar Bay of Fundy. At first, a stranger, you found it empty; in a few moments, if he offered you the right hand of fellowship, it was flooding with a warm tide. We could readily go on for a page or two speaking of the lamented singer, and of what it meant to know him as a friend--to share his hospitality and his sympathy. But it occurs to us that some reader may be inquiring why the professor from New Brunswick has been brought into a book on American authors. We might answer, with a smile, to incite him to become as loyal an American as General Wallace or Mark Twain. Or we might repeat as an answer a statement made to us not long ago by an observant inhabitant of this part of the literary world--"Professor Roberts is quite as good an American as Henry James." But, using American in its fullest sense, Roberts easily comes in under that head. The shadow of the Stars and Stripes falls near his birthplace. His public is largely a purely American public. His residence for the last four years has been New York City. He is perhaps the most gifted author reared in late decades by our lovely neighbor, the Dominion of Canada, his alma mater-- O child of nations, giant-limbed, Who stand'st among the nations now Unheeded, unadored, unhymned, With unanointed brow! Speaking of Roberts in _The Writer_ once, his friend Hovey said: "All his excursions include a return ticket to the Maritime Provinces, and 'Up and Away in the Morning' is always for the sake of 'Home, Home in the Evening.'" This statement has been contradicted by Roberts's life during the last few years. He is to be found in New York winter and summer. At the same time we should be stultifying ourselves to deny his loyalty to his native land. It lives in many of his pages; it is kept aflame by ties of family and of friendship. The beautiful part of the world northeast of New England has been to him nursery, academy and studio. Indeed, one who knew him well has said: "He is neither Briton nor American, but assertively Canadian; and, if history ever make his dream a reality, his own poems will not have been an entirely negligible factor in bringing it to pass." Charles George Douglass Roberts, M.A., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L., was born in Douglas, at the mouth of the Keswick River, near Fredericton, New Brunswick, on January 10, 1860. His father, the Rev. G. Goodridge Roberts, M.A., the son of Professor George Roberts, Ph.D., is the rector of the English church in Fredericton, and also the canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His mother, Emma Wetmore Bliss Roberts, comes of what used to be known as United Empire Loyalist stock--the same stock, by the way, that Emerson's mother came of. Her ancestors left the colonies for the provinces at the outbreak of the American Revolution. There were many influential families among the Loyalists, and, on the whole, their headstrong flight has been beneficial to the land 'way down East. The novelist's mother, it should be said, is a sister of Bliss Carman's mother, which makes the two young writers, Roberts and Carman, cousins by blood as well as brothers by profession. A strong intellectual ancestry has Roberts, it will be seen, an ancestry that fully accounts for the circumstance that his sister and his two younger brothers are skillful at versification. The first fourteen years of Roberts's life were spent in Woodstock, of which parish his father was then the rector, and up to the end of these fourteen years Charles's education had been personally supervised by his father. Fortunate conditions!--as they who have missed such supervision can most eloquently testify. Ideal conditions, if we are to accept the well-digested opinion of scholastic as well as of medical experts. The Robertses moved from Woodstock to Fredericton in 1874. At Fredericton, Charles attended the Collegiate School. Chief among those who fitted the boy for college was Dr. George R. Parkin, who, although now the head of Upper Canada College, Toronto, has perhaps been most prominent as an Imperial Federationist advocate. In 1876 young Roberts was matriculated at the University of New Brunswick. As for his progress there, no more need be said than that he won the Douglas silver medal for Latin and Greek, the alumni gold medal for the Latin essay, and a classical scholarship. In 1879 he was graduated with honors in ethics, metaphysics and political economy. That same year he was appointed head master of the Chatham (N. B.) Grammar School. The next year, 1880, chronicled two notable events--his marriage, and the publication of his first book, "Orion and Other Poems." In 1881, at the University of New Brunswick, he took his degree of Master of Arts for Greek and higher mathematics. During the next two years he taught school in Fredericton. Then there came a brief excursion which may have illustrated his doubts about a career. He left off teaching and went to Toronto. There, with the assistance of Goldwin Smith, he established _The Week_, the most important of the Canadian literary periodicals. He relinquished this work the following year to take the chair of English and French literature in King's College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1887 he abandoned the French department for the department of Economics and International Law. At Windsor he lived in a house in the balmy woods--"Kingscroft," he called it--and there he planned three books--"The Forge in the Forest," his first Acadian romance; "The Book of the Native," and "A History of Canada." These plans compelled the abandonment of teaching, so, in 1895, Roberts left King's College and returned to Fredericton. At the age of thirty-five, therefore, he formally adopted the profession of literature. Early in 1897 he moved to New York, where for eight months he was associate editor of _The Illustrated American_. Since then he has directed his efforts wholly to authorship. And with the utmost justification. In narrative and in descriptive power he shines brilliantly among his contemporaries. Hovey would not answer the question: "Who is the greatest poet born on Canadian soil?"--"but," he writes, "when I say that Roberts is _par excellence_ the 'Poet of Canada,' I have little fear that anyone will contradict me." There is his noble hymn, "Canada," there is "Autochthon," there is "Kinship," there is "Origins"--poems of faultless grace and deep-founded sentiment and what one critic has termed "chiselled, Parnassian calm." For example: The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane. Space, in the dim predestined hour, Shall crumble like a ruined tower. I only, with unfaltering eye, Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by. Hovey, whom we may accept as an accomplished judge of symbolist literature, put "Do Seek their Meat from God" and "The Young Ravens that call upon Him," two sketches in "Earth's Enigmas," and "Savory Meats," a story published in the _Chap-Book_, together, and said that they "form an altogether unique and extraordinary triptych. I am inclined to think these three pieces," he says, "Roberts's most notable contribution to literature. The problem of the struggle for existence, of the preying of life on life, is treated with an inexorable fidelity to the fact, a catholic sympathy, a sense of universality and mystery, and a calm acceptance, that reaches the level of 'pathos' in the highest Greek usage of the word. There is a finality in these three prose poems that is known only to the greatest art." As for Robert's novels, they are full of the perfumed freshness, the vigorous life and the romantic wealth which constituted, and to a small extent still constitute, the salient characteristics of the lands in which he spent his youth. We have noted his narrative and descriptive power. Let us take from "A Sister to Evangeline" one of Paul Grande's visions of Yvonne de Lamourie. "In one of these I saw her as she stood a certain morning in the orchard, prying with insistent little finger-tips into the heart of a young apple-flower, while I watched and said nothing. I know not to this day whether she were thinking of the apple-flower or wondering at the dumbness of her cavalier; but she feigned, at least, to concern herself with only the blossom's heart. Her wide white lids downcast over her great eyes, her long lashes almost sweeping the rondure of her cheek, she looked a Madonna. The broad, low forehead; the finely chiselled nose, not too small for strength of purpose; the full, firm chin--all added to this sweet dignity, which was of a kind to compel a lover's worship. There was enough breadth to the gracious curve below the ear to make me feel that this girl would be a strong man's mate. But the mouth, a bow of tenderness, with a wilful dimple at either delectable corner always lurking, spoke her all woman, too laughing and loving to spend her days in sainthood. Her hair--very thick and of a purply-bronze, near to black--lay in careless fullness over her little ears. On her head, though in all else she affected the dress of Grand Pré maids, she wore, not the Acadian linen cap, but a fine shawl of black Spanish lace, which became her mightily. Her bodice was of linen homespun, coarse, but bleached to a creamy whiteness; and her skirt, of the same simple stuff, was short after the Acadian fashion, so that I could see her slim ankles, and feet of that exceeding smallness and daintiness which may somehow tread heavily upon a man's heart." And there is a strong resemblance to Thomas Hardy in at least one of the paragraphs narrating Paul Grande's race with death toward the Anderson farm--the paragraph dealing with the idle things that then incongruously concerned the hero: "Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight for an instant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver; I see the shadow of a dead, gnarled branch cast upon a mossy open in startling semblance to a crucifix--so clear, I cannot but stoop and touch it reverently as I pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a company of tall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming to float toward me, a squadron of small, light wings; I hear the smooth swish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant creak of the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp crackle of dry twigs as we thread the aisles of older forest; I hear, from the face of a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournful _Whóo-hu-hu--Hóo-oo_ of the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper, of bruised snakeroot, and of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy breath of unseen _linoea_; and once at the fringed brink of a rivulet, the pungent fragrance of wild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings of branches on my face; I feel the strong prickles of the fir, the cool, flat frondage of the spruce and hemlock, the unresisting, feathery spines of the young hackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey web upon my face, and the abhorrence with which I dash off the fat spider that clings to my chin; I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I tread upon a humped and swollen gathering of toad-stools." More than one judicious critic has remarked that few men of his years have achieved--and deservedly!--the literary renown which Professor Roberts's published works warrant. These works are as follows: "Orion and Other Poems" (1880), "In Divers Tones" (1887), "The Canadians of Old" (a translation from the French of de Gaspé, 1889), Appleton's "Canadian Guide Book" (1890), "Ave, An Ode for the Shelley Centenary" (1892), "Songs of the Common Day" (1893), "The Raid of Beauséjour" (1894), "Reub Dare's Shad Boat" (1895), "Around the Camp Fire" (1896), "Earth's Enigmas" (1896), "A History of Canada" (1897), "The Forge in the Forest" (1897), "The Book of the Native" (1897), "New York Nocturnes" (1898), "A Sister to Evangeline" (1898), "By the Marshes of Minas" (1900), "The Heart of the Ancient Wood" (1900). However, notwithstanding this long and excellent literary record, we are assured that Roberts "has a keen fondness for athletics. He is an enthusiastic football and tennis player, canoeist and fisherman, and is equally as skilled in these as he is in the pursuits of literature." Another novel from his pen, "Barbara Ladd," appears this fall. "I consider it," he writes, "a sort of cross between 'The Heart of the Ancient Wood' and a historical-psychological romance." As for the future, he says: "Next will probably appear a collection of poems, and a collection of animal stories. Then another romance, planned but not yet named; and then, if the Fates are very good to me, I'll take time for a long lyrical drama on which I have been engaged off and on for some years." [Illustration: Photo by Strauss. WINSTON CHURCHILL.] WINSTON CHURCHILL Late in the year 1900 it suddenly became plain to some of the mystified inhabitants of the literary world that there were two Winston Churchills. It is indeed remarkable how long the error lived which confounded Winston L. S. Churchill, war correspondent and politician, and eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill, with plain Winston Churchill, the author of "Richard Carvel." The error cropped out soon after the beginning of the South African war, when the Englishman, at a place called Estcourt, took gallant part in the defence of an armored train bound to the relief of Ladysmith. It was the result of one of the sentences in the report of the action: "Winston Churchill's brilliant behavior is compared with the gallant action in the Tirah campaign, which won the Victoria cross for Lord Fincastle, who was also acting as a newspaper correspondent." Immediately some persons, who should have known better, jumped to the conclusion that this Winston Churchill was the author of a book then extremely popular in this country. It is a notable commentary on the persistency of false ideas that the two Churchills were not, in certain quarters, positively distinguished from each other until they met in Boston the middle of last December. It was an interesting meeting, as we gather from the notes of a witness. "The young, light-haired Englishman was in bed, in his room at the Touraine, shortly after noon, when Major J. B. Pond arrived with a heavily built six-footer, smooth-shaven, dark-complexioned, a pair of merry black eyes, and a rather thick body encased in a raglan of dark gray. "'Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill,' said the Major. The man on the bed turned over on his side and held out his hand. "'I'm sorry to find that you are ill,' said the Churchill in the raglan, as he caught the outstretched hand. "'Nothing serious, I guess,' said the other; 'been travelling, you know. But, I say, how came you by that name?' "The author of 'Richard Carvel' smiled. "'The first trace of it I can find in the family,' he said, 'is about 1851. It seems that there have been Winston Churchills over here for a good many years.' "Then there was an exchange of bouquets. Winston Churchill said that he had always been looking forward with pleasure to a meeting with his namesake, and the other Churchill said something in the same strain. "'I was interested when I read your first book,' said the Englishman. 'Didn't think a great deal of that book; but the other one, "Richard Carvel," I was willing to become responsible for that.' "Then it developed that each had been responsible for the other to a greater or less extent. For this reason it was inevitable that they should meet." As a matter of fact, mail for the Englishman, simply directed "Winston Churchill, Boston, Mass.," had been sent to his namesake's residence on Beacon Street. Later it was told that the American met the same embarrassment in London. "When I was staying at Brown's Hotel," he said to the Parliamentarian, "I found it almost impossible to get my mail. They compelled me to sign for it personally." The Englishman, by the way, is the author of a romance in regard to which the London critics seem to hold an opinion similar to that which he admittedly holds in regard to the American's first novel--"The Celebrity." Speaking of "The Celebrity" reminds us of the still prevalent notion that its contemptible hero is Mr. Richard Harding Davis. In fact we believe that the author was openly charged with having written the satire merely to pay a private grudge. We heard an echo of the charge as late as this year. Yet, more than two years ago Mr. Churchill, in a public letter, took pains specifically to deny the imputation. "The Celebrity" he said, in effect, was entirely an imaginary work. No one at all resembling the chief character had ever been met by him. So far from paying grudges, he had no grudge to pay. Indeed, the young writer grew so tender on the subject that the Colonial atmosphere of "Richard Carvel" was attributed to his desire to avoid contemporary themes. But the truth is, he completed "The Celebrity" while temporarily short of historical material for use in the history of Richard and his Dorothy. Twice he thoroughly revised "The Celebrity" before sending it to the publishers. And who is this Winston Churchill? He is the son of Spalding Churchill of Maine and Emma Bell Blaine of St. Louis, and he was born in the Missouri metropolis on Nov. 10, 1871. The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his birthplace; and there, at Smith Academy, he prepared for college. The college proved to be the Naval Academy at Annapolis. As a boy he was inclined to be uncommonly studious, but at the Naval Academy he developed a strong inclination towards athletics. It was largely owing to his energy and his enthusiasm that the cadets revived rowing. Like most other cadets, he learned to fence expertly; and you will find an intimate knowledge of this accomplishment in his treatment of one of the most dramatic scenes in "Richard Carvel." He took to horseback riding, also to golf and to tennis, in short, to all the pastimes that strengthen the body and enliven the mind. It is his devotion to physical exercise which has enabled him to work long and hard without distress. He felt, before his graduation from Annapolis, that his place was at the writing table, not on the deck of a man-o'-war. Apropos of which he has said: "When a man is being trained for a definite career, it helps him to make up his mind as to his tastes and abilities. If he is sure he doesn't want to do that particular thing, he must know pretty definitely what he does want to do. When he throws over a certainty for a chance his heart must be firmly set on the kind of work involved in the chance. For this reason a technical school helps some men to find their vocation better than four years at a university, where the training is general." In 1894 he became editor of the _Army and Navy Journal_. The following year he joined the staff of the _Cosmopolitan_ at Irvington-on-the-Hudson. While working for the magazine he took as wife Miss Mabel Harlakenden Hall of St. Louis, whose fortune induced him to give up magazine work altogether and devote himself to the realization of his dreams. Now if Churchill lacked either determination or genius the wealth that through marriage he became a sharer in would have have availed him little. He might have attracted some attention as a dilettante, or he might have done the things that a wealthy person alone can do--establish another _Anglo-Saxon Review_, for example, or publish small thoughts in editions de luxe. He would have succeeded if his wife had never brought him a copper. It would have taken him longer to succeed, that is all. Art is long, and life is short only to the poor fellow who must ascend the ladder round by round. But not all the money in the world can ease the labor of the brain. Churchill's ambition, from the first moment that he felt the literary impulse, was to write a historical novel. Annapolis had fired his imagination. "Seeing those old houses," he once said, "which used to be the scenes of the gayest and happiest social life before the Revolution--they look as if the people had just gone out of them--and reading the history of the town as it used to be, interested me greatly in a certain aspect of the life of the colonial planters, which had not, it seemed to me, been fully and truthfully expressed in a novel. What I wanted to do in 'Richard Carvel' was to give a picture of the life of colonial Maryland and Virginia, with special reference to Annapolis, and to contrast the people who made it with the corresponding element in England. One of the things I wanted to bring out strongly was that, although the leading men in business, in professional life, and in politics, in both Maryland and London, came from the same stock, a few generations back, politically, the British had sunk into a state of gross corruption and degradation, while the Americans were men of the highest integrity and the cleanest motives, mindful of their legal and moral debt to Great Britain, but resolute not to endure more than a certain amount of injustice." And how do you suppose Mr. Churchill prepared for the big task of writing a historical novel? He has answered the question himself: "By visiting all the places concerned in the story, and by reading biographies, histories, memoirs, letters, old newspapers--in fact, everything which could give me an insight into the life of those days, or into the character of the people like John Paul Jones and Charles Fox, whom I desired to introduce. Of course I read a great deal too much; a great many books gave me no direct help and added nothing to what I had already learned; but I have no doubt that all this reading counted in the way of letting me into the spirit and the atmosphere and the ideas and the business methods and the modes of life and thought of those days. Of course, I took voluminous notes, and had no end of trouble to keep them arranged so that I could use them, in spite of the effort I made to keep notes on costumes in one volume, manners and customs in another, unusual words and turns of expression in another, incidents in another, character in another, history in another and so on." "Richard Carvel" was begun in St. Louis not long after the author's marriage. It was written over again for the fifth time between October, 1898, and April, 1899, at a little town on the Hudson, an hour's journey from New York. Yet it is a proof of Churchill's zeal and industry that in those six months he visited the metropolis only five times. His habit is to work from early breakfast until one in the afternoon, and then, after luncheon, for a few hours more, after which he takes some physical exercise; and after dinner he picks up the thread of the story again. You see, his literary methods are very simple; they mean work early and late, work done doggedly, and as scrupulously as if the keenest critic were looking over his shoulder. The furore which "Richard Carvel" excited is too well remembered, we think, to particularize on. The author was made a lion of everywhere, truly, and exhibited in all the gilded cages of the East. We recall that the mere announcement of his purpose to go to the theatre in New York was sufficient to insure a big audience. Not another one of our American authors whose fame is of recent acquirement, and whose inclination is to keep far from the madding crowd has been followed about by so many hero-worshippers as the author of "Richard Carvel" was during the twelvemonth following the publication of the book. Was the attention justly merited? Undoubtedly. "Richard Carvel" is an extraordinarily powerful story. Its atmosphere is vivid; its characters are excellently drawn; its plot is skillfully laid; its action is vigorous and delightfully varied. "Richard Carvel" was the first of a series of historical novels which Churchill planned just after leaving Annapolis. It has been followed lately by the second member of the series, "The Crisis," the writing of which occupied nearly two years. While thus engaged the author declined to be interrupted. Naturally, after bounding to the top of the ladder, anything which he might have offered would have been accepted by some publishers. "You have no idea," he once remarked, "of the temptations that are put in the way of a man whose book has been accorded a popular success." The temptations he brushed aside; he made up his mind to pursue a straight road. And wisely, for, as he argues, "When a man makes a great reputation by a single book, and then allows succeeding books to go from his hands which do not represent the very best work of which he is capable, the public finds it out at once. No matter if there is good work in these hastily written books, people ignore them. I think it is the worst thing a man can do for his reputation to write books too fast. Of course, it is the worst possible thing he can do for his lasting reputation, which is the thing really worth working for, but what I mean is that it is the worst thing he can do in the short run as well as in the long run. Why, even speaking commercially, which is the lowest and the least and the last way in which one can look at these things, it is a fatal mistake. And I think a novelist makes a great mistake if he confines himself to one period or writes several books on one epoch, though it is more or less the practice to-day. I think we ought to go in more for versatility." Mr. Churchill is seen in New York and Boston in the winter; in the summer he is to be found only by traveling 'way down East. In Boston, particularly, the Churchills have become very well known. There Mr. Churchill puts up at the most aristocratic clubs, and Mrs. Churchill graces the most fashionable receptions. * * * * * * Transcriber's note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact. 
38049	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs= LOUISA MAY ALCOTT HER Life, Letters, and Journals. EDITED BY EDNAH D. CHENEY BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1898 _Copyright, 1889_, BY J. S. P. ALCOTT. UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. TO MRS. ANNA B. PRATT, THE SOLE SURVIVING SISTER OF LOUISA M. ALCOTT, AND HER NEVER-FAILING HELP, COMFORTER, AND FRIEND FROM BIRTH TO DEATH, This Memoir IS RESPECTFULLY AND TENDERLY DEDICATED, BY EDNAH D. CHENEY. JAMAICA PLAIN, June, 1889. [Illustration: Portrait of Miss Alcott] INTRODUCTION. Louisa May Alcott is universally recognized as the greatest and most popular story-teller for children in her generation. She has known the way to the hearts of young people, not only in her own class, or even country, but in every condition of life, and in many foreign lands. Plato says, "Beware of those who teach fables to children;" and it is impossible to estimate the influence which the popular writer of fiction has over the audience he wins to listen to his tales. The preacher, the teacher, the didactic writer find their audience in hours of strength, with critical faculties all alive, to question their propositions and refute their arguments. The novelist comes to us in the intervals of recreation and relaxation, and by his seductive powers of imagination and sentiment takes possession of the fancy and the heart before judgment and reason are aroused to defend the citadel. It well becomes us, then, who would guard young minds from subtle temptations, to study the character of those works which charm and delight the children. Of no author can it be more truly said than of Louisa Alcott that her works are a revelation of herself. She rarely sought for the material of her stories in old chronicles, or foreign adventures. Her capital was her own life and experiences and those of others directly about her; and her own well-remembered girlish frolics and fancies were sure to find responsive enjoyment in the minds of other girls. It is therefore impossible to understand Miss Alcott's works fully without a knowledge of her own life and experiences. By inheritance and education she had rich and peculiar gifts; and her life was one of rare advantages, as well as of trying difficulties. Herself of the most true and frank nature, she has given us the opportunity of knowing her without disguise; and it is thus that I shall try to portray her, showing what influences acted upon her through life, and how faithfully and fully she performed whatever duties circumstances laid upon her. Fortunately I can let her speak mainly for herself. Miss Alcott revised her journals at different times during her later life, striking out what was too personal for other eyes than her own, and destroying a great deal which would doubtless have proved very interesting. The small number of letters given will undoubtedly be a disappointment. Miss Alcott wished to have most of her letters destroyed, and her sister respected her wishes. She was not a voluminous correspondent; she did not encourage many intimacies, and she seldom wrote letters except to her family, unless in reference to some purpose she had strongly at heart. Writing was her constant occupation, and she was not tempted to indulge in it as a recreation. Her letters are brief, and strictly to the point, but always characteristic in feeling and expression; and, even at the risk of the repetition of matter contained in her journals or her books, I shall give copious extracts from such as have come into my hands. E. D. C. JAMAICA PLAIN, Mass., 1889. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION iii CHAPTER. I. GENEALOGY AND PARENTAGE 11 II. CHILDHOOD 16 III. FRUITLANDS 32 IV. THE SENTIMENTAL PERIOD 56 V. AUTHORSHIP 75 VI. THE YEAR OF GOOD LUCK 110 VII. "HOSPITAL SKETCHES" 136 VIII. EUROPE, AND "LITTLE WOMEN" 170 IX. EUROPE 204 X. FAMILY CHANGES 263 XI. LAST YEARS 329 XII. CONCLUSION 387 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE PORTRAIT OF MISS ALCOTT _Frontispiece_ Photogravure by A. W. Elson & Co., from a photograph by Notman (negative destroyed), taken in 1883. The facsimile of her writing is an extract from a letter to her publisher, written from her hospital retreat a few weeks previous to her death. ORCHARD HOUSE ("APPLE SLUMP"), CONCORD, MASS., THE HOME OF THE ALCOTTS, 1858 TO 1878 93 Engraved by John Andrew & Son Co., from a photograph. PORTRAIT OF MISS ALCOTT 140 Photogravure by A. W. Elson & Co., from a photograph taken just previous to her going to Washington as a hospital nurse, in 1862. FAC-SIMILE OF MISS ALCOTT'S WRITING 362 Extract from a letter to her publisher, January, 1886. FAC-SIMILE OF PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION OF "A MODERN MEPHISTOPHELES," NOW FIRST PRINTED 380 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. CHAPTER I. GENEALOGY AND PARENTAGE. TO LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. BY HER FATHER. When I remember with what buoyant heart, Midst war's alarms and woes of civil strife, In youthful eagerness thou didst depart, At peril of thy safety, peace, and life, To nurse the wounded soldier, swathe the dead,-- How piercèd soon by fever's poisoned dart, And brought unconscious home, with wildered head, Thou ever since 'mid langour and dull pain, To conquer fortune, cherish kindred dear, Hast with grave studies vexed a sprightly brain, In myriad households kindled love and cheer, Ne'er from thyself by Fame's loud trump beguiled, Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere,-- I press thee to my heart as Duty's faithful child. Louisa Alcott was the second child of Amos Bronson and Abba May Alcott. This name was spelled Alcocke in English history. About 1616 a coat-of-arms was granted to Thomas Alcocke of Silbertoft, in the county of Leicester. The device represents three cocks, emblematic of watchfulness; and the motto is _Semper Vigilans_. The first of the name appearing in English history is John Alcocke of Beverley, Yorkshire, of whom Fuller gives an account in his Worthies of England. Thomas and George Alcocke were the first of the name among the settlers in New England. The name is frequently found in the records of Dorchester and Roxbury, and has passed through successive changes to its present form. The name of Bronson came from Mr. Alcott's maternal grandfather, the sturdy Capt. Amos Bronson of Plymouth, Conn. "His ancestors on both sides had been substantial people of respectable position in England, and were connected with the founders and governors of the chief New England colonies. At the time of Mr. Alcott's birth they had become simple farmers, reaping a scanty living from their small farms in Connecticut." Amos Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa, was born Nov. 29, 1799, at the foot of Spindle Hill, in the region called New Connecticut. He has himself given in simple verse the story of his quaint rustic life in his boyhood, and Louisa has reproduced it in her story of "Eli's Education" (in the Spinning-Wheel Stories), which gives a very true account of his youthful life and adventures. He derived his refined, gentle nature from his mother, who had faith in her son, and who lived to see him the accomplished scholar he had vowed to become in his boyhood. Although brought up in these rustic surroundings, his manners were always those of a true gentleman. The name of the little mountain town afterward became Wolcott, and Louisa records in her journal a pilgrimage made thither in after years.[1] Louisa Alcott's mother was a daughter of Col. Joseph May of Boston. This family is so well known that it is hardly necessary to repeat its genealogy here.[2] She was a sister of Samuel J. May, for many years pastor of the Unitarian church at Syracuse, who was so tenderly beloved by men of all religious persuasions in his home, and so widely known and respected for his courage and zeal in the Antislavery cause, as well as for his many philanthropic labors. Mrs. Alcott's mother was Dorothy Sewall, a descendant of that family already distinguished in the annals of the Massachusetts colony, and which has lost nothing of its reputation for ability and virtue in its latest representatives.[3] Mrs. Alcott inherited in large measure the traits which distinguished her family. She was a woman of large stature, fine physique, and overflowing life. Her temper was as quick and warm as her affections, but she was full of broad unselfish generosity. Her untiring energies were constantly employed, not only for the benefit of her family, but for all around her. She had a fine mind, and if she did not have large opportunities for scholastic instruction, she always enjoyed the benefit of intellectual society and converse with noble minds. She loved expression in writing, and her letters are full of wit and humor, keen criticism, and noble moral sentiments. Marriage with an idealist, who had no means of support, brought her many trials and privations. She bore them heroically, never wavering in affection for her husband or in devotion to her children. If the quick, impatient temper sometimes relieved itself in hasty speech, the action was always large and unselfish. It will be apparent from Louisa's life that she inherited the traits of both her parents, and that the uncommon powers of mind and heart that distinguished her were not accidental, but the accumulated result of the lives of generations of strong and noble men and women. She was well born. _Mr. Alcott to Colonel May._ GERMANTOWN, Nov. 29, 1832. DEAR SIR,--It is with great pleasure that I announce to you the _birth of a second daughter_. She was born at half-past 12 this morning, on my birthday (33), and is a very fine healthful child, much more so than Anna was at birth,--has a fine foundation for health and energy of character. Abba is very comfortable, and will soon be restored to the discharge of those domestic and maternal duties in which she takes so much delight, and in the performance of which she furnishes so excellent a model for imitation. Those only who have seen her in those relations, much as there is in her general character to admire and esteem, can form a true estimate of her personal worth and uncommon devotion of heart. She was formed for domestic sentiment rather than the gaze and heartlessness of what is falsely called "society." Abba inclines to call the babe _Louisa May_,--a name to her full of every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth. I hope its _present possessor_ may rise to equal attainment, and deserve a place in the estimation of society. With Abba's and Anna's and Louisa's regards, allow me to assure you of the sincerity with which I am Yours, A. BRONSON ALCOTT. The children who lived to maturity were-- ANNA BRONSON ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, ELIZABETH SEWALL ALCOTT, ABBA MAY ALCOTT. FOOTNOTES: [1] For further particulars of the Alcott genealogy, see "New Connecticut," a poem by A. B. Alcott, published in 1887. I am also indebted to Mr. F. B. Sanborn's valuable paper read at the memorial service at Concord in 1888. [2] For particulars of the genealogy of the May families, see "A Genealogy of the Descendants of John May," who came from England to Roxbury in America, 1640. [3] For the Sewall family, see "Drake's History of Boston," or fuller accounts in the Sewall Papers published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD. TO THE FIRST ROBIN.[4] Welcome, welcome, little stranger, Fear no harm, and fear no danger; We are glad to see you here, For you sing "Sweet Spring is near." Now the white snow melts away; Now the flowers blossom gay: Come dear bird and build your nest, For we love our robin best. LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. CONCORD. Mr. Alcott had removed to Germantown, Penn, to take charge of a school, and here Louisa was born, Nov. 29, 1832. She was the second daughter, and was welcomed with the same pride and affection as her elder sister had been. We have this pleasant little glimpse of her when she was hardly a month old, from the pen of one of her mother's friends. Even at that extremely early age love saw the signs of more than usual intelligence, and friends as well as fond parents looked forward to a promising career. _Extract from a Letter by Miss Donaldson._ GERMANTOWN, PENN., Dec. 16, 1832. I have a dear little pet in Mrs. Alcott's little Louisa. It is the prettiest, best little thing in the world. You will wonder to hear me call anything so young pretty, but it is really so in an uncommon degree; it has a fair complexion, dark bright eyes, long dark hair, a high forehead, and altogether a countenance of more than usual intelligence. The mother is such a delightful woman that it is a cordial to my heart whenever I go to see her. I went in to see her for a few moments the evening we received your letter, and I think I never saw her in better spirits; and truly, if goodness and integrity can insure felicity, she deserves to be happy. The earliest anecdote remembered of Louisa is this: When the family went from Philadelphia to Boston by steamer, the two little girls were nicely dressed in clean nankeen frocks for the voyage; but they had not been long on board before the lively Louisa was missing, and after a long search she was brought up from the engine-room, where her eager curiosity had carried her, and where she was having a beautiful time, with "plenty of dirt." The family removed to Boston in 1834, and Mr. Alcott opened his famous school in Masonic Temple. Louisa was too young to attend the school except as an occasional visitor; but she found plenty of interest and amusement for herself in playing on the Common, making friends with every child she met, and on one occasion falling into the Frog Pond. She has given a very lively picture of this period of her life in "Poppy's Pranks," that vivacious young person being a picture of herself, not at all exaggerated. The family lived successively in Front Street, Cottage Place, and Beach Street during the six succeeding years in Boston. They occasionally passed some weeks at Scituate during the summer, which the children heartily enjoyed. Mrs. Hawthorne gives a little anecdote which shows how the child's heart was blossoming in this family sunshine: "One morning in Front Street, at the breakfast table, Louisa suddenly broke silence, with a sunny smile saying, 'I love everybody in _dis_ whole world.'" Two children were born during this residence in Boston. Elizabeth was named for Mr. Alcott's assistant in his school,--Miss E. P. Peabody, since so widely known and beloved by all friends of education. A boy was born only to die. The little body was laid reverently away in the lot of Colonel May in the old burial-ground on the Common, and the children were taught to speak with tenderness of their "baby brother." When Louisa was about seven years old she made a visit to friends in Providence. Miss C. writes of her: "She is a beautiful little girl to look upon, and I love her affectionate manners. I think she is more like her mother than either of the others." As is usually the case, Louisa's journal, which she began at this early age, speaks more fully of her struggles and difficulties than of the bright, sunny moods which made her attractive. A little letter carefully printed and sent home during this visit is preserved. In it she says she is not happy; and she did have one trying experience there, to which she refers in "My Boys." Seeing some poor children who she thought were hungry, she took food from the house without asking permission, and carried it to them, and was afterward very much astonished and grieved at being reprimanded instead of praised for the deed. Miss C. says: "She has had several spells of feeling sad; but a walk or a talk soon dispels all gloom. She was half moody when she wrote her letter; but now she is gay as a lark. She loves to play out of doors, and sometimes she is not inclined to stay in when it is unpleasant." In her sketches of "My Boys" she describes two of her companions here, not forgetting the kindness of the one and the mischievousness of the other. Although the family were quite comfortable during the time of Mr. Alcott's teaching in Boston, yet the children wearied of their extremely simple diet of plain boiled rice without sugar, and graham meal without butter or molasses. An old friend who could not eat the bountiful rations provided for her at the United States Hotel, used to save her piece of pie or cake for the Alcott children. Louisa often took it home to the others in a bandbox which she brought for the purpose. This friend was absent in Europe many years, and returned to find the name of Louisa Alcott famous. When she met the authoress on the street she was eagerly greeted. "Why, I did not think you would remember me!" said the old lady. "Do you think I shall ever forget that bandbox?" was the instant reply. In 1840, Mr. Alcott's school having proved unsuccessful, the family removed to Concord, Mass., and took a cottage which is described in "Little Women" as "Meg's first home," although Anna never lived there after her marriage. It was a pleasant house, with a garden full of trees, and best of all a large barn, in which the children could have free range and act out all the plays with which their little heads were teeming. Of course it was a delightful change from the city for the children, and here they passed two very happy years, for they were too young to understand the cares which pressed upon the hearts of their parents. Life was full of interest. One cold morning they found in the garden a little half-starved bird; and having warmed and fed it, Louisa was inspired to write a pretty poem to "The Robin." The fond mother was so delighted that she said to her, "You will grow up a Shakspeare!" From the lessons of her father she had formed the habit of writing freely, but this is the first recorded instance of her attempting to express her feelings in verse. From the influences of such parentage as I have described, the family life in which Louisa was brought up became wholly unique. If the father had to give up his cherished projects of a school modelled after his ideas, he could at least conduct the education of his own children; and he did so with the most tender devotion. Even when they were infants he took a great deal of personal care of them, and loved to put the little ones to bed and use the "children's hour" to instil into their hearts lessons of love and wisdom. He was full of fun too, and would lie on the floor and frolic with them, making compasses of his long legs with which to draw letters and diagrams. No shade of fear mingled with the children's reverent recognition of his superior spiritual life. So their hearts lay open to him, and he was able to help them in their troubles. He taught them much by writing; and we have many specimens of their lists of words to be spelled, written, and understood. The lessons at Scituate were often in the garden, and their father always drew their attention to Nature and her beautiful forms and meanings. Little symbolical pictures helped to illustrate his lessons, and he sometimes made drawings himself. Here is an example of lessons. A quaint little picture represents one child playing on a harp, another drawing an arrow. It is inscribed-- FOR LOUISA. 1840. Two passions strong divide our life,-- Meek, gentle love, or boisterous strife. Below the child playing the harp is-- Love, Music, Concord. Below the shooter is-- Anger, Arrow, Discord. Another leaflet is-- FOR LOUISA 1840. Louisa loves-- What? (_Softly._) Fun. Have some then, Father says. Christmas Eve, December, 1840. Concordia. * * * * * FOR ANNA. 1840. Beauty or Duty,-- which loves Anna best? A Question from her Father. Christmas Eve, December, 1840. Concordia. A letter beautifully printed by her father for Louisa (1839) speaks to her of conscience, and she adds to it this note: "L. began early, it seems, to wrestle with her conscience." The children were always required to keep their journals regularly, and although these were open to the inspection of father and mother, they were very frank, and really recorded their struggles and desires. The mother had the habit of writing little notes to the children when she wished to call their attention to any fault or peculiarity. Louisa preserved many of them, headed,-- [_Extracts_ from letters from Mother, received during these early years. I preserve them to show the ever tender, watchful help she gave to the child who caused her the most anxiety, yet seemed to be the nearest to her heart till the end.--L. M. A.] No. 1.--MY DEAR LITTLE GIRL,--Will you accept this doll from me on your seventh birthday? She will be a quiet playmate for my active Louisa for seven years more. Be a kind mamma, and love her for my sake. YOUR MOTHER. BEACH STREET, BOSTON, 1839. _From her Mother._ COTTAGE IN CONCORD. DEAR DAUGHTER,--Your tenth birthday has arrived. May it be a happy one, and on each returning birthday may you feel new strength and resolution to be gentle with sisters, obedient to parents, loving to every one, and happy in yourself. I give you the pencil-case I promised, for I have observed that you are fond of writing, and wish to encourage the habit. Go on trying, dear, and each day it will be easier to be and do good. You must help yourself, for the cause of your little troubles is in yourself; and patience and courage age only will make you what mother prays to see you,--her good and happy girl. CONCORD, 1843. DEAR LOUY,--I enclose a picture for you which I always liked very much, for I imagined that you might be just such an industrious daughter and I such a feeble but loving mother, looking to your labor for my daily bread. Keep it for my sake and your own, for you and I always liked to be grouped together. MOTHER. The lines I wrote under the picture in my journal:-- TO MOTHER. I hope that soon, dear mother, You and I may be In the quiet room my fancy Has so often made for thee,-- The pleasant, sunny chamber, The cushioned easy-chair, The book laid for your reading, The vase of flowers fair; The desk beside the window Where the sun shines warm and bright: And there in ease and quiet The promised book you write; While I sit close beside you, Content at last to see That you can rest, dear mother, And I can cherish thee. [The dream came true, and for the last ten years of her life Marmee sat in peace, with every wish granted, even to the "grouping together;" for she died in my arms.--L. M. A.] A passage in Louisa's story of "Little Men" (p. 268) describes one of their childish plays. They "made believe" their minds were little round rooms in which the soul lived, and in which good or bad things were preserved. This play was never forgotten in after life, and the girls often looked into their little rooms for comfort or guidance in trial or temptation. Louisa was very fond of animals, as is abundantly shown in her stories. She never had the happiness of owning many pets, except cats, and these were the delight of the household. The children played all manner of plays with them, tended them in sickness, buried them with funeral honors, and Louisa has embalmed their memory in the story of "The Seven Black Cats" in "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag." Dolls were an equal source of pleasure. The imaginative children hardly recognized them as manufactured articles, but endowed them with life and feeling. Louisa put her dolls through every experience of life; they were fed, educated, punished, rewarded, nursed, and even hung and buried, and then resurrected in her stories. The account of the "Sacrifice of the Dolls" to the exacting Kitty Mouse in "Little Men" delights all children by its mixture of pathetic earnestness and playfulness. It is taken from the experience of another family of children. Miss Alcott twice says that she never went to any school but her father's; but there were some slight exceptions to this rule. She went a few months to a little district school in Still River Village. This was a genuine old-fashioned school, from which she took the hint of the frolics in "Under the Lilacs." Miss Ford also kept a little school in Mr. Emerson's barn, to which the children went; and Mary Russell had a school, which Louisa attended when eight or nine years old. These circumstances, however, had small influence in her education. During this period of life in Concord, which was so happy to the children, the mother's heart was full of anxious care. She however entered into all their childish pleasures, and her watchful care over their moral growth is shown by her letters and by Louisa's journals. The youngest child, Abba May, who was born in the cottage, became the pet of the family and the special care of the oldest sister, Anna. Louisa's childish journal gives us many hints of this happy life. She revised these journals in later years, adding significant comments which are full of interest. She designed them to have place in her autobiography, which she hoped to write. From three different sources--her journals, an article written for publication, and a manuscript prepared for a friend,--we give her own account of these childish years. She has not followed the order of events strictly, and it has not been possible, therefore, to avoid all repetition; but they give the spirit of her early life, and clearly show the kind of education she received from her father and from the circumstances around her. _Sketch of Childhood, by herself._ One of my earliest recollections is of playing with books in my father's study,--building houses and bridges of the big dictionaries and diaries, looking at pictures, pretending to read, and scribbling on blank pages whenever pen or pencil could be found. Many of these first attempts at authorship still remain in Bacon's Essays, Plutarch's Lives, and other works of a serious nature, my infant taste being for solid literature, apparently. On one occasion we built a high tower round baby Lizzie as she sat playing with her toys on the floor, and being attracted by something out-of-doors, forgot our little prisoner. A search was made, and patient baby at last discovered curled up and fast asleep in her dungeon cell, out of which she emerged so rosy and smiling after her nap that we were forgiven for our carelessness. Another memory is of my fourth birthday, which was celebrated at my father's school-room in Masonic Temple. All the children were there. I wore a crown of flowers, and stood upon a table to dispense cakes to each child as the procession marched past. By some oversight the cakes fell short, and I saw that if I gave away the last one I should have none. As I was queen of the revel, I felt that I ought to have it, and held on to it tightly till my mother said,-- "It is always better to give away than to keep the nice things; so I know my Louy will not let the little friend go without." The little friend received the dear plummy cake, and I a kiss and my first lesson in the sweetness of self-denial,--a lesson which my dear mother beautifully illustrated all her long and noble life. Running away was one of the delights of my early days; and I still enjoy sudden flights out of the nest to look about this very interesting world, and then go back to report. On one of these occasions I passed a varied day with some Irish children, who hospitably shared their cold potatoes, salt-fish, and crusts with me as we revelled in the ash-heaps which then adorned the waste lands where the Albany Depot now stands. A trip to the Common cheered the afternoon, but as dusk set in and my friends deserted me, I felt that home was a nice place after all, and tried to find it. I dimly remember watching a lamp-lighter as I sat to rest on some doorsteps in Bedford Street, where a big dog welcomed me so kindly that I fell asleep with my head pillowed on his curly back, and was found there by the town-crier, whom my distracted parents had sent in search of me. His bell and proclamation of the loss of "a little girl, six years old, in a pink frock, white hat, and new green shoes," woke me up, and a small voice answered out of the darkness,-- "Why, dat's me!" Being with difficulty torn from my four-footed friend, I was carried to the crier's house, and there feasted sumptuously on bread-and-molasses in a tin plate with the alphabet round it. But my fun ended next day when I was tied to the arm of the sofa to repent at leisure. I became an Abolitionist at a very early age, but have never been able to decide whether I was made so by seeing the portrait of George Thompson hidden under a bed in our house during the Garrison riot, and going to comfort "the poor man who had been good to the slaves," or because I was saved from drowning in the Frog Pond some years later by a colored boy. However that may be, the conversion was genuine; and my greatest pride is in the fact that I lived to know the brave men and women who did so much for the cause, and that I had a very small share in the war which put an end to a great wrong. Another recollection of her childhood was of a "contraband" hidden in the oven, which must have made her sense of the horrors of slavery very keen. I never went to school except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family. Schools then were not what they are now; so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child's nature, as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest. I never liked arithmetic nor grammar, and dodged those branches on all occasions; but reading, writing, composition, history, and geography I enjoyed, as well as the stories read to us with a skill peculiarly his own. "Pilgrim's Progress," Krummacher's "Parables," Miss Edgeworth, and the best of the dear old fairy tales made the reading hour the pleasantest of our day. On Sundays we had a simple service of Bible stories, hymns, and conversation about the state of our little consciences and the conduct of our childish lives which never will be forgotten. Walks each morning round the Common while in the city, and long tramps over hill and dale when our home was in the country, were a part of our education, as well as every sort of housework,--for which I have always been very grateful, since such knowledge makes one independent in these days of domestic tribulation with the "help" who are too often only hindrances. Needle-work began early, and at ten my skilful sister made a linen shirt beautifully; while at twelve I set up as a doll's dressmaker, with my sign out and wonderful models in my window. All the children employed me, and my turbans were the rage at one time, to the great dismay of the neighbors' hens, who were hotly hunted down, that I might tweak out their downiest feathers to adorn the dolls' headgear. Active exercise was my delight, from the time when a child of six I drove my hoop round the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening. I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences, and be a tomboy. My wise mother, anxious to give me a strong body to support a lively brain, turned me loose in the country and let me run wild, learning of Nature what no books can teach, and being led,--as those who truly love her seldom fail to be,-- "Through Nature up to Nature's God." I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before. Something born of the lovely hour, a happy mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child's soul seemed to bring me very near to God; and in the hush of that morning hour I always felt that I "got religion," as the phrase goes. A new and vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father's arms, came to me then, never to change through forty years of life's vicissitudes, but to grow stronger for the sharp discipline of poverty and pain, sorrow and success. Those Concord days were the happiest of my life, for we had charming playmates in the little Emersons, Channings, Hawthornes, and Goodwins, with the illustrious parents and their friends to enjoy our pranks and share our excursions. Plays in the barn were a favorite amusement, and we dramatized the fairy tales in great style. Our giant came tumbling off a loft when Jack cut down the squash-vine running up a ladder to represent the immortal bean. Cinderella rolled away in a vast pumpkin, and a long black pudding was lowered by invisible hands to fasten itself on the nose of the woman who wasted her three wishes. Pilgrims journeyed over the hill with scrip and staff and cockle-shells in their hats; fairies held their pretty revels among the whispering birches, and strawberry parties in the rustic arbor were honored by poets and philosophers, who fed us on their wit and wisdom while the little maids served more mortal food. FOOTNOTE: [4] Written at eight years of age. CHAPTER III. FRUITLANDS. MY KINGDOM. A little kingdom I possess, Where thoughts and feelings dwell, And very hard I find the task Of governing it well; For passion tempts and troubles me, A wayward will misleads, And selfishness its shadow casts On all my words and deeds. How can I learn to rule myself, To be the child I should, Honest and brave, nor ever tire Of trying to be good? How can I keep a sunny soul To shine along life's way? How can I tune my little heart To sweetly sing all day? Dear Father, help me with the love That casteth out my fear, Teach me to lean on thee, and feel That thou art very near, That no temptation is unseen, No childish grief too small, Since thou, with patience infinite, Doth soothe and comfort all. I do not ask for any crown But that which all may win, Nor seek to conquer any world Except the one within. Be thou my guide until I find, Led by a tender hand, Thy happy kingdom in _myself_, And dare to take command. In 1842 Mr. Alcott went to England. His mind was very much exercised at this time with plans for organized social life on a higher plane, and he found like-minded friends in England who gave him sympathy and encouragement. He had for some years advocated a strictly vegetarian diet, to which his family consented from deference to him; consequently the children never tasted meat till they came to maturity. On his return from England he was accompanied by friends who were ready to unite with him in the practical realization of their social theories. Mr. Lane resided for some months in the Alcott family at Concord, and gave instruction to the children. Although he does not appear to have won their hearts, they yet reaped much intellectual advantage from his lessons, as he was an accomplished scholar. In 1843 this company of enthusiasts secured a farm in the town of Harvard, near Concord, which with trusting hope they named Fruitlands. Mrs. Alcott did not share in all the peculiar ideas of her husband and his friends, but she was so utterly devoted to him that she was ready to help him in carrying out his plans, however little they commended themselves to her better judgment. She alludes very briefly to the experiment in her diary, for the experience was too bitter to dwell upon. She could not relieve her feelings by bringing out the comic side, as her daughter did. Louisa's account of this colony, as given in her story called "Transcendental Wild Oats," is very close to the facts; and the mingling of pathos and humor, the reverence and ridicule with which she alternately treats the personages and the notions of those engaged in the scheme, make a rich and delightful tale. It was written many years later, and gives the picture as she looked back upon it, the absurdities coming out in strong relief, while she sees also the grand, misty outlines of the high thoughts so poorly realized. This story was published in the "Independent," Dec. 8, 1873, and may now be found in her collected works ("Silver Pitchers," p. 79). Fortunately we have also her journal written at the time, which shows what education the experience of this strange life brought to the child of ten or eleven years old. The following extract from Mr. Emerson proves that this plan of life looked fair and pleasing to his eye, although he was never tempted to join in it. He was evidently not unconscious of the inadequacy of the means adopted to the end proposed, but he rejoiced in any endeavor after high ideal life. JULY, 8, 1843. _Journal._--The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at Fruitlands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact,--to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and in the field were those of superior men,--of men at rest. What had they to conceal? What had they to exhibit? And it seemed so high an attainment that I thought--as often before, so now more, because they had a fit home, or the picture was fitly framed--that these men ought to be maintained in their place by the country for its culture. Young men and young maidens, old men and women, should visit them and be inspired. I think there is as much merit in beautiful manners as in hard work. I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July; we will see them in December. I know they are better for themselves than as partners. One can easily see that they have yet to settle several things. Their saying that things are clear, and they sane, does not make them so. If they will in very deed be lovers, and not selfish; if they will serve the town of Harvard, and make their neighbors feel them as benefactors wherever they touch them,--they are as safe as the sun.[5] _Early Diary kept at Fruitlands_, 1843. _Ten Years Old._ _September 1st._--I rose at five and had my bath. I love cold water! Then we had our singing-lesson with Mr. Lane. After breakfast I washed dishes, and ran on the hill till nine, and had some thoughts,--it was so beautiful up there. Did my lessons,--wrote and spelt and did sums; and Mr. Lane read a story, "The Judicious Father": How a rich girl told a poor girl not to look over the fence at the flowers, and was cross to her because she was unhappy. The father heard her do it, and made the girls change clothes. The poor one was glad to do it, and he told her to keep them. But the rich one was very sad; for she had to wear the old ones a week, and after that she was good to shabby girls. I liked it very much, and I shall be kind to poor people. Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said _men_, but I said _babies_. Men are often bad; babies never are. We had a long talk, and I felt better after it, and _cleared up_. We had bread and fruit for dinner. I read and walked and played till supper-time. We sung in the evening. As I went to bed the moon came up very brightly and looked at me. I felt sad because I have been cross to-day, and did not mind Mother. I cried, and then I felt better, and said that piece from Mrs. Sigourney, "I must not tease my mother." I get to sleep saying poetry,--I know a great deal. _Thursday, 14th._--Mr. Parker Pillsbury came, and we talked about the poor slaves. I had a music lesson with Miss F. I hate her, she is so fussy. I ran in the wind and played be a horse, and had a lovely time in the woods with Anna and Lizzie. We were fairies, and made gowns and paper wings. I "flied" the highest of all. In the evening they talked about travelling. I thought about Father going to England, and said this piece of poetry I found in Byron's poems:-- "When I left thy shores, O Naxos, Not a tear in sorrow fell; Not a sigh or faltered accent Told my bosom's struggling swell." It rained when I went to bed, and made a pretty noise on the roof. _Sunday, 24th._--Father and Mr. Lane have gone to N. H. to preach. It was very lovely.... Anna and I got supper. In the eve I read "Vicar of Wakefield." I was cross to-day, and I cried when I went to bed. I made good resolutions, and felt better in my heart. If I only _kept_ all I make, I should be the best girl in the world. But I don't, and so am very bad. [Poor little sinner! _She says the same at fifty._--L. M. A.] _October 8th._--When I woke up, the first thought I got was, "It's Mother's birthday: I must be very good." I ran and wished her a happy birthday, and gave her my kiss. After breakfast we gave her our presents. I had a moss cross and a piece of poetry for her. We did not have any school, and played in the woods and got red leaves. In the evening we danced and sung, and I read a story about "Contentment." I wish I was rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family this day. _Thursday, 12th._--After lessons I ironed. We all went to the barn and husked corn. It was good fun. We worked till eight o'clock and had lamps. Mr. Russell came. Mother and Lizzie are going to Boston. I shall be very lonely without dear little Betty, and no one will be as good to me as mother. I read in Plutarch. I made a verse about sunset:-- Softly doth the sun descend To his couch behind the hill, Then, oh, then, I love to sit On mossy banks beside the rill. Anna thought it was very fine; but I didn't like it very well. _Friday, Nov. 2nd._--Anna and I did the work. In the evening Mr. Lane asked us, "What is man?" These were our answers: A human being; an animal with a mind; a creature; a body; a soul and a mind. After a long talk we went to bed very tired. [No wonder, after doing the work and worrying their little wits with such lessons.--L. M. A.] A sample of the vegetarian wafers we used at Fruitlands:-- Vegetable diet and sweet repose. Animal food and nightmare. Pluck your body from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shamble. Without flesh diet there could be no blood-shedding war. Apollo eats no flesh and has no beard; his voice is melody itself. Snuff is no less snuff though accepted from a gold box. _Tuesday, 20th._--I rose at five, and after breakfast washed the dishes, and then helped mother work. Miss F. is gone, and Anna in Boston with Cousin Louisa. I took care of Abby (May) in the afternoon. In the evening I made some pretty things for my dolly. Father and Mr. L. had a talk, and father asked us if _we_ saw any reason for us to separate. Mother wanted to, she is so tired. I like it, but not the school part or Mr. L. Eleven years old. _Thursday, 29th._--It was Father's and my birthday. We had some nice presents. We played in the snow before school. Mother read "Rosamond" when we sewed. Father asked us in the eve what fault troubled us most. I said my bad temper. I told mother I liked to have her write in my book. She said she would put in more, and she wrote this to help me:-- DEAR LOUY,--Your handwriting improves very fast. Take pains and do not be in a hurry. I like to have you make observations about our conversations and your own thoughts. It helps you to express them and to understand your little self. Remember, dear girl, that a diary should be an epitome of your life. May it be a record of pure thought and good actions, then you will indeed be the precious child of your loving mother. _December 10th._--I did my lessons, and walked in the afternoon. Father read to us in dear Pilgrim's Progress. Mr. L. was in Boston, and we were glad. In the eve father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy, and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together. [Little Lu began early to feel the family cares and peculiar trials.--L. M. A.] I liked the verses Christian sung and will put them in:-- "This place has been our second stage, Here we have heard and seen Those good things that from age to age To others hid have been. "They move me for to watch and pray, To strive to be sincere, To take my cross up day by day, And serve the Lord with fear." [The appropriateness of the song at this time was much greater than the child saw. She never forgot this experience, and her little cross began to grow heavier from this hour.--L. M. A.] CONCORD, _Sunday_.--We all went into the woods to get moss for the _arbor_ Father is making for _Mr. Emerson_. I miss Anna so much. I made two verses for her:-- TO ANNA. Sister, dear, when you are lonely, Longing for your distant home, And the images of loved ones Warmly to your heart shall come, Then, mid tender thoughts and fancies, Let one fond voice say to thee, "Ever when your heart is heavy, Anna, dear, then think of me." Think how we two have together Journeyed onward day by day, Joys and sorrows ever sharing, While the swift years roll away. Then may all the sunny hours Of our youth rise up to thee, And when your heart is light and happy, Anna, dear, then think of me. [Poetry began to flow about this time in a thin but copious stream.--L. M. A.] _Wednesday._--Read Martin Luther. A long letter from Anna. She sends me a picture of Jenny Lind, the great singer. She must be a happy girl. I should like to be famous as she is. Anna is very happy; and I don't miss her as much as I shall by and by in the winter. I wrote in my Imagination Book, and enjoyed it very much. Life is pleasanter than it used to be, and I don't care about dying any more. Had a splendid run, and got a box of cones to burn. Sat and heard the pines sing a long time. Read Miss Bremer's "Home" in the eve. Had good dreams, and woke now and then to think, and watch the moon. I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy. [Moods began early.--L. M. A.] _January, 1845, Friday._--Did my lessons, and in the P.M. mother read "Kenilworth" to us while we sewed. It is splendid! I got angry and called Anna mean. Father told me to look out the word in the Dic., and it meant "base," "contemptible." I was so ashamed to have called my dear sister that, and I cried over my bad tongue and temper. We have had a lovely day. All the trees were covered with ice, and it shone like diamonds or fairy palaces. I made a piece of poetry about winter:-- The stormy winter's come at last, With snow and rain and bitter blast; Ponds and brooks are frozen o'er, We cannot sail there any more. The little birds are flown away To warmer climes than ours; They'll come no more till gentle May Calls them back with flowers. Oh, then the darling birds will sing From their neat nests in the trees. All creatures wake to welcome Spring, And flowers dance in the breeze. With patience wait till winter is o'er, And all lovely things return; Of every season try the more Some knowledge or virtue to learn. [A moral is tacked on even to the early poems.--L. M. A.] I read "Philothea,"[6] by Mrs. Child. I found this that I liked in it. Plato said:-- "When I hear a note of music I can at once strike its chord. Even as surely is there everlasting harmony between the soul of man and the invisible forms of creation. If there were no innocent hearts there would be no white lilies.... I often think flowers are the angel's alphabet whereby they write on hills and fields mysterious and beautiful lessons for us to feel and learn." [Well done, twelve-year-old! Plato, the father's delight, had a charm for the little girl also.--L. M. A.] _Wednesday._--I am so cross I wish I had never been born. _Thursday._--Read the "Heart of Mid-Lothian," and had a very happy day. Miss Ford gave us a botany lesson in the woods. I am always good there. In the evening Miss Ford told us about the bones in our bodies, and how they get out of order. I must be careful of mine, I climb and jump and run so much. I found this note from dear mother in my journal:-- MY DEAREST LOUY,--I often peep into your diary, hoping to see some record of more happy days. "Hope, and keep busy," dear daughter, and in all perplexity or trouble come freely to your MOTHER. DEAR MOTHER,--You _shall_ see more happy days, and I _will_ come to you with my worries, for you are the best woman in the world. L. M. A. _A Sample of our Lessons._ "What virtues do you wish more of?" asks Mr. L. I answer:-- Patience, Obedience, Industry, Love, Generosity, Respect, Silence, Perseverance, Self-denial. "What vices less of?" Idleness, Impatience, Selfishness, Wilfulness, Impudence, Activity, Vanity, Pride, Love of cats. MR. L. L. SOCRATES. ALCIBIADES. How can you get what you need? By trying. How do you try? By resolution and perseverance. How gain love? By gentleness. What is gentleness? Kindness, patience, and care for other people's feelings. Who has it? Father and Anna. Who means to have it? Louisa, if she can. [She never got it.--L. M. A.] Write a sentence about anything. "I hope it will rain; the garden needs it." What are the elements of _hope_? Expectation, desire, faith. What are the elements in _wish_? Desire. What is the difference between faith and hope? "Faith can believe without seeing; hope is not sure, but tries to have faith when it desires." No. 3. What are the most valuable kinds of self-denial? Appetite, temper. How is self-denial of temper known? If I control my temper, I am respectful and gentle, and every one sees it. What is the result of this self-denial? Every one loves me, and I am happy. Why use self-denial? For the good of myself and others. How shall we learn this self-denial? By resolving, and then trying _hard._ What then do you mean to do? To resolve and try. [Here the record of these lessons ends, and poor little Alcibiades went to work and tried till fifty, but without any very great success, in spite of all the help Socrates and Plato gave her.--L. M. A.] _Tuesday._--More people coming to live with us; I wish we could be together, and no one else. I don't see who is to clothe and feed us all, when we are so poor now. I was very dismal, and then went to walk and made a poem. DESPONDENCY. Silent and sad, When all are glad, And the earth is dressed in flowers; When the gay birds sing Till the forests ring, As they rest in woodland bowers. Oh, why these tears, And these idle fears For what may come to-morrow? The birds find food From God so good, And the flowers know no sorrow. If He clothes these And the leafy trees, Will He not cherish thee? Why doubt His care; It is everywhere, Though the way we may not see. Then why be sad When all are glad, And the world is full of flowers? With the gay birds sing, Make life all Spring, And smile through the darkest hours. Louisa Alcott grew up so naturally in a healthy religious atmosphere that she breathed and worked in it without analysis or question. She had not suffered from ecclesiastical tyranny or sectarian bigotry, and needed not to expend any time or strength in combating them. She does not appear to have suffered from doubt or questioning, but to have gone on her way fighting all the real evils that were presented to her, trusting in a sure power of right, and confident of victory. CONCORD, _Thursday._--I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass. The moss was like velvet, and as I ran under the arches of yellow and red leaves I sang for joy, my heart was so bright and the world so beautiful. I stopped at the end of the walk and saw the sunshine out over the wide "Virginia meadows." It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond. A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I _felt_ God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life. [I have, for I most sincerely think that the little girl "got religion" that day in the wood when dear mother Nature led her to God.--L. M. A., 1885.] One of Louisa's strongest desires at this time was for a room of her own, where she might have the solitude she craved to dream her dreams and work out her fancies. These sweet little notes and an extract from her journal show how this desire was felt and gratified. DEAREST MOTHER,--I have tried to be more contented, and I think I have been more so. I have been thinking about my little room, which I suppose I never shall have. I should want to be there about all the time, and I should go there and sing and think. But I'll be contented With what I have got; Of folly repented, Then sweet is my lot. From your trying daughter, LOUY. MY DEAR LOUISA,--Your note gave me so much delight that I cannot close my eyes without first thanking you, dear, for making me so happy, and blessing God who gave you this tender love for your mother. I have observed all day your patience with baby, your obedience to me, and your kindness to all. Go on "trying," my child; God will give you strength and courage, and help you fill each day with words and deeds of love. I shall lay this on your pillow, put a warm kiss on your lips, and say a little prayer over you in your sleep. MOTHER. MY LOUY,--I was grieved at your selfish behavior this morning, but also greatly pleased to find you bore so meekly Father's reproof for it. That is the way, dear; if you find you are wrong, take the discipline sweetly, and do so no more. It is not to be expected that children should always do right; but oh, how lovely to see a child penitent and patient when the passion is over. I thought a little prayer as I looked at you, and said in my heart, "Dear God, sustain my child in this moment of trial, that no hasty word, no cruel look, no angry action may add to her fault." And you were helped. I know that you will have a happy day after the storm and the gentle shower; keep quiet, read, walk, but do not talk much till all is peace again. MOTHER. HILLSIDE, CONCORD. DEAR,--I am glad you put your heart in the right place; for I am sure all true strength comes from above. Continue to feel that God is _near_ you, dear child, and He never will forsake you in a weak moment. Write me always when you feel that I can help you; for, though God is near, Mother never forgets you, and your refuge is her arms. Patience, dear, will give us content, if nothing else. Be assured the little room you long for will come, if it is necessary to your peace and well-being. Till then try to be happy with the good things you have. They are many,--more perhaps than we deserve, after our frequent complaints and discontent. Be cheerful, my Louy, and all will be gayer for your laugh, and all good and lovely things will be given to you when you deserve them. I am a busy woman, but never can forget the calls of my children. MOTHER. DEAREST,--I am sure you have lived very near to God _to-day_, you have been so good and happy. Let each day be like this, and life will become a sweet song for you and all who love you,--none so much as your MOTHER. _Thirteen Years Old._ HILLSIDE. _March, 1846._--I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and am very happy about it. It does me good to be alone, and Mother has made it very pretty and neat for me. My work-basket and desk are by the window, and my closet is full of dried herbs that smell very nice. The door that opens into the garden will be very pretty in summer, and I can run off to the woods when I like. I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens and no more a child. I am old for my age, and don't care much for girl's things. People think I'm wild and queer; but Mother understands and helps me. I have not told any one about my plan; but I'm going to _be_ good. I've made so many resolutions, and written sad notes, and cried over my sins, and it doesn't seem to do any good! Now I'm going to _work really_, for I feel a true desire to improve, and be a help and comfort, not a care and sorrow, to my dear mother. _Fifteen Years Old._ _Sunday, Oct. 9, 1847._--I have been reading to-day Bettine's correspondence with Goethe. She calls herself a child, and writes about the lovely things she saw and heard, and felt and did. I liked it much. [First taste of Goethe. Three years later R. W. E. gave me "Wilhelm Meister," and from that day Goethe has been my chief idol.--L. M. A., 1885.] The experiment at Fruitlands was (outwardly) an utter failure, and had exhausted Mr. Alcott's resources of mind, body, and estate. Louisa has not exaggerated the collapse which followed. But the brave, loving mother could not give way to despondency, for she had her young to care for. After a few days Mr. Alcott rose from his despair, and listened to her counsel. They lived a short time at Still River, and then returned to Concord; but not to the happy little cottage. Mr. Alcott sought such work as he could find to do with his hands; but it was scanty and insufficient. Mrs. Alcott subdued her proud heart to the necessity of seeking help from friends. They had a few rooms in the house of a kind neighbor, who welcomed them to her house, in addition to her own large family; and there they struggled with the poverty which Louisa for the first time fully realized. Yet her journal says little of the hardships they endured, but is full of her mental and moral struggles. It was characteristic of this family that they never were conquered by their surroundings. Mr. Alcott might retire into sad and silent musing, Mrs. Alcott's warm, quick temper, might burst out into flame, the children might be quarrelsome or noisy; but their ideal of life always remained high, fresh, and ennobling. Their souls always "knew their destiny divine," and believed that they would find fitting expression in life some time. "Chill penury" could not repress "their noble rage," nor freeze "the genial current" of their souls. The children escaped from the privations of daily life into a world of romance, and in the plays in the old barn revelled in luxury and splendor. This dramatic tendency was very strong in Louisa, and she never outgrew it. It took various shapes and colors, and at one time threatened to dominate her life. The education of the children was certainly desultory and insufficient; but it was inspiring, and brought out their powers. They learned to feel and to think justly, and to express their thoughts and feelings freely and forcibly, if they did not know well the rules of grammar and rhetoric. Mr. Alcott always loved the study of language, and became a master of it; while Mrs. Alcott had a rich and well-chosen vocabulary, gained from the intelligent companions of her youth and the best literature, which she read freely. Mr. Alcott made great use of the study of language in his teaching, and often employed the definition of a word to convey a lesson or a rebuke. The children were encouraged, and even required, to keep their journals regularly, and to write letters. Their efforts at poetry or the drama were not laughed at, but treasured by their parents as indications of progress. Mr. Alcott's records of his own theory and practice in the education of children are full of valuable suggestion, and much yet remains buried in his journals. The girls had full freedom to act out their natures, with little fear of ridicule or criticism. An innate sense of dignity and modesty kept them from abusing this liberty; and perhaps nowhere in the world could it have been more safely indulged than in the simple life of Concord, whose very atmosphere seemed then filled with a spiritual presence which made life free, pure, and serene. Louisa gives this interesting anecdote of their life at that time:-- People wondered at our frolics, but enjoyed them, and droll stories are still told of the adventures of those days. Mr. Emerson and Margaret Fuller were visiting my parents one afternoon, and the conversation having turned to the ever interesting subject of education, Miss Fuller said:-- "Well, Mr. Alcott, you have been able to carry out your methods in your own family, and I should like to see your model children." She did in a few moments, for as the guests stood on the door-steps a wild uproar approached, and round the corner of the house came a wheelbarrow holding baby May arrayed as a queen; I was the horse, bitted and bridled, and driven by my elder sister Anna; while Lizzie played dog, and barked as loud as her gentle voice permitted. All were shouting and wild with fun, which, however, came to a sudden end as we espied the stately group before us; for my foot tripped, and down we all went in a laughing heap; while my mother put a climax to the joke by saying, with a dramatic wave of the hand,-- "Here are the model children, Miss Fuller." They were undoubtedly very satisfactory to Miss Fuller, who partook largely of the educational views of that time, and who loved to tell anecdotes of this family. One of the sisters writes in her diary: "She _said_ prayers; but I think my resolutions to be good are prayers." In 1841 Colonel May, Mrs. Alcott's father, died and left her a small amount of property. Mrs. Alcott decided to purchase with this a house in Concord, and the addition of five hundred dollars from Mr. Emerson, who was always the good Providence of the family, enabled her in 1845 to buy the place in Concord known as Hillside. This house is on the road to Lexington, about one third of a mile from Mr. Emerson's home. It was afterward occupied by Mr. Hawthorne. In this house the girlish life of Louisa was passed, which she has represented so fully in "Little Women," and of which she speaks in her journal as the happiest time of her life. Yet she was not unmindful of the anxiety of her parents; and the determined purpose to retrieve the fortunes of the family and to give to her mother the comfort and ease which she had never known in her married life became the constant motive of her conduct. It is in the light of this purpose alone that her character and her subsequent career can be fully understood. She naturally thought of teaching as her work, and had for a short time a little school in the barn for Mr. Emerson's children and others. It was indeed a great comfort to be sure of the house over their heads, but there were still six mouths to be fed, six bodies to be clothed, and four young, eager minds to be educated. Concord offered very little opportunity for such work as either Mr. or Mrs. Alcott could do, and at last even the mother's brave heart broke down. She was painfully anxious about the support of her household. A friend passing through Concord called upon her, and Mrs. Alcott could not hide the traces of tears on her face. "Abby Alcott, what does this mean?" said the visitor, with determined kindness. The poor mother opened her heart to her friend, and told the story of their privations and sufferings. "Come to Boston, and I will find you employment," said the friend. The family removed to Boston in 1848, and Mrs. Alcott became a visitor to the poor in the employ of one or more benevolent societies, and finally kept an intelligence office. Her whole heart went into her work; and the children, as well as the mother, learned many valuable lessons from it. Her reports of her work are said to have been very interesting, and full of valuable suggestion. Mr. Alcott began to hold conversations in West Street. He attracted a small circle of thoughtful men and women about him, who delighted in the height of his aspirations and the originality of his thoughts. It was congenial occupation for him, and thus added to the happiness of the family, though very little to its pecuniary resources. His price of admission was small, and he freely invited any one who would enjoy the meetings although unable to pay for them. He was a great and helpful influence to young minds. Besides the morally pure and spiritually elevated atmosphere of thought to which they were introduced by him, they found a great intellectual advantage in the acquaintance with ancient poets and philosophers, into whose life he had entered sympathetically. His peculiar theories of temperament and diet never failed to call out discussion and opposition. One of my earliest recollections of Louisa is on one of these occasions, when he was emphasizing his doctrine that a vegetable diet would produce unruffled sweetness of temper and disposition. I heard a voice behind me saying to her neighbor: "I don't know about that. I've never eaten any meat, and I'm awful cross and irritable very often." On her fourteenth birthday her mother wrote her the following poem, with a present of a pen. It was a prophetic gift, and well used by the receiver. Oh, may this pen your muse inspire, When wrapt in pure poetic fire, To write some sweet, some thrilling verse; A song of love or sorrow's lay, Or duty's clear but tedious way In brighter hope rehearse. Oh, let your strain be soft and high, Of crosses here, of crowns beyond the sky; Truth guide your pen, inspire your theme, And from each note joy's music stream. [Original, I think. I have tried to obey.--L. M. A., 1885.] In a sketch written for a friend, Louisa gives this account of the parents' influence on the children:-- When cautious friends asked mother how she dared to have such outcasts among her girls, she always answered, with an expression of confidence which did much to keep us safe, "I can trust my daughters, and this is the best way to teach them how to shun these sins and comfort these sorrows. They cannot escape the knowledge of them; better gain this under their father's roof and their mother's care, and so be protected by these experiences when their turn comes to face the world and its temptations." Once we carried our breakfast to a starving family; once lent our whole dinner to a neighbor suddenly taken unprepared by distinguished guests. Another time, one snowy Saturday night, when our wood was very low, a poor child came to beg a little, as the baby was sick and the father on a spree with all his wages. My mother hesitated at first, as we also had a baby. Very cold weather was upon us, and a Sunday to be got through before more wood could be had. My father said, "Give half our stock, and trust in Providence; the weather will moderate, or wood will come." Mother laughed, and answered in her cheery way, "Well, their need is greater than ours, and if our half gives out we can go to bed and tell stories." So a generous half went to the poor neighbor, and a little later in the eve, while the storm still raged and we were about to cover our fire to keep it, a knock came, and a farmer who usually supplied us appeared, saying anxiously, "I started for Boston with a load of wood, but it drifts so I want to go home. Wouldn't you like to have me drop the wood here; it would accommodate me, and you needn't hurry about paying for it." "Yes," said Father; and as the man went off he turned to Mother with a look that much impressed us children with his gifts as a seer, "Didn't I tell you wood would come if the weather did not moderate?" Mother's motto was "Hope, and keep busy," and one of her sayings, "Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will come back buttered." FOOTNOTES: [5] Emerson in Concord. By Edward Waldo Emerson. [6] "Philothea" was the delight of girls. The young Alcotts made a dramatic version of it, which they acted under the trees. Louisa made a magnificent Aspasia, which was a part much to her fancy. Mrs. Child was a very dear friend of Mrs. Alcott, and her daughters knew her well. CHAPTER IV. THE SENTIMENTAL PERIOD. A SONG FROM THE SUDS. Queen of my tub, I merrily sing, While the white foam rises high, And sturdily wash, and rinse, and wring, And fasten the clothes to dry; Then out in the free fresh air they swing, Under the sunny sky. I wish we could wash from our hearts and our souls The stains of the week away, And let water and air by their magic make Ourselves as pure as they; Then on the earth there would be indeed A glorious washing-day! Along the path of a useful life Will heart's-ease ever bloom; The busy mind has no time to think Of sorrow, or care, or gloom; And anxious thoughts may be swept away As we busily wield a broom. I am glad a task to me is given To labor at day by day; For it brings me health, and strength, and hope, And I cheerfully learn to say,-- "Head, you may think; heart, you may feel; But hand, you shall work alway!" The period of free, happy childhood was necessarily short, and at about the age of fifteen Louisa Alcott began to feel the pressure of thoughts and duties which made life a more solemn matter. In spite of the overflowing fun which appears in her books, her nature was very serious, and she could not cast aside care lightly. So many varying tendencies existed in her character that she must have struggled with many doubts and questions before finding the true path. But she always kept the pole-star of right strictly in view, and never failed in truth to that duty which seemed to her nearest and most imperative. If she erred in judgment, she did not err in conscientious fidelity. Her mother's rules for her guidance were-- Rule yourself. Love your neighbor. Do the duty which lies nearest you. She never lost sight of these instructions. I will introduce this period in her own words, as written later for the use of a friend. My romantic period began at fifteen, when I fell to writing poetry, keeping a heart-journal, and wandering by moonlight instead of sleeping quietly. About that time, in browsing over Mr. Emerson's library, I found Goethe's "Correspondence with a Child," and at once was fired with a desire to be a Bettine, making my father's friend my Goethe. So I wrote letters to him, but never sent them; sat in a tall cherry-tree at midnight, singing to the moon till the owls scared me to bed; left wild flowers on the doorstep of my "Master," and sung Mignon's song under his window in very bad German. Not till many years later did I tell _my_ Goethe of this early romance and the part he played in it. He was much amused, and begged for his letters, kindly saying he felt honored to be so worshipped. The letters were burnt long ago, but Emerson remained my "Master" while he lived, doing more for me,--as for many another,--than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man, untempted and unspoiled by the world which he made better while in it, and left richer and nobler when he went. The trials of life began about this time, and happy childhood ended. One of the most memorable days of my life is a certain gloomy November afternoon, when we had been holding a family council as to ways and means. In summer we lived much as the birds did, on our fruit and bread and milk; the sun was our fire, the sky our roof, and Nature's plenty made us forget that such a thing as poverty existed. In 1850 she heads her diary "The Sentimental Period." She was then seventeen years old, but her diary gives no hint of the sentimental notions that often fill the heads of young girls at that period. The experiences of Jo with her charming young neighbor in "Little Women" do not represent hers at all. One bit of romance was suggested by Goethe's "Correspondence with a Child." It may be difficult for readers of to-day to understand the fascination which this book exercised upon young minds of the last generation, yet it is certain that it led more than one young girl to form an ideal attachment to a man far older than herself, but full of nobility and intellectual greatness. Theodore Parker said of letters addressed to him by a young New Hampshire girl, "They are as good as Bettine's without the lies." This mingling of idealism and hero-worship was strongly characteristic of that transcendental period when women, having little solid education and less industrial employment, were full of noble aspirations and longings for fuller and freer life, which must find expression in some way. The young woman of to-day, wearing waterproof and india-rubber boots, skating, driving, and bicycling, studying chemistry in the laboratory, exhibiting her pictures in open competition, adopting a profession without opposition, and living single without fear of reproach, has less time for fancies and more regard for facts. Miss Alcott was safe in choosing her idol. Worship of Emerson could only refine and elevate her thoughts, and her intimate acquaintance with his beautiful home chastened her idolatry into pure reverent friendship which never failed her. She kept her worship to herself, and never sent him the letters in which she poured out the longings and raptures which filled her girlish heart. Her diary, which was revised by herself in later years, tells the story of this period quite fully. The details may seem trifling, but they help to illustrate this important formative period of her life. _Journal._ THE SENTIMENTAL PERIOD. BOSTON, _May, 1850._--So long a time has passed since I kept a journal that I hardly know how to begin. Since coming to the city I don't seem to have thought much, for the bustle and dirt and change send all lovely images and restful feelings away. Among my hills and woods I had fine free times alone, and though my thoughts were silly, I daresay, they helped to keep me happy and good. I see now what Nature did for me, and my "romantic tastes," as people called that love of solitude and out-of-door life, taught me much. This summer, like the last, we shall spend in a large house (Uncle May's, Atkinson Street), with many comforts about us which we shall enjoy, and in the autumn I hope I shall have something to show that the time has not been wasted. Seventeen years have I lived, and yet so little do I know, and so much remains to be done before I begin to be what I desire,--a truly good and useful woman. In looking over our journals, Father says, "Anna's is about other people, Louisa's about herself." That is true, for I don't _talk_ about myself; yet must always think of the wilful, moody girl I try to manage, and in my journal I write of her to see how she gets on. Anna is so good she need not take care of herself, and can enjoy other people. If I look in my glass, I try to keep down vanity about my long hair, my well-shaped head, and my good nose. In the street I try not to covet fine things. My quick tongue is always getting me into trouble, and my moodiness makes it hard to be cheerful when I think how poor we are, how much worry it is to live, and how many things I long to do I never can. So every day is a battle, and I'm so tired I don't want to live; only it's cowardly to die till you have done something. I can't talk to any one but Mother about my troubles, and she has so many now to bear I try not to add any more. I know God is always ready to hear, but heaven's so far away in the city, and I so heavy I can't fly up to find Him. FAITH. Written in the diary. Oh, when the heart is full of fears And the way seems dim to heaven, When the sorrow and the care of years Peace from the heart has driven,-- Then, through the mist of falling tears, Look up and be forgiven. Forgiven for the lack of faith That made all dark to thee, Let conscience o'er thy wayward soul Have fullest mastery: Hope on, fight on, and thou shalt win A noble victory. Though thou art weary and forlorn, Let not thy heart's peace go; Though the riches of this world are gone, And thy lot is care and woe, Faint not, but journey hourly on: True wealth is not below. Through all the darkness still look up: Let virtue be thy guide; Take thy draught from sorrow's cup, Yet trustfully abide; Let not temptation vanquish thee, And the Father will provide. [We had small-pox in the family this summer, caught from some poor immigrants whom mother took into our garden and fed one day. We girls had it lightly, but Father and Mother were very ill, and we had a curious time of exile, danger, and trouble. No doctors, and all got well.--L. M. A.] _July_, 1850.--Anna is gone to L. after the varioloid. She is to help Mrs. ---- with her baby. I had to take A.'s school of twenty in Canton Street. I like it better than I thought, though it's very hard to be patient with the children sometimes. They seem happy, and learn fast; so I am encouraged, though at first it was very hard, and I missed Anna so much I used to cry over my dinner and be very blue. I guess this is the teaching I need; for as a _school-marm_ I must behave myself and guard my tongue and temper carefully, and set an example of sweet manners. I found one of mother's notes in my journal, so like those she used to write me when she had more time. It always encourages me; and I wish some one would write as helpfully to her, for she needs cheering up with all the care she has. I often think what a hard life she has had since she married,--so full of wandering and all sorts of worry! so different from her early easy days, the youngest and most petted of her family. I think she is a very brave, good woman; and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her. But I'm afraid she will be in heaven before I can do it. Anna, too, she is feeble and homesick, and I miss her dreadfully; for she is my conscience, always true and just and good. She must have a good time in a nice little home of her own some day, as we often plan. But waiting is so _hard_! _August_, 1850.--School is hard work, and I feel as though I should like to run away from it. But my children get on; so I travel up every day, and do my best. I get very little time to write or think; for my working days have begun, and when school is over Anna wants me; so I have no quiet. I think a little solitude every day is good for me. In the quiet I see my faults, and try to mend them; but, deary me, I don't get on at all. I used to imagine my mind a room in confusion, and I was to put it in order; so I swept out useless thoughts and dusted foolish fancies away, and furnished it with good resolutions and began again. But cobwebs get in. I'm not a good housekeeper, and never get my room in nice order. I once wrote a poem about it when I was fourteen, and called it "My Little Kingdom." It is still hard to rule it, and always will be I think. Reading Miss Bremer and Hawthorne. The "Scarlet Letter" is my favorite. Mother likes Miss B. better, as more wholesome. I fancy "lurid" things, if true and strong also. Anna wants to be an actress, and so do I. We could make plenty of money perhaps, and it is a very gay life. Mother says we are too young, and must wait. A. acts often splendidly. I like tragic plays, and shall be a Siddons if I can. We get up fine ones, and make harps, castles, armor, dresses, water-falls, and thunder, and have great fun. It was at this period of her life that she was violently attacked by a mania for the stage, and the greater part of her leisure time was given to writing and enacting dramas. Her older sister, Anna, had the same taste, and assisted her in carrying out all her plans. A family of great talent with whom they were intimate joined with them, and their mother always allowed them to have all the private theatricals they wished to perform. Some of these early plays are preserved in manuscripts as she wrote them. They are written in stilted, melodramatic style, full of highstrung sentiments of loyalty, honor and devotion, with the most improbable incidents and violent devices, and without a touch of common life or the slightest flavor of humor. The idea of self-sacrifice always comes into them; but they are thoroughly girlish. It is so that girls dream and feel before they know life at all. Their hearts are full of vague, restless longings, and they seek some vent for the repressed energies of their natures away from the prosaic realities of the present. While Louisa sat sewing the tedious seams of her daily task what a relief it was to let her imagination run riot among the wildest and most exciting scenes. Of course she had a "Bandit's Bride" among her plays. "The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maiden's Vow," is preserved entire, and is a good specimen of these girlish efforts. It is full of surprises and concealments, and the denouement is as unnatural as could well be imagined. The dialogue is often bright and forcible, and the sentiments always lofty, and we have no doubt it seemed very grand to the youthful audience. It is taken from her reading, with no touch of her own life in it. This is not the same play described with such a ludicrous finale in "Little Women," although the heroine bears the same favorite name of Zara. Her own early amusement was, however, fully in her mind when she wrote that scene, which is true to fact. A friend and relative of the family living in Roxbury, Dr. Windship, was much interested in the development of Louisa's dramatic talent. The girls always enjoyed delightful visits at his house. He tried to help the young dramatist to public success, and writes to her mother:-- I have offered to Mr. Barry of the Boston Theatre Louisa's "Prima Donnas." He is very much pleased with it just as it is, and will bring it out this season in good style. He thinks it will have a fine run. Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Wood consented to take the principal characters. But from some difficulty in the arrangements "The Rival Prima Donnas" was not produced. One great pleasure was gained, however, as Mr. Barry gave her a free pass to the theatre, which proved a source of constant refreshment and delight. Of course Louisa was eager to go on to the stage herself. She had indeed extraordinary dramatic power, and could at any time quickly transform herself into Hamlet, and recite a scene with tragic effect. But the careful mother knew better than the girl the trials and dangers of the profession, and dissuaded her from it. She also knew how little such youthful facility of expression indicates the power which will make a great actress. Louisa has reproduced her dramatic experience in "Work," which gives a picture faithful in spirit and in many of its details to this phase of her life. She here indicates a knowledge of her own limitation of talent. "Christie's gala" was a part quite after her own heart. A farce, called "Nat Batchelor's Pleasure Trip; or, The Trials of a Good-natured Man," was brought out at the Howard Athenaeum. The papers of the day said of it: "It is a creditable first attempt at dramatic composition, and received frequent applause." Another critic says: "It proved a full success." This performance, however, took place in 1860,--a later period than that of which I am now speaking. An incident which occurred at this representation probably suggested scenes which recur in "Work" and other of Miss Alcott's stories. Quite a hit was made by a little girl, a Miss Jones, who, having to speak but a few lines, spoke them so well that upon her exit she received the rare compliment of an enthusiastic recall from the audience, despite the fact that "some necessary question of the play was then to be considered." For the time being she certainly was the sensation of the piece. Miss Alcott had in Dr. Windship a kind and judicious helper in her dramatic undertakings, with whom she kept up a correspondence under the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. In 1851 Louisa had an experience which she has reproduced in her story called "How I Went Out to Service." Her mother's work among the poor of Boston led to her being applied to for employment, and at one time she kept a regular intelligence office. A gentleman came to her seeking a companion for his aged father and sister, who was to do only light work, and to be treated with the greatest respect and kindness. As Mrs. Alcott did not readily think of any who would fill the place, the impulsive Louisa suggested, "Why couldn't I go, Mother?" She went, and had two months of disappointment and painful experience which she never forgot. She wrote out the story which was published later, called "How I Went Out to Service." The story has an important lesson for those who condemn severely young girls who prefer the more independent life of the factory or shop to what is considered the safety and comfort of service in families. If a girl like Louisa Alcott, belonging to a well-known, highly esteemed family, and herself commanding respect by her abilities and character, could be treated with such indignity by a family in which no one would have feared to place her, how much may not a poor unfriended girl be called upon to endure! _Journal._ 1851.--We went to a meeting, and heard splendid speaking from Phillips, Channing, and others. People were much excited, and cheered "Shadrack and liberty," groaned for "Webster and slavery," and made a great noise. I felt ready to do anything,--fight or work, hoot or cry,--and laid plans to free Simms. I shall be horribly ashamed of my country if this thing happens and the slave is taken back. [He was.--L. M. A.] 1852.--_High Street, Boston._--After the small-pox summer, we went to a house in High Street. Mother opened an intelligence office, which grew out of her city missionary work and a desire to find places for good girls. It was not fit work for her, but it paid; and she always did what came to her in the way of duty or charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love's sake. Anna and I taught; Lizzie was our little housekeeper,--our angel in a cellar kitchen; May went to school; father wrote and talked when he could get classes or conversations. Our poor little home had much love and happiness in it, and was a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men. Father and Mother had no money to give, but gave them time, sympathy, help; and if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionnaires. This is practical Christianity. My first story was printed, and $5 paid for it. It was written in Concord when I was sixteen. Great rubbish! Read it aloud to sisters, and when they praised it, not knowing the author, I proudly announced her name. Made a resolution to read fewer novels, and those only of the best. List of books I like:-- Carlyle's French Revolution and Miscellanies. Hero and Hero-Worship. Goethe's poems, plays, and novels. Plutarch's Lives. Madame Guion. Paradise Lost and Comus. Schiller's Plays. Madame de Staël. Bettine. Louis XIV. Jane Eyre. Hypatia. Philothea. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Emerson's Poems. In "Little Women" (p. 174), she has told a story which has usually been supposed to represent her first success in literature; but she has transferred the incident from her sister to her own representative, Jo. It was the quiet Anna who had secretly written a story and fastened it inside of a newspaper. She read it to her mother and sisters, as described in the book, and was very much delighted with their approbation and astonishment. 1853.--In January I started a little school,--E. W., W. A., two L's, two H's,--about a dozen in our parlor. In May, when my school closed, I went to L. as second girl. I needed the change, could do the wash, and was glad to earn my $2 a week. Home in October with $34 for my wages. After two days' rest, began school again with ten children. Anna went to Syracuse to teach; Father to the West to try his luck,--so poor, so hopeful, so serene. God be with him! Mother had several boarders, and May got on well at school. Betty was still the home bird, and had a little romance with C. Pleasant letters from Father and Anna. A hard year. Summer distasteful and lonely; winter tiresome with school and people I didn't like. I miss Anna, my one bosom friend and comforter. 1854.--_Pinckney Street._--I have neglected my journal for months, so must write it up. School for me month after month. Mother busy with boarders and sewing. Father doing as well as a philosopher can in a money-loving world. Anna at S. I earned a good deal by sewing in the evening when my day's work was done. In February Father came home. Paid his way, but no more. A dramatic scene when he arrived in the night. We were waked by hearing the bell. Mother flew down, crying "My husband!" We rushed after, and five white figures embraced the half-frozen wanderer who came in hungry, tired, cold, and disappointed, but smiling bravely and as serene as ever. We fed and warmed and brooded over him, longing to ask if he had made any money; but no one did till little May said, after he had told all the pleasant things, "Well, did people pay you?" Then, with a queer look, he opened his pocket-book and showed one dollar, saying with a smile that made our eyes fill, "Only that! My overcoat was stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better." I shall never forget how beautifully Mother answered him, though the dear, hopeful soul had built much on his success; but with a beaming face she kissed him, saying, "I call that doing _very well_. Since you are safely home, dear, we don't ask anything more." Anna and I choked down our tears, and took a little lesson in real love which we never forgot, nor the look that the tired man and the tender woman gave one another. It was half tragic and comic, for Father was very dirty and sleepy, and Mother in a big nightcap and funny old jacket. [I began to see the strong contrasts and the fun and follies in every-day life about this time.--L. M. A.] Anna came home in March. Kept our school all summer. I got "Flower Fables" ready to print. Louisa also tried service with a relative in the country for a short time, but teaching, sewing, and writing were her principal occupations during this residence in Boston. These seven years, from Louisa's sixteenth to her twenty-third year, might be called an apprenticeship to life. She tried various paths, and learned to know herself and the world about her, although she was not even yet certain of success in the way which finally opened before her and led her so successfully to the accomplishment of her life-purpose. She tried teaching, without satisfaction to herself or perhaps to others. The kind of education she had herself received fitted her admirably to understand and influence children, but not to carry on the routine of a school. Sewing was her resource when nothing else offered, but it is almost pitiful to think of her as confined to such work when great powers were lying dormant in her mind. Still, Margaret Fuller said that a year of enforced quiet in the country devoted mainly to sewing was very useful to her, since she reviewed and examined the treasures laid up in her memory; and doubtless Louisa Alcott thought out many a story which afterward delighted the world while her fingers busily plied the needle. Yet it was a great deliverance when she first found that the products of her brain would bring in the needed money for family support. _L. in Boston to A. in Syracuse._ THURSDAY, 27th. DEAREST NAN,--I was so glad to hear from you, and hear that all were well. I am grubbing away as usual, trying to get money enough to buy Mother a nice warm shawl. I have eleven dollars, all my own earnings,--five for a story, and four for the pile of sewing I did for the ladies of Dr. Gray's society, to give him as a present. ... I got a crimson ribbon for a bonnet for May, and I took my straw and fixed it nicely with some little duds I had. Her old one has haunted me all winter, and I want her to look neat. She is so graceful and pretty and loves beauty so much, it is hard for her to be poor and wear other people's ugly things. You and I have learned not to mind _much_; but when I think of her I long to dash out and buy the finest hat the limited sum of ten dollars can procure. She says so sweetly in one of her letters: "It is hard sometimes to see other people have so many nice things and I so few; but I try not to be envious, but contented with my poor clothes, and cheerful about it." I hope the little dear will like the bonnet and the frills I made her and some bows I fixed over from bright ribbons L. W. threw away. I get half my rarities from her rag-bag, and she doesn't know her own rags when fixed over. I hope I shall live to see the dear child in silk and lace, with plenty of pictures and "bottles of cream," Europe, and all she longs for. For our good little Betty, who is wearing all the old gowns we left, I shall soon be able to buy a new one, and send it with my blessing to the cheerful saint. She writes me the funniest notes, and tries to keep the old folks warm and make the lonely house in the snowbanks cosey and bright. To Father I shall send new neckties and some paper; then he will be happy, and can keep on with the beloved diaries though the heavens fall. Don't laugh at my plans; I'll carry them out, if I go to service to do it. Seeing so much money flying about, I long to honestly get a little and make my dear family more comfortable. I feel weak-minded when I think of all they need and the little I can do. Now about you: Keep the money you have earned by so many tears and sacrifices, and clothe yourself; for it makes me mad to know that my good little lass is going round in shabby things, and being looked down upon by people who are not worthy to touch her patched shoes or the hem of her ragged old gowns. Make yourself tidy, and if any is left over send it to Mother; for there are always many things needed at home, though they won't tell us. I only wish I too by any amount of weeping and homesickness could earn as much. But my mite won't come amiss; and if tears can add to its value, I've shed my quart,--first, over the book not coming out; for that was a sad blow, and I waited so long it was dreadful when my castle in the air came tumbling about my ears. Pride made me laugh in public; but I wailed in private, and no one knew it. The folks at home think I rather enjoyed it, for I wrote a jolly letter. But my visit was spoiled; and now I'm digging away for dear life, that I may not have come entirely in vain. I didn't mean to groan about it; but my lass and I must tell some one our trials, and so it becomes easy to confide in one another. I never let Mother know how unhappy you were in S. till Uncle wrote. My doings are not much this week. I sent a little tale to the "Gazette," and Clapp asked H. W. if five dollars would be enough. Cousin H. said yes, and gave it to me, with kind words and a nice parcel of paper, saying in his funny way, "Now, Lu, the door is open, go in and win." So I shall try to do it. Then cousin L. W. said Mr. B. had got my play, and told her that if Mrs. B. liked it as well, it must be clever, and if it didn't cost too much, he would bring it out by and by. Say nothing about it yet. Dr. W. tells me Mr. F. is very sick; so the farce cannot be acted yet. But the Doctor is set on its coming out, and we have fun about it. H. W. takes me often to the theatre when L. is done with me. I read to her all the P.M. often, as she is poorly, and in that way I pay my debt to them. I'm writing another story for Clapp. I want more fives, and mean to have them too. Uncle wrote that you were Dr. W.'s pet teacher, and every one loved you dearly. But if you are not well, don't stay. Come home, and be cuddled by your old LU. CHAPTER V. AUTHORSHIP. OUR ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. Sitting patient in the shadow Till the blessed light shall come, A serene and saintly presence Sanctifies our troubled home. Earthly joys and hopes and sorrows Break like ripples on the strand Of the deep and solemn river, Where her willing feet now stand. O my sister, passing from me Out of human care and strife, Leave me as a gift those virtues Which have beautified your life. Dear, bequeath me that great patience Which has power to sustain A cheerful, uncomplaining spirit In its prison-house of pain. Give me--for I need it sorely-- Of that courage, wise and sweet, Which has made the path of duty Green beneath your willing feet. Give me that unselfish nature That with charity divine Can pardon wrong for love's dear sake,-- Meek heart, forgive me mine! Thus our parting daily loseth Something of its bitter pain, And while learning this hard lesson My great loss becomes my gain; For the touch of grief will render My wild nature more serene, Give to life new aspirations, A new trust in the unseen. Henceforth safe across the river I shall see forevermore A beloved household spirit Waiting for me on the shore; Hope and faith, born of my sorrow, Guardian angels shall become; And the sister gone before me By their hands shall lead me home. When only twenty-two years old Miss Alcott began her career of authorship by launching a little flower bark, which floated gaily on the stream. She had always written poems, plays, and stories for her own and her friends' pleasure, and now she gathered up some tales she had written for Mr. Emerson's daughter, and published them under the name of "Flower Fables." She received the small amount of thirty-two dollars for the book; but it gave her the great satisfaction of having earned it by work that she loved, and which she could do well. She began to have applications for stories from the papers; but as yet sewing and teaching paid better than writing. While she sewed her brain was busy with plans of poems, plays, and tales, which she made use of at a later period. The following letter to her mother shows how closely she associated her with this early success:-- 20 PINCKNEY STREET, BOSTON, Dec. 25, 1854. (With "Flower Fables,") DEAR MOTHER,--Into your Christmas stocking I have put my "first-born," knowing that you will accept it with all its faults (for grandmothers are always kind), and look upon it merely as an earnest of what I may yet do; for, with so much to cheer me on, I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities. Whatever beauty or poetry is to be found in my little book is owing to your interest in and encouragement of all my efforts from the first to the last; and if ever I do anything to be proud of, my greatest happiness will be that I can thank you for that, as I may do for all the good there is in me; and I shall be content to write if it gives you pleasure. Jo is fussing about; My lamp is going out. To dear mother, with many kind wishes for a happy New Year and merry Christmas. I am ever your loving daughter LOUY. This letter shows that she had already begun to see that she must study not only fairies and fancies, but men and realities; and she now began to observe life, not in books, but as it went on around her. In the intense excitement of the anti-slavery struggles of that period she might well learn how full of dramatic situations and the elements of both tragedy and comedy real human life is. She says: "I began to see the strong contrasts and fun and frolic in every day life about this time." She also considered her reading, and tried to make it more thorough and profitable; and she did not "waste even _ink_ on poems and fancies," but planned stories, that everything might help toward her great object of earning support for her family. In June, 1855, Miss Alcott went to Walpole, N. H., where she had a free life among the hills for a few months. It must have been a great refreshment to her after the winter's work in the city. In July the family followed her thither, and occupied a small house. The country life and joy soon began to find expression, and she wrote a little story called "King Goldenrod," which she says "ought to be fresh and true," as written at that beautiful time and place. But this pleasant country life was for a short season only; and in chill November she set out for the city, with brave heart and scanty outfit, to seek her fortune once more. While still continuing to sew as a means of livelihood, she began to try a great variety of literary ventures. She wrote notices of books for the papers, and at one time got five dollars for a story, besides twelve dollars for sewing. The following year the publishers began to find out the value of her work, and to call for more stories. Even her poems were accepted. Little Nell was then the favorite heroine of Dickens, and Louisa's poem on that subject was published in the "Courier." Although she at first enjoyed the beautiful scenery of Walpole, she found the dull little town did not offer her the opportunities for work that she needed; and leaving her family there, she came down to Boston to seek her fortune, and went to the well-known boarding-house of Mrs. David Reed on Chauncey Street. The happy home which she had here during the winter is represented as Mrs. Kirke's house in "Little Women," and Jo's garret is the sky-parlor in which she lived and wrote. She had a rich winter, hearing many of the finest lectures, and enjoying her free pass to the theatre. One of her greatest helps, however, was the friendship of Theodore Parker, who took great interest in her struggles, and wisely strengthened and encouraged her. She loved to go to his Sunday evening receptions, and sit quietly watching the varied company who collected there; and a word or pressure of the hand from her host was enough to cheer her for the whole week. She has gratefully recorded this influence in her sketch of Mr. Power in "Work;" but she has not given to that delineation the striking personality of her subject which we should have expected of her. She then perhaps looked up to him too much to take note of the rich elements of wit and humor in his nature, and has painted him wholly seriously, and with a colorless brush. _Journal._ _Twenty-two Years Old._ PINCKNEY STREET, BOSTON, _Jan._ 1, 1855.--The principal event of the winter is the appearance of my book "Flower Fables." An edition of sixteen hundred. It has sold very well, and people seem to like it. I feel quite proud that the little tales that I wrote for Ellen E. when I was sixteen should now bring money and fame. I will put in some of the notices as "varieties." Mothers are always foolish over their first-born. Miss Wealthy Stevens paid for the book, and I received $32. [A pleasing contrast to the receipts of six months only in 1886, being $8000 for the sale of books, and no new one; but I was prouder over the $32 than the $8000.--L. M. A., 1886.] _April_, 1855.--I am in the garret with my papers round me, and a pile of apples to eat while I write my journal, plan stories, and enjoy the patter of rain on the roof, in peace and quiet. [Jo in the garret.--L. M. A.] Being behindhand, as usual, I'll make note of the main events up to date, for I don't waste ink in poetry and pages of rubbish now. I've begun to _live_, and have no time for sentimental musing. In October I began my school; Father talked, Mother looked after her boarders, and tried to help everybody. Anna was in Syracuse teaching Mrs. S----'s children. My book came out; and people began to think that topsey-turvey Louisa would amount to something after all, since she could do so well as housemaid, teacher, seamstress, and story-teller. Perhaps she may. In February I wrote a story for which C. paid $5, and asked for more. In March I wrote a farce for W. Warren, and Dr. W. offered it to him; but W. W. was too busy. Also began another tale, but found little time to work on it, with school, sewing, and house-work. My winter's earnings are,-- School, one quarter $50 Sewing $50 Stories $20 if I am ever paid. A busy and a pleasant winter, because, though hard at times, I do seem to be getting on a little; and that encourages me. Have heard Lowell and Hedge lecture, acted in plays, and thanks to our rag-money and good cousin H., have been to the theatre several times,--always my great joy. Summer plans are yet unsettled. Father wants to go to England: not a wise idea, I think. We shall probably stay here, and A. and I go into the country as governesses. It's a queer way to live, but dramatic, and I rather like it; for we never know what is to come next. We are real "Micawbers," and always "ready for a spring." I have planned another Christmas book, and hope to be able to write it. 1855.--Cousin L. W. asks me to pass the summer at Walpole with her. If I can get no teaching, I shall go; for I long for the hills, and can write my fairy tales there. I delivered my burlesque lecture on "Woman, and Her Position; by Oronthy Bluggage," last evening at Deacon G.'s. Had a merry time, and was asked by Mr. W. to do it at H. for money. Read "Hamlet" at our club,--my favorite play. Saw Mrs. W. H. Smith about the farce; says she will do it at her benefit. _May._--Father went to C. to talk with Mr. Emerson about the England trip. I am to go to Walpole. I have made my own gowns, and had money enough to fit up the girls. So glad to be independent. [I wonder if $40 fitted up the whole family. Perhaps so, as my wardrobe was made up of old clothes from cousins and friends.--L. M. A.] WALPOLE, N. H., _June, 1855_.--Pleasant journey and a kind welcome. Lovely place, high among the hills. So glad to run and skip in the woods and up the splendid ravine. Shall write here, I know. Helped cousin L. in her garden; and the smell of the fresh earth and the touch of green leaves did me good. Mr. T. came and praised my first book, so I felt much inspired to go and do another. I remember him at Scituate years ago, when he was a young ship-builder and I a curly-haired hoyden of five or six. Up at five, and had a lovely run in the ravine, seeing the woods wake. Planned a little tale which ought to be fresh and true, as it came at that hour and place,--"King Goldenrod." Have lively days,--writing in A.M., driving in P.M., and fun in eve. My visit is doing me much good. _July, 1855._--Read "Hyperion." On the 16th the family came to live in Mr. W.'s house rent free. No better plan offered, and we were all tired of the city. Here Father can have a garden; Mother can rest and be near her good niece; the children have freedom and fine air; and A. and I can go from here to our teaching, wherever it may be. Busy and happy times as we settle in the little house in the lane near by my dear ravine,--plays, picnics, pleasant people, and good neighbors. Fanny Kemble came up, Mrs. Kirkland and others, and Dr. Bellows is the gayest of the gay. We acted the "Jacobite," "Rivals," and "Bonnycastles," to an audience of a hundred, and were noticed in the Boston papers. H. T. was our manager, and Dr. B., D. D., our dramatic director. Anna was the star, her acting being really very fine. I did "Mrs. Malaprop," "Widow Pottle," and the old ladies. Finished fairy book in September. Anna had an offer from Dr. Wilbur of Syracuse to teach at the great idiot asylum. She disliked it, but decided to go. Poor dear! so beauty-loving, timid, and tender. It is a hard trial; but she is so self-sacrificing she tries to like it because it is duty. _October._--A. to Syracuse. May illustrated my book, and tales called "Christmas Elves." Better than "Flower Fables." Now I must try to sell it. [Innocent Louisa, to think that a Christmas book could be sold in October.--L. M. A.] _November._--Decided to seek my fortune; so, with my little trunk of home-made clothes, $20 earned by stories sent to the "Gazette," and my MSS., I set forth with Mother's blessing one rainy day in the dullest month in the year. [My birth-month; always to be a memorable one.--L. M. A.] Found it too late to do anything with the book, so put it away and tried for teaching, sewing, or any honest work. Won't go home to sit idle while I have a head and pair of hands. _December._--H. and L. W. very kind, and my dear cousins the Sewalls take me in. I sew for Mollie and others, and write stories. C. gave me books to notice. Heard Thackeray. Anxious times; Anna very home-sick. Walpole very cold and dull now the summer butterflies have gone. Got $5 for a tale and $12 for sewing; sent home a Christmas-box to cheer the dear souls in the snow-banks. _January, 1856._--C. paid $6 for "A Sister's Trial," gave me more books to notice, and wants more tales. [Should think he would at that price.--L. M. A.] Sewed for L. W. Sewall and others. Mr. J. M. Field took my farce to Mobile to bring out; Mr. Barry of the Boston Theatre has the play. Heard Curtis lecture. Began a book for summer,--"Beach Bubbles." Mr. F. of the "Courier" printed a poem of mine on "Little Nell." Got $10 for "Bertha," and saw great yellow placards stuck up announcing it. Acted at the W.'s. _March._--Got $10 for "Genevieve." Prices go up, as people like the tales and ask who wrote them. Finished "Twelve Bubbles." Sewed a great deal, and got very tired; one job for Mr. G. of a dozen pillow-cases, one dozen sheets, six fine cambric neckties, and two dozen handkerchiefs, at which I had to work all one night to get them done, as they were a gift to him. I got only $4. Sewing won't make my fortune; but I can plan my stories while I work, and then scribble 'em down on Sundays. Poem on "Little Paul;" Curtis's lecture on "Dickens" made it go well. Hear Emerson on "England." _May._--Anna came on her way home, sick and worn out; the work was too much for her. We had some happy days visiting about. Could not dispose of B. B. in book form, but C. took them for his paper. Mr. Field died, so the farce fell through there. Altered the play for Mrs. Barrow to bring out next winter. _June, 1856._--Home, to find dear Betty very ill with scarlet-fever caught from some poor children Mother nursed when they fell sick, living over a cellar where pigs had been kept. The landlord (a deacon) would not clean the place till Mother threatened to sue him for allowing a nuisance. Too late to save two of the poor babies or Lizzie and May from the fever. [L. never recovered, but died of it two years later.--L. M. A.] An anxious time. I nursed, did house-work, and wrote a story a month through the summer. Dr. Bellows and Father had Sunday eve conversations. _October._--Pleasant letters from Father, who went on a tour to N. Y., Philadelphia, and Boston. Made plans to go to Boston for the winter, as there is nothing to do here, and there I can support myself and help the family. C. offers 10 dollars a month, and perhaps more. L. W., M. S., and others, have plenty of sewing; the play _may_ come out, and Mrs. R. will give me a sky-parlor for $3 a week, with fire and board. I sew for her also. If I can get A. L. to governess I shall be all right. I was born with a boy's spirit under my bib and tucker. I _can't wait_ when I _can work_; so I took my little talent in my hand and forced the world again, braver than before and wiser for my failures. [Jo in N. Y.--L. M. A.] I don't often pray in words; but when I set out that day with all my worldly goods in the little old trunk, my own earnings ($25) in my pocket, and much hope and resolution in my soul, my heart was very full, and I said to the Lord, "Help us all, and keep us for one another," as I never said it before, while I looked back at the dear faces watching me, so full of love and hope and faith. _Journal._ BOSTON, _November, 1856_. _Mrs. David Reed's._--I find my little room up in the attic very cosey, and a house full of boarders very amusing to study. Mrs. Reed very kind. Fly round and take C. his stories. Go to see Mrs. L. about A. Don't want me. A blow, but I cheer up and hunt for sewing. Go to hear Parker, and he does me good. Asks me to come Sunday evenings to his house. I did go there, and met Phillips, Garrison, Hedge, and other great men, and sit in my corner weekly, staring and enjoying myself. When I went Mr. Parker said, "God bless you, Louisa; come again;" and the grasp of his hand gave me courage to face another anxious week. _November 3d._--Wrote all the morning. In the P.M. went to see the Sumner reception as he comes home after the Brooks affair. I saw him pass up Beacon Street, pale and feeble, but smiling and bowing. I rushed to Hancock Street, and was in time to see him bring his proud old mother to the window when the crowd gave three cheers for her. I cheered too, and was very much excited. Mr. Parker met him somewhere before the ceremony began, and the above P. cheered like a boy; and Sumner laughed and nodded as his friend pranced and shouted, bareheaded and beaming. My kind cousin, L. W., got tickets for a course of lectures on "Italian Literature," and seeing my old cloak sent me a new one, with other needful and pretty things such as girls love to have. I shall never forget how kind she has always been to me. _November 5th._--Went with H. W. to see Manager Barry about the everlasting play which is always coming out but never comes. We went all over the great new theatre, and I danced a jig on the immense stage. Mr. B. was very kind, and gave me a pass to come whenever I liked. This was such richness I didn't care if the play was burnt on the spot, and went home full of joy. In the eve I saw La Grange as Norma, and felt as if I knew all about that place. Quite stage-struck, and imagined myself in her place, with white robes and oak-leaf crown. _November 6th._--Sewed happily on my job of twelve sheets for H. W., and put lots of good will into the work after his kindness to me. Walked to Roxbury to see cousin Dr. W. about the play and tell the fine news. Rode home in the new cars, and found them very nice. In the eve went to teach at Warren Street Chapel Charity School. I'll help as I am helped, if I can. Mother says no one so poor he can't do a little for some one poorer yet. _Sunday._--Heard Parker on "Individuality of Character," and liked it much. In the eve I went to his house. Mrs. Howe was there, and Sumner and others. I sat in my usual corner, but Mr. P. came up and said, in that cordial way of his, "Well, child, how goes it?" "Pretty well, sir." "That's brave;" and with his warm hand-shake he went on, leaving me both proud and happy, though I have my trials. He is like a great fire where all can come and be warmed and comforted. Bless him! Had a talk at tea about him, and fought for him when W. R. said he was not a Christian. He is my _sort_; for though he may lack reverence for other people's God, he works bravely for his own, and turns his back on no one who needs help, as some of the pious do. _Monday, 14th._--May came full of expectation and joy to visit good aunt B. and study drawing. We walked about and had a good home talk, then my girl went off to Auntie's to begin what I hope will be a pleasant and profitable winter. She needs help to develop her talent, and I can't give it to her. Went to see Forrest as Othello. It is funny to see how attentive all the once cool gentlemen are to Miss Alcott now she has a pass to the new theatre. _November 29th._--My birthday. Felt forlorn so far from home. Wrote all day. Seem to be getting on slowly, so should be contented. To a little party at the B.'s in the eve. May looked very pretty, and seemed to be a favorite. The boys teased me about being an authoress, and I said I'd be famous yet. Will if I can, but something else may be better for me. Found a pretty pin from Father and a nice letter when I got home. Mr. H. brought them with letters from Mother and Betty, so I went to bed happy. _December._--Busy with Christmas and New Year's tales. Heard a good lecture by E. P. Whipple on "Courage." Thought I needed it, being rather tired of living like a spider;--spinning my brains out for money. Wrote a story, "The Cross on the Church Tower," suggested by the tower before my window. Called on Mrs. L., and she asked me to come and teach A. for three hours each day. Just what I wanted; and the children's welcome was very pretty and comforting to "Our Olly," as they call me. Now board is all safe, and something over for home, if stories and sewing fail. I don't do much, but can send little comforts to Mother and Betty, and keep May neat. _December 18th._--Begin with A. L., in Beacon Street. I taught C. when we lived in High Street, A. in Pinckney Street, and now Al.; so I seem to be an institution and a success, since I can start the boy, teach one girl, and take care of the little invalid. It is hard work, but I can do it; and am glad to sit in a large, fine room part of each day, after my sky-parlor, which has nothing pretty in it, and only the gray tower and blue sky outside as I sit at the window writing. I love luxury, but freedom and independence better. _To her Father, written from Mrs. Reed's._ BOSTON, Nov. 29, 1856. DEAREST FATHER,--Your little parcel was very welcome to me as I sat alone in my room, with snow falling fast outside, and a few tears in (for birthdays are dismal times to me); and the fine letter, the pretty gift, and, most of all, the loving thought so kindly taken for your old absent daughter, made the cold, dark day as warm and bright as summer to me. And now, with the birthday pin upon my bosom, many thanks on my lips, and a whole heart full of love for its giver, I will tell you a little about my doings, stupid as they will seem after your own grand proceedings. How I wish I could be with you, enjoying what I have always longed for,--fine people, fine amusements, and fine books. But as I can't, I am glad you are; for I love to see your name first among the lecturers, to hear it kindly spoken of in papers and inquired about by good people here,--to say nothing of the delight and pride I take in seeing you at last filling the place you are so fitted for, and which you have waited for so long and patiently. If the New Yorkers raise a statue to the modern Plato, it will be a wise and highly creditable action. * * * * * I am very well and very happy. Things go smoothly, and I think I shall come out right, and prove that though an _Alcott_ I _can_ support myself. I like the independent feeling; and though not an easy life, it is a free one, and I enjoy it. I can't do much with my hands; so I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world. I have very pleasant lectures to amuse my evenings,--Professor Gajani on "Italian Reformers," the Mercantile Library course, Whipple, Beecher, and others, and, best of all, a free pass at the Boston Theatre. I saw Mr. Barry, and he gave it to me with many kind speeches, and promises to bring out the play very soon. I hope he will. My farce is in the hands of Mrs. W. H. Smith, who acts at Laura Keene's theatre in New York. She took it, saying she would bring it out there. If you see or hear anything about it, let me know. I want something doing. My mornings are spent in writing. C. takes one a month, and I am to see Mr. B., who may take some of my wares. In the afternoons I walk and visit my hundred relations, who are all kind and friendly, and seem interested in our various successes. Sunday evenings I go to Parker's parlor, and there meet Phillips, Garrison, Scherb, Sanborn, and many other pleasant people. All talk, and I sit in a corner listening, and wishing a certain placid gray-haired gentleman was there talking too. Mrs. Parker calls on me, reads my stories, and is very good to me. Theodore asks Louisa "how her worthy parents do," and is otherwise very friendly to the large, bashful girl who adorns his parlor steadily. Abby is preparing for a busy and, I hope, a profitable winter. She has music lessons already, French and drawing in store, and, if her eyes hold out, will keep her word and become what none of us can be, "an accomplished Alcott." Now, dear Father, I shall hope to hear from you occasionally, and will gladly answer all epistles from the Plato whose parlor parish is becoming quite famous. I got the "Tribune," but not the letter, and shall look it up. I have been meaning to write, but did not know where you were. Good-by, and a happy birthday from your ever loving child, LOUISA. _Journal._ _Twenty-four Years Old._ _January, 1857._--Had my first new silk dress from good little L. W.,--very fine; and I felt as if all the Hancocks and Quincys beheld me as I went to two parties in it on New Year's eve. A busy, happy month,--taught, wrote, sewed, read aloud to the "little mother," and went often to the theatre; heard good lectures; and enjoyed my Parker evenings very much. Father came to see me on his way home; little money; had had a good time, and was asked to come again. Why don't rich people who enjoy his talk pay for it? Philosophers are always poor, and too modest to pass round their own hats. Sent by him a good bundle to the poor Forlornites among the ten-foot drifts in W. _February._--Ran home as a valentine on the 14th. _March._--Have several irons in the fire now, and try to keep 'em all hot. _April._--May did a crayon head of Mother with Mrs. Murdock; very good likeness. All of us as proud as peacocks of our "little Raphael." Heard Mrs. Butler read; very fine. _May._--Left the L.'s with my thirty-three dollars, glad to rest. May went home with her picture, happy in her winter's work and success. Father had three talks at W. F. Channing's. Good company,--Emerson, Mrs. Howe, and the rest. Saw young Booth in Brutus, and liked him better than his father; went about and rested after my labors; glad to be with Father, who enjoyed Boston and friends. Home on the 10th, passing Sunday at the Emerson's. I have done what I planned,--supported myself, written eight stories, taught four months, earned a hundred dollars, and sent money home. _June._--All happy together. My dear Nan was with me, and we had good times. Betty was feeble, but seemed to cheer up for a time. The long, cold, lonely winter has been too hard for the frail creature, and we are all anxious about her. I fear she may slip away; for she never seemed to care much for this world beyond home. So gradually the day seemed to be coming to which Louisa had long looked forward. She found that she could be independent, could help her family, and even indulge some of her own tastes. About this time Miss Alcott mentions a young friend who died in her arms, and speaks of going to console the sister in her loneliness. This shows how warmly her heart beat for others while her head was so busy with her ambitious plans. She speaks also of the hint of a new story called "The Cost of an Idea." She never lost sight of this plan, but did not carry it out. Her father's life and character were in her mind, and she longed to portray the conflict between his high ideal and the practical difficulties of his life; but it was an impossible subject. The Fruitlands episode was told in "Transcendental Wild Oats," and his early life in "Elis's Education." But although her admiration and affection for him are abundantly shown in her journals, she never perhaps understood him so thoroughly that she could adequately portray his personality; neither could she do justice to all related to him without trenching upon the privacy due to sacred feelings. [Illustration: ORCHARD HOUSE, CONCORD, MASS. Home of the Alcott Family, 1858.] A great shadow fell over Louisa's heart and life from the increasing illness of her dear younger sister Elizabeth. This young girl was tenderly beloved by all the family, and was indeed as pure, refined, and holy as she is represented as Beth in "Little Women." Her decay was very gradual, and she was so patient and sweet that the sad time of anxiety was a very precious one in remembrance. This sickness added to the pecuniary burdens of the family, and eight years afterward Louisa paid the bill of the physician who attended her sister. In October, 1857, the family removed again to Concord, and Louisa remained at home to assist in the care of the beloved invalid. They lived a few months in a part of a house which they hired until the Orchard House, which they had bought, was ready for them. Here the dear sister's life came to a close. This was the first break in the household, and the mother's heart never fully recovered from it. Louisa accepted death with strong, sweet wisdom. It never seemed to have any terror for her. In July they took possession of the Orchard House, which was hereafter the permanent residence of the family. This was a picturesque old house on the side of a hill, with an orchard of apple-trees. It was not far from Mr. Emerson's, and within walking distance of the village, yet very quiet and rural. Mr. Alcott had his library, and was always very happy there; but Louisa's heart never clung to it. The engagement of the elder sister was a very exciting event to Louisa, who did not like having the old sisterly relation broken in upon; but everything was so genuine and true in the love of the newly betrothed pair that she could not help accepting the change as a blessing to her sister and taking the new brother into her heart. The entries in her journal show that the picture she has drawn in "Little Women" of this noble man is from life, and not exaggerated. Louisa went to Boston for a visit, and again had hopes of going on to the stage; but an accident prevented it; and she returned to Concord and her writing, working off her disappointment in a story called "Only an Actress." Among her experiences at this time was an offer of marriage, about which she consulted her mother, telling her that she did not care for the lover very much. The wise mother saved her from the impulse to self-sacrifice, which might have led her to accept a position which would have given help to the family. Although this was not the only instance of offers of marriage, more or less advantageous, made to her, Louisa had no inclination toward matrimony. Her heart was bound up in her family, and she could hardly contemplate her own interests as separate from theirs. She loved activity, freedom, and independence. She could not cherish illusions tenderly; and she always said that she got tired of everybody, and felt sure that she should of her husband if she married. She never wished to make her heroines marry, and the love story is the part of her books for which she cared least. She yielded to the desire of the public, who will not accept life without a recognition of this great joy in it. Still it must be acknowledged that she has sometimes painted very sweet and natural love scenes, although more often in quaint and homely guise than in the fashion of ancient romance. "King of Clubs and Queen of Hearts" is very prettily told; and "Mrs. Todger's Teapot" is true to that quiet, earnest affection which does not pass away with youth. The writing went on, and she received five, six, or ten dollars apiece for her stories; but she did not yet venture to give up the sewing and teaching, which was still the sure reliance. Her younger sister now began to exercise her talent, and illustrated a little book of Louisa's called "Christmas Elves," which she says is better than "Flower Fables." _Journal._ Read Charlotte Bronté's life. A very interesting, but sad one. So full of talent; and after working long, just as success, love, and happiness come, she dies. Wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles. I can't be a C. B., but I may do a little something yet. _July._--Grandma Alcott came to visit us. A sweet old lady; and I am glad to know her, and see where Father got his nature. Eighty-four; yet very smart, industrious, and wise. A house needs a grandma in it. As we sat talking over Father's boyhood, I never realized so plainly before how much he has done for himself. His early life sounded like a pretty old romance, and Mother added the love passages. I got a hint for a story; and some day will do it, and call it "The Cost of an Idea." Spindle Hill, Temple School, Fruitlands, Boston, and Concord, would make fine chapters. The trials and triumphs of the Pathetic Family would make a capital book; may I live to do it. _August._--A sad, anxious month. Betty worse; Mother takes her to the seashore. Father decides to go back to Concord; he is never happy far from Emerson, the one true friend who loves and understands and helps him. _September._--An old house near R. W. E.'s is bought with Mother's money, and we propose to move. Mother in Boston with poor Betty, who is failing fast. Anna and I have a hard time breaking up. _October._--Move to Concord. Take half a house in town till spring, when the old one is to be made ready. Find dear Betty a shadow, but sweet and patient always. Fit up a nice room for her, and hope home and love and care may keep her. People kind and friendly, and the old place looks pleasant, though I never want to live in it. _November._--Father goes West, taking Grandma home. We settle down to our winter, whatever it is to be. Lizzie seems better, and we have some plays. Sanborn's school makes things lively, and we act a good deal. Twenty-five this month. I feel my quarter of a century rather heavy on my shoulders just now. I lead two lives. One seems gay with plays, etc., the other very sad,--in Betty's room; for though she wishes us to act, and loves to see us get ready, the shadow is there, and Mother and I see it. Betty loves to have me with her; and I am with her at night, for Mother needs rest. Betty says she feels "strong" when I am near. So glad to be of use. _December._--Some fine plays for charity. _January, 1858._--Lizzie much worse; Dr. G. says there is no hope. A hard thing to hear; but if she is only to suffer, I pray she may go soon. She was glad to know she was to "get well," as she called it, and we tried to bear it bravely for her sake. We gave up plays; Father came home; and Anna took the housekeeping, so that Mother and I could devote ourselves to her. Sad, quiet days in her room, and strange nights keeping up the fire and watching the dear little shadow try to wile away the long sleepless hours without troubling me. She sews, reads, sings softly, and lies looking at the fire,--so sweet and patient and so worn, my heart is broken to see the change. I wrote some lines one night on "Our Angel in the House." [Jo and Beth.--L. M. A.] _February._--A mild month; Betty very comfortable, and we hope a little. Dear Betty is slipping away, and every hour is too precious to waste, so I'll keep my lamentations over Nan's [affairs] till this duty is over. Lizzie makes little things, and drops them out of windows to the school-children, smiling to see their surprise. In the night she tells me to be Mrs. Gamp, when I give her her lunch, and tries to be gay that I may keep up. Dear little saint! I shall be better all my life for these sad hours with you. _March 14th._--My dear Beth died at three this morning, after two years of patient pain. Last week she put her work away, saying the needle was "too heavy," and having given us her few possessions, made ready for the parting in her own simple, quiet way. For two days she suffered much, begging for ether, though its effect was gone. Tuesday she lay in Father's arms, and called us round her, smiling contentedly as she said, "All here!" I think she bid us good-by then, as she held our hands and kissed us tenderly. Saturday she slept, and at midnight became unconscious, quietly breathing her life away till three; then, with one last look of the beautiful eyes, she was gone. A curious thing happened, and I will tell it here, for Dr. G. said it was a fact. A few moments after the last breath came, as Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face, I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air. Mother's eyes followed mine, and when I said, "What did you see?" she described the same light mist. Dr. G. said it was the life departing visibly. For the last time we dressed her in her usual cap and gown, and laid her on her bed,--at rest at last. What she had suffered was seen in the face; for at twenty-three she looked like a woman of forty, so worn was she, and all her pretty hair gone. On Monday Dr. Huntington read the Chapel service, and we sang her favorite hymn. Mr. Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Sanborn, and John Pratt, carried her out of the old home to the new one at Sleepy Hollow chosen by herself. So the first break comes, and I know what death means,--a liberator for her, a teacher for us. _April._--Came to occupy one wing of Hawthorne's house (once ours) while the new one was being repaired. Father, Mother, and I kept house together; May being in Boston, Anna at Pratt Farm, and, for the first time, Lizzie absent. I don't miss her as I expected to do, for she seems nearer and dearer than before; and I am glad to know she is safe from pain and age in some world where her innocent soul must be happy. Death never seemed terrible to me, and now is beautiful; so I cannot fear it, but find it friendly and wonderful. _May._--A lonely month with all the girls gone, and Father and Mother absorbed in the old house, which I don't care about, not liking Concord. On the 7th of April, Anna came walking in to tell us she was engaged to John Pratt; so another sister is gone. J. is a model son and brother,--a true man,--full of fine possibilities, but so modest one does not see it at once. He is handsome, healthy, and happy; just home from the West, and so full of love he is pleasant to look at. I moaned in private over my great loss, and said I'd never forgive J. for taking Anna from me; but I shall if he makes her happy, and turn to little May for my comfort. [Now that John is dead, I can truly say we all had cause to bless the day he came into the family; for we gained a son and brother, and Anna the best husband ever known. For ten years he made her home a little heaven of love and peace; and when he died he left her the legacy of a beautiful life, and an honest name to his little sons.--L. M. A., 1873.] _June._--The girls came home, and I went to visit L. W. in Boston. Saw Charlotte Cushman, and had a stage-struck fit. Dr. W. asked Barry to let me act at his theatre, and he agreed. I was to do Widow Pottle, as the dress was a good disguise and I knew the part well. It was all a secret, and I had hopes of trying a new life; the old one being so changed now, I felt as if I must find interest in something absorbing. But Mr. B. broke his leg, so I had to give it up; and when it was known, the dear, respectable relations were horrified at the idea. I'll try again by-and-by, and see if I have the gift. Perhaps it is acting, not writing, I'm meant for. Nature must have a vent somehow. _July._--Went into the new house and began to settle. Father is happy; Mother glad to be at rest; Anna is in bliss with her gentle John; and May busy over her pictures. I have plans simmering, but must sweep and dust and wash my dish-pans a while longer till I see my way. Worked off my stage fever in writing a story, and felt better; also a moral tale, and got twenty-five dollars, which pieced up our summer gowns and bonnets all round. The inside of my head can at least cover the outside. _August._--Much company to see the new house. All seem to be glad that the wandering family is anchored at last. We won't move again for twenty years if I can help it. The old people need an abiding place; and now that death and love have taken two of us away, I can, I hope, soon manage to care for the remaining four. The weeklies will all take stories; and I can simmer novels while I do my housework, so see my way to a little money, and perhaps more by-and-by if I ever make a hit. Probably owing to the excitement of grief for her sister's death, and sympathy in Anna's happy betrothal, Louisa became in October more discouraged than she had ever been, and went to Boston in search of work. As she walked over the mill dam the running stream brought the thought of the River of Death, which would end all troubles. It was but a momentary impulse, and the brave young heart rallied to the thought, "There is work for me, and I'll have it!" Her journal narrates how Mr. Parker helped her through this period of anxiety. She was all ready to go to Lancaster, to hard drudgery at sewing, when her old place as governess was again offered to her, and her own support was assured. _October._--Went to Boston on my usual hunt for employment, as I am not needed at home and seem to be the only bread-winner just now. * * * * * My fit of despair was soon over, for it seemed so cowardly to run away before the battle was over I couldn't do it. So I said firmly, "There _is_ work for me, and I'll have it," and went home resolved to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her. Sunday Mr. Parker preached a sermon on "Laborious Young Women." Just what I needed; for it said: "Trust your fellow-beings, and let them help you. Don't be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want." "I will," said I, and went to Mr. P.'s. He was out; but I told Mrs. P. my wants, and she kindly said Theodore and Hannah would be sure to have something for me. As I went home I met Mrs. L., who had not wanted me, as Alice went to school. She asked if I was engaged, and said A. did not do well, and she thought perhaps they would like me back. I was rejoiced, and went home feeling that the tide had begun to turn. Next day came Miss H. S. to offer me a place at the Girls' Reform School at Lancaster, to sew ten hours a day, make and mend. I said I'd go, as I could do anything with a needle; but added, if Mrs. L. wants me I'd rather do that. "Of course you had. Take it if it comes, and if not, try my work." I promised and waited. That eve, when my bag was packed and all was ready for Lancaster, came a note from Mrs. L. offering the old salary and the old place. I sang for joy, and next day early posted off to Miss S. She was glad and shook hands, saying, "It was a test, my dear, and you stood it. When I told Mr. P. that you would go, he said, 'That is a true girl; Louisa will succeed.'" I was very proud and happy; for these things are tests of character as well as courage, and I covet the respect of such true people as Mr. P. and Miss S. So away to my little girl with a bright heart! for with tales, and sewing for Mary, which pays my board, there I am fixed for the winter and my cares over. Thank the Lord! She now found publishers eager for her stories, and went on writing for them. She was encouraged by E. P. Whipple's praise of "Mark Field's Mistake," and by earning thirty dollars, most of which she sent home. _Journal._ Earned thirty dollars; sent twenty home. Heard Curtis, Parker, Higginson, and Mrs. Dall lecture. See Booth's Hamlet, and my ideal done at last. My twenty-sixth birthday on the 29th. Some sweet letters from home, and a ring of A.'s and J.'s hair as a peace-offering. A quiet day, with many thoughts and memories. The past year has brought us the first death and betrothal,--two events that change my life. I can see that these experiences have taken a deep hold, and changed or developed me. Lizzie helps me spiritually, and a little success makes me more self-reliant. Now that Mother is too tired to be wearied with my moods, I have to manage them alone, and am learning that work of head and hand is my salvation when disappointment or weariness burden and darken my soul. In my sorrow I think I instinctively came nearer to God, and found comfort in the knowledge that he was sure to help when nothing else could. A great grief has taught me more than any minister, and when feeling most alone I find refuge in the Almighty Friend. If this is experiencing religion I have done it; but I think it is only the lesson one must learn as it comes, and I am glad to know it. After my fit of despair I seem to be braver and more cheerful, and grub away with a good heart. Hope it will last, for I need all the courage and comfort I can get. I feel as if I could write better now,--more truly of things I have felt and therefore _know_. I hope I shall yet do my great book, for that seems to be my work, and I am growing up to it. I even think of trying the "Atlantic." There 's ambition for you! I'm sure some of the stories are very flat. If Mr. L. takes the one Father carried to him, I shall think I can do something. _December._--Father started on his tour West full of hope. Dear man! How happy he will be if people will only listen to and _pay_ for his wisdom. May came to B. and stayed with me while she took drawing lessons. Christmas at home. Write an Indian story. _January_, 1859.--Send a parcel home to Marmee and Nan. Mother very ill. Home to nurse her for a week. Wonder if I ought not to be a nurse, as I seem to have a gift for it. Lizzie, L. W., and Mother all say so; and I like it. If I couldn't write or act I'd try it. May yet. $21 from L.; $15 home. * * * * * Some day I'll do my best, and get well paid for it. [$3,000 for a short serial in 1876. True prophet.--L. M. A.] Wrote a sequel to "Mark Field." Had a queer time over it, getting up at night to write it, being too full to sleep. _March._--"Mark" was a success, and much praised. So I found the divine afflatus did descend. Busy life teaching, writing, sewing, getting all I can from lectures, books, and good people. Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors! _April._--May went home after a happy winter at the School of Design, where she did finely, and was pronounced full of promise. Mr. T. said good things of her, and we were very proud. No doubt now what she is to be, if we can only keep her along. I went home also, being done with A., who went out of town early. Won't teach any more if I can help it; don't like it; and if I can get writing enough can do much better. I have done more than I hoped. Supported myself, helped May, and sent something home. Not borrowed a penny, and had only five dollars given me. So my third campaign ends well. _May._--Took care of L. W., who was ill. Walked from C. to B. one day, twenty miles, in five hours, and went to a party in the evening. Not very tired. Well done for a vegetable production! _June._--Took two children to board and teach. A busy month, as Anna was in B. _September._--Great State Encampment here. Town full of soldiers, with military fuss and feathers. I like a camp, and long for a war, to see how it all seems. I can't fight, but I can nurse. [Prophetic again.--L. M. A.] _October_, 1859.--May did a fine copy of Emerson's Endymion[7] for me. Mother sixty. God bless the dear, brave woman! Good news of Parker in Florence,--my beloved minister and friend. To him and R. W. E. I owe much of my education. May I be a worthy pupil of such men! _November._--Hurrah! My story was accepted; and Lowell asked if it was not a translation from the German, it was so unlike most tales. I felt much set up, and my fifty dollars will be very happy money. People seem to think it a great thing to get into the "Atlantic;" but I've not been pegging away all these years in vain, and may yet have books and publishers and a fortune of my own. Success has gone to my head, and I wander a little. Twenty-seven years old, and very happy. The Harper's Ferry tragedy makes this a memorable month. Glad I have lived to see the Antislavery movement and this last heroic act in it. Wish I could do my part in it. _December_, 1859.--The execution of Saint John the Just took place on the second. A meeting at the hall, and all Concord was there. Emerson, Thoreau, Father, and Sanborn spoke, and all were full of reverence and admiration for the martyr. I made some verses on it, and sent them to the "Liberator." A sickness of Mrs. Alcott through which she nursed her makes Louisa question whether nursing is not her true vocation. She had an opportunity to try it later. Much interest attaches to this period of Louisa's work, when she dashed off sensational stories as fast as they were wanted, from the account which she has given of it in "Little Women." She has concentrated into one short period there the work and the feelings of a much longer time. She certainly did let her fancy run riot in these tales, and they were as sensational as the penny papers desired. She had a passion for wild, adventurous life, and even for lurid passion and melodramatic action, which she could indulge to the utmost in these stories. Louisa was always a creature of moods; and it was a great relief to work off certain feelings by the safe vent of imaginary persons and scenes in a story. She had no one to guide or criticise her; and the fact that these gambols of fancy brought the much-needed money, and were, as she truly called them, "pot boilers," certainly did not discourage her from indulging in them. She is probably right in calling most of them "trash and rubbish," for she was yet an unformed girl, and had not studied herself or life very deeply; but her own severe condemnation of them in "Little Women" might give a false idea. The stories are never coarse or immoral. They give a lurid, unnatural picture of life, but sin is not made captivating or immorality attractive. There is often a severe moral enforced. They did not give poison to her readers, only over-seasoned unnatural food, which might destroy the relish for wholesome mental nourishment. We are inclined to ask, What did Louisa herself get out of this wild, Walpurgis-Night ride among ghosts and goblins, letting her fancy run riot, and indulging every mood as it rose? Did it not give her the dash and freedom in writing which we find in all her books, a command of language, and a recognition of the glow and force of life? She finds life no mere commonplace drudgery, but full of great possibilities. Did it not also give her an interest in all the wild fancies and dreams of girls, all the longing for adventure of boys, and make her hopeful even of the veriest young scamps that they would work off the turbulent energies of youth safely if activities were wisely provided for them? No writer for children ever was so fully recognized as understanding them. They never felt that she stood on a pinnacle of wisdom to censure them, but came right down into their midst to work and play with them, and at the same time to show them the path out of the tangled thickets, and to help them to see light in their gloomiest despair. Yet she unquestionably recognized that she was not doing the best work of which she was capable; and she looked forward still to the books she was to write, as well as the fortune she was to make. She did not like any reference to these sensational stories in after life, although she sometimes re-used plots or incidents in them; and she was very unwilling to have them republished. _Boston Bulletin,--Ninth Issue._ SUNDAY EVE, November, 1858. MY BLESSED NAN,--Having finished my story, I can refresh my soul by a scribble to you, though I have nothing to tell of much interest. Mrs. L. is to pay me my "celery" each month, as she likes to settle all bills in that way; so yesterday she put $20.85 into my willing hands, and gave me Saturday P.M. for a holiday. This unexpected $20, with the $10 for my story (if I get it) and $5 for sewing, will give me the immense sum of $35. I shall get a second-hand carpet for the little parlor, a bonnet for you, and some shoes and stockings for myself, as three times round the Common in cold weather conduces to chilblains, owing to stockings with a profusion of toe, but no heel, and shoes with plenty of heel, but a paucity of toe. The prejudices of society demand that my feet be covered in the houses of the rich and great; so I shall hose and shoe myself, and if any of my fortune is left, will invest it in the Alcott Sinking Fund, the Micawber R. R., and the Skimpole three per cents. Tell me how much carpet you need, and T. S. will find me a good one. In December I shall have another $20; so let me know what is wanting, and don't live on "five pounds of rice and a couple of quarts of split peas" all winter, I beg. How did you like "Mark Field's Mistake"? I don't know whether it is good or bad; but it will keep the pot boiling, and I ask no more. I wanted to go and see if "Hope's Treasures" was accepted, but was afeared. M. and H. both appeared; but one fell asleep, and the other forgot to remember; so I still wait like Patience on a hard chair, smiling at an inkstand. Miss K. asked me to go to see Booth for the last time on Saturday. Upon that ravishing thought I brooded all the week very merrily, and I danced, sang, and clashed my cymbals daily. Saturday A.M. Miss K. sent word she couldn't go, and from my pinnacle of joy I was precipitated into an abyss of woe. While in said abyss Mrs. L. put the $20 into my hands. That was a moment of awful trial. Every one of those dollars cried aloud, "What, ho! Come hither, and be happy!" But eight cold feet on a straw carpet marched to and fro so pathetically that I locked up the tempting fiend, and fell to sewing, as a Saturday treat! But, lo! virtue was rewarded. Mrs. H. came flying in, and took me to the Museum to see "Gold" and "Lend Me Five Shillings." Warren, in an orange tie, red coat, white satin vest, and scarlet ribbons on his ankles, was the funniest creature you ever saw; and I laughed till I cried,--which was better for me than the melancholy Dane, I dare say. I'm disgusted with this letter; for I always begin trying to be proper and neat; but my pen will not keep in order, and ink has a tendency to splash when used copiously and with rapidity. I have to be so moral and so dignified nowadays that the jocosity of my nature will gush out when it gets a chance, and the consequences are, as you see, rubbish. But you like it; so let's be merry while we may, for to-morrow is Monday, and the weekly grind begins again. FOOTNOTES: [7] A fine bas-relief owned by Mr. Emerson. CHAPTER VI. THE YEAR OF GOOD LUCK. THE CHILDREN'S SONG. _Tune._--"Wait for the Wagon." The world lies fair about us, and a friendly sky above; Our lives are full of sunshine, our homes are full of love; Few cares or sorrows sadden the beauty of our day; We gather simple pleasures like daisies by the way. _Chorus._--Oh! sing with cheery voices, Like robins on the tree; For little lads and lasses As blithe of heart should be. The village is our fairyland: its good men are our kings; And wandering through its by-ways our busy minds find wings. The school-room is our garden, and we the flowers there, And kind hands tend and water us that we may blossom fair. _Chorus._--Oh! dance in airy circles, Like fairies on the lee; For little lads and lasses As light of foot should be. There's the Shepherd of the sheepfold; the Father of the vines; The Hermit of blue Walden; the Poet of the pines; And a Friend who comes among us, with counsels wise and mild With snow upon his forehead, yet at heart a very child. _Chorus._--Oh! smile as smiles the river, Slow rippling to the sea; For little lads and lasses As full of peace should be. There's not a cloud in heaven but drops its silent dew; No violet in the meadow but blesses with its blue; No happy child in Concord who may not do its part To make the great world better by innocence of heart. _Chorus._--Oh! blossom in the sunshine Beneath the village tree; For little lads and lasses Are the fairest flowers we see. After such long and hard struggles, it is pleasant to find the diary for 1860 headed "A Year of Good Luck." The appointment of Mr. Alcott as Superintendent of Schools in Concord was a great happiness to the family. It was a recognition of his character and ability, and gave him congenial occupation and some small pecuniary compensation. Louisa was writing for the "Atlantic," and receiving better pay for her work; Anna was happy; and May absorbed in her art. In the summer Miss Alcott had an experience in caring for a young friend during a temporary fit of insanity, which she has partially reproduced in the touching picture of Helen in the story of "Work." It is a powerful lesson; but it is almost cruelly enforced, and is an artistic blemish in the book. While the great problem of heredity should be studied and its lessons enforced, it is yet a mystery, whose laws are not understood; and it is not wise to paint its possible effects in the lurid light of excited imagination, which may too often bring about the very evils which a wise and temperate caution might prevent. For the physician and teacher such investigations are important; but they are dangerous to the young and sensitive. The following unusually long letter gives a pleasing picture of the family life at this time:-- _To Mrs. Bond._ APPLE SLUMP, Sept. 17, 1860. DEAR AUNTIE,--I consider this a practical illustration of one of Mother's naughty amended sayings, "Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will return buttered;" and this "rule of three" don't "puzzle me," as the other did; for my venerable raiment went away with one if not two feet in the grave, and came back in the guise of three stout angels, having been resurrectionized by the spirit who lives on the other side of a Charles River Jordan. Thank you very much, and be sure the dreams I dream in them will be pleasant ones; for, whether you sewed them or not, I know they bring some of the Auntie influence in their strength, softness, and warmth; and, though a Vandal, I think any prayers I may say in them will be the better for the affectionate recollections that will clothe me with the putting on of these friendly gowns, while my belief in both heavenly and earthly providences will be amazingly strengthened by the knowledge of some lives here, whose beauty renders it impossible to doubt the existence of the life hereafter. We were very glad to hear that the Papa was better; for when paternal "Richards" ain't "themselves," everybody knows the anxious state of the domestic realms. I hope Georgie (last name disremembered) has recovered from the anguish of discontented teeth and berry-seeds, and that "the Mama" was as much benefited by the trip as the other parties were, barring the horse perhaps. This amiable town is convulsed just now with a gymnastic fever, which shows itself with great violence in all the schools, and young societies generally. Dr. Lewis has "inoculated us for the disease," and it has "taken finely;" for every one has become a perambulating windmill, with all its four sails going as if a wind had set in; and the most virulent cases present the phenomena of black eyes and excoriation of the knobby parts of the frame, to say nothing of sprains and breakage of vessels looming in the future. The City Fathers approve of it; and the city sons and daughters intend to show that Concord has as much muscle as brain, and be ready for another Concord fight, if Louis Napoleon sees fit to covet this famous land of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Alcott, & Co. Abby and I are among the pioneers; and the delicate vegetable productions clash their cymbals in private, when the beef-eating young ladies faint away and become superfluous _dumb belles_. Saturday we had J. G. Whittier, Charlotte Cushman, Miss Stebbins the sculptress, and Mr. Stuart, conductor of the underground railroad of this charming free country. So you see our humble place of abode is perking up; and when the "great authoress and artist" are fairly out of the shell, we shall be an honor to our country and terror to the foe,--provided good fortune don't addle or bad fortune smash us. Father continues to stir up the schools like a mild pudding-stick, Mother to sing Hebron among her pots and pans, Anna and the Prince Consort to bill and coo in the little dove-cot, Oranthy Bluggage to launch chips on the Atlantic and make a gigantic blot of herself in working the vessel, Abby to teach the fine arts and play propriety for the family, and the old house to put its best foot foremost and hoot at the idea of ever returning to the chaos from which it came. This is a condensed history of "the pathetic family," which is also a "happy family," owing to the prevalence of friends and lots of kindness in the original packages, "which are always arriving" when the "Widow Cruise's oil-bottle" begins to give out. You know I never _could_ do anything in a neat and proper manner; so you will receive this topsy-turvy note as you do its writer, and with love to all from all, believe her, dear auntie, Ever lovingly yours, L. M. A. This characteristic letter not only shows Louisa's affectionate feelings and gives a picture of her life, but indicates that "The Pathetic Family," which was the foundation of "Little Women," was already shaping itself in her mind. Mr. Alcott's career as Superintendent of Schools was a gratifying success, and is still remembered by friends of education in the town. The year closed with a school festival, for which Louisa wrote a poem, and in which she took hearty delight. In 1861 war was declared with the South. The Alcotts were all alive with patriotic enthusiasm, and Louisa took an active part in fitting off the boys for the army. But she also found time for much reading. Mr. Alcott, in his sonnet, uses the expression about Louisa-- "Hast with grave studies vexed a lively brain." He may possibly have referred to this period, though she could never properly be called a student. She was a rapid, intelligent reader, and her taste was severe and keen. From her childhood she had browsed in her father's library, full of the works of ancient philosophers and quaint English poets, and had imbibed from them great thoughts and noble sentiments; but her reading, like all her education, was immethodical. Occasionally she would lay out courses of reading, which she pursued for a time; but in general she followed the cravings of a healthy appetite for knowledge, reading what came in her way. Later in life she often read light literature in abundance, to drown the sensations of pain, and to pass away the hours of invalidism. She read French easily, and learned to speak it when abroad; she also studied German, but did not acquire equal facility in that tongue. Of ancient languages she had no knowledge. History could not fail to interest such a student of life, and she loved Nature too well not to enjoy the revelations of science when brought to her notice; but she had never time to give to a thorough study of either. In her journal at this time she speaks of her religious feelings, which the experiences of grief and despair and reviving hope had deepened. Louisa Alcott's was a truly religious soul; she always lived in the consciousness of a Higher Power sustaining and blessing her, whose presence was revealed to her through Nature, through the inspired words of great thinkers and the deep experiences of her own heart. She never held her life as an isolated possession which she was free to use for her own enjoyment or glory. Her father truly called her "Duty's faithful child," and her life was consecrated to the duty she recognized as specially hers. But for outward forms and rites of religion she cared little; her home was sacred to her, and she found her best life there. She loved Theodore Parker, and found great strength and help from his preaching, and afterward liked to listen to Dr. Bartol; but she never joined any church. The Bible was not her favorite reading, though her father had read it much to her in her childhood, with his own peculiar charm of interpretation. Pilgrim's Progress was one of the few religious books which became dear to her in the same way. Her sister Anna was married in May; this was of course a great event in the family. While fully rejoicing in her sister's happiness, Louisa felt her loss as a constant companion and confidant. The journal gives a sufficient description of the event. Her strong affection for her brother-in-law appears in "Little Women" and in "Jo's Boys." About this time her farce was brought out at the Howard Athenæum. The story-writing continued, as it helped to pay the expenses of the family; but the continuous, hurried work had begun to affect her health, and she occasionally suffered from illness. In the summer of 1861 Miss Alcott began to write her first novel, entitled "Moods;" this proved to be the least successful of her books, and yet like many an unfortunate child, it was the dearest to the mother's heart. It was not written for money, but for its own sake, and she was possessed by the plot and the characters. Warwick represented her ideal of a hero, while her sister preferred the type of the amiable Moor; yet there is far less of her outward self revealed in this than in her other stories. It is full of her thoughts and fancies, but not of her life. The wilful, moody, charming Sylvia does not affect us like the stormy Jo, who is a real presence to us, and whom we take to our hearts in spite of her faults. The men are such as she found in books, but had never known herself, and, carefully as she has drawn them, have not the individuality of Laurie and Professor Bhaer. The action takes place in an unreal world; and though there are many pretty scenes, they have not the real flavor of New England life. The principal incident, of a young girl going up the river on a picnic-voyage for some days with her brother and two other young men, was so contrary to common ideas of decorum, that the motive hardly seems sufficient for the staid sister's consent; but in the simple, innocent life which the Alcotts lived in Concord such scruples were little felt. Miss Alcott did not lay stress upon the marriage question as the principal feature of the book; she cared more to describe the wilful moods of a young girl, full of good feelings, and longing for a rich and noble life, but not established in convictions and principles. She meant to represent much of her own nature in Sylvia, for she was always a creature of moods, which her family learned to recognize and respect. But how unlike was the discipline of family work and love, which saved Louisa from fatal caprices and fitful gusts of fancy called passion, to the lot of the wealthy and admired Sylvia. Miss Alcott says that the incidents of the marriage, although not drawn from life, were so close to an actual case that the wife asked her how she had known her secret; but such realism is a poor justification in art. It is that which becomes true to the imagination and heart through its vivid personation of character which is accepted, not the bare facts. The great question of the transcendental period was truth to the inward life instead of the outward law. But in "Moods" the marriage question is not stated strongly; it does not reach down to this central principle. It is only in tragedy that such a double relation could be endured, when the situation is compelled by fate,--the fate of character and overpowering circumstances,--and when there is no happy solution possible. But Sylvia's position is made only by her own weakness, and the love which stands in opposition to outward duty has no right of existence. If her love for Warwick _could_ be overcome, there was no question of her duty; and when she accepts Faith's criticism of him, it is clear that it is a much lighter spell than love which has fascinated her. We do not accept the catastrophe which sacrifices a splendid life to make a comfortable solution of the practical difficulty, and to allow Sylvia to accept a happy home without a thorough regeneration of heart and mind. But these were the natural mistakes of youth and inexperience; Louisa had known but little of such struggles. Love and marriage were rather uninteresting themes to her, and she had not yet found her true power. Still the book has great literary merit. It is well written, in a more finished style than any of her other work, except "Modern Mephistopheles," and the dialogue is vigorous and sprightly. In spite of her careful revision and pruning, there is something left of youthful gush in it, and this perhaps touched the heart of young girls, who found in Sylvia's troubles with herself a reflection of their own. The "golden wedding" scenes have some of her usual freedom and vivacity. She is at home with a troop of mothers and babies and noisy boys. But the "golden wedding" was a new importation from Germany, and not at home in the New England farmhouse. Why might it not have been a true wedding or a harvest feast? Louisa never lost her interest in this early work, though it was the most unlucky of books, and subjected to severe handling. It was sent to and fro from publisher to author, each one suggesting some change. Redpath sent it back as being too long. Ticknor found it very interesting, but could not use it then. Loring liked it, but wanted it shorter. She condensed and altered until her author's spirit rebelled, and she declared she would change it no more. After her other books had made her famous, "Moods" was again brought forward and republished as it was originally written. It met with warmer welcome than before, and a cheap edition was published in England to supply the popular demand. Miss Alcott learned the first painful lesson of over-work on this book. She was possessed by it, and for three weeks labored so constantly that she felt the physical effects keenly. Fortunately new household tasks (for the daughters of John Brown came to board with them), and the enthusiasm of the time, changed the current of her thoughts. _Journal._ _February_, 1860.--Mr. ---- won't have "M. L.," as it is antislavery, and the dear South must not be offended. Got a carpet with my $50, and wild Louisa's head kept the feet of the family warm. _March._--Wrote "A Modern Cinderella," with Nan for the heroine and John for the hero. Made my first ball dress for May, and she was the finest girl at the party. My tall, blond, graceful girl! I was proud of her. Wrote a song for the school festival, and heard it sung by four hundred happy children. Father got up the affair, and such a pretty affair was never seen in Concord before. He said, "We spend much on our cattle and flower shows; let us each spring have a show of our children, and begrudge nothing for their culture." All liked it but the old fogies who want things as they were in the ark. _April._--Made two riding habits, and May and I had some fine rides. Both needed exercise, and this was good for us. So one of our dreams came true, and we really did "dash away on horseback." Sanborn was nearly kidnapped for being a friend of John Brown; but his sister and A. W. rescued him when he was handcuffed, and the scamps drove off. Great ferment in town. A meeting and general flurry. Had a funny lover who met me in the cars, and said he lost his heart at once. Handsome man of forty. A Southerner, and very demonstrative and gushing, called and wished to pay his addresses; and being told I didn't wish to see him, retired, to write letters and haunt the road with his hat off, while the girls laughed and had great fun over Jo's lover. He went at last, and peace reigned. My adorers are all queer. Sent "Cinderella" to the "Atlantic," and it was accepted. Began "By the River," and thought that this was certainly to be a lucky year; for after ten years hard climbing I had reached a good perch on the ladder, and could look more hopefully into the future, while my paper boats sailed gaily over the Atlantic. _May._--Meg's wedding. My farce was acted, and I went to see it. Not very well done; but I sat in a box, and the good Doctor handed up a bouquet to the author, and made as much as he could of a small affair. Saw Anna's honeymoon home at Chelsea,--a little cottage in a blooming apple-orchard. Pretty place, simple and sweet. God bless it! The dear girl was married on the 23d, the same day as Mother's wedding. A lovely day; the house full of sunshine, flowers, friends, and happiness. Uncle S. J. May married them, with no fuss, but much love; and we all stood round her. She in her silver-gray silk, with lilies of the valley (John's flower) in her bosom and hair. We in gray thin stuff and roses,--sackcloth, I called it, and ashes of roses; for I mourn the loss of my Nan, and am not comforted. We have had a little feast, sent by good Mrs. Judge Shaw; then the old folks danced round the bridal pair on the lawn in the German fashion, making a pretty picture to remember, under our Revolutionary elm. Then, with tears and kisses, our dear girl, in her little white bonnet, went happily away with her good John; and we ended our first wedding. Mr. Emerson kissed her; and I thought that honor would make even matrimony endurable, for he is the god of my idolatry, and has been for years. _June._--To Boston to the memorial meeting for Mr. Parker, which was very beautiful, and proved how much he was beloved. Music Hall was full of flowers and sunshine, and hundreds of faces, both sad and proud, as the various speakers told the life of love and labor which makes Theodore Parker's memory so rich a legacy to Boston. I was very glad to have known so good a man, and been called "friend" by him. Saw Nan in her nest, where she and her mate live like a pair of turtle doves. Very sweet and pretty, but I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe. _August._--"Moods." Genius burned so fiercely that for four weeks I wrote all day and planned nearly all night, being quite possessed by my work. I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants. Finished the book, or a rough draught of it, and put it away to settle. Mr. Emerson offered to read it when Mother told him it was "Moods" and had one of his sayings for motto. Daresay nothing will ever come of it; but it _had_ to be done, and I'm the richer for a new experience. _September._--Received $75 of Ticknor for "Cinderella," and feel very rich. Emerson praised it, and people wrote to me about it and patted me on the head. Paid bills, and began to simmer another. _October._--I went to B. and saw the Prince of Wales trot over the Common with his train at a review. A yellow-haired laddie very like his mother. Fanny W. and I nodded and waved as he passed, and he openly winked his boyish eye at us; for Fanny, with her yellow curls and wild waving, looked rather rowdy, and the poor little prince wanted some fun. We laughed, and thought that we had been more distinguished by the saucy wink than by a stately bow. Boys are always jolly,--even princes. Read Richter, and enjoyed him very much. Mother went to see Uncle S. J. May, and I was house-keeper. Gave my mind to it so energetically that I dreamed dip-toast, talked apple-sauce, thought pies, and wept drop-cakes. Read my book to Nan, who came up to cheer me in my struggles; and she laughed and cried over it and said it was "good." So I felt encouraged, and will touch it up when duty no longer orders me to make a burnt-offering of myself. _November._--Father sixty-one; L. aged twenty-eight. Our birthday. Gave Father a ream of paper, and he gave me Emerson's picture; so both were happy. Wrote little, being busy with visitors. The John Brown Association asked me for a poem, which I wrote. Kind Miss R. sent May $30 for lessons, so she went to B. to take some of Johnstone. She is one of the fortunate ones, and gets what she wants easily. I have to grub for my help, or go without it. Good for me, doubtless, or it wouldn't be so; so cheer up, Louisa, and grind away! _December._--More luck for May. She wanted to go to Syracuse and teach, and Dr. W. sends for her, thanks to Uncle S. J. May. I sew like a steam-engine for a week, and get her ready. On the 17th go to B. and see our youngest start on her first little flight alone into the world, full of hope and courage. May all go well with her! Mr. Emerson invited me to his class when they meet to talk on Genius; a great honor, as all the learned ladies go. Sent "Debby's Debit" to the "Atlantic," and they took it. Asked to the John Brown meeting, but had no "good gown," so didn't go; but my "pome" did, and came out in the paper. Not good. I'm a better patriot than poet, and couldn't say what I felt. A quiet Christmas; no presents but apples and flowers. No merry-making; for Nan and May were gone, and Betty under the snow. But we are used to hard times, and, as Mother says, "while there is a famine in Kansas we mustn't ask for sugar-plums." All the philosophy in our house is not in the study; a good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady thinks high thoughts and does kind deeds while she cooks and scrubs. _January, 1861._--Twenty-eight; received thirteen New Year's gifts. A most uncommon fit of generosity seemed to seize people on my behalf, and I was blessed with all manner of nice things, from a gold and ivory pen to a mince-pie and a bonnet. Wrote on a new book--"Success" ["Work"]--till Mother fell ill, when I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse. The dear woman was very ill, but rose up like a phoenix from her ashes after what she gayly called "the irrepressible conflict between sickness and the May constitution." Father had four talks at Emerson's; good people came, and he enjoyed them much; made $30. R. W. E. probably put in $20. He has a sweet way of bestowing gifts on the table under a book or behind a candle-stick, when he thinks Father wants a little money, and no one will help him earn. A true friend is this tender and illustrious man. Wrote a tale and put it away,--to be sent when "Debby" comes out. "F. T." appeared, and I got a dress, having mended my six-year old silk till it is more patch and tear than gown. Made the claret merino myself, and enjoyed it, as I do anything bought with my "head-money." _February._--Another turn at "Moods," which I remodelled. From the 2d to the 25th I sat writing, with a run at dusk; could not sleep, and for three days was so full of it I could not stop to get up. Mother made me a green silk cap with a red bow, to match the old green and red party wrap, which I wore as a "glory cloak." Thus arrayed I sat in groves of manuscripts, "living for immortality," as May said. Mother wandered in and out with cordial cups of tea, worried because I couldn't eat. Father thought it fine, and brought his reddest apples and hardest cider for my Pegasus to feed upon. All sorts of fun was going on; but I didn't care if the world returned to chaos if I and my inkstand only "lit" in the same place. It was very pleasant and queer while it lasted; but after three weeks of it I found that my mind was too rampant for my body, as my head was dizzy, legs shaky, and no sleep would come. So I dropped the pen, and took long walks, cold baths, and had Nan up to frolic with me. Read all I had done to my family; and Father said: "Emerson must see this. Where did you get your metaphysics?" Mother pronounced it wonderful, and Anna laughed and cried, as she always does, over my works, saying, "My dear, I'm proud of you." So I had a good time, even if it never comes to anything; thing; for it was worth something to have my three dearest sit up till midnight listening with wide-open eyes to Lu's first novel. I planned it some time ago, and have had it in my mind ever so long; but now it begins to take shape. Father had his usual school festival, and Emerson asked me to write a song, which I did. On the 16th the schools all met in the hall (four hundred),--a pretty posy bed, with a border of proud parents and friends. Some of the fogies objected to the names Phillips and John Brown. But Emerson said: "Give it up? No, no; _I_ will read it." Which he did, to my great contentment; for when the great man of the town says "Do it," the thing is done. So the choir warbled, and the Alcotts were uplifted in their vain minds. Father was in glory, like a happy shepherd with a large flock of sportive lambs; for all did something. Each school had its badge,--one pink ribbons, one green shoulder-knots, and one wreaths of pop-corn on the curly pates. One school to whom Father had read Pilgrim's Progress told the story, one child after the other popping up to say his or her part; and at the end a little tot walked forward, saying with a pretty air of wonder,--"And behold it was all a dream." When all was over, and Father about to dismiss them, F. H., a tall, handsome lad came to him, and looking up confidingly to the benign old face, asked "our dear friend Mr. Alcott to accept of Pilgrim's Progress and George Herbert's Poems from the children of Concord, as a token of their love and respect." Father was much touched and surprised, and blushed and stammered like a boy, hugging the fine books while the children cheered till the roof rung. His report was much admired, and a thousand copies printed to supply the demand; for it was a new thing to have a report, neither dry nor dull; and teachers were glad of the hints given, making education a part of religion, not a mere bread-making grind for teacher and an irksome cram for children. _April._--War declared with the South, and our Concord company went to Washington. A busy time getting them ready, and a sad day seeing them off; for in a little town like this we all seem like one family in times like these. At the station the scene was very dramatic, as the brave boys went away perhaps never to come back again. I've often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish. I long to be a man; but as I can't fight, I will content myself with working for those who can. Sewed a good deal getting May's summer things in order, as she sent for me to make and mend and buy and send her outfit. Stories simmered in my brain, demanding to be writ; but I let them simmer, knowing that the longer the divine afflatus was bottled up the better it would be. John Brown's daughters came to board, and upset my plans of rest and writing when the report and the sewing were done. I had my fit of woe up garret on the fat rag-bag, and then put my papers away, and fell to work at housekeeping. I think disappointment must be good for me, I get so much of it; and the constant thumping Fate gives me may be a mellowing process; so I shall be a ripe and sweet old pippin before I die. _May._--Spent our May-day working for our men,--three hundred women all sewing together at the hall for two days. May will not return to S. after her vacation in July; and being a lucky puss, just as she wants something to do, F. B. S. needs a drawing teacher in his school and offers her the place. Nan found that I was wearing all the old clothes she and May left; so the two dear souls clubbed together and got me some new ones; and the great parcel, with a loving letter, came to me as a beautiful surprise. Nan and John walked up from Cambridge for a day, and we all walked back. Took a sail to the forts, and saw our men on guard there. Felt very martial and Joan-of-Arc-y as I stood on the walls with the flag flying over me and cannon all about. _June._--Read a good deal; grubbed in my garden, and made the old house pretty for May. Enjoyed Carlyle's French Revolution very much. His earthquaky style suits me. "Charles Auchester" is charming,--a sort of fairy tale for grown people. Dear old "Evelina," as a change, was pleasant. Emerson recommended Hodson's India, and I got it, and liked it; also read Sir Thomas More's Life. I read Fielding's "Amelia," and thought it coarse and queer. The heroine having "her lovely nose smashed all to bits falling from a post shay" was a new idea. What some one says of Richardson applies to Fielding, "The virtues of his heroes are the vices of decent men." _July._--Spent a month at the White Mountains with L. W.,--a lovely time, and it did me much good. Mountains are restful and uplifting to my mind. Lived in the woods, and revelled in brooks, birds, pines, and peace. _August._--May came home very tired, but satisfied with her first attempt, which has been very successful in every way. She is quite a belle now, and much improved,--a tall blond lass, full of grace and spirit. _September._--Ticknor sent $50. Wrote a story for C., as Plato needs new shirts, and Minerva a pair of boots, and Hebe a fall hat. _October._--All together on Marmee's birthday. Sewing and knitting for "our boys" all the time. It seems as if a few energetic women could carry on the war better than the men do it so far. A week with Nan in the dove-cot. As happy as ever. _November_ and _December_.--Wrote, read, sewed, and wanted something to do. In 1862, at the suggestion of Miss Peabody, Miss Alcott opened a Kindergarten school; but it was not successful, and she took a final leave of the teacher's profession, and returned to her writing, which she found to be her true calling. She wrote much; for "brain was lively, and work paid for readily." Besides the occasional stories in papers and magazines, her most important labor was the preparation of the story called "Work," or, as she originally named it, "Success." This story however was not published until ten years later. Here she took the road that was later to lead to fame and fortune, by writing from her own experience of life. Christie is Louisa herself under very thin disguise; and all her own experiences, as servant, governess, companion, seamstress, and actress are brought in to give vividness to the picture; while many other persons may be recognized as models for her skilful portraiture. The book has always been deservedly popular. _January, 1862._--E. P. Peabody wanted me to open a Kindergarten, and Mr. Barnard gave a room at the Warren Street Chapel. Don't like to teach, but take what comes; so when Mr. F. offered $40 to fit up with, twelve pupils, and his patronage, I began. Saw many great people, and found them no bigger than the rest of the world,--often not half so good as some humble soul who made no noise. I learned a good deal in my way, and am not half so much impressed by society as before I got a peep at it. Having known Emerson, Parker, Phillips, and that set of really great and good men and women living for the world's work and service of God, the mere show people seem rather small and silly, though they shine well, and feel that they are stars. _February._--Visited about, as my school did not bring enough to pay board and the assistant I was made to have, though I didn't want her. Went to lectures; saw Booth at the Goulds',--a handsome, shy man, glooming in a corner. Very tired of this wandering life and distasteful work; but kept my word and tugged on. Hate to visit people who only ask me to help amuse others, and often longed for a crust in a garret with freedom and a pen. I never knew before what insolent things a hostess can do, nor what false positions poverty can push one into. _April._--Went to and from C. every day that I might be at home. Forty miles a day is dull work; but I have my dear people at night, and am not a beggar. Wrote "King of Clubs,"--$30. The school having no real foundation (as the people who sent didn't care for Kindergartens, and Miss P. wanted me to take pupils for nothing, to try the new system), I gave it up, as I could do much better at something else. May took my place for a month, that I might keep my part of the bargain; and I cleaned house, and wrote a story which made more than all my months of teaching. They ended in a wasted winter and a debt of $40,--to be paid if I sell my hair to do it. _May._--School finished for me, and I paid Miss N. by giving her all the furniture, and leaving her to do as she liked; while I went back to my writing, which pays much better, though Mr. F. did say, "Stick to your teaching; you can't write." Being wilful, I said, "I won't teach; and I can write, and I'll prove it." Saw Miss Rebecca Harding, author of "Margret Howth," which has made a stir, and is very good. A handsome, fresh, quiet woman, who says she never had any troubles, though she writes about woes. I told her I had had lots of troubles; so I write jolly tales; and we wondered why we each did so. _June_, _July_, _August._--Wrote a tale for B., and he lost it, and wouldn't pay. Wrote two tales for L. I enjoy romancing to suit myself; and though my tales are silly, they are not bad; and my sinners always have a good spot somewhere. I hope it is good drill for fancy and language, for I can do it fast; and Mr. L. says my tales are so "dramatic, vivid, and full of plot," they are just what he wants. _September_, _October._--Sewing Bees and Lint Picks for "our boys" kept us busy, and the prospect of the first grandchild rejoiced the hearts of the family. Wrote much; for brain was lively, and work paid for readily. Rewrote the last story, and sent it to L., who wants more than I can send him. So, between blue flannel jackets for "our boys" and dainty slips for Louisa Caroline or John B., Jr., as the case may be, I reel off my "thrilling" tales, and mess up my work in a queer but interesting way. War news bad. Anxious faces, beating hearts, and busy minds. I like the stir in the air, and long for battle like a war-horse when he smells powder. The blood of the Mays is up! _After Anna's Marriage._ SUNDAY MORN, 1860. MRS. PRATT: MY DEAR MADAM,--The news of the town is as follows, and I present it in the usual journalesque style of correspondence. After the bridal train had departed, the mourners withdrew to their respective homes; and the bereaved family solaced their woe by washing dishes for two hours and bolting the remains of the funeral baked meats. At four, having got settled down, we were all routed up by the appearance of a long procession of children filing down our lane, headed by the Misses H. and R. Father rushed into the cellar, and appeared with a large basket of apples, which went the rounds with much effect. The light infantry formed in a semi-circle, and was watered by the matron and maids. It was really a pretty sight, these seventy children loaded with wreaths and flowers, standing under the elm in the sunshine, singing in full chorus the song I wrote for them. It was a neat little compliment to the superintendent and his daughter, who was glad to find that her "pome" was a favorite among the "lads and lasses" who sang it "with cheery voices, like robins on the tree." Father put the finishing stroke to the spectacle by going off at full speed, hoppity-skip, and all the babes followed in a whirl of rapture at the idea. He led them up and down and round and round till they were tired; then they fell into order, and with a farewell song marched away, seventy of the happiest little ones I ever wish to see. We subsided, and fell into our beds with the new thought "Annie is married and gone" for a lullaby, which was not very effective in its results with all parties. Thursday we set our house in order, and at two the rush began. It had gone abroad that Mr. M. and Mrs. Captain Brown were to adorn the scene, so many people coolly came who were not invited, and who had no business here. People sewed and jabbered till Mrs. Brown, with Watson Brown's widow and baby came; then a levee took place. The two pale women sat silent and serene through the clatter; and the bright-eyed, handsome baby received the homage of the multitude like a little king, bearing the kisses and praises with the utmost dignity. He is named Frederick Watson Brown, after his murdered uncle and father, and is a fair, heroic-looking baby, with a fine head, and serious eyes that look about him as if saying, "I am a Brown! Are these friends or enemies?" I wanted to cry once at the little scene the unconscious baby made. Some one caught and kissed him rudely; he didn't cry, but looked troubled, and rolled his great eyes anxiously about for some familiar face to reassure him with its smile. His mother was not there; but though many hands were stretched to him, he turned to Grandma Bridge, and putting out his little arms to her as if she was a refuge, laughed and crowed as he had not done before when she danced him on her knee. The old lady looked delighted; and Freddy patted the kind face, and cooed like a lawful descendant of that pair of ancient turtle doves. When he was safe back in the study, playing alone at his mother's feet, C. and I went and worshipped in our own way at the shrine of John Brown's grandson, kissing him as if he were a little saint, and feeling highly honored when he sucked our fingers, or walked on us with his honest little red shoes, much the worse for wear. Well, the baby fascinated me so that I forgot a raging headache and forty gabbling women all in full clack. Mrs. Brown, Sen., is a tall, stout woman, plain, but with a strong, good face, and a natural dignity that showed she was something better than a "lady," though she _did_ drink out of her saucer and used the plainest speech. The younger woman had such a patient, heart-broken face, it was a whole Harper's Ferry tragedy in a look. When we got your letter, Mother and I ran into the study to read it. Mother read aloud; for there were only C., A., I, and Mrs. Brown, Jr., in the room. As she read the words that were a poem in their simplicity and happiness, the poor young widow sat with tears rolling down her face; for I suppose it brought back her own wedding-day, not two years ago, and all the while she cried the baby laughed and crowed at her feet as if there was no trouble in the world. The preparations had been made for twenty at the utmost; so when forty souls with the usual complement of bodies appeared, we grew desperate, and our neat little supper turned out a regular "tea fight." A., C., B., and I rushed like comets to and fro trying to fill the multitude that would eat fast and drink like sponges. I filled a big plate with all I could lay hands on, and with two cups of tea, strong enough for a dozen, charged upon Mr. E. and Uncle S., telling them to eat, drink, and be merry, for a famine was at hand. They cuddled into a corner; and then, feeling that my mission was accomplished, I let the hungry _wait_ and the thirsty _moan_ for tea, while I picked out and helped the regular Antislavery set. We got through it; but it was an awful hour; and Mother wandered in her mind, utterly lost in a grove of teapots; while B. pervaded the neighborhood demanding hot water, and we girls sowed cake broadcast through the land. When the plates were empty and the teapots dry, people wiped their mouths and confessed at last that they had done. A conversation followed, in which Grandpa B. and E. P. P. held forth, and Uncle and Father mildly upset the world, and made a new one in which every one desired to take a place. Dr. B., Mr. B., T., etc., appeared, and the rattle continued till nine, when some Solomon suggested that the Alcotts must be tired, and every one departed but C. and S. We had a polka by Mother and Uncle, the lancers by C. and B., and an _étude_ by S., after which scrabblings of feast appeared, and we "drained the dregs of every cup," all cakes and pies we gobbled up, etc.; then peace fell upon us, and our remains were interred decently. CHAPTER VII. HOSPITAL SKETCHES. THOREAU'S FLUTE. We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead; His pipe hangs mute beside the river Around it wistful sunbeams quiver, But Music's airy voice is fled. Spring mourns as for untimely frost; The bluebird chants a requiem; The willow-blossom waits for him;-- The Genius of the wood is lost." Then from the flute, untouched by hands, There came a low, harmonious breath: "For such as he there is no death;-- His life the eternal life commands; Above man's aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Made one small spot a continent, And tuned to poetry life's prose. "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, Swallow and aster, lake and pine, To him grew human or divine,-- Fit mates for this large-hearted child. Such homage Nature ne'er forgets, And yearly on the coverlid 'Neath which her darling lieth hid Will write his name in violets. "To him no vain regrets belong Whose soul, that finer instrument, Gave to the world no poor lament, But wood-notes ever sweet and strong. O lonely friend! he still will be A potent presence, though unseen,-- Steadfast, sagacious, and serene; Seek not for him--he is with thee." Miss Alcott could not help feeling deeply the excitement of the hour when the war broke out. Her father had been one of the earliest Abolitionists, having joined the Antislavery Society with Garrison, and she well remembered the fugitive slave whom her mother had hidden in the oven. Now this feeling could be united with her patriotic zeal and her strong love of active life, and it was inevitable that she should long to share personally in the dangers and excitement of the war. Louisa had always been the nurse in the family, and had by nature the magnetic power which encourages and helps the feeble and suffering; therefore, since no other way of serving the cause opened to her, it was most like her to take her own life in her hands and join the corps of devoted nurses. She was accepted, and went to Washington. Her journal gives an account of her situation in the Union Hospital at Georgetown. It was a small hospital, much inferior in its appointments to those which were afterward arranged. Although Louisa had never been very ill up to that time, and thought herself exceptionally strong, yet she had not the rugged constitution fit to bear the labors and exposures of such a position; and the healthful habits of outdoor life and simple food to which she had always been accustomed made the conditions of the crowded, ill-ventilated hospital peculiarly perilous to her. She says, "I was never ill before this time, and never well afterward." But with all its hardships, Miss Alcott found in the hospital the varied and intense human life she had longed to know. Her great heart went out to all the men, black or white, the Virginia blacksmith and the rough Michigander. She even tried to befriend the one solitary rebel who had got left behind, and who was taken into the hospital to the disgust of some of the men; but he was impervious to all kindness, and she could find nothing in him for sympathy or romance to fasten upon. Miss Alcott remained in the hospital only about six weeks. Yet this short period had a very strong influence, both for good and evil, on her future life. The severe attack of fever which drove her from her post left her with shattered nerves and weakened constitution, and she never again knew the fulness of life and health which she had before. The chamber in her quiet home at Concord was evermore haunted by the fearful visions of delirium, and she could not regain there the peace she needed for work. But the experience of life, the observation of men under the excitement of war, the way in which they met the great conqueror Death, the revelations of heroism and love, and sometimes of bitterness and hate, brought her a deeper insight into human life than she ever had before, and gave to her writings greater reality. Louisa constantly wrote to the family of her experiences, and these letters were so interesting that she was persuaded to publish them in the "Commonwealth" newspaper. They attracted great attention, and first made her widely and favorably known to a higher public than that which had read her stories. These letters were published by James Redpath in book form, and Miss Alcott received $200 for the book,--a welcome sum to her at that time. The sketches are almost a literal reproduction of her letters to her family; but as they have been so extensively read, and are accessible to every one, I shall give in preference to them extracts from her journal kept at the hospital. Other stories growing out of her experience in the hospital, or more remotely connected with it, have been published in the same volume in later editions. "My Contraband" is one of the most dramatic and powerful stories she ever wrote. She portrays the intensity of hatred in a noble nature,--hatred justified by the provocation, and yet restrained from fatal execution by the highest suggestions of religion. This story called forth a letter of commendation and frank criticism from Col. T. W. Higginson, which was very encouraging to the young writer. The beautiful lines on Thoreau's flute, the most perfect of her poems, excepting the exquisite tribute to her mother, were first composed in the watches of the night in the hospital, and afterwards recalled during the tedious days of convalescence at Concord. This poem was printed in the "Atlantic," and brought her a welcome ten-dollar bill. "Hospital Sketches" were hastily written, and with little regard to literary execution, but they are fresh and original, and, still more, they are true, and they appeared at just the time the public wanted them. Every heart was longing to hear not only from field and camp, but from the hospitals, where sons and brothers were tenderly cared for. The generous, hopeful spirit with which Miss Alcott entered into the work was recognized as that which animated the brave corps of women who answered so promptly to their country's call, and every loyal and loving heart vibrated in unison with the strings she touched so skilfully. _Journal kept at the Hospital, Georgetown, D. C., 1862._ _November._--Thirty years old. Decided to go to Washington as nurse if I could find a place. Help needed, and I love nursing, and _must_ let out my pent-up energy in some new way. Winter is always a hard and a dull time, and if I am away there is one less to feed and warm and worry over. I want new experiences, and am sure to get 'em if I go. So I've sent in my name, and bide my time writing tales, to leave all snug behind me, and mending up my old clothes,--for nurses don't need nice things, thank Heaven! _December._--On the 11th I received a note from Miss H. M. Stevenson telling me to start for Georgetown next day to fill a place in the Union Hotel Hospital. Mrs. Ropes of Boston was matron, and Miss Kendall of Plymouth was a nurse there, and though a hard place, help was needed. I was ready, and when my commander said "March!" I marched. Packed my trunk, and reported in B. that same evening. [Illustration: _From a photograph of Miss Alcott taken about 1862._] We had all been full of courage till the last moment came; then we all broke down. I realized that I had taken my life in my hand, and might never see them all again. I said, "Shall I stay, Mother?" as I hugged her close. "No, go! and the Lord be with you!" answered the Spartan woman; and till I turned the corner she bravely smiled and waved her wet handkerchief on the door-step. Shall I ever see that dear old face again? So I set forth in the December twilight, with May and Julian Hawthorne as escort, feeling as if I was the son of the house going to war. Friday, the 12th, was a very memorable day, spent in running all over Boston to get my pass, etc., calling for parcels, getting a tooth filled, and buying a veil,--my only purchase. A. C. gave me some old clothes; the dear Sewalls money for myself and boys, lots of love and help; and at 5 P.M., saying "good-by" to a group of tearful faces at the station, I started on my long journey, full of hope and sorrow, courage and plans. A most interesting journey into a new world full of stirring sights and sounds, new adventures, and an ever-growing sense of the great task I had undertaken. I said my prayers as I went rushing through the country white with tents, all alive with patriotism, and already red with blood. A solemn time, but I'm glad to live in it; and am sure it will do me good whether I come out alive or dead. All went well, and I got to Georgetown one evening very tired. Was kindly welcomed, slept in my narrow bed with two other room-mates, and on the morrow began my new life by seeing a poor man die at dawn, and sitting all day between a boy with pneumonia and a man shot through the lungs. A strange day, but I did my best; and when I put mother's little black shawl round the boy while he sat up panting for breath, he smiled and said, "You are real motherly, ma'am." I felt as if I was getting on. The man only lay and stared with his big black eyes, and made me very nervous. But all were well behaved; and I sat looking at the twenty strong faces as they looked back at me,--the only new thing they had to amuse them,--hoping that I looked "motherly" to them; for my thirty years made me feel old, and the suffering round me made me long to comfort every one. _January, 1863. Union Hotel Hospital, Georgetown, D. C._--I never began the year in a stranger place than this: five hundred miles from home, alone, among strangers, doing painful duties all day long, and leading a life of constant excitement in this great house, surrounded by three or four hundred men in all stages of suffering, disease, and death. Though often homesick, heartsick, and worn out, I like it, find real pleasure in comforting, tending, and cheering these poor souls who seem to love me, to feel my sympathy though unspoken, and acknowledge my hearty good-will, in spite of the ignorance, awkwardness, and bashfulness which I cannot help showing in so new and trying a situation. The men are docile, respectful, and affectionate, with but few exceptions; truly lovable and manly many of them. John Sulie, a Virginia blacksmith, is the prince of patients; and though what we call a common man in education and condition, to me is all I could expect or ask from the first gentleman in the land. Under his plain speech and unpolished manner I seem to see a noble character, a heart as warm and tender as a woman's, a nature fresh and frank as any child's. He is about thirty, I think, tall and handsome, mortally wounded, and dying royally without reproach, repining, or remorse. Mrs. Ropes and myself love him, and feel indignant that such a man should be so early lost; for though he might never distinguish himself before the world, his influence and example cannot be without effect, for real goodness is never wasted. _Monday, 4th._--I shall record the events of a day as a sample of the days I spend:-- Up at six, dress by gaslight, run through my ward and throw up the windows, though the men grumble and shiver; but the air is bad enough to breed a pestilence; and as no notice is taken of our frequent appeals for better ventilation, I must do what I can. Poke up the fire, add blankets, joke, coax, and command; but continue to open doors and windows as if life depended upon it. Mine does, and doubtless many another, for a more perfect pestilence-box than this house I never saw,--cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash-rooms, and stables. No competent head, male or female, to right matters, and a jumble of good, bad, and indifferent nurses, surgeons, and attendants, to complicate the chaos still more. After this unwelcome progress through my stifling ward, I go to breakfast with what appetite I may; find the uninvitable fried beef, salt butter, husky bread, and washy coffee; listen to the clack of eight women and a dozen men,--the first silly, stupid, or possessed of one idea; the last absorbed with their breakfast and themselves to a degree that is both ludicrous and provoking, for all the dishes are ordered down the table _full_ and returned _empty_; the conversation is entirely among themselves, and each announces his opinion with an air of importance that frequently causes me to choke in my cup, or bolt my meals with undignified speed lest a laugh betray to these famous beings that a "chiel's amang them takin' notes." Till noon I trot, trot, giving out rations, cutting up food for helpless "boys," washing faces, teaching my attendants how beds are made or floors are swept, dressing wounds, taking Dr. F. P.'s orders (privately wishing all the time that he would be more gentle with my big babies), dusting tables, sewing bandages, keeping my tray tidy, rushing up and down after pillows, bed-linen, sponges, books, and directions, till it seems as if I would joyfully pay down all I possess for fifteen minutes' rest. At twelve the big bell rings, and up comes dinner for the boys, who are always ready for it and never entirely satisfied. Soup, meat, potatoes, and bread is the bill of fare. Charley Thayer, the attendant, travels up and down the room serving out the rations, saving little for himself, yet always thoughtful of his mates, and patient as a woman with their helplessness. When dinner is over, some sleep, many read, and others want letters written. This I like to do, for they put in such odd things, and express their ideas so comically, I have great fun interiorally, while as grave as possible exteriorally. A few of the men word their paragraphs well and make excellent letters. John's was the best of all I wrote. The answering of letters from friends after some one had died is the saddest and hardest duty a nurse has to do. Supper at five sets every one to running that can run; and when that flurry is over, all settle down for the evening amusements, which consist of newspapers, gossip, the doctor's last round, and, for such as need them, the final doses for the night. At nine the bell rings, gas is turned down, and day nurses go to bed. Night nurses go on duty, and sleep and death have the house to themselves. My work is changed to night watching, or half night and half day,--from twelve to twelve. I like it, as it leaves me time for a morning run, which is what I need to keep well; for bad air, food, and water, work and watching, are getting to be too much for me. I trot up and down the streets in all directions, sometimes to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill, over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing and ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, and I long to follow. Ordered to keep my room, being threatened with pneumonia. Sharp pain in the side, cough, fever, and dizziness. A pleasant prospect for a lonely soul five hundred miles from home! Sit and sew on the boys' clothes, write letters, sleep, and read; try to talk and keep merry, but fail decidedly, as day after day goes, and I feel no better. Dream awfully, and wake unrefreshed, think of home, and wonder if I am to die here, as Mrs. R., the matron, is likely to do. Feel too miserable to care much what becomes of me. Dr. S. creaks up twice a day to feel my pulse, give me doses, and ask if I am at all consumptive, or some other cheering question. Dr. O. examines my lungs and looks sober. Dr. J. haunts the room, coming by day and night with wood, cologne, books, and messes, like a motherly little man as he is. Nurses fussy and anxious, matron dying, and everything very gloomy. They want me to go home, but I _won't_ yet. _January 16th._--Was amazed to see Father enter the room that morning, having been telegraphed to by order of Mrs. R. without asking leave. I was very angry at first, though glad to see him, because I knew I should have to go. Mrs. D. and Miss Dix came, and pretty Miss W., to take me to Willard's to be cared for by them. I wouldn't go, preferring to keep still, being pretty ill by that time. On the 21st I suddenly decided to go home, feeling very strangely, and dreading to be worse. Mrs. R. died, and that frightened the doctors about me; for my trouble was the same,--typhoid pneumonia. Father, Miss K., and Lizzie T. went with me. Miss Dix brought a basket full of bottles of wine, tea, medicine, and cologne, besides a little blanket and pillow, a fan, and a testament. She is a kind old soul, but very queer and arbitrary. Was very sorry to go, and "my boys" seemed sorry to have me. Quite a flock came to see me off; but I was too sick to have but a dim idea of what was going on. Had a strange, excited journey of a day and night,--half asleep, half wandering, just conscious that I was going home; and, when I got to Boston, of being taken out of the car, with people looking on as if I was a sight. I daresay I was all blowzed, crazy, and weak. Was too sick to reach Concord that night, though we tried to do so. Spent it at Mr. Sewall's; had a sort of fit; they sent for Dr. H., and I had a dreadful time of it. Next morning felt better, and at four went home. Just remember seeing May's shocked face at the depot, Mother's bewildered one at home, and getting to bed in the firm belief that the house was roofless, and no one wanted to see me. As I never shall forget the strange fancies that haunted me, I shall amuse myself with recording some of them. The most vivid and enduring was the conviction that I had married a stout, handsome Spaniard, dressed in black velvet, with very soft hands, and a voice that was continually saying, "Lie still, my dear!" This was Mother, I suspect; but with all the comfort I often found in her presence, there was blended an awful fear of the Spanish spouse who was always coming after me, appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long. I appealed to the Pope, and really got up and made a touching plea in something meant for Latin, they tell me. Once I went to heaven, and found it a twilight place, with people darting through the air in a queer way,--all very busy, and dismal, and ordinary. Miss Dix, W. H. Channing, and other people were there; but I thought it dark and "slow," and wished I hadn't come. A mob at Baltimore breaking down the door to get me, being hung for a witch, burned, stoned, and otherwise maltreated, were some of my fancies. Also being tempted to join Dr. W. and two of the nurses in worshipping the Devil. Also tending millions of rich men who never died or got well. _February._--Recovered my senses after three weeks of delirium, and was told I had had a very bad typhoid fever, had nearly died, and was still very sick. All of which seemed rather curious, for I remembered nothing of it. Found a queer, thin, big-eyed face when I looked in the glass; didn't know myself at all; and when I tried to walk discovered that I couldn't, and cried because my legs wouldn't go. Never having been sick before, it was all new and very interesting when I got quiet enough to understand matters. Such long, long nights; such feeble, idle days; dozing, fretting about nothing; longing to eat, and no mouth to do it with,--mine being so sore, and full of all manner of queer sensations, it was nothing but a plague. The old fancies still lingered, seeming so real I believed in them, and deluded Mother and May with the most absurd stories, so soberly told that they thought them true. Dr. B. came every day, and was very kind. Father and Mother were with me night and day, and May sang "Birks of Aberfeldie," or read to me, to wile away the tiresome hours. People sent letters, money, kind inquiries, and goodies for the old "Nuss." I tried to sew, read, and write, and found I had to begin all over again. Received $10 for my labors in Washington. Had all my hair, a yard and a half long, cut off, and went into caps like a grandma. Felt badly about losing my one beauty. Never mind, it might have been my head, and a wig outside is better than a loss of wits inside. _March._--Began to get about a little, sitting up nearly all day, eating more regularly, and falling back into my old ways. My first job was characteristic: I cleared out my piece-bags and dusted my books, feeling as tired as if I had cleaned the whole house. Sat up till nine one night, and took no lunch at three A.M.,--two facts which I find carefully recorded in my pocket diary in my own shaky handwriting. Father had two courses of conversations: one at Mr. Quincy's, very select and fine; the other at a hall not so good. He was tired out with taking care of me, poor old gentleman; and typhus was not inspiring. Read a great deal, being too feeble to do much else. No end of rubbish, with a few good things as ballast. "Titan" was the one I enjoyed the most, though it tired my weak wits to read much at a time. Recalled, and wrote some lines on "Thoreau's Flute," which I composed one night on my watch by little Shaw at the hospital. On the 28th Father came home from Boston, bringing word that Nan had a fine boy. We all screamed out when he burst in, snowy and beaming; then Mother began to cry, May to laugh, and I to say, like B. Trotwood, "There, I knew it wouldn't be a girl!" We were all so glad it was safely over, and a jolly little lad was added to the feminine family. Mother went straight down to be sure that "mother and child were doing well," and I fell to cleaning house, as good work for an invalid and a vent for a happy aunt. _First Birth in the Alcott and Pratt Branch, 1863._ MONDAY EVE. DEAREST LITTLE MOTHER,--Allow me to ask who was a true prophet. Also to demand, "Where is my niece, Louisa Caroline?" No matter, I will forgive you, and propose three cheers for my _nephew_. Hurrah! hurrah! Hurray! I wish you could have seen the performance on Saturday evening. We were all sitting deep in a novel, not expecting Father home owing to the snowstorm, when the door burst open, and in he came, all wet and white, waving his bag, and calling out, "Good news! good news! Anna has a fine boy!" With one accord we opened our mouths and screamed for about two minutes. Then Mother began to cry; I began to laugh; and May to pour out questions; while Papa beamed upon us all,--red, damp, and shiny, the picture of a proud old Grandpa. Such a funny evening as we had! Mother kept breaking down, and each time emerged from her handkerchief saying solemnly, "I must go right down and see that baby!" Father had told every one he met, from Mr. Emerson to the coach driver, and went about the house saying, "Anna's boy! yes, yes, Anna's boy!" in a mild state of satisfaction. May and I at once taxed our brains for a name, and decided upon "Amos Minot Bridge Bronson May Sewall Alcott Pratt," so that all the families would be suited. I was so anxious to hear more that I went up to town this A.M. and found John's note. Grandma and Grandpa Pratt came to hear the great news; but we could only inform them of the one tremendous fact, that Pratt, Jr., had condescended to arrive. Now tell us his weight, inches, color, etc. I know I shall fall down and adore when I see that mite; yet my soul is rent when I think of the _L. C._ on the pincushion, and all the plans I had made for "my niece." Now get up quickly, and be a happy mamma. Of course John does _not_ consider his son as _the_ most amazing product of the nineteenth century. Bless the baby! Ever your admiring LU. _April._--Had some pleasant walks and drives, and felt as if born again, everything seemed so beautiful and new. I hope I was, and that the Washington experience may do me lasting good. To go very near to death teaches one to value life, and this winter will always be a very memorable one to me. Sewed on little shirts and gowns for my blessed nephew, who increased rapidly in stature and godliness. Sanborn asked me to do what Conway suggested before he left for Europe; viz., to arrange my letters in a printable shape, and put them in the "Commonwealth." They thought them witty and pathetic. I didn't; but I wanted money; so I made three hospital sketches. Much to my surprise, they made a great hit; and people bought the papers faster than they could be supplied. The second, "A Night" was much liked, and I was glad; for my beautiful "John Sulie" was the hero, and the praise belonged to him. More were wanted; and I added a postscript in the form of a letter, which finished it up, as I then thought. Received $100 from F. L. for a tale which won the prize last January; paid debts, and was glad that my winter bore visible fruit. Sent L. another tale. Went to Boston, and saw "our baby;" thought him ugly, but promising. Got a set of furniture for my room,--a long-talked-of dream of ours. _May._--Spent the first week or two in putting the house in order. May painted and papered the parlors. I got a new carpet and rug besides the paper, and put things to rights in a thorough manner. Mother was away with Nan, so we had full sweep; and she came home to a clean, fresh house. Nan and the Royal Infanta came as bright as a whole gross of buttons, and as good as a hairless brown angel. Went to Readville, and saw the 54th Colored Regiment, both there and next day in town as they left for the South. Enjoyed it very much; also the Antislavery meetings. Had a fresh feather in my cap; for Mrs. Hawthorne showed Fields "Thoreau's Flute," and he desired it for the "Atlantic." Of course I didn't say no. It was printed, copied, praised, and glorified; also _paid for_, and being a mercenary creature, I liked the $10 nearly as well as the honor of being "a new star" and "a literary celebrity." _June._--Began to write again on "Moods," feeling encouraged by the commendation bestowed on "Hospital Sketches," which were noticed, talked of, and inquired about, much to my surprise and delight. Had a fine letter from Henry James, also one from Wasson, and a request from Redpath to be allowed to print the sketches in a book. _Roberts Bros. also asked, but I preferred the _Redpath_, and said yes; so he fell to work with all his might. Went to Class Day for the first time; had a pleasant day seeing new sights and old friends. G. H. came to the H.'s. Didn't like her as well as Miss H.; too sharp and full of herself; insisted on talking about religion with Emerson, who glided away from the subject so sweetly, yet resolutely, that the energetic lady gave it up at last. [1877.--Short-sighted Louisa! Little did you dream that this same Roberts Bros. were to help you to make your fortune a few years later. The "Sketches" never made much money, but showed me "my style," and taking the hint, I went where glory waited me.--L. M. A.] _July._--Sanborn asked for more contributions, and I gave him some of my old Mountain Letters vamped up. They were not good, and though they sold the paper, I was heartily ashamed of them, and stopped in the middle, resolving never again to try to be funny, lest I should be rowdy and nothing more. I'm glad of the lesson, and hope it will do me good. Had some pleasant letters from Sergeant Bain,--one of my boys who has not forgotten me, though safely at home far away in Michigan. It gratified me very much, and brought back the hospital days again. He was a merry, brave little fellow, and I liked him very much. His right arm was amputated after Fredericksburg, and he took it very cheerfully, trying at once to train his left hand to do duty for both, and never complained of his loss. "Baby B." _August._--Redpath carried on the publishing of the "Sketches" vigorously, sending letters, proof, and notices daily, and making all manner of offers, suggestions, and prophecies concerning the success of the book and its author. Wrote a story, "My Contraband," and sent it to Fields, who accepted and paid $50 for it, with much approbation for it and the "Sketches." L. sent $40 for a story, and wanted another. Major M. invited me to Gloucester; but I refused, being too busy and too bashful to be made a lion of, even in a very small way. Letters from Dr. Hyde, Wilkie (home with a wound from Wagner), Charles Sumner, Mr. Hale, and others,--all about the little "Sketches," which keep on making friends for me, though I don't get used to the thing at all, and think it must be all a mistake. On the 25th my first morning-glory bloomed in my room,--a hopeful blue,--and at night up came my book in its new dress. I had added several chapters to it, and it was quite a neat little affair. An edition of one thousand, and I to have five cents on each copy. _September._--Redpath anxious for another book. Send him a volume of stories and part of a book to look at. He likes both; but I decide on waiting a little, as I'm not satisfied with the stories, and the novel needs time. "Sketches" sell well, and a new edition is called for. Dear old Grandma died at Aunt Betsey's in her eighty-ninth year,--a good woman, and much beloved by her children. I sent money to help lay her away; for Aunt B. is poor, and it was all I could do for the kind little old lady. Nan and Freddy made us a visit, and we decided that of all splendid babies he was the king. Such a hearty, happy, funny boy, I could only play with and adore him all the while he stayed, and long for him when he went. Nan and John are very fond of "our son," and well they may be. Grandma and Grandpa think him perfect, and even artistic Aunty May condescends to say he is "a very nice thing." "My Contraband; or, The Brothers," my story in the "Atlantic," came out, and was liked. Received $40 from Redpath for "Sketches,"--first edition; wanted me to be editor of a paper; was afraid to try, and let it go. Poor old "Moods" came out for another touching up. _October._--Thought much about going to Port Royal to teach contrabands. Fields wanted the letters I should write, and asked if I had no book. Father spoke of "Moods," and he desired to see it. So I fell to work, and finished it off, thinking the world must be coming to an end, and all my dreams getting fulfilled in a most amazing way. If there was ever an astonished young woman, it is myself; for things have gone on so swimmingly of late I don't know who I am. A year ago I had no publisher, and went begging with my wares; now _three_ have asked me for something, several papers are ready to print my contributions, and F. B. S. says "any publisher this side of Baltimore would be glad to get a book." There is a sudden hoist for a meek and lowly scribbler, who was told to "stick to her teaching," and never had a literary friend to lend a helping hand! Fifteen years of hard grubbing may be coming to something after all; and I may yet "pay all the debts, fix the house, send May to Italy, and keep the old folks cosey," as I've said I would so long, yet so hopelessly. May began to take anatomical drawing lessons of Rimmer. I was very glad to be able to pay her expenses up and down and clothe her neatly. Twenty dollars more from Redpath on account. _December._--Earnings 1863, $380. The principal event of this otherwise quiet month was the Sanitary Fair in Boston, and our part in it. At G. G. B.'s request, I dramatized six scenes from Dickens, and went to town on the 14th to play. Things did not go well for want of a good manager and more time. Our night was not at all satisfactory to us, owing to the falling through of several scenes for want of actors. People seemed to like what there was of it, and after a wearisome week I very gladly came home again. Our six entertainments made twenty-five hundred dollars for the Fair. Rewrote the fairy tales, one of which was published; but owing to delays it was late for the holidays, and badly bound in the hurry; so the poor "Rose Family" fared badly. Had a letter from the publisher of a new magazine, called the "Civil Service Magazine," asking for a long tale. Had no time to write one; but will by and by, if the thing is good. While in town received $10 of F. B. S. and $20 of Redpath, with which I bought May hat, boots, gloves, ribbons, and other little matters, besides furnishing money for her fares up and down to Rimmer. _January, 1864._--New Year's Day was a very quiet one. Nan and Freddy were here, and in the evening we went to a dance at the hall. A merry time; for all the town was there, as it was for the Soldiers' Aid Society, and every one wanted to help. Nan and I sat in the gallery, and watched the young people dance the old year out, the new year in as the clock struck twelve. On looking over my accounts, I find I have earned by my _writing_ alone nearly _six hundred dollars_ since last January, and spent less than a hundred for myself, which I am glad to know. May has had $70 for herself, and the rest has paid debts or bought necessary things for the family. Received from the "Commonwealth" $18 for "A Hospital Christmas." Wrote a fairy tale, "Fairy Pinafores." "Picket Duty" and other tales came out,--first of Redpath's series of books for the "Camp Fires." Richardson sent again for a long story for the "Civil Service Magazine." Tried a war story, but couldn't make it go. _February._--Nan quite sick again. Mother passed most of the month with her; so I had to be housekeeper, and let my writing go,--as well perhaps, as my wits are tired, and the "divine afflatus" don't descend as readily as it used to do. Must wait and fill up my idea-box before I begin again. There is nothing like work to set fancy a-going. Redpath came flying up on the 4th to get "Moods," promising to have it out by May. Gave it to him with many fears, and he departed content. The next day received a telegram to come down at once and see the printers. Went, and was told the story was too long for a single volume, and a two-volume novel was bad to begin with. Would I cut the book down about half? No, I wouldn't, having already shortened it all it would bear. So I took my "opus" and posted home again, promising to try and finish my shorter book in a month. A dull, heavy month, grubbing in the kitchen, sewing, cleaning house, and trying to like my duty. Mrs. S. takes a great fancy to May; sends her flowers, offers to pay for her to go to the new Art School, and arranges everything delightfully for her. She is a fortunate girl, and always finds some one to help her as she wants to be helped. Wish I could do the same, but suppose as I never do that it is best for me to work and wait and do all for myself. Mr. Storrs, D.D., wrote for a sketch for his little paper, "The Drum Beat," to be printed during the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair. A very cordial, pleasant letter, which I answered by a little sketch called "A Hospital Lamp." He sent me another friendly letter, and all the daily papers as they came out. A very gentlemanly D.D. is Dr. Storrs. The "Hospital Sketches" were fully entitled to their wide and rapid popularity; and for the first time perhaps Miss Alcott felt sure of her vocation, and knew that it would bring at last the success which would enable her to carry out her plans for the family. And yet the battle was not over. She gained in reputation, was received with great attention in society, and lionized more than she cared for. But she still continued writing stories for the various papers at very low prices. Some of them were refused by the publishers, as she thinks, on account of the Antislavery sentiments expressed in them. Her "blood and thunder" stories continued in demand, and she wrote them rapidly, and was glad of the money they brought. But she had not yet found her true path, and she suffered at times from keen depression of spirits; for the way seemed long and dark, and she did not see the end. In more than one sense she struggled with Moods; for that unhappy book was still tossed from publisher to publisher, who gave her much praise, but no satisfaction. _Journal._ A busy month getting settled. Freddy's birthday on the 28th, one year old. He had a dozen nice little presents laid out in a row when he came down to breakfast, and seemed quite overpowered with his riches. On being told to take what he liked best, he chose the picture of little Samuel which Father gave him, and the good pope was much delighted at that. Was asked for a poem for the great album at the St. Louis Fair, and sent "Thoreau's Flute" as my best. Also received a letter from the Philadelphia managers asking contributions for the paper to be printed at their Fair. Wrote nothing this month. _April._--At Father's request I sent "Moods" to T., and got a very friendly note from him, saying they had so many books on hand that they could do nothing about it now. So I put it back on the shelf, and set about my other work. Don't despair, "Moods," we'll try again by and by! [Alas! we did try again.--L. M. A.] Wrote the first part of a story for Professor C. called "Love and Loyalty,"--flat, patriotic, and done to order. Wrote a new fairy tale, "Nelly's Hospital." _May._--Had a letter from Mrs. Gildersleeve, asking for my photograph and a sketch of my life, for a book called "Heroic Women" which she was getting up. Respectfully refused. Also a letter and flattering notice from "Ruth Hall," and a notice from a Chicago critic with a long extract from "Rose Family." My tale "Enigmas" came out, and was much liked by readers of sensation rubbish. Having got my $50, I was resigned. _June._--To town with Father on the 3d to a Fraternity Festival to which we were invited. Had a fine time, and was amazed to find my "'umble" self made a lion of, set up among the great ones, stared at, waited upon, complimented, and made to hold a "layvee" whether I would or no; for Mr. S. kept bringing up people to be introduced till I was tired of shaking hands and hearing the words "Hospital Sketches" uttered in every tone of interest, admiration, and respect. Mr. Wasson, Whipple, Alger, Clarke, Calthrop, and Chadwick came to speak to me, and many more whose names I forget. It was a very pleasant surprise and a new experience. I liked it, but think a small dose quite as much as is good for me; for after sitting in a corner and grubbing _à la_ Cinderella, it rather turns one's head to be taken out and be treated like a princess all of a sudden. _August._--Went to Gloucester for a fortnight with May at the M.'s. Found a family of six pretty daughters, a pleasant mother, and a father who was an image of one of the Cheeryble brothers. Had a jolly time boating, driving, charading, dancing, and picnicking. One mild moonlight night a party of us camped out on Norman's Woe, and had a splendid time, lying on the rocks singing, talking, sleeping, and rioting up and down. Had a fine time, and took coffee at all hours. The moon rose and set beautifully, and the sunrise was a picture I never shall forget. Wrote another fairy tale, "Jamie's Wonder Book," and sent the "Christmas Stories" to W. & W., with some lovely illustrations by Miss Greene. They liked the book very much, and said they would consult about publishing it, though their hands were full. _September._--Mrs. D. made a visit, and getting hold of my old book of stories liked them, and insisted on taking "Moods" home to read. As she had had experience with publishers, was a good business woman, and an excellent critic, I let her have it, hoping she might be able to give the poor old book the lift it has been waiting for all these years. She took it, read it, and admired it heartily, saying that "no American author had showed so much promise; that the plan was admirable; the execution unequal, but often magnificent; that I had a great field before me, and my book must be got out." Mrs. D. sent it to L., who liked it exceedingly, and asked me to shorten it if I could, else it would be too large to sell well. Was much disappointed, said I'd never touch it again, and tossed it into the spidery little cupboard where it had so often returned after fruitless trips. At last, in the excited hours of a wakeful night, Miss Alcott thought of a way to curtail the objectionable length of the book, and she spent a fortnight in remodelling it,--as she then thought improving it greatly,--although she afterwards returned to her original version as decidedly the best. The book was brought out, and she had the pleasure of presenting the first copy to her mother on her sixty fourth birthday. She had various projects in her mind, one of which was a novel, with two characters in it like Jean Paul Richter and Goethe. It is needless to say this was never carried out. Miss Alcott had great powers of observation, and a keen insight into character as it fell within her own range of life, but she had not the creative imagination which could paint to the life the subtlest workings of thought and feeling in natures foreign to her own experience. She could not have portrayed such men: but who could? _Journal._ _October._--Wrote several chapters of "Work," and was getting on finely, when, as I lay awake one night, a way to shorten and arrange "Moods" came into my head. The whole plan laid itself smoothly out before me, and I slept no more that night, but worked on it as busily as if mind and body had nothing to do with one another. Up early, and began to write it all over again. The fit was on strong, and for a fortnight I hardly ate, slept, or stirred, but wrote, wrote, like a thinking machine in full operation. When it was all rewritten without copying, I found it much improved, though I'd taken out ten chapters, and sacrificed many of my favorite things; but being resolved to make it simple, strong, and short, I let everything else go, and hoped the book would be better for it. [It wasn't. 1867.] Sent it to L.; and a week after, as I sat hammering away at the parlor carpet,--dusty, dismal, and tired,--a letter came from L. praising the story more enthusiastically than ever, thanking me for the improvements, and proposing to bring out the book at once. Of course we all had a rapture, and I finished my work "double quick," regardless of weariness, toothache, or blue devils. Next day I went to Boston and saw L. A brisk, business-like man who seemed in earnest and said many complimentary things about "Hospital Sketches" and its author. It was agreed to bring out the book immediately, and Mrs. D. offered to read the proof with me. Was glad to have the old thing under way again, but didn't quite believe it would ever come out after so many delays and disappointments. Sewed for Nan and Mary, heard Anna Dickinson and liked her. Read "Emily Chester" and thought it an unnatural story, yet just enough like "Moods" in a few things to make me sorry that it came out now. On Mother's sixty-fourth birthday I gave her "Moods" with this inscription,--"To Mother, my earliest patron, kindest critic, dearest reader, I gratefully and affectionately inscribe my first romance." A letter from T. asking me to write for the new magazine "Our Young Folks," and saying that "An Hour" was in the hands of the editors. _November._--Proof began to come, and the chapters seemed small, stupid, and no more my own in print. I felt very much afraid that I'd ventured too much and should be sorry for it. But Emerson says "that what is true for your own private heart is true for others." So I wrote from my own consciousness and observation and hope it may suit some one and at least do no harm. I sent "An Hour" to the "Commonwealth" and it was considered _excellent_. Also wrote a Christmas Story, "Mrs. Todger's Teapot." T. asked to see the other fairy tales and designs and poems, as he liked "Nelly's Hospital" so much. On my thirty-second birthday received Richter's Life from Nan and enjoyed it so much that I planned a story of two men something like Jean Paul and Goethe, only more every-day people. Don't know what will come of it, but if "Moods" goes well "Success" shall follow. Sewed for Wheeler's colored company and sent them comfort-bags, towels, books, and bed-sacks. Mr. W. sent me some relics from Point Look Out and a pleasant letter. _December._--Earnings, 1864,--$476. On Christmas Eve received ten copies of "Moods" and a friendly note from L. The book was hastily got out, but on the whole suited me, and as the inside was considered good I let the outside go. For a week wherever I went I saw, heard, and talked "Moods;" found people laughing or crying over it, and was continually told how well it was going, how much it was liked, how fine a thing I'd done. I was glad but not proud, I think, for it has always seemed as if "Moods" grew in spite of me, and that I had little to do with it except to put into words the thoughts that would not let me rest until I had. Don't know why. By Saturday the first edition was gone and the second ready. Several booksellers ordered a second hundred, the first went so fast, and friends could not get it but had to wait till more were ready. Spent a fortnight in town at Mary's, shopping, helping Nan, and having plays. Heard Emerson once. Gave C. "Mrs. Todger's Teapot," which was much liked. Sent L. the rest of his story and got $50. S. paid $35 for "An Hour." R. promised $100 for "Love and Loyalty," so my year closes with a novel well-launched and about $300 to pay debts and make the family happy and comfortable till spring. Thank God for the success of the old year, the promise of the new! The sale of "Moods" was at first very rapid; for "Hospital Sketches" had created an interest in the author, and welcome recognition came to her from many sources. She received a handsome sum from the copyright, and "the year closed with enough to make her feel free of debt and the family comfortable." She ends the year's journal triumphantly. The following year was spent mostly in Boston. Miss Alcott went into society and enjoyed the friendly attentions of men and women of ability. She continued to write stories for money, but now received fifty, seventy-five, or a hundred dollars for them. She frequently took part in theatrical performances for charities. She was always brilliant and successful and enjoyed them with something of her early zest. Her long story of "Success," or "Work," as she afterwards named it, was still in her mind, but she did not finish it at this time. _Journal._ _January, 1865._--The month began with some plays at the town hall to raise funds for the Lyceum. We did very well and some Scenes from Dickens were excellent. Father lectured and preached a good deal, being asked like a regular minister and paid like one. He enjoyed it very much and said good things on the new religion which we ought to and shall have. May had orders from Canada and England for her pretty pen-and-ink work and did well in that line. Notices of "Moods" came from all directions, and though people didn't understand my ideas owing to my shortening the book so much, the notices were mostly favorable and gave quite as much praise as was good for me. I had letters from Mrs. Parker, Chadwick, Sanborn, E. B. Greene, the artist, T. W. Higginson and some others. All friendly and flattering. Saw more notices of "Moods" and received more letters, several from strangers and some very funny. People seemed to think the book finely written, very promising, wise, and interesting; but some fear it isn't moral, because it speaks freely of marriage. Wrote a little on poor old "Work" but being tired of novels, I soon dropped it and fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best, and I can't afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cosey. Earned $75 this month. I went to Boston and heard Father lecture before the Fraternity. Met Henry James, Sr., there, and he asked me to come and dine, also called upon me with Mrs. James. I went, and was treated like the Queen of Sheba. Henry Jr. wrote a notice of "Moods" for the "North American," and was very friendly. Being a literary youth he gave me advice, as if he had been eighty and I a girl. My curly crop made me look young, though thirty-one. Acted in some public plays for the N. E. Women's Hospital and had a pleasant time. L. asked me to be a regular contributor to his new paper, and I agreed if he'd pay beforehand; he said he would, and bespoke two tales at once, $50 each, longer ones as often as I could, and whatever else I liked to send. So here's another source of income and Alcott brains seem in demand, whereat I sing "Hallyluyer" and fill up my inkstand. _April._--Richmond taken on the 2d. Hurrah! Went to Boston and enjoyed the grand jollification. Saw Booth again in Hamlet and thought him finer than ever. Had a pleasant walk and talk with Phillips. On the 15th in the midst of the rejoicing came the sad news of the President's assassination, and the city went into mourning. I am glad to have seen such a strange and sudden change in a nation's feelings. Saw the great procession, and though few colored men were in it, one was walking arm in arm with a white gentleman, and I exulted thereat. Nan went to housekeeping in a pleasant house at Jamaica Plain, and I went to help her move. It was beautiful to see how Freddy enjoyed the freedom, after being cooped up all winter, and how every morning, whether it rained or shone, he looked out and said, with a smile of perfect satisfaction, "Oh, pretty day!"--for all days _were_ pretty to him, dear little soul! Had a fine letter from Conway, and a notice in the "Reader,"--an English paper. He advised sending copies to several of the best London papers. English people don't understand "transcendental literature," as they call "Moods." My next book shall have no _ideas_ in it, only facts, and the people shall be as ordinary as possible; then critics will say it's all right. I seem to have been playing with edge tools without knowing it. The relations between Warwick, Moor, and Sylvia are pronounced impossible; yet a case of the sort exists, and the woman came and asked me how I knew it. I did _not_ know or guess, but perhaps felt it, without any other guide, and unconsciously put the thing into my book, for I changed the ending about that time. It was meant to show a life affected by _moods_, not a discussion of marriage, which I knew little about, except observing that very few were happy ones. _June._--Busy writing, keeping house, and sewing. Company often; and strangers begin to come, demanding to see the authoress, who does not like it, and is porcupiny. Admire the books, but let the woman alone, if you please, dear public! On the 24th Anna's second boy was born, at half-past three in the morning,--Lizzie's birthday. A fine, stout, little lad, who took to life kindly, and seemed to find the world all right. Freddy could not understand it at first, and told his mother that "the babee" had got his place. But he soon loved the "tunning sing," and would stand watching it with a grave face, till some funny little idea found vent in still funnier words or caresses. Nan was very happy with her two boys, so was John, though both had wished for a daughter. _July._--While at Nan's Mrs. B. asked me if I would go abroad with her sister. I said "yes;" but as I spoke neither French nor German, she didn't think I'd do. I was sorry; but being used to disappointment, went to work for Nan, and bided my time, which came very soon. _To Anna._ [Date uncertain.] MY LASS,--This must be a frivolous and dressy letter, because you always want to know about our clothes, and we have been at it lately. May's bonnet is a sight for gods and men. Black and white outside, with a great cockade boiling over the front to meet a red ditto surging from the interior, where a red rainbow darts across the brow, and a surf of white lace foams up on each side. I expect to hear that you and John fell flat in the dust with horror on beholding it. My bonnet has nearly been the death of me; for, thinking some angel might make it possible for me to go to the mountains, I felt a wish for a tidy hat, after wearing an old one till it fell in tatters from my brow. Mrs. P. promised a bit of gray silk, and I built on that; but when I went for it I found my hat was founded on sand; for she let me down with a crash, saying she wanted the silk herself, and kindly offering me a flannel petticoat instead. I was in woe for a spell, having one dollar in the world, and scorning debt even for that prop of life, a "bonnet." Then I roused myself, flew to Dodge, demanded her cheapest bonnet, found one for a dollar, took it, and went home wondering if the sky would open and drop me a trimming. I am simple in my tastes, but a naked straw bonnet is a little too severely chaste even for me. Sky did not open; so I went to the "Widow Cruise's oil bottle"--my ribbon box--which, by the way, is the eighth wonder of the world, for nothing is ever put in, yet I always find some old dud when all other hopes fail. From this salvation bin I extracted the remains of the old white ribbon (used up, as I thought, two years ago), and the bits of black lace that have adorned a long line of departed hats. Of the lace I made a dish, on which I thriftily served up bows of ribbon, like meat on toast. Inside put the lace bow, which adorns my form anywhere when needed. A white flower A. H. gave me sat airily on the brim,--fearfully unbecoming, but pretty in itself, and in keeping. Strings are yet to be evolved from chaos. I feel that they await me somewhere in the dim future. Green ones _pro tem._ hold this wonder of the age upon my gifted brow, and I survey my hat with respectful awe. I trust you will also, and see in it another great example of the power of mind over matter, and the convenience of a colossal brain in the primeval wrestle with the unruly atoms which have harassed the feminine soul ever since Eve clapped on a modest fig-leaf and did up her hair with a thorn for a hairpin. I feel very moral to-day, having done a big wash alone, baked, swept the house, picked the hops, got dinner, and written a chapter in "Moods." May gets exhausted with work, though she walks six miles without a murmur. It is dreadfully dull, and I work so that I may not "brood." Nothing stirring but the wind; nothing to see but dust; no one comes but rose-bugs; so I grub and scold at the "A." because it takes a poor fellow's tales and keeps 'em years without paying for 'em. If I think of my woes I fall into a vortex of debts, dishpans, and despondency awful to see. So I say, "every path has its puddle," and try to play gayly with the tadpoles in _my_ puddle, while I wait for the Lord to give me a lift, or some gallant Raleigh to spread his velvet cloak and fetch me over dry shod. L. W. adds to my woe by writing of the splendors of Gorham, and says, "When tired, run right up here and find rest among these everlasting hills." All very aggravating to a young woman with one dollar, no bonnet, half a gown, and a discontented mind. It's a mercy the mountains are everlasting, for it will be a century before _I_ get there. Oh, me, such is life! Now I've done my Jeremiad, and I will go on twanging my harp in the "willow tree." You ask what I am writing. Well, two books half done, nine stories simmering, and stacks of fairy stories moulding on the shelf. I can't do much, as I have no time to get into a real good vortex. It unfits me for work, worries Ma to see me look pale, eat nothing, and ply by night. These extinguishers keep genius from burning as I could wish, and I give up ever hoping to do anything unless luck turns for your LU. CHAPTER VIII. EUROPE AND LITTLE WOMEN. LITTLE WOMEN. Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust and worn by time, All fashioned and filled long ago By children now in their prime. Four little keys hung side by side, With faded ribbons, brave and gay When fastened there with childish pride Long ago on a rainy day. Four little names, one on each lid, Carved out by a boyish hand; And underneath there lieth hid Histories of the happy band Once playing here, and pausing oft To hear the sweet refrain That came and went on the roof aloft In the falling summer rain. * * * * * Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust and worn by time: Four women, taught by weal and woe To love and labor in their prime; Four sisters parted for an hour,-- None lost, one only gone before, Made by love's immortal power Nearest and dearest evermore. Oh! when these hidden stores of ours Lie open to the Father's sight, May they be rich in golden hours,-- Deeds that show fairer for the light, Deeds whose brave music long shall ring Like a spirit-stirring strain, Souls that shall gladly soar and sing In the long sunshine, after rain. The years which followed the war and Miss Alcott's experience as a hospital nurse were rather sad and anxious from many causes. Louisa felt deeply the loss of one sister by death and the separation from another by marriage. The success of "Hospital Sketches" and a few other stories published about the same time had given her confidence in her powers and hopes of a successful future. But for nearly five years she accomplished nothing which met with equal favor. The reception of the novel "Moods," in which she thought she had expressed her best life, was not cheering to her; and she had become wholly dissatisfied with the sensational stories, which formed the most ready resource for earning money. Her health was seriously injured by the fever from which she suffered in the hospital, and she had no longer the physical energy to sustain the unceasing activity of her brain. Under these difficulties she naturally desired a change of circumstances; and the old longing for a journey to Europe--which she had felt strongly in her youth, and which, like all Americans of culture, she felt more and more as time passed on--became her ruling desire. She was very fond of new scenes and variety of people, and she often expressed a wish to live many years in Europe. The circumstances of the family were not yet such as to justify Louisa, in her own eyes, in taking her earnings for the desired trip. But in 1865 an opportunity was offered her to go to Europe as companion to an invalid lady. From her experience in nursing--for which she had a natural gift--she and her friends thought her suited to the position, and advised her acceptance of the offer. Although devotedly kind, unselfish, and generous, Louisa had not the temperament suited to the needs of a nervous invalid. She was impetuous and impatient, and her own life was too strong within her and too earnest in its cravings, for her to restrain her moods and actions within the narrow limits of a companion's service. She found even what she recognized as fair services wearisome and distasteful, and sometimes chafed severely under what seemed unnecessary demands on her time, strength, and patience. Looking back on this experience in later years, she recognized these facts, and wrote in 1885: "Now, being a nervous invalid myself, I understand what seemed whims, selfishness, and folly in others." Louisa finally decided to leave her companions and go on alone to Paris and England, where she would find many of her own and her father's friends. At Vevay she had made the acquaintance of a young Polish lad, whom she found very interesting, and who was the original of the charming Laurie in "Little Women." He met her again in Paris, and contributed greatly to the pleasure of her stay there. He afterwards came to America, and visited her; but finally returned to his own country. The journal gives a sufficient account of her life while on this journey. I have no letters written at this time, as she wished all her family letters destroyed. Her few weeks in London passed very happily. Her wide reading in English history and in contemporary fiction, especially the works of Dickens and Thackeray, filled London with interesting associations, and she enjoyed thoroughly her free rambles through the old city, as well as the interesting people, who received her with great kindness. That Louisa might have these few weeks of entire relaxation and enjoyment, her mother had been obliged to borrow means for the support of the family; and Louisa was very anxious to clear off this debt like all others. She was very exact in pecuniary matters. Money to her was not an end, but a most necessary means. She paid every debt that her father had incurred, even though outlawed by time. It is often asked whether she ever sold her beautiful hair, as represented in "Little Women." The deed was never really done; but she and her sisters always held this treasure as a possible resource in case of need; and Louisa once says in her journal, "I will pay my debts, if I have to sell my hair to do it." She even went so far as to inquire of a barber as to its money value. _Journal._ _1865._--Mr. W., hearing that I was something of a nurse and wanted to travel, proposed my going with his invalid daughter. I agreed, though I had my doubts. But every one said "Go;" so after a week of worry I did go. On the 19th we sailed in the "China." I could not realize that my long-desired dream was coming true; and fears that I might not see all the dear home faces when I came back made my heart very full as we steamed down the harbor and Boston vanished. Was not very sick, but uncomfortable all the way, and found the Ladies' Saloon my only refuge till we were nearly across; enjoyed intervals of quiet, and had many fine glimpses of the sea in its various moods, sunsets and sunrises, fogs, icebergs, rain-storms, and summer calms. No very pleasant people on board; so I read, took notes, and _wiled_ away the long days as I best could. We had a very quiet and quick passage of nine days, and on Saturday, the 29th, steamed up the Mersey at dawn, and got to Liverpool at nine. I was heartily glad to set my feet on the solid earth, and thought I'd never go to sea again; rested, and looked about a little. _August._--Went up to London, and there spent four dull, drizzly days. I amused myself in my usual way, looking well about me, and writing down all I saw in my pocket-diary or letters. Went to the parks, Westminster Abbey, and some of the famous streets. I felt as if I'd got into a novel while going about in the places I'd read so much of; saw no one I knew, and thought English weather abominable. On the 5th to Dover through a lovely green country; took steamer there to Ostende; but was ill all the way, and saw nothing but a basin; spent two days at a queer hotel near the fine promenade, which was a very foreign and brilliant scene. To Brussels on the 7th. Here I enjoyed much, for the quaint old city was full of interesting things. The ancient square, where the statues of Egmont and Horn stand, was my delight; for the old Dutch houses were still standing, and everything was so new and strange I wanted to stay a month. To Cologne on the 9th, and the country we passed through was like a big picture-book. The city was very hot, dirty, and evil-smelling. We saw the Cathedral, got eau de Cologne, and very gladly left after three days. On the 12th began a lovely voyage up the Rhine. It was too beautiful to describe, so I shall not try; but I feel richer and better for that memorable day. We reached Coblenz at sunset, and I was up half the night enjoying the splendid view of the fortress opposite the town, the moonlit river with its bridges of boats, and troops crossing at midnight. A second day, still more charming, took us through the famous parts of the Rhine, and filled my head with pictures that will last all my life. Before we reached Bieberich we stopped at a queer little Dutch town, and had a queer time; for no one spoke English, and we only a little bad French. Passed the night there, and next day reached Schwalbach after many trials and tribulations. The place is a narrow valley shut in by high hills, the town being divided into two parts: the lowest is the original town--queer ale-houses, churches, and narrow streets; the upper part, near the springs, is full of fine hotels, pleasure-grounds, and bath-houses. We took lodgings with Madame Genth, wife of the Forestmeister (forest master),--two rooms,--and began the water under Dr. Genth's care. We walked a little, talked a little, bathed and rode a little, worried a good deal, and I grubbed away at French, with no master and small success. _September._--Still at Schwalbach, A. doing her best to get well, and I doing mine to help her. Rather dull days,--bathing, walking, and quiddling about. A letter from home on the 20th. All well and happy, thank God. It touched and pleased me very much to see how they missed me, thought of me, and longed to have me back. Every little thing I ever did for them is now so tenderly and gratefully remembered; and my absence seems to have left so large a gap that I begin to realize how much I am to them in spite of all my faults. The letters made me very happy, and everything brightened immensely. A. got stronger, and when G. came on the 28th was able to start off next day on the way to Vevay, where we are to pass some weeks before we are to go to Nice. Went to Wiesbaden first, a pleasant, gay place, full of people. Saw the gambling hall and people playing, the fine grounds and drives, and then went on to Frankfort. Here I saw and enjoyed a good deal. The statues of Goethe, Schiller, Faust, Gutenberg, and Schaeffer are in the squares. Goethe's house is a tall, plain building, with each story projecting over the lower, and a Dutch roof; a marble slab over the front door recording the date of Goethe's birth. I took a look at it and wanted to go in, as it was empty, but there was no time. Some Americans said, "Who was Goethe, to fuss about?" Frankfort is a pleasant old city on the river, and I'm glad to have been there. _October._--On to Heidelberg, a charming old place surrounded by mountains. We went to the Castle and had a fine time roving about the ruins, looking at the view from the great terrace, admiring the quaint stone images of knights, saints, monsters, and angels, and visiting the big tun in the cellar by torchlight. The moon rose while we were there and completed the enchantment of the scene. The drive home was like looking at a picture-book, for the street was narrow, the carriage high, and we looked in at the windows, seeing pretty scenes. Here, men drinking beer in a Dutch-looking room; there, little children going to bed; a pair of lovers with a pot of flowers between them; an old woman brooding over the fire like a witch; and in one room some one lay dead surrounded by candles. From H. we went to Baden-Baden, a very fashionable place. The old château was my delight, and we passed a morning going up and down to visit it. Next to Freiburg, where the Cathedral delighted me extremely, being full of old carved images and grotesque designs; the market-place with the fountains, statues, water running beside the streets, and queer costumes. Basle came next, and a firemen's fête made the city very gay. The hotel was on the river, and moonlight made a Venetian scene for me with the lighted bridge, covered with gondola-like boats and music from both shores. I walk while A. rests, and enjoy sights from my window when she is asleep, as I cannot leave her at night. On our way to Berne I caught my first glimpse of the Alps, October 8th, mother's birthday. Tall, white, spectral-looking shapes they were, towering above the green hills and valleys that lay between. Clouds half hid them, and the sun glittered on the everlasting snow that lay upon their tops. Sharp, strange outlines against the sky they became as night came on, and in the morning I had a fine view of the Jungfrau, the Blümlis, the Wetterhorn, and Mönch from the terrace at Berne. B. was a queer old city, but I saw little of it except the bears and shops. No time. Freiburg No. 2 was the most romantic place we have been in. The town is built in a wide crevice or valley between two steep hills, so that suspension bridges are hung from height to height over a winding river and the streets of the town. Watch-towers stand all about on the hills, and give a very romantic air to the place. The hotel overhung the valley, and from our rooms we went out along a balcony to a wide, paved platform with a fountain in the middle, an aviary, and flowers all about. The view down the valley was charming,--the airy bridges, green or rocky slopes, busy squares below, cows and goats feeding on the hills, the towers, the old church, and a lovely blue sky overhead. I longed to sketch it. At Lausanne we stopped at the Hotel Gibbon and saw the garden where the great historian wrote his history. The view of the lake was lovely, with rocky mountains opposite, little towns at their feet, vineyards along the hillsides, and pretty boats on the lake, the water of which was the loveliest blue. To Vevay at last,--a pleasant hour's sail to a very pleasant place. We took rooms at the Pension Victoria. Our landlady was an English woman who had married a French courier. Very kind sort of people: rooms comfortable, meals good, and surroundings agreeable. Our fellow-boarders varied from time to time,--an English doctor and wife, a fine old lady with them who looked like Marie Antoinette; two Scotch ladies named Glennie, very pleasant, well-bred ladies who told me about Beattie who was their grandfather, and Walter Scott whom they knew; Colonel ---- and family, rebels, and very bitter and rude to us. Had queer times with them. I did not enjoy the life nor the society after the first novelty wore off, for I missed my freedom and grew very tired of the daily worry which I had to go through with. _November._--(Laurie) Took some French lessons with Mademoiselle Germain and learned a little, but found it much harder than I thought, and often got discouraged, I was so stupid. A. got much better, and some new people came. The doctor and his set left, and in their place came a Russian family, an Irish lady and daughter, and a young Pole with whom we struck up a friendship. Ladislas Wisinewski (Laurie) was very gay and agreeable, and being ill and much younger we petted him. He played beautifully, and was very anxious to learn English, so we taught him that and he taught us French. On my birthday A. gave me a pretty painting of Chillon. Ladislas promised me the notes of the Polish National Hymn, and played me his sweetest airs as a present after wishing me "All good and happiness on earth, and a high place in Heaven as my reward." It was a mild, windy day, very like me in its fitful changes of sunshine and shade. Usually I am sad on my birthday, but not this time; for though nothing very pleasant happened, I was happy and hopeful and enjoyed everything with unusual relish. I feel rather old with my thirty-three years, but have much to keep me young, and hope I shall not grow older in heart as the time goes on. I thought much of dear father on this his sixty-sixth birthday, and missed the little ceremony that always takes place on these occasions. Hope I shall be safely at home before another November comes. _December._--Laurie very interesting and good. Pleasant walks and talks with him in the château garden and about Vevay. A lovely sail on the lake, and much fun giving English and receiving French lessons. Every one very kind, and the house quite home-like. Much indecision about going to Nice owing to the cholera. At last we decided to go, and started on the 6th to meet G. at Geneva. L. went with us to Lausanne, kissed our hands at parting, and went back to V. disconsolate. Sad times for all, but we journeyed away to Nice and tried to forget our troubles. A flat uninteresting country till we approached the sea. Nice very pleasant, climate lovely, and sea beautiful. We lived in our own rooms, and saw no one but the doctor and Consul and a few American callers. A pleasant drive every day on the Promenade,--a wide curving wall along the bay with hotels and Pensions on one side and a flowery walk on the other. Gay carriages and people always to be seen; shops full of fine and curious things; picturesque castles, towers, and walls on one hill; a lighthouse on each point of the moon-shaped bay; boats and our fleet on the water; gardens, olive and orange-trees, queer cacti, and palms all about on the land; monks, priests, soldiers, peasants, etc. A dull Christmas within doors, though a lovely day without. Windows open, roses blooming, air mild, and city gay. With friends, health, and a little money how jolly one might be in this perpetual summer. _January, 1866._--Nice. Rained all New Year's day, and I spent it sewing, writing, and reading an American newspaper which came in the morning, my only present. I hoped for letters but got none, and was much disappointed. A. was ill, so I had to receive in American style. Mr. Perkins, Cooper, and the Consul called. At dinner we drank the healths of all at home, and did not forget Laddie (Laurie). A quiet, dull time generally, driving sometimes, walking little, and writing letters. Now and then I got a pleasant walk by myself away among the vineyards and olive-trees or down into the queer old city. I soon tired of the fashionable Promenade, for every one was on exhibition. Sometimes before or after the fashionable hour I walked there and enjoyed the sea and sky. A ball was given at our Pension and we went. A queer set,--Russians, Spaniards, French, English, Americans, Italians, Jews, and Sandwich Islanders. They danced wildly, dressed gayly, and sounded as if the "confusion of tongues" was come again. A few pleasant Americans called on us, but we were very lonely and uncomfortable. Decided to take an apartment No. 10 Rue Geoffredo, paying six hundred francs for ten weeks, six rooms, all large and handsome. Dr. P. got us a good maid, and on the 17th we went to our new quarters. Madame Rolande was French governess for six years to Victoria's children, and was a funny old party. Couldn't sleep at all for some nights, and felt very poorly, for my life didn't suit me and the air was too exciting. _February._--Got on excellently with our housekeeping, for Julie proved a treasure and we were very comfortable. Had many lovely drives, and saw something of Nice and its beauties. To Cimies, an old Franciscan monastery near the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. The convent stands where a temple of Diana once stood, and is surrounded by ancient ilex trees. A monk in his cowl, brown robe, sandals, and rope girdle did the honors of the church, which was dark and full of bad pictures. San Andre with its château and grotto, Villa Franca in a lovely little bay, the wood of Var where the daisies grew, Valrosa, a villa in a rose garden, and the Porte were all interesting. Also Castle Hill, which overlooks the town. I decided to go home in May, though A. wants me to stay. I'm tired of it, and as she is not going to travel, my time is too valuable to be wasted. The carnival occurred. Funny, but not so fine a sight as I expected. Also went to the theatre to see "Lady Tartuffe." Had a pleasant time, though I couldn't understand much. The acting was so natural and good that I caught the plot, and with a little telling from Hosmer knew what was going on. Wrote a little on three stories which would come into my head and worry me till I gave them a "vent." Good letters from home. All well and busy, and longing for me in the spring. _March._--A tedious month, which might have been quite the reverse had I been free to enjoy it in my own way. Read French, walked to my favorite places, and wrote letters when I found time. Went often to Valrosa, a lovely villa buried in roses. Got a wheeled chair and a man to draw it, then with books, lunch, and work, I tempted A. out into the woods, and we had some pleasant hours. _April._--Went to the Cathedral to see the Easter ceremonies. Fine music, the Gloria was sung, a Franciscan monk preached, the Bishop blessed every one, and was fussed over like a great doll. A very splendid scene. Saw Ristori twice, once in "Medea" and once in "Elizabeth." Never saw such acting; especially in Queen Bess, it was splendid, as she changes from the young, violent, coquettish woman to the peevish old crone dying with her crown on, vain, ambitious, and remorseful. _May._--On the first day of the month left A. and Nice and started alone for Paris, feeling as happy as a freed bird. A pleasant journey, Laddie waiting for me in Paris to take me to my room at Madame Dyne's. A very charming fortnight here; the days spent in seeing sights with my Laddie, the evenings in reading, writing, hearing "my boy" play, or resting. Saw all that I wished to see in a very pleasant way, and on the 17th reluctantly went to London. Passed a fortnight at a lovely old place on Wimbledon Common with the Conways, going to town with them to see the lions, Royal Exhibition, Hampton Court, Kensington and British Museums, Crystal Palace, and many other pleasant places. But none were lovelier to me than the old farm-house with the thatched roof, the common of yellow gorse, larks going up in the morning, nightingales flying at night, hawthorne everywhere, and Richmond Park full of deer close by. Also Robin Hood's barn. _June._--Passed the first ten days of the month at Aubrey House with the Peter Taylors. A lovely English home with kind, pure, and friendly people. Saw many interesting persons,--Miss Cobbe, Jean Ingelow, Dr. Garrett, Madame Bodichon, Matilde Blinde, Mill, Bright, Gladstone, Hughes, and the rest at the House of Commons where Mr. T. took me. Went to a dinner-party or two, theatres, to hear Dickens read, a concert, _conversazione_ and receptions, seeing English society, or rather one class of it, and liking what I saw. On the 11th went to board with Mrs. Travers in Westbourne Grove Terrace. A pleasant little room, plain living, and for society Mrs. T. and daughter, two sisters from Dublin, and ten young men,--barristers, clerks, ministers, and students. A guinea a week. Very free and jolly, roaming about London all day, dining late and resting, chatting, music, or fun in the evening. Saw the Tower, Windsor, Parks, Gardens, and all manner of haunts of famous men and women,--Milton's house, Johnson's in Bolt Court, Lamb's, Sairy Gamp's, Saracen's Head, the Charter House where Thackeray was when a lad, Furnival's Inn where Dickens wrote Pickwick, Bacon's Walk, and endless memorable sights. St. Paul's I liked better than Notre Dame. _July._--At Mrs. Travers's till the 7th. Saw Routledge about "Moods." He took it, would like another book, and was very friendly. Said good-by all round, and at six A.M. on the 7th left for Liverpool with Mr. W., who saw to my luggage and went part way. Reached the "Africa" safely. A trip of fourteen stormy, dull, long, sick days, but at last at eleven at night we sailed up the harbor in the moonlight, and I saw dear John waiting for me on the wharf. Slept on board, and next day reached home at noon to find Father at the station, Nan and babies at the gate, May flying wildly round the lawn, and Marmee crying at the door. Into her arms I went, and was at home at last. Happy days, talking and enjoying one another. Many people came to see me, and all said I was much improved; of which I was glad, as there was, is, and always will be room for it. Found Mother looking old, sick, and tired; Father as placid as ever; Nan poorly, but blest in her babies; May full of plans, as usual; Freddy very stout and loving; and my Jack the dearest, prettiest, merriest baby boy that ever kissed and loved everybody. _August._--Soon fell to work on some stories, for things were, as I expected, behindhand when the money-maker was away. Found plenty to do, as orders from E., L., "Independent," "U. S. C. S. Magazine," and several other offers waited for me. Wrote two long tales for L. and got $200 for them. One for E. for which he paid $75, also a bit of poetry for $5. He wanted a long story in twenty-four chapters, and I wrote it in a fortnight,--one hundred and eighty-five pages,--besides work, sewing, nursing, and company. Sent S. E. S. the first $100 on my account; could have sent $300, but it was needed, so I gave it up unwillingly, and must work away for the rest. Mother borrowed the money that I might stay longer and see England, as I had missed much while condemned to "hard work and solitary confinement for nine months," as she expressed it. _September._--Mother sick, did little with my pen. Got a girl, and devoted myself to Mother, writing after she was abed. In this way finished a long tale. But E. would not have it, saying it was too long and too sensational! _November._--Mother slowly mending. A sensible Western woman "rubbed" her, and did her a great deal of good. She left her room and seemed more like herself. I never expect to see the strong, energetic Marmee of old times, but, thank the Lord! she is still here, though pale and weak, quiet and sad; all her fine hair gone, and face full of wrinkles, bowed back, and every sign of age. Life has been so hard for her, and she so brave, so glad to spend herself for others. Now we must live for her. On Miss Alcott's return from Europe in July, 1866, she devoted herself as earnestly as ever to the personal care of her mother and to story-writing for the support of the family. She agreed to write a fifty-dollar tale once a month, and besides this wrote many short stories for other publishers. Her father's return from the West with two hundred dollars, earned on his western trip, gave her some relief; and she was cheered by hearing that "Moods" was selling well in Europe. But she was not well, and she felt anxious and troubled about many things. Her journal of these months is very meagre; and January, 1867, opens with the statement that she is "sick from too hard work." Yet the account of stories furnished to publishers continues till August, when she went to Clark's Island for a few weeks of recreation. Here her spirits returned, and she spent, as she says, "a harem-scarem fortnight," which must have given her great refreshment. She says: "Got to work again after my long vacation, for bills accumulate and worry me. I dread debt more than anything." In the journal occurs this slight notice of the first step in one of the most important achievements of her life, of which I shall speak more fully hereafter:-- _Journal._ _September, 1867._--Niles, partner of Roberts, asked me to write a girls' book. Said I'd try. F. asked me to be the editor of "Merry's Museum." Said I'd try. Began at once on both new jobs; but didn't like either. The Radical Club met at Sargent's. Fine time. Bartol inspired; Emerson chairman; Alcott on his legs; strong-minded ladies out in full force; æsthetic tea for refreshment. _October._--Agreed with F. to be editor for $500 a year. Read manuscripts, write one story each month and an editorial. On the strength of this engagement went to Boston, took a room--No. 6 Hayward Place--furnished it, and set up housekeeping for myself. Cannot keep well in C., so must try Boston, and not work too hard. On the 28th rode to B. on my load of furniture with Fred, feeling as if I was going to camp out in a new country; hoped it would prove a hospitable and healthy land. This incident appears in "The Old-fashioned Girl" (p. 153), where the country girl goes into the city in a farmer's cart, with a squash pie in her hand given her at parting by an old friend. Her sister May had a drawing class at her room every day, which gave Louisa the pleasure of companionship. Miss Alcott was an enthusiastic admirer of Dickens, and she entered into the humor of his homely characters most heartily. She acted "Mrs. Jarley displaying her waxwork" nine times this winter, and was always successful in giving life and variety to the representation. She was constantly called upon to act for charity. She enjoyed the fun, and as she could not give money, it satisfied her generous nature to be able to help in any way. She wrote an article for Mr. B., called "Happy Women," in which she gratified her love of single life by describing the delightful spinsters of her acquaintance. Her sketches are all taken from life, and are not too highly colored. The Physician, the Artist, the Philanthropist, the Actress, the Lawyer, are easily recognizable. They were a "glorious phalanx of old maids," as Theodore Parker called the single women of his Society, who aided him so much in his work. _To her Mother._ JANUARY, 1868. Things look promising for the new year. F. $20 for the little tales, and wrote two every month; G. $25 for the "Bells;" L. $100 for the two "Proverb" stories. L. takes all I'll send; and F. seems satisfied. So my plan will work well, and I shall make my $1,000 this year in spite of sickness and worry. Praise the Lord and keep busy, say I. I am pretty well, and keep so busy I haven't time to be sick. Every one is very clever to me; and I often think as I go larking round, independent, with more work than I can do, and half-a-dozen publishers asking for tales, of the old times when I went meekly from door to door peddling my first poor little stories, and feeling so rich with $10. It's clear that Minerva Moody is getting on, in spite of many downfalls, and by the time she is a used up old lady of seventy or so she may finish her job, and see her family well off. A little late to enjoy much maybe; but I guess I shall turn in for my last long sleep with more content, in spite of the mortal weariness, than if I had folded my hands and been supported in elegant idleness, or gone to the devil in fits of despair because things moved so slowly. Keep all the money I send; pay up every bill; get comforts and enjoy yourselves. Let's be merry while we may, and lay up a bit for a rainy day. With which gem from Aristotle, I am, honored Madam, your dutiful and affectionate L. M. ALCOTT. Regards to Plato. Don't he want new socks? Are his clothes getting shiny? Although, as I have said, little direct European influence is observable in Miss Alcott's writings from her journeys in Europe, yet this first visit had a marked effect upon her life and writings. She was unfavorably situated to gain the refreshment she sorely needed; and yet she did get a great deal from the entire change of surroundings, from the larger horizon into which she entered, from her rich enjoyment of scenery, and from the variety of companions she met. Probably she looked through new spectacles at her own work, as she describes herself as looking through those of Professor Bhaer, and she saw all the defects of the pot-boiling stories which she had been pouring out one after another, without strong purpose, or regard for artistic excellence. She had also the chance to look upon her own early life and home from a distance; and as she thought of the incidents of those years they grouped into more harmonious lines, and she saw how much they contained of real life, of true poetry and humor, as well as moral significance. So the old idea of "The Pathetic Family" took shape anew in her mind. In July, 1863, the enterprising firm of Roberts Brothers asked her for the publication in book form of "Hospital Sketches," which were then appearing in the "Commonwealth" newspaper, being struck by their intense reality and originality. At the time, as she states in her journal, she preferred to allow Mr. Redpath to publish them. Later, in September, 1867, Roberts Brothers asked her to write a girls' book for them, and in May, 1868, they repeated the request through her father, who had brought to them a collection of short stories for publication. Miss Alcott's fancy had always been for depicting the life of boys rather than girls; but she fortunately took the suggestion of the publisher, and said, like Col. Miller, "I'll try, sir." The old idea of "The Pathetic Family" recurred to her mind; and she set herself to describe the early life of her home. The book was finished in July, named "Little Women," and sent to the publishers, who promptly accepted it, making Miss Alcott an outright offer for the copyright, but at the same time advising her not to part with it. It was published in October, and the result is well known. She was quite unconscious of the unusual merit of the book, thinking, as she says, the first chapters dull, and so was quite surprised at her success. "It reads better than I expected," she says; and she truly adds, "We really lived most of it, and if it succeeds, that will be the reason of it." But that is not the whole secret of its success. Through many trials and many failures Louisa had learned her literary art. By her experience in melodrama she had proved the emptiness of sensational writing, and knew how to present the simple and true,--seemingly without art, but really with the nicest art of discrimination and emphasis. All her previous training and experience were needed to fit her for the production of her masterpiece; for in spite of all the good work she did later, this remains her masterpiece, by which she will be remembered and loved. Already twenty-one years have passed, and another generation has come up since she published this book, yet it still commands a steady sale; and the mothers who read it in their childhood renew their enjoyment as they watch the faces of their little girls brighten with smiles over the theatricals in the barn, or moisten with tears at the death of the beloved sister. One of the greatest charms of the book is its perfect truth to New England life. But it is not merely local; it touches the universal heart deeply. The excitement of the children was intense; they claimed the author as their own property, and felt as if she were interpreting their very lives and thoughts. The second series was anticipated with the eagerness of a bulletin from the war and the stock market. But unlike Miss Alcott herself, the children took especial interest in the love-story, and when poor Laurie was so obstinately refused by Jo, "they wept aloud, and refused to be comforted," and in some instances were actually made ill by grief and excitement. Miss Alcott had now secured publishers in whom she placed perfect confidence, and who henceforth relieved her of the worry of business matters, dealing directly and fairly by her, and consulting her interests as well as their own. This is abundantly shown by her private journals and letters. The success of "Little Women" was so well assured that Miss Alcott at once set about preparing the second part, which was eagerly demanded by the little women outside, who wanted all the girls to marry, and rather troubled her by wishing to settle matters their own way. She finished writing the sequel, which had been rapid work, Jan. 1, 1869. The success of "Little Women" was not confined to this country. The book was translated into French, German, and Dutch, and has become familiarly known in England and on the Continent. In Holland the first series was published under the title "Under the Mother's Wings," and the second part as "On Their Own Wings;" and these two books with "Work" established her fame among the children, who still continue to read her stories with fresh delight. It is hardly necessary to analyze or criticise this happy production. It is a realistic transcript of life, but idealized by the tenderness of real feeling. It teaches the lessons of every-day conduct and inculcates the simplest virtues of truth, earnest effort, and loving affection. There is abundant humor, but no caricature, and tender, deep feeling without sentimentality. Miss Alcott herself did not wish her representative, Jo, to marry; but the demand of the publisher and the public was so imperative that she created her German professor, of whom no prototype existed. While some of her romantic young readers were not satisfied at Jo's preferring him to the charming Laurie, he is certainly a genuine, warm-hearted man, who would probably have held her affections by his strong moral and intellectual traits. That he became a very living personality to the author is evident from his reappearance in "Jo's Boys," where he has the same strong, cheery influence in the school and home that she found from him in her girlhood. The style of the book is thoroughly easy and colloquial; and the girls talk and act like girls, and not like prim little women. The influence of the book has been wide and deep, and has helped to make a whole generation of girls feel a deeper sense of family love and the blessings to be gained from lives of earnest effort, mutual sacrifice, and high aims. Much interest has been expressed in regard to the originals of the characters in "Little Women." This is the author's own statement:-- Facts in the stories that are true, though often changed as to time and place:-- "Little Women"--The early plays and experiences; Beth's death; Jo's literary and Amy's artistic experiences; Meg's happy home; John Brooke and his death; Demi's character. Mr. March did not go to the war, but Jo did. Mrs. March is all true, only not half good enough. Laurie is not an American boy, though every lad I ever knew claims the character. He was a Polish boy, met abroad in 1865. Mr. Lawrence is my grandfather, Colonel Joseph May. Aunt March is no one. _Journal._ _January, 1868. Gamp's Garret, Hayward Place, Boston._--The year begins well and cheerfully for us all. Father and Mother comfortable at home; Anna and family settled in Chelsea; May busy with her drawing classes, of which she has five or six, and the prospect of earning $150 a quarter; also she is well and in good spirits. I am in my little room, spending busy, happy days, because I have quiet, freedom, work enough, and strength to do it. F. pays me $500 a year for my name and some editorial work on Merry's Museum; "The Youth's Companion" pays $20 for two short tales each month; L. $50 and $100 for all I will send him; and others take anything I have. My way seems clear for the year if I can only keep well. I want to realize my dream of supporting the family and being perfectly independent. Heavenly hope! I have written twenty-five stories the past year, besides the fairy book containing twelve. Have earned $1,000, paid my own way, sent home some, paid up debts, and helped May. For many years we have not been so comfortable: May and I both earning, Annie with her good John to lean on, and the old people in a cosey home of our own. After last winter's hard experience, we cannot be too grateful. To-day my first hyacinth bloomed, white and sweet,--a good omen,--a little flag of truce, perhaps, from the enemies whom we have been fighting all these years. Perhaps we are to win after all, and conquer poverty, neglect, pain, and debt, and march on with flags flying into the new world with the new year. _Thursday, 7th._--A queer day. Up early, and had my bread and milk and baked apples. Fed my doves. Made May a bonnet, and cut out a flannel wrapper for Marmee, who feels the cold in the Concord snowbanks. Did my editorial work in the P.M., and fixed my dresses for the plays. L. sent $50, and F. $40, for tales. A. and boys came. To Dorchester in evening, and acted Mrs. Pontifex, in "Naval Engagements," to a good house. A gay time, had flowers, etc. Talked half the night with H. A. about the fast ways of young people nowadays, and gave the child much older-sisterly advice, as no one seems to see how much she needs help at this time of her young life. Dreamed that I was an opera dancer, and waked up prancing. _Wednesday, 15th._--Wrote all day. Did two short tales for F. In the evening with A. M. to hear Fanny Kemble read "The Merchant of Venice." She was a whole stock company in herself. Looked younger and handsomer than ever before, and happy, as she is to be with her daughters now. We went to supper afterwards at Mrs. Parkman's, and saw the lioness feed. It was a study to watch her face, so full of varying expression was it,--always strong, always sweet, then proud and fierce as she sniffed at nobodies who passed about her. Being one, I kept away, and enjoyed the great creature afar off, wondering how a short, stout, red woman _could_ look so like a queen in her purple velvet and point lace. Slipped behind a door, but Dr. Holmes found me out, and affably asked, "How many of you children are there?" As I was looking down on the top of his illustrious head, the question was funny. But I answered the little man with deep respect, "Four, sir." He seemed to catch my naughty thought, and asked, with a twinkle in his eye, looking up as if I were a steeple, "And all as tall as you?" Ha! ha! _18th._--Played again at D., and had a jolly time. Home early, and putting off my fine feathers, fell to work on my stories. F. seems to expect me to write the whole magazine, which I did not bargain for. To Nan's in p. m., to take care of her while the Papa and Freddie went to C. The dear little man, so happy and important with his bit of a bag, six pennies, and a cake for refreshment during the long journey of an hour. We brooded over Johnny as if he were a heavenly sort of fire to warm and comfort us with his sunny little face and loving ways. She is a happy woman! I sell _my_ children; and though they feed me, they don't love me as hers do. Little Tranquillity played alone all day, and made a pretty picture sitting in "marmar's" lap in his night-gown, talking through the trumpet to her. She never heard his sweet little voice in any other way. Poor Nan! _Wednesday, 22d._--To the Club with Father. A good paper on the "Historical View of Jesus." Father spoke finely. It amuses me to see how people listen and applaud _now_ what was hooted at twenty years ago. The talk lasted until two, and then the hungry philosophers remembered they had bodies and rushed away, still talking. [Hard to feed.--L. M. A.] Got a snow-slide on my bonnet, so made another in the P.M., and in the evening to the Antislavery Festival. All the old faces and many new ones. Glad I have lived in the time of this great movement, and known its heroes so well. War times suit me, as I am a fighting _May_. _24th._--My second hyacinth bloomed pale blue, like a timid hope, and I took the omen for a good one, as I _am_ getting on, and have more than I can do of the work that I once went begging for. Enjoyed the little spring my little flower made for me, and Buzzy, my pet fly, moved into the sweet mansion from his hanging garden in the ivy pot. Acted in Cambridge, Lucretia Buzzard and Mrs. Jarley. _Sunday, 31st._--Last day of the month, but I'm not satisfied with my four weeks' work. Acting for charity upsets my work. The change is good for me, and so I do it, and because I have no money to give. Four tales this month. Received $70; sent $30 home. No debts. _February 1st._--Arranged "Hospital Sketches and War Stories" for a book. By taking out all Biblical allusions, and softening all allusions to rebs., the book may be made "quite perfect," I am told. Anything to suit customers. _Friday, 14th._--My third hyacinth bloomed this A.M., a lovely pink. So I found things snug, and had a busy day chasing----who dodged. Then I wrote my tales. Made some shirts for my boys, and went out to buy a squash pie for my lonely supper. It snowed; was very cold. No one paid, and I wanted to send some money home. Felt cross and tired as I trudged back at dusk. My pie turned a somersault, a boy laughed, so did I, and felt better. On my doorstep I found a gentleman who asked if Miss A. lived here. I took him up my winding stair and found him a very delightful fly, for he handed me a letter out of which fell a $100 bill. With this bait Mr. B. lured me to write "one column of Advice to Young Women," as Mrs. Shaw and others were doing. If he had asked me for a Greek oration I would have said "yes." So I gave a receipt, and the very elegant agent bowed himself away, leaving my "'umble" bower full of perfume, and my soul of peace. Thriftily taking advantage of the enthusiastic moment, I planned my article while I ate my dilapidated pie, and then proceeded to write it with the bill before me. It was about old maids. "Happy Women" was the title, and I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us. This was a nice little episode in my trials of an authoress, so I record it. So the pink hyacinth was a true prophet, and I went to bed a happy millionaire, to dream of flannel petticoats for my blessed Mother, paper for Father, a new dress for May, and sleds for my boys. _Monday, 17th._--Father came full of plans about his book. Went with him to the Club. P. read a paper, and the Rabbi Nathan talked. A curious jumble of fools and philosophers. The Club should be kept more select, and not be run by one person. _Tuesday, 25th._--Note from Lady Amberly as I sat sewing on my ninepenny dress. She wanted to come and see me, and I told her to do so, and I'd show her how I lived in my sky-parlor,--spinning yarns like a spider. Met her at the Club, and liked her, so simple and natural. Acted for Mr. Clarke's Church Fair in the evening. Did Mrs. Jarley three times. Very hoarse with a cold, but kept my promise. "Proverb Stories" suggested, and "Kitty's Class-Day" written. _Friday, 28th._--Packed for home, as I am needed there, and acted Jarley for the third evening. Have done it nine times this week, and my voice is gone. I am sorry to leave my quiet room, for I've enjoyed it very much. Written eight long tales, ten short ones, read stacks of manuscripts, and done editorial work. Acted for charity twelve times. Not a bad two months' work. I can imagine an easier life, but with love, health, and work I can be happy; for these three help one to do, to be, and to endure all things. _March, April, and May._--Had the pleasure of providing Marmee with many comforts, and keeping the hounds of care and debt from worrying her. She sits at rest in her sunny room, and that is better than any amount of fame to me. _May, 1868._--Father saw Mr. Niles about a fairy book. Mr. N. wants a _girls' story_, and I begin "Little Women." Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it. [Good joke.--L. M. A.] _June._--Sent twelve chapters of "L. W." to Mr. N. He thought it _dull_; so do I. But work away and mean to try the experiment; for lively, simple books are very much needed for girls, and perhaps I can supply the need. Wrote two tales for Ford, and one for F. L. clamors for more, but must wait. _July 15th._--Have finished "Little Women," and sent it off,--402 pages. May is designing some pictures for it. Hope it will go, for I shall probably get nothing for "Morning Glories." Very tired, head full of pain from overwork, and heart heavy about Marmee, who is growing feeble. [Too much work for one young woman. No wonder she broke down. 1876.--L. M. A.] _August._--Roberts Bros. made an offer for the story, but at the same time advised me to keep the copyright; so I shall. [An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the "dull book" was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling. 1885.--L. M. A.] _August 26th._--Proof of whole book came. It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it. Mr. N. likes it better now, and says some girls who have read the manuscripts say it is "splendid!" As it is for them, they are the best critics, so I should be satisfied. _September._--Father's book ["Tablets"] came out. Very simple outside, wise and beautiful within. Hope it will bring him praise and profit, for he has waited long. No girl, Mother poorly, May busy with pupils, Nan with her boys, and much work to be done. We don't like the kitchen department, and our tastes and gifts lie in other directions, so it is hard to make the various Pegasuses pull the plan steadily. _October 8th._--Marmee's birthday; sixty-eight. After breakfast she found her gifts on a table in the study. Father escorted her to the big red chair, the boys prancing before blowing their trumpets, while we "girls" marched behind, glad to see the dear old Mother better and able to enjoy our little fête. The boys proudly handed her the little parcels, and she laughed and cried over our gifts and verses. I feel as if the decline had begun for her; and each year will add to the change which is going on, as time alters the energetic, enthusiastic home-mother into a gentle, feeble old woman, to be cherished and helped tenderly down the long hill she has climbed so bravely with her many burdens. _October 26th._--Came to Boston, and took a quiet room in Brookline Street. Heard Emerson in the evening. Sent a report of it to A. P. for the "Standard" at his desire. Anna is nicely settled in her new house, and Marmee is with her. Helped put down carpets and settle things. _30th._--Saw Mr. N. of Roberts Brothers, and he gave me good news of the book. An order from London for an edition came in. First edition gone and more called for. Expects to sell three or four thousand before the New Year. Mr. N. wants a second volume for spring. Pleasant notices and letters arrive, and much interest in my little women, who seem to find friends by their truth to life, as I hoped. _November 1st._--Began the second part of "Little Women." I can do a chapter a day, and in a month I mean to be done. A little success is so inspiring that I now find my "Marches" sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play. Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life. I _won't_ marry Jo to Laurie to please any one. _Monday, 16th._--To the Club for a change, as I have written like a steam engine since the 1st. Weiss read a fine paper on "Woman Suffrage." Good talk afterward. Lunched with Kate Field, Celia Thaxter, and Mr. Linton. Woman's Club in P.M. _17th._--Finished my thirteenth chapter. I am so full of my work, I can't stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run. _29th._--My birthday; thirty-six. Spent alone, writing hard. No presents but Father's "Tablets." I never seem to have many presents, as some do, though I give a good many. That is best perhaps, and makes a gift very precious when it does come. _December._--Home to shut up the house, as Father goes West and Mother to Anna's. A cold, hard, dirty time; but was so glad to be off out of C. that I worked like a beaver, and turned the key on Apple Slump with joy. May and I went to the new Bellevue Hotel in Beacon Street. She doesn't enjoy quiet corners as I do, so we took a sky-parlor, and had a queer time whisking up and down in the elevator, eating in a marble café, and sleeping on a sofa bed, that we might be genteel. It did not suit me at all. A great gale nearly blew the roof off. Steam pipes exploded, and we were hungry. I was very tired with my hard summer, with no rest for the brains that earn the money. _January, 1869._--Left our lofty room at Bellevue and went to Chauncey Street. Sent the sequel of "L. W." to Roberts on New Year's Day. Hope it will do as well as the first, which is selling finely, and receives good notices. F. and F. both want me to continue working for them, and I shall do so if I am able; but my head-aches, cough, and weariness keep me from working as I once could, fourteen hours a day. In March we went home, as Mother was restless at Nan's, and Father wanted his library. Cold and dull; not able to write; so took care of Marmee and tried to rest. Paid up all the debts, thank the Lord!--every penny that money can pay,--and now I feel as if I could die in peace. My dream is beginning to come true; and if my head holds out I'll do all I once hoped to do. _April._--Very poorly. Feel quite used up. Don't care much for myself, as rest is heavenly even with pain; but the family seem so panic-stricken and helpless when I break down, that I try to keep the mill going. Two short tales for L., $50; two for Ford, $20; and did my editorial work, though two months are unpaid for. Roberts wants a new book, but am afraid to get into a vortex lest I fall ill. _To her Publishers._ BOSTON, Dec. 28, 1869. Many thanks for the check which made my Christmas an unusually merry one. After toiling so many years along the uphill road,--always a hard one to women writers,--it is peculiarly grateful to me to find the way growing easier at last, with pleasant little surprises blossoming on either side, and the rough places made smooth by the courtesy and kindness of those who have proved themselves friends as well as publishers. With best wishes for the coming year, I am yours truly, L. M. ALCOTT. AUGUST, 1871. DEAR MR. NILES,--Many thanks for the fortune and the kind note accompanying it. Please hand the money to S. E. S., and he will put it somewhere for me.... You are very kind to find a minute out of your hurried day to attend to this affair.... I'm not sure but I shall try Dr. B. if my present and ninth doctor fails to cure my aching bones. I haven't a bit of faith in any of them; but my friends won't let me gently slip away where bones cease from troubling, so I must keep trying. Very gratefully your friend, L. M. A. Written in 1871, just after the publication of "Little Men":-- AUGUST 5TH. DEAR MR. NILES,--Thanks for the parcel and notes. ... The letters were very gushing from Nellie and Dollie and Sallie Somebody asking for pictures, autographs, family history, and several new books right away. I must give Dr. R. a fair trial, and if he fails I'll try Dr. B., just to make up the number of doctors to a round ten. "Happy Thoughts" is very funny, especially the trip to Antwerp. Yours truly, L. M. A. CHAPTER IX. EUROPE. THE LAY OF A GOLDEN GOOSE. Long ago in a poultry yard One dull November morn, Beneath a motherly soft wing A little goose was born. Who straightway peeped out of the shell To view the world beyond, Longing at once to sally forth And paddle in the pond. "Oh! be not rash," her father said, A mild Socratic bird; Her mother begged her not to stray With many a warning word. But little goosey was perverse, And eagerly did cry, "I've got a lovely pair of wings, Of course I ought to fly." In vain parental cacklings, In vain the cold sky's frown, Ambitious goosey tried to soar, But always tumbled down. The farm-yard jeered at her attempts, The peacocks screamed, "Oh fie! You're only a domestic goose, So don't pretend to fly." Great cock-a-doodle from his perch Crowed daily loud and clear, "Stay in the puddle, foolish bird, That is your proper sphere." The ducks and hens said, one and all, In gossip by the pool, "Our children never play such pranks; My dear, that fowl's a fool." The owls came out and flew about, Hooting above the rest, "No useful egg was ever hatched From transcendental nest." Good little goslings at their play And well-conducted chicks Were taught to think poor goosey's flights Were naughty, ill-bred tricks. _They_ were content to swim and scratch, And not at all inclined For any wild-goose chase in search Of something undefined. Hard times she had as one may guess, That young aspiring bird, Who still from every fall arose Saddened but undeterred. She knew she was no nightingale, Yet spite of much abuse, She longed to help and cheer the world, Although a plain gray goose. She could not sing, she could not fly, Nor even walk with grace, And all the farm-yard had declared A puddle was her place. But something stronger than herself Would cry, "Go on, go on! Remember, though an humble fowl, You're cousin to a swan." So up and down poor goosey went, A busy, hopeful bird. Searched many wide unfruitful fields, And many waters stirred. At length she came unto a stream Most fertile of all _Niles_, Where tuneful birds might soar and sing Among the leafy isles. Here did she build a little nest Beside the waters still, Where the parental goose could rest Unvexed by any _bill_. And here she paused to smooth her plumes, Ruffled by many plagues; When suddenly arose the cry, "This goose lays golden eggs." At once the farm-yard was agog; The ducks began to quack; Prim Guinea fowls relenting called, "Come back, come back, come back." Great chanticleer was pleased to give A patronizing crow, And the contemptuous biddies clucked, "I wish my chicks did so." The peacocks spread their shining tails, And cried in accents soft, "We want to know you, gifted one, Come up and sit aloft." Wise owls awoke and gravely said, With proudly swelling breasts, "Rare birds have always been evoked From transcendental nests!" News-hunting turkeys from afar Now ran with all thin legs To gobble facts and fictions of The goose with golden eggs. But best of all the little fowls Still playing on the shore, Soft downy chicks and goslings gay, Chirped out, "Dear Goose, lay more." But goosey all these weary years Had toiled like any ant, And wearied out she now replied, "My little dears, I can't. "When I was starving, half this corn Had been of vital use, Now I am surfeited with food Like any Strasbourg goose." So to escape too many friends, Without uncivil strife, She ran to the Atlantic pond And paddled for her life. Soon up among the grand old Alps She found two blessed things, The health she had so nearly lost, And rest for weary limbs. But still across the briny deep Couched in most friendly words, Came prayers for letters, tales, or verse, From literary birds. Whereat the renovated fowl With grateful thanks profuse, Took from her wing a quill and wrote This lay of a Golden Goose. BEX, SWITZERLAND, August, 1870. The year 1869 was less fruitful in work than the preceding one. Miss Alcott spent the winter in Boston and the summer in Concord. She was ill and very tired, and felt little inclined for mental effort. "Hospital Sketches," which had been first published by Redpath, was now republished by Roberts Brothers, with the addition of six shorter "Camp and Fireside Stories." The interest of the public in either the author or the work had not lessened; for two thousand copies of the book in its new form were sold the first week. In her weary condition she finds her celebrity rather a burden than a pleasure, and says in her journal:-- People begin to come and stare at the Alcotts. Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges into the woods _à la_ Hawthorne, and won't be even a very small lion. Refreshed my soul with Goethe, ever strong and fine and alive. Gave S. E. S. $200 to invest. What richness to have a little not needed! Miss Alcott had some pleasant refreshment in travelling during the summer. _July._-- ... Spent in Canada with my cousins, the Frothinghams, at their house at Rivière du Loup,--a little village on the St. Lawrence, full of queer people. Drove, read, and walked with the little ones. A pleasant, quiet time. _August._-- ... A month with May at Mt. Desert. A gay time, and a little rest and pleasure before the old pain and worry began again. Made up $1,000 for S. E. S. to invest. Now I have $1,200 for a rainy day, and no debts. With that thought I can bear neuralgia gayly. In the autumn the whole family went to Boston, the father and mother staying with Mrs. Pratt; while Louisa and her sister May, "the workers," occupied rooms in Pinckney Street. Not being well enough to do much new work, Louisa began using up her old stories, and found that the little women "helped their rejected sisters to good places where once they went a-begging." In January, 1870, she suffered from loss of voice, for which she tried "heroic treatment" under a distinguished physician. She got well enough to write a little, and in February wrote the conclusion to "The Old-fashioned Girl," which was published in March. She says:-- I wrote it with left hand in a sling, one foot up, head aching, and no voice. Yet, as the book is funny, people will say, "Didn't you enjoy doing it?" I often think of poor Tom Hood as I scribble, rather than lie and groan. I certainly earn my living by the sweat of my brow. The book does not reveal this condition; for nothing could be fresher, brighter, and more wholesome than the heroine Polly, many of whose adventures are drawn from the author's own experience. She steps out of her usual surroundings into the fashionable life of the city, but betrays her own want of sympathy with it. The book has always been very popular. In 1870, the success of "Hospital Sketches" and the continued receipts from "Little Women" put their author in a pecuniary position which enabled her to go abroad for the rest and refreshment which she sorely needed. The younger sister was invited to go by her friend A. B. on condition that Louisa would accompany them. This journey was very free and independent. She has given an account--somewhat travestied certainly, but very true to the general facts--in "Shawl Straps," although the reader would hardly suppose the old lady described in that book had not yet reached her fortieth year. These sketches were arranged after her return, at the request of Mrs. Stowe, for the "Christian Union," and were published in a book forming one volume of "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag" in 1872. Fortunately we have many of Louisa's original letters preserved in her father's copies, which have escaped the destruction of her correspondence. With some extracts from her journals, they give a sufficient account of this journey. In many respects the contrast to her former visit to Europe is most pleasant. She has now become pecuniarily independent by her own exertions, and has a popular reputation which brings her welcome and recognition wherever she goes. But she has paid a heavy price for these gains. Her health has become seriously shattered. The long application to writing, sometimes even for fourteen hours a day,--a pressure of excitement which kept her from eating and sleeping,--added to sorrow and anxiety, have told upon her nerves and strength, and she is often unfitted to enjoy the pleasures which are open to her. Yet her journal and letters are as full of wit and humor as ever; and she laid up stores of pleasant memories which lasted her through life. Readers of "Shawl Straps" will recognize the originals of those bright sketches in the series of letters from Dinan. _Second Trip to Europe._ _April._--... On the first day of the month (fit day for _my_ undertaking I thought) May and I went to N. Y. to meet A. B., with John for escort. Every one very kind. Thirty gifts, a parting ball among our house-mates, and a great cake. Half-a-dozen devoted beings at the station to see us off. But I remember only Father and Mother as they went away the day before, leaving the two ambitious daughters to sail away, perhaps forever. Marmee kept up bravely, and nodded and smiled; but at the corner I saw the white handkerchief go up to the eyes, after being gayly waved to us. May and I broke down, and said, "We won't go;" but next day we set forth, as young birds will, and left the nest empty for a year. Sailed on the 2d in a gale of wind in the French steamer "Lafayette" for Brest. Our adventures are told in "Shawl Straps." "O. F. G." came out in March, and sold well. Train-boy going to N. Y. put it into my lap; and when I said I didn't care for it, exclaimed with surprise,-- "Bully book, ma'am! Sell a lot; better have it." John told him I wrote it; and his chuckle, stare, and astonished "No!" was great fun. On the steamer little girls had it, and came in a party to call on me, very sea-sick in my berth, done up like a mummy. Spent some charming weeks in Brittany. _June and July._--"O. F. G." was published in London by Sampson Low & Co. We left Dinan on the 15th, and had a lovely trip through France to Vevay and Bex. Talk of war between France and Prussia. Much excitement at Vevay. Refugees from Lyons come in. Isabella and Don Carlos were there, with queer followers. _September._--... On the 3d came news of the Emperor's surrender. Great wailing among the French here. All well at home. Books going finely; no debts. We decide to go to Rome for the winter, as May pines for the artist's Paradise; and war will not trouble us I hope. SHIP "LAFAYETTE," April 9, 1870. DEAREST MARMEE,--To-morrow we come to our long journey's end [Brest, France], thank the Lord. It has been a good one on the whole, and I have got along as well as I expected. But it is tiresome to be day after day doing nothing; for my head will not let me read. May has done well, and has been very kind to me and good, and is the life of the table, I guess. I never go up to meals, for Marie takes such good care of me; I lie and peck all sorts of funny messes, and receive calls in my den. People seem to think we are "guns," and want to know us; but as they are not interesting, we are on the reserve, and it has a fine effect. About three thousand miles away does not seem possible in so little while. How do you all get along,--Marmee, Father, the laddies, my lass, and dear old John? He was so good and kind all the way I had no care or worry, but just lopped round and let him do all the work. Bless the dear! I shall despatch a good long letter as soon as we arrive and have something to tell. We send this to ease your mind. Letters here are not prepaid, so pay for mine out of my money. Don't forget to tell the post-master in Boston about my letters. Bless you all, says your LU. MORLAIX, April 14, 1870. DEAREST MARMEE,--Having got our "poise" a bit by a day and night on land, I begin at once to scribble to you, as I mean to keep a letter on hand all the time, and send them off as fast as they are done. We had a twelve days' passage, owing to a double screw which they were trying and which delayed us, though it is safer than one. The weather was cold and rainy, and the sea rough, so I only went up once or twice, and kept warm in my den most of the time. After the first two days I didn't feel sick, except my head as usual. I slept, ate, ruminated, and counted the hours. May poked about more, and was liked by all. We got to Brest about noon Wednesday. A. and I got our trunks through the custom-house, and after some squabbling with the men, got all aboard for Morlaix, which is a curious old place worth seeing. It was a lovely day, warm as our June, and we had a charming trip of three hours through a country already green and flowery. We reached our hotel all right, and after a nice dinner had baths and went to bed. May's room being some way from mine, she came and bunked in with me in my little bed, and we slept. To-day is lovely, warm, and I am sitting at an open window looking at the square, enjoying the queer sights and sounds; for the air resounds with the rattle of wooden shoes on the stones. Market-women sit all about selling queer things, among which are snails; they buy them by the pint, pick them out with a pin like nuts, and seem to relish them mightily. We went out this A.M. after breakfast, and took a stroll about the queer old town. May was in heaven, and kept having raptures over the gables, the turrets with storks on them, the fountains, people, and churches. She is now sketching the tower of St. Melanie, with a crowd of small boys round her enjoying the sight and criticising the work. It don't seem very new to me, but I enjoy it, and feel pretty well. We are to study French every day when we settle, and I am to do the mending, etc., for A., who is to talk for us, and make our bargains. So far we go well together. To-morrow we go on to Lamballe, where we take the diligence to Dinan, fourteen miles farther, and there settle for some weeks. I wish the boys could see the funny children here in little wooden shoes like boats, the girls in blue cloth caps, aprons, and shawls, just like the women, and the boys in funny hats and sheepskin jackets. Now I must go and get May, who can't speak a word of French, and has a panic if any one speaks to her. The beggars afflict her, and she wants to give them money on all occasions. This P.M. we go for a drive to see all there is, as neither A. nor I are good walkers; "adoo" till by and by. I wish I could send you this balmy day. DINAN, Sunday, April 17, 1870. Here we are, all settled at our first neat stopping-place, and are in clover, as you will see when I tell you how plummy and lovely it is. We left Morlaix Friday at 8 A.M., and were so amazed at the small bill presented us that we couldn't praise the town enough. You can judge of the cheapness of things, when I say that my share of the expenses from Brest here, including two days at a hotel, car, 'bus, and diligence fare, fees, and everything, was $8. The day was divine, and we had a fine little journey to Lamballe, where the fun began; for instead of a big diligence, we found only a queer ramshackle thing like an insane carryall, with a wooden boot and queer porch for the driver. Our four trunks were piled up behind and tied on with old ropes, our bags stowed in a wooden box on top, and ourselves inside with a fat Frenchman. The humpbacked driver "ya hooped" to the horses, and away we clattered at a wild pace, all feeling dead sure that something would happen, for the old thing bounded and swayed awfully, the trunks were in danger of tumbling off, and to our dismay we soon discovered that the big Frenchman was tipsy. He gabbled to A. as only a tipsy person could, quoted poetry; said he was Victor Hugo's best friend, and a child of Nature; that English ladies were all divine, but too cold,--for when he pressed A.'s hand she told him it was not allowed in England, and he was overwhelmed with remorse; bowed, sighed, rolled his eyes, and told her that he drank much ale, because it flew to his head and gave him "commercial ideas." I never saw anything so perfectly absurd as it was, and after we got used to it we laughed ourselves sick over the lark. You ought to have seen us and our turnout, tearing over the road at a breakneck pace, pitching, creaking, and rattling, the funny driver hooting at the horses, who had their tails done up in chignons, blue harness, and strings of bells, the drunken man warbling, exhorting, and languishing at us all by turns, while A. headed him off with great skill. I sat, a mass of English dignity and coolness, suffering alternate agonies of anxiety and amusement, and May, who tied her head up in a bundle, looked like a wooden image. It was rich; and when we took up first a peasant woman in wooden shoes and fly-away cap, and then a red-nosed priest smoking a long pipe, we were a superb spectacle. In this style we banged into Dinan, stopped at the gate, and were dumped bag and baggage in the square. Finding Madame Coste's man was not here for us, we hired a man to bring our trunks up. To our great amazement, an oldish woman, who was greasing the wheels of a diligence, came, and catching up our big trunks, whipped them into two broad carts, and taking one trotted down the street at a fine pace, followed by the man with the other. That was the finishing touch; and we went laughing after them through the great arched gate into the quaintest, prettiest, most romantic town I ever saw. Narrow streets with overhanging gables, distracting roofs, windows, and porches, carved beams, and every sort of richness. The strong old lady beat the man, and finally landed us close by another old gate at a charming house fronting the south, overlooking a lovely green valley, full of gardens, blooming plum and peach trees, windmills, and a ruined castle, at sight of which we all skipped. Madame Coste received us with rapture, for A. brought a letter from Mrs. L., who stayed here and was the joy of the old lady's soul. We were in great luck, for being early in the season she had three rooms left, and we nabbed them at once,--a salon with old oak walls and wardrobes, blue damask furniture, a fireplace, funny windows, and quaint furniture. A little room out of it for A., and upstairs a larger room for May and me, with two beds draped in green chintz, and carved big wardrobe, etc., and best of all, a sunny window toward the valley. For these rooms and our board we each pay $1 a day, and I call that cheap. It would be worth that to get the fun and air alone, for it is like June, and we sit about with open windows, flowers in the fields, birds singing, and everything spring-like. We took possession at once, and dressed for a dinner at six. We were then presented to our fellow-boarders,--Madame Forney, a buxom widow, her son Gaston, a handsome Frenchy youth of twenty-three, and her daughter, a homely girl of twenty, who is to be married here on the 3d of May. After a great bowing and scraping we had a funny fish dinner, it being Good Friday. When they found we didn't speak French they were "desolated," and begged us to learn at once, which we solemnly vowed to do. Gaston "knew English," so May at once began to teach him more, and the ice being broken we got gay and friendly at once. I could understand them pretty well, but can't talk, and A. told them that I was forbidden to say much on account of my throat. This will give me a chance to get a fair start. May pegs away at her grammar, and with that and the elegant Gaston, she will soon begin to "parlez-vous." After dinner we were borne to the great salon, where a fire, lights, and a piano appeared. Every one sat round and gabbled except the Alcotts, who looked and laughed. Mademoiselle Forney played, and then May convulsed them by singing some _Chants Amériques_, which they thought very lively and droll. They were all attention and devotion to Madame Coste,--a tall old lady with whiskers, who kept embracing A. and beaming at us in her great content at being friends of _chère_ Madame L. A. told them that I was a celebrated authoress, and May a very fine artist, and we were beamed at more than ever. Being tired, we turned in early, after a jolly time in our own little salon, eating chocolate and laying plans. DINAN, April 20, 1870. ... A. and I went shopping. A. got a little bird to enliven our parlor, a sort of sparrow, gray with a red head and a lively song. We named him Bernard du Guesclin (the hero of the town), and call him Bernie. I got some nice gloves for three francs (sixty cents), and a white sun-umbrella for May (forty cents). She needs it when she sketches, and there is always a crowd of children round her to watch and admire; she gives one of them a sou to hold the umbrella, and so gets on nicely. In the P.M. A. and I went to the little village of Lahou, in the valley where the ruined castle is, to a fair. It was a very picturesque sight, for the white-capped women, sitting about on the green hillside, looked like flowers, and the blue blouses of the men and wide-brimmed hats added to the effect. The little street was lined with booths, where they sold nuts, queer cakes, hot sausages, and pancakes, toys, etc. I got a funny cake, just the size and shape of a deep pie-dish, and a jack-knife, for a sou. We also indulged in nuts, and sat on our campstools in a shady place and ate them boldly in the public mart, while enjoying the lively scene. French and English people went by in droll parties, and we coolly sat and stared at them. May is going to sketch the castle, so I won't waste paper describing the pretty place with the ruined church full of rooks, the old mill with the waterwheel housed in vines, or the winding river, and meadows full of blue hyacinths and rosy daisies. Yesterday, A. and I had to return the call of Mademoiselle M., and as she speaks English I got on very well. The stairs to her apartment were so steep that we held on by a velvet-covered rope as we climbed up. In the P.M. we had fun, for we took two donkey carriages and rode to the mineral spring. Gaston was sick and couldn't go, as we had planned, so May drove herself in one, and A. and I in the other. I wish the boys could have seen us, it was so funny. The carriages were bath-chairs with a wee donkey harnessed to each, so small, so neat, and looking so venerable with thin long ears and bits of feet that I felt as if I was driving my grandmother. May was a very imposing sight, alone in her chair under her new umbrella, in her gray suit, with bright gloves and a big whip, driving a gray rat who wouldn't trot unless pounded and banged and howled at in the maddest way. Our steed was bigger, but the most pig-headed old scamp you ever saw, for it took two big women to make him go. I drove, and A. thrashed away with all her might,--our joint efforts only producing occasional short trots which enraged us dreadfully. We laughed till we were sick, it was so very absurd; while May trundled serenely along, enjoying the fine views regardless of her rat, who paced along at his ease, wagging his ears and meditating. We had a nice trip, but didn't drink the water, as iron don't suit us. Coming home, we passed the home of the donkeys, and they at once turned in, and were with much difficulty persuaded to go on by two short girls in caps and short gowns, who ran and shouted "E! E! va oui!" and punched sticks into the poor asses, rattling us over the stones till our eyes danced in our heads. We found it rather hard work, and A. means to buy a horse and straw pony-chaise, so we can drive ourselves in peace where we like.... A. is bargaining for a horse which an Englishman wishes to sell for $50, including harness and cart. We can't hire horses for less than $2 a drive, and donkeys are vile, so it is cheaper to buy, and sell when we go away, and so drive as much as we like. A. knows about such things, and takes all the responsibility.... To-morrow we go on a little excursion in the steamboat down the river, and return _à la_ donkey with the English ladies, who have returned our call and are very friendly. Please forward this little note in an envelope to its address. The child wrote me a pretty letter, which N. sent, and the pa said I wouldn't answer. The child said, "I know she will, she is so nice." So I do. Best love to every one. Don't go home too soon. I shall write to Fred and Jack next time. Good-by. LU. _To M. S._ ... They call each other pet names that convulse us,--"my little pig," "my sweet hen," "my cabbage," and "my tom-cat." A French lady with her son and daughter board here, and their ways amuse us mightily. The girl is to be married next week to a man whom she has seen twice, and never talked to but an hour in her life. She writes to him what her mother dictates, and says she should be ashamed to love him before they were married. Her wedding clothes absorb her entire mind, and her Jules will get a pretty doll when he takes Mademoiselle A. F. to wife. Gaston, the son, puts on _blasé_ airs, though only twenty-two, and languishes at May, for they can't talk, as he does not know English nor she French. April 27. I left my letter to drive to a ruined château, which we went all over, as a part is inhabited by a farmer who keeps his hog in the great banqueting hall, his grain in the chapel, and his hens in the lady's chamber. It was very picturesque; the old rooms, with ivy coming in at the windows, choking up the well, and climbing up the broken towers. The lady of the château was starved to death by her cruel brothers, and buried in the moat, where her bones were found long afterward, and her ghost still haunts the place they say. Here we had cider, tell Pa. Coming home we saw a Dolmen, one of the Druidical remains. It stood in a grove of old pines,--a great post of gray stone, some twenty-five feet high, and very big round. It leaned as if falling, and had queer holes in it. Brittany is full of these relics, which no one can explain, and I was glad to see the mysterious things. Yesterday we took a little trip down the river in a tiny steamer, going through a lock and skimming along between the green banks of the narrow river to Miss M.'s country-house, where we had new milk, and lay on the grass for an hour or so. Then May and Miss M. walked home, and A. and I went in a donkey cart. To-day the girls have gone to La Garaye with Gaston on donkeys. The weather has been cold for a day or two with easterly winds. So I feel it at once and keep warm. It is very unusual at this time, but comes, I suppose, because I've travelled hundreds of miles to get rid of them. It won't last long, and then we shall be hot enough. We lead such quiet, lazy lives I really have nothing to tell. Oh, yes, the _fiancé_ of Mademoiselle has arrived, and amuses us very much. He is a tiny man in uniform, with a red face, big moustache, and blue eyes. He thinks he talks English, and makes such very funny mistakes. He asked us if we had been to "promenade on monkeys" meaning donkeys, and called the Casino "the establishment of dance." He addresses all his attentions to the ma, and only bows to his future wife, who admires her diamonds and is contented. We are going away on the day of the wedding, as it is private. The girls have just returned in great spirits, for A.'s donkey kept lying down, and it took all three to get him up again. They sat in a sort of chair, and looked very funny with the four little legs under them and long ears flopping before. I shall go to Garaye some fine day, and will tell you about it. Adieu, love to all. Yours, LU. _Dinan_, May 6, 1870. DEAR PEOPLE,--I have just got a fat letter full of notices from N.,--all good, and news generally pleasant. The great event of the season is over, and Miss F. is Mrs. C. It was a funny scene, for they had a breakfast the day before, then on Tuesday the wedding. We did not go, as the church is like a tomb, but we saw the bride, in white satin, pearls, orange flowers, and lace, very pretty, and like other brides. Her ma, in purple moire and black lace, was fine to see; and the little groom, in full regimentals, with a sabre as large as himself, was very funny. A lot of people came in carriages to escort them to church; and our little square was full of queer turnouts, smartly dressed people, and a great bustle. There was some mistake about the bride's carriage, and it did not drive up in time, so she stood on the steps till it came as near as it could, and then she trotted out to it on Gaston's arm, with her maid holding up her satin train. Uncle, ma, bride, and brother drove off, but the groom's carriage was delayed by the breaking of a trace, and there he sat, with his fat pa and ma, after every one had gone, fuming, and poking his little cocked hat out of the window, while the man mended the harness, and every one looked on with breathless interest. We went to D---- with Coste in the P.M., and had a fine view of the sea and San Malo. We didn't like D----, and won't go there. When we got home about eight o'clock the wedding dinner was in full blast, and I caught a glimpse of a happy pair at the head of the table, surrounded by a lot of rigged-up ladies and fine men, all gabbing and gabbling as only French folk can. The couple are still here, resting and getting acquainted before they go to Lamballe for a week of festivity. A church wedding is a very funny thing, and I wish you could have seen it. The dry season continues, and the people have processions and masses to pray for rain. One short flurry of hail is all we have had, and the cold winds still blow. When our month is out we shall go somewhere near the sea if it is at all warm. Nothing could be kinder than dear old Coste, and I couldn't be in a better place to be poorly in than this; she coddles me like a mother, and is so grieved that I don't get better. Send Ma a bit of the gorse flower with which the fields are now yellow. Yours, LU. DINAN, May 13, 1870. DEAREST FOLKS,--We drove to Guildo yesterday to see if we should like it for July. It is a queer little town on the seashore, with ruins near by, bright houses, and lots of boats. Rooms a franc a day, and food very cheap. The man of the house--a big, brown, Peggotty sailor--has a sloop, and promised the girls as much sailing as they liked. We may go, but our plans are very vague, and one day we say we will go to one place and the next to another, and shall probably end by staying where we are. Yours, LU. DINAN, May 17, 1870. DEAREST PEOPLE,--We run out and do errands in the cool before breakfast at ten, then we write, sew, and read, and look round, till four, when we go to drive. May and I in the cherry bounce with M. Harmon to drive us, and A. on horseback; for, after endless fuss, she has at last evoked a horse out of chaos, and comes galloping gayly after us as we drive about the lovely roads with the gallant hotel-keeper, Adolph Harmon. We are getting satiated with ruins and châteaux, and plan a trip by water to Nantes; for the way they do it is to hire a big boat and be towed by a horse in the most luxurious manner. _To Anna._ DINAN, May 25, 1870. DEAR BETSEY,[8]--All well. We have also had fun about the queer food, as we don't like brains, liver, etc. A. does; and when we eat some mess, not knowing what it is, and find it is sheep's tails or eels, she exults over us, and writes poems. I wander dreadfully, but the girls are racketing, birdie singing like mad, and nine horses neighing to one another in the place, so my ideas do not flow as clearly as they should. Besides, I expect Gaston to come in every minute to show us his rig; for he is going to a picnic in Breton costume,--a very French affair, for the party are to march two and two, with fiddlers in front, and donkeys bearing the feast in the rear. Such larks! Yesterday we had a funny time. We went to drive in a basket chair, very fine, with a perch behind and a smart harness; but most of the horses here are stallions, and act like time. Ours went very well at first, but in the town took to cutting up, and suddenly pounced on to a pile of brush, and stuck his head into a bake-shop. We tried to get him out, but he only danced and neighed, and all the horses in town seemed to reply. A man came and led him on a bit, but he didn't mean to go, and whisked over to the other side, where he tangled us and himself up with a long string of team horses. I flew out and May soon followed. A. was driving, and kept in while the man led the "critter" back to the stable. I declined my drive with the insane beast, and so we left him and bundled home in the most ignominious manner. All the animals are very queer here, and, unlike ours, excessively big. We went to a ruin one day, and were about to explore the castle, when a sow, with her family of twelve, charged through the gateway at us so fiercely that we fled in dismay; for pigs are not nice when they attack, as we don't know where to bone 'em, and I saw a woman one day whose nose had been bitten off by an angry pig. I flew over a hedge; May tried to follow. I pulled her over head first, and we tumbled into the tower like a routed garrison. It wasn't a nice ruin, but we were bound to see it, having suffered so much. And we did see it, in spite of the pigs, who waylaid us on all sides, and squealed in triumph when we left,--dirty, torn, and tired. The ugly things wander at their own sweet will, and are tall, round-backed, thin wretches, who run like race horses, and are no respecters of persons. Sunday was a great day here, for the children were confirmed. It was a pretty sight to see the long procession of little girls, in white gowns and veils, winding through the flowery garden and the antique square, into the old church, with their happy mothers following, and the boys in their church robes singing as they went. The old priest was too ill to perform the service, but the young one who did announced afterward that if the children would pass the house the old man would bless them from his bed. So all marched away down the street, with crosses and candles, and it was very touching to see the feeble old man stretch out his hands above them as the little white birds passed by with bended heads, while the fresh, boyish voices chanted the responses. This old priest is a very interesting man, for he is a regular saint, helping every one, keeping his house as a refuge for poor and old priests, settling quarrels among the people, and watching over the young people as if they were his own. I shall put him in a story. _Voilà!_ Gaston has just come in, rigged in a white embroidered jacket, with the Dinan coat-of-arms worked in scarlet and yellow silk on it fore and aft; a funny hat, with streamers, and a belt, with a knife, horn, etc. He is handsome, and as fond of finery as a girl. I'll send you his picture next time, and one of Dinan. You will see that Marmee has all she needs, and a girl, and as much money as she wants for being cosey and comfortable. S. E. S. will let her have all she wants, and make her take it. I'm sorry the chapel $100 didn't come, for she likes to feel that she has some of her very own. I have written to Conway and Mrs. Taylor, so that if we decide to take a run to England before we go to Italy, the way will be open.... But Dinan is so healthy and cosey, that we shall linger till the heat makes us long for the sea. Roses, cherries, strawberries, and early vegetables are come, and we are in clover. Dear old Coste broods over us like a motherly hen, and just now desired me to give her affectionate and respectful compliments to my _bonne mère_. Now I'm spun out; so adieu, my darling Nan. Write often, and I will keep sending,--trusting that you will get them in time. Kisses all round. Yours, LU. DINAN, May 30, 1870. DEAR FOLKS,--May has made up such a big letter that I will only add a line to give you the last news of the health of her Highness Princess Louisa. She is such a public character nowadays that even her bones are not her own, and her wails of woe cannot be kept from the long ears of the world,--old donkey as it is! Dr. Kane, who was army surgeon in India, and doctor in England for forty years, says my leg trouble and many of my other woes come from the calomel they gave me in Washington. He has been through the same thing with an Indian jungle fever, and has never got the calomel out of him.... I don't know anything about it, only my leg is the curse of my life. But I think Dr. K.'s iodine of potash will cure it in the end, as it did his arms, after taking it for three months. It is simple, pleasant, and seems to do something to the bones that gives them ease; so I shall sip away and give it a good trial. We are now revelling in big strawberries, green peas, early potatoes, and other nice things, on which we shall grow fat as pigs. We are beginning to think of a trip into Normandy, where the H.'s are. Love to all. By-by! Your loving LU. No news except through N., who yesterday sent me a nice letter with July account of $6,212,--a neat little sum for "the Alcotts, who can't make money!" With $10,000 well invested, and more coming in all the time, I think we may venture to enjoy ourselves, after the hard times we have all had. The cream of the joke is, that we made our own money ourselves, and no one gave us a blessed penny. That does soothe my rumpled soul so much that the glory is not worth thinking of. _To Anna._ DINAN, June 4, 1870. * * * * * The present excitement is the wood which Coste is having put in. Loads keep coming in queer, heavy carts drawn by four horses each, and two men to work the machine. Two men chop the great oak stumps, and a woman puts it in down cellar by the armful. The men get two francs a day,--forty cents! (Wouldn't our $3 a day workmen howl at that sort of wages!) When several carts arrive at once the place is a lively scene. Just now there were three carts and twelve horses, and eight were all up in a snarl, while half-a-dozen ladies stood at their doors and gave advice. One had a half-dressed baby in her arms; one a lettuce she was washing; another her distaff; and a fourth her little bowl of soup, which she ate at on the sidewalk, in the intervals gesticulating so frantically that her sabots rattled on the stones. The horses had a free fight, and the man couldn't seem to manage one big one, who romped about like a wild elephant, till the lady with the baby suddenly set the half-naked cherub on the doorsteps, charged in among the rampant beasts, and, by some magic howl or jerk, brought the bad horse to order, when she quietly returned to her baby, who had sat placidly eating dirt, and with a calm _Voilà, messieurs_, she skipped little Jean into his shirt, and the men sat down to smoke. We are now in great excitement over Gaston, who has lately become so very amiable that we don't know him. We began by letting the spoiled child severely alone. This treatment worked well, and now he offers us things at table, bows when we enter, and to-day presented us with green tulips, violet shrubs, and queer medals all round. We have let little bits of news leak out about us, and they think we are dukes and duchesses in _Amérique_, and pronounce us _très spirituelles; très charmantes; très seductives femmes_. We laugh in private, and are used to having the entire company rise when we enter, and embrace us with ardor, listen with uplifted hands and shrieks of _mon Dieu! grand ciel!_ etc., to all remarks, and point us out in public as _les dames Américaines_. Such is fame! An English lady arrived to-day--a Miss B.--dressed, with English taste, in a little green skirt, pink calico waist, a large crumpled frill, her hair in a tight knot, one front tooth sticking straight out, and a golden oriole in a large cage. She is about forty, very meek and pursy, and the old ladies have been sitting in a heap since breakfast, talking like mad. May has "sack" on the brain just now, and A. has "hose" on the brain; and at this moment they are both gabbling wildly, one saying, "I shall trim it with blue and have it pinked!" the other shrieking, "My hose must be red, with little dragons in black all over it, like small-pox!" and the bird flies to her upper perch in dismay at the riot, while I sit and laugh, with an occasional duennaish, "Young ladies, less noise if you please!" It rained last eve, and we are waiting for it to dry before going out in the donkey chaise to buy a warm bun and some strawberries for lunch, to be eaten as we parade the town and drink ale at intervals. * * * * * Do tell me how things are about my pictures. I see they are advertised, and if they sell I want my share of the profits. Send me one of those that are in the market, after taking off the heavy card. Love to all, and the best of luck. Ever your LU. HOTEL D'UNIVERSE, TOURS, June 17, 1870. DEAREST PEOPLE,--Our wanderings have begun again, and here we are in this fine old city in a cosey hotel, as independent and happy as three old girls can be. We left Dinan Wednesday at 7 A.M. Gaston got up to see us off,--a most unusual and unexpected honor; also Mrs. B. and all the old ladies, whom we left dissolved in tears. We had a lovely sail down the river to St. Malo, where we breakfasted at Hotel Franklin, a quaint old house in a flowery corner. At twelve we went by rail to Le Mans,--a long trip,--and arrived at 6 P.M. so tired that we went to bed in the moonlight while a band played in the square before the hotel, and the sidewalks before the café were full of people taking ices and coffee round little tables. Next morning we went to see the famous cathedral and had raptures, for it is like a dream in stone. Pure Gothic of the twelfth century, with the tomb of Berengaria, wife of Coeur de Leon, stained glass of the richest kind, dim old chapels with lamps burning, a gorgeous high altar all crimson and gold and carmine, and several organs. Anything more lovely and divine I never saw, for the arches, so light and graceful, seemed to soar up one above the other like the natural curves of trees or the spray of a great fountain. We spent a long time here and I sat above in the quaint old chapel with my eyes and heart full, and prayed a little prayer for my family. Old women and men knelt about in corners telling their beads, and the priest was quietly saying his prayers at the altar. Outside it was a pile of gray stone, with towers and airy pinnacles full of carved saints and busy rooks. I don't think we shall see anything finer anywhere. It was very hot for there had been no rain for four months, so we desired to start for town at 5 and get in about 8 as it is light then. We had a pleasant trip in the cool of the day, and found Tours a great city, like Paris on a small scale. Our hotel is on the boulevard, and the trees, fountains, and fine carriages make our windows very tempting. We popped into bed early; and my bones are so much better that I slept without any opium or anything,--a feat I have not performed for some time. This morning we had coffee and rolls in bed, then as it was a fine cool day we dressed up clean and nice and went out for a walk. At the post-office we found your letters of May 31, one from Nan and Ma, and one from L. We were exalted, and went into the garden and read them in bliss, with the grand cathedral right before us. Cathedral St. Martin, twelfth century, with tomb of Charles XIII.'s children, the armor of Saint Louis, fine pictures of Saint Martin, his cloak, etc. May will tell you about it and I shall put in a photograph, if I can find one. We are now--12 o'clock--in our pleasant room all round the table writing letters and resting for another trip by and by. The _Fête Dieu_ is on Monday,--very splendid,--and we shall then see the cathedral in its glory. To-day a few hundred children were having their first communion there, girls all in white, with scarlet boys, crosses, candles, music, priests, etc. Get a Murray, and on the map of France follow us to Geneva, _via_ St. Malo, Le Mans, Tours, Amboise and Blois, Orleans, Nevers, Autun. We may go to the Vosges instead of the Jura if Mrs. H. can go, as A. wants to see her again. But we head for the Alps of some sort and will report progress as we go. My money holds out well so far, as we go second class. _To her Father._ TOURS, June 20, 1870. DEAR PAPA,--Before we go on to fresh "châteaux and churches new," I must tell you about the sights here in this pleasant, clean, handsome old city. May has done the church for you, and I send a photograph to give some idea of it. The inside is very beautiful; and we go at sunset to see the red light make the gray walls lovely outside and the shadows steal from chapel to chapel inside, filling the great church with what is really "a dim religious gloom." We wandered about it the other evening till moonrise, and it was very interesting to see the people scattered here and there at their prayers; some kneeling before Saint Martin's shrine, some in a flowery little nook dedicated to the infant Christ, and one, a dark corner with a single candle lighting up a fine picture of the Mater Dolorosa, where a widow all in her weeds sat alone, crying and praying. In another a sick old man sat, while his old wife knelt by him praying with all her might to Saint Gratien (the patron saint of the church) for her dear old invalid. Nuns and priests glided about, and it was all very poetical and fine, till I came to an imposing priest in a first class chapel who was taking snuff and gaping, instead of piously praying. The _Fête Dieu_ was yesterday, and I went out to see the procession. The streets were hung with old tapestry, and sheets covered with flowers. Crosses, crowns, and bouquets were suspended from house to house, and as the procession approached, women ran out and scattered green boughs and rose-leaves before the train. A fine band and a lot of red soldiers came first, then the different saints on banners, carried by girls, and followed by long trains of girls bearing the different emblems. Saint Agnes and her lamb was followed by a flock of pretty young children all in white, carrying tall white lilies that filled the air with their fragrance. "Mary our Mother" was followed by orphans with black ribbons crossed on their breasts. Saint Martin led the charity boys in their gray suits, etc. The Host under a golden canopy was borne by priests in gorgeous rig, and every one knelt as it passed with censors swinging, candles burning, boys chanting, and flowers dropping from the windows. A pretty young lady ran out and set her baby in a pile of green leaves in the middle of the street before the Host, and it passed over the little thing who sat placidly staring at the show and admiring its blue shoes. I suppose it is a saved and sacred baby henceforth. It was a fine pageant and quite touching, some of it; but as usual, I saw something funny to spoil the solemnity. A very fat and fine priest, who walked with his eyes upon his book and sung like a pious bumblebee, suddenly destroyed the effect by rapping a boy over the head with his gold prayer-book, as the black sheep strayed a little from the flock. I thought the old saint swore also. The procession went from the cathedral to Charlemagne's Tower, an old, old relic, all that is left of the famous church which once covered a great square. We went to see it, and the stones looked as if they were able to tell wonderful tales of the scenes they had witnessed all these hundreds of years. I think the "Reminiscences of a Rook" would be a good story, for these old towers are full of them, and they are long-lived birds. AMBOISE, THE GOLDEN LION, Tuesday, June 21, 1870. Here we go again! now in an utterly different scene from Tours. We left at 5 P.M., and in half an hour were here on the banks of the Loire in a queer little inn where we are considered duchesses at least, owing to our big trunks and A.'s good French. I am the Madame, May Mam'selle, and A. the companion. Last evening being lovely, we went after dinner up to the castle where Charles VIII. was born in 1470. The Arab chief, Abd-el-Kader, and family were kept prisoners here, and in the old garden is a tomb with the crescent over it where some of them were buried. May was told about the terrace where the Huguenots hung thick and the court enjoyed the sight till the Loire, choked up with dead bodies, forced them to leave. We saw the little low door where Anne of Brittany's first husband Charles VIII. "bumped his head" and killed himself, as he was running through to play bowls with his wife. It has been modernized and is now being restored as in old times, so the interior was all in a toss. But we went down the winding road inside the tower, up which the knights and ladies used to ride. Father would have enjoyed the _pleached_ walks, for they are cut so that looking down on them, it is like a green floor, and looking up it is a thick green wall. There also Margaret of Anjou and her son were reconciled to Warwick. Read Murray, I beg, and see all about it. We sat in the twilight on the terrace and saw what Fred would have liked, a little naked boy ride into the river on one horse after another, and swim them round in the deep water till they were all clean and cool. This morning at 7 o'clock we drove to Chenonceaux, the chateau given by Henry II. to Diane de Poictiers. It was a lovely day, and we went rolling along through the most fruitful country I ever saw. Acre on acre of yellow grain, vineyards miles long, gardens and orchards full of roses and cherries. The Cher is a fine river winding through the meadows, where haymakers were at work and fat cattle feeding. It was a very happy hour, and the best thing I saw was May's rapturous face opposite, as she sat silently enjoying everything, too happy to talk. The château built over the water is very interesting; Catherine de Medicis took it away from Diane when the king died, and her room is still seen as she left it; also a picture of Diane, a tall simpering woman in a tunic, with hounds, stag, cupids, and other rubbish round her. The gallery of pictures was fine; for here were old, old portraits and bas-reliefs, Agnes Sorel, Montaigne, Rabelais, many kings and queens, and among them Lafayette and dear old Ben Franklin. There is a little theatre where Rousseau's plays were acted. This place at the time of the Revolution belonged to the grandmother of George Sand, and she was so much respected that no harm was done to it. So three cheers for Madame Dupin! Among the pictures were Ninon D'Enclos, and Madame Sevigné holding a picture of her beloved daughter. The Guidos, etc. I don't care for so much as they were all grimy and convulsive, and I prefer pictures of people who really lived, to these impossible Venuses and repulsive saints,--bad taste, but I can't help it. The walls were hung with stamped leather and tapestry, carved chairs in which queens had sat, tables at which kings had eaten, books they had read, and glasses that had reflected their faces were all about, and I just revelled. The old kitchen had a fireplace quaint enough to suit Pa, with immense turn-spits, cranes, andirons, etc. The chapel, balcony, avenue, draw-bridge, and all the other pleasing bits were enjoyed, and I stole a sprig of jasmine from the terrace which I shall press for Mamma. Pray take extra care of the photographs, for if lost, we cannot replace them, and I want to make a fine album of pictures with flowers and descriptions after I get home.... But all goes well and we enjoy much every day. Love to all, LU. _To her Mother._ BLOIS, June 24, 1870. DEAR MARMEE,--On this, Lizzie's and Johnny's birthday, I'll begin a letter to you. We found at the Poste Restante here two "Moods" and a paper for me, one book from L., and one from N. I think the pictures horrid, and sent them floating down the Loire as soon as possible, and put one book at the bottom of my trunk and left the other where no one will find it. I couldn't read the story, and try to forget that I ever wrote it. Blois is a noisy, dusty, soldierly city with nothing to admire but the river, nearly dry now with this four months' drought, and the old castle where Francis I., Louis XII., Catherine de Medicis, and other great folks lived. It has been very splendidly restored by the Government, and the ceilings are made with beams blazoned with coats-of-arms, the walls hung with cameos, painted with the same design as the stamped leather in old times, and the floors inlaid with colored tiles. Brown and gold, scarlet, blue, and silver, quaint dragons and flowers, porcupines and salamanders, crowns and letters, glittered everywhere. We saw the guard-room and the very chimney where the Duc de Guise was leaning when the king Henry III. sent for him; the little door where the king's gentlemen fell upon and stabbed him with forty wounds; the cabinet where the king and his mother plotted the deed; the chapel where the monks prayed for success; and the great hall where the body lay covered with a cloak till the king came and looked at it and kicked his dead enemy, saying, "I did not think he was so tall." We also saw the cell where the brother of the duke was murdered the next day, and the attic entire where their bodies were burnt, after which the ashes were thrown into the Loire by order of the king; the window out of which Marie de Medicis lowered herself when her son Louis XIII. imprisoned her there; the recess where Catherine de Medicis died; and many other interesting places. What a set of rascals these old kings and queens were! The _Salle des États_ was very gorgeous, and here in a week or so are to be tried the men who lately fired at the Emperor. It will be a grand, a fine sight when the great arched hall is full. I got a picture of the castle, and one of a fireplace for Pa. It is a mass of gold and color, with the porcupine of Louis XIII. and the ermine of his wife Anne of Brittany, their arms, in medallion over it. At 5 P.M. we go on to Orleans for a day, where I shall get some relics of Joan of Arc for Nan. We shall pass Sunday at Bourges where the great church is, and then either to Geneva or the Jura, for a few weeks of rest. GENEVA, June 29, 1870. It seems almost like getting home again to be here where I never thought to come again when I went away five years ago. We are at the Metropole Hotel right on the lake with a glimpse of Mount Blanc from our windows. It is rather fine after the grimy little inns of Brittany, and we enjoy a sip of luxury and put on our best gowns with feminine satisfaction after living in old travelling suits for a fortnight. I began my letter at Blois, where we spent a day or two. At Orleans we only passed a night, but we had time to see the famous statue of the Maid, put up in gratitude by the people of the city she saved. It is a fine statue of Joan in her armor on horseback, with her sword drawn. Round the base of the statue are bronzed bas-reliefs of her life from the girl with her sheep, to the martyr at the stake. They were very fine, but don't show much in the photograph which I got for Nan, remembering the time when she translated Schiller's play for me. At Bourges we saw the great cathedral, but didn't like it as well as that in Tours. We only spent a night there, and A. bought an antique ring of the time of Francis I.,--an emerald set in diamonds. It cost $9, and is very quaint and handsome. Moulins we reached Sunday noon, and at 3 o'clock went to vespers in the old church, where we saw a good deal of mumbo-jumbo by red, purple, and yellow priests, and heard a boy with a lovely voice sing in the hidden choir like a little angel among the clouds. A. had a fancy to stay a week, if we could find rooms out of town in some farm-house; for the handsome white cattle have captivated her, and we were rather tired. So the old lady at the hotel said she had a little farm-house out in the fields, and we should go see it with her in basket _chay_. After dinner we all piled in and went along a dusty road to a little dirty garden-house with two rooms and a few cabbages and rose-bushes round it. She said we could sleep and eat at the hotel and come down here for the day. That didn't suit at all, so we declined; and on Monday morning we set out for Lyons. It was a very interesting trip under, over, and through the mountains with two engines and much tunnelling and up-and-down grading. May was greatly excited at the queer things we did, and never knew that cars could turn such sharp corners. We wound about so that we could see the engine whisking out of sight round one corner while we were turning another, and the long train looked like a snake winding through the hills. The tunnels were so long that lamps were lighted, and so cold we put on our sacks while passing in the darkness. The scenery was very fine; and after we left Lyons, where we merely slept, the Alps began to appear, and May and I stared in blissful silence; for we had two tall old men opposite, and a little priest, so young that we called him the Rev. boy. He slept and said his prayers most of the time, stealing sly looks at May's hair, A.'s pretty hands, and my buckled shoes, which were like his own and seemed to strike him as a liberty on my part. The old boys were very jolly, especially the one with three chins, who smiled paternally upon us and tried to talk. But we were very English and mum, and he thought we didn't understand French, and confided to his friend that he didn't see "how the English could travel and know not the French tongue." They sang, gabbled, slept, and slapped one another at intervals, and were very amusing till they left, and another very handsome Booth-like priest took their places. _To her Father._ BEX, July 14, 1870. DEAR PA,--As I have not written to you yet, I will send you a picture-letter and tell you about the very interesting old Count Sz-- who is here. This morning he asked us to go to the hills and see some curious trees which he says were planted from acorns and nuts brought from Mexico by Atala. We found some very ancient oaks and chestnuts, and the enthusiastic old man told us the story about the Druids who once had a church, amphitheatre, and sacrificial altar up there. No one knows much about it, and he imagines a good deal to suit his own pet theory. You would have liked to hear him hold forth about the races and Zoroaster, Plato, etc. He is a Hungarian of a very old family, descended from Semiramide and Zenobia. He believes that the body can be cured often by influencing the soul, and that doctors should be priests, and priests doctors, as the two affect the body and soul which depend on one another. He is doing a great deal for Miss W., who has tried many doctors and got no help. I never saw such a kindly, simple, enthusiastic, old soul, for at sixty-seven he is as full of hope and faith and good-will as a young man. I told him I should like my father to see a little book he has written, and he is going to give me one. We like this quiet little place among the mountains, and pass lazy days; for it is very warm, and we sit about on our balconies enjoying the soft air, the moonlight, and the changing aspect of the hills. May had a fine exciting time going up St. Bernard, and is now ready for another.... The Polish Countess and her daughter have been reading my books and are charmed with them. Madame says she is not obliged to turn down any pages so that the girls may not read them, as she does in many books, "All is so true, so sweet, so pious, she may read every word." I send by this mail the count's little pamphlet. I don't know as it amounts to much, but I thought you might like to see it. Love to every one, and write often to your Affectionate daughter L. M. A. BEX, July 18, 1870. DEAR PEOPLE,--The breaking out of this silly little war between France and Prussia will play the deuce with our letters. I have had none from you for a long time; and Alexandre, the English waiter here, says that the mails will be left to come as they can, for the railroads are all devoted to carrying troops to the seat of war. The French have already crossed the Rhine, and rumors of a battle came last eve; but the papers have not arrived, and no letters for any one, so all are fuming for news, public and private, and I am howling for my home letter, which is more important than all the papers on the continent.... Don't be worried if you don't hear regularly, or think us in danger. Switzerland is out of the mess, and if she gets in, we can skip over into Italy, and be as cosey as possible. It will make some difference in money, perhaps, as Munroe in Paris is our banker, and we shall be plagued about our letters, otherwise the war won't effect us a bit; I dare say you know as much about it as we do, and Marmee is predicting "a civil war" all over the world. We hear accounts of the frightful heat with you. Don't wilt away before we come.... Lady Amberley is a trump, and I am glad she says a word for her poor sex though she _is_ a peeress.... I should like to have said of me what Hedge says of Dickens; and when I die, I should prefer such a memory rather than a tomb in Westminster Abbey. * * * * * I hope to have a good letter from Nan soon. May does the descriptions so well that I don't try it, being lazy. LU. _To Anna._ SUNDAY, July 24, 1870. ... The war along the Rhine is sending troops of travellers to Switzerland for refuge; and all the large towns are brimful of people flying from Germany. It won't trouble us, for we have done France and don't mean to do Germany. So when August is over, we shall trot forward to Italy, and find a warm place for our winter-quarters. At any time twenty-four hours carries us over the Simplon, so we sit at ease and don't care a straw for old France and Prussia. Russia, it is reported, has joined in the fight, but Italy and England are not going to meddle, so we can fly to either "in case of fire."[9] BEX, July 27, 1870. We heard of Dickens's death some weeks ago and have been reading notices, etc., in all the papers since. One by G. Greenwood in the Tribune was very nice. I shall miss my old Charlie, but he is not the old idol he once was.... Did you know that Higginson and a little girl friend had written out the Operatic Tragedy in "Little Women" and set the songs to music and it was all to be put in "Our Young Folks." What are we coming to in our old age? Also I hope to see the next designs N. has got for "Little Women." I know nothing about them. _To her Mother._ 3 P.M., BEX, July 31, 1870. Papers are suppressed by the Government so we know nothing about the war, except the rumors that float about. But people seem to think that Europe is in for a general fight, and there is no guessing when it will end. The trouble about getting into Italy is, that civil war always breaks out there and things are so mixed up that strangers get into scrapes among the different squabblers. When the P.'s were abroad during the last Italian fuss, they got shut up in some little city and would have been killed by Austrians, who were rampaging round the place drunk and mad, if a woman had not hid them in a closet for a day and night, and smuggled them out at last, when they ran for their lives. I don't mean to get into any mess, and between Switzerland and England we can manage for a winter. London is so near home and so home-like that we shall be quite handy and can run up to Boston at any time. Perhaps Pa will step across to see us. All these plans may be knocked in the head to-morrow and my next letter may be dated from the Pope's best parlor or Windsor Castle; but I like to spin about on ups and downs so you can have something to talk about at Apple Slump. Uncertainty gives a relish to things, so we chase about and have a dozen plans a day. It is an Alcott failing you know.... Love to all and bless you, Ever yours LU. BEX, Aug. 7, 1870. DEAR MR. NILES,--I keep receiving requests from editors to write for their papers and magazines. I am truly grateful, but having come abroad for rest I am not inclined to try the treadmill till my year's vacation is over. So to appease these worthy gentlemen and excuse my seeming idleness I send you a trifle in rhyme,[10] which you can (if you think it worth the trouble) set going as a general answer to everybody; for I can't pay postage in replies to each separately,--"it's very costly." Mr. F. said he would pay me $10, $15, $20 for any little things I would send him; so perhaps you will let him have it first. The war makes the bankers take double toll on our money, so we feel very poor and as if we ought to be earning, not spending; only we are _so_ lazy we can't bear to think of it in earnest.... We shall probably go to London next month if the war forbids Italy for the winter; and if we can't get one dollar without paying five for it, we shall come home disgusted. Perhaps if I can do nothing else this year I could have a book of short stories, old and new, for Christmas. F. and F. have some good ones, and I have the right to use them. We could call them "Jo March's Necessity Stories." Would it go with new ones added and good illustrations? I am rising from my ashes in a most phoenix-like manner. L. M.A. _To her Mother._ VEVAY, PENSION PARADIS, Aug. 11, 1870. DEAR MARMEE,--.... This house is very cosey, and the food excellent. I thought it would be when I heard gentlemen liked it,--they always want good fodder. There are only three now,--an old Spaniard and his son, and a young Frenchman. We see them at meals, and the girls play croquet with them.... This is the gay season here, and in spite of the war Vevay is full. The ex-Queen of Spain and her family are here at the Grand Hotel; also Don Carlos, the rightful heir to the Spanish throne. Our landlady says that her house used to be full of Spaniards, who every day went in crowds to call on the two kings, Alphonse and Carlos. We see brown men and women with black eyes driving round in fine coaches, with servants in livery, who I suppose are the Court people. The papers tell us that the French have lost two big battles; the Prussians are in Strasbourg, and Paris in a state of siege. The papers are also full of theatrical messages from the French to the people, asking them to come up and be slaughtered for _la patrie_, and sober, cool reports from the Prussians. I side with the Prussians, for they sympathized with us in our war. Hooray for old Pruss!... France is having a bad time. Princess Clotilde passed through Geneva the other day with loads of baggage, flying to Italy; and last week a closed car with the imperial arms on it went by here in the night,--supposed to be Matilde and other royal folks flying away from Paris. The Prince Imperial has been sent home from the seat of war; and poor Eugénie is doing her best to keep things quiet in Paris. The French here say that a republic is already talked of; and the Emperor is on his last legs in every way. He is sick, and his doctor won't let him ride, and so nervous he can't command the army as he wanted to. Poor old man! one can't help pitying him when all his plans fail. We still dawdle along, getting fat and hearty. The food is excellent. A breakfast of coffee and tip-top bread, fresh butter, with eggs or fried potatoes, at 8; a real French dinner at 1.30, of soup, fish, meat, game, salad, sweet messes, and fruit, with wine; and at 7 cold meat, salad, sauce, tea, and bread and butter. It is grape time now, and for a few cents we get pounds, on which we feast all day at intervals. We walk and play as well as any one, and feel so well I ought to do something.... Fred and Jack would like to look out of my window now and see the little boys playing in the lake. They are there all day long like little pigs, and lie around on the warm stones to dry, splashing one another for exercise. One boy, having washed himself, is now washing his clothes, and all lying out to dry together.... Ever yours, LU. _To Anna._ VEVAY, Aug. 21, 1870. I had such a droll dream last night I must tell you. I thought I was returning to Concord after my trip, and was alone. As I walked from the station I missed Mr. Moore's house, and turning the corner, found the scene so changed that I did not know where I was. Our house was gone, and in its place stood a great gray stone castle, with towers and arches and lawns and bridges, very fine and antique. Somehow I got into it without meeting any one of you, and wandered about trying to find my family. At last I came across Mr. Moore, papering a room, and asked him where his house was. He didn't know me, and said,-- "Oh! I sold it to Mr. Alcott for his school, and we live in Acton now." "Where did Mr. Alcott get the means to build this great concern?" I asked. "Well, he _gave_ his own land, and took the great pasture his daughter left him,--the one that died some ten years ago." "So I am dead, am I?" says I to myself, feeling so queerly. "Government helped build this place, and Mr. A. has a fine college here," said Mr. Moore, papering away again. I went on, wondering at the news, and looked into a glass to see how I looked dead. I found myself a fat old lady, with gray hair and specs,--very like E. P. P. I laughed, and coming to a Gothic window, looked out and saw hundreds of young men and boys in a queer flowing dress, roaming about the parks and lawns; and among them was Pa, looking as he looked thirty years ago, with brown hair and a big white neckcloth, as in the old times. He looked so plump and placid and young and happy I was charmed to see him, and nodded; but he didn't know me; and I was so grieved and troubled at being a Rip Van Winkle, I cried, and said I had better go away and not disturb any one,--and in the midst of my woe, I woke up. It was all so clear and funny, I can't help thinking that it may be a foreshadowing of something real. I used to dream of being famous, and it has partly become true; so why not Pa's college blossom, and he get young and happy with his disciples? I only hope he won't quite forget me when I come back, fat and gray and old. Perhaps his dream is to come in another world, where everything is fresh and calm, and the reason why he didn't recognize me was because I was still in this work-a-day world, and so felt old and strange in this lovely castle in the air. Well, he is welcome to my fortune; but the daughter who did die ten years ago is more likely to be the one who helped him build his School of Concord up aloft. I can see how the dream came; for I had been looking at Silling's boys in their fine garden, and wishing I could go in and know the dear little lads walking about there, in the forenoon. I had got a topknot at the barber's, and talked about my gray hairs, and looking in the glass thought how fat and old I was getting, and had shown the B.'s Pa's picture, which they thought saintly, etc. I believe in dreams, though I am free to confess that "cowcumbers" for tea may have been the basis of this "ally-gorry-cal wision."... As we know the Consul at Spezzia,--that is, we have letters to him, as well as to many folks in Rome, etc.,--I guess we shall go; for the danger of Europe getting into the fight is over now, and we can sail to England or home any time from Italy.... Love to every one. Kiss my _cousin_ for me. Ever your LU. _To Mr. Niles._ AUGUST 23, 1870. Your note of August 2 has just come, with a fine budget of magazines and a paper, for all of which many thanks. * * * * * Don't give my address to any one. I don't want the young ladies' notes. They can send them to Concord, and I shall get them next year. * * * * * The boys at Silling's school are a perpetual source of delight to me; and I stand at the gate, like the Peri, longing to go in and play with the lads. The young ladies who want to find live Lauries can be supplied here, for Silling has a large assortment always on hand. My B. says she is constantly trying to incite me to literary effort, but I hang fire. So I do,--but only that I may go off with a bang by and by, _à la mitrailleuse_. L. M. A. _To her Family._ VEVAY, Aug. 29, 1870. DEAR PEOPLE,--... M. Nicaud, the owner of this house,--a funny old man, with a face so like a parrot that we call him M. Perrot,--asked us to come and visit him at his _châlet_ up among the hills. He is building a barn there, and stays to see that all goes well; so we only see him on Sundays, when he convulses us by his funny ways. Last week seven of us went up in a big landau, and the old dear entertained us like a prince. We left the carriage at the foot of a little steep path, and climbed up to the dearest old _châlet_ we ever saw. Here Pa Nicaud met us, took us up the outside steps into his queer little salon, and regaled us with his sixty-year old wine and nice little cakes. We then set forth, in spite of clouds and wind, to view the farm and wood. It showered at intervals, but no one seemed to care; so we trotted about under umbrellas, getting mushrooms, flowers, and colds, viewing the Tarpeian Rock, and sitting on rustic seats to enjoy the _belle vue_, which consisted of fog. It was such a droll lark that we laughed and ran, and enjoyed the damp picnic very much. Then we had a tip-top Swiss dinner, followed by coffee, three sorts of wine, and cigars. Every one smoked, and as it poured guns, the old Perrot had a blazing fire made, round which we sat, talking many languages, singing, and revelling. We had hardly got through dinner and seen another foggy view when tea was announced, and we stuffed again, having pitchers of cream, fruit, and a queer but very nice dish of slices of light bread dipped in egg and fried, and eaten with sugar. The buxom Swiss maid flew and grinned, and kept serving up some new mess from her tiny dark kitchen. It cleared off, and we walked home in spite of our immense exploits in the eating line. Old Perrot escorted us part way down, and we gave three cheers for him as we parted. Then we showed Madame and the French governess and Don Juan (the Spanish boy) some tall walking, though the roads were very steep and rough and muddy. We tramped some five miles; and our party (May, A., the governess, and I) got home long before Madame and Don Juan, who took a short cut, and wouldn't believe that we didn't get a lift somehow. I felt quite proud of my old pins; for they were not tired, and none the worse for the long walk. I think they are really all right now, for the late cold weather has not troubled them in the least; and I sleep--O ye gods, how I do sleep!--ten or twelve hours sound, and get up so drunk with dizziness it is lovely to see. Aint I grateful? Oh, yes! oh, yes! We began French lessons to-day, May and I, of the French governess,--a kind old girl who only asks two francs a lesson. We _must_ speak the language, for it is disgraceful to be so stupid; so we have got to work, and mean to be able to _parlez-vous_ or die. The war is still a nuisance, and we may be here some time, and really need some work; for we are so lazy we shall be spoilt, if we don't fall to.... I gave Count C. Pa's message, and he was pleased. He reads no English, and is going to Hungary soon; so Pa had better not send the book.... LU. VEVAY, Sept. 10, 1870. DEAR PEOPLE,--As all Europe seems to be going to destruction, I hasten to drop a line before the grand smash arrives. We mean to skip over the Alps next week, if weather and war permit; for we are bound to see Milan and the lakes, even if we have to turn and come back without a glimpse of Rome. The Pope is beginning to perk up; and Italy and England and Russia seem ready to join in the war, now that France is down. Think of Paris being bombarded and smashed up like Strasbourg. We never shall see the grand old cathedral at Strasbourg now, it is so spoilt. Vevay is crammed with refugees from Paris and Strasbourg. Ten families applied here yesterday.... Our house is brimful, and we have funny times. The sick Russian lady and her old Ma make a great fuss if a breath of air comes in at meal times, and expect twenty people to sit shut tight in a smallish room for an hour on a hot day. We protested, and Madame put them in the parlor, where they glower as we pass, and lock the door when they can. The German Professor is learning English, and is a quiet, pleasant man. The Polish General, a little cracked, is very droll, and bursts out in the middle of the general chat with stories about transparent apples and golden horses.... Benda, the crack book-and-picture man, has asked May if she was the Miss Alcott who wrote the popular books; for he said he had many calls for them, and wished to know where they could be found. We told him "at London," and felt puffed up.... May and I delve away at French; but it makes my head ache, and I don't learn enough to pay for the trouble. I never could _study_, you know, and suffer such agony when I try that it is piteous to behold. The little brains I have left I want to keep for future works, and not exhaust them on grammar,--vile invention of Satan! May gets on slowly, and don't have fits after it; so she had better go on (the lessons only cost two francs).... L. M. A. _To her Mother._ LAGO DI COMO, Oct. 8, 1870. DEAREST MARMEE,--A happy birthday, and many of 'em! Here we actually are in the long-desired Italy, and find it as lovely as we hoped. Our journey was a perfect success,--sunlight, moonlight, magnificent scenery, pleasant company, no mishaps, and one long series of beautiful pictures all the way. Crossing the Simplon is an experience worth having; for without any real danger, fatigue, or hardship, one sees some of the finest as well as most awful parts of these wonderful Alps. The road,--a miracle in itself! for all Nature seems to protest against it, and the elements never tire of trying to destroy it. Only a Napoleon would have dreamed of making a path through such a place; and he only cared for it as a way to get his men and cannon into an enemy's country by this truly royal road. May has told you about our trip; so I will only add a few bits that she forgot. Our start in the dawn from Brieg, with two diligences, a carriage, and a cart, was something between a funeral and a caravan: first an immense diligence with seven horses, then a smaller one with four, then our _calèche_ with two, and finally the carrier's cart with one. It was very exciting,--the general gathering of sleepy travellers in the dark square, the tramping of horses, the packing in, the grand stir of getting off; then the slow winding up, up, up out of the valley toward the sun, which came slowly over the great hills, rising as we never saw it rise before. The still, damp pine-forests kept us in shadow a long time after the white mountain-tops began to shine. Little by little we wound through a great gorge, and then the sun came dazzling between these grand hills, showing us a new world. Peak after peak of the Bernese Oberland rose behind us, and great white glaciers lay before us; while the road crept like a narrow line, in and out over chasms that made us dizzy to look at, under tunnels, and through stone galleries with windows over which dashed waterfalls from the glaciers above. Here and there were refuges, a hospice, and a few _châlets_, where shepherds live their wild, lonely lives. In the P.M. we drove rapidly down toward Italy through the great Valley of Gondo,--a deep rift in rock thousands of feet deep, and just wide enough for the road and a wild stream that was our guide; a never-to-be-forgotten place, and a fit gateway to Italy, which soon lay smiling below us. The change is very striking; and when we came to Lago Maggiore lying in the moonlight we could only sigh for happiness, and love and look and look. After a good night's rest at Stresa, we went in a charming gondola-sort of boat to see Isola Bella,--the island you see in the chromo over the fireplace at home,--a lovely island, with famous castle, garden, and town on it. The day was as balmy as summer, and we felt like butterflies after a frost, and fluttered about, enjoying the sunshine all day. A sail by steamer brought us to Luino, where we went on the diligence to Lugano. Moonlight all the way, and a gay driver, who wound his horn as we clattered into market-places and over bridges in the most gallant style. The girls were on top, and in a state of rapture all the way. After supper in a vaulted, frescoed hall, with marble floors, pillars, and galleries, we went to a room which had green doors, red carpet, blue walls, and yellow bed-covers,--all so gay! It was like sleeping in a rainbow. As if a heavenly lake under our windows with moonlight _ad libitum_ wasn't enough, we had music next door; and on leaning out of a little back window, we made the splendid discovery that we could look on to the stage of the opera-house across a little alley. My Nan can imagine with what rapture I stared at the scenes going on below me, and how I longed for her as I stood there wrapped in my yellow bed-quilt, and saw gallant knights in armor warble sweetly to plump ladies in masks, or pretty peasants fly wildly from ardent lovers in red tights; also a dishevelled maid who tore her hair in a forest, while a man aloft made thunder and lightning,--and _I saw him do it_! It was the climax to a splendid day; for few travellers can go to the opera luxuriously in their night-gowns, and take naps between the acts as I did. A lovely sail next morning down the lake; then a carriage to Menaggio; and then a droll boat, like a big covered market-wagon with a table and red-cushioned seats, took us and our trunks to Cadenabbia, for there is only a donkey road to the little town. At the hotel on the edge of the lake we found Nelly L., a sweet girl as lovely as Minnie, and so glad to see us; for since her mother died in Venice last year she has lived alone with her maid. She had waited for us, and next day went to Milan, where we join her on Monday. She paints; and May and she made plans at once to study together, and enjoy some of the free art-schools at Milan and Naples or Florence, if we can all be together. It is a great chance for May, and I mean she shall have a good time, and not wait for tools and teachers; for all is in the way of her profession, and of use to her. Cadenabbia is only two hotels and a few villas opposite Bellagio, which is a town, and fashionable. We were rowed over to see it by our boatman, who spends his time at the front of the stone steps before the hotel, and whenever we go out he tells us, "The lake is tranquil; the hour is come for a walk on the water," and is as coaxing as only an Italian can be. He is amiably tipsy most of the time. To-day it rains so we cannot go out, and I rest and write to my Marmee in a funny room with a stone floor inlaid till it looks like castile soap, a ceiling in fat cupids and trumpeting fairies, a window on the lake, with balcony, etc. Hand-organs with jolly singing boys jingle all day, and two big bears go by led by a man with a drum. The boys would laugh to see them dance on their hind legs, and shoulder sticks like soldiers. ... All looks well, and if the winter goes on rapidly and pleasantly as the summer we shall soon be thinking of home, unless one of us decides to stay. I shall post this at Milan to-morrow, and hope to find letters there from you. By-by till then. _Journal._ _October_, 1870.--A memorable month.... Off for Italy on the 2d. A splendid journey over the Alps and Maggiore by moonlight. Heavenly days at the lakes, and so to Milan, Parma, Pisa, Bologna, and Florence. Disappointed in some things, but found Nature always lovely and wonderful; so didn't mind faded pictures, damp rooms, and the cold winds of "sunny Italy." Bought furs at Florence, and arrived in Rome one rainy night. _November 10th._--In Rome, and felt as if I had been there before and knew all about it. Always oppressed with a sense of sin, dirt, and general decay of all things. Not well; so saw things through blue glasses. May in bliss with lessons, sketching, and her dreams. A. had society, her house, and old friends. The artists were the best company; counts and princes very dull, what we saw of them. May and I went off on the Campagna, and criticised all the world like two audacious Yankees. Our apartment in Piazza Barbarini was warm and cosey; and I thanked Heaven for it, as it rained for two months, and my first view most of the time was the poor Triton with an icicle on his nose. We pay $60 a month for six good rooms, and $6 a month for a girl, who cooks and takes care of us. _29th._--My thirty-eighth birthday. May gave me a pretty sketch, and A. a fine nosegay. In Rome Miss Alcott was shocked and grieved by the news of the death of her well-beloved brother-in-law, Mr. Pratt. She has drawn so beautiful a picture of him in "Little Women" and in "Little Men," that it is hardly needful to dwell upon his character or the grief which his death caused her. With her usual care for others, her thoughts at once turned to the support of the surviving family, and she found comfort in writing "Little Men" with the thought of the dear sister and nephews constantly in her heart. In spite of this great sorrow and anxiety for the dear ones at home, the year of travel was very refreshing to her. Her companions were congenial, she took great delight in her sister's work, and she was independent in her plans, and could go whither and when she would. The voyage home was a hard one; there was small-pox on board, but Miss Alcott fortunately escaped the infection. "Little Men" was out the day she arrived, as a bright red placard in the carriage announced, and besides all the loving welcomes from family and friends, she received the pleasing news that fifty thousand of the books were already sold. But the old pains and weariness came home with her also. She could not stay in Concord, and went again to Boston, hoping to rest and work. Her young sister came home to brighten up the family with her hopeful, helpful spirit. At forty years of age Louisa had accomplished the task she set for herself in youth. By unceasing toil she had made herself and her family independent; debts were all paid, and enough was invested to preserve them from want. And yet wants seemed to increase with their satisfaction, and she felt impelled to work enough to give to all the enjoyments and luxuries which were fitted to them after the necessaries were provided for. It may be that her own exhausted nervous condition made it impossible for her to rest, and the demand which she fancied came from without was the projection of her own thought. _Journal._ 1871.--_Rome._--Great inundation. Streets flooded, churches with four feet of water in them, and queer times for those who were in the overflowed quarters. Meals hoisted up at the window; people carried across the river-like streets to make calls; and all manner of funny doings. We were high and dry at Piazza Barbarini, and enjoyed the flurry. To the Capitol often, to spend the A.M. with the Roman emperors and other great men. M. Aurelius as a boy was fine; Cicero looked very like W. Phillips; Agrippina in her chair was charming; but the other ladies, with hair _à la sponge_, were ugly; Nero & Co. a set of brutes and bad men. But a better sight to me was the crowd of poor people going to get the bread and money sent by the king; and the splendid snow-covered hills were finer than the marble beauty inside. Art tires; Nature never. Professor Pierce and his party just from Sicily, where they had been to see the eclipse,--all beaming with delight, and well repaid for the long journey by a _two minutes'_ squint at the sun when darkest. Began to write a new book, "Little Men," that John's death may not leave A. and the dear little boys in want. John took care that they should have enough while the boys are young, and worked very hard to have a little sum to leave, without a debt anywhere. In writing and thinking of the little lads, to whom I must be a father now, I found comfort for my sorrow. May went on with her lessons, "learning," as she wisely said, how little she knew and how to go on. _February._--A gay month in Rome, with the carnival, artists' fancy ball, many parties, and much calling. Decided to leave May for another year, as L. sends $700 on "Moods," and the new book will provide $1,000 for the dear girl; so she may be happy and free to follow her talent. _March._--Spent at Albano. A lovely place. Walk, write, and rest. A troop of handsome officers from Turin, who clatter by, casting soft glances at my two blonde signorinas, who enjoy it very much.[11] Baron and Baroness Rothschild were there, and the W.'s from Philadelphia, Dr. O. W. and wife, and S. B. Mrs. W. and A. B. talk _all day_, May sketches, I write, and so we go on. Went to look at rooms at the Bonapartes. _April._--Venice. Floated about for two weeks seeing sights. A lovely city for a short visit. Not enough going on to suit brisk Americans. May painted, A. hunted up old jewelry and friends, and I dawdled after them. A very interesting trip to London,--over the Brenner Pass to Munich, Cologne, Antwerp, and by boat to London. _May._--A busy month. Settled in lodgings, Brompton Road, and went sight-seeing. Mrs. P. Taylor, Conway, and others very kind. Enjoyed showing May my favorite places and people. A. B. went home on the 11th, after a pleasant year with us. I am glad to know her, for she is true and very interesting. May took lessons of Rowbotham and was happy. "Little Men" came out in London. I decided to go home on the 25th, as I am needed. A very pleasant year in spite of constant pain, John's death, and home anxieties. Very glad I came, for May's sake. It has been a very useful year for her. _June._--After an anxious passage of twelve days, got safely home. Small-pox on board, and my room-mate, Miss D., very ill. I escaped, but had a sober time lying next door to her, waiting to see if my turn was to come. She was left at the island, and I went up the harbor with Judge Russell, who took some of us off in his tug. Father and T. N. came to meet me with a great red placard of "Little Men" pinned up in the carriage. After due precautions, hurried home and found all well. My room refurnished and much adorned by Father's earnings. Nan well and calm, but under her sweet serenity is a very sad soul, and she mourns for her mate like a tender turtle-dove. The boys were tall, bright lads, devoted to Marmee, and the life of the house. Mother feeble and much aged by this year of trouble. I shall never go far away from her again. Much company, and loads of letters, all full of good wishes and welcome. "Little Men" was out the day I arrived. Fifty thousand sold before it was out. A happy month, for I felt well for the first time in two years. I knew it wouldn't last, but enjoyed it heartily while it did, and was grateful for rest from pain and a touch of the old cheerfulness. It was much needed at home. _July, August, September._--Sick. Holiday soon over. Too much company and care and change of climate upset the poor nerves again. Dear Uncle S. J. May died; our best friend for years. Peace to his ashes. He leaves a sweeter memory behind him than any man I know. Poor Marmee is the last of her family now. _October._--Decided to go to B.; Concord is so hard for me, with its dampness and worry. Get two girls to do the work, and leave plenty of money and go to Beacon Street to rest and try to get well that I may work. A lazy life, but it seemed to suit; and anything is better than the invalidism I hate worse than death. Bones ached less, and I gave up morphine, as sunshine, air, and quiet made sleep possible without it. Saw people, pictures, plays, and read all I could, but did not enjoy much, for the dreadful weariness of nerves makes even pleasure hard. _November._--May sent pleasant letters and some fine copies of Turner. She decides to come home, as she feels she is needed as I give out. Marmee is feeble, Nan has her boys and her sorrow, and one strong head and hand is wanted at home. A year and a half of holiday is a good deal, and duty comes first always. Sorry to call her back, but her eyes are troublesome, and housework will rest them and set her up. Then she can go again when I am better, for I don't want her to be thwarted in her work more than just enough to make her want it very much. On the 19th she came. Well, happy, and full of sensible plans. A lively time enjoying the cheerful element she always brings into the house. Piles of pictures, merry adventures, and interesting tales of the fine London lovers. Kept my thirty-ninth and Father's seventy-second birthday in the old way. Thanksgiving dinner at Pratt Farm. All well and all together. Much to give thanks for. _December._--Enjoyed my quiet, sunny room very much; and this lazy life seems to suit me, for I am better, mind and body. All goes well at home, with May to run the machine in her cheery, energetic style, and amuse Marmee and Nan with gay histories. Had a furnace put in, and all enjoyed the new climate. No more rheumatic fevers and colds, with picturesque open fires. Mother is to be cosey if money can do it. She seems to be now, and my long-cherished dream has come true; for she sits in a pleasant room, with no work, no care, no poverty to worry, but peace and comfort all about her, and children glad and able to stand between trouble and her. Thank the Lord! I like to stop and "remember my mercies." Working and waiting for them makes them very welcome. Went to the ball for the Grand Duke Alexis. A fine sight, and the big blonde boy the best of all. Would dance with the pretty girls, and leave the Boston dowagers and their diamonds in the lurch. To the Radical Club, where the philosophers mount their hobbies and prance away into time and space, while we gaze after them and try to look wise. A merry Christmas at home. Tree for the boys, family dinner, and frolic in the evening. A varied, but on the whole a good year, in spite of pain. Last Christmas we were in Rome, mourning for John. What will next Christmas bring forth? I have no ambition now but to keep the family comfortable and not ache any more. Pain has taught me patience, I hope, if nothing more. _January_, 1872.--Roberts Brothers paid $4,400 as six months' receipts for the books. A fine New Year's gift. S. E. S. invested $3,000, and the rest I put in the bank for family needs. Paid for the furnace and all the bills. What bliss it is to be able to do that and ask no help! * * * * * Mysterious bouquets came from some unknown admirer or friend. Enjoyed them very much, and felt quite grateful and romantic as day after day the lovely great nosegays were handed in by the servant of the unknown. _February and March._--At Mrs. Stowe's desire, wrote for the "Christian Union" an account of our journey through France, and called it "Shawl Straps."... Many calls and letters and invitations, but I kept quiet, health being too precious to risk, and sleep still hard to get for the brain that would work instead of rest. Heard lectures,--Higginson, Bartol, Frothingham, and Rabbi Lilienthal. Much talk about religion. I'd like to see a little more really _lived_. _April and May._--Wrote another sketch for the "Independent,"--"A French Wedding;" and the events of my travels paid my winter's expenses. All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems; I turn my adventures into bread and butter. * * * * * _June_, 1872.--Home, and begin a new task. Twenty years ago I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done. Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable. It has cost me my health, perhaps; but as I still live, there is more for me to do, I suppose. FOOTNOTES: [8] Betsey Prig was a pet name for her sister, as she herself was Sairey Gamp. [9] This was a family joke as Mrs. Alcott always ended her instructions to her children "in case of fire." [10] This is the poem prefixed to the chapter. [11] See Shawl Straps, p. 179. CHAPTER X. FAMILY CHANGES. TRANSFIGURATION.[12] IN MEMORIAM. Lines written by Louisa M. Alcott on the death of her mother. Mysterious death! who in a single hour Life's gold can so refine, And by thy art divine Change mortal weakness to immortal power! Bending beneath the weight of eighty years, Spent with the noble strife Of a victorious life, We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears. But ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung, A miracle was wrought; And swift as happy thought She lived again,--brave, beautiful, and young. Age, pain, and sorrow dropped the veils they wore And showed the tender eyes Of angels in disguise, Whose discipline so patiently she bore. The past years brought their harvest rich and fair; While memory and love, Together, fondly wove A golden garland for the silver hair. How could we mourn like those who are bereft, When every pang of grief Found balm for its relief In counting up the treasures she had left?-- Faith that withstood the shocks of toil and time; Hope that defied despair; Patience that conquered care; And loyalty, whose courage was sublime; The great deep heart that was a home for all,-- Just, eloquent, and strong In protest against wrong; Wide charity, that knew no sin, no fall; The spartan spirit that made life so grand, Mating poor daily needs With high, heroic deeds, That wrested happiness from Fate's hard hand. We thought to weep, but sing for joy instead, Full of the grateful peace That follows her release; For nothing but the weary dust lies dead. Oh, noble woman! never more a queen Than in the laying down Of sceptre and of crown To win a greater kingdom, yet unseen; Teaching us how to seek the highest goal, To earn the true success,-- To live, to love, to bless,-- And make death proud to take a royal soul. The history of the next six years offers little variety of incident in Miss Alcott's busy life. She could not work at home in Concord as well as in some quiet lodging in Boston, where she was more free from interruption from visitors; but she spent her summers with her mother, often taking charge of the housekeeping. In 1872 she wrote "Work," one of her most successful books. She had begun it some time before, and originally called it "Success." It represents her own personal experience more than any other book. She says to a friend: "Christie's adventures are many of them my own; Mr. Power is Mr. Parker; Mrs. Wilkins is imaginary, and all the rest. This was begun at eighteen, and never finished till H. W. Beecher wrote to me for a serial for the 'Christian Union' in 1872, and paid $3,000 for it." Miss Alcott again sent May to Europe in 1873 to finish her studies, and herself continued writing stories to pay the expenses of the family. The mother's serious illness weighed heavily on Louisa's heart, and through the summer of 1873 she was devoted to the invalid, rejoicing in her partial recovery, though sadly feeling that she would never be her bright energetic self again. Mrs. Alcott was able, however, to keep her birthday (October 8) pleasantly, and out of this experience came a story called "A Happy Birthday." This little tale paid for carriages for the invalid. It is included in "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag." Louisa and her mother decided to spend the winter in Boston, while Mr. Alcott was at the West. Her thoughts dwell much upon her father's life, and she is not content that he has not all the recognition and enjoyment that she would gladly give him. She helps her mother to perform the sacred duty of placing a tablet on Colonel May's grave, and the dear old lady recognizes that her life has gone down into the past, and says, "This isn't my Boston, and I never want to see it any more." Louisa was at this time engaged in writing for "St. Nicholas" and "The Independent." The return of the young artist, happy in her success, brings brightness to the home-circle. In the winter of 1875 Miss Alcott takes her old place at the Bellevue, where May can have her drawing-classes. She was herself ill, and the words, "No sleep without morphine!" tell the story of nervous suffering. _Journal._ _July_, 1872.--May makes a lovely hostess, and I fly round behind the scenes, or skip out of the back window when ordered out for inspection by the inquisitive public. Hard work to keep things running smoothly, for this sight-seeing fiend is a new torment to us. _August._--May goes to Clark's Island for rest, having kept hotel long enough. I say "No," and shut the door. People _must_ learn that authors have some rights; I can't entertain a dozen a day, and write the tales they demand also. I'm but a human worm, and when walked on must turn in self-defence. Reporters sit on the wall and take notes; artists sketch me as I pick pears in the garden; and strange women interview Johnny as he plays in the orchard. It looks like impertinent curiosity to me; but it is called "fame," and considered a blessing to be grateful for, I find. Let 'em try it. _September._--To Wolcott, with Father and Fred. A quaint, lovely old place is the little house on Spindle Hill, where the boy Amos dreamed the dreams that have come true at last. Got hints for my novel, "The Cost of an Idea," if I ever find time to write it. Don't wonder the boy longed to climb those hills, and see what lay beyond. _October._--Went to a room in Allston Street, in a quiet, old-fashioned house. I can't work at home, and need to be alone to spin, like a spider. Rested; walked; to the theatre now and then. Home once a week with books, etc., for Marmee and Nan. Prepared "Shawl Straps" for Roberts. _November._--Forty on the 29th. Got Father off for the West, all neat and comfortable. I enjoyed every penny spent, and had a happy time packing his new trunk with warm flannels, neat shirts, gloves, etc., and seeing the dear man go off in a new suit, overcoat, hat, and all, like a gentleman. We both laughed over the pathetic old times with tears in our eyes, and I reminded him of the "poor as poverty, but serene as heaven" saying. Something to do came just as I was trying to see what to take up, for work is my salvation. H. W. Beecher sent one of the editors of the "Christian Union" to ask for a serial story. They have asked before, and offered $2,000, which I refused; now they offered $3,000, and I accepted. Got out the old manuscript of "Success," and called it "Work." Fired up the engine, and plunged into a vortex, with many doubts about getting out. Can't work slowly; the thing possesses me, and I must obey till it's done. One thousand dollars was sent as a seal on the bargain, so I was bound, and sat at the oar like a galley-slave. F. wanted eight little tales, and offered $35 apiece; used to pay $10. Such is fame! At odd minutes I wrote the short ones, and so paid my own expenses. "Shawl Straps," Scrap-Bag, No. 2, came out, and went well. Great Boston fire; up all night. Very splendid and terrible sight. _December._--Busy with "Work." Write three pages at once on impression paper, as Beecher, Roberts, and Low of London all want copy at once. [This was the cause of the paralysis of my thumb, which disabled me for the rest of my life.--L. M. A.] Nan and the boys came to visit me, and break up the winter. Rested a little, and played with them. Father very busy and happy. On his birthday had a gold-headed cane given him. He is appreciated out there. During these western trips, Mr. Alcott found that his daughter's fame added much to the warmth of his reception. On his return he loved to tell how he was welcomed as the "grandfather of 'Little Women.'" When he visited schools, he delighted the young audiences by satisfying their curiosity as to the author of their favorite book, and the truth of the characters and circumstances described in it. BOSTON, 1872. DEAR MARMEE,--Had a very transcendental day yesterday, and at night my head was "swelling wisibly" with the ideas cast into it. The club was a funny mixture of rabbis and weedy old ladies, the "oversoul" and oysters. Papa and B. flew clean out of sight like a pair of Platonic balloons, and we tried to follow, but couldn't. In the P.M. went to R. W. E.'s reading. All the literary birds were out in full feather. This "'umble" worm was treated with distinguished condescension. Dr. B. gave me his noble hand to press, and murmured compliments with the air of a bishop bestowing a benediction. Dear B. beamed upon me from the depths of his funny little cloak and said, "We are getting on well, ain't we?" W. bowed his Jewish head, and rolled his fine eye at me. Several dreadful women purred about me, and I fled. M. said what I liked,--that he'd sent my works to his mother, and the good old lady told him to tell me that she couldn't do a stroke of work, but just sat and read 'em right through; she wished she was young so as to have a long life in which to keep on enjoying such books. The peacock liked that. I have paid all my own expenses out of the money earned by my little tales; so I have not touched the family income. Didn't mean to write; but it has been an expensive winter, and my five hundred has made me all right. The $500 I lent K. makes a difference in the income; but I could not refuse her, she was so kind in the old hard times. At the reading a man in front of me sat listening and knitting his brows for a time, but had to give it up and go to sleep. After it was over some one said to him, "Well, what do you think of it?" "It's all very fine I have no doubt; but I'm blessed if I can understand a word of it," was the reply.... The believers glow when the oracle is stuck, rustle and beam when he is audible, and nod and smile as if they understood perfectly when he murmurs under the desk! We are a foolish set! _Journal_. _January_, 1873.--Getting on well with "Work;" have to go slowly now for fear of a break-down. All well at home. A week at Newport with Miss Jane Stewart. Dinners, balls, calls, etc. Saw Higginson and "H. H." Soon tired of gayety, and glad to get home to my quiet den and pen. Roberts Brothers paid me $2,022 for books. S. E. S. invested most of it, with the $1,000 F. sent. Gave C. M. $100,--a thank-offering for my success. I like to help the class of "silent poor" to which we belonged for so many years,--needy, but respectable, and forgotten because too proud to beg. Work difficult to find for such people, and life made very hard for want of a little money to ease the necessary needs. _February and March._--Anna very ill with pneumonia; home to nurse her. Father telegraphed to come home, as we thought her dying. She gave me her boys; but the dear saint got well, and kept the lads for herself. Thank God! Back to my work with what wits nursing left me. Had Johnny for a week, to keep all quiet at home. Enjoyed the sweet little soul very much, and sent him back much better. Finished "Work,"--twenty chapters. Not what it should be,--too many interruptions. Should like to do one book in peace, and see if it wouldn't be good. _April_--The job being done I went home to take May's place. Gave her $1,000, and sent her to London for a year of study. She sailed on the 26th, brave and happy and hopeful. I felt that she needed it, and was glad to be able to help her. I spent seven months in Boston; wrote a book and ten tales; earned $3,250 by my pen, and am satisfied with my winter's work. _May._--D. F. wanted a dozen little tales, and agreed to pay $50 apiece, if I give up other things for this. Said I would, as I can do two a day, and keep house between times. Cleaned and grubbed, and didn't mind the change. Let head rest, and heels and feet do the work. Cold and dull; but the thought of May free and happy was my comfort as I messed about. _June and July._--Settled the servant question by getting a neat American woman to cook and help me with the housework. Peace fell upon our troubled souls, and all went well. Good meals, tidy house, cheerful service, and in the P.M. an intelligent young person to read and sew with us. It was curious how she came to us. She had taught and sewed, and was tired, and wanted something else; decided to try for a housekeeper's place, but happened to read "Work," and thought she'd do as Christie did,--take anything that came. I was the first who answered her advertisement, and when she found I wrote the book, she said, "I'll go and see if Miss A. practises as she preaches." She found I did, and we had a good time together. My new helper did so well I took pale Johnny to the seaside for a week; but was sent for in haste, as poor Marmee was very ill. Mental bewilderment came after one of her heart troubles (the dropsy affected the brain), and for three weeks we had a sad time. Father and I took care of her, and my good A. S. kept house nicely and faithfully for me. Marmee slowly came back to herself, but sadly feeble,--never to be our brave, energetic leader any more. She felt it, and it was hard to convince her that there was no need of her doing anything but rest. _August, September, October._--Mother improved steadily. Father went to the Alcott festival in Walcott, A. and boys to Conway for a month; and it did them all much good. I had quiet days with Marmee; drove with her, and had the great pleasure of supplying all her needs and fancies. May busy and happy in London. A merry time on Mother's birthday, October 8. All so glad to have her still here; for it seemed as if we were to lose her. Made a little story of it for F.,--"A Happy Birthday."--and spent the $50 in carriages for her. _November and December._--Decided that it was best not to try a cold, lonely winter in C., but go to B. with Mother, Nan, and boys, and leave Father free for the West. Took sunny rooms at the South End, near the Park, so the lads could play out and Marmee walk. She enjoyed the change, and sat at her window watching people, horse-cars, and sparrows with great interest. Old friends came to see her, and she was happy. Found a nice school for the boys; and Nan enjoyed her quiet days. _January_, 1874.--Mother quite ill this month. Dr. Wesselhoeft does his best for the poor old body, now such a burden to her. The slow decline has begun, and she knows it, having nursed her mother to the same end. Father disappointed and rather sad, to be left out of so much that he would enjoy and should be asked to help and adorn. A little more money, a pleasant house and time to attend to it, and I'd bring all the best people to see and entertain _him_. When I see so much twaddle going on I wonder those who can don't get up something better, and have really good things. When I had the youth I had no money; now I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life. I suppose it's the discipline I need; but it's rather hard to love the things I do and see them go by because duty chains me to my galley. If I come into port at last with all sail set that will be reward perhaps. Life always was a puzzle to me, and gets more mysterious as I go on. I shall find it out by and by and see that it's all right, if I can only keep brave and patient to the end. May still in London painting Turners, and doing pretty panels as "pot-boilers." They sell well, and she is a thrifty child. Good luck to our mid-summer girl. _February._--Father has several conversations at the Clubs and Societies and Divinity School. No one pays anything; but they seem glad to listen. There ought to be a place for him. Nan busy with her boys, and they doing well at school,--good, gay, and intelligent; a happy mother and most loving little sons. I wrote two tales, and got $200. Saw Charles Kingsley,--a pleasant man. His wife has Alcott relations, and likes my books. Asked us to come and see him in England; is to bring his daughters to Concord by and by. _March._--May came home with a portfolio full of fine work. Must have worked like a busy bee to have done so much. Very happy in her success; for she has proved her talent, having copied Turner so well that Ruskin (meeting her in the National Gallery at work) told her that she had "caught Turner's spirit wonderfully." She has begun to copy Nature, and done well. Lovely sketches of the cloisters in Westminster Abbey, and other charming things. I write a story for all my men, and make up the $1,000 I planned to earn by my "pot-boilers" before we go back to C. A tablet to Grandfather May is put in Stone Chapel, and one Sunday A.M. we take Mother to see it. A pathetic sight to see Father walk up the broad aisle with the feeble old wife on his arm as they went to be married nearly fifty years ago. Mother sat alone in the old pew a little while and sung softly the old hymns; for it was early, and only the sexton there. He asked who she was and said his father was sexton in Grandfather's time. Several old ladies came in and knew Mother. She broke down thinking of the time when she and her mother and sisters and father and brothers all went to church together, and we took her home saying, "This isn't my Boston; all my friends are gone; I never want to see it any more." [She never did.--L. M. A.] _April and May._--Back to Concord, after May and I had put all in fine order and made the old house lovely with her pictures. When all were settled, with May to keep house, I went to B. for rest, and took a room in Joy Street. The Elgin Watch Company offered me a gold watch or $100 for a tale. Chose the money, and wrote the story "My Rococo Watch"[13] for them. _October._--Took two nice rooms at the Hotel Bellevue for the winter; May to use one for her classes. Tried to work on my book, but was in such pain could not do much. Got no sleep without morphine. Tried old Dr. Hewett, who was sure he could cure the woe.... _November._--Funny time with the publishers about the tale; for all wanted it at once, and each tried to outbid the other for an unwritten story. I rather enjoyed it, and felt important with Roberts, Low, and Scribner all clamoring for my "'umble" works. No peddling poor little manuscripts now, and feeling rich with $10. The golden goose can sell her eggs for a good price, if she isn't killed by too much driving. _December._--Better and busier than last month. All well at home, and Father happy among his kind Westerners. Finish "Eight Cousins," and get ready to do the temperance tale, for F. offers $700 for six chapters,--"Silver Pitchers." _January_, 1875.-- ... Father flourishing about the Western cities, "riding in Louisa's chariot, and adored as the grandfather of 'Little Women,'" he says. _February._--Finish my tale and go to Vassar College on a visit. See M. M., talk with four hundred girls, write in stacks of albums and school-books, and kiss every one who asks me. Go to New York; am rather lionized, and run away; but things look rather jolly, and I may try a winter there some time, as I need a change and new ideas. _March._--Home again, getting ready for the centennial fuss. _April._--On the 19th a grand celebration. General _break-down_, owing to an unwise desire to outdo all the other towns; too many people.... Miss Alcott was very much interested in the question of Woman Suffrage, and exerted herself to get up a meeting in Concord. The subject was then very unpopular, and there was an ill-bred effort to destroy the meeting by noise and riot. Although not fond of speaking in public, she always put herself bravely on the side of the unpopular cause, and lent to it all the argument of her heroic life. When Mrs. Livermore lectured at Concord, Miss Alcott sat up all night talking with her on the great question. She had an opportunity of trying which was most exhausting, abuse or admiration, when she went to a meeting of the Women's Congress at Syracuse, in October. She was introduced to the audience by Mrs. Livermore, and the young people crowded about her like bees about a honeycomb. She was waylaid in the streets, petitioned for autographs, kissed by gushing young maidens, and made emphatically the lion of the hour. It was all so genial and spontaneous, that she enjoyed the fun. No amount of adulation ever affected the natural simplicity of her manners. She neither despised nor overrated her fame; but was glad of it as a proof of success in what she was ever aiming to do. She spent a few weeks in New York enjoying the gay and literary society which was freely opened to her; but finding most satisfaction in visiting the Tombs, Newsboys' Home, and Randall's Island, for she liked these things better than parties and dinners. _Journal._ _June, July, August_, 1875.--Kept house at home, with two Irish incapables to trot after, and ninety-two guests in one month to entertain. Fame is an expensive luxury. I can do without it. This is my worst scrape, I think. I asked for bread, and got a stone,--in the shape of a pedestal. _September and October_, 1875.--I go to Woman's Congress in Syracuse, and see Niagara. Funny time with the girls. Write loads of autographs, dodge at the theatre, and am kissed to death by gushing damsels. One energetic lady grasped my hand in the crowd, exclaiming, "If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground: you will be borne in the arms of the people! Will you come?" "Never," responded Miss A., trying to look affable, and dying to laugh as the good soul worked my arm like a pump-handle, and from the gallery generations of girls were looking on. "This, this, is fame!" _November, December._--Take a room at Bath Hotel, New York, and look about me. Miss Sally Holly is here, and we go about together. She tells me much of her life among the freedmen, and Mother is soon deep in barrels of clothes, food, books, etc., for Miss A. to take back with her. See many people, and am very gay for a country-mouse. Society unlike either London or Boston. Go to Sorosis, and to Mrs. Botta's, O. B. Frothingham's, Miss Booth's, and Mrs. Croly's receptions. Visit the Tombs, Newsboys' Home, and Randall's Island on Christmas Day with Mrs. Gibbons. A memorable day. Make a story of it. Enjoy these things more than the parties and dinners. _To Mrs. Dodge._ NEW YORK, Oct. 5, 1875. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--So far, New York seems inviting, though I have not seen or done much but "gawk round" as the country folks do. I have seen Niagara, and enjoyed my vacation very much, especially the Woman's Congress in Syracuse. I was made a member, so have the honor to sign myself, Yours truly, L. M. ALCOTT, M. C. _To her Father._ NEW YORK, Nov. 26, 1875. DEAR SEVENTY-SIX,--As I have nothing else to send you on our joint birthday, I'll despatch a letter about some of the people I have lately seen in whom you take an interest. Tuesday we heard Gough on "Blunders," and it was very good,--both witty and wise, earnest and sensible. Wednesday eve to Mr. Frothingham's for his Fraternity Club meeting. Pleasant people. Ellen F.; Abby Sage Richardson, a very lovely woman; young Putnam and wife; Mrs. Stedman; Mattie G. and her spouse, Dr. B., who read a lively story of Mormon life; Mrs. Dodge; O. Johnson and wife, and many more whose names I forget. After the story the given subject for discussion was brought up,--"Conformity and Noncomformity." Mr. B., a promising young lawyer, led one side, Miss B. the other, and Mr. F. was in the chair. It was very lively; and being called upon, I piped up, and went in for nonconformity when principle was concerned. Got patted on the head for my remarks, and didn't disgrace myself except by getting very red and talking fast. Ellen F. was very pleasant, and asked much about May. Proudly I told of our girl's achievements, and E. hoped she would come to New York. Mrs. Richardson was presented, and we had some agreeable chat. She is a great friend of O. B. F., and is lecturing here on "Literature." Shall go and hear her, as she is coming to see me. O. B. F. was as polished and clear and cool and witty as usual; most gracious to the "'umble" Concord worm; and Mrs. F. asked me to come and see them. Yesterday took a drive with Sally H. in Central Park as it was fine, and she had no fun on her Thanksgiving. I dined at Mrs. Botta's, for she kindly came and asked me. Had a delightful time, and felt as if I'd been to Washington; for Professor Byng, a German ex-consul, was there, full of Capitol gossip about Sumner and all the great beings that there do congregate. Mr. Botta you know,--a handsome, long-haired Italian, very cultivated and affable. Also about Lord H., whom B. thought "an amiable old woman," glad to say pretty things, and fond of being lionized. Byng knew Rose and Una, and asked about them; also told funny tales of Victor Emmanuel and his Court, and queer adventures in Greece, where he, B., was a consul, or something official. It was a glimpse into a new sort of world; and as the man was very accomplished, elegant, and witty, I enjoyed it much. We had music later, and saw some fine pictures. Durant knew Miss Thackeray, J. Ingelow, and other English people whom I did, so we had a good dish of gossip with Mrs. Botta, while the others talked three or four languages at once. It is a delightful house, and I shall go as often as I may, for it is the sort of thing I like much better than B. H. and champagne. To-night we go to hear Bradlaugh; to-morrow, a new play; Sunday, Frothingham and Bellows; and Monday, Mrs. Richardson and Shakespeare. But it isn't all play, I assure you. I'm a thrifty butterfly, and have written three stories. The "G." has paid for the little Christmas tale; the "I." has "Letty's Tramp;" and my "girl paper" for "St. Nick" is about ready. Several other papers are waiting for tales, so I have a ballast of work to keep me steady in spite of much fun. Mr. Powell has been twice to see me, and we go to visit the charities of New York next week. I like to see both sides, and generally find the busy people most interesting. So far I like New York very much, and feel so well I shall stay on till I'm tired of it. People begin to tell me how much better I look than when I came, and I have not an ache to fret over. This, after such a long lesson in bodily ails, is a blessing for which I am duly grateful. Hope all goes well with you, and that I shall get a line now and then. I'll keep them for you to _bind_ up by and by instead of mine.... We can buy a carriage some other time, and a barn likewise, and a few other necessities of life. Rosa has proved such a good speculation we shall dare to let May venture another when the ship comes in. I am glad the dear "rack-a-bones" is a comfort to her mistress, only don't let her break my boy's bones by any antics when she feels her oats. I suppose you are thinking of Wilson just now, and his quiet slipping away to the heavenly council chambers where the good senators go. Rather like Sumner's end, wasn't it? No wife or children, only men and servants. Wilson was such a genial, friendly soul I should have thought he would have felt the loneliness very much. Hope if he left any last wishes his mates will carry them out faithfully.... Now, dear Plato, the Lord bless you, and keep you serene and happy for as many years as He sees fit, and me likewise, to be a comfort as well as a pride to you. Ever your loving FORTY-THREE _To her Nephews._ NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 1875. DEAR FRED AND DONNY,--We went to see the news-boys, and I wish you'd been with us, it was so interesting. A nice big house has been built for them, with dining-room and kitchen on the first floor, bath-rooms and school-room next, two big sleeping-places,--third and fourth stories,--and at the top a laundry and gymnasium. We saw all the tables set for breakfast,--a plate and bowl for each,--and in the kitchen great kettles, four times as big as our copper boiler, for tea and coffee, soup, and meat. They have bread and meat and coffee for breakfast, and bread and cheese and tea for supper, and get their own dinners out. School was just over when we got there, and one hundred and eighty boys were in the immense room with desks down the middle, and all around the walls were little cupboards numbered. Each boy on coming in gives his name, pays six cents, gets a key, and puts away his hat, books, and jacket (if he has 'em) in his own cubby for the night. They pay five cents for supper, and schooling, baths, etc., are free. They were a smart-looking set, larking round in shirts and trousers, barefooted, but the faces were clean, and the heads smooth, and clothes pretty decent; yet they support themselves, for not one of them has any parents or home but this. One little chap, only six, was trotting round as busy as a bee, locking up his small shoes and ragged jacket as if they were great treasures. I asked about little Pete, and the man told us his brother, only nine, supported him and took care of him entirely; and wouldn't let Pete be sent away to any home, because _he_ wished to have "his family" with him. Think of that, Fred! How would it seem to be all alone in a big city, with no mamma to cuddle you; no two grandpa's houses to take you in; not a penny but what you earned, and Donny to take care of? Could you do it? Nine-year-old Patsey does it capitally; buys Pete's clothes, pays for his bed and supper, and puts pennies in the savings-bank. There's a brave little man for you! I wanted to see him; but he is a newsboy, and sells late papers, because, though harder work, it pays better, and the coast is clear for those who do it. The savings-bank was a great table all full of slits, each one leading to a little place below and numbered outside, so each boy knew his own. Once a month the bank is opened, and the lads take out what they like, or have it invested in a big bank for them to have when they find homes out West, as many do, and make good farmers. One boy was putting in some pennies as we looked, and I asked how much he had saved this month. "Fourteen dollars, ma'am," says the thirteen-year-older, proudly slipping in the last cent. A prize of $3 is offered to the lad who saves the most in a month. The beds upstairs were in two immense rooms, ever so much larger than our town hall,--one hundred in one, and one hundred and eighty in another,--all narrow beds with a blue quilt, neat pillow, and clean sheet. They are built in long rows, one over another, and the upper boy has to climb up as on board ship. I'd have liked to see one hundred and eighty all in their "by-lows" at once, and I asked the man if they didn't train when all were in. "Lord, ma'am, they're up at five, poor little chaps, and are so tired at night that they drop off right away. Now and then some boy kicks up a little row, but we have a watchman, and he soon settles 'em." He also told me how that very day a neat, smart young man came in, and said he was one of their boys who went West with a farmer only a little while ago; and now he owned eighty acres of land, had a good house, and was doing well, and had come to New York to find his sister, and to take her away to live with him. Wasn't that nice? Lots of boys do as well. Instead of loafing round the streets and getting into mischief, they are taught to be tidy, industrious, and honest, and then sent away into the wholesome country to support themselves. It was funny to see 'em scrub in the bath-room,--feet and faces,--comb their hair, fold up their old clothes in the dear cubbies, which make them so happy because they feel that they _own_ something. The man said every boy wanted one, even though he had neither shoes nor jacket to put in it; but would lay away an old rag of a cap or a dirty tippet with an air of satisfaction fine to see. Some lads sat reading, and the man said they loved it so they'd read all night, if allowed. At nine he gave the word, "Bed!" and away went the lads, trooping up to sleep in shirts and trousers, as nightgowns are not provided. How would a boy I know like that,--a boy who likes to have "trommin" on his nighties? Of course, I don't mean dandy Don! Oh, dear no! After nine [if late in coming in] they are fined five cents; after ten, ten cents; and after eleven they can't come in at all. This makes them steady, keeps them out of harm, and gives them time for study. Some go to the theatre, and sleep anywhere; some sleep at the Home, but go out for a better breakfast than they get there, as the swell ones are fond of goodies, and live well in their funny way. Coffee and cakes at Fulton Market is "the tip-top grub," and they often spend all their day's earnings in a play and a supper, and sleep in boxes or cellars after it. Lots of pussies were round the kitchen; and one black one I called a bootblack, and a gray kit that yowled loud was a newsboy. That made some chaps laugh, and they nodded at me as I went out. Nice boys! but I know some nicer ones. Write and tell me something about my poor Squabby. By-by, your WEEDY. _To her Family._ SATURDAY EVENING, Dec. 25, 1875. DEAR FAMILY,-- ... I had only time for a word this A.M., as the fourth letter was from Mrs. P. to say they could not go; so I trotted off in the fog at ten to the boat, and there found Mr. and Mrs. G. and piles of goodies for the poor children. She is a dear little old lady in a close, Quakerish bonnet and plain suit, but wide-awake and full of energy. It was grand to see her tackle the big mayor and a still bigger commissioner, and tell them what _ought_ to be done for the poor things on the Island, as they are to be routed; for the city wants the land for some dodge or other. Both men fled soon, for the brave little woman was down on 'em in a way that would have made Marmee cry "Ankore!" and clap her dress-gloves to rags. When the rotundities had retired, she fell upon a demure priest, and read him a sermon; and then won the heart of a boyish reporter so entirely that he stuck to us all day, and helped serve out dolls and candy like a man and a brother. Long life to him! Mr. G. and I discussed pauperism and crime like two old wiseacres; and it was sweet to hear the gray-headed couple say "thee" and "thou," "Abby" and "James," to one another, he following with the bundles wherever the little poke-bonnet led the way. I've had a pretty good variety of Christmases in my day, but never one like this before. First we drove in an old ramshackle hack to the chapel, whither a boy had raced before us, crying joyfully to all he met, "She's come! Miss G.--she's come!" And all faces beamed, as well they might, since for thirty years she has gone to make set after set of little forlornities happy on this day. The chapel was full. On one side, in front, girls in blue gowns and white pinafores; on the other, small chaps in pinafores likewise; and behind them, bigger boys in gray suits with cropped heads, and larger girls with ribbons in their hair and pink calico gowns. They sang alternately; the girls gave "Juanita" very well, the little chaps a pretty song about poor children asking a "little white angel" to leave the gates of heaven ajar, so they could peep in, if no more. Quite pathetic, coming from poor babies who had no home but this. The big boys spoke pieces, and I was amused when one bright lad in gray, with a red band on his arm, spoke the lines I gave G.,--"Merry Christmas." No one knew me, so I had the joke to myself; and I found afterward that I was taken for the mayoress, who was expected. Then we drove to the hospital, and there the heart-ache began, for me at least, so sad it was to see these poor babies, born of want and sin, suffering every sort of deformity, disease, and pain. Cripples half blind, scarred with scrofula, burns, and abuse,--it was simply awful and indescribable! As we went in, I with a great box of dolls and the young reporter with a bigger box of candy, a general cry of delight greeted us. Some children tried to run, half-blind ones stretched out their groping hands, little ones crawled, and big ones grinned, while several poor babies sat up in their bed, beckoning us to "come quick." One poor mite, so eaten up with sores that its whole face was painted with some white salve,--its head covered with an oilskin cap; one eye gone, and the other half filmed over; hands bandaged, and ears bleeding,--could only moan and move its feet till I put a gay red dolly in one hand and a pink candy in the other; then the dim eye brightened, the hoarse voice said feebly, "Tanky, lady!" and I left it contentedly sucking the sweetie, and _trying_ to _see_ its dear new toy. It can't see another Christmas, and I like to think I helped make this one happy, even for a minute. It was pleasant to watch the young reporter trot round with the candy-box, and come up to me all interest to say, "One girl hasn't got a doll, ma'am, and looks _so_ disappointed." After the hospital, we went to the idiot house; and there I had a chance to see faces and figures that will haunt me a long time. A hundred or so of half-grown boys and girls ranged down a long hall, a table of toys in the middle, and an empty one for Mrs. G.'s gifts. A cheer broke out as the little lady hurried in waving her handkerchief and a handful of gay bead necklaces, and "Oh! Ohs!" followed the appearance of the doll-lady and the candy man. A pile of gay pictures was a new idea, and Mrs. G. told me to hold up some bright ones and see if the poor innocents would understand and enjoy them. I held up one of two kittens lapping spilt milk, and the girls began to mew and say "Cat! ah, pretty." Then a fine horse, and the boys bounced on their benches with pleasure; while a ship in full sail produced a cheer of rapture from them all. Some were given out to the good ones, and the rest are to be pinned round the room; so the pictures were a great success. All wanted dolls, even boys of nineteen; for all were children in mind. But the girls had them, and young women of eighteen cuddled their babies and were happy. The boys chose from the toy-table, and it was pathetic to see great fellows pick out a squeaking dog without even the wit to pinch it when it was theirs. One dwarf of thirty-five chose a little Noah's ark, and brooded over it in silent bliss. Some with beards sucked their candy, and stared at a toy cow or box of blocks as if their cup was full. One French girl sang the Marseillaise in a feeble voice, and was so overcome by her new doll that she had an epileptic fit on the spot, which made two others go off likewise; and a slight pause took place while they were kindly removed to sleep it off. A little tot of four, who hadn't sense to put candy in its mouth, was so fond of music that when the girls sang the poor vacant face woke up, and a pair of lovely soft hazel eyes stopped staring dully at nothing, and went wandering to and fro with light in them, as if to find the only sound that can reach its poor mind. I guess I gave away two hundred dolls, and a soap-box of candy was empty when we left. But rows of sticky faces beamed at us, and an array of gay toys wildly waved after us, as if we were angels who had showered goodies on the poor souls. Pauper women are nurses; and Mrs. G. says the babies die like sheep, many being deserted so young nothing can be hoped or done for them. One of the teachers in the idiot home was a Miss C., who remembered Nan at Dr. Wilbur's. Very lady-like, and all devotion to me. But such a life! Oh, me! Who _can_ lead it, and not go mad? At four, we left and came home, Mrs. G. giving a box of toys and sweeties on board the boat for the children of the men who run it. So leaving a stream of blessings and pleasures behind her, the dear old lady drove away, simply saying, "There now, I shall feel better for the next year!" Well she may; bless her! She made a speech to the chapel children after the Commissioner had prosed in the usual way, and she told 'em that _she_ should come as long as she could, and when she was gone her children would still keep it up in memory of her; so for thirty years more she hoped this, their one holiday, would be made happy for them. I could have hugged her on the spot, the motherly old dear! Next Wednesday we go to the Tombs, and some day I am to visit the hospital with her, for I like this better than parties, etc. I got home at five, and then remembered that I'd had no lunch; so I took an apple till six, when I discovered that all had dined at one so the helpers could go early this evening. Thus my Christmas day was without dinner or presents, for the first time since I can remember. Yet it has been a very memorable day, and I feel as if I'd had a splendid feast seeing the poor babies wallow in turkey soup, and that every gift I put into their hands had come back to me in the dumb delight of their unchild-like faces trying to smile. After the pleasant visit in New York, Miss Alcott returned to Boston, where she went into society more than usual, often attending clubs, theatres, and receptions. She was more lionized than ever, and had a natural pleasure in the attention she received. The summer of 1876 she spent at Concord, nursing her mother, who was very ill. She here wrote "Rose in Bloom," the sequel to "Eight Cousins," in three weeks. It was published in November. Louisa was anxious that her sister should have a home for her young family. Mrs. Pratt invested what she could of her husband's money in the purchase, and Louisa contributed the rest. This was the so-called Thoreau House on the main street in Concord, which became Mrs. Pratt's home, and finally that of her father. Louisa spent the summer of 1877 in Concord. Her mother's illness increased, and she was herself very ill in August. Yet she wrote this summer one of her brightest and sweetest stories, "Under the Lilacs." Her love of animals is specially apparent in this book, and she records going to the circus to make studies for the performing dog Sanch. During the winter of 1877, Miss Alcott went to the Bellevue for some weeks, and having secured the necessary quiet, devoted herself to the writing of a novel for the famous No Name Series published by Roberts Brothers. This book had been in her mind for some time, as is seen by the journal. As it was to appear anonymously, and was not intended for children, she was able to depart from her usual manner, and indulge the weird and lurid fancies which took possession of her in her dramatic days, and when writing sensational stories. She was much interested, and must have written it very rapidly, as it was published in April. She enjoyed the excitement of her _incognito_, and was much amused at the guesses of critics and friends, who attributed the book to others, and were sure Louisa Alcott did not write it, because its style was so unlike hers. It certainly is very unlike the books Miss Alcott had lately written. It has nothing of the home-like simplicity and charm of "Little Women," "Old-Fashioned Girl," and the other stories with which she was delighting the children, and, with "Moods," must always be named as exceptional when speaking of her works. Still, a closer study of her life and nature will reveal much of her own tastes and habits of thought in the book; and it is evident that she wrote _con amore_, and was fascinated by the familiars she evoked, however little charm they may seem to possess to others. She was fond of Hawthorne's books. The influence of his subtle and weird romances is undoubtedly perceptible in the book, and it is not strange that it was attributed to his son. She says it had been simmering in her brain ever since she read "Faust" the year before; and she clearly wished to work according to Goethe's thought,--that the Prince of Darkness was a gentleman, and must be represented as belonging to the best society. The plot is powerful and original. A young poet, with more ambition than genius or self-knowledge, finds himself, at nineteen, friendless, penniless, and hopeless, and is on the point of committing suicide. He is saved by Helwyze, a middle-aged man, who has been severely crippled by a terrible fall, and his heart seared by the desertion of the woman he loved. A man of intellect, power, imagination, and wealth, but incapable of conscientious feeling or true love, he is a dangerous savior for the impulsive poet; but he takes him to his home, warms, feeds, and shelters him, and promises to bring out his book. The brilliant, passionate woman who gave up her lover when his health and beauty were gone, returned to him when youth had passed, and would gladly have devoted herself to soothing his pain and enriching his life. Her feeling is painted with delicacy and tenderness. But Helwyze's heart knew nothing of the divine quality of forgiveness; for his love there was no resurrection; and he only valued the power he could exercise over a brilliant woman, and the intellectual entertainment she could bring him. A sweet young girl, Olivia's protegee, completes the very limited _dramatis personæ_. The young poet, Felix Canaris, under the guidance of his new friend, wins fame, success, and the young girl's heart; but his wayward fancy turns rather to the magnificent Olivia. The demoniac Helwyze works upon this feeling, and claims of Olivia her fair young friend Gladys as a wife for Felix, who is forced to accept her at the hands of his master. She is entirely responsive to the love which she fancies she has won, and is grateful for her fortunate lot, and devotes herself to the comfort and happiness of the poor invalid who delights in her beauty and grace. For a time Felix enjoys a society success, to which his charming wife, as well as his book, contribute. But at last this excitement flags. He writes another book, which he threatens to burn because he is dissatisfied with it. Gladys entreats him to spare it, and Helwyze offers to read it to her. She is overcome and melted with emotion at the passion and pathos of the story; and when Helwyze asks, "Shall I burn it?" Felix answers, "No!" Again the book brings success and admiration, but the tender wife sees that it does not insure happiness, and that her husband is plunging into the excitement of gambling. The demon Helwyze has complete control over the poet, which he exercises with such subtle tyranny that the young man is driven to the dreadful thought of murder to escape from him; but he is saved from the deed by the gentle influence of his wife, who has won his heart at last, unconscious that it had not always been hers. Helwyze finds his own punishment. One being resists his power,--Gladys breathes his poisoned atmosphere unharmed. He sends for Olivia as his ally to separate the wife from her husband's love. A passion of curiosity possesses him to read her very heart; and at last he resorts to a strange means to accomplish his purpose. He gives her an exciting drug without her knowledge, and under its influence she speaks and acts with a rare genius which calls forth the admiration of all the group. Left alone with her, Helwyze exercises his magnetic power to draw forth the secrets of her heart; but he reads there only a pure and true love for her husband, and fear of the unhallowed passion which he is cherishing. The secret of his power over the husband is at last revealed. Canaris has published as his own the work of Helwyze, and all the fame and glory he has received has been won by deceit, and is a miserable mockery. The tragic result is inevitable. Gladys dies under the pressure of a burden too heavy for her,--the knowledge of deceit in him she had loved and trusted; while the stricken Helwyze is paralyzed, and lives henceforth only a death in life. With all the elements of power and beauty in this singular book, it fails to charm and win the heart of the reader. The circumstances are in a romantic setting, but still they are prosaic; and tragedy is only endurable when taken up into the region of the ideal, where the thought of the universal rounds out all traits of the individual. In Goethe's Faust, Margaret is the sweetest and simplest of maidens; but in her is the life of all wronged and suffering womanhood. The realism which is delightful in the pictures of little women and merry boys is painful when connected with passions so morbid and lives so far removed from joy and sanity. As in her early dramas and sensational stories, we do not find Louisa Alcott's own broad, generous, healthy life, or that which lay around her, in this book, but the reminiscences of her reading, which she had striven to make her own by invention and fancy. This note refers to "A Modern Mephistopheles":-- [1877.] DEAR MR. NILES,--I had to keep the proof longer than I meant because a funeral came in the way. The book as last sent is lovely, and much bigger than I expected. Poor "Marmee," ill in bed, hugged it, and said, "It is perfect! only I do wish your name could be on it." She is very proud of it; and tender-hearted Anna weeps and broods over it, calling Gladys the best and sweetest character I ever did. So much for home opinion; now let's see what the public will say. May clamors for it; but I don't want to send this till she has had one or two of the others. Have you sent her "Is That All?" If not, please do; then it won't look suspicious to send only "M. M." I am so glad the job is done, and hope it won't disgrace the series. Is not another to come before this? I hope so; for many people suspect what is up, and I could tell my fibs about No. 6 better if it was not mine. Thanks for the trouble you have taken to keep the secret. Now the fun will begin. Yours truly, L. M. A. P. S.--Bean's expressman grins when he hands in the daily parcel. He is a Concord man. By Louisa's help the younger sister again went abroad in 1876; and her bright affectionate letters cheered the little household, much saddened by the mother's illness. _Journal._ _January_, 1876.--Helped Mrs. Croly receive two hundred gentlemen. A letter from Baron Tauchnitz asking leave to put my book in his foreign library, and sending 600 marks to pay for it. Said, "Yes, thank you, Baron." Went to Philadelphia to see Cousin J. May installed in Dr. Furness's pulpit. Dull place is Philadelphia. Heard Beecher preach; did not like him.... Went home on the 21st, finding I could not work here. Soon tire of being a fine lady. _February and March._--Took a room in B., and fell to work on short tales for F. T. N. wanted a centennial story; but my frivolous New York life left me no ideas. Went to Centennial Ball at Music Hall, and got an idea. Wrote a tale of "'76," which with others will make a catchpenny book. Mother poorly, so I go home to nurse her. _April, May, and June._--Mother better. Nan and boys go to P. farm. May and I clean the old house. It seems as if the dust of two centuries haunted the ancient mansion, and came out spring and fall in a ghostly way for us to clear up. Great freshets and trouble. Exposition in Philadelphia; don't care to go. America ought to pay her debts before she gives parties. "Silver Pitchers," etc., comes out, and goes well. Poor stuff; but the mill must keep on grinding even chaff. _June._--Lovely month! Keep hotel and wait on Marmee. Try to get up steam for a new serial, as Mrs. Dodge wants one, and Scribner offers $3,000 for it. Roberts Brothers want a novel; and the various newspapers and magazines clamor for tales. My brain is squeezed dry, and I can only wait for help. _July, August._--Get an idea and start "Rose in Bloom," though I hate sequels. _September._--On the 9th my dear girl sails in the "China" for a year in London or Paris. God be with her! She has done her distasteful duty faithfully, and deserved a reward. She cannot find the help she needs here, and is happy and busy in her own world over there. [She never came home.--L. M. A.] Finish "Rose." * * * * * _November._--"Rose" comes out; sells well. ... Forty-four years old. My new task gets on slowly; but I keep at it, and can be a prop, if not an angel, in the house, as Nan is. _December._--Miss P. sends us a pretty oil sketch of May,--so like the dear soul in her violet wrapper, with yellow curls piled up, and the long hand at work. Mother delights in it. She (M.) is doing finely, and says, "I am getting on, and I feel as if it was not all a mistake; for I have some talent, and will prove it." Modesty is a sign of genius, and I think our girl has both. The money I invest in her pays the sort of interest I like. I am proud to have her show what she can do, and have her depend upon no one but me. Success to little Raphael! My dull winter is much cheered by her happiness and success. _January, February, 1877._--The year begins well. Nan keeps house; boys fine, tall lads, good and gay; Father busy with his new book; Mother cosey with her sewing, letters, Johnson, and success of her "girls." Went for some weeks to the Bellevue, and wrote "A Modern Mephistopheles" for the No Name Series. It has been simmering ever since I read Faust last year. Enjoyed doing it, being tired of providing moral pap for the young. Long to write a novel, but cannot get time enough. May's letters our delight. She is so in earnest she will not stop for pleasure, rest, or society, but works away like a Trojan. Her work admired by masters and mates for its vigor and character. _March._--Begin to think of buying the Thoreau place for Nan. The $4,000 received from the Vt. and Eastern R. Rs. must be invested, and she wants a home of her own, now the lads are growing up. Mother can be with her in the winter for a change, and leave me free to write in B. Concord has no inspiration for me. _April._--May, at the request of her teacher, M. Muller, sends a study of still life to the Salon. The little picture is accepted, well hung, and praised by the judges. No friend at court, and the modest work stood on its own merits. She is very proud to see her six months' hard work bear fruit. A happy girl, and all say she deserves the honor. "M. M." appears and causes much guessing. It is praised and criticised, and I enjoy the fun, especially when friends say, "I know _you_ didn't write it, for you can't hide your peculiar style." Help to buy the house for Nan,--$4,500. So she has _her_ wish, and is happy. When shall I have mine? Ought to be contented with knowing I help both sisters by my brains. But I'm selfish, and want to go away and rest in Europe. Never shall. _May, June._--Quiet days keeping house and attending to Marmee, who grows more and more feeble. Helped Nan get ready for her new home. Felt very well, and began to hope I had outlived the neuralgic worries and nervous woes born of the hospital fever and the hard years following. May living alone in Paris, while her mates go jaunting,--a solitary life; but she is so busy she is happy and safe. A good angel watches over her. Take pleasant drives early in the A.M. with Marmee. She takes her comfort in a basket wagon, and we drive to the woods, picking flowers and stopping where we like. It keeps her young, and rests her weary nerves. _July._--Got too tired, and was laid up for some weeks. A curious time, lying quite happily at rest, wondering what was to come next. _August._--As soon as able began "Under the Lilacs," but could not do much. Mrs. Alcott grew rapidly worse, and her devoted daughter recognized that the final parting was near. As Louisa watched by the bedside she wrote "My Girls," and finished "Under the Lilacs." The journal tells the story of the last days of watching, and of the peaceful close of the mother's self-sacrificing yet blessed life. Louisa was very brave in the presence of death. She had no dark thoughts connected with it; and in her mother's case, after her long, hard life, she recognized how "growing age longed for its peaceful sleep." The tie between this mother and daughter was exceptionally strong and tender. The mother saw all her own fine powers reproduced and developed in her daughter; and if she also recognized the passionate energy which had been the strength and the bane of her own life, it gave her only a more constant watchfulness to save her child from the struggles and regrets from which she had suffered herself. _Journal._ _September_, 1877.--On the 7th Marmee had a very ill turn, and the doctor told me it was the beginning of the end. [Water on the chest.] She was so ill we sent for Father from Walcott; and I forgot myself in taking care of poor Marmee, who suffered much and longed to go. As I watched with her I wrote "My Girls," to go with other tales in a new "Scrap Bag," and finished "Under the Lilacs." I foresaw a busy or a sick winter, and wanted to finish while I could, so keeping my promise and earning my $3,000. Brain very lively and pen flew. It always takes an exigency to spur me up and wring out a book. Never have time to go slowly and do my best. _October._--Fearing I might give out, got a nurse and rested a little, so that when the last hard days come I might not fail Marmee, who says, "Stay by, Louy, and help me if I suffer too much." I promised, and watched her sit panting life away day after day. We thought she would not outlive her seventy-seventh birthday, but, thanks to Dr. W. and homoeopathy, she got relief, and we had a sad little celebration, well knowing it would be the last. Aunt B. and L. W. came up, and with fruit, flowers, smiling faces, and full hearts, we sat round the brave soul who faced death so calmly and was ready to go. I overdid and was very ill,--in danger of my life for a week,--and feared to go before Marmee. But pulled through, and got up slowly to help her die. A strange month. _November._--Still feeble, and Mother failing fast. On the 14th we were both moved to Anna's at Mother's earnest wish. A week in the new home, and then she ceased to care for anything. Kept her bed for three days, lying down after weeks in a chair, and on the 25th, at dusk, that rainy Sunday, fell quietly asleep in my arms. She was very happy all day, thinking herself a girl again, with parents and sisters round her. Said her Sunday hymn to me, whom she called "Mother," and smiled at us, saying, "A smile is as good as a prayer." Looked often at the little picture of May, and waved her hand to it, "Good-by, little May, good-by!" Her last words to Father were, "You are laying a very soft pillow for me to go to sleep on." We feared great suffering, but she was spared that, and slipped peacefully away. I was so glad when the last weary breath was drawn, and silence came, with its rest and peace. On the 27th it was necessary to bury her, and we took her quietly away to Sleepy Hollow. A hard day, but the last duty we could do for her; and there we left her at sunset beside dear Lizzie's dust,--alone so long. On the 28th a memorial service, and all the friends at Anna's,--Dr. Bartol and Mr. Foote of Stone Chapel. A simple, cheerful service, as she would have liked it. Quiet days afterward resting in her rest. My duty is done, and now I shall be glad to follow her. _December._--Many kind letters from all who best knew and loved the noble woman. I never wish her back, but a great warmth seems gone out of life, and there is no motive to go on now. My only comfort is that I _could_ make her last years comfortable, and lift off the burden she had carried so bravely all these years. She was so loyal, tender, and true; life was hard for her, and no one understood all she had to bear but we, her children. I think I shall soon follow her, and am quite ready to go now she no longer needs me. _January_, 1878.--An idle month at Nan's, for I can only suffer. Father goes about, being restless with his anchor gone. Dear Nan is house-mother now,--so patient, so thoughtful and tender; I need nothing but that cherishing which only mothers can give. May busy in London. Very sad about Marmee; but it was best not to send for her, and Marmee forbade it, and she has some very _tender friends_ near her. _February._--... Wrote some lines on Marmee. _To Mrs. Dodge._ CONCORD, June 3 [1877]. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--The tale[14] goes slowly owing to interruptions, for summer is a busy time, and I get few quiet days. Twelve chapters are done, but are short ones, and so will make about six or seven numbers in "St. Nicholas." I will leave them divided in this way that you may put in as many as you please each month; for trying to suit the magazine hurts the story in its book form, though this way does no harm to the monthly parts, I think. I will send you the first few chapters during the week for Mrs. Foote, and with them the schedule you suggest, so that my infants may not be drawn with whiskers, and my big boys and girls in pinafores, as in "Eight Cousins." I hope the new baby won't be set aside too soon for my illustrations; but I do feel a natural wish to have one story prettily adorned with good pictures, as hitherto artists have much afflicted me. I am daily waiting with anxiety for an illumination of some sort, as my plot is very vague so far; and though I don't approve of "sensations" in children's books, one must have a certain thread on which to string the small events which make up the true sort of child-life. I intend to go and simmer an afternoon at Van Amburg's great show, that I may get hints for the further embellishment of Ben and his dog. I have also put in a poem by F. B. S.'s small son,[15] and that hit will give Mrs. Foote a good scene with the six-year-old poet reciting his verses under the lilacs. I shall expect the small tots to be unusually good, since the artist has a live model to study from. Please present my congratulations to the happy mamma and Mr. Foote, Jr. Yours _warmly_, L. M. A. AUGUST 21, 1879. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I have not been able to do anything on the serial.... But after a week at the seaside, to get braced up for work, I intend to begin. The Revolutionary tale does not seem to possess me. I have casually asked many of my young folks, when they demand a new story, which they would like, one of that sort or the old "Eight Cousin" style, and they all say the latter. It would be much the easier to do, as I have a beginning and a plan all ready,--a village, and the affairs of a party of children. We have many little romances going on among the Concord boys and girls, and all sorts of queer things, which will work into "Jack and Jill" nicely. Mrs. Croly has been anxious for a story, and I am trying to do a short one, as I told her you had the refusal of my next serial. I hope you will not be very much disappointed about the old-time tale. It would take study to do it well, and leisure is just what I have not got, and I shall never have, I fear, when writing is to be done. I will send you a few chapters of "Jack and Jill" when in order, if you like, and you can decide if they will suit. I shall try to have it unlike the others if possible, but the dears _will_ cling to the "Little Women" style. I have had a very busy summer, but have been pretty well, and able to do my part in entertaining the four hundred philosophers. Yours truly, L. M. A. SEPTEMBER 17 [1879]. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--Don't let me _prose_. If I seem to be declining and falling into it, pull me up, and I'll try to prance as of old. Years tame down one's spirit and fancy, though they only deepen one's love for the little people, and strengthen the desire to serve them wisely as well as cheerfully. Fathers and mothers tell me they use my books as helps for themselves; so now and then I like to slip in a page for them, fresh from the experience of some other parent, for education seems to me to be _the_ problem in our times. Jack and Jill are right out of our own little circle, and the boys and girls are in a twitter to know what is going in; so it will be a "truly story" in the main. Such a long note for a busy woman to read! but your cheery word was my best "starter;" and I'm, more than ever, Yours truly, L. M. A. MAY ALCOTT NIERIKER. Born at Concord, July, 1840. Died in Paris, December, 1879. This younger sister became so dear to Louisa, and through the legacy which she left to her of an infant child, exercised so great an influence over the last ten years of her life, that it will not be uninteresting to trace out the course of her life and the development of her character. May was born before the experiments at Fruitlands, and her childhood passed during the period when the fortunes of the family were at the lowest ebb; but she was too young to feel in all their fulness the cares which weighed upon the older sisters. Her oldest sister--the affectionate, practical Anna--almost adopted May as her own baby, and gave her a great deal of the attention and care which the mother had not time for amid her numerous avocations. The child clung to Anna with trust and affection; but with her quick fancy and lively spirit, she admired the brilliant qualities of Louisa. Hasty in temperament, quick and impulsive in action, she quarrelled with Louisa while she adored her, and was impatient with her rebukes, which yet had great influence over her. She had a more facile nature than the other sisters, and a natural, girlish love of attention, and a romantic fondness for beauty in person and style in living. Graceful in figure and manners, with a fine complexion, blue eyes, and a profusion of light wavy hair, she was attractive in appearance; and a childish frankness, and acceptance of sympathy or criticism, disarmed those who were disposed to find fault with her. May is very truly described in "Little Women," and her character is painted with a discerning but loving hand: "A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners." Many little touches of description show the consciousness of appearance and love of admiration which she innocently betrayed, and illustrate the relation of the sisters: "'Don't stop to quirk your little finger and prink over your plate, Amy,' cried Jo." Her mother says of this daughter in her diary: "She does all things well; her capabilities are much in her eyes and fingers. When a child, I observed with what ease and grace she did little things." According to Louisa, "If anybody had asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, 'My nose.' No one minded it but herself, and it was doing its best to grow; but Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself." "Little Raphael," as the sisters called her, very early developed a love and talent for drawing which became the delight of her life. She covered her books with sketches, but managed to escape reprimand by being a model of deportment. Always having in her mind an ideal of elegant life, the many little trials of their times of poverty were of course severe mortifications to her; and the necessity of wearing dresses which came to her from others, and which were ugly in themselves or out of harmony with her own appearance, caused her much affliction. She was always generous and easily reconciled after a quarrel, and was a favorite with her companions, and the heroine of those innocent little love episodes which, as Tennyson says,-- "Are but embassies of love To tamper with the feelings, ere he found Empire for life."[16] While May was too young to take the part in the support of the family which fell to Anna and Louisa, she was yet a blessing and comfort by her kind, bright nature. After the death of Elizabeth in 1858, her mother speaks of "turning to the little May for comfort," and her father's letters show how dear she was to him, although she never entered into his intellectual life. May shared in the blessing of Louisa's first success, for she went to the School of Design in 1859 for the lessons in her art, for which she longed so eagerly. In 1860 an old friend sent her thirty dollars for lessons in drawing, and she had the best instruction she could then receive in Boston. In 1863, Louisa procured for her the great advantage of study with Dr. Rimmer, who was then giving his precious lessons in art anatomy in Boston. Under his instructions, May gave some attention to modelling, and completed an ideal bust. Although she did not pursue this branch of art, it was undoubtedly of great service in giving her more thorough knowledge of the head, and a bolder and firmer style of drawing than she would have gained in any other way. As will be seen from Louisa's journal, May was frequently with her in Boston, engaged in studying or teaching. By the kindness of a friend, she went to Europe in 1870, when Louisa accompanied her. Louisa sent her to Europe for a year of study in 1873, and again in 1877. In London and Paris she had good opportunities for study, and improved rapidly in her art. She made some admirable copies from Turner which attracted the attention of Ruskin; and a picture from still life was accepted at the Paris Salon, which event gave great happiness to the family circle and friends at home. May was very generous in giving to others help in the art she loved. While at home, in the intervals of her studies in Europe, she tried to form an art centre in Concord, and freely gave her time, her instruction, and the use of her studio to young artists. She wrote a little book to aid them in prosecuting their studies abroad, called "Studying Art Abroad, and How to do it Cheaply." Like the rest of the family, May composed with great ease, and sometimes wrote little stories. Her letters are very sprightly and agreeable. While residing in London, May had become acquainted with a young Swiss gentleman, whose refined and artistic tastes were closely in unison with her own. During the sad days of bereavement caused by her mother's death he was a kind and sympathetic friend, soothing her grief and cheering her solitude by his music. Thus, frequently together, their friendship became love, and they were betrothed. The course of this true love, which for a time ran swiftly and smoothly, is most exquisitely depicted in May's letters to her family. The charming pictures of herself and her young lover are so like Amy and her Laurie in his happiest moods, that we almost feel as if Miss Alcott had been prophetic in her treatment of these characters in "Little Women." I wish I could give her own natural, frank account of this event. May had the secret of perpetual youth, at least in spirit; and in reading her letters, one has no consciousness that more than thirty years had passed over her head, for they had taken no drop of freshness from her heart. The union of this happy pair was not a surprise to the friends at home, who had read May's heart, revealed in her frank, innocent letters, more clearly than she had supposed. When the claims of business called Mr. Nieriker from London, the hearts of the young couple quailed before the idea of separation, and they decided to be married at once, and go together. The simple ceremony was performed in London, March 22, 1878; and May started on her journey, no longer alone, but with a loving friend by her side. May's letters are full of the most artless joy in her new life. The old days of struggle and penury are gone; the heart-loneliness is no more; the world is beautiful, and everybody loving and kind. Life in the modest French home is an idyllic dream, and she writes to her sisters of every detail of her household. The return of her husband at sunset is a feast, and the evening is delightful with poetry and music. Her blue dress, her crimson furniture, satisfy her artistic sense. She does not neglect her art, but paints with fresh inspiration, and waits for his criticism and praise. She says, "He is very ambitious for my artistic success, and is my most severe critic." In the morning she finds her easel set out for her, a fire burning ready for her comfort, and her husband in the big arm-chair waiting to read to her, or to take his violin and pose for his picture in gray velvet paletot and red slippers.[17] For the time conjugal love is all sufficient, and May wonders at herself that the happiness of the moment can so drown every remembrance of sorrow. Yet a pathetic note is occasionally heard, as she mourns for the mother who is gone, or yearns for the sister who has been such a strength to her through life. The picturesqueness and ease of French life make America look stupid and forlorn, and she has no wish to go home, but only to have her dear ones share in her happiness. Her work in art was successful; and the money she received for it was not unacceptable, although her husband's income sufficed for their modest wants. She was justified in her grateful feeling that she was singularly blessed. Her husband's family were German-Swiss of high standing, artistic temperament, and warm affections. His mother and sister came to visit them, and took May to their hearts with cordial love. Among the pictures painted by May at this time the most remarkable is the portrait of a negro girl, which is a very faithful study from life, and gives the color and characteristic traits of a beautiful negro without exaggeration. The expression of the eyes is tender and pathetic, well-suited to the fate of a slave girl. Such earnest study would have borne richer fruit if longer life had been hers. May's own nature seems to have blossomed out like a flower in this sunny climate. In her youth at home she was impulsive, affectionate, and generous, but quick in temper and sometimes exacting; but the whole impression she made upon her husband and his family was of grace and sweetness, and she herself declares that her sisters at home would not recognize her, she has "become so sweet in this atmosphere of happiness." We would gladly linger over these records of a paradisiacal home where Adam and Eve renewed their innocent loves and happy labors. When musing over the sorrows of humanity it refreshes us to know that such joy is possible, and needs only love and simple hearts to make it real. May's note of happiness is touchingly echoed from the heart of her bereaved father, who recalls the days of his own courtship. He cherished every tender word from her; and the respectful and loving words of his new son, to whom he responds affectionately, were like balm to his stricken heart. May's joy was heightened by the expectation of motherhood. Her health was excellent, and she had the loving care of her new mother and sister. The anxious family at home received the news of the birth of a daughter with heartfelt delight. It was a great disappointment to Louisa that she could not be with her sister at this time; but her health was not equal to the voyage, and she felt that May had most loving and sufficient care. An American friend in Paris kindly wrote to Louisa full details of the little niece and of the mother's condition. "It is difficult," she says, "to say which of that happy household is the proudest over that squirming bit of humanity." For about two weeks all seemed well; but alarming symptoms began to appear, and the mother's strength failed rapidly. The brain was the seat of disease; and she was generally unconscious, although she had intervals of apparent improvement, when she recognized her friends. She passed away peacefully December 29, 1879. An American clergyman in Paris took charge of the funeral service, which according to May's expressed desire was very simple, and she was laid in the tranquil cemetery of Montrouge outside of the fortifications. Foreseeing the possibility of a fatal termination to her illness, May had made every preparation for the event, and obtained a promise from her sister-in-law that she would carry the baby to Louisa to receive the devoted care that she knew would be given it. The child became a source of great comfort to Miss Alcott as will be seen from the journals. After her death Mr. Nieriker visited his little girl in America, and in June, 1889, her aunt took her to his home in Zurich, Switzerland. Before the sad letters describing May's illness could reach America, came the cable message of her death. It was sent to Mr. Emerson, the never-failing friend of the family, who bore it to Louisa, her father being temporarily absent. His thoughtfulness softened the blow as much as human tenderness could, but still it fell with crushing weight upon them all. The father and sister could not sleep, and in the watches of the night he wrote that touching ode, the cry of paternal love and grief entitled "Love's Morrow." _To Mrs. Bond._ CONCORD, Jan. 1, 1880. DEAR AUNTIE,--It is hard to add one more sorrow to your already full heart, particularly one of this sort, but I did not want you to hear it from any one but us. Dear May is dead. Gone to begin the new year with Mother, in a world where I hope there is no grief like this. Gone just when she seemed safest and happiest, after nearly two years of such sweet satisfaction and love that she wrote us, "If I die when baby comes, remember I have been so unspeakably happy for a year that I ought to be content...." And it is all over. The good mother and sister have done everything in the most devoted way. We can never repay them. My May gave me her little Lulu, and in the spring I hope to get my sweet legacy. Meantime the dear grandma takes her to a home full of loving friends and she is safe. I will write more when we know, but the cruel sea divides us and we must wait. Bless you dear Auntie for all your love for May; she never forgot it, nor do we. Yours ever, LOUISA. JANUARY 4. DEAR AUNTIE,--I have little further news to tell, but it seems to comfort me to answer the shower of tender sympathetic letters that each mail brings us.... So we must wait to learn how the end came at last, where the dear dust is to lie, and how soon the desolate little home is to be broken up. It only remains for May's baby to be taken away to fill our cup to overflowing. But perhaps it would be best so, for even in Heaven with Mother, I know May will yearn for the darling so ardently desired, so tenderly welcomed, bought at such a price. In all the troubles of my life I never had one so hard to bear, for the sudden fall from such high happiness to such a depth of sorrow finds me unprepared to accept or bear it as I ought. Sometime I shall know why such things are; till then must try to trust and wait and hope as you do.... Sorrow has its lonely side, and sympathy is so sweet it takes half its bitterness away. Yours ever, L. After May's marriage and death Louisa remained awhile in Concord, trying to forget her grief in care for others. She went to the prison in Concord, and told a story to the prisoners which touched their hearts, and was long remembered by some of them. She wrote some short stories for "St Nicholas," among them "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore," called out by the acting of the popular opera of that name by a juvenile troupe. She spent some weeks at Willow Cottage, Magnolia, which she has described in her popular story of "Jack and Jill." The scene of the story is mostly laid in Concord, or "Harmony" as she calls it, and she has introduced many familiar scenes and persons into the book. This summer, too, the long-dreamed of School of Philosophy was established. The opening of the School was a great event to Mr. Alcott, as it was the realization of the dream of years. Louisa enjoyed his gratification, and took pains to help him to reap full satisfaction from it. She carried flowers to grace the opening meeting, and was friendly to his guests. She occasionally attended lectures given by her friends,--Dr. Bartol, Mrs. Howe, and others,--and she could not fail to enjoy meeting many of the bright people who congregated there; but she did not care for the speculative philosophy. Her keen sense of humor led her to see all that was incongruous or funny or simply novel in the bearing of the philosophers. She felt that her father had too much of the trying details, and perhaps did not appreciate how much joy of recognition it brought him. She had not much faith in the practical success of the experiment. Philosophy was much associated in her mind with early poverty and suffering, and she did not feel its charms. She was usually at the seashore at this season, as she suffered from the heat at Concord. Frequent allusions to the school appear in her journal. The following anecdote is given by a friend. "It was at Concord on Emerson day. After a morning with Bartol and Alcott and Mrs. Howe, I lunched with the Alcotts', who had for guest the venerable Dr. McCosh. Naturally the conversation turned on the events of the morning. 'I was thinking,' said the Doctor, 'as I looked among your audience, that there were no young men; and that with none but old men your school would soon die with them. By the way, madam,' he continued, addressing Miss Alcott, 'will you tell me what is your definition of a philosopher?' "The reply came instantly, 'My definition is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.' "The laugh which followed this reply was heartily joined in by the philosopher himself." _Journal._ _March_, 1878.--A happy event,--May's marriage to Ernest Nieriker, the "tender friend" who has consoled her for Marmee's loss, as John consoled Nan for Beth's. He is a Swiss, handsome, cultivated, and good; an excellent family living in Baden, and E. has a good business. May is old enough to choose for herself, and seems so happy in the new relation that we have nothing to say against it. They were privately married on the 22d, and went to Havre for the honeymoon, as E. had business in France; so they hurried the wedding. Send her $1,000 as a gift, and all good wishes for the new life. _April._--Happy letters from May, who is enjoying life as one can but once. E. writes finely to Father, and is a son to welcome I am sure. May sketches and E. attends to his business by day, and both revel in music in the evening, as E. is a fine violin player. How different our lives are just now!--I so lonely, sad, and sick; she so happy, well, and blest. She always had the cream of things, and deserved it. My time is yet to come somewhere else, when I am ready for it. Anna clears out the old house; for we shall never go back to it; it ceased to be "home" when Marmee left it. I dawdle about, and wait to see if I am to live or die. If I live, it is for some new work. I wonder what? _May._--Begin to drive a little, and enjoy the spring. Nature is always good to me. May settles in her own house at Meudon,--a pretty apartment, with balcony, garden, etc.... I plan and hope to go to them, if I am ever well enough, and find new inspiration in a new life. May and E. urge it, and I long to go, but cannot risk the voyage yet. I doubt if I ever find time to lead my own life, or health to try it. _June and July._--Improving fast, in spite of dark predictions and forebodings. The Lord has more work for me, so I am spared. Tried to write a memoir of Marmee; but it is too soon, and I am not well enough. * * * * * May has had the new mother and brother-in-law with her, and finds them most interesting and lovable. They seem very proud of her, and happy in her happiness. Bright times for our youngest! May they last! [They did.--L. M. A.] * * * * * Got nicely ready to go to May in September; but at the last moment gave it up, fearing to undo all the good this weary year of ease has done for me, and be a burden on her. A great disappointment; but I've learned to wait. I long to see her happy in her own home. Nan breaks her leg; so it is well I stayed, as there was no one to take her place but me. Always a little chore to be done. _October, November._--Nan improved. Rode, nursed, kept house, and tried to be contented, but was not. Make no plans for myself now; do what I can, and should be glad not to have to sit idle any longer. On the 8th, Marmee's birthday, Father and I went to Sleepy Hollow with red leaves and flowers for her. A cold, dull day, and I was glad there was no winter for her any more. _November 25th._--A year since our beloved Marmee died. A very eventful year. May marries, I live instead of dying, Father comes to honor in his old age, and Nan makes her home our refuge when we need one. _December._--A busy time. Nan gets about again. I am so well I wonder at myself, and ask no more. Write a tale for the "Independent," and begin on an art novel, with May's romance for its thread. Went to B. for some weeks, and looked about to see what I could venture to do.... So ends 1878,--a great contrast to last December. Then I thought I was done with life; now I can enjoy a good deal, and wait to see what I am spared to do. Thank God for both the sorrow and the joy. _January_, 1879.--At the Bellevue in my little room writing. Got two books well started, but had too many interruptions to do much, and dared not get into a vortex for fear of a break-down. Went about and saw people, and tried to be jolly. Did Jarley for a fair, also for Authors' Carnival at Music Hall. A queer time; too old for such pranks. A sad heart and a used-up body make play hard work, I find. Read "Mary Wollstonecraft," "Dosia," "Danieli," "Helène," etc. I like Gréville's books. Invest $1,000 for Fred's schooling, etc. Johnny has his $1,000 also safely in the bank for his education and any emergency. _February._--Home to Concord rather used up. Find a very quiet life is best; for in B. people beset me to do things, and I try, and get so tired I cannot work. Dr. C. says rest is my salvation; so I rest. Hope for Paris in the spring, as May begs me to come. She is leading what she calls "an ideal life,"--painting, music, love, and the world shut out. People wonder and gossip; but M. and E. laugh and are happy. Wise people to enjoy this lovely time! Went to a dinner, at the Revere House, of the Papyrus Club. Mrs. Burnett and Miss A. were guests of honor. Dr. Holmes took me in, and to my surprise I found myself at the president's right hand, with Mrs. B., Holmes, Stedman, and the great ones of the land. Had a gay time. Dr. H. very gallant. "Little Women" often toasted with more praise than was good for me. Saw Mrs. B. at a lunch, and took her and Mrs. M. M. Dodge to Concord for a lunch. Most agreeable women. A visit at H. W.'s. Mission time at Church of the Advent. Father Knox-Little preached, and waked up the sinners. H. hoped to convert me, and took me to see Father K.-L., a very interesting man, and we had a pleasant talk; but I found that we meant the same thing, though called by different names; and his religion had too much ceremony about it to suit me. So he gave me his blessing, and promised to send me some books. [Never did.--L. M. A.] Pleasant times with my "rainy-day friend," as I call Dr. W. She is a great comfort to me, with her healthy common-sense and tender patience, aside from skill as a doctor and beauty as a woman. I love her much, and she does me good. * * * * * Happy letters from May. Her hopes of a little son or daughter in the autumn give us new plans to talk over. I _must_ be well enough to go to her then. _April._--Very poorly and cross; so tired of being a prisoner to pain. Long for the old strength when I could do what I liked, and never knew I had a body. Life not worth living in this way; but having over-worked the wonderful machine, I must pay for it, and should not growl, I suppose, as it is just. To B. to see Dr. S. Told me I was better than she ever dreamed I could be, and need not worry. So took heart, and tried to be cheerful, in spite of aches and nerves. Warm weather comforted me, and green grass did me good. Put a fence round A.'s garden. Bought a phaeton, so I might drive, as I cannot walk much, and Father loves to take his guests about. _May and June._--Go to B. for a week, but don't enjoy seeing people. Do errands, and go home again. Saw "Pinafore;" a pretty play. Much company. E.'s looked at the Orchard House and liked it; will hire it, probably. Hope so, as it is forlorn standing empty. I never go by without looking up at Marmee's window, where the dear face used to be, and May's, with the picturesque vines round it. No golden-haired, blue-gowned Diana ever appears now; she sits happily sewing baby-clothes in Paris. Enjoyed fitting out a box of dainty things to send her. Even lonely old spinsters take an interest in babies. _June._--A poor month. Try to forget my own worries, and enjoy the fine weather, my little carriage, and good friends. Souls are such slaves to bodies it is hard to keep up out of the slough of despond when nerves jangle and flesh aches. Went with Father on Sunday to the prison, and told the men a story. Thought I could not face four hundred at first; but after looking at them during the sermon, I felt that I could at least _amuse_ them, and they evidently needed something new. So I told a hospital story with a little moral to it, and was so interested in watching the faces of some young men near me, who drank in every word, that I forgot myself, and talked away "like a mother." One put his head down, and another winked hard, so I felt that I had caught them; for even one tear in that dry, hard place would do them good. Miss McC. and Father said it was well done, and I felt quite proud of my first speech. [Sequel later.] _July._--Wrote a little tale called "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore," for "St. Nicholas;" $100. _14th._--The philosophers begin to swarm, and the buzz starts to-morrow. How much honey will be made is still doubtful, but the hive is ready and drones also. On the 15th, the School of Philosophy began in the study at Orchard House,--thirty students; Father, the dean. He has his dream realized at last, and is in glory, with plenty of talk to swim in. People laugh, but will enjoy something new in this dull old town; and the fresh Westerners will show them that all the culture of the world is not in Concord. I had a private laugh when Mrs. ---- asked one of the new-comers, with her superior air, if she had ever looked into Plato. And the modest lady from Jacksonville answered, with a twinkle at me, "We have been reading Plato in _Greek_ for the past six years." Mrs. ---- subsided after that. [Oh, wicked L. M. A., who hates sham and loves a joke.--L. M. A.] Was the first woman to register my name as a voter. _August._--To B. with a new "Scrap Bag." "Jimmy" to the fore. Wrote a little tale. The town swarms with budding philosophers, and they roost on our steps like hens waiting for corn. Father revels in it, so we keep the hotel going, and try to look as if we liked it. If they were philanthropists, I should enjoy it; but speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the "unknowable" till our poor are fed and the wicked saved? A young poet from New York came; nice boy. Sixteen callers to-day. Trying to stir up the women about suffrage; so timid and slow. Happy letters from May. Sophie N. is with her now. All well in the Paris nest. Passed a week in Magnolia with Mrs. H. School ended for this year. Hallelujah! _September._--Home from the seaside refreshed, and go to work on a new serial for "St. Nicholas,"--"Jack and Jill." Have no plan yet but a boy, a girl, and a sled, with an upset to start with. Vague idea of working in Concord young folks and their doings. After two years of rest, I am going to try again; it is so easy to make money now, and so pleasant to have it to give. A chapter a day is my task, and not that if I feel tired. No more fourteen hours a day; make haste slowly now. Drove about and drummed up women to my suffrage meeting. So hard to move people out of the old ruts. I haven't patience enough; if they won't see and work, I let 'em alone, and steam along my own way. May sent some nice little letters of an "Artist's Holiday," and I had them printed; also a book for artists abroad,--very useful, and well done. Eight chapters done. Too much company for work. _October 8th._--Dear Marmee's birthday. Never forgotten. Lovely day. Go to Sleepy Hollow with flowers. Her grave is green; blackberry vines with red leaves trail over it. A little white stone with her initials is at the head, and among the tall grass over her breast a little bird had made a nest; empty now, but a pretty symbol of the refuge that tender bosom always was for all feeble and sweet things. Her favorite asters bloomed all about, and the pines sang overhead. So she and dear Beth are quietly asleep in God's acre, and we remember them more tenderly with each year that brings us nearer them and home. Went with Dr. W. to the Woman's Prison, at Sherburne. A lovely drive, and very remarkable day and night. Read a story to the four hundred women, and heard many interesting tales. A much better place than Concord Prison, with its armed wardens, and "knock down and drag out" methods. Only women here, and they work wonders by patience, love, common-sense, and the belief in salvation for all. First proof from Scribner of "Jack and Jill." Mrs. D. likes the story, so I peg away very slowly. Put in Elly D. as one of my boys. The nearer I keep to nature, the better the work is. Young people much interested in the story, and all want to "go in." I shall have a hornet's nest about me if all are not _angels_. Father goes West. I mourn much because all say I must not go to May; not safe; and I cannot add to Mamma Nieriker's cares at this time by another invalid, as the voyage would upset me, I am so sea-sick. Give up my hope and long-cherished plan with grief. May sadly disappointed. I know I shall wish I had gone; it is my luck. _November._--Went to Boston for a month, as some solace for my great disappointment. Take my room at the Bellevue, and go about a little. Write on "J. and J." Anxious about May. _8th._--Little Louisa May Nieriker arrived in Paris at 9 p. m., after a short journey. All doing well. Much rejoicing. Nice little lass, and May very happy. Ah, if I had only been there! Too much happiness for me. _25th._--Two years since Marmee went. How she would have enjoyed the little granddaughter, and all May's romance! Perhaps she does. Went home on my birthday (forty-seven). Tried to have a little party for Nan and the boys, but it was rather hard work. Not well enough to write much, so give up my room. Can lie round at home, and it's cheaper. _December._--May not doing well. The weight on my heart is not all imagination. She was too happy to have it last, and I fear the end is coming. Hope it is my nerves; but this peculiar feeling has never misled me before. Invited to the breakfast to O. W. H. No heart to go. _8th._--Little Lu one month old. Small, but lively. Oh, if I could only be there to see,--to help! This is a penance for all my sins. Such a tugging at my heart to be by poor May, alone, so far away. The N.'s are devoted, and all is done that can be; but not one of her "very own" is there. Father came home. _29th._--May died at 8 a. m., after three weeks of fever and stupor. Happy and painless most of the time. At Mr. W.'s funeral on the 30th, I _felt_ the truth before the news came. _Wednesday, 31st._--A dark day for us. A telegram from Ernest to Mr. Emerson tells us "May is dead." Anna was gone to B.; Father to the post-office, anxious for letters, the last being overdue. I was alone when Mr. E. came. E. sent to him, knowing I was feeble, and hoping Mr. E. would soften the blow. I found him looking at May's portrait, pale and tearful, with the paper in his hand. "My child, I wish I could prepare you; but alas, alas!" There his voice failed, and he gave me the telegram. I was not surprised, and read the hard words as if I knew it all before. "I _am_ prepared," I said, and thanked him. He was much moved and very tender. I shall remember gratefully the look, the grasp, the tears he gave me; and I am sure that hard moment was made bearable by the presence of this our best and tenderest friend. He went to find Father but missed him, and I had to tell both him and Anna when they came. A very bitter sorrow for all. The dear baby may comfort E., but what can comfort us? It is the distance that is so hard, and the thought of so much happiness ended so soon. "Two years of perfect happiness" May called these married years, and said, "If I die when baby comes, don't mourn, for I have had as much happiness in this short time as many in twenty years." She wished me to have her baby and her pictures. A very precious legacy! Rich payment for the little I could do for her. I see now why I lived,--to care for May's child and not leave Anna all alone. _January 1st_, 1880.--A sad day mourning for May. Of all the trials in my life I never felt any so keenly as this, perhaps because I am so feeble in health that I cannot bear it well. It seems so hard to break up that happy little home and take May just when life was richest, and to leave me who had done my task and could well be spared. Shall I ever know why such things happen? Letters came telling us all the sad story. May was unconscious during the last weeks, and seemed not to suffer. Spoke now and then of "getting ready for Louy," and asked if she had come. All was done that love and skill could do, but in vain. E. is broken-hearted, and good Madame N. and Sophie find their only solace in the poor baby. May felt a foreboding, and left all ready in case she died. Some trunks packed for us, some for the N. sisters. Her diary written up, all in order. Even chose the graveyard where she wished to be, out of the city. E. obeys all her wishes sacredly. Tried to write on "J. and J." to distract my mind; but the wave of sorrow kept rolling over me, and I could only weep and wait till the tide ebbed again. _February._--More letters from E. and Madame N. Like us, they find comfort in writing of the dear soul gone, now there is nothing more to do for her. I cannot make it true that our May is dead, lying far away in a strange grave, leaving a husband and child whom we have never seen. It all reads like a pretty romance, now death hath set its seal on these two happy years; and we shall never know all that she alone could tell us. Many letters from friends in France, England, and America, full of sympathy for us, and love and pride and gratitude for May, who was always glad to help, forgive, and love every one. It is our only consolation now. Father and I cannot sleep, but he and I make verses as we did when Marmee died. Our grief seems to flow into words. He writes "Love's Morrow" and "Our Madonna." Lulu has gone to Baden with Grandmamma. Finish "J. and J." The world goes on in spite of sorrow, and I must do my work. Both these last serials were written with a heavy heart,--"Under the Lilacs" when Marmee was failing, and "Jack and Jill" while May was dying. Hope the grief did not get into them. Hear R. W. E. lecture for his one hundredth time. Mary Clemmer writes for a sketch of my life for a book of "Famous Women." Don't belong there. Read "Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat." Not very interesting. Beauties seldom amount to much. Plain Margaret Fuller was worth a dozen of them. "Kings in Exile," a most interesting book, a very vivid and terrible picture of Parisian life and royal weakness and sorrow. Put papers, etc., in order. I feel as if one should be ready to go at any moment.... _March._--A box came from May, with pictures, clothes, vases, her ornaments, a little work-basket, and, in one of her own sepia boxes, her pretty hair tied with blue ribbon,--all that is now left us of this bright soul but the baby, soon to come. Treasures all. A sad day, and many tears dropped on the dear dress, the blue slippers she last wore, the bit of work she laid down when the call came the evening Lulu was born. The fur-lined sack feels like May's arms round me, and I shall wear it with pleasure. The pictures show us her great progress these last years. To Boston for a few days on business, and to try to forget. Got gifts for Anna's birthday on the 16th,--forty-nine years old. My only sister now, and the best God ever made. Repaired her house for her. Lulu is not to come till autumn. Great disappointment; but it is wiser to wait, as summer is bad for a young baby to begin here. _29th._--Town meeting. Twenty women there, and voted first, thanks to Father. Polls closed,--in joke, we thought, as Judge Hoar proposed it; proved to be in earnest, and _we_ elected a good school committee. Quiet time; no fuss. JANUARY 20, 1880. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I have been so bowed down with grief at the loss of my dear sister just when our anxiety was over that I have not had a thought or care for anything else. The story is done; but the last chapters are not copied, and I thought it best to let them lie till I could give my mind to the work. I never get a good chance to do a story without interruption of some sort. "Under the Lilacs" was finished by my mother's bedside in her last illness, and this one when my heart was full of care and hope and then grief over poor May. I trust the misery did not get into the story; but I'm afraid it is not as gay as I meant most of it to be. I forgot to number the pages of the last two chapters, and so cannot number these. I usually keep the run, but this time sent off the parcel in a hurry. Can you send me the right number to go on with in chapter seventeen? I can send you four more as soon as I hear. I don't believe I shall come to New York this winter. May left me her little daughter for my own; and if she comes over soon, I shall be too busy singing lullabies to one child to write tales for others, or go anywhere, even to see my kind friends. A sweeter little romance has just ended in Paris than any I can ever make; and the sad facts of life leave me no heart for cheerful fiction. Yours truly, L. M. ALCOTT. FOOTNOTES: [12] This poem was first published anonymously in "The Masque of Poets," in 1878. [13] In Spinning-Wheel Stories. [14] Under the Lilacs. [15] Under the Lilacs, page 78. [16] Gardener's Daughter. [17] This interesting picture is in the possession of her sister. CHAPTER XI. LAST YEARS. MY PRAYER. (Written October, 1886.) Courage and patience, these I ask, Dear Lord, in this my latest strait; For hard I find my ten years' task, Learning to suffer and to wait. Life seems so rich and grand a thing, So full of work for heart and brain, It is a cross that I can bring No help, no offering, but pain. The hard-earned harvest of these years I long to generously share; The lessons learned with bitter tears To teach again with tender care; To smooth the rough and thorny way Where other feet begin to tread; To feed some hungry soul each day With sympathy's sustaining bread. So beautiful such pleasures show, I long to make them mine; To love and labor and to know The joy such living makes divine. But if I may not, I will only ask Courage and patience for my fate, And learn, dear Lord, thy latest task,-- To suffer patiently and wait. The early part of the year 1880 was in the deep shadow of sadness, from the death of Louisa's sister. Boxes full of May's pictures, clothes, and books came home to call up anew all the memories of the bright spirit who had blossomed into such beautiful life so quickly to fade away. Miss Alcott tried to rise above her grief and busy herself with new interests. She took an active part in the voting of the women in Concord, and rejoiced in the election of a good school committee. In April she returned to her old rooms at the Bellevue, where she busied herself with dramatizing "Michael Strogoff," which she never completed. She kept up her interest in young girls, and received with pleasure a visit from thirty pupils of the Boston University, and she helped to give the children of the North End Mission a happy day at Walden Pond. She went to York for rest and refreshment during the summer. Her heart was filled with longing for the child, and everything was done with reference to its coming. As September brought cooler weather, over the sea came the little babe to the warm hearts that were longing to welcome her. No woman as true and loving as Louisa Alcott but has the mother-nature strong in her heart; and she could not help feeling a new spring of love and life when the child of one so dear was put into her arms to be her very own. Rosy and healthy, full of life and energy,--not a model of sainthood, but a real human nature, with a will to be regulated, not broken, with impulses to be trained, talents and tendencies to be studied, and a true, loving heart to be filled with joy,--Louisa found the child a constant source of interest and pleasure. She brought her up as she herself had been trained,--more by influences than by rules,--and sought to follow the leadings which she found in the young nature rather than to make it over after a plan of her own. This new care and joy helped to fill up the void in her life from the loss of the mother for whom she had worked so faithfully and the pet sister to whom she had ever been a good providence. The principal interest of the next few years was the care of this child. It was a pleasant occupation to Louisa, occupying her heart, and binding her with new ties to younger generations. The journal tells all the simple story of the "voyage across the seas." Miss Alcott was very attractive to children, especially to the little ones, who thronged about her and pleaded for stories; but this was the first one who ever really filled the mother-longing in her heart. She was now truly a "marmee;" and remembering the blessing which her own mother had been to her, her standard of motherhood must have been very high. Much care was now also given to her father, and she speaks with pride of her handsome old philosopher in his new suit of clothes. Miss Alcott was gratified by a visit from one of the men to whom she had spoken at Concord Prison. He told her his story, and she assisted him to find work, and had the satisfaction of hearing of his well-doing. There is little record of writing done at this period, Louisa's time and thoughts being absorbed by the child. In the autumn of 1881 she wrote a preface to a new edition of the "Prayers of Theodore Parker," and also one to the new edition of "Moods." Louisa kept the birthdays of November, though with saddened heart. She wrote a tale for the Soldiers' Home,--"My Red Cap," in "Proverb Stories,"--and another for the New England Hospital fair,--"A Baby's Birthday;" and also one for her old publisher. Such was the feeling toward her as a universal benefactor, that a poor woman wrote her begging her to send some Christmas gifts to her children, as they had asked her to write to Santa Claus for some. With Lulu's help she got up a box for the poor family, and then made a story out of the incident, for which she received a hundred dollars. A new project was that of a temperance society, which was felt to be needed in Concord. Louisa occupied herself much in looking over her mother's papers, and unfortunately destroyed them, instead of preparing a memoir of her as she had intended to do. It is a matter of great regret that she did not feel able to do this work, for Mrs. Alcott's letters would have been a most valuable record of the life of her time, as well as a treasury of bright thought and earnest feeling. Louisa was not willing to commit the task to any other hand, and the opportunity is gone. _To Mrs. Dodge._ CONCORD, May 29. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I was away from home, so your letter did not reach me till I got back yesterday. Thanks for your kind thought of me, and recollections of the pleasant week when the L. L.'s had a lark. I should like another; but in this work-a-day world busy folk don't get many, as we know. If I write a serial, you shall have it; but I have my doubts as to the leisure and quiet needed for such tasks being possible with a year-old baby. Of course little Lu is a _very_ remarkable child, but I fancy I shall feel as full of responsibility as a hen with one chick, and cluck and scratch industriously for the sole benefit of my daughter. She may, however, have a literary turn, and be my assistant, by offering hints and giving studies of character for my work. She comes in September, if well. If I do begin a new story, how would "An Old-Fashioned Boy" and his life do? I meant that for the title of a book, but another woman took it. You proposed a revolutionary tale once, but I was not up to it; for this I have quaint material in my father's journals, letters, and recollections. He was born with the century, and had an uncle in the war of 1812; and his life was very pretty and pastoral in the early days. I think a new sort of story wouldn't be amiss, with fun in it, and the queer old names and habits. I began it long ago, and if I have a chance will finish off a few chapters and send them to you, if you like. Yours cordially, L. M. ALCOTT. _To Mr. Niles, about the new illustrated edition of "Little Women."_ YORK, July 20, 1880. The drawings are all capital, and we had great fun over them down here this rainy day.... Mr. Merrill certainly deserves a good penny for his work. Such a fertile fancy and quick hand as his should be well paid, and I shall not begrudge him his well-earned compensation, nor the praise I am sure these illustrations will earn. It is very pleasant to think that the lucky little story has been of use to a fellow-worker, and I am much obliged to him for so improving on my hasty pen-and-ink sketches. What a dear rowdy boy Teddy is with the felt basin on! The papers are great gossips, and never get anything quite straight, and I do mean to set up my own establishment in Boston (D.V.). Now I have an excuse for a home of my own, and as the other artistic and literary spinsters have a house, I am going to try the plan, for a winter at least. Come and see how cosey we are next October at 81 Pinckney Street. Miss N. will receive. Yours truly, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Dodge._ 81 PINCKNEY STREET, 1880. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--The editor of "Harper's Young People" asked for a serial, and I declined; then they wanted a short story for Christmas, and I sent one. But it was not long enough, though longer than most of my short $100 tales. So I said, "If you don't want it, send it to 'Saint Nicholas.'" Therefore if "How It Happened" comes straying along, you will know what it means. If you don't want it, please send it to me in Boston, 81 Pinckney Street; for Christmas tales are always in demand, and I have no time to write more. You will like to know that my baby is safely here,--a healthy, happy little soul, who comes like sunshine to our sad hearts, and takes us all captive by her winning ways and lovely traits. I shall soon be settled for the winter, and I hope have good times after the hard ones. Affectionately yours, L. M. A. _Journal._ _April_, 1880.--So sad and poorly; went to B. for a change. Old room at the Bellevue. Amused myself dramatizing "Michael Strogoff;" read, walked, and rested. Reporters called for story of my life; did not get much. Made my will, dividing all I have between Nan and the boys, with Father as a legacy to Nan, and to Lulu her mother's pictures and small fortune of $500. _May._--Thirty girls from Boston University called; told stories, showed pictures, wrote autographs. Pleasant to see so much innocent enthusiasm, even about so poor a thing as a used-up old woman. Bright girls! simple in dress, sensible ideas of life, and love of education. I wish them all good luck. Ordered a stone for May's grave like Marmee's and Beth's, for some day I hope to bring her dust home. Twenty-third is the anniversary of Mother's wedding. If she had lived, it would have been the golden wedding. Went to see St. Botolph's Club rooms. Very prim and neat, with easy chairs everywhere; stained glass, and a pious little _bar_, with nothing visible but a moral ice-pitcher and a butler like a bishop. The reverend gentlemen will be comfortable and merry, I fancy, as there is a smoking-room and card-tables, as well as a library and picture-gallery. Divines nowadays are not as godly as in old times, it seems. Mrs. Dodge wants a new serial, but I doubt if I can do it; boys, babies, illness, and business of all sorts leave no time for story-telling. _June._--We all enjoy the new rooms very much, and Father finds his study delightful. Prepare the Orchard House for W. T. Harris, who is to rent it. North End Mission children at Walden Pond. Help give them a happy day,--eleven hundred of them. Get Anna and John off to Walpole. Cleaned house. Madame N. sends a picture of Lulu,--a funny, fat little thing in her carriage. Don't realize that it is May's child, and that she is far away in a French cemetery, never to come home to us again. It is decided that Baby is to come to us in September. _24th._--Lizzie's birthday and Johnny's. He is fifteen,--a lovely, good boy, whom every one loves. Got the Dean a new suit of clothes, as he must be nice for his duties at the School. Plato's toga was not so costly, but even he did not look better than my handsome old philosopher. _July and August._--To York with boys. Rest and enjoy the fine air. Home in August, and let Anna go down. Four hundred callers since the School began. Philosophy is a bore to outsiders. Got things ready for my baby,--warm wrapper, and all the dear can need on her long journey. On the 21st saw Mrs. Giles (who went for baby) off; the last time I went, it was to see May go. She was sober and sad, not gay as before; seemed to feel it might be a longer voyage than we knew. The last view I had of her, was standing alone in the long blue cloak waving her hand to us, smiling with wet eyes till out of sight. How little we dreamed what an experience of love, joy, pain, and death she was going to! A lonely time with all away. My grief meets me when I come home, and the house is full of ghosts. _September._--Put papers in order, and arrange things generally, to be in order when our Lulu comes. Make a cosey nursery for the darling, and say my prayers over the little white crib that waits for her, if she ever comes. God watch over her! Paid my first _poll_-tax. As my _head_ is my most valuable piece of property, I thought $2 a cheap tax on it. Saw my townswomen about voting, etc. Hard work to stir them up; cake and servants are more interesting. _18th._--In Boston, waiting for the steamer that brings my treasure. The ocean seems very wide and terrible when I think of the motherless little creature coming so far to us. _19th._--Lulu and Sophie N. arrived with poor G., worn out by anxiety. A stormy passage, and much care, being turned out of the stateroom I had engaged for them and paid for, by a rude New York dressmaker. No help for it, so poor G. went to a rat-hole below, and did her best. As I waited on the wharf while the people came off the ship, I saw several babies, and wondered each time if that was mine. At last the captain appeared, and in his arms a little yellow-haired thing in white, with its hat half off as it looked about with lively blue eyes and babbled prettily. Mrs. G. came along by it, and I knew it was Lulu. Behind, walked a lovely brown-eyed girl with an anxious face, all being new and strange to Sophie. I held out my arms to Lulu, only being able to say her name. She looked at me for a moment, then came to me, saying "Marmar" in a wistful way, and resting close as if she had found her own people and home at last,--as she had, thank Heaven! I could only listen while I held her, and the others told their tale. Then we got home as soon as we could, and dear baby behaved very well, though hungry and tired. The little princess was received with tears and smiles, and being washed and fed went quietly to sleep in her new bed, while we brooded over her and were never tired of looking at the little face of "May's baby." She is a very active, bright child, not pretty yet, being browned by sea air, and having a yellow down on her head, and a pug nose. Her little body is beautifully formed, broad shoulders, fine chest, and lovely arms. A happy thing, laughing and waving her hands, confiding and bold, with a keen look in the eyes so like May, who hated shams and saw through them at once. She always comes to me, and seems to have decided that I am really "Marmar." My heart is full of pride and joy, and the touch of the dear little hands seems to take away the bitterness of grief. I often go at night to see if she is really _here_, and the sight of the little head is like sunshine to me. Father adores her, and she loves to sit in his strong arms. They make a pretty picture as he walks in the garden with her to "see birdies." Anna tends her as she did May, who was her baby once, being ten years younger, and we all find life easier to live now the baby has come. Sophie is a sweet girl, with much character and beauty. A charming sister in love as in law. _October._--Happy days with Lulu and Sophie; getting acquainted with them. Lulu is rosy and fair now, and grows pretty in her native air,--a merry little lass, who seems to feel at home and blooms in an atmosphere of adoration. People come to see "Miss Alcott's baby," and strangers waylay her little carriage in the street to look at her; but she does not allow herself to be kissed. As Father wants to go West I decide to hire Cousin L. W.'s house furnished for the winter, so that Sophie and the boys can have a pleasant time. S. misses the gayety of her home-life in stupid Concord, where the gossip and want of manners strike her very disagreeably. Impertinent questions are asked her, and she is amazed at the queer, rude things people say. _November 8th._--Lulu's birthday. One year old. Her gifts were set out on a table for her to see when she came down in the afternoon,--a little cake with _one_ candle, a rose crown for the queen, a silver mug, dolly, picture-books, gay ball, toys, flowers, and many kisses. She sat smiling at her treasures just under her mother's picture. Suddenly, attracted by the sunshine on the face of the portrait which she knows is "Marmar," she held up a white rose to it calling "Mum! Mum!" and smiling at it in a way that made us all cry. A happy day for her, a sad one to us. _Thanksgiving._--Family dinner. Father at Syracuse, having conversations at Bishop Huntington's and a fine time everywhere. _December._--Too busy to keep much of a journal. My life is absorbed in my baby. On the twenty-third she got up and walked alone; had never crept at all, but when ready ran across the room and plumped down, laughing triumphantly at her feat. _Christmas._--Tried to make it gay for the young folks, but a heavy day for Nan and me. Sixty gifts were set out on different tables, and all were much pleased. Sophie had many pretty things, and gave to all generously. A hard year for all, but when I hold my Lulu I feel as if even death had its compensations. A new world for me. Called down one day to see a young man. Found it one of those to whom I spoke at the prison in Concord last June. Came to thank me for the good my little story did him, since it kept him straight and reminded him that it is never too late to mend. Told me about himself, and how he was going to begin anew and wipe out the past. He had been a miner, and coming East met some fellows who made him drink; while tipsy he stole something in a doctor's office, and having no friends here was sentenced to three years in prison. Did well, and was now out. Had a prospect of going on an expedition to South America with a geological surveying party. An interesting young man. Fond of books, anxious to do well, intelligent, and seemed eager to atone for his one fault. Gave him a letter to S. G. at Chicago. Wrote to the warden, who confirmed D.'s story and spoke well of him. Miss Willard wrote me later of him, and he seemed doing well. Asked if he might write to me, and did so several times, then went to S. A. and I hear no more. Glad to have said a word to help the poor boy. _March_, 1881.--Voted for school committee. _October._--Wrote a preface for Parker's Prayers, just got out by F. B. Sanborn. _November._--Forty-nine on 29th. Wrote a preface to the new edition of "Moods." _8th._--Gave my baby _two_ kisses when she woke, and escorted her down to find a new chair decked with ribbons, and a doll's carriage tied with pink; toys, pictures, flowers, and a cake, with a red and a blue candle burning gayly. Wrote a tale for the Soldiers' Home,--"My Red Cap,"--and one for the Woman's Hospital fair,--"A Baby's Birthday." Also a tale for F. _December._--A poor woman in Illinois writes me to send her children some Christmas gifts, being too poor and ill to get any. They asked her to write to Santa Claus and she wrote to _me_. Sent a box, and made a story about it,--$100. Lulu much interested, and kept bringing all her best toys and clothes "for poor little boys." A generous baby. _To Mr. Niles._ FEBRUARY 12, 1881. DEAR MR. NILES,--Wendell Phillips wrote me a letter begging me to write a preface for Mrs. Robinson's "History of the Suffrage Movement;" but I refused him, as I did Mrs. R., because I don't write prefaces well, and if I begin to do it there will be no end.... Cannot you do a small edition for her? All the believers will buy the book, and I think the sketches of L. M. Child, Abby May, Alcott, and others will add much to the interest of the book. Has she seen you about it? Will you look at the manuscripts by and by, or do you scorn the whole thing? Better not; for we are going to win in time, and the friend of literary ladies ought to be also the friend of women generally. We are going to meet the Governor, council, and legislature at Mrs. Tudor's next Wednesday eve and have a grand set-to. I hope he will come out of the struggle alive. Do give Mrs. R. a lift if you can, and your petitioners will ever pray. Yours truly, L. M. A. February 19, 1881. DEAR MR. NILES,--Thank you very much for so kindly offering to look at Mrs. R.'s book. It is always pleasant to find a person who can conquer his prejudices to oblige a friend, if no more. I think we shall be glad by and by of every little help we may have been able to give to this reform in its hard times, for those who take the tug now will deserve the praise when the work is done. I can remember when Antislavery was in just the same state that Suffrage is now, and take more pride in the very small help we Alcotts could give than in all the books I ever wrote or ever shall write. "Earth's fanatics often make heaven's saints," you know, and it is as well to try for that sort of promotion in time. If Mrs. R. does send her manuscripts I will help all I can in reading or in any other way. If it only records the just and wise changes Suffrage has made in the laws for women, it will be worth printing; and it is time to keep account of these first steps, since they count most. I, for one, don't want to be ranked among idiots, felons, and minors any longer, for I am none of the three, but very gratefully yours, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Stearns._ FEBRUARY 21, 1881. _Dear Mrs. Stearns_,--Many thanks for the tender thoughtfulness which sends us the precious little notes from the dear dead hands. They are so characteristic that they bring both Mother and May clearly up before me, alive and full of patient courage and happy hopes. I am resigned to my blessed mother's departure, since life was a burden, and the heroic past made a helpless future very hard to think of. But May's loss, just when life was fullest and sweetest, seems very bitter to me still, in spite of the sweet baby who is an unspeakable comfort. I wish you could see the pretty creature who already shows many of her mother's traits and tastes. Her love of pictures is a passion, but she will not look at the common gay ones most babies enjoy. She chooses the delicate, well-drawn, and painted figures of Caldecott and Miss Greenaway; over these she broods with rapture, pointing her little fingers at the cows or cats, and kissing the children with funny prattlings to these dumb playmates. She is a fine, tall girl, full of energy, intelligence, and health; blonde and blue-eyed like her mother, but with her father's features, for which I am glad, for he is a handsome man. Louisa May bids fair to be a noble woman; and I hope I may live to see May's child as brave and bright and talented as she was and, much happier in her fate. Father is at the West, busy and well. Anna joins me in thanks and affectionate regards. Ever yours, L. M. Alcott. _Journal._ _March_, 1882.--Helped start a temperance society; much needed in C. A great deal of drinking, not among the Irish, but young American gentlemen, as well as farmers and mill hands. Women anxious to do something, but find no interest beyond a few. Have meetings, and try to learn how to work. I was secretary, and wrote records, letters, and sent pledges, etc.; also articles in "Concord Freeman" and "Woman's Journal" about the union and town meetings. _April._--Read over and destroyed Mother's diaries, as she wished me to do so. A wonderfully interesting record of her life, from her delicate, cherished girlhood through her long, hard, romantic married years, old age, and death. Some time I will write a story or a memoir of it. Lulu's teeth trouble her; but in my arms she seems to find comfort, for I tell stories by the dozen; and lambs, piggies, and "tats" soothe her little woes. Wish I were stronger, so that I might take all the care of her. We seem to understand each other, but my nerves make me impatient, and noise wears upon me. Mr. Emerson ill. Father goes to see him. E. held his hand, looking up at the tall, sorry old man, and saying, with that smile of love that has been Father's sunshine for so many years, "_You_ are very well,--keep so, keep so." After Father left, he called him back and grasped his hand again, as if he knew it was for the last time, and the kind eyes said, "Good-by, my friend!" April 27, 1882, Louisa speaks most tenderly of the death of Mr. Emerson. He had been to her and to her family the truest and best of friends; and her own profound reverence for him had been a strong influence, from the time when she played games with his children in the barn until she followed him to his honored grave. Let critics and philosophers judge him by his intellect; in the hearts of this family, and in many an humble home besides, he will always be remembered as the tenderest, most sympathetic, most loyal of all friends, whose bounty fell on them silently as the dew from heaven, and whose presence could brighten the highest joy and soothe the keenest sorrow they could ever know. _Journal._ _Thursday, 27th._--Mr. Emerson died at 9 P.M. suddenly. Our best and greatest American gone. The nearest and dearest friend Father has ever had, and the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me,--from the time I sang Mignon's song under his window (a little girl) and wrote letters _à la_ Bettine to him, my Goethe, at fifteen, up through my hard years, when his essays on Self-Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love, and Friendship helped me to understand myself and life, and God and Nature. Illustrious and beloved friend, good-by! _Sunday, 30th._--Emerson's funeral. I made a yellow lyre of jonquils for the church, and helped trim it up. Private services at the house, and a great crowd at the church. Father read his sonnet, and Judge Hoar and others spoke. Now he lies in Sleepy Hollow among his brothers, under the pines he loved. I sat up till midnight to write an article on R. W. E. for the "Youth's Companion," that the children may know something of him. A labor of love. _May._--Twenty-seven boys signed pledge. Temperance work. Meetings. I give books to schools. Wrote an article for Mrs. Croly on R. W. E. _June._--I visited A. B. in Mattapoisset for a week. A queer time, driving about or talking over our year in Europe. School children called upon me with flowers, etc. _24th._--John's seventeenth birthday. A dear boy, good and gay, full of love, manliness, and all honest and lovely traits, like his father and mother. Long life to my boy! _July._--School of Philosophy opens on the 17th in full force. I arrange flowers, oak branches, etc., and then fly before the reporters come. Father very happy. Westerners arrive, and the town is full with ideal speculators. Penny has a new barge; we call it the "Blue Plato" (not the "Black Maria"), and watch it rumble by with Margaret Fullers in white muslin and Hegels in straw hats, while stout Penny grins at the joke as he puts money in his purse. The first year Concord people stood aloof, and the strangers found it hard to get rooms. Now every one is eager to take them, and the School is pronounced a success because it brings money to the town. Even philosophers can't do without food, beds, and washing; so all rejoice, and the new craze flourishes. If all our guests paid we should be well off; several hundred a month is rather wearing. Father asked why we never went, and Anna showed him a long list of four hundred names of callers, and he said no more. _October._--To Hotel Bellevue with John. Missed my dear baby, but need quiet. Brain began to work, and plans for tales to simmer. Began "Jo's Boys," as Mrs. Dodge wants a serial. In the autumn of 1882 Mr. Alcott was attacked by a severe stroke of paralysis, from which he never fully recovered; and for the rest of his life his daughters shared in the duty of tending and caring for him in his enfeebled state. It had been the great reward of Louisa's years of hard work that she could surround her mother with every comfort that could make her happy in her last declining years. Not less had she delighted to gratify every wish of her father. His library was fitted up with exquisite taste, his books and manuscripts bound, and he was "throned in philosophic ease" for the rest of his days. What a relief it was now that she could have the faithful nurse ready at his call; that she could give him the pleasant drives which he enjoyed so much; and lighten her sister's labors with every assistance that money could procure! The Orchard House, which had been the family home for twenty-five years, was sold to Mr. Harris, and Mrs. Pratt's house was the home of all. Louisa spent part of the summer at the seashore, and finally bought a small house at Nonquit, where the children could all spend the summer, while she and her sister alternated in the care of her father. In the autumn of 1885, Miss Alcott decided to take a furnished house in Louisburg Square. Her nephews were established in Boston, and their mother wished to be with them. Mr. Alcott bore the moving well, and they found many comforts in the arrangement. Louisa's health was very feeble. She had great trouble in the throat, and her old dyspeptic symptoms returned to annoy her. Still she cannot give up work, and busies herself in preparing "Lulu's Library" for publication, and hopes to be able to work on "Jo's Boys." "Lulu's Library" was a collection of stories which had been the delight of the child. The first series was published in 1885, the second in 1887, and the third in 1889. They are full of Louisa's charming qualities, and have a special interest from the tender feeling with which she gathered them up for her niece. The touching preface to "Jo's Boys" tells of the seven years of occasional work on this book, and reveals the depth of feeling which would not allow her to write as formerly of Marmee and Amy, who were no longer here to accept their own likenesses. During the latter part of her work on this book, she could only write from half an hour to one or two hours a day. This was published in September, 1886. It contains an engraving of her from a bas-relief by Mr. Ricketson. This book was written under hard circumstances, and cost its author more effort perhaps than any other. It is evidently not the overflow of her delight and fun in life like "Little Women," but it is full of biographical interest. Her account of her own career, and of the annoyances to which her celebrity exposed her, is full of her old spirit and humor. She has expressed many valuable thoughts on education, and her spirit is as hopeful for her boys as in her days of youth and health. She has too many characters to manage; but we feel a keen interest in the fortunes of Dan and Emil, and in the courtship by the warm-hearted Tom of his medical sweetheart. _Preface to "Jo's Boys."_ Having been written at long intervals during the past seven years, this story is more faulty than any of its very imperfect predecessors; but the desire to atone for an unavoidable disappointment, and to please my patient little friends, has urged me to let it go without further delay. To account for the seeming neglect of Amy, let me add, that, since the original of that character died, it has been impossible for me to write of her as when she was here to suggest, criticise, and laugh over her namesake. The same excuse applies to Marmee. But the folded leaves are not blank to those who knew and loved them and can find memorials of them in whatever is cheerful, true, or helpful in these pages. L. M. ALCOTT. CONCORD, JULY 4, 1886. _To Mr. Horace Chandler._ DEAR MR. CHANDLER,--The corrections are certainly rather peculiar, and I fear my struggles to set them right have only produced greater confusion. Fortunately punctuation is a free institution, and all can pepper to suit the taste. I don't care much, and always leave proof-readers to quibble if they like. Thanks for the tickets. I fear I cannot come till Thursday, but will try, and won't forget the office, since I am not that much-tried soul the editor. Yours truly, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Williams (Betsey Prig)._ NONQUIT, August 25. DEAR BETSEY,--I am so sorry the darling Doll is ill! Brood over him, and will him well; for mother-love works wonders. My poppet is a picture of health, vigor, and delightful naughtiness. She runs wild in this fine place with some twenty other children to play with,--nice babies, well-bred, and with pleasant mammas for me to gossip with. It would be a good place for your little people, as the air is delicious, bathing safe and warm, and cottages to be quiet in if one cares to keep house. Do try it next year. Let me know early. I can get a nice little cot for you (near mine) for $100, or perhaps less, from June to October,--if you care to stay; I do.... We have been here since July, and are all hearty, brown, and gay as larks. "John Inglesant" was too political for me. I am too lazy here to read much; mean to find a den in Boston and work for a month or two; then fly off to New York, and perhaps run over and see my Betsey. I shall be at home in October, and perhaps we may see you then, if the precious little shadow gets nice and well again, and I pray he may. Lulu has some trifling ail now and then,--just enough to show me how dear she is to us all, and what a great void the loss of our little girl would make in hearts and home. She is very intelligent and droll. When I told her the other day that the crickets were hopping and singing in the grass with their mammas, she said at once, "No; their Aunt Weedys." Aunty is nearer than mother to the poor baby; and it is very sweet to have it so, since it must be. Now, my blessed Betsey, keep a brave heart, and I am sure all will be well in the nest. Love and kisses to the little birds, and all good wishes to the turtle-dove and her mate. Yours ever, L. M. A. The older birthdays are 29th of November, Lulu's the 8th; so we celebrate for Grandpa, Auntie, and Lulu all at once, in great style,--eighty-three, fifty, and three years old. When I get on my pins I'm going (D. V.) to devote myself to settling poor souls who need a gentle boost in hard times. _To Mr. Niles._ JUNE 23, 1883. DEAR MR. NILES,--Thanks for the Goethe book. I want everything that comes out about him. "Princess Amelia" is charming, and the surprise at the end well done. Did the author of "My Wife's Sister" write it? I told L. C. M. she might put "A Modern Mephistopheles" in my list of books. Several people had found it out, and there was no use in trying to keep it secret after that. Mrs. Dodge begged me to consider myself mortgaged to her for tales, etc., and as I see no prospect of any time for writing books, I may be able to send her some short stories from time to time, and so be getting material for a new set of books like "Scrap-bag," but with a new name. You excel in names, and can be evolving one meantime.... Yours truly, L. M. A. JULY 15, 1884. I wish I might be inspired to do those dreadful boys ["Jo's Boys"]; but rest is more needed than money. Perhaps during August, my month at home, I may take a grind at the old mill. _Journal._ _October_ 24, 1882.--Telegram that Father had had a paralytic stroke. Home at once, and found him stricken down. Anxious days; little hope. _November._--Gave up our rooms, and I went home to help with the new care. My Lulu ran to meet me, rosy and gay, and I felt as if I could bear anything with this little sunbeam to light up the world for me. Poor Father dumb and helpless; feeble mind slowly coming back. He knows us; but he's asleep most of the time. Get a nurse, and wait to see if he will rally. It is sad to see the change one moment makes, turning the hale, handsome old man into this pathetic wreck. The forty sonnets last winter and the fifty lectures at the School last summer were too much for a man of eighty-three. He was warned by Dr. W., but thought it folly to stop; and now poor Father pays the penalty of breaking the laws of health. I have done the same: may I be spared this end! _January_, 1883.--Too busy to keep a diary. Can only jot down a fact now and then. Father improving. Much trouble with nurses; have no idea of health; won't walk; sit over the fire, and drink tea three times a day; ought to be an intelligent, hearty set of women. Could do better myself; have to fill up all the deficiencies and do double duty. People come to see Father; but it excites him, and we have to deny him. _February._--To B. for a week of rest, having got Mrs. H. settled with Father, and all comfortable for November. Began a book called "Genius." Shall never finish it, I dare say, but must keep a vent for my fancies to escape at. This double life is trying, and my head will work as well as my hands. _March._--To give A. rest I took Lulu and maid to the Bellevue for a month. Lulu very happy with her new world. Enjoys her walks, the canary I got her, and the petting _she_ gets from all. Showed her to friends; want them to know May's child. Had her picture taken by Notman; very good. _April 2d._--Town meeting. Seven women vote. I am one of them, and A. another. A poor show for a town that prides itself on its culture and independence. _6th._--Go home to stay; Father needs me. New nurse; many callers; Lulu fretful, Anna tired, Father feeble,--hard times for all. Wrote a story for "St. Nicholas" at odd moments. Nurses and doctors take a deal of money. _May._--Take care of Lulu, as we can find no good woman to walk and dress and play with her. The ladies are incapable or proud; the girls vulgar or rough; so my poor baby has a bad time with her little temper and active mind and body. Could do it myself if I had the nerves and strength, but am needed elsewhere, and must leave the child to some one. Long to go away with her and do as I like. Shall never lead my own life. _July._--Go to Nonquit with Miss H. and Lulu for the summer. A quiet, healthy place, with pleasant people and fine air. Turn Lulu loose, with H. to run after her, and try to rest. Lulu takes her first bath in the sea. Very bold; walks off toward Europe up to her neck, and is much afflicted that I won't let her go to the bottom and see the "little trabs;" makes a cupid of herself, and is very pretty and gay. The boys revel in the simple pleasures of Nonquit,--a fine place for them to be in. Wrote a tale for "St. Nicholas,"--"Sophie's Secret,"--$100. _August._--Home to C., and let A. come for her holiday. Much company. P. C. Mozoomdar preached, and had a conversation at Mrs. Emerson's; a most interesting man. Curious to hear a Hindu tell how the life of Christ impressed him. _November 27th._--Decide to lessen care and worry at home; so take rooms in Boylston Street, and with Lulu set forth to make a home of our own. The whole parlor floor gives my lady room to run in doors, and the Public Garden opposite is the out-door play-ground. Miss C. comes as governess, and we settle down. Fred boards with us. Heard Mathew Arnold. _29th._--Birthday,--fifty-one. Home with gifts to poor Father,--eighty-four. Found a table full for myself. _December 25th._--Home with gifts for all; sad day. See H. Martineau's statue; very fine. _January_, 1884.--New Year's Day is made memorable by my solemnly spanking my child. Miss C. and others assure me it is the only way to cure her wilfulness. I doubt it; but knowing that mothers are usually too tender and blind, I correct my dear in the old-fashioned way. She proudly says, "Do it, do it!" and when it is done is heartbroken at the idea of Aunt Wee-wee's giving her pain. Her bewilderment was pathetic, and the effect, as I expected, a failure. Love is better; but also endless patience. _February 2d._--Wendell Phillips died. I shall mourn for him next to R. W. E. and Parker. _6th._--Funeral at Hollis Street Church. Sat between Fred Douglas and his wife. A goodly gathering of all left of the old workers. Glad and proud to be among them. * * * * * _June._--Sell the Orchard House to W. T. Harris. Glad to be done with it, though after living in it twenty-five years, it is full of memories; but places have not much hold on me when the dear persons who made them dear are gone.... Bought a cottage at Nonquit, with house and furniture. All like it, and it is a good investment I am told. _24th._--To Nonquit with Lulu and K. and John. Fixed my house, and enjoyed the rest and quiet immensely. Lulu wild with joy at the freedom.... _July and August._--Restful days in my little house, which is cool and quiet, and without the curse of a kitchen to spoil it. Lulu happy and well, and every one full of summer fun. On the 7th of August I went home, and let A. go for her holiday. Took care of Father and house, and idled away the hot days with books and letters. Drove with Father, as he enjoyed it very much.... _October._--To Boston with John, and take rooms at the Bellevue. Very tired of home-worry, and fly for rest to my old refuge, with J. and L. to look after and make a home for. Saw Irving. Always enjoy him, though he is very queer. Ellen Terry always the same, though charming in her way. _November._--Find Bellevue uncomfortable and expensive, so take rooms in Chestnut Street for self and boys. _8th._--My Lulu's birthday. Go home with flowers, gifts, and a grateful heart that the dear little girl is so well and happy and good. A merry day with the little queen of the house. _29th._--Our birthday,--Father eighty-five; L. M. A. fifty-two. Quiet day; always sad for thinking of Mother and John and May, who all left us at this season. _December._--Began again on "Jo's Boys," as T. N. wants a new book very much, and I am tired of being idle. Wrote two hours for three days, then had a violent attack of vertigo, and was ill for a week. Head won't bear work yet. Put away papers, and tried to dawdle and go about as other people do. Pleasant Christmas with Lulu and Nan and poor Father, who loves to see us about him. A narrow world now, but a happy one for him. Last day of the year. All well at home except myself; body feeble, but soul improving. _January_ 1, 1885.--Pleasant greeting from brother Ernest by telegram,--never forgets us. Opera in the evening,--Emma Nevada. Sent box home. Very cold. John had his first dress-suit. Happy boy! Several pleasant Sunday evenings at E. P. W.'s. See Mrs. Burnett, and like her. Visit Blind Asylum and North End Mission. Lulu passed a week with me for a change. _19th._--An old-fashioned party in an old-time house. All in antique costume; Lulu very pretty in hers. Country kitchen and country fare; spinning and weaving; old songs and dances; tally-ho coach with P. as an ancient Weller,--very funny. * * * * * _June._--Read Life of Saint Elizabeth by D'Alembert,--quaint and sweet; also French novels. Write out the little tales I tell Lulu for a new Christmas book, having nothing else. Send one, "The Candy Country," to "St. Nicholas." * * * * * _August 8th._--Go home, and A. goes to N. Take care of Father, arrange the little tales, and look at houses in B. Have a plan to take a furnished house for the winter, and all be together. A. is lonely in C.; boys must be near business. I want Lulu, and Father will enjoy a change. Sorted old letters, and burned many. Not wise to keep for curious eyes to read and gossip-lovers to print by and by. Lived in the past for days, and felt very old, recalling all I have been through. Experiences go deep with me, and I begin to think it might be well to keep some record of my life, if it will help others to read it when I'm gone. People seem to think our lives interesting and peculiar. _September._--After a lively time with house-brokers, I take a house in Louisburg Square for two years. It is a large house, furnished, and well suited to our needs,--sunny, trees in front, good air, and friends near by. All are pleased, and we prepare to move October 1st.... Father drove down very nicely. Pleased with his new room; Lulu charmed with her big, sunny nursery and the play-house left for her; boys in clover; and Nan ready for the new sort of housekeeping. I shall miss my quiet, care-free life in B.; but it is best for all, so I shall try to bear the friction and the worry many persons always bring me. It will be an expensive winter; but T. N. tells me the books never sold better, so a good run in January will make all safe. "Lulu's Library" as a "pot-boiler" will appease the children, and I may be able to work on "Jo's Boys." _March_, 1886.--To Mrs. H.'s to hear Mr. Snyder read the "Iliad;" enjoyed it. Sixteen little girls call, and the autograph fiend is abroad. _27th._--Another attack of vertigo,--ill for a week; sleepless nights. Head worked like a steam-engine; would not stop. Planned "Jo's Boys" to the end, and longed to get up and write it. Told Dr. W. that he had better let me get the ideas _out_, then I could rest. He very wisely agreed, and said, "As soon as you can, write half an hour a day, and see if it does you good. Rebellious brains want to be attended to, or trouble comes." So I began as soon as able, and was satisfied that we were right; for my head felt better very soon, and with much care about not overdoing, I had some pleasant hours when I forgot my body and lived in my mind. _April._--Went on writing one or two hours a day, and felt no ill effects. _May._--Began to think of Concord, and prepare to go back for the summer. Father wants his books; Lulu, her garden; Anna, her small house; and the boys, their friends. I want to go away and rest. Anna goes up the last of the month and gets the house ready. We send Lulu and Father later, and the boys and I shut up No. 10.... _June._--Home in C.,--sunny, clean, and pleasant. Put Lulu in order, and get ready for a month in Princeton with Mrs. H. Very tired. A quiet three weeks on the hillside,--a valley pink with laurel in front, Mount Wachusett behind us, and green hills all round. A few pleasant people. I read, sleep, walk, and write,--get fifteen chapters done. Instinct was right; after seven years of rest, the old brain was ready for work and tired of feeding on itself, since work it must at something. Enjoyed Hedge's "Hours with German Classics," and "Baldwin," by Vernon Lee. Home in time to get Anna and Lulu off to N. for the summer. A. needs the rest very much, and Lulu the freedom. I shall revel in the quiet, and finish my book. _July._--The seashore party get off, and peace reigns. I rest a day, and then to work. Finish "Jo's Boys," and take it to T. N. Much rejoicing over a new book. Fifty thousand to be the first edition; orders coming in fast. Not good,--too great intervals between the parts, as it was begun long ago; but the children will be happy, and my promise kept. Two new chapters were needed, so I wrote them, and gladly corked my inkstand. What next? Mrs. Dodge wants a serial, and T. N. a novel. I have a dozen plots in my head, but think the serial better come first. Want a great deal of money for many things; every poor soul I ever knew comes for help, and expenses increase. I am the only money-maker, and must turn the mill for others, though my own grist is ground and in the barn. The School begins. Father feeble, but goes,--for the last time, I think. A series of letters to her father's friend, Mrs. Stearns, show how tenderly and carefully Louisa watched over the slow decline of the stricken man, but they are too full of details of the sickroom for publication. A few extracts will give her feeling. MAY 23 [1885]. DEAR MRS. STEARNS,--Many thanks for the sweet nosegay you sent me. It came in good time, for to-day is the anniversary of Father's wedding-day and my sister's silver wedding. Rather sad for both mateless ones; but we have done our best to cheer them up, and the soft rain is very emblematic of the memories their own quiet tears keep green. Father remembered you, and smelled his flowers with pleasure. He is very tired of living, and wants to "go up," as he expresses it. A little more or little less light would make him happier; but the still active mind beats against the prison bars, and rebels against the weakness of body that prevents the old independent life. I am afraid the end is not to be peaceful unless it is sudden, as I hope it may be for all our sakes; it is so wearing to see this slow decline, and be able to do little but preach and practise patience. * * * * * Affectionately yours, L. M. A. SUNDAY. * * * * * It is only a temporary change, perhaps; but I still hope that it will last, and his mind grow still clearer. These painless, peaceful days have a certain sweetness, sad as it is to see the dear, hale old man so feeble. If he can know us, and enjoy something of the old life, it is worth having, though the end may come at any moment.... Now and then a word comes without effort. "Up!" was the first one, and seems very characteristic of this beautiful, aspiring soul, almost on the wing for heaven. _To Mr. Niles._ NONQUIT, July 13, 1885. DEAR MR. NILES,--I want to know if it is too late to do it and if it is worth doing; namely, to collect some of the little tales I tell Lulu and put them with the two I shall have printed the last year and the "Mermaid Tale" to match the pictures we bought, and call it "Lulu's Library"? I have several tiny books written down for L.; and as I can do no great work, it occurred to me that I might venture to copy these if it would do for a Christmas book for the younger set. I ache to fall on some of the ideas that are simmering in my head, but dare not, as my one attempt since the last "Jo's Boys" break-down cost me a week or two of woe and $30 for the doctor. I have lovely long days here, and can copy these and see 'em along if you want them. One has gone to "Harper's Young People," and one is for "St. Nicholas" when it is done,--about the Kindergarten for the blind. These with Lulu's would make a little book, and might begin a series for small folks. Old ladies come to this twaddle when they can do nothing else. What say you?... Yours truly, L. M. A. SEPTEMBER 18, 1885. DEAR MR. NILES,--I send you some funny sketches by Mrs. L. She seems to be getting on. How would it do to ask her to illustrate the fairy book? She has a pretty taste in elves, and her little girl was good. I hope to touch up the other stories this winter, and she can illustrate, and next Christmas (or whenever it is ready) we can have a little book out. This sort of work being all I dare do now, I may as well be clearing the decks for action when the order comes to "Up, and at 'em!" again, if it ever does. [Illustration: _Fac-simile of Miss Alcott's Writing._ ] I'd like to help Mrs. L. if I could, as we know something of her, and I fancy she needs a lift. Perhaps we could use these pictures in some way if she liked to have us. Maybe I could work them into a story of out "cullud bredren." Thanks for the books. Dear Miss ---- is rather prim in her story, but it is pretty and quite _correct_. So different from Miss Alcott's slap-dash style. The "H. H." book ["Ramona"] is a noble record of the great wrongs of her chosen people, and ought to wake up the sinners to repentance and justice before it is too late. It recalls the old slavery days, only these victims are red instead of black. It will be a disgrace if "H. H." gave her work and pity all in vain. Yours truly, L. M. A. [1885.] DEAR MR. NILES,--Thanks for the book which I shall like to read. Please tell Miss N. that she will find in Sanborn's article in "St. Nicholas" or Mrs. Moulton's in the "Eminent Women" book all that I wish to have said about myself. You can add such facts about editions, etc., as you think best. I don't like these everlasting notices; one is enough, else we poor people feel like squeezed oranges, and nothing is left sacred. George Eliot's new life and letters is well done, and we are not sorry we have read them. Mr. Cross has been a wise man, and leaves us all our love and respect instead of spoiling them as Froude did for Carlyle, Yours truly, L. M. A. January 2, 1886. DEAR MR. NILES,--Thanks for the good wishes and news. Now that I cannot work, it is very agreeable to hear that the books go so well, and that the lazy woman need not worry about things. I appreciate my blessings, I assure you. I heartily wish I could "swamp the book-room with 'Jo's Boys,'" as Fred says, and hope to do it by and by when head and hand can safely obey the desire of the heart, which will never be too tired or too old to remember and be grateful. Your friend, L. M. Alcott. Monday, A.M. [1886]. Dear Mr. Niles,--My doctor forbids me to begin a long book or anything that will need much thought this summer. So I must give up "Tragedy of To-day," as it will need a good deal of thinking to be what it ought. I can give you a girls' book however, and I think that will be better than a novel. I have several stories done, and can easily do more and make a companion volume for "Spinning-Wheel Stories" at Christmas if you want it. This, with the Lulu stories, will be better than the set of novels I am sure.... Wait till I can do a novel, and then get out the set in style, if Alcott is not forgotten by that time. I was going to send Mrs. Dodge one of the tales for girls, and if there is time she might have more. But nearly all new ones would make a book go well in the holiday season. You can have those already done now if you want them. "Sophie's Secret" is one, "An Ivy Spray: or Cinderella's Slippers" another, and "Mountain Laurel" is partly done. "A Garland for Girls" might do for a title perhaps, as they are all for girls. Yours truly, L. M. A. In the spring of 1886, Dr. Rhoda Lawrence took charge of Miss Alcott's health, and gave her treatment by massage and other appropriate means, from which she received benefit. The summer was spent at Concord with her father, and was varied by a pleasant trip to the mountains. Miss Alcott finished "Jo's Boys," which was published in September. She occupied herself also in looking over old journals and letters, and destroyed many things which she did not wish to have come under the public eye. She had enjoyed her life at Princeton, and said that she felt better than for fifteen years; but in August she was severely attacked with rheumatism and troubled with vertigo. She suffered very much, and was in a very nervous condition. Miss Alcott always looked bravely and calmly upon all the possibilities of life, and she now made full preparations for the event of her own death. Her youngest nephew had always been especially beloved, and she decided to take out papers of adoption, to make him legally her son and heir. She wished him to assume the name of Alcott, and to be her representative. Louisa's journal closes July, 1886, with the old feeling,--that she must grind away at the mill and make money to supply the many claims that press upon her from all sides. She feels the burden of every suffering human life upon her own soul. She knew that she could write what was eagerly desired by others and would bring her the means of helping those in need, and her heart and head united in urging her to work. Whether it would have been possible for her to have rested more fully, and whether she might then have worked longer and better, is one of those questions which no one is wise enough to answer. Yet the warning of her life should not be neglected, and the eager brain should learn to obey the laws of life and health while it is yet time. In September, 1886, Miss Alcott returned to Louisburg Square, and spent the winter in the care of her father, and in the society of her sister and nephews and the darling child. She suffered much from hoarseness, from nervousness and debility, and from indigestion and sleeplessness, but still exerted herself for the comfort of all around her. She had a happy Christmas, and sympathized with the joy of her oldest nephew in his betrothal. In December she was so weary and worn that she went out to Dr. Lawrence's home in Roxbury for rest and care. She found such relief to her overtasked brain and nerves from the seclusion and quiet of Dunreath Place, that she found her home and rest there for the remainder of her life. It was a great trial to Louisa to be apart from her family, to whom she had devoted her life. She clung to her dying father, and to the dear sister still left to her, with increasing fondness, and she longed for her boys and her child; but her tired nerves could not bear even the companionship of her family, and sometimes for days she wanted to be all alone. "I feel so safe out here!" she said once. Mr. Alcott spent the summer at Melrose, and Louisa went there to visit him in June. In June and July, 1887, she went to Concord and looked over papers and completed the plan for adopting her nephew. She afterward went to Princeton, accompanied by Dr. Lawrence. She spent eight weeks there, and enjoyed the mountain air and scenery with something of her old delight. She was able to walk a mile or more, and took a solitary walk in the morning, which she greatly enjoyed. Her evening walk was less agreeable, because she was then exposed to the eager curiosity of sight-seers, who constantly pursued her. Miss Alcott had a great intellectual pleasure here in the society of Mr. James Murdock and his family. The distinguished elocutionist took great pains to gratify her taste for dramatic reading by selecting her favorite scenes for representation, and she even attended one of his public readings given in the hall of the hotel. The old pain in her limbs from which she suffered during her European journey again troubled her, and she returned to Dr. Lawrence's home in the autumn, where she was tenderly cared for. Miss Alcott was still continually planning stories. Dr. Lawrence read to her a great deal, and the reading often suggested subjects to her. She thought of a series to be called "Stories of All Nations," and had already written "Trudel's Siege," which was published in "St. Nicholas," April, 1888, the scene of which was laid at the siege of Leyden. The English story was to be called "Madge Wildfire," and she had thought of plots for others. She could write very little, and kept herself occupied and amused with fancy work, making flowers and pen-wipers of various colors, in the form of pinks, to send to her friends. On her last birthday Louisa received a great many flowers and pleasant remembrances, which touched her deeply, and she said, "I did not mean to cry to-day, but I can't help it, everybody is so good." She went in to see her father every few days, and was conscious that he was drawing toward the end. While riding with her friend, Louisa would tell her of the stories she had planned, one of which was to be called "The Philosopher's Wooing," referring to Thoreau. She also had a musical novel in her mind. She could not be idle, and having a respect for sewing, she busied herself with it, making garments for poor children, or helping the Doctor in her work. She insisted upon setting up a work-basket for the Doctor, amply supplied with necessary materials, and was pleased when she saw them used. A flannel garment for a poor child was the last work of her hands. Her health improved in February, especially in the comfort of her nights, as the baths she took brought her the long-desired sleep. "Nothing so good as sleep," she said. But a little too much excitement brought on violent headaches. During these months Miss Alcott wrote part of the "Garland for Girls," one of the most fanciful and pleasing of her books. These stories were suggested by the flowers sent to her by different friends, which she fully enjoyed. She rode a great deal, but did not see any one. Her friends were much encouraged; and although they dared not expect full recovery, they hoped that she might be "a comfortable invalid, able to enjoy life, and give help and pleasure to others." She did not suffer great pain, but she was very weak; her nervous system seemed to be utterly prostrated by the years of work and struggle through which she had passed. She said, "I don't want to live if I can't be of use." She had always met the thought of death bravely; and even the separation from her dearest friends was serenely borne. She believed in their continued presence and influence, and felt that the parting was for a little time. She had no fear of God, and no doubt of the future. Her only sadness was in leaving the friends whom she loved and who might yet need her. A young man wrote asking Miss Alcott if she would advise him to devote himself to authorship; she answered, "Not if you can do anything else. Even dig ditches." He followed her advice, and took a situation where he could support himself, but he still continued to write stories. A little boy sent twenty-five cents to buy her books. She returned the money, telling him it was not enough to buy books, but sent him "Little Men." Scores of letters remained unanswered for want of strength to write or even to read. Early in March Mr. Alcott failed very rapidly. Louisa drove in to see him, and was conscious that it was for the last time. Tempted by the warm spring-like day, she had made some change in her dress, and absorbed in the thought of the parting, when she got into the carriage she forgot to put on the warm fur cloak she had worn. The next morning she complained of violent pain in her head, amounting to agony. The physician who had attended her for the last weeks was called. He felt that the situation was very serious. She herself asked, "Is it not meningitis?" The trouble on the brain increased rapidly. She recognized her dear young nephew for a moment and her friendly hostess, but was unconscious of everything else. So, at 3.30 P.M., March 6, 1888, she passed quietly on to the rest which she so much needed. She did not know that her father had already preceded her. The friends of the family who gathered to pay their last tribute of respect and love to the aged father were met at the threshold by the startling intelligence, "Louisa Alcott is dead," and a deeper sadness fell upon every heart. The old patriarch had gone to his rest in the fulness of time, "corn ripe for the sickle," but few realized how entirely his daughter had worn out her earthly frame. Her friends had hoped for renewed health and strength, and for even greater and nobler work from her with her ripened powers and greater ease and leisure. Miss Alcott had made every arrangement for her death; and by her own wish the funeral service was very simple, in her father's rooms at Louisburg Square, and attended only by a few of her family and nearest friends. They read her exquisite poem to her mother, her father's noble tribute to her, and spoke of the earnestness and truth of her life. She was remembered as she would have wished to be. Her body was carried to Concord and placed in the beautiful cemetery of Sleepy Hollow where her dearest ones were already laid to rest. "Her boys" went beside her as "a guard of honor," and stood around as she was placed across the feet of father, mother, and sister, that she might "take care of them as she had done all her life." Of the silent grief of the bereaved family I will not speak, but the sound of mourning filled all the land, and was re-echoed from foreign shores. The children everywhere had lost their friend. Miss Alcott had entered into their hearts and revealed them to themselves. In her childish journal her oldest sister said, "I have not a secret from Louisa; I tell her everything, and am not afraid she will think me silly." It was this respect for the thought and life of children that gave Louisa Alcott her great power of winning their respect and affection. Nothing which was real and earnest to them seemed unimportant to her. * * * * * LAST LETTERS. _To Mr. Niles._ SUNDAY, 1886. DEAR MR. NILES,--The goodly supply of books was most welcome; for when my two hours pen-work are over I need something to comfort me, and I long to go on and finish "Jo's Boys" by July 1st. My doctor frowns on that hope, and is so sure it will do mischief to get up the steam that I am afraid to try, and keep Prudence sitting on the valve lest the old engine run away and have another smash-up. I send you by Fred several chapters, I wish they were neater, as some were written long ago and have knocked about for years; but I can't spare time to copy, so hope the printers won't be in despair. I planned twenty chapters and am on the fifteenth. Some are long, some short, and as we are pressed for time we had better not try to do too much. ... I have little doubt it will be done early in July, but things are so contrary with me I can never be sure of carrying out a plan, and I don't want to fail again; so far I feel as if I could, without harm, finish off these dreadful boys. Why have any illustrations? The book is not a child's book, as the lads are nearly all over twenty, and pretty pictures are not needed. Have the bas-relief if you like, or one good thing for frontispiece. I can have twenty-one chapters and make it the size of "Little Men." Sixteen chapters make two hundred and sixteen pages, and I may add a page here and there later,--or if need be, a chapter somewhere to fill up. I shall be at home in a week or two, much better for the rest and fine air; and during my quiet days in C. I can touch up proofs and confer about the book. Sha'n't we be glad when it is done? Yours truly, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Dodge_. JUNE 29. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I will evolve something for December (D. V.) and let you have it as soon as it is done. Lu and I go to Nonquit next week; and after a few days of rest, I will fire up the old engine and see if it will run a short distance without a break-down. There are usually about forty young people at N., and I think I can get a hint from some of them. Had a call from Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Gilder last eve. Mr. G. asked if you were in B., but I didn't know. Father remains comfortable and happy among his books. Our lads are making their first visit to New York, and may call on "St. Nick," whom they have made their patron saint. I should like to own the last two bound volumes of "St. Nicholas," for Lulu. She adores the others, and they are nearly worn out with her loving but careless luggings up and down for "more towries, Aunt Wee-wee." Charge to Yours affectionately, L. M. A. P. S.--Wasn't I glad to see you in my howling wilderness of wearisome domestic worrits! Come again. CONCORD, August 15. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I like the idea of "Spinning-Wheel Stories," and can do several for a series which can come out in a book later. Old-time tales, with a thread running through all from the wheel that enters in the first one. A Christmas party of children might be at an old farm-house and hunt up the wheel, and grandma spins and tells the first story; and being snow-bound, others amuse the young folks each evening with more tales. Would that do? The mother and child picture would come in nicely for the first tale,--"Grandma and her Mother." Being at home and quiet for a week or so (as Father is nicely and has a capable nurse), I have begun the serial, and done two chapters; but the spinning-tales come tumbling into my mind so fast I'd better pin a few while "genius burns." Perhaps you would like to start the set Christmas. The picture being ready and the first story can be done in a week, "Sophie's Secret" can come later. Let me know if you would like that, and about how many pages of the paper "S. S." was written on you think would make the required length of tale (or tail?). If you don't want No. 1 yet, I will take my time and do several. The serial was to be "Mrs. Gay's Summer School," and have some city girls and boys go to an old farm-house, and for fun dress and live as in old times, and learn the good, thrifty old ways, with adventures and fun thrown in. That might come in the spring, as it takes me longer to grind out yarns now than of old. Glad you are better. Thanks for kind wishes for the little house; come and see it, and gladden the eyes of forty young admirers by a sight of M. M. D. next year. Yours affectionately, L. M. A. 31 CHESTNUT ST., DECEMBER 31. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--A little cousin, thirteen years old, has written a story and longs to see it in print. It is a well written bit and pretty good for a beginner, so I send it to you hoping it may find a place in the children's corner. She is a grandchild of S. J. May, and a bright lass who paints nicely and is a domestic little person in spite of her budding accomplishments. Good luck to her! I hoped to have had a Christmas story for some one, but am forbidden to write for six months, after a bad turn of vertigo. So I give it up and take warning. All good wishes for the New Year. From yours affectionately, L. M. ALCOTT. _To Mr. Niles_. 1886. DEAR MR. NILES,--Sorry you don't like the bas-relief [of herself]; I do. A portrait, if bright and comely, wouldn't be me, and if like me would disappoint the children; so we had better let them imagine "Aunt Jo young and beautiful, with her hair in two tails down her back," as the little girl said. In haste, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Bond._ CONCORD, Tuesday, 1886. DEAR AUNTIE,--I want to find Auntie Gwinn, and don't know whom to ask but you, as your big motherly heart yearns over all the poor babies, and can tell them where to go when the nest is bare. A poor little woman has just died, leaving four children to a drunken father. Two hard-working aunts do all they can, and one will take the oldest girl. We want to put the two small girls and boy into a home till we can see what comes next. Lulu clothes one, and we may be able to put one with a cousin. But since the mother died last Wednesday they are very forlorn, and must be helped. If we were not so full I'd take one; but Lu is all we can manage now. There is a home at Auburndale, but it is full; and I know of no other but good Auntie Gwinn's. What is her address, please? I shall be in town on Saturday, and can go and see her if I know where. Don't let it be a bother; but one turns at once in such cases to the saints for direction, and the poor aunts don't known what to do; so this aunt comes to the auntie of all. I had a pleasant chat with the Papa in the cars, and was very glad to hear that W. is better. My love to both and S. Thanks for the news of portraits. I'll bear them in mind if G. H. calls. Lulu and Anna send love, and I am as always, Your LOUISA ALCOTT. _To Mrs. Dodge._ APRIL 13, 1880. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I am glad you are going to have such a fine outing. May it be a very happy one. I cannot promise anything, but hope to be allowed to write a little, as my doctor has decided that it is as well to let me put on paper the tales "knocking at the saucepan lid and demanding to be taken out" (like Mrs. Cratchit's potatoes), as to have them go on worrying me inside. So I'm scribbling at "Jo's Boys," long promised to Mr. Niles and clamored for by the children. I may write but one hour a day, so cannot get on very fast; but if it is ever done, I can think of a serial for "St. Nicholas." I began one, and can easily start it for '88, if head and hand allow. I will simmer on it this summer, and see if it can be done. Hope so, for I don't want to give up work so soon. I have read "Mrs. Null," but don't like it very well,--too slow and colorless after Tolstoi's "Anna Karanina." I met Mr. and Mrs. S. at Mrs. A.'s this winter. Mr. Stockton's child-stories I like very much. The older ones are odd but artificial. Now, good-by, and God be with you, dear woman, and bring you safely home to us all. Affectionately yours, L. M. ALCOTT. _To Mrs. Bond._ DUNREATH PLACE, ROXBURY, March 15, 1887 DEAR AUNTIE,--I have been hoping to get out and see you all winter, but have been so ill I could only live on hope as a relish to my gruel,--that being my only food, and not of a nature to give me strength. Now I am beginning to live a little, and feel less like a sick oyster at low tide. The spring days will set me up I trust, and my first pilgrimage shall be to you; for I want you to see how prettily my May-flower is blossoming into a fine off-shoot of the old plant. Lizzy Wells has probably told you our news of Fred and his little bride, and Anna written you about it as only a proud mamma can. Father is very comfortable, but says sadly as he looks up from his paper, "Beecher has gone now; all go but me." Please thank Mr. Bond for the poems, which are interesting, even to a poor, ignorant worm who does not know Latin. Mother would have enjoyed them very much. I should have acknowledged his kindness sooner; but as I am here in Roxbury my letters are forwarded, and often delayed. I was sorry to hear that you were poorly again. Isn't it hard to sit serenely in one's soul when one's body is in a dilapidated state? I find it a great bore, but try to do it patiently, and hope to see the why by and by, when this mysterious life is made clear to me. I had a lovely dream about that, and want to tell it you some day. Love to all. Ever yours, L. M. A. Her publisher wished to issue a new edition of "A Modern Mephistopheles," and to add to it her story "A Whisper in the Dark," to which she consented. MAY 6, 1887. DEAR MR. NILES.--This is about what I want to say. You may be able to amend or suggest something. I only want it understood that the highfalutin style was for a disguise, though the story had another purpose; for I'm not ashamed of it, and like it better than "Work" or "Moods." Yours in haste, L. M. A. P. S.--Do you want more fairy tales? _Preface._ "A Modern Mephistopheles" was written among the earlier volumes of the No Name Series, when the chief idea of the authors was to puzzle their readers by disguising their style as much as possible, that they might enjoy the guessing and criticism as each novel appeared. This book was very successful in preserving its incognito; and many persons still insist that it could not have been written by the author of "Little Women." As I much enjoyed trying to embody a shadow of my favorite poem in a story, as well as the amusement it has afforded those in the secret for some years, it is considered well to add this volume to the few romances which are offered, not as finished work by any means, but merely attempts at something graver than magazine stories or juvenile literature. L. M. ALCOTT. [Illustration: _Fac-simile of Preface to "A Modern Mephistopheles."_] SATURDAY A.M., May 7, 1887. DEAR MR. NILES,--Yours just come. "A Whisper" is rather a lurid tale, but might do if I add a few lines to the preface of "Modern Mephistopheles," saying that this is put in to fill the volume, or to give a sample of Jo March's necessity stories, which many girls have asked for. Would that do? It seems to me that it would be better to wait till I can add a new novel, and then get out the set. Meantime let "Modern Mephistopheles" go alone, with my name, as a summer book before Irving comes [Irving as Faust]. I hope to do "A Tragedy of To-day" this summer, and it can come out in the fall or next spring, with "Modern Mephistopheles," "Work," and "Moods." A spunky new one would make the old ones go. "Hospital Sketches" is not cared for now, and is filled up with other tales you know.... Can that plan be carried out? I have begun my tragedy, and think it will be good; also a shorter thing called "Anna: An Episode," in which I do up Boston in a jolly way, with a nice little surprise at the end. It would do to fill up "Modern Mephistopheles," as it is not long, unless I want it to be. I will come in next week and see what can be done. Yours truly, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Bond._ SUNDAY, Oct. 16, [1887]. DEAR AUNTIE,--As you and I belong to the "Shut-in Society," we may now and then cheer each other by a line. Your note and verse are very good to me to-day, as I sit trying to feel all right in spite of the stiffness that won't walk, the rebel stomach that won't work, and the tired head that won't rest. My verse lately has been from the little poem found under a good soldier's pillow in the hospital. I am no longer eager, bold, and strong,-- All that is past; I am ready not to do At last--at last. My half-day's work is done, And this is all my part. I give a patient God My patient heart. The learning not to do is so hard after being the hub to the family wheel so long. But it is good for the energetic ones to find that the world can get on without them, and to learn to be still, to give up, and wait cheerfully. As we have "fell into poetry," as Silas Wegg says, I add a bit of my own; for since you are Marmee now, I feel that you won't laugh at my poor attempts any more than she did, even when I burst forth at the ripe age of eight. Love to all the dear people, and light to the kind eyes that have made sunshine for others so many years. Always your LU. _To Mrs. Bond, with first copy of "Lulu's Library," second volume._ OCTOBER, 1887. DEAR AUNTIE,--I always gave Mother the first author's copy of a new book. As her representative on earth, may I send you, with my love, the little book to come out in November? The tales were told at sixteen to May and her playmates; then are related to May's daughter at five; and for the sake of these two you may care to have them for the little people. I am still held by the leg, but seem to gain a little, and hope to be up by and by. Slow work, but part of the discipline I need, doubtless; so I take it as well as I can. You and I won't be able to go to the golden wedding of S. J. May. I have been alone so long I feel as if I'd like to see any one, and be in the good times again. L. W. reports you as "nicely, and sweet as an angel;" so I rejoice, and wish I could say the same of Your loving LU. _To Mrs. Dodge._ DECEMBER 22, 1887. DEAR MRS. DODGE,--I send you the story your assistant editor asked for. As it is needed at once I do not delay to copy it, for I can only write an hour a day and do very little. You are used to my wild manuscript, and will be able to read it. I meant to have sent the Chinese tale, but this was nearly done, and so it goes, as it does not matter where we begin.... I hope you are well, and full of the peace which work well done gives the happy doer. I mend slowly, but surely, and my good Doctor says my best work is yet to come; so I will be content with health if I can get it. With all good wishes, Yours affectionately, L. M. A. _To Mrs. Bond._ FEBRUARY 7 [1888]. DEAR AUNTIE,--My blessed Anna is so busy, and I can do so little to help her, I feel as if I might take upon me the pleasant duty of writing to you. Father is better, and we are all so grateful, for just now we want all to be bright for our boy. The end is not far off, but Father rallies wonderfully from each feeble spell, and keeps serene and happy through everything. I don't ask to keep him now that life is a burden, and am glad to have him go before it becomes a pain. We shall miss the dear old white head and the feeble saint so long our care; but as Anna says, "He will be with Mother." So we shall be happy in the hope of that meeting. Sunday he seemed very low, and I was allowed to drive in and say "good-by." He knew me and smiled, and kissed "Weedy," as he calls me, and I thought the drowsiness and difficulty of breathing could not last long. But he revived, got up, and seemed so much as usual, I may be able to see him again. It is a great grief that I am not there as I was with Lizzie and Mother, but though much better, the shattered nerves won't bear much yet, and quiet is my only cure. I sit alone and bless the little pair like a fond old grandmother. You show me how to do it. With love to all, Yours ever, LU. _Her last note. To Mrs. Bond._ FEBRUARY 8, 1888. _Air_,-"Haste to the Wedding." DEAR AUNTIE,--I little knew what a sweet surprise was in store for me when I wrote to you yesterday. As I awoke this morning my good Doctor L. came in with the lovely azalea, her round face beaming through the leaves like a full moon. It was very dear of you to remember me, and cheer up my lonely day with such a beautiful guest. It stands beside me on Marmee's work-table, and reminds me tenderly of her favorite flowers; and among those used at her funeral was a spray of this, which lasted for two weeks afterward, opening bud after bud in the glass on her table, where lay the dear old "Jos. May" hymn book, and her diary with the pen shut in as she left it when she last wrote there, three days before the end, "The twilight is closing about me, and I am going to rest in the arms of my children." So you see I love the delicate flower, and enjoy it very much. I can write now, and soon hope to come out and see you for a few minutes, as I drive out every fine day, and go to kiss my people once a week for fifteen minutes. Slow climbing, but I don't slip back; so think up my mercies, and sing cheerfully, as dear Marmee used to do, "Thus far the Lord has led me on!" Your loving LU. CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION. TO MY FATHER, ON HIS EIGHTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY. Dear Pilgrim, waiting patiently, The long, long journey nearly done, Beside the sacred stream that flows Clear shining in the western sun; Look backward on the varied road Your steadfast feet have trod, From youth to age, through weal and woe, Climbing forever nearer God. Mountain and valley lie behind; The slough is crossed, the wicket passed; Doubt and despair, sorrow and sin, Giant and fiend, conquered at last. Neglect is changed to honor now; The heavy cross may be laid down; The white head wins and wears at length The prophet's, not the martyr's, crown. Greatheart and Faithful gone before, Brave Christiana, Mercy sweet, Are Shining Ones who stand and wait The weary wanderer to greet. Patience and Love his handmaids are, And till time brings release, Christian may rest in that bright room Whose windows open to the east. The staff set by, the sandals off, Still pondering the precious scroll, Serene and strong, he waits the call That frees and wings a happy soul. Then, beautiful as when it lured The boy's aspiring eyes, Before the pilgrim's longing sight Shall the Celestial City rise. _November_ 29, 1885. L. M. A. Miss Alcott's appearance was striking and impressive rather than beautiful. Her figure was tall and well-proportioned, indicating strength and activity, and she walked with freedom and majesty. Her head was large, and her rich brown hair was long and luxuriant, giving a sense of fulness and richness of life to her massive features. While thoroughly unconventional, and even free and easy in her manner, she had a dignity of deportment which prevented undue liberties, and made intruders stand in awe of her. Generous in the extreme in serving others, she knew her own rights, and did not allow them to be trampled on. She repelled "the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," and had much of the Burns spirit that sings "A man's a man for a' that" in the presence of insolent grandeur. Miss Alcott always took her stand not for herself, but for her family, her class, her sex. The humblest writer should not be imposed upon in her person; every woman should be braver and stronger from her attitude. She was careless of outward distinctions; but she enjoyed the attentions which her fame brought her with simple pleasure, and was delighted to meet bright, intelligent, distinguished people, who added to her stores of observation and thought. She had the rare good fortune, which an heir of millions might envy, of living all her life in the society of the noblest men and women. The Emersons, the Thoreaus, the Hawthornes, and Miss Elizabeth Peabody were the constant companions of her childhood and youth. It was from them that her standard of character was formed, and she could never enter any circle higher than that in which she had breathed freely from a child. She was quite capable of hero-worship, but her heroes were few. With all her imagination and romance, Miss Alcott was a tremendous destroyer of illusions; she remorselessly tore them away from herself, persisting in holding a lens before every fault and folly of her own, and she did the same for those she loved best. Only what was intrinsically noble and true could stand the searching test of her intellectual scrutiny and keen perception of the incongruous and ridiculous. This disposition was apparent in Louisa's relation to her father, whom she did not always fully understand. Perhaps he had a perception of this when he wrote-- "I press thee to my heart, as Duty's faithful child." She had little sympathy with his speculative fancy, and saw plainly the impracticability of his schemes, and did not hesitate to touch with light and kindly satire his little peculiarities; yet in her deepest heart she gave him not only affection, but deep reverence. She felt the nobility and grandeur of his mind and heart. In "Little Women" the portrait of the father is less vivid and less literal than that of any other member of the family, and is scarcely recognizable; but it was impossible to make the student and idealist a part of the family life as she painted it,--full of fun, frolic, and adventure. In the second part she has taken pains to make up for this seeming neglect, and pays homage to the quiet man at the end of the house, whose influence was so potent and so sweet over all within it. Mrs. Alcott was a rich and noble nature, full of zeal and impulse, daily struggling with a temper threatening to burst out into fire, ready to fight like a lioness for her young, or to toil for them till Nature broke down under the burden. She had a rich appreciation of heroism and beauty in all noble living, a true love of literature, and an overflowing sympathy with all suffering humanity, but was also capable of righteous indignation and withering contempt. To this mother, royal in her motherhood, Louisa was bound by the closest ties of filial love and mutual understanding. She early believed herself to be her mother's favorite child, knew she was close to her heart, her every struggle watched, her every fault rebuked, every aspiration encouraged, every effort after good recognized. I think Louisa felt no pride in this preference. She knew that she was dear to her mother, because her stormy, wayward heart was best understood by her; and hence the mother, wiser for her child than for herself, watched her unfolding life with anxious care. Throughout the childish journal this relation is evident: the child's heart lies open to the mother, and the mother can help her because she understands her, and holds sacred every cry of her heart. Such a loving relation to a mother--so rich, so full, so enduring--was the greatest possible blessing to her life. And richly did Louisa repay the care. From her earliest years she was her mother's confidante, friend, and comforter. Her dream of success was not of fame and glory, but of the time when she could bring this weary pilgrim into "that chamber whose name is Peace," and there bid her sit with folded hands, listening to the loving voices of her children, and drinking in the fulness of life without care or anxiety. And it all came true, like the conclusion of a fairy story; for good fairies had been busy at work for many years preparing the way. Who that saw that mother resting from her labors, proud in her children's success, happy in her husband's contentment, and in the love that had never faltered in the darkest days, can ever forget the peace of her countenance, the loving joy of her heart? The relation of Miss Alcott to her older sister was of entire trust and confidence. Anna inherited the serene, unexacting temper of her father, with much of the loving warmth of her mother. She loved to hide behind her gifted sister, and to keep the ingle-side warm for her to retreat to when she was cold and weary. Anna's fine intellectual powers were shown more in the appreciation of others than in the expression of herself; her dramatic skill and her lively fancy, combined with her affection for Louisa, made her always ready to second all the plans for entertainment or benevolence. She appears in her true light in the sweet, lovable Meg of "Little Women;" and if she never had the fame and pecuniary success of her sister, she had the less rare, but equally satisfying, happiness of wifehood and motherhood. And thus she repaid to Louisa what she had so generously done for the family, by giving her new objects of affection, and connecting her with a younger generation. Louisa was always very fond of boys, and the difference of nature gave her an insight into their trials and difficulties without giving her a painful sense of her own hard struggles. In her nephews she found objects for all her wise and tender care, which they repaid with devoted affection. When boys became men, "they were less interesting to her; she could not understand them." Elizabeth was unlike the other sisters. Retiring in disposition, she would gladly have ever lived in the privacy of home, her only desire being for the music that she loved. The father's ideality was in her a tender religious feeling; the mother's passionate impulse, a self-abnegating affection. She was in the family circle what she is in the book,--a strain of sweet, sad music we long and love to hear, and yet which almost breaks the heart with its forecasting of separation. She was very dear to both the father and mother, and the picture of the father watching all night by the marble remains of his child is very touching. He might well say,-- "Ah, me! life is not life deprived of thee." Of the youngest of all,--bright, sparkling, capricious May,--quick in temper, quick in repentance, affectionate and generous, but full of her own plans, and quite inclined to have the world go on according to her fancies,--I have spoken elsewhere. Less profound in her intellectual and religious nature than either of her sisters, she was like a nymph of Nature, full of friendly sportiveness, and disposed to live out her own life, since it might be only a brief summer day. She was Anna's special child, and Louisa was not always so patient with her as the older sister; yet how well Louisa understood her generous nature is shown by the beautiful sketch she has made of her in "Little Women." She was called the lucky one of the family, and she reaped the benefit of her generous sister's labors in her opportunities of education. Miss Alcott's literary work is so closely interwoven with her personal life that it needs little separate mention. Literature was undoubtedly her true pursuit, and she loved and honored it. That she had her ambitious longings for higher forms of art than the pleasant stories for children is evident from her journals, and she twice attempted to paint the life of mature men and women struggling with great difficulties. In "Moods" and "A Modern Mephistopheles" we have proof of her interest in difficult subjects. I have spoken of them in connection with her life; but while they evince great power, and if standing alone would have stamped her as an author of original observation and keen thought, they can hardly be considered as thoroughly successful, and certainly have not won the sanction of the public like "Hospital Sketches" and "Little Women." Could she ever have commanded quiet leisure, with a tolerable degree of health, she might have wrought her fancies into a finer fabric, and achieved the success she aimed at. Much as Miss Alcott loved literature, it was not an end in itself to her, but a means. Her heart was so bound up in her family,--she felt it so fully to be her sacred mission to provide for their wants,--that she sacrificed to it all ambitious dreams, health, leisure,--everything but her integrity of soul. But as "he that loseth his life shall find it," she has undoubtedly achieved a really greater work than if she had not had this constant stimulus to exertion. In her own line of work she is unsurpassed. While she paints in broad, free strokes the life of her own day, represented mostly by children and young people, she has always a high moral purpose, which gives strength and sweetness to the delineation; yet one never hears children complain of her moralizing,--it is events that reveal the lesson she would enforce. Her own deep nature shines through all the experiences of her characters, and impresses upon the children's hearts a sense of reality and truth. She charms them, wisely, to love the common virtues of truth, unselfishness, kindness, industry, and honesty. Dr. Johnson said children did not want to hear about themselves, but about giants and fairies; but while Miss Alcott could weave fairy fancies for them, they are quite as pleased with her real boys and girls in the plainest of costumes. An especial merit of these books for young boys and girls is their purity of feeling. The family affection which was so predominant in the author's own life, always appears as the holiest and sweetest phase of human nature. She does not refuse to paint the innocent love and the happy marriage which it is natural for every young heart to be interested in, but it is in tender, modest colors. She does not make it the master and tyrant of the soul, nor does she ever connect it with sensual imagery; but it appears as one of "God's holy ordinances,"--natural and beautiful,--and is not separated from the thought of work and duty and self-sacrifice for others. No mother fears that her books will brush the bloom of modesty from the faces of her young men or maidens. Even in the stories of her early period of work for money, which she wisely renounced as trash, while there is much that is thoroughly worthless as art, and little that has any value, Miss Alcott never falls into grossness of thought or baseness of feeling. She is sentimental, melodramatic, exaggerated, and unreal in her descriptions, but the stories leave no taint of evil behind them. Two of these stories, "The Baron's Gloves" and "A Whisper in the Dark," have been included in her published works, with her permission. Her friends are disposed to regret this, as they do not add to her reputation; but at least they serve to show the quality of work which she condemned so severely, and to satisfy the curiosity of readers in regard to it. It would be easy to point out defects in her style, and in some of her books there is evidence of the enforced drudgery of production, instead of the spontaneous flow of thought. The most serious defect is in her style of expression, which certainly passes the fine line between colloquial ease and slang; it is her own natural, peculiar style, which appears in her journals and letters. That it is attractive to children is certain, but it offends the taste of those who love purity and elegance of speech. It does not appear in Louisa's more ambitious novels; here she sometimes falls into the opposite extreme of labored and stilted expression. But much of these books is written in a pure and beautiful style, showing that she could have united ease with elegance if she had not so constantly worked at high speed and with little revision. She was a great admirer of Dickens's writings; and although she has never imitated him, she was perhaps strengthened in her habit of using dashing, expressive language by so fascinating a model. I have placed at the head of each chapter one of Miss Alcott's own poems, usually written at the period of which the chapter treats, and characteristic of her life at that time. Her first literary essay was the "Little Robin." But although her fond mother saw the future of a great poet in these simple verses, Louisa never claimed the title for herself. Her thoughts ran often into rhyme, and she sent many birthday and Christmas verses to her friends and especially to her father. They are usually playful. She always wrote to express some feeling of the hour, and I find no objective or descriptive poetry. But a few of her sacred poems, for we may certainly call them so, are very tender and beautiful, and deserve a permanent place among the poems of feeling,--those few poems which a true heart writes for itself. "Thoreau's Flute" was originally published in the "Atlantic Monthly." It is the least personal of her poems. The lines to her father on his eighty-sixth birthday, the verses dedicated to her mother, and "My Prayer," the last poem that she wrote, breathe her deepest religious feeling in sweet and fitting strains. They will speak to the hearts of many in the hours of trial which are common to humanity. The long playful poem called "The Lay of the Golden Goose" was sent home from Europe as an answer to many questions from her admirers and demands for new stories. It has never been published, and is an interesting specimen of her playful rhyming. While to Miss Alcott cannot be accorded a high rank as a poet,--which, indeed, she never claimed for herself,--it would be hard to deny a place in our most select anthology to "Thoreau's Flute" or "Transfiguration," the "Lines to my Father on his Eighty-sixth Birthday" and "My Prayer." I have therefore thought it well to preserve her best poems in connection with her life, where they properly belong; for they are all truly autobiographical, revealing the inner meaning of her life. The pecuniary success of Miss Alcott's books enabled her to carry out her great purpose of providing for the comfort and happiness of her family. After the publication of "Little Women," she not only received a handsome sum for every new story, but there was a steady income from the old ones. Her American publishers estimate that they "have sold of her various works a million volumes, and that she realized from them more than two hundred thousand dollars." While her own tastes were very simple, her expenses were large, for she longed to gratify every wish of those she loved, and she gave generously to every one in need. She had a true sense of the value of money. Her early poverty did not make her close in expending it, nor her later success lavish. She never was enslaved by debt or corrupted by wealth. She always held herself superior to her fortune, and made her means serve her highest purposes. Of Miss Alcott's own reading she says:-- "Never a student, but a great reader. R. W. E. gave me Goethe's works at fifteen, and they have been my delight ever since. My library consists of Goethe, Emerson, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, and George Sand. George Eliot I don't care for, nor any of the modern poets but Whittier; the old ones--Herbert, Crashaw, Keats, Coleridge, Dante, and a few others--I like." She gives this account of the beginning of her literary career:-- "This gem ['The Robin'] my proud mother preserved with care, assuring me that if I kept on in this way I might be a second Shakespeare in time. Fired with this modest ambition, I continued to write poems upon dead butterflies, lost kittens, the baby's eyes, and other simple subjects till the story-telling mania set in; and after frightening my sisters out of their wits by awful tales whispered in bed, I began to write down these histories of giants, ogres, dauntless girls, and magic transformations till we had a library of small paper-covered volumes illustrated by the author. Later the poems grew gloomy and sentimental, and the tales more fanciful and less tragic, lovely elves and spirits taking the places of the former monsters." Of her method of work she says:-- "I never had a study. Any pen and paper do, and an old atlas on my knee is all I want. Carry a dozen plots in my head, and think them over when in the mood. Sometimes keep one for years, and suddenly find it all ready to write. Often lie awake and plan whole chapters word for word, then merely scribble them down as if copying. "Used to sit fourteen hours a day at one time, eating little, and unable to stir till a certain amount was done. "Very few stories written in Concord; no inspiration in that dull place. Go to Boston, hire a quiet room and shut myself up in it." The following letter gives her advice to young writers:-- _To Mr. J. P. True._ CONCORD, October 24. DEAR SIR,--I never copy or "polish," so I have no old manuscripts to send you; and if I had it would be of little use, for one person's method is no rule for another. Each must work in his own way; and the only drill needed is to keep writing and profit by criticism. Mind grammar, spelling, and punctuation, use short words, and express as briefly as you can your meaning. Young people use too many adjectives and try to "write fine." The strongest, simplest words are best, and no _foreign_ ones if it can be helped. Write, and print if you can; if not, still write, and improve as you go on. Read the best books, and they will improve your style. See and hear good speakers and wise people, and learn of them. Work for twenty years, and then you may some day find that you have a style and place of your own, and can command good pay for the same things no one would take when you were unknown. I know little of poetry, as I never read modern attempts, but advise any young person to keep to prose, as only once in a century is there a true poet; and verses are so easy to do that it is not much help to write them. I have so many letters like your own that I can say no more, but wish you success, and give you for a motto Michael Angelo's wise words: "Genius is infinite patience." Your friend, L. M. ALCOTT. P. S.--The lines you send are better than many I see; but boys of nineteen cannot know much about hearts, and had better write of things they understand. Sentiment is apt to become sentimentality; and sense is always safer, as well as better drill, for young fancies and feelings. Read Ralph Waldo Emerson, and see what good prose is, and some of the best poetry we have. I much prefer him to Longfellow. "Years afterward," says Mr. True, "when I had achieved some slight success, I once more wrote, thanking her for her advice; and the following letter shows the kindliness of heart with which she extended ready recognition and encouragement to lesser workers in her chosen field:"-- CONCORD, Sept. 7, 1883. MY DEAR MR. TRUE,--Thanks for the pretty book, which I read at once and with pleasure; for I still enjoy boys' pranks as much as ever. I don't remember the advice I gave you, and should judge from this your first story that you did not need much. Your boys are real boys; and the girls can run,--which is a rare accomplishment nowadays I find. They are not sentimental either; and that is a good example to set both your brother writers and the lasses who read the book. I heartily wish you success in your chosen work, and shall always be glad to know how fast and how far you climb on the steep road that leads to fame and fortune. Yours truly, L. M. Alcott. Roberts Brothers, Miss Alcott's publishers for nearly twenty years, have collected all her stories in a uniform edition of twenty-five volumes. They are grouped into different series according to size and character, from her novels to "Lulu's Library" for very small children, and may be enumerated as follows:-- _Novels_ (four volumes).--Work, Moods, A Modern Mephistopheles, Hospital Sketches. _Little Women Series_ (eight volumes).--Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Little Men, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, Jo's Boys. _Spinning-Wheel Stories Series_ (four volumes).--Silver Pitchers, Proverb Stories, Spinning-Wheel Stories, A Garland for Girls. _Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag_ (six volumes).--My Boys, Shawl-Straps, Cupid and Chow-Chow, My Girls, Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving. _Lulu's Library_ (three volumes). Many of these stories were originally published in various magazines,--the popular "St Nicholas," for which Miss Alcott wrote some of her best things in her later years, the "Youth's Companion," and others. Her works have been republished in England; and through her English publishers, Messrs. Sampson Low and Company, of London, she has reaped the benefit of copyright there, and they have been translated into many languages. Her name is familiar and dear to the children of Europe, and they still read her books with the same eagerness as the children of her own land. This extract from a letter written by the translator of Miss Alcott's books into Dutch will show how she is esteemed in Holland:-- "Miss Alcott was and is so much beloved here by her books, that you could scarce find a girl that had not read one or more of them. Last autumn I gave a translation of 'Lulu's Library' that appeared in November, 1887; the year before, a collection of tales and Christmas stories that appeared under the name of 'Gandsbloempje' ('Dandelion'). Yesterday a young niece of mine was here, and said, 'Oh, Aunt, how I enjoyed those stories! but the former of "Meh Meh" I still preferred.' A friend wrote: 'My children are confined to the sickroom, but find comfort in Alcott's "Under the Lilacs."' Her fame here was chiefly caused by her 'Little Women' and 'Little Women Wedded,' which in Dutch were called 'Under Moedervleugels' ('Under Mother's Wings') and 'Op Eigen Wieken' ('With Their Own Wings'). Her 'Work' was translated as 'De Hand van den Ploey' ('The Hand on the Plough')." How enduring the fame of Louisa M. Alcott will be, time only can show; but if to endear oneself to two generations of children, and to mould their minds by wise counsel in attractive form entitle an author to the lasting gratitude of her country, that praise and reward belong to LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. TERMINUS. It is time to be old, To take in sail: The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said, "No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root; Fancy departs: no more invent, Contract thy firmament To compass of a tent. There's not enough for this and that, Make thy option which of two; Economize the failing river, Not the less revere the Giver; Leave the many, and hold the few. Timely wise, accept the terms; Soften the fall with wary foot; A little while Still plan and smile. And, fault of novel germs, Mature the unfallen fruit." * * * * * As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time; I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed. EMERSON. LOUISA M. ALCOTT'S WRITINGS. _Miss Alcott is really a benefactor of households._--H. H. _Miss Alcott has a faculty of entering into the lives and feelings of children that is conspicuously wanting in most writers who address them; and to this cause, to the consciousness among her readers that they are hearing about people like themselves, instead of abstract qualities labelled with names, the popularity of her books is due._--MRS. SARAH J. HALE. _Dear Aunt Jo! You are embalmed in the thoughts and loves of thousands of little men and women._--EXCHANGE. =Little Women; or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.= With illustrations. 16mo $1.50 =Hospital Sketches, and Camp and Fireside Stories.= With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =An Old-Fashioned Girl.= With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =Little Men:= Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys. With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =Jo's Boys and How they Turned Out.= A sequel to "Little Men." With portrait of "Aunt Jo." 16mo 1.50 =Eight Cousins=; or, The Aunt-Hill. With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =Rose in Bloom.= A sequel to "Eight Cousins." 16mo 1.50 =Under the Lilacs.= With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =Jack and Jill.= A Village Story. With illustrations. 16mo 1.50 =Work:= A Story of Experience. With character illustrations by Sol Eytinge. 16mo 1.50 =Moods.= A Novel. New edition, revised and enlarged. 16mo 1.50 =A Modern Mephistopheles, and A Whisper in the Dark.= 16mo 1.50 =Silver Pitchers, and Independence.= A Centennial Love Story. 16mo 1.25 =Proverb Stories.= New edition, revised and enlarged. 16mo 1.25 =Spinning-Wheel Stories.= With illustrations. 16mo 1.25 =A Garland for Girls, and Other Stories.= With illustrations. 16mo 1.25 =My Boys, &c.= First volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo $1.00 =Shawl-Straps.= Second volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo 1.00 =Cupid and Chow-Chow, &c.= Third volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo 1.00 =My Girls, &c.= Fourth volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo 1.00 =Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, &c.= Fifth volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo 1.00 =An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, &c.= Sixth volume of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag. 16mo 1.00 =Little Women.= Illustrated. Embellished with nearly 200 characteristic illustrations from original designs drawn expressly for this edition of this noted American Classic. One small quarto, bound in cloth, with emblematic designs 2.50 =Little Women Series.= Comprising Little Women; Little Men; Eight Cousins; Under the Lilacs; An Old-Fashioned Girl; Jo's Boys; Rose in Bloom; Jack and Jill. 8 large 16mo volumes in a handsome box 12.00 Miss Alcott's novels in uniform binding in sets. Moods; Work; Hospital Sketches; A Modern Mephistopheles, and A Whisper in the Dark. 4 volumes. 16mo 6.00 =Lulu's Library.= Vols. I., II., III. A collection of New Stories. 16mo 3.00 _These books are for sale at all bookstores, or will be mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, to any address._ LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. LOUISA M. ALCOTT, HER LIFE, LETTERS, AND JOURNALS EDITED BY EDNAH D. CHENEY. With PORTRAITS and View of the ALCOTT HOME in Concord. One vol. 16mo. Uniform with "Little Women." Price, $1.50. Mrs. Cheney has allowed this popular author to tell the story of her early struggles, her successes, and prosperity and life work, in her own inimitable style, gracefully weaving the daily record of this sweet and useful life into a garland of _immortelles_, in a manner at once pleasing and within the comprehension of the thousands of readers and admirers of Miss Alcott's books. It might truly be called the biography of "Little Women." A most fascinating as well as a deeply pathetic book. The story,--the long, hard struggle for money to keep the household in comfort, and the well-earned success coming, alas, too late to save her health,--is delightfully told in her own words, from letters and journals, so that we have the bright, the witty, and the always charming personality of the children's author before us from the first page to the last. We have to thank Mrs. Cheney that she hid not from us the hard, grinding toil, nor spared us the record of one discouragement in the life so interesting to us; for in this narrative we have a valuable lesson for the young writer of our day.--_The Epoch._ One who knew Miss Alcott well says: "Nobody can read of the struggles of the Alcott family, and of the tender yet resolute heroism with which Miss Alcott met and relieved them, without being touched to tears by the pathos and reality of the picture. Louisa Alcott was not a member of any church; but her belief in God, her loyalty to conscience, her fidelity to duty, her rescue of the Alcott family from its peculiar perils, place her among the women saints of the century, and it will be hard to find any one of her sex who has more faithfully responded to the duties of the position in which God had placed her."--_Cincinnati Commercial Gazette._ Louisa May Alcott is without a rival as a writer for the young. The millions who have read her stories--and been made better by the reading--will want this book that they may get near the inner life, the fruitful source of their entertainment and profit. They will see that purity, simplicity, love, earnestness, and patience were so interwoven with her genius that her stories were the natural outgrowth of her beautiful character. The book needs no commendation from us. Every reader of her stories will be glad to know that they may now become intimately acquainted with that beautiful life which is here brought out of its long cherished seclusion.--_Saturday Evening Herald._ LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. [Illustration: "Sing, Tessa, Sing!" cried Tommo, twanging away with all his might.--PAGE 47.] AUNT JO'S SCRAP-BAG: Containing "My Boys," "Shawl-Straps," "Cupid and Chow-Chow," "My Girls," "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore," "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving." 6 vols. Price of each, $1.00. LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. LOUISA M. ALCOTT'S STORY-BOOKS. [Illustration: A CHRISTMAS DREAM.] LULU'S LIBRARY. A COLLECTION OF STORIES BY "AUNT JO" With Illustrations by JESSIE MCDERMOTT. 3 vols. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00 per volume. LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. NOVELS AND STORIES BY LOUISA M. ALCOTT. WORK. A Story of Experience. With Illustrations by SOL EYTINGE. This story relates, in many of its most important features and incidents, to actual experiences of its author; and in "Christie" we find the views and ideas of Miss Alcott herself expressed in such a way as to make them most interesting and valuable. MOODS. A Novel. Although this story was originally written at a time when its author's powers and years were far from fully matured, it was in its first form indicative of great power. It was revised and partly rewritten after she had attained a full maturity, and after actual experience with life had broadened and rounded out her mental vision, so that it now stands as the first-born and dearest to her heart of her novels. A MODERN MEPHISTOPHELES. A Story. This story was written for the "No Name Series," in which it originally appeared, and consequently was intended to be disguised It is a surprise that Miss Alcott could have written this volume; not that it is inferior, but that it varies from her usual tone and theme so much. Yet her plot is ingenious, and there is dramatic design well worked out. As we read, knowing now who the author is (the story was first published anonymously), we recognize the grace of her style and the art of her workmanship. Its tone and, above all, its lofty moral purpose are hers. Plots differ, appearances are changed; but some of the deep traits of the true nature of Miss Alcott are in the book. Being dead she yet liveth.--_Public Opinion_. HOSPITAL SKETCHES, and Camp and Fireside Stories. With Illustrations. These stories and sketches were written at the time of the Civil War, in which the author took part as a nurse in one of the hospitals, and show some of the many minor side scenes that help to make up that great conflict. Four volumes. 16mo. Cloth. $1.50 per volume. _Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price by the publishers,_ LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. [Illustration: "'I'm not hurt, all right in a minute,' he said, sitting up, a little pale and dizzy, as the boys gathered round him, full of admiration and alarm."--PAGE 2] LITTLE MEN; OR, LIFE AT PLUMFIELD WITH JO'S BOYS. Price, $1.50. LITTLE BROWN, AND COMPANY, BOSTON. [Illustration: WALTON RICKETSON, SCULP.] JO'S BOYS, AND HOW THEY TURNED OUT. A sequel to "Little Men." With a new portrait of "Aunt Jo." Price, $1.50. Little, Brown, and Company, BOSTON. POPULAR STORY BOOKS. SUSAN COOLIDGE has always possessed the affection of her young readers, for it seems as if she had the happy instinct of planning stories that each girl would like to act out in reality.--_The Critic._ Not even Miss Alcott apprehends child nature with finer sympathy, or pictures its nobler traits with more skill.--_Boston Daily Advertiser._ =THE NEW YEAR'S BARGAIN.= A Christmas Story for Children. With Illustrations by ADDIE LEDYARD. 16mo. $1.25. =WHAT KATY DID.= A Story. With Illustrations by ADDIE LEDYARD. 16mo. $1.25. =WHAT KATY DID AT SCHOOL.= Being more about "What Katy Did." With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =MISCHIEF'S THANKSGIVING,= and other Stories. With Illustrations by ADDIE LEDYARD. 16mo. $1.25. =NINE LITTLE GOSLINGS.= With Illustrations by J. A. MITCHELL. 16mo. $1.25. =EYEBRIGHT.= A Story. With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =CROSS PATCH.= With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =A ROUND DOZEN.= With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =A LITTLE COUNTRY GIRL.= With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =WHAT KATY DID NEXT.= With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =CLOVER.= A Sequel to the Katy Books. With Illustrations by JESSIE MCDERMOTT. 16mo. $1.25. =JUST SIXTEEN.= With Illustrations. 16mo. $1.25. =IN THE HIGH VALLEY.= With Illustrations, 16mo. $1.25. =A GUERNSEY LILY=; or, How the Feud was Healed. A Story of the Channel Islands. Profusely Illustrated. 16mo. $1.25. =THE BARBERRY BUSH,= and Seven Other Stories about Girls for Girls. With Illustrations by JESSIE MCDERMOTT. 16mo. $1.25. =NOT QUITE EIGHTEEN.= A volume of Stories. With Illustrations by JESSIE MCDERMOTT. 16mo. $1.25. _Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers._ 
51426	----	American Men of Letters HENRY D. THOREAU [Illustration: Henry D. Thoreau.] American Men of Letters. HENRY D. THOREAU. BY F. B. SANBORN. _REVISED EDITION._ [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge Copyright, 1882, BY F. B. SANBORN. _All rights reserved._ Much do they wrong our Henry wise and kind, Morose who name thee, cynical to men, Forsaking manners civil and refined To build thyself in Walden woods a den,-- Then flout society, flatter the rude hind. We better knew thee, loyal citizen! Thou, friendship's all-adventuring pioneer, Civility itself wouldst civilize: Whilst braggart boors, wavering 'twixt rage and fear, Slave hearths lay waste, and Indian huts surprise, And swift the Martyr's gibbet would uprear: Thou hail'dst him great whose valorous emprise Orion's blazing belt dimmed in the sky,-- Then bowed thy unrepining head to die. A. BRONSON ALCOTT CONCORD, _January, 1882_. PREFACE When, in 1879, I was asked by my friend Charles Dudley Warner to write the biography of Thoreau which follows, I was by no means unprepared. I had known this man of genius for the last seven years of his too short life; had lived in his family, and in the house of his neighbor across the way, Ellery Channing, his most intimate friend outside of that family; and had assisted Channing in the preparation and publication of his "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,"--the first full biography which appeared. Not very long after Thoreau's death Channing had written me these sentences, with that insight of the future which he often displayed: "That justice can be done to our deceased brother by me, of course I do not think. But to you and to me is intrusted the care of his immediate fame. I feel that my part is not yet done, and cannot be without your aid. My little sketch must only serve as a note and advertisement that such a man lived,--that he did brave work, which must yet be given to the world. In the midst of all the cold and selfish men who knew this brave and devoted scholar and genius, why should not you be called on to make some sacrifices, even if it be to publish my sketch?" This I was ready to do in 1864; and it was through my means that the volume, then much enlarged by Channing, was published in 1873, and again, with additions and corrections, in 1902. I had also the great advantage of hearing from the mother and sister of Henry the affectionate side of his domestic life,--which indeed I had witnessed, both in his health and in his long mortal illness. From Emerson, who had a clear view of Thoreau's intellect and his moral nature, I derived many useful suggestions, though not wholly agreeing with him in some of his opinions. In March, 1878, after hearing Emerson read a few unpublished notes on Thoreau, made years before, I called on him one evening, and thus entered the event in my journal:-- "I was shown several of Thoreau's early papers; one a commentary on Emerson's 'Sphinx,' and another from his own translation of 'The Seven Against Thebes,' written at William Emerson's house on Staten Island in 1843. Of this episode in Thoreau's life (his tutorship for six months of William Emerson's three sons), Emerson told me that his brother and Henry were not men that could get along together: 'each would think whatever the other did was out of place.' This was said to imply that Thoreau's poem 'The Departure' could not have been written on his leaving Castleton in Staten Island. I had shown Emerson these verses (first printed by me, at Sophia Thoreau's wish, in the Boston 'Commonwealth' of 1863), whereupon he said:-- "I think Thoreau had always looked forward to authorship as his work in life, and finding that he could write prose well, he soon gave up writing verse, in which he was not willing to be patient enough to make the lines smooth and flowing. These verses are smoother than he usually wrote; but I have now no recollection of seeing them before, nor of any circumstances in which they may have been written.' Alluding to Judge Hoar's marked dislike of Thoreau, Emerson said, 'There was no _bow_ in Henry; he never sought to please his hearers or his friends.' Thomas Cholmondeley, the nephew of Scott's friend Richard Heber, meeting Henry at dinner at Emerson's, to whom Cholmondeley had letters in 1854, and expressing to his host the wish to see more of him, Emerson said he told the Englishman, 'If you wish to see Thoreau, go and board at his mother's house; she will be glad to take you in, and there you can meet him every day. He did so,' added Emerson, 'and you know the result.' ... This led to further mention of Mrs. Thoreau, who, Emerson said, 'was a person of sharp and malicious wit,' of whose sayings he read me some instances from his Journals. Among these was her remark to Mrs. Emerson, 'Henry is very _tolerant_'; adding 'Mr. Emerson has been talking so much with Henry that he has learnt Henry's way of thinking and talking.' Emerson went on to me:-- "'I had known Henry slightly when in college; the scholarship from which he drew an income while there (a farm at Pullen Point in Chelsea) was the one that I and my brothers, William and Edward, had enjoyed while we were at college. But my first intimate acquaintance with Henry began after his graduation in 1837. Mrs. Brown, my wife's sister, who then boarded with the Thoreau family in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands, used to bring me his verses (the "Sic Vita" and others), and tell me of his entries in his Journal. Here is the Index to my Journals, in which Thoreau's name appears perhaps fifty times, perhaps more.'" Thus far my Journal of 1878. I was myself introduced to Thoreau by Emerson, March 28, 1855, in the Concord Town Hall, one evening, just before a lecture there by Emerson. From that time until Henry's death, May 6, 1862, I saw him every few days, unless he or I was away from Concord, and for more than two years I dined with him daily at his mother's table, in the house opposite to Ellery Channing's. I thus came to know all the surviving members of his kindred,--his eccentric uncle, Charles Dunbar, his two aunts on each side, Jane and Maria Thoreau, and Louisa and Sophia Dunbar (both older than Mrs. Thoreau), and the descendants in Maine of his aunt Mrs. Billings, long since dead. His sister Helen and his brother John I never knew, but learned much about them from their mother and sister; for neither Henry nor his father often spoke of them. Sophia also placed in my hands after Henry's death several of his poems, which I printed in the "Commonwealth," and Emerson gave me other manuscripts of Thoreau which had lodged with him while he was editing the "Dial." He had urged Sophia to leave all the MSS. with me, but her pique against Channing at the time prevented this,--she knowing him to be intimate with me. With all this preparation, I received from Mr. Blake, to whom Sophia had bequeathed them in 1876, the correspondence of Thoreau and his college essays, with some other papers of Henry's and his own, but without the replies from the family to Henry's affectionate letters. Even his own to his mother and sisters had been withheld from publication by Emerson in 1865, when a small collection of Thoreau's Letters and Poems was edited by Emerson. This omission Sophia regretted, as she told me; and finding them now in my hands, though I made use of their contents in writing the biography, I withheld them from full publication, foreseeing that I should probably have occasion to edit the letters in full at some later time; and I made but sparing use of the early essays. On the other hand, I perceived that the character and genius of Thoreau could not be well understood unless some knowledge was had of the Concord farmers, scholars, and citizens, among whom he had spent his days, and who have furnished a background for that scene of authorship which the small town of Concord has presented for now more than seventy years. Therefore, having access to the records and biographies of the Concord "Social Circle," then in preparation for the public, and to many other records of the past in New England, I sketched therefrom the character of our interesting community, which gave color and tone to the outlines of this thoughtful scholar's career. But I held back for the "Familiar Letters" the more intimate details of Thoreau's self-devoted life, and did not draw heavily on the thirty-odd volumes of the Journals, to which, at Worcester, Mr. Blake gave me free access. It was then his purpose to bring out these Journals much earlier and more fully than was done, until Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. published their admirable edition in fourteen volumes, a few years ago, after Mr. Blake's death. The success of my biography, written under these limitations, has more than justified reasonable expectations. It was popular from the first, and is still widely read, and called for by a generation of readers quite distinct from those for whom it was originally written. Since the spring of 1882, when it was published, many details of Thoreau's life and that of his ancestors have become known by an examination of his copious manuscripts, of the papers of his Loyalist ancestors, and his father's relatives in the island of Jersey; and by the publication of some twenty-five volumes from Thoreau's own hand. He never employed an amanuensis, and he seems to have carefully preserved the large mass of his manuscripts which accumulated during his literary life of some twenty-five years. The exceptions to this remark were the copies of his earlier verses, which he told me, in his last illness, he had destroyed, because they did not meet Emerson's approval, and those pages of his Journals which he had issued in printed books or magazine articles. Fragments of his youthful verses were kept, however, by some of his family, and still exist. From all these sources many things have come to light concerning his ancestry and the minor events of his life, which I hope eventually to give the world in a final biography that will serve as a sequel to this one. The greatly enhanced reputation which Thoreau now enjoys, as compared with his fame in 1882, seems to warrant a detail which was not then needful, and which even the "Familiar Letters" does not furnish. Much misconception of his character and the facts of his life still prevails; and singular statements have been made in text-books, as to his origin and training. One authority described Thoreau as descended from "farmer folk" in Connecticut, who were recent immigrants from France. So far as I know, not a single ancestor of his ever dwelt in Connecticut; they were all merchants; and though his Thoreau ancestors spoke French, or a patois of it, in Jersey, there is no evidence that any of them had lived in France for more than five centuries. This initial authentic biography, with its few errors corrected, now comes forth in a new edition, which will long be found useful, in the manner indicated, and I hope, may be received as the earlier edition has been, with all the favor which its modest aim deserves. F. B. S. Concord, Mass., October 8, 1909. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Page Birth and Family 1 CHAPTER II. Childhood and Youth 32 CHAPTER III. Concord and its Famous People 63 CHAPTER IV. The Embattled Farmers 97 CHAPTER V. The Transcendental Period 124 CHAPTER VI. Early Essays in Authorship 148 CHAPTER VII. Friends and Companions 174 CHAPTER VIII. The Walden Hermitage 201 CHAPTER IX. Horace in the Role of Mæcenas 216 CHAPTER X. In Wood and Field 242 CHAPTER XI. Personal Traits and Social Life 261 CHAPTER XII. Poet, Moralist, and Philosopher 284 CHAPTER XIII. Life, Death, and Immortality 297 HENRY D. THOREAU. CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND FAMILY. There died in a city of Maine, on the river Penobscot, late in the year 1881, the last member of a family which had been planted in New England a little more than a hundred years before, by a young tradesman from the English island of Jersey, and had here produced one of the most characteristic American and New English men of genius whom the world has yet seen. This lady, Miss Maria Thoreau, was the last child of John Thoreau, the son of Philip Thoreau and his wife, Marie le Galais, who, a hundred years ago, lived in the parish of St. Helier, in Jersey. This John Thoreau was born in that parish, and baptized there in the Anglican church, in April, 1754; he emigrated to New England about 1773, and in 1781 married in Boston Miss Jane Burns, the daughter of a Scotchman of some estate in the neighborhood of Stirling Castle, who had emigrated earlier to Massachusetts, and had here married Sarah Orrok, the daughter of David Orrok, a Massachusetts Quaker. Jane (Burns) Thoreau, the granddaughter of David Orrok, and the grandmother of Henry David Thoreau, died in Boston, in 1796, at the age of forty-two. Her husband, John Thoreau, Sr., removed from Boston to Concord, in 1800, lived in a house on the village square, and died there in 1801. His mother, Marie le Galais, outlived him a few weeks, dying at St. Helier, in 1801. Maria Thoreau, granddaughter and namesake of Marie le Galais, died in December, 1881, in Bangor, Maine. From the recollections of this "aunt Maria," who outlived all her American relatives by the name of Thoreau, Henry Thoreau derived what information he possessed concerning his Jersey ancestors. In his journal for April 21, 1855, he makes this entry:-- "Aunt Maria has put into my hands to-day for safe-keeping three letters from Peter Thoreau (her uncle), directed to 'Miss Elizabeth Thoreau, Concord, near Boston,' and dated at Jersey, respectively, July 1, 1801, April 22, 1804, and April 11, 1806; also a '_Vue de la ville de St. Helier_,' accompanying the first letter. The first is in answer to one from my aunt Elizabeth, announcing the death of her father (my grandfather). He states that his mother (Marie (le Galais) Thoreau) died June 26, 1801, the day before he received aunt Elizabeth's letter, though not till after he had heard from another source of the death of his brother, which was not communicated to his mother. 'She was in the seventy-ninth year of her age,' he says, 'and retained her memory to the last. She lived with my two sisters, who took the greatest care of her.' He says that he had written to my grandfather about his oldest brother (who died about a year before), but had got no answer,--had written that he left his children, two sons and a daughter, in a good way: 'The eldest son and daughter are both married and have children; the youngest is about eighteen. I am still a widower. Of four children I have but two left,--Betsey and Peter; James and Nancy are both at rest.' He adds that he sends 'a view of our native town.' "The second of these letters is sent by the hand of Captain John Harvey, of Boston, then at Guernsey. On the 4th of February, 1804, he had sent aunt Elizabeth a copy of the last letter he had written (which was in answer to her second), since he feared she had not received it. He says that they are still at war with the French; that they received the day before a letter from her 'uncle and aunt Le Cappelain of London;' complains of not receiving letters, and says, 'Your aunts, Betsey and Peter join with me,' etc. According to the third letter (April 11, 1806), he had received by Capt. Touzel an answer to that he sent by Capt. Harvey, and will forward this by the former, who is going _via_ Newfoundland to Boston. 'He expects to go there every year; several vessels from Jersey go there every year.' His nephew had told him, some time before, that he met a gentleman from Boston, who told him he saw the sign 'Thoreau and Hayse' there, and he therefore thinks the children must have kept up the name of the firm. 'Your cousin John is a lieutenant in the British service; he has already been in a campaign on the Continent; he is very fond of it.' Aunt Maria thinks the correspondence ceased at Peter's death, because he was the one who wrote English." These memoranda indicate that the grandfather of Henry Thoreau was the younger son of a family of some substance in Jersey, which had a branch in London and a grandson in the army that fought under Wellington against Napoleon; that the American Thoreau engaged in trade in Boston, with a partner, and carried on business successfully for years; and that there was the same pleasant family feeling in the English and French Thoreaus that we shall see in their American descendants. Miss Maria Thoreau, in answer to a letter of mine, some years ago, sent me the following particulars of her ancestry, some of which repeat what is above stated by her nephew:-- "BANGOR, _March 18, 1878_. "MR. SANBORN. "_Dear Sir_,--In answer to your letter, I regret that I cannot find more to communicate. I have no earlier record of my grandparents, Philippe Thoreau and Marie Le Gallais, than a certificate of their baptism in St. Helier, Jersey, written on parchment in the year 1773. I do not know what their vocation was. My Father was born in St. Helier in April, 1754, and was married to Jane Burns in Boston, in 1781. She died in that city in the year 1796, aged forty-two years. My sister Elizabeth continued my Father's correspondence with his brother, Uncle Peter Thoreau, at St. Helier, for a number of years after Father's decease, and in one of his letters he speaks of the death of grandmother, Marie Le Gallais, as taken place so near the time intelligence reach'd them of Father's death, in 1801, it was not communicated to her. Father removed to Concord in 1800, and died there, of consumption. I do not know at what time he emigrated to this country, but have been told he was shipwreck'd on the passage, and suffered much. I think he must have left a large family circle, as Uncle Peter in his letters refers to aunts and cousins, two of which, aunts Le Cappelain and Pinkney, resided in London, and a cousin, John Thoreau, was an officer in the British army. "Soon after Father's arrival in Boston, probably, he open'd a store on Long Wharf, as documents addressed to 'John Thoreau, merchant,' appear to signify, and one subsequently purchased 'on King Street, afterward called State Street.' And now I will remark in passing that Henry's father was bred to the mercantile line, and continued in it till failure in business; when he resorted to pencil-making, and succeeded so well as to obtain the first medal at the Salem Mechanics' Fair. I think Henry could hardly compete with his father in pencil-making, any more than he, with his peculiar genius and habits, would have been willing to spend much time in such 'craft.' His father left no will, but a competency, at least, to his family, and what was done relative to the business after his death was accomplished by his daughter Sophia. I mention this to rectify Mr. Page's mistake relating to Henry. "And now, as I have written all I can glean of Father's family, I will turn to the maternal side, of which it appears, in religious belief, they were of the Quaker persuasion. But I was sorry to see, by good old great-great-grandfather Tillet's will, that slavery was tolerated in those days in the good State of Massachusetts, and handed down from generation to generation. My great-grandmother (Tillet) married David Orrok; her daughter, Sarah Orrok, married Mr. Burns, a Scotch gentleman. At what time he came to this country, or married, I cannot ascertain, but have often been told, to gain the consent to it of grandmother's Quaker parents, he was obliged to doff his rich apparel of gems and ruffles, and conform to the more simple garb of his Quaker bride. On a visit to his home in Scotland he died, in what year is not mentioned. Before my father's decease, a letter was received from the executor of grandfather's estate, dated Stirling, informing him there was property left to Jane Burns, his daughter in America, 'well worth coming after.' But Father was too much out of health to attend to the getting it; and the letter, subsequently put into a lawyer's hands by Brother, then the only heir, was lost. "It has been said I inherit more of the traits of my foreign ancestry than any of my family,--which pleases me. Probably the vivacity of the French and the superstition of the Scotch may somewhat characterize me,--which it is to be hop'd the experience of an octogenarian may suitably modify. But this is nothing, here nor there. And now that I have written all that is necessary, and perhaps more, I will close, with kind wishes for health and happiness. Yours respectfully, "MARIA THOREAU." It would be hard to compress more family history into a short letter, and yet leave it so sprightly in style as this. Of the four children of Maria Thoreau's brother John and Cynthia Dunbar,--John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia,--the two eldest, John and Helen, were said to be "clear Thoreau," and the others, Henry and Sophia, "clear Dunbar;" though in fact the Thoreau traits were marked in Henry also. Let us see, then, who and what were the family of Henry Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, who was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787. She was the daughter of Rev. Asa Dunbar, who was born at Bridgewater, Mass., in 1745; graduated at Harvard College in 1767 (a classmate of Sir Thomas Bernard and Increase Sumner); preached for a while at Bedford, near Concord, in 1769, when he was "a young candidate, newly begun to preach;" settled in Salem in 1772; resigned his pastorate in 1779; and removed to Keene just at the close of the Revolution, where he became a lawyer, and died, a little upwards of forty-two, in 1787. He married before 1775, Miss Mary Jones, the daughter of Col. Elisha Jones, of Weston, a man of wealth and influence in his town, who died in 1776. Mrs. Mary (Jones) Dunbar long outlived the husband of her youth; in middle life she married a Concord farmer, Jonas Minott, whom she also outlived; and it was in his house that her famous grandson was born in July, 1817. Mrs. Minott was left a widow for the second time in 1813, when she was sixty-five years old, and in 1815 she sent a petition to the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts, which was drawn up and indorsed by her pastor, Dr. Ripley, of Concord, and which contains a short sketch of Henry Thoreau's maternal grandfather, from whom he is said to have inherited many qualities. Mrs. Minott's petition sets forth "that her first husband, Asa Dunbar, Esq., late of Keene, N. H., was a native of Massachusetts; that he was for a number of years settled in the gospel ministry at Salem; that afterwards he was a counselor-at-law; that he was Master of a Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons at Keene, where he died; that in the cause of Masonry he was interested and active; that through some defection or misfortune of that Lodge _she_ has suffered loss, both on account of what was due to him and to her, at whose house they held their meetings; that in the settlement of the estate of her late husband, Jonas Minott, Esq., late of Concord, she has been peculiarly unfortunate, and become very much straitened in the means of living comfortably; that being thus reduced, and feeling the weight of cares, of years, and of widowhood to be very heavy, after having seen better days, she is induced, by the advice of friends, as well as her own exigencies, to apply for aid to the benevolence and charity of the Masonic fraternity." At the house of this decayed gentlewoman, about two years after the date of this petition, Henry Thoreau was born. She lived to see him running about, a sprightly boy, and he remembered her with affection. One of his earliest recollections of Concord was of driving in a chaise with his grandmother along the shore of Walden Pond, perhaps on the way to visit her relatives in Weston, and thinking, as he said afterward, that he should like to live there. Ellery Channing, whose life of his friend Henry is a mine of curious information on a thousand topics, relevant and irrelevant, and who often traversed the "old Virginia road" with Thoreau before the house in which he was born was removed from its green knoll to a spot further east, where it now stands, thus pictures the brown farm-house and its surroundings: "It was a perfect piece of our old New England style of building, with its gray, unpainted boards, its grassy, unfenced door-yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote from thoroughfares; on the Virginia road, an old-fashioned, winding, at length deserted pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchards, tumbling walls, and mossy banks. About it are pleasant sunny meadows, deep with their beds of peat, so cheering with its homely, hearth-like fragrance; and in front runs a constant stream through the centre of that great tract sometimes called 'Bedford levels,'--the brook a source of the Shawsheen River." (This is a branch of the Merrimac, as Concord River is, but flows into the main stream through Andover, and not through Billerica and Lowell, as the Concord does.) The road on which it stands, a mile and a half east of the Fitchburg railroad station, and perhaps a mile from Thoreau's grave in the village cemetery, is a by-path from Concord to Lexington, through the little town of Bedford. The farm-house, with its fields and orchard, was a part of Mrs. Minott's "widow's thirds," on which she was living at the date of her grandson's birth (July 12, 1817), and which her son-in-law, John Thoreau, was "carrying on" for her that year. Mrs. Minott, a few years before Dr. Ripley's petition in her behalf, came near having a more distinguished son-in-law, Daniel Webster, who, like the young Dunbars, was New Hampshire born, and a year or two older than Mrs. Minott's daughter, Louisa Dunbar. He had passed through Dartmouth College a little in love with two or three of the young ladies of Hanover, and had returned to his native town of Salisbury, N. H., when he met in Boscawen, near by, Miss Louisa, who, like Miss Grace Fletcher, whom he married a few years afterward, was teaching school in one of the New Hampshire towns. Miss Dunbar made an impression on Webster's heart, always susceptible, and, had the fates been propitious, he might have called Henry Thoreau nephew in after years; but the silken tie was broken before it was fairly knit. I suspect that she was the person referred to by one of Webster's biographers, who says, speaking of an incident that occurred in January, 1805: "Mr. Webster, at that time, had no thought of marrying; he had not even met the lady who afterward became his wife. He had been somewhat interested in another lady, who is occasionally referred to in his letters, written after he left college, but who was not either of those whom he had known at Hanover. But this affair never proceeded very far, and he had entirely dismissed it from his mind before he went to Boston in 1804." In January, 1806, about the time of his father's death, Webster wrote to a college friend, "I am not married, and seriously am inclined to think I never shall be," though he was then a humble suitor to Grace Fletcher. Louisa Dunbar was a lively, dark-haired, large-eyed, pleasing young lady, who had perhaps been educated in part at Boscawen, where Webster studied for college, and afterwards was a school-teacher there. She received from him those attentions which young men give to young ladies without any very active thoughts of marriage; but he at one time paid special attentions to her, which might have led to matrimony, perhaps, if Webster had not soon after fallen under the sway of a more fascinating school-teacher, Miss Grace Fletcher, of Hopkinton, N. H., whom he first saw at the door of her little school-house in Salisbury, not far from his own birthplace. A Concord matron, a neighbor and friend of the Dunbars and Thoreaus, heard the romantic story from Webster's own lips forty years afterward, as she was driving with him through the valley of the Assabet: how he was traveling along a New Hampshire road in 1805, stopped at a school-house to ask a question or leave a message, and was met at the door by that vision of beauty and sweetness, Grace Fletcher herself, to whom he yielded his heart at once. From a letter of Webster's to this Concord friend (Mrs. Louisa Cheney) I quote this description of his native region, which has never been printed:-- "FRANKLIN, N. H., _September 29, '45_. "DEAR MRS. CHENEY,--You are hardly expecting to hear from me in this remote region of the earth. Where I am was originally a part of Salisbury, the place of my birth; and, having continued to own my father's farm, I sometimes make a visit to this region. The house is on the west bank of Merrimac River, fifteen miles above Concord (N. H.), in a pleasant valley, made rather large by a turn in the stream, and surrounded by high and wooded hills. I came here five or six days ago, alone, to try the effect of the mountain air upon my health. "This is a very picturesque country. The hills are high, numerous, and irregular,--some with wooded summits, and some with rocky heads as white as snow. I went into a pasture of mine last week, lying high up on one of the hills, and had there a clear view of the White Mountains in the northeast, and of Ascutney, in Vermont, back of Windsor, in the west; while within these extreme points was a visible scene of mountains and dales, lakes and streams, farms and forests. I really think this region is the true Switzerland of the United States. "I am attracted to this particular spot by very strong feelings. It is the scene of my early years; and it is thought, and I believe truly, that these scenes come back upon us with renewed interest and more strength of feeling as we find years running over us. White stones, visible from the window, and close by, mark the grave of my father, my mother, one brother, and three sisters. Here are the same fields, the same hills, the same beautiful river, as in the days of my childhood. The human beings which knew them now know them no more. Few are left with whom I shared either toil or amusement in the days of youth. But this is melancholy and personal, and enough of it. One mind cannot enter fully into the feelings of another in regard to the past, whether those feelings be joyous or melancholy, or, which is more commonly the case, partly both. I am, dear Mrs. Cheney, yours truly, "DANIEL WEBSTER." No doubt the old statesman was thinking, as he wrote, not only of his father, Captain Ebenezer Webster ("with a complexion," said Stark, under whom he fought at Bennington, "that burnt gunpowder could not change"), of his mother and his brethren, but also of Grace Fletcher,--and echoing in his heart the verse of Wordsworth:-- "Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside a cottage fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, The bowers where Lucy played; And thine, too, is the last green field That Lucy's eyes surveyed." It was no such deep sentiment as this which Louisa Dunbar had inspired in young Webster's breast; but he walked and talked with her, took her to drive in his chaise up and down the New Hampshire hills, and no doubt went with her to church and to prayer-meeting. She once surprised me by confiding to me (as we were talking about Webster in the room where Henry Thoreau afterwards died, and where there hung then an engraving by Rowse of Webster's magnificent head) "that she regarded Mr. Webster, under Providence, as the means of her conversion." Upon my asking how, she said that, in one of their drives,--perhaps in the spring of 1804,--he had spoken to her so seriously and scripturally on the subject of religion that her conscience was awakened, and she soon after joined the church, of which she continued through life a devout member. Her friendship for Mr. Webster also continued, and in his visits to Concord, which were frequent from 1843 to 1849, he generally called on her, or she was invited to meet him at the house of Mr. Cheney, where, among social and political topics, Webster talked with her of the old days at Boscawen and Salisbury. Cynthia Dunbar, the mother of Henry Thoreau, was born in Keene, N. H., in 1787, the year that her father died. Her husband, John Thoreau, who was a few months younger than herself, was born in Boston. When Henry Thoreau first visited Keene, in 1850, he made this remark: "Keene Street strikes the traveler favorably; it is so wide, level, straight, and long. I have heard one of my relatives who was born and bred there [Louisa Dunbar, no doubt] say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off." His mother hardly lived there long enough to notice the chickens a mile off, but she occasionally visited her native town after her marriage in 1812, and a kinswoman (Mrs. Laura Dunbar Ralston, of Washington, D. C.), now living, says, "I recollect Mrs. Thoreau as a handsome, high-spirited woman, half a head taller than her husband, accomplished, after the manner of those days, with a voice of remarkable power and sweetness in singing." She was fond of dress, and had a weakness, not uncommon in her day, for ribbons, which her austere friend, Miss Mary Emerson (aunt of R. W. Emerson), once endeavored to rebuke in a manner of her own. In 1857, when Mrs. Thoreau was seventy years old, and Miss Emerson eighty-four, the younger lady called on the elder in Concord, wearing bonnet-ribbons of a good length and of a bright color,--perhaps yellow. During the call, in which Henry Thoreau was the subject of conversation, Miss Emerson kept her eyes shut. As Mrs. Thoreau and her daughter Sophia rose to go, the little old lady said, "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God and a person of your years." In uttering this reproof, Miss Emerson may have had in mind the clerical father of Mrs. Thoreau, Rev. Asa Dunbar, whom she was old enough to remember. He was settled in Salem as the colleague of Rev. Thomas Barnard, after a long contest which led to the separation of the First Church there, and the formation of the Salem North Church in 1772. The parishioners of Mr. Dunbar declared their new minister "admirably qualified for a gospel preacher," and he seems to have proved himself a learned and competent minister. But his health was infirm, and this fact, as one authority says, "soon threw him into the profession of the law, which he honorably pursued for a few years at Keene." Whether he went at once to Keene on leaving Salem in 1779 does not appear, but he was practicing law there in 1783, and was also a leading Freemason. His diary for a few years of his early life--a faint foreshadowing of his grandson's copious journals--is still in existence, and indicates a gay and genial disposition, such as Mrs. Thoreau had. His only son, Charles Dunbar, who was born in February, 1780, and died in March, 1856, inherited this gaiety of heart, but also that lack of reverence and discipline which is proverbial in New England for "ministers' sons and deacons' daughters." His nephew said of him, "He was born the winter of the great snow, and he died in the winter of another great snow,--a life bounded by great snows." At the time of Henry Thoreau's birth, Mrs. Thoreau's sisters, Louisa and Sarah, and their brother Charles were living in Concord, or not far off, and there Louisa Dunbar died a few years before Mrs. Thoreau. Her brother Charles, who was two years older than Daniel Webster, was a person widely known in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much celebrated by Thoreau in his journals. At the time of his death, I find the following curious entries, in Thoreau's journal for April 3, 1856:-- "People are talking about my uncle Charles. George Minott [a sort of cousin of the Thoreaus] tells how he heard Tilly Brown once asking him to show him a peculiar inside lock in wrestling. 'Now, don't hurt me,--don't throw me hard.' He struck his antagonist inside his knees with his feet, and so deprived him of his legs. Edmund Hosmer remembers his tricks in the bar-room, shuffling cards, etc.; he could do anything with cards, yet he did not gamble. He would toss up his hat, twirling it over and over, and catch it on his head invariably. He once wanted to live at Hosmer's, but the latter was afraid of him. 'Can't we study up something?' he asked. Hosmer asked him into the house, and brought out apples and cider, and uncle Charles talked. 'You!' said he, 'I burst the bully of Haverhill.' He wanted to wrestle,--would not be put off. 'Well, we won't wrestle in the house.' So they went out to the yard, and a crowd got round. 'Come, spread some straw here,' said uncle Charles,--'I don't want to hurt him.' He threw him at once. They tried again; he told them to spread more straw, and he 'burst' him. Uncle Charles used to say that he hadn't a single tooth in his head. The fact was they were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of them by the time he was twenty-one. Ever since I knew him he could swallow his nose. He had a strong head, and never got drunk; would drink gin sometimes, but not to excess. Did not use tobacco, except snuff out of another's box, sometimes; was very neat in his person; was not profane, though vulgar." This was the uncle who, as Thoreau said in "Walden," "goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath." He was a humorous, ne'er-do-weel character, who, with a little property, no family, and no special regard for his reputation, used to move about from place to place, a privileged jester, athlete, and unprofessional juggler. One of his tricks was to swallow all the knives and forks and some of the plates at the tavern table, and then offer to restore them if the landlord would forgive him the bill. I remember this worthy in his old age, an amusing guest at his brother-in-law's table, where his nephew plied him with questions. We shall find him mentioned again, in connection with Daniel Webster's friendship for the Dunbar family. Thoreau's mother had this same incessant and rather malicious liveliness that in Charles Dunbar took the grotesque form above hinted at. She was a kindly, shrewd woman, with traditions of gentility and sentiments of generosity, but with sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice, which never quite amounted to ill-nature, but greatly provoked the prim and commonplace respectability that she so often came in contact with. Along with this humorous quality there went also an affectionate earnestness in her relation with those who depended on her, that could not fail to be respected by all who knew the hard conditions that New England life, even in a favored village like Concord, then imposed on the mother of a family, where the outward circumstances were not in keeping with the inward aspiration. "Who sings the praise of woman in our clime? I do not boast her beauty or her grace: Some humble duties render her sublime, She, the sweet nurse of this New England race, The flower upon the country's sterile face; The mother of New England's sons, the pride Of every house where those good sons abide." Her husband was a grave and silent, but inwardly cheerful and social person, who found no difficulty in giving his wife the lead in all affairs. The small estate he inherited from his father, the first John Thoreau, was lost in trade, or by some youthful indiscretions, of which he had his quiet share; and he then, about 1823, turned his attention to pencil-making, which had by that time become a lucrative business in Concord. He had married in 1812, and he died in 1859. He was a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and "minding his own business;" very much in contrast with his wife, who was one of the most unceasing talkers ever seen in Concord. Her gift in speech was proverbial, and wherever she was the conversation fell largely to her share. She fully verified the Oriental legend, which accounts for the greater loquacity of women by the fact that nine baskets of talk were let down from heaven to Adam and Eve in their garden, and that Eve glided forward first and secured six of them. Old Dr. Ripley, a few years before his death, wrote a letter to his son, towards the end of which he said, with courteous reticence, "I meant to have filled a page with sentiments. But _a kind neighbor_, Mrs. Thoreau, has been here more than an hour. This letter must go in the mail to-day." Her conversation generally put a stop to other occupations; and when at her table Henry Thoreau's grave talk with others was interrupted by this flow of speech at the other end of the board, he would pause, and wait with entire and courteous silence, until the interruption ceased, and then take up the thread of his own discourse where he had dropped it; bowing to his mother, but without a word of comment on what she had said. Dr. Ripley was the minister of Concord for half a century, and in his copious manuscripts, still preserved, are records concerning his parishioners of every conceivable kind. He carefully kept even the smallest scrap that he ever wrote, and among his papers I once found a fragment, on one side of which was written a pious meditation, and on the other a certificate to this effect: "Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business in that place, and is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals." There is no date, but the time was about 1818. Chelmsford is a town ten miles north of Concord, to which John Thoreau had removed for three years, in the infancy of Henry. From Chelmsford he went to Boston in 1821, but was successful in neither place, and soon returned to Concord, where he gave up trade and engaged in pencil-making, as already mentioned. From that time, about 1823, till his death in 1859, John Thoreau led a plodding, unambitious, and respectable life in Concord village, educating his children, associating with his neighbors on those terms of equality for which Concord is famous, and keeping clear, in a great degree, of the quarrels, social and political, that agitated the village. Mrs. Thoreau, on the other hand, with her sister Louisa and her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings. In 1826, when Dr. Lyman Beecher, then of Boston, Dr. John Todd, then of Groton, and other Calvinistic divines succeeded in making a schism in Dr. Ripley's parish, and drawing off Trinitarians enough to found a separate church, the Thoreaus generally seceded, along with good old Deacon White, whose loss Dr. Ripley bewailed. This contention was sharply maintained for years, and was followed by the antimasonic and antislavery agitation. In the latter Mrs. Thoreau and her family engaged zealously, and their house remained for years headquarters for the early abolitionists and a place of refuge for fugitive slaves. The atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. By this time, too,--I speak of the years from 1836 onward till the outbreak of the civil war,--the children of Mrs. Thoreau had reached an age and an education which made them noteworthy persons. Helen, the oldest child, born in 1812, was an accomplished teacher. John, the elder son, born in 1814 was one of those lovely and sunny natures which infuse affection in all who come within their range; and Henry, with his peculiar strength and independence of soul, was a marked personage among the few who would give themselves the trouble to understand him. Sophia, the youngest child, born in 1819, had, along with her mother's lively and dramatic turn, a touch of art; and all of them, whatever their accidental position for the time, were superior persons. Living in a town where the ancient forms survived in daily collision or in friendly contact with the new ideas that began to make headway in New England about 1830, the Thoreaus had peculiar opportunities, above their apparent fortunes, but not beyond their easy reach of capacity, for meeting on equal terms the advancing spirit of the period. The children of the house, as they grew up, all became school-teachers, and each displayed peculiar gifts in that profession. But they were all something more than teachers, and becoming enlisted early in the antislavery cause, or in that broader service of humanity which "plain living and high thinking" imply, they gradually withdrew from that occupation,--declining the opportunities by which other young persons, situated as they then were, rise to worldly success, and devoting themselves, within limits somewhat narrow, to the pursuit of lofty ideals. The household of which they were loving and thoughtful members (let one be permitted to say who was for a time domesticated there) had, like the best families everywhere, a distinct and individual existence, in which each person counted for something, and was not a mere drop in the broad water-level that American society tends more and more to become. To meet one of the Thoreaus was not the same as to encounter any other person who might happen to cross your path. Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and the mists of the valley. Without wealth, or power, or social prominence, they still held a rank of their own, in scrupulous independence, and with qualities that put condescension out of the question. They could have applied to themselves, individually, and without hauteur, the motto of the French chevalier:-- "Je suis ni roi, ni prince aussi, Je suis le seigneur de Coucy." "Nor king, nor duke? Your pardon, no; I am the master of Thoreau." They lived their life according to their genius, without the fear of man or of "the world's dread laugh," saying to Fortune what Tennyson sings:-- "Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown,-- With that wild wheel we go not up nor down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. Smile, and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands,-- For man is man, and master of his fate." CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Concord, the Massachusetts town in which Thoreau was born, is to be distinguished from the newer but larger town of the same name which became the capital of New Hampshire about the time the first American Thoreau made his appearance in "old Concord." The latter, the first inland plantation of the Massachusetts Colony, was bought of the Indians by Major Willard, a Kentish man, and Rev. Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan clergyman from the banks of the Ouse in Bedfordshire, and was settled under their direction in 1635. Mr. Bulkeley, from whom Mr. Emerson and many of the other Concord citizens of Thoreau's day were descended, was the first minister of the town, which then included the present towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Carlisle, and Lincoln; and among his parishioners were the ancestors of the principal families that now inhabit these towns. Concord itself, the centre of this large tract, was thought eligible for settlement because of its great meadows on the Musketaquid or Meadow River. It had been a seat of the Massachusetts Indians, and a powerful Sachem, Tahattawan, lived between its two rivers, where the Assabet falls into the slow-gliding Musketaquid. Thoreau, the best topographer of his birthplace, says:-- "It has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the Concord circling nine times round. I have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river has probably very near the smallest allowance. But wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. For the most part it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a mossbed. A row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes." From these river-grapes, by seedling cultivation, a Concord gardener, in Thoreau's manhood, bred and developed the Concord grape, which is now more extensively grown throughout the United States than any other vine, and once adorned, in vineyards large and small, the hillsides over which Thoreau rambled. The uplands are sandy in many places, gravelly and rocky in others, and nearly half the township is now covered, as it has always been, with woods of oak, pine, chestnut, and maple. It is a town of husbandmen, chiefly, with a few mechanics, merchants, and professional men in its villages; a quiet region, favorable to thought, to rambling, and to leisure, as well as to that ceaseless industry by which New England lives and thrives. Its population in 1909 approaches 5,000, but at Thoreau's birth it did not exceed 2,000. There are few great estates in it, and little poverty; the mode of life has generally been plain and simple, and was so in Thoreau's time even more than now. When he was born, and for some years afterward, there was but one church, and the limits of the parish and the township were the same. At that time it was one of the two shire towns of the great county of Middlesex,--Cambridge, thirteen miles away, being the other. It was therefore a seat of justice and a local centre of trade,--attracting lawyers and merchants to its public square much more than of late years. Trade in Concord then was very different from what it has been since the railroad began to work its revolutions. In the old days, long lines of teams from the upper country, New Hampshire and Vermont, loaded with the farm products of the interior, stopped nightly at the taverns, especially in the winter, bound for the Boston market, whence they returned with a cargo for their own country. If a thaw came on, or there was bad sleighing in Boston, the drivers, anxious to lighten their loads, would sell and buy in the Concord public square, to the great profit of the numerous traders, whose little shops stood around or near it. Then, too, the hitching-posts in front of the shops had full rows of wagons and chaises from the neighboring towns fastened there all day long; while the owners looked over goods, priced, chaffered, and beat down by the hour together the calicoes, sheetings, shirtings, kerseymeres, and other articles of domestic need,--bringing in, also, the product of their own farms and looms to sell or exchange. Each "store" kept an assortment of "West India goods," dry goods, hardware, medicines, furniture, boots and shoes, paints, lumber, lime, and the miscellaneous articles of which the village or the farms might have need; not to mention a special trade in New England rum and old Jamaica, hogsheads of which were brought up every week from Boston by teams, and sold or given away by the glass, with an ungrudging hand. A little earlier than the period now mentioned, when Colonel Whiting (father of the late eminent lawyer, Abraham Lincoln's right-hand adviser in the law of emancipation, William Whiting, of Boston) was a lad in Concord village, "there were five stores and three taverns in the middle of the town, where intoxicating liquors were sold by the glass to any and every body; and it was the custom, when a person bought even so little as fifty cents' worth of goods, to offer him a glass of liquor, and it was generally accepted." Such was the town when John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, came there to die in 1800, and such it remained during the mercantile days of John Thoreau, his son, who was brought up in a house on the public square, and learned the business of buying and selling in the store of Deacon White, close by. Pencil-making, the art by which he earned his modest livelihood during Henry Thoreau's youth, was introduced into Concord about 1812 by William Munroe, whose son has in later years richly endowed the small free library from which Thoreau drew books, and to which he gave some of his own. In this handicraft, which was at times quite profitable, the younger Thoreaus assisted their father from time to time, and Henry acquired great skill in it; even to the extent, says Mr. Emerson, of making as good a pencil as the best English ones. "His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. 'Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.'" Thoreau may have said this, but he afterward changed his mind, for he went on many years, at intervals, working at his father's business, which in time grew to be mainly the preparation of fine-ground plumbago for electrotyping. This he supplied to various publishers, and among others to the Harpers, for several years. But what he did in this way was incidental, and as an aid to his father, his mother, or his sister Sophia, who herself carried on the business for some time after the death of Henry in 1862. It was the family employment, and must be pursued by somebody. Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics of Concord. The Heywood family has been resident in Concord for two hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time has held the office of town clerk, in lineal succession from father to son, for one hundred years at least. The grandson of the first John Heywood filled the office (which is the most responsible in town, and generally accompanied by other official trusts) for eighteen years, beginning in 1731; his son held the place with a slight interregnum for thirteen years; his nephew, Dr. Abiel Heywood, was town clerk from 1796 to 1834 without a break, and Dr. Heywood's son, Mr. George Heywood, was the town clerk for thirty-odd years after March, 1853. Of the dozen ministers who, since 1635, have preached in the parish church, five were either Bulkeleys or Emersons, descendants of the first minister, or else connected by marriage with that clerical line; and the young minister who, in the year 1882, accepted the pastorate of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, is a descendant, and bears the same name. Mr. Emerson himself, the great clerk of Concord, which was his lay parish for almost half a century after he ceased to preach in its pulpit, counted among his ancestors four of the Concord pastors, whose united ministry covered a century; while his grandmother's second husband, Dr. Ripley, added a half century more to the family ministry. For this ancestral claim, quite as much as for his gift of wit and eloquence, Mr. Emerson was chosen, in 1835, to commemorate by an oration the two hundredth anniversary of the town settlement. In this discourse he said:-- "I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes of families, and I believe this town to have been the dwelling-place, in all times since its planting, of pious and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths of common life, who served God and loved man, and never let go their hope of immortality. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws, no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrived to make pretty intelligible the will of a free and just community." Into such a community Henry Thoreau, a free and just man, was born. Dr. Heywood, above-named, was the first town clerk he remembered, and the one who entered on the records the marriage of his father and mother, and the birth of all the children. He cried the banns of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar in the parish meeting-house; and he was the last clerk who made this Sunday outcry. He thus proclaimed his own autumnal nuptials in 1822, when he married for the first time at the age of sixty-three. The banns were cried at the opening of the service, and this compelled the town clerk to be a more regular attendant in the meeting-house than his successors have found necessary. Dr. Heywood's pew was about half-way down the broad aisle, and in full view of the whole congregation, whether in the "floor pews" or "up in the galleries." Wearing his old-fashioned coat and small-clothes, the doctor would rise in his pew, deliberately adjust his spectacles, and look about for a moment, in order to make sure that his audience was prepared; then he made his proclamation with much emphasis of voice and dignity of manner. There was a distinction, however, in the manner of "publishing the banns" of the white and the black citizens; the former being "cried" in the face of the whole congregation, and the latter simply "posted" in the meeting-house porch, as was afterwards the custom for all. Dr. Heywood, from a sense of justice, or some other proper motive, determined on one occasion to "post" a white couple, instead of giving them the full benefit of his sonorous voice; but, either because they missed the _éclat_ of the usual proclamation, or else felt humiliated at being "posted like niggers in the porch," they brought the town clerk to justice forthwith, and he was forced for once to yield to popular outcry, and join in the outcry himself. After publishing his own banns, and just before the wedding, he for the first time procured a pair of trousers,--having worn knee-breeches up to that time, as Colonel May (the father-in-law of Mr. Alcott) and others had thought it proper to wear them. When Dr. Heywood told his waggish junior, 'Squire Brooks, of the purchase, and inquired how young gentlemen put their trousers on, his legal neighbor advised him that they were generally put on over the head. Dr. Heywood survived amid "this age loose and all unlaced," as Marvell says, until 1839, having practiced medicine, more or less, in Concord for upward of forty years, and held court there as a local justice for almost as long. Dr. Isaac Hurd, who was his contemporary, practiced in Concord for fifty-four years, and in all sixty-five years; and Dr. Josiah Bartlett, who accompanied and succeeded Dr. Hurd, practiced in Concord nearly fifty-eight years; while the united medical service of himself and his father, Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Charlestown, was one hundred and two years. Dr. Bartlett himself was one of the most familiar figures in Concord through Thoreau's life-time, and for fifteen years after. To him have been applied, with more truth, I suspect, than to "Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic," those noble lines of Dr. Johnson on his humble friend:-- "Well tried through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend, Officious, innocent, sincere, _Of every friendless name the friend_." He said more than once that for fifty years no severity of weather had kept him from visiting his distant patients,--sometimes miles away,--except once, and then the snow was piled so high that his sleigh upset every two rods; and when he unharnessed and mounted his horse, the beast, floundering through a drift, slipped him off over his crupper. He was a master of the horse, and encouraged that proud creature to do his best in speed. One of his neighbors mentioned in his hearing a former horse of Dr. Bartlett's, which was in the habit of running away. "By faith!" said the doctor (his familiar oath), "I recollect that horse; he was a fine traveler, but I have no remembrance that he ever ran away." When upwards of seventy, he was looking for a new horse. The jockey said, "Doctor, if you were not so old, I have a horse that would suit you." "Hm!" growled the doctor, "don't talk to me about _old_. Let's see your horse;" and he bought him, and drove him for eight years. He practiced among the poor with no hope of reward, and gave them, besides, his money, his time, and his influence. One day a friend saw him receiving loads of firewood from a shiftless man to whom he had rendered gratuitous service in sickness for twenty years. "Ah, doctor! you are getting some of your back pay." "By faith! no; the fellow is poor, so I paid him for his wood, and let him go." Dr. Bartlett did not reach Concord quite in season to assist at the birth of Henry Thoreau; but from the time his parents brought him back to his native town from Boston, in 1823, to the day of Sophia Thoreau's death, in 1876, he might have supplied the needed medical aid to the family, and often did so. The young Henry dwelt in his first tabernacle on the Virginia road but eight months, removing then to a house on the Lexington road, not far from where Mr. Emerson afterwards established his residence, on the edge of Concord village. In the mean time he had been baptized by Dr. Ripley in the parish church, at the age of three months; and his mother boasted that he did not cry. His aunt, Sarah Thoreau, taught him to walk when he was fourteen months old, and before he was sixteen months he removed to Chelmsford, "next to the meeting-house, where they kept the powder, in the garret," as was the custom in many village churches of New England then. Coming back to Concord before he was six years old, he soon began to drive his mother's cow to pasture, barefoot, like other village boys; just as Emerson, when a boy in Boston, a dozen years before, had driven his mother's cow where now the fine streets and halls are. Thoreau, like Emerson, began to go to school in Boston, where he lived for a year or more in Pinckney Street. But he returned to Concord in 1823, and, except for short visits or long walking excursions, he never left the town again till he died, in 1862. He there went on with his studies in the village schools, and fitted for Harvard College at the "Academy," which 'Squire Hoar, Colonel Whiting, 'Squire Brooks, and other magnates of the town had established about 1820. This private school was generally very well taught, and here Thoreau himself taught for a while in after years. In his boyhood it had become a good place to study Greek, and in 1830, when perhaps Henry Thoreau was one of its pupils, Mr. Charles Emerson, visiting his friends in Concord, wrote thus of what he saw there: "Mr. George Bradford and I attended the Exhibition yesterday at the Academy. We were extremely gratified. To hear little girls saying their Greek grammar and young ladies read Xenophon was a new and very agreeable entertainment." Thoreau must have been beginning his Greek grammar about that time, for he entered college in 1833, and was then proficient in Greek. He must also have gone, as a boy, to the "Concord Lyceum," where he afterwards lectured every winter. Concord, as the home of famous lawyers and active politicians, was always a place of resort for political leaders, and Thoreau might have seen and heard there all the celebrated congressmen and governors of Massachusetts, at one time and another. He could remember the visit of Lafayette to Concord in 1824, and the semi-centennial celebration of the Concord Fight in 1825. In 1830 he doubtless looked forward with expectation for the promised lecture of Edward Everett before the Lyceum, concerning which Mr. Everett wrote as follows to Dr. Ripley (November 3, 1830):-- "I am positively forbidden by my physician to come to Concord to-day. To obviate, as far as possible, the inconvenience which this failure might cause the Lyceum, I send you the lecture which I should have delivered. It is one which I have delivered twice before; but my health has prevented me from preparing another. Although _in print_, as you see, it has _not been published_. I held it back from publication to enable me, with propriety, to deliver it at Concord. Should you think it worth while to have it read to the meeting, it is at your service for that purpose; and, should this be done, I would suggest, as it is one hour and three quarters long, that some parts should be omitted. For this reason I have inclosed some passages in brackets, which can be spared without affecting the context." It would hardly occur to a popular lecturer now to apologize because he had delivered his lecture twice before, or to send the copy forward, when he could not himself be there to read it. Mr. Emerson began to lecture in the Concord Lyceum before 1834, when he came to reside in the town. In October of that year he wrote to Dr. Ripley, declining to give the opening lecture, but offering to speak in the course of the winter, as he did. During its first half century he lectured nearly a hundred times in this Lyceum, reading there, first and last, nearly all the essays he published in his lifetime, and many that have since been printed. Thoreau gave his first lecture there in April, 1838, and afterwards lectured nearly every year for more than twenty years. On one occasion, very early in his public career, when the expected lecturer of the Lyceum failed to come, as Mr. Everett had failed, but had not been thoughtful enough to send a substitute, Henry Thoreau and Mr. Alcott were pressed into the service, and spoke before the audience in duet, and with opinions extremely heretical,--both being ardent radicals and "come-outers." A few years after this (in 1843), Wendell Phillips made his first appearance before the Concord Lyceum, and spoke in a manner which Thoreau has described in print, and which led to a sharp village controversy, not yet quite forgotten on either side. But to return to the childhood and youth of Thoreau. When he was three or four years old, at Chelmsford, on being told that he must die, as well as the men in the New England Primer, and having the joys of heaven explained to him, he said, as he came in from "coasting," that he did not want to die and go to heaven, because he could not carry his sled to so fine a place; for, he added, "the boys say it is not shod with iron, and not worth a cent." At the age of ten, says Channing, "he had the firmness of the Indian, and could repress his pathos, and had such seriousness that he was called 'judge.'" As an example of childish fortitude, it is related that he carried his pet chickens for sale to the tavern-keeper in a basket; whereupon Mr. Wesson told him to 'stop a minute,' and, in order to return the basket promptly, took the darlings out, and wrung their necks, one by one, before the boy's eyes, who wept inwardly, but did not budge. Having a knack at whittling, and being asked by a schoolmate to make him a bow and arrow, young Henry refused, not deigning to give the reason,--that he had no knife. "So through life," says Channing, "he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations." He was a sturdy and kindly playmate, whose mirthful tricks are yet remembered by those who frolicked with him, and he always abounded with domestic affection. While in college he once asked his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said, pleasantly, "You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam abroad to seek your fortune;" but the thought of leaving home and forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his cheeks. Then his sister Helen, who was standing by, says Channing, "tenderly put her arm around him and kissed him, saying, 'No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.'" And this, indeed, he did, though he made one or two efforts to seek his fortune for a time elsewhere. His reading had been wide and constant while at school, and after he entered college at the age of sixteen. His room in Cambridge was in Hollis Hall; his instructors were such as he found there, but in rhetoric he profited much by the keen intelligence of Professor Channing, an uncle of his future friend and biographer, Ellery Channing. I think he also came in contact, while in college, with that singular poet, Jones Very, of Salem. He was by no means unsocial in college, though he did not form such abiding friendships as do many young men. He graduated in 1837. His expenses at Cambridge, which were very moderate, compared with what a poor scholar must now pay to go through college, were paid in part by his father, in part by his aunts and his elder sister, Helen, who had already begun to teach school; and for the rest he depended on his own efforts and the beneficiary funds of the college, in which he had some little share. I have understood that he received the income of the same modest endowment which had been given to William and Ralph Waldo Emerson when in college, some years before; and in other ways the generous thought of that most princely man, Waldo Emerson, was not idle in his behalf, though he knew Thoreau then only as the studious son of a townsman, who needed a friend at court. What Mr. Emerson wrote to Josiah Quincy, who was then president of Harvard College, in behalf of Henry Thoreau does not appear, except from the terms of old Quincy's reply; but we may infer it. Thoreau had the resource of school-keeping in the country towns, during the college vacation and the extra vacation that a poor scholar could claim; and this brought him, in 1835, to an acquaintance with that elder scholar, Brownson, who afterwards became a Catholic doctor of theology. He left college one winter to teach school at Canton, near Boston, where he was examined by Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, then a Protestant minister in Canton. He studied German and boarded with Mr. Brownson while he taught the school. In 1836, he records in his journal that he "went to New York with father, peddling." In his senior year, 1836-37, he was ill for a time, and lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the ordinary college motives for study. This fact, and also that he was a beneficiary of the college, further appears from the letter of President Quincy to Mr. Emerson, as follows:-- "CAMBRIDGE, _25th June, 1837_. "MY DEAR SIR,--Your view concerning Thoreau is entirely in consent with that which I entertain. His general conduct has been very satisfactory, and I was willing and desirous that whatever falling off there had been in his scholarship should be attributable to his sickness. He had, however, imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions. His instructors were impressed with the conviction that he was indifferent, even to a degree that was faulty, and that they could not recommend him, consistent with the rule by which they are usually governed in relation to beneficiaries. I have always entertained a respect for and interest in him, and was willing to attribute any apparent neglect or indifference to his ill health rather than to wilfulness. I obtained from the instructors the authority to state all the facts to the Corporation, and submit the result to their discretion. This I did, and that body granted _twenty-five dollars_, which was within _ten_, or at most _fifteen_, dollars of any sum he would have received, had no objection been made. There is no doubt that, from some cause, an unfavorable opinion has been entertained, since his return after his sickness, of his disposition to exert himself. To what it has been owing may be doubtful. I appreciate very fully the goodness of his heart and the strictness of his moral principle; and have done as much for him as, under the circumstances, was possible. "Very respectfully, your humble servant, "JOSIAH QUINCY. "Rev. R. W. EMERSON." It is possible the college faculty may have had other grounds of distrust in Thoreau's case. On May 30, 1836, his classmate Peabody wrote him the following letter from Cambridge,--Thoreau being then at home, for some reason,--from which we may infer that the sober youth was not averse to such deeds as are there related:-- "The Davy Club got into a little trouble, the week before last, from the following circumstance: H. W. gave a lecture on Pyrotechny, and illustrated it with a parcel of fireworks he had prepared in the vacation. As you may imagine, there was some slight noise on the occasion. In fact, the noise was so slight that Tutor B. heard it at his room in Holworthy. This worthy boldly determined to march forth and attack the 'rioters.' Accordingly, in the midst of a grand display of rockets, etc., he stepped into the room, and, having gazed round him in silent astonishment for the space of two minutes, and hearing various cries of 'Intrusion!' 'Throw him over!' 'Saw his leg off!' 'Pull his wool!' etc., he made two or three dignified motions with his hand to gain attention, and then kindly advised us to 'retire to our respective rooms.' Strange to say, he found no one inclined to follow this good advice, and _he_ accordingly thought fit to withdraw. There is, as perhaps you know, a law against keeping powder in the college buildings. The effect of Tutor B.'s intrusion was evident on the next Monday night, when H. W. and B. were invited to call and see President Quincy; and owing to the tough reasoning of Tutor B., who boldly asserted that 'powder was powder,' they were each presented with a public admonition. "We had a miniature volcano at Webster's lecture, the other morning [this was Professor Webster, afterwards hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman], and the odors therefrom surpassed all ever produced by Araby the Blest. Imagine to yourself all the windows and shutters of the lecture-room closed, and then conceive the delightful scent produced by the burning of nearly a bushel of sulphur, phosphoretted hydrogen, and other still more pleasant ingredients. As soon as the burning commenced, there was a general rush to the door, and a crowd collected there, running out every half minute to get a breath of fresh air, and then coming in to see the volcano. 'No noise nor nothing.' Bigelow and Dr. Bacon manufactured some 'laughing gas,' and administered it on the Delta. It was much better than that made by Webster. Jack Weiss took some, as usual; Wheeler, Jo Allen, and Hildreth each received a dose. Wheeler proceeded to dance for the amusement of the company, Jo jumped over the Delta fence, and Sam raved about Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, etc. He took two doses; it produced a great effect on him. He seemed to be as happy as a mortal could desire; talked with Shakespeare, Milton, etc., and seemed to be quite at home with them." The persons named were classmates of Thoreau: one of them afterward Rev. John Weiss; Wheeler was of Lincoln, and died early in Germany, whither he went to study; Samuel Tenney Hildreth was a brother of Richard Hildreth, the historian, and also died young. The zest with which his classmate related these pranks to Thoreau seems to imply in his correspondent a mind too ready towards such things to please the learned faculty of Cambridge. Mr. Quincy's letter was in reply to one which Mr. Emerson had written at the request of Mrs. Thoreau, who feared her son was not receiving justice from the college authorities. Thoreau graduated without much distinction, but with a good name among his classmates, and a high reputation for general scholarship. When he went to Maine, in May, 1838, to see if there was not some school for him to teach there, he took with him this certificate from his pastor, Dr. Ripley:-- "CONCORD, _May 1, 1838_. "TO THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION,--The undersigned very cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer, Mr. David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher branches of useful literature. He is a native of this town, and a graduate of Harvard University. He is well disposed and well qualified to instruct the rising generation. His scholarship and moral character will bear the strictest scrutiny. He is modest and mild in his disposition and government, but not wanting in energy of character and fidelity in the duties of his profession. It is presumed his character and usefulness will be appreciated more highly as an acquaintance with him shall be cultivated. Cordial wishes for his success, reputation, and usefulness attend him, as an instructor and gentleman. "EZRA RIPLEY, "_Senior Pastor of the First Church in Concord, Mass._ "N. B.--_It is but justice to observe here that the eyesight of the writer is much impaired._" Accompanying this artless document is a list of clergymen in the towns of Maine,--Portland, Belfast, Camden, Kennebunk, Castine, Ellsworth, etc.,--in the handwriting of the good old pastor, signifying that as young Thoreau traveled he should report himself to these brethren, who might forward his wishes. But even at that early date, I suspect that Thoreau undervalued the "D. D.'s" in comparison with the "chickadedees," as he plainly declared in his later years. Another certificate, in a firmer hand, and showing no token of impaired eyesight, was also carried by Thoreau in this first visit to Maine. It was this:-- "I cordially recommend Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard University in August, 1837, to the confidence of such parents or guardians as may propose to employ him as an instructor. I have the highest confidence in Mr. Thoreau's moral character, and in his intellectual ability. He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services. "R. WALDO EMERSON. "CONCORD, _May 2, 1838_." The acquaintance of Mr. Emerson with his young townsman had begun perhaps a year before this date, and had advanced very fast toward intimacy. It originated in this way: A lady connected with Mr. Emerson's family was visiting at Mrs. Thoreau's while Henry was in college, and the conversation turned on a lecture lately read in Concord by Mr. Emerson. Miss Helen Thoreau surprised the visitor by saying, "My brother Henry has a passage in his diary containing the same things that Mr. Emerson has said." This remark being questioned, the diary was produced, and, sure enough, the thought of the two passages was found to be very similar. The incident being reported to Mr. Emerson, he desired the lady to bring Henry Thoreau to see him, which was soon done, and the intimacy began. It was to this same lady (Mrs. Brown, of Plymouth) that Thoreau addressed one of his earliest poems,--the verses called "Sic Vita," in the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac," commencing:-- "I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied By a chance bond together." These verses were written on a strip of paper inclosing a bunch of violets, gathered in May, 1837, and thrown in at Mrs. Brown's window by the poet-naturalist. They show that he had read George Herbert carefully, at a time when few persons did so, and in other ways they are characteristic of the writer, who was then not quite twenty years old. It may be interesting to see what old Quincy himself said, in a certificate, about his stubbornly independent pupil. For the same Maine journey Cambridge furnished the Concord scholar with this document:-- "HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, _March 26, 1838_. "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,--I certify that Henry D. Thoreau, of Concord, in this State of Massachusetts, graduated at this seminary in August, 1837; that his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches, and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. He is recommended as well qualified as an instructor, for employment in any public or private school or private family. "JOSIAH QUINCY, "_President of Harvard University_." It seems that there was question, at this time, of a school in Alexandria, near Washington (perhaps the Theological Seminary for Episcopalians there), in which young Thoreau might find a place; for on the 12th of April, 1838, President Quincy wrote to him as follows:-- "SIR,--The school is at Alexandria; the students are said to be young men well advanced in ye knowledge of ye Latin and Greek classics; the requisitions are, qualification and _a person who has had experience in school keeping_. Salary $600 a year, besides washing and Board; duties to be entered on ye 5th or 6th of May. If you choose to apply, I will write as soon as I am informed of it. State to me your experience in school keeping. Yours, "JOSIAH QUINCY." We now know that Thoreau offered himself for the place; and we know that his journey to Maine was fruitless. He did, in fact, teach the town grammar school in Concord for a few weeks in 1837, and in July, 1838, was teaching, at the Parkman house, in Concord. He had already, as we have seen, though not yet twenty-one, appeared as a lecturer before the Concord Lyceum. It is therefore time to consider him as a citizen of Concord, and to exhibit further the character of that town. * * * * * _Note._--The Tutor mentioned on page 55 was Francis Bowen, afterward professor at Harvard; the other "B." was H. J. Bigelow, afterward a noted surgeon in Boston. CHAPTER III. CONCORD AND ITS FAMOUS PEOPLE. The Thoreau family was but newly planted in Concord, to which it was alien both by the father's and the mother's side. But this wise town adopts readily the children of other communities that claim its privileges,--and to Henry Thoreau these came by birth. Of all the men of letters that have given Concord a name throughout the world, he is almost the only one who was born there. Emerson was born in Boston, Alcott in Connecticut, Hawthorne in Salem, Channing in Boston, Louisa Alcott in Germantown, and others elsewhere; but Thoreau was native to the soil. And since his genius has been shaped and guided by the personal traits of those among whom he lived, as well as by the hand of God and by the intuitive impulses of his own spirit, it is proper to see what the men of Concord have really been. It is from them we must judge the character of the town and its civilization, not from those exceptional, imported persons--cultivated men and women,--who may be regarded as at the head of society, and yet may have no representative quality at all. It is not by the few that a New England town is to be judged, but by the many. Yet there were a Few and a Many in Concord, between whom certain distinctions could be drawn, in the face of that general equality which the institutions of New England compel. Life in our new country had not yet been reduced to the ranks of modern civilization--so orderly outward, so full of mutiny within. It is mentioned by Tacitus, in his life of Agricola, that this noble Roman lived as a child in Marseilles; "a place," he adds, "of Grecian culture and provincial frugality, mingled and well blended." I have thought this felicitous phrase of Tacitus most apposite for Concord as I have known it since 1854, and as Thoreau must have found it from 1830 onward. Its people lived then and since with little display, while learning was held in high regard; and the "plain living and high thinking," which Wordsworth declared were gone from England, have never been absent from this New England town. It has always been a town of much social equality, and yet of great social and spiritual contrasts. Most of its inhabitants have lived in a plain way for the two centuries and a half that it has been inhabited; but at all times some of them have had important connections with the great world of politics, affairs, and literature. Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the founder and first minister of the town, was a near kinsman of Oliver St. John, Cromwell's solicitor-general, of the same noble English family that, a generation or two later, produced Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the brilliant, unscrupulous friend of Pope and Swift. Another of the Concord ministers, Rev. John Whiting, was descended, through his grandmother, Elizabeth St. John, wife of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, from this same old English family, which, in its long pedigree, counted for ancestors the Norman Conqueror of England and some of his turbulent posterity. He was, says the epitaph over him in the village burying-ground, "a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, and was a universal lover of mankind." In this character some representative gentleman of Concord has stood in every generation since the first settlement of the little town. The Munroes of Lexington and Concord are descended from a Scotch soldier of Charles II.'s army, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America. His powerful kinsman, General George Munro, who commanded for Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made commander-in-chief for Scotland. Robert Cumming, father of Dr. John Cumming, a celebrated Concord physician, was one of the followers of the first Pretender in 1715, and when the Scotch rebellion of that year failed, Cumming, with some of his friends, fled to New England, and settled in Concord and the neighboring town of Stow. Duncan Ingraham, a retired sea-captain, who had enriched himself in the Surinam trade, long lived in Concord, before and after the Revolution, and one of his grandchildren was Captain Marryatt, the English novelist; another was the American naval captain, Ingraham, who brought away Martin Kosta, a Hungarian refugee, from the clutches of the Austrian government. While Duncan Ingraham was living in Concord, a hundred years ago, a lad from that town, Joseph Perry, who had gone to sea with Paul Jones, became a high naval officer in the service of Catharine of Russia, and wrote to Dr. Ripley from the Crimea in 1786 to inquire what had become of his parents in Concord, whom he had not seen or heard from for many years. The stepson of Duncan Ingraham, Tilly Merrick, of Concord, who graduated at Cambridge in 1773, made the acquaintance of Sir Archibald Campbell, when captured in Boston Harbor, that Scotch officer having visited at the house of Mrs. Ingraham, Merrick's mother, while a prisoner in Concord Jail. A few years later Merrick was himself captured twice on his way to and from Holland and France, whither he went as secretary or attaché to our commissioner, John Adams. The first time he was taken to London; the second time to Halifax, where, as it happened, Sir Archibald was then in command as Governor of Nova Scotia. Young Merrick went presently to the governor's quarters, but was refused admission by the sentinel,--while parleying with whom, Sir Archibald heard the conversation, and came forward. He at once recognized his Concord friend, greeted him cordially with "How do you do, my little rebel?" and after taking good care of him, in remembrance of his own experience in Concord, procured Merrick's exchange for one of Burgoyne's officers, captured at Saratoga. Returning to America after the war, Tilly Merrick went into an extensive business at Charleston, S. C., with the son of Duncan Ingraham for a partner, and there became the owner of large plantations, worked by slaves, which he afterwards lost through reverses in business. Coming back to Concord in 1798, with the remnants of his South Carolina fortune, and inheriting his mother's Concord estate, he married a lady of the Minott family, and became a country store-keeper in his native town. His daughter, Mrs. Brooks, was for many years the leader of the antislavery party in Concord, and a close friend of the Thoreaus, who at one time lived next door to her hospitable house. Soon after Mr. Emerson fixed his home in Concord, in 1834, a new bond of connection between the town and the great world outside this happy valley began to appear,--the genius of that man whose like has not been seen in America, nor in the whole world in our century:-- "A large and generous man, who, on our moors, Built up his thought (though with an Indian tongue, And fittest to have sung at Persian feasts), Yet dwelt among us as the sage he was,-- Sage of his days,--patient and proudly true; Whose word was worth the world, whose heart was pure. Oh, such a heart was his! no gate or bar; The poorest wretch that ever passed his door Welcome as highest king or fairest friend." This genius, in one point of view so solitary, but in another so universal and social, soon made itself felt as an attractive force, and Concord became a place of pilgrimage, as it has remained for so many years since. When Theodore Parker left Divinity Hall, at Cambridge, in 1836, and began to preach in Unitarian pulpits, he fixed his hopes on Concord as a parish, chiefly because Emerson was living there. It is said that he might have been called as a colleague for Dr. Ripley, if it had not been thought his sermons were too learned for the Christians of the Nine-Acre Corner and other outlying hamlets of the town. In 1835-36 Mr. Alcott began to visit Mr. Emerson in Concord, and in 1840 he went there to live. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, coadjutors of Mr. Alcott in his Boston school, had already found their way to Concord, where Margaret at intervals resided, or came and went in her sibylline way. Ellery Channing, one of the nephews of Dr. Channing, the divine, took his bride, a sister of Margaret Fuller, to Concord in 1843; and Hawthorne removed thither, upon his marriage with Miss Peabody's sister Sophia, in 1842. After noticing what went on about him for a few years, in his seclusion at the Old Manse, Hawthorne thus described the attraction of Concord, in 1845: "It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles. These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thralldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." The picture here painted still continued to be true until long after the death of Thoreau; and the attraction was increased at times by the presence in the village of Hawthorne himself, of Alcott, and of others who made Concord their home or their haunt. Thoreau also was resorted to by pilgrims, who came sometimes from long distances and at long intervals, to see and talk with him. There was in the village, too, a consular man, for many years the first citizen of Concord,--Samuel Hoar,--who made himself known abroad by sheer force of character and "plain heroic magnitude of mind." It was of him that Emerson said, at his death in November, 1856,-- "He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt that if one had met him in a cabin or in a forest he must still seem a public man, answering as sovereign state to sovereign state; and might easily suggest Milton's picture of John Bradshaw, that he 'was a consul from whom the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private seemed ever sitting in judgment on kings.' He returned from courts or congresses to sit down with unaltered humility, in the church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench, where Honor came and sat down beside him." In his house and in a few others along the elm-planted street, you might meet at any time other persons of distinction, beauty, or wit,--such as now and then glance through the shining halls of cities, and, in great centres of the world's civilization, like London or Paris, muster "In solemn troops and sweet societies," which are the ideal of poets and fair women, and the envy of all who aspire to social eminence. Thoreau knew the worth of this luxury, too, though, as a friend said of him, "a story from a fisher or hunter was better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors, where he was misunderstood." There were not many such parlors in Concord, but there was and had constantly been in the town a learned and social element, such as gathers in an old New England village of some wealth and inherited culture. At the head of this circle--which fell off on one side into something like fashion and mere amusement, on another into the activity of trade or politics, and rose, among the women especially, into art and literature and religion--stood, in Thoreau's boyhood and youth, a grave figure, yet with something droll about him,--the parish minister and county Nestor, Dr. Ezra Ripley, who lived and died in the "Old Manse." Dr. Ripley was born in 1751, in Woodstock, Conn., the same town in which Dr. Abiel Holmes, the father of the poet Holmes, was born. He entered Harvard College in 1772, came with the students to Concord in 1775, when the college buildings at Cambridge were occupied by Washington and his army, besieging Boston, and graduated in 1776. Among his classmates were Governor Gore, Samuel Sewall, the second chief-justice of Massachusetts of that name, and Royal Tyler, the witty chief-justice of Vermont. Governor Gore used to say that in college he was called "Holy Ripley," from his devout character. He settled in Concord in 1778, and at the age of twenty-nine married the widow of his last predecessor, Rev. William Emerson (and the daughter of his next predecessor, Rev. Daniel Bliss), who was at their marriage ten years older than her husband, and had a family of five children. Dr. Ripley's own children were three in number: the Reverend Samuel Ripley, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss Ripley, born August 1, 1784; and Miss Sarah Ripley, born August 8, 1789. When this daughter died, not long after her mother, in 1826, breaking, says Mr. Emerson, "the last tie of blood which bound me and my brothers to his house," Dr. Ripley said to Mr. Emerson, "I wish you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected." He died himself in September, 1841. Of Dr. Ripley countless anecdotes are told in his parish, and he was the best remembered person, except Thoreau himself, who had died in Concord, till Emerson; just as his house, described so finely by Hawthorne in his "Mosses," is still the best known house in Concord. It was for a time the home of Mr. Emerson, and there, it is said, he wrote his first book, "Nature," concerning which, when it came out anonymously, the question was asked, "Who is the author of 'Nature'?" The reply was, of course, "God and Ralph Waldo Emerson." The Old Manse was built about 1766 for Mr. Emerson's grandfather, then minister of the parish, and into it he brought his bride, Miss Phebe Bliss (daughter of Rev. Daniel Bliss, of Concord, and Phebe Walker, of Connecticut). Miss Mary Emerson, youngest child of this marriage, used to say "she was in arms at the battle of Concord," because her mother held her up, then two years old, to see the soldiers from her window; and from his study window her father saw the fight at the bridge. It was the scene of many of the anecdotes, told of Dr. Ripley, some of which, gathered from various sources, may here be given; it was also, after his death, one of the resorts of Thoreau, of Margaret Fuller, of Ellery Channing, of Dr. Hedge, and of the Transcendentalists in general. His parishioners to this day associate Dr. Ripley's form "with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit; with Watts's hymns; with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and, not less, with the report like musketry from the movable seats."[1] One of these "iron-gray deacons," Francis Jarvis, used to visit the Old Manse with his children on Sunday evenings, and his son, Dr. Edward Jarvis, thus describes another side of Dr. Ripley's pastoral character:-- "Among the very pleasant things connected with the Sabbaths in the Jarvis family were the visits to Dr. Ripley in the evening. The doctor had usually a small levee of such friends as were disposed to call. Deacon Jarvis was fond of going there, and generally took with him one of the children and his wife, when she was able. There were at these levees many of the most intelligent and agreeable men of the town,--Mr. Samuel Hoar, Mr. Nathan Brooks, Mr. John Keyes, Deacon Brown, Mr. Pritchard, Major Burr, etc. These were extremely pleasant gatherings. The little boys sat and listened, and remembered the cheerful and instructive conversation. There were discussions of religion and morals, of politics and philosophy, the affairs of the town, the news of the day, the religious and social gossip, pleasant anecdotes and witty tales. All were in their best humor. Deacon Jarvis [adds his son], did not go to these levees every Sunday night, though he would have been glad to do so, had he been less distrustful. When his children, who had no such scruples, asked him to go and take them with him, he said he feared that Dr. Ripley would not like to see him so frequently." According to Mr. Emerson, Dr. Ripley was "a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, and public spirited; his house open to all men." An old farmer who used to travel thitherward from Maine, where Dr. Ripley had a brother settled in the ministry, used to say that "no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor's gate." It was one of the listeners at his Sunday evening levees, no doubt, who said (at the time when Dr. Ripley was preparing for his first and last journey to Baltimore and Washington, in the presidency of the younger Adams) "that a man who could tell a story so well was company for kings and for John Quincy Adams." When P. M., after his release from the State Prison, had the effrontery to call on Dr. Ripley, as an old acquaintance, as they were talking together on general matters, his young colleague, Rev. Mr. Frost, came in. The doctor presently said, "Mr. M., my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (very well known to you), which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us." Mr. Emerson, his grandson (by Dr. Ripley's marriage with the widow of Rev. William Emerson) relates that he once went to a funeral with Dr. Ripley, and heard him address the mourners. As they approached the farm-house the old minister said that the eldest son, who was now to succeed the deceased father of a family in his place as a Concord yeoman, was in some danger of becoming intemperate. In his remarks to this son, he presently said,-- "Sir, I condole with you. I knew your great-grandfather; when I came to this town, in 1778, he was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that old family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If _you_ fail--Ichabod!--the glory is departed. Let us pray." He took Mr. Emerson about with him in his chaise when a boy, and in passing each house he would tell the story of its family, dwelling especially on the nine church-members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor; every one of the nine having come to bad fortune or a bad end. "The late Dr. Gardiner," says Mr. Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed in New England,--so that men might worship God with less fear. But he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to appear in Concord. When Mr. Emerson took his friend Mr. Alcott to see the old doctor, he gave him warning that his brilliant young kinsman was not quite sound in the faith, and bore testimony in particular against a sect of his own naming, called "Egomites" (from _ego_ and _mitto_), who "sent themselves" on the Lord's errands without any due call thereto. Dr. Channing viewed the "apostles of the newness" with more favor, and could pardon something to the spirit of liberty which was strong in them. The occasional correspondence between the Concord shepherd of his people and the great Unitarian preacher is full of interest. In February, 1839, when he was eighty-eight years old and weighed down with infirmities, he could still lift up his voice in testimony. He then wrote to Dr. Channing:-- "Broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. My mind labors and is oppressed, viewing the present state of Christianity, and the various speculations, opinions, and practices of the passing period. Extremes appear to be sought and loved, and their novelty gains attention. You, sir, appear to retain and act upon the sentiment of the Latin phrase,-- "'Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines.' "The learned and estimable Norton appears to me to have weakened his hold on public opinion and confidence by his petulance or pride, his want of candor and charity." Six years earlier, Dr. Channing had written to Dr. Ripley almost as if replying to some compliment like this, and expressed himself thus, in a letter dated January 22, 1833,-- "I thank God for the testimony which you have borne to the usefulness of my writings. Such approbation from one whom I so much venerate, and who understands so well the wants and signs of the times, is very encouraging to me. If I have done anything towards manifesting Christianity in its simple majesty and mild glory I rejoice, and I am happy to have contributed anything towards the satisfaction of your last years. It would gratify many, and would do good, if, in the quiet of your advanced age, you would look back on the eventful period through which you have passed, and would leave behind you, or give now, a record of the changes you have witnessed, and especially of the progress of liberal inquiry and rational views in religion."[2] Dr. Ripley's prayers were precise and undoubting in their appeal for present providences. He prayed for rain and against the lightning, "that it may not lick up our spirits;" he blessed the Lord for exemption from sickness and insanity,--"that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and to others." One memorable occasion, in the later years of his pastorate, when he had consented to take a young colleague, is often remembered in his parish, now fifty years after its date. The town was suffering from drought, and the farmers from Barrett's Mill, Bateman's Pond, and the Nine-Acre Corner had asked the minister to pray for rain. Mr. Goodwin (the father of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University) had omitted to do this in his morning service, and at the noon intermission Dr. Ripley was reminded of the emergency by the afflicted farmers. He told them courteously that Mr. Goodwin's garden lay on the river, and perhaps he had not noticed how parched the uplands were; but he entered the pulpit that afternoon with an air of resolution and command. Mr. Goodwin, as usual, offered to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer, but the old shepherd, as Mr. Emerson says, "rejected his offer with some humor, and with an air that said to all the congregation, 'This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious; I will pray myself.'" He did so, and with unusual fervor demanded rain for the languishing corn and the dry grass of the field. As the story goes, the afternoon opened fair and hot, but before the dwellers in Nine-Acre Corner and the North Quarter reached their homes a pouring shower rewarded the gray-haired suppliant, and reminded Concord that the righteous are not forsaken. Another of Mr. Emerson's anecdotes bears on this point:-- "One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield, helping him, with his man, to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder-gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, 'We are in the Lord's hand,--mind your rake, George! we are in the Lord's hand;' and seemed to say, 'You know me; this field is mine,--Dr. Ripley's, thine own servant.'" In his later years Dr. Ripley was much distressed by a schism in his church, which drew off to a Trinitarian congregation several of his oldest friends and parishioners. Among the younger members who thus seceded, seventy years ago, were the maiden aunts of Thoreau, Jane and Maria,--the last of whom, and the last of the name in America, has died recently, as already mentioned. Thoreau seceded later, but not to the "Orthodox" church,--as much against the wish of Dr. Ripley, however, as if he had. In later years, Thoreau's church (of the Sunday Walkers) was recognized in the village gossip; so that when I first spent Sunday in Concord, and asked my landlord what churches there were, he replied, "The Unitarian, the Orthodox, and the Walden Pond Association." To the latter he professed to belong, and said its services consisted in walking on Sunday in the Walden woods. Dr. Ripley would have viewed such rites with horror, but they have now become common. His Old Manse, which from 1842 to 1846 was occupied by Hawthorne, was for twenty years (1847-1867) the home of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, that sweet and learned lady, and has since been the dwelling-place of her children, the grandchildren of Dr. Ripley. Near by stands now the statue of the Concord Minute-Man of 1775, marking the spot to which the Middlesex farmers came "In sloven dress and broken rank," and where they stood when in unconscious heroism they "Fired the shot heard round the world," and drove back the invading visitor from their doorsteps and cornfields. Dr. Ripley, however, seldom repelled a visitor or an invader, unless he came from too recent an experience in the state prison, or offered to "break out" his path on a Sunday, when he had fancied himself too much snow-bound to go forth to his pulpit. The anecdote is characteristic, if not wholly authentic. One Sunday, after a severe snow-storm, his neighbor, the great farmer on Ponkawtassett Hill, half a mile to the northward of the Old Manse, turned out his ox-teams and all his men and neighbors to break a path to the meeting-house and the tavern. Wallowing through the drifts, they had got as far as Dr. Ripley's gate, while the good parson, snugly blocked in by a drift completely filling his avenue of ash-trees, thought of nothing less than of going out to preach that day. The long team of oxen, with much shouting and stammering from the red-faced farmer, was turned out of the road and headed up the avenue, when Dr. Ripley, coming to his parsonage door, and commanding silence, began to berate Captain B. for breaking the Sabbath and the roads at one stroke,--implying, if not asserting, that he did it to save time and oxen for his Monday's work. Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch, flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth; and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at first. This led to a long quarrel between minister and parishioner, in course of which, one day, as the doctor halted his chaise in front of the farmer's house on the hill, the stammering captain came forward, a peck measure in his hand, with which he had been giving his oxen their meal, and began to renew the unutterable grievance. Waxing warm, as the doctor admonished him afresh, he smote with his wooden measure on the shafts of the chaise, until his gentle wife, rushing forth, called on the neighbors to stop the fight which she fancied was going on between the charioteer of the Lord and the foot-soldier. Despite these outbursts, and his habitual way of looking at all things "from the parochial point of view," as Emerson said of him, he was also a courteous and liberal-minded man, as the best anecdotes of him constantly prove. He was the sovereign of his people, managing the church, the schools, the society meetings, and, for a time, the Lyceum, as he thought fit. The lecturers, as well as the young candidates for school-keeping--Theodore Parker, Edward Everett, and the rest--addressed themselves to him, and when he met Webster, then the great man of Massachusetts, it was on equal terms. Daniel Webster was never a lyceum lecturer in Concord, and he did not often try cases there, but was sometimes consulted in causes of some pecuniary magnitude. When Humphrey Barrett died (whose management of his nephew's estate will be mentioned in the next chapter), his heir by will (a young man without property, until he should inherit the large estate bequeathed him), found it necessary to employ counsel against the heirs-at-law, who sought to break the will. His attorney went to Mr. Webster in Boston and related the facts, adding that his client could not then pay a large fee, but might, if the cause were gained, as Mr. Webster thought it would be. "You may give me one hundred dollars as a retainer," said Webster, "and tell the young man, from me, that when I win his case I shall send him a bill that will make his hair stand on end." It so happened, however, that Webster was sent to the Senate, and the case was won by his partner. In the summer of 1843, while Thoreau was living at Staten Island, Webster visited Concord to try an important case in the county court, which then held sessions there. This was the "Wyman Trial," long famous in local traditions, Webster and Choate being both engaged in the case, and along with them Mr. Franklin Dexter and Mr. Rockwood Hoar, the latter a young lawyer, who had been practicing in the Middlesex courts for a few years, where his father, Mr. Samuel Hoar, was the leader of the bar. Judge Allen (Charles Allen of Worcester) held the court, and the eminent array of counsel just named was for the defense. The occasion was a brilliant one, and made a great and lasting sensation in the village. Mr. Webster and his friends were entertained at the houses of the chief men of Concord, and the villagers crowded the court-house to hear the arguments and the colloquies between the counsel and the court. Webster was suffering from his usual summer annoyance, the "hay catarrh," or "rose cold," which he humorously described afterward in a letter to a friend in Concord:-- "You know enough of my miserable catarrh. Its history, since I left your hospitable roof, is not worth noting. There would be nothing found in it, either of the sublime or the beautiful; nothing fit for elegant description or a touch of sentiment. Not that it has not been a great thing in its way; for I think the _sneezing_ it has occasioned has been truly transcendental. A fellow-sufferer from the same affliction, who lived in Cohasset, was asked, the other day, what in the world he took for it? His reply was that he 'took eight handkerchiefs a day.' And this, I believe, is the approved mode of treatment; though the _doses_ here mentioned are too few for severe cases. Suffice it to say, my dear lady, that either from a change of air, or the progress of the season, or, what is more probable, from the natural progress of the disease itself, I am much better than when I left Concord, and I propose to return to Boston to-day, feeling, or hoping, that I may now be struck off the list of invalids." Notwithstanding this affliction, Mr. Webster made himself agreeable to the ladies of Concord, old and young, and even the little girls, like Louisa Alcott, went to the courthouse to see and hear him. He was present at a large tea-party given by Mrs. R. W. Emerson in his honor, and he renewed his old acquaintance with the Dunbars and Thoreaus. Mr. Emerson, writing to Thoreau September 8, 1843, said, briefly, "You will have heard of our 'Wyman Trial,' and the stir it made in the village. But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of the railroad, knew nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble fell;--why should I speak of it to you?" Thoreau was indeed interested in it, and in the striking personality of Webster. To his mother he wrote from Staten Island (August 29, 1843):-- "I should have liked to see Daniel Webster walking about Concord; I suppose the town shook, every step he took. But I trust there were some sturdy Concordians who were not tumbled down by the jar, but represented still the upright town. Where was George Minott? he would not have gone far to see him. Uncle Charles should have been there;--he might as well have been catching cat-naps in Concord as anywhere. And, then, what a whetter-up of his memory this event would have been! You'd have had all the classmates again in alphabetical order reversed,--'and Seth Hunt and Bob Smith--and he was a student of my father's--and where's Put now? and I wonder--you--if Henry's been to see George Jones yet? A little account with Stow--Balcolm--Bigelow--poor, miserable t-o-a-d (sound asleep). I vow--you--what noise was that? saving grace--and few there be. That's clear as preaching--Easter Brooks--morally depraved--how charming is divine philosophy--somewise and some otherwise--Heighho! (Sound asleep again.) Webster's a smart fellow--bears his age well. How old should you think he was? you--does he look as if he were two years younger than I?'" This uncle was Charles Dunbar, of course, who was in fact two years older than Webster, and, like him, a New Hampshire man. He and his sisters--the mother and the aunt of Henry Thoreau--had known Webster in his youth, when he was a poor young lawyer in New Hampshire; and the acquaintance was kept up from time to time as the years brought them together. Whenever Webster passed a day in Concord, as he did nearly every year from 1843 to 1850, he would either call on Miss Dunbar, or she would meet him at tea in the house of Mr. Cheney, a college classmate of Mr. Emerson, whom he usually visited; and whose garden was a lovely plot, ornamented with great elm trees, on the bank of the Musketaquid. Mrs. Thoreau was often included in these friendly visits; and it was of this family, as well as of the Emersons, Hoars, and Brookses, no doubt, that Webster was thinking when he sadly wrote to Mrs. Cheney his last letter, less than a year before his death in 1852. In this note, dated at Washington, November 1, 1851, when he was Secretary of State under Fillmore, Mr. Webster said:-- "I have very much wished to see you all, and in the early part of October seriously contemplated going to Concord for a day. But I was hindered by circumstances, and partly deterred also by changes which have taken place. My valued friend, Mr. Phinney (of Lexington), is not living; and many of those whom I so highly esteemed, in your beautiful and quiet village, have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions, which I cannot (but) regard as so many vagaries of the imagination. These former warm friends would have no pleasure, of course, in intercourse with one of old-fashioned opinions. Nevertheless, dear Mrs. Cheney, if I live to see another summer, I will make a visit to your house, and talk about former times and former things." He never came; for in June, 1852, the Whig convention at Baltimore rejected his name as a Presidential candidate, and he went home to Marshfield to die. The tone of sadness in this note was due, in part, perhaps, to the eloquent denunciation of Webster by Mr. Emerson in a speech at Cambridge in 1851, and to the unequivocal aversion with which Webster's contemporary, the first citizen of Concord, Samuel Hoar, spoke of his 7th of March speech, and the whole policy with which Webster had identified himself in those dreary last years of his life. Mr. Hoar had been sent by his State in 1846 to protest in South Carolina against the unconstitutional imprisonment at Charleston of colored seamen from Massachusetts; and he had been driven by force from the State to which he went as an envoy. But, although Webster knew the gross indignity of the act, and introduced into his written speech in March, 1850, a denunciation of it, he did not speak this out in the Senate, nor did it appear in all the authorized editions of the speech. He could hardly expect Mr. Hoar to welcome him in Concord after he had uttered his willingness to return fugitive slaves, but forgot to claim reparation for so shameful an affront to Massachusetts as the Concord Cato had endured. Mr. Webster was attached to Concord--as most persons are who have ever spent pleasant days there--and used to compliment his friend on his house and garden by the river side. Looking out upon his great trees from the dining-room window, he once said: "I am in the terrestrial paradise, and I will prove it to you by this. America is the finest continent on the globe, the United States the finest country in America, Massachusetts the best State in the Union, Concord the best town in Massachusetts, and my friend Cheney's field the best acre in Concord." This was an opinion so like that often expressed by Henry Thoreau, that one is struck by it. Indeed, the devotion of Thoreau to his native town was so marked as to provoke opposition. "Henry talks about Nature," said Madam Hoar (the mother of Senator Hoar, and daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut), "just as if she'd been born and brought up in Concord." CHAPTER IV. THE EMBATTLED FARMERS. It was not the famous lawyers, the godly ministers, the wealthy citizens, nor even the learned ladies of Concord, who interested Henry Thoreau specially,--but the sturdy farmers, each on his hereditary acres, battling with the elements and enjoying that open-air life which to Thoreau was the only existence worth having. As his best biographer, Ellery Channing, says: "He came to see the inside of every farmer's house and head, his pot of beans, and mug of hard cider. Never in too much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could sit out the oldest frequenter of the bar-room, and was alive from top to toe with curiosity." Concord, in our day, and still more in Thoreau's childhood, was dotted with frequent old farm-houses, of the ample and picturesque kind that bespeaks antiquity and hospitality. In one such he was born, though not one of the oldest or the best. He was present at the downfall of several of these ancient homesteads, in whose date and in the fortunes of their owners for successive generations, he took a deep interest; and still more in their abandoned orchards and door-yards, where the wild apple tree and the vivacious lilac still flourished. To show what sort of men these Concord farmers were in the days when their historical shot was fired, let me give some anecdotes and particulars concerning two of the original family stocks,--the Hosmers, who first settled in Concord in 1635, with Bulkeley and Willard, the founders of the town; and the Barretts, whose first ancestor, Humphrey Barrett, came over in 1639. James Hosmer, a clothier from Hawkhurst in Kent, with his wife Ann (related to Major Simon Willard, that stout Kentishman, Indian trader and Indian fighter, who bought of the Squaw Sachem the township of Concord, six miles square), two infant daughters, and two maid-servants, came from London to Boston in the ship "Elizabeth," and the next year built a house on Concord Street, and a mill on the town brook. From him descended James Hosmer, who was killed at Sudbury in 1658, in an Indian fight, Stephen, his great-grandson, a famous surveyor, and Joseph, his great-great-grandson, one of the promoters of the Revolution, who had a share in its first fight at Concord Bridge. Joseph Hosmer was the son of a Concord farmer, who, in 1743, seceded from the parish church, because Rev. Daniel Bliss, the pastor, had said in a sermon (as his opponents averred), "that it was as great a sin for a man to get an estate by honest labor, if he had not a single aim at the glory of God, as to get it by gaming at cards or dice." What this great-grandfather of Emerson did say, a century before the Transcendental epoch, was this, as he declared: "If husbandmen plow and sow that they may be rich, and live in the pleasures of this world, and appear grand before men, they are as far from true religion in their plowing, sowing, etc., as men are that game for the same purpose." Thomas Hosmer, being a prosperous husbandman, perhaps with a turn for display, took offense, and became a worshipper at what was called the "Black Horse Church,"--a seceding conventicle which met at the tavern with the sign of the Black Horse, near where the Concord Library now stands. Joseph Hosmer, his boy, was known at the village school as "the little black colt,"--a lad of adventurous spirit, with dark eyes and light hair, whose mother, Prudence Hosmer, would repeat old English poetry until all her listeners but her son were weary. When he was thirty-nine years old, married and settled, a farmer and cabinet-maker, there was a convention in the parish church to consider the Boston Port Bill, the doings of General Gage in Boston, and the advice of Samuel Adams and John Hancock to resist oppression. Daniel Bliss, the leading lawyer and leading Tory in Concord, eldest son of Parson Bliss, and son-in-law of Colonel Murray, of Rutland, Vt., the chief Tory of that region, made a speech in this convention against the patriotic party. He was a graceful and fluent speaker, a handsome man, witty, sarcastic, and popular, but with much scorn for the plain people. He painted in effective colors the power of the mother country and the feebleness of the colonies; he was elegantly dressed, friendly in his manner, but discouraging to the popular heart, and when he sat down, a deep gloom seemed to settle on the assembly. His brother-in-law, Parson Emerson, an ardent patriot, if present, was silent. From a corner of the meeting-house there rose at last a man with sparkling eyes, plainly dressed in butternut brown, who began to speak in reply to the handsome young Tory, at first slowly and with hesitation, but soon taking fire at his own thoughts, he spoke fluently, in a strain of natural eloquence, which gained him the ear and applause of the assembly. A delegate from Worcester, who sat near Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip, frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and where he leads the way they will surely follow." Four months later, in April, 1775, this Concord mechanic made good the words of his Tory townsman, for it was his speech to the minute-men which goaded them on to the fight. After forming the regiment as adjutant, he addressed them, closing with these words: "I have often heard it said that the British boasted they could march through our country, laying waste every village and neighborhood, and that we would not dare oppose them,--_and I begin to believe it is true_." Then turning to Major Buttrick, who commanded, and looking off from the hill-side to the village, from which a thick smoke was rising, he cried, "Will you let them burn the town down?" whereupon the sturdy major, who had no such intention, ordered his men to march; and when, a few minutes later, the British fired on his column of companies, the Acton men at the head, he sprang from the ground shouting, "Fire, fellow-soldiers, for God's sake fire!" and discharged his own piece at the same instant. The story has often been told, but will bear repetition. Thoreau heard it in 1835 from the lips of Emerson, as he pronounced the centennial discourse in honor of the town's settlement and history; but he had read it and heard it a hundred times before, from his earliest childhood. Mr. Emerson added, after describing the fight:-- "These poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory; they never dreamed their children would contend which had done the most. They supposed they had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying tribute to any but their own governors. And as they had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God. Captain Charles Miles, who was wounded in the pursuit of the enemy, told my venerable friend (Dr. Ripley), who sits by me, 'that he went to the services of that day with the same seriousness and acknowledgment of God, which he carried to church.'" Humphrey Barrett, fifth in descent from the original settler, was born in 1752, on the farm his ancestors had owned ever since 1640, and was no doubt in arms at Concord Fight in 1775. His biographer says:-- "Some persons slightly acquainted with him in the latter part of his life, judged him to be unsocial, cold, and indifferent, but those most acquainted with him knew him to be precisely the reverse. The following acts of his life make apparent some traits of his character. A negro, by the name of Cæsar Robbins, had been in the habit of getting all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr. Barrett's wood-lot near by him; this being done with the knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent of the owner. Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own use from another part of his farm; but on one occasion he thought he would get it from the lot by Cæsar's. He accordingly sent two men with two teams, with directions to cut only hard wood. The men had been gone but a few hours when Cæsar came to Mr. Barrett's house, his face covered with sweat, and in great agitation, and says, 'Master Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men and teams have broke into our wood-lot, and are making terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we do something immediately I shall be ruined.' Mr. Barrett had no heart to resist this appeal of Cæsar's; he told him not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt, and would put the matter right. He then wrote an order to his men to cut no more wood, but to come directly home with their teams, and sent the order by Cæsar."[3] The biographer of Mr. Barrett, who was also his attorney and legal adviser, goes on to say:-- "A favorite nephew who bore his name, and whose guardian he was, died under age in 1818, leaving a large estate, and no relatives nearer than uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts. Mr. Barrett believed that the estate in equity ought to be distributed equally between the uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts by right of representation.[4] And although advised that such was not the law, he still insisted upon having the question carried before the Supreme Court for decision; and when the court decided against his opinion, he carried out his own views of equity by distributing the portion that fell to him according to his opinion of what the law ought to be. After he had been fully advised that the estate would be distributed in a manner he thought neither equitable nor just, he applied to the writer to make out his account as guardian; furnishing the evidence, as he believed, of the original amount of all his receipts as such guardian. I made the account, charging him with interest at six per cent. on all sums from the time of receipt till the time of making the account. Mr. Barrett took the account for examination, and soon returned it with directions to charge him with compound interest, saying that he believed he had realized as much as that. I accordingly made the account conform to his directions. He then wished me to present this account to the party who claimed half the estate, and ask him to examine it with care and see if anything was omitted. This was done, and no material omission discovered, and no objection made. Mr. Barrett then said that he had always kept all the property of his ward in a drawer appropriated for the purpose; that he made the amount of property in the drawer greater than the balance of the account; and (handing to me the contents of the drawer) he wished me to ascertain the precise sum to which it amounted. I found that it exceeded the balance of the account by $3,221.59. He then told me, in substance, that he was quite unwilling to have so large an amount of property go where it was in danger of being distributed inequitably, and particularly as he was confident he had disclosed every source from which he had realized any property of his ward, and also the actual amount received; _but_, as he knew not how it got into the drawer, and had intended all the property there to go to his nephew, he should not feel right to retain it, and therefore directed me to add it to the amount of the estate,--which was done."[5] Conceive a community in which such characters were common, and imagine whether the claim of King George and the fine gentlemen about him, to tax the Americans without their own consent would be likely to succeed! I find in obscure anecdotes like this sufficient evidence that if John Hampden had emigrated to Massachusetts when he had it in mind, he would have found men like himself tilling their own acres in Concord. The Barretts, from their name, may have been Normans, but, like Hampden, the Hosmers were Saxons, and held land in England before William the Conqueror. When Major Hosmer, who was adjutant, and formed the line of the regiment that returned the British fire at Concord Bridge, had an estate to settle about 1785, the heir to which was supposed to be in England, he employed an agent, who was then visiting London, to notify the heir, and also desired him to go to the Heralds' Office and ascertain what coat-of-arms belonged to any branch of the Hosmer family. When the agent (who may have been Mr. Tilly Merrick, of Concord, John Adams's attaché in Holland), returned to America, after reporting his more important business to Major Hosmer, he added,-- "I called at the Heralds' Office in London, and the clerk said, '_There was no coat-of-arms for you, and, if you were an Englishman you would not want one; for_ (he said) _there were Hosmers in Kent long before the Conquest; and at the battle of Hastings, the men of Kent were the vanguard of King Harold_.'" If Major Hosmer's ancestors failed to drive back the invaders then, their descendants made good the failure in Concord seven centuries later. Thoreau's favorite walk, as he tells us,--the pathway toward Heaven,--was along the old Marlborough road, west and southwest from Concord village, through deep woods in Concord and in Sudbury. To reach this road he passed by the great Hosmer farm-house, built by the old major already mentioned, in 1760 or thereabout, and concerning which there is a pretty legend that Thoreau may have taken with him along the Marlborough road. In 1758, young Jo. Hosmer, "the little black colt," drove to Marlborough one autumn day with a load of furniture he had made for Jonathan Barnes, a rich farmer, and town clerk in thrifty Marlborough. He had received the money for his furniture, and was standing on the doorstep, preparing to go home, when a young girl, Lucy Barnes, the daughter of the house, ran up to him and said, "Concord woods are dark, and a thunderstorm is coming up; you had better stay all night." "Since you ask me, I will," was the reply, and the visit was often repeated in the next few months. But when he asked farmer Jonathan for his daughter, the reply was,-- "Concord plains are barren soil. Lucy had better marry her cousin John, whose father will give him one of the best farms in Marlborough, with a good house on it, and Lucy can match his land acre for acre." Joseph returned from that land of Egypt, and like a wise youth took the hint, and built a house of his own, planting the elm trees that now overshadow it, after a hundred and twenty years. After the due interval he went again to Marlborough, and found Lucy Barnes in the September sunshine, gathering St. Michael's pears in her father's garden. Cousin John was married, by this time, to another damsel. Miss Lucy was bent on having her own way and her own Joseph; and so Mr. Barnes gave his consent. They were married at Christmas, 1761; and Lucy came home behind him on his horse, through the same Concord woods. She afterwards told her youngest son, with some pique:-- "When my brother Jonathan was married, and went to New Hampshire, twenty couples on horseback followed them to Haverhill, on the Merrimac, but when your father and I were married, we came home alone through these dark Concord woods."[6] The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:-- "I can recall with peculiar pleasure a vacation passed in Concord in my senior year, which Loammi Baldwin, Lemuel Shaw, Washington Allston, and myself spent with Rufus Hosmer at his father's house. I recall the benign face of Major Hosmer, as he stood in the door to receive us, with his handsome daughter-in-law (the wife of Capt. Cyrus Hosmer) on his arm. There was a charming circle of young people then living in Concord, and we boys enjoyed this very much; but we liked best of all to stay at home and listen to the Major's stories. It was very pleasant to have a rainy day come for this, and hard to tell which seemed the happier, he or we." Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town. Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar, long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later life, once said,-- "In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way, 'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you see, the man's on the wrong side.'" Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,-- "I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as clearly as they did the outside." He was for many years sheriff of the county, and it was the habit of the young lawyers in term-time to get round his chair and ask his opinion about their cases. Such was his knowledge of the common law, and so well did he know the judges and jurymen, that when he said to Mr. Hoar, "I fear you will lose your case," that gentleman said, "from that moment I felt it lost, for I never knew him to make a wrong guess." He was a Federalist of the old school, and in his eyes Alexander Hamilton was the first man in America. His son held much the same opinion of Daniel Webster. Near by Major Hosmer's farm-house stood the old homestead and extensive farm buildings of the Lee family, who at the beginning of the Revolution owned one of the two or three great farms in Concord. This estate has been owned and sold in one parcel of about four hundred acres ever since it was first occupied by Henry Woodhouse about 1650. It lies between the two rivers Assabet and Musketaquid, and includes Nahshawtuc, or Lee's Hill, on which, in early days, was an Indian village. The Lees inherited it from the original owner, and held it for more than one hundred years, though it narrowly escaped confiscation in 1775, its owner being a Tory. Early in the present century it fell, by means of a mortgage, into the hands of "old Billy Gray" (the founder of the fortunes that for two or three generations have been held in the Gray family of Boston), was by him sold to Judge Fay, of Cambridge, and by him, in 1822, conveyed to his brother-in-law, Joseph Barrett, of Concord, a distant cousin of the Humphrey Barrett, mentioned elsewhere. Joseph Barrett had been one of Major Hosmer's deputies, when the old yeoman was sheriff, but now turned his attention to farming his many acres, and deserves mention here as one of the Concord farmers of two generations after the battle, among whom Henry Thoreau grew up. Indeed, the Lee Farm was one of his most accustomed haunts, since the river flowed round it for a mile or two, and its commanding hill-top gave a prospect toward the western and northwestern mountains, Wachusett and Monadnoc chief among the beautiful brotherhood, whom Thoreau early saluted with a dithyrambic verse:-- "With frontier strength ye stand your ground, With grand content ye circle round, (Tumultuous silence for all sound), Ye distant nursery of rills, Monadnoc and the Peterboro hills; * * * * * But special I remember thee, Wachusett, who, like me, Standest alone without society; Thy far blue eye A remnant of the sky." Lee's Hill (which must be distinguished from Lee's Cliff, three miles further up the main river), was the centre of this farm, and almost of the township itself, and Squire Barrett, while he tilled its broad acres (or left them untilled), might be called the centre of the farmers of his county. He was for some years president of the Middlesex Agricultural Society (before which, in later years, Emerson, and Thoreau, and Agassiz gave addresses), and took the prize in the plowing-match at its October cattle-show, holding his own plow, and driving his oxen himself. Descending from the committee-room in dress coat and ruffled shirt, he found his plow-team waiting for him, but his rivals in the match already turning their furrows. Laying off his coat, and fortifying himself with a pinch of maccaboy, while, as his teamster vowed, "that nigh-ox had his eye on the 'Squire from the time he hove in sight, ready to start the minute he took the plow-handles,"--then stepping to the task, six feet and one inch in height, and in weight two hundred and fifty pounds, the 'Squire began, and before the field was plowed he had won the premium. He was one of the many New England yeomen we have all known, who gave the lie to the common saying about the sturdier bulk and sinew of our beer-drinking cousins across the water. 'Squire Barrett could lift a barrel of cider into a cart, and once carried on his shoulders, up two flights of stairs, a sack containing eight bushels of Indian corn, which must have weighed more than four hundred pounds. He was a good horseman, an accomplished dancer, and in the hayfield excelled in the graceful sweep of his scythe and the flourish of his pitchfork. In course of time (1840) Mr. Alcott, with his wife (a daughter of Colonel May, of Boston), and those daughters who have since become celebrated, came to live in the Hosmer cottage not far from 'Squire Barrett's, and under the very eaves of Major Hosmer's farm-house, to which in 1761 came the fair and willful Lucy Barnes. The portly and courtly 'Squire, who knew Colonel May, came to call on his neighbors, and had many a chat with Mrs. Alcott about her Boston kindred, the Mays, Sewalls, Salisburys, etc. His civility was duly returned by Mrs. Alcott, who, when 'Squire Barrett was a candidate for State Treasurer in 1845, was able, by letters to her friends in Boston, to give him useful support. He was chosen, and held the office till his death in 1849, when Thoreau had just withdrawn from his Walden hermitage, and was publishing his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack." Thoreau's special friend among the farmers was another character, Edmund Hosmer, a scion of the same prolific Hosmer stock, who died in 1881. Edmund Hosmer, with Mr. Alcott, George Curtis and his brother Burrill, and other friends, helped Thoreau raise the timbers of his cabin in 1845, and was often his Sunday visitor in the hermitage. Of him it is that mention is made in "Walden," as follows:-- "On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the crunching of the snow, made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social 'crack;' one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms;' who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned,--for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty." Edmund Hosmer, who was a friend of Mr. Emerson also, and of whom George Curtis and his brother hired land which they cultivated for a time, has been celebrated in prose and verse by other Concord authors. I suppose it was he of whom Emerson wrote thus in his apologue of Saadi, many years ago:-- "Said Saadi,--When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver's door, I scorned the fame of Timour brave,-- Timour to Hassan was a slave. In every glance of Hassan's eye I read rich years of victory. And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides. I shunned his eyes--the faithful man's, I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance." Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And it may be that he was Ellery Channing's "Spicy farming sage, Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age, Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year, And springs from bed each morning with a cheer. Of all his neighbors he can something tell, 'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well! The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring,-- Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing." Hosmer might have sat, also, for the more idyllic picture of the Concord farmer, which Channing has drawn in his "New England":-- "This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire, His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak; He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher Than pensioned blows.--he owned the tree he stroke, And knows the value of the distant smoke, When he returns at night, his labor done, Matched in his action with the long day's sun." Near the small farm of Edmund Hosmer, when Mr. Curtis lived with him and sometimes worked on his well-tilled acres, lay a larger farm, which, about the beginning of Thoreau's active life, was brought from neglect and barrenness into high cultivation by Captain Abel Moore, another Concord farmer, and one of the first, in this part of the country, to appreciate the value of our bog-meadows for cultivation by ditching and top-dressing with the sand which Nature had so thoughtfully ridged up in hills close by. Under the name of "Captain Hardy," Emerson celebrated this achievement of his townsman, upon which the hundreds who in summer strolled to the School of Philosophy in Mr. Alcott's orchard, gazed with admiration,--bettered as it had been by the thirty years' toil and skill bestowed upon it since by Captain Moore's son and grandson. Emerson said:-- "Look across the fence into Captain Hardy's land. There's a musician for you who knows how to make men dance for him in all weathers,--all sorts of men,--Paddies, felons, farmers, carpenters, painters,--yes, and trees, and grapes, and ice, and stone,--hot days, cold days. Beat that true Orpheus lyre if you can. He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow, and lay stone-wall; to make trees bear fruit God never gave them, and foreign grapes yield the juices of France and Spain, on his south side. He saves every drop of sap, as if it were his blood. See his cows, his horses, his swine! And he, the piper that plays the jig they all must dance, biped and quadruped, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin, in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the waters, hills, and meadows. With one blast of his pipe he danced a thousand tons of gravel from yonder blowing sand-heap to the bog-meadow, where the English grass is waving over thirty acres; with another, he winded away sixty head of cattle in the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro' on the hills." Such were and are the yeomen of Concord, among whom Thoreau spent his days, a friend to them and they to him, though each sometimes spoke churlishly of the other. He surveyed their wood-lots, laid out their roads, measured their fields and pastures for division among the heirs when a husbandman died, inspected their rivers and ponds, and exchanged information with them concerning the birds, the beasts, insects, flowers, crops, and trees. Their yearly Cattle Show in October was his chief festival,--one of the things he regretted, when living on the edge of New York Bay, and sighing for Fairhaven and White Pond. Without them the landscape of his native valley would not have been so dear to his eyes, and to their humble and perennial virtues he owed more inspiration than he would always confess. He read in the crabbed Latin of those old Roman farmers, Cato, Varro, and musically-named Columella, and fancied the farmers of Concord were daily obeying Cato's directions, who in turn was but repeating the maxims of a more remote antiquity. "I see the old, pale-faced farmer walking beside his team, with contented thoughts," he says, "for the five thousandth time. This drama every day in the streets; this is the theatre I go to.... Human life may be transitory and full of trouble, but the perennial mind, whose survey extends from that spring to this, from Columella to Hosmer, is superior to change. I will identify myself with that which did not die with Columella, and will not die with Hosmer." * * * * * _Note._--The account of "Captain Hardy" was copied by Channing from Emerson's Journal into the first biography of Thoreau, without the name of the author; and so was credited by me to Thoreau in a former edition of this book. CHAPTER V. THE TRANSCENDENTAL PERIOD. Although Henry Thoreau would have been, in any place or time of the world's drama, a personage of note, it has already been observed, in regard to his career and his unique literary gift, that they were affected, and in some sort fashioned by the influences of the very time and place in which he found himself at the opening of life. It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. And the place of his birth and breeding, the home of his affections, as it was the Troy, the Jerusalem, and the Rome of his imagination, was determined by Providence to be that very centre and shrine of Transcendentalism, the little village of Concord, which would have been saved from oblivion by his books, had it no other title to remembrance. Let it be my next effort, then, to give some hint--not a brief chronicle--of that extraordinary age, not yet ended (often as they tell us of its death and epitaph), now known to all men as the Transcendental Period. We must wait for after-times to fix its limits and determine its dawn and setting; but of its apparent beginning and course, one cycle coincided quite closely with the life of Thoreau. He was born in July, 1817, when Emerson was entering college at Cambridge, and Carlyle was wrestling "with doubt, fear, unbelief, mockery, and scoffing, in agony of spirit," at Edinburgh. He died in May, 1862, when the distinctly spiritual and literary era of Transcendentalism had closed, its years of preparation were over, and it had entered upon the conflict of political regeneration, for which Thoreau was constantly sounding the trumpet. In these forty-five years,--a longer period than the age of Pericles, or of the Medici, or of Queen Elizabeth,--New England Transcendentalism rose, climbed, and culminated, leaving results that, for our America, must be compared with those famous eras of civilization. Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism. It is common to trace the so-called Transcendentalism of New England to Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth in the mother-country, and to Goethe, Richter, and Kant in Germany; and there is a certain outward affiliation of this sort, which cannot be denied. But that which in our spiritual soil gave root to the foreign seeds thus wafted hitherward, was a certain inward tendency of high Calvinism and its counterpart, Quakerism, always welling forth in the American colonies. Now it inspired Cotton, Wheelwright, Sir Harry Vane, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, in Massachusetts; now William Penn and his quaint brotherhood on the Delaware; now Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont, in Connecticut; and, again, John Woolman, the wandering Friend of God and man, in New Jersey, Nicholas Gilman, the convert of Whitefield, in New Hampshire, and Samuel Hopkins, the preacher of disinterested benevolence, in Rhode Island, held forth this noble doctrine of the Inner Light. It is a gospel peculiarly attractive to poets, so that even the loose-girt Davenant, who would fain think himself the left-hand son of Shakespeare, told gossiping old Aubrey that he believed the world, after a while, would settle into one religion, "an ingenious Quakerism,"--that is, a faith in divine communication that would yet leave some scope for men of wit like himself. How truly these American Calvinists and Quakers prefigured the mystical part of Concord philosophy, may be seen by a few of their sayings. Jonathan Edwards, in 1723, when he was twenty years old, and the fair saint of his adoration was fifteen, thus wrote in his diary what he had seen and heard of Sarah Pierpont:-- "There is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world; and there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it, and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and a singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her." Nicholas Gilman, the parish minister of little Durham, in New Hampshire,--being under concern of mind for his friend Whitefield, and the great man of New England, at that time, Sir William Pepperell, just setting forth for the capture of Louisburg--wrote to them in March, 1745,--to Sir William thus:-- "Do you indeed love the Lord? do you make the Lord your Guide and Counselor in ye affair? If you have a Soul, great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord, and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall know that, and everything else needful, one thing after another, as fast as you are prepared for it. But God will, doubtless, humble such as leave him out of their Schemes, as though his Providence was not at all concerned in the matter--whereas his Blessing is all in all." To Whitefield, Gilman wrote in the same vein, on the same day:-- "Are you sufficiently sure that his call is from above, that he was moved by the Holy Ghost to this Expedition? Would it be no advantage to his Estate to win the place? May he not have a prospect of doubling his Wealth and Honours, if crowned with Success? What Demonstration has he given of being so entirely devoted to the Lord? He has a vast many Talents,--is it an easy thing for so Wise a man to become a Fool for Christ? so great a man to become a Little Child? so rich a man to crowd in at the Strait Gate of Conversion, and make so little noise?... If you see good to encourage the Expedition, be fully satisfy'd the project was formed in Heaven. Was the Lord first consulted in the affair? Did they wait for his Counsell?" John Woolman, the New Jersey Quaker (born in 1720, died in 1772), said,-- "There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which, in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure, and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion, nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become brethren. That state in which every motion from the selfish spirit yieldeth to pure love, I may acknowledge with gratitude to the Father of Mercies, is often opened before me as a pearl to seek after."[7] That even the pious egotism and the laughable vagaries of Transcendentalism had their prototype in the private meditations of the New England Calvinists, is well known to such as have studied old diaries of the Massachusetts ministers. Thus, a minister of Malden (a successor of the awful Michael Wigglesworth, whose alleged poem, "The Day of Doom," as Cotton Mather thought, might perhaps "find our children till the Day itself arrives"), in his diary for 1735, thus enters his trying experiences with a "one-horse Shay," whose short life may claim comparison with that of the hundred-year master-piece of Dr. Holmes's deacon:-- "_January 31._ Bought a shay for £27 10_s._ The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family. "_March, 1735._ Had a safe and comfortable journey to York. "_April 24._ Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver! Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful the preservation! "_May 5._ Went to the Beach with three of the children. The Beast being frighted, when we were all out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study, and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses? "_May 15._ Shay brought home; mending cost 30 shillings. Favored in this beyond expectation. "_May 16._ My wife and I rode to Rumney Marsh. The Beast frighted several times." At last this divine comedy ends with the pathetic conclusive line,-- "_June 4._ Disposed of my shay to the Rev. Mr. White." I will not pause to dwell on the laughable episodes and queer characteristic features of the Transcendental Period, though such it had in abundance. They often served to correct the soberer absurdity with which our whole country was slipping unconsciously down the easy incline of national ruin and dishonor,--from which only a bloody civil war could at last save us. Thoreau saw this clearly, and his political utterances, paradoxical as they seemed in the two decades from 1840 to 1860, now read like the words of a prophet. But there are some points in the American Renaissance which may here be touched on, so much light do they throw on the times. It was a period of strange faiths and singular apocalypses--that of Charles Fourier being one. In February, 1843, Mr. Emerson, writing to Henry Thoreau from New York, where he was then lecturing, said:-- "Mr. Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour and a half of what he calls his principles, and he shames truer men by his fidelity and zeal; and already begins to hear the reverberations of his single voice from most of the States of the Union. He thinks himself sure of W. H. Channing here, as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous whilst he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating paragraphs out of his master's book) descriptions of the self-augmenting potency of the solar system, which is destined to contain one hundred and thirty-two bodies, I believe,--and his urgent inculcation of our _stellar duties_. But it has its kernel of sound truth, and its insanity is so wide of the New York insanities that it is virtue and honor." This was written a few months before Thoreau himself went to New York, and it was while there that he received from his friends in Concord and in Harvard, the wondrous account of Mr. Alcott's Paradise Regained at Fruitlands; where in due time Thoreau made his visit and inspected that Garden of Eden on the Coldspring Brook. If Mr. Brisbane had his "stellar duties" and inculcated them in others, the Brook Farmers of 1842-43 had their planetary mission also; namely, to cultivate the face of the planet they inhabited, and to do it with their own hands, as Adam and Noah did. Of the Brook Farm enterprise much has been written, and much more will be; but concerning the more individual dream of Thoreau's friends at "Fruitlands," less is known; and I may quote a few pages concerning it from Thoreau's correspondence. While Thoreau was at Staten Island in 1843, Mr. Emerson wrote to him often, giving the news of Concord as a Transcendental capital. In May of that year we have this intelligence:-- "Ellery Channing is well settled in his house, and works very steadily thus far, and our intercourse is very agreeable to me. Young Ball (B. W.) has been to see me, and is a prodigious reader and a youth of great promise,--born, too, in the good town. Mr. Hawthorne is well, and Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane are revolving a purchase in Harvard of ninety acres." This was "Fruitlands," described in the "Dial" for 1843, and which Charles Lane himself describes in a letter soon to be cited. In June, 1843, Mr. Emerson again sends tidings from Concord, where the Fitchburg railroad was then building:-- "The town is full of Irish, and the woods of engineers, with theodolite and red flag, singing out their feet and inches to each other from station to station. Near Mr. Alcott's (the Hosmer cottage) the road is already begun. From Mr. A. and Mr. Lane at Harvard we have yet heard nothing. They went away in good spirits, having sent 'Wood Abram' and Larned, and William Lane before them with horse and plow, a few days in advance, to begin the spring work. Mr. Lane paid me a long visit, in which he was more than I had ever known him gentle and open; and it was impossible not to sympathize with and honor projects that so often seem without feet or hands. They have near a hundred acres of land which they do not want, and no house, which they want first of all. But they account this an advantage, as it gives them the occasion they so much desire,--of building after their own idea. In the event of their attracting to their company a carpenter or two, which is not impossible, it would be a great pleasure to see their building,--which could hardly fail to be new and beautiful. They have fifteen acres of woodland, with good timber." Then, passing in a moment from "Fruitlands" to Concord woods, Thoreau's friend writes:-- "Ellery Channing is excellent company, and we walk in all directions. He remembers you with great faith and hope, thinks you ought not to see Concord again these ten years; that you ought to grind up fifty Concords in your mill; and much other opinion and counsel he holds in store on this topic. Hawthorne walked with me yesterday afternoon, and not until after our return did I read his 'Celestial Railroad,' which has a serene strength we cannot afford not to praise, in this low life. I have letters from Miss Fuller at Niagara. She found it sadly cold and rainy at the Falls." Not so with Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane in the first flush of their hopes at Fruitlands. On the 9th of June,--the date of the letter just quoted being June 7,--Mr. Lane writes to Thoreau:-- "DEAR FRIEND,--The receipt of two acceptable numbers of the 'Pathfinder' reminds me that I am not altogether forgotten by one who, if not in the busy world, is at least much nearer to it externally than I am. Busy indeed we all are, since our removal here; but so recluse is our position, that with the world at large we have scarcely any connection. You may possibly have heard that, after all our efforts during the spring had failed to place us in connection with the earth, and Mr. Alcott's journey to Oriskany and Vermont had turned out a blank,--one afternoon in the latter part of May, Providence sent to us the legal owner of a slice of the planet in this township (Harvard), with whom we have been enabled to conclude for the concession of his rights. It is very remotely placed, nearly three miles beyond the village, without a road, surrounded by a beautiful green landscape of fields and woods, with the distance filled up by some of the loftiest mountains in the State. The views are, indeed, most poetic and inspiring. You have no doubt seen the neighborhood; but from these very fields, where you may at once be at home and out, there is enough to love and revel in for sympathetic souls like yours. On the estate are about fourteen acres of wood, part of it extremely pleasant as a retreat, a very sylvan realization, which only wants a Thoreau's mind to elevate it to classic beauty. "I have some imagination that you are not so happy and so well housed in your present position as you would be here amongst us; although at present there is much hard manual labor,--so much that, as you perceive, my usual handwriting is very greatly suspended. We have only two associates in addition to our own families; our house accommodations are poor and scanty; but the greatest want is of good female aid. Far too much labor devolves on Mrs. Alcott. If you should light on any such assistance, it would be charitable to give it a direction this way. We may, perhaps, be rather particular about the quality; but the conditions will pretty well determine the acceptability of the parties without a direct adjudication on our part. For though to me our mode of life is luxurious in the highest degree, yet generally it seems to be thought that the setting aside of all impure diet, dirty habits, idle thoughts, and selfish feelings, is a course of self-denial, scarcely to be encountered or even thought of in such an alluring world as this in which we dwell. "Besides the busy occupations of each succeeding day, we form, in this ample theatre of hope, many forthcoming scenes. The nearer little copse is designed as the site of the cottages. Fountains can be made to descend from their granite sources on the hill-slope to every apartment if required. Gardens are to displace the warm grazing glades on the south, and numerous human beings, instead of cattle, shall here enjoy existence. The farther wood offers to the naturalist and the poet an exhaustless haunt; and a short cleaning of the brook would connect our boat with the Nashua. Such are the designs which Mr. Alcott and I have just sketched, as, resting from planting, we walked round this reserve. "In your intercourse with the dwellers in the great city, have you alighted on Mr. Edward Palmer, who studies with Dr. Beach, the Herbalist? He will, I think, from his previous nature-love, and his affirmations to Mr. Alcott, be animated on learning of this actual wooing and winning of Nature's regards. We should be most happy to see him with us. Having become so far actual, from the real, we might fairly enter into the typical, if he could help us in any way to types of the true metal. We have not passed away from home, to see or hear of the world's doings, but the report has reached us of Mr. W. H. Channing's fellowship with the Phalansterians, and of his eloquent speeches in their behalf. Their progress will be much aided by his accession. To both these worthy men be pleased to suggest our humanest sentiments. While they stand amongst men, it is well to find them acting out the truest possible at the moment. "Just before we heard of this place, Mr. Alcott had projected a settlement at the Cliffs on the Concord River, cutting down wood and building a cottage; but so many more facilities were presented here that we quitted the old classic town for one which is to be not less renowned. As far as I could judge, our absence promised little pleasure to our old Concord friends; but at signs of progress I presume they rejoiced with, dear friend, "Yours faithfully, "CHARLES LANE." Another Palmer than the Edward here mentioned became an inmate of "Fruitlands," and, in course of time its owner; the abandoned paradise, which was held by Mr. Lane and Mr. Alcott for less than a year, is now the property of his son. Mr. Lane, after a time, returned to England and died there; Mr. Alcott to Concord, where, in 1845, he aided Thoreau in building his hut by Walden. Mr. Channing (the nephew and biographer of Dr. Channing) continued his connection with the "Phalansterians" in New Jersey until 1849 or later, for in that year Fredrika Bremer found him dwelling and preaching among them, at the "North American Phalanstery," to which he had been invited from his Unitarian parish in Cincinnati, about the time that Brook Farm was made a community, and before Mr. Alcott's dream had taken earthly shape at "Fruitlands." The account given by Miss Bremer of the terms upon which Mr. Channing was thus invited to New Jersey, show what was the spirit of Transcendentalism then, on its social side. They said to him,-- "Come to us,--be our friend and spiritual shepherd, but in perfect freedom. Follow your own inspiration,--preach, talk to us, how and when it appears best to you. We undertake to provide for your pecuniary wants; live free from anxiety, how, and where you will; but teach us how we should live and work; our homes and our hearts are open to you." It was upon such terms as this, honorable alike to those who gave and those who received, that much of the intellectual and spiritual work of the Transcendental revival was done. There was another and an unsocial side to the movement also, which Mr. Emerson early described in these words, that apply to Thoreau and to Alcott at one period:-- "It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof; they feel the disproportion between themselves and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work and crying out for somewhat worthy to do. They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house; to live in the country rather than in the town; and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. They are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign or domestic, in the abolition of the slave trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth; they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can do nothing for humanity." It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,--this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. I know few epistles more pathetic in their humility and concern for the future, than one which Dr. Ripley addressed to Dr. Channing in February, 1839, after hearing and meditating on the utterances of Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, George Ripley, and the other "apostles of the newness," who disturbed with their oracles the quiet air of his parish. He wrote:-- "Denied, as I am, the privilege of going from home, of visiting and conversing with enlightened friends, and of reading even; broken down with the infirmities of age, and subject to fits that deprive me of reason and the use of my limbs, I feel it a duty to be patient and submissive to the will of God, who is too wise to err, and too good to injure. Some reason is left,--my mental powers, though weak, are yet awake, and I long to be doing something for good. The contrast between paper and ink is so strong, that I can write better than do anything else. In this way I take the liberty to express to you a few thoughts, which you will receive as well-meant and sincere.... "We may certainly assume that whatever is unreasonable, self-contradictory, and destitute of common sense, is erroneous. Should we not be likely to find the truth, in all moral subjects, were we to make more use of plain reason and common sense? I know that our modern speculators, Transcendentalists, or, as they prefer to be called, Realists, presume to follow Reason in her purest dictates, her sublime and unfrequented regions. They presume, by her power, not only to discover what is truth, but to judge of revealed truth. But is not their whole process marred by leaving out common sense, by which mankind are generally governed? That superiority which places a man above the power of doing good to his fellow-men seems to me not very desirable. I honor most the man who transcends others in capacity and disposition to do good, and whose daily practice corresponds with his profession. Here I speak of professed Christians. I would not treat with disrespect and severe censure men who advance sentiments which I may neither approve nor understand, provided their authors be men of learning, piety, and holy lives. The speculations and novel opinions of _such_ men rarely prove injurious. Nevertheless, I would that their mental endowments might find a better method of doing good,--a more simple and intelligible manner of informing and reforming their fellow-men.... "The hope of the gospel is my hope, my consolation, support and rejoicing. Such is my state of health that death is constantly before me; no minute would it be unexpected. I am waiting in faith and hope, but humble and penitent for my imperfections and faults. The prayer of the publican, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!' is never forgotten. I have hoped to see and converse with you, but now despair. If you shall think I use too much freedom with you, charge it to the respect and esteem which are cherished for your character by your affectionate friend and brother, "E. RIPLEY. "CONCORD, _February 26, 1839_." At this time Dr. Ripley was almost eighty-eight, and he lived two years longer, to mourn yet more pathetically over the change of times and manners. "It was fit," said Emerson, "that in the fall of laws, this loyal man should die." But the young men who succeeded him were no less loyal to the unwritten laws, and from their philosophy, which to the old theologian seemed so misty and unreal, there flowered forth, in due season, the most active and world-wide philanthropies. Twenty years after this pastoral epistle, there came to Concord another Christian of the antique type, more Puritan and Hebraic than Dr. Ripley himself, yet a Transcendentalist, too,--and JOHN BROWN found no lack of practical good-will in Thoreau, Alcott, Emerson, and the other Transcendentalists. The years had "come full circle," the Sibyl had burnt her last prophetic book, and the new æon was about to open with the downfall of slavery. CHAPTER VI. EARLY ESSAYS IN AUTHORSHIP. It has been a common delusion, not yet quite faded away, that the chief Transcendentalists were but echoes of each other,--that Emerson imitated Carlyle, Thoreau and Alcott imitated Emerson, and so on to the end of the chapter. No doubt that the atmosphere of each of these men affected the others, nor that they shared a common impulse communicated by what Matthew Arnold likes to call the _Zeitgeist_,--the ever-felt spirit of the time. In the most admirable of the group, who is called by preëminence "the Sage of Concord,"--the poet Emerson,--there has been an out-breathing inspiration as profound as that of the _Zeitgeist_ himself; so that even Hawthorne, the least susceptible of men, found himself affected as he says, "after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's." But, in fact, Thoreau brought to his intellectual tasks an originality as marked as Emerson's, if not so brilliant and star-like--a patience far greater than his, and a proud independence that makes him the most solitary of modern thinkers. I have been struck by these qualities in reading his yet unknown first essays in authorship, the juvenile papers he wrote while in college, from the age of seventeen to that of twenty, before Emerson had published anything except his first little volume, "Nature," and while Thoreau, like other young men, was reading Johnson and Goldsmith, Addison and the earlier English classics, from Milton backward to Chaucer. Let me therefore quote from these papers, carefully preserved by him, with their dates, and sometimes with the marks of the rhetorical professor on their margins. Along with these may be cited some of his earlier verses, in which a sentiment more purely human and almost amatory appears, than in the later and colder, if higher flights of his song. The earliest writings of Thoreau, placed in my hands by his literary executor, Mr. Harrison Blake of Worcester, are the first of his Cambridge essays, technically called "themes" and "forensics." These began several years before his daily journals were kept, namely, in 1834; and it is curious that one of them, dated January 17, 1835, but written in 1834, recommends "keeping a private journal or record of our thoughts, feelings, studies, and daily experience." This is precisely what Thoreau did from 1837 till his death; and it may be interesting to see what reasons the boy of seventeen advanced for the practice. He says:-- "As those pieces which the painter sketches for his own amusement, in his leisure hours, are often superior to his most elaborate productions, so it is that ideas often suggest themselves to us spontaneously, as it were, far surpassing in beauty those which arise in the mind upon applying ourselves to any particular subject. Hence, could a machine be invented which would instantaneously arrange upon paper each idea as it occurs to us, without any exertion on our part, how extremely useful would it be considered! The relation between this and the practice of keeping a journal is obvious.... If each one would employ a certain portion of each day in looking back upon the time which has passed, and in writing down his thoughts and feelings, in reckoning up his daily gains, that he may be able to detect whatever false coins may have crept into his coffers, and, as it were, in settling accounts with his mind,--not only would his daily experience be greatly increased, since his feelings and ideas would thus be more clearly defined,--but he would be ready to turn over a new leaf (having carefully perused the preceding one) and would not continue to glance carelessly over the same page, without being able to distinguish it from a new one." This is ingenious, quaint, and mercantile, bespeaking the hereditary bent of his family to trade and orderly accounts; but what follows in the same essay is more to the purpose, as striking the key-note of Thoreau's whole after-life. He adds:-- "Most of us are apt to neglect the study of our own characters, thoughts, and feelings, and, for the purpose of forming our own minds, look to others, _who should merely be considered as different editions of the same great work_. To be sure, it would be well for us to examine the various copies, that we might detect any errors; yet it would be foolish for one _to borrow a work which he possessed himself, but had not perused_." The earliest record of the day's observations which I find is dated a few months later than this (April 20, 1835), when Henry Thoreau was not quite eighteen, and relates to the beauties of nature. The first passage describes a Sunday prospect from the garret window of his father's house, (afterwards the residence of Mr. William Munroe, the benefactor of the Concord Library), on the main street of the village. He writes:-- "'Twas always my delight to monopolize the little Gothic window which overlooked the kitchen-garden, particularly of a Sabbath afternoon; when all around was quiet, and Nature herself was taking her afternoon nap,--when the last peal of the bell in the neighboring steeple, 'Swinging slow with sullen roar,' had 'left the vale to _solitude_ and _me_,' and the very air scarcely dared breathe, lest it should disturb the universal calm. Then did I use, with eyes upturned, to gaze upon the clouds, and, allowing my imagination to wander, search for flaws in their rich drapery, that I might get a peep at that world beyond, which they seem intended to veil from our view. Now is my attention engaged by a truant hawk, as, like a messenger from those ethereal regions, he issues from the bosom of a cloud, and, at first a mere speck in the distance, comes circling onward, exploring every seeming creek, and rounding every jutting precipice. And now, his mission ended, what can be more majestic than his stately flight, as he wheels around some towering pine, enveloped in a cloud of smaller birds that have united to expel him from their premises." The second passage, under the same date, seems to describe earlier and repeated visits, made by his elder brother John and himself, to a hill which was always a favorite resort of Thoreau's, Fairhaven Cliffs, overlooking the river-bay, known as "Fairhaven," a mile or two up the river from Concord village toward Sudbury:-- "In the freshness of the dawn my brother and I were ever ready to enjoy a stroll to a certain cliff, distant a mile or more, where we were wont to climb to the highest peak, and seating ourselves on some rocky platform, catch the first ray of the morning sun, as it gleamed upon the smooth, still river, wandering in sullen silence far below. The approach to the precipice is by no means calculated to prepare one for the glorious _dénouement_ at hand. After following for some time a delightful path that winds through the woods, occasionally crossing a rippling brook, and not forgetting to visit a sylvan dell, whose solitude is made audible by the unwearied tinkling of a crystal spring,--you suddenly emerge from the trees upon a flat and mossy rock, which forms the summit of a beetling crag. The feelings which come over one on first beholding this freak of nature are indescribable. The giddy height, the iron-bound rock, the boundless horizon open around, and the beautiful river at your feet, with its green and sloping banks, fringed with trees and shrubs of every description, are calculated to excite in the beholder emotions of no common occurrence,--to inspire him with noble and sublime emotions. The eye wanders over the broad and seemingly compact surface of the slumbering forest on the opposite side of the stream, and catches an occasional glimpse of a little farm-house, 'resting in a green hollow, and lapped in the bosom of plenty;' while a gentle swell of the river, a rustic, and fortunately rather old-looking bridge on the right, with the cloudlike Wachusett in the distance, give a finish and beauty to the landscape, that is rarely to be met with even in our own fair land. This interesting spot, if we may believe tradition, was the favorite haunt of the red man, before the axe of his pale-faced visitor had laid low its loftier honors, or his 'strong water' had wasted the energies of the race." Here we have a touch of fine writing, natural in a boy who had read Irving and Goldsmith, and exaggerating a little the dimensions of the rocks and rills of which he wrote. But how smooth the flow of description, how well-placed the words, how sure and keen the eye of the young observer! To this mount of vision did Thoreau and his friends constantly resort in after years, and it was on the plateau beneath that Mr. Alcott, in 1843, was about to cut down the woods and build his Paradise, when a less inviting fate, as he thought, beckoned his English friend Lane and himself to "Fruitlands," in the distant town of Harvard. At some time after this, perhaps while Thoreau was encamped at Walden with his books and his flute, Mr. Emerson sent him the following note, which gives us now a glimpse into that Arcadia:-- "Will you not come up to the Cliff this P. M., at any hour convenient to you, where our ladies will be greatly gratified to see you? and the more, they say, if you will bring your flute for the echo's sake, though now the wind blows. "R. W. E. "Monday, 1 o'clock P. M." It does not appear that Thoreau wrote verses at this time, though he was a great reader of the best poetry,--of Milton very early, and with constant admiration and quotation. Thus, in a college essay of 1835, on "Simplicity of Style," he has this passage concerning the Bible and Milton:-- "The most sublime and noblest precepts may be conveyed in a plain and simple strain. The Scriptures afford abundant proof of this. What images can be more natural, what sentiments of greater weight and at the same time more noble and exalted than those with which they abound? They possess no local or relative ornament which may be lost in a translation; clothed in whatever dress, they still retain their peculiar beauties. Here is simplicity itself. Every one allows this, every one admires it, yet how few attain to it! The union of wisdom and simplicity is plainly hinted at in the following lines of Milton:-- "Suspicion sleeps At Wisdom's gate, and to _Simplicity_ Resigns her charge.'" Early in 1837 Thoreau wrote an elaborate paper, though of no great length, on Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," with many quotations, in course of which he said:-- "These poems place Milton in an entirely new and extremely pleasing light to the reader, who was previously familiar with him as the author of 'Paradise Lost' alone. If before he venerated, he may now admire and love him. The immortal Milton seems for a space to have put on mortality,--to have snatched a moment from the weightier cares of Heaven and Hell, to wander for a while among the sons of men.... I have dwelt upon the poet's beauties and not so much as glanced at his blemishes. A pleasing image, or a fine sentiment loses none of its charms, though Burton, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Marlowe, or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written something very similar,--or even in another connection, may have used the identical word, whose aptness we so much admire. That always appeared to me a contemptible kind of criticism which, deliberately and in cold blood, can dissect the sublimest passage, and take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incongruities; when applied to Milton, it is little better than sacrilege." The moral view taken by the young collegian in these essays is quite as interesting as the literary opinions, or the ease of his style. In September, 1835, discussing punishments, he says:-- "Certainty is more effectual than severity of punishment. No man will deliberately cut his own fingers. Some have asked, 'Cannot reward be substituted for punishment? Is hope a less powerful incentive to action than fear? When a political pharmacopoeia has the command of both ingredients, wherefore employ the bitter instead of the sweet?' This reasoning is absurd. Does a man deserve to be rewarded for refraining from murder? Is the greatest virtue merely negative? or does it rather consist in the performance of a thousand every-day duties, hidden from the eye of the world?" In an essay on the effect of story-telling, written in 1836, he says:-- "The story of the world never ceases to interest. The child enchanted by the melodies of Mother Goose, the scholar pondering 'the tale of Troy divine,' and the historian breathing the atmosphere of past ages,--all manifest the same passion, are alike the creatures of curiosity. The same passion for the novel (somewhat modified, to be sure), that is manifested in our early days, leads us, in after-life, when the sprightliness and credulity of youth have given way to the reserve and skepticism of manhood, to the more serious, though scarcely less wonderful annals of the world. The love of stories and of story-telling cherishes a purity of heart, a frankness and candor of disposition, a respect for what is generous and elevated, a contempt for what is mean and dishonorable, and tends to multiply merry companions and never-failing friends." In March, 1837, in an essay on the source of our feeling of the sublime, Thoreau says:-- "The emotion excited by the sublime is the most unearthly and god-like we mortals experience. It depends for the peculiar strength with which it takes hold on and occupies the mind, upon a principle which lies at the foundation of that worship which we pay to the Creator himself. And is fear the foundation of that worship? Is fear the ruling principle of our religion? Is it not rather the mother of superstition? Yes, that principle which prompts us to pay an involuntary homage to the infinite, the incomprehensible, the sublime, forms the very basis of our religion. It is a principle implanted in us by our Maker, a part of our very selves; we cannot eradicate it, we cannot resist it; fear may be overcome, death may be despised; but the infinite, the sublime seize upon the soul and disarm it. We may overlook them, or rather fall short of them; we may pass them by, but, so sure as we meet them face to face, we yield." Speaking of national characteristics, he says:-- "It is not a little curious to observe how man, the boasted lord of creation, is the slave of a name, a mere sound. How much mischief have those magical words, North, South, East, and West caused! Could we rest satisfied with one mighty, all-embracing West, leaving the other three cardinal points to the Old World, methinks we should not have cause for so much apprehension about the preservation of the Union." (This was written in February, 1837.) Before he had reached the age of nineteen he thus declared his independence of foreign opinion, while asserting its general sway over American literature, in 1836:-- "We are, as it were, but colonies. True, we have declared our independence, and gained our liberty, but we have dissolved only the political bands which connected us with Great Britain; though we have rejected her tea, she still supplies us with food for the mind. The aspirant to fame must breathe the atmosphere of foreign parts, and learn to talk about things which the homebred student never dreamed of, if he would have his talents appreciated or his opinion regarded by his countrymen. Ours are authors of the day, they bid fair to outlive their works; they are too fashionable to write for posterity. True, there are some amongst us, who can contemplate the babbling brook, without, in imagination, polluting its waters with a mill-wheel; but even they are prone to sing of skylarks and nightingales perched on hedges, to the neglect of the homely robin-redbreast and the straggling rail-fences of their own native land." So early did he take this position, from which he never varied. In May, 1837, we find another note of his opening life, in an essay on Paley's "Common Reasons." He says:-- "Man does not wantonly rend the meanest tie that binds him to his fellows; he would not stand aloof, even in his prejudices, did not the stern demands of truth require it. He is ready enough to float with the tide, and when he does stem the current of popular opinion, sincerity, at least, must nerve his arm. He has not only the burden of proof, but that of reproof to support. We may call him a fanatic, an enthusiast; but these are titles of honor; they signify the devotion and entire surrendering of himself to his cause. So far as my experience goes, man _never_ seriously maintained an objectionable principle, doctrine, or theory; error _never_ had a sincere defender; her disciples were _never_ enthusiasts. This is strong language, I confess, but I do not rashly make use of it. We are told that 'to err is human,' but I would rather call it inhuman, if I may use the word in this sense. I speak not of those errors that have to do with facts and occurrences, but rather, errors of judgment." Here we have that bold generalization and that calm love of paradox which mark his later style. The lofty imagination was always his, too, as where this youth of nineteen says in the same essay:-- "Mystery is yet afar off,--it is but a cloud in the distance, whose shadow, as it flits across the landscape, gives a pleasing variety to the scene. But as the perfect day approaches, its morning light discovers the dark and straggling clouds, which at first skirted the horizon, assembling as at a signal, and as they expand and multiply, rolling slowly onward to the zenith, till, at last, the whole heavens, if we except a faint glimmering in the East, are overshadowed." What a confident and flowing movement of thought is here! like the prose of Milton or Jeremy Taylor, but with a more restrained energy. "Duty," writes the young moralist in another essay of 1837, "is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity; so far as it exists, it is binding; and, if all duties are binding, so as on no account to be neglected, how can one bind stronger than another?" "None but the highest minds can attain to moral excellence. With by far the greater part of mankind religion is a habit; or rather habit is religion. However paradoxical it may seem, it appears to me that to reject _religion_ is the first step towards moral excellence; at least no man ever attained to the highest degree of the latter by any other road. Could infidels live double the number of years allotted to other mortals, they would become patterns of excellence. So, too, of all true poets,--they would neglect the beautiful for the true." I suspect that Thoreau's first poems date from the year 1836-37, since the "big red journal," in which they were copied, was begun in October, 1837. The verses entitled, "To the Maiden in the East," were by no means among the first, which date from 1836 or earlier; but near these in time was that poem called "Sympathy," which was the first of his writings to appear in Mr. Emerson's "Dial." These last were addressed, we are told, to Ellen Sewall, with whom, the legend says, both Henry and John Thoreau were in love. Few of these poems show any imitation of Mr. Emerson, whose own verses at that time were mostly unpublished, though he sometimes read them in private to his friends. But like most of Thoreau's verses, these indicate a close familiarity with the Elizabethan literature, and what directly followed it, in the time of the Stuarts. The measure of "Sympathy" was that of Davenant's "Gondibert," which Thoreau, almost alone of his contemporaries, had read; the thought was above Davenant, and ranged with Raleigh and Spenser. These verses will not soon be forgotten:-- "Lately, alas! I knew a gentle boy, Whose features all were cast in Virtue's mould, As one she had designed for Beauty's toy, But after manned him for her own stronghold. "Say not that Cæsar was victorious, With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame; In other sense this youth was glorious, Himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came. * * * * * "Eternity may not the chance repeat, But I must tread my single way alone, In sad remembrance that we once did meet, And know that bliss irrevocably gone. "The spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, For elegy has other subject none; Each strain of music in my ears shall ring Knell of departure from that other one. * * * * * "Is't then too late the damage to repair? Distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft The empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, But in my hands the wheat and kernel left. "If I but love that virtue which he is, Though it be scented in the morning air, Still shall we be dearest acquaintances, Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare." The other poem seems to have been written later than the separation of which that one so loftily speaks; and it vibrates with a tenderer chord than sympathy. It begins,-- "Low in the eastern sky Is set thy glancing eye," and then it goes on with the picture of lover-like things,--the thrushes and the flowers, until, he says, "The trees a welcome waved, And lakes their margin laved, When thy free mind To my retreat did wind." Then comes the Persian dialect of high love:-- "It was a summer eve,-- The air did gently heave, While yet a low-hung cloud Thy eastern skies did shroud; The lightning's silent gleam Startling my drowsy dream, _Seemed like the flash Under thy dark eyelash_. * * * * * "I'll be thy Mercury, Thou, Cytherea to me,-- _Distinguished by thy face The earth shall learn my place_. As near beneath thy light Will I outwear the night, With mingled ray Leading the westward way." "Let us," said Hafiz, "break up the tiresome roof of heaven into new forms,"--and with as bold a flight did this young poet pass to his "stellar duties." Then dropping to the Concord meadow again, like the tuneful lark, he chose a less celestial path "Of gentle slope and wide, As thou wert by my side; I'll walk with gentle pace, And choose the smoothest place, And careful dip the oar, And shun the winding shore, And gently steer my boat Where water-lilies float, And cardinal flowers Stand in their sylvan bowers." A frivolous question has sometimes been raised whether the young Thoreau knew what love was, like the Sicilian shepherd, who found him a native of the rocks, a lion's whelp. With his poet-nature, he early gathered this experience, and passed on; praising afterwards the lion's nature in the universal god:-- "Implacable is Love,-- Foes may be bought or teased From their hostile intent,-- But he goes unappeased Who is on kindness bent. "There's nothing in the world, I know, That can escape from Love, For every depth it goes below, And every height above." The Red Journal of five hundred and ninety-six long pages, in which the early verses occur, was the first collection of Thoreau's systematic diarizing. It ran on from October, 1837, to June, 1840, and was succeeded by another journal of three hundred and ninety-six pages, which was finished early in 1841. He wrote his first lecture (on Society) in March, 1838, and read it before the Concord Lyceum in the Freemasons' Hall, April 11, 1838. In the December following he wrote a memorable essay on "Sound and Silence," and in February, 1840, wrote his "first printed paper of consequence," as he says, on "Aulus Persius Flaccus." The best of the early verses seem to have been written in 1836-41. His contributions to the "Dial," which he helped edit, were taken from his journals, and ran through nearly every number from July, 1840, to April, 1844, when that magazine ceased. For these papers he received nothing but the thanks of Emerson and the praise of a few readers. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, in February, 1843, wrote to Thoreau, that "the regular income of the 'Dial' does not pay the cost of its printing and paper; yet there are readers enough to support it, if they would only subscribe; and they will subscribe, if they are convinced that only by doing so can they secure its continuance." They did not subscribe, and in the spring of 1844 it came to an end. In 1842 Thoreau took a walk to Wachusett, his nearest mountain, and the journal of this excursion was printed in the "Boston Miscellany" of 1843. In it occurred the verses, written at least as early as 1841, in which he addresses the mountains of his horizon, Monadnoc, Wachusett, and the Peterborough Hills of New Hampshire. These verses were for some time in the hands of Margaret Fuller, for publication in the "Dial," if she saw fit, but she returned them with the following characteristic letter,--the first addressed by her to Thoreau:-- "[CONCORD] _18th October, 1841_. "I do not find the poem on the mountains improved by mere compression, though it might be by fusion and glow. Its merits to me are, a noble recognition of Nature, two or three manly thoughts, and, in one place, a plaintive music. The image of the ships does not please me originally. It illustrates the greater by the less, and affects me as when Byron compares the light on Jura to that of the dark eye of woman. I cannot define my position here, and a large class of readers would differ from me. As the poet goes on to-- "Unhewn primeval timber, For knees so stiff, for masts so limber." he seems to chase an image, already rather forced, into conceits. "Yet, now that I have some knowledge of the man, it seems there is no objection I could make to his lines (with the exception of such offenses against taste as the lines about the humors of the eye, as to which we are already agreed), which I would not make to himself. He is healthful, rare, of open eye, ready hand, and noble scope. He sets no limits to his life, nor to the invasions of nature; he is not willfully pragmatical, cautious, ascetic, or fantastical. But he is as yet a somewhat bare hill, which the warm gales of Spring have not visited. Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail; we can number and mark the substances imbedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. Yet what could a companion do at present, unless to tame the guardian of the Alps too early? Leave him at peace amid his native snows. He is friendly; he will find the generous office that shall educate him. It is not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather. "The unfolding of affections, a wider and deeper human experience, the harmonizing influences of other natures, will mould the man and melt his verse. He will seek thought less and find knowledge the more. I can have no advice or criticism for a person so sincere; but, if I give my impression of him, I will say, 'He says too constantly of Nature, she is mine.' She is not yours till you have been more hers. Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture. Say not so confidently, all places, all occasions are alike. This will never come true till you have found it false. "I do not know that I have more to say now; perhaps these words will say nothing to you. If intercourse should continue, perhaps a bridge may be made between two minds so widely apart; for I apprehended you in spirit, and you did not seem to mistake me so widely as most of your kind do. If you should find yourself inclined to write to me, as you thought you might, I dare say, many thoughts would be suggested to me; many have already, by seeing you from day to day. Will you finish the poem in your own way, and send it for the 'Dial'? Leave out "And seem to milk the sky." The image is too low; Mr. Emerson thought so too. "Farewell! May truth be irradiated by Beauty! Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut,[8] and write to me about Shakespeare, if you read him there. I have many thoughts about him, which I have never yet been led to express. "MARGARET F. "The penciled paper Mr. E. put into my hands. I have taken the liberty to copy it. You expressed one day my own opinion,--that the moment such a crisis is passed, we may speak of it. There is no need of artificial delicacy, of secrecy; it keeps its own secrets; it cannot be made false. Thus you will not be sorry that I have seen the paper. Will you not send me some other records of the _good week_?" "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." This searching criticism would not offend Thoreau; nor yet the plainness with which the same tongue told the faults of a prose paper--perhaps "The Service,"--which Margaret rejected in this note:-- "[CONCORD] _1st December (1841)_. "I am to blame for so long detaining your manuscript. But my thoughts have been so engaged that I have not found a suitable hour to reread it as I wished, till last night. This second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be _pained_ not to meet it again. But then, the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without _pain_. I never once feel myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating of tools on the mosaic. It is true, as Mr. Emerson says, that essays not to be compared with this have found their way into the 'Dial.' But then, these are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding, which induces us to permit their presence. Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding." These were the years of Thoreau's apprenticeship in literature, and many were the tasks and mortifications he must endure before he became a master of the writer's art. CHAPTER VII. FRIENDS AND COMPANIONS. "Margaret Fuller," says William Henry Channing, "was indeed The Friend; this was her vocation." It was no less the vocation of Thoreau, though in a more lofty, unvarying, and serene manner. "Literally," says the friend who best knew him, "his views of friendship were high and noble. Those who loved him never had the least reason to regret it. He made no useless professions, never asked one of those questions that destroy all relation; but he was on the spot at the time, and had so much of human life in his keeping to the last, that he could spare a breathing-place for a friend. He meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it without the slightest abatement; not veering as a weathercock with each shift of a friend's fortune, nor like those who bury their early friendships, in order to make room for fresh corpses." It is, therefore, impossible to sketch him by himself. He could have said, with Ellery Channing,-- "O band of Friends, ye breathe within this space, And the rough finish of a humble man By your kind touches rises into art." His earliest companion was his brother John, "a flowing generous spirit," as one described him, for whom his younger brother never ceased to grieve. Walking among the Cohasset rocks and looking at the scores of shipwrecked men from the Irish brig St. John, in 1849, he said, "A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but one corpse." With him it was the funeral of John Thoreau in February, 1842. They had made the voyage of the Concord and Merrimac together, in 1839; they had walked and labored together, and invented Indian names for one another from boyhood. John was "Sachem Hopeful of Hopewell,"--a sunny soul, always serene and loving. When publishing his first book, in 1849, Henry dedicated it to this brother, with the simple verse-- "Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me, Though now thou climbest loftier mounts, And fairer rivers dost ascend, Be thou my Muse, my Brother John." John Thoreau's death was singular and painful; his brother could not speak of it without physical suffering, so that when he related it to his friend Ricketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to go to the door for air. This was the only time Mr. Ricketson ever saw him show deep emotion. His sister Sophia once said:-- "Henry rarely spoke of dear John; it pained him too much. He sent the following verses from Staten Island in May, 1843, the year after John's death, in a letter to Helen. You will see that they apply to himself:"-- "Brother, where dost thou dwell? What sun shines for thee now? Dost thou, indeed, fare well, As we wished here below? "What season didst thou find? 'T was winter here. Are not the Fates more kind Than they appear? "Is thy brow clear again, As in thy youthful years? And was that ugly pain The summit of thy fears? "Yet thou wast cheery still; They could not quench thy fire; Thou didst abide their will, And then retire. "Where chiefly shall I look To feel thy presence near? Along the neighboring brook May I thy voice still hear? "Dost thou still haunt the brink Of yonder river's tide? And may I ever think That thou art by my side? "What bird wilt thou employ To bring me word of thee? For it would give them joy,-- 'T would give them liberty, To serve their former lord With wing and minstrelsy. "A sadder strain mixed with their song, They've slowlier built their nests; Since thou art gone Their lively labor rests. "Where is the finch, the thrush I used to hear? Ah, they could well abide The dying year. "Now they no more return, I hear them not; They have remained to mourn; Or else forgot." Before the death of his brother, Thoreau had formed the friendship with Ellery Channing, that was in some degree to replace the daily intimacy he had enjoyed with John Thoreau. This man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make genius an unhappy boon, was a year younger than Thoreau when he came, in 1843, to dwell in Concord with his bride, a younger sister of Margaret Fuller. They lived first in a cottage near Mr. Emerson's, Thoreau being at that time an inmate of Mr. Emerson's household; afterwards, in 1843, Mr. Channing removed to a hill-top some miles away, then to New York in 1844-45, then to Europe for a few months, and finally to a house on the main street of the village, opposite the last residence of the Thoreau family, where Henry lived from 1850 till his death in 1862. In the garden of Mr. Channing's house, which lay on the river, Thoreau kept his boat, under a group of willows, and from that friendly harbor all his later voyages were made. At times they talked of occupying this house together. "I have an old house and a garden patch," said Channing, "you have legs and arms, and we both need each other's companionship. These miserable cracks and crannies which have made the wall of life look thin and fungus-like, will be cemented by the sweet and solid mortar of friendship." They did in fact associate more closely than if they had lived in the same house. At the age of thirty-seven, when contemplating a removal from the neighborhood of his friend Thoreau, this humorous man of letters thus described himself and his tastes to another friend:-- "I am a poet, or of a poetical temper or mood, with a very limited income both of brains and of moneys. This world is rather a sour world. But as I am, equally with you, an admirer of Cowper, why should I not prove a sort of unnecessary addition to your neighborhood possibly? I may leave Concord, and my aim would be to get a small place, in the vicinity of a large town, with some land, and, if possible, near to some _one_ person with whom I might in some measure fraternize. Come, my neighbor! thou hast now a new occupation, the setting up of a poet and literary man,--one who loves old books, old garrets, old wines, old pipes, and (last not least) Cowper. We might pass the winter in comparing _variorum_ editions of our favorite authors, and the summer in walking and horticulture. This is a grand scheme of life. All it requires is the house of which I spake. I think one in middle life feels averse to change, and especially to local change. The Lares and Penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving. But the fatal hour may come, when, bidding one long, one last adieu to those weather-beaten Penates, we sally forth with Don Quixote, once more to strike our lances into some new truth, or life, or man." This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship" was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin. When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered, "with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is better some things should end." Of their earlier friendship, and of Channing's poetic gift, so admirable, yet so little appreciated by his contemporaries, this mention occurs in a letter written by Thoreau in March, 1856:-- "I was surprised to hear the other day that Channing was in X. When he was here last (in December, I think), he said, like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he lived, 'that he did not know the name of the place;' so it has remained in a degree of obscurity to me. I am rejoiced to hear that you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. He and I, as you know, have been old cronies,-- "'Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill, Together both, ere the high lawns appeared Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield, and both together heared,' etc. "'But O, the heavy change,' now he is gone. The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most that you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be 'reserved and enigmatic,' and you must deal with him at arm's length. I have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. Nor need I suggest how witty and poetic he is,--and what an inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship you will find in him." In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or three miles away from the hermitage. "He who came from farthest to my lodge," says Thoreau, "through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours; even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,--making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest." In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse, he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the latter,-- "On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay, Down this still stream we took our meadowy way, A poet wise hath settled whose fine ray Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day. Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, Shining more brightly as the day goes by, Most travelers cannot at first descry, But eyes that wont to range the evening sky." These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this neglected poet said:-- "Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray. _There is no other test_ of the value of poetry, but its popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called verses; but they are not good,--they are wholly unknown and unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than nothing,--and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented S. with the last set of those little books there is, to have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary _curio_, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking, 'How could ever I have liked these?'" Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,-- "If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea,"-- and who cried to his companions,-- "Ye heavy-hearted mariners Who sail this shore,-- Ye patient, ye who labor, Sitting at the sweeping oar, And see afar the flashing sea-gulls play On the free waters, and the glad bright day Twine with his hand the spray,-- From out your dreariness, From your heart-weariness, I speak, for I am yours On these gray shores." It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to his friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing thus addressed him:-- "Modest and mild and kind, Who never spurned the needing from thy door-- (Door of thy heart, which is a palace-gate); Temperate and faithful,--in whose word the world Might trust, sure to repay; unvexed by care, Unawed by Fortune's nod, slave to no lord, Nor coward to thy peers,--long shalt thou live! Not in this feeble verse, this sleeping age,-- But in the roll of Heaven, and at the bar Of that high court where Virtue is in place, There thou shalt fitly rule, and read the laws Of that supremer state,--writ Jove's behest, And even old Saturn's chronicle; Works ne'er Hesiod saw,--types of all things, And portraitures of all--whose golden leaves, Roll back the ages' doors, and summon up Unsleeping truths, by which wheels on Heaven's prime." In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley, he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been constant. "If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of all human privileges," he said one day, after returning from an evening spent at Walden with Thoreau, "it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To most, the presence of such is painfully irksome; they are lovers of present reputation, and not of that exaltation of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau; and the evenings passed in their society during these winter months have realized my conception of what friendship, when great and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects." Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long winter evenings with him in the hut:-- "One of the last of the philosophers," he writes in "Walden,"--"Connecticut gave him to the world,--he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,--the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. Of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, _ingenuus_. Great Looker! great Expecter! to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of,--we three,--it expanded and racked my little house." Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem, at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt Whitman in Brooklyn the same year. Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of 1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after his marriage in 1842:-- "There in the old gray house, whose end we see Half peeping through the golden willow's veil, Whose graceful twigs make foliage through the year, My Hawthorne dwelt, a scholar of rare worth, The gentlest man that kindly nature drew; New England's Chaucer, Hawthorne fitly lives. His tall, compacted figure, ably strung To urge the Indian chase or guide the way, Softly reclining 'neath the aged elm, Like some still rock looked out upon the scene, As much a part of nature as itself." In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire mountains, Thoreau said:-- "Mr. Hawthorne has come home. I went to meet him the other evening (at Mr. Emerson's), and found that he had not altered, except that he was looking pretty brown after his voyage. He is as simple and childlike as ever." This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad, in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish church near by. Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate, of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island. In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on "the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this occasion--Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty--all these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H. Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates of Harvard a year before Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except Alcott were Cambridge scholars,--for Margaret Fuller, without entering college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the "Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ." This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record of his friendships, and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was made public:-- "This evening I pass with Thoreau at his hermitage on Walden, and he reads me some passages from his manuscript volume, entitled 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers.' The book is purely American, fragrant with the life of New England woods and streams, and could have been written nowhere else. Especially am I touched by his sufficiency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor,--as if a man had once more come into Nature who knew what Nature meant him to do with her,--Virgil, and White of Selborne, and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all in one. I came home at midnight, through the woody snow-paths, and slept with the pleasing dream that presently the press would give me two books to be proud of--Emerson's 'Poems,' and Thoreau's 'Week.'" This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr. Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic," and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which, nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April 20, 1848, and said:-- "I find Chapman very anxious to publish a journal common to Old and New England, as was long ago proposed. Froude and Clough and other Oxonians would gladly conspire. Let the 'Massachusetts Quarterly' give place to this, and we should have two legs, and bestride the sea. Here I know so many good-minded people that I am sure will gladly combine. But what do I, or does any friend of mine in America care for a journal? Not enough, I fear, to secure an energetic work on that side. I have a letter from Cabot lately and do write him to-day. 'Tis certain the Massachusetts 'Quarterly Review' will fail, unless Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and Channing and Newcome, the fourfold visages, fly to the rescue. I am sorry that Alcott's editor, the Dumont of our Bentham, the Baruch of our Jeremiah, is so slow to be born." In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing, at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr. Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9] Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr. Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his diary an incident not unusual in the town:-- "Our friend the fugitive, who has shared now a week's hospitalities with us (sawing and piling my wood), feels this new trust of Freedom yet unsafe here in New England, and so has left us this morning for Canada. We supplied him with the means of journeying, and bade him Godspeed to a freer land. His stay with us has given image and a name to the dire entity of slavery." It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's Walden hut. My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came, directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from my native town, as follows:-- "HAMPTON FALLS, N. H., _Jan'y_ 30th, '55. "MY DEAR SIR,--I have had it in mind to write you a letter ever since the day when you visited me, without my knowing it, at Cambridge. I saw you afterward at the Library, but refrained from introducing myself to you, in the hope that I should see you later in the day. But as I did not, will you allow me to seek you out, when next I come to Concord? "The author of the criticism in the 'Harvard Magazine' is Mr. Morton of Plymouth, a friend and pupil of your friend, Marston Watson, of that old town. Accordingly I gave him the book which you left with me, judging that it belonged to him. He received it with delight, as a gift of value in itself, and the more valuable for the sake of the giver. "We who at Cambridge look toward Concord as a sort of Mecca for our pilgrimages, are glad to see that your last book finds such favor with the public. It has made its way where your name has rarely been heard before, and the inquiry, 'Who is Mr. Thoreau?' proves that the book has in part done its work. For my own part, I thank you for the new light it shows me the aspects of Nature in, and for the marvelous beauty of your descriptions. At the same time, if any one should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be apt to answer that it is not worth a straw. Whenever again you visit Cambridge, be assured, sir, that it would give me much pleasure to see you at my room. There, or in Concord, I hope soon to see you; if I may intrude so much on your time. "Believe me always, yours very truly, "F. B. SANBORN." This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's. I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief note of his appearance:-- "To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek--which he thought ought to be studied--and about other things. In his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson, so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said many good things. He looks like Emerson, too,--coarser, but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E. has. Thoreau looks eminently _sagacious_--like a sort of wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his throat, and has a brown complexion." A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with other particulars:-- "He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose, bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest animal's--some retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson" [we young collegians then wearing ours upright], "and often an old dress-coat, broad in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired." Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In 1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in 1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him the stanchest of friends. This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with them, at least on his own side. "A truth-speaker he," said Emerson at his funeral, "capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." CHAPTER VIII. THE WALDEN HERMITAGE. It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly the scenes and events of his sylvan life,--his days and nights with Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often coming forth from it. The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,--though it would be hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any place which is not neighbor either to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet, "That like an arrowe clear Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"-- to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,-- "Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds." He gave beauty and dignity to obscure places by his mention of them; and it is curious that the neighborhood of Walden,--now the most romantic and poetical region of Concord, associated in every mind with this tender lover of Nature, and his worship of her,--was anciently a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters, such as fringed the sober garment of many a New England village in Puritanic times. Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where, in the early days of emancipation in Massachusetts, the newly freed slaves of Concord magnates took up their abode,-- "The wrathful kings on cairns apart," as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham, freedman of 'Squire Duncan Ingraham, who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard, on the day of Concord fight, was brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn, then something the worse for 'Squire Ingraham's wine, and ordered to "lay down his arms and disperse," as the rebels at Lexington had been six hours earlier. Here also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun linen, and made the Walden Woods resound with her shrill singing:-- "Dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos Assiduo resonat cantu, tectisque superbis Urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum, Arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas." But some paroled English prisoners in the War of 1812, burnt down her proud abode, with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens, while Zilpha was absent. Down the road towards the village from Cato's farm and Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived Brister Freeman, who gave his name to the hill,--Scipio Brister, "a handy negro," once the slave of 'Squire Cummings, but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's boyhood set free again by death, and buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near the ancestor of President Garfield, but still nearer the unmarked graves of British grenadiers, who fell in the retreat from Concord. With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus, in the edge of the Walden Woods, "dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly--large, round, and black,--such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord, before or since," says Thoreau. Such was the African colony on the south side of Concord village among the woods, while on the northern edge of the village, along the Great Meadows, there dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins, whose descendants still flit about the town. Older than all was the illustrious Guinea negro, John Jack, once a slave on the farm which is now the glebe of the Old Manse, but who purchased his freedom about the time the Old Manse was built in 1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph, written by Daniel Bliss, the young Tory brother of the first mistress of the manse (Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother of Emerson, the poet):-- "_God wills us free, Man wills us slaves, I will as God wills: God's will be done._ Here lies the body of JOHN JACK, A native of Africa, who died March, 1773, aged about sixty years. Though born in a land of slavery, He was born free; Though he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave; Till by his honest though stolen labors He acquired the source of slavery Which gave him his freedom; Though not long before Death the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And put him on a footing with kings. Though a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves." This epitaph, and the anecdote already given concerning Cæsar Robbins, may illustrate the humanity and humor with which the freedmen of Concord were regarded, while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in his early days of freedom, may show the mixture of savage fun and contempt that also followed them, and which some of their conduct may have deserved. The village drover and butcher once had a ferocious bull to kill, and when he had succeeded with some difficulty in driving him into his slaughter-house, on the Walden road, nobody was willing to go in and kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from his hill near Walden, came along the road, and was slyly invited by the butcher to go into the slaughter-house for an axe,--being told that when he brought it he should have a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman opened the door and walked in; it was shut behind him, and he found the bull drawn up in line of battle before him. After some pursuit and retreat in the narrow arena, Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began attacking his pursuer, giving him a blow here or there as he had opportunity. His employers outside watched the bull-fight through a hole in the building, and cheered on the matador with shouts and laughter. At length, by a fortunate stroke, the African conquered, the bull fell, and his slayer threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt. But his tormentors declared "he was no longer the dim, sombre negro he went in, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool straightened out and standing erect on his head." Without waiting to be identified, or to receive pay for his work, Brister, affrighted and wrathful, withdrew to the wooded hill and to the companionship of his fortune-telling Fenda, who had not foreseen the hazard of her spouse. It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town "poor-farm" and poor-house,--the last retreat of these straggling soldiers of fortune,--that Thoreau went toward the village jail from his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn, but I never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the former denizens of the Walden woods--votaries of Bacchus and Apollo, and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,--like Giordano Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,-- "_Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco, Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco_." It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter VI.), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr. Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had bought land on both sides of Walden Pond. How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5, 1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr. Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his cabin. Channing writes:-- "I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else. Concord is just as good a place as any other; there are, indeed, more people in the streets of that village than in the streets of this." [He was writing from the Tribune Office, in New York.] "This is a singularly muddy town; muddy, solitary, and silent. I saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words to me about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau might be something, if he would only take a journey through the Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G--,' said the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about nothing? and that nutmeg-grater of a Z. yet shriek about nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you philosophers.'" Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau, which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person Channing adds:-- "I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka occasionally; my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale. In addition to this I find that my corresponding members at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear occasionally from the World; everything seems to be promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine, taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without necessity." It is well to read this shrewd humor, uttered in the opposite sense from Thoreau's paradoxical wit in his "Walden," as an introduction or motto to that book. For Thoreau has been falsely judged from the wit and the paradox of "Walden," as if he were a hater of men, or foolishly desired all mankind to retire to the woods. As Channing said, soon after his friend's death,-- "The fact that our author lived for a while alone in a shanty, near a pond, and named one of his books after the place where it stood, has led some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope. It was a writing-case; here in this wooden inkstand he wrote a good part of his famous 'Walden,' and this solitary woodland pool was more to his Muse than all oceans of the planet, by the force of imagination. Some have fancied, because he moved to Walden, he left his family. He bivouacked there and really lived at home, where he went every day." This last is not literally true, for he was sometimes secluded in his hut for days together; but he remained as social at Walden as he had been while an inmate of Mr. Emerson's family in 1841-43, or again in 1847-48, after giving up his hermitage. He, in fact, as he says himself,-- "Went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived." In another place he says he went to Walden to "transact some private business," and this he did to good purpose. He edited there his "Week," some portions of which had appeared in the "Dial" from 1840 to 1844, but which was not published as a volume until 1849, although he had made many attempts to issue it earlier. It was at Walden, also, that he wrote his essay on Carlyle, which was first published in "Graham's Magazine," at Philadelphia, in 1847, through the good offices of Horace Greeley, of which we shall hear more in the next chapter. Thoreau's hermit life was not, then, merely a protest against the luxury and the restraints of society, nor yet an austere discipline such as monks and saints have imposed upon themselves for their souls' good. "My purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles." He lived a life of labor and study in his hut. Emerson says, "as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it." He had edited his first book there; had satisfied himself that he was fit to be an author, and had passed his first examinations; then he graduated from that gymnasium as another young student might from the medical college or the polytechnic school. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there." His abandoned hut was then taken by a Scotch gardener, Hugh Whelan by name, who removed it some rods away, to the midst of Thoreau's bean-field, and made it his cottage for a few years. Then it was bought by a farmer, who put it on wheels and carried it three miles northward, toward the entry of the Estabrook Farm on the old Carlisle road, where it stood till after Thoreau's death,--a shelter for corn and beans, and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue jays. The wood-cut representing the hermitage in the first edition of "Walden," is from a sketch made by Sophia Thoreau, and is more exact than that given in Page's "Life of Thoreau," but in neither picture are the trees accurately drawn. On the spot where Thoreau lived at Walden there is now a cairn of stones, yearly visited by hundreds, and growing in height as each friend of his muse adds a stone from the shore of the fair water he loved so well. "Beat with thy paddle on the boat Midway the lake,--the wood repeats The ordered blow; the echoing note Is ended in thy ear; yet its retreats Conceal Time's possibilities; And in this Man the nature lies Of woods so green, And lakes so sheen, And hermitages edged between. And I may tell you that the Man was good, Never did his neighbor harm,-- Sweet was it where he stood, Sunny and warm; Like the seat beneath a pine That winter suns have cleared away With their yellow tine,-- Red-cushioned and tasseled with the day." The events and thoughts of Thoreau's life at Walden may be read in his book of that name. As a protest against society, that life was ineffectual,--as the communities at Brook Farm and Fruitlands had proved to be; and as the Fourierite phalansteries, in which Horace Greeley interested himself, were destined to be. In one sense, all these were failures; but in Thoreau's case the failure was slight, the discipline and experience gained were invaluable. He never regretted it, and the Walden episode in his career has made him better known than anything else. CHAPTER IX. HORACE IN THE RÔLE OF MÆCENAS. In a letter to his sister Sophia, July 21, 1843, written from Mr. William Emerson's house at Staten Island, Thoreau says:-- "In New York I have seen, since I wrote last, Horace Greeley, editor of the 'Tribune,' who is cheerfully in earnest at his office of all work,--a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet,--and says, 'Now be neighborly.' He believes only or mainly, first in the Sylvania Association, somewhere in Pennsylvania; and secondly, and most of all, in a new association, to go into operation soon in New Jersey, with which he is connected." This was the "Phalanstery" at which W. H. Channing afterward preached. A fortnight later, Thoreau writes to Mr. Emerson:-- "I have had a pleasant talk with W. H. Channing; and Greeley, too, it was refreshing to meet. They were both much pleased with your criticism on Carlyle, but thought that you had overlooked what chiefly concerned them in the book,--its practical aims and merits." This refers to the notice of Carlyle's "Past and Present," in the "Dial" for July, 1843, and shows that Mr. Greeley was a quick reader of that magazine, as Thoreau always was of the "New York Tribune." From this time onward a warm friendship continued between Thoreau and Greeley, and many letters went to and fro, which reveal the able editor in the light of a modern Mæcenas to the author of the Musketaquid Georgics. No letters seem to have passed between them earlier than 1846; and in 1844-45 Thoreau must have known the "Tribune" editor best through his newspaper, and from the letters of Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, and other common friends, who saw much of him then, admired and laughed at him, or did both by turns. Miss Fuller, who had gone to New York to write for the "Tribune," and to live in its Editor's family, wrote:-- "Mr. Greeley is a man of genuine excellence, honorable, benevolent, and of an uncorrupted disposition. He is sagacious, and, in his way, of even great abilities. In modes of life and manners, he is a man of the people,--and of the American people. With the exception of my own mother, I think him the most disinterestedly generous person I have ever known." There was a laughable side even to these fine traits, and there were eccentricities of dress and manner, which others saw more keenly than this generous woman. Ellery Channing,--whose eye no whimsical or beautiful object ever escaped,--in the letter of March, 1845, already cited, thus signaled to Thoreau the latest news of his friend:-- "Mumbo Jumbo is recovering from an attack of sore eyes, and will soon be out, in a pair of canvas trousers, scarlet jacket, and cocked hat. I understand he intends to demolish all the remaining species of Fetichism at a meal. I think it is probable it will vomit him." Thoreau wrote an essay on Carlyle in 1846, and in the summer of that year sent it to Mr. Greeley, with a request that he would find a place for it in some magazine. To this request, which Mr. Greeley himself had invited, no doubt, he thus replied:-- "_August 16, 1846._ "MY DEAR THOREAU,--Believe me when I say that I _mean_ to do the errand you have asked of me, and that soon. But I am not sanguine of success, and have hardly a hope that it will be immediate, if ever. I hardly know a work that would publish your article all at once, and 'to be continued' are words shunned like a pestilence. But I know you have written a good thing about Carlyle,--too solidly good, I fear, to be profitable to yourself, or attractive to publishers. Did'st thou ever, O my friend! ponder on the significance and cogency of the assurance, 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon,' as applicable to literature,--applicable, indeed, to all things whatsoever? God grant us grace to endeavor to serve Him rather than Mammon,--that ought to suffice us. In my poor judgment, if anything is calculated to make a scoundrel of an honest man, writing to sell is that very particular thing. "Yours heartily, "HORACE GREELEY. "Remind Ralph Waldo Emerson and wife of my existence and grateful remembrance." On the 30th of September Mr. Greeley again wrote, saying,-- "I learned to-day, through Mr. Griswold, former editor of 'Graham's Magazine,' that your lecture is accepted, to appear in that magazine. Of course it is to be paid for at the usual rate, as I expressly so stated when I inclosed it to Graham. He has not written me a word on the subject, which induces me to think he may have written you.[10] Please write me if you would have me speak further on the subject. The pay, however, is sure, though the amount may not be large, and I think you may wait until the article appears, before making further stipulations on the subject." From the tenor of this I infer that Thoreau had written to say that he might wish to read his "Thomas Carlyle" as a lecture, and desired to stipulate for that before it was printed. He might be excused for some solicitude concerning payment, from his recent experience with the publishers of the "Boston Miscellany," which had printed, in 1843, his "Walk to Wachusett." At the very time when Thoreau, in New York, was making Greeley's acquaintance, Mr. Emerson, in Boston, was dunning the Miscellaneous publishers, and wrote to Thoreau (July 20, 1843):-- "When I called on ----, their partner, in their absence, informed me that they could not pay you, at present, any part of their debt on account of the Boston 'Miscellany.' After much talking all the promise he could offer was, 'that within a year it would probably be paid,'--a probability which certainly looks very slender. The very worst thing he said was the proposition that you should take your payment in the form of Boston Miscellanies! I shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals." But I cannot learn that anything came of it. Mr. Greeley, as we shall see, was a more successful collector. On the 26th of October, 1846, he continued the adventures of the wandering essay as follows:-- "MY FRIEND THOREAU,--I know you think it odd that you have not heard further, and, perhaps blame my negligence or engrossing cares, but, if so, without good reason. I have to-day received a letter from Griswold, in Philadelphia, who says: 'The article by Thoreau on Carlyle is in type, and will be paid for liberally.' 'Liberally' is quoted as an expression of Graham's. I know well the difference between a publisher's and an author's idea of what _is_ 'liberally'; but I give you the best I can get as the result of three letters to Philadelphia on this subject. "Success to you, my friend! Remind Mr. and Mrs. Emerson of my existence, and my lively remembrance of their various kindnesses. "Yours, very busy in our political contest, "HORACE GREELEY." It would seem that "Griswold" (who was Rufus W. Griswold, the biographer of Poe) and "Graham" (who was George R. Graham, the magazine publisher of Philadelphia), did not move so fast either in publication or in payment as they had led Mr. Greeley to expect; and also that Thoreau became impatient and wrote to his friend that he would withdraw the essay. Whereupon Mr. Greeley, under date of February 5, 1847, wrote thus:-- "MY DEAR THOREAU,--Although your letter only came to hand to-day, I attended to its subject yesterday, when I was in Philadelphia, on my way home from Washington. Your article is this moment in type, and will appear about the 20th inst., _as the leading article_ in 'Graham's Magazine' for next month. Now don't object to this, nor be unreasonably sensitive at the delay. It is immensely more important to you that the article should appear thus (that is, if you have any literary aspirations) than it is that you should make a few dollars by issuing it in some other way. As to lecturing, you have been at perfect liberty to deliver it as a lecture a hundred times, if you had chosen,--the more the better. It is really a good thing, and I will see that Graham pays you fairly for it. But its appearance there is worth far more to you than money. I know there has been too much delay, and have done my best to obviate it. But I could not. A magazine that pays, and which it is desirable to be known as a contributor to, is always crowded with articles, and has to postpone some for others of even less merit. I do this myself with good things that I am not required to pay for. "Thoreau, do not think hard of Graham. Do not try to stop the publication of your article. It is best as it is. But just sit down and write a like article about Emerson, which I will give you $25 for, if you cannot do better with it; then one about Hawthorne at your leisure, etc., etc. I will pay you the money for each of these articles on delivery, publish them when and how I please, leaving to you the copyright expressly. In a year or two, if you take care not to write faster than you think, you will have the material of a volume worth publishing,--and then we will see what can be done. There is a text somewhere in St. Paul--my Scriptural reading is getting rusty,--which says, 'Look not back to the things which are behind, but rather to those which are before,' etc. Commending this to your thoughtful appreciation, I am, yours, etc. "HORACE GREELEY." The Carlyle essay did appear in two numbers of "Graham's Magazine" (March and April, 1847), but alas, no payment came to hand. After waiting a year longer, Thoreau wrote to Greeley again (March 31, 1848), informing him of the delinquency of Griswold and Graham. At once, his friend replied (April 3), "It saddens and surprises me to know that your article was not paid for by Graham; and, since my honor is involved in the matter, I will see that you _are_ paid, and that at no distant day." Accordingly on the 17th of May, 1848, he writes again as follows:-- "DEAR FRIEND THOREAU,--I trust you have not thought me neglectful or dilatory with regard to your business. I have done my very best, throughout, and it is only to-day that I have been able to lay my hand on the money due you from Graham. I have been to see him in Philadelphia, but did not catch him in his business office; then I have been here to meet him, and been referred to his brother, etc. I finally found the two numbers of the work in which your article was published (not easy, I assure you, for he has them not, nor his brother, and I hunted them up, and bought one of them at a very out-of-the-way place), and with these I made out a regular bill for the contribution; drew a draft on G. R. Graham for the amount, gave it to his brother here for collection, and to-day received the money. Now you see how to get pay yourself, another time; I have pioneered the way, and you can follow it easily yourself. There has been no intentional injustice on Graham's part; but he is overwhelmed with business, has too many irons in the fire, and we did not go at him the right way. Had you drawn a draft on him, at first, and given it to the Concord Bank to send in for collection, you would have received your money long since. Enough of this. I have made Graham pay you $75, but I only send you $50, for, having got so much for Carlyle, I am ashamed to take your 'Maine Woods' for $25." This last allusion is to a new phase of the queer patronage which the good Mæcenas extended to our Concord poet. In his letter of March 31, 1848, Thoreau had offered Greeley, in compliance with his suggestion of the previous year, a paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which afterwards appeared in the "Union Magazine." On the 17th of April Greeley writes:-- "I inclose you $25 for your article on Maine Scenery, as promised. I know it is worth more, though I have not yet found time to read it; but I have tried once to sell it without success. It is rather long for my columns, and too fine for the million; but I consider it a cheap bargain, and shall print it myself, if I do not dispose of it to better advantage. You will not, of course, consider yourself under any sort of obligation to me, for my offer was in the way of business, and I have got more than the worth of my money." On the 17th of May he adds:-- "I have expectations of procuring it a place in a new magazine of high character that will pay. I don't expect to get as much for it as for Carlyle, but I hope to get $50. If you are satisfied to take the $25 for your 'Maine Woods,' say so, and I will send on the money; but I don't want to seem a Jew, buying your articles at half price to speculate upon. If you choose to let it go that way, it shall be so; but I would sooner do my best for you, and send you the money." On the 28th of October, 1848, he writes: "I break a silence of some duration to inform you that I hope on Monday to receive payment for your glorious account of 'Ktaadn and the Maine Woods,' which I bought of you at a Jew's bargain, and sold to the 'Union Magazine.' I am to get $75 for it, and, as I don't choose to _exploiter_ you at such a rate, I shall insist on inclosing you $25 more in this letter, which will still leave me $25 to pay various charges and labors I have incurred in selling your articles and getting paid for them,--the latter by far the more difficult portion of the business." In the letter of April 17, 1848, Mr. Greeley had further said:-- "If you will write me two or three articles in the course of the summer, I think I can dispose of them for your benefit. But write not more than half as long as your article just sent me, for that is too long for the magazines. If that were in two, it would be far more valuable. What about your book (the 'Week')? Is anything going on about it now? Why did not Emerson try it in England? I think the Howitts could get it favorably before the British public. If you can suggest any way wherein I can put it forward, do not hesitate, but command me." In the letter of May 17th, he reiterates the advice to be brief:-- "Thoreau, if you will only write one or two articles, when in the spirit, about half the length of this, I can sell it readily and advantageously. The length of your papers is the only impediment to their appreciation by the magazines. Give me one or two shorter, and I will try to coin them speedily." May 25th he returns to the charge, when sending the last twenty-five dollars for the "Maine Woods":-- "Write me something shorter when the spirit moves (never write a line otherwise, for the hack writer is a slavish beast, _I_ know), and I will sell it for you soon. I want one shorter article from your pen that will be quoted, as these long articles cannot be, and let the public know something of your way of thinking and seeing. It will do good. What do you think of following out your thought in an essay on 'The Literary Life?' You need not make a personal allusion, but I know you can write an article worth reading on that theme, when you are in the vein." After a six months' interval (November 19, 1848), Greeley resumes in a similar strain:-- "FRIEND THOREAU,--Yours of the 17th received. Say we are even on money counts, and let the matter drop. I have tried to serve you, and have been fully paid for my own disbursements and trouble in the premises. So we will move on. "I think you will do well to send me some passages from one or both of your new works to dispose of to the magazines. This will be the best kind of advertisement, whether for a publisher or for readers. You may write with an angel's pen, yet your writings have no mercantile money value till you are known and talked of as an author. Mr. Emerson would have been twice as much known and read, if he had written for the magazines a little, just to let common people know of his existence. I believe a chapter from one of your books printed in 'Graham,' or 'The Union,' will add many to the readers of the volume when issued. Here is the reason why British books sell so much better among us than American,--because they are thoroughly advertised through the British reviews, magazines, and journals which circulate or are copied among us. However, do as you please. If you choose to send me one of your manuscripts I will get it published, but I cannot promise you any considerable recompense; and, indeed, if Munroe will do it, that will be better. Your writings are in advance of the general mind here; Boston is nearer their standard. I never saw the verses you speak of. Won't you send them again? I have been buried up in politics for the last six weeks. Kind regards to Emerson. It is doubtful about my seeing you this season." Here the letters ceased for a time. "Munroe did it,"--that is, a Boston bookseller published Thoreau's "Week," which was favorably reviewed by George Ripley in the "Tribune," by Lowell in the "Massachusetts Quarterly," and by others elsewhere; but the book did not sell, and involved its author in debt for its printing. To meet this he took up surveying as a business, and after a time, when some payment must be made, he asked his friend Greeley for a loan. In the interval, Margaret Fuller had written from Europe those remarkable letters for the "Tribune," had married in Italy, sailed for home in 1850, and died on the shore of Fire Island, near New York, whither Thoreau went with her friends to learn her fate, and recover the loved remains. This was in July, 1850, and he no doubt saw Mr. Greeley there. A year and a half later, when he was seeking opportunities to lecture, he wrote to Mr. Greeley again, in February, 1852, offering himself to lecture in a course at New York, which the "Tribune" editor had some interest in. The reply was this:-- "NEW YORK, _February 24, 1852_. "MY FRIEND THOREAU,--Thank you for your remembrance, though the motto you suggest is impracticable. The People's Course is full for the season; and even if it were not, your name would probably not pass; because it is not merely necessary that each lecturer should continue _well_ the course, but that he shall be _known_ as the very man beforehand. Whatever draws less than fifteen hundred hearers damages the finances of the movement, so low is the admission, and so large the expense. But, Thoreau, you are a better speaker than many, but a far better writer still. Do you wish to swap any of your 'wood-notes wild' for dollars? If yea, and you will sell me some articles, shorter, if you please, than the former, I will try to coin them for you. Is it a bargain? Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." Thoreau responded at once with some manuscripts (March 5), and was thus addressed, March 18, by his friend:-- "I shall get you some money for the articles you sent me, though not immediately. As to your long account of a Canadian tour, I don't know. It looks unmanageable. Can't you cut it into three or four, and omit all that relates to time? The cities are described to death; but I know you are at home with Nature, and that _she_ rarely and slowly changes. Break this up, if you can, and I will try to have it swallowed and digested." A week later he sent a letter from the publisher, Sartain, accepting the articles for a low price,[11] and adds: "If you break up your 'Excursion to Canada' into three or four articles, I have no doubt I could get it published on similar terms." April 3, 1852, he returns to a former proposition, that Thoreau shall write about Emerson as he did six years before on Carlyle. "FRIEND THOREAU,--I wish you to write me an article on Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Works and Ways, extending to one hundred pages, or so, of letter sheet like this, to take the form of a review of his writings, but to give some idea of the Poet, the Genius, the Man,--with some idea of the New England scenery and home influence, which have combined to make him what he is. Let it be calm, searching, and impartial; nothing like adulation, but a just summing up of what he is and what he has done. I mean to get this into the 'Westminster Review,' but if not acceptable there, I will publish it elsewhere. I will pay you fifty dollars for the article when delivered; in advance, if you desire it. Say the word, and I will send the money at once. It is perfectly convenient to do so. Your 'Carlyle' article is my model, but you can give us Emerson better than you did Carlyle. I presume he would allow you to write extracts for this purpose from his lectures not yet published. I would delay the publication of the article to suit his publishing arrangements, should that be requested. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." To this request, as before, there came a prompt negative, although Thoreau was then sadly in need of money. Mr. Greeley wrote, April 20:-- "I am rather sorry you will not do the 'Works and Ways,' but glad that you are able to employ your time to better purpose. But your Quebec notes haven't reached me yet, and I fear the 'good time' is passing. They ought to have appeared in the June number of the monthlies, but now cannot before July. If you choose to send them to me all in a lump, I will try to get them printed in that way. I don't care about them if you choose to reserve, or to print them elsewhere; but I can better make a use for them at this season than at any other." They were sent, and offered to the "Whig Review," and to other magazines; but on the 25th of June, Mr. Greeley writes:-- "I have had only bad luck with your manuscript. Two magazines have refused it on the ground of its length, saying that articles 'To be continued' are always unpopular, however good. I will try again." It seems that the author had relied upon money from this source, and a week or two later he asks his friend to lend him the expected seventy-five dollars, offering security, with mercantile scrupulosity. Promptly came this answer:-- "NEW YORK, _July 8, 1852_. "DEAR THOREAU,--Yours received. I was absent yesterday. I _can_ lend you the seventy-five dollars, and am very glad to do it. Don't talk about security. I am sorry about your MSS., which I do not quite despair of using to your advantage. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." The "Yankee in Canada," as it is now called (the record of Thoreau's journey through French Canada in September, 1850, with Ellery Channing), was offered to "Putnam's Magazine" by Mr. Greeley, and begun there, but ill-luck attended it. Before it went the paper on "Cape Cod," which became the subject of controversy, first as to price, and then as to its tone towards the people of that region. This will explain the letters of Mr. Greeley that follow:-- "NEW YORK, _November 23, 1852_. "MY DEAR THOREAU,--I have made no bargain--none whatever--with Putnam concerning your MSS. I have indicated no price to them. I handed over the MS. because I wished it published, and presumed that was in accordance both with your interest and your wishes. And I now say to you, that if he will pay you three dollars per printed page, I think that will be very well. I have promised to write something for him myself, and shall be well satisfied with that price. Your 'Canada' is not so fresh and acceptable as if it had just been written on the strength of a last summer's trip, and I hope you will have it printed in 'Putnam's Monthly.' But I have said nothing to his folks as to price, and will not till I hear from you again. Very probably there was some misapprehension on the part of C. I presume the price now offered you is that paid to writers generally for the 'Monthly.' As to Sartain, I know his '(Union) Magazine' has broken down, but I guess he will pay you. I have seen but one of your articles printed by him, and I think the other may be reclaimed. Please address him at once." "NEW YORK, _January 2, 1853_. "FRIEND THOREAU,--I have yours of the 29th, and credit you $20. Pay me when and in such sums as may be convenient. I am sorry you and C. cannot agree so as to have your whole MS. printed. It will be worth nothing elsewhere after having partly appeared in Putnam's. I think it is a mistake to conceal the authorship of the several articles, making them all (so to speak) _editorial_; but _if_ that is done, don't you see that the elimination of very flagrant heresies (like your defiant Pantheism) becomes a necessity? If you had withdrawn your MSS., on account of the abominable misprints in the first number, your ground would have been far more tenable. "However, do what you will. Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." Thoreau did what he would, of course, and the article in Putnam came to an abrupt end. The loan made in July, 1852, was paid with interest on the 9th of March, 1853, as the following note shows:-- "NEW YORK, _March 16, 1853_. "DEAR SIR,--I have yours of the 9th, inclosing Putnam's check for $59, making $79 in all you have paid me. I am paid in full, and this letter is your receipt in full. I don't want any pay for my 'services,' whatever they may have been. Consider me your friend who _wished_ to serve you, however unsuccessfully. Don't break with C. or Putnam." A year later, Thoreau renewed his subscription to the "Weekly Tribune," but the letter miscarried. In due time came this reply to a third letter:-- "_March 6, 1854._ "DEAR SIR,--I presume your first letter containing the $2 was robbed by our general mail robber of New Haven, who has just been sent to the State's Prison. Your second letter has probably failed to receive attention owing to a press of business. But I will make all right. You ought to have the Semi-weekly, and I shall order it sent to you one year on trial; if you choose to write me a letter or so some time, very well; if not, we will be even without that. "Thoreau, I want you to do something on _my_ urgency. I want you to collect and arrange your 'Miscellanies' and send them to me. Put in 'Ktaadn,' 'Carlyle,' 'A Winter Walk,' 'Canada,' etc., and I will try to find a publisher who will bring them out at his own risk, and (I hope) to your ultimate profit. If you have anything new to put with them, very well; but let me have about a 12mo volume whenever you can get it ready, and see if there is not something to your credit in the bank of Fortune. Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." In reply, Thoreau notified his friend of the early publication of "Walden," and was thus met:-- "_March 23, 1854._ "DEAR THOREAU,--I am glad your 'Walden' is coming out. _I_ shall announce it at once, whether Ticknor does or not. I am in no hurry now about your 'Miscellanies;' take your time, select your title, and prepare your articles deliberately and finally. Then, if Ticknor will give you something worth having, let him have this too; if proffering it to him is to glut your market, let it come to me. But take your time. I was only thinking you were merely waiting when you might be doing something. I referred (without naming you) to your 'Walden' experience in my lecture on 'Self-Culture,' with which I have had ever so many audiences. This episode excited much interest, and I have been repeatedly asked who it is that I refer to. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY. "P. S.--You must know Miss Elizabeth Hoar, whereas I hardly do. Now, I have offered to edit Margaret's works, and I want of Elizabeth a letter or memorandum of personal recollections of Margaret and her ideas. Can't you ask her to write it for me? "H. G." To the request of this postscript Thoreau attended at once, but the "Miscellanies" dwelt not in his mind, it would seem. He had now become deeply concerned about slavery, was also pursuing his studies concerning the Indians, and had little time for the collection of his published papers. A short note of April 2, 1854, closes this part of the Greeley correspondence, thus:-- "DEAR THOREAU,--Thank you for your kindness in the matter of Margaret. Pray take no further trouble; but if anything should come in your way, calculated to help me, do not forget. "Yours, "HORACE GREELEY." In August, 1855, Mr. Greeley wrote to suggest that copies of "Walden" should be sent to the "Westminster Review," to "The Reasoner," 147 Fleet Street, London, to Gerald Massey, office of the "News," Edinburgh, and to "---- Wills, Esq., Dickens's Household Words," adding:-- "There is a small class in England who ought to know what you have written, and I feel sure your publishers would not throw away copies sent to these periodicals; especially if your 'Week on the Concord and Merrimac' could accompany them. Chapman, editor of the 'Westminster,' expressed surprise that your book had not been sent him, and I could find very few who had read or seen it. If a new edition should be called for, try to have it better known in Europe, but have a few copies sent to those worthy of it, at all events." In March, 1856, Mr. Greeley opened a new correspondence with Thoreau, asking him to become the tutor of his children, and to live with him, or near him, at Chappaqua. The proposition was made in the most generous manner, and was for a time considered by Thoreau, who felt a sense of obligation as well as a sincere friendship towards the man who had believed in him and served him so seasonably in the years of his obscurity. But it resulted in nothing further than a brief visit to Mr. Greeley in the following autumn, during which, as Thoreau used to say, Mr. Alcott and Mr. Greeley went to the opera together. CHAPTER X. IN WOOD AND FIELD. Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. "He was a good swimmer," says Emerson, "a good runner, skater, boatman, and would outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all." In his last illness says Channing,-- "His habit of engrossing his thoughts in a journal, which had lasted for a quarter of a century,--his out-door life, of which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his living ceased,--this now became so incontrovertibly a thing of the past that he said once, standing at the window, 'I cannot see on the outside at all. We thought ourselves great philosophers in those wet days when we used to go out and sit down by the wall-sides.' This was absolutely all he was ever heard to say of that outward world during his illness, neither could a stranger in the least infer that he had ever a friend in field or wood." This out-door life began as early as he could recollect, and his special attraction to rivers, woods, and lakes was a thing of his boyhood. He had begun to collect Indian relics before leaving college, and was a diligent student of natural history there. Whether he was naturally an observer or not (which has been denied in a kind of malicious paradox), let his life-work attest. Early in 1847 he made some collections of fishes, turtles, etc., in Concord for Agassiz, then newly arrived in America, and I have (in a letter of May 3, 1847) this account of their reception:-- "I carried them immediately to Mr. Agassiz, who was highly delighted with them. Some of the species he had seen before, but never in so fresh condition. Others, as the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and the little turtle he knew only from the books. I am sure you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble, if you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he surveyed each fin and scale. He said the small mud-turtle was really a very rare species, quite distinct from the snapping-turtle. The breams and pout seemed to please the Professor very much. He would gladly come up to Concord to make a spearing excursion, as you suggested, but is drawn off by numerous and pressing engagements." On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:-- "Mr. Agassiz was very much surprised and pleased at the extent of the collections you sent during his absence; the little fox he has established in comfortable quarters in his backyard, where he is doing well. Among the fishes you sent there is one, probably two, new species." June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered, much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to cultivate Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction. The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there, so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot, engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain had been explored in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods, and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with felicity. "In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang, Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang; He trod the unplanted forest-floor, whereon The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone; Where feeds the moose and walks the surly bear, And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads, And blessed the monument of the man of flowers, Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers. He heard, when in the grove, at intervals With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,-- One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, Declares the close of its green century. * * * * * Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed, He roamed, content alike with man and beast, Where darkness found him he lay glad at night; There the red morning touched him with its light. Three moons his great heart him a hermit made, So long he roved at will the boundless shade." Thus much is a picture of the Maine forests, and may have been suggested in part by the woodland life of Dr. Jackson there while surveying the State. But what follows is the brave proclamation of the poet, for himself and his heroes, among whom Thoreau and John Brown must be counted, since it declares their creed and practice,--while in the last couplet the whole inner doctrine of Transcendentalism is set forth:-- "The timid it concerns to ask their way, And fear what foes in caves and swamps can stray, To make no step until the event is known, And ills to come as evils past bemoan. Not so the wise: no timid watch he keeps To spy what danger on his pathway creeps; Go where he will the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome; Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, By God's own light illumined and foreshowed." Thoreau may have heard these verses read by their author in his study, before he set forth on his first journey to Maine in 1838; they were first published in the "Dial" in October, 1840, but are omitted, for some reason, in a partial edition of Emerson's Poems (in 1876). He never complied with this description so far as to spend three months in the Maine woods, even in the three campaigns which he made there (in 1846, in 1853, and in 1857), for in none of these did he occupy three weeks, and in all but little more than a month. His account of them, as now published, makes a volume by itself, which his friend Channing edited two years after Thoreau's death, and which contains the fullest record of his studies of the American Indian. It was his purpose to develop these studies into a book concerning the Indian, and for this purpose he made endless readings in the Jesuit Fathers, in books of travel, and in all the available literature of the subject. But the papers he had thus collected were not left in such form that they could be published; and so much of his untiring diligence seems now lost, almost thrown away. Doubtless his friends and editors, upon call, will one day print detached portions of these studies, from entries in his journals, and from his commonplace books. In his explorations of Concord and its vicinity, as well as in those longer foot-journeys which he took among the mountains and along the sea-shore of New England, from 1838 to 1860, Thoreau's habits were those of an experienced hunter, though he seldom used a gun in his years of manhood. Upon this point he says in "Walden":-- "Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless than even those of the savage. Perhaps I have owed to fishing and hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which, otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets, even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.... I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. I have long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I am now inclined to think there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.... We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected." Emerson mentions that Thoreau preferred his spy-glass to his gun to bring the bird nearer to his eye, and says also of his patience in out-door observation:-- "He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits,--nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him." And I have thought that Emerson had Thoreau in mind when he described his "Forester":-- "He took the color of his vest From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast; For as the wood-kinds lurk and hide, So walks the woodman unespied." The same friend said of him:-- "It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants;[12] in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, 'that either he had told the bees things, or the bees had told him.' Snakes coiled round his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in the mild form of botany and ichthyology. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses; he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. Every fact lay in order and glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole." It was this poetic and coördinating vision of the natural world which distinguished Thoreau from the swarm of naturalists, and raised him to the rank of a philosopher even in his tedious daily observations. Channing, no less than Emerson, has observed and noted this trait, giving to his friend the exact title of "poet-naturalist," and also, in his poem, "The Wanderer," bestowing on him the queer name of _Idolon_, which he thus explains:-- "So strangely was the general current mixed With his vexed native blood in its crank wit, That as a mirror shone the common world To this observing youth,--whom noting, thence I called _Idolon_,--ever firm to mark Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole." In an earlier poem Channing had called him "Rudolpho," and had thus portrayed his daily and nightly habits of observation:-- "I see Rudolpho cross our honest fields Collapsed with thought, and as the Stagyrite At intellectual problems, mastering Day after day part of the world's concern. Nor welcome dawns nor shrinking nights him menace, Still adding to his list beetle and bee,-- Of what the vireo builds a pensile nest, And why the peetweet drops her giant egg In wheezing meadows, odorous with sweet brake. Who wonders that the flesh declines to grow Along his sallow pits? or that his life, To social pleasure careless, pines away In dry seclusion and unfruitful shade? I must admire thy brave apprenticeship To those dry forages, although the worldling Laugh in his sleeve at thy compelled devotion. So shalt thou learn, Rudolpho, as thou walk'st, More from the winding lanes where Nature leaves Her unaspiring creatures, and surpass In some fine saunter her acclivity." The hint here given that Thoreau injured his once robust health by his habits of out-door study and the hardships he imposed on himself, had too much truth in it. Growing up with great strength of body and limb, and having cultivated his physical advantages by a temperate youth much exercised with manual labor, in which he took pleasure, Thoreau could not learn the lesson of moderation in those pursuits to which his nature inclined. He exposed himself in his journeys and night encampments to cold and hunger, and changes of weather, which the strongest cannot brave with impunity. Mr. Edward Hoar, who traveled with him in the Maine woods in 1857,--a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an Indian, among the head-waters of the Kennebec, Penobscot, and St. John's rivers,--and who in 1858 visited the White Mountains with him, remembers, with a shiver to this day, the rigor of a night spent on the bare rocks of Mount Washington, with insufficient blankets,--Thoreau sleeping from habit, but himself lying wakeful all night, and gazing at the coldest of full moons. It was after such an experience as this on Monadnoc, whither Thoreau and Channing went to camp out for a week in August, 1860, that the latter wrote:-- "With the night, Reserved companion, cool and sparsely clad, Dream, till the threefold hour with lowly voice Steals whispering in thy frame, 'Rise, valiant youth! The dawn draws on apace, envious of thee, And polar in his gait; advance thy limbs, Nor strive to heat the stones.'" Thoreau had much scorn for weakness like this, and said of his comrade, "I fear that he did not improve all the night as he might have done, to sleep." This was his last excursion, and he died within less than two years afterward. The account of it which Channing has given may therefore be read with interest:-- "He ascended such hills as Monadnoc by his own path; would lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point he proposed to visit below,--perhaps forty miles away on the landscape, and set off bravely to make the 'shortcut.' The lowland people wondered to see him scaling the heights as if he had lost his way, or at his jumping over their cow-yard fences,--asking if he had fallen from the clouds. In a walk like this he always carried his umbrella; and on this Monadnoc trip, when about a mile from the station (in Troy, N. H.), a torrent of rain came down; without the umbrella his books, blankets, maps, and provisions would all have been spoiled, or the morning lost by delay. On the mountain there being a thick soaking fog, the first object was to camp and make tea.[13] He spent five nights in camp, having built another hut, to get varied views. Flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks were carefully examined, all parts of the mountain were visited, and as accurate a map as could be made by pocket compass was carefully sketched and drawn out, in the five days spent there,--with notes of the striking aerial phenomena, incidents of travel and natural history. The fatigue, the blazing sun, the face getting broiled, the pint-cup never scoured, shaving unutterable, your stockings dreary, having taken to peat,--not all the books in the world, as Sancho says, could contain the adventures of a week in camping. The wild, free life, the open air, the new and strange sounds by night and day, the odd and bewildering rocks, amid which a person can be lost within a rod of camp; the strange cries of visitors to the summit; the great valley over to Wachusett, with its thunder-storms and battles in the cloud; the farmers' backyards in Jaffrey, where the family cotton can be seen bleaching on the grass, but no trace of the pigmy family; the dry, soft air all night, the lack of dew in the morning; the want of water,--a pint being a good deal,--these, and similar things make up some part of such an excursion." These excursions were common with Thoreau, but less so with Channing, who therefore, notes down many things that his friend would not think worth recording, except as a part of that calendar of Nature which he set himself to keep, and of which his journals, for more than twenty years, are the record. From these he made up his printed volumes, and there may be read the details that he registered. He had gauges for the height of the river, noted the temperature of springs and ponds, the tints of the morning and evening sky, the flowering and fruit of plants, all the habits of birds and animals, and every aspect of nature from the smallest to the greatest. Much of this is the dryest detail, but everywhere you come upon strokes of beauty, in a single word-picture, or in a page of idyllic description, like this of the Concord heifer, which might be a poem of Theocritus, or one of the lost bucolics of Moschus:-- "One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by degrees approach, as if to take some morsel from our hands, while our hearts leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by degrees drew near with her fair limbs progressive, making pretense of browsing; nearer and nearer till there was wafted to us the bovine fragrance,--cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be,--and then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest recognition within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for his herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured as a hind; her hide was mingled white and fawn color; on her muzzle's tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy; and on her side turned toward me the map of Asia plain to see. Farewell, dear heifer! though thou forgettest me, my prayer to heaven shall be that thou may'st not forget thyself. "I saw her name was Sumach. And by the kindred spots I knew her mother, more sedate and matronly, with full-grown bag, and on her sides was Asia, great and small, the plains of Tartary, even to the pole, while on her daughter's was Asia Minor. She was not disposed to wanton with the herdsman. As I walked the heifer followed me, and took an apple from my hand, and seemed to care more for the hand than the apple. So innocent a face I have rarely seen on any creature, and I have looked in the face of many heifers; and as she took the apple from my hand, I caught the apple of her eye. There was no sinister expression. She smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom. For horns, though she had them, they were so well disposed in the right place, but neither up nor down, that I do not now remember she had any." Or take this apostrophe to the "Queen of Night, the Huntress Diana," which is not a translation from some Greek worshipper, but the sincere ascription of a New England hunter of the noblest deer:-- "My dear, my dewy sister, let thy rain descend on me! I not only love thee, but I love the best of thee,--that is to love thee rarely. I do not love thee every day--commonly I love those who are less than thee; I love thee only on great days. Thy dewy words feed me like the manna of the morning. I am as much thy sister as thy brother; thou art as much my brother as my sister. It is a portion of thee and a portion of me which are of kin. O my sister! O Diana! thy tracks are on the eastern hill; thou newly didst pass that way. I, the hunter, saw them in the morning dew. My eyes are the hounds that pursued thee. I hear thee; thou canst speak, I cannot; I fear and forget to answer; I am occupied with hearing. I awoke and thought of thee; thou wast present to my mind. How camest thou there? Was I not present to thee, likewise?" In such a lofty mystical strain did this Concord Endymion declare his passion for Nature, in whose green lap he slumbers now on the hill-side which the goddess nightly revisits. "O sister of the sun, draw near, With softly-moving step and slow, For dreaming not of earthly woe Thou seest Endymion sleeping here!" CHAPTER XI. PERSONAL TRAITS AND SOCIAL LIFE. The face of Thoreau, once seen, could not easily be forgotten, so strong was the mark that genius had set upon it. The portrait of him, which has been commonly engraved, though it bore some resemblance at the time it was taken (by S. W. Rowse, in 1854), was never a very exact likeness. A few years later he began to wear his beard long, and this fine silken muffler for his delicate throat and lungs, was also an ornament to his grave and thoughtful face, concealing its weakest feature, a receding chin. The head engraved for this volume is from a photograph taken, in 1861, at New Bedford, and shows him as he was in his last years. His personal traits were not startling and commanding like those of Webster, who drew the eyes of all men wherever he appeared, but they were peculiar, and dwelt long in the memory. His features were prominent, his eyes large, round, and deep-set, under bold brows, and full of fearless meditation; the color varying from blue to gray, as if with the moods of his mind. A youth who saw him for the first time, said with a start, "How deep and clear is the mark that _thought_ sets upon a man's face!" And, indeed, no man could fail to recognize in him that rare intangible essence we call _thought_; his slight figure was active with it, while in his face it became contemplative, as if, like his own peasant, he were "meditating some vast and sunny problem." Channing says of his appearance:-- "In height he was about the average; in his build spare, with limbs that were rather longer than usual, or of which he made a longer use. His features were marked; the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen,--blue in certain lights and in others gray; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste; the clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking he made a short cut, if he could, and when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side, seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. The intensity of his mind, like Dante's, conveyed the breathing of aloofness,--his eyes bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands perhaps clasped behind him, or held closely at his side,--the fingers made into a fist." It is not possible to describe him more exactly. In December, 1854, Thoreau went to lecture at Nantucket, and on his way spent a day or two with one of his correspondents, Daniel Ricketson of New Bedford,--reaching his house on Christmas day. His host, who then saw him for the first time, thus recorded his impressions:-- "I had expected him at noon, but as he did not arrive, I had given him up for the day. In the latter part of the afternoon, I was clearing off the snow, which had fallen during the day, from my front steps, when, looking up, I saw a man walking up the carriage-road, bearing a portmanteau in one hand and an umbrella in the other. He was dressed in a long overcoat of dark color, and wore a dark soft hat. I had no suspicion it was Thoreau, and rather supposed it was a pedler of small wares." This was a common mistake to make about Thoreau. When he ran the gauntlet of the Cape Cod villages,--"feeling as strange," he says, "as if he were in a town in China,"--one of the old fishermen could not believe that he had not something to sell, as Bronson Alcott had when he perambulated Eastern Virginia and North Carolina in 1819-22, peddling silks and jewelry. Being assured that Thoreau was not peddling spectacles or books, the fisherman said at last: "Well, it makes no odds what it is you carry, so long as you carry Truth along with you." "As Thoreau came near me," continues Mr. Ricketson, "he stopped and said, 'You do not know me.' It flashed at once on my mind that the person before me was my correspondent, whom in my imagination I had figured as stout and robust, instead of the small and rather inferior-looking man before me. I concealed my disappointment, and at once replied, 'I presume this is Mr. Thoreau.' Taking his portmanteau, I conducted him to his room, already awaiting him. My disappointment at his personal appearance passed off on hearing his conversation at the table and during the evening; and rarely through the years of my acquaintance with him did his presence conflict with his noble powers of mind, his rich conversation, and broad erudition. His face was afterwards greatly improved in manly expression by the growth of his beard, which he wore in full during the later years of his life; but when I first saw him he had just been sitting for the crayon portrait of 1854, which represents him without the beard. The 'ambrotype' of him, which is engraved for your volume, was taken for me by Dunshee, at New Bedford, August 21, 1861, on his last visit to me at Brooklawn. His health was then failing,--he had a racking cough,--but his face, except a shade of sadness in the eyes, did not show it. Of this portrait, Miss Sophia Thoreau, to whom I sent it soon after her brother's death, wrote me, May 26, 1862: 'I cannot tell you how agreeably surprised I was, on opening the little box, to find my own lost brother again. I could not restrain my tears. The picture is invaluable to us. I discover a slight shade about the eyes, expressive of weariness; but a stranger might not observe it. I am very glad to possess a picture of so late a date. The crayon, drawn eight years ago next summer, we considered good; it betrays the poet. Mr. Channing, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Alcott, and many other friends who have looked at the ambrotype, express much satisfaction.'" Of Thoreau's appearance then (at the age of thirty-seven), Mr. Ricketson goes on to say:-- "The most expressive feature of his face was his eye, blue in color, and full of the greatest humanity and intelligence. His head was of medium size, the same as that of Emerson, and he wore a number seven hat. His arms were rather long, his legs short, and his hands and feet rather large. His sloping shoulders were a mark of observation. But when in usual health he was strong and vigorous, a remarkable pedestrian, tiring out nearly all his companions in his prolonged tramps through woods and marshes, when in pursuit of some rare plant. In Thoreau, as in Dr. Kane, Lord Nelson, and other heroic men, it was the spirit more than the temple in which it dwelt, that made the man." A strange mistake has prevailed as to the supposed churlishness and cynical severity of Thoreau, which Mr. Alcott, in one of his octogenarian sonnets, has corrected, and which all who knew the man would protest against. Of his domestic character Mr. Ricketson writes:-- "Some have accused him of being an imitator of Emerson, others as unsocial, impracticable, and ascetic. Now, he was none of these. A more original man never lived, nor one more thoroughly a personification of civility. Having been an occasional guest at his house, I can assert that no man could hold a finer relationship with his family than he." Channing says the same thing more quaintly:-- "In his own home he was one of those characters who may be called household treasures; always on the spot with skillful eye and hand, to raise the best melons, plant the orchard with the choicest trees, and act as extempore mechanic; fond of the pets,--his sister's flowers or sacred tabby--kittens being his favorites,--he would play with them by the half hour." He was sometimes given to music and song, and now and then, in moments of great hilarity, would dance gayly,--as he did once at Brooklawn, in the presence of his host, Mr. Ricketson, and Mr. Alcott, who was also visiting there. On the same occasion he sung his unique song of "Tom Bowline," which none who heard would ever forget, and finished the evening with his dance. Hearing Mr. Ricketson speak of this dance, Miss Thoreau said:-- "I have so often witnessed the like, that I can easily imagine how it was; and I remember that Henry gave me some account of it. I recollect he said he did not scruple to tread on Mr. Alcott's toes." Mr. Ricketson's own account is this:-- "One afternoon, when my wife was playing an air upon the piano,--'Highland Laddie,' perhaps,--Thoreau became very hilarious, sang 'Tom Bowline,' and finally entered upon an improvised dance. Not being able to stand what appeared to me at the time the somewhat ludicrous appearance of our Walden hermit, I retreated to my 'shanty,' a short distance from my house; while my older and more humor-loving friend Alcott remained and saw it through, much to his amusement. It left a pleasant memory, which I recorded in some humble lines that afterwards appeared in my 'Autumn Sheaf.'" After Thoreau's return home from this visit, his New Bedford friend seems to have sent him a copy of the words and music of "Tom Bowline," which was duly acknowledged and handed over to the musical people of Concord for them to play and sing. It is a fine old pathetic sailor-song of Dibdin's, which pleased Thoreau (whose imagination delighted in the sea), and perhaps reminded him of his brother John. As Thoreau sang it, the verses ran thus:-- "Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowline, The darling of our crew; No more he'll hear the tempest howling, For death has broached him to. His form was of the manliest beauty; His heart was kind and soft; Faithful, below, he did his duty, But now he's gone aloft. "Tom never from his word departed, His virtues were so rare; His friends were many and true-hearted, His Poll was kind and fair. And then he'd sing so blithe and jolly; Ah, many's the time and oft! But mirth is changed to melancholy, For Tom is gone aloft. "Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather When He who all commands Shall give, to call life's crew together, The word to pipe all hands. Thus death, who kings and tars dispatches, In vain Tom's life has doffed; For though his body's under hatches, His soul is gone aloft!" Another of his songs was Moore's "Canadian Boat Song," with its chorus,-- "Row brothers, row." Mrs. W. H. Forbes, who knew him in her childhood, from the age of six to that of fifteen more particularly, and who first remembers him in his hut at Walden, writes me:-- "The time when Mr. Thoreau was our more intimate playfellow must have been in the years from 1850 to 1855. He used to come in, at dusk, as my brother and I sat on the rug before the dining-room fire, and, taking the great green rocking-chair, he would tell us stories. Those I remember were his own adventures, as a child. He began with telling us of the different houses he had lived in, and what he could remember about each. The house where he was born was on the Virginia road, near the old Bedford road. The only thing he remembered about that house was that from its windows he saw a flock of geese walking along in a row on the other side of the road; but to show what a long memory he had, when he told his mother of this, she said the only time he could have seen that sight was, when he was about eight months old, for they left that house then. Soon after, he lived in the old house on the Lexington road, nearly opposite Mr. Emerson's. There he was tossed by a cow as he played near the door, in his red flannel dress,--and so on, with a story for every house. He used to delight us with the adventures of a brood of fall chickens, which slept at night in a tall old fashioned fig-drum in the kitchen, and as their bed was not changed when they grew larger, they packed themselves every night each in its own place, and grew up, not shapely, but shaped to each other and the drum, like figs! "Sometimes he would play juggler tricks for us, and swallow his knife and produce it again from our ears or noses. We usually ran to bring some apples for him as soon as he came in, and often he would cut one in halves in fine points that scarcely showed on close examination, and then the joke was to ask Father to break it for us and see it fall to pieces in his hands. But perhaps the evenings most charming were those when he brought some ears of pop-corn in his pocket and headed an expedition to the garret to hunt out the old brass warming-pan; in which he would put the corn, and hold it out and shake it over the fire till it was heated through, and at last, as we listened, the rattling changed to popping. When this became very brisk, he would hold the pan over the rug and lift the lid, and a beautiful fountain of the white corn flew all over us. It required both strength and patience to hold out the heavy warming-pan at arm's length so long, and no one else ever gave us that pleasure. "I remember his singing 'Tom Bowline' to us, and also playing on his flute, but that was earlier. In the summer he used to make willow whistles, and trumpets out of the stems of squash leaves, and onion leaves. When he found fine berries during his walks, he always remembered us, and came to arrange a huckleberrying for us. He took charge of the 'hay rigging' with the load of children, who sat on the floor which was spread with hay, covered with a buffalo-robe; he sat on a board placed across the front and drove, and led the frolic with his jokes and laughter as we jolted along, while the elders of the family accompanied us in a 'carryall.' Either he had great tact and skill in managing us and keeping our spirits and play within bounds, or else he became a child in sympathy with us, for I do not remember a check or reproof from him, no matter how noisy we were. He always was most kind to me and made it his especial care to establish me in the 'thickest places,' as we used to call them. Those sunny afternoons are bright memories, and the lamb-kill flowers and sweet 'everlasting,' always recall them and his kind care. Once in awhile he took us on the river in his boat, a rare pleasure then; and I remember one brilliant autumn afternoon, when he took us to gather the wild grapes overhanging the river, and we brought home a load of crimson and golden boughs as well. He never took us to walk with him, but sometimes joined us for a little way, if he met us in the woods on Sunday afternoons. He made those few steps memorable by showing us many wonders in so short a space: perhaps the only chincapin oak in Concord, so hidden that no one but himself could have discovered it--or some remarkable bird, or nest, or flower. He took great interest in my garden of wild flowers, and used to bring me seeds, or roots, of rare plants. In his last illness it did not occur to us that he would care to see us, but his sister told my mother that he watched us from the window as we passed, and said: 'Why don't they come to see me? I love them as if they were my own.' After that we went often, and he always made us so welcome that we liked to go. I remember our last meetings with as much pleasure as the old play-days." Although so great a traveler in a small circle--being every day a-field when not too ill,--he was also a great stay-at-home. He never crossed the ocean, nor saw Niagara or the Mississippi until the year before his death. He lived within twenty miles of Boston, but seldom went there, except to pass through it on his way to the Maine woods, to Cape Cod, to the house of his friend, Marston Watson at Plymouth, or to Daniel Ricketson's at New Bedford. To the latter he wrote in February, 1855:-- "I did not go to Boston, for, with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors (George Minott), an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home." What took him from home in the winter season was generally some engagement to lecture, of which he had many after his Walden life became a little known abroad. From the year 1847 Thoreau may be said to have fairly entered on his career as author and lecturer; having taken all the needful degrees and endured most of the mortifications necessary for the public profession of authorship. Up to that time he had supported himself, except while in college, chiefly by the labor of his hands; after 1847, though still devoted to manual labor occasionally, he yet worked chiefly with his head as thinker, observer, surveyor, magazine contributor, and lecturer. His friends were the first promoters of his lectures, and among his correspondence are some letters from Hawthorne, inviting him to the Salem Lyceum. The first of these letters is dated, Salem, October 21, 1848, and runs thus:-- "MY DEAR SIR,--The managers of the Salem Lyceum, sometime ago, voted that you should be requested to deliver a lecture before that Institution during the approaching season. I know not whether Mr. Chever, the late corresponding secretary, communicated the vote to you; at all events, no answer has been received, and as Mr. Chever's successor in office, I am requested to repeat the invitation. Permit me to add my own earnest wishes that you will accept it; and also, laying aside my official dignity, to express my wife's desire and my own that you will be our guest, if you do come. In case of your compliance, the Managers desire to know at what time it will best suit you to deliver the lecture. "Very truly yours, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE, "_Cor. Sec'y, Salem Lyceum_. "P.S. I live at No. 14 Mall Street, where I shall be very happy to see you. The stated fee for lectures is $20." A month later, Hawthorne, who had received an affirmative answer from Thoreau, wrote to him from Boston (November 20, 1848), as follows:-- "MY DEAR THOREAU,--I did not sooner write you, because there were preëngagements for the two or three first lectures, so that I could not arrange matters to have you come during the present month. But, as it happens, the expected lectures have failed us, and we now depend on you to come the very next Wednesday. I shall announce you in the paper of to-morrow, so you _must_ come. I regret that I could not give you longer notice. We shall expect you on Wednesday at No. 14 Mall Street. "Yours truly, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE. "If it be utterly impossible for you to come, pray write me a line so that I may get it Wednesday evening. But by all means come. "This secretaryship is an intolerable bore. I have traveled thirty miles, this wet day, on no other business." Apparently another lecture was wanted by the Salem people the same winter, for on the 19th of February, 1849, when the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac" was in press, Hawthorne wrote again, thus:-- "The managers request that you will lecture before the Salem Lyceum on Wednesday evening _after_ next, that is to say, on the 28th inst. May we depend on you? Please to answer immediately, if convenient. Mr. Alcott delighted my wife and me, the other evening, by announcing that you had a book in press. I rejoice at it, and nothing doubt of such success as will be worth having. Should your manuscripts all be in the printer's hands, I suppose you can reclaim one of them for a single evening's use, to be returned the next morning,--or perhaps that Indian lecture, which you mentioned to me, is in a state of forwardness. Either that, or a continuation of the Walden experiment (or indeed, anything else), will be acceptable. We shall expect you at 14 Mall Street. "Very truly yours, "NATH^L HAWTHORNE." These letters were written just before Hawthorne was turned out of his office in the Salem custom-house, and while his own literary success was still in abeyance,--the "Scarlet Letter" not being published till a year later. They show the friendly terms on which Hawthorne stood with the Concord Transcendentalists, after leaving that town in 1846. He returned to it in 1852, when he bought Mr. Alcott's estate, then called "Hillside," which he afterward christened "Wayside," and by this name it is still known. Mr. Alcott bought this place in 1845, and from then till 1848, when he left it to reside in Boston, he expended, as Hawthorne said, "a good deal of taste and some money in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems, and branches, and trees, on a system of his own." In this work he was aided by Thoreau, who was then in the habit of performing much manual labor. In 1847 he joined Mr. Alcott in the task of cutting trees for Mr. Emerson's summer-house, which the three friends were to build in the garden. Mr. Emerson, however, went with them to the woods but one day, when finding his strength and skill unequal to that of his companions, he withdrew, and left the work to them. Mr. Alcott relates that Thoreau was not only a master workman with the axe, but also had such strength of arm, that when a tree they were felling lodged in some unlucky position, he rushed at it, and by main strength carried out the trunk until it fell where he wanted it. It was one of the serious doctrines of the Transcendentalists that each person should perform his quota of hand-work, and accordingly Alcott, Channing, Hawthorne, and the rest, took their turn at wood-chopping, hay-making, plowing, tree-pruning, grafting, etc. Even Emerson trimmed his own orchard, and sometimes lent a hand in hoeing corn and raking hay. To Thoreau such tasks were easy, and, unlike some amateur farmers, he was quite willing to be seen at his work, whatever it might be (except the pencil-making, in which there were certain secrets), and by choice he wore plain working clothes, and generally old ones. The fashion of his garments gave him no concern, and was often old, or even grotesque. At one time he had a fancy for corduroy, such as Irish laborers then wore, but which occasionally appeared in the wardrobe of a gentleman. As he climbed trees, waded swamps, and was out in all weathers during his daily excursions, he naturally dressed himself for what he had to do. As may be inferred from his correspondence with Horace Greeley, Thoreau's whole income from authorship during the twenty years that he practiced that profession, cannot have exceeded a few hundred dollars yearly,--not half enough in most years to supply even his few wants. He would never be indebted to any person pecuniarily, and therefore he found out other ways of earning his subsistence and paying his obligations,--gardening, fence-building, white-washing, pencil-making, land-surveying, etc.,--for he had great mechanical skill, and a patient, conscientious industry in whatever he undertook. When his father, who had been long living in other men's houses, undertook, at last, to build one of his own, Henry worked upon it, and performed no small part of the manual labor. He had no false pride in such matters,--was, indeed, rather proud of his workmanship, and averse to the gentility even of his industrious village. During his first residence at Mr. Emerson's in 1841-43, Thoreau managed the garden and did other hand-work for his friend; and when Mr. Emerson went to England in 1847, he returned to the house (soon after leaving his Walden hut), and took charge of his friend's household affairs in his absence. In a letter to his sister Sophia (October 24, 1847), Thoreau says:-- "... I went to Boston the 5th of this month to see Mr. Emerson off to Europe. He sailed in the 'Washington Irving' packet ship, the same in which Mr. Hedge went before him. Up to this trip, the first mate aboard this ship was, as I hear, one Stephens, a Concord boy, son of Stephens, the carpenter, who used to live above Mr. Dennis. Mr. Emerson's state-room was like a carpeted dark closet, about six feet square, with a large keyhole for a window (the window was about as big as a saucer, and the glass two inches thick), not to mention another skylight overhead in the deck, of the size of an oblong doughnut, and about as opaque. Of course, it would be in vain to look up, if any contemplative promenader put his foot upon it. Such will be his lodgings for two or three weeks; and instead of a walk in Walden woods, he will take a promenade on deck, where the few trees, you know, are stripped of their bark." There is a poem of Thoreau's, of uncertain date, called "The Departure," which, as I suppose, expresses his emotions at leaving finally, in 1848, the friendly house of Emerson, where he had dwelt so long, upon terms of such ideal intimacy. It was never seen by his friends, so far as I can learn, until after his death, when Sophia Thoreau gave it to me, along with other poems, for publication in the "Boston Commonwealth," in 1863. Since then it has been mentioned as a poem written in anticipation of death. This is not so; it was certainly written long before his illness. "In this roadstead I have ridden, In this covert I have hidden: Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me, And I hid beneath their lee. "This true people took the stranger, And warm-hearted housed the ranger; They received their roving guest, And have fed him with the best; "Whatsoe'er the land afforded To the stranger's wish accorded,-- Shook the olive, stripped the vine, And expressed the strengthening wine. "And by night they did spread o'er him What by day they spread before him; That good will which was repast Was his covering at last. "The stranger moored him to their pier Without anxiety or fear; By day he walked the sloping land,-- By night the gentle heavens he scanned. "When first his bark stood inland To the coast of that far Finland, Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore, The weary mariner to restore. "And still he stayed from day to day, If he their kindness might repay; But more and more The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore. "And still, the more the stranger waited, The less his argosy was freighted; And still the more he stayed, The less his debt was paid. "So he unfurled his shrouded mast To receive the fragrant blast,-- And that same refreshing gale Which had woo'd him to remain Again and again;-- It was that filled his sail And drove him to the main. "All day the low hung clouds Dropped tears into the sea, And the wind amid the shrouds Sighed plaintively." CHAPTER XII. POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER. The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name,--as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind tended naturally to the ideal side. He would have been an idealist in any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined every wide prospect and every narrow cranny in which his active, patient spirit pursued its task. It was this inward illumination as well as the star-like beam of Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused Thoreau to write in his senior year at college, "This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful," and he cherished this belief through life. In youth, too, he said, "The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means." It was in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:-- "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." In the same significance read his little-known verses, "The Pilgrims." "When I have slumbered I have heard sounds As of travelers passing These my grounds. "'T was a sweet music Wafted them by, I could not tell If afar off or nigh. "Unless I dreamed it This was of yore; I never told it To mortal before. "Never remembered But in my dreams, What to me waking A miracle seems." It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical expression, copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece. This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have. After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this the judgment of Mr. Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson, who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his own? "Light winged smoke, Icarian bird! Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,-- * * * * * Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame." No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses sure to survive for centuries. As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:-- "Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is not too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high. She is persuasive, not litigious, leaving conscience to decide. She never sacrificeth her dignity that she may secure for herself a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious about appearances." In another essay of the same year he wrote:-- "The order of things should be reversed: the seventh should be man's day of toil, in which to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature." This was an anticipation of his theory of labor and leisure set forth in "Walden," where he says:-- "For more than five years I maintained myself solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living; the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I found that the occupation of day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in the year to support one." This was true of Thoreau, because, as he said, his "greatest skill had been to want but little." In him this economy was a part of morality, or even of religion. "The high moral impulse," says Channing, "never deserted him, and he resolved early to read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself." How early this austerity appeared in what he wrote, has been little noticed; but I discover it in his earliest college essays, before he was eighteen years old. Thus, in such a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs:-- "There appears to be something noble, something exalted, in giving up one's own interest for that of his fellow-beings. He is a true patriot, who, casting aside all selfish thoughts, and not suffering his benevolent intentions to be polluted by thinking of the fame he is acquiring, presses forward in the great work he has undertaken, with unremitted zeal; who is as one pursuing his way through a garden abounding with fruits of every description, without turning aside, or regarding the brambles which impede his progress, but pressing onward with his eyes fixed upon the golden fruit before him. He is worthy of all praise; his is, indeed, true greatness." In contrast with this man the young philosopher sets before us the man who wishes, as the Greeks said, _pleonektein_,--to get more than his square meal at the banquet of life. "Aristocrats may say what they please,--liberty and equal rights are and ever will be grateful, till nature herself shall change; and he who is ambitious to exercise authority over his fellow-beings, with no view to their benefit or injury, is to be regarded as actuated by peculiarly selfish motives. Self-gratification must be his sole object. Perhaps he is desirous that his name may be handed down to posterity; that in after ages something more may be said of him than that he lived and died. His deeds may never be forgotten; but is this greatness? If so, may I pass through life unheeded and unknown!" What was his own ambition--a purpose in life which only the unthinking could ever confound with selfishness--was expressed by him early in a prayer which he threw into this verse:-- "Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf, Than that I may not disappoint myself; That in my conduct I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye. That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practice more than my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I thy purpose did not know, Or overrated thy designs." And it may be said of him that he acted this prayer as well as uttered it. Says Channing again:-- "In our estimate of his character, the moral qualities form the basis; for himself rigidly enjoined; if in another, he could overlook delinquency. Truth before all things; in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest purity, the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith in friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right, which nothing can tease or purchase out of us." Thus it is said that when he went to prison rather than pay his tax, which went to support slavery in South Carolina, and his friend Emerson came to the cell and said, "Henry, why are you here?" the reply was, "Why are you _not_ here?" In this act, which even his best friends at first denounced as "mean and sneaking and in bad taste,"--this refusal to pay the trifling sum demanded of him by the Concord tax-gatherer,--the outlines of his political philosophy appear. They were illuminated afterwards by his trenchant utterances in denunciation of slavery and in encomium of John Brown, who attacked that monster in its most vulnerable part. It was not mere whim, but a settled theory of human nature and the institution of government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce the parish church and refuse to pay its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State and refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward, first of all men, in public support of Brown and his Virginia campaign. This theory found frequent expression in his lectures. In 1846 he said:-- "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." And again:-- "I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten _honest_ men only,--ay, if one honest man, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation. In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839. Thoreau said:-- "Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution (of government) never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical; still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of government?" Such a legislator, proclaiming his law from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:-- "I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that 'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further to 'remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right." Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the man. "For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, "we are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that power which establishes justice in the land." Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher. The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial. CHAPTER XIII. LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY. The life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership,--not of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so that he could write--to use his own words--"sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of writing coveted by him; "sentences which are expressive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across,--not mere repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build." It was this thirst for final and concentrated expression, and not love of fame, or "literary aspirations," as poor Greeley put it, which urged him on to write. For printing he cared little,--and few authors since Shakespeare have been less anxious to publish what they wrote. Of the seven volumes of his works first printed, and twenty more which may be published some day, only two, "The Week" and "Walden," appeared in his lifetime,--though the material for two more had been scattered about in forgotten magazines and newspapers, for his friends to collect after his death. Of his first works (and some of his best) it could be said, as Thomas Wharton said, in 1781, of his friend Gray's verses, "I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, 'The Progress of Poetry' and 'The Bard' met with at their first publication; it appeared there were not twenty people in England who liked them." This disturbed Thoreau's friends, but not himself; he rather rejoiced in the slow sale of his first book; and when the balance of the edition,--more than seven hundred copies out of one thousand,--came back upon his hands unsold in 1855, and earlier, he told me with glee that he had made an addition of seven hundred volumes to his library, and all of his own composition. "O solitude, obscurity, meanness!" he exclaims in 1856 to his friend Blake, "I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbors' eyes." Of course, pride had something to do with this; "it was a wild stock of pride," as Burke said of Lord Keppel, "on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues." Both pride and piety led him to write,-- "Fame cannot tempt the bard Who's famous with his God, Nor laurel him reward Who has his Maker's nod." Though often ranked as an unbeliever, and too scornful in some of his expressions concerning the religion of other men, Thoreau was in truth deeply religious. Sincerity and devotion were his most marked traits; and both are seen in his verses from the same poem ("Inspiration") so often quoted:-- "I will then trust the love untold Which not my worth or want hath bought,-- Which wooed me young and wooes me old, And to this evening hath me brought." Thoreau's business in life was observation, thought, and writing, to which last, reading was essential. He read much, but studied more; nor was his reading that indiscriminate, miscellaneous perusal of everything printed, which has become the vice of this age. He read books of travel, scientific books, authors of original merit, but few newspapers, of which he had a very poor opinion. "Read not the 'Times,' read the Eternities," he said. Nor did he admire the magazines, or their editors, greatly. He quarreled with "Putnam's Magazine," in 1853-54, and in 1858, after yielding to the suggestion of Mr. Emerson, that he should contribute to the "Atlantic," in consequence of a dispute with Mr. Lowell, its editor, about the omission of a sentence in one of his articles, he published no more in that magazine until the year of his death (1862), when Mr. Fields obtained from him some of his choicest manuscripts. He spent the last months of his life in revising these, and they continued to appear for some years after his death. Those which were published in the "Atlantic" in 1878 are passages from his journals, selected by his friend Blake, who long had the custody of his manuscripts. These consist chiefly of his journals in thirty-nine volumes, many parts of which had already been printed, either by Thoreau himself, by his sister Sophia, or his friend Channing, who, in 1873, published a life of Thoreau, containing many extracts from the journals, which had never before been printed. When we speak of his works, we should include Mr. Channing's book also, half of which, at least, is from Thoreau's pen. His method in writing was peculiarly his own, though it bore some external resemblance to that of his friends, Emerson and Alcott. Like them he early began to keep a journal, which became both diary and commonplace book. But while they noted down the thoughts which occurred to them, without premeditation or consecutive arrangement, Thoreau made studies and observations for his journal as carefully and habitually as he noted the angles and distances in surveying a Concord farm. In all his daily walks and distant journeys, he took notes on the spot of what occurred to him, and these, often very brief and symbolic, he carefully wrote out, as soon as he could get time, in his diary, not classified by topics, but just as they had come to him. To these he added his daily meditations, sometimes expressed in verse, especially in the years between 1837 and 1850, but generally in close and pertinent prose. Many details are found in his diaries, but not such as are common in the diaries of other men,--not trivial but significant details. From these daily entries he made up his essays, his lectures, and his volumes; all being slowly, and with much deliberation and revision, brought into the form in which he gave them to the public. After that he scarcely changed them at all; they had received the last imprint of his mind, and he allowed them to stand and speak for themselves. But before printing, they underwent constant change, by addition, erasure, transposition, correction, and combination. A given lecture might be two years, or twenty years in preparation; or it might be, like his defense of John Brown, copied with little change from the pages of his diary for the fortnight previous. But that was an exceptional case; and Thoreau was stirred and quickened by the campaign and capture of Brown, as perhaps he had never been before. "The thought of that man's position and fate," he said, "is spoiling many a man's day here at the North for other thinking. If any one who has seen John Brown in Concord, can pursue successfully any other train of thought, I do not know what he is made of. If there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, I will warrant him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or purse. I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent." The fact that Thoreau noted down his thoughts by night as well as by day, appears also from an entry in one of his journals, where he is describing the coming on of day, as witnessed by him at the close of a September night in Concord. "Some bird flies over," he writes, "making a noise like the barking of a puppy (it was a cuckoo). It is yet so dark that I have dropped my pencil and cannot find it." No writer of modern times, in fact, was so much awake and abroad at night, or has described better the phenomena of darkness and of moonlight. It is interesting to note some dates and incidents concerning a few of Thoreau's essays. The celebrated chapter on "Friendship," in the "Week," was written in the winter of 1847-48, soon after he left Walden, and while he was a member of Mr. Emerson's household during the absence of his friend in Europe. On the 13th of January, 1848, Mr. Alcott notes in his diary:-- "Henry Thoreau came in after my hours with the children, and we had a good deal of talk on the modes of popular influence. He read me a manuscript essay of his on 'Friendship,' which he has just written, and which I thought superior to anything I had heard." To the same period or a little later belong those verses called "The Departure," which declare, under a similitude, Thoreau's relations with one family of his friends. In 1843, when he first met Henry James, Lucretia Mott, and others who have since been famous, in the pleasant seclusion of Staten Island, he wrote a translation of the "Seven Against Thebes," which has never been printed, some translations from Pindar, printed in the "Dial," in 1844, and two articles for the New York "Democratic Review," called "Paradise to be Regained," and "The Landlord." Thoreau left "a vast amount of manuscript," in the words of his sister, who was his literary executor until her death in 1876, when she committed her trust to his Worcester friend, Mr. Harrison Blake. She was aided in the revision and publication of the "Excursions," "Maine Woods," "Letters," and other volumes which she issued from 1862 to 1866, by Mr. Emerson, Mr. Channing, and other friends,--Mr. Emerson having undertaken that selection of letters and poems from his mass of correspondence and his preserved verses, which appeared in 1865. His purpose, as he said to Miss Thoreau, was to exhibit in that volume "a most perfect piece of stoicism," and he fancied that she had "marred his classic statue" by inserting some tokens of natural affection which the domestic letters showed. Miss Thoreau said that "it did not seem quite honest to Henry" to leave out such passages; Mr. Fields, the publisher, agreed with her, and a few of them were retained. His correspondence, as a whole, is much more affectionate, and less pugnacious than would appear from the published volume. He was fond of dispute, but those who knew him best loved him most. Of his last illness his sister said:-- "It was not possible to be sad in his presence. No shadow of gloom attaches to anything in my mind connected with my precious brother. He has done much to strengthen the faith of his friends. Henry's whole life impresses me as a grand miracle." Walking once with Mr. Alcott, soon after he passed his eightieth birth day, as we faced the lovely western sky in December, the old Pythagorean said, "I always think of Thoreau when I look at a sunset;" and I then remembered it was at that hour Thoreau usually walked along the village street, under the arch of trees, with the sunset sky seen through their branches. "He said to me in his last illness," added Alcott, "'I shall leave the world without a regret,'--that was the saying either of a grand egotist or of a deeply religious soul." Thoreau was both, and both his egotism and his devotion offended many of those who met him. His aversion to the companionship of men was partly religious--a fondness for the inward life--and partly egotism and scorn for frivolity. "Emerson says his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part," writes Thoreau in 1854, "that he is driven to all sorts of resources,--and among the rest to men. I tell him we differ only in our resources: mine is to get away from men. They very rarely affect me as grand or beautiful; but I know that there is a sunrise and a sunset every day. I have seen more men than usual lately; and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are." In 1859 he wrote to Mr. Blake:-- "I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for _the sake of society_; as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say. They have got a club, the handle of which is in the Parker House, at Boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, expecting to make me tender, or minced meat, and so fit for a club to dine off. The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it! First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got." Yet Thoreau knew the value of society, and avoided it oftentimes only because he was too busy. To his friend Ricketson, who reproached him for ceasing to answer letters, he wrote in November, 1860, just before he took the fatal cold that terminated in consumption and ended his life prematurely:-- "FRIEND RICKETSON,--You know that I never promised to correspond with you, and so, when I do, I do more than I promised. Such are my pursuits and habits, that I rarely go abroad; and it is quite a habit with me to decline invitations to do so. Not that I could not enjoy such visits, if I were not otherwise occupied. I have enjoyed very much my visits to you, and my rides in your neighborhood, and am sorry that I cannot enjoy such things oftener; but life is short, and there are other things also to be done. I admit that you are more social than I am, and more attentive to 'the common courtesies of life;' but this is partly for the reason that you have fewer or less exacting private pursuits. Not to have written a note for a year is with me a very venial offense. I think I do not correspond with any one so often as once in six months. I have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to; but I suppose I had no new or particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement. I have felt that you would be glad to see me almost whenever I got ready to come; but I only offer myself as a rare visitor, and a still rarer correspondent. I am very busy, after my fashion, little as there is to show for it, and feel as if I could not spend many days nor dollars in traveling; for the shortest visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the weeks, you know. "Nevertheless, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. Please remember me to your family. I have a very pleasant recollection of your fireside, and I trust that I shall revisit it; also of your shanty and the surrounding regions." He did make a last visit to this friend in August, 1861, after his return from Minnesota, whither he went with young Horace Mann, in June. And it was to Mr. Ricketson that Sophia Thoreau, two weeks after her brother's death, wrote the following account of his last illness:-- "CONCORD, _May 20, 1862_. "DEAR FRIEND,--Profound joy mingles with my grief. I feel as if something very beautiful had happened,--not death. Although Henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me. My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him who made him, and who has now called him to labor in more glorious fields than earth affords! "You ask for some particulars relating to Henry's illness. I feel like saying that Henry was never affected, never reached by it. I never before saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. Very often I have heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. He remarked to me that there was as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health, the mind always conforming to the condition of the body. The thought of death, he said, could not begin to trouble him. His thoughts had entertained him all his life, and did still. When he had wakeful nights, he would ask me to arrange the furniture, so as to make fantastic shadows on the wall, and he wished his bed was in the form of a shell that he might curl up in it. He considered occupation as necessary for the sick as for those in health, and has accomplished a vast amount of labor during the past few months, in preparing some papers for the press. He did not cease to call for his manuscript till the last day of his life. During his long illness I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us. His perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, 'Well, Mr. Thoreau, we must all go.' Henry replied, 'When I was a very little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course, I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.' "There is very much that I should like to write you about my precious brother had I time and strength. I wish you to know how very gentle, lovely, and submissive he was in all his ways. His little study bed was brought down into our front parlor, when he could no longer walk with our assistance, and every arrangement pleased him. The devotion of his friends was most rare and touching. His room was made fragrant by the gifts of flowers from young and old. Fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts, were sent him. It was really pathetic, the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. Total strangers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done them. All this attention was fully appreciated and very gratifying to Henry. He would sometimes say, 'I should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much has been done for me. I could never repay my friends.' And they remembered him to the last. Only about two hours before he left us, Judge Hoar called with a bouquet of hyacinths fresh from his garden, which Henry smelt and said he liked, and a few minutes after he was gone another friend came with a dish of his favorite jelly. I can never be grateful enough for the gentle, easy exit which was granted him. At seven o'clock, Tuesday morning, he became restless, and desired to be moved. Dear Mother, aunt Louisa, and myself were with him. His self-possession did not forsake him. A little after eight he asked to be raised quite up. His breathing grew fainter and fainter, and without the slightest struggle, he left us at nine o'clock,--but not alone; our Heavenly Father was with us. "Your last letter reached us by the evening mail on Monday. Henry asked me to read it to him, which I did. He enjoyed your letters, and felt disappointed not to see you again. Mr. Blake and Mr. Brown came twice to visit him, since January. They were present at his funeral, which took place in the church. Mr. Emerson read such an address as no other man could have done. It is a source of great satisfaction that one so gifted knew and loved my brother, and is prepared to speak such brave words about him at this time. The 'Atlantic Monthly' for July will contain Mr. Emerson's memories of Henry. I hope that you saw a notice of the services on Friday, written by Mr. Fields, in the 'Transcript.' "Let me thank you for your very friendly letters. I trust we shall see you in Concord, Anniversary Week. It would give me pleasure to make the acquaintance of your family, of whom my brother has so often told me. If convenient, will you please bring the ambrotype of Henry which was taken last autumn in New Bedford. I am interested to see it. Mr. Channing will take the crayon likeness to Boston this week to secure some photographs. My intention was to apologize for not writing you at this time; but I must now trust to your generosity to pardon this hasty letter, written under a great pressure of cares and amidst frequent interruptions. My mother unites with me in very kind regards to your family. "Yours truly, "S. E. THOREAU." To Parker Pillsbury, who would fain talk with Thoreau in this last winter concerning the next world, the reply was, "One world at a time." To a young friend (Myron Benton) he wrote a few weeks before death:-- "CONCORD, _March 21, 1862_. "DEAR SIR,--I thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since I received it, I have intended to answer before I died, however briefly. I am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, I have not written my books in vain. I was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, 'I wish you would write another book--write it for me.' He is actually more familiar with what I have written than I am myself. I am pleased when you say that in 'The Week' you like especially 'those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book;' for these, I suppose, are the least attractive to most readers. I have not been engaged in any particular work on Botany, or the like, though, if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally. "You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_ that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add, that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. "Yours truly, HENRY D. THOREAU, "By SOPHIA E. THOREAU." "With an unfaltering trust in God's mercies," wrote Ellery Channing, "and never deserted by his good genius, he most bravely and unsparingly passed down the inclined plane of a terrible malady--pulmonary consumption; working steadily at the completing of his papers to his last hours, or so long as he could hold the pencil in his trembling fingers. Yet if he did get a little sleep to comfort him in this year's campaign of sleepless affliction, he was sure to interest those about him in his singular dreams, more than usually fantastic. He said once, that having got a few moments of repose, 'sleep seemed to hang round his bed in festoons.' He declared uniformly that he preferred to endure with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by narcotics. His patience was unfailing; assuredly he knew not aught save resignation; he did mightily cheer and console those whose strength was less. His every instant now, his least thought and work, sacredly belonged to them, dearer than his rapidly perishing life, whom he should so quickly leave behind." Once or twice he shed tears. Upon hearing a wandering musician in the street playing some tune of his childhood he might never hear again, he wept, and said to his mother, "Give him some money for me!" "Northward he turneth through a little door, And scarce three steps, ere Music's golden tongue, Flattered to tears this aged man and poor; But no--already had his death-bell rung, The joys of all his life were said and sung." He died on the 6th of May, 1862, and had a public funeral from the parish church a few days later. On his coffin his friend Channing placed several inscriptions, among them this, "Hail to thee, O man! who hast come from the transitory place to the imperishable." This sentiment may stand as faintly marking Thoreau's deep, vital conviction of immortality, of which he never had entertained a doubt in his life. There was in his view of the world and its Maker no room for doubt; so that when he was once asked, superfluously, what he thought of a future world and its compensations, he replied, "Those were voluntaries I did not take,"--having confined himself to the foreordained course of things. He is buried in the village cemetery, quaintly named "Sleepy Hollow," with his family and friends about him; one of whom, surviving him for a few years, said, as she looked upon his low head-stone on the hillside, "Concord is Henry's monument, covered with suitable inscriptions by his own hand." INDEX. Academy, Concord, 46. Acton, originally a part of Concord, 32. Adams, John Quincy, 78. Adams, Samuel, 100. African Slaves in Concord, 203-205. Agassiz, Louis, 115, 243, 245. Agricola at Marseilles, 64. Alcott, A. Bronson, sonnet on Thoreau, v.; born in Connecticut, 63; at Concord Lyceum, 49; visits Dr. Ripley, 80; in old age, 81; goes to live in Concord, 117; helps "raise" Thoreau's hut, 118; his School of Philosophy, 121; an early Transcendentalist, 124; his Paradise at Fruitlands, 134-140; a friend of John Brown, 148; plan of living in Concord woods, 155; builds a summer-house for Emerson, 194; his friendship with Thoreau, 186; his conversations, 187, 188, 190, 199; from his diary, 192, 195, 304; peddler in Virginia, 187, 260; visits Horace Greeley, 188; harbors a fugitive slave, 195; lends Thoreau his axe, 209; goes to the opera with Greeley, 241; with Thoreau in New Bedford, 267; his opinion of Thoreau, 306. Alcott, Louisa, 63, 91. Allston, Washington, visits Concord, 111. American literature, Thoreau's view of, 160. American Slavery, Thoreau's opposition to, 195, 199, 292; John Brown's attack upon, 292, 303. Assabet River, 15, 33, 114, 202. Ball, B. W., 135. Bangor, 1, 5, 245. Barnes, Lucy, 109, 110. Barrett, Humphrey, a Concord farmer, 89, 98, 103, 107. Barrett, Joseph, 114-117. Bartlett, Dr. Josiah, 43, 44. Bartlett, Robert, 190. Bedford (the town), 9, 12. Bedford road, 12, 270. Betsey (Thoreau), 3, 4. Bigelow, Dr. H. J., 62. Blake, Harrison, 141, 301, 305, 307. Bliss, Rev. Daniel, 74, 75, 99, 100. Bliss, Daniel, the Tory, 100, 204. Bliss, Phebe, 75, 205. Boston, the home of John Thoreau, the Jerseyman, 2, 6; of Henry Thoreau, 27; birth-place of Emerson, 63. Boston Miscellany, 220. Bowen, Prof. Francis, 62. Bradford, George P., 46. Bradford, Gershom, 105. Bremer, Frederika, 141. Brisbane, Albert, 133, 134. Brister's Hill, 202. Brister, a freedman, 203, 205, 208. Brook Farm, 134, 141. Brooks, Nathan, 42, 46, 77, 105, 112. Brooks, Mrs. Nathan, 68. Brown, John, of Osawatomie, 146, 185, 199, 242, 292, 293, 295, 303. Brown, Mrs., of Plymouth, 60. Brownson, Orestes A., 53. Bruno, Giordano, quoted, 208. Bulkley family in Concord, 33, 39, 98. Burke, Edmund, quoted, 299. Buttrick, Major, 102. Cambridge, Thoreau's residence in, 51; letters from, 56, 61; Thoreau's visit to, 196. Campbell, Sir Archibald, 68. Canada, Thoreau's excursion to, 233, 235. Cape Cod, 236, 264. Carlyle, Thomas, 124, 125, 193, 233; Thoreau's essay on, 218-224. Channing, Rev. Dr., 80, 82, 144. Channing, Ellery (the poet), 11, 41, 49-51, 63, 70, 135, 136, 177-189; his lines on Emerson, 69; on Thoreau, 185, 214; quoted, 49-51; his friendship for Thoreau, 178-185; his verses on Hawthorne, 188; his house, 198; his letters to Thoreau, 209, 218; calls Thoreau Idolon, 252; and Rudolpho, 253; visits Monadnoc, 255; describes Thoreau, 262, 267, 291, 315; his biography of Thoreau, 11, 49, 301. Channing, Rev. W. H., 140, 141, 174, 216. Chapman, Dr., 193. Chappaqua, 241. Cheney, Mrs., of Concord, 18, 93. Cohasset, 91, 175. Columella, 132. Concord (town of) described, 32-40; celebrities, 41-48, 63-96; farmers, 97-123; Lyceum, 47, 48, 168; as a transcendental capital, 135, 143, 146; the home of Channing and Thoreau, 178; localities, 201-204; freedmen, 204; jail, 207; the monument to Thoreau, 317. Concord Fight, 76, 86, 99, 102, 109. Concord grape, 34. Concord River, 33, 140, 154, 167, 176, 178, 183, 188, 199, 202, 208. Concord Village, 189, 201; trade in, 35; customs of, 40, 46, 48, 64, 72, 76, 87, 116, 122. Connecticut, 73, 82, 127, 186. Corner, Nine-Acre, 70, 84, 208. Davenant, Sir William, 127, 164. "Departure, The," 282, 305. Dial, The, 127, 135, 163, 168, 171, 173, 212, 217, 248. Diana, Ascription to, 260. Dunbar, Rev. Asa, 8, 9, 20. Dunbar, Charles, uncle of Thoreau, 21-24, 92, 93. Dunbar, Cynthia (mother of Thoreau), 8, 18, 19, 21, 24-28, 50, 57, 92, 96, 312. Dunbar, Louisa, 13-17, 21. Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 128. "Egomites," 80. Emerson, Charles, 46. Emerson, Miss Mary, 19, 20, 75. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, born in Boston, 63; a descendant of Concord ministers, 39; quoted, 37; began to lecture in Concord, 48; begins acquaintance with Thoreau, 59; goes to live in Concord, 69; draws people there, 71; describes Dr. Ripley, 77-84; describes the "Concord Fight," 103; on Captain Hardy, 121, 123; goes to Europe, 281; his "Forester," 251; his proposition for an international magazine, 193; on Thoreau's acquaintance with Nature, 251, 252; on Thoreau's patience in observation, 250; his relations with Thoreau, 189; his summer-house, 194, 278; tries to work in the woods, 278; praises Thoreau's "Smoke," 287; gives his funeral eulogy, 313. Emerson, William, 190. Endymion of Concord, 260. Essays of Thoreau, in college, 150-163; "Effect of Story Telling," 158; "L'Allegro and Il Penseroso," 156; "National Characteristics," 160; "Paley's Common Reasons," 161; "Punishment," 158; "Source of our feeling for the Sublime," 159; "Simplicity of Style," 156. Everett, Edward, 88. Fairhaven Cliffs, 153. Fenda, the fortune teller, 204. Fields, James T., 300, 306. Forbes, Mrs. W. H., recollections of Thoreau, 270-273. "Forester, The," verse by Emerson, 257. "Fruitlands," in Harvard, 135-137. Fugitive Slave, in Concord, 195. Fuller, Margaret, in Concord, 70; criticises Thoreau's poems, 169-172; rejects a prose article by him, 173; her character, 174; in Cambridge, 191; at a conversation, 190; visit to Europe, marriage, and death, 230; writes for the "Tribune," and lives with H. Greeley, 217. Gardiner, Dr., 79, 80. Garfield, his ancestors, 204. Gilman, Rev. Nicholas, 128-130. Goodwin, Rev. H. B., 83. Graham, George R., 222, 224. Graham's Magazine, 213, 224. Graveyard in Lincoln, 204. Greeley, Horace, as Mæcenas, 217; editor of the "Tribune," 216; described by Margaret Fuller, 217; his correspondence with Thoreau, 219-229, 231-240; invites Thoreau to Chappaqua, satirized by W. E. Channing, 218. Griswold, R. W., 220, 222. Hafiz, quoted, 166. Hamilton, Alexander, 113. Hampden, John, 107. Hardy, Captain, 120-122. Harvard Magazine, 196. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, moves and removes to Concord, 70; quoted, 71; Channing's verses on, 188; Emerson's influence on, 148; his "Scarlet Letter," 277; invites Thoreau to lecture in Salem, 276; returns to Concord, 278; returns thither from Europe, 189. Herald's Office, London, 108. Heywood, Dr. Abiel, 38, 40-42. Heywood, George, 39. Hildreth, S. T., 57. Hoar, E. R., 90, 312. Hoar, Edward, 254. Hoar, Miss Elizabeth, 239. Hoar, Mrs. Samuel, 96. Hoar, Samuel, 46, 72, 90, 95, 112. Hollowell Farm, 172, _note_, 208. Hosmer Cottage, 117. Hosmer, Cyrus, 111. Hosmer, Edmund, 118-120. Hosmer, James, 98. Hosmer, Joseph (the Major), 98, 99, 100, 109, 111, 112, 113. Hosmer, Lucy, 110. Hurd, Dr. Isaac, 42. Icarus, 202. Indians, (American), 240, 242, 248. Ingraham, Cato, a slave, 203. Ingraham, Duncan, 66-68. Jack, John, a negro, 204; epitaph on, 205. Jackson, Dr. C. T., 246, 247. James, Henry, 305. Jarvis, Deacon Francis, 76, 77. Jarvis, Dr. Edward, 76. Jersey, Isle of, 1-4. Journal of Thoreau, 2, 150, 154, 167. Ktaadn, and Thoreau's visit there, 226, 227, 228, 245. Keene, N. H., 18. Kosta, Martin, 67. Lane, Charles, 135-141. Lee family, 114; their farm and hill, 115. Letters from Maria Thoreau, 5; from D. Webster, 15; from Josiah Quincy, 53, 61; from Dr. Ripley, 57, 81; from Dr. Channing to Dr. Ripley, 82; from Charles Lane, to Thoreau, 137-140; from A. G. Peabody, 55, 56; from R. W. Emerson, 155, 193; from F. B. Sanborn, 197; from Henry Thoreau, 92, 181, 209, 210, 216, 307, 308, 314; from Horace Greeley, 219, 222-231, 233-240; from Margaret Fuller, 169-173; from Dr. Ripley, 144-146; from Sophia Thoreau, 176, 268, 306, 310, 314; letter to Sophia Thoreau, 189, 216, 281. Levet, Robert, 43. Lowell, James Russell, 112, 246. Mæcenas, Greeley as, 216-241. Manse, Old, built in 1766, 75; occupied by Hawthorne 85; Channing's verses on, 188; farmers at, 86-88; "Mosses from," 183; first mistress of, 205. Marlboro road, 109. Marryatt, Captain, 67. Marvell, Andrew, 42. Massey, Gerald, 240. Merrick, Tilly, 67, 108. Milton, John, 156, 157. Minott, George, 22, 24, 92, 274. Minott, Mrs., the grandmother of Thoreau, 9-11. Minute-Man, statue of, 86. Monadnoc, 115, 254-257. Moore, Abel ("Captain Hardy"), 120, 121. Morton, Edwin, 197. Munroe of Lexington and Concord, 66; William, 37, 152. Musketaquid, 33. Nature, "born and brought up in Concord," 96; Thoreau's observation of, 252, 285. Orrok, David, 2. Orrok, Sarah, 2. Out-door life of Thoreau, at Walden, 209, 211; in general, 242, 243, 249-252, 264-267; by night, 304. Parker, Theodore, 69; school candidate, 88. "Past and Present," by Carlyle, notice of, 217. Peabody, A. G., letter from, 54. Peabody, Elizabeth P., 70, 168. Penobscot River, 245. Pepperell, Sir William, 129. Perry, Joseph, 67. Phalanstery, 140, 141, 216. Phillips, Wendell, at Concord, 49. Pierpont, Sarah, 128. Pillsbury, Parker, 314. Poems, quoted from Tennyson, 31; from Ellery Channing, 24, 69, 119, 176, 184, 185, 215, 252, 255; Emerson's "Saadi", 119; "Maine Woods," 246, 247; Milton, 181; Thoreau's "Love," 167; "Sympathy," 164; "The Maiden in the East," 165; to his brother John, 176; The Departure, 282; "The Pilgrims," 285; "Smoke" (a fragment), 287; from T. P. Sanborn, 260; from Keats, 316. Poet, the character of, 284. Ponkawtassett Hill, 86, 182. Putnam's Magazine, 236, 237. Quarterly, Massachusetts, 230. Quincy, Josiah, 52; letter from, 53, 61; certificate in favor of Thoreau, 61. Ralston, Mrs. Laura Dunbar, 19. Ricketson, Daniel, 176, 188, 263; description of Thoreau's actual appearance, 266; disappointment in imagined personal appearance of Thoreau, 264; on Thoreau's domestic character, 267; describes Thoreau's dance, 268; Letters from Thoreau to, 308, 309; Letter from Sophia Thoreau to, 310. Ripley, Dr. (pastor at Concord), petition to Grand Lodge of Masons, 1-9; letter from, 25; certificate in favor of Thoreau's father, 26; schism in parish of, 28, 85; Thoreau baptized by, 45; letter from Edward Everett to, 47; letter introducing Thoreau as a teacher, 57; anecdotes of, 73-80, 86, 87; letter to Dr. Channing, 81; reply, 82; his prayers, 83, 84; letter on the Transcendental movement, 144, 146. Ripley, Rev. Samuel, 74. Ripley, Mrs. Sarah, 85. Robbins, Cæsar, a negro, 104, 203. Sanborn, F. B., acquaintance with Thoreau, 196; extract from diary, 198, 199; introduces John Brown to Thoreau, 199; letter to Thoreau, 197. Sanborn, T. P., his "Endymion" quoted, 260. Sartain, John, 232. "Service, The," 172. Sewall, Ellen, 163. "Shay," a one-horse, 131-133. Slave, fugitive, 195. Staten Island, 89, 92, 305. Sunday prospect, 152. Sunday walkers, 85. Tacitus, quoted, 64. Teufelsdröckh, 210. Thoreau family, 4, 5, 27-31. Thoreau, Helen, 59-61. Thoreau, Henry, his ancestry, 1-10; born in Concord, 12; his mother, 8, 24; his father, 25; as a pencil-maker, 37; first dwelling-place, 45; at the Concord Academy, 46; enters Harvard College, 46; at Chelmsford, 49; his childish stoicism, 50; his graduation, 51; as school teacher, 52; a beneficiary of Harvard College, 53, 54; his certificate from Dr. Ripley, 57, 58; from Emerson, 59; beginning of acquaintance with Emerson, 59; his "Sic Vita," 60; Quincy's certificate, 61; a Transcendentalist, 124; first essays in authorship, 149, 153; description of a visit to Fairhaven Cliffs, 153, 154; his early poems, 164-167; his first lecture, 168; his "Walk to Wachusett," 169; his earliest companion, 175; his friendship with Ellery Channing, 178-183; his praise of Alcott, 186; goes to Alcott's conversations, 187; visits Chappaqua and Walt Whitman, 188; his burial place, 189; his relation with Emerson, 189, 190; reads his "Week" to Alcott, 192; designs a lodge for Emerson, 194; his acquaintance with Sanborn, 195; at Walden, 201; his reasons for going to Walden, 212; edits "The Week," 212; talks with W. H. Channing and Greeley, 216; his essay on Carlyle, 218-225; his paper on "Ktaadn" and the "Maine Woods," 225; his "Week," 230; asks Greeley for a loan, 235; his "Canada," and "Cape Cod," 235, 236; Greeley asks him to become a tutor, 241; his out-door life, 242; collects specimens for Agassiz, 243, 245; his visits to Maine, 245, 248; as a naturalist, 249-252; a night on Mount Washington, 254; his Monadnoc trip, 256-257; his description of a Concord heifer, 258, 259; his apostrophe to the "Queen of Night," 259; his face, 199, 261, 266; described by Channing, 262; by Ricketson, 263-266; travels on Cape Cod, 264; domestic character, 267; dances, 268; sings "Tom Bowline," 269; his social traits, 270-273; as author and lecturer, 274-277; his manual labor, 278; fashion of his garments, 279; income from authorship, 280; lives in Emerson's household, 281; his parable, 285; his habit of versification, 286; his reading, 286; as naturalist, 288-291; his theory of labor and leisure, 288; his political philosophy, 292; eras in his life, 297; his aim in writing, 298; his religion, 299; his business in life, 300; his method in writing, 304; his sunset walks, 307; his aversion to society, 307; his decline and death, 313-316; his funeral, 317. Thoreau, John, the father, 25, 27. Thoreau, John, the brother, 175, 178. Thoreau, John, the Jerseyman; 1, 5-7, 37. Thoreau, Maria, 1-8. Thoreau, Sophia, 29, 38, 44, 265, 282, 301, 305, 310, 315; letter from, 176, 268, 306, 310-314; letters to, 189, 216, 281. "Tom Bowline," sung by Thoreau, 268, 269, 272. Transcendentalism, 124, 126, 133, 142, 247, 279; in New England, 124-126; in politics, 292-296; social and unsocial, 141-145; at Brook Farm, 134; at Fruitlands, 137. Transcendentalists of Concord, 63, 70, 76, 80, 119, 134-137, 143, 146, 148, 288, 307. Transcendental Period, 124-147. "Tribune," New York, 217, 230, 238. Very, Jones, 51, 190. Wachusett, 115, 138, 169, 220. Walden (the book), 196, 211, 214, 239,240. Walden Hermitage, 201-215. Walden woods, 11, 155, 202, 209, 212, 214. Watson, Marston, 188, 197. Webster, Daniel, a lover of Louisa Dunbar, 13, 14; describes his native place, 15-17; his friendship for Louisa Dunbar, 17, 93; at the "Wyman Trial," 90; his "rose-cold," 91; visits in Concord, 93; letter to Mrs. Cheney, 94; described by Carlyle, 293; by Thoreau, 294; contrasted with Thoreau, 296. Webster, Prof. J. W., 56. "Week," The, (Thoreau's first book), 183, 196, 213, 230, 240, 299, 304. Weiss, Rev. John, 57. "Westminster Review," 240. Wharton, Thomas, 298. Whig Review, 238. Whitefield, G., letter to, 129. Whiting, Colonel, 36, 46. Whiting, Rev. John, 65. Whitman, Walt, 186, 188. Whittier, J. G., quoted, 131. Wigglesworth, Michael, 131. Willard, Major, 32, 98. Woolman, John, 127, 130. Zilpha, the Walden Circe, 203. AMERICAN STATESMEN Biographies of Men famous in the Political History of the United States. Edited by JOHN T. MORSE, JR. Each volume, with portrait, 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 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Mr. Alcott, who has now passed the age of eighty-two, has been for years doing in some degree what Dr. Channing urged the patriarch of his denomination to do, but which the old minister never found time and strength for. It is curious that these two venerable men, whose united life in Concord covers a period of more than a century, both came from Connecticut.] [Footnote 3: This princely anecdote is paralleled, in its way, by one told of Gershom Bradford, of Duxbury, son of Colonel Gam. Bradford, the friend of Washington and Kosciusko, but himself a plain Old Colony farmer. Once walking in his woods, he saw a man cutting down a fine tree; he concealed himself that the man might not see him, and went home. When asked why he did not stop the trespasser, he replied, "Could not the poor man have a tree?" Gershom Bradford was a descendant of Governor Bradford, the Pilgrim, and uncle of Mrs. Sarah Ripley, of Concord.] [Footnote 4: This would, of course, diminish his own share, as the law then stood, from one half the estate to one fourth, or less.] [Footnote 5: "These facts," says his biographer, whom I knew well, "show clearly, I think, not only that his love of right was stronger than his love of money, but that he would rather make any sacrifice of property than leave a doubt in his own mind whether justice had been done to others."] [Footnote 6: Lucy Barnes, daughter of Jonathan and Rachel Barnes of Marlborough, was born July 7, 1742, married Joseph Hosmer, of Concord, December 24, 1761, and died in Concord, ----, ----. Her brother was Rev. Jonathan Barnes, born in 1749, graduated at Harvard College, in 1770, and settled as a minister in Hillsborough, N. H., where he died in 1805.] [Footnote 7: The resemblance between some of John Woolman's utterances and those of Henry Thoreau has been noticed by Whittier, who says of the New Jersey Quaker, "From his little farm on the Rancocas he looked out with a mingled feeling of wonder and sorrow upon the hurry and unrest of the world; he regarded the merely rich man with unfeigned pity. With nothing of his scorn, he had all of Thoreau's commiseration for people who went about, bowed down with the weight of broad acres and great houses on their backs." The "scorn" of Thoreau and the "pity," of Woolman, sprang from a common root, however.] [Footnote 8: The Hollowell Place, no doubt.] [Footnote 9: In building this quaint structure, Thoreau was so averse to Mr. Alcott's plan of putting up and tearing down with no settled design of form on paper, that he withdrew his mechanic hand, so skillful in all carpenter work.] [Footnote 10: No such letter appears.] [Footnote 11: That is to say, a low price compared with what is now paid. As the letter courteously states some matters that have now become curious, it may be given:-- "PHILADELPHIA, _March 24, 1852_. "DEAR SIR,--I have read the articles of Mr. Thoreau forwarded by you, and will be glad to publish them if our terms are satisfactory. We generally pay for prose composition per printed page, and would allow him three dollars per page. We do not pay more than four dollars for any that we now engage. I did not suppose our maximum rate would have paid you (Mr. Greeley) for your lecture, and therefore requested to know your own terms. Of course, when an article is unusually desirable, we may deviate from rule; I now only mention ordinary arrangement. I was very sorry not to have your article, but shall enjoy the reading of it in Graham. Mr. T. might send us some further contributions, and shall at least receive prompt and courteous decision respecting them. Yours truly, "JOHN SARTAIN." It seems sad so candid and amiable a publisher should not have succeeded.] [Footnote 12: It was a "Primo Flauto" of his father's, who, like himself, was a sweet player on the flute, and had performed with that instrument in the parish choir, before the day of church-organs in Concord.] [Footnote 13: Thoreau says of this adventure: "After putting our packs under a rock, having a good hatchet, I proceeded to build a substantial house. This was done about dark, and by that time we were as wet as if we had stood in a hogshead of water. We then built a fire before the door, directly on the site of our camp of two years ago. Standing before this, and turning round slowly, like meat that is roasting, we were as dry, if not drier than ever, after a few hours, and so, at last, we turned in."] Transcriber's Notes Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected. Page 39: Changed "aniversary" to "anniversary." (Orig: two hundredth aniversary of the town settlement.) Footnote from Page 111: Dashes represent blank spaces of unrecorded death date. (Orig: and died in Concord, ----, ----.) Page 130: Changed "acknowlege" to "acknowledge." (Orig: to pure love, I may acknowlege with gratitude) Page 229: Changed "existnce" to "existence." (Orig: let common people know of his existnce.) Page 234: Changed "that" to "than." (Orig: make a use for them at this season that at any other.") 
6561	----	OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS By Clara Barrus (Illustration of John Burroughs. From a photograph by Theona Peck Harris) CONTENTS OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS THE RETREAT OF A POET-NATURALIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ANCESTRY AND FAMILY LIFE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH SELF-ANALYSIS THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS A WINTER DAY AT SLABSIDES BACK TO PEPACTON CAMPINGING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION OUR FRIEND JOHN BURROUGHS We all claim John Burroughs as our friend. He is inextricably blended with our love for the birds and the flowers, and for all out of doors; but he is much more to us than a charming writer of books about nature, and we welcome familiar glimpses of him as one welcomes anything which brings him in closer touch with a friend. A clever essayist, in speaking of the "obituary method of appreciation," says that we feel a slight sense of impropriety and insecurity in contemporary plaudits. "Wait till he is well dead, and four or five decades of daisies have bloomed over him, says the world; then, if there is any virtue in his works, we will tag and label them and confer immortality upon him." But Mr. Burroughs has not had to wait till the daisies cover him to be appreciated. A multitude of his readers has sought him out and walked amid the daisies with him, listened with him to the birds, and gained countless delightful associations with all these things through this personal relation with the author; and these friends in particular will, I trust, welcome some "contemporary plaudits." As a man, and as a writer, Mr. Burroughs has been in the public eye for many years. At the age of twenty-three he had an article printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in 1910 that journal celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his contributions to its columns. Early in his career he received marked recognition from able critics, and gratifying responses from readers. It is rare in the history of an author that his books after fifty years of writing have the freshness, lucidity, and charm that Mr. Burroughs's later books have. A critic in 1876 speaks of his "quiet, believing style, free from passion or the glitter of rhetoric, and giving one the sense of simple eyesight"; and now, concerning one of his later books, "Time and Change," Mr. Brander Matthews writes: "In these pellucid pages--so easy to read because they are the result of hard thinking--he brings home to us what is the real meaning of the discoveries and the theories of the scientists.... He brings to bear his searching scientific curiosity and his sympathetic interpreting imagination.... All of them models of the essay at its best--easy, unpedantic, and unfailingly interesting." From school-children all over the United States, from nearly every civilized country on the globe, from homes of the humble and of the wealthy, from the scholar in his study, from the clergyman, the lawyer, the physician, the business man, the farmer, the raftsman, the sportsman, from the invalid shut in from the great outdoors (but, thanks to our friend, not shut _out_ from outdoor blessings), have come for many years heartfelt letters attesting the wholesome and widespread influence of his works. President Roosevelt a few years ago, in dedicating one of his books to "Dear Oom John," voiced the popular feeling: "It is a good thing for our people that you have lived, and surely no man can wish to have more said of him." Some years ago, the New York "Globe," on announcing a new book by Mr. Burroughs, said, "It has been the lot of few writers of this country or of any country to gain such good will and personal esteem as for many years have been freely given to John Burroughs." If we ask why this is so, we find it answered by Whitman, who, in conversation with a friend, said, "John is one of the true hearts--one of the true hearts--warm, sure, firm." Mr. Burroughs has been much visited, much "appreciated," much rhymed about, much painted, modeled, and photographed, and--much loved. Because he has been so much loved, and because his influence has been so far-reaching, it has seemed to me that a book which gives familiar and intimate glimpses of him will be welcomed by the legion who call him friend. The exceptional opportunities I have enjoyed for many years past of observing him encourage me in the undertaking. The readers of Mr. Burroughs crave the personal relation with him. Just as they want to own his books, instead of merely taking them from the public libraries, so they want to meet the man, take him by the hand, look into his eyes, hear his voice, and learn, if possible, what it is that has given him his unfailing joy in life, his serenity, his comprehensive and loving insight into the life of the universe. They feel, too, a sense of deep gratitude to one who has shown them how divine is the soil under foot--veritable star-dust from the gardens of the Eternal. He has made us feel at one with the whole cosmos, not only with bird and tree, and rock and flower, but also with the elemental forces, the powers which are friendly or unfriendly according as we put ourselves in right or wrong relations with them. He has shown us the divine in the common and the near at hand; that heaven lies about us here in this world; that the glorious and the miraculous are not to be sought afar off, but are here and now; and that love of the earth-mother is, in the truest sense, love of the divine: "The babe in the womb is not nearer its mother than are we to the invisible, sustaining, mothering powers of the universe, and to its spiritual entities, every moment of our lives." One who speaks thus of the things of such import to every human soul is bound to win responses; he deals with things that come home to us all. We want to know him. Although retiring in habit, naturally seeking seclusion, Mr. Burroughs is not allowed overindulgence in this tendency. One may with truth describe him as a contemporary described Edward FitzGerald--"an eccentric man of genius who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it." And yet he is no recluse. When disciples seek out the hermit in hiding behind the vines at Slabsides, they find a genial welcome, a simple, homely hospitality; find that the author merits the Indian name given him by a clever friend--"Man-not-afraid-of-company." The simplicity and gentleness of this author and his strong interest in people endear him to the reader; we feel these qualities in his writings long before meeting him--a certain urbanity, a tolerant insight and sympathy, and a quiet humor. These draw us to him. Perhaps after cherishing his writings for years, cherishing also a confident feeling that we shall know him some day, we obey a sudden impulse, write to him about a bird or a flower, ask help concerning a puzzling natural-history question, tell him what a solace "Waiting" is, what a joy his books have been; possibly we write some verses to him, or express appreciation for an essay that has enlarged our vision and opened up a new world of thought. Perhaps we go to see him at Slabsides, or in the Catskills, as the case may be; perhaps in some unexpected way he comes to us--stops in the same town where we live, visits the college where we are studying, or we encounter him in our travels. In whatever way the personal relation comes about, we, one and all, share this feeling: he is no longer merely the favorite author, he is _our friend_ John Burroughs. I question whether there is any other modern writer so approachable, or one we so desire to approach. He has so written himself into his books that we know him before meeting him; we are charmed with his directness and genuineness, and eager to claim the companionship his pages seem to offer. Because of his own unaffected self, our artificialities drop away when we are with him; we want to be and say and do the genuine, simple thing; to be our best selves; and one who brings out this in us is sure to win our love. (Illustration of Slabsides. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) Mr. Burroughs seems to have much in common with Edward FitzGerald; we may say of him as has been said of the translator of the "Rubaiyat": "Perhaps some worship is given him... on account of his own refusal of worship for things unworthy, or even for things merely conventional." Like FitzGerald, too, our friend is a lover of solitude; like him he shuns cities, gets his exhilaration from the common life about him; is inactive, easy-going, a loiterer and saunterer through life; and could say of himself as FitzGerald said, on describing his own uneventful days in the country: "Such is life, and I believe I have got hold of a good end of it." Another point of resemblance: the American dreamer is like his English brother in his extreme sensitiveness--he cannot bear to inflict or experience pain. "I lack the heroic fibre," he is wont to say. FitzGerald acknowledged this also, and, commenting on his own over-sensitiveness and tendency to melancholy, said, "It is well if the sensibility that makes us fearful of ourselves is diverted to become a case of sympathy and interest with nature and mankind." That this sensibility in Mr. Burroughs has been so diverted, all who are familiar with his widespread influence on our national life and literature will agree. In a bright descriptive article written a few years ago, Miss Isabel Moore dispels some preconceived and erroneous notions about Mr. Burroughs, and shows him as he is--a man keenly alive to the human nature and life around him. "The boys and girls buzzed about him," she says, "as bees about some peculiarly delectable blossom. He walked with them, talked with them, entranced them... the most absolutely human person I have ever met--a born comrade, if there ever was one; in daily life a delightful acquaintance as well as a philosopher and poet and naturalist, and a few other things." She describes him riding with a lot of young people on a billowy load of hay; going to a ball-game, at which no boy there enjoyed the contest more, or was better informed as to the points of the game. "Verily," she says, "he has what Bjornson called 'the child in the heart.'" It is the "child in the heart," and, in a way, the "child" in his books, that accounts for his wide appeal. He often says he can never think of his books as _works_, because so much play went into the making of them. He has gone out of doors in a holiday spirit, has had a good time, has never lost the boy's relish for his outings, and has been so blessed with the gift of expression that his own delight is communicated to his reader. And always it is the man behind the book that makes the widest appeal. In 1912, a Western architect, in correspondence with the writer concerning recent essays of Mr. Burroughs, said:-- I have had much pleasure and soul-help in reading and re-reading "The Summit of the Years." In this, and in "All's Well with the World," is mirrored the very soul of the gentlest, the most lovable man-character I have ever come across in literature or life....To me all his books, from "Wake-Robin" to "Time and Change," radiate the most joyous optimism.... During the past month I have devoted my evenings to re-reading (them).... He has always meant a great deal more to me than merely intellectual pleasure, and, next to Walt Whitman, has helped me to keep my life as nearly open to the influences of outdoors and the stars as may be in a dweller in a large town. As I write, a letter comes from a Kansas youth, now a graduate student at Yale, expressing the hope that he can see Mr. Burroughs at Slabsides in April: "There is nothing I want to say--but for a while I would like to be near him. He is my great good teacher and friend.... As you know, he is more to me than Harvard or Yale. He is the biggest, simplest, and serenest man I have met in all the East." I suppose there is no literary landmark in America that has had a more far-reaching influence than Slabsides. Flocks of youths and maidens from many schools and colleges have, for the past fifteen years, climbed the hill to the rustic cabin in all the gayety and enthusiasm of their young lives. But they have seen more than the picturesque retreat of a living author; they have received a salutary impression made by the unostentatious life of a man who has made a profound impression on his day who has made a profound impression on his day and age; they have gone their separate ways with an awakened sense of the comradeship it is possible to have with nature, and with an ennobling affection for the one who has made them aware of it. And this affection goes with them to whatever place on the globe their destinies carry them. It is transmitted to their children; it becomes a very real part of their lives. "My dear John Burroughs--Everybody's dear John Burroughs," a friend writes him from London, recounting her amusing experiences in the study of English birds. And it is "Everybody's dear John Burroughs" who stands in the wide doorway at Slabsides and gives his callers a quiet, cordial welcome. And when the day is ended, and the visitor goes his way down the hill, he carries in his heart a new treasure--the surety that he has found a comrade. Having had the privilege for the past twelve years of helping Mr. Burroughs with his correspondence, I have been particularly interested in the spontaneous responses which have come to him from his young readers, not only in America, but from Europe, New Zealand, Australia. Confident of his interest, they are boon companions from the start. They describe their own environment, give glimpses of the wild life about them, come to him with their natural-history difficulties; in short, write as to a friend of whose tolerant sympathy they feel assured. In fact, this is true of all his correspondents. They get on easy footing at once. They send him birds, flowers, and insects to identify; sometimes live animals and birds--skylarks have been sent from England, which he liberated on the Hudson, hoping to persuade them to become acclimated; "St. John's Bread," or locust pods, have come to him from the Holy. Land; pressed flowers and ferns from the Himalayas, from Africa, from Haleakala. Many correspondents are considerate enough not to ask for an answer, realizing the countless demands of this nature made upon a man like Mr. Burroughs; others boldly ask, not only for a reply, but for a photograph, an autograph, his favorite poem written in his own hand, a list of favorite books, his views on capital punishment, on universal peace, on immortality; some naively ask for a sketch of his life, or a character sketch of his wife with details of their home life, and how they spend their time; a few modestly hope he will write a poem to them personally, all for their very own. A man of forty-five is tired of the hardware business, lives in the country, sees Mr. Burroughs's essays in the "Country Calendar," and asks him to "learn" him to "rite for the press." Some readers take him to task for his opinions, some point out errors, or too sweeping statements (for he does sometimes make them); occasionally one suggests other topics for him to write about; others labor to bring him back into orthodox paths; hundreds write of what a comfort "Waiting" has been; and there are countless requests for permission to visit Slabsides, as well as invitations to the homes of his readers. Many send him verses, a few the manuscripts of entire books, asking for criticism. (And when he does give criticism, he gives it "unsweetened," being too honest to praise a thing unless in his eyes it merits praise.) Numerous are the requests that he write introductions to books; that he address certain women's clubs; that he visit a school, or a nature-study club, or go from Dan to Beersheba to hold Burroughs Days--each writer, as a rule, urging his claim as something very special, to which a deaf ear should not be turned. Not all his correspondents are as considerate as the little girl who was especially eager to learn his attitude toward snakes, and who, after writing a pretty letter, ended thus: "Inclosed you will find a stamp, for I know it must be fearfully expensive and inconvenient to be a celebrity." Occasionally he is a little severe with a correspondent, especially if one makes a preposterous statement, or draws absurd conclusions from faulty observations. But he is always fair. The following letter explains itself:-- Your first note concerning my cat and hog story made me as mad as a hornet, which my reply showed. Your second note has changed me into a lamb, as nearly as a fellow of seventy-five can become one.... I have read, I think, every book you ever wrote, and do not let any production of yours escape me; and I have a little pile of framed copies of your inimitable "My Own" to diffuse among people at Christmas; and all these your writings make me wonder and shed metaphorical tears to think that you are such a heretic about reason in animals. But even Homer nods; and it is said Roosevelt has moments of silence. S. C. B. The questions his readers propound are sometimes very amusing. A physician of thirty years' practice asks in all seriousness how often the lions bring forth their young, and whether it is true that there is a relation between the years in which they breed and the increased productivity of human beings. One correspondent begs Mr. Burroughs to tell him how he and his wife and Theodore Roosevelt fold their hands (as though the last-named ever folded his), declaring he can read their characters with surprising accuracy if this information is forthcoming. In this instance, I think, Mr. Burroughs folded his hands serenely, leaving his correspondent waiting for the valued data. The reader will doubtless be interested to see the kind of letter the children sometimes get from their friend. I am fortunate in having one written in 1887 to a rhetoric class in Fulton, New York, and one in 1911, written to children in the New York City schools, both of which I will quote:-- West Park, N. Y., February 21, 1887 My Dear Young Friends,-- Your teacher Miss Lawrence has presumed that I might have something to say to a class of boys and girls studying rhetoric, and, what is more, that I might be disposed to say it. What she tells me about your interest in my own writings certainly interests me and makes me wish I might speak a helpful word to you. But let me tell you that very little conscious rhetoric has gone into the composition of those same writings. Valuable as the study of rhetoric undoubtedly is, it can go but a little way in making you successful writers. I think I have got more help as an author from going a-fishing than from any textbook or classbook I ever looked into. Miss Lawrence will not thank me for encouraging you to play truant, but if you take Bacon's or Emerson's or Arnold's or Cowley's essays with you and dip into them now and then while you are waiting for the fish to bite, she will detect some fresh gleam in your composition when next you hand one in. There is no way to learn style so sure as by familiarity with nature, and by study of the great authors. Shakespeare can teach you all there is to be learned of the art of expression, and the rhetoric of a live trout leaping and darting with such ease and sureness cannot well be beaten. What you really have in your heart, what you are in earnest about, how easy it is to say that! Miss Lawrence says you admire my essay on the strawberry. Ah! but I loved the strawberry--I loved the fields where it grew, I loved the birds that sang there, and the flowers that bloomed there, and I loved my mother who sent me forth to gather the berries; I loved all the rural sights and sounds, I felt near them, so that when, in after years, I came to write my essay I had only to obey the old adage which sums up all of the advice which can be given in these matters, "Look in thy heart and write." The same when I wrote about the apple. I had apples in my blood and bones. I had not ripened them in the haymow and bitten them under the seat and behind my slate so many times in school for nothing. Every apple tree I had ever shinned up and dreamed under of a long summer day, while a boy, helped me to write that paper. The whole life on the farm, and love of home and of father and mother, helped me to write it. In writing your compositions, put your rhetoric behind you and tell what you feel and know, and describe what you have seen. All writers come sooner or later to see that the great thing is to be simple and direct; only thus can you give a vivid sense of reality, and without a sense of reality the finest writing is mere froth. Strive to write sincerely, as you speak when mad, or when in love; not with the tips of the fingers of your mind, but with the whole hand. A noted English historian (Freeman) while visiting Vassar College went in to hear the rhetoric class. After the exercises were over he said to the professor, "Why don't you teach your girls to spin a plain yarn?" I hope Miss Lawrence teaches you to spin a plain yarn. There is nothing like it. The figures of rhetoric are not paper flowers to be sewed upon the texture of your composition; they have no value unless they are real flowers which sprout naturally from your heart. What force in the reply of that little Parisian girl I knew of! She offered some trinkets for sale to a lady on the street. "How much is this?" asked the lady, taking up some article from the little girl's basket. "Judge for yourself. Madam, I have tasted no food since yesterday morning." Under the pressure of any real feeling, even of hunger, our composition will not lack point. I might run on in this way another sheet, but I will stop. I have been firing at you in the dark,--a boy or a girl at hand is worth several in the bush, off there in Fulton,--but if any of my words tingle in your ears and set you to thinking, why you have your teacher to thank for it. Very truly yours, John Burroughs. La Manda Park, Cal., February 24, 1911 My Dear Young Friends,-- A hint has come to me here in southern California, where I have been spending the winter, that you are planning to celebrate my birthday--my seventy-fourth this time, and would like a word from me. Let me begin by saying that I hope that each one of you will at least reach my age, and be able to spend a winter, or several of them, in southern California, and get as much pleasure out of it as I have. It is a beautiful land, with its leagues of orange groves, its stately plains, its park-like expanses, its bright, clean cities, its picturesque hamlets, and country homes, and all looked down upon by the high, deeply sculptured mountains and snow-capped peaks. Let me hope also that when you have reached my age you will be as well and as young as I am. I am still a boy at heart, and enjoy almost everything that boys do, except making a racket. Youth and age have not much to do with years. You are young so long as you keep your interest in things and relish your daily bread. The world is "full of a number of things," and they are all very interesting. As the years pass I think my interest in this huge globe upon which we live, and in the life which it holds, deepens. An active interest in life keeps the currents going and keeps them clear. Mountain streams are young streams; they sing and sparkle as they go, and our lives may be the same. With me, the secret of my youth in age is the simple life--simple food, sound sleep, the open air, daily work, kind thoughts, love of nature, and joy and contentment in the world in which I live. No excesses, no alcoholic drinks, no tobacco, no tea or coffee, no stimulants stronger than water and food. I have had a happy life. I have gathered my grapes with the bloom upon them. May you all do the same. With all good wishes, John Burroughs "I have no genius for making gifts," Mr. Burroughs once said to me, but how his works belie his words! In these letters, and in many others which his unknown friends have received from him, are gifts of rare worth, while his life itself has been a benefaction to us all. One day in recounting some of the propitious things which have come to him all unsought, he said: "How fortunate I have always been! My name should have been 'Felix.'" But since "John" means "the gracious gift of God," we are content that he was named John Burroughs. THE RETREAT OF A POET-NATURALIST We are coming more and more to like the savor of the wild and the unconventional. Perhaps it is just this savor or suggestion of free fields and woods, both in his life and in his books, that causes so many persons to seek out John Burroughs in his retreat among the trees and rocks on the hills that skirt the western bank of the Hudson. To Mr. Burroughs more perhaps than to any other living American might be applied these words in Genesis: "See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed"--so redolent of the soil and of the hardiness and plenitude of rural things is the influence that emanates from him. His works are as the raiment of the man, and to them adheres something as racy and wholesome as is yielded by the fertile soil. We are prone to associate the names of our three most prominent literary naturalists,--Gilbert White, of England, and Thoreau and John Burroughs, of America,--men who have been so _en rapport_ with nature that, while ostensibly only disclosing the charms of their mistress, they have at the same time subtly communicated much of their own wide knowledge of nature, and permanently enriched our literature as well. In thinking of Gilbert White one invariably thinks also of Selborne, his open-air parish; in thinking of Thoreau one as naturally recalls his humble shelter on the banks of Walden Pond; and it is coming to pass that in thinking of John Burroughs one thinks likewise of his hidden farm high on the wooded hills that overlook the Hudson, nearly opposite Poughkeepsie. It is there that he has built himself a picturesque retreat, a rustic house named Slabsides. I find that, to many, the word "Slabsides" gives the impression of a dilapidated, ramshackle kind of place. This impression is an incorrect one. The cabin is a well-built two-story structure, its uneuphonious but fitting name having been given it because its outer walls are formed of bark-covered slabs. "My friends frequently complain," said Mr. Burroughs, "because I have not given my house a prettier name, but this name just expresses the place, and the place just meets the want that I felt for something simple, homely, secluded--something with the bark on." Both Gilbert White and Thoreau became identified with their respective environments almost to the exclusion of other fields. The minute observations of White, and his records of them, extending over forty years, were almost entirely confined to the district of Selborne. He says that he finds that "that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined." The thoroughness with which he examined his own locality is attested by his "Natural History of Selborne." Thoreau was such a stay-at-home that he refused to go to Paris lest he miss something of interest in Concord. "I have traveled a good deal in Concord," he says in his droll way. And one of the most delicious instances of provinciality that I ever came across is Thoreau's remark on returning Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explorations" to a friend who had lent him the book--"Most of the phenomena therein recorded are to be observed about Concord." In thinking of John Burroughs, however, the thought of the author's mountain home as the material and heart of his books does not come so readily to consciousness. For most of us who have felt the charm, of his lyrical prose, both in his outdoor books and in his "Indoor Studies," were familiar with him as an author long before we knew there was a Slabsides--long before there was one, in fact, since he has been leading his readers to nature for fifty years, while the picturesque refuge we are now coming to associate with him has been in existence only about fifteen years. Our poet-naturalist seems to have appropriated all outdoors for his stamping-ground. He has given us in his limpid prose intimate glimpses of the hills and streams and pastoral farms of his native country; has taken us down the Pepacton, the stream of his boyhood; we have traversed with him the "Heart of the Southern Catskills," and the valleys of the Neversink and the Beaverkill; we have sat upon the banks of the Potomac, and sailed down the Saguenay; we have had a glimpse of the Blue Grass region, and "A Taste of Maine Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also, and other "Excursions" as well); we have walked with him the lanes of "Mellow England"; journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at the azure glaciers of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland of Jamaica; camped with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone; looked in awe and wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the Colorado; felt the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the sun-steeped skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas. Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no wanderer. No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has he; none is more completely under the spell of a dear and familiar locality. Somewhere he has said: "Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, 'This is home,' and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined." (Illustration of Riverby from the Orchard. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let us glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster County, New York. This has been his home since 1874. Having chosen this place by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from the neighboring hills, and finished it with the native woods; he planted a vineyard on the sloping hillside, and there he has successfully combined the business of grape-culture with his pursuits and achievements as a literary naturalist. More than half his books have been written since he has dwelt at Riverby, the earlier ones having appeared when he was a clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly unfriendly to literary work. It was not until he gave up his work in Washington, and his later position as bank examiner in the eastern part of New York State, that he seemed to come into his own. Business life, he had long known, could never be congenial to him; literary pursuits alone were insufficient; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of him cried out for recognition; he felt the need of closer contact with the soil; of having land to till and cultivate. This need, an ancestral one, was as imperative as his need of literary expression, an individual one. Hear what he says after having ploughed in his new vineyard for the first time: "How I soaked up the sunshine to-day! At night I glowed all over; my whole being had had an earth bath; such a feeling of freshly ploughed land in every cell of my brain. The furrow had struck in; the sunshine had photographed it upon my soul." Later he built him a little study somewhat apart from his dwelling, to which he could retire and muse and write whenever the mood impelled him. This little one-room study, covered with chestnut bark, is on the brow of a hill which slopes toward the river; it commands an extended view of the Hudson. But even this did not meet his requirements. The formality and routine of conventional life palled upon him; the expanse of the Hudson, the noise of railway and steamboat wearied him; he craved something more retired, more primitive, more homely. "You cannot have the same kind of attachment and sympathy for a great river; it does not flow through your affections like a lesser stream," he says, thinking, no doubt, of the trout-brooks that thread his father's farm, of Montgomery Hollow Stream, of the Red Kill, and of others that his boyhood knew. Accordingly he cast about for some sequestered spot in which to make himself a hermitage. (Illustration of The Study, Riverby. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) During his excursions in the vicinity of West Park, Mr. Burroughs had lingered oftenest in the hills back of, and parallel with, the Hudson, and here he finally chose the site for his rustic cabin. He had fished and rowed in Black Pond, sat by its falls in the primitive forest, sometimes with a book, sometimes with his son, or with some other hunter or fisher of congenial tastes; and on one memorable day in April, years agone, he had tarried there with Walt Whitman. There, seated on a fallen tree, Whitman wrote this description of the place which was later printed in "Specimen Days":-- I jot this memorandum in a wild scene of woods and hills where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy, what I call weather-beaten, and let-alone--a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse, impetuous, copious fall--the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent waters plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk-white foam--a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume--every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary, and savage--not ten visitors a year--broken rocks everywhere, shade overhead, thick underfoot with leaves--a just palpable wild and delicate aroma. "Not ten visitors a year" may have been true when Whitman described the place, but we know it is different now. Troops of Vassar girls come to visit the hermit of Slabsides, and are taken to these falls; nature-lovers, and those who only think themselves nature-lovers, come from far and near; Burroughs clubs, boys' schools, girls' schools, pedestrians, cyclists, artists, authors, reporters, poets,--young and old, renowned and obscure,--from April till November seek out this lover of nature, who is a lover of human nature as well, who gives himself and his time generously to those who find him. When the friends of Socrates asked him where they should bury him, he said: "You may bury me if you can _find_ me." Not all who seek John Burroughs really find him; he does not mix well with every newcomer; one must either have something of Mr. Burroughs's own cast of mind, or else be of a temperament capable of genuine sympathy with him, in order to find the real man. He withdraws into his shell before persons of uncongenial temperament; to such he can never really speak--they see Slabsides, but they don't see Burroughs. He is, however, never curt or discourteous to any one. Unlike Thoreau, who "put the whole of nature between himself and his fellows," Mr. Burroughs leads his fellows to nature, although it is sometimes, doubtless, with the feeling that one can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink; for of all the sightseers that journey to Slabsides there must of necessity be many that "Oh!" and "Ah!" a good deal, but never really get further in their study of nature than that. Still, it can scarcely fail to be salutary even to these to get away from the noise and the strife in city and town, and see how sane, simple, and wholesome life is when lived in a sane and simple and wholesome way. Somehow it helps one to get a clearer sense of the relative value of things, it makes one ashamed of his petty pottering over trifles, to witness this exemplification of the plain living and high thinking which so many preach about, and so few practice. "The thing which a man's nature calls him to do--what else so well worth doing?" asks this writer. One's first impression after glancing about this well-built cabin, with the necessities of body and soul close at hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at least, is one who has known what he wanted to do and has done it. We are glad that Gilbert White made pastoral calls on his outdoor parishioners,--the birds, the toads, the turtles, the snails, and the earthworms,--although we often wonder if he evinced a like conscientiousness toward his human parishioners; we are glad that Thoreau left the manufacture of lead pencils to become, as Emerson jocosely complained, "the leader of a huckleberry party",--glad because these were the things their natures called them to do, and in so doing they best enriched their fellows. They literally went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer way than had they tarried in our midst. It must have been in answer to a similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to hie himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain cabin is built. "As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own breast," says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's spirit must shed itself upon its environment before it can brood and be at all content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master does brood and is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his temperament; it affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet is not so remote that he is shut off from human fellowship. For he is no recluse; his sympathies are broad and deep. Unlike Thoreau, who asserts that "you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature," and that "those qualities that bring you near to the one estrange you from the other," Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is doubtless the most accessible of all notable American writers,--a fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in his literary work, his submission to being hunted out often being taken advantage of, no doubt, by persons who are in no real sense nature-lovers, but who go to his retreat merely to see the hermit in hiding there. After twelve years' acquaintance with his books I yielded to the impulse, often felt before, to tell Mr. Burroughs what a joy his writings had been to me. In answering my letter he said: "The genuine responses that come to an author from his unknown readers, judging from my own experience, are always very welcome. It is no intrusion but rather an inspiration." A gracious invitation to make him a visit came later. The visit was made in the "month of tall weeds," in September, 1901. Arriving at West Park, the little station on the West Shore Railway, I found Mr. Burroughs in waiting. The day was gray and somewhat forbidding; not so the author's greeting; his almost instant recognition and his quiet welcome made me feel that I had always known him. It was like going home to hear him say quietly, "So you are here--really here," as he took my hand. The feeling of comradeship that I had experienced in reading his books was realized in his presence. With market-basket on arm, he started off at a brisk pace along the country road, first looking to see if I was well shod, as he warned me that it was quite a climb to Slabsides. His kindly face was framed with snowy hair. He was dressed in olive-brown clothes, and "his old experienced coat" blended in color with the tree-trunks and the soil with which one felt sure it had often been in close communion. We soon left the country road and struck into a woodland path, going up through quiet, cathedral-like woods till we came to an abrupt rocky stairway which my companion climbed with ease and agility despite his five-and-sixty years. I paused to examine some mushrooms, and, finding a species that I knew to be edible, began nibbling it. "Don't taste that," he said imperatively; but I laughed and nibbled away. With a mingling of anxiety and curiosity he inquired: "Are you sure it's all right? Do you really like them? I never could; they are so uncanny--the gnomes or evil genii or hobgoblins of the vegetable world--give them a wide berth." He pointed to a rock in the distance where he said he sometimes sat and sulked. "_You_ sulk, and own up to it, too?" I asked. "Yes, and own up to it, too. Why not? Don't you?" "Are there any bee-trees around here?" I questioned, remembering that in one of his essays he has said: "If you would know the delight of bee-hunting, and how many sweets such a trip yields besides honey, come with me some bright, warm, late September or early October day. It is the golden season of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon the hills, or by the painted woods and along the amber-colored streams at such a time is enough." Here was a September day if not a bright one, and here were the painted woods, and somehow I felt half aggrieved that he did not immediately propose going in quest of wild honey. Instead he only replied: "I don't know whether there are bee-trees around here now or not. I used to find a good deal of wild honey over at a place that I spoke of casually as Mount Hymettus, and was much surprised later to find they had so put it down on the maps of this region. Wild honey is delectable, but I pursued that subject till I sucked it dry. I haven't done much about it these later years." So we are not to gather wild honey, I find; but what of that?--am I not actually walking in the woods with John Burroughs? Up, up we climb, an ascent of about a mile and a quarter from the railway station. Emerging from the woods, we come rather suddenly upon a reclaimed rock-girt swamp, the most of which is marked off in long green lines of celery. This swamp was formerly a lake-bottom; its rich black soil and three perennial springs near by decided Mr. Burroughs to drain and reclaim the soil and compel it to yield celery and other garden produce. Nestling under gray rocks, on the edge of the celery garden, embowered in forest trees, is the vine-covered cabin, Slabsides. What a feeling of peace and aloofness comes over one in looking up at the encircling hills! The few houses scattered about on other rocks are at a just comfortable distance to be neighborly, but not too neighborly. Would one be lonesome here? Aye, lonesome, but-- "Not melancholy,--no, for it is green And bright and fertile, furnished in itself With the few needful things that life requires; In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie, How tenderly protected!" Mr. Burroughs has given to those who contemplate building a house some sound advice in his essay "Roof-Tree." There he has said that a man makes public proclamation of what are his tastes and his manners, or his want of them, when he builds his house; that if we can only keep our pride and vanity in abeyance and forget that all the world is looking on, we may be reasonably sure of having beautiful houses. Tried by his own test, he has no reason to be ashamed of his taste or his manners when Slabsides is critically examined. Blending with its surroundings, it is coarse, strong, and substantial without; within it is snug and comfortable; its wide door bespeaks hospitality; its low, broad roof, protection and shelter; its capacious hearth, cheer; all its appointments for the bodily needs express simplicity and frugality; and its books and magazines, and the conversation of the host--are they not there for the needs that bread alone will not supply? "Mr. Burroughs, why don't you PAINT things?" asked a little boy of four, who had been spending a happy day at Slabsides, but who, at nightfall, while nestling in the author's arms, seemed suddenly to realize that this rustic house was very different from anything he had seen before. "I don't like things painted, my little man; that is just why I came up here--to get away from paint and polish--just as you liked to wear your overalls to-day and play on the grass, instead of keeping on that pretty dress your mother wanted you to keep clean." "Oh!" said the child in such a knowing tone that one felt he understood. But that is another story. The time of which I am speaking--that gray September day--what a memorable day it was! How cheery the large, low room looked when the host replenished the smouldering fire! "I sometimes come up here even in winter, build a fire, and stay for an hour or more, with long, sad, sweet thoughts and musings," he said. He is justly proud of the huge stone fireplace and chimney which he himself helped to construct; he also helped to hew the trees and build the house. "What joy went into the building of this retreat! I never expect to be so well content again." Then, musing, he added: "It is a comfortable, indolent life I lead here; I read a little, write a little, and dream a good deal. Here the sun does not rise so early as it does down at Riverby. 'Tired nature's sweet restorer' is not put to rout so soon by the screaming whistles, the thundering trains, and the necessary rules and regulations of well-ordered domestic machinery. Here I really 'loaf and invite my soul.' Yes, I am often melancholy, and hungry for companionship--not in the summer months, no, but in the quiet evenings before the fire, with only Silly Sally to share my long, long thoughts; she is very attentive, but I doubt if she notices when I sigh. She doesn't even heed me when I tell her that ornithology is a first-rate pursuit for men, but a bad one for cats. I suspect that she studies the birds with greater care than I do; for now I can get all I want of a bird and let him remain in the bush, but Silly Sally is a thorough-going ornithologist; she must engage in all the feather-splittings that the ornithologists do, and she isn't satisfied until she has thoroughly dissected and digested her material, and has all the dry bones of the subject laid bare." We sat before the fire while Mr. Burroughs talked of nature, of books, of men and women whose lives or books, or both, have closely touched his own. He talked chiefly of Emerson and Whitman, the men to whom he seems to owe the most, the two whom most his soul has loved. "I remember the first time I saw Emerson," he said musingly; "it was at West Point during the June examinations of the cadets. Emerson had been appointed by President Lincoln as one of the board of visitors. I had been around there in the afternoon, and had been peculiarly interested in a man whose striking face and manner challenged my attention. I did not hear him speak, but watched him going about with a silk hat, much too large, pushed back on his head; his sharp eyes peering into everything, curious about everything. 'Here,' said I to myself, 'is a countryman who has got away from home, and intends to see all that is going on'--such an alert, interested air! That evening a friend came to me and in a voice full of awe and enthusiasm said, 'Emerson is in town!' Then I knew who the alert, sharp-eyed stranger was. We went to the meeting and met our hero, and the next day walked and talked with him. He seemed glad to get away from those old fogies and talk with us young men. I carried his valise to the boat-landing--I was in the seventh heaven of delight." "I saw him several years later," he continued, "soon after 'Wake-Robin' was published; he mentioned it and said: 'Capital title, capital!' I don't suppose he had read much besides the title." "The last time I saw him," he said with a sigh, "was at Holmes's seventieth-birthday breakfast, in Boston. But then his mind was like a splendid bridge with one span missing; he had--what is it you doctors call it?--_aphasia_, yes, that is it--he had to grope for his words. But what a serene, godlike air! He was like a plucked eagle tarrying in the midst of a group of lesser birds. He would sweep the assembly with that searching glance, as much as to say, 'What is all this buzzing and chirping about?' Holmes was as brilliant and scintillating as ever; sparks of wit would greet every newcomer, flying out as the sparks fly from that log. Whittier was there, too, looking nervous and uneasy and very much out of his element. But he stood next to Emerson, prompting his memory and supplying the words his voice refused to utter. When I was presented, Emerson said in a slow, questioning way, 'Burroughs--Burroughs?' 'Why, thee knows _him_,' said Whittier, jogging his memory with some further explanation; but I doubt if he then remembered anything about me." It was not such a leap from the New England writers to Whitman as one might imagine. Mr. Burroughs spoke of Emerson's prompt and generous indorsement of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass": "I give you joy of your free, brave thought. I have great joy in it." This and much else Emerson had written in a letter to Whitman. "It is the charter of an emperor!" Dana had said when Whitman showed him the letter. The poet's head was undoubtedly a little turned by praise from such a source, and much to Emerson's annoyance, the letter was published in the next edition of the "Leaves." Still Emerson and Whitman remained friends to the last. "Whitman was a child of the sea," said Mr. Burroughs; "nurtured by the sea, cradled by the sea; he gave one the same sense of invigoration and of illimitableness that we get from the sea. He never looked so much at home as when on the shore--his gray clothes, gray hair, and far-seeing blue-gray eyes blending with the surroundings. And his thoughts--the same broad sweep, the elemental force and grandeur and all-embracingness of the impartial sea!" "Whitman never hurried," Mr. Burroughs continued; "he always seemed to have infinite time at his disposal." It brought Whitman very near to hear Mr. Burroughs say, "He used to take Sunday breakfasts with us in Washington. Mrs. Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them; but he was always late to breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. Sometimes it got to be a little trying to have domestic arrangements so interfered with; but a car would stop at last, Walt would roll off it, and saunter up to the door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every one that came into personal relations with him felt his rare compelling charm." It was all very well, this talk about the poets, but climbing "break-neck stairs" on our way thither had given the guest an appetite, and the host as well; and these appetites had to be appeased by something less transcendental than a feast of reason. Scarcely interrupting his engaging monologue, Mr. Burroughs went about his preparations for dinner, doing things deftly and quietly, all unconscious that there was anything peculiar in this sight to the spectator. Potatoes and onions were brought in with the earth still on them, their bed was made under the ashes, and we sat down to more talk. After a while he took a chicken from the market-basket, spread it on a toaster, and broiled it over the coals; he put the dishes on the hearth to warm, washed the celery, parched some grated corn over the coals while the chicken was broiling, talking the while of Tolstoy and of Maeterlinck, of orioles and vireos, of whatever we happened to touch upon. He avowed that he was envious of Maeterlinck on account of his poetic "Life of the Bee." "I ought to have written that," he said; "I know the bee well enough, but I could never do anything so exquisite." Parts of Maeterlinck's "Treasures of the Humble," and "Wisdom and Destiny," he "couldn't stand." I timorously mentioned his chapter on "Silence." "'Silence'? Oh, yes; silence is very well--some kinds of it; but _why make such a noise about silence_?" he asked with a twinkle in his eyes. When the chicken was nearly ready, I moved toward the dining-table, on which some dishes were piled. As though in answer to my thought, he said: "Yes, if there's anything you can do there, you may." So I began arranging the table. "Where are _my_ knife and fork?" "In the cupboard," he answered without ceremony. We brought the good things from the hearth, hot and delicious, and sat down to a dinner that would have done credit to an Adirondack guide,--and when one has said this, what more need one say? In helping myself to the celery I took an outside piece. Mine host reached over and, putting a big white centre of celery on my plate, said: "What's the use taking the outside of things when one can have the heart?" This is typical of John Burroughs's life as well as his art--he has let extraneous things, conventionalities, and non-essentials go; has gone to the heart of things. It is this that has made his work so vital. As we arose from the table, I began picking up the dishes. "You are going to help, are you?" "Of course," I replied; "where is your dish-cloth? "--a natural question, as any woman will agree, but what a consternation it evoked! A just perceptible delay, a fumbling among pots and pans, and he came toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the sorriest-looking rag I had ever seen--its narrow circumference encircling a very big hole. "Is _that_ the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked. For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that my housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry remnant and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and carrying out my resolution the next day, to send him a respectable dish-cloth. Prosaic, if you will, but does not his own Emerson say something about giving-- "to barrows, trays, and pans, Grace and glimmer of romance"? And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole, self-respecting dish-cloth? So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at the same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was. Yet it did not seem so strange after all, but almost as though it had happened before. Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed her master about the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him that she liked chicken bones. While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp. "Never mind that," said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the fire; "a Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's never been the same since." The work finished, there was more talk before the fire. It was here that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented, noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's message bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a criticism which stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been written concerning the Good Gray Poet. Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting," and, like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before the fire with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of the faith and trust expressed in those familiar lines. It would seem natural that he should write such a poem after the heat of the day, after his ripe experience, after success had come to him; it is the lesson we expect one to learn on reaching his age, and learning how futile is the fret and urge of life, how infinitely better is the attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to come to naught. "I have lived to prove it true," he said,--"that which I but vaguely divined when I wrote the lines. Our lives are all so fearfully and wonderfully shot through with the very warp and woof of the universe, past, present, and to come! No doubt at all that our own--that which our souls crave and need--does gravitate toward us, or we toward it. 'Waiting' has been successful," he added, "not on account of its poetic merit, but for some other merit or quality. It puts in simple and happy form some common religious aspirations, without using the religious jargon. People write me from all parts of the country that they treasure it in their hearts; that it steadies their hand at the helm; that it is full of consolation for them. It is because it is poetry allied with religion that it has this effect; poetry alone would not do this; neither would a prose expression of the same religious aspirations do it, for we often outgrow the religious views and feelings of the past. The religious thrill, the sense of the Infinite, the awe and majesty of the universe, are no doubt permanent in the race, but the expression of these feelings in creeds and forms addressed to the understanding, or exposed to the analysis of the understanding, is as transient and flitting as the leaves of the trees. My little poem is vague enough to escape the reason, sincere enough to go to the heart, and poetic enough to stir the imagination." The power of accurate observation, of dispassionate analysis, of keen discrimination and insight that we his readers are familiar with in his writings about nature, books, men, and life in general, is here seen to extend to self-analysis as well,--a rare gift; a power that makes his opinions carry conviction. We feel he is not intent on upholding any theory, but only on seeing things as they are, and reporting them as they are. A steady rain had set in early in the afternoon, effectually drowning my hopes of a longer wood-land walk that day, but I was then, and many a time since then have been, well content that it was so. I learned less of woodland lore, but more of the woodland philosopher. In quiet converse passed the hours of that memorable day in the humble retreat on the wooded hills,-- "Far from the clank of the world,"-- and in the company of the poet-naturalist. So cordial had my host been, so gracious the admission to his home and hospitality, that I left the little refuge with a feeling of enrichment I shall cherish while life lasts. I had sought out a favorite author; I had gained a friend. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES (In response to my request, Mr. Burroughs began in 1903 to write for me a series of letters, autobiographical in character. It is from them, for the most part, helped out by interviews to fill in the gaps, that I have compiled this part of the book. The letters were not written continuously; begun in 1903, they suffered a long interruption, were resumed in 1906, again in 1907, and lastly in 1912. The reader will, I trust, pardon any repetition noted, an occasional return to a subject previously touched upon being unavoidable because of the long intervals between some of the letters. It seems to me that these letters picture our author more faithfully than could any portrait drawn by another. Thomas Bailey Aldrich has said that no man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set about it; that in spite of his candid purpose he omits necessary touches and adds superfluous ones; that at times he cannot help draping his thought, and that, of course, the least shred of drapery is a disguise. But, Aldrich to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe Mr. Burroughs has pictured himself and his environment in these pages with the same fidelity with which he has interpreted nature. He is so used to "straight seeing and straight thinking" that these gifts do not desert him when his observation is turned upon himself. He seems to be a shining example of the exception that proves the rule. Besides, when Aldrich pronounced that dictum, Mr. Burroughs had not produced these sketches. This record was not written with the intention of its being published as it stood, but merely to acquaint me with the facts and with the author's feelings concerning them, in case I should some day undertake his biography. But it seems to me that just because it was so written, it has a value which would be considerably lessened were it to be worked over into a more finished form. I have been willing to sacrifice the more purely literary value which would undoubtedly grace the record, were the author to revise it, that I may retain its homely, unstudied human value. I have arranged the autobiographical material under three headings: Ancestry and Family Life, Childhood and Youth, and Self-Analysis.--C. B.) ANCESTRY AND FAMILY LIFE I am, as you know, the son of a farmer. My father was the son of a farmer, as was his father, and his. There is no break, so far as I know, in the line of farmers back into the seventeenth century. There was a Rev. George Burroughs who was hanged (in 1692) for a witch in Salem. He was a Harvard graduate. I know of no other Harvard graduate by our name until Julian (Mr. Burroughs's son) graduated in 1901 from Harvard. My father's cousin, the Rev. John C. Burroughs, the first president of Chicago University, was graduated from Yale sometime in the early forties. The first John Burroughs of whom I have any trace came from the West Indies, and settled in Stratford, Connecticut, where he married in 1694. He had ten children, of whom the seventh was John, born in August, 1705. My descent does not come from this John, but from his eldest brother, Stephen, who was born at Stratford in February, 1695. Stephen had eight children, and here another John turns up--his last child, born in 1745. His third child, Stephen Burroughs (born in 1729), was a shipbuilder and became a noted mathematician and astronomer, and lived at Bridgeport, Connecticut. My descent is through Stephen's seventh child, Ephraim, born in 1740. Ephraim, my great-grandfather, also had a large family, six sons and several daughters, of which my grandfather Eden was one. He was born in Stratford, about 1770. My great-grandfather Ephraim left Stratford near the beginning of the Revolution and came into New York State, first into Dutchess County, when Grandfather was a small boy, and finally settled in what is now the town of Stamford, Delaware County, where he died in 1818. He is buried in a field between Hobart and Stamford. My grandfather Eden married Rachael Avery, and shortly afterward moved over the mountain to the town of Roxbury, cutting a road through the woods and bringing his wife and all their goods and chattels on a sled drawn by a yoke of oxen. This must have been not far from the year 1795. He cleared the land and built a log house with a black-ash bark roof, and a great stone chimney, and a floor of hewn logs. Grandmother said it was the happiest day of her life when she found herself the mistress of this little house in the woods. Great-grandmother Avery lived with them later. She had a petulant disposition. One day when reproved for something, she went off and hid herself in the bushes and sulked--a family trait; I'm a little that way, I guess. Grandfather Burroughs was religious,--an Old-School Baptist,--a thoughtful, quiet, exemplary man who read his Bible much. He was of spare build, serious, thrifty after the manner of pioneers, and a kind husband and father. He died, probably of apoplexy, when I was four years old. I can dimly remember him. He was about seventy-two. Grandmother Burroughs had sandy hair and a freckled face, and from her my father and his sister Abby got their red hair. From this source I doubtless get some of my Celtic blood. Grand-mother Burroughs had nine children; the earliest ones died in infancy; their graves are on the hill in the old burying-ground. Two boys and five girls survived--Phoebe, Betsy, Mary, Abby, Olly, Chauncey (my father), and Hiram. I do not remember Grandmother at all. She died, I think, in 1838, of consumption; she was in the seventies. Father said her last words were, "Chauncey, I have but a little while to live." Her daughter Oily and also my sister Oily died of consumption. Grandmother used to work with Grandfather in the fields, and help make sugar. I have heard them tell how in 1812 they raised wheat which sold for $2.50 a bushel--a great thing. Father told me of his uncle, Chauncey Avery, brother of Grandmother Burroughs, who, with his wife and seven children, was drowned near Shandaken, by a flood in the Esopus Creek, in April, 1814, or 1816. The creek rose rapidly in the night; retreat was cut off in the morning. They got on the roof and held family prayers. Uncle Chauncey tried to fell a tree and make a bridge, but the water drove him away. The house was finally carried away with most of the family in it. The father swam to a stump with one boy on his back and stood there till the water carried away the stump, then tried to swim with the boy for shore, but the driftwood soon engulfed him and all was over. Two of the bodies were never found. Their bones doubtless rest somewhere in the still waters of the lower Esopus. (Here follow details concerning one paternal and one maternal aunt, which, though picturesque, would better be omitted. It is to be noted, however, that in this simple homely narrative of his ancestors (which, by the way, gives a vivid picture of the early pioneer days) and later in his own personal history, there is no attempt to conceal or gloss over weaknesses or shortcomings; all is set down with engaging candor.--C. B.) Father's sister Abby married a maternal cousin, John Kelly. He was of a scholarly turn. He worked for Father the year I was born, and I was named after him. I visited him in Pennsylvania in 1873, and while there, when he was talking with me about the men of our family named John Burroughs, he said, "One was a minister in the West, one was Uncle Hiram's son, you are the third, and there is still another I have heard of,--a writer." And I was silly enough not to tell him that I was that one. After I reached home, some of my people sent him "Winter Sunshine," and when he found that I was its author, he wrote that he "set great store by it." I don't know why I should have been so reticent about my books--they were a foreign thing, I suppose; it was not natural to speak of them among my kinsfolk. (In this connection let me quote from an early letter of Mr. Burroughs to me. It was written in 1901 after the death of his favorite sister: "She was very dear to me, and I had no better friend. More than the rest of my people she aspired to understand and appreciate me, and with a measure of success. My family are plain, unlettered farmer folk, and the world in which you and I live iss a sealed book to them. The have never read my books. What they value in me is what I have in common with them, which is, no doubt, the larger part of me. But I love them all just the same. They are a part of father and mother, of the old home, and of my youthful days."--C. B.) Mother's father. Grandfather Kelly, was a soldier of 1776, of Irish descent, born in Connecticut, I think. His name was Edmund Kelly. He went into the war as a boy and saw Washington and La Fayette. He was at Valley Forge during that terrible winter the army spent there. One day Washington gave the order to the soldiers to dress-parade for inspection; some had good clothes, some scarcely any, and no shoes. He made all the well-dressed men go and cut wood for the rest, and excused the others. Grandfather was a small man with a big head and quite pronounced Irish features. He was a dreamer. He was not a good provider; Grandmother did most of the providing. He wore a military coat with brass buttons, and red-top boots. He believed in spooks and witches, and used to tell us spook stories till our hair would stand on end. He was an expert trout fisherman. Early in the morning I would dig worms for bait, and we would go fishing over in West Settlement, or in Montgomery Hollow. I went fishing with him when he was past eighty. He would steal along the streams and "snake" out the trout, walking as briskly as I do now. From him I get my dreamy, lazy, shirking ways. In 1848 he and Grandmother came to live near us. He had a severe fit of illness that year. I remember we caught a fat coon for him. He was fond of game. I was there one morning when they entertained a colored minister overnight, probably a fugitive slave. He prayed--how lustily he prayed! I have heard Grandfather tell how, when he was a boy in Connecticut, he once put his hand in a bluebird's nest and felt, as he said, "something comical"; he drew out his hand, which was followed by the head and neck of a black snake; he took to his heels, and the black snake after him. (I rather think that's a myth.) He said his uncle, who was ploughing, came after the black snake with a whip, and the snake slunk away. He thought he remembered that. It may be a black snake might pursue one, but I doubt it. (Mr. Burroughs's ingrained tendency to question reports of improbable things in nature shows even in these reminiscences of his grandfather. His instinct for the truth is always on the qui vive.--C. B.) Grandmother Kelly lived to be past eighty. She was a big woman--thrifty and domestic--big enough to take "Granther" up in her arms and walk off with him. She did more to bring up her family than he did; was a practical housewife, and prolific. She had ten children and made every one of them toe the mark. I don't know whether she ever took "Granther" across her knee or not, but he probably deserved it. She was quite uneducated. Her maiden name was Lavinia Minot. I don't know where her people came from, or whether she had any brothers and sisters. They lived in Red Kill mostly, in the eastern part of the town of Roxbury, and also over on the edge of Greene County. I remember, when Grandfather used to tell stories of cruelty in the army, and of the hardships of the soldiers, she would wriggle and get very angry. All her children were large. They were as follows: Sukie, Ezekiel, Charles, Martin, Edmund, William, Thomas, Hannah, Abby, and Amy (my mother). Aunt Sukie was a short, chubby woman, always laughing. Uncle Charles was a man of strong Irish features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass--and I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund was a farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died comparatively young; he had nurseries near Rochester. Uncle Thomas was a farmer, slow and canny, with a quiet, dry humor. Aunt Hannah married Robert Avery, who drank a good deal; I can't remember anything about her. Aunt Abby was large and thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a large family.... Amy, my mother, was her mother's tenth child. Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808. Her father moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there with an ox-team. Mother "worked out" in her early teens. She was seventeen or eighteen when she married, February, 1827. Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather Burroughs's old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house of which you saw the foundations. Brother Hiram was born there. (Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father stood and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room where they slept the first night they went there; the one where the eldest child was born; that in which his mother died. I stood (one August day in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining joists of his grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris of stones and beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out to me, as his father had done for him, the location of the various rooms, and mused upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where the paths led to the barn and to the spring, and seemed to take a melancholy interest in picturing the lives of his parents and grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness from a song sparrow, and his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and the sunlit Present claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon rejoicing in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the old house.--C.B.) My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He received a fair schooling for those times--the three R's--and taught school one or two winters. His reading was the Bible and hymn-book, his weekly secular paper, and a monthly religious paper. He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy, quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing--both alike disreputable in those times. In early manhood he "experienced religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have been discarded. He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, and other forms of wickedness, and became an exemplary member of the community. He was a man of unimpeachable veracity; bigoted and intolerant in his religious and political views, but a good neighbor, a kind father, a worthy citizen, a fond husband, and a consistent member of his church. He improved his farm, paid his debts, and kept his faith. He had no sentiment about things and was quite unconscious of the beauties of nature over which we make such an ado. "The primrose by the river's brim" would not have been seen by him at all. This is true of most farmers; the plough and the hoe and the scythe do not develop their aesthetic sensibilities; then, too, in the old religious view the beauties of this world were vain and foolish. I have said that my father had strong religious feeling. He took "The Signs of the Times" for over forty years, reading all those experiences with the deepest emotion. I remember when a mere lad hearing him pray in the hog-pen. It was a time of unusual religious excitement with him, no doubt; I heard, and ran away, knowing it was not for me to hear. Father had red hair, and a ruddy, freckled face. He was tender-hearted and tearful, but with blustering ways and a harsh, strident voice. Easily moved to emotion, he was as transparent as a child, with a child's lack of self-consciousness. Unsophisticated, he had no art to conceal anything, no guile, and, as Mother used to say, no manners. "All I ever had," Father would rejoin, "for I've never used any of them." I doubt if he ever said "Thank you" in his life; I certainly never heard him. He had nothing to conceal, and could not understand that others might have. I have heard him ask people what certain things cost, men their politics, women their ages, with the utmost ingenuousness. One day when he and I were in Poughkeepsie, we met a strange lad on the street with very red hair, and Father said to him, "I can remember when my hair was as red as yours." The boy stared at him and passed on. Although Father lacked delicacy, he did not lack candor or directness. He would tell a joke on himself with the same glee that he would on any one else.... I have heard him tell how, in 1844, at the time of the "anti-renters," when he saw the posse coming, he ran over the hill to Uncle Daniel's and crawled under the bed, but left his feet sticking out, and there they found him. He had not offended, or dressed as an Indian, but had sympathized with the offenders. He made a great deal of noise about the farm, sending his voice over the hills (we could hear him calling us to dinner when we were working on the "Rundle Place," half a mile away), shouting at the cows, the pigs, the sheep, or calling the dog, with needless expenditure of vocal power at all times and seasons. The neighbors knew when Father was at home; so did the cattle in the remotest field. His bark was always to be dreaded more than his bite. His threats of punishment were loud and severe, but the punishment rarely came. Never but once did he take a gad to me, and then the sound was more than the substance. I deserved more than I got: I had let a cow run through the tall grass in the meadow when I might easily have "headed her off," as I was told to do. Father used to say "No," to our requests for favors (such as a day off to go fishing or hunting) with strong emphasis, and then yield to our persistent coaxing. One day I was going to town and asked him for money to buy an algebra. "What is an algebra?" He had never heard of an algebra, and couldn't see why I needed one; he refused the money, though I coaxed and Mother pleaded with him. I had left the house and had got as far as the big hill up there by the pennyroyal rock, when he halloed to me that I might get the algebra--Mother had evidently been instrumental in bringing him to terms. But my blood was up by this time, and as I trudged along to the village I determined to wait until I could earn the money myself for the algebra, and some other books I coveted. I boiled sap and made maple-sugar, and the books were all the sweeter by reason of the maple-sugar money. When I wanted help, as I did two or three times later, on a pinch. Father refused me; and, as it turned out, I was the only one of his children that could or would help him when the pinch came--a curious retribution, but one that gave me pleasure and him no pain. I was better unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him. But he was a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my needs, but love outweighs understanding. He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned later, that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion. He never had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he doubted if I would ever amount to anything. He saw that I was an odd one, and had tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize with. He never alluded to my literary work; apparently left it out of his estimate of me. My aims and aspirations were a sealed book to him, as his peculiar religious experiences were to me, yet I reckon it was the same leaven working in us both. I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's. He had overheard me telling sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I had rather go to hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he was living, than attend all the fancy parties in the world." He said he had heard him preach when he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. The elder undoubtedly had a strong natural eloquence. Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told me that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in, and accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time; he said nothing, but his eyes filled with tears. He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790). He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827. He was six years her senior. She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school, and was one of his pupils. I have often heard him say: "I rode your Uncle Martin's old sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went courting her." When he would be affectionate toward her before others, Mother would say, "Now, Chauncey, don't be foolish." Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it in 1827. In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was born, April 3, 1837. It was a frame house with three or four rooms below and one room "done off" above, and a big chamber. I was the fifth son and the seventh child of my parents. (Illustration of Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) Mother was in her twenty-ninth year when she was carrying me. She had already borne four boys and two girls; her health was good and her life, like that of all farmers' wives in that section, was a laborious one. I can see her going about her work--milking, butter-making, washing, cooking, berry-picking, sugar-making, sewing, knitting, mending, and the thousand duties that fell to her lot and filled her days. Both she and Father were up at daylight in summer, and before daylight in winter. Sometimes she had help in the kitchen, but oftener she did not. The work that housewives did in those times seems incredible. They made their own soap, sugar, cheese, dipped or moulded their candles, spun the flax and wool and wove it into cloth, made carpets, knit the socks and mittens and "comforts" for the family, dried apples, pumpkins, and berries, and made the preserves and pickles for home use. Mother went about all these duties with cheerfulness and alacrity. She more than kept up her end of the farm work. She was more strenuous than father. How many hours she sat up mending and patching our clothes, while we were sleeping! Rainy days meant no let-up in her work, as they did in Father's. The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made. Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too, in my boyhood to make over two tons of butter annually, the care of which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the butter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese, also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that. I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our shirts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing those shirts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair shirt to do penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new flax-made shirt! No one sees these things any more. Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able to enumerate in our mothers. She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge to it. She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more than she thought. She scolded a good deal, but was not especially quick-tempered. She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father. She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition. As I have said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself in her perpetually. A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her. Whatever is most valuable in my books comes from her--the background of feeling, of pity, of love comes from her. She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children, wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father to get me books. She never read one of my books. She died in 1880, at the age of seventy-three. I had published four of my books then. She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but little of what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an old hymn--"Only a veil between." She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's Farm"--and had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I wrote them in Washington the fall that you were born. I was sick and forlorn at the time.) I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding, introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary man help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries. The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic tendencies, are largely her gift. On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher. Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side. In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them. (Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as men--do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and sympathetic.") To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful, well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and the home feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:-- "How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within! "Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them, the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working. God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity." The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:-- Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five. Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis. Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever. Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead; thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling up other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt at witty remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The Signs of the Times," like his father before him. He married and had five children. For many years previous to his death he lived at the homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912. Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with the most yearning fondness. Edmund died in infancy. Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing; writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would worry incessantly lest something happen to him. She married and had five daughters. Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?" John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded of what William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among the seventeen Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the rest nobodies.") Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he has become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of the family besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious, methodical and orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in the summer of 1912, when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the summer home where Mr. Burroughs has lived of late years, near the old place where he was born,--this brother recounted some of their youthful exploits, especially the one which yielded the material for the essay "A White Day and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five dollars for it," said Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece about it, and got seventy-five.") Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her brother's books and his ideals more than any other member of the family. She married and had two children. At the time of her death, in 1901, of typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the band of brothers and sisters had been unbroken by death for more than thirty-seven years. Her loss was a severe blow to her brother. He had always shared his windfalls with her; she had read some of his essays, and used to talk with him about his aspirations, encouraging him timidly, before he had gained recognition. Eveline died at the age of five years. The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed afresh for Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my affections," he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this is my constant thought. If I could only have another chance! How generous death makes us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for the living." As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram in everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these stone walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated during the years he had the farm." So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from us in cold alienation." We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while the others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues." "Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it in any way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram, here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me nearly four years' work, and which I rewrote four times.'" "'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was not aware. When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some of the pictures, but that was all." There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the ties of kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated in what makes up one's real existence. The one, the elder, intent on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah! the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"), of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his soul loved as Jonathan loved David! The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other, a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become a household word because of all that he has contributed to our intellectual and emotional life. A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs and his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a dreamer, and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account than his brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were leading industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties. On the top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest. From some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned that the stranger was from America. Immediately he showed a lively interest. "From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?" Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being questioned about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure, "took to books"; but what was he that this Englishman should inquire about him as the one man in America he was eager to learn about! Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was the one literary man the Delaware County farmer did know, though his knowledge was on the personal and not on the literary side. And imagine the surprise of the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had actually lighted upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.) CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable, and with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most farm boys have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age.... I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the old-fashioned way by being called up to the teacher several times a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by one, by continued repetition. It took me a long time, I remember, to distinguish _b_ from _d_, and _c_ from _e_. When and how I learned to read I do not remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later Olney's Geography, and then Dayballs Arithmetic. I went to school summers till I was old enough to help on the farm, say at the age of eleven or twelve, when my schooling was confined to the winters. (Illustration of The Old Schoolhouse, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by M.H. Fanning) As a boy, the only farm work that appealed to me was sugar-making in the maple woods in spring. This I thoroughly enjoyed. It brought me near to wild nature and was freer from routine than other farm work. Then I soon managed to gather a little harvest of my own from the sugar bush. I used to anticipate the general tapping by a few days or a week, and tap a few trees on my own account along the sunny border of the Woods, and boil the sap down on the kitchen stove (to the disgust of the womenfolks), selling the sugar in the village. I think the first money I ever earned came to me in this way. My first algebra and first grammar I bought with some of this precious money. When I appeared in the village with my basket of small cakes of early sugar, how my customers would hail me and call after me! No one else made such white sugar, or got it to market so early. One season, I remember, I got twelve silver quarters for sugar, and I carried them in my pockets for weeks, jingling them in the face of my envious schoolmates, and at intervals feasting my own eyes upon them. I fear if I could ever again get hold of such money as that was I should become a miser. Hoeing corn, weeding the garden, and picking stone was drudgery, and haying and harvesting I liked best when they were a good way off; picking up potatoes worried me, but gathering apples suited my hands and my fancy better, and knocking "Juno's cushions" in the spring meadows with my long-handled knocker, about the time the first swallow was heard laughing overhead, was real fun. I always wanted some element of play in my work; buckling down to any sort of routine always galled me, and does yet. The work must be a kind of adventure, and permit of sallies into free fields. Hence the most acceptable work for me was to be sent strawberrying or raspberrying by Mother; but the real fun was to go fishing up Montgomery Hollow, or over on Rose's Brook, this necessitating a long tramp, and begetting a hunger in a few hours that made a piece of rye bread the most delectable thing in the world; yet a pure delight that never sated. Mother used to bake her bread in the large old-fashioned brick oven, and once or twice a week we boys had to procure oven wood. "You must get me oven wood this morning," she would say; "I am going to bake today." Then we would scurry around for dry, light, quick wood--pieces of old boxes and boards, and dry limbs. "One more armful," she would often say, when we were inclined to quit too soon. In a half-hour or so, the wood would be reduced to ashes, and the oven properly heated. I can see Mother yet as she would open the oven door and feel the air inside with her hand. "Run, quick, and get me a few more sticks--it is not quite hot enough." When it was ready, the coals and ashes were raked out, and in went the bread, six or seven big loaves of rye, with usually two of wheat. The wheat was for company. When we would come in at dinner- or supper-time and see wheat bread on the table we would ask: "Who's in the other room?" Maybe the answer would be, "Your Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey." How glad I would be! I always liked to see company. Well, the living was better, and then, company brought a new element into the day; it gave a little tinge of romance to things. To wake up in the morning and think that Uncle Martin and Aunt Virey were there, or Uncle Edmund and Aunt Saliny, quickened the pulse a little. Or, when any of my cousins came,--boys near my own age,--what joy filled the days! And when they went, how lonesome I would be! how forlorn all things looked till the second or third day! I early developed a love of comrades, and was always fond of company--and am yet, as the records of Slabsides show. I was quite a hunter in my youth, as most farm boys are, but I never brought home much game--a gray squirrel, a partridge, or a wild pigeon occasionally. I think with longing and delight of the myriads of wild pigeons that used to come every two or three years--covering the sky for a day or two, and making the naked spring woods gay and festive with their soft voices and fluttering blue wings. I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood, like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts. Those in the rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon vast flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split off and, with a downward wheel and rush, join those in the wood. Presently I seized the old musket and ran out in the road, and then crept up behind the wall, till only the width of the road separated me from the swarms of fluttering pigeons. The air and the woods were literally blue with them, and the ground seemed a yard deep with them. I pointed my gun across the wall at the surging masses, and then sat there spellbound. The sound of their wings and voices filled my ears, and their numbers more than filled my eyes. Why I did not shoot was never very clear to me. Maybe I thought the world was all turning to pigeons, as they still came pouring down from the heavens, and I did not want to break the spell. There I sat waiting, waiting, with my eye looking along the gun-barrel, till, suddenly, the mass rose like an explosion, and with a rush and a roar they were gone. Then I came to my senses and with keen mortification realized what an opportunity I had let slip. Such a chance never came again, though the last great flight of pigeons did not take place till 1875. When I was about ten or twelve, a spell was put upon me by a red fox in a similar way. The baying of a hound upon the mountain had drawn me there, armed with the same old musket. It was a chilly day in early December. I took up my stand in the woods near what I thought might be the runway, and waited. After a while I stood the butt of my gun upon the ground, and held the barrel with my hand. Presently I heard a rustle in the leaves, and there came a superb fox loping along past me, not fifty feet away. He was evidently not aware of my presence, and, as for me, I was aware of his presence alone. I forgot that I had a gun, that here was the game I was in quest of, and that now was my chance to add to my store of silver quarters. As the unsuspecting fox disappeared over a knoll, again I came to my senses, and brought my gun to my shoulder; but it was too late, the game had gone. I returned home full of excitement at what I had seen, and gave as the excuse why I did not shoot, that I had my mitten on, and could not reach the trigger of my gun. It is true I had my mitten on, but there was a mitten, or something, on my wits also. It was years before I heard the last of that mitten; when I failed at anything they said, "John had his mitten on, I guess." I remember that I had a sort of cosmogony of my own when I was a mere boy. I used to speculate as to what the world was made of. Partly closing my eyes, I could see what appeared to be little crooked chains of fine bubbles floating in the air, and I concluded that that was the stuff the world was made of. And the philosophers have not yet arrived at a much more satisfactory explanation. In thinking of my childhood and youth I try to define to myself wherein I differed from my brothers and from other boys in the neighborhood, or wherein I showed any indication of the future bent of my mind. I see that I was more curious and alert than most boys, and had more interests outside my special duties as a farm boy. I knew pretty well the ways of the wild bees and hornets when I was only a small lad. I knew the different bumblebees, and had made a collection of their combs and honey before I had entered my teens. I had watched the little frogs, the hylas, and had captured them and held them till they piped sitting in my hand. I had watched the leaf-cutters and followed them to their nests in an old rail, or under a stone. I see that I early had an interest in the wild life about me that my brothers did not have. I was a natural observer from childhood, had a quick, sure eye and ear, and an eager curiosity. I loved to roam the hills and woods and prowl along the streams, just to come in contact with the wild and the adventurous. I was not sent to Sunday-school, but was allowed to spend the day as I saw fit, provided I did not carry a gun or a fishing-rod. Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations. What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I got it through literature, and more especially through the works of Audubon, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was early drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau, and to the nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my natural-history tastes were stimulated by them. I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing, tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open air--would have cured me of my love of nature. For love is the main thing, the prime thing, and to train the eye and ear and acquaint one with the spirit of the great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot of minute facts about nature, is, or should be, the object of nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy of the frog? But to know the live frog--his place in the season and the landscape, and his life-history--is something. If I wanted to instill the love of nature into a child's heart, I should do it, in the first place, through country life, and, in the next place, through the best literature, rather than through classroom investigations, or through books of facts about the mere mechanics of nature. Biology is all right for the few who wish to specialize in that branch, but for the mass of pupils, it is a waste of time. Love of nature cannot be commanded or taught, but in some minds it can be stimulated. Sweet were the days of my youth! How I love to recall them and dwell upon them!--a world apart, separated from the present by a gulf like that of sidereal space. The old farm bending over the hills and dipping down into the valleys, the woods, the streams, the springs, the mountains, and Father and Mother under whose wings I was so protected, and all my brothers and sisters-how precious the thought of them all! Can the old farm ever mean to future boys what it meant to me, and enter so deeply into their lives? No doubt it can, hard as it is to believe it. The "Bundle place," the "barn on the hill," the "Deacon woods," the clover meadow, the "turn in the road," the burying-ground, the sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the "old-barn meadow," and so on through the list--each field and section of the farm had to me an atmosphere and association of its own. The long, smooth, broad hill--a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon the lower edge of which the house is planted--shut off the west and southwest winds; its fields were all amenable to the plough, yielding good crops of oats, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, or, when in grass, yielding good pasture, divided east and west by parallel stone walls; this hill, or lower slope of the mountain, was one of the principal features of the farm. It was steep, but it was smooth; it was broad-backed and fertile; its soil was made up mainly of decomposed old red sandstone. How many times have I seen its different sections grow ruddy under the side-hill plough! One of my earliest recollections of my father is seeing him, when I was a child of three or four, striding across the middle side-hill lot with a bag slung across his breast, scattering the seed-grain. How often at early nightfall, while the west was yet glowing, have I seen the grazing cattle silhouetted against the sky. In the winter the northwest winds would sweep the snow clean from the other side, and bring it over to our side and leave it in a long, huge drift that buried the fences and gave the hill an extra full-breasted appearance. The breast of the old hill would be padded with ten or fifteen feet of snow. This drift would often last till May. I have seen it stop the plough. I remember once carrying a jug of water up to Brother Curtis when his plough was within a few feet of the snow. Woodchucks would sometimes feel the spring through this thick coverlid of snow and bore up through it to the sunlight. I think the woodchuck's alarm clock always goes off before April is done, and he comes forth, apparently not to break his long fast, but to find his mate. I remember working in oats in the middle side-hill lot one September during the early years of the Civil War, when Hiram was talking of enlisting as a drummer, and when Father and Mother were much worried about it. I carried together the sheaves, putting fifteen in a "shock." I have heard my father tell of a curious incident that once befell his hired man and himself when they were drawing in oats on a sled from the first side-hill lot. They had on a load, and the hired man had thrust his fork into the upper sides of it and was bringing his weight to bear against its tendency to capsize. But gravity got the better of them and over went the load; the hired man (Rueb Dart) clung to his fork, and swung over the load through the air, alighting on his feet none the worse for the adventure. The spring that supplies the house and the dairy with water comes from the middle side-hill lot, some forty or fifty rods from the house, and is now brought down in pipes; in my time, in pump-logs. It was always an event when the old logs had to be taken up and new ones put down. I saw the logs renewed twice in my time; once poplar logs were used, and once hemlock, both rather short-lived. A man from a neighboring town used to come with his long auger and bore the logs--a spectacle I was never tired of looking at. Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes' walk from the house, what a feature that was! In winter and in summer, what delightful associations I have with it! I know each of its great sugar maples as I know my friends or the members of the family. Each has a character of its own, and in sap-producing capacity they differ greatly. A fringe of the great trees stood out in the open fields; these were the earliest to run. In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making by overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and making new ones. The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in tapping in those days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out of basswood blocks with this gouge, and then sharpened so as to fit the half-round gash which the gouge made in the tree. The dairy milk-pans were used to catch the sap, and huge iron kettles to boil it down in. When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush. Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an axe to cut the gash in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it to make a place for the spile, while one of my younger brothers and I carried the pans and placed them in position. It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare, the roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered the sap by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was sturdy work. We would usually begin about three or four o'clock, and by five have the one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the hogsheads. When the sap ran all night, we would begin the gathering in the morning. The syruping-off usually took place at the end of the second day's boiling, when two or three hundred pailfuls of sap had been reduced to four or five of syrup. In the March or April twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry those heavy pails of syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove, from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average annual yield. The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember; the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or restless in the barnyard. When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,--England, France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the past,--and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren they seem!--not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm of the Old World--no architecture, no great names; in fact, no past. They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling to them! They are written over with the lives of the first settlers that cleared the fields and built the stone walls--simple, common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but without the appeal of heroism or adventure. The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age, the soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is new in human history, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty years. Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines of the country are gentle and flowing. The valleys are long, open, and wide; the hills broad and smooth, no angles or abruptness, or sharp contrasts anywhere. Hence it is not what is called a picturesque land--full of bits of scenery that make the artist's fingers itch. The landscape has great repose and gentleness, so far as long, sweeping lines and broad, smooth slopes can give this impression. It is a land which has never suffered violence at the hands of the interior terrestrial forces; nothing is broken or twisted or contorted or thrust out or up abruptly. The strata are all horizontal, and the steepest mountain-slopes clothed with soil that nourishes large forest growths. I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school in winter, till I was seventeen. From the time I was fourteen I had had a desire to go away to school. I had a craving for knowledge which my brothers did not share. One fall when I was about fifteen I had the promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy in the village that winter. But I did not go. Then the next fall I had the promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where one of the neighbor's boys, Dick Van Dyke, went. How I dreamed of Harpersfield! That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to it by the promise of Harpersfield. It was in September, in the lot above the sugar bush--cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for rye. How many days I ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield was the lure at the end of each furrow, I remember that. To this day I cannot hear the name without seeing a momentary glow upon my mental horizon--a finger of enchantment is for an instant laid upon me. But I did not go to Harpersfield. When the time drew near for me to go, Father found himself too poor, or the expense looked too big--none of the other boys had had such privileges, and why should I? So I swallowed my disappointment and attended the home district school for another winter. Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all. The desire, the yearning to go, the effort to make myself worthy to go, the mental awakening, and the high dreams, were the main matter. I doubt if the reality would have given me anything more valuable than these things. The aspiration for knowledge opens the doors of the mind and makes ready for her coming. These were my first and last days at the plough, and they made that field memorable to me. I never cross it now but I see myself there--a callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my head in a cloud of alluring day-dreams. This, I think, was in the fall of 1853. I went to school that winter with a view to leaving home in the spring to try my luck at school-teaching in an adjoining county. Many Roxbury boys had made their first start in the world by going to Ulster County to teach a country school. I would do the same. So, late in March, 1854, about the end of the sugar season, I set out for Olive, Ulster County. An old neighbor, Dr. Hull, lived there, and I would seek him. There was only a stage-line at that time connecting the two counties, and that passed twelve miles from my home. My plan was to cross the mountain into Red Kill to Uncle Martin Kelly's, pass the night there, and in the morning go to Clovesville, three miles distant, and take the stage. How well I remember that walk across the mountain in a snow-squall through which the sun shone dimly, a black oilcloth satchel in my hand, and in my heart vague yearnings and forebodings! I had but a few dollars in my pocket, probably six or seven, most of which I had earned by selling maple sugar. Father was willing I should go, though my help was needed on the farm. Well, I traversed the eight miles to my uncle's in good time, and in the morning he drove me down to the turnpike to take the stage. I remember well my anxious and agitated state of mind while waiting at the hotel for the arrival of the stage. I had never ridden in one, I am not sure that I had even seen one, and I did not know just what was expected of me, or just how I should deport myself. An untraveled farm boy at seventeen is such a vague creature anyway, and I was, in addition, such a bundle of sensibilities, timidities, and embarrassments as few farm boys are. I paid my fare at the hotel at the rate of a sixpence a mile for about thirty-two miles, and when the stage came, saw my name entered upon the "waybill," and got aboard with a beating heart. Of that first ride of my life in a public conveyance, I remember little. The stage was one of those old-fashioned rocking Concord coaches, drawn by four horses. We soon left the snow-clad hills of Delaware County behind, and dropped down into the milder climate of Ulster, where no snow was to be seen. About three in the afternoon the stage put me down at Terry's Tavern on the "plank-road" in Olive. I inquired the way to Dr. Hull's and found the walk of about a mile an agreeable change. The doctor and his wife welcomed me cordially. They were old friends of my family. I spent a day with them, riding about with the doctor on his visits to patients, and making inquiries for a school in want of a teacher. On the third day we heard of a vacancy in a district in the west end of the town, seven or eight miles distant, called Tongore. Hither I walked one day, saw the trustees, and made my application. I suspect my youth and general greenness caused them to hesitate; they would consider and let me know inside of a week. So, in a day or two, hearing of no other vacancies, I returned home the same way I had come. It was the first day of April when I made the return trip. I remember this because at one of the hotels where we changed horses I saw a copper cent lying upon the floor, and, stooping to pick it up, found it nailed fast. The bartender and two or three other spectators had a quiet chuckle at my expense. Before the week was out a letter came from the Tongore trustees saying I could have the school; wages, ten dollars the first month, and, if I proved satisfactory, eleven for the other five months, and "board around." I remember the handwriting of that letter as if I had received it but yesterday. "Come at your earliest opportunity." How vividly I recall the round hand in which those words were written! I replied that I would be on hand the next week, ready to open school on Monday, the 11th. Again I took the stage, my father driving me twelve miles to Dimmock's Corners to meet it, a trip which he made with me many times in after years. Mother always getting up and preparing our breakfast long before daylight. We were always in a more or less anxious frame of mind upon the road lest we be too late for the stage, but only once during the many trips did we miss it. On that occasion it had passed a few minutes before we arrived, but, knowing it stopped for breakfast at Griffin's Corners, four or five miles beyond, I hastened on afoot, running most of the way, and arrived in sight of it just as the driver had let off the first crack from his whip to start his reluctant horses. My shouting was quickly passed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race quite out of breath. On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended at Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in the late April afternoon. The little frogs were piping, and I remember how homesick the familiar spring sound made me. As I walked along the road near sundown with this sound in my ears, I saw coming toward me a man with a gait as familiar as was the piping of the frogs. He turned out to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and how delighted I was to see him in that lonesome land! He had sold a yoke of oxen down there and had been down to deliver them. The home ties pulled very strongly at sight of him. Warren's three boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest boy neighbors. His father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable characters of the town. Warren himself had had some varied experiences. He was one of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before. Indeed, he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the sheriff, at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol was the one that did the fatal work. At any rate, he had had to flee the country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close pressed by the posse. He went South and was absent several years. After the excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two factions had died down, he returned and was not molested. And here he was in the April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight of him cheered my heart. I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued it for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty pupils from the ages of six to twelve or thirteen. I can distinctly recall the faces of many of those boys and girls to this day--Jane North, a slender, clean-cut girl of ten or eleven; Elizabeth McClelland, a fat, freckled girl of twelve; Alice Twilliger, a thin, talkative girl with a bulging forehead. Two or three of the boys became soldiers in the Civil War, and fell in the battle of Gettysburg. (In April, 1912, Mr. Burroughs received the following: "Hearty congratulations upon your seventy-fifth birthday, from your old Tongore pupil of many years ago. R--B--.") I "boarded round," going home with the children as they invited me. I was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to warm biscuit and pie for supper. A few families were very poor, and there I was lucky to get bread and potatoes. In one house I remember the bedstead was very shaky, and in the middle of the night, as I turned over, it began to sway and lurch, and presently all went down in a heap. But I clung to the wreck till morning, and said nothing about it then. I remember that a notable eclipse of the sun occurred that spring on the 26th of May, when the farmers were planting their corn. What books I read that summer I cannot recall. Yes, I recall one--"The Complete Letter-Writer," which I bought of a peddler, and upon which I modeled many of my letters to various persons, among others to a Roxbury girl for whom I had a mild fancy. My first letter to a girl I wrote to her, and a ridiculously stiff, formal, and awkward letter it was, I assure you. I am positive I addressed her as "Dear Madam," and started off with some sentence from "The Complete Letter-Writer," so impressed was I that there was a best way to do this thing, and that the book pointed it out. Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and stilted and unreal it must have sounded to them! Oh, how crude and callow and obtuse I was at that time, full of vague and tremulous aspirations and awakenings, but undisciplined, uninformed, with many inherited incapacities and obstacles to weigh me down. I was extremely bashful, had no social aptitude, and was likely to stutter when anxious or embarrassed, yet I seem to have made a good impression. I was much liked in school and out, and was fairly happy. I seem to see sunshine over all when I look back there. But it was a long summer to me. I had never been from home more than a day or two at a time before, and I became very homesick. Oh, to walk in the orchard back of the house, or along the road, or to see the old hills again--what a Joy it would have been! But I stuck it out till my term ended in October, and then went home, taking a young fellow from the district (a brother of some girls I fancied) with me. I took back nearly all my wages, over fifty dollars, and with this I planned to pay my way at Hedding Literary Institute, in the adjoining county of Greene, during the coming winter term. I left home for the school late in November, riding the thirty miles with Father, atop a load of butter. It was the time of year when the farmers took their butter to Catskill. Father usually made two trips. This was the first one of the season, and I accompanied him as far as Ashland, where the Institute was located. I remained at school there three months, the length of the winter term, and studied fairly hard. I had a room by myself and enjoyed the life with the two hundred or more boys and girls of my own age. I studied algebra, geometry, chemistry, French, and logic, wrote compositions, and declaimed in the chapel, as the rules required. It was at this time that I first read Milton. We had to parse in "Paradise Lost," and I recall how I was shocked and astonished by that celestial warfare. I told one of my classmates that I did not believe a word of it. Among my teachers was a young, delicate, wide-eyed man who in later life became well known as Bishop Hurst, of the Methodist Church. He heard our small class in logic at seven o'clock in the morning, in a room that was never quite warmed by the newly kindled fire. I don't know how I came to study logic (Whately's). I had never heard of such a study before; maybe that is why I chose it. I got little out of it. What an absurd study, taught, as it was, as an aid to argumentation!--like teaching a man to walk by explaining to him the mechanism of walking. The analysis of one sound argument, or of one weak one, in terms of common sense, is worth any amount of such stuff. But it was of a piece with grammar and rhetoric as then taught--all preposterous studies viewed as helps toward correct writing and speaking. Think of our parsing Milton as an aid to mastering the English language! I remember I stood fairly high in composition--only one boy in the school ahead of me, and that was Herman Coons, to whom I became much attached, and who became a Methodist minister. He went home with me during the holiday vacation. After leaving school we corresponded for several years, and then lost track of each other. I do not know that there is one of my school-mates of that time now living. I know of none that became eminent in any field. One of the boys was fatally injured that winter while coasting. I remember sitting up with him many nights and ministering to him. He died in a few weeks. It was an event when Father and Mother came to visit me for a few hours, and Mother brought me some mince pies. What feasts two or three other boys and I had in my room over those home-made pies! Toward spring we had a public debate in the chapel, and I was chosen as one of the disputants. We debated the question of the Crimean War, which was on then. I was on the side of England and France against Russia. Our side won. I think I spoke very well. I remember that I got much of my ammunition from a paper in "Harper's Magazine," probably by Dr. Osgood. It seems my fellow on the affirmative had got much of his ammunition from the same source, and, as I spoke first, there was not much powder left for him, and he was greatly embarrassed. What insignificant things one remembers in a world of small events! I recall how one morning when we had all gathered in chapel for prayers, none of the professors appeared on the platform but our French teacher, and, as praying for us was not one of his duties, he hurried off to find some one to perform that function, while we all sat and giggled. In the spring of 1855, with eight or ten dollars in my pocket which Father had advanced me, I made my first visit to New York by steamer from Catskill, on my way to New Jersey in quest of a position as school-teacher. Three of our neighborhood boys were then teaching in or near Plainfield, and I sought them out, having my first ride on the cars on that trip from Jersey City. As I sat there in my seat waiting for the train to start, I remember I actually wondered if the starting would be so sudden as to jerk my hat off! I was too late to find a vacancy in any of the schools in the districts I visited. On one occasion I walked from Somerville twelve miles to a village where there was a vacancy, but the trustees, after looking me over, concluded I was too young and inexperienced for their large school. That night the occultation of Venus by the moon took place. I remember gazing at it long and long. On my return in May I stopped in New York and spent a day prowling about the second-hand bookstalls, and spent so much of my money for books that I had only enough left to carry me to Griffin's Corners, twelve miles from home. I bought Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," Dr. Johnson's works, Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," and Dick's works and others. Dick was a Scottish philosopher whose two big fat volumes held something that caught my mind as I dipped into them. But I got little from him and soon laid him aside. On this and other trips to New York I was always drawn by the second-hand bookstalls. How I hovered about them, how good the books looked, how I wanted them all! To this day, when I am passing them, the spirit of those days lays its hand upon me, and I have to pause a few moments and, half-dreaming, half-longing, run over the titles. Nearly all my copies of the English classics I have picked up at these curbstone stalls. How much more they mean to me than new books of later years! Here, for instance, are two volumes of Dr. Johnson's works in good leather binding, library style, which I have carried with me from one place to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first essay in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago (in 1860), I said that Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that the power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this comparison seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read Boswell's Life of him till much later. In his conversation Johnson got the fulcrum in the right place. I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books. I remember the day because the grass was green, but the air was full of those great "goose-feather" flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May. I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and pored over my books when I had a chance. I must have found Locke's "Essay" pretty tough reading, but I remember buckling to it, getting right down on "all fours," as one has to, to follow Locke. I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it. It let loose a flood of emotion in me. I remember finishing it one morning and then going out to work in the hay-field, and how the homely and familiar scenes fairly revolted me. I dare say the story took away my taste for Locke and Johnson for a while. In early September I again turned my face Jerseyward in quest of a school, but stopped on my way in Olive to visit friends in Tongore. The school there, since I had left it, had fared badly. One of the teachers the boys had turned out of doors, and the others had "failed to give satisfaction"; so I was urged to take the school again. The trustees offered to double my wages--twenty-two dollars a month. After some hesitation I gave up the Jersey scheme and accepted the trustees' offer. It was during that second term of teaching at Tongore that I first met Ursula North, who later became my wife. Her uncle was one of the trustees of the school, and I presume it was this connection that brought her to the place and led to our meeting. If I had gone on to Jersey in that fall of '55, my life might have been very different in many ways. I might have married some other girl, might have had a large family of children, and the whole course of my life might have been greatly changed. It frightens me now to think that I might have missed the Washington life, and Whitman,... and much else that has counted for so much with me. What I might have gained is, in the scale, like imponderable air. I read my Johnson and Locke that winter and tried to write a little in the Johnsonese buckram style. The young man to-day, under the same conditions, would probably spend his evenings reading novels or the magazines. I spent mine poring over "The Rambler." In April I closed the school and went home, again taking a young fellow with me. I was then practically engaged to Ursula North, and I wrote her a poem on reaching home. About the middle of April I left home for Cooperstown Seminary. I rode to Moresville with Jim Bouton, and as the road between there and Stamford was so blocked with snowdrifts that the stage could not run, I was compelled to walk the eight miles, leaving my trunk behind. From Stamford I reached Cooperstown after an all-night ride by stage. My summer at Cooperstown was an enjoyable and a profitable one. I studied Latin, French, English literature, algebra, and geometry. If I remember correctly, I stood first in composition over the whole school. I joined the Websterian Society and frequently debated, and was one of the three or four orators chosen by the school to "orate" in a grove on the shore of the lake, on the Fourth of July. I held forth in the true spread-eagle style. I entered into the sports of the school, ball-playing and rowing on the lake, with the zest of youth. One significant thing I remember: I was always on the lookout for books of essays. It was at this time that I took my first bite into Emerson, and it was like tasting a green apple--not that he was unripe, but I wasn't ripe for him. But a year later I tasted him again, and said, "Why, this tastes good"; and took a bigger bite; then soon devoured everything of his I could find. I say I was early on the lockout for books of essays, and I wanted the essay to begin, not in a casual way by some remark in the first person, but by the annunciation of some general truth, as most of Dr. Johnson's did. I think I bought Dick's works on the strength of his opening sentence--"Man is a compound being." As one's mind develops, how many changes in taste he passes through! About the time of which I am now writing, Pope was my favorite poet. His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned to care for. I am sure the growth of my literary taste has been along the right lines--from the formal and the complex, to the simple and direct. Now, the less the page seems written, that is, the more natural and instinctive it is, other things being equal, the more it pleases me. I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such; yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better. Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind, how it takes us! My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe, if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I really saw and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my writing when I see it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick. (In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown, after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered. Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place. I again dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and threaded some of the streets I had known so well. I wished I could have been alone there.... I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers. I could not quite get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It was here that I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical Chapter') and first dipped into Emerson." After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the young student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall, when he began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until the following spring, returning East to marry, as he says, "the girl I left behind me." He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home farm. During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at writing. There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he invested his earnings in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he had dreams of wealth. But the buckle project failed, the dreams vanished, and he began to read medicine, and resumed his teaching. From 1859 to 1862 he was writing much, on philosophical subjects mainly. It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the birds.--C. B.) Ever since the time when in my boyhood I saw the strange bird in the woods of which I have told you, the thought had frequently occurred to me, "I shall know the birds some day." But nothing came of the thought and wish till the spring of '63, when I was teaching school near West Point. In the library of the Military Academy, which I frequently visited of a Saturday, I chanced upon the works of Audubon. I took fire at once. It was like bringing together fire and powder! I was ripe for the adventure; I had leisure, I was in a good bird country, and I had Audubon to stimulate me, as well as a collection of mounted birds belonging to the Academy for reference. How eagerly and joyously I took up the study! It fitted in so well with my country tastes and breeding; it turned my enthusiasm as a sportsman into a new channel; it gave to my walks a new delight; it made me look upon every grove and wood as a new storehouse of possible treasures. I could go fishing or camping or picknicking now with my resources for enjoyment doubled. That first hooded warbler that I discovered and identified in a near-by bushy field one Sunday morning--shall I ever forget the thrill of delight it gave me? And when in August I went with three friends into the Adirondacks, no day or place or detention came amiss to me; new birds were calling and flitting on every hand; a new world was opened to me in the midst of the old. At once I was moved to write about the birds, and I began my first paper, "The Return of the Birds," that fall, and finished it in Washington, whither I went in October, and where I lived for ten years. Writing about the birds and always treating them in connection with the season and their environment, was, while I was a government clerk, a kind of vacation. It enabled me to live over again my days amid the sweet rural things and influences. The paper just referred to is, as you may see, mainly written out of my memories as a farm boy. The enthusiasm which Audubon had begotten in me quickened and gave value to all my youthful experiences and observations of the birds. (This brings us to the time when our subject is fairly launched on early manhood. He has regular employment--a clerkship in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which, if not especially congenial in itself, affords him leisure to do the things he most wishes to do. He is even now growing in strength and efficiency as an essayist.--C. B.) SELF-ANALYSIS March, 1909 My Dear Friend,-- You once asked me how, considering my antecedents and youthful environment, I accounted for myself; what sent me to Nature, and to writing about her, and to literature generally. I wish I could answer you satisfactorily, but I fear I cannot. I do not know, myself; I can only guess at it. I have always looked upon myself as a kind of sport; I came out of the air quite as much as out of my family. All my weaknesses and insufficiencies--and there are a lot of them--are inherited, but of my intellectual qualities, there is not much trace in my immediate forbears. No scholars or thinkers or lovers of books, or men of intellectual pursuits for several generations back of me--all obscure farmers or laborers in humble fields, rather grave, religiously inclined men, I gather, sober, industrious, good citizens, good neighbors, correct livers, but with no very shining qualities. My four brothers were of this stamp--home-bodies, rather timid, non-aggressive men, somewhat below the average in those qualities and powers that insure worldly success--the kind of men that are so often crowded to the wall. I can see myself in some of them, especially in Hiram, who had daydreams, who was always going West, but never went; who always wanted some plaything--fancy sheep or pigs or poultry; who was a great lover of bees and always kept them; who was curious about strange lands, but who lost heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of his native hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he made. Perhaps it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always seemed nearer to me than any of the rest. I have at times his vagueness, his indefiniteness, his irresolution, and his want of spirit when imposed upon. Poor Hiram! One fall in his simplicity he took his fancy Cotswold sheep to the State Fair at Syracuse, never dreaming but that a farmer entirely outside of all the rings and cliques, and quite unknown, could get the prize if his stock was the best. I can see him now, hanging about the sheep-pens, homesick, insignificant, unnoticed, living on cake and pie, and wondering why a prize label was not put upon his sheep. Poor Hiram! Well, he marched up the hill with his sheep, and then he marched down again, a sadder and, I hope, a wiser man. Once he ordered a fancy rifle, costing upwards of a hundred dollars, of a gunsmith in Utica. When the rifle came, it did not suit him, was not according to specifications; so he sent it back. Not long after that the man failed and no rifle came, and the money was not returned. Then Hiram concluded to make a journey out there. I was at home at the time, and can see him yet as he started off along the road that June day, off for Utica on foot. Again he marched up the hill, and then marched down, and no rifle or money ever came. For years he had the Western fever, and kept his valise under his bed packed ready for the trip. Once he actually started and got as far as White Pigeon, Michigan. There his courage gave out, and he came back. Still he kept his valise packed, but the end of his life's journey came before he was ready to go West again. Hiram, as you know, came to live with me at Slabsides during the last years of his life. He had made a failure of it on the old farm, after I had helped him purchase it; nearly everything had gone wrong, indoors and out; and he was compelled to give it up. So he brought his forty or more skips of bees to West Park and lived with me, devoting himself, not very successfully, to bee-culture. He loved to "fuss" with bees. I think the money he got for his honey looked a little more precious to him than other money, just as the silver quarters I used to get when a boy for the maple sugar I made had a charm and a value no quarters have ever had in my eyes since. That thing in Hiram that was so appealed to by his bee-culture, and by any fancy strain of sheep or poultry, is strong in me, too, and has played an important part in my life. If I had not taken it out in running after wild nature and writing about it I should probably have been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer. As it is, I have always been a bee-lover, and have usually kept several swarms. Ordinary farming is prosy and tiresome compared with bee-farming. Combined with poultry-raising, it always had special attractions for me. When I was a farm boy of twelve or thirteen years, one of our neighbors had a breed of chickens with large topknots that filled my eye completely. My brother and I used to hang around the Chase henyard for hours, admiring and longing for those chickens. The impression those fowls made upon me seems as vivid to-day as it was when first made. The topknot was the extra touch--the touch of poetry that I have always looked for in things, and that Hiram, in his way, craved and sought for, too. There was something, too, in my maternal grandfather that probably foreshadowed the nature-lover and nature-writer. In him it took the form of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible. He went from the Book to the stream, and from the stream to the Book, with great regularity. I do not remember that he ever read the newspapers, or any other books than the Bible and the hymn-book. When he was over eighty years, old he would woo the trout-streams with great success, and between times would pore over the Book till his eyes were dim. I do not think he ever joined the church, or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont in those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon the Bible. When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a soldier under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and one of his sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead. The half-wild, adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my veins--that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid in action--surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my revolutionary ancestor, Grandfather Kelly. I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring, peace-loving, solitude-loving men--men not strongly sketched in on the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or uproarious--law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this impression from many sources, and think it is a correct one. Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails in the barn--how much I still dream about these things! But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself. Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered into my very blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters, and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a part of that which I am. I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition--her yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally. Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him. The texture of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the berry lot! It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings for raspberries. The last work she did in the world was to gather a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from a visit to my sister's, less than a mile away. I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to this day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to distant fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the woods for black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of Mother. You could not see all that I bring home with me in my pail on such occasions; if you could, you would see the traces of daisies and buttercups and bobolinks, and the blue skies, with thoughts of Mother and the Old Home, that date from my youth. I usually eat some of the berries in bread and milk, as I was wont to do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as near a boy again as it is possible for me to be. (Illustration of One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson) No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my subsequent love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all rural things. I feel at home with them; they are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It seems to me a man who was not born and reared in the country can hardly get Nature into his blood, and establish such intimate and affectionate relations with her, as can the born countryman. We are so susceptible and so plastic in youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into and color and feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I must have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a real and lasting possession. When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common ones. I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life and warmth to my page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have taken from the soil much of its fertility. At least, so it seems to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily go far astray. It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have entered into one's life. When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have much significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a pail of chips. She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground. That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old. Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin," in the chapter called "The Invitation,"--the vision of the small bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the "Deacon woods" near home. The memory of that bird stuck to me as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of. Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must have occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front of us. "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear view of it. Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me from the first. Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird, the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day. When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity of a stump or a tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by approaching silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I sometimes succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird. I used to capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over the nest in the side of the bank along the road. I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for I distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private affairs of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting still a long time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and catch them in the act of peeping. And this I succeeded in doing, discovering one piping from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung like a sailor to a mast; I finally allayed the fears of one I had captured till he sat in the palm of my hand and piped--a feat I have never been able to repeat since. I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my own for all the different kinds. One summer I made it a point to collect bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of pounds. I found it very palatable, though the combs were often infested with parasites. The small red-banded bumblebees that lived in large colonies in holes in the ground afforded me the largest yields. A large bee, with a broad light-yellow band, was the ugliest customer to deal with. It was a fighter and would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me across the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it had me. It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed the other pretty rapidly. As a child I was always looked upon and spoken of as an "odd one" in the family, even by my parents. Strangers, and relatives from a distance, visiting at the house, would say, after looking us all over, "That is not your boy," referring to me, "who is he?" And I am sure I used to look the embarrassment I felt at not being as the others were. I did not want to be set apart from them or regarded as an outsider. As this was before the days of photography, there are no pictures of us as children, so I can form no opinion of how I differed in my looks from the others. I remember hearing my parents say that I showed more of the Kelly--Mother's family. I early "took to larnin'," as Father used to say, differing from my brothers and sisters in this respect. I quickly and easily distanced them all in the ordinary studies. I had gone through Dayball's Arithmetic while two of my older brothers were yet in addition. "Larnin'" came very hard to all of them except to Hiram and me, and Hiram did not have an easy time of it, though he got through his Dayball, and studied Greenleaf's Grammar. There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district, and I used to take home books from it. They were usually books of travel or of adventure. I remember one, especially, a great favorite, "Murphy, the Indian Killer." I must have read this book several times. Novels, or nature books, or natural-history books, were unknown in that library. I remember the "Life of Washington," and I am quite certain that it was a passage in this book that made a lasting impression upon me when I was not more than six or seven years old. I remember the impression, though I do not recall the substance of the passage. The incident occurred one Sunday in summer when Hiram and a cousin of ours and I were playing through the house, I carrying this book in my hand. From time to time I would stop and read this passage aloud, and I can remember, as if it were but yesterday, that I was so moved by it, so swept away by its eloquence, that, for a moment, I was utterly oblivious to everything around me. I was lifted out of myself, caught up in a cloud of feeling, and wafted I know not whither. My companions, being much older than I was, regarded not my reading. These exalted emotional states, similar to that just described, used occasionally to come to me under other conditions about this time, or later. I recall one such, one summer morning when I was walking on the top of a stone wall that ran across the summit of one of those broad-backed hills which you yourself know. I had in my hand a bit of a root of a tree that was shaped much like a pistol. As I walked along the toppling stones, I flourished this, and called and shouted and exulted and let my enthusiasm have free swing. It was a moment of supreme happiness. I was literally intoxicated; with what I do not know. I only remember that life seemed amazingly beautiful--I was on the crest of some curious wave of emotion, and my soul sparkled and flashed in the sunlight. I have haunted that old stone wall many times since that day, but I have never been able again to experience that thrill of joy and triumph. The cup of life does not spontaneously bead and sparkle in this way except in youth, and probably with many people it does not even then. But I know from what you have told me that you have had the experience. When one is trying to cipher out his past, and separate the factors that have played an important part in his life, such incidents, slight though they are, are significant. The day-dreams I used to indulge in when twelve or thirteen, while at work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving the cows to pasture, or hoeing corn,--dreams of great wealth and splendor, of dress and equipage,--were also significant, but not prophetic. Probably what started these golden dreams was an itinerant quack phrenologist who passed the night at our house when I was a lad of eight or nine. He examined the heads of all of us; when he struck mine, he grew enthusiastic. "This is the head for you," he said; "this boy is going to be rich, very rich"; and much more to that effect. Riches was the one thing that appealed to country people in those times; it was what all were after, and what few had. Hence the confident prophesy of the old quack made an impression, and when I began to indulge in day-dreams I was, no doubt, influenced by it. But, as you know, it did not come true, except in a very limited sense. Instead of returning to the Old Home in a fine equipage, and shining with gold,--the observed of all observers, and the envy of all enviers,--as I had dreamed, and as had been foretold, I came back heavy-hearted, not indeed poor, but far from rich, walked up from the station through the mud and snow unnoticed, and took upon myself the debts against the old farm, and so provided that it be kept in the family. It was not an impressive home-coming; it was to assume burdens rather than to receive congratulations; it was to bow my head rather than to lift it up. Out of the golden dreams of youth had come cares and responsibilities. But doubtless it was best so. The love that brought me back to the old home year after year, that made me willing to serve my family, and that invested my native hills with such a charm, was the best kind of riches after all. As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often seen inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming in the woods and fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer, following the streams and swimming in the pools. Occasionally I went fishing, though this was to incur parental displeasure--unless I brought home some fine trout, in which case the displeasure was much tempered. I think this Sunday-school in the woods and fields was, in my case, best. It has always seemed, and still seems, as if I could be a little more intimate with Nature on Sunday than on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a different spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and I could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about me more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other. The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens, black birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples that grew in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays in later years is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and wild strawberries, and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks and hilltops. What day can compare with a Sunday to go to the waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge," or to "Columbine Ledge," or to stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet peace and repose is over all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from venom as are grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and dance as at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read a little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than on Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday, but never finished it. I must send you the fragment. But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature? What made me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things? The precise value of the _x_ is hard to find. My reading, no doubt, had much to do with it. This intellectual and emotional interest in nature is in the air in our time, and has been more or less for the past fifty years. I early read Wordsworth, and Emerson and Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," as I have before told you. But the previous question is, why the nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One cannot corner this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that way--the love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and Thomson and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they did not kindle this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though he did not directly treat of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed to blend with Nature, and to reveal the ideal and spiritual values in her works. I think it was this, or something like it, that stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky and flower full of a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake that has mainly drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a strict man of science; but nature for the soul's sake--the inward world of ideals and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it is my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science. I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself back into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a startling affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of commonplace facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence of the tyrannies of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly bragging and saintly flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us as we grow old. Do we outgrow him?--or do we fall away from him? I cannot bear to hear Emerson spoken of as a back-number, and I should like to believe that the young men of to-day find in him what I found in him fifty years ago, when he seemed to whet my appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger that could "eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do not. The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon, but debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of the world. Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, and he will be found wanting. And yet, let me quickly add, there is something more precious and divine about him than about any or all the others. He prepares the way for a greater than he, prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new thought, as none other does. But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive. For a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him. I think I have always had a pretty soft shell, so to speak, hardly enough lime and grit in it, and at times I am aware that such is the fact to this day. Well, Emerson found my intellectual shell very plastic; I took the form of his mould at once, and could not get away from him; and, what is more, did not want to get away from him, did not see the need of getting away from him. Nature herself seemed to speak through him. An intense individuality that possesses the quality of lovableness is apt to impose itself upon us in this way. It was under this spell, as you know, that I wrote "Expression," of which I have told you. The "Atlantic," by the way, had from the first number been a sort of university to me. It had done much to stimulate and to shape my literary tastes and ambitions. I was so eager for it that when I expected it in the mail I used to run on my way to the post office for it. So, with fear and trembling, I sent that essay to its editor. Lowell told a Harvard student who was an old schoolmate of mine that when he read the paper he thought some young fellow was trying to palm off an early essay of Emerson's upon him as his own, and that he looked through the "Dial" and other publications in the expectation of finding it. Not succeeding in doing so, he concluded the young man had written it himself. It was published in November, 1860, and as the contributors' names were not given at that time, it was ascribed to Emerson by the newspaper reviewers of that number. It went into Poole's Index as by Emerson, and later. Professor Hill (Some years ago I took it upon myself to let Professor Hill know the real author of "Expression." He appeared grateful, though some what chagrined, and said the error should be corrected in the next edition. Mr. Burroughs smiled indulgently when he learned of my zeal in the matter: "Emerson's back is broad; he could have afforded to continue to shoulder my early blunders," he said. C. B.) of Harvard, quoted a line from it in a footnote in his "Rhetoric," and credited it to Emerson. So I had deceived the very elect. The essay had some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit and manner. When I came to view it through the perspective of print, I quickly saw that this kind of thing would not do for me. I must get on ground of my own. I must get this Emersonian musk out of my garments at all hazards. I concluded to bury my garments in the earth, as it were, and see what my native soil would do toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all manner of rural themes--sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These, no doubt, helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote about things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes. When a man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he is pretty sure to be himself. When I wrote upon more purely intellectual themes, as I did about this time for the "Leader," the Emersonian influence was more potent, though less so than in the first "Atlantic" essay. Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in proportion as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings, and ceases to echo the thoughts and moods of another. Only thus can he be sincere; and sincerity is the main secret of style. What I wrote from "the push of reading," as Whitman calls it, was largely an artificial product; I had not made it my own; but when I wrote of country scenes and experiences, I touched the quick of my mind, and it was more easy to be real and natural. I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday Press" which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them over, you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings of Analogy--often a forced and unreal Analogy. December, 1907 My Dear Friend,-- You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been with me, etc. It is an inviting subject. How an old man likes to run on about himself! I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons', much more than was my father's or his father's. I have picnicked all along the way. I have on the whole been gay and satisfied. I have had no great crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions, except such as must come to all who live; neither poverty, nor riches. I have had uniform good health, true friends, and some congenial companions. I have done, for the most part, what I wanted to do. Some drudgery I have had, that is, in uncongenial work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in bank-examining; but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an open door, as it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant feeling that I would soon be there. My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday. The fishing, the hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering--all had a holiday character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality. I have been under no exacting master or tyrant.... I have never been a slave to any bad habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. I have had no social or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom or dictated my dress or habits. Neither has any religious order or any clique. I have had no axe to grind. I have gone with such men and women as I liked, irrespective of any badge of wealth or reputation or social prestige that they might wear. I have looked for simple pleasures everywhere, and have found them. I have not sought for costly pleasures, and do not want them--pleasures that cost money, or health, or time. The great things, the precious things of my life, have been without money and without price, as common as the air. Life has laid no urgent mission upon me. My gait has been a leisurely one. I am not bragging of it; I am only stating a fact. I have never felt called upon to reform the world. I have doubtless been culpably indifferent to its troubles and perplexities, and sins and sufferings. I lend a hand occasionally here and there in my own neighborhood, but I trouble myself very little about my neighbors--their salvation or their damnation. I go my own way and do my own work. I have loved nature, I have loved the animals, I have loved my fellow-men. I have made my own whatever was fair and of good report. I have loved the thoughts of the great thinkers and the poems of the great poets, and the devout lines of the great religious souls. I have not looked afar off for my joy and entertainment, but in things near at hand, that all may have on equal terms. I have been a loving and dutiful son, and a loving and dutiful father, and a good neighbor. I have got much satisfaction out of life; it has been worth while. I have not been a burden-bearer; for shame be it said, perhaps, when there are so many burdens to be borne by some one. I have borne those that came in my way, or that circumstances put upon me, and have at least pulled my own weight. I have had my share of the holiday spirit; I have had a social holiday, a moral holiday, a business holiday. I have gone a-fishing while others were struggling and groaning and losing their souls in the great social or political or business maelstrom. I know, too, I have gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums and given their lives to the betterment of their fellows. But I have been a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime. I am not a fighter, I dislike any sort of contest, or squabble, or competition, or storm. My strength is in my calm, my serenity, my sunshine. In excitement I lose my head, and my heels, too. I cannot carry any citadel by storm. I lack the audacity and spirit of the stormer. I must reduce it slowly or steal it quietly. I lack moral courage, though I have plenty of physical and intellectual courage. I could champion Walt Whitman when nearly every contemporaneous critic and poet were crying him down, but I utterly lack the moral courage to put in print what he dared to. I have wielded the "big stick" against the nature-fakers, but I am very uncomfortable under any sort of blame or accusation. It is so much easier for me to say yes than no. My moral fibre is soft compared to my intellectual. I am a poor preacher, an awkward moralizer. A moral statement does not interest me unless it can be backed up by natural truth; it must have intellectual value. The religious dogmas interest me if I can find a scientific basis for them, otherwise not at all. I shall shock you by telling you I am not much of a patriot. I have but little national pride. If we went to war with a foreign power to-morrow, my sympathies would be with the foreigner if I thought him in the right. I could gladly see our navy knocked to pieces by Japan, for instance, if we were in the wrong. I have absolutely no state pride, any more than I have county or town pride, or neighborhood pride. But I make it up in family or tribal affection. I am too much preoccupied, too much at home with myself, to feel any interest in many things that interest my fellows. I have aimed to live a sane, normal, healthy life; or, rather, I have an instinct for such a life. I love life, as such, and I am quickly conscious of anything that threatens to check its even flow. I want a full measure of it, and I want it as I do my spring water, clear and sweet and from the original sources. Hence I have always chafed in cities, I must live in the country. Life in the cities is like the water there--a long way from the original sources, and more or less tainted by artificial conditions. The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know when the vital current is foul. They are never really well. They do not look out for personal inward sanitation. Smokers, drinkers, coffee-tipplers, gluttonous eaters, diners-out, are likely to lose the sense of perfect health, of a clear, pure life-current, of which I am thinking. The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape, the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is within the reach of most of us. The least cloud or film in my mental skies mars or stops my work. I write with my body quite as much as with my mind. How persons whose bread of life is heavy, so to speak,--no lightness or buoyancy or airiness at all,--can make good literature is a mystery to me; or those who stimulate themselves with drugs or alcohol or coffee. I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find a spur in a whiff of morning air. Such as my books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity, or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their making. The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my books is not paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids. All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as my mind does to my body. Their powers seem to have been more purely psychic. Look at Stevenson--almost bedridden all his life, yet behold the felicity of his work! How completely his mind must have been emancipated from the infirmities of his body! It is clearly not thus with me. My mind is like a flame that depends entirely upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never write in the afternoon, because this combustion is poorest then. Life has been to me simply an opportunity to learn and enjoy, and, through my books, to share my enjoyment with others. I have had no other ambition. I have thirsted to know things, and to make the most of them. The universe is to me a grand spectacle that fills me with awe and wonder and joy, and with intense curiosity. I have had no such religious burden to bear as my fathers did--the conviction of sin, the struggle, the agony, the despair of a soul that fears it is lost. The fear of hell has never troubled me. Of sin in the theological sense, the imputed sin of Adam's transgression, which so worried the old people, I have not had a moment's concern. That I have given my heart to Nature instead of to God, as these same old people would have said, has never cast a shadow over my mind or conscience--as if God would not get all that belonged to Him, and as if love of his works were not love of Him! I have acquiesced in things as they are, and have got all the satisfaction out of them that I could. Over my personal sins and shortcomings, I have not been as much troubled as I should; none of us are. We do not see them in relief as others do; they are like the color of our eyes, or our hair, or the shapes of our noses. I do not know that it is true that my moral fibre is actually weak. If I may draw a figure from geology, it is probably true that my moral qualities are the softer rock in the strata that make up my being--the easiest worn away. I see that I carry the instinct of the naturalist into all my activities. If a thing is natural, sane, wholesome, that is enough. Whether or not it is conventionally correct, or square with the popular conception of morality, does not matter to me. I undoubtedly lack the heroic fibre. My edge is much easier turned than was that, say, of Thoreau. Austerity would ill become me. You would see through the disguise. Yes, there is much soft rock in my make-up. Is that why I shrink from the wear and tear of the world? The religious storm and upheaval that I used to hear so much of in my youth is impossible with me. I am liable to deep-seated enthusiasms; but to nothing like a revolution in my inward life, nothing sudden, nothing violent. I can't say that there has been any abandonment of my opinions on important subjects; there has been new growth and evolution, I hope. The emphasis of life shifts, now here, now there; it is up hill and down dale, but there is no change of direction.... Certain deep-seated tendencies and instincts have borne me on. I have gravitated naturally to the things that were mine. I could not make anything I chose of myself; I could only be what I am. In my youth I once "went forward" at a "protracted meeting," but nothing came of it. The change in me that I was told would happen did not happen, and I never went again. My nature was too equable, too self-poised, to be suddenly overturned and broken up. I am not a bit gregarious. I cannot herd with other men and be "Hail, fellow, well met!" with them as I wish I could. I am much more at home with women; we seem to understand one another better. Put me with a lot of men, and we naturally separate as oil and water separate. On shipboard it is rarely that any of the men take to me, or I to them--I do not smoke or drink or tell stories, or talk business or politics, and the men have little use for me. On my last voyage across the Atlantic, the only man who seemed to notice me, or to whom I felt drawn at all, was a Catholic priest. Real countrymen, trappers, hunters, and farmers, I seem to draw near to. On the Harriman Alaskan Expedition the two men I felt most at home with were Fred Dellenbaugh, the artist and explorer, and Captain Kelly, the guide. Can you understand this? Do you see why men do not, as a rule, care for me, and why women do? I accuse myself of want of sociability. Probably I am too thin-skinned. A little more of the pachyderm would help me in this respect. Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism. I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer--I write without any previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual life from day to day has prepared me for it. I do not work up my subject, or outline it, or sketch it in the rough. When I sit down to write upon any theme, like that of my "Cosmopolitan" article last April ("What Life Means to Me," 1906), or of my various papers on animal intelligence, I do not know what I have to say on the subject till I delve into my mind and see what I find there. The writing is like fishing or hunting, or sifting the sand for gold--I am never sure of what I shall find. All I want is a certain feeling, a bit of leaven, which I seem to refer to some place in my chest--not my heart, but to a point above that and nearer the centre of the chest--the place that always glows or suffuses when one thinks of any joy or good tidings that is coming his way. It is a kind of hunger for that subject; it warms me a little to think of it, a pleasant thrill runs through me; or it is something like a lover's feeling for his sweetheart--I long to be alone with it, and to give myself to it. I am sure I shall have a good time. Hence, my writing is the measure of my life. I can write only about what I have previously felt and lived. I have no legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a dry branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my heart and write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one should be able to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could. Stevenson had the true literary legerdemain; he was master of the art of writing; he could invest a broomstick with charm; if it remained a broomstick, it was one on which the witches might carry you through the air at night. Stevenson had no burden of meaning to deliver to the world; his subject never compelled him to write; but he certainly could invest common things and thoughts with rare grace and charm. I wish I had more of this gift, this facility of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject. I could not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the old kitchen at home--the broom with which Mother used to sweep the floor, and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and hills as she finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we used to sweep the snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came from school or from doing the chores in winter. Here would be a personal appeal that would probably find me more inevitably than it would Stevenson. I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk, or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up. Hence, when magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California, or here or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their artist would make, I have felt constrained to refuse. The thought that I was expected to write something would have burdened me and stood in the way of my enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment, there is no writing with me. I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines to a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an artist, and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and of human interest, but nothing came of it--my perverse pen would not do what it was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen. When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my thoughts than writing them up. I watched them and ran after them because I loved them and was happy with them in the fields and woods; the writing came as an afterthought, and as a desire to share my enjoyment with others. Hence, I have never carried a notebook, or collected data about nature in my rambles and excursions. What was mine, what I saw with love and emotion, has always fused with my mind, so that in the heat of writing it came back to me spontaneously. What I have lived, I never lose. My trip to Alaska came near being spoiled because I was expected to write it up, and actually did so from day to day, before fusion and absorption had really taken place. Hence my readers complain that they do not find me in that narrative, do not find my stamp or quality as in my other writings. And well they may say it. I am conscious that I am not there as in the others; the fruit was plucked before it had ripened; or, to use my favorite analogy, the bee did not carry the nectar long enough to transform it into honey. Had I experienced a more free and disinterested intercourse with Alaskan nature, with all the pores of my mind open, the result would certainly have been different. I might then, after the experience had lain and ripened in my mind for a year or two, and become my own, have got myself into it. When I went to the Yellowstone National Park with President Roosevelt, I waited over three years before writing up the trip. I recall the President's asking me at the time if I took notes. I said, "No; everything that interests me will stick to me like a burr." And I may say here that I have put nothing in my writings at any time that did not interest me. I have aimed in this to please myself alone. I believe it to be true at all times that what does not interest the writer will not interest his reader. From the impromptu character of my writings come both their merits and their defects--their fresh, unstudied character, and their want of thoroughness and reference-book authority. I cannot, either in my writing or in my reading, tolerate any delay, any flagging of the interest, any beating about the bush, even if there is a bird in it. The thought, the description, must move right along, and I am impatient of all footnotes and quotations and asides. A writer may easily take too much thought about his style, until it obtrudes itself upon the reader's attention. I would have my sentences appear as if they had never taken a moment's thought of themselves, nor stood before the study looking-glass an instant. In fact, the less a book appears written, the more like a spontaneous product it is, the better I like it. This is not a justification of carelessness or haste; it is a plea for directness, vitality, motion. Those writers who are like still-water fishermen, whose great virtues are patience and a tireless arm, never appealed to me any more than such fishing ever did. I want something more like a mountain brook--motion, variety, and the furthest possible remove from stagnation. Indeed, where can you find a better symbol of good style in literature than a mountain brook after it is well launched towards the lowlands--not too hurried, and not too loitering--limpid, musical, but not noisy, full but not turbid, sparkling but not frothy, every shallow quickly compensated for by a deep reach of thought; the calm, lucid pools of meaning alternating with the passages of rapid description, of moving eloquence or gay comment--flowing, caressing, battling, as the need may be, loitering at this point, hurrying at that, drawing together here, opening out there--freshness, variety, lucidity, power. (We wish that, like the brook, our self-analyst would "go on forever"; but his stream of thought met some obstacle when he had written thus far, and I have never been able to induce it to resume its flow. I have, there-fore, selected a bit of self-analysis from Mr. Burroughs's diary of December, 1884, with which to close this subject. C.B.) I have had to accomplish in myself the work of several generations. None of my ancestors were men or women of culture; they knew nothing of books. I have had to begin at the stump, and to rise from crude things. I have felt the disadvantages which I have labored under, as well as the advantages. The advantages are, that things were not hackneyed with me, curiosity was not blunted, my faculties were fresh and eager--a kind of virgin soil that gives whatever charm and spontaneity my books possess, also whatever of seriousness and religiousness. The disadvantages are an inaptitude for scholarly things, a want of the steadiness and clearness of the tone of letters, the need of a great deal of experimenting, a certain thickness and indistinctness of accent. The farmer and laborer in me, many generations old, is a little embarrassed in the company of scholars; has to make a great effort to remember his learned manners and terms. The unliterary basis is the best to start from; it is the virgin soil of the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and the library, and much work must be done. I am near to nature and can write upon these themes with ease and success; this is my proper field, as I well know. But bookish themes--how I flounder about amid them, and have to work and delve long to get down to the real truth about them in my mind! In writing upon Emerson, or Arnold, or Carlyle, I have to begin, as it were, and clear the soil, build a log hut, and so work up to the point of view that is not provincial, but more or less metropolitan. My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or modesty, or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is also a help in bringing me to the truth. I am not likely to stand in my own light; nor to mistake my own wants and whims for the decrees of the Eternal. At least, if I make the mistake to-day, I shall see my error to-morrow. (The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many of the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has attained as a writer. Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness, of which our author seems unconscious, to his father. To his mother he has credited most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike unselfconsciousness which he describes in his father, we are doubtless largely indebted for the candid self-analysis here given. But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it simply and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in which he was genuinely interested. To be naked and unashamed is a condition lost by most of us long ago, but retained by a few who still have many of the traits of the natural man. C.B.) THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS I once asked Mr. Burroughs about his early writings, his beginnings. He replied, "They were small potatoes and few in a hill, although at the time I evidently thought I was growing some big ones. I had yet to learn, as every young writer has to learn, that big words do not necessarily mean big thoughts." Later he sent me these maiden efforts, with an account of when and where they appeared. These early articles show that Mr. Burroughs was a born essayist. They all took the essay form. In his reading, as he has said, any book of essays was pretty sure to arrest his attention. He seems early to have developed a hunger for the pure stuff of literature--something that would feed his intellect at the same time that it appealed to his aesthetic sense. Concerning his first essays, he wrote me:-- The only significant thing about my first essays, written between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, is their serious trend of thought; but the character of my early reading was serious and philosophical. Locke and Johnson and Saint-Pierre and the others no doubt left their marks upon me. I diligently held my mind down to the grindstone of Locke's philosophy, and no doubt my mind was made brighter and sharper by the process. Out of Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," a work I had never before heard of, I got something, though it would be hard for me to say just what. The work is a curious blending of such science as there was in his time, with sentiment and fancy, and enlivened by a bright French mind. I still look through it with interest, and find that it has a certain power of suggestion for me yet. He confessed that he was somewhat imposed upon by Dr. Johnson's high-sounding platitudes. "A beginner," he said, "is very apt to feel that if he is going to write, the thing to do is to write, and get as far from the easy conversational manner as possible. Let your utterances be measured and stately." At first he tried to imitate Johnson, but soon gave that up. He was less drawn to Addison and Lamb at the time, because they were less formal, and seemingly less profound; and was slow in perceiving that the art of good writing is the art of bringing one's mind and soul face to face with that of the reader. How different that early attitude from the penetrating criticism running through his "Literary Values"; how different his stilted beginnings from his own limpid prose as we know it, to read which is to forget that one is reading! Mr. Burroughs's very first appearance in print was in a paper in Delaware County, New York,--the Bloomfield "Mirror,"--on May 18, 1856. The article--"Vagaries vs. Spiritualism"--purports to be written by "Philomath," of Roxbury, New York, who is none other than John Burroughs, at the age of nineteen. It starts out showing impatience at the unreasoning credulity of the superstitious mind, and continues in a mildly derisive strain for about a column, foreshadowing the controversial spirit which Mr. Burroughs displayed many years later in taking to task the natural-history romancers. The production was evidently provoked by a too credulous writer on spiritualism in a previous issue of the "Mirror." I will quote its first paragraph:-- Mr. Mirror,--Notwithstanding the general diffusion of knowledge in the nineteenth century, it is a lamentable fact that some minds are so obscured by ignorance, or so blinded by superstition, as to rely with implicit confidence upon the validity of opinions which have no foundation in nature, or no support by the deductions of reason. But truth and error have always been at variance, and the audacity of the contest has kept pace with the growing vigor of the contending parties. Some straightforward, conscientious persons, whose intentions are undoubtedly commendable, are so infatuated by the sophistical theories of the spiritualist, or so tossed about on the waves of public opinion, that they lose sight of truth and good sense, and, like the philosopher who looked higher than was wise in his stargazing, tumble into a ditch. In 1859 or 1860, Mr. Burroughs began to contribute to the columns of the "Saturday Press," an organ of the literary bohemians in New York, edited by Henry Clapp. These were fragmentary things of a philosophical cast, and were grouped under the absurd title "Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure," by "All Souls." There were about sixty of these fragments. I have examined most of them; some are fanciful and far-fetched; some are apt and felicitous; but all foreshadow the independent thinker and observer, and show that this "Intellectual Epicure" was feeding on strong meat and assimilating it. I assume that it will interest the reader who knows Mr. Burroughs only as the practiced writer of the past fifty years to see some of his first sallies into literature, to trace the unlikeness to his present style, and the resemblances here and there. Accordingly I subjoin some extracts by "All Souls" from the time-stained pages of the New York "Saturday Press" of 1859 and 1860:-- A principle of absolute truth, pointed with fact and feathered with fancy, and shot from the bow-string of a master intellect, is one of the most potent things under the sun. It sings like a bird of peace to those who are not the object of its aim, but woe, woe to him who is the butt of such terrible archery! For a thing to appear heavy to us, it is necessary that we have heft to balance against it; to appear strong, it is necessary that we have strength; to appear great, it is necessary that we have an idea of greatness. We must have a standard to measure by, and that standard must be in ourselves. An ignorant peasant cannot know that Bacon is so wise. To duly appreciate genius, you must have genius; a pigmy cannot measure the strength of a giant. The faculty that reads and admires, is the green undeveloped state of the faculty that writes and creates. A book, a principle, an individual, a landscape, or any object in nature, to be understood and appreciated, must answer to something within us; appreciation is the first step toward interpreting a revelation. To feel terribly beaten is a good sign; the more resources a man is conscious of, the deeper he will feel his defeat. But to feel unusually elated at a victory indicates that our strength did not warrant it, that we had gone beyond our resources. The boy who went crowing all day through the streets, on having killed a squirrel with a stone, showed plainly enough that it was not a general average of his throwing, and that he was not in the habit of doing so well; while the rifleman picks the hawk from the distant tree without remark or comment, and feels vexed if he miss. The style of some authors, like the manners of some men, is so naked, so artificial, has so little character at the bottom of it, that it is constantly intruding itself upon your notice, and seems to lie there like a huge marble counter from behind which they vend only pins and needles; whereas the true function of style is as a means and not as an end--to concentrate the attention upon the thought which it bears, and not upon itself--to be so apt, natural, and easy, and so in keeping with the character of the author, that, like the comb in the hive, it shall seem the result of that which it contains, and to exist for _its_ sake alone. It is interesting to note, in these and other extracts, how the young writer is constantly tracing the analogy between the facts of everyday life about him, and moral and intellectual truths. A little later he began to knit these fragments together into essays, and to send the essays to the "Saturday Press" under such titles as "Deep," and "A Thought on Culture." There is a good deal of stating the same thing in diverse ways. The writer seems to be led on and on to seek analogies which, for the most part, are felicitous; occasionally crudities and unnecessarily homely comparisons betray his unformed taste. The first three paragraphs of "Deep" give a fair sample of the essay:-- Deep authors? Yes, reader, I like deep authors, that is, authors of great penetration, reach, and compass of thought; but I must not be bored with a sense of depth--must not be required to strain my mental vision to see into the bottom of a well; the fountain must flow out at the surface, though it come from the centre of the globe. Then I can fill my cup without any artificial aid, or any painful effort. What we call depth in a book is often obscurity; and an author whose meaning is got at only by severe mental exertion, and a straining of the mind's eye, is generally weak in the backbone of him. Occasionally it is the dullness of the reader, but oftener the obtuseness of the writer. A strong vigorous writer is not obscure--at any rate, not habitually so; never leaves his reader in doubt, or compels him to mount the lever and help to raise his burden; but clutches it in his mighty grasp and hurls it into the air, so that it is not only unencumbered by the soil that gave it birth, but is wholly detached and relieved, and set off against the clear blue of his imagination. His thought is not like a rock propped up but still sod-bound, but is like a rock held aloft, or built into a buttress, with definite shape and outline. Let me next quote from "A Thought on Culture," which appeared in the same publication a little later, and which is the first to bear his signature:-- In the conduct of life a man should not show his knowledge, but his wisdom; not his money--that were vulgar and foolish--but the result of it--independence, courage, culture, generosity, manliness, and that noble, humane, courteous air which wealth always brings to the right sort of a man. A display of mere knowledge, under most circumstances, is pedantry; an exercise of wisdom is always godlike. We cannot pardon the absence of knowledge, but itself must be hid. We can use a thing without absolutely showing it, we can be reasonable without boring people with our logic, and speak correctly without parsing our sentences. The end of knowledge is not that a man may appear learned, any more than the end of eating is that a man may seem to have a full stomach; but the end of it is that a man may be wise, see and understand things as they are; be able to adjust himself to the universe in which he is placed, and judge and reason with the celerity of instinct, and that without any conscious exercise of his knowledge. When we feel the food we have eaten, something is wrong; so when a man is forever conscious of his learning, he has not digested it, and it is an encumbrance.... The evolution of this author in his use of titles is interesting. Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books. "Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf and Tendril,"--how much they connote! Then how felicitous are the titles of most of his essays! "Birch Browsings," "The Snow-Walkers," "Mellow England," "Our Rural Divinity" (the cow), "The Flight of the Eagle" (for one of his early essays on Whitman), "A Bunch of Herbs," "A Pinch of Salt," "The Divine Soil," "The Long Road" (on evolution)--these and many others will occur to the reader. Following "A Thought on Culture" was a short essay on poetry, the drift of which is that poetry as contrasted with science must give us things, not as they are in themselves, but as they stand related to our experience. Our young writer is more at his ease now:-- Science, of course, is literal, as it ought to be, but science is not life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate on a higher scale. Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or sings, or falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality. It says a soap bubble is a soap bubble--a drop of water impregnated with oleate of potash or soda, and inflated with common air; but life says it is a crystal sphere, dipped in the rainbow, buoyant as hope, sensitive as the eye, with a power to make children dance for joy, and to bring youth into the look of the old.... Who in his youth ever saw the swallow of natural history to be the twittering, joyous bird that built mud nests beneath his father's shed, and in the empty odorous barn?--that snapped the insects that flew up in his way when returning at twilight from the upland farm; and that filled his memory with such visions of summer when he first caught its note on some bright May morning, flying up the southern valley? Describe water, or a tree, in the language of exact science, or as they really are in and of themselves, and what person, schooled only in nature, would recognize them? Things must be given as they seem, as they stand represented in the mind. Objects arrange themselves in our memory, not according to the will, or any real quality in themselves, but as they affect our lives and stand to us in our unconscious moments. The hills we have dwelt among, the rocks and trees we have looked upon in all moods and feelings, that stood to us as the shore to the sea, and received a thousand impresses of what we lived and suffered, have significance to us that is not accounted for by anything we can see or feel in them. Here we see the youth of twenty-three setting forth a truth which he has sedulously followed in his own writing about nature, the following of which accounts so largely for the wide appeal his works have made. Some time in 1860, Mr. Burroughs began to send essays to the New York "Leader," a weekly paper, the organ of Tammany Hall at that time. His first article was made up of three short essays--"World Growth," "New Ideas," and "Theory and Practice." Here beyond question is the writer we know: The ideas that indicate the approach of a new era in history come like bluebirds in the spring, if you have ever noticed how that is. The bird at first seems a mere wandering voice in the air; you hear its carol on some bright morning in March, but are uncertain of its course or origin; it seems to come from some source you cannot divine; it falls like a drop of rain when no cloud is visible; you look and listen, but to no purpose. The weather changes, and it is not till a number of days that you hear the note again, or, maybe, see the bird darting from a stake in the fence, or flitting from one mullein-stalk to another. Its notes now become daily more frequent; the birds multiply; they sing less in the air and more when at rest; and their music is louder and more continuous, but less sweet and plaintive. Their boldness increases and soon you see them flitting with a saucy and inquiring air about barns and outbuildings, peeping into dove-cota and stable windows, and prospecting for a place to nest. They wage war against robins, pick quarrels with swallows, and would forcibly appropriate their mud houses, seeming to doubt the right of every other bird to exist but themselves. But soon, as the season advances, domestic instincts predominate; they subside quietly into their natural places, and become peaceful members of the family of birds. So the thoughts that indicate the approach of a new era in history at first seem to be mere disembodied, impersonal voices somewhere in the air; sweet and plaintive, half-sung and half-cried by some obscure and unknown poet. We know not whence they come, nor whither they tend. It is not a matter of sight or experience. They do not attach themselves to any person or place, and their longitude and latitude cannot be computed. But presently they become individualized and centre in some Erasmus, or obscure thinker, and from a voice in the air, become a living force on the earth. They multiply and seem contagious, and assume a thousand new forms. They grow quarrelsome and demonstrative, impudent and conceited, crowd themselves in where they have no right, and would fain demolish or appropriate every institution and appointment of society. But after a time they settle into their proper relations, incorporate themselves in the world, and become new sources of power and progress in history. This quotation is especially significant, as it shows the writer's already keen observation of the birds, and his cleverness in appropriating these facts of nature to his philosophical purpose. How neatly it is done! Readers of "Wake-Robin" will recognize a part of it in the matchless description of the bluebird which is found in the initial essay of that book. In 1860, in the "Leader," there also appeared a long essay by Mr. Burroughs, "On Indirections." This has the most unity and flow of thought of any thus far. It is so good I should like to quote it all. Here are the opening paragraphs:-- The South American Indian who discovered the silver mines of Potosi by the turning up of a bush at the roots, which he had caught hold of to aid his ascent while pursuing a deer up a steep hill, represents very well how far intention and will are concerned in the grand results that flow from men's lives. Every schoolboy knows that many of the most valuable discoveries in science and art were accidental, or a kind of necessity, and sprang from causes that had no place in the forethought of the discoverer. The ostrich lays its eggs in the sand, and the sun hatches them; so man puts forth an effort and higher powers second him, and he finds himself the source of events that he had never conceived or meditated. Things are so intimately connected and so interdependent, the near and the remote are so closely related, and all parts of the universe are so mutually sympathetic, that it is impossible to tell what momentous secrets may lurk under the most trifling facts, or what grand and beautiful results may be attained through low and unimportant means. It seems that Nature delights in surprise, and in underlying our careless existences with plans that are evermore to disclose themselves to us and stimulate us to new enterprise and research. The simplest act of life may discover a chain of cause and effect that binds together the most remote parts of the system. We are often nearest to truth in some unexpected moment, and may stumble upon that while in a careless mood which has eluded our most vigilant and untiring efforts. Men have seen deepest and farthest when they opened their eyes without any special aim, and a word or two carelessly dropped by a companion has revealed to me a truth that weeks of study had failed to compass.... Nature will not be come at directly, but indirectly; all her ways are retiring and elusive, and she is more apt to reveal herself to her quiet, unobtrusive lover, than to her formal, ceremonious suitor. A man who goes out to admire the sunset, or to catch the spirit of field and grove, will very likely come back disappointed. A bird seldom sings when watched, and Nature is no coquette, and will not ogle and attitudinize when stared at. The farmer and traveler drink deepest of this cup, because it is always a surprise and comes without forethought or preparation. No insulation or entanglement takes place, and the soothing, medicinal influence of the fields and the wood takes possession of us as quietly as a dream, and before we know it we are living the life of the grass and the trees. How unconsciously here he describes his own intercourse with Nature! And what an unusual production for a youth of twenty-three of such meagre educational advantages! In 1862, in an essay on "Some of the Ways of Power," which appeared in the "Leader," he celebrated the beauty and completeness of nature's inexorable laws:-- There is an evident earnestness and seriousness in the meaning of things, and the laws that traverse nature and our own being are as fixed and inexorable, though, maybe, less instantaneous and immediate in their operation, as the principle of gravitation, and are as little disposed to pardon the violator or adjourn the day of adjudication. There seems to be this terrible alternative put to every man on entering the world, _conquer or be conquered_. It is what the waves say to the swimmer, "Use me or drown"; what gravity says to the babe, "Use me or fall"; what the winds say to the sailor, "Use me or be wrecked"; what the passions say to every one of us, "Drive or be driven." Time in its dealings with us says plainly enough, "Here I am, your master or your servant." If we fail to make a good use of time, time will not fail to make a bad use of us. The miser does not use his money, so his money uses him; men do not govern their ambition, and so are governed by it.... These considerations are valuable chiefly for their analogical import. They indicate a larger truth. Man grows by conquering his limitations--by subduing new territory and occupying it. He commences life on a very small capital; his force yet lies outside of him, scattered up and down in the world like his wealth--in rocks, in trees, in storms and flood, in dangers, in difficulties, in hardships,--in short, in whatever opposes his progress and puts on a threatening front. The first difficulty overcome, the first victory gained, is so much added to his side of the scale--so much reinforcement of pure power. I have said elsewhere that Mr. Burroughs has written himself into his books. We see him doing this in these early years; he was an earnest student of life at an age when most young men would have been far less seriously occupied. Difficulties and hardships were roundabout him, his force was, indeed, "scattered up and down in the world, in rocks and trees," in birds and flowers, and from these sources he was even then wresting the beginnings of his successful career. It was in November, 1860, when twenty-three years of age, that he made his first appearance in the pages of the "Atlantic Monthly," in the essay "Expression," comments upon which by its author I have already quoted. At that time he was under the Emersonian spell of which he speaks in his autobiographical sketch. Other readers and lovers of Emerson had had similar experiences. Brownlee Brown, an "Atlantic" contributor (of "Genius" and "The Ideal Tendency," especially), was a "sort of refined and spiritualized Emerson, without the grip and gristle of the master, but very pleasing and suggestive," Mr. Burroughs says. The younger writer made a pilgrimage to the home of Brownlee Brown in the fall of 1862, having been much attracted to him by the above-named essays. He found him in a field gathering turnips. They had much interesting talk, and some correspondence thereafter. Mr. Brown admitted that his mind had been fertilized by the Emersonian pollen, and declared he could write in no other way. Concerning his own imitation of Emerson, Mr. Burroughs says:-- It was by no means a conscious imitation. Had I tried to imitate him, probably the spurious character of my essay would have deceived no one. It was one of those unconscious imitations that so often give an impression of genuineness.... When I began to realize how deeply Emerson had set his stamp upon me, I said to myself: "This will never do. I must resist this influence. If I would be a true disciple of Emerson, I must be myself and not another. I must brace myself by his spirit, and not go tricked out in his manner, and his spirit was _'Never imitate.'_" It was this resolution, as he has before told us, that turned him to writing on outdoor subjects. In rereading "Expression" recently, I was struck, not so much by its Emersonian manner, as by its Bergsonian ideas. I had heard Mr. Burroughs, when he came under the spell of Bergson in the summer of 1911, say that the reason he was so moved by the French philosopher was doubtless because he found in him so many of his own ideas; and it was with keen pleasure that I came upon these forerunners of Bergson written before Bergson was born. At the time when Mr. Burroughs was dropping the Emersonian manner, and while his style was in the transition stage, he wrote an essay on "Analogy," and sent it also to the "Atlantic," receiving quite a damper on his enthusiasm when Lowell, the editor, returned it. But he sent it to the old "Knickerbocker Magazine," where it appeared in 1862. Many years later he rewrote it, and it was accepted by Horace Scudder, then the "Atlantic's" editor; in 1902, after rewriting it the second time, he published it in "Literary Values." Because of the deep significance of them at this time in the career of Mr. Burroughs, I shall quote the following letters received by him from David A. Wasson, a Unitarian clergyman of Massachusetts, and a contributor to the early numbers of the "Atlantic." Their encouragement, their candor, their penetration, and their prescience entitle them to a high place in an attempt to trace the evolution of our author. One readily divines how much such appreciation and criticism meant to the youthful essayist. Groveland, Mass., May 21, 1860 Mr. Burroughs,-- My Dear Sir,--Let me tell you at the outset that I have for five years suffered from a spinal hurt, from which I am now slowly recovering, but am still unable to walk more than a quarter of a mile or to write without much pain. I have all the will in the world to serve you, but, as you will perceive, must use much brevity in writing. "Expression" I do not remember,--probably did not read,--for I read no periodical literature--not even the "Atlantic," which is the best periodical I know--unless my attention is very especially called to it, and often, to tell the truth, do not heed the call when it is given. Where I am at present I have not access to back numbers of the "Atlantic," but shall have soon. The essay that you sent me I read carefully twice, but unfortunately left it in Boston, where it reached me. I can therefore only speak of it generally. It certainly shows in you, if my judgment may be trusted, unusual gifts of pure intellect--unusual, I mean, among scholars and literary men; and the literary execution is creditable, though by no means of the same grade with the mental power evinced. You must become a fine literary worker to be equal to the demands of such an intellect as yours. For the deeper the thought, the more difficult to give it a clear and attractive expression. You can write so as to command attention. I am sure you can. Will you? that is the only question. Can you work and wait long enough? Have you the requisite patience and persistency? If you have, there is undoubtedly an honorable future before you. But I will not conceal from you that I think you too young to have written "numerous essays" of the class you attempt, or to publish a book consisting of such. No other kind of writing requires such mental maturity; stories may be written at any age, though good ones are seldom written early. Even poems and works of art have been produced by some Raphael or Milton at a comparatively early season of life, and have not given shame to the author at a later age; though this is the exception, not the rule. But the purely reflective essay belongs emphatically to maturer life. Your twenty-four years have evidently been worth more to you than the longest life to most men; but my judgment is that you should give your genius more time yet, and should wait upon it with more labor. This is my frank counsel. I will respect you so much as to offer it without disguise. Let me fortify it by an example or two. Mr. Emerson published nothing, I think, until he was past thirty, and his brother Charles, now dead, who was considered almost superior to him, maintained that it is almost a sin to go into print sooner. Yet both these had all possible educational advantages, and were familiar with the best books and the best results of American culture from infancy almost. I myself printed nothing--saving some poetical indiscretions--until I was twenty-seven, and this was only a criticism on Dr. Isaac Barrow--not a subject, you see, that made great demands upon me. Two years later an article on Lord Bacon, for which I had been indirectly preparing more than two years, and directly at least one; and even then I would say little respecting his philosophy, and confined myself chiefly to a portraiture of his character as a man. At thirty-two years of age I sent to press an essay similar in character to those I write now--and am at present a little ashamed of it. I am now thirty-nine years old, and all that I have ever put in print would not make more than one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty pages in the "Atlantic." Upon reflection, however, I will say two hundred pages, including pamphlet publications. I would have it less rather than more. But for this illness it would have been even less, for this has led me to postpone larger enterprises, which would have gone to press much later, and prepare shorter articles for the "Atlantic." Yet my literary interest began at a very early age. In writing essays such as it seems to me you have a genius for, I require:-- 1. That one should get the range--the largest _range_--of the laws he sets forth. This is the _sine qua num_. Every primary law goes through heaven and earth. Go with it. This is the business and privilege of intellect. 2. When one comes to writing, let his discourse have a beginning and an end. Do not let the end of his essay be merely the end of his sheet, or the place where he took a notion to stop writing, but let it be necessary. Each paragraph, too, should represent a distinct advance, a clear step, in the exposition of his thought. I spare no labor in securing this, and reckon no labor lost that brings me toward this mark. I reckon my work ill done if a single paragraph, yes, or a single sentence, can be transposed without injuring the whole. 3. Vivid expression must be sought, must be labored for unsparingly. This you, from your position, will find it somewhat hard to attain, unless you have peculiar aptitude for it. Expression in the country is far less vivacious than in cities. I have spoken frankly; now you must decide for yourself. You have mental power enough; if you have accessory qualities (which I think you must possess), you cannot fail to make your mark. The brevity that I promised you will not find in this letter, but you will find haste enough to make up for the lack of it. If now, after the foregoing, you feel any inclination to send me the essay on "Analogy" (capital subject), pray do so. I will read it, and if I have anything to say about it, will speak as frankly as above. I shall be in this place--Groveland, Mass.--about three weeks; after that in Worcester a short while. Very truly yours, DAVID A. WASSON. Groveland, Mass., June 18, 1862. Mr. Burroughs,-- My Dear Sir,-- I am sorry to have detained your MS. so long, but part of the time I have been away, and during the other portion of it, the fatigue that I must undergo was all that my strength would bear. I read your essay carefully in a few days after receiving it and laid it aside for a second perusal. Now I despair of finding time for such a second reading as I designed, and so must write you at once my impressions after a single reading. The inference concerning your mind that I draw from your essay enhances the interest I previously felt in you. All that you tell me of yourself has the same effect. You certainly have high, very high, mental power; and the patience and persistency that you must have shown hitherto assures me that you will in future be equal to the demands of your intellect. As to publishing what you have now written, you must judge. The main question, is whether you will be discouraged by failure of your book. If not, publish, if you like; and then, if the public ignores your thought, gather up your strength again and write so that they cannot ignore you. For, in truth, the public does not like to think; it likes to be amused; and conceives a sort of hatred against the writer who would force it to the use of its intellect. This is invariably the case; it will be so with you. If the public finds anything in your work that can be condemned, it will be but too happy to pass sentence; if it can make out to think that you are a pretender, it will gladly do so; if it can turn its back upon you and ignore you, its back, and nothing else, you will surely see. And this on account of your merits. You really have thoughts. You make combinations of your own. You have freighted your words out of your own mental experience. You do not flatter any of the sects by using their cant. Now, then, be sure that you have got to do finished work, finished in every minutest particular, for years, before your claims will be allowed. If you _were_ a pretender, your success in immediate prospect would be more promising; the very difficulty is that you are not--that you think--that the public must read you _humbly_, confessing that you have intelligence beyond its own. I said that the general public wants to be amused: I now add that it dearly desires to be flattered, or at least allowed to flatter itself. Those people who have no thoughts of their own are the very ones who hate mortally to admit to themselves that any intelligence in the world is superior to their own. A noble nature is indeed never so delighted as when it finds something that may be lawfully reverenced; but all the ignoble keep up their self-complacence by shutting their eyes to all superiority. I state the case strongly, as you will feel it bye and bye. Mind, I am not a disappointed man; and have met as generous appreciation as I ought to wish. I am not misanthropic, nor in the least soured. I say all this, not _against_ the public, but _for_ you. Now, then, as to the essay. It is rich in thought. Everywhere are the traces of a penetrating and sincere intellect. Much of the expression is also good. The faults of it, _me judice_, are as follows: The introduction I think too long. I should nearly throw away the first five pages. Your true beginning I think to be near the bottom of the sixth page, though the _island_ in the middle paragraph of that page is too fine to be lost. From the sixth to about the twentieth I read with hearty pleasure. Then begin subordinate essays in illustration of your main theme. These are good in themselves, but their subordination is a little obscured. I think careless readers--and most of your readers, be sure, will be careless--will fail to perceive the connection. You are younger than I, and will hope more from your readers; but I find even superior men slow, _slow_, SLOW to understand--missing your point so often! I think the relationship must be brought out more strongly, and some very good sentences must be thrown out because they are more related to the subordinate than the commanding subject. This is about all that I have to say. Sometimes your sentences are a little heavy, but you will find, little by little, happier terms of expression. I do not in the least believe that you cannot in time write as well as I. What I have done to earn expression I know better than you The crudities that I have outgrown or outlabored, I also know. You must be a little less careless about your spelling, simply because these slips will discredit your thought in the eyes of superficial critics. You understand, of course, that I speak above of the general public--not of the finer natures, who will welcome you with warm hands. I fear that the results of my reading will not correspond to your wishes, and that it was hardly worth your while to send me your MS. But I am obliged to you for informing me of your existence, for I augur good for my country from the discovery of every such intelligence as yours, and I pledge to you my warm interest and regard. Very cordially yours, David A. Wasson Worcester, Sept. 29, 1862, My Dear Mr. Burroughs,-- To the medicine proposition I say. Yes. A man of your tastes and mental vigor should be able to do some clean work in that profession. I know not of any other established profession that allows a larger scope of mind than this. There is some danger of materialism, but this you have already weaponed yourself against, and the scientific studies that come in the line of the profession will furnish material for thought and expression which I am sure you will know well how to use. I am glad if my suggestions about your essay proved of some service to you. There is thought and statement in it which will certainly one day come to a market. The book, too, all in good season. Life for you is very long, and you can take your time. Take it by all means. Give yourself large leisure to do your best. I am about setting up my household gods in Worcester. This makes me in much haste, and therefore without another word I must say that I shall always be glad to hear from you, and that I am always truly your friend. D. A. Wasson Of the early nature papers which Mr. Burroughs wrote for the New York "Leader," and which were grouped under the general title, "From the Back Country," there were five or six in number, of two or three columns each. One on "Butter-Making," of which I will quote the opening passage, fairly makes the mouth water:-- With green grass comes golden butter. With the bobolinks and the swallows, with singing groves, and musical winds, with June,--ah, yes! with tender, succulent, gorgeous June,--all things are blessed. The dairyman's heart rejoices, and the butter tray with its virgin treasure becomes a sight to behold. There lie the rich masses, fold upon fold, leaf upon leaf, fresh, sweet, and odorous, just as the ladle of the dairymaid dipped it from the churn, sweating great drops of buttermilk, and looking like some rare and precious ore. The cool spring water is the only clarifier needed to remove all dross and impurities and bring out all the virtues and beauties of this cream-evolved element. How firm and bright it becomes, how delicious the odor it emits! what vegetarian ever found it in his heart, or his palate either, to repudiate butter? The essence of clover and grass and dandelions and beechen woods is here. How wonderful the chemistry that from elements so common and near at hand produces a result so beautiful and useful! Eureka! Is not this the alchemy that turns into gold the commonest substances? How can transformation be more perfect? During the years of this early essay-writing, Mr. Burroughs was teaching country schools in the fall and winter, and working on the home farm in summer; at the same time he was reading serious books and preparing himself for whatever was in store for him. He read medicine for only three months, in the fall of 1862, and then resumed teaching. His first magazine article about the birds was written in the summer or fall of 1863, and appeared in the "Atlantic" in the spring of 1885. He learned from a friend to whom Mr. Sanborn had written that the article had pleased Emerson. It was in 1864, while in the Currency Bureau in Washington, that he wrote the essays which make up his first nature book, "Wake-Robin." His first book, however, was not a nature book, but was "Walt Whitman as Poet and Person." It was published in 1867, preceding "Wake-Robin" by four years. It has long been out of print, and is less known than his extended, riper work, "Whitman, A. Study," written in 1896. A record of the early writings of Mr. Burroughs would not be complete without considering also his ventures into the field of poetry. In the summer of 1860 he wrote and printed his first verses (with the exception of some still earlier ones written in 1856 to the sweetheart who became his wife), which were addressed to his friend and comrade E. M. Allen, subsequently the husband of Elizabeth Akers, the author of "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight." The lines to E. M. A. were printed in the "Saturday Press." Because they are the first of our author's verses to appear in print, I quote them here:-- TO E. M. A. A change has come over nature Since you and June were here; The sun has turned to the southward Adown the steps of the year. The grass is ripe in the meadow, And the mowers swing in rhyme; The grain so green on the hillside Is in its golden prime. No more the breath of the clover Is borne on every breeze, No more the eye of the daisy Is bright on meadow leas. The bobolink and the swallow Have left for other clime-- They mind the sun when he beckons And go with summer's prime. Buttercups that shone in the meadow Like rifts of golden snow, They, too, have melted and vanished Beneath the summer's glow. Still at evenfall in the upland The vesper sparrow sings, And the brooklet in the pasture Still waves its glassy rings. And the lake of fog to the southward With surges white as snow-- Still at morn away in the distance I see it ebb and flow. But a change has come over nature, The youth of the year has gone; A grace from the wood has departed, And a freshness from the dawn. Another poem, "Loss and Gain," was printed in the New York "Independent" about the same time. LOSS AND GAIN The ship that drops behind the rim Of sea and sky, so pale and dim, Still sails the seas With favored breeze, Where other waves chant ocean's hymn. The wave that left this shore so wide, And led away the ebbing tide, Is with its host On fairer coast, Bedecked and plumed in all its pride. The grub I found encased in clay When next I came had slipped away On golden wing, With birds that sing, To mount and soar in sunny day. No thought or hope can e'er be lost-- The spring will come in spite of frost. Go crop the branch Of maple stanch, The root will gain what you exhaust. The man is formed as ground he tills-- Decay and death lie 'neath his sills. The storm that beats, And solar heats, Have helped to form whereon he builds. Successive crops that lived and grew, And drank the air, the light, the dew, And then deceased, His soil increased In strength, and depth, and richness, too. From slow decay the ages grow, From blood and crime the centuries blow, What disappears Beneath the years, Will mount again as grain we sow. These rather commonplace verses, the first showing his love for comrades, the others his philosophical bent, were the forerunners of that poem of Mr. Burroughs's--"Waiting"--which has become a household treasure, often without the ones who cherish it knowing its source. "Waiting" was Written in the fall of 1862. In response to my inquiry as to its genesis, its author said:-- I was reading medicine in the office of a country doctor at the time and was in a rather gloomy and discouraged state of mind. My outlook upon life was anything but encouraging. I was poor. I had no certain means of livelihood. I had married five years before, and, at a venture, I had turned to medicine as a likely solution of my life's problems. The Civil War was raging and that, too, disturbed me. It sounded a call of duty which increased my perturbations; yet something must have said to me, "Courage! all will yet be well. You are bound to have your own, whatever happens." Doubtless this feeling had been nurtured in me by the brave words of Emerson. At any rate, there in a little dingy back room of Dr. Hull's office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote "Waiting." I had at that time had some literary correspondence with David A. Wasson whose essays in the "Atlantic" I had read with deep interest. I sent him a copy of the poem. He spoke of it as a vigorous piece of work, but seemed to see no special merit in it. I then sent it to "Knickerbocker's Magazine," where it was printed, in December, I think, in 1862. It attracted no attention, and was almost forgotten by me till many years afterwards when it appeared in Whittier's "Songs of Three Centuries." This indorsement by Whittier gave it vogue. It began to be copied by newspapers and religious Journals, and it has been traveling on the wings of public print ever since. I do not think it has any great poetic merit. The secret of its success is its serious religious strain, or what people interpret as such. It embodies a very comfortable optimistic philosophy which it chants in a solemn, psalm-like voice. Its sincerity carries conviction. It voices absolute faith and trust in what, in the language of our fathers, would be called the ways of God with man. I have often told persons, when they have questioned me about the poem, that I came of the Old School Baptist stock, and that these verses show what form the old Calvinistic doctrine took in me. Let me quote here the letter which Mr. Wasson wrote to the author of "Waiting," on receiving the first autograph copy of it ever written:-- Worcester, Dec. 22,1862. Mr. Burroughs,-- My Dear Sir,--I beg your pardon a thousand times for having neglected so long to acknowledge the letter containing your vigorous verses. Excess of work, and then a dash of illness consequent upon this excess, must be my excuse--by your kind allowance. The verses are vigorous and flowing, good in sentiment, and certainly worthy of being sent to "some paper," if you like to print them. On the other hand, they do not indicate to me that you have any special call to write verse. A man of your ability and fineness of structure must necessarily be enough of a poet not to fail altogether in use of the poetical form. But all that I know of you indicates a predominance of reflective intellect--a habit of mind quite foreign from the lyrical. I think it may be very good practice to compose in verse, as it exercises you in terse and rhythmical expression; but I question whether your vocation lies in that direction. After all, you must not let anything which I, or any one, may say stand in your way, if you feel any clear leading of your genius in a given direction. What I have said is designed to guard you against an expenditure of power and hope in directions that may yield you but a partial harvest, when the same ought to be sown on more fruitful fields. I think you have unusual reflective power; and I am sure that in time you will find time and occasion for its exercise, and will accomplish some honorable tasks. Very truly yours, D. A. Wasson It maybe fancy on my part, but I have a feeling that, all unconsciously to Mr. Burroughs, a sentence or two in Mr. Wasson's letter of September 29, 1862, had something to do with inspiring the mood of trustfulness and the attitude of waiting in serenity, which gave birth to this poem:-- ... The book, too, all in good season. Life for you is very long, and you can take your time. Take it by all means. Give yourself large leisure to do your best. Whether or not this is so, I am sure the sympathy and understanding of such a man as Mr. Wasson was a godsend to our struggling writer, and was one of the most beautiful instances in his life of "his own" coming to him. "Waiting" seems to have gone all over the world. It has been several times set to music, and its authorship has even been claimed by others. It has been parodied, more's the pity; and spurious stanzas have occasionally been appended to it; while an inferior stanza, which the author dropped years ago, is from time to time resurrected by certain insistent ones. Originally, it had seven stanzas; the sixth, discarded by its author, ran as follows:-- You flowret, nodding in the wind, Is ready plighted to the bee; And, maiden, why that look unkind? For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee. This stanza is a detraction from the poem as we know it, and assuredly its author has a right to drop it. Concerning the fifth stanza, Mr. Burroughs says he has never liked it, and has often substituted one which he wrote a few years ago. The stanza he would reject is-- The waters know their own and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights. The one he would offer instead-- The law of love binds every heart, And knits it to its utmost kin, Nor can our lives flow long apart From souls our secret souls would win. And yet he is not satisfied with this; he says it is too subtle and lacks the large, simple imagery of the original lines. The legion who cherish this poem in their hearts are justly incensed whenever they come across a copy of it to which some one, a few years ago, had the effrontery to add this inane stanza:-- Serene I fold my hands and wait, Whate'er the storms of life may be, Faith guides me up to heaven's gate, And love will bring my own to me. One of Mr. Burroughs's friends (Joel Benton), himself a poet, in an article tracing the vicissitudes of this poem, shows pardonable indignation at the "impudence and hardihood of the unmannered meddler" who tacked on the "heaven's gate" stanza, and adds:-- The lyric as Burroughs wrote it embodies a motive, or concept, that has scarcely been surpassed for amenability to poetic treatment, and for touching and impressive point. Its partly elusive outlines add to its charm. Its balance between hint and affirmation; its faith in universal forces, and its tender yet virile expression, are all shining qualities, apparent to the critical, and hypnotic to the general, reader. There is nothing in it that need even stop at "heaven's gate." It permits the deserving reader by happy instinct to go through that portal--without waiting outside to parade his sect mark. But the force of the poem and catholicity of its sanctions are either utterly destroyed or ridiculously enfeebled, by capping it with a sectarian and narrowly interpreted climax. Although the poem is so well known, I shall quote it here in the form preferred by its author;-- WAITING Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me. I stay my haste, I make delays, For what avails this eager pace? I stand amid th' eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face. Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me; No wind can drive my bark astray, Nor change the tide of destiny. What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; My heart shall reap where it hath sown, And garner up its fruit of tears. The waters know their own and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law Unto the soul of pure delights. The stars come nightly to the sky, The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me. A WINTER DAY AT SLABSIDES "Come and go to Slabsides for over Sunday--I think we can keep warm. We will have an old-fashioned time; I will roast a duck in the pot; it will be great fun." This invitation came from Mr. Burroughs in 1911 to friends who proposed to call on him early in December. Riverby was closed for the season, its occupants tarrying in Poughkeepsie, but, ever ready for an adventure, the Sage of Slabsides proposed a winter picnic at his cabin in the hills. A ride of some two hours from New York brings us to West Park, where our host awaits us. A stranger, glancing at his white hair and beard, might credit his seventy-five years, but not when looking at his ruddy face with the keen, bright eyes, or at his alert, vigorous movements. Together with blankets and a market-basket of provisions we are stowed away in a wagon and driven up the steep, winding way; at first along a country road, then into a wood's road with huge Silurian rocks cropping out everywhere, showing here and there seams of quartz and patches of moss and ferns. "In there," said Mr. Burroughs, pointing to an obscure path, "I had a partridge for a neighbor. She had a nest there. I went to see her every day till she became uneasy about it, and let me know I was no longer welcome." "Yonder," he continued, indicating a range of wooded hills against the wintry sky, "is the classic region of 'Popple Town Hill,' and over there is 'Pang Yang.'" Some friendly spirit has preceded us to the cabin; a fire is burning in the great stone fireplace, and mattresses and bedding are exposed to the heat. Moving these away, the host makes room for us near the hearth. He piles on the wood, and we are soon permeated by the warmth of the fire and of the unostentatious hospitality of Slabsides. How good it is to be here! The city, with its rush and roar and complexities, seems far away. How satisfying it is to strip off the husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania of owning things"--one feels all this afresh in looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago in his essay "An Outlook upon Life":-- I am bound to praise the simple life, because I have lived it and found it good.... I love a small house, plain clothes, simple living. Many persons know the luxury of a skin bath--a plunge in the pool or the wave unhampered by clothing. That is the simple life--direct and immediate contact with things, life with the false wrappings torn away--the fine house, the fine equipage, the expensive habits, all cut off. How free one feels, how good the elements taste, how close one gets to them, how they fit one's body and one's soul! To see the fire that warms you, or better yet, to cut the wood that feeds the fire that warms you; to see the spring where the water bubbles up that slakes your thirst, and to dip your pail into it; to see the beams that are the stay of your four walls, and the timbers that uphold the roof that shelters you; to be in direct and personal contact with the sources of your material life; to want no extras, no shields; to find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to find a quest of wild berries more satisfying than a gift of tropic fruit; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest, or over a wild flower in spring--these are some of the rewards of the simple life. (Illustration of The Living-Room. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning) The two men were soon talking companionably. When persons of wide reading and reflection, and of philosophic bent, who have lived long and been mellowed by life, come together, the interchange of thought is bound to be valuable; things are so well said, so inevitably said, that the listener thinks he cannot forget the manner of saying; but thoughts crowd thick and fast, comments on men and measures, on books and events, are numerous and varied, but hard to recapture. The logs ignite, sending out their cheering heat, the coals glow, the sparks fly upward, warmth and radiance envelop us; but an attempt to warm the reader by the glow of that fireside talk is almost as futile as an effort to dispel to-day's cold by the fire of yesterday. A few deserted cottages perched on the rocks near by show us where the summer neighbors of our host live, but at all seasons his wild neighbors are the ones he hobnobs with the most; while his indoor companions are Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Carlyle, Arnold, Wordsworth, Darwin, Huxley, Emerson, Whitman, Bergson, and many others, ancient and modern. "I've been rereading Emerson's essay on 'Immortality' lately, evenings in my study down there by the river," said Mr. Burroughs. "I had forgotten it was so noble and fine--he makes much of the idea of permanence." In this connection he spoke of John Fiske and his contributions to literature, telling of the surprise he felt on first meeting Fiske at Harvard, to see the look of the _bon vivant_ in one in whom the intellectual and the spiritual were so prominent. Laughing, he recalled the amusement of the college boys at Fiske's comical efforts to discover a piece of chalk dropped during his lecture on "Immortality." Standing on the hearth, a merry twinkle in his eyes, he recited some humorous lines which he had written concerning the episode. Reverting to the question of immortality in a serious vein, he summed up the debated question much as he has done in one of his essays,--that it has been good to be here, and will be good to go hence; that we know not whence we come, nor whither we go; were not consulted as to our coming, and shall not be as to our going; but that it is all good; all for "the glory of God;" though we must use this phrase in a larger sense than the cramped interpretation of the theologian. All the teeming life of the globe, the millions on millions in the microscopic world, and the millions on millions of creatures that can be seen by the naked eye--those who have been swept away, those here now, those who will come after--all appearing in their appointed time and place, playing their parts and vanishing, and to the old question "Why?" we may as well answer, "For the glory of God"; if we will only conceive a big enough glory, and a big enough God. His utter trust in things as they are seemed a living embodiment of that sublime line in "Waiting"-- "I stand amid the Eternal ways"; and, thus standing, he is content to let the powers that be have their way with him. "To all these mysteries I fall back upon the last words I heard Whitman say, shortly before the end--commonplace words, but they sum it up: 'It's all right, John, it's all right'; but Whitman had the active, sustaining faith in immortality-- 'I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.'" As the afternoon wanes, Mr. Burroughs hangs the kettle on the crane, broils the chops, and with a little help from one of the guests, soon has supper on the table, a discussion of Bergson's philosophy suffering only occasional interruptions; such as, "Where _have_ those women (summer occupants of Slabsides) put my holder?" or, "See if there isn't some salt in the cupboard." "There! I forgot to bring up eggs for breakfast, but here are other things," he mutters as he rummages in his market-basket. "That memory of mine is pretty tricky; sometimes I can't remember things any better than I can find them when they are right under my nose. I've just found a line from Emerson that I've been hunting for two days--'The worm striving to be man.' I looked my Emerson through and through, and no worm; then I found in Joel Benton's Concordance of Emerson that the line was in 'May-Day'; he even cited the page, but my Emerson had no printing on that page. I searched all through 'May-Day,' and still no worm; I looked again with no better success, and was on the point of giving up when I spied the worm--it almost escaped me--" "It must have turned, didn't it?" "Yes, the worm surely turned, or I never should have seen it," he confessed. The feminine member of the trio wields the dish-mop while the host dries the dishes, and the Dreamer before the fire luxuriates in the thought that his help is not needed. The talk on philosophy and religion does not make the host forget to warm sheets and blankets and put hot bricks in the beds to insure against the fast-gathering cold. The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the yellow-birch partition between living-room and bedroom downstairs, and plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms overhead, as we sit before the hearth in quiet talk. Outside the moonlight floods the great open space around the cabin, revealing outlines of the rocky inclosure. No sounds in all that stillness without, and within only the low voices of the friends, and the singing logs. Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his maternal grandparents:-- "They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there they have lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to their graves! I'm glad I went; it made them live again for me. How plainly I could see the little man in his blue coat with brass buttons, with his decidedly Irish features! And Grandmother, a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways. The moss is on their gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong above them. I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their graves. I broke off the branch and brought it home." "There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a pitcher of hot water by the door. It is bitter cold, one's fingers ache, and one wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in a cabin in the woods in the dead of winter. But a crackling fire below and savory smells of bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the day begins right merrily. And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him prepare it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching on politics and religion, on current events, on conflicting views of the vitalists and the chemico-physicists, on this and on that, but never to the detriment of his duck. It is true he did serenely fold his hands and wait, between times. Then what an event to see him lift the smoking cover and try the bird with a fork--" to see if the duck is relenting," he explains. At a certain time he arises from a grave psychological discussion to rake out hollow places in the coals where he buries potatoes and onions. "The baking of an onion," he declares, "takes all the conceit out of him. He is sweet and humble after his baptism of fire." Then the talk soars above ducks and onions, until he gives one of the idlers permission to prepare the salad and lay the table. For a dinner to remember all one's days, commend me to a thoroughly relented duck; a mealy, ash-baked potato; an onion (yea, several of them) devoid of conceit, and well buttered and salted; and a salad of Slabsides celery and lettuce; with Riverby apples and pears, and beechnuts to complete the feast--beechnuts gathered in October up in the Catskills, gathered one by one as the chipmunk gathers them, by the "Laird of Woodchuck Lodge," as he is called on his native heath, though he is one and the same with the master of Slabsides. We hear no sounds all the day outside the cabin but the merry calls of chickadees, until in mid-afternoon an unwelcome "Halloa!" tells us the wagon is come to take us down to Riverby. Reluctantly the fire is extinguished, and the wide, hospitable door of Slabsides closes behind us. Riverby, "the house that Jack built," as the builder boasted, is a house interesting and individual, though conforming somewhat to the conventions of the time when it was built (1874). It is as immaculate within as its presiding genius can make it, presenting a sharp contrast to the easy-going housekeeping of the mountain cabin. We tarry a few minutes in the little bark-covered study, detached from the house and overlooking the Hudson, where Mr. Burroughs does his writing when at home; we see the rustic summer-house near by, and the Riverby vineyards, formerly husbanded by "the Vine-Dresser of Esopus," as his friends used to call him; now by his son Julian, who combines, like his father before him, grape-growing with essay-writing. A pleasant hour is spent in the artistic little cottage, planned and built by the author and his son, where live Mr. Julian Burroughs and his family. Here the grandfather has many a frolic with his three grandchildren, who know him as "Baba." John Burroughs the younger is his special pride. Who knows but the naturalist stands somewhat in awe of his grandson?--for as the youngster reaches for his "Teddy," and says sententiously, "Bear!" the elder never ventures a word about the dangers of "sham natural history." Boarding the West Shore train, laden with fruit and beechnuts and pleasant memories, we return to the city's roar and whirl, dreaming still of the calls of chickadees in the bare woods and of quiet hours before the fire at Slabsides. BACK TO PEPACTON There has always been a haunting suggestiveness to me about the expression _Rue du Temps Perdu_--the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so it is not easy to say, but imaginative, brooding natures who live much in their emotions are prone to this chronic homesickness for the Past, this ever-recurring, mournful retrospect, this tender, wistful gaze into the years that are no more. It is this tendency in us all as we grow older that makes us drift back to the scenes of our youth; it satisfies a deep-seated want to look again upon the once familiar places. We seek them out with an eagerness wholly wanting in ordinary pursuits. The face of the fields, the hills, the streams, the house where one was born--how they are invested with something that exists nowhere else, wander where we will! In their midst memories come crowding thick and fast; things of moment, critical episodes, are mingled with the most trivial happenings; smiles and tears and sighs are curiously blended as we stroll down the Street of Lost Time. While we are all more or less under this spell of the Past, some natures are more particularly enthralled by it, even in the very zenith of life, showing it to be of temperamental origin rather than the outcome of the passing years. Of such a temperament is John Burroughs. Now, when the snows of five-and-seventy winters have whitened his head, we do not wonder when we hear him say, "Ah! the Past! the Past has such a hold on me!" But even before middle life he experienced this yearning, even then confessed that he had for many years viewed everything in the light of the afternoon's sun--"a little faded and diluted, and with a pensive tinge." "It almost amounts to a disease," he reflects, "this homesickness which home cannot cure--a strange complaint. Sometimes when away from the old scenes it seems as if I must go back to them, as if I should find the old contentment and satisfaction there in the circle of the hills. But I know I should not--the soul's thirst can never be slaked. My hunger is the hunger of the imagination. Bring all my dead back again, and place me amid them in the old home, and a vague longing and regret would still possess me." As early as his forty-fifth birthday he wrote in his Journal: "Indeed, the Past begins to grow at my back like a great pack, and it seems as if it would overwhelm me quite before I get to be really an old man. As time passes, the world becomes more and more a Golgotha,--a place of graves,--even if one does not actually lose by death his friends and kindred. The days do not merely pass, we bury them; they are of us, like us, and in them we bury our own image, a real part of ourselves." Perhaps, among the poems of Mr. Burroughs, next to "Waiting" the verses that have the most universal appeal are those of-- THE RETURN He sought the old scenes with eager feet-- The scenes he had known as a boy; "Oh, for a draught of those fountains sweet, And a taste of that vanished joy!" He roamed the fields, he wooed the streams, His school-boy paths essayed to trace; The orchard ways recalled his dreams, The hills were like his mother's face. Oh, sad, sad hills! Oh, cold, cold hearth! In sorrow he learned this truth-- One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth. But a half-loaf is better than no bread, and Mr. Burroughs has now yielded to this deep-seated longing for his boyhood scenes, and has gone back to the place of his birth amid the Catskills; and one who sees him there during the midsummer days--alert, energetic, curious concerning the life about him--is almost inclined to think he has literally gone back to his youth as well, for the boy in him is always coming to the surface. It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that John Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the harvest of his earlier books; it was there also that most of his more recent books were written. Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart has always been there. He went back many years ago and named one of his books ("Pepacton") from the old stream, and he has now gone back and arranged for himself a simple summer home on the farm where he first saw the light. Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home, Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard little of his more remote retreat on his native heath. (Illustration of Woodchuck Lodge and Barn. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old home in Delaware County on one pretext or another--to boil sap in the old sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the robins; to meander up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild strawberries in the June meadows and hobnob with the bobolinks; to saunter in the hemlocks in quest of old friends in the tree-tops; and--yes, truth compels me to confess--to sit in the fields with rifle in hand and wage war against the burrowing woodchuck which is such a menace to the clover and vegetables of the farmer. In the summer of 1908, Mr. Burroughs rescued an old dwelling fast going to decay which stood on the farm a half-mile from the Burroughs homestead, and there, with friends, camped out for a few weeks, calling the place, because of the neighbors who most frequented it, "Camp Monax," or, in homelier language, "Woodchuck Lodge." In the succeeding summers he has spent most of his time there. Though repairing and adding many improvements, he has preserved the simple, primitive character of the old house, has built a roomy veranda across its front, made tables, bookcases, and other furniture of simple rustic character, and there in summer he dwells with a few friends, as contented and serene a man as can be found in this complicated world of to-day. There his old friends seek him out, and new ones come to greet him. Artists and sculptors paint and model him, and photographers carry away souvenirs of their pilgrimages. In order to withdraw himself completely during his working hours from the domestic life, Mr. Burroughs instituted a study in the hay-barn, a few rods up the hill from the house. A rough box, the top of which is covered with manilla paper, an old hickory chair, and a hammock constitute his furnishings. The hay carpet and overflowing haymows yield a fragrance most acceptable to him, and through the great doorway he looks out upon the unfrequented road and up to Old Clump, the mountain in the lap of which his father's farm is cradled, the mountain which he used to climb to salt the sheep, the mountain which is the haunt of the hermit thrush. (His nieces and nephews at the old home always speak of this songster as "Uncle John's bird.") (Illustration of Mr. Burroughs in the Hay-Barn Study, Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by R. J. H. DeLoach) As I watched Mr. Burroughs start out morning after morning with his market-basket of manuscripts on his arm, and briskly walk to his rude study, I asked myself, "Is there another literary man anywhere, now that Tolstoy has gone, who is so absolutely simple and unostentatious in tastes and practice as is John Burroughs?" How he has learned to strip away the husks and get at the kernels! How superbly he ignores non-essentials! how free he is from the tyranny of things! There in the comfort of the hills among which his life began, with his friends around him, he rejoices in the ever-changing face of Nature, enjoys the fruits of his garden, his forenoons of work, and the afternoons when friends from near and far walk across the fields, or drive, or motor up to Woodchuck Lodge; and best of all, he enjoys the peace that evening brings--those late afternoon hours when the shadow of Old Clump is thrown on the broad mountain-slope across the valley, and when the long, silvery notes of the vesper sparrow chant "Peace, goodwill, and then good-night." As the shadows deepen, he is wont to carry his Victor out to the stone wall and let the music from Brahms's "Cradle Song" or Schubert's "Serenade" float to us as we sit on the veranda, hushed into humble gratitude for our share in this quiet life. To see Mr. Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they are a part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to his books; to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths, linger by the stone walls he helped to build, sit with him on the big rock in the meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see him in the everyday life--hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about the house preparing breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing on the veranda; to eat his corn-cakes, or the rice-flour pudding with its wild strawberry accompaniment; to see him rocking his grandson in the old blue cradle in which he himself was rocked; to picnic in the beech woods with him, climb toward Old Clump at sunset and catch the far-away notes of the hermit; to loll in the hammocks under the apple trees, or to sit in the glow of the Franklin stove of a cool September evening while he and other philosophic or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers, and his absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines--to witness and experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege so rare that I feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure, with less fortunate friends of Our Friend. (Illustration of Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked. From a photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson) It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with Mr. Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills. The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs--"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide, warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance to the hills, "like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs sometimes said. Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth. As he has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon it... planted himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills in his struggle." From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford, cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill, Father rode when he went courting Mother." Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard, and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood. As we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences were interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest. On the way back he pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement schoolhouse where he and his brothers used to go, although his first school was in a little stone building which is still standing on the outskirts of Roxbury, and known thereabouts as "the old stone jug." Mr. Burroughs remembers his first day in this school, and the little suit he wore, of bluish striped cotton, with epaulets on the shoulders which flopped when he ran. He fell asleep one day and tumbled off the seat, cutting his head; he was carried to a neighboring farmhouse, and he still vividly recalls the smell of camphor which pervaded the room when he regained consciousness. He was about four years of age. He remembers learning his "A-b ab's," as they were called, and just how the column of letters looked in the old spelling-book; remembers sitting on the floor under the desks and being called out once in a while to say his letters: "Hen Meeker, a boy bigger than I was, stuck on _e_. I can remember the teacher saying to him; 'And you can't tell that? Why, little Johnny Burroughs can tell you what it is. Come, Johnny.' And I crawled out and went up and said it was e, like a little man." Up the hill a short distance from the old homestead he indicated the "turn 'n the road," as it passes by the "Deacon Woods"; this, he said, was his first journey into the world. He was about four years old when, running away, he got as far as this turn; then, looking back and seeing how far he was from the house, he became frightened and ran back crying. "I have seen a young robin," he added, "do the very same thing on its first journey from the nest." "One of my earliest recollections," he said, "is that of lying on the hearth one evening to catch crickets that Mother said ate holes in our stockings--big, light-colored, long-legged house crickets, with long horns; one would jump a long way. "Another early recollection comes to me: one summer day, when I was three or four years old, on looking skyward, I saw a great hawk sailing round in big circles. I was suddenly seized with a panic of fear and hid behind the stone wall. "The very earliest recollection of my life is that of the 'hired girl' throwing my cap down the steps, and as I stood there crying, I looked up on the sidehill and saw Father with a bag slung across his shoulders, striding across the furrows sowing grain. It was a warm spring day, and as I looked hillward wistfully, I wished Father would come down and punish the girl for throwing my cap down the stairs--little insignificant things, but how they stick in the memory!" "I see myself as a little boy rocking this cradle," said Mr. Burroughs, as he indicated the quaint blue wooden cradle (which I had found in rummaging through the attic at the old home, and had installed in Woodchuck Lodge), "or minding the baby while Mother bakes or mends or spins. I hear her singing; I see Father pushing on the work of the farm." Most of the soil in Delaware County is decomposed old red sandstone. Speaking of this soil Mr. Burroughs said, "In the spring when the plough has turned the turf, I have seen the breasts of these broad hills glow like the breasts of robins." He is fond of studying the geology of the region now. I have seen him dig away the earth the better to expose the old glacier tracings, and then explain to his grandchildren how the glaciers ages ago made the marks on the rocks. To me one of the finest passages in his recent book "Time and Change" is one wherein he describes the look of repose and serenity of his native hills, "as if the fret and fever of life were long since passed with them." It is a passage in which he looks at his home hills through the eye of the geologist, but with the vision of the poet--the inner eye which assuredly yields him "the bliss of solitude." One evening as we sat in the kitchen at the old home, he described the corn-shelling of the olden days: "I see the great splint basket with the long frying-pan handle thrust through its ears across the top, held down by two chairs on either end, and two of my brothers sitting in the chairs and scraping the ears of corn against the iron. I hear the kernels rattle, a shower of them falling in the basket, with now and then one flying out in the room. With the cobs that lie in a pile beside the basket I build houses, carrying them up till they topple, or till one of the shelters knocks them over. Mother is sitting by, sewing, her tallow dip hung on the back of a chair. Winter reigns without. How it all comes up before me!" He remembers when four or five years old crying over a thing which had caused him deep chagrin: A larger boy--"the meanest boy I ever knew, and he became the meanest man," he said with spirit--"found me sulking under a tree in the corner of the school-yard; he bribed me with a slate pencil into confessing what I was crying about, but as soon as I had told him, he ran away with the pencil, shouting my secret to the other boys." One day we went 'cross lots after spearmint for jelly for the table at Woodchuck Lodge, and an abandoned house near the mint-patches recalled to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word "taste" used, except in reference to food. The woman who had lived in this house, while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at drawing something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me open my eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than the one I knew about--the taste of things I ate!" At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some men working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities" used. "They had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under it were other stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier roadmakers. David Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said, as they exposed the earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!' The word made a lasting impression on me." (Illustration of View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard. From this high vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants--Double Top and Mount Graham. It was not a favorite walk of the boy John Burroughs. He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear a gang of ghosts would be at his heels. "When I got down the road a ways, though, how I would run!" He was always "scairy" if he had to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime: "I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'em out." Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active, sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But we do outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole underneath and wrote of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true, saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power--a creature on whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels; he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being Man, who could put all creatures under his feet. Along the road between the old home and Woodchuck Lodge are some rocks which were the "giant stairs" of his childhood. On these he played, and he is fond now of pausing and resting there as he recalls events of those days. "Are these rocks very old?" some one asked him one day. "Oh, yes; they've been here since Adam was a kitten." Whichever way he turns, memories of early days awaken; as he himself has somewhere said in print, "there is a deposit of him all over the landscape where he has lived." As we have learned, Mr. Burroughs seems to have been more alive than his brothers and playmates, to have had wider interests and activities. When, a lad, he saw his first warbler in the "Deacon Woods," the black-throated blue-back, he was excited and curious as to what the strange bird could be (so like a visitant from another clime it seemed); the other boys met his queries with indifference, but for him it was the event of the day; it was far more, it was the keynote to all his days; it opened his eyes to the life about him--here, right in the "Deacon Woods," were such exquisite creatures! It fired him with a desire to find out about them. That tiny flitting warbler! How far its little wings have carried it! What an influence it has had on American literature, and on the lives of readers for the past fifty years, sending them to nature, opening their eyes to the beauty that is common and near at hand! One feels like thanking the Giver of all good that a little barefoot boy noted the warbler that spring day as it flitted about in the beeches wood. Life has been sweeter and richer because of it. Down the road a piece is the place where this boy made a miniature sawmill, sawing cucumbers for logs. On this very rock where we sit he used to catch the flying grasshoppers early of an August morning--"the big brown fellows that fly like birds"; they would congregate here during the night to avail themselves of the warmth of the rocks, and here he would stop on his way from driving the cows to pasture, and catch them napping. Yonder in the field by a stone wall, under a maple which is no longer standing, in his early twenties he read Schlemiel's "Philosophy of History," one of the volumes which, when a youth, he had found in an old bookstall in New York, on the occasion of his first trip there. "Off there through what we used to call the 'Long Woods' lies the road along which Father used to travel in the autumn when he took his butter to Catskill, fifty miles away. Each boy went in turn. When it came my turn to go, I was in a great state of excitement for a week beforehand, for fear my clothes would not be ready, or else it would be too cold, or that the world would come to an end before the time of starting. Perched high on a spring-seat, I made the journey and saw more sights and wonders than I have ever seen on a journey since." On the drive up from the village he showed me the place, a mile or more from their haunts on the breezy mountain lands, where the sheep were driven annually to be washed. It was a deep pool then, and a gristmill stood near by. He said he could see now the huddled sheep, and the overhanging rocks with the phoebes' nests in the crevices. "Down in the Hollow," as they call the village of Robbery, he drew my attention to the building which was once the old academy, and where he had his dream of going to school. He remembers as a lad of thirteen going down to the village one evening to hear a man, McLaurie, talk up the academy before there was one in Roxbury. "I remember it as if it were yesterday; a few of the leading men of the village were there. I was the only boy. I've wondered since what possessed me to go. In his talk the man spoke of what a blessing it would be to boys of that vicinity, pointing me out and saying, 'Now, like that boy, there.' I recall how I dropped my head and blushed. He was a small man, very much in earnest. When I heard of his death a few years ago, it gave me long, long thoughts. He finally got the academy going, taught it, and had a successful school there for several years, but I never got there. The school in the West Settlement, Father thought, was good enough for me. But my desire to go, and dreaming of it, impressed it and him upon me more, perhaps, than the boys who really went were impressed. How outside of it all I felt when I used to go down there to the school exhibitions! It was after that that I had my dream of going to Harpersfield Seminary--the very name had a romantic sound. Though Father had promised me I might go, when the time came he couldn't afford it; he didn't mean to go back on his word, but there was very little money--I wonder how they got along so well as they did with so little." "As a boy it had been instilled into my mind that God would strike one dead for mocking him. One day Ras Jenkins and I were crossing this field when it began to thunder. Ras turned up his lips to the clouds contemptuously. 'Oh, don't, you'll be struck,' I cried, cringing in expectation of the avenging thunderbolt. What a revelation it was when he was not struck! I immediately began to think, 'Now, maybe God isn't so easily offended as I thought'; but it seemed to me any God with dignity ought to have been offended by such an act." Mr. Burroughs showed me the old rosebush in the pasture, all that was left to mark the site where a house had once stood; even before his boyhood days this house had become a thing of the past. The roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood! Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago. They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you the bush in the old pasture where they grew." One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood, and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse itself stood. How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the one that coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded, losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of, trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not to scratch their slates. The woods have been greatly mutilated in which they used to loiter on the way to school and gather crinkle-root to eat with their lunches,--though they usually ate it all up before lunch-time came, he said. In one of his books Mr. Burroughs speaks of a schoolmate who, when dying, said, "I must hurry, I have a long way to go over a hill and through a wood, and it is getting dark." This was his brother Wilson, and he doubtless had in mind this very course they used to take in going to school. This school (where Jay Gould was his playmate) he attended only until he was twelve years of age. A rather curious reciprocal help these two lads gave each other--especially curious in the light of their subsequent careers as writer and financier. The boy John Burroughs was one day feeling very uncomfortable because he could not furnish a composition required of him. Eight lines only were sufficient if the task was completed on time, but the time was up and no line was written. This meant being kept after school to write twelve lines. In this extremity. Jay Gould came to his rescue with the following doggerel:-- "Time is flying past, Night is coming fast, I, minus two, as you all know, But what is more I must hand o'er Twelve lines by night, Or stay and write. Just eight I've got But you know that's not Enough lacking four, But to have twelve It wants no more." "I have never been able to make out what the third line meant," said Mr. Burroughs. A few years later, when Jay Gould was hard up (he had left school and was making a map of Delaware County), John Burroughs helped him out by buying two old books of him, paying him eighty cents. The books were a German grammar and Gray's "Elements of Geology." The embryo financier was glad to get the cash, and the embryo writer unquestionably felt the richer in possessing the books. Mr. Burroughs loves to look off toward Montgomery Hollow and talk of the old haunt. "I've taken many a fine string of trout from that stream," he would say. One day he and his brother Curtis and I drove over there and fished the stream, and he could hardly stay in the wagon the last half-mile. "Isn't it time to get out now, Curtis?" he fidgeted every little while. "Not yet, John,--not yet," said the more phlegmatic brother. But it was August, and although the rapid mountain brook seemed just the place for trout, the trout were not in their places. I shall long remember the enticing stream, the pretty cascades, the high shelving rocks sheltering the mossy nest of the phoebe, and the glowing masses of bee-balm blooming beside the stream; yes, and the eagerness of one of the fishermen as he slipped along ahead of me, dropping his hook into the pools. Occasionally he would relinquish the rod, putting it into my hands with a rare self-denial as we came to a promising pool; but I was more deft at gathering bee-balm than taking trout, and willingly spared the rod to the eager angler. And even he secured only two troutling to carry back in his mint-lined creel. "Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was wont to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the pastime. One day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he showed me the stone wall where he and his grandfather tarried the last time they went fishing together, he a boy of ten and his grandfather past eighty. As they rested on the wall, the old man, without noticing it, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall. "It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I didn't move till he got ready to get up." It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr. Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of the old trees once stood,--the grandmother trees,--and mourned that they were no more; but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are still standing, and each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes goes back there now in early spring to re-create the idyllic days. Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process. But the look of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says, are the same as in the old times. "How these sounds ignore the years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees. Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats sparingly of sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully. He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks; caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four. One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his egg--he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room. He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events in the life at Woodchuck Lodge. (Illustration of Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning) As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's "Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman. "No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said, "as Wordsworth.... But his poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers." As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:-- "The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth Have come to him in solitude. In common things that round us lie Some random truths he can impart,-- The harvest of a quiet eye That broods and sleeps on his own heart." What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr. Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of the Years," his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"? And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he first felt the desire to write. Seeing him daily in these scenes, one feels that it may, indeed, be said of him as Matthew Arnold said of Sophocles, that he sees life steadily, and sees it whole. What a masterly handling is his of the facts of the universe, giving his reader the truths of the scientist touched with an idealism such as is only known to the poet's soul! A friend, writing me of "The Summit of the Years," spoke of "its splendid ascent by a rapid crescendo from the personal to the cosmic," and of how gratifying it is to see our author putting forth such fine work in his advancing years. Another friend called it "a beautiful record of a beautiful life." I recall the September morning on which he began that essay. He had written the first sentence--"The longer I live, the more I am impressed with the beauty and the wonder of the world"--when he was interrupted for a time. He spoke of what he had written, and said he hardly knew what he was going to make of it. Later in the day he brought me a large part of the essay to copy, and I remember how moved I was at its beauty, how grateful that I had been present at its inception and birth. One afternoon he called us from our separate work, the artist from her canvas and me from my typewriter, to look at a wonderful rainbow spanning the wide valley below us. The next day he brought me a short manuscript saying, "If that seems worth while to you, you may copy it--I don't know whether there is anything in it or not." It was "The Rainbow," which appeared some months later in a popular magazine--a little gem, and a good illustration of his ability to throw the witchery of the ideal around the facts of nature. The lad with us had been learning Wordsworth's "Rainbow," a favorite of Mr. Burroughs, and it was no unusual thing of a morning to hear the rustic philosopher while frying the bacon for breakfast, singing contentedly in a sort of tune of his own making:-- "And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and 1855. On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams! They had also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years. He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for buttons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt began early to sigh for the unattainable. We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled. She would also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the berries were gone in the lowlands." During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass of color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was done before starting for South America. He had promised to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him hither. As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this at its height!" Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the horizon. He gazed upon the landscape long and long. How fondly his eye dwells upon these scenes! So I have seen him look when about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the features and expression in his mind forever. "The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and there he wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early life real to me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again." (Illustration of On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home, his days there are not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would seem to indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so that he sometimes almost chides himself for living so much in the present. "Oh, the power of a living reality to veil or blot out the Past!" he sighed. "And yet, is it not best so? Does not the grass grow above graves? Why should these lovely scenes always be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been a spell put upon them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to see him bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the "new barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck from a stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going a half-mile across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the buckwheat bloom, is to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and dominated by the spell of the Past, he is yet very much alive to the Present, out of which he is probably getting as full a measure of content as any man living to-day. He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck Lodge after the completion of the repairs which had made the house so homelike and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful dream come true! And to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson all these years with never the home feeling, when here were my native hills waiting to cradle me as they did in my youth, and I so slow to return to them! I've been homesick for over forty years: I was an alien there; I couldn't take root there. It was a lucky day when I decided to spend the rest of my summers here" CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with Mr. Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The lure held out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that John Muir would start from his home at Martinez, California, and await him at the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through, that weirdly picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon of the Colorado; camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert; tarry awhile in Southern California; then visit Yosemite before embarking on the Pacific preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii. The lure held out to the more obscure members of the party was all that has been enumerated, plus that of having these two great, simple men for traveling companions. To see the wonders of the Southwest is in itself great good fortune, but to see them in company with these two students of nature, and to study the students while the students were studying the wonders, was an incalculable privilege. It frightens me now when I think on what a slight chance hung our opportunity for this unique Journey; for Mr. Burroughs, though at first deciding to go, had later given it up, declaring himself to be too much of a tenderfoot to go so far from home alone at his age. "Why should I go gadding about to see the strange and the extraordinary?" he wrote me, when trying to argue himself into abandoning the trip. "The whole gospel of my books (if they have any gospel) is 'Stay at home; see the wonderful and the beautiful in the simple things all about you; make the most of the common and the near at hand.' When I have gone abroad, I have carried this spirit with me, and have tested what I have seen by the nature revealed to me at my own doorstep. Well, I am glad I have triumphed at last; I feel much better and like writing again, now that this incubus is off my shoulders." But the incubus soon rested on him again, for the next mail carried a letter begging him to reconsider and let two of his women friends accompany him. So it all came about in a few days, and we were off. We wondered how Mr. Muir would relish two women being in the party, but assured Mr. Burroughs we should not hamper them, and should be ready to do whatever they were. "Have no fears on that score," he said; "Muir will be friendly if you are good listeners; and he is well worth listening to. He is very entertaining, but he sometimes talks when I want to be let alone; at least he did up in Alaska." "But you won't be crusty to him, will you?" "Oh, no, I shan't dare to be--he is too likely to get the best of one; he is a born tease." The long journey across the Western States (by the Santa Fe route) was full of interest at every point. Even the monotony of the Middle West was not wearisome, while the scenery and scenes in New Mexico and Arizona were fascinating in the extreme. Mr. Burroughs had been to the Far West by a northern route, but this was all fresh territory to him, and he brought to it his usual keen appetite for new phases of nature, made still keener by a recently awakened interest in geological subjects. It enhanced the pleasure and profit of the trip a hundredfold to get his first impressions of the moving panorama, as I did when he dictated notes to me from his diary, or descriptive letters to his wife and son. The impression one gets out there of earth sculpture in process is one of the chief attractions of the region, and Mr. Burroughs never tired of studying the physiognomy of the land, and the overwhelming evidences of time and change, and of contrasting these with our still older, maturer landscapes in the East. In passing through Kansas he commented on the monotonous level expanse of country as being unbearable from any point of view except as good farm land. Used to hills and mountains, inviting brooks and winding roads, he turned away from this unpicturesque land, saying if it was a good place to make money, it was also a place to lose one's own soul--he was already homesick for the beauty and diversity of our more winsome country. Two days' journey from Chicago and we reached the desert town of Adamana. As the train stopped near the little inn, a voice called out in the darkness, "Hello, Johnnie, is that you?" "Yes, John Muir"; and there under the big dipper, on the great Arizona desert, the two friends met after a lapse of ten years. "Muir, aren't you surprised to find me with two women in my wake?" asked Mr. Burroughs, introducing us. "Yes; surprised that there are only two, Johnnie." Then to us, "Up in Alaska there were a dozen or two following him around, tucking him up in steamer rugs, putting pillows to his head, running to him with a flower, or a description of a bird--Oh, two is a very moderate number, Johnnie, but we'll manage to worry through with them, somehow." And picking up part of our luggage, the tall, grizzly Scot led the way to the inn. The next day we drove nine miles over the rolling desert to visit one of the petrified forests, of which there are five in that vicinity. Blended with the unwonted scenes--the gray sands dotted with sagebrush and greasewood, the leaping jack rabbits, the frightened bands of half-wild horses, the distant buttes and mesas, and the brilliant blue of the Arizona sky--is the memory of that talk of Mr. Muir's during the long drive, a talk which for range and raciness I have never heard equaled. He often uses the broad dialect of the Scot, translating as he goes along. His forte is in monologue. He is a most engaging talker,--discursive, grave and gay,--mingling thrilling adventures, side-splitting anecdotes, choice quotations, apt characterizations, scientific data, enthusiastic descriptions, sarcastic comments, scornful denunciations, inimitable mimicry. Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is not a ready talker; he gives of his best in his books. He establishes intimate relations with his reader, Mr. Muir with his listener. He is more fond of an interchange of ideas than is Mr. Muir; is not the least inclined to banter or to get the better of one; is so averse to witnessing discomfiture that even when forced into an argument, he is loath to push it to the bitter end. Yet when he does engage in argument, he drives things home with very telling force, especially when writing on debatable points. As we drove along the desert, Mr. Muir pointed to a lofty plateau toward which we were tending,--"Robbers' Roost,"--where sheep-stealers hie themselves, commanding the view for hundreds of miles in every direction. I wish I could make vivid the panorama we saw from this vantage-ground--the desert in the foreground, and far away against the sky the curiously carved pink and purple and lilac mountains, while immediately below us lay the dry river-bed over which a gaunt raven flew and croaked ominously, and a little beyond rose the various buttes, mauve and terra-cotta colored, from whose sides and at whose bases projected the petrified trees. There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering--no branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often flattened, as though they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day. Some of the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and five to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though uprooted where they lay. Others were broken at regular intervals, as though sawed into stove lengths. In places the ground looks like a chip-yard, the chips dry and white as though bleached by the sun. The eye is deceived; chips these surely are, you think, but the ear corrects this impression, for as your feet strike the fragments, the clinking sound proves that they are stone. In some of the other forests, visited later, the chips and larger fragments, and the interior of the trunks, are gorgeously colored, so that we walked on a natural mosaic of jasper, chalcedony, onyx, and agate. In many fragments the cell-structure of the wood is still visible, but in others nature has carried the process further, and crystallization has transformed the wood of these old, old trees into the brilliant fragments we can have for the carrying--"beautiful wood replaced by beautiful stone," as Mr. Muir was fond of saying. With what wonder and incredulity we roamed about witnessing the strange spectacle!--the prostrate monarchs with hearts of jasper and chalcedony, now silent and rigid in this desolate region where they basked in the sunlight and swayed in the winds millions of years ago. Only a small part of the old forest is as yet exposed; these trees, buried for ages beneath the early seas, becoming petrified as they lay, are, after ages more, gradually being unearthed as the softer parts of the soil covering them wears away. The scenic aspects of the place, the powerful appeal it made to the imagination, the evidences of infinite time, the wonderful metamorphosis from vegetable life to these petrified remains which copy so faithfully the form and structure of the living trees, were powerfully enhanced by the sight of these two men wandering amid these ruins of Carboniferous time, sometimes in earnest conversation, oftener in silence; again in serious question from the one and perhaps bantering answer from the other; for although Mr. Burroughs was intensely interested in this spectacle, and full of cogitations and questions as to the cause and explanation of it all, Mr. Muir was not disposed to treat questions seriously. "Oh, get a primer of geology, Johnnie," he would say when the earnest Eastern student would ask for a solution of some of the puzzles arising in his mind--a perversity that was especially annoying, since the Scot had carefully explored these regions, and was doubtless well equipped to adduce reasonable explanations had he been so minded. That very forest to which we went on that first day, and where we ate our luncheon from the trunk of a great petrified Sigillaria, had been discovered by Mr. Muir and his daughter a few years before as they were riding over the sandy plateau. He told us how excited he was that night--he could not sleep, but lay awake trying to restore the living forest in imagination, for, from the petrified remains, he could tell to what order these giants belonged. When others congregate to eat, the Scot seems specially impelled to talk. With a fine disregard for food, he sat and crumbled dry bread, occasionally putting a bit in his mouth, talking while the eating was going on. He is likewise independent of sleep. "Sleep!" he would exclaim, when the rest of us, after a long day of sight-seeing, would have to yield to our sense of fatigue, "why, you can sleep when you get back home, or, at least, in the grave." Mr. Burroughs, on the contrary, is specially dependent upon sleep and food in order to do his work or to enjoy anything. On our arrival at the Grand Canon in the morning, after a night of travel and fasting, all the rest of us felt the need of refreshing ourselves and taking breakfast before we would even take a peep at the great rose-purple abyss out there a few steps from the hotel, but the teasing Scot jeered at us for thinking of eating when there was that sublime spectacle to be seen. When we did go out to the rim, Mr. Muir preceded us, and, as we approached, waved toward the great abyss and said: "There! Empty your heads of all vanity, and look!" And we did look, overwhelmed by what must be the most truly sublime spectacle this earth has to offer--a veritable terrestrial Book of Revelation, as Mr. Burroughs said. We followed a little path along the rim, led by Mr. Muir, to where we could escape from the other sight-seers, and there we sat on the rocks, though the snow lay in patches on the ground that bright February day. Mr. Burroughs made a fire of Juniper brush, and as the fragrant incense rose on the air, with that wondrous spectacle before our eyes, we listened to Mr. Muir reciting some lines from Milton--almost the only poet one would think of quoting in the presence of such solemn, awful beauty. Mr. Muir tried to dissuade us the next day from going down into the canon: "Don't straddle a mule and poke your noses down to the ground, and plunge down that dangerous icy trail, imagining, because you get a few shivers down your backs, you are seeing the glories of the canon, or getting any conception of the noble river that made it. You must climb, climb, to see the glories, always." But when Mr. Burroughs would ask him where we could climb to, to see the canon, since under his guidance we had been brought to the very edge on the top, he did not deign to explain, but continued to deride the project of the descent into the depths--a way the dear man has of meeting an argument that is a bit annoying at times. We did go down into the canon on mule-back,--down, down, over four thousand feet,--and the jeering Scot went with us, sitting his mule uncompromisingly, and indulging in many a jest at the expense of the terrified women who felt, when too late to retreat, that it would have been better to heed his advice. Still, after the descent, and then the ascent, were safely accomplished, we were glad we had not let him dissuade us. None of us can ever forget that day, with its rich and varied experiences, the mingled fear and awe and exultation, the overpowering emotions felt at each new revelation of the stupendous spectacle, often relieved by the lively sallies of Mr. Muir. We ate our luncheon on the old Cambrian plateau, the mighty Colorado, still a thousand feet below us, looking entirely inadequate to have accomplished the tremendous results we were witnessing. One day at the canon, feeling acutely aware of our incalculable privilege, I said, "To think of having the Grand Canon, and John Burroughs and John Muir thrown in!" "I wish Muir _was_ thrown in, sometimes," retorted Mr. Burroughs, with a twinkle in his eye, "when he gets between me and the canon." In contrast to Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, is Mr. Burroughs, the Home-lover, one who is under the spell of the near and the familiar. The scenes of his boyhood in the Catskills, the woods he wandered in about Washington during the years he dwelt there, his later tramping-ground along the Hudson--these are the scenes he has made his readers love because he has loved them so much himself; and however we may enjoy his journeyings in "Mellow England," in "Green Alaska," in Jamaica, or his philosophical or speculative essays, we find his stay-at-home things the best. And he likes the familiar scenes and things the best, much as he enjoyed the wonders that the great West offered. The robins in Yosemite Valley and the skylarks in the Hawaiian Islands, because these were a part of his earlier associations, did more to endear these places to him than did the wonders themselves. On Hawaii, where we saw the world's greatest active volcano throwing up its fountains of molten lava sixty or more feet high, the masses falling with a roar like that of the "husky-voiced sea," Mr. Burroughs found it difficult to understand why some of us were so fascinated that we wanted to stay all night, willing to endure the discomforts of a resting-place on lava rocks, occasional stifling gusts of sulphur fumes, dripping rain, and heat that scorched our veiled faces, so long as we could gaze on that boiling, tumbling, heaving, ever-changing lake of fire. Such wild, terrible, unfamiliar beauty could not long hold him under its spell. (Illustration of John Muir and John Burroughs, Pasadena, California. From a photograph by George R. King) A veritable homesickness came over him amid unfamiliar scenes. One day in early March, after journeying all day over the strange region of the California desert, with its giant cacti, its lava-beds, its volcanic cones, its rugged, barren mountains, its deep gorges and canons, its snow-capped peaks, on reaching San Bernardino, so green and fresh and smiling in the late afternoon sun, and riding through miles and miles of orange groves to Riverside, this return to a winsome nature (though unlike his own), after so much of the forbidding aspect had been before us, was to Mr. Burroughs like water brooks to the thirsty hart. His abiding love for early friends, too, crops out on all occasions. Twice while away on this trip be received the proffer of honorary degrees from two of our American universities. Loath to accept such honors at any time, he was especially so now, and declined, defending himself by saying that the acceptance would have necessitated his hurrying straight home across the States to have the degrees conferred upon him, when he was planning to tarry in Iowa and see an old schoolmate. "I didn't want to do it," he said petulantly; "I wanted to stop and see Sandy Smith"--his tone being not unlike what he would have used when as a boy he doubtless coaxed to "go out and play with Sandy." Mr. Burroughs is too much a follower of the genuinely simple life to be long contented in hotels, however genial the hospitality. He declared the elegant suite at the Mission Inn at Riverside, which was tendered to him and his party in the most cordial, unobtrusive way, was too luxurious for a "Slabsider" like him. It was positively painful to him to be asked, as he was frequently on the Western and Hawaiian tour, to address audiences, or "just to come and meet the students" at various schools and colleges. Such meetings usually meant being "roped in" to making a speech, often in spite of assurances to the contrary. I have known him to slip away from a men's club early in the evening, before dinner was announced, and return to our little cottage in Pasadena, where he would munch contentedly an uncooked wafer, drink a cup of hot water, read a little geology, and go to bed at the seasonable hour of nine, the next morning awakening with a keen appetite for the new day, for his breakfast, and for his forenoon of work, whereas, had he stayed out till eleven or twelve, eaten a hearty dinner, and been stimulated and excited by much talk, he would have awakened without the joy in the morning which he has managed to carry through his seventy-six years, and which his readers, who rejoice in the freshness and tranquillity of his pages, hope he will keep till he reaches the end of the Long Road. Mr. Muir is as averse to speaking in public as is Mr. Burroughs, much as he likes to talk. They both dislike the noise and confusion of cities, and what we ordinarily mean by social life. Mr. Burroughs is less an alien in cities than is Mr. Muir, yet, on the whole, he is more of a solitaire, more of a recluse. He avoids men where the other seeks them. He cannot deal or dicker with men, but the canny Scot can do this, if need be, and even enjoy it. Circumstances seem to have made Mr. Muir spend most of his years apart from his fellows, although by nature he is decidedly gregarious; circumstances seem to have decreed that Mr. Burroughs spend the greater part of his life among his fellow-men, though there is much of the hermit in his make-up. Mr. Muir gets lost in cities--this man who can find his way on the trackless desert, the untrodden glaciers, and in the most remote and inaccessible mountain heights. He will never admit that his wanderings were lonely: "You can always have the best part of your friends with you," he said; "it is only when people cease to love that they are separated." One Sunday in Pasadena we had planned to have a picnic up one of the canons, but the rain decreed otherwise. So, discarding tables and other appurtenances of life within doors, we picnicked on the floor of our sitting-room, making merry there with the luncheon we had prepared for the jaunt. While passing back and forth through the room in our preparations, we heard the men of the party talk in fragments, and amusing fragments they were. Once when Mr. Browne, the editor of the "Dial," was discussing some point in connection with the Spanish-American War, I heard Mr. Muir say, with a sigh of relief, "I was getting flowers up on the Tuolumne meadows then, and didn't have to bother about those questions." When another friend was criticizing Mr. Roosevelt for the reputed slaughter of so many animals in Africa, and Mr. Burroughs declared he did not credit half the things the papers said the hunter was doing, Mr. Muir said, half chidingly, half tolerantly, "Roosevelt, the muggins, I am afraid he is having a good time putting bullets through those friends of his." Now I had heard him call Mr. Burroughs "You muggins" in the same winning, endearing way he said "Johnnie"; I had heard him speak of a petrified tree in the Sigillaria forest as a "muggins"; of a bear that trespassed on his flowery domains in the Sierra meadows as a "muggins" that he tried to look out of countenance and failed; of a "comical little muggins of a daisy" that some one had named after him; and one day he had rejoiced my heart by dubbing me "You muggins, you"; and behold! here he was now applying the elastic term to our many-sided (I did not say "strenuous") ex-President! Later I heard him apply it to a Yosemite waterfall, and by then should not have been surprised to hear him speak of a mighty glacier, or a giant sequoia, as a "muggins." "Stickeen," Mr. Muir's incomparable dog story, came out in book form while we were in Pasadena. I sent a copy to my brother, who wrote later asking me to inquire of Mr. Muir why he did not keep Stickeen after their perilous adventures together. So I put the question to him one day. "Keep him!" he ejaculated, as he straightened his back, and the derisive wrinkles appeared on one side of his nose; "keep him! he wasn't mine--I'm Scotch, I never steal." Then he explained that Stickeen's real master was attached to him; that he could not take him from him; and besides, the dog was accustomed to a cold climate, and would have been very unhappy in California. "Oh, no, I couldn't keep Stickeen," he said wistfully, but one felt that he _had_ kept Stickeen, the best part of him, by immortalizing him in that story. While we were housekeeping in Pasadena, Mr. Burroughs began writing on the Grand Canon. One morning, after having disposed of several untimely callers, he had finally settled down to work. We sat around the big table writing or reading. Mr. Burroughs was there in the body, but in spirit we could see he was at the "Divine Abyss," as he called the Canon. Once he read us a few sentences which were so good that I resolved we must try harder to prevent interruptions, that he might keep all his writing up to that standard. But while engaged in letter-writing, some point arose, and, forgetting my laudable resolution, I put a question to him. Answering me abstractedly, he went on with his writing. Then I realized how inexcusable it was to intrude my trivialities at such a time. Castigating myself and resolving anew, I wrote on in contrite silence. After a little Mr. Burroughs paused and lifted his head; his expression was puzzled, as though wrestling with some profound thought, or weighing some nicety of expression; I saw he was about to speak--perhaps to utter his latest impression concerning the glories of the Canon. As he opened his lips this is what we heard: "_Couldn't we warm up those Saratoga chips for luncheon?_" Whereupon it will be seen that the abyss he was then cogitating about was in the epigastric region, instead of in Arizona. Mr. Muir likes a laugh at his own expense. He told us of a school-teacher in the vicinity of his home instructing her pupils about Alaska and the glaciers; and on telling them that the great Muir Glacier was named after their neighbor, who discovered it, one little boy piped up with, "What, not that old man that drives around in a buggy!" I may as well offset this with one of our Hawaiian experiences. When we were in Honolulu, we heard that one of the teachers there, thinking to make a special impression upon her pupils, told them the main facts about Mr. Burroughs's writings, their scope and influence, what he stood for as a nature writer, his place in literature, and then described his appearance, and said, "And this noted man, this great nature lover, is right here--a guest in our city!" A little lad broke in with, "I know--I saw him yesterday--he was in our yard stealing mangoes." One day, while still in Pasadena, I told Mr. Muir that on April 3d a few of us wished to celebrate Mr. Burroughs's birthday, his seventy-second, by a picnic up one of the Mount Lowe canons. He said it would be impossible for him to be with us on that day, as he had to go up to San Francisco. On my expressing keen disappointment he teasingly said:--"Why, you will have Johnnie, and Mr. Browne, and the mountains--what more do you want?" "But we want _you_," I protested, assuring him that this was not a case where one could say,-- "How happy could I be with either, Were t'other dear Johnnie away!" "Well, then, why can't you have it some other day?" "Because he wasn't born some other day." "But why must you be tied to the calendar? Can't you celebrate Johnnie's birthday a few days later just as well? Such a stickler for the exact date as you are, I never saw." Thus he bantered, but when he had to leave us, we knew he was as disappointed as we all were that he could not be with us on that "exact date." How he did enjoy hectoring us for our absurd mistake in not reading our long tickets through, consequently getting on the Santa Fe train to go up to San Francisco when a little coupon stated that the ticket took us by the Coast line. We were bound to let the Scot know of our mistake, and our necessary transfer to the other road (as we had arranged to meet him at a certain point on the Santa Fe), else, I suppose, we never should have given him that chance to jeer at us. He made us tell him all about it when we met, and shaking with laughter at all the complications the mistake entailed, he declared, "Oh, but that's a bully story!" "It'll put an inch of fat on Muir's ribs," retorted "Oom John," who was not without chagrin at the fiasco. "Johnnie, when you sail for Honolulu, I expect, unless you're narrowly watched, you'll get on the wrong ship and go off to Vancouver," teased the fun-loving Scot. In Yosemite, Mr. Muir told us about the great trees he used to saw into timber during his early years in the valley, showing us the site of his old mill, and bragging that he built it and kept it in repair at a cost of less than twenty-five cents a year. It seemed strange that he, a tree-lover, could have cut down those noble spruces and firs, and I whispered this to Mr. Burroughs. "Ask him about it," said the latter, "ask him." So I did. "Bless you, I never cut down the trees--I only sawed those the Lord had felled." The storms that swept down the mountains had laid these monarchs low, and the thrifty Scot had merely taken advantage of the ill winds, at the same time helping nature to get rid of the debris. "How does this compare with Esopus Valley, Johnnie?" Mr. Muir was fond of asking Mr. Burroughs, when he saw the latter gazing in admiration at mighty El Capitan, or the thundering Yosemite Falls. Or he would say, "How is that for a piece of glacial work, Johnnie?" as he pointed to Half Dome and told how the glacier had worn off at least half a mile from its top, and then had sawed right down through the valley. "O Lord! that's too much, Muir," answered Mr. Burroughs. He declared that it stuck in his crop--this theory that ice alone accounts for this great valley cut out of the solid rocks. When the Scot would get to riding his ice-hobby too hard, Mr. Burroughs would query, "But, Muir, the million years before the ice age--what was going on here then?' "Oh, God knows," said Mr. Muir, but vouchsafed no further explanation. (Illustration of John Burroughs and John Muir in the Yosemite. From a photograph by F. P. Clatworthy) "With my itch for geology," said Mr. Burroughs, "I want it scratched all the time, and Muir doesn't want to scratch it." So he dropped his questions, which elicited only bantering answers from the mountaineer, and gave himself up to sheer admiration of the glories and beauties of the region, declaring that of all the elemental scenes he had beheld, Yosemite beat them all--"The perpetual thunder peal of the waters dashing like mad over gigantic cliffs, the elemental granite rocks--it is a veritable 'wreck of matter and crush of worlds' that we see here." Mr. Burroughs urged Mr. Muir again and again to reclaim his early studies in the Sierra which were printed in the "Overland Monthly" years ago, and give them to the public now with the digested information which he alone can supply, and which is as yet inaccessible in his voluminous notes and sketches of the region. At Mr. Muir's home we saw literally barrels of these notes. He admitted that he had always been dilatory about writing, but not about studying or note-taking; often making notes at night when fatigued from climbing and from two and three days' fasting; but the putting of them into literature is irksome to him. Yet, much as he dislikes the labor of writing, he will shut himself away from the air and sunshine for weeks at a time, if need arises, and write vigorously in behalf of the preservation of our forests. He did this back in the late seventies, and in more recent years has been tireless in his efforts to secure protection to our noble forests when danger has threatened them. Mr. Muir's knowledge of the physiognomy and botany of most of the countries of the globe is extensive, and he has recently added South America and South Africa to his list; there is probably no man living, and but few who have lived, so thoroughly conversant with the effects of glaciation as is he; yet, unless he puts his observations into writing, much of his intimate knowledge of these things must be lost when he passes on. And, as Mr. Burroughs says, "The world wants this knowledge seasoned with John Muir, not his mere facts. He could accumulate enough notes to fill Yosemite, yet that would be worth little. He has spent years studying and sketching the rocks, and noting facts about them, but you can't reconstruct beauty and sublimity out of mere notes and sketches. He must work his harvest into bread." But concerning this writing Mr. Muir confesses he feels the hopelessness of giving his readers anything but crumbs from the great table God has spread: "I can write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the feast." Here we see the marked contrast between these two nature students: Mr. Muir talks because he can't help it, and his talk is good literature; he writes only because he has to, on occasion; while Mr. Burroughs writes because he can't help it, and talks when he can't get out of it. Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, needs a continent to roam in; while Mr. Burroughs, the Saunterer, needs only a neighborhood or a farm. The Wanderer is content to scale mountains; the Saunterer really climbs the mountain after he gets home, as he makes it truly his own only by dreaming over it and writing about it. The Wanderer finds writing irksome; the Saunterer is never so well or so happy as when he can write; his food nourishes him better, the atmosphere is sweeter, the days are brighter. The Wanderer has gathered his harvest from wide fields, just for the gathering; he has not threshed it out and put it into the bread of literature--only a few loaves; the Saunterer has gathered his harvest from a rather circumscribed field, but has threshed it out to the last sheaf; has made many loaves; and it is because he himself so enjoys writing that his readers find such joy and morning freshness in his books, his own joy being communicated to his reader, as Mr. Muir's own enthusiasm is communicated to his hearer. With Mr. Burroughs, if his field of observation is closely gleaned, he turns aside into subjective fields and philosophizes--a thing which Mr. Muir never does. One of the striking things about Mr. Muir is his generosity; and though so poor in his youth and early adult life, he has now the wherewithal to be generous. His years of frugality have, strange to say, made him feel a certain contempt for money. At El Tovar he asked, "What boy brought up my bags?" Whereupon a string of bell-boys promptly appeared for their fees, and Mr. Muir handed out tips to all the waiting lads, saying in a droll way, "I didn't know I had so many bags." When we tried to reimburse him for the Yosemite trip, he would have none of it, saying, almost peevishly, "Now don't annoy me about that." Yet, if he thinks one is trying to get the best of him, he can look after the shekels as well as any one. One day in Yosemite when we were to go for an all day's tramp and wished a luncheon prepared at the hotel, on learning of the price they were to charge, he turned his back on the landlord and dispatched one of us to the little store, where, for little more than the hotel would have charged for one person, a luncheon for five was procured, and then he really chuckled that he had been able to snap his fingers at mine host, who had thought he had us at his mercy. I see I have kept Mr. Muir close to the footlights most of the time, allowing Mr. Burroughs to hover in the background where he blends with the neutral tones; but so it was in all the thrilling scenes in the Western drama--Mr. Muir and the desert, Mr. Muir and the petrified trees, Mr. Muir and the canon, Mr. Muir and Yosemite; while with "Oom John," it was a blending with the scene, a quiet, brooding absorption that made him seem a part of them--the desert, the petrified trees, the Grand Canon, Yosemite, and Mr. Burroughs inseparably linked with them, but seldom standing out in sharp contrast to them, as the "Beloved Egotist" stood out on all occasions. Perhaps the most idyllic of all our days of camping and tramping with John of Birds and John of Mountains was the day in Yosemite when we tramped to Nevada and Vernal Falls, a distance of fourteen miles, returning to Camp Ahwahnee at night, weary almost to exhaustion, but strangely uplifted by the beauty and sublimity n which we had lived and moved and had our being. Our brown tents stood hospitably open, and out in the great open space in front we sat around the campfire under the noble spruces and firs, the Merced flowing softly on our right, mighty Yosemite Falls thundering away in the distance, while the moon rose over Sentinel Rock, lending a touch of ineffable beauty to the scene, and a voice, that is now forever silenced, lent to the rhymes of the poets its richness of varied emotion, as it chanted choicest selections from the Golden Poems of all time. We lingered long after the other campers had gone to rest, loath to bring to its close a day so replete with sublimity and beauty. Mr. Burroughs summed it up as he said good-night: "A day with the gods of eld--a holy day in the temple of the gods." JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION "John is making an impression on his age--has come to stay--has veritable, indisputable, dynamic gifts," Walt Whitman said familiarly to a friend in 1888, in commenting on our subject's place in literature. And of a letter written to him by Mr. Burroughs that same year he said: "It is a June letter, worthy of June; written in John's best outdoor mood. Why, it gets into your blood, and makes you feel worth while. I sit here, helpless as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air." Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his hearers that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the rest of us do, and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of consecration of thought and patient study of the lives of birds and flowers, and so had bought the right to take June and all that it means into his brain and heart and life; and that if the rest of us wish these joys, we must purchase them on the same terms. We are often led to ask what month he has not taken into his heart and life, and given out again in his writings. Perhaps most of all he has taken April into his heart, as his essay on it in "Birds and Poets" will show:-- How it (April) touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--how these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark. But why continue? The whole essay breathes of swelling buds, springing grass, calls of birds, April flowers, April odors, and April's uncloying freshness and charm. As we realize what the returning spring brings to this writer, we say with Bliss Carman:-- "Make (him) over. Mother April, When the sap begins to stir." I fancy there are many of his readers who will echo what one of his friends has said to him: "For me the 3d of April will ever stand apart in the calendar with a poignant beauty and sweetness because it is your birthday. It is the keynote to which the whole springtime music is set." Or another: "If April 3d comes in like any other day, please understand that it will be because she does not dare to show how glad she is over her own doings." On another birthday, the same correspondent says: "I find that you are so inwoven with the spring-time that I shall never again be able to resolve the season into its elements. But I am the richer for it. I feel a sort of compassion for one who has never seen the spring through your eyes." Mr. Burroughs puts his reader into close and sympathetic communion with the open-air world as no other literary naturalist has done. Gilbert White reported with painstaking fidelity the natural history of Selborne; Thoreau gave Thoreau with glimpses of nature thrown in; Richard Jefferies, in dreamy, introspective descriptions of rare beauty and delicacy, portrayed his own mystical impressions of nature; but Mr. Burroughs takes us with him to the homes and haunts of the wild creatures, sets us down in their midst, and lets us see and hear and feel just what is going on. We read his books and echo Whitman's verdict on them: "They take me outdoors! God bless outdoors!" And since God _has_ blessed outdoors, we say, "God bless John Burroughs for taking us out of doors with him!" Our writer never prates about nature, telling us to look and admire. He loves the common, everyday life about him, sees it more intimately than you or I see it, and tells about it so simply and clearly that he begets a like feeling in his reader. It was enjoined of the early Puritans "to walke honestlie in the sweete fields and woodes." How well our friend has obeyed this injunction! And what an unobtrusive lover he is! Although it is through him that his mistress stands revealed, it is not until we look closely that we spy her adorer in the background, intent only on unveiling her charms. How does he do this? First by succumbing himself--Nature's graces, her inconsistencies, even her objectionable traits appeal to him. Like the true lover, he is captivated by each of her phases, and surrenders himself without reserve. Such homage makes him the recipient of her choicest treasures, her most adorable revelations. (Illustration of Mr. Burroughs sitting for a Statuette. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott) I have mentioned Gilbert White's contributions to the literature about nature: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his book is mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the facts with charm! To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously report them seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get so little of the parson himself. What were his feelings about all these things he has been at such pains to record? The things themselves are not enough. It is not alluring to be told soberly:-- Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they eat the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious; with their upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. And so on. By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats a similar subject. After describing the porcupine, mingling description and human encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's interest, he says:-- In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our unfair tactics! He protested and protested, and whimpered and scolded like some infirm old man tormented by boys. His game after we led him forth was to keep himself as much as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two sticks and the cord we finally threw him over on his back and exposed his quill-less and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed to say, "Now you may do with me as you like." Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too. Thoreau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at the same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by his opinionatedness. You want to see his bean-field, but know you would be an intruder. He might even tell you to your face that he was happiest the mornings when nobody called. He likes to advise and berate, but at long range. Speaking of these two writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors taught Burroughs gentle things about men--it had no such effect upon Thoreau." Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of literature as well. He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic spectator, but seldom gives one much to carry away. His descriptions, musical as they are, barely escape being wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer" he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pass. One of the purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet or a hepatica. But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy he is. His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks that flow down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his Catskill home. They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould, of the good brown earth. His art pierces through our habitual indifference to Nature and kindles our interest in, not her beauty alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and democratic qualities. Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it. He experiences the country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it, absorbs it." Let us try this writer by his own test. He says: "When one tries to report nature he has to remember that every object has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in the proportion that its integrity in this respect is preserved." He must, as we know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river and the sky when he brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at dawn on the alder bough; must make us see and hear the bird _on the bough_, and this is worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled specimens. To do this requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist has to an unusual degree--an imagination that goes straight to the heart of whatever he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that re-creates what he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr. Burroughs, and then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is the end of speech." One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic conceits; the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch of fringed polygalas resembles a "flock of rose-purple butterflies" alighted on the ground; the male and female flowers of the early everlasting are "found separated from each other in well-defined groups, like men and women in an old-fashioned country church"; "the note of the pewee is a human sigh"; the bloodroot--"a full-blown flower with a young one folded in a leaf beneath it, only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose protruding from its mother's blanket." Speaking of the wild orchids known as "lady's-slippers," see the inimitable way in which he puts you on the spot where they grow: "Most of the floral ladies leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods, only the stemless one (_Cypripedium acaule_) leaves hers on dry ground before she reaches the swamp, commonly under evergreen trees where the carpet of pine needles will not hurt her feet." Almost always he invests his descriptions with some human touch that gives them rare charm--nature and human nature blended--if it is merely the coming upon a red clover in England-- "The first red clover head just bloomed... but like the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home." When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging, we conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and large simplicity--qualities which make up a style original, fresh, convincing. His writing, whether about nature, literature, science, or philosophy, is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his humor is delicious; he says things in a crisp, often racy, way. Yet what a sense of leisureliness one has in reading him, as well as a sense of companionability! What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic apprehension of the mere fact. He never flings dry facts at us, but facts are always his inspiration. He never seeks to go behind them, and seldom to use them as symbols, as does Thoreau. Thoreau preaches and teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never. The facts themselves fill him with wonder and delight--a wonder and delight his reader shares. The seasons, the life of the birds and the animals, the face of nature, the ever new, the ever common day--all kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul. The witchery of the ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a pretty story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him is always holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be intellectually honest. He has an abiding hankering after the true, the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any tampering with the truth. Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter, he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I am, mole and all." And he would have made the mole interesting; he has done so, but that is a mole of another color. This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts,--those natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue. Accordingly, when one warps the truth to suit his purpose, especially in the realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams to raise a warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But he never cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and generous praise to deserving ones. It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is by nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or man, much less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is traduced--for he shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of the mother bird when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a porcupine to be misrepresented without bristling up in its defense. I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral twist to his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances where he does do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks of the calmness and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows or kingbirds: "He seldom deigns to notice his noisy and furious antagonist, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent--rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm not sure but it is worthy of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the farm, especially stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of the stones that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons in stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard over its products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome? Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it," so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite their own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She reflects their thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only what they bring to her. And the writer who brings much--much of insight, of devotion, of sympathy--is sure to bring much away for his reader's delectation. Does not this account for the sense of intimacy which his reader has with the man, even before meeting him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet him, it will be as a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet him, and hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones of his voice. We sometimes hear the expression, "English in shirt-sleeves," applied to objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied in a commendatory way to good English,--to the English of such a writer as Mr. Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely, everyday expressions; English that shows the man to have been country-bred, albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to distant woods and pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature and philosophy, or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste. Or, to use a figure perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits, he is one who has flocked with birds not of a like feather with those that shared with him the parent nest. Although his kin knew and cared little for the world's great books, he early learned to love them when he was roaming his native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest. It is to writers of _this_ kind of "English in shirt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see shirt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, sturdiness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless conformity to prescribed customs. Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking our thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs? How are we glad that they lead us into green pastures and beside still waters, away from the crowded haunts of the conventional, and the respectably commonplace society garb of speech! What matter if occasionally one even gives a wholesome shock by daring to come into the drawing-room of our minds in his shirt-sleeves, his hands showing the grime of the soil, and his frame the strength that comes from battling with wind and weather? It is the same craving which makes us say with Richard Hovey:-- "I am sick of four walls and a ceiling; I have need of the sky, I have business with the grass." But it will not do to carry this analogy too far in writing of Mr. Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as having in it something of the uncouth, or the ill-timed, or the uncultured. His writing is of the earth, but not of the earth earthy. He sees divine things underfoot as well as overhead. His page has the fertility of a well-cultivated pastoral region, the limpidness of a mountain brook, the music of our unstudied songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond the summer clouds; it has, at times, the ruggedness of a shelving rock, combined with the grace of its nodding columbines. Mr. Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries," that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was with a peculiar pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over the same meadows where he used to gather strawberries. My first introduction to him as a writer, many years before, had been in hearing this essay read. And since then never a year passes that I do not read it at least three times--once in winter just to bring June and summer near; once in spring when all outdoors gives promise of the fullness yet to be; and once in the radiant summer weather when daisies and clover and bobolinks and strawberries riot in one's blood, making one fairly mad to bury one's self in the June meadows and breathe the clover-scented air. And it always stands the test--the test of being read out in the daisy-flecked meadows with rollicking bobolinks overhead. What quality is it, though, that so moves and stirs us when Mr. Burroughs recounts some of the simple happenings of his youth? What is it in his recitals that quickens our senses and perceptions and makes our own youth alive and real? It is paradise regained--the paradise of one's lost youth. Let this author describe his boyhood pastures, going 'cross lots to school, or to his favorite spring, whatsoever it is--is it the path that he took to the little red schoolhouse in the Catskills? Is it the spring near his father's sugar bush that we see? No. One is a child again, and in a different part of the State, with tamer scenery, but scenery endeared by early associations. The meadow you see is the one that lies before the house where you were born; you read of the boy John Burroughs jumping trout streams on his way to school, but see yourself and your playmates scrambling up a canal bank, running along the towpath, careful to keep on the land side of the towline that stretches from mules to boat, lest you be swept into the green, uninviting waters of the Erie. On you run with slate and books; you smell the fresh wood as you go through the lumber yard. Or, read another of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself on that first spring outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after "cowslips"; another, and you are trudging along with your brother after the cows, stopping to nibble spearmint, or pick buttercups by the way. Prosaic recollections, compared to spring paths and trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet this is what our author's writings do--re-create for each of us our own youth, with our own childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a glamour for us, however prosy they seem to others; and why? Because, though nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of nature his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in the soul of his reader. Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen than in his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he gives their salient points; he represents the bird as an object in natural history, but ah! how much more he gives! Imagine our bird-lover describing a bird as Ellery Channing described one, as something with "a few feathers, a hole at one end and a point at the other, and a pair of wings"! We see the bird Mr. Burroughs sees; we hear the one he hears. Long before I had the memorable experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of that inimitable description of its song in "Wake-Robin." It does, indeed, seem to be "the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best moments." As one listens to its strain in the hush of twilight, the pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a truth seem trivial and cheap. What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds, how we watch their courtships, how we peer into their nests, and how lively is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in their "procreant cradles," beset on all sides by foes that fly and creep and glide! And not only does he make the bird a visible living creature; he makes it sing joyously to the ear, while all nature sings blithely to the eye. We see the bird, not as a mass of feathers with "upper parts bright blue, belly white, breast ruddy brown, mandibles and legs black," as the textbooks have it, but as a thing of life and beauty: "Yonder bluebird with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did he come down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?" Who is there in reading this matchless description of the bluebird that does not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse quicken with the promise of approaching spring, that does not feel that the bird did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of hope and promise, even though the skies are still bleak, and the winds still cold? Who, indeed, except those prosaic beings who are blind and deaf to the most precious things in life? "I heard a bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so stirred as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for enthusiasm. "Well, and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year before, and the year before that?" inquired in measured, world-wearied tones the dampener of ardors. No, my poor friend, it did not. And just because it sounded the same as it has in all the succeeding springs since life was young, it touched a chord in one's heart that must be long since mute in your own, making you poor, indeed, if this dear familiar bird voice cannot set it vibrating once more. THE END 
45165	----	[Illustration: AUNT DELIGHT'S SCHOOL.] PETER PARLEY'S OWN STORY. _FROM THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF THE LATE SAMUEL G. GOODRICH_, ("_PETER PARLEY_.") With Illustrations. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY SHELDON & COMPANY, 335 BROADWAY, COR. WORTH ST, 1864. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by THE HEIRS OF S. G. GOODRICH, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. ELECTROTYPED BY SMITH & MCDOUGAL, 82 & 84 BERKMAN ST. PRINTED BY C. S. WESTCOTT & CO., 79 JOHN ST. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE Birth and Parentage--The Old House--Ridgefield--The Meeting-house--Parson Mead--Keeler's Tavern--The Cannon-ball--Lieutenant Smith 9 CHAPTER II. The New House--High Ridge--Nathan Kellogg's Spy-glass--The Shovel--The Black Patch in the Road--Distrust of British Influence--Old Chich-es-ter--Aunt Delight--Return after Twenty Years 16 CHAPTER III. Ridgefield Society--Trades and Professions--Chimney-Corner Courtships--Domestic Economy--Dram-drinking--Family Products--Molly Gregory and Church Music--Travelling Artisans--Festival of the Quilts--Clerical Patronage--Raising a Church--The Retired Tailor and His Farm 30 CHAPTER IV. Habits of the People--Their Costume--Amusements--Festivals-- Marriages--Funerals--Dancing--Winter Sports--My Two Grandmothers--Mechanical Genius--Importance of Whittling--Pigeons--Sporting Adventures 45 CHAPTER V. Death of Washington--Jerome Bonaparte and Miss Patterson--Sunday Travelling--Oliver Wolcott--Timothy Pickering--American Politeness quite natural--Locomotion--Public Conveyances--My Father's Chaise 58 CHAPTER VI. The Upper and Lower Classes of Ridgefield--Master Stebbins and his School--What is a Noun?--Deacon Benedict and his Man Abijah--My Latin Acquirements--Family Worship--Widow Bennett--The Temple of Dagon 65 CHAPTER VII. The Clergy of Fairfield--A Laughing Parson--The Three Deacons 79 CHAPTER VIII. Mat Olmstead, the Town Wit--The Salamander Hat--Solar Eclipse--The Old Hen and the Philosopher--Lieutenant Smith--Extraordinary Meteor--Fulton and his Steam-boat--Granther Baldwin and his Wife--Sarah Bishop and her Cave 87 CHAPTER IX. Farewell to Home--Danbury--My New Vocation--My Brother-in-law-- His Conversations with Lawyer Hatch--Clerical Anecdotes 108 CHAPTER X. New Haven--Distinguished Men--Whitney's Cotton-gin--Durham--My Grandmother's Indian Puddings--In Search of a Doctor--Return to Danbury--The Cold Friday--Factory Workmen--Mathematics 117 CHAPTER XI. Arrival at Hartford--My Occupation There--Restlessness--My Friend George Sheldon 129 CHAPTER XII. War with England--In the Army--My Uncle's Advice-- Campaigning--On the March--Our Military Costume--My first Soldier's Supper 134 CHAPTER XIII. New London--Our Military Reputation--Sent with a Letter--British Cannon-balls--Out of Harm's Way--An Alarm--On Guard--Take a Prisoner--Strange Emotions--My Left-hand Chum--A Grateful Country 138 CHAPTER XIV. Effects of War in New England--Personal Experience--News of Peace--Illuminations--Confessions 145 CHAPTER XV. Evil Effects of Night Study--Commencement of a Literary Career--Thoughts on Dancing--New York--Saratoga--Death of my Uncle--Become a Bookseller--Cold Summer--T'other Side of Ohio 149 CHAPTER XVI. Marriage--Walter Scott--Byron--Sidney Smith's Taunt--Publication of Original American Works--Mrs. Sigourney 159 CHAPTER XVII. Domestic Troubles--Sketch of Brainard--Aunt Lucy's Back-Parlor--The Fall of Niagara--Death of Brainard 164 CHAPTER XVIII. My First Visit to Europe--Hurricane--Arrival at Liverpool-- London--Travel on the Continent--Return to Bristol--Interview with Hannah More--Design in Travelling--Visit to Ireland and Scotland 172 CHAPTER XIX. The Edinburgh Lions--Literary Celebrities--Jeffrey in the Forum--Sir Walter at the Desk--Riding with Scotch Ladies--Beautiful Scenery--A Scotch Mist 179 CHAPTER XX. Blackwood--The General Assembly--Sir Walter Scott--Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart--Origin of "Tam O'Shanter"--Last Words of Scott 187 CHAPTER XXI. En Route for London--"The Laird o'Cockpen"--Localities of Legendary Fame--Difference between English and American Scenery 195 CHAPTER XXII. London again--Jacob Perkins and his Steam-gun--Dukes of Wellington, Sussex, and York--British Ladies at a Review--House of Commons and its Orators--Catalani--Distinguished Foreigners--Edward Irving compared to Edmund Kean--Byron lying in State 202 CHAPTER XXIII. Return to the United States--Boston and its Worthies--Business Operations--Ackermann's Forget-Me-Not the Parent of all other Annuals--The American Species--Their Decline 216 CHAPTER XXIV. "The Token"--N. P. Willis and Nathaniel Hawthorne--Comparison between them--Lady Authors--Publishers' Profits--Authors and Publishers 222 CHAPTER XXV. I become an Author--His real Name a profound Secret--How it was divulged--Great Success--Illness--The Doctors disagree--English Imitations--Conduct of a London Bookseller--Objections to Parley's Tales--Mother Goose 232 CHAPTER XXVI. Children my first Patrons--A Visit to New Orleans--Feelings of Humiliation--The Mice eat my Papers--A Wrong Calculation 251 CHAPTER XXVII. I make a Speech--Lecture on Ireland--Politics--Personal Attacks--Become a Senator--The "Fifteen Gallon Law"--A Pamphlet in its Favor--"My Neighbor Smith"--A Political Career unprofitable 257 CHAPTER XXVIII. Am appointed U. S. Consul to Paris--Louis XVIII.--A few Jottings upon French Notabilities--Cure for Hydrocephalus--Unsettled State of Things in Paris 266 CHAPTER XXIX. Louis Philippe and the Revolution--List of Grievances--The Mob at the Madeleine--Barricades--"Down with Guizot!"--The Fight commenced--Flight of the King and Queen--Scene in the Chamber of Deputies--Sack of the Tuileries 274 CHAPTER XXX. After the Revolution--"Funeral of the Victims"--The Constituent Assembly--Paris in a State of Siege--Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon chosen President 296 CHAPTER XXXI. The Author's Duties as Consul--Aspect of Things in Paris--Louis Napoleon's Designs--The 2nd of December, 1852--The New Reign of Terror complete--Louis Napoleon as Emperor--Out of Office--Return to New York--Conclusion 301 CHAPTER XXXII. The Death of Peter Parley 313 ILLUSTRATIONS. AUNT DELIGHT (_Frontispiece_) MAKING MAPLE SUGAR 37 DEACON OLMSTEAD 82 FIRST ADVENTURE ON THE SEA 119 THE COLD FRIDAY 124 WHITTLING 167 PETER PARLEY'S OWN STORY. CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND PARENTAGE--THE OLD HOUSE--RIDGEFIELD--THE MEETING-HOUSE--PARSON MEAD--KEELER'S TAVERN--THE CANNON-BALL--LIEUTENANT SMITH. In the western part of the State of Connecticut is a small town named Ridgefield. This title is descriptive, and indicates the general form and position of the place. It is, in fact, a collection of hills, rolled into one general and commanding elevation. On the west is a ridge of mountains, forming the boundary between the States of Connecticut and New York; to the south the land spreads out in wooded undulations to Long Island Sound; east and north, a succession of hills, some rising up against the sky and others fading away in the distance, bound the horizon. In this town, in an antiquated and rather dilapidated house of shingles and clapboards, I was born on the 19th of August, 1793. My father, Samuel Goodrich, was minister of the Congregational Church of that place, and there was no other religious society and no other clergyman in the town. He was the son of Elizur Goodrich, a distinguished minister of the same persuasion at Durham, Connecticut. Two of his brothers were men of eminence--the late Chauncey Goodrich of Hartford, and Elizur Goodrich of New Haven. My mother was a daughter of John Ely, a physician of Saybrook, whose name figures, not unworthily, in the annals of the revolutionary war. I was the sixth child of a family of ten children, two of whom died in infancy, and eight of whom lived to be married and settled in life. My father's annual salary for the first twenty-five years, and during his ministry at Ridgefield, averaged four hundred dollars a-year: the last twenty-five years, during which he was settled at Berlin, near Hartford, his stipend was about five hundred dollars a-year. He was wholly without patrimony, and owing to peculiar circumstances, which will be hereafter explained, my mother had not even the ordinary outfit when they began their married life. Yet they so brought up their family of eight children, that they all attained respectable positions in life, and at my father's death he left an estate of four thousand dollars. These facts throw light upon the simple annals of a country clergyman in Connecticut, half-a-century ago; they also bear testimony to the thrifty energy and wise frugality of my parents, and especially of my mother, who was the guardian deity of the household. Ridgefield belongs to the county of Fairfield, and is now a handsome town, as well on account of its artificial as its natural advantages; with some two thousand inhabitants. It is fourteen miles from Long Island Sound, of which its many swelling hills afford charming views. The main street is a mile in length, and is now embellished with several handsome houses. About the middle of it there is, or was, some forty years ago, a white, wooden Meeting-house, which belonged to my father's congregation. It stood in a small grassy square, the favorite pasture of numerous flocks of geese, and the frequent playground of school-boys, especially on Sunday afternoons. Close by the front door ran the public road, and the pulpit, facing it, looked out upon it on fair summer Sundays, as I well remember by a somewhat amusing incident. In the contiguous town of Lower Salem dwelt an aged minister, by the name of Mead. He was all his life marked with eccentricity, and about those days of which I speak, his mind was rendered yet more erratic by a touch of paralysis. He was, however, still able to preach, and on a certain Sunday, having exchanged with my father, he was in the pulpit and engaged in making his opening prayer. He had already begun his invocation, when David P----, who was the Jehu of that generation, dashed by the front door upon a horse, a clever animal, of which he was but too proud--in a full, round trot. The echo of the clattering hoofs filled the church, which, being of wood, was sonorous as a drum, and arrested the attention, as well of the minister as the congregation, even before the rider had reached it. The minister was fond of horses, almost to frailty; and, from the first, his practised ear perceived that the sounds came from a beast of bottom. When the animal shot by the door, he could not restrain his admiration; which was accordingly thrust into the very marrow of his prayer "We pray Thee, O Lord, in a particular and peculiar manner--_that's a real smart critter_--to forgive us our manifold trespasses, in a particular and peculiar manner," &c. I have somewhere heard of a traveller on horseback, who, just at eventide, being uncertain of his road, inquired of a person he chanced to meet, the way to Barkhamstead. "You are in Barkhamstead now," was the reply. "Yes, but where is the centre of the place?" "It hasn't got any centre." "Well, but direct me to the tavern." "There ain't any tavern." "Yes, but the meeting-house?" "Why didn't you ask that afore? There it is, over the hill!" So, in those days, in Connecticut, as doubtless in other parts of New England, the meeting-house was the great geographical monument, the acknowledged meridian of every town and village. Even a place without a centre, or a tavern, had its house of worship; and this was its point of reckoning. It was, indeed, something more. It was the town-hall, where all public meetings were held for civil purposes; it was the temple of religion, the pillar of society, religious, social, and moral, to the people around. It will not be considered strange, then, if I look back to the meeting-house of Ridgefield, as not only a most revered edifice, but as in some sense the starting-point of my existence. Here, at least, linger many of my most cherished remembrances. A few rods to the south of this there was, and still is, a tavern, kept in my day by Squire Keeler. This institution ranked second only to the meeting-house; for the tavern of those days was generally the centre of news, and the gathering-place for balls, musical entertainments, public shows, &c.; and this particular tavern had special claims to notice. It was, in the first place, on the great thoroughfare of the day, between Boston and New York; and had become a general and favorite stopping-place for travellers. It was, moreover, kept by a hearty old gentleman, who united in his single person the varied functions of publican, postmaster, representative, justice of the peace, and I know not what else. He, besides, had a thrifty wife, whose praise was in all the land. She loved her customers, especially members of Congress, governors, and others in authority who wore powder and white top-boots, and who migrated to and fro in the lofty leisure of their own coaches. She was, indeed, a woman of mark; and her life has its moral. She scoured and scrubbed, and kept things going, until she was seventy years old; at which time, during an epidemic, she was threatened with an attack. She, however, declared that she had not time to be sick, and kept on working; so that the disease passed her by, though it made sad havoc all around her, especially with more dainty dames who had leisure to follow the fashion. Besides all this, there was an historical interest attached to Keeler's tavern; for, deeply imbedded in the north-eastern corner-post, there was a cannon-ball, planted there during the famous fight with the British in 1777. It was one of the chief historical monuments of the town, and was visited by all curious travellers who came that way. Little can the present generation imagine with what glowing interest, what ecstatic wonder, what big, round eyes, the rising generation of Ridgefield, half a century ago, listened to the account of the fight, as given by Lieutenant Smith, himself a witness of the event and a participator in the conflict, sword in hand. This personage, whom I shall have occasion again to introduce to my readers, was, in my time, a justice of the peace, town librarian, and general oracle in such loose matters as geography, history, and law; then about as uncertain and unsettled in Ridgefield, as is now the longitude of Lilliput. He had a long, lean face; long, lank, silvery hair; and an unctuous, whining voice. With these advantages, he spoke with the authority of a seer, and especially in all things relating to the revolutionary war. The agitating scenes of that event, so really great in itself, so unspeakably important to the country, had transpired some five-and-twenty years before. The existing generation of middle age had all witnessed it; nearly all had shared in its vicissitudes. On every hand there were corporals, serjeants, lieutenants, captains, and colonels, no strutting fops in militia buckram, raw blue and buff, all fuss and feathers, but soldiers, men who had seen service and won laurels in the tented field. Every old man, every old woman, had stories to tell, radiant with the vivid realities of personal observation or experience. Some had seen Washington, and some Old Put; one was at the capture of Ticonderoga under Ethan Allen; another was at Bennington, and actually heard old Stark say, "Victory this day, or my wife Molly is a widow!" Some were at the taking of Stony Point, and others in the sanguinary struggle of Monmouth. One had witnessed the execution of André, and another had been present at the capture of Burgoyne. The time which had elapsed since these events had served only to magnify and glorify these scenes, as well as the actors, especially in the imagination of the rising generation. If perchance we could now dig up and galvanize into life a contemporary of Julius Cæsar, who was present and saw him cross the Rubicon, and could tell us how he looked and what he said, we should listen with somewhat of the greedy wonder with which the boys of Ridgefield listened to Lieutenant Smith, when of a Saturday afternoon, seated on the stoop of Keeler's tavern, he discoursed upon the discovery of America by Columbus, Braddock's defeat, and the old French war; the latter a real epic, embellished with romantic episodes of Indian massacres and captivities. When he came to the Revolution, and spoke of the fight at Ridgefield, and punctuated his discourse with a present cannon-ball, sunk six inches deep in a corner-post of the very house in which we sat, you may well believe it was something more than words--it was, indeed, "action, action, glorious action!" How little can people now-a-days comprehend or appreciate these things! CHAPTER II. THE NEW HOUSE--HIGH RIDGE--NATHAN KELLOGG'S SPY-GLASS--THE SHOVEL--THE BLACK PATCH IN THE ROAD--DISTRUST OF BRITISH INFLUENCE--OLD CHICH-ES-TER--AUNT DELIGHT--RETURN AFTER TWENTY YEARS. My memory goes distinctly back to the year 1797, when I was four years old. At that time a great event happened--great in the narrow horizon of childhood: we removed from the Old House to the New House! This latter, situated on a road tending westward and branching from the main street, my father had just built; and it then appeared to me quite a stately mansion and very beautiful, inasmuch as it was painted red behind and white in front: most of the dwellings thereabouts being of the dun complexion which pine-boards and chestnut-shingles assume, from exposure to the weather. Long after, having been absent twenty years, I revisited this my early home, and found it shrunk into a very small and ordinary two-story dwelling, wholly divested of its paint, and scarcely thirty feet square. This building, apart from all other dwellings, was situated on what is called High Ridge, a long hill, looking down upon the village, and commanding an extensive view of the surrounding country. From our upper windows, this was at once beautiful and diversified. On the south, as I have said, the hills sloped in a sea of undulations down to Long Island Sound, a distance of some fourteen miles. This beautiful sheet of water, like a strip of pale sky, with the island itself, more deeply tinted, beyond, was visible in fair weather, for a stretch of sixty miles, to the naked eye. The vessels, even the smaller ones, sloops, schooners, and fishing-craft, could be seen, creeping like insects over the surface. With a spy-glass--and my father had one bequeathed to him by Nathan Kellogg, a sailor, who made rather a rough voyage of life, but anchored at last in the bosom of the Church, as this bequest intimates--we could see the masts, sails, and rigging. It was a poor, dim affair, compared with modern instruments of the kind; but to me, its revelations of an element which then seemed as beautiful, as remote, and as mystical as the heavens, surpassed the wonders of the firmament. To the west, at a distance of three miles, lay the undulating ridge of hills, cliffs, and precipices already mentioned, and which bear the name of West Mountain. They are some five hundred feet in height, and from our point of view had an imposing appearance. Beyond them, in the far distance, glimmered the peaks of the highlands along the Hudson. These two prominent features of the spreading landscape--the sea and the mountain, ever present, yet ever remote--impressed themselves on my young imagination with all the enchantment which distance lends to the view. I have never lost my first love. Never, even now, do I catch a glimpse of either of these two rivals of nature, such as I first learned them by heart, but I feel a gush of emotion as if I had suddenly met with the cherished companions of my childhood. In after days, even the purple velvet of the Apennines and the poetic azure of the Mediterranean, have derived additional beauty to my imagination from mingling with these vivid associations of my childhood. It was to the New House, then, thus situated, that we removed, as I have stated, when I was four years old. On that great occasion, everything available for draught or burden was put in requisition; and I was permitted, or required, I forget which, to carry the _peel_, as it was then called, but which would now bear the title of "shovel." Birmingham had not then been heard of in those parts, or at least was a great way off; so this particular utensil had been forged expressly for my father by David Olmstead, the blacksmith, as was the custom in those days. I recollect it well, and can state that it was a sturdy piece of iron, the handle being four feet long, with a knob at the end. As I carried it along, I doubtless felt a touch of that consciousness of power which must have filled the breast of Samson as he bore off the gates of Gaza. I recollect perfectly well to have perspired under the operation, for the distance of our migration was half-a-mile, and the season was summer. One thing more I remember: I was barefoot; and as we went up the lane which diverged from the main road to the house, we passed over a patch of earth blackened by cinders, where my feet were hurt by pieces of melted glass and metal. I inquired what this meant, and was told that here a house was burned down by the British troops already mentioned, and then in full retreat, as a signal to the ships that awaited them in the Sound, where they had landed, and where they intended to embark. This detail may seem trifling; but it is not without significance. It was the custom in those days for boys to go barefoot in the mild season. I recollect few things in life more delightful than, in the spring, to cast away my shoes and stockings, and have a glorious scamper over the fields. Many a time, contrary to the express injunctions of my mother, have I stolen this bliss; and many a time have I been punished by a severe cold for my disobedience. Yet the bliss then seemed a compensation for the retribution. In these exercises I felt as if stepping on air; as if leaping aloft on wings. I was so impressed with the exultant emotions thus experienced, that I repeated them a thousand times in happy dreams; especially in my younger days. Even now these visions sometimes come to me in sleep, though with a lurking consciousness that they are but a mockery of the past; sad monitors of the change which time has wrought upon me. As to the black patch in the lane, that, too, had its meaning. The story of a house burned down by a foreign army seized upon my imagination. Every time I passed the place I ruminated upon it, and put a hundred questions as to how and when it happened. I was soon master of the whole story, and of other similar events which had occurred all over the country. I was thus initiated into the spirit of that day, and which has never wholly subsided in our country; inasmuch as the war of the Revolution was alike unjust in its origin, and cruel as to the manner in which it was waged. It was, moreover, fought on our own soil; thus making the whole people share, personally, in its miseries. There was scarcely a family in Connecticut whom it did not visit, either immediately or remotely, with the shadows of mourning and desolation. The British nation, to whom this conflict was a foreign war, are slow to comprehend the popular dislike of England, here in America. Could they know the familiar annals of our towns and villages--burn, plundered, sacked--with all the attendant horrors, for the avowed purpose of punishing a nation of rebels, and those rebels of their own kith and kin: could they be made acquainted with the deeds of those twenty thousand Hessians, sent hither by King George, and who have left their name in our language as a word signifying brigands, who sell their blood and commit murder for hire: could they thus read the history of minds and hearts, influenced at the fountains of life for several generations, they would perhaps comprehend, if they could not approve, the habitual distrust of British influence, which lingers among our people. About three-fourths of a mile from my father's house, on the winding road to Lower Salem, which I have already mentioned, and which bore the name of West Lane, was the school-house where I took my first lessons, and received the foundations of my very slender education. I have since been sometimes asked where I graduated: my reply has always been, "At West Lane." Generally speaking, this has ended the inquiry; whether, because my questioners have confounded this venerable institution with "Lane Seminary," or have not thought it worth while to risk an exposure of their ignorance as to the college in which I was educated, I am unable to say. The site of the school-house was a triangular piece of land, measuring perhaps a rood in extent, and lying, according to the custom of those days, at the meeting of four roads. The ground hereabouts--as everywhere else in Ridgefield--was exceedingly stony; and, in making the pathway, the stones had been thrown out right and left, and there remained in heaps on either side, from generation to generation. All around was bleak and desolate. Loose, squat stone walls, with innumerable breaches, inclosed the adjacent fields. A few tufts of elder, with here and there a patch of briers and pokeweed, flourished in the gravelly soil. Not a tree, however, remained; save an aged chestnut, at the western angel of the space. This, certainly, had not been spared for shade or ornament, but probably because it would have cost too much labor to cut it down; for it was of ample girth. At all events, it was the oasis in our desert during summer; and in autumn, as the burrs disclosed its fruit, it resembled a besieged city; the boys, like so many catapults, hurled at it stones and sticks, until every nut had capitulated. Two houses only were at hand: one, surrounded by an ample barn, a teeming orchard, and an enormous wood-pile, belonging to Granther Baldwin; the other was the property of "Old Chich-es-ter;" an uncouth, unsocial being, whom everybody, for some reason or other, seemed to despise and shun. His house was of stone, and of one story. He had a cow, which every year had a calf. He had a wife--dirty and uncombed, and vaguely reported to have been brought from the old country. This is about the whole history of the man, so far as it is written in the authentic traditions of the parish. His premises, an acre in extent, consisted of a tongue of land between two of the converging roads. No boy, that I ever heard of, ventured to cast a stone, or to make an incursion into this territory, though it lay close to the school-house. I have often, in passing, peeped timidly over the walls, and caught glimpses of a stout man with a drab coat, drab breeches, and drab gaiters, prowling about the house; but never did I discover him outside of his own dominion. I know it was darkly intimated he had been tarred and feathered in the revolutionary war; but as to the rest, he was a perfect myth. The school-house itself consisted of rough, unpainted clapboards, upon a wooden frame. It was plastered within, and contained two apartments, a little entry, taken out of a corner for a wardrobe, and the school-room proper. The chimney was of stone, and pointed with mortar, which, by the way, had been dug into a honeycomb by uneasy and enterprising penknives. The fireplace was six feet wide and four feet deep. The flue was so ample and so perpendicular, that the rain, sleet, and snow fell directly to the hearth. In winter, the battle for life with green fizzling fuel, which was brought in lengths and cut up by the scholars, was a stern one. Not unfrequently the wood, gushing with sap as it was, chanced to go out, and as there was no living without fire, the thermometer being ten or twenty degrees below zero, the school was dismissed, whereat all the scholars rejoiced aloud, not having the fear of the schoolmaster before their eyes. It was the custom at this place to have a woman's school in the summer months, and this was attended only by young children. It was, in fact, what we now call a primary or infant school. In winter, a man was employed as teacher, and then the girls and boys of the neighborhood, up to the age of eighteen, or even twenty, were among the pupils. It was not uncommon, at this season, to have forty scholars crowded into this little building. I was about six years old when I first went to school. My teacher was Aunt Delight, that is Delight Benedict, a maiden lady of fifty, short and bent, of sallow complexion and solemn aspect. I remember the first day with perfect distinctness. I went alone--for I was familiar with the road, it being that which passed by our old house. I carried a little basket, with bread and butter within, for my dinner, and this was covered over with a white cloth. When I had proceeded about half way, I lifted the cover, and debated whether I would not eat my dinner then. I believe it was a sense of duty only that prevented my doing so, for in those happy days I always had a keen appetite. Bread and butter were then infinitely superior to _pâté de foie gras_ now; but still, thanks to my training, I had also a conscience. As my mother had given me the food for dinner, I did not think it right to convert it into lunch, even though I was strongly tempted. I think we had seventeen scholars--boys and girls--mostly of my own age. Among them were some of my after-companions. I have since met several of them--one at Savannah and two at Mobile--respectably established, and with families around them. Some remain, and are now among the grey old men of the town: the names of others I have seen inscribed on the tombstones of their native village. And the rest--where are they? The school being assembled, we were all seated upon benches, made of what were called _slabs_--that is, boards having the exterior or rounded part of the log on one side: as they were useless for other purposes, these were converted into school-benches, the rounded part down. They had each four supports, consisting of straddling wooden legs set into augur-holes. Our own legs swayed in the air, for they were too short to touch the floor. Oh, what an awe fell over me, when we were all seated and silence reigned around! The children were called up one by one to Aunt Delight, who sat on a low chair, and required each, as a preliminary, "to make his manners," which consisted of a small, sudden nod. She then placed the spelling-book--which was Dilworth's--before the pupil, and with a buck-handled penknife pointed, one by one, to the letters of the alphabet, saying, "What's that?" If the child knew his letters, the "what's that?" very soon ran on thus:-- "What's that?" "A." "'Stha-a-t?" "B." "Sna-a-a-t?" "C." "Sna-a-a-t?" "D." &c. I looked upon these operations with intense curiosity and no small respect, until my own turn came. I went up to the schoolmistress with some emotion, and when she said, rather spitefully, as I thought, "Make your obeisance!" my little intellects all fled away, and I did nothing. Having waited a second, gazing at me with indignation, she laid her hand on the top of my head, and gave it a jerk which made my teeth clash. I believe I bit my tongue a little; at all events, my sense of dignity was offended, and when she pointed to A, and asked what it was, it swam before me dim and hazy, and as big as a full moon. She repeated the question, but I was doggedly silent. Again, a third time, she said, "What's that?" I replied: "Why don't you tell me what it is? I didn't come here to learn you your letters." I have not the slightest remembrance of this, for my brains were all a wool-gathering; but as Aunt Delight affirmed it to be a fact, and it passed into a tradition in my family, I put it in. What immediately followed I do not clearly remember, but one result is distinctly traced in my memory. In the evening of this eventful day the schoolmistress paid my parents a visit, and recounted to their astonished ears this my awful contempt of authority. My father, after hearing the story, got up and went away; but my mother, who was a careful disciplinarian, told me not to do so again! I always had a suspicion that both of them smiled on one side of their faces, even while they seemed to sympathize with the old lady on the other; still, I do not affirm it, for I am bound to say of both my parents, that I never knew them, even in trifles, say one thing while they meant another. I believe I achieved the alphabet that summer, but my after progress, for a long time, I do not remember. Two years later I went to the winter school at the same place, kept by Lewis Olmstead--a man who made a business of ploughing, mowing, carting manure, &c., in the summer, and of teaching school in the winter; with a talent for music at all seasons, wherefore he became chorister upon occasion, when, peradventure, Deacon Hawley could not officiate. He was a celebrity in ciphering, and Squire Seymour declared that he was the greatest "arithmeticker" in Fairfield county. All I remember of his person is his hand, which seemed to me as big as Goliath's, judging by the claps of thunder it made in my ears on one or two occasions. The next step of my progress which is marked in my memory, is the spelling of words of two syllables. I did not go very regularly to school, but by the time I was ten years old I had learned to write, and had made a little progress in arithmetic. There was not a grammar, a geography, or a history of any kind in the school. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the only things taught, and these very indifferently--not wholly from the stupidity of the teacher, but because he had forty scholars, and the custom of the age required no more than he performed. I did as well as the other scholars, certainly no better. I had excellent health and joyous spirits; in leaping, running, and wrestling I had but one superior of my age, and that was Stephen Olmstead, a snug-built fellow, smaller than myself, and who, despite our rivalry, was my chosen friend and companion. I seemed to live for play: alas! how the world has changed since then! After I had left my native town for some twenty years, I returned and paid it a visit. Among the monuments that stood high in my memory was the West Lane school-house. Unconsciously carrying with me the measures of childhood, I had supposed it to be thirty feet square; how had it dwindled when I came to estimate it by the new standards I had formed! It was in all things the same, yet wholly changed to me. What I had deemed a respectable edifice, as it now stood before me was only a weather-beaten little shed, which, upon being measured, I found to be less than twenty feet square. It happened to be a warm summer day, and I ventured to enter the place. I found a girl, some eighteen years old, keeping a ma'am school for about twenty scholars, some of whom were studying Parley's Geography. The mistress was the daughter of one of my schoolmates, and some of the boys and girls were grandchildren of the little brood which gathered under the wing of Aunt Delight, when I was an abecedarian. None of them, not even the schoolmistress, had ever heard of me. The name of my father, as having ministered to the people of Ridgefield in some bygone age, was faintly traced in their recollection. As to Peter Parley, whose geography they were learning, they supposed him to be a decrepit old gentleman hobbling about on a crutch, a long way off, for whom, nevertheless, they had a certain affection, inasmuch as he had made geography into a story-book. The frontispiece picture of the old fellow, with his gouty foot in a chair, threatening the boys that if they touched his tender toe he would tell them no more stories, secured their respect, and placed him among the saints in the calendar of their young hearts. "Well," thought I, "if this goes on, I may yet rival Mother Goose!" I hope the reader will not imagine that I am thinking too little of his amusement and too much of my own, if I stop a few moments to note the lively recollections I entertain of the joyousness of my early life, and not of mine only, but that of my playmates and companions. In looking back to those early days, the whole circle of the seasons seems to me almost like one unbroken morning of pleasure. I was of course subjected to the usual crosses incident to my age, those painful and mysterious visitations sent upon children--the measles, mumps, whooping-cough, and the like; usually regarded as retributions for the false step of our mother Eve in the Garden; but they have almost passed from my memory, as if overflowed and borne away by the general drift of happiness which filled my bosom. Among these calamities, one monument alone remains--the small-pox. It was in the year 1798, as I well remember, that my father's house was converted into a hospital, or, as it was then called, a "pest-house," where, with some dozen other children, I was inoculated for this disease, then the scourge and terror of the world. The lane in which our house was situated was fenced up, north and south, so as to cut off all intercourse with the world around. A flag was raised, and upon it were inscribed the ominous words, "[Hand symbol pointing right] SMALL-POX." My uncle and aunt, from New Haven, arrived with their three children. Half-a-dozen others of the neighborhood were gathered together, making, with our own children, somewhat over a dozen subjects for the experiment. When all was ready, like Noah and his family, we were shut in. Provisions were deposited in a basket at a point agreed upon, down the lane. Thus we were cut off from the world, excepting only that Dr. Perry, the physician, ventured to visit us. As to myself, the disease passed lightly over, leaving, however, its indisputable autographs on various parts of my body. Were it not for these testimonials, I should almost suspect that I had escaped the disease, for I only remember, among my symptoms and my sufferings, a little headache, and the privation of salt and butter upon my hasty-pudding. My restoration to these privileges I distinctly recollect: doubtless these gave me more pleasure than the clean bill of health which they implied. Several of the patients suffered severely, and among them my brother and one of my cousins. But although there is evidence that I was subject to the usual drawbacks upon the happiness of childhood, these were so few that they have passed from my mind; and those early years, as I look back to them, seem to have flowed on in one bright current of uninterrupted enjoyment. CHAPTER III. RIDGEFIELD SOCIETY--TRADES AND PROFESSIONS--CHIMNEY-CORNER COURTSHIPS--DOMESTIC ECONOMY--DRAM-DRINKING--FAMILY PRODUCTS--MOLLY GREGORY AND CHURCH MUSIC--TRAVELLING ARTISANS--FESTIVAL OF THE QUILTS--CLERICAL PATRONAGE--RAISING A CHURCH--THE RETIRED TAILOR AND HIS FARM. Let me now give you a sketch of Ridgefield and of the people, how they lived, thought, and felt, at the beginning of the present century. It will give you a good idea of the rustic life of New England fifty years ago. From what I have already said, you will easily imagine the prominent physical characteristics and aspect of my native town: a general mass of hills, rising up in a crescent of low mountains, and commanding a wide view on every side. The soil was naturally hard, and thickly sown with stones of every size. The fields were divided by rude stone walls, and the surface of most of them was dotted with gathered heaps of stones and rocks, thus clearing spaces for cultivation, yet leaving a large portion of the land still encumbered. The climate was severe, on account of the elevation of the site, yet this was perhaps fully compensated by its salubrity. Yet, despite the somewhat forbidding nature of the soil and climate of Ridgefield, it may be regarded as presenting a favorable example of New England country life and society at the time I speak of. The town was originally settled by a sturdy race of men, mostly the immediate descendants of English emigrants, some from Milford. Their migration over an intervening space of savage hills, rocks and ravines, into a territory so uninviting, and their speedy conversion of this into a thriving and smiling village, bear witness to their courage and energy. At the time referred to, the date of my earliest recollection, the society of Ridgefield was exclusively English. I remember but one Irishman, one negro, and one Indian in the town. The first had begged and blarneyed his way from Long Island, where he had been wrecked; the second was a liberated slave; and the last was the vestige of a tribe which dwelt of yore in a swampy tract, the name of which I have forgotten. We had a professional beggar, called Jagger, who had served in the armies of more than one of the Georges, and insisted upon crying, "God save the king!" even on the 4th of July, and when openly threatened by the boys with a gratuitous ride on a rail. We had one settled pauper, Mrs. Yabacomb, who, for the first dozen years of my life, was my standard type for the witch of Endor. Nearly all the inhabitants of Ridgefield were farmers, with the few mechanics that were necessary to carry on society in a somewhat primeval state. Even the persons not professionally devoted to agriculture had each his farm, or at least his garden and home lot, with his pigs, poultry, and cattle. The population might have been 1200, comprising two hundred families. All could read and write, but in point of fact, beyond the Almanac and Watts' Psalms and Hymns, their literary acquirements had little scope. There were, I think, four newspapers, all weekly, published in the State: one at Hartford, one at New London, one at New Haven, and one at Litchfield. There were, however, not more than three subscribers to all these in our village. We had, however, a public library of some two hundred volumes, and, what was of equal consequence, the town was on the road which was then the great thoroughfare, connecting Boston with New York; and hence we had means of intelligence from travellers constantly passing through the place, which kept us acquainted with the march of events. If Ridgefield was thus rather above the average of Connecticut villages in civilization, I suppose the circumstances and modes of life in my father's family were somewhat above those of most people around us. We had a farm of forty acres, with four cows, two horses, and some dozen sheep, to which may be added a stock of poultry, including a flock of geese. My father carried on the farm, besides preaching two sermons a-week, and visiting the sick, attending funerals, solemnizing marriages, &c. He laid out the beds and planted the garden; pruned the fruit-trees, and worked with the men in the meadow in hay-time. He generally cut the corn-stalks himself, and always shelled the ears; the latter being done by drawing them across the handle of the frying-pan, fastened over a wash-tub. I was sometimes permitted, as an indulgence, to share this favorite employment with my father. With these and a few other exceptions, our agricultural operations were carried on by hired help. It was the custom in New England, at the time I speak of, for country lawyers, physicians, clergymen, even doctors of divinity, to partake of these homespun labors. In the library of the Athenæum, at Hartford, is a collection of almanacs, formerly belonging to John Cotton Smith--one of the most elegant and accomplished men of his time--a distinguished Member of Congress, Judge of the Superior Court, and several years Governor of the State; in looking it over, I observed such notes as the following, made with his own hand: "Cut my barley," "began rye harvest," "planted field of potatoes," &c.: thus showing his personal attention to, if not his participation in, the affairs of the farm. Nearly all the judges of the Superior Court occasionally worked in the field, in these hearty old federal times. But I returned to Ridgefield. The household, as well as political, economy of those days lay in this,--that every family lived as much as possible within itself. Money was scarce, wages being about fifty cents a-day, though these were generally paid in meat, vegetables, and other articles of use--seldom in money. There was not a factory of any kind in the place.[1] There was a butcher, but he only went from house to house to slaughter the cattle and swine of his neighbors. There was a tanner, but he only dressed other people's skins. There was a clothier, but he generally fulled and dressed other people's cloth. All this is typical of the mechanical operations of the place. Even dyeing blue a portion of the wool, so as to make linsey-woolsey for short gowns, aprons, and blue-mixed stockings--vital necessities in those days--was a domestic operation. During the autumn, a dye-tub in the chimney corner--thus placed so as to be cherished by the genial heat--was as familiar in all thrifty houses as the Bible or the back-log. It was covered with a board, and formed a cosy seat in the wide-mouthed fireplace, especially of a chill evening. When the night had waned, and the family had retired, it frequently became the anxious seat of the lover, who was permitted to carry on his courtship, the object of his addresses sitting demurely in the opposite corner. Some of the first families in Connecticut, I suspect, could their full annals be written, would find their foundations to have been laid in these chimney-corner courtships. Being thus exposed, the dye-tub was the frequent subject of distressing and exciting accidents. Among the early, indelible incidents in my memory, one of the most prominent is turning this over. Nothing so roused the indignation of thrifty housewives, for, besides the stain left upon the floor by the blue, a most disagreeable odor was diffused by it. To this general system of domestic economy our family was not an exception. Every autumn, it was a matter of course that we had a fat ox or a fat cow ready for slaughter. One full barrel was salted down; the hams were cut out, slightly salted, and hung up in the chimney for a few days, and thus became "dried" or "hung beef," then as essential as bread. Pork was managed in a similar way, though even on a larger scale, for two barrels were indispensable. A few pieces, as the spare-ribs, &c., were distributed to the neighbors, who paid in kind when they killed their swine. Mutton and poultry came in their turn, all from our own stock, except when on Thanksgiving-day some of the magnates gave the parson a turkey. This, let me observe, in those good old times, was a bird of mark; no timid, crouching biped, with downcast head and pallid countenance, but stalking like a lord, and having wattles red as a "banner bathed in slaughter." His beard was long, shining, and wiry. There was, in fact, something of the native bird still in him, for though the race was nearly extinct, a few wild flocks lingered in the remote woods. Occasionally, in the depth of winter, and towards the early spring, these stole to the barnyard, and held communion with their civilized cousins. Severe battles ensued among the leaders for the favors of the fair, and as the wild cocks always conquered, the vigor of the race was kept up. Our bread was made of rye, mixed with Indian meal. Wheat bread was reserved for the sacrament and company; a proof not of its superiority, but of its scarcity and consequent estimation. All the vegetables came from our garden and farm. The fuel was supplied by our own woods--sweet-scented hickory, snapping chestnut, odoriferous oak, and reeking, fizzling ash--the hot juice of the latter, by the way, being a sovereign antidote for the earache. These were laid in huge piles, all alive with sap, on the tall, gaunt andirons. The building of a fire, a real architectural achievement, was always begun by daybreak. There was first a back-log, from fifteen to four-and-twenty inches in diameter, and five feet long, imbedded in the ashes; then came a top log, then a fore stick, then a middle stick, and then a heap of kindlings, reaching from the bowels down to the bottom. Above all was a pyramid of smaller fragments, artfully adjusted, with spaces for the blaze. Friction matches had not then been invented. So, if there were no coals left from the last night's fire, and none to be borrowed from the neighbors, resort was had to flint, steel, and tinder-box. Often, when the flint was dull, and the steel soft, and the tinder damp, the striking of fire was a task requiring both energy and patience. If the pile on the andirons was skilfully constructed, the spark being applied, there was soon a furious stinging smoke; but the forked flame soon began to lick the sweating sticks above, and by the time the family had arisen, and assembled in the "keeping-room," there was a roaring blaze, defying the bitter blasts of winter, which found abundant admittance through the crannies of the doors and windows. To feed the family fire in those days, during the severe season, was fully one man's work. But to go on with our household history. Sugar was partially supplied by our maple-trees. These were tapped in March, the sap being collected, and boiled down in the woods. This was wholly a domestic operation, and one in which all the children rejoiced, each taking his privilege of tasting, at every stage of the manufacture. The chief supply of sugar, however, was from the West Indies. [Illustration: MAKING MAPLE-SUGAR.] Rum was largely consumed, but our distilleries had scarcely begun. A half-pint of it was given as a matter of course to every day laborer, more particularly in the summer season. In all families, rich or poor, it was offered to male visitors as an essential point of hospitality, or even good manners. Women--I beg pardon--ladies, took their schnapps, then named "Hopkins' Elixir," which was the most delicious and seductive means of getting tipsy that has been invented. Crying babies were silenced with hot toddy. Every man imbibed his morning dram, and this was esteemed temperance. There is a story of a preacher, about those days, who thus lectured his parish: "I say nothing, my beloved brethren, against taking a little bitters before breakfast, and after breakfast; especially if you are used to it. What I contend against is, this dramming, dramming, dramming, at all hours of the day. There are some men who take a glass at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and at four in the afternoon. I do not purpose to contend against old-established customs, my brethren, rendered respectable by time and authority; but this dramming, dramming, is a crying sin in the land." As to brandy, I scarcely heard of it, so far as I can recollect, till I was sixteen years old, and, as an apprentice in a country store, was called upon to sell it. Cider was the universal table beverage. Brandy and whisky soon after came into use. I remember, in my boyhood, to have seen a strange zigzag tin tube, denominated a "still," belonging to one of our neighbors, converting, drop by drop, certain innocent liquids into "fire-water." But, in the days I speak of, French brandy was confined to the houses of the rich, and to the drug-shop. Wine, in our country towns, was then almost exclusively used for the sacrament. There was, of course, no baker in Ridgefield; each family not only made its own bread, cakes, and pies, but its own soap, candles, butter, cheese, and the like. The manufacture of linen and woollen cloth was no less a domestic operation. Cotton--that is, raw cotton--was then wholly unknown among us at the North, except as a mere curiosity, produced somewhere in the tropics; but whether it grew on a plant, or an animal, was not clearly settled in the public mind. We raised our own flax, rotted it, hackled it, dressed it, and spun it. The little wheel, turned by the foot, had its place, and was as familiar as if it had been a member of the family. How often have I seen my mother, and my grandmother, too, sit down to it--though this, as I remember, was for the purpose of spinning some finer kind of thread--the burden of the spinning being done by a neighbor of ours, Sally St. John. By the way, she was a good-hearted, cheerful old maid, who petted me beyond my deserts. I grieve to say, that I repaid her partiality by many mischievous pranks; for which I should have been roundly punished, had not the good creature forgiven and concealed my offences. I did, indeed, get fillipped for catching her foot one day in a steel-trap; but I declare that I was innocent of malice prepense, inasmuch as I had set the trap for a rat, instead of the said Sally. Nevertheless, the verdict was against me; not wholly on account of my misdemeanor in this particular instance, but because, if I did not deserve punishment for that, I had deserved it, and should deserve it for something else; and so it was safe to administer it. The wool was also spun in the family; partly by my sisters, and partly by Molly Gregory, daughter of our neighbor, the town carpenter. I remember her well as she sang and spun aloft in the attic. In those days, church-singing was the only one of the fine arts which flourished in Ridgefield, except the music of the drum and fife. The choir was divided into four parts, ranged on three sides of the meeting-house gallery. The tenor, led by Deacon Hawley, was in front of the pulpit, the bass to the left, and the treble and counter to the right; the whole being set in motion by a pitch-pipe, made by the deacon himself, who was a cabinet-maker. Molly took upon herself the entire counter, for she had excellent lungs. The fuguing tunes, which had then run a little mad, were her delight. In her solitary operations aloft I have often heard her send forth, from the attic windows, the droning hum of her wheel, with fitful snatches of a hymn, in which the bass began, the tenor followed, then the treble, and, finally, the counter--winding up with irresistible pathos. Molly singing to herself, and all unconscious of eavesdroppers, carried on all the parts thus:-- _Bass._ "Long for a cooling-- _Tenor._ "Long for a cooling-- _Treble._ "Long for a cooling-- _Counter._ "Long for a cooling stream at hand, And they must drink or die!" The knitting of stockings was performed by the women of the family in the evening, and especially at tea-parties. This was considered a moral, as well as an economical, employment; for people held, with Dr. Watts, that "Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do." Satan, however, dodged the question: for if the hands were occupied the tongue was loose; and it was said that, in some families, he kept them well occupied with idle gossip. At all events, pianos, chess-boards, graces, battledoors and shuttlecocks, with other safety-valves of the kind, were only known by the hearing of the ear, as belonging to some such Vanity Fair as New York or Boston. The weaving of cloth--linen as well as woollen--was performed by an itinerant workman, who came to the house, put up his loom, and threw his shuttle, till the season's work was done. The linen was bleached and made up by the family; the woollen cloth was sent to the fuller to be dyed and dressed. Twice a-year, that is, in the spring and autumn, the tailor came to the house and made a stock of clothes for the male members; this was called "whipping the cat." Mantuamakers and milliners came, in their turn, to fit out the female members of the family. There was a similar process as to boots and shoes. We sent the hides of the cattle--cows and calves we had killed--to the tanner, and these came back in assorted leather. Occasionally a little morocco, then wholly a foreign manufacture, was bought at the store, and made up for the ladies' best shoes. Amby Benedict, the travelling shoemaker, came with his bench, lapstone, and awls, and converted some little room into a shop, till the household was duly shod. He was a merry fellow, and threw in lots of singing gratis. He played all the popular airs upon his lapstone--as hurdygurdies and hand-organs do now. Carpets were then only known in a few families, and were confined to the keeping-room and parlor. They were all home-made: the warp consisting of woollen yarn, and the woof of lists and old woollen cloth, cut into strips, and sewed together at the ends. Coverlids generally consisted of quilts, made of pieces of waste calico, sewed together in octagons, and quilted in rectangles, giving the whole a gay and rich appearance. This process of quilting generally brought together the women of the neighborhood, married and single; and a great time they had of it, what with tea, talk, and stitching. In the evening the men were admitted; so that a quilting was a real festival, not unfrequently leading to love-making and marriage among the young people. This reminds me of a sort of communism or socialism, which prevailed in our rural districts long before Owen or Fourier was born. At Ridgefield we used to have "stone bees," when all the men of a village or hamlet came together with their draught cattle, and united to clear some patch of earth of stones and rocks. All this labor was gratuitously rendered, save only that the proprietor of the land furnished the grog. Such a meeting was always, of course, a very social and sociable affair. When the work was done, gymnastic exercises--such as hopping, wrestling, and foot-racing--took place among the athletic young men. My father generally attended these celebrations as a looker-on. It was, indeed, the custom for the clergy of the olden time to mingle with the people, even in their labors and their pastimes. For some reason or other, it seemed that things went better when the parson gave them his countenance. I followed my father's example, and attended these cheerful and beneficial gatherings. Most of the boys of the town did the same. I may add that, if I may trust the traditions of Ridgefield, the cellar of our new house was dug by a "bee" in a single day, and that was Christmas. House-raising and barn-raising, the framework being always of wood, were done in the same way by a neighborly gathering of the people. I remember an anecdote of a church-raising, which I may as well relate here. In the eastern part of the State, I think at Lyme, or Pautipaug, a meeting-house was destroyed by lightning. After a year or two the society mustered its energies, and raised the frame of another on the site of the old one. It stood about six months, and was then blown over. In due time another frame was prepared, and the neighborhood gathered together to raise it. It was now proposed by Deacon Hart that they should commence the performances by a prayer and hymn, it having been suggested that perhaps the want of these pious preliminaries on former occasions had something to do with the calamitous results which attended them. When all was ready, therefore, a prayer was made, and the chorister of the place gave out two lines of the hymn, thus:-- "If God to build the house deny, The builders work in vain." This being sung, the chorister completed the verse thus, adapting the lines to the occasion:-- "Unless the Lord doth shingle it, It will blow down agin!" I must not fail to give you a portrait of one of our village homes, of the middle class, at this era. I take as an example that of our neighbor, J. B., who had been a tailor, but having thriven in his affairs, and being now some fifty years old, had become a farmer. It was situated on the road leading to Salem, there being a wide space in front occupied by the wood-pile, which in these days was not only a matter of great importance, but of formidable bulk. The size of the wood-pile was, indeed, in some sort an index to the rank and condition of the proprietor. The house itself was a low edifice, forty feet long, and of two stories in front; the rear being what was called a _breakback_--that is, sloping down to a height of ten feet; this low part furnishing a shelter for garden tools and various household instruments. The whole was constructed of wood, the outside being of the dun complexion assumed by unpainted wood, exposed to the weather for twenty or thirty years, save only that the roof was tinged of a reddish brown by a fine moss that found sustenance in the chestnut shingles. To the left was the garden, which in the productive season was a wilderness of onions, squashes, cucumbers, beets, parsnips, and currants, with the never-failing tansy for bitters, horseradish for seasoning, and fennel for keeping old women awake in church time. The interior of the house presented a parlor with plain, whitewashed walls, a home-made carpet upon the floor, calico curtains at the window, and a mirror three feet by two against the side, with a mahogany frame: to these must be added eight chairs and a cherry table, of the manufacture of Deacon Hawley. The "keeping" or sitting-room had also a carpet, a dozen rush-bottom chairs, a table, &c. The kitchen was large--fully twenty feet square, with a fireplace six feet wide and four feet deep. On one side it looked out upon the garden, the squashes and cucumbers climbing up and forming festoons over the door; on the other it commanded a view of the orchard, embracing first a circle of peaches, pears, and plums; and beyond, a wide-spread clover-field, embowered with apple-trees. Just by was the well, with its tall sweep, the old oaken bucket dangling from the pole. The kitchen was, in fact, the most comfortable room in the house; cool in summer, and perfumed with the breath of the garden and the orchard: in winter, with its roaring blaze of hickory, it was a cosy resort, defying the bitterest blasts of the season. Here the whole family assembled at meals, except when the presence of company made it proper to serve tea in the parlor. The bed-rooms were all without carpets, and the furniture was generally of a simple character. The beds, however, were of ample size, and well filled with geese feathers, these being deemed essential for comfortable people. I must say, by the way, that every decent family had its flock of geese, of course, which was picked thrice a-year, despite the noisy remonstrances of both goose and gander. The sheets of the bed, though of home-made linen, were as white as the driven snow. Indeed, the beds of this era showed that sleep was a luxury, well understood and duly cherished by all classes. The cellar, extending under the whole house, was by no means the least important part of the establishment. In the autumn, it was supplied with three barrels of beef and as many of pork, twenty barrels of cider, with numerous bins of potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, and cabbages. The garret, which was of huge dimensions, at the same time displayed a labyrinth of dried pumpkins, peaches, and apples, hung in festoons upon the rafters, amid bunches of summer savory, boneset, fennel, and other herbs, the floor being occupied by heaps of wool, flax, tow, and the like. The barn corresponded to the house. It was a low brown structure, having abundance of sheds built on to it, without the least regard to symmetry. It was well stocked with hay, oats, rye, and buckwheat. Six cows, one or two horses, three dozen sheep, and an ample supply of poultry, including two or three broods of turkeys, constituted its living tenants. The farm I need not describe in detail, but the orchard must not be overlooked. This consisted of three acres, covered, as I have said, with apple-trees, yielding abundantly--as well for the cider-mill as for the table, including the indispensable winter apple-sauce--according to their kinds. I think an apple orchard in the spring is one of the most beautiful objects in the world. How often have I ventured into Uncle Josey's ample orchard at this joyous season, and stood entranced among the robins, blackbirds, woodpeckers, bluebirds, jays, and orioles,--all seeming to me like playmates, racing, chasing, singing, rollicking, in the exuberance of their joy, or perchance slily pursuing their courtships, or even more slily building their nests and rearing their young. The inmates of the house I need not describe, further than to say that Uncle Josey himself was a little deaf, and of moderate abilities; yet he lived to good account, for he reared a large family, and was gathered to his fathers at a good old age, leaving behind him a handsome estate, a fair name, and a good example. His wife, who spent her early life at service in a kitchen, was a handsome, lively, efficient woman, and a universal favorite in the neighborhood. This is the homely picture of a Ridgefield farmer's home half a century ago. There were other establishments more extensive and more sumptuous in the town, as there were others also of an inferior grade; but this was a fair sample of the houses, barns, and farms of the middle class. FOOTNOTE: [1] I recollect, as an after-thought, one exception. There was a hatter who supplied the town; but he generally made hats to order, and usually in exchange for the skins of foxes, rabbits, muskrats, and other chance peltry. I frequently purchased my powder and shot from the proceeds of skins which I sold him. CHAPTER IV. HABITS OF THE PEOPLE--THEIR COSTUME--AMUSEMENTS--FESTIVALS-- MARRIAGES--FUNERALS--DANCING--WINTER SPORTS--MY TWO GRANDMOTHERS--MECHANICAL GENIUS--IMPORTANCE OF WHITTLING--PIGEONS--SPORTING ADVENTURES. You will now have some ideas of the household industry and occupations of the country people in Connecticut, at the beginning of the present century. Their manners, in other respects, had a corresponding stamp of homeliness and simplicity. In most families, the first exercise of the morning was reading the Bible, followed by a prayer, at which all were assembled, including the servants and helpers of the kitchen and the farm. Then came the breakfast, which was a substantial meal, always including hot viands, with vegetables, apple-sauce, pickles, mustard, horseradish, and various other condiments. Cider was the common drink for laboring people: even children drank it at will. Tea was common, but not so general as now. Coffee was almost unknown. Dinner was a still more hearty and varied repast--characterised by abundance of garden vegetables; tea was a light supper. The day began early: the breakfast hour was six in summer and seven in winter; dinner was at noon--the work-people in the fields being called to their meals by a conchshell winded by some kitchen Triton. Tea was usually taken about sundown. In families where all were laborers, all sat at table, servants as well as masters--the food being served before sitting down. In families where the masters and mistresses did not share the labors of the household or the farm, the meals of the domestics were taken separately. There was, however, in those days a perfectly good understanding and good feeling between the masters and servants. The latter were not Irish: they had not as yet imbibed the plebeian envy of those above them, which has since so generally embittered and embarrassed American domestic life. The terms "democrat" and "aristocrat" had not got into use: these distinctions, and the feelings now implied by them, had indeed no existence in the hearts of the people. Our servants, during all my early life, were generally the daughters of respectable farmers and mechanics in the neighborhood, and, respecting others, were themselves respected and cherished. They were devoted to the interests of the family, and were always relied upon and treated as friends. In health they had the same food, in sickness the same care, as the masters and mistresses or their children. At the period of my earliest recollections, men of all classes were dressed in long, broad-tailed coats, with huge pockets; long waistcoats, breeches, and hats with low crowns and broad brims: some so wide as to be supported at the sides with cords. The stockings of the parson, and a few others, were of silk in summer and worsted in winter; those of the people were generally of wool. Women dressed in wide bonnets, sometimes of straw and sometimes of silk; and gowns of silk, muslin, gingham, &c., generally close and short-waisted, the breast and shoulders being covered by a full muslin kerchief. Girls ornamented themselves with a large white vandike. On the whole, the dress of both men and women has greatly changed; for at Ridgefield, as at less remote places, the people follow, though at a distance, the fashions of Paris. The amusements were then much the same as at present, though some striking differences may be noted. Books and newspapers were then scarce, and were read respectfully, and as if they were grave matters, demanding thought and attention. They were not toys and pastimes, taken up every day, and by everybody, in the short intervals of labor, and then hastily dismissed, like waste paper. The aged sat down when they read, and drew forth their spectacles, and put them deliberately and reverently upon the nose. Even the young approached a book with reverence, and a newspaper with awe. How the world has changed! The two great festivals were Thanksgiving and "Training-day;" the latter deriving, from the still lingering spirit of the revolutionary war, a decidedly martial character. The marching of the troops, and the discharge of gunpowder, which invariably closed the exercises, were glorious and inspiring mementoes of heroic achievements upon many a bloody field. The music of the drum and fife resounded on every side. A match between two rival drummers always drew an admiring crowd, and was in fact one of the chief excitements of the great day. Tavern-haunting, especially in winter, when there was little to do, for manufactures had not then sprung up to give profitable occupation during this inclement season, was common even with respectable farmers. Marriages were celebrated in the evening, at the house of the bride, with a general gathering of the neighborhood, and were usually finished off by dancing. Everybody went, as to a public exhibition, without invitation. Funerals generally drew large processions, which proceeded to the grave. Here the minister always made an address suited to the occasion. If there were anything remarkable in the history of the deceased, it was turned to religious account in the next Sunday's sermon. Singing-meetings, to practise church music, were a great resource for the young in winter. Dances at private houses were common, and drew no reproaches from the sober people present. Balls at the taverns were frequented by the young; the children of deacons and ministers attended, though the parents did not. The winter brought sleighing, skating, and the usual round of indoor sports. In general, the intercourse of all classes was kindly and considerate, no one arrogating superiority, and yet no one refusing to acknowledge it where it existed. You would hardly have noticed that there was a higher and a lower class. Such there were, certainly; for there must always and everywhere be the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish. But in our society these existed without being felt as a privilege to one, which must give offence to another. It may serve in some degree to throw light upon the manners and customs of this period, if I give you a sketch of my two grandmothers. Both were widows, and were well stricken in years when they came to visit us at Ridgefield, about the year 1803-4. My grandmother Ely was a lady of the old school, and sustaining the character in her upright carriage, her long, tapering waist, and her high-heeled shoes. The customs of Louis XV.'s time had prevailed in New York and Boston, and even at this period they still lingered there in isolated cases. It is curious enough, that at this time the female attire of a century ago is revived; and every black-eyed, stately old lady, dressed in black silk, and showing her steel-grey hair beneath her cap, reminds me of my maternal grandmother. My other grandmother was in all things the opposite; short, fat, blue-eyed, and practical; a good example of a hearty country dame. I scarcely knew which of the two I liked the best. The first sang me plaintive songs, told me stories of the Revolution--her husband, Col. Ely, having had a large and painful share in its vicissitudes--she described Gen. Washington, whom she had seen; and the French officers, Lafayette, Rochambeau, and others, who had been inmates of her house. She told me tales of even more ancient date, and recited poetry, generally ballads, which were suited to my taste. And all this lore was commended to me by a voice of inimitable tenderness, and a manner at once lofty and condescending. My other grandmother was not less kind, but she promoted my happiness and prosperity in another way. Instead of stories, she gave me bread and butter: in place of poetry, she fed me with apple-sauce and pie. Never was there a more hearty old lady: she had a firm conviction that children must be fed, and what she believed she practised. I can recollect with great vividness the interest I took in the domestic events I have described. The operations of the farm had no great attractions for me. Ploughing, hoeing, digging, seemed to me mere drudgery, imparting no instruction, and affording no scope for ingenuity or invention. Mechanical operations, especially those of the weaver and carpenter, on the contrary, stimulated my curiosity, and excited my emulation. Thus I soon became familiar with the carpenter's tools, and made such windmills, kites, and perpetual motions, as to win the admiration of my playmates, and excite the respect of my parents; so that they seriously meditated putting me apprentice to a carpenter. Up to the age of fourteen, I think this was regarded as my manifest destiny. It was a day of great endeavors among all inventive geniuses. Fulton was struggling to develop steam navigation; and other discoverers were seeking to unfold the wonders of art as well as of nature. It was, in fact, the very threshold of the era of steam-boats, railroads, electric telegraphs, and a thousand other useful discoveries, which have since changed the face of the world. In this age of excitement, perpetual motion was the great hobby of aspiring mechanics. I pondered and whittled intensely on this subject before I was ten years old. Despairing of reaching my object by mechanical means, I attempted to arrive at it by magnetism, my father having bought me a pair of horse-shoe magnets in one of his journeys to New Haven. I should have succeeded, had it not been a principle in the nature of this curious element, that no substance will intercept the stream of attraction. I tried to change the poles, and turn the north against the south; but there, too, nature had headed me, and of course I failed. A word, by the way, on the matter of whittling. This is generally represented as a sort of idle, fidgety, frivolous use of the penknife, and is set down, by foreigners and sketchers of American manners, as a peculiar characteristic of our people. No portrait of an American is deemed complete, unless with penknife and shingle in hand. I feel not the slightest disposition to resent even this, among the thousand caricatures that pass for traits of American life. For my own part, I can testify that, during my youthful days, I found the penknife a source of great amusement, and even of instruction. Many a long winter evening, many a dull, drizzly day, in spring, and summer, and autumn--sometimes at the kitchen fireside, sometimes in the attic, sometimes in a cosy nook of the barn, sometimes in the shelter of a neighboring stone wall, thatched over with wild grape-vines--have I spent in great ecstasy, making candle-rods, or some other simple article of household goods, for my mother; or in perfecting toys for myself and my young friends; or perhaps in attempts at more ambitious achievements. This was not mere waste of time; mere idleness and dissipation. I was amused: that was something. Some of the pleasantest remembrances of my childhood carry me back to the scenes I have just indicated; when, in happy solitude, absorbed in my mechanical devices, I listened to the rain pattering upon the roof, or the wind roaring down the chimney: thus enjoying a double bliss, a pleasing occupation, with a conscious delight in my sense of security from the rage of the elements without. Nay more; these occupations were instructive: my mind was stimulated to inquire into the mechanical powers, and my hand was educated to mechanical dexterity. If you ask me why it is that this important institution of whittling is indigenous among us, I reply that, in the first place, our country is full of a great variety of woods, suited to carpentry, many of them easily wrought, and thus inviting boyhood to try its hands upon them. In the next place, labor is dear; and therefore even children are led to supply themselves with toys, or perchance to furnish some of the simpler articles of use to the household. This dearness of labor, moreover, furnishes a powerful stimulant to the production of labor-saving machines; and hence it is--through all these causes co-operating one with another--that steam-navigation, the electric telegraph, the steam-reaper, &c., &c., are American inventions: hence it is that, whether it be at the World's Fair at London or Paris, we gain a greater proportion of prizes for useful inventions than any other people. That is what comes of whittling! I must add, that in these early days I was a Nimrod, a mighty hunter; first with a bow and arrow, and afterwards with the old hereditary firelock, which snapped six times and went off once. The smaller kinds of game were abundant. The thickets teemed with quails;[2] partridges drummed in every wood; the gray squirrel--the most picturesque animal of our forests--enlivened every hickory copse with his mocking laugh, his lively gambols, and his long, bushy tail. The pigeons, in spring and autumn, migrated in countless flocks; and many lingered in our woods for the season. Everybody was then a hunter; not, of course, a sportsman: for the chase was followed more for profit than for pastime. Game was, in point of fact, a substantial portion of the supply of food at certain seasons of the year. All were then good shots, and my father was no exception: he was even beyond his generation in netting pigeons. This was not deemed a reproach at that time in a clergyman; nor was he the only parson that indulged in these occupations. One day, as I was with him on West Mountain, baiting pigeons, we had seduced a flock of three or four dozen down into the bed where they were feeding; my father and myself lying concealed in our bush-hut, close by. Suddenly, whang went a gun into the middle of the flock! Out we ran in great indignation; for at least a dozen of the birds were bleeding and fluttering before us. Scarcely had we reached the spot, when we met Parson M----, of Lower Salem, who had thus unwittingly poached upon us. The two clergymen had first a squabble, and then a good laugh; after which they divided the plunder and then parted. The stories told by Wilson and Audubon as to the amazing quantity of pigeons in the West, were realized by us in Connecticut half-a-century ago. I have seen, in the county of Fairfield, a stream of these noble birds pouring at brief intervals through the skies, from the rising to the setting sun. Of all the pigeon tribe, this of our country--the passenger pigeon--is the swiftest and most beautiful. At the same time, it is unquestionably superior to any other for the table. All the other species of the eastern, as well as the western continent, which I have tasted, are soft and flavorless in comparison. I can recollect no sports of my youth which equalled in excitement our pigeon hunts, which generally took place in September and October. We usually started on horseback before daylight, and made a rapid progress to some stubble-field on West Mountain. The ride in the keen, fresh air, especially as the dawn began to break, was delightful. The gradual encroachment of day upon the night filled my mind with sublime images: the waking up of a world from sleep, the joyousness of birds and beasts in the return of morning, and my own sympathy in this cheerful and grateful homage of the heart to God, the Giver of good--all contributed to render these adventures most impressive upon my young heart. My memory is still full of the sights and sounds of those glorious mornings: the silvery whistle of the wings of migrating flocks of plover, invisible in the gray mists of dawn; the faint murmur of the distant mountain torrents; the sonorous gong of the long-trailing flocks of wild geese, seeming to come from the unseen depths of the skies--these were among the suggestive sounds that stole through the dim twilight. As morning advanced, the scene was inconceivably beautiful: the mountain sides, clothed in autumnal green, and purple, and gold, rendered more glowing by the sunrise--with the valleys covered with mists, and spreading out like lakes of silver; while on every side the ear was saluted by the mocking screams of the red-headed woodpecker, the cawing of congresses of crows; and, finally, the rushing sound of the pigeons, pouring like a tide over the tops of the trees. By this time of course our nets were ready, and our flyers and stool-birds on the alert. What moments of ecstasy were these, and especially when the head of the flock--some red-breasted old father or grandfather--caught the sight of our pigeons, and turning at the call, drew the whole train down into our net-bed! I have often seen a hundred, or two hundred of these splendid birds, come upon us, with a noise absolutely deafening. Sometimes our bush-hut, where we lay concealed, was covered all over with pigeons, and we dared not move a finger, as their red, piercing eyes were upon us. When at last, with a sudden pull of the rope, the net was sprung, and we went out to secure our booty--often fifty, and sometimes even a hundred birds--I felt a fulness of triumph which words are wholly inadequate to express! Up to the age of eight years I was never trusted with a gun. Whenever I went forth as a sportsman on my own account, it was only with a bow and arrow. My performances as a hunter were very moderate. In truth, I had a rickety old gun, that had belonged to my grandfather, and though it perhaps had done good service in the Revolution, or further back in the times of bears and wolves, it was now very decrepit, and all around the lock seemed to have the shaking palsy. Occasionally I met with adventures, half serious and half ludicrous. Once, in running my hand into a hole in a hollow tree, some twenty feet from the ground, being in search of a woodpecker, I hauled out a blacksnake. At another time, in a similar way, I had my fingers pretty sharply nipped by a screech-owl. My memory supplies me with numerous instances of this kind. As to fishing, I never had a passion for it: I was too impatient. I had no enthusiasm for nibbles, and there were too many of these in proportion to the bites. I perhaps resembled a man by the name of Bennett, who joined the Shakers of New Canaan about these days, but soon left them, declaring that the Spirit was too long in coming--"he could not wait." Nevertheless, I dreamed away some pleasant hours in angling in the brooks and ponds of my native town. I well remember, that on my eighth birthday I went four miles to Burt's mills, carrying on the old mare two bushels of rye. While my grist was being ground I angled in the pond, and carried home enough for a generous meal. Now all these things may seem trifles, yet in a review of my life I deem them of some significance. This homely familiarity with the more mechanical arts was a material part of my education: this communion with nature gave me instructive and important lessons from nature's open book of knowledge. My technical education, as will be seen hereafter, was extremely narrow and irregular. This defect was at least partially supplied by the commonplace incidents I have mentioned. The teachings, or rather the training of the senses, in the country--ear and eye, foot and hand, by running, leaping, climbing over hill and mountain, by occasional labor in the garden and on the farm, and by the use of tools, and all this in youth--is sowing seed which is repaid largely and readily to the hand of after-cultivation, however unskilful it may be. This is not so much because of the amount of knowledge available in after-life, which is thus obtained--though this is not to be despised--as it is that healthful, vigorous, manly habits and associations, physical, moral, and intellectual, are thus established and developed. FOOTNOTE: [2] The American quail is a species of partridge, in size between the European quail and partridge. The _partridge_ of New England is the _pheasant_ of the South, and the _ruffed grouse_ of the naturalists. CHAPTER V. DEATH OF WASHINGTON--JEROME BONAPARTE AND MISS PATTERSON--SUNDAY TRAVELLING--OLIVER WOLCOTT--TIMOTHY PICKERING--AMERICAN POLITENESS QUITE NATURAL--LOCOMOTION--PUBLIC CONVEYANCES--MY FATHER'S CHAISE. The incidents I have just related occurred about the year 1800--some a little earlier and some a little later. Among the events of general interest that happened near this time I remember the death of Washington, which took place in 1799, and was commemorated all through the country by the tolling of bells, funeral ceremonies, orations, sermons, hymns, and dirges, attended by a mournful sense of his loss, which seemed to cast a pall over the entire heavens. In Ridgefield the meeting-house was dressed in black, and we had a discourse pronounced by a Mr. Edmonds, of Newtown. The subject, indeed, engrossed all minds. Lieutenant Smith came every day to our house to talk over the event, and to bring us the proceedings in different parts of the country. Among other papers he brought us a copy of the _Connecticut Courant_, which gave us the particulars of the rites and ceremonies which took place in Hartford in commemoration of the great man's decease. The celebrated hymn, written for the occasion by Theodore Dwight, sank into my mother's heart--for she had a constitutional love of things mournful and poetical--and she often repeated it, so that it became a part of the cherished lore of my childhood. I give you these scenes and feelings in some detail, to impress you with the depth and sincerity of this mourning of the American nation, in cities and towns, in villages and hamlets, for the death of Washington. I have already said that Ridgefield was on the great thoroughfare between Boston and New York, for the day of steamers and railroads had not dawned. Even the mania for turnpikes, which ere long overspread New England, had not yet arrived. The stage-coaches took four days to make the trip of two hundred miles between the two great cities. In winter, during the furious snow-storms, the journey was often protracted to seven, eight, or ten days. With such public conveyances, great people--for even then the world was divided into the great and little, as it is now--travelled in their own carriages. About this time--it must have been in the summer of 1804--I remember Jerome Bonaparte coming up to Keeler's tavern with a coach and four, attended by his young wife, Miss Patterson of Baltimore. It was a gay establishment, and the honeymoon sat happily on the tall, sallow stripling and his young bride. You must remember that Napoleon was then filling the world with his fame: at this moment his feet were on the threshold of the empire. The arrival of his brother in the United States of course made a sensation. His marriage, his movements, all were gossipped over from Maine to Georgia, the extreme points of the Union. His entrance into Ridgefield produced a flutter of excitement even there. A crowd gathered around Keeler's tavern to catch a sight of the strangers, and I was among the rest. I had a good look at Jerome, who was the chief object of interest, and the image never faded from my recollection. Half a century later, I was one evening at the Tuileries, amid the flush and the fair of Louis Napoleon's new court. Among them I saw an old man, taller than the mass around--his nose and chin almost meeting in contact, while his toothless gums were "munching the airy meal of dotage and decrepitude." I was irresistibly chained to this object, as if a spectre had risen up through the floor and stood among the garish throng. My memory travelled back--back among the winding labyrinths of years. Suddenly I found the clue: the stranger was Jerome Bonaparte! Ah, what a history lay between the past and present--a lapse of nearly fifty years. What a difference between him then and now! Then he was a gay and gallant bridegroom; now, though he had the title of king, he was throneless and sceptreless--an Invalid Governor of Invalids--the puppet and pageant of an adventurer, whose power lay in the mere magic of a name. About this time, as I well remember, Oliver Wolcott passed through our village. He arrived at the tavern late on Saturday evening, but he called at our house in the morning, his family being connected with ours. He was a great man then; for not only are the Wolcotts traditionally and historically a distinguished race in Connecticut, but he had recently been a member of Washington's cabinet. I mention him now only for the purpose of noting his deference to public opinion, characteristic of the eminent men of that day. In the morning he went to church, but immediately after the sermon he had his horses brought up, and proceeded on his way. He, however, had requested my father to state to his people, at the opening of the afternoon service, that he was travelling on public business, and though he regretted it, he was obliged to continue his journey on the Sabbath. This my father did, but Deacon Olmstead, the Jeremiah of the parish, shook his white locks, and lifted up his voice against such a desecration of the Lord's day. Some years after, as I remember, Lieutenant-Governor Treadwell arrived at Keeler's tavern on Saturday evening, and prepared to prosecute his journey the next morning, his daughter, who was with him, being ill. This same Deacon Olmstead called upon him, and said, "Sir, if you thus set the example of violation of the Sabbath, you must expect to get one vote less at the next election!" The Governor was so much struck by the appearance of the deacon, who was the very image of a patriarch or a prophet, that he deferred his departure till Monday. Although great people rode in their own carriages, the principal method of travelling was on horseback. Many of the members of Congress came to Washington in this way. I have a dim recollection of seeing one day, when I was trudging along to school, a tall, pale, gaunt man, approaching on horseback, with his plump saddlebags behind him. I looked at him keenly, and made my obeisance, as in duty bound. He lifted his hat, and bowed in return. By a quick instinct, I sat him down as a man of mark. In the evening, Lieutenant Smith came to our house and told us that Timothy Pickering had passed through the town! He had seen him, and talked with him, and was vastly distended with the portentous news thereby acquired, including the rise and fall of empires for ages to come, and all of which he duly unfolded to our family circle. Before I proceed, let me note, in passing, a point of manners then universal, but which has now nearly faded away. When travellers met on the highway, they saluted each other with a certain dignified and formal courtesy. All children were regularly taught at school to "make their manners" to strangers; the boys to bow, and the girls to courtesy. It was something different from the frank, familiar, "How are you, stranger?" of the Far West; something different from the "_Bon jour, serviteur_," of the Alps. Our salute was more measured and formal; respect to age and authority being evidently an element of this homage, which was sedulously taught to the young. For children to salute travellers was, in my early days, as well a duty as a decency. A child who did not "make his manners" to a stranger on the high-road was deemed a low fellow; a stranger who refused to acknowledge this civility was esteemed a _sans culotte_, perhaps a favorer of Jacobinism. But I must return to locomotion. In Ridgefield, in the year 1800, there was but a single chaise, and that belonged to Colonel Bradley, one of the principal citizens of the place. It was without a top, and had a pair of wide-spreading, asinine ears. That multitudinous generation of travelling vehicles, so universal and so convenient now--such as top-wagons, four-wheeled chaises, tilburies, dearborns, &c., was totally unknown. Even if these things had been invented, the roads would scarcely have permitted the use of them. Physicians who had occasion to go from town to town went on horseback; all clergymen, except perhaps Bishop Seabury, who rode in a coach, travelled in the same way. My father's people, who lived at a distance, came to church on horseback; their wives and daughters being seated on pillions behind them. In a few cases--as in spring-time, when the mud was bottomless--the farm wagon was used for transporting the family. In winter it was otherwise, for we had three or four months of sleighing. Then the whole country was a railroad, and gay times we had. Oh! those beautiful winters, which would drive me shivering to the fireside now: what vivid delight have I had in their slidings and skatings, their sleddings and sleighings! One thing strikes me now with wonder, and that is, the general indifference in those days to the intensity of winter. No doubt, as I have said before, the climate was then more severe; but, be that as it may, people seemed to suffer less from it than at the present day. Nobody thought of staying at home from church because of the extremity of the weather. We had no thermometers, it is true, to frighten us with the revelation that it was twenty-five degrees below zero. The habits of the people were simple and hardy, and there were few defences against the assaults of the seasons. The houses were not tight; we had no stoves, no Lehigh or Lackawanna coal; yet we lived, and comfortably, too: nay, we even changed burly winter into a season of enjoyment. I have said that, in the year 1800, there was but a single chaise in Ridgefield; and this was brought, I believe, from New Haven. There was not, I imagine, a coach, or any kind of pleasure-vehicle--that crazy old chaise excepted--in the county of Fairfield, out of the two half-shire towns. Such things, indeed, were known at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; for already the government had laid a tax upon pleasure conveyances: but they were comparatively few in number, and were mostly imported. In 1798 there was but one public hack in New Haven, and but one coach; the latter, belonging to Pierpoint Edwards, was a large, four-wheeled vehicle, for two persons, called a chariot. In the smaller towns there were no pleasure vehicles in use throughout New England. About that time there came to our village a man by the name of Jesse Skellinger, an Englishman, and chaisemaker by trade. My father engaged him to build him a chaise. A bench was set up in our barn, and certain trees of oak and ash were cut in our neighboring woods. These were sawed and seasoned, and shaped into wheels and shafts. Thomas Hawley, half blacksmith, and half wheelwright, was duly initiated, and he cunningly wrought the iron necessary for the work. In five months the chaise was finished, with a standing top; greatly to the admiration of our family. What a gaze was there, as this vehicle went through Ridgefield street upon its first expedition! This was the beginning of the chaise-manufactory in Ridgefield, which has since been a source of large revenue to the town. Skellinger was engaged by Elijah Hawley, who had formerly done something as a wagon-builder; and thus in due time an establishment was founded, which for many years was noted for the beauty and excellence of its pleasure vehicles. CHAPTER VI. THE UPPER AND LOWER CLASSES OF RIDGEFIELD--MASTER STEBBINS AND HIS SCHOOL--WHAT IS A NOUN?--DEACON BENEDICT AND HIS MAN ABIJAH--MY LATIN ACQUIREMENTS--FAMILY WORSHIP--WIDOW BENNETT--THE TEMPLE OF DAGON. Ridgefield, as well as most other places, had its Up-town and Down-town; terms which have not unfrequently been the occasion of serious divisions in the affairs of Church and State. In London this distinction takes the name of West End and the City. The French philosophers say that every great capital has similar divisions; West End being always the residence of the aristocracy, and East End of the _canaille_. Ridgefield, being a village, had a right to follow its own whim; and therefore West Lane, instead of being the aristocratic end of the place, was really rather the low end. It constituted, in fact, what was called _Down-town_, in distinction from the more eastern and northern section, called _Up-town_. In this latter portion, and about the middle of the main street, was the Up-town school, the leading seminary of the village; for at this period it had not arrived at the honors of an academy. At the age of ten years I was sent here, the institution being then, and for many years after, under the charge of Master Stebbins. He was a man with a conciliating stoop in the shoulders, a long body, short legs, and a swaying walk. He was at this period some fifty years old, his hair being thin and silvery, and always falling in well-combed rolls over his coat-collar. His eyes were blue, and his dress invariably of the same color. Breeches and knee-buckles, blue-mixed stockings, and shoes with bright buckles, seemed as much a part of the man as his head and shoulders. On the whole, his appearance was that of the middle-class gentleman of the olden time; and he was, in fact, what he seemed. This seminary of learning for the rising aristocracy of Ridgefield was a wooden edifice, thirty by twenty feet, covered with brown clapboards, and, except an entry, consisted of a single room. Around, and against the walls, ran a continuous line of seats, fronted by a continuous writing-desk. Beneath were depositories for books and writing materials. The centre was occupied by slab seats, similar to those of West Lane. The larger scholars were ranged on the outer sides, at the desks; the smaller fry of abecedarians were seated in the centre. The master was enshrined on the east side of the room, and, regular as the sun, he was in his seat at nine o'clock, and the performances of the school began. According to the Catechism, which we learned and recited on Saturday, the chief end of man was to glorify God and keep His commandments; according to the routine of this school, one would have thought it to be reading, writing, and arithmetic, to which we may add spelling. From morning to night, in all weathers, through every season of the year, these exercises were carried on with the energy, patience, and perseverance of a manufactory. Master Stebbins respected his calling: his heart was in his work; and so, what he pretended to teach, he taught well. When I entered the school, I found that a huge stride had been achieved in the march of mind since I left West Lane. Webster's Spelling-book had taken the place of Dilworth, which was a great improvement. The drill in spelling was very thorough, and applied every day to the whole school. I imagine that the exercises might have been amusing to a stranger, especially as one scholar would sometimes go off in a voice as grum as that of a bull-frog, while another would follow in tones as fine and piping as those of a peet-weet. The blunders, too, were often very ludicrous; even we children would sometimes have tittered, had not such an enormity been certain to have brought out the birch. As to rewards and punishments, the system was this: whoever missed, went down; so that perfection mounted to the top. Here was the beginning of the up and down of life. Reading was performed in classes, which generally plodded on without a hint from the master. Nevertheless, when Zeek Sanford--who was said to have "a streak of lightning in him"--in his haste to be smart, read the 37th verse of the 2nd chapter of the Acts,--"Now when they heard this, they were _pickled_ in their heart,"--the birch stick on Master Stebbins's table seemed to quiver and peel at the little end, as if to give warning of the wrath to come. When Orry Keeler--Orry was a girl, you know, and not a boy--drawled out in spelling, "k--o--n, _kon_, s--h--u--n--t--s, _shunts_, konshunts," the bristles in the master's eyebrows fidgeted like Aunt Delight's knitting-needles. Occasionally, when the reading was insupportably bad, he took a book, and himself read as an example. Master Stebbins was a great man with a slate and pencil, and I have an idea that we were a generation after his own heart. We certainly achieved wonders in arithmetic, according to our own conceptions, some of us going even beyond the Rule of Three, and making forays into the mysterious regions of Vulgar Fractions. But, after all, penmanship was Master Stebbins's great accomplishment. He had no pompous lessons upon single lines and bifid lines, and the like. The revelations of inspired copy-book makers had not then been vouchsafed to man. He could not cut an American eagle with a single flourish of a goose-quill. He was guided by good taste and native instinct, and wrote a smooth round hand, like copper-plate. His lessons from A to &, all written by himself, consisted of pithy proverbs and useful moral lessons. On every page of our writing-books he wrote the first line himself. The effect was what might have been expected--with such models, patiently enforced, nearly all became good writers. Beyond these simple elements, the Up-town school made few pretensions. When I was there, two Webster's Grammars and one or two Dwight's Geographies were in use. The latter was without maps or illustrations, and was, in fact, little more than an expanded table of contents, taken from Morse's Universal Geography--the mammoth monument of American learning and genius of that age and generation. The grammar was a clever book, but I have an idea that neither Master Stebbins nor his pupils ever fathomed its depths. They floundered about in it, as if in a quagmire, and after some time came out pretty nearly where they went in, though perhaps a little confused by the din and dusky atmosphere of these labyrinths. Let me here repeat an anecdote, which I have indeed told before, but which I had from the lips of its hero, a clergyman, of some note thirty years ago, and which well illustrates this part of my story. At a village school, not many miles from Ridgefield, he was put into Webster's Grammar. Here he read, "_A noun is the name of a thing--as horse, hair, justice_." Now, in his innocence, he read it thus: "_A noun is the name of a thing--as horse-hair justice_." "What, then," said he, ruminating deeply, "is a noun? But first I must find out what a horse-hair justice is." Upon this he meditated for some days, but still he was as far as ever from the solution. Now, his father was a man of authority in those parts, and, moreover, he was a justice of the peace. Withal, he was of respectable ancestry, and so there had descended to him a stately high-backed settee, covered with horse-hair. One day, as the youth came from school, pondering upon the great grammatical problem, he entered the front door of the house, and there he saw before him his father, officiating in his legal capacity, and seated upon the old horse-hair settee. "I have found it!" said the boy to himself, greatly delighted--"my father is a horse-hair justice, and therefore a noun!" Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the world got on remarkably well in spite of this narrowness of the country schools. The elements of an English education were pretty well taught throughout the village seminaries of Connecticut, and, I may add, of New England. The teachers were heartily devoted to their profession: they respected their calling, and were respected and encouraged by the community. They had this merit, that while they attempted little, that, at least, was thoroughly performed. I went steadily to the Up-town school for three winters; being occupied during the summers upon the farm, and in various minor duties. I was a great deal on horseback, often carrying messages to the neighboring towns of Reading, Wilton, Weston, and Lower Salem, for then the post routes were few, and the mails, which were weekly, crept like snails over hill and valley. I became a bold rider at an early age: before I was eight years old I frequently ventured to put a horse to his speed, and that, too, without a saddle. A person who has never tried it, can hardly conceive the wild delight of riding a swift horse, when he lays down his ears, tosses his tail in air, and stretches himself out in a full race. The intense energy of the beast's movements, the rush of the air, the swimming backward of lands, houses, and trees, with the clattering thunder of the hoofs--all convey to the rider a fierce ecstasy, which, perhaps, nothing else can give. About this period, however, I received a lesson, which lasted me a lifetime. You must know that Deacon Benedict, one of our neighbors, had a fellow living with him named Abijah. He was an adventurous youth, and more than once led me into tribulation. I remember that on one occasion I went with him to shoot a dog that was said to worry the deacon's sheep. It was night, and dark as Egypt, but Bige said he could see the creature close to the cow-house, behind the barn. He banged away, and then jumped over the fence, to pick up the game. After a time he came back, but said not a word. Next morning it was found that he had shot the brindled cow; mistaking a white spot in her forehead for the dog, he had taken a deadly aim, and put the whole charge into her pate. Fortunately her skull was thick and the shot small, so the honest creature was only a little cracked. Bige, however, was terribly scolded by the deacon, who was a justice of the peace, and had a deep sense of the importance of his duties. I came in for a share of blame, though I was only a looker-on. Bige said the deacon called me a "parsnip scrimmage," but more probably it was a _particeps criminis_. But to proceed. One day I was taking home from the pasture a horse that belonged to some clergyman--I believe Dr. Ripley, of Greensfarms. Just as I came upon the level ground in front of Jerry Mead's old house, Bige came up behind me on the deacon's mare--an ambling brute with a bushy tail and shaggy mane. As he approached he gave a chirrup, and my horse, half in fright and half in fun, bounded away, like Tam O'Shanter's mare. Away we went, I holding on as well as I could, for the animal was round as a barrel. He was no doubt used to a frolic of this sort, although he belonged to a doctor of divinity, and looked as if he believed in total depravity. When he finally broke into a gallop he flew like the wind, at the same time bounding up and down with a tearing energy, quite frightful to think of. After a short race he went from under me, and I came with a terrible shock to the ground. The breath was knocked out of me for some seconds, and as I recovered it with a gasping effort, my sensations were indescribably agonizing. Greatly humbled and sorely bruised, I managed to get home, where the story of my adventure had preceded me. I was severely lectured by my parents, which, however, I might have forgotten, had not the concussion made an indelible impression on my memory, thus perpetuating the wholesome counsel. When I was about twelve years old, a man by the name of Sackett was employed to keep a high-school, or, as it was then called, an academy. Here I went irregularly for a few weeks, and at a public exhibition I remember to have spoken a piece, upon a stage fitted up in the meeting-house, entitled "Charles Chatterbox." This was the substance of my achievements at Sackett's seminary. The narrowness of my father's income, and the needs of a large family, induced him to take half-a-dozen pupils to be fitted for college. This he continued for a series of years. It might seem natural that I should have shared in these advantages; but, in the first place, my only and elder brother, Charles A. Goodrich--now widely known by his numerous useful publications--had been destined for the clerical profession, partly by his own predilection, partly by encouragement from a relative, and partly, too, from an idea that his somewhat delicate constitution forbade a more hardy career. To this may doubtless be added the natural desire of his parents that at least one of their sons should follow the honored calling to which father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been devoted. Hence he was put in training for college. The expenses to be thus incurred were formidable enough to my parents, without adding to them by attempting anything of the kind for me. And, besides, I had manifested no love of study, and evidently preferred action to books. Moreover, it must be remembered, that I was regarded as a born carpenter, and it would have seemed tempting Providence to have set me upon any other career. So, with perfect content on my part, from the age of twelve to fourteen, I was chiefly employed in active services about the house and farm. I could read, write, and cipher; this was sufficient for my ambition, and satisfactory to my parents, in view of the life to which I was apparently destined. Nevertheless, though my school exercises were such as I have described, I doubtless gathered some little odds and ends of learning about those days, beyond the range of my horn-books. I heard a good deal of conversation from the clergymen who visited us, and, above all, I listened to the long discourses of Lieutenant Smith upon matters and things in general. My father, too, had a brother in Congress, from whom he received letters, documents, and messages, all of which became subjects of discussion. I remember, further, that out of some childish imitation, I thumbed over Corderius and Erasmus--the first Latin books, then constantly in the hands of my father's pupils. I was so accustomed to hear them recite their lessons in Virgil, that _Tityre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi_-- and _Arma_, arms--_virumque_, and the man--_cano_, I sing, were as familiar to my ears as _hillery, tillery, zachery zan_, and probably conveyed to my mind about as much meaning. Even the first lesson in Greek-- <En>, in--<archê>, the beginning--<ên>, was--<ho logos>, the Word-- was also among the cabalistic jingles in my memory. All this may seem nothing as a matter of education; still, some years after, while I was an apprentice in Hartford, feeling painfully impressed with the scantiness of my knowledge, I borrowed some Latin school-books, under the idea of attempting to master that language. To my delight and surprise, I found that they seemed familiar to me. Thus encouraged, I began, and bending steadily over my task at evening, when my day's duties were over, I made my way nearly through the Latin Grammar and the first two books of Virgil's _�neid_. In my poverty of knowledge, even these acquisitions became useful to me. From the age of twelve to fifteen, though generally occupied in the various tasks assigned me, I still found a good deal of time to ramble over the country. Whole days I spent in the long, lonesome lanes that wound between Ridgefield and Salem, in the half-cultivated, half-wooded hills that lay at the foot of West Mountain, and in the deep recesses of the wild and rugged regions beyond. I frequently climbed to the tops of the cliffs and ridges that rose one above another; and having gained the crown of the mountain, cast long and wistful glances over the blue vale that stretched out for many miles to the westward. I had always my gun in hand, and though not insensible to any sport that might fall in my way, I was more absorbed in the fancies that came thronging to my imagination. Thus I became familiar with the whole country around, and especially with the shaded glens and gorges of West Mountain. I must add that these had, besides their native, savage charms, a sort of fascination from being the residence of a strange woman, who had devoted herself to solitude, and was known under the name of "the Hermitess." This personage I had occasionally seen in our village; and I frequently met her as she glided through the forests, while I was pursuing my mountain rambles. I sometimes felt a strange thrill as she passed; but this only seemed to render the recesses where she dwelt still more inviting. I have no doubt that I inherited from my mother a love of the night side of nature; not a love that begets melancholy, but an appetite that found pleasure in the shadows, as well as the lights, of life and imagination. Eminently practical as she was--laborious, skilful, and successful in the duties which Providence had assigned her, as the head of a large family, with narrow means--she was still of a poetic temperament. Her lively fancy was vividly set forth by a pair of the finest eyes I have ever seen; dark and serious, yet tender and sentimental. These bespoke, not only the vigor of her conceptions, but the melancholy tinge that shaded her imagination. Sometimes, indeed, the well of sadness in her heart became full, and it ran over in tears. These, however, were like spring showers; brief in duration, and afterwards brightening to all around. She was not the only woman who has felt better after a good cry. It was, in fact, a poetic, not a real sorrow, that thus excited her emotions; for her prevailing humor abounded in wit and vivacity, not unfrequently taking the hue of playful satire. Nevertheless, her taste craved the pathetic, the mournful; not as a bitter medicine, but a spicy condiment. Her favorite poets were King David and Dr. Watts: she preferred the dirge-like melody of Windham to all other music. All the songs she sang were minors. You will gather, from what I have said, that my father not only prayed in his family night and morning, but before breakfast, and immediately after the household was assembled he always read a chapter in the sacred volume. It is recorded in our family Bible, that he read it through, in course, thirteen times in the space of about five-and-twenty years. He was an excellent reader, having a remarkably clear, frank, hearty voice; so that I was deeply interested, and thus early became familiar with almost every portion of the Old and New Testament. The practice of family worship, as I before stated, was at this time very general in New England. In Ridgefield, it was not altogether confined to the strictly religious; to clergymen, deacons, and church members. It was a custom which decency hardly allowed to be omitted. No family was thought to go on well without it. There is a good story which well describes this trait of manners. Somewhere in Vermont, in this golden age, there was a widow by the name of Bennett. In consequence of the death of her husband, the charge of a large farm and an ample household devolved upon her. Her husband had been a pious man, and all things had prospered with him. His widow, alike from religious feeling and affectionate regard for his memory, desired that everything should be conducted as much as possible as it had been during his lifetime. Especially did she wish the day to begin and close with family worship. Now, she had a foreman on the farm by the name of Ward. He was a good man for work, but he was not a religious man. In vain did the widow, in admitting his merits at the plough, the scythe, and the flail, still urge him to crown her wishes, by leading in family prayer. For a long time the heart of the man was hard, and his ear deaf to her entreaties. At last, however, wearied with her importunities, he seemed to change, and, to her great joy, consented to make a trial. On a bright morning in June--at early sunrise--the family were all assembled in the parlor, men and maidens, for their devotions. When all was ready, Ward, in a low, troubled voice, began. He had never prayed, or at least not in public, but he had heard many prayers, and possessed a retentive memory. After getting over the first hesitancy, he soon became fluent, and taking passages here and there from the various petitions he had heard--Presbyterian, Methodist, Universalist, and Episcopalian--he went on with great eloquence, gradually elevating his tone and accelerating his delivery. Ere long his voice grew portentous, and some of the men and maids, thinking he was suddenly taken either mad or inspired, stole out on their toes into the kitchen, where, with gaping mouths, they awaited the result. The Widow Bennett bore it all for about half an hour; but at last, as the precious time was passing away, she lost patience, and sprang to her feet. Placing herself directly in front of the speaker, she exclaimed, "Ward, what do you mean?" As if suddenly relieved from a nightmare, he exclaimed, "Oh dear, ma'am, I'm much obliged to you; for somehow I couldn't wind the thing off." I must not pass over another incident having reference to the topic in question. Under the biblical influence of those days my father's scholars built a temple of the Philistines, and when it was completed within and without, all the children round about assembled, as did the Gazaites of old. The edifice was chiefly of boards, slenderly constructed, and reached the height of twelve feet; nevertheless, all of us got upon it, according to the 16th chapter of Judges. The oldest of the scholars played Samson. When all was ready, he took hold of the pillars of the temple, one with his right hand and one with his left. "Let me die with the Philistines!" said he, and bowing himself, down we came in a heap! Strange to say, nobody but Samson was hurt, and he only in some skin bruises. If you could see him now--dignified even to solemnity, and seldom condescending to any but the gravest matters--you would scarcely believe the story, even though I write it and verify it. Nevertheless, if he must have played, he should have taken the part of Samson, for he is one of the most gifted men I have ever known. CHAPTER VII. THE CLERGY OF FAIRFIELD--A LAUGHING PARSON--THE THREE DEACONS. Before I complete my narrative so far as it relates to Ridgefield, I should state that in the olden time a country minister's home was a ministers' tavern, and therefore I saw at our house, at different periods, most of the orthodox or Congregational clergymen belonging to that part of the State. My father frequently exchanged with those of the neighboring towns, and sometimes consociations and associations were held at Ridgefield. Thus, men of the clerical profession constituted a large portion of the strangers who visited us. I may add that my lineage was highly ministerial, from an early period down to my own time. The pulpit of Durham, filled by my paternal grandfather, continued in the same family one hundred and twenty-six consecutive years. A short time since we reckoned among our relations, not going beyond the degree of second cousin, more than a dozen ministers of the Gospel, and all of the same creed. As to the clergy of Fairfield county, my boyish impressions of them were, that they were of the salt of the earth; nor has a larger experience altered my opinion. If I sometimes indulge a smile at the recollection of particular traits of character, or more general points of manner significant of the age, I still regard them with affection and reverence. I need not tell you that they were counsellors in religious matters, in the dark and anxious periods of the spirit, in times of sickness, at the approach of death. They sanctified the wedding, not refusing afterward to countenance the festivity which naturally ensued. They administered baptism, but only upon adults who made a profession, or upon the children of professors. I may add that, despite their divinity, they were sociable in their manners and intercourse. The state of the Church was no doubt first in their minds, but ample room was left for the good things of life. Those who came to our house examined my brother in his Greek and Latin, and I went out behind the barn to gather tansy for their morning bitters. They dearly loved a joke, and relished anecdotes, especially if they bore a little hard upon the cloth. The following will suffice as a specimen of the stories they delighted in. Once upon a time there was a clergyman--the Rev. Dr. T----, a man of high character, and distinguished for his dignity of manner. But it was remarked that frequently as he was ascending the pulpit stairs he would smile, and sometimes almost titter, as if beset by an uncontrollable desire to laugh. This excited remark, and at last scandal. Finally, it was thought necessary for some of his clerical friends, at a meeting of the Association, to bring up the matter for consideration. The case was stated, the Rev. Dr. T---- being present. "Well, gentlemen," said he, "the fact charged against me is true, but I beg you to permit me to offer an explanation. A few months after I was licensed to preach I was in a country town, and on a Sabbath morning was about to enter upon the services of the church. At the back of the pulpit was a window, which looked out upon a field of clover, then in full bloom, for it was summer. As I rose to commence the reading of the Scriptures, I cast a glance into the field, and there I saw a man performing the most extraordinary evolutions--jumping, whirling, slapping in all directions, and with a ferocious agony of exertion. At first I thought he was mad; but suddenly the truth burst upon me--he had buttoned up a bumblebee in his pantaloons! I am constitutionally nervous, gentlemen, and the shock of this scene upon my risible sensibilities was so great, that I could hardly get through the services. Several times I was upon the point of bursting into a laugh. Even to this day, the remembrance of this scene, through the temptation of the devil, often comes upon me as I am ascending the pulpit. This, I admit, is a weakness, but I trust it will rather excite your sympathy and your prayers than your reproaches." It may be amusing, perhaps profitable, to give here a few sketches of the remarkable characters of Ridgefield, at the opening of the present century. Some were types of their time; others, however eccentric, were exemplifications of our race and our society, influenced by peculiar circumstances, and showing into what fashions this stuff of humanity may be wrought. They are still prominent in my recollection, and seem to me an essential part of the social landscape which encircled my youth. I begin with the three deacons of my father's parish. First was Deacon Olmstead, full threescore years and ten at the opening of the present century. His infancy touched upon the verge of Puritanism--the days of Increase and Cotton Mather. The spirit of the Puritans lived in his heart, while the semblance of the patriarchs lingered in his form. He was fully six feet high, with broad shoulders, powerful limbs, and the august step of a giant. His hair was white, and rolled in thin curls upon his shoulders; he was still erect, though he carried a long cane, like that of father Abraham in the old pictures, representing him at the head of his kindred and his camels, going from the land of Haran to the land of Canaan. Indeed, he was my personification of the great progenitor of the Hebrews; and when my father read from the twelfth chapter of Genesis, how he and Lot and their kindred journeyed forth, I half fancied it must be Deacon Olmstead under another name. [Illustration: DEACON OLMSTEAD.] Deacon Olmstead was in all things a noble specimen of humanity--an honor to human nature, a shining light in the church. I have spoken of him as having something grand about him, yet I remember how kindly he condescended to take me, a child, on his knee, and how gently his great brawny fingers encircled my infant hand. I have said he was wise; yet his book-learning was small, though it might have been as great as that of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. He knew, indeed, the Bible by heart, and that is a great teacher. He had also lived long, and profited by observation and experience. Above all, he was calm, just, sincere, and it is wonderful how these lamps light up the path of life. I have said he was proud, yet it was only toward the seductions of the world: to these he was hard and stern: to his God he was simple, obedient, and docile as a child: toward his kindred and his neighbor, toward the poor, toward the suffering, though not so soft, he was sympathetic as a sister of charity. I must now present a somewhat different portrait--that of Deacon John Benedict. He was a worthy old man, and enjoyed many claims to respect. He was not only a deacon, but a justice of the peace; moreover, he was the father of Aunt Delight, of whom I desire ever to speak with reverence. She, not being a beauty, was never married, and hence, having no children of her own, she combed and crammed the heads of other people's children. In this way she was eminently useful in her day and generation. The Deacon respected the law, especially as it was administered in his own person. He was severe upon those who violated the statutes of the State, but one who violated the statutes of Deacon John Benedict committed the unpardonable sin. He was the entire police of the meeting-house on Sunday, and not a boy or girl, or even a bumblebee, could offend without condign punishment. Nevertheless, the Deacon is said, in one case--rather before my time--to have met his match. There was in the village a small, smart, nervous woman, with a vigorous clack, which, once set going, was hard to stop. One day she was at church, and having carried her dinner of mince-pie in a little cross-handled basket, she set it down under the seat. In the midst of sermon-time a small dog came into the pew, and getting behind her petticoats, began to devour the pie. She heard what was going on, and gave him a kick. Upon this the dog backed out with a yelp, taking with him the dinner-basket, hung about his neck, across the pew into the broad aisle. "Oh dear!" said the woman, in a shrill voice, "the dog's got my dinner! There! I've spoken loud in meeting-time! What will Deacon Benedict say? Why! I'm talking all the time. There it goes agin! What shall I du?" "Hold your tongue!" said the Deacon, who was in his official seat, fronting the explosion. These words operated like a charm, and the nervous lady was silent. The next day Deacon John appeared at the house of the offender, carrying a calf-bound volume in his hand. The woman gave one glance at the book, and one at the Deacon. That was enough: it spoke volumes, and the man of the law returned home, and never mentioned the subject afterward. Deacon Hawley was very unlike either of his two associates whom I have described. He was younger, and of a peculiarly mild and amiable temper. His countenance wore a tranquil and smooth expression. His hair was fine and silky, and lay, as if oiled, close to his head. He had a soft voice, and an ear for music. He was a cabinet-maker by trade, a chorister by choice, and a deacon by the vote of the church. In each of these things he found his place, as if designed for it by nature. In worldly affairs as well as spiritual, Deacon Hawley's path was straight and even: he was successful in business, beloved in society, honored in the church. Exceedingly frugal by habit and disposition, he still loved to give in charity, though he did not talk of it. When he was old, his family being well provided for, he spent much of his time in casting about to find opportunities of doing good. Once he learned that a widow, who had been in good circumstances, was struggling with poverty. He was afraid to offer money as charity, for fear of wounding her pride--the more sensitive, perhaps, because of her change of condition. He therefore intimated that he owed a debt of fifty dollars to her late husband, and wished to pay it to her. "And how was that?" said the lady, somewhat startled. "I will tell you," said the Deacon. "About five-and-twenty years ago, soon after you were married, I made some furniture for your husband--to the amount of two hundred dollars. I have been looking over the account, and find that I rather overcharged him in the price of some chairs--that is, I could have afforded them at somewhat less. I have added up the interest, and here, madam, is the money." The widow listened, and as she suspected the truth, the tears came to her eyes. The Deacon did not pause to reply, but laid the money on the table and departed. The term _deacon_ is associated in many minds with a sort of affectation, a cant in conversation, and an I-am-holier-than-thou air and manner. I remember Deacon C----, who deemed it proper to become scriptural, and talk as much as possible like Isaiah. He was in partnership with his son Laertes, and they sold crockery and furniture. One day a female customer came, and the old gentleman being engaged, went to call his son, who was in the loft above. Placing himself at the foot of the stairs, he said, attuning his voice to the occasion, "La-ar-tes, descend--a lady waits!" Deacon C---- sought to signalize himself by a special respect to the ways of Providence; so he refused to be insured against fire, declaring that if the Lord wished to burn down his house or his barn he should submit without a murmur. He pretended to consider thunder, and lightning, and conflagrations as special acts of the Almighty, and it was distrusting Providence to attempt to avert their effects. Deacon Hawley had none of these follies or frailties. Though a deacon, he was still a man; though aspiring to heaven, he lived cheerily on earth; though a Christian, he was a father, a neighbor, and, according to his rank in life, a gentleman, having in all things the feelings and manners appropriate to each of those relations. CHAPTER VIII. MAT OLMSTEAD, THE TOWN WIT--THE SALAMANDER HAT--SOLAR ECLIPSE--THE OLD HEN AND THE PHILOSOPHER--LIEUTENANT SMITH--EXTRAORDINARY METEOR--FULTON AND HIS STEAM-BOAT--GRANTHER BALDWIN AND HIS WIFE--SARAH BISHOP AND HER CAVE. Another celebrity in Ridgefield, whom I must not forget, was Matthew Olmstead, or Mat Olmstead, as he was usually called; he was a day laborer, and though his specialty was the laying of stone fences, he was equally adroit at hoeing corn, mowing, and farm-work in general. He was rather short and thick-set, with a long nose, a little bulbous in his latter days; with a ruddy complexion, and a mouth shutting like a pair of nippers, the lips having an oblique dip to the left, giving a keen and mischievous expression to his face: qualified, however, by more of mirth than malice. This feature was indicative of his mind and character; for he was sharp in speech, and affected a crisp, biting brevity, called dry wit. He had also a turn for practical jokes, and a great many of these were told of him; to which, perhaps, he had no historical claim. The following is one of them, and is illustrative of his manner, even if it originated elsewhere. On a cold, stormy day in December, a man chanced to come into the bar-room of Keeler's tavern, where Mat Olmstead and several of his companions were lounging. The stranger had on a new hat of the latest fashion, and still shining with the gloss of the iron. He seemed conscious of his dignity, and carried his head in such a manner as to invite attention to it. Mat's knowing eye immediately detected the weakness of the stranger; so he approached him, and said,-- "What a very nice hat you've got on! Pray who made it?" "Oh, it came from New York," was the reply. "Well, let me take it," said Mat. The stranger took it off his head, gingerly, and handed it to him. "It is a wonderful nice hat," said Matthew; "and I see it's a real salamander!" "Salamander?" said the other. "What's that?" "Why, a real salamander hat won't burn!" "No? I never heard of that before: I don't believe it's one of that kind." "Sartain sure; I'll bet you a mug of flip of it." "Well, I'll stand you!" "Done: now I'll just put it under the fore-stick?" "Well." It being thus arranged, Mat put the hat under the fore-stick into a glowing mass of coals. In an instant it took fire, collapsed, and rolled into a black, crumpled mass of cinders. "I du declare," said Mat Olmstead, affecting great astonishment, "it ain't a salamander hat arter all! Well, I'll pay the flip!" Yet wit is not always wisdom. Keen as this man was as to things immediately before him, he was of narrow understanding. He seemed not to possess the faculty of reasoning beyond his senses. He never would admit that the sun was fixed, and that the world turned round. I remember, that when the great solar eclipse of 1806 was approaching, he with two other men were at work in one of our fields, not far from the house. The eclipse was to begin at ten or eleven o'clock, and my father invited the workmen to come up and observe it through some pieces of smoked glass. They came, though Mat ridiculed the idea of an eclipse--not but the thing might happen; but it was idle to suppose it could be foretold. While they were waiting and watching, my father explained the cause and nature of the phenomenon. Mat laughed with that low, scoffing chuckle, with which a woodcock, safe in his den, replies to the bark of a besieging dog. "So you don't believe this?" said my father. "No," said Mat, shaking his head; "I don't believe a word of it. You say, Parson Goodrich, that the sun is fixed, and don't move?" "Yes, I say so." "Well: didn't you preach last Sunday out of the 10th chapter of Joshua?" "Yes." "And didn't you tell us that Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still?" "Yes." "Well: what was the use of telling the sun to stand still if it never moved?" This was a dead shot, especially at a parson, and in the presence of an audience inclined, from the fellowship of ignorance, to receive the argument. Being thus successful, Mat went on,-- "Now, Parson Goodrich, let's try it again. If you turn a thing that's got water in it bottom up, the water'll run out, won't it?" "No doubt." "If the world turns round, then, your well will be turned bottom up, and the water'll run out!" At this point my father applied his eye to the sun, through a piece of smoked glass. The eclipse had begun: a small piece was evidently cut off from the rim. My father stated the fact, and the company around looked through the glass, and saw that it was so. Mat Olmstead, however, sturdily refused to try it, and bore on his face an air of supreme contempt; as much as to say "You don't humbug me!" But ignorance and denial of the works of God do not interrupt their march. By slow and invisible degrees, a shade crept over the landscape. There was no cloud in the sky; but a chill stole through the atmosphere, and a strange dimness fell over the world. It was mid-day, yet it seemed like the approach of night. All nature seemed chilled and awed by the strange phenomenon. The birds, with startled looks and ominous notes, left their busy cares and gathered in the thick branches of the trees, where they seemed to hold counsel one with another. The hens, with slow and hesitating steps, set their faces toward their roosts. One old hen, with a brood of chickens, walked along with a tall, halting tread, and sought shelter upon the barn-floor, where she gathered her young ones under her wings, continuing to made a low sound, as if saying, "Hush, my babes, lie still and slumber." I well remember this phenomenon--the first of the kind I had ever witnessed. Though occupied by this seeming conflict of the heavenly bodies, I recollect to have paid some attention to the effect of the scene upon others. Mat Olmstead said not a word; the other workmen were overwhelmed with emotions of awe. At length, the eclipse began to pass away, and nature slowly returned to her equanimity. The birds came forth, and sang a jubilee, as if relieved from some impending calamity. The hum of life again filled the air; the old hen with her brood gaily resumed her rambles, and made the leaves and gravel fly with her invigorated scratchings. The workmen, too, having taken a glass of grog, returned thoughtfully to their labors. "After all," said one of the men, as they passed along to the field, "I guess the parson was right about the sun and the moon." "Well, perhaps he was," said Mat; "but then Joshua was wrong." * * * * * This incident of the total eclipse was, many years later, turned to account in Parley's Magazine, in the following dialogue between Peter Parley and his children: _Parley._ Come, John, you promised to write something for this number of the Magazine; is it ready? _John._ Well--* * *--not exactly. _Jane._ Oh, Mr. Parley--'tis ready--he read it all to me, and it's real good, if anybody could understand it. _P._ Bring it here, John. (_John comes up gingerly, and gives Mr. Parley a piece of paper._) _John._ There 'tis--but you mustn't read it aloud. _All the children._ Yes, yes, read it! Read it! Go ahead! _P._ Well, I'll read it--it looks pretty good. Now let all be perfectly still. (_Parley reads._) The Old Hen and the Philosopher: a Fable. PART I. REFLECTIONS OF A HEN WITH CHICKENS DURING AN ECLIPSE OF THE SUN. "Craw * * * craw * * * craw! What's the matter with my eyes? It looks very dark, for a clear summer's day. I must be getting old, for it ain't more than ten o'clock, and it seems exactly like sundown. Craw * * * craw * * * craw! Why, it's getting cold. It seems as chill as evening. Cut, cut, cudawcut! What can be the matter? Why, the sun is going to bed before it's fairly got up. Cur--r-r-r-r-r! Well, after all, it may be only a fit of the vapors--or my gizzard may be put out of order by that toad I ate yesterday. I thought, then, I should pay dear for it. Cur--r-r-r-r-r? Here chicks--come under my wings! I'm going to take a nap. Come along--Nip, Dip, Pip, Rip--come into your featherbed, my little dearies! There! Don't stick your noses out--be still now--I'm going to sing a song. Hush, my chickies--don't you peep-- Hush, my children--go to sleep! Now the night is dark and thick-- Go to sleep each little chick! * * * * * Fiddle-de-dee--I can't sleep, and the chickens are as lively as bed-bugs. Cut--cut--cu--daw--cut! What on airth is the matter! The sun has got put out, right up there in the sky, just like a candle. Well--never did I see or hear of such a thing afore! And now it's night in the middle of the day! What will come next? Why, I expect I shall walk on my head, and fly with my claws! It ain't half fair, to shave an old hen and chickens out of their dinner and supper in this way. However, it's too dark for decent people to be abroad. So, my chicks, we must get into the coop and go to rest. Cur--r-r-r-r--it's very queer indeed. How thankful I am that I don't make day and night, and get the world into such a scrape as this. Come in! Come in, chicks! It ain't our affair. Come along--there--you rowdies! You ain't sleepy, and I don't wonder at it. But hens and chickens must go to bed when the lamp is put out. Cur--r-r-r-r-r." PART II. REFLECTIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER UPON A BLADE OF GRASS. Here is a leaf, which we call a blade of grass. There are myriads like it in this field; it seems a trifle; it seems insignificant. But let me look at it with my glass. How wonderful is its texture! It seems woven like network, and nothing can exceed the beauty of its structure. And yet every blade of grass is like this. It exceeds all human art in the delicacy of its fabric, yet it grows here out of the ground. _Grows!_ What does that mean? What makes it grow? Has it life? It must have life, or it could not grow. And what is that life? It cannot think; it cannot walk; who makes it grow then? Who made this blade of grass? It was not man; it is not the beast of the field. It is God who made it! And is God here in the field, all around me--in every blade of grass, in every leaf, and stem, and flower? It must be so, indeed. How full of instruction is every thing around us, if we use the powers we possess! * * * * * _Moral._ Some people believe, that birds and beasts have minds and souls as well as human beings; but we see that the most stupendous wonder of nature excited in one of the most intelligent and civilized of birds, only a queer sort of surprise, expressed in the words cut--cut--cu--dawcut! At the same time it appears that a single blade of grass opens to the philosopher a sublime strain of thought, teaching the profound lesson that God is everywhere! Is there not a gulf as wide as eternity, between the human soul and animal instinct? * * * * * _All the children._ Bravo, bravo--John! _Parley._ Well, John--that'll do for a boy. I shan't insert it as my own, you know; people will say, it's good for John Smith, only fourteen years old; but for Peter Parley--why, it's too ridiculous, altogether. At any rate--John--the moral is good--and if people do laugh at the article, you just say to 'em--_keep your tongue between your teeth, till you do better, and you won't speak for a year_! There's nothing like showing a proper spirit upon occasions of importance. * * * * * To return to Mat Olmstead. Notwithstanding his habitual incredulity, he had still his weak side, for he was a firm believer in ghosts: not ghosts in general, but in two that he had seen himself. These were of enormous size, white, and winged like angels. He had seen them one dark night as he was going to his house, which was situated in a lonesome lane that diverged from the high road. It was very late, and Mat had spent the evening at the tavern, like Tam O'Shanter; like him, he "was na fou, but just had plenty." Well, Mat Olmstead's two angels turned out to be a couple of white geese, which he had startled into flight as he stumbled upon them quietly snoozing in the joint of a rail fence! It has often appeared to me that Mat Olmstead was a type, a representative of a class of men not very rare in this world of ours. It is not at all uncommon to find people, and those who are called strong-minded, who are habitual unbelievers in things possible and probable--nay, in things well established by testimony--while they readily become the dupes of the most absurd illusions and impositions. Dr. Johnson, it is stated, did not believe in the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, until six months after it had happened, while he readily accepted the egregious deception of the Cock Lane Ghost. In our day we see people, and sharp ones, too, who reject the plainest teachings of common sense, sanctioned by the good and wise of centuries, and follow with implicit faith some goose of the imagination, like Joe Smith or Brigham Young. These are Mat Olmsteads, a little intoxicated by their own imaginations, and in their night of ignorance and folly they fall down and worship the grossest and goosiest of illusions. I now turn to a different character, Lieutenant, or, as we all called him, _Leftenant_ Smith, who has been already introduced to you. He was a man of extensive reading and large information; he was also some sixty years old, and had stored in his memory the results of his own observation and experience. He read the newspapers and conversed with travellers, affected philosophy, and deemed himself the great intelligencer of the town: he dearly loved to dispense his learning, asking only in return attentive listeners; and he liked discussion, provided the talk was all left to himself. He was equal to all questions: with my father, he dilated upon such high matters as the purchase of Louisiana; Lewis and Clarke's exploring expedition; the death of Hamilton in the duel with Aaron Burr; the attack of the Leopard on the Chesapeake; Fulton's attempts at steam navigation, and the other agitating topics of those times, as they came one after another. I have an impression now that Lieut. Smith, after all, was not very profound; but to me he was a miracle of learning. I listened to his discussions with very little interest, but his narratives engaged my whole attention. These were always descriptive of actual events, for he would have disdained fiction: from them I derived a satisfaction that I never found in fables. The travels of Mungo Park, his strange adventures and melancholy death, which about those days transpired through the newspapers, and all of which Lieut. Smith had at his tongue's end, excited my interest and my imagination, even beyond the romances of Sinbad the Sailor and Robinson Crusoe. In the year 1807 an event occurred, not only startling in itself, but giving exercise to all the philosophical powers of Lieut. Smith. On the morning of the 14th of December, about daybreak, I had arisen, and was occupied in building a fire, this being my daily duty; suddenly the room was filled with light, and, looking up, I saw through the window a ball of fire, nearly the size of the moon, passing across the heavens from north-west to south-east. It was at an immense height, and of intense brilliancy. Having passed the zenith, it swiftly descended toward the earth: while still at a great elevation it burst, with three successive explosions, into fiery fragments. The report was like three claps of rattling thunder in quick succession. My father, who saw the light and heard the sounds, declared it to be a meteor of extraordinary magnitude. It was noticed all over the town, and caused great excitement. On the following day the news came that huge fragments of stone had fallen in the adjacent town of Weston, some eight or ten miles south-east of Ridgefield. It appeared that the people in the neighborhood heard the rushing of the stones through the air, as well as the shock when they struck the earth. One, weighing two hundred pounds, fell on a rock, which it splintered; its huge fragments ploughing up the ground around to the extent of a hundred feet. This meteor was estimated to be half-a-mile in diameter, and to have travelled through the heavens at the rate of two or three hundred miles a minute. On this extraordinary occasion the Lieutenant came to our house, according to his wont, and for several successive evenings discoursed to us upon the subject. I must endeavor to give you a specimen of his performances. "I have examined the subject, sir," said he, addressing my father, "and am inclined to the opinion that these phenomena are animals revolving in the orbits of space between the heavenly bodies. Occasionally, one of them comes too near the earth, and rushing through our atmosphere with immense velocity, takes fire and explodes!" "This is rather a new theory, is it not?" said my father. "It appears that these meteoric stones, in whatever country they fall, are composed of the same ingredients: mostly silex, iron, and nickel: these substances would make rather a hard character, if endowed with animal life, and especially with the capacity of rushing through space at the rate of two or three hundred miles a minute, and then exploding?" "These substances I consider only as the shell of the animal, sir." "You regard the creature as a huge shell-fish, then?" "Not necessarily a fish; for the whole order of nature, called _Crustacea_, has the bones on the outside. In this case of meteors, I suppose them to be covered with some softer substance; for it frequently happens that a jelly-like matter comes down with meteoric stones. This resembles coagulated blood; and thus what is called bloody rain or snow has often fallen over great spaces of country. Now, when the chemists analyze these things--the stones, which I consider the bones; and the jelly, which I consider the fat; and the rain, which I consider the blood--they find them all to consist of the same elements; that is, silex, iron, nickel, &c. None but my animal theory will harmonise all these phenomena, sir." "But," interposed my father, "consider the enormous size of your aërial monsters. I recollect to have read only a short time since, that in the year 1803, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the inhabitants of several towns of Normandy, in France, heard noises in the sky, like the peals of cannon and musketry, with a long-continued roll of drums. Looking upward, they saw something like a small cloud at an immense elevation, which soon seemed to explode, sending its vapor in all directions. At last a hissing noise was heard, and then stones fell, spreading over a country three miles wide by eight miles long. No less than two thousand pieces were collected, weighing from one ounce to seventeen pounds. That must have been rather a large animal, eight miles long and three miles wide!" "What is that, sir, in comparison with the earth, which Kepler, the greatest philosopher that ever lived, conceived to be a huge beast?" "Yes; but did he prove it?" "He gave good reasons for it, sir. He found very striking analogies between the earth and animal existences: such as the tides, indicating its breathing through vast internal lungs; earthquakes, resembling eructations from the stomach; and volcanoes, suggestive of boils, pimples, and other cutaneous eruptions." "I think I have seen your theory set to verse." Saying this, my father rose, and bringing a book, read as follows,-- "To me things are not as to vulgar eyes-- I would all nature's works anatomize: This world a living monster seems to me, Rolling and sporting in the aërial sea: The soil encompasses her rocks and stones, As flesh in animals encircles bones. I see vast ocean, like a heart in play, Pant systole and diastole every day. The world's great lungs, monsoons and trade-winds show-- From east to west, from west to east they blow. The hills are pimples, which earth's face defile, And burning Etna an eruptive boil. On her high mountains living forests grow, And downy grass o'erspreads the vales below: From her vast body perspirations rise, Condense in clouds and float beneath the skies." My father having closed the book, the profound Lieutenant, who did not conceive it possible that a thing so serious could be made the subject of a joke, said,-- "A happy illustration of my philosophy, sir, though I cannot commend the form in which it is put. If a man has anything worth saying, sir, he should use prose. Poetry is only proper when one wishes to embellish folly or dignify trifles. In this case it is otherwise, I admit; and I am happy to find so powerful a supporter of my animal theory of meteors. I shall consider the subject, and present it for the consideration of the philosophic world." One prominent characteristic of this philosopher was, that when a great event came about, he fancied that he had foreseen and predicted it from the beginning. Now, about this time Fulton actually succeeded in his long-sought application of steam to navigation. The general opinion of the country had been, all along, that he was a monomaniac, attempting an impossibility. He was the standing theme of cheap newspaper wit, and a God-send to orators who were hard run for a joke. Lieutenant Smith, who was only an echo of what passed around him during the period of Fulton's labors, joined in the current contempt; but when the news came, in October, 1807, that he had actually succeeded--that one of his boats had steamed at the rate of five miles an hour against the current of the Hudson river--then, still an echo of the public voice, did he greatly jubilate. "I told you so! I told you so!" was his first exclamation, as he entered the house, swelling with the account. "Well, and what is it?" said my father. "Fulton has made his boat go, sir! I told you how it would be, sir. It opens a new era in the history of navigation. We shall go to Europe in ten days, sir." Now, you will readily understand, that in these sketches I do not pretend to report with literal precision the profound discourses of our Ridgefield _savant_; I remember only the general outlines, the rest being easily suggested. My desire is to present the portrait of one of the notables of our village--one whom I remember with pleasure, and whom I conceive to be a representative of the amiable, and perhaps useful race of fussy philosophers to be found in most country villages. From the town oracle I turn to the town miser. Granther Baldwin, as I remember him, was threescore years and ten--perhaps a little more. He was a man of middle size, thin, wiry, and bloodless, and having his body bent forward at a sharp angle with his hips, while his head was thrown back over his shoulders, giving his person the general form of a reversed letter Z. His complexion was brown and stony; his eye grey and twinkling, with a nose and chin almost meeting like a pair of forceps. His hair, standing out with an irritable friz, was of a rusty gray. He always walked and rode with restless rapidity. At church, he wriggled in his seat, tasted fennel, and bobbed his head up and down and around. He could not afford tobacco, so he chewed, with a constant activity, either an oak chip or the roots of elecampane, which was indigenous in the lane near his house. On Sundays he was decent in his attire, but on week-days he was a beggarly curiosity. It was said that he once exchanged hats with a scarecrow, and cheated scandalously in the bargain. His boots--a withered wreck of an old pair of whitetops--dangled over his shrunken calves and a coat in tatters fluttered from his body. He rode a rat-tailed, ambling mare, which always went like the wind, shaking the old gentleman merrily from right to left, and making his bones, boots, and rags rustle like his own bush-harrow. Familiar as he was, the school-boys were never tired of him, and when he passed, "There goes Granther Baldwin!" was the invariable ejaculation. I must add, in order to complete the picture, that in contrast to his leanness and activity, his wife was very fat, and, either from indolence or lethargy, dozed away half her life in the chimney-corner. She spent a large part of her life in cheating her husband out of fourpence-ha'pennies, of which more than a peck were found secreted in an old chest at her death. It was the boast of this man that he had risen from poverty to wealth, and he loved to describe the process of his advancement. He always worked in the cornfield till it was so dark that he could see his hoe strike fire. When in the heat of summer he was obliged occasionally to let his cattle breathe, he sat on a sharp stone, lest he should rest too long. He paid half-a-dollar to the parson for marrying him, which he always regretted, as one of his neighbors got the job done for a pint of mustard-seed. On fast-days he made his cattle go without food as well as himself. He systematically stooped to save a crooked pin or a rusty nail, as it would cost more to make it than to pick it up. Such were his boasts--or at least, such were the things traditionally imputed to him. He was withal a man of keen faculties; sagacious in the purchase of land, as well as in the rotation of crops. He was literally honest, and never cheated any one out of a farthing, according to his arithmetic, though he had sometimes an odd way of reckoning. It is said that in his day the law imposed a fine of one dollar for profane swearing. During this period, Granther Baldwin employed a carpenter who was notoriously addicted to this vice. Granther kept a strict account of every instance of transgression, and when the job was done, and the time came to settle the account, he said to the carpenter,-- "You've worked with me thirty days, I think, Mr. Kellogg?" "Yes, Granther," was the reply. "At a dollar a-day: that makes thirty dollars, I think?" "Yes, Granther." "Mr. Kellogg, I am sorry to observe that you have a very bad habit of taking the Lord's name in vain." "Yes, Granther." "Well, you know that's agin the law." "Yes, Granther." "And there's a fine of one dollar for each offence." "Yes, Granther." "Well--here's the account I've kept, and I find you've broken the law twenty-five times; that is, sixteen times in April, and nine in May. At a dollar a time, that makes twenty-five dollars--don't it?" "Yes, Granther." "So, then, twenty-five from thirty leaves five; it appears, therefore, that there is a balance of five dollars due to you. How'll you take it, Mr. Kellogg? In cash, or in my way--say in 'taters, pork, and other things?" At this point the carpenter's brow lowered, but with a prodigious effort at composure he replied,-- "Well, Granther, you may keep the five dollars, and I'll take it out in _my_ way--that is, in swearing!" Upon this he hurled at the old gentleman a volley of oaths, too numerous and too profane to repeat. One sketch more, and my gallery of eccentricities is finished. Men hermits have been frequently heard of, but a woman hermit is of rare occurrence. Nevertheless, Ridgefield could boast of one of these among its curiosities. Sarah Bishop was, at the period of my boyhood, a thin, ghostly old woman, bent and wrinkled, but still possessing a good deal of activity. She lived in a cave, formed by nature, in a mass of projecting rocks that overhung a deep valley or gorge in West Mountain, about four miles from our house. The rock, bare and desolate, was her home, except that occasionally she strayed to the neighborhood villages; seldom being absent more than one or two days at a time. She never begged, but received such articles as were given to her. She was of a highly religious turn of mind, and at long intervals came to our church, and partook of the sacrament. She sometimes visited our family--the only one thus favored in the town--and occasionally remained overnight. She never would eat with us at the table, nor engage in general conversation. Upon her early history she was invariably silent; indeed, she spoke of her affairs with great reluctance. She neither seemed to have sympathy for others, nor to ask it in return. If there was any exception, it was only in respect to the religious exercises of the family: she listened intently to the reading of the Bible, and joined with apparent devotion in the morning and evening prayer. My excursions frequently brought me within the wild precincts of her solitary den. Several times I have paid a visit to the spot, and in two instances found her at home. A place more desolate, in its general outline, more absolutely given up to the wildness of nature, it is impossible to conceive. Her cave was a hollow in the rock, about six feet square. Except a few rags and an old basin, it was without furniture; her bed being the floor of the cave, and her pillow a projecting point of the rock. It was entered by a natural door about three feet wide and four feet high, and was closed in severe weather only by pieces of bark. At a distance of a few feet was a cleft, where she kept a supply of roots and nuts, which she gathered, and the food that was given her. She was reputed to have a secret depository, where she kept a quantity of antique dresses; several of them of rich silks, and apparently suited to fashionable life: though I think this was an exaggeration. At a little distance down the ledge there was a fine spring of water, near which she was often found in fair weather. There was no attempt, either in or around the spot, to bestow upon it an air of convenience or comfort. A small space of cleared ground was occupied by a few thriftless peachtrees, and in summer a patch of starveling beans, cucumbers, and potatoes. Up two or three of the adjacent forest-trees there clambered luxuriant grape-vines, highly productive in their season. With the exception of these feeble marks of cultivation, all was left ghastly and savage as nature made it. The trees, standing upon the tops of the cliff, and exposed to the shock of the tempest, were bent and stooping towards the valley: their limbs contorted, and their roots clinging, as with an agonized grasp, into the rifts of the rocks upon which they stood. Many of them were hoary with age, and hollow with decay; others were stripped of their leaves by the blasts; and others still, grooved and splintered by the lightning. The valley below, enriched with the decay of centuries, and fed with moisture from the surrounding hills, was a wild paradise of towering oaks, and other giants of the vegetable kingdom, with a rank undergrowth of tangled shrubs. In the distance, to the east, the gathered streams spread out into a beautiful expanse of water called Long Pond. A place at once so secluded and so wild was, of course, the chosen haunt of birds, beasts and reptiles. The eagle built her nest and reared her young in the clefts of the rocks; foxes found shelter in the caverns; and serpents revelled alike in the dry hollows of the cliffs and the dark recesses of the valley. The hermitess had made companionship with these brute tenants of the wood. The birds had become so familiar with her, that they seemed to heed her almost as little as if she had been a stone. The fox fearlessly pursued his hunt and his gambols in her presence. The rattlesnake hushed his monitory signal as he approached her. Such things, at least, were entertained by the popular belief. It was said, indeed, that she had domesticated a particular rattlesnake, and that he paid her daily visits. She was accustomed--so said the legend--to bring him milk from the villages, which he devoured with great relish. It will not surprise you that a subject like this should have given rise to one of my first poetical efforts; the first verses, in fact, that I ever published. I gave them to Brainard, then editor of the Mirror, at Hartford; and he inserted them, probably about the year 1823. The facts in respect to this Nun of the Mountain were, indeed, strange enough, without any embellishment of fancy. During the winter she was confined for several months to her cell. At that period she lived upon roots and nuts, which she had laid in for the season. She had no fire; and, deserted even by her brute companions, she was absolutely alone. She appeared to have no sense of solitude, no weariness at the slow lapse of days and months. When spring returned, she came down from her mountain a mere shadow; each year her form more bent, her limbs more thin and wasted, her hair more blanched, her eye more colorless. At last, life seemed ebbing away, like the faint light of a lamp sinking into the socket. The final winter came; it passed, and she was not seen in the villages around. Some of the inhabitants went to the mountain, and found her standing erect, her feet sunk in the frozen marsh of the valley. In this situation, being unable to extricate herself, she had yielded her breath to Him who gave it! The early history of this strange personage was involved in some mystery. So much as this, however, was ascertained, that she was of good family, and lived on Long Island. During the Revolutionary war, in one of the numerous forays of the British soldiers, her father's house was burned, and she was infamously treated. Desolate in fortune, blighted at heart, she fled from human society, and for a long time concealed her sorrows in the cavern which she had accidentally found. Her grief--softened by time, perhaps alleviated by a veil of insanity--was at length so far mitigated, that, although she did not seek human society, she could endure it. She continued to occupy her cave till the year 1810 or 1811, when she departed in the manner I have described; and we may hope, for a brighter and happier existence. CHAPTER IX. FAREWELL TO HOME--DANBURY--MY NEW VOCATION--MY BROTHER-IN-LAW--HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH LAWYER HATCH--CLERICAL ANECDOTES. In the autumn of the year 1808, a sudden change took place in my prospects. My eldest sister had married a gentleman by the name of Cooke, in the adjacent town of Danbury. He was a tradesman, and being in want of a clerk, offered me the place. It was considered a desirable situation by my parents, and, overlooking my mechanical aptitudes, they accepted it at once, and at the age of fifteen I found myself installed in a country store. This arrangement gratified my love of change; and at the same time, as Danbury was a much more considerable town than Ridgefield, going to live there naturally suggested the idea of advancement, especially as I was to exchange my uncertain prospects for a positive profession. However, I little comprehended what it meant to say, "Farewell to home:" I have since learned its significance. In thus bidding adieu to the paternal roof, we part with youth for ever. We part with the spring-tide of life, which strews every path with flowers, fills the air with poetry, and the heart with rejoicing. We part with that genial spirit which endows familiar objects--brooks, lawns, play-grounds, hill-sides--with its own sweet illusions; we bid adieu to this and its fairy companionships. Even if, in after life, we return to the scenes of our childhood, they have lost the bloom of youth, and in its place we see the wrinkles of that age which has graven its hard lines upon our hearts. Farewell to home implies something even yet more serious: we relinquish, and often with exultation, the tender care of parents, in order to take upon ourselves the responsibilities of independence. What seeming infatuation it is, that renders us thus impatient of the guidance of those who gave us being, and makes us at the same time anxious to spread our untried sails upon an untried sea, to go upon a voyage which involves all the chances, evil as well as good, of existence! And yet it is not infatuation--it is instinct. We cannot always be young; we cannot all remain under the paternal roof. The old birds push the young ones from the nest, and force them to a trial of their wings. It is the system of nature that impels us to go forth and try our fortunes, and it is a kind Providence, after all, which endues us with courage for the outset of our uncertain career. I was not long in discovering that my new vocation was very different from what I had expected, and very different from my accustomed way of life. My habits had been active, my employments chiefly in the open air. I was accustomed to be frequently on horseback, and to make excursions to the neighboring towns. I had also enjoyed much personal liberty, which I failed not to use in rambling over the fields and forests. All this was now changed. My duties lay exclusively in the store, and this seemed now my prison. From morning to night I remained there, and, as our business was not large, I had many hours upon my hands with nothing to do but to consider the weariness of my situation. My brother-in-law was always present, and being a man of severe aspect and watchful eyes, I felt a sort of restraint, which, for a time, was agonizing. I had, consequently, pretty sharp attacks of homesickness; a disease which, though not dangerous, is one of the most distressing to which suffering humanity is exposed. This state of misery continued for some weeks, during which time I revolved various plans of escape from my confinement: such as stealing away at night, making my way to Norwalk, getting on board a sloop, and going as cabin-boy to the West Indies. I believe that a small impulse would have set me upon some such mad expedition. By degrees, however, I became habituated to my occupation, and as my situation was eligible in other respects, I found myself ere long reconciled to it. The father and mother of my brother-in-law were aged people, living with him in the same house, and as one family. They were persons of great amiability and excellence of character: the former, Colonel Cooke, was eighty years of age, but he had still the perfect exercise of his faculties, and though he had ceased all business, he was cheerful, and took a lively interest in passing events. Never have I seen a more pleasing spectacle than this reverend couple, at the age of fourscore, both smoking their pipes in the evening, with two generations of their descendants around them. My brother-in-law was a man of decided character, and his portrait deserves a place in these annals. He had graduated at Yale College, and had been qualified for the bar; but his health was feeble, and therefore, chiefly for occupation, he succeeded to the store which his father had kept before him. Being in easy circumstances, he made no great efforts in business. Though, as I have said, he was of stern aspect, and his manners were somewhat cold and distant, his character was that of a just and kind man. In business he treated people respectfully, but he never solicited custom: he showed, but never recommended his goods. If his advice were asked, he offered it without regard to his own interest. He gave me no instructions, but left me to the influence of his example. He was of a religious turn of mind, not merely performing the accustomed duties of a Christian, but making devotional books a large part of his study. Perhaps he was conscious of failing health, and already heard the monitory voice of that disease which was ere long to terminate his career. Nevertheless, he was not insensible to the pleasures of cultivated society, and however grave he might be in his general air and manner, he was particularly gratified with the visits of a man, in all things his opposite, Moses Hatch, then a leading lawyer in Danbury. This person was a frequent visitor to the store, and the long winter which commenced soon after I entered upon my apprenticeship was not a little enlivened by his conversations with my master. It frequently happened during the deep snows, that the day passed without a single customer, and on these occasions Lawyer Hatch was pretty sure to pay us a visit. It was curious to see these two men, so opposite in character, attracted to each other as if by contradiction. My brother-in-law evidently found a pleasant relaxation in the conversation of his neighbor, embellished with elegant wit and varied learning, while the latter derived equal gratification from the serious, manly intellect of his friend. In general the former was the talker, and the latter the listener; yet sometimes the conversation became discussion, and a keen trial of wit _versus_ logic ensued. The lawyer always contended for victory; my brother-in-law for the truth. The precise form of these conversations has vanished from my mind, but some of the topics remain. I recollect long talks about the embargo, non-intercourse, and other Jeffersonian measures, which were treated with unsparing ridicule and reproach; anecdotes and incidents of Napoleon, who excited mingled admiration and terror; with observations upon public men, as well in Europe as America. I remember also a very keen discussion upon Berkeley's theory of the ideality of nature, mental and material, which so far excited my curiosity, that, finding the "Minute Philosopher" by that author, in the family library, I read it through with great interest and attention. The frequent references to Shakespeare in these conversations led me to look into his works, and, incited by the recommendations of my sister, I read them through, somewhat doggedly, seeking even to penetrate the more difficult and obscure passages. It frequently happened that my master, owing to the influence of disease, was affected with depression of spirits; and the lawyer's best wit and choicest stories were expended without even exciting a smile. Not discouraged, but rather stimulated by such adversity, he usually went on, and was pretty sure at last to strike the vein, as Moses did the water in the rock, and a gush of uncontrollable laughter was the result. I remember in one instance, Mr. Cooke sat for a long time, looking moodily into the fire, while Squire Hatch went on telling stories, chiefly about clergymen, of which he had a great assortment. I will endeavor to give you a sketch of the scene. "I know not why it is so," said the lawyer; "but the fact is undeniable, that the most amusing anecdotes are about clergymen. The reason perhaps is, that incongruity is the source of humorous associations; and this is evidently the most frequent and striking in a profession which sets apart its members as above the mass of mankind, in a certain gravity of character and demeanor, of which the black coat is the emblem. A spot upon this strikes every eye, while a brown coat, being the color of dirt, hides rather than reveals what is upon its surface. Thus it is, as we all know, that what would be insipid as coming from a layman, is very laughable if it happens to a parson. I have heard that on a certain occasion, as the Rev. J---- M---- was about to read a hymn, he saw a little boy sitting behind the chorister in the gallery, who had intensely red hair. The day was cold, and the little rogue was pretending to warm his hands by holding them close to the chorister's head. This so disconcerted the minister, that it was some minutes before he could go on with the services." The only effect of this was, that my master drew down one corner of his mouth. "I have heard of another clergyman," said the lawyer, "who suffered in a similar way. One day, in the very midst of his sermon, he saw Deacon B---- fast asleep, his head leaning back on the rail of the pew, and his mouth wide open. A young fellow in the gallery above, directly over him, took a quid of tobacco from his mouth, and taking a careful aim, let it drop plump into the deacon's mouth. The latter started from his sleep, and went through a terrible paroxysm of fright and choking before he recovered." Mr. Cooke bit his lip, but was silent. Lawyer Hatch, although he pretended to be all the while looking into the fire, got a quick side-glance at the face of his auditor, and continued,-- "You know the Rev. Dr. B----, sir? Well, one day he told me, that as he was on his way to New Haven he came to the house of one of his former parishioners, who, some years before, had removed to that place. As he was about to pass it, he remembered that this person had died recently, and he thought it meet and proper to stop and condole with the widow. She met him very cheerfully, and they had some pleasant chat together. "'Madam,' said he, after a time, 'it is a painful subject--but you have recently met with a severe loss.' "She instantly applied her apron to her eyes, and said,-- "'Oh yes, doctor; there's no telling how I feel.' "'It is indeed a great bereavement you have suffered.' "'Yes, doctor; very great, indeed.' "'I hope you bear it with submission?' "'I try tu; but oh, doctor, I sometimes feel in my heart--Goosy, goosy gander, where shall I wander?'" The lawyer glanced at the object of his attack, and seeming to see a small breach in the wall, he thought it time to bring up his heavy guns. He went on,-- "There's another story about this same Dr. B----, which is amusing. Some years ago he lost his wife, and after a time he began to look out for another. At last he fixed his mind upon a respectable lady in a neighboring town, and commenced paying her his addresses. This naturally absorbed much of his time and attention, and his parish became dissatisfied. The deacons of the church held several conferences on the subject, and it was finally agreed that Deacon Becket, who had the grace of smooth speech, should give the Reverend Doctor a hint of what they deemed his fearful backsliding. Accordingly, the next Sabbath morning, on going to church, the deacon overtook the parson, and the following dialogue ensued,-- "'Good morning, Dr. B----.' "'Good morning, Deacon Becket.' "'Well, Doctor, I'm glad to meet you; for I wanted to say to you as how I thought of changing my pew!' "'Indeed! And why so?' "'Well, I'll tell you. I sit, as you know, clear over the backside of the meeting-house; and between me and the pulpit there's Judy Vickar, Molly Warren, Experience Pettibone, and half-a-dozen old maids, who sit with their mouths wide open, and they catch all the best of your sarmon; and when it gets to me, it's plaguy poor stuff!'" My brother-in-law could hold out no longer: his face was agitated for a moment with nervous spasms; and then, bending forward, he burst into a round, hearty laugh. The lawyer--who made it a point never to smile at his own jokes--still had a look upon his face as much as to say, "Well, sir, I thought I should get my case." It may be easily imagined that I was greatly interested by these conversations and discussions; and always felt not a little annoyed, if perchance, as sometimes happened, I was called away in the midst of a good story, or a keen debate, to supply a customer with a gallon of treacle, or a paper of pins. I know not if this disgusted me with my trade; but it is very certain that I conceived for it a great dislike, nearly from the beginning. Never, so far as I can recollect, did I for one moment enter heartily into its spirit. I was always, while I continued in it, a mere servile laborer; doing my duty, perhaps, yet with a languid and reluctant heart. However, I got through the winter; and when the summer came, Mr. Cooke nearly gave up personal attention to business in consequence of ill health; and we had a new clerk, who was older than myself, and took the responsible charge of the establishment. He was an excellent merchant, and to me was a kind and indulgent friend. He afterwards settled in Troy, where he is still living, in the enjoyment of an ample fortune, and in excellent reputation as a father, friend, Christian, and neighbor; the natural fruit of good sense, good temper, and good conduct. CHAPTER X. NEW HAVEN--DISTINGUISHED MEN--WHITNEY'S COTTON-GIN--DURHAM--MY GRANDMOTHER'S INDIAN PUDDINGS--IN SEARCH OF A DOCTOR--RETURN TO DANBURY--THE COLD FRIDAY--FACTORY WORKMEN--MATHEMATICS. In the summer of 1809 I made a short tour with my brother-in-law and my sister, for the health of the former. This, to me, was a grand expedition; for among other places we visited was New Haven, then a sort of Jerusalem in my imagination; a holy place containing Yale College, of which Dr. Dwight was president. Besides all this, one of my uncles and some of my cousins lived there; and, better still, my brother was there, and then a member of the college. Ah, how my heart beat when we set out! Such was the vividness of my perceptions, that I could fill a book with recollections of that short, simple journey; the whole circuit not exceeding one hundred and twenty miles. I was duly impressed with the beauty of New Haven; for then, as now, it was celebrated for a rare union of rural freshness and city elegance. I have recently, in passing through it, had a transient view of its appearance; and may safely affirm that, after pretty large observation in the Old World as well as in the New, I know of no town or city more inviting; especially to one whose judgment is cultivated by observation and study, and whose feelings are chastened by reflection and experience. There is something of the activity and bustle of commerce in a part of the town, and at one point, all the spasm of a railway station. In other portions of the place, and over three-fourths of its area, there is the quietude and repose proper to a seat of learning. Here the houses seem suited to the city, each with a garden breathing the perfumes of the country. At the period of the visit I am describing, New Haven had not one-half its present population; and many of the institutions which now adorn it did not exist. The College, however, was then as now, a leading literary institution in the country. To me it was an object of special reverence, as my grandfather and his five sons had all graduated there. My brother and two of my cousins were at this time among its inmates. Of course, I looked with intense curiosity at the several buildings that belonged to it. Many things here excited my admiration. I looked with particular interest--I may add, with some degree of envy--at the students, who seemed to me the privileged sons of the earth. Several were pointed out as promising to be the master-spirits of their age and generation; in some cases, I have since seen these anticipations fulfilled. Next to the College I visited the Bay, and for the first time actually stood upon the shore of that living sea which, through my whole childhood, had spread its blue bosom before me in the distant horizon. A party of three or four of us took a boat, and went down toward the entrance of the Bay, landing on the eastern side. From this point the view was enchanting; it was a soft summer afternoon, and the sea only breathed upon by light puffs of wind that came from the west. I looked long, and with a species of entrancement, at its heaving and swelling surface: I ran my eye far away, till it met the line where sky and wave are blended together: I followed the lulling surf as it broke, curling and winding, among the mimic bays of the rocky shore. It was a spectacle, not only full of beauty in itself, but to me it was a revelation and a fulfilment of the thousand half-formed fancies which had been struggling in my longing bosom from very childhood. [Illustration: FIRST ADVENTURE ON THE SEA.] Our party was so occupied with our contemplations, that we had scarcely noticed a thunder-storm, which now approached and menaced us from the west. We set out to return, but before we had got half across the Bay it broke full upon us. The change in the aspect of the sea was fearful: all its gentleness was gone; and now, black and scowling, it seemed as if agitated by a demon, threatening everything with destruction that came within its scope. By a severe struggle we succeeded in reaching Long Walk, though not without risk. While staying at New Haven, I met many distinguished men; as the house of my uncle, Elizur Goodrich, was frequented by all the celebrities of the place. Among these was Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, a machine for combing out the seeds from the cotton in its raw state, to which America may almost be said to owe her cotton trade. Whitney's first gin was made in 1793, at which time almost the whole of our raw material was imported. The results of his invention may be estimated by the fact, that while in 1789 only one million pounds of cotton were produced in the United States, the product of the year 1855 exceeded fourteen hundred millions! We saw the original model of Mr. Whitney's gin at his gun-factory, which was situated in a wild, romantic spot, near the foot of East Rock, and about two miles distant from New Haven. Having spent about a week at New Haven, we proceeded to Durham, an old-fashioned, sleepy town, of a thousand inhabitants. It is chiefly remarkable for the distinguished men it has produced--the Chaunceys, celebrated in the annals of New England, and, I may add, in those of the country at large; the Wadsworths, no less noted in various commanding stations, military and civil, public and private; the Lymans, renowned in the battlefield, the college, the pulpit, and the senate; the Austins--father and son--to whose talent and enterprise Texas owes her position as a member of the Union. To this list of remarkable names, I trust I may add that of the Goodriches, without the imputation of egotism, for historical justice demands it. At the time I visited the place, nearly all the family had long since left it. My grandfather, Dr. Goodrich, died in 1797, but my grandmother was living, as well as her daughter, Mrs. Smith, wife of Rev. David Smith, the clergyman of the place, who had succeeded to my grandfather's pulpit. I trust I have all due respect for my paternal grandmother, who has already, by the way, been introduced to your notice. She was now quite lame, but active, energetic, and alive to everything that was passing. She welcomed me heartily, and took the best care of me in the world, lavishing upon me, without stint, all the treasures of her abundant larder. As to her Indian puddings--alas, I shall never see their like again! A comfortable old body she was in all things, and, as I have before remarked, took a special interest in the welfare of the generation of descendants rising up around her. When she saw me eating with a good appetite, her benignant grandmotherly face beamed like a lantern. As to my uncle and aunt Smith, I may remark that they were plain, pious people, the former worthily filling the pulpit of my grandfather, and enjoying a high degree of respect, alike from his position and character. Besides attending to his parochial duties, he prepared young men for college. Among his pupils were several persons who attained distinction. As a man, he was distinguished for his cheerful, frank, friendly manners: as a preacher, he was practical, sincere, and successful. I must mention a story of him, among my pulpit anecdotes. As sometimes happens, in a congregation of farmers during midsummer, it once chanced that a large number of his people, even the deacons in the sacramental seat, fell asleep in the very midst of the sermon. The minister looked around, and just at this moment, the only person who seemed quite awake was his eldest son, David, sitting in the pew by the side of the pulpit. Pausing a moment, and looking down upon his son, he exclaimed, in a powerful voice: "David, wake up!" In a moment the whole congregation roused themselves, and long did they remember the rebuke. During our stay at Durham, my brother-in-law was so ill as to need the advice of a skilful physician. Accordingly, I was dispatched on horseback to Middletown, a distance of eight or ten miles, for Dr. O----, then famous in all the country round about. On my way I met a man of weather-beaten complexion and threadbare garments, mounted on a lean and jaded mare. Beneath him was a pair of plump saddlebags. He had all the marks of a doctor, for then men of his profession traversed the country on horseback, carrying with them a collection of pills, powders, and elixirs, equivalent to an apothecary's shop. Instinct told me that he was my man. As I was about to pass him I drew in my breath, to ask if he were Dr. O----, but a sudden bashfulness seized me: the propitious moment passed, and I went on. On arriving at the house of Dr. O----, I learned that he had gone to the village in the south-western part of the town, six or eight miles off. "There!" said I to myself, "I knew it was he: if I had only spoken to him!" However, reflection was vain. I followed to the designated spot, and there I found that he had left about half an hour before, for another village in the central part of the town. I gave chase, but he was too quick for me, so that I was obliged to return to Durham without him. "Ah!" I thought, "how much trouble a little courage would have saved me!" In fact, I took the incident to heart, and have often practised to advantage upon the lesson it suggested; which is, Never to let a doctor, or anything else, slip, for the want of asking an opportune question. At length we departed from Durham, and took our way homeward, through a series of small towns, arriving at last at Woodbury. The week of our sojourn here flew on golden wings with me. The village itself was after my own heart. It lies in a small tranquil valley, its western boundary consisting of a succession of gentle acclivities, covered with forests; that on the east is formed of basaltic ledges, broken into wild and picturesque forms, rising sharp and hard against the horizon. Through the valley, in long serpentine sweeps, flows a stream, clear and bright, now dashing and now sauntering; here presenting a rapid, and there a glassy pool. In ancient times it was bordered by cities of the beaver; it was now the haunt of a few isolated and persecuted muskrats. In the spring and autumn, the wild ducks, in their migrations, often stooped to its bosom for a night's lodging. At all seasons it was renowned for its trout. In former ages, when the rivers, protected by the deep forests, ran full to the brim, and when the larger streams were filled to repletion with shad and salmon, this was sometimes visited by enterprising individuals of their race, which shot up cataracts, and leaped over obstructing rocks, roots, and mounds, impelled by instinct to seek places remote from the sea, where they might deposit their spawn in safety. In those days, I imagine, the accidents and incidents of shad and salmon life often rivalled the adventurous annals of Marco Polo or Robinson Crusoe. There was about this little village a singular union of refinement and rusticity, of cultivated plain and steepling rock, of blooming meadow and dusky forest. The long, wide street, saving the highway and a few stray paths here and there, was a bright, grassy lawn, decorated with abundance of sugar-maples, which appeared to have found their Paradise. Such is the shape of the encircling hills and ledges that the site of the village seemed a sort of secluded Happy Valley, where everything turns to poetry and romance. And this aptitude is abundantly encouraged by history; for here was once the favored home of a tribe of Indians. All around--the rivers, the hills, the forests--are still rife with legends and remembrances of the olden time. A rocky mound, rising above the river on one side, and dark forests on the other, bears the name of "Pomperaug's Castle;" a little to the north, near a bridle-path that traversed the meadows, was a heap of stones, called "Pomperaug's Grave." To the east I found a wild ledge, called "Bethel Rock." And each of these objects has its story. It was a great time, that happy week--for let it be remembered that for a whole year I had been imprisoned in a country store. What melody was there in the forest echoes then! Ah! I have since heard Catalani, and Garcia, and Pasta, and Sontag, and Grisi; I have even heard "the Swedish Nightingale;" nay, in France and Italy--the very home of music and song--I have listened to the true nightingale, which has given to Jenny Lind her sweetest and most appropriate epithet; but never, in one or all, have I heard such music as filled my ears that incense-breathing morn, when I made a foray into the wilds of Woodbury! We returned to Danbury after a tour of some five or six weeks. The succeeding autumn and winter presented no peculiar incident--with a single exception. There was, if I rightly remember, in the month of February, a certain "cold Friday," which passed down to succeeding generations as among the marvels of the time. It had snowed heavily for three days, and the ground was covered three feet deep. A driving wind from the north-east then set in, and growing colder and colder, it became at last so severe as to force everybody to shelter. This continued for two days, the whole air being filled with sleet, so that the sun, without a cloud in the sky, shone dim and grey as through a fog. The third day the wind increased, both in force and intensity of cold. Horses, cattle, fowls, sheep, perished in their coverings. The roads were blocked up with enormous drifts; the mails were stopped, travelling was suspended; the world, indeed, seemed paralyzed, and the circulation of life to be arrested. [Illustration: THE COLD FRIDAY.] On the morning of this third day, which was the ominous and famous Friday, word was brought to my sister that a poor family, about two miles off, to whom she had long been a kind friend, was in danger of starvation. She knew no fear, and tolerated no weakness. A thing that ought to be done, was to be done. Therefore, a sack was filled with bread, meat, candles, and a pint of rum: this was lashed around my waist. The horse was brought to the door--I mounted and set off. I knew the animal well, and we had enjoyed many a scamper together. He was, indeed, after my own heart--clean limbed, with full, knowing eyes, and small, pointed sensitive ears. He had a cheerful walk, a fleet, skimming trot, a swift gallop, and all these paces we had often tried. I think he knew who was on his back; but when we got to the turning of the road, which brought his nostrils into the very tunnel of the gale, he snorted, whirled backward, and seemed resolved to return. I, however, brought him steady to his work, gave him sharp advice in the ribs, and showed him that I was resolved to be master. Hesitating a moment, as if in doubt whether I could be in earnest, he started forward; yet so keen was the blast, that he turned aside his head, and screamed as if his nostrils were pierced with hot iron. On he went, however, in some instances up to the saddle in the drift, yet clearing it at full bounds. In a few minutes we were at the door of the miserable hut, now half buried in a snow-drift. I was just in time. The wretched inmates--a mother and three small children--without fire, without food, without help or hope, were in bed, poorly clothed, and only keeping life in their bodies by a mutual cherishing of warmth, like pigs or puppies in a similar extremity. The scene within was dismal in the extreme. The fireplace was choked with snow, which had fallen down the chimney: the ill-adjusted doors and windows admitted alike the drift and the blast, both of which swept across the room in cutting currents. As I entered, the pale, haggard mother comprehend at a glance that relief had come, burst into a flood of tears. I had no time for words. I threw them the sack, remounted my horse, and, the wind at my back, I flew home. One of my ears was a little frost-bitten, and occasionally, for years after, a tingling and itching sensation there reminded me of my ride; which, after all, left an agreeable remembrance upon my mind. Danbury is a handsome town, chiefly built on a long, wide street, crossed near the northern extremity by a small river, a branch of the Housatonic, which, having numerous rapids, affords abundance of mill-sites in its course. At this crossing there were two extensive hat-factories, famous over the whole country. Nearly all the workmen in these establishments, of whom there were several hundred at the time I am describing, were foreigners, mostly English and Irish. A large part of the business of our store was the furnishing of rum to these poor wretches, who bought one or two quarts on Saturday night and drank till Monday, and frequently till Tuesday. A factory workman of those days was thought to be born to toil, and to get drunk. Philanthropy itself had not then lifted its eye or its hopes above this hideous malaria of custom. It is a modern discovery that manufacturing towns may rise up, where comfort, education, morals, and religion, in their best and happiest exercise, may be possessed by the toiling masses. A few words more, and I have done with Danbury. The health of my brother-in-law gradually failed, and at last, as winter approached, he took to his room, and finally to his bed. By almost insensible degrees, and with singular tranquillity of mind and body, he approached his end. It was a trait of his character to believe nothing, to do nothing, by halves. Having founded his faith on Christ, Christianity was now, in its duties, its promises, and its anticipations, as real as life itself. He was afflicted with no doubts, no fears. With his mind in full vigor, his strong intellect vividly awake, he was ready to enter into the presence of his God. The hour came. He had taken leave of his friends, and then, feeling a sense of repose, he asked to be left alone. They all departed save one, who sat apart, listening to every breath. In a few moments she came and found him asleep, but it was the sleep that knows no waking! I continued in the store alone for several months, selling out the goods, and closing up the affairs of the estate. I had now a good deal of time to myself, and thumbed over several books, completing my reading of Shakspeare, to which I have already alluded. It happened that we had a neighbor over the way, a good-natured, chatty old gentleman, by the name of Ebenezer White. He had been a teacher, and had a great taste for mathematics. In those days it was the custom for the newspapers to publish mathematical questions, and to invite their solution. Master White was sure to give the answer first. In fact, his genius for mathematics was so large, that it left rather a moderate space in his brain for common sense. He was, however, full of good feeling, and was now entirely at leisure. Indeed, time hung heavy on his hands, so he made me frequent visits, and in fact lounged away an hour or two of almost every day at the store. I became at last interested in mathematics, and under his good-natured and gratuitous lessons I learned something of geometry and trigonometry, and thus passed on to surveying and navigation. This was the first drop of real science that I ever tasted--I might almost say the last, for though I have since skimmed a good many books, I feel that I have really mastered almost nothing. CHAPTER XI. ARRIVAL AT HARTFORD--MY OCCUPATION THERE--RESTLESSNESS--MY FRIEND GEORGE SHELDON. I now enter upon a new era in my life. Early in the summer of 1811, I took leave of Danbury, and went to Hartford. On my arrival there, I was installed in the dry-goods store of C. B. K----, my father having made the arrangement some weeks before. My master had no aptitude for business, and spent much of his time away, leaving the affairs of the shop to an old clerk, by the name of Jones, and to me. Things went rather badly, and he sought to mend his fortune by speculation in Merino sheep--then the rage of the day. A ram sold for a thousand dollars, and a ewe for a hundred. Fortunes were made and lost in a day during this mania. My master, after buying a flock and driving it to Vermont, where he spent three months, came back pretty well shorn--that is, three thousand dollars out of pocket! This soon brought his affairs to a crisis, and so in the autumn I was transferred to the dry-goods store of J. B. H----. My new employer had neither wife nor child to take up his time, so he devoted himself sedulously to business. He was, indeed, made for it--elastic in his frame, quick-minded, of even temper, and assiduous politeness. He was already well established, and things marched along as if by rail. For a time we had another clerk, but he was soon dismissed, and I was the only assistant; my master, however, seldom leaving the shop during business hours. Had the capacity for trade been in me, I might now have learned my business. I think I may say that I fulfilled my duty, at least in form. I was regular in my hours, kept the books duly journalized and posted. I never consciously wronged arithmetic to the amount of a farthing. I duly performed my task at the counter. Yet, in all this I was a slave: my heart was not in my work. My mind was away; I dreamed of other things; I thought of other pursuits. And yet I scarcely knew all this. I had certainly no definite plan for the future. A thousand things floated before my imagination. Every book I read drew me aside into its own vortex. Poetry made me poetical; politics made me political; travels made me truant. I was restless, for I was in a wrong position; yet I asked no advice, for I did not know that I needed it. My head and heart were a hive of thoughts and feelings, without the regulating and sedative supremacy of a clear and controlling intelligence. I was then eighteen years of age. I had been sufficiently educated for my station. My parents had now removed from Ridgefield to Berlin, a distance of but eleven miles from my present residence, so that I had easy and frequent communication with them. My uncle, Chauncey Goodrich, then a Senator of the United States, lived in an almost contiguous street, and while in the city, always treated me with the kindness and consideration which my relationship to him naturally dictated. In general, then, my situation was eligible enough; and yet I was unhappy. The truth is, I had now been able to sit in judgment upon myself--to review my acquirements, to analyze my capacities, to estimate my character, to compare myself with others, and to see a little into the future. The decision was painful to my ambition. I had all along, unconsciously, cherished a vague idea of some sort of eminence, and this, unhappily, had nothing to do with selling goods or making money. I had lived in the midst of relations, friends, and alliances, all of which had cultivated in me trains of thought alien to my present employment. My connections were respectable--some of them eminent, but none of them rich. All had acquired their positions without wealth, and I think it was rather their habit to speak of it as a very secondary affair. Brought up under such influences, how could I give up my heart to trade? It was clear, indeed, that I had missed my vocation. Full of this conviction, I besought my parents to allow me to quit the store, and attempt to make my way through college. Whether for good or ill, I know not, but they decided against the change, and certainly on substantial grounds. Their circumstances did not permit them to offer me any considerable aid, and without it they feared that I should meet with insuperable difficulties. I returned to the store disheartened at first, but after a time my courage revived, and I resolved to re-educate myself. I borrowed some Latin books, and with the aid of George Sheldon, an assistant in a publisher's establishment, and at this time my bosom friend, I passed through the Latin Grammar, and penetrated a little way into Virgil. This was done at night, for during the day I was fully occupied. At the same time I began, with such light and strength as I possessed, to train my mind, to discipline my thoughts, then as untamed as the birds of the wilderness. _I sought to think_--to think steadily, to acquire the power of forcing my understanding up to a point, and make it stand there and do its work. I attempted to gain the habit of speaking methodically, logically, and with accumulating power, directed to a particular object. I did all this as well by study as by practice. I read Locke on the Understanding and Watts on the Mind. I attempted composition, and aided myself by Blair's Rhetoric. This was a task; for not only was my time chiefly occupied by my daily duties, but it was a contest against habit--it was myself against myself; and in this I was almost unaided and alone. I was to lay aside the slipshod practice of satisfying myself with impressions, feelings, guesses; in short, of dodging mental labor by jumping at conclusions. I was, indeed, to learn the greatest of all arts, that of reasoning--of discovering the truth; and I was to do this alone, and in the face of difficulties, partly founded in my mental constitution, and partly also in my training. I did not at first comprehend the extent of my undertaking. By degrees I began to appreciate it: I saw and felt, at last, that it was an enormous task, and even after I had resolved upon it, again and again my courage gave way, and I ceased my efforts in despair. Still I returned to the work by spasms. I found, for instance, that my geography was all wrong: Asia stood up edgewise in my imagination, just as I had seen it on an old smoky map in Lieutenant Smith's study; Africa was in the south-east corner of creation, and Europe was somewhere in the north-east. In fact, my map of the world was very Chinese in its projection. I knew better, but still I had thus conceived it, and the obstinate bump of locality insisted upon presenting its outlines to my mind according to this arrangement. I had similar jumbles of conception and habit as to other things. This would not do; so I re-learned the elements of geography; I revised my history, my chronology, my natural history, in all of which I had caught casual glimpses of knowledge. What I read I read earnestly. I determined to pass no word without ascertaining its meaning, and I persevered in this, doggedly, for five-and-twenty years. My friend Sheldon was of inestimable service to me in my studies. Possessing advantages over me in age, experience, and education, he made many rough places smooth to my stumbling feet. Especially when, during my early efforts in thinking, my mind was assailed with doubts as to the truth of the Christian religion, his clear intelligence and sincere faith did much to help me through my difficulties. CHAPTER XII. WAR WITH ENGLAND--IN THE ARMY--MY UNCLE'S ADVICE--CAMPAIGNING--ON THE MARCH--OUR MILITARY COSTUME--MY FIRST SOLDIER'S SUPPER. During my residence at Hartford war was declared against Great Britain. For some time Connecticut held aloof from all participation in the struggle. But when, in 1813, our own territory was threatened, all feeling vanished before the instinct of self-preservation, and the strong feeling of animosity which then raged against England. Anticipating this state of things, the state government had made preparations for the emergency. As it was midsummer--a period when the husbandmen could ill afford to leave their farms--orders were sent by Governor Smith to dispatch at once the companies of militia from the larger towns to the defence of New London and the neighboring country. At that time I belonged to an artillery company, and this was among those ordered to the coast. I received a summons at four o'clock in the afternoon to be ready to march next day at sunrise. I went at once to consult my uncle--who, by the way, was at that time not only mayor of the city, but Lieutenant-Governor of the State. He had a short time before promised to make me one of his aids, and perhaps thought I should expect him now to fulfill his engagement. He soon set that matter at rest. "You must, of course, go," said he. "We old federalists cannot shelter our nephews when there is a question of defending our own territory." "Ought I not to consult my parents?" said I. "I will go down and see them to-morrow," he replied. "Certainly, then, I shall go. I wish to go. My only feeling is, that my mother may have some anxiety." "I will see her to-morrow. You may be at ease on that subject. Be ready to march at sunrise, according to your orders. I will come and see you before you start." The next morning, while it was yet dark, he came, gave me some letters of introduction, and also supplied me with ten dollars--a welcome addition to my light purse. After a little advice he said,--"I have only one thing to add: If you come to a fight, _don't run away till the rest do_. Goodby!" The next morning, June 7, 1813, about sunrise, the whole company, nearly sixty in number, mounted in wagons, departed. At sunset we were on the heights two miles back of New London. No provision had been made for us, and so we went supperless to bed in a large empty barn. I scarcely closed my eyes, partly because it was my first experiment in sleeping on the floor, and partly because of the terrific snoring of a fellow-soldier by my side. Never have I heard such a succession of choking, suffocating, strangling sounds, as issued from his throat. I expected that he would die, and, indeed, once or twice I thought he was dead. Strange to say, he got up the next morning in excellent condition, and seemed, indeed, to feel better for the exercise. This man became quite a character before the campaign was over: he got the title, of �olus, and as he could not be tolerated in the barracks, he was provided with a tent at a good distance, where he blew his blast without restraint. At the close of the campaign he was the fattest man in the company. I was glad to see the daylight. The weather was fine, and as the sun came up we saw the British fleet--some half-dozen large ships of war--lying off the mouth of the Thames. They seemed very near at hand, and for the first time I realized my situation--that of a soldier who was likely soon to be engaged in battle. I said nothing of my emotions: indeed, words were unnecessary. I watched the countenances of my companions as they first caught a view of the black and portentous squadron, and I read in almost every face a reflection of my own feelings. We were, however, not all sentimentalists. There were among us, as doubtless in all such companies, a supply of witty, reckless Gallios, who gave a cheerful turn to our thoughts. We soon dispersed among the inhabitants, scattered over the neighboring hills and valleys, for breakfast. Like hungry wolves we fell upon the lean larders, and left famine behind. Of course every one offered to pay, but not one person would accept a farthing: we were, indeed, received as protectors and deliverers. It was something, after all, to be soldiers! With our stomachs fortified, and our consciousness flattered, we came cheerfully together. At ten o'clock we were mustered, and began our march all in our best trim: cocked hats, long-tailed blue coats, with red facings, white pantaloons, and shining cutlasses at our sides. Our glittering cannon moved along with the solemnity of elephants. It was, in fact, a fine company--all young men, and many from the best families in Hartford. As we entered New London the streets presented some confusion, for the people were still removing back into the country, as an attack was daily expected. A few military companies were also gathering into the town. We were, however, not wholly overlooked: women put their heads out of the windows and smiled their gratitude as we passed along. Men stopped and surveyed us with evident signs of approbation. It was a glorious thing to belong to such a company! At last we came to a halt in one of the public squares. Then there was racing and chasing of aids-de-camp for four mortal hours, during which our martial pride drooped a little in the broiling sun. At four o'clock in the afternoon we were transported across the Thames to the village of Groton, and took up our quarters in a large house on the bank of the river, vacated for our use. Two immense kettles--the one filled with junks of salt beef, and the other with unwashed potatoes--were swung upon the kitchen trammels, and at six o'clock in the evening we were permitted each to fish out his dinner from the seething mass. That was my first soldier's supper; and, after all, it was a welcome meal. CHAPTER XIII. NEW LONDON--OUR MILITARY REPUTATION--SENT WITH A LETTER--BRITISH CANNON-BALLS--OUT OF HARM'S WAY--AN ALARM--ON GUARD--TAKE A PRISONER--STRANGE EMOTIONS--MY LEFT-HAND CHUM--A GRATEFUL COUNTRY. New London is situated on the western bank of the river Thames, three miles from its mouth. It has now ten or twelve thousand inhabitants, but at the time I am speaking of there were not more than four thousand. The entrance to the river is broad, and affords a fine harbor. This is defended by Fort Trumbull on the western side of the river, half a mile below the city. It contained a garrison of six or seven hundred soldiers during the war of 1812. Opposite to New London is the village of Groton, the main street running along the river bank; on an eminence some hundred rods from the river, and commanding a view of the surrounding country, including the harbor and the islands which lie scattered near it in the Sound, is the site of Fort Griswold. The old fort is now in ruins, but in my time it was in tolerable repair. Our company, as well as other portions of the militia, labored upon it, and strengthened it, as well by completing its works as by erecting a small redoubt upon the south-eastern side. To the defence of the latter, in case of attack, the Hartford company was assigned. The officers of our company were rigid disciplinarians, and accordingly we were drilled for about four hours each day. We soon gained much reputation for our martial exercises and our tidy appearance. Many people came over from New London to witness our performances, among whom were often persons of distinction. On Sundays we marched two miles to church, and being in our best guise, caused quite a sensation. Men and women, boys and girls, streamed along at our flanks, often in a broiling sun, yet always with admiring looks. After a morning drill we were generally at leisure for the rest of the day, taking our turns, however, on guard, and in other occasional duties. Most of the soldiers gave up their rations of mess beef and potatoes, and lived on their own resources. We formed ourselves into a general club for a supply of fresh fish. Every day three of us went out fishing, and generally returned with a half-bushel basket full of various kinds, among which the blackfish or tataug, now so greatly esteemed, was always abundant. I was employed by the captain to keep his journal of our proceedings, and sometimes I was dispatched to New London, or to some one of the officers along the line, with a letter or a parcel. I remember that on one occasion H. A----, my special companion, and myself, were sent with a letter to an officer who commanded a small picket on the eastern shore, near the mouth of the river; that is, at Point Groton. It was a distance of some three miles. The weather was pleasant, and our route lay along the shore of the stream, which opens into a wide bay as it meets the Sound. As we approached the southern point of the shore we found ourselves quite near to the British squadron. One of the vessels, which we knew as the "Acasta"--for we had learned all their names--was under full sail in a light wind, and coming up toward the shore. She was already so near that we could see the men, and note every movement on the deck. While we were admiring the beautiful appearance of the ship, we suddenly saw several white puffs issue from her sides and uncoil themselves into volumes of smoke. Then came a deafening roar; a moment after, and in the very midst of it, there were wild howls in the air above our heads. At a little distance beyond the ground was ploughed up, scattering the soil around, and the top of one of the forest trees, of which a few were scattered here and there, was cut asunder and fell almost at our feet. We understood the joke in an instant, and so did the lieutenant who commanded the picket. He was the object of the attack, and the broadside of the "Acasta," sending its shot over our heads, had hurled one or two balls crashing through the roof of the little fish-hut which he and his men occupied. In less than five minutes they were seen trotting off at a round pace, with their cannon jerking right and left over the rough ground behind them. Several other shots were fired, but the party escaped in safety. My companion and myself ensconced ourselves behind the rocks, and though it was grave sport we enjoyed it exceedingly. We could trace the cannon-balls as they flew by, looking like globes of mist twinkling through the air. Several of them passed close over our heads, and grooved the earth in long trenches at our sides. The noise they made as they rose high in the air was a strange mixture, between a howl and a scream. After having thus showed her teeth and made a great noise the frigate returned to her anchorage, and all was quiet. I hope I shall not degrade myself as a soldier in your eyes by confessing that this was the only battle in which I was engaged during this glorious war! I must, however, mention one circumstance which tried the souls of our company. On a certain Saturday a large accession to the British force arrived in the bay, the whole number of vessels of all kinds amounted to fourteen. This looked very much like an attack, and accordingly there was a feverish anxiety among the inhabitants of New London and the vicinity, and a general bustle in the army from Groton Point to Allyn's Mountain. A large body of militia was set to work upon Fort Griswold. Our company was drilled in the little redoubt which we were to defend, and every preparation was made to give the enemy a warm reception. The general idea was, that a landing of British troops would be made on the eastern side, and that we should take the brunt of the first attack. The sun set in clouds, and as the evening advanced bursts of thunder, attended by flashes of lightning, muttered along the distant horizon. Our company was admonished to sleep on their arms. Everything wore a rather ominous appearance. There were no signs of cowardice in the men, but they looked thoughtful; and when the wit of the company let off some of his best jokes--which would ordinarily have set the whole corps in a roar--he was answered by a dead silence. It chanced that I was that night on guard. My turn came at ten o'clock. Taking my gun, I paced the bank of the river in front of our barracks. I had received orders to let nothing pass by land or water. It was intensely dark, but at frequent intervals thin flashes of lightning sprang up against the distant sky behind dark rolling masses of clouds. Gradually the lights in the streets and windows of New London, stretching in a long line on the opposite side of the river, were extinguished one by one; a few remaining, however, as sentinels, indicating anxiety and watchfulness. The sounds on all sides were at last hushed, "and left the world to darkness and to me." More than half of my two-hours' watch had passed when I heard the dip of oars and the flapping of waves against the prow of a boat. I looked in the direction of the sounds, and at last descried the dusky outline of a small craft stealing down the river. I cried out,--"Boat ahoy! who goes there?" My voice echoed portentously in the silence, but no answer was given, and the low, black, raking apparition glided on its way. Again I challenged, but there was still no reply. On went the ghost! I cocked my gun. The click sounded ominously on the still night air. I began to consider the horror of shooting some fellow-being in the dark. I called a third time, and not without avail. The rudder was turned, the boat whirled on her heel, and a man came ashore. According to my orders I marshalled him to the guard-room, and gave notice of what had happened to the captain. The man was only a fisherman going home, but he was detained till morning. So, you see, I can boast that I made one prisoner. My watch was soon over, and returning to my station I laid down to sleep. All was soon quiet, and I was buried in profound repose, when suddenly there was a cry in the main barrack-room overhead,--"Alarm! alarm!" "Alarm! alarm!" was echoed by twenty voices, attended by quick, shuffling sounds, and followed by a hurried rush of men down the staircase. A moment after the guard in front discharged his musket, and was answered by a long line of reports up and down the river, from the various sentinels, extending for half-a-dozen miles. Then came the roll of drums and the mustering of the men. Several of our company had been out to see what was going on: they came back saying that the enemy was approaching! J. M---- distinctly heard the roar of cannon, and positively saw the flash of muskets. B. W---- found out that the attack had already begun upon our southern pickets. Nobody doubted that our time had come! In a very few minutes our company was drawn up in line, and the roll was called. It was still dark, but the faint flash gave us now and then a glimpse of each other's faces. I think we were a ghostly-looking set, but it was, perhaps, owing to the blueish complexion of the light. J. S----, of West Hartford, who marched at my left shoulder--usually the lightest-hearted fellow in the company--whispered to me,--"Goodrich, I'd give fifty dollars to be at West Division!" For myself, I felt rather serious, and asked a certain anxious feeling in my stomach,--"What's to be done?" Johnson, our captain, was a man of nerve and ready speech. When the roll was finished, he said in a clear, hearty tone,--"All right, my good fellows! Every man at his post!" These few words--which were, however, more politic than true, for one fellow was taken with sudden colic, and could not be got out--were electrical. We were ready to take our places in the redoubt. Messengers were now sent to the two neighboring posts to inquire into the state of facts. Word was brought that the first alarm came from our barracks! The matter was inquired into, and it turned out that the whole affair was originated by a corporal of ours, who, in a fit of nightmare, jumped up and cried,--"Alarm! alarm!" Our martial ardor soon reconciled itself to this rather ludicrous denouement, though several persons, who had been somewhat chapfallen, became suddenly inflated with courage, which signalized itself with outbursts of "Hang the British!" "They're a pack of sneaking cowards, after all!" and the like. The next morning was fresh and fair. The skirmishing thunder-gusts of the night had cleared the air, and even distant objects seemed near at hand. Before us lay the whole British fleet, still and harmless, in the glassy bay. My lefthand chum, J. S----, who, in the dark hour, would have given fifty dollars to be at West Division, was now himself again. "Come on here, you black old Ramilies!" said he, dashing the doubled fist of his right hand into the palm of his left: "Come on here, you black-hearted British bull-dogs, and we'll do your business for you!" Our period of service was brief. In about six weeks from the time of our departure we were dismissed, and returned to our homes. Thus closed my military career, so far as relates to active service. The remembrances of my first and last campaign are, on the whole, pleasant. There were feelings of fraternity established between the members of the company which have continued to this day. My country has not been unmindful of my services; for I have received two land-warrants, giving me a title to some hundred and sixty acres, with the fresh virgin soil of the Far West upon them. Say not that republics are ungrateful! CHAPTER XIV. EFFECTS OF WAR IN NEW ENGLAND--PERSONAL EXPERIENCE--NEWS OF PEACE--ILLUMINATIONS--CONFESSIONS. I remember perfectly well the universal state of anxiety and depression which prevailed in New England during the latter part of the war. The acts of government, the movements of fleets and armies, furnish no idea of the condition of society in its daily life. Let me give you a few items as indications of the embarrassments, vexations, and privations which the war had brought unto every man's house and home. Such a thing as silver or gold money was almost unknown. The chief circulation consisted of bills of suspended banks, or what were called "facilities;" that is, bank notes, authorized by the legislature of Connecticut, redeemable in three years after the war. These were at fifteen to twenty-five per cent. discount compared with specie. Banks issued notes of fifty, twenty-five, and twelve-and-a-half cents. Barbers issued bills payable in shaving, and various institutions adopted a similar course. The whole mass acquired the title of "rag-money," "shin-plasters," &c.: a large portion of it was notoriously worthless, either as being counterfeit, or issued by irresponsible parties, yet it generally passed without scrutiny. I had personal experience of the universal depression. In the summer of 1814 I was out of my time, and cast about for some employment. I went to New York for this object, but found not the slightest encouragement. After some reflection I established a manufactory of pocket-books, in connection with one of my friends, who furnished the capital. The greatest difficulty was to find the materials. I made expeditions to Boston, Charlestown, Providence, &c., and was not able to obtain over fifty pieces of morocco fit for the purpose. In December I went to New York, and was more successful. I made a considerable purchase, and dispatched my goods by the carrier. Pretty well content with my success, I had gone in the evening to a concert at the City Hotel. While listening to the music there was a murmur in the streets. Soon the door of the concert-room was thrown open, and in rushed a man all breathless with excitement. He mounted on a table, and swinging a white handkerchief aloft, cried out,-- "Peace! peace! peace!" The music ceased: the hall was speedily vacated. I rushed into the street, and oh, what a scene! It was on the evening of Saturday, the 11th of February, 1815, that the news of the treaty of peace reached New York. In half-an-hour after Broadway was one living sea of shouting, rejoicing people. "Peace! peace! peace!" was the deep, harmonious, universal anthem. The whole spectacle was enlivened by a sudden inspiration. Somebody came with a torch: the bright idea passed into a thousand brains. In a few minutes thousands and tens of thousands of people were marching about with candles, lamps, torches, making the jubilant street appear like a gay and gorgeous procession. The whole night Broadway sang its song of peace. We were all democrats--all federalists! Old enemies rushed into each other's arms: every house was in a revel: every heart seemed melted by a joy which banished all evil thought and feeling. Nobody asked, that happy night, what were the terms of the treaty: we had got peace--that was enough! I moved about for hours in the ebbing and flowing tide of people, not being aware that I had opened my lips. The next morning I found that I was hoarse from having joined in the exulting cry of "Peace! peace!" The next day, Sunday, all the churches sent up hymns of thanksgiving for the joyous tidings. I set out in the stage-coach on Monday morning for Connecticut. All along the road the people saluted us with swinging of hats and cries of rejoicing. At one place, in a rather lonesome part of the road, a schoolmaster came with the whole school at his heels to ask us if the news was true. We told him it was; whereupon he tied his bandanna pocket-handkerchief to a broom, swung it aloft, and the whole school hosannaed, "Peace! peace!" At all our stopping-places the people were gathered to rejoice in the good tidings. At one little tavern I looked into a room, by chance, the door being open, and there I saw the good-wife, with a chubby boy in her lap--both in a perfect gale of merriment--the child crying out, "Peath! peath!" Oh, ye makers of war, reflect upon this heartfelt verdict of the people in behalf of peace! We arrived at New Haven in the evening, and found it illuminated: the next day I reached Hartford, and there also was a grand illumination. The news spread over the country, carrying with it a wave of shouts and rejoicings. Boston became clamorous with pealing bells; the schools had a jubilee; the blockaded shipping, rotting at the dilapidated wharves, got out their dusty buntings, and these, ragged and forlorn, now flapped merrily in the breeze. At night the city flamed far and wide--from Beacon street down the Bay, telling the glorious tale even unto Cape Cod. So spread the news over the country, everywhere, carrying joy to every heart--with, perhaps, a single exception. At Washington, the authors of the war peeped into the dispatches, and found that the treaty had no stipulations against the Orders in Council, Paper Blockades, and Impressments, which were the pretexts for the war. All that could be maintained was, that we had made war, charging the enemy with very gross enormities, and we had made peace, saying not one word about them! So the war was ended. Let us be frank, and confess the truth: the war, in the aspects in which history thus presents it, was disgraceful to the authors of it: it was, in many respects, disastrous to the country; and yet it has left us some wholesome lessons. It has shown the danger and folly of plunging a great country into a national conflict for narrow and selfish purposes, because, under such circumstances, the people will be divided, and it will be a partisan, and not a patriotic war; it has put on record another instance in which war has been declared in boasting, and ended precisely where it began, after years of violence, sorrow, and bloodshed. It has shown, also--in connection with subsequent events--the superiority of peace to war, even in obtaining the ends of justice; for let it be remembered that Daniel Webster extorted from Great Britain, by the force of argument, that which the sword could not achieve. CHAPTER XV. EVIL EFFECTS OF NIGHT STUDY--COMMENCEMENT OF A LITERARY CAREER--THOUGHTS ON DANCING--NEW YORK--SARATOGA--DEATH OF MY UNCLE--BECOME A BOOKSELLER--COLD SUMMER--T'OTHER SIDE OF OHIO. I have told you that my apprenticeship terminated in the summer of 1814. Previous to that time I had made some advances in the study of the French language, under M. Value, or, to give him his title, the Count Value. This person had spent his early life in Paris, but afterward migrated to St. Domingo, where he owned a large estate. In the insurrection of 1794 he escaped only with his life. With admirable cheerfulness and serenity he devoted himself to teaching French and dancing, as means of support. He settled for a time at New Haven, where, at the age of seventy, he was captivated by a tall, red-haired schoolmistress of twenty, whom he married. The Count finally established himself at Hartford, and I became one of his pupils. I pursued my studies with considerable assiduity, and to practise myself in French, I translated Chateaubriand's René. One of my friends had just established a newspaper at Middletown, and my translation was published there. About this time my health was feeble, and my eyes became seriously affected in consequence of my night studies. Unaware of the danger, I persevered, and thus laid the foundation of a nervous weakness and irritability of my eyes, which has since been to me a rock ahead in the whole voyage of life. From that time I have never been able to read or write without pain. As if by a kind of fatality, I seemed to be afterwards drawn into a literary career, for which I was doubly disqualified--first by an imperfect education, and next by defective eyesight. Oh! what penalties have I paid for thus persisting in a course which seems to have been forbidden to me by Providence. After a long and laborious life, I feel a profound consciousness that I have done nothing well; at the same time, days, months, nay years, have I struggled with the constant apprehension that I should terminate my career in blindness! How little do we know, especially in the outset of our existence, what is before us! It is well that we do not know, for the prospect would often overwhelm us. In the autumn of 1814, as already stated, I established, in company with a friend, a pocket-book factory at Hartford; but the peace put a speedy termination to that enterprise. We came out of it with a small loss, and my kind-hearted partner pocketed this, "for he had money, and I had none." He forgave me, and would have done the same had the deficit been more considerable, for he was a true friend. Early in the following spring, I made an arrangement to go to Paris as a clerk in the branch of the importing house of Richards, Taylor & Wilder, of New York. About a month afterwards the news came that Napoleon had suddenly returned from Elba, and as business was prostrated by that event, my engagement failed. For nearly a year, my health continued indifferent, and my eyes in such a state that I was incapable of undertaking any serious business. I spent my time partly at Berlin, and partly at Hartford. I read a little, and practised my French with Value and his scholars. I also felt the need of disciplining my hands and feet, which about these days seemed to me to have acquired a most absurd development, giving me a feeling of great embarrassment when I entered into company. I therefore took lessons in dancing, and, whether I profited by it or not as to manners, I am persuaded that this portion of my education was highly beneficial to me in other points of view. As many good people have a prejudice against dancing, I am disposed to write down my experience on the subject. In the winter, our good old teacher had weekly cotillion parties, for the purpose of improving his scholars. The young men invited the young women, and took them to these gatherings, and after the exercises conducted them home again. I know this will sound strange to those who only understand metropolitan manners at the present day; but I never knew an instance, in my own experience or observation, in which the strictest propriety was departed from. These parties took place in the evening: they began at eight o'clock, and continued till ten or eleven--sometimes till twelve. The company consisted entirely of young persons, from fifteen to twenty years of age: they included the children of the respectable inhabitants, with a number of young ladies from the boarding-schools. Some of these I have since seen the wives of bishops, senators, and governors of States--filling the first stations to which women can aspire in this country, and I am satisfied that these Hartford parties, under the auspices of our amiable and respected old teacher, were every way refining and elevating: not only did they impart ease of manner, but, as I think, purity of sentiment. In the spring of 1815 I paid a visit to New York, and having letters of introduction to Oliver Wolcott and Archibald Gracie, I called on these gentlemen. My lodgings were at the City Hotel, situated on the western side of Broadway, between Thames and Cedar Streets, the space being now occupied by warehouses. It was then the chief hotel of New York, and was kept by a model landlord, named Jennings, with a model bar-keeper by the name of Willard. The latter was said never to sleep night or day, for at all hours he was at his post, and never forgot a customer, even after an absence of twenty years. It was late in the spring, and Mr. Gracie called for me and took me to his country seat, occupying a little promontory on the western side of Hurlgate, a charming spot. Contiguous to it were the summer residences of many of the leading citizens of New York. Here I spent a fortnight very agreeably. Mr. Gracie was at this period distinguished alike on account of his wealth, his intelligence, and his amiable and honorable character. Never have I witnessed anything more charming--more affectionate, dignified, and graceful, than the intercourse of the family with one another. Not many years after, Mr. Gracie lost his entire fortune by the vicissitudes of commerce, but his character was beyond the reach of accident. He is still remembered with affectionate respect by all those whose memories reach back to the times in which he flourished, and when it might be said, without disparagement to any other man, that he was the first merchant in New York. Early in the ensuing summer, my uncle, Chauncey Goodrich, being in bad health, paid a visit to Saratoga and Ballston for the benefit of the waters, and I accompanied him. We soon returned, however, for it was now apparent that he had a disease of the heart, which was rapidly tending to a fatal result. Experiencing great suffering at intervals, he gradually yielded to the progress of his malady, and at last, on the 18th of August, 1815, while walking the room, and engaged in cheerful conversation, he faltered, sank into a chair, and instantly expired. "His death," says the historian, "was a shock to the whole community. Party distinctions were forgotten, under a sense of the general calamity; and in the simple but expressive language which was used at his funeral, 'all united in a tribute of respect to the man who had so long been dear to us, and done us so much good.'" To me, the loss was irreparable; leaving, however, in my heart a feeling of gratitude that I had witnessed an example of the highest intellectual power united with the greatest moral excellence, and that, too, in one whose relationship to me enforced and commended its teachings to my special observance. Alas, how little have I done in life that is worthy of such inspiration! Not long after this, my friend George Sheldon, who had established himself as a bookseller and publisher, invited me to become his partner, and this I did early in the year 1816. We pursued the business for nearly two years, during which time we published, among other works, Scott's Family Bible, in five volumes quarto--a considerable enterprise for that period in a place like Hartford. In the autumn of 1817 I had gone to Berlin, for the purpose of making a short excursion for the benefit of my health, when a messenger came from Hartford, saying that my partner was very ill, and wished me to return. I immediately complied, and on entering the room of my friend I found him in a high fever, his mind already wandering in painful dreams. As I came to his bedside he said,--"Oh, take away these horrid knives, they cut me to the heart!" I stooped over him and said,-- "There are no knives here; you are only dreaming." "Oh, is it you?" said he. "I am glad you have come. Do stay with me, and speak to me, so as to keep off these dreadful fancies." I did stay by him for four days and nights; but his doom was sealed. His mind continued in a state of wild delirium till a few minutes before his death. I stood gazing at his face, when a sudden change came over him: the agitated and disturbed look of insanity had passed--a quiet pallor had come over his countenance, leaving it calm and peaceful. He opened his eyes, and, as if waking from sleep, looked on me with an aspect of recognition. His lips moved, and he pronounced the name of his wife: she came, with all the feelings of youth and love--ay, and of hope, too, in her heart. She bent over him: he raised his feeble and emaciated arms and clasped her to his heart: he gave her one kiss, and passed to another life! The summer of 1816 was probably the coldest that has been known in this century. In New England--from Connecticut to Maine--there were severe frosts in every month. The crop of Indian corn was almost entirely cut off: of potatoes, hay, oats, &c., there was not, probably, more than half the usual supply. The means of averting the effects of such a calamity--now afforded by railroads, steam navigation, canals, and other facilities of intercommunication--did not then exist. The following winter was severe, and the ensuing spring backward. At this time I made a journey into New Hampshire, passing along the Connecticut river, in the region of Hanover. It was then June, and the hills were almost as barren as in November. I saw a man at Orford who had been forty miles for a half-bushel of Indian corn, and paid two dollars for it! Along the seaboard it was not difficult to obtain a supply of food, although every article was dear. In the interior it was otherwise: the cattle died for want of fodder, and many of the inhabitants nearly perished from starvation. The desolating effects of the war still lingered over the country, and at last a kind of despair seized upon some of the people. In the pressure of adversity many persons lost their judgment, and thousands feared or felt that New England was destined, henceforth, to become a part of the frigid zone. At the same time, Ohio--with its rich soil, its mild climate, its inviting prairies--was opened fully upon the alarmed and anxious vision. As was natural under the circumstances, a sort of stampede took place from cold, desolate, worn-out New England, to this land of promise. I remember very well the tide of emigration through Connecticut on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettle, gridirons, feather-beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling book--the lares and penates of the household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of ten miles a-day. In several instances I saw families on foot--the father and boys taking turns in dragging along an improvised hand-wagon, loaded with the wreck of the household goods--occasionally giving the mother and baby a ride. Many of these persons were in a state of poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival, from fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818, that I published a small tract, entitled, "T'other Side of Ohio," that is, the other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the paradise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand, a talented young physician of Berlin, who had made a visit to the West about this time. It consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the Alleghanies, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep, and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were consequently strewn with the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen, which had made ship-wreck in their perilous descents. The scenes on the road--of families gathered at night in miserable sheds, called taverns--mothers frying, children crying, fathers swearing, were a mingled comedy and tragedy of errors. Even when they arrived at their new homes, along the banks of the Muskingum, or the Scioto, frequently the whole family--father, mother, children--speedily exchanged the fresh complexion and elastic step of their first abodes, for the sunken cheek and languid movement, which mark the victim of intermittent fever. The instances of homesickness, described by this vivid sketcher, were touching. Not even the captive Israelites, who hung their harps upon the willows along the banks of the Euphrates, wept more bitter tears, or looked back with more longing to their native homes, than did these exiles from New England; mourning the land they had left, with its roads, schools, meeting-houses; its hope, health, and happiness! Two instances, related by the traveller, I must mention. He was one day riding in the woods, apart from the settlements, when he met a youth some eighteen years of age, in a hunting-frock, and with a fowling-piece in his hand. The two fell into conversation. "Where are you from?" said the youth, at last. "From Connecticut," was the reply. "That is near the old Bay State?" "Yes." "And have you been there?" "To Massachusetts? Yes, many a time." "Let me take your hand, stranger. My mother was from the Bay State, and brought me here when I was an infant. I have heard her speak of it. Oh, it must be a lovely land! I wish I could see a meeting-house and a school-house, for she is always talking about them. And the sea--the sea--oh, if I could see that! Did you ever see it, stranger?" "Yes, often." "What, the real, salt sea--the ocean--with the ships upon it?" "Yes." "Well," said the youth, scarcely able to suppress his emotion, "if I could see the old Bay State and the ocean, I should be willing then to die!" In another instance the traveller met, somewhere in the valley of the Scioto, a man from Hartford, by the name of Bull. He was a severe democrat, and feeling sorely oppressed with the idea that he was no better off in Connecticut under federalism than the Hebrews in Egypt, joined the throng and migrated to Ohio. He was a man of substance, but his wealth was of little avail in a new country, where all the comforts and luxuries of civilization were unknown. "When I left Connecticut," said he, "I was wretched from thinking of the sins of federalism. After I had got across Byram river, which divides that State from New York, I knelt down and thanked the Lord for that He had brought me and mine out of such a priest-ridden land. But I've been well punished, and I'm now preparing to return; when I again cross Byram river, I shall thank God that He has permitted me to get back again!" CHAPTER XVI. MARRIAGE--WALTER SCOTT--BYRON--SIDNEY SMITH'S TAUNT--PUBLICATION OF ORIGINAL AMERICAN WORKS--MRS. SIGOURNEY. Early in the year 1818 I was married to the daughter of Stephen Rowe Bradley, of Westminster, Vermont. Thus established in life, I pursued the business of bookseller and publisher at Hartford for four years. My vocation gave me the command of books, but I was able to read very little--my eyes continuing to be so weak that I could hardly do justice to my affairs. However, I dipped into a good many books, and acquired a considerable knowledge of authors and their works. During the period in which Scott had been enchanting the world with his poetry--that is, from 1805 to 1815--I had shared in the general intoxication. The Lady of the Lake delighted me beyond expression, and even now, it seems to me the most pleasing and perfect of metrical romances. These productions seized powerfully upon the popular mind, partly on account of the romance of their revelations, and partly also because of the simplicity of the style, and the easy flow of the versification. Everybody could read and comprehend them. One of my younger sisters committed the whole of the Lady of the Lake to memory, and was accustomed of an evening to sit at her sewing, while she recited it to an admiring circle of listeners. All young poets were inoculated with the octo-syllabic verse, and newspapers, magazines, and even volumes, teemed with imitations and variations inspired by the "Wizard Harp of the North." Not only did Scott himself continue to pour out volume after volume, but others produced set poems in his style, some of them so close in their imitation as to be supposed the works of Scott himself, trying the effect of a disguise. At last, however, the market was overstocked, and the general appetite began to pall with a surfeit, when a sudden change took place in the public taste. It was just at this point that Byron produced his first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Scott speedily appreciated the eclipse to which his poetical career was doomed by the rising genius of Byron. He now turned his attention to prose fiction, and in July, 1814, completed and published Waverley, which had been begun some eight or ten years before. Guy Mannering came out the next year, and was received with a certain degree of eagerness. The Antiquary, Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and the Heart of Mid-Lothian, followed in quick succession. I suspect that never, in any age, have the productions of any author created in the world so wide and deep an enthusiasm. This emotion reached its height upon the appearance of Ivanhoe in 1819, which, I think, proved the most popular of these marvellous productions. At this period, although there was a good deal of mystery as to their authorship, the public generally referred them to Scott. He was called the "Great Unknown"--a title which served to create even an adventitious interest in his career. The appearance of a new tale from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than did some of the battles of Napoleon, which decided the fate of thrones and empires. Everybody read these works; everybody--the refined and the simple--shared in the delightful dreams which seemed to transport them to remote ages and distant climes, and made them live and breathe in the presence of the stern Covenanters of Scotland, the gallant bowmen of Sherwood Forest, or even the Crusaders in Palestine, where Coeur de Lion and Saladin were seen struggling for the mastery! I can testify to my own share in this intoxication. I was not able, on account of my eyes, to read these works myself, but I found friends to read them to me. To one good old maid--Heaven bless her!--I was indebted for the perusal of no less than seven of these tales. Of course, there were many editions of these works in the United States, and among others, I published an edition, I think, in eight volumes, octavo--including those which had appeared at that time. About this time I began to think of trying to bring out original American works. It must be remembered that I am speaking of a period prior to 1820. At that date, Bryant, Irving, and Cooper, the founders of our modern literature, had just commenced their literary career. Neither of them had acquired a positive reputation. Halleck, Percival, Brainard, Longfellow, Willis, were at school--at least, all were unknown. The general impression was that we had not, and could not have, a literature. It was the precise point at which Sydney Smith had uttered that bitter taunt in the Edinburgh Review--"Who reads an American book?" It proved to be that "darkest hour just before the dawn." The successful booksellers of the country were for the most part the mere reproducers and sellers of English books. It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to undertake American works, unless they might be Morse's Geographies, classical books, school-books, devotional books, or other utilitarian works. Nevertheless, about this time, I published an edition of Trumbull's poems, in two volumes, octavo, and paid him a thousand dollars and a hundred copies of the work, for the copyright. I was seriously counselled against this by several booksellers--and, in fact, Trumbull had sought a publisher in vain for several years previous. There was an association of designers and engravers at Hartford, called the "Graphic Company," and as I desired to patronize the liberal arts there, I employed them to execute the embellishments. For so considerable an enterprise, I took the precaution to get a subscription, in which I was tolerably successful. The work was at last produced, but it did not come up to the public expectation, or the patriotic zeal had cooled, and more than half the subscribers declined taking the work. I did not press it, but putting a good face upon the affair, I let it pass, and--while the public supposed I had made money by my enterprise, and even the author looked askance at me in the jealous apprehension that I had made too good a bargain out of him--I quietly pocketed a loss of about a thousand dollars. This was my first serious adventure in patronizing American literature. About the same period I turned my attention to books for education and books for children, being strongly impressed with the idea that there was here a large field for improvement. I wrote, myself, a small arithmetic, and half-a-dozen toy-books, and published them anonymously. I also employed several persons to write school histories, and educational manuals of chemistry, natural philosophy, &c., upon plans which I prescribed--all of which I published; but none of these were very successful at that time. Some of them, passing into other hands, are now among the most popular and profitable school-books in the country. It was before this period that Miss Huntly, now Mrs. Sigourney, was induced to leave her home in Norwich, and make Hartford her residence. This occurred about the year 1814. Ere long she was the presiding genius of our social circle. I shall not write her history, nor dilate upon her literary career, yet I may speak of her influence in this new relation--a part of which fell upon myself. Mingling in the gayeties of our social gatherings, and in no respect clouding their festivity, she led us all toward intellectual pursuits and amusements. We had even a literary coterie under her inspiration, its first meetings being held at Mr. Wadsworth's. I believe one of my earliest attempts at composition was made here. The ripples thus begun, extended over the whole surface of our young society, producing a lasting and refining effect. It could not but be beneficial thus to mingle in intercourse with one who has the faculty of seeing poetry in all things and good everywhere. Few persons living have exercised a wider influence than Mrs. Sigourney. No one that I now know can look back upon a long and earnest career of such unblemished beneficence. CHAPTER XVII. DOMESTIC TROUBLES--SKETCH OF BRAINARD--AUNT LUCY'S BACK-PARLOR--THE FALL OF NIAGARA--DEATH OF BRAINARD. In 1821, clouds and darkness began to gather around my path. By a fall from a horse, I was put upon crutches for more than a year, and a cane for the rest of my life. Ere long death entered my door, and my home was desolate. I was once more alone--save only that a child was left me, to grow to womanhood, and to die a youthful mother, loving and beloved. My affairs became embarrassed, my health failed, and my only hope of renovation was in a change of scene. Before I give you a sketch of my experience and observations abroad, I must present the portrait of my friend Brainard. He came to Hartford in February, 1822, to take the editorial charge of the Connecticut Mirror. He was now twenty-six years old, and had gained some reputation for wit and poetical talent. One day a young man, small in stature, with a curious mixture of ease and awkwardness, of humor and humility, came into my office, and introduced himself as Mr. Brainard. I gave him a hearty welcome, for I had heard very pleasant accounts of him. As was natural, I made a complimentary allusion to his poems, which I had seen and admired. A smile, yet shaded with something of melancholy, came over his face as he replied,-- "Don't expect too much of me; I never succeeded in anything yet. I never could draw a mug of cider without spilling more than half of it!" I afterwards found that much truth was thus spoken in jest. This was, in point of fact, precisely Brainard's appreciation of himself. All his life, feeling that he could do something, he still entertained a mournful and disheartening conviction that, on the whole, he was doomed to failure and disappointment. There was sad prophecy in this presentment--a prophecy which he at once made and fulfilled. We soon became friends, and, at last, intimates. I was now boarding at "Ripley's"--a good old-fashioned tavern, over which presided Major Ripley, respected for revolutionary services, an amiable character, and a long Continental queue. In the administration of the establishment he was ably supported by his daughter, Aunt Lucy--the very genius of tavern courtesy, cookery, and comfort. Here Brainard joined me, and we took rooms side by side. Thus, for more than a year, we were together, as intimate as brothers. He was of a child-like disposition, and craved constant sympathy. He soon got into the habit of depending upon me in many things, and at last--especially in dull weather, or when he was sad, or something went wrong with him--he would creep into my bed, as if it were his right. At that period of gloom in my own fortunes, this was as well a solace to me as to him. After my return from Europe we resumed these relations, and for some months more we were thus together. I cannot do better than sketch a single incident, which will give you some insight into Brainard's character. The scene opens in Miss Lucy's little back-parlor--a small, cosy, carpeted room, with two cushioned rocking-chairs, and a bright hickory fire. It is a chill November night, about seven o'clock of a Friday evening. The Mirror--Brainard's paper--is to appear the next morning. The week has thus far passed, and he has not written for it a line. How the days have gone he can hardly tell. He has read a little--dipped into Byron, pored over the last Waverly novel, and been to see his friends; at all events, he has got rid of the time. He has not felt competent to bend down to his work, and has put it off till the last moment. No further delay is possible. He is now not well; he has a severe cold. Miss Lucy, who takes a motherly interest in him, tells him not to go out, and his own inclinations suggest the charms of a quiet evening in the rocking chair, by a good fire--especially in comparison with going to his comfortless office, and drudging for the press. He lingers till eight, and then suddenly rousing himself, by a desperate effort, throws on his cloak and sallies forth. As was not uncommon, I go with him. A dim fire is kindled in the small Franklin stove in his office, and we sit down. Brainard, as was his wont, especially when he was in trouble, falls into a curious train of reflections, half comic and half serious. "Would to Heaven," he says, "I were a slave! I think a slave, with a good master, has a good time of it. The responsibility of taking care of himself--the most terrible burden of life--is put on his master's shoulders. Madame Roland, with a slight alteration, would have uttered a profound truth. She should have said--'Oh, Liberty, Liberty, thou art a humbug!' After all, liberty is the greatest possible slavery, for it puts upon a man the responsibility of taking care of himself. If he goes wrong, why, he's condemned! If a slave sins, he's only flogged, and gets over it, and there's an end of it. Now, if I could only be flogged, and settle the matter that way, I should be perfectly happy. But here comes my tormentor." The door is now opened, a boy with a touselled head and inky countenance enters, saying curtly--"Copy, Mr. Brainard!" "Come in fifteen minutes!" says the editor, with a droll mixture of fun and despair. [Illustration: WHITTLING.] Brainard makes a few observations, and sits down at his little narrow pine table--hacked along edges with many a restless penknife. He seems to notice the marks, and pausing a moment, says,-- "This table reminds me of one of my brother William's stories. There was an old man in Groton, who had but one child, and she was a daughter. When she was about eighteen, several young men came to see her. At last she picked out one of them, and desired to marry him. He seemed a fit match enough, but the father positively refused his consent. For a long time he persisted, and would give no reason for his conduct. At last he took his daughter aside, and said--'Now, Sarah, I think pretty well of this young man in general, but I've observed that he's given to whittling. There's no harm in that, but the point is this: he whittles and whittles, and never makes nothing! Now, I tell you, I'll never give my only daughter to such a feller as that!' Whenever Bill told this story, he used to insinuate that this whittling chap, who never made anything, was me! At any rate, I think it would have suited me exactly." Some time passed in similar talk, when, at last, Brainard turned suddenly, took up his pen, and began to write. I sat apart, and left him to his work. Some twenty minutes passed, when, with a smile on his face, he got up, approached the fire, and taking the candle to light his paper, read as follows:-- "THE FALLS OF NIAGARA. "The thoughts are strange that crowd into my brain, While I look upwards to thee. It would seem As if God pour'd thee from his 'hollow hand,' And hung his bow upon thy awful front; And spoke in that loud voice that seem'd to him Who dwelt in Patmos for his Saviour's sake, 'The sound of many waters;' and had bade Thy flood to chronicle the ages back, And notch his cent'ries in the eternal rocks!" He had hardly done reading when the boy came. Brainard handed him the lines--on a small scrap of coarse paper--and told him to come again in half-an-hour. Before this time had elapsed, he had finished and read me the following stanza:-- "Deep calleth unto deep. And what are we That hear the question of that voice sublime? Oh! what are all the notes that ever rung From war's vain trumpet by thy thundering side? Yea, what is all the riot man can make, In his short life, to thy unceasing roar? And yet, bold babbler, what art thou to Him Who drown'd a world, and heap'd the waters far Above its loftiest mountains? A light wave, That breathes and whispers of its Maker's might." These lines having been furnished, Brainard left his office, and we returned to Miss Lucy's parlor. He seemed utterly unconscious of what he had done. I praised the verses, but he thought I only spoke warmly from friendly interest. The lines went forth, and produced a sensation of delight over the whole country. Almost every exchange paper that came to the office had extracted them. Even then he would scarcely believe that he had done anything very clever. And thus, under these precise circumstances, were composed the most suggestive and sublime stanzas upon Niagara that were ever penned. Brainard had never, as he told me, been within less than five hundred miles of the cataract, nor do I believe that, when he went to the office, he had meditated upon the subject. The reader will see, from the circumstances I have mentioned, that I know the history of most of Brainard's pieces, as they came out, from time to time, in his newspaper. Nearly all of them were occasional--that is, suggested by passing events, or incidents in the poet's experience. Early in the year 1825 I persuaded Brainard to make a collection of his poems, and have them published. At first his lip curled at the idea, as being too pretentious. He insisted that he had done nothing to justify the publication of a volume. Gradually he began to think of it, and, at length, I induced him to sign a contract authorizing me to make arrangements for the work. He set about the preparation, and at length--after much lagging and many lapses--the pieces were selected and arranged. When all was ready, I persuaded him to go to New York with me to settle the matter with a publisher. One anecdote, in addition to those already before the public, and I shall close this sketch. Brainard's talent for repartee was of the first order. On one occasion, Nathan Smith, an eminent lawyer, was at Ripley's tavern, in the midst of a circle of judges and lawyers attending the court. He was an Episcopalian, and at this time was considered by his political adversaries--unjustly, no doubt--as the paid agent of that persuasion, now clamoring for a sum of money from the State, to lay the foundation of a "Bishops' Fund." He was thus regarded somewhat in the same light as O'Connell, who, while he was the great patriot leader of Irish independence, was, at the same time, liberally supported by the "rint." By accident, Brainard came in, and Smith, noticing a little feathery attempt at whiskers down his cheeks, rallied him upon it. "It will never do," said he; "you cannot raise it, Brainard. Come, here's sixpence--take that, and go to the barber's and get it shaved off! It will smooth your cheek, and ease your conscience." Brainard drew himself up, and said with great dignity--as Smith held out the sixpence on the point of his forefinger--"No, sir, you had better keep it for the Bishops' Fund!" In Brainard's editorial career--though he was negligent, dilatory, sometimes almost imbecile, from a sort of constitutional inertness--still a train of inextinguishable light remains to gleam along his path. Many a busy, toiling editor has filled his daily columns for years, without leaving a living page behind him; while Brainard, with all his failings and irregularities, has left a collection of gems which will be cherished to immortality. And among all that he wrote idly and recklessly, as it might seem--there is not a line that, "dying, he could wish to blot." His love of parents, of home, of kindred, was beautiful indeed; his love of nature, and especially of the scenes of his childhood, was the affection of one never weaned from the remembrance of his mother's breast. He was true in friendship, chivalrous in all that belonged to personal honor. I never heard him utter a malignant thought--I never knew him to pursue an unjust design. At the early age of eight-and-twenty, with a submissive spirit, he resigned himself to death, and in pious, gentle, cheerful faith, he departed on the 26th of September, 1828. CHAPTER XVIII. MY FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE--HURRICANE--ARRIVAL AT LIVERPOOL--LONDON--TRAVEL ON THE CONTINENT--RETURN TO BRISTOL--INTERVIEW WITH HANNAH MORE--DESIGN IN TRAVELLING--VISIT TO IRELAND AND SCOTLAND. It was on the 16th of November, 1823, that I set sail in the "Canada," Captain Macy, on my first visit to Europe. I have now before me four volumes of notes made during my tour; which I might, perhaps, have ventured to publish when they were fresh; but since that period the world has been inundated with tales of travels, I shall therefore only indulge in a rapid outline of my adventures, and a few sketches of men and things, which may perchance be of interest to the reader. Our voyage was, as usual at that season of the year, tempestuous. As we approached the British Islands we were beset by a regular hurricane. On the 5th of December, the Captain kindly informed us that we were almost precisely in the situation of the "Albion," the day before she was wrecked on the rocky headland of Kinsale, at the south-east extremity of Ireland; an event which had spread a general gloom throughout the United States. As night set in we were struck by a squall, and with difficulty the vessel was brought round, so as to lie to. The storm was fearful; and the frequent concussions of the waves upon the ship, sounding like reports of artillery, made her reel and stagger like a drunken man. The morning came at last, and the weather was fair, but our deck was swept of its boats, bulwarks, and hen-coops. Our old cow in her hovel, the covering of the steerage, and that of the companion-way, were saved. The next morning we took a pilot, and on the 8th of December entered the dock at Liverpool. I had suffered fearfully by sea-sickness, and had scarcely strength to walk ashore. I felt such horror--such disgust of the sea--that I could easily have pledged myself never to venture upon it again. However, this all passed away like a dream: my strength revived; and even my constitution, shattered by long suffering, seemed to be renovated. With the return of health and spirits, my journey to London was delightful. Though it was December, the landscape was intensely green, while the atmosphere was dark as twilight. And this was England! Oh, what emotions filled my breast as I looked on Kenilworth, Warwick, and Lichfield, and at last on London! I remained in the latter place about a month, and then went to Paris. In April I visited Switzerland and a portion of Germany, and followed the Rhine to Cologne. Thence I travelled through Flanders and Holland, and taking a sloop at Rotterdam, swung down the Maese, and in May reached London again. I soon after departed for Bristol, taking Salisbury and Stonehenge on my way. Having reached that city, and seen its sights, I hired a post-coach, and went to Barley-wood, some ten miles distant. Hannah More was still living there! The house was a small thatched edifice--half cottage and half villa--tidily kept, and garnished with vines and trellises. Its site was on a gentle hill, sloping to the south-east, and commanding a charming view over the undulating country around, including the adjacent village of Wrington, with a wide valley sloping to the Bristol Channel; the latter sparkling in the distance, and bounded by the Welsh mountains in the far horizon. Behind the house, and on the crown of the hill, was a small copse, threaded with neat gravel walks, and at particular points embellished with objects of interest. In one place there was a little rustic temple, with this motto--"_Audi, Hospes, contemnere opes_;" in another, there was a stone monument, erected to the memory of Bishop Porteus, who had been a particular friend of the proprietor of the place. A little further on I found another monument, with this inscription: "_To John Locke, born in this village, this monument is erected by Mrs. Montague, and presented to Hannah More._" From this sequestered spot an artificial opening was cut through the foliage of the trees, giving a view of the house--about a mile distant--in which Locke was born! Mrs. More was now seventy-nine years of age, and was very infirm, having kept her room for two years. She received me with great cordiality, and mentioned several Americans who had visited her, and others, with whom she had held correspondence. Her mind and feelings were alive to every subject that was suggested. She spoke very freely of her writings and her career. I told her of the interest I had taken, when a child, in the story of the Shepherd of Salisbury Plain; upon which she recounted its history, remarking that the character of the hero was modelled from life, though the incidents were fictitious. Her tract, called Village Politics, by Will Chip, was written at the request of the British Ministry, and two million copies were sold the first year, She showed me copies of Coelebs in Search of a Wife--the most successful of her works--in French and German; and a copy of one of her Sacred Dramas, Moses in the Bulrushes, on palm-leaves, in the Cingalese tongue; it having been translated into that language by the Missionary School at Ceylon. She showed me also the knife with which the leaf had been prepared, and the scratches made in it to receive the ink. She expressed a warm interest in America, and stated that Wilberforce had always exerted himself to establish and maintain good relations between Great Britain and our country. I suggested to her that, in the United States, the general impression--that of the great mass of the people--was that the English were unfriendly to us. She said it was not so. I replied that the Americans all read the English newspapers, and generally the products of the British press; that feelings of dislike, disgust, animosity, certainly pervaded most of these publications; and it was natural to suppose that these were the reflections of public opinion in Great Britain: at all events, our people regarded them as such, and hence inferred that England was our enemy. She expressed great regret at this state of things, and said all good people should strive to keep peace between the two countries: to all which I warmly assented. My interview with this excellent lady was, on the whole, most gratifying. Regarding her as one of the greatest benefactors of the age--as, indeed, one of the most remarkable women that had ever lived--I looked upon her not only with veneration, but affection. Besides, I felt that I owed her a special debt; and my visit to her was almost like a pilgrimage to the shrine of a divinity. When I left America, I had it in mind to render my travels subservient to a desire I had long entertained of making an improvement in books for the young. I had sought in London, France, and Germany, for works that might aid my design. It is true I had little success; for while scientific and classical education was sedulously encouraged on the Continent, as well as in England, it seemed to be thought that Dilworth and Mother Goose had done all that could be done. In this interview with Mrs. More I had the subject still in mind; and discerning by what she had accomplished the vast field that was open, and actually inviting cultivation, I began from this time to think of attempting to realize the project I had formed. It is true that, in some respects, the example I had just contemplated differed from my own scheme. Hannah More had written chiefly for the grown-up masses; whereas my plan was to begin further back--with the children. Her means, however, seemed adapted to my purpose: her success, to encourage my attempt. She had discovered that truth could be made attractive to simple minds. Fiction was, indeed, often her vehicle; but it was not her end. The great charm of these works, which had captivated the million, was their verisimilitude. Was there not, then, a natural relish for truth in all minds; or, at least, was there not a way of presenting it, which made it even more interesting than romance? Did not children love truth? If so, was it necessary to feed them on fiction? Could not History, Natural History, Geography, Biography, become the elements of juvenile works, in place of fairies and giants, and mere monsters of the imagination? These were the inquiries that from this time filled my mind. Taking leave of Barley-wood and its interesting occupant, I traversed Wales, and embarking at Holyhead, passed over to Ireland. Having seen Dublin, with the extraordinary contrasts of sumptuousness in some of its streets and edifices, with the fearful squalidness and poverty in others, I passed on to the North; and after visiting the Giant's Causeway returned to Belfast, and embarked in a steamboat for Greenock. Thence I proceeded toward Dumbarton, and in the early evening, as I approached the town in a small steamer, I realized in the distance before me the scene of the song,-- "The sun has gone down o'er the lofty Ben Lomond, And left the red clouds to preside o'er the scene." On the morrow I went to Loch Lomond, crossing the lake in a steamboat; thence on foot to Callender; and spent two days around Loch Katrine, amid the scenery of the Lady of the Lake. With a copy of that poem in my hand, which I had bought of a countryman on the borders of Loch Lomond, I easily traced out the principal landmarks of the story: "Ellen's Isle," nearly in the middle of the lake; on the northern shore, "the Silver Strand," where the maiden met Fitz-James; far to the east, Benain, rearing its "forehead fair" to the sky; to the south, the rocky pyramid called "Roderick's Watchtower;" and still beyond, the "Goblin's Cave." Leaving the lake, I passed through the Trosachs, a wild, rocky glen, and the scene of the most startling events in the poem. At last I came to Coilantogle Ford, where the deadly struggle took place between the two heroes of the poem--Roderick and Fitz-James. Finally, I went to the borders of Loch Achray, a placid sheet of water, beautiful by nature, but still more enchanting through the delightful associations of poetic art. "The minstrel came once more to view The eastern ridge of Benvenue, For, ere he parted, he would say Farewell to lovely Loch Achray. Where shall he find, in foreign land, So lone a lake, so sweet a strand!" * * * * * But I must forbear. I have pledged myself not to weary my reader with descriptions of scenery, and especially with that which is familiar to every one. I will try not to sin again: at least till I get out of Scotland. Having spent two days in this region of poetry and romance, I left for Glasgow, and at last reached Edinburgh. CHAPTER XIX. THE EDINBURGH LIONS--LITERARY CELEBRITIES--JEFFREY IN THE FORUM--SIR WALTER AT THE DESK--RIDING WITH SCOTCH LADIES--BEAUTIFUL SCENERY--A SCOTCH MIST. Edinburgh was then decidedly the literary metropolis of the three kingdoms; not through the amount of its productions, but their superiority. I had several letters of introduction; among them one to Blackwood; another to Constable; another to Miss Y----. The latter proved fortunate. Her father was a Writer to the Signet; an elderly gentleman of excellent position, and exceedingly fond of showing off "Auld Reekie." Well, indeed, might he be; for of all the cities I have seen, it is, in many respects, the most interesting. I am told it is gloomy in winter; but now it was summer. And in these high latitudes, nature makes ample amends in this season for the gloom and inclemency of the winter. The day after delivering my letters, Mr. Y---- called on me, and showed me the lions of the town. Many of them--all, indeed--were interesting; but I pass them by, and shall only linger a short time at the Court of Sessions, which is the supreme civil court of Scotland. This, with the High Court of Justiciary--the supreme criminal court--forms the College of Justice, and constitutes the supreme tribunal of Scotland. Their sessions are held in the old Parliament House, situated in the centre of the Old Town. We entered a large Gothic hall, opening, as I observed, into various contiguous apartments. Here I saw a considerable number of persons, mostly lawyers and their clients; some sauntering, some meditating, some gathered in groups and conversing together. There was a large number of people distributed through the several apartments, and in the grand hall there was a pervading hum of voices, which rose and rumbled, and died away amid the groinings of the roof above. Among the persons in this hall, a man some thirty years of age, tall and handsome, dressed in a gown, but without the wig, attracted my particular attention. He was walking apart, and there was a certain look of coldness and haughtiness about him. Nevertheless, for some undefinable reason, he excited in me a lively curiosity. "Who is that gentleman?" said I, to my guide. "That large, noble-looking person, with a gown and wig? That is Cranstoun, one of our first lawyers, and the brother-in-law of Dugald Stuart." "No: that person beyond, and to the left? He is without a wig." "Oh, that's Cockburn; a fiery Whig, and one of the keenest fellows we have at the bar." "Yes: but I mean that younger person near the corner." "Oh, that small, red-faced, freckled man? Why, that's Moncrief; a very sound lawyer. His father, Sir Harry Moncrief, is one of the most celebrated divines in Scotland." "No, no; it is that tall, handsome, proud-looking person, walking by himself." "Oh, I see: that's Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law. Would you like to know him?" "Yes." And so I was introduced to a man who, at that time, was hardly less an object of interest to me than Scott himself. Though a lawyer by profession, he had devoted himself to literature, and was now in the very height of his career. Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, Valerius, and other works, had given him a prominent rank as a man of talent; and, besides, in 1820, he had married the eldest daughter of the "Great Unknown." My conversation with him was brief at this time, but I afterwards became well acquainted with him. My guide now led me into one of the side-rooms, where I saw a judge and jury, and a lawyer addressing them. The latter was a very small man, without gown or wig, apparently about forty years of age, though he might be somewhat older. He was of dark complexion, with an eye of intense blackness, and almost painfully-piercing expression. His motions were quick and energetic, his voice sharp and penetrating; his general aspect exciting curiosity rather than affection. He was speaking energetically, and as we approached the bar my conductor said to me, in a whisper, "Jeffrey!" We paused, and listened intently. The case in itself seemed dry enough: something, I believe, about a _stoppage in transitu_. But Jeffrey's pleading was admirable; clear, progressive, logical. Occasionally, in fixing upon a weak point of his adversary, he displayed a leopard-like spring of energy, altogether startling. He seized upon a certain point in the history of the case, and insisted that the property in question rested at that period in the hands of the defendant's agent, for at least a fortnight. This he claimed to be fatal to his adversary's plea. Having stated the facts, with a clearness which seemed to prove them, he said, turning with startling quickness upon his antagonist,--"Now, I ask my learned brother to tell me, what was the state of the soul during that fortnight?" To a jury of Scotch Presbyterians, familiar with theological metaphysics, this allusion was exceedingly pertinent and effective. We passed into another room. Three full-wigged judges were seated upon a lofty bench, and beneath them, at a little table in front, was a large man, bent down and writing laboriously. As I approached, I caught a side-view of his face. There was no mistaking him: it was Sir Walter himself! Was it not curious to see the most renowned personage in the three kingdoms sitting at the very feet of these men: they the court, and he the clerk? They were indeed all "lords," and their individual names were suggestive to the ear: one was Robertson, son of the historian of Charles V.; another was Gillies, brother of the renowned Grecian scholar of that name; another, Mackenzie, son of the author of the Man of Feeling. These are high titles; but what were they to the author of Waverley? Mr. Y---- introduced me to him at once, breaking in upon his occupation with easy familiarity. As he arose from his seat, I was surprised at his robust, vigorous frame. He was very nearly six feet in height, full-chested, and of a farmer-like aspect. His complexion seemed to have been originally sandy, but now his hair was grey. He had the rough, freckled, weather-beaten skin of a man who is much in the open air; his eye was small and grey, and peering out keenly and inquisitively from beneath a heavy brow, edged with something like grey, twisted bristles: the whole expression of his face, however, was exceedingly agreeable. He greeted me kindly, the tone of his voice being hearty, yet with a very decided Scotch accent. A few commonplace remarks, and one or two inquiries as to my acquaintance with American literary men, was all that passed between us on this occasion; but subsequently, as will be seen, I was more highly favored. One morning I found a note at my hotel, from Miss Y----, inviting me to breakfast. I went at ten, and we had a pleasant chat. She then proposed a ride, to which I acceded. She was already in her riding-habit; so without delay we went forth, calling first upon Mrs. Russell. She led us into another room, and there, on the floor, in a romp with her two boys, was Francis Jeffrey! Think of the first lawyer in Scotland, the lawgiver of the great republic of letters throughout Christendom, having a rough-and-tumble on the floor, as if he were himself a boy! Let others think as they will, I loved him from that moment; and ever after, as I read his criticisms, cutting and scorching as they often were, I fancied that I could still see a kind and genial spirit shining through them all. At least it is certain that, behind his editorial causticity, there was in private life a fund of gentleness and geniality which endeared him to all who enjoyed his intimacy. I was now introduced to him, and he seemed a totally different being from the fierce and fiery gladiator of the legal arena, where I had before seen him. His manners were gentle and gentlemanly: polite to the ladies and gracious to me. We found Mrs. Russell in a riding-dress, and prepared to accompany us in our excursion. Taking leave of Mr. Jeffrey, we went to the stable, and having mounted, walked our steeds gently out of the town by Holyrood, and to the east of Arthur's seat, leaving Portobello on the left. We rode steadily, noting a few objects as we passed, until at last, reaching an elevated mound, we paused, and the ladies directed my attention to the scenes around. We were some two miles south of the town, upon one of the slopes of the Braid Hills. What a view was before us! The city, a vast smoking hive, to the north; and to the right, Arthur's Seat, bald and blue, seeming to rise up and almost peep into its streets and chimneys. Over and beyond all was the sea. The whole area between the point where we stood and that vast azure line, blending with the sky, was a series of abrupt hills and dimpling valleys, threaded by a network of highways and byways; honeycombed in spots by cities and villages, and elsewhere sprinkled with country seats. It is an unrivalled scene of varied beauty and interest. The natural site of Edinburgh is remarkable, consisting of three rocky ledges, steepling over deep ravines. These have all been modified by art; in one place a lake has been dried up, and is now covered with roads, bridges, tenements, gardens, and lawns. The sides of the cliffs are in some instances covered with masses of buildings, occasionally rising tier above tier--in one place presenting a line of houses a dozen stories in height! The city is divided by a deep chasm into two distinct parts: the Old Town, dark and smoky, and justifying the popular appellation of "Auld Reekie;" the other, the New Town, with the fresh architecture and the rich and elaborate embellishments of a modern city. Nearly from the centre of the Old Town rises the Castle, three hundred and eighty feet above the level of the sea; on one side looking down almost perpendicularly, two hundred feet into the vale beneath; on the other, holding communication with the streets by means of a winding pathway. In the new town is Calton Hill, rich with monuments of art and memorials of history. From these two commanding positions the views are unrivalled. But I forget that I have taken you to the Braid Hills. My amiable guides directed my attention to various objects--some far and some near, and all with names familiar to history, or song, or romance. Yonder mass of dun and dismal ruins was Craigmillar Castle, once the residence of Queen Mary. Nearly in the same direction, and not remote, is the cliff, above whose bosky sides peer out the massive ruins of Roslin Castle; further south are glimpses of Dalkieth Palace, the sumptuous seat of the Duke of Buccleuch; there is the busy little village of Lasswade, which takes the name of "Gandercleugh" in the Tales of my Landlord; yonder winds the Esk, and there the Galawater--both familiar in many a song; and there is the scenery of the Gentle Shepherd, presenting the very spot where that inimitable colloquy took place between Peggy and her companion Jenny,-- "Gae farer up the burn to Habbie's How Where a' the sweets o' spring an' summer grow: Between twa birks, out o'er a little linn, The water fa's and makes a singan din: A pool, breast deep, beneath as clear as glass, Kisses wi' easy whirls the bordering grass. We'll end our washing while the morning's cool, And when the day grows hot we'll to the pool, There wash oursels--it's healthful now in May, An' sweetly caller on sae warm a day." While we were surveying these scenes the rain began to fall in a fine, insinuating mizzle; soon large drops pattered through the fog, and at last there was a drenching shower. I supposed the ladies would seek some shelter; not they: accustomed to all the humors of this drizzly climate, and of course defying them. They pulled off their green veils, and stuffed them into their saddle-pockets: then chirruping to their steeds, they sped along the road, as if mounted on broomsticks. I was soon wet through, and so, doubtless, were they. However, they took to it as ducks to a pond. On we went, the water--accelerated by our speed--spouting in torrents from our stirrups. In all my days I had never such an adventure. And the coolness with which the ladies took it, that was the most remarkable. Indeed, it was provoking; for as they would not accept sympathy, of course they could not give it, though my reeking condition would have touched any other heart than theirs. On we went, till at last, coming to the top of the hill, we suddenly cropped out into the sunshine, the shower still scudding along the valley beneath us. We continued our ride, getting once more soaked on our way, and again drying in the sun. At last we reached home, having made a circuit of fifteen miles. Scarcely a word was said of the rain. I saw the ladies to their residences, and was thankful when I found myself once more in my hotel. As a just moral of this adventure, I suggest to any American, who may ride with Scotch ladies around Edinburgh, not to go forth in his best dress-coat, and pantaloons without straps. CHAPTER XX. BLACKWOOD--THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY--SIR WALTER SCOTT--MR. AND MRS. LOCKHART--ORIGIN OF "TAM O'SHANTER"--LAST WORDS OF SCOTT. I delivered my letter of introduction to Blackwood, and he treated me very kindly. I found him an exceedingly intelligent and agreeable gentleman. The Magazine which bears his name was then in its glory, and of course a part of its radiance shone on him. He was a man of excellent judgment in literary matters, and his taste, no doubt, contributed largely to the success of the Magazine. Of course I was gratified at receiving from him a note, inviting me to dine with him the next day. His house was on the south of the old town, nearly two miles distant. The persons present were such as I should myself have selected: among them Lockhart and James Ballantyne. I sat next the latter, and found him exceedingly agreeable and gentlemanlike. He was a rather large man, handsome, smooth in person and manner, and very well dressed. It must be remembered, that at this time Scott did not acknowledge that he was the author of the Waverley novels, nor did his friends. Perhaps the mystery was even promoted by them; for, no doubt, it added to the interest excited by his works. However, the veil was not closely preserved in the circle of intimacy. Ballantyne said to me, in the course of a conversation which turned upon the popularity of authors, as indicated by the sale of their works,--"We have now in course of preparation forty thousand volumes of Scott's poems and the works of the author of Waverley:" evidently intimating the identity of their authorship. The next day I went to St. Giles's Church, to see the General Assembly, then holding its annual session there. This body consisted of nearly four hundred members, chosen by different parishes, boroughs, and universities. The sessions are attended by a Commissioner appointed by the Crown, but he is seated outside of the area assigned to the Assembly, and has no vote, and no right of debate. He sits under a canopy, with the insignia of royalty, and a train of gaily-dressed pages. He opens the sessions in the name of the King, the Head of the Church: the Moderator then opens it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, _the only true Head of the Church_! It appears that the Scotch, in bargaining for a union with England, took good care to provide for their religious independence, and this they still jealously preserve. The aspect of the Assembly was similar to that of the House of Commons, though somewhat graver. I observed that the debates were often stormy, with scraping of the floor, laughing aloud, and cries of "Hear, hear!" The members were, in fact, quite disorderly, showing at least as little regard for decorum as ordinary legislatures. Sir Walter Scott once remarked, in my hearing, that it had never yet been decided how many more than six members could speak at once! The persons here pointed out to me as celebrities were Dr. Chalmers, the famous pulpit orator; Dr. Cook, the ecclesiastical historian; and Dr. Baird, principal of the University. The first of these was now at the height of his fame. He had already begun those reforms which, some years later, resulted in a disruption of the Scottish Church. A few days after the dinner at Mr. Blackwood's I dined with Mr. Lockhart. Besides the host and hostess, there were present Sir Walter Scott, his son, Charles Scott, Mr. Blackwood, and three or four other persons. At dinner I sat next Sir Walter. Everything went off pleasantly, with the usual ease, hospitality, and heartiness of an English dinner. After the ladies had retired the conversation became general and animated. Byron was the engrossing topic. Sir Walter spoke of him with the deepest feeling of admiration and regret. A few weeks before, on the receipt of the news of his death, he had written an obituary notice of him, in which he compared him to the sun, withdrawn from the heavens at the very moment when every telescope was levelled to discover either his glory or his spots. Lockhart and Blackwood both told stories, and we passed a pleasant half hour. The wine was at last rather low, and our host ordered the servant to bring more. Upon which Scott said, "No, no, Lokert"--such was his pronunciation of his son-in-law's name--"we have had enough: let us go and see the ladies." And so we gathered to the parlor. Mrs. Lockhart spoke with great interest of Washington Irving, who had visited the family at Abbotsford. She said that he slept in a room which looked out on the Tweed. In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, he was very pale, and being asked the reason, confessed that he had not been able to sleep. The sight of the Tweed from his window, and the consciousness of being at Abbotsford, so filled his imagination, so excited his feelings, as to deprive him of slumber. Our lively hostess was requested to give us some music, and instantly complied--the harp being her instrument. She sang Scotch airs, and played several pibrochs, all with taste and feeling. Her range of tunes seemed inexhaustible. Her father sat by, and entered heartily into the performances. He beat time vigorously with his lame leg, and frequently helped out a chorus, the heartiness of his tones making up for some delinquencies in tune and time. Often he made remarks upon the songs, and told anecdotes respecting them. When a certain pibroch had been played, he said it reminded him of the first time he ever saw Miss Edgeworth. There had come to Abbotsford a wild Gaelic peasant from the neighborhood of Staffa, and it was proposed to him to sing a a pibroch common in that region. He had consented, but required the whole party present to sit in a circle on the floor, while he should sing the song, and perform a certain pantomimic accompaniment, in the centre. All was accordingly arranged in the great hall, and the performer had just begun his wild chant, when in walked a small but stately lady, and announced herself as Miss Edgeworth! Mrs. Lockhart asked me about the American Indians, expressing great curiosity concerning them. I told the story of one who was tempted to go into the rapids of the Niagara river, just above the Falls, for a bottle of rum. This he took with him, and having swam out to the point agreed upon, he turned back and attempted to regain the land. For a long time the result was doubtful: he struggled powerfully, but in vain; inch by inch he receded from the shore; and at last, finding his doom sealed, he raised himself above the water, wrenched the cork from the bottle, and putting the latter to his lips, yielded to the current, and thus went down to his doom. Sir Walter then said that he had read an account of an Indian, who was in a boat, approaching a cataract; by some accident it was drawn into the current, and the savage saw that his escape was impossible. Upon this he arose, wrapped his robe of skins around him, seated himself erect, and, with an air of imperturbable gravity, went over the falls. "The most remarkable thing about the American Indians," said Blackwood, "is their being able to follow in the trail of their enemies, by their footprints left in the leaves, upon the grass, and even upon the moss of the rocks. The accounts given of this seem hardly credible." "I can readily believe it, however," said Sir Walter. "You must remember that this is a part of their education. I have learned at Abbotsford to discriminate between the hoof-marks of all our neighbors' horses, and I taught the same thing to Mrs. Lockhart. It is, after all, not so difficult as you might think. Every horse's foot has some peculiarity, either of size, shoeing, or manner of striking the earth. I was once walking with Southey--a mile or more from home--across the fields. At last we came to a bridle-path leading towards Abbotsford, and here I noticed fresh hoof-prints. Of this I said nothing; but pausing, and looking up with an inspired expression, I said to Southey,--'I have a gift of second sight: we shall have a stranger to dinner!' "'And what may be his name?' was the reply. "'Scott,' said I. "'Ah, it is some relation of yours,' he said; 'you have invited him, and you would pass off, as an example of your Scottish gift of prophecy, a matter previously agreed upon!' "'Not at all,' said I. 'I assure you that, till this moment, I never thought of such a thing.' "When we got home, I was told that Mr. Scott, a farmer living some three or four miles distant, and a relative of mine, was waiting to see me. Southey looked astounded. The man remained to dinner, and he was asked if he had given any intimation of his coming. He replied in the negative: that, indeed, he had no idea of visiting Abbotsford when he left home. After enjoying Southey's wonder for some time, I told him that I saw the tracks of Mr. Scott's horse in the bridle-path, and inferring that he was going to Abbotsford, easily foresaw that we should have him to dinner." Presently the conversation turned upon Burns. Scott knew him well. He said that Tam O'Shanter was written to please a stonecutter, who had executed a monument for the poet's father, on condition that he should write him a witch-story in verse. He stated that Burns was accustomed in his correspondence, more especially with ladies, to write an elaborate letter, and then send a copy of it to several persons; modifying local and personal passages to suit each individual. He said that of some of these letters he had three or four copies, thus addressed to different persons, and all in the poet's handwriting. The evening passed in pleasant conversation, varied by the music of Mrs. Lockhart's voice and harp; and some amusing imitations by a gentleman of the party, till twelve o'clock. It will readily be supposed that my eye often turned upon the chief figure in this interesting group. I could not for a moment forget his presence; though nothing could be more unpretending and modest than his whole air and bearing. The general effect of his face was that of calm dignity; and now, in the presence of children and friends, lighted by genial emotions, it was one of the pleasantest countenances I have ever seen. When standing or walking, his manly form, added to an aspect of benevolence, completed the image; at once exciting affection and commanding respect. His manners were quiet, unpretending, absolutely without self-assertion. He appeared to be happy, and desirous of making others so. He was the only person present who seemed unconscious that he was the author of Waverley. His intercourse with his daughter was most charming. She seemed quite devoted to him; watching his lips when he was speaking, and seeking in everything to anticipate and fulfil his wishes. When she was singing, his eye dwelt upon her; his ear catching and seeming to relish every tone. Frequently, when she was silent, his eye rested upon her, and the lines came to my mind,-- "Some feelings are to mortals given, With less of earth in them than heaven: And if there be a human tear From passion's dross refined and clear, A tear so limpid and so meek It would not stain an angel's cheek: 'Tis that which pious fathers shed Upon a duteous daughter's head!" Eight years later, when I was again in London, Scott was on his death-bed at Abbotsford. Overburdened with the struggle to extricate himself from the wreck of his fortunes, his brain had given way, and the mighty intellect was in ruins. On the morning of the 17th he woke from a paralytic slumber; his eye clear and calm, every trace of delirium having passed away. Lockhart came to his bedside. "My dear," he said, "I may have but a moment to speak to you. Be a good man: be virtuous; be religious: be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you are called upon to lie here!" These were almost the last words he spoke; he soon fell into a stupor, which became the sleep of death. So he died, with all his children around him. "It was a beautiful day," says his biographer; "so warm, that every window was wide open; and so perfectly still, that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear--the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles--was distinctly audible, as we knelt around the bed; and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes!" CHAPTER XXI. EN ROUTE FOR LONDON--"THE LAIRD O'COCKPEN"--LOCALITIES OF LEGENDARY FAME--DIFFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCENERY. Early in June I set out for London. My route led me through the village of Dalkeith, and the possessions of the Duke of Buccleuch, which extended for thirty miles on both sides of the road. We were constantly meeting objects which revived historical or poetic reminiscences. Among these was Cockpen, the scene of the celebrated ballad; and as I rode by the whole romance passed before my mind. I fancied that I could even trace the pathway along which the old laird proceeded upon his courtship, as well as the residence of "The penniless lass wi' a lang pedigree;" who was so daft as to reject his offer, although "His wig was well powthered and as gude as new; His waistcoat was red, and his coat it was blue; A ring on his finger, a sword and cocked hat-- And wha could refuse the laird wi' a' that?" We crossed the Galawater and the Ettrick, and travelled along the banks of the Tweed. We passed Abbotsford on our left; and further on saw the Eildon Hills, "cleft in three" by the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott; as duly chronicled in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. We proceeded along the banks of the Teviot, a small limpid stream, where barefooted lassies were washing, as in the days of Allan Ramsay. We saw Netherby Hall, and a little beyond Cannobie Lea, the scenes of the song Young Lochinvar. All these, and many more localities of legendary fame, were passed in the course of a forenoon's progress in the stage-coach. One day's journey brought me to Carlisle: thence I travelled through the lake district, looking with delight upon Windermere, Rydal, Grassmere, Helvellyn, Derwentwater, and Skiddaw. Then turning eastward, I passed over a hilly and picturesque country, to the ancient and renowned city of York. Having lingered, half entranced, amid its antiquities, and looked almost with worship upon its cathedral--the most beautiful I have ever seen--I departed, and soon found myself once more in London. As I shall not return to the subject again, I must say a few words as to the impression England makes upon the mind of an American traveller. I have visited this country several times within the last thirty years, and I shall group my impressions in one general view. The whole may be summed up in a single sentence, which is, that England is incomparably the most beautiful country in the world! I do not speak of it in winter, when encumbered with fogs; when there is "No sun, no moon, no morn, no noon, No dusk, no dawn--no proper time of day; No sky, no earthly view, no distance looking blue; No road, no street, no t'other side the way!" I take her, as I do any other beauty who sits for her portrait, in her best attire; that is, in summer. The sun rises here as high in June as it does in America. Vegetation is just about as far advanced. The meadows, the wheat-fields, the orchards, the forests are in their glory. There is one difference, however, between the two countries; the sun in England is not so hot, the air is not so highly perfumed, the buzz of the insects is not so intense. Everything is more tranquil. With us, all nature, during summer, appears to be in haste: as if its time was short; as if it feared the coming frost. In England, on the contrary, there seems to be a confidence in the seasons, as if there were time for the ripening harvests; as if the wheat might swell out its fat sides, the hop amplify its many-plaited flowers, the oats multiply and increase their tassels; each and all attaining their perfection at leisure. In the United States, the period of growth of most vegetables is compressed into ten weeks; in Great Britain, it extends to sixteen. If we select the middle of June as a point of comparison, we shall see that in America there is a spirit, vigor, energy in the climate, as indicated by vegetable and animal life, unknown in Europe. The air is clearer, the landscape is more distinct, the bloom more vivid, the odors more pungent. A clover-field in America, in full bloom, is by many shades more ruddy than the same thing in England: its breath even is sweeter: the music of the bees stealing its honey is of a higher key. A summer forest with us is of a livelier green than in any part of Great Britain; the incense breathed upon the heart, morning and evening, is, I think, more full and fragrant. And yet, if we take the summer through, this season is pleasanter in England than with us. It is longer, its excitements are more tranquil, and, being spread over a larger space, the heart has more leisure to appreciate them, than in the haste and hurry of our American climate. There is one fact worthy of notice, which illustrates this peculiarity of the English summer: the trees there are all of a more sturdy, or, as we say, _stubbed_ form and character. The oaks, the elms, the walnuts, beeches, are shorter and thicker, as well in the trunks as the branches, than ours. The leaves are thicker, the twigs larger in circumference. I have noticed particularly the recent growths of apple-trees, and they are at once shorter and stouter than in America. This quality in the trees gives a peculiarity to the landscape: the forest is more solid and less graceful than ours. If you will look at an English painting of trees, you notice the fact I state, and perceive the effect it gives, especially to scenes of which trees constitute a prevailing element. All over Europe, in fact, the leaves of the trees have a less feathery appearance than in America; and in general the forms of the branches are less arching, and, of course, less beautiful. Hence it will be perceived that European pictures of trees differ in this respect from American ones: the foliage in the former being more solid, and the sweep of the branches more angular. But it is in respect to the effects of human art and industry that the English landscape has the chief advantage over ours. England is an old country, and shows on its face the influences of fifteen centuries of cultivation. It is, with the exception of Belgium, the most thickly-settled country of Europe. It is under a garden-like cultivation; the ploughing is straight and even, as if regulated by machinery; the boundaries of estates consist, for the most part, of stone mason-work, the intermediate divisions being hedges, neatly trimmed, and forming a beautiful contrast to our stiff stone walls and rail fences. In looking from the top of a hill over a large extent of country, it is impossible not to feel a glow of delight at the splendor of the scene: the richness of the soil, its careful and skilful cultivation, its green, tidy boundaries chequering the scene, its teeming crops, its fat herds, its numberless and full-fleeced sheep. Nor must the dwellings be overlooked. I pass by the cities and the manufacturing villages, which, in most parts, are visible in every extended landscape; sometimes, as in the region of Manchester, spreading out for miles, and sending up wreaths of smoke from a thousand tall, tapering chimneys. I am speaking now of the country; and here are such residences as are unknown to us. An English castle would swallow up a dozen of our wood or brick villas. The adjacent estate often includes a thousand acres; and these, be it remembered, are kept almost as much for ornament as use. Think of a dwelling that might gratify the pride of a prince, surrounded by several square miles of wooded park, and shaven lawn, and winding stream, and swelling hill; and all having been for a hundred, perhaps five hundred years, subjected to every improvement which the highest art could suggest! There is certainly a union of unrivalled beauty and magnificence in the lordly estates of England. We have nothing in America which at all resembles them. And then there is every grade of imitation of these high examples scattered over the whole country. The greater part of the surface of England belongs to wealthy proprietors, and these have alike the desire and the ability to give an aspect of neatness, finish, and elegance, not only to their dwellings and the immediate grounds, but to their entire estates. The prevailing standard of taste thus leads to a universal beautifying of the surface of the country. Even the cottager feels the influence of this omnipresent spirit: the brown thatch over his dwelling, and the hedge before his door, must be neatly trimmed: the green ivy must clamber up and festoon his windows; and the little yard in front must bloom with roses and lilies, and other gentle flowers, in their season. So much for the common aspect of England as the traveller passes over it. The seeker after the picturesque may find abundant gratification in Devonshire, Derbyshire, Westmoreland, though Wales and Scotland, and parts of Ireland, are still more renowned for their beauty. So far as combinations of nature are concerned, nothing in the world can surpass some of our own scenery; as along the upper waters of the Housatonic and the Connecticut, or among the islands of Lake George, and a thousand other places: but these lack the embellishments of art and the associations of romance or song, which belong to the rival beauties of British landscapes. I confine these remarks to a single topic, the aspect of England as it meets the eye of an American traveller. The English do not and cannot enjoy the spectacle as an American does; for they are born to it, and have no experience which teaches them to estimate it by common and inferior standards. Having said so much on this subject, I shall not venture to speak of English society: of the lights and shadows of life beneath the myriad roofs of towns and cities. The subject would be too extensive; and besides, it has been abundantly treated by others. I only say, in passing, that the English people are the best studied at home. John Bull, out of his own house, is generally a rough customer: here, by his fireside, with wife, children, and friends, he is generous, genial, gentlemanly. There is no hospitality like that of an Englishman, when you have crossed his threshold. Everywhere else he will annoy you. He will poke his elbow into your sides in a crowded thoroughfare; he will rebuff you if, sitting at his side in a railway-carriage, you ask a question by way of provoking a little conversation: he carries at his back a load of prejudices, like the bundle of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress; and, instead of seeking to get rid of them, he is always striving to increase his collection. If he becomes a diplomat, his great business is to meddle in everybody's affairs; if an editor, he is only happy in proportion as he can say annoying and irritating things. And yet, catch this same John Bull at home, and his crusty, crocodile armor falls off, and he is the very best fellow in the world: liberal, hearty, sincere,--the perfection of a gentleman. CHAPTER XXII. LONDON AGAIN--JACOB PERKINS AND HIS STEAM-GUN--DUKES OF WELLINGTON, SUSSEX, AND YORK--BRITISH LADIES AT A REVIEW--HOUSE OF COMMONS AND ITS ORATORS--CATALANI--DISTINGUISHED FOREIGNERS--EDWARD IRVING COMPARED TO EDMUND KEAN--BYRON LYING IN STATE. London, when I first knew it, was not what it is now. Its population has at least doubled since 1824. At that time Charing Cross was a filthy, triangular thoroughfare, a stand for hackney-coaches, a grand panorama of show-bills pasted over the surrounding walls, with the King's Mews in the immediate vicinity: this whole area is now the site of Trafalgar Square. This is an index of other and similar changes that have taken place all over the city. At the present day, London not only surpasses in its extent, its wealth, its accumulations of all that belongs to art, the extent of its commerce, the vastness of its influence, all the cities that now exist, but all that the world has before known. King George IV. was then on the throne, and though he was shy of showing himself in public, I chanced to see him several times, and once to advantage, at Ascot Races. For more than an hour his majesty stood in the pavilion, surrounded by the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of York, the Marquis of Anglesea, and other persons of note. But for the star on his left breast, and the respect paid to him, he might have passed as only an over-dressed and rather sour old rake. I noticed that his coat sat very close and smooth, and was told that he was trussed and braced by stays. It was said to be the labor of at least two hours to prepare him for a public exhibition. He was a dandy to the last. The wrinkles of his coat, after it was on, were cut out by the tailor, and carefully drawn up with the needle. He had the gout, and walked badly. I imagine there were few among the thousands gathered to the spectacle who were really less happy than his majesty--the monarch of the three kingdoms. I saw the Duke of Wellington not only on this, but on many subsequent occasions. I think the portraits give a false idea of his personal appearance. He was really a rather small, thin, insignificant-looking man, unless you saw him on horseback. He then seemed rather stately, and in a military dress, riding always with inimitable ease, he sustained the image of the great general. At other times I never could discover in his appearance anything but the features and aspect of an ordinary, and certainly not prepossessing, old man. I say this with great respect for his character, which, as a personification of solid sense, indomitable purpose, steady loyalty, and unflinching devotion to a sense of public duty, I conceive to be one of the finest in British history. At this period our countryman, Jacob Perkins, was astonishing London with his steam-gun. He was certainly a man of extraordinary genius, and was the originator of numerous useful inventions. At the time of which I write, he fancied that he had discovered a new mode of generating steam, by which he was not only to save a vast amount of fuel, but to obtain a marvellous increase of power. So confident was he of success, that he told me he felt certain of being able, in a few months, to go from London to Liverpool with the steam produced by a gallon of oil. Such was his fertility of invention, that while pursuing one discovery others came into his mind, and, seizing upon his attention, kept him in a whirl of experiments, in which many things were begun, and comparatively nothing completed. Though the steam-gun never reached any practical result, it was for some time the admiration of London. I was present at an exhibition of its wonderful performances in the presence of the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Wellington, and other persons of note. The purpose of the machine was to discharge bullets by steam, instead of gunpowder, and with great rapidity--at least a hundred a minute. The balls were put in a sort of tunnel, and by working a crank back and forward, they were let into the chamber of the barrel one by one, and expelled by the steam. The noise of each explosion was like that of a musket; and when the discharges were rapid, there was a ripping uproar, quite shocking to tender nerves. The balls--carried about a hundred feet across the smithy--struck upon an iron target, and were flattened to the thickness of a shilling piece. The whole performance was indeed quite formidable, and the Duke of Sussex seemed greatly excited. I stood close to him; and when the bullets flew pretty thick, and the discharge came to its climax, I heard him say to the Duke of Wellington, in an under-tone,--"Wonderful, wonderful--wonderful! wonderful, wonderful--wonderful! wonderful, wonderful--wonderful!" and so he went on, without variation. It was, in fact, a very good commentary upon the performance. Having spoken of the Duke of Sussex, I must say a few words of his brother, the Duke of York, whom I had seen at Ascot. He was there interested in the race, for he had entered a horse by the name of Moses, for one of the prizes. Some person reflected upon him for this. His ready reply was, that he was devoted to _Moses and the profits_. Despite his disgrace in the Flanders campaign, and his notorious profligacy, he was still a favorite among the British people. There was about him a certain native honorableness and goodness of heart, which always existed, even in the midst of his worst career. I saw the Duke on another occasion, at a cavalry review on Hounslow Heath. The Duke of Wellington was among the spectators. He was now in military dress, and mounted on a fine chestnut-colored horse. His motions were quick, and frequently seemed to indicate impatience. Several ladies and gentlemen on horseback were admitted to the review, and within the circle of the sentries stationed to exclude the crowd. I obtained admission by paying five shillings; for I learned that in England money is quite as mighty as in America. The privileged group of fair ladies and brave men, gathered upon a grassy knoll to observe the evolutions of the soldiers, presented an assemblage such as the aristocracy of England alone can furnish. Those who imagine that this is an effeminate generation, should learn that both the men and women belonging to the British nobility, taken together, are without doubt the finest race in the world. One thing is certain, these ladies could stand fire; for although the horses leaped and pranced at the discharges of the troops, their fair riders seemed as much at ease as if upon their own feet. Their horsemanship was indeed admirable, and suggested those habits of exercise and training, to which their full rounded forms and blooming countenances gave ample testimony. The performances consisted of various marches and counter-marches--sometimes slow, and sometimes quick--across the extended plain. The evolutions of the flying-artillery excited universal admiration. When the whole body--about four thousand horse--rushed in a furious gallop over the ground, the clash of arms, the thunder of hoofs, the universal shudder of the earth--all together created more thrilling emotions in my mind, than any other military parade I ever beheld. I have seen eighty thousand infantry in the field; but they did not impress my imagination as forcibly as these few regiments of cavalry at Hounslow Heath. One incident gave painful effect to the spectacle. As the whole body were sweeping across the field, a single trooper was pitched from his horse and fell to the ground. A hundred hoofs passed over him, and trampled him into the sod. On swept the gallant host, as heedless of their fallen companion as if only a feather had dropped from of their caps. The conflict of cavalry in real battle, must be the most fearful exhibition which the dread drama of war can furnish. On this occasion both the King and the Duke of York were present; so that it was one off universal interest. About fifty ladies on horseback rode back and forth over the field, on the flanks of the troops, imitating their evolutions. I have been often at the House of Commons; but I shall now only speak of a debate, in July, 1824, upon the petition, I believe, of the City of London, for a recognition of the independence of some of the South American States. Canning was then Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and took the brunt of the battle made upon the Ministry. Sir James Mackintosh led, and Brougham followed him, on the same side. I shall not attempt to give you a sketch of the speeches: a mere description of the appearance and manner of the prominent orators will suffice. Sir James, then nearly sixty years old, was a man rather above the ordinary size; and with a fine, philanthropic face. His accent was decidedly Scotch, and his voice shrill and dry. He spoke slowly, often hesitated, and was entirely destitute of what we call eloquence. There was no easy flow of sentences, no gush of feeling, no apparent attempt to address the heart or the imagination. His speech was a rigid lecture, rather abstract and philosophical; evidently addressed to the stern intellect of stern men. He had a good deal of gesture, and once or twice was boisterous in tone and manner. His matter was logical; and occasionally he illustrated his propositions by historical facts, happily narrated. On the whole he made the impression upon my mind that he was a very philosophical, but not very practical, statesman. Brougham's face and figure are familiar to every one; and making allowance for added years, there is little change in his appearance since the time of which I speak. He had abundance of words, as well as ideas. In his speech on the occasion I describe, he piled thought upon thought, laced sentence within sentence, mingled satire and philosophy, fact and argument, history and anecdote, as if he had been a cornucopia, and was anxious to disburden himself of his abundance. In all this there were several hard hits, and Canning evidently felt them. As he rose to reply, I took careful note of his appearance; for he was then, I imagine, the most conspicuous of the British Statesmen. He was a handsome man, with a bald, shining head, and a figure slightly stooping in the shoulders. His face was round, his eye large and full, his lips a little voluptuous: the whole bearing a lively and refined expression. In other respects, his appearance was not remarkable. His voice was musical; and he spoke with more ease and fluency than most other orators of the House of Commons; yet even he hesitated, paused, and repeated his words, not only in the beginning, but sometimes in the very midst of his argument. He, however, riveted the attention of the Members; and his observations frequently brought out the ejaculation of "hear, hear," from both sides of the House. Brougham and Mackintosh watched him with vigilant attention; now giving nods of assent, and now signs of disapprobation. Of course, I visited the House of Lords, paying two shillings and sixpence for admittance. The general aspect of the assembly was eminently grave and dignified. Lord Eldon was the Chancellor--a large, heavy, iron-looking man--the personification of bigoted Conservatism. He was so opposed to reforms, that he shed tears when the punishment of death was abolished for stealing five shillings in a dwelling-house! When I saw him, his head was covered with the official wig: his face sufficed, however, to satisfy any one that his obstinacy of character was innate. While I was here, a Committee from the House of Commons was announced; they had brought up a message to the Lords. The Chancellor, taking the seals in his hands, approached the Committee, bowing three times, and they doing the same. Then they separated, each moving backward, and bowing. To persons used to such a ceremony, this might be sublime; to me it was ludicrous: and all the more so, on account of the ponderous starchness of the chief performer in the solemn farce. There was a somewhat animated debate while I was present, in which Lords Liverpool, Lauderdale, Harrowby and Grey participated; yet nothing was said or done that would justify particular notice at this late day. A great event happened in the musical world while I was in London--the appearance of Catalani at the Italian Opera, after several years of absence. The opera was _Le Nozze di Figaro_. I had never before seen an opera; and could not, even by the enchantments of music, have my habits of thought and my common sense so completely overturned and bewitched, as to see the whole business of life--intrigue, courtship, marriage, cursing, shaving, preaching, praying, loving, hating--done by singing, instead of talking, and yet feel that it was all right and proper. It requires both a musical ear and early training fully to appreciate and feel the opera. Madame Catalani was a large handsome woman; a little masculine and past forty. She was not only a very clever actress, but was deemed to have every musical merit--volume, compass, clearness of tone, surpassing powers of execution. Her whole style was dramatic; bending even the music to the sentiments of the character and the song. I could appreciate, uninstructed as I was, her amazing powers; though, to say the truth, I was quite as much astonished as pleased. Pasta and Garcia, both of whom I afterwards heard, gave me infinitely greater pleasure; chiefly because their voices possessed that melody of tone which excites sympathy in every heart; even the most untutored. Madame Catalani gave the opera a sort of epic grandeur--an almost tragic vehemence of expression; Pasta and Garcia rendered it the interpreter of those soft and tender emotions, for the expression of which God seems to have given music to mankind. It was, no doubt, a great thing to hear the greatest cantatrice of the age; but I remember Madame Catalani as a prodigy, rather than as an enchantress. On the occasion I am describing, she sang, by request, "Rule Britannia" between the acts; which drew forth immense applause, in which I heartily joined: not that I liked the words, but that I felt the music. It was about this time that a great attraction was announced at one of the theatres; nothing less than the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands, who had graciously condescended to honor the performance with their presence. They had come to visit England, and pay their homage to George the Fourth; hence the Government deemed it necessary to receive them with hospitality, and pay them such attentions as were due to their rank and royal blood. The king's name was Kamehamaha; but he had also the sub-title or surname of Rhio-Rhio: which, being interpreted, meant Dog of Dogs. Canning's wit got the better of his reverence, and so he profanely suggested that, if his majesty was a Dog of Dogs, what must the queen be? However, there was an old man about the court, who had acquired the title of Poodle, and he was selected as a fit person to attend upon their majesties. They had their lodgings at the Adelphi Hotel, and might be seen at all hours of the day, looking at the puppet-shows in the streets with intense delight. Of all the institutions of Great Britain, Punch and Judy evidently made the strongest and most favorable impression upon the royal party. They were, I believe, received at a private interview by the King at Windsor: everything calculated to gratify them was done. I saw them at the theatre, dressed in a European costume, with the addition of some barbarous finery. The king was an enormous man--six feet three or four inches; the queen was short, but otherwise of ample dimensions. Besides these persons, the party comprised five or six other members of the king's household. They had all large, round, flat faces, of a coarse, though good-humored expression. Their complexion was a ruddy brown, not very unlike the American Indians; their general aspect, however, was very different. They looked with a kind of vacant wonder at the play, evidently not comprehending it; the farce, on the contrary, seemed greatly to delight them. It is sad to relate that this amiable couple never returned to their country; both died in England--victims either to the climate, or to the change in their habits of living. Among the prominent objects of interest in London at this period was Edward Irving, then preaching at the Caledonian Chapel, Cross Street, Hatton Garden. He was now in the full flush of his fame; and such was the eagerness to hear him, that it was difficult to get admission. People of all ranks--literary men, philosophers, statesmen, noblemen, persons of the highest name and influence, with a full and diversified representation of the fair sex--crowded to his church. I was so fortunate as to get a seat in the pew of a friend, a privilege which I appreciated all the more when I counted twenty coroneted coaches standing at the door, some of those who came in them not being able to obtain even an entrance into the building. The interior was crowded to excess; the aisles were full; and even fine ladies seemed happy to get seats upon the pulpit stairway. Persons of the highest title were scattered here and there, and cabinet ministers were squeezed in with the mass of common humanity. Mr. Irving's appearance was very remarkable. He was over six feet in height, very broad-shouldered, with long, black hair hanging in heavy, twisted ringlets down upon his shoulders. His complexion was pallid, yet swarthy; the whole expression of his face, owing chiefly to an unfortunate squint, was half-sinister and half-sanctified, creating in the minds of the beholder a painful doubt whether he was a great saint or a great sinner. There was a strange mixture of saintliness and dandyism in the whole appearance of this man. His prayer was affected--strange, quaint, peculiar in its phraseology, yet solemn and striking. His reading of the psalm was peculiar, and a fancy crossed my mind that I had heard something like it, but certainly not in a church. I was seeking to trace out a resemblance between this strange parson and some star of Drury Lane or Covent Garden. Suddenly I found the clue: Edward Irving in the pulpit was imitating Edmund Kean upon the stage! And he succeeded admirably--his tall and commanding person giving him an immense advantage over the little, insignificant, yet inspired actor. He had the tones of the latter, his gestures, his looks even, as I had often seen him in Richard the Third and Shylock. He had evidently taken lessons of the renowned tragedian, but whether in public or private is not for me to say. In spite of the evident affectation, the solemn dandyism, the dramatic artifices of the performer--for, after all, I could only consider the preacher as an actor--the sermon was very impressive. The phraseology was rich, flowing, redundant, abounding in illustration, and seemed to me carefully modelled after that of Jeremy Taylor. Some of the pictures presented to the imagination were startling, and once or twice it seemed as if the whole audience was heaving and swelling with intense emotion, like a sea rolling beneath the impulses of a tempest. Considered as a display of oratorical art, it was certainly equal to anything I have ever heard from the pulpit; yet it did not appear to me calculated to have any permanent effect in enforcing Christian truth upon the conscience. The preacher seemed too much a player, and too little an apostle. The after-thought was, that the whole effect was the result of stage trick, and not of sober truth. The character and career of Edward Irving present a strange series of incongruities. He was born in Scotland in 1792; he became a preacher, and acquired speedy notoriety, as much by his peculiarities as his merits. He attracted the attention of Dr. Chalmers, and through his influence was for a time assistant-minister in the parish of St. John's, at Glasgow. From this place he was called to the Caledonian Chapel, where I heard him. His fame continued to increase; and having published a volume of discourses, under the quaint title, For the Oracles of God, four Orations: for Judgment to come, an Argument in Nine Parts: three large editions of the work were sold in the space of six months. Wherever he preached crowds of eager listeners flocked to hear him. His eccentricities increased with his fame. He drew out his discourses to an enormous length, and on several occasions protracted the services to four hours! He soon became mystical, and took to studying unfulfilled prophecy as the true key to the interpretation of the Scriptures. From this extravagance he passed to the doctrine that Christians, by the power of faith, can attain to the working of miracles, and speaking with unknown tongues, as in the primitive ages. Such at last were his vagaries, that he was cut off from communion with the Scottish Church; in consequence, he became the founder of a sect which continues to the present time in England, bearing the title of "Irvingites." Worn out with anxiety and incessant labors, he died at Glasgow, while on a journey for his health, in 1834, at the early age of forty-two. One more event I must notice--the arrival in London of the remains of Lord Byron, and their lying in state previous to interment. His body had been preserved in spirits, and was thus brought from Greece, attended by five persons of his lordship's suite. Having been transferred to the coffin, it lay in state at the house of Sir Edward Knatchbull, where such were the crowds that rushed to behold the spectacle, that it was necessary to defend the coffin with a stout wooden railing. When I arrived at the place the lid was closed. I was told, however, that the countenance, though the finer lines had collapsed, was so little changed as to be easily recognised by his acquaintances. The general muscular form of the body was perfectly preserved. The aspect of the scene, even as I witnessed it, was altogether very impressive. The coffin was covered with a pall, enriched by escutcheons wrought in gold. On the top was a lid, set round with black plumes. Upon it were these words,-- "GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON. BORN IN LONDON, 22D JANUARY, 1788. DIED AT MISSOLONGHI, APRIL 19TH, 1824." At the head of the coffin was an urn containing the ashes of his brain and heart: this being also covered with a rich pall, wrought with figures in gold. The windows were closed, and the darkened room was feebly illumined by numerous wax tapers. And this was all that remained of Byron! What a lesson upon the pride of genius, the vanity of rank, the fatuity of fame,--all levelled in the dust, and, despite the garnished pall and magnificent coffin, their possessor bound to pass through the same process of corruption as the body of a common beggar! CHAPTER XXIII. RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES--BOSTON AND ITS WORTHIES--BUSINESS OPERATIONS--ACKERMANN'S "FORGET-ME-NOT" THE PARENT OF ALL OTHER ANNUALS--THE AMERICAN SPECIES--THEIR DECLINE. Having made a hurried excursion to Paris and back to London, I departed for Liverpool, and thence embarked for the United States, arriving there in October, 1824. I remained at Hartford till October, 1826, and then removed to Boston, with the intention of publishing original works, and at the same time of trying my hand at authorship--the latter part of my plan, however, known only to myself. At that time Boston was recognized as the literary metropolis of the Union--the admitted Athens of America. Edward Everett had established the North-American Review, and though he had now just left the editorial chair, his spirit dwelt in it, and his fame lingered around it. R. H. Dana, Edward T. Channing, George Bancroft, and others, were among the rising lights of the literary horizon. Society was strongly impressed with literary tastes, and genius was respected and cherished. The day had not yet come when it was glory enough for a college professor to marry a hundred thousand dollars of stocks, or when it was the chief end of a lawyer to become the attorney of an insurance company, or a bank, or a manufacturing corporation. A Boston imprint on a book was equal to a certificate of good paper, good print, good binding, and good matter. And while such was the state of things at Boston, at New York the Harpers, who till recently had been mere printers in Dover street, had scarcely entered upon their career as publishers; and the other shining lights in the trade, at the present time, were either unborn, or in the nursery, or at school. What a revolution do these simple items suggest, wrought in the space of thirty years! The sceptre has departed from Judah: New York is now the acknowledged metropolis of American literature, as well as of art and commerce. Nevertheless, if we look at Boston literature at the present time, as reflected in its publishing lists, we shall see that the light of other days has not degenerated; for since the period of which I speak, Prescott, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whipple, Holmes, Lowell, Hilliard, have joined the Boston constellation of letters. It cannot interest the reader to hear in detail my business operations in Boston at this period. It will be sufficient to say that, among other works, I published an edition of the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, with a life of the author, furnished by his widow, she having a share of the edition. I also published an edition of Hannah More's works, and of Mrs. Opie's works: these being, I believe, the first complete collections of the writings of these authors. In 1827 I published Sketches by N. P. Willis, his first adventure in responsible authorship. The next year I issued the Commonplace Book of Prose, the first work of the now celebrated Dr. Cheever. This was speedily followed by the Commonplace Book of Poetry, and Studies in Poetry, by the same author. In 1828 I published a first, and soon after a second, volume of the Legendary, designed as a periodical, and intended to consist of original pieces in prose and verse, principally illustrative of American history, scenery, and manners. This was edited by N. P. Willis, and was, I believe, his first editorial engagement. Among the contributors were Halleck, Miss Sedgwick, Miss Francis, Mrs. Sigourney, Willis, Pierpont, and other popular writers of that day. It was kindly treated by the press, which generously published, without charge, the best pieces in full, saving the reading million the trouble of buying the book and paying for the chaff, which was naturally found with the wheat. Despite this courtesy, the work proved a miserable failure. The time had not come for such a publication. At the present day, with the present accessories and the present public spirit, I doubt not that such an enterprise would be eminently successful. The first work of the Annual kind, entitled the Forget-Me-Not, was issued by the Ackermanns of London, in the winter of 1823, while I was in that city. It was successfully imitated by Carey and Lea at Philadelphia, in a work entitled the Atlantic Souvenir, and which was sustained with great spirit for several years. In 1828 I commenced and published the first volume of the Token, which I continued for fifteen years; editing it myself, with the exception of the volume for 1829, which came out under the auspices of Mr. Willis. In 1836, the Atlantic Souvenir ceased; and after that time, by arrangement with the publishers, its title was added to that of the Token. The success of this species of publication stimulated new enterprises of the kind, and a rage for them spread over Europe and America. The efforts of the first artists and the best writers were at length drawn into them; and for nearly twenty years every autumn produced an abundant harvest of Diadems, Bijous, Amaranths, Bouquets, Hyacinths, Amulets, Talismans, Forget-Me-Nots, &c. Under these seductive titles they became messengers of love, tokens of friendship, signs and symbols of affection, and luxury and refinement; and thus they stole alike into the palace and the cottage, the library, the parlor, and the boudoir. The public taste grew by feeding on these luscious gifts, and soon craved even more gorgeous works of the kind; whence came Heath's Book of Beauty, Lady Blessington's Flowers of Loveliness, Bulwer's Pilgrims of the Rhine, Butler's Leaflets of Memory, Christmas with the Poets, and many others of similar design and execution. Many of the engravings of these works cost 500 dollars each, and many a piece of poetry 50 dollars a page. On several of these works the public spent 50,000 dollars a-year! At last the race of Annuals drew near the end of its career, yet not without having produced a certain revolution in the public taste. Their existence had sprung, at least in part, from steel-engraving, which had been invented and introduced by our countryman, Jacob Perkins. This enabled the artist to produce works of greater delicacy than had ever before been achieved; steel also gave the large number of impressions which the extensive sales of the Annuals demanded, and which could not have been obtained from copper. These works scattered gems of art far and wide, making the reading mass familiar with fine specimens of engraving; and not only cultivating an appetite for this species of luxury, but exalting the general standard of taste all over the civilized world. And thus, though the Annuals, by name, have perished, they have left a strong necessity in the public mind for books enriched by all the embellishments of art. Hence we have illustrated editions of Byron, Rogers, Thomson, Cowper, Campbell, and others; including our own poets, Bryant, Halleck, Sigourney, Longfellow, Read, &c. Wood-engraving, which since then has risen into such importance, has lent its potent aid in making books one of the chief luxuries of society, from the nursery to the parlor. In comparison with many of these works, the Token was a very modest affair. The first year I offered prizes for the best pieces in prose and poetry. The highest for prose was awarded to the author of Some Passages in the Life of an Old Maid. A mysterious man, in a mysterious way, presented himself for the money, and, giving due evidence of his authority to receive it, it was paid to him; but who the author really was never transpired, though I had, and still have, my confident guess upon the subject. Even the subsequent volumes, though they obtained favor in their day, did not approach the splendor of the modern works of a similar kind. Nevertheless, some of the engravings, from the designs of Allston, Leslie, Newton, Cole, Inman, Chapman, Fisher, Brown, Alexander, Healy, and others, were very clever, even compared with the finest works of the present day. The literary contributions were, I believe, equal, on the whole, to any of the Annuals, American or European. Here were inserted some of the earliest productions of Willis, Hawthorne, Miss Francis (now Mrs. Child), Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Hale, Pierpont, Greenwood, and Longfellow. Several of these authors first made acquaintance with the public through the pages of this work. It is a curious fact that the latter, Longfellow, wrote prose, and at that period had shown neither a strong bias nor a particular talent for poetry. The Token was continued annually till 1842, when it finally ceased. The day of Annuals had, indeed, passed before this was given up; and the last two or three years it had only lingered out a poor and fading existence. As a matter of business, it scarcely paid its expenses, and was a serious drawback upon my time and resources for fifteen years; a punishment, no doubt, fairly due to an obstinate pride, which made me reluctant to abandon a work with which my name and feelings had become somewhat identified. CHAPTER XXIV. "THE TOKEN"--N. P. WILLIS AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE--COMPARISON BETWEEN THEM--LADY AUTHORS--PUBLISHERS' PROFITS--AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS. I may here say, with propriety, a few words more as to the contributors for the Token. The most prominent writer for it was N. P. Willis; his articles were the most read, the most admired, the most abused, and the most advantageous to the work. I published his first book; and his two first editorial engagements were with me: hence the early portion of his literary career fell under my special notice. He had begun to write verses very early; and while in College, before he was eighteen, he had acquired an extended reputation, under the signature of "Roy." In 1827, when he was just twenty years old, I published his volume, entitled Sketches. It elicited quite a shower of criticism, in which praise and blame were about equally dispensed: at the same time the work sold with a readiness quite unusual for a book of poetry at that period. It is not calculated to establish the infallibility of critics, to look over these notices at the present day: many of the pieces which were then condemned have now taken their places among the acknowledged gems of our literature; and others, which excited praise at the time, have faded from the public remembrance. One thing is certain, everybody thought Willis worth criticising. He has been, I suspect, more written about than any other literary man in the history of American literature. Some of the attacks upon him proceeded, no doubt, from a conviction that he was a man of extraordinary gifts, and yet of extraordinary affectations; and the lash was applied in kindness, as that of a schoolmaster to a beloved pupil's back; some of them were dictated by envy; for we have had no other example of literary success so early, so general, and so flattering. That Mr. Willis made mistakes in literature and life, at the outset, may be admitted by his best friends; for it must be remembered that, before he was five-and-twenty, he was more read than any other American poet of his time; and besides, being possessed of an easy and captivating address, he became the pet of society, and especially of the fairer portion of it. Since that period, his life, on the whole, has been one of serious, useful, and successful labor. His reputation as a poet has hardly advanced, and probably the public generally regard some of his early verses as his best. As an essayist, however, he stands in the first rank; distinguished for a keen sagacity in analyzing society, a fine perception of the beauties of nature, and an extraordinary talent for endowing trifles with interest and meaning. As a traveller, he is among the most entertaining, sagacious, and instructive. His style is certainly peculiar, and is deemed affected, tending to an excess of refinement, and displaying an undue hankering for grace and melody; sometimes sacrificing sense to sound. This might once have been a just criticism, but the candid reader of his works now before the public will deem it hypercritical. His style is suited to his thought; it is flexible, graceful, musical, and is adapted to the playful wit, the piquant sentiment, the artistic descriptions of sea, earth, and sky, of which they are the vehicle. In the seeming exhaustlessness of his resources, in his prolonged freshness, in his constantly-increasing strength, Mr. Willis has refuted all the early prophets, who regarded him only as a precocity, destined to shine a few brief years and fade away. As to his personal character, I need only say, that from the beginning he had a larger circle of steadfast friends than almost any man within my knowledge. There has been something in his works which has made women generally both his literary and personal admirers. For so many favors he has given the world an ample return; for, with all his imputed literary faults--some real and some imaginary--I regard him as having contributed more to the amusement of society than almost any other of our living authors. It is not easy to conceive of a stronger contrast than is presented by comparing Nathaniel Hawthorne with N. P. Willis. The former was for a time one of the principal writers for the Token, and his admirable sketches were published side by side with those of the latter. Yet it is curious to remark, that everything Willis wrote attracted immediate attention, and excited ready praise, while the productions of Hawthorne were almost entirely unnoticed. The personal appearance and demeanor of these two gifted young men, at the early period of which I speak, was also in striking contrast. Willis was slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheeks ruddy, his aspect cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand, and was received readily and with welcome. Hawthorne, on the contrary, was of a rather sturdy form, his hair dark and bushy, his eyes steel-grey, his brow thick, his mouth sarcastic, his complexion stony, his whole aspect cold, moody, distrustful. He stood aloof, and surveyed the world from shy and sheltered positions. There was a corresponding difference in the writings of these two persons. Willis was all sunshine and summer, the other chill, dark, and wintry; the one was full of love and hope, the other of doubt and distrust; the one sought the open daylight--sunshine, flowers, music--and found them everywhere; the other plunged into the dim caverns of the mind, and studied the grisly spectres of jealousy, remorse, despair. I had seen some anonymous publication which seemed to me to indicate extraordinary powers. I inquired of the publishers as to the writer, and through them a correspondence ensued between me and "N. Hawthorne." This name I considered a disguise, and it was not till after many letters had passed that I met the author, and found it to be his true title, representing a very substantial personage. At this period he was unsettled as to his views: he had tried his hand in literature, and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world. His mind vacillated between various projects, verging, I think, toward a mercantile profession. I combated his despondence, and assured him of triumph, if he would persevere in a literary career. He wrote numerous articles, which appeared in the Token: occasionally an astute critic seemed to see through them, and to discover the mind that was in them; but in general they passed without notice. Such articles as "Sights from a Steeple," "Sketches beneath an Umbrella," the "Wives of the Dead," the "Prophetic Pictures," now universally acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and power,--extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame, while columns were given to pieces since totally forgotten. I felt annoyed, almost angry, indeed, at this. I wrote several articles in the papers, directing attention to these productions, and finding no echo of my views, I recollect to have asked John Pickering, a gentleman in whose critical powers I had great confidence, to read some of them, and give me his opinion of them. He did as I requested; his answer was that they displayed a wonderful beauty of style, with a sort of second-sight, which revealed, beyond the outward forms of life and being, a sort of spirit-world, somewhat as a lake reflects the earth around it and the sky above it; yet he deemed them too mystical to be popular. He was right, no doubt, at that period; but, ere long, a large portion of the reading world obtained a new sense--how, or where, or whence, is not easily determined--which led them to study the mystical, to dive beneath and beyond the senses. Hawthorne was, in fact, a kind of Wordsworth in prose: less kindly, less genial toward mankind, but deeper and more philosophical. His fate was similar: at first he was neglected, at last he had worshippers. In 1837 I recommended Mr. Hawthorne to publish a volume, comprising his various pieces, which had appeared in the Token and elsewhere. He consented, but as I had ceased to be a publisher, it was difficult to find any one who would undertake to bring out the work. I applied to the agent of the Stationers' Company, but he refused; until at last I relinquished my copyrights on such of the tales as I had published to Mr. Hawthorne, and joined a friend of his in a bond to indemnify them against loss; and thus the work was published by the Stationers' Company, under the title of Twice-Told Tales, and for the author's benefit. It was deemed a failure for more than a year, when a breeze seemed to rise and fill its sails, and with it the author was carried on to fame and fortune. Among the most successful of the writers for the Token was Miss Francis, now Mrs. Child. I have not seen her for many years, but I have many pleasant remembrances of her lively conversation, her saucy wit, her strong good sense, and her most agreeable person and presence. To Rev. F. W. P. Greenwood I was indebted not only for some of the best contributions, but for excellent counsel and advice in my literary affairs. He was a man of genius, gentle manners, and apostolic dignity of life and character. To Mr. Pierpont I was indebted for encouragement and sympathy in my whole career, and for some of the best poems which appeared in the work I am noticing. I remember once to have met him, and to have asked him to give me a contribution for the Token. He stopped and said, reflectingly, "I had a dream not long ago, which I have thought to put into verse. I will try, and if I am successful you shall have it." A few days after he gave me the lines, now in all the gem-books, beginning,-- "Was it the chime of a tiny bell That came so sweet to my dreaming ear-- Like the silvery tones of a fairy's shell, That he winds on the beach so mellow and clear, When the winds and the waves lie together asleep, And the moon and the fairy are watching the deep-- She dispensing her silvery light, And he his notes, as silvery quite, While the boatman listens and ships his oar, To catch the music that comes from the shore? Hark! the notes on my ear that play Are set to words; as they float, they say, 'Passing away, passing away!'" Next to Willis, Mrs. Sigourney was my most successful and liberal contributor: to her I am indebted for a large part of the success of my editorial labors in the matter now referred to. To Miss Sedgwick, also, the Token owes a large share of its credit with the public. To B. B. Thacher, also among the good and the departed; to Mrs. Osgood, to John Neale, A. H. Everett, Mr. Longfellow, H. T. Tuckerman, Epes and John Sargent, Miss Leslie, J. T. Fields, O. W. Holmes--to all these, and to many others, I owe the kind remembrance which belongs to good deeds, kindly and graciously bestowed. It is not to be supposed that in a long career, both as bookseller and editor, I should have escaped altogether the annoyances and vexations which naturally attach to these vocations. The relation of author and publisher is generally regarded as that of the cat and the dog, both greedy of the bone, and inherently jealous of each other. The authors have hitherto written the accounts of the wrangles between these two parties, and the publishers have been traditionally gibbeted as a set of mean, mercenary wretches, coining the heart's blood of genius for their own selfish profits. Great minds, even in modern times, have not been above this historical prejudice. The poet Campbell is said to have been an admirer of Napoleon because he shot a bookseller. Nevertheless, speaking from my own experience, I suspect, if the truth were told, that, even in cases where the world has been taught to bestow all its sympathy in behalf of the author, it would appear that while there were claws on one side there were teeth on the other. My belief is, that where there have been quarrels there have generally been mutual provocations. I know of nothing more vexatious, more wearisome, more calculated to beget impatience, than the egotisms, the exactions, the unreasonableness of authors, in cases I have witnessed. That there may be examples of meanness, stupidity, and selfishness in publishers, is indisputable. But, in general, I am satisfied that an author who will do justice to a publisher will have justice in return. I could give some curious instances of this. A schoolmaster came to me once with a marvellously clever grammar; it was sure to overturn all others. He had figured out his views in a neat hand, like copper-plate. He estimated that there were always a million of children at school who would need his grammar; providing for books worn out, and a supply for new comers, half-a-million would be wanted every year. At one cent a copy for the author--which he insisted was exceedingly moderate--this would produce to him five thousand dollars a year; but if I would publish the work, he would condescend to take half that sum annually, during the extent of the copyright--twenty-eight years! I declined, and he seriously believed me a heartless blockhead. He obtained a publisher at last, but the work never reached a second edition. Every publisher is laden with similar experiences. I once employed a young man to block out some little books to be published under the nominal authorship of Solomon Bell: these I remodelled, and one or two volumes were issued. Some over-astute critic announced them as veritable _Peter Parleys_, and they had a sudden sale. The young man who had assisted me, and who was under the most solemn obligations to keep the matter secret, thought he had an opportunity to make his fortune; so he publicly claimed the authorship, and accused me of duplicity! The result was that the books fell dead from that hour; the series was stopped; and his unprinted manuscripts, for which I had paid him, became utterly worthless. A portion I burnt, and a portion still remain amidst the rubbish of other days. In other instances I was attacked in the papers, editorially and personally, by individuals who were living upon the employment I gave them. I was in daily intercourse with persons of this character, who, while flattering me to my face, I knew to be hawking at me in print. These I regarded and treated as trifles at the time; they are less than trifles now. One thing may be remarked, that, in general, such difficulties come from poor and unsuccessful writers. They have been taught that publishers and booksellers are vampires, and naturally feed upon the vitals of genius; assuming--honestly, no doubt--that they are of this latter class, they feel no great scruple in taking vengeance upon those whom they regard as their natural enemies. My editorial experience also furnished me with some amusing anecdotes. An editor of a periodical once sent me an article for the Token, entitled La Longue-vue; the pith of the story consisted in a romantic youth's falling in love with a young lady, two miles off, through a telescope! I ventured to reject it; and the Token for that year was duly damned in the columns of the offended author. In judging of publishers one thing should be considered, and that is, that two-thirds of the original works issued by them are unprofitable. An eminent London publisher once told me, that he calculated that out of ten publications four involved a positive, and often a heavy, loss; three barely paid the cost of paper, print, and advertising; and three paid a profit. Nothing is more common than for a publisher to pay money to an author, every farthing of which is lost. Self-preservation, therefore, compels the publisher to look carefully to his operations. One thing is certain, he is generally the very best judge as to the value of a book, in a marketable point of view: if he rejects it, it is solely because he thinks it will not pay, not because he despises genius. Happily, at the present day, the relations between these two parties--authors and publishers--are on a better footing than in former times. Indeed, a great change has taken place in the relative positions of the two classes. Nothing is now more marketable than good writing, whatever may be its form--poetry or prose, fact or fiction, reason or romance. Starving, neglected, abused genius, is a myth of bygone times. If an author is poorly paid, it is because he writes poorly. I do not think, indeed, that authors are adequately paid, for authorship does not stand on a level with other professions as to pecuniary recompense, but it is certain that a clever, industrious, and judicious writer may make his talent the means of living. CHAPTER XXV. BECOME AN AUTHOR--HIS REAL NAME A PROFOUND SECRET--HOW IT WAS DIVULGED--GREAT SUCCESS--ILLNESS--THE DOCTORS DISAGREE--ENGLISH IMITATIONS--CONDUCT OF A LONDON BOOKSELLER--OBJECTIONS TO PARLEY'S TALES--MOTHER GOOSE. Though I was busily engaged in publishing various works, I found time to make my long-meditated experiment in the writing of books for children. The first attempt was made in 1827, and bore the title of the Tales of Peter Parley about America. No persons but my wife and one of my sisters were admitted to the secret: for, in the first place, I hesitated to believe that I was qualified to appear before the public as an author; and, in the next place, nursery literature had not then acquired the respect in the eyes of the world it now enjoys. It is since that period that persons of acknowledged genius--Scott, Dickens, Lamartine, Mary Howitt, in Europe; and Todd, Gallaudet, Abbott, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Child, and others, in America--have stooped to the composition of books for children and youth. I published my little book, and let it make its way. It came before the world untrumpeted, and for some months seemed not to attract the slightest attention. Suddenly I began to see notices of it in the papers all over the country, and in a year from the date of its publication it had become a favorite. In 1828 I published the Tales of Peter Parley about Europe; in 1829, Parley's Winter Evening Tales; in 1830, Parley's Juvenile Tales, and Parley's Asia, Africa, Sun, Moon, and Stars. About this time the public guessed my secret. Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, to whom I am indebted for many kind offices in my literary career, first discovered and divulged it; yet I could have wished she had not done me this questionable favor. Though the authorship of the Parley books has been to me a source of some gratification, you will see, in the sequel, that it has also subjected me to endless vexations. I shall not enter into the details of my proceedings at this busy and absorbed period of my life. I had now obtained a humble position in literature, and was successful in such unambitious works as I attempted. I gave myself up almost wholly for about four years--that is, from 1828 to 1832--to authorship, generally writing fourteen hours a-day.--A part of the time I was entirely unable to read, and could write but little, on account of the weakness of my eyes. In my larger publications I employed persons to block out work for me: this was read to me, and then I put it into style, generally writing by dictation, my wife being my amanuensis. Thus embarrassed, I still, by dint of incessant toil, produced five or six volumes a-year, most of them small, but some of larger compass. In the midst of these labors--that is, in the spring of 1832--I was suddenly attacked with symptoms which seemed to indicate a disease of the heart, rapidly advancing to a fatal termination. In the course of a fortnight I was so reduced as not to be able to mount a pair of stairs without help, and a short walk produced palpitation of the heart, so violent, in several instances, as almost to deprive me of consciousness. There seemed no hope but in turning my back upon my business, and seeking a total change of scene and climate. In May I embarked for England, and after a few weeks reached Paris. I here applied to Baron Larroque, who, assisted by L'Herminier--both eminent in the treatment of diseases of the heart--subjected me to various experiments, but without the slightest advantage. At this period I was obliged to be carried upstairs, and never ventured to walk or ride alone, being constantly subject to nervous spasms, which often brought me to the verge of suffocation. Despairing of relief here, I proceeded to London, and was carefully examined by Sir Benjamin Brodie. He declared that I had no organic disease; that my difficulty was nervous irritability; and that whereas the French physicians had interdicted wine, and required me to live on a light vegetable diet, I must feed well upon good roast beef, and take two generous glasses of port with my dinner! Thus encouraged, I passed on to Edinburgh, where I consulted Abercrombie, then at the height of his fame. He confirmed the views of Dr. Brodie, in the main; and, regarding the irregularity of my vital organs as merely functional, still told me that, without shortening my life, it would probably never be wholly removed. He told me of an instance in which a patient of his, who, having been called upon to testify before the committee of the House of Commons, in the trial of Warren Hastings, from mere embarrassment had been seized with palpitation of the heart, which, however, continued till his death, many years after. Even this sombre view of my case was then a relief. Four-and-twenty years have passed since that period, and thus far my experience has verified Dr. Abercombie's prediction. These nervous attacks pursue me to this day: yet I have become familiar with them; and, regarding them only as troublesome visitors, I receive them patiently and bow them out as gently as I can. After an absence of six months I returned to Boston, and, by the advice of my physician, took up my residence in the country. I built a house at Jamaica Plain, four miles from the city, and here I continued for more than twenty years. My health was partially restored, and I resumed my literary labors, which I continued steadily, from 1833 to 1850, with a few episodes of lecturing and legislating, three voyages to Europe, and an extensive tour to the South. It would be tedious and unprofitable, were I even to enumerate my various works, produced from the beginning to the present time. I may sum up the whole in a single sentence: I am the author and editor of about one hundred and seventy volumes, and of these seven millions have been sold! I have said, that however the authorship of Parley's Tales has made me many friends, it has also subjected me to many annoyances. When I was in London, in 1832, I learned that Mr. Tegg, a prominent publisher there, had commenced the republication of Parley's Tales. I called upon him, and found that he had one of them actually in the press. The result of our interview was a contract, in which I engaged to prepare several of these works, which he agreed to publish, allowing me a small consideration. Four of these works I prepared on the spot, and after my return to America prepared and forwarded ten others. Some time after, I learned that the books, or at least a portion of them, had been published in London, and were very successful. I wrote several letters to Mr. Tegg on the subject, but could get no reply. Ten years passed away, and being in pressing need of all that I might fairly claim as my due, I went to London, and asked him to render me an account of his proceedings under the contract. I had previously learned, on inquiry, that he had indeed published four or five of the works, as we had agreed, but, taking advantage of these, which passed readily into extensive circulation, he proceed to set aside the contract, and to get up a series of publications upon the model of those I had prepared for him, giving them in the title-pages the name of Parley, and passing them off, by every artifice in his power, as the genuine works of that author. He had thus published over a dozen volumes, which he was circulating as Peter Parley's Library. The speculation, as I was told, had succeeded admirably; and I was assured that many thousand pounds of profit had been realized thereby. To my request for an account of his stewardship the publisher replied, in general terms, that I was misinformed as to the success of the works in question; that, in fact, they had been a very indifferent speculation; that he found the original works were not adapted to his purpose, and he had consequently got up others; that he had created, by advertising and other means, an interest in these works, and had thus greatly benefited the name and fame of Parley; and, all things considered, he thought he had done more for me than I had for him: therefore, in his view, if we considered the account balanced, we should not be very far from a fair adjustment. To this answer I made a suitable reply, but without obtaining the slightest satisfaction. The contract I had made was a hasty memorandum, and judicially, perhaps, of no binding effect on him. And besides, I had no money to expend in litigation. A little reflection satisfied me that I was totally at his mercy: a fact of which his calm and collected manner assured me he was even more conscious than myself. The discussion was not prolonged. At the second interview he cut the whole matter short, by saying,--"Sir, I do not owe you a farthing: neither justice nor law requires me to pay you anything. Still, I am an old man, and have seen a good deal of life, and have learned to consider the feelings of others as well as my own. I will pay you four hundred pounds, and we will be quits! If we cannot do this, we can do nothing." In view of the whole case, this was as much as I expected, and so I accepted the proposition. I earnestly remonstrated with him against the enormity of making me responsible for works I never wrote, but as to all actual claims on the ground of the contract I gave him a receipt in full, and we parted. It is not to be supposed that the annoyances arising from the falsification of the name of Parley, which I have just pointed out, have been the only obstacles which have roughened the current of my literary life. Not only the faults and imperfections of execution in my juvenile works--and no one knows them so well as myself--have been urged against them, but the whole theory on which they are founded has been often and elaborately impugned. It is quite true, that when I wrote the first half-dozen of Parley's Tales I had formed no philosophy upon the subject: I simply used my experience with children in addressing them. I followed no models, I put on no harness of the schools, I pored over no learned examples. I imagined myself on the floor with a group of boys and girls, and I wrote to them as I would have spoken to them. At a later period I had reflected on the subject, and embodied in a few simple lines the leading principle of what seemed to me the true art of teaching children,--and that is, to consider that their first ideas are simple and single, and formed of images of things palpable to the senses; and hence that these images are to form the staple of lessons to be communicated to them. THE TEACHER'S LESSON. I saw a child, some four years old, Along a meadow stray; Alone she went, uncheck'd, untold, Her home not far away. She gazed around on earth and sky, Now paused, and now proceeded; Hill, valley, wood, she passed them by Unmarked, perchance unheeded. And now gay groups of roses bright In circling thickets bound her-- Yet on she went with footsteps light, Still gazing all around her. And now she paused, and now she stooped, And plucked a little flower; A simple daisy 'twas, that drooped Within a rosy bower. The child did kiss the little gem, And to her bosom press'd it; And there she placed the fragile stem, And with soft words caressed it. I love to read a lesson true From nature's open book-- And oft I learn a lesson new From childhood's careless look. Children are simple, loving, true-- 'Tis God that made them so; And would you teach them?--be so, too, And stoop to what they know. Begin with simple lessons, things On which they love to look; Flowers, pebbles, insects, birds on wings-- These are God's spelling-book! And children know His A B C, As bees where flowers are set; Wouldst thou a skilful teacher be? Learn then this alphabet. From leaf, from page to page, Guide thou thy pupil's look; And when he says, with aspect sage, "Who made this wondrous book?" Point thou with reverend gaze to heaven, And kneel in earnest prayer That lessons thou hast humbly given May lead thy pupil there! From this commencement I proceeded, and came to the conclusion that in feeding the mind of children with facts, we follow the evident philosophy of nature and Providence; inasmuch as these had created all children to be ardent lovers of things they could see and hear, and feel and know. Thus I sought to teach them history, and biography, and geography, and all in the way in which nature would teach them,--that is, by a large use of the senses, and especially by the eye. I selected as subjects for my books things capable of sensible representation, such as familiar animals, birds, trees; and of these I gave pictures, as a starting-point. The first line I wrote was, "Here I am; my name is Peter Parley;" and before I went further, gave an engraving representing my hero, as I wished him to be conceived by my pupils. Before I began to talk of a lion, I gave a picture of a lion; my object being, as you will perceive, to have the child start with a distinct image of what I was about to give an account of. Thus I secured his interest in the subject, and thus I was able to lead his understanding forward in the path of knowledge. These views, of course, led me in a direction exactly opposite to the old theories in respect to nursery-books, in two respects. In the first place, it was thought that education should, at the very threshold, seek to spiritualize the mind, and lift it above sensible ideas, and to teach it to live in the world of imagination. A cow was very well to give milk, but when she got into a book she must jump over the moon; a little girl going to see her grandmother was well enough as a matter of fact, but to be suited to the purposes of instruction she must end her career by being eaten up by a wolf. My plan was, in short, deemed too utilitarian, too materialistic, and hence it was condemned by many persons, and among them the larger portion of those who had formed their tastes upon the old classics, from Homer down to Mother Goose! This was one objection; another, was that I aimed at making education easy--thus bringing up the child in habits of receiving knowledge only as made into pap, and of course putting it out of his power to relish and digest the stronger meat, even when his constitution demanded it. On these grounds, and still others, my little books met with opposition, sometimes even in grave Quarterlies, and often in those sanctified publications, entitled "Journals of Education." In England, at the period that the name of Parley was most current--both in the genuine as well as the false editions--the feeling against my juvenile works was so strong among the conservatives, that an attempt was made to put them down by reviving the old nursery-books. In order to do this, a publisher in London reproduced these works, employing the best artists to illustrate them, and bringing them out in all the captivating luxuries of modern typography. Nay, such was the reverence at the time for the old favorites of the nursery, that a gentleman of the name of Halliwell expended a vast amount of patient research and antiquarian lore in hunting up and setting before the world the history of these performances, from "Hey diddle diddle" to "A farmer went trotting upon his grey mare-- Bumpety, bumpety, bump!" To all this I made no direct reply; I ventured, however, to suggest my views in the following article inserted in Merry's Museum for August, 1846. Dialogue BETWEEN TIMOTHY AND HIS MOTHER. _Timothy._ Mother! mother! do stop a minute, and hear me say my poetry! _Mother._ Your poetry, my son? Who told you how to make poetry? _T._ Oh, I don't know; but hear what I have made up. _M._ Well, go on. _T._ Now don't you laugh; it's all mine. I didn't get a bit of it out of a book. Here it is! "Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eat the mop; The pig's in a hurry, The cat's in a flurry-- Higglety, pigglety--pop!" _M._ Well, go on. _T._ Why, that's all. Don't you think it pretty good? _M._ Really, my son, I don't see much sense in it. _T._ _Sense?_ Who ever thought of _sense_, in poetry? Why, mother, you gave me a book the other day, and it was all poetry, and I don't think there was a bit of sense in the whole of it. Hear me read. [_Reads._] "Hub a dub! Three men in a tub-- And how do you think they got there? The butcher, The baker, The candlestick maker, They all jumped out of a rotten potato: 'Twas enough to make a man stare." And here's another. "A cat came fiddling out of a barn, With a pair of bagpipes under her arm; She could sing nothing but fiddle cum fee-- The mouse has married the humblebee-- Pipe, cat--dance, mouse-- We'll have a wedding at our good house!" And here's another. "Hey, diddle, diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon-- The little dog laughed To see the craft, And the dish ran after the spoon." Now, mother, the book is full of such things as these, and I don't see any meaning in them. _M._ Well, my son, I think as you do; they are really very absurd. _T._ Absurd? Why, then, do you give me such things to read? _M._ Let me ask you a question. Do you not love to read these rhymes, even though they are silly? _T._ Yes, dearly. _M._ Well, you have just learned to read, and I thought these jingles, silly as they are, might induce you to study your book, and make you familiar with reading. _T._ I don't understand you, mother; but no matter. "Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eat the mop; The pig's in a hurry--" _M._ Stop, stop, my son. I choose you should understand me. _T._ But, mother, what's the use of understanding you? "Higglety, pigglety, pop!" _M._ Timothy! _T._ Ma'am? _M._ Listen to me, or you will have cause to repent it. Listen to what I say? I gave you the book to amuse you, and improve you in reading, not to form your taste in poetry. _T._ Well, mother, pray forgive me. I did not mean to offend you. But I really do love poetry, because it is so silly! "Higglety, pigglety, pop!" _M._ Don't say that again, Timothy! _T._ Well, I won't; but I'll say something out of this pretty book you gave me. "Doodledy, doodledy, dan! I'll have a piper to be my good man-- And if I get less meat, I shall get game-- Doodledy, doodledy, dan!" _M._ That's enough, my son. _T._ But, dear mother, do hear me read another. "We're all in the dumps, For diamonds are trumps-- The kittens are gone to St. Paul's-- The babies are bit, The moon's in a fit-- And the houses are built without walls." _M._ I do not wish to hear any more. _T._ One more; one more, dear mother! "Round about--round about-- Maggoty pie-- My father loves good ale, And so do I." Don't you like that, mother? _M._ No; it is too coarse, and unfit to be read or spoken. _T._ But it is here in this pretty book you gave me, and I like it very much, mother. And here is a poem, which I think very fine. "One-ery, two-ery, Ziccary zan, Hollow bone, crack a bone-- Ninery ten: Spittery spat, It must be done, Twiddledum, twiddledum, Twenty-one, Hink, spink, the puddings--" _M._ Stop, stop, my son. Are you not ashamed to say such things? _T._ Ashamed? No, mother. Why should I be? It's all printed here as plain as day. Ought I to be ashamed to say any thing that I find in a pretty book you have given me? Just hear the rest of this. "Hink, spink, the puddings--" _M._ Give me the book, Timothy. I see that I have made a mistake; it is not a proper book for you. _T._ Well, you may take the book; but I can say the rhymes, for I have learned them all by heart. "Hink, spink, the puddings--" _M._ Timothy, how dare you! _T._ Well, mother, I won't say it, if you don't wish me to. But mayn't I say-- "Higglety, pigglety, pop!" _M._ I had rather you would not. _T._ And "Doodledy, doodledy, dan"--mayn't I say that? _M._ No. _T._ Nor "Hey, diddle, diddle?" _M._ I do not wish you to say any of those silly things. _T._ Dear me, what shall I do? _M._ I had rather you would learn some good, sensible things. _T._ Such as what? _M._ Watts's Hymns, and Original Hymns. _T._ Do you call them sensible things? I hate 'em. "Doodledy, doodledy, dan!" _M._ [_Aside._] Dear, dear, what shall I do? The boy has got his head turned with these silly rhymes. It was really a very unwise thing to put a book into his hands, so full of nonsense and vulgarity. These foolish rhymes stick like burs in his mind, and the coarsest and vilest seem to be best remembered. I must remedy this mistake; but I see it will take all my wit to do it. [_Aloud._] Timothy, you must give me up this book, and I will get you another. _T._ Well, mother, I am sorry to part with it; but I don't care so much about it, as I know all the best of it by heart. "Hink, spink, the puddings stink"-- _M._ Timothy, you'll have a box on the ear, if you repeat that! _T._ Well, I suppose I can say, "Round about--round about-- Maggoty pie--" _M._ You go to bed! _T._ Well, if I must, I must. Good-night, mother! "Higglety, pigglety, pop! The dog has eat the mop; The cat's in a flurry, The cow's in a hurry, Higglety, pigglety, pop!" Good-night, mother! I trust, that no one will gather from this that I condemn rhymes for children. I know that there is a certain music in them that delights the ear of childhood. Nor am I insensible to the fact that in Mother Goose's Melodies, there is frequently a sort of humor in the odd jingle of sound and sense. There is, furthermore, in many of them, an historical significance, which may please the profound student who puzzles it out; but what I affirm is, that many of these pieces are coarse, vulgar, offensive, and it is precisely these portions that are apt to stick to the minds of children. And besides, if, as is common, such a book is the first that a child becomes acquainted with, it is likely to give him a low idea of the purpose and meaning of books, and to beget a taste for mere jingles. With these views, I sought to prepare lessons which combined the various elements suited to children--a few of them even including frequent, repetitious rhymes--yet at the same time presenting rational ideas and gentle kindly sentiments. Will you excuse me for giving you one example--my design being to show you how this may be done, and how even a very unpromising subject is capable of being thus made attractive to children. THE TOAD'S STORY. Oh, gentle stranger, stop, And hear poor little Hop Just sing a simple song, Which is not very long-- Hip, hip, hop. I am an honest toad, Living here by the road; Beneath a stone I dwell, In a snug little cell, Hip, hip, hop. It may seem a sad lot To live in such a spot-- But what I say is true-- I have fun as well as you! Hip, hip, hop. Just listen to my song-- I sleep all winter long, But in spring I peep out, And then I jump about-- Hip, hip, hop. When the rain patters down, I let it wash my crown, And now and then I sip A drop with my lip: Hip, hip, hop. When the bright sun is set, And the grass with dew is wet, I sally from my cot, To see what's to be got, Hip, hip, hop. And now I wink my eye, And now I catch a fly, And now I take a peep, And now and then I sleep: Hip, hip, hop. And this is all I do-- And yet they say it's true, That the toady's face is sad, And his bite is very bad! Hip, hip, hop. Oh, naughty folks they be, That tell such tales of me, For I'm an honest toad, Just living by the road: Hip, hip, hop! These were my ideas in regard to first books--toy-books--those which are put into the hands of children to teach them the art of reading. As to books of amusement and instruction, to follow these, I gave them Parley's tales of travels, of history, of nature and art, together with works designed to cultivate a love of truth, charity, piety, and virtue, and I sought to make these so attractive as to displace the bad books to which I have already alluded--the old monstrosities, Puss in Boots, Jack the Giant-killer, and others of that class. A principal part of my machinery was the character of Peter Parley--a kind-hearted old man, who had seen much of the world, and, not presuming to undertake to instruct older people, loved to sit down and tell his stories to children. Beyond these juvenile works, I prepared a graduated series upon the same general plan, reaching up to books for the adult library. It is true that occasionally I wrote and published a book aside from this, my true vocation: thus I edited the Token, and published two or three volumes of poetry. But, out of all my works, about a hundred and twenty are professedly juvenile; and forty are for my early readers advanced to maturity. It is true that I have written openly, avowedly, to attract and to please children; yet it has been my design at the same time to enlarge the circle of knowledge, to invigorate the understanding, to strengthen the moral nerve, to purify and exalt the imagination. Such have been my aims: how far I have succeeded, I must leave to the judgment of others. One thing I may perhaps claim, and that is, my example and my success have led others, of higher gifts than my own, to enter the ample and noble field of juvenile instruction by means of books; many of them have no doubt surpassed me, and others will still follow surpassing them. I look upon the art of writing for children and youth, advanced as it has been of late years, still as but just begun. CHAPTER XXVI. CHILDREN MY FIRST PATRONS--A VISIT TO NEW ORLEANS--FEELINGS OF HUMILIATION--THE MICE EAT MY PAPERS--A WRONG CALCULATION. If thus I met with opposition, I had also my success, nay, I must say, my triumphs. My first patrons were the children themselves, then the mothers, and then, of course, the fathers. In the early part of the year 1846 I made a trip from Boston to the South, returning by the way of the Mississippi and the Ohio. I received many a kind welcome under the name of the fictitious hero whom I had made to tell my stories. Sometimes, it is true, I underwent rather sharp cross-questioning, and frequently was made to feel that I held my honors by a rather questionable title. I, who had undertaken to teach truth, was forced to confess that fiction lay at the foundation of my scheme! My innocent young readers, however, did not suspect me: they had taken all I had said as positively true, and I was, of course, Peter Parley himself. "Did you really write that book about Africa?" said a black-eyed, dark-haired girl of some eight years old, at Mobile. I replied in the affirmative. "And did you really get into prison there!" "No; I was never in Africa." "Never in Africa?" "Never." "Well, then, why did you say you had been there?" On another occasion--I think at Savannah--a gentleman called upon me, introducing his two grandchildren, who were anxious to see Peter Parley. The girl rushed up to me, and kissed me at once. We were immediately the best friends in the world. The boy, on the contrary, held himself aloof, and ran his eye over me, up and down, from top to toe. He then walked round, surveying me with the most scrutinizing gaze. After this he sat down, and during the interview took no further notice of me. At parting he gave me a keen look, but said nothing. The next day the gentleman called and told me that his grandson, as they were on their way home, said to him,-- "Grandfather, I wouldn't have anything to do with that man; he ain't Peter Parley." "How do you know that?" said the grandfather. "Because," said the boy, "he hasn't got his foot bound up, and he don't walk with a crutch!" On my arrival at New Orleans I was kindly received, and had the honors of a public welcome. The proceedings were gratifying to me; and, even if they stood alone, would make amends for much misunderstanding and opposition. Hitherto I have spoken chiefly of the books I have written for children, the design of which was as much to amuse as to instruct them. These comprise the entire series called Parley's Tales, with many others, bearing Parley's name. As to works for education--school-books, including readers, histories, geographies, &c., books for popular reading, and a wilderness of prose and poetry admitting of no classification--it is unnecessary to recount them. This is the closing chapter of my literary history, and I have little indeed to say, and that is a confession. In looking at the long list of my publications, in reflecting upon the large numbers that have been sold, I feel far more of humiliation than of triumph. If I have sometimes taken to heart the soothing flatteries of the public, it has ever been speedily succeeded by the conviction that my life has been, on the whole, a series of mistakes, and especially in that portion of it which has been devoted to authorship. I have written too much, and have done nothing really well. I know, better than any one can tell me, that there is nothing in this long catalogue that will give me a permanent place in literature. A few things may struggle upon the surface for a time, but--like the last leaves of a tree in autumn, forced at length to quit their hold and drop into the stream--even these will disappear, and my name and all I have done will be forgotten. A recent event, half-ludicrous and half-melancholy, has led me into this train of reflection. On going to Europe in 1851 I sent my books and papers to a friend, to be kept till my return. Among them was a large box of business documents--letters, accounts, receipts, bills paid, notes liquidated--comprising the transactions of several years, long since passed away. Shortly after my return to New York, in preparing to establish myself and family, I caused these things to be sent to me. On opening the particular box just mentioned, I found it a complete mass of shavings, shreds, fragments. My friend had put it carefully away in the upper loft of his barn, and there it became converted into a universal mouse-nest! The history of whole generations of the mischievous little rogues was still visible; beds, galleries, play-grounds, birth-places, and even graves, were in a state of excellent preservation. Several wasted and shrivelled forms of various sizes--the limbs curled up, the eyes extinct, the teeth disclosed, the long, slender tails straight and stiffened--testified to the joys and sorrows of the races that had flourished there. On exploring this mass of ruins, I discovered here and there a file of letters eaten through, the hollow cavity evidently having been the happy and innocent cradle of childhood to these destroyers. Sometimes I found a bed lined with paid bills, and sometimes the pathway of a gallery paved with liquidated accounts. What a mass of thoughts, of feelings, cares, anxieties, were thus made the plunder of these thoughtless creatures! In examining the papers I found, for instance, letters from N. P. Willis, written five-and-twenty years ago, with only "Dear Sir" at the beginning, and "Yours truly" at the end. I found epistles of nearly equal antiquity from many other friends--sometimes only the heart eaten out, and sometimes the whole body gone. For all purposes of record, these papers were destroyed. I was alone, for my family had not yet returned from Europe: it was the beginning of November, and I began to light my fire with these relics. For two whole days I pored over them, buried in the reflections which the reading of the fragments suggested. Absorbed in this dreary occupation, I forgot the world without, and was only conscious of bygone scenes which came up in review before me. It was as if I had been in the tomb, and was reckoning with the past. How little was there in all that I was thus called to remember, save of care, and struggle, and anxiety; and how were all the thoughts, and feelings, and experiences, which seemed mountains in their day, levelled down to the merest grains of dust! A note of hand--perchance of a thousand dollars--what a history rose up in recollection as I looked over its scarcely legible fragments!--what clouds of anxiety had its approaching day of maturity cast over my mind! How had I been, with a trembling heart, to some bank-president--he a god, and I a craven worshipper--making my offering of some other note for a discount, which might deliver me from the wrath to come! With what anxiety have I watched the lips of the oracle, for my fate was in his hands! A simple monosyllable--yes or no--might save or ruin me. What a history was in that bit of paper!--and yet it was destined only to serve as stuffing for the beds of vermin. I ought, no doubt, to have smiled at all this; but I confess it made me serious. Nor was it the most humiliating part of my reflections. I have been too familiar with care, conflict, disappointment, to mourn over them very deeply, now that they were passed. The seeming fatuity of such a mass of labors as these papers indicated, compared with their poor results, however it might humble, could not distress me. But there were many things suggested by these letters, all in rags as they were, that caused positive humiliation. They revived in my mind the vexations, misunderstandings, controversies of other days; and now, reviewed in the calm light of time, I could discover the mistakes of judgment, of temper, of policy, that I had made. I turned back to my letter-book; I reviewed my correspondence; and I came to the conclusion that in almost every difficulty which had arisen in my path, even if others were wrong, I was not altogether right: in most cases, prudence, conciliation, condescension, might have averted these evils. Thus the thorns which had wounded me and others too, as it seemed, had generally sprung up from the seeds I had sown, or had thriven upon the culture my own hands had unwisely bestowed. At first I felt disturbed at the ruin which had been wrought in these files of papers. Hesitating and doubtful, I consigned them one by one to the flames. At last the work was complete; all had perished, and the feathery ashes had leaped up in the strong draught of the chimney and disappeared for ever. I felt a relief at last; I smiled at what had happened; I warmed my chill fingers over the embers; I felt that a load was off my shoulders. "At least," said I in my heart, "these things are now passed; my reckoning is completed, the account is balanced, the responsibilities of those bygone days are liquidated; let me burden my bosom with them no more!" Alas, how fallacious my calculation! A few months only had passed, when I was called to contend with a formidable claim which came up from the midst of transactions to which these extinct papers referred, and against which they constituted my defence. As it chanced, I was able to meet and repel it by documents which survived; but the event caused me deep reflection. I could not but remark that, however we may seek to cover our lives with forgetfulness, their records still exist, and these may come up against us when we have no vouchers to meet the charges which are thus presented. Who, then, will be our helper? CHAPTER XXVII. MAKE A SPEECH--LECTURE ON IRELAND--POLITICS--PERSONAL ATTACKS--BECOME A SENATOR--THE "FIFTEEN-GALLON LAW"--A PAMPHLET IN ITS FAVOR--"MY NEIGHBOR SMITH"--A POLITICAL CAREER UNPROFITABLE. The first public speech I ever made was at St. Albans, in England, in the year 1832, at a grand celebration of the passing of the Reform Bill; having accompanied thither Sir Francis Vincent, the representative in Parliament of that ancient borough. More than three thousand people, men, women, and children, gathered from the town and the vicinity, were feasted at a long table, set out in the principal street of the place. After this feast there were various sports, such as donkey-races, climbing a greased pole, and the like. At six o'clock, about one hundred and fifty of the gentry and leading tradesmen and mechanics sat down to a dinner, Sir Francis presiding. The President of the United States was toasted, and I was called upon to respond. Entirely taken by surprise, for not a word had been said to me upon the subject, I made a speech. I could never recall what I said: all I remember is a whirl of thoughts and emotions as I rose, occasional cries of "Hear, hear!" as I went on, and a generous clapping of hands as I concluded. Whether this last was because I really made a good hit, or from another principle-- "The best of Graham's speeches was _his last_"-- I am totally unable to say. My next public appearance was in a lecture at the Tremont Temple, in Boston; my subject being "Ireland and the Irish." Although my discourse was written, and pretty well committed to memory, yet for several days before the time appointed for its delivery arrived, when I thought of my engagement, my heart failed me. When the hour came I went to the door of the room, but on seeing the throng of persons collected I felt that my senses were deserting me: turning on my heel, I went out, and going to an apothecary's, fortified myself with some peppermint lozenges. When I got back, the house was waiting with impatience. I was immediately introduced to the audience by Dr. Walter Channing, and stepping upon the platform, began. After the first sentence, I was perfectly at my ease. I afterwards delivered this lecture more than forty times. In the autumn of 1836 there was a large evening party at Jamaica Plain, at the house of Mrs. G----, the lady-patroness of the village. Among the notable men present was Daniel Webster, whom I had frequently seen, but to whom I was now introduced for the first time. He spoke to me of many things, and at last of politics, suggesting that the impending presidential election involved most important questions, and he deemed it the duty of every man to reflect upon the subject, and to exert his influence as his conscience might dictate. Since my residence in Massachusetts, a period of nearly eight years, I had been engrossed in my business, and had never even voted. Just at this time I was appointed, without any suggestion of my own, one of the delegates to the Whig Convention to nominate a person to represent us, the Ninth Congressional District, in Congress. This was to take place at Medway, at the upper end of the district. I went accordingly, and on the first ballot was the highest candidate, save one--Mr. Hastings, of Mendon. I declined, of course, and he was unanimously nominated. The canvass that ensued was a very animated one, Mr. Van Buren being the democratic candidate for the presidency. He was considered as the heir-apparent of the policy of Gen. Jackson, and had, indeed, promised, if elected, to walk in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor. Without the personal popularity of that remarkable man, he became the target for all the hostility which his measures had excited. He was, however, elected, but to be overwhelmed with a whirlwind of discontent and opposition four years after. The candidate for Congress in our district, in opposition to Mr. Hastings, was Alexander H. Everett, who had been hitherto a conspicuous Whig, and who had signalized himself by the ability and bitterness of his attacks on General Jackson and his administration. He had singled out Mr. Van Buren, for especial vehemence of reproach, because, being Secretary of State at the time, Mr. Everett was superseded as Minister to Spain without the customary courtesy of an official note advising him of the appointment of his successor. To the amazement of the public in general, and his friends in particular, on the 8th of January, 1836, Mr. Everett delivered an oration before the democracy of Salem, in which--ignoring the most prominent portion of his political life--he came out with the warmest eulogies upon General Jackson and his administration! About the first of May, the precise period when it was necessary, in order to render him eligible to Congress in the Ninth District, he took up his residence within its precincts, and, as was easily foreseen, was the democratic candidate for Congress. The Whig District Committee, of which I was one, and Charles Bowen (Mr. Everett's publisher), another, issued a pamphlet, collating and contrasting Mr. Everett's two opinions of General Jackson's policy, and especially of Mr. Van Buren--the one flatly contradicting the other, and, in point of date, being but two or three years apart. This was circulated over the towns of the district. It was a terrible document, and Mr. Everett felt its force. One of them was left at his own door in the general distribution. This he took as a personal insult, and meeting Bowen, knocked him over the head with his umbrella. Bowen clutched him by the throat, and would have strangled him but for the timely interference of a bystander. I had been among Mr. Everett's personal friends, but he now made me the object of special attack. In a paper, which then circulated a good deal in the district, I was severely lashed under the name of Peter Parley, not because I was a candidate for office, but because I was chairman of the Whig District Committee. I recollect that one day some rather scandalous thing came out against me in the editorial columns of this journal, and feeling very indignant, I went to see the editor. I did not know him personally, but from occasionally reading his paper I had got the idea that he was a very monster of violence. He was not at the office, but such was my irritation and impatience that I went to his house. I rang, and a beautiful black-eyed girl, some eight years old, came to the door. I asked if Mr. H---- was in? "Mother," said the child, in a voice of silver, "is father at home?" At this moment another child, and still younger, its bullet-pate head all over curls, came to the door. Then a mild and handsome woman came, and to my inquiry she said that her husband was out, but would return in a few moments. My rage was quelled in an instant. "So," said I to myself, "these children call that man father, and this woman calls him husband. After all, he cannot be such a monster as I have fancied him, with such a home." I turned on my heel and went away, my ill-humor having totally subsided. Some two years after I told him this anecdote, and we had a good-humored laugh over it. Both of us had learned to discriminate between political controversy and personal animosity. The attacks made upon me during this canvass had an effect different from what was intended. I was compelled to take an active part in the election, and deeming the success of my party essential to my own defence, I naturally made more vigorous efforts for that object. Mr. Everett was defeated by a large majority, and the Whig candidate triumphed. At the same time I was chosen a member of the legislature for Roxbury-Jamaica Plain, where I resided, being a parish of that town. The next year I was a candidate for the Senate, in competition with Mr. Everett, and was elected. In this manner I was forced into politics, and was indebted mainly to opposition for my success. During the ensuing session of the legislature, the winter of 1837-8, the famous "Fifteen-Gallon Law" was passed--that is, a law prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors in less quantities than fifteen gallons. The county I represented was largely in favor of the measure, and I voted for it, though I was by no means insensible to the agitation it was certain to produce. I had determined not to be a candidate for re-election, and therefore considered myself free to engage in the discussion which preceded the next election, and which, of course, mainly turned upon this law. Among other things, I wrote a little pamphlet, entitled Five Letters to my Neighbor Smith, touching the Fifteen-Gallon Jug, the main design of which was to persuade the people of Massachusetts to make the experiment, and see whether such a restraint upon the sale of intoxicating drinks would not be beneficial. This was published anonymously, and my intention was to have the authorship remain unknown. It, however, had an enormous sale--a hundred thousand copies--in the course of a few months, and curiosity soon found me out. Now in the village of Jamaica Plain I had a neighbor, though not by the name of Smith--a rich liquor-dealer, who did his business in Boston--a very respectable man, but a vehement opposer of the "Fifteen-Gallon Law." As the election approached, the citizens of the state were drawn out in two parties--those in favor of prohibition on the one side, and the men in favor of free liquor on the other. My neighbor was the wealthiest, the most respectable, and the most influential of the latter. He insisted, that by "My Neighbor Smith" I meant him; and though I had said nothing disagreeable of that personage, but on the contrary, had drawn his portrait in very amiable colors, he held that it was a malicious personal attack. In vain did I deny the charge, and point to the fact that the residence, character, and qualities of my fictitious hero were inapplicable to him. Anxious to be persecuted, he insisted upon it that he was persecuted. At the county convention, which took place some two months prior to this election, I declined being a candidate. The members present, however, clearly discerning the gathering storm, refused to release me, and I was forced to accept the nomination. The election was to take place on Monday, in November. On the Saturday previous there was issued in Boston a pamphlet, entitled the Cracked Jug, a personal and political attack upon me, written with great malice and some ability. It was scattered, like snow-flakes, all over the country; and was, I suspect, the Sunday reading of all the tipplers and taverners of the country. The bar-room critics esteemed it superior to anything which had appeared since the Letters of Junius, and, of course, considered me annihilated. On Monday, election-day, my family were insulted in the streets of Jamaica Plain, and as I went into the Town Hall to cast my vote I heard abundance of gibes cast at me from beneath lowering beavers. The result was, that there was no choice of senators in the county. The election, when the people had thus failed to fill their places, fell upon the legislature, and I was chosen. The storm gradually passed away. The "Fifteen-Gallon Law" was repealed, but it nearly overturned the Whig party in the state, which, being in the majority, was made responsible for it. I deemed it necessary to reply to my Neighbor Smith's Cracked Jug, and he rejoined. What seemed at the time a deadly personal struggle, was, ere long, forgotten; neither party, I believe, carrying, in his character or his feelings, any of the scars inflicted during the battle. Both had, in some sort, triumphed; both, in some sort, been beaten; both could, therefore, afford to return to the amicable relations of village neighborhood. In the autumn of 1840 the Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison as the candidate for the presidency, in opposition to Mr. Van Buren. He had held various civil and military trusts, in which he had displayed courage, wisdom, and patriotism. His personal character was eminently winning to the people, being marked with benevolence and simplicity. He had long retired from public life, and for several years had lived as a farmer on the "North Bend" of the Ohio, near Cincinnati. The Democrats ridiculed him as drinking hard cider and living in a log cabin. The masses, resenting this as coming from those who, having the Government spoils, were rioting in the White House on champagne, took these gibes, and displayed them as their mottoes and symbols upon their banners. They gathered in barns, as was meet for the friends of the farmer of North Bend, using songs and speeches as flails, threshing his enemies with a will. The spirit spread over mountain and valley, and in every part of the country men were seen leaving their customary employments to assemble in multitudinous conventions. Many of these gatherings numbered twenty thousand persons. During this animated canvass I was not a candidate for office, yet I took part in the great movement, and made about a hundred speeches in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Everybody, then, could make a speech, and everybody could sing a song. Orators sprang up like mushrooms, and the gift of tongues was not more universal than the gift of music. From this period I have taken no active part in politics. In reviewing the past, while duly appreciating the honor conferred by the confidence bestowed upon me by the citizens who gave me their suffrages, I still regard my political career as an unprofitable, nay, an unhappy episode, alien to my literary position and pursuits, and every way injurious to my interests and my peace of mind. It gave me painful glimpses into the littleness, the selfishness, the utter quackery of a large portion of those politicians who lead, or seem to lead, the van of parties; and who, pretending to be guided by patriotism, are usually only using principles and platforms as means to carry them into office. As some compensation for this, it has also led me to a conviction that the great mass of the people are governed by patriotic motives, though even with these I have often noted curious instances in which the public interests were forgotten in a desire to achieve some selfish end. CHAPTER XXVIII. AN APPOINTED U.S. CONSUL TO PARIS--LOUIS XVIII.--A FEW JOTTINGS UPON FRENCH NOTABILITIES--CURE FOR HYDROCEPHALUS--UNSETTLED STATE OF THINGS IN PARIS. In the autumn of 1846, I went with my family to Paris, partly for literary purposes, and partly also to give my children advantages of education, which, in consequence of my absorbing cares for a series of years, they had been denied. Here they remained for nearly two years, while I returned home to attend to my affairs, spending the winters, however, with them. Toward the close of 1849 I removed to New York, to execute certain literary engagements. These completed, I went, in December 1850, to Washington, taking my family with me. Here we remained for three months, when, having received the appointment of United States Consul to Paris, I returned to New York, and, after due preparation, sailed on the 5th of April, 1851, to enter upon the official duties which thus devolved upon me. About the middle of April, 1851, I arrived in Paris, and soon after took charge of the Consulate there. I have frequently been in this gay city, and I now propose to gather up my recollections of it, and select therefrom a few items which may fill up the blank that yet remains in my story. I first visited Paris in January, 1824, as I have told you. At the time I first arrived here, this city was very different from what it now is. Louis XVIII. was upon the throne, and had occupied it for nine years. During this period he had done almost nothing to repair the state of waste and dilapidation in which the Allies had left it. These had taken down the statue of Napoleon on the column of the Place Vendôme, and left its pedestal vacant; the king had followed up the reform and erased the offensive name of the exiled Emperor from the public monuments, and put his own, Louis XVIII., in their place; he had caused a few churches to be repaired, and some pictures of the Virgin to be painted and placed in their niches. But ghastly mounds of rubbish, the wrecks of demolished edifices; scattered heaps of stones at the foot of half-built walls of buildings,--destined never to be completed,--these and other unsightly objects were visible on every hand, marking the recent history of Napoleon, overthrown in the midst of his mighty projects, and leaving his name and his works to be desecrated alike by a foreign foe and a more bitter domestic adversary. The king, Louis XVIII., was a man of good sense and liberal mind, for one of his race; but he was wholly unfit to administer the government. He was a sort of monster of obesity, and, at the time I speak of, having lost the use of his lower limbs, he could not walk, and was trundled about the palace of the Tuileries in a wheelchair. I have often seen him let down in this, through the arch in the south-eastern angle of the palace, into his coach; and on returning from his ride, again taken up; and all this more like a helpless barrel of beef than a sovereign. Had the Allies intended to make Legitimacy at once odious and ridiculous, they could not better have contrived it than by squatting down this obese imbecile extinguisher upon the throne of France, as the successor of Napoleon! The Parisians are, however, a philosophic race: as they could not help themselves, they did not spend their lives like children, in profitless poutings. They had their jokes, and among these, they were accustomed to call Louis Dix-huit, "_Louis des huîtres_"--a tolerable pun, which was equivalent to giving him the familiar title of "Oyster Louis." Deeming it their birthright to have three or four hours of pleasure every day, whoever may be in power, they still frequented the promenades, the boulevards, and the theatres. I cannot, perhaps, do better than transcribe a few passages from the hasty jottings I made at the time:-- "February 14.--Went to a meeting of the Société Philomatique, composed of members of the Institute; saw Fourier, the famous geometrician and physician: Thénard, a famous chemist, associated with Gay-Lussac: Poisson, one of the first mathematicians in Europe; and Géoffroy St. Hilaire, a zoologist, second only to Cuvier. "The proceedings were conducted with order and simplicity, forming a striking contrast to the pompous declamation I heard in London, at the Society of Arts, upon hatching eggs. "February 16.--Went to a meeting of the Institute, held in the Hôtel Mazarin: one hundred and fifty members present; Arago president. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and imposing in appearance, with a dark, swarthy complexion, and a black, piercing eye. Lamarck, the famous writer on natural history--old, infirm, blind--was led in by another member, a distinguished entomologist, whose name I have forgotten: Fontaine, the architect; tall, homely, and aged: Gay-Lussac, a renowned chemist, under forty, active, fiery in debate: Cuvier, rather a large man, red face, eyes small, very near-sighted; eyes near together and oddly appearing and disappearing; features acute, hair grey, long, and careless: he spoke several times, and with great pertinency and effect; Lacroix, the mathematician: Laplace, the most famous living astronomer; tall, thin, and sharp-featured--reminded me of the portraits of Voltaire; he is about seventy-five, feeble, yet has all his mental faculties. "The principal discussion related to gasometers, the police of Paris having asked the opinion of the Institute as to the safety of certain new kinds, lately introduced. The subject excited great interest, and the debate was quite animated. Thénard, Gay-Lussac, Girard, Laplace, Cuvier, and others, engaged in the debate. Nearly all expressed themselves with great ease and even volubility. They were occasionally vehement, and when excited several spoke at once, and the president was obliged often to ring his bell to preserve order. "It was strange and striking to see so many old men, just on the borders of the grave, still retaining such ardor for science as to appear at a club like this, and enter with passion into all the questions that came up. Such a spectacle is not to be seen elsewhere on the earth. The charms of science generally fade to the eye of threescore and ten: few passions except piety and avarice survive threescore. It is evident, in studying this Association, that the highest and most ardent exercises of the mind are here stimulated by the desire of glory, which is the reward of success. One thing struck me forcibly in this assembly, and that was, the utter absence of all French foppery in dress among the members. Their attire was plain black, and generally as simple as that of so many New England clergymen. "In the evening went to the Théâtre Français, to see Talma in the celebrated tragedy of 'Sylla,' by Jouy. Do not well understand the French, but could see that the acting is very masterly. In the passionate parts there was a display of vigor, but at other times the performance was quiet and natural, without any of the stage exaggeration I am accustomed to. Most of the scenes were such as might actually take place under the circumstances indicated in the play. Talma is said to resemble Napoleon in person: he certainly looked very much like his portraits. His hair was evidently arranged to favor the idea of resemblance to the Emperor. He is a very handsome man, and comes up to my idea of a great actor. "February 20.--Went to see a new comedy by Casimir Delavigne, 'L'Ecole des Vieillards.' Talma and Mademoiselle Mars played the two principal parts. The piece consisted of a succession of rather long dialogues, without any change of scenery. Talma is inimitable in the character of a refined but somewhat imbecile man, who has passed the prime of life; and Mademoiselle Mars is, beyond comparison, the most graceful and pleasing of actresses. I am struck with the strict propriety, the refinement even, of the manners of the audience. "February 21st.--Went to the Hospital of La Charité. Saw Laennec, with his pupils, visiting the patients. He makes great use of the stethoscope, which is a wooden tube applied to the body, and put to the ear; by the sound, the state of the lungs and the vital organs is ascertained. It is like a telescope, by which the interior of the body is perceived, only that the ear is used instead of the eye. It is deemed a great improvement. Laennec is the inventor, and has high reputation in the treatment of diseases of the chest. He has learned to ascertain the condition of the lungs by thumping on the breast and back of the patient, and putting the ear to the body at the same time. "The whole hospital was neat and clean; bedsteads of iron. French medical practice very light; few medicines given; nursing is a great part of the treatment. "Same day, went to Hôtel Dieu, a medical and surgical hospital. Saw Dupuytren and his pupils visiting the patients. He holds the very first rank as a surgeon. His operations are surprisingly bold and skilful. Edward C----, of Philadelphia, who is here studying medicine, told me a good anecdote of him. He has a notion that he can instantly detect hydrocephalus in a patient from the manner in which he carries his head. One day, while he was in the midst of his scholars at the hospital, he saw a common sort of man standing at a distance, among several persons who had come for medical advice. Dupuytren's eye fell upon him, and he said to his pupils,--'Do you see yonder that fellow that has his hand to his face, and carries his head almost on his shoulder? Now, take notice: that man has hydrocephalus. Come here, my good fellow!' "The man thus called came up. 'Well,' said Dupuytren, 'I know what ails you; but come, tell us about it yourself. What is the matter with you?' "'I've got the toothache!' was the reply. "'Take that,' said Dupuytren, giving him a box on the ear; 'and go to the proper department and have it pulled out!'" I was again in Paris in the summer of 1832. Great changes had taken place since 1824. Louis XVIII. was dead; Charles X. had succeeded; and, after a brief reign, had been driven away by the revolution of the "Three Glorious Days." Louis Philippe was now on the throne. On the 29th of July, and the two following days, we saw the celebration of the event which had thus changed the dynasty of France. It consisted of a grand fête, in the Champs Elysées, closed by a most imposing military spectacle, in which eighty thousand troops, extending from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place Vendôme, marched before the admiring throng. Louis Philippe was himself on horseback as commander-in-chief, and such was his popularity among the masses, that, in many instances, I saw men in blouses rush up and grasp his hand, and insist upon shaking it. Sixteen years after I saw him hustled into a cab, and flying from the mob for his life--his family scattered, and he but too happy to get safe to England in the disguise of a sailor! As I have said, I established my family in Paris in 1846; that winter and the following I was also there. I remember that on a certain Monday in February, 1848, I went up to see our countrywoman, the Marchioness Lavalette, to arrange with her about an introduction she had promised me to Guizot. She was not at home, but as I was coming down the hill from the Place St. George, I met her in her carriage. She asked me to walk back to her house, and I did so. I observed that she was much agitated, and asked her the cause. "We are going to have trouble!" said she. "I have just been to the Chambers: the ministry have determined to stop the meeting of the Liberals to-morrow; the proclamation is already being printed." "Well, and what then?" said I. "Another 'Three Glorious Days!'" To this I replied that I conceived her fears groundless, that Louis Philippe appeared to me strong in the confidence of the people; that he was noted for his prudence and sagacity; that Guizot, his prime minister, was a man of great ability; that the whole cabinet, indeed, were distinguished for their judgment and capacity. The lady shook her head and rejoined,-- "I know Paris better than you do. We are on the eve of an earthquake!" Soon after this I took my leave. What speedily ensued may best be told in another chapter, by a few extracts from a letter I addressed to a friend in Boston at the time. CHAPTER XXIX. LOUIS PHILIPPE AND THE REVOLUTION--LIST OF GRIEVANCES--THE MOB AT THE MADELEINE--BARRICADES--"DOWN WITH GUIZOT!"--THE FIGHT COMMENCED--FLIGHT OF THE KING AND QUEEN--SCENE IN THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES--SACK OF THE TUILERIES. PARIS, March 14th, 1848. It may be well to state a few particulars as to the political condition of France at the moment of the revolt. Louis Philippe commenced his career under fair auspices, and for a time everything promised a happy fulfilment of what seemed his duty and his destiny. But by degrees a great change came over the monarch; the possession of power seduced his heart, and turned his head; and forgetting his pledges, and blind to his true interest, he set himself to building up a dynasty that should hand down his name and fame to posterity. It seemed, at a superficial glance, that he might realize his dream. He had acquired the reputation of being the most sagacious monarch of his time. He had improved and embellished the capital; on all sides his "image and superscription" were seen in connection with works of beauty and utility. France was happier than the adjacent countries. The famine and the pestilence, that had recently desolated neighboring states, had trod more lightly here. The king was blessed with a large family. These had all reached maturity, and were allied to kings and queens, princes and princesses. The upholders of the Crown in the parliament were men whose names alone were a tower of strength. Peace reigned at home, and the army abroad had just succeeded in achieving a signal triumph over an enemy that had baffled them for years. Such was the outward seeming of affairs: but there were threatening fires within which might at any moment produce a conflagration. Many thinking people were profoundly disgusted with the retrograde tendency of the Government. Although the march of despotism had been cautious and stealthy, the people generally began to feel the tyranny to which they had become subjected. Among these grievances were the constant increase of the national debt, and consequent increase of taxation, with the restraints put upon the liberty of the press and of speech. By a law of some years' standing the people were prohibited from holding stated meetings of more than twenty persons without license; and _reform banquets_, or meetings for the discussion of public affairs--of which about seventy had been held in different parts of the kingdom within the last year--were now pronounced illegal by the ministry. Finally, a determination to suppress one of them, about to be held in the twelfth ward of Paris, was solemnly announced by the Ministry in the Chamber of Deputies. It is material to bear in mind, that there are always in this metropolis at least one hundred thousand workmen who live from day to day upon their labor, and who, upon the slightest check to trade, are plunged into poverty, if not starvation. At the moment of which we are speaking, this immense body of men, with their families, were suffering sorely from the stagnation of business in the capital. There were not less than two hundred thousand persons who, for the space of three months, had hardly been able to obtain sufficient food to appease the cravings of hunger. How easy to stir up these people to rebellion!--how natural for them to turn their indignation against the king and his government! The "Opposition" members seized the occasion now afforded them to excite these discontented masses against the ministry; and the latter, by their rashness, did more than their enemies to prepare the mind and set the match to the train. The crisis was now at hand. The "Opposition" deputies declared their intention to attend the proposed meeting; and in spite of the threats of the ministry, the preparations for the banquet went vigorously on. A place was selected in the Champs Elysées, and a building was in progress of erection for the celebration. The programme of the same was announced; the toast for the occasion was published; the orator, O. Barrot, selected. The day was fixed: an ominous day for tyranny, an auspicious one for human freedom. It was the 22d of February, the birthday of Washington! Whether it has received a new title to its place in the calendar of liberty, must be left for the decision of time. The evening of the 21st came, and then proclamations were issued, by the co-operation of the ministry and the police prohibiting the banquet. This act, though it had been threatened, still fell like a thunderbolt upon the people. It was known that an immense military force had been quietly assembled in Paris and the vicinity--eighty thousand troops, with artillery and ample munitions--and that the garrisons around the Tuileries had been victualled as if for a siege. But it had not been believed that an attempt to stifle the voice of the people, so bold as this, would really be made. Yet such was the fact. The leaders of the "Opposition" receded from their ground; and it was announced, in the papers of the 22d, that the banquet, being forbidden by the Government, would not take place. The morning of this day was dark and drizzly. I had anticipated some manifestation of uneasiness, and at half-past nine o'clock went forth. Groups of people were reading the proclamations posted up at the corners of the streets, but all was tranquil. I walked along the Boulevards for a mile yet saw no symptoms of the coming storm. The designated place of meeting for the banquet was the square of the Madeleine. This is at the western extremity of the Boulevards, and near the great central square called the Place de la Concorde, a point communicating directly with the Chamber of Deputies, the Champs Elysées, the gardens of the Tuileries, &c. At eleven o'clock, A.M., a dark mass was seen moving along the Boulevards towards the proposed place of meeting. This consisted of thousands of workmen from the faubourgs. In a few moments the entire square of the Madeleine was filled with these persons, dressed almost exclusively in their characteristic costume, which consists of a blue tunic, called _blouse_--a garment which is made very much in the fashion of our farmers' frocks. The opening scene of the drama had now begun. The mass rushed and eddied around the Madeleine, which, by the way, is the finest church and the finest edifice in Paris. Such was the threatening aspect of the scene, that the shops were all suddenly shut, and the people around began to supply themselves, with bread and other food, for "three days." In a few moments the avalanche took its course down the Rue Royale, swept across the Place de la Concorde, traversed the bridge over the Seine, and collected, in swelling and heaving masses, in the place, or square, before the Chamber of Deputies. This building is defended in front by a high iron railing. The gate of this was soon forced, and some hundreds of the people rushed up the long flight of steps, and, pausing beneath the portico, struck up the song of the "Marseillaise"--a song, by the way, interdicted by law on account of its exciting character. The crowd here rapidly increased: shouts, songs, cries filled the air. East and west, along the quays, and through the streets behind the Chamber, came long lines of students from the various schools. Standing upon one of the pillars of the bridge, I commanded a view of the whole scene. It was one to fill the heart with the liveliest emotions. A hundred thousand people were now collected, seeming like an agitated sea, and sending forth a murmur resembling the voice of many waters. From the southern gate of the Tuileries now issued two bodies of troops--one, on horseback, coming along the northern quay. These were the Municipal Guard, a magnificent corps, richly caparisoned, and nobly mounted. Being picked men, and well paid, they were the chief reliance of the Government, and for that very reason were hated by the people. The other body of troops were infantry of the line, and, crossing the Pont Royal, came along the southern bank of the river. Both detachments approached the multitude, and crowding upon them with a slow advance, succeeded at last in clearing the space before the Chamber. The greater part of the throng recrossed the bridge, and spread themselves over the Place de la Concorde. This square, perhaps the most beautiful in the world, is about five acres in extent. This vast area was now crowded with an excited populace, mainly of the working classes. Their number constantly augmented, and bodies of troops, foot and horse, arrived from various quarters, till the square was literally covered. The number of persons here collected in one mass was over one hundred thousand. At the commencement, the mob amused themselves with songs and shouts; but in clearing the space before the Chamber, and driving the people across the bridge, the guards had displayed great rudeness. They pressed upon the masses, and one woman was crushed to death beneath the hoofs of the horses. Pebbles now began to be hurled at the troops from the square. Dashing in among the people, sword in hand, the cavalry drove them away; but as they cleared one spot, another was immediately filled. The effect of this was to chafe and irritate the mob, who now began to seize sticks and stones, and hurl them in good earnest at their assailants. While this petty war was going on, some thousands of the rioters dispersed themselves through the Champs Elysées, and began to build barricades across the main avenue. The chairs, amounting to many hundreds, were immediately disposed in three lines across the street. Benches, trellises, boxes, fences--every movable thing within reach--were soon added to the barricades. An omnibus passing by was captured, detached from the horses, and tumbled into one of the lines. The flag was taken from the Panorama near by, and a vast procession paraded through the grounds, singing the "Marseillaise," the "Parisienne," and other patriotic airs. Meanwhile, a small detachment of foot guards advanced to the scene of action; but they were pelted with stones, and took shelter in their guard-house. This was assailed with a shower of missiles, which rattled like hail upon its roof. The windows were dashed in, and a heap of brush near by was laid to the wall, and set on fire. A body of horse guards soon arrived, and dispersed the rioters; but the latter crossed to the northern side of the Champs Elysées, attacked another guard-house, and set it on fire. A company of the line came to the spot, but the mob cheered them, and they remained inactive. The revel proceeded, and, in the face of the soldiers, the people fed the fire with fuel from the surrounding trees and fences, sang their songs, cracked their jokes, and cried "Down with Guizot!" "Vive la Réforme!" &c. In these scenes the boys took the lead, performing the most desperate feats, and inspiring the rest by their intrepidity. A remarkable air of fun and frolic characterized the mob--jokes flew as freely on all sides as stones and sticks. Such was the course of events the first day, so far as they fell under my own observation. It appears from the papers that similar proceedings, though in some cases of a more serious character, took place elsewhere. Great masses of people gathered at various points. They made hostile demonstrations before the Office of Foreign Affairs, crying out, "Down with Guizot!" Some person called for the minister. "He is not here," said one; "he is with the Countess Lieven,"--a remark which the _habitués_ of Paris will understand as conveying a keen satire. At other points a spirit of insubordination was manifested. Bakers' shops were broken open, armories forced, and barricades begun. Everywhere the hymn of the "Marseillaise" and "Mourir pour la Patrie" were sung--often by hundreds of voices, and with thrilling effect. The rappel for calling out the National Guard was beaten in several quarters. As night closed in, heavy masses of soldiery, horse and foot, with trains of artillery, were seen at various points. The Place du Carrousel was full of troops, and at evening they were reviewed by the King and the Dukes of Nemours and Montpensier. Six thousand soldiers were disposed along the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Porte St. Martin. Patrols were seen in different quarters during the whole night. About twelve tranquillity reigned over the city, disturbed only in a few remote and obscure places by the building of barricades, the arrest of rioters, and one or two combats, in which several persons were killed. Such was the first day's work--the prelude to the drama about to follow. Wednesday, the 23d, was fair, with dashes of rain at intervals, as in our April. I was early abroad, and soon noticed that companies of National Guards were on duty. Only regular troops had been called out the day before--a fact which showed the distrust of the National Guards entertained by the king. This was remarked by the latter, and was doubtless one of the causes which hastened the destruction of the Government. At nine o'clock I passed up the Boulevards. Most of the shops were shut, and an air of uneasiness prevailed among the people. At the Porte St. Denis there was a great throng, and a considerable mass of troops. Barricades were soon after erected in the streets of St. Denis, Cléry, St. Eustache, Cadran, &c. Several fusilades took place between the people at these points and the soldiers, and a number of persons were killed. Some contests occurred in other quarters during the morning. At two o'clock the Boulevards, the Rues St. Denis, St. Martin, Montmartre, St. Honoré--in short, all the great thoroughfares--were literally crammed with people. Bodies of horse and foot, either stationary or patrolling, were everywhere to be seen. It was about this time that some officers of the National Guard ordered their men to fire, but they refused. In one instance four hundred National Guards were seen marching, in uniform, but without arms. It became evident that the soldiers generally were taking part with the people. This news was carried to the palace, and Count Molé was called in to form a new ministry. He undertook the task, and orders were immediately given to spread the intelligence of this through the city. Meanwhile the riot and revel went on in various quarters. The police were active, and hundreds of persons were arrested and lodged in prison. Skirmishes took place, here and there, between the soldiers and the people; long processions were seen, attended by persons who sang choruses, and shouted "Down with Guizot!" "Vive la Réforme!" About four o'clock the news of the downfall of the Guizot ministry was spread along the Boulevards. The joyful intelligence ran over the city with the speed of light. It was everywhere received with acclamations. The people and the troops, a short time before looking at each other in deadly hostility, were seen shaking hands, and expressing congratulations. An immense population--men, women, and children--poured into the Boulevards, to share in the jubilation. Large parties of the National Guard paraded the streets, the officers and men shouting "Vive la Réforme!" and the crowd cheering loudly. Bands of five hundred to fifteen hundred men and boys went about making noisy demonstrations of joy. On being met by the troops, they divided to let them pass, and immediately resumed their cries and their songs. Toward half-past six o'clock in the evening an illumination was spoken of, and many persons lighted up spontaneously. The illumination soon became more general, and the populace, in large numbers, went through the streets, calling, "Light up!" Numerous bands, alone or following detachments of the National Guards, went about, shouting "Vive le Roi!" "Vive la Réforme!" and singing the "Marseillaise." At many points, where barricades had been erected, and the people were resisting the troops, they ceased when they heard the news of the resignations, and the troops retired. "It is all over!" was the general cry; and a feeling of relief seemed to pervade every bosom. There can be no doubt that, but for a fatal occurrence which soon after took place, the further progress of the revolt might have been stayed. Many wise people now say, indeed, that the revolution was all planned beforehand; they had foreseen and predicted it: and from the beginning of the outbreak everything tended to this point. The fact is unquestionably otherwise. The "Opposition," with their various clubs and societies distributed through all classes in Paris, and holding constant communication with the workmen or blousemen, no doubt stood ready to take advantage of any violence on the part of the Government which might justify resistance; but they had not anticipated such a contingency on the present occasion. It is not probable that the Molé ministry, had it been consummated, would have satisfied the people; but the king had yielded; Guizot, the special object of hatred, had fallen, and it was supposed that further concessions would be made, as concession had begun. But accident, which often rules the fate of empires and dynasties, now stepped in to govern the course of events, and give them a character which should astonish the world. In the course of the evening a large mass of people had collected on the Boulevard, in the region of Guizot's office--the Hôtel des Affaires Etrangères. The troops here had unfortunately threatened the people, by rushing at them with fixed bayonets, after the announcement of the resignation of the ministry, and when a good feeling prevailed among all classes. This irritated the mob, and was partly, no doubt, the occasion of the large gathering in this quarter. For some reason, not well explained, a great many troops had also assembled here and in the vicinity. At ten o'clock, the street from the Madeleine to the Rue de la Paix was thronged with soldiers and people. There was, however, no riot and no symptom of disorder. At this moment a collection of persons, mostly young men, about sixty in number, came along the Boulevard, on the side opposite to the soldiers and the Foreign Office. It is said that the colonel anticipated some attack, though nothing of the kind was threatened. It appears that the soldiers stood ready to fire, when one of their muskets went off, and wounded the commander's horse in the leg. He mistook this for a shot from the crowd, and gave instant orders to fire. A fusilade immediately followed. Twenty persons fell dead, and forty were wounded. The scene which ensued baffles description. The immense masses dispersed in terror, and carried panic in all directions. The groans of the dying and the screams of the wounded filled the air. Shops and houses around were turned into hospitals. "We are betrayed! we are betrayed!"--"Revenge! revenge!" was the cry of the masses. From this moment the doom of the monarchy was sealed. The leaders of the clubs, no doubt, took their measures for revolution. An immense waggon was soon brought to the scene of the massacre; the dead bodies were laid on it, and flaring torches were lighted over it. The ghastly spectacle was paraded through the streets, and the mute lips of the corpses doubtless spoke more effectively than those of the living. Large masses of people, pale with excitement and uttering execrations upon the murderers, followed in the train of the waggon, as it passed through the more populous streets of the city, and especially in those quarters inhabited by the lower classes. The effect was such as might have been anticipated. At midnight the barricades were begun, and at sunrise the streets of Paris displayed a network of fortifications from the Place St. George to the church of Notre Dame, which set the troops at defiance. More than a thousand barricades, some of them ten feet in height, were thrown up during that memorable night; yet such were the suddenness and silence of the operations, that most of the inhabitants of the city slept in security, fondly dreaming that the tempest had passed, and that the morning would greet them in peace. On Thursday, the decisive day, the weather was still mild and without rain, though the sky was dimmed with clouds. At eleven in the morning I sallied forth. I cannot express my astonishment at the scene. The whole Boulevard was a spectacle of desolation. From the Rue de la Paix to the Rue Montmartre--the finest part of Paris, the glory of the city--every tree was cut down, all the public monuments reduced to heaps of ruins, the pavements torn up, and the entire wreck tumbled into a succession of barricades. Every street leading into this portion of the Boulevard was strongly barricaded. Such giant operations seemed like the work of enchantment. But my wonder had only begun. At the point where the Rue Montmartre crosses the Boulevard, the entire pavement was torn up, and something like a square breastwork was formed, in which a cannon was planted. The whole space around was crowded with the populace. As I stood for a moment surveying the scene, a young man, about twenty, passed through the crowd, and stepping upon the carriage of the cannon, cried out, "Down with Louis Philippe!" The energy with which this was spoken sent a thrill through every bosom; and the remarkable appearance of the youth gave additional effect to his words. He was short, broad-shouldered, and full-chested. His face was pale, his cheek spotted with blood, and his head, without hat or cap, was bound with a handkerchief. His features were keen, and his deep-set eye was lit with a spark that seemed borrowed from a tiger. As he left the throng he came near me, and I said, inquiringly, "Down with Louis Philippe?" "Yes!" was his reply. "And what then?" said I. "A republic!" was his answer; and he passed on, giving the watchword of "Down with Louis Philippe!" to the masses he encountered. This was the first instance in which I heard the overthrow of the king and the adoption of a republic proposed. In pursuing my walk, I noticed that the population were now abundantly supplied with weapons. On the two first days they were unarmed; but after the slaughter at the Foreign Office they went to all the houses and demanded weapons. These were given, for refusal would have been vain. An evidence of the consideration of the populace, even in their hour of wrath, is furnished by the fact, that in all cases where the arms had been surrendered, they wrote on the doors in chalk, "_Armes données_"--Arms given up; so as to prevent the annoyance of a second call. It might seem a fearful thing to behold a mob, such as that of Paris, brandishing guns, fowling-pieces, swords, cutlasses, hatchets, and axes; but I must say that I felt not the slightest fear in passing among their thickest masses. Some of them, who had doubtless never handled arms before, seemed a little jaunty and jubilant. The _gamins_--the leaders in riots, rows, and rebellions--were swarming on all sides, and seemed to feel a head taller in the possession of their weapons. I saw several of these unwashed imps strutting about with red sashes around the waist, supporting pistols, dirks, cutlasses, &c.; yet I must state that over the whole scene there was an air of good-breeding, which seemed a guarantee against insult or violence. I may also remark here, that during the whole three days I did not observe a scuffle or wrangle among the people; I did not hear an insulting word, nor did I see a menace offered, save in conflicts between the soldiers and the populace. I can add, that I did not see a drunken person during the whole period, with the single exception which I shall hereafter mention. I took a wide circuit in the region of the Rue Montmartre, the Bourse, the Rue Vivienne, St. Honoré, and the Palais Royal. Everywhere there were enormous barricades and crowds of armed people. Soon after--that is, about twelve o'clock--I passed the southern quadrangle of the Palais Royal, which, lately the residence of the brother of the King of Naples, was now attacked and taken by the populace. The beautiful suite of rooms was richly furnished, and decorated with costly pictures, statues, bronzes, and other specimens of art. These were unsparingly tumbled into the square and the street, and consigned to the flames. At the distance of one hundred and fifty feet from the front of the Palais Royal was the Château d'Eau, a massive stone building occupied as a barrack, and at this moment garrisoned by one hundred and eighty municipal guards. In most parts of the city, seeing that the troops fraternized with the people, the Government had given them orders not to fire. These guards, however, attacked the insurgents in and about the Palais Royal. Their fire was returned, and a desperate conflict ensued. The battle lasted for more than an hour, the people rushing in the very face of the muskets, of the guard, as they blazed from the grated windows. At last the barrack was set on fire, and the guard yielded, though not till many of their number had fallen, and the rest were nearly dead with suffocation. The Château d'Eau is now a mere ruin, its mottled walls giving evidence of the shower of bullets that had been poured upon it. No sooner had the Château d'Eau surrendered, than the flushed victors took their course towards the Tuileries, which was near at hand; shouting, singing, roaring, they came like a surge, bearing all before them. The Place du Carrousel was filled with troops; but not a sword was unsheathed--not a bayonet pointed--not a musket or a cannon fired. There stood, idle and motionless, the mighty armament which the king had appointed for his defence. How vain had his calculations proved! for, alas! they were founded in a radical error. The soldiers would not massacre their brethren, to sustain a throne which they now despised. But we must now enter the Tuileries. For several days previous to the events we have described, some anxiety had been entertained by persons in and about the palace. The king, however, had no fears. He appeared in unusual spirits; and, if any intimation of danger was given, he turned it aside with a sneer or a joke. Even so late as Wednesday, after he had called upon Count Molé to form a new ministry, he remarked that he was so "firmly seated in the saddle, that nothing could throw him off." Molé soon found it impossible, with the materials at hand, to construct a ministry. Thiers was then called in; and, after a long course of higgling and chaffering on the part of the king, it was agreed that he and Barrot should undertake to carry on the Government. This was announced by them in person, as they rode through the streets on Thursday morning. These concessions, however, came too late. The cry for a republic was bursting from the lips of the million. The abdication of the king was decreed, and a raging multitude were demanding this at the very gates of the palace. Overborne by the crisis, the king agreed to abdicate in favor of the Duke de Nemours. Some better tidings were brought him, and he retracted what he had just done. A moment after it became certain that the insurgents would shortly burst into the palace. In great trepidation, the king agreed to resign the crown in favor of his grandson, the young Count de Paris; yet, still clinging to the hope, he shuffled and hesitated before he would put his name to the act of abdication. This, however, was at last done, and the king and queen, dressed in black, and accompanied by a few individuals who remained faithful in this trying moment, passed from the Tuileries to the Place de la Concorde, through the subterranean passage constructed many years previously for the walks of the infant King of Rome. They here entered a small, one-horse vehicle, and, after a rapid and successful flight, landed safely at Dover, in England. Meanwhile, the mob had seized the royal carriages, fourteen in number, and made a bonfire of them, near the celebrated arch in the Place du Carrousel. Soon after, they forced the railing at several points, and came rushing across the square toward the palace. Scarcely had the various members of the royal family time to escape on one side of the building, when the mob broke in at the other. I have not time to follow the adventures of these several individuals. We cannot but sympathize with them in their misfortunes; but we may remark, that the fall of the Orleans dynasty was not broken by a single act of courage or dignity on the part of any one of the family. Their flight seemed a vulgar scramble for mere life. Even the king was reduced to the most common place disguises--the shaving of his whiskers, the change of his dress, the adopting an "alias!" I may add here, that they have all escaped; and while everybody seems glad of this, there is no one behind who mourns their loss. None are more loud in denouncing the besotted confidence of the king than his two hundred and twenty-five purchased deputies, who were so loyal in the days of prosperity. A short time after the king and queen had passed the Place de la Concorde I chanced to be there. In a few moments Odillon Barrot appeared from the gate of the Tuileries, and, followed by a long train of persons, proceeded to the Chamber of Deputies. It was now understood that the king had abdicated, and that Thiers and Barrot were to propose the Count de Paris as king, under the regency of his mother, the Duchess of Orleans. The most profound emotion seemed to occupy the immense multitude. All were hushed into silence by the rapid succession of astonishing events. After a short space the Duchess of Orleans, with her two sons, the Count de Paris and the Duke de Chartres, were seen on foot coming toward the Chamber, encircled by a strong escort. She was dressed in deep mourning, her face bent to the ground. She moved across the bridge, and passing to the rear of the building, entered it through the gardens. Shortly after this the Duke de Nemours, attended by several gentlemen on horseback, rode up, and also entered the building. The scene that ensued within is said to have presented an extraordinary mixture of the solemn and the ludicrous. The duchess being present, Barrot proceeded to state the abdication of the king, and to propose the regency. It was then that Lamartine seemed to shake off the poet and philosopher, and suddenly to become a man of action. Seizing the critical moment, he declared his conviction that the days of monarchy were numbered; that the proposed regency was not suited to the crisis; and that a republic alone would meet the emergency and the wishes of France. These opinions, happily expressed and strenuously enforced, became decisive in their effect. Several other speeches were made, and a scene of great confusion followed. A considerable number of the mob had broken into the room, and occupied the galleries and the floor. One of them brought his firelock to his shoulder, and took aim at M. Sauzet, the president. Entirely losing his self-possession, he abdicated with great speed, and disappeared. In the midst of the hubbub a Provisional Government was announced, and the leading members were named. Some of the more obnoxious deputies were aimed at by the muskets of the mob, and skulking behind benches and pillars, they oozed out at back-doors and windows. A blouseman came up to the Duke de Nemours, who drew his sword. The man took it from him, broke it over his knee, and counselled his highness to depart. This he did forthwith, having borrowed a coat and hat for the purpose of disguise. A call was made for the members of the Provisional Government to proceed to the Hôtel de Ville. The assembly broke up, and the curtain fell upon the last sitting of the Chamber of Deputies--the closing scene of Louis Philippe's government. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon that I retraced my steps toward the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde was crowded with soldiers, and fifty cannon were ranged in front of the gardens. Yet this mighty force seemed struck with paralysis. Long lines of infantry stood mute and motionless, and heavy masses of cavalry seemed converted into so many statues. Immediately before the eyes of those soldiers was the palace of the Tuileries in full possession of the mob, but not a muscle moved for their expulsion! Passing into the gardens, I noticed that thousands of persons were spread over their surface, and a rattling discharge of fire-arms was heard on all sides. Looking about for the cause of this, I perceived that hundreds of men and boys were amusing themselves with shooting sparrows and pigeons, which had hitherto found a secure resting-place in this favorite resort of leisure and luxury. Others were discharging their muskets for the mere fun of making a noise. Proceeding through the gardens, I came at last to the palace. It had now been, for more than an hour, in full possession of the insurgents. All description fails to depict a scene like this. The whole front of the Tuileries, one-eighth of a mile in length, seemed gushing at doors, windows, balconies, and galleries, with living multitudes--a mighty beehive of men, in the very act of swarming. A confused hubbub filled the air, and bewildered the senses with its chaotic sounds. At the moment I arrived the throne of the king was borne away by a jubilant band of revellers; and, after being paraded through the streets, was burned at the Place de la Bastille. I entered the palace, and passed through the long suites of apartments devoted to occasions of ceremony. A year before I had seen these gorgeous halls filled with the flush and the fair--kings, princes, and nobles--gathered to this focal point of luxury, refinement, and taste from every quarter of the world. How little did Louis Philippe, at that moment, dream of "coming events!" How little did the stately queen--a proud obelisk of silk, and lace, and diamonds--foresee the change that was at hand! I recollected well the effect of this scene upon my own mind, and felt the full force of the contrast which the present moment offered. In the very room where I had seen the pensive and pensile Princess de Joinville and the Duchess de Montpensier--the latter then fresh from the hymeneal altar, her raven hair studded with diamonds like evening stars--whirling in the mazy dance, I now beheld a band of creatures like Calibans, gambolling to the song of the "Marseillaise!" On every side my eye fell upon scenes of destruction. Passing to the other end of the palace, I beheld a mob in the chambers of the princesses. Some rolled themselves in the downy beds, others anointed their shaggy heads with choice pomatum, exclaiming, "Dieu! how sweet it smells!" One of the _gamins_, grimed with gunpowder, blood, and dirt, seized a tooth-brush, and placing himself before a mirror, seemed delighted at the manifest improvement which he produced upon his ivory. On leaving the palace, I saw numbers of the men drinking wine from bottles taken from the well-stocked cellars. None of them were positively drunk. To use the words of "Tam O'Shanter," "They were na fou, but just had plenty"--perhaps a little more. They flourished their guns and pistols, brandished their swords, and performed various antics, but they offered no insult to any one. They seemed in excellent humor, and made more than an ordinary display of French _politesse_. They complimented the women, of whom there was no lack; and one of them, resembling a figure of Pan, seized a maiden by the waist, and both rigadooned merrily over the floor. Leaving this scene of wreck, confusion, and uproar, I proceeded toward the gate of the gardens leading into the Rue de Rivoli. I was surprised to find here a couple of ruthless-looking blousemen, armed with pistols, keeping guard. On inquiry, I found that the mob themselves had instituted a sort of government. One fellow, in the midst of the devastation in the palace, seeing a man put something into his pocket, wrote on the wall, "Death to thieves!" The Draconian code was immediately adopted by the people, and became the law of Paris. Five persons, taken in acts of robbery, were shot down by the people, and their bodies exposed in the streets, with the label of "Thief" on their breast. Thus order and law seemed to spring up from the instincts of society, in the midst of uproar and confusion, as crystals are seen shooting from the chaos of the elements. Three days had now passed, and the revolution was accomplished. The people soon returned to their wonted habits; the Provisional Government proceeded in its duties; the barricades disappeared; and in a single week the more obtrusive traces of the storm that had passed had vanished from the streets and squares of Paris. CHAPTER XXX. AFTER THE REVOLUTION--"FUNERAL OF THE VICTIMS"--THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY--PARIS IN A STATE OF SIEGE--CAVAIGNAC--LOUIS NAPOLEON CHOSEN PRESIDENT. It is not my design to enter into the history of the revolution in detail, but I may sketch a few of the prominent events which followed. For this purpose, I make an extract from an account I have elsewhere given:-- For several weeks and months Paris was a scene of extraordinary excitement. The Provisional Government had announced that they would provide the people with labor. Consequently, deputations of tailors, hatters, engravers, musicians, paviors, cabinet-makers, seamstresses, and a multitude of other trades and vocations, flocked in long lines to the Hôtel de Ville to solicit the favor of the Government. Vast crowds of people perpetually haunted this place, and, in one instance, a raging multitude came thundering at the doors, demanding that the blood-red flag of the former revolution should be the banner of the new republic! It was on this occasion that Lamartine addressed the people, and with such eloquence as to allay the storm which threatened again to deluge France in blood. The members of the Government were so besieged and pressed by business, that for several weeks they slept in the Hôtel de Ville. They proceeded with a bold hand to announce and establish the republic. In order to make a favorable impression upon the people, they decreed a gorgeous ceremony at the foot of the column of July, on Sunday, February 27th, by which they solemnly inaugurated the new republic. All the members of the Provisional Government were present on horseback; there were sixty thousand troops and two hundred thousand people to witness the spectacle. Another still more imposing celebration took place on the 4th of March. This was called the "Funeral of the Victims." After religious ceremonies at the Madeleine, the members of the Government, with a long train of public officers and an immense _cortège_ of military, proceeded to the July column, conducting a superb funeral-car, drawn by eight cream-colored horses. This contained most of the bodies of those slain in the revolution--about two hundred and fifty. These were deposited in the vault of the column, with the victims of the revolution of 1830. Nothing can adequately portray this spectacle. A tri-colored flag was stretched on each side of the Boulevards, from the Madeleine to the July column--a distance of three miles. As this consisted of three strips of cloth, the length of the whole was eighteen miles! The solemn movement of the funeral procession, the dirge-like music, the march of nearly a hundred thousand soldiers, and the sympathizing presence of three hundred thousand souls, rendered it a scene never surpassed and rarely equalled, either by the magnificence of the panorama or the solemn and touching sentiments excited. Still other spectacles succeeded; and in the summer four hundred thousand people assembled in the Champs Elysées to witness the Presentation of Flags to the assembled National Guards, eighty thousand being present. Such scenes can only be witnessed in Paris. Events proceeded with strange rapidity. A Constituent Assembly was called by the Provisional Government to form a constitution. The members were elected by ballot, the suffrage being universal--that is, open to all Frenchmen over twenty-one. The election took place in April, and on the 4th of May the first session was held, being officially announced to the assembled people from the steps of the Chamber of Deputies. On the 15th of May a conspiracy was disclosed, the leaders of which were Raspail, Barbès, Sobrier, Caussidière, Blanqui, Flotte, Albert, and Louis Blanc--the two last having been members of the Provisional Government. Caussidière was prefect of police. The Assembly proceeded in the work of framing a constitution, administering the government in the mean time. On the 24th of June a terrific insurrection broke out, promoted by the leaders of various factions, all desiring the overthrow of the republic which had been inaugurated. Cavaignac, who was minister of war, was appointed dictator, and Paris was declared in a state of siege. The insurgents confined their operations chiefly to the faubourgs of St. Jacques and St. Antoine. They got possession of these, and formed skilful and able plans of operation, which had for their ultimate object the surrounding of the city and getting possession of certain important points, including the Chamber--thus securing the government in their own hands. Cavaignac proceeded to attack the barricades, thus clearing the streets one by one. The fighting was terrible. For four days the battle continued, the sound of cannon frequently filling the ears of the people all over the city. Night and day the inhabitants were shut up in their houses, ignorant of all, save that the conflict was raging. The women found employment in scraping lint for the wounded. All Paris was a camp. The windows were closed; the soldiers and sentinels passed their watchwords; litters, carrying the dead and wounded, were borne along the streets; the tramp of marching columns and the thunder of rushing cavalry broke upon the ear! At last the conflict was over; the insurgents were beaten--Cavaignac triumphed. But the victory was dearly purchased. Between two and three thousand persons were killed, and among them no less than seven general officers had fallen. The insurgents fought like tigers. Many women were in the ranks, using the musket, carrying the banners, rearing barricades, and cheering the fight. Boys and girls mingled in the conflict. The National Guards who combated them had equal courage and superior discipline. One of the Garde Mobile--Hyacinthe Martin, a youth of fourteen--took four standards from the tops of the barricades. His gallantry excited great interest, and Cavaignac decorated him with the cross of the Legion of Honor. He became a hero of the day; but--sad to relate!--being invited to fêtes, banquets, and repasts, his head was turned, and he was soon a ruined profligate. The leaders in this terrific insurrection were never detected. It is certain that the movement was headed by able men, and directed by skilful engineers. The masses who fought were roused to fury by poverty and distress--by disappointment at finding the national workshops discontinued, and by stimulating excitements furnished by Socialist clubs and newspapers. It is computed that forty thousand insurgents were in arms, and eighty thousand government soldiers were brought against them. It may be considered that this struggle was the remote but inevitable result of the course of the Provisional Government in adopting the doctrine of obligation, on the part of the State, to supply work and wages to the people, and in establishing national workshops in pursuance of this idea. Still, it may be said, on the other hand, that nothing but such a step could have enabled the Provisional Government to maintain itself during three months, and give being to an organized Assembly from which a legitimate government could proceed. The Constitution was finished in the autumn, and promulgated on the 19th of November, 1848. On the 10th of December following, the election of President took place, and it appeared that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had five million out of seven million votes. He was duly inaugurated about a week after the election, and entered upon the high duties which thus devolved upon him. CHAPTER XXXI. THE AUTHOR'S DUTIES AS CONSUL--ASPECT OF THINGS IN PARIS--LOUIS NAPOLEON'S DESIGNS--THE 2ND OF DECEMBER, 1852--THE NEW REIGN OF TERROR COMPLETE--LOUIS NAPOLEON AS EMPEROR--OUT OF OFFICE--RETURN TO NEW YORK--CONCLUSION. I now come to the period of 1851, when I entered upon the consulate. Of the space during which I was permitted to hold this office I have no very remarkable personal incidents to relate. The certifying of invoices, and the legalizing of deeds and powers of attorney, are the chief technical duties of the American Consul at Paris. If he desires to enlarge the circle of his operations, however, he can find various ways of doing it. As, for instance, in supplying the wants of distressed Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and others, who are martyrs to liberty, and suppose the American heart and purse always open to those who are thus afflicted; in answering questions from notaries, merchants, lawyers, as to the laws of the different American States upon marriage, inheritance, and the like; in advising emigrants whether to settle in Iowa, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Texas; in listening to inquiries made by deserted wives as to where their errant husbands may be found, who left France ten, or twenty, or thirty years ago, and went to America, by which is generally understood St. Domingo or Martinique. A considerable business may be done in lending money to foreigners, who pretend to have been naturalized in the United States, and are, therefore, entitled to consideration and sympathy: it being, of course, well understood that money lent to such persons will never be repaid. Some time and cash may also be invested in listening to the stories and contributing to the wants of promising young American artists, who are striving to get to Italy to pursue their studies--such persons usually being graduates of the London school of artful dodgers. Some waste leisure and a good deal of postage may be disposed of in correspondence with ingenious Americans, inventors and discoverers: as, for instance, with a man in Arkansas or Minnesota, who informs you that he has contrived a new and infallible method of heating and ventilating European cities, and wishes it brought to the notice of the authorities there, it being deemed the duty of the American Consul to give attention to such matters. These monotonies are occasionally diversified by a letter from some unfortunate fellow-countryman who is detained at Mazas or Clichy, and begs to be extricated; or some couple who wish to be put under the bonds of wedlock; or some enterprising wife, all the way from Tennessee, in chase of a runaway husband; or some inexperienced but indignant youth who has been fleeced by his landlord. Such are the duties which devolve upon the American Consul at Paris, the incidents alluded to having come under my notice while I was there in that capacity. I must now speak of certain public events which transpired at that period, and which will ever be regarded as among the most remarkable in modern history. I have told you how Louis Napoleon, in consequence of the Revolution of 1848, became President of the Republic. When I arrived in Paris, in April, 1851, he was officiating in that capacity, his residence being the little palace of the Elysée Bourbon, situated between the Faubourg St. Honoré and the Champs Elysées. The National Assembly, consisting of seven hundred and fifty members, held their sessions at the building called the Chamber of Deputies. The Government had been in operation somewhat over two years. To the casual observer, the external aspect of things was not very different from what it had been under the monarchy of Louis Philippe. It is true that the palace of the Tuileries was vacant; no royal coaches were seen dashing through the avenues; the public monuments everywhere proclaimed "liberty, equality, fraternity." But still, the streets were filled with soldiers as before. Armed sentinels were stationed at the entrances of all the public buildings. The barracks were, as usual, swarming with soldiers, and large masses of horse and foot were training at the Champ de Mars and at Satory. Martial reviews and exercises were, indeed, the chief amusement of the metropolis. The President's house was a palace, and all around it was bristling with bayonets. It was obvious that, whatever name the Government might bear, military force lay at the bottom of it; and if to-day this might be its defence, to-morrow it might also be its overthrow. It is now ascertained that Louis Napoleon, from the beginning, had his mind fixed upon the restoration of the Empire. In accepting the presidency of the Republic, and even in swearing fidelity to the Constitution, he considered himself only as mounting the steps of the Imperial throne. In order to prepare the nation for the revolution which he meditated, Louis Napoleon caused agitating and alarming rumors to be circulated of a terrible plot, planned by the Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists of France, the object of which was to overturn the whole fabric of society, to destroy religion, to sweep away the obligations of marriage, to strip the rich of their property, and make a general distribution of it among the masses. Other conspiracies, having similar designs, were said to exist in all the surrounding countries of Europe, and the time was now near at hand when the fearful explosion would take place. The police of France, subject to the control and direction of the President, were instructed to discover evidences of this infernal plot, and they were so successful, that the public mind was filled with a vague but anxious apprehension that society was reposing upon a volcano, which might soon burst forth and overwhelm the whole country in chaos. The National Assembly acted in a manner to favor these schemes of the Presidents. They were divided into four or five factions, and spent their time chiefly in angry disputes and selfish intrigues. A portion of them were monarchists; and, though they had acquired their seats by pledges of devotion to the republic, they were now plotting its overthrow; a part being for the restoration of the Orleanists, and a part for the Bourbons. Another faction was for Louis Napoleon, and actively promoted his schemes. By the Constitution he was ineligible for a second term, and his friends were seeking the means of overcoming the difficulty, and giving him a re-election, by fair means or foul. The Liberals were divided into several shades of opinion--some being Republicans, after the model of General Cavaignac; some being Democrats, like Victor Hugo; and some Socialists, after the fashion of Pierre Leroux. In such a state of things there was a vast deal of idle debate, while the substantial interests of the country seemed, if not totally forgotten, at least secondary to the interests of parties, and the passions and prejudices of individuals. I remember that on a certain Monday evening, the 1st of December, 1852, I was present at the Elysée, and was then first introduced to Louis Napoleon. I found him to be an ordinary-looking person, rather under size, but well formed, and with a dull expression of countenance. The room was tolerably full, the company consisting, as is usual in such cases, of diplomats, military officers, and court officials, with a sprinkling of citizens, in black coats. I was forcibly struck by the preponderance of soldiers in the assembly, and I said several times to my companions that it seemed more like a camp than a palace. The whole scene was dull; the President himself appeared preoccupied, and was not master of his usual urbanity; General Magnan walked from room to room with a ruminating air, occasionally sending his keen glances around, as if searching for something which he could not find. There was no music--no dancing. That gayety which almost always pervades a festive party in Paris was wholly wanting. There was no ringing laughter--no merry hum of conversation. I noticed all this, but I did not suspect the cause. At eleven o'clock the assembly broke up, and the guests departed. At twelve, the conspirators, gathered for their several tasks, commenced their operations. About four in the morning the leading members of the Assembly were seized in their beds, and hurried to prison. Troops were distributed at various points, so as to secure the city. When the light of day came, proclamations were posted at the corners of the streets, announcing to the citizens that the National Assembly was dissolved; that universal suffrage was decreed; that the Republic was established! Such was the general unpopularity of the Assembly, that the first impression of the people was that of delight at its overthrow. Throughout the first day the streets of Paris were like a swarming hive, filled with masses of people, yet, for the most part, in good-humor. The second day they had reflected, and began to frown, but yet there was no general spirit of revolt. A few barricades were attempted, but the operators were easily dispersed. The third day came; and although there was some agitation among the masses, there was evidently no preparation, no combination for general resistance. As late as ten o'clock in the forenoon I met one of the Republicans whom I knew, and asked him what was to be done. His reply was,-- "We can do nothing; our leaders are in prison; we are bound hand and foot. I am ready to give my life at the barricades, if with the chance of benefit; but I do not like to throw it away. We can do nothing!" Soon after this I perceived heavy columns of troops--some four thousand men--marching through the Rue de la Paix, and then proceeding along the Boulevards towards the Port St. Denis. These were soon followed by a body of about a thousand horse. I was told that similar bodies were moving to the same point through other avenues of the city. In a short time the whole Boulevard, from the Rue de la Paix to the Place de la Bastille, an extent of two miles, was filled with troops. My office was on the Boulevard des Italiens, and was now fronted by a dense body of lancers, each man with his cocked pistol in his hand. Except the murmur of the horses' hoofs, there was a general stillness over the city. The side-walks were filled with people; and though there was no visible cause for alarm, yet there was still a vague apprehension which cast pallor and gloom upon the faces of all. Suddenly a few shots were heard in the direction of the Boulevard Montmartre, and then a confused hum, and soon a furious clatter of hoofs. A moment after, the whole body of horse started into a gallop, and rushed by as if in flight; presently they halted, however, wheeled slowly, and gradually moved back, taking up their former position. The men looked keenly at the houses on either side, and pointed their pistols threateningly at all whom they saw at the windows. It afterward appeared, that when the troops had been drawn out in line and stationed along the Boulevard, some half-dozen shots were fired into them from the tops of buildings and from windows: this created a sudden panic; the troops ran, and, crowding upon others, caused the sudden movement I have described. In a few moments the heavy, sickening sound of muskets came from the Porte St. Denis. Volley succeeded volley, and after some time the people were seen rushing madly along the pavements of the Boulevard, as if to escape. The gate of our hôtel was now closed, and, at the earnest request of the throng that had gathered for shelter in the court of the hôtel, I put out the "Stars and Stripes"--the first and last time that I ever deemed it necessary. The dull roar of muskets, with the occasional boom of cannon, continued at intervals for nearly half-an-hour. Silence at last succeeded, and the people ventured into the streets. About four in the afternoon I walked for a mile along the Boulevard. The pavements were strewn with the fragments of shattered windows, broken cornices, and shivered doorways. Many of the buildings, especially those on the southern side of the street, were thickly spattered with bullet-marks, especially around the windows. One edifice was riddled through and through with cannon-shot. Frequent spots of blood stained the sidewalk, and along the Boulevard Montmartre, particularly around the doorways, there were pools like those of the shambles; it being evident that the reckless soldiers had shot down in heaps the fugitives who, taken by surprise, strove to obtain shelter at the entrances of the hôtels upon the street. The morning came, and the triumph of the Reign of Terror was complete. What was enacted in Paris was imitated all over France. Nearly every department was declared in a state of siege; revolt was punished with death, and doubt or hesitation with imprisonment. Forty thousand persons were hurried to the dungeons, without even the form or pretence of trial. All over the country the press was silenced, as it had been in Paris; save only a few obsequious prints, which published what was dictated to them. These declared that all this bloodshed and violence were the necessary result of the Socialist conspiracy, which threatened to overturn society; happily, as they contended, Louis Napoleon, like a beneficent Providence, had crushed the monster, and he now asked the people to ratify what he had done, by making him President for ten years. In the midst of agitation, delusion, and panic, the vote was taken, and Louis Napoleon was elected by a vote of eight millions of suffrages! The nominal Republic thus established soon gave way to the Empire; the President reached the Imperial throne, and now stands before the world as Napoleon III.! Since his acquisition of a throne Louis Napoleon has conducted the government with ability, and he has certainly been seconded by fortune. He married a lady who has shed lustre upon her high position by her gentle virtues and gracious manners. He engaged in the Eastern War, and triumphed. He has greatly improved and embellished the capital, and made Paris the most charming city in the world: nowhere else does life seem to flow on so cheerfully and so tranquilly as here. He has gradually softened the rigors of his government; and though some noble spirits still pine in exile, he has taken frequent advantage of opportunity to diminish the number. The people of France, at the present time, appear to be satisfied with the government, and, no doubt, a large majority, could the question be proposed to them, would vote for its continuance. * * * * * In the summer of 1853, I was politely advised from the State Department that President Pierce had appointed my successor in the consulate. Thus, having held the place a little over two years, on the 1st of August, 1853, I was restored to the privileges of private-citizen life. As I had various engagements which forbade me immediately to leave France, I hired a small house at Courbevoie, which I made my residence till my departure for America. In the autumn of 1854 I set out with my family for a short tour in Italy. In all my wanderings I had never visited this famous country; and as I was not likely ever to have another opportunity, I felt it to be a kind of duty to avail myself of a few unappropriated weeks to accomplish this object. After visiting Florence, Rome, and Naples, we returned to Paris. Tarrying there for a short time, for the purpose of seeing the International Exhibition of 1855, we finally left Europe in October, and in the next month found a new home in New York. * * * * * I have now come to my farewell. Leave-takings are in general somewhat melancholy, and it is best to make them as brief as possible. Mine shall consist of a single train of thought, and that suggestive of cheerful rather than mournful feelings. Like a traveller approaching the end of his journey, I naturally cast a look backward, and surveying the monuments which rise up in the distance, seek to estimate the nature and tendency of the march of events which I have witnessed, and in which I have participated. One general remark appears to me applicable to the half century over which my observation has extended; which is, that everywhere there has been improvement. I know of no department of human knowledge, no sphere of human inquiry, no race of men, no region of the earth, where there has been retrogression. On the whole, the age has been alike fruitful in discovery, and in the practical, beneficial results of discovery. Science has advanced with giant strides; and it is the distinguishing characteristic of modern science that it is not the mere toy of the philosopher, nor the hidden mystery of the laboratory, but the hard-working servant of the manufactory, the workshop, and the kitchen. On every hand are the evidences of improvement. What advances have been made in agriculture; in the analysis of soils, the preparation of manures, the improvement of implements, from the spade to the steam-reaper; in the manufacture of textile fabrics by the inventions of Jacquard and others in weaving, and innumerable devices in spinning; in the working of iron--cutting, melting, moulding, rolling, shaping it like dough, whereby it is applied to a thousand new uses; in commerce and navigation, by improved models of ships, improved chronometers, barometers, and quadrants--in chain-pumps and wheel-rudders; in printing, by the use of the steam-press, throwing off a hundred thousand impressions instead of two thousand in a day; in microscopes, which have revealed new worlds in the infinity of littleness, as well as in telescopes, which have unfolded immeasurable depths of space before hidden from the view. How has travelling been changed, from jolting along at the rate of six miles an hour over rough roads in a stage-coach, to putting one's self comfortably to bed in a steamboat and going fifteen miles an hour; or sitting down in a railway-carriage to read a novel, and before you have finished it to find yourself two hundred miles away! And in the moral world, the last fifty years appear to me to have shown an improvement, if not as marked, yet as certain and positive, as in the material world. Everywhere, as I believe, the standard of humanity is more elevated than before. If in some things, with the increase of wealth and luxury, we have degenerated, on the whole there has been an immense advance, as well in technical morals as in those large humanities which aim at the good of all mankind. In looking at the political condition of our country, there are no doubt threatening clouds in the sky and mutterings of ominous thunders in the distance. I have, however, known such things before; I have seen the country shaken to its centre by the fierce collision of parties, and the open assaults of the spirit of disunion. But these dangers passed away. Within my memory, the states of the Union have been doubled in number, and the territory of the Union has been trebled in extent. This I have seen; and as such has been the fact, so may be, and so I trust will be, the future. Farewell! CHAPTER XXXII. THE DEATH OF PETER PARLEY. _From the London Welcome Guest._ Friend of my youth! Delightful instructor of my early days! Thou kindly soul, who labored so patiently to expand my unopened mind, and inspire it with a becoming interest in the world in which it had but lately awakened! Benevolent traveller, who led my innocence gently by the hand through all the countries of the earth, and chatted intelligibly with me of their strangely varying customs, their wonderful histories, their diverse climates, and productions, and capacities! Thou that, in the first budding of my young ideas, pointed out to me the glories of the starry night, and the marvels of the vasty deep; that couldst sympathize with my untaught childhood, and adapt thy immeasurable learning to its little wants, and powers, and likings, and intertwine thy omniscient narrative with absorbing adventures that enthralled its whole soul, and thrilled its wondering bosom, and upraised the hairs that as yet but thinly covered its tender pate! May my right hand forget its cunning, thou large-hearted benefactor, if I permit thee to pass away into Hades all unheralded! That stingy paragraph in a print that is read to-day and handed into oblivion to-morrow, is no meed worthy of thee, Peter Parley. Thou meritest a more bounteous memorial. Thy name is known far and wide; and countless eyes, as they read in these pages that thou hast entered the Land of Shadows, shall be dimmed with grateful recollection. If it may be allowed a copy of the WELCOME GUEST to journey beyond the postal arrangements of this world, and to meet the disembodied eyes of the other one, I wish that the concession may be made to this current number, and that it may be placed in Peter Parley's hands, as he sits in honor amid his new fellows. Then shall his gentle shade rejoice to know that we, his children, who used to gather around his knees, so to say, when he was still in the flesh, many long years since, are not ungrateful for his care of us, but cherish a most fond remembrance of it! It was but last May the hand that had written so pleasantly and so usefully grew chill, and the pen fell from its unnerved grasp. No fresh travels of Peter Parley shall we have reported to us. Whatever his journeyings may not be--however weirdly novel, and thrilling, and strange--we cannot hope for any record of them. No sojourner in that land has ever yet returned to give us his account of it. No pencillings by the way, no fine descriptions of landscape or people, no notes of its ways and manners, ever reach us from the other side of the dividing river. So Peter Parley will observe and record for us never again. Which of Peter Parley's numerous writings did you give the preference to, my reader? There was a capital story about a sailor boy in the _Tales of the Sea_, if you remember. To me that young Crusoe endeared the whole volume. I confess the facts with which every page was stored have escaped me somewhat; but oh! how well I recollect the sailor boy! Do you remember that picture which served as the frontispiece of the _Tales of the Stars_? There was old Peter himself, with a crowd of us--his curly-headed darlings--all round him. The stars, if my memory serves me, are shining with unwonted brightness upon the interesting group, and upon a celestial globe which occupies the left side of the scene. If my memory serves me, I say; but ay me! the lapse of many years has much impaired it, I fear, and the vision I call before me of that primeval period, is somewhat a broken and fragmentary one. I cannot stay to mention all the members of the library with which Peter Parley and our governess, acting with a sweet consent, supplied us. There were some pleasant passages in the _Tales of Animals_. I still vividly remember the panther and the lion, which appeared upon that stage. I cannot say why I remember them above all others, any more than I can say why many things connected with my early youth have remained in my memory, whilst a thousand other incidents of equal importance have vanished utterly from it. All I know is, that I especially remember the panther and the lion in Mr. Parley's famous zoological work. But, in my opinion, Peter Parley's most triumphant effusion--his _chef d'oeuvre_--the work on which his fame will undoubtedly rest in the judgment of an admiring posterity of infants--the _ne plus ultra_ of his great powers, in which the astonishing grace of his style reaches its highest perfection, and his knowledge is surpassed only by the facility and the kindliness with which he imparts it--his crowning effort is--need I name it? Shall I not be accused of penning truisms? Of course I mean his _Travels through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America_. Let that be a red-lettered day in my calendar when I entered upon those travels. Blessed be the dear maternal hand that gave them to me! Once more, standing by _her_ side--the kind hand the while, I doubt not, smoothing my roughened locks, the gentle tongue patiently helping my tardy utterance--I spell out the opening chapters. Gather round me now, O pleasant company, into which I was then introduced. Be seated again at thy round table, O Parley! with those delightful guests around thee, and let me listen to thy wonderful stories. Be present with me, ye shades. If, O Pluto! thou hast them in thy keeping, I pray thee to grant them a brief furlough, that I may know them once more. Come, O Jenkins! bravest of men; come in that pea-green jacket, in which thou presentest thyself to the astonished Parley at the end of the travels in Europe. 'Tis a bleak night, and Parley, resting by his blazing fire from all his Continental labors, thinks, good soul! of his absent friends, and of course of thee, Jenkins. Presently a knock is heard at the door, and Parley, answering it--he kept no lounging John Thomases in his unostentatious establishment--beholds a pea-green jacket. Enters the jacket, and shakes itself. Wonders the simple Parley, not having the remotest idea, you know, who this intruding garment is. Can it be?--yes of course, it is--Jenkins. Is not that a grand _denouement_? I say the recognition of Orestes by Electra, in the Greek play, so much bragged about by the Scholiasts and that lot, is not fit to hold a candle to it, to speak metaphorically. Is it not Jenkins that I see in Asia, defending himself stoutly, in the midst of an arid plain, against a mounted Arab? The child of the desert is urging his barb straight upon the brave fellow. Hard by may be seen a small fire of sticks, which our hungry but injudicious friend has kindled, with a view to cooking him a mutton chop, or some such dainty. My wishes are for thy welfare, Jenkins! My blessings on thy valor, incomparable man! That is Leo, I think, that I see in such a heartrending condition on board, or rather on the boards of yonder wreck, while the omnipresent genius of Peter Parley is being tossed in wave-blankets some little way off. Yes, I know him; that _is_ Leo. Parley, the chivalrous Parley, saves his life upon that occasion, and earns his lasting gratitude. I doubt whether Leo's character will bear investigation; he comes to great grief in the end. But I like him for his grateful services to his deliverer; and I like him for the mysterious air there is about him, and for his thrilling adventures. He wanders all over the world in a black mantle, nobody knows why; at least I do not, and have no desire to know. I suppose he found a secret satisfaction in roaming everywhere inside that cloak, and that is enough for me. There are three pictures in the whole work that I feel an intense interest in; and one has to do with Leo. It is when he escapes from that prison built into the lake; just as the prisoner of Chillon would have been overjoyed to escape, had he had the knack and vigor of our hero. The particular scene of the act which the delightful artist (what was _his_ name? which are his pictures in the National Gallery?) has been good enough to delineate, is our Jack Shepherd holding on to his prison-window by the only remaining bar. Of course he is accompanied by the cloak, which the breezes of the night are swelling into a globular form. Some dozen feet below the cloak, sparkles in the moonlight the water, into which the fugitive proposes to drop, as soon as the artist has done with him. 'Tis a dismal prospect for thee, Leo. May the daughters of the lake bear up thy chin! I have a fond belief that he is not to be drowned at present. We are only in Asia now, and we shall want him many a time yet in the other two quarters. Who is that sailor I see crouching on that bank? Above his head is a most truculent-looking tiger; below him is an infuriated crocodile. Do you talk to me of dramatic effect, Aristarchus, in those tomes you are always maudling over? I defy you and your tribe, sirrah, to produce me a situation so breath-stopping, so blood-chilling, so every way effective, as the opening scene of Asia. That is a good hit in the Winter's Tale, by a play-wright called Shakspeare, when "exit Antigonus, pursued by a bear." But can it be compared--I appeal to all unprejudiced infants--with that first chapter of our Second Expedition? Was ever a mortal in so dire an extremity? Scylla and Charybdis, to my mind, are a joke to it. But Parley rescues him, and without any of your _Dei ex machina_; though, if there ever was a knot that seemed to require a Deity's fingers for its unravelling, this surely was it. Of course, he rescues him; for it is not Parley's way, whatever other people may do, to hurl his valiant souls prematurely into Hades, and make them a prey to dogs and vultures. I have said that there were three pictures in the Travels that especially entranced me, and I have mentioned one of them. Now for the other two. The first represents the famous Parley himself, the English Herodotus, playing with a spider in that unwholesome dungeon at Tripoli. Poor Parley! He had his little troubles now and then. There can be no doubt that he is in a tremendous scrape at this time. But his genial temper is unruffled; he makes friends at once with his tiny fellow-tenant, and I dare say is, even now, meditating some Tales of Insects for your and my benefit. He reminds me rather of Goldsmith, making observations for his History of the Earth and Animated Nature. There is the same innocence, the same benignity, the same childish look of innocence about him. I have no doubt the spider is become much attached to him. I lisp out my good wishes for thee, thou even-minded captive. I place my small palm upon thy unkempt head, and bless thee. We are not kept long in suspense about him. A night soon arrives when Leo's cloak insinuates itself into his cell, and a voice is heard in its folds saying, "Follow me," and Parley follows, even as St. Peter followed the angel, and they reach a wharf, and fire a pistol, and a boat pulls in to the shore, and they embark in it, and Parley is once more a free man, and addresses himself afresh to his travels. My last wood-cut portrays this indefatigable wanderer a second time oppressed by the hard fates. He is in America this time, and by some misfortune (a great good fortune to me and to you, my young brethren and sisters of the nursery) has been made the prey of an Indian tribe. _Me miserum!_ The savages have tied him to a tree. There are those hands that have guided that immortal pen through Europe, Asia, and Africa, corded stringently to a _triste lignum_ in America! There he stands, denuded of his raiment, and with a writhing expression all over him; for the sportive innocents of the tribe are amusing their leisure hours by shooting their youthful arrows at him. Yes; they are making a target of poor P. P. O! my fellow-students, think what this great heart suffers for us! During all that agony he is gathering information for our benefit, is writing for us another incomparable chapter, is taking stock of yonder wigwams. But the page is growing indistinct before me, and I hear voices saluting me from the nursery, not as a child, but as a veteran. Can it be? No; impossible! And Peter Parley and his brave company recede mournfully to their land, wherever it is, and my hair is a trifle grey, or that mirror lies. Farewell, my good Peter. Fare ye well, my stout Jenkins, my mysterious Leo, and all ye other fine fellows. I rejoice to have met you once more, and to have spent a pleasant hour with you, and talked over our old companionship. THE END. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors have been repaired. _Underscores_ surround italicized text. P. 73: Words surrounded <as shown here> are transliterated from the Greek script. 
726	----	A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION. by William Dean Howells It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menace of reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from it. A few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction to the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there was a counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled it back to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and the word "novel" is again the synonym of all that is morally false and mentally despicable. Yet that this, too, is partly apparent, I think can be shown from some phases of actual fiction which happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call "psychologism" has been present in the romanticism of the last four or five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with. I. No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives romanticism whatever will survive it. In "The Right of Way" Mr. Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is nothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one is important or unimportant according as things are happening to him or not, but has in himself no claim upon the reader's attention. Once more the novel begins to rise to its higher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters of their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well be chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is the devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength. Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he is from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger of remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much may be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless. I confess that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur, all but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged with murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of drunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where they have thrown him, and where his former client finds him. From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though I found myself more than once in the world where things happen of themselves and do not happen from the temperaments of its inhabitants. In a better and wiser world, the homicide would not perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist's affair is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world, the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we suspect a trick. When I suffered from this suspicion in "The Right of Way" I was the more vexed because I felt that I was in the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no need of miracles. I have liked Mr. Parker's treatment of French-Canadian life, as far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasures for me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure down cold, but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more than that of him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well as social, sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book, which is historical of the present rather than the past, he gives one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting temperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are still Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the frank expression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when they wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied spirit might have, if it could be made known to us in the circumstances of another world. He has, indeed, made almost as clean a break with his past as if he had really been drowned in the river. When, after the term of oblivion, in which he knows nothing of his past self, he is restored to his identity by a famous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit to his brother, the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors of his past, work out his redemption in his new life; and the author solves it for him by appointing him to a life of unselfish labor, illumined by actions of positive beneficence. It is something like the solution which Goethe imagines for Faust, and perhaps no other is imaginable. In contriving it, Mr. Parker indulges the weaker brethren with an abundance of accident and a luxury of catastrophe, which the reader interested in the psychology of the story may take as little account of as he likes. Without so much of them he might have made a sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as "The Scarlet Letter"; with them he has made a most picturesque romantic novel. His work, as I began by saying, or hinting, is the work of a poet, in conception, and I wish that in some details of diction it were as elect as the author's verse is. But one must not expect everything; and in what it is, "The Right of Way" satisfies a reasonable demand on the side of literature, while it more than meets a reasonable expectation on the side of psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch in contemporary noveling, and mounts far above the average best toward the day of better things which I hope it is not rash to image dawning. II. I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories by another poet. "The Ruling Passion," Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker's novel through kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the prevalence of psychologism over determinism in it. In the situations and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe that I like best among these charming things the two sketches--they are hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight," though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greater evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it. That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in fact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has felt rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than intentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that account, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for being frankly, however uninsistently, moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new world customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now faded economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution. III. Mr. William Allen White's method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke's. If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for it seems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating, so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is a picture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, and the photograph itself, though it may include, does not represent everything. Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproach the true painters of manners by calling them photographic, but I doubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censure of his conscientious work, and I am sure that now he would count it honor. He cannot be the admirable artist he is without knowing that it is the inwardness as well as the outwardness of men that he photographs, and if the reader does not know it, the worse for the reader. He is not the sort of reader who will rise from this book humiliated and fortified, as any reader worthy of it will. The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story, "The Man on Horseback," which, when I read it a few years ago in the magazine where it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect in its way that I should not have known how to better it. Of course, this is a good deal for a critic to say; it is something like abdicating his office; but I repeat it. It takes rather more courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it, for people do not much expect it of him, or altogether like it in him; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every moment honest. He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the other stories, "A Victory for the People," "A Triumph's Evidence," "The Mercy of Death," and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;" and where he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think it is because of his unconscious political bias, rather than anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to any sort of movement, and whose unfaithfulness does not necessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully good as the portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only from a little kindness. His story might have been called "The Man on Foot," by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or any of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the author's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort which gives his life to the man who is down. Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most men in the struggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally, almost as few as can be on top materially; and probably nothing will more surprise the saints at the judgment day than to find themselves in such a small minority. But probably not the saints alone will be saved, and it is some such hope that Mr. White has constantly in mind when making his constant appeal to conscience. It is, of course, a dramatic, not a didactic appeal. He preaches so little and is so effectively reticent that I could almost with he had left out the preface of his book, good as it is. Yes, just because it is so good I could wish he had left it out. It is a perfect justification of his purpose and methods, but they are their own justification with all who can think about them, and the others are themselves not worth thinking about. The stories are so bravely faithful to human nature in that political aspect which is but one phase of our whole average life that they are magnificently above all need of excusing or defending. They form a substantial body of political fiction, such as we have so long sighed for, and such as some of us will still go on sighing for quite as if it had not been supplied. Some others will be aware that it has been supplied in a form as artistically fine as the material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort of humanity is coarse and common except to those who themselves are so. The meaning that animates the stories is that our political opportunity is trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed and falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers the strongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim Gorky's wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of "Foma Gordyeeff" accuses conditions which we can only imagine with difficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strange book one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient of such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma's willingness to rot through vice into imbecility is as wise as anything else there. It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings, but we are no longer among the damned; with the worst there is a purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition of Dan Gregg then seems not the worst that could befall him; he might again have been governor. IV. If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell's very interesting novel of "Circumstance" do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky and those Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are always human with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society. They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it is when they give way to the natural man, and especially the natural woman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds Kitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in a way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, she is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in that moment of nature the thick air of good society seems to blow away and let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better than the good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers. They are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of the medical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only by his reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that can excuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of good principles and generous instincts. The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs. Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow to work her way to authority in the household of Kitty's uncle, where she displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kith and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather, she is a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; but she is limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She is bold up to a point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, but not to all lengths; and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep him from changing his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has not quite the courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not do it, and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful. The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt of those which have been committed; and the author does a good thing morally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still something of a problem to his reader. In most things she is almost too plain a case; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that a murderess should be; but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes and remains a mystery, and the reader does not get rid of her as he would if she had really done the deed. In the inferior exigencies she strikes fearlessly; and when the man who has divorced her looms up in her horizon with doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees to let her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least, made him unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is enough for her. Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am not sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has not met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she has the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious; she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at her making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am not sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's character. She is really a good girl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by those limitations of temper which I have already hinted. V. It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that of the half-caste heroine of "A Japanese Nightingale" and the young American whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them. It is far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is true to humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki and Bigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is of as palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door. If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college in America. When this brother comes back to Japan--he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty idyl--he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his sister's disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of the young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the kind that is characterized and does not characterize. The charm, the delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. Her father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort of marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English constancy which is not always so evident as in his case qualifies the daughter's nature. Her mother was, of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her own people--the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as in Philadelphia--because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in what makes her loveliest. There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette--it is hardly of the dimensions of a novel--which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassing lovableness. Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl could, I should think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana's book from going out and marrying Japanese girls. They are safe from this, however, for the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safely commended at least to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in the art of imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a long while. It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to note them. In fact, I have forgotten them. VI. I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of an author who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as the Japanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not our interest. Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality in acquiring literary quantity, and though his book, "The Marrow of Tradition," is of the same strong material as his earlier books, it is less simple throughout, and therefore less excellent in manner. At his worst, he is no worse than the higher average of the ordinary novelist, but he ought always to be very much better, for he began better, and he is of that race which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if it will not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown. He is fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap graces and poses of the jouster. He does, indeed, cast them all from him when he gets down to his work, and in the dramatic climaxes and closes of his story he shortens his weapons and deals his blows so absolutely without flourish that I have nothing but admiration for him. "The Marrow of Tradition," like everything else he has written, has to do with the relations of the blacks and whites, and in that republic of letters where all men are free and equal he stands up for his own people with a courage which has more justice than mercy in it. The book is, in fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in history why it should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it would be better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he is so inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor foibles may be, he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans may well be proud of; but while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he is too clearly of a judgment that is made up. One cannot blame him for that; what would one be one's self? If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago, what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity the argument of his fiction? Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel, and shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a legal government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not paint the blacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery made them on both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victory to the blacks--if he suffers the daughter of the black wife to have pity on her father's daughter by his white wife, and while her own child lies dead from a shot fired in the revolt, gives her husband's skill to save the life of her sister's child--it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or ethics are false. Those who would question either must allow, at least, that the negroes have had the greater practice in forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor his interpretation of the fact. No one who reads the book can deny that the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize in the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against which no series of hangings and burnings will finally avail. VII. In Mr. Chesnutt's novel the psychologism is of that universal implication which will distinguish itself to the observer from the psychologism of that more personal sort--the words are not as apt as I should like--evident in some of the interesting books under notice here. I have tried to say that it is none the less a work of art for that reason, and I can praise the art of another novel, in which the same sort of psychologism prevails, though I must confess it a fiction of the rankest tendenciousness. "Lay Down Your Arms" is the name of the English version of the Baroness von Suttner's story, "Die Waffen Nieder," which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on the continent of Europe. Its success there has been very great, and I wish its success on the continent of America could be so great that it might replace in the hands of our millions the baleful books which have lately been glorifying bloodshed in the private and public wars of the past, if not present. The wars which "Lay Down Your Arms" deals with are not quite immediate, and yet they are not so far off historically, either. They are the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose personal relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian lady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of soldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with her own, whom she first marries, makes love to her just before the outbreak of the war first named, she is as much in love with his soldiership as with himself. But when the call to arms comes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of war as she has never known before. He is killed in one of the battles of Italy, and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beau sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fights through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from love of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that he quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris. There the third war overtakes him, and in the siege, this Austrian, who has fought the Prussians to the death, is arrested by the communards as a Prussian spy and shot. The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of the intense passion of grief which fills it. Neither does it convey a due impression of the character in the different persons which, amidst the heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth and impartiality as pervade the effects of "War and Peace." I do not rank it with that work, but in its sincerity and veracity it easily ranks above any other novel treating of war which I know, and it ought to do for the German peoples what the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in at least one generation. Will it do anything for the Anglo-Saxon peoples? Probably not till we have pacified the Philippines and South Africa. We Americans are still apparently in love with fighting, though the English are apparently not so much so; and as it is always well to face the facts, I will transfer to my page some facts of fighting from this graphic book, which the read may apply to the actualities in the Philippines, with a little imagination. They are taken from a letter written to the heroine by her second husband after one of the Austrian defeats. "The people poured boiling water and oil on the Prussians from the windows of the houses at ----.... The village is ours--no, it is the enemy's, now ours again--and yet once more the enemy's; but it is no longer a village, but a smoking mass of ruins of houses....One family has remained behind...an old married couple and their daughter, the latter in childbed. The husband is serving in our regiment.... Poor devil! he got there just in time to see the mother and child die; a shell had exploded under their bed.... I saw a breastwork there which was formed of corpses. The defenders had heaped all the slain who were lying near, in order, from that rampart, to fire over at their assailants. I shall surely never forget that wall in my life. A man who formed one of its bricks was still alive, and was waving his arm.... What is happening there? The execution party is drawn out. Has a spy been caught? Seventeen this time. There they come, in four ranks, each one of four men, surrounded by a square of soldiers. The condemned men step out, with their heads down. Behind comes a cart with a corpse in it, and bound to the corpse the dead man's son, a boy of twelve, also condemned.... Steep, rocky heights; Jaegers, nimble as cats, climbing up them.... Some of them, who are hit by the enemy's shot, suddenly stretch out both their arms, let their muskets fall, and, with their heads falling backwards, drop off the height, step by step, from one rocky point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces. I saw a horseman at some distance, obliquely behind me, at whose side a shell burst. His horse swerved aside and came against the tail of mind, then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but a fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open and torn out all the intestines. The upper part of his body was held to the lower only by the spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great, bleeding cavity. A short distance farther he fell to the ground, one foot still clinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on over the stony soil.... Another street fight in the little town of Saar.... In the middle of the square stands a high pillar of the Virgin. The mother of God holds her child in one arm, and stretches the other out in blessing.... Here the fight was prolonged, man to man. They were hacking at me, I laying about me on all sides.... A Prussian dragoon, strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a pretty, dandified lieutenant--how many girls are, perhaps, mad after him?) out of his saddle and split his skull at the feet of the Virgin's pillar. The gentle saint looked on unmoved. Another of the enemy's dragoons--a Goliath, too--seized, just before me almost, my right-hand man, and bent him backwards in his saddle so powerfully that he broke his back--I myself heard it crack. To this the Madonna gave her blessing also." VIII. It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like the facts of Vereschagin's pictures, but like these they are imagined rather below than above the real horror of war, and represent them inadequately. The incidents of another book, the last on my list, are of the warfare which goes on in times of peace, and which will go on as long as there are human passions, and mankind are divided into men and women, and saints and sinners. Of all the books on my list, "Let Not Man Put Asunder" is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the author's intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. The story is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author, who cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel their reality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the important cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting us is so great that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our sensation, or to question the validity of our emotions. The action, which is positively of to-day, or yesterday at the furthest, passes in Boston and England, among people of such great fortune and high rank and transcendent fashion that the proudest reader cannot complain of their social quality. As to their moral quality, one might have thought the less said the better, if the author had not said so much that is pertinent and impressive. It is from first to last a book with a conscience in it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It is so very nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is with a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of surprise at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not shortcomings that impair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is the intimation of a mystical authority in marriage against which divorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and by virtue of which it claims eternally its own the lovers united in it; though they seem to become haters, it cannot release them to happiness in a new union through any human law. If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly dramatic) no more than this, he would have established his right to be taken seriously, but he has done very much more, and has made us acquainted with types and characters which we do not readily forget, and with characters much more real than their ambient. For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassalls live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwell are of a baroniality difficult of verification. Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in which it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed away, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so much regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy Boston, the decadent Boston. It is, of course, a Boston much worse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginably bad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high ideals is to a level lower than that of people who have never had them. As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it, she is so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book, though it does not make one hold one's breath like some of the dramatic episodes: "Whatever religious instinct had been in the family had spent itself at least two generations before her time. She was a pagan--a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan.... But she was none the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits of life, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effect will often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious one, a pagan with a New England conscience." This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of Petrina's sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are mighty well, too. "She had inherited a countenance whose expression was like the light which lingers in the sky long after sunset--the light of some ancestral fire gone out. If in her face there were prayers, they had been said by Pepperells and Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts churchyards. If in her voice there were tears, they had been shed by those who would weep no more. She mirrored the emotions she had never felt; and all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritual aspirations which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintive echo they had given to this woman's tone, and the light of petition they had left burning in her eyes." No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of "Let Not Man Put Asunder" can think subtly as well as say clearly, and the book abounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature in its lighter aspects. Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face, is a most amusing creature, with all her tragedy, and she is on the whole the most perfectly characterized personality in the story. The author gives you a real sense of her beauty, her grace, her being always charmingly in a hurry and always late. The greatest scene is hers: the scene in which she meets her divorced husband with his second wife. One may suspect some of the other scenes, but one must accept that scene as one of genuine dramatic worth. Too much of the drama in the book is theatre rather than drama, and yet the author's gift is essentially dramatic. He knows how to tell a story on his stage that holds you to the fall of the curtain, and makes you almost patient of the muted violins and the limelight of the closing scene. Such things, you say, do not happen in Brookline, Mass., whatever happens in London or in English country houses; and yet the people have at one time or other convinced you of their verity. Of the things that are not natural, you feel like saying that they are supernatural rather than unnatural, and you own that at its worst the book is worth while in a time when most novels are not worth while. Footnotes "The Right of Way." A Novel. By Gilbert Parker. Harper & Brothers. "The Ruling Passion. Tales of nature and human nature." By Henry Van Dyke. Charles Scribner's Sons. "Spoils and Stratagems Stories of love and politics." By Wm. Allen White. Charles Scribner's Sons. "Foma Gordyeeff." By Maxim Gorky. Translated from the Russian by Isabel F. Hapgood. Charles Scribner's Sons. "Circumstances." By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. The Century Company. "A Japanese Nightingale." By Onoto Watana. Harper & Brothers. "The Marrow of Tradition." By Charles W. Chesnutt. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. "Lay Down Your Arms. The autobiography of Martha von Tilling." By Bertha von Suttner. Authorized Translation. By T. Holmes. Longmans, Green & Co. "Let Not Man Put Asunder." By Basil King. Harper & Brothers. 
8088	----	PASSAGES FROM THE AMERICAN NOTE-BOOKS, VOLUME I By Nathaniel Hawthorne Salem, June 15, 1835.--A walk down to the Juniper. The shore of the coves strewn with bunches of sea-weed, driven in by recent winds. Eel-grass, rolled and bundled up, and entangled with it,--large marine vegetables, of an olive-color, with round, slender, snake-like stalks, four or five feet long, and nearly two feet broad: these are the herbage of the deep sea. Shoals of fishes, at a little distance from the shore, discernible by their fins out of water. Among the heaps of sea-weed there were sometimes small pieces of painted wood, bark, and other driftage. On the shore, with pebbles of granite, there were round or oval pieces of brick, which the waves had rolled about till they resembled a natural mineral. Huge stones tossed about, in every variety of confusion, some shagged all over with sea-weed, others only partly covered, others bare. The old ten-gun battery, at the outer angle of the Juniper, very verdant, and besprinkled with white-weed, clover, and buttercups. The juniper-trees are very aged and decayed and moss-grown. The grass about the hospital is rank, being trodden, probably, by nobody but myself. There is a representation of a vessel under sail, cut with a penknife, on the corner of the house. Returning by the almshouse, I stopped a good while to look at the pigs,--a great herd,--who seemed to be just finishing their suppers. They certainly are types of unmitigated sensuality,--some standing in the trough, in the midst of their own and others' victuals,--some thrusting their noses deep into the food,--some rubbing their backs against a post,--some huddled together between sleeping and waking, breathing hard,--all wallowing about; a great boar swaggering round, and a big sow waddling along with her huge paunch. Notwithstanding the unspeakable defilement with which these strange sensualists spice all their food, they seem to have a quick and delicate sense of smell. What ridiculous-looking animals! Swift himself could not have imagined anything nastier than what they practise by the mere impulse of natural genius. Yet the Shakers keep their pigs very clean, and with great advantage. The legion of devils in the herd of swine,--what a scene it must have been! Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright, comfortable light within its darksome stone wall. June 18th.--A walk in North Salem in the decline of yesterday afternoon, --beautiful weather, bright, sunny, with a western or northwestern wind just cool enough, and a slight superfluity of heat. The verdure, both of trees and grass, is now in its prime, the leaves elastic, all life. The grass-fields are plenteously bestrewn with white-weed, large spaces looking as white as a sheet of snow, at a distance, yet with an indescribably warmer tinge than snow,--living white, intermixed with living green. The hills and hollows beyond the Cold Spring copiously shaded, principally with oaks of good growth, and some walnut-trees, with the rich sun brightening in the midst of the open spaces, and mellowing and fading into the shade,--and single trees, with their cool spot of shade, in the waste of sun: quite a picture of beauty, gently picturesque. The surface of the land is so varied, with woodland mingled, that the eye cannot reach far away, except now and then in vistas perhaps across the river, showing houses, or a church and surrounding village, in Upper Beverly. In one of the sunny bits of pasture, walled irregularly in with oak-shade, I saw a gray mare feeding, and, as I drew near, a colt sprang up from amid the grass,--a very small colt. He looked me in the face, and I tried to startle him, so as to make him gallop; but he stretched his long legs, one after another, walked quietly to his mother, and began to suck,--just wetting his lips, not being very hungry. Then he rubbed his head, alternately, with each hind leg. He was a graceful little beast. I bathed in the cove, overhung with maples and walnuts, the water cool and thrilling. At a distance it sparkled bright and blue in the breeze and sun. There were jelly-fish swimming about, and several left to melt away on the shore. On the shore, sprouting amongst the sand and gravel, I found samphire, growing somewhat like asparagus. It is an excellent salad at this season, salt, yet with an herb-like vivacity, and very tender. I strolled slowly through the pastures, watching my long shadow making grave, fantastic gestures in the sun. It is a pretty sight to see the sunshine brightening the entrance of a road which shortly becomes deeply overshadowed by trees on both sides. At the Cold Spring, three little girls, from six to nine, were seated on the stones in which the fountain is set, and paddling in the water. It was a pretty picture, and would have been prettier, if they had shown bare little legs, instead of pantalets. Very large trees overhung them, and the sun was so nearly gone down that a pleasant gloom made the spot sombre, in contrast with these light and laughing little figures. On perceiving me, they rose up, tittering among themselves. It seemed that, there was a sort of playful malice in those who first saw me; for they allowed the other to keep on paddling, without warning her of my approach. I passed along, and heard them come chattering behind. June 22d.--I rode to Boston in the afternoon with Mr. Proctor. It was a coolish day, with clouds and intermitting sunshine, and a pretty fresh breeze. We stopped about an hour at the Maverick House, in the sprouting branch of the city, at East Boston,--a stylish house, with doors painted in imitation of oak; a large bar; bells ringing; the bar-keeper calls out, when a bell rings, "Number--"; then a waiter replies, "Number-- answered"; and scampers up stairs. A ticket is given by the hostler, on taking the horse and chaise, which is returned to the bar-keeper when the chaise is wanted. The landlord was fashionably dressed, with the whitest of linen, neatly plaited, and as courteous as a Lord Chamberlain. Visitors from Boston thronging the house,--some, standing at the bar, watching the process of preparing tumblers of punch,--others sitting at the windows of different parlors,--some with faces flushed, puffing cigars. The bill of fare for the day was stuck up beside the bar. Opposite this principal hotel there was another, called "The Mechanics," which seemed to be equally thronged. I suspect that the company were about on a par in each; for at the Maverick House, though well dressed, they seemed to be merely Sunday gentlemen,--mostly young fellows,--clerks in dry-goods stores being the aristocracy of them. One, very fashionable in appearance, with a handsome cane, happened to stop by me and lift up his foot, and I noticed that the sole of his boot (which was exquisitely polished) was all worn out. I apprehend that some such minor deficiencies might have been detected in the general showiness of most of them. There were girls, too, but not pretty ones, nor, on the whole, such good imitations of gentility as the young men. There were as many people as are usually collected at a muster, or on similar occasions, lounging about, without any apparent enjoyment; but the observation of this may serve me to make a sketch of the mode of spending the Sabbath by the majority of unmarried, young, middling-class people, near a great town. Most of the people had smart canes and bosom-pins. Crossing the ferry into Boston, we went to the City Tavern, where the bar-room presented a Sabbath scene of repose,--stage-folk lounging in chairs half asleep, smoking cigars, generally with clean linen and other niceties of apparel, to mark the day. The doors and blinds of an oyster and refreshment shop across the street were closed, but I saw people enter it. There were two owls in a back court, visible through a window of the bar-room,--speckled gray, with dark-blue eyes,--the queerest-looking birds that exist,--so solemn and wise,--dozing away the day, much like the rest of the people, only that they looked wiser than any others. Their hooked beaks looked like hooked noses. A dull scene this. A stranger, here and there, poring over a newspaper. Many of the stage-folk sitting in chairs on the pavement, in front of the door. We went to the top of the hill which formed part of Gardiner Greene's estate, and which is now in the process of levelling, and pretty much taken away, except the highest point, and a narrow path to ascend to it. It gives an admirable view of the city, being almost as high as the steeples and the dome of the State House, and overlooking the whole mass of brick buildings and slated roofs, with glimpses of streets far below. It was really a pity to take it down. I noticed the stump of a very large elm, recently felled. No house in the city could have reared its roof so high as the roots of that tree, if indeed the church-spires did so. On our drive home we passed through Charlestown. Stages in abundance were passing the road, burdened with passengers inside and out; also chaises and barouches, horsemen and footmen. We are a community of Sabbath-breakers. August 31st.--A drive to Nahant yesterday afternoon. Stopped at Rice's, and afterwards walked down to the steamboat wharf to see the passengers land. It is strange how few good faces there are in the world, comparatively to the ugly ones. Scarcely a single comely one in all this collection. Then to the hotel. Barouches at the doors, and gentlemen and ladies going to drive, and gentlemen smoking round the piazza. The bar-keeper had one of Benton's mint-drops for a bosom-brooch! It made a very handsome one. I crossed the beach for home about sunset. The tide was so far down as just to give me a passage on the hard sand, between the sea and the loose gravel. The sea was calm and smooth, with only the surf-waves whitening along the beach. Several ladies and gentlemen on horseback were cantering and galloping before and behind me. A hint of a story,--some incident which should bring on a general war; and the chief actor in the incident to have something corresponding to the mischief he had caused. September 7th--A drive to Ipswich with B------. At the tavern was an old, fat, country major, and another old fellow, laughing and playing off jokes on each other,--one tying a ribbon upon the other's hat. One had been a trumpeter to the major's troop. Walking about town, we knocked, for a whim, at the door of a dark old house, and inquired if Miss Hannah Lord lived there. A woman of about thirty came to the door, with rather a confused smile, and a disorder about the bosom of her dress, as if she had been disturbed while nursing her child. She answered us with great kindness. Entering the burial-ground, where some masons were building a tomb, we found a good many old monuments, and several covered with slabs of red freestone or slate, and with arms sculptured on the slab, or an inlaid circle of slate. On one slate gravestone, of the Rev. Nathl. Rogers, there was a portrait of that worthy, about a third of the size of life, carved in relief, with his cloak, band, and wig, in excellent preservation, all the buttons of his waistcoat being cut with great minuteness,--the minister's nose being on a level with his cheeks. It was an upright gravestone. Returning home, I held a colloquy with a young girl about the right road. She had come out to feed a pig, and was a little suspicious that we were making fun of her, yet answered us with a shy laugh and good-nature,--the pig all the time squealing for his dinner. Displayed along the walls, and suspended from the pillars of the original King's Chapel, were coats-of-arms of the king, the successive governors, and other distinguished men. In the pulpit there was an hour-glass on a large and elaborate brass stand. The organ was surmounted by a gilt crown in the centre, supported by a gilt mitre on each side. The governor's pew had Corinthian pillars, and crimson damask tapestry. In 1727 it was lined with china, probably tiles. Saint Augustin, at mass, charged all that were accursed to go out of the church. "Then a dead body arose, and went out of the church into the churchyard, with a white cloth on its head, and stood there till mass was over. It was a former lord of the manor, whom a curate had cursed because he refused to pay his tithes. A justice also commanded the dead curate to arise, and gave him a rod; and the dead lord, kneeling, received penance thereby." He then ordered the lord to go again to his grave, which he did, and fell immediately to ashes. Saint Augustin offered to pray for the curate, that he might remain on earth to confirm men in their belief; but the curate refused, because he was in the place of rest. A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,--a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of this idea. A change from a gay young girl to an old woman; the melancholy events, the effects of which have clustered around her character, and gradually imbued it with their influence, till she becomes a lover of sick-chambers, taking pleasure in receiving dying breaths and in laying out the dead; also having her mind full of funeral reminiscences, and possessing more acquaintances beneath the burial turf than above it. A well-concerted train of events to be thrown into confusion by some misplaced circumstance, unsuspected till the catastrophe, yet exerting its influence from beginning to end. On the common, at dusk, after a salute from two field-pieces, the smoke lay long and heavily on the ground, without much spreading beyond the original space over which it had gushed from the guns. It was about the height of a man. The evening clear, but with an autumnal chill. The world is so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest,--gayly dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves. A story, the hero of which is to be represented as naturally capable of deep and strong passion, and looking forward to the time when he shall feel passionate love, which is to be the great event of his existence. But it so chances that he never falls in love, and although he gives up the expectation of so doing, and marries calmly, yet it is somewhat sadly, with sentiments merely of esteem for his bride. The lady might be one who had loved him early in life, but whom then, in his expectation of passionate love, he had scorned. The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street-lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam. The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly. To represent the process by which sober truth gradually strips off all the beautiful draperies with which imagination has enveloped a beloved object, till from an angel she turns out to be a merely ordinary woman. This to be done without caricature, perhaps with a quiet humor interfused, but the prevailing impression to be a sad one. The story might consist of the various alterations in the feelings of the absent lover, caused by successive events that display the true character of his mistress; and the catastrophe should take place at their meeting, when he finds himself equally disappointed in her person; or the whole spirit of the thing may here be reproduced. Last evening, from the opposite shore of the North River, a view of the town mirrored in the water, which was as smooth as glass, with no perceptible tide or agitation, except a trifling swell and reflux on the sand, although the shadow of the moon danced in it. The picture of the town perfect in the water,--towers of churches, houses, with here and there a light gleaming near the shore above, and more faintly glimmering under water,--all perfect, but somewhat more hazy and indistinct than the reality. There were many clouds flitting about the sky; and the picture of each could be traced in the water,--the ghost of what was itself unsubstantial. The rattling of wheels heard long and far through the town. Voices of people talking on the other side of the river, the tones being so distinguishable in all their variations that it seemed as if what was there said might be understood; but it was not so. Two persons might be bitter enemies through life, and mutually cause the ruin of one another, and of all that were dear to them. Finally, meeting at the funeral of a grandchild, the offspring of a son and daughter married without their consent,--and who, as well as the child, had been the victims of their hatred,--they might discover that the supposed ground of the quarrel was altogether a mistake, and then be wofully reconciled. Two persons, by mutual agreement, to make their wills in each other's favor, then to wait impatiently for one another's death, and both to be informed of the desired event at the same time. Both, in most joyous sorrow, hasten to be present at the funeral, meet, and find themselves both hoaxed. The story of a man, cold and hard-hearted, and acknowledging no brotherhood with mankind. At his death they might try to dig him a grave, but, at a little space beneath the ground, strike upon a rock, as if the earth refused to receive the unnatural son into her bosom. Then they would put him into an old sepulchre, where the coffins and corpses were all turned to dust, and so he would be alone. Then the body would petrify; and he having died in some characteristic act and expression, he would seem, through endless ages of death, to repel society as in life, and no one would be buried in that tomb forever. Cannon transformed to church-bells. A person, even before middle age, may become musty and faded among the people with whom he has grown up from childhood; but, by migrating to a new place, he appears fresh with the effect of youth, which may be communicated from the impressions of others to his own feelings. In an old house, a mysterious knocking might be beard on the wall, where had formerly been a doorway, now bricked up. It might be stated, as the closing circumstance of a tale, that the body of one of the characters had been petrified, and still existed in that state. A young man to win the love of a girl, without any serious intentions, and to find that in that love, which might have been the greatest blessing of his life, he had conjured up a spirit of mischief which pursued him throughout his whole career,--and this without any revengeful purposes on the part of the deserted girl. Two lovers, or other persons, on the most private business, to appoint a meeting in what they supposed to be a place of the utmost solitude, and to find it thronged with people. October 17th.--Some of the oaks are now a deep brown red; others are changed to a light green, which, at a little distance, especially in the sunshine, looks like the green of early spring. In some trees, different masses of the foliage show each of these hues. Some of the walnut-trees have a yet more delicate green. Others are of a bright sunny yellow. Mr. ------ was married to Miss ------ last Wednesday. Yesterday Mr. Brazer, preaching on the comet, observed that not one, probably, of all who heard him, would witness its reappearance. Mrs. ------ shed tears. Poor soul! she would be contented to dwell in earthly love to all eternity! Some treasure or other thing to be buried, and a tree planted directly over the spot, so as to embrace it with its roots. A tree, tall and venerable, to be said by tradition to have been the staff of some famous man, who happened to thrust it into the ground, where it took root. A fellow without money, having a hundred and seventy miles to go, fastened a chain and padlock to his legs, and lay down to sleep in a field. He was apprehended, and carried gratis to a jail in the town whither he desired to go. An old volume in a large library,--every one to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was said to be a book of magic. A ghost seen by moonlight; when the moon was out, it would shine and melt through the airy substance of the ghost, as through a cloud. Prideaux, Bishop of Worcester, during the sway of the Parliament, was forced to support himself and his family by selling his household goods. A friend asked him, "How doth your lordship?" "Never better in my life," said the Bishop, "only I have too great a stomach; for I have eaten that little plate which the sequestrators left me. I have eaten a great library of excellent books. I have eaten a great deal of linen, much of my brass, some of my pewter, and now I am come to eat iron; and what will come next I know not." A scold and a blockhead,--brimstone and wood,--a good match. To make one's own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story. In a dream to wander to some place where may be heard the complaints of all the miserable on earth. Some common quality or circumstance that should bring together people the most unlike in all other respects, and make a brotherhood and sisterhood of them,--the rich and the proud finding themselves in the same category with the mean and the despised. A person to consider himself as the prime mover of certain remarkable events, but to discover that his actions have not contributed in the least thereto. Another person to be the cause, without suspecting it. October 25th.--A person or family long desires some particular good. At last it comes in such profusion as to be the great pest of their lives. A man, perhaps with a persuasion that he shall make his fortune by some singular means, and with an eager longing so to do, while digging or boring for water, to strike upon a salt-spring. To have one event operate in several places,--as, for example, if a man's head were to be cut off in one town, men's heads to drop off in several towns. Follow out the fantasy of a man taking his life by instalments, instead of at one payment,--say ten years of life alternately with ten years of suspended animation. Sentiments in a foreign language, which merely convey the sentiment without retaining to the reader any graces of style or harmony of sound, have somewhat of the charm of thoughts in one's own mind that have not yet been put into words. No possible words that we might adapt to them could realize the unshaped beauty that they appear to possess. This is the reason that translations are never satisfactory,--and less so, I should think, to one who cannot than to one who can pronounce the language. A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate,--he having made himself one of the personages. It is a singular thing, that, at the distance, say, of five feet, the work of the greatest dunce looks just as well as that of the greatest genius,--that little space being all the distance between genius and stupidity. Mrs. Sigourney says, after Coleridge, that "poetry has been its own exceeding great reward." For the writing, perhaps; but would it be so for the reading? Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one's genius. Salem, August 31st, 1836.--A walk, yesterday, down to the shore, near the hospital. Standing on the old grassy battery, that forms a semicircle, and looking seaward. The sun not a great way above the horizon, yet so far as to give a very golden brightness, when it shone out. Clouds in the vicinity of the sun, and nearly all the rest of the sky covered with clouds in masses, not a gray uniformity of cloud. A fresh breeze blowing from land seaward. If it had been blowing from the sea, it would have raised it in heavy billows, and caused it to dash high against the rocks. But now its surface was not at all commoved with billows; there was only roughness enough to take off the gleam, and give it the aspect of iron after cooling. The clouds above added to the black appearance. A few sea-birds were flitting over the water, only visible at moments, when they turned their white bosoms towards me,--as if they were then first created. The sunshine had a singular effect. The clouds would interpose in such a manner that some objects were shaded from it, while others were strongly illuminated. Some of the islands lay in the shade, dark and gloomy, while others were bright and favored spots. The white lighthouse was sometimes very cheerfully marked. There was a schooner about a mile from the shore, at anchor, laden apparently with lumber. The sea all about her had the black, iron aspect which I have described; but the vessel herself was alight. Hull, masts, and spars were all gilded, and the rigging was made of golden threads. A small white streak of foam breaking around the bows, which were towards the wind. The shadowiness of the clouds overhead made the effect of the sunlight strange, where it fell. September.--The elm-trees have golden branches intermingled with their green already, and so they had on the first of the month. To picture the predicament of worldly people, if admitted to paradise. As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin. "Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it,"--an extempore prayer by a New England divine. In old times it must have been much less customary than now to drink pure water. Walker emphatically mentions, among the sufferings of a clergyman's wife and family in the Great Rebellion, that they were forced to drink water, with crab-apples stamped in it to relish it. Mr. Kirby, author of a work on the History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals, questions whether there may not be an abyss of waters within the globe, communicating with the ocean, and whether the huge animals of the Saurian tribe--great reptiles, supposed to be exclusively antediluvian, and now extinct--may not be inhabitants of it. He quotes a passage from Revelation, where the creatures under the earth are spoken of as distinct from those of the sea, and speaks of a Saurian fossil that has been found deep in the subterranean regions. He thinks, or suggests, that these may be the dragons of Scripture. The elephant is not particularly sagacious in the wild state, but becomes so when tamed. The fox directly the contrary, and likewise the wolf. A modern Jewish adage,--"Let a man clothe himself beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife above his ability." It is said of the eagle, that, in however long a flight, he is never seen to clap his wings to his sides. He seems to govern his movements by the inclination of his wings and tail to the wind, as a ship is propelled by the action of the wind on her sails. In old country-houses in England, instead of glass for windows, they used wicker, or fine strips of oak disposed checkerwise. Horn was also used. The windows of princes and great noblemen were of crystal; those of Studley Castle, Holinshed says, of beryl. There were seldom chimneys; and they cooked their meats by a fire made against an iron back in the great hall. Houses, often of gentry, were built of a heavy timber frame, filled up with lath and plaster. People slept on rough mats or straw pallets, with a round log for a pillow; seldom better beds than a mattress, with a sack of chaff for a pillow. October 25th.--A walk yesterday through Dark Lane, and home through the village of Danvers. Landscape now wholly autumnal. Saw an elderly man laden with two dry, yellow, rustling bundles of Indian corn-stalks,--a good personification of Autumn. Another man hoeing up potatoes. Rows of white cabbages lay ripening. Fields of dry Indian corn. The grass has still considerable greenness. Wild rose-bushes devoid of leaves, with their deep, bright red seed-vessels. Meeting-house in Danvers seen at a distance, with the sun shining through the windows of its belfry. Barberry-bushes,--the leaves now of a brown red, still juicy and healthy; very few berries remaining, mostly frost-bitten and wilted. All among the yet green grass, dry stalks of weeds. The down of thistles occasionally seen flying through the sunny air. In this dismal chamber FAME was won. (Salem, Union Street.) Those who are very difficult in choosing wives seem as if they would take none of Nature's ready-made works, but want a woman manufactured particularly to their order. A council of the passengers in a street: called by somebody to decide upon some points important to him. Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not. A Thanksgiving dinner. All the miserable on earth are to be invited, --as the drunkard, the bereaved parent, the ruined merchant, the broken-hearted lover, the poor widow, the old man and woman who have outlived their generation, the disappointed author, the wounded, sick, and broken soldier, the diseased person, the infidel, the man with an evil conscience, little orphan children or children of neglectful parents, shall be admitted to the table, and many others. The giver of the feast goes out to deliver his invitations. Some of the guests he meets in the streets, some he knocks for at the doors of their houses. The description must be rapid. But who must be the giver of the feast, and what his claims to preside? A man who has never found out what he is fit for, who has unsettled aims or objects in life, and whose mind gnaws him, making him the sufferer of many kinds of misery. He should meet some pious, old, sorrowful person, with more outward calamities than any other, and invite him, with a reflection that piety would make all that miserable company truly thankful. Merry, in "merry England," does not mean mirthful; but is corrupted from an old Teutonic word signifying famous or renowned. In an old London newspaper, 1678, there is an advertisement, among other goods at auction, of a black girl, about fifteen years old, to be sold. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death. The race of mankind to be swept away, leaving all their cities and works. Then another human pair to be placed in the world, with native intelligence like Adam and Eve, but knowing nothing of their predecessors or of their own nature and destiny. They, perhaps, to be described as working out this knowledge by their sympathy with what they saw, and by their own feelings. Memorials of the family of Hawthorne in the church of the village of Dundry, Somersetshire, England. The church is ancient and small, and has a prodigiously high tower of more modern date, being erected in the time of Edward IV. It serves as a landmark for an amazing extent of country. A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes. A snake, taken into a man's stomach and nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion. A sketch illustrating the imperfect compensations which time makes for its devastations on the person,--giving a wreath of laurel while it causes baldness, honors for infirmities, wealth for a broken constitution,--and at last, when a man has everything that seems desirable, death seizes him. To contrast the man who has thus reached the summit of ambition with the ambitious youth. Walking along the track of the railroad, I observed a place where the workmen had bored a hole through the solid rock, in order to blast it; but, striking a spring of water beneath the rock, it gushed up through the hole. It looked as if the water were contained within the rock. A Fancy Ball, in which the prominent American writers should appear, dressed in character. A lament for life's wasted sunshine. A new classification of society to be instituted. Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed,--First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps them all through one darksome portal,--all his children. Fortune to come like a pedler with his goods,--as wreaths of laurel, diamonds, crowns; selling them, but asking for them the sacrifice of health, of integrity, perhaps of life in the battle-field, and of the real pleasures of existence. Who would buy, if the price were to be paid down? The dying exclamation of the Emperor Augustus, "Has it not been well acted?" An essay on the misery of being always under a mask. A veil may be needful, but never a mask. Instances of people who wear masks in all classes of society, and never take them off even in the most familiar moments, though sometimes they may chance to slip aside. The various guises under which Ruin makes his approaches to his victims: to the merchant, in the guise of a merchant offering speculations; to the young heir, a jolly companion; to the maiden, a sighing, sentimentalist lover. What were the contents of the burden of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress? He must have been taken for a pedler travelling with his pack. To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence: as, the clocks have struck, the dead have been buried. Curious to imagine what murmurings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,--as, for instance, death. Trifles to one are matters of life and death to another. As, for instance, a farmer desires a brisk breeze to winnow his grain; and mariners, to blow them out of the reach of pirates. A recluse, like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his chamber. Would it not be wiser for people to rejoice at all that they now sorrow for, and vice versa? To put on bridal garments at funerals, and mourning at weddings? For their friends to condole with them when they attained riches and honor, as only so much care added? If in a village it were a custom to hang a funeral garland or other token of death on a house where some one had died, and there to let it remain till a death occurred elsewhere, and then to hang that same garland over the other house, it would have, methinks, a strong effect. No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom. Fame! Some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it,--as, the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable,--and they are known to everybody; while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens. Something analogous in the world at large. The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere. Nobody will use other people's experience, nor has any of his own till it is too late to use it. Two lovers to plan the building of a pleasure-house on a certain spot of ground, but various seeming accidents prevent it. Once they find a group of miserable children there; once it is the scene where crime is plotted; at last the dead body of one of the lovers or of a dear friend is found there; and, instead of a pleasure-house, they build a marble tomb. The moral,--that there is no place on earth fit for the site of a pleasure-house, because there is no spot that may not have been saddened by human grief, stained by crime, or hallowed by death. It might be three friends who plan it, instead of two lovers; and the dearest one dies. Comfort for childless people. A married couple with ten children have been the means of bringing about ten funerals. A blind man on a dark night carried a torch, in order that people might see him, and not run against him, and direct him how to avoid dangers. To picture a child's (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer's day,--his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc. The blind man's walk. To picture a virtuous family, the different members examples of virtuous dispositions in their way; then introduce a vicious person, and trace out the relations that arise between him and them, and the manner in which all are affected. A man to flatter himself with the idea that he would not be guilty of some certain wickedness,---as, for instance, to yield to the personal temptations of the Devil,--yet to find, ultimately, that he was at that very time committing that same wickedness. What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude? A girl's lover to be slain and buried in her flower-garden, and the earth levelled over him. That particular spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers, produces them of admirable splendor, beauty, and perfume; and she delights, with an indescribable impulse, to wear them in her bosom, and scent her chamber with them. Thus the classic fantasy would be realized, of dead people transformed to flowers. Objects seen by a magic-lantern reversed. A street, or other location, might be presented, where there would be opportunity to bring forward all objects of worldly interest, and thus much pleasant satire might be the result. The Abyssinians, after dressing their hair, sleep with their heads in a forked stick, in order not to discompose it. At the battle of Edge Hill, October 23, 1642, Captain John Smith, a soldier of note, Captain Lieutenant to Lord James Stuart's horse, with only a groom, attacked a Parliament officer, three cuirassiers, and three arquebusiers, and rescued the royal standard, which they had taken and were guarding. Was this the Virginian Smith? Stephen Gowans supposed that the bodies of Adam and Eve were clothed in robes of light, which vanished after their sin. Lord Chancellor Clare, towards the close of his life, went to a village church, where he might not be known, to partake of the Sacrament. A missionary to the heathen in a great city, to describe his labors in the manner of a foreign mission. In the tenth century, mechanism of organs so clumsy, that one in Westminster Abbey, with four hundred pipes, required twenty-six bellows and seventy stout men. First organ ever known in Europe received by King Pepin, from the Emperor Constantine, in 757. Water boiling was kept in a reservoir under the pipes; and, the keys being struck, the valves opened, and steam rushed through with noise. The secret of working them thus is now lost. Then came bellows organs, first used by Louis le Debonnaire. After the siege of Antwerp, the children played marbles in the streets with grape and cannon shot. A shell, in falling, buries itself in the earth, and, when it explodes, a large pit is made by the earth being blown about in all directions,-- large enough, sometimes, to hold three or four cart-loads of earth. The holes are circular. A French artillery-man being buried in his military cloak on the ramparts, a shell exploded, and unburied him. In the Netherlands, to form hedges, young trees are interwoven into a sort of lattice-work; and, in time, they grow together at the point of junction, so that the fence is all of one piece. To show the effect of gratified revenge. As an instance, merely, suppose a woman sues her lover for breach of promise, and gets the money by instalments, through a long series of years. At last, when the miserable victim were utterly trodden down, the triumpher would have become a very devil of evil passions,--they having overgrown his whole nature; so that a far greater evil would have come upon himself than on his victim. Anciently, when long-buried bodies were found undecayed in the grave, a species of sanctity was attributed to them. Some chimneys of ancient halls used to be swept by having a culverin fired up them. At Leith, in 1711, a glass bottle was blown of the capacity of two English bushels. The buff and blue of the Union were adopted by Fox and the Whig party in England. The Prince of Wales wore them. In 1621, a Mr. Copinger left a certain charity, an almshouse, of which four poor persons were to partake, after the death of his eldest son and his wife. It was a tenement and yard. The parson, head-boroughs, and his five other sons were to appoint the persons. At the time specified, however, all but one of his sons were dead; and he was in such poor circumstances that he obtained the benefit of the charity for himself, as one of the four. A town clerk arranges the publishments that are given in, according to his own judgment. To make a story from Robert Raikes seeing dirty children at play, in the streets of London, and inquiring of a woman about them. She tells him that on Sundays, when they were not employed, they were a great deal worse, making the streets like hell; playing at church, etc. He was therefore induced to employ women at a shilling to teach them on Sundays, and thus Sunday schools were established. To represent the different departments of the United States government by village functionaries. The War Department by watchmen, the law by constables, the merchants by a variety store, etc. At the accession of Bloody Mary, a man, coming into a house, sounded three times with his mouth, as with a trumpet, and then made proclamation to the family. A bonfire was built, and little children were made to carry wood to it, that they might remember the circumstance in old age. Meat and drink were provided at the bonfires. To describe a boyish combat with snowballs, and the victorious leader to have a statue of snow erected to him. A satire on ambition and fame to be made out of this idea. It might be a child's story. Our body to be possessed by two different spirits; so that half of the visage shall express one mood, and the other half another. An old English sea-captain desires to have a fast-sailing ship, to keep a good table, and to sail between the tropics without making land. A rich man left by will his mansion and estate to a poor couple. They remove into it, and find there a darksome servant, whom they are forbidden by will to turn away. He becomes a torment to them; and, in the finale, he turns out to be the former master of the estate. Two persons to be expecting some occurrence, and watching for the two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors. There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity. To imagine such circumstances. A woman, tempted to be false to her husband, apparently through mere whim,--or a young man to feel an instinctive thirst for blood, and to commit murder. This appetite may be traced in the popularity of criminal trials. The appetite might be observed first in a child, and then traced upwards, manifesting itself in crimes suited to every stage of life. The good deeds in an evil life,--the generous, noble, and excellent actions done by people habitually wicked,--to ask what is to become of them. A satirical article might be made out of the idea of an imaginary museum, containing such articles as Aaron's rod, the petticoat of General Harrison, the pistol with which Benton shot Jackson,--and then a diorama, consisting of political or other scenes, or done in wax-work. The idea to be wrought out and extended. Perhaps it might be the museum of a deceased old man. An article might be made respecting various kinds of ruin,--ruin as regards property,--ruin of health,--ruin of habits, as drunkenness and all kinds of debauchery,--ruin of character, while prosperous in other respects,--ruin of the soul. Ruin, perhaps, might be personified as a demon, seizing its victims by various holds. An article on fire, on smoke. Diseases of the mind and soul,--even more common than bodily diseases. Tarleton, of the Revolution, is said to have been one of the two handsomest men in Europe,--the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., being the other. Some authorities, however, have represented him as ungainly in person and rough in manners. Tarleton was originally bred to the law, but quitted law for the army early in life. He was son to a mayor of Liverpool, born in 1754, of ancient family. He wrote his own memoirs after returning from America. Afterwards in Parliament. Never afterwards distinguished in arms. Created baronet in 1818, and died childless in 1833. Thought he was not sufficiently honored among more modern heroes. Lost part of his right hand in battle of Guilford Court House. A man of pleasure in England. It would be a good idea for a painter to paint a picture of a great actor, representing him in several different characters of one scene,-- Iago and Othello, for instance. Maine, July 5th, 1837.--Here I am, settled since night before last with B------, and living very singularly. He leads a bachelor's life in his paternal mansion, only a small part of which is occupied by a family who serve him. He provides his own breakfast and supper, and occasionally his dinner; though this is oftener, I believe, taken at the hotel, or an eating-house, or with some of his relatives. I am his guest, and my presence makes no alteration in his way of life. Our fare, thus far, has consisted of bread, butter, and cheese, crackers, herrings, boiled eggs, coffee, milk, and claret wine. He has another inmate, in the person of a queer little Frenchman, who has his breakfast, tea, and lodging here, and finds his dinner elsewhere. Monsieur S------ does not appear to be more than twenty-one years old,--a diminutive figure, with eyes askew, and otherwise of an ungainly physiognomy; he is ill-dressed also, in a coarse blue coat, thin cotton pantaloons, and unbrushed boots; altogether with as little of French coxcombry as can well be imagined, though with something of the monkey aspect inseparable from a little Frenchman. He is, nevertheless, an intelligent and well-informed man, apparently of extensive reading in his own language,--a philosopher, B------ tells me, and an infidel. His insignificant personal appearance stands in the way of his success, and prevents him from receiving the respect which is really due to his talents and acquirements; wherefore he is bitterly dissatisfied with the country and its inhabitants, and often expresses his feelings to B------ (who has gained his confidence to a certain degree) in very strong terms. Thus here are three characters, each with something out of the common way, living together somewhat like monks. B------, our host, combines more high and admirable qualities, of that sort which make up a gentleman, than any other that I have met with. Polished, yet natural, frank, open, and straightforward, yet with a delicate feeling for the sensitiveness of his companions; of excellent temper and warm heart; well acquainted with the world, with a keen faculty of observation, which he has had many opportunities of exercising, and never varying from a code of honor and principle which is really nice and rigid in its way. There is a sort of philosophy developing itself in him which will not impossibly cause him to settle down in this or some other equally singular course of life. He seems almost to have made up his mind never to be married, which I wonder at; for he has strong affections, and is fond both of women and children. The little Frenchman impresses me very strongly, too,--so lonely as he is here, struggling against the world, with bitter feelings in his breast, and yet talking with the vivacity and gayety of his nation; making this his home from darkness to daylight, and enjoying here what little domestic comfort and confidence there is for him; and then going about all the livelong day, teaching French to blockheads who sneer at him, and returning at about ten o'clock in the evening (for I was wrong in saying he supped here,--he eats no supper) to his solitary room and bed. Before retiring, he goes to B------'s bedside, and, if he finds him awake, stands talking French, expressing his dislike of the Americans, "Je hais, je hais les Yankees!"--thus giving vent to the stifled bitterness of the whole day. In the morning I hear him getting up early, at sunrise or before, humming to himself, scuffling about his chamber with his thick boots, and at last taking his departure for a solitary ramble till breakfast. Then he comes in, cheerful and vivacious enough, eats pretty heartily, and is off again, singing French chansons as he goes down the gravel-walk. The poor fellow has nobody to sympathize with him but B------, and thus a singular connection is established between two utterly different characters. Then here is myself, who am likewise a queer character in my way, and have come to spend a week or two with my friend of half a lifetime,--the longest space, probably, that we are ever destined to spend together; for Fate seems preparing changes for both of us. My circumstances, at least, cannot long continue as they are and have been; and B------, too, stands between high prosperity and utter ruin. I think I should soon become strongly attached to our way of life, so independent and untroubled by the forms and restrictions of society. The house is very pleasantly situated,--half a mile distant from where the town begins to be thickly settled, and on a swell of land, with the road running at a distance of fifty yards, and a grassy tract and a gravel-walk between. Beyond the road rolls the Kennebec, here two or three hundred yards wide. Putting my head out of the window, I can see it flowing steadily along straightway between wooded banks; but arriving nearly opposite the house, there is a large and level sand island in the middle of the stream; and just below the island the current is further interrupted by the works of the mill-dam, which is perhaps half finished, yet still in so rude a state that it looks as much like the ruins of a dam destroyed by the spring freshets as like the foundations of a dam yet to be. Irishmen and Canadians toil at work on it, and the echoes of their hammering and of the voices come across the river and up to this window. Then there is a sound of the wind among the trees round the house; and, when that is silent, the calm, full, distant voice of the river becomes audible. Looking downward thither, I see the rush of the current, and mark the different eddies, with here and there white specks or streaks of foam; and often a log comes floating on, glistening in the sun, as it rolls over among the eddies, having voyaged, for aught I know, hundreds of miles from the wild upper sources of the river, passing down, down, between lines of forest, and sometimes a rough clearing, till here it floats by cultivated banks, and will soon pass by the village. Sometimes a long raft of boards comes along, requiring the nicest skill in navigating it through the narrow passage left by the mill-dam. Chaises and wagons occasionally go over the road, the riders all giving a passing glance at the dam, or perhaps alighting to examine it more fully, and at last departing with ominous shakes of the head as to the result of the enterprise. My position is so far retired from the river and mill-dam, that, though the latter is really rather a scene, yet a sort of quiet seems to be diffused over the whole. Two or three times a day this quiet is broken by the sudden thunder from a quarry, where the workmen are blasting rocks; and a peal of thunder sounds strangely in such a green, sunny, and quiet landscape, with the blue sky brightening the river. I have not seen much of the people. There have been, however, several incidents which amused me, though scarcely worth telling. A passionate tavern-keeper, quick as a flash of gunpowder, a nervous man, and showing in his demeanor, it seems, a consciousness of his infirmity of temper. I was a witness of a scuffle of his with a drunken guest. The tavern-keeper, after they were separated, raved like a madman, and in a tone of voice having a drolly pathetic or lamentable sound mingled with its rage, as if he were lifting up his voice to weep. Then he jumped into a chaise which was standing by, whipped up the horse, and drove off rapidly, as if to give his fury vent in that way. On the morning of the Fourth of July, two printer's apprentice-lads, nearly grown, dressed in jackets and very tight pantaloons of check, tight as their skins, so that they looked like harlequins or circus-clowns, yet appeared to think themselves in perfect propriety, with a very calm and quiet assurance of the admiration of the town. A common fellow, a carpenter, who, on the strength of political partisanship, asked B------'s assistance in cutting out great letters from play-bills in order to print "Martin Van Buren Forever" on a flag; but B------ refused. B------ seems to be considerably of a favorite with the lower orders, especially with the Irishmen and French Canadians,--the latter accosting him in the street, and asking his assistance as an interpreter in making their bargains for work. I meant to dine at the hotel with B------ to-day; but having returned to the house, leaving him to do some business in the village, I found myself unwilling to move when the dinner-hour approached, and therefore dined very well on bread, cheese, and eggs. Nothing of much interest takes place. We live very comfortably in our bachelor establishment on a cold shoulder of mutton, with ham and smoked beef and boiled eggs; and as to drinkables, we had both claret and brown sherry on the dinner-table to-day. Last evening we had along literary and philosophical conversation with Monsieur S------. He is rather remarkably well-informed for a man of his age, and seems to have very just notions on ethics, etc., though damnably perverted as to religion. It is strange to hear philosophy of any sort from such a boyish figure. "We philosophers," he is fond of saying, to distinguish himself and his brethren from the Christians. One of his oddities is, that, while steadfastly maintaining an opinion that he is a very small and slow eater, and that we, in common with other Yankees, eat immensely and fast, he actually eats both faster and longer than we do, and devours, as B------avers, more victuals than both of us together. Saturday, July 8th.--Yesterday afternoon, a stroll with B------ up a large brook, he fishing for trout, and I looking on. The brook runs through a valley, on one side bordered by a high and precipitous bank; on the other there is an interval, and then the bank rises upward and upward into a high hill with gorges and ravines separating one summit from another, and here and there are bare places, where the rain-streams have washed away the grass. The brook is bestrewn with stones, some bare, some partially moss-grown, and sometimes so huge as--once at least--to occupy almost the whole breadth of the current. Amongst these the stream brawls, only that this word does not express its good-natured voice, and "murmur" is too quiet. It sings along, sometimes smooth, with the pebbles visible beneath, sometimes rushing dark and swift, eddying and whitening past some rock, or underneath the hither or the farther bank; and at these places B------ cast his line, and sometimes drew out a trout, small, not more than five or six inches long. The farther we went up the brook, the wilder it grew. The opposite bank was covered with pines and hemlocks, ascending high upwards, black and solemn. One knew that there must be almost a precipice behind, yet we could not see it. At the foot you could spy, a little way within the darksome shade, the roots and branches of the trees; but soon all sight was obstructed amidst the trunks. On the hither side, at first the bank was bare, then fringed with alder-bushes, bending and dipping into the stream, which, farther on, flowed through the midst of a forest of maple, beech, and other trees, its course growing wilder and wilder as we proceeded. For a considerable distance there was a causeway, built long ago of logs, to drag lumber upon; it was now decayed and rotten, a red decay, sometimes sunken down in the midst, here and there a knotty trunk stretching across, apparently sound. The sun being now low towards the west, a pleasant gloom and brightness were diffused through the forest, spots of brightness scattered upon the branches, or thrown down in gold upon the last year's leaves among the trees. At last we came to where a dam had been built across the brook many years ago, and was now gone to ruin, so as to make the spot look more solitary and wilder than if man had never left vestiges of his toil there. It was a framework of logs with a covering of plank sufficient to obstruct the onward flow of the brook; but it found its way past the side, and came foaming and struggling along among scattered rocks. Above the dam there was a broad and deep pool, one side of which was bordered by a precipitous wall of rocks, as smooth as if hewn out and squared, and piled one upon another, above which rose the forest. On the other side there was still a gently shelving bank, and the shore was covered with tall trees, among which I particularly remarked a stately pine, wholly devoid of bark, rising white in aged and majestic ruin, thrusting out its barkless arms. It must have stood there in death many years, its own ghost. Above the dam the brook flowed through the forest, a glistening and babbling water-path, illuminated by the sun, which sent its rays almost straight along its course. It was as lovely and wild and peaceful as it could possibly have been a hundred years ago; and the traces of labors of men long departed added a deeper peace to it. I bathed in the pool, and then pursued my way down beside the brook, growing dark with a pleasant gloom, as the sun sank and the water became more shadowy. B------ says that there was formerly a tradition that the Indians used to go up this brook, and return, after a brief absence, with large masses of lead, which they sold at the trading-stations in Augusta; whence there has always been an idea that there is a lead-mine hereabouts. Great toadstools were under the trees, and some small ones as yellow and almost the size of a half-broiled yolk of an egg. Strawberries were scattered along the brookside. Dined at the hotel or Mansion House to-day. Men were playing checkers in the parlor. The Marshal of Maine, a corpulent, jolly fellow, famed for humor. A passenger left by the stage, hiring an express onward. A bottle of champagne was quaffed at the bar. July 9th.--Went with B------ to pay a visit to the shanties of the Irish and Canadians. He says that they sell and exchange these small houses among themselves continually. They may be built in three or four days, and are valued at four or five dollars. When the turf that is piled against the walls of some of them becomes covered with grass, it makes quite a picturesque object. It was almost dusk--just candle-lighting time--when we visited them. A young Frenchwoman, with a baby in her arms, came to the door of one of them, smiling, and looking pretty and happy. Her husband, a dark, black-haired, lively little fellow, caressed the child, laughing and singing to it; and there was a red-bearded Irishman, who likewise fondled the little brat. Then we could hear them within the hut, gabbling merrily, and could see them moving about briskly in the candlelight, through the window and open door. An old Irishwoman sat in the door of another hut, under the influence of an extra dose of rum,--she being an old lady of somewhat dissipated habits. She called to B------, and began to talk to him about her resolution not to give up her house: for it is his design to get her out of it. She is a true virago, and, though somewhat restrained by respect for him, she evinced a sturdy design to remain here through the winter, or at least for a considerable time longer. He persisting, she took her stand in the doorway of the hut, and stretched out her fist in a very Amazonian attitude. "Nobody," quoth she, "shall drive me out of this house, till my praties are out of the ground." Then would she wheedle and laugh and blarney, beginning in a rage, and ending as if she had been in jest. Meanwhile her husband stood by very quiet, occasionally trying to still her; but it is to be presumed, that, after our departure, they came to blows, it being a custom with the Irish husbands and wives to settle their disputes with blows; and it is said the woman often proves the better man. The different families also have battles, and occasionally the Irish fight with the Canadians. The latter, however, are much the more peaceable, never quarrelling among themselves, and seldom with their neighbors. They are frugal, and often go back to Canada with considerable sums of money. B------ has gained much influence both with the Irish and the French,--with the latter, by dint of speaking to them in their own language. He is the umpire in their disputes, and their adviser, and they look up to him as a protector and patron-friend. I have been struck to see with what careful integrity and wisdom he manages matters among them, hitherto having known him only as a free and gay young man. He appears perfectly to understand their general character, of which he gives no very flattering description. In these huts, less than twenty feet square, he tells me that upwards of twenty people have sometimes been lodged. A description of a young lady who had formerly been insane, and now felt the approach of a new fit of madness. She had been out to ride, had exerted herself much, and had been very vivacious. On her return, she sat down in a thoughtful and despondent attitude, looking very sad, but one of the loveliest objects that ever were seen. The family spoke to her, but she made no answer, nor took the least notice; but still sat like a statue in her chair,--a statue of melancholy and beauty. At last they led her away to her chamber. We went to meeting this forenoon. I saw nothing remarkable, unless a little girl in the next pew to us, three or four years old, who fell asleep, with her bead in the lap of her maid, and looked very pretty: a picture of sleeping innocence. July 11th, Tuesday.--A drive with B------ to Hallowell, yesterday, where we dined, and afterwards to Gardiner. The most curious object in this latter place was the elegant new mansion of ------. It stands on the site of his former dwelling, which was destroyed by fire. The new building was estimated to cost about thirty thousand dollars; but twice as much has already been expended, and a great deal more will be required to complete it. It is certainly a splendid structure; the material, granite from the vicinity. At the angles it has small, circular towers; the portal is lofty and imposing. Relatively to the general style of domestic architecture in our country, it well deserves the name of castle or palace. Its situation, too, is fine, far retired from the public road, and attainable by a winding carriage-drive; standing amid fertile fields, and with large trees in the vicinity. There is also a beautiful view from the mansion, adown the Kennebec. Beneath some of the large trees we saw the remains of circular seats, whereupon the family used to sit before the former house was burned down. There was no one now in the vicinity of the place, save a man and a yoke of oxen; and what he was about, I did not ascertain. Mr. ------ at present resides in a small dwelling, little more than a cottage, beside the main road, not far from the gateway which gives access to his palace. At Gardiner, on the wharf, I witnessed the starting of the steamboat New England for Boston. There was quite a collection of people, looking on or taking leave of passengers,--the steam puffing,--stages arriving, full-freighted with ladies and gentlemen. A man was one moment too late; but running along the gunwale of a mud-scow, and jumping into a skiff, he was put on board by a black fellow. The dark cabin, wherein, descending from the sunshiny deck, it was difficult to discern the furniture, looking-glasses, and mahogany wainscoting. I met two old college acquaintances, O------, who was going to Boston, and B------ with whom we afterwards drank a glass of wine at the hotel. B------, Mons. S------, and myself continue to live in the same style as heretofore. We appear mutually to be very well pleased with each other. Mons. S------ displays many comical qualities, and manages to insure us several hearty laughs every morning and evening,--those being the seasons when we meet. I am going to take lessons from him in the pronunciation of French. Of female society I see nothing. The only petticoat that comes within our premises appertains to Nancy, the pretty, dark-eyed maid-servant of the man who lives in the other part of the house. On the road from Hallowell to Augusta we saw little booths, in two places, erected on the roadside, where boys offered beer, apples, etc., for sale. We passed an Irishwoman with a child in her arms, and a heavy bundle, and afterwards an Irishman with a light bundle, sitting by the highway. They were husband and wife; and B------ says that an Irishman and his wife, on their journeys, do not usually walk side by side, but that the man gives the woman the heaviest burden to carry, and walks on lightly ahead! A thought comes into my mind: Which sort of house excites the most contemptuous feelings in the beholder,--such a house as Mr.------'s, all circumstances considered, or the board-built and turf-buttressed hovels of these wild Irish, scattered about as if they had sprung up like mushrooms, in the dells and gorges, and along the banks of the river? Mushrooms, by the way, spring up where the roots of an old tree are hidden under the ground. Thursday, July 13th.--Two small Canadian boys came to our house yesterday, with strawberries to sell. It sounds strangely to hear children bargaining in French on the borders of Yankee-land. Among other languages spoken hereabouts must be reckoned the wild Irish. Some of the laborers on the mill-dam can speak nothing else. The intermixture of foreigners sometimes gives rise to quarrels between them and the natives. As we were going to the village yesterday afternoon, we witnessed the beginning of a quarrel between a Canadian and a Yankee,--the latter accusing the former of striking his oxen. B------ thrust himself between and parted them; but they afterwards renewed their fray, and the Canadian, I believe, thrashed the Yankee soundly,--for which he had to pay twelve dollars. Yet he was but a little fellow. Coming to the Mansion House about supper-time, we found somewhat of a concourse of people, the Governor and Council being in session on the subject of the disputed territory. The British have lately imprisoned a man who was sent to take the census; and the Mainiacs are much excited on the subject. They wish the Governor to order out the militia at once, and take possession of the territory with the strong hand. There was a British army-captain at the Mansion House; and an idea was thrown out that it would be as well to seize upon him as a hostage. I would, for the joke's sake, that it had been done. Personages at the tavern: the Governor, somewhat stared after as he walked through the bar-room; Councillors seated about, sitting on benches near the bar, or on the stoop along the front of the house; the Adjutant-General of the State; two young Blue-Noses, from Canada or the Provinces; a gentleman "thumbing his hat" for liquor, or perhaps playing off the trick of the "honest landlord" on some stranger. The decanters and wine-bottles on the move, and the beer and soda founts pouring out continual streams, with a whiz. Stage-drivers, etc., asked to drink with the aristocracy, and mine host treating and being treated. Rubicund faces; breaths odorous of brandy-and-water. Occasionally the pop of a champagne cork. Returned home, and took a lesson in French of Mons. S------. I like him very much, and have seldom met with a more honest, simple, and apparently so well-principled a man; which good qualities I impute to his being, by the father's side, of German blood. He looks more like a German--or, as he says, like a Swiss--than a Frenchman, having very light hair and a light complexion, and not a French expression. He is a vivacious little fellow, and wonderfully excitable to mirth; and it is truly a sight to see him laugh;--every feature partakes of his movement, and even his whole body shares in it, as he rises and dances about the room. He has great variety of conversation, commensurate with his experiences in life, and sometimes will talk Spanish, ore rotundo,--sometimes imitate the Catholic priests, chanting Latin songs for the dead, in deep, gruff, awful tones, producing really a very strong impression,--then he will break out into a light, French song, perhaps of love, perhaps of war, acting it out, as if on the stage of a theatre: all this intermingled with continual fun, excited by the incidents of the passing moment. He has Frenchified all our names, calling B------ Monsieur Du Pont, myself M. de L'Aubepine, and himself M. le Berger, and all, Knights of the Round-Table. And we live in great harmony and brotherhood, as queer a life as anybody leads, and as queer a set as may be found anywhere. In his more serious intervals, he talks philosophy and deism, and preaches obedience to the law of reason and morality; which law he says (and I believe him) he has so well observed, that, notwithstanding his residence in dissolute countries, he has never yet been sinful. He wishes me, eight or nine weeks hence, to accompany him on foot to Quebec, and then to Niagara and New York. I should like it well, if my circumstances and other considerations would permit. What pleases much in Mons. S------ is the simple and childlike enjoyment he finds in trifles, and the joy with which he speaks of going back to his own country, away from the dull Yankees, who here misunderstand and despise him. Yet I have never heard him speak harshly of them. I rather think that B------ and I will be remembered by him with more pleasure than anybody else in the country; for we have sympathized with him, and treated him kindly, and like a gentleman and an equal; and he comes to us at night as to home and friends. I went down to the river to-day to see B------ fish for salmon with a fly,--a hopeless business; for he says that only one instance has been known in the United States of salmon being taken otherwise than with a net. A few chubs were all the fruit of his piscatory efforts. But while looking at the rushing and rippling stream, I saw a great fish, some six feet long and thick in proportion, suddenly emerge at whole length, turn a somerset, and then vanish again beneath the water. It was of a glistening, yellowish brown, with its fins all spread, and looking very strange and startling, darting out so lifelike from the black water, throwing itself fully into the bright sunshine, and then lost to sight and to pursuit. I saw also a long, flat-bottomed boat go up the river, with a brisk wind, and against a strong stream. Its sails were of curious construction: a long mast, with two sails below, one on each side of the boat, and a broader one surmounting them. The sails were colored brown, and appeared like leather or skins, but were really cloth. At a distance, the vessel looked like, or at least I compared it to, a monstrous water-insect skimming along the river. If the sails had been crimson or yellow, the resemblance would have been much closer. There was a pretty spacious raised cabin in the after part of the boat. It moved along lightly, and disappeared between the woody banks. These boats have the two parallel sails attached to the same yard, and some have two sails, one surmounting the other. They trade to Waterville and thereabouts,--names, as "Paul Pry," on their sails. Saturday, July 15th.--Went with B------ yesterday to visit several Irish shanties, endeavoring to find out who had stolen some rails of a fence. At the first door at which we knocked (a shanty with an earthen mound heaped against the wall, two or three feet thick), the inmates were not up, though it was past eight o'clock. At last a middle-aged woman showed herself, half dressed, and completing her toilet. Threats were made of tearing down her house; for she is a lady of very indifferent morals, and sells rum. Few of these people are connected with the mill-dam,--or, at least, many are not so, but have intruded themselves into the vacant huts which were occupied by the mill-dam people last year. In two or three places hereabouts there is quite a village of these dwellings, with a clay and board chimney, or oftener an old barrel, smoked and charred with the fire. Some of their roofs are covered with sods, and appear almost subterranean. One of the little hamlets stands on both sides of a deep dell, wooded and bush-grown, with a vista, as it were, into the heart of a wood in one direction, and to the broad, sunny river in the other: there was a little rivulet, crossed by a plank, at the bottom of the dell. At two doors we saw very pretty and modest-looking young women,-- one with a child in her arms. Indeed, they all have innumerable little children; and they are invariably in good health, though always dirty of face. They come to the door while their mothers are talking with the visitors, standing straight up on their bare legs, with their little plump bodies protruding, in one hand a small tin saucepan, and in the other an iron spoon, with unwashed mouths, looking as independent as any child or grown person in the land. They stare unabashed, but make no answer when spoken to. "I've no call to your fence, Misser B------." It seems strange that a man should have the right, unarmed with any legal instrument, of tearing down the dwelling-houses of a score of families, and driving the inmates forth without a shelter. Yet B------ undoubtedly has this right; and it is not a little striking to see how quietly these people contemplate the probability of his exercising it,--resolving, indeed, to burrow in their holes as long as may be, yet caring about as little for an ejectment as those who could find a tenement anywhere, and less. Yet the women, amid all the trials of their situation, appear to have kept up the distinction between virtue and vice; those who can claim the former will not associate with the latter. When the women travel with young children, they carry the baby slung at their backs, and sleeping quietly. The dresses of the new-comers are old-fashioned, making them look aged before their time. Monsieur S------ shaving himself yesterday morning. He was in excellent spirits, and could not keep his tongue or body still, more than long enough to make two or three consecutive strokes at his beard. Then he would turn, flourishing his razor and grimacing joyously, enacting droll antics, breaking out into scraps and verses of drinking-songs, "A boire! a boire!"--then laughing heartily, and crying, "Vive la gaite!" then resuming his task, looking into the glass with grave face, on which, however, a grin would soon break out anew, and all his pranks would be repeated with variations. He turned this foolery to philosophy, by observing that mirth contributed to goodness of heart, and to make us love our fellow-creatures. Conversing with him in the evening, he affirmed, with evident belief in the truth of what he said, that he would have no objection, except that it would be a very foolish thing, to expose his whole heart, his whole inner man, to the view of the world. Not that there would not be much evil discovered there; but, as he was conscious of being in a state of mental and moral improvement, working out his progress onward, he would not shrink from such a scrutiny. This talk was introduced by his mentioning the "Minister's Black Veil," which he said he had seen translated into French, as an exercise, by a Miss Appleton of Bangor. Saw by the river-side, late in the afternoon, one of the above-described boats going into the stream with the water rippling at the prow, from the strength of the current and of the boat's motion. By and by comes down a raft, perhaps twenty yards long, guided by two men, one at each end,--the raft itself of boards sawed at Waterville, and laden with square bundles of shingles and round bundles of clapboards. "Friend," says one man, "how is the tide now?"--this being important to the onward progress. They make fast to a tree, in order to wait for the tide to rise a little higher. It would be pleasant enough to float down the Kennebec on one of these rafts, letting the river conduct you onward at its own pace, leisurely displaying to you all the wild or ordered beauties along its banks, and perhaps running you aground in some peculiarly picturesque spot, for your longer enjoyment of it. Another object, perhaps, is a solitary man paddling himself down the river in a small canoe, the light, lonely touch of his paddle in the water making the silence seem deeper. Every few minutes a sturgeon leaps forth, sometimes behind you, so that you merely hear the splash, and, turning hastily around, see nothing but the disturbed water. Sometimes he darts straight on end out of a quiet black spot on which your eyes happen to be fixed, and, when even his tail is clear of the surface, he falls down on his side and disappears. On the river-bank, an Irishwoman washing some clothes, surrounded by her children, whose babbling sounds pleasantly along the edge of the shore; and she also answers in a sweet, kindly, and cheerful voice, though an immoral woman, and without the certainty of bread or shelter from day to day. An Irishman sitting angling on the brink with an alder pole and a clothes-line. At frequent intervals, the scene is suddenly broken by a loud report like thunder, rolling along the banks, echoing and reverberating afar. It is a blast of rocks. Along the margin, sometimes sticks of timber made fast, either separately or several together; stones of some size, varying the pebbles and sand; a clayey spot, where a shallow brook runs into the river, not with a deep outlet, but finding its way across the bank in two or three single runlets. Looking upward into the deep glen whence it issues, you see its shady current. Elsewhere, a high acclivity, with the beach between it and the river, the ridge broken and caved away, so that the earth looks fresh and yellow, and is penetrated by the nests of birds. An old, shining tree-trunk, half in and half out of the water. An island of gravel, long and narrow, in the centre of the river. Chips, blocks of wood, slabs, and other scraps of lumber, strewed along the beach; logs drifting down. The high bank covered with various trees and shrubbery, and, in one place, two or three Irish shanties. Thursday, July 20th.--A drive yesterday afternoon to a pond in the vicinity of Augusta, about nine miles off, to fish for white perch. Remarkables: the steering of the boat through the crooked, labyrinthine brook, into the open pond,--the man who acted as pilot,--his talking with B------ about politics, the bank, the iron money of "a king who came to reign, in Greece, over a city called Sparta,"--his advice to B------ to come amongst the laborers on the mill-dam, because it stimulated them "to see a man grinning amongst them." The man took hearty tugs at a bottle of good Scotch whiskey, and became pretty merry. The fish caught were the yellow perch, which are not esteemed for eating; the white perch, a beautiful, silvery, round-backed fish, which bites eagerly, runs about with the line while being pulled up, makes good sport for the angler, and an admirable dish; a great chub; and three horned pouts, which swallow the hook into their lowest entrails. Several dozen fish were taken in an hour or two, and then we returned to the shop where we had left our horse and wagon, the pilot very eccentric behind us. It was a small, dingy shop, dimly lighted by a single inch of candle, faintly disclosing various boxes, barrels standing on end, articles hanging from the ceiling; the proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, respectively contained in a tin pint-measure and an earthenware jug, with two or three tumblers beside them, out of which nearly all the party drank; some coming up to the counter frankly, others lingering in the background, waiting to be pressed, two paying for their own liquor and withdrawing. B------ treated them twice round. The pilot, after drinking his brandy, gave a history of our fishing expedition, and how many and how large fish we caught. B------ making acquaintances and renewing them, and gaining great credit for liberality and free-heartedness,--two or three boys looking on and listening to the talk,--the shopkeeper smiling behind his counter, with the tarnished tin scales beside him,--the inch of candle burning down almost to extinction. So we got into our wagon, with the fish, and drove to Robinson's tavern, almost five miles off, where we supped and passed the night. In the bar-room was a fat old countryman on a journey, and a quack doctor of the vicinity, and an Englishman with a peculiar accent. Seeing B------'s jointed and brass-mounted fishing-pole, he took it for a theodolite, and supposed that we had been on a surveying expedition. At supper, which consisted of bread, butter, cheese, cake, doughnuts, and gooseberry-pie, we were waited upon by a tall, very tall woman, young and maiden-looking, yet with a strongly outlined and determined face. Afterwards we found her to be the wife of mine host. She poured out our tea, came in when we rang the table-bell to refill our cups, and again retired. While at supper, the fat old traveller was ushered through the room into a contiguous bedroom. My own chamber, apparently the best in the house, had its walls ornamented with a small, gilt-framed, foot-square looking-glass, with a hairbrush hanging beneath it; a record of the deaths of the family written on a black tomb, in an engraving, where a father, mother, and child were represented in a graveyard, weeping over said tomb; the mourners dressed in black, country-cut clothes; the engraving executed in Vermont. There was also a wood engraving of the Declaration of Independence, with fac-similes of the autographs; a portrait of the Empress Josephine, and another of Spring. In the two closets of this chamber were mine hostess's cloak, best bonnet, and go-to-meeting apparel. There was a good bed, in which I slept tolerably well, and, rising betimes, ate breakfast, consisting of some of our own fish, and then started for Augusta. The fat old traveller had gone off with the harness of our wagon, which the hostler had put on to his horse by mistake. The tavern-keeper gave us his own harness, and started in pursuit of the old man, who was probably aware of the exchange, and well satisfied with it. Our drive to Augusta, six or seven miles, was very pleasant, a heavy rain having fallen during the night, and laid the oppressive dust of the day before. The road lay parallel with the Kennebec, of which we occasionally had near glimpses. The country swells back from the river in hills and ridges, without any interval of level ground; and there were frequent woods, filling up the valleys or crowning the summits. The land is good, the farms look neat, and the houses comfortable. The latter are generally but of one story, but with large barns; and it was a good sign, that, while we saw no houses unfinished nor out of repair, one man at least had found it expedient to make an addition to his dwelling. At the distance of more than two miles, we had a view of white Augusta, with its steeples, and the State-House, at the farther end of the town. Observable matters along the road were the stage,--all the dust of yesterday brushed off, and no new dust contracted,--full of passengers, inside and out; among them some gentlemanly people and pretty girls, all looking fresh and unsullied, rosy, cheerful, and curious as to the face of the country, the faces of passing travellers, and the incidents of their journey; not yet damped, in the morning sunshine, by long miles of jolting over rough and hilly roads,--to compare this with their appearance at midday, and as they drive into Bangor at dusk;--two women dashing along in a wagon, and with a child, rattling pretty speedily down hill;--people looking at us from the open doors and windows;--the children staring from the wayside;--the mowers stopping, for a moment, the sway of their scythes;--the matron of a family, indistinctly seen at some distance within the house, her head and shoulders appearing through the window, drawing her handkerchief over her bosom, which had been uncovered to give the baby its breakfast,--the said baby, or its immediate predecessor, sitting at the door, turning round to creep away on all fours;--a man building a flat-bottomed boat by the roadside: he talked with B------ about the Boundary question, and swore fervently in favor of driving the British "into hell's kitchen" by main force. Colonel B------, the engineer of the mill-dam, is now here, after about a fortnight's absence. He is a plain country squire, with a good figure, but with rather a heavy brow; a rough complexion; a gait stiff, and a general rigidity of manner, something like that of a schoolmaster. He originated in a country town, and is a self-educated man. As he walked down the gravel-path to-day, after dinner, he took up a scythe, which one of the mowers had left on the sward, and began to mow, with quite a scientific swing. On the coming of the mower, he laid it down, perhaps a little ashamed of his amusement. I was interested in this; to see a man, after twenty-five years of scientific occupation, thus trying whether his arms retained their strength and skill for the labors of his youth,-- mindful of the day when he wore striped trousers, and toiled in his shirt-sleeves,--and now tasting again, for pastime, this drudgery beneath a fervid sun. He stood awhile, looking at the workmen, and then went to oversee the laborers at the mill-dam. Monday, July, 24th.--I bathed in the river on Thursday evening, and in the brook at the old dam on Saturday and Sunday,--the former time at noon. The aspect of the solitude at noon was peculiarly impressive, there being a cloudless sunshine, no wind, no rustling of the forest-leaves, no waving of the boughs, no noise but the brawling and babbling of the stream, making its way among the stones, and pouring in a little cataract round one side of the mouldering dam. Looking up the brook, there was a long vista,--now ripples, now smooth and glassy spaces, now large rocks, almost blocking up the channel; while the trees stood upon either side, mostly straight, but here and there a branch thrusting itself out irregularly, and one tree, a pine, leaning over,-- not bending,--but leaning at an angle over the brook, rough and ragged; birches, alders; the tallest of all the trees an old, dead, leafless pine, rising white and lonely, though closely surrounded by others. Along the brook, now the grass and herbage extended close to the water; now a small, sandy beach. The wall of rock before described, looking as if it had been hewn, but with irregular strokes of the workman, doing his job by rough and ponderous strength,--now chancing to hew it away smoothly and cleanly, now carelessly smiting, and making gaps, or piling on the slabs of rock, so as to leave vacant spaces. In the interstices grow brake and broad-leaved forest-grass. The trees that spring from the top of this wall have their roots pressing close to the rock, so that there is no soil between; they cling powerfully, and grasp the crag tightly with their knotty fingers. The trees on both sides are so thick, that the sight and the thoughts are almost immediately lost among confused stems, branches, and clustering green leaves,--a narrow strip of bright blue sky above, the sunshine falling lustrously down, and making the pathway of the brook luminous below. Entering among the thickets, I find the soil strewn with old leaves of preceding seasons, through which may be seen a black or dark mould; the roots of trees stretch frequently across the path; often a moss-grown brown log lies athwart, and when you set your foot down, it sinks into the decaying substance,--into the heart of oak or pine. The leafy boughs and twigs of the underbrush enlace themselves before you, so that you must stoop your head to pass under, or thrust yourself through amain, while they sweep against your face, and perhaps knock off your hat. There are rocks mossy and slippery; sometimes you stagger, with a great rustling of branches, against a clump of bushes, and into the midst of it. From end to end of all this tangled shade goes a pathway scarcely worn, for the leaves are not trodden through, yet plain enough to the eye, winding gently to avoid tree-trunks and rocks and little hillocks. In the more open ground, the aspect of a tall, fire-blackened stump, standing alone, high up on a swell of land, that rises gradually from one side of the brook, like a monument. Yesterday, I passed a group of children in this solitary valley,--two boys, I think, and two girls. One of the little girls seemed to have suffered some wrong from her companions, for she was weeping and complaining violently. Another time, I came suddenly on a small Canadian boy, who was in a hollow place, among the ruined logs of an old causeway, picking raspberries,--lonely among bushes and gorges, far up the wild valley,--and the lonelier seemed the little boy for the bright sunshine, that showed no one else in a wide space of view except him and me. Remarkable items: the observation of Mons. S------ when B------ was saying something against the character of the French people,--"You ought not to form an unfavorable judgment of a great nation from mean fellows like me, strolling about in a foreign country." I thought it very noble thus to protest against anything discreditable in himself personally being used against the honor of his country. He is a very singular person, with an originality in all his notions;--not that nobody has ever had such before, but that he has thought them out for himself. He told me yesterday that one of his sisters was a waiting-maid in the Rocher de Cancale. He is about the sincerest man I ever knew, never pretending to feelings that are not in him,--never flattering. His feelings do not seem to be warm, though they are kindly. He is so single-minded that he cannot understand badinage, but takes it all as if meant in earnest,--a German trait. He values himself greatly on being a Frenchman, though all his most valuable qualities come from Germany. His temperament is cool and pure, and he is greatly delighted with any attentions from the ladies. A short time since, a lady gave him a bouquet of roses and pinks; he capered and danced and sang, put it in water, and carried it to his own chamber; but he brought it out for us to see and admire two or three times a day, bestowing on it all the epithets of admiration in the French language,--"Superbe! magnifique!" When some of the flowers began to fade, he made the rest, with others, into a new nosegay, and consulted us whether it would be fit to give to another lady. Contrast this French foppery with his solemn moods, when we sit in the twilight, or after B------ is abed, talking of Christianity and Deism, of ways of life, of marriage, of benevolence,--in short, of all deep matters of this world and the next. An evening or two since, he began singing all manner of English songs,--such as Mrs. Hemans's "Landing of the Pilgrims," "Auld Lang Syne," and some of Moore's,--the singing pretty fair, but in the oddest tone and accent. Occasionally he breaks out with scraps from French tragedies, which he spouts with corresponding action. He generally gets close to me in these displays of musical and histrionic talent. Once he offered to magnetize me in the manner of Monsieur P------. Wednesday, July 26th.--Dined at Barker's yesterday. Before dinner, sat with several other persons in the stoop of the tavern. There were B------, J. A. Chandler, Clerk of the Court, a man of middle age or beyond, two or three stage people, and, near by, a negro, whom they call "the Doctor," a crafty-looking fellow, one of whose occupations is nameless. In presence of this goodly company, a man of a depressed, neglected air, a soft, simple-looking fellow, with an anxious expression, in a laborer's dress, approached and inquired for Mr. Barker. Mine host being gone to Portland, the stranger was directed to the bar-keeper, who stood at the door. The man asked where he should find one Mary Ann Russell,--a question which excited general and hardly suppressed mirth; for the said Mary Ann is one of a knot of women who were routed on Sunday evening by Barker and a constable. The man was told that the black fellow would give him all the information he wanted. The black fellow asked,-- "Do you want to see her?" Others of the by-standers or by-sitters put various questions as to the nature of the man's business with Mary Ann. One asked,-- "Is she your daughter?" "Why, a little nearer than that, I calkilate," said the poor devil. Here the mirth was increased, it being evident that the woman was his wife. The man seemed too simple and obtuse to comprehend the ridicule of his situation, or to be rendered very miserable by it. Nevertheless, he made some touching points. "A man generally places some little dependence on his wife," said he, "whether she's good or not." He meant, probably, that he rests some affection on her. He told us that she had behaved well, till committed to jail for striking a child; and I believe he was absent from home at the time, and had not seen her since. And now he was in search of her, intending, doubtless, to do his best to get her out of her troubles, and then to take her back to his home. Some advised him not to look after her; others recommended him to pay "the Doctor" aforesaid for guiding him to her; which finally "the Doctor" did, in consideration of a treat; and the fellow went off, having heard little but gibes and not one word of sympathy! I would like to have witnessed his meeting with his wife. There was a moral picturesqueness in the contrasts of the scene,--a man moved as deeply as his nature would admit, in the midst of hardened, gibing spectators, heartless towards him. It is worth thinking over and studying out. He seemed rather hurt and pricked by the jests thrown at him, yet bore it patiently, and sometimes almost joined in the laugh, being of an easy, unenergetic temper. Hints for characters:--Nancy, a pretty, black-eyed, intelligent servant-girl, living in Captain H------'s family. She comes daily to make the beds in our part of the house, and exchanges a good-morning with me, in a pleasant voice, and with a glance and smile,--somewhat shy, because we are not acquainted, yet capable of being made conversable. She washes once a week, and may be seen standing over her tub, with her handkerchief somewhat displaced from her white neck, because it is hot. Often she stands with her bare arms in the water, talking with Mrs. H------, or looks through the window, perhaps, at B------, or somebody else crossing the yard,--rather thoughtfully, but soon smiling or laughing. Then goeth she for a pail of water. In the afternoon, very probably, she dresses herself in silks, looking not only pretty, but lady-like, and strolls round the house, not unconscious that some gentleman may be staring at her from behind the green blinds. After supper, she walks to the village. Morning and evening, she goes a-milking. And thus passes her life, cheerfully, usefully, virtuously, with hopes, doubtless, of a husband and children.--Mrs. H------ is a particularly plump, soft-fleshed, fair-complexioned, comely woman enough, with rather a simple countenance, not nearly so piquant as Nancy's. Her walk has something of the roll or waddle of a fat woman, though it were too much to call her fat. She seems to be a sociable body, probably laughter-loving. Captain H------ himself has commanded a steamboat, and has a certain knowledge of life. Query, in relation to the man's missing wife, how much desire and resolution of doing her duty by her husband can a wife retain, while injuring him in what is deemed the most essential point? Observation. The effect of morning sunshine on the wet grass, on sloping and swelling land, between the spectator and the sun at some distance, as across a lawn. It diffused a dim brilliancy over the whole surface of the field. The mists, slow-rising farther off, part resting on the earth, the remainder of the column already ascending so high that you doubt whether to call it a fog or a cloud. Friday, July 28th.--Saw my classmate and formerly intimate friend, ------, for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good success in life, in spite of circumstance, having struggled upward against bitter opposition, by the force of his own abilities, to be a member of Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact, seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own purpose, often without the man's suspecting that he is made a tool of; and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his conversation, at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the expression of which can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with regard to himself had really a great deal of frankness. He spoke of his ambition, of the obstacles which he had encountered, of the means by which he had overcome them, imputing great efficacy to his personal intercourse with people, and his study of their characters; then of his course as a member of the Legislature and Speaker, and his style of speaking and its effects; of the dishonorable things which had been imputed to him, and in what manner he had repelled the charges. In short, he would seem to have opened himself very freely as to his public life. Then, as to his private affairs, he spoke of his marriage, of his wife, his children, and told me, with tears in his eyes, of the death of a dear little girl, and how it affected him, and how impossible it had been for him to believe that she was really to die. A man of the most open nature might well have been more reserved to a friend, after twelve years' separation, than ------ was to me. Nevertheless, he is really a crafty man, concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it is not good for him to have known. He by no means feigns the good-feeling that he professes, nor is there anything affected in the frankness of his conversation; and it is this that makes him so very fascinating. There is such a quantity of truth and kindliness and warm affections, that a man's heart opens to him, in spite of himself. He deceives by truth. And not only is he crafty, but, when occasion demands, bold and fierce as a tiger, determined, and even straightforward and undisguised in his measures,--a daring fellow as well as a sly one. Yet, notwithstanding his consummate art, the general estimate of his character seems to be pretty just. Hardly anybody, probably, thinks him better than he is, and many think him worse. Nevertheless, if no overwhelming discovery of rascality be made, he will always possess influence; though I should hardly think that he would take any prominent part in Congress. As to any rascality, I rather believe that he has thought out for himself a much higher system of morality than any natural integrity would have prompted him to adopt; that he has seen the thorough advantage of morality and honesty; and the sentiment of these qualities has now got into his mind and spirit, and pretty well impregnated them. I believe him to be about as honest as the great run of the world, with something even approaching to high-mindedness. His person in some degree accords with his character,--thin and with a thin face, sharp features, sallow, a projecting brow not very high, deep-set eyes, an insinuating smile and look, when he meets you, and is about to address you. I should think that he would do away with this peculiar expression, for it reveals more of himself than can be detected in any other way, in personal intercourse with him. Upon the whole, I have quite a good liking for him, and mean to go to--to see him. Observation. A steam-engine across the river, which almost continually during the day, and sometimes all night, may be heard puffing and panting, as if it uttered groans for being compelled to labor in the heat and sunshine, and when the world is asleep also. Monday, July 31st.--Nothing remarkable to record. A child asleep in a young lady's arms,--a little baby, two or three months old. Whenever anything partially disturbed the child, as, for instance, when the young lady or a bystander patted its cheek or rubbed its chin, the child would smile; then all its dreams seemed to be of pleasure and happiness. At first the smile was so faint, that I doubted whether it were really a smile or no; but on further efforts, it brightened forth very decidedly. This, without opening its eyes.--A constable, a homely, good-natured, business-looking man, with a warrant against an Irishman's wife for throwing a brickbat at a fellow. He gave good advice to the Irishman about the best method of coming easiest through the affair. Finally settled,--the justice agreeing to relinquish his fees, on condition that the Irishman would pay for the mending of his old boots! I went with Monsieur S------ yesterday to pick raspberries. He fell through an old log bridge thrown over a hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the rotten logs and among the bushes.--A shower coming on, the rapid running of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and dashing swiftly past us, and showing the soles of his naked feet as he ran adown the path, and up the opposite rise. Tuesday, August 1st.--There having been a heavy rain yesterday, a nest of chimney-swallows was washed down the chimney into the fireplace of one of the front rooms. My attention was drawn to them by a most obstreperous twittering; and looking behind the fireboard, there were three young birds, clinging with their feet against one of the jambs, looking at me, open-mouthed, and all clamoring together, so as quite to fill the room with the short, eager, frightened sound. The old birds, by certain signs upon the floor of the room, appeared to have fallen victims to the appetite of the cat. La belle Nancy provided a basket filled with cotton-wool, into which the poor little devils were put; and I tried to feed them with soaked bread, of which, however, they did not eat with much relish. Tom, the Irish boy, gave it as his opinion that they were not old enough to be weaned. I hung the basket out of the window, in the sunshine, and upon looking in, an hour or two after, found that two of the birds had escaped. The other I tried to feed, and sometimes, when a morsel of bread was thrust into its open mouth, it would swallow it. But it appeared to suffer very much, vociferating loudly when disturbed, and panting, in a sluggish agony, with eyes closed, or half opened, when let alone. It distressed me a good deal; and I felt relieved, though somewhat shocked, when B------ put an end to its misery by squeezing its head and throwing it out of the window. They were of a slate-color, and might, I suppose, have been able to shift for themselves.--The other day a little yellow bird flew into one of the empty rooms, of which there are half a dozen on the lower floor, and could not find his way out again, flying at the glass of the windows, instead of at the door, thumping his head against the panes or against the ceiling. I drove him into the entry and chased him from end to end, endeavoring to make him fly through one of the open doors. He would fly at the circular light over the door, clinging to the casement, sometimes alighting on one of the two glass lamps, or on the cords that suspended them, uttering an affrighted and melancholy cry whenever I came near and flapped my handkerchief, and appearing quite tired and sinking into despair. At last he happened to fly low enough to pass through the door, and immediately vanished into the gladsome sunshine.--Ludicrous situation of a man, drawing his chaise down a sloping bank, to wash in the river. The chaise got the better of him, and, rushing downward as if it were possessed, compelled him to run at full speed, and drove him up to his chin into the water. A singular instance, that a chaise may run away with a man without a horse! Saturday, August 12th.--Left Augusta a week ago this morning for ------. Nothing particular in our drive across the country. Fellow-passenger a Boston dry-goods dealer, travelling to collect bills. At many of the country shops he would get out, and show his unwelcome visage. In the tavern, prints from Scripture, varnished and on rollers,--such as the Judgment of Christ; also a droll set of colored engravings of the story of the Prodigal Son, the figures being clad in modern costume,--or, at least, that of not more than half a century ago. The father, a grave, clerical person, with a white wig and black broadcloth suit; the son, with a cocked hat and laced clothes, drinking wine out of a glass, and caressing a woman in fashionable dress. At ------ a nice, comfortable boarding-house tavern, without a bar or any sort of wines or spirits. An old lady from Boston, with her three daughters, one of whom was teaching music, and the other two schoolmistresses. A frank, free, mirthful daughter of the landlady, about twenty-four years old, between whom and myself there immediately sprang up a flirtation, which made us both feel rather melancholy when we parted on Tuesday morning. Music in the evening, with a song by a rather pretty, fantastic little mischief of a brunette, about eighteen years old, who has married within a year, and spent the last summer in a trip to the Springs and elsewhere. Her manner of walking is by jerks, with a quiver, as if she were made of calves-feet jelly. I talk with everybody: to Mrs. T------ good sense,--to Mary, good sense, with a mixture of fun,--to Mrs. G------, sentiment, romance, and nonsense. Walked with ------ to see General Knox's old mansion,--a large, rusty-looking edifice of wood, with some grandeur in the architecture, standing on the banks of the river, close by the site of an old burial-ground, and near where an ancient fort had been erected for defence against the French and Indians. General Knox once owned a square of thirty miles in this part of the country, and he wished to settle it with a tenantry, after the fashion of English gentlemen. He would permit no edifice to be erected within a certain distance of his mansion. His patent covered, of course, the whole present town of Waldoborough and divers other flourishing commercial and country villages, and would have been of incalculable value could it have remained unbroken to the present time. But the General lived in grand style, and received throngs of visitors from foreign parts, and was obliged to part with large tracts of his possessions, till now there is little left but the ruinous mansion and the ground immediately around it. His tomb stands near the house,--a spacious receptacle, an iron door at the end of a turf-covered mound, and surmounted by an obelisk of marble. There are inscriptions to the memory of several of his family; for he had many children, all of whom are now dead, except one daughter, a widow of fifty, recently married to Hon. John H------. There is a stone fence round the monument. On the outside of this are the gravestones, and large, flat tombstones of the ancient burial-ground,--the tombstones being of red freestone, with vacant spaces, formerly inlaid with slate, on which were the inscriptions, and perhaps coats-of-arms. One of these spaces was in the shape of a heart. The people were very wrathful that the General should have laid out his grounds over this old burial-place; and he dared never throw down the gravestones, though his wife, a haughty English lady, often teased him to do so. But when the old General was dead, Lady Knox (as they called her) caused them to be prostrated, as they now lie. She was a woman of violent passions, and so proud an aristocrat, that, as long as she lived, she would never enter any house in the town except her own. When a married daughter was ill, she used to go in her carriage to the door, and send up to inquire how she did. The General was personally very popular; but his wife ruled him. The house and its vicinity, and the whole tract covered by Knox's patent, may be taken as an illustration of what must be the result of American schemes of aristocracy. It is not forty years since this house was built, and Knox was in his glory; but now the house is all in decay, while within a stone's-throw of it there is a street of smart white edifices of one and two stories, occupied chiefly by thriving mechanics, which has been laid out where Knox meant to have forests and parks. On the banks of the river, where he intended to have only one wharf for his own West Indian vessels and yacht, there are two wharves, with stores and a lime kiln. Little appertains to the mansion except the tomb and the old burial-ground, and the old fort. The descendants are all poor, and the inheritance was merely sufficient to make a dissipated and drunken fellow of the only one of the old General's sons who survived to middle age. The man's habits were as bad as possible as long as he had any money; but when quite ruined, he reformed. The daughter, the only survivor among Knox's children (herself childless), is a mild, amiable woman, therein totally differing from her mother. Knox, when he first visited his estate, arriving in a vessel, was waited upon by a deputation of the squatters, who had resolved to resist him to the death. He received them with genial courtesy, made them dine with him aboard the vessel, and sent them back to their constituents in great love and admiration of him. He used to have a vessel running to Philadelphia, I think, and bringing him all sorts of delicacies. His way of raising money was to give a mortgage on his estate of a hundred thousand dollars at a time, and receive that nominal amount in goods, which he would immediately sell at auction for perhaps thirty thousand. He died by a chicken-bone. Near the house are the remains of a covered way, by which the French once attempted to gain admittance into the fort; but the work caved in and buried a good many of them, and the rest gave up the siege. There was recently an old inhabitant living who remembered when the people used to reside in the fort. Owl's Head,--a watering-place, terminating a point of land, six or seven miles from Thomaston. A long island shuts out the prospect of the sea. Hither coasters and fishing-smacks run in when a storm is anticipated. Two fat landlords, both young men, with something of a contrast in their dispositions; one of them being a brisk, lively, active, jesting, fat man; the other more heavy and inert, making jests sluggishly, if at all. Aboard the steamboat, Professor Stuart of Andover, sitting on a sofa in the saloon, generally in conversation with some person, resolving their doubts on one point or another, speaking in a very audible voice; and strangers standing or sitting around to hear him, as if he were an ancient apostle or philosopher. He is a bulky man, with a large, massive face, particularly calm in its expression, and mild enough to be pleasing. When not otherwise occupied, he reads, without much notice of what is going on around him. He speaks without effort, yet thoughtfully. We got lost in a fog the morning after leaving Owl's Head. Fired a brass cannon, rang bell, blew steam, like a whale snorting. After one of the reports of the cannon, we heard a horn blown at no great distance, the sound coming soon after the report. Doubtful whether it came from the shore or a vessel. Continued our ringing and snorting; and by and by something was seen to mingle with the fog that obscured everything beyond fifty yards from us. At first it seemed only like a denser wreath of fog; it darkened still more, till it took the aspect of sails; then the hull of a small schooner came beating down towards us, the wind laying her over towards us, so that her gunwale was almost in the water, and we could see the whole of her sloping deck. "Schooner ahoy!" say we. "Halloo! Have you seen Boston Light this morning?" "Yes; it bears north-northwest, two miles distant." "Very much obliged to you," cries our captain. So the schooner vanishes into the mist behind. We get up our steam, and soon enter the harbor, meeting vessels of every rig; and the fog, clearing away, shows a cloudy sky. Aboard, an old one-eyed sailor, who had lost one of his feet, and had walked on the stump from Eastport to Bangor, thereby making a shocking ulcer. Penobscot Bay is full of islands, close to which the steamboat is continually passing. Some are large, with portions of forest and portions of cleared land; some are mere rocks, with a little green or none, and inhabited by sea-birds, which fly and flap about hoarsely. Their eggs may be gathered by the bushel, and are good to eat. Other islands have one house and barn on them, this sole family being lords and rulers of all the land which the sea girds. The owner of such an island must have a peculiar sense of property and lordship; he must feel more like his own master and his own man than other people can. Other islands, perhaps high, precipitous, black bluffs, are crowned with a white lighthouse, whence, as evening comes on, twinkles a star across the melancholy deep,--seen by vessels coming on the coast, seen from the mainland, seen from island to island. Darkness descending, and, looking down at the broad wake left by the wheels of the steamboat, we may see sparkles of sea-fire glittering through the gloom. Salem, August 22d.--A walk yesterday afternoon down to the Juniper and Winter Island. Singular effect of partial sunshine, the sky being broadly and heavily clouded, and land and sea, in consequence, being generally overspread with a sombre gloom. But the sunshine, somehow or other, found its way between the interstices of the clouds, and illuminated some of the distant objects very vividly. The white sails of a ship caught it, and gleamed brilliant as sunny snow, the hull being scarcely visible, and the sea around dark; other smaller vessels too, so that they looked like heavenly-winged things, just alighting on a dismal world. Shifting their sails, perhaps, or going on another tack, they almost disappear at once in the obscure distance. Islands are seen in summer sunshine and green glory; their rocks also sunny and their beaches white; while other islands, for no apparent reason, are in deep shade, and share the gloom of the rest of the world. Sometimes part of an island is illuminated and part dark. When the sunshine falls on a very distant island, nearer ones being in shade, it seems greatly to extend the bounds of visible space, and put the horizon to a farther distance. The sea roughly rushing against the shore, and dashing against the rocks, and grating back over the sands. A boat a little way from the shore, tossing and swinging at anchor. Beach birds flitting from place to place. The family seat of the Hawthornes is Wigcastle, Wigton, Wiltshire. The present head of the family, now residing there, is Hugh Hawthorne. William Hawthorne, who came over in 1635-36, was a younger brother of the family. A young man and girl meet together, each in search of a person to be known by some particular sign. They watch and wait a great while for that person to pass. At last some casual circumstance discloses that each is the one that the other is waiting for. Moral,--that what we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it. The journal of a human heart for a single day in ordinary circumstances. The lights and shadows that flit across it; its internal vicissitudes. Distrust to be thus exemplified:--Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man, and offered to his acceptance,--as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to be real, and he to be told so, when too late. A man tries to be happy in love; he cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems all a dream. In domestic life, the same; in politics, a seeming patriot; but still he is sincere, and all seems like a theatre. An old man, on a summer day, sits on a hill-top, or on the observatory of his house, and sees the sun's light pass from one object to another connected with the events of his past life,--as the school-house, the place where his wife lived in her maidenhood,--its setting beams falling on the churchyard. An idle man's pleasures and occupations and thoughts during a day spent by the sea-shore: among them, that of sitting on the top of a cliff, and throwing stones at his own shadow, far below. A blind man to set forth on a walk through ways unknown to him, and to trust to the guidance of anybody who will take the trouble; the different characters who would undertake it: some mischievous, some well-meaning, but incapable; perhaps one blind man undertakes to lead another. At last, possibly, he rejects all guidance, and blunders on by himself. In the cabinet of the Essex Historical Society, old portraits.--Governor Leverett; a dark mustachioed face, the figure two-thirds length, clothed in a sort of frock-coat, buttoned, and a broad sword-belt girded round the waist, and fastened with a large steel buckle; the hilt of the sword steel,--altogether very striking. Sir William Pepperell, in English regimentals, coat, waistcoat, and breeches, all of red broadcloth, richly gold-embroidered; he holds a general's truncheon in his right hand, and extends the left towards the batteries erected against Louisbourg, in the country near which he is standing. Endicott, Pyncheon, and others, in scarlet robes, bands, etc. Half a dozen or more family portraits of the Olivers, some in plain dresses brown, crimson, or claret; others with gorgeous gold-embroidered waistcoats, descending almost to the knees, so as to form the most conspicuous article of dress. Ladies, with lace ruffles, the painting of which, in one of the pictures, cost five guineas. Peter Oliver, who was crazy, used to fight with these family pictures in the old Mansion House; and the face and breast of one lady bear cuts and stabs inflicted by him. Miniatures in oil, with the paint peeling off, of stern, old, yellow faces. Oliver Cromwell, apparently an old picture, half length, or one third, in an oval frame, probably painted for some New England partisan. Some pictures that had been partly obliterated by scrubbing with sand. The dresses, embroidery, laces of the Oliver family are generally better done than the faces. Governor Leverett's gloves,--the glove part of coarse leather, but round the wrist a deep, three or four inch border of spangles and silver embroidery. Old drinking-glasses, with tall stalks. A black glass bottle, stamped with the name of Philip English, with a broad bottom. The baby-linen, etc., of Governor Bradford of Plymouth County. Old manuscript sermons, some written in short-hand, others in a hand that seems learnt from print. Nothing gives a stronger idea of old worm-eaten aristocracy--of a family being crazy with age, and of its being time that it was extinct--than these black, dusty, faded, antique-dressed portraits, such as those of the Oliver family; the identical old white wig of an ancient minister producing somewhat the impression that his very scalp, or some other portion of his personal self, would do. The excruciating agonies which Nature inflicts on men (who break her laws) to be represented as the work of human tormentors; as the gout, by screwing the toes. Thus we might find that worse than the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition are daily suffered without exciting notice. Suppose a married couple fondly attached to one another, and to think that they lived solely for one another; then it to be found out that they were divorced, or that they might separate if they chose. What would be its effect? Monday, August 27th.--Went to Boston last Wednesday. Remarkables:--An author at the American Stationers' Company, slapping his hand on his manuscript, and crying, "I'm going to publish."--An excursion aboard a steamboat to Thompson's Island, to visit the Manual Labor School for boys. Aboard the steamboat several poets and various other authors; a Commodore,--Colton, a small, dark brown, sickly man, with a good deal of roughness in his address; Mr. Waterston, talking poetry and philosophy. Examination and exhibition of the boys, little tanned agriculturists. After examination, a stroll round the island, examining the products, as wheat in sheaves on the stubble-field; oats, somewhat blighted and spoiled; great pumpkins elsewhere; pastures; mowing ground;--all cultivated by the boys. Their residence, a great brick building, painted green, and standing on the summit of a rising ground, exposed to the winds of the bay. Vessels flitting past; great ships, with intricacy of rigging and various sails; schooners, sloops, with their one or two broad sheets of canvas: going on different tacks, so that the spectator might think that there was a different wind for each vessel, or that they scudded across the sea spontaneously, whither their own wills led them. The farm boys remain insulated, looking at the passing show, within sight of the city, yet having nothing to do with it; beholding their fellow-creatures skimming by them in winged machines, and steamboats snorting and puffing through the waves. Methinks an island would be the most desirable of all landed property, for it seems like a little world by itself; and the water may answer instead of the atmosphere that surrounds planets. The boys swinging, two together, standing up, and almost causing the ropes and their bodies to stretch out horizontally. On our departure, they ranged themselves on the rails of the fence, and, being dressed in blue, looked not unlike a flock of pigeons. On Friday, a visit to the Navy Yard at Charlestown, in company with the Naval Officer of Boston, and Cilley. Dined aboard the revenue-cutter Hamilton. A pretty cabin, finished off with bird's-eye maple and mahogany; two looking-glasses. Two officers in blue frocks, with a stripe of lace on each shoulder. Dinner, chowder, fried fish, corned beef,--claret, afterwards champagne. The waiter tells the Captain of the cutter that Captain Percival (Commander of the Navy Yard) is sitting on the deck of the anchor boy (which lies inside of the cutter), smoking his cigar. The captain sends him a glass of champagne, and inquires of the waiter what Percival says to it. "He said, sir, `What does he send me this damned stuff for?' but drinks, nevertheless." The Captain characterizes Percival as the roughest old devil that ever was in his manners, but a kind, good-hearted man at bottom. By and by comes in the steward. "Captain Percival is coming aboard of you, sir." "Well, ask him to walk down into the cabin"; and shortly down comes old Captain Percival, a white-haired, thin-visaged, weather-worn old gentleman, in a blue, Quaker-cut coat, with tarnished lace and brass buttons, a pair of drab pantaloons, and brown waistcoat. There was an eccentric expression in his face, which seemed partly wilful, partly natural. He has not risen to his present rank in the regular line of the profession; but entered the navy as a sailing-master, and has all the roughness of that class of officers. Nevertheless, he knows how to behave and to talk like a gentleman. Sitting down, and taking in hand a glass of champagne, he began a lecture on economy, and how well it was that Uncle Sam had a broad back, being compelled to bear so many burdens as were laid on it,-- alluding to the table covered with wine-bottles. Then he spoke of the fitting up of the cabin with expensive woods,--of the brooch in Captain Scott's bosom. Then he proceeded to discourse of politics, taking the opposite side to Cilley, and arguing with much pertinacity. He seems to have moulded and shaped himself to his own whims, till a sort of rough affectation has become thoroughly imbued throughout a kindly nature. He is full of antique prejudices against the modern fashions of the younger officers, their mustaches and such fripperies, and prophesies little better than disgrace in case of another war; owning that the boys would fight for their country, and die for her, but denying that there are any officers now like Hull and Stuart, whose exploits, nevertheless, he greatly depreciated, saying that the Boxer and Enterprise fought the only equal battle which we won during the war; and that, in that action, an officer had proposed to haul down the stars and stripes, and a common sailor threatened to cut him to pieces if he should do so. He spoke of Bainbridge as a sot and a poltroon, who wanted to run from the Macedonian, pretending to take her for a line-of-battle ship; of Commodore Elliot as a liar; but praised Commodore Downes in the highest terms. Percival seems to be the very pattern of old integrity; taking as much care of Uncle Sam's interests as if all the money expended were to come out of his own pocket. This quality was displayed in his resistance to the demand of a new patent capstan for the revenue-cutter, which, however, Scott is resolved in such a sailor-like way to get, that he will probably succeed. Percival spoke to me of how his business in the yard absorbed him, especially the fitting of the Columbus seventy-four, of which ship he discoursed with great enthusiasm. He seems to have no ambition beyond his present duties, perhaps never had any; at any rate, he now passes his life with a sort of gruff contentedness, grumbling and growling, yet in good humor enough. He is conscious of his peculiarities; for when I asked him whether it would be well to make a naval officer Secretary of the Navy, he said, "God forbid, for that an old sailor was always full of prejudices and stubborn whim-whams," instancing himself; whereto I agreed. We went round the Navy Yard with Percival and Commodore Downes, the latter a sailor and a gentleman too, with rather more of the ocean than the drawing-room about him, but courteous, frank, and good-natured. We looked at ropewalks, rigging-lofts, ships in the stocks; and saw the sailors of the station laughing and sporting with great mirth and cheerfulness, which the Commodore said was much increased at sea. We returned to the wharf at Boston in the cutter's boat. Captain Scott, of the cutter, told me a singular story of what occurred during the action between the Constitution and Macedonian--he being powder-monkey aboard the former ship. A cannon-shot came through the ship's side, and a man's head was struck off, probably by a splinter, for it was done without bruising the head or body, as clean as by a razor. Well, the man was walking pretty briskly at the time of the accident; and Scott seriously affirmed that he kept walking onward at the same pace, with two jets of blood gushing from his headless trunk, till, after going about twenty feet without a head, he sunk down at once, with his legs under him. [The corroboration of the truth of this, see Lord Bacon, Century IV. of his Sylva Sylvarum, or Natural History, in Ten Centuries, paragraph 400.] On Saturday, I called to see E. H------, having previously appointed a meeting for the purpose of inquiring about our name. He is an old bachelor, and truly forlorn. The pride of ancestry seems to be his great hobby. He had a good many old papers in his desk at the Custom-House, which he produced and dissertated upon, and afterwards went with me to his sister's, and showed me an old book, with a record of the children of the first emigrant (who came over two hundred years ago), in his own handwriting. E----'s manners are gentlemanly, and he seems to be very well informed. At a little distance, I think, one would take him to be not much over thirty; but nearer at hand one finds him to look rather venerable,--perhaps fifty or more. He is nervous, and his hands shook while he was looking over the papers, as if he had been startled by my visit; and when we came to the crossings of streets, he darted across, cautioning me, as if both were in great danger to be run over. Nevertheless, being very quick-tempered, he would face the Devil if at all irritated. He gave a most forlorn description of his life; how, when he came to Salem, there was nobody except Mr. ------ whom he cared about seeing; how his position prevented him from accepting of civilities, because he had no home where he could return them; in short, he seemed about as miserable a being as is to be found anywhere,--lonely, and with sensitiveness to feel his loneliness, and capacities, now withered, to have enjoyed the sweets of life. I suppose he is comfortable enough when busied in his duties at the Custom-House; for when I spoke to him at my entrance, he was too much absorbed to hear me at first. As we walked, he kept telling stories of the family, which seemed to have comprised many oddities, eccentric men and women, recluses and other kinds,--one of old Philip English (a Jersey man, the name originally L'Anglais), who had been persecuted by John Hawthorne, of witch-time memory, and a violent quarrel ensued. When Philip lay on his death-bed, he consented to forgive his persecutor; "But if I get well," said he, "I'll be damned if I forgive him!" This Philip left daughters, one of whom married, I believe, the son of the persecuting John, and thus all the legitimate blood of English is in our family. E---- passed from the matters of birth, pedigree, and ancestral pride to give vent to the most arrant democracy and locofocoism that I ever happened to hear, saying that nobody ought to possess wealth longer than his own life, and that then it should return to the people, etc. He says S. I------ has a great fund of traditions about the family, which she learned from her mother or grandmother (I forget which), one of them being a Hawthorne. The old lady was a very proud woman, and, as E---- says, "proud of being proud," and so is S. I------. October 7th.--A walk in Northfields in the afternoon. Bright sunshine and autumnal warmth, giving a sensation quite unlike the same degree of warmth in summer. Oaks,--some brown, some reddish, some still green; walnuts, yellow,--fallen leaves and acorns lying beneath; the footsteps crumple them in walking. In sunny spots beneath the trees, where green grass is overstrewn by the dry, fallen foliage, as I passed, I disturbed multitudes of grasshoppers basking in the warm sunshine; and they began to hop, hop, hop, pattering on the dry leaves like big and heavy drops of a thunder-shower. They were invisible till they hopped. Boys gathering walnuts. Passed an orchard, where two men were gathering the apples. A wagon, with barrels, stood among the trees; the men's coats flung on the fence; the apples lay in heaps, and each of the men was up in a separate tree. They conversed together in loud voices, which the air caused to ring still louder, jeering each other, boasting of their own feats in shaking down the apples. One got into the very top of his tree, and gave a long and mighty shake, and the big apples came down thump, thump, bushels hitting on the ground at once. "There! did you ever hear anything like that?" cried he. This sunny scene was pretty. A horse feeding apart, belonging to the wagon. The barberry-bushes have some red fruit on them, but they are frost-bitten. The rose-bushes have their scarlet hips. Distant clumps of trees, now that the variegated foliage adorns them, have a phantasmagorian, an apparition-like appearance. They seem to be of some kindred to the crimson and gold cloud-islands. It would not be strange to see phantoms peeping forth from their recesses. When the sun was almost below the horizon, his rays, gilding the upper branches of a yellow walnut-tree, had an airy and beautiful effect,--the gentle contrast between the tint of the yellow in the shade and its ethereal gold in the fading sunshine. The woods that crown distant uplands were seen to great advantage in these last rays, for the sunshine perfectly marked out and distinguished every shade of color, varnishing them as it were; while the country round, both hill and plain, being in gloomy shadow, the woods looked the brighter for it. The tide, being high, had flowed almost into the Cold Spring, so its small current hardly issued forth from the basin. As I approached, two little eels, about as long as my finger, and slender in proportion, wriggled out of the basin. They had come from the salt water. An Indian-corn field, as yet unharvested,--huge, golden pumpkins scattered among the hills of corn,--a noble-looking fruit. After the sun was down, the sky was deeply dyed with a broad sweep of gold, high towards the zenith; not flaming brightly, but of a somewhat dusky gold. A piece of water, extending towards the west, between high banks, caught the reflection, and appeared like a sheet of brighter and more glistening gold than the sky which made it bright. Dandelions and blue flowers are still growing in sunny places. Saw in a barn a prodigious treasure of onions in their silvery coats, exhaling a penetrating perfume. How exceeding bright looks the sunshine, casually reflected from a looking-glass into a gloomy region of the chamber, distinctly marking out the figures and colors of the paper-hangings, which are scarcely seen elsewhere. It is like the light of mind thrown on an obscure subject. Man's finest workmanship, the closer you observe it, the more imperfections it shows; as in a piece of polished steel a microscope will discover a rough surface. Whereas, what may look coarse and rough in Nature's workmanship will show an infinitely minute perfection, the closer you look into it. The reason of the minute superiority of Nature's work over man's is, that the former works from the innermost germ, while the latter works merely superficially. Standing in the cross-road that leads by the Mineral Spring, and looking towards an opposite shore of the lake, an ascending bank, with a douse border of trees, green, yellow, red, russet, all bright colors, brightened by the mild brilliancy of the descending sun; it was strange to recognize the sober old friends of spring and summer in this new dress. By the by, a pretty riddle or fable might be made out of the changes in apparel of the familiar trees round a house, adapted for children. But in the lake, beneath the aforesaid border of trees,--the water being, not rippled, but its glassy surface somewhat moved and shaken by the remote agitation of a breeze that was breathing on the outer lake,--this being in a sort of bay,--in the slightly agitated mirror, the variegated trees were reflected dreamily and indistinctly; a broad belt of bright and diversified colors shining in the water beneath. Sometimes the image of a tree might be almost traced; then nothing but this sweep of broken rainbow. It was like the recollection of the real scene in an observer's mind,--a confused radiance. A whirlwind, whirling the dried leaves round in a circle, not very violently. To well consider the characters of a family of persons in a certain condition,--in poverty, for instance,--and endeavor to judge how an altered condition would affect the character of each. The aromatic odor of peat-smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant. Salem, October 14th.--A walk through Beverly to Browne's Hill, and home by the iron-factory. A bright, cool afternoon. The trees, in a large part of the space through which I passed, appeared to be in their fullest glory, bright red, yellow, some of a tender green, appearing at a distance as if bedecked with new foliage, though this emerald tint was likewise the effect of frost. In some places, large tracts of ground were covered as with a scarlet cloth,--the underbrush being thus colored. The general character of these autumnal colors is not gaudy, scarcely gay; there is something too deep and rich in it: it is gorgeous and magnificent, but with a sobriety diffused. The pastures at the foot of Browne's Hill were plentifully covered with barberry-bushes, the leaves of which were reddish, and they were hung with a prodigious quantity of berries. From the summit of the hill, looking down a tract of woodland at a considerable distance, so that the interstices between the trees could not be seen, their tops presented an unbroken level, and seemed somewhat like a richly variegated carpet. The prospect from the hill is wide and interesting; but methinks it is pleasanter in the more immediate vicinity of the hill than miles away. It is agreeable to look down at the square patches of cornfield, or of potato-ground, or of cabbages still green, or of beets looking red,--all a man's farm, in short,--each portion of which he considers separately so important, while you take in the whole at a glance. Then to cast your eye over so many different establishments at once, and rapidly compare thorn,--here a house of gentility, with shady old yellow-leaved elms hanging around it; there a new little white dwelling; there an old farm-house; to see the barns and sheds and all the out-houses clustered together; to comprehend the oneness and exclusiveness and what constitutes the peculiarity of each of so many establishments, and to have in your mind a multitude of them, each of which is the most important part of the world to those who live in it,--this really enlarges the mind, and you come down the hill somewhat wiser than you go up. Pleasant to look over an orchard far below, and see the trees, each casting its own shadow; the white spires of meeting-houses; a sheet of water, partly seen among swelling lands. This Browne's Hill is a long ridge, lying in the midst of a large, level plain; it looks at a distance somewhat like a whale, with its head and tail under water, but its immense back protruding, with steep sides, and a gradual curve along its length. When you have climbed it on one side, and gaze from the summit at the other, you feel as if you had made a discovery,--the landscape being quite different on the two sides. The cellar of the house which formerly crowned the hill, and used to be named Browne's Folly, still remains, two grass-grown and shallow hollows, on the highest part of the ridge. The house consisted of two wings, each perhaps sixty feet in length, united by a middle part, in which was the entrance-hall, and which looked lengthwise along the hill. The foundation of a spacious porch may be traced on either side of the central portion; some of the stones still remain; but even where they are gone, the line of the porch is still traceable by the greener verdure. In the cellar, or rather in the two cellars, grow one or two barberry-bushes, with frost-bitten fruit; there is also yarrow with its white flower, and yellow dandelions. The cellars are still deep enough to shelter a person, all but his head at least, from the wind on the summit of the hill; but they are all grass-grown. A line of trees seems to have been planted along the ridge of the hill. The edifice must have made quite a magnificent appearance. Characteristics during the walk:--Apple-trees with only here and there an apple on the boughs, among the thinned leaves, the relics of a gathering. In others you observe a rustling, and see the boughs shaking and hear the apples thumping down, without seeing the person who does it. Apples scattered by the wayside, some with pieces bitten out, others entire, which you pick up and taste, and find them harsh, crabbed cider-apples, though they have a pretty, waxen appearance. In sunny spots of woodland, boys in search of nuts, looking picturesque among the scarlet and golden foliage. There is something in this sunny autumnal atmosphere that gives a peculiar effect to laughter and joyous voices,--it makes them infinitely more elastic and gladsome than at other seasons. Heaps of dry leaves tossed together by the wind, as if for a couch and lounging-place for the weary traveller, while the sun is warming it for him. Golden pumpkins and squashes, heaped in the angle of a house, till they reach the lower windows. Ox-teams, laden with a rustling load of Indian corn, in the stalk and ear. When all inlet of the sea runs far up into the country, you stare to see a large schooner appear amid the rural landscape; she is unloading a cargo of wood, moist with rain or salt water that has dashed over it. Perhaps you hear the sound of an axe in the woodland; occasionally, the report of a fowling-piece. The travellers in the early part of the afternoon look warm and comfortable as if taking a summer drive; but as eve draws nearer, you meet them well wrapped in top-coats or cloaks, or rough, great surtouts, and red-nosed withal, seeming to take no great comfort, but pressing homeward. The characteristic conversation among teamsters and country squires, where the ascent of a hill causes the chaise to go at the same pace as an ox-team,--perhaps discussing the qualities of a yoke of oxen. The cold, blue aspects of sheets of water. Some of the country shops with the doors closed; others still open as in summer. I meet a wood-sawyer, with his horse and saw on his shoulders, returning from work. As night draws on, you begin to see the gleaming of fires on the ceilings in the houses which you pass. The comfortless appearance of houses at bleak and bare spots,--you wonder how there can be any enjoyment in them. I meet a girl in a chintz gown, with a small shawl on her shoulders, white stockings, and summer morocco shoes,--it looks observable. Turkeys, queer, solemn objects, in black attire, grazing about, and trying to peck the fallen apples, which slip away from their bills. October 16th.--Spent the whole afternoon in a ramble to the sea-shore, near Phillips's Beach. A beautiful, warm, sunny afternoon, the very pleasantest day, probably, that there has been in the whole course of the year. People at work, harvesting, without their coats. Cocks, with their squad of hens, in the grass-fields, hunting grasshoppers, chasing them eagerly with outspread wings, appearing to take much interest in the sport, apart from the profit. Other hens picking up the ears of Indian corn. Grasshoppers, flies, and flying insects of all sorts are more abundant in these warm autumnal days than I have seen them at any other time. Yellow butterflies flutter about in the sunshine, singly, by pairs, or more, and are wafted on the gentle gales. The crickets begin to sing early in the afternoon, and sometimes a locust may be heard. In some warm spots, a pleasant buzz of many insects. Crossed the fields near Brookhouse's villa, and came upon a long beach,-- at least a mile long, I should think,--terminated by craggy rocks at either end, and backed by a high broken bank, the grassy summit of which, year by year, is continually breaking away, and precipitated to the bottom. At the foot of the bank, in some parts, is a vast number of pebbles and paving-stones, rolled up thither by the sea long ago. The beach is of a brown sand, with hardly any pebbles intermixed upon it. When the tide is part way down, there is a margin of several yards from the water's edge, along the whole mile length of the beach, which glistens like a mirror, and reflects objects, and shines bright in the sunshine, the sand being wet to that distance from the water. Above this margin the sand is not wet, and grows less and less damp the farther towards the bank you keep. In some places your footstep is perfectly implanted, showing the whole shape, and the square toe, and every nail in the heel of your boot. Elsewhere, the impression is imperfect, and even when you stamp, you cannot imprint the whole. As you tread, a dry spot flashes around your step, and grows moist as you lift your foot again. Pleasant to pass along this extensive walk, watching the surf-wave;--how sometimes it seems to make a feint of breaking, but dies away ineffectually, merely kissing the strand; then, after many such abortive efforts, it gathers itself, and forms a high wall, and rolls onward, heightening and heightening without foam at the summit of the green line, and at last throws itself fiercely on the beach, with a loud roar, the spray flying above. As you walk along, you are preceded by a flock of twenty or thirty beach birds, which are seeking, I suppose, for food on the margin of the surf, yet seem to be merely sporting, chasing the sea as it retires, and running up before the impending wave. Sometimes they let it bear them off their feet, and float lightly on its breaking summit; sometimes they flutter and seem to rest on the feathery spray. They are little birds with gray backs and snow-white breasts; their images may be seen in the wet sand almost or quite as distinctly as the reality. Their legs are long. As you draw near, they take a flight of a score of yards or more, and then recommence their dalliance with the surf-wave. You may behold their multitudinous little tracks all along your way. Before you reach the end of the beach, you become quite attached to these little sea-birds, and take much interest in their occupations. After passing in one direction, it is pleasant then to retrace your footsteps. Your tracks being all traceable, you may recall the whole mood and occupation of your mind during your first passage. Here you turned somewhat aside to pick up a shell that you saw nearer the water's edge. Here you examined a long sea-weed, and trailed its length after you for a considerable distance. Here the effect of the wide sea struck you suddenly. Here you fronted the ocean, looking at a sail, distant in the sunny blue. Here you looked at some plant on the bank. Here some vagary of mind seems to have bewildered you; for your tracks go round and round, and interchange each other without visible reason. Here you picked up pebbles and skipped them upon the water. Here you wrote names and drew faces with a razor sea-shell in the sand. After leaving the beach, clambered over crags, all shattered and tossed about everyhow; in some parts curiously worn and hollowed out, almost into caverns. The rock, shagged with sea-weed,--in some places, a thick carpet of sea-weed laid over the pebbles, into which your foot would sink. Deep tanks among these rocks, which the sea replenishes at high tide, and then leaves the bottom all covered with various sorts of sea-plants, as if it were some sea-monster's private garden. I saw a crab in one of them; five-fingers too. From the edge of the rocks, you may look off into deep, deep water, even at low tide. Among the rocks, I found a great bird, whether a wild-goose, a loon, or an albatross, I scarcely know. It was in such a position that I almost fancied it might be asleep, and therefore drew near softly, lest it should take flight; but it was dead, and stirred not when I touched it. Sometimes a dead fish was cast up. A ledge of rocks, with a beacon upon it, looking like a monument erected to those who have perished by shipwreck. The smoked, extempore fireplace, where a party cooked their fish. About midway on the beach, a fresh-water brooklet flows towards the sea. Where it leaves the land, it is quite a rippling little current; but, in flowing across the sand, it grows shallower and more shallow, and at last is quite lost, and dies in the effort to carry its little tribute to the main. An article to be made of telling the stories of the tiles of an old-fashioned chimney-piece to a child. A person conscious that he was soon to die, the humor in which he would pay his last visit to familiar persons and things. A description of the various classes of hotels and taverns, and the prominent personages in each. There should be some story connected with it,--as of a person commencing with boarding at a great hotel, and gradually, as his means grew less, descending in life, till he got below ground into a cellar. A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely. A person to spend all his life and splendid talents in trying to achieve something naturally impossible,--as to make a conquest over Nature. Meditations about the main gas-pipe of a great city,--if the supply were to be stopped, what would happen? How many different scenes it sheds light on? It might be made emblematical of something. December 6th.--A fairy tale about chasing Echo to her hiding-place. Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror. A house to be built over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole village is lighted by it. Elsewhere, a farm-house was lighted by it, and no other fuel used in the coldest weather. Gnomes, or other mischievous little fiends, to be represented as burrowing in the hollow teeth of some person who has subjected himself to their power. It should be a child's story. This should be one of many modes of petty torment. They should be contrasted with beneficent fairies, who minister to the pleasures of the good. A man will undergo great toil and hardship for ends that must be many years distant,--as wealth or fame,--but none for an end that may be close at hand,--as the joys of heaven. Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation. And this would be the case, even though he were surrounded by true-hearted relatives and friends. A company of men, none of whom have anything worth hoping for on earth, yet who do not look forward to anything beyond earth! Sorrow to be personified, and its effect on a family represented by the way in which the members of the family regard this dark-clad and sad-browed inmate. A story to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another. To personify winds of various characters. A man living a wicked life, in one place, and simultaneously a virtuous and religious one in another. An ornament to be worn about the person of a lady,--as a jewelled heart. After many years, it happens to be broken or unscrewed, and a poisonous odor comes out. Lieutenant F. W------ of the navy was an inveterate duellist and an unerring shot. He had taken offence at Lieutenant F------, and endeavored to draw him into a duel, following him to the Mediterranean for that purpose, and harassing him intolerably. At last, both parties being in Massachusetts, F------ determined to fight, and applied to Lieutenant A------ to be his second. A------ examined into the merits of the quarrel, and came to the conclusion that F------ had not given F. W------ justifiable cause for driving him to a duel, and that he ought not to be shot. He instructed F------ in the use of the pistol, and, before the meeting, warned him, by all means, to get the first fire; for that, if F. W------ fired first, he, F------, was infallibly a dead man, as his antagonist could shoot to a hair's-breadth. The parties met; and F------, firing immediately on the word's being given, shot F. W------ through the heart. F. W------, with a most savage expression of countenance, fired, after the bullet had gone through his heart, and when the blood had entirely left his face, and shot away one of F------'s side-locks. His face probably looked as if he were already in the infernal regions; but afterwards it assumed an angelic calmness and repose. A company of persons to drink a certain medicinal preparation, which would prove a poison, or the contrary, according to their different characters. Many persons, without a consciousness of so doing, to contribute to some one end; as to a beggar's feast, made up of broken victuals from many tables; or a patch carpet, woven of shreds from innumerable garments. Some very famous jewel or other thing, much talked of all over the world. some person to meet with it, and get possession of it in some unexpected manner, amid homely circumstances. To poison a person or a party of persons with the sacramental wine. A cloud in the shape of an old woman kneeling, with arms extended towards the moon. On being transported to strange scenes, we feel as if all were unreal. This is but the perception of the true unreality of earthly things, made evident by the want of congruity between ourselves and them. By and by we become mutually adapted, and the perception is lost. An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images that have been reflected in it pass back again across its surface. Our Indian races having reared no monuments, like the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, when they have disappeared from the earth their history will appear a fable, and they misty phantoms. A woman to sympathize with all emotions, but to have none of her own. A portrait of a person in New England to be recognized as of the same person represented by a portrait in Old England. Having distinguished himself there, he had suddenly vanished, and had never been heard of till he was thus discovered to be identical with a distinguished man in New England. Men of cold passions have quick eyes. A virtuous but giddy girl to attempt to play a trick on a man. He sees what she is about, and contrives matters so that she throws herself completely into his power, and is ruined,--all in jest. A letter, written a century or more ago, but which has never yet been unsealed. A partially insane man to believe himself the Provincial Governor or other great official of Massachusetts. The scene might be the Province House. A dreadful secret to be communicated to several people of various characters,--grave or gay,--and they all to become insane, according to their characters, by the influence of the secret. Stories to be told of a certain person's appearance in public, of his having been seen in various situations, and of his making visits in private circles; but finally, on looking for this person, to come upon his old grave and mossy tombstone. The influence of a peculiar mind, in close communion with another, to drive the latter to insanity. To look at a beautiful girl, and picture all the lovers, in different situations, whose hearts are centred upon her. May 11th, 1838.--At Boston last week. Items:--A young man, with a small mustache, dyed brown, reddish from its original light color. He walks with an affected gait, his arms crooked outwards, treading much on his toes. His conversation is about the theatre, where he has a season ticket,--about an amateur who lately appeared there, and about actresses, with other theatrical scandal.--In the smoking-room, two checker and backgammon boards; the landlord a great player, seemingly a stupid man, but with considerable shrewdness and knowledge of the world.--F------, the comedian, a stout, heavy-looking Englishman, of grave deportment, with no signs of wit or humor, yet aiming at both in conversation, in order to support his character. Very steady and regular in his life, and parsimonious in his disposition,--worth $ 50,000, made by his profession.--A clergyman, elderly, with a white neckcloth, very unbecoming, an unworldly manner, unacquaintance with the customs of the house, and learning them in a childlike way. A ruffle to his shirt, crimped.--A gentleman, young, handsome, and sea-flushed, belonging to Oswego, New York, but just arrived in port from the Mediterranean: he inquires of me about the troubles in Canada, which were first beginning to make a noise when he left the country,--whether they are all over. I tell him all is finished, except the hanging of the prisoners. Then we talk over the matter, and I tell him the fates of the principal men,-- some banished to New South Wales, one hanged, others in prison, others, conspicuous at first, now almost forgotten.--Apartments of private families in the hotel,--what sort of domesticity there may be in them; eating in public, with no board of their own. The gas that lights the rest of the house lights them also, in the chandelier from the ceiling.-- A shabby-looking man, quiet, with spectacles, at first wearing an old, coarse brown frock, then appearing in a suit of elderly black, saying nothing unless spoken to, but talking intelligently when addressed. He is an editor, and I suppose printer, of a country paper. Among the guests, he holds intercourse with gentlemen of much more respectable appearance than himself, from the same part of the country.--Bill of fare; wines printed on the back, but nobody calls for a bottle. Chairs turned down for expected guests. Three-pronged steel forks. Cold supper from nine to eleven P. M. Great, round, mahogany table, in the sitting-room, covered with papers. In the morning, before and soon after breakfast, gentlemen reading the morning papers, while others wait for their chance, or try to pick out something from the papers of yesterday or longer ago. In the forenoon, the Southern papers are brought in, and thrown damp and folded on the table. The eagerness with which those who happen to be in the room start up and make prize of them. Play-bills, printed on yellow paper, laid upon the table. Towards evening comes the Transcript. June 15th.--The red light which the sunset at this season diffuse; there being showery afternoons, but the sun setting bright amid clouds, and diffusing its radiance over those that are scattered in masses all over the sky. It gives a rich tinge to all objects, even to those of sombre lines, yet without changing the lines. The complexions of people are exceedingly enriched by it; they look warm, and kindled with a mild fire. The whole scenery and personages acquire, methinks, a passionate character. A love-scene should be laid on such an evening. The trees and the grass have now the brightest possible green, there having been so many showers alternating with such powerful sunshine. There are roses and tulips and honeysuckles, with their sweet perfume; in short, the splendor of a more gorgeous climate than ours might be brought into the picture. The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd, yet as completely in the power of another, life and all, as if they two were in the deepest solitude. Tremont, Boston, June 16th.--Tremendously hot weather to-day. Went on board the Cyane to see Bridge, the purser. Took boat from the end of Long Wharf; with two boatmen who had just landed a man. Row round to the starboard side of the sloop, where we pass up the steps, and are received by Bridge, who introduces us to one of the lieutenants,--Hazard. Sailors and midshipmen scattered about,--the middies having a foul anchor, that is, an anchor with a cable twisted round it, embroidered on the collars of their jackets. The officers generally wear blue jackets with lace on the shoulders, white pantaloons, and cloth caps. Introduced into the cabin,--a handsome room, finished with mahogany, comprehending the width of the vessel; a sideboard with liquors, and above it a looking-glass; behind the cabin, an inner room, in which is seated a lady, waiting for the captain to come on board; on each side of this inner cabin, a large and convenient state-room with bed,--the doors opening into the cabin. This cabin is on a level with the quarter-deck, and is covered by the poop-deck. Going down below stairs, you come to the ward-room, a pretty large room, round which are the state-rooms of the lieutenants, the purser, surgeon, etc. A stationary table. The ship's main-mast comes down through the middle of the room, and Bridge's chair, at dinner, is planted against it. Wine and brandy produced; and Bridge calls to the Doctor to drink with him, who answers affirmatively from his state-room, and shortly after opens the door and makes his appearance. Other officers emerge from the side of the vessel, or disappear into it, in the same way. Forward of the ward-room, adjoining it, and on the same level, is the midshipmen's room, on the larboard side of the vessel, not partitioned off, so as to be shut up. On a shelf a few books; one midshipman politely invites us to walk in; another sits writing. Going farther forward, on the same level we come to the crew's department, part of which is occupied by the cooking-establishment, where all sorts of cooking is going on for the officers and men. Through the whole of this space, ward-room and all, there is barely room to stand upright, without the hat on. The rules of the quarter-deck (which extends aft from the main-mast) are, that the midshipmen shall not presume to walk on the starboard side of it, nor the men to come upon it at all, unless to speak to an officer. The poop-deck is still more sacred,--the lieutenants being confined to the larboard side, and the captain alone having a right to the starboard. A marine was pacing the poop-deck, being the only guard that I saw stationed in the vessel,--the more stringent regulations being relaxed while she is preparing for sea. While standing on the quarter-deck, a great piping at the gangway, and the second cutter comes alongside, bringing the consul and some other gentleman to visit the vessel. After a while, we are rowed ashore with them, in the same boat. Its crew are new hands, and therefore require much instruction from the cockswain. We are seated under an awning. The guns of the Cyane are medium thirty-two pounders; some of them have percussion locks. At the Tremont, I had Bridge to dine with me: iced champagne, claret in glass pitchers. Nothing very remarkable among the guests. A wine-merchant, French apparently, though he had arrived the day before in a bark from Copenhagen: a somewhat corpulent gentleman, without so good manners as an American would have in the same line of life, but good-natured, sociable, and civil, complaining of the heat. He had rings on his fingers of great weight of metal, and one of them had a seal for letters; brooches at the bosom, three in a row, up and down; also a gold watch-guard, with a seal appended. Talks of the comparative price of living, of clothes, etc., here and in Europe. Tells of the prices of wines by the cask and pipe. Champagne, he says, is drunk of better quality here than where it grows.--A vendor of patent medicines, Doctor Jaques, makes acquaintance with me, and shows me his recommendatory letters in favor of himself and drugs, signed by a long list of people. He prefers, he says, booksellers to druggists as his agents, and inquired of me about them in this town. He seems to be an honest man enough, with an intelligent face, and sensible in his talk, but not a gentleman, wearing a somewhat shabby brown coat and mixed pantaloons, being ill-shaven, and apparently not well acquainted with the customs of a fashionable hotel. A simplicity about him that is likable, though, I believe, he comes from Philadelphia.--Naval officers, strolling about town, bargaining for swords and belts, and other military articles; with the tailor, to have naval buttons put on their shore-going coats, and for their pantaloons, suited to the climate of the Mediterranean. It is the almost invariable habit of officers, when going ashore or staying on shore, to divest themselves of all military or naval insignia, and appear as private citizens. At the Tremont, young gentlemen with long earlocks,--straw hats, light, or dark-mixed.--The theatre being closed, the play-bills of many nights ago are posted up against its walls. July 4th.--A very hot, bright, sunny day; town much thronged; booths on the Common, selling gingerbread, sugar-plums, and confectionery, spruce beer, lemonade. Spirits forbidden, but probably sold stealthily. On the top of one of the booths a monkey, with a tail two or three feet long. He is fastened by a cord, which, getting tangled with the flag over the booth, he takes hold and tries to free it. He is the object of much attention from the crowd, and played with by the boys, who toss up gingerbread to him, while he nibbles and throws it down again. He reciprocates notice, of some kind or other, with all who notice him. There is a sort of gravity about him. A boy pulls his long tail, whereat he gives a slight squeak, and for the future elevates it as much as possible. Looking at the same booth by and by, I find that the poor monkey has been obliged to betake himself to the top of one of the wooden joists that stick up high above. There are boys, going about with molasses candy, almost melted down in the sun. Shows: A mammoth rat; a collection of pirates, murderers, and the like, in wax. Constables in considerable number, parading about with their staves, sometimes conversing with each other, producing an effect by their presence, without having to interfere actively. One or two old salts, rather the worse for liquor: in general the people are very temperate. At evening the effect of things rather more picturesque; some of the booth-keepers knocking down the temporary structures, and putting the materials in wagons to carry away; other booths lighted up, and the lights gleaming through rents in the sail-cloth tops. The customers are rather riotous, calling loudly and whimsically for what they want; a young fellow and a girl coming arm in arm; two girls approaching the booth, and getting into conversation with the folks thereabout. Perchance a knock-down between two half-sober fellows in the crowd: a knock-down without a heavy blow, the receiver being scarcely able to keep his footing at any rate. Shoutings and hallooings, laughter, oaths,--generally a good-natured tumult; and the constables use no severity, but interfere, if at all, in a friendly sort of way. I talk with one about the way in which the day has passed, and he bears testimony to the orderliness of the crowd, but suspects one booth of selling liquor, and relates one scuffle. There is a talkative and witty seller of gingerbread holding forth to the people from his cart, making himself quite a noted character by his readiness of remark and humor, and disposing of all his wares. Late in the evening, during the fire-works, people are consulting how they are to get hone,-- many having long miles to walk: a father, with wife and children, saying it will be twelve o'clock before they reach home, the children being already tired to death. The moon beautifully dark-bright, not giving so white a light as sometimes. The girls all look beautiful and fairy-like in it, not exactly distinct, nor yet dim. The different characters of female countenances during the day,--mirthful and mischievous, slyly humorous, stupid, looking genteel generally, but when they speak often betraying plebeianism by the tones of their voices. Two girls are very tired, one a pale, thin, languid-looking creature; the other plump, rosy, rather overburdened with her own little body. Gingerbread figures, in the shape of Jim Crow and other popularities. In the old burial-ground, Charter Street, a slate gravestone, carved round the borders, to the memory of "Colonel John Hathorne, Esq.," who died in 1717. This was the witch-judge. The stone is sunk deep into the earth, and leans forward, and the grass grows very long around it; and, on account of the moss, it was rather difficult to make out the date. Other Hathornes lie buried in a range with him on either side. In a corner of the burial-ground, close under Dr. P-----'s garden fence, are the most ancient stones remaining in the graveyard; moss-grown, deeply sunken. One to "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician," in 1688; another to his wife. There, too, is the grave of Nathaniel Mather, the younger brother of Cotton, and mentioned in the Magnalia as a hard student, and of great promise. "An aged man at nineteen years," saith the gravestone. It affected me deeply, when I had cleared away the grass from the half-buried stone, and read the name. An apple-tree or two hang over these old graves, and throw down the blighted fruit on Nathaniel Mather's grave,--he blighted too. It gives strange ideas, to think how convenient to Dr. P------'s family this burial-ground is,--the monuments standing almost within arm's reach of the side windows of the parlor,--and there being a little gate from the back yard through which we step forth upon those old graves aforesaid. And the tomb of the P. family is right in front, and close to the gate. It is now filled, the last being the refugee Tory, Colonel P------ and his wife. M. P------ has trained flowers over this tomb, on account of her friendly relations with Colonel P------. It is not, I think, the most ancient families that have tombs,--their ancestry for two or three generations having been reposited in the earth before such a luxury as a tomb was thought of. Men who founded families, and grew rich, a century or so ago, were probably the first. There is a tomb of the Lyndes, with a slab of slate affixed to the brick masonry on one side, and carved with a coat of arms. July 10th.--A fishing excursion, last Saturday afternoon, eight or ten miles out in the harbor. A fine wind out, which died away towards evening, and finally became quite calm. We cooked our fish on a rock named "Satan," about forty feet long and twenty broad, irregular in its shape, and of uneven surface, with pools of water here and there, left by the tide,--dark brown rock, or whitish; there was the excrement of sea-fowl scattered on it, and a few feathers. The water was deep around the rock, and swelling up and downward, waving the sea-weed. We built two fires, which, as the dusk deepened, cast a red gleam over the rock and the waves, and made the sea, on the side away from the sunset, look dismal; but by and by up came the moon, red as a house afire, and, as it rose, it grew silvery bright, and threw a line of silver across the calm sea. Beneath the moon and the horizon, the commencement of its track of brightness, there was a cone of blackness, or of very black blue. It was after nine before we finished our supper, which we ate by firelight and moonshine, and then went aboard our decked boat again,--no safe achievement in our ticklish little dory. To those remaining in the boat, we had looked very picturesque around our fires, and on the rock above them,--our statures being apparently increased to the size of the sons of Anak. The tide, now coming up, gradually dashed over the fires we had left, and so the rock again became a desert. The wind had now entirely died away, leaving the sea smooth as glass, except a quiet swell, and we could only float along, as the tide bore us, almost imperceptibly. It was as beautiful a night as ever shone,--calm, warm, bright, the moon being at full. On one side of us was Marblehead lighthouse, on the other, Baker's Island; and both, by the influence of the moonlight, had a silvery hue, unlike their ruddy beacon tinge in dark nights. They threw long reflections across the sea, like the moon. There we floated slowly with the tide till about midnight, and then, the tide turning, we fastened our vessel to a pole, which marked a rock, so as to prevent being carried back by the reflux. Some of the passengers turned in below; some stretched themselves on deck; some walked about, smoking cigars. I kept the deck all night. Once there was a little cat's-paw of a breeze, whereupon we untied ourselves from the pole; but it almost immediately died away, and we were compelled to make fast again. At about two o'clock, up rose the morning star, a round, red, fiery ball, very comparable to the moon at its rising, and, getting upward, it shone marvellously bright, and threw its long reflection into the sea, like the moon and the two lighthouses. It was Venus, and the brightest star I ever beheld; it was in the northeast. The moon made but a very small circuit in the sky, though it shone all night. The aurora borealis shot upwards to the zenith, and between two and three o'clock the first streak of dawn appeared, stretching far along the edge of the eastern horizon,-- a faint streak of light; then it gradually broadened and deepened, and became a rich saffron tint, with violet above, and then an ethereal and transparent blue. The saffron became intermixed with splendor, kindling and kindling, Baker's Island lights being in the centre of the brightness, so that they were extinguished by it, or at least grew invisible. On the other side of the boat, the Marblehead lighthouse still threw out its silvery gleam, and the moon shone brightly too; and its light looked very singularly, mingling with the growing daylight. It was not like the moonshine, brightening as the evening twilight deepens; for now it threw its radiance over the landscape, the green and other tints of which were displayed by the daylight, whereas at-evening all those tints are obscured. It looked like a milder sunshine,--a dreamy sunshine,--the sunshine of a world not quite so real and material as this. All night we had heard the Marblehead clocks telling the hour. Anon, up came the sun, without any bustle, but quietly, his antecedent splendors having gilded the sea for some time before. It had been cold towards morning, but now grew warm, and gradually burning hot in the sun. A breeze sprang up, but our first use of it was to get aground on Coney Island about five o'clock, where we lay till nine or thereabout, and then floated slowly up to the wharf. The roar of distant surf, the rolling of porpoises, the passing of shoals of fish, a steamboat smoking along at a distance, were the scene on my watch. I fished during the night, and, feeling something on the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,--all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking himself secure on the bottom. Ladurlad, in the Curse of Kehama, on visiting a certain celestial region, the fire in his heart and brain died away for a season, but was rekindled again on returning to earth. So may it be with me in my projected three months' seclusion from old associations. Punishment of a miser,--to pay the drafts of his heir in his tomb. July 13th.--A show of wax-figures, consisting almost wholly of murderers and their victims,--Gibbs and Hansley, the pirates, and the Dutch girl whom Gibbs murdered. Gibbs and Hansley were admirably done, as natural as life; and many people who had known Gibbs would not, according to the showman, be convinced that this wax-figure was not his skin stuffed. The two pirates were represented with halters round their necks, just ready to be turned off; and the sheriff stood behind them, with his watch, waiting for the moment. The clothes, halter, and Gibbs's hair were authentic. E. K. Avery and Cornell,--the former a figure in black, leaning on the back of a chair, in the attitude of a clergyman about to pray; an ugly devil, said to be a good likeness. Ellen Jewett and R. P. Robinson, she dressed richly, in extreme fashion, and very pretty; he awkward and stiff, it being difficult to stuff a figure to look like a gentleman. The showman seemed very proud of Ellen Jewett, and spoke of her somewhat as if this wax-figure were a real creation. Strong and Mrs. Whipple, who together murdered the husband of the latter. Lastly the Siamese twins. The showman is careful to call his exhibition the "Statuary." He walks to and fro before the figures, talking of the history of the persons, the moral lessons to be drawn therefrom, and especially of the excellence of the wax-work. He has for sale printed histories of the personages. He is a friendly, easy-mannered sort of a half-genteel character, whose talk has been moulded by the persons who most frequent such a show; an air of superiority of information, a moral instructor, with a great deal of real knowledge of the world. He invites his departing guests to call again and bring their friends, desiring to know whether they are pleased; telling that he had a thousand people on the 4th of July, and that they were all perfectly satisfied. He talks with the female visitors, remarking on Ellen Jewett's person and dress to them, he having "spared no expense in dressing her; and all the ladies say that a dress never set better, and he thinks he never knew a handsomer female." He goes to and fro, snuffing the candles, and now and then holding one to the face of a favorite figure. Ever and anon, hearing steps upon the staircase, he goes to admit a new visitor. The visitors,--a half-bumpkin, half country-squire-like man, who has something of a knowing air, and yet looks and listens with a good deal of simplicity and faith, smiling between whiles; a mechanic of the town; several decent-looking girls and women, who eye Ellen herself with more interest than the other figures,--women having much curiosity about such ladies; a gentlemanly sort of person, who looks somewhat ashamed of himself for being there, and glances at me knowingly, as if to intimate that he was conscious of being out of place; a boy or two, and myself, who examine wax faces and faces of flesh with equal interest. A political or other satire might be made by describing a show of wax-figures of the prominent public men; and, by the remarks of the showman and the spectators, their characters and public standing might be expressed. And the incident of Judge Tyler as related by E---- might be introduced. A series of strange, mysterious, dreadful events to occur, wholly destructive of a person's happiness. He to impute them to various persons and causes, but ultimately finds that he is himself the sole agent. Moral, that our welfare depends on ourselves. The strange incident in the court of Charles IX. of France: he and five other maskers being attired in coats of linen covered with pitch and bestuck with flax to represent hairy savages. They entered the hall dancing, the five being fastened together, and the king in front. By accident the five were set on fire with a torch. Two were burned to death on the spot, two afterwards died; one fled to the buttery, and jumped into a vessel of water. It might be represented as the fate of a squad of dissolute men. A perception, for a moment, of one's eventual and moral self, as if it were another person,--the observant faculty being separated, and looking intently at the qualities of the character. There is a surprise when this happens,--this getting out of one's self,--and then the observer sees how queer a fellow he is. July 27th.--Left home [Salem] on the 23d instant. To Boston by stage, and took the afternoon cars for Worcester. A little boy returning from the city, several miles, with a basket of empty custard-cups, the contents of which he had probably sold at the depot. Stopped at the Temperance House. An old gentleman, Mr. Phillips of Boston, got into conversation with one, and inquired very freely as to my character, tastes, habits, and circumstances,--a freedom sanctioned by his age, his kindly and beneficent spirit, and the wisdom of his advice. It is strange how little impertinence depends on what is actually said, but rather on the manner and motives of saying it. "I want to do you good," said he with warmth, after becoming, apparently, moved by my communications. "Well, sir," replied I, "I wish you could, for both our sakes; for I have no doubt it will be a great satisfaction to you." He asked the most direct questions of another young man; for instance, "Are you married?" having before ascertained that point with regard to myself. He told me by all means to act, in whatever way; observing that he himself would have no objection to be a servant, if no other mode of action presented itself. The landlord of the tavern, a decent, active, grave, attentive personage, giving me several cards of his house to distribute on my departure. A judge, a stout, hearty country squire, looking elderly; a hale and rugged man, in a black coat, and thin, light pantaloons. Started for Northampton at half past nine in the morning. A respectable sort of man and his son on their way to Niagara,--grocers, I believe, and calculating how to perform the tour, subtracting as few days as possible from the shop. Somewhat inexperienced travellers, and comparing everything advantageously or otherwise with Boston customs; and considering themselves a long way from home, while yet short of a hundred miles from it. Two ladies, rather good-looking. I rode outside nearly all day, and was very sociable with the driver and another outside passenger. Towards night, took up an essence-vendor for a short distance. He was returning home, after having been out on a tour two or three weeks; and nearly exhausted his stock. He was not exclusively an essence-pedler, having a large tin box, which had been filled with dry goods, combs, jewelry, etc., now mostly sold out. His essences were of anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar, wormwood, together with opodeldoc, and an oil for the hair. These matters are concocted at Ashfield, and the pedlers are sent about with vast quantities. Cologne-water is among the essences manufactured, though the bottles have foreign labels on them. The pedler was good-natured and communicative, and spoke very frankly about his trade, which he seemed to like better than farming, though his experience of it is yet brief. He spoke of the trials of temper to which pedlers are subjected, but said that it was necessary to be forbearing, because the same road must be travelled again and again. The pedlers find satisfaction for all contumelies in making good bargains out of their customers. This man was a pedler in quite a small way, making but a narrow circuit, and carrying no more than an open basket full of essences; but some go out with wagon-loads. He himself contemplated a trip westward, in which case he would send on quantities of his wares ahead to different stations. He seemed to enjoy the intercourse and seeing of the world. He pointed out a rough place in the road, where his stock of essences had formerly been broken by a jolt of the stage. What a waste of sweet smells on the desert air! The essence-labels stated the efficacy of the stuffs for various complaints of children and grown people. The driver was an acquaintance of the pedler, and so gave him his drive for nothing, though the pedler pretended to wish to force some silver into his hand; and afterwards he got down to water the horses, while the driver was busied with other matters. This driver was a little, dark ragamuffin, apparently of irascible temper, speaking with great disapprobation of his way-bill not being timed accurately, but so as to make it appear as if he were longer upon the road than he was. As he spoke, the blood darkened in his cheek, and his eye looked ominous and angry, as if he were enraged with the person to whom he was speaking; yet he had not real grit, for he had never said a word of his grievances to those concerned. "I mean to tell them of it by and by. I won't bear it more than three or four times more," said he. Left Northampton the next morning, between one and two o'clock. Three other passengers, whose faces were not visible for some hours; so we went on through unknown space, saying nothing, glancing forth sometimes to see the gleam of the lanterns on wayside objects. How very desolate looks a forest when seen in this way,--as if, should you venture one step within its wild, tangled, many-stemmed, and dark-shadowed verge, you would inevitably be lost forever. Sometimes we passed a house, or rumbled through a village, stopping perhaps to arouse some drowsy postmaster, who appeared at the door in shirt and pantaloons, yawning, received the mail, returned it again, and was yawning when last seen. A few words exchanged among the passengers, as they roused themselves from their half-slumbers, or dreamy, slumber-like abstraction. Meantime dawn broke, our faces became partially visible, the morning air grew colder, and finally cloudy day came on. We found ourselves driving through quite a romantic country, with hills or mountains on all sides, a stream on one side, bordered by a high, precipitous bank, up which would have grown pines, only that, losing their footholds, many of them had slipped downward. The road was not the safest in the world; for often the carriage approached within two or three feet of a precipice; but the driver, a merry fellow, lolled on his box, with his feet protruding horizontally, and rattled on at the rate of ten miles an hour. Breakfast between four and five,--newly caught trout, salmon, ham, boiled eggs, and other niceties,--truly excellent. A bunch of pickerel, intended for a tavern-keeper farther on, was carried by the stage-driver. The drivers carry a "time-watch" enclosed in a small wooden case, with a lock, so that it may be known in what time they perform their stages. They are allowed so many hours and minutes to do their work, and their desire to go as fast as possible, combined with that of keeping their horses in good order, produces about a right medium. One of the passengers was a young man who had been in Pennsylvania, keeping a school,--a genteel enough young man, but not a gentleman. He took neither supper nor breakfast, excusing himself from one as being weary with riding all day, and from the other because it was so early. He attacked me for a subscription for "building up a destitute church," of which he had taken an agency, and had collected two or three hundred dollars, but wanted as many thousands. Betimes in the morning, on the descent of a mountain, we arrived at a house where dwelt the married sister of the young man, whom he was going to visit. He alighted, saw his trunk taken off, and then, having perceived his sister at the door, and turning to bid us farewell, there was a broad smile, even a laugh of pleasure, which did him more credit with me than anything else; for hitherto there had been a disagreeable scornful twist upon his face, perhaps, however, merely superficial. I saw, as the stage drove off, his comely sister approaching with a lighted-up face to greet him, and one passenger on the front seat beheld them meet. "Is it an affectionate greeting?" inquired I. "Yes," said he, "I should like to share it"; whereby I concluded that there was a kiss exchanged. The highest point of our journey was at Windsor, where we could see leagues around over the mountain, a terribly bare, bleak spot, fit for nothing but sheep, and without shelter of woods. We rattled downward into a warmer region, beholding as we went the sun shining on portions of the landscape, miles ahead of us, while we were yet in chillness and gloom. It is probable that during a part of the stage the mists around us looked like sky clouds to those in the lower regions. Think of driving a stage-coach through the clouds! Seasonably in the forenoon we arrived at Pittsfield. Pittsfield is a large village, quite shut in by mountain walls, generally extending like a rampart on all sides of it, but with insulated great hills rising here and there in the outline. The area of the town is level; its houses are handsome, mostly wooden and white; but some are of brick, painted deep red, the bricks being not of a healthy, natural color. There are handsome churches, Gothic and others, and a court-house and an academy; the court-house having a marble front. There is a small wall in the centre of the town, and in the centre of the Mall rises an elm of the loftiest and straightest stem that ever I beheld, without a branch or leaf upon it till it has soared seventy or perhaps a hundred feet into the air. The top branches unfortunately have been shattered somehow or other, so that it does not cast a broad shade; probably they were broken by their own ponderous foliage. The central square of Pittsfield presents all the bustle of a thriving village,--the farmers of the vicinity in light wagons, sulkies, or on horseback; stages at the door of the Berkshire Hotel, under the stoop of which sit or lounge the guests, stage-people, and idlers, observing or assisting in the arrivals and departures. Huge trunks and bandboxes unladed and laded. The courtesy shown to ladies in aiding them to alight, in a shower, under umbrellas. The dull looks of passengers, who have driven all night, scarcely brightened by the excitement of arriving at a new place. The stage agent demanding the names of those who are going on,--some to Lebanon Springs, some to Albany. The toddy-stick is still busy at these Berkshire public-houses. At dinner soup preliminary, in city style. Guests: the court people; Briggs, member of Congress, attending a trial here; horse-dealers, country squires, store-keepers in the village, etc. My room, a narrow crib overlooking a back court-yard, where a young man and a lad were drawing water for the maid-servants,--their jokes, especially those of the lad, of whose wit the elder fellow, being a blockhead himself, was in great admiration, and declared to another that he knew as much as them both. Yet he was not very witty. Once in a while the maid-servants would come to the door, and hear and respond to their jokes, with a kind of restraint, yet both permitting and enjoying them. After or about sunset there was a heavy shower, the thunder rumbling round and round the mountain wall, and the clouds stretching from rampart to rampart. When it abated, the clouds in all parts of the visible heavens were tinged with glory from the west; some that hung low being purple and gold, while the higher ones were gray. The slender curve of the new moon was also visible brightening amidst the fading brightness of the sunny part of the sky. There are marble-quarries in and near Pittsfield, which accounts for the fact that there are none but marble gravestones in the burial-grounds; some of the monuments well carved; but the marble does not withstand the wear and tear of time and weather so well as the imported marble, and the sculpture soon loses its sharp outline. The door of one tomb, a wooden door, opening in the side of a green mound, surmounted by a marble obelisk, having been shaken from its hinges by the late explosion of the powder-house, and incompletely repaired, I peeped in at the crevices, and saw the coffins. It was the tomb of Rev. Thomas Allen, first minister of Pittsfield, deceased in 1810. It contained three coffins, all with white mould on their tops: one, a small child's, rested upon another, and the other was on the opposite side of the tomb, and the lid was considerably displaced; but, the tomb being dark, I could see neither corpse nor skeleton. Marble also occurs here in North Adams, and thus some very ordinary houses have marble doorsteps, and even the stone walls are built of fragments of marble. Wednesday, 26th.--Left Pittsfield at about eight o'clock in the Bennington stage, intending to go to Williamstown. Inside passengers,--a new-married couple taking a jaunt. The lady, with a clear, pale complexion, and a rather pensive cast of countenance, slender, and with a genteel figure; the bridegroom, a shopkeeper in New York probably, a young man with a stout black beard, black eyebrows, which formed one line across his forehead. They were very loving; and while the stage stopped, I watched them, quite entranced in each other, both leaning sideways against the back of the coach, and perusing their mutual comeliness, and apparently making complimentary observations upon it to one another. The bride appeared the most absorbed and devoted, referring her whole being to him. The gentleman seemed in a most paradisiacal mood, smiling ineffably upon his bride, and, when she spoke, responding to her with a benign expression of matrimonial sweetness, and, as it were, compassion for the "weaker vessel," mingled with great love and pleasant humor. It was very droll. The driver peeped into the coach once, and said that he had his arm round her waist. He took little freedoms with her, tapping her with his cane,--love-pats; and she seemed to see nothing amiss. They kept eating gingerbread all along the road, and dined heartily notwithstanding. Our driver was a slender, lathe-like, round-backed, rough-bearded, thin-visaged, middle-aged Yankee, who became very communicative during our drive. He was not bred a stage-driver, but had undertaken the business temporarily, as a favor to his brother-in-law. He was a native of these Berkshire mountains, but had formerly emigrated to Ohio, and had returned for a time to try the benefit of her native air on his wife's declining health,--she having complaints of a consumptive nature. He pointed out the house where he was married to her, and told the name of the country squire who tied the knot. His wife has little or no chance of recovery, and he said he would never marry again,--this resolution being expressed in answer to a remark of mine relative to a second marriage. He has no children. I pointed to a hill at some distance before us, and asked what it was. "That, sir," said he, "is a very high hill. It is known by the name of Graylock." He seemed to feel that this was a more poetical epithet than Saddleback, which is a more usual name for it. Graylock, or Saddleback, is quite a respectable mountain; and I suppose the former name has been given to it because it often has a gray cloud, or lock of gray mist, upon its head. It does not ascend into a peak, but heaves up a round ball, and has supporting ridges on each side. Its summit is not bare, like that of Mount Washington, but covered with forests. The driver said, that several years since the students of Williams College erected a building for an observatory on the top of the mountain, and employed him to haul the materials for constructing it; and he was the only man who had driven an ox-team up Graylock. It was necessary to drive the team round and round, in ascending. President Griffin rode up on horseback. Along our road we passed villages, and often factories, the machinery whirring, and girls looking out of the windows at the stage, with heads averted from their tasks, but still busy. These factories have two, three, or more boarding-houses near them, two stories high, and of double length,--often with bean-vines running up round the doors, and with altogether a domestic look. There are several factories in different parts of North Adams, along the banks of a stream,--a wild, highland rivulet, which, however, does vast work of a civilized nature. It is strange to see such a rough and untamed stream as it looks to be so subdued to the purposes of man, and making cottons and woollens, sawing boards and marbles, and giving employment to so many men and girls. And there is a sort of picturesqueness in finding these factories, supremely artificial establishments, in the midst of such wild scenery. For now the stream will be flowing through a rude forest, with the trees erect and dark, as when the Indians fished there; and it brawls and tumbles and eddies over its rock-strewn current. Perhaps there is a precipice, hundreds of feet high, beside it, down which, by heavy rains or the melting of snows, great pine-trees have slid or fallen headlong, and lie at the bottom, or half-way down, while their brethren seem to be gazing at their fall from the summit, and anticipating a like fate. And then, taking a turn in the road, behold these factories and their range of boarding-houses, with the girls looking out of the windows as aforesaid! And perhaps the wild scenery is all around the very site of the factory, and mingles its impression strangely with those opposite ones. These observations were made during a walk yesterday. I bathed in a pool of the stream that was out of sight, and where its brawling waters were deep enough to cover me, when I lay at length. A part of the road along which I walked was on the edge of a precipice, falling down straight towards the stream; and in one place the passage of heavy loads had sunk it, so that soon, probably, there will be an avalanche, perhaps carrying a stage-coach or heavy wagon down into the bed of the river. I met occasional wayfarers; once two women in a cart,--decent, brown-visaged, country matrons,--and then an apparent doctor, of whom there are seven or thereabouts in North Adams; for though this vicinity is very healthy, yet the physicians are obliged to ride considerable distances among the mountain towns, and their practice is very laborious. A nod is always exchanged between strangers meeting on the road. This morning an underwitted old man met me on a walk, and held a pretty long conversation, insisting upon shaking hands (to which I was averse, lest his band should not be clean), and insisting on his right to do so, as being "a friend of mankind." He was a gray, bald-headed, wrinkled-visaged figure, decently dressed, with cowhide shoes, a coat on one arm, and an umbrella on the other, and said that he was going to see a widow in the neighborhood. Finding that I was not provided with a wife, he recommended a certain maiden of forty years, who had three hundred acres of land. He spoke of his children, who are proprietors of a circus establishment, and have taken a granddaughter to bring up in their way of life; and he gave me a message to tell them in case we should meet. While this old man is wandering among the hills, his children are the gaze of multitudes. He told me the place where he was born, directing me to it by pointing to a wreath of mist which lay on the side of a mountain ridge, which he termed "the smoke yonder." Speaking of the widow, he said: "My wife has been dead these seven years, and why should not I enjoy myself a little?" His manner was full of quirks and quips and eccentricities, waving his umbrella and gesticulating strangely, with a great deal of action. I suppose, to help his natural foolishness, he had been drinking. We parted, he exhorting me not to forget his message to his sons, and I shouting after him a request to be remembered to the widow. Conceive something tragical to be talked about, and much might be made of this interview in a wild road among the hills, with Graylock, at a great distance, looking sombre and angry, by reason of the gray, heavy mist upon his head. The morning was cloudy, and all the near landscape lay unsunned; but there was sunshine on distant tracts, in the valleys, and in specks upon the mountain-tops. Between the ridges of hills, there are long, wide, deep valleys, extending for miles and miles, with houses scattered along them. A bulky company of mountains, swelling round head over round head, rises insulated by such broad vales from the surrounding ridges. I ought to have mentioned that I arrived at North Adams in the forenoon of the 26th, and, liking the aspect of matters indifferently well, determined to make my headquarters here for a short time. On the road to Northampton, we passed a tame crow, which was sitting on the peak of a barn. The crow flew down from its perch, and followed us a great distance, hopping along the road, and flying, with its large, black, flapping wings, from post to post of the fence, or from tree to tree. At last he gave up the pursuit with a croak of disappointment. The driver said, perhaps correctly, that the crow had scented some salmon which was in a basket under the seat, and that this was the secret of his pursuing us. This would be a terrific incident if it were a dead body that the crow scented, instead of a basket of salmon. Suppose, for instance, in a coach travelling along, that one of the passengers suddenly should die, and that one of the indications of his death would be this deportment of the crow. July 29th.--Remarkable characters:--A disagreeable figure, waning from middle age, clad in a pair of tow homespun pantaloons, and a very soiled shirt, barefoot, and with one of his feet maimed by an axe; also an arm amputated two or three inches below the elbow. His beard of a week's growth, grim and grisly, with a general effect of black; altogether a disgusting object. Yet he has the signs of having been a handsome man in his idea, though now such a beastly figure that probably no living thing but his great dog would touch him without an effort. Coming to the stoop, where several persons were sitting, "Good morning, gentlemen," said the wretch. Nobody answered for a time, till at last one said, "I don't know whom you speak to: not to me, I'm sure" (meaning that he did not claim to be a gentleman). "Why, I thought I spoke to you all at once," replied the figure, laughing. So he sat himself down on the lower step of the stoop, and began to talk; and, the conversation being turned upon his bare feet by one of the company, he related the story of his losing his toes by the glancing aside of an axe, and with what great fortitude he bore it. Then he made a transition to the loss of his arm, and, setting his teeth and drawing in his breath, said that the pain was dreadful; but this, too, he seems to have borne like an Indian; and a person testified to his fortitude by saying that he did not suppose there was any feeling in him, from observing how he bore it. The man spoke of the pain of cutting the muscles, and the particular agony at one moment, while the bone was being sawed asunder; and there was a strange expression of remembered anguish, as he shrugged his half-limb, and described the matter. Afterwards, in a reply to a question of mine, whether he still seemed to feel the hand that had been amputated, he answered that he did always; and, baring the stump, he moved the severed muscles, saying, "There is the thumb, there the forefinger," and so on. Then he talked to me about phrenology, of which he seems a firm believer and skilful practitioner, telling how he had hit upon the true character of many people. There was a great deal of sense and acuteness in his talk, and something of elevation in his expressions,--perhaps a studied elevation,--and a sort of courtesy in his manner; but his sense had something out of the way in it; there was something wild and ruined and desperate in his talk, though I can hardly say what it was. There was a trace of the gentleman and man of intellect through his deep degradation; and a pleasure in intellectual pursuits, and an acuteness and trained judgment, which bespoke a mind once strong and cultivated. "My study is man," said he. And looking at me, "I do not know your name," he said, "but there is something of the hawk-eye about you, too." This man was formerly a lawyer in good practice; but, taking to drinking, was reduced to the lowest state. Yet not the lowest; for after the amputation of his arm, being advised by divers persons to throw himself upon the public for support, he told them that, even if he should lose his other arm, he would still be able to support himself and a servant. Certainly he is a strong-minded and iron-constitutioned man; hut, looking at the stump of his arm, he said that the pain of the mind was a thousand times greater than the pain of the body. "That hand could make the pen go fast," said he. Among people in general, he does not seem to have any greater consideration in his ruin because of his former standing in society. He supports himself by making soap; and, on account of the offals used in that business, there is probably rather an evil odor in his domicile. Talking about a dead horse near his house, he said that he could not bear the scent of it. "I should not think you could smell carrion in that house," said a stage agent. Whereupon the soap-maker dropped his head, with a little snort, as it were, of wounded feeling; but immediately said that he took all in good part. There was an old squire of the village, a lawyer probably, whose demeanor was different,-- with a distance, yet with a kindliness; for he remembered the times when they met on equal terms. "You and I," said the squire, alluding to their respective troubles and sicknesses, "would have died long ago, if we had not had the courage to live." The poor devil kept talking to me long after everybody else had left the stoop, giving vent to much practical philosophy, and just observation on the ways of men, mingled with rather more assumption of literature and cultivation than belonged to the present condition of his mind. Meantime his great dog, a cleanly looking and not ill-bred dog, being the only decent attribute appertaining to his master,--a well-natured dog, too, and receiving civilly any demonstration of courtesy from other people, though preserving a certain distance of deportment,--this great dog grew weary of his master's lengthy talk, and expressed his impatience to be gone by thrusting himself between his legs, rolling over on his back, seizing his ragged trousers, or playfully taking his maimed, bare foot into his mouth,--using, in short, the kindly and humorous freedom of a friend, with a wretch to whom all are free enough, but none other kind. His master rebuked him, but with kindness too, and not so that the dog felt himself bound to desist, though he seemed willing to allow his master all the time that could possibly be spared. And at last, having said many times that he must go and shave and dress himself,--and as his beard had been at least a week growing, it might have seemed almost a week's work to get rid of it,--he rose from the stoop and went his way,--a forlorn and miserable thing in the light of the cheerful summer morning. Yet he seems to keep his spirits up, and still preserves himself a man among men, asking nothing from them; nor is it clearly perceptible what right they have to scorn him, though he seems to acquiesce, in a manner, in their doing so. And yet he cannot wholly have lost his self-respect; and doubtless there were persons on the stoop more grovelling than himself. Another character:--A blacksmith of fifty or upwards, a corpulent figure, big in the paunch and enormous in the rear; yet there is such an appearance of strength and robustness in his frame, that his corpulence appears very proper and necessary to him. A pound of flesh could not be spared from his abundance, any more than from the leanest man; and he walks about briskly, without any panting or symptom of labor or pain in his motion. He has a round, jolly face, always mirthful and humorous and shrewd, and the air of a man well to do, and well respected, yet not caring much about the opinions of men, because his independence is sufficient to itself. Nobody would take him for other than a man of some importance in the community, though his summer dress is a tow-cloth pair of pantaloons, a shirt not of the cleanest, open at the breast, and the sleeves rolled up at the elbows, and a straw hat. There is not such a vast difference between this costume and that of Lawyer H------ above mentioned, yet never was there a greater diversity of appearance than between these two men; and a glance at them would be sufficient to mark the difference. The blacksmith loves his glass, and comes to the tavern for it, whenever it seems good to him, not calling for it slyly and shyly, but marching steadily to the bar, or calling across the room for it to be prepared. He speaks with great bitterness against the new license law, and vows if it be not repealed by fair means it shall be by violence, and that he will be as ready to cock his rifle for such a cause as for any other. On this subject his talk is really fierce; but as to all other matters he is good-natured and good-hearted, fond of joke, and shaking his jolly sides with frequent laughter. His conversation has much strong, unlettered sense, imbued with humor, as everybody's talk is in New England. He takes a queer position sometimes,--queer for his figure particularly, --straddling across a chair, facing the back, with his arms resting thereon, and his chin on them, for the benefit of conversing closely with some one. When he has spent as much time in the bar-room or under the stoop as he chooses to spare, he gets up at once, and goes off with a brisk, vigorous pace. He owns a mill, and seems to be prosperous in the world. I know no man who seems more like a man, more indescribably human, than this sturdy blacksmith. There came in the afternoon a respectable man in gray homespun cloth, who arrived in a wagon, I believe, and began to inquire, after supper, about a certain new kind of mill machinery. Being referred to the blacksmith, who owned one of these mills, the stranger said that he had come from Vermont to learn about the matter. "What may I call your name?" said he to the blacksmith. "My name is Hodge," replied the latter. "I believe I have heard of you," said the stranger. Then they colloquied at much length about the various peculiarities and merits of the new invention. The stranger continued here two or three days, making his researches, and forming acquaintance with several millwrights and others. He was a man evidently of influence in his neighborhood, and the tone of his conversation was in the style of one accustomed to be heard with deference, though all in a plain and homely way. Lawyer H------ took notice of this manner; for the talk being about the nature of soap, and the evil odor arising from that process, the stranger joined in. "There need not be any disagreeable smell in making soap," said he. "Now we are to receive a lesson," said H------, and the remark was particularly apropos to the large wisdom of the stranger's tone and air. Then he gave an account of the process in his domestic establishment, saying that he threw away the whole offals of the hog, as not producing any soap, and preserved the skins of the intestines for sausages. He seemed to be hospitable, inviting those with whom he did business to take "a mouthful of dinner" with him, and treating them with liquors; for he was not an utter temperance man, though moderate in his potations. I suspect he would turn out a pattern character of the upper class of New England yeomen, if I had an opportunity of studying him. Doubtless he had been selectman, representative, and justice, and had filled all but weighty offices. He was highly pleased with the new mill contrivance, and expressed his opinion that, when his neighbors saw the success of his, it would be extensively introduced into that vicinity. Mem. The hostlers at taverns call the money given them "pergasus,"-- corrupted from "perquisites." Otherwise "knock-down money." Remarkable character:--A travelling surgeon-dentist, who has taken a room in the North Adams House, and sticks up his advertising bills on the pillars of the piazza, and all about the town. He is a tall, slim young man, six feet two, dressed in a country-made coat of light blue (taken, as he tells me, in exchange for dental operations), black pantaloons, and clumsy, cowhide hoots. Self-conceit is very strongly expressed in his air; and a doctor once told him that he owed his life to that quality; for, by keeping himself so stiffly upright, he opens his chest, and counteracts a consumptive tendency. He is not only a dentist, which trade he follows temporarily, but a licensed preacher of the Baptist persuasion, and is now on his way to the West to seek a place of settlement in his spiritual vocation. Whatever education he possesses, he has acquired by his own exertions since the age of twenty-one,--he being now twenty-four. We talk together very freely; and he has given me an account, among other matters, of all his love-affairs, which are rather curious, as illustrative of the life of a smart young country fellow in relation to the gentle sex. Nothing can exceed the exquisite self-conceit which characterizes these confidences, and which is expressed inimitably in his face, his upturned nose, and mouth, so as to be truly a caricature; and he seems strangely to find as much food for his passion in having been jilted once or twice as in his conquests. It is curious to notice his revengeful feeling against the false ones,-- hidden from himself, however, under the guise of religious interest, and desire that they may be cured of their follies. A little boy named Joe, who haunts about the bar-room and the stoop, four years old, in a thin, short jacket, and full-breeched trousers, and bare feet. The men tease him, and put quids of tobacco in his mouth, under pretence of giving him a fig; and he gets curaged, and utters a peculiar, sharp, spiteful cry, and strikes at them with a stick, to their great mirth. He is always in trouble, yet will not keep away. They despatch him with two or three cents to buy candy and nuts and raisins. They set him down in a niche of the door, and tell him to remain there a day and a half: he sits down very demurely, as if he meant to fulfil his penance; but a moment after, behold! there is little Joe capering across the street to join two or three boys who are playing in a wagon. Take this boy as the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country roue, to spend a wild and brutal youth, ten years of his prime in the State Prison, and his old age in the poorhouse. There are a great many dogs kept in the village, and many of the travellers also have dogs. Some are almost always playing about; and if a cow or a pig be passing, two or three of them scamper forth for an attack. Some of the younger sort chase pigeons, wheeling as they wheel. If a contest arises between two dogs, a number of others come with huge barking to join the fray, though I believe that they do not really take any active part in the contest, but swell the uproar by way of encouraging the combatants. When a traveller is starting from the door, his dog often gets in front of the horse, placing his forefeet down,-- looking the horse in the face, and barking loudly, then, as the horse comes on, running a little farther, and repeating the process; and this he does in spite of his master's remonstrances, till, the horse being fairly started, the dog follows on quietly. One dog, a diminutive little beast, has been taught to stand on his hind legs, and rub his face with his paw, which he does with an aspect of much endurance and deprecation. Another springs at people whom his master points out to him, barking and pretending to bite. These tricks make much mirth in the bar-room. All dogs, of whatever different sizes and dissimilar varieties, acknowledge the common bond of species among themselves, and the largest one does not disdain to suffer his tail to be smelt of, nor to reciprocate that courtesy to the smallest. They appear to take much interest in one another; but there is always a degree of caution between two strange dogs when they meet. July 31st.--A visit to what is called "Hudson's Cave," or "Hudson's Falls," the tradition being that a man by the name of Henry Hudson, many years ago, chasing a deer, the deer fell over the place, which then first became known to white men. It is not properly a cave, but a fissure in a huge ledge of marble, through which a stream has been for ages forcing its way, and has left marks of its gradually wearing power on the tall crags, having made curious hollows from the summit down to the level which it has reached at the present day. The depth of the fissure in some places is at least fifty or sixty feet, perhaps more, and at several points it nearly closes over, and often the sight of the sky is hidden by the interposition of masses of the marble crags. The fissure is very irregular, so as not to be describable in words, and scarcely to be painted,--jetting buttresses, moss-grown, impending crags, with tall trees growing on their verge, nodding over the head of the observer at the bottom of the chasm, and rooted, as it were, in air. The part where the water works its way down is very narrow; but the chasm widens, after the descent, so as to form a spacious chamber between the crags, open to the sky, and its floor is strewn with fallen fragments of marble, and trees that have been precipitated long ago, and are heaped with drift-wood, left there by the freshets, when the scanty stream becomes a considerable waterfall. One crag, with a narrow ridge, which might be climbed without much difficulty, protrudes from the middle of the rock, and divides the fall. The passage through the cave made by the stream is very crooked, and interrupted, not only by fallen wrecks, but by deep pools of water, which probably have been forded by few. As the deepest pool occurs in the most uneven part of the chasm, where the hollows in the sides of the crag are deepest, so that each hollow is almost a cave by itself, I determined to wade through it. There was an accumulation of soft stuff on the bottom, so that the water did not look more than knee-deep; but, finding that my feet sunk in it, I took off my trousers, and waded through up to my middle. Thus I reached the most interesting part of the cave, where the whirlings of the stream had left the marks of its eddies in the solid marble, all up and down the two sides of the chasm. The water is now dammed for the construction of two marble saw-mills, else it would have been impossible to effect the passage; and I presume that, for years after the cave was discovered, the waters roared and tore their way in a torrent through this part of the chasm. While I was there, I heard voices, and a small stone tumbled down; and looking up towards the narrow strip of bright light, and the sunny verdure that peeped over the top,--looking up thither from the deep, gloomy depth,--I saw two or three men; and, not liking to be to them the most curious part of the spectacle, I waded back, and put on my clothes. The marble crags are overspread with a concretion, which makes them look as gray as granite, except where the continual flow of water keeps them of a snowy whiteness. If they were so white all over, it would be a splendid show. There is a marble-quarry close in the rear, above the cave, and in process of time the whole of the crags will be quarried into tombstones, doorsteps, fronts of edifices, fireplaces, etc. That will be a pity. On such portions of the walls as are within reach, visitors have sculptured their initials, or names at full length; and the white letters showing plainly on the gray surface, they have more obvious effect than such inscriptions generally have. There was formerly, I believe, a complete arch of marble, forming a natural bridge over the top of the cave; but this is no longer so. At the bottom of the broad chamber of the cave, standing in its shadow, the effect of the morning sunshine on the dark or bright foliage of the pines and other trees that cluster on the summits of the crags was particularly beautiful; and it was strange how such great trees had rooted themselves in solid marble, for so it seemed. After passing through this romantic and most picturesque spot, the stream goes onward to turn factories. Here its voice resounds within the hollow crags; there it goes onward; talking to itself, with babbling din, of its own wild thoughts and fantasies,--the voice of solitude and the wilderness,--loud and continual, but which yet does not seem to disturb the thoughtful wanderer, so that he forgets there is a noise. It talks along its storm-strewn path; it talks beneath tall precipices and high banks,--a voice that has been the same for innumerable ages; and yet, if you listen, you will perceive a continual change and variety in its babble, and sometimes it seems to swell louder upon the ear than at others,--in the same spot, I mean. By and by man makes a dam for it, and it pours over it, still making its voice heard, while it labors. At one shop for manufacturing the marble, I saw the disk of a sun-dial as large as the top of a hogshead, intended for Williams College; also a small obelisk, and numerous gravestones. The marble is coarse-grained, but of a very brilliant whiteness. It is rather a pity that the cave is not formed of some worthless stone. In the deep valleys of the neighborhood, where the shadows at sunset are thrown from mountain to mountain, the clouds have a beautiful effect, flitting high over them, bright with heavenly gold. It seems as if the soul might rise up from the gloom, and alight upon them and soar away. Walking along one of the valleys the other evening, while a pretty fresh breeze blew across it, the clouds that were skimming over my head seemed to conform themselves to the valley's shape. At a distance, mountain summits look close together, almost as if forming one mountain, though in reality a village lies in the depths between them. A steam-engine in a factory to be supposed to possess a malignant spirit. It catches one man's arm, and pulls it off; seizes another by the coat-tails, and almost grapples him bodily; catches a girl by the hair, and scalps her; and finally draws in a man, and crushes him to death. The one-armed soap-maker, Lawyer H------, wears an iron hook, which serves him instead of a hand for the purpose of holding on. They nickname him "Black Hawk." North Adams still.--The village, viewed from the top of a hill to the westward at sunset, has a peculiarly happy and peaceful look. It lies on a level, surrounded by hills, and seems as if it lay in the hollow of a large hand. The Union Village may be seen, a manufacturing place, extending up a gorge of the hills. It is amusing to see all the distributed property of the aristocracy and commonalty, the various and conflicting interests of the town, the loves and hates, compressed into a space which the eye takes in as completely as the arrangement of a tea-table. The rush of the streams comes up the hill somewhat like the sound of a city. The hills about the village appear very high and steep sometimes, when the shadows of the clouds are thrown blackly upon them, while there is sunshine elsewhere; so that, seen in front, the effect of their gradual slope is lost. These hills, surrounding the town on all sides, give it a snug and insulated air; and, viewed from certain points, it would be difficult to tell how to get out, without climbing the mountain ridges; but the roads wind away and accomplish the passage without ascending very high. Sometimes the notes of a horn or bugle may be heard sounding afar among these passes of the mountains, announcing the coming of the stage-coach from Bennington or Troy or Greenfield or Pittsfield. There are multitudes of sheep among the hills, and they appear very tame and gentle; though sometimes, like the wicked, they "flee when no man pursueth." But, climbing a rude, rough, rocky, stumpy, ferny height yesterday, one or two of them stood and stared at me with great earnestness. I passed on quietly, but soon heard an immense baa-ing up the hill, and all the sheep came galloping and scrambling after me, baa-ing with all their might in innumerable voices, running in a compact body, expressing the utmost eagerness, as if they sought the greatest imaginable favor from me; and so they accompanied me down the hillside,-- a most ridiculous cortege. Doubtless they had taken it into their heads that I brought them salt. The aspect of the village is peculiarly beautiful towards sunset, when there are masses of cloud about the sky,--the remnants of a thunder-storm. These clouds throw a shade upon large portions of the rampart of hills, and the hills towards the west are shaded of course; the clouds also make the shades deeper in the village, and thus the sunshine on the houses and trees, and along the street, is a bright, rich gold. The green is deeper in consequence of the recent rain. The doctors walk about the village with their saddle-bags on their arms, one always with a pipe in his mouth. A little dog, named Snapper, the same who stands on his hind legs, appears to be a roguish little dog, and the other day he stole one of the servant-girl's shoes, and ran into the street with it. Being pursued, he would lift the shoe in his mouth (while it almost dragged on the ground), and run a little way, then lie down with his paws on it, and wait to be pursued again. August 11th.--This morning, it being cloudy and boding of rain, the clouds had settled upon the mountains, both on the summits and ridges, all round the town, so that there seemed to be no way of gaining access to the rest of the world, unless by climbing above the clouds. By and by they partially dispersed, giving glimpses of the mountain ramparts through their obscurity, the separate clouds lying heavily upon the mountain's breast. In warm mornings, after rain, the mist breaks forth from the forests on the ascent of the mountains, like smoke,--the smoke of a volcano; then it soars up, and becomes a cloud in heaven. But these clouds to-day were real rain-clouds. Sometimes, it is said, while laboring up the mountain-side, they suddenly burst, and pour down their moisture in a cataract, sweeping all before it. Every new aspect of the mountains, or view from a different position, creates a surprise in the mind. Scenes and characters:--A young country fellow, twenty or thereabouts, decently dressed, pained with the toothache. A doctor, passing on horseback, with his black leather saddle-bags behind him, a thin, frosty-haired man. Being asked to operate, he looks at the tooth, lances the gum, and the fellow being content to be dealt with on the spot, he seats himself in a chair on the stoop with great heroism. The doctor produces a rusty pair of iron forceps; a man holds the patient's head; the doctor perceives that, it being a difficult tooth to get at, wedged between the two largest in his jaws, he must pull very hard; and the instrument is introduced. A turn of the doctor's hand; the patient begins to utter a cry, but the tooth comes out first, with four prongs. The patient gets up, half amazed, pays the doctor ninepence, pockets the tooth, and the spectators are in glee and admiration. There was a fat woman, a stage-passenger to-day,--a wonder how she could possibly get through the door, which seemed not so wide as she. When she put her foot on the step, the stage gave a great lurch, she joking all the while. A great, coarse, red-faced dame. Other passengers,--three or four slender Williamstown students, a young girl, and a man with one leg and two crutches. One of the most sensible men in this village is a plain, tall, elderly person, who is overseeing the mending of a road,--humorous, intelligent, with much thought about matters and things; and while at work he has a sort of dignity in handling the hoe or crow-bar, which shows him to be the chief. In the evening he sits under the stoop, silent and observant from under the brim of his hat; but, occasion calling, he holds an argument about the benefit or otherwise of manufactories or other things. A simplicity characterizes him more than appertains to most Yankees. A man in a pea-green frock-coat, with velvet collar. Another in a flowered chintz frock-coat. There is a great diversity of hues in garments. A doctor, a stout, tall, round-paunched, red-faced, brutal-looking old fellow, who gets drunk daily. He sat down on the step of our stoop, looking surly, and speaking to nobody; then got up and walked homeward, with a morose swagger and a slight unevenness of gait, attended by a fine Newfoundland dog. A barouche with driver returned from beyond Greenfield or Troy empty, the passengers being left at the former place. The driver stops here for the night, and, while washing, enters into talk with an old man about the different roads over the mountain. People washing themselves at a common basin in the bar-room! and using the common hair-brushes! perhaps with a consciousness of praiseworthy neatness! A man with a cradle on his shoulder, having been cradling oats. I attended a child's funeral yesterday afternoon. There was an assemblage of people in a plain, homely apartment. Most of the men were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and one or two were in shirt-sleeves. The coffin was placed in the midst of us, covered with a velvet pall. A bepaid clergyman prayed (the audience remaining seated, while he stood up at the head of the coffin), read a passage of Scripture and commented upon it. While he read and prayed and expounded there was a heavy thunder-storm rumbling among the surrounding hills, and the lightning flashed fiercely through the gloomy room; and the preacher alluded to GOD's voice of thunder. It is the custom in this part of the country--and perhaps extensively in the interior of New England--to bury the dead first in a charnel-house, or common tomb, where they remain till decay has so far progressed as to secure them from the resurrectionists. They are then reburied, with certain ceremonies, in their own peculiar graves. O. E. S------, a widower of forty or upwards, with a son of twelve and a pair of infant twins. He is a sharp, shrewd Yankee, with a Yankee's license of honesty. He drinks sometimes more than enough, and is guilty of peccadilloes with the fair sex; yet speaks most affectionately of his wife, and is a fond and careful father. He is a tall, thin, hard-featured man, with a sly expression of almost hidden grave humor, as if there were some deviltry pretty constantly in his mind,--which is probably the case. His brother tells me that he was driven almost crazy by the loss of his wife. It appears to me that men are more affected by the deaths of their wives than wives by the deaths of their husbands. Orrin S------ smokes a pipe, as do many of the guests. A walk this forenoon up the mountain ridge that walls in the town towards the east. The road is cut zigzag, the mountain being generally as steep as the roof of a house; yet the stage to Greenfield passes over this road two or three times a week. Graylock rose up behind me, appearing, with its two summits and a long ridge between, like a huge monster crouching down slumbering, with its head slightly elevated. Graylock is properly the name for the highest elevation. It appeared to better advantage the higher the point from which I viewed it. There were houses scattered here and there up the mountainside, growing poorer as I ascended; the last that I passed was a mean log-hut, rough, rude, and dilapidated, with the smoke issuing from a chimney of small stones, plastered with clay; around it a garden of beans, with some attempt at flowers, and a green creeper running over the side of the cottage. Above this point there were various excellent views of mountain scenery, far off and near, and one village lying below in the hollow vale. Having climbed so far that the road seemed now to go downward, I retraced my steps. There was a wagon descending behind me; and as it followed the zigzag of the road I could hear the voices of the men high over my head, and sometimes I caught a glimpse of the wagon almost perpendicularly above me, while I was looking almost perpendicularly down to the log-hut aforementioned. Trees were thick on either hand,--oaks, pines, and others; and marble occasionally peeped up in the road and there was a lime-kiln by the wayside, ready for burning. Graylock had a cloud on his head this morning, the base of a heavy white cloud. The distribution of the sunshine amid mountain scenery is very striking; one does not see exactly why one spot should be in deep obscurity while others are all bright. The clouds throw their shadows upon the hillsides as they move slowly along,--a transitory blackness. I passed a doctor high up the road in a sulky, with his black leather saddle-bags. Hudson's Cave is formed by Hudson's Brook. There is a natural arch of marble still in one part of it. The cliffs are partly made verdant with green moss, chiefly gray with oxidation; on some parts the white of the marble is seen; in interstices grow brake and other shrubs, so that there is naked sublimity seen through a good deal of clustering beauty. Above, the birch, poplars, and pines grow on the utmost verge of the cliffs, which jut far over, so that they are suspended in air; and whenever the sunshine finds its way into the depths of the chasm, the branches wave across it. There is a lightness, however, about their foliage, which greatly relieves what would otherwise be a gloomy scene. After the passage of the stream through the cliffs of marble, the cliffs separate on either side, and leave it to flow onward; intercepting its passage, however, by fragments of marble, some of them huge ones, which the cliffs have flung down, thundering into the bed of the stream through numberless ages. Doubtless some of these immense fragments had trees growing on them, which have now mouldered away. Decaying trunks are heaped in various parts of the gorge. The pieces of marble that are washed by the water are of a snow-white, and partially covered with a bright green water-moss, making a beautiful contrast. Among the cliffs, strips of earth-beach extend downward, and trees and large shrubs root themselves in that earth, thus further contrasting the nakedness of the stone with their green foliage. But the immediate part where the stream forces its winding passage through the rock is stern, dark, and mysterious. Along the road, where it runs beneath a steep, there are high ridges, covered with trees,--the dew of midnight damping the earth, far towards midnoon. I observed the shadows of water-insects, as they swam in the pools of a stream. Looking down a streamlet, I saw a trunk of a tree, which has been overthrown by the wind, so as to form a bridge, yet sticking up all its branches, as if it were unwilling to assist anybody over. Green leaves, following the eddies of the rivulet, were now borne deep under water, and now emerged. Great uprooted trees, adhering midway down a precipice of earth, hung with their tops downward. There is an old man, selling the meats of butternuts under the stoop of the hotel. He makes that his station during a part of the season. He was dressed in a dark thin coat, ribbed velvet pantaloons, and a sort of moccasins, or shoes, appended to the legs of woollen stockings. He had on a straw hat, and his hair was gray, with a long, thin visage. His nuts were contained in a square tin box, having two compartments, one for the nuts, and another for maple sugar, which he sells in small cakes. He had three small tin measures for nuts,--one at one cent, others at two, four, and six cents; and as fast as they were emptied, he filled them again, and put them on the top of his box. He smoked a pipe, and talked with one man about whether it would be worth while to grow young again, and the duty of being contented with old age; about predestination and freewill and other metaphysics. I asked him what his sales amounted to in the course of a day. He said that butternuts did not sell so well as walnuts, which are not yet in season; that he might to-day have sold fifty cents' worth of walnuts, never less than a dollar's worth, often more; and when he went round with a caravan, he had sold fifteen dollars' worth per day, and once as much as twenty dollars' worth. This promises to be an excellent year for walnuts. Chestnuts have been scarce for two or three years. He had one hundred chestnut-trees on his own land, and last year he offered a man twenty-five cents if he would find him a quart of good chestnuts on them. A bushel of walnuts would cost about ten dollars. He wears a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles. A drunken fellow sat down by him, and bought a cent's worth of his butternuts, and inquired what he would sell out to him for. The old man made an estimate, though evidently in jest, and then reckoned his box, measures, meats, and what little maple sugar he had, at four dollars. He had a very quiet manner, and expressed an intention of going to the Commencement at Williamstown to-morrow. His name, I believe, is Captain Gavett. Wednesday, August 15th.--I went to Commencement at Williams College,-- five miles distant. At the tavern were students with ribbons, pink or blue, fluttering from their buttonholes, these being the badges of rival societies. There was a considerable gathering of people, chiefly arriving in wagons or buggies, some in barouches, and very few in chaises. The most characteristic part of the scene was where the pedlers, gingerbread-sellers, etc., were collected, a few hundred yards from the meeting-house. There was a pedler there from New York State, who sold his wares by auction, and I could have stood and listened to him all day long. Sometimes he would put up a heterogeny [this is a word made by Mr. Hawthorne, but one that was needed.--S. H.] of articles in a lot,--as a paper of pins, a lead-pencil, and a shaving-box,--and knock them all down, perhaps for ninepence. Bunches of lead-pencils, steel-pens, pound-cakes of shaving-soap, gilt finger-rings, bracelets, clasps, and other jewelry, cards of pearl buttons, or steel ("there is some steel about them, gentlemen, for my brother stole 'em, and I bore him out in it"), bundles of wooden combs, boxes of matches, suspenders, and, in short, everything,--dipping his hand down into his wares with the promise of a wonderful lot, and producing, perhaps, a bottle of opodeldoc, and joining it with a lead-pencil,--and when he had sold several things of the same kind, pretending huge surprise at finding "just one more," if the lads lingered; saying, "I could not afford to steal them for the price; for the remorse of conscience would be worth more,"--all the time keeping an eye upon those who bought, calling for the pay, making change with silver or bills, and deciding on the goodness of banks; and saying to the boys who climbed upon his cart, "Fall down, roll down, tumble down, only get down"; and uttering everything in the queer, humorous recitative in which he sold his articles. Sometimes he would pretend that a person had bid, either by word or wink, and raised a laugh thus; never losing his self-possession, nor getting out of humor. When a man asked whether a bill were good: "No! do you suppose I'd give you good money?" When he delivered an article, he exclaimed, "You're the lucky man," setting off his wares with the most extravagant eulogies. The people bought very freely, and seemed also to enjoy the fun. One little boy bought a shaving-box, perhaps meaning to speculate upon it. This character could not possibly he overdrawn; and he was really excellent, with his allusions to what was passing, intermingled, doubtless, with a good deal that was studied. He was a man between thirty and forty, with a face expressive of other ability, as well as of humor. A good many people were the better or the worse for liquor. There was one fellow,--named Randall, I think,--a round-shouldered, bulky, ill-hung devil, with a pale, sallow skin, black beard, and a sort of grin upon his face,--a species of laugh, yet not so much mirthful as indicating a strange mental and moral twist. He was very riotous in the crowd, elbowing, thrusting, seizing hold of people; and at last a ring was formed, and a regular wrestling-match commenced between him and a farmer-looking man. Randall brandished his legs about in the most ridiculous style, but proved himself a good wrestler, and finally threw his antagonist. He got up with the same grin upon his features,--not a grin of simplicity, but intimating knowingness. When more depth or force of expression was required, he could put on the most strangely ludicrous and ugly aspect (suiting his gesture and attitude to it) that can be imagined. I should like to see this fellow when he was perfectly sober. There were a good many blacks among the crowd. I suppose they used to emigrate across the border, while New York was a slave State. There were enough of them to form a party, though greatly in the minority; and, a squabble arising, some of the blacks were knocked down, and otherwise maltreated. I saw one old negro, a genuine specimen of the slave negro, without any of the foppery of the race in our part of the State,--an old fellow, with a bag, I suppose of broken victuals, on his shoulder, and his pockets stuffed out at his hips with the like provender; full of grimaces and ridiculous antics, laughing laughably, yet without affectation; then talking with a strange kind of pathos about the whippings he used to get while he was a slave;--a singular creature, of mere feeling, with some glimmering of sense. Then there was another gray old negro, but of a different stamp, politic, sage, cautious, yet with boldness enough, talking about the rights of his race, yet so as not to provoke his audience; discoursing of the advantage of living under laws, and the wonders that might ensue, in that very assemblage, if there were no laws; in the midst of this deep wisdom, turning off the anger of a half-drunken fellow by a merry retort, a leap in the air, and a negro's laugh. I was interested--there being a drunken negro ascending the meeting-house steps, and near him three or four well-dressed and decent negro wenches--to see the look of scorn and shame and sorrow and painful sympathy which one of them assumed at this disgrace of her color. The people here show out their character much more strongly than they do with us; there was not the quiet, silent, dull decency of our public assemblages, but mirth, anger, eccentricity,--all manifesting themselves freely. There were many watermelons for sale, and people burying their muzzles deep in the juicy flesh of them. There were cider and beer. Many of the people had their mouths half opened in a grin, which, more than anything else, I think, indicates a low stage of refinement. A low-crowned hat--very low--is common. They are respectful to gentlemen. A bat being startled, probably, out of the meeting-house, by the commotion around, flew blindly about in the sunshine, and alighted on a man's sleeve. I looked at him,--a droll, winged, beast-insect, creeping up the man's arm, not over-clean, and scattering dust on the man's coat from his vampire wings. The man stared at him, and let the spectators stare for a minute, and then shook him gently off; and the poor devil took a flight across the green to the meeting-house, and then, I believe, alighted on somebody else. Probably he was put to death. Bats are very numerous in these parts. There was a drunken man, annoying people with his senseless talk and impertinences, impelled to perform eccentricities by an evil spirit in him; and a pale little boy, with a bandaged leg, whom his father brought out of the tavern and put into a barouche. Then the boy heedfully placed shawls and cushions about his leg to support it, his face expressive of pain and care,--not transitory, but settled pain, of long and forcedly patient, endurance; and this painful look, perhaps, gave his face more intelligence than it might otherwise have had, though it was naturally a sensitive face. Well-dressed ladies were in the meeting-house in silks and cambrics,--the sunburnt necks in contiguity with the delicate fabrics of the dresses showing the yeomen's daughters. Country graduates,--rough, brown-featured, schoolmaster-looking, half-bumpkin, half-scholarly figures, in black ill-cut broadcloth,--their manners quite spoilt by what little of the gentleman there was in them. The landlord of the tavern keeping his eye on a man whom he suspected of an intention to bolt. [A word meaning in Worcester, I find, "to spring out with speed and suddenness."--S. H.] The next day after Commencement was bleak and rainy from midnight till midnight, and a good many guests were added to our table in consequence. Among them were some of the Williamstown students, gentlemanly young fellows, with a brotherly feeling for each other, a freedom about money concerns, a half-boyish, half-manly character; and my heart warmed to them. They took their departure--two for South Adams and two across the Green Mountains--in the midst of the rain. There was one of the graduates with his betrothed, and his brother-in-law and wife, who stayed during the day,--the graduate the very model of a country schoolmaster in his Sunday clothes, being his Commencement suit of black broadcloth and pumps. He is engaged as assistant teacher of the academy at Shelburne Falls. There was also the high sheriff of Berkshire, Mr. Twining, with a bundle of writs under his arm, and some of them peeping out of his pockets. Also several Trojan men and women, who had been to Commencement. Likewise a young clergyman, graduate of Brown College, and student of the Divinity School at Cambridge. He had come across the Hoosic, or Green Mountains, about eighteen miles, on foot, from Charlemont, where he is preaching, and had been to Commencement. Knowing little of men and matters, and desiring to know more, he was very free in making acquaintance with people, but could not do it handsomely. A singular smile broke out upon his face on slight provocation. He was awkward in his manners, yet it was not an ungentlemanly awkwardness,-- intelligent as respects book-learning, but much deficient in worldly tact. It was pleasant to observe his consciousness of this deficiency, and how he strove to remedy it by mixing as much as possible with people, and sitting almost all day in the bar-room to study character. Sometimes he would endeavor to contribute his share to the general amusement,--as by growling comically, to provoke and mystify a dog; and by some bashful and half-apropos observations. In the afternoon there came a fresh bevy of students onward from Williamstown; but they made only a transient visit, though it was still raining. These were a rough-hewn, heavy set of fellows, from the hills and woods in this neighborhood,--great unpolished bumpkins, who had grown up farmer-boys, and had little of the literary man, save green spectacles and black broadcloth (which all of them had not), talking with a broad accent, and laughing clown-like, while sheepishness overspread all, together with a vanity at being students. One of the party was six feet seven inches high, and all his herculean dimensions were in proportion; his features, too, were cast in a mould suitable to his stature. This giant was not ill-looking, but of a rattier intelligent aspect. His motions were devoid of grace, but yet had a rough freedom, appropriate enough to such a figure. These fellows stayed awhile, talked uncouthly about college matters, and started in the great open wagon which had brought them and their luggage hither. We had a fire in the bar-room almost all day,--a great, blazing fire,--and it was pleasant to have this day of bleak November weather, and cheerful fireside talk, and wet garments smoking in the fireside heat, still in the summer-time. Thus the day wore on with a sort of heavy, lazy pleasantness; and night set in, still stormy. In the morning it was cloudy, but did not rain, and I went with the little clergyman to Hudson's Cave. The stream which they call the North Branch, and into which Hudson's Brook empties, was much swollen, and tumbled and dashed and whitened over the rocks, and formed real cascades over the dams, and rushed fast along the side of the cliffs, which had their feet in it. Its color was deep brown, owing to the washing of the banks which the rain had poured into it. Looking back, we could see a cloud on Graylock; but on other parts of Saddle Mountain there were spots of sunshine, some of most glorious brightness, contrasting with the general gloom of the sky, and the deep shadow which lay on the earth. We looked at the spot where the stream makes its entrance into the marble cliff, and it was (this morning, at least) the most striking view of the cave. The water dashed down in a misty cascade, through what looked like the portal of some infernal subterranean structure; and far within the portal we could see the mist and the falling water; and it looked as if, but for these obstructions of view, we might have had a deeper insight into a gloomy region. After our return, the little minister set off for his eighteen miles' journey across the mountain; and I was occupied the rest of the forenoon with an affair of stealing--a woman of forty or upwards being accused of stealing a needle-case and other trifles from a factory-girl at a boarding-house. She came here to take passage in a stage; but Putnam, a justice of the peace, examined her and afterwards ordered her to be searched by Laura and Eliza, the chambermaid and table-waiter. Hereupon was much fun and some sympathy. They searched, and found nothing that they sought, though she gave up a pair of pantalets, which she pretended to have taken by mistake. Afterwards, she being in the parlor, I went in; and she immediately began to talk to me, giving me an account of the affair, speaking with the bitterness of a wronged person, with a sparkling eye, yet with great fluency and self-possession. She is a yellow, thin, and battered old thing, yet rather country-lady-like in aspect and manners. I heard Eliza telling another girl about it, under my window; and she seemed to think that the poor woman's reluctance to be searched arose from the poorness of her wardrobe and of the contents of her bandbox. At parting, Eliza said to the girl, "What do you think I heard somebody say about you? That it was enough to make anybody's eyes start square out of their head to look at such red cheeks as yours." Whereupon the girl turned off the compliment with a laugh, and took her leave. There is an old blind dog, recognizing his friends by the sense of smell. I observe the eager awkwardness with which he accomplishes the recognition, his carefulness in descending steps, and generally in his locomotion. He evidently has not forgotten that he once had the faculty of sight; for he turns his eyes with earnestness towards those who attract his attention, though the orbs are plainly sightless. Here is an Englishman,--a thorough-going Tory and Monarchist,--upholding everything English, government, people, habits, education, manufactures, modes of living, and expressing his dislike of all Americanisms,--and this in a quiet, calm, reasonable way, as if it were quite proper to live in a country and draw his subsistence from it, and openly abuse it. He imports his clothes from England, and expatiates on the superiority of English boots, hats, cravats, etc. He is a man of unmalleable habits, and wears his dress of the same fashion as that of twenty years ago. August 18th.--There has come one of the proprietors, or superintendents, of a caravan of animals,--a large, portly paunched, dark-complexioned, brandy-burnt, heavy-faced man of about fifty; with a diminutive nose in proportion to the size of his face,--thick lips; nevertheless he has the air of a man who has seen much, and derived such experience as was for his purpose. Also it is the air of a man not in a subordinate station, though vulgar and coarse. He arrived in a wagon, with a span of handsome gray horses, and ordered dinner. He had left his caravan at Worcester, and came from thence and over the mountain hither, to settle stopping-places for the caravan. The nearest place to this. I believe, was Charlemont; the penultimate at Greenfield. In stopping at such a village as this, they do not expect much profit, if any; but would be content with enough to pay their travelling expenses, while they look to gather gain at larger places. In this village, it seems, the selectmen had resolved not to license any public exhibition of the kind; and it was interesting to attend to the consultations whether it were feasible to overcome the objections, and what might be the best means. Orrin S------ and the chance passers-by took part in the discussion. The scruple is that the factory-girls, having ready money by them, spend it for these nonsenses, quitting their work; whereas, were it a mere farming-town, the caravan would take little in proportion to their spendings. The opinion generally was that the license could not be obtained; and the portly man's face grew darker and downcast at the prospect; and he took out a travelling-map, and looked it carefully over, to discover some other station. This is something like the planning of the march of an army. It was finally resolved to enlist the influence of a brother-in-law of the head selectman, and try to gain his consent. Whereupon the caravan-man and the brother-in-law (who, being a tavern-keeper, was to divide the custom of the caravan people with this house) went to make the attempt,--the caravan-man stalking along with stiff, awkward bulk and stature, yet preserving a respectability withal, though with somewhat of the blackguard. Before he went, he offered a wager of "a drink of rum to a thaw of tobacco" that he did not succeed. When he came back, there was a flush in his face and a sparkle in his eye that did not look like failure; but I know not what was the result. He took a glass of wine with the brother-in-law,--a grave, thin, frosty-haired, shrewd-looking yeoman, in his shirt-sleeves,--then ordered his horses, paid his bill, and drove off, accompanied still by the same yeoman, perhaps to get the permission of the other two selectmen. If he does not get a license here, he will try at Cheshire. A fellow appears with a pink guard-chain and two breast-pins in his shirt,--one a masonic one of gold, with compass and square, and the other of colored glass, set in filigree brass,--and the shirt a soiled one. A tendency to obesity is more common in this part of the country than I have noticed it elsewhere. August 19th.--I drove with Orrin S------ last evening to an old farmer's house to get some chickens. Entering the kitchen, I observed a fireplace with rough stone jambs and back, and a marble hearth, cracked, and otherwise contrasting a roughness of workmanship with the value of the material. There was a clock without a case, the weights being visible, and the pendulum swinging in air,--and a coffee-mill fixed against the wall. A religious newspaper lay on the mantel-piece. The old farmer was reluctant to go after the fowls, declaring that it would be impossible to find them in the dark; but Orrin insisting, he lighted a lamp, and we all went together, and quickly found them, roosted about the wood-pile; whereupon Orrin speedily laid hands on five, and wrung their necks in a twinkling, they fluttering long after they should have been dead. When we had taken our departure, Orrin remarked, "How faint-hearted these old fellows are!" and it was a good observation; for it was the farmer's timorous age that made him doubt the practicability of catching the chickens, and it contrasted well with the persevering energy of the middle-aged Orrin. But Orrin inquired, somewhat dolefully, whether I should suppose that he himself bewailed the advances of age. It is a grievous point with him. In the evening there was a strange fellow in the bar-room,--a sort of mock Methodist,--a cattle-drover, who had stopped here for the night with two cows and a Durham bull. All his talk turned upon religion, and he would ever and anon burst out in some strain of scriptural-styled eloquence, chanted through his nose, like an exhortation at a camp-meeting. A group of Universalists and no-religionists sat around him, making him their butt, and holding wild argument with him; and he strangely mingled humor with his enthusiasm, and enthusiasm with his humor, so that it was almost impossible to tell whether he were in jest or earnest. Probably it was neither, but an eccentricity, an almost monomania, that has grown upon him,--perhaps the result of strong religious excitement. And, having been a backslider, he is cursed with a half-frenzied humor. In the morning he talked in the same strain at breakfast, while quaffing fourteen cups of tea,--Eliza, all the while, as she supplied him, entreating him not to drink any more. After breakfast (it being the Sabbath) he drove his two cows and bull past the stoop, raising his stair, and running after them with strange, uncouth gestures; and the last word I heard from him was an exhortation: "Gentlemen, now all of you take your Bibles, and meditate on divine things,"--this being uttered with raised hands, and a Methodistical tone, intermingled, as was his expression, with something humorous; so that, to the last, the puzzle was still kept up, whether he was an enthusiast or a jester. He wore a suit of coarse brown cloth, cut in rather a Quaker fashion; and he had a large nose, and his face expressed enthusiasm and honor,--a sort of smile and twinkle of the eye, with wildness. He is excellent at a bargain; and if, in the midst of his ghostly exhortation, the talk were turned on cattle, he eagerly seized the topic and expatiated on it. While this fellow was enumerating the Universalists in neighboring towns who had turned from their errors on their death-beds, some one exclaimed, "John Hodges! why, he isn't dead,--he's alive and well." Whereat there was a roar of laughter. While holding an argument at table, I heard him mutter to himself at something that his adversary said; and though I could not distinguish what it was, the tone did more to convince me of some degree of earnestness than aught beside. This character might be wrought into a strange portrait of something sad, terrific, and laughable. The Sabbath wore away lazily, and therefore wickedly. The heavy caravan-man inquired for some book of light reading, and, having obtained an old volume of a literary paper, betook himself to the seat of his wagon, to read. At other times he smoked, and talked sensibly enough with anybody that offered. He is a man of sense, though not quick, and seems to be a fair man. When he walks, he puts the thumb of each hand into the armhole of his waistcoat, and moves along stiffly, with a knock-kneed gait. His talk was chiefly of hotels, and such matters as a man, always travelling, without any purpose of observation for mental improvement, would be interested in. He spoke of his life as a hard one. There was a Methodist quarterly meeting here, and a love-feast. There is a fellow hereabout who refuses to pay six dollars for the coffin in which his wife was buried. She died about six months since, and I believe he is already engaged to another. He is young and rather comely, but has not a straightforward look. One man plods along, looking always on the ground, without ever lifting his eyes to the mountain scenery, and forest, and clouds, above and around him. Another walks the street with a quick, prying eye, and sharp face,--the most, expressive possible of one on the lookout for gain,--of the most disagreeable class of Yankees. There is also a sour-looking, unwholesome boy, the son of this man, whose voice is querulous and ill-natured, precisely suited to his aspect. So is his character. We have another with Indian blood in him, and the straight, black hair,-- something of the tawny skin and the quick, shining eye of the Indian. He seems reserved, but is not ill-natured when spoken to. There is so much of the white in him, that he gives the impression of belonging to a civilized race, which causes the more strange sensation on discovering that he has a wild lineage. August 22d.--I walked out into what is called the Notch this forenoon, between Saddle Mountain and another. There are good farms in this Notch, although the ground is considerably elevated,--this morning, indeed, above the clouds; for I penetrated through one in reaching the higher region, although I found sunshine there. Graylock was hidden in clouds, and the rest of Saddle Mountain had one partially wreathed about it; but it was withdrawn before long. It was very beautiful cloud-scenery. The clouds lay on the breast of the mountain, dense, white, well-defined, and some of them were in such close vicinity that it seemed as if I could infold myself in them; while others, belonging to the same fleet, were floating through the blue sky above. I had a view of Williamstown at the distance of a few miles,--two or three, perhaps,--a white village and steeple in a gradual hollow, with high mountainous swells heaving themselves up, like immense, subsiding waves, far and wide around it. On these high mountain-waves rested the white summer clouds, or they rested as still in the air above; and they were formed in such fantastic shapes that they gave the strongest possible impression of being confounded or intermixed with the sky. It was like a day-dream to look at it; and the students ought to be day-dreamers, all of them,--when cloud-land is one and the same thing with the substantial earth. By degrees all these clouds flitted away, and the sultry summer sun burned on hill and valley. As I was walking home, an old man came down the mountain-path behind me in a wagon, and gave me a drive to the village. Visitors being few in the Notch, the women and girls looked from the windows after me; the men nodded and greeted me with a look of curiosity; and two little girls whom I met, bearing tin pails, whispered one another and smiled. North Adams, August 23d.--The county commissioners held a court; in the bar-room yesterday afternoon, for the purpose of letting out the making of the new road over the mountain. The commissioners sat together in attitudes of some dignity, with one leg laid across another; and the people, to the number of twenty or thirty, sat round about with their hats on, in their shirt-sleeves, with but little, yet with some formality. Several had come from a distance to bid for the job. They sat with whips in their hands. The first bid was three dollars,--then there was a long silence,--then a bid of two dollars eighty-five cents, and finally it was knocked down at two eighteen, per rod. A disposition to bid was evidenced in one man by his joking on the bid of another. After supper, as the sun was setting, a man passed by the door with a hand-organ, connected with which was a row of figures, such as dancers, pirouetting and turning, a lady playing on a piano, soldiers, a negro wench dancing, and opening and shutting a huge red mouth,--all these keeping time to the lively or slow tunes of the organ. The man had a pleasant, but sly, dark face; he carried his whole establishment on his shoulder, it being fastened to a staff which he rested on the ground when he performed. A little crowd of people gathered about him on the stoop, peeping over each other's heads with huge admiration,--fat Otis Hodge, and the tall stage-driver, and the little boys, all declaring that it was the masterpiece of sights. Some few coppers did the man obtain, as well as much praise. He had come over the high, solitary mountain, where for miles there could hardly be a soul to hear his music. In the evening, a portly old commissioner, a cheerful man enough, was sitting reading the newspaper in the parlor, holding the candle between the newspaper and his eyes,--its rays glittering on his silver-bowed spectacles and silvery hair. A pensive mood of age had come upon him, and sometimes he heaved a long sigh, while he turned and re-turned the paper, and folded it for convenient reading. By and by a gentleman came to see him, and he talked with him cheerfully. The fat old squire, whom I have mentioned more than once, is an odd figure, with his bluff, red face,--coarsely red,--set in silver hair,-- his clumsy legs, which he moves in a strange straddle, using, I believe, a broomstick for a staff. The breadth of back of these fat men is truly a wonder. A decent man, at table the other day, took the only remaining potato out of the dish, on the end of his knife, and offered his friend half of it! The mountains look much larger and more majestic sometimes than at others,--partly because the mind may be variously disposed, so as to comprehend them more or less, and partly that an imperceptible (or almost so) haze adds a great deal to the effect. Saddleback often looks a huge, black mass,--black-green, or black-blue. The cave makes a fresh impression upon me every time I visit it,--so deep, so irregular, so gloomy, so stern,--part of its walls the pure white of the marble,--others covered with a gray decomposition and with spots of moss, and with brake growing where there is a handful of earth. I stand and look into its depths at various points, and hear the roar of the stream re-echoing up. It is like a heart that has been rent asunder by a torrent of passion, which has raged and foamed, and left its ineffaceable traces; though now there is but a little rill of feeling at the bottom. In parts, trees have fallen across the fissure,--trees with large trunks. I bathed in the stream in this old, secluded spot, which I frequent for that purpose. To reach it, I cross one branch of the stream on stones, and then pass to the other side of a little island, overgrown with trees and underbrush. Where I bathe, the stream has partially dammed itself up by sweeping together tree-trunks and slabs and branches, and a thousand things that have come down its current for years perhaps; so that there is a deep pool, full of eddies and little whirlpools which would carry me away, did I not take hold of the stem of a small tree that lies opportunely transversely across the water. The bottom is uneven, with rocks of various size, against which it is difficult to keep from stumbling, so rapid is the stream. Sometimes it bears along branches and strips of bark,--sometimes a green leaf, or perchance a dry one,-- occasionally overwhelmed by the eddies and borne deep under water, then rushing atop the waves. The forest, bordering the stream, produces its effect by a complexity of causes,--the old and stern trees, with stately trunks and dark foliage,-- as the almost black pines,--the young trees, with lightsome green foliage,--as sapling oaks, maples and poplars,--then the old, decayed trunks, that are seen lying here and there, all mouldered, so that the foot would sink into them. The sunshine, falling capriciously on a casual branch considerably within the forest verge, while it leaves nearer trees in shadow, leads the imagination into the depths. But it soon becomes bewildered there. Rocks strewn about, half hidden in the fallen leaves, must not be overlooked. August 26th.--A funeral last evening, nearly at sunset,--a coffin of a boy about ten years old laid on a one-horse wagon among some straw,--two or three barouches and wagons following. As the funeral passed through the village street, a few men formed a short procession in front of the coffin, among whom were Orrin S----- and I. The burial-ground (there are two in the town) is on the sides and summit of a round hill, which is planted with cypress and other trees, among which the white marble gravestones show pleasantly. The grave was dug on the steep slope of a hill; and the grave-digger was waiting there, and two or three other shirt-sleeved yeomen, leaning against the trees. Orrin S------, a wanton and mirth-making middle-aged man, who would not seem to have much domestic feeling, took a chief part on the occasion, assisting in taking the coffin from the wagon and in lowering it into the grave. There being some superfluous earth at the bottom of the grave, the coffin was drawn up again after being once buried, and the obstacle removed with a hoe; then it was lowered again for the last time. While this was going on, the father and mother stood weeping at the upper end of the grave, at the head of the little procession,--the mother sobbing with stifled violence, and peeping forth to discover why the coffin was drawn up again. It being fitted in its place, Orrin S------ strewed some straw upon it,--this being the custom here, because "the clods on the coffin-lid have an ugly sound." Then the Baptist minister, having first whispered to the father, removed his hat, the spectators all doing the same, and thanked them "in the name of these mourners, for this last act of kindness to them." In all these rites Orrin S------ bore the chief part with real feeling and sadly decorous demeanor. After the funeral, I took a walk on the Williamstown road, towards the west. There had been a heavy shower in the afternoon, and clouds were brilliant all over the sky, around Graylock and everywhere else. Those over the hills of the west were the most splendid in purple and gold, and, there being a haze, it added immensely to their majesty and dusky magnificence. This morning I walked a little way along the mountain road, and stood awhile in the shadow of some oak and chestnut trees,--it being a warm, bright, sunshiny morning. The shades lay long from trees and other objects, as at sunset, but how different this cheerful and light radiance from the mild repose of sunset! Locusts, crickets, and other insects were making music. Cattle were feeding briskly, with morning appetites. The wakeful voices of children were heard in a neighboring hollow. The dew damped the road, and formed many-colored drops in the grass. In short, the world was not weary with a long, sultry day, but in a fresh, recruited state, fit to carry it through such a day. A rough-looking, sunburnt, soiled-skirted, odd, middle-aged little man came to the house a day or two ago, seeking work. He had come from Ohio, and was returning to his native place, somewhere in New England, stopping occasionally to earn money to pay his way. There was something rather ludicrous in his physiognomy and aspect. He was very free to talk with all and sundry. He made a long eulogy on his dog Tiger, yesterday, insisting on his good moral character, his not being quarrelsome, his docility, and all other excellent qualities that a huge, strong, fierce mastiff could have. Tiger is the bully of the village, and keeps all the other dogs in awe. His aspect is very spirited, trotting massively along, with his tail elevated and his head likewise. "When he sees a dog that's anything near his size, he's apt to growl a little,"--Tiger had the marks of a battle on him,--"yet he's a good dog." Friday, August 31st.--A drive on Tuesday to Shelburne Falls, twenty-two miles or thereabouts distant. Started at about eight o'clock in a wagon with Mr. Leach and Mr. Birch. Our road lay over the Green Mountains, the long ridge of which was made awful by a dark, heavy, threatening cloud, apparently rolled and condensed along the whole summit. As we ascended the zigzag road, we looked behind, at every opening in the forest, and beheld a wide landscape of mountain-swells and valleys intermixed, and old Graylock and the whole of Saddleback. Over the wide scene there was a general gloom; but there was a continual vicissitude of bright sunshine flitting over it, now resting for a brief space on portions of the heights, now flooding the valleys with green brightness, now making out distinctly each dwelling, and the hotels, and then two small brick churches of the distant village, denoting its prosperity, while all around seemed under adverse fortunes. But we, who stood so elevated above mortal things, and saw so wide and far, could see the sunshine of prosperity departing from one spot and rolling towards another, so that we could not think it much matter which spot were sunny or gloomy at any one moment. The top of this Hoosic Mountain is a long ridge, marked on the county map as two thousand one hundred and sixty feet above the sea; on this summit is a valley, not very deep, but one or two miles wide, in which is the town of L------. Here there are respectable farmers, though it is a rough, and must be a bleak place. The first house, after reaching the summit, is a small, homely tavern. We left our horse in the shed, and, entering the little unpainted bar-room, we heard a voice, in a strange, outlandish accent, exclaiming "Diorama." It was an old man, with a full, gray-bearded countenance, and Mr. Leach exclaimed, "Ah, here's the old Dutchman again!" And he answered, "Yes, Captain, here's the old Dutchman,"--though, by the way, he is a German, and travels the country with this diorama in a wagon, and had recently been at South Adams, and was now returning from Saratoga Springs. We looked through the glass orifice of his machine, while he exhibited a succession of the very worst scratches and daubings that can be imagined,--worn out, too, and full of cracks and wrinkles, dimmed with tobacco-smoke, and every other wise dilapidated. There were none in a later fashion than thirty years since, except some figures that had been cut from tailors' show-bills. There were views of cities and edifices in Europe, of Napoleon's battles and Nelson's sea-fights, in the midst of which would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand (the Hand of Destiny) pointing at the principal points of the conflict, while the old Dutchman explained. He gave a good deal of dramatic effect to his descriptions, but his accent and intonation cannot be written. He seemed to take interest and pride in his exhibition; yet when the utter and ludicrous miserability thereof made us laugh, he joined in the joke very readily. When the last picture had been shown, he caused a country boor, who stood gaping beside the machine, to put his head within it, and thrust out his tongue. The head becoming gigantic, a singular effect was produced. The old Dutchman's exhibition being over, a great dog, apparently an elderly dog, suddenly made himself the object of notice, evidently in rivalship of the Dutchman. He had seemed to be a good-natured, quiet kind of dog, offering his head to be patted by those who were kindly disposed towards him. This great, old dog, unexpectedly, and of his own motion, began to run round after his not very long tail with the utmost eagerness; and, catching hold of it, he growled furiously at it, and still continued to circle round, growling and snarling with increasing rage, as if one half of his body were at deadly enmity with the other. Faster and faster went he, round and roundabout, growing still fiercer, till at last he ceased in a state of utter exhaustion; but no sooner had his exhibition finished than he became the same mild, quiet, sensible old dog as before; and no one could have suspected him of such nonsense as getting enraged with his own tail. He was first taught this trick by attaching a bell to the end of his tail; but he now commences entirely of his own accord, and I really believe he feels vain at the attention he excites. It was chill and bleak on the mountain-top, and a fire was burning in the bar-room. The old Dutchman bestowed on everybody the title of "Captain," perhaps because such a title has a great chance of suiting an American. Leaving the tavern, we drove a mile or two farther to the eastern brow of the mountain, whence we had a view, over the tops of a multitude of heights, into the intersecting valleys down which we were to plunge,--and beyond them the blue and indistinctive scene extended to the east and north for at least sixty miles. Beyond the hills it looked almost as if the blue ocean might be seen. Monadnock was visible, like a sapphire cloud against the sky. Descending, we by and by got a view of the Deerfield River, which makes a bend in its course from about north and south to about east and west, coming out from one defile among the mountains, and flowing through another. The scenery on the eastern side of the Green Mountains is incomparably more striking than on the western, where the long swells and ridges have a flatness of effect; and even Graylock heaves itself so gradually that it does not much strike the beholder. But on the eastern part, peaks one or two thousand feet high rush up on either bank of the river in ranges, thrusting out their shoulders side by side. They are almost precipitous, clothed in woods, through which the naked rock pushes itself forth to view. Sometimes the peak is bald, while the forest wraps the body of the hill, and the baldness gives it an indescribably stern effect. Sometimes the precipice rises with abruptness from the immediate side of the river; sometimes there is a cultivated valley on either side,--cultivated long, and with all the smoothness and antique rurality of a farm near cities,--this gentle picture strongly set off by the wild mountain-frame around it. Often it would seem a wonder how our road was to continue, the mountains rose so abruptly on either side, and stood, so direct a wall, across our onward course; while, looking behind, it would be an equal mystery how we had gotten thither, through the huge base of the mountain, that seemed to have reared itself erect after our passage. But, passing onward, a narrow defile would give us egress into a scene where new mountains would still appear to bar us. Our road was much of it level; but scooped out among mountains. The river was a brawling stream, shallow, and roughened by rocks; now we drove on a plane with it; now there was a sheer descent down from the roadside upon it, often unguarded by any kind of fence, except by the trees that contrived to grow on the headlong interval. Between the mountains there were gorges, that led the imagination away into new scenes of wildness. I have never driven through such romantic scenery, where there was such variety and boldness of mountain shapes as this; and though it was a broad sunny day, the mountains diversified the view with sunshine and shadow, and glory and gloom. In Charlemont (I think), after passing a bridge, we saw a very curious rock on the shore of the river, about twenty feet from the roadside. Clambering down the bank, we found it a complete arch, hollowed out of the solid rock, and as high as the arched entrance of an ancient church, which it might be taken to be, though considerably dilapidated and weather-worn. The water flows through it, though the rock afforded standing room, beside the pillars. It was really like the archway of an enchanted palace, all of which has vanished except the entrance,--now only into nothingness and empty space. We climbed to the top of the arch, in which the traces of water having eddied are very perceptible. This curiosity occurs in a wild part of the river's course, and in a solitude of mountains. Farther down, the river becoming deeper, broader, and more placid, little boats were seen moored along it, for the convenience of crossing. Sometimes, too, the well-beaten track of wheels and hoofs passed down to its verge, then vanished, and appeared on the other side, indicating a ford. We saw one house, pretty, small, with green blinds, and much quietness in its environments, on the other side of the river, with a flat-bottomed boat for communication. It was a pleasant idea that the world was kept off by the river. Proceeding onward, we reached Shelburne Falls. Here the river, in the distance of a few hundred yards, makes a descent of about a hundred and fifty feet over a prodigious bed of rock. Formerly it doubtless flowed unbroken over the rock, merely creating a rapid; and traces of water having raged over it are visible in portions of the rock that now lie high and dry. At present the river roars through a channel which it has worn in the stone, leaping in two or three distinct falls, and rushing downward, as from flight to flight of a broken and irregular staircase. The mist rises from the highest of these cataracts, and forms a pleasant object in the sunshine. The best view, I think, is to stand on the verge of the upper and largest fall, and look down through the whole rapid descent of the river, as it hurries, foaming, through its rock-worn path,--the rocks seeming to have been hewn away, as when mortals make a road. These falls are the largest in this State, and have a very peculiar character. It seems as if water had had more power at some former period than now, to hew and tear its passage through such an immense ledge of rock as here withstood it. In this crag, or parts of it, now far beyond the reach of the water, it has worn what are called pot-holes,--being circular hollows in the rock, where for ages stones have been whirled round and round by the eddies of the water; so that the interior of the pot is as circular and as smooth as it could have been made by art. Often the mouth of the pot is the narrowest part, the inner space being deeply scooped out. Water is contained in most of these pot-holes, sometimes so deep that a man might drown himself therein, and lie undetected at the bottom. Some of them are of a convenient size for cooking, which might be practicable by putting in hot stones. The tavern at Shelburne Falls was about the worst I ever saw,--there being hardly anything to eat, at least nothing of the meat kind. There was a party of students from the Rensselaer school at Troy, who had spent the night there, a set of rough urchins from sixteen to twenty years old, accompanied by the wagon-driver, a short, stubbed little fellow, who walked about with great independence, thrusting his hands into his breeches-pockets, beneath his frock. The queerness was, such a figure being associated with classic youth. They were on an excursion which is yearly made from that school in search of minerals. They seemed in rather better moral habits than students used to be, but wild-spirited, rude, and unpolished, somewhat like German students, which resemblance one or two of them increased by smoking pipes. In the morning, my breakfast being set in a corner of the same room with them, I saw their breakfast-table, with a huge wash-bowl of milk in the centre, and a basin and spoon placed for each guest. In the bar-room of this tavern were posted up written advertisements, the smoked chimney-piece being thus made to serve for a newspaper: "I have rye for sale," "I have a fine mare colt," etc. There was one quaintly expressed advertisement of a horse that had strayed or been stolen from a pasture. The students, from year to year, have been in search of a particular rock, somewhere on the mountains in the vicinity of Shelburne Falls, which is supposed to contain some valuable ore; but they cannot find it. One man in the bar-room observed that it must be enchanted; and spoke of a tinker, during the Revolutionary War, who met with a somewhat similar instance. Roaming along the Hudson River, he came to a precipice which had some bunches of singular appearance embossed upon it. He knocked off one of the hunches, and carrying it home, or to a camp, or wherever he lived, he put it on the fire, and incited it down into clear lead. He sought for the spot again and again, but could never find it. Mr. Leach's brother is a student at Shelburne Falls. He is about thirty-five years old, and married; and at this mature age he is studying for the ministry, and will not finish his course for two or three years. He was bred a farmer, but has sold his farm, and invested the money, and supports himself and wife by dentistry during his studies. Many of the academy students are men grown, and some, they say, well towards forty years old. Methinks this is characteristic of American life,--these rough, weather-beaten, hard-handed, farmer-bred students. In nine cases out of ten they are incapable of any effectual cultivation; for men of ripe years, if they have any pith in them, will have long ago got beyond academy or even college instruction. I suspect nothing better than a very wretched smattering is to be obtained in these country academies. Mr. Jerkins, an instructor at Amherst, speaking of the Western mounds, expressed an opinion that they were of the same nature and origin as some small circular hills which are of very frequent occurrence here in North Adams. The burial-ground is on one of them, and there is another, on the summit of which appears a single tombstone, as if there were something natural in making these hills the repositories of the dead. A question of old H------ led to Mr. Jenkins's dissertation on this subject, to the great contentment of a large circle round the bar-room fireside on the last rainy day. A tailor is detected by Mr. Leach, because his coat had not a single wrinkle in it. I saw him exhibiting patterns of fashions to Randall, the village tailor. Mr. Leach has much tact in finding out the professions of people. He found out a blacksmith, because his right hand was much larger than the other. A man getting subscriptions for a religious and abolition newspaper in New York,--somewhat elderly and gray-haired, quick in his movements, hasty in his walk, with an eager, earnest stare through his spectacles, hurrying about with a pocket-book of subscriptions in his hand,--seldom speaking, and then in brief expressions,--sitting down before the stage comes, to write a list of subscribers obtained to his employers in New York. Withal, a city and business air about him, as of one accustomed to hurry through narrow alleys, and dart across thronged streets, and speak hastily to one man and another at jostling corners, though now transacting his affairs in the solitude of mountains. An old, gray man, seemingly astray and abandoned in this wide world, sitting in the bar-room, speaking to none, nor addressed by any one. Not understanding the meaning of the supper-bell till asked to supper by word of mouth. However, he called for a glass of brandy. A pedler, with girls' silk neckerchiefs,--or gauze,--men's silk pocket-handkerchiefs, red bandannas, and a variety of horn combs, trying to trade with the servant-girls of the house. One of them, Laura, attempts to exchange a worked vandyke, which she values at two dollars and a half; Eliza, being reproached by the pedler, "vows that she buys more of pedlers than any other person in the house." A drove of pigs passing at dusk. They appeared not so much disposed to ramble and go astray from the line of march as in daylight, but kept together in a pretty compact body. There was a general grunting, not violent at all, but low and quiet, as if they were expressing their sentiments among themselves in a companionable way. Pigs, on a march, do not subject themselves to any leader among themselves, but pass on, higgledy-piggledy, without regard to age or sex. September 1st.--Last evening, during a walk, Graylock and the whole of Saddleback were at first imbued with a mild, half-sunshiny tinge, then grew almost black,--a huge, dark mass lying on the back of the earth and encumbering it. Stretching up from behind the black mountain, over a third or more of the sky, there was a heavy, sombre blue heap or ledge of clouds, looking almost as solid as rocks. The volumes of which it was composed were perceptible, by translucent lines and fissures; but the mass, as a whole, seemed as solid, bulky, and ponderous in the cloud-world as the mountain was on earth. The mountain and cloud together had an indescribably stern and majestic aspect. Beneath this heavy cloud, there was a fleet or flock of light, vapory mists, flitting in middle air; and these were tinted, from the vanished sun, with the most gorgeous and living purple that can be conceived,--a fringe upon the stern blue. In the opposite quarter of the heavens, a rose-light was reflected, whence I know not, which colored the clouds around the moon, then well above the horizon, so that the nearly round and silver moon appeared strangely among roseate clouds,--sometimes half obscured by them. A man with a smart horse, upon which the landlord makes laudatory remarks. He replies that he has "a better at home." Dressed in a brown, bright-buttoned coat, smartly cut. He immediately becomes familiar, and begins to talk of the license law, and other similar topics,--making himself at home, as one who, being much of his time upon the road, finds himself at ease at any tavern. He inquired after a stage agent, named Brigham, who formerly resided here, but now has gone to the West. He himself was probably a horse-jockey. An old lady, stopping here over the Sabbath, waiting for to-morrow's stage for Greenfield, having been deceived by the idea that she could proceed on her journey without delay. Quiet, making herself comfortable, taken into the society of the women of the house. September 3d.--On the slope of Bald Mountain a clearing, set in the frame of the forest on all sides,--a growth of clover upon it, which, having been mowed once this year, is now appropriated to pasturage. Stumps remaining in the ground; one tall, barkless stem of a tree standing upright, branchless, and with a shattered summit. One or two other stems lying prostrate and partly overgrown with bushes and shrubbery, some of them bearing a yellow flower,--a color which Autumn loves. The stumps and trunks fire-blackened, yet nothing about them that indicates a recent clearing, but the roughness of an old clearing, that, being removed from convenient labor, has none of the polish of the homestead. The field, with slight undulations, slopes pretty directly down. Near the lower verge, a rude sort of barn, or rather haystack roofed over, and with hay protruding and hanging out. An ox feeding, and putting up his muzzle to pull down a mouthful of hay; but seeing me, a stranger, in the upper part of the field, he remains long gazing, and finally betakes himself to feeding again. A solitary butterfly flitting to and fro, blown slightly on its course by a cool September wind,--the coolness of which begins to be tempered by a bright, glittering sun. There is dew on the grass. In front, beyond the lower spread of forest, Saddle Mountain rises, and the valleys and long, swelling hills sweep away. But the impression of this clearing is solitude, as of a forgotten land. It is customary here to toll the bell at the death of a person, at the hour of his death, whether A. M. or P. M. Not, however, I suppose, if it happen in deep night. "There are three times in a man's life when he is talked about,--when he is born, when he is married, and when he dies." "Yes," said Orrin S------, "and only one of the times has he to pay anything for it out of his own pocket." (In reference to a claim by the guests of the bar-room on the man Amasa Richardson for a treat.) A wood-chopper, travelling the country in search of jobs at chopping. His baggage a bundle, a handkerchief, and a pair of coarse boots. His implement an axe, most keenly ground and sharpened, which I had noticed standing in a corner, and thought it would almost serve as a razor. I saw another wood-chopper sitting down on the ascent of Bald Mountain, with his axe on one side and a jug and provisions on the other, on the way to his day's toil. The Revolutionary pensioners come out into the sunshine to make oath that they are still above ground. One, whom Mr. S------ saluted as "Uncle John," went into the bar-room, walking pretty stoutly by the aid of a long, oaken staff,--with an old, creased, broken and ashen bell-crowned hat on his head, and wearing a brown old-fashioned suit of clothes. Pretty portly, fleshy in the face, and with somewhat of a paunch, cheerful, and his senses, bodily and mental, in no very bad order, though he is now in his ninetieth year. "An old man's withered and wilted apple," quoth Uncle John, "keeps a good while." Mr. S------ says his grandfather lived to be a hundred, and that his legs became covered with moss, like the trunk of an old tree. Uncle John would smile and cackle at a little jest, and what life there was in him seemed a good-natured and comfortable one enough. He can walk two or three miles, he says, "taking it moderate." I suppose his state is that of a drowsy man but partly conscious of life,--walking as through a dim dream, but brighter at some seasons than at others. By and by he will fall quite asleep, without any trouble. Mr. S------, unbidden, gave him a glass of gin, which the old man imbibed by the warm fireside, and grew the younger for it. September 4th.--This day an exhibition of animals in the vicinity of the village, under a pavilion of sail-cloth,--the floor being the natural grass, with here and there a rock partially protruding. A pleasant, mild shade; a strip of sunshine or a spot of glimmering brightness in some parts. Crowded,--row above row of women, on an amphitheatre of seats, on one side. In an inner pavilion an exhibition of anacondas,--four,--which the showman took, one by one, from a large box, under some blankets, and hung round his shoulders. They seemed almost torpid when first taken out, but gradually began to assume life, to stretch, to contract, twine and writhe about his neck and person, thrusting out their tongues and erecting their heads. Their weight was as much as he could bear, and they hung down almost to the ground when not contorted,--as big round as a thigh, almost,--spotted and richly variegated. Then he put them into the box again, their heads emerging and writhing forth, which the showman thrust back again. He gave a descriptive and historical account of them, and a fanciful and poetical one also. A man put his arm and head into the lion's mouth,--all the spectators looking on so attentively that a breath could not be heard. That was impressive,--its effect on a thousand persons,--more so than the thing itself. In the evening the caravan people were at the tavern, talking of their troubles in coming over the mountain,--the overturn of a cage containing two leopards and a hyena. They are a rough, ignorant set of men, apparently incapable of taking any particular enjoyment from the life of variety and adventure which they lead. There was the man who put his head into the lion's mouth, and, I suppose, the man about whom the anacondas twined, talking about their suppers, and blustering for hot meat, and calling for something to drink, without anything of the wild dignity of men familiar with the nobility of nature. A character of a desperate young man, who employs high courage and strong faculties in this sort of dangers, and wastes his talents in wild riot, addressing the audience as a snake-man,--keeping the ring while the monkey rides the pony,--singing negro and other songs. The country boors were continually getting within the barriers, and venturing too near the cages. The great lion lay with his fore paws extended, and a calm, majestic, but awful countenance. He looked on the people as if he had seen many such concourses. The hyena was the most ugly and dangerous looking beast, full of spite, and on ill terms with all nature, looking a good deal like a hog with the devil in him, the ridge of hair along his back bristling. He was in the cage with a leopard and a panther, and the latter seemed continually on the point of laying his paw on the hyena, who snarled, and showed his teeth. It is strange, though, to see how these wild beasts acknowledge and practise a degree of mutual forbearance, and of obedience to man, with their wild nature yet in them. The great white bear seemed in distress from the heat, moving his head and body in a peculiar, fantastic way, and eagerly drinking water when given it. He was thin and lank. The caravan men were so sleepy, Orrin S------ says, that he could hardly wake them in the morning. They turned over on their faces to show him. Coming out of the caravansary, there were the mountains, in the quiet sunset, and many men drunk, swearing, and fighting. Shanties with liquor for sale. The elephant lodged in the barn. September 5th.--I took a walk of three miles from the village, which brought me into Vermont. The line runs athwart a bridge,--a rude bridge, which crosses a mountain stream. The stream runs deep at the bottom of a gorge, plashing downward, with rapids and pools, and bestrewn with large rocks, deep and shady, not to be reached by the sun except in its meridian, as well on account of the depth of the gorge as of the arch of wilderness trees above it. There was a stumpy clearing beyond the bridge, where some men were building a house. I went to them, and inquired if I were in Massachusetts or Vermont, and asked for some water. Whereupon they showed great hospitality, and the master-workman went to the spring, and brought delicious water in a tin basin, and produced another jug containing "new rum, and very good; and rum does nobody any harm if they make a good use of it," quoth he. I invited them to call on me at the hotel, if they should cone to the village within two or three days. Then I took my way back through the forest, for this is a by-road, and is, much of its course, a sequestrated and wild one, with an unseen torrent roaring at an unseen depth, along the roadside. My walk forth had been an almost continued ascent, and, returning, I had an excellent view of Graylock and the adjacent mountains, at such a distance that they were all brought into one group, and comprehended at one view, as belonging to the same company,--all mighty, with a mightier chief. As I drew nearer home, they separated, and the unity of effect was lost. The more distant then disappeared behind the nearer ones, and finally Graylock itself was lost behind the hill which immediately shuts in the village. There was a warm, autumnal haze, which, I think, seemed to throw the mountains farther off, and both to enlarge and soften them. To imagine the gorges and deep hollows in among the group of mountains,-- their huge shoulders and protrusions. "They were just beginning to pitch over the mountains, as I came along," --stage-driver's expression about the caravan. A fantastic figure of a village coxcomb, striding through the bar-room, and standing with folded arms to survey the caravan men. There is much exaggeration and rattle-brain about this fellow. A mad girl leaped from the top of a tremendous precipice in Pownall, hundreds of feet high, if the tale be true, and, being buoyed up by her clothes, came safely to the bottom. Inquiries about the coming of the caravan, and whether the elephant had got to town, and reports that he had. A smart, plump, crimson-faced gentleman, with a travelling-portmanteau of peculiar neatness and convenience. He criticises the road over the mountain, having come in the Greenfield stage; perhaps an engineer. Bears still inhabit Saddleback and the neighboring mountains and forests. Six were taken in Pownall last year, and two hundred foxes. Sometimes they appear on the hills, in close proximity to this village. September 7th.--Mr. Leach and I took a walk by moonlight last evening, on the road that leads over the mountain. Remote from houses, far up on the hillside, we found a lime-kiln, burning near the road; and, approaching it, a watcher started from the ground, where he had been lying at his length. There are several of these lime-kilns in this vicinity. They are circular, built with stones, like a round tower, eighteen or twenty feet high, having a hillock heaped around in a great portion of their circumference, so that the marble may be brought and thrown in by cart-loads at the top. At the bottom there is a doorway, large enough to admit a man in a stooping posture. Thus an edifice of great solidity is constructed, which will endure for centuries, unless needless pains are taken to tear it down. There is one on the hillside, close to the village, wherein weeds grow at the bottom, and grass and shrubs too are rooted in the interstices of the stones, and its low doorway has a dungeon-like aspect, and we look down from the top as into a roofless tower. It apparently has not been used for many years, and the lime and weather-stained fragments of marble are scattered about. But in the one we saw last night a hard-wood fire was burning merrily, beneath the superincumbent marble,--the kiln being heaped full; and shortly after we came, the man (a dark, black-bearded figure, in shirt-sleeves) opened the iron door, through the chinks of which the fire was gleaming, and thrust in huge logs of wood, and stirred the immense coals with a long pole, and showed us the glowing limestone,--the lower layer of it. The heat of the fire was powerful, at the distance of several yards from the open door. He talked very sensibly with us, being doubtless glad to have two visitors to vary his solitary night-watch; for it would not do for him to fall asleep, since the fire should be refreshed as often as every twenty minutes. We ascended the hillock to the top of the kiln, and the marble was red-hot, and burning with a bluish, lambent flame, quivering up, sometimes nearly a yard high, and resembling the flame of anthracite coal, only, the marble being in large fragments, the flame was higher. The kiln was perhaps six or eight feet across. Four hundred bushels of marble were then in a state of combustion. The expense of converting this quantity into lime is about fifty dollars, and it sells for twenty-five cents per bushel at the kiln. We asked the man whether he would run across the top of the intensely burning kiln, barefooted, for a thousand dollars; and he said he would for ten. He told us that the lime had been burning forty-eight hours, and would be finished in thirty-six more. He liked the business of watching it better by night than by day; because the days were often hot, but such a mild and beautiful night as the last was just right. Here a poet might make verses with moonlight in them, and a gleam of fierce firelight flickering through. It is a shame to use this brilliant, white, almost transparent marble in this way. A man said of it, the other day, that into some pieces of it, when polished, one could see a good distance; and he instanced a certain gravestone. Visited the cave. A large portion of it, where water trickles and falls, is perfectly white. The walls present a specimen of how Nature packs the stone, crowding huge masses, as it were, into chinks and fissures, and here we see it in the perpendicular or horizontal layers, as Nature laid it. September 9th.--A walk yesterday forenoon through the Notch, formed between Saddle Mountain and another adjacent one. This Notch is otherwise called the Bellowspipe, being a long and narrow valley, with a steep wall on either side. The walls are very high, and the fallen timbers lie strewed adown the precipitous descent. The valley gradually descends from the narrowest part of the Notch, and a stream of water flows through the midst of it, which, farther onward in its course, turns a mill. The valley is cultivated, there being two or three farm-houses towards the northern end, and extensive fields of grass beyond, where stand the hay-mows of last year, with the hay cut away regularly around their bases. All the more distant portion of the valley is lonesome in the extreme; and on the hither side of the narrowest part the land is uncultivated, partly overgrown with forest, partly used as sheep-pastures, for which purpose it is not nearly so barren as sheep-pastures usually are. On the right, facing southward, rises Graylock, all beshagged with forest, and with headlong precipices of rock appearing among the black pines. Southward there is a most extensive view of the valley, in which Saddleback and its companion mountains are crouched,--wide and far,--a broad, misty valley, fenced in by a mountain wall, and with villages scattered along it, and miles of forest, which appear but as patches scattered here and there upon the landscape. The descent from the Notch southward is much more abrupt than on the other side. A stream flows down through it; and along much of its course it has washed away all the earth from a ledge of rock, and then formed a descending pavement, smooth and regular, which the scanty flow of water scarcely suffices to moisten at this period, though a heavy rain, probably, would send down a torrent, raging, roaring, and foaming. I descended along the course of the stream, and sometimes on the rocky path of it, and, turning off towards the south village, followed a cattle-path till I came to a cottage. A horse was standing saddled near the door, but I did not see the rider. I knocked, and an elderly woman, of very pleasing and intelligent aspect, came at the summons, and gave me directions how to get to the south village through an orchard and "across lots," which would bring me into the road near the Quaker meeting-house, with gravestones round it. While she talked, a young woman came into the pantry from the kitchen, with a dirty little brat, whose squalls I had heard all along; the reason of his outcry being that his mother was washing him,--a very unusual process, if I may judge by his looks. I asked the old lady for some water, and she gave me, I think, the most delicious I ever tasted. These mountaineers ought certainly to be temperance people; for their mountain springs supply them with a liquor of which the cities and the low countries can have no conception. Pure, fresh, almost sparkling, exhilarating,--such water as Adam and Eve drank. I passed the south village on a by-road, without entering it, and was taken up by the stage from Pittsfield a mile or two this side of it. Platt, the driver, a friend of mine, talked familiarly about many matters, intermixing his talk with remarks on his team and addresses to the beasts composing it, who were three mares, and a horse on the near wheel,--all bays. The horse he pronounced "a dreadful nice horse to go; but if he could shirk off the work upon the others, he would,"--which unfairness Platt corrected by timely strokes of the whip whenever the horse's traces were not tightened. One of the mares wished to go faster, hearing another horse tramp behind her; "and nothing made her so mad," quoth Platt, "as to be held in when she wanted to go." The near leader started. "O the little devil," said he, "how skittish she is!" Another stumbled, and Platt bantered her thereupon. Then he told of foundering through snow-drifts in winter, and carrying the mail on his back--four miles from Bennington. And thus we jogged on, and got to "mine inn" just as the dinner-bell was ringing. Pig-drover, with two hundred pigs. They are much more easily driven on rainy days than on fair ones. One of his pigs, a large one, particularly troublesome as to running off the road towards every object, and leading the drove. Thirteen miles about a day's journey, in the course of which the drover has to travel about thirty. They have a dog, who runs to and fro indefatigably, barking at those who straggle on the flanks of the line of march, then scampering to the other side and barking there, and sometimes having quite an affair of barking and surly grunting with some refractory pig, who has found something to munch, and refuses to quit it. The pigs are fed on corn at their halts. The drove has some ultimate market, and individuals are peddled out on the march. Some die. Merino sheep (which are much raised in Berkshire) are good for hardly anything to eat,--a fair-sized quarter dwindling down to almost nothing in the process of roasting. The tavern-keeper in Stockbridge, an elderly bachelor,--a dusty, black-dressed, antiquated figure, with a white neckcloth setting off a dim, yellow complexion, looking like one of the old wax-figures of ministers in a corner of the New England Museum. He did not seem old, but like a middle-aged man, who had been preserved in some dark and cobwebby corner for a great while. He is asthmatic. In Connecticut, and also sometimes in Berkshire, the villages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, so that they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkable instance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from the winds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from a mountain-top. The streets are very wide,--two or three hundred feet, at least,--with wide, green margins, and sometimes there is a wide green space between two road tracks. Nothing can be neater than the churches and houses. The graveyard is on the slope, and at the foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of red freestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble, and one of cast-iron with an inscription of raised letters. There was one of the date of about 1776, on which was represented the third-length, has-relief portrait of a gentleman in a wig and other costume of that day; and as a framework about this portrait was wreathed a garland of vine-leaves and heavy clusters of grapes. The deceased should have been a jolly bottleman; but the epitaph indicated nothing of the kind. In a remote part of the graveyard,--remote from the main body of dead people,--I noticed a humble, mossy stone, on which I traced out "To the memory of Julia Africa, servant of Rev." somebody. There were also the half-obliterated traces of other graves, without any monuments, in the vicinity of this one. Doubtless the slaves here mingled their dark clay with the earth. At Litchfield there is a doctor who undertakes to cure deformed people,-- and humpbacked, lame, and otherwise defective folk go there. Besides these, there were many ladies and others boarding there, for the benefit of the air, I suppose. At Canaan, Connecticut, before the tavern, there is a doorstep, two or three paces large in each of its dimensions; and on this is inscribed the date when the builder of the house came to the town,--namely, 1731. The house was built in 1751. Then follows the age and death of the patriarch (at over ninety) and his wife, and the births of, I think, eleven sons and daughters. It would seem as if they were buried underneath; and many people take that idea. It is odd to put a family record in a spot where it is sure to be trampled underfoot. At Springfield, a blind man, who came in the stage,--elderly,--sitting in the reading-room, and, as soon as seated, feeling all around him with his cane, so as to find out his locality, and know where he may spit with safety! The cautious and scientific air with which he measures his distances. Then he sits still and silent a long while,--then inquires the hour,--then says, "I should like to go to bed." Nobody of the house being near, he receives no answer, and repeats impatiently, "I'll go to bed." One would suppose, that, conscious of his dependent condition, he would have learned a different sort of manner; but probably he has lived where he could command attention. Two travellers, eating bread and cheese of their own in the bar-room at Stockbridge, and drinking water out of a tumbler borrowed from the landlord. Eating immensely, and, when satisfied, putting the relics in their trunk, and rubbing down the table. Sample ears of various kinds of corn hanging over the looking-glass or in the bars of taverns. Four ears on a stalk (good ones) are considered a heavy harvest. A withered, yellow, sodden, dead-alive looking woman,--an opium-eater. A deaf man, with a great fancy for conversation, so that his interlocutor is compelled to halloo and bawl over the rumbling of the coach, amid which he hears best. The sharp tones of a woman's voice appear to pierce his dull organs much better than a masculine voice. The impossibility of saying anything but commonplace matters to a deaf man, of expressing any delicacy of thought in a raised tone, of giving utterance to fine feelings in a bawl. This man's deafness seemed to have made his mind and feelings uncommonly coarse; for, after the opium-eater had renewed an old acquaintance with him, almost the first question he asked, in his raised voice, was, "Do you eat opium now?" At Hartford, the keeper of a temperance hotel reading a Hebrew Bible in the bar by means of a lexicon and an English version. A negro, respectably dressed, and well-mounted on horseback, travelling on his own hook, calling for oats, and drinking a glass of brandy-and-water at the bar, like any other Christian. A young man from Wisconsin said, "I wish I had a thousand such fellows in Alabama." It made a strange impression on me,--the negro was really so human!--and to talk of owning a thousand like him! Left North Adams September 11th. Reached home September 24th, 1838. October 24th.--View from a chamber of the Tremont of the brick edifice, opposite, on the other side of Beacon Street. At one of the lower windows, a woman at work; at one above, a lady hemming a ruff or some such ladylike thing. She is pretty, young, and married; for a little boy comes to her knees, and she parts his hair, and caresses him in a motherly way. A note on colored paper is brought her; and she reads it, and puts it in her bosom. At another window, at some depth within the apartment, a gentleman in a dressing-gown, reading, and rocking in an easy-chair, etc., etc., etc. A rainy day, and people passing with umbrellas disconsolately between the spectator and these various scenes of indoor occupation and comfort. With this sketch might be mingled and worked up some story that was going on within the chamber where the spectator was situated. All the dead that had ever been drowned in a certain lake to arise. The history of a small lake from the first, till it was drained. An autumnal feature,--boys had swept together the fallen leaves from the elms along the street in one huge pile, and had made a hollow, nest-shaped, in this pile, in which three or four of them lay curled, like young birds. A tombstone-maker, whom Miss B----y knew, used to cut cherubs on the top of the tombstones, and had the art of carving the cherubs' faces in the likeness of the deceased. A child of Rev. E. P------ was threatened with total blindness. A week after the father had been informed of this, the child died; and, in the mean while, his feelings had become so much the more interested in the child, from its threatened blindness, that it was infinitely harder to give it up. Had he not been aware of it till after the child's death, it would probably have been a consolation. Singular character of a gentleman (H. H------, Esq.) living in retirement in Boston,--esteemed a man of nicest honor, and his seclusion attributed to wounded feelings on account of the failure of his firm in business. Yet it was discovered that this man had been the mover of intrigues by which men in business had been ruined, and their property absorbed, none knew how or by whom; love-affairs had been broken off, and much other mischief done; and for years he was not in the least suspected. He died suddenly, soon after suspicion fell upon him. Probably it was the love of management, of having an influence on affairs, that produced these phenomena. Character of a man who, in himself and his external circumstances, shall be equally and totally false: his fortune resting on baseless credit,-- his patriotism assumed,--his domestic affections, his honor and honesty, all a sham. His own misery in the midst of it,--it making the whole universe, heaven and earth alike, all unsubstantial mockery to him. Dr. Johnson's penance in Uttoxeter Market. A man who does penance in what might appear to lookers-on the most glorious and triumphal circumstance of his life. Each circumstance of the career of an apparently successful man to be a penance and torture to him on account of some fundamental error in early life. A person to catch fire-flies, and try to kindle his household fire with them. It would be symbolical of something. Thanksgiving at the Worcester Lunatic Asylum. A ball and dance of the inmates in the evening,--a furious lunatic dancing with the principal's wife. Thanksgiving in an almshouse might make a better sketch. The house on the eastern corner of North and Essex Streets [Salem], supposed to have been built about 1640, had, say sixty years later, a brick turret erected, wherein one of the ancestors of the present occupants used to practise alchemy. He was the operative of a scientific person in Boston, the director. There have been other alchemists of old in this town,--one who kept his fire burning seven weeks, and then lost the elixir by letting it go out. An ancient wineglass (Miss Ingersol's), long-stalked, with a small, cup-like bowl, round which is wreathed a branch of grape-vine, with a rich cluster of grapes, and leaves spread out. There is also some kind of a bird flying. The whole is excellently cut or engraved. In the Duke of Buckingham's comedy "The Chances," Don Frederic says of Don John (they are two noble Spanish gentlemen), "One bed contains us ever." A person, while awake and in the business of life, to think highly of another, and place perfect confidence in him, but to be troubled with dreams in which this seeming friend appears to act the part of a most deadly enemy. Finally it is discovered that the dream-character is the true one. The explanation would be--the soul's instinctive perception. Pandora's box for a child's story. Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting. "A person to look back on a long life ill-spent, and to picture forth a beautiful life which he would live, if he could be permitted to begin his life over again. Finally to discover that he had only been dreaming of old age,--that he was really young, and could live such a life as he had pictured." A newspaper, purporting to be published in a family, and satirizing the political and general world by advertisements, remarks on domestic affairs,--advertisement of a lady's lost thimble, etc. L. H------. She was unwilling to die, because she had no friends to meet her in the other world. Her little son F. being very ill, on his recovery she confessed a feeling of disappointment, having supposed that he would have gone before, and welcomed her into heaven! H. L. C------ heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage day, all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England,-- among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him,-- wandered about New England all her lifetime, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his deathbed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise. January 4th, 1839.--When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed, with sky, and gradually transformed into it. A stranger, dying, is buried; and after many years two strangers come in search of his grave, and open it. The strange sensation of a person who feels himself an object of deep interest, and close observation, and various construction of all his actions, by another person. Letters in the shape of figures of men, etc. At a distance, the words composed by the letters are alone distinguishable. Close at hand, the figures alone are seen, and not distinguished as letters. Thus things may have a positive, a relative, and a composite meaning, according to the point of view. "Passing along the street, all muddy with puddles, and suddenly seeing the sky reflected in these puddles in such a way as quite to conceal the foulness of the street." A young man in search of happiness,--to be personified by a figure whom he expects to meet in a crowd, and is to be recognized by certain signs. All these signs are given by a figure in various garbs and actions, but he does not recognize that this is the sought-for person till too late. If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones,--others to have danced forth to light, fantastic airs. Familiar spirits, according to Lilly, used to be worn in rings, watches, sword-hilts. Thumb-rings were set with jewels of extraordinary size. A very fanciful person, when dead, to have his burial in a cloud. "A story there passeth of an Indian king that sent unto Alexander a fair woman, fed with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to destroy him!"--Sir T. Browne. Dialogues of the unborn, like dialogues of the dead,--or between two young children. A mortal symptom for a person being to lose his own aspect and to take the family lineaments, which were hidden deep in the healthful visage. Perhaps a seeker might thus recognize the man he had sought, after long intercourse with him unknowingly. Some moderns to build a fire on Ararat with the remnants of the ark. Two little boats of cork, with a magnet in one and steel in the other. To have ice in one's blood. To make a story of all strange and impossible things,--as the Salamander, the Phoenix. The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturae. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by and by a boy is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture, the resemblance is found to be perfect. A prophecy may be connected. A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily. 1840.--A man, unknown, conscious of temptation to secret crimes, puts up a note in church, desiring the prayers of the congregation for one so tempted. Some most secret thing, valued and honored between lovers, to be hung up in public places, and made the subject of remark by the city,--remarks, sneers, and laughter. To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes. From different points of view, it should appear to change,--now an old man, now an old woman,--a gunner, a farmer, or the Old Nick. A ground-sparrow's nest in the slope of a bank, brought to view by mowing the grass, but still sheltered and comfortably hidden by a blackberry-vine trailing over it. At first, four brown-speckled eggs,-- then two little bare young ones, which, on the slightest noise, lift their heads, and open wide mouths for food,--immediately dropping their heads, after a broad gape. The action looks as if they were making a most earnest, agonized petition. In another egg, as in a coffin, I could discern the quiet, death-like form of the little bird. The whole thing had something awful and mysterious in it. A coroner's inquest on a murdered man,--the gathering of the jury to be described, and the characters of the members,--some with secret guilt upon their souls. To represent a man as spending life and the intensest labor in the accomplishment of some mechanical trifle,--as in making a miniature coach to be drawn by fleas, or a dinner-service to be put into a cherry-stone. A bonfire to be made of the gallows and of all symbols of evil. The love of posterity is a consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring. The device of a sun-dial for a monument over a grave, with some suitable motto. A man with the right perception of things,--a feeling within him of what is true and what is false. It might be symbolized by the talisman with which, in fairy tales, an adventurer was enabled to distinguish enchantments from realities. A phantom of the old royal governors, or some such shadowy pageant, on the night of the evacuation of Boston by the British. ------ taking my likeness, I said that such changes would come over my face that she would not know me when we met again in heaven. "See if I do not!" said she, smiling. There was the most peculiar and beautiful humor in the point itself, and in her manner, that can be imagined. Little F. H------ used to look into E----'s mouth to see where her smiles came from. "There is no Measure for Measure to my affections. If the earth fails me, I can die, and go to GOD," said ------. Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. This might be thought out at great length. Boston, July 3d, 1839.--I do not mean to imply that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to every toilsome man; and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, the experience that my heart is acquiring now will flow out in truth and wisdom. August 27th.--I have been stationed all day at the end of Long Wharf, and I rather think that I had the most eligible situation of anybody in Boston. I was aware that it must be intensely hot in the midst of the city; but there was only a short space of uncomfortable heat in my region, half-way towards the centre of the harbor; and almost all the time there was a pure and delightful breeze, fluttering and palpitating, sometimes shyly kissing my brow, then dying away, and then rushing upon me in livelier sport, so that I was fain to settle my straw hat more tightly upon my head. Late in the afternoon, there was a sunny shower, which came down so like a benediction that it seemed ungrateful to take shelter in the cabin or to put up an umbrella. Then there was a rainbow, or a large segment of one, so exceedingly brilliant and of such long endurance that I almost fancied it was stained into the sky, and would continue there permanently. And there were clouds floating all about,-- great clouds and small, of all glorious and lovely hues (save that imperial crimson which was revealed to our united gaze),--so glorious indeed, and so lovely, that I had a fantasy of heaven's being broken into fleecy fragments and dispersed through space, with its blest inhabitants dwelling blissfully upon those scattered islands. February 7th, 1840.--What beautiful weather this is!--beautiful, at least, so far as sun, sky, and atmosphere are concerned, though a poor, wingless biped is sometimes constrained to wish that he could raise himself a little above the earth. How much mud and mire, how many pools of unclean water, how many slippery footsteps, and perchance heavy tumbles, might be avoided, if we could tread but six inches above the crust of this world. Physically we cannot do this; our bodies cannot; but it seems to me that our hearts and minds may keep themselves above moral mud-puddles and other discomforts of the soul's pathway. February 11th.--I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (northeast, I believe) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharfs, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill Monument; and what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,--my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release. February 12th.--All day long again have I been engaged in a very black business,--as black as a coal; and, though my face and hands have undergone a thorough purification, I feel not altogether fit to hold communion with doves. Methinks my profession is somewhat akin to that of a chimney-sweeper; but the latter has the advantage over me, because, after climbing up through the darksome flue of the chimney, he emerges into the midst of the golden air, and sings out his melodies far over the heads of the whole tribe of weary earth-plodders. My toil to-day has been cold and dull enough; nevertheless, I was neither cold nor dull. March 15th.--I pray that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-House; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all offices,--all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my custom-house experience,--to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me, because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature. March 23d.--I do think that it is the doom laid upon me, of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-House, that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again trying to write worthily, . . . . yet with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping. . . . Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region. A salt or even a coal ship is ten million times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh breeze around me, and my thoughts, having hardly anything to do with my occupation, are as free as air. Nevertheless, you are not to fancy that the above paragraph gives a correct idea of my mental and spiritual state. . . . It is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of my chain; for, after all, a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom-House. And, with such materials as these, I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there, so that the present portion of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence. . . . It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And, when I quit this earthly cavern where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not perceive, I trust, by my look, or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings, that I have been a custom-house officer. April 7th.--It appears to me to have been the most uncomfortable day that ever was inflicted on poor mortals. . . . Besides the bleak, unkindly air, I have been plagued by two sets of coal-shovellers at the same time, and have been obliged to keep two separate tallies simultaneously. But I was conscious that all this was merely a vision and a fantasy, and that, in reality, I was not half frozen by the bitter blast, nor tormented by those grimy coal-beavers, but that I was basking quietly in the sunshine of eternity. . . . Any sort of bodily and earthly torment may serve to make us sensible that we have a soul that is not within the jurisdiction of such shadowy demons,--it separates the immortal within us from the mortal. But the wind has blown my brains into such confusion that I cannot philosophize now. April 19th.--. . . . What a beautiful day was yesterday! My spirit rebelled against being confined in my darksome dungeon at the Custom-House. It seemed a sin,--a murder of the joyful young day,--a quenching of the sunshine. Nevertheless, there I was kept a prisoner till it was too late to fling myself on a gentle wind, and be blown away into the country. . . . When I shall be again free, I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon. . . . 6 P. M.--I went out to walk about an hour ago, and found it very pleasant, though there was a somewhat cool wind. I went round and across the Common, and stood on the highest point of it, where I could see miles and miles into the country. Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords, whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or wooden pavements. Blessed be God for the sky too, though the smoke of the city may somewhat change its aspect,--but still it is better than if each street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people walking on the mall,--mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked to lie down and roll too. April 30th.--. . . . I arose this morning feeling more elastic than I have throughout the winter; for the breathing of the ocean air has wrought a very beneficial effect. . . . What a beautiful, most beautiful afternoon this has been! It was a real happiness to live. If I had been merely a vegetable,--a hawthorn-bush, for instance,-- I must have been happy in such an air and sunshine; but, having a mind and a soul, . . . . I enjoyed somewhat more than mere vegetable happiness. . . . The footsteps of May can be traced upon the islands in the harbor, and I have been watching the tints of green upon them gradually deepening, till now they are almost as beautiful as they ever can be. May 19th.--. . . . Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance where at first there was a mere shadow. . . . If at any time there should seem to be an expression unintelligible from one soul to another, it is best not to strive to interpret it in earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood; and, were we to wait a thousand years, we need deem it no more time than we can spare. . . . It is not that I have any love of mystery, but because I abhor it, and because I have often felt that words may be a thick and darksome veil of mystery between the soul and the truth which it seeks. Wretched were we, indeed, if we had no better means of communicating ourselves, no fairer garb in which to array our essential being, than these poor rags and tatters of Babel. Yet words are not without their use even for purposes of explanation,--but merely for explaining outward acts and all sorts of external things, leaving the soul's life and action to explain itself in its own way. What a misty disquisition I have scribbled! I would not read it over for sixpence. May 29th.--Rejoice with me, for I am free from a load of coal which has been pressing upon my shoulders throughout all the hot weather. I am convinced that Christian's burden consisted of coal; and no wonder he felt so much relieved, when it fell off and rolled into the sepulchre. His load, however, at the utmost, could not have been more than a few bushels, whereas mine was exactly one hundred and thirty-five chaldrons and seven tubs. May 30th.--. . . . On board my salt-vessels and colliers there are many things happening, many pictures which, in future years, when I am again busy at the loom of fiction, I could weave in; but my fancy is rendered so torpid by my ungenial way of life that I cannot sketch off the scenes and portraits that interest me, and I am forced to trust them to my memory, with the hope of recalling them at some more favorable period. For these three or four days I have been observing a little Mediterranean boy from Malaga, not more than ten or eleven years old, but who is already a citizen of the world, and seems to be just as gay and contented on the deck of a Yankee coal-vessel as he could be while playing beside his mother's door. It is really touching to see how free and happy he is,--how the little fellow takes the whole wide world for his home, and all mankind for his family. He talks Spanish,--at least that is his native tongue; but he is also very intelligible in English, and perhaps he likewise has smatterings of the speech of other countries, whither the winds may have wafted this little sea-bird. He is a Catholic; and yesterday being Friday he caught some fish and fried them for his dinner in sweet-oil, and really they looked so delicate that I almost wished he would invite me to partake. Every once in a while he undresses himself and leaps overboard, plunging down beneath the waves as if the sea were as native to him as the earth. Then he runs up the rigging of the vessel as if he meant to fly away through the air. I must remember this little boy, and perhaps I may make something more beautiful of him than these rough and imperfect touches would promise. June 11th.--. . . . I could wish that the east-wind would blow every day from ten o'clock till five; for there is great refreshment in it to us poor mortals that toil beneath the sun. We must not think too unkindly even of the east-wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west. To-day, if I had been on the wharves, the slight chill of an east-wind would have been a blessing, like the chill of death to a world-weary man. . . . . But this has been one of the idlest days that I ever spent in Boston. . . . In the morning, soon after breakfast, I went to the Athenaeum gallery, and, during the hour or two that I stayed, not a single visitor came in. Some people were putting up paintings in one division of the room; but I had the other all to myself. There are two pictures there by our friend Sarah Clarke,--scenes in Kentucky. From the picture-gallery I went to the reading-rooms of the Athenaeum, and there read the magazines till nearly twelve; thence to the Custom-House, and soon afterwards to dinner with Colonel Hall; then back to the Custom-House, but only for a little while. There was nothing in the world to do, and so at two o'clock I cane home and lay down, with the Faerie Queene in my hand. August 21st.--Last night I slept like a child of five years old, and had no dreams at all,--unless just before it was time to rise, and I have forgotten what those dreams were. After I was fairly awake this morning, I felt very bright and airy, and was glad that I had been compelled to snatch two additional hours of existence from annihilation. The sun's disk was but half above the ocean's verge when I ascended the ship's side. These early morning hours are very lightsome and quiet. Almost the whole day I have been in the shade, reclining on a pile of sails, so that the life and spirit are not entirely worn out of me. . . . The wind has been east this afternoon,--perhaps in the forenoon, too,--and I could not help feeling refreshed, when the gentle chill of its breath stole over my cheek. I would fain abominate the east-wind, . . . . but it persists in doing me kindly offices now and then. What a perverse wind it is! Its refreshment is but another mode of torment. Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street [Family Mansion]--. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales, many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,-- at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . . I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! . . . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . . When we shall be endowed with our spiritual bodies, I think that they will be so constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance in no time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of those whom we love. . . . But, after all, perhaps it is not wise to intermix fantastic ideas with the reality of affection. Let us content ourselves to be earthly creatures, and hold communion of spirit in such modes as are ordained to us. . . . I was not at the end of Long Wharf to-day, but in a distant region,--my authority having been put in requisition to quell a rebellion of the captain and "gang" of shovellers aboard a coal-vessel. I would you could have beheld the awful sternness of my visage and demeanor in the execution of this momentous duty. Well,--I have conquered the rebels, and proclaimed an amnesty; so to-morrow I shall return to that paradise of measurers, the end of Long Wharf,--not to my former salt-ship, she being now discharged, but to another, which will probably employ me well-nigh a fortnight longer. . . . Salt is white and pure,--there is something holy in salt. . . . I have observed that butterflies--very broad-winged and magnificent butterflies--frequently come on board of the salt-ship, where I am at work. What have these bright strangers to do on Long Wharf, where there are no flowers nor any green thing,--nothing but brick storehouses, stone piers, black ships, and the bustle of toilsome men, who neither look up to the blue sky, nor take note of these wandering gems of the air? I cannot account for them, unless they are the lovely fantasies of the mind. November.--. . . . How delightfully long the evenings are now! I do not get intolerably tired any longer; and my thoughts sometimes wander back to literature, and I have momentary impulses to write stories. But this will not be at present. The utmost that I can hope to do will be to portray some of the characteristics of the life which I am now living, and of the people with whom I am brought into contact, for future use. . . . The days are cold now, the air eager and nipping, yet it suits my health amazingly. I feel as if I could run a hundred miles at a stretch, and jump over all the houses that happen to be in my way. . . . I have never had the good luck to profit much, or indeed any, by attending lectures, so that I think the ticket had better be bestowed on somebody who can listen to Mr. ------ more worthily. My evenings are very precious to me, and some of them are unavoidably thrown away in paying or receiving visits, or in writing letters of business, and therefore I prize the rest as if the sands of the hour-glass were gold or diamond dust. I was invited to dine at Mr. Baucroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very thankful. Is not this a beautiful morning? The sun shines into my soul. April, 1841.--. . . . I have been busy all day, from early breakfast-time till late in the afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom-House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, an effervescent atmosphere, and I have enjoyed it in all its freshness,--breathing air which had not been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which have common and indivisible property in the atmosphere of this great city. My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the wilderness of ocean. . . . It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this,--"disgorge," quotha, as if the vessels were sick) on the wharf, and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon bewail myself at being compelled to earn my bread by taking some little share in the toils of mortal men. . . . Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state. END OF VOL. I 
8089	----	PASSAGES FROM THE AMERICAN NOTE-BOOKS, VOLUME II By Nathaniel Hawthorne [EXTRACTS FROM HIS PRIVATE LETTERS.] Brook Farm, Oak Hill, April 13th, 1841.--. . . . Here I am in a polar Paradise! I know not how to interpret this aspect of nature,--whether it be of good or evil omen to our enterprise. But I reflect that the Plymouth pilgrims arrived in the midst of storm, and stepped ashore upon mountain snowdrifts; and, nevertheless, they prospered, and became a great people,--and doubtless it will be the same with us. I laud my stars, however, that you will not have your first impressions of (perhaps) our future home from such a day as this. . . . Through faith, I persist in believing that Spring and Summer will come in their due season; but the unregenerated man shivers within me, and suggests a doubt whether I may not have wandered within the precincts of the Arctic Circle, and chosen my heritage among everlasting snows. . . . Provide yourself with a good stock of furs, and, if you can obtain the skin of a polar bear, you will find it a very suitable summer dress for this region. . . . I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk-pail. . . . I intend to convert myself into a milkmaid this evening, but I pray Heaven that Mr. Ripley may be moved to assign me the kindliest cow in the herd, otherwise I shall perform my duty with fear and trembling. . . . I like my brethren in affliction very well; and, could you see us sitting round our table at meal-times, before the great kitchen fire, you would call it a cheerful sight. Mrs. B------ is a most comfortable woman to behold. She looks as if her ample person were stuffed full of tenderness,--indeed, as if she were all one great, kind heart. * * * * * * April 14th, 10 A. M.--. . . . I did not milk the cows last night, because Mr. Ripley was afraid to trust them to my hands, or me to their horns, I know not which. But this morning I have done wonders. Before breakfast, I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle, and with such "righteous vehemence," as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor, that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires; and finally went down to breakfast, and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast, Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitchfork; and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure. This office being concluded, and I having purified myself, I sit down to finish this letter. . . . Miss Fuller's cow hooks the other cows, and has made herself ruler of the herd, and behaves in a very tyrannical manner. . . . I shall make an excellent husbandman,--I feel the original Adam reviving within me. April 16th.--. . . . Since I last wrote, there has been an addition to our community of four gentlemen in sables, who promise to be among our most useful and respectable members. They arrived yesterday about noon. Mr. Ripley had proposed to them to join us, no longer ago than that very morning. I had some conversation with them in the afternoon, and was glad to hear them express much satisfaction with their new abode and all the arrangements. They do not appear to be very communicative, however, --or perhaps it may be merely an external reserve, like my own, to shield their delicacy. Several of their prominent characteristics, as well as their black attire, lead me to believe that they are members of the clerical profession; but I have not yet ascertained from their own lips what has been the nature of their past lives. I trust to have much pleasure in their society, and, sooner or later, that we shall all of us derive great strength from our intercourse with them. I cannot too highly applaud the readiness with which these four gentlemen in black have thrown aside all the fopperies and flummeries which have their origin in a false state of society. When I last saw them, they looked as heroically regardless of the stains and soils incident to our profession as I did when I emerged from the gold-mine. . . . I have milked a cow!!! . . . . The herd has rebelled against the usurpation of Miss Fuller's heifer; and, whenever they are turned out of the barn, she is compelled to take refuge under our protection. So much did she impede my labors by keeping close to me, that I found it necessary to give her two or three gentle pats with a shovel; but still she preferred to trust herself to my tender mercies, rather than venture among the horns of the herd. She is not an amiable cow; but she has a very intelligent face, and seems to be of a reflective cast of character. I doubt not that she will soon perceive the expediency of being on good terms with the rest of the sisterhood. I have not yet been twenty yards from our house and barn; but I begin to perceive that this is a beautiful place. The scenery is of a mild and placid character, with nothing bold in its aspect; but I think its beauties will grow upon us, and make us love it the more, the longer we live here. There is a brook, so near the house that we shall be able to hear its ripple in the summer evenings, . . . . but, for agricultural purposes, it has been made to flow in a straight and rectangular fashion, which does it infinite damage as a picturesque object. . . . It was a moment or two before I could think whom you meant by Mr. Dismal View. Why, he is one of the best of the brotherhood, so far as cheerfulness goes; for if he do not laugh himself, he makes the rest of us laugh continually. He is the quaintest and queerest personage you ever saw,--full of dry jokes, the humor of which is so incorporated with the strange twistifications of his physiognomy, that his sayings ought to be written down, accompanied with illustrations by Cruikshank. Then he keeps quoting innumerable scraps of Latin, and makes classical allusions, while we are turning over the goldmine; and the contrast between the nature of his employment and the character of his thoughts is irresistibly ludicrous. I have written this epistle in the parlor, while Farmer Ripley, and Farmer Farley, and Farmer Dismal View were talking about their agricultural concerns. So you will not wonder if it is not a classical piece of composition, either in point of thought or expression. * * * * * * Mr. Ripley has bought four black pigs. April 22d.--. . . . What an abominable hand do I scribble! but I have been chopping wood, and turning a grindstone all the forenoon; and such occupations are apt to disturb the equilibrium of the muscles and sinews. It is an endless surprise to me how much work there is to be done in the world; but, thank God, I am able to do my share of it,--and my ability increases daily. What a great, broad-shouldered, elephantine personage I shall become by and by! I milked two cows this morning, and would send you some of the milk, only that it is mingled with that which was drawn forth by Mr. Dismal View and the rest of the brethren. April 28th.--. . . . I was caught by a cold during my visit to Boston. It has not affected my whole frame, but took entire possession of my head, as being the weakest and most vulnerable part. Never did anybody sneeze with such vehemence and frequency; and my poor brain has been in a thick fog; or, rather, it seemed as if my head were stuffed with coarse wool. . . . Sometimes I wanted to wrench it off, and give it a great kick, like a football. This annoyance has made me endure the bad weather with even less than ordinary patience; and my faith was so far exhausted that, when they told me yesterday that the sun was setting clear, I would not even turn my eyes towards the west. But this morning I am made all over anew, and have no greater remnant of my cold than will serve as an excuse for doing no work to-day. The family has been dismal and dolorous throughout the storm. The night before last, William Allen was stung by a wasp on the eyelid; whereupon the whole side of his face swelled to an enormous magnitude, so that, at the breakfast-table, one half of him looked like a blind giant (the eye being closed), and the other half had such a sorrowful and ludicrous aspect that I was constrained to laugh out of sheer pity. The same day, a colony of wasps was discovered in my chamber, where they had remained throughout the winter, and were now just bestirring themselves, doubtless with the intention of stinging me from head to foot A similar discovery was made in Mr. Farley's room. In short, we seem to have taken up our abode in a wasps' nest. Thus you see a rural life is not one of unbroken quiet and serenity. If the middle of the day prove warm and pleasant, I promise myself to take a walk. . . . I have taken one walk with Mr. Farley; and I could not have believed that there was such seclusion at so short a distance from a great city. Many spots seem hardly to have been visited for ages,--not since John Eliot preached to the Indians here. If we were to travel a thousand miles, we could not escape the world more completely than we can here. * * * * * * I read no newspapers, and hardly remember who is President, and feel as if I had no more concern with what other people trouble themselves about than if I dwelt in another planet. May 1st.--. . . . Every day of my life makes me feel more and more how seldom a fact is accurately stated; how, almost invariably, when a story has passed through the mind of a third person, it becomes, so far as regards the impression that it makes in further repetitions, little better than a falsehood, and this, too, though the narrator be the most truth-seeking person in existence. How marvellous the tendency is! . . . Is truth a fantasy which we are to pursue forever and never grasp? * * * * * * My cold has almost entirely departed. Were it a sunny day, I should consider myself quite fit for labor out of doors; but as the ground is so damp, and the atmosphere so chill, and the sky so sullen, I intend to keep myself on the sick-list this one day longer, more especially as I wish to read Carlyle on Heroes. * * * * * * There has been but one flower found in this vicinity,--and that was an anemone, a poor, pale, shivering little flower, that had crept under a stone-wall for shelter. Mr. Farley found it, while taking a walk with me. . . . . This is May-day! Alas, what a difference between the ideal and the real! May 4th.--. . . . My cold no longer troubles me, and all the morning I have been at work under the clear blue sky, on a hillside. Sometimes it almost seemed as if I were at work in the sky itself, though the material in which I wrought was the ore from our gold-mine. Nevertheless, there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul. This gold ore is a pure and wholesome substance, else our mother Nature would not devour it so readily, and derive so much nourishment from it, and return such a rich abundance of good grain and roots in requital of it. The farm is growing very beautiful now,--not that we yet see anything of the peas and potatoes which we have planted; but the grass blushes green on the slopes and hollows. I wrote that word "blush" almost unconsciously; so we will let it go as an inspired utterance. When I go forth afield, . . . . I look beneath the stonewalls, where the verdure is richest, in hopes that a little company of violets, or some solitary bud, prophetic of the summer, may be there. . . . But not a wildflower have I yet found. One of the boys gathered some yellow cowslips last Sunday; but I am well content not to have found them, for they are not precisely what I should like to send to you, though they deserve honor and praise, because they come to us when no others will. We have our parlor here dressed in evergreen as at Christmas. That beautiful little flower-vase . . . . stands on Mr. Ripley's study-table, at which I am now writing. It contains some daffodils and some willow-blossoms. I brought it here rather than keep it in my chamber, because I never sit there, and it gives me many pleasant emotions to look round and be surprised--for it is often a surprise, though I well know that it is there--by something connected with the idea [of a friend]. * * * * * * I do not believe that I should be patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. When I was in the Custom-House and then at Salem I was not half so patient. . . . We had some tableaux last evening, the principal characters being sustained by Mr. Farley and Miss Ellen Slade. They went off very well. . . . I fear it is time for me--sod-compelling as I am--to take the field again. May 11th.--. . . . This morning I arose at milking-time in good trim for work; and we have been employed partly in an Augean labor of clearing out a wood-shed, and partly in carting loads of oak. This afternoon I hope to have something to do in the field, for these jobs about the house are not at all to my taste. June 1st.--. . . . I have been too busy to write a long letter by this opportunity, for I think this present life of mine gives me an antipathy to pen and ink, even more than my Custom-House experience did. . . . In the midst of toil, or after a hard day's work in the goldmine, my soul obstinately refuses to be poured out on paper. That abominable gold-mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures in the course of two or three days! Of all hateful places that is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money. Mr. George Bradford will probably be here to-day, so that there will be no danger of my being under the necessity of laboring more than I like hereafter. Meantime my health is perfect, and my spirits buoyant, even in the gold-mine. August 12th.--. . . . I am very well, and not at all weary, for yesterday's rain gave us a holiday; and, moreover, the labors of the farm are not so pressing as they have been. And, joyful thought! in a little more than a fortnight; I shall be free from my bondage,--. . . . free to enjoy Nature,--free to think and feel! . . . . Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. O, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so. August 18th.--I am very well, only somewhat tired with walking half a dozen miles immediately after breakfast, and raking hay ever since. We shall quite finish haying this week, and then there will be no more very hard or constant labor during the one other week that I shall remain a slave. August 22d.--. . . . I had an indispensable engagement in the bean-field, whither, indeed, I was glad to betake myself, in order to escape a parting scene with ------. He was quite out of his wits the night before, and I sat up with him till long past midnight. The farm is pleasanter now that he is gone; for his unappeasable wretchedness threw a gloom over everything. Since I last wrote, we have done haying, and the remainder of my bondage will probably be light. It will be a long time, however, before I shall know how to make a good use of leisure, either as regards enjoyment or literary occupation. . . . It is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Ripley will succeed in locating his community on this farm. He can bring Mr. E------ to no terms, and the more they talk about the matter, the further they appear to be from a settlement. We must form other plans for ourselves; for I can see few or no signs that Providence purposes to give us a home here. I am weary, weary, thrice weary, of waiting so many ages. Whatever may be my gifts, I have not hitherto shown a single one that may avail to gather gold. I confess that I have strong hopes of good from this arrangement with M------; but when I look at the scanty avails of my past literary efforts, I do not feel authorized to expect much from the future. Well, we shall see. Other persons have bought large estates and built splendid mansions with such little books as I mean to write; so that perhaps it is not unreasonable to hope that mine may enable me to build a little cottage, or, at least, to buy or hire one. But I am becoming more and more convinced that we must not lean upon this community. Whatever is to be done must be done by my own undivided strength. I shall not remain here through the winter, unless with an absolute certainty that there will be a house ready for us in the spring. Otherwise, I shall return to Boston;--still, however, considering myself an associate of the community, so that we may take advantage of any more favorable aspect of affairs. How much depends on these little books! Methinks if anything could draw out my whole strength, it would be the motives that now press upon me. Yet, after all, I must keep these considerations out of my mind, because an external pressure always disturbs instead of assisting me. Salem, September 3d.--. . . . But really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hands have, during the past summer, grown very brown and rough, insomuch that many people persist in believing that I, after all, was the aforesaid spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense. I know not exactly how soon I shall return to the farm. Perhaps not sooner than a fortnight, from to-morrow. Salem, September 14th.--. . . . Master Cheever is a very good subject for a sketch, especially if he be portrayed in the very act of executing judgment on an evildoer. The little urchin may be laid across his knee, and his arms and legs, and whole person indeed, should be flying all abroad, in an agony of nervous excitement and corporeal smart. The Master, on the other hand, must be calm, rigid, without anger or pity, the very personification of that immitigable law whereby suffering follows sin. Meantime the lion's head should have a sort of sly twist on one side of its mouth, and a wink of one eye, in order to give the impression that, after all, the crime and the punishment are neither of them the most serious things in the world. I could draw the sketch myself, if I had but the use of ------'s magic fingers. Then the Acadians will do very well for the second sketch. They might be represented as just landing on the wharf; or as presenting themselves before Governor Shirley, seated in the great chair. Another subject might be old Cotton Mather, venerable in a three-cornered hat and other antique attire, walking the streets of Boston, and lifting up his hands to bless the people, while they all revile him. An old dame should be seen, flinging water, or emptying some vials of medicine on his head from the latticed window of an old-fashioned house; and all around must be tokens of pestilence and mourning,--as a coffin borne along,--a woman or children weeping on a doorstep. Can the tolling of the Old South bell be painted? If not this, then the military council, holden at Boston by the Earl of Loudon and other captains and governors, might be taken, his lordship in the great chair, an old-fashioned, military figure, with a star on his breast. Some of Louis XV.'s commanders will give the costume. On the table, and scattered about the room, must be symbols of warfare,--swords, pistols, plumed hats, a drum, trumpet, and rolled-up banner in one leap. It were not amiss to introduce the armed figure of an Indian chief, as taking part in the council,--or standing apart from the English, erect and stern. Now for Liberty Tree. There is an engraving of that famous vegetable in Snow's History of Boston. If represented, I see not what scene can be beneath it, save poor Mr. Oliver, taking the oath. He must have on a bag-wig, ruffled sleeves, embroidered coat, and all such ornaments, because he is the representative of aristocracy and an artificial system. The people may be as rough and wild as the fancy can make them; nevertheless, there must be one or two grave, puritanical figures in the midst. Such an one might sit in the great chair, and be an emblem of that stern, considerate spirit which brought about the Revolution. But this would be a hard subject. But what a dolt am I to obtrude my counsel. . . . September 16th.--. . . . I do not very well recollect Monsieur du Miroir, but, as to Mrs. Bullfrog, I give her up to the severest reprehension. The story was written as a mere experiment in that style; it did not come from any depth within me,--neither my heart nor mind had anything to do with it. I recollect that the Man of Adamant seemed a fine idea to nee when I looked at it prophetically; but I failed in giving shape and substance to the vision which I saw. I don't think it can be very good. . . . I cannot believe all these stories about ------, because such a rascal never could be sustained and countenanced by respectable men. I take him to be neither better nor worse than the average of his tribe. However, I intend to have all my copyrights taken out in my own name; and, if he cheat me once, I will have nothing more to do with him, but will straightway be cheated by some other publisher,--that being, of course, the only alternative. Governor Shirley's young French wife might be the subject of one of the cuts. She should sit in the great chair,--perhaps with a dressing-glass before her,--and arrayed in all manner of fantastic finery, and with an outre French air, while the old Governor is leaning fondly over her, and a puritanic councillor or two are manifesting their disgust in the background. A negro footman and a French waiting-maid might be in attendance. In Liberty Tree might be a vignette, representing the chair in a very shattered, battered, and forlorn condition, after it had been ejected from Hutchinson's house. This would serve to impress the reader with the woful vicissitudes of sublunary things. . . . Did you ever behold such a vile scribble as I write since I became a farmer? My chirography always was abominable, but now it is outrageous. Brook Farm, September 22d, 1841.--. . . . Here I am again, slowly adapting myself to the life of this queer community, whence I seem to have been absent half a lifetime, so utterly have I grown apart from the spirit, and manners of the place. . . . I was most kindly received; and the fields and woods looked very pleasant in the bright sunshine of the day before yesterday. I have a friendlier disposition towards the farm, now that I am no longer obliged to toil in its stubborn furrows. Yesterday and to-day, however, the weather has been intolerable,--cold, chill, sullen, so that it is impossible to be on kindly terms with Mother Nature. . . . I doubt whether I shall succeed in writing another volume of Grandfather's Library while I remain here. I have not the sense of perfect seclusion which has always been essential to my power of producing anything. It is true, nobody intrudes into my room; but still I cannot be quiet. Nothing here is settled; everything is but beginning to arrange itself, and though I would seem to have little to do with aught beside my own thoughts, still I cannot but partake of the ferment around me. My mind will not be abstracted. I must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter. Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set seriously about literary occupation for the present. It will be good to have a longer interval between my labor of the body and that of the mind. I shall work to the better purpose after the beginning of November. Meantime I shall see these people and their enterprise under a new point of view, and perhaps be able to determine whether we have any call to cast in our lot among them. * * * * * * I do wish the weather would put off this sulky mood. Had it not been for the warmth and brightness of Monday, when I arrived here, I should have supposed that all sunshine had left Brook Farm forever. I have no disposition to take long walks in such a state of the sky; nor have I any buoyancy of spirit. I am a very dull person just at this time. September 25th.--. . . . One thing is certain. I cannot and will not spend the winter here. The time would be absolutely thrown away so far as regards any literary labor to be performed. . . . The intrusion of an outward necessity into labors of the imagination and intellect is, to me, very painful. . . . I had rather a pleasant walk to a distant meadow a day or two ago, and we found white and purple grapes in great abundance, ripe, and gushing with rich, pure juice when the hand pressed the clusters. Did you know what treasures of wild grapes there are in this land? If we dwell here, we will make our own wine. . . . September 27th.--. . . . Now, as to the affair with ------, I fully confide in your opinion that he intends to make an unequal bargain with poor, simple, innocent me,--never having doubted this myself. But how is he to accomplish it? I am not, nor shall be, the least in his power, whereas he is, to a certain extent, in mine. He might announce his projected Library, with me for the editor, in all the newspapers in the universe; but still I could not be bound to become the editor, unless by my own act; nor should I have the slightest scruple in refusing to be so, at the last moment, if he persisted in treating me with injustice. Then, as for his printing Grandfather's Chair, I have the copyright in my own hands, and could and would prevent the sale, or make him account to me for the profits, in case of need. Meantime he is making arrangements for publishing the Library, contracting with other booksellers, and with printers and engravers, and, with every step, making it more difficult for himself to draw back. I, on the other hand, do nothing which I should not do if the affair with ------ were at an end; for, if I write a book, it will be just as available for some other publisher as for him. Instead of getting me into his power by this delay, he has trusted to my ignorance and simplicity, and has put himself in my power. He is not insensible of this. At our last interview, he himself introduced the subject of the bargain, and appeared desirous to close it. But I was not prepared,--among other reasons, because I do not yet see what materials I shall have for the republications in the Library; the works that he has shown me being ill adapted for that purpose; and I wish first to see some French and German books which he has sent for to New York. And, before concluding the bargain, I have promised George Hillard to consult him, and let him do the business. Is not this consummate discretion? and am I not perfectly safe? . . . . I look at the matter with perfect composure, and see all round my own position, and know that it is impregnable. * * * * * * I was elected to two high offices last night,--viz. to be a trustee of the Brook Farm estate, and Chairman of the Committee of Finance! . . . . From the nature of my office, I shall have the chief direction of all the money affairs of the community, the making of bargains, the supervision of receipts and expenditures, etc., etc., etc. . . . My accession to these august offices does not at all decide the question of my remaining here permanently. I told Mr. Ripley that I could not spend the winter at the farm, and that it was quite uncertain whether I returned in the spring. . . . Take no part, I beseech you, in these magnetic miracles. I am unwilling that a power should be exercised on you of which we know neither the origin nor consequence, and the phenomena of which seem rather calculated to bewilder us than to teach us any truths about the present or future state of being. . . . Supposing that the power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it; there would be an intruder into the holy of holies. . . . I have no faith whatever, that people are raised to the seventh heaven, or to any heaven at all, or that they gain any insight into the mysteries of life beyond death by means of this strange science. Without distrusting that the phenomena have really occurred, I think that they are to be accounted for as the result of a material and physical, not of a spiritual, influence. Opium has produced many a brighter vision of heaven, I fancy, and just as susceptible of proof as these. They are dreams. . . . And what delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous, than to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual? what so miserable as to lose the soul's true, though hidden knowledge and consciousness of heaven in the mist of an earth-born vision? If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings; but let us not degrade high heaven and its inhabitants into any such symbols and forms as Miss L------ describes; do not let an earthly effluence from Mrs. P------'s corporeal system bewilder and perhaps contaminate something spiritual and sacred. I should as soon think of seeking revelations of the future state in the rottenness of the grave,--where so many do seek it. . . . The view which I take of this matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries; but from a deep reverence of the soul, and of the mysteries which it knows within itself, but never transmits to the earthly eye and ear. Keep the imagination sane,--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven. Brook Farm, September 26th.--A walk this morning along the Needham road. A clear, breezy morning, after nearly a week of cloudy and showery weather. The grass is much more fresh and vivid than it was last month, and trees still retain much of their verdure, though here and there is a shrub or a bough arrayed in scarlet and gold. Along the road, in the midst of a beaten track, I saw mushrooms or toadstools which had sprung up probably during the night. The houses in this vicinity are, many of them, quite antique, with long, sloping roots, commencing at a few feet from the ground, and ending in a lofty peak. Some of them have huge old elms overshadowing the yard. One may see the family sleigh near the door, it having stood there all through the summer sunshine, and perhaps with weeds sprouting through the crevices of its bottom, the growth of the months since snow departed. Old barns, patched and supported by timbers leaning against the sides, and stained with the excrement of past ages. In the forenoon I walked along the edge of the meadow towards Cow Island. Large trees, almost a wood, principally of pine with the green pasture-glades intermixed, and cattle feeding. They cease grazing when an intruder appears, and look at him with long and wary observation, then bend their heads to the pasture again. Where the firm ground of the pasture ceases, the meadow begins, loose, spongy, yielding to the tread, sometimes permitting the foot to sink into black mud, or perhaps over ankles in water. Cattle-paths, somewhat firmer than the general surface, traverse the dense shrubbery which has overgrown the meadow. This shrubbery consists of small birch, elders, maples, and other trees, with here and there white-pines of larger growth. The whole is tangled and wild and thick-set, so that it is necessary to part the nestling stems and branches, and go crashing through. There are creeping plants of various sorts which clamber up the trees; and some of them have changed color in the slight frosts which already have befallen these low grounds, so that one sees a spiral wreath of scarlet leaves twining up to the top of a green tree, intermingling its bright hues with their verdure, as if all were of one piece. Sometimes, instead of scarlet, the spiral wreath is of a golden yellow. Within the verge of the meadow, mostly near the firm shore of pasture ground, I found several grapevines, hung with an abundance of large purple grapes. The vines had caught hold of maples and alders, and climbed to the summit, curling round about and interwreathing their twisted folds in so intimate a manner that it was not easy to tell the parasite from the supporting tree or shrub. Sometimes the same vine had enveloped several shrubs, and caused a strange, tangled confusion, converting all these poor plants to the purpose of its own support, and hindering their growing to their own benefit and convenience. The broad vine-leaves, some of them yellow or yellowish-tinged, were seen apparently growing on the same stems with the silver-mapled leaves, and those of the other shrubs, thus married against their will by the conjugal twine; and the purple clusters of grapes hung down from above and in the midst so that one might "gather grapes," if not "of thorns," yet of as alien bushes. One vine had ascended almost to the tip of a large white-pine, spreading its leaves and hanging its purple clusters among all its boughs,--still climbing and clambering, as if it would not be content till it had crowned the very summit with a wreath of its own foliage and bunches of grapes. I mounted high into the tree, and ate the fruit there, while the vine wreathed still higher into the depths above my head. The grapes were sour, being not yet fully ripe. Some of them, however, were sweet and pleasant. September 27th.--A ride to Brighton yesterday morning, it being the day of the weekly cattle-fair. William Allen and myself went in a wagon, carrying a calf to be sold at the fair. The calf had not had his breakfast, as his mother had preceded him to Brighton, and he kept expressing his hunger and discomfort by loud, sonorous baas, especially when we passed any cattle in the fields or in the road. The cows, grazing within hearing, expressed great interest, and some of them came galloping to the roadside to behold the calf. Little children, also, on their way to school, stopped to laugh and point at poor little Bessie. He was a prettily behaved urchin, and kept thrusting his hairy muzzle between William and myself, apparently wishing to be stroked and patted. It was an ugly thought that his confidence in human nature, and nature in general, was to be so ill rewarded as by cutting his throat, and selling him in quarters. This, I suppose, has been his fate before now! It was a beautiful morning, clear as crystal, with an invigorating, but not disagreeable coolness. The general aspect of the country was as green as summer,--greener indeed than mid or latter summer,--and there were occasional interminglings of the brilliant hues of autumn, which made the scenery more beautiful, both visibly and in sentiment. We saw no absolutely mean nor poor-looking abodes along the road. There were warm and comfortable farm-houses, ancient, with the porch, the sloping roof, the antique peak, the clustered chimney, of old times; and modern cottages, smart and tasteful; and villas, with terraces before them, and dense shade, and wooden urns on pillars, and other such tokens of gentility. Pleasant groves of oak and walnut, also, there were, sometimes stretching along valleys, sometimes ascending a hill and clothing it all round, so as to make it a great clump of verdure. Frequently we passed people with cows, oxen, sheep, or pigs for Brighton Fair. On arriving at Brighton, we found the village thronged with people, horses, and vehicles. Probably there is no place in New England where the character of an agricultural population may be so well studied. Almost all the farmers within a reasonable distance make it a point, I suppose, to attend Brighton Fair pretty frequently, if not on business, yet as amateurs. Then there are all the cattle-people and butchers who supply the Boston market, and dealers from far and near; and every man who has a cow or a yoke of oxen, whether to sell or buy, goes to Brighton on Monday. There were a thousand or two of cattle in the extensive pens belonging to the tavern-keeper, besides many that were standing about. One could hardly stir a step without running upon the horns of one dilemma or another, in the shape of ox, cow, bull, or ram. The yeomen appeared to be more in their element than I have ever seen them anywhere else, except, indeed, at labor,--more so than at musterings and such gatherings of amusement. And yet this was a sort of festal day, as well as a day of business. Most of the people were of a bulky make, with much bone and muscle, and some good store of fat, as if they had lived on flesh-diet; with mottled faces, too, hard and red, like those of persons who adhered to the old fashion of spirit-drinking. Great, round-paunched country squires were there too, sitting under the porch of the tavern, or waddling about, whip in hand, discussing the points of the cattle. There were also gentlemen-farmers, neatly, trimly, and fashionably dressed, in handsome surtouts, and trousers strapped under their boots. Yeomen, too, in their black or blue Sunday suits, cut by country tailors, and awkwardly worn. Others (like myself) had on the blue stuff frocks which they wear in the fields, the most comfortable garments that ever were invented. Country loafers were among the throng,--men who looked wistfully at the liquors in the bar, and waited for some friend to invite them to drink,--poor, shabby, out-at-elbowed devils. Also, dandies from the city, corseted and buckramed, who had come to see the humors of Brighton Fair. All these, and other varieties of mankind, either thronged the spacious bar-room of the hotel, drinking, smoking, talking, bargaining, or walked about among the cattle-pens, looking with knowing eyes at the horned people. The owners of the cattle stood near at hand, waiting for offers. There was something indescribable in their aspect, that showed them to be the owners, though they mixed among the crowd. The cattle, brought from a hundred separate farms, or rather from a thousand, seemed to agree very well together, not quarrelling in the least. They almost all had a history, no doubt, if they could but have told it. The cows had each given her milk to support families,--had roamed the pastures, and come home to the barn-yard, had been looked upon as a sort of member of the domestic circle, and was known by a name, as Brindle or Cherry. The oxen, with their necks bent by the heavy yoke, had toiled in the plough-field and in haying-time for many years, and knew their master's stall as well as the master himself knew his own table. Even the young steers and the little calves had something of domestic sacredness about them; for children had watched their growth, and petted them, and played with them. And here they all were, old and young, gathered from their thousand homes to Brighton Fair; whence the great chance was that they would go to the slaughter-house, and thence be transmitted, in sirloins, joints, and such pieces, to the tables of the Boston folk. William Allen had come to buy four little pigs to take the places of four who have now grown large at our farm, and are to be fatted and killed within a few weeks. There were several hundreds, in pens appropriated to their use, grunting discordantly, and apparently in no very good humor with their companions or the world at large. Most or many of these pigs had been imported from the State of New York. The drovers set out with a large number, and peddle them along the road till they arrive at Brighton with the remainder. William selected four, and bought them at five cents per pound. These poor little porkers were forthwith seized by the tails, their legs tied, and they thrown into our wagon, where they kept up a continual grunt and squeal till we got home. Two of them were yellowish, or light gold-color, the other two were black and white speckled; and all four of very piggish aspect and deportment. One of them snapped at William's finger most spitefully, and bit it to the bone. All the scene of the Fair was very characteristic and peculiar,--cheerful and lively, too, in the bright, warm sun. I must see it again; for it ought to be studied. September 28th.--A picnic party in the woods, yesterday, in honor of little Frank Dana's birthday, he being six years old. I strolled out, after dinner, with Mr. Bradford, and in a lonesome glade we met the apparition of an Indian chief, dressed in appropriate costume of blanket, feathers, and paint, and armed with a musket. Almost at the same time, a young gypsy fortune-teller came from among the trees, and proposed to tell my fortune. While she was doing this, the goddess Diana let fly an arrow, and hit me smartly in the hand. The fortune-teller and goddess were in fine contrast, Diana being a blonde, fair, quiet, with a moderate composure; and the gypsy (O. G.) a bright, vivacious, dark-haired, rich-complexioned damsel,--both of them very pretty, at least pretty enough to make fifteen years enchanting. Accompanied by these denizens of the wild wood, we went onward, and came to a company of fantastic figures, arranged in a ring for a dance or a game. There was a Swiss girl, an Indian squaw, a negro of the Jim Crow order, one or two foresters, and several people in Christian attire, besides children of all ages. Then followed childish games, in which the grown people took part with mirth enough,--while I, whose nature it is to be a mere spectator both of sport and serious business, lay under the trees and looked on. Meanwhile, Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller, who arrived an hour or two before, came forth into the little glade where we were assembled. Here followed much talk. The ceremonies of the day concluded with a cold collation of cakes and fruit. All was pleasant enough,--an excellent piece of work,--"would 't were done!" It has left a fantastic impression on my memory, this intermingling of wild and fabulous characters with real and homely ones, in the secluded nook of the woods. I remember them, with the sunlight breaking through overshadowing branches, and they appearing and disappearing confusedly,--perhaps starting out of the earth; as if the every-day laws of nature were suspended for this particular occasion. There were the children, too, laughing and sporting about, as if they were at home among such strange shapes,--and anon bursting into loud uproar of lamentation, when the rude gambols of the merry archers chanced to overturn them. And apart, with a shrewd, Yankee observation of the scene, stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy figure, enjoying the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a perception of its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit of the thing. This morning I have been helping to gather apples. The principal farm labors at this time are ploughing for winter rye, and breaking up the greensward for next year's crop of potatoes, gathering squashes, and not much else, except such year-round employments as milking. The crop of rye, to be sure, is in process of being thrashed, at odd intervals. I ought to have mentioned among the diverse and incongruous growths of the picnic party our two Spanish boys from Manilla;--Lucas, with his heavy features and almost mulatto complexion; and Jose, slighter, with rather a feminine face,--not a gay, girlish one, but grave, reserved, eying you sometimes with an earnest but secret expression, and causing you to question what sort of person he is. Friday, October 1st.--I have been looking at our four swine,--not of the last lot, but those in process of fattening. They lie among the clean rye straw in the sty, nestling close together; for they seem to be beasts sensitive to the cold, and this is a clear, bright, crystal morning, with a cool northwest-wind. So there lie these four black swine, as deep among the straw as they can burrow, the very symbols of slothful ease and sensuous comfort. They seem to be actually oppressed and overburdened with comfort. They are quick to notice any one's approach, and utter a low grunt thereupon,--not drawing a breath for that particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary breath,--at the same time turning an observant, though dull and sluggish eye upon the visitor. They seem to be involved and buried in their own corporeal substance, and to look dimly forth at the outer world. They breathe not easily, and yet not with difficulty nor discomfort; for the very unreadiness and oppression with which their breath cones appears to make them sensible of the deep sensual satisfaction which they feel. Swill, the remnant of their last meal, remains in the trough, denoting that their food is more abundant than even a hog can demand. Anon they fall asleep, drawing short and heavy breaths, which heave their huge sides up and down; but at the slightest noise they sluggishly unclose their eyes, and give another gentle grunt. They also grunt among themselves, without any external cause; but merely to express their swinish sympathy. I suppose it is the knowledge that these four grunters are doomed to die within two or three weeks that gives them a sort of awfulness in my conception. It makes me contrast their present gross substance of fleshly life with the nothingness speedily to come. Meantime the four newly bought pigs are running about the cow-yard, lean, active, shrewd, investigating everything, as their nature is. When I throw an apple among them, they scramble with one another for the prize, and the successful one scampers away to eat it at leisure. They thrust their snouts into the mud, and pick a grain of corn out of the rubbish. Nothing within their sphere do they leave unexamined, grunting all the time with infinite variety of expression. Their language is the most copious of that of any quadruped, and, indeed, there is something deeply and indefinably interesting in the swinish race. They appear the more a mystery the longer one gazes at them. It seems as if there were an important meaning to them, if one could but find it out. One interesting trait in them is their perfect independence of character. They care not for man, and will not adapt themselves to his notions, as other beasts do; but are true to themselves, and act out their hoggish nature. October 7th.--Since Saturday last (it being now Thursday), I have been in Boston and Salem, and there has been a violent storm and rain during the whole time. This morning shone as bright as if it meant to make up for all the dismalness of the past days. Our brook, which in the summer was no longer a running stream, but stood in pools along its pebbly course, is now full from one grassy verge to the other, and hurries along with a murmuring rush. It will continue to swell, I suppose, and in the winter and spring it will flood all the broad meadows through which it flows. I have taken a long walk this forenoon along the Needham road, and across the bridge, thence pursuing a cross-road through the woods, parallel with the river, which I crossed again at Dedham. Most of the road lay through a growth of young oaks principally. They still retain their verdure, though, looking closely in among them, one perceives the broken sunshine falling on a few sere or bright-hued tufts of shrubbery. In low, marshy spots, on the verge of the meadows or along the river-side, there is a much more marked autumnal change. Whole ranges of bushes are there painted with many variegated lines, not of the brightest tint, but of a sober cheerfulness. I suppose this is owing more to the late rains than to the frost; for a heavy rain changes the foliage somewhat at this season. The first marked frost was seen last Saturday morning. Soon after sunrise it lay, white as snow, over all the grass, and on the tops of the fences, and in the yard, on the heap of firewood. On Sunday, I think, there was a fall of snow, which, however, did not lie on the ground a moment. There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October. The sunshine is peculiarly genial; and in sheltered places, as on the side of a bank, or of a barn or house, one becomes acquainted and friendly with the sunshine. It seems to be of a kindly and homely nature. And the green grass, strewn with a few withered leaves, looks the more green and beautiful for them. In summer or spring, Nature is farther from one's sympathies. October 8th.--Another gloomy day, lowering with portents of rain close at hand. I have walked up into the pastures this morning, and looked about me a little. The woods present a very diversified appearance just now, with perhaps more varieties of tint than they are destined to wear at a somewhat later period. There are some strong yellow hues, and some deep red; there are innumerable shades of green, some few having the depth of summer; others, partially changed towards yellow, look freshly verdant with the delicate tinge of early summer or of May. Then there is the solemn and dark green of the pines. The effect is, that every tree in the wood and every bush among the shrubbery has a separate existence, since, confusedly intermingled, each wears its peculiar color, instead of being lost in the universal emerald of summer. And yet there is a oneness of effect likewise, when we choose to look at a whole sweep of woodland instead of analyzing its component trees. Scattered over the pasture, which the late rains have kept tolerably green, there are spots or islands of dusky red,--a deep, substantial line, very well fit to be close to the ground,--while the yellow, and light, fantastic shades of green soar upward to the sky. These red spots are the blueberry and whortleberry bushes. The sweetfern is changed mostly to russet, but still retains its wild and delightful fragrance when pressed in the hand. Wild China-asters are scattered about, but beginning to wither. A little while ago, mushrooms or toadstools were very numerous along the wood-paths and by the roadsides, especially after rain. Some were of spotless white, some yellow, and some scarlet. They are always mysteries and objects of interest to me, springing as they do so suddenly from no root or seed, and growing one wonders why. I think, too, that some varieties are pretty objects, little fairy tables, centre-tables, standing on one leg. But their growth appears to be checked now, and they are of a brown tint and decayed. The farm business to-day is to dig potatoes. I worked a little at it. The process is to grasp all the stems of a hill and pull them up. A great many of the potatoes are thus pulled, clinging to the stems and to one another in curious shapes,--long red things, and little round ones, imbedded in the earth which clings to the roots. These being plucked off, the rest of the potatoes are dug out of the hill with a hoe, the tops being flung into a heap for the cow-yard. On my way home, I paused to inspect the squash-field. Some of the squashes lay in heaps as they were gathered, presenting much variety of shape and hue,--as golden yellow, like great lumps of gold, dark green, striped and variegated; and some were round, and some lay curling their long necks, nestling, as it were, and seeming as if they had life. In my walk yesterday forenoon I passed an old house which seemed to be quite deserted. It was a two-story, wooden house, dark and weather-beaten. The front windows, some of them, were shattered and open, and others were boarded up. Trees and shrubbery were growing neglected, so as quite to block up the lower part. There was an aged barn near at hand, so ruinous that it had been necessary to prop it up. There were two old carts, both of which had lost a wheel. Everything was in keeping. At first I supposed that there would be no inhabitants in such a dilapidated place; but, passing on, I looked back, and saw a decrepit and infirm old man at the angle of the house, its fit occupant. The grass, however, was very green and beautiful around this dwelling, and, the sunshine falling brightly on it, the whole effect was cheerful and pleasant. It seemed as if the world was so glad that this desolate old place, where there was never to be any more hope and happiness, could not at all lessen the general effect of joy. I found a small turtle by the roadside, where he had crept to warm himself in the genial sunshine. He had a sable back, and underneath his shell was yellow, and at the edges bright scarlet. His head, tail, and claws were striped yellow, black, and red. He withdrew himself as far as he possibly could into his shell, and absolutely refused to peep out, even when I put him into the water. Finally, I threw him into a deep pool and left him. These mailed gentlemen, from the size of a foot or more down to an inch, were very numerous in the spring; and now the smaller kind appear again. Saturday, October 9th.--Still dismal weather. Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather. For a week past we have been especially gladdened with a little seamstress from Boston, about seventeen years old; but of such a petite figure, that, at first view, one would take her to be hardly in her teens. She is very vivacious and smart, laughing and singing and talking all the time,--talking sensibly; but still taking the view of matters that a city girl naturally would. If she were larger than she is, and of less pleasing aspect, I think she might be intolerable; but being so small, and with a fair skin, and as healthy as a wild-flower, she is really very agreeable; and to look at her face is like being shone upon by a ray of the sun. She never walks, but bounds and dances along, and this motion, in her diminutive person, does not give the idea of violence. It is like a bird, hopping from twig to twig, and chirping merrily all the time. Sometimes she is rather vulgar, but even that works well enough into her character, and accords with it. On continued observation, one discovers that she is not a little girl, but really a little woman, with all the prerogatives and liabilities of a woman. This gives a new aspect to her, while the girlish impression still remains, and is strangely combined with the sense that this frolicsome maiden has the material for the sober bearing of a wife. She romps with the boys, runs races with them in the yard, and up and down the stairs, and is heard scolding laughingly at their rough play. She asks William Allen to place her "on top of that horse," whereupon he puts his large brown hands about her waist, and, swinging her to and fro, lifts her on horseback. William threatens to rivet two horseshoes round her neck, for having clambered, with the other girls and boys, upon a load of hay, whereby the said load lost its balance and slid off the cart. She strings the seed-berries of roses together, making a scarlet necklace of them, which she fastens about her throat. She gathers flowers of everlasting to wear in her bonnet, arranging them with the skill of a dress-maker. In the evening, she sits singing by the hour, with the musical part of the establishment, often breaking into laughter, whereto she is incited by the tricks of the boys. The last thing one hears of her, she is tripping up stairs to bed, talking lightsomely or warbling; and one meets her in the morning, the very image of bright morn itself, smiling briskly at you, so that one takes her for a promise of cheerfulness through the day. Be it said, with all the rest, that there is a perfect maiden modesty in her deportment. She has just gone away, and the last I saw of her was her vivacious face peeping through the curtain of the cariole, and nodding a gay farewell to the family, who were shouting their adieus at the door. With her other merits, she is an excellent daughter, and supports her mother by the labor of her hands. It would be difficult to conceive beforehand how much can be added to the enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition; for her intellect is very ordinary, and she never says anything worth hearing, or even laughing at, in itself. But she herself is an expression well worth studying. Brook Farm, October 9th.--A walk this afternoon to Cow Island. The clouds had broken away towards noon, and let forth a few sunbeams, and more and more blue sky ventured to appear, till at last it was really warm and sunny,--indeed, rather too warm in the sheltered hollows, though it is delightful to be too warm now, after so much stormy chillness. O the beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the intervals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and sits down, strewing dandelions of gold, and blue asters, as her parting gifts and memorials! I went to a grapevine, which I have already visited several times, and found some clusters of grapes still remaining, and now perfectly ripe. Coming within view of the river, I saw several wild ducks under the shadow of the opposite shore, which was high, and covered with a grove of pines. I should not have discovered the ducks had they not risen and skimmed the surface of the glassy stream, breaking its dark water with a bright streak, and, sweeping round, gradually rose high enough to fly away. I likewise started a partridge just within the verge of the woods, and in another place a large squirrel ran across the wood-path from one shelter of trees to the other. Small birds, in flocks, were flitting about the fields, seeking and finding I know not what sort of food. There were little fish, also, darting in shoals through the pools and depths of the brooks, which are now replenished to their brims, and rush towards the river with a swift, amber-colored current. Cow Island is not an island,--at least, at this season,--though, I believe, in the time of freshets, the marshy Charles floods the meadows all round about it, and extends across its communication with the mainland. The path to it is a very secluded one, threading a wood of pines, and just wide enough to admit the loads of meadow hay which are drawn from the splashy shore of the river. The island has a growth of stately pines, with tall and ponderous stems, standing at distance enough to admit the eve to travel far among them; and, as there is no underbrush, the effect is somewhat like looking among the pillars of a church. I returned home by the high-road. On my right, separated from the road by a level field, perhaps fifty yards across, was a range of young forest-trees, dressed in their garb of autumnal glory. The sun shone directly upon them; and sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn. In its absence, one doubts whether there be any truth in what poets have told about the splendor of an American autumn; but when this charm is added, one feels that the effect is beyond description. As I beheld it to-day, there was nothing dazzling; it was gentle and mild, though brilliant and diversified, and had a most quiet and pensive influence. And yet there were some trees that seemed really made of sunshine, and others were of a sunny red, and the whole picture was painted with but little relief of darksome lines, only a few evergreens. But there was nothing inharmonious; and, on closer examination, it appeared that all the tints had a relationship among themselves. And this, I suppose, is the reason that, while nature seems to scatter them so carelessly, they still never shock the beholder by their contrasts, nor disturb, but only soothe. The brilliant scarlet and the brilliant yellow are different lines of the maple-leaves, and the first changes into the last. I saw one maple-tree, its centre yellow as gold, set in a framework of red. The native poplars have different shades of green, verging towards yellow, and are very cheerful in the sunshine. Most of the oak-leaves have still the deep verdure of summer; but where a change has taken place, it is into a russet-red, warm, but sober. These colors, infinitely varied by the progress which different trees have made in their decay, constitute almost the whole glory of autumnal woods; but it is impossible to conceive how much is done with such scanty materials. In my whole walk I saw only one man, and he was at a distance, in the obscurity of the trees. He had a horse and a wagon, and was getting a load of dry brushwood. Sunday, October 10th.--I visited my grapevine this afternoon, and ate the last of its clusters. This vine climbs around a young maple-tree, which has now assumed the yellow leaf. The leaves of the vine are more decayed than those of the maple. Thence to Cow Island, a solemn and thoughtful walk. Returned by another path of the width of a wagon, passing through a grove of hard wood, the lightsome hues of which make the walk more cheerful than among the pines. The roots of oaks emerged from the soil, and contorted themselves across the path. The sunlight, also, broke across in spots, and otherwheres the shadow was deep; but still there was intermingling enough of bright hues to keep off the gloom from the whole path. Brooks and pools have a peculiar aspect at this season. One knows that the water must be cold, and one shivers a little at the sight of it; and yet the grass about the pool may be of the deepest green, and the sun may be shining into it. The withered leaves which overhanging trees shed upon its surface contribute much to the effect. Insects have mostly vanished in the fields and woods. I hear locusts yet, singing in the sunny hours, and crickets have not yet finished their song. Once in a while I see a caterpillar,--this afternoon, for instance, a red, hairy one, with black head and tail. They do not appear to be active, and it makes one rather melancholy to look at them. Tuesday, October 12th.--The cawing of the crow resounds among the woods. A sentinel is aware of your approach a great way off, and gives the alarm to his comrades loudly and eagerly,--Caw, caw, caw! Immediately the whole conclave replies, and you behold them rising above the trees, flapping darkly, and winging their way to deeper solitudes. Sometimes, however, they remain till you come near enough to discern their sable gravity of aspect, each occupying a separate bough, or perhaps the blasted tip-top of a pine. As you approach, one after another, with loud cawing, flaps his wings and throws himself upon the air. There is hardly a more striking feature in the landscape nowadays than the red patches of blueberry and whortleberry bushes, as seen on a sloping hillside, like islands among the grass, with trees growing in them; or crowning the summit of a bare, brown hill with their somewhat russet liveliness; or circling round the base of an earth-imbedded rock. At a distance, this hue, clothing spots and patches of the earth, looks more like a picture than anything else,--yet such a picture as I never saw painted. The oaks are now beginning to look sere, and their leaves have withered borders. It is pleasant to notice the wide circle of greener grass beneath the circumference of an overshadowing oak. Passing an orchard, one hears an uneasy rustling in the trees, and not as if they were struggling with the wind. Scattered about are barrels to contain the gathered apples; and perhaps a great heap of golden or scarlet apples is collected in one place. Wednesday, October 13th.--A good view, from an upland swell of our pasture, across the valley of the river Charles. There is the meadow, as level as a floor, and carpeted with green, perhaps two miles from the rising ground on this side of the river to that on the opposite side. The stream winds through the midst of the flat space, without any banks at all; for it fills its bed almost to the brim, and bathes the meadow grass on either side. A tuft of shrubbery, at broken intervals, is scattered along its border; and thus it meanders sluggishly along, without other life than what it gains from gleaming in the sun. Now, into the broad, smooth meadow, as into a lake, capes and headlands put themselves forth, and shores of firm woodland border it, covered with variegated foliage, making the contrast so much the stronger of their height and rough outline with the even spread of the plain. And beyond, and far away, rises a long, gradual swell of country, covered with an apparently dense growth of foliage for miles, till the horizon terminates it; and here and there is a house, or perhaps two, among the contiguity of trees. Everywhere the trees wear their autumnal dress, so that the whole landscape is red, russet, orange, and yellow, blending in the distance into a rich tint of brown-orange, or nearly that,--except the green expanse so definitely hemmed in by the higher ground. I took a long walk this morning, going first nearly to Newton, thence nearly to Brighton, thence to Jamaica Plain, and thence home. It was a fine morning, with a northwest-wind; cool when facing the wind, but warm and most genially pleasant in sheltered spots; and warm enough everywhere while I was in motion. I traversed most of the by-ways which offered themselves to me; and, passing through one in which there was a double line of grass between the wheel-tracks and that of the horses' feet, I came to where had once stood a farm-house, which appeared to have been recently torn down. Most of the old timber and boards had been carted away; a pile of it, however, remained. The cellar of the house was uncovered, and beside it stood the base and middle height of the chimney. The oven, in which household bread had been baked for daily food, and puddings and cake and jolly pumpkin-pies for festivals, opened its month, being deprived of its iron door. The fireplace was close at hand. All round the site of the house was a pleasant, sunny, green space, with old fruit-trees in pretty fair condition, though aged. There was a barn, also aged, but in decent repair; and a ruinous shed, on the corner of which was nailed a boy's windmill, where it had probably been turning and clattering for years together, till now it was black with time and weather-stain. It was broken, but still it went round whenever the wind stirred. The spot was entirely secluded, there being no other house within a mile or two. No language can give an idea of the beauty and glory of the trees, just at this moment. It would be easy, by a process of word-daubing, to set down a confused group of gorgeous colors, like a bunch of tangled skeins of bright silk; but there is nothing of the reality in the glare which would thus be produced. And yet the splendor both of individual clusters and of whole scenes is unsurpassable. The oaks are now far advanced in their change of hue; and, in certain positions relatively to the sun, they light up and gleam with a most magnificent deep gold, varying according as portions of the foliage are in shadow or sunlight. On the sides which receive the direct rays, the effect is altogether rich; and in other points of view it is equally beautiful, if less brilliant. This color of the oak is more superb than the lighter yellow of the maples and walnuts. The whole landscape is now covered with this indescribable pomp; it is discerned on the uplands afar off; and Blue Hill in Milton, at the distance of several miles, actually glistens with rich, dark light,--no, not glistens, nor gleams,--but perhaps to say glows subduedly will be a truer expression for it. Met few people this morning; a grown girl, in company with a little boy, gathering barberries in a secluded lane; a portly, autumnal gentleman, wrapped in a greatcoat, who asked the way to Mr. Joseph Goddard's; and a fish-cart from the city, the driver of which sounded his horn along the lonesome way. Monday, October 18th.--There has been a succession of days which were cold and bright in the forenoon, and gray, sullen, and chill towards night. The woods have now taken a soberer tint than they wore at my last date. Many of the shrubs which looked brightest a little while ago are now wholly bare of leaves. The oaks have generally a russet-brown shade, although some of them are still green, as are likewise other scattered trees in the forests. The bright yellow and the rich scarlet are no more to be seen. Scarcely any of them will now bear a close examination; for this shows them to be rugged, wilted, and of faded, frost-bitten hue; but at a distance, and in the mass, and enlivened by the sun, they have still somewhat of the varied splendor which distinguished them a week ago. It is wonderful what a difference the sunshine makes; it is like varnish, bringing out the hidden veins in a piece of rich wood. In the cold, gray atmosphere, such as that of most of our afternoons now, the landscape lies dark,--brown, and in a much deeper shadow than if it were clothed in green. But, perchance, a gleam of sun falls on a certain spot of distant shrubbery or woodland, and we see it brighten with many lines, standing forth prominently from the dimness around it. The sunlight gradually spreads, and the whole sombre scene is changed to a motley picture,--the sun bringing out many shades of color, and converting its gloom to an almost laughing cheerfulness. At such times I almost doubt whether the foliage has lost any of its brilliancy. But the clouds intercept the sun again, and lo! old Autumn appears, clad in his cloak of russet-brown. Beautiful now, while the general landscape lies in shadow, looks the summit of a distant hill (say a mile off), with the sunshine brightening the trees that cover it. It is noticeable that the outlines of hills, and the whole bulk of them at the distance of several miles, become stronger, denser, and more substantial in this autumn atmosphere and in these autumnal tints than in summer. Then they looked blue, misty, and dim. Now they show their great humpbacks more plainly, as if they had drawn nearer to us. A waste of shrubbery and small trees, such as overruns the borders of the meadows for miles together, looks much more rugged, wild, and savage in its present brown color than when clad in green. I passed through a very pleasant wood-path yesterday, quite shut in and sheltered by trees that had not thrown off their yellow robes. The sun shone strongly in among them, and quite kindled them; so that the path was brighter for their shade than if it had been quite exposed to the sun. In the village graveyard, which lies contiguous to the street, I saw a man digging a grave, and one inhabitant after another turned aside from his way to look into the grave and talk with the digger. I heard him laugh, with the traditionary mirthfulness of men of that occupation. In the hollow of the woods, yesterday afternoon, I lay a long while watching a squirrel, who was capering about among the trees over my head (oaks and white-pines, so close together that their branches intermingled). The squirrel seemed not to approve of my presence, for he frequently uttered a sharp, quick, angry noise, like that of a scissors-grinder's wheel. Sometimes I could see him sitting on an impending bough, with his tail over his hack, looking down pryingly upon me. It seems to be a natural posture with him, to sit on his hind legs, holding up his fore paws. Anon, with a peculiarly quick start, he would scramble along the branch, and be lost to sight in another part of the tree, whence his shrill chatter would again be heard. Then I would see him rapidly descending the trunk, and running along the ground; and a moment afterwards, casting my eye upward, I beheld him flitting like a bird among the high limbs at the summit, directly above me. Afterwards, he apparently became accustomed to my society, and set about some business of his own. He came down to the ground, took up a piece of a decayed bough (a heavy burden for such a small personage), and, with this in his mouth, again climbed up and passed from the branches of one tree to those of another, and thus onward and onward till he went out of sight. Shortly afterwards he returned for another burden, and this he repeated several times. I suppose he was building a nest,--at least, I know not what else could have been his object. Never was there such an active, cheerful, choleric, continually-in-motion fellow as this little red squirrel, talking to himself, chattering at me, and as sociable in his own person as if he had half a dozen companions, instead of being alone in the lonesome wood. Indeed, he flitted about so quickly, and showed himself in different places so suddenly, that I was in some doubt whether there were not two or three of them. I must mention again the very beautiful effect produced by the masses of berry-bushes, lying like scarlet islands in the midst of withered pasture-ground, or crowning the tops of barren hills. Their hue, at a distance, is lustrous scarlet, although it does not look nearly as bright and gorgeous when examined close at hand. But at a proper distance it is a beautiful fringe on Autumn's petticoat. Friday, October 22d.--A continued succession of unpleasant, Novembery days, and autumn has made rapid progress in the work of decay. It is now somewhat of a rare good fortune to find a verdant, grassy spot, on some slope, or in a dell; and even such seldom-seen oases are bestrewn with dried brown leaves,--which, however, methinks, make the short, fresh grass look greener around them. Dry leaves are now plentiful everywhere, save where there are none but pine-trees. They rustle beneath the tread, and there is nothing more autumnal than that sound. Nevertheless, in a walk this afternoon, I have seen two oaks which retained almost the greenness of summer. They grew close to the huge Pulpit Rock, so that portions of their trunks appeared to grasp the rough surface; and they were rooted beneath it, and, ascending high into the air, overshadowed the gray crag with verdure. Other oaks, here and there, have a few green leaves or boughs among their rustling and rugged shade. Yet, dreary as the woods are in a bleak, sullen day, there is a very peculiar sense of warmth and a sort of richness of effect in the slope of a bank and in sheltered spots, where bright sunshine falls, and the brown oaken foliage is gladdened by it. There is then a feeling of comfort, and consequently of heart-warmth, which cannot be experienced in summer. I walked this afternoon along a pleasant wood-path, gently winding, so that but little of it could be seen at a time, and going up and down small mounds, now plunging into a denser shadow and now emerging from it. Part of the way it was strewn with the dusky, yellow leaves of white-pines,--the cast-off garments of last year; part of the way with green grass, close-cropped, and very fresh for the season. Sometimes the trees met across it; sometimes it was bordered on one side by an old rail-fence of moss-grown cedar, with bushes sprouting beneath it, and thrusting their branches through it; sometimes by a stone-wall of unknown antiquity, older than the wood it closed in. A stone-wall, when shrubbery has grown around it, and thrust its roots beneath it, becomes a very pleasant and meditative object. It does not belong too evidently to man, having been built so long ago. It seems a part of nature. Yesterday I found two mushrooms in the woods, probably of the preceding night's growth. Also I saw a mosquito, frost-pinched, and so wretched that I felt avenged for all the injuries which his tribe inflicted upon me last summer, and so did not molest this lone survivor. Walnuts in their green rinds are falling from the trees, and so are chestnut-burrs. I found a maple-leaf to-day, yellow all over, except its extremest point, which was bright scarlet. It looked as if a drop of blood were hanging from it. The first change of the maple-leaf is to scarlet; the next, to yellow. Then it withers, wilts, and drops off, as most of them have already done. October 27th.--Fringed gentians,--I found the last, probably, that will be seen this year, growing on the margin of the brook. 1842.--Some man of powerful character to command a person, morally subjected to him, to perform some act. The commanding person suddenly to die; and, for all the rest of his life, the subjected one continues to perform that act. "Solomon dies during the building of the temple, but his body remains leaning on a staff, and overlooking the workmen, as if it were alive." A tri-weekly paper, to be called the Tertian Ague. Subject for a picture,--Satan's reappearance in Pandemonium, shining out from a mist, with "shape star-bright." Five points of Theology,--Five Points at New York. It seems a greater pity that an accomplished worker with the hand should perish prematurely, than a person of great intellect; because intellectual arts may be cultivated in the next world, but not physical ones. To trace out the influence of a frightful and disgraceful crime in debasing and destroying a character naturally high and noble, the guilty person being alone conscious of the crime. A man, virtuous in his general conduct, but committing habitually some monstrous crime,--as murder,--and doing this without the sense of guilt, but with a peaceful conscience,--habit, probably, reconciling him to it; but something (for instance, discovery) occurs to make him sensible of his enormity. His horror then. The strangeness, if they could be foreseen and forethought, of events which do not seem so strange after they have happened. As, for instance, to muse over a child's cradle, and foresee all the persons in different parts of the world with whom he would have relations. A man to swallow a small snake,--and it to be a symbol of a cherished sin. Questions as to unsettled points of history, and mysteries of nature, to be asked of a mesmerized person. Gordier, a young man of the Island of Jersey, was paying his addresses to a young lady of Guernsey. He visited the latter island, intending to be married. He disappeared on his way from the beach to his mistress's residence, and was afterwards found dead in a cavity of the rocks. After a time, Galliard, a merchant of Guernsey, paid his addresses to the young lady; but she always felt a strong, unaccountable antipathy to him. He presented her with a beautiful trinket. The mother of Gordier, chancing to see this trinket, recognized it as having been bought by her dead son as a present for his mistress. She expired on learning this; and Galliard, being suspected of the murder, committed suicide. The cure of Montreux in Switzerland, ninety-six years old, still vigorous in mind and body, and able to preach. He had a twin-brother, also a preacher, and the exact likeness of himself. Sometimes strangers have beheld a white-haired, venerable, clerical personage, nearly a century old; and, upon riding a few miles farther, have been astonished to meet again this white-haired, venerable, century-old personage. When the body of Lord Mohun (killed in a duel) was carried home, bleeding, to his house, Lady Mohun was very angry because it was "flung upon the best bed." A prophecy, somewhat in the style of Swift's about Partridge, but embracing various events and personages. An incident that befell Dr. Harris, while a Junior at college. Being in great want of money to buy shirts or other necessaries, and not knowing how to obtain it, he set out on a walk from Cambridge to Boston. On the way, he cut a stick, and, after walking a short distance, perceived that something had become attached to the end of it. It proved to be a gold ring, with the motto, "God speed thee, friend." Brobdingnag lay on the northwest coast of the American continent. People with false hair and other artifices may be supposed to deceive Death himself; so that he does not know when their hour is come. Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning. Advice of Lady Pepperell's father on her marriage,--never to work one moment after Saturday sunset,--never to lay down her knitting except in the middle of the needle,--always to rise with the sun,--to pass an hour daily with the housekeeper,--to visit every room daily from garret to cellar,--to attend herself to the brewing of beer and the baking of bread,--and to instruct every member of the family in their religious duties. Service of plate, presented by the city of London to Sir William Pepperell, together with a table of solid silver. The table very narrow, but long; the articles of plate numerous, but of small dimensions,--the tureen not holding more than three pints. At the close of the Revolution, when the Pepperell and Sparhawk property was confiscated, this plate was sent to the grandson of Sir William, in London. It was so valuable, that Sheriff Moulton of old York, with six well-armed men, accompanied it to Boston. Pepperell's only daughter married Colonel Sparhawk, a fine gentleman of the day. Andrew Pepperell, the son, was rejected by a young lady (afterwards the mother of Mrs. General Knox), to whom he was on the point of marriage, as being addicted to low company and low pleasures. The lover, two days afterwards, in the streets of Portsmouth, was sun-struck, and fell down dead. Sir William had built an elegant house for his son and his intended wife; but after the death of the former he never entered it. He lost his cheerfulness and social qualities, and gave up intercourse with people, except on business. Very anxious to secure his property to his descendants by the provisions of his will, which was drawn up by Judge Sewall, then a young lawyer. Yet the Judge lived to see two of Sir William's grandchildren so reduced that they were to have been numbered among the town's poor, and were only rescued from this fate by private charity. The arms and crest of the Pepperell family were displayed over the door of every room in Sir William's house. In Colonel Sparhawk's house there were forty portraits, most of them in full length. The house built for Sir William's son was occupied as barracks during the Revolution, and much injured. A few years after the peace, it was blown down by a violent tempest, and finally no vestige of it was left, but there remained only a summer-house and the family tomb. At Sir William's death, his mansion was hung with black, while the body lay in state for a week. All the Sparhawk portraits were covered with black crape, and the family pew was draped with black. Two oxen were roasted, and liquid hospitality dispensed in proportion. Old lady's dress seventy or eighty years ago. Brown brocade gown, with a nice lawn handkerchief and apron,--short sleeves, with a little ruffle, just below the elbow,--black mittens,--a lawn cap, with rich lace border,--a black velvet hood on the back of the head, tied with black ribbon under the chin. She sat in an old-fashioned easy-chair, in a small, low parlor,--the wainscot painted entirely black, and the walls hung with a dark velvet paper. A table, stationary ever since the house was built, extending the whole length of a room. One end was raised two steps higher than the rest. The Lady Ursula, an early Colonial heroine, was wont to dine at the upper end, while her servants sat below. This was in the kitchen. An old garden and summer-house, and roses, currant-bushes, and tulips, which Lady Ursula had brought from Grondale Abbey in Old England. Although a hundred and fifty years before, and though their roots were propagated all over the country, they were still flourishing in the original garden. This Lady Ursula was the daughter of Lord Thomas Cutts of Grondale Abbey in England. She had been in love with an officer named Fowler, who was supposed to have been slain in battle. After the death of her father and mother, Lady Ursula came to Kittery, bringing twenty men-servants and several women. After a time, a letter arrived from her lover, who was not killed, but merely a prisoner to the French. He announced his purpose to come to America, where he would arrive in October. A few days after the letter came, she went out in a low carriage to visit her work-people, and was blessing the food for their luncheon, when she fell dead, struck by an Indian tomahawk, as did all the rest save one. They were buried where the massacre took place, and a stone was erected, which (possibly) still remains. The lady's family had a grant from Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the territory thereabout, and her brother had likewise come over and settled in the vicinity. I believe very little of this story. Long afterwards, at about the commencement of the Revolution, a descendant of Fowler came from England, and applied to the Judge of Probate to search the records for a will, supposed to have been made by Lady Ursula in favor of her lover as soon as she heard of his existence. In the mean time the estate had been sold to Colonel Whipple. No will could be found. (Lady Ursula was old Mrs. Cutts, widow of President Cutts.) The mode of living of Lady Ursula's brother in Kittery. A drawbridge to the house, which was raised every evening, and lowered in the morning, for the laborers and the family to pass out. They kept thirty cows, a hundred sheep, and several horses. The house spacious,--one room large enough to contain forty or fifty guests. Two silver branches for candles,--the walls ornamented with paintings and needlework. The floors were daily rubbed with wax, and shone like a mahogany table. A domestic chaplain, who said prayers every morning and evening in a small apartment called the chapel. Also a steward and butler. The family attended the Episcopal Church at Christmas, Easter, and Good Friday, and gave a grand entertainment once a year. Madam Cutts, at the last of these entertainments, wore a black damask gown, and cuffs with double lace ruffles, velvet shoes, blue silk stockings, white and silver stomacher. The daughter and granddaughters in rich brocades and yellow satin. Old Major Cutts in brown velvet, laced with gold, and a large wig. The parson in his silk cassock, and his helpmate in brown damask. Old General Atkinson in scarlet velvet, and his wife and daughters in white damask. The Governor in black velvet, and his lady in crimson tabby trimmed with silver. The ladies wore bell-hoops, high-heeled shoes, paste buckles, silk stockings, and enormously high head-dresses, with lappets of Brussels lace hanging thence to the waist. Among the eatables, a silver tub of the capacity of four gallons, holding a pyramid of pancakes powdered with white sugar. The date assigned to all this about 1690. What is the price of a day's labor in Lapland, where the sun never sets for six months? Miss Asphyxia Davis! A life, generally of a grave hue, may be said to be embroidered with occasional sports and fantasies. A father confessor,--his reflections on character, and the contrast of the inward man with the outward, as he looks around on his congregation, all whose secret sins are known to him. A person with an ice-cold hand,--his right hand, which people ever afterwards remember when once they have grasped it. A stove possessed by a Devil. June 1st, 1842.--One of my chief amusements is to see the boys sail their miniature vessels on the Frog Pond. There is a great variety of shipping owned among the young people, and they appear to have a considerable knowledge of the art of managing vessels. There is a full-rigged man-of-war, with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its appearance; and, when on a voyage across the pond, it so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its motions,--its tossing up and down on the small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to the breeze,--the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do. If we see a real, great ship, the mind grasps and possesses, within its real clutch, all that there is of it; while here the mimic ship is the representation of an ideal one, and so gives us a more imaginative pleasure. There are many schooners that ply to and fro on the pond, and pilot-boats, all perfectly rigged. I saw a race, the other day, between the ship above mentioned and a pilot-boat, in which the latter came off conqueror. The boys appear to be well acquainted with all the ropes and sails, and can call them by their nautical names. One of the owners of the vessels remains on one side of the pond, and the other on the opposite side, and so they send the little bark to and fro, like merchants of different countries, consigning their vessels to one another. Generally, when any vessel is on the pond, there are full-grown spectators, who look on with as much interest as the boys themselves. Towards sunset, this is especially the case: for then are seen young girls and their lovers; mothers, with their little boys in hand; schoolgirls, beating hoops round about, and occasionally running to the side of the pond; rough tars, or perhaps masters or young mates of vessels, who make remarks about the miniature shipping, and occasionally give professional advice to the navigators; visitors from the country; gloved and caned young gentlemen;--in short, everybody stops to take a look. In the mean time; dogs are continually plunging into the pond, and swimming about, with noses pointed upward, and snatching at floating chips; then, emerging, they shake themselves, scattering a horizontal shower on the clean gowns of ladies and trousers of gentlemen; then scamper to and fro on the grass, with joyous barks. Some boys cast off lines of twine with pin-hooks, and perhaps pull out a horned-pout,--that being, I think, the only kind of fish that inhabits the Frog Pond. The ship-of-war above mentioned is about three feet from stem to stern, or possibly a few inches more. This, if I mistake not, was the size of a ship-of-the-line in the navy of Liliput. Fancy pictures of familiar places which one has never been in, as the green-room of a theatre, etc. The famous characters of history,--to imagine their spirits now extant on earth, in the guise of various public or private personages. The case quoted in Combe's Physiology of a young man of great talents and profound knowledge of chemistry, who had in view some new discovery of importance. In order to put his mind into the highest possible activity, he shut himself up for several successive days, and used various methods of excitement. He had a singing-girl, he drank spirits, smelled, penetrating odors, sprinkled Cologne-water round the room, etc., etc. Eight days thus passed, when he was seized with a fit of frenzy which terminated in mania. Flesh and Blood,--a firm of butchers. Miss Polly Syllable, a schoolmistress. Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them. A spendthrift,--in one sense he has his money's worth by the purchase of large lots of repentance and other dolorous commodities. To symbolize moral or spiritual disease by disease of the body; as thus, --when a person committed any sin, it might appear in some form on the body,--this to be wrought out. "Shrieking fish," a strange idea of Leigh Hunt. In my museum, all the ducal rings that have been thrown into the Adriatic. An association of literary men in the other world,--or dialogues of the dead, or something of that kind. Imaginary diseases to be cured by impossible remedies,--as a dose of the Grand Elixir, in the yolk of a Phoenix's egg. The disease may be either moral or physical. A physician for the cure of moral diseases. To point out the moral slavery of one who deems himself a free man. A stray leaf from the book of fate, picked up in the street. Concord, August 5th.--A rainy day,--a rainy day. I am commanded to take pen in hand, and I am therefore banished to the little ten-foot-square apartment misnamed my study; but perhaps the dismalness of the day and the dulness of my solitude will be the prominent characteristics of what I write. And what is there to write about? Happiness has no succession of events, because it is a part of eternity; and we have been living in eternity ever since we came to this old manse. Like Enoch, we seem to have been translated to the other state of being, without having passed through death. Our spirits must have flitted away unconsciously, and we can only perceive that we have cast off our mortal part by the more real and earnest life of our souls. Externally, our Paradise has very much the aspect of a pleasant old domicile on earth. This antique house--for it looks antique, though it was created by Providence expressly for our use, and at the precise time when we wanted it--stands behind a noble avenue of balm-of-Gilead trees; and when we chance to observe a passing traveller through the sunshine and the shadow of this long avenue, his figure appears too dim and remote to disturb the sense of blissful seclusion. Few, indeed, are the mortals who venture within our sacred precincts. George Prescott, who has not yet grown earthly enough, I suppose, to be debarred from occasional visits to Paradise, comes daily to bring three pints of milk from some ambrosial cow; occasionally, also, he makes an offering of mortal flowers. Mr. Emerson comes sometimes, and has been feasted on our nectar and ambrosia. Mr. Thoreau has twice listened to the music of the spheres, which, for our private convenience, we have packed into a musical-box. E. H------, who is much more at home among spirits than among fleshly bodies, came hither a few times merely to welcome us to the ethereal world; but latterly she has vanished into some other region of infinite space. One rash mortal, on the second Sunday after our arrival, obtruded himself upon us in a gig. There have since been three or four callers, who preposterously think that the courtesies of the lower world are to be responded to by people whose home is in Paradise. I must not forget to mention that the butcher comes twice or thrice a week; and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with portions of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance. Would that I were permitted to record the celestial dainties that kind Heaven provided for us on the first day of our arrival! Never, surely, was such food heard of on earth,--at least, not by me. Well, the above-mentioned persons are nearly all that have entered into the hallowed shade of our avenue; except, indeed, a certain sinner who came to bargain for the grass in our orchard, and another who came with a new cistern. For it is one of the drawbacks upon our Eden that it contains no water fit either to drink or to bathe in; so that the showers have become, in good truth, a godsend. I wonder why Providence does not cause a clear, cold fountain to bubble up at our doorstep; methinks it would not be unreasonable to pray for such a favor. At present we are under the ridiculous necessity of sending to the outer world for water. Only imagine Adam trudging out of Paradise with a bucket in each hand, to get water to drink, or for Eve to bathe in! Intolerable! (though our stout handmaiden really fetches our water.) In other respects Providence has treated us pretty tolerably well; but here I shall expect something further to be done. Also, in the way of future favors, a kitten would be very acceptable. Animals (except, perhaps, a pig) seem never out of place, even in the most paradisiacal spheres. And, by the way, a young colt comes up our avenue, now and then, to crop the seldom-trodden herbage; and so does a company of cows, whose sweet breath well repays us for the food which they obtain. There are likewise a few hens, whose quiet cluck is heard pleasantly about the house. A black dog sometimes stands at the farther extremity of the avenue, and looks wistfully hitherward; but when I whistle to him, he puts his tail between his legs, and trots away. Foolish dog! if he had more faith, he should have bones enough. Saturday, August 6th.--Still a dull day, threatening rain, yet without energy of character enough to rain outright. However, yesterday there were showers enough to supply us well with their beneficent outpouring. As to the new cistern, it seems to be bewitched; for, while the spout pours into it like a cataract, it still remains almost empty. I wonder where Mr. Hosmer got it; perhaps from Tantalus, under the eaves of whose palace it must formerly have stood; for, like his drinking-cup in Hades, it has the property of filling itself forever, and never being full. After breakfast I took my fishing-rod, and went down through our orchard to the river-side; but as three or four boys were already in possession of the best spots along the shore, I did not fish. This river of ours is the most sluggish stream that I ever was acquainted with. I had spent three weeks by its side, and swam across it every day, before I could determine which way its current ran; and then I was compelled to decide the question by the testimony of others, and not by my own observation. Owing to this torpor of the stream, it has nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor is there so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand in any part of its course; but it slumbers along between broad meadows, or kisses the tangled grass of mowing-fields and pastures, or bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and other waterloving plants. Flags and rushes grow along its shallow margin. The yellow water-lily spreads its broad flat leaves upon its surface; and the fragrant white pond-lily occurs in many favored spots,--generally selecting a situation just so far from the river's brink that it cannot be grasped except at the hazard of plunging in. But thanks be to the beautiful flower for growing at any rate. It is a marvel whence it derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and from which the yellow lily likewise draws its unclean life and noisome odor. So it is with many people in this world; the same soil and circumstances may produce the good and beautiful, and the wicked and ugly. Some have the faculty of assimilating to themselves only what is evil, and so they become as noisome as the yellow water-lily. Some assimilate none but good influences, and their emblem is the fragrant and spotless pond-lily, whose very breath is a blessing to all the region round about. . . . Among the productions of the river's margin, I must not forget the pickerel-weed, which grows just on the edge of the water, and shoots up a long stalk crowned with a blue spire, from among large green leaves. Both the flower and the leaves look well in a vase with pond-lilies, and relieve the unvaried whiteness of the latter; and, being all alike children of the waters, they are perfectly in keeping with one another. . . . I bathe once, and often twice, a day in our river; but one dip into the salt sea would be worth more than a whole week's soaking in such a lifeless tide. I have read of a river somewhere (whether it be in classic regions or among our Western Indians I know not) which seemed to dissolve and steal away the vigor of those who bathed in it. Perhaps our stream will be found to have this property. Its water, however, is pleasant in its immediate effect, being as soft as milk, and always warmer than the air. Its hue has a slight tinge of gold, and my limbs, when I behold them through its medium, look tawny. I am not aware that the inhabitants of Concord resemble their native river in any of their moral characteristics. Their forefathers, certainly, seem to have had the energy and impetus of a mountain torrent, rather than the torpor of this listless stream,--as it was proved by the blood with which they stained their river of Peace. It is said there are plenty of fish in it; but my most important captures hitherto have been a mud-turtle and an enormous eel. The former made his escape to his native element,--the latter we ate; and truly he had the taste of the whole river in his flesh, with a very prominent flavor of mud. On the whole, Concord River is no great favorite of mine; but I am glad to have any river at all so near at hand, it being just at the bottom of our orchard. Neither is it without a degree and kind of picturesqueness, both in its nearness and in the distance, when a blue gleam from its surface, among the green meadows and woods, seems like an open eye in Earth's countenance. Pleasant it is, too, to behold a little flat-bottomed skiff gliding over its bosom, which yields lazily to the stroke of the paddle, and allows the boat to go against its current almost as freely as with it. Pleasant, too, to watch an angler, as he strays along the brink, sometimes sheltering himself behind a tuft of bushes, and trailing his line along the water, in hopes to catch a pickerel. But, taking the river for all in all, I can find nothing more fit to compare it with than one of the half-torpid earthworms which I dig up for bait. The worm is sluggish, and so is the river,--the river is muddy, and so is the worm. You hardly know whether either of them be alive or dead; but still, in the course of time, they both manage to creep away. The best aspect of the Concord is when there is a northwestern breeze curling its surface, in a bright, sunshiny day. It then assumes a vivacity not its own. Moonlight, also, gives it beauty, as it does to all scenery of earth or water. Sunday, August 7th.--At sunset last evening I ascended the hill-top opposite our house; and, looking downward at the long extent of the river, it struck me that I had done it some injustice in my remarks. Perhaps, like other gentle and quiet characters, it will be better appreciated the longer I am acquainted with it. Certainly, as I beheld it then, it was one of the loveliest features in a scene of great rural beauty. It was visible through a course of two or three miles, sweeping in a semicircle round the hill on which I stood, and being the central line of a broad vale on either side. At a distance, it looked like a strip of sky set into the earth, which it so etherealized and idealized that it seemed akin to the upper regions. Nearer the base of the hill, I could discern the shadows of every tree and rock, imaged with a distinctness that made them even more charming than the reality; because, knowing them to be unsubstantial, they assumed the ideality which the soul always craves in the contemplation of earthly beauty. All the sky, too, and the rich clouds of sunset, were reflected in the peaceful bosom of the river; and surely, if its bosom can give back such an adequate reflection of heaven, it cannot be so gross and impure as I described it yesterday. Or, if so, it shall be a symbol to me that even a human breast, which may appear least spiritual in some aspects, may still have the capability of reflecting an infinite heaven in its depths, and therefore of enjoying it. It is a comfortable thought, that the smallest and most turbid mud-puddle can contain its own picture of heaven. Let us remember this, when we feel inclined to deny all spiritual life to some people, in whom, nevertheless, our Father may perhaps see the image of His face. This dull river has a deep religion of its own: so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously. The scenery of Concord, as I beheld it from the summit of the hill, has no very marked characteristics, but has a great deal of quiet beauty, in keeping with the river. There are broad and peaceful meadows, which, I think, are among the most satisfying objects in natural scenery. The heart reposes on them with a feeling that few things else can give, because almost all other objects are abrupt and clearly defined; but a meadow stretches out like a small infinity, yet with a secure homeliness which we do not find either in an expanse of water or of air. The hills which border these meadows are wide swells of land, or long and gradual ridges, some of them densely covered with wood. The white village, at a distance on the left, appears to be embosomed among wooded hills. The verdure of the country is much more perfect than is usual at this season of the year, when the autumnal hue has generally made considerable progress over trees and grass. Last evening, after the copious showers of the preceding two days, it was worthy of early June, or, indeed, of a world just created. Had I not then been alone, I should have had a far deeper sense of beauty, for I should have looked through the medium of another spirit. Along the horizon there were masses of those deep clouds in which the fancy may see images of all things that ever existed or were dreamed of. Over our old manse, of which I could catch but a glimpse among its embowering trees, appeared the immensely gigantic figure of a hound, crouching down with head erect, as if keeping watchful guard while the master of the mansion was away. . . . How sweet it was to draw near my own home, after having lived homeless in the world so long! . . . . With thoughts like these, I descended the hill, and clambered over the stone-wall, and crossed the road, and passed up our avenue, while the quaint old house put on an aspect of welcome. Monday, August 8th.--I wish I could give a description of our house, for it really has a character of its own, which is more than can be said of most edifices in these days. It is two stories high, with a third story of attic chambers in the gable-roof. When I first visited it, early in June, it looked pretty much as it did during the old clergyman's lifetime, showing all the dust and disarray that might be supposed to have gathered about him in the course of sixty years of occupancy. The rooms seemed never to have been painted; at all events, the walls and panels, as well as the huge cross-beams, had a venerable and most dismal tinge of brown. The furniture consisted of high-backed, short-legged, rheumatic chairs, small, old tables, bedsteads with lofty posts, stately chests of drawers, looking-glasses in antique black frames, all of which were probably fashionable in the days of Dr. Ripley's predecessor. It required some energy of imagination to conceive the idea of transforming this ancient edifice into a comfortable modern residence. However, it has been successfully accomplished. The old Doctor's sleeping-apartment, which was the front room on the ground-floor, we have converted into a parlor; and by the aid of cheerful paint and paper, a gladsome carpet, pictures and engravings, new furniture, bijouterie, and a daily supply of flowers, it has become one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in the whole world. The shade of our departed host will never haunt it; for its aspect has been changed as completely as the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished forever. The opposite room has been metamorphosed into a store-room. Through the house, both in the first and second story, runs a spacious hall or entry, occupying more space than is usually devoted to such a purpose in modern times. This feature contributes to give the whole house an airy, roomy, and convenient appearance; we can breathe the freer by the aid of the broad passageway. The front door of the hall looks up the stately avenue, which I have already mentioned; and the opposite door opens into the orchard, through which a path descends to the river. In the second story we have at present fitted up three rooms,--one being our own chamber, and the opposite one a guest-chamber, which contains the most presentable of the old Doctor's ante-Revolutionary furniture. After all, the moderns have invented nothing better, as chamber furniture, than these chests of drawers, which stand on four slender legs, and rear an absolute tower of mahogany to the ceiling, the whole terminating in a fantastically carved summit. Such a venerable structure adorns our guest-chamber. In the rear of the house is the little room which I call my study, and which, in its day, has witnessed the intellectual labors of better students than myself. It contains, with some additions and alterations, the furniture of my bachelor-room in Boston; but there is a happier disposal of things now. There is a little vase of flowers on one of the bookcases, and a larger bronze vase of graceful ferns that surmounts the bureau. In size the room is just what it ought to be; for I never could compress my thoughts sufficiently to write in a very spacious room. It has three windows, two of which are shaded by a large and beautiful willow-tree, which sweeps against the overhanging eaves. On this side we have a view into the orchard, and, beyond, a glimpse of the river. The other window is the one from which Mr. Emerson, the predecessor of Dr. Ripley, beheld the first fight of the Revolution,-- which he might well do, as the British troops were drawn up within a hundred yards of the house; and on looking forth just now, I could still perceive the western abutments of the old bridge, the passage of which was contested. The new monument is visible from base to summit. Notwithstanding all we have done to modernize the old place, we seem scarcely to have disturbed its air of antiquity. It is evident that other wedded pairs have spent their honeymoons here, that children have been born here, and people have grown old and died in these rooms, although for our behoof the same apartments have consented to look cheerful once again. Then there are dark closets, and strange nooks and corners, where the ghosts of former occupants might hide themselves in the daytime, and stalk forth when night conceals all our sacrilegious improvements. We have seen no apparitions as yet; but we hear strange noises, especially in the kitchen, and last night, while sitting in the parlor, we heard a thumping and pounding as of somebody at work in my study. Nay, if I mistake not (for I was half asleep), there was a sound as of some person crumpling paper in his hand in our very bedchamber. This must have been old Dr. Ripley with one of his sermons. There is a whole chest of them in the garret; but he need have no apprehensions of our disturbing them. I never saw the old patriarch myself, which I regret, as I should have been glad to associate his venerable figure at ninety years of age with the house in which he dwelt. Externally the house presents the same appearance as in the Doctor's day. It had once a coat of white paint; but the storms and sunshine of many years have almost obliterated it, and produced a sober, grayish hue, which entirely suits the antique form of the structure. To repaint its reverend face would be a real sacrilege. It would look like old Dr. Ripley in a brown wig. I hardly know why it is that our cheerful and lightsome repairs and improvements in the interior of the house seem to be in perfectly good taste, though the heavy old beams and high wainscoting of the walls speak of ages gone by. But so it is. The cheerful paper-hangings have the air of belonging to the old walls; and such modernisms as astral lamps, card-tables, gilded Cologne-bottles, silver taper-stands, and bronze and alabaster flower-vases do not seem at all impertinent. It is thus that an aged man may keep his heart warm for new things and new friends, and often furnish himself anew with ideas; though it would not be graceful for him to attempt to suit his exterior to the passing fashions of the day. August 9th.--Our orchard in its day has been a very productive and profitable one; and we were told that in one year it returned Dr. Ripley a hundred dollars, besides defraying the expense of repairing the house. It is now long past its prime: many of the trees are moss-grown, and have dead and rotten branches intermixed among the green and fruitful ones. And it may well be so; for I suppose some of the trees may have been set out by Mr. Emerson, who died in the first year of the Revolutionary War. Neither will the fruit, probably, bear comparison with the delicate productions of modern pomology. Most of the trees seem to have abundant burdens upon them; but they are homely russet apples, fit only for baking and cooking. (But we are yet to have practical experience of our fruit.) Justice Shallow's orchard, with its choice pippins and leather-coats, was doubtless much superior. Nevertheless, it pleases me to think of the good minister, walking in the shadows of these old, fantastically shaped apples-trees, here plucking some of the fruit to taste, there pruning away a too luxuriant branch, and all the while computing how many barrels may be filled, and how large a sum will be added to his stipend by their sale. And the same trees offer their fruit to me as freely as they did to him,--their old branches, like withered hands and arms, holding out apples of the same flavor as they held out to Dr. Ripley in his lifetime. Thus the trees, as living existences, form a peculiar link between the dead and us. My fancy has always found something very interesting in an orchard. Apple-trees, and all fruit-trees, have a domestic character which brings them into relationship with man. They have lost, in a great measure, the wild nature of the forest-tree, and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man, and by contributing to his wants. They have become a part of the family; and their individual characters are as well understood and appreciated as those of the human members. One tree is harsh and crabbed, another mild; one is churlish and illiberal, another exhausts itself with its free-hearted bounties. Even the shapes of apple-trees have great individuality, into such strange postures do they put themselves, and thrust their contorted branches so grotesquely in all directions. And when they have stood around a house for many years, and held converse with successive dynasties of occupants, and gladdened their hearts so often in the fruitful autumn, then it would seem almost sacrilege to cut them down. Besides the apple-trees, there are various other kinds of fruit in close vicinity to the house. When we first arrived, there were several trees of ripe cherries, but so sour that we allowed them to wither upon the branches. Two long rows of currant-bushes supplied us abundantly for nearly four weeks. There are a good many peach-trees, but all of an old date,--their branches rotten, gummy, and mossy,--and their fruit, I fear, will be of very inferior quality. They produce most abundantly, however,--the peaches being almost as numerous as the leaves; and even the sprouts and suckers from the roots of the old trees have fruit upon them. Then three are pear-trees of various kinds, and one or two quince-trees. On the whole, these fruit-trees, and the other items and adjuncts of the place, convey a very agreeable idea of the outward comfort in which the good old Doctor must have spent his life. Everything seems to have fallen to his lot that could possibly be supposed to render the life of a country clergyman easy and prosperous. There is a barn, which probably used to be filled annually with his hay and other agricultural products. There are sheds, and a hen-house, and a pigeon-house, and an old stone pigsty, the open portion of which is overgrown with tall weeds, indicating that no grunter has recently occupied it. . . . I have serious thoughts of inducting a new incumbent in this part of the parsonage. It is our duty to support a pig, even if we have no design of feasting upon him; and, for my own part, I have a great sympathy and interest for the whole race of porkers, and should have much amusement in studying the character of a pig. Perhaps I might try to bring out his moral and intellectual nature, and cultivate his affections. A cat, too, and perhaps a dog, would be desirable additions to our household. August 10th.--The natural taste of man for the original Adam's occupation is fast developing itself in me. I find that I am a good deal interested in our garden, although, as it was planted before we came here, I do not feel the same affection for the plants that I should if the seed had been sown by my own hands. It is something like nursing and educating another person's children. Still, it was a very pleasant moment when I gathered the first string-beans, which were the earliest esculent that the garden contributed to our table. And I love to watch the successive development of each new vegetable, and mark its daily growth, which always affects me with surprise. It is as if something were being created under my own inspection, and partly by my own aid. One day, perchance, I look at my bean-vines, and see only the green leaves clambering up the poles; again, to-morrow, I give a second glance, and there are the delicate blossoms; and a third day, on a somewhat closer observation, I discover the tender young beans, hiding among the foliage. Then, each morning, I watch the swelling of the pods and calculate how soon they will be ready to yield their treasures. All this gives a pleasure and an ideality, hitherto unthought of, to the business of providing sustenance for my family. I suppose Adam felt it in Paradise; and, of merely and exclusively earthly enjoyments, there are few purer and more harmless to be experienced. Speaking of beans, by the way, they are a classical food, and their culture must have been the occupation of many ancient sages and heroes. Summer-squashes are a very pleasant vegetable to be acquainted with. They grow in the forms of urns and vases,--some shallow, others deeper, and all with a beautifully scalloped edge. Almost any squash in our garden might be copied by a sculptor, and would look lovely in marble, or in china; and, if I could afford it, I would have exact imitations of the real vegetable as portions of my dining-service. They would be very appropriate dishes for holding garden-vegetables. Besides the summer-squashes, we have the crook-necked winter-squash, which I always delight to look at, when it turns up its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that imparts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the beholder. Our own crop, however, does not promise to be very abundant; for the leaves formed such a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that most of them dropped off without producing the germ of fruit. Yesterday and to-day I have cut off an immense number of leaves, and have thus given the remaining blossoms a chance to profit by the air and sunshine; but the season is too far advanced, I am afraid, for the squashes to attain any great bulk, and grow yellow in the sun. We have muskmelons and watermelons, which promise to supply us with as many as we can eat. After all, the greatest interest of these vegetables does not seem to consist in their being articles of food. It is rather that we love to see something born into the world; and when a great squash or melon is produced, it is a large and tangible existence, which the imagination can seize hold of and rejoice in. I love, also, to see my own works contributing to the life and well-being of animate nature. It is pleasant to have the bees come and suck honey out of my squash-blossoms, though, when they have laden themselves, they fly away to some unknown hive, which will give me back nothing in return for what my garden has given them. But there is much more honey in the world, and so I am content. Indian corn, in the prime and glory of its verdure, is a very beautiful vegetable, both considered in the separate plant, and in a mass in a broad field, rustling and waving, and surging up and down in the breeze and sunshine of a summer afternoon. We have as many as fifty hills, I should think, which will give us an abundant supply. Pray Heaven that we may be able to eat it all! for it is not pleasant to think that anything which Nature has been at the pains to produce should be thrown away. But the hens will be glad of our superfluity, and so will the pigs, though we have neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we must certainly keep. There is something very sociable and quiet, and soothing, too, in their soliloquies and converse among themselves; and, in an idle and half-meditative mood, it is very pleasant to watch a party of hens picking up their daily subsistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a picture with delight. I find that I have not given a very complete idea of our garden, although it certainly deserves an ample record in this chronicle, since my labors in it are the only present labors of my life. Besides what I have mentioned, we have cucumber-vines, which to-day yielded us the first cucumber of the season, a bed of beets, and another of carrots, and another of parsnips and turnips, none of which promise us a very abundant harvest. In truth, the soil is worn out, and, moreover, received very little manure this season. Also, we have cabbages in superfluous abundance, inasmuch as we neither of us have the least affection for them; and it would be unreasonable to expect Sarah, the cook, to eat fifty head of cabbages. Tomatoes, too, we shall have by and by. At our first arrival, we found green peas ready for gathering, and these, instead of the string-beans, were the first offering of the garden to our board. Saturday, August 13th.--My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy. It is usually supposed that the cares of life come with matrimony; but I seem to have cast off all care, and live on with as much easy trust in Providence as Adam could possibly have felt before he had learned that there was a world beyond Paradise. My chief anxiety consists in watching the prosperity of my vegetables, in observing how they are affected by the rain or sunshine, in lamenting the blight of one squash and rejoicing at the luxurious growth of another. It is as if the original relation between man and Nature were restored in my case, and as if I were to look exclusively to her for the support of my Eve and myself,--to trust to her for food and clothing, and all things needful, with the full assurance that she would not fail me. The fight with the world,--the struggle of a man among men,--the agony of the universal effort to wrench the means of living from a host of greedy competitors,--all this seems like a dream to me. My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from heaven. This is, practically at least, my faith. And so I awake in the morning with a boyish thoughtlessness as to how the outgoings of the day are to be provided for, and its incomings rendered certain. After breakfast, I go forth into my garden, and gather whatever the bountiful Mother has made fit for our present sustenance; and of late days she generally gives me two squashes and a cucumber, and promises me green corn and shell-beans very soon. Then I pass down through our orchard to the river-side, and ramble along its margin in search of flowers. Usually I discern a fragrant white lily, here and there along the shore, growing, with sweet prudishness, beyond the grasp of mortal arm. But it does not escape me so. I know what is its fitting destiny better than the silly flower knows for itself; so I wade in, heedless of wet trousers, and seize the shy lily by its slender stem. Thus I make prize of five or six, which are as many as usually blossom within my reach in a single morning;--some of them partially worm-eaten or blighted, like virgins with an eating sorrow at the heart; others as fair and perfect as Nature's own idea was, when she first imagined this lovely flower. A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of flowers. Besides these, I gather whatever else of beautiful chances to be growing in the moist soil by the river-side,--an amphibious tribe, yet with more richness and grace than the wild-flowers of the deep and dry woodlands and hedge-rows,-- sometimes the white arrow-head, always the blue spires and broad green leaves of the pickerel-flower, which contrast and harmonize so well with the white lilies. For the last two or three days, I have found scattered stalks of the cardinal-flower, the gorgeous scarlet of which it is a joy even to remember. The world is made brighter and sunnier by flowers of such a hue. Even perfume, which otherwise is the soul and spirit of a flower, may be spared when it arrays itself in this scarlet glory. It is a flower of thought and feeling, too; it seems to have its roots deep down in the hearts of those who gaze at it. Other bright flowers sometimes impress me as wanting sentiment; but it is not so with this. Well, having made up my bunch of flowers, I return home with them. . . . . Then I ascend to my study, and generally read, or perchance scribble in this journal, and otherwise suffer Time to loiter onward at his own pleasure, till the dinner-hour. In pleasant days, the chief event of the afternoon, and the happiest one of the day, is our walk. . . . . So comes the night; and I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I myself can suggest no more appropriate epithet, but which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True, it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but for a few summer weeks it is good to live as if this world were heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be, although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil will mingle itself with our realities. Monday, August 15th.--George Hillard and his wife arrived from Boston in the dusk of Saturday evening, to spend Sunday with us. It was a pleasant sensation, when the coach rumbled up our avenue, and wheeled round at the door; for I felt that I was regarded as a man with a household, a man having a tangible existence and locality in the world,--when friends came to avail themselves of our hospitality. It was a sort of acknowledgment and reception of us into the corps of married people,--a sanction by no means essential to our peace and well-being, but yet agreeable enough to receive. So we welcomed them cordially at the door, and ushered them into our parlor, and soon into the supper-room. . . . The night flitted over us all, and passed away, and up rose a gray and sullen morning, . . . . and we had a splendid breakfast of flapjacks, or slapjacks, and whortleberries, which I gathered on a neighboring hill, and perch, bream, and pout, which I hooked out of the river the evening before. About nine o'clock, Hillard and I set out for a walk to Walden Pond, calling by the way at Mr. Emerson's, to obtain his guidance or directions, and he accompanied us in his own illustrious person. We turned aside a little from our way, to visit Mr. ------, a yeoman, of whose homely and self-acquired wisdom Mr. Emerson has a very high opinion. We found him walking in his fields, a short and stalwart and sturdy personage of middle age, with a face of shrewd and kind expression, and manners of natural courtesy. He had a very free flow of talk; for, with a little induction from Mr. Emerson, he began to discourse about the state of the nation, agriculture, and business in general, uttering thoughts that had come to him at the plough, and which had a sort of flavor of the fresh earth about them. His views were sensible and characteristic, and had grown in the soil where we found them; . . . . and he is certainly a man of intellectual and moral substance, a sturdy fact, a reality, something to be felt and touched, whose ideas seem to be dug out of his mind as he digs potatoes, beets, carrots, and turnips out of the ground. After leaving Mr. ------, we proceeded through wood-paths to Walden Pond, picking blackberries of enormous size along the way. The pond itself was beautiful and refreshing to my soul, after such long and exclusive familiarity with our tawny and sluggish river. It lies embosomed among wooded hills, it is not very extensive, but large enough for waves to dance upon its surface, and to look like a piece of blue firmament, earthen-circled. The shore has a narrow, pebbly strand, which it was worth a day's journey to look at, for the sake of the contrast between it and the weedy, oozy margin of the river. Farther within its depths, you perceive a bottom of pure white sand, sparkling through the transparent water, which, methought, was the very purest liquid in the world. After Mr. Emerson left us, Hillard and I bathed in the pond, and it does really seem as if my spirit, as well as corporeal person, were refreshed by that bath. A good deal of mud and river slime had accumulated on my soul; but these bright waters washed them all away. We returned home in due season for dinner. . . . To my misfortune, however, a box of Mediterranean wine proved to have undergone the acetous fermentation; so that the splendor of the festival suffered some diminution. Nevertheless, we ate our dinner with a good appetite, and afterwards went universally to take our several siestas. Meantime there came a shower, which so besprinkled the grass and shrubbery as to make it rather wet for our after-tea ramble. The chief result of the walk was the bringing home of an immense burden of the trailing clematis-vine, now just in blossom, and with which all our flower-stands and vases are this morning decorated. On our return we found Mr. and Mrs. S------, and E. H------, who shortly took their leave, and we sat up late, telling ghost-stories. This morning, at seven, our friends left us. We were both pleased with the visit, and so, I think, were our guests. * * * * * * Monday, August 22d.--I took a walk through the woods yesterday afternoon, to Mr. Emerson's, with a book which Margaret Fuller had left, after a call on Saturday eve. I missed the nearest way, and wandered into a very secluded portion of the forest; for forest it might justly be called, so dense and sombre was the shade of oaks and pines. Once I wandered into a tract so overgrown with bushes and underbrush that I could scarcely force a passage through. Nothing is more annoying than a walk of this kind, where one is tormented by an innumerable host of petty impediments. It incenses and depresses me at the same time. Always when I flounder into the midst of bushes, which cross and intertwine themselves about my legs, and brush my face, and seize hold of my clothes, with their multitudinous grip,--always, in such a difficulty, I feel as if it were almost as well to lie down and die in rage and despair as to go one step farther. It is laughable, after I have got out of the moil, to think how miserably it affected me for the moment; but I had better learn patience betimes, for there are many such bushy tracts in this vicinity, on the margins of meadows, and my walks will often lead me into them. Escaping from the bushes, I soon came to an open space among the woods,--a very lovely spot, with the tall old trees standing around as quietly as if no one had intruded there throughout the whole summer. A company of crows were holding their Sabbath on their summits. Apparently they felt themselves injured or insulted by my presence; for, with one consent, they began to Caw! caw! caw! and, launching themselves sullenly on the air, took flight to some securer solitude. Mine, probably, was the first human shape that they had seen all day long,--at least, if they had been stationary in that spot; but perhaps they had winged their way over miles and miles of country, had breakfasted on the summit of Graylock, and dined at the base of Wachusett, and were merely come to sup and sleep among the quiet woods of Concord. But it was my impression at the time, that they had sat still and silent on the tops of the trees all through the Sabbath day, and I felt like one who should unawares disturb an assembly of worshippers. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of his gravity of mien and black attire. Crows are certainly thieves, and probably infidels. Nevertheless, their voices yesterday were in admirable accordance with the influences of the quiet, sunny, warm, yet autumnal afternoon. They were so far above my head that their loud clamor added to the quiet of the scene, instead of disturbing it. There was no other sound, except the song of the cricket, which is but an audible stillness; for, though it be very loud and heard afar, yet the mind does not take note of it as a sound, so entirely does it mingle and lose its individuality among the other characteristics of coming autumn. Alas for the summer! The grass is still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense as ever, and as green; the flowers are abundant along the margin of the river, and in the hedge-rows, and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid as they were a month ago; and yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine there is an autumnal influence. I know not how to describe it. Methinks there is a sort of coolness amid all the heat, and a mildness in the brightest of the sunshine. A breeze cannot stir without thrilling me with the breath of autumn, and I behold its pensive glory in the far, golden gleams among the long shadows of the trees. The flowers, even the brightest of them,--the golden-rod and the gorgeous cardinals,-- the most glorious flowers of the year,--have this gentle sadness amid their pomp. Pensive autumn is expressed in the glow of every one of them. I have felt this influence earlier in some years than in others. Sometimes autumn may be perceived even in the early days of July. There is no other feeling like that caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception, or rather prophecy, of the year's decay, so deliciously sweet and sad at the same time. After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading; for she had a book in her hand, with some strange title, which I did not understand, and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground, and me sitting by her side. He made some remark about the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy. In the midst of our talk, we heard footsteps above us, on the high bank; and while the person was still hidden among the trees, he called to Margaret, of whom he had gotten a glimpse. Then he emerged from the green shade, and, behold! it was Mr. Emerson. He appeared to have had a pleasant time; for he said that there were Muses in the woods to-day, and whispers to be heard in the breezes. It being now nearly six o'clock, we separated,--Margaret and Mr. Emerson towards his home, and I towards mine. . . . Last evening there was the most beautiful moonlight that ever hallowed this earthly world; and when I went to bathe in the river, which was as calm as death, it seemed like plunging down into the sky. But I had rather be on earth than even in the seventh heaven, just now. Wednesday, August 24th.--I left home at five o'clock this morning to catch some fish for breakfast. I shook our summer apple-tree, and ate the golden apple which fell from it. Methinks these early apples, which come as a golden promise before the treasures of autumnal fruit, are almost more delicious than anything that comes afterwards. We have but one such tree in our orchard; but it supplies us with a daily abundance, and probably will do so for at least a week to come. Meantime other trees begin to cast their ripening windfalls upon the grass; and when I taste them, and perceive their mellowed flavor and blackening seeds, I feel somewhat overwhelmed with the impending bounties of Providence. I suppose Adam, in Paradise, did not like to see his fruits decaying on the ground, after he had watched them through the sunny days of the world's first summer. However, insects, at the worst, will hold a festival upon them, so that they will not be thrown away, in the great scheme of Nature. Moreover, I have one advantage over the primeval Adam, inasmuch as there is a chance of disposing of my superfluous fruits among people who inhabit no Paradise of their own. Passing a little way down along the river-side, I threw in my line, and soon drew out one of the smallest possible of fishes. It seemed to be a pretty good morning for the angler,--an autumnal coolness in the air, a clear sky, but with a fog across the lowlands and on the surface of the river, which a gentle breeze sometimes condensed into wreaths. At first I could barely discern the opposite shore of the river; but, as the sun arose, the vapors gradually dispersed, till only a warm, smoky tint was left along the water's surface. The farm-houses across the river made their appearance out of the dusky cloud; the voices of boys were heard, shouting to the cattle as they drove them to the pastures; a man whetted his scythe, and set to work in a neighboring meadow. Meantime, I continued to stand on the oozy margin of the stream, beguiling the little fish; and though the scaly inhabitants of our river partake somewhat of the character of their native element, and are but sluggish biters, still I contrived to pull out not far from two dozen. They were all bream, a broad, flat, almost circular fish, shaped a good deal like a flounder, but swimming on their edges, instead of on their sides. As far as mere pleasure is concerned, it is hardly worth while to fish in our river, it is so much like angling in a mud-puddle; and one does not attach the idea of freshness and purity to the fishes, as we do to those which inhabit swift, transparent streams, or haunt the shores of the great briny deep. Standing on the weedy margin, and throwing the line over the elder-bushes that dip into the water, it seems as if we could catch nothing but frogs and mud-turtles, or reptiles akin to them. And even when a fish of reputable aspect is drawn out, one feels a shyness about touching him. As to our river, its character was admirably expressed last night by some one who said "it was too lazy to keep itself clean." I might write pages and pages, and only obscure the impression which this brief sentence conveys. Nevertheless, we made bold to eat some of my fish for breakfast, and found them very savory; and the rest shall meet with due entertainment at dinner, together with some shell-beans, green corn, and cucumbers from our garden; so this day's food comes directly and entirely from beneficent Nature, without the intervention of any third person between her and us. Saturday, August 27th.--A peach-tree, which grows beside our house and brushes against the window, is so burdened with fruit that I have had to prop it up. I never saw more splendid peaches in appearance,--great, round, crimson-cheeked beauties, clustering all over the tree. A pear-tree, likewise, is maturing a generous burden of small, sweet fruit, which will require to be eaten at about the same time as the peaches. There is something pleasantly annoying in this superfluous abundance; it is like standing under a tree of ripe apples, and giving it a shake, with the intention of bringing down a single one, when, behold, a dozen come thumping about our ears. But the idea of the infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty of our Mother Nature is well worth attaining; and I never had it so vividly as now, when I find myself, with the few mouths which I am to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman's wealth of fruits. His children, his friends in the village, and the clerical guests who came to preach in his pulpit, were all wont to eat and be filled from these trees. Now, all these hearty old people have passed away, and in their stead is a solitary pair, whose appetites are more than satisfied with the windfalls which the trees throw down at their feet. Howbeit, we shall have now and then a guest to keep our peaches and pears from decaying. G. B------, my old fellow-laborer at the community at Brook Farm, called on me last evening, and dined here to-day. He has been cultivating vegetables at Plymouth this summer, and selling them in the market. What a singular mode of life for a man of education and refinement,--to spend his days in hard and earnest bodily toil, and then to convey the products of his labor, in a wheelbarrow, to the public market, and there retail them out,--a peck of peas or beans, a bunch of turnips, a squash, a dozen ears of green corn! Few men, without some eccentricity of character, would have the moral strength to do this; and it is very striking to find such strength combined with the utmost gentleness, and an uncommon regularity of nature. Occasionally he returns for a day or two to resume his place among scholars and idle people, as, for instance, the present week, when he has thrown aside his spade and hoe to attend the Commencement at Cambridge. He is a rare man,--a perfect original, yet without any one salient point; a character to be felt and understood, but almost impossible to describe: for, should you seize upon any characteristic, it would inevitably be altered and distorted in the process of writing it down. Our few remaining days of summer have been latterly grievously darkened with clouds. To-day there has been an hour or two of hot sunshine; but the sun rose amid cloud and mist, and before he could dry up the moisture of last night's shower upon the trees and grass, the clouds have gathered between him and us again. This afternoon the thunder rumbles in the distance, and I believe a few drops of rain have fallen; but the weight of the shower has burst elsewhere, leaving us nothing but its sullen gloom. There is a muggy warmth in the atmosphere, which takes all the spring and vivacity out of the mind and body. Sunday, August 28th.--Still another rainy day,--the heaviest rain, I believe, that has fallen since we came to Concord (not two months ago). There never was a more sombre aspect of all external nature. I gaze from the open window of my study somewhat disconsolately, and observe the great willow-tree which shades the house, and which has caught and retained a whole cataract of rain among its leaves and boughs; and all the fruit-trees, too, are dripping continually, even in the brief intervals when the clouds give us a respite. If shaken to bring down the fruit, they will discharge a shower upon the head of him who stands beneath. The rain is warm, coming from some southern region; but the willow attests that it is an autumnal spell of weather, by scattering down no infrequent multitude of yellow leaves, which rest upon the sloping roof of the house, and strew the gravel-path and the grass. The other trees do not yet shed their leaves, though in some of them a lighter tint of verdure, tending towards yellow, is perceptible. All day long we hear the water drip, drip, dripping, splash, splash, splashing, from the eaves, and babbling and foaming into the tubs which have been set out to receive it. The old unpainted shingles and boards of the mansion and out-houses are black with the moisture which they have imbibed. Looking at the river, we perceive that its usually smooth and mirrored surface is blurred by the infinity of rain-drops; the whole landscape--grass, trees, and houses--has a completely water-soaked aspect, as if the earth were wet through. The wooded hill, about a mile distant, whither we went to gather whortleberries, has a mist upon its summit, as if the demon of the rain were enthroned there; and if we look to the sky, it seems as if all the water that had been poured down upon us were as nothing to what is to come. Once in a while, indeed, there is a gleam of sky along the horizon, or a half-cheerful, half-sullen lighting up of the atmosphere; the rain-drops cease to patter down, except when the trees shake off a gentle shower; but soon we hear the broad, quiet, slow, and sure recommencement of the rain. The river, if I mistake not, has risen considerably during the day, and its current will acquire some degree of energy. In this sombre weather, when some mortals almost forget that there ever was any golden sunshine, or ever will be any hereafter, others seem absolutely to radiate it from their own hearts and minds. The gloom cannot pervade them; they conquer it, and drive it quite out of their sphere, and create a moral rainbow of hope upon the blackest cloud. As for myself, I am little other than a cloud at such seasons, but such persons contrive to make me a sunny one, shining all through me. And thus, even without the support of a stated occupation, I survive these sullen days and am happy. This morning we read the Sermon on the Mount. In the course of the forenoon, the rain abated for a season, and I went out and gathered some corn and summer-squashes, and picked up the windfalls of apples and pears and peaches. Wet, wet, wet,--everything was wet; the blades of the corn-stalks moistened me; the wet grass soaked my boots quite through; the trees threw their reserved showers upon my head; and soon the remorseless rain began anew, and drove me into the house. When shall we be able to walk again to the far hills, and plunge into the deep woods, and gather more cardinals along the river's margin? The track along which we trod is probably under water now. How inhospitable Nature is during a rain! In the fervid heat of sunny days, she still retains some degree of mercy for us; she has shady spots, whither the sun cannot come; but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes one shiver to think how dripping with wet are those deep, umbrageous nooks, those overshadowed banks, where we find such enjoyment during sultry afternoons. And what becomes of the birds in such a soaking rain as this? Is hope and an instinctive faith so mixed up with their nature that they can be cheered by the thought that the sunshine will return? or do they think, as I almost do, that there is to be no sunshine any more? Very disconsolate must they be among the dripping leaves; and when a single summer makes so important a portion of their lives, it seems hard that so much of it should be dissolved in rain. I, likewise, am greedy of the summer days for my own sake; the life of man does not contain so many of them that one can be spared without regret. Tuesday, August 30th.--I was promised, in the midst of Sunday's rain, that Monday should be fair, and, behold! the sun came back to us, and brought one of the most perfect days ever made since Adam was driven out of Paradise. By the by, was there ever any rain in Paradise? If so, how comfortless must Eve's bower have been! and what a wretched and rheumatic time must they have had on their bed of wet roses! It makes me shiver to think of it. Well, it seemed as if the world was newly created yesterday morning, and I beheld its birth; for I had risen before the sun was over the hill, and had gone forth to fish. How instantaneously did all dreariness and heaviness of the earth's spirit flit away before one smile of the beneficent sun! This proves that all gloom is but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real truth. It requires many clouds, long brooding over us, to make us sad, but one gleam of sunshine always suffices to cheer up the landscape. The banks of the river actually laughed when the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive and cheerful, and, by way of fun and amusement, it had swept away many wreaths of meadow-hay, and old, rotten branches of trees, and all such trumpery. These matters came floating downwards, whirling round and round in the eddies, or hastening onward in the main current; and many of them, before this time, have probably been carried into the Merrimack, and will be borne onward to the sea. The spots where I stood to fish, on my preceding excursion, were now under water; and the tops of many of the bushes, along the river's margin, barely emerged from the stream. Large spaces of meadow are overflowed. There was a northwest-wind throughout the day; and as many clouds, the remnants of departed gloom, were scattered about the sky, the breeze was continually blowing them across the sun. For the most part, they were gone again in a moment; but sometimes the shadow remained long enough to make me dread a return of sulky weather. Then would come the burst of sunshine, making me feel as if a rainy day were henceforth an impossibility. . . . In the afternoon Mr. Emerson called, bringing Mr. ------. He is a good sort of humdrum parson enough, and well fitted to increase the stock of manuscript sermons, of which there must be a fearful quantity already in the world. Mr. ------, however, is probably one of the best and most useful of his class, because no suspicion of the necessity of his profession, constituted as it now is, to mankind, and of his own usefulness and success in it, has hitherto disturbed him; and therefore he labors with faith and confidence, as ministers did a hundred years ago. After the visitors were gone, I sat at the gallery window, looking down the avenue; and soon there appeared an elderly woman,--a homely, decent old matron, dressed in a dark gown, and with what seemed a manuscript book under her arm. The wind sported with her gown, and blew her veil across her face, and seemed to make game of her, though on a nearer view she looked like a sad old creature, with a pale, thin countenance, and somewhat of a wild and wandering expression. She had a singular gait, reeling, as it were, and yet not quite reeling, from one side of the path to the other; going onward as if it were not much matter whether she went straight or crooked. Such were my observations as she approached through the scattered sunshine and shade of our long avenue, until, reaching the door, she gave a knock, and inquired for the lady of the house. Her manuscript contained a certificate, stating that the old woman was a widow from a foreign land, who had recently lost her son, and was now utterly destitute of friends and kindred, and without means of support. Appended to the certificate there was a list of names of people who had bestowed charity on her, with the amounts of their several donations,-- none, as I recollect, higher than twenty-five cents. Here is a strange life, and a character fit for romance and poetry. All the early part of her life, I suppose, and much of her widowhood, were spent in the quiet of a home, with kinsfolk around her, and children, and the lifelong gossiping acquaintances that some women always create about them. But in her decline she has wandered away from all these, and from her native country itself, and is a vagrant, yet with something of the homeliness and decency of aspect belonging to one who has been a wife and mother, and has had a roof of her own above her head,--and, with all this, a wildness proper to her present life. I have a liking for vagrants of all sorts, and never, that I know of, refused my mite to a wandering beggar, when I had anything in my own pocket. There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it. It is desirable, I think, that such persons should be permitted to roam through our land of plenty, scattering the seeds of tenderness and charity, as birds of passage bear the seeds of precious plants from land to land, without even dreaming of the office which they perform. Thursday, September 1st.--Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. . . . He is a keen and delicate observer of nature,--a genuine observer,--which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures and friendly passages with these lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden or wildwood, are his familiar friends. He is also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so well; and, strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, spearhead, or other relic of the red man, as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth. With all this he has more than a tincture of literature,--a deep and true taste for poetry, especially for the elder poets, and he is a good writer,--at least he has written a good article, a rambling disquisition on Natural History, in the last Dial, which, he says, was chiefly made up from journals of his own observations. Methinks this article gives a very fair image of his mind and character,--so true, innate, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as letter of what he sees, even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving the wild beauty of the whole scene. Then there are in the article passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them. There is a basis of good sense and of moral truth, too, throughout the article, which also is a reflection of his character; for he is not unwise to think and feel, and I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know. After dinner (at which we cut the first watermelon and muskmelon that our garden has grown), Mr. Thoreau and I walked up the bank of the river, and at a certain point he shouted for his boat. Forthwith a young man paddled it across, and Mr. Thoreau and I voyaged farther up the stream, which soon became more beautiful than any picture, with its dark and quiet sheet of water, half shaded, half sunny, between high and wooded banks. The late rains have swollen the stream so much that many trees are standing up to their knees, as it were, in the water, and boughs, which lately swung high in air, now dip and drink deep of the passing wave. As to the poor cardinals which glowed upon the bank a few days since, I could see only a few of their scarlet hats, peeping above the tide. Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it. He said that, when some Indians visited Concord a few years ago, he found that he had acquired, without a teacher, their precise method of propelling and steering a canoe. Nevertheless he was desirous of selling the boat of which he was so fit a pilot, and which was built by his own hands; so I agreed to take it, and accordingly became possessor of the Musketaquid. I wish I could acquire the aquatic skill of the original owner. September 2d.--Yesterday afternoon Mr. Thoreau arrived with the boat. The adjacent meadow being overflowed by the rise of the stream, he had rowed directly to the foot of the orchard, and landed at the bars, after floating over forty or fifty yards of water where people were lately making hay. I entered the boat with him, in order to have the benefit of a lesson in rowing and paddling. . . . I managed, indeed, to propel the boat by rowing with two oars, but the use of the single paddle is quite beyond my present skill. Mr. Thoreau had assured me that it was only necessary to will the boat to go in any particular direction, and she would immediately take that course, as if imbued with the spirit of the steersman. It may be so with him, but it is certainly not so with me. The boat seemed to be bewitched, and turned its head to every point of the compass except the right one. He then took the paddle himself, and, though I could observe nothing peculiar in his management of it, the Musketaquid immediately became as docile as a trained steed. I suspect that she has not yet transferred her affections from her old master to her new one. By and by, when we are better acquainted, she will grow more tractable. . . . We propose to change her name from Musketaquid (the Indian name of the Concord River, meaning the river of meadows) to the Pond-Lily, which will be very beautiful and appropriate, as, during the summer season, she will bring home many a cargo of pond-lilies from along the river's weedy shore. It is not very likely that I shall make such long voyages in her as Mr. Thoreau has made. He once followed our river down to the Merrimack, and thence, I believe, to Newburyport in this little craft. In the evening, ---- ------ called to see us, wishing to talk with me about a Boston periodical, of which he had heard that I was to be editor, and to which he desired to contribute. He is an odd and clever young man, with nothing very peculiar about him,--some originality and self-inspiration in his character, but none, or, very little, in his intellect. Nevertheless, the lad himself seems to feel as if he were a genius. I like him well enough, however; but, after all, these originals in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and commonplace than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life. They have a rule and a routine, which they follow with as little variety as other people do their rule and routine; and when once we have fathomed their mystery, nothing can be more wearisome. An innate perception and reflection of truth give the only sort of originality that does not finally grow intolerable. September 4th.--I made a voyage in the Pond-Lily all by myself yesterday morning, and was much encouraged by my success in causing the boat to go whither I would. I have always liked to be afloat, but I think I have never adequately conceived of the enjoyment till now, when I begin to feel a power over that which supports me. I suppose I must have felt something like this sense of triumph when I first learned to swim; but I have forgotten it. O that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements. We had a thunder-storm last evening; and to-day has been a cool, breezy autumnal day, such as my soul and body love. September 18th.--How the summer-time flits away, even while it seems to be loitering onward, arm in arm with autumn! Of late I have walked but little over the hills and through the woods, my leisure being chiefly occupied with my boat, which I have now learned to manage with tolerable skill. Yesterday afternoon I made a voyage alone up the North Branch of Concord River. There was a strong west-wind blowing dead against me, which, together with the current, increased by the height of the water, made the first part of the passage pretty toilsome. The black river was all dimpled over with little eddies and whirlpools; and the breeze, moreover, caused the billows to beat against the bow of the boat, with a sound like the flapping of a bird's wing. The water-weeds, where they were discernible through the tawny water, were straight outstretched by the force of the current, looking as if they were forced to hold on to their roots with all their might. If for a moment I desisted from paddling, the head of the boat was swept round by the combined might of wind and tide. However, I toiled onward stoutly, and, entering the North Branch, soon found myself floating quietly along a tranquil stream, sheltered from the breeze by the woods and a lofty hill. The current, likewise, lingered along so gently that it was merely a pleasure to propel the boat against it. I never could have conceived that there was so beautiful a river-scene in Concord as this of the North Branch. The stream flows through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood, which, as if but half satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle, and unobtrusive as it is, seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it passage; for the trees are rooted on the very verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it. On one side there is a high bank, forming the side of a hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten, though Mr. Thoreau told it to me; and here, in some instances, the trees stand leaning over the river, stretching out their arms as if about to plunge in headlong. On the other side, the bank is almost on a level with the water; and there the quiet congregation of trees stood with feet in the flood, and fringed with foliage down to its very surface. Vines here and there twine themselves about bushes or aspens or alder-trees, and hang their clusters (though scanty and infrequent this season) so that I can reach them from my boat. I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood. Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality. The sky, and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tints, --all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul. There were many tokens of autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colors,--the real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning. These stood on low, marshy spots, where a frost has probably touched them already. Others were of a light, fresh green, resembling the hues of spring, though this, likewise, is a token of decay. The great mass of the foliage, however, appears unchanged; but ever and anon down came a yellow leaf, half flitting upon the air, half falling through it, and finally settling upon the water. A multitude of these were floating here and there along the river, many of them curling upward, so as to form little boats, fit for fairies to voyage in. They looked strangely pretty, with yet a melancholy prettiness, as they floated along. The general aspect of the river, however, differed but little from that of summer,--at least the difference defies expression. It is more in the character of the rich yellow sunlight than in aught else. The water of the stream has now a thrill of autumnal coolness; yet whenever a broad gleam fell across it, through an interstice of the foliage, multitudes of insects were darting to and fro upon its surface. The sunshine, thus falling across the dark river, has a most beautiful effect. It burnishes it, as it were, and yet leaves it as dark as ever. On my return, I suffered the boat to float almost of its own will down the stream, and caught fish enough for this morning's breakfast. But, partly from a qualm of conscience, I finally put them all into the water again, and saw them swim away as if nothing had happened. Monday, October 10th.--A long while, indeed, since my last date. But the weather has been generally sunny and pleasant, though often very cold; and I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air. My chief amusement has been boating up and down the river. A week or two ago (September 27 and 28) I went on a pedestrian excursion with Mr. Emerson, and was gone two days and one night, it being the first and only night that I have spent away from home. We were that night at the village of Harvard, and the next morning walked three miles farther, to the Shaker village, where we breakfasted. Mr. Emerson had a theological discussion with two of the Shaker brethren; but the particulars of it have faded from my memory; and all the other adventures of the tour have now so lost their freshness that I cannot adequately recall them. Wherefore let them rest untold. I recollect nothing so well as the aspect of some fringed gentians, which we saw growing by the roadside, and which were so beautiful that I longed to turn back and pluck them. After an arduous journey, we arrived safe home in the afternoon of the second day,--the first time that I ever came home in my life; for I never had a home before. On Saturday of the same week, my friend D. R------ came to see us, and stayed till Tuesday morning. On Wednesday there was a cattleshow in the village, of which I would give a description, if it had possessed any picturesque points. The foregoing are the chief outward events of our life. In the mean time autumn has been advancing, and is said to be a month earlier than usual. We had frosts, sufficient to kill the bean and squash vines, more than a fortnight ago; but there has since been some of the most delicious Indian-summer weather that I ever experienced,--mild, sweet, perfect days, in which the warm sunshine seemed to embrace the earth and all earth's children with love and tenderness. Generally, however, the bright days have been vexed with winds from the northwest, somewhat too keen and high for comfort. These winds have strewn our avenue with withered leaves, although the trees still retain some density of foliage, which is now imbrowned or otherwise variegated by autumn. Our apples, too, have been falling, falling, falling; and we have picked the fairest of them from the dewy grass, and put them in our store-room and elsewhere. On Thursday, John Flint began to gather those which remained on the trees; and I suppose they will amount to nearly twenty barrels, or perhaps more. As usual when I have anything to sell, apples are very low indeed in price, and will not fetch me more than a dollar a barrel. I have sold my share of the potato-field for twenty dollars and ten bushels of potatoes for my own use. This may suffice for the economical history of our recent life. 12 o'clock, M.--Just now I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold! the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance! He was probably attempting to get a fly, which was on the pane of glass against which he rapped; and on my first motion the feathered visitor took wing. This incident had a curious effect on me. It impressed me as if the bird had been a spiritual visitant, so strange was it that this little wild thing should seem to ask our hospitality. November 8th.--I am sorry that our journal has fallen so into neglect; but I see no chance of amendment. All my scribbling propensities will be far more than gratified in writing nonsense for the press; so that any gratuitous labor of the pen becomes peculiarly distasteful. Since the last date, we have paid a visit of nine days to Boston and Salem, whence we returned a week ago yesterday. Thus we lost above a week of delicious autumnal weather, which should have been spent in the woods or upon the river. Ever since our return, however, until to-day, there has been a succession of genuine Indian-summer days, with gentle winds or none at all, and a misty atmosphere, which idealizes all nature, and a mild, beneficent sunshine, inviting one to lie down in a nook and forget all earthly care. To-day the sky is dark and lowering, and occasionally lets fall a few sullen tears. I suppose we must bid farewell to Indian summer now, and expect no more love and tenderness from Mother Nature till next spring be well advanced. She has already made herself as unlovely in outward aspect as can well be. We took a walk to Sleepy Hollow yesterday, and beheld scarcely a green thing, except the everlasting verdure of the family of pines, which, indeed, are trees to thank God for at this season. A range of young birches had retained a pretty liberal coloring of yellow or tawny leaves, which became very cheerful in the sunshine. There were one or two oak-trees whose foliage still retained a deep, dusky red, which looked rich and warm; but most of the oaks had reached the last stage of autumnal decay,--the dusky brown hue. Millions of their leaves strew the woods and rustle underneath the foot; but enough remain upon the boughs to make a melancholy harping when the wind sweeps over them. We found some fringed gentians in the meadow, most of them blighted and withered; but a few were quite perfect. The other day, since our return from Salem, I found a violet; yet it was so cold that day, that a large pool of water, under the shadow of some trees, had remained frozen from morning till afternoon. The ice was so thick as not to be broken by some sticks and small stones which I threw upon it. But ice and snow too will soon be no extraordinary matters with us. During the last week we have had three stoves put up, and henceforth no light of a cheerful fire will gladden us at eventide. Stoves are detestable in every respect, except that they keep us perfectly comfortable. Thursday, November 24th.--This is Thanksgiving Day, a good old festival, and we have kept it with our hearts, and, besides, have made good cheer upon our turkey and pudding, and pies and custards, although none sat at our board but our two selves. There was a new and livelier sense, I think, that we have at last found a home, and that a new family has been gathered since the last Thanksgiving Day. There have been many bright cold days latterly,--so cold that it has required a pretty rapid pace to keep one's self warm a-walking. Day before yesterday I saw a party of boys skating on a pond of water that has overflowed a neighboring meadow. Running water has not yet frozen. Vegetation has quite come to a stand, except in a few sheltered spots. In a deep ditch we found a tall plant of the freshest and healthiest green, which looked as if it must have grown within the last few weeks. We wander among the wood-paths, which are very pleasant in the sunshine of the afternoons, the trees looking rich and warm,--such of them, I mean, as have retained their russet leaves; and where the leaves are strewn along the paths, or heaped plentifully in some hollow of the hills, the effect is not without a charm. To-day the morning rose with rain, which has since changed to snow and sleet; and now the landscape is as dreary as can well be imagined,--white, with the brownness of the soil and withered grass everywhere peeping out. The swollen river, of a leaden hue, drags itself sullenly along; and this may be termed the first winter's day. Friday, March 31st, 1843.--The first month of spring is already gone; and still the snow lies deep on hill and valley, and the river is still frozen from bank to bank, although a late rain has caused pools of water to stand on the surface of the ice, and the meadows are overflowed into broad lakes. Such a protracted winter has not been known for twenty years, at least. I have almost forgotten the wood-paths and shady places which I used to know so well last summer; and my views are so much confined to the interior of our mansion, that sometimes, looking out of the window, I am surprised to catch a glimpse of houses, at no great distance, which had quite passed out of my recollection. From present appearances, another month may scarcely suffice to wash away all the snow from the open country; and in the woods and hollows it may linger yet longer. The winter will not have been a day less than five months long; and it would not be unfair to call it seven. A great space, indeed, to miss the smile of Nature, in a single year of human life. Even out of the midst of happiness I have sometimes sighed and groaned; for I love the sunshine and the green woods, and the sparkling blue water; and it seems as if the picture of our inward bliss should be set in a beautiful frame of outward nature. . . . As to the daily course of our life, I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away with the necessity of writing for bread. Those prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, because an office would inevitably remove us from our present happy home,--at least from an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance, not a trouble. Every day, I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a word to a human being. . . . In the way of exercise I saw and split wood, and, physically, I never was in a better condition than now. This is chiefly owing, doubtless, to a satisfied heart, in aid of which comes the exercise above mentioned, and about a fair proportion of intellectual labor. On the 9th of this mouth, we left home again on a visit to Boston and Salem. I alone went to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had caught hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good thus to get apart from my happiness, for the sake of contemplating it. On the 21st, I returned to Boston, and went out to Cambridge to dine with Longfellow, whom I had not seen since his return from Europe. The next day we came back to our old house, which had been deserted all this time; for our servant had gone with us to Boston. Friday, April 7th.--My wife has gone to Boston to see her sister M------, who is to be married in two or three weeks, and then immediately to visit Europe for six months. . . . I betook myself to sawing and splitting wood; there being an inward unquietness which demanded active exercise, and I sawed, I think, more briskly than ever before. When I re-entered the house, it was with somewhat of a desolate feeling; yet not without an intermingled pleasure, as being the more conscious that all separation was temporary, and scarcely real, even for the little time that it may last. After my solitary dinner, I lay down, with the Dial in my hand, and attempted to sleep; but sleep would not come. . . . So I arose, and began this record in the journal, almost at the commencement of which I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. Thoreau, who came to return a book, and to announce his purpose of going to reside at Staten Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson's brother. We had some conversation upon this subject, and upon the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects. I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own account, that he is going away, as he is out of health, and may be benefited by his removal; but, on my account, I should like to have him remain here, he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and, with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too. . . . I had a purpose, if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being; but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours after her departure. Saturday, April 8th.--After journalizing yesterday afternoon, I went out and sawed and split wood till teatime, then studied German (translating Lenore), with an occasional glance at a beautiful sunset, which I could not enjoy sufficiently by myself to induce me to lay aside the book. After lamplight, finished Lenore, and drowsed over Voltaire's Candide, occasionally refreshing myself with a tune from Mr. Thoreau's musical-box, which he had left in my keeping. The evening was but a dull one. I retired soon after nine, and felt some apprehension that the old Doctor's ghost would take this opportunity to visit me; but I rather think his former visitations have not been intended for me, and that I am not sufficiently spiritual for ghostly communication. At all events, I met with no disturbance of the kind, and slept soundly enough till six o'clock or thereabouts. The forenoon was spent with the pen in my hand, and sometimes I had the glimmering of an idea, and endeavored to materialize it in words; but on the whole my mind was idly vagrant, and refused to work to any systematic purpose. Between eleven and twelve I went to the post-office, but found no letter; then spent above an hour reading at the Athenaeum. On my way home, I encountered Mr. Flint, for the first time these many weeks, although he is our next neighbor in one direction. I inquired if he could sell us some potatoes, and he promised to send half a bushel for trial. Also, he encouraged me to hope that he might buy a barrel of our apples. After my encounter with Mr. Flint, I returned to our lonely old abbey, opened the door without the usual heart-spring, ascended to my study, and began to read a tale of Tieck. Slow work, and dull work too! Anon, Molly, the cook, rang the bell for dinner,--a sumptuous banquet of stewed veal and macaroni, to which I sat down in solitary state. My appetite served me sufficiently to eat with, but not for enjoyment. Nothing has a zest in my present widowed state. [Thus far I had written, when Mr. Emerson called.] After dinner, I lay down on the couch, with the Dial in my hand as a soporific, and had a short nap; then began to journalize. Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face; and we had as good a talk as I ever remember to have had with him. He spoke of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last meeting. [There rings the tea-bell.] Then we discoursed of Ellery Channing, a volume of whose poems is to be immediately published, with revisions by Mr. Emerson himself and Mr. Sam G. Ward. . . . He calls them "poetry for poets." Next Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well. . . . We talked of Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed and its history written; also of C. N------, who, it appears, is passing through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine and gathering dusk. . . . Salem.--. . . . Here I am, in my old chamber, where I produced those stupendous works of fiction which have since impressed the universe with wonderment and awe! To this chamber, doubtless, in all succeeding ages, pilgrims will come to pay their tribute of reverence;--they will put off their shoes at the threshold for fear of desecrating the tattered old carpets! "There," they will exclaim, "is the very bed in which he slumbered, and where he was visited by those ethereal visions which he afterwards fixed forever in glowing words! There is the wash-stand at which this exalted personage cleansed himself from the stains of earth, and rendered his outward man a fitting exponent of the pure soul within. There, in its mahogany frame, is the dressing-glass, which often reflected that noble brow, those hyacinthine locks, that mouth bright with smiles or tremulous with feeling, that flashing or melting eye, that--in short, every item of the magnanimous face of this unexampled man. There is the pine table,--there the old flag-bottomed chair on which he sat, and at which he scribbled, during his agonies of inspiration! There is the old chest of drawers in which he kept what shirts a poor author may be supposed to have possessed! There is the closet in which was reposited his threadbare suit of black! There is the worn-out shoe-brush with which this polished writer polished his boots. There is--" but I believe, this will be pretty much all, so here I close the catalogue. . . . A cloudy veil stretches over the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and, if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there. I can neither guide nor enlighten him. It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings; and when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or an essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them, not they with me. . . . I have recently been both lectured about and preached about here in my native city; the preacher was Rev. Mr. Fox of Newburyport; but how he contrived to put me into a sermon I know not. I trust he took for his text, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." Salem, March 12th.--. . . . That poor home! how desolate it is now! Last night, being awake, . . . . my thoughts travelled back to the lonely old Manse; and it seemed as if I were wandering up stairs and down stairs all by myself. My fancy was almost afraid to be there alone. I could see every object in a dim, gray light,--our chamber, the study, all in confusion; the parlor, with the fragments of that abortive breakfast on the table, and the precious silver forks, and the old bronze image, keeping its solitary stand upon the mantelpiece. Then, methought, the wretched Vigwiggie came, and jumped upon the window-sill, and clung there with her fore paws, mewing dismally for admittance, which I could not grant her, being there myself only in the spirit. And then came the ghost of the old Doctor, stalking through the gallery, and down the staircase, and peeping into the parlor; and though I was wide awake, and conscious of being so many miles from the spot, still it was quite awful to think of the ghost having sole possession of our home; for I could not quite separate myself from it, after all. Somehow the Doctor and I seemed to be there tete-a-tete. . . . I believe I did not have any fantasies about the ghostly kitchen-maid; but I trust Mary left the flat-irons within her reach, so that she may do all her ironing while we are away, and never disturb us more at midnight. I suppose she comes thither to iron her shroud, and perhaps, likewise, to smooth the Doctor's band. Probably, during her lifetime, she allowed him to go to some ordination or other grand clerical celebration with rumpled linen, and ever since, and throughout all earthly futurity (at least, as long as the house shall stand), she is doomed to exercise a nightly toil with a spiritual flat-iron. Poor sinner!--and doubtless Satan heats the irons for her. What nonsense is all this! but, really, it does make me shiver to think of that poor home of ours. March 16th.--. . . . As for this Mr. ------, I wish he would not be so troublesome. His scheme is well enough, and might possibly become popular; but it has no peculiar advantages with reference to myself, nor do the subjects of his proposed books particularly suit my fancy as themes to write upon. Somebody else will answer his purpose just as well; and I would rather write books of my own imagining than be hired to develop the ideas of an engraver; especially as the pecuniary prospect is not better, nor so good, as it might be elsewhere. I intend to adhere to my former plan of writing one or two mythological story-books, to be published under O'Sullivan's auspices in New York,---which is the only place where books can be published with a chance of profit. As a matter of courtesy, I may call on Mr. ------, if I have time; but I do not intend to be connected with this affair. Sunday, April 9th.--. . . . After finishing my record in the journal, I sat a long time in grandmother's chair, thinking of many things. . . . My spirits were at a lower ebb than they ever descend to when I am not alone; nevertheless, neither was I absolutely sad. Many times I wound and rewound Mr. Thoreau's little musical-box; but certainly its peculiar sweetness had evaporated, and I am pretty sure that I should throw it out of the window were I doomed to hear it long and often. It has not an infinite soul. When it was almost as dark as the moonlight would let it be, I lighted the lamp, and went on with Tieck's tale, slowly and painfully, often wishing for help in my difficulties. At last I determined to learn a little about pronouns and verbs before proceeding further, and so took up the phrase-book, with which I was commendably busy, when, at about a quarter to nine, came a knock at my study door, and, behold, there was Molly with a letter! How she came by it I did not ask, being content to suppose it was brought by a heavenly messenger. I had not expected a letter; and what a comfort it was to me in my loneliness and sombreness! I called Molly to take her note (enclosed), which she received with a face of delight as broad and bright as the kitchen fire. Then I read, and re-read, and re-re-read, and quadruply, quintuply, and sextuply re-read my epistle, until I had it all by heart, and then continued to re-read it for the sake of the penmanship. Then I took up the phrase-book again; but could not study, and so bathed and retired, it being now not far from ten o'clock. I lay awake a good deal in the night, but saw no ghost. I arose about seven, and found that the upper part of my nose, and the region round about, was grievously discolored; and at the angle of the left eye there is a great spot of almost black purple, and a broad streak of the same hue semicircling beneath either eye, while green, yellow, and orange overspread the circumjacent country. It looks not unlike a gorgeous sunset, throwing its splendor over the heaven of my countenance. It will behoove me to show myself as little as possible, else people will think I have fought a pitched battle. . . . The Devil take the stick of wood! What had I done, that it should bemaul me so? However, there is no pain, though, I think, a very slight affection of the eyes. This forenoon I began to write, and caught an idea by the skirts, which I intend to hold fast, though it struggles to get free. As it was not ready to be put upon paper, however, I took up the Dial, and finished reading the article on Mr. Alcott. It is not very satisfactory, and it has not taught me much. Then I read Margaret's article on Canova, which is good. About this time the dinner-bell rang, and I went down without much alacrity, though with a good appetite enough. . . . It was in the angle of my right eye, not my left, that the blackest purple was collected. But they both look like the very Devil. Half past five o'clock.--After writing the above, . . . . I again set to work on Tieck's tale, and worried through several pages; and then, at half past four, threw open one of the western windows of my study, and sallied forth to take the sunshine. I went down through the orchard to the river-side. The orchard-path is still deeply covered with snow; and so is the whole visible universe, except streaks upon the hillsides, and spots in the sunny hollows, where the brown earth peeps through. The river, which a few days ago was entirely imprisoned, has now broken its fetters; but a tract of ice extended across from near the foot of the monument to the abutment of the old bridge, and looked so solid that I supposed it would yet remain for a day or two. Large cakes and masses of ice came floating down the current, which, though not very violent, hurried along at a much swifter pace than the ordinary one of our sluggish river-god. These ice-masses, when they struck the barrier of ice above mentioned, acted upon it like a battering-ram, and were themselves forced high out of the water, or sometimes carried beneath the main sheet of ice. At last, down the stream came an immense mass of ice, and, striking the barrier about at its centre, it gave way, and the whole was swept onward together, leaving the river entirely free, with only here and there a cake of ice floating quietly along. The great accumulation, in its downward course, hit against a tree that stood in mid-current, and caused it to quiver like a reed; and it swept quite over the shrubbery that bordered what, in summer-time, is the river's bank, but which is now nearly the centre of the stream. Our river in its present state has quite a noble breadth. The little hillock which formed the abutment of the old bridge is now an island with its tuft of trees. Along the hither shore a row of trees stand up to their knees, and the smaller ones to their middles, in the water; and afar off, on the surface of the stream, we see tufts of bushes emerging, thrusting up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The water comes over the stone-wall, and encroaches several yards on the boundaries of our orchard. [Here the supper-bell rang.] If our boat were in good order, I should now set forth on voyages of discovery, and visit nooks on the borders of the meadows, which by and by will be a mile or two from the water's edge. But she is in very bad condition, full of water, and, doubtless, as leaky as a sieve. On coming from supper, I found that little Puss had established herself in the study, probably with intent to pass the night here. She now lies on the footstool between my feet, purring most obstreperously. The day of my wife's departure, she came to me, talking with the greatest earnestness; but whether it was to condole with me on my loss, or to demand my redoubled care for herself, I could not well make out. As Puss now constitutes a third part of the family, this mention of her will not appear amiss. How Molly employs herself, I know not. Once in a while, I hear a door slam like a thunder-clap; but she never shows her face, nor speaks a word, unless to announce a visitor or deliver a letter. This day, on my part, will have been spent without exchanging a syllable with any human being, unless something unforeseen should yet call for the exercise of speech before bedtime. Monday, April 10th.--I sat till eight o'clock, meditating upon this world and the next, . . . . and sometimes dimly shaping out scenes of a tale. Then betook myself to the German phrase-book. Ah! these are but dreary evenings. The lamp would not brighten my spirits, though it was duly filled. . . . This forenoon was spent in scribbling, by no means to my satisfaction, until past eleven, when I went to the village. Nothing in our box at the post-office. I read during the customary hour, or more, at the Athenaeum, and returned without saying a word to mortal. I gathered, from some conversation that I heard, that a son of Adam is to be buried this afternoon from the meeting-house; but the name of the deceased escaped me. It is no great matter, so it be but written in the Book of Life. My variegated face looks somewhat more human to-day; though I was unaffectedly ashamed to meet anybody's gaze, and therefore turned my back or my shoulder as much as possible upon the world. At dinner, behold an immense joint of roast veal! I would willingly have had some assistance in the discussion of this great piece of calf. I am ashamed to eat alone; it becomes the mere gratification of animal appetite,--the tribute which we are compelled to pay to our grosser nature; whereas in the company of another it is refined and moralized and spiritualized; and over our earthly victuals (or rather vittles, for the former is a very foolish mode of spelling),--over our earthly vittles is diffused a sauce of lofty and gentle thoughts, and tough meat is mollified with tender feelings. But oh! these solitary meals are the dismallest part of my present experience. When the company rose from table, they all, in my single person, ascended to the study, and employed themselves in reading the article on Oregon in the Democratic Review. Then they plodded onward in the rugged and bewildering depths of Tieck's tale until five o'clock, when, with one accord, they went out to split wood. This has been a gray day, with now and then a sprinkling of snow-flakes through the air. . . . To-day no more than yesterday have I spoken a word to mortal. . . . It is now sunset, and I must meditate till dark. April 11th.--I meditated accordingly, but without any very wonderful result. Then at eight o'clock bothered myself till after nine with this eternal tale of Tieck. The forenoon was spent in scribbling; but at eleven o'clock my thoughts ceased to flow,--indeed, their current has been wofully interrupted all along,--so I threw down my pen, and set out on the daily journey to the village. Horrible walking! I wasted the customary hour at the Athenaeum, and returned home, if home it may now be called. Till dinner-time I labored on Tieck's tale, and resumed that agreeable employment after the banquet. Just when I was on the point of choking with a huge German word, Molly announced Mr. Thoreau. He wished to take a row in the boat, for the last time, perhaps, before he leaves Concord. So we emptied the water out of her, and set forth on our voyage. She leaks, but not more than she did in the autumn. We rowed to the foot of the hill which borders the North Branch, and there landed, and climbed the moist and snowy hillside for the sake of the prospect. Looking down the river, it might well have been mistaken for an arm of the sea, so broad is now its swollen tide; and I could have fancied that, beyond one other headland, the mighty ocean would outspread itself before the eye. On our return we boarded a large cake of ice, which was floating down the river, and were borne by it directly to our own landing-place, with the boat towing behind. Parting with Mr. Thoreau, I spent half an hour in chopping wood, when Molly informed me that Mr. Emerson wished to see me. He had brought a letter of Ellery Channing, written in a style of very pleasant humor. This being read and discussed, together with a few other matters, he took his leave, since which I have been attending to my journalizing duty; and thus this record is brought down to the present moment. April 25th.--Spring is advancing, sometimes with sunny days, and sometimes, as is the case now, with chill, moist, sullen ones. There is an influence in the season that makes it almost impossible for me to bring my mind down to literary employment; perhaps because several months' pretty constant work has exhausted that species of energy,-- perhaps because in spring it is more natural to labor actively than to think. But my impulse now is to be idle altogether,--to lie in the sun, or wander about and look at the revival of Nature from her death-like slumber, or to be borne down the current of the river in my boat. If I had wings, I would gladly fly; yet would prefer to be wafted along by a breeze, sometimes alighting on a patch of green grass, then gently whirled away to a still sunnier spot. . . . O, how blest should I be were there nothing to do! Then I would watch every inch and hair's-breadth of the progress of the season; and not a leaf should put itself forth, in the vicinity of our old mansion, without my noting it. But now, with the burden of a continual task upon me, I have not freedom of mind to make such observations. I merely see what is going on in a very general way. The snow, which, two or three weeks ago, covered hill and valley, is now diminished to one or two solitary specks in the visible landscape; though doubtless there are still heaps of it in the shady places in the woods. There have been no violent rains to carry it off: it has diminished gradually, inch by inch, and day after day; and I observed, along the roadside, that the green blades of grass had sometimes sprouted on the very edge of the snowdrift the moment that the earth was uncovered. The pastures and grass-fields have not yet a general effect of green; nor have they that cheerless brown tint which they wear in later autumn, when vegetation has entirely ceased. There is now a suspicion of verdure,-- the faint shadow of it,--but not the warm reality. Sometimes, in a happy exposure,--there is one such tract across the river, the carefully cultivated mowing-field, in front of an old red homestead,--such patches of land wear a beautiful and tender green, which no other season will equal; because, let the grass be green as it may hereafter, it will not be so set off by surrounding barrenness. The trees in our orchard, and elsewhere, have as yet no leaves; yet to the most careless eye they appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if, by one magic touch, they might instantaneously put forth all their foliage, and the wind, which now sighs through their naked branches, might all at once find itself impeded by innumerable leaves. This sudden development would be scarcely more wonderful than the gleam of verdure which often brightens, in a moment, as it were, along the slope of a bank or roadside. It is like a gleam of sunlight. Just now it was brown, like the rest of the scenery: look again, and there is an apparition of green grass. The Spring, no doubt, comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter has lingered so long that, at best, she can hardly retrieve half the allotted term of her reign. The river, this season, has encroached farther on the land than it has been known to do for twenty years past. It has formed along its course a succession of lakes, with a current through the midst. My boat has lain at the bottom of the orchard, in very convenient proximity to the house. It has borne me over stone fences; and, a few days ago, Ellery Channing and I passed through two rails into the great northern road, along which we paddled for some distance. The trees have a singular appearance in the midst of waters. The curtailment of their trunks quite destroys the proportions of the whole tree; and we become conscious of a regularity and propriety in the forms of Nature, by the effect of this abbreviation. The waters are now subsiding, but gradually. Islands become annexed to the mainland, and other islands emerge from the flood, and will soon, likewise, be connected with the continent. We have seen on a small scale the process of the deluge, and can now witness that of the reappearance of the earth. Crows visited us long before the snow was off. They seem mostly to have departed now, or else to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they haunt all summer long. Ducks came in great numbers, and many sportsmen went in pursuit of them, along the river; but they also have disappeared. Gulls come up from seaward, and soar high overhead, flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the most picturesque birds that I am acquainted with; indeed, quite the most so, because the manner of their flight makes them almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination has time to rest upon them; they have not flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds, and lay hold of these soaring gulls, and repose with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. The smaller birds,--the birds that build their nests in our trees, and sing for us at morning-red,--I will not describe. . . . But I must mention the great companies of blackbirds-- more than the famous "four-and-twenty" who were baked in a pie--that congregate on the tops of contiguous trees, and vociferate with all the clamor of a turbulent political meeting. Politics must certainly be the subject of such a tumultuous debate; but still there is a melody in each individual utterance, and a harmony in the general effect. Mr. Thoreau tells me that these noisy assemblages consist of three different species of blackbirds; but I forget the other two. Robins have been long among us, and swallows have more recently arrived. April 26th.--Here is another misty day, muffling the sun. The lilac-shrubs under my study window are almost in leaf. In two or three days more, I may put forth my hand and pluck a green bough. These lilacs appear to be very aged, and have lost the luxuriant foliage of their prime. Old age has a singular aspect in lilacs, rose-bushes, and other ornamental shrubs. It seems as if such things, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish in immortal youth, or at least to die before their decrepitude. They are trees of Paradise, and therefore not naturally subject to decay; but have lost their birthright by being transplanted hither. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a venerable rose-bush; and there is something analogous to this in human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental--who can give the world nothing but flowers--should die young, and never be seen with gray hairs and wrinkles, any more than the flower-shrubs with mossy bark and scanty foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is not worthy of immortality. Nothing else, indeed, is worthy of it; and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long as they may, and contort themselves in whatever fashion they please, they are still respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two in a season, or none at all. Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow old on earth, should, beside their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites; else men will not be satisfied that the moss should gather on them. Winter and Spring are now struggling for the mastery in my study; and I yield somewhat to each, and wholly to neither. The window is open, and there is a fire in the stove. The day when the window is first thrown open should be an epoch in the year; but I have forgotten to record it. Seventy or eighty springs have visited this old house; and sixty of them found old Dr. Ripley here,--not always old, it is true, but gradually getting wrinkles and gray hairs, and looking more and more the picture of winter. But he was no flower-shrub, but one of those fruit-trees or timber-trees that acquire a grace with their old age. Last Spring found this house solitary for the first time since it was built; and now again she peeps into our open windows and finds new faces here. . . . It is remarkable how much uncleanness winter brings with it, or leaves behind it. . . . The yard, garden, and avenue, which should be my department, require a great amount of labor. The avenue is strewed with withered leaves,--the whole crop, apparently, of last year,--some of which are now raked into heaps; and we intend to make a bonfire of them. . . . There are quantities of decayed branches, which one tempest after another has flung down, black and rotten. In the garden are the old cabbages which we did not think worth gathering last autumn, and the dry bean-vines, and the withered stalks of the asparagus-bed; in short, all the wrecks of the departed year,--its mouldering relics, its dry bones. It is a pity that the world cannot be made over anew every spring. Then, in the yard, there are the piles of firewood, which I ought to have sawed and thrown into the shed long since, but which will cumber the earth, I fear, till June, at least. Quantities of chips are strewn about, and on removing them we find the yellow stalks of grass sprouting underneath. Nature does her best to beautify this disarray. The grass springs up most industriously, especially in sheltered and sunny angles of the buildings, or round the doorsteps,--a locality which seems particularly favorable to its growth; for it is already high enough to bend over and wave in the wind. I was surprised to observe that some weeds (especially a plant that stains the fingers with its yellow juice) had lived, and retained their freshness and sap as perfectly as in summer, through all the frosts and snows of last winter. I saw them, the last green thing, in the autumn; and here they are again, the first in the spring. Thursday, April 27th.--I took a walk into the fields, and round our opposite hill, yesterday noon, but made no very remarkable observation. The frogs have begun their concerts, though not as yet with a full choir. I found no violets nor anemones, nor anything in the likeness of a flower, though I looked carefully along the shelter of the stone-walls, and in all spots apparently propitious. I ascended the hill, and had a wide prospect of a swollen river, extending around me in a semicircle of three or four miles, and rendering the view much finer than in summer, had there only been foliage. It seemed like the formation of a new world; for islands were everywhere emerging, and capes extending forth into the flood; and these tracts, which were thus won from the watery empire, were among the greenest in the landscape. The moment the deluge leaves them, Nature asserts them to be her property by covering them with verdure; or perhaps the grass had been growing under the water. On the hill-top where I stood, the grass had scarcely begun to sprout; and I observed that even those places which looked greenest in the distance were but scantily grass-covered when I actually reached them. It was hope that painted them so bright. Last evening we saw a bright light on the river, betokening that a boat's party were engaged in spearing fish. It looked like a descended star,-- like red Mars,--and, as the water was perfectly smooth, its gleam was reflected downward into the depths. It is a very picturesque sight. In the deep quiet of the night I suddenly heard the light and lively note of a bird from a neighboring tree,--a real song, such as those which greet the purple dawn, or mingle with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the note gushed out from the midst of a dream, in which he fancied himself in Paradise with his mate; and, suddenly awaking, he found he was on a cold, leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality; but if he found his mate beside him, all was well. This is another misty morning, ungenial in aspect, but kinder than it looks; for it paints the hills and valleys with a richer brush than the sunshine could. There is more verdure now than when I looked out of the window an hour ago. The willow-tree opposite my study window is ready to put forth its leaves. There are some objections to willows. It is not a dry and cleanly tree; it impresses me with an association of sliminess; and no trees, I think, are perfectly satisfactory, which have not a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to put forth its leaves, and the last to scatter them on the ground; and during the whole winter its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a cheering influence in a proper point of view. Our old house would lose much were this willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the roof in winter, and its heap of summer verdure. The present Mr. Ripley planted it, fifty years ago, or thereabouts. Friday, June 2d.--Last night there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden. The beans have suffered very much, although, luckily, not more than half that I planted have come up. The squashes, both summer and winter, appear to be almost killed. As to the other vegetables, there is little mischief done,--the potatoes not being yet above ground, except two or three; and the peas and corn are of a hardier nature. It is sad that Nature will so sport with us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her; and then, when we are entirely in her power, striking us to the heart. Our summer commences at the latter end of June, and terminates somewhere about the first of August. There are certainly not more than six weeks of the whole year when a frost may be deemed anything remarkable. Friday, June 23d.--Summer has come at last,--the longest days, with blazing sunshine, and fervid heat. Yesterday glowed like molten brass. Last night was the most uncomfortably and unsleepably sultry that we have experienced since our residence in Concord; and to-day it scorches again. I have a sort of enjoyment in these seven-times-heated furnaces of midsummer, even though they make me droop like a thirsty plant. The sunshine can scarcely be too burning for my taste; but I am no enemy to summer showers. Could I only have the freedom to be perfectly idle now, --no duty to fulfil, no mental or physical labor to perform,--I should be as happy as a squash, and much in the same mode; but the necessity of keeping my brain at work eats into my comfort, as the squash-bugs do into the heart of the vines. I keep myself uneasy and produce little, and almost nothing that is worth producing. The garden looks well now: the potatoes flourish; the early corn waves in the wind; the squashes, both for summer and winter use, are more forward, I suspect, than those of any of my neighbors. I am forced, however, to carry on a continual warfare with the squash-bugs, who, were I to let them alone for a day, would perhaps quite destroy the prospects of the whole summer. It is impossible not to feel angry with these unconscionable insects, who scruple not to do such excessive mischief to me, with only the profit of a meal or two to themselves. For their own sakes they ought at least to wait till the squashes are better grown. Why is it, I wonder, that Nature has provided such a host of enemies for every useful esculent, while the weeds are suffered to grow unmolested, and are provided with such tenacity of life, and such methods of propagation, that the gardener must maintain a continual struggle or they will hopelessly overwhelm him? What hidden virtue is in these things, that it is granted them to sow themselves with the wind, and to grapple the earth with this immitigable stubbornness, and to flourish in spite of obstacles, and never to suffer blight beneath any sun or shade, but always to mock their enemies with the same wicked luxuriance? It is truly a mystery, and also a symbol. There is a sort of sacredness about them. Perhaps, if we could penetrate Nature's secrets, we should find that what we call weeds are more essential to the well-being of the world than the most precious fruit or grain. This may be doubted, however, for there is an unmistakable analogy between these wicked weeds and the bad habits and sinful propensities which have overrun the moral world; and we may as well imagine that there is good in one as in the other. Our peas are in such forwardness that I should not wonder if we had some of them on the table within a week. The beans have come up ill, and I planted a fresh supply only the day before yesterday. We have watermelons in good advancement, and muskmelons also within three or four days. I set out some tomatoes last night, also some capers. It is my purpose to plant some more corn at the end of the month, or sooner. There ought to be a record of the flower-garden, and of the procession of the wild-flowers, as minute, at least, as of the kitchen vegetables and pot-herbs. Above all, the noting of the appearance of the first roses should not be omitted; nor of the Arethusa, one of the delicatest, gracefullest, and in every manner sweetest of the whole race of flowers. For a fortnight past I have found it in the swampy meadows, growing up to its chin in heaps of wet moss. Its hue is a delicate pink, of various depths of shade, and somewhat in the form of a Grecian helmet. To describe it is a feat beyond my power. Also the visit of two friends, who may fitly enough be mentioned among flowers, ought to have been described. Mrs. F. S------ and Miss A. S------. Also I have neglected to mention the birth of a little white dove. I never observed, until the present season, how long and late the twilight lingers in these longest days. The orange line of the western horizon remains till ten o'clock, at least, and how much later I am unable to say. The night before last, I could distinguish letters by this lingering gleam between nine and ten o'clock. The dawn, I suppose, shows itself as early as two o'clock, so that the absolute dominion of night has dwindled to almost nothing. There seems to be also a diminished necessity, or, at all events, a much less possibility, of sleep than at other periods of the year. I get scarcely any sound repose just now. It is summer, and not winter, that steals away mortal life. Well, we get the value of what is taken from us. Saturday, July 1st.--We had our first dish of green peas (a very small one) yesterday. Every day for the last week has been tremendously hot; and our garden flourishes like Eden itself, only Adam could hardly have been doomed to contend with such a ferocious banditti of weeds. Sunday, July 9th.--I know not what to say, and yet cannot be satisfied without marking with a word or two this anniversary. . . . But life now swells and heaves beneath me like a brim-full ocean; and the endeavor to comprise any portion of it in words is like trying to dip up the ocean in a goblet. . . . God bless and keep us! for there is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow,--the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it. July 18th.--This morning I gathered our first summer-squashes. We should have had them some days earlier, but for the loss of two of the vines, either by a disease of the roots or by those infernal bugs. We have had turnips and carrots several times. Currants are now ripe, and we are in the full enjoyment of cherries, which turn out much more delectable than I anticipated. George Hillard and Mrs. Hillard paid us a visit on Saturday last. On Monday afternoon he left us, and Mrs. Hillard still remains here. Friday, July 28th.--We had green corn for dinner yesterday, and shall have some more to-day, not quite full grown, but sufficiently so to be palatable. There has been no rain, except one moderate shower, for many weeks; and the earth appears to be wasting away in a slow fever. This weather, I think, affects the spirits very unfavorably. There is an irksomeness, a restlessness, a pervading dissatisfaction, together with an absolute incapacity to bend the mind to any serious effort. With me, as regards literary production, the summer has been unprofitable; and I only hope that my forces are recruiting themselves for the autumn and winter. For the future, I shall endeavor to be so diligent nine months of the year that I may allow myself a full and free vacation of the other three. Monday, July 31st.--We had our first cucumber yesterday. There were symptoms of rain on Saturday, and the weather has since been as moist as the thirstiest soul could desire. Wednesday, September 13th.--There was a frost the night before last, according to George Prescott; but no effects of it were visible in our garden. Last night, however, there was another, which has nipped the leaves of the winter-squashes and cucumbers, but seems to have done no other damage. This is a beautiful morning, and promises to be one of those heavenly days that render autumn, after all, the most delightful season of the year. We mean to make a voyage on the river this afternoon. Sunday, September 23d.--I have gathered the two last of our summer-squashes to-day. They have lasted ever since the 18th of July, and have numbered fifty-eight edible ones, of excellent quality. Last Wednesday, I think, I harvested our winter-squashes, sixty-three in number, and mostly of fine size. Our last series of green corn, planted about the 1st of July, was good for eating two or three days ago. We still have beans; and our tomatoes, though backward, supply us with a dish every day or two. My potato-crop promises well; and, on the whole, my first independent experiment of agriculture is quite a successful one. This is a glorious day,--bright, very warm, yet with an unspeakable gentleness both in its warmth and brightness. On such days it is impossible not to love Nature, for she evidently loves us. At other seasons she does not give me this impression, or only at very rare intervals; but in these happy, autumnal days, when she has perfected the harvests, and accomplished every necessary thing that she had to do, she overflows with a blessed superfluity of love. It is good to be alive now. Thank God for breath,--yes, for mere breath! when it is made up of such a heavenly breeze as this. It comes to the cheek with a real kiss; it would linger fondly around us, if it might; but, since it must be gone, it caresses us with its whole kindly heart, and passes onward, to caress likewise the next thing that it meets. There is a pervading blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window and think, "O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God!" And such a day is the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Creator would never have made such weather; and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond all thought, if he had not meant us to be immortal. It opens the gates of heaven, and gives us glimpses far inward. Bless me! this flight has carried me a great way; so now let me come back to our old abbey. Our orchard is fast ripening; and the apples and great thumping pears strew the grass in such abundance that it becomes almost a trouble--though a pleasant one--to gather them. This happy breeze, too, shakes them down, as if it flung fruit to us out of the sky; and often, when the air is perfectly still, I hear the quiet fall of a great apple. Well, we are rich in blessings, though poor in money. . . . Friday, October 6th.--Yesterday afternoon I took a solitary walk to Walden Pond. It was a cool, windy day, with heavy clouds rolling and tumbling about the sky, but still a prevalence of genial autumn sunshine. The fields are still green, and the great masses of the woods have not yet assumed their many-colored garments; but here and there are solitary oaks of deep, substantial red, or maples of a more brilliant hue, or chestnuts either yellow or of a tenderer green than in summer. Some trees seem to return to their hue of May or early June before they put on the brighter autumnal tints. In some places, along the borders of low and moist land, a whole range of trees were clothed in the perfect gorgeousness of autumn, of all shades of brilliant color, looking like the palette on which Nature was arranging the tints wherewith to paint a picture. These hues appeared to be thrown together without design; and yet there was perfect harmony among them, and a softness and a delicacy made up of a thousand different brightnesses. There is not, I think, so much contrast among these colors as might at first appear. The more you consider them, the more they seem to have one element among them all, which is the reason that the most brilliant display of them soothes the observer, instead of exciting him. And I know not whether it be more a moral effect or a physical one, operating merely on the eye; but it is a pensive gayety, which causes a sigh often, and never a smile. We never fancy, for instance, that these gayly clad trees might be changed into young damsels in holiday attire, and betake themselves to dancing on the plain. If they were to undergo such a transformation, they would surely arrange themselves in funeral procession, and go sadly along, with their purple and scarlet and golden garments trailing over the withering grass. When the sunshine falls upon them, they seem to smile; but it is as if they were heart-broken. But it is in vain for me to attempt to describe these autumnal brilliancies, or to convey the impression which they make on me. I have tried a thousand times, and always without the slightest self-satisfaction. Fortunately there is no need of such a record, for Nature renews the picture year after year; and even when we shall have passed away from the world, we can spiritually create these scenes, so that we may dispense with all efforts to put them into words. Walden Pond was clear and beautiful as usual. It tempted me to bathe; and, though the water was thrillingly cold, it was like the thrill of a happy death. Never was there such transparent water as this. I threw sticks into it, and saw them float suspended on an almost invisible medium. It seemed as if the pure air were beneath them, as well as above. It is fit for baptisms; but one would not wish it to be polluted by having sins washed into it. None but angels should bathe in it; but blessed babies might be dipped into its bosom. In a small and secluded dell that opens upon the most beautiful cove of the whole lake, there is a little hamlet of huts or shanties, inhabited by the Irish people who are at work upon the railroad. There are three or four of these habitations, the very rudest, I should imagine, that civilized men ever made for themselves,--constructed of rough boards, with the protruding ends. Against some of them the earth is heaped up to the roof, or nearly so; and when the grass has had time to sprout upon them, they will look like small natural hillocks, or a species of ant-hills,--something in which Nature has a larger share than man. These huts are placed beneath the trees, oaks, walnuts, and white-pines, wherever the trunks give them space to stand; and by thus adapting themselves to natural interstices, instead of making new ones, they do not break or disturb the solitude and seclusion of the place. Voices are heard, and the shouts and laughter of children, who play about like the sunbeams that come down through the branches. Women are washing in open spaces, and long lines of whitened clothes are extended from tree to tree, fluttering and gambolling in the breeze. A pig, in a sty even more extemporary than the shanties, is grunting and poking his snout through the clefts of his habitation. The household pots and kettles are seen at the doors; and a glance within shows the rough benches that serve for chairs, and the bed upon the floor. The visitor's nose takes note of the fragrance of a pipe. And yet, with all these homely items, the repose and sanctity of the old wood do not seem to be destroyed or profaned. It overshadows these poor people, and assimilates them somehow or other to the character of its natural inhabitants. Their presence did not shock me any more than if I had merely discovered a squirrel's nest in a tree. To be sure, it is a torment to see the great, high, ugly embankment of the railroad, which is here thrusting itself into the lake, or along its margin, in close vicinity to this picturesque little hamlet. I have seldom seen anything more beautiful than the cove on the border of which the huts are situated; and the more I looked, the lovelier it grew. The trees overshadowed it deeply; but on one side there was some brilliant shrubbery which seemed to light up the whole picture with the effect of a sweet and melancholy smile. I felt as if spirits were there,--or as if these shrubs had a spiritual life. In short, the impression was indefinable; and, after gazing and musing a good while, I retraced my steps through the Irish hamlet, and plodded on along a wood-path. According to my invariable custom, I mistook my way, and, emerging upon the road, I turned my back instead of my face towards Concord, and walked on very diligently till a guide-board informed me of my mistake. I then turned about, and was shortly overtaken by an old yeoman in a chaise, who kindly offered me a drive, and soon set me down in the village. [EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS.] Salem, April 14th, 1844.--. . . . I went to George Hillard's office, and he spoke with immitigable resolution of the necessity of my going to dine with Longfellow before returning to Concord; but I have an almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt to get me out to dinner. Possibly, however, I may go. Afterwards I called on Colonel Hall, who held me long in talk about politics and other sweetmeats. Then I stepped into a book auction, not to buy, but merely to observe, and, after a few moments, who should come in, with a smile as sweet as sugar (though savoring rather of molasses), but, to my horror and petrifaction, ---- ------! I anticipated a great deal of bore and botheration; but, through Heaven's mercy, he merely spoke a few words, and left me. This is so unlike his deportment in times past, that I suspect "The Celestial Railroad" must have given him a pique; and, if so, I shall feel as if Providence had sufficiently rewarded me for that pious labor. In the course of the forenoon I encountered Mr. Howes in the street. He looked most exceedingly depressed, and, pressing my hand with peculiar emphasis, said that he was in great affliction, having just heard of his son George's death in Cuba. He seemed encompassed and overwhelmed by this misfortune, and walks the street as in a heavy cloud of his own grief, forth from which he extended his hand to meet my grasp. I expressed my sympathy, which I told him I was now the more capable of feeling in a father's suffering, as being myself the father of a little girl,--and, indeed, the being a parent does give one the freedom of a wider range of sorrow as well as of happiness. He again pressed my hand, and left me. . . . When I got to Salem, there was great joy, as you may suppose. . . . Mother hinted an apprehension that poor baby would be spoilt, whereupon I irreverently observed that, having spoiled her own three children, it was natural for her to suppose that all other parents would do the same; when she averred that it was impossible to spoil such children as E---- and I, because she had never been able to do anything with us. . . . I could hardly convince them that Una had begun to smile so soon. It surprised my mother, though her own children appear to have been bright specimens of babyhood. E---- could walk and talk at nine months old. I do not understand that I was quite such a miracle of precocity, but should think it not impossible, inasmuch as precocious boys are said to make stupid men. May 27th, 1844.--. . . . My cook fills his office admirably. He prepared what I must acknowledge to be the best dish of fried fish and potatoes for dinner to-day that I ever tasted in this house. I scarcely recognized the fish of our own river. I make him get all the dinners, while I confine myself to the much lighter task of breakfast and tea. He also takes his turn in washing the dishes. We had a very pleasant dinner at Longfellow's, and I liked Mrs. Longfellow very much. The dinner was late and we sat long; so that C---- and I did not get to Concord till half past nine o'clock, and truly the old Manse seemed somewhat dark and desolate. The next morning George Prescott came with Una's Lion, who greeted me very affectionately, but whined and moaned as if he missed somebody who should have been here. I am not quite so strict as I should be in keeping him out of the house; but I commiserate him and myself, for are we not both of us bereaved? C----, whom I can no more keep from smoking than I could the kitchen chimney, has just come into the study with a cigar, which might perfume this letter and make you think it came from my own enormity, so I may as well stop here. May 29th.--C---- is leaving me, to my unspeakable relief; for he has had a bad cold, which caused him to be much more troublesome and less amusing than might otherwise have been the case. May 31st.--. . . . I get along admirably, and am at this moment superintending the corned beef, which has been on the fire, as it appears to me, ever since the beginning of time, and shows no symptom of being done before the crack of doom. Mrs. Hale says it must boil till it becomes tender; and so it shall, if I can find wood to keep the fire a-going. Meantime, I keep my station in the dining-room, and read or write as composedly as in my own study. Just now, there came a very important rap at the front door, and I threw down a smoked herring which I had begun to eat, as there is no hope of the corned beef to-day, and went to admit the visitor. Who should it be but Ben B------, with a very peculiar and mysterious grin upon his face! He put into my hand a missive directed to "Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne." It contained a little bit of card, signifying that Dr. L. F------ and Miss C. B------ receive their friends Thursday eve, June 6. I am afraid I shall be too busy washing my dishes to pay many visits. The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal. However, I moralize deeply on this and other matters, and have discovered that all the trouble and affliction in the world come from the necessity of cleansing away our earthly stains. I ate the last morsel of bread yesterday, and congratulate myself on being now reduced to the fag-end of necessity. Nothing worse can happen, according to ordinary modes of thinking, than to want bread; but, like most afflictions, it is more in prospect than reality. I found one cracker in the tureen, and exulted over it as if it had been so much gold. However, I have sent a petition to Mrs. P------ stating my destitute condition, and imploring her succor; and, till it arrive, I shall keep myself alive on herrings and apples, together with part of a pint of milk, which I share with Leo. He is my great trouble now, though an excellent companion too. But it is not easy to find food for him, unless I give him what is fit for Christians,--though, for that matter, he appears to be as good a Christian as most laymen, or even as some of the clergy. I fried some pouts and eels, yesterday, on purpose for him, for he does not like raw fish. They were very good, but I should hardly have taken the trouble on my own account. George P------ has just come to say that Mrs. P------ has no bread at present, and is gone away this afternoon, but that she will send me some to-morrow. I mean to have a regular supply from the same source. . . . You cannot imagine how much the presence of Leo relieves the feeling of perfect loneliness. He insists upon being in the room with me all the time, except at night, when he sleeps in the shed, and I do not find myself severe enough to drive him out. He accompanies me likewise in all my walks to the village and elsewhere; and, in short, keeps at my heels all the time, except when I go down cellar. Then he stands at the head of the stairs and howls, as if he never expected to see me again. He is evidently impressed with the present solitude of our old abbey, both on his own account and mine, and feels that he may assume a greater degree of intimacy than would be otherwise allowable. He will be easily brought within the old regulations after your return. P. S. 3 o'clock.--The beef is done!!! Concord. The old Manse. June 2d.--. . . . Everything goes on well with me. At the time of writing my last letter, I was without bread. Well, just at supper-time came Mrs. B------ with a large covered dish, which proved to contain a quantity of specially good flapjacks, piping hot, prepared, I suppose, by the fair hands of Miss Martha or Miss Abby, for Mrs. P------ was not at home. They served me both for supper and breakfast; and I thanked Providence and the young ladies, and compared myself to the prophet fed by ravens,--though the simile does rather more than justice to myself, and not enough to the generous donors of the flapjacks. The next morning, Mrs. P------ herself brought two big loaves of bread, which will last me a week, unless I have some guests to provide for. I have likewise found a hoard of crackers in one of the covered dishes; so that the old castle is sufficiently provisioned to stand a long siege. The corned beef is exquisitely done, and as tender as a young lady's heart, all owing to my skilful cookery; for I consulted Mrs. Hale at every step, and precisely followed her directions. To say the truth, I look upon it as such a masterpiece in its way, that it seems irreverential to eat it. Things on which so much thought and labor are bestowed should surely be immortal. . . . Leo and I attended divine services this morning in a temple not made with hands. We went to the farthest extremity of Peter's path, and there lay together under an oak, on the verge of the broad meadow. Concord, June 6th.--. . . . Mr. F------ arrived yesterday, and appeared to be in most excellent health, and as happy as the sunshine. About the first thing he did was to wash the dishes; and he is really indefatigable in the kitchen, so that I am quite a gentleman of leisure. Previous to his arrival, I had kindled no fire for four entire days, and had lived all that time on the corned beef, except one day, when Ellery and I went down the river on a fishing excursion. Yesterday, we boiled some lamb, which we shall have cold for dinner to-day. This morning, Mr. F------ fried a sumptuous dish of eels for breakfast. Mrs. P------ continues to be the instrument of Providence, and yesterday sent us a very nice plum. pudding, I have told Mr. F------ that I shall be engaged in the forenoons, and he is to manage his own occupations and amusements during that time. . . . Leo, I regret to say, has fallen under suspicion of a very great crime,-- nothing less than murder,--a fowl crime it may well be called, for it is the slaughter of one of Mr. Hayward's hens. He has been seen to chase the hens, several times, and the other day one of them was found dead. Possibly he may be innocent, and, as there is nothing but circumstantial evidence, it must be left with his own conscience. Meantime, Mr. Hayward, or somebody else, seems to have given him such a whipping that he is absolutely stiff, and walks about like a rheumatic old gentleman. I am afraid, too, that he is an incorrigible thief. Ellery says he has seen him coming up the avenue with a calf's whole head in his mouth. How he came by it is best known to Leo himself. If he were a dog of fair character, it would be no more than charity to conclude that he had either bought it, or had it given to him; but with the other charges against him, it inclines me to great distrust of his moral principles. Be that as it may, he managed his stock of provisions very thriftily,--burying it in the earth, and eating a portion of it whenever he felt an appetite. If he insists upon living by highway robbery, it would be well to make him share his booty with us. . . . June 10th.--. . . . Mr. F------ is in perfect health, and absolutely in the seventh heaven, and he talks and talks and talks and talks; and I listen and listen and listen with a patience for which, in spite of all my sins, I firmly expect to be admitted to the mansions of the blessed. And there is really a contentment in being able to make this poor, world-worn, hopeless, half-crazy man so entirely comfortable as he seems to be here. He is an admirable cook. We had some roast veal and a baked rice-pudding on Sunday, really a fine dinner, and cooked in better style than Mary can equal; and George Curtis came to dine with us. Like all male cooks, he is rather expensive, and has a tendency to the consumption of eggs in his various concoctions. . . . I have had my dreams of splendor; but never expected to arrive at the dignity of keeping a man-cook. At first we had three meals a day, but now only two. . . . * * * * * * We dined at Mr. Emerson's the other day, in company with Mr. Hedge. Mr. Bradford has been to see us two or three times. . . . He looks thinner than ever. [PASSAGES FROM NOTE-BOOKS.] May 5th, 1850.--I left Portsmouth last Wednesday, at the quarter past twelve, by the Concord Railroad, which at New Market unites with the Boston and Maine Railroad about ten miles from Portsmouth. The station at New Market is a small wooden building, with one railroad passing on one side, and another on another, and the two crossing each other at right angles. At a little distance stands a black, large, old, wooden church, with a square tower, and broken windows, and a great rift through the middle of the roof, all in a stage of dismal ruin and decay. A farm-house of the old style, with a long sloping roof, and as black as the church, stands on the opposite side of the road, with its barns; and these are all the buildings in sight of the railroad station. On the Concord rail, in the train of cars, with the locomotive puffing, and blowing off its steam, and making a great bluster in that lonely place, while along the other railroad stretches the desolate track, with the withered weeds growing up betwixt the two lines of iron, all so desolate. And anon you hear a low thunder running along these iron rails; it grows louder; an object is seen afar off; it approaches rapidly, and comes down upon you like fate, swift and inevitable. In a moment, it dashes along in front of the station-house, and comes to a pause, the locomotive hissing and fuming in its eagerness to go on. How much life has come at once into this lonely place! Four or five long cars, each, perhaps, with fifty people in it, reading newspapers, reading pamphlet novels, chattering, sleeping; all this vision of passing life! A moment passes, while the luggage-men are putting on the trunks and packages; then the bell strikes a few times, and away goes the train again, quickly out of sight of those who remain behind, while a solitude of hours again broods over the station-house, which, for an instant, has thus been put in communication with far-off cities, and then remains by itself, with the old, black, ruinous church, and the black old farm-house, both built years and years ago, before railroads were ever dreamed of. Meantime, the passenger, stepping from the solitary station into the train, finds himself in the midst of a new world all in a moment. He rushes out of the solitude into a village; thence, through woods and hills, into a large inland town; beside the Merrimack, which has overflowed its banks, and eddies along, turbid as a vast mud-puddle, sometimes almost laving the doorstep of a house, and with trees standing in the flood half-way up their trunks. Boys, with newspapers to sell, or apples and lozenges; many passengers departing and entering, at each new station; the more permanent passenger, with his check or ticket stuck in his hat-band, where the conductor may see it. A party of girls, playing at ball with a young man. Altogether it is a scene of stirring life, with which a person who had been waiting long for the train to come might find it difficult at once to amalgamate himself. It is a sombre, brooding day, and begins to rain as the cars pass onward. In a little more than two hours we find ourselves in Boston surrounded by eager hackmen. Yesterday I went to the Athenaeum, and, being received with great courtesy by Mr. Folsom, was shown all over the edifice from the very bottom to the very top, whence I looked out over Boston. It is an admirable point of view; but, it being an overcast and misty day, I did not get the full advantage of it. The library is in a noble hall, and looks splendidly with its vista of alcoves. The most remarkable sight, however, was Mr. Hildreth, writing his history of the United States. He sits at a table, at the entrance of one of the alcoves, with his books and papers before him, as quiet and absorbed as he would be in the loneliest study; now consulting an authority; now penning a sentence or a paragraph, without seeming conscious of anything but his subject. It is very curious thus to have a glimpse of a book in process of creation under one's eye. I know not how many hours he sits there; but while I saw him he was a pattern of diligence and unwandering thought. He had taken himself out of the age, and put himself, I suppose, into that about which he was writing. Being deaf, he finds it much the easier to abstract himself. Nevertheless, it is a miracle. He is a thin, middle-aged man, in black, with an intelligent face, rather sensible than scholarlike. Mr. Folsom accompanied me to call upon Mr. Ticknor, the historian of Spanish literature. He has a fine house, at the corner of Park and Beacon Streets, perhaps the very best position in Boston. A marble hall, a wide and easy staircase, a respectable old man-servant evidently long at home in the mansion, to admit us. We entered the library, Mr. Folsom considerably in advance, as being familiar with the house; and I heard Mr. Ticknor greet him in friendly tones, their scholar-like and bibliographical pursuits, I suppose, bringing them into frequent conjunction. Then I was introduced, and received with great distinction, but yet without any ostentatious flourish of courtesy. Mr. Ticknor has a great head, and his hair is gray or grayish. You recognize in him at once the man who knows the world, the scholar, too, which probably is his more distinctive character, though a little more under the surface. He was in his slippers; a volume of his book was open on a table, and apparently he had been engaged in revising or annotating it. His library is a stately and beautiful room for a private dwelling, and itself looks large and rich. The fireplace has a white marble frame about it, sculptured with figures and reliefs. Over it hung a portrait of Sir Walter Scott, a copy, I think, of the one that represents him in Melrose Abbey. Mr. Ticknor was most kind in his alacrity to solve the point on which Mr. Folsom, in my behalf, had consulted him (as to whether there had been any English translation of the Tales of Cervantes); and most liberal in his offers of books from his library. Certainly, he is a fine example of a generous-principled scholar, anxious to assist the human intellect in its efforts and researches. Methinks he must have spent a happy life (as happiness goes among mortals), writing his great three-volumed book for twenty years; writing it, not for bread, nor with any uneasy desire of fame, but only with a purpose to achieve something true and enduring. He is, I apprehend, a man of great cultivation and refinement, and with quite substance enough to be polished and refined, without being worn too thin in the process,--a man of society. He related a singular story of an attempt of his to become acquainted with me years ago, when he mistook my kinsman Eben for me. At half past four, I went to Mr. Thompson's, the artist who has requested to paint my picture. This was the second sitting. The portrait looked dimly out from the canvas, as from a cloud, with something that I could recognize as my outline, but no strong resemblance as yet. I have had three portraits taken before this,--an oil picture, a miniature, and a crayon sketch,--neither of them satisfactory to those most familiar with my physiognomy. In fact, there is no such thing as a true portrait; they are all delusions, and I never saw any two alike, nor hardly any two that I would recognize, merely by the portraits themselves, as being of the same man. A bust has more reality. This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean idea of his art; a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of the New Church; and I have generally found something marked in men who adopt that faith. He had painted a good picture of Bryant. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim at it in his artistic endeavors. May 6th.--This morning it is an easterly rain (south-easterly, I should say just now at twelve o'clock), and I went at nine, by appointment, to sit for my picture. The artist painted awhile; but soon found that he had not so much light as was desirable, and complained that his tints were as muddy as the weather. Further sitting was therefore postponed till to-morrow at eleven. It will be a good picture; but I see no assurance, as yet, of the likeness. An artist's apartment is always very interesting to me, with its pictures, finished and unfinished; its little fancies in the pictorial way,--as here two sketches of children among flowers and foliage, representing Spring and Summer, Winter and Autumn being yet to come out of the artist's mild; the portraits of his wife and children; here a clergyman, there a poet; here a woman with the stamp of reality upon her, there a feminine conception which we feel not to have existed. There was an infant Christ, or rather a child Christ, not unbeautiful, but scarcely divine. I love the odor of paint in an artist's room; his palette and all his other tools have a mysterious charm for me. The pursuit has always interested my imagination more than any other, and I remember before having my first portrait taken, there was a great bewitchery in the idea, as if it were a magic process. Even now, it is not without interest to me. I left Mr. Thompson before ten, and took my way through the sloppy streets to the Athenaeum, where I looked over the newspapers and periodicals, and found two of my old stories (Peter Goldthwaite and the Shaker Bridal) published as original in the last London Metropolitan! The English are much more unscrupulous and dishonest pirates than ourselves. However, if they are poor enough to perk themselves in such false feathers as these, Heaven help them! I glanced over the stories, and they seemed painfully cold and dull. It is the more singular that these should be so published, inasmuch as the whole book was republished in London, only a few months ago. Mr. Fields tells me that two publishers in London had advertised the Scarlet Letter as in press, each book at a shilling. * * * * * * Certainly life is made much more tolerable, and man respects himself far more, when he takes his meals with a certain degree of order and state. There should be a sacred law in these matters; and, as consecrating the whole business, the preliminary prayer is a good and real ordinance. The advance of man from a savage and animal state may be as well measured by his mode and morality of dining, as by any other circumstance. At Mr. Fields's, soon after entering the house, I heard the brisk and cheerful notes of a canary-bird, singing with great vivacity, and making its voice echo through the large rooms. It was very pleasant, at the close of the rainy, east-windy day, and seemed to fling sunshine through the dwelling. May 7th.--I did not go out yesterday afternoon, but after tea I went to Parker's. The drinking and smoking shop is no bad place to see one kind of life. The front apartment is for drinking. The door opens into Court Square, and is denoted, usually, by some choice specimens of dainties exhibited in the windows, or hanging beside the door-post; as, for instance, a pair of canvas-back ducks, distinguishable by their delicately mottled feathers; an admirable cut of raw beefsteak; a ham, ready boiled, and with curious figures traced in spices on its outward fat; a half, or perchance the whole, of a large salmon, when in season; a bunch of partridges, etc., etc. A screen stands directly before the door, so as to conceal the interior from an outside barbarian. At the counter stand, at almost all hours,--certainly at all hours when I have chanced to observe,--tipplers, either taking a solitary glass, or treating all round, veteran topers, flashy young men, visitors from the country, the various petty officers connected with the law, whom the vicinity of the Court-House brings hither. Chiefly, they drink plain liquors, gin, brandy, or whiskey, sometimes a Tom and Jerry, a gin cocktail (which the bar-tender makes artistically, tossing it in a large parabola from one tumbler to another, until fit for drinking), a brandy-smash, and numerous other concoctions. All this toping goes forward with little or no apparent exhilaration of spirits; nor does this seem to be the object sought,--it being rather, I imagine, to create a titillation of the coats of the stomach and a general sense of invigoration, without affecting the brain. Very seldom does a man grow wild and unruly. The inner room is hung round with pictures and engravings of various kinds,--a painting of a premium ox, a lithograph of a Turk and of a Turkish lady, . . . . and various showily engraved tailors' advertisements, and other shop-bills; among them all, a small painting of a drunken toper, sleeping on a bench beside the grog-shop,--a ragged, half-hatless, bloated, red-nosed, jolly, miserable-looking devil, very well done, and strangely suitable to the room in which it hangs. Round the walls are placed some half a dozen marble-topped tables, and a centre-table in the midst; most of them strewn with theatrical and other show-bills; and the large theatre-bills, with their type of gigantic solidity and blackness, hung against the walls. Last evening, when I entered, there was one guest somewhat overcome with liquor, and slumbering with his chair tipped against one of the marble tables. In the course of a quarter of an hour, he roused himself (a plain, middle-aged man), and went out with rather an unsteady step, and a hot, red face. One or two others were smoking, and looking over the papers, or glancing at a play-bill. From the centre of the ceiling descended a branch with two gas-burners, which sufficiently illuminated every corner of the room. Nothing is so remarkable in these bar-rooms and drinking-places, as the perfect order that prevails: if a man gets drunk, it is no otherwise perceptible than by his going to sleep, or his inability to walk. Pacing the sidewalk in front of this grog-shop of Parker's (or sometimes, on cold and rainy days, taking his station inside), there is generally to be observed an elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody, but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. he is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay (perhaps by dint of too frequent visits at Parker's bar), he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered, "to collect his rents," as Parker says,--that is, to catch an occasional ninepence from some charitable acquaintances, or a glass of liquor at the bar. The word "ragamuffin," which I have used above, does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety too, and a kind of decency in his groggy and red-nosed destitution. Underground, beneath the drinking and smoking rooms, is Parker's eating-hall, extending all the way to Court Street. All sorts of good eating may be had there, and a gourmand may feast at what expense he will. I take an interest in all the nooks and crannies and every development of cities; so here I try to make a description of the view from the back windows of a house in the centre of Boston, at which I now glance in the intervals of writing. The view is bounded, at perhaps thirty yards' distance, by a row of opposite brick dwellings, standing, I think, on Temple Place; houses of the better order, with tokens of genteel families visible in all the rooms betwixt the basements and the attic windows in the roof; plate-glass in the rear drawing-rooms, flower-pots in some of the windows of the upper stories. Occasionally, a lady's figure, either seated or appearing with a flitting grace, or dimly manifest farther within the obscurity of the room. A balcony, with a wrought-iron fence running along under the row of drawing-room windows, above the basement. In the space betwixt the opposite row of dwellings and that in which I am situated are the low out-houses of the above-described houses, with flat roofs; or solid brick walls, with walks on them, and high railings, for the convenience of the washerwomen in hanging out their clothes. In the intervals are grass-plots, already green, because so sheltered; and fruit-trees, now beginning to put forth their leaves, and one of them, a cherry-tree, almost in full blossom. Birds flutter and sing among these trees. I should judge it a good site for the growth of delicate fruit; for, quite enclosed on all sides by houses, the blighting winds cannot molest the trees. They have sunshine on them a good part of the day, though the shadow must come early, and I suppose there is a rich soil about the roots. I see grapevines clambering against one wall, and also peeping over another, where the main body of the vine is invisible to me. In another place, a frame is erected for a grapevine, and probably it will produce as rich clusters as the vines of Madeira, here in the heart of the city, in this little spot of fructifying earth, while the thunder of wheels rolls about it on every side. The trees are not all fruit-trees. One pretty well-grown buttonwood-tree aspires upward above the roofs of the houses. In the full verdure of summer, there will be quite a mass or curtain of foliage between the hither and the thither row of houses. Afternoon.--At eleven, I went to give Mr. Thompson a sitting for my picture. I like the painter. He seems to reverence his art and to aim at truth in it, as I said before; a man of gentle disposition too, and simplicity of life and character. I seated myself in the pictorial chair, with the only light in the room descending upon me from a high opening, almost at the ceiling, the rest of the sole window being shuttered. He began to work, and we talked in an idle and desultory way,--neither of us feeling very conversable,--which he attributed to the atmosphere, it being a bright, west-windy, bracing day. We talked about the pictures of Christ, and how inadequate and untrue they are. He said he thought artists should attempt only to paint child-Christs, human powers being inadequate to the task of painting such purity and holiness in a manly development. Then he said that an idea of a picture had occurred to him that morning, while reading a chapter in the New Testament,--how "they parted his garments among them, and for his vesture did cast lots." His picture was to represent the soldier to whom the garment without a seam had fallen, after taking it home and examining it, and becoming impressed with a sense of the former wearer's holiness. I do not quite see how he would make such a picture tell its own story;-- but I find the idea suggestive to my own mind, and I think I could make something of it. We talked of physiognomy and impressions of character, --first impressions,--and how apt they are to come aright in the face of the closest subsequent observation. There were several visitors in the course of the sitting, one a gentleman, a connection from the country, with whom the artist talked about family matters and personal affairs,--observing on the poorness of his own business, and that he had thoughts of returning to New York. I wish he would meet with better success. Two or three ladies also looked in. Meanwhile Mr. Thompson had been painting with more and more eagerness, casting quick, keen glances at me, and then making hasty touches on the picture, as if to secure with his brush what he had caught with his eye. He observed that he was just getting interested in the work, and I could recognize the feeling that was in him as akin to what I have experienced myself in the glow of composition. Nevertheless, he seemed able to talk about foreign matters, through it all. He continued to paint in this rapid way, up to the moment of closing the sitting; when he took the canvas from the easel, without giving me time to mark what progress he had made, as he did the last time. The artist is middle-sized, thin, a little stooping, with a quick, nervous movement. He has black hair, not thick, a beard under his chin, a small head, but well-developed forehead, black eyebrows, eyes keen, but kindly, and a dark face, not indicating robust health, but agreeable in its expression. His voice is gentle and sweet, and such as comes out from amidst refined feelings. He dresses very simply and unpictorially in a gray frock or sack, and does not seem to think of making a picture of himself in his own person. At dinner to-day there was a young Frenchman, whom ------ befriended a year or so ago, when he had not another friend in America, and obtained employment for him in a large dry-goods establishment. He is a young man of eighteen or thereabouts, with smooth black hair, neatly dressed; his face showing a good disposition, but with nothing of intellect or character. It is funny to think of this poor little Frenchman, a Parisian too, eating our most un-French victuals,--our beefsteaks, and roasts, and various homely puddings and hams, and all things most incongruent to his hereditary stomach; but nevertheless he eats most cheerfully and uncomplainingly. He has not a large measure of French vivacity, never rattles, never dances, nor breaks into ebullitions of mirth and song; on the contrary, I have never known a youth of his age more orderly and decorous. He is kind-hearted and grateful, and evinces his gratitude to the mother of the family and to his benefactress by occasional presents, not trifling when measured by his small emolument of five dollars per week. Just at this time he is confined to his room by indisposition, caused, it is suspected, by a spree on Sunday last. Our gross Saxon orgies would soon be the ruin of his French constitution. A thought to-day. Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world. May 8th.--I went last evening to the National Theatre to see a pantomime. It was Jack the Giant-Killer, and somewhat heavy and tedious. The audience was more noteworthy than the play. The theatre itself is for the middling and lower classes, and I had not taken my seat in the most aristocratic part of the house; so that I found myself surrounded chiefly by young sailors, Hanover Street shopmen, mechanics, and other people of that class. It is wonderful! the difference that exists in the personal aspect and dress, and no less in the manners, of people in this quarter of the city, as compared with other parts of it. One would think that Oak Hall should give a common garb and air to the great mass of the Boston population; but it seems not to be so; and perhaps what is most singular is, that the natural make of the men has a conformity and suitableness to the dress. Glazed caps and Palo Alto hats were much worn. It is a pity that this picturesque and comparatively graceful hat should not have been generally adopted, instead of falling to the exclusive use of a rowdy class. In the next box to me were two young women, with an infant, but to which of them appertaining I could not at first discover. One was a large, plump girl, with a heavy face, a snub nose, coarse-looking, but good-natured, and with no traits of evil,--save, indeed, that she had on the vilest gown of dirty white cotton, so pervadingly dingy that it was white no longer, as it seemed to me. The sleeves were short, and ragged at the borders, and her shawl, which she took off on account of the heat, was old and faded,--the shabbiest and dirtiest dress that I ever saw a woman wear. Yet she was plump, and looked comfortable in body and mind. I imagine that she must have had a better dress at home, but had come to the theatre extemporaneously, and, not going to the dress circle, considered her ordinary gown good enough for the occasion. The other girl seemed as young or younger than herself. She was small, with a particularly intelligent and pleasant face, not handsome, perhaps, but as good or better than if it were. It was mobile with whatever sentiment chanced to be in her mind, as quick and vivacious a face in its movements as I have ever seen; cheerful, too, and indicative of a sunny, though I should think it might be a hasty, temper. She was dressed in a dark gown (chintz, I suppose the women call it), a good, homely dress, proper enough for the fireside, but a strange one to appear in at a theatre. Both these girls appeared to enjoy themselves very much,--the large and heavy one in her own duller mode; the smaller manifesting her interest by gestures, pointing at the stage, and with so vivid a talk of countenance that it was precisely as if she had spoken. She was not a brunette, and this made the vivacity of her expression the more agreeable. Her companion, on the other hand, was so dark, that I rather suspected her to have a tinge of African blood. There were two men who seemed to have some connection with these girls,-- one an elderly, gray-headed personage, well-stricken in liquor, talking loudly and foolishly, but good-humoredly; the other a young man, sober, and doing his best to keep his elder friend quiet. The girls seemed to give themselves no uneasiness about the matter.--Both the men wore Palo Alto hats. I could not make out whether either of the men were the father of the child, though I was inclined to set it down as a family party. As the play went on, the house became crowded and oppressively warm, and the poor little baby grew dark red, or purple almost, with the uncomfortable heat in its small body. It must have been accustomed to discomfort, and have concluded it to be the condition of mortal life, else it never would have remained so quiet. Perhaps it had been quieted with a sleeping-potion. The two young women were not negligent of it; but passed it to and fro between them, each willingly putting herself to inconvenience for the sake of tending it. But I really feared it might die in some kind of a fit, so hot was the theatre, so purple with heat, yet strangely quiet, was the child. I was glad to hear it cry at last; but it did not cry with any great rage and vigor, as it should, but in a stupid kind of way. Hereupon the smaller of the two girls, after a little inefficacious dandling, at once settled the question of maternity by nursing her baby. Children must be hard to kill, however injudicious the treatment. The two girls and their cavaliers remained till nearly the close of the play. I should like well to know who they are,--of what condition in life, and whether reputable as members of the class to which they belong. My own judgment is that they are so. Throughout the evening, drunken young sailors kept stumbling into and out of the boxes, calling to one another from different parts of the house, shouting to the performers, and singing the burden of songs. It was a scene of life in the rough. May 14th.--A stable opposite the house,--an old wooden construction, low, in three distinct parts; the centre being the stable proper, where the horses are kept, and with a chamber over it for the hay. On one side is the department for chaises and carriages; on the other, the little office where the books are kept. In the interior region of the stable everything is dim and undefined,--half-traceable outlines of stalls, sometimes the shadowy aspect of a horse. Generally a groom is dressing a horse at the stable door, with a care and accuracy that leave no part of the animal unvisited by the currycomb and brush; the horse, meanwhile, evidently enjoying it, but sometimes, when the more sensitive parts are touched, giving a half-playful kick with his hind legs, and a little neigh. If the men bestowed half as much care on their own personal cleanliness, they would be all the better and healthier men therefor. They appear to be busy men, these stablers, yet have a lounging way with them, as if indolence were somehow diffused through their natures. The apparent head of the establishment is a sensible, thoughtful-looking, large-featured, and homely man, past the middle age, clad rather shabbily in gray, stooping somewhat, and without any smartness about him. There is a groom, who seems to be a very comfortable kind of personage,--a man of forty-five or thereabouts (R. W. Emerson says he was one of his schoolmates), but not looking so old; corpulent, not to say fat, with a white frock, which his goodly bulk almost fills, enveloping him from neck nearly to ankles. On his head he wears a cloth cap of a jockey shape; his pantaloons are turned up an inch or two at bottom, and he wears brogans on his feet. His hair, as may be seen when he takes off his cap to wipe his brow, is black and in perfect preservation, with not exactly a curl, yet a vivacious and elastic kind of twist in it. His face is fresh-colored, comfortable, sufficiently vivid in expression, not at all dimmed by his fleshly exuberance, because the man possesses vigor enough to carry it off. His bodily health seems perfect; so, indeed, does his moral and intellectual. He is very active and assiduous in his duties, currycombing and rubbing down the horses with alacrity and skill; and, when not otherwise occupied, you may see him talking jovially with chance acquaintances, or observing what is going forward in the street. If a female acquaintance happens to pass, he touches his jockey cap, and bows, accomplishing this courtesy with a certain smartness that proves him a man of the world. Whether it be his greater readiness to talk, or the wisdom of what he says, he seems usually to be the centre talker of the group. It is very pleasant to see such an image of earthly comfort as this. A fat man who feels his flesh as a disease and encumbrance, and on whom it presses so as to make him melancholy with dread of apoplexy, and who moves heavily under the burden of himself,--such a man is a doleful and disagreeable object. But if he have vivacity enough to pervade all his earthiness, and bodily force enough to move lightly under it, and if it be not too unmeasured to have a trimness and briskness in it, then it is good and wholesome to look at him. In the background of the house, a cat, occasionally stealing along on the roofs of the low out-houses; descending a flight of wooden steps into the brick area; investigating the shed, and entering all dark and secret places; cautious, circumspect, as if in search of something; noiseless, attentive to every noise. Moss grows on spots of the roof; there are little boxes of earth here and there, with plants in them. The grass-plots appertaining to each of the houses whose rears are opposite ours (standing in Temple Place) are perhaps ten or twelve feet broad, and three times as long. Here and there is a large, painted garden-pot, half buried in earth. Besides the large trees in blossom, there are little ones, probably of last year's setting out. Early in the day chambermaids are seen hanging the bedclothes out of the upper windows; at the window of the basement of the same house, I see a woman ironing. Were I a solitary prisoner, I should not doubt to find occupation of deep interest for my whole day in watching only one of the houses. One house seems to be quite shut up; all the blinds in the three windows of each of the four stories being closed, although in the roof-windows of the attic story the curtains are hung carelessly upward, instead of being drawn. I thick the house is empty, perhaps for the summer. The visible side of the whole row of houses is now in the shade,--they looking towards, I should say, the southwest. Later in the day, they are wholly covered with sunshine, and continue so through the afternoon; and at evening the sunshine slowly withdraws upward, gleams aslant upon the windows, perches on the chimneys, and so disappears. The upper part of the spire and the weathercock of the Park Street Church appear over one of the houses, looking as if it were close behind. It shows the wind to be cast now. At one of the windows of the third story sits a woman in a colored dress, diligently sewing on something white. She sews, not like a lady, but with an occupational air. Her dress, I observe, on closer observation, is a kind of loose morning sack, with, I think, a silky gloss on it; and she seems to have a silver comb in her hair,--no, this latter item is a mistake. Sheltered as the space is between the two rows of houses, a puff of the east-wind finds its way in, and shakes off some of the withering blossoms from the cherry-trees. Quiet as the prospect is, there is a continual and near thunder of wheels proceeding from Washington Street. In a building not far off, there is a hall for exhibitions; and sometimes, in the evenings, loud music is heard from it; or, if a diorama be shown (that of Bunker Hill, for instance, or the burning of Moscow), an immense racket of imitative cannon and musketry. May, 16th.--It has been an easterly rain yesterday and to-day, with occasional lightings up, and then a heavy downfall of the gloom again. Scenes out of the rear windows,--the glistening roof of the opposite houses; the chimneys, now and then choked with their own smoke, which a blast drives down their throats. The church-spire has a mist about it. Once this morning a solitary dove came and alighted on the peak of an attic window, and looked down into the areas, remaining in this position a considerable time. Now it has taken a flight, and alighted on the roof of this house, directly over the window at which I sit, so that I can look up and see its head and beak, and the tips of its claws. The roofs of the low out-houses are black with moisture; the gutters are full of water, and there is a little puddle where there is a place for it in the hollow of a board. On the grass-plot are strewn the fallen blossoms of the cherry-tree, and over the scene broods a parallelogram of sombre sky. Thus it will be all day as it was yesterday; and, in the evening, one window after another will be lighted up in the drawing-rooms. Through the white curtains may be seen the gleam of an astral-lamp, like a fixed star. In the basement rooms, the work of the kitchen going forward; in the upper chambers, here and there a light. In a bar-room, a large, oval basin let into the counter, with a brass tube rising from the centre, out of which gushes continually a miniature fountain, and descends in a soft, gentle, never-ceasing rain into the basin, where swim a company of gold-fishes. Some of them gleam brightly in their golden armor; others have a dull white aspect, going through some process of transformation. One would think that the atmosphere, continually filled with tobacco-smoke, might impregnate the water unpleasantly for the scaly people; but then it is continually flowing away and being renewed. And what if some toper should be seized with the freak of emptying his glass of gin or brandy into the basin,--would the fishes die or merely get jolly? I saw, for a wonder, a man pretty drunk at Parker's the other evening,--a well-dressed man, of not ungentlemanly aspect. He talked loudly and foolishly, but in good phrases, with a great flow of language, and he was no otherwise impertinent than in addressing his talk to strangers. Finally, after sitting a long time staring steadfastly across the room in silence, he arose, and staggered away as best he might, only showing his very drunken state when he attempted to walk. Old acquaintances,--a gentleman whom I knew ten years ago, brisk, active, vigorous, with a kind of fire of physical well-being and cheerful spirits glowing through him. Now, after a course, I presume, of rather free living, pale, thin, oldish, with a grave and care or pain worn brow,--yet still lively and cheerful in his accost, though with something invincibly saddened in his tones. Another, formerly commander of a revenue vessel, --a man of splendid epaulets and very aristocratic equipment and demeanor; now out of service and without position, and changed into a brandy-burnt and rowdyish sort of personage. He seemed as if he might still be a gentleman if he would; but his manners show a desperate state of mind by their familiarity, recklessness, the lack of any hedge of reserve about himself, while still he is evidently a man of the world, accustomed to good society. He has latterly, I think, been in the Russian service, and would very probably turn pirate on fair occasion. Lenox, July 14th.--The tops of the chestnut-trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I suppose, in bloom. Red raspberries are just through the season. Language,--human language,--after all, is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls and other utterances of brute nature,-- sometimes not so adequate. July 16th.--The tops of the chestnut-trees are peculiarly rich, as if a more luscious sunshine were falling on them than anywhere else. "Whitish," as above, don't express it. The queer gestures and sounds of a hen looking about for a place to deposit her egg; her self-important gait; the sideway turn of her head and cock of her eye, as she pries into one and another nook, croaking all the while,--evidently with the idea that the egg in question is the most important thing that has been brought to pass since the world began. A speckled black and white and tufted hen of ours does it to most ludicrous perfection; and there is something laughably womanish in it too. July 25th.--As I sit in my study, with the windows open, the occasional incident of the visit of some winged creature,--wasp, hornet, or bee,-- entering out of the warm sunny atmosphere, soaring round the room in large sweeps, then buzzing against the glass, as not satisfied with the place, and desirous of getting out. Finally, the joyous, uprising curve with which, coming to the open part of the window, it emerges into the cheerful glow of the outside. August 4th.--Dined at hotel with J. T. Fields and wife. Afternoon, drove with them to Pittsfield and called on Dr. Holmes. August 5th.--Drove with Fields and his wife to Stockbridge, being thereto invited by Mr. Field of Stockbridge, in order to ascend Monument Mountain. Found at Mr. Field's Dr. Holmes and Mr. Duyckinck of New York; also Mr. Cornelius Matthews and Herman Melville. Ascended the mountain; that is to say, Mrs. Fields and Miss Jenny Field, Mr. Field and Mr. Fields, Dr. Holmes, Messrs. Duyckinck, Matthews, Melville, Mr. Henry Sedgewick, and I, and were caught in a shower. Dined at Mr. Field's. Afternoon, under guidance of J. T. Headley, the party scrambled through the ice-glen. August 7th.--Messrs. Duyckink, Matthews, Melville, and Melville, junior, called in the forenoon. Gave them a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield's champagne, and walked down to the lake with them. At twilight Mr. Edwin P. Whipple and wife called. August 8th.--Mr. and Mrs. Whipple took tea with us. August 12th.--Seven chickens hatched. J. T. Readley and brother called. Eight chickens. August 19th.--Monument Mountain, in the early sunshine; its base enveloped in mist, parts of which are floating in the sky, so that the great hill looks really as if it were founded on a cloud. Just emerging from the mist is seen a yellow field of rye, and, above that, forest. August 21st.--Eight more chickens hatched. Ascended a mountain with my wife; a beautiful, mellow, autumnal sunshine. August 24th.--In the afternoons, nowadays, this valley in which I dwell seems like a vast basin filled with golden sunshine as with wine. August 31st.--J. R. Lowell called in the evening. September 1st.--Mr. and Mrs. Lowell called in the forenoon, on their way to Stockbridge or Lebanon to meet Miss Bremer. September 2d.--"When I grow up," quoth J-----, in illustration of the might to which he means to attain,--"when I grow up, I shall be two men." September 3d.--Foliage of maples begins to change. Julian, after picking up a handful of autumnal maple-leaves the other day,--"Look, papa, here's a bunch of fire!" September 7th.--In a wood, a heap or pile of logs and sticks, that had been cut for firewood, and piled up square, in order to be carted away to the house when convenience served,--or, rather, to be sledded in sleighing time. But the moss had accumulated on them, and leaves falling over them from year to year and decaying, a kind of soil had quite covered them, although the softened outline of the woodpile was perceptible in the green mound. It was perhaps fifty years--perhaps more--since the woodman had cut and piled those logs and sticks, intending them for his winter fires. But he probably needs no fire now. There was something strangely interesting in this simple circumstance. Imagine the long-dead woodman, and his long-dead wife and family, and the old man who was a little child when the wood was cut, coming back from their graves, and trying to make a fire with this mossy fuel. September 19th.--Lying by the lake yesterday afternoon, with my eyes shut, while the waves and sunshine were playing together on the water, the quick glimmer of the wavelets was perceptible through my closed eyelids. October 13th.--A windy day, with wind northwest, cool, with a prevalence of dull gray clouds over the sky, but with brief, quick glimpses of sunshine. The foliage having its autumn hues, Monument Mountain looks like a headless sphinx, wrapped in a rich Persian shawl. Yesterday, through a diffused mist, with the sun shining on it, it had the aspect of burnished copper. The sun-gleams on the hills are peculiarly magnificent just in these days. One of the children, drawing a cow on the blackboard, says, "I'll kick this leg out a little more,"--a very happy energy of expression, completely identifying herself with the cow; or perhaps, as the cow's creator, conscious of full power over its movements. October 14th.--The brilliancy of the foliage has passed its acme; and indeed it has not been so magnificent this season as in some others, owing to the gradual approaches of cooler weather, and there having been slight frosts instead of severe ones. There is still a shaggy richness on the hillsides. October 16th.--A morning mist, filling up the whole length and breadth of the valley betwixt my house and Monument Mountain, the summit of the mountain emerging. The mist reaches almost to my window, so dense as to conceal everything, except that near its hither boundary a few ruddy or yellow tree-tops appear, glorified by the early sunshine, as is likewise the whole mist-cloud. There is a glen between this house and the lake, through which winds a little brook with pools and tiny waterfalls over the great roots of trees. The glen is deep and narrow, and filled with trees; so that, in the summer, it is all a dense shadow of obscurity. Now, the foliage of the trees being almost entirely a golden yellow, instead of being full of shadow, the glen is absolutely full of sunshine, and its depths are more brilliant than the open plain or the mountain-tops. The trees are sunshine, and, many of the golden leaves being freshly fallen, the glen is strewn with sunshine, amid which winds and gurgles the bright, dark little brook. December 1st.--I saw a dandelion in bloom near the lake. December 19th.--If the world were crumbled to the finest dust, and scattered through the universe, there would not be an atom of the dust for each star. "Generosity is the flower of justice." The print in blood of a naked foot to be traced through the street of a town. Sketch of a personage with the malignity of a witch, and doing the mischief attributed to one,--but by natural means; breaking off love-affairs, teaching children vices, ruining men of wealth, etc. Ladislaus, King of Naples, besieging the city of Florence, agreed to show mercy, provided the inhabitants would deliver to him a certain virgin of famous beauty, the daughter of a physician of the city. When she was sent to the king, every one contributing something to adorn her in the richest manner, her father gave her a perfumed handkerchief, at that time a universal decoration, richly wrought. This handkerchief was poisoned with his utmost art, . . . . and they presently died in one another's arms. Of a bitter satirist,--of Swift, for instance,--it might be said, that the person or thing on which his satire fell shrivelled up as if the Devil had spit on it. The Fount of Tears,--a traveller to discover it,--and other similar localites. Benvenuto Cellini saw a Salamander in the household fire. It was shown him by his father, in childhood. For the virtuoso's collection,--the pen with which Faust signed away his salvation, with a drop of blood dried in it. An article on newspaper advertisements,--a country newspaper, methinks, rather than a city one. An eating-house, where all the dishes served out, even to the bread and salt, shall be poisoned with the adulterations that are said to be practised. Perhaps Death himself might be the cook. Personify the century,--talk of its present middle age,--of its youth,-- and its adventures and prospects. An uneducated countryman, supposing he had a live frog in his stomach, applied himself to the study of medicine in order to find a cure for this disease; and he became a profound physician. Thus misfortune, physical or moral, may be the means of educating and elevating us. "Mather's Manuductio ad Ministerium,"--or "Directions for a candidate" for the ministry,--with the autographs of four successive clergymen in it, all of them, at one time or another, residents of the old Manse,-- Daniel Bliss, 1734; William Emerson, 1770; Ezra Ripley, 1781; and Samuel Ripley, son of the preceding. The book, according to a Latin memorandum, was sold to Daniel Bliss by Daniel Bremner, who, I suppose, was another student of divinity. Printed at Boston "for Thomas Hancock, and sold at his shop in Ann St. near the Draw Bridge, 1726." William Emerson was son-in-law of Daniel Bliss. Ezra Ripley married the widow of said William Emerson, and Samuel Ripley was their son. Mrs. Prescott has an ox whose visage bears a strong resemblance to Daniel Webster,--a majestic brute. The spells of witches have the power of producing meats and viands that have the appearance of a sumptuous feast, which the Devil furnishes. But a Divine Providence seldom permits the meat to be good, but it has generally some bad taste or smell,--mostly wants salt,--and the feast is often without bread. An article on cemeteries, with fantastic ideas of monuments; for instance, a sun-dial;--a large, wide carved stone chair, with some such motto as "Rest and Think," and others, facetious or serious. "Mamma, I see a part of your smile,"--a child to her mother, whose mouth was partly covered by her hand. "The syrup of my bosom,"--an improvisation of a little girl, addressed to an imaginary child. "The wind-turn," "the lightning-catch," a child's phrases for weathercock and lightning-rod. "Where's the man-mountain of these Liliputs?" cried a little boy, as he looked at a small engraving of the Greeks getting into the wooden horse. When the sun shines brightly on the new snow, we discover ranges of hills, miles away towards the south, which we have never seen before. To have the North Pole for a fishing-pole, and the Equinoctial Line for a fishing-line. If we consider the lives of the lower animals, we shall see in them a close parallelism to those of mortals;--toil, struggle, danger, privation, mingled with glimpses of peace and ease; enmity, affection, a continual hope of bettering themselves, although their objects lie at less distance before them than ours can do. Thus, no argument for the imperfect character of our existence and its delusory promises, and its apparent injustice, can be drawn in reference to our immortality, without, in a degree, being applicable to our brute brethren. Lenox, February 12th, 1851.--A walk across the lake with Una. A heavy rain, some days ago, has melted a good deal of the snow on the intervening descent between our house and the lake; but many drifts, depths, and levels yet remain; and there is a frozen crust, sufficient to bear a man's weight, and very slippery. Adown the slopes there are tiny rivulets, which exist only for the winter. Bare, brown spaces of grass here and there, but still so infrequent as only to diversify the scene a little. In the woods, rocks emerging, and, where there is a slope immediately towards the lake, the snow is pretty much gone, and we see partridge-berries frozen, and outer shells of walnuts, and chestnut-burrs, heaped or scattered among the roots of the trees. The walnut-husks mark the place where the boys, after nutting, sat down to clear the walnuts of their outer shell. The various species of pine look exceedingly brown just now,--less beautiful than those trees which shed their leaves. An oak-tree, with almost all its brown foliage still rustling on it. We clamber down the bank, and step upon the frozen lake, It was snow-covered for a considerable time; but the rain overspread it with a surface of water, or imperfectly melted snow, which is now hard frozen again; and the thermometer having been frequently below zero, I suppose the ice may be four or five feet thick. Frequently there are great cracks across it, caused, I suppose, by the air beneath, and giving an idea of greater firmness than if there were no cracks; round holes, which have been hewn in the marble pavement by fishermen, and are now frozen over again, looking darker than the rest of the surface; spaces where the snow was more imperfectly dissolved than elsewhere little crackling spots, where a thin surface of ice, over the real mass, crumples beneath one's foot; the track of a line of footsteps, most of them vaguely formed, but some quite perfectly, where a person passed across the lake while its surface was in a state of slush, but which are now as hard as adamant, and remind one of the traces discovered by geologists in rocks that hardened thousands of ages ago. It seems as if the person passed when the lake was in an intermediate state between ice and water. In one spot some pine boughs, which somebody had cut and heaped there for an unknown purpose. In the centre of the lake, we see the surrounding hills in a new attitude, this being a basin in the midst of them. Where they are covered with wood, the aspect is gray or black; then there are bare slopes of unbroken snow, the outlines and indentations being much more hardly and firmly defined than in summer. We went southward across the lake, directly towards Monument Mountain, which reposes, as I said, like a headless sphinx. Its prominences, projections, and roughnesses are very evident; and it does not present a smooth and placid front, as when the grass is green and the trees in leaf. At one end, too, we are sensible of precipitous descents, black and shaggy with the forest that is likely always to grow there; and, in one streak, a headlong sweep downward of snow. We just set our feet on the farther shore, and then immediately returned, facing the northwest-wind, which blew very sharply against us. After landing, we came homeward, tracing up the little brook so far as it lay in our course. It was considerably swollen, and rushed fleetly on its course between overhanging banks of snow and ice, from which depended adamantine icicles. The little waterfalls with which we had impeded it in the summer and autumn could do no more than form a large ripple, so much greater was the volume of water. In some places the crust of frozen snow made a bridge quite over the brook; so that you only knew it was there by its brawling sound beneath. The sunsets of winter are incomparably splendid, and when the ground is covered with snow, no brilliancy of tint expressible by words can come within an infinite distance of the effect. Our southern view at that time, with the clouds and atmospherical hues, is quite indescribable and unimaginable; and the various distances of the hills which lie between us and the remote dome of Taconic are brought out with an accuracy unattainable in summer. The transparency of the air at this season has the effect of a telescope in bringing objects apparently near, while it leaves the scene all its breadth. The sunset sky, amidst its splendor, has a softness and delicacy that impart themselves to a white marble world. February 18th.--A walk, yesterday afternoon, with the children; a bright, and rather cold day, breezy from the north and westward. There has been a good deal of soaking rain lately, and it has, in great measure, cleared hills and plains of snow, only it may be seen lying in spots, and on each side of stone-walls, in a pretty broad streak. The grass is brown and withered, and yet, scattered all amongst it, on close inspection, one finds a greenness,--little shrubs that have kept green under all the severity of winter, and seem to need no change to fit them for midsummer. In the woods we see stones covered with moss that retains likewise a most lively green. Where the trees are dense, the snow still lies under them. On the sides of the mountains, some miles off, the black pines and the white snow among them together produce a gray effect. The little streams are the most interesting objects at this time; some that have an existence only at this season,--Mississippis of the moment;--yet glide and tumble along as if they were perennial. The familiar ones seem strange by their breadth and volume; their little waterfalls set off by glaciers on a small scale. The sun has by this time force enough to make sheltered nooks in the angles of woods, or on banks, warm and comfortable. The lake is still of adamantine substance, but all round the borders there is a watery margin, altogether strewed or covered with thin and broken ice, so that I could not venture on it with the children. A chickadee was calling in the woods yesterday,--the only small bird I have taken note of yet; but, crows have been cawing in the woods for a week past, though not in very great numbers. February 22d.--For the last two or three days there has been a warm, soaking, southeasterly rain, with a spongy moisture diffused through the atmosphere. The snow has disappeared, except in spots which are the ruins of high drifts, and patches far up on the hillsides. The mists rest all day long on the brows of the hills that shut in our valley. The road over which I walk every day to and from the village is in the worst state of mud and mire, soft, slippery, nasty to tread upon; while the grass beside it is scarcely better, being so oozy and so overflowed with little streams, and sometimes an absolute bog. The rivulets race along the road, adown the hills; and wherever there is a permanent brooklet, however generally insignificant, it is now swollen into importance, and the rumble and tumble of its waterfalls may be heard a long way off. The general effect of the day and scenery is black, black, black. The streams are all as turbid as mud-puddles. Imitators of original authors might be compared to plaster casts of marble statues, or the imitative book to a cast of the original marble. March 11th.--After the ground had been completely freed of snow, there has been a snow-storm for the two days preceding yesterday, which made the earth all white again. This morning, at sunrise, the thermometer stood at about 18 degrees above zero. Monument Mountain stands out in great prominence, with its dark forest-covered sides, and here and there a large, white patch, indicating tillage or pasture land; but making a generally dark contrast with the white expanse of the frozen and snow-covered lake at its base, and the more undulating white of the surrounding country. Yesterday, under the sunshine of midday, and with many voluminous clouds hanging over it, and a mist of wintry warmth in the air, it had a kind of visionary aspect, although still it was brought out in striking relief. But though one could see all its bulgings, round swells, and precipitous abruptnesses, it looked as much akin to the clouds as to solid earth and rock substance. In the early sunshine of the morning, the atmosphere being very clear, I saw the dome of Taconic with more distinctness than ever before, the snow-patches and brown, uncovered soil on its round head being fully visible. Generally it is but a dark blue unvaried mountain-top. All the ruggedness of the intervening hill-country was likewise effectively brought out. There seems to be a sort of illuminating quality in new snow, which it loses after being exposed for a day or two to the suit and atmosphere. For a child's story,--the voyage of a little boat, made of a chip, with a birch-bark sail, down a river. March 31st.--A walk with the children yesterday forenoon. We went through the wood, where we found partridge-berries, half hidden among the dry, fallen leaves; thence down to the brook. This little brook has not cleansed itself from the disarray of the past autumn and winter, and is much embarrassed and choked up with brown leaves, twigs, and bits of branches. It rushes along merrily and rapidly, gurgling cheerfully, and tumbling over the impediments of stones with which the children and I made little waterfalls last year. At many spots, there are small basins or pools of calmer and smoother depth,--three feet, perhaps, in diameter, and a foot or two deep,--in which little fish are already sporting about; all elsewhere is tumble and gurgle and mimic turbulence. I sat on the withered leaves at the foot of a tree, while the children played, a little brook being the most fascinating plaything that a child can have. Una jumped to and fro across it; Julian stood beside a pool, fishing with a stick, without hook or line, and wondering that he caught nothing. Then he made new waterfalls with mighty labor, pulling big stones out of the earth, and flinging them into the current. Then they sent branches of trees, or the outer shells of walnuts, sailing down the stream, and watched their passages through the intricacies of the way,--how they were hurried over in a cascade, hurried dizzily round in a whirlpool, or brought quite to a stand-still amongst the collected rubbish. At last Julian tumbled into the brook, and was wetted through and through so that we were obliged to come home; he squelching along all the way, with his india-rubber shoes full of water. There are still patches of snow on the hills; also in the woods, especially on the northern margins. The lake is not yet what we may call thawed out, although there is a large space of blue water, and the ice is separated from the shore everywhere, and is soft, water-soaked, and crumbly. On favorable slopes and exposures, the earth begins to look green; and almost anywhere, if one looks closely, one sees the greenness of the grass, or of little herbage, amidst the brown. Under the nut-trees are scattered some of the nuts of last year; the walnuts have lost their virtue, the chestnuts do not seem to have much taste, but the butternuts are in no manner deteriorated. The warmth of these days has a mistiness, and in many respects resembles the Indian summer, and is not at all provocative of physical exertion. Nevertheless, the general impression is of life, not death. One feels that a new season has begun. Wednesday, April 9th.--There was a great rain yesterday,--wind from the southeast, and the last visible vestige of snow disappeared. It was a small patch near the summit of Bald Mountain, just on the upper verge of a grove of trees. I saw a slight remnant of it yesterday afternoon, but to-day it is quite gone. The grass comes up along the roadside and on favorable exposures, with a sort of green blush. Frogs have been melodious for a fortnight, and the birds sing pleasantly. April 20th.--The children found Houstonias more than a week ago. There have been easterly wind, continual cloudiness, and occasional rain for a week. This morning opened with a great snow-storm from the northeast, one of the most earnest snow-storms of the year, though rather more moist than in midwinter. The earth is entirely covered. Now, as the day advances towards noon, it shows some symptoms of turning to rain. April 28th.--For a week we have found the trailing arbutus pretty abundant in the woods. A day or two since, Una found a few purple violets, and yesterday a dandelion in bloom. The fragrance of the arbutus is spicy and exquisite. May 16th.--In our walks now, the children and I find blue, white, and golden violets, the former, especially, of great size and richness. Houstonias are very abundant, blue-whitening some of the pastures. They are a very sociable little flower, and dwell close together in communities,--sometimes covering a space no larger than the palm of the hand, but keeping one another in cheerful heart and life,--sometimes they occupy a much larger space. Lobelia, a pink flower, growing in the woods. Columbines, of a pale red, because they have lacked sun, growing in rough and rocky places on banks in the copses, precipitating towards the lake. The leaves of the trees are not yet out, but are so apparent that the woods are getting a very decided shadow. Water-weeds on the edge of the lake, of a deep green, with roots that seem to have nothing to do with earth, but with water only. May 23d.--I think the face of nature can never look more beautiful than now, with this so fresh and youthful green,--the trees not being fully in leaf, yet enough so to give airy shade to the woods. The sunshine fills them with green light. Monument Mountain and its brethren are green, and the lightness of the tint takes away something from their massiveness and ponderosity, and they respond with livelier effect to the shine and shade of the sky. Each tree now within sight stands out in its own individuality of line. This is a very windy day, and the light shifts with magical alternation. In a walk to the lake just now with the children, we found abundance of flowers,--wild geranium, violets of all families, red columbines, and many others known and unknown, besides innumerable blossoms of the wild strawberry, which has been in bloom for the past fortnight. The Houstonias seem quite to overspread some pastures, when viewed from a distance. Not merely the flowers, but the various shrubs which one sees,--seated, for instance, on the decayed trunk of a tree,--are well worth looking at, such a variety and such enjoyment they have of their new growth. Amid these fresh creations, we see others that have already run their course, and have done with warmth and sunshine,--the hoary periwigs, I mean, of dandelions gone to seed. August 7th.--Fourier states that, in the progress of the world, the ocean is to lose its saltness, and acquire the taste of a peculiarly flavored lemonade. October 13th.--How pleasant it is to see a human countenance which cannot be insincere,--in reference to baby's smile. The best of us being unfit to die, what an inexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death! "Is that a burden of sunshine on Apollo's back?" asked one of the children,--of the chlamys on our Apollo Belvedere. October 21st.--Going to the village yesterday afternoon, I saw the face of a beautiful woman, gazing at me from a cloud. It was the full face, not the bust. It had a sort of mantle on the head, and a pleasant expression of countenance. The vision lasted while I took a few steps, and then vanished. I never before saw nearly so distinct a cloud-picture, or rather sculpture; for it came out in alto-rilievo on the body of the cloud. October 27th.--The ground this morning is white with a thin covering of snow. The foliage has still some variety of hue. The dome of Taconic looks dark, and seems to have no snow on it, though I don't understand how that can be. I saw, a moment ago, on the lake, a very singular spectacle. There is a high northwest-wind ruffling the lake's surface, and making it blue, lead-colored, or bright, in stripes or at intervals; but what I saw was a boiling up of foam, which began at the right bank of the lake, and passed quite across it; and the mist flew before it, like the cloud out of a steam-engine. A fierce and narrow blast of wind must have ploughed the water in a straight line, from side to side of the lake. As fast as it went on, the foam subsided behind it, so that it looked somewhat like a sea-serpent, or other monster, swimming very rapidly. October 29th.--On a walk to Scott's pond, with Ellery Channing, we found a wild strawberry in the woods, not quite ripe, but beginning to redden. For a week or two, the cider-mills have been grinding apples. Immense heaps of apples lie piled near them, and the creaking of the press is heard as the horse treads on. Farmers are repairing cider-barrels; and the wayside brook is made to pour itself into the bunghole of a barrel, in order to cleanse it for the new cider. November 3d.--The face of the country is dreary now in a cloudy day like the present. The woods on the hillsides look almost black, and the cleared spaces a kind of gray brown. Taconic, this morning (4th), was a black purple, as dense and distinct as Monument Mountain itself. I hear the creaking of the cider-press; the patient horse going round and round, perhaps thirsty, to make the liquor which he never can enjoy. We left Lenox Friday morning, November 21, 1851, in a storm of snow and sleet, and took the cars at Pittsfield, and arrived at West Newton that evening. Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness, without dreaming of it; but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, "Here it is!" like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find. West Newton, April 13th, 1852.--One of the severest snow-storms of the winter. April 30th.--Wrote the last page (199th MS.) of the Blithedale Romance. May 1st.--Wrote Preface. Afterwards modified the conclusion, and lengthened it to 201 pages. First proof-sheets, May 14. Concord, Mass., August 20th.--A piece of land contiguous to and connected with a handsome estate, to the adornment and good appearance of which it was essential.--But the owner of the strip of land was at variance with the owner of the estate, so he always refused to sell it at any price, but let it lie there, wild and ragged, in front of and near the mansion-house. When he dies, the owner of the estate, who has rejoiced at the approach of the event all through his enemy's illness, hopes at last to buy it; but, to his infinite discomfiture, the enemy enjoined in his will that his body should be buried in the centre of this strip of land. All sorts of ugly weeds grow most luxuriantly out of the grave in poisonous rankness. The Isles of Shoals, Monday, August 30th.--Left Concord at a quarter of nine A. M. Friday, September 3, set sail at about half past ten to the Isles of Shoals. The passengers were an old master of a vessel; a young, rather genteel man from Greenland, N. H.; two Yankees from Hamilton and Danvers; and a country trader (I should judge) from some inland town of New Hampshire. The old sea-captain, preparatory to sailing, bought a bunch of cigars (they cost ten cents), and occasionally puffed one. The two Yankees had brought guns on board, and asked questions about the fishing of the Shoals. They were young men, brothers, the youngest a shopkeeper in Danvers, the other a farmer, I imagine, at Hamilton, and both specimens of the least polished kind of Yankee, and therefore proper to those localities. They were at first full of questions, and greatly interested in whatever was going forward; but anon the shopkeeper began to grow, first a little, then very sick, till he lay along the boat, longing, as he afterwards said, for a little fresh water to be drowned in. His brother attended him in a very kindly way, but became sick himself before he reached the end of the voyage. The young Greenlander talked politics, or rather discussed the personal character of Pierce. The New Hampshire trader said not a word, or hardly one, all the way. A Portsmouth youth (whom I forgot to mention) sat in the stern of the boat, looking very white. The skipper of the boat is a Norwegian, a good-natured fellow, not particularly intelligent, and speaking in a dialect somewhat like Irish. He had a man with him, a silent and rather sulky fellow, who, at the captain's bidding, grimly made himself useful. The wind not being favorable, we had to make several tacks before reaching the islands, where we arrived at about two o'clock. We landed at Appledore, on which is Laighton's Hotel,--a large building with a piazza or promenade before it, about an hundred and twenty feet in length, or more,--yes, it must be more. It is an edifice with a centre and two wings, the central part upwards of seventy feet. At one end of the promenade is a covered veranda, thirty or forty feet square, so situated that the breeze draws across it from the sea on one side of the island to the sea on the other, and it is the breeziest and comfortablest place in the world on a hot day. There are two swings beneath it, and here one may sit or walk, and enjoy life, while all other mortals are suffering. As I entered the door of the hotel, there met me a short, corpulent, round, and full-faced man, rather elderly, if not old. He was a little lame. He addressed me in a hearty, hospitable tone, and, judging that it must be my landlord, I delivered a letter of introduction from Pierce. Of course it was fully efficient in obtaining the best accommodations that were to be had. I found that we were expected, a man having brought the news of our intention the day before. Here ensued great inquiries after the General, and wherefore he had not come. I was looked at with considerable curiosity on my own account, especially by the ladies, of whom there were several, agreeable and pretty enough. There were four or five gentlemen, most of whom had not much that was noteworthy. After dinner, which was good and abundant, though somewhat rude in its style, I was introduced by Mr. Laighton to Mr. Thaxter, his son-in-law, and Mr. Weiss, a clergyman of New Bedford, who is staying here for his health. They showed me some of the remarkable features of the island, such as a deep chasm in the cliffs of the shore, towards the southwest; also a monument of rude stones, on the highest point of the island, said to have been erected by Captain John Smith before the settlement at Plymouth. The tradition is just as good as truth. Also, some ancient cellars, with thistles and other weeds growing in them, and old fragmentary bricks scattered about. The date of these habitations is not known; but they may well be the remains of the settlement that Cotton Mather speaks about; or perhaps one of them was the house where Sir William Pepperell was born, and where he went when he and somebody else set up a stick, and travelled to seek their fortunes in the direction in which it fell. In the evening, the company at the hotel made up two whist parties, at one of which I sat down,--my partner being an agreeable young lady from Portsmouth. We played till I, at least, was quite weary. It had been the beautifullest of weather all day, very hot on the mainland, but a delicious climate under our veranda. Saturday, September 4th.--Another beautiful day, rather cooler than the preceding, but not too cool. I can bear this coolness better than that of the interior. In the forenoon, I took passage for Star Island, in a boat that crosses daily whenever there are passengers. My companions were the two Yankees, who had quite recovered from yesterday's sickness, and were in the best of spirits and the utmost activity of mind of which they were capable. Never was there such a string of questions as they directed to the boatman,--questions that seemed to have no gist, so far as related to any use that could be made of the answers. They appear to be very good young men, however, well-meaning, and with manners not disagreeable, because their hearts are not amiss. Star Island is less than a mile from Appledore. It is the most populous island of the group,--has been, for three or four years, an incorporated township, and sends a representative to the New Hampshire legislature. The number of voters is variously represented as from eighteen to twenty-eight. The inhabitants are all, I presume, fishermen. Their houses stand in pretty close neighborhood to one another, scattered about without the slightest regularity or pretence of a street, there being no wheel-carriages on the island. Some of the houses are very comfortable two-story dwellings. I saw two or three, I think, with flowers. There are also one or two trees on the island. There is a strong odor of fishiness, and the little cove is full of mackerel-boats, and other small craft for fishing, in some of which little boys of no growth at all were paddling about. Nearly in the centre of this insular metropolis is a two-story house, with a flag-staff in the yard. This is the hotel. On the highest point of Star Island stands the church,--a small, wooden structure; and, sitting in its shadow, I found a red-baize-skirted fisherman, who seemed quite willing to converse. He said that there was a minister here, who was also the schoolmaster; but that he did not keep school just now, because his wife was very much out of health. The school-house stood but a little way from the meeting-house, and near it was the minister's dwelling; and by and by I had a glimpse of the good man himself, in his suit of black, which looked in very decent condition at the distance from which I viewed it. His clerical air was quite distinguishable, and it was rather curious to see it, when everybody else wore red-baize shirts and fishing-boots, and looked of the scaly genus. He did not approach me, and I saw him no nearer. I soon grew weary of Gosport, and was glad to re-embark, although I intend to revisit the island with Mr. Thaxter, and see more of its peculiarities and inhabitants. I saw one old witch-looking woman creeping about with a cane, and stooping down, seemingly to gather herbs. On mentioning her to Mr. Thaxter, after my return, he said that it was probably "the bearded woman." I did not observe her beard; but very likely she may have had one. The larger part of the company at the hotel returned to the mainland to-day. There remained behind, however, a Mr. T------ from Newburyport, --a man of natural refinement, and a taste for reading that seems to point towards the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and men of that class. I have had a good deal of talk with him, and at first doubted whether he might not be a clergyman; but Mr. Thaxter tells me that he has made his own way in the world,--was once a sailor before the mast, and is now engaged in mercantile pursuits. He looks like nothing of this kind, being tall and slender, with very quiet manners, not beautiful, though pleasing from the refinement that they indicate. He has rather a precise and careful pronunciation, but yet a natural way of talking. In the afternoon I walked round a portion of the island that I had not previously visited, and in the evening went with Mr. Titcomb to Mr. Thaxter's to drink apple-toddy. We found Mrs. Thaxter sitting in a neat little parlor, very simply furnished, but in good taste. She is not now, I believe, more than eighteen years old, very pretty, and with the manners of a lady,--not prim and precise, but with enough of freedom and ease. The books on the table were "Pre-Raphaelitism," a tract on spiritual mediums, etc. There were several shelves of books on one side of the room, and engravings on the walls. Mr. Weiss was there, and I do not know but he is an inmate of Mr. Thaxter's. By and by came in Mr. Thaxter's brother, with a young lady whose position I do not know,-- either a sister or the brother's wife. Anon, too, came in the apple-toddy, a very rich and spicy compound; after which we had some glees and negro melodies, in which Mr. Thaxter sang a noble bass, and Mrs. Thaxter sang like a bird, and Mr. Weiss sang, I suppose, tenor, and the brother took some other part, and all were very mirthful and jolly. At about ten o'clock Mr. Titcomb and myself took leave, and emerging into the open air, out of that room of song, and pretty youthfulness of woman, and gay young men, there was the sky, and the three-quarters waning moon, and the old sea moaning all round about the island. Sunday, September 5th.--To-day I have done little or nothing except to roam along the shore of the island, and to sit under the piazza, talking with Mr. Laighton or some of his half-dozen guests; and about an hour before dinner I came up to my room, and took a brief nap. Since dinner I have been writing the foregoing journal. I observe that the Fanny Ellsler, our passenger and mail boat, has arrived from Portsmouth, and now lies in a little cove, moored to the rocky shore, with a flag flying at her main-mast. We have been watching her for some hours, but she stopped to fish, and then went to some other island, before putting in here. I must go and see what news she has brought. "What did you fire at?" asked one of the Yankees just now of a boy who had been firing a gun. "Nothing," said the boy. "Did you hit it?" rejoined the Yankee. The farmer is of a much ruder and rougher mould than his brother,-- heavier in frame and mind, and far less cultivated. It was on this account, probably, that he labored as a farmer, instead of setting up a shop. When it is warm, as yesterday, he takes off his coat, and, not minding whether or no his shirt-sleeves be soiled, goes in this guise to meals or wherever else,---not resuming his coat as long as he is more comfortable without it. His shoulders have a stoop, and altogether his air is that of a farmer in repose. His brother is handsome, and might have quite the aspect of a smart, comely young man, if well dressed. This island is said to be haunted by a spectre called "Old Bab." He was one of Captain Kidd's men, and was slain for the protection of the treasure. Mr. Laighton said that, before he built his house, nothing would have induced the inhabitant of another island to come to this after nightfall. The ghost especially haunts the space between the hotel and the cove in front. There has, in times past, been great search for the treasure. Mr. Thaxter tells me that the women on the island are very timid as to venturing on the sea,--more so than the women of the mainland,--and that they are easily frightened about their husbands. Very few accidents happen to the boats or men,--none, I think, since Mr. Thaxter has been here. They are not an enterprising set of people, never liking to make long voyages. Sometimes one of them will ship on a voyage to the West Indies, but generally only on coastwise trips, or fishing or mackerel voyages. They have a very strong local attachment, and return to die. They are now generally temperate, formerly very much the contrary. September 5th.--A large part of the guests took their departure after an early breakfast this morning, including Mr. Titcomb, Mr. Weiss, the two Yankees, and Mr. Thaxter,--who, however, went as skipper or supercargo, and will return with the boat. I have been fishing for cunners off the rocks, but with intolerably poor success. There is nothing so dispiriting as poor fishing, and I spend most of the time with my head on my hands, looking at the sea breaking against the rocks, shagged around the bases with sea-weed. It is a sunny forenoon, with a cool breeze from the southwest. The mackerel craft are in the offing. Mr. Laighton says that the Spy (the boat which went to the mainland this morning) is now on her return with all her colors set; and he thinks that Pierce is on board, he having sent Mr. Thaxter to invite him to come in this boat. Pierce arrived before dinner in the Spy, accompanied by Judge Upham and his brother and their wives, his own wife, Mr. Furness, and three young ladies. After dinner some of the gentlemen crossed over to Gosport, where we visited the old graveyard, in which were monuments to Rev. Mr. Tucke (died 1773, after forty years' settlement) and to another and later minister of the island. They were of red freestone, lying horizontally on piles of the granite fragments, such as are scattered all about. There were other graves, marked by the rudest shapes of stones at head and foot. And so many stones protruded from the ground, that it was wonderful how space and depth enough was found between them to cover the dead. We went to the house of the town clerk of Gosport (a drunken fisherman, Joe Caswell by name) and there found the town records, commencing in 1732 in a beautiful style of penmanship. They are imperfect, the township having been broken up, probably at the time of the Revolution. Caswell, being very drunk, immediately put in a petition to Pierce to build a sea-mole for the protection of the navigation of the island when he should be President. He was dressed in the ordinary fisherman's style,--red-baize shirt, trousers tucked into large boots, which, as he had just come ashore, were wet with salt water. He led us down to the shore of the island, towards the east, and showed us Betty Moody's Hole. This Betty Moody was a woman of the island in old times. The Indians came off on a depredating excursion, and she fled from them with a child, and hid herself in this hole, which is formed by several great rocks being lodged so as to cover one of the fissures which are common along these shores. I crept into the hole, which is somewhat difficult of access, long, low, and narrow, and might well enough be a hiding-place. The child, or children, began to cry; and Betty, fearful of discovery, murdered them to save herself. Joe Caswell did not tell the latter part of the story, but Mr. Thaxter did. Not far from the spot there is a point of rocks extending out farther into the ocean than the rest of the island. Some four or five years ago there was a young woman residing at Gosport in the capacity of schoolteacher. She was of a romantic turn, and used to go and sit on this point of rock to view the waves. One day, when the wind was high, and the surf raging against the rocks, a great wave struck her, as she sat on the edge, and seemed to deprive her of sense; another wave, or the reflex of the same one, carried her off into the sea, and she was seen no more. This happened, I think, in 1846. Passing a rock near the centre of the island, which rose from the soil about breast-high, and appeared to have been split asunder, with an incalculably aged and moss-grown fissure, the surfaces of which, however, precisely suited each other; Mr. Hatch mentioned that there was an idea among the people, with regard to rocks thus split, that they were rent asunder at the time of the Crucifixion. Judge Upham observed that this superstition was common in all parts of the country. Mr. Hatch said that he was professionally consulted, the other day, by a man who had been digging for buried treasure at Dover Point; up the Piscataqua River; and, while he and his companions were thus engaged, the owner of the land came upon them, and compelled Hatch's client to give him a note for a sum of money. The object was to inquire whether this note was obligatory. Hatch says that there are a hundred people now resident in Portsmouth, who, at one time or another, have dug for treasure. The process is, in the first place, to find out the site of the treasure by the divining-rod. A circle is then described with the steel rod about the spot, and a man walks around within its verge, reading the Bible to keep off the evil spirit while his companions dig. If a word is spoken, the whole business is a failure. Once the person who told him the story reached the lid of the chest, so that the spades plainly scraped upon it, when one of the men spoke, and the chest immediately moved sideways into the earth. Another time, when he was reading the Bible within the circle, a creature like a white horse, but immoderately large, came from a distance towards the circle, looked at him, and then began to graze about the spot. He saw the motion of the jaws, but heard no sound of champing. His companions saw the gigantic horse precisely as he did, only to them it appeared bay instead of white. The islanders stared with great curiosity at Pierce. One pretty young woman appeared inclined to engross him entirely to herself. There is a bowling-alley on the island, at which some of the young fishermen were rolling. September 7th.--. . . . I have made no exploration to-day, except a walk with the guests in the morning, but have lounged about the piazza and veranda. It has been a calm, warm, sunny day, the sea slumbering against the shores, and now and then breaking into white foam. The surface of the island is plentifully overgrown with whortleberry and bayberry bushes. The sheep cut down the former, so that few berries are produced; the latter gives a pleasant fragrance when pressed in the hand. The island is one great ledge of rock, four hundred acres in extent, with a little soil thrown scantily over it; but the bare rock everywhere emerging, not only in points, but still more in flat surfaces. The only trees, I think, are two that Mr. Laighton has been trying to raise in front of the hotel, the taller of which looks scarcely so much as ten feet high. It is now about sunset, and the Fanny, with the mail, is just arrived at the moorings. So still is it, that the sounds on board (as of throwing oars into a small boat) are distinctly heard, though a quarter of a mile off. She has the Stars and Stripes flying at the main-mast. There appear to be no passengers. The only reptile on the island is a very vivid and beautiful green snake, which is exceedingly abundant. Yesterday, while catching grasshoppers for fish-bait, I nearly griped one in my hand; indeed, I rather think I did gripe it. The snake was as much startled as myself, and, in its fright, stood an instant on its tail, before it recovered presence of mind to glide away. These snakes are quite harmless. September 8th.--Last evening we could hear the roaring of the beaches at Hampton and Rye, nine miles off. The surf likewise swelled against the rocky shores of the island, though there was little or no wind, and, except for the swell, the surface was smooth. The sheep bleated loudly; and all these tokens, according to Mr. Laighton, foreboded a storm to windward. This morning, nevertheless, there were no further signs of it; it is sunny and calm, or only the slightest breeze from the westward; a haze sleeping along the shore, betokening a warm day; the surface of the sea streaked with smoothness, and gentle ruffles of wind. It has been the hottest day that I have known here, and probably one of the hottest of the season ashore; and the land is now imperceptible in the haze. Smith's monument is about seven feet high, and probably ten or twelve in diameter at its base. It is a cairn or mere heap of stones, thrown together as they came to hand, though with some selection of large and flat ones, towards the base, and with smaller ones thrown in. At the foundation, there are large rocks, naturally imbedded in the earth. I see no reason to disbelieve that a part of this monument may have been erected by Captain Smith, although subsequent visitors may have added to it. Laighton says it is known to have stood upwards of a hundred years. It is a work of considerable labor, and would more likely have been erected by one who supposed himself the first discoverer of the island than by anybody afterwards for mere amusement. I observed in some places, towards the base, that the lichens had grown from one stone to another; and there is nothing in the appearance of the monument that controverts the supposition of its antiquity. It is an irregular circle, somewhat decreasing towards the top. Few of the stones, except at the base, are bigger than a man could easily lift,--many of them are not more than a foot across. It stands towards the southern part of the island; and all the other islands are visible from it,--Smutty Nose, Star Island, and White Island,--on which is the lighthouse,--much of Laighton's island (the proper name of which is Hog, though latterly called Appledore), and Duck Island, which looks like a mere reef of rocks, and about a mile farther into the ocean, easterly of Hog Island. Laighton's Hotel, together with the house in which his son-in-law resides, which was likewise built by Laighton, and stands about fifty yards from the hotel, occupies the middle of a shallow valley, which passes through the island from east to west. Looking from the veranda, you have the ocean opening towards the east, and the bay towards Rye Beach and Portsmouth on the west. In the same storm that overthrew Minot's Light, a year or two ago, a great wave passed entirely through this valley; and Laighton describes it, when it came in from the sea, as toppling over to the height of the cupola of his hotel. It roared and whitened through, from sea to sea, twenty feet abreast, rolling along huge rocks in its passage. It passed beneath his veranda, which stands on posts, and probably filled the valley completely. Would I had been here to see! The day has been exceedingly hot. Since dinner, the Spy has arrived from Portsmouth, with a party of half a dozen or more men and women and children, apparently from the interior of New Hampshire. I am rather sorry to receive these strangers into the quiet life that we are leading here; for we had grown quite to feel ourselves at home, and the two young ladies, Mr. Thaxter, his wife and sister, and myself, met at meal-times like one family. The young ladies gathered shells, arranged them, laughed gently, sang, and did other pretty things in a young-ladylike way. These new-comers are people of uncouth voices and loud laughter, and behave themselves as if they were trying to turn their expedition to as much account as possible in the way of enjoyment. John's boat, the regular passenger-boat, is now coming in, and probably brings the mail. In the afternoon, while some of the new-comers were fishing off the rocks, west of the hotel, a shark came close in shore. Hearing their outcries, I looked out of my chamber window, and saw the dorsal fin and the fluke of his tail stuck up out of the water, as he moved to and fro. He must have been eight or ten feet long. He had probably followed the small fish into the bay, and got bewildered, and, at one time, he was almost aground. Oscar, Mr. Laighton's son, ran down with a gun, and fired at the shark, which was then not more than ten yards from the shore. He aimed, according to his father's directions, just below the junction of the dorsal fin with the body; but the gun was loaded only with shot, and seemed to produce no effect. Oscar had another shot at him afterwards; the shark floundered a little in the water, but finally got off and disappeared, probably without very serious damage. He came so near the shore that he might have been touched with a boat-hook. September 9th.--Mr. Thaxter rowed me this morning, in his dory, to White Island, on which is the lighthouse. There was scarcely a breath of air, and a perfectly calm sea; an intensely hot sunshine, with a little haze, so that the horizon was indistinct. Here and there sail-boats sleeping on the water, or moving almost imperceptibly over it. The lighthouse island would be difficult of access in a rough sea, the shore being so rocky. On landing, we found the keeper peeling his harvest of onions, which he had gathered prematurely, because the insects were eating them. His little patch of garden seemed to be a strange kind of soil, as like marine mud as anything; but he had a fair crop of marrow squashes, though injured, as he said, by the last storm; and there were cabbages and a few turnips. I recollect no other garden vegetables. The grass grows pretty luxuriantly, and looked very green where there was any soil; but he kept no cow, nor even a pig nor a hen. His house stands close by the garden, --a small stone building, with peaked roof, and whitewashed. The lighthouse stands on a ledge of rock, with a galley between, and there is a long covered way, triangular in shape, connecting his residence with it. We ascended into the lantern, which is eighty-seven feet high. It is a revolving light, with several great illuminators of copper silvered, and colored lamp-glasses. Looking downward, we had the island displayed as on a chart, with its little bays, its isthmus of shingly beach connecting two parts of the island, and overflowed at high tide; its sunken rocks about it, indicated by the swell, or slightly breaking surf. The keeper of the lighthouse was formerly a writing-master. He has a sneaking kind of look, and does not bear a very high character among his neighbors. Since he kept the light, he has lost two wives,--the first a young creature whom he used to leave alone upon this desolate rock, and the gloom and terror of the situation were probably the cause of her death. The second wife, experiencing the same kind of treatment, ran away from him, and returned to her friends. He pretends to be religious, but drinks. About a year ago he attempted to row out alone from Portsmouth. There was a head wind and head tide, and he would have inevitably drifted out to sea, if Mr. Thaxter had not saved him. While we were standing in his garden-patch, I heard a woman's voice inside the dwelling, but know not whose it was. A lighthouse nine miles from shore would be a delightful place for a new-married couple to spend their honeymoon, or their whole first year. On our way back we landed at another island called Londoner's Rock, or some such name. It has but little soil. As we approached it, a large bird flew away. Mr. Thaxter took it to be a gannet; and, while walking over the island, an owl started up from among the rocks near us, and flew away, apparently uncertain of its course. It was a brown owl, but Mr. Thaxter says that there are beautiful white owls, which spend the winter here, and feed upon rats. These are very abundant, and live amidst the rocks,--probably having been brought hither by vessels. The water to-day was not so transparent as sometimes, but had a slight haze diffused through it, somewhat like that of the atmosphere. The passengers brought by the Spy, yesterday, still remain with us. They consist of country traders, a country doctor, and such sorts of people, rude, shrewd, and simple, and well-behaved enough; wondering at sharks, and equally at lobsters; sitting down to table with their coats off; helping themselves out of the dish with their own forks; taking pudding on the plates off which they have eaten meat. People at just this stage of manners are more disagreeable than at any other stage. They are aware of some decencies, but not so deeply aware as to make them a matter of conscience. They may be heard talking of the financial affairs of the expedition, reckoning what money each has paid. One offers to pay another three or four cents, which the latter has overpaid. "It's of no consequence, sir," says his friend, with a tone of conscious liberality, "that's near enough." This is a most tremendously hot day. There is a young lady staying at the hotel, afflicted with what her friends call erysipelas, but which is probably scrofula. She seems unable to walk, or sit up; but every pleasant day, about the middle of the forenoon, she is dragged out beneath the veranda, on a sofa. To-day she has been there until late in the decline of the afternoon. It is a delightful place, where the breezes stir, if any are in motion. The young girls, her sisters or cousins, and Mr. Thaxter's sister, sat round her, babbling cheerfully, and singing; and they were so merry that it did not seem as if there could be an incurably sick one in the midst of them. The Spy came to-day, with more passengers of no particular character. She still remains off the landing, moored, with her sails in the wind. The mail arrived to-day, but nothing for me. Close by the veranda, at the end of the hotel, is drawn up a large boat, of ten or twelve tons, which got injured in some gale, and probably will remain there for years to decay, and be a picturesque and characteristic object. The Spy has been lying in the broad track of golden light, thrown by the sun, far down towards the horizon, over the rippling water, her sails throwing distinct, dark shadows over the brightness. She has now got under way, and set sail on a northwest course for Portsmouth; carrying off, I believe, all the passengers she brought to-day. September 10th.--Here is another beautiful morning, with the sun dimpling in the early sunshine. Four sailboats are in sight, motionless on the sea, with the whiteness of their sails reflected in it. The heat-haze sleeps along the shore, though not so as quite to hide it, and there is the promise of another very warm day. As yet, however, the air is cool and refreshing. Around the island, there is the little ruffle of a breeze; but where the sail-boats are, a mile or more off, the sea is perfectly calm. The crickets sing, and I hear the chirping of birds besides. At the base of the lighthouse yesterday, we saw the wings and feathers of a decayed little bird, and Mr. Thaxter said they often flew against the lantern with such force as to kill themselves, and that large quantities of them might be picked up. How came these little birds out of their nests at night? Why should they meet destruction from the radiance that proves the salvation of other beings? Mr. Thaxter had once a man living with him who had seen "Old Bab," the ghost. He met him between the hotel and the sea, and describes him as dressed in a sort of frock, and with a very dreadful countenance. Two or three years ago, the crew of a wrecked vessel, a brigantine, wrecked near Boon Island, landed on Hog Island of a winter night, and found shelter in the hotel. It was from the eastward. There were six or seven men, with the mate and captain. It was midnight when they got ashore. The common sailors, as soon as they were physically comfortable, seemed to be perfectly at ease. The captain walked the floor, bemoaning himself for a silver watch which he had lost; the mate, being the only married man, talked about his Eunice. They all told their dreams of the preceding night, and saw in them prognostics of the misfortune. There is now a breeze, the blue ruffle of which seems to reach almost across to the mainland, yet with streaks of calm; and, in one place, the glassy surface of a lake of calmness, amidst the surrounding commotion. The wind, in the early morning, was from the west, and the aspect of the sky seemed to promise a warm and sunny day. But all at once, soon after breakfast, the wind shifted round to the eastward; and great volumes of fog, almost as dense as cannon-smoke, came sweeping from the eastern ocean, through the valley, and past the house. It soon covered the whole sea, and the whole island, beyond a verge of a few hundred yards. The chilliness was not so great as accompanies a change of wind on the mainland. We had been watching a large ship that was slowly making her way between us and the land towards Portsmouth. This was now hidden. The breeze is still very moderate; but the boat, moored near the shore, rides with a considerable motion, as if the sea were getting up. Mr. Laighton says that the artist who adorned Trinity Church in New York with sculpture wanted some real wings from which to imitate the wings of cherubim. Mr. Thaxter carried him the wings of the white owl that winters here at the Shoals, together with those of some other bird; and the artist gave his cherubim the wings of an owl. This morning there have been two boat-loads of visitors from Rye. They merely made a flying call, and took to their boats again,--a disagreeable and impertinent kind of people. The Spy arrived before dinner, with several passengers. After dinner came the Fanny, bringing, among other freight, a large basket of delicious pears to me, together with a note from Mr. B. B. Titcomb. He is certainly a man of excellent, taste and admirable behavior. I sent a plateful of pears to the room of each guest now in the hotel, kept a dozen for myself, and gave the balance to Mr. Laighton. The two Portsmouth young ladies returned in the Spy. I had grown accustomed to their presence, and rather liked them; one of them being gay and rather noisy, and the other quiet and gentle. As to new-comers, I feel rather a distaste to them; and so, I find, does Mr. Laighton,--a rather singular sentiment for a hotel-keeper to entertain towards his guests. However, he treats them very hospitably, when once within his doors. The sky is overcast, and, about the time of the Spy and the Fanny sailed, there were a few drops of rain. The wind, at that time, was strong enough to raise white-caps to the eastward of the island, and there was good hope of a storm. Now, however, the wind has subsided, and the weather-seers know not what to forebode. September 11th.--The wind shifted and veered about, towards the close of yesterday, and later it was almost calm, after blowing gently from the northwest,--notwithstanding which it rained. There being a mistiness in the air, we could see the gleam of the lighthouse itself by the highest point of this island, or by our being in a valley. As we sat in the piazza in the evening, we saw the light from on board some vessel move slowly through the distant obscurity,--so slowly that we were only sensible of its progress by forgetting it and looking again. The plash and murmur of the waves around the island were soothingly audible. It was not unpleasantly cold, and Mr. Laighton, Mr. Thaxter and myself sat under the piazza till long after dark; the former at a little distance, occasionally smoking his pipe, and Mr. Thaxter and I talking about poets and the stage. The latter is an odd subject to be discussed in this stern and wild scene, which has precisely the same characteristics now as two hundred years ago. The mosquitoes were very abundant last night, and they are certainly a hardier race than their inland brethren. This morning there is a sullen sky, with scarcely any breeze. The clouds throw shadows of varied darkness upon the sea. I know not which way the wind is; but the aspect of things seems to portend a calm drizzle as much as anything else. About eleven o'clock, Mr. Thaxter took me over to Smutty Nose in his dory. A sloop from the eastward, laden with laths, bark, and other lumber, and a few barrels of mackerel, filled yesterday, and was left by her skipper and crew. All the morning we have seen boats picking up her deck-load, which was scattered over the sea, and along the shores of the islands. The skipper and his three men got into Smutty Nose in the boat; and the sloop was afterwards boarded by the Smutty Noses and brought into that island. We saw her lying at the pier,--a black, ugly, rotten old thing, with the water half-way over her decks. The wonder was, how she swam so long. The skipper, a man of about thirty-five or forty, in a blue pilot-cloth overcoat, and a rusty, high-crowned hat jammed down over his brow, looked very forlorn; while the islanders were grouped about, indolently enjoying the matter. I walked with Mr. Thaxter over the island, and saw first the graves of the Spaniards. They were wrecked on this island a hundred years ago, and lie buried in a range about thirty feet in length, to the number of sixteen, with rough, moss-grown pieces of granite on each side of this common grave. Near this spot, yet somewhat removed, so as not to be confounded with it, are other individual graves, chiefly of the Haley family, who were once possessors of the island. These have slate gravestones. There is also, within a small enclosure of rough pine boards, a white marble gravestone, in memory of a young man named Bekker, son of the person who now keeps the hotel on Smutty Nose. He was buried, Mr. Thaxter says, notwithstanding his marble monument, in a rude pine box, which he himself helped to make. We walked to the farthest point of the island, and I have never seen a more dismal place than it was on this sunless and east-windy day, being the farthest point out into the melancholy sea, which was in no very agreeable mood, and roared sullenly against the wilderness of rocks. One mass of rock, more than twelve feet square, was thrown up out of the sea in a storm, not many years since, and now lies athwartwise, never to be moved unless another omnipotent wave shall give it another toss. On shore, such a rock would be a landmark for centuries. It is inconceivable how a sufficient mass of water could be brought to bear on this ponderous mass; but, not improbably, all the fragments piled upon one another round these islands have thus been flung to and fro at one time or another. There is considerable land that would serve tolerably for pasture on Smutty Nose, and here and there a little enclosure of richer grass, built round with a strong stonewall. The same kind of enclosure is prevalent on Star Island,--each small proprietor fencing off his little bit of tillage or grass. Wild-flowers are abundant and various on these islands; the bayberry-bush is plentiful on Smutty Nose, and makes the hand that crushes it fragrant. The hotel is kept by a Prussian, an old soldier, who fought at the Battle of Waterloo. We saw him in the barn,--a gray, heavy, round-skulled old fellow, troubled with deafness. The skipper of the wrecked sloop had, apparently, just been taking a drop of comfort, but still seemed downcast. He took passage in a fishing-vessel, the Wave, of Kittery, for Portsmouth; and I know not why, but there was something that made me smile in his grim and gloomy look, his rusty, jammed hat, his rough and grisly beard, and in his mode of chewing tobacco, with much action of the jaws, getting out the juice as largely as possible, as men always do when disturbed in mind. I looked at him earnestly, and was conscious of something that marked him out from among the careless islanders around him. Being as much discomposed as it was possible for him to be, his feelings individualized the man and magnetized the observer. When he got aboard the fishing-vessel, he seemed not entirely at his ease, being accustomed to command and work amongst his own little crew, and now having nothing to do. Nevertheless, unconsciously perhaps, he lent a hand to whatever was going on, and yet had a kind of strangeness about him. As the Wave set sail, we were just starting in our dory, and a young fellow, an acquaintance of Mr. Thaxter, proposed to take us in tow; so we were dragged along at her stern very rapidly, and with a whitening wake, until we came off Hog Island. Then the dory was cast loose, and Mr. Thaxter rowed ashore against a head sea. The day is still overcast, and the wind is from the eastward; but it does not increase, and the sun appears occasionally on the point of shining out. A boat--the Fanny, I suppose, from Portsmouth--has just come to her moorings in front of the hotel. A sail-boat has put off from her, with a passenger in the stern. Pray God she bring me a letter with good news from home; for I begin to feel as if I had been long enough away. There is a bowling-alley on Smutty Nose, at which some of the Star-Islanders were playing, when we were there. I saw only two dwelling-houses besides the hotel. Connected with Smutty Nose by a stone-wall there is another little bit of island, called Malaga. Both are the property of Mr. Laighton. Mr. Laighton says that the Spanish wreck occurred forty-seven years ago, instead of a hundred. Some of the dead bodies were found on Malaga, others on various parts of the next island. One or two had crept to a stone-wall that traverses Smutty Nose, but were unable to get over it. One was found among the bushes the next summer. Mr. Haley had them buried at his own expense. The skipper of the wrecked sloop, yesterday, was unwilling to go to Portsmouth until he was shaved,--his beard being of several days' growth. It seems to be the impulse of people under misfortune to put on their best clothes, and attend to the decencies of life. The Fanny brought a passenger,--a thin, stiff, black-haired young man, who enters his name as Mr. Tufts, from Charlestown. He, and a country trader, his wife, sister, and two children (all of whom have been here several days) are now the only guests besides myself. September 12th.--The night set in sullen and gloomy, and morning has dawned in pretty much the same way. The wind, however, seems rising somewhat, and grumbles past the angle of the house. Perhaps we shall see a storm yet from the eastward; and, having the whole sweep of the broad Atlantic between here and Ireland, I do not see why it should not be fully equal to a storm at sea. It has been raining more or less all the forenoon, and now, at twelve o'clock, blows, as Mr. Laighton says, "half a gale" from the southeast. Through the opening of our shallow valley, towards the east, there is the prospect of a tumbling sea, with hundreds of white-caps chasing one another over it. In front of the hotel, being to leeward, the water near the shore is but slightly ruffled; but farther the sea is agitated, and the surf breaks over Square Rock. All round the horizon, landward as well as seaward, the view is shut in by a mist. Sometimes I have a dim sense of the continent beyond, but no more distinct than the thought of the other world to the unenlightened soul. The sheep bleat in their desolate pasture. The wind shakes the house. A loon, seeking, I suppose, some quieter resting-place than on the troubled waves, was seen swimming just now in the cove not more than a hundred yards from the hotel. Judging by the pother which this "half a gale" makes with the sea, it must have been a terrific time, indeed, when that great wave rushed and roared across the islands. Since dinner, I have been to the eastern shore to look at the sea. It is a wild spectacle, but still, I suppose, lacks an infinite deal of being a storm. Outside of this island there is a long and low one (or two in a line), looking more like a reef of rocks than an island, and at the distance of a mile or more. There the surf and spray break gallantly,-- white-sheeted forms rising up all at once, and hovering a moment in the air. Spots which, in calm times, are not discernible from the rest of the ocean, now are converted into white, foamy breakers. The swell of the waves against our shore makes a snowy depth, tinged with green, for many feet back from the shore. The longer waves swell, overtop, and rush upon the rocks; and, when they return, the waters pour back in a cascade. Against the outer points of Smutty Nose and Star Island, there is a higher surf than here; because, the wind being from the southeast, these islands receive it first, and form a partial barrier in respect to this. While I looked, there was moisture in the air, and occasional spats of rain. The uneven places in the rocks were full of the fallen rain. It is quite impossible to give an idea of these rocky shores,--how confusedly they are tossed together, lying in all directions; what solid ledges, what great fragments thrown out from the rest. Often the rocks are broken, square and angular, so as to form a kind of staircase; though, for the most part, such as would require a giant stride to ascend them. Sometimes a black trap-rock runs through the bed of granite; sometimes the sea has eaten this away, leaving a long, irregular fissure. In some places, owing to the same cause perhaps, there is a great hollow place excavated into the ledge, and forming a harbor, into which the sea flows; and, while there is foam and fury at the entrance, it is comparatively calm within. Some parts of the crag are as much as fifty feet of perpendicular height, down which you look over a bare and smooth descent, at the base of which is a shaggy margin of sea-weed. But it is vain to try to express this confusion. As much as anything else, it seems as if some of the massive materials of the world remained superfluous, after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thrown down here, where the millionth part of them emerge from the sea, and in the course of thousands of years have become partially bestrewn with a little soil. The wind has changed to southwest, and blows pretty freshly. The sun shone before it set; and the mist, which all day has overhung the land, now takes the aspect of a cloud,--drawing a thin veil between us and the shore, and rising above it. In our own atmosphere there is no fog nor mist. September 13th.--I spent last evening, as well as part of the evening before, at Mr. Thaxter's. It is certainly a romantic incident to find such a young man on this lonely island; his marriage with the pretty Miranda is true romance. In our talk we have glanced over many matters, and, among the rest, that of the stage, to prepare himself for which was his first motive in coming hither. He appears quite to have given up any dreams of that kind now. What he will do on returning to the world, as his purpose is, I cannot imagine; but, no doubt, through all their remaining life, both he and she will look back to this rocky ledge, with its handful of soil, as to a Paradise. Last evening we (Mr., Mrs., and Miss Thaxter) sat and talked of ghosts and kindred subjects; and they told me of the appearance of a little old woman in a striped gown, that had come into that house a few months ago. She was seen by nobody but an Irish nurse, who spoke to her, but received no answer. The little woman drew her chair up towards the fire, and stretched out her feet to warm them. By and by the nurse, who suspected nothing of her ghostly character, went to get a pail of water; and, when she came back, the little woman was not there. It being known precisely how many and what people were on the island, and that no such little woman was among them, the fact of her being a ghost is incontestable. I taught them how to discover the hidden sentiments of letters by suspending a gold ring over them. Ordinarily, since I have been here, we have spent the evening under the piazza, where Mr. Laighton sits to take the air. He seems to avoid the within-doors whenever he can. So there he sits in the sea-breezes, when inland people are probably drawing their chairs to the fireside; and there I sit with him,--not keeping up a continual flow of talk, but each speaking as any wisdom happens to come into his mind. The wind, this morning, is from the northwestward, rather brisk, but not very strong. There is a scattering of clouds about the sky; but the atmosphere is singularly clear, and we can see several hills of the interior, the cloud-like White Mountains, and, along the shore, the long white beaches and the dotted dwellings, with great distinctness. Many small vessels spread their wings, and go seaward. I have been rambling over the southern part of the island, and looking at the traces of habitations there. There are several enclosures,--the largest perhaps thirty yards square,--surrounded with a rough stonewall of very mossy antiquity, built originally broad and strong, two or three large stones in width, and piled up breast-high or more, and taking advantage of the extending ledge to make it higher. Within this enclosure there is almost a clear space of soil, which was formerly, no doubt, cultivated as a garden, but is now close cropt by the sheep and cattle, except where it produces thistles, or the poisonous weed called mercury, which seems to love these old walls, and to root itself in or near them. These walls are truly venerable, gray, and mossy; and you see at once that the hands that piled the stones must have been long ago turned to dust. Close by the enclosure is the hollow of an old cellar, with rocks tumbled into it, but the layers of stone at the side still to be traced, and bricks, broken or with rounded edges, scattered about, and perhaps pieces of lime; and weeds and grass growing about the whole. Several such sites of former human homes may be seen there, none of which can possibly be later than the Revolution, and probably they are as old as the settlement of the island. The site has Smutty Nose and Star opposite, with a road (that is, a water-road) between, varying from half a mile to a mile. Duck Island is also seen on the left; and, on the right, the shore of the mainland. Behind, the rising ground intercepts the view. Smith's monument is visible. I do not see where the inhabitants could have kept their boats, unless in the chasms worn by the sea into the rocks. One of these chasms has a spring of fresh water in the gravelly base, down to which the sea has worn out. The chasm has perpendicular, though irregular, sides, which the waves have chiselled out very square. Its width varies from ten to twenty feet, widest towards the sea; and on the shelves, up and down the sides, some soil has been here and there accumulated, on which grow grass and wild-flowers,--such as golden-rod, now in bloom, and raspberry-bushes, the fruit of which I found ripe,--the whole making large parts of the sides of the chasm green, its verdure overhanging the strip of sea that dashes and foams into the hollow. Sea-weed, besides what grows upon and shags the submerged rocks, is tossed into the harbor, together with stray pieces of wood, chips, barrel-staves, or (as to-day) an entire barrel, or whatever else the sea happens to have on hand. The water rakes to and fro over the pebbles at the bottom of the chasm, drawing back, and leaving much of it bare, then rushing up, with more or less of foam and fury, according to the force and direction of the wind; though, owing to the protection of the adjacent islands, it can never have a gale blowing right into its mouth. The spring is situated so far down the chasm, that, at half or two-thirds tide, it is covered by the sea. Twenty minutes after the retiring of the tide suffices to restore to it its wonted freshness. In another chasm, very much like the one here described, I saw a niche in the rock, about tall enough for a person of moderate stature to stand upright. It had a triangular floor and a top, and was just the place to hold the rudest statue that ever a savage made. Many of the ledges on the island have yellow moss or lichens spread on them in large patches. The moss of those stone walls does really look very old. "Old Bab," the ghost, has a ring round his neck, and is supposed either to have been hung or to have had his throat cut, but he steadfastly declines telling the mode of his death. There is a luminous appearance about him as he walks, and his face is pale and very dreadful. The Fanny arrived this forenoon, and sailed again before dinner. She brought, as passenger, a Mr. Balch, brother to the country trader who has been spending a few days here. On her return, she has swept the islands of all the non-residents except myself. The wind being ahead, and pretty strong, she will have to beat up, and the voyage will be anything but agreeable. The spray flew before her bows, and doubtless gave the passengers all a thorough wetting within the first half-hour. The view of Star Island or Gosport from the north is picturesque,--the village, or group of houses, being gathered pretty closely together in the centre of the island, with some green about them; and above all the other edifices, wholly displayed, stands the little stone church, with its tower and belfry. On the right is White Island, with the lighthouse; to the right of that, and a little to the northward, Londoner's Rock, where, perhaps, of old, some London ship was wrecked. To the left of Star Island, and nearer Hog, or Appledore, is Smutty Nose. Pour the blue sea about these islets, and let the surf whiten and steal up from their points, and from the reefs about them (which latter whiten for an instant, and then are lost in the whelming and eddying depths), the northwest-wind the while raising thousands of white-caps, and the evening sun shining solemnly over the expanse,--and it is a stern and lovely scene. The valleys that intersect, or partially intersect, the island are a remarkable feature. They appear to be of the same formation as the fissures in the rocks, but, as they extend farther from the sea, they accumulate a little soil along the irregular sides, and so become green and shagged with bushes, though with the rock everywhere thrusting itself through. The old people of the isles say that their fathers could remember when the sea, at high tide, flowed quite through the valley in which the hotel stands, and that boats used to pass. Afterwards it was a standing pond; then a morass, with cat-tail flags growing in it. It has filled up, so far as it is filled, by the soil being washed down from the higher ground on each side. The storms, meanwhile, have tossed up the shingle and paving-stones at each end of the valley, so as to form a barrier against the passage of any but such mighty waves as that which thundered through a year or two ago. The old inhabitants lived in the centre or towards the south of the island, and avoided the north and east because the latter were so much bleaker in winter. They could moor their boats in the road, between Smutty Nose and Hog, but could not draw them up. Mr. Laighton found traces of old dwellings in the vicinity of the hotel, and it is supposed that the principal part of the population was on this island. I spent the evening at Mr. Thaxter's, and we drank a glass of his 1820 Scheidam. The northwest-wind was high at ten o'clock, when I came home, the tide full, and the murmur of the waves broad and deep. September 14th.--Another of the brightest of sunny mornings. The wind is not nearly so high as last night, but it is apparently still from the northwest, and serves to make the sea look very blue and cold. The atmosphere is so transparent that objects seem perfectly distinct along the mainland. To-day I must be in Portsmouth; to-morrow, at home. A brisk west, or northwest wind, making the sea so blue, gives a very distinct outline in its junction with the sky. September 16th.--On Tuesday, the 14th, there was no opportunity to get to the mainland. Yesterday morning opened with a southeast rain, which continued all day. The Fanny arrived in the forenoon, with some coal for Mr. Laighton, and sailed again before dinner, taking two of the maids of the house; but as it rained pouring, and as I could not, at any rate, have got home to-night, there would have been no sense in my going. It began to clear up in the decline of the day; the sun shot forth some golden arrows a little before his setting; and the sky was perfectly clear when I went to bed, after spending the evening at Mr. Thaxter's. This morning is clear and bright; but the wind is northwest, making the sea look blue and cold, with little breaks of white foam. It is unfavorable for a trip to the mainland; but doubtless I shall find an opportunity of getting ashore before night. The highest part of Appledore is about eighty feet above the sea. Mr. Laighton has seen whales off the island,--both on the eastern side and between it and the mainland; once a great crowd of them, as many as fifty. They were drawn in by pursuing their food,--a small fish called herring-bait, which came ashore in such abundance that Mr. Laighton dipped up basketfuls of them. No attempt was made to take the whales. There are vague traditions of trees on these islands. One of them, Cedar Island, is said to have been named from the trees that grew on it. The matter appears improbable, though, Mr. Thaxter says, large quantities of soil are annually washed into the sea; so that the islands may have been better clad with earth and its productions than now. Mrs. Thaxter tells me that there are several burial-places on this island; but nobody has been buried here since the Revolution. Her own marriage was the first one since that epoch, and her little Karl, now three months old, the first-born child in all those eighty years. [Then follow extracts from the Church Records of Gosport.] This book of the church records of Gosport is a small folio, well bound in dark calf, and about an inch thick; the paper very stout, with a water-mark of an armed man in a sitting posture, holding a spear . . . . over a lion, who brandishes a sword; on alternate pages the Crown, and beneath it the letters G. R. The motto of the former device Pro Patria. The book is written in a very legible hand, probably by the Rev. Mr. Tucke. The ink is not much faded. Concord, March 9th, 1853.--Finished, this day, the last story of Tanglewood Tales. They were written in the following order. The Pomegranate Seeds. The Minotaur. The Golden Fleece. The Dragons' Teeth. Circe's Palace. The Pygmies. The introduction is yet to be written. Wrote it 13th March. I went to Washington (my first visit) on 14th April. Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots. June 9th.--Cleaning the attic to-day, here at the Wayside, the woman found an immense snake, flat and outrageously fierce, thrusting out its tongue. Ellen, the cook, killed it. She called it an adder, but it appears to have been a striped snake. It seems a fiend, haunting the house. On further inquiry, the snake is described as plaided with brown and black. Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrows, and uses fire-arms,--a pistol,--perhaps a revolver. I burned great heaps of old letters and other papers, a little while ago, preparatory to going to England. Among them were hundreds of ------'s letters. The world has no more such, and now they are all dust and ashes. What a trustful guardian of secret matters is fire! What should we do without fire and death? END OF VOL. II 
39406	----	(This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Million Book Project) KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS OTHER WORKS BY MR. TOWNSEND _Richard Hickman Menefee_. 1907 _Kentuckians in History and Literature_. 1907 _The Life of James Francis Leonard_. 1909 _Kentucky: Mother of Governors_. 1910 _Lore of the Meadowland_. 1911 KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS 1784-1912 BY JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES LANE ALLEN IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I THE TORCH PRESS CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA NINETEEN THIRTEEN _Of this edition one thousand sets have been printed, of which this is number_ 241 COPYRIGHT 1913 BY THE TORCH PRESS PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1913 [Illustration: (Printers' Union Logo)] To My Mother INTRODUCTION Mr. Townsend's fellow countrymen must feel themselves to be put under a beautiful obligation to him by his work entitled _Kentucky in American Letters_. He has thus fenced off for the lovers of New World literature a well watered bluegrass pasture of prose and verse, which they may enter and range through according to their appetites for its peculiar green provender and their thirst for the limestone spring. This strip of pasture is a hundred years long; its breadth may not be politely questioned! For the backward-looking and for the forward-looking students of American literature, not its merely browsing readers, he has wrought a service of larger and more lasting account. Whether his patiently done and richly crowned work be the first of its class and kind, there is slight need to consider here: fitly enough it might be a pioneer, a path-blazer, as coming from the land of pioneers, path-blazers. But whether or not other works of like character be already in the field of national observation, it is inevitable that many others soon will be. There must in time and in the natural course of events come about a complete marshalling of the American commonwealths, especially of the older American commonwealths, attended each by its women and men of letters; with the final result that the entire pageant of our literary creativeness as a people will thus be exhibited and reviewed within those barriers and divisions, which from the beginning have constituted the peculiar genius of our civilization. When this has been done, when the States have severally made their profoundly significant showing, when the evidence up to some century mark or half-century mark is all presented, then for the first time we, as a reading and thoughtful self-studying people, may for the first time be advanced to the position of beginning to understand what as a whole our cis-Atlantic branch of English literature really is. Thus Mr. Townsend's work and the work of his fellow-craftsmen are all stations on the long road but the right road. They are aids to the marshalling of the American commonwealths at a great meeting-point of the higher influences of our nation. Now, already American literature has long been a subject in regard to which a library of books has been written. The authors of by far the most of these books are themselves Americans, and they have thus looked at our literature and at our civilization from within; the authors of the rest are foreigners who have investigated and philosophized from the outside. Altogether, native and foreign, they have approached their theme from divergent directions, with diverse aims, and under the influence of deep differences in their critical methods and in their own natures. But so far as the writer of these words is aware, no one of them either native or foreign has ever set about the study of American literature, enlightened with the only solvent principle that can ever furnish its solution. That solvent principle is contained within a single proposition. That single proposition is the one upon which our forefathers deliberately chose to found the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World: that it should not be a civilization of States which were not a Nation; that it should not be the civilization of a nation without states; but that it should be a Nation of States. Now, if any man aspires to draw from American literature the philosophy of its traits, if he sets it as the goal of his wisdom to explain its breadth and its narrowness, its plenty here and its lack there, its color in one place and its pallor in another, let him go back to the will of the fathers in the foundation of the Republic and find the explanation of our literature at the basis of our whole civilization. He will never find it anywhere else. He will find it there as he there finds the origin of our system of government, of our system of industry, of our system of political barriers, of our system of education: in the entire nature of our institutions as derived and unfolded from the idea that we should be a nation of states. Our literature--our novels and our poetry--have been as rigorously included in this development as all the other elements of our life. For the first time in this way he may come to see a great light; and with that light shining about him he may be prepared to write the first history of American literature. None has yet been written. [Illustration] PREFACE I What is a Kentucky book, is the one great question this work has elicited. Surely a Kentucky book is one written by a Kentuckian about Kentucky or Kentuckians and printed in Kentucky; surely it is a book written by a Kentuckian upon any subject under the sun, and published in any clime; surely it is one written in Kentucky by a citizen of any other state or country, regardless of the subject or place of publication, for, "in general, I have regarded the birthplace of a piece of literature more important than that of the author." But is a book, though treating of Kentucky or Kentuckians, regardless of its place of publication, whose author was not born in, nor for any appreciable period resided in, this state, entitled to be properly classified as a Kentucky work? The writer has responded in the negative to this question in the present work. There have been several noted American authors who have written volumes about Kentucky or Kentuckians, and they themselves were not natives of this state, nor resided within its confines. Those early Western travelers rarely omitted Kentucky from their journeys. The first of them, F. A. Michaux, published his famous _Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee_, at London, in 1805; two years later F. Cuming's _Tour to the Western Country, through Ohio and Kentucky_, was printed at Pittsburg; and in 1817 John Bradbury got out the first edition of his now noted _Travels in the Interior of America_, at London. Bradbury died in 1823 and to-day lies buried in the cemetery at Middletown, Kentucky, near Louisville. George W. Ogden's _Letters from the West_ (New Bedford, 1823); W. Bullock's _Sketch of a Journey through the Western States_ (London, 1827); and Tilly Buttrick's _Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries_ (Boston, 1831), round out fairly well that group of Scotchmen, Englishmen, New Englanders, and what not, who found many interesting things in Kentucky a hundred years and more ago. Ogden spent two summers in Kentucky; Bullock owned a river-side tract near Ludlow, Kentucky, and old Bradbury sleeps in a quiet Kentucky hamlet, but neither of them may be properly classified as a real Kentuckian. The Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy of 1825 was the one Kentucky event that kindled the imaginations of more alien writers than any other happening in our history. Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno Hoffman, G. P. R. James, James Hall, and several others, wrote plays, novels, and poems based upon this tragedy. In 1832 James Kirke Paulding, the friend of Washington Irving, published one of the earliest Kentucky romances, entitled _Westward Ho!_ which name he got from the old Elizabethan drama of John Webster and Thomas Dekker. Two years after the appearance of Paulding's tale, William A. Caruthers, the Virginia novelist, printed _The Kentuckian in New York_; and in the same year Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"), put forth one of his earliest works, _Kentucky, a Tale_ (London, 1834). In 1845 Charles Winterfield's _My First Days With the Rangers_, appeared, to be followed the next year by William T. Porter's _A Quarter Race in Kentucky_. These writers hardly did more than point the way to Kentucky for Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose world-famous novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (Boston, 1852), was set against a background of slave-holding Kentucky. This is the most famous example our literature affords of a writer of another state or country coming to Kentucky for the materials out of which to build a book. In 1860 David Ross Locke, the Ohio journalist and satirist, discovered the _Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby_, postmaster at "Confedrit X Roads, Kentucky," and his political satires on Kentucky, the _Nasby Letters_, tickled the readers of his paper, _The Toledo Blade_, through many years. These alleged communications from poor Petroleum may be read to-day in Locke's _Swingin' Round the Cirkel_, and _Ekkoes from Kentucky_. J. G. Marshall's _The Outlaw Brothers_ (New York, 1864); Miss Martha Remick's _Millicent Halford: a Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky in the year 1861_ (Boston, 1865); two novels by Edward Willett, entitled _Kentucky Border Foes_, and _Old Honesty: a Tale of the Early Days of Kentucky_, both of which were issued in the late sixties; Constance F. Woolson's _Two Women_ (New York, 1877), and Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd's story, _Glorinda_ (Boston, 1888), concludes the group of writers of the comparatively modern school who did not linger long in the "meadowland," but who found it good literary soil, and helped themselves accordingly. In recent years Mr. Winston Churchill's _The Crossing_, Dr. James Ball Naylor's _The Kentuckian_, Mr. Augustus Thomas's _The Witching Hour_, and the Kentucky lyrics of Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, the Ohio poet, have drawn fresh attention to Kentucky as a background for literary productions, although they are written by those who cannot qualify as Kentuckians. But to claim any of these writers for the Commonwealth, would be to make one's self absurd. Dr. Naylor's lines upon this point are _apropos_: I must admit--although it hurts!-- That I was born unlucky; I've never, literally, had A home in Old Kentucky. And yet I feel should wayward Chance Direct my steps to roam there, I'd meet you all and greet you all-- And find myself _at home_ there! As has already been indicated, the good physician-poet is not by any manner of means the only alien bard who has remembered Kentucky in his work. No less a poet than the great Sir Walter Scott celebrated Kentucky in _Marmion_--the State's first appearance in English poetry. The passage may be found near the close of the ninth stanza in the third canto. Lord Marmion and his followers have ridden "the livelong day," and are now quartered at a well-known Scottish hostelry. They have all eaten and drunk until they are on the borderland of dreams when their leader, seeing their condition, ... called upon a squire:-- "Fitz-Eustace, know'st thou not some lay, To speed the lingering night away? We slumber by the fire."-- VIII "So please you," thus the youth rejoined "Our choicest minstrel's left behind." And while Fitz realizes that he cannot, in any degree, equal the famous singer to whom he has referred, he now further praises him, calls down curses on the cause that kept him from following Marmion, and ventures "To sing his favourite roundelay." IX A mellow voice Fitz-Eustace had, The air he chose was wild and sad; Such have I heard, in Scottish land, Rise from the busy harvest band, When falls before the mountaineer, On lowland plains, the ripened ear. Now one shrill voice the notes prolong, Now a wild chorus swells the song: Oft have I listened, and stood still, As it came soften'd up the hill, And deem'd it the lament of men Who languish'd for their native glen; And thought how sad would be such sound, On Susquehannah's swampy ground, _Kentucky's wood-encumber'd brake_, Or wild Ontario's boundless lake, Where heart-sick exiles, in the strain, Recall'd fair Scotland's hills again! After Sir Walter, the next English poet to tell the world of Kentucky and one of her sons, was George Gordon (Lord) Byron. His references are found in the eighth canto and the sixty-first to the sixty-seventh stanzas inclusive, of _Don Juan_. This poem was begun in 1819 and published, several cantos at a time, until the final sixteenth appeared in 1824. The sixty-first stanza will serve our purpose. LXI Of all men, saving Sylla, the man-slayer, Who passes for in life and death most lucky, Of the greatest names which in our faces stare, _The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky_, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere; For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless days Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. In 1827 Alfred Tennyson, with his brother Charles, published a slender sheaf of juvenile verses, entitled _Poems By Two Brothers_. _On Sublimity_ contains eleven stanzas of ten lines each. The poet disdains "vales in tenderest green," and asks for "the wild cascade, the rugged scene," the sea, the mountains, dark cathedrals, storms, "Niagara's flood of matchless might," and Mammoth Cave. The hurricane fair earth to darkness changing, _Kentucky's chambers of eternal gloom_,[1] The swift-pac'd columns of the desert ranging Th' uneven waste, the violent Simoom The snow-clad peaks, stupendous Gungo-tree! Whence springs the hallow'd Jumna's echoing tide, Hear Cotopaxi's cloud-capt majesty, Enormous Chimborazo's naked pride, The dizzy Cape of winds that cleaves the sky, Whence we look down into eternity, The pillar'd cave of Morven's giant king The Yanar, and the Geyser's boiling fountain, The deep volcano's inward murmuring, The shadowy Colossus of the mountain; Antiparos, where sun-beams never enter; Loud Stromboli, amid the quaking isles; The terrible Maelstroom, around his centre Wheeling his circuit of unnumber'd miles: These, these are sights and sounds that freeze the blood, Yet charm the awe-struck soul which doats on solitude. Tennyson was the third and last English poet of the nineteenth century to make mention of Kentucky in his works. Much writing has been done by Kentuckians from the beginning until the present time, but most of what is usually termed literature is the work of the school of today. That much, however, of the early productions, especially the anonymous and fugitive poems, have been forever lost, may be gathered from a letter written to Edwin Bryant, editor of _The Lexington Intelligencer_, by an Ohio correspondent, which appeared in that paper in January, 1834, a part of which is as follows: There were a vast number of rural and sentimental songs, sung by the hunters and pioneers, that, in this our day, to the present generation would be truly interesting. Would it not be wise for you, Messrs. Editors, to publish a note in your valuable paper, offering the "Poets' Corner," and save what you can of the fragments of "Olden Times?"... I know that there were many sentimental pieces--some written by a Mr. Bullock--many war songs; one on St. Clair's defeat; and there was a wonderful flow of poetical effusions on the first discovery of a settlement of Kentucky. There was a wooing song of the hunter--one stanza I can only repeat: "I will plough and live, and you may knit and sowe, And through the wild woods, I'll hunt the buffaloe!" To many these things may appear as ... light as empty air, but look to the future, and you will at once discover the inquisitive mind will earnestly desire to look into such matters and things. The pity is, this admonition passed unheeded by Bryant and his contemporaries, and much that "the inquisitive mind" would revel in to-day, was thus lost. The most famous, however, of the pioneer songs that the above quoted writer probably had in mind, _The Hunters of Kentucky_, the celebrated ballad of the Battle of New Orleans, has come down to us, but it was written by the alien hand of Samuel Woodworth, who achieved a double triumph over oblivion by also writing _The Old Oaken Bucket_. And were other "wooing songs of the hunter" extant, we would certainly discover that many of them were done by non-Kentuckians. Even _Kentucky Belle_, ballad of Morgan and his men, was the work of Constance Fenimore Woolson, the famous author of _Anne_. In recent years the ballads of the Kentucky mountains have been investigated by a group of scholars, and Dr. Hubert Gibson Shearin will shortly publish a collection of them. It is impossible to discuss them at this time; and as nearly all of them are offshoots of the old English ballads and Scottish songs, done over by their Kentucky descendants, the ever-recurring question: "Are they Kentucky productions?" will not down. II THE KENTUCKY MAGAZINES Kentucky has failed to produce and maintain a respectable literary magazine for any considerable length of time. Many magazines have been born in Kentucky with high hopes, and a few of them have braved the storms for a number of years, but all of them have gone the way of all the earth after a pathetic struggle for existence. The reasons for this lie not far afield: the leading magazines and periodicals of the east through the immensity of their circulation secure that large patronage necessary to maintain a publication conducted on a generous basis, ensuring variety and excellence. Experience has long since demonstrated even to the bravest of the inland publishers that the point of distribution is the controlling factor in success. The means of transportation which have so miraculously improved, have annihilated distance and along with it to no small extent the Western and Southern periodical of literary flavor. The opulent publications are enabled through their very prosperity to command contributors not to be approached by a periodical circumscribed in means and constituency. Again, the Kentucky magazines have all along made the fatal mistake of truckling to dead prejudices and sectionalism. The material and the moulders have long been with us, but the wide popular support, which after all is the first essential, has failed to materialise, and it may be regretfully apprehended that it now lies as far away as ever. The first magazine issued in Kentucky or the West was _The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, for the year 1803_, which was edited and published by Daniel Bradford, son of old John Bradford, the editor of _The Kentucky Gazette_. _The Medley_ lived through the year of 1803, but in January, 1804, Editor Bradford announced that he was compelled, from lack of appreciation, to abandon its publication. The twelve parts were bound for those of the subscribers who cared to have them made into a single volume, and probably not more than two copies are extant to-day. _The Medley's_ literary merit was not impressive, and its death can only be deplored because it happened to be the first Western magazine. _The Almoner_, a religious periodical, the first issue of which was dated from Lexington, April, 1814, and which died a twelvemonth later, was published by Thomas T. Skillman, the pioneer printer. Its account of the preacher, John Poage Campbell, and his many theological works, is about all one finds of interest in it. William Gibbes Hunt, a Harvard man, who later took a degree from Transylvania University, established _The Western Review_ at Lexington, in August, 1819, and this was the first literary magazine in the West worthy the name. Hunt was a man of fine tastes, and he had a proper conception of what a magazine should be. He worked hard for two years, but in July, 1821,--the number for which month is notable as having contained the first draft of General William O. Butler's famous poem, _The Boatman's Horn_, which is there entitled _The Boat Horn_,--Hunt rehearsed the pathetic tale of the lack of support and appreciation for a Western magazine, and, without any expressed regret, entitled it his valedictory. He had survived twice as long as any of his predecessors, and he probably felt that he had done fairly well, as he undoubtedly had. The four bound volumes of _The Western Review_ may be read to-day with more than an historical interest. Hunt returned to his home in New England; and the only other thing of his that is preserved is _An Address on the Principles of Masonry_ (Lexington, 1821), and a very excellent oration it is, too. There were brave men after Hunt, however. _The Literary Pamphleteer_ was born and died at Paris, Kentucky, in 1823; and in the following year Thomas T. Skillman established _The Western Luminary_ at Lexington. This was a semi-religious journal, but its publication was shortly suspended. _The Microscope_ seems to have been the first magazine published at Louisville, it being founded in 1824, but its life was ephemeral. Under a half a dozen different names, with many lapses between the miles, _The Transylvanian_, which Professor Thomas Johnson Matthews, of Transylvania University, established at Lexington in 1829, has survived until the present time. It is now the literary magazine of Transylvania University. Mr. James Lane Allen, Mr. Frank Waller Allen, and one or two other well-known Kentucky writers saw their earliest essays and stories first published in _The Transylvanian_. John Clark's _Lexington Literary Journal_, a twice-a-week affair, was founded in 1833; and the _Louisville Literary News-Letter_, edited by Edmund Flagg and issued by George D. Prentice, lived in the Kentucky metropolis from December, 1838, to November, 1840. Far and away the most famous literary periodical ever published in Kentucky, was _The Western Messenger_, founded at Cincinnati in 1835, and removed to Louisville in April, 1836. James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888), the noted Boston Unitarian preacher and author, was editor, publisher, and agent of _The Messenger_ while it was at Louisville; and he solicited subscriptions throughout Kentucky. Ralph Waldo Emerson first appeared as a poet in his friend Clarke's magazine. His _Goodby Proud World_, _The Rhodora_, _The Humble Bee_, and several of his other now noted poems, were printed for the first time in _The Messenger_. Clarke also published papers from the hands of Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, and nearly all of the writers now grouped as the New England school. He printed a poem of John Keats, which had never been previously published, the manuscript of which was furnished by George Keats, brother of the poet, who lived at Louisville for many years. Clarke later wrote an interesting sketch of George Keats for his magazine. During parts of the four years he published _The Messenger_ at Louisville he had as assistant editors Christopher P. Cranch and Samuel Osgood, now well-known names in American letters. Clarke returned to Boston in 1840, and _The Messenger_ returned to Cincinnati, where it was suspended in April, 1841. "The periodical was an exotic," wrote William Henry Venable, "a Boston flower blooming in the Ohio Valley;" and this is the one-line history of it. Its like was never seen before, never since, and will never be seen again in the West. Thirteen years after _The Western Messenger_ left Louisville, _The Western Literary Magazine_, a monthly publication, was begun; and three years later, or in 1856, _The Louisville Review_, another monthly, was established. But the war clouds of civil strife were gradually gathering, and the endless pen scratching of the Kentucky magazinist was lost in the cannon's roar. Newspapers were the only things Kentuckians had time to peruse. Since the war Kentucky periodicals have been, almost without exception, rather tame affairs. They have all been most mushroomish. A few of them may be singled out, such as _The Southern Bivouac_, which was conducted at Louisville for several years by General Basil W. Duke and Richard W. Knott; _The Illustrated Kentuckian_, founded at Lexington, in 1892; _The Southern Magazine_, of Louisville, published papers by Mr. Allen, stories by Mr. John Fox, Jr., and several other now well-known writers; and Charles J. O'Malley's _Midland Review_ ran for some time. These are the comparatively recent Kentucky periodicals which have bloomed in a day and wilted with the earliest winter. _The Register_, official organ of the State Historical Society, is still being issued three times a year. It is unique among Kentucky magazines in that it is the only one that has had adequate financial support, which, however, comes to it in the form of a State appropriation. For the last twenty-five years _The Courier-Journal_, of Louisville, has devoted space in its Saturday edition to reviews of new books; and in recent years _The Evening Post_, also of Louisville, has maintained a similar department. J. W. T. Lexington, Kentucky June 13, 1913 FOOTNOTE: [1] The italics in which the three Kentucky lines are set, are my own. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The last several years have been devoted to the collecting and classifying of Kentucky books and authors from Filson, in 1784, to Mr. Allen, in 1912. While the author has done other things, this has been his most serious business. Of the more than a thousand Kentucky writers, one hundred and ninety-six, or those who achieved considerable reputation in their day and generation, or others to whom fame came late, are now discussed. The author hopes to publish within the next two or three years a _Dictionary of Kentucky Writers_, which will attempt to bring together in brief biographical and critical notes all of Kentucky's literary workers from the beginning until the present time. The crossroads poet is a most elusive, most diffident figure, but I shall do my best to bring him into the _Dictionary_ that is to be. I have received assistance from many quarters. Colonel Reuben T. Durrett, Dr. Henry A. Cottell, General Bennett H. Young, Colonel Robert M. Kelly, Mrs. Evelyn Snead Barnett, Mrs. Elvira Miller Slaughter, and Mr. George T. Settle, of Louisville, Kentucky, have aided me in many directions. Mr. George McCalla Spears, of Dallas, Texas, author of _Dear Old Kentucky_, and the owner of one of the best collections of Kentucky books ever gotten together, I have to thank for a catalogue of his library and a dozen informing letters. Judge James H. Mulligan, Miss Anna Totten, Mrs. Annie Gratz Clay, Miss Jo Peter, and Mr. James M. Roach, of Lexington, Kentucky, have loaned and given me many rare Kentucky items; to Mr. William Kavanaugh Doty, of Richmond, Kentucky, Mrs. Daniel Henry Holmes, of Covington, Kentucky, Mrs. Lucien Beckner, of Winchester, Kentucky, Dr. Thomas E. Pickett, of Maysville, Kentucky, State Librarian Frank K. Kavanaugh, of Frankfort, Kentucky, Mr. Alexander Hill, and Miss Marian Prentice Piatt, of Cincinnati, Ohio, Mr. Henry Cleveland Wood, of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, Mr. Paul Weir, of Owensboro, Kentucky, Mr. Ingram Crockett, of Henderson, Kentucky, Mrs. Mary Addams Bayne, of Shelbyville, Kentucky, Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, of Eminence, Kentucky, and Mrs. Caroline S. Valentine, of New Castle, Kentucky, the majority of whom are writers, I am doubly indebted for facts regarding their own work, as well as for what I now more especially thank them--information concerning other Kentucky writers. Death found the two best friends, perhaps, this work had during the course of its preparation, when it took Charles J. O'Malley, the Kentucky poet and critic, and Jahu Dewitt Miller, the Philadelphia lecturer and bookman. Both of these men had just gotten into the spirit of the work when they died within a year of each other. O'Malley wrote the most illuminating letters concerning Kentucky authors it has been my good fortune to receive; Miller made the most gratifying and surprising additions to my collection of Kentuckiana, exceedingly scarce volumes and pamphlets which he alone seemed able to unearth from the old bookshops of the country. The memories of them both must be ever green with me and in this work. I have to thank Mr. Allen for his very fine introduction. To have one's name associated with his is reward sufficient for the years of toil and sacrifice this work has demanded of its author. CONTENTS JOHN FILSON 1 THE AIR AND CLIMATE OF KENTUCKY 2 QUADRUPEDS 3 BOONE'S FIRST VIEW OF KENTUCKY 4 JOHN BRADFORD 5 NOTES ON KENTUCKY. SECTION I 6 MATTHEW LYON 8 REPLY TO JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE 9 GILBERT IMLAY 11 THE FLIGHT OF A FLORID LOVER 13 ADAM RANKIN 17 ON THE EXTENT OF THE GOSPEL OFFER 18 UPON MARRIAGE BY LICENSE 18 THOMAS JOHNSON 19 EXTEMPORE GRACE 21 DANVILLE 21 KENTUCKY 21 HUDSON, WIFE-MURDERER 22 PARSON RICE 22 THE POET'S EPITAPH 22 GEORGE BECK 23 FIFTEENTH ODE OF HORACE 24 ANACREON'S FIFTY-FIFTH ODE 25 ANACREON'S FIRST ODE 26 HUMPHREY MARSHALL 26 PRIMEVAL KENTUCKY 28 STEPHEN T. BADIN 30 EPICEDIUM 31 CHARLES CALDWELL 34 GENERAL GREENE'S EARLY LIFE 35 ALLAN B. MAGRUDER 37 CITIZEN GENET AND JEFFERSON 38 HENRY CLAY 39 REPLY TO JOHN RANDOLPH 42 ADDRESS TO LA FAYETTE 43 JOHN J. AUDUBON 45 INDIAN SUMMER ON THE OHIO 48 HORACE HOLLEY 52 MR. CLAY AND COL. MEADE 53 CONSTANTINE S. RAFINESQUE 56 GEOLOGICAL ANNALS 58 MANN BUTLER 59 PIONEER VISITORS 60 ZACHARY TAYLOR 62 A LETTER TO HENRY CLAY 63 DANIEL DRAKE 65 MAYSLICK, KENTUCKY, IN 1800 67 MARY A. HOLLEY 69 TEXAS WOMEN 70 JOHN J. CRITTENDEN 71 EULOGY UPON JUSTICE MCKINLEY 73 JOHN M. HARNEY 74 ECHO AND THE LOVER 76 THE WIPPOWIL 77 SYLPHS BATHING 78 GEORGE ROBERTSON 78 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 80 EARLY STRUGGLES 80 LITERARY FAME 81 SHADRACH PENN 82 THE COMING OF GEORGE D. PRENTICE 83 WILLIAM O. BUTLER 84 THE BOATMAN'S HORN 86 HEW AINSLIE 87 THE BOUROCKS O' BARGENY 89 THE HAUGHS O' AULD KENTUCK 89 THE INGLE SIDE 90 THE HINT O' HAIRST 91 JAMES G. BIRNEY 91 THE NO-GOVERNMENT DOCTRINES 93 THOMAS CORWIN 95 THE MEXICAN WAR 96 HENRY B. BASCOM 98 A CLERGYMAN'S VIEW OF NIAGARA 99 JAMES T. MOREHEAD 102 JOHN FINLEY 103 LEWIS COLLINS 104 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 105 JULIA A. TEVIS 107 THE MAY QUEEN 108 ROBERT J. BRECKINRIDGE 112 SANCTIFICATION 113 CAROLINE L. HENTZ 114 BESIDE THE LONG MOSS SPRING 115 JOHN P. DURBIN 117 IMPRESSIONS OF LONDON 118 FORTUNATUS COSBY, JR. 119 FIRESIDE FANCIES 120 THOMAS F. MARSHALL 123 TEMPERANCE: AN ADDRESS 124 JEFFERSON J. POLK 126 THE BATTLE OF THE BOARDS 127 GEORGE D. PRENTICE 129 THE CLOSING YEAR 131 ON REVISITING BROWN UNIVERSITY 133 PARAGRAPHS 135 ROBERT M. BIRD 135 NICK OF THE WOODS 137 JOHN A. MCCLUNG 139 THE WOMEN OF BRYANT'S STATION 140 JAMES O. PATTIE 142 THE SANTA FE COUNTRY 143 WILLIAM F. MARVIN 145 EPIGRAM 146 THE FIRST ROSES OF SPRING 146 SONG 147 ELISHA BARTLETT 147 JOHN BROWDIE OF "NICHOLAS NICKLEBY" 148 SAMUEL D. GROSS 150 KENTUCKY 151 THE DEATH OF HENRY CLAY 152 THOMAS H. CHIVERS 152 THE DEATH OF ALONZO 154 GEORGIA WATERS 156 JEFFERSON DAVIS 156 FROM THE FAREWELL SPEECH 158 WILLIAM D. GALLAGHER 160 THE MOTHERS OF THE WEST 162 THOMAS H. SHREVE 163 I HAVE NO WIFE 164 ORMSBY M. MITCHEL 166 ASTRONOMICAL EVIDENCES OF GOD 167 ALBERT T. BLEDSOE 169 SEVEN CRISES CAUSED THE CIVIL WAR 171 RICHARD H. MENEFEE 173 KENTUCKY: A TOAST 174 GEORGE W. CUTTER 176 THE SONG OF STEAM 177 MARY P. SHINDLER 179 THE FADED FLOWER 180 MARTIN J. SPALDING 181 A BISHOP'S ARRIVAL 182 JOHN W. AUDUBON 185 LOS ANGELES 186 TULARE VALLEY 186 CHRISTMAS IN 'FRISCO 187 ADRIEN E. ROUQUETTE 187 SOUVENIR DE KENTUCKY 189 EMILY V. MASON 191 THE DEATH OF LEE 192 EDMUND FLAGG 194 THE ANCIENT MOUNDS OF THE WEST 195 CATHERINE A. WARFIELD 197 CAMILLA BOUVERIE'S DIARY 198 A PLEDGE TO LEE 199 J. ROSS BROWNE 200 LAPDOGS IN GERMANY 201 ROBERT MORRIS 205 THE LEVEL AND THE SQUARE 206 AMELIA B. WELBY 207 THE RAINBOW 209 ON THE DEATH OF A SISTER POET 210 CHARLES W. WEBBER 211 TROUTING ON JESSUP'S RIVER 212 LEWIS J. FRAZEE 216 HAVRE 217 THEODORE O'HARA 218 THE BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD 220 THE OLD PIONEER 223 SECOND LOVE 225 A ROLLICKING RHYME 225 THE FAME OF WILLIAM T. BARRY 226 SARAH T. BOLTON 228 PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE 229 JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE 231 HENRY CLAY 232 JAMES WEIR, SR. 234 SIMON KENTON 235 MARY E. W. BETTS 237 A KENTUCKIAN KNEELS TO NONE BUT GOD 238 REUBEN T. DURRETT 239 LA SALLE: DISCOVERER OF LOUISVILLE 241 RICHARD H. COLLINS 244 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 245 ANNIE C. KETCHUM 247 APRIL TWENTY-SIXTH 248 FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD 250 ALOYSIUS AND MR. FENTON 252 AN AMAZING PROPHECY 254 STEPHEN C. FOSTER 255 MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, GOOD-NIGHT 256 ZACHARIAH F. SMITH 258 EARLY KENTUCKY DOCTORS 259 JOHN A. BROADUS 261 OXFORD UNIVERSITY 263 MARY J. HOLMES 265 THE SCHOOLMASTER 266 ROSA V. JEFFREY 269 A GLOVE 270 A MEMORY 271 SALLIE R. FORD 272 OUR MINISTER MARRIES 273 JOHN E. HATCHER 276 NEWSPAPER PARAGRAPHS 277 WILLIAM C. WATTS 279 A WEDDING AND A DANCE 280 J. PROCTOR KNOTT 282 FROM THE DULUTH SPEECH 283 GEORGE G. VEST 285 JEFFERSON'S PASSPORTS TO IMMORTALITY 286 EULOGY OF THE DOG 286 WILLIAM P. JOHNSTON 288 BATTLE OF SHILOH--SUNDAY MORNING 289 WILL WALLACE HARNEY 291 THE STAB 292 J. STODDARD JOHNSTON 292 "CAPTAIN MOLL" 293 JULIA S. DINSMORE 295 LOVE AMONG THE ROSES 295 HENRY T. STANTON 297 THE MONEYLESS MAN 299 "A MENS� ET THORO" 300 A SPECIAL PLEA 301 SWEETHEART 301 SARAH M. PIATT 303 IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD 304 A WORD WITH A SKYLARK 305 THE GIFT OF TEARS 306 BOYD WINCHESTER 307 LAKE GENEVA 308 THOMAS GREEN 310 THE CONSPIRATORS 312 FORCEYTHE WILLSON 313 THE OLD SERGEANT 314 W. C. P. BRECKINRIDGE 319 IS NOT THIS THE CARPENTER'S SON 321 BASIL W. DUKE 323 MORGAN, THE MAN 324 HENRY WATTERSON 325 OLD LONDON TOWN 327 GILDEROY W. GRIFFIN 331 THE GYPSIES 332 JOHN L. SPALDING 334 AN IVORY PAPER-KNIFE 335 NATHANIEL S. SHALER 336 THE ORPHAN BRIGADE 337 TOM MARSHALL 339 LINCOLN IN KENTUCKY 341 WILLIAM L. VISSCHER 342 PROEM 343 BENNETT H. YOUNG 344 PREHISTORIC WEAPONS 345 JAMES H. MULLIGAN 348 IN KENTUCKY 350 OVER THE HILL TO HUSTONVILLE 351 NELLY M. MCAFFEE 353 FINALE 353 MARY F. CHILDS 356 DE NAMIN' OB DE TWINS 357 WILLIAM T. PRICE 359 THE OFFENBACH AND GILBERT OPERAS 361 GEORGE M. DAVIE 363 "FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE" 363 HADRIAN, DYING, TO HIS SOUL 364 JOHN URI LLOYD 364 "LET'S HAVE THE MERCY TEXT" 366 KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS JOHN FILSON John Filson, the first Kentucky historian, was born at East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania, in 1747. He was educated at the academy of the Rev. Samuel Finley, at Nottingham, Maryland. Finley was afterwards president of Princeton University. John Filson looked askance at the Revolutionary War, and came out to Kentucky about 1783. In Lexington he conducted a school for a year, and spent his leisure hours in collecting data for a history of Kentucky. He interviewed Daniel Boone, Levi Todd, James Harrod, and many other Kentucky pioneers; and the information they gave him was united with his own observations, forming the material for his book. Filson did not remain in Kentucky much over a year for, in 1784, he went to Wilmington, Delaware, and persuaded James Adams, the town's chief printer, to issue his manuscript as _The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke_; and then he continued his journey to Philadelphia, where his map of the three original counties of Kentucky--Jefferson, Fayette, and Lincoln--was printed and dedicated to General Washington and the United States Congress. This Wilmington edition of Filson's history is far and away the most famous history of Kentucky ever published. Though it contained but 118 pages, one of the six extant copies recently fetched the fabulous sum of $1,250--the highest price ever paid for a Kentucky book. The little work was divided into two parts, the first part being devoted to the history of the country, and the second part was the first biography of Daniel Boone ever published. Boone dictated this famous story of his life to the Pennsylvania pedagogue, who put it into shape for publication, yet several Western writers refer to it as "Boone's autobiography." Boone is the author's central hero straight through the work, and he is happier when discussing him than in relating the country's meager history. Filson's _Kentucky_ was translated into French by M. Parraud, and issued at Paris in 1785; and in the same year a German version was published. Gilbert Imlay incorporated it into the several editions of his _Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America_ (London, 1793). And several subsequent Western writers also reproduced it in their works, seldom giving Filson the proper credit for it. The last three or four years of his life John Filson spent in Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana. He was one of the founders of Cincinnati, which he named "Losantiville;" and a short time later, in 1788, he wandered into the Miami woods one day and was never seen again. Col. Reuben T. Durrett, the Louisville historian, wrote his biography, and established an historical organization, in 1884, which he named the "Filson Club." Filson's fame is secure in Kentucky, and Colonel Durrett and his work have made it so. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Life and Writings of John Filson_, by R. T. Durrett (Louisville, Kentucky, 1884); _Kentuckians in History and Literature_, by John Wilson Townsend (New York, 1907); _The First Map of Kentucky_, by P. Lee Phillips (Washington, 1908). THE AIR AND CLIMATE OF KENTUCKY [From _The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky_ (Wilmington, Delaware, 1784)] This country is more temperate and healthy than the other settled parts of America. In summer it has not the sandy heats which Virginia and Carolina experience, and receives a fine air from its rivers. In winter, which at most lasts three months, commonly two, and is but seldom severe, the people are safe in bad houses; and the beasts have a goodly supply without fodder. The winter begins about Christmas, and ends about the first of March, at farthest does not exceed the middle of that month. Snow seldom falls deep or lies long. The west winds often bring storms and the east winds clear the sky; but there is no steady rule of weather in that respect, as in the northern states. The west winds are sometimes cold and nitrous. The Ohio running in that direction, and there being mountains on that quarter, the westerly winds, by sweeping along their tops, in the cold regions of the air, and over a long tract of frozen water, collect cold in their course, and convey it over the Kentucky country; but the weather is not so intensely severe as these winds bring with them in Pennsylvania. The air and seasons depend very much on the winds as to heat and cold, dryness and moisture. QUADRUPEDS [From the same] Among the native animals are the urus, bison, or zorax, described by Cesar, which we call a buffalo, much resembling a large bull, of a great size, with a large head, thick, short, crooked horns, and broader in his forepart than behind. Upon his shoulder is a large lump of flesh, covered with a thick boss of long wool and curly hair, of a dark brown color. They do not rise from the ground as our cattle, but spring up at once upon their feet; are of a broad make, and clumsy appearance, with short legs, but run fast, and turn not aside for any thing when chased, except a standing tree. They weigh from 500 to 1000 weight, are excellent meat, supplying the inhabitants in many parts with beef, and their hides make good leather. I have heard a hunter assert, he saw above 1000 buffaloes at the Blue Licks at once; so numerous were they before the first settlers had wantonly sported away their lives. There still remains a great number in the exterior parts of the settlement. They feed upon cane and grass, as other cattle, and are innocent, harmless creatures. There are still to be found many deer, elks, and bears, within the settlement, and many more on the borders of it. There are also panthers, wild cats, and wolves. The waters have plenty of beavers, otters, minks, and muskrats: nor are the animals common to other parts wanting, such as foxes, rabbits, squirrels, racoons, ground-hogs, pole-cats, and opossums. Most of the species of the domestic quadrupeds have been introduced since the settlement, such as horses, cows, sheep, and hogs, which are prodigiously multiplied, suffered to run in the woods without a keeper, and only brought home when wanted. BOONE'S FIRST VIEW OF KENTUCKY [From the same] It was on the 1st of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin river, in North Carolina, to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucky, in company with John Finley, John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Monay, and William Cool. We proceeded successfully; and after a long and fatiguing journey, through a mountainous wilderness, in a westward direction, on the seventh day of June following we found ourselves on Red river, where John Finley had formerly been trading with the Indians, and, from the top of an eminence, saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky. Here let me observe, that for some time we had experienced the most uncomfortable weather as a prelibation of our future sufferings. At this place we encamped, and made a shelter to defend us from the inclement season, and began to hunt and reconnoiter the country. We found everywhere abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this vast forest. The buffaloe were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant, of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing. In this forest, the habitation of beasts of every kind natural to America, we practiced hunting with great success, until the 22d day of December following. JOHN BRADFORD John Bradford, Kentucky's pioneer journalist, was born near Warrenton, Virginia, in 1749. He saw service in the Revolutionary War, and came to Kentucky when thirty years of age. He fought against the Indians at Chillicothe, and, in 1785, brought his family out from Virginia to Kentucky, locating at Cane Run, near Lexington. Two years later he and his brother, Fielding Bradford, founded _The Kentucke Gazette_, the first issue of which appeared Saturday, August 18, 1787--the second newspaper west of the Alleghanies. The following year John Bradford published _The Kentucke Almanac_, the first pamphlet from a Western press; and this almanac was issued every twelvemonth for many years. Fielding Bradford withdrew from the _Gazette_ in May, 1788, and "Old Jawn," as he was called, carried the entire burden until 1802, when his son, Daniel Bradford, assumed control. In March, 1789, under instructions from the Virginia legislature, Bradford discarded "Kentucke" for "Kentucky," one of the many interesting facts connected with the _Gazette_. John Bradford was the first state printer; and the first book he published was the laws passed by the first Kentucky legislature, which assembled at Lexington in 1792. The Bradfords published many of the most important early Western books, and a "Bradford" brings joy to the heart of any present-day collector of Kentuckiana. The column in the _Gazette_ devoted to verse, headed "Sacred to the Muses," preserved many early Western poems; but the little anecdotes which seldom failed to be tucked beneath the verse, were nearly always coarse and vulgar, giving one a rather excellent index to the editor's morals or the morals of his readers. Bradford appears to have taken a great fancy to the poems of Philip Freneau (1752-1832), the first real American poet, for he "picked up" more than twenty of them from the _Freeman's Journal_. The most complete files of the _Kentucky Gazette_ are preserved in the Lexington Public Library, though the vandals that have consulted them from time to time have cut and inked out many valuable things. John Bradford was a public-spirited citizen, being, at different times, chairman of the town trustees, and of the board of trustees of Transylvania University. He was a profound mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, his contemporaries tell us, and in proof thereof they have handed down another of his sobriquets, "Old Wisdom." Though his fame as the first Kentucky editor is fixed, as an author his reputation rests upon _The General Instructor; or, the Office, Duty, and Authority of Justices of the Peace, Sheriffs, Coroners, and Constables, in the State of Kentucky_ (Lexington, Ky., 1800), a legal compilation; and upon his more famous work, _Notes on Kentucky_ (Xenia, Ohio, 1827). These sixty-two articles were originally printed in the _Gazette_ between August 25, 1826, and January 9, 1829. Upon this work John Bradford is ranked among the Kentucky historians. At the time of his death, which occurred at Lexington, Kentucky, March 31, 1830, he was sheriff of Fayette county. BIBLIOGRAPHY. No biography of Bradford has been written, but any of the histories of Kentucky contain extended notices of his life and work. NOTES ON KENTUCKY. SECTION I [From the _Kentucky Gazette_ (August 25, 1826)] This country was well known to the Indian traders many years before its settlement. They gave a description of it to Lewis Evans, who published his first map of it as early as 1752. In the year 1750,[2] Dr. Thomas Walker, Colby Chew, Ambrose Powell and several others from the counties of Orange and Culpepper, in the state of Virginia, set out on an excursion to the Western Waters; they traveled down the Holstein river, and crossed over the Mountains into Powell's valley, thence across the Cumberland mountain at the gap where the road now crosses, proceeded on across what was formerly known by the name of the Wilderness until they arrived at the Hazlepath; here the company divided, Dr. Walker with a part continued north until they came to the Kentucky river which they named Louisa or Levisa river. After traveling down the excessive broken or hilly margin some distance they became dissatisfied and returned and continued up one of its branches to its head, and crossed over the mountains to New River at the place called Walker's Meadows. In the year 1754 James McBride with some others, passed down the Ohio river in canoes, and landed at the mouth of the Kentucky river, where they marked on a tree the initials of their names, and the date of the year. These men passed through the country and were the first who gave a particular account of its beauty and richness of soil to the inhabitants of the British settlements in America. No further notice seems to have been taken of Kentucky until the year 1767, when John Finlay with others (whilst trading with the Indians) passed through a part of the rich lands of Kentucky. It was then called by the Indians in their language, the Dark and Bloody Grounds. Some difference took place between these traders and the Indians, and Finlay deemed it prudent to return to his residence in North Carolina, where he communicated his knowledge of the country to Col. Daniel Boone and others. This seems to have been one of the most important events in the history of Kentucky, as it was the exciting cause which prompted Col. Boone shortly afterwards to make his first visit to the Dark and Bloody Grounds. FOOTNOTE: [2] Marshall in his _History_, v. i, p. 7, says it was 1758. Mr. H. Taylor thinks Dr. Walker informed him it was in 1752, but Col. Shelby states implicitly that, in 1779 in company with Dr. Walker on Yellow creek a mile or two from Cumberland mountain, the Doctor observed "upon that tree," pointing to a beech across the road to the left hand, "Ambrose Powell marked his name and the date of the year." I examined the tree and found _A. Powell 1750_ cut in legible characters. MATTHEW LYON Matthew Lyon, "the Hampden of Congress," was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, July 14, 1750. He emigrated to America when he was fifteen years old, and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut, as an apprentice of Jabez Bacon, the wealthiest merchant in all New England. Lyon left Connecticut, in 1774, and removed to Vermont, where he became one of the famous Green Mountain Boys of the Revolution. He was a member of the Vermont legislature for four years; and in 1783 he founded the town of Fair Haven, Vermont. Lyon became one of the great men of Vermont, a disciple of Thomas Jefferson, "the pioneer Democrat of New England." In 1796 he was elected to Congress and he went to Philadelphia in May, 1797, to enter upon his duties. He at once became one of the powerful men in that body. Lyon had published a newspaper at Fair Haven for several years, besides issuing a number of books from his press, but during the years of 1798 and 1799 he edited the now famous _Scourge of Aristocracy_, a semi-monthly magazine. At the present day this is a rare volume, and much to be desired. In 1801 Lyon cast Vermont's vote for Thomas Jefferson against Aaron Burr for the presidency, and this vote is said to have made certain Jefferson's election. Late in this year of 1801 Lyon left Vermont for Kentucky, and he later became the founder of Eddyville, Lyon county, Kentucky. The county, however, was named in honor of his son, Chittenden Lyon. In 1802 Matthew Lyon was a member of the Kentucky legislature; and from 1803 to 1811 he was in the lower House of Congress from his Kentucky district. His opposition to the War of 1812 retired him to private life. At Eddyville he was engaged in shipbuilding, in which he had great success, but after his defeat for reëlection to Congress, in 1812, disasters came fast upon him, and he was reduced from affluence to comparative poverty. At the age of sixty-eight years, however, he recovered himself, paid all his debts, and died in easy circumstances. In 1820 Lyon was appointed United States Factor to the Cherokee Indians of Arkansas territory, and he set out for his future home at Spadra Bluff, Arkansas. He was later elected as Arkansas's second delegate to Congress, but he did not live to take his seat, dying at Spadra Bluff, August 1, 1822. Eleven years later his remains were returned to Kentucky, and re-interred at Eddyville, where a proper monument marks the spot to-day. Matthew Lyon's reply to John Randolph of Roanoke, in 1804, in regard to the old question of the Yazoo frauds, is his only extant speech that is at all remembered at the present time. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _Matthew Lyon_, by J. F. McLaughlin (New York, 1900). REPLY TO JOHN RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE[3] [From _Matthew Lyon_, by J. F. McLaughlin (New York, 1900)] The Postmaster General [Gideon Granger] has not lost my esteem, nor do I think his character can be injured by the braying of a jackal, or the fulminations of a madman. But, sir, permit me to inquire from whom these charges of bribery, of corruption, and of robbery, come? Is it from one who has for forty years, in one shape or other, been intrusted with the property and concerns of other people, and has never wanted for confidence, one whose long and steady practice of industry, integrity, and well doing, has obtained for him his standing on this floor? Is it from one who sneered with contempt on the importunity with which he has solicited to set a price on the important vote he held in the last Presidential election? No, sir, these charges have been fabricated in the disordered imagination of a young man whose pride has been provoked by my refusing to sing encores to all his political dogmas. I have had the impudence to differ from him in some few points, and some few times to neglect his fiat. It is long since I have observed that the very sight of my plebeian face has had an unpleasant effect on the gentleman's nose, for out of respect to this House and to the State he represents, I will yet occasionally call him gentleman. I say, sir, these charges have been brought against me by a person nursed in the bosom of opulence, inheriting the life services of a numerous train of the human species, and extensive fields, the original proprietors of which property, in all probability, came no honester by it than the purchasers of the Georgia lands did by what they claim. Let that gentleman apply the fable of the thief and the receiver, in Dilworth's Spelling Book, so ingeniously quoted by himself, in his own case, and give up the stolen men in his possession. I say, sir, these charges have come from a person whose fortune, leisure and genius have enabled him to obtain a great share of the wisdom of the schools, but who in years, experience, and the knowledge of the world and the ways of man, is many, many years behind those he implicates--a person who, from his rant in this House, seems to have got his head as full of British contracts and British modes of corruption as ever Don Quixote's was supposed to have been of chivalry, enchantments and knight errantry--a person who seems to think no man can be honest and independent unless he has inherited land and negroes, nor is he willing to allow a man to vote in the people's elections unless he is a landholder. I can tell that gentleman I am as far from offering or receiving a bribe as he or any other member on this floor; it is a charge which no man ever made against me before him, who from his insulated situation, unconversant with the world, is perhaps as little acquainted with my character as any member of this House, or almost any man in the nation, and I do most cordially believe that, had my back and my mind been supple enough to rise and fall with his motions, I should have escaped his censure. I, sir, have none of that pride which sets men above being merchants and dealers; the calling of a merchant is, in my opinion, equally dignified, and no more than equally dignified with that of a farmer, or a manufacturer. I have a great part of my life been engaged in all the stations of merchant, farmer and manufacturer, in which I have honestly earned and lost a great deal of property, in the character of a merchant. I act like other merchants, look out for customers with whom I can make bargains advantageous to both parties; it is all the same to me whether I contract with an individual or the public; I see no constitutional impediment to a member of this House serving the public for the same reward the public gives another. Whenever my constituents or myself think I have contracts inconsistent with my duties as a member of this House, I will retire from it. I came to this House as a representative of a free, a brave, and a generous people. I thank my Creator that He gave me the face of a man, not that of an ape or a monkey, and that He gave me the heart of a man also, a heart which will spare to its last drop in defence of the dignity of the station my generous constituents have placed me in. I shall trouble the House no farther at this time, than by observing that I shall not be deterred by the threats of the member from Virginia from giving the vote I think the interest and honor of the nation require; and by saying if that member means to be understood that I have offered contracts from the Postmaster-General, the assertion or insinuation has no foundation in truth, and I challenge him to bring forward his boasted proof. FOOTNOTE: [3] This reply was made in answer to one of Randolph's ranting Yazoo philippics, several of which are among the bitterest speeches ever heard in Congress. Lyon at this time (1804) was a member of Congress from Kentucky. The Yazoo land grant frauds had aroused the public mind, and a commission had endeavored to settle by compromise the claims of Georgia, and those holding under the Georgia act of 1795, to the vast territory in dispute. Randolph denounced the frauds committed, and opposed any settlement of the controversy, while Lyon desired to see the country settled, and the compromise of the commissioners carried out. GILBERT IMLAY Gilbert Imlay, the first Kentucky novelist, was born in New Jersey, about 1755. He was captain of a company in the Revolution. The war over, Imlay turned his face toward the West; and he reached the Falls of the Ohio--Louisville--in 1784. In the little river town he worked under George May as a "commissioner for laying out lands in the back settlements." Imlay had not been a Kentuckian many months before he had obtained patents for many thousand acres of land--all of which he subsequently lost. It is not certainly known how long he remained in Kentucky, but it was about eight years. He went to London in 1792 and, in that year, the first edition of his _Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America_ was published. This work is made up of a series of descriptive letters which the author wrote from Kentucky to an English friend. The second edition of 1793, and the third edition of 1797, reproduced John Filson's _Kentucke_ and Thomas Hutchins's _History_, together with much new material. While a resident of Kentucky Gilbert Imlay wrote the first Kentucky novel, entitled _The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family, being a Delineation of English Manners drawn from Real Characters. Written in America, by G. Imlay, Esq._ (London, 1793, 3 vols.; Dublin, 1794, 1 vol.). The epistolary form is adopted throughout, and the narrative relates the fortunes of "an eminent merchant in the city of London," Mr. T----n, who loses his great fortune and emigrates with his family to America. His daughter, the beautiful Caroline, is the heroine of the story. Landing in Philadelphia, they travel to Pittsburgh, and from there drift down the Ohio river in a Kentucky flatboat, or "ark," to Louisville. Caroline's lover, Capt Arl----ton, had preceded the family and gone on to Lexington, but he soon returned to Louisville when he learned that his sweetheart awaited his coming. "The emigrants" remained in Kentucky some three months, or from June until August. Caroline's capture by the Indians in August decided the family to forsake the "dark and bloody ground," though she was safely rescued. They finally find their way to London, and all ends well. _The Emigrants_, in the three-volume edition, is exceedingly scarce, but the Dublin one-volume edition may be occasionally procured in the rare book shops of London. In 1793 Gilbert Imlay went to Paris, where he met the famous Mary Wollstonecraft, with whom he was soon living, as they both held mutual affection equivalent to marriage. In 1794 a daughter was born to them, Fanny Imlay, who committed suicide at Swansea, October 10, 1816. In April, 1796, Imlay and Mary agreed to go separate paths after much stormy weather together; and a short time later she became the wife of William Godwin, the English philosopher and novelist. In giving birth to the future wife of the poet Shelley, she surrendered her own life. Mary Wollstonecraft's _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ is the chief memorial of her pathetic and eventful career. After having parted on that April morning of 1796 with the woman he had so outrageously treated, Gilbert Imlay, "the handsome scoundrel," is lost to history. When, where, or how he died is unknown. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _London Monthly Review_ (August, 1793); _Kentuckians in History and Literature_, by John Wilson Townsend (New York, 1907); _Dictionary of National Biography_; biographies of Shelley, Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. THE FLIGHT OF A FLORID LOVER [From _The Emigrants_ (Dublin, 1794)] LETTER XLVI. CAPT. ARL--TON TO MR. IL--RAY. Louisville, June. It is impossible for me to see Caroline in the present state of my mind, and therefore I hope you will not look upon it in the least disrespectful, my friend, if I should happen to be absent when you arrive; for to be candid with you, I shall make a journey purposely to Lexington. Your obliging favour from Pittsburg, which you meant should give me spirits, has had quite a contrary effect. By attempting to soothe my mind, I discover that secret poison, flattery, ever contains, and which I consider the principal cause of my present wretchedness. The image you have given of Caroline makes her appear to me more lovely than ever; and when you say that enchantment seems to spring up where e'er she treads, I feel the full force of all her charms, and conceive that I behold her in this season of fragrance and beauty, decorating those gardens which you passed through on your return from the fatal view upon the Allegany, While the blushing rose, drooping hides its head, As Caroline's sweets more odorous prove, And op'ning lilies look faint, sick, and dead,-- For things inanimate, feel the force of love. She is irresistible--and it is only by absence that I shall ever be enabled to forget my misfortunes, and therefore, my dear friend, I must request that in your future letters, when you mention that divine woman, you will not appreciate that beauty which has ten thousand charms to fascinate and fetter the soul. She has not only all the symmetry of form, the softness of love, and the enchantment of a goddess; but she can assume an animation and that surprising activity of motion, that while you are suspended in the transports of astonishment, you are lost in admiration at the gracefulness with which she moves--I have seen her bound over a rock, and pluck a wild honey-suckle, that grew upon the side of a precipice, and while I stood gazing at her in amazement, she has brought it as a trophy of her exertions. Believe, my friend, that if ever nature formed one woman to excel another in personal charms, it must be Caroline. * * * * * I leave this enclosed in a packet for General W----. I am this moment informed there are boats making round Diamond Island. Who knows but one of them contains the lovely Caroline? Ah! my friend, I feel every emotion of love and shame so powerfully, that I must instantly fly to avoid exposing myself--curse that mandate which banished me from the lovely tyrant of my heart--curse the vanity which exposed my weakness;--for damnable is that fate which compels a man to avoid the object of all others, which to him is the most interesting--I must this instant be off. O Caroline!--Caroline! while my soul deadens at the thought, I abandon the spot which will be converted into elysium the moment you arrive. Forgive me, my friend, this effusion of nature--this weakness, for it prepares us for those delicious raptures, that flow from the source of sympathy, and while it softens us to that tender texture, which is congenial to feminine charms, it invigorates our actions, and fosters every generous and noble sentiment. The streamers of your vessels, for it must be you, are playing in the wind, as if enraptured with the treasure over which they impend, seem eradiated with the charms of Caroline; while the gentle Ohio, as if conscious of its charge, proudly swells, and appears to vie with the more elevated earth, in order to secure to its divinity, upon which to tread at her disembarkation, the flowery carpet of its banks. Adieu. I am off. J. A. AN EXASPERATED MATCHMAKER LETTER XLVII. MR. IL--RAY TO CAPT. ARL--TON. Louisville, June. My dear James, From the time we left Pittsburg until our arrival here, which was ten days after our embarkation, we were all appreciating the pleasure we should derive from finding you at this place. I had expatiated largely upon the satisfaction we should experience from the information you would give us of the country; and no sooner were we in sight of the town that we hung out a flag of invitation; not doubting that you would observe it, and immediately come off to us in a barge; but what was the surprise of the whole part, and my mortification, when we learned upon landing, you had left the place not more than half an hour. The letter you left enclosed for me in General W----'s packet, to be sure, informed me of the cause of your absence; but it by no means justified the action. And I demand as a proof of your respect for your old friends, that you instantly return. Remember, James, this is the command of a friend, who is anxious to restore you to a state of reason, which it appears you have not possessed for some time past. Caroline was in tolerable spirits until within two days of our arrival, when she suddenly appeared to be pensive and in a state of extreme trepidation; and since we arrived she has been confined by indisposition. If you have a delicate and tender regard for this charming girl, you will fly immediately to enquire after her health. But to put it out of your power to frame a shadow for an excuse, I inform you that it is my intention first to visit the Illinois, and to view this country on my return. I waited during yesterday for an opportunity to send this, and as I could not meet with one, I send a person I have hired for that purpose, as my men are unacquainted with the country. Believe me to be your sincere, but unhappy friend, G. Il--ray. THE BASHFUL LOVER'S RETURN LETTER XLVIII. CAPT. ARL--TON TO MR. IL--RAY. Lexington, June. Your express has this moment reached me: and to convince you, my dear Il--ray, that no man can be more alive to every sentiment of love and friendship, I shall not defer my return to Louisville a single hour; and I merely dispatch this by the return of your messenger, to let you know I shall be with you tomorrow in the evening; and that in my present distracted state of mind, I think it most advisable to make my _entre_ under the cover of the dark, to prevent my being perceived, as I wish to devote the whole evening in sequestered converse with you, my friend. Caroline is ill! Ah! Il--ray I am wretched in the extreme. I am burnt up with a scorching fever--I am wrecked in the elements of every painful passion, and my every effort to reason is baffled by my reflections upon past occurrences. But I am your indissoluble friend, J. Arl--ton. ADAM RANKIN Rev. Adam Rankin, author of the first book ever printed in Kentucky, was born in Pennsylvania, March 24, 1755. He was graduated from Liberty Hall, now Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, when about twenty-five years of age; and two years later he was licensed to preach by the Virginia Presbytery. Rev. Rankin came to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1784, to accept the pastorate of the Presbyterian church. He also conducted a school for some time, but his one thought was Psalmody, which became "his monomania." He created a schism in his church by insisting that Dr. Watts's imitation of the Psalms of David be expelled from the church worship, and that the Psalms in their most literal dress be chanted. His brethren disapproved of his views, but they could not discourage him or cause him to discard his contention. Everywhere he went he preached and wrote upon his favorite subject. Rev. Rankin's Kentucky brethren made life unbearable for him, and he went to London, where he remained for two years. When he did return to Kentucky it was to face accusation after accusation, and church trial after church trial, until he was finally suspended. Rev. Rankin was a strange, eccentric man, a dreamer of dreams, a Kentucky Luther, and, perhaps, a bit crazed with the bitter opposition his views received. His latest, boldest dream was that Jerusalem was about to be rebuilt and that he must hurry there in order to assist in the rebuilding. He bade his Lexington flock farewell, and started to the Holy City, but, on November 25, 1827, death overtook him at Philadelphia. Rev. Rankin was the author of several theological works, but his _A Process in the Transylvania Presbytery, &c._ (Maxwell and Gooch, At the Sign of the Buffalo, Main Street, Lexington, 1793), is the first book ever printed in Kentucky, if the _Kentucky Acts_ which John Bradford published in the same year be excepted. Many days were required to print this little book of Rankin upon the hand-press of the publishers, though it contained but ninety-six pages, divided into five parts. Although it is not great literature, it is the first book that can, in any wise, come under that term published in this State. It is surely of more literary importance than Bradford's _Acts_. Rev. Rankin was, as were nearly all of the early Kentucky theologians, a prolific pamphleteer. His _Dialogues_ (Lexington, 1810), is really his most important publication, but it has been greatly overlooked in the recent rush among Kentucky historical writers to list _A Process_ as the first book published in Kentucky. His eccentric career as a man and preacher is, after all, of more interest than his work as an author. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky_, by R. H. Davidson (New York, 1847); _The Centenary of Kentucky_, by R. T. Durrett (Louisville, Kentucky, 1892). ON THE EXTENT OF THE GOSPEL OFFER [From _A Process in the Transylvania Presbytery_ (Lexington, Ky., 1793)] We believe, that as it respects the outward means, the ambassadors are authorised to publish, proclaim, and declare the counsel of God, as it stands connected with our salvation; and that all, who hear the sound, have an equal and indefinite warrant, not only to embrace the means as offered to them indiscriminately, by which comes faith, but have a right to believe, that Christ, with all his benefits, is freely offered to them, as sinners, without ever enquiring, into the secret purposes of God, whether they are elect, or non-elect. UPON MARRIAGE BY LICENSE [From the same] Seeing, under our government, it is not purchasing a liberty by pecuniary rewards, further, than compensating a prothonotary, for taking bond and security, that guardians are agreed, and keeping a just register, for the credit and safety of the rising family. And as the contract is partly civil in its nature, and civil government is bound to defend the civil rights--we believe it perfectly consonant to the analogy of faith, which might be evinced from the fourth chapter of Ruth. But as it is partly social, and the parties contracting come under the mutual obligations to fulfil their relative duties, it ought to be consummated before witnesses. And as it is partly religious, every family appertaining to the Church of Christ, commences a nursery, or infant society, to train up their family in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We believe it right, that whenever a church in full order exists, that the pastor, or church officer should consecrate them, to the business assigned them as a Church of Christ, taking their obligations for the due performance of their duty. THOMAS JOHNSON, Jr. Thomas Johnson, Junior, the first Kentucky poet, who, for many years, enjoyed the sobriquet of the "Drunken Poet of Danville," was born in Virginia about 1760, and he came to Kentucky when twenty-five years of age. He settled at Danville, then a village, and immediately entered into the role of poet, punster, and ne'er-do-weel. Documentary evidence is extant to prove that Danville was a gay little town when the young Virginian arrived there about 1785; and he was early drawn into excesses, or led others into them. Johnson was a rather prolific maker of coarse satirical rhymes, which he finally assembled into a small pamphlet, and published them as _The Kentucky Miscellany_ (Lexington, 1796). This was the first book of poems, if they may be so termed, printed in Kentucky. The original price of this pamphlet was nine pence the copy, but it is impossible to procure it today for any price, and there is not an extant copy of this first edition. _The Kentucky Miscellany_ went into a second edition in 1815, and a third edition was published a few years later, but no copies of either edition are extant. The fourth and final edition appeared from the _Advertiser_ office at Lexington, in 1821, and a dog-eared, much-mutilated copy of this is in the collection of the Filson Club in Louisville--perhaps the only copy in the world. _The Miscellany_ contained but thirty-six small pages, about the size of the medical almanacs of to-day. Many of the little verses are very vulgar and actually obscene, perhaps due to the fact that Johnson could never quite bury John Barleycorn alive. The most famous of them is the _Extempore Grace_, which the bard delivered one day in the tavern of old Erasmus Gill in Danville. In his cups he stumbled into the tavern dining-room, where he found the meal over, and the guests gone, nothing being left but the crumbs. He glanced at the tables, then at Gill, and offered _Extempore Grace_. His lines on Danville, on Kentucky, and on several other subjects reveal the satirist; and the verses to Polly, his sweetheart, and to his favorite physician the better elements in his nature. That these rather vulgar verses of Johnson did not escape the censorship of Western advocates of the pure food law in literature, is made certain by a letter from an Ohio critic which appeared in the _Lexington Intelligencer_ for January 28, 1834. After having made a strong plea for the preservation of early Western verse, the writer added: "I do not mean to embrace the low doggerel of _Tom Johnson_; this was published some years ago, and I never felt _decency_ more outraged than when it was handed me to read by _mine landlady_! My stars! Save us from the _blackguardism_, for the world is sufficiently demoralized." Had this early critic of Tom's verses presented a bundle of them to some library, how many Western writers would rise up and call him blessed! Johnson died and was buried at Danville, but the date of his death or the exact place of his burial is unknown. He had passed and was almost forgotten by 1830. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky_, by R. H. Davidson (New York, 1847); _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _Centre College Cento_ (Danville, Kentucky, January, 1907); _Kentuckians in History and Literature_, by J. W. Townsend (New York, 1907). EXTEMPORE GRACE [From _The Kentucky Miscellany_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1821)] O! Thou who blest the loaves and fishes Look down upon these empty dishes; And that same power that did them fill, Bless each of us, but d---- old Gill! DANVILLE [From the same] Accursed Danville, vile, detested spot, Where knaves inhabit, and where fools resort-- Thy roguish cunning, and thy deep design, Would shame a Bluebeard or an Algerine. O, may thy fatal day be ever curst, When by blind error led, I entered first. KENTUCKY [From the same] I hate Kentucky, curse the place, And all her vile and miscreant race! Who make religion's sacred tie A mask thro' which they cheat and lie. Proteus could not change his shape, Nor Jupiter commit a rape With half the ease those villains can Send prayers to God and cheat their man! I hate all Judges here of late, And every Lawyer in the State. Each quack that is called Physician, And all blockheads in Commission-- Worse than the Baptist roaring rant, I hate the Presbyterian cant-- Their Parsons, Elders, nay, the whole, And wish them gone with all my soul. HUDSON, WIFE MURDERER [From the same] Strange things of Orpheus poets tell, How for a wife he went to Hell; Hudson, a wiser man no doubt, Would go to Hell to be without! PARSON RICE [From the same] Ye fools! I told you once or twice, You'd hear no more from canting R----e; He cannot settle his affairs, Nor pay attention unto prayers, Unless you pay up your arrears. Oh, how in pulpit he would storm, And fill all Hell with dire alarm! Vengeance pronounced against each vice, And, more than all, curs'd avarice; Preach'd money was the root of ill; Consigned each rich man unto Hell; But since he finds you will not pay, Both rich and poor may go that way. 'Tis no more than I expected-- The meeting-house is now neglected: All trades are subject to this chance, No longer pipe, no longer dance. THE POET'S EPITAPH [From the same] Underneath this marble tomb, In endless shades lies drunken Tom; Here safely moored, dead as a log, Who got his death by drinking grog. By whiskey grog he lost his breath-- Who would not die so sweet a death? GEORGE BECK George Beck, classicist, born in England in 1749, became instructor of mathematics at Woolwich Academy, near London, at the age of twenty-seven years; but he was later dismissed. Beck married an English woman of culture and emigrated to the United States in 1795, reaching these shores in time to serve "Mad Anthony" Wayne as a scout in his Indian campaign. The wanderlust was upon George Beck, and he became one of the first of that little band of nomadic painters that came early to the Blue Grass country, and having once come remained. He arrived at Lexington in 1800; and it was not long before he began to send short original poems and spirited translations of Anacreon, Homer, Horace, and Virgil to old John Bradford's _Gazette_. At about this time, too, Beck was doing many portraits and a group of landscapes in oils of the Kentucky river country, a few of which have come down to posterity. Eighteen hundred and six seems to have been Beck's best year in Kentucky from the literary viewpoint, as the _Gazette_ is full of his verses and translations. He was widely known as the "Lexington Horace." Besides painting and poetry, George Beck was a rather learned astronomer, as his _Observations on the Comet_ of 1811 prove. With his wife he conducted an "Academy for Young Ladies" for several years. His last years were much embittered by the lack of appreciation upon the part of the Western public. The Kentucky of 1800 was not a whirlpool of art or literature by any means, and this cultured man languished and finally died among a people who cared very little for his fine learning or his manners. George Beck, poet, translator, mathematician, astronomer, artist, died in Lexington, Kentucky, December 14, 1812. His wife survived him until the cholera year of 1833, which swept away nearly two thousand citizens of Lexington and the Blue Grass. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Kentucky Gazette_ (Lexington, December 22, 1812); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i). FIFTEENTH ODE OF HORACE A New Translation of the Fifteenth Ode of Horace, or Prophecy of Nerceus, from which (according to Count Algorotti and Dr. Johnson) Gray took his beautiful Ode, _The Bard_. [From _The Kentucky Gazette_ (October 27, 1806)] What time the fair perfidious shepherd bore The beauteous Helen back to Ilion's shore, To sleep the howling waves were won By Nerceus, Ocean's hoary son, While round the liquid realms he sung, From guilty love, what dire disasters sprung. Thee, tainted Youth, what omens dire attend! Thy neck and Ilion's soon to Greece shall bend. To man and horse what sweat and blood, What carnage float down Xanthus' flood! What wrath on Troy shall Greece infuriate turn! What glittering domes, and spires, and temples burn! In vain you boast the Queen of beauty's smiles, Her charms, her floating curls, her amourous wiles, These, these alas! will nought avail While Cretan arrows round you sail! And, tho' the fates awhile such guilt may spare, Vile dust at length shall smear that golden hair! Trace back, vain Youth! sad Ilion's fate of old! Ulysses' sons and Nestor's yet behold, Teucer's and Diomede's more dread Horrific war shall round you shed; Then shall ye trembling fly like timid deer When hungry wolves are howling in their rear. By promise Vain of Universal Sway Lur'd you from Greece the beauteous Queen away? In less than ten revolving years Achilles' dreadful fleet appears! His bloody trains of Myrmidonians dire Shall wrap proud Ilion's domes in Grecian fire! ANACREON'S FIFTY-FIFTH ODE [From _The Kentucky Gazette_ (November 3, 1806)] What deathless Artist's mimic hand Shall paint me here the Ocean bland, Shall give the waves such kindling glows As when immortal Venus rose? Who, in phrenzy's flight of mind Such touch and tinctures bright may find To match her form and golden hair And naked paint the heavenly fair? While every amorous rival billow Strives her buoyant breast to pillow? 'Tis done! behold the wavelets green Softly press the Paphian Queen, Around her heavenly bosom play, Kiss its warm blush and melt away. Her graceful neck of pearl behold, Her wavy curls of floating gold: But none but lips divine may tell What Graces on that bosom dwell! Such bloom a bed of lilies shows Illumin'd by the crimson'd rose. Rounding off with grace divine Like hills of snow her shoulders shine. While streaming thro' the waves she swims The silvery maze half veils her limbs, Else where's the eye that durst behold Such beauty stream'd on heavenly mold? Th' enamour'd Triton's glittering train Sporting round the liquid main Waving their gold and silver pinions, Bear her o'er their deep dominions, While infant Loves and young desires Dancing 'mid the choral choirs Clasp the beauteous Queen around And sail in triumph o'er the bright profound. ANACREON'S FIRST ODE [From _The Western Review_ (Lexington, March, 1821)] I would Atrides' glory tell, I would to Cadmus strike my shell; I try the vocal cords--in vain! Love, only love, breathes through the strain. I strip away the truant wire, And string with deeper chords the lyre, Then great Alcides' toils would sing: Soft love still sighs through every string. Hence, themes of Glory, hence! adieu! For what have I to do with you? My heart and lyre in union make Resounding Love and only Love. HUMPHREY MARSHALL Humphrey Marshall, author of the first _History of Kentucky_ that was in any wise comprehensive, was born near Warrenton, Virginia, in 1760. What little school instruction he received was from the young woman whom he afterwards married. Marshall removed to Kentucky in 1782, after having served as an officer in the Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Virginia convention of 1788, as a representative of the district of Kentucky, which adopted the Federal constitution. Marshall was in the Kentucky legislature for several terms and, from 1795 to 1801, he was United States Senator from Kentucky. Some years later he was again in the State legislature; and at about that time his famous duel with Henry Clay took place. The first edition of his _History of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, 1812), appeared in a single volume of 407 pages; but the second and final edition was greatly revised and augmented and published in two octavo volumes (Frankfort, 1824). Humphrey Marshall's pen was pointed with poison for his enemies (and he had more of them than any other Kentuckian of his time, perhaps), and in his book he lashed them ruthlessly. He was the first as well as the last of Kentucky's "personal" historians. He first endeavored to silence his foes with newspapers and pamphlets, but, not being satisfied with the results, he poured out his wrath in book form to the extent of a thousand pages and more. While prejudice is the most descriptive word possible to use in characterizing Marshall's work, it is not all prejudice. He wrote with wonderful keenness concerning the Spanish conspiracy in Kentucky, his views upon the men that were guilty of bartering Kentucky to Spain in order to obtain free navigation of the Mississippi river having been abundantly affirmed by the latest historical work upon that subject. He also wrote of the Burr conspiracy with great clearness of vision, all of which is very remarkable when one stops to consider that nearly every one of the men connected with these two conspiracies were his bitterest enemies. That Marshall was an able writer all of the Kentucky historians have freely admitted, notwithstanding the fact they have quarreled with his "copy" many times. He is, as his biographer writes, "the stormy petrel of Kentucky's earlier years," a most remarkable man from several points of view. His _History of Kentucky_, in either edition, is rather scarce at this time, and it is not to be found in many of the rare book shops of the country. Humphrey Marshall died at Lexington, Kentucky, July 3, 1841. He lies buried upon the banks of the Kentucky river, near the capitol of the Commonwealth, Frankfort. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall_, by A. C. Quisenberry (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). PRIMEVAL KENTUCKY [From _The History of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, 1824, v. i)] The country, once seen, held out abundant inducements to be re-visited, and better known. Among the circumstances best adapted to engage the attention, and impress the feelings of the adventurous hunters of North Carolina, may be selected the uncommon fertility of the soil, and the great abundance of wild game, so conspicuous at that time. And we are assured that the effect lost nothing of the cause. Forests those hunters had seen--mountains they had ascended--valleys they had traversed--deer they had killed--and bears they had successfully hunted. They had heard the howl of the wolf; the whine of the panther; and the heart-rending yell of the savage man; with correspondent sensations of delight, or horror. But these were all lost to memory, in the contemplation of Kentucky; animated with all the enchanting variety, and adorned with all the majestic grace and boldness of nature's creative energy. To nature's children, she herself is eloquent, and affecting. Never before had the feelings of these rude hunters experienced so much of the pathetic, the sublime, or the marvellous. Their arrival on the plains of Elkhorn was in the dawn of summer; when the forests, composed of oaks of various kinds, of ash, of walnut, cherry, buck-eye, hackberry, sugar trees, locust, sycamore, coffee tree, and an indefinite number of other trees, towering aloft to the clouds, overspread the luxuriant undergrowth, with their daily shade; while beneath, the class of trees--the shrubs, the cane, the herbage, and the different kinds of grass, and clover, interspersed with flowers, filled the eye, and overlaid the soil, with the forest's richest carpet. The soil itself, more unctuous and fertile than Egypt's boasted Delta, from her maternal bosom, gave copious nutriment; and in rich exuberance sustained the whole, in matchless verdure. Here it was, if Pan ever existed, that without the aid of fiction, he held his sole dominion, and Sylvan empire, unmolested by Ceres, or Lucina, for centuries. The proud face of creation here presented itself, without the disguise of art. No wood had been felled; no field cleared; no human habitation raised: even the red man of the forest had not put up his wigwam of poles and bark for habitation. But that mysterious Being, whose productive power we call Nature, ever bountiful, and ever great--had not spread out this replete and luxurious pasture without stocking it with numerous flocks and herds: nor were their ferocious attendants, who prey upon them, wanting, to fill up the circle of created beings. Here was seen the timid deer; the towering elk; the fleet stag; the surly bear; the crafty fox; the ravenous wolf; the devouring panther; the insidious wild-cat; and the haughty buffaloe: besides innumerable other creatures, winged, fourfooted, or creeping. And here, at some time unknown, had been, for his bones are yet here, the leviathan of the forest, the monstrous mammoth; whose trunk, like that of the famous Trojan horse, would have held an host of men; and whose teeth, nine feet in length, inflicted death and destruction, on both animals and vegetable substances--until exhausting all within its range, itself became extinct. Nor is it known, although the race must have abounded in the country, from the great number of bones belonging to the species, found in different places, that there is one of the kind living on the American continent, if in the universe. STEPHEN T. BADIN Stephen Theodore Badin, Kentucky's earliest Catholic bard, was born at Orleans, France, in 1768. Though very poor he received a classical and theological training in Paris and Tours; and in 1792 he emigrated to America. In the following year Badin was ordained by Bishop John Carroll at Baltimore, he being the first Roman Catholic priest ordained in the United States. He was subsequently appointed to do missionary work in Kentucky, which was then in the old Baltimore diocese, and he made his home at Georgetown, Kentucky. During the next few years Badin rode more than one hundred thousand miles on horseback in order to meet all of his appointments. He was then the only Catholic priest in Kentucky, though he did have assistants from time to time. In 1797 Badin was made vicar-general, and the large Catholic emigrations from Maryland to Kentucky about this time greatly increased his labors. His _Principles of Catholics_ (1805) was the first Catholic book published in the West, and it gave him a larger audience than his voice could well reach. Badin later organized missions and built churches in Louisville and Lexington, St. Peter's in Lexington being made possible by the generosity of his Protestant friends, of whom he had many. Badin and Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, of the Bardstown diocese, had a misunderstanding as to the settlement of titles to certain church properties which Badin had acquired before Flaget came to Kentucky, and, rather than to have an acrimonious argument with the Bishop, he quit Kentucky, in 1819, and spent the next nine years in European travel. From 1830 to 1836 he worked among the Pottawatomie Indians in Indiana with marked success. Father Badin died at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1853. He was the author of several Latin poems in hexameters, among them being _Carmen Sacrum_, a translation of which was published at Frankfort; _Epicedium_, an elegy upon the death of Col. Joseph Hamilton Daviess at the battle of Tippecanoe; and _Sanctissimae Trinitatis Laudes et Invocatis_ (Louisville, 1843). His brief in memoriam for Colonel Daviess is his best known work and, perhaps, his masterpiece. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Sketches of Early Catholic Missions in Kentucky_, by M. J. Spalding (Louisville, 1846); _The Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky_, by B. J. Webb (Louisville, 1884). EPICEDIUM In Gloriosam Mortem Magnanimi Equitum Ducis Joseph Hamilton Daviess, Patrii Amoris Victimæ In Tippecanoe Pugna ad Amnem Wabaschum, 7. Die Nov. 1811. Epicedium; Honorabili Viro Joanni Rowan Meo Ipsiusque Amico Dicatum. [From _The Kentucky Gazette_ (February 18, 1812)] Autumnus felix aderat granaria complens Frugibus; umbrosas patulis jam frondibus ulmos Exuerat brumoe proprior, cum Fama per orbem Non rumore vago fatalia nuncia defert: "Sub specie pacis Slyvæcola perfidus atra "Nocte viros inopino plumbo occidit et hasta; "Dux equitum triplici confossus vulnere, fortis "Occubuit; turmoe hostiles periere fugatoe, "Hostilesque casas merito ultrix flamma voravit." Mensibus �stivis portenderat ista Cometes Funera; Terra quatit repetitis motibus; ægre Volvit sanguineas Wabaschus tardior undas Ingeminant Dryades suspiria longa; Hymenoeus Deficit audita clade, et solatia spernit Omnia; triste silet Musarum turba; fidelis Luget Amicities, lugubri tegmine vestit Et caput et lævam, desiderioque dalentis Non pudor aut modus est. Lacrymas at fundere inanes Quid juvat? Heu lacrymis nil Fata moventur acerba! Ergo piæ Themidis meliora oracula poscunt Unanimes; diram causam Themis aure benigna Excipit, et mox decretum pronunciat oequum: "Davidis effigies nostra appendatur in aula; "Tempora sacra viri quercus civilis adornet, "Ac non immeritam jungat Victoria laurum. "Signa sui Legislator det publica luctus; Historioe chartis referat memorabile Clio. "Prælium, et alta locum cyparissus contegat umbra. "Tristis Hymen pretiosa urna cor nobile servet; "Marmoreo reliquos cineres sincera sepulcro "Condat Amicities; præsens venturaque laudet "�tas magnanimum David, virtute potentem "Eloquii, belli et pacis decus immortale." Vita habet angustos fines, et gloria nullos: Qui patrioe reddunt vitam, illi morte nec ipsa Vincuntur; virtutum exempla nepotibus extant. Pro Patria vitam profundere maxima laus est. Stephanus Theodorus Badin, Cathol. Mission. Moerens canebat 15. Dec. 1811. A TRANSLATION BY "WOODFORDENSIS" [From the same] On the glorious death of Joseph Hamilton Daviess, Commander of the Horse, who fell a victim to his love of country, in the late battle on the Wabash, the 7th. Nov., 1811. Dedicated to John Rowan, Esq. 'Twas late in autumn, and the thrifty swain In spacious barns secur'd the golden grain; November's chilly mornings breath'd full keen; No leafy honors crown'd the sylvan scene. When Fame with those sad tidings quickly flew Throughout our land; (her tale, alas! too true): "The savage Indian, our perfidious foe, Pretending peace with hypocritic show, Surpris'd our legions in the dead of night And urg'd with lead and steel the mortal fight; Our valiant warriors strew th' ensanguin'd plain, Ev'n our great Captain of the Horse is slain With triple wound!!! At length the foe retires, With loss; and leaves his town to our avenging fires." When summer gilded our nocturnal sky With astral gems; a comet blazed on high, Portentous of these fates!--the earth, in throes Repeated labors; rueful Wabash flows With slower current, stain'd with mingling blood! The _Dryads_ fill with plaints the echoing wood! Hymen, the slaughter heard, dissolves in grief! Naught can console him, naught can yield relief. In woeful silence sits the muses' train And Friendship mourns her fav'rite hero slain. The funeral crape, vain badge of grief! she wears Upon her head, her arms the emblem bears, Her sorrowing mind no moderation knows, Admits no measure to her boundless woes. Ah, what avails the vain expense of tears? Fate still unmov'd this fruitless anguish bears! Therefore to Themis' shrine, with one accord, They come to crave a more benign award. The direful cause the attentive Goddess hears, And soon this just decree her record bears: "Let Daviess still in semblance grace my halls, Let his bright portraiture adorn my walls; The civic oak his sacred brows entwine, And vict'ry to the wreath his laurel join. Let Legislative acts of mourning show The voted ensigns of the public woe; In the historic page be ever read The fierce encounter, when great Daviess bled, And be the fatal spot with cypress shade o'erspread; His noble heart let Hymen's care enclose In the rich urn, and friendship's hand compose His other relics in the marble tomb. Then let the ages present and to come Just praises render to his glorious name; Let honor'd Daviess gild the page of fame, A hero, fit a nation's pow'r to wield, In council wise, and mighty in the field." His mortal life a narrow space confines, But glory with unbounded lustre shines. Those virtuous souls, who shed their noble blood A willing off'ring to the public good, Who to their country's welfare freely give The sacrifice of life, forever live As bright examples to the unborn brave, To shew how virtue rescues from the grave. The noblest act the patriot's fame can tell, Is, that he bravely for his country fell. Thus sung the missionary bard, and paid This mournful tribute to the mighty dead. DR. CHARLES CALDWELL Dr. Charles Caldwell, versatile and voluminous writer of prose, was born at Caswell, North Carolina, May 14, 1772. He entered the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, in 1792; and he won the city's gratitude in the following year by his medical services during the yellow fever epidemic. In 1810 Dr. Caldwell became professor of natural history in the University of Pennsylvania; and four years later he succeeded Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844) as editor of _The Port-Folio_, a Philadelphia magazine of high character. In 1819 Dr. Caldwell came to Lexington, Kentucky, to accept the chair of materia medica in Transylvania University. Some months later he was sent to Europe to purchase books and apparatus for his department. He returned to Transylvania and continued there until 1837, when he removed to Louisville and established a medical institute. Some years later he and the trustees disagreed and he left. After leaving the institute, Dr. Caldwell continued to reside at Louisville, in which city he died, July 9, 1853. Dr. Caldwell was the first distinguished American practitioner of phrenology, if he did not actually discover this alleged science. From 1794 until his death, Dr. Caldwell was an indefatigable literary worker. He was the author of more than two hundred pamphlets, essays, and books. He translated Blumenbach's _Elements of Physiology_ (1795); _Bachtiar Nameh_ (1813), a Persian tale which he translated from the Arabic; edited Cullen's _Practice of Physic_ (1816); _Memoirs of the Life and Campaigns of the Hon._ [General] _Greene_ (Philadelphia, 1819); _Elements of Phrenology_ (1824); _A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL.D., late President of Transylvania University_ (Boston, 1828); and _Thoughts and Experiments on Mesmerism_ (1842). BIBLIOGRAPHY. His _Autobiography_ (Philadelphia, 1855), published posthumously, has been regarded by many as an unfortunate work, as in it he made some rather severe pictures of his contemporaries. That the work contains much excellent writing, and is often very happy in the descriptions of the country through which the author passed, no one has arisen to gainsay; _Autobiography of Samuel D. Gross, M. D._ (Philadelphia, 1887, v. ii). GENERAL GREENE'S EARLY LIFE [From _Memoirs of the Life and Campaigns of the Hon. Nathaniel Greene_ (Philadelphia, 1819)] Nathaniel Greene, although descended from ancestors of elevated standing, was not indebted to the condition of his family for any part of the real lustre and reputation he possessed. As truly as is the case with any individual, he was the founder of his own fortune, and the author of his own fame. He was the second son of Nathaniel Greene, an anchor-smith, of considerable note, who is believed to have had the earliest establishment of the kind erected in America, and, by persevering industry in the line of his profession, an extensive and lucrative concern in iron-works, and some success in commercial transactions, had acquired a sufficiency to render him comfortable, if not wealthy. He was born in the year 1741, in the town of Warwick, and county of Kent, in the province of Rhode Island. As far as is known, his childhood passed without any peculiar or unequivocal indications of future greatness. But this is a point of little moment. The size of the oak it is destined to produce, can rarely be foretold from an examination of the acorn. Nor is it often that any well defined marks of genius in the child afford a premonition of the eminence of the man. Several of his contemporaries, however, who are still living, have a perfect recollection that young Greene had neither the appearance nor manners of a common boy; nor was he so considered by his elder, and more discerning acquaintance. * * * * * Being intended by his father for the business which he had himself pursued, young Greene received at school nothing but the elements of a common English education. But, to himself, an acquisition so humble and limited, was unsatisfactory and mortifying. Even now, his aim was lofty; and he had a noble ambition, not only to embark in high pursuits, but to qualify himself for a manly and honourable acquittance in them. Seeming, at this early period of life, to realize the important truth that, knowledge is power, a desire to obtain it became, in a short time, his ruling passion. He accordingly procured, in part by his own economy, the necessary books, and, at intervals of leisure, acquired, chiefly without the aid of an instructor, a competent acquaintance with the Latin tongue. This attainment, respectable in itself, was only preliminary to higher efforts. With such funds as he was able to raise, he purchased a small, but well selected library, and spent his evenings, and all the time he could redeem from business, in regular study. He read with a view to general improvement; but geography, travels, and military history--the latter, more especially--constituted his delight. Having, also, a predilection for mathematics and mechanical philosophy, and pursuing, in most cases, the bent of his inclination, as far as prudence and opportunity would admit, his knowledge, in the more practical departments of these sciences, became highly respectable. ALLAN B. MAGRUDER Allan Bowie Magruder, poet and historian, was born in Kentucky, about 1775. He received an academic education, studied law, and was admitted to the Lexington bar in 1797. He contributed very fair verse to the _Kentucky Gazette_ in 1802 and 1803, which attracted considerable comment in the West. That his fame as a poet was wide-spread, is indicated by a letter from an Ohio writer published in the _Lexington Intelligencer_, January 28, 1834, in which Magruder's verse is highly praised and further information concerning his career is sought. After stabbing poor Tom Johnson's little pamphlet of rhymes to the heart, Magruder is placed upon his pedestal as the first real Kentucky poet; and that his work was superior to either Johnson's or George Beck's is obvious, continues the caustic correspondent. The truth is, of course, that the verses of neither of the three men merit mention for anything save their priority; and the young Lexington lawyer's muse was not as productive as Tom's or Beck's, no more than three or four of his poems having come down to us. His first prose work was entitled _Reflections on the late Cession of Louisiana to the United States_ (Lexington, 1803). This little volume of 150 pages was issued by Daniel Bradford, for whose periodical, _The Medley_, Magruder wrote _The Character of Thomas Jefferson_ (June; July, 1803). This essay attracted the attention of the President, and he appointed Magruder commissioner of lands in Louisiana, to which territory he shortly afterwards removed. He was later a member of the State legislature; and from November 18, 1812, to March 3, 1813, Magruder was United States Senator from his adopted State. The next few years he devoted to collecting materials for a history of the North American Indians; and he also made notes for many years for a history of Kentucky, which he finally abandoned, and which he turned over to his old friend, John Bradford, who made use of them in his _Notes on Kentucky_. Allan B. Magruder died at Opelousas, Louisiana, April 16, 1822, when but forty-seven years of age. He was a man of culture and of high promise, but once in the politics of the country his early literary triumphs were not repeated, and he appears to have never done any writing worth while after his removal from Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Lexington Intelligencer_ (Lexington, Kentucky, January 28, 1834); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iv). CITIZEN GENET AND JEFFERSON [From _The Medley_ (Lexington, Ky., July, 1803)] When Citizen Genet, the ex-minister of the Robesperian fanaticism, appeared in America, he attempted to impose his new philosophy of light and liberty upon the government. He had nothing to boast of, on the score of superior diplomatic skill. His communications to the secretary of state, were evidently of the tampering kind. They were impressed with all the marks of that enthusiastic insanity, which regulated the councils of the faction; and which, were calculated to mistake their object, by disgusting their intended victims. The mind of Mr. Jefferson, discovered itself, in an early period of his correspondence with the French minister. The communications of Genet were decorated with all the flowers of eloquence, without the force and conviction of rhetorical energy. Accustomed to diplomatic calculation, and intimately combining cause with effect, Mr. Jefferson apprehended the subject, with strength and precision; considered it--developed it--viewed it on all sides--listened to every appeal, and attended to every charge--and in every communication, burst forth with a strength of refutation, that at once detected and embarrassed, the disappointed minister of a wily and fanatic faction. It is, in most instances, useless to oppose enthusiasm with the deliberate coolness of reason and argument. They are the antipodes of each other; and of that imperious nature, which mutually solicit triumph and disdain reconciliation. The tyranny of the Robesperian principles, were calculated to inveigle within the vortex of European politics, the American government and people. The coolness and sagacity of the secretary of state, composed their defence and protection. The appeal was mutually made to the government; and it is a fortunate circumstance, that there existed this tribunal to approbate the measures of the secretary, and to silence forever, the declamatory oracle of an insidious faction. Checked and defeated on all sides, his doctrines stripped of their visionary principles, and himself betrayed into the labyrinth of diplomatic mystery, their ex-divinity, shrank into the silence of contempt; declaring with his last breath, that Mr. Jefferson was the only man in America, whose talents he highly respected. HENRY CLAY Henry Clay, the most famous Kentuckian ever born, first saw the light in the "Slashes," Hanover county, Virginia, April 12, 1777. When twenty years of age, he settled in Lexington, Kentucky, as a lawyer; and Lexington was his home henceforth. In 1803 Henry Clay was elected to the State legislature; and before he was thirty years old he was filling an unexpired term in the United States Senate. In 1811 he was sent to the National House of Representatives from the old Lexington district. He was immediately chosen Speaker of that body, a position to which he was subsequently elected five times. This was the period of his greatest speeches. His utterances upon American rights did much to bring about the War of 1812. In 1814 Henry Clay went to Europe as a peace commissioner, and the Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24, 1814. He had resigned the Speakership in order to go to Ghent, but on his return in 1815, he found himself reëlected; and he presided as Speaker until 1820, declining two diplomatic posts and two cabinet offices in order to continue in the chair. In 1820 Henry Clay advocated the Missouri Compromise, and a short time afterwards he retired from public life to devote his attention to his private affairs. He was, however, in 1823, again elected to the lower House of Congress, and was again chosen Speaker, serving as such until 1825. In 1824 he announced himself as a candidate for president, but he was defeated by John Quincy Adams, who made him his Secretary of State. Andrew Jackson was elected president, in 1828, and Mr. Clay--to give him the name he was always known by, regardless of the many positions he held--once more retired from American politics. In 1831 the people elected him United States Senator from Kentucky, and in that body he fought Jackson's policies so strenuously that the Whig party was born, with Mr. Clay as its legitimate parent. The Whigs nominated him as their first candidate for president, but he was overwhelmingly defeated by his old-time enemy, Andrew Jackson. He was the author of the Compromise tariff of 1832-1833, which did much toward winning him the sobriquet of the "Great Compromiser." Mr. Clay was reëlected to the Senate, in 1837; and two years later his great debates with John C. Calhoun took place. Late in this year of 1839, the Whig political bosses set him aside and nominated William Henry Harrison for president and he was elected. In 1842 Henry Clay was retired to private life for the third time, but two years later he was again the candidate of the Whigs for president, and he was defeated by a comparatively unknown man, James K. Polk of Tennessee--the only Speaker of the House who has ever been elected president of the United States. The year of 1849 found Henry Clay once more in the Senate, but he was now old and very feeble. The great Compromise of 1850 sapped his rapidly waning strength, though it greatly added to his fame as a statesman. On June 29, 1852, Henry Clay died at Washington City, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. His body was brought back to the land he loved so well, and to which he had brought world-wide fame, and was buried at Lexington, where a grateful people have erected a cloud-tipped monument to his memory. He is one of the American immortals, though it is not at all difficult to quarrel with many of his public acts. He carried the name and fame of Kentucky into the remotest corners of the universe, and it would be indeed surprising if it were not possible to find flaws in a record that was as long as his. His connection with the Graves-Cilley duel in 1838 appears unpardonable at this time, but perhaps the whole truth regarding this infamous affair has not yet been brought out. Considering the patent fact that few orators can stand the printed page, and that the methods by which Clay's addresses were preserved were crude and unsatisfactory, many of the speeches are very readable even unto this day. They undoubtedly prove, however, that the man behind them, and not the manner or matter of them, was the thing that made Henry Clay the most lovable character in American history. BIBLIOGRAPHY. There are many biographies of Clay, and numerous collections of his speeches. Carl Schurz's _Henry Clay_ (Boston, 1887, two vols.), is the best account of the statesman; _Henry Clay_, by Thomas H. Clay (Philadelphia, 1910), is adequate for Clay the man; and Daniel Mallory's _Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay_ (New York, 1844), is the finest collection of his speeches made hitherto. REPLY TO JOHN RANDOLPH[4] [From _The Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay_, edited by Daniel Mallory (New York, 1844, v. i., 4th edition)] Sir, I am growing old. I have had some little measure of experience in public life, and the result of that experience has brought me to this conclusion, that when business, of whatever nature, is to be transacted in a deliberative assembly, or in private life, courtesy, forebearance, and moderation, are best calculated to bring it to a successful conclusion. Sir, my age admonishes me to abstain from involving myself in personal difficulties; would to God that I could say, I am also restrained by higher motives. I certainly never sought any collision with the gentleman from Virginia. My situation at this time is peculiar, if it be nothing else, and might, I should think, dissuade, at least, a generous heart from any wish to draw me into circumstances of personal altercation. I have experienced this magnanimity from some quarters of the house. But I regret, that from others it appears to have no such consideration. The gentleman from Virginia was pleased to say, that in one point at least he coincided with me--in an humble estimate of my grammatical and philological acquirements, I know my deficiencies. I was born to no proud patrimonial estate; from my father I inherited only infancy, ignorance, and indigence. I feel my defects; but, so far as my situation in early life is concerned, I may, without presumption, say they are more my misfortune than my fault. But, however I regret my want of ability to furnish to the gentleman a better specimen of powers of verbal criticism, I will venture to say, it is not greater than the disappointment of this committee as to the strength of his argument. ADDRESS TO LA FAYETTE [From the same] General, The house of representatives of the United States, impelled alike by its own feelings, and by those of the whole American people, could not have assigned to me a more gratifying duty than that of presenting to you cordial congratulations upon the occasion of your recent arrival in the United States, in compliance with the wishes of Congress, and to assure you of the very high satisfaction which your presence affords on this early theatre of your glory and renown. Although but few of the members who compose this body shared with you in the war of our revolution, all have, from impartial history, or from faithful tradition, a knowledge of the perils, the sufferings, and the sacrifices, which you voluntarily encountered, and the signal services, in America and in Europe, which you performed for an infant, a distant, and an alien people; and all feel and own the very great extent of the obligations under which you have placed our country. But the relations in which you have ever stood to the United States, interesting and important as they have been, do not constitute the only motive of the respect and admiration which the house of representatives entertain for you. Your consistency of character, your uniform devotion to regulated liberty, in all the vicissitudes of a long and arduous life, also commands its admiration. During all the recent convulsions of Europe, amidst, as after the dispersion of, every political storm, the people of the United States have beheld you, true to your old principles, firm and erect, cheering and animating with your well-known voice, the votaries of liberty, its faithful and fearless champion, ready to shed the last drop of that blood which here you so freely and nobly spilt, in the same holy cause. The vain wish has been sometimes indulged, that Providence would allow the patriot, after death, to return to his country, and to contemplate the intermediate changes which had taken place; to view the forest felled, the cities built, the mountains levelled, the canals cut, the highways constructed, the progress of the arts, advancement of learning, and the increase of population. General, your present visit to the United States is a realization of the consoling object of that wish. You are in the midst of posterity. Every where, you must have been struck with the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us. Even this very city, bearing a venerated name, alike endeared to you and to us, has since emerged from the forest which then covered its site. In one respect you behold us unaltered, and this is in the sentiment of continued devotion to liberty, and of ardent affection and profound gratitude to your departed friend, the father of his country, and to you, and to your illustrious associates in the field and in the cabinet, for the multiplied blessings which surround us, and for the very privilege of addressing you which I now exercise. This sentiment, now fondly cherished by more than ten millions of people, will be transmitted, with unabated vigor, down the tide of time, through the countless millions who are destined to inhabit this continent, to the latest posterity.[5] FOOTNOTES: [4] This reply to Randolph was made in the House of Representatives, in 1824, in the course of the debate between Clay and Randolph. "During the session of 1823-4, attempts wore made to run at Mr. Clay, on account of his peculiar situation in being named for the presidency while Speaker of the House of Representatives, and for his zealous support of the American system. In a debate on an improvement bill he encountered Mr. Randolph of Virginia, who had endeavored to provoke him to reply," and the bit of the debate reproduced here is the answer the gentleman from Virginia received for his pains. [5] After the above address, La Fayette rose, and in a tone influenced by powerful feeling, made an eloquent reply. In 1824 La Fayette visited the United States, as "the guest of the Nation," and he was gladly welcomed in many parts of the country. And "on the tenth of December, 1824, he was introduced in the House of Representatives by a committee appointed for that purpose. The general, being conducted to the sofa placed for his reception, the Speaker (Mr. Clay), addressed him" in the very happy words given above. JOHN J. AUDUBON John James Audubon, the celebrated ornithologist, was born at Mandeville, Louisiana, May 5, 1780. He was educated in France under private tutors, but his consuming love of Nature and especially of bird-life, was too strong to keep him in a beaten path of study, so most of his time was spent in the woods and fields. When seventeen years old Audubon returned to the United States to settle upon his father's estate, "Mill Grove," near Philadelphia. There he devoted his entire time to hunting, fishing, drawing, and music. Some months later he met and fell in love with his nearest neighbor, Lucy Bakewell, a young English girl. "Too young and too useless to be married," as he himself afterwards wrote, his about-to-be father-in-law, William Bakewell, advised Audubon to become a New York business man. With his friend, Ferdinand Rozier, whom he had met in France, and who was then connected with a French firm in Philadelphia, he visited Kentucky, late in 1806, "thought well of it, and liked it exceedingly." But his great love of Nature was not to be denied, and his business suffered accordingly. On April 8, 1808, Audubon was married to Miss Bakewell, and the next morning left for Pittsburgh, where he and his bride, accompanied by Rozier, floated down the Ohio river in a flatboat, which was their bridal tour, with Louisville, Kentucky, as their destination. Upon reaching Louisville Audubon and Rozier opened a large store which prospered when Audubon attended to it; "but birds were birds then as now, and my thoughts were ever and anon turning toward them as the objects of my greatest delight." His first child, Victor, was born at Louisville, in 1809. Rozier conducted the store, and Audubon spent his days in "the darling forests." In 1810 Alexander Wilson, the Scotch ornithologist and poet, called upon Audubon at his store in Louisville hoping to obtain his subscription to his work upon American birds, but Audubon showed him birds he had never seen before, which seemingly angered the Scot as he afterwards wrote slightingly of the Kentucky naturalist. Late in 1810 Audubon and Rozier removed their stock of goods to Henderson, Kentucky, where their trade was so poor that Rozier was left behind the counter, while Audubon was compelled to fish and hunt for food. A short time after their arrival in Henderson, the two partners decided to move to St. Genevieve on the Mississippi river, but Audubon disliked the community, sold out to Rozier, and returned to his home in Henderson. His second son, John Woodhouse, was born at Henderson, in 1812. Two daughters were also born at Henderson, the first of whom, Lucy, died in infancy and was buried in her father's garden. His pecuniary affairs were now greatly reduced, but he continued to draw birds and quadrupeds. He disposed of Mill Grove and opened a small store in Henderson, which prospered and put him on his feet again. Audubon was doing so finely in business now that he purchased a small farm and was adding to it from time to time. His brother-in-law, Thomas Bakewell, arrived at Henderson about 1816, and finally persuaded Audubon to erect a steam-mill on his property at a great expense. For a time this mill did all the sawing for the country, but in the end it ruined Audubon and his partners. He left Henderson in 1819, after having resided in the town for nearly ten years, and set up as a portrait painter in Louisville, where he was very successful. From Louisville Audubon went to Cincinnati and from there to New Orleans. In October, 1823, he again settled at Louisville as a painter of "birds, landscapes, portraits, and even signs." His wife was the only person in the world who had any faith in his ultimate "arrival" as a famous naturalist, and the outlook was indeed dark. Audubon quitted Louisville in March, 1824, and two years later he went to England, where the first public exhibition of his drawings was held. His first and most famous work, _Birds of America_, was published at London from 1827 to 1838, issued in numbers, each containing five plates, without text, the complete work consisting of four folio volumes. Audubon returned to America in 1829, and he was with his sons at Louisville for a short time, both of whom were engaged in business there. He went to New Orleans to see his wife, and together they came to Louisville, in 1830, to bid the "Kentucky lads," as he called them, goodbye, before sailing for England. At "the fair Edinburgh," in the fall of 1830, Audubon began the _Ornithological Biographies_ (Edinburgh, 1831-39, 5 vols.), the text to the plates of the _Birds_. In 1840-44 the work was republished in seven volumes, text and plates together, as _Birds of America_. In 1831 Audubon and his wife returned to America, and they were again in Louisville with the boys for some time. In 1833 his famous trip to Labrador was taken, and the following year found the family in England. The next ten years were passed in wandering from country to country in search of birds, but, in 1842, Audubon purchased "Minniesland," now Audubon Park, New York. With his sons and the Rev. John Bachman he planned the _Quadrupeds of America_, the last volume of which was issued after his death, which occurred at "Minniesland" on January 27, 1851. His wife, who wrote his life, survived him many years, dying at Shelbyville, Kentucky, June 19, 1874, but she is buried by his side on the banks of the Hudson. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life of John James Audubon_, edited by his Widow (New York, 1869); _Audubon and His Journals_, edited by Maria R. Audubon (New York, 1900); _John James Audubon_, by John Burroughs (Boston, 1902). INDIAN SUMMER ON THE OHIO IN 1810[6] [From _Audubon and His Journals_, edited by Maria R. Audubon (New York, 1900, v. ii)] When my wife, my eldest son (then an infant), and myself were returning from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, we found it expedient, the waters being unusually low, to provide ourselves with a _skiff_, to enable us to proceed to our abode at Henderson. I purchased a large, commodious, and light boat of that denomination. We procured a mattress, and our friends furnished us with ready prepared viands. We had two stout negro rowers, and in this trim we left the village of Shippingport [now within the corporate limits of Louisville], in expectation of reaching the place of our destination in a very few days. It was in the month of October. The autumnal tints already decorated the shores of that queen of rivers, the Ohio. Every tree was hung with long and flowing festoons of different species of vines, many loaded with clustered fruits of varied brilliancy, their rich bronzed carmine mingling beautifully with the yellow foliage which now predominated over the yet green leaves, reflecting more lively tints from the clear stream than ever landscape painter portrayed, or poet imagined. The days were yet warm. The sun had assumed the rich and glowing hue which at that season produces the singular phenomenon called there the "Indian Summer." The moon had rather passed the meridian of her grandeur. We glided down the river, meeting no other ripple of the water than that formed by the propulsion of our boat. Leisurely we moved along, gazing all day on the grandeur and beauty of the wild scenery around us. Now and then a large catfish rose to the surface of the water, in pursuit of a shoal of fry, which, starting simultaneously from the liquid element like so many silver arrows, produced a shower of light, while the pursuer with open jaws seized the stragglers, and, with a splash of his tail, disappeared from our view. Other fishes we heard, uttering beneath our bark a rumbling noise, the strange sound of which we discovered to proceed from the white perch, for on casting our net from the bow, we caught several of that species, when the noise ceased for a time. Nature, in her varied arrangements, seems to have felt a partiality towards this portion of our country. As the traveler ascends or descends the Ohio, he cannot help remarking that alternately, nearly the whole length of the river, the margin, on one side, is bounded by lofty hills and a rolling surface, while on the other, extensive plains of the richest alluvial land are seen as far as the eye can command the view. Islands of varied size and form rise here and there from the bosom of the water, and the winding course of the stream frequently brings you to places where the idea of being on a river of great length changes to that of floating on a lake of moderate extent. Some of these islands are of considerable size and value; while others, small and insignificant, seem as if intended for contrast, and as serving to enhance the general interest of the scenery. These little islands are frequently overflowed during great freshets or floods, and receive at their heads prodigious heaps of drifted timber. We foresaw with great concern the alterations that cultivation would soon produce along those delightful banks. As night came, sinking in darkness the broader portions of the river, our minds became affected by strong emotions, and wandered far beyond the present moments. The tinkling of bells told us that the cattle which bore them were gently roving from valley to valley in search of food, or returning to their distant homes. The hooting of the Great Owl, or the muffled noise of its wings, as it sailed smoothly over the stream, were matters of interest to us; so was the sound of the boatman's horn, as it came winding more and more softly from afar. When daylight returned, many songsters burst forth with echoing notes, more and more mellow to the listening ear. Here and there the lonely cabin of a squatter struck the eye, giving note of commencing civilization. The crossing of the stream by a Deer foretold how soon the hills would be covered with snow. Many sluggish flatboats we overtook and passed; some laden with produce from the different head-waters of the small rivers that pour their tributary streams into the Ohio; others, of less dimensions, crowded with emigrants from distant parts, in search of a new home. Purer pleasures I never felt; nor have you, reader, I ween, unless indeed you have felt the like, and in such company. The margins of the shores and of the river were, at this season amply supplied with game. A Wild Turkey, a Grouse, or a Blue-winged Teal, could be procured in a few moments; and we fared well, for, whenever we pleased we landed, struck up a fire, and provided as we were with the necessary utensils, procured a good repast. Several of these happy days passed, and we neared our home, when, one evening, not far from Pigeon Creek (a small stream which runs into the Ohio from the State of Indiana), a loud and strange noise was heard, so like the yells of Indian warfare, that we pulled at our oars, and made for the opposite side as fast and as quietly as possible. The sounds increased, we imagined we heard cries of "murder;" and as we knew that some depredations had lately been committed in the country by dissatisfied parties of aborigines, we felt for a while extremely uncomfortable. Ere long, however, our minds became more calmed, and we plainly discovered that the singular uproar was produced by an enthusiastic set of Methodists, who had wandered thus far out of the common way for the purpose of holding one of their annual camp-meetings, under the shade of a beech forest. Without meeting with any other interruption, we reached Henderson, distant from Shippingport, by water, about two hundred miles. When I think of these times, and call back to my mind the grandeur and beauty of those almost uninhabited shores; when I picture to myself the dense and lofty summits of the forests, that everywhere spread along the hills and overhung the margins of the stream, unmolested by the axe of the settler; when I know how dearly purchased the safe navigation of that river has been, by the blood of many worthy Virginians; when I see that no longer any aborigines are to be found there, and that the vast herds of Elk, Deer, and Buffaloes which once pastured on these hills, and in these valleys, making for themselves great roads to the several salt-springs, have ceased to exist; when I reflect that all this grand portion of our Union, instead of being in a state of nature, is now more or less covered with villages, farms, and towns, where the din of hammers and machinery is constantly heard; that the woods are fast disappearing under the axe by day, and the fire by night; that hundreds of steamboats are gliding to and fro, over the whole length of the majestic river, forcing commerce to take root and to prosper at every spot; when I see the surplus population of Europe coming to assist in the destruction of the forest, and transplanting civilization into its darkest recesses; when I remember that these extraordinary changes have all taken place in the short period of twenty years, I pause, wonder, and although I know all to be a fact, can scarcely believe its reality. Whether these changes are for the better or for the worse, I shall not pretend to say; but in whatever way my conclusions may incline, I feel with regret that there are on record no satisfactory accounts of the state of that portion of the country, from the time when our people first settled in it. This has not been because no one in America is able to accomplish such an undertaking. Our Irvings and our Coopers have proved themselves fully competent for the task. It has more probably been because the changes have succeeded each other with such rapidity as almost to rival the movements of their pens. However, it is not too late yet; and I sincerely hope that either or both of them will ere long furnish the generations to come with those delightful descriptions which they are so well qualified to give, of the original state of a country that has been rapidly forced to change her form and attire under the influence of increasing population. Yes, I hope to read, ere I close my earthly career, accounts from those delightful writers of the progress of civilization in our Western Country. They will speak of the Clarks, the Croghans, the Boones, and many other men of great and daring enterprise. They will analyze, as it were, into each component part the country as it once existed, and will render the picture, as it ought to be, immortal. FOOTNOTE: [6] Copyright, 1897, by Charles Scribner's Sons. HORACE HOLLEY Horace Holley, old Transylvania University's celebrated president, was born at Salisbury, Connecticut, February 13, 1781, the son of Luther Holley, a wealthy merchant. He was fitted at Williams College for Yale, from which institution he was graduated in 1803. Holley studied law in New York for awhile, but soon relinquished it for theology, which he returned to Yale to pursue. In 1805 he was appointed to his first pastorate. Going to Boston in 1809, as pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian church, he at once made a great reputation for himself as an eloquent pulpit orator. Holley was at Hollis Street for nine years, during which time he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, as well as a member of several civic boards. He was elected president of Transylvania University, of Lexington, in 1817, and he journeyed to Kentucky in the following spring, where he went carefully over the ground and finally decided to accept the position. He entered almost at once upon the most difficult task of converting a grammar school into a great university. Success soon crowned his efforts, however, and Transylvania took her place by the side of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, as one of the higher seats of learning in the United States. In at least one year under the Holley régime, Transylvania had the largest student body in this country. The institution was as well known in New York or London, among scholars, as it was in the West. Several of the professors were men of national reputation, and the students came from all parts of the United States. Never before in the South or West has a seat of learning had higher hopes for the future, or greater success or reputation than had Transylvania under Horace Holley. Then the Kentucky Presbyterians and others launched Dame Rumor, freighted with falsehoods and misrepresentations galore. The president was charged with every crime in the calendar: he was an atheist, an agnostic, a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, and all that was evil. The whole truth was this: he was a Unitarian, holding the Christ to be the greatest personality in history, but denying him as the very Son of God. This his prejudiced, ill-advised enemies were unable to understand. Driven to desperation by the bitter crusade that was being waged against him, Holley resigned, in March, 1827, after nine years of great success as head of the University, which after his departure, fell away to almost nothing. He went from Kentucky to Louisiana, where he endeavored to re-organize the College of New Orleans, and in which work he wore himself out. Late in the summer he and his wife took passage for New York, but he contracted yellow-fever, and, on July 31, 1827, he died. His body was consigned to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but his fame is secure as an American educator of distinguished ability. The finest bit of prose he ever wrote, perhaps, is contained in one of his Kentucky letters to his wife in Boston, written while he was in Lexington looking over the lay of the land, which, as subsequent events proved, he utterly failed to anticipate in its most dangerous and damning aspect. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D._, by Charles Caldwell, M. D. (Boston, 1828); _More Colonial Homesteads_, by Marion Harland (New York, 1899); _Lore of the Meadowland_, by J. W. Townsend (Lexington, Kentucky, 1911). MR. CLAY AND COLONEL MEADE [From _A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D._, by Charles Caldwell, M. D. (Boston, 1828)] Lexington, May 27th, 1818. I wrote a hasty letter to you on the night of my arrival. I shall now he able to speak a little more in detail. The town and the vicinity are very handsome. The streets are broad, straight, paved, clean, and have rows of trees on each side. The houses are of brick almost universally, many of them in the midst of fields, and have a very rural and charming appearance. The taste is for low houses, generally two, sometimes even but one story high, like English cottages. This taste gives an effect that eyes accustomed to the high buildings of an Atlantic city, where there is but little room, are not at first pleased with. But it is a taste adapted to the circumstances, and to me is not unpleasant. I have taken lodgings at the principal hotel of the place, where I have a drawing-room to receive calls, which were yesterday until dinner almost innumerable.... In the afternoon I walked about town with Mr. Clay, and called at a few charming houses. I visited also the Athenaeum, an institution not yet furnished with many books, but well supplied with newspapers, and the best periodicals. I find everything of this sort, which is valuable, from Boston and the other Atlantic cities. This morning I breakfasted at Mr. Clay's, who lives a mile and a half from town. He arrived here only three days before me. Ashland is a very pleasant place, handsomer than I anticipated. The grounds are beautiful, the lawns and walks extensive, the shrubbery luxuriant, and the garden well supplied. The native forest of ash in the rear adds a charming effect to the whole. After breakfast Mr. Clay rode in with me, and we went with the trustees, by appointment, to the college, to visit the professors and students. They were all collected in the largest hall to receive us. I made a short address, which was received in a kind manner. I was then conducted to the library, the apparatus, and the recitation rooms. The library is small, and the apparatus smaller. There is no regular division of students into classes as in other colleges, and but few laws. Everything is to be done, and so much the better, as nothing is to be reformed. Almost the whole is proposed to be left to me to arrange. I am now making all necessary inquiries, and a meeting of the trustees is to be called next week. After this visit, I went with a party of ladies and gentlemen, nine miles into the country to the seat of Colonel [David] Meade [1744-1838] where we dined and passed the day. This gentleman, who is near seventy, is a Virginian of the old school. He has been a good deal in England, in his youth, and brought home with him English notions of a country seat, though he is a great republican in politics. He and his wife dress in the costume of the olden time. He has the square coat and great cuffs, the vest of the court, short breeches, and white stockings, at all times. Mrs. Meade has the long waist, the white apron, the stays, the ruffles about the elbows, and the cap of half a century ago. She is very mild and ladylike, and though between sixty and seventy, plays upon the piano-forte with the facility and cheerfulness of a young lady. Her husband resembles Colonel Pickering in the face, and the shape of the head. He is entirely a man of leisure, never having followed any business, and never using his fortune but in adorning his place and entertaining his friends and strangers. No word is ever sent to him that company is coming. To do so offends him. But a dinner--he dines at the hour of four--is always ready for visitors; and servants are always in waiting. Twenty of us went out today, without warning, and were entertained luxuriously on the viands of the country. Our drink consisted of beer, toddy, and water. Wine, being imported and expensive, he never gives; nor does he allow cigars to be smoked in his presence. His house consists of a cluster of rustic cottages, in front of which spreads a beautiful, sloping lawn, as smooth as velvet. From this diverge, in various direction, and forming vistas terminated by picturesque objects, groves and walks extending over some acres. Seats, Chinese temples, verdant banks, and alcoves are interspersed at convenient distances. The lake, over which presides a Grecian temple, that you may imagine to be the residence of the water nymphs, has in it a small island, which communicates with the shore by a white bridge of one arch. The whole is surrounded by a low rustic fence of stone, surmounted and almost hidden by honey-suckle and roses, now in full flower, and which we gathered in abundance to adorn the ladies. Everything is laid out for walking and pleasure. His farm he rents, and does nothing for profit. The whole is in rustic taste. You enter from the road, through a gate between rude and massive columns, a field without pretension, wind a considerable distance through a noble park to an inner gate, the capitals to whose pillars are unique, being formed of the roots of trees, carved by nature. Then the rich scene of cultivation, of verdure and flower-capped hedges, bursts upon you. There is no establishment like this in our country. Instead of a description, I might have given you its name, "_Chaumiere du Prairies_." CONSTANTINE S. RAFINESQUE Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, the learned, eccentric scientist of Kentucky and the West, was born near Constantinople, Turkey, October 22, 1783. He was of French-German descent. His boyhood years were spent in Italy and in traveling on the Continent. Rafinesque came to America in 1802, and he remained in this country but three years, when he returned to Italy; and there the subsequent ten years of his life were passed. In 1809 he married, after a fashion, a Sicilian woman, Josephine Vaccaro, who bore him two children. Rafinesque returned to America in 1815, and a short time after his arrival, he met his former friend, John D. Clifford, of Philadelphia and Lexington--twin-towns in those days--"the only man he ever loved," who persuaded him to come out to Kentucky. At Henderson, Kentucky, Rafinesque met the great Audubon, who took him under his roof, and who told him many amusing tales of the fishes of the Ohio--which the little scientist believed, as coming from a famous man--and which caused him no end of trouble and work in after years. Audubon ridiculed him to his face, which the simple-minded man could not understand; and in his _Journals_ the ornithologist has much fun at his guest's expense. That he treated him very badly, no one can deny. Through Clifford's influence, probably, Rafinesque was appointed, in 1819, to the chair of natural science and modern languages in Transylvania University. This was during the presidency of Horace Holley, when the old University was at the high-tide of its history, but the diminutive scientist, though heralded as "the most learned man in America," was not received as such in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky an hundred years ago. From the president down to the children of the little city he was looked upon as an impossible creature. Seven of the best years of his life were spent in the service of the University and of the town. His boldest dream for the town was a Botanical Garden, modeled upon the gardens of France, and though he did actually make a splendid start toward this ideal, in the end all his plans came to nothing. In June, 1825, Rafinesque left Lexington, never to return. He went to Philadelphia, where the remaining fifteen years of his life were spent. Death discovered the little fellow among his books, plants, and poverty, September 18, 1840, in a miserable, rat-ridden garret on Race street, Philadelphia. Rafinesque's publications reach the surprising number of 447, consisting of books, pamphlets, magazine articles, translations, and reprints. His most important works are _Ichthyologia Ohiensis, or Natural History of the Fishes Inhabiting the River Ohio and its Tributary Streams_ (Lexington, 1820), a reprint of which his biographer, Dr. Call, has published (Cleveland, 1899); and his _Ancient Annals of Kentucky_, which Humphrey Marshall printed as an introduction to his _History of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, 1824). The oversheets of this were made into a pamphlet of thirty-nine pages. The little work considers the antiquities of the State, and is the starting point for all latter-day writers upon "the prehistoric men of Kentucky." Imagination and fact run riotously together, yet the work has been correctly characterized as "the most remarkable history of Kentucky that was ever written, or ever will be." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _A Kentucky Cardinal_, by James Lane Allen (New York, 1894); _Life and Writings of Rafinesque_, by Richard E. Call (Louisville, Kentucky, 1895); _Rafinesque: A Sketch of his Life_, by T. J. Fitzpatrick (Des Moines, Iowa, 1911). GEOLOGICAL ANNALS OF THE REVOLUTIONS OF NATURE IN KENTUCKY [From _Ancient Annals of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, 1824)] 1. Every complete history of a country ought to include an account of the physical changes and revolutions, which it may have undergone. 2. The documents for such geological survey, are to be found everywhere in the bowels of the earth, its rocks and strata, with the remains of organized bodies imbedded therein, which are now considered as the medals of nature. 3. The soil of Kentucky shows, like many other countries, that it has once been the bed of the sea. In James's Map, the primitive ocean is supposed to have covered North America, by having a former level of 6000 feet above the actual level. Since the highest lands in Kentucky do not exceed 1800 feet above the level of the actual ocean, they were once covered with at least 4200 feet of water. 4. The study of the soil of Kentucky, proves evidently the successive and gradual retreat of the salt waters, without evincing any proofs of any very violent or sudden disruptions or emersions of land, nor eruptions of the ocean, except some casual accidents, easily ascribed to earthquakes, salses and submarine volcanoes. 5. There are no remains of land or burning volcanoes in Kentucky, nor of any considerable fresh water lake. All the strata are nearly horizontal, with valleys excavated by the tides and streams during the soft state of the strata. 6. After these preliminary observations, I shall detail the successive evolution of this soil and its productions, under six distinct periods of time, which may be compared to the six epochs or days of creation, and supposed to have lasted an indefinite number of ages. MANN BUTLER Mann Butler, the first Kentucky historian who worked with comparatively modern methods, eliminating personal prejudices and imagination, was born at Baltimore, July, 1784. At the age of three years he was taken to the home of his grandfather in Chelsea, England. Mann Butler returned to the United States, in 1798, and entered St. Mary's College, Georgetown, D. C., from which institution he was afterwards graduated in the arts, medicine, and law. His tastes were decidedly literary, and he preferred law to medicine as being, perhaps, more in line with literature. He emigrated to Kentucky, locating at Lexington, in 1806, for the practice of law. He later abandoned law for pedagogy, opening an academy at Versailles, Kentucky. Some years later he taught in Maysville and Frankfort, and was then called to a professorship in Transylvania University, Lexington, where he remained for several years. In 1831 Butler removed to Louisville, where he was engaged in teaching for fifteen years. His _History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1834; Cincinnati, 1836) was, after Filson's florid sentences, Rafinesque's imagination, and Marshall's prejudices and castigations, most welcome and timely. He was microscopic in finding facts, fair, having no enemies to punish, an excellent chronicler, in short, and doing a work that was much needed. The Kentucky legislature took a keen interest in his history, rendering him great assistance. Butler's _Appeal from the Misrepresentations of James Hall, Respecting the History of Kentucky and the West_ (Frankfort, 1837), was a just criticism of the Cincinnati writer's _Sketches of History in the West_ (Philadelphia, 1835), a work in which fact and fiction are well-nigh inseparable. Mann Butler spent the last seven years of his life in St. Louis, teaching and in preparing a history of the Ohio valley, which he left in manuscript, but which, together with his library, was afterwards destroyed by Federal soldiers during the Civil War. He was killed in Missouri, in 1852, while a passenger on a Pacific train which was wrecked by the falling of a bridge spanning the Gasconade river. Mann Butler had many of the qualities required in a great historian, and the work he did has lived well and will live longer. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, 1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i). PIONEER VISITORS [From _A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1834)] During this same year [1769], a party of about forty stout hunters, "from New River, Holstein and Clinch" united in a hunting expedition west of the Cumberland Mountains. Nine of this party, led on by Col. James Knox, reached Kentucky; and, from the time they were absent from home, they "obtained the name of the _Long Hunters_." This expedition reached "the country south of the Kentucky river," and became acquainted with Green river, and the lower part of the Cumberland. In addition to these parties, so naturally stimulated by the ardent curiosity incident to early and comparatively, idle society, the claimants of military bounty lands which had been obtained from the British crown, for services against the French, furnished a new and keen band of western explorers. Their land warrants were surveyed on the Kenhawa and the Ohio; though most positively against the very letter of the royal proclamation of '63. But at this distance from the royal court, it was nothing new in the history of government that edicts emanating, even from the king in council, should be but imperfectly regarded. However, this may be, land warrants were actually surveyed on the Kenhawa as early as 1772, and in 1773, several surveyors were deputied to lay out bounty lands on the Ohio river. Amongst others Thomas Bullitt, uncle to the late Alexander Scott Bullitt, first lieutenant governor of Kentucky; and Hancock Taylor, engaged in this adventurous work. These gentlemen with their company were overtaken on the 28th of May, 1773, by the McAfees, whose exertions will hereafter occupy a conspicuous station in this narrative. On the 29th, the party in one boat and four canoes, reached the Ohio river, and elected Bullitt their captain. There is a romantic incident connected with this gentleman's descent of the Ohio, evincing singular intrepidity and presence of mind; it is taken from his journal, as Mr. [Humphrey] Marshall says, and the author has found it substantially confirmed by the McAfee papers. While on his voyage, he left his boat and went alone through the woods to the Indian town of Old Chillicothe, on the Scioto. He arrived in the midst of the town undiscovered by the Indians, until he was waving his white flag as a token of peace. He was immediately asked what news? Was he from the Long Knife? And why, if he was a peace-messenger, he had not sent a runner? Bullitt, undauntedly replied, that he had no bad news; was from the Long Knife, and as the red men and the whites were at peace, he had come among his brothers to have friendly talk with them, about living on the other side of the Ohio; that he had no runner swifter than himself; and, that he was in haste and could not wait the return of a runner. "Would you," said he, "if you were very hungry, and had killed a deer, send your squaw to town to tell the news, and wait her return before you eat?" This simple address to their own feelings, soon put the Indians in good humor, and at his desire a council was assembled to hear his talk the next day. Captain Bullitt then made strong assurances of friendship on the part of the whites and acknowledged that these "Shawanees and Delawares, our nearest neighbors," "did not get any of the money or blankets given for the land, which I and my people are going to settle. But it is agreed by the great men, who own the land, that they will make a present to both the Delawares and the Shawanees, the next year; and the year following, that shall be as good." On the ensuing day, agreeably to the very deliberate manner of the Indians in council, Captain Bullitt was informed, that "he seemed kind and friendly, and that it pleased them well." That as "to settling the country on the other side of the Ohio with your people, we are particularly pleased that they are not to _disturb_ us in our hunting. For we must hunt, to kill meat for our women and children, and to get something to buy our powder and lead with, and to get us blankets and clothing." In these talks, there seems a strange want of the usual sagacity of the Indians as to the consequences of white men settling on their hunting grounds; so contrary to their melancholy experience for a century and a half previous; yet, the narrative is unimpeachable. On the part of Bullitt, too, the admission of _no compensation_ to the Delawares and Shawanees, appears to be irreconcilable with the treaty at Fort Stanwix with the master tribes of the confederacy, the Six Nations. However, this may be, the parties separated in perfect harmony, and Captain Bullitt proceeded to the Falls. Here he pitched his camp above the mouth of Bear-grass creek, retiring of a night to the upper point of the shoal above _Corn Island_, opposite to the present city of Louisville. It was this gentleman, who, according to the testimony of Jacob Sodowsky, a respectable farmer, late of Jessamine county, in this State, first laid off the town of Louisville, in August, 1773. He likewise surveyed Bullitt's Lick in the adjoining county, of the same name. ZACHARY TAYLOR Zachary Taylor, twelfth president of the United States, was a Kentuckian save for his accidental birth near Orange, Virginia, September 24, 1784. His father, Richard Taylor, had been planning for many years to remove to Kentucky, but his vacillation gave Virginia another president. When but nine months old Zachary Taylor was brought to Kentucky, the family settling near Louisville. He "grew up to manhood with the yell of the savage and the crack of the rifle almost constantly ringing in his ears." The first twenty-four years of his life were passed wholly in Kentucky amid all the dangers of the Western wilderness. He was fighting Indians almost before he could hold a rifle at arm's length, and in such an environment his education was, of course, very limited. Taylor entered the army, in 1808, serving in the War of 1812, in Black Hawk's war of 1832, and against the Seminole Indians (1836-1837). In 1837 he was brevetted brigadier-general. In 1838 General Taylor was placed in command of the military stations in Florida; and in 1845 he took command of the army on the Texas border. The next five years of General Taylor's life is the history of the Mexican War. At Palo Alto, Monterey, and at Buena Vista, on February 22-23, 1847, where he crushed Santa Anna, he was the absolute man of the hour, the hero of the country. On the strength of his military renown, General Taylor was elected as the Whig candidate for president of the United States, in 1848, defeating General Lewis Cass of Michigan, and former president, Martin Van Buren, of New York. He was inaugurated in March, 1849, but he died at the White House, Washington, July 9, 1850. The country was torn asunder with many important questions during Taylor's administration, which, though brief, was a stormy one. His remains were interred at his old home near Louisville--the only president ever buried in this State--and a ruined monument marks the grave at this time. In 1908 a volume of his _Letters from the Battlefields of the Mexican War_ appeared. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Some Notable Families of America_, by Annah Robinson Watson; _The War with Mexico_, by H. O. Ladd (New York, 1835); _General Taylor_, by O. O. Howard (New York, 1892). A LETTER TO HENRY CLAY [From _The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay_, edited by Calvin Colton (New York, 1855)] Baton Rouge, La., December 28, 1847. My dear Sir,--Your kind and acceptable letter of the 13th instant, congratulating me on my safe return to the United States, and for the complimentary and flattering terms you have been pleased to notice my services, I beg leave to tender you my sincere thanks. The warm and hearty reception I have met with from so many of my fellow-citizens, where I have mingled among them since my return, in addition to their manifestations of their high appreciation and approval of my conduct while in Mexico, has been truly gratifying, and has ten-fold more than compensated me for the dangers and toils encountered in the public service, as well as for the privations in being so long separated from my family and friends; yet there are circumstances connected with my operations in that country which I can never forget, and which I must always think of with feelings of the deepest sorrow and regret. I left Mexico after it was determined the column under my orders was to act on the defensive, and after the capital of the enemy had fallen into our hands, and their army dispersed, on a short leave of absence, to visit my family, and to attend to some important private affairs, which could not well be arranged without my being present, and which had been too long neglected. After reaching New Orleans, I informed the Secretary of War that should my presence in Mexico be deemed necessary at any time, I was ready to return, and that a communication on that or any other subject connected with my public duties would reach me if addressed to this place. I therefore feel bound to remain here, or in the vicinity, until the proper authorities at Washington determine what disposition is to be made of or with me. Under this state of things I do not expect to have it in my power to visit Kentucky, although it would afford me much real pleasure to mix once more with my numerous relatives and friends in that patriotic State, to whom I am devotedly attached; as well as again to visit, if not the place of my nativity, where I was reared from infancy to early manhood. And let me assure you I duly appreciate your kind invitation to visit you at your own hospitable home, and should anything occur which will enable me to avail myself of it, I will embrace the opportunity with much real pleasure. I regret to say, I found my family, or rather Mrs. Taylor, on my return, in feeble health, as well as my affairs in any other than a prosperous condition; the latter was, however, to be expected, and I must devote what time I can spare, or can be spared from my public duties, in putting them in order as far as I can do so. Should circumstances so turn out as will induce you to visit Washington the present winter, I trust you will take every precaution to protect yourself while traveling from the effects of the severe cold weather you must necessarily encounter in crossing the mountains, particularly so after having passed several of the last winters in the South. The letter which you did me the honor to address to me, referred to, reached me on the eve of my leaving Monterey to return to the United States, and was at once replied to, which reply I flatter myself reached you shortly after writing your last communication; in which I stated, although I had received some letters from individuals in Kentucky, calculated, or perhaps intended, to produce unkind feelings on my part toward you, even admitting such was the case, their object has not been accomplished in the slightest degree, and I hope it will never be the case. Please present me mostly kindly to your excellent lady, and wishing you and yours continued health and prosperity, I remain, with respect and esteem, etc. DANIEL DRAKE Daniel Drake, "the Franklin of the West," was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, October 20, 1785. When he was but three years old, his family removed to Mayslick, Mason county, Kentucky, where they dwelt in a log cabin for some time. When he was sixteen years of age, Drake went to Cincinnati to study medicine, the city's first medical student. He later attended lectures at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. On his return to Kentucky, Dr. Drake practiced his profession near his home at Mayslick, Kentucky, but he shortly afterwards went to Cincinnati, where he became a distinguished physician and author. In 1816 he was appointed professor of materia medica and botany in the medical school of Transylvania University, and he held this chair for one year. He returned to Transylvania, in 1823, and this time he remained for four years. In 1835 Dr. Drake organized the medical department of Cincinnati College. Four years later he went to Louisville to accept the chair of clinical medicine and pathological anatomy in the University of Louisville, which he occupied for ten years. He returned to Cincinnati two years before his death, which occurred there, November 6, 1852. Dr. Drake's publications include _Topography, Climate, and Diseases of Cincinnati_ (1810); _Picture of Cincinnati_ (Cincinnati, 1815); _Practical Essays on Medical Education_ (1832); _Systematic Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America_ (Philadelphia, 1850; 1852), a work which was characterized by Judge James Hall of Cincinnati as "the most important and valuable work ever written in the United States. The subject is large. The work could not be compiled. The subject was new, and the materials were to be collected from original sources, from observation, personal inspection, oral evidence, etc. It occupied many years; and was, probably, in contemplation during the whole or most part of Dr. Drake's long professional life." To-day Dr. Drake's most popular work is _Pioneer Life in Kentucky_, a series of reminiscential letters addressed to his children, concerning early times in Kentucky. It was issued by Robert Clarke, the Cincinnati publisher in his well-known Ohio Valley Historical Series. This is a charming volume and it has been much quoted and praised by Western writers. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. ii); _Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley_, by W. H. Venable (Cincinnati, 1891); Allibone's _Dictionary of Authors_ (Philadelphia, 1897). MAYSLICK, KENTUCKY, IN 1800 [From _Pioneer Life in Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1870)] Mayslick, although scarcely a village, was at once an emporium and capital for a tract of country six or eight miles in diameter, and embracing several hundred families, of which those in father's neighborhood were tolerably fair specimens. Uncle Abraham Drake kept a store, and Shotwell and Morris kept taverns; besides them there were a few poor mechanics. Uncle Cornelius Drake was a farmer merely, and lived a little out of the center of the station; the great men of which were the three I have just named. With this limited population, it seems, even down to this time, wonderful to me that such gatherings and such scenes should have been transacted there. They commenced within five years after its settlement, and increasing with the progress of surrounding population, continued in full vigor long after I left home for Cincinnati. It was the place for holding regimental militia musters, when all the boys and old men of the surrounding country, not less than those who stood enrolled, would assemble; and before dispersing at night, the training was quite eclipsed by a heterogeneous drama of foot racing, pony racing, wrestling, fighting, drunkenness and general uproar. It was also a place for political meetings and stump conflict by opposing candidates, and after intellectual performances there generally followed an epilogue of oaths, yells, loud blows, and gnashing of teeth. Singing-schools were likewise held at the same place in a room of Deacon Morris's tavern. I was never a scholar, which I regret, for it has always been a grief with me that I did not learn music in early life. I occasionally attended. As in all country singing-schools, sacred music only was taught, but in general there was not much display of sanctity. I have a distinct remembrance of one teacher only. He was a Yankee, without a family, between forty and fifty years of age, and wore a matted mass of thick hair over the place where men's ears are usually found. Thus protected, his were never seen, and after the opinion spread abroad that by some misfortune they had been cut off, he "cut and run." The infant capital was, still further, the local seat of justice; and Saturday was for many years, at all times I might say, the regular term time. Instead of trying cases at home, two or three justices of the peace would come to the Lick on that day, and hold their separate courts. This, of course, brought thither all the litigants of the neighborhood with their friends and witnesses; all who wished to purchase at the store would postpone their visit to the same day; all who had to replenish their jugs of whiskey did the same thing; all who had business with others expected to meet them there, as our city merchants, at noon, expect to meet each other on 'change; finally, all who thirsted after drink, fun, frolic, or fighting, of course, were present. Thus Saturday was a day of largely suspended field labor, but devoted to public business, social pleasure, dissipation, and beastly drunkenness. You might suppose that the presence of civil magistrates would have repressed some of these vices, but it was not so. Each day provided a bill of fare for the next. A new trade in horses, another horse race, a cock-fight, or a dog-fight, a wrestling match, or a pitched battle between two bullies, who in fierce encounter would lie on the ground scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other's eyes, and biting off each other's noses, in the manner of bull-dogs, while a Roman circle of interested lookers-on would encourage the respective gladiators with shouts which a passing demon might have mistaken for those of hell. In the afternoon, the men and boys of business and sobriety would depart, and at nightfall the dissipated would follow them, often two on a horse, reeling and yelling as I saw drunken Indians do in the neighborhood of Fort Leavenworth, in the summer of 1844. But many would be too much intoxicated to mount their horses, and must therefore remain till Sunday morning. MARY A. HOLLEY Mrs. Mary Austin Holley, the historian of Texas, was born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1786. On January 1, 1805, she was married to the Rev. Horace Holley, who, in the fall of that year, became pastor of a church at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut. Mrs. Holley, of course, was in Boston with her husband from 1809 to 1818; and she accompanied him to Lexington, Kentucky, when he accepted the presidency of Transylvania University. Mrs. Holley was one of the few persons whom the eccentric scientist, Rafinesque, set down as having been very kind to him while he was connected with the University. She lived in Lexington until the spring of 1827, when she went with her husband to New Orleans. She wrote a poem, _On Leaving Kentucky_, the first stanza of which is as follows: Farewell to the land in which broad rivers flow, And vast prairies bloom as in Eden's young day! Farewell to the land in which lofty trees grow, And the vine and the mistletoe's empire display. She later embarked with her husband for New York, and it was her pen that so vividly described his death on shipboard. After Dr. Holley's death his widow returned to Lexington, Kentucky, and wrote the memoir for Dr. Charles Caldwell's _Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D._ (Boston, 1828). Mrs. Holley left Kentucky in 1831 and emigrated to Texas under the protection of her celebrated kinsman, General Stephen Fuller Austin, a Transylvania University man, and the founder of Texas. Her _Texas_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1836), was one of the first histories of that country ever published. Mrs. Holley was a widely read woman, theology being her favorite study, and, like her husband, she was a Unitarian. In person she was said to be a very charming woman. Mrs. Holley spent the last several years of her life at New Orleans, in which city she died on August 2, 1846. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Transylvanian_ (Lexington, January, 1829); Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905). TEXAS WOMEN [From _Texas_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1836)] Living in a wild country under circumstances requiring constant exertion, forms the character to great and daring enterprise. Women thus situated are known to perform exploits, which the effeminate men of populous cities might tremble at. Hence there are more Dianas and _Esther Stanhopes_ than one in Texas. It is not uncommon for ladies to mount their mustangs and hunt with their husbands, and with them to camp out for days on their excursions to the sea shore for fish and oysters. All visiting is done on horseback, and they will go fifty miles to a ball with their silk dresses, made perhaps in Philadelphia or New Orleans, in their saddle-bags. Hardy, vigorous constitutions, free spirits, and spontaneous gaiety are thus induced, and continued a rich legacy to their children, who, it is to be hoped, will sufficiently value the blessing not to squander it away, in their eager search for the luxuries and refinements of polite life. Women have capacity for greatness, but they require occasions to bring it out. They require, perhaps, stronger motives than men--they have stronger barriers to break through of indolence and habit--but, when roused, they are quick to discern and unshrinking to act. _Lot was unfortunate in his wife._ Many a wife in Texas has proved herself the better half, and many a widow's heart has prompted her to noble daring. Mrs. ---- left her home in Kentucky with her six sons, and _no other jewels_. There was good land and room in Texas. Hither she came with the first settlers, at a time when the Indians were often troublesome by coming in large companies and encamping near an isolated farm, demanding of its helpless proprietors, not then too well provided for, whatever of provisions or other things struck their fancies. One of these _foraging_ parties, not over nice in their demands, stationed themselves in rather too near proximity to the dwelling of this veteran lady. They were so well satisfied with their position, and scoured the place so completely, that she ventured to remonstrate, gently at first, then more vehemently. All would not do: the _pic-nics_ would not budge an inch; and moreover threatened life if she did not forbear from further expressions of impatience. The good woman was _armed_. She buckled on her _breastplate_ of _courage_, if not of _righteousness_, and with her children and women servants, all her household around her, sent for the chief, and very boldly expostulating with him, _commanded_ him to depart on the instant at the peril of his tribe; or by a signal she would call in her whole _people_, numerous and formidable, and exterminate his race. She was no more troubled with the Indians. She lives comfortably with her thriving family and thriving fortune, and with great credit to herself, on the road between Brazoria and San Felipe, in the same house now famed for its hospitality and comfort. It is the usual stopping place for travellers on that route, who are not a little entertained with the border stories and characteristic jests there related, by casual companies meeting for the night and sharing the same apartment. It was thus that the above incident, much more exemplified, was drawn from the hostess herself. A volume of _reminiscences_ thus collected, racy with the marvellous, would not be _unapt_ to modern taste, and the modern science of book-making. JOHN J. CRITTENDEN John Jordan Crittenden, a Kentucky statesman and orator of national reputation, was born near Versailles, Kentucky, September 10, 1787. He was graduated from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, studied law, and was admitted to the Frankfort bar. Crittenden served in the War of 1812; and in 1816 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature. In the following year he was elected United States Senator from Kentucky, his party, the Whig, then being in power in this State. From 1827 to 1829 Crittenden was United States Attorney for the district of Kentucky; and in 1835 he was again sent to the Senate, with Henry Clay as his colleague. President William Henry Harrison made him his Attorney-General, in 1841, and he resigned his seat in the Senate. When John Tyler succeeded to the presidency six months later, on the death of Harrison, Crittenden withdrew from the cabinet portfolio, and he was almost immediately returned to the Senate by the legislature of Kentucky. He served until 1848, when he was elected Governor of Kentucky. Governor Crittenden was the most distinguished, if not indeed the ablest, chief executive this Commonwealth has ever known. He resigned the governorship, in 1850, in order to become President Fillmore's Attorney-General, which position he held for three years. In 1855 Crittenden was for the fourth time elected United States Senator from Kentucky. As the war between the States approached, Senator Crittenden, though a Southerner, chose the cause of the Union, lining up with the administration heart and soul. In the beginning he did his utmost to prevent the war, and, failing, he exerted his entire energies to aid Abraham Lincoln and the North to prosecute it. In 1860 the Senator urged his famous Compromise, providing for the reëstablishment of the old slave-line of 36' 30 N., and for the enforcement of the fugitive-slave laws, but it was never moulded into law. The last two years of his life were spent as a member of the lower House of Congress, where he continued his fight for the supremacy of the Constitution. Senator Crittenden died near Frankfort, Kentucky, July 26, 1863, thus surviving his greatest friend and fellow patriot, Henry Clay, more than eleven years. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life of John J. Crittenden_, by Mrs. Chapman Coleman (Philadelphia, 1871); _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, 1882). EULOGY UPON ASSOCIATE JUSTICE McKINLEY [From _The Life of John J. Crittenden_, edited by his daughter, Mrs. Chapman Coleman (Philadelphia, 1871)] At the opening of the court this morning, Mr. Crittenden, the Attorney-General of the United States, addressed the court as follows: "Since its adjournment yesterday, the members of the bar and officers of the court held a meeting and adopted resolutions expressive of their high sense of the public and private worth of the Hon. John McKinley, one of the justices of this court, and their deep regret at his death. By the same meeting I was requested to present those resolutions to the court, and to ask that they might be entered on its records, and I now rise to perform that honored task. "Besides the private grief which naturally attends it, the death of a member of this court, which is the head of the great, essential, and vital department of the government, must always be an event of public interest and importance. "I had the good fortune to be acquainted with Judge McKinley from my earliest manhood. In the relations of private life he was frank, hospitable, affectionate. In his manners he was simple and unaffected, and his character was uniformly marked with manliness, integrity, and honor. Elevation to the bench of the Supreme Court made no change in him. His honors were borne meekly, without ostentation or presumption. "He was a candid, impartial, and righteous judge. Shrinking from no responsibility, he was fearless in the performance of his duty, seeking only to do right, and fearing nothing but to do wrong. Death has now set her seal to his character, making it unchangeable forever; and I think it may be truly inscribed on his monument that as a private gentleman and as a public magistrate he was without fear and without reproach. "This occasion cannot but remind us of other afflicting losses which have recently befallen us. The present, indeed, has been a sad year for the profession of the law. In a few short months it has been bereaved of its brightest and greatest ornaments. Clay, Webster, and Sergeant have gone to their immortal rest in quick succession. We had scarcely returned from the grave of one of them till we were summoned to the funeral of another. Like bright stars they have sunk below the horizon, and have left the land in widespread gloom. This hall that knew them so well shall know them no more. Their wisdom has no utterance now, and the voice of their eloquence shall be heard here no more forever. "This hall itself seems as though it was sensible of its loss, and even these marble pillars seem to sympathize as they stand around us like so many majestic mourners. "But we will have consolation in the remembrance of these illustrious men. Their _names_ will remain to us and be like a light kindled in the sky to shine upon us and to guide our course. We may hope, too, that the memory of them and their great examples will create a virtuous emulation which may raise up men worthy to be their successors in the service of their country, its constitution, and its laws. "For this digression, and these allusions to Clay, Webster, and Sergeant, I hope the occasion may be considered as a sufficient excuse, and I will not trespass by another word, except only to move that these resolutions in relation to Judge McKinley, when they shall have been read by the clerk, may be entered on the records of this court." JOHN M. HARNEY John Milton Harney, the first of the Kentucky poets to win and retain a wide reputation, a man with the divine afflatus, whose whole body of song is slender but of real worth, was born near Georgetown, Delaware, March 9, 1789. He was the second son of Major Thomas Harney, of Revolutionary War fame, and the elder brother of General William S. Harney, a hero of Cerro Gordo. When John Milton Harney was but two years old, his family emigrated to Tennessee, and later removed to Louisiana. He studied medicine and settled at Bardstown, Kentucky. In 1814 Dr. Harney married a daughter of Judge John Rowan, the early Kentucky statesman; and her death four years later was such a shock to her husband that he was compelled to abandon his practice, and seek solace in travel and new scenes. Dr. Harney spent some time in England, and on his return to America he settled at Savannah, Georgia. He over-exerted himself at a disastrous fire in Savannah, which resulted in a violent fever and ended in breaking his health. He returned to Bardstown, Kentucky, became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and in that place he died, January 15, 1825, when but thirty-five years of age. At the age of twenty-three years, Dr. Harney wrote _Crystalina, a Fairy Tale_, in six cantos, but his extreme sensitiveness caused him to hold it in manuscript for four years, or until 1816, when it was issued anonymously at New York. This work was highly praised by Rufus W. Griswold, John Neal, and other well-known critics, but the unfavorable criticism far outweighed the favorable criticism, so the author held, and he published nothing more in book form; and he did all in his power to suppress the edition of _Crystalina_. William Davis Gallagher, poet and critic of a later time in the West, went over Dr. Harney's manuscripts and from them rescued his masterpiece, the exquisite _Echo and the Lover_. This Gallagher published in his _Western Literary Journal_ for 1837--the first form in which the public saw it. No Western poem has had a wider audience than the _Echo_. It has been parodied in Europe and America many times, and is the finest expression of Dr. Harney's genius. It is to be regretted that no comprehensive account of the poet's life and literary labors has come down to posterity. As a poet and as a man his merits were of the truest sort, but a handful of facts, a suppressed book, a lyric or so, are all that have been brought to the attention of the literary world. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892). ECHO AND THE LOVER [From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)] _Lover._ Echo! mysterious nymph, declare Of what you're made and what you are-- _Echo._ "Air!" _Lover._ 'Mid airy cliffs, and places high, Sweet Echo! listening, love, you lie-- _Echo._ "You lie!" _Lover._ You but resuscitate dead sounds-- Hark! how my voice revives, resounds! _Echo._ "Zounds!" _Lover._ I'll question you before I go-- Come, answer me more apropos! _Echo._ "Poh! poh!" _Lover._ Tell me, fair nymph, if e'er you saw So sweet a girl as Phoebe Shaw! _Echo._ "Pshaw!" _Lover._ Say, what will win that frisking coney Into the toils of matrimony! _Echo._ "Money!" _Lover._ Has Phoebe not a heavenly brow? Is it not white as pearl--as snow? _Echo._ "Ass, no!" _Lover._ Her eyes! Was ever such a pair? Are the stars brighter than they are? _Echo._ "They are!" _Lover._ Echo, you lie, but can't deceive me; Her eyes eclipse the stars, believe me-- _Echo._ "Leave me!" _Lover._ But come, you saucy, pert romancer, Who is as fair as Phoebe? Answer. _Echo._ "Ann, sir!" THE WHIPPOWIL [From the same] There is a strange, mysterious bird, Which few have seen, but all have heard: He sits upon a fallen tree, Through all the night, and thus sings he: Whippowil! Whippowil! Whippowil! Despising show, and empty noise, The gaudy fluttering thing he flies: And in the echoing vale by night Thus sings the pensive anchorite: Whippowil! Oh, had I but his voice and wings, I'd envy not a bird that sings; But gladly would I flit away, And join the wild nocturnal lay: Whippowil! The school-boy, tripping home in haste, Impatient of the night's repast, Would stop to hear my whistle shrill, And answer me with mimic skill: Whippowil! The rich man's scorn, the poor man's care, Folly in silk, and Wisdom bare, Virtue on foot, and Vice astride, No more should vex me while I cried: Whippowil! How blest!--Nor loneliness nor state, Nor fame, nor wealth, nor love, nor hate, Nor av'rice, nor ambition vain, Should e'er disturb my tranquil strain: Whippowil! Whippowil! Whippowil! SYLPHS BATHING [From _Crystalina_ (New York, 1816)] The shores with acclamations rung, As in the flood the playful damsels sprung: Upon their beauteous bodies, with delight, The billows leapt. Oh, 'twas a pleasant sight To see the waters dimple round, for joy, Climb their white necks, and on their bosoms toy: Like snowy swans they vex'd the sparkling tide, Till little rainbows danced on every side. Some swam, some floated, some on pearly feet Stood sidelong, smiling, exquisitely sweet. GEORGE ROBERTSON George Robertson, the most widely quoted Kentucky jurist, and an able writer, was born near Harrodsburg, Kentucky, November 18, 1790. He was educated in the arts and in law at Transylvania University, and entered upon the practice of his profession at Lancaster, Kentucky, in 1809. In 1816 Robertson was elected to Congress, where he remained for two terms. He drew up the bill for the establishment of Arkansaw territory; and he projected the system of cutting public lands into small lots, selling them to actual settlers for one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. He declined another term in the House, as well as the attorney-generalship of Kentucky, in order to devote his whole attention to the law. Robertson was elected against his desire to the Kentucky legislature, in 1822, and he was a member of that body for the next five years. This was the time of the struggle between the Old-Court and New-Court parties, which was one of the most bitter political fights ever seen in Kentucky. Robertson consistently and vigorously championed the cause of the Old-Court party, which finally won. That this disgusted him with political life in any dress, is shown by his subsequent declination of the governorship of Arkansaw, and the Columbian and Peruvian missions. In 1828 he was elected an associate justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and, in the following year, chief justice. This position was George Robertson's heart's desire--he hated politics with a never-dying hatred, the law and the bench being his earthly paradise. He was chief justice of Kentucky for fourteen years, when he resigned to return to the active practice of law. From 1834 to 1857 Judge Robertson was professor of law in Transylvania University at Lexington. He died at Lexington, May 16, 1874, generally regarded as the ablest jurist Kentucky has produced. He was also the author of four books: _Introductory Lecture to the Transylvania Law Class_ (Lexington); _Biographical Sketch of John Boyle_ (Frankfort, 1838); _Scrap-Book on Law and Politics, Men and Times_ (Lexington, 1855), his best known book; and his very interesting and well-written autobiography, entitled _An Outline of the Life of George Robertson, written by Himself_ (Lexington, 1876), to which his son contributed an introduction and appendix. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The chief authority for the facts of Judge Robertson's life is, of course, his autobiography; Samuel M. Wilson's study in _Great American Lawyers_ (Philadelphia, 1908). ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS ON THE SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY [From _Scrap Book on Law and Politics, Men and Times_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1855)] Yet we have hopes that are immortal--interests that are imperishable--principles that are indestructible. Encouraged by those hopes, stimulated by those interests, and sustained by and sustaining those principles, let us, come what may, be true to God, true to ourselves, and faithful to our children, our country, and mankind. And then, whenever or wherever it may be our doom to look, for the last time, on earth, we may die justly proud of the title of "Kentuckian," and, with our expiring breath, may cordially exclaim--Kentucky, as she was;--Kentucky, as she is;--Kentucky, as she will be;--Kentucky forever. EARLY STRUGGLES [From _An Outline of the Life of George Robertson, written by Himself_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1876)] Yet, thus juvenile, poor, and proud, I ventured not only on the rather hopeless prospects of professional life, but, on the 28th of November, 1809, when I was only ten days over nineteen years of age, I ventured on the far more momentous contingencies of marriage, and, linking my destinies with a wife only fifteen years and seven months old, we embarked without freight or pilotage, on the untried sea of early marriage. I had never made a cent, and had nothing but ordinary clothes, a horse, an old servant, a few books, and the humble talents with which God had blessed me. I borrowed thirteen dollars as an outfit, and out of that fund I paid for my license and handed to my groomsman, R. P. Letcher, five dollars for paying the parson, Randolph Hall, father of Rev. Nathan H. Hall. Some days afterwards Letcher rather slyly put into my hand a dollar, suggesting that he had saved that much for me by paying the preacher only four dollars. This looked to me as such minute parsimony as to excite my indignation, important as was only one dollar then to me. And I manifested that feeling in a manner both emphatic and censurious; to which Letcher replied that four dollars was more than was then customary, and that Mr. Hall, when he received it, expressed the warmest gratitude, and said that, old as he was, he had never received so large a fee for solemnizing the matrimonial rite! This reconciled me to the return of the dollar. My wife and myself lived with her mother until the 9th of September, 1810, when we set up for ourselves in a small buckeye house with only two rooms, built and first occupied by Judge [John] Boyle, and respecting which I may here suggest this remarkable coincidence of successive events:--That Boyle commenced housekeeping in that house, and, while he occupied it, was elected to Congress; that Samuel McKee commenced housekeeping in the same house, and succeeded Boyle in Congress; that I commenced housekeeping in the same house, and succeeded McKee in Congress; and that R. P. Letcher commenced housekeeping in the same house, and, after an interval of two years, succeeded me in Congress. I was unable to furnish it with a carpet, and our only furniture consisted of two beds, one table, one bureau, six split-bottomed chairs, and a small supply of table and kitchen furniture, which I bought with a small gold watch. I had bought a bag of flour, a bag of corn meal, a half barrel of salt, and two hams and two middlings of bacon; and these, together with the milk of a small cow given to my wife by her mother, and a few chickens and some butter, constituted our entire outfit of provisions. But all our supplies were stolen the night we commenced housekeeping. This was, at that time, a heavy blow. I had no money; and, though I had good credit, I resolved not to buy anything on credit. And that was one of the best resolutions I ever made. It stimulated my industry and economy, and soon secured to me peace and a comfortable sense of independence. In adhering to my privative, but conservative resolve, I often cut and carried on my shoulders wood from a neighboring forest. LITERARY FAME [From the same] The classical reader remembers that, when almost all the Greeks, captured with Nicias at Syracuse, had died in dungeons, a remnant of the survivors saved themselves by the recitation of beautiful extracts from Euripides. How potent was the shadowed genius of the immortal Athenian, when it alone melted the icy hearts that nothing else could touch, and broke the captive's chains, which justice, and prayers, and tears, had in vain tried to unloose! And hence "the glory of Euripides had all Greece for a monument." He too was elevated by the light of other minds. It is said that he acquired a sublime inspiration whenever he read Homer--whose Iliad and whose Odyssey--the one exhibiting the fatality of strife among leading men, the other portraying the efficacy of perseverance--have stamped his name on the roll of fame in letters of sunshine, that will never fade away. No memorial tells where Troy once stood--Delphi is now mute--the thunder of Olympus is hushed, and Apollo's lyre no longer echoes along the banks of the Peneus--but the fame of Homer still travels with the stars. SHADRACH PENN Shadrach Penn, one of the ablest of Kentucky journalists, was born at Frederick, Maryland, in 1790. His family settled near Georgetown, Kentucky, when he was a mere boy. Penn began his newspaper career at Georgetown when he was but nineteen years of age; and he subsequently served in the War of 1812. In 1818 Penn removed to Louisville and established _The Public Advertiser_, which was a weekly for the first few years of its history, then a semi-weekly, and, on April 4, 1826, a final change was made "and the first daily newspaper west of the Alleghanies was flung to the public." After the establishment of the _Kentucky Gazette_, this marked the second most epoch-making event in Kentucky journalism. Penn was an able editor, the very ablest in Kentucky, and he was having things his own way in the West, advocating Jacksonian Democracy. In 1828 President Jackson showed his appreciation of Penn's services by offering him a place in his cabinet, which he declined, but he did spend a winter at Washington as the President's warm friend and adviser. Then, _mirabile dictu!_ the Whigs brought George D. Prentice to Kentucky and, in 1830, he established the _Louisville Journal_, and began a most bitter fight upon Penn's paper. Penn fought back as best he could, but he was quite unequal for the contest. For nearly twelve years the warfare was waged without either editor asking quarter, and to the infinite amusement of the whole country. In 1841 Penn ran up the white flag and went to St. Louis to become editor of the _St. Louis Reporter_. Prentice bade him farewell in the best of temper, and when he died at St. Louis, on June 15, 1846, the old Whig's tribute to his memory was the finest one written. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Pioneer Press of Kentucky_, by W. H. Perrin (Louisville, 1888); _Memorial History of Louisville, Kentucky_, by J. Stoddard Johnston (Chicago, 1896). THE COMING OF GEORGE D. PRENTICE [From _The Public Advertiser_ (Louisville, September 10, 1830)] This gentleman and Mr. Buxton, of Cincinnati, have issued proposals for publishing a daily paper in Louisville, which is to be edited by Mr. Prentice. Willing that the gentleman shall be known by the people whose patronage he is seeking, we copy today from a Cincinnati paper his account of the late elections in Kentucky. The production may be viewed as a fair specimen of his "fine literature, his drollery, strong powers of sarcasm," and, above all, his "poetical capacity." The respect and attachment he displays toward Kentucky (to say nothing of the Jackson party), must be exquisitely gratifying to the respectable portion of Mr. Clay's friends in this city. To them we commend the letter of Mr. Prentice as an erudite, chaste, and veritable production, worthy of the "great editor" who is hereafter to figure as Mr. Clay's champion in the West. We may, moreover, congratulate them in consequence of the fair prospect before them; for with the aid of such an editor they cannot fail to effect miraculous revolutions or revulsions in the political world. The occupants of all our fish markets will be confirmed in their devotion to the opposition beyond redemption. WILLIAM O. BUTLER William Orlando Butler, one of General Lew Wallace's favorite poets, was born near Nicholasville, Kentucky, in 1791. He was the son of Percival Butler, a noted Revolutionary soldier. He was graduated from Transylvania University, Lexington, in 1812. Butler studied law for a short time, but the War of 1812 called him and he enlisted. At the River Raisin he was wounded and captured and carried through Canada to Fort Niagara, but he was later exchanged. Butler was with General Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, and his gallantry attracted the attention of the general, who placed him upon his staff. In 1817 Butler returned to the law, married, and settled in the little river town of Carrollton, Kentucky, on the Ohio, his home henceforth. In July, 1821, the first draft of his famous poem, _The Boatman's Horn_ (then called _The Boat Horn_), was published in _The Western Review_, a monthly magazine of Lexington, Kentucky. In describing his boyhood days at Covington, Indiana, General Lew Wallace very charmingly writes of his early love for the Wabash river, and for old Nebeker, the lonesome ferryman, who "welcomed me for my company. On the farther side, chained to a tree, he kept a long tin horn. A traveller, coming to the bank and finding us on the townward side, blew to get our attention ... when the voice of the big horn on the thither side called to us--How it startled me! What music there was in it! What haste I made to unship my oar!... And if since then I have been an ardent fisherman, believing with my friend Maurice Thompson that "Halcyon prophecies come to pass In the haunts of the bream and bass;" and if the song of Butler, the soldier-poet of Kentucky-- "Oh, boatman, wind that horn again! For never did the joyous air Upon its lambent bosom bear So wild, so soft, so sweet a strain"-- is still a favorite of mine, with power to stir my pulses and return me to a freak of childhood full of joyousness alloyed only with thought of my mother's fears, the shrewd reader will know at once how such tastes inured to me. And as swimming seems to have been one of my natural accomplishments, I must have acquired it during my days at the ferry." This is far and away the best background for Butler's poem that has been done, and with it before the reader the famous poem must mean more to him. The poem was subsequently published as the title-poem in a small collection of his verse, entitled _The Boatman's Horn and Other Poems_. From 1839 to 1843 Butler was a Kentucky Congressman; and in 1844 the unsuccessful candidate for governor of Kentucky. Upon his Mexican War record, General Butler was nominated by the Democratic party for vice-president of the United States with General Lewis Cass, of Michigan, as the head of the ticket, but they were defeated by Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams. In 1855 General Butler declined the governorship of the territory of Nebraska; and in 1861 he went to Washington as a member of the famous "Peace Congress." General Butler died at his home, Carrollton, Kentucky, August 6, 1880, in the ninetieth year of his age. Though famous as a soldier and politician, _The Boatman's Horn_ is the work that will keep his name green for many years; and several of his other poems are not to be utterly despised. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Biographical Sketch of Gen. William O. Butler_, by F. P. Blair, Senior (Washington, 1848), was reprinted in full in _The Kentucky Yeoman_ (Frankfort, June 15, 1848); _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); Lew Wallace's _Autobiography_ (New York, 1906). THE BOATMAN'S HORN [From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)] O, boatman! wind that horn again, For never did the list'ning air Upon its lambent bosom bear So wild, so soft, so sweet a strain! What though thy notes are sad and few, By every simple boatman blown, Yet is each pulse to nature true, And melody in every tone. How oft, in boyhood's joyous day, Unmindful of the lapsing hours, I've loitered on my homeward way By wild Ohio's bank of flowers; While some lone boatman from the deck Poured his soft numbers to the tide, As if to charm from storm and wreck The boat where all his fortunes ride! Delighted, Nature drank the sound, Enchanted, Echo bore it round In whispers soft and softer still, From hill to plain and plain to hill, Till e'en the thoughtless frolic boy, Elate with hope and wild with joy, Who gambolled by the river's side And sported with the fretting tide, Feels something new pervade his breast, Change his light steps, repress his jest, Bends o'er the flood his eager ear, To catch the sounds far off, yet dear-- Drinks the sweet draught, but knows not why The tear of rapture fills his eye. And can he now, to manhood grown, Tell why those notes, simple and lone, As on the ravished ear they fell, Bind every sense in magic spell? There is a tide of feeling given To all on earth, its fountains, heaven, Beginning with the dewy flower, Just ope'd in Flora's vernal bower, Rising creation's orders through, With louder murmur, brighter hue-- That tide is sympathy! its ebb and flow Give life its hue, its joy, and woe. Music, the master-spirit that can move Its waves to war, or lull them into love-- Can cheer the sinking sailor 'mid the wave, And bid the warrior on! nor fear the grave, Inspire the fainting pilgrim on the road, And elevate his soul to claim his God. Then, boatman, wind that horn again! Though much of sorrow mark its strain, Yet are its notes to sorrow dear; What though they wake fond memory's tear? Tears are sad memory's sacred feast, And rapture oft her chosen guest. HEW AINSLIE Hew Ainslie, the foremost Scottish-Kentucky poet, was born at Bargery Mains, Ayrshire, April 5, 1792. Ill-health cut short Ainslie's education at the Ayr Academy, but some years later he went up to Glasgow to study law. Law and Hew Ainslie were not congenial fellows, and he shortly embarked upon the art of landscape gardening. He was next a clerk in Edinburgh, and also amanuensis for Professor Dugald Stewart. "Gradually the clouds of [Ainslie's] tobacco smoke began to curl into seven letters which looked like America." He was thirty years of age when he arrived at New York. He spent his first years in New York and Indiana as a farmer, but he soon relinquished this work and went, in 1829, to Louisville, Kentucky, where, three years later, an Ohio river flood swept his property away. And two years after this disastrous flood, fire destroyed his property in Indiana. Undismayed by misfortune, Ainslie became a contractor and supervised the erection of many large business structures in Louisville and other cities. During all these years he was assiduously courting the Muse, and making a great reputation for himself as a poet. Ainslie's first book, _A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns_ (Deptford, 1822), is the English edition of his charming lyrics; and his _Scottish Songs, Ballads, and Poems_ (New York, 1855), is the only American edition of his work. In 1864, forty-two years after his departure, Ainslie revisited the land of his birth, where he was hailed as one of Scotland's finest singers since Robert Burns. Kentucky was in the poet's blood, however, and a year later he returned to his home at Louisville. His American friends were not to be outdone by his home people, and they arranged a great home-coming for him. In 1871, when the Scots of Louisville assembled to celebrate the birthday of Burns, Ainslie, the toastmaster, arose and smilingly confessed to having once kissed "Bonnie Jean," Burns's widow. He died at Louisville, March 11, 1878. A comprehensive Scottish edition of his _A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, and Poems_, was issued in 1892. _The Ingle Side_, a little song of sixteen lines, is Ainslie's masterpiece; but it was as a poet of the sea that he won his great reputation. "As Lloyd Mifflin is America's greatest sonneteer, so Hew Ainslie, the adopted Kentuckian, may perhaps be ranked as America's most ardent singer of the sea." BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i); _Hew Ainslie_, by A. S. Mackenzie (Library of Southern Literature, Atlanta, Georgia, 1909, v. i). THE BOUROCKS O' BARGENY [From _A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, and Poems_ (Paisley, Scotland, 1892)] I left ye, Jeanie, blooming fair, 'Mang the bourocks o' Bargeny; [bowers] I've found ye on the banks o' Ayr, But sair ye're altered, Jeanie. I left ye 'mang the woods sae green, In rustic weed befitting; I've found ye buskit like a queen, [attired] In painted chaumbers sitting. [chambers] I left ye like the wanton lamb That plays 'mang Hadyed's heather; I've found ye noo a sober dame, A wife and eke a mither. Ye're fairer, statelier, I can see, Ye're wiser, nae dou't, Jeanie; But ah! I'd rather met wi' thee 'Mang the bourocks o' Bargeny. THE HAUGHS O' AULD KENTUCK [From the same] Welcome, Edie, owre the sea, Welcome to this lan' an' me, Welcome from the warl' whaur we Hae whistled owre the lave o't. [rest] Come, gie your banes anither hitch, Up Hudson's stream, thro' Clinton's ditch, An' see our watlin meadows rich [cane-brake] Wi' corn an' a' the lave o't. [all the rest of it] We've hizzie here baith swank and sweet [maidens agile] An' birkies here that can stan' a heat [young men] O' barley bree, or aqua vit [brew; water of life] Syne whistle owre the lave o't. Gude kens, I want nae better luck [Goodness knows] Than just to see ye, like a buck, Spanking the haughs o' auld Kentuck, [speeding over the meadows] An' whistling owre the lave o't. THE INGLE SIDE [From the same] It's rare to see the morning bleeze, [blaze] Like a bonfire frae the sea; It's fair to see the burnie kiss [streamlet] The lip o' the flowery lea; An' fine it is on green hillside, When hums the hinny bee; But rarer, fairer, finer far, Is the ingle side to me. Glens may be gilt wi' gowans rare [daisies] The birds may fill the tree, An' haughs hae a' the scented ware [river meadows] That simmer's growth can gie; But the canty hearth where cronies meet, [cheerful] An' the darling o' our e'e-- That makes to us a warl' complete, Oh! the ingle side for me. THE HINT O' HAIRST [From the same] It's dowie in the hint o' hairst, [dreary; end; harvest] At the wa'-gang o' the swallow, [away-going] When the wind blows cauld an' the burns grow bauld, [bold] An' the wuds are hingin' yellow; But oh! it's dowier far to see The deid-set o' a shining e'e That darkens the weary warld on thee. There was muckle love atween us twa-- Oh! twa could ne'er been fonder; An' the thing on yird was never made That could hae gart us sunder. But the way of Heaven's aboon a' ken, [above all knowing] And we maun bear what it likes to sen'-- [must] It's comfort, though, to weary men, That the warst o' this warld's waes maun en'. There's mony things that come and gae, Just kent and syne forgotten; The flow'rs that busk a bonnie brae [deck; slope] Gin anither year lie rotten. But the last look o' that lovin' e'e, An' the dying grip she gied to me, They're settled like eternitie-- O Mary! that I were with thee. JAMES G. BIRNEY James Gillespie Birney, leader of the Conservative Abolitionists, opposed to the radicalism of William Lloyd Garrison and all his ilk, yet as earnest and sincere in his hatred of slavery, was born at Danville, Kentucky, February 4, 1792. He was at Transylvania University for a short time, then proceeded to Princeton, from which institution he was graduated in 1810. In 1814 he became a lawyer in his native town of Danville. In 1816 Birney was in the Kentucky legislature; but two years later he removed to Alabama, settling upon a plantation near Huntsville. The slavery question was appealing to him more and more, and he finally became an agent for the American Colonization Society. In the fall of 1833 Birney returned to Kentucky, and went to Danville, where he freed his own slaves, and organized the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society. On January 1, 1836, the first issue of his anti-slavery sheet, _The Philanthropist_, appeared from his Cincinnati office. This soon became the Bible of the Conservative Abolitionists, who opposed the drastic methods of Garrison and his followers. In his speeches Birney denounced all violence and fanaticism in the handling of the slavery problem, though he himself received much violence at the hands of mobs and almost insane partisans. His strong addresses through the North won him the secretaryship of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837. In this capacity he was soon recognized as the real leader of the "Constitutional Abolitionists," who said they stood upon the Constitution, fought against secession, and desired to wipe slavery from the face of the American continent with decency and in order. In 1840 and again in 1844 Birney was the candidate of the Liberty party for president of the United States. In the second campaign he multiplied his very small vote received in the first race by nine. He was thrown from his horse, in 1845, and the final twelve years of his life were passed as an invalid. Birney died at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, November 25, 1857. Besides numerous contributions to the press, his principal writings are _Letter on Colonization_ (1834); _Addresses and Speeches_ (1835); _American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery_ (1840); _Speeches in England_(1840); and _An Examination of the Decision of the_ _United States Supreme Court in the Case of Strader et al. v. Graham_ (1850). BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _James G. Birney and His Times_, by his son, William Birney (New York, 1890). THE NO-GOVERNMENT DOCTRINES [From _A Letter on the Political Obligations of Abolitionists_ (Boston, 1839)] Within the last twelve or eighteen months, it is believed--after efforts, some successful, some not, had been begun to affect the elections--and whilst the most indefatigable exertions were being made by many of our influential, intelligent and liberal friends to convince the great body of the abolitionists of the necessity--the indispensable necessity--of breaking away from their old "_parties_," and uniting together in the use of the elective franchise for the advancement of the cause of human freedom in which we were engaged;--at this very time, and mainly, too, in that part of the country where _political action_ had been most successful, and whence, from its promise of soon being wholly triumphant, great encouragement was derived by abolitionists everywhere, a sect has arisen in our midst, whose members regard it as of religious obligation, in no case, _to exercise the elective franchise_. This persuasion is part and parcel of the tenet which it is believed they have embraced--that as Christians have the precepts of the Gospel to direct, and the Spirit of God to guide them, all human governments, as necessarily including the idea of _force to secure obedience_, are not only superfluous, but unlawful encroachments on the Divine government, as ascertained from the sources above mentioned. Therefore, they refuse to do anything voluntarily, by which they would be considered as acknowledging the lawful existence of human governments. Denying to civil governments the right to use force, they easily deduce that family governments have no such right. Thus they would withhold from parents any power of personal chastisement or restraint for the correction of their children. They carry out to the full extent the "non-resistance" theory. To the first ruffian who would demand our purse, or oust us from our houses, they are to be unconditionally surrendered, unless _moral suasion_ be found sufficient to induce him to decline from his purpose. Our wives, our daughters, our sisters--our mothers we are to see set upon by the most brutal, without any effort on our part, except argument, to defend them--and even they themselves are forbidden to use in defense of their purity such powers as God has endowed them with for its protection, if resistance should be attended with any injury or destruction to the assailant. In short, the "No-Government" doctrines, as they are believed now to be embraced, seem to strike at the root of the social structure; and tend--so far as I am able to judge of their tendency--to throw society into entire confusion, and to renew, under the sanction of religion, scenes of anarchy and license that have generally heretofore been the offspring of the rankest infidelity and irreligion. It is but justice to say--judging from the moral deportment of the adherents of the "No-Government" scheme--that so far from admitting, what I have supposed to be, its legitimate consequences, they would wholly deny and repudiate them. These Sectaries have not as yet separated themselves from the American [Anti-Slavery] society. Far from it. They insist that their views are altogether harmonious with what is required for membership by the constitution.... But is this really so? Is the difference between those who seek to abolish any and every government of human institution, and those who prefer _any_ government to a state of things in which every one may do what seemeth good in his own eyes--is the difference between them, I say, so small that they can act harmoniously under the same organization? When, in obedience to the principles of the society, I go to the polls and there call on my neighbors to unite with me in electing to Congress men who are in favor of Human Rights, I am met by a No-Government abolitionist inculcating on them the doctrine that Congress has _no rightful authority_ to act at all in the premises--how can we proceed together? When I am animating my fellow-citizens to aid men in infusing into the government salutary influences which shall put an end to all oppression--my No-Government brother cries out at the top of his lungs, _all_ governments are of the Devil(!) where is our harmony! Our efficiency? We are in the condition of the two physicians called in to the same patient--one of whom should be intent on applying the proper remedies for expelling the disease from the body and thus restoring and purifying its functions; the other equally intent on utterly destroying body, members, functions and all. Could they be agreed, and could they walk together? It seems to me not. And simply because their aim, their objects are radically and essentially different. So with the No-Government and the Pro-Government abolitionists. One party is for sustaining and purifying governments, and bringing them to a perfect conformity with the principles of the Divine government--the other for destroying _all_ government. THOMAS CORWIN Thomas Corwin, witty, delightful "Tom" Corwin, was born near Paris, Kentucky, July 29, 1794. Before he was five years old, his father had taken him into the wilds of Ohio, the Lebanon of today. "Tom" Corwin was admitted to the bar, in 1818, after a slender education and a brief reading of the law. His wit and eloquence made his reputation rapidly and, in 1830, he found himself in the lower House of Congress. The whole country laughed at his inimitable speeches; and that he had a strong hold on the Ohio Whigs is certain as they returned him to the House for ten years. In 1840 Corwin was elected governor of Ohio, after a brilliant and successful state-wide campaign. He was incomparable on the stump, and he rode into the gubernatorial chair on an overwhelming Whig tide. Two years later, however, his former opponent, Wilson Shannon, defeated him for reëlection. In 1844 Corwin was sent to the United States Senate, in which body he renewed his House reputation as an orator. On the eve of the Mexican War, he made his memorable anti-war speech, which practically ruined his future political career, as the country desired to fight the hated men on the border. But a more bravely beautiful speech was never made. President Fillmore chose Corwin his Secretary of the Treasury, in 1850. At the expiration of Fillmore's term, Corwin returned to the practice of law at Lebanon, Ohio. In 1858 he reëntered public life, serving a term in Congress; and, in 1861, President Lincoln appointed him minister to Mexico. Corwin remained in Mexico until the coming of Maximilian, when he returned to Washington to practice law. In the capital of the country he died, December 18, 1865. "Tom" Corwin was one of the most captivating of American orators, and most lovable of men. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life and Speeches of Thomas Corwin_, by Isaac Strohn (Dayton, Ohio, 1859); _The Library of Oratory_ (New York, 1902, v. vi). THE MEXICAN WAR [From _Life and Speeches of Thomas Corwin_, by Isaac Strohn (Dayton, Ohio, 1859)] Mr. President, this uneasy desire to augment our territory has depraved the moral sense and blunted the otherwise keen sagacity of our people. What has been the fate of all nations who have acted upon the idea that they must advance! Our young orators cherish this notion with a fervid but fatally mistaken zeal. They call it by the mysterious name of "destiny." "Our destiny," they say, is "onward," and hence they argue, with ready sophistry, the propriety of seizing upon any territory and any people that may lie in the way of our "fated" advance. Recently these progressives have grown classical; some assiduous student of antiquities has helped them to a patron saint. They have wandered back into the desolated Pantheon, and there, among the polytheistic relics of that "pale mother of dead empires," they have found a god whom these Romans, centuries gone by, baptized "Terminus." Sir, I have heard much and read somewhat of this gentleman Terminus. Alexander, of whom I have spoken, was a devotee of this divinity. We have seen the end of him and his empire. It was said to be an attribute of this god that he must always advance and never recede. So both republican and imperial Rome believed. It was, as they say, their destiny. And for a while it did seem to be even so. Roman Terminus did advance. Under the eagles of Rome he was carried from his home on the Tiber to the farthest East on the one hand, and to the far West, among the then barbarous tribes of western Europe, on the other. But at length the time came when retributive justice had become "a destiny." The despised Gaul calls out the contemned Goth, and Attila, with his Huns answers back the battle-shout to both. The "blue-eyed nations of the North," in succession or united, pour forth their countless hosts of warriors upon Rome and Rome's always-advancing god Terminus. And now the battle-axe of the barbarian strikes down the conquering eagle of Rome. Terminus at last recedes, slowly at first, but finally he is driven to Rome, and from Rome to Byzantium. Whoever would know the further fate of this Roman deity, so recently taken under the patronage of American democracy, may find ample gratification of his curiosity in the luminous pages of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_. Such will find that Rome thought as you now think, that it was her destiny to conquer provinces and nations, and no doubt she sometimes said, as you say, "I will conquer a peace," and where now is she, the mistress of the world? The spider weaves his web in her palaces, the owl sings his watch-song in her towers. Teutonic power now lords it over the servile remnant, the miserable memento of old and once omnipotent Rome. Sad, very sad, are the lessons which time has written for us. Through and in them all I see nothing but the inflexible execution of that old law which ordains as eternal that cardinal rule, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods, nor anything which is his." Since I have lately heard so much about the dismemberment of Mexico I have looked back to see how, in the course of events, which some call "Providence," it has fared with other nations who engaged in this work of dismemberment. I see that in the latter half of the eighteenth century three powerful nations, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, united in the dismemberment of Poland. They said, too, as you say, "It is our destiny." They "wanted room." Doubtless each of these thought, with his share of Poland, his power was too strong ever to fear invasion, or even insult. One had his California, another his New Mexico, and the third his Vera Cruz. Did they remain untouched and incapable of harm? Alas! no--far, very far, from it. Retributive justice must fulfill its destiny, too. HENRY B. BASCOM Henry Bidleman Bascom, the distinguished Methodist preacher and orator, was born at Hancock, New York, May 27, 1796. He received a scanty education, and when but eighteen years of age he was licensed to preach by the Ohio conference of the Methodist church. He was a circuit-rider, traveling more than four hundred miles upon horseback his first year in the work, and receiving the princely salary of $12.10 for his year's services. Bascom was too florid for the Ohio brethren, and they caused him to be transferred to Tennessee and Kentucky circuits. In this work he won a wide reputation as a pulpit orator. In 1823 Henry Clay had Bascom appointed chaplain of the House of Representatives, but his long sermons did not please the members, and he was not a great success in Washington. Bascom was elected as the first president of Madison College, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1827, but two years later he became an agent for the American Colonization Society. From 1831 to 1841 he was professor of moral science and belles-lettres in Augusta College, Augusta, Kentucky, the first Methodist college in the world. The Methodist church having taken over Transylvania University, at Lexington, Dr. Bascom was elected president of that institution in 1842. He revived the ancient seat of learning to a wonderful degree, becoming another Horace Holley, but the rebirth proved ephemeral. In 1844 President Bascom protested against the action of the General Conference of the Methodist church concerning slavery, and, in the Louisville conference of 1845, he took a most prominent part, winning for himself the title of "father of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South." Dr. Bascom was editor of the _Southern Methodist Review_ for several years; and in 1848 he resigned the presidency of Transylvania University, only to be elected a bishop in the branch of the Methodist church he had helped to establish. He was ordained as bishop in May, 1850, and almost immediately set out for Missouri, where he held his first and only conference. On his return to Kentucky he was in very poor health; and he died at Louisville, September 8, 1850. Bishop Bascom was the greatest Methodist preacher Kentucky can claim; and he was also an able writer. His works include _Sermons from the Pulpit_; _Lectures on Infidelity_; _Lectures and Essays on Moral and Mental Science_; and _Methodism and Slavery_. In 1910 a portrait in oils of Bishop Bascom was painted by Paul Sawyier, the Kentucky artist, for Transylvania University. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life of Henry Bidleman Bascom, D.D., LL.D._, by M. M. Henkle (Nashville, Tennessee, 1856); _The Transylvanian_ (Lexington, Kentucky, June, 1910). A CLERGYMAN'S VIEW OF NIAGARA [From _The Life of Henry Bidleman Bascom, D. D., LL. D._, by Rev. M. M. Henkle (Nashville, Tennessee, 1856)] I have seen, surveyed, and communed with the whole!--and awed and bewildered, as if enchanted before the revealment of a mystery, I attempt to write. You ask me, in your last, for some detailed, veritable account of the Falls, and I should be glad to gratify you; but how shall I essay to paint a scene that so utterly baffles all conception, and renders worse than fruitless every attempt at description? In five minutes after my arrival, on the evening of the fifth, I descended the winding-path from the "Pavillion," on the Canadian side, and, for the first time in my life, saw this unequaled cascade from "Table Rock;" the whole indescribable scene, in bold outline, bursting on my view. I had heard and read much, and imagined more of what was before me. I was perfectly familiar with the often-told, the far-traveled story of what I saw; but the overpowering _reality_ on which I was gazing, motionless as the rock on which I stood, deprived me of recollection, annihilated all curiosity; and with emotions of sublimity till now unfelt, and all unearthly, the involuntary exclamation escaped me, "_God of Grandeur! what a scene!_" But the majesty of the sight, and the interest of the moment, how depict them? The huge amplitude of water, tumbling in foam above, and dashing on, arched and pillared as it glides, until it reaches the precipice of the _chute_, and then, in one vast column, bounding with maddening roar and rush, into the depths beneath, presents a spectacle so unutterably appalling, that language falters; words are no longer signs, and I despair giving you any idea of what I saw and felt. Yet this is not all. The eye and mind necessarily take in other objects, as parts of the grand panorama, forests, cliffs, and islands; banks, foam, and spray; wood, rock, and precipice; dimmed with the rising fog and mist, and obscurely gilded by the softening tints of the rainbow. These all belong to the picture; and the effect of the whole is immeasurably heightened by the noise of the cataract, now reminding you of the reverberations of the heavens in a tempest, and then of the eternal roar of ocean, when angered by the winds! The concave bed of rock, from which the water falls some two hundred feet into the almost boundless reservoir beneath, is the section of a circle, which, at first sight, from "Table Rock," presents something like the geometrical curve of the rainbow; and the wonders of the grand "crescent," thus advantageously thrown upon the eye in combination, and the appropriate sensations and conceptions heightened by the crash and boom of the waters, render the sight more surpassingly sublime, than anything I have ever looked upon, or conceived of. As it regards my thoughts and feelings at the time, I can help you to no conception of their character. Overwhelming astonishment was the only bond between thought and thought; and wild, vague, and boundless were the associations of the hour! Before me, the strength and fullness of the congregated "lakes of the north," were enthroned and concentrated within a circumference embraced by a single glance of the eye! Here I saw, rolling and dashing, at the rate of _twenty-five hundred millions of tons per day_, nearly one half of all the fresh water upon the surface of the globe! On the American side, I beheld a vast deluge, nine hundred feet in breadth, with a fall of one hundred and eighty or ninety, met, fifty feet above the level of the gulf, by a huge projection of rock, which seems to break the descent and continuity of the flood, only to increase its fierce and overwhelming bound. And turning to the "crescent," I saw the mingled rush of foam and tide, dashing with fearful strife and desperate emulation--four hundred yards of the sheet rough and sparry, and the remaining three hundred a deep sealike mass of living green--rolling and heaving like a sheet of emerald. Even imagination failed me, and I could think of nothing but ocean let loose from his bed, and seeking a deeper gulf below! The fury of the water, at the termination of its fall, combined with the columned strength of the cataract, and the deafening thunder of the flood, are at once inconceivable and indescribable. No imagination, however creative, can correspond with the grandeur of the reality. I have already mentioned, and it is important that you keep it in view, the ledge of rock, the verge of the cataract, rising like a wall of equal height, and extending in semicircular form across the whole bed of the river, a distance of more than two thousand feet; and the impetuous flood, conforming to this arrangement, in making its plunge, with mountain weight, into the great horseshoe basin beneath, exhibits a spectacle of the sublime, in geographical scenery, without, perhaps, a parallel in nature. As I leaned from "Table Rock," and cast my eye downward upon the billowy turbulence of the angry depth, where the waters were tossing and whirling, coiling and springing, with the energy of an earthquake, and a rapidity that almost mocked my vision, I found the scene sufficient to appal a sterner spirit than mine; and I was glad to turn away and relieve my mind by a sight of the surrounding scenery; bays, islands, shores, and forests, everywhere receding in due perspective. The rainbows of the "crescent" and American side, which are only visible from the western bank of the Niagara, and in the afternoon, seem to diminish somewhat from the awfulness of the scene, and to give it an aspect of rich and mellow grandeur, not unlike the bow of promise, throwing its assuring radiance over the retiring waters of the deluge. JAMES T. MOREHEAD James Turner Morehead, Kentucky's most scholarly governor, was born near Shepherdsville, Kentucky, May 24, 1797. He was prepared for Transylvania University, Lexington, and there he studied from 1813 to 1815. He studied law under John J. Crittenden and, in 1818, entered upon the practice at Bowling Green, Kentucky. Ten years later Morehead was in the Kentucky legislature, and he was returned for several sessions. In 1832 he was a delegate to the Baltimore convention which nominated Henry Clay for the presidency; and while in Baltimore he himself was nominated for lieutenant-governor of Kentucky, with John Breathitt for governor. They were elected in August, 1832, but the Governor died on February 21, 1834, and Morehead succeeded to his office on the following day. He served until September, 1836. Upon the expiration of his term, Governor Morehead resumed the practice of law at Frankfort. He was elected United States Senator from Kentucky, in 1841, and he served until 1847. Senator Morehead was an attractive public speaker, and when it was known in Washington that he was to make a speech the galleries were usually well filled. After the expiration of his term, he practiced law at Covington, Kentucky. Senator Morehead had the most extensive collection of books and manuscripts upon the history of Kentucky and the West of any man of his day and generation. After his death, which occurred at Covington, Kentucky, December 28, 1854, his library was purchased by the Young Men's Mercantile Library Association of Cincinnati. Morehead's _Address in Commemoration of the First Settlement of Kentucky, at Boonesborough_ (Frankfort, 1840, 181 pp.), rescued and preserved numerous documents of great historical importance. In the preparation of his great _History of the United States_, George Bancroft is said to have relied upon this famous address of Morehead for much of his information concerning the early history of the West. Morehead also published _Practice and Proceedings at Law in Kentucky_ (1846). The fine face of this scholar and statesman is one of Matthew Harris Jouett's most luminous canvasses.[7] BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iv); _National Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1906, v. xiii). JOHN FINLEY [From _An Address in Commemoration of the First Settlement of Kentucky_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, 1840)] The first successful attempt to explore the Kentucky country was made by John Finley, a backwoodsman of North Carolina, in 1767. He was attended by a few companions, as adventurous as himself, whose names have escaped the notice of history. They were evidently a party of hunters, and were prompted to the bold and hazardous undertaking, for the purpose of indulging in their favorite pursuits. Of Finley and his comrades, and of the course and extent of their journey, little is now known. That they were of the pure blood, and endowed with the genuine qualities, of the pioneers, is manifestly undeniable. That they passed over the Cumberland, and through the intermediate country to the Kentucky river, and penetrated the beautiful valley of the Elkhorn, there are no sufficient reasons to doubt. It is enough, however, to embalm their memory in our hearts, and to connect their names with the imperishable memorials of our early history, that they were the first adventurers that plunged into the dark and enchanted wilderness of Kentucky--that of all their contemporaries they saw her first--and saw her in the pride of her virgin beauty--at the dawn of summer--in the fullness of her vegetation--her soil, instinct with fertility, covered with the most luxuriant verdure--the air perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and her tall forests looming in all their primeval magnificence. How long Finley lived, or where he died, the silence of history does not enable us to know. That his remains are now mingled with the soil that he discovered, there is some reason to hope, for he conducted Boone to Kentucky in 1769--and there the curtain drops upon him forever. It is fit it should be raised. It is fit that justice, late and tardy that it be, should be done to the memory of the first of the pioneers. And what can be more appropriate, than that the first movement should be made for the performance of such a duty, on the day of the commemoration of the discovery and settlement of the Commonwealth? FOOTNOTE: [7] Governor Morehead's widow, Mrs. L. M. Morehead, who died several years ago, published a slender volume of verse, _Christmas Is Coming and Other Poems for the "House Mother" and her Darlings_ (Philadelphia, 1871). LEWIS COLLINS Lewis Collins, the Kentucky historian, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, on Christmas Day, 1797. When a boy he entered the printing office of Joel R. Lyle, editor of _The Paris Citizen_, where he worked for more than a year as a printer. He removed to Mason county, Kentucky, to become associate editor of the _Washington Union_. On November 1, 1820, Lewis Collins purchased the _Maysville Eagle_, which had been established six years prior to his purchase, and he made it one of the best country newspapers ever published in Kentucky. In 1823 he was married to a sister of Benjamin O. Peers, afterwards president of Transylvania University. Collins was editor of the _Eagle_ for twenty-seven years, when he retired in order to give his entire attention to his _Historical Sketches of Kentucky_ (Maysville, 1847). This was the first illustrated history of Kentucky, and easily the most comprehensive that had appeared. The histories of Marshall and Butler began at the beginning, but both concluded with the year of 1812, while Collins brought his work down to 1844. His was a mine of historic lore, arranged in departments, and not altogether readable as a continuous narrative. It was the foundation upon which his son, Richard H. Collins, was later to build the most magnificent state history ever published. Lewis Collins was presiding judge of the Mason county court from 1851 to 1854. He was a just judge, a painstaking chronicler of his people's past, and a fine type of Christian citizen. Judge Collins died at Lexington, Kentucky, January 29, 1870. The Kentucky legislature passed an appropriate resolution in which his life was commended and his death deplored. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by Z. F. Smith (Louisville, Kentucky, 1892); _Kentucky in the Nation's History_, by R. M. McElroy (New York, 1909). PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION [From _Historical Sketches of Kentucky_ (Maysville and Cincinnati, 1847)] The late H. P. Peers, of the city of Maysville, laid the foundation for the work which is now presented to the reading community. Mr. Peers designed it to be simply a small _Gazetteer_ of the State; and had collected, and partially arranged for publication, the major part of the materials, comprising a description of the towns and counties. Upon his decease, the materials passed into the hands of the Author, who determined to remodel them, and make such additions as would give permanency and increased value to the work. He has devoted much labor to this object; but circumstances having rendered its publication necessary at an earlier day than was contemplated, some errors may have escaped, which more time, and a fuller investigation, would have enabled him to detect. Serious obstacles have been encountered in the preparation of the Biographical Sketches. Many of those which appear in the work, were prepared from the personal recollections of the Author; while others have been omitted because he did not know to whom he could apply for them, or having applied, and in some instances repeatedly, failed in procuring them. This is his apology for the non-appearance of many names in that department which are entitled to a distinguished place in the annals of Kentucky. In the preparation of the work, one design of the Author has been to preserve, in a durable form, those rich fragments of local and personal history, many of which exist, at present, only in the ephemeral form of oral tradition, or are treasured up among the recollections of the aged actors in the stirring scenes, the memory of which is thus perpetuated. These venerable witnesses from a former age, are rapidly passing away from our midst, and with them will be buried the knowledge of much that is most interesting in the primitive history of the commonwealth. It is from sources such as we have mentioned, that the materials for the future historian are to be drawn; and, like the scattered leaves of the Sybil, these frail mementos of the past should be gathered up and preserved with religious veneration. If the Author shall have succeeded, in thus redeeming from oblivion any considerable or important portion of the early history of the State, his design will be fully accomplished, and his labor amply rewarded. Of all the members of this great republican confederacy, there is none whose history is more rich in the variety, quality, and interest of its materials. The poet, the warrior, and the statesman, can each find subjects, the contemplation of which will instruct him in his art; and to the general reader, it would, perhaps, be impossible to present a field of more varied and attractive interest. JULIA A. TEVIS Mrs. Julia Ann (Hieronymous) Tevis, author of a delightful autobiography, was born near Winchester, Kentucky, December 5, 1799. When but seven years old her parents removed to Virginia, settling at Winchester, and at the female academy of the town her education was begun. In 1813 Miss Hieronymous's family removed to Georgetown, D. C., where her education was continued under private teachers--"a considerable portion of my time was devoted to music, drawing, and French, with various kinds of embroidery." Two years later she was placed in the finishing school of an English woman in Washington where French and music continued to be her major subjects. Miss Hieronymous completed her training at the school of Mrs. Stone in Washington when nineteen years of age, and returned to her home to read and study. She spent many hours at the Capital meeting and hearing most of the famous men of her time. At the age of twenty years she became a school-ma'am at Wytheville, Virginia, and the following sixty years of her life were devoted to teaching. She later taught at Abingdon, Virginia, where she united with the Methodist church, and where she was married on March 9, 1824, to Rev. John Tevis (1792-1861), a Kentucky Methodist preacher. Mrs. Tevis desired to continue teaching, and upon her removal to her husband's home at Shelbyville, Kentucky, she opened Science Hill Academy. This famous old institution for the instruction of young women--founded March 25, 1825, and the second Protestant female academy established in the Mississippi Valley--has continued without interruption until the present time. The remaining years of the founder's life were filled with the school, her girls, her children, her cares and perplexities. In 1875 the semi-centennial of the founding of Science Hill was celebrated in a fitting manner. Some time later Mrs. Tevis closed the manuscripts of her autobiography, entitled _Sixty Years in a School-Room_ (Cincinnati, 1878), a large work of nearly five hundred pages, in which the details of her splendid service are ably set forth. Mrs. Tevis died at Shelbyville, Kentucky, April 21, 1880. Her pupils erected a fitting monument to her memory. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The chief authority for the facts of Mrs. Tevis's life is, of course, her autobiography; Annual Catalogues of Science Hill. THE MAY QUEEN [From _Sixty Years in a School-Room_ (Cincinnati, 1878)] For many years we kept up the custom of crowning a "Rose Queen" in May, and enjoying a holiday in the woods. Happily for the girls, I greeted the return of the festival day with a gladness almost equal to theirs, for I retained enough of the freshness of youth in my heart to enable me to participate with zest in the joys of childhood. "Once upon a time," after a long severe Winter, followed by a Spring of unusual beauty, it was determined to celebrate the day with great rejoicings. The girls were wild with delight at the prospect of a whole day's release from slates, books, and blackboards--a charming episode in the drudgery of their everyday life. Ah, happy children! to whom every glimpse of nature is beautiful, and every blade of grass a marvel! Give them ever so small a bit of green meadow checkered with sunshine and shade upon which to revel among buttercups and daisies, and "little they'll reck" how the world goes on. There was but little opportunity for canvassing or intrigue in the election of Queen. Fanny Henning was chosen by acclamation as best fitted to grace the regal authority. Fanny possessed a mind and a character as transparent as a clear brook. Her ingenuous face, her self-forgetting and amiable bearing towards her companions made her the loved and cherished of them all. She also held a distinguished place in the estimation of her teachers for superior excellence, dutiful affection, and modest deportment. Thus it was universally conceded that "Fair-handed Spring" might well resign to Fanny her sovereignty for one day over the brilliant treasures of garden, glade, and forest, awakened into life and brightened into beauty by her magic wand. The rosy hours followed each other in quick succession until within a few days of the anticipated time, when lo! the "queen elect" broke out with measles. The whole school was filled with dismay, bitter tears of disappointment were shed by some; others predicted that she would be well enough to go through the ceremony. Fanny, uniting in their hopeful aspirations, prepared her coronation speech and rehearsed it to perfection, for, though confined to her room, she was not really ill. On the eve of the appointed day, however, the doctor pronounced her too feeble to endure the fatigue. What was to be done? The trophies of many loyal hearts were ready to be laid at the feet of the queen. Spirit hands seemed dispensing blessings, and guardian angels extending their wings over these healthful, happy girls as they diligently wrought sparkling wreaths and arranged beautiful bouquets. The banners were prepared, the white dresses were trimmed with evergreen. The Seasons, the maids of honor, and all the officials were in waiting, but "_Hamlet_" could not be left out of the play. One modest little girl, after listening in silence to the suggestions of the others, raised her eyes to my face and said hesitatingly: "Can't Emma Maxwell be queen in Fanny's place?" "Oh, no!" said another; "she could not possibly learn the speech in time." "No, indeed!" exclaimed several voices at once, "that would be impossible; but she might read it." "Yes, yes! let her read it; the queen's speeches are read in Parliament!" "Will you accept the proposition?" said I, turning to Emma. "I think I can learn it," she replied, "and will try if you wish it." The coronation was to take place the next morning at ten o'clock. A previous rehearsal would be impossible; but what Emma proudly determined to do was generously accomplished. The evening star looked out bright and clear in the blue deep, thrilling the hearts of these young girls with the prospect of a pleasant morrow. Most of them were stirring before sunrise. "Is it clear?" "Are we going?" And from every room issued the sound of cheerful voices; and then such shouts, such hurrying and bathing and dressing as was seldom known before. Ten o'clock came, and the yard, where the temporary throne was erected, was soon filled with spectators and invited guests, mingling with the children and participating in their pleasure. The proxy queen bore her blushing honors meekly, going through all the coronation ceremonies with a charming dignity. She stood Calypso-like among her train of attendants in full view of the audience who listened in breathless silence to her address. I watched her closely; she seemed to plant her feet firmly, as if to still the beatings of her heart; no gesture except a gentle motion of the right arm as she swayed her scepter majestically around, her eyes steadily fixed upon some object beyond, with which she seemed completely absorbed. Not a word was misplaced, not a sentence omitted, of a speech long enough for a Parliamentary harangue. No one prompted, nor did she once turn her eyes toward the scroll she held in her left hand. Enthusiastic and excessive were the rejoicings of her juvenile auditors. Fanny witnessed the whole ceremony through a convenient window which framed for her a living picture of ineffable beauty, and on this clear day, with only a few white Spring clouds floating over the bluest of skies, it was a sight of earth that makes one understand heaven. The Seasons followed in quick succession, proffering homage to the queen; then came the "rosy Hours" with their sweet-toned voices, and the ceremony was completed by a few words from "Fashion and Modesty," the latter gently pushing the former aside, and casting a veil over the burning blushes of the queen. The address being finished, queen and attendants walked in procession to a grove that skirted the town, where beauty filled the eye, and singing birds warbled sweet music. When tired of play, a more substantial entertainment was provided. Group after group spread the white cloth on the soft green turf, and surrounded the plentiful repast, gratefully acknowledging the Hand that supplies our wants from day to day. He who called our attention to the "lilies of the field," stamps a warrant of sacredness upon our rejoicings, in all that he has made. There was something very remarkable in the quickness and facility with which Emma Maxwell memorized the queen's speech. She was a girl of more than ordinary vivacity, of a highly imaginative, impressionable nature, and seemed to have the gift of bewitching all who knew her. She occupied a commanding position in her class as a good reciter, but I had not hitherto noticed any great facility in memorizing. I called her the next day, and asked her to recite the piece to me alone. She stared rather vacantly at me, and said: "I can not remember a sentence of it." "What! when you repeated it with so much facility yesterday! explain yourself." "I do not know how it is," she replied, "that though I can learn with the utmost precision, mechanically, whatever I choose, in a short time, yet under such circumstances my memory has not the power of retention. If my train of repetition had been interrupted for one moment yesterday, I should have failed utterly." "What were you looking at so intently the whole time?" "I was looking at certain objects about the yard and house in connection with which I had studied the speech the evening before." "Yes; but you certainly can repeat some portion of it to me?" "Not one sentence connectedly; it has all passed from my mind like a shadow on the wall." Yet she was a girl of good judgment, read much, talked well, and possessed in an eminent degree the indispensable requisite of a good memory--power of attention. ROBERT J. BRECKINRIDGE Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, LL.D., one of Kentucky's most prolific writers for the public prints, was born at Cabell's Dale, near Lexington, Kentucky, March 8, 1800. He was the son of John Breckinridge, President Jefferson's Attorney-General. He studied at Princeton and Yale, and was graduated from Union College in 1819. Breckinridge then read law and was admitted to the Lexington, Kentucky, bar in 1823. He practiced law for eight years, during part of which time he was a member of the Kentucky legislature. Realizing that Kentucky would oppose the emancipation of the slaves, in which he heartily believed, Breckinridge decided to quit the law and politics for the church. He studied theology and became pastor of the Second Presbyterian church in Baltimore, which pastorate he held for thirteen years. In 1845 Dr. Breckinridge was elected president of Jefferson College (now Washington and Jefferson College), at Washington, Pennsylvania, but two years later he resigned the presidency of the college in order to accept the pastorate of the First Presbyterian church of Lexington, Kentucky. In 1848 Dr. Breckinridge was elected superintendent of public instruction of Kentucky; and in 1853 he became professor of theology in the Danville Theological Seminary, which position he held until his death. He was chairman of the Baltimore national convention of 1864 which nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. Dr. Breckinridge's writings include _Travels in France, Germany_, etc. (Philadelphia, 1839); _Popery in the XIX. Century in the United States_ (1841); _Memoranda of Foreign Travel_ (Baltimore, 1845); _The Internal Evidence of Christianity_ (1852); _The Knowledge of God Objectively Considered_ (New York, 1858); and _The Knowledge of God Subjectively Considered_ (New York, 1859). These two last named works, of enormous proportions, are Dr. Breckinridge's greatest theological and literary productions. He also published _Kentucky School Reports_ (1848-1853). While a resident of Baltimore he was one of the editors of _The Literary and Religious Magazine_, and of its successor, _The Spirit of the Nineteenth Century_, in both of which publications he carried on many bitter and never-ending discussions with the Roman Catholics concerning theological and historical questions. He was also editor of _The Danville Quarterly Review_ for several years. A complete collection of Dr. Breckinridge's books, debates, articles, and pamphlets, upon slavery, temperance, Popery, Universalism, Presbyterianism, education, agriculture, and politics, would form a five-foot shelf of books. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i). SANCTIFICATION [From _The Knowledge of God Subjectively Considered_ (New York, 1859)] The completeness of the Plan of Salvation seems to be absolute. The adaptedness of all its parts to each other, and to their own special end--and the adaptedness of the whole and of every part, to the great end of all, the eradication of sin and misery; exhibits a subject, the greatest, the most intricate, and the most remote of all in a manner so precise and clear; that the sacred Scriptures, even if they had no grace and no mercy to offer to us personally, might justly challenge the very highest place as the most stupendous monument of sublime and successful thought. What then ought we to think of them, when all this glorious intelligence is merely tributary to our salvation? The end of this infinite completeness, only to pour into our polluted and thoughtless hearts, inexhaustible supplies of grace--that we may be extricated from a condition utterly hopeless without that grace ... and be brought to a condition unspeakably blessed to us and glorious to God? Yet this is the overwhelming conclusion to which every just consideration of them forces us to come; the conclusion to which the imperfect disclosure which has now been attempted, of a single point in this divine system, wholly compels us. In this deep conviction, therefore, and as the conclusion of all that has now been advanced, I venture to define, that Sanctification is a benefit of the Covenant of Redemption--being a work of grace, on the part of the triune God, wherein the elect who have been Effectually Called, Regenerated, Justified, and Adopted, are, through the virtue of the death and resurrection of Christ, by the indwelling of the Word and Spirit, through the use of the divine ordinances, and by the power of God with them, enabled more and more to die unto sin, to be renewed in the spirit of their mind, and to live unto righteousness, in an increasing conformity to the image of God, to his great Glory, and their growth in holiness. CAROLINE L. HENTZ Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, novelist, was born at Lancaster, Massachusetts, June 1, 1800. When twenty-four years of age she was married to N. M. Hentz, a Frenchman, then associated with George Bancroft in conducting the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts. Two years after her marriage her husband was elected to the chair of modern languages in the University of North Carolina, and this position he held until 1830, when he removed to Covington, Kentucky, where he and his wife conducted a private school. Covington was the birthplace of Mrs. Hentz's first literary work. The directors of the Arch Street theatre, Philadelphia, had offered a prize of five hundred dollars for the best original tragedy founded on the conquest of the Moors in Spain, and Mrs. Hentz submitted _De Lara, or, the Moorish Bride_, which was awarded first place, but the prize was never paid the author. _De Lara_ was later published and successfully produced on the stage. This encouraged Mrs. Hentz to write another tragedy, entitled _Lamorah, or, the Western Wild_, a tragedy of Indian life, which was staged in Cincinnati and published at Columbus, Georgia. Her _Constance of Werdenberg_ was written at Covington. After two years at Covington, Mrs. Hentz crossed the Ohio river and opened a school at Cincinnati. Her novel, _Lovell's Folly_, was written there. In 1834 she removed to Alabama, and this State was her home for the subsequent fourteen years. Her first widely successful novel, _Aunt Patty's Scrap-Bag_ (Philadelphia, 1846) was followed by her generally accepted masterpiece, _Linda, or, the Young Pilot of the Belle Creole_ (1850). Now came in rapid succession her other works: _Rena, or, the Snow Bird_ (1851); _Marcus Warland_ (1852); _Eoline_; _Wild Jack_; _Helen and Arthur_; _Ugly Effie_; _The Planter's Northern Bride_ (1854); _Love after Marriage_ (1854); _The Banished Son; Robert Graham_ (1856); and _Ernest Lynwood_ (1856), her last book and by some critics regarded as her best. Mrs. Hentz began her literary work in Kentucky, as indicated above, and, though the claim of Kentucky is rather slender upon her it is, nevertheless, legitimate. She died at Marianna, Florida, February 11, 1856. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iii); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, Georgia, 1909, v. vi). BESIDE THE LONG MOSS SPRING [From _Marcus Warland_ (1852)] Marcus sat beside the Long Moss Spring, the morning sun-beams glancing through the broad leaves of the magnolia and the brilliant foliage of the holly, and playing on his golden hair. He held in his hand a fishing-rod, whose long line floated on the water; and though his eye was fixed on the buoyant cork, there was no hope or excitement in its gaze. His face was pale and wore a severe expression, very different from the usual joyousness and thoughtlessness of childhood. Even when the silvery trout and shining perch, lured by the bait, hung quivering on the hook, and were thrown, fluttering like wounded birds through the air, to fall panting, then pulseless, at his side, he showed no consciousness of success, no elation at the number of his scaly victims. Tears, even, large and slowly gathering tears, rolled gradually and reluctantly down his fair oval cheeks; they were not like the sudden, drenching shower, that leaves the air purer and the sky bluer, but the drops that issue from the wounded bark formed of the life-blood of the tree. Beautiful was the spot where the boy sat, and beautiful the vernal morning that awakened Nature to the joy and the beauty of youth. The fountain, over whose basin he was leaning, was one of those clear, deep, pellucid springs, that gush up in the green wilds of southern Georgia, forming a feature of such exquisite loveliness in the landscape, that the traveler pauses on the margin, feeling as if he had found one of those enchanted springs of which we read in fairy land, whose waters are too bright, too pure, too serene for earth. The stone which formed the basin of the fountain was smooth and calcareous, hollowed out by the friction of the waters, and gleaming white and cold through their diaphanous drapery. In the centre of this basin, where the spring gushed in all its depth and strength, it was so dark it looked like an opaque body, impervious to the eye, whence it flowed over the edge of its rocky receptacle in a full, rejoicing current, sweeping over its mossy bed, and bearing its sounding tribute to the Chattahoochee, "rolling rapidly." The mossy bed to which we have alluded was not the verdant velvet that covers with a short, curling nap the ancient rock and the gray old tree, but long, slender, emerald-green plumes, waving under the water, and assuming through its mirror a tinge of deep and irradiant blue. Nothing can be imagined more rich and graceful than this carpet for the fountain's silvery tread, and which seems to bend beneath it, as the light spray rustling in the breeze. The golden water-lily gleamed up through the crystal, and floated along the margin on its long and undulating stems. JOHN P. DURBIN John Price Durbin, Seventh President of Dickinson College, was born near Paris, Kentucky, October 10, 1800. He was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in Paris, and the meager wages he received were invested in books. In 1819 Durbin became a Methodist circuit-rider. He afterwards studied at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and was graduated from Cincinnati College in 1825. In the fall of that year he became professor of languages in Augusta College, Augusta, Kentucky, and he occupied the chair until 1831, when he was elected chaplain of the United States Senate. In the next year Dr. Durbin was elected professor of natural sciences in Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, He remained at Wesleyan but one year, when he was chosen editor of the New York _Christian Advocate and Journal_. In 1834 Editor Durbin became President Durbin of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the greatest head the college has ever known. During vacations Dr. Durbin traveled extensively in Europe and the Orient, and these journeys are best preserved in his books. In the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist church he was in the thickest of the great fight over the slavery question; and in the following year he resigned as president of Dickinson, after more than ten years of distinguished success in the management of the ancient college. He now returned to the active pastorate, taking charge of the Union Methodist church in Philadelphia. From 1850 to 1872 Dr. Durbin was secretary of the Methodist Missionary Society, in the interest of which he visited Europe in 1867. He raised many millions of dollars for foreign missions while he was in charge of the society. He was the founder of foreign missions in Bulgaria. Dr. Durbin was an eloquent and persuasive preacher, an able administrator, and during the latter years of his life he wielded a wonderful influence in the Methodist church. He died at New York City, October 17, 1876. His works include _Observations in Europe_ (New York, 1844, 2 vols.); _Observations in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor_ (New York, 1845, 2 vols.); and he edited the American edition of Wood's _Mosaic History of the Creation_ (New York, 1831). Dr. Durbin was a rather prolific contributor to religious and secular periodicals. His _Observations in Europe_ is the best literary work he did. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. ii). IMPRESSIONS OF LONDON [From _Observations in Europe_ (New York, 1844, v. ii)] The first impression of London is usually wonder at its _immensity_. I received this impression in its full force, as the reader will have already perceived, in coming up the Thames. Nor did it diminish in the course of my rambles through the great metropolis, subsequently. When the stranger first leaves the river, and plunges into the thronged streets, he absolutely becomes dizzy in the whirl of busy life around him. Men sweep by him in _masses_; at times the way seems wedged with them: wagons, carts, omnibuses, hacks, and coaches block up the avenues, and make it quite an enterprise to cross them. Every day my amazement increased at the extent, the activity, the wealth of London. The impression was totally different from that of Paris. The French capital strikes you as the seat of human enjoyment. You find the art of life, so far as mere physical good is concerned, in perfection there. No wish need be ungratified. Your taste may be gratified with the finest music, the most fascinating spectacles, the most splendid works of art in the world. You may eat and drink when and where you please; in half an hour, almost any delicacy that earth has produced or art invented is set before you. You may spend days and weeks in visiting her museums, her hospitals, her gardens, her cemeteries, her libraries, her palaces, and yet remain unsatisfied. In London everything is different. Men are active, but it is in pursuit of wealth. In general they do not seem to enjoy life. The arts are cultivated to a small extent by a small class of society; the mass seem hardly to know that arts exist. No splendid collections are open, without fee or reward, to the public, or to you. You can purchase gratification, but of a lower order than in Paris, and at a higher price. Except a few _lions_--the Docks, the Tunnel, Westminster Abbey, _&c._--nearly everything that the city has to show to a stranger can be seen as you ride along the streets. When you leave Paris you have just begun to enjoy it, and desire to return again; you leave London convinced, indeed, of its vastness and wealth, but tired of gazing at dingy buildings and thronged streets, and are satisfied without another visit. Such, at least, were my own impressions. Apart from private friendships and professional interests, I have no care to see London again. FORTUNATUS COSBY, Jr. Fortunatus Cosby, Junior, poet and editor, the son of a distinguished lawyer, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, May 2, 1801. He was educated at Yale and Transylvania, then studied law, but, like so many literary men have done, never practiced. Cosby was a passionate lover of books, and most of his life was spent among his collection. He was wealthy and well able to indulge his taste to any extreme. His kinsman, President Thomas Jefferson, offered to make him secretary of the legation at London, but he declined. Cosby was some years later superintendent of the Philadelphia public schools, and a contributor to _Graham's Magazine_, as well as to other high-class periodicals. In 1846 he was editor of the Louisville _Examiner_, the first Kentucky paper devoted to emancipation of the slaves. In 1860 Cosby was appointed consul to Geneva, and the next eight years of his life were devoted to his diplomatic duties and to traveling. He returned to the United States in 1868, and to his old home near Louisville. There death found him in June, 1871. Several of his friends, which included William Cullen Bryant, Rufus W. Griswold, and George D. Prentice, often urged Cosby to collect his verse and bring it together in a volume, but he was "too careless of his fame to do it;" and "many waifs he from time to time contributed to the periodicals," are now lost to the general public. He is, of course, well represented in all of the anthologies of American poetry, but a collection of his writings should be made. Cosby's best work is to be seen in his _Fireside Fancies_, _Ode to the Mocking Bird_, _The Traveler in the Desert_, and _A Dream of Long Ago_. He has often been pronounced the best song writer this country has produced; and that he was a man of fine culture, an ardent lover of books and Nature, and a maker of charming and exquisite verse can be readily proved. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, Kentucky, 1892). FIRESIDE FANCIES [From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)] By the dim and fitful firelight Musing all alone, Memories of old companions Dead, or strangers grown;-- Books that we have read together, Rambles in sweet summer weather, Thoughts released from earthly tether-- Fancy made my own. In my cushioned arm-chair sitting Far into the night, Sleep, with leaden wings extinguished All the flickering light; But, the thoughts that soothed me waking, Care, and grief, and pain forsaking, Still the self-same path were taking-- Pilgrims, still in sight. Indistinct and shadowy phantoms Of the sacred dead, Absent faces bending fondly O'er my drooping head, In my dreams were woven quaintly, Dim at first, but calm and saintly, As the stars that glimmer faintly From their misty bed. Presently a lustrous brightness Eye could scarce behold, Gave to my enchanted vision Looks no longer cold, Features that no clouds encumber, Forms refreshed by sweetest slumber, And, of all that blessed number, Only one was old. Graceful were they as the willow By the zephyr stirred! Bright as childhood when expecting An approving word! Fair as when from earth they faded, Ere the burnished brow was shaded, Or, the hair with silver braided, Or lament was heard. Roundabout in silence moving Slowly to and fro-- Life-like as I knew and loved them In their spring-time glow;-- Beaming with a loving luster, Close, and closer still they cluster Round my chair that radiant muster, Just as long ago. Once, the aged, breathing comfort O'er my fainting cheek, Whispered words of precious meaning Only she could speak; Scarce could I my rapture smother, For I knew it was my mother, And to me there was no other Saint-like and so meek! Then the pent-up fount of feeling Stirred its inmost deep-- Brimming o'er its frozen surface From its guarded keep, On my heart its drops descending, And for one glad moment lending Dreams of Joy's ecstatic blending, Blessed my charmèd sleep. Bright and brighter grew the vision With each gathering tear, Till the past was all before me In its radiance clear; And again we read at even-- Hoped, beneath the summer heaven, Hopes that had no bitter leaven, No disturbing fear. All so real seemed each presence, That one word I spoke-- Only one of old endearment That dead silence broke. But the angels who were keeping Stillest watch while I was sleeping, Left me o'er the embers weeping-- Fled when I awoke. But, as ivy clings the greenest On abandoned walls; And as echo lingers sweetest In deserted halls:-- Thus, the sunlight that we borrow From the past to gild our sorrow, On the dark and dreaded morrow Like a blessing falls. THOMAS F. MARSHALL Thomas Francis Marshall, the famous Kentucky orator and advocate, was born at Frankfort, Kentucky, June 7, 1801. He was the son of Dr. Louis Marshall, a brother of the great chief justice, and sometime president of Washington College (Washington and Lee University). "Tom" Marshall, to give him the name by which he was known throughout the South and West, was educated by private tutors, studied law under John J. Crittenden, and began the practice at Versailles, Kentucky. From 1832 to 1836 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature, and his speeches in that body, as well as in other places, brought him a great reputation as a brilliant and witty orator. The habit of drink was fastening itself upon him, however, and this retarded his progress in the world. Marshall was elected to Congress from the old Ashland district in 1840, and in that body he always bitterly opposed most measures proposed by Henry Clay, whom he afterwards eloquently eulogized. In 1841 his distinguished friend, Richard H. Menefee, the Kentucky orator, died, and Marshall delivered his celebrated eulogy upon him. This address, given before the Law Society of Transylvania University, was the greatest effort of his life. It has been pronounced the finest speech of its character yet made in America. Marshall served in the Mexican War with no great degree of gallantry; and in 1850 he opposed the third Kentucky Constitution, then in the making, through a paper which he edited and called the _Old Guard_. "Tom" Marshall joined many temperance societies, and delivered many temperance speeches, but he always violated his pledge and returned to the old paths of drink. He was the great wit of his day and generation in Kentucky, if not, indeed, in the whole country. His stories are related to-day by persons who think them of recent origin. Marshall was counsel in many noted trials in the South and West, and his arguments to the jury were logical and eloquent. His speech in the famous Matt. Ward trial is, perhaps, his master effort before a jury. In 1856 Marshall removed to Chicago, but he shortly afterwards returned to Kentucky. In 1858-1859 he delivered lectures upon historical subjects in various cities of the United States. The Civil War failed to interest him at all, but he was broken in health at the time, and preparing himself for the long journey which was fast pressing upon him. "Tom" Marshall died near Versailles, Kentucky, September 22, 1864. To-day he sleeps amid a clump of trees in a Blue Grass meadow near the little town of his triumphs and of his failures--Versailles. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Speeches and Writings of Thomas F. Marshall_, edited by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858); _Thomas F. Marshall_, by Charles Fennell (_The Green Bag_, Boston, July, 1907). TEMPERANCE: AN ADDRESS [From _Speeches and Writings of Hon. Thomas F. Marshall_, edited by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858)] Mr. President, we of the "Total Abstinence and Vigilance Society," in our meetings at the other end of the city [Washington] are so much in the habit of "telling experiences," that I myself have somewhat fallen into it, and am guilty occasionally of the egotism of making some small confessions (as small as I can possibly make them). Mine, then, sir, was a different case. I had earned a most unenviable notoriety by excesses which, though bad enough, did not half reach the reputation they won for me. I never was an habitual drunkard. I was one of your spreeing gentry. My sprees, however, began to crowd each other and my best friends feared that they would soon run together. Perhaps my long intervals of entire abstinence--perhaps something peculiar in my form, constitution, or complexion--may have prevented the physical indications, so usual, of that terrible disease, which, till temperance societies arose, was deemed incurable and resistless. Perhaps I had nourished the vanity to believe that nature had endowed me with a versatility which enabled me to throw down and take up at pleasure any pursuit, and I chose to sport with the gift. If so, I was brought to the very verge of a fearful punishment. Physicians tell us that intemperance at last becomes, of itself, not a habit voluntarily indulged, but a disease which its victim cannot resist. I had not become fully the subject of that fiendish thirst, that horrible yearning after the distillation "from the alembick of hell," which is said to scorch in the throat, and consume the vitals of the confirmed drunkard, with fires kindled for eternity. I did become alarmed, and for the first time, no matter from what cause, lest the demon's fangs were fastening upon me, and I was approaching that line which separates the man who frolics, and can quit, from the lost inebriate, whose appetite is disease, and whose will is dead. I joined the society on my own account, and felt that I must encounter the title of "reformed drunkard," annoying enough to me, I assure you. I judged, from the cruel publicity given through the press to my frolics, what I had to bear and brave. But I did brave it all; and I would have dared anything to break the chain which I at last discovered was riveting my soul, to unclasp the folds of that serpent-habit whose full embrace is death. Letters from people I never had heard of, newspaper paragraphs from Boston to New Orleans were mailed, and are still mailing to me, by which I am very distinctly, and in the most friendly and agreeable manner, apprised that I enjoyed all over the delectable reputation of a sot, with one foot in the grave, and understanding almost totally overthrown. I doubt not, sir, that the societies who have invited me to address them at different places in the Union, will expect to find me with an unhealed carbuncle on my nose, and my body of the graceful and manly shape and proportion of a demijohn. I have dared all these annoyances, all this celebrity. I have not shrunk from being a text for temperance preachers, and a case for the outpouring of the sympathies of people who have more philanthropy than politeness, more temperance than taste. I signed the pledge on my own account, sir, and my heart leaped to find that I was free. The chain has fallen from my freeborn limbs; not a link or fragment remains to tell I ever wore the badge of servitude. JEFFERSON J. POLK Jefferson J. Polk, an eccentric clergyman, physician, and writer, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, March 10, 1802. He spent his young manhood as a printer on the _Georgetown Patriot_, and the _Kentucky Gazette_. In 1822 Polk joined the Lexington Temperance Society, and he continued steadfast in the cause until his death. He subsequently united with the Methodist church of Lexington, and married; but he continued to work as a journeyman-printer until 1826, when he removed to Danville, Kentucky, where he purchased and became editor of _The Olive Branch_, a weekly newspaper. This he conducted for several years, when he disposed of it in order to become an agent for the American Colonization Society. Polk held that emancipation with colonization in Liberia or elsewhere was the only proper and just solution of the slavery question. The awful Asiatic cholera reached Danville in 1833--as it did nearly a dozen other Kentucky towns--and Polk played his part in the battle which was waged against it. A short time later he became a Methodist circuit-rider, but, in 1839, he went to Lexington to study medicine at Transylvania Medical School. In the following year Dr. Polk removed to Perryville, Kentucky, some miles from Danville, and this was his future home. Here he practiced medicine and preached the Gospel for the next twenty years. In 1860 he supported John Bell of Tennessee for president, but, when Lincoln was elected, he became a strong Union man. The battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862), the greatest battle ever fought upon Kentucky soil, was waged before the good doctor's very door. He converted his house into a hospital, and himself acted as surgeon of a field hospital. After the war he was postmaster of Perryville and claim agent for Union soldiers. At the age of sixty-five years, this eccentric old man published one of the literary curiosities of Kentucky literature, yet withal a work of real interest and much first-hand information. The little volume was entitled _Autobiography of Dr. J. J. Polk, to which is added his occasional writings and biographies of worthy men and women of Boyle County, Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1867). From the frontispiece portrait the author looks fiercely out at the reader, a real son of thunder. Besides the autobiography of Dr. Polk the volume contains sketches of men, women, and places, fables, proverbs, sermons, woman's rights, a ghost story, "love powders," reflections of an old man, biographies of a group of the doctor's parishioners--all crowded into the 254 pages of this book. Dr. Polk died at Perryville, Kentucky, May 23, 1881. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The chief authority for the facts of Dr. Polk's life is, of course, his _Autobiography_; _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882). THE BATTLE OF THE BOARDS [From _Autobiography of Dr. J. J. Polk_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1867)] In the early settlement of Kentucky, when the Indians still roved through our dense forests, plundering and murdering the white inhabitants, three men left Harrod's Station to search for their horses that had strayed off. They pursued their trail through the rich pea-vine and cane, that everywhere abounded, for many miles. Frequently on their route they saw signs that a party of Indians were in their vicinity, hence they took every step cautiously. Thus they traveled all day. Toward night they were many miles from home, but they continued their search until darkness and a cold rain that began to fall drove them to take shelter in an old deserted log cabin, thickly surrounded by cane and matted over with grape-vines. After they had gained this pleasant retreat they held a consultation, and agreed not to strike a fire, as the Indians, if any in the neighborhood, knew the location of the cabin, and, like themselves, might take shelter in it, and murder or expel the white intruders. Finally, the three now in possession, concluded to ascend into the loft of the cabin, the floor of which was clap-boards, resting upon round poles. In their novel position they lay down quietly side by side, each man holding his trusty rifle in his arms. Thus arranged, they awaited the results of the night. They had not been in their perilous position long when six well-armed Indians entered the cabin, placed their guns and other implements of warfare in one corner of the house, struck a light, and began to make the usual demonstrations of joy on such occasions. One of our heroes wished to know the number of the Indians--he was the middle man of the three, and was lying on his back--and, as hilarity and mirth "grew thick and fast" among the Indians, he attempted to turn over and get a peep at things below. His comrades caught him on each side to keep him from turning over, and, in the struggle, one of the poles broke, and with a tremendous crash the clap-boards and the three men fell in the midst of the Indians, who with a loud yell of terror fled from the house, leaving their guns, and never returned. The three men who had thus made a miraculous escape from the savage foe, remained all night in quiet possession of the cabin, and in the morning returned to the station with their trophies. Whenever the three heroes met in after life they laughed over their strange deliverance, and what they called "The Battle of the Boards." GEORGE D. PRENTICE George Dennison Prentice, poet, editor, wit, and founder of the _Journal School of Female Poets_, was born at Preston, Connecticut, December 18, 1802. In the fall of 1820 Prentice entered the Sophomore class of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, where one of his instructors was Horace Mann, and among his classmates was Samuel G. Howe. At college he was famous for his prodigious memory. Prentice was graduated from Brown in 1823, after which he taught school for some time. He next turned to the law, but this he also abandoned to enter upon his life work--journalism. In 1827 he became editor of a paper in New London, Connecticut, but in the following year he went to Hartford to take charge of the _New England Review_, which "was the Louisville _Journal_, born in Connecticut." In 1830 the Connecticut Whigs requested Prentice to journey to Kentucky and prepare a campaign life of Henry Clay. He finally decided to do this, naming John Greenleaf Whittier, the good Quaker poet, as his successor in the editorial chair of _The Review_, and setting out at once upon his long pilgrimage to Lexington. He dashed off his biography of the statesman in a few months, and it greatly pleased the Whigs of his State, but Prentice had decided to remain in Kentucky. He went to Louisville, and on November 24, 1830, the first issue of the _Louisville Journal_ appeared, and George D. Prentice had at last come into his very own. His pungent paragraphs made the "Yankee schoolmaster" feared by editors in the remotest corners of the country, but more especially by Shadrach Penn, editor of the _Louisville Advertiser_, the Democratic organ, as the _Journal_ was the Whig organ. After a constant warfare of more than ten years, poor Penn capitulated, and removed to Missouri. Prentice found another foe worthy of his steel in John H. Harney, editor of the Louisville _Daily Democrat_, but the battle of the wits between them was not as keen as it was between him and Penn. Prentice survived both editors and wrote exquisite eulogies upon them! He also had many personal encounters, which his biographer, Mr. John James Piatt, the Ohio poet, declines to dignify with the term of "duel." His pistol "brush" with Col Reuben T. Durrett, the Kentucky historical writer and collector, was, perhaps, his most serious affair. And the colonel lived to write a fine tribute to him, which was turning the tables upon him just a bit! Prentice's home in Louisville was the center of the city's literary life for many years. His wife was a charming and cultured woman, in every way fitted to assist him. A volume of his witty paragraphs, called by the publishers, _Prenticeana_ (New York, 1859), attracted attention in London and Paris, and in all parts of the United States. Next to Whig politics, the _Journal_ was the literary newspaper of the country. All Western and Southern poets were welcomed to its columns, particularly were female poets "featured," and upon them all Prentice poured out indiscriminate praise, which may or may not have been good for them or for the public. At any rate, he never failed to send a kindly letter to each new "discovery," in which their work already submitted was extravagantly valued, and in which they were urged to flood the office with more of the same kind. His praise of Amelia B. Welby, the sentimental singer of the long ago, seems indefensible to-day. As a poet himself Prentice was a master of blank verse forms. Mr. Piatt put him next to Bryant among American poets in the handling of this difficult measure. _The Closing Year_, written in 1835, is undoubtedly his finest poem; and _At My Mother's Grave_ is usually set beside it. Although his sons, wife, and most of his friends sympathized with the South in the war of Sections, Prentice was always an ardent advocate of the Union cause. He died near Louisville, on the banks of the Ohio river, January 22, 1870. Henry Watterson delivered an eulogy upon him, and snugly adjusted his mantle about his own shoulders. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poems of George D. Prentice_, edited by John J. Piatt (Cincinnati, 1878); _The Pioneer Press of Kentucky_, by W. H. Perrin (Louisville, 1888). THE CLOSING YEAR [From _The Poems of George D. Prentice, edited with a Biographical Sketch_, by John J. Piatt (Cincinnati, 1878, 4th Edition)] 'Tis midnight's holy hour--and silence now Is brooding, like a gentle spirit, o'er The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds The bell's deep notes are swelling. 'Tis the knell Of the departed Year. No funeral train Is sweeping past; yet on the stream and wood, With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest, Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred, As by a mourner's sigh; and on yon cloud, That floats so still and placidly through heaven, The spirits of the seasons seem to stand-- Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, And Winter with his aged locks--and breathe In mournful cadences, that come abroad Like the far wind-harp's wild and touching wail, A melancholy dirge o'er the dead Year, Gone from the earth forever. 'Tis a time For memory and for tears. Within the deep, Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim, Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time, Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold And solemn finger to the beautiful And holy visions that have passed away And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts The coffin-lid of hope, and joy, and love, And, bending mournfully above the pale Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness. The Year Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow, Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course, It waved its scepter o'er the beautiful, And they are not. It laid its pallid hand Upon the strong man, and the haughty form Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim. It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged The bright and joyous, and the tearful wail Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song And reckless shout resounded. It passed o'er The battle-plain, where sword and spear and shield Flashed in the light of midday--and the strength Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass, Green from the soil of carnage, waves above The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came And faded like a wreath of mist at eve; Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air, It heralded its millions to their home In the dim land of dreams. Remorseless Time!-- Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe!--what power Can stay him in his silent course, or melt His iron heart to pity? On, still on He presses, and forever. The proud bird, The condor of the Andes, that can soar Through heaven's unfathomable depths, or brave The fury of the northern hurricane And bathe his plumage in the thunder's home, Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down To rest upon his mountain-crag--but Time Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness, And night's deep darkness has no chain to bind His rushing pinion. Revolutions sweep O'er earth, like troubled visions o'er the breast Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink, Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles Spring, blazing, from the ocean, and go back To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise, Gathering the strength of hoary centuries, And rush down like the Alpine avalanche, Startling the nations; and the very stars, Yon bright and burning blazonry of God, Glitter awhile in their eternal depths, And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train, Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away, To darkle in the trackless void: yet Time, Time the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career, Dark, stern, all-pitiless, and pauses not Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path, To sit and muse, like other conquerors, Upon the fearful ruin he has wrought. ON REVISITING BROWN UNIVERSITY [From the same] It is the noon of night. On this calm spot, Where passed my boyhood's years, I sit me down To wander through the dim world of the Past. The Past! the silent Past! pale Memory kneels Beside her shadowy urn, and with a deep And voiceless sorrow weeps above the grave Of beautiful affections. Her lone harp Lies broken at her feet, and as the wind Goes o'er its moldering chords, a dirge-like sound Rises upon the air, and all again Is an unbreathing silence. Oh, the Past! Its spirit as a mournful presence lives In every ray that gilds those ancient spires, And like a low and melancholy wind Comes o'er yon distant wood, and faintly breathes Upon my fevered spirit. Here I roved Ere I had fancied aught of life beyond The poet's twilight imaging. Those years Come o'er me like the breath of fading flowers, And tones I loved fall on my heart as dew Upon the withered rose-leaf. They were years When the rich sunlight blossomed in the air, And fancy, like a blessed rainbow, spanned The waves of Time, and joyous thoughts went off Upon its beautiful unpillared arch To revel there in cloud, and sun, and sky. Within yon silent domes, how many hearts Are beating high with glorious dreams. 'Tis well; The rosy sunlight of the morn should not Be darkened by the portents of the storm That may not burst till eve. Those youthful ones Whose thoughts are woven of the hues of heaven, May see their visions fading tint by tint, Till naught is left upon the darkened air Save the gray winter cloud; the brilliant star That glitters now upon their happy lives May redden to a scorching flame and burn Their every hope to dust; yet why should thoughts Of coming sorrows cloud their hearts' bright depths With an untimely shade? Dream on--dream on, Ye thoughtless ones--dream on while yet ye may! When life is but a shadow, tear, and sigh, Ye will turn back to linger round these hours Like stricken pilgrims, and their music sweet Will be a dear though melancholy tone In Memory's ear, sounding forever more. PRENTICE PARAGRAPHS [From _Prenticeana_ (New York, 1859)] James Ray and John Parr have started a locofoco paper in Maine, called the _Democrat_. Parr, in all that pertains to decency, is below zero; and Ray is below Parr. The editor of the ---- speaks of his "lying curled up in bed these cold mornings." This verifies what we said of him some time ago--"he lies like a dog." A young widow has established a pistol gallery in New Orleans. Her qualifications as a teacher of the art of duelling are of course undoubted; she has killed her man. Wild rye and wild wheat grow in some regions spontaneously. We believe that wild oats are always sown. "What would you do, madam, if you were a gentleman?" "Sir, what would you do if you were one?" Whatever Midas touched was turned into gold; in these days, touch a man with gold and he'll turn into anything. ROBERT M. BIRD Robert Montgomery Bird, creator of _Nick of the Woods_, was born at Newcastle, Delaware, in 1803. He early abandoned the practice of medicine in Philadelphia in order to devote his entire attention to literature. His first works were three tragedies, entitled _The Gladiator_, _Oraloosa_, and _The Broker of Bogota_, the first of which was very popular on the stage. In 1834 Dr. Bird published his first novel, _Calavar_, a romance of Mexico that was highly praised by William H. Prescott. In the following year _The Infidel_, sequel to _Calavar_, appeared. _The Hawks_ _of Hawk Hollow_, and _Sheppard Lee_ followed fast upon the heels of _The Infidel_. Then came _Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_ (Philadelphia, 1837, 2 vols.), the author's masterpiece. The background of this fine old romance was set against the Kentucky of 1782. Dr. Bird's Kentucky pioneers and Indians are drawn to the life, the silly sentimentalism of Cooper and Chateaubriand concerning the Indian character was avoided and indirectly proved untrue. _Nick of the Woods_ was dramatized and produced upon the stage with great success. A collection of Dr. Bird's periodical papers was made, in 1838, and published under the title of _Peter Pilgrim, or a Rambler's Recollections_. This work included the first adequate description of Mammoth Cave, in Edmonson county, Kentucky. The author was one of the cave's earliest explorers, and his account of it heralded its wonders to the world in a manner that had never been done before. Just how long Dr. Bird remained in Kentucky is not known, as no comprehensive biography of him has been issued, but he must have been in this State for several years prior to the publication of _Nick of the Woods_, and _Peter Pilgrim_. His last novel was _Robin Day_ (1839). After the publication of this tale, Dr. Bird became a Delaware farmer. In 1847 he returned to Philadelphia and became joint editor of the _North American Gazette_. He died at Philadelphia, January 22, 1854, of brain fever. Morton McMichael, with whom he was associated in conducting the _Gazette_, wrote an eloquent tribute to his memory. Dr. Bird's poem, _The Beech Tree_, is remembered today by many readers. But it is as the creator of _Nick of the Woods_, a new edition of which appeared in 1905, that his fame is firmly fixed. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Prose Writers of America_, by R. W. Griswold (Philadelphia, 1847); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. i). NICK OF THE WOODS [From _Nick of the Woods_ (New York, 1853, revised edition)] "What's the matter, Tom Bruce?" said the father, eyeing him with surprise. "Matter enough," responded the young giant, with a grin of mingled awe and delight; "the Jibbenainosay is up again!" "Whar?" cried the senior, eagerly,--"not in our limits?" "No, by Jehosaphat!" replied Tom; "but nigh enough to be neighborly,--on the north bank of Kentuck, whar he has left his mark right in the middle of the road, as fresh as though it war but the work of the morning!" "And a clear mark, Tom?--no mistake in it?" "Right to an iota!" said the young man;--"a reggelar cross on the breast, and a good tomahawk dig right through the skull; and a long-legg'd fellow, too, that looked as though he might have fou't old Sattan himself!" "It's the Jibbenainosay, sure enough; and so good luck to him!" cried the commander: "thar's a harricane coming!" "Who is the Jibbenainosay?" demanded Forrester. "Who?" cried Tom Bruce: "Why, Nick,--Nick of the Woods." "And who, if you please, is Nick of the Woods?" "Thar," replied the junior, with another grin, "thar, stranger, you're too hard for me. Some think one thing, and some another; but thar's many reckon he's the devil." "And his mark, that you were talking of in such mysterious terms,--what is that?" "Why, a dead Injun, to be sure, with Nick's mark on him,--a knife-cut, or a brace of 'em, over the ribs in the shape of a cross. That's the way the Jibbenainosay marks all the meat of his killing. It has been a whole year now since we h'ard of him." "Captain," said the elder Bruce, "you don't seem to understand the affa'r altogether; but if you were to ask Tom about the Jibbenainosay till doomsday, he could tell you no more than he has told already. You must know, thar's a creatur' of some sort or other that ranges the woods round about our station h'yar, keeping a sort of guard over us like, and killing all the brute Injuns that ar' onlucky enough to come in his way, besides scalping them and marking them with his mark. The Injuns call him _Jibbenainosay_, or a word of that natur', which them that know more about the Injun gabble that I do, say means the _Spirit-that-walks_; and if we can believe any such lying devils as Injuns (which I am loath to do, for the truth ar'nt in 'em), he is neither man nor beast, but a great ghost or devil that knife cannot harm nor bullet touch; and they have always had an idea that our fort h'yar in partickelar, and the country round about, war under his protection--many thanks to him, whether he be a devil or not; for that war the reason the savages so soon left off a worrying of us." "Is it possible," said Roland, "that any one can believe such an absurd story?" "Why not?" said Bruce, stoutly. "Thar's the Injuns themselves, Shawnees, Hurons, Delawares, and all,--but partickelarly the Shawnees, for he beats all creation a-killing of Shawnees,--that believe in him, and hold him in such eternal dread, that thar's scarce a brute of 'em has come within ten miles of the station h'yar this three y'ar: because as how, he haunts about our woods h'yar in partickelar, and kills 'em wheresomever he catches 'em,--especially the Shawnees, as I said afore, against which the creatur' has a most butchering spite; and there's them among the other tribes that call him _Shawneewannaween_, or the Howl of the Shawnees, because of his keeping them ever a howling. And thar's his marks, captain,--what do you make of _that_? When you find an Injun lying scalped and tomahawked, it stands to reason thar war something to kill him." "Ay, truly," said Forrester; "but I think you have human beings enough to give the credit to, without referring it to a supernatural one." "Strannger," said Big Tom Bruce the younger, with a sagacious nod, "when you kill an Injun yourself, I reckon,--meaning no offense--you will be willing to take all the honor that can come of it, without leaving it to be scrambled after by others. Thar's no man 'arns a scalp in Kentucky, without taking great pains to show it to his neighbors." "And besides, captain," said the father, very gravely, "thar are men among us who have seen the creatur'!" "_That_," said Roland, who perceived his new friends were not well pleased with his incredulity, "is an argument I can resist no longer." JOHN A. McCLUNG John Alexander McClung, Kentucky's romantic historian and novelist, was born near the ancient town of Washington, Kentucky, September 25, 1804. He was educated at the Buck Pond Academy of his uncle, Dr. Louis Marshall, near Versailles, Kentucky. Having united with the Presbyterian church when he was sixteen years old, McClung entered Princeton Theological Seminary, in 1822, to fit himself for the ministry. He accepted his first pastorate in 1828, but, as his religious views were undergoing a profound change, he withdrew from the church and devoted himself to literature. His first work was a novel, called _Camden_ (Philadelphia, 1830). This was a story of the South during the Revolutionary War. His _Sketches of Western Adventure_ (Maysville, Kentucky, 1832), though almost as fictitious as _Camden_, came to be regarded as history, and it is upon this work that McClung's reputation rests. In a general way the _Sketches_ are "of the most interesting incidents connected with the settlement of the West from 1755 to 1794." Many of them are most certainly figments of the author's imagination, yet they have come to be regarded as literal truth and history. His story of the women at Bryant's Station, who carried water for the defense of the fort while it was besieged by ambushed Indians under Simon Girty, in 1782, is his _piece de resistance_. John Filson, Alexander Fitzroy, Gilbert Imlay, Harry Toulmin, William Littell, Rafinesque, Marshall, and Butler, the Kentucky historians that published their works prior to McClung's, are silent concerning the tripping of the women to the spring for water while the Indians lay upon the banks of Elkhorn with rifles cocked and ready. All Indians have been scalp-hunters, regardless of whatever else they have been, and a woman's scalp dangling from their sticks afforded them as much pleasure as a man's. When the Collinses, both father and son, reached this romance they merely reproduced it "as interesting," allowing it to pass without further comment of any kind. McClung blended romance and history as charmingly as did Judge James Hall, of Cincinnati, whom Mann Butler took to task. The climax of this tale came in the erection of a memorial wall encircling a spring which sprang out of the ground some years prior to the Civil War! McClung began the practice of law in 1835, but in 1849 he returned to the ministry. He subsequently held pastorates at Cincinnati and Indianapolis, but finally settled at Maysville, Kentucky. He declined the presidency of Hanover College, Indiana, in 1856. On August 16, 1859, McClung was drowned in the Niagara river, his body being carried over the falls, but it was later recovered and returned to Kentucky for interment. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by Z. F. Smith (Louisville, Kentucky, 1892); _Kentucky in the Nation's History_, by R. M. McElroy (New York, 1909). THE WOMEN OF BRYANT'S STATION [From _Sketches of Western Adventure_ (Cincinnati, 1838)] All ran hastily to the picketing, and beheld a small party of Indians, exposed to open view, firing, yelling, and making the most furious gestures. The appearance was so singular, and so different from their usual manner of fighting, that some of the more wary and experienced of the garrison instantly pronounced it a decoy party, and restrained the young men from sallying out and attacking them, as some of them were strongly disposed to do. The opposite side of the fort was instantly manned, and several breaches in the picketing rapidly repaired. Their greatest distress arose from the prospect of suffering for water. The more experienced of the garrison felt satisfied that a powerful party was in ambuscade near the spring, but at the same time they supposed that the Indians would not unmask themselves, until the firing upon the opposite side of the fort was returned with such warmth, as to induce the belief that the feint had succeeded. Acting upon this impression, and yielding to the urgent necessity of the case, they summoned all the women, without exception, and explaining to them the circumstances in which they were placed, and the improbability that any injury would be offered them, until the firing had been returned from the opposite side of the fort, they urged them to go in a body to the spring, and each bring up a bucket full of water. Some of the ladies, as was natural, had no relish for the undertaking, and asked why the men could not bring water as well as themselves, observing that _they_ were not bullet-proof, and that the Indians made no distinction between male and female scalps! To this it was answered, that women were in the habit of bringing water every morning to the fort, and that if the Indians saw them engaged as usual, it would induce them to believe that their ambuscade was undiscovered, and that they would not unmask themselves for the sake of firing at a few women, when they hoped, by remaining concealed a few moments longer, to obtain complete possession of the fort. That if men should go down to the spring, the Indians would immediately suspect that something was wrong, would despair of succeeding by ambuscade, and would instantly rush upon them, follow them into the fort, or shoot them down at the spring. The decision was soon over. A few of the boldest declared their readiness to brave the danger, and the younger and more timid rallying in the rear of these veterans, they all marched down in a body to the spring, within point blank shot of more than five hundred Indian warriors! Some of the girls could not help betraying symptoms of terror, but the married women, in general, moved with a steadiness and composure, which completely deceived the Indians. Not a shot was fired. The party were permitted to fill their buckets, one after another, without interruption, and although their steps became quicker and quicker, on their return, and when near the gate of the fort, degenerated into a rather unmilitary celerity, attended with some little crowding in passing the gate, yet not more than one-fifth of the water was spilled, and the eyes of the youngest had not dilated to more than double their ordinary size. JAMES O. PATTIE James Ohio Pattie, an early Western traveler, was born near Brooksville, Kentucky, in 1804. His father, Sylvester Pattie (1782-1828), emigrated to Missouri in 1812, and settled at St. Charles. He served in the War of 1812, at the conclusion of which he built a saw-mill on the Gasconade river, sending down pine lumber in rafts to St. Louis. Several years later his wife died, leaving nine young children, of whom James O. Pattie was the eldest. In 1824 Sylvester Pattie became dissatisfied with his lumber business and decided to dispose of it and undertake an expedition into New Mexico, which was one of the first from this country into that territory. The route pursued by his party was quite new. James O. Pattie was at school, but he prevailed upon his father to permit him to accompany the expedition. It remained for him to write a most interesting account of their remarkable journey, in which Indians who had never seen white men before were encountered, his own capture described, together with the sufferings and death of his father in New Mexico. On his return to the United States Pattie passed through Cincinnati, where he met Timothy Flint, one of the pioneers of Western letters, who edited his journal under the title of _The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, of Kentucky, during an Expedition from St. Louis, through the Vast Regions between that Place and the Pacific Ocean, and thence Back through the City of Mexico to Vera Cruz, during Journeyings of Six Years; in which_ _he and his Father, who accompanied him, suffered Unheard of Hardships and Dangers, and Various Conflicts with the Indians, and were made Captives, in which Captivity his Father Died; together with a description of the Country and the Various Nations through which they Passed_ (Cincinnati, 1831). "One sees in [Pattie's] pages the beginnings of the drama to be fought out in the Mexican War." The date and place of his death are unknown. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iv); Pattie's _Narrative_ has been carefully re-edited with notes and introduction by Reuben Gold Thwaites, and published in his famous _Early Western Travels Series_ (Cleveland, 1905, v. xviii). THE SANTA FE COUNTRY [From _The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie, of Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1831)] We set off for Santa Fe on the 1st of November [1824]. Our course for the first day led us over broken ground. We passed the night in a small town, called Callacia, built on a small stream, that empties into the del Norte. The country around this place presents but a small portion of level surface. The next day our path lay over a point of the mountain. We were the whole day crossing. We killed a grey bear, that was exceedingly fat. It had fattened on a nut of the shape and size of a bean, which grows on a tree resembling the pine, called by the Spanish, _pinion_. We took a great part of the meat with us. We passed the night again in a town called Albukerque. The following day we passed St. Thomas, a town situated on the bank of the del Norte, which is here a deep and muddy stream, with bottoms from five to six miles wide on both sides. These bottoms sustain numerous herds of cattle. The small huts of the shepherds, who attend to them, were visible here and there. We reached another town called Elgidonis, and stopped for the night. We kept guard around our horses all night, but in the morning four of our mules were gone. We hunted for them until ten o'clock, when two Spaniards came, and asked us what we would give them if they would find our mules? We told them to bring the mules, and we would pay them a dollar. They set off, two of our men following them without their knowledge and went into a thicket, where they had tied the mules, and returned with them to us. As may be supposed, we gave them both a good whipping. It seemed at first that the whole town would rise against us in consequence. But when we related the circumstances fairly to the people, the officer corresponding to our justice of the peace, said, we had done perfectly right, and had the men put in the stocks. We recommenced our journey, and passed a mission of Indians under the control of an old priest. After crossing a point of the mountain, we reached Santa Fe, on the 5th. This town contains between four and five thousand inhabitants. It is situated on a large plain. A handsome stream runs through it, adding life and beauty to a scene striking and agreeable from the union of amenity and cultivation around, with the distant view of the snow clad mountains. It is pleasant to walk on the flat roofs of the houses in the evening, and look on the town and plain spread below. The houses are low, with flat roofs as I have mentioned. The churches are differently constructed from the other buildings and make a beautiful show. They have a great number of large bells, which, when disturbed, make a noise, that would almost seem sufficient to awaken the dead. We asked the governor for permission to trap beaver in the river Helay. His reply was that, he did not know if he was allowed by the law to do so; but if upon examination it lay in his power, he would inform us on the morrow, if we would come to his office at 9 o'clock in the morning. According to this request, we went to the place appointed, the succeeding day, which was the 9th of November. We were told by the governor, that he had found nothing that would justify him in giving us the legal permission we desired. We then proposed to him to give us liberty to trap upon the conditions that we paid him five per cent on the beaver we might catch. He said he would consider this proposition, and give us an answer the next day at the same hour. The thoughts of our hearts were not at all favorable to this person, as we left him. WILLIAM F. MARVIN William F. Marvin, "the latter-day drunken poet of Danville," was born at Leicestershire, England, in 1804. He emigrated to America when a young man, and made his home in the little town of Danville, Kentucky. Marvin was a shoemaker by trade, but verse-making and bacchanalian nights were his heart's delight and perfect pleasures. He was a well-known character in Danville and the surrounding country, and many are the old wives' tales they tell on the old poet to this day. On one occasion, while in his cups, of course, he attempted suicide, using his shoe knife on his throat, but he was finally persuaded that a shoe knife could be put to far better purposes. Marvin served in the Mexican War, and on his return home, he published his first and only book of verse, _The Battle of Monterey and Other Poems_ (Danville, Kentucky, 1851). The title-poem, _The Battle of Monterey_, is a rather lengthy metrical romance of some forty or more pages; but the "other poems," called also "miscellaneous poems," extend the book to its 219 pages. A few of these are worthy of preservation, especially the shorter lyrics. Marvin's book is now extremely rare. The writer has located not more than six copies, though a large edition was printed by the poet's publisher, Captain A. S. McGrorty, who is still in the land of the living. During the closing years of his life Marvin contributed occasional poems to the old _Kentucky Advocate_, the Danville newspaper, his last poem having appeared in that paper, called _The Beauty, Breadth, and Depth of Love_. William F. Marvin died at Danville, Kentucky, July 12, 1879, and was buried in the cemetery of the town. To-day his grave may be identified, but it is unmarked by a monument. His verse certainly shows decided improvement over the rhymes of Thomas Johnson, but both of them were imperfect forerunners of that celebrated poet and distinguished soldier, who was born at Danville about the time Marvin reached there and set up his shop on Main street--Theodore O'Hara, the highest poetic note in the literature of old Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Kentucky Advocate_ (Danville, July 14, 1879); letters from G. W. Doneghy, the Danville poet of to-day, author of _The Old Hanging Fork, and Other Poems_ (Franklin, Ohio, 1897), to the writer. EPIGRAM [From _The Battle of Monterey and Other Poems_ (Danville, Kentucky, 1851)] A bee, while hovering round a lip, Where wit and beauty hung, Mistook its bloom, and flew to sip, But ah, the bee got stung. THE FIRST ROSES OF SPRING [From the same] Ye are come my sad heart to beguile, In the blush of your beautiful hue; The fairest and welcomest flowers that smile, Within the wide arch of the blue. From Araby odors ye bring, And ye steal the warm tints from the sky, And scatter your pearly bright beauties in spring, As if nature ne'er meant you to die. The soft crimson blush of each lip, 'Mong the green leaves and buds that abound Seems pouting in richness, and parted to sip The dew that is falling around. Ye bow to the breath of the Morn, And cover his wings with perfume; And woo the gay bee in the earliest dawn, To rest on your bosoms of bloom. Ye have brought back the passion of love, For a moment to warm my lone breast, And pointed to undying roses above, That smile through eternity's rest. SONG [From the same] AIR--_Here's a health to One I love dear_. Here's a bumper brimful for our friends, And a frown and a fig for our foes; And may he who stoops meanly to gain his own ends, Never know the sweets of repose. Though folly and ignorance join, To blight the young buds of our fame, Their slander a moment may injure the vine, But its fruits will be blushing the same. Then here is a bumper to truth, May its banners wave wide as the world, And a fig for the mortal in age or in youth Who has not its banner unfurl'd. ELISHA BARTLETT Dr. Elisha Bartlett, physician, poet, and politician, was born at Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1805. He was graduated in medicine from Brown University in 1826, and later practiced at Lowell, Massachusetts, of which city he was the first mayor. Dr. Bartlett lectured at Dartmouth College in 1839; and two years later he became professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the medical school of Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. He left Transylvania in 1844, for the University of Maryland, but he returned to Lexington two years later, occupying his former chair in the medical school. In 1849 Dr. Bartlett left Transylvania and went to Louisville, where he delivered medical lectures for a year. From 1851 until his death he was professor of materia medica and medical jurisprudence in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York City. Dr. Bartlett died at his birthplace, Smithfield, Rhode Island, July 18, 1855, one of the most widely known of American physicians, and also well known and highly regarded by medical men in Europe. His medical works are: _Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science_ (Philadelphia, 1844); _Inquiry into the Degree of Certainty in Medicine_ (1848); _A Discourse on the Life and Labours of Dr. Wells, the Discoverer of the Philosophy of Dew_ (1849); _The Fevers of the United States_ (1850); _Discourse on the Times, Character, and Works of Hippocrates_ (1852). These are his medical works, but it is upon his small volume of poems, _Simple Settings, in Verse, for Six Portraits and Pictures, from Mr. Dickens's Gallery_ (Boston, 1855), that he is entitled to his place in this work. Of this little book of but eighty pages, his friend, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote: "Yet few suspected him of giving utterance in rhythmical shape to his thoughts or feelings. It was only when his failing limbs could bear him no longer, as conscious existence slowly retreated from his palsied nerves, that he revealed himself freely in truest and tenderest form of expression. We knew he was dying by slow degrees, and we heard from him from time to time, or saw him always serene and always hopeful while hope could have a place in his earthly future.... When to the friends he loved there came, as a farewell gift, ... a little book with a few songs in it--songs with his whole warm heart in them--they knew that his hour was come, and their tears fell fast as they read the loving thoughts that he had clothed in words of beauty and melody. Among the memorials of departed friendships, we treasure the little book of 'songs' ... his last present, as it was his last production." BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i); _History of the Medical Department of Transylvania University_, by Dr. Robert Peter (Louisville, Kentucky, 1905). JOHN BROWDIE OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY [From _Simple Settings, in Verse, for Six Portraits and Pictures, from Mr. Dickens's Gallery_ (Boston, 1854)] 'Twas worth a crown, John Browdie, to hear you ringing out, O'er hedge and hill and roadside, that loud, hilarious shout; And how the echoes caught it up and flung it all about. 'Twas worth another, John, to see that broad and glorious grin, That stretched your wide mouth wider still, and wrinkled round your chin. And showed how true the heart was that glowed and beat within. Yes! Nick has beaten the _measther_,--'twas a sight beneath the sun! And I only wish, John Browdie, when that good deed was done, That you and I had both been there to help along the fun. Be sure he let him have it well;--his trusty arm was nerved With hoarded wrongs and righteous hate,--so it slackened not nor swerved, Until the old curmudgeon got the thrashing he deserved. The guinea, John, you gave the lad, is charmed forevermore; It shall fill your home with blessings; it shall add unto your store; Be light upon your pathway, and sunshine on your floor. These are the treasures, too, laid up forever in the sky, Kind words to solace aching hearts, and make wet eyelids dry, And kindly deeds in silence done with no one standing by. And when you tell the story, John, to her, your joy and pride-- The miller's bonny daughter, so soon to be your bride-- She shall love you more than ever, and cling closer to your side. Content and health be in your house! and may you live to see Full many a little Browdie, John, climb up your sturdy knee; The mother's hope, the father's stay and comfort long to be. These are thy crown, O England; thy glory, grace, and might!-- Who work the work of honest hands, from early morn till night, And worship God by serving man, and doing what is right. All honor, then, to them! let dukes and duchesses give room! The men who by the anvil strike, and ply the busy loom; And scatter plenty through the land, and make the desert bloom. SAMUEL D. GROSS Dr. Samuel David Gross, the distinguished American surgeon and author, was born near Easton, Pennsylvania, July 8, 1805. He was graduated from the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in the class of 1828, and he at once entered upon the active practice of his profession in Philadelphia. In 1833 Dr. Gross accepted a professorship in the Ohio Medical College of Cincinnati, which position he held until 1840, when he became professor of surgery in the University of Louisville. The subsequent sixteen years of Dr. Gross's life were spent upon Kentucky soil. His _Report on Kentucky Surgery_ (Louisville, 1851) contained the first biography of Dr. Ephraim McDowell, the Kentucky surgeon, who performed the first operation for the removal of the ovaries done in the world. That Dr. McDowell had actually accomplished this wonderful feat at Danville, in 1809, was Dr. Gross's contention, and that he was able to prove it beyond all doubt, and place the Danville doctor before the world as the father of ovariotomy, proves the power of his paper. Dr. Gross was the founder of the Louisville _Medical Review_, but he had conducted it but a short time when he accepted the chair of surgery in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. This position he occupied until about two years prior to his death. Dr. Gross enjoyed an international reputation as a surgeon. Oxford and Cambridge conferred degrees upon him in recognition of his distinguished contributions to medical science. As an original demonstrator he was well known. He was among the first to urge the claims of preventive medicine; and his demonstrations upon rabbits, with a view to throwing additional light on manual strangulation, are familiar to students of medicine and medical history. His works include: _Elements of Pathological Anatomy_ (1839); _Foreign Bodies in the Air-Passages_ (1854); _Report on the Causes which Retard the Progress of American Medical Literature_ (1856); _System of Surgery_ (1859); _Manual of Military Surgery_ (1861), Japanese translation (Tokio, 1874); and his best known work of a literary value, _John Hunter and His Pupils_ (1881). In 1875 he published two lectures, entitled _The History of American Medical Literature_; and, in the following year, with several other writers, he issued _A Century of American Medicine_. Dr. Gross was always greatly interested in the history of medicine and surgery. He died at Philadelphia, May 6, 1884. BIBLIOGRAPHY. His _Autobiography_ (Philadelphia, 1887, two vols.), was edited by his sons, one of whom, A. Haller Gross, was born in Kentucky; Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. iii). KENTUCKY [From _Autobiography of Samuel D. Gross, M. D._ (Philadelphia, 1887, v. i.)] It was pleasant to dwell in the land of Boone, of Clay, and of Crittenden; to behold its fertile fields, its majestic forests, and its beautiful streams; and to associate with its refined, cultivated, generous-hearted, and chivalric people. It was there that I had hoped to spend the remainder of my days upon objects calculated to promote the honor and welfare of its noble profession, and finally to mingle my dust with the dust and ashes of the sons and daughters of Kentucky. But destiny has decreed otherwise. A change has come over my life. I stand this evening in the presence of a new people, a stranger in a strange place, and a candidate for new favors. THE DEATH OF HENRY CLAY [From the same] The admirers of Mr. Clay cannot but regret the motives which induced him to spend his last days at Washington. It was a pitiful ambition which prompted him to forsake his family and his old friends to die at the capital of the country in order that he might have the _éclat_ of a public funeral. Broken down in health and spirits when he left his old home, unable to travel except by slow stages, he knew perfectly well that his days were numbered, and that he could never again see Kentucky. How much more dignified would it have been if he had breathed out his once precious life in the bosom of his family and in the arms of the woman who for upwards of half a century had watched over his interests, reared his children with a fond mother's care, loved him with a true woman's love, and followed him, wherever he was, with her prayers and her blessings! THOMAS H. CHIVERS Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, the eccentric Southern poet, and maker of most unusual verse forms, was born near Washington, Georgia, December 12, 1807. He was instructed in the classics by his mother, and, choosing medicine as his vocation, he went to Lexington, Kentucky--most probably making the long journey on horse-back--and entered the medical school of Transylvania University. Chivers matriculated in November, 1828, and took up his abode at the old Phoenix Hotel, as his father was wealthy and liberal with him. He took one ticket and made it during his first year. The college records show that he returned for the fall session of 1829, and that, during his second year, he took two tickets, graduating on March 17, 1830. The thesis he submitted for his degree of Doctor of Medicine was _Remittent and Intermittent Bilious Fever_. Kentucky was the birthplace of the first poems Chivers wrote, and, very probably, the birthplace of his first book, _Conrad and Eudora, or The Death of Alonzo_ (Philadelphia, 1834). This little drama, intended for the study, was set in Kentucky, and founded upon the Beauchamp-Sharp murder of 1825, which was still the chief topic of conversation in the State when the poet reached Lexington in 1828. Chivers's second book of poems, called _Nacoochee_ (New York, 1837), contained two poems written while a student of Transylvania, entitled _To a China Tree_, and _Georgia Waters_. A short time after the publication of this book Chivers and Edgar Allan Poe became acquainted; and the remainder of their lives they were denouncing and fighting each other. It all came about by Chivers claiming his _Allegra Florence in Heaven_, published in _The Lost Pleiad_ (New York, 1845), as the original of _The Raven_. Of course, the world and the critics have smiled at this claim and let it pass. After Poe's death Chivers claimed practically everything the Virginian did to be a plagiarism of some of his own poems. His most famous work was _Eonchs of Ruby_ (New York, 1851). This was followed by _Virginalia_ (Philadelphia, 1853); _Memoralia_ (Philadelphia, 1853); _Atlanta_ (Macon, Ga., 1853); _Birth-Day Song of Liberty_ (Atlanta, Ga., 1856); and _The Sons of Usna_ (Philadelphia, 1858). Bayard Taylor, in his famous _Echo Club_, mentioned _Facets of Diamond_ as one of the poet's publications, but a copy of it has not yet been unearthed. Dr. Chivers died at Decatur, Georgia, December 19, 1858. No more pathetic figure has appeared in American letters than Chivers. Had he been content to write his poetry independently of Poe or any one else, he would have left his name clearer. He was a wonderful manipulator of verse-forms, but he was not what Poe was--a world-genius. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _In the Poe Circle_, by Joel Benton (New York, 1899); _The Poe-Chivers Papers_, by G. E. Woodberry (_Century Magazine_, Jan., Feb., 1903); _Representative Southern Poets_, by C. W. Hubner (New York, 1906); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, Georgia, 1909, v. ii). THE DEATH OF ALONZO [From _Conrad and Eudora_ (Philadelphia, 1834)] _Act III. Scene IV. Frankfort. Time, midnight._ Conrad _enters from the tavern, walks the street, dressed in dark clothes, with a masque on his face, and, with difficulty, finds_ Alonzo's _house_. _Conrad._ This is the place,--and I must change my name. (_Goes to the door and knocks. Puts his hand in his bosom. A female voice is heard within--the wife of_ Alonzo.) _Angeline._ I would not venture out this time o' night. (_Conrad knocks_.) _Alonzo._ Who's there? _Conrad._ A friend. _Angeline_ (_within_). I would not venture out, my love! _Alonzo._ Why, Angeline!--thy fears are woman's, love. (_Knocks again._) _Alonzo._ Who is that?--speak out! _Conrad._ Darby--'tis thy friend! He has some business with thee--'tis of weight! Has sign'd a bond, and thou must seal the deed! _Alonzo._ What does he say? _Angeline._ Indeed I do not know--you'd better see. (_Knocks again and looks round._) _Alonzo._ Who can this be--so late at night? (_Opens the door and steps back._) _Conrad._ Behold! (_Throws off his masque and takes him by the throat._) Look in my face, and call my name! _Alonzo._ Conrad!--Conrad! do not kill me, have mercy! _Conrad._ Where is my wife? Now, villain! die!--die!--die! (_Stabs him._) Now, pray! if thou canst pray, now pray--now die! Now, drink the wormwood which Eudora drank. (_Stamps him._ Alonzo _dies_.) (Conrad _rushes out and is seen no more_. Angeline, Alonzo's _wife, runs in the room, screams, and falls upon his breast_.) _Angeline._ 'Tis he--'tis he--Conrad has kill'd Alonzo! Oh! my husband! my husband! thou art dead! 'Tis he--'tis he--the wretch has kill'd Alonzo! (_The doctor_, Alonzo's _brother, rushes in, crying "Murder!--murder!" Watchmen and citizens rush in, crying "Murder! murder!_ Alonzo's _dead_! Alonzo's _dead_!") _Citizens._ Who, under God's heaven, could have done this deed? _Angeline._ 'Tis he--'tis he! Conrad has kill'd Alonzo! _Watchmen._ Who did it? Speak! speak! Conrad kill'd Alonzo? _Angeline._ Conrad--'twas Conrad, kill'd my husband! Dead! Oh! death--death--death! What will become of me? _Doctor._ Did you see his face? My God! I know 'twas he! _Angeline._ I saw his face--I heard his voice--he's gone! (Angeline _feels his pulse, while the rest look round_.) Oh! my husband!--my husband!--death, death! Speak, Alonzo! speak to Angeline--death! Oh! speak one word, and tell me who it was! (_Kisses him._) No pulse--my husband's dead! He's gone!--he's gone! (_Faints away on his breast. The watchmen and citizens take her into an adjoining room, bearing her husband with her--asking, "Who could have kill'd him? Speak_, Angeline--_speak_!") _Curtain falls. End of Act III._ GEORGIA WATERS [From _Nacoochee_ (New York, 1837)] On thy waters, thy sweet valley waters, Oh! Georgia! how happy were we! When thy daughters, thy sweet-smiling daughters, Once gathered sweet-william for me. Oh! thy wildwood, thy dark shady wildwood Had many bright visions for me; For my childhood, my bright rosy childhood Was cradled, dear Georgia! in thee! On thy mountains, thy green purple mountains, The seasons are waiting on thee; And thy fountains, thy clear crystal fountains Are making sweet music for me. Oh! thy waters, thy sweet valley waters Are dearer than any to me; For thy daughters, thy sweet-smiling daughters, Oh! Georgia! give beauty to thee. Transylvania University, 1830. JEFFERSON DAVIS Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, was born in Christian, now Todd, county, Kentucky, June 3, 1808. During his infancy his family removed first to Louisiana and afterwards to Mississippi, locating near the village of Woodville. When but seven years old he was mounted on a pony and, with a company of travelers, rode back to Kentucky. He entered St. Thomas College, a Roman Catholic institution, near Springfield, Kentucky. This tiny, obscure "college" was presided over by Dominicans, and Davis was the only Protestant boy in it. He spent two years at St. Thomas, when he returned home to be fitted for college. In October, 1821, when in his fourteenth year, Jefferson Davis arrived in Lexington, Kentucky, and matriculated in the academic department of Transylvania University. Horace Holley, surrounded with his famous faculty, was in charge of the University during Davis's student days. His favorite professor was Robert H. Bishop, afterwards president of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; and his fellow students included David Rice Atchison, George Wallace Jones, Gustavus A. Henry, and Belvard J. Peters, all subsequently in Congress or on the bench. When Davis was in the United States Senate he found five other Transylvania men in the same body. He made his home with old Joseph Ficklin, the Lexington postmaster, and three of the happiest years of his life were spent in the "Athens of the West." He left Transylvania at the end of his junior year in order to enter West Point, from which he was graduated in 1828. As Lieutenant Davis he was in Kentucky during the cholera-year of 1833, and he did all in his power to bury the dead and watch the dying. Near Louisville, on June 17, 1835, Davis was married to Miss Sarah Knox Taylor, second daughter of President Taylor, but within the year the fair young girl died. Davis was in the lower House of Congress, in 1845, as a Democrat; but in the following year he enlisted for service in the Mexican War, through which he served with great credit to himself and to his country. From 1847 to 1851 he was United States Senator from Mississippi; and from 1853 to 1857 he was Secretary of War in President Pierce's cabinet. Davis was immediately returned to the Senate, where he continued until January 21, 1861, when he bade the Senators farewell in a speech that has made him famous as an orator. Four weeks later he was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States. On February 22, 1862, he was elected permanent president, and settled himself in the capitol at Richmond, Virginia. President Davis was arrested near Irwinville, Georgia, May 10, 1865, and for the next two years he was a prisoner in Fortress Monroe. He died at New Orleans, December 6, 1889, but in 1893 his body was removed to Richmond. As an author Davis's fame must rest on his _The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_ (New York, 1881, two vols.). BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Jefferson Davis: A Memoir by his wife_, Mrs. V. Jefferson Davis (New York 1890, two vols.); _Belford's Magazine_ (Jan., 1890); _Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime_, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1897); _Jefferson Davis_, by W. E. Dodd (Philadelphia, 1907); _Statesmen of the Old South_, by W. E. Dodd (New York, 1911). Prof. W. L. Fleming, of Louisiana State University is now preparing what will be the most comprehensive and, perhaps, the definitive biography of Davis. FROM FAREWELL SPEECH IN UNITED STATES SENATE ON JANUARY 21, 1861 [From _The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_ (New York, 1881, v. i.)] It has been a conviction of pressing necessity, it has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi to her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races. That Declaration of Independence is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made. The communities were declaring their independence; the people of those communities were asserting that no man was born--to use the language of Mr. Jefferson--booted and spurred, to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal--meaning the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families; but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body politic. These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for which they made their declaration; these were the ends to which their enunciation was directed. They have no reference to the slave; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment against George III was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do--to stir up insurrection among our slaves? Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the Prince to be arraigned for raising up insurrection among them? And how was this to be enumerated among the high crimes which caused the colonies to sever their connection with the mother country? When our Constitution was formed, the same idea was rendered more palpable; for there we find provision made for that very class of persons as property; they were not put upon the footing of equality with white men--not even upon that of paupers and convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three fifths. Then, Senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together; we recur to the principles upon which our Government was founded; and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Government which, thus perverted, threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard. This is done, not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit; but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit unshorn to our children. I find in myself, perhaps, a type of the general feeling of my constituents towards yours. I am sure I feel no hostility towards you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent. I, therefore, feel that I but express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceable relations with you, though we must part. They may be mutually beneficial to us in the future, as they have been in the past, if you so will it. The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and, if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear; and thus, putting our trust in God and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may. In the course of my service here, associated at different times with a great variety of Senators, I see now around me some with whom I have served long; there have been points of collision; but, whatever of offense there has been to me, I leave here. I carry with me no hostile remembrance. Whatever offense I have given which has not been redressed, or for which satisfaction has not been demanded, I have, Senators, in this hour of our parting, to offer you my apology for any pain which, in heat of discussion, I have inflicted. I go hence unencumbered of the remembrance of any injury received, and having discharged the duty of making the only reparation in my power for any injury offered. Mr. President and Senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a final adieu. WILLIAM D. GALLAGHER William Davis Gallagher, poet and critic, was born at Philadelphia, August 21, 1808. When he was but eight years old he removed to Cincinnati with his mother, a widow. In 1821 he was apprenticed to a Cincinnati printer. At the age of twenty years Gallagher journeyed through Kentucky and Mississippi, and his letters concerning the country and the people won him his first fame as a writer. In 1831 he became editor of the Cincinnati _Mirrow_, the fifth or sixth literary journal published in the West. Three years later Thomas H. Shreve joined Gallagher in editing the paper. Like all Western magazines, the _Mirrow's_ high hopes were utterly dashed upon the old rocks of failure from one cause or another. In 1835 Gallagher published _Erato No. I._, and _Erato No. II._, which were two small pamphlets of poems. _Erato No. III._ was published at Louisville, two years later. The chief poem in this was upon a Kentucky subject. Gallagher's anthology of Western verse, without biographical or critical notes, entitled _The Poetical Literature of the West_ (Cincinnati, 1841), the first work in that field, was well done, and it strengthened his claim as a critic. In 1854 he became one of the editors of the _Louisville Courier_; but he shortly afterwards purchased a farm near Pewee Valley, Kentucky, some twelve miles from Louisville, and as a Kentucky farmer he spent the final forty years of his life. He took keen interest in agricultural pursuits, but he made nothing more than a meager living out of his farm. His essay on _Fruit Culture in the Ohio Valley_ attracted the attention of persons interested in that subject. As a poet Gallagher submits his claim upon a rather long pastoral poem, entitled _Miami Woods_. This work was begun in 1839, and finished seventeen years later. This gives the title of his book of poems, _Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1881). _A Golden Wedding_ is not an overly skillful production, and the poet is best seen in his shorter lyrics. Perhaps _The Mothers of the West_, which appeared in the _Erato No. III._, is the best thing he did, and the one poem that will keep his fame green. Gallagher began his literary career with great promise, and he pursued it diligently for some years, but when he should have been doing his finest work, he was winning some prize from an agricultural journal for the best essay on _Fruit Culture in the Ohio Valley_! He failed to follow the gleam. William D. Gallagher died at "Fern Rock Cottage," Pewee Valley, Kentucky, June 27, 1894. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892). THE MOTHERS OF THE WEST [From _Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1881)] The mothers of our Forest-Land! Stout-hearted dames were they; With nerve to wield the battle-brand, And join the border fray. Our rough land had no braver In its days of blood and strife-- Aye ready for severest toil, Aye free to peril life. The mothers of our Forest-Land! On old Kentucky's soil, How shared they, with each dauntless band, War's tempest, and life's toil! They shrank not from the foeman, They quail'd not in the fight, But cheer'd their husbands through the day, And soothed them through the night. The mothers of our Forest-Land! _Their_ bosoms pillow'd Men; And proud were they by such to stand In hammock, fort, or glen; To load the sure old rifle-- To run the leaden ball-- To watch a battling husband's place, And fill it should he fall. The mothers of our Forest-Land! Such were their daily deeds: Their monument--where does it stand? Their epitaph--who reads? No braver dames had Sparta-- No nobler matrons Rome-- Yet who or lauds or honors them, Ev'n in their own green home? The mothers of our Forest-Land! They sleep in unknown graves; And had they borne and nursed a band Of ingrates, or of slaves, They had not been more neglected! But their graves shall yet be found, And their monuments dot here and there "The Dark and Bloody Ground!" THOMAS H. SHREVE Thomas H. Shreve, poet and journalist, was born at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1808. In early life he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and entered mercantile pursuits. In 1834 Shreve became a Cincinnati editor; but four years later he returned to Louisville to again engage in business. Throughout his business career, Shreve was a constant contributor of poems and prose sketches to the best magazines. He finally abandoned business for literature, and he at once became associate editor of the _Louisville Journal_. He was not a rugged journalist of the Prentice type, but a cultured and chaste essayist who should have written from his study window, rather than from such a seething hothouse of sarcasm and invective as Prentice maintained. He was a mild-mannered man, a Quaker, who spent his last months on earth in crossing swords with Thomas Babington Macaulay concerning the character of William Penn. In 1851 Shreve's _Drayton, an American Tale_, was issued by the Harpers at New York. This work won the author much praise in the East as well as in the West, and it started him upon an honorable career, which was soon cut short by disease. Thomas H. Shreve died at Louisville, December 23, 1853. Prentice penned a splendid tribute to the memory of his dead friend and associate; and some years later a collection of his verse was made as a fitting memorial of his blameless life and literary labors. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _The Shreve Family_, by L. P. Allen (Greenfield, Illinois). I HAVE NO WIFE [From _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ (August, 1838)] I have no wife--and I can go Just where I please, and feel as free As crazy winds which choose to blow Round mountain-tops their melody. On those who have Love's race to run, Hope, like a seraph, smiles most sweet-- But they who Hymen's goal have won, Sometimes, 'tis said, find Hope a cheat. I have no wife--young girls are fair-- But how it is, I cannot tell, No sooner are they wed, than their Enchantments give them the farewell. The girls, oh, bless them! make us yearn To risk all odds and take a wife-- To cling to one, and not to turn Ten thousand in the dance of life. I have no wife:--Who'd have his nose Forever tied to one lone flower, E'en if that flower should be a rose, Plucked with light hand from fairy bower? Oh! better far the bright bouquet Of flowers of every hue and clime; By turns to charm the sense away, And fill the heart with dreams sublime. I have no wife:--I now can change From grave to joy, from light to sad Unfettered, in my freedom range And fret awhile, and, then, be glad. I now can heed a Siren's tongue, And feel that eyes glance not in vain-- Make love apace, and, being flung, Get up and try my luck again. I have no wife to pull my hair If it should chance entangled be-- I'm like the lion in his lair, Who flings his mane about him free. If 'tis my fancy, I can wear My boots unblessed by blacking paste, Cling to my coat till it's threadbare, Without a lecture on bad taste. I have no wife, and I can dream Of girls who're worth their weight in gold; Can bask my heart in Love's broad beam, And dance to think it's yet unsold. Or I can look upon a brow Which mind and beauty both enhance, Go to the shrine, and make my bow, And thank the Fates I have a chance. I have no wife, and, like a wave, Can float away to any land, Curl up and kiss, or gently lave The sweetest flowers that are at hand. A Pilgrim, I can bend before The shrine which heart and mind approve;-- Or, Persian like, I can adore Each star that gems the heaven of love. I have no wife--in heaven, they say, Such things as weddings are not known-- Unyoked the blissful spirits stray O'er fields where care no shade has thrown. Then why not have a heaven below, And let fair Hymen hence be sent? It would be fine--but as things go, _Unwedded, folks won't be content_! ORMSBY M. MITCHEL Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, the celebrated American astronomer and author, was born near Morganfield, Kentucky, August 28, 1809. He graduated from West Point in the famous class of 1829 which included Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, Mitchel was professor of mathematics at West Point for two years; but he later studied law and practiced at Cincinnati for a year. In 1834 he was elected professor of mathematics and astronomy in Cincinnati College. By his own efforts he raised sufficient funds with which to establish an astronomical observatory in Cincinnati, in 1845--now the Mitchel Observatory--the first of the larger observatories in this country. In 1860 Professor Mitchel was chosen as director of the Dudley observatory at Albany, New York, and there he remained for two years. The Civil War coming on, he entered the Union army, and rose to the rank of general. General Mitchel was placed in command of the "Department of the South," but before the war was well under way, almost, he contracted yellow fever and died at Beaufort, South Carolina, October 30, 1862. General Mitchel was the most distinguished astronomer ever born on Kentucky soil; and in the army the men knew him as "Old Stars." He was a popular lecturer, but it is as an author that his great reputation rests. His books are: _The Planetary and Stellar Worlds_ (New York, 1848); _The Orbs of Heaven_ (1851); _A Concise Elementary Treatise of the Sun, Planets, Satellites, and Comets_ (1860); and _The Astronomy of the Bible_ (New York, 1863). From 1846 to 1848 General Mitchel published an astronomical journal, called _The Sidereal Messenger_. Harvard and Hamilton Colleges conferred honorary degrees upon him; and he was a member of many scientific societies in the United States and Europe. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, Astronomer and General_, by his son, F. A. Mitchel; biographical sketch in _The Astronomy of the Bible_ (New York, 1863); _Old Stars_, by P. C. Headley (Boston, 1864). ASTRONOMICAL EVIDENCES OF GOD [From _The Astronomy of the Bible_ (New York, 1863)] If we extend our researches beyond the limits of the solar system, and, passing across the mighty gulf which separates us from the starry heavens, inspect minutely the organizations which are there displayed, we find the dominion of these same laws extending to these remote regions, and holding an imperious sway over revolving suns. Thus we perceive, that in one most important particular, the objects which compose the mighty universe are obviously alike, and seem to have sprung from a common origin. We are, moreover, compelled to admit a sun in every visible star; and if a sun, then attendant planets; and if revolving planets, then, likewise, some scheme of sentient existence, possibly remotely analogous to that which is displayed with such wonderful minuteness in our globe. Thus if the being of a God can be argued from the admirable adaptations which surround man in this nether world, every star that glitters in the vast concave of heaven proclaims, with equal power, this mighty truth. If we rise still higher, and from the contemplation of individual stars, examine their distribution, their clusterings, their aggregations into immense systems, the fact of their mutual influences, their restless and eternal activity, their amazing periods of revolution, their countless millions, and their ever-during organizations, the mind, whelmed with the display of grandeur, exclaims involuntarily, "This is the empire of a God!" And now, how is the knowledge of this vast surrounding universe revealed to the mind of man? Here is, perhaps, the crowning wonder. Through the agency of light, a subtle, intangible, imponderable something, originating, apparently, in the stars and suns, darting with incredible velocity from one quarter of the universe to the other, whether in absolute particles of matter shot off from luminous bodies, or by traces of an ethereal fluid, who shall tell? This incomprehensible fluid falls upon an instrument of most insignificant dimensions, yet of most wonderful construction, the human eye, and, lo! to the mind what wonders start into being. Pictures of the most extravagant beauty cover the earth; clouds dipped in the hues of heaven fill the atmosphere; the sun, the moon, the planets, come up from out of the depths of space, and far more amazing still, the distant orbs of heaven, in their relative magnitudes, distances and motions, are revealed to the bewildered mind. We have only to proceed one step further, and bringing to the aid of the human eye, the auxiliary power of the optic glass, the mind is brought into physical association with objects which inhabit the confines of penetrable space. We take cognizance of objects so remote, that even the flashing element of light itself, by which they are revealed, flies on its errand ten times ten thousand years to accomplish its stupendous journey. Strike the human eye from existence, and at a single blow, the sun is blotted out, the planets fade, the heavens are covered with the blackness of darkness, the vast universe shrinks to a narrow compass bounded by the sense of touch alone. Such, then, is the organization of the universe, and such the means by which we are permitted to take cognizance of its existence and phenomena. If the feeble mind of man has achieved victories in the natural world--if his puny structures, which have survived the attacks of a few thousand years, proclaim the superiority of the intelligence of his mind to insensate matter--if the contemplation of the works of art and the triumphs of human genius, swells us into admiration at the power of this invisible spirit that dwells in mortal form,--what shall be the emotions excited, the ideas inspired, by the contemplation of the boundless universe of God? ALBERT T. BLEDSOE Albert Taylor Bledsoe, controversialist, was born at Frankfort, Kentucky, November 9, 1809, the son of a journalist. He was appointed from Kentucky to West Point and was graduated in 1830, after which he served in the army in Indian territory until the last day of August, 1832, when he resigned to enter upon the study of law. A year later Bledsoe abandoned law to become a tutor in Kenyon College, Ohio, where he later studied theology and was ordained a clergyman in the Protestant Episcopal church. He was connected with various Ohio churches from 1835 to 1838, but in the latter year he quit the ministry to resume his legal studies and he removed to Springfield, Illinois, where he formed a partnership with the afterwards celebrated statesman and soldier, Colonel Edward D. Baker. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were practicing law in Springfield at this time, and Bledsoe knew both of them intimately; but because of his subsequent connection with the Southern Confederacy none of the biographies of these men mention him. For the following ten years Bledsoe practiced his profession at Springfield and Washington, D. C. His first book, _An Examination of Edwards's Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will_ (Philadelphia, 1845), showed that his interest in theological subjects had not waned. In 1848 Bledsoe was elected professor of mathematics in the University of Mississippi, which position he held for the ensuing six years. His next volume, _A Theodicy, or Vindication of the Divine Glory_ (New York, 1853), gave him a place among theologians. In 1854 Dr. Bledsoe was elected to the chair of mathematics in the University of Virginia, and this he occupied until 1861. While at the University he published _An Essay on Liberty and Slavery_ (Philadelphia, 1856), which anticipated his subsequent action of entering the Confederate army, which he did in 1861, and he was commissioned as a colonel. Dr. Bledsoe was speedily made assistant secretary of war, but this work proved most uncongenial, and he gladly accepted the joint invitation of Davis and Lee to run the blockade, in 1863, and go to England to gather materials for a constitutional argument on the right of secession. He spent three years in London and upon his return to the United States, in February, 1866, he brought his vast researches together in his best known work, _Is Davis a Traitor? or was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861?_ (Baltimore, 1866). Dr. Bledsoe now took up his residence at Baltimore, and some months later he became editor of a quarterly periodical, _The Southern Review_, which he conducted for the final years of his life. In 1868 he added the principalship of a Baltimore school to his burdens; and in the same year his last volume appeared, _The Philosophy of Mathematics_ (Philadelphia, 1868). In 1871 Dr. Bledsoe was ordained a minister in the Methodist church, and his _Review_ became the recognized organ of his church. He died at Alexandria, Virginia, December 8, 1877. Dr. Bledsoe was always a student and scholar, but he was essentially a controversialist, often bitter in his statements, but time has mellowed much of this, and he now stands forth as a very remarkable man. Consider him from a dozen angles, and one will not find his like in the whole range of American history. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i); _Library of Southern Literature_, sketch by his daughter, Mrs. Sophie Herrick (Atlanta, 1909, v. i). SEVEN CRISES CAUSED THE CIVIL WAR [From _The Southern Review_ (Baltimore, April, 1867)] This history consists of seven great crises. The first of these convulsed the Union, and threatened its dissolution before the new Constitution was formed, or conceived. For how little soever its history may be known, the North and the South, like Jacob and Esau, struggled together, and that, too, with almost fatal desperation, in the womb of the old Union. Slavery had nothing at all to do with that struggle between the North and the South, the _dramatis personæ_ in the tragedy of 1861. It was solely and simply a contest for power. The second crisis was the formation and adoption of the new Constitution. Much has been said about that event, as the most wonderful revolution in the history of the world; because the government of a great people was then radically changed by purely peaceable means, and without shedding a drop of blood. But if that was a bloodless revolution in itself, no one, who has maturely considered it in all its bearings, can deny that it was, in the end, the occasion of the most sanguinary strife in the annals of a fallen world. The revolution of 1801, by which the radical notions and doctrines of the infidel philosophers of the eighteenth century gained the ascendency in this country, never more to abate in their onward march, constituted the third great crisis in the political history of the United States. In passing through this crisis, the Republic of 1787 became in practice the Democracy of the following generation; and, finally, the rabid radicalism of 1861. It was then that the democratic, or predominant, element in the Republic, began to swallow up the others, and so became the most odious of all the forms of absolute power or despotism. It was then that the reign of "King Demos," the unchecked and the unlimited power of mere numbers, was inaugurated, and his throne established on the ruins of American freedom. But, while history will show this, it will also administer the consoling reflection, that American freedom was doomed, from the first, by the operation of other causes, and that the revolution of 1801 only precipitated its fall. If so, then the sooner its fall the better for the world; as in that case its destruction would involve a smaller portion of the human family in its ruins. The desperate struggle of 1820-21, between the North and the South, relative to the admission of Missouri into the Union; the equally fierce contest respecting the Tariff in 1832-33; the Mexican War, and the acquisition of vast territory, by the dismemberment of a foreign empire, which led to the most violent and angry of all the quarrels between the two sections; constitute the fourth, fifth and sixth crises in the stormy history of the United Sections. The seventh and last great crisis, grew out of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the rise of the Republican party, as it is called; and consisted in the secession of the Southern States, and the war of coercion. Each of these seven crises had, of course, its prelude and its sequel, without which it cannot be comprehended, or seen how it followed the preceding, and how it led to the succeeding crises in the chain of events. Now some of these crises are most imperfectly understood by the public, and, in some respects, most perfectly misunderstood, such as the first two for example; others, and especially the fourth, or the great Compromise of 1820, are overlaid with a mass of lying traditions such as the world has seldom seen; traditions invented by politicians, and industriously propagated by the press and the pulpit. If these traditions were cleared away, and the facts which lie beneath them in the silent records of the country brought to view, the revelation would be sufficient to teach both sections of the Union the profoundest lessons of humiliation and sorrow. If patiently and properly studied, the history of the United States is, perhaps, fraught with as many valuable lessons for the warning and instruction of mankind, as that of any other age or nation since the fall of Rome, since the Flood, or since the fall of man. RICHARD H. MENEFEE Richard Hickman Menefee, who with Henry Clay and Thomas F. Marshall form the great triumvirate of early Kentucky orators, was born at Owingsville, Kentucky, December 4, 1809. He was educated at Transylvania University, and graduated from the law school of that institution in 1832. He practiced his profession at Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, for several years, when, in 1836, he was elected to the Kentucky legislature. In the legislature he won a wide reputation as an orator, and rapidly became known as the most gifted man of his age in Kentucky. In the summer of 1837 Menefee made the race for Congress and, after an exciting campaign, it was found that he had defeated his opponent, Judge Richard French. In the lower House of Congress Menefee and Sargeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi were the two young men that compelled the country's attention and admiration as orators. In 1838 William J. Graves, a Kentucky member of the House, killed Jonathan Cilley, representative from a Maine district, and the friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a duel near Washington City. Menefee was one of Graves's seconds. This affair of honor was so bitterly condemned on all sides that Congress was compelled to enact the anti-duelling law. In July, 1838, the people of Boston tendered Daniel Webster a great home-coming banquet, in Faneuil Hall, and Menefee responded very eloquently to a toast to Kentucky. One more session of Congress and he returned to Kentucky, entering upon the practice of law at Lexington, where cases pressed fast upon him. He met Henry Clay in the great Rogers will case of 1840, and Clay got the jury's verdict. Cassius M. Clay placed Menefee in nomination for the United States Senate in the Kentucky legislature of 1841, but his ill-health made his election a hazardous action. A short time before his death he drew up the mature reflections of his life, in the form of a diary, and this, only recently published, has added to his fame. Menefee died at Lexington, Kentucky, February 20, 1841. Thomas P. Marshall pronounced an eulogy upon him which has taken its rightful place among the masterpieces of American oratory; and in 1869 a Kentucky county was carved out of several other counties and named in his honor. While he was not a constructive statesman, Menefee's fame as an orator seems to grow greater with the passing of the years. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Speeches and Writings of Thomas F. Marshall_, by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858); _Richard Hickman Menefee_, by John Wilson Townsend (New York, 1907). KENTUCKY: A TOAST [From _Richard Hickman Menefee_, by John Wilson Townsend (New York, 1907)] MR. CHAIRMAN: I cannot remain silent under the sentiment which has just been announced and so enthusiastically received. That sentiment relates not to myself but to Kentucky--dearer to me than self. Of Kentucky I have nothing to say. There she is. In her history, from the period when first penetrated by the white man as the _dark and bloody ground_, down to the present, she speaks. The character to which that history entitles her is before the world. She is proud of it. She is proud of the past; she is proud of the present. And her pride is patriotic and just. As one of her sons, I ask to express in her name, the acknowledgments due to the complimentary notice you have taken of her, a notice not the less complimentary from its association with the name of Massachusetts. There is much in the character and history of Massachusetts which should bind her in the strongest bonds to Kentucky. Your sentiment places them together: just where they ought to be. Kentucky is willing to occupy the place you have assigned her. Without respect now to subordinate differences in past events, both States stand knit together by the highest and strongest motives by which States can be impelled. I mean the motive and purpose common to each of maintaining and upholding, in every extremity and to the very last, the Union of these States and the Constitution. Massachusetts has proclaimed over and over again her resolution not to survive them. Nor will Kentucky survive them. She has embarked her whole destiny--all she has and all she hopes for--in the Union and the Constitution. Let come what may of public calamity, of faction, of sectional seduction or intimidation, or evil in any form the most dreadful to man, Kentucky, like Massachusetts, regards the overthrow of the Union as more frightful than all. Kentucky acknowledges no justification for a disruption of the Union that is not a justification for revolution itself. In that Union, and under that Constitution, Kentucky means to stand or fall. Kentucky stands by the Union in her living efforts; she means to hold fast to it in her expiring groans. With Massachusetts she means to perish, if perish she must, with hands clenched, in death, upon the Union. * * * * * If the occasion allowed it, I should like to say something of old Massachusetts. I should like to rekindle my own patriotism at her altars. Here--on this very spot--in this very hall--the sacred flame of revolutionary liberty first ascended. Here it has ever ascended. It has never been smothered--never dimmed. Perpetual--clear--holy! Behold its inspirations here in your midst! Where are the doctrines of the Union and the Constitution so incessantly inculcated as here? Where are those doctrines so enthusiastically adopted as here? The principles of the Union and the Constitution--for us another name for the principles of liberty which cannot survive their overthrow--will, in after ages, trace with delight their lineage through you. The blood of freedom is here pure. To be allied to it is to be ennobled. _Massachusetts!_ Which of her multitude of virtues shall I commend? How can I discriminate? I will not attempt it. I take her as she is and all together--I give--_Old Massachusetts!_ God bless her! GEORGE W. CUTTER George Washington Cutter, one of Kentucky's finest poets, was born in Massachusetts about 1809, but he early came to Covington, Kentucky, and entered upon the practice of his profession, the law. He commanded a company of Kentuckians in the Mexican War with great honor to himself and to them. He had been a constant contributor of verse to the periodicals of his time, but he did not publish his first book until after the war with Mexico. _Buena Vista and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1848) was his first collection, and it contained a preface signed from Covington, Kentucky, December, 1847. From this it will be seen that Cutter returned to Kentucky after the war, and that he was living in this State at the time of his book's appearance. Tradition has said that he wrote the title-poem, _Buena Vista_, a spirited war ballad, on the field of action immediately after the battle. His little volume contained thirty-seven poems, including _The Song of Steam_, which has been singled out by critics as his masterpiece, an ode to Henry Clay, his political idol, and his fine descriptive poem, _The Creation of Woman_. This, to the present writer, is the most exquisite thing Cutter did in verse. It is highly and consistently poetical, and it should be better appreciated than it has been. Cutter was married to Mrs. Frances Ann Drake, a famous Kentucky actress, but they were not happy and a separation by mutual agreement subsequently followed. Mrs. Cutter was the widow of Alexander Drake, of the well-known family of that name, and after parting with the poet she resumed her first husband's name, returned to the stage, and managed theatres in Kentucky and Ohio until her death in Oldham county, Kentucky, September 1, 1875. Cutter later removed to Indiana and was a member of the State legislature, after which service he removed to Washington City to accept a government position. In Washington Cutter continued his poetical output, life in the capital turning his attention to patriotic subjects. _Poems, National and Patriotic_ (Philadelphia, 1857) proved the author to be, for the critics of his time, "the most intensely patriotic poet we have." This volume contained sixty-nine of what he regarded as his best poems. _The Song of Steam and Other Poems_ also appeared in this same year of 1857, and it contained one of the poet's finest efforts, _The Song of the Lightning_. Cutter died at Washington, D. C., December 24, 1865. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, 1860); Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905). THE SONG OF STEAM [From _Buena Vista and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1848)] Harness me down with your iron bands, Be sure of your curb and rein; For I scorn the power of your puny hands As the tempest scorns a chain. How I laughed as I lay concealed from sight, For many a countless hour, At the childish boast of human might, And the pride of human power. When I saw an army upon the land, A navy upon the seas, Creeping along, a snail-like band, Or waiting the wayward breeze; When I marked the peasant faintly reel With the toil which he daily bore, As he feebly turned the tardy wheel, Or tugged at the weary oar;-- When I measured the panting courser's speed, The flight of the courier dove-- As they bore the law a king decreed, Or the lines of impatient love-- I could not but think how the world would feel, As these were outstripp'd afar, When I should be bound to the rushing keel, Or chained to the flying car. Ha! ha! ha! they found me at last, They invited me forth at length, And I rushed to my throne with a thunder-blast, And I laughed in my iron strength. Oh! then ye saw a wondrous change On the earth and the ocean wide, Where now my fiery armies range, Nor wait for wind or tide. Hurrah! hurrah! the waters o'er, The mountain's steep decline, Time--space--have yielded to my power-- The world! the world is mine! The rivers, the sun hath earliest blest, Or those where his beams decline; The giant streams of the queenly west, Or the orient floods divine: The ocean pales where'er I sweep, To hear my strength rejoice, And the monsters of the briny deep Cower, trembling, at my voice. I carry the wealth and the lord of earth, The thoughts of his god-like mind, The wind lags after my flying forth, The lightning is left behind. In the darksome depths of the fathomless mine, My tireless arm doth play, Where the rocks never saw the sun decline, Or the dawn of the glorious day. I bring earth's glittering jewels up From the hidden cave below, And I make the fountain's granite cup With a crystal gush o'erflow. I blow the bellows, I forge the steel, In all the shops of trade; I hammer the ore and turn the wheel, Where my arms of strength are made; I manage the furnace, the mill, the mint; I carry, I spin, I weave; And all my doings I put into print, On every Saturday eve. I've no muscle to weary, no breast to decay, No bones to be "laid on the shelf," And soon I intend you may "go and play," While I manage this world myself. But harness me down with your iron bands, Be sure of your curb and rein; For I scorn the strength of your puny hands, As the tempest scorns a chain. MARY P. SHINDLER Mrs. Mary Palmer Shindler, poet and novelist, was born at Beaufort, South Carolina, February 15, 1810. She was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin M. Palmer, the celebrated Presbyterian preacher of New Orleans. She was educated in Charleston by the daughter of Dr. David Ramsey, the early historian of South Carolina. Her education was completed in the schools of Connecticut and New Jersey. In 1835 Miss Palmer was married to Charles E. Dana of New York; and in 1848 to Rev. Robert D. Shindler, an Episcopal clergyman. Two years after this marriage they removed to Maryland, and then to Shelbyville, Kentucky, where Dr. Shindler held a professorship in Shelby College. Shelbyville was Mrs. Shindler's home henceforth, save for short sojourns in other states, and in that town she died about 1880. She was the author of _The Southern Harp_ (1840); _The Northern Harp_ (1841); _The Parted Family and Other Poems_ (1842); _The Temperance Lyre_ (1842); _Charles Morton, or the Young Patriot_ (1843); _The Young Sailor_ (1844); _Forecastle Tour_ (1844); and, _Letters to Relatives and Friends on the Trinity_ (1845). Several of Mrs. Shindler's lyrics are well known. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. v); _The Writers of South Carolina_, by George A. Wauchope (Columbia, South Carolina, 1910). THE FADED FLOWER [From _The Parted Family and Other Poems_ (1842)] I have seen a fragrant flower All impearled with morning dew; I have plucked it from the bower, Where in loveliness it grew. Oh, 'twas sweet, when gayly vying With the garden's richest bloom; But when faded, withered, dying, Sweeter far its choice perfume. So the heart, when crushed by sorrow, Sends its richest streams abroad, While it learns sweet balm to borrow From the uplifted hand of God. Not in its sunny days of gladness Will the heart be fixed on Heaven; When 'tis wounded, clothed in sadness, Oft its richest love is given. MARTIN J. SPALDING Martin John Spalding, seventh archbishop of Baltimore, was born near Lebanon, Kentucky, May 23, 1810. His forebears were Maryland Catholics who had emigrated to Kentucky. He was graduated from St. Mary's College when but sixteen years of age. Spalding then spent four years at St. Joseph's College, Bardstown, Kentucky, and the same number of years in Rome, at the conclusion of which he is said to have made a seven hours' defense in Latin of 256 theological propositions. This exhibition won him a doctor's diploma, and his ordination as a priest. From 1834 to 1843 Dr. Spalding was president of St. Joseph's College in Bardstown. And from 1843 to 1848 he was in charge of the cathedral at Louisville. In 1848 he was consecrated Bishop of Lengone; and two years later Bishop of Louisville. Bishop Spalding served in this capacity until 1864 when, in the presence of four thousand people, he was installed as the seventh archbishop of Baltimore. This high office he held until his death, which occurred at Baltimore, February 7, 1872. Bishop Spalding was the greatest Roman Catholic reviewer and historian Kentucky has produced. He was one of the editors of the _Catholic Magazine_, and the author of the excellent _Sketches of the Early Catholic Missions in Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1846); _The Life, Times, and Character of the Rt. Rev. B. J. Flaget_ (Louisville, 1852). He also published _Lectures on the General Evidences of Christianity_ (1844); _Review of D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation_ (Baltimore, 1847); _History of the Protestant Reformation_ (1860); and a posthumous volume, _Miscellanea_ (1885). There is also a uniform five volume edition of his works, which is fortunate, as his books, especially the _Sketches_, and _Flaget_, are exceedingly scarce. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life of Archbishop Spalding_, by his nephew, John L. Spalding (New York, 1872); Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905). A BISHOP'S ARRIVAL [From _Sketches of the Life, Times, and Character of the Rt. Rev. Benedict Joseph Flaget_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1852)] Bishop Dubourg had sailed from Bordeaux on the 1st of July, 1817; and he had landed at Annapolis on the 4th of September. His _suite_ consisted of five priests--of whom the present Archbishop of New Orleans was one--and twenty-six young men, some of whom were candidates for the ministry, and others were destined to become lay brothers to assist the missionaries in temporal affairs. Several of these youths were from Belgium; and among them was the V. Rev. D. A. Deparcq, of our Diocese. A portion of the company started directly for Baltimore with Bishop Dubourg; the rest, with the Rev. M. Blanc at their head, remained at Annapolis, where they were entertained with princely hospitality in the mansion of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, until the end of October. Preparations were in the meantime made for crossing the mountains. The stage then ran westward only once a week; and no less than three weeks were consumed in transporting the missionary band to Pittsburgh. The Bishop and M. Blanc were in the last division; but after remaining in the stage for two days, during which time it had repeatedly upset, endangering their lives, they finally abandoned it altogether, and performed the remainder of the journey for five days on foot. About the middle of November, the missionary company embarked on a flatboat; and they reached Louisville on the last day of the month. Here they found the Rev. MM. Chabrat and Shaeffer, who had been sent on by Bishop Flaget to welcome them to Kentucky. Accompanied by them and by the Rev. M. Blanc, Bishop Dubourg started immediately for St. Thomas's, where he arrived in the evening of December 2d. Bishop Flaget was rejoiced to meet his old friend. "I recognized him instantly," says he; "see! on meeting me, he has the humility to dismount, in order to present me the most affectionate salute that ever was given." Many and long were the "happy conversations" which he held with his former associate, and now distinguished guest. Bishop Dubourg officiated pontifically, and preached an admirable sermon in the church of St. Thomas,--the only cathedral which the Bishop as yet possessed. On the 12th of December, the two prelates, accompanied by Father Badin, set out for St. Louis, by the way of Louisville. Here Bishop Dubourg preached in the chapel erected by M. Badin. On the 18th they embarked on the steamboat Piqua, and on the 20th reached the mouth of the Ohio, where they were detained five days by the ice. Their time was passed chiefly in religious exercises and pious conversations. The following description of the Piqua and its passengers, from the pen of Bishop Flaget, may not be uninteresting to us at the present day, when steamboat building and navigation have so greatly changed for the better: "Nothing could be more original than the medley of persons on board this boat. We have a band of seven or eight comedians, a family of seven or eight Jews, and a company of clergymen composed of a tonsured cleric, a priest, and two Bishops; besides others, both white and black. Thus more than thirty persons are lodged in an apartment (cabin), twenty feet by twelve, which is again divided into two parts. This boat comprises the old and the new testament. It might serve successively for a synagogue, a cathedral, a theatre, an hospital, a parlor, a dining room, and a sleeping apartment. It is, in fact, a veritable _Noah's ark_, in which there are both clean and unclean animals;--and what is more astonishing,--peace and harmony reign here." They were still at the mouth of the Ohio on the morning of Christmas day. Not being able to say three Masses, they determined to make three meditations. At the conclusion of the second, the redoubtable Piqua resumed her course towards St. Louis. The Bishops and clergy made a kind of retreat on their Noah's ark. On the evening of Christmas day, the boat stopped near the farm of the widow Fenwick, a good Catholic, whom they were happy to visit. M. Badin continued his journey by land from this point, in order to be able to visit on the way many of his old friends, Catholic emigrants from Kentucky. The Bishops returned to the boat, where they found the comedians performing a play,--that is, engaged in a general fight among themselves,--until they were separated by the captain. At midnight, on the 30th, they arrived at St. Genevieve; and early next morning they sent a messenger to announce their coming to M. De Andreis. Two hours afterwards, "about thirty of the principal inhabitants came, with several young men on horseback and a carriage, to escort the Bishops into the town. We went to the presbytery to put on our pontifical robes: twenty-four choir-children with the cross at their head, and four citizens bearing a canopy, conducted us to the church, where after the installation of Bishop Dubourg, on a throne specially prepared for the purpose, we sang the _Te Deum_. The whole day was spent in receiving visits." On the first day of the year 1818, Bishop Dubourg celebrated Pontifical Mass at St. Genevieve. The journey was then continued to Prairie du Rocher and Cahokias to St. Louis, where the prelates arrived on the 5th. They were received with great pomp, in the best French style; and Bishop Dubourg was no sooner known than he was universally esteemed and beloved. He professed himself much pleased with the dispositions and sentiments of his new flock,--so different from what he had been led to expect. Bishop Flaget having now completed his mission, preached his farewell sermon to the Catholics of St. Louis on the feast of the Epiphany; and on the next day he turned his face homeward. He and M. Badin performed the journey on horseback, by the way of Kaskaskia and Vincennes. They were detained three days at the former place, not being able to cross the river in consequence of the running ice; and in traversing Illinois they passed three successive nights in the open air of the prairies. They reached Vincennes on the 27th of January; and after remaining here two weeks, attending to missionary duties, they continued their journey. On the 21st of February, the Bishop found himself once more at his retired and pleasant home in the seminary of St. Thomas. JOHN W. AUDUBON John Woodhouse Audubon, son of the great Audubon, was born at Henderson, Kentucky, November 30, 1812. At the time of his birth his father was ekeing out an existence in Henderson, with saw-mills and lumber ventures of various kinds, all of which finally failed. The nomadic life of the ornithologist was early forced upon his son. Their wanderings were chiefly confined to the country south of the Ohio river, and Louisiana. John Woodhouse Audubon was instructed by his mother in the useful field of learning; but from his father he learned to delineate birds and mammals, though it was the family's desire that he should become a portrait painter. He and his brother, Victor, who was three years his elder, were sent to school together, but, in 1826, they were separated, Victor becoming a clerk at Louisville, Kentucky, and John remaining in Louisiana with his mother, who was then conducting a school, while the father went to Europe to solicit subscriptions for his forthcoming _Birds of America_. John W. Audubon was at this time engaged in drawing from Nature, and in playing the violin, to which he was devoted throughout life. He was a clerk for a short time on a Mississippi river steamboat, but any kind of routine was distasteful to him, his whole life being absorbed in the study of birds and mammals. He accompanied his father on one of his European trips, and in England and Scotland he copied many of the masterpieces of the great painters. In 1863 the collection of new species demanded that father and son should go as far South as the Gulf of Mexico; and while passing through Charleston, South Carolina, the son met Maria Bachman, whom he married the following year. In 1840 the Audubon house near New York City was built, and there John W. Audubon spent the remaining years of his life. In 1849 he joined a California company to go to the gold fields, but he went not for gold but for new birds and mammals. He returned in the following year, and in 1851, his famous father died. The brothers were then occupied with the publication of _The Quadrupeds_, and the octavo edition of _The Birds of America_. In the summer of 1860 Victor Audubon died; and on February 21, 1862, his brother followed him into the silent country. John Woodhouse Audubon's forty-nine years were spent in collaborating with his father and brother, but his independent fame is founded upon the manuscript record of his 1849 journey from New York to California. This most interesting manuscript was edited by his daughter, Miss Maria R. Audubon, of Salem, New York, and published as _Audubon's Western Journal: 1849-1850_ (Cleveland, Ohio, 1906). A more charming book of travels, of Nature in many forms, would be difficult to name. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The several lives of the great Audubon contain much material for a study of his son. His daughter made an excellent sketch of him for her edition of his _Western Journal: 1849-1850_ (Cleveland, 1906). LOS ANGELES[8] [From Audubon's _Western Journal, 1849-1850_ (Cleveland, 1906)] This "city of the angels" is anything else, unless the angels are fallen ones. An antiquated, dilapidated air pervades all, but Americans are pouring in, and in a few years will make a beautiful place of it. It is well watered by a pretty little river, led off in irrigating ditches like those at San Antonio de Bexar. The whole town is surrounded to the south with very luxuriant vines, and the grapes are quite delightful; we parted from them with great regret, as fruit is such a luxury with us. Many of the men took bushels, and only paid small sums for them. TULARE VALLEY [From the same] One more day brought us to this great valley, and the view from the last hill looking to northwest was quite grand, stretching on one hand until lost in distance, and on the other the snowy mountains on the east of the Tulare valley. Here, for the first time, I saw the Lewis woodpecker, and Steller's jay in this country. I have seen many California vultures and a new hawk, with a white tail and red shoulders. During the dry season this great plain may be travelled on, but now numerous ponds and lakes exist, and the ground is in places, for miles, too boggy to ride over, so we were forced to skirt the hills. This compelled us sometimes to take three days when two should have been ample. Our journeys now are not more than twenty miles a day, and our nights are so penetrating and cold, that four blankets are not too many. CHRISTMAS IN 'FRISCO IN 1849 [From the same] Christmas Day! Happy Christmas! Merry Christmas! Not that here, to me at any rate, in this pandemonium of a city. Not a _lady_ to be seen, and the women, poor things, sad and silent, except when drunk or excited. The place full of gamblers, hundreds of them, and men of the lowest types, more blasphemous, and with less regard for God and his commands than all I have ever seen on the Mississippi, [in] New Orleans or Texas, which give us the same class to some extent, it is true; but instead of a few dozen, or a hundred, gaming at a time, here there are thousands, and one house alone pays one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per annum for the rent of the "Monte" tables. Sunday makes no difference, certainly not Christmas, except for a little more drunkenness, and a little extra effort on the part of the hotel keepers to take in more money. FOOTNOTE: [8] Copyright, 1905, by the Arthur H. Clark Company. ADRIEN E. ROUQUETTE Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette, Louisiana's most distinguished poet, was born at New Orleans, February 13, 1813, the scion of an old and honorable Creole family, and the brother of Francois Dominique Rouquette (1810-1890), who was also a poet of much merit. From his boyhood he had a great fancy for the American Indian, and among them he spent many of his early years. His academic training was begun at Transylvania University of Lexington, Kentucky, but as the old matriculation books have disappeared, it now seems quite impossible to definitely fix his period of residence. From Lexington Rouquette journeyed to Paris, France, where he studied at the Royal College and at Nantes and Remnes. He was graduated from Remnes, March 26, 1833, and at once returned to New Orleans. He had, however, developed into such an unconventional fellow his family decided that a law course in Paris was what he needed, so back to the capital of the French he went. He soon abandoned the law and again returned to New Orleans, where he took up his abode among the Indians. In 1841 Rouquette published his first and best book of poems, written wholly in French, entitled _Les Savanes_ (Paris and New Orleans). Nearly all of the poems were upon Louisiana subjects, save the finest one, _Souvenir de Kentucky_, an exquisite memorial of his Kentucky days, written in 1838. As he was partly educated in Kentucky and in praise of Kentucky wrote his masterpiece, this State has a double claim upon him which, though secondary to that of Louisiana, is none the less legitimate. In 1842 the poet began his studies for the priesthood, and three years later he was ordained and attached to the Catholic cathedral at New Orleans. His subsequent works include _Discours prononce a la Cathedral de Saint Louis_ (New Orleans, 1846); _Wild Flowers_ (New Orleans, 1848); _La Thebaide en Amerique_ (New Orleans, 1852); _L'Antoniade_ (New Orleans, 1860), a long poem in which a solitary life is extolled; _Poemes patriotiques_ (New Orleans, 1860); _St. Catherine Tegehkwitha_ (New Orleans, 1873); and, _La Nouvelle Atala_ (New Orleans, 1879). In 1859 the Abbé Rouquette established a mission for the Choctaw Indians on the Bayou Lacombe, to which work he gave the larger part of his life. Rouquette also turned into French the poems of Estelle Anna Lewis (1824-1880), the Baltimore woman whom Poe admired; and he edited _Selections from the Poets of all Countries_. The three great Louisiana writers, Rouquette, the poet, Fortier, the critic, and Gayarré, the historian, published pamphlets condemnatory of Mr. George W. Cable's conceptions of Creole life and history as set forth in his many books. The Abbé sent his out anonymously, entitled _Critical Dialogue between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book, or a Grandissime Ascension_, edited by E. Junius (Great Publishing House of Sam Slick Allspice, 12 Veracity street, Mingo City, 1880). From the Creole standpoint _The Grandissimes_ most probably deserved to be satirized, but not in the cheap and easy manner of this little pamphlet. It was a very unhappy swan-song of senility for the Abbé Rouquette. He died at New Orleans, July 15, 1887, lamented by his city and state. Sainte-Beuve, though recognizing the influence of Chateaubriand in Rouquette's work, praised him highly, as did many of the other famous French critics of his day and generation. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Cyclopaedia of American Literature_, by E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck (New York, 1856); _Louisiana Studies_, by Alcée Fortier (New Orleans, 1894); _Literature of the Louisiana Territory_, by A. N. DeMenil (St. Louis, 1904). SOUVENIR DE KENTUCKY [From _Les Savanes, Poésies Americaines_ (Paris, 1841)] Kentucky, the bloody land! * * * * * Le Seigneur dit à Osée: "Après cela, néanmoins, je l'attirerai doucement à moi, je l'amènerai dans la solitude, et je lui parlerai au coeur."--(_La Bible_ Osee). Enfant, je dis un soir: Adieu, ma bonne mère! Et je quittai gaîment sa maison et sa terre, Enfant, dans mon exil, une lettre, un matin, (O Louise!) m'apprit que j'étais orphelin! Enfant, je vis les bois du Kentucky sauvage, Et l'homme se souvient des bois de son jeune âge! Ah! dans le Kentucky les arbres sont bien beaux: C'est la _terre de sang_, aux indiens tombeaux, Terre aux belles forêts, aux séculaires chênes, Aux bois suivis de bois, aux magnifiques scènes; Imposant cimetière, où dorment en repos Tant de _rouges-tribus_ et tant de _blanches-peaux_; Où l'ombre du vieux Boon, immobile génie, Semble écouter, la nuit, l'éternelle harmonie, Le murmure êternel des immenses déserts, Ces mille bruits confus, ces mille bruits divers, Cet orgue des forêts, cet orchestre sublime, O Dieu! que seul tu fis, que seul ton souffle anime! Quand au vaste clavier pèse un seul de tes doigts, Soudain, roulent dans l'air mille flots à la fois: Soudain, au fond des bois, sonores basiliques, Bourdonne un océan de sauvages musiques; Et l'homme, à tous ces sons de l'orgue universel, L'homme tombe à genoux, en regardant le ciel! Il tombe, il croit, il prie; et, chrétien sans étude, Il retrouve, étonné, Dieu dans la solitude! A portion of this famous poem was translated by a writer in _The Southern Quarterly Review_ (July, 1854). Here, with its Indian tombs, the Bloody Land Spreads out:--majestic forests, secular oaks, Woods stretching into woods; a witching realm, Yet haunted with dread shadows;--a vast grave, Where, laid together in the sleep of death, Rest myriads of the red men and the pale. Here, the stern forest genius, veteran Boon, Still harbors: still he hearkens, as of yore, To never ceasing harmonies, that blend, At night, the murmurs of a thousand sounds, That rise and swell capricious, change yet rise, Borne from far wastes immense, whose mingling strains-- The forest organ's tones, the sylvan choir-- Thy breath alone, O God! can'st animate, Making it fruitful in the matchless space! Thy mighty fingers pressing on its keys, How suddenly the billowy tones roll up From the great temples of the solemn depths, Resounding through the immensity of wood To the grand gushing harmonies, that speak For thee, alone, O Father. As we hear The unanimous concert of this mighty chaunt, We bow before thee; eyes uplift to Heaven, We pray thee, and believe. A Christian sense Informs us, though untaught in Christian books Awed into worship, as we learn to know That thou, O God, art in the solitude! EMILY V. MASON Miss Emily Virginia Mason, biographer and anthologist, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, October 15, 1815, the sister of Stevens Thompson Mason, first governor of Michigan. She was educated in Kentucky schools and in a female seminary at Troy, New York. From 1845 until 1861 Miss Mason lived in Fairfax county, Virginia, but when the Civil War began she left her home and volunteered in the Confederate States hospital service; and she was matron successively of hospitals in the Virginia towns of Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Richmond. Miss Mason won a wide reputation in this work, becoming one of the best loved of Southern women. Almost immediately after the war her first literary work was published, an anthology of _The Southern Poems of the War_ (Baltimore, 1867) which was one of the first collection issued of verse which owed its origin to the war. Her second book was what she always said was the first life of Lee, though John Esten Cooke's account of the great soldier appeared about the same time, entitled _A Popular Life of General Robert Edward Lee_ (Baltimore, 1871). This was followed by her edition of _The Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia in 1798_ (1871), which enjoyed wide popularity among Virginians of her generation. Miss Mason went to Paris, France, about 1870, and for the following fifteen years she was associate principal of an American school for young women. Upon her return to this country she established herself in an attractive old Southern home at Georgetown, D. C., in which she spent the remainder of her life. Miss Mason's last literary work was _Memories of a Hospital Matron_, which appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for September and October of 1902. She was an able writer and a most remarkable woman in many respects. Miss Mason died at Georgetown, D. C., February 16, 1909, at the great age of ninety-four years. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Southern Writers_, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1905); _The Washington Post_ (February 17, 1909). THE DEATH OF LEE [From _A Popular Life of General Robert E. Lee_ (Baltimore, 1871)] On the evening of this day, 28th of September [1870] after a morning of great fatigue, he attended the vestry meeting referred to, returned home, and seated at the tea-table, opened his lips to give thanks to God. The family looked up to see the parted lips, but heard no sound. With that last thanksgiving his great heart broke. For many days his weeping friends hung over him, hoping for a return of health and reason, but in vain. He murmured of battles and sieges; of guarded tents and fields just won. Among his last words were: "Strike my tent! Send for Hill!" Remarkably coincident with those of his great lieutenant, Jackson, whose words were: "Let A. P. Hill prepare for action! March the infantry rapidly to the front! Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees." At 9 o'clock on the morning of the 12th of October, the great soldier breathed his last. The following day his body was borne to the college-chapel, escorted by a guard of honor composed of Confederate soldiers. Next the hearse was led General Lee's favorite horse "Traveller," who had borne him in so many battles. The Trustees and Faculty of the college, the cadets of the Military Institute, and the citizens, followed in procession. Above the chapel floated the flag of Virginia, draped in mourning. Through this and the succeeding day, the body, covered with flowers, lay in state, visited by thousands who came to look for the last time upon his noble features. On the 15th, the last said rites were rendered, amid the tolling of the bells, the sound of martial music, and the thundering of artillery. The students, officers and soldiers of the Confederate army, and about a thousand persons, assembled at the chapel. A military escort, with the officers of General Lee's staff, were in the front. The hearse followed, with the faithful "Traveller" close behind it. Next came a committee of the Virginia Legislature, with citizens from all parts of the State. Passing the Military Institute, the cadets made the military salute as the body appeared, then joined the procession, and escorted it back to the chapel. It had been the request of General Lee that no funeral oration should be pronounced over his remains. His old and long-tried friend, the Rev. Wm. N. Pendleton, simply read the burial services of the Episcopal Church, after which was lowered into a tomb beneath the chapel all that was mortal of Robert E. Lee. EDMUND FLAGG Edmund Flagg, traveler, journalist, and poet, was born at Wiscasset, Maine, November 24, 1815. Immediately upon his graduation from Bowdoin College, in 1835, he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and became a teacher. His letters written to the _Louisville Journal_ while traveling in the states of the Middle West, were afterwards collected, revised, and published anonymously, entitled _The Far West, or a Tour beyond the Mountains_ (New York, 1838, two vols.). This work has been edited by Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites and published as volumes 26 and 27 of _Early Western Travels_ (Cleveland, 1906). In 1839 Flagg became associate editor of the Louisville _Literary News-Letter_, of which George D. Prentice was editor. All of his poems of merit were published in the _Journal_, and _News-Letter_. Flagg contributed both prose and verse to the Louisville papers for nearly thirty-five years. Ill-health compelled him to abandon journalism for law, and at Vicksburg, Mississippi, he formed a partnership with the celebrated Sargent Smith Prentiss. Two years later he became editor of the _Gazette_ at Marietta, Ohio. Flagg's first two novels were issued about this time, entitled _Carrero_ (New York, 1842), and _Francois of Valois_ (New York, 1842). He was next editor of a publication at St. Louis; and in 1849 he was secretary of the American legation at Berlin. In 1850-1851 he was United States consul at Venice. He afterwards returned to St. Louis and to journalism. Two of his plays, _Blanche of Artois_, and _The Howard Queen_, were well received at Louisville, Cincinnati, and several other cities. In 1853 Flagg's _Venice, the City of the Sea_, appeared, and it won him a wide reputation. _North Italy since 1849_, issued some years later, resumed the story of Venice where his first work had left off, and brought it down to date. Flagg was afterwards connected with the State department in Washington, and under an order from Congress he prepared his famous _Report on the Commercial Relations of the United States with all Foreign Nations_ (Washington, 1856-1857, four vols.). His final work was a novel, _De Molai, the Last of the Military Templars_ (1888). Edmund Flagg died at Salem, Virginia, in 1890. He is most certainly a Kentucky poet, journalist, and traveler, but his fame as a dramatist, historian, and novelist belongs wholly to other states. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Literature of the Louisiana Territory_, by A. N. DeMenil (St. Louis, 1904); Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905). THE ANCIENT MOUNDS OF THE WEST [From _The Louisville Literary News-Letter_] Ages since--long ere the first son of the Old World had pressed the fresh soil of the New--long before the bright region beyond the blue waves had become the object of the philosopher's reverie by day, and the enthusiast's vision by night--in the deep stillness and solitude of an unpeopled land, these vast mausoleums rose as they now rise, in lonely grandeur from the plain and looked down even as now they look, upon the giant floods rolling their dark waters at their base, hurrying past them to the deep. So has it been with the massive tombs of Egypt, amid the sands and barrenness of the desert. For ages untold have the gloomy pyramids been reflected by the inundations of the Nile; an hundred generations, they tell us, have arisen from the cradle, and reposed beneath their shadows, and like autumn leaves have dropped into the grave; but, from the midnight of bygone centuries, comes forth no darting spirit to claim these kingly sepulchres as his own! And shall the dusky piles, on the plains of distant Egypt affect so deeply our reverence for the departed, and these mighty monuments, reposing in dark sublimity upon our own magnificent prairies, vailed in mystery more inscrutable than they, call forth no solitary throb? Is there no hallowing interest associated with these aged relics--these tombs, and temples, and towers' of another race, to elicit emotion? Are they indeed to us no more than the dull clods we tread upon? Why then does the wanderer from the far land gaze upon them with wonder and veneration? Why linger fondly around them, and meditate upon the power which reared them, and is departed? Why does the poet, the man of genius and fancy, or the philosopher of mind and nature, seat himself at their base, and with strange and undefined emotions, pause and ponder, amid the loneliness that slumbers around? And surely, if the far traveler, as he wanders through this Western Valley, may linger around these aged piles, and meditate upon a power departed--a race obliterated--an influence swept from the earth forever--and dwell with melancholy emotions upon the destiny of man, is it not meet, that those into whose keeping they seem by Providence consigned, should regard them with interest and emotion?--that they should gather up and preserve every incident relevant to their origin, design, or history, which may be attained, and avail themselves of every measure, which may give to them perpetuity, and hand them down, undisturbed in form or character, to other generations? That these venerable piles are of the workmanship of man's hand, no one, who with unprejudiced opinion has examined them, can doubt. But with such an admission, what is the cloud of reflections, which throng and startle the mind? What a series of unanswerable inquiries succeed! When were these enormous earth heaps reared up from the plain? By what race of beings was the vast undertaking accomplished? What was their purpose?--what changes in their form and magnitude have taken place?--what vicissitudes and revolutions have, in the lapse of centuries, rolled like successive waves over the plains at their base? As we reflect, we anxiously look around us for some tradition--some time-stained chronicle--some age-worn record--even the faintest and most unsatisfactory legend, upon which to repose our credulity, and relieve the inquiring solicitude of the mind. But our research is hopeless. The present race of Aborigines can tell nothing of these tumuli. To them as to us they are vailed in mystery. Ages since--long ere the white-face came--while this fair land was yet the home of his fathers--the simple Indian stood before the venerable earth-heap, and gazed, and wondered, and turned away. CATHERINE A. WARFIELD Mrs. Catherine Ann Warfield, poet and novelist, was born at Natchez, Mississippi, June 6, 1816, the daughter of Nathaniel H. Ware. She was educated at Philadelphia with her sister, Eleanor P. Ware Lee (1820-1849), with whom she afterwards collaborated in her first two volumes. Catherine Ware was married at Cincinnati, in 1833, to Robert Elisha Warfield, of Lexington, Kentucky, and Kentucky was her home henceforth. _The Wife of Leon, and Other Poems, by Two Sisters of the West_ (New York, 1844), and _The Indian Chamber, and Other Poems_ (New York, 1846) were the works of the sisters. In 1857 Mrs. Warfield removed from Lexington to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, near Louisville, and some three years later her masterpiece appeared, entitled _The Household of Bouverie_ (New York, 1860, two vols.). This work brought her into wide notice. During the Civil War Mrs. Warfield wrote some of the most spirited lyrics which that mighty conflict called forth. After the war she turned again to prose fiction, producing the following books: _The Romance of the Green Seal_ (1867); _Miriam Monfort_ (1873); _A Double Wedding_ (1875); _Hester Howard's Temptation_ (1875); _Lady Ernestine_ (1876); _Miriam's Memoirs_ (1876); _Sea and Shore_ (1876); _Ferne Fleming_ (1877); and her last novel, _The Cardinal's Daughter_ (1877). Mrs. Warfield died at Pewee Valley, Kentucky, May 21, 1877, at the time of her greatest popularity. Of her books _The Household of Bouverie_ is the only one that is generally known to-day, and is, perhaps, the only one that is at all readable and interesting. Mrs. Warfield was an early edition of "The Duchess" and Mary Jane Holmes, though she did write fine war lyrics and one good story, which is just a bit better than either of the other two women did. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Women of the South Distinguished in Literature_, by Mary Forrest (New York, 1861); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xii). CAMILLA BOUVERIE'S DIARY [From _The Household of Bouverie_ (New York, 1860, v. ii)] Another queer scene with little Paul, whose quaint ways divert and mystify me all the time. During Mr. Bouverie's absence of a week, I have nothing else to amuse me nor to write about. He has called me familiarly "Camilla" until now; but fearing that Mr. Bouverie might not like the appellation, or rather that it might make me appear too childish in his sight, I said to him recently: "Paul, you are a little fellow, and I am your guardian's wife. Don't you think it would sound better if you were to add a handle to my name, as common folks say? Call me 'Cousin Camilla' or 'Aunt Camilla,' whichever you prefer; which shall it be, Quintil?" "Neither," he replied, manfully, "for you are neither of those things to me, and I do not like to tell stories; but I will call you 'madam,' if you choose, as you are a 'madam;'" and something like a sneer wreathed his childish lips. "A foolish little madam, you think, Paul!" I rejoined, half in pique, half in playfulness. "Why that is the very name for you," he said, brightening with the thought. "'Little Madam!' I will call you so; but I will not put in the foolish," he added, gravely, "for, perhaps, you will change after a while and grow wiser." He spoke very seriously, sorrowfully almost, and I was quite provoked for a moment to be set down in this fashion, by such a mere babe and suckling. I was glad of the opportunity presented to me of snubbing him by noticing a streak of molasses on his cheek. "Go wash your face, Paul," I said, "it is dirty!" He walked gravely to the glass and surveyed the stain. "Looking glasses are useful things, after all," he said; "they tell the truth--see 'Little Madam,' how you are mistaken! my face is not dirty, only soiled; food is not dirt--if it were, we should all starve." He turned and smiled at me in his peculiar way, half mocking, half affectionate. "Yet, as you bid me," he added, "I will wash it off; but isn't it a pity to waste what would keep a bee alive a whole day!" Is this brat a humorist? He has brought out of his funny little trunk the oddest present for me! It is a Medusa's head admirably carved in alabaster, and was broken from the side of a vase by accident, and given to him by a lady, at whose house he made a visit with Mr. Bouverie. He considers it a priceless treasure. There is a vague horror to me in the face that is almost insupportable. The snaky hair, the sightless, glaring eyes, are so mysteriously dreadful. He says it will answer for a paper weight. No, Paul, I will lay it away out of sight forever. A PLEDGE TO LEE (Written for a Kentucky Company) [From _Southern Poems of the War_, edited by Emily V. Mason (Baltimore, 1867)] We pledge thee, Lee! In water or wine, In blood or in brine, What matter the sign? Whether brilliantly glowing, Or darkly overflowing, So the cup is divine That we fill to thee! Vanquished--victorious, Gloomy or glorious, Fainting and bleeding, Advancing, receding, Lingering or leading, Captive or free; With swords raised on high, With hearts nerved to die, Or to grasp victory; Hand to hand--knee to knee, With a wild three times three We pledge thee, Lee! We pledge thee, chief: In the name of our nation, Her wide devastation, Her sore desolation, Her grandeur and grief! Where'er thou warrest When our need is the sorest, Or in Fortress or forest, Bidest thy time; Thou--Heaven elected, Thou--Angel-protected, Thou--Brother selected, What e'er thy fate be, Our trust is in thee, And our faith is sublime. With swords raised on high, With hearts nerved to die, Or to grasp victory; Hand to hand--knee to knee, With a wild three times three, We pledge thee, Lee! J. ROSS BROWNE John Ross Browne, humorist and traveler, was born in Ireland, in 1817, but when an infant his father came to America and settled at Louisville, Kentucky. Browne was educated in the Louisville schools, and studied medicine for a time under several well-known physicians. When eighteen years old he went to New Orleans; and this journey kindled his passion for travel that ended only with his death. Browne took the whole world for his home. He first went almost around the globe on a whaling vessel, and on his return to this country, he published his first book, called _Etchings of a Whaling Cruise_ (New York, 1846). Browne was private secretary for Robert J. Walker, Secretary of the Treasury, for a time, but, in 1849, he went to California as a government commissioner; and in 1851 he went to Europe as a newspaper correspondent. A tour of Palestine is described in Browne's most famous book, _Yusef, or the Journey of the Frangi_ (New York, 1853). He shortly afterwards returned to the United States and became an inspector of customs on the Pacific coast; but the year of 1861 found him again in Europe, residing at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Browne's next work was _Crusoe's Island_ (New York, 1864). His family's residence in Germany resulted in the author publishing _An American Family in Germany_ (New York, 1866), one of his most delightful volumes. Browne's travels in northern Europe are described in _The Land of Thor_ (New York, 1867). He now returned to America and made his home in California. He investigated the mineral resources of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and his report was issued as _Resources of the Pacific Slope_ (1869). _Adventures in the Apache Country_ (1869), was his last book. Browne was appointed United States Minister to China on March 11, 1868, but he was recalled sixteen months later. He died at Oakland, California, December 9, 1875. Most of his volumes are very cleverly illustrated with his own comical sketches of characters and scenes. That J. Ross Browne was a man of very considerable ability in several directions admits of no argument. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. i); _National Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1900, v. viii). LAPDOGS IN GERMANY [From _An American Family in Germany_ (New York, 1866)] One of the most remarkable sights is the dog-fancier--a strapping six-foot dandy, leading after him, with silken strings, a whole brood of nasty little poodles. This fellow is a type of the class; you meet them everywhere at every Continental city. There are thousands of them in Frankfort, men strangely infatuated on the subject of little dogs. Now pardon me if I devote some serious reflections to this extraordinary and unreasonable propensity, which, I fear, is rapidly taking root in the hearts of the American people, especially the female portion of our population. In men it is often excusable; they may be driven to it by unrequited affection. I never see a fine-looking fellow leading a gang of little poodle-dogs after him, that I don't imagine he has had some dreadful experience in the line of true love; but with the opposite sex the case is quite different. "If women have one weakness more marked than another," says Mrs. Beecher Stowe, in a very eloquent passage of the "Minister's Wooing," "it is toward veneration. They are born worshippers--makers of silver shrines for some divinity or other, which, of course, they always think fell straight down from heaven." And, in illustration of this very just remark, she refers to instances where celebrated preachers and divines have stood like the image that Nebuchadnezzar the king set up, "and all womankind, coquettes and flirts not excepted, have been ready to fall down and worship, even before the sound of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, and so forth," where the most gifted and accomplished of the sex "have turned away from the flattery of admirers, to prostrate themselves at the feet of a genuine hero, who never moved them except by heroic deeds and the rhetoric of a noble life"--a most striking and beautiful trait in woman's character to which all homage should be rendered. She clingeth unto man, even as the ivy clingeth unto the oak. But does anybody pretend to tell me that man is always the lucky recipient of this devotion? Alas, no! Not always for him is it that women are burdened with this load of "fealty, faith, and reverence more than they know what to do with;" not always for him is it that "They stand like a hedge of sweet peas, throwing out fluttering tendrils everywhere for something high and strong to climb by." Alas! man is but a cipher among the objects of woman's heroic devotion. I have a lady in my eye who from early youth has bestowed the tenderest affections of her heart upon poll-parrots; another, who for years has wept over the woes of a little chicken; who would abandon her midnight slumber to minister to the afflictions of a lame turkey, and insensible to the appeals of her lover, only relax in her severity when moved by the plaintive mewing of a cat; another, who, in the bosom of her family, and tenderly adored by her husband, has long since yielded to the fascinating allurement of a sewing-machine, and wrapped around its cogwheels, cotton spools, and hammering needles the poetry of a romantic attachment; and, lastly, the particular case in point, at which I marvel most of all, three most bewitching young ladies, of acknowledged beauty, who are hopelessly and irrevocably gone in love with--what do you think? Not a man, erect and noble, with the brow of Jove and eye of Mars; not even a horse, the paragon of beautiful and intelligent animals, or a lion, the king of the forest; but a miserable, dirty, nasty, little lapdog; a snappish, foul-eyed inodorous, sneaking little brute, which even the very cats hold in contempt! And yet they love it; at least they say so, and I have no reason to dispute their word. Have I not heard them, morning, noon, and night, protest their devotion to the dear little Fidel--the precious, beautiful little Fidel--the adorable love of a little Fidel! Oh, it is enough to make the angels weep to see the grace and fondness with which this horrid little wretch is caught up in those tender white arms, and hugged to those virgin bosoms and kissed by those pouting and honeyed lips! Faugh! It drives me mad. What is the use of wasting so much sweetness when there are thousands of good, honest fellows actually pining away from unrequited affection? brave sons of toil, ready at a moment's notice to be caressed by these sweet-pea vines, who are throwing out their fluttering tendrils for something high and strong to cling to. I leave it to any honest miner, if it is not provoking to the last degree to see the noblest capacity of woman's nature thus cruelly and wastefully perverted--the choicest affections devoted to a miserable, disgusting, and unsympathizing little monster--the very honey of their lips lavished on that foul and mucous nose, which, if it knows anything, must know some thing not fit to be mentioned to polite ears. Heaven! how often have I longed to have a good fair kick at one of these pampered little brutes. Only think of the care taken of them, while widows and orphans are shivering in the cold and perishing of hunger. The choicest pieces of meat cut up for them, potatoes and gravy mixed, delicate morsels of bread; the savory mess put before them by delicate hands, and swallowed into their delicate stomachs, and too often rejected by those delicate organs, to the detriment of the carpet. And then, when this delectable subject of woman's adoration is rubbed, and scrubbed, and pitied, and physicked, and thoroughly combed out from head to foot, with every love-lock of his glossy hair filtered of its fleas, how tenderly he is laid upon the bed or clasped in the embraces of beauty! Shade of Cupid! what a happy thing it is to be a lapdog! Well might the immortal Bard of Avon prefer to be a dog that bayed the moon rather than an indifferent poet. For my part, I'd sooner be wrapped in the arms of beauty than be King of the Cannibal Islands. That strange infatuation of feminine instinct which lends to the head-dress, at an approaching bridal, a degree of importance to which the expected groom can never aspire; which sees the destinies of the whole matrimonial career centred in the fringe of a nightgown; which seeks advice and consolation in the pattern of a reception-dress; which would shrink from the fearful sacrifice of liberty but for the magic power of new bonnets, new gloves, and embroidered handkerchiefs--that we can all understand; these are woman's coy devices to tantalize mankind; these are the probationary tortures inflicted upon him through mere wantonness and love of mischief. But when the richest treasures of her affection, the most divine essence of her being, the Promethean spark warm from her virgin heart, for which worlds are lost and won--when these are cast away upon a nauseous little lapdog, ye gods! what can poor mortals do but abandon their humanity! It is shocking to think of such competition, but how can we help it if young ladies give themselves up to dog worship? I sincerely trust this Continental fashion may never take root in California. Should it do so, farewell all hope for the honest sons of toil; it will then be the greatest of good fortunes to be born a lapdog! ROB MORRIS Robert Morris, who is generally bracketed with Albert Pike as the most distinguished writer and craftsman American Masonry has produced, was born near Boston, Massachusetts, August 31, 1818. He was made a Mason in Mississippi, in 1846, and this was the beginning of a Masonic career almost without parallel in the history of the fraternity. Morris, of course, received all of the higher degrees in Masonry, but the most momentous thing he did as a craftsman was to establish the Order of the Eastern Star in 1850--the year he became a Kentuckian. In September, 1854, while living in southern Kentucky, Morris wrote his most celebrated poem, entitled _The Level and the Square_, which was first published in his magazine, _The American Freemason_, of Louisville, Kentucky. Rudyard Kipling lifted a line from it for his equally famous poem, _The Mother Lodge_. Although Morris revised his lines many times, the original version is far and away the finest. In 1858 he was elected Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Kentucky; and two years later he removed his residence to La Grange, Kentucky, the little town with which his fame is intertwined. Morris wrote several well-known religious songs, _Sweet Galilee_, being the best of them. He was the author of many books upon Masonry, his _Lights and Shadows of Freemasonry_ (Louisville, 1852), being the first work in Masonic belles-lettres. This was followed by his _History of the Morgan Affair_ (New York, 1852); _Life in the Triangle_ (1853); _The Two Saints John_ (1854); _Code of Masonic Law_ (Louisville, 1855), the pioneer work on Masonic jurisprudence; _Masonic Book of American Adoptive Rights_ (1855); _History of Freemasonry in Kentucky_ (Frankfort, 1859), his most important historical work; _Synopsis of Masonic Laws_ (1859); _Tales of Masonic Life_ (1860); _Masonic Odes and Poems_ (New York, 1864); _Biography of Eli Bruce_ (1867); _Dictionary of Freemasonry_ (1872); _Manual of the Queen of the South_ (1876); _Knights Templar's Trumpet_ (1880); _Freemasonry in the Holy Land_ (New York, 1882), an excellent work; _The Poetry of Freemasonry_ (New York, 1884), upon the publication of which, the author was invited to New York City and crowned "The Poet Laureate of Freemasonry," December 17, 1884; and, _Magnum Opus_ (1886). Morris was one of the foremost numismatics of his day and generation in America, his works on this science being _The Twelve Caesars_, and _Numismatic Pilot_. He was also the author of several works designed especially for the officers of a Masonic lodge; and he edited in thirty volumes _The Universal Masonic Library_, besides editing from time to time four Masonic magazines. Rob Morris, to give him the name by which he is best known, died at La Grange, Kentucky, July 31, 1888. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iv). THE LEVEL AND THE SQUARE [From _The American Freemason_ (Louisville, Kentucky, September 15, 1854)] We meet upon the Level and we part upon the Square: What words of precious meaning those words Masonic are! Come let us contemplate them, they are worthy of our thought-- With the highest and the lowest, and the rarest they are fraught. We meet upon the Level, though from every station come-- The King from out his palace and the poor man from his home; For the one must leave his diadem without the Mason's door, And the other finds his true respect upon the checkered floor. We part upon the Square for the world must have its due; We mingle with its multitude, a cold, unfriendly crew; But the influence of our gatherings in memory is green, And we long, upon the Level, to renew the happy scene. There's a world where all are equal--we are hurrying towards it fast-- We shall meet upon the Level there when the gates of death are passed; We shall stand before the Orient, and our Master will be there To try the blocks we offer His unerring square. We shall meet upon the Level there, but never thence depart: There's a mansion--'tis all ready for each zealous, faithful heart:-- There's a Mansion and a welcome, and a multitude is there, Who have met upon the Level and been tried upon the Square. Let us meet upon the Level, then, while laboring patient here-- Let us meet and let us labor tho' the labor seem severe; Already in the western sky the signs bid us prepare, To gather up our working tools and part upon the square. Hands around, ye faithful Ghiblimites, the bright, fraternal chain, We part upon the Square below to meet in heaven again;-- Oh, what words of precious meaning those words Masonic are-- We meet upon the Level and we part upon the Square. AMELIA B. WELBY Mrs. Amelia B. Welby, Kentucky's most famous female poet of the mid-century, was born at St. Michael's, Maryland, February 3, 1819. When she was fifteen years old her family removed to Louisville, Kentucky, the city of her fame. In 1837, George D. Prentice, with his wonderful nose for finding female verse-makers, added Amelia to his already long and ever-increasing list. He printed her first poem in his _Journal_, and crowned her as the finest branch of his poetical tree. His declaration that she possessed the divine afflatus meant nothing, as he had said the same thing about many another sentimental single lady, pining upon the peaks of poesy. But Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus W. Griswold soon separated her from the versifiers and placed her among the poets, and thus her fame has come down to us with fragrance. In June, 1838, Amelia was married to George Welby, a Louisville merchant, who also held her to be a poet born in the purple. Mrs. Welby's verse became well-known and greatly admired in many parts of the country, and, in response to numerous requests for a volume of her work, she collected her _Journal_ verse and published it under the title of _Poems by Amelia_ (Boston, 1845). A second edition was published the following year, and by 1860 the volume was said to be in its seventeenth edition! Robert W. Weir's illustrated edition of her poems was issued in 1850, and this is the most desirable form in which her work has been preserved. These various editions will at once convey some idea of her great popularity. With Poe, Prentice, and Griswold singing her praises, and the public purchasing her poems as rapidly as they could be made into books, Amelia's fame seemed secure. To-day, however, no one has read any of her verse save _The Rainbow_, which has been set down as her best poem, and she has become essentially an historical personage, the keepsake of Kentucky letters. While the greater number of her poems are quite unreadable, her elegy for Miss Laura M. Thurston, a sister versifier, is well done and her finest piece of work. Mrs. Welby died at Louisville, May 3, 1852, when but thirty-three years of age. Had she lived longer, and the poetic appreciation of the American people suffered no change, the heights to which she would have attained can be but vaguely guessed at. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Female Poets of America_, by R. W. Griswold (Philadelphia, 1856); _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, 1860). THE RAINBOW [From _Poems by Amelia_ (Boston, 1845)] I sometimes have thoughts, in my loneliest hours, That lie on my heart like the dew on the flowers, Of a ramble I took one bright afternoon When my heart was as light as a blossom in June; The green earth was moist with the late fallen showers, The breeze fluttered down and blew open the flowers, While a single white cloud, to its haven of rest On the white-wing of peace, floated off in the west. As I threw back my tresses to catch the cool breeze, That scattered the rain-drops and dimpled the seas, Far up the blue sky a fair rainbow unrolled Its soft-tinted pinions of purple and gold. 'Twas born in a moment, yet, quick as its birth It had stretched to the uttermost ends of the earth, And, fair, as an angel, it floated as free, With a wing on the earth and a wing on the sea. How calm was the ocean! how gentle its swell! Like a woman's soft bosom it rose and it fell; While its light sparkling waves, stealing laughingly o'er, When they saw the fair rainbow, knelt down on the shore. No sweet hymn ascended, no murmur of prayer, Yet I felt that the spirit of worship was there, And bent my young head, in devotion and love, 'Neath the form of the angel, that floated above. How wide was the sweep of its beautiful wings! How boundless its circle! how radiant its rings! If I looked on the sky, 'twas suspended in air; If I looked on the ocean, the rainbow was there; Thus forming a girdle, as brilliant and whole As the thoughts of the rainbow, that circled my soul. Like the wing of the Deity, calmly unfurled, It bent from the cloud and encircled the world. There are moments, I think, when the spirit receives Whole volumes of thought on its unwritten leaves, When the folds of the heart in a moment unclose Like the innermost leaves from the heart of a rose. And thus, when the rainbow had passed from the sky, The thoughts it awoke were too deep to pass by; It left my full soul, like the wing of a dove, All fluttering with pleasure, and fluttering with love. I know that each moment of rapture or pain But shortens the links in life's mystical chain; I know that my form, like that bow from the wave, Must pass from the earth, and lie cold in the grave; Yet O! when death's shadows my bosom encloud, When I shrink at the thought of the coffin and shroud, May Hope, like the rainbow, my spirit enfold In her beautiful pinions of purple and gold. ON THE DEATH OF A SISTER POET [From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)] She has passed, like a bird, from the minstrel throng, She has gone to the land where the lovely belong! Her place is hush'd by her lover's side, Yet his heart is full of his fair young bride; The hopes of his spirit are crushed and bowed As he thinks of his love in her long white shroud; For the fragrant sighs of her perfumed breath Were kissed from her lips by his rival--Death. Cold is her bosom, her thin white arms All mutely crossed o'er its icy charms, As she lies, like a statue of Grecian art, With a marbled brow and a cold hushed heart; Her locks are bright, but their gloss is hid; Her eye is sunken 'neath its waxen lid: And thus she lies in her narrow hall-- Our fair young minstrel--the loved of all. Light as a bird's were her springing feet, Her heart as joyous, her song as sweet; Yet never again shall that heart be stirred With its glad wild songs like a singing bird: Ne'er again shall the strains be sung, That in sweetness dropped from her silver tongue; The music is o'er, and Death's cold dart Hath broken the spell of that free, glad heart. Often at eve, when the breeze is still, And the moon floats up by the distant hill, As I wander alone 'mid the summer bowers, And wreathe my locks with the sweet wild flowers, I will think of the time when she lingered there, With her mild blue eyes and her long fair hair; I will treasure her name in my bosom-core; But my heart is sad--I can sing no more. CHARLES W. WEBBER Charles Wilkins Webber, the foremost Kentucky writer of prose fiction and adventure of the old school, was born at Russellville, Kentucky, May 29, 1819, the son of Dr. Augustine Webber, a noted Kentucky physician. In 1838 young Webber went to Texas where he was with the Rangers for several years. He later returned to Kentucky and studied medicine at Transylvania University, Lexington, which he soon abandoned for a brief course at Princeton Theological Seminary, with the idea of entering the Presbyterian ministry. A short time afterwards, however, he settled at New York as a literary man. Webber was connected with several newspapers and periodicals, being associate editor of _The Whig Review_ for about two years. His first book, called _Old Hicks, the Guide_ (New York, 1848) was followed by _The Gold Mines of the_ _Gila_ (New York, 1849, two vols.). In 1849 Webber organized an expedition to the Colorado country, but it utterly failed. Several of his other books were now published: _The Hunter-Naturalist_ (Philadelphia, 1851); _Tales of the Southern Border_ (1852; 1853); _Texas Virago_ (1852); _Wild Girl of Nebraska_ (1852); _Spiritual Vampirism_ (Philadelphia, 1853); _Jack Long, or the Shot in the Eye_ (London, 1853), his masterpiece; _Adventures with Texas Rifle Rangers_ (London, 1853); _Wild Scenes in the Forest and Prairie_ (London, 1854); and his last book, _History of Mystery_ (Philadelphia, 1855). In 1855 Webber joined William Walker's expedition to Central America, and in the battle of Rivas, he was mortally wounded. He died at Nicaragua, April 11, 1856, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. Webber's career is almost as interesting as his stories. In fact, he put so much of his life into his works that all of them may be said to be largely autobiographical. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Cyclopaedia of American Literature_, by E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck (New York, 1856); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. vi). TROUTING ON JESSUP'S RIVER [From _Wild Scenes in the Forest and Prairie, or the Romance of Natural History_ (London, 1854)] "The Bridge" at Jessup's River is well known to sportsmen; and to this point we made our first flyfishing expedition. The eyes of Piscator glistened at the thought, and early was he busied with hasty fingers through an hour of ardent preparation amongst his varied and complicated tackle. Now was his time for triumph. In all the ruder sports in which we had heretofore been engaged, I, assisted by mere chance, had been most successful; but now the infallible certainty of skill and science were to be demonstrated in himself, and the orthodoxy of flies vindicated to my unsophisticated sense. The simple preparations were early completed; the cooking apparatus, which was primitive enough to suit the taste of an ascetic, consisted in a single frying-pan. The blankets, with the guns, ammunition, rods, etc., were all disposed in the wagon of our host, which stood ready at the door. It was a rough affair, with stiff wooden springs, like all those of the country, and suited to the mountainous roads they are intended to traverse, rather than for civilized ideas of comfort. We, however, bounded into the low-backed seat; and if it had been cushioned to suit royalty, we could not have been more secure than we were of such comfort as a backwood sportsman looks for. We soon found ourselves rumbling, pitching, and jolting, over a road even worse than that which brought us first to the lake. It seemed to me that nothing but the surprising docility of the ponies which drew us, could have saved us, strong wagon and all, from being jolted to atoms. I soon got tired of this, and sprang out with my gun, determined to foot it ahead, in the hope of seeing a partridge or red squirrel. We arrived at the "bridge" about the middle of the afternoon. There we found an old field called Wilcox's clearing, and, like all places I had seen in this fine grazing region, it was still well sodded down in blue grass and clover. Our luggage having been deposited in the shantee, consisting almost entirely of boards torn from the old house, which were leaned against the sides of two forks placed a few feet apart, we set off at once for the falls, a short distance above. This was merely an initial trial, to obtain enough for dinner, and find the prognostics of the next day's sport in feeling the manner of the fish. At the falls the river is only about fifteen feet wide, though its average width is from twenty-five to thirty. The water tumbles over a ledge of about ten feet, at the bottom of which is a fine hole, while on the surface sheets of foam are whirled round and round upon the tormented eddies, for the stream has considerable volume and power. We stepped cautiously along the ledge, Piscator ahead, and holding his flies ready for a cast, which was most artistically made, not without a glance of triumph at me, then preparing to do the same with the humble angle-worm. The "flies" fall--I see the glance of half a dozen golden sides darting at them; but by this time my own cast is made, and I am fully occupied with the struggles of a fine trout. My companion's success was again far short of mine, and seeing him looking at my trout lying beside me, I said: "Try the worms, good Piscator--here they are. This is not the right time of day for them to take the flies in this river, I judge." Improving the door of escape thus opened to him, he took off the flies and used worms with immediate and brilliant success, which brought back the smile to his face; and he would now and then as calmly brush away the distracting swarm of flies from his face, as if they had been mere innocent motes. But later that evening came a temporary triumph for Piscator. The hole at the falls was soon exhausted, and we moved down to glean the ripples. It was nearly sunset, and here the pertinacious Piscator determined to try the flies again. He cast with three, and instantly struck two half-pound trout, which, after a spirited play, he safely landed. Rarely have I seen a prouder look of triumph than that which glowed on his face as he bade me "look there!" when he landed them. "Very fine, Piscator--a capital feat! but I fear it was an accident. You will not get any more that way." "We shall see, sir," said he, and commenced whipping the water again, but to no avail, while I continued throwing them out with great rapidity. I abstained from watching him, for I had no desire to spoil his evening sport by taunting him to continue his experiment. I soon observed him throwing out the fish with great spirit again. I merely shouted to him across the stream--"the angle-worm once more, Piscator?" "Yes!" with a laugh. As the sun went down the black gnats began to make themselves felt in their smarting myriads, and we forthwith beat a hasty retreat to the shantee. We had taken about ten pounds of trout; and the first procedure, after reaching the camp, was to build a "smudge," or smoke-fire, to drive away these abominable gnats, which fortunately take flight with the first whiff of smoke, and the next was to prepare the fish for dinner, though not till all had been carefully dressed by the guide, and placed in the cold current of the little spring near, that they might keep sound. Now came the rousing fire, and soon some splendid trout were piled upon dishes of fresh pealed elm bark before us. They were very skillfully cooked, and no epicure ever enjoyed a feast more thoroughly than we did our well-flavored and delicious trout, in that rude shantee. The feast being over, then to recline back upon the fresh couch of soft spruce boughs, and, with a cigar in mouth, watch the gathering night-shades brooding lower and more low upon the thick wild forest in front, far into the depths of which the leaping flames of our crackling fire go, darting now and then with a revealing tongue of quick light, and listening to the owl make hoarse answer to the wolf afar off--to think of wild passages in a life of adventure years ago amidst surroundings such as this; with the additional spice of peril from savages and treacherous foes, and then, as the hushed life subsides into a stiller mood, see the faces of loved ones come to you through the darkness, with a smile from out your distant home, and while it sinks sweetly on your heart, subside into happy and dream-peopled slumber! "This is bliss!" the bliss of the shantee to the wearied sportsman! a bliss unattainable by the toiler, and still more by the lounger of the city. We were on foot with the sun next morning, and after another feast, which we appreciated with unpalled appetites, we set off for some deep spring holes nearly a mile above the falls. The morning set cloudy, and rain fell piteously for several hours. But if this change detracted from our sport, it at least served to give zest to the evening's shelter and repose. I never felt more delightfully than I did when I sat down to a fine dinner that evening in the old tavern, and very much of this pleasurable feeling of entire comfort I attributed to the prompt use of the cold bath, on reaching our temporary home, wet, weary, and shivering with cold. This, with a change of clothes, restored me to a healthy glow of warmth, ready to enjoy whatever our host might provide. DR. L. J. FRAZEE Dr. Lewis Jacob Frazee, author of a little volume of travels of considerable charm, was born at Germantown, Kentucky, August 23, 1819. He was prepared for college at the Maysville Academy, celebrated as the school at which young U. S. Grant spent one year. He was graduated from Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky, in the class of 1837; and four years later he graduated in the medical department of the University of Louisville. On April 9, 1844, Dr. Frazee left Maysville, Kentucky, for a long sojourn in Europe, spending most of his time in Paris studying subjects then untaught in this country. He also visited England and the continent before returning home. These travels Dr. Frazee related in a book of nearly three hundred pages, entitled _The Medical Student in Europe_ (Maysville, Kentucky, 1849), which is now an exceedingly rare work. The style is natural and clear and exhibits genuine literary flavor. He settled at Louisville in 1851. His only other publication was _The Mineral Waters of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1872), a brochure. Dr. Frazee took a keen interest in the Filson Club of Louisville, and one of his finest papers was read before that organization: _An Analysis of the Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie_. He was sometime professor in the medical school of the University of Louisville, and in the Kentucky School of Medicine; and he edited _The Transylvania Medical Journal_ for several years. Old age found the good doctor surrendering his practice and professorships to establish the Louisville Dental Depot, designed to furnish the local dentists with supplies. He died at Louisville, Kentucky, August 12, 1905, eleven days before his eighty-sixth birthday. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (Louisville, Kentucky, August 13, 1905); letters from Dr. Thos. E. Pickett, the Maysville historian, to the present writer. HAVRE [From _The Medical Student in Europe_ (Maysville, Kentucky, 1849)] Havre is a place of about 25,000 inhabitants, has fine docks, which are accessible in high tide, and a considerable amount of shipping. Many of the streets are narrow and crooked, with narrow sidewalks and in many cases none at all. The houses are stuccoed, and generally present rather a sombre aspect. Three-fourths of the women we saw in Havre wore no bonnets, but simply a cap. Some of them were mounted upon donkeys, with a large market basket swung down each side of the animal; these of course were the peasants. My attention was attracted by the large sumpter horses here, which draw singly from eight to ten bales of cotton, apparently with considerable ease. On the day after we arrived at Havre we ascended the hill which rises at one extremity of the city. The various little winding pathways up the hill, have on each side massive stone walls, with now and then a gateway leading to a private residence almost buried in a thicket of shrubbery and flowers. Upon the hill are situated some most delightful and elegant mansions, with grounds beautifully ornamented with shade trees, shrubbery, flowers and handsome walks. These salubrious retreats have a double charm when compared with the thronged, narrow, and noisy streets of the city below. Beyond these _Villas_ were fields of grass and grain undivided by fences, with here and there a farm house surrounded by a clump of trees. In Havre we found delightful cherries and strawberries, as well as a variety of vegetables; the oysters and fish here though in abundance are of rather an inferior quality, the oysters are very small and of a decided copperish taste. At breakfast, which we took at any hour in the morning that we thought proper, we ordered such articles as suited our fancy, generally however a cup of coffee, a beef steak, eggs, an omelet or something of this sort. We dined about five in the evening upon soups, a variety of meats and vegetables, well prepared, and a dessert of strawberries and other fruits, nuts, etc. The meats and vegetables were not placed upon the table, but each dish was passed around separately--the table being cleared and clean plates placed for each course. We were compelled to eat slowly or wait for some time upon others. This would not suit one of our western men who is for doing everything in a minute, but the plan certainly has its advantages--one, of promoting digestion by giving time for the mastication of the food, and another, of no small moment for an epicure, that of having things fresh from the oven. My own objection to the plan was, that I never knew how much of an article to eat, as I did not know what would next be introduced. Such an objection fails, of course, in many of the hotels where the bill of fare is stereotyped, and where with more precision than an almanac-maker you can foretell every change that will take place during the ensuing year. Our table was well supplied with wine, which is used as regularly at dinner as milk by our Kentucky farmers. When our bill was made out, each item was charged separately, so much for breakfast, mentioning what it consisted of--so much for dinner--so much per day for a room, so much for each candle we used, and so on. A French landlord in making out your bill goes decidedly into minutiae. THEODORE O'HARA Theodore O'Hara, author of the greatest martial elegy in American literature, was born at Danville, Kentucky, February 11, 1820. He was the son of Kane O'Hara, an Irish political exile, and a noted educator in his day and generation. O'Hara's boyhood days were spent at Danville, but his family settled at Frankfort when he was a young man. He was fitted for college by his father, and his preparation was so far advanced that he was enabled to join the senior class of St. Joseph's College, a Roman Catholic institution at Bardstown, Kentucky. Upon his graduation O'Hara was offered the chair of Greek, but he declined it in order to study law. In 1845 he held a position in the United States Treasury department at Washington; and a few years later he proved himself a gallant soldier upon battlefields in Mexico, being brevetted major for meritorious service. After the war O'Hara practiced law at Washington for some time; and he went to Cuba with the Lopez expedition of 1850. After his return to the United States he edited the Mobile, Alabama, _Register_ for a time; and he was later editor of the Frankfort, Kentucky, _Yeoman_. O'Hara was a public speaker of great ability, and his address upon William Taylor Barry, the Kentucky statesman and diplomat, is one of the climaxes of Southern oratory. During the Civil War he was colonel of the twelfth Alabama regiment. After the war Colonel O'Hara went to Columbus, Georgia, and became a cotton broker. He died near Guerrytown, Alabama, June 6, 1867. Seven years later his dust was returned to Kentucky, and re-interred in the State cemetery at Frankfort. If collected Colonel O'Hara's poems, addresses, political and literary essays, and editorials would make an imposing volume. His real fame rests upon his famous martial elegy, _The Bivouac of the Dead_, which he wrote at Frankfort in the summer of 1847, to remember young Henry Clay, Colonel McKee, Captain Willis, and the other brave fellows who fell in the war with Mexico. When their remains were returned to Frankfort and buried in the cemetery on the hill, Colonel O'Hara, their old companion in arms, wrote his stately in memoriam for them. He did not read it over them, as Ranck and the others have written, but he did publish it in _The Kentucky Yeoman_, a Democratic paper of Frankfort. _The Bivouac of the Dead_ is the greatest single poem ever written by a Kentucky hand, is matchless, superb, and is read in the remotest corners of the world. Its opening lines have been cut deep within memorial shafts in many military cemeteries. Colonel O'Hara sleeps to-day on the outer circle of his comrades, one with them in death as in life, with the lofty military monument, which Kentucky has erected to commemorate her sons slain in the battles of the republic, casting its long shadows across his grave. His elegy in honor of Daniel Boone was written at the "old pioneer's" grave in the Frankfort cemetery before his now much-mutilated monument was erected. It was originally printed in _The Kentucky Yeoman_ for December 19, 1850. Two other poems purporting to be his have been discovered, but there must be others sealed over and forgotten in the scattered and broken files of Southern newspapers and periodicals. So the poet has come down to us, like he who wrote _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, with one slender sheaf under his arm. But it is enough, enough for both of them. BIBLIOGRAPHY. George W. Ranck's little books: _O'Hara and His Elegies_ (Baltimore, 1875); _The Bivouac of the Dead and Its Author_ (1898; 1909); Daniel E. O'Sullivan's paper in _The Southern Bivouac_ (Louisville, January, 1887); Robert Burns Wilson's fine tribute in _The Century Magazine_ (May, 1890). The late Mrs. Susan B. Dixon, the Henderson historian, left a MS. life of O'Hara that is to be issued shortly. THE BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD [From _O'Hara and His Elegies_, by George W. Ranck (Baltimore, 1875)] The muffled drum's sad roll has beat The soldier's last tattoo; No more on life's parade shall meet The brave and daring few. On Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards with solemn round The bivouac of the dead. No answer of the foe's advance Now swells upon the wind; No troubled thought at midnight haunts Of loved ones left behind; No vision of the morrow's strife The warrior's dream alarms; No braying horn nor screaming fife At dawn shall call to arms. Their shivered swords are red with rust; Their plumed heads are bowed; Their haughty banner, trailed in dust, Is now their martial shroud; And plenteous funeral-tears have washed The red stains from each brow, And their proud forms, in battle gashed, Are free from anguish now. The neighing steed, the flashing blade, The trumpet's stirring blast; The charge, the dreadful cannonade, The din and shout, are past; No war's wild note, nor glory's peal, Shall thrill with fierce delight Those breasts that nevermore shall feel The rapture of the fight. Like the dread northern hurricane That sweeps his broad plateau, Flushed with the triumph yet to gain, Came down the serried foe.[9] Our heroes felt the shock, and leapt To meet them on the plain; And long the pitying sky hath wept Above our gallant slain. Sons of our consecrated ground Ye must not slumber there, Where stranger steps and tongues resound Along the headless air. Your own proud land's heroic soil Shall be your fitter grave: She claims from war his richest spoil-- The ashes of her brave. So 'neath their parent turf they rest; Far from the gory field; Borne to a Spartan mother's breast On many a bloody shield. The sunshine of their native sky Smiles sadly on them here, And kindred hearts and eyes watch by The heroes' sepulchre. Rest on, embalmed and sainted dead! Dear as the blood you gave, No impious footsteps here shall tread The herbage of your grave; Nor shall your glory be forgot While fame her record keeps, Or honor points the hallowed spot Where valor proudly sleeps. Yon marble minstrel's voiceless tone In deathless songs shall tell, When many a vanquished age hath flown, The story how ye fell. Nor wreck, nor change, or winter's blight, Nor time's remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of holy light That gilds your glorious tomb. THE OLD PIONEER [From the same] A dirge for the brave old pioneer! Knight-errant of the wood! Calmly beneath the green sod here He rests from field and flood; The war-whoop and the panther's screams No more his soul shall rouse, For well the aged hunter dreams Beside his good old spouse. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! Hushed now his rifle's peal; The dews of many a vanish'd year Are on his rusted steel; His horn and pouch lie mouldering Upon the cabin-door; The elk rests by the salted spring, Nor flees the fierce wild boar. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! Old Druid of the West! His offering was the fleet wild deer, His shrine the mountain's crest. Within his wildwood temple's space An empire's towers nod, Where erst, alone of all his race, He knelt to Nature's God. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! Columbus of the land! Who guided freedom's proud career Beyond the conquer'd strand; And gave her pilgrim sons a home No monarch's step profanes, Free as the chainless winds that roam Upon its boundless plains. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! The muffled drum resound! A warrior is slumb'ring here Beneath his battle-ground. For not alone with beast of prey The bloody strife he waged, Foremost where'er the deadly fray Of savage combat raged. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! A dirge for his old spouse! For her who blest his forest cheer, And kept his birchen house. Now soundly by her chieftain may The brave old dame sleep on, The red man's step is far away, The wolf's dread howl is gone. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! His pilgrimage is done; He hunts no more the grizzly bear About the setting sun. Weary at last of chase and life, He laid him here to rest, Nor recks he now what sport or strife Would tempt him further west. A dirge for the brave old pioneer! The patriarch of his tribe! He sleeps--no pompous pile marks where, No lines his deeds describe. They raised no stone above him here, Nor carved his deathless name-- An empire is his sepulchre, His epitaph is Fame. SECOND LOVE [From _The Southern Bivouac_ (Louisville, Kentucky, January, 1887)] Thou art not my first love, I loved before we met, And the memory of that early dream Will linger round me yet; But thou, thou art my last love, The truest and the best. My heart but shed its early leaves To give thee all the rest. A ROLLICKING RHYME [From the same] I'd lie for her, I'd sigh for her, I'd drink the river dry for her-- But d----d if I would die for her. THE FAME OF WILLIAM T. BARRY [From _Obituary Addresses_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, 1855)] On his accession to the Presidency, General Jackson--with that discerning appreciation of the most available ability and worth in his party which characterized him--called Mr. Barry into his cabinet to the position of Postmaster General. Here, as one of the most distinguished of the council of Jackson, during the greater part of his incumbency, he is entitled to his full share of the fame of that glorious administration. His health, however, failing him under the wasting labors of the toilsome department over which he presided, he was forced to relinquish it before the administration terminated; and General Jackson, unwilling entirely to lose the benefit of his able services, appointed him, in 1835, Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Spain, a post in which, while its dignity did not disparage his civil rank, it was hoped that the lightness of the duties, and the influence of a genial climate, might serve to renovate his impaired health. But it was otherwise ordained above. He had reached Liverpool on the way to his mission, when the great conqueror, at whose summons the strongest manhood, the noblest virtue, the proudest genius, and the brightest wisdom must surrender, arrested his earthly career on the 30th of August, 1835; and here is all that is left to us of the patriot, the orator, the hero, the statesman, the sage--the rest belongs to Heaven and to fame. Such, fellow-citizens, is a most cursory and feeble memento of the life and public services of the illustrious man in whose memory Kentucky has decreed the solemn honors of this day. It is well for her that she has felt "the late remorse of love," and reclaimed these precious ashes to her heart, after they have slumbered so many years unsepultured in a foreign land; that no guilty consciousness of unworthy neglect may weigh upon her spirit, and depress her proud front with shame; that no reproaching echo of that eloquent voice that once so sweetly thrilled her, pealing back upon her soul amidst her prideful recollections of the past, may appal her in her feast of memory, and blast her revel of glory; that no avenging muse, standing among the shrines of her departed greatness, and searching in vain for that which should mark her remembrance of one she should so devoutly hallow, shall have reason to sing of her as she has sung: "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar; And Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore." Here, beneath the sunshine of the land he loved, and amid the scenes which he consecrated with his genius, he will sleep well. Sadly, yet proudly will his fond foster-mother receive within her bosom to-day this cherished remnant of the child she nursed for fame; doubly endeared to her, as he expired far away in a stranger land, beyond the reach of her maternal embrace, and with no kindred eyes to light the gathering darkness of death, no friendly hand to soften his descent to the grave, no pious orisons to speed his spirit on its long journey through eternity. Gently, reverently let us lay him in this proud tabernacle, where he will dwell embalmed in glory till the last trump shall reveal him to us all radiant with the halo of his life. Let the Autumn's wind harp on the dropping leaves her softest requiem over him; let the Winter's purest snows rest spotless on his grave; let Spring entwine her brightest garland for his tomb, and Summer gild it with her mildest sunshine. Here let the marble minstrel rise to sing to the future generations of the Commonwealth the inspiring lay of his high genius and his lofty deeds. Here let the patriot repair when doubts and dangers may encompass him, and he would learn the path of duty and of safety--an oracle will inhabit these sacred graves, whose responses will replenish him with wisdom, and point him the way to virtuous renown. Let the ingenuous youth who pants for the glories of the forum, and "the applause of listening Senates," come hither to tune his soul by those immortal echoes that will forever breathe about this spot and make its silence vocal with eloquence. And here, too, let the soldier of liberty come, when the insolent invader may profane the sanctuary of freedom--here by this holy altar may he fitly devote to the infernal gods the enemies of this country and of liberty. We will now leave our departed patriot to his sleep of glory. And let no tear moisten the turf that shall wrap his ashes. Let no sound of mourning disturb the majestic solitude of his grand repose. He claims no tribute of sorrow. His body returns to its mother earth, his spirit dwells in the Elysian domain of God, and his deeds are written on the roll of Fame. "Let none dare mourn for him." FOOTNOTES: [9] Some versions show the following stanzas at this point: Who heard the thunder of the fray Break o'er the field beneath, Knew well the watchword of that day Was "Victory or Death." Long had the doubtful conflict raged O'er all that stricken plain, For never fiercer fight had waged The vengeful blood of Spain; And still the storm of battle blew, Still swelled the gory tide; Not long, our stout old chieftain[10] knew, Such odds his strength could bide. 'Twas in that hour his stern command Called to a martyr's grave The flower of his beloved land, The nation's flag to save. By rivers of their fathers' gore His first-born laurels grew, And well he deemed the sons would pour Their lives for glory too. Full many a norther's breath has swept O'er Angostura's plain,[11] And long the pitying sky has wept Above its mouldered slain. The raven's scream, or eagle's flight, Or shepherd's pensive lay, Alone awakes each sullen height That frowned o'er that dread fray. Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground, Ye must not slumber there, et cetera. [10] Gen. Zachary Taylor. [11] Near Buena Vista. SARAH T. BOLTON Mrs. Sarah Tittle Bolton, author of _Paddle Your Own Canoe_, was born at Newport, Kentucky, in 1820. When she was about three years old, her father removed to Indiana, settling first in Jennings county, but later moving on to Madison. When a young woman, she contributed poems to the Madison newspaper which attracted the editor, Nathaniel Bolton, so strongly that he married the author. They moved to Indianapolis, and Mrs. Bolton soon gained a wide reputation as a poet. Her ode sung at the laying of the corner-stone of the Masonic Temple, in 1850, won her a loving cup from the Masons of Hoosierdom. Two years later her poem in honor of the hero of Hungary, Louis Kossuth, increased her fame. In 1855 Mr. Bolton was appointed consul to Geneva, Switzerland, and his wife accompanied him to his post. They remained in Switzerland for three years, during which time Mrs. Bolton acted as correspondent for the Cincinnati _Commercial_. In 1858 she and her husband returned to Indianapolis, in which city he died some months later. Her _Poems_ (New York, 1856) brought her newspaper and periodical verse together; and a complete collection, with a notice of her life, was published at Indianapolis in 1886. Mrs. Bolton was Indiana's foremost female singer for many years. She died at Indianapolis in 1893. Of her many poems _Paddle Your Own Canoe_ is the best known, although _Left on the Battlefield_ is admired by many of her readers. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, 1860); _The Hoosiers_, by Meredith Nicholson (New York, 1900). PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE [From _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, edited by W. T. Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860)] Voyager upon life's sea, To yourself be true, And where'er your lot may be, Paddle your own canoe. Never, though the winds may rave, Falter nor look back; But upon the darkest wave Leave a shining track. Nobly dare the wildest storm, Stem the hardest gale, Brave of heart and strong of arm, You will never fail. When the world is cold and dark, Keep an aim in view; And toward the beacon-mark Paddle your own canoe. Every wave that bears you on To the silent shore, From its sunny source has gone To return no more. Then let not an hour's delay Cheat you of your due; But, while it is called to-day, Paddle your own canoe. If your birth denies you wealth, Lofty state and power, Honest fame and hardy health Are a better dower. But if these will not suffice, Golden gain pursue; And to gain the glittering prize, Paddle your own canoe. Would you wrest the wreath of fame From the hand of fate? Would you write a deathless name With the good and great? Would you bless your fellow-men? Heart and soul imbue With the holy task, and then Paddle your own canoe. Would you crush the tyrant wrong, In the world's free fight? With a spirit brave and strong, Battle for the right. And to break the chains that bind The many to the few-- To enfranchise slavish mind-- Paddle your own canoe. Nothing great is lightly won, Nothing won is lost; Every good deed, nobly done, Will repay the cost. Leave to Heaven, in humble trust, All you will to do; But if you succeed, you must Paddle your own canoe. JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE John Cabell Breckinridge, the youngest of the American vice-presidents, distinguished as a public speaker, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, January 21, 1821. He was educated at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and then studied law at Transylvania University. Breckinridge lived at Burlington, Iowa, for a year, when he returned to Lexington, Kentucky, to practice law. He served in the Mexican War, and was afterwards a member of Congress. In 1856, when he was about thirty-five years of age, he was elected vice-president of the United States, with James Buchanan as president. In 1860 Breckinridge was the candidate of the Southern slaveholders for the presidency, but Abraham Lincoln received 180 electoral votes to his 72, Kentucky failing to support him. He took his seat in the United States Senate in March, 1861, as the successor of John J. Crittenden, and he at once became the champion of the Southern Confederacy in that body. He was expelled from the Senate on December 4, 1861, on which occasion he delivered his farewell address. Breckinridge then went South. He was appointed a major-general, and he saw service at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, Nashville, and in several other great battles. From January to April, 1865, General Breckinridge was Jefferson Davis's secretary of war. When the Confederacy surrendered, he made his escape to Europe, where he remained for three years, when he returned to Lexington and to his law practice. General Breckinridge died at Lexington, Kentucky, May 17, 1875. Ten years later an imposing statue was erected to his memory on Cheapside, Lexington. He was a man of most attractive personality, an eloquent orator, a capable advocate, a brave soldier, an honest public servant, the greatest member of the house of Breckinridge. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Library of Oratory_ (New York, 1902, v. x); J. C. S. Blackburn's oration upon Breckinridge; _McClure's Magazine_ (January, 1901). For many years Col. J. Stoddard Johnston has been engaged upon a life of Breckinridge. HENRY CLAY [From _Obituary Addresses on the Occasion of the Death of the Hon. Henry Clay_ (Washington, 1852)] Imperishably associated as his name has been for fifty years with every great event affecting the fortunes of our country, it is difficult to realize that he is indeed gone forever. It is difficult to feel that we shall see no more his noble form within these walls--that we shall hear no more his patriot tones, now rousing his countrymen to vindicate their rights against a foreign foe, now imploring them to preserve concord among themselves. We shall see him no more. The memory and fruits of his services alone remain to us. Amidst the general gloom, the Capitol itself looks desolate, as if the genius of the place had departed. Already the intelligence has reached almost every quarter of the Republic, and a great people mourn with us to-day, the death of their most illustrious citizen. Sympathizing as we do deeply with his family and friends, yet private affliction is absorbed in the general sorrow. The spectacle of a whole community lamenting the loss of a great man, is far more touching than any manifestation of private grief. In speaking of a loss which is national, I will not attempt to describe the universal burst of grief with which Kentucky will receive these tidings. The attempt would be vain to depict the gloom that will cover her people, when they know that the pillar of fire is removed, which has guided their footsteps for the life of a generation. * * * * * The life of Mr. Clay, sir, is a striking example of the abiding fame which surely awaits the direct and candid statesman. The entire absence of equivocation or disguise, in all his acts, was his master-key to the popular heart; for while the people will forgive the errors of a bold and open nature, he sins past forgiveness who deliberately deceives them. Hence Mr. Clay, though often defeated in his measures of policy, always secured the respect of his opponents without losing the confidence of his friends. He never paltered in a double cause. The country was never in doubt as to his opinions or his purposes. In all the contests of his time, his position on great public questions was as clear as the sun in a cloudless sky. Sir, standing by the grave of this great man, and considering these things, how contemptible does appear the mere legerdemain of politics! What a reproach is his life on that false policy which would trifle with a great and upright people! If I were to write his epitaph, I would inscribe, as the highest eulogy, on the stone which shall mark his resting-place, "Here lies a man who was in the public service for fifty years, and never attempted to deceive his countrymen." While the youth of America should imitate his noble qualities, they may take courage from his career, and note the high proof it affords that, under our equal institutions, the avenues of honour are open to all. Mr. Clay rose by the force of his own genius, unaided by power, patronage, or wealth. At an age when our young men are usually advanced to the higher schools of learning, provided only with the rudiments of an English education, he turned his steps to the West, and amid the rude collisions of a border-life, matured a character whose highest exhibitions were destined to mark eras in his country's history. Beginning on the frontiers of American civilization, the orphan boy, supported only by the consciousness of his own powers, and by the confidence of the people, surmounted all the barriers of adverse fortune, and won a glorious name in the annals of his country. Let the generous youth, fired with honorable ambition, remember that the American system of government offers on every hand bounties to merit. If, like Clay, orphanage, obscurity, poverty, shall oppress him; yet if, like Clay, he feels the Promethean spark within, let him remember that his country, like a generous mother, extends her arms to welcome and to cherish every one of her children whose genius and worth may promote her prosperity or increase her renown. Mr. Speaker, the signs of woe around us, and the general voice announce that another great man has fallen. Our consolation is that he was not taken in the vigour of his manhood, but sank into the grave at the close of a long and illustrious career. The great statesmen who have filled the largest space in the public eye, one by one are passing away. Of the three great leaders of the Senate, one alone remains, and he must follow soon. We shall witness no more their intellectual struggles in the American Forum; but the monuments of their genius will be cherished as the common property of the people, and their names will continue to confer dignity and renown upon their country. Not less illustrious than the greatest of these will be the name of Clay--a name pronounced with pride by Americans in every quarter of the globe; a name to be remembered while history shall record the struggles of modern Greece for freedom, or the spirit of liberty burn in the South American bosom; a living and immortal name--a name that would descend to posterity without the aid of letters, borne by tradition from generation to generation. Every memorial of such a man will possess a meaning and a value to his countrymen. His tomb will be a hallowed spot. Great memories will cluster there, and his countrymen, as they visit it, may well exclaim-- "Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines, Shrines to no creed or code confined; The Delphian vales, the Palestines, The Meccas of the mind." JAMES WEIR, Sr. James Weir, Senior, an early Kentucky romancer, was born at Greenville, Kentucky, June 16, 1821. He was the son of James Weir, a Scotch-Irish merchant and quasi-author. He was graduated from Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, in 1840, and later studied law at Transylvania University. He engaged in the practice of law at Owensboro, Kentucky--first known as the Yellow Banks--and on March 1, 1842, he was married to Susan C. Green, daughter of Judge John C. Green of Danville. Weir wrote a trilogy of novels which do not deserve the obscurity into which they have fallen. They were called _Lonz Powers, or the Regulators_ (Philadelphia, 1850, two vols.); _Simon Kenton, or the Scout's Revenge_ (Philadelphia, 1852); and _The Winter Lodge, or Vow Fulfilled_ (Philadelphia, 1854). All of these romances were thrown upon historical backgrounds, and they created much favorable criticism at the time of their publication. Weir wrote numerous sketches and verses, but these were his only published books. Business, bar sufficient to all literary labors, pressed hard upon him, and he practically abandoned literature. In 1869 he was elected president of the Owensboro and Russellville railroad; and for nearly forty years he was president of the Deposit bank at Owensboro. Weir died at Owensboro, Kentucky, January 31, 1906. His son, Dr. James Weir, Junior, was an author of considerable reputation. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); letters of Mr. Paul Weir to the Author. SIMON KENTON [From _Simon Kenton; or, The Scout's Revenge_ (Philadelphia, 1852)] By the side of the Sergeant [Duffe, in whose North Carolina home the tale opens] sat a stout, powerfully framed, and wild-looking being, whose visage, though none of the whitest (for it was very unfashionably sunburnt), betokened an Anglo-Saxon; whilst his dress and equipments went far to proclaim him a savage; and, had it not been for his language (though none of the purest), it would have been somewhat difficult to settle upon his race! In a court of justice, especially in the South, where color is considered _prima facie_ evidence of slavery, we wouldn't have given much for his chance of freedom. Simon Kenton, or Sharp-Eye, for such were the titles given him by his parents, and by his border companions, and he answered readily to them both, in his dress and appearance, presented a striking picture of the daring half savage characters everywhere to be found at that day (and, indeed, at the present time) upon our extreme western frontier. A contemporary of Boone, and one of the most skillful and determined scouts of Kentucky, or the "Cane-Land," as it was then sometimes called, Kenton's dress, composed of a flowing hunting-shirt of tanned buckskin, with pants, or rather leggins, of the same material--a broad belt, buckled tight around his waist, supporting a tomahawk and hunting-knife--a gay pair of worked moccasins, with a capacious shot-pouch swung around his neck and ornamented with long tufts of black hair, resembling very much, as in truth they were, the scalp-locks of the western Indian, gave him a decidedly savage appearance, and declared at once his very recent return from a dangerous life upon the frontier. He had been a fellow-soldier of Duffe during the Revolution; but, after the war, being of an adventurous and daring disposition, had wandered out West, where he had already become famous in the many bloody border frays between the savage and early settler, and was considered second, in skill and cool bravery, to no scout of the "Dark and Bloody Ground." On a visit to the Old States, as they were called at that period to distinguish them from the more recent settlements in the West, Kenton was sojourning, for the time, with his old friend and companion in arms, not without a hope that, by his glowing descriptions of the flowing savannas beyond the Blue Ridge, and of the wild freedom of a frontier life, he might induce the latter to bear him company upon his return to Kentucky. Six feet two inches in his moccasins, with a well-knit sinewy frame to match his great height, and with a broad, full, and open face, tanned and swarthy, it is true, yet pleasant and bright, with a quiet, good-humored smile and lighted up by a deep-blue eye, and with heavy masses of auburn hair, and whiskers sweeping carelessly around and about his countenance, Kenton exhibited in his person, as he sat before the fire of the Sergeant, a splendid specimen of the genuine borderer, and no wonder the Indian brave trembled at the redoubted name of Sharp-Eye, and instinctively shrank from a contest with so formidable a foe. Although, now surrounded by friends, and in the house of an old comrade, the scout, as was natural with him from long custom, still held grasped in his ready hand the barrel of his trusty rifle, from which he never parted, not even when he slept, and, at the same time, kept his ears wide awake to all suspicious sounds, as if yet in the land of the enemy, and momentarily expecting the wild yell of his accustomed foe. Notwithstanding he was well skilled in every species of woodcraft, an adept at following the trail of the wild beasts of the forest, and familiar with all the cunning tricks of the wily savage; yet, strange as it may appear, he was the most credulous of men, and as simple as a child in what is generally termed the "ways of the world," or, in other words, the tortuous windings of policy and hypocrisy, so often met with under the garb of civilization. Indeed, it has been said of him "that his confidence in man, and his credulity were such that the same man might cheat him twenty times; and, if he professed friendship, he might cheat him still!" At the feet of the scout lay the inseparable companion of all his journeyings, his dog; and Bang, for such was the name of this prime favorite, was as rough a specimen of the canine species as his master's countenance was of the face divine! But Bang was, nevertheless, a very knowing dog, and, ever and anon, now as his master became excited in his descriptions of western scenes and adventures, he would raise his head and look intelligently at the narrator, and so wisely did he wag his shaggy tail, that more than once the warm-hearted hunter, breaking off suddenly in his narrative, would pat his trusty comrade upon the head, and swear, with a hearty emphasis, "that Bang knew all about it!" MARY E. W. BETTS Mrs. Mary E. Wilson Betts, the author of a single lyric which has preserved her name, was born at Maysville, Kentucky, in January, 1824. Miss Wilson was educated in the schools of her native town, and, on July 10, 1854, she was married to Morgan L. Betts, editor of the _Detroit Times_. She died at Maysville two months later, or on September 19, 1854, of congestion of the brain, believed to have been caused by the great gunpowder explosion near Maysville on August 13, 1854. Mrs. Betts's husband died in the following October. While she wrote many poems, her brief tribute to Col. William Logan Crittenden, kinsman of John J. Crittenden, who was a member of Lopez's filibustering expedition to Cuba, in 1850, has preserved her name for the present generation. Colonel Crittenden was captured by the Cubans, shot, and his brains beaten out. Before the shots were fired he was requested to kneel, but he made his now famous reply: "A Kentuckian kneels to none except his God, and always dies facing his enemy!" When, in her far-away Kentucky home, Mrs. Betts learned of Crittenden's fate, she wrote her tribute to the memory of the gallant son of Kentucky, which was first printed in the _Maysville Flag_. The editor introduced the little poem thus: "The lines which follow are from one of Kentucky's most gifted daughters of song. Upon gentler themes the tones of her lyre have oft been heard to breathe their music. To sing to the warrior, its cords have ne'er been strung till now; the tragic death, and last eloquent words of the gallant Crittenden, have caused this tribute to his memory." This poem has been republished many times and in various forms. During the Spanish-American war in 1898 it was often seen in print as being typical of the courage of the soldiers of this country. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lopez's Expeditions to Cuba_, by A. C. Quisenberry (Louisville, 1906); _Kentuckians in History and Literature_, by J. W. Townsend (New York, 1907). A KENTUCKIAN KNEELS TO NONE BUT GOD! [From _The Maysville Flag_] Ah! tyrants, forge your chains at will-- Nay! gall this flesh of mine: Yet, thought is free, unfettered still, And will not yield to thine! Take, take the life that Heaven gave, And let my heart's blood stain thy sod; But know ye not Kentucky's brave Will kneel to none but God! You've quenched fair freedom's sunny light, Her music tones have stilled, And with a deep and darkened blight, The trusting heart has filled! Then do you think that I will kneel Where such as you have trod? Nay! point your cold and threatening steel-- I'll kneel to none but God! As summer breezes lightly rest Upon a quiet river, And gently on its sleeping breast The moonbeams softly quiver-- Sweet thoughts of home light up my brow When goaded with the rod; Yet, these cannot unman me now-- I'll kneel to none but God! And tho' a sad and mournful tone Is coldly sweeping by; And dreams of bliss forever flown Have dimmed with tears mine eye-- Yet, mine's a heart unyielding still-- Heap on my breast the clod; I'll kneel to none but God! My soaring spirit scorns thy will-- REUBEN T. DURRETT Reuben Thomas Durrett, founder of the Filson Club and editor of its publications, was born near Eminence, Kentucky, January 22, 1824. He was graduated from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1849. The following year he began the practice of law at Louisville, and for the next thirty years he was one of the leaders of the Louisville bar. He was editor of the _Louisville Courier_ from 1857 to 1859, and throughout his long life he has been a contributor of historical essays to the Louisville press. Colonel Durrett was imprisoned for his Southern sympathies during the Civil War, and for this reason he saw little service. In 1871 he founded the Public Library of Louisville; and in 1884 he organized the now well-known Filson Club, which meets monthly in his magnificent library--the greatest collection of Kentuckiana in the world. While his library has never been catalogued, he must possess at least thirty thousand books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and newspaper files. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Dr. Robert M. McElroy, and many other historical investigators have made important "finds" in Colonel Durrett's library. He has one of the six extant copies of the first edition of John Filson's _History of Kentucke_; and he has the copy of Dean Swift's _Gulliver's Travels_, which Neely, the pioneer, read to Daniel Boone on Lulbegrub Creek, near Winchester, Kentucky, in 1770, as they sat around the evening camp fire. The Filson club was founded to increase the interest then taken in historical subjects in Kentucky, and to issue an annual publication. That this purpose has been well carried out may be seen by the twenty-six handsome and valuable monographs which have appeared.[12] The Club's first book was Colonel Durrett's _The Life and Writings of John Filson, the first historian of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1884). This work brought Filson into world-wide notice and revived an interest in his precious little history. _An Historical Sketch of St. Paul's Church, Louisville_ (Louisville, 1889); _The Centenary of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1892); _The Centenary of Louisville_ (Louisville, 1893); _Bryant's Station_ (Louisville, 1897); and _Traditions of the Earliest Visits of Foreigners to North America_ (Louisville, 1908), all of which are Filson Club publications, comprise Colonel Durrett's work in book form. This distinguished gentleman and writer resides at Louisville, where he keeps the open door for any who would come and partake of the wisdom of himself and of his books. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Memorial History of Louisville_, by J. S. Johnston (Chicago, 1896); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. iv). LA SALLE: DISCOVERER OF LOUISVILLE[13] [From _The Centenary of Louisville_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1893)] In the year 1808, while digging the foundation of the great flouring mill of the Tarascons in that part of Louisville known as Shippingport, it became necessary to remove a large sycamore tree, the trunk of which was six feet in diameter, and the roots of which penetrated the earth for forty feet around. Under the center of the trunk of this tree was found an iron hatchet, which was so guarded by the base and roots that no human hand could have placed it there after the tree grew. It must have occupied the spot where it was found when the tree began to grow. The hatchet was made by bending a flat bar of iron around a cylinder until the two ends met, and then welding them together and hammering them to a cutting edge, leaving a round hole at the bend for a handle. The annulations of this tree were two hundred in number, thus showing it to be two hundred years old according to the then mode of computation. Here was a find which proved to be a never-ending puzzle to the early scientists of the Falls of the Ohio. The annulations of this tree made it two hundred years old, and so fixed the date earlier than any white man or user of iron was known to have been at the falls. One thought that Moscoso, the successor of De Soto, in his wanderings up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, might have entered the Ohio and left the hatchet there in 1542; another, that it might have come from the Spaniards who settled St. Augustine in 1565; another, that the Spaniards who went up the Ohio in 1669 in search of silver might have left it where it was found; and another, that Marquette, when he discovered the Upper Mississippi in 1673, or La Salle, when he sailed down to its mouth in 1682, might have given the hatchet to an Indian, who left it at the Falls. But from these reasonable conjectures their learning and imagination soon led these savants into the wildest theories and conjectures. One thought that the Northmen, whom the Sagas of Sturleson made discoverers of America in the eleventh century, had brought the hatchet to this country; another, that Prince Madoc, who left a principality in Wales in the twelfth century for a home in the western wilderness, might have brought it here; and another, that it might have been brought here by those ancient Europeans whom Diodorus and Pausanius and other classical writers assure us were in communication with this country in ancient times. One of these learned ethnologists finally went so far as to advance the theory of the Egyptian priests, as related by Plato, that the autochthons of our race brought it here before the Island of Atlantis, lying between Europe and America, went down in the ocean and cut off all further communication between the continents. This hatchet, however, really furnished no occasion for such strained conjectures and wild speculations. If the sycamore under which it was found was two hundred years old, as indicated by its annulations, it must have begun to grow about the time that Jamestown in Virginia and Quebec in Canada were founded. It would have been no unreasonable act for an Indian or white man to have brought this hatchet from the English on the James, or from the French on the St. Lawrence, to the Falls of the Ohio in 1608, just two hundred years before it was discovered by removing the tree that grew over it. The known habit of the sycamore, however, to make more than one annulation in years particularly favorable to growth suggests that two hundred annulations do not necessarily mean that many years. If we allow about fifty per cent of the life of the tree to have been during years exceptionally favorable to its growth, and assign double annulations to these favorable years, we shall have this tree to have made its two hundred annulations in about one hundred and thirty-nine years, and to have sprung from its seed and to have begun its growth about the year 1669 or 1670, when La Salle, the great French explorer, is believed to have been at the Falls of the Ohio. We have no account of any one at the Falls in 1608, or about this time, to support the conjecture that it might have come from Jamestown or Quebec; but we have La Salle at this place in 1669 or 1670, and it is not unreasonable that he should have left it here at that time. In this sense the old rusty hatchet, which is fortunately preserved, becomes interesting to us all for its connection with the discovery of Louisville. It is a souvenir of the first white man who ever saw the Falls of the Ohio. It is a memento of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, the discoverer of the site of the city of Louisville. FOOTNOTES: [12] A complete list of the club's publications is: _John Filson_, by R. T. Durrett (1884); _The Wilderness Road_, by Thomas Speed (1886); _The Pioneer Press of Kentucky_, by W. H. Perrin (1888); _Life and Times of Judge Caleb Wallace_, by W. H. Whitsitt (1888); _An Historical Sketch of St. Paul's Church_, by R. T. Durrett (1889); _The Political Beginnings of Kentucky_, by J. M. Brown (1889); _The Centenary of Kentucky_, by R. T. Durrett (1892); _The Centenary of Louisville_, by R. T. Durrett (1893); _The Political Club of Danville, Kentucky_, by Thomas Speed (1894); _The Life and Writings of Rafinesque_, by R. E. Call (1895); _Transylvania University_, by Dr. Robert Peter (1896); _Bryant's Station_, by R. T. Durrett (1897); _The First Explorations of Kentucky_, by J. S. Johnston (1898); _The Clay Family_, by Z. F. Smith and Mrs. Mary R. Clay (1899); _The Battle of Tippecanoe_, by Alfred Pirtle (1900); _Boonesborough_, by G. W. Ranck (1901); _The Old Masters of the Bluegrass_, by S. W. Price (1902); _The Battle of the Thames_, by B. H. Young (1903); _The Battle of New Orleans_, by Z. F. Smith (1904); _History of the Medical Department of Transylvania University_, by Dr. Robert Peter (1905); _Lopez's Expeditions to Cuba_, by A. C. Quisenberry (1906); _The Quest for a Lost Race_, by Dr. T. E. Pickett (1907); _Traditions of the Earliest Visits of Foreigners to North America_, by R. T. Durrett (1908); _Sketches of Two Distinguished Kentuckians_, by J. W. Townsend and S. W. Price (1909); _The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky_, by B. H. Young (1910); _The Kentucky Mountains_, by Miss Mary Verhoeff (1911). No publication was issued in 1912. [13] Copyright, 1893, by the Filson Club. RICHARD H. COLLINS Richard Henry Collins, whom Mr. James Lane Allen has happily christened "the Kentucky Froissart," was born at Maysville, Kentucky, May 4, 1824, over the office of _The Eagle_. He was the son of Lewis Collins (1797-1870), who published a history of Kentucky in 1847. Richard H. Collins was a Cincinnati lawyer for eleven years, but he lived many years at Maysville, where he edited the old _Eagle_, which his father had made famous. In 1861 he founded the _Danville Review_; and in 1874 he published a "revised, enlarged four-fold, and brought down to the year 1874" edition, in two enormous volumes, of his father's history of Kentucky. Unquestionably this is a work of tremendous importance, the most magnificent and elaborate history of this or any other State yet compiled. Traveling the whole State over, obtaining contributions from each town's ablest writer, and then building them upon his father's fine foundation, Collins was able to publish an almost invaluable work. To-day his history of Kentucky, though it certainly contains many errors of various kinds and degrees, is the greatest mine of our State's history which all must explore if they would be informed of our people's past. Dean Shaler and all later Kentucky historical writers have taken pleasure in paying tribute to his work. The one mistake that Collins made, which might have been easily avoided, was to put his manuscripts together in such a manner that the authorship of the various papers cannot be determined; but in this he followed his father's methods; and for this reason the writer has been compelled to reproduce the prefaces of both books, rather than portions of the actual text, for fear he may use matter prepared by a contributor. Collins practiced law in different Kentucky towns, wrote for newspapers and magazines, and spent a very busy and rather active life. He died at the home of his daughter at Maryville, Missouri, on New Year's Day of 1888. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by Z. F. Smith (Louisville, 1892); _The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_, by James Lane Allen (New York, 1892). PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION [From _History of Kentucky_ (Covington, Kentucky, 1882, v. ii)] Twenty-seven years, 1847 to 1874, have elapsed since _Collins's History of Kentucky_ quietly and modestly claimed recognition among the standard local histories in the great American republic. That has been an eventful period. Death, too, has been busy with the names in the Preface above--has claimed alike the author and compiler, Judge Lewis Collins, and about one hundred and fifty more of the honored and substantial names who contributed information or other aid towards preserving what was then unwritten of the history of the State. The author of the present edition (now nearly fifty years of age) is the youngest of the forty-two contributors who are still living; while several of them are over eighty and one is over ninety-two years of age. Time has dealt gently with them; fame has followed some, and fortune others; a few have achieved both fame and fortune, while a smaller few lay claim to neither. It is not often, as in this case, that the mantle of duty as a state-historian falls from the father to the son's shoulders. It has been faithfully and conscientiously worn; how well and ably, let the disinterested and unprejudiced judge. The present edition had its origin in this: When Judge Collins died, the Legislature of Kentucky was in session. As its testimonial and appreciation of his services and character, this resolution was unanimously adopted, and on March 21, 1870, approved by Gov. Stevenson: "_Resolved by the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky_: "That we have heard with deep regret of the death of Judge Lewis Collins, of Maysville, Kentucky, which has occurred since the meeting of this General Assembly. He was a native Kentuckian of great purity of character and enlarged public spirit; associated for half a century with the press of the State, which he adorned with his patriotism, his elevated morals, and his enlightened judgment. He was the author of a _History of Kentucky_, evidencing extended research, and which embodies in a permanent form the history of each county in the State, and the lives of its distinguished citizens, and is an invaluable contribution to the literature and historical knowledge of the State. His name being thus perpetually identified with that of his native State, this General Assembly, from a sense of duty and regard for his memory, expresses this testimonial of its appreciation of his irreproachable character and valued services." This touching, and tender, and noble tribute to the departed author and editor, was but the culmination of a sympathy broader than the State, for it was echoed and sent back by many citizens from a distance. He had lived to some purpose. It was no small comfort to his family, to know that their bereavement was regarded as a public bereavement; and that his name and works would live on, and be green in the memory of the good people of Kentucky--the place of his birth, the home of his manhood, the scene of his life's labors, his grave. In a spontaneous tribute of praise and sympathy, the entire newspaper press of the State, and many in other States, announced his decease. * * * * * That action of the State, and those generous outpourings of sympathy and regard, started fresh inquiries for the work that had made him best known--_Collins's History of Kentucky_. It had been _out of print_ for more than twenty years! It was known that I had been associated with my father as an editor, and then his successor, and had assisted him with his _History_. Hence, many applications and inquiries for the book were made to me; always with the suggestion that I ought to prepare a new edition, enlarged, and bring down to the present the history of the State. It was an important undertaking--as delicate as important. I shrank from the great responsibility, and declined. But the urgency continued, for the necessity of a State history was felt. The great State of Kentucky, the mother of statesmen and heroes, the advance guard of civilization west of the great Appalachian chain, had no published _History_ of the last twenty-six years; and no _History_ at all in book form, _now accessible_ to more than a few thousand of the intelligent minds among her million-and-a-third of inhabitants. The duty of preparing this _History_ sought _me_, and not I _it_. It has been a task of tremendous labor, extending through the long weary months of nearly four years. But it has been a sweet and a proud task, and the _destiny_ that seemed driving me on is almost fulfilled. I wish I could know the verdict of the future upon my labors, but that is impossible. The carping and noisy fault-finding of the dissatisfied and ungenerous few are far from being pleasant; but the consciousness of duty done, with an honest heart, and the praise of the liberal ones who will appreciate the work, will be a noble and a proud satisfaction, and a joy ceasing only with my life. [Then follow three pages of names of persons whom he thanks for assistance.] ANNIE C. KETCHUM Mrs. Annie Chambers Ketchum, poet, naturalist, and novelist, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, November 8, 1824, the daughter of Benjamin Stuart Chambers, founder of Cardome Academy; her mother was a member of the famous Bradford family of journalists. Miss Chambers was graduated from Georgetown Female College with the M. A. degree. Her first husband was William Bradford, whom she married in 1844, and from whom she was subsequently divorced. After her separation from her husband, she went to Memphis, Tennessee, and opened a school for girls, which she conducted for several years. In 1858 she was married to Leonidas Ketchum, a Tennessean, who was mortally wounded at the battle of Shiloh in 1863. After her husband's death, Mrs. Ketchum returned to Kentucky and conducted a school at Georgetown for three years, but, in 1866, she returned to Memphis, where she again taught for a number of years. Mrs. Ketchum spent the winter of 1875 at Paris, France, pursuing her literary work, and on May 24, 1876, she entered upon the novitiate in a convent there. She afterwards returned to America and her last years were spent in Kentucky. Mrs. Ketchum died in 1904. Her first literary work to attract attention was a novel, entitled _Nellie Bracken_ (Philadelphia, 1855). From 1859 to 1861 Mrs. Ketchum was editor of _The Lotus_, a monthly magazine published at Memphis. _Benny: A Christmas Ballad_ (New York, 1869) was the first of her poems to attract any considerable attention; and her best known poem, _Semper Fidelis_, originally published in _Harper's Magazine_ for October, 1873, is a long, leisurely thing that makes one wonder at its once wide popularity. All of her poems Mrs. Ketchum brought together in _Lotus Flowers_ (New York, 1878). _Lotus_ was her shibboleth, and she never missed an opportunity to make use of it. She made many translations from Latin, German, and French writers, her finest work in this field being _Marcella, a Russian Idyl_ (New York, 1878). _The Teacher's Empire_ (1886) was a collection of educational essays contributed to various journals. Mrs. Ketchum's _Botany for Academies and Colleges_ (Philadelphia, 1887), was a text-book in many institutions for several years subsequent to its publication. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v. iii); B. O. Gaines's _History of Scott County, Kentucky_ (1905, v. ii). APRIL TWENTY-SIXTH [From _The Southern Poems of the War_, edited by Emily V. Mason (Baltimore, 1867)] Dreams of a stately land, Where roses and lotus open to the sun, Where green ravine and misty mountains stand, By lordly valor won. Dreams of the earnest-browed And eagle-eyed, who late with banners bright, Rode forth in knightly errantry, to do Devoir for God and right. Shoulder to shoulder, see The crowning columns file through pass and glen! Hear the shrill bugle! List the rolling drum, Mustering the gallant men! Resolute, year by year, They keep at bay the cohorts of the world; Hemmed in, yet trusting in the Lord of Hosts, The cross is still unfurled. Patient, heroic, true, And counting tens where hundreds stood at first; Dauntless for truth, they dare the sabre's edge, The bombshell's deadly burst. While we, with hearts made brave By their proud manhood, work, and watch, and pray, Till, conquering fate, we greet with smiles and tears The conquering ranks of grey! Oh, God of dreams and sleep, Dreamless they sleep--'tis we, the sleepless, dream, Defend us while our vigil dark we keep, Which knows no morning beam! Bloom, gentle spring-tide flowers-- Sing, gentle winds, above each holy grave, While we, the women of a desolate land, Weep for the true and brave. Memphis, Tennessee. FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD Francis Henry Underwood, "the editor who was never the editor" of _The Atlantic Monthly_, though he was indeed the projector and first associate editor of that famous magazine, was born at Enfield, Massachusetts, January 12, 1825, the son of Roswell Underwood. He spent the year of 1843-1844 at Amherst College, and in the summer of 1844 he came out to Kentucky and settled at Bowling Green as a school teacher. Underwood read law at Bowling Green and was admitted to the bar of that town in 1847. On May 18, 1848, he was married to Louisa Maria Wood, of Taylorsville, Kentucky, to whom he afterwards dedicated his Kentucky novel. While in Kentucky Underwood wrote verses which he submitted to N. P. Willis, who was then at Washington. The celebrated critic wrote him: "Your poetry is as good as Byron's was at the same stage of progress--correct, and evidently inspired, and capable of expansion into stuff for fame." None of it, however, has come down to us. Underwood's intense hatred of slavery caused him to quit Kentucky, in 1850, after having lived for six years in this State, and to return to Massachusetts, where he was admitted to the bar of Northampton. He enlisted in the Free-soil movement with heart and soul. In 1852 he was clerk of the Massachusetts Senate, which position he left to become literary adviser for the then leading publishers of New England, Phillips, Sampson and Company. In 1853 Underwood conceived the idea of a Free-soil literary magazine, but a publisher's failure delayed its appearance. In November, 1857, however, the first issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_ appeared, Dr. Holmes having christened the "baby," with James Russell Lowell as editor-in-chief, and Underwood as assistant editor. Lowell and Underwood were great friends and they worked together with pleasure and harmony. For two years they were the editors, when the breaking up of the firm of Phillips, Sampson and Company, and the passing of the periodical into the hands of Ticknor and Fields, caused Underwood to resign. From 1859 to 1870 he was clerk of the Superior Criminal Court of Boston; and from 1861 to 1875 he was a member of the Boston School Committee. Underwood's first three works were a _Handbook of English Literature_ (Boston, 1871); _Handbook of American Literature_ (Boston, 1872); and _Cloud Pictures_ (Boston, 1872), a group of musical stories. Then came his Kentucky novel, entitled _Lord of Himself_ (Boston, 1874), which was really a series of pictures of life at Bowling Green in 1844. This tale was well received by the Kentucky press and public, the background and characters were declared realistic, and the author's effort to make something pathetic out of the old system of slavery was smiled at and dismissed in the general pleasure his story gave. In his imaginary Kentucky county of Barry, Underwood had a merry time rehabilitating the past. The character of Arthur Howard is the author himself. _Lord of Himself_ is a work of high merit, and it does not deserve the oblivion into which it has fallen. In 1880 Underwood's second novel, _Man Proposes_, was published, together with his _The True Story of Exodus_. Two years later his biographies of Longfellow and Lowell were issued; and in 1883 his study of Whittier was published. In 1885 President Cleveland named Underwood United States Consul at Glasgow; and three years later the University of Glasgow granted him LL.D. During Cleveland's second administration Underwood was consul at Edinburgh. While in Scotland he wrote his last two novels, called _Quabbin_ (Boston, 1892), and _Dr. Gray's Quest_. In _Quabbin_ he described his native town of Enfield in much the same manner that he had years before written of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Underwood died at Edinburgh, August 8, 1894. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Biographical Catalogue of Amherst College_; _The Author of "Quabbin,"_ by J. T. Trowbridge (_Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1895); _The Editor who was Never the Editor_, by Bliss Perry (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1907). Mr. Perry's paper is especially notable for the great number of letters reproduced which Underwood received from the celebrities of his time. ALOYSIUS AND MR. FENTON [From _Lord of Himself_ (Boston, 1874)] It was at this juncture that the youth of many locks and ample Byronic shirt collar appeared on the scene. Aloysius Pittsinger was his name. He was a consolation. His very name, Aloysius, had a sweet gurgle in the sound, resembling the anticipatory and involuntary noises from children's mouths at the sight of sugar lollipops. He was a clerk in Mr. Goldstein's store. There he dispensed tobacco, both fine-cut and plug, assorted nails, New Orleans sugar, Rio coffee, Porto Rico molasses, Gloucester mackerel, together with foreign cloths and homespun jeans, and all the gimcracks which little negroes coveted and the swarms of summer flies had spared. The appearance of Aloysius happened in this wise. Mr. Fenton was an early riser, but was loath to go to his shop without his breakfast. On the fateful morning he had come down rather earlier than usual. After due search and discussion, it was announced to him that there was nothing at once appetizing and substantial in the house that could, within the desired period, be got ready for the table; and his wife made bold to ask if in this emergency he wouldn't go out and get something. To a hungry man, in the faint interval after a "nipper" and before a solid bit, such a proposition is an unpleasant surprise. But, after devoting the cook and the household generally to immediate pains and inconveniences, and to something more hereafter, Mr. Fenton put on his slouched hat and started out. He mused also. If I were ambitious of the fame of the great American novelist, or were contending for the fifty thousand dollar prize offered by the publishers of the Metropolitan Album, and hoped to have my thrilling descriptions read by its subscribing army of three hundred and fifty-one thousand chambermaids, I might paint the current of his swift thought thus: "The air bites shrewdly. Ha, by the mass! Shall I to the _abattoir_ and ask the slayer of oxen for a steak? or a chop from the loin of sheep, a bell-wether of Kentucky's finest flock--Kentucky, state renowned for dainty mutton? Or does the slayer of oxen yet sleep, supinely stertorous, heavy with the lingering fumes of the mighty Bourbon? Perchance he has no steak, no chop!--all gone to feed an insatiable people! Bethink me. Ay--and the _abattoir_ is far, though its perfume is nigh; it is thrice a hundred yards from hence. I will go to the house of the Israelite, Goldstein, and get a fish--a fish dear to losel Yankees, and not scorned by the sons of the sun-land either. 'Tis well. I will make the trial. Haply I shall find that the young man, Pittsinger, whose prænomen is Aloysius, has arisen, and is even now combing his ambrosial locks." What he _did_ think was something like this: "It's doggon cold this mornin'. I wonder whether that derned old drunken Bill Stone's got ary bit of fresh meat--and if he's up yet. I don't b'lieve it, for he was drunk's an owl last night at old Red Eye. Besides, it's fer to the slaughter-house. Le's see. I might get a mackerel at Goldstein's. I'll do it. B'iled a little, to take the salt out, and then het with cream, it ain't bad, by a derned sight." He walked out to the square, occasionally blowing his cold fingers. The shutters were not taken down from Goldstein's front windows, but Mr. Fenton knew that the clerk slept in a little room in a ruinous lean-to back of the store, and he rattled the door to call him. There was no answer, nor sound of any one stirring, and he rattled again. His powerful shake made the square resound. He called, endeavoring to throw his voice through the key-hole, "Aloysius, ain't you up yit? I want a mackerel." The silence was aggravating, and there were internal qualms that made Fenton doubly impatient. "Aloysius, you lazy bones! Do you hear? I want a mackerel for breakfast. You're thest the no-countest boy I ever see! If 'twan't for your father, you'd thest starve." Fenton sadly meditated, and was about to give it up, when he heard a voice within, saying, "Never too late, Mr. Fenton. You shall have your mackerel. You needn't wait. As soon as I get my clothes on I'll tote you over one." AN AMAZING PROPHECY [From the same] "The hardest strain upon the republic is yet to come," said Mr. Pierrepont. "God only knows how the slavery question is to be settled; but no change in policy will be adopted without a severe struggle. If the South is worsted, it will have the terrible problem of the status of the negroes to solve, and it will be a tumultuous time for a generation. The danger to the North in the event of success, or of defeat either, will arise from its wealth. The accumulations at the commercial centres are to make them enormously rich. Money is a power, and never a quiescent one. Your rich men will put themselves into office, or they will send their paid attorneys to legislate for them. They will so touch the subtle springs of finance as to make every affair of state serve their personal advantage. They will make corruption honorable, and bribery a fine art. It is now a mark of decency and a badge of distinction for a public man to be poor. Everyone knows that a public man can't be rich honestly; but you will live to see congressmen going to the capital carrying travelling-bags, and returning home with wagon loads of trunks, and with stocks and bonds that will enable them to snap their fingers at constituents." "It is the old story of republics," said Mr. Howard. "They are founded by valor, reared by industry, with frugality and equal laws. Wealth follows, then corruption, then the public conscience is debauched, faith is lost, and justice thrust out. Then the general rottenness is shaken by the coming of a new Cæsar, and an empire is welcomed because liberty had already been lost, and anything is better than anarchy. However, let us hope this is far away." STEPHEN C. FOSTER Stephen Collins Foster, the celebrated song writer, was born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 4, 1826. At the age of fifteen years he entered Jefferson College, at Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, but music had set its seal upon him and he soon returned to Pittsburgh to pursue it. The next few years were almost entirely devoted to his musical studies, though he had a living to make. The year of 1842 found Foster clerking in a Cincinnati store; and during this time his first song, _Open Thy Lattice, Love_, was published at Baltimore. _Uncle Ned_, and _O Susannah!_ followed fast upon his first effort, and the three launched him upon his career. He relinquished his business cares, and surrendered his life to song. In 1850 Foster married Jane McDowell of Pittsburgh, and they lived at New York City for a short time before settling at Pittsburgh. His _Camptown Races_, and _My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight_, appeared in 1850. It is surely a regrettable fact that the most famous Kentucky song was not written by a Kentucky hand. Foster's only child, Mrs. Marion Foster Welsh, of Pittsburgh, has recently repudiated the ancient tale that is told of the origin of _My Old Kentucky Home_, but as she declined to furnish the real history of the song, saying she would make it known at the proper time, nothing better than the often repeated story can be told here. Foster was visiting his kinsman, Judge John Rowan, at his home, "Federal Hill," near Bardstown, Kentucky, and on this typical Southern plantation, with its negroes and their cabins, _My Old Kentucky Home_ was written. The story is usually elaborated, but as it has been set aside by the author's daughter, further comment is not worth while. It is enough to know that it was written in Kentucky. Foster went to New York City in 1860, and the same year _Old Black Joe_ appeared. _Old Folks at Home_, _Nelly was a Lady_, _Nelly Bly_, _Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground_, _Old Dog Tray_, _Don't Bet Your Money on the Shanghai_, _We Are Coming, Father Abraham_, and dozens of other songs have kept Foster's fame green. His beautiful serenade, _Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming_, is his highest note in genuine scientific music. Foster died at New York, January 13, 1864, and he was buried in Allegheny cemetery, Pittsburgh. In 1906 the Kentucky home-comers never seemed to tire of _My Old Kentucky Home_, and a fitting memorial was unveiled at Louisville by Foster's daughter in honor of the song's maker. It is known and sung in the remotest corners of the world. Mr. James Lane Allen's fine tribute to the poet's memory may be found in _The Bride of the Mistletoe_: "More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield [Kentucky], a writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber of sound." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Atlantic Monthly_ (November, 1867); _Current Literature_ (September, 1901). Strangely enough no formal biography of Foster has been written. MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, GOOD-NIGHT [From _Stephen Collins Foster Statue_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1906, a pamphlet)] The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home, 'Tis summer, the darkies are gay; The corn-top's ripe and the meadow's in the bloom, While the birds make music all the day; The young folks roll on the little cabin floor, All merry, all happy, and bright, By'n-by hard times comes a-knocking at the door, Then my old Kentucky home, good-night! CHORUS: Weep no more, my lady, O weep no more to-day! We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home, For the old Kentucky home far away. They hunt no more for the 'possum and the coon, On the meadow, the hill, and the shore; They sing no more by the glimmer of the moon, On the bench by the old cabin door; The day goes by, like a shadow o'er the heart, With sorrow, where all was delight; The time has come when the darkies have to part, Then my old Kentucky home, good-night! CHORUS: Weep no more, my lady, O weep no more to-day! We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home, For the old Kentucky home far away. The head must bow and the back will have to bend, Wherever the darkey may go; A few more days and the trouble all will end In the field where the sugar-cane grows; A few more days for to tote the weary load-- No matter, 'twill never be light; A few more days till we totter on the road, Then my old Kentucky home, good-night! CHORUS: Weep no more, my lady, O weep no more to-day! We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home, For the old Kentucky home far away. ZACHARIAH F. SMITH Zachariah Frederick Smith, the Kentucky historian, was born near Eminence, Kentucky, January 7, 1827. He was educated at Bacon College, Harrodsburg, Kentucky. During the Civil War he was president of Henry College at New Castle, Kentucky. From 1867 to 1871 he was superintendent of public instruction in Kentucky. Professor Smith was subsequently interested in various enterprises, and for four years he was connected with the publishing firm of D. Appleton and Company. For more than fifty years he was a curator of Transylvania University. His _History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1885; 1892), is the only exhaustive and readable history of the Commonwealth from the beginnings down to the date of its publication. In a sense it is the chronicles of the Collinses transformed from the encyclopedic to the continuous narrative form. Professor Smith's other works are: _A School History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1889); _Youth's History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1898); _The Mother of Henry Clay_ (Louisville, 1899); and _The Battle of New Orleans_ (Louisville, 1904). He spent the final years of his life upon _The History of the Reformation of the 19th Century, Inaugurated, Advocated, and Directed by Barton W. Stone, of Kentucky: 1800-1832_, which was almost ready for publication when he died. In this work Professor Smith set forth that Barton W. Stone, and not Alexander Campbell, was the founder of the Christian ("Campbellite") so-called "reformation" in this State, and that its adherents are "Stoneites," not "Campbellites," as they are called by the profane. Professor Smith died at Louisville, Kentucky, July 4, 1911, but he was buried at Eminence. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Kentucky in the Nation's History_, by R. M. McElroy (New York, 1909); _The Register_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, September, 1911). EARLY KENTUCKY DOCTORS [From _The History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1892)] It is probable Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia, was the first physician who ever visited Kentucky. In 1745 he came and negotiated treaties with the Indian tribes for the establishment of a colony, which was announced in Washington's journal (1754) as Walker's settlement on the Cumberland, accompanied by a map, dated 1750. Some time just before 1770, Dr. John Connolly, of Pittsburgh, visited the Falls of the Ohio, and three years later, in company with Captain Thomas Bullitt, patented the land on which Louisville now stands. But little is known of the professional performances of either Walker or Connolly, except the fact that they were both men of superior intelligence, and of far more than average cultivation. They were both known as enterprising business men rather than great practitioners of medicine. In a _History of the Medical Literature of Kentucky_, Dr. Lunsford P. Yandell (the elder) says: "The first surgical operation ever performed in Kentucky by a white man occurred in 1767." Colonel James Smith, in that year, accompanied by his black servant, Jamie, traveled from the mouth of the Tennessee river across the country to Carolina, now Tennessee. On their way, Colonel Smith stepped upon a projecting fragment of cane, which pierced his foot, and was broken off level with the skin. Swelling quickly came on, causing the flesh to rise above the end of the cane. Having no other instruments than a knife, a moccasin awl, and a pair of bullet-molds, the colonel directed his servant to seize the piece of cane with the bullet-molds, while he raised the skin with the awl and cut the flesh away from around the piece of cane, and, with the assistance of Jamie, the foreign body was drawn out. Colonel Smith then treated the wound with the bruised bark from the root of a lind tree, and subsequently by poultices made of the same material, using the mosses of the old logs in the forest, which he secured with strips of elm bark, as a dressing. Dr. Frederick Ridgely, a favorite pupil of Dr. Rush, was sent from Philadelphia early in 1779, as a surgeon to a vessel sailing with letters of marque and reprisal off the coast of Virginia. This vessel was chased into the Chesapeake Bay by a British man-of-war. As the ship's colors were struck to the enemy, Dr. Ridgely leaped overboard, and narrowly escaped capture by swimming two miles to the shore. He was at once thereafter appointed an officer in the medical department of the Colonial army. A few months later, he resigned his commission, and settled, in 1790, at Lexington, where he speedily attained a leading position as a master of the healing art. From Lexington he was frequently called, in the capacity of surgeon, to accompany militia in their expeditions against the Indians. He was appointed surgeon-general to the army of "Mad Anthony Wayne," returning finally to Lexington, where he took part in the organization of the first medical college established in the West. Dr. Ridgely was a frequent contributor to the _American Medical Repertory_, published at Philadelphia. He was the intimate friend of Dr. Samuel Brown, also of Lexington. At the organization of the medical department of Transylvania University, in 1799, Brown and Ridgely were the first professors. Ridgely, in that year, delivered a course of lectures to a small class, and, as the organization of the faculty had not been completed, no further attempts at teaching were made. Dr. Samuel Brown, like his colleague, Ridgely, was a surgeon of great ability and large experience. These two gentlemen added greatly to the growth and popularity of Lexington by their renown as surgeons. They attracted patients from the remote settlements on the frontier, and were both frequent contributors to the medical literature of that time. The cases reported by these gentlemen were numerous, interesting, carefully observed, and ably reported. Dr. Brown was a student at the University of Edinburgh with Hosack, Davidge, Ephraim McDowell, and Brockenborough, of Virginia. Hosack became famous as a professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, at New York; Davidge laid the foundation of the University of Maryland; Brown was one of the first professors in Transylvania University, at Lexington, while McDowell achieved immortal fame in surgery as the father of ovariotomy. Strong rivalry in the practice of medicine at Lexington, between Brown and Ridgely, and Fishback and Pindell, had much to do with the difficulties attending the efforts of the two former to establish the medical school. In 1798, Jenner made public his great discovery of the protective power of vaccination. Dr. Brown, of Lexington, was his first imitator on this continent. Within three years from the date of Jenner's first publication, and before the experiment had been tried elsewhere in this country, Brown had already vaccinated successfully more than five hundred people at Lexington. JOHN A. BROADUS John Albert Broadus, the most distinguished clergyman and writer Kentucky Baptists have produced, was born near Culpepper, Virginia, January 24, 1827. At the age of sixteen years Broadus united with the Baptist church; and he shortly afterwards decided to study for the ministry of his church. He taught school for a time before going to the University of Virginia, in 1846, and he was graduated four years later with the M.A. degree. While at the University Broadus was greatly impressed by Professors Gessner Harrison, Wm. H. McGuffey, and E. H. Courtenay. In 1851 Broadus declined a professorship in Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky, in order to become assistant instructor of ancient languages in his _alma mater_ and pastor of the Charlottesville Baptist church. In 1857 it was decided to establish the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Greenville, South Carolina, and Broadus, James P. Boyce, Basil Manly, Jr., William Williams, and E. T. Winkler, were the committee on establishment. Boyce and Manly urged the curriculum system, but Broadus advocated the elective system so earnestly that he completely won them over. "So, as Mr. Jefferson had drawn a new American university, Mr. Broadus drew a new American seminary." The Seminary opened in 1859 with the members of the committee, with the exception of Williams, as the professors. Boyce was elected president, and Broadus occupied the chair of New Testament Interpretation and Homiletics. Twenty-six students greeted the faculty; and all were soon hard at work. After a few years, however, the Civil War came and the Seminary shortly suspended. During the war Dr. Broadus was a chaplain in the Confederate armies. At the close of the war work in the Seminary was resumed with seven students enrolled, Dr. Broadus having but one student in homiletics, and he was blind! The lectures he prepared for this blind brother were the basis of the work that made him famous, _The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons_ (Philadelphia, 1870), which is at the present time the finest thing on the subject, a text-book in nearly every theological school in Christendom. Dr. Broadus declined chairs in Chicago and Brown universities, and the presidency of Vassar College, in order to remain with the Seminary, the darling of his dreams. In 1873 he read his notable paper in memory of Gessner Harrison at the University of Virginia; and the next year he joined Dr. Boyce in Kentucky in the effort that was then being made to remove the Seminary to Louisville. His lectures before the Newton Theological Seminary were published as _The History of Preaching_ (New York, 1876). In 1877 the Seminary was removed to Louisville, Dr. Boyce remaining as president and Dr. Broadus as professor of homiletics. From the first the Seminary was a success, it now being the largest in the United States. In 1879 Dr. Broadus delivered his noted address upon Demosthenes before Richmond College, Virginia, which is regarded as one of the very finest efforts of his life. In Louisville he became the city's first citizen, honored and beloved by all classes. In 1886 Harvard conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity upon him; and later in the same year one of the most important of his books appeared, _Sermons and Addresses_ (Baltimore, 1886). This was followed by his famous _Commentary on Matthew_ (Philadelphia, 1887), which was begun during the darkest days of the Civil War, and is now considered the best commentary in English on that Gospel. Dr. Boyce died at Pau, France, in 1888, and Dr. Broadus succeeded him as president of the Seminary. In January, 1889, he delivered the Lyman Beecher lectures on _Preaching_ at Yale; and some months later his _Translation of and Notes to Chrysostom's Homilies_ (New York, 1889) appeared. In the spring of 1890 Dr. Broadus delivered three lectures before Johns Hopkins University, which were published as _Jesus of Nazareth_ (New York, 1890). He spent the summer of 1892 in Louisville preparing his _Memoir of James P. Boyce_ (New York, 1893); and _A Harmony of the Gospels_ (New York, 1893), his final works. Dr. Broadus died at Louisville, Kentucky, March 16, 1895. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Life and Letters of John Albert Broadus_, by A. T. Robertson (Philadelphia, 1900); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. ii). OXFORD UNIVERSITY[14] [From _Life and Letters of John A. Broadus_, by A. T. Robertson (Philadelphia, 1901)] We had four and a half hours at Oxford, and spent it with exceeding great pleasure, and most respectably heavy expense. At University College we saw a memorial of Sir Wm. Jones, by Flaxman, which I am sure I shall never forget--worthy of Sir Wm. and worthy of Flaxman. At Magdalen College we saw the varied and beautiful grounds, with the Poet's Walk, where Addison loved to stroll. At New College we visited the famous and beautiful chapel. (New College is now five hundred years old.) These are the most remarkable of the nineteen colleges. You know they are entirely distinct establishments, as much as if a hundred miles apart, and that the University of Oxford is simply a general organization which gives degrees to the men prepared by the different colleges. Then we spent one and a half hours at the famous Bodleian Library, the most valuable (British Museum has the largest number of books) in the world. Oh, the books, the books--the early and rare editions, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the autographs of famous persons, and the portraits, the portraits of hundreds of the earth's greatest ones. Happy students, fellows, professors, who have constant access to the Bodleian Library. SPURGEON [From the same] I was greatly delighted with Spurgeon, especially with his conduct of public worship. The congregational singing has often been described, and is as good as can well be conceived. Spurgeon is an excellent reader of Scripture, and remarkably impressive in reading hymns, and the prayers were quite what they ought to have been. The sermon was hardly up to his average in freshness, but was exceedingly well delivered, without affectation or apparent effort, but with singular earnestness, and directness. The whole thing--house, congregation, order, worship, preaching, was as nearly up to my ideal as I ever expect to see in this life. Of course Spurgeon has his faults and deficiencies, but he is a wonderful man. Then he preaches the real gospel, and God blesses him. After the services concluded, I went to a room in the rear to present my letter, and was cordially received. Somebody must tell Mrs. V---- that I "thought of her" repeatedly during the sermon, and "gave her love" to Spurgeon, and he said such a message encouraged him. (I made quite a little story of it, and the gentlemen in the room were apparently much interested, not to say amused.) We went straight towards St. Paul's, where Liddon has been preaching every Sunday afternoon in September, and there would be difficulty in getting a good seat. We lunched at the Cathedral Hotel, hard by, and then stood three-quarters of an hour at the door of St. Paul's, waiting for it to open. Meantime a good crowd had collected behind us, and there was a tremendous rush when the door opened, to get chairs near the preaching stand. The crowd looked immense in the vast cathedral, and yet there were not half as many as were quietly seated in Spurgeon's Tabernacle. There everybody could hear, and here, in the grand and beautiful show-place, Mr. Liddon was tearing his throat in the vain attempt to be heard by all. The grand choral service was all Chinese to me. FOOTNOTE: [14] Copyright, 1901, by the American Baptist Publication Society. MARY J. HOLMES Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, a family favorite for fifty years, was born at Brookfield, Massachusetts, April 5, 1828. She became a teacher at an early age, and at Allen's Hill, New York, on August 9, 1849, she was married to Daniel Holmes, a Yale man of the class of 1848, who had been teaching the year between his graduation and marriage at Versailles, Kentucky. Immediately after the ceremony he and his bride started to Kentucky, where Mrs. Holmes joined her husband in teaching. In 1850 they gave up the school at Versailles, taking charge of the district school at Glen's Creek, near Versailles. Here they taught for two years, when Mr. Holmes decided to relinquish teaching for the practice of law, and they removed to Brockport, New York, their home henceforth. Mrs. Holmes returned to Kentucky in 1857, for a visit, and this, with the three years indicated above, included her Kentucky life. Having settled at Brockport, she began her career as a novelist. Her first and best known book, _Tempest and Sunshine, or Life in Kentucky_, was published in 1854. Mr. Middleton, one of the chief characters in this novel, was a rather close characterization of a Kentucky planter, Mr. Singleton, who resided some miles from Versailles; and his daughter, Sue Singleton, subsequently Mrs. Porter, always claimed, though facetiously, that she was the original of _Tempest_. It is now known, however, that Mrs. Holmes had not thought of her in delineating the character, and that the Singleton home is the only thing in the book that is drawn from actual life with any detail whatever. In her Kentucky books that followed _Tempest and Sunshine_, she usually built an accurate background for characters that lived only in her imagination. Besides _Tempest and Sunshine_, Mrs. Holmes was the author of thirty-four books, published in the order given: _The English Orphans_; _Homestead on the Hillside_, a book of Kentucky stories; _Lena Rivers_, a Kentucky novel, superior to _Tempest and Sunshine_; _Meadow Brook_; _Dora Deane_; _Cousin Maude_; _Marian Grey_, a Kentucky story; _Darkness and Daylight_; _Hugh Worthington_, another Kentucky novel; _The Cameron Pride_; _Rose Mather_; _Ethelyn's Mistake_; _Millbank_; _Edna Browning_; _West Lawn_; _Edith Lyle_; _Mildred_; _Daisy Thornton_; _Forrest House_; _Chateau D'Or_; _Madeline_; _Queenie Hetherton_; _Christmas Stories_; _Bessie's Fortune_; _Gretchen_; _Marguerite_; _Dr. Hathern's Daughters_; _Mrs. Hallam's Companion_; _Paul Ralston_; _The Tracy Diamonds_; _The Cromptons_; _The Merivale Banks_; _Rena's Experiment_; and _The Abandoned Farm_. About two million copies of Mrs. Holmes's books have been sold by her authorized publishers; how many have been sold in pirated editions cannot, of course, be ascertained. Mrs. Holmes died at Brockport, New York, October 6, 1907. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Allibone's _Dictionary of Authors_ (Philadelphia, 1897, v. ii); _The Nation_ (October 10, 1907). THE SCHOOLMASTER [From _Lena Rivers_ (New York, 1856)] And now Mr. Everett was daily expected. Anna, who had no fondness for books, greatly dreaded his arrival, thinking within herself how many pranks she'd play off upon him, provided 'Lena would lend a helping hand, which she much doubted. John Jr., too, who for a time, at least, was to be placed under Mr. Everett's instruction, felt in no wise eager for his arrival, fearing, as he told 'Lena that "between the 'old man' and the tutor, he would be kept a little too straight for a gentleman of his habits;" and it was with no particular emotions of pleasure that he and Anna saw the stage stop before the gate one pleasant morning toward the middle of November. Running to one of the front windows, Carrie, 'Lena, and Anna watched their new teacher, each after her own fashion commenting upon his appearance. "Ugh," exclaimed Anna, "what a green, boyish looking thing! I reckon nobody's going to be afraid of him." "I say he's real handsome," said Carrie, who being thirteen years of age, had already, in her own mind, practiced many a little coquetry upon the stranger. "I like him," was 'Lena's brief remark. Mr. Everett was a pale, intellectual looking man, scarcely twenty years of age, and appearing still younger so that Anna was not wholly wrong when she called him boyish. Still there was in his large black eye a firmness and decision which bespoke the man strong within him, and which put to flight all of Anna's preconceived notions of rebellion. With the utmost composure he returned Mrs. Livingstone's greeting, and the proud lady half bit her lip with vexation as she saw how little he seemed awed by her presence. Malcolm Everett was not one to acknowledge superiority where there was none, and though ever polite toward Mrs. Livingstone, there was something in his manner which forbade her treating him as aught save an equal. He was not to be trampled down, and for once in her life Mrs. Livingstone had found a person who would neither cringe to her nor flatter. The children were not presented to him until dinner time, when, with the air of a young desperado, John Jr. marched into the dining-room, eyeing his teacher askance, calculating his strength, and returning his greeting with a simple nod. Mr. Everett scanned him from head to foot, and then turned to Carrie half smiling at the great dignity which she assumed. With Lena and Anna he seemed better pleased, holding their hands and smiling down upon them through rows of teeth which Anna pronounced the whitest she had ever seen. Mr. Livingstone was not at home, and when his mother appeared, Mrs. Livingstone did not think proper to introduce her. But if by this omission she thought to keep the old lady silent, she was mistaken, for the moment Mrs. Nichols was seated, she commenced with, "Your name is Everett, I b'lieve?" "Yes, ma'am," said he, bowing very gracefully toward her. "Any kin to the governor what was?" "No, ma'am, none whatever," and the white teeth became slightly visible for a moment, but soon disappeared. "You are from Rockford, 'Lena tells me?" "Yes, ma'am. Have you friends there?" "Yes--or that is, Nancy Scovandyke's sister, Betsy Scovandyke that used to be, lives there. Maybe you know her. Her name is Bacon--Betsy Bacon. She's a widder and keeps boarders." "Ah," said he, the teeth this time becoming wholly visible, "I've heard of Mrs. Bacon, but have not the honor of her acquaintance. You are from the east, I perceive." "Law, now! how did you know that?" asked Mrs. Nichols, while Mr. Everett answered, "I _guessed_ at it," with a peculiar emphasis on the word guessed, which led 'Lena to think he had used it purposely and not from habit. Mr. Everett possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of making those around him both respect and like him, and ere six weeks had passed, he had won the love of all his pupils. Even John Jr. was greatly improved, and Carrie seemed suddenly reawakened into a thirst for knowledge, deeming no task too long, and no amount of study too hard, if it won the commendation of the teacher. 'Lena, who committed to memory with great ease, and who consequently did not deserve so much credit for her always perfect lessons, seldom received a word of praise, while poor Anna, notoriously lazy when books were concerned, cried almost every day, because as she said, "Mr. Everett didn't like her as he did the rest, else why did he look at her so much, watching her all the while, and keeping her after school to get her lessons over, when he knew how she hated them." Once Mrs. Livingstone ventured to remonstrate, telling him that Anna was very sensitive, and required altogether different treatment from Carrie. "She thinks you dislike her," said she, "and while she retains this impression, she will do nothing as far as learning is concerned; so if you do not like her, try and make her think you do!" There was a peculiar look in Mr. Everett's dark eyes as he answered, "You may think it strange, Mrs. Livingstone, but of all my pupils I love Anna the best! I know I find more fault with her, and am, perhaps, more severe with her than with the rest, but it's because I would make her what I wish her to be. Pardon me, madam, but Anna does not possess the same amount of intellect with her cousin or sister, but by proper culture she will make a fine, intelligent woman." Mrs. Livingstone hardly relished being told that one child was inferior to the other, but she could not well help herself--Mr. Everett would say what he pleased--and thus the conference ended. From that time Mr. Everett was exceedingly kind to Anna, wiping away the tears which invariably came when told that she must stay with him in the schoolroom after the rest were gone; then, instead of seating himself in rigid silence at a distance until her task was learned, he would sit by her side, occasionally smoothing her long curls and speaking encouragingly to her as she poured over some hard rule of grammar, or puzzled her brains with some difficult problem in Colburn. Ere long the result of all this became manifest. Anna grew fonder of her books, more ready to learn, and--more willing to be kept after school! Ah, little did Mrs. Livingstone think what she was doing when she bade young Malcolm Everett make her warm-hearted, impulsive daughter _think_ he liked her! ROSA V. JEFFREY Mrs. Rosa Vertner Jeffrey, one of the most beautiful of Kentucky women, whose personal loveliness has caused some critics to forget she was a gifted poet, was born at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1828, the daughter of John Y. Griffith, a writer of considerable reputation in his day. Her mother died when she was but nine months old, and she was reared by her aunt. When Rosa was ten years of age her adopted parents removed to Lexington, Kentucky, where she was educated at the Episcopal Seminary. In 1845 Miss Vertner--she had taken the name of her foster parents--was married to Claude M. Johnson, a wealthy citizen of Lexington, and she at once took her place as a great social and literary leader. One of her sons, Mr. Claude M. Johnson, was mayor of Lexington for several years, and he was afterwards in the service of the United States government. In 1861 Mrs. Johnson's husband died, and she removed to Rochester, New York, where she resided for two years, when she was married to Alexander Jeffrey, of Edinburgh, Scotland, and they returned to Lexington, her home for the remainder of her life. Mrs. Jeffrey died at Lexington, Kentucky, October 6, 1894, and no woman has yet arisen in Kentucky to take her position as society's favorite beauty and poet. She began her literary career as a contributor of verse to Prentice's _Louisville Journal_. Her pen-name was "Rosa," and under this name her first volume of poems was published, entitled _Poems, by Rosa_ (Boston, 1857). This was followed by _Florence Vale_; _Woodburn_, a novel; _Daisy Dare and Baby Power_ (Philadelphia, 1871), a book of poems; _The Crimson Hand and Other Poems_ (Philadelphia, 1881), her best known work; and _Marah_ (Philadelphia, 1884), a novel. Mrs. Jeffrey was also the author of a five-act comedy, called _Love and Literature_. As a novelist or playwright she did nothing especially strong, but as a writer of pleasing poems her place in the literature of Kentucky seems secure. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _The Register_ (Frankfort, January, 1911). A GLOVE [From _The Crimson Hand and Other Poems_ (Philadelphia, 1881)] In a box of airy trifles--fans, flowers, and ribbons gay-- I chanced to find a tasselled glove, worn once on the first of May. How long ago? Ah me, ah me! twelve years, twelve years today! Alas! for that beautiful, fragrant time, so far in the past away, And crowned with sweeter memories than any other May, Standing alone, in a checkered life--it was my wedding day! The passing hours were shod with light, and their glowing sandals made Such sunny tracks that they guide me yet through a retrospect of shade. Through changes and shadows of twelve long years, down that love-lit path I stray; The winters come and the winters go, yet it leads to an endless May. No leaves of the autumn have fallen there, and never a flake of snow Has chilled the path of those May-day hours that gleam through the long ago! The flowering cherry's wild perfume came stealing, bitter sweet, From fragrant breezes drifting heaps of blossoms to my feet; The flowers are dust, but the bees that bore their subtle sweets away Dropped golden honey on the path of that beautiful first of May. And the sweetness clings, for I gather it in wandering back today. Twelve years! twelve years!--a long, long life for a little tasselled glove! Yet, I treasure it still for his dear sake who clasped with so much love The hand that wore, on that festal night, this delicate, dainty thing-- His forever! bound to him by the link of a wedding ring! The glove is soiled and faded now, but the ring is as bright today As the love that flooded my life with light on that beautiful first of May. A MEMORY [From the same] A memory filled my heart last night With all its youthful glow; Under the ashes, out of my sight, I buried it long ago; I buried it deep, I bade it rest, And whispered a long "good-by;" But lo! it has risen--too sweet, too blest Too cherished a thing to die. In the dim, dim past, where the shadows fall, I left it, but, crowned with light, A spirit of joy in the banquet-hall, It haunted my soul last night. One earnest, tender, passionate glance-- I cherished it--that was all, As we drifted on through the mazy dance To a musical rise and fall. It rose with a weird and witching swell, 'Mid the twinkling of merry feet, And clasped me close in a wild, strange spell Of memories bitter-sweet; Bitter--because they left a sting And vanished: a lifelong pain; Sweet--because nothing can ever bring Such joy to my heart again. To me it was nothing, only a waltz; To the other it meant no wrong; Men may be cruel--who are not false-- And women remember too long. SALLIE R. FORD Mrs. Sallie Rochester Ford, the mother of good _Grace Truman_, was born at Rochester Springs, near Danville, Kentucky, in 1828. Miss Rochester was graduated from the female seminary at Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1849, and six years later she was married to Rev. Samuel H. Ford (1823-1905), a Baptist preacher and editor of Louisville and St. Louis. She was her husband's associate in his literary enterprises, rendering him excellent service at all times. Her last years were spent at St. Louis, in which city she died in February, 1910, having rounded out more than four score years. Mrs. Ford's religious novel, _Grace Truman, or Love and Principle_ (New York, 1857) attracted wide attention in its day, and it was reprinted many times. It was read by thousands of young girls; and ministers descanted upon it in their sermons. While the work sets forth that the Baptist road is the only right of way to heaven, and is sentimental to the core, it is fairly well-written, and it undoubtedly did much good. A copy of it may be found in almost any collection of Kentucky books. _Grace Truman_ was followed by _Mary Bunyan_ (New York, 1859); _Morgan and His Men_ (Mobile, Ala., 1864); _Ernest Quest_ (New York, 1877); _Evangel Wiseman_ (1907); and Mrs. Ford's final work, published at St. Louis, _The Life of Rochester Ford, the Successful Christian Lawyer_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _How I Came to Write "Grace Truman: An Appendix_ to the 1886 edition; Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_ (Boston, 1905). OUR MINISTER MARRIES [From _Grace Truman_ (St. Louis, 1886)] May roses fling abroad their rich fragrance on the evening air! May dews glide noiselessly to the newly awakened earth, and lose themselves in her fresh, green bosom. A soft May moon steals above the eastern horizon, and gilds with radiant luster the brow of night. Gentle May zephyrs from their airy home glide over the earth, kissing the lips of the rose, and the tender cheek of the hedge-row violet. Young and tender May leaves whisper to each other tales of love, away, away, in the dark old forests. And other lips than those of the dancing leaves have whispered tales of love; and mortal ears have heard its sweet low murmurings; and mortal hearts have felt its thrilling inspiration, until the soul, fired beneath its ecstatic power, has tasted of bliss which mortal tongue can never say. In the hospitable mansion of Mr. Gray, all is excitement and expectancy. She to whom their hearts were so closely wedded, the living, joyous Annie, is tonight to take upon her the marriage vow. She is to wed the man of her heart's free choice, the object of her pure unsullied love. She is to stand in the presence of God and many witnesses, and promise to love and cherish, yea as long as life shall last, him upon whom she has bestowed her girlhood's fresh full confidence and affection. The house is brilliantly lighted throughout, and everything bears the testimony of free Kentucky hospitality. 'Tis but the twilight hour--early, yet the guests are fast assembling. * * * * * It was a simple yet beautiful and impressive scene--that little group as it stood, while the aged man of God, in a solemn and touching manner, united in indissoluble ties the two warm loving hearts before him. The vailed form of the bride, leaning on the arm of him who was henceforth to be her earthly stay; the calm dignified form, and earnest, we might say, almost holy expression of him who was receiving the precious trust--the bent form, and hoary locks, and tremulous voice of the minister--all conspired to make the scene one of solemn beauty and intense interest. Congratulations followed, and many were the kisses that pressed the blushing cheek of the happy bride, who, with her vail thrown back from her brow and the color playing over her bright face "like moonlight over streams," looked the very embodiment of grace and loveliness. Fannie calmly waited till the excitement was measurably over; and then approaching her new cousin, leaning on the arm of Mr. Ray, gave them each a fervent kiss and her warmest wishes for their future happiness. * * * * * The time passed most delightfully to all present. Mr. and Mrs. Gray moved about among the guests dispensing pleasure and enjoyment wherever they went. But the bride and bridegroom were the chief attraction; she, with her naturally exuberant spirits, heightened by the excitement of the occasion, and yet tempered by her husband's dignified cheerfulness; and he, with his fine conversational powers and affable manner, drew around them an admiring crowd wherever they were. The young ladies and gentlemen promenaded and chatted gayly, while the more elderly ones grouped themselves together in different parts of the room for the purpose of social conversation. * * * * * Supper was served in liberal, handsome style; and Mr. and Mrs. Gray, assisted by Mr. and Mrs. Truman, attended to the wants of their guests in the most obliging and attentive manner. And when the hour arrived for the company to disperse to their respective homes, each one went away happy in the thoughts of having passed a most agreeable hour. Mr. and Mrs. Gray accompanied their daughter to Weston the day after the wedding, when they met with a most welcome reception from Mr. and Mrs. Holmes, who had provided an evening entertainment for the bridal party, and had called together many of their friends. They remained several days, during which time they saw their daughter nicely and comfortably ensconced in a neat little brick cottage, situated in a very pleasant part of the village, and which was henceforth called "The Parsonage." Annie, or, we should rather say, Mrs. Lewis, united with the little church of which her husband was now the almost idolized pastor, on the Saturday after her marriage. It had been so arranged by Mr. Lewis that they should be married on Tuesday previous to their church meeting, that she might thus soon cast her lot among his people. She was welcomed with warm hearts and affectionate greeting; and when, on the following morning, her husband led her down into the stream, where but a few months before he had followed Christ in baptism, they received her from the liquid grave, a member of the household of faith, a laborer with them in the vineyard of the Lord. JOHN E. HATCHER Col. John E. Hatcher ("G. Washington Bricks"), a newspaper humorist who won wide fame in his day and generation, but who is now quite sealed over and forgotten, was born near Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1828. When a boy his parents emigrated to Tennessee. At the age of twenty years Hatcher became editor of _The American Democrat_ at Florence, Alabama; and in 1852 he purchased _The Mirror_, a paper which General Zollicoffer had established at Columbia, Tennessee. Some time later Hatcher disposed of that property, and accepted a position on the _Nashville Patriot_. He was fast gaining a reputation for his humorous sketches, paragraphs, and rhymes, which were floating through many Southern newspapers under his pen-name of "G. Washington Bricks." Hatcher relinquished the pen for the sword when the Civil War began, becoming an officer on the staff of General Cheatham. After the war, or in 1867, Colonel Hatcher settled at Louisville, Kentucky, joining the staff of Prentice's then fast-expiring _Journal_. When, in the following year, the _Journal_ was united with the _Courier_, he became editor of the _Daily Democrat_; and when that paper was consolidated with the other two to make _The Courier-Journal_, he became one of the editors of the new paper, and continued to write for it so long as he lived. For a short time he did some special work for a Louisville publication known as _The Evening Express_, conducted by Mr. Overton. A few years before his death Colonel Hatcher returned to his old home at Columbia, Tennessee, and founded _The Mail_; but he became "outside editor" of _The Courier-Journal_, laying down his pen for that paper only with his death, which occurred at Columbia, Tennessee, March 26, 1879. Consumption caused his demise and robbed Southern journalism of one of its finest minds. Colonel Hatcher married Miss Lizzie McKnight, daughter of a prosperous merchant at Iuka, Mississippi, and the early death of their only child, a daughter, coupled with consumption, hastened his own death. As an editorial paragraphist Colonel Hatcher has never had a peer in Kentucky or the South. Prentice, the father of the paragraph, was a wit; Hatcher was a humorist; and his writings were often credited to Prentice by those who were not acquainted with the inner workings of the office. Henry Watterson has written this fine tribute to Colonel Hatcher's memory: He was one of the silent singers of the press, but he lacked nothing of eminence except good fortune; for he was a humorist of the very first water, and had he lived under different conditions could not have failed of the celebrity to which his talents entitled him. Born not merely poor, but far inland, with no early advantages, and later in life with none except those furnished by a rural newspaper; ill health overtook him before he had divined his own powers.... His wit was not so aggressive as that of Mr. Prentice. But he had more humor. He died in the prime of life and left behind him a professional tradition, which is cherished by the little circle of friends to whom a charming personality and many brilliant gifts made him very dear. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (March 27, 1879); _Oddities of Southern Life_, by Henry Watterson (Boston, 1882). NEWSPAPER PARAGRAPHS [From _The Courier-Journal_] Garters with monogram clasps are now worn by the pretty girls. They are rather a novelty yet, but we hope to see more of them. "The New York _Telegraph_ advises people to marry for love and not for money." Good advice, certainly; but inasmuch as you will always be in want of money if you marry for love, and always in want of love if you marry for money, your safest way is to marry for a little of both. Some of our contemporaries will persist in speaking of us as a "rebel." That we fought for the stars and bars with a heroism of which Marathon, Leuctra, and Thermopylae never even dreamed, the bones of half-a-dozen substitutes which lie bleeding upon as many "stormy heights and carnage covered fields" bear testimony abundant and indisputable, and that we suffer ourselves still to be called a "rebel" without unsheathing the avenging dagger and wading up to our knees in gore, is simply because there is already as much blood upon the hands of our substitutes as we can furnish soap to wash off without becoming a bankrupt. Nevertheless, if this thing is much longer persisted in, there may come a time when virtue will cease to be a forebearance. One more taste of blood, this sanguinary arm once more uplifted to smite, and the world will shudder. General Grant says he won't call an extra session of Congress unless the war in Europe is likely to give us trouble. So he is determined that if the gods bring us one calamity, he will immediately step forward with another. For list of candidates see first page.--_Banner_. For the candidates themselves--but you needn't trouble yourself to see them; they'll see you. The French General Failly, who was killed by a Prussian shell, and was afterward murdered by his own soldiers, and subsequently blew out his own brains, is now a prisoner at Mayence--whether dead or alive, the telegraph does not inform us. The Glasgow _Times_ tells of a man in Georgia, fifty years of age, who never in his life drank a glass of whiskey, smoked a pipe, or courted a woman. The poor wretch has lived utterly in vain. The man who has never sat by a beautiful woman, with a pipe in his mouth, a glass of whiskey in one hand, and the whalebones of her palpitating stays in the other, and "with a lip unused to the cool breath of reason, told his love," has no more idea of Paradise than a deaf and dumb orang-outang has of metaphysics. Even without the pipe and whiskey there is, strictly speaking, nothing disagreeable about it. The United States navy has but one Admiral Poor. We wish we could say it has but one poor admiral. WILLIAM C. WATTS William Courtney Watts, author of a single historical novel which is regarded by many as the finest work of its kind yet done by a Kentucky hand, was born at Salem, Kentucky, February 7, 1830. His family has no record of his school days, but he was married to Miss Nannie Ferguson when a young man, and six children were born to them. Watts's early years were spent at Salem and Smithland, Kentucky, but he later went to New Orleans as a clerk in the firm of Givens, Watts and Company, cotton brokers. He shortly afterwards joined the New York branch of this New Orleans house, known as Watts, Crowe and Company, as a partner in the business; and from New York Watts went to Liverpool, England, to represent the firm of W. C. Watts and Company, which was the foreign title for the New Orleans and New York houses. For some years the business was very prosperous, and Watts, of course, shared largely in the firm's success. After the usual congratulatory messages between England and the United States had been exchanged, Watts is said to have sent the first cablegram across the Atlantic. After many years of prosperity, failure overtook the house of Watts, and he returned to New York, setting up in business with a Mr. Slaughter. Some time subsequently he came back to Kentucky, making his home in Smithland, but rheumatism ruined his health, causing lameness, and making him an invalid for the remainder of his life. In Smithland, during days of illness, Watts wrote his splendid story, _The Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement_ (New York, 1897). This novel of early Kentucky life is one of the most charming and delightful tales ever told by an American author, although founded upon fact and, in a sense, twice-told. _The Chronicles_ is the only book Watts wrote, and he has come down to posterity with this single story in his feeble hand. The preface, signed on the sixty-seventh anniversary of his birth, was done but ten months before his death, which occurred at Smithland, Kentucky December 27, 1897. He is buried in the cemetery of the little Kentucky town over which he cast the glamour of romance, almost unknown to its citizen of this day, and still unappreciated and unheralded by Kentuckians. His _Chronicles_ is known only to the student and collector, as it was never properly put before the public, though published by a powerful New York firm. His family knows little of his life and is quite careless of his fame. In years to come the _Chronicles_ may take high rank among the finest series of historical pictures ever penned of a single Southern settlement, and then William Courtney Watts will come into his very own. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (December 28, 1897); letter from Watts's daughter to the author. A WEDDING AND A DANCE[15] [From _Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement_ (New York, 1897)] A few weeks after the race there was a grand wedding, and, this time, Squire Howard united in holy matrimony Jefferson Brantley and Emily Wilmot, the ceremony taking place at the residence of the bride's father. Joseph Adair and Horace Benton were the groomsmen, and Laura Howard and Ada Howard the bridesmaids. A young lady from Princeton was to have been one of the bridesmaids, but illness prevented her attendance, and Ada Howard took her place. The residence of Mr. Wilmot was too small to admit of dancing, but the company present had a merry time--the fun and frolic being kept up until a late hour. It was then the custom to "give" (hold) the infare at the residence of the groom's parents or some other near relative, but, as Mr. Brantley had no relatives in the county, his infare was held at the Brick Hotel in Salem, and great were the preparations made on the occasion--never had such an elegant and sumptuous table been spread in those "parts"; there were meats of many sorts, including barbacued pigs, and cakes, pastries, fruits, nuts, and wines and liquors in abundance. Silas Holman and Billy Wilmot were never in better trim, and their fiddles seemed the fountain of such ecstatic sounds as to set the nerves of old as well as young tingling with a pleasurable excitement which could only find its true expression in the quick and graceful movements of the dance. And dancing there was, and such dancing! There was Bird McCoy, who could "cut the double shuffle,"--spring into the air, strike his feet together thrice before lighting, and not lose step to the music. And among the young ladies--many of them country girls whose lives in the open air made them as active as squirrels and as graceful as fawns--were many good dancers, but it was conceded that among them all the slight, sylph-like Ada Howard was the best--"the pick of the flock." And the mirth and fun grew "fast and furious," and the "dancers quick and quicker flew." Nor did the fun and frolic cease until faint streaks of light in the East heralded the coming morn. They almost literally "Danced all night 'til broad daylight, And went home with the girls in the morning." And yet, be it said that, while there was a good deal of drinking that night, there was no drunkenness, rowdyism, unseemly behavior, or ungentlemanly conversation; for woe to the young man who at such a time and place, when ladies were present, had violated the recognized rules of decorum! It is certain, however, that several young persons came very near that night being "fiddled out of the church." There was one gay, good-humored, hearty country girl who, when "churched" for dancing that night, admitted that she was "on the floor with the so-called dancers"; that she had a "partner," and took part in the movements; but, she contended, that inasmuch as she had not _crossed her feet_, she had violated no rule of the church. "What," she asked, "if I walk forward and backward and turn and bow _without_ music, is that dancing? And if I do the same when there _is_ music, does that make it dancing?" And the good old brethren, who were sitting in judgment, after mature deliberation, came to the conclusion that they were not "cl'ar on the p'int 'bout crossin' the feet." "And," said one, "if we err, let it be on the side o' marcy." "Yes," replied another, "but let the young sister understand that she must n't do it ag'in." And so the matter was settled. FOOTNOTE: [15] Copyright, 1897, by G. P. Putnam's Sons. J. PROCTOR KNOTT James Proctor Knott, he who made Duluth famous, was born at Lebanon, Kentucky, August 29, 1830. In 1851 he became a Missouri lawyer, and later a member of the Missouri legislature. For a time he was attorney-general of the state but, refusing to take certain test oaths prescribed for officials, his office was declared vacant and he returned to Lebanon, his birthplace. In 1866 Knott was sent to the lower house of Congress, and he was re-elected two years later. On January 27, 1871, he delivered his celebrated Duluth speech upon the St. Croix and Superior land grant, which effort brought him a national reputation as an orator and humorist, but which injured him as a constructive statesman--if he ever was or could be such a statesman! Knott was in Congress again from 1875 until 1883, when he was elected governor of Kentucky. Governor Knott was not an overly forceful executive, but the people enjoyed his witty stories and speeches, and thus his term wore on and out. It was an era of good feeling, Kentuckians smiling and taking their governor good naturedly at all times. His brief eulogy to remember James Francis Leonard, the Kentucky telegrapher, was the finest literary thing he did while governor of Kentucky. The governor was dean of the law faculty of Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, from 1894 to 1901, when, old age coming on, he returned to his home at Lebanon, where the final years of his life were passed, and where he died on June 18, 1911. BIBLIOGRAPHY: _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_, by Henry Watterson (Boston, 1883); _The Life of James Francis Leonard_, by J. W. Townsend (Louisville, 1909). FROM THE DULUTH SPEECH [From _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_, edited by Henry Watterson (Boston, 1883)] Hence, as I have said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to determine where the terminus of this great and indispensable road should be, until I accidentally overheard some gentleman the other day mention the name of "Duluth." [Great laughter.] Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft, sweet accents of an angel's whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth! 'Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks. [Renewed laughter.] But where was Duluth? Never, in all my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. [Laughter.] And I felt a profounder humiliation in my ignorance that its dulcet syllables had never before ravished my delighted ear. [Roars of laughter.] I was certain the draughtsman of this bill had never heard of it, or it would have been designated as one of the termini of this road. I asked my friends about it, but they knew nothing of it. I rushed to the library and examined all the maps I could find. [Laughter.] I discovered in one of them a delicate, hair-like line, diverging from the Mississippi near a place marked Prescott, which I supposed was intended to represent the river St. Croix, but I could nowhere find Duluth. Nevertheless, I was confident it existed somewhere, and that its discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present century, if not of all modern times. [Laughter.] I knew it was bound to exist in the very nature of things; that the symmetry and perfection of our planetary system would be incomplete without it [renewed laughter]; that the elements of material nature would long since have resolved themselves back into original chaos if there had been such a hiatus in creation as would have resulted from leaving out Duluth. [Roars of laughter.] In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the conviction that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but that wherever it was it was a great and glorious place. I was convinced that the greatest calamity that ever befell the benighted nations of the ancient world was in their having passed away without a knowledge of the actual existence of Duluth; that their fabled Atlantis, never seen save by the hallowed vision of inspired poesy, was, in fact, but another name for Duluth; that the golden orchard of the Hesperides was but a poetical synonym for the beer gardens in the vicinity of Duluth. [Great laughter.] I was certain that Herodotus had died a miserable death because in all his travels and with all his geographical research he had never heard of Duluth. [Laughter.] I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand; if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strains, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystalize in deathless song the rising glories of Duluth. [Great and continued laughter.] Yet, sir, had it not been for this map, kindly furnished me by the legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could nowhere find Duluth. [Renewed laughter.] Had such been my melancholy fate, I have no doubt that, with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath, I should have whispered, "Where is Duluth?" [Roars of laughter.] GEORGE G. VEST George Graham Vest, exquisite eulogist of man's good friend, the dog, was born at Frankfort, Kentucky, December 6, 1830. At the age of eighteen years Vest was graduated from Centre College, Danville, Kentucky; and five years later Transylvania University granted him his degree in law. The year of his graduation from Transylvania, 1853, Vest went to Missouri, settling at Georgetown. He rapidly attained a State-wide reputation as a lawyer and orator. In 1860 he was a presidential elector on the Democratic ticket, and a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Vest's sympathy lay with the South and he resigned his seat in the legislature in order to become a member of the Confederate Congress. He served two years in the Confederate House and one year in the Senate. After the war he resumed the practice of his profession at Sedalia, but he later removed to Kansas City. In 1878 Vest was elected United States Senator from Missouri and this position he held until 1903. In the Senate his powers as an orator and debater were generally recognized, and he became a national figure. Of the many speeches that Senator Vest made, his tribute to the dog, made in a jury trial, is the one thing that will keep his memory green for many years. It appears that Senator Vest was called into a case in which one party was endeavoring to recover damages for the death of a favorite dog, and when it came time for him to speak he arose and delivered his tribute to the dog, and then resumed his seat without having mentioned the case before the jury in any way whatsoever. The jury understood however, and the Senator won his case. Senator Vest died at Sweet Springs, Missouri, August 9, 1904. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. vi); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xii). JEFFERSON'S PASSPORTS TO IMMORTALITY[16] [From _The Writings of Thomas Jefferson_ (Washington, 1905, v. xii)] Upon the canvas of the past, Washington and Jefferson stand forth the central figures in our struggle for independence. The character of the former was so rounded and justly proportioned, that, so long as our country lives, or a single community of Americans can be found, Washington will be "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." To Washington we are more indebted than to any one man for national existence; but what availed the heroism of Bunker Hill, the sufferings of Valley Forge, or the triumph of Yorktown, if the government they established had been but an imitation of the monarchy from which we had separated? To Jefferson we owe eternal gratitude for his sublime confidence in popular government, and his unfaltering courage in defending at all times and in all places, the great truth, that "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." The love of liberty is found not in palaces, but with the poor and oppressed. It flutters in the heart of the caged bird, and sighs with the worn and wasted prisoner in his dungeon. It has gone with martyrs to the stake, and kissed their burning lips as the tortured spirit winged its flight to God! In the temple of this deity Jefferson was high priest! For myself, I worship no mortal man living or dead; but if I could kneel at such a shrine, it would be with uncovered head and loving heart at the grave of Thomas Jefferson. EULOGY OF THE DOG [From _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xii)] Gentlemen of the Jury: The best human friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps, when he needs it most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deceives him, the one that never proves ungrateful and treacherous is his dog. A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground where the wintry wind blows and the snow drifts fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journeys through the heavens. If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying, to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when, the last scene of all comes and when death takes the master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by the graveside may the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in death. FOOTNOTE: [16] Copyright, 1905, by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association. WILLIAM P. JOHNSTON William Preston Johnston, biographer and poet, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, January 5, 1831, the son of the famous Confederate general, Albert Sidney Johnston. He was graduated from Yale in 1852. During the Civil War young Johnston was on the staff of Jefferson Davis. After the war he was professor of history and literature in Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, for ten years. In 1880 he accepted the presidency of Louisiana State University, at Baton Rouge. Paul Tulane's magnificent gift in 1883 made Tulane University possible, and Johnston became its first president. This position he held until his death, which occurred at New Orleans, July 16, 1899. President Johnston's _Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston_ (New York, 1878), is one of the most admirable biographies ever written by a Kentuckian. His graphic description of the battle of Shiloh, in which his famous father met death and the South defeat, is now accepted, even in the North, as the best account of that desperate conflict. Had General Johnston lived a day longer no one can even guess what it would have meant to the South and to the North. President Johnston was also the author of _The Prototype of Hamlet_ (1890), in which his power as a Shakesperian scholar is well proved; and he published _The Johnstons of Salisbury_. He was a maker of charming verse, which may be read in his three collections, _My Garden Walk_ (1894), _Pictures of the Patriarchs_ (1896), and _Seekers After God_ (Louisville, 1898), a book of sonnets. As a man, Johnston was a true type of the courtly Southern soldier and scholar. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1888, v. iii); _William Preston Johnston's Work for a New South_, by A. D. Mayo (Washington, 1900); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. vii). BATTLE OF SHILOH--SUNDAY MORNING [From _The Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston_ (New York, 1879)] Saturday afternoon, April 5th, the sun, breaking through the mists which drifted away, set in a cloudless sky. The night was clear, calm, and beautiful. General Johnston, tired out with the vigils of the night before, slept quietly in an ambulance-wagon, his staff bivouacking by the camp-fires around him. Some of Hardee's troops having wasted their rations, he and Bragg spent a large part of the night getting up provisions for them. Before the faintest glimmer of dawn, the wide forest was alive with preparations for the mighty contest of the coming day. No bugle-note sounded, and no drum beat the reveillé; but men took their hasty morning meal, and looked with sharp attention to the arms that were to decide the fortunes of the fight. The cool, gray dawn found them in motion. Morning opened with all the delicate fragrance and beauty of the season, enhanced by the contrast of the day before. The sky was serene, the air was bracing, the dew lay heavy on the tender green of leaf and herb, and the freshness of early spring was on all around. When the sun rose it was with unclouded brilliancy; and, as it shed its glories over the coverts of the oak-woods, the advancing host, stirred by the splendor of the scene and the enthusiasm of the hour, passed the omen from lip to lip, and welcomed its rising as another "sun of Austerlitz." The native buoyance of General Johnston's self-repressed temper broke its barriers at the prospect of that struggle which should settle for all time by the arbitrament of arms the dispute as to his own military ability and skill and the fate of the Confederate cause in the West. He knew the hazard; but he knew, too, that he had done all that foresight, fortitude, energy, and strategy, could accomplish to secure a victory, and he welcomed with exultant joy the day that was about to decide not only these great questions, but for him all questions, solving the mysteries of life and death. Men who came within his influence on the battle-field felt and confessed the inspiration of his presence, his manner, and his words. As he gave his orders in terse sentences, every word seemed to ring with a presage of victory. Turning to his staff, as he mounted, he exclaimed, "Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River." It was thus that he formulated his plan of battle. It must not stop short of entire victory. As he rode forward he encountered Colonel Randal L. Gibson, who was the intimate friend of his son. When Gibson ordered his brigade to salute, General Johnston took him warmly by the hand and said: "Randal, I never see you but I think of William. I hope you may get through safely to-day, but we must win a victory." Gibson says he felt greatly stirred by his words. Sharp skirmishing had begun before he reached the front. Here he met Colonel John S. Marmaduke, commanding the Third Arkansas Regiment. This officer, in reply to General Johnston's questions, explained, with some pride, that he held the _centre_ of the front line, the other regiments forming on him. Marmaduke had been with General Johnston in Utah, at Bowling Green, and in the retreat to Corinth, and regarded him with the entire affection and veneration of a young soldier for his master in the art of war. General Johnston put his hand on Marmaduke's shoulder, and said to him with an earnestness that went to his heart, "_My son_, we must this day conquer or perish!" Marmaduke felt himself moved to a tenfold resolution. General Johnston said to the ambitious Hindman, who had been in the vanguard from the beginning: "You have _earned_ your spurs as major-general. Let this day's work win them." "Men of Arkansas!" he exclaimed to a regiment from that State, "they say you boast of your prowess with the bowie-knife. To-day you wield a nobler weapon--the bayonet. Employ it well." It was with such words, as he rode from point to point, that he raised a spirit in that host which swept away the serried lines of the conquerors of Donelson. WILL WALLACE HARNEY Will Wallace Harney, poet, was born at Bloomington, Indiana, June 20, 1832, the son of John H. Harney, professor of mathematics in the University of Indiana, and author of the first _Algebra_ edited by an American. When the future poet was seven years of age his father removed to Louisville, Kentucky, to accept the presidency of Louisville College. In 1844 President Harney became editor of the Louisville _Daily Democrat_, which he conducted for nearly twenty-five years. Will Wallace Harney was educated by the old grammarian, Noble Butler, and at Louisville College. He became a teacher in the public schools of the city, in which he taught for five years; and he was the first principal of the high school there, holding the position for two years. Know-Nothingism then swept the city and elected a new board of trustees, which requested Harney's resignation. He was appointed to a professorship in the State Normal School at Lexington, which he held for two years. He then returned to Louisville to practice law, but he was shortly afterwards asked to become assistant editor of the _Daily Democrat_; and after his father's death, in 1867, he became editor of that paper. Harney's masterpiece, _The Stab_, that John J. Piatt called "a tragic little night-piece which Heine could not have surpassed in its simple, graphic narration and vivid suggestiveness," was written in Kentucky before 1860. In 1869 Harney removed to Florida, where he planted an orange grove and wrote for the high-class magazines and newspapers of the East and South. From 1883 to 1885 he was editor of _The Bitter Sweet_, a newspaper of Kissimmee. Harney spent the final years of his life with his only son, William R. Harney, a business man of Jacksonville, to whom he inscribed his one book, _The Spirit of the South_ (Boston, 1909). This volume brought together his poems and short stories which he cared to preserve from newspapers and periodicals. The poet died at Jacksonville, Florida, March 28, 1912. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Blue Grass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _Memorial History of Louisville, Kentucky_, by J. S. Johnston (Chicago, 1896). THE STAB[17] [From _The Spirit of the South_ (Boston, 1909)] On the road, the lonely road, Under the cold white moon, Under the ragged trees, he strode; He whistled, and shifted his heavy load; Whistled a foolish tune. There was a step timed with his own; A figure that stooped and bowed; A cold white blade that flashed and shone, Like a splinter of daylight downward thrown-- And the moon went behind a cloud. But the moon came out, so broad and good, The barn cock woke and crowed; Then roughed his feathers in drowsy mood, And the brown owl called to his mate in the wood, That a dead man lay on the road. FOOTNOTE: [17] Copyright, 1909, by the Author. J. STODDARD JOHNSTON Josiah Stoddard Johnston, journalist and historian, was born at New Orleans, February 10, 1833. He is the nephew of the celebrated Confederate cavalry leader, General Albert Sidney Johnston. Left an orphan when but five years old, he was reared by relatives in Kentucky. He was graduated from Yale in 1853; and the following year he was married to Miss Elizabeth W. Johnson, daughter of George W. Johnson, Confederate governor of Kentucky. Johnston was a cotton planter in Arkansas from 1855 to 1859, and a Kentucky farmer until the Civil War began. He served throughout the war upon the staffs of Generals Bragg, Buckner, and Breckinridge. Colonel Johnston was editor of the old Frankfort _Yeoman_ for more than twenty years; and from 1903 to 1908 he was associate editor of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_. In 1871 Colonel Johnston was Adjutant-General of Kentucky; and Secretary of State from 1875 to 1879. He has been vice-president of the Filson Club of Louisville since 1893; and he is now consulting geologist of the Kentucky Geological Survey. Colonel Johnston's knowledge of plants and mammals is very extensive and most surprising in a man of literary tastes. His tube-roses and flower gardens is one of the traditions of the old town of Frankfort. Colonel Johnston has published _The Memorial History of Louisville, Kentucky_ (Chicago, 1896, two vols.); _The First Explorations of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1898); and _The Confederate History of Kentucky_. Colonel Johnston is one of the finest men in Kentucky to-day, dignified, cultured, and deeply learned in the history of Kentucky and the West. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Memorial History of Louisville_ (Chicago, 1896); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. vi). "CAPTAIN MOLL"[18] [From _First Explorations of Kentucky_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1898)] The Revolutionary War was drawing to a close, involving Virginia in its last throes in the devastation of an invading army. The whole eastern portion was overrun by the British forces under Arnold and Tarleton, the capital taken, and much public and private property destroyed everywhere. Charlottesville, to which the legislature had adjourned, Monticello, and Castle Hill were raided by Tarleton's dragoons, and the legislature, Mr. Jefferson, and Doctor Walker barely escaped capture. An interesting incident of the raid is recorded well illustrating the spirit which actuated the American women of that period. Not far distant from Charlottesville, on an estate known as "The Farm," resided Nicholas Lewis, the uncle and guardian of Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific. His wife was Mary Walker, the eldest daughter of Doctor Walker. Her husband was absent in the army when Tarleton with his raiders swooped down on her home and proceeded to appropriate forage and every thing eatable and portable. She received the British cavalryman with spirit and dignity, and upbraided him sharply for his war on defenseless women, telling him to go to the armies of Virginia and meet her men. Tarleton parried her thrusts with politeness as well as he could, and after his men were rested, resumed his march. After his departure Mrs. Lewis discovered that his men had carried off all her ducks except a single old drake. This she caused to be caught and sent it to Tarleton by a messenger, who overtook him, with her compliments, saying that the drake was lonesome without his companions, and as he had evidently overlooked it, she wished to reunite them. From that time she was known as "Captain Moll," and bears that sobriquet in the family records. She was a woman of strong character, was still living at "The Farm" in 1817, and left many descendants in Virginia and in and near Louisville, Kentucky. On the 19th of October, 1781, Tarleton's career closed, and Virginia was relieved from similar devastation for a period of eighty years by the surrender at Yorktown. FOOTNOTE: [18] Copyright, 1898, by John P. Morton and Company. JULIA S. DINSMORE Miss Julia Stockton Dinsmore ("F.V."), poet, was born in Louisiana about 1833, but most of her long life of nearly eighty years has been spent in Kentucky. For many years Miss Dinsmore published an occasional poem in the newspapers of her home town, Petersburg, Kentucky, but, in 1910, when she was seventy-seven years of age, the New York firm of Doubleday, Page and Company discovered Miss Dinsmore to be a poet of much grace and charm, and they at once issued the first collection of her work, entitled "Verses and Sonnets." This little volume contains more than eighty exquisite lyrics, which have been favorably reviewed by the literary journals of the country. _Love Among the Roses_, _Noon in a Blue Grass Pasture_, _Far 'Mid the Snows_, _That's for Remembrance_, and several of the sonnets are very fine. Miss Dinsmore is a great lover of Nature, as her poems reveal, and she is often in the saddle. A most remarkable woman she surely is, having won the plaudits of her people when most women of her years have their eyes turned toward the far country. Another volume of her verse may be published shortly. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Current Literature_ (June, 1910); _The Nation_ (July 14, 1910). LOVE AMONG THE ROSES[19] [From _Verses and Sonnets_ (New York, 1910)] "What, dear--what dear?" How sweet and clear The redbird's eager voice I hear; Perched on the honeysuckle trellis near He sits elate, Red as the cardinal whose name he bears, And tossing high the gay cockade he wears Calls to his mate, "What, dear--what, dear?" She stirs upon her nest, And through her ruddy breast The tremor of her happy thoughts repressed Seems rising like a sigh of bliss untold, There where the searching sunbeams' stealthy gold Slips past the thorns and her retreat discloses, Hid in the shadow of June's sweetest roses. Her russet, rustic home, Round as inverted dome Built by themselves and planned, Within whose tiny scope, As though to them the hollow of God's hand, They gladly trust their all with faith and hope. "What, dear--what, dear?" Are all the words I hear, The rest is said, or sung In some sweet, unknown tongue. Whose music, only, charms my alien ear; But bird, my heart can guess All that its tones express Of love and cheer, and fear and tenderness. It says, "Does the day seem long-- The scented and sunny day Because you must sit apart? Are you lonesome, my own sweetheart? You know you can hear my song And you know I'm alert and strong And a match for the wickedest jay That ever could do us wrong. As I sit on the snowball spray Or this trellis not far away, And look at you on the nest, And think of those beautiful speckled shells In whose orbs the birds of the future rest, My heart with such pride and pleasure swells As never could be expressed. "But, dear--but, dear!"-- Now I seem to hear A change in the notes so proud and clear-- "But, dear--but, dear! Do you feel no fear When day is gone and the night is here? When the cold, white moon looks down on you, And your feathers are damp with the chilly dew, And I am silent, and all is still, Save the sleepless insects, sad and shrill, And the screeching owl, and the prowling cat, And the howling dog--when the gruesome bat Flits past the nest in his circling flight Do you feel afraid in the lonely night?" "Courage! my own, when daylight dawns You shall hear again in the cheerful morns My madrigal among the thorns, Whose rugged guardianship incloses Our link of love among the roses." FOOTNOTE: [19] Copyright, 1910, by Doubleday, Page and Company. HENRY T. STANTON Henry Thompson Stanton, one of the most popular poets Kentucky has produced, was born at Alexandria, Virginia, June 30, 1834. He was brought by his father, Judge Richard Henry Stanton, to Maysville, Kentucky, when he was only two years old. Stanton was educated at the Maysville Academy and at West Point, but he was not graduated. He entered the Confederate army as captain of a company in the Fifth Kentucky regiment, and through various promotions he surrendered as a major. Major Stanton saw much service on the battlefields of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. After the war he practised law for a time and was editor of the Maysville _Bulletin_ until 1870, when he removed to Frankfort, Kentucky, to become chief assistant to the State Commissioner of Insurance. Major Stanton's first volume of verse was _The Moneyless Man and Other Poems_ (Baltimore, 1871). This title poem, written for a wandering elocutionist who "struck" the town of Maysville one day, and asked the major to write him "a poem that would draw tears from any audience," made him famous and miserable for the rest of his life. For the nomad he "dashed off this special lyric and it brought all Kentucky to the mourners' bench. It was more deadly as a tear-provoker than 'Stay, Jailer, Stay,' and though the author wrote other things which were far better, the public would never admit it, and many people innocently courted death by rushing up to Stanton and exclaiming: 'Oh, and is this Major Stanton who wrote 'The Moneyless Man?' So glad to meet you.'" One Kentucky poet took the philosophy of _The Moneyless Man_ too seriously, and _A Reply to the Moneyless Man_ was the pathetic result. The rhythm of the poem is very pleasing, but it is, in a word, melodramatic. Major Stanton's second and final collection of his verse was _Jacob Brown and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1875). It contains several poems that are superior to _The Moneyless Man_, but the general reader refuses to read them. From 1875 till 1886 he edited the Frankfort _Yeoman_; and during President Cleveland's first administration he served as Land Commissioner. Besides his poems, Major Stanton wrote a group of paper-backed novels, entitled _The Kents; Social Fetters_ (Washington, 1889); and _A Graduate of Paris_ (Washington, 1890). Major Stanton died at Frankfort, Kentucky, May 8, 1898. Two years later _Poems of the Confederacy_ (Louisville, 1900), containing the war lyrics of the major, was artistically printed as a memorial to his memory. The introduction to the little book was written by Major Stanton's friend and fellow man of letters, Colonel J. Stoddard Johnston, and it is an altogether fitting remembrance for the author of _The Moneyless Man_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Poems of the Confederacy_ (Louisville, 1900); _Confessions of a Tatler_, by Elvira Miller Slaughter (Louisville, 1905). THE MONEYLESS MAN [From _The Moneyless Man and Other Poems_ (Baltimore, 1871)] Is there no secret place on the face of the earth, Where charity dwelleth, where virtue has birth? Where bosoms in mercy and kindness will heave, When the poor and the wretched shall ask and receive? Is there no place at all, where a knock from the poor, Will bring a kind angel to open the door? Ah, search the wide world wherever you can There is no open door for a Moneyless Man! Go, look in yon hall where the chandelier's light Drives off with its splendor the darkness of night, Where the rich-hanging velvet in shadowy fold Sweeps gracefully down with its trimmings of gold, And the mirrors of silver take up, and renew, In long lighted vistas the 'wildering view: Go there! at the banquet, and find, if you can, A welcoming smile for a Moneyless Man! Go, look in yon church of the cloud-reaching spire, Which gives to the sun his same look of red fire, Where the arches and columns are gorgeous within, And the walls seem as pure as a soul without sin; Walk down the long aisles, see the rich and the great In the pomp and the pride of their worldly estate; Walk down in your patches, and find, if you can, Who opens a pew to a Moneyless Man. Go, look in the Banks, where Mammon has told His hundreds and thousands of silver and gold; Where, safe from the hands of the starving and poor, Lies pile upon pile of the glittering ore! Walk up to their counters--ah, there you may stay 'Til your limbs grow old, 'til your hairs grow gray, And you'll find at the Banks not one of the clan With money to lend to a Moneyless Man! Go, look to yon Judge, in his dark-flowing gown, With the scales wherein law weighteth equity down; Where he frowns on the weak and smiles on the strong, And punishes right whilst he justifies wrong; Where juries their lips to the Bible have laid, To render a verdict--they've already made: Go there, in the court-room, and find, if you can, Any law for the cause of a Moneyless Man! Then go to your hovel--no raven has fed The wife who has suffered too long for her bread; Kneel down by her pallet, and kiss the death-frost From the lips of the angel your poverty lost: Then turn in your agony upward to God, And bless, while it smites you, the chastening rod, And you'll find, at the end of your life's little span, There's a welcome above for a Moneyless Man! "A MENS� ET THORO" [From _Jacob Brown and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1875)] Both of us guilty and both of us sad-- And this is the end of passion! And people are silly--people are mad, Who follow the lights of Fashion; For she was a belle, and I was a beau, And both of us giddy-headed-- A priest and a rite--a glitter and show, And this is the way we wedded. There were wants we never had known before, And matters we could not smother; And poverty came in an open door, And love went out at another: For she had been humored--I had been spoiled, And neither was sturdy-hearted-- Both in the ditches and both of us soiled, And this is the way we parted. A SPECIAL PLEA [From the same] Prue and I together sat Beside a running brook; The little maid put on my hat, And I the forfeit took. "Desist," she cried; "It is not right, I'm neither wife nor sister;" But in her eye there shone such light, That twenty times I kiss'd her. SWEETHEART[20] [From _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Mrs. F. P. Dickey (Louisville, Kentucky, 1892)] Sweetheart--I call you sweetheart still, As in your window's laced recess, When both our eyes were wont to fill, One year ago, with tenderness. I call you sweetheart by the law Which gives me higher right to feel, Though I be here in Malaga, And you in far Mobile. I mind me when, along the bay The moonbeams slanted all the night; When on my breast your dark locks lay, And in my hand, your hand so white; This scene the summer night-time saw, And my soul took its warm anneal And bore it here to Malaga From beautiful Mobile. The still and white magnolia grove Brought winged odors to your cheek, Where my lips seared the burning love They could not frame the words to speak; Sweetheart, you were not ice to thaw, Your bosom neither stone nor steel; I count to-night, at Malaga, Its throbbings at Mobile. What matter if you bid me now To go my way for others' sake? Was not my love-seal on your brow For death, and not for days to break? Sweetheart, our trothing holds no flaw; There was no crime and no conceal, I clasp you here in Malaga, As erst in sweet Mobile. I see the bay-road, white with shells, I hear the beach make low refrain, The stars lie flecked like asphodels Upon the green, wide water-plain-- These silent things as magnets draw, They bear me hence with rushing keel, A thousand miles from Malaga, To matchless, fair Mobile. Sweetheart, there is no sea so wide, No time in life, nor tide to flow, Can rob my breast of that one bride It held so close a year ago. I see again the bay we saw; I hear again your sigh's reveal, I keep the faith at Malaga I plighted at Mobile. FOOTNOTE: [20] Copyright, 1892, by the Author. SARAH M. B. PIATT Mrs. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, one of Kentucky's most distinguished poets, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, August 11, 1836. Her grandfather was Morgan Bryan, brother-in-law of Daniel Boone, and one of the proprietors of Bryan's Station, near Lexington, famous in the old Indian wars. When only three years old she left Lexington to make her home near Versailles, Kentucky, where her beautiful mother died in 1844. After her mother's death she was sent to her aunt's home at New Castle, Kentucky. Miss Bryan was graduated from Henry Female College, New Castle; and on June 18, 1861, she was married to John James Piatt, the Ohio poet. George D. Prentice, of course, was the first to praise and print Mrs. Piatt's poems and start her upon a literary career. Her husband, too, has been her chief critic, and responsible for the publication of her work in book form. From the first Mrs. Piatt's poems have been deeply introspective, voicing the heart of a woman in every line. Her work has been cordially commended by Bayard Taylor, William Dean Howells, John Burroughs, Hamilton Wright Mabie, and many other well-known and capable critics in America and Europe. Several of Mrs. Piatt's poems were published in _The Nests at Washington and Other Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1861), but her first independent volume, issued anonymously, was _A Woman's Poems_ (Boston, 1871). This is her best known work, made famous by Bayard Taylor in his delightful little book, _The Echo Club_. This was followed by _A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles and Other Poems_ (1874); _That New World and Other Poems_ (1876); _Poems in Company with Children_ (1877); _Dramatic Persons and Moods_ (1880); _The Children Out of Doors and Other Poems_ (with her husband, 1885); _An Irish Garland_ (1885); _Selected Poems_ (1885); _In Primrose Time_ (1886); _Child's-World Ballads_ (1887); _The Witch in the Glass_ (1889); _An Irish Wild-Flower_ (1891); _An Enchanted Castle_ (1893); _Complete Poems_ (1894, two vols.); _Child's-World Ballads_ (1896, second series); and _The Gift of Tears_ (Cincinnati, 1906). These volumes prove Mrs. Piatt to be one of the most prolific and finest female poets America has produced. English reviewers have often linked her name with Mrs. Browning's and Miss Rossetti's, and if she has not actually reached their rank, she has surely shown work worthy of a high place in the literature of her native country. Mrs. Piatt is at the present time residing at North Bend, Ohio, near Cincinnati. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Echo Club_, by Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1876); _The Poets of Ohio_, by Emerson Venable (Cincinnati, 1909). IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE [From _An Irish Garland_ (North Bend, Ohio, 1885)] Where the graves were many, we looked for one. Oh, the Irish rose was red, And the dark stones saddened the setting sun With the names of the early dead. Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him In the land we love so well, Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim In the churchyard of Clonmel. But the sexton came. "Can you tell us where Charles Wolfe is buried?" "I can-- See, that is his grave in the corner there. (Ay, he was a clever man, If God had spared him!) It's many that come To be asking for him," said he. But the boy kept whispering, "Not a drum Was heard,"--in the dusk to me. (Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall Of the roofless church where he lay, And the leaves that the withering year let fall He swept, with the ivy away; And, as we read on the rock the words That, writ in the moss, we found, Right over his bosom a shower of birds In music fell to the ground). ... Young poet, I wonder did you care, Did it move you in your rest To hear that child in his golden hair, From the mighty woods of the West, Repeating your verse of his own sweet will, To the sound of the twilight bell, Years after your beating heart was still In the churchyard of Clonmel? A WORD WITH A SKYLARK (A CAPRICE OF HOMESICKNESS)[21] [From _Songs of Nature_, edited by John Burroughs (New York, 1901)] If this be all, for which I've listened long, Oh, spirit of the dew! You did not sing to Shelley such a song As Shelley sung to you. Yet, with this ruined Old World for a nest, Worm-eaten through and through,-- This waste of grave-dust stamped with crown and crest,-- What better could you do? Ah me! but when the world and I were young, There was an apple-tree, There was a voice came in the dawn and sung The buds awake--ah me! Oh, Lark of Europe, downward fluttering near, Like some spent leaf at best, You'd never sing again if you could hear My Blue-Bird of the West! THE GIFT OF TEARS[22] [From _The Gift of Tears_ (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1906)] The legend says: In Paradise God gave the world to man. Ah me! The woman lifted up her eyes: "Woman, I have but tears for thee." But tears? And she began to shed, Thereat, the tears that comforted. (No other beautiful woman breathed, No rival among men had he, The seraph's sword of fire was sheathed, The golden fruit hung on the tree. Her lord was lord of all the earth, Wherein no child had wailed its birth), Tears to a bride? Yea, therefore tears. In Eden? Yea, and tears therefore. Ah, bride in Eden, there were fears In the first blush your young cheek wore, Lest that first kiss had been too sweet, Lest Eden withered from your feet! Mother of women! Did you see How brief your beauty, and how brief, Therefore, the love of it must be, In that first garden, that first grief? Did those first drops of sorrow fall To move God's pity for us all? Oh, sobbing mourner by the dead-- One watcher at the grave grass-grown! Oh, sleepless for some darling head Cold-pillowed on the prison-stone, Or wet with drowning seas! He knew, Who gave the gift of tears to you! FOOTNOTES: [21] Copyright, 1901, by McClure, Phillips and Company. [22] Copyright, 1906, by John James Piatt. BOYD WINCHESTER Boyd Winchester, author of a charming book on Switzerland, was born in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, September 23, 1836. He came to Kentucky when a youth and entered Centre College, Danville, where he studied for three years. He subsequently spent two years at the University of Virginia. Mr. Winchester was graduated from the Law School of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1858, and that city has been his home ever since. He rose rapidly in his profession; and he later served a single term in the Kentucky legislature, and two terms in the lower House of Congress. President Cleveland appointed Mr. Winchester United States Minister to Switzerland, in 1885, and the next four years he resided at Berne. While in Switzerland Mr. Winchester was an ardent student of the country's history and a keen observer of its aspects and institutions. On his return to the United States he wrote his well-known book, _The Swiss Republic_ (Philadelphia, 1891). A fire his publishers, the Lippincotts, suffered shortly after his volume was issued, destroyed the unsold copies, and the small first edition was soon exhausted. The work has thus become exceedingly scarce. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _National Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1906, v. xiii); _General Catalogue of Centre College_. LAKE GENEVA[23] [From _The Swiss Republic_ (Philadelphia, 1891)] The Lake of Geneva is the largest of Western Europe, being fifty-seven miles long, and its greatest width nine miles; it has its storms, its waves, and its surge; now placid as a mirror, now furious as the Atlantic; at times a deep-blue sea curling before the gentle waves, then a turbid ocean dark with the mud and sand from its lowest depths; the peasants on its banks still laugh at the idea of there being sufficient cordage in the world to reach the bottom of the _Genfer-See_. It is eleven hundred and fifty-four feet above the sea, and having the same depth, its bottom coincides with the sea-level; the water is of such exceeding purity that when analyzed only 0.157 in 1000 contain foreign elements. The lake lies nearly in the form of a crescent stretching from the southwest towards the northeast. Mountains rise on every side, groups of the Alps of Savoy, Valais, and Jura. The northern or the Swiss shore is chiefly what is known as a _cote_, or a declivity that admits of cultivation, with spots of verdant pasture scattered at its feet and sometimes on its breast, with a cheery range of garden, chalet, wood, and spire; villas, hamlets, and villages seem to touch each other down by the banks, and to form but one town, whilst higher up, they peep out from among the vineyards or nestle under the shade of walnut-trees. At the foot of the lake is the white city of Geneva, of which Bancroft wrote, "Had their cause been lost, Alexander Hamilton would have retired with his bride to Geneva, where nature and society were in their greatest perfection." The city is divided into two parts by the Rhone as it glides out of the basin of the lake on its course towards the Mediterranean. The Arve pours its turbid stream into the Rhone soon after that river issues from the lake. The contrast between the two rivers is very striking, the one being as pure and limpid as the other is foul and muddy. The Rhone seems to scorn the alliance and keeps as long as possible unmingled with his dirty spouse; two miles below the place of their junction a difference and opposition between this ill-assorted couple is still observable; these, however, gradually abate by long habit, till at last, yielding to necessity, and to the unrelenting law which joined them together, they mix imperfect union and flow in a common stream to the end of their course. At the head of the lake begins the valley of the Rhone, where George Eliot said, "that the very sunshine seemed dreary mid the desolation of ruin and of waste in this long, marshy, squalid valley; and yet, on either side of the weary valley are noble ranges of granite mountains, and hill resorts of charm and health...." Standing at almost any point on the Lake of Geneva, to the one side towers Dent-du-Midi, calm, proud, and dazzling, like a queen of brightness; on the other side is seen the Jura through her misty shroud extending in mellow lines, and a cloudless sky vying in depths of color with the azure waters. So graceful the outlines, so varied the details, so imposing the framework in which this lake is set, well might Voltaire exclaim, "Mon lac est le premier," (my lake is the first). For richness combined with grandeur, for softness around and impressiveness above, for a correspondence of contours on which the eye reposes with unwearied admiration, from the smiling aspect of fertility and cultivation at its lower extremity to the sublimity of a savage nature at its upper, no lake is superior to that of Geneva. Numberless almost are the distinguished men and women who have lived, labored, and died upon the shores of this fair lake; every spot has a tale to tell of genius, or records some history. In the calm retirement of Lausanne, Gibbon contemplated the decay of empires; Rousseau and Byron found inspiration on these shores; there is "Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love! Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought; Thy trees take root in love." Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne's forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Debonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain. "Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls; A thousand feet in depth below, Its massy waters meet and flow; Below the surface of the lake The dark vault lies" where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese. FOOTNOTE: [23] Copyright, 1891, by J. B. Lippincott Company. THOMAS M. GREEN Thomas Marshall Green, journalist and historian, was born near Danville, Kentucky, November 23, 1836, the son of Judge John Green, an early Kentucky jurist of repute, who died when his son was but two years old. Green was graduated from Centre College, Danville, in what is now known as the famous class of '55, which included several men afterwards distinguished. In 1856 Green joined the staff of the _Frankfort Commonwealth_, then a political journal of wide influence; and in the following year he became editor of that paper. He left the _Commonwealth_ in 1860, to become editor of the _Maysville Eagle_, of which he made a pronounced success, its screams smacking not at all of the dignified days of its first editors, the Collinses, father and son. His _Historic Families of Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1889), gave him a place among Kentucky historians, but the late Colonel John Mason Brown, of Louisville, gave to Green his greatest opportunity when he published his _The Political Beginnings of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1889). This work of Colonel Brown's was, in effect, an avowed vindication of the reputation of his grandfather, John Brown, first United States Senator from Kentucky, who, in the stormy days in which his lot had been cast, had been violently attacked for his alleged connection with the Spanish Conspiracy of Aaron Burr, which was charged in a controversy running through many years of violent disputation, to have been an attempt in connection with General James Wilkinson, Judges Sebastian, Wallace, and Innes of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and others to detach Kentucky from her allegiance to the United States, and annex her territory to the Spanish dominions of the South and South-west, through which the much-desired free navigation of the Mississippi would be assured. Colonel Brown was a brilliant man of unusual scholarly attainments and deeply read in American history. These qualities with his large legal training enabled him to present a strong case in the vindication of his grandfather's reputation. His arguments, theories, and proofs were illuminating, able, and to many minds most convincing, while they fell with small effect upon Green and many others who held the opposite view. For this reason Green wrote and published _The Spanish Conspiracy_ (Cincinnati 1891), a wonderfully well informed and clever work, and the one upon which he takes his place among Western historians. Students who would be fully informed as to the many phases--the charges and matter relied upon for defense, pro and con, in this bitter controversy which marshalled Kentucky into two hostile camps, whose alignments were more or less maintained through many strenuous years--must study these two books. They present the last word on either side. Colonel Brown's untimely death, which occurred in 1890, some months before the appearance of Green's book, probably lost Kentucky a reply to the Maysville historian that would have added to the flood of light thrown on this early and vital crisis. _The Spanish Conspiracy_ was supplemented and supported in its conclusions by Mr. Anderson C. Quisenberry's _The Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall_ (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). Thomas M. Green died at Danville, Kentucky, April 7, 1904. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Biographical Encyclopaedia of Kentucky_ (Cincinnati, 1878); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v, xv). THE CONSPIRATORS[24] [From _The Spanish Conspiracy_ (Cincinnati, 1891)] The grief of the reader in learning from the _Political Beginnings_, that Humphrey Marshall was "violent, irreligious and profane," will be mollified by the assurance given in the same work that Harry Innes "was a sincerely religious man." It might with equal truth have been stated that Caleb Wallace, who had abandoned the Presbyterian pulpit to go into politics, kept up his church relations, and practiced his devotions with the utmost regularity. Sebastian also, who had cast off the gown of the Episcopal ministry in his pursuit of the "flesh pots of Egypt," continued, it is believed, the exercise of all religious observations, and, in the depth of his piety, deemed a treasonable overture entirely too good to be communicated to an infidel. While John Brown, who had absorbed faith as he sat under the very droppings of the sanctuary, it will be cheerfully conceded was the most devout of the four. On the other hand, John Wood, one of the editors of the _Western World_, whom they afterwards bought, was a reprobate; and young Joseph M. Street, whom they could neither bribe nor intimidate, and the attempt to assassinate whom proved a failure, was a sinner. It is distressing to think that, like Gavin Hamilton, the latter "drank, and swore, and played at cards." It may be that the wickedness of the editors of the _Western World_, and the contemplation of their own saintliness, justified in the eyes of the four Christian jurists and statesmen the several little stratagems they devised, and paid Littell for introducing into his "Narrative," in order to obtain the advantage of the wicked editors in the argument. The contrast of their characters made innocent those little mutilations by Innes of his own letter to Randolph! The same process of reasoning made laudable John Brown's suppression of his Muter letter, his assertion that it was identical with the "sliding letter," and his claim that the acceptance of Gardoqui's proposition would have been consistent with the alleged purpose to make some future application for the admission of Kentucky into the new Union! While the suppression of the resolution of Wallace and Wilkinson in the July convention, and the declaration that such a _motion never was made_, in order to prove the unhappy editors to be liars, became as praiseworthy as the spoiling of the Egyptians by the Israelites! The scene of those four distinguished gentlemen seated around a table, with a prayer-book in the center, planning the screen for themselves and the discomfiture of the editors, would be a subject worthy of the brush of a Hogarth. FOOTNOTE: [24] Copyright, 1891, by Robert Clarke Company. FORCEYTHE WILLSON Forceythe Willson, "the William Blake of Western letters," was born at Little Genesee, New York, April 10, 1837, the elder brother of the latest Republican governor of Kentucky, Augustus E. Willson. When Forceythe was nine years old, his family packed their household goods upon an "ark," or Kentucky flatboat, at Pittsburgh, and drifted down the Ohio river, landing at Maysville, Kentucky, where they resided for a year, and in which town the future governor of Kentucky was born. In 1847 the Willsons removed to Covington, Kentucky, and there Forceythe's education was begun. The family lived at Covington for six years, at the end of which time Forceythe entered Harvard University, but an attack of tuberculosis compelled him to leave without his degree. He returned to the West, making his home at New Albany, Indiana, a little town just across the Ohio river from Louisville. A year later Willson joined the editorial staff of the _Louisville Journal_, and together he and Prentice courted the muse and defended the cause of the Union. Willson's masterpiece, _The Old Sergeant_, was the "carrier's address" for January 1, 1863, printed anonymously on the front page of the _Journal_. The author's name was withheld until Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced it the best ballad the war had produced, when Willson was heralded as its author. _The Old Sergeant_ recites an almost literally true story, and it is wonderfully well done. In the fall of 1863 Willson was married to the New Albany poet, Elizabeth C. Smith, and they removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the future executive of the Commonwealth of Kentucky was a student in Harvard University. The Willsons purchased a home near Lowell's, and they were soon on friendly terms with all of the famous New England writers. In 1866 _The Old Sergeant and Other Poems_ appeared at Boston, but it did not make an appeal to the general public. Forceythe Willson died at Alfred Centre, New York, February 2, 1867, but his body was brought back to Indiana, and buried on the banks of the Whitwater river. Willson believed it quite possible for the living to hold converse with the dead, and this, with other strange beliefs, entered largely into his poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY. His authoritative biographer, Mr. John James Piatt, the Ohio poet, has written illuminatingly of this rare fellow, with his "almond-shaped eyes," as Dr. Holmes called them, and his Oriental look and manner, in _The Atlantic Monthly_ (March, 1875); _Lexington Leader_ (September 13, 1908). His brother, Hon. Augustus E. Willson, will shortly utter the final word concerning him and his work. THE OLD SERGEANT [From _The Old Sergeant and Other Poems_ (Boston, 1867)] The Carrier cannot sing to-day the ballads With which he used to go, Rhyming the glad rounds of the happy New Years That are now beneath the snow: For the same awful and portentous Shadow That overcast the earth, And smote the land last year with desolation, Still darkens every hearth. And the carrier hears Beethoven's mighty death-march Come up from every mart; And he hears and feels it breathing in his bosom, And beating in his heart. And to-day, a scarred and weather-beaten veteran, Again he comes along, To tell the story of the Old Year's struggles In another New Year's song. And the song is his, but not so with the story; For the story, you must know, Was told in prose to Assistant-Surgeon Austin, By a soldier of Shiloh; By Robert Burton, who was brought up on the Adams, With his death-wound in his side; And who told the story to the Assistant-Surgeon, On the same night that he died. But the singer feels it will better suit the ballad, If all should deem it right, To tell the story as if what it speaks of Had happened but last night. "Come a little nearer, Doctor--thank you--let me take the cup: Draw your chair up--draw it closer--just another little sup! Maybe you may think I'm better; but I'm pretty well used up-- Doctor, you've done all you could do, but I'm just a-going up! "Feel my pulse, sir, if you want to, but it ain't much use to try--" "Never say that," said the Surgeon, as he smothered down a sigh; "It will never do, old comrade, for a soldier to say die!" "What you _say_ will make no difference, Doctor, when you come to die." "Doctor, what has been the matter?" "You were very faint, they say; You must try to get to sleep now." "Doctor, have I been away?" "Not that anybody knows of!" "Doctor--Doctor, please to stay! There is something I must tell you, and you won't have long to stay! "I have got my marching orders, and I'm ready now to go; Doctor, did you say I fainted?--but it couldn't ha' been so-- For as sure as I'm a Sergeant, and was wounded at Shiloh, I've this very night been back there, on the old field of Shiloh! "This is all that I remember: The last time the Lighter came, And the lights had all been lowered, and the noises much the same, He had not been gone five minutes before something called my name. 'Orderly Sergeant--Robert Burton!'--just that way it called my name. "And I wondered who could call me so distinctly and so slow, Knew it couldn't be the Lighter--he could not have spoken so-- And I tried to answer, 'Here, sir!' but I couldn't make it go; For I couldn't move a muscle, and I couldn't make it go! "Then I thought: It's all a nightmare, all a humbug and a bore; Just another foolish _grape-vine_[25]--and it won't come any more; "But it came, sir, notwithstanding, just the same way as before: 'Orderly Sergeant--Robert Burton!'--even plainer than before. "That is all that I remember, till a sudden burst of light, And I stood beside the River, where we stood that Sunday night, Waiting to be ferried over to the dark bluffs opposite, When the river was perdition and all hell was opposite!-- "And the same old palpitation came again in all its power, And I heard a Bugle sounding, as from some celestial Tower; And the same mysterious voice said: 'It is the eleventh hour! Orderly Sergeant--Robert Burton--it is the eleventh hour!' "Doctor Austin!--what _day_ is this?" "It is Wednesday night, you know." "Yes--to-morrow will be New Year's, and a right good time below! What _time_ is it, Doctor Austin?" "Nearly Twelve." "Then don't you go! Can it be that all this happened--all this--not an hour ago! "There was where the gunboats opened on the dark rebellious host; And where Webster semicircled his last guns upon the coast; There were still the two log-houses, just the same, or else their ghosts-- And the same old transport came and took me over--or its ghost! "And the old field lay before me all deserted far and wide; There was where they fell on Prentiss--there McClernand met the tide; There was where stem Sherman rallied, and where Hurlbut's heroes died-- Lower down, where Wallace charged them, and kept charging till he died. "There was where Lew Wallace showed them he was of the canny kin, There was where old Nelson thundered, and where Rousseau waded in; There McCook sent 'em to breakfast, and we all began to win-- There was where the grape-shot took me, just as we began to win. "Now, a shroud of snow and silence over everything was spread; And but for this old blue mantle and the old hat on my head, I should not have even doubted, to this moment, I was dead-- For my footsteps were as silent as the snow upon the dead! "Death and silence! Death and silence! all around me as I sped! And behold, a mighty Tower, as if builded to the dead-- To the Heaven of the heavens, lifted up its mighty head, Till the Stars and Stripes of Heaven all seemed waving from its head! "Round and mighty-based it towered--up into the infinite-- And I knew no mortal mason could have built a shaft so bright; For it shone like solid sunshine; and a winding stair of light, Wound around it and around it till it wound clear out of sight! "And, behold, as I approached it--with a rapt and dazzled stare-- Thinking that I saw old comrades just ascending the great Stair-- Suddenly the solemn challenge broke of--'Halt, and who goes there!' 'I'm a friend,' I said, 'if you are.' 'Then advance, sir, to the Stair!' "I advanced! That sentry, Doctor, was Elijah Ballantyne! First of all to fall on Monday, after we had formed the line! 'Welcome, my old Sergeant, welcome! Welcome by that countersign!' And he pointed to the scar there, under this old cloak of mine! "As he grasped my hand, I shuddered, thinking only of the grave; But he smiled and pointed upward with a bright and bloodless glaive: 'That's the way, sir, to Head-quarters.' 'What Head-quarters!' 'Of the Brave.' 'But the great Tower?' 'That,' he answered, 'Is the way, sir, of the Brave!' "Then a sudden shame came o'er me at his uniform of light; At my own so old and tattered, and at his so new and bright; 'Ah!' said he, 'you have forgotten the New Uniform to-night-- Hurry back, for you must be here at just twelve o'clock to-night!' "And the next thing I remember, you were sitting _there_, and I-- Doctor--did you hear a footstep? Hark! God bless you all! Good by! Doctor, please to give my musket and my knapsack, when I die, To my Son--my Son that's coming--he won't get here till I die! "Tell him his old father blessed him as he never did before-- And to carry that old musket"--Hark! a knock is at the door! "Till the Union--" See! it opens! "Father! Father! speak once more!" "_Bless you!_"--gasped the old, gray Sergeant, and he lay and said no more! FOOTNOTE: [25] Canard. W. C. P. BRECKINRIDGE William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, orator and journalist, was born at Baltimore, Maryland, August 28, 1837, the son of Rev. Robert J. Breckinridge (1800-1871), and an own cousin of John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875). He was graduated from Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, in the famous class of '55, after which he studied medicine for a year, when he abandoned it to enter the Louisville Law School. Before he was of age he was admitted to the Fayette County Bar, and he was a member of it when he died. In July, 1862, he entered the Confederate Army as a captain in John Hunt Morgan's command; and during the last two years of the war was colonel of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry. The war over, Colonel Breckinridge returned to Lexington and became editor of _The Observer and Reporter_, which he relinquished a few years later in order to devote his entire attention to the law. In 1884 Colonel Breckinridge was elected to the lower House of Congress from the Ashland district, and he took his seat in December, 1885, which was the first session of the Forty-ninth Congress. One of his colleagues from Kentucky was the present Governor of the Commonwealth, James B. McCreary; another was John G. Carlise, who was chosen speaker over Thomas B. Reed of Maine. Colonel Breckinridge served ten years in the House, closing his career there in the Fifty-third Congress. In Washington he won a wide reputation as a public speaker, being commonly characterized as "the silver tongue orator from Kentucky." In 1894, after the most bitter congressional campaign of recent Kentucky history, he was defeated for re-election; and two years later as the "sound money" candidate he again met defeat, Evan E. Settle, who was also known in Congress as a very eloquent orator, and who hailed from the Kentucky county of "Sweet Owen," triumphing over him. Colonel Breckinridge was never again a candidate for public office. In 1897 he resumed his newspaper work, becoming chief editorial writer on _The Lexington Herald_, which paper was under the management of his son, Mr. Desha Breckinridge, the present editor. During the last eight years of his life Colonel Breckinridge achieved a new and fresh fame as a writer of large information upon State and national affairs. Simplicity was the goal toward which he seemed to strive in his discussions of great and small questions. His articles upon the Goebel tragedy were really State papers of importance. Upon more than one occasion his editorial utterances were wired to a New York paper, appearing simultaneously in that paper and in his own. He declined several offers to become editor of metropolitan newspapers. While at the present time Colonel Breckinridge is remembered by the great common people as an orator of unsurpassed gifts, and while a great memorial mass of legends have grown about his name, it is as a writer of real ability, who had all the requisites and inclinations of a man of letters save one of the chief essentials: leisure. When his speeches and writings are collected and his biography written his true position in the literature of Kentucky will be more clearly and generally appreciated than it now is. Colonel Breckinridge died at Lexington, Kentucky, November 19, 1904. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The eulogy of John Rowan Allen is the finest summing up of Colonel Breckinridge's life and labors (_Lexington Leader_, November 23, 1904); _Kentucky Eloquence_, edited by Bennett H. Young (Louisville, Kentucky, 1907). His papers, together with those of his grandfather and father, are now in possession of the Library of Congress. "IS NOT THIS THE CARPENTER'S SON?" [From _The Lexington Herald_ (Christmas Day, 1899)] "And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." And this has been the universal truth since those days--the one unchangeable, pregnant, vital truth of development, of progress, of civilization, of happiness, of freedom, of charity. The perpetual presence, the ceaseless personal influence, the potent force of His continual association alone renders human history intelligible or makes possible the solution of any grave problem which man meets in his upward march to better life and more wholesome conditions. And to-day the accepted anniversary of the birth of the "carpenter's son" is the one day whose celebration is in all civilized nations, among all independent people and in all learned tongues. The world has not yet accepted Him; there are nations very large in numbers, very old in histories, very devout in their accepted religions, which have not accepted His claim to be divine, nor bowed to the reign of His supreme authority. And the contrast between such nations and those who have accepted His claim and modeled their laws upon His teachings form the profoundest reason for the verity of that claim and the beneficence of those teachings. Millions to-day will assemble themselves in their accustomed houses of worship, and with songs and instruments of music, with garlands and wreaths, with glad countenances and uplifted hearts, render adoration to the carpenter's son of Nazareth; adoration to the lowly Jew who was born in a manger and died upon a cross. Many millions will not attend worship, but still render unconscious testimony to the wondrous power which He has exercised through the centuries in the glad happiness which springs from conditions which are only possible under His teachings and by the might of His perpetual presence. They will not know that "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by," but the day is full of joy, the homes are radiant with happiness, the cheer is jovial and the laughter jocund, the eye brightens under the glances of loved ones--because He has passed by and scattered love and charity with profuse prodigality along the pathway He trod. He has walked through the gay hearts of little children, and joy has sprung up as wild flowers where His footsteps fell; He has lingered at the mother's bedside and ineffable love has filled the heart of her who felt His gentle presence. In carpenter shops like unto that in which He toiled for thirty years, in humble homes, in the counting rooms of bankers, in the offices of lawyers and doctors, in the charitable institutions which are memorials of His teachings, He has passed by; those within may not have been conscious thereof; they were possibly too absorbed to feel the sweet and pervading fragrance of the omnipotent force which He always exerts; yet over them and their thoughts He did exert that irresistible power; and to-day the world is better, sweeter, more joyful, more loving, because of Him. It is in its secular aspect that we venture to submit these thoughts; it is His transforming power secularly to which we call attention this sweet Christmas morning. "Christ the Lord Has Risen," but it is Jesus the man--Jesus of Nazareth, the son of the carpenter, the new teacher of universal brotherhood, the man who went about doing good; the obscure Jew who brought the new and nobler era of charity and forgiveness and love into actual existence that _The Herald_, a mere secular paper, desires to hold up. And peculiarly to that aspect of His life that was social; the friend of Lazarus; the diner at the table of Zaccheus; the pleased and kindly guest at the wedding of Cana; the man who leaned His head on the breast of His friend, the simple gentleman who took little children in His arms and loved them; the obedient son, the loyal friend, the forbearing associate, the forgiving master, the tender healer of disease, the loving man who was touched with a sense of all our infirmities. To-day with jollity let us turn the water of our common lives into the wine of sweet domestic happiness; let us take the children of misfortune to our breast; let us be loyal to our weaker friends; let us share our fullness with our brethren who are lean in this world's goods, and, shedding smiles and kind words, and pleasant phrases through the day, it may be that some stricken heart made glad may say: "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." BASIL W. DUKE General Basil Wilson Duke, historian of Morgan's men, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, May 28, 1838. He was educated at Georgetown and Centre Colleges, after which he studied law at Transylvania University. He was admitted to the bar, in 1858, and entered upon the practice at St. Louis. In 1861 he was a member of the Kentucky legislature; and in June of that year he married the sister of John Hunt Morgan and enlisted in Morgan's command. Upon Morgan's death, in 1864, General Duke succeeded him as leader of the band. After the war he settled at Louisville, Kentucky, as a lawyer, and that city is his home today. From 1875 to 1880 General Duke was commonwealth's attorney for the Fifth Judicial District; and since 1895 he has been a commissioner of Shiloh Military Park. His _Morgan's Cavalry_ (Cincinnati, 1867; New York, 1906), is the authoritative biography of the noted partisan leader and history of his intrepid band. General Duke was one of the editors of _The Southern Bivouac_, a Louisville magazine, from 1885 to 1887. His _History of the Bank of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1895), filled a gap in Kentucky history; and his _Reminiscences_ (New York, 1911), was a delightful volume of enormous proportions. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky_ (Chicago, 1897); _The Bookman_ (December, 1907). MORGAN, THE MAN [From _Morgan's Cavalry_ (Cincinnati, 1867)] General Morgan had more of those personal qualities which make a man's friends devoted to him than any one I have ever known. He was himself very warm and constant in the friendships which he formed. It seemed impossible for him to do enough for those to whom he was attached, or to ever give them up. His manner, when he wished, prepossessed every one in his favor. He was generally more courteous and attentive to his inferiors than to his equals and superiors. This may have proceeded in a great measure from his jealousy of dictation and impatience of restraint, but was the result also of warm and generous feeling. His greatest faults arose out of his kindness and easiness of disposition, which rendered it impossible for him to say or do unpleasant things, unless when under the influence of strong prejudice or resentment. This temperament made him a too lax disciplinarian, and caused him to be frequently imposed upon. He was exceedingly and unfeignedly modest. For a long time he sought, in every way, to avoid the applause and ovations which met him everywhere in the South, and he never learned to keep a bold countenance when receiving them. His personal appearance and carriage were striking and graceful. His features were eminently handsome and adapted to the most pleasing expressions. His eyes were small, of a grayish blue color, and their glances keen and thoughtful. His figure on foot or on horseback was superb. He was exactly six feet in height, and although not at all corpulent, weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. His form was perfect and the rarest combination of strength, activity, and grace. His constitution seemed impervious to the effects of privation and exposure, and it was scarcely possible to perceive that he suffered from fatigue or lack of sleep. Men are not often born who can wield such an influence as he exerted, apparently without an effort; who can so win men's hearts and stir their blood. He will, at least, be remembered until the Western cavalrymen and their children have all died. The bold riders who lived in the border-land, whose every acre he made historic, will leave many a story of his audacity and wily skill. HENRY WATTERSON Henry Watterson, the foremost Kentucky journalist, and one of the most widely known newspaper men in the United States, was born at Washington, D. C., February 16, 1840. This accident of birth was due to the fact that his father, Harvey McGee Watterson, with his wife, was in Washington as a member of the lower house of Congress from his native state, Tennessee. In consequence of defective vision, Henry Watterson was educated by private tutors; but he did attend the Episcopal School at Philadelphia for a short time. At the age of eighteen years he became a reporter on the Washington _States_; but, in 1861, he returned to Nashville, Tennessee, to edit the _Republican Banner_. Watterson was a staff officer in the Confederate Army, and in 1864 chief of scouts for General Joseph E. Johnston, but throughout the war he was also editing a newspaper. After the war he married and revived the _Banner_, which he edited for about two years, when he removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and succeeded George D. Prentice as editor of the _Journal_. In the following year Watterson, with Walter N. Haldeman, consolidated the _Journal_, _Courier_, and _Daily Democrat_ to form _The Courier-Journal_. The first issue of this paper appeared November 8, 1868, and Colonel Watterson has been its editor ever since. He has made it the greatest newspaper in Kentucky, if not in the South or West, and one of the best known papers printed in the English language. His editorials are unequalled by any other writer in America, either from the point of thought or construction; and his style is always more interesting than his substance. Colonel Watterson has held but one public office, having been a member of the Forty-fourth Congress, in 1876, and the personal friend and most ardent supporter of Samuel J. Tilden in the infamous Hayes-Tilden controversy of that year. Colonel Watterson has been a delegate-at-large from Kentucky in many Democratic presidential conventions, in all of which bodies he has been a conspicuous figure. He is famous as a journalist, orator, and author. His eulogy upon Abraham Lincoln has been listened to in almost every state in the Union, and it is his best known effort in oratory. Though now past his three score years and ten, Colonel Watterson is as vigorous and vindictive as ever in the handling of public questions and of his legion of enemies, as the country witnessed in the presidential campaign of 1912. He edited _Oddities of Southern Life and Character_ (Boston, 1882); and he has written _The History of the Spanish-American War_ (Louisville, 1898); _The Compromises of Life: Lectures and Addresses_ (New York, 1902), containing his ablest speeches delivered upon many occasions; and _Old London Town_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1911), a group of his European letters to _The Courier-Journal_, edited by Joseph Fort Newton. Colonel Watterson has an attractive country home near Louisville, "Mansfield," but in recent years his winters have been spent at Naples-on-the-Gulf, in Florida, and his summers in "grooming presidential candidates!" BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (February, 1904); _Harper's Weekly_ (November 12, 1904); _The Booklovers Magazine_ (March, 1905). OLD LONDON TOWN[26] [From _Old London Town, and Other Travel Sketches_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1910)] London, less than any of the great capitals of the world--even less than Berlin--has changed its aspects in the last four decades of alteration and development. During the Second Empire, and under the wizard hand of Baron Hauseman, a new Paris sprang into existence. We know what has happened in New York and Chicago. But London, except the Thames Embankment and the opening of a street here and there betwixt the City and the West End--the mid-London of Soho and the Strand--is very much the London I became acquainted with nearly forty years ago. To be sure many of the ancient landmarks, such as Temple Bar, the Cock and the Cheshire Cheese, have gone to the ash heap of the forgotten, whilst some imposing hostelries have risen in the region about Trafalgar Square; but, in the main, the biggest village of Christendom has lost none of its familiar earmarks, so that the exile set down anywhere from Charing Cross and Picadilly Circus to the bustling region of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, blindfold, would, the instant the bandage were removed from his eyes, exclaim, "It is London!" Yes, it is London; the same old London; the same old cries in the street; the same old whitey-brown atmosphere; even the same old Italian organ-grinders, the tunes merely a trifle varied. Nor yet without its charm, albeit to me of a rather ghostly, reminiscental sort. I came here in 1866, with a young wife and a roll of ambitious manuscript, found work to do and a publisher, lived for a time in the clouds of two worlds, that of Bohemia, of which the Savage Club was headquarters, and that of the New Apocalypse of Science which eddied about the School of Mines in Jermyn Street and the _Fortnightly Review_, then presided over by George Henry Lewes, my nearest friend and sponsor the late Professor Huxley. I alternated my days and nights between a somewhat familiar intimacy with Spencer and Tyndall and a wholly familiar intimacy with Tom Robertson and Andrew Halliday. Artemus Ward was in London and it was to him that I owed these later associations. Sir Henry Irving had not made his mark. Sir Charles Wyndham was still in America. There were Keenes and Kembles yet upon the stage. Charles Matthews ruled the roost of Comedy. George Eliot was in the glory of her powers and her popularity. Thackeray was gone, but Charles Dickens lived and wrote. Bulwer-Lytton lived and wrote. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade vied with one another for current favor. Modern Frenchification had invaded neither the restaurants nor the music halls. Evans's Coffee House (Pendennis core of Harmony) prevailed after midnight in Covent Garden Market. In short, the solidarities of Old England, along with its roast, succulent, abundant and intact. * * * * * To me London was Mecca. The look of it, the very smell of it, was inspiration. Incidentally--I don't mind saying--there were some cakes and ale. The nights were jolly enough down in the Adelphi, where the barbarians of the Savage Club held high revel, and George Augustus Sala was Primate, and Edmund Yates and Tom Robertson were High Priests. Temple Bar blocked the passage from Belgravia to the Bank of England, and there was no Holborn Viaduct nor Victorian Embankment. Aye, long ago! How far away it seems, and how queer! To me it was the London of story-books; of Whittington and his cat and Goody Two-Shoes and the Canterbury Shades; of Otway and Marlowe and Chatterton; of Nell Gwynne and Dick Steele and poor Goldsmith; of all that was bizarre and fanciful in history, that was strange and romantic in legend; and not the London of the Tower, the Museum and Westminster Abbey; not the London of Cremorne Gardens, newly opened, nor the Argyle Rooms, which should have been burned to the ground before they were opened at all. Since then I have been in and out of London many times. I have been amused here and bored here; but give me back my old fool's paradise and I shall care for naught else. One may doubt which holds him closest, the London of History or the London of Fiction, or that London which is a mingling of both, and may be called simply the London of Literature, in which Oliver Goldsmith carouses with Tom Jones, and Harry Fielding discusses philosophy with the Vicar of Wakefield, where Nicholas Nickleby makes so bold as to present himself to Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray and to ask his intercession in favor of a poor artist, the son of a hairdresser of the name of Turner in Maiden Lane, and even where "Boz," as he passes through Longacre, is tripped up by the Artful Dodger, and would perchance fall upon the siding if not caught in the friendly arms of Sir Richard Steele on his way to pay a call upon the once famous beauty, the Lady Beatrix Esmond. But yesterday I strolled into Mitre Court, and threading my way through the labyrinth of those dingy old law chambers known as the Middle and Inner Temple, found myself in the little graveyard of the Temple Church and by the side of the grave of Oliver Goldsmith. Though less than a stone's throw from Fleet Street and the Strand, the place is quiet enough, only a faint hum of wheels penetrating the cool precincts and gloomy walls. There, beneath three oblong slabs, put together like an outer stone coffin, lies the most richly endowed of all the vagabonds, with the simple but sufficient legend: "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith, "Born Nov. 10th, 1728. Died April 4th, 1774." to tell a story which for all its vagrancy and folly, is somewhat dear to loving hearts. He died leaving many debts and a few friends. He lived a lucky-go-devil, who could squander in a night of debauch more than he could earn in a month of labor. Yet he gave us the good Primrose and _The Deserted Village_ and _The Traveler_, and many a care-dispelling screed beside. The Frenchman would say "his destiny." The less fanciful Briton, "his temperament." Poor Noll! He seemed to know himself fairly well in spite of his dissipations and his vanity, and he sleeps sound enough now, perhaps as soundly as the rest of those who in life held him in a rather equivocal admiration and affectionate contempt. There are a few other tombs--an effigy or two--round about, the weird old Chapel of the Templars, shut in by great walls from the streets beyond, to keep them solemn company. For Goldsmith, at least, there seems a fitness; for his life, and such labor as he did, eddied round these sad precincts. Nigh at hand was the Mitre tavern, across the way the Cock, and down the street the Cheshire Cheese. Without the Vandal has been busy enough, within all remains as it was the day they buried him. Perhaps he was not a desirable visiting acquaintance. I dare say he was rather a trying familiar friend. Pen-craft and purse-making are often wide apart. The charm of authorship ends in most cases upon the printed page. The man carries his sentiment in a globule of ink and it evaporates by exposure to the atmosphere of the world of action. The song of Dickens died by its own fireside. Kipling, for all his word-painting, is hardly a miracle of grace. Why should one wish to have known Goldsmith, or grudge him his place by the side of the great old Doctor, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Garrick? He lived his own life, and, though it was not very clean and wholly unprosperous, perhaps he enjoyed it. He left us some rich fruitage dangling over a wall, which may well conceal all else. Of the dead, no ill! Their faults to the past. The rest to Eternity! Gradually, but surely, a new London is showing itself above the debris of the old. Miles of roundabout are reduced by short cuts. Thoroughfares are ruthlessly cut through sacred precincts and landmarks obliterated to make room for imposing edifices and widened streets. In the end, London will be rebuilt to rival Paris in the splendor, without the uniformity of its architecture. The grime will, of course, attach itself in time to the modern city as it did in the ancient, so that the London that is to be will grow old to the coming generations as the London that was grew old to the generations that went before. "To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow Creeps on this petty pace from day to day, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Ever and ever the old times, the dear old times! Were they really any better than these? I don't think so--we only fancy them so. They had their displacements. It was then, as now, "eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die," life the same old walking shadow, the same old play, or, lagging superfluous, or laughing his hour upon the stage and seen no more, the same old "... tale told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Somehow, London has a tendency to call up such reflections; sombre, serious itself, to provoke moralizing, albeit a turmoil, with incessant flashes of light and shade, the contrasts the vividest and most precipitate on earth, deep and penetrating, even from Hyde Park corner to St. Martins-in-the-Field, and on eastward beyond the Tower and into the purlieus of Whitechapel and the solitudes of Bethnal Green. FOOTNOTE: [26] Copyright, 1910, by The Torch Press. GILDEROY W. GRIFFIN Gilderoy Wells Griffin, essayist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 6, 1840, the son of a merchant. He was educated in the University of Louisville, and admitted to the bar just as he attained his majority. He soon became private secretary for George D. Prentice, and this pointed his path from law to letters. Griffin was dramatic critic of the Louisville _Journal_ until after Prentice's death; and his first book was a biographical study of the great editor. His _Studies in Literature_ (Baltimore, 1870), a small group of essays, was followed by the final edition of _Prenticeana_ (Philadelphia, 1871), which he revised and to which he also contributed a new sketch of Prentice. Griffin was appointed United States Consul to Copenhagen, in 1871. His _Memoir of Col. Charles S. Todd_ (Philadelphia, 1872), was an excellent piece of writing. The most tangible result of his sojourn in Copenhagen was _My Danish Days_ (1875), one of the most delightful of his works. In Denmark his most intimate friend, perhaps, was Hans Christian Anderson. His _A Visit to Stratford_ (1875), was worth while. The year following its publication, Griffin was transferred to a similar position in the Samoan Islands, and he left in manuscript a work on the Islands which has never been published. In 1879 Griffin was again transferred, this time being sent to Aukland, New Zealand, where he remained until 1884; and the time of his departure witnessed the appearance of his last work, _New Zealand: Her Commerce and Resources_ (Wellington, N. Z., 1884). President Arthur sent him as consul to Sydney, which post he held for seven years. Griffin's death occurred while he was visiting his old home, Louisville, Kentucky, October 21, 1891. His brother was the step-father of the famous Mary Anderson, the former actress, and she has a goodly word for the memory of Griffin in her autobiography. He was a patron of the drama, a faithful and far-seeing diplomat, and a very able writer. His wife, Alice M. Griffin, published a volume of _Poems_ (Cincinnati, 1864). BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (October 22, 1891); _A Few Memories_, by Mary Anderson de Navarro (London, 1896). THE GYPSIES [From _Studies in Literature_ (Baltimore, 1870)] The Gypsies are wholly ignorant of their origin, and have kept but an imperfect record of their migrations; but it is evident that they are a distinct race of people. Like the Jews, they have no country of their own, and are scattered over all parts of the globe. Time has made little or no change in their peculiarities. They have the same language, personal appearance, habits, and customs, that they had centuries ago. The name of Gypsies (meaning Egyptians) is doubtless an incorrect one. At least we know of nothing to justify them in the assumption of the title. In Italy they are called "Zingari," in Germany "Zigeuner," in Spain "Gitanos," in Turkey "Tchengenler," in Persia "Sisech Hindu," in Sweden "Tartars," and in France "Bohemiens." Borrow expresses the opinion that the name of Gypsies originated among the priests and learned men of Europe, who expected to find in Scripture some account of their origin and some clew to their skill in the occult sciences. Simson, the author of a recent work entitled the _History of the Gypsies_, believes that they are a mixture of the shepherd-kings and the native Egyptians, who formed part of the "mixed multitude" mentioned in the Biblical account of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt. Grellman, however, traces their origin to India. He says that they belong to the Soodra caste. Vulcanius describes them simply as robbers and outlaws, and Hervas regards their language as "a mere jargon of banditti." Their keen black eyes, swarthy complexion, long raven locks, high cheek-bones, and projecting lower jaws evidently indicate Asiatic origin. It is certain that neither their language nor physiognomy are African. It is argued that if really Egyptians, they would in all probability have preserved a religion, or some of the forms of worship so characteristic of the descendants of that people; whereas, the Gypsies have no religion at all. Indeed, it is a proverb with them that "the Gypsy church was built of lard, and the dogs ate it." Whether Egyptians or not, they are doubtless what they claim to be, "Rommany Chals," and not "Gorgios." Very few who have seen them will refuse to believe that they do not understand the art of making horse-shoes, and of snake-charming, fortunetelling, poisoning with the drows, and of singing such songs as the following: "The Rommany chi And the Rommany chal Shall jaw tasaulor To drab the bawlor, And dook the gry Of the farming rye. "The Rommany churl And the Rommany girl To-morrow shall hie To poison the sty, And bewitch on the mead The farmer's stead." JOHN L. SPALDING John Lancaster Spalding, the poet-priest, was born at Lebanon, Kentucky, June 2, 1840. He is a nephew of Archbishop Martin John Spalding. John L. Spalding was graduated from St. Mary's College, Maryland, in 1859; and a short time later he was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church. In 1865 he was secretary to the bishop of Louisville; and four years later he built St. Augustine's church for the Catholic negroes of Louisville. In 1871 Spalding was chancellor of the diocese of Louisville. From 1872 to 1877 he was stationed in New York City. He was consecrated bishop of Peoria, Illinois, May 1, 1877, which position he held until 1908, when ill-health compelled his retirement. Bishop Spalding was appointed by President Roosevelt as one of the arbitrators to settle the anthracite coal strike of 1902, and this appointment brought him before the whole country for a time. In 1909 he was created titular archbishop of Scyphopolis. Bishop Spalding continues his residence at Peoria, but recently his health has broken so badly that his life has been despaired of more than once. For many years it has been his custom to spend his summers in Kentucky with his boyhood friends and neighbors. He is the author of _The Life of the Most Rev. Martin John Spalding, Archbishop_ (New York, 1872); _Essays and Reviews_ (1876); _Religious Mission of the Irish People_ (1880); _Lectures and Discourses_ (1882); _America and Other Poems_ (1885); _Education and the Higher Life_ (Chicago, 1891); _The Poet's Praise_ (1891); _Things of the Mind_ (Chicago, 1894); _Means and End of Education; Thoughts and Theories of Life and Education_ (Chicago, 1897); _Songs: Chiefly from the German_ (1896); _God and the Soul; Opportunity and Other Essays_ (Chicago, 1901); _Religion, Agnosticism, and Education_ (Chicago, 1902); _Aphorisms and Reflections_ (Chicago, 1901); _Socialism and Labor_ (Chicago, 1902); _Glimpses of Truth_ (Chicago, 1903); _The Spalding Year Book_ (1905); _Religion and Art, and other Essays_ (Chicago, 1905). Bishop Spalding's biography of his famous kinsman, Archbishop Spalding, is his finest prose work, and as a poet he has done some pleasing verse, most of which, of course, is marred by being woven into his religion. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Weekly_ (October 25, 1902); _The Dial_ (January 1, 1904). AN IVORY PAPER-KNIFE.[27] [From _The Hesperian Tree_, edited by J. J. Piatt (Columbus, Ohio, 1903)] O snow-white blade, thou openest for me So many a page filled with delightful lore Where deathless minds have left the precious store Of words that breathe and truth that makes us free. To hold thee in my hand, or but to see Thee lying on my desk, O ivory oar, Waiting to drive my bark to any shore, Is fortaste of fresh joy and liberty. Thou bringest dreams of the Dark Continent Where herded elephants in freedom roam, Or blow their trumpets when they danger scent, Or in wide rivers shoot the pearly foam, Yet art of vital books all redolent, Where highest thoughts have made themselves a home. FOOTNOTE: [27] Copyright, 1902, by John James Piatt. NATHANIEL S. SHALER Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the distinguished Harvard geologist, poet, historian, and sociologist, was born at Newport, Kentucky, February 20, 1841. He was graduated from Harvard in 1862, where he had the benefit of almost private instruction from the great Agassiz. Shaler returned to Kentucky, and for the next two years he served in the Union army. In 1864 he was appointed assistant in palentology at Harvard; and four years later he became assistant in zoology and geology in the Lawrence Scientific School and head of the department of palentology. In 1873 the Governor of Kentucky appointed Professor Shaler director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, and he devoted parts of the next seven years to this work. He was the most efficient State geologist Kentucky has ever known, and his work for the Survey pointed out the path trodden by his successors. His assistant, Professor John R. Proctor, followed him as Director, and he stands next to his chief in the work he accomplished. _The Kentucky Geological Survey_ (1874-1880, 6 vols.), volume three of which, entitled _A General Account of the Commonwealth of Kentucky_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1876), was written entirely by Shaler, are excellent memorials of the work he did for his native state. In 1884 Shaler was placed in charge of the Atlantic division of the United States Geological Survey; and in 1891 he was chosen dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. This position he held until a year or two before his death. Dean Shaler published _Thoughts on the Nature of Intellectual Property_ (Boston, 1878); _Glaciers_ (Boston, 1881); _The First Book of Geology_ (Boston, 1884); _Kentucky: A Pioneer Commonwealth_ (Boston, 1885), the philosophy of Kentucky history summarized; _Aspects of the Earth_ (New York, 1889); _Nature and Man in America_ (New York, 1891); _The Story of Our Continent_ (Boston, 1892); _Sea and Land_ (New York, 1892); _The United States_ (New York, 1893); _The Interpretation of Nature_ (Boston, 1893); _Domesticated Animals_ (New York, 1895); _American Highways_ (New York, 1896); _Outlines of the Earth's History_ (New York, 1898); _The Individual_ (New York, 1900); _Elizabeth of England_ (Boston, 1903, five vols.), a "dramatic romance," celebrating "the spacious times of great Elizabeth"; _The Neighbor_ (Boston, 1904); _The Citizen_ (New York, 1904); _Man and the Earth_ (New York, 1905); and _From Old Fields_ (Boston, 1906), a book of short poems. Besides these books, Dean Shaler wrote hundreds of magazine articles, reports, scientific memoirs, miscellaneous essays. He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 10, 1906, just as he was about to make ready for a final journey to Kentucky. Dean Shaler was loved and honored more at Harvard, perhaps, than any other teacher the University has ever known. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The World's Work_ (June, 1906); _Science_ (June 8, 1906); _The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, with a Supplementary Memoir by his Wife_, published posthumously (Boston, 1909), is a charming record of his days at Harvard and in Kentucky. THE ORPHAN BRIGADE[28] [From _From Old Fields_ (Boston, 1906)] Eighteen hundred and sixty-one: There in the echo of Sumter's gun Marches the host of the Orphan Brigade, Lit by their banners, in hope's best arrayed. Five thousand strong, never legion hath borne Might as this bears it forth in that morn: Hastings and Cressy, Naseby, Dunbar, Cowpens and Yorktown, Thousand Years' War, Is writ on their hearts as onward afar They shout to the roar of their drums. Eighteen hundred and sixty-two: Well have they paid to the earth its due. Close up, steady! the half are yet here And all of the might, for the living bear The dead in their hearts over Shiloh's field-- Rich, O God, is thy harvest's yield! Where faith swings the sickle, trust binds the sheaves, To the roll of the surging drums. Eighteen hundred and sixty-three: Barring Sherman's march to the sea-- Shorn to a thousand; face to the foe Back, ever back, but stubborn and slow. Nineteen hundred wounds they take In that service of Hell, yet the hills they shake With the roar of their charge as onward they go To the roll of their throbbing drums. Eighteen hundred and sixty-four: Their banners are tattered, and scarce twelve score, Battered and wearied and seared and old, Stay by the staves where the Orphans hold Firm as a rock when the surges break-- Shield of a land where men die for His sake, For the sake of the brothers whom they have laid low, To the roll of their muffled drums. Eighteen hundred and sixty-five: The Devil is dead and the Lord is alive, In the earth that springs where the heroes sleep, And in love new born where the stricken weep. That legion hath marched past the setting of sun: Beaten? nay, victors: the realms they have won Are the hearts of men who forever shall hear The throb of their far-off drums. "TOM" MARSHALL[29] [From _The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler_ (Boston, 1909)] I have referred above to Thomas F. Marshall, a man of singular attractiveness and talents with whom I had a curious relation. I first met him when I was about fourteen years of age, when he, for some time a congressman, had through drunkenness fallen into a curious half-abandoned mode of life. He was then an oldish fellow, but retained much of his youthful splendor. He was about six feet three inches high, but so well built that he did not seem large, until you stood beside him. His face, even when marred by drink, had something of majesty in it. Marshall, when I knew him, picked up a scanty living as a lecturer. When sober, which he often was for months at a time, his favorite subject was temperance. On this theme he was as eloquent as Gough; in his season of spree, he turned to history. The gradations were not sharp, for he would, as I have seen him, preach most admirably of the evil of drink while he supported himself in his fervent oratory with whiskey from a silver mug. In matters of history, he had read widely. One of his favorite themes was the mediæval history of Italy. I recall with a distinctness which shows the impressiveness of his discourses his story of Florence, so well told that ten years after, when I saw the town for the first time, the shape of it and of the neighboring places was curiously familiar. Along with some other youths, I noted down the dates of events as he gave them and looked them up. We never caught him in an error, though at times he was so drunk that he could hardly stand up. I have known many historians who doubtless much exceeded him in learning, but never another who seemed to have such a capacity for living in the events he narrated. I had no sooner met "Tom" Marshall than we became friends. He at once took a curious fancy to me, talked to me as though we were of an age, and gave me my first chance of such contact with a man of learning and imagination. The relation, while on one side largely profitable to me, became embarrassing, for the unhappy man got the notion that I could stop his drinking if I would stay with him. A number of times when he had his dipsomaniac fury upon him I found that by sitting by his bed and talking with him on some historical subject, or rather listening to his talk, he would apparently forget about his drink and in a few hours drop asleep and awake to be sober for some months. Sometimes these quiet interviews were most interesting to me. I recall one of them when I found him in an attack of half delirium. His memory, always active, took him back to the days when he was in Congress and to the scene when he, a very young member of the House, had been chosen by some careful elders to lead an attack on John Quincy Adams. They, the elders, were to come to his support when he had drawn the enemy's fire. It all became so real to him, that he sprang out of bed and in his tattered nightgown gave, first his own speech with all the actions of a young orator, and then the deliberate, crushing rejoinder of his mighty antagonist. At the end of it he fell back upon his bed, cursing the villains who led him into the fight and left him to take the consequences. My relations with Marshall continued until I went to Cambridge but my influence over his drinking gradually lessened as he sank lower, and his able mind began to be permanently clouded. When I had been some months at college, I espied the poor fellow in the street, carpet-bag in hand, evidently making for my quarters. I sent word by a messenger to my chum, Hyatt, to receive and care for him, but to say that I had left town, which was true, for I went at once to Greenfield, where I had friends. Hyatt was also to provide the wanderer with a suit of clothes and a railway ticket back to Kentucky. I stayed away until I learned that Marshall was on his way home. I have always been ashamed of my conduct in this matter, but the unhappy man was at that time of his degradation an impossible burthen for me to carry; once ensconced in my quarters it would have been impossible to provide him with a dignified exit, and there was no longer hope that I might reform him. Yet the cowardice of the action has grieved me to this day. Two years afterwards, in 1862, I saw Marshall for the last time. I was with a column of troops going through the town of Versailles, Kentucky. He was seated in front of a bar-room, with his chin upon the top of his cane. He was so far gone that the sight merely troubled his wits without affording him any explanation of what it meant. His bleared though still noble face stays in my memories as one of the saddest of those weary years. LINCOLN IN KENTUCKY [From the same] Among the interesting and in a way shaping incidents of my boyhood, was a brief contact with Abraham Lincoln about 1856. He was coming on foot from the town of Covington; I was on horseback, and met him near the bridge over the Licking River. He asked the way to my grandfather's house, which was about a mile off. Attracted by his appearance, I dismounted and asked him to get on my horse, which he declined to do; so I walked beside him. Probably because he knew how to talk to a lad--few know the art, and those the large natures alone--we became at once friendly. When I had shown him into the house, I hung about to find his name. As I had never heard of Mr. Lincoln of Illinois, it was explained to me that he was the man who was "running against" the Little Giant. We lads all knew Stephen A. Douglas, who was so popular that farm tools were named for him: the Little Giant this and that of cornshellers or ploughs. While Mr. Lincoln was with my grandfather, my mother dined or supped with him. When she came home she said: "I have had a long talk with Mr. Lincoln, who is called an Abolitionist; if he is an Abolitionist, I am an Abolitionist." I well remember the horror with which this remark inspired the household: if my mother had said she was Satan, it could not have been worse. The droll part of the matter is that all the reasonable people about me were in heart haters of slavery. They saw and deplored its evils, and were full of fanciful schemes for making an end of it. But the name Abolitionist was abominated. I never knew what brought Mr. Lincoln to my grandfather's house. It is likely that he came because a certain doctor of central Kentucky, an uncle of Mr. Lincoln, a widower, had recently married an aunt of mine, a widow. This union of two middle-aged people, each with large families, brought trouble; since family traditions were against divorce, a separation was effected which had an amusing though tragic finish. When all other matters of property had been arranged and P. had betaken himself to his plantation in Mississippi, as an afterthought he set up a supplementary claim to a saddle mule belonging to my aunt which he had forgotten to demand in the settlement. This reopened the question, and it was determined in family council that the grasping doctor should not be satisfied. We boys had the notion that Mr. Lincoln's visit related to this episode of the mule, for shortly after the "critter" was sent with a servant by steamboat, to be delivered to the claimant at the landing of his plantation on the Mississippi River. In due time the negro returned and made report: It was that the unworthy suitor came with a group of his friends to witness his success, mounted, and started to ride away, but the beast, frisky from its long confinement, "stooped up behind," as the darkeys phrase it, and threw his master and killed him. Whether Lincoln had a hand in the negotiations which led to this finish or not, I am sure that the humor of it must have tickled him. FOOTNOTES: [28] Copyright, 1906, by Houghton, Mifflin Company. [29] Copyright, 1909, by Houghton, Mifflin Company. WILLIAM L. VISSCHER William Lightfoot Visscher, poet, was born at Owingsville, Kentucky, November 25, 1842. He was educated at the Bath Seminary, Owingsville, and graduated in law from the University of Louisville, but he never practiced. He was a soldier in the Civil War for four years. Colonel Visscher--which title he did not win upon the battlefield!--has been connected with more newspapers than he now cares to count; and he has written hundreds of verses which have appeared in periodicals and in book form. He is the author of five novels: _Carlisle of Colorado_; _Way Out Yonder_; _Thou Art Peter_; _Fetch Over the Canoe_ (Chicago, 1908); and _Amos Hudson's Motto_. The first of these is the best known work he has done in prose fiction. His _Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express_ (Chicago, 1908), filled a small gap in American history. A little group of biographical sketches and newspaper reminiscences, called _Ten Wise Men and Some More_ (Chicago, 1909), is interesting. Colonel Visscher has also published five books of verse: _Black Mammy; Harp of the South; Blue Grass Ballads and Other Verse_ (Chicago, 1900); _Chicago: an Epic_, and his most recent volume, _Poems of the South and Other Verses_ (Chicago, 1911). The colonel is also a popular lecturer; and he has actually put paint on his face and essayed acting. He is a poet of the Old South, one reading his verse would at once conclude that not to have been born in Kentucky before the war, one might as well never have lived at all. He is a versified, pocket-edition of Mr. Thomas Nelson Page; and while he has not reached the sublime heights of true poesy, he has written some delicious dialect and much pleasing verse. _Proem_, printed in two of his books, is certainly the best thing he has done hitherto. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Century Magazine_ (July, 1902); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). PROEM[30] [From _Poems of the South and Other Verse_ (Chicago, 1911)] In the evening of a lifetime While the shadows, growing long, Fall eastward, and the gloaming Brings the spell of vesper song, Fond memory turns backward To the bright light of the day, Where joys, like troops of fairies, Gaily dance along the way, Full-armed with mirth and music, Driving skirmishers of care Howling, back into the forest, And their dark, uncanny lair. So the pastures of Kentucky, And the fields of Tennessee, The bloom of all the Southland And the old-time melody; The vales, and streams, and mountains; The bay of trailing hounds; The neigh of blooded horses And the farm-yard's cheery sounds; The smiles of wholesome women And the hail of hearty men, Come sweeping back, in fancy, And, behold, I'm young again. FOOTNOTE: [30] Copyright, 1911, by the Author. BENNETT H. YOUNG Bennett Henderson Young, historian and antiquarian, was born at Nicholasville, Kentucky, May 25, 1843, the son of blue-stocking Presbyterians. His academic training was received at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and Queen's College, Toronto, Canada. He was graduated in law from Queen's College, Belfast, Ireland. Colonel Young was with General John Hunt Morgan and his men during the Civil War, being in charge of the raid through St. Alban's, Vermont. He was a member of the fourth Constitutional convention which formulated Kentucky's present constitution. Colonel Young is now one of the leading lawyers of Louisville, and commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans. He has published _The History of the Kentucky Constitutions_ (1890); _The History of Evangelistic Work in Kentucky_ (1891); _History of the Battle of the Blue Licks_ (Louisville, 1897); _The History of Jessamine County, Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1898); _The History of the Division of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky_ (1898); _The Battle of the Thames_ (Louisville, 1901); _Kentucky Eloquence_ (Louisville, 1907); and _The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1910). Colonel Young has taken a keen interest in "the prehistoric men of Kentucky," the mound-builders; and his collection is one of the finest in the country. His work upon these ancient people is far and away the ablest volume he has written. It represented the researches of a life-time, and the results of his labors are quite obvious. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky_ (Chicago, 1897); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). PREHISTORIC WEAPONS[31] [From _The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1910)] The life of prehistoric man, judging from the large number of fortifications existing in Kentucky to this day, must have been one of constant and general warfare. His weapons were all constructed for conflict at short range. First was his ax of two kinds, grooved and grooveless. The indications are that these were used contemporaneously, and though this is not certain, their proximity to each other in so many places would tend to show that they were made during the same period. The grooved ax would be more reliable either in domestic use or in war than the grooveless ax, because of the grip of the handle, aided materially by the groove, permitting it to be held much more closely and to admit of heavier strokes and more constant action. The battle-axes vary in weight from one to thirty-two pounds. They were doubtless so variant in weight by reason of the conditions that surrounded the makers, and also by reason of the ability of the user to carry either light or heavy weight. With handles from three to six feet and firmly bound with rawhide, which could be obtained from several animals, these men were enabled to fasten the handle tightly around the ax, either grooved or ungrooved. These axes would require close contact in battle. They had flint saws or knives which enabled them to cut the hickory withe or sapling from which these handles were made. After soaking the handle in hot water, or for that matter in cold water, it could easily have been bent around the ax and tied with rawhide, which, by its contraction when drying, would press the handle closely in the groove. They also used what is known as a battle-ax blade, that is, a thin piece of flint, oval in shape, about five by three and a half inches. By splitting the handle and placing the flint blade between it, and then binding with rawhide, they were enabled to fasten it very securely. These handles were about two or two and a half feet in length, and with the blade projecting on either side, became a dangerous weapon at close range. The most damage, however, done by these prehistoric people was doubtless accomplished by the bow and arrow. The bows were about six feet in length, judging by the strings which we have seen and one of which the writer has been able to secure from Salts Cave. They would be made of many woods, preferably of hickory, cedar, or ash, but hickory usually possesses greater strength than other timbers of similar size. It is not probable that they had any tools with which they could split the hickory trees. They would, therefore, be compelled to use the hickory saplings in the manufacture of bow staves. The penetrative force of the stone-tipped arrow, driven by the strong and skillful arms of these prehistoric men, must have been very great. Quite a number of instances are known and specimens preserved in which they were driven practically through the larger bones of the body. The author has a human pelvis found in a cave in Meade County. Imbedded in this is a portion of a flint arrow-point, the position of which shows that it had been driven through the body, penetrating the bone on the opposite side from which it entered. The point reached into the socket of the hip joint. There it remained, causing necrosis of the bone, until by processes of Nature the wastage was stopped, and the point remained in the bone until the death of the individual, which the indications show occurred long after receiving the wound. In one instance an arrowhead was driven three inches into the bone of the leg just below its union with the hip, and evidently caused the death of the party into whom it had been shot. A number of instances are known in which these arrowheads penetrated several inches into bone, and it was no unusual thing that they attained sufficient penetrative force to drive them through both coverings of the skull. Three of these arrowheads that have come under the immediate observation of the author are not sharp at all, but rather blunt. The smaller triangular arrowheads, if sufficiently strong--and probably they were--could have been driven readily into bone without the use of any great force, but an arrow-point about three inches in length, and with a blunt point, thus driven into the bones of the body, demonstrates beyond all question that the power which was used in their propulsion must have been comparatively very great. The wooden or cane shafts probably were tipped with many kinds of points, some beveled, some serrated, some triangular, some blunt, being fastened thereto with the sinew of the deer or other animal. There are some evidences, although not entirely conclusive, that these arrow-points were often tipped with poison. It is said that at one time the Shawnees in Western Kentucky were so well versed in the use of poisons that they could place them in springs and thus destroy their enemies, and also that quite large streams of water were impregnated with these dangerous elements. We sometimes comment upon the savageness of the methods of these people, but the poisoned arrow is no worse than the soft-nose or explosive bullet, which has been used by civilized nations in the memory of living people. The next weapon was the spear. These carried points so large that they could not have been used with the ordinary bow. They must have been attached to a larger piece of wood or cane than the arrow-shaft. They were probably mounted upon cane or pieces of wood from four and one-half to seven feet in length. They were doubtless used also in the destruction of the larger animals, either bears or buffaloes, during the buffalo period in Kentucky. The spear would be much more formidable in close quarters with an animal even as large as the wildcat than the bow and arrow. It would be comparatively as efficient as the bayonet of modern times. Many of the flint knives were mounted on wooden handles. These sometimes measure from one to ten inches in length, and at very close range would become formidable weapons--not as formidable, however, as the battle-ax blade which has been described above. In Kentucky there are no evidences of the cross-bow having been used. The five weapons which we have described completed the military accoutrement of these men, who must have spent a large portion of their lives in warlike scenes and exploits. FOOTNOTE: [31] Copyright, 1910, by the Filson Club. JAMES H. MULLIGAN James Hilary Mulligan, the author of _In Kentucky_, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, November 21, 1844. He was graduated at St. Mary's College, Montreal, Canada, in 1864; and five years later Kentucky (Transylvania) University granted him his degree in law. For forty years Judge Mulligan has been known in Kentucky as a lawyer, orator, and maker of clever, humorous verse. He was editor of the old Lexington _Morning Transcript_ for a year; and for six years he was judge of the Recorder's Court of Lexington, from which work he won his title of "judge." From 1881 to 1888 Judge Mulligan was a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives; and from 1890 to 1894 he was in the State Senate. In 1894 President Cleveland appointed Judge Mulligan Consul-General at Samoa, and this post he held for two years. While in Samoa he saw much of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was working upon _Weir of Hermiston_, and well upon his way to the undiscovered country when the Kentucky diplomat met him. When Stevenson died, December 4, 1894, the first authoritative news of his passing came in a now rare and precious little booklet of thirty-seven pages which Lloyd Osbourne, Judge Mulligan, Bazett Haggard, brother of the English novelist, and another writer, sent out to the world, entitled _A Letter to Mr. Stevenson's Friends_ (Apia, Samoa, 1894). It contained a detailed account of the writer's last days, his death, and funeral. Mr. Osbourne "ventured also to reprint Mr. Gosse's beautiful lines, _To Tusitala in Vailima_, which reached Mr. Stevenson but three days before his death." President Cleveland offered to send Judge Mulligan to Cape Town, Africa, but he declined the appointment, and came home. For the past fifteen years he has devoted his attention to the law and to the writing of verse and prose. His _Samoa, the Government, Commerce, and People_ (Washington, 1896), is said to be the most exhaustive account of that island ever published. Judge Mulligan's little humorous poem, _In Kentucky_, has made him famous. First read at a banquet in the old Phoenix Hotel, Lexington, in 1902, it has been declaimed in the halls of Congress and gotten into the _Congressional Record_. It has been parodied a thousand times, reproduced in almost every newspaper in English, illustrated, and at least one Kentuckian has heard it chanted by an Englishman in the shadow of the Pyramids in Egypt! More than a million souvenir postal cards have been sold with the verses printed upon them; and had the author had _In Kentucky_ copyrighted, he would have reaped a harvest of golden coins. As poetry Judge Mulligan's _Over the Hills to Hustonville_, or _The Bells of Old St. Joseph's_, are superior to _In Kentucky_, but they are both comparatively unknown to the general public. Judge Mulligan's home, "Maxwell Place," on the outskirts of Lexington, was the birthplace of _In Kentucky_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lexington Leader_ (April 4, 1909); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xiv). IN KENTUCKY [From _The Lexington Herald_ (February 12, 1902)] The moonlight falls the softest In Kentucky; The summer days come oftest In Kentucky; Friendship is the strongest, Love's light glows the longest, Yet, wrong is always wrongest In Kentucky. Life's burdens bear the lightest In Kentucky; The home fires burn the brightest In Kentucky; While players are the keenest, Cards come out the meanest, The pocket empties cleanest In Kentucky. The sun shines ever brightest In Kentucky; The breezes whisper lightest In Kentucky; Plain girls are the fewest, Their little hearts the truest, Maiden's eyes the bluest In Kentucky. Orators are the grandest In Kentucky; Officials are the blandest In Kentucky; Boys are all the fliest, Danger ever nighest, Taxes are the highest In Kentucky. The bluegrass waves the bluest In Kentucky; Yet, bluebloods are the fewest(?) In Kentucky; Moonshine is the clearest, By no means the dearest, And, yet, it acts the queerest In Kentucky. The dovenotes are the saddest In Kentucky; The streams dance on the gladdest In Kentucky; Hip pockets are the thickest, Pistol hands the slickest, The cylinder turns quickest In Kentucky. The song birds are the sweetest In Kentucky; The thoroughbreds are fleetest In Kentucky; Mountains tower proudest, Thunder peals the loudest, The landscape is the grandest-- And politics--the damnedest In Kentucky. OVER THE HILL TO HUSTONVILLE [From _The Lexington Leader_ (April 4, 1909)] Over the hill to Hustonville, Past mead and vale and waving grain With fleecy clouds and glad sunshine And the balm of the coming rain; On where hidden beneath the hill, In the widening vale below-- Chime and smith and distant herd Sing a song of the long ago. Over the hill to Hustonville Where silent fields are sad and brown, And the crow's lone call is blended With the anvil beat of the town; Where sweet the hamlet life flows on, And the doors ever open wide, Welcome the worn and wandering To the ingle and cheer inside. Over the hill to Hustonville I knew and loved as a child, A scene that yet lights up to me With a radiant glow and mild; With drowsy lane and quiet street, Gables quaint and the houses gray, Ancient inn with battered sign, And an air of the far-away. Over the hill to Hustonville Where men are yet sturdy and strong As were their sires in days long past-- As true as their flint-locks long. And maids are shy and soft of speech-- As the wild-rose, lithsome and true, Eyes alight as the coming dawn, Softly blue, as their skies are blue. Some--sometime--in the bye and bye, With all my life-won riches rare-- Dead hopes and faded memories-- A silken floss of baby hair; Fast locked close within my heart-- Worn of strife and the empty quest-- I'll over the hill to Hustonville, To dream ever--and rest--and rest. NELLY M. McAFEE Mrs. Nelly (Nichol) Marshall McAfee, novelist and verse writer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, May 8, 1845, the daughter of Humphrey Marshall, the younger. When but eighteen years of age she embarked upon a literary career. Her verse and short-stories appeared in many of the best American newspapers and magazines, and they brought her a wide reputation. On February 13, 1871, after a romantic courtship of some years, Miss Marshall was married to Captain John J. McAfee, a former Confederate soldier, then a member of the Kentucky legislature. Mrs. McAfee published two volumes of verse, entitled _A Bunch of Violets_, and _Leaves From the Book of My Heart_. Her novels include _Eleanor Morton, or Life in Dixie_ (New York, 1865); _Sodom Apples_ (1866); _Fireside Gleamings_ (Chicago, 1866); _Dead Under the Roses_ (1867); _Wearing the Cross_ (Cincinnati, 1868); _As by Fire_ (New York, 1869); _Passion, or Bartered and Sold_ (Louisville, 1876); and _A Criminal Through Love_ (Louisville, 1882). Mrs. McAfee died at Washington, D. C., about 1895. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Woods-McAfee Memorial History_, by N. M. Woods (Louisville, 1905); _Dictionary of American Authors_, by O. F. Adams (Boston, 1905). FINALE [From _A Criminal Through Love_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1882)] Many years have been gathered to the illimitable past, and we find ourselves, with undiminished interest, seeking to learn all we can in regard to the positions and attainments of the characters who have been with us for so long. This is the gist of what we have learned about them. Walter Floor's firm has grown and flourished; the dark cloud of sorrow that so long overshadowed his sky, has rolled away, and he is nevermore melancholy or oppressed. His home is the resting-place and haven for everybody who chooses to enjoy shelter and repose. Constant and Valentine are standing guests at the Floor mansion; the talented painter has no longer any need to work for money. The mention of his name opens every door to him, and Fortune and Fame await him with their arms laden with golden sheaves and shining laurel wreaths. His greatest work of art--his masterpiece--was taken from Mozart's Opera of _Don Juan_. At a glance any one could tell that the artist painted the portrait _con amore_, for Donna Anna was nothing more than a portrait of Margarethe Heinold--whom we must ever after this moment remember only as Margarethe Hendrik. More happiness than came with this name to her could scarcely be enjoyed by mortal. Great sums were offered again and again to Constant for this picture, but he refused to sell it; it now graces the elegant _Salon_ of Julian Hendrik in his magnificent villa, which stands on the banks of the Rhine. Margarethe, after the night of her brilliant _debut_, never stepped upon the boards. She was often urged to let the world hear her splendid voice, which returned to her in all its volume and beauty after she regained her health, but she refused to entertain the proposition for an instant, declaring that public life, however glorious, had no charms for her; that she lived only for her husband, to whom she becomes ever more tenderly attached the better she became acquainted with his noble heart, elevated mind, and peerless character as a man and a gentleman. Didier Mametin is still in Paris; at the death of old Vincent he became his heir, and was at last able to open such a photographer's _Atelier_ as other artists pronounced perfect in every detail. The lighthearted Frenchman, never accustomed to an extravagant mode of living, is just as merry in humor and abstemious in diet as of yore. Henriette often declares that he acts as if he were afraid of starving--he is such a hoarder for "rainy days." But Didier had a varied experience, and the lessons he learned were not easily forgotten. One happy fact remains: He and Henriette love each other dearly, and would not exchange their places or give up their home to be a king and queen and live in a palace. Roderick Martens attends to the ship-building interests of Jyphoven, in Amsterdam, and occupies the old Jyphoven mansion. Herr and Madame Jyphoven continue to reside in Paris. Bella is enchanted with life in the French city, and declares that to be mistress of the whole world--if she would go but for a day--could be no inducement to her to set her foot in the old Holland fishery, as she now describes it to be. She is entirely reconciled to Francisca. The beauty and happiness of the young wife would captivate the most callous heart. And Von Kluyden? This man who devoted himself to intrigue and rascality for so long, knew not, while he lived, how otherwise to occupy his time. He was never satisfied. Nemesis held him fast in her cruel clutches. When the time came for Hendrik to assert and prove his rights, he did so most successfully; and that for which Isabella bartered her honor, and beauty, and youth, passed like sand through the fingers, and was hers no more. Von Kluyden was successful in nothing that he undertook to accomplish; the ghost of the murdered Horst followed him day and night;--he finally died in a madhouse! Isabella had, a little while before his dementia, entrusted herself and her million of money into the hands of a young man of the titled nobility--who in his turn did not love the young widow even for her marvelous beauty--but for the _thalers_ and _gulden_ that brought plenty to his empty coffers and luxury to his impoverished home. In this marriage Isabella did not find the happiness she expected to find, and for which she had so long waited. The Prince squandered her enormous fortune, as Princes are usually supposed to squander fortunes, in about the half of a year's duration, and by that time, having found out and enjoyed all that life held for him of pleasure or excitement, he closed his career by putting a pistol-ball through his head, early one morning, while the sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and flowers were blooming on every side. So it has come to pass that Isabella--although not yet twenty-five years of age, has been twice a widow--(and a very charming one she is!) not likely now ever to be aught else! The sale of her beauty, her honor, her peace of mind, has brought to her, as a recompense for what she has lost, a varied and rich experience, which will save her forever hereafter from the chance of being deceived and betrayed through the tenderest and noblest impulses of the human heart. And so the curtain goes down forever between us and those with whom we have whiled away some pleasant hours, and gathered, it may be, profit or amusement from their acting on the stage of life. _Voila tout._ MARY F. CHILDS Mrs. Mary Fairfax Childs, maker of dialect verse, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, May 25, 1846. She is the daughter of the Rev. Edward Fairfax Berkley (1813-1897), who was rector of Christ Church, Lexington, for nineteen years. Dr. Berkley baptized Henry Clay, in 1847, and buried him five years later. Miss Berkley was a pupil at the Misses Jackson's Seminary for young ladies until her thirteenth year, or, in 1858, when her father accepted a call to St. Louis, in which city he labored for the following forty years. In St. Louis, she continued her studies at a private school for girls, when she left prior to her graduation in order to devote herself more especially to music, Latin, and French. Miss Berkley was married, in 1870, to William Ward Childs, a returned Confederate soldier; and in 1884 they removed to Clinton, Missouri, where they resided for seven years, when business called them to New York, their home until Mr. Child's death in 1911. Mrs. Childs's life in New York was a very busy one. She was prominent in several social and literary groups; and for many years she was corresponding secretary of the New York Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Her first poem that attracted wide attention was entitled _De Namin' ob de Twins_, which originally appeared in _The Century Magazine_ for December, 1903. It was the second in a group of _Eleven Negro Songs_, written by Joel Chandler Harris, Grace MacGowan Cooke, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and one or two other poets. That Mrs. Childs's masterpiece was the flower of the flock admits of little question: it is one of the best negro dialect poems yet written by a Southern woman. Exactly a year later the same periodical published her _A Christmas Warning_, with the well-known refrain, _Roos' high, chicken--roos' high_. These, with many others, were brought together in an attractive volume, entitled _De Namin' ob de Twins, and Other Sketches from the Cotton Land_ (New York, 1908). This collection is highly esteemed by that rather small company of lovers of dialect verse. Mrs. Childs's poem, _The Boys Who Wore the Gray_, has been printed, and is well-known throughout the South. She has recently completed another collection of sketches, called _Absolute Monarchy_, which will appear in 1913. At the present time Mrs. Childs is historian of the Society of Kentucky Women of New York, although she is residing at Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Louis. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mrs. Childs to the present writer; _The Century Magazine_ (January, 1906). DE NAMIN' OB DE TWINS[32] [From _De Namin' ob de Twins, and Other Sketches from the Cotton Land_ (New York, 1908)] What I gwine name mah Ceely's twins? I dunno, honey, yit, But I is jes er-waitin' fer de fines' I kin git, De names is purty nigh run out, So many niggahs heah, I 'clar' dey's t'ick as cotton-bolls in pickin'-time o' yeah. But 't ain' no use to 'pose to me Ole secondary names, Lak 'Liza_beth_ an' Jose_phine_, or Caesah, Torm, an' James, 'Ca'se dese heah twinses ob mah gal's Is sech a diff'ent kind, Dey's 'titled to do grandes' names dat ary one kin find. Fer sho dese little shiny brats Is got de fus'-cut look, So mammy wants fine city names, lak you gits out a book; I ax Marse Rob, an' he done say Some 'rageous stuff lak dis: He'd call de bruddah Be'lze_bub_, de sistah Gene_sis_; Or Alphy an' Omegy--de Beginnin' an' de en'-- But den, ob co'se no man kin tell, what mo' de Lawd 'll sen'; Fer de pappy ob dese orphans-- You heah me?--I'll be boun', While dey's er-crawlin' on de flo', he'll be er-lookin' roun'; 'Ca'se I done seen dem Judas teahs He drap at Ceely's grabe, A-peepin' 'hind his han'kercher, at ole Tim's yaller Gabe; A-mekin' out to moan an' groan, Lak he was gwine 'o bus'-- Lawd! honey, dem dat howls de mos,' gits ober it de fus'. Annynias an' Saphiry, Sis Tab done say to me, But he'p me, Lawd! what _do_ she 'spec' dese chillum gwine o' be? 'Sides, dem names 's got er cur'us soun'-- You says I's hard to please? Well, so 'ould any granny be, wid sech a pa'r as dese. Ole Pahson Bob he 'low dat I Will suttinly be sinnin', Onless I gibs 'em names dat starts 'em right in de beginnin'; "Iwilla" fer de gal, he say, F'om de tex' "I will a-rise," An' dat 'ould show she's startin' up, todes glory in de skies; An' fer dis man chile, Aberham-- De fardah ob' em all-- Or else Belshazzah, who done writ dat writin' on de wall; But Pahson Bob--axcuse me, Lawd!-- Hed bettah sabe his bref To preach de gospel, an' jes keep his "visin" to hiss'f; Per nary pusson, white nor black, Ain' gib no p'int to me 'Bout namin' dese heah Chris'mus gifs, asleep on granny's knee; (Now heshaby--don' squirm an' twis', Be still you varmints, do! You anin' gwine hab no niggah names to tote aroun' wide you!) 'Ca'se on de question ob dese names I sho is hed mah mine _Per_zactly an' _per_cidedly done med up all de time; Fer mah po' Ceely Ann--yas, Lawd, Jes nigh afo' she died, She name' dis gal, "Neu-ral-gy," her boy twin, "Hom-i-cide." FOOTNOTE: [32] Copyright, 1908, by B. W. Dodge and Company. WILLIAM T. PRICE William Thompson Price, dramatic critic, creator of playwrights, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, December 17, 1846. He was educated in the private schools of Louisville, but the Civil War proved more interesting than text-books, so he ran away with Colonel E. P. Clay, whom he left, in turn, for John H. Morgan, and Generals Forrest and Wheeler. He was finally captured and imprisoned but he, of course, escaped. After the war Mr. Price went to Germany and studied for three years at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. From 1875 to 1880 he was dramatic critic for the Louisville _Courier-Journal_; and the following five years he devoted to editorial work for various newspapers, and to collecting material for his enormous biography of the Rev. George O. Barnes, a noted and eccentric Kentucky evangelist, which appeared under the title of _Without Scrip or Purse_ (Louisville, 1883). Mr. Price went to New York in the early eighties, and that city has remained his home to this day. In 1885 he was dramatic critic for the now defunct New York _Star_, which he left after a year to become a reader of new plays for A. M. Palmer, the leading manager of his time, whom he was associated with for more than twenty years. Mr. Price's _The Technique of the Drama_ (New York, 1892), gave him a high position among the dramatic writers of the country. A new edition of it was called for in 1911, and it seems destined to remain the chief authority in its field for many years. In 1901 Mr. Price became playreader for Harrison Grey Fiske; and in the same year he founded the American School of Playwriting, in which men and women, whom the gods forgot, are transformed into great dramatists--perhaps! His second volume upon the stage, _The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle_ (New York, 1908), is the text-book of his school. At the present time Mr. Price is editor of _The American Playwright_, a monthly magazine of dramatic discussion. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Price to the present writer; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE OFFENBACH AND GILBERT OPERAS[33] [From _The Technique of the Drama_ (New York, 1892)] The light-hearted genius of Paris composed a new style of opera for the general merriment of the world. Who can describe the surprises, the quaintness of song, the drolleries of action of the Offenbach school? It was the intoxicating wine of music. Gladstone, when premier of England, found time to say that the world owed as much in its civilization to the discovery of the fiddle as it did to steam. This cannot be applied in its whole sense to Offenbach, but this master of satire and the sensuous certainly expressed his times. He set laughter to song. It was democratic. It spared not king, courtier, or the rabble. It was wisdom and sentiment in disguise. It was born among despotisms, and jested when kingdoms fell. It was the stalking horse behind which Offenbach hunted the follies of the day and bagged the absurdities of the hour. If it had _double entendre_, its existence had a double meaning. Its music and purpose defied national prejudices. Under its laughter-compelling notes the sober bass-viol put on a merry disposition, and your cornet-a-piston became a wag. It was flippant, the glorification of youthful mirth and feelings, and it made many a melancholy Jacques sing again the song of Beranger, "_Comme je regrette ma jambe si dodu._" It is not the purpose here to commend its delirious dances, but to admit that there was genius in it. In a technical sense the dramatic part of them are models compared with the inane and vague compositions of a later school. The opera bouffe is in a stage beyond decadence, and no longer regards consistency, even of nonsense, in its dramatic elements. Some of the conventionalisms of its technique remain. We hear again and again the old choruses, the drinking songs, the letter songs, the wine songs, the conspirators' songs, the departure for the war, the lovers' duets, and what-not, with the old goblets, the old helmets and all in use; but order is lost, and the topical song often saves the public patience, apart from the _disjecta membra_, upon which are fed the eye and the ear. The Gilbert opera. The delicate foolery of Gilbert and the interpreting melody of Sullivan created an inimitable form of opera that delighted its generations. In its way perfection marks it. There is much in it that ministers to inward quiet and enjoyment. "Pinafore," "The Mikado," and all the list, are products of genius. "Ruddygore" is structurally weak, proving that even nonsense must have a logical treatment. Successful in a manner as "Ruddygore" was, it was filled with characteristic quaintness. We accept Rose Maybud as a piece of good luck, from the moment her modest slippers demurely patter to the front; and it is a sober statement to say that our generation has seen nothing more charming than her artful artlessness and innocence. She is worthy of Gilbert. His taste is refined beyond the point of vulgarity in essence or by way of expediency. His fancy is not tainted with the corruption of flesh-tight limbs, and he holds fast only to such physical allurements as the "three little maids just from school" in the "Mikado" or the impossibly good and dainty Rose Maybud may tempt us with. In the dance there is no lasciviousness, only joy. Gilbert and Sullivan have called a halt to the can-can and bid the world be decent. The whole history of comic opera is filled with proof that music first consented to lend itself to foolery on condition that there should be some heart in it; and even Offenbach, the patriarch of libidinous absurdities, could not get along without stopping by the wayside to make his sinners sing love-songs filled with pure emotion. Rose Maybud is a piece of delicate coquetry with the mysterious simplicity of maidenhood, giving offense in no way. These authors are satirists, not burlesquers and fakirs. FOOTNOTE: [33] Copyright, 1892, by Brentano's. GEORGE M. DAVIE George Montgomery Davie, a verse-maker of cleverness and charm, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, March 16, 1848. He began his collegiate career at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, but he later went to Princeton, from which institution he was graduated in 1868. Two years later he established himself as a lawyer at Louisville. Davie rose rapidly in his profession, and he was soon recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in Kentucky. Though busy with his practice, he found time to write verse and short prose papers for periodicals that were appreciated by many persons. Davie was a Latinist of decided ability, and he often employed himself in turning the odes of Horace into English. His original work, however, is very charming and clever, a smile being concealed in almost every line he wrote, though it is a very quiet and dignified smile, never boisterous. He was one of the founders of the now celebrated Filson Club, of Louisville. He died at New York, February 22, 1900, but he sleeps to-day in Louisville's beautiful Cave Hill cemetery. _Verses_ (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.), a broadside, contains Davie's best original poems and translations and it is a very scarce item at this time. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (February 23, 1900); _Kentucky Eloquence_ (Louisville, 1907). "FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE!" (Catullus, Car. CI.) [From _Verses_ (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.)] Through many nations, over many seas, Brother, I come to thy sad obsequies: To bring the last gifts for the dead to thee, And speak to thy mute ashes--left to me By the hard fate, that on a cruel day, From me, dear brother, called Thyself away. Receive these gifts, wet with fraternal tears; And the last rites, that custom old endears; These fond memorials would my sorrow tell-- Brother! forever, hail thee--and farewell! HADRIAN, DYING, TO HIS SOUL [From the same] Animula vagula blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula rigida nudula; Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos? Thou sprite! so charming, uncontrolled, Guest and companion of my clay, Into what places wilt thou stray, When thou art naked, pale, and cold? Wilt then make merry--as of old? JOHN URI LLOYD John Uri Lloyd, novelist and scientist, was born at West Bloomfield, New York, April 19, 1849. He is the son of a civil engineer who came West, in 1853, for the purpose of surveying a railroad between Covington and Louisville, known as the "River Route." Mr. Lloyd was thus four years old when his father settled at Burlington, Boone county, Kentucky, near the line of the road. The panic of 1854 came and the railroad company failed, but his parents preferred their new Kentucky home to the old home in the East, and they decided to remain, taking up their first vocations, that of teaching. For several years they taught in the village schools of the three little Kentucky towns of Burlington, Petersburg, and Florence. Mr. Lloyd lived at Florence until he was fourteen years of age, when he was apprenticed to a Cincinnati druggist, but he continued to be a resident of Kentucky until 1876, since which time he has lived at Cincinnati. In 1878 he became connected with the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy, and this connection has continued to the present day. In 1880 he was married to a Kentucky woman. Mr. Lloyd is one of the most distinguished pharmaceutical chemists in the United States. He has a magnificent library and museum upon his subjects; and he is generally conceded to be the world's highest authority on puff-balls. Mr. Lloyd's scientific works include _The Chemistry of Medicines_ (1881); _Drugs and Medicines of North America_ (1884); _King's American Dispensatory_ (1885); _Elixirs, their History and Preparation_ (1892); and he, as president, has edited the publications of the Lloyd Library, as follows: _Dr. B. S. Barton's Collections_ (1900); _Dr. Peter Smith's Indian Doctor's Dispensatory_ (1901); _A Study in Pharmacy_ (1902); _Dr. David Schopf's Materia Medica Americana_ (1903); _Dr. Manasseh Cutler's Vegetable Productions_ (1903); _Reproductions from the Works of William Downey, John Carver, and Anthony St. Storck_ (1907); _Hydrastis Canadensis_ (1908); _Samuel Thomson and Thomsonian Materia Medica_ (1909). Dr. Lloyd has won his general reputation as a writer of novels descriptive of life in northern Kentucky. His first work to attract wide attention was entitled _Etidorpha, or the End of Earth_ (New York, 1895), a work which involved speculative philosophy. This was followed by a little story, _The Right Side of the Car_ (Boston, 1897). Then came the Stringtown stories, which made his reputation. "Stringtown" is the fictional name for the Kentucky Florence of his boyhood. There are four of them: _Stringtown on the Pike_ (New York, 1900); _Warwick of the Knobs_ (New York, 1901); _Red Head_ (New York, 1903); and _Scroggins_ (New York, 1904). In these stories the author's aim was not to be engaged solely as a novelist, "but to portray to outsiders a phase of life unknown to the world at large, and to establish a folk-lore picture in which the scenes that occurred in times gone by, would be paralleled in the events therein narrated." _Stringtown on the Pike_ is Mr. Lloyd's best known book, but _Warwick of the Knobs_ is far and way the finest of the four. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (May, 1900); _The Outlook_ (November 16, 1901); _The Bookman_ (December, 1910). "LET'S HAVE THE MERCY TEXT"[34] [From _Warwick of the Knobs_ (New York, 1901)] Warwick made no movement; no word of greeting came from his lips, no softening touch to his furrowed brow, no sparkle to his cold, gray eye. As though gazing upon a stranger, he sat and pierced the girl through and through with a formal stare, that drove despair deeper into her heart and caused her to cling closer to her brother. "Pap, sister's home ag'in," the youth repeated. "I know nothing of a sister who claims a home here." Mary would have fallen but for the strong arm of her brother, who gently, tenderly guided her to a great rocking-chair. Then he turned on his father. "I said thet sister's home agin, and I means it, pap." Turning the leaves of the Book to a familiar passage, Warwick read aloud: "'The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father, but of the world.' This girl has no home here. She is of the world." "Father, ef sister hes no home here, I hav'n't none, either. Ef she must go out into the world, I'll go with her." The man of God gazed sternly at the rebellious youth. Then he turned to the girl. "The good Book says, 'A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.'" Joshua stepped between the two and hid the child from her father. "Pap, thet book says tough things to-night. The text you preached from to-day was a better one. I remember et, and I'll leave et to you ef I am not right. 'I am merciful, saith the Lord, and I will not keep my anger forever.' Thet's a better text, and I takes et, God was in a better humor when He wrote et." "Joshua!" spoke the father, shocked at his son's irreverence. "Listen, pap. I hate to say et, but I must. You preached one thing this morning, and you acts another thing now. Didn't you say thet God 'retaineth not His anger forever, because He delighteth in mercy?' I may not hev the words right, but I've got the sense." "My son!" "Pap, I axes the question on the square. Ain't thet what you preached?" "That was the text." "It ain't fair to preach one text in the meetin'-house and act another text at home." "Joshua!" "Let's hev the mercy text to-night. Pap, sister's home ag'in. Let's act the fergivin' text out." Joshua stepped aside and the minister, touched in spite of himself, glanced at his daughter, a softened glance, that spoke of affection, but he made no movement. Then the girl slowly rose and turned toward the door, still keeping her eyes on her father's face. She edged backward step by step toward the door by which she had entered. Her hand grasped the latch; the door moved on its hinges. "Stop, sister," said Joshua. "Pap, ef sister opens thet door I go with her, and then you will sit alone in this room ferever. You will be the last Warwick of the Knob." Warwick, with all his coldness and strength, could not stand the ordeal. "Come back, my children," he said. "It is also written, 'I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.'" And then, as in former times, Mary's head rested on her father's knee. FOOTNOTE: [34] Copyright, 1901, by Dodd, Mead and Company. Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout. The oe ligature in this etext has been replaced with oe. Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original. Page xxi: The title of the Emerson poem "Goodby Proud World" is as in the original. Page 251: 1833 has been changed to 1883 as this follows chronologically from the surrounding sentences. (... and in 1883 his study ...) Page 273: A missing quote in (... to Write "Grace Truman: ...) is as in the original. 
39407	----	(This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Million Book Project) KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS OTHER WORKS BY MR. TOWNSEND _Richard Hickman Menefee._ 1907 _Kentuckians in History and Literature._ 1907 _The Life of James Francis Leonard._ 1909 _Kentucky: Mother of Governors._ 1910 _Lore of the Meadowland._ 1911 KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS 1784-1912 BY JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES LANE ALLEN IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II THE TORCH PRESS CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA NINETEEN THIRTEEN _Of this edition one thousand sets have been printed, of which this is number_ 241 COPYRIGHT 1913 BY THE TORCH PRESS PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 1913 [Illustration] To Mary Katherine Bullitt and Samuel Judson Roberts and to their memories CONTENTS JAMES N. BASKETT 1 "I 'OVES 'OO BEST, 'TAUSE 'OO BEAT 'EM ALL" 2 JAMES LANE ALLEN 4 KING SOLOMON OF KENTUCKY: AN ADDRESS 9 THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE 13 NANCY HUSTON BANKS 17 ANVIL ROCK 18 THE OLD FASHIONED FIDDLERS 19 WILLIAM B. SMITH 20 A SOUTHERN VIEW OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM 22 THE MERMAN AND THE SERAPH 24 ANDERSON C. QUISENBERRY 27 THE DEATH OF CRITTENDEN 27 ROBERT BURNS WILSON 29 LOVINGLY TO ELIZABETH, MY MOTHER 32 WHEN EVENING COMETH ON 32 DANIEL HENRY HOLMES 36 BELL HORSES 39 MY LADY'S GARDEN 40 LITTLE BLUE BETTY 42 THE OLD WOMAN UNDER THE HILL 44 MARGERY DAW 45 WILLIAM H. WOODS 47 SYCAMORES 48 ANDREW W. KELLEY 49 THE OLD SCISSORS' SOLILOQUY 50 LATE NEWS 52 YOUNG E. ALLISON 53 ON BOARD THE DERELICT 54 HESTER HIGBEE GEPPERT 57 THE GARDENER AND THE GIRL 58 HENRY C. WOOD 60 THE WEAVER 61 WILLIAM E. CONNELLEY 63 KANSAS HISTORY 65 CHARLES T. DAZEY 67 THE FAMOUS KNOT-HOLE 70 JOHN P. FRUIT 72 THE CLIMAX OF POE'S POETRY 72 HARRISON ROBERTSON 74 TWO TRIOLETS 75 STORY OF THE GATE 75 INGRAM CROCKETT 77 AUDUBON 78 THE LONGING 79 DEAREST 80 ELIZA CALVERT OBENCHAIN 81 "SWEET DAY OF REST" 82 KATE SLAUGHTER MCKINNEY 85 A LITTLE FACE 85 CHARLES J. O'MALLEY 86 ENCELADUS 88 NOON IN KENTUCKY 90 LANGDON SMITH 91 EVOLUTION 92 WILL J. LAMPTON 98 THESE DAYS 98 OUR CASTLES IN THE AIR 99 CHAMPAGNE 100 MARY ANDERSON DE NAVARRO 101 LAZY LOUISVILLE 102 MARY R. S. ANDREWS 104 THE NEW SUPERINTENDENT 106 ELVIRA MILLER SLAUGHTER 110 THE SOUTH AND SONG 111 SUNDOWN LANE 113 JOSEPH S. COTTER 115 NEGRO LOVE SONG 115 ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD 116 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS 117 EVELYN S. BARNETT 119 THE WILL 119 JOHN PATTERSON 123 A CLUSTER OF GRAPES 124 CHORAL ODE FROM EURIPIDES 125 WILLIAM E. BARTON 126 A WEARY WINTER 128 BENJ. H. RIDGELY 129 A KENTUCKY DIPLOMAT 131 ZOE A. NORRIS 135 THE CABARET SINGER 137 IN A MOMENT OF WEARINESS 138 LUCY CLEAVER MCELROY 139 OLD ALEC HAMILTON 140 MARY F. LEONARD 142 GOODBY 143 JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER 144 THE CALL OF THE DRUM 146 OSCAR W. UNDERWOOD 150 THE PROTECTION OF PROFITS 151 ELIZABETH ROBINS 156 A PROMISING PLAYWRIGHT 158 ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE 162 MAN A PRODUCT OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE 163 ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON 165 THE MAGIC KETTLE 167 EVA A. MADDEN 170 THE END OF "THE I CAN SCHOOL" 170 JOHN FOX, JR. 172 THE CHRISTMAS TREE ON PIGEON 176 FANNIE C. MACAULAY 181 APPROACHING JAPAN 183 JAMES D. BRUNER 184 THE FRENCH CLASSICAL DRAMA 185 MADISON CAWEIN 187 CONCLUSION 191 INDIAN SUMMER 192 HOME 193 LOVE AND A DAY 193 IN A SHADOW GARDEN 195 UNREQUITED 196 A TWILIGHT MOTH 196 GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN 198 EMMY LOU'S VALENTINE 199 MARY ADDAMS BAYNE 202 THE COMING OF THE SCHOOLMASTER 203 ELIZABETH CHERRY WALTZ 205 PA GLADDEN AND THE WANDERING WOMAN 207 REUBENA HYDE WALWORTH 209 THE UNDERGROUND PALACE OF THE FAIRIES 210 CRITTENDEN MARRIOTT 211 THE ARRIVAL OF THE ENEMY 213 ABBIE CARTER GOODLOE 217 A COUNTESS OF THE WEST 218 GEORGE LEE BURTON 222 AFTER PRISON--HOME 223 JAMES TANDY ELLIS 228 YOUTHFUL LOVERS 229 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER 230 HIS SON'S SWEETHEART 232 SISTER IMELDA 233 A JUNE IDYL 234 HEART MEMORIES 235 A NUN'S PRAYER 235 HARRISON CONRAD 236 IN OLD TUCSON 236 A KENTUCKY SUNRISE 237 A KENTUCKY SUNSET 237 ALICE HEGAN RICE 238 THE OPPRESSED MR. OPP DECIDES 239 RICHARD H. WILSON 244 SUSAN--VENUS OF CADIZ 245 LUCY FURMAN 247 A MOUNTAIN COQUETTE 249 BERT FINCK 254 BEHIND THE SCENES 254 OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN 255 NEAR THE COTTAGE IN GREENOT WOODS 258 HARRY L. MARRINER 262 WHEN MOTHER CUTS HIS HAIR 263 SIR GUMSHOO 264 LUCIEN V. RULE 265 WHAT RIGHT HAST THOU? 265 THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD 266 EVA WILDER BRODHEAD 267 THE RIVALS 269 CORDIA GREER PETRIE 273 ANGELINE JINES THE CHOIR 274 MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS 279 MRS. MOLLY MORALIZES 281 CALE YOUNG RICE 284 PETRARCA AND SANCIA 285 ROBERT M. MCELROY 289 GEORGE ROGERS CLARK 290 EDWIN D. SCHOONMAKER 293 THE PHILANTHROPIST 294 CREDO HARRIS 295 BOLOGNA 295 HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES 297 THE BISHOP SPEAKS 298 EDWIN CARLILE LITSEY 300 THE RACE OF THE SWIFT 301 MILTON BRONNER 303 MR. HEWLETT'S WOMEN 304 A. S. MACKENZIE 305 A KELTIC TALE 306 LAURA SPENCER PORTOR 308 THE LITTLE CHRIST 309 BUT ONE LEADS SOUTH 310 LEIGH GORDON GILTNER 311 THE JESTING GODS 311 MARGARET S. ANDERSON 318 THE PRAYER OF THE WEAK 318 NOT THIS WORLD 319 WHISTLER 320 ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH 320 UNREMEMBERING JUNE 321 IRVIN S. COBB 323 THE BELLED BUZZARD 327 ISAAC F. MARCOSSON 343 THE WAGON CIRCUS 344 GERTRUDE KING TUFTS 345 SHIPWRECKED 346 CHARLES HANSON TOWNE 350 SPRING 351 SLOW PARTING 351 OF DEATH 352 WILLIAM E. WALLING 353 RUSSIA AND AMERICA 354 THOMPSON BUCHANAN 355 THE WIFE WHO DIDN'T GIVE UP 358 WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT 363 AN ACTRESS'S HEART 364 FRANK WALLER ALLEN 366 A WOMAN ANSWERED 367 VENITA SEIBERT 368 THE ORIGIN OF BABIES 369 CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK 371 THE DOCTRINE ACCORDING TO JONESY 373 GEORGE BINGHAM 375 HOGWALLOW NEWS 377 MABEL PORTER PITTS 379 ON THE LITTLE SANDY 379 MARION FORSTER GILMORE 380 THE CRADLE SONG 381 APPENDIX 383 MRS. AGNES B. MITCHELL 385 WHEN THE COWS COME HOME 385 KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTER JAMES NEWTON BASKETT James Newton Baskett, novelist and scientist, was born near Carlisle, Kentucky, November 1, 1849. He was taken to Missouri in early life by his parents. He was graduated from the University of Missouri in 1872, since which time he has devoted himself almost exclusively to fiction and to comparative vertebrate anatomy, with ornithology as his particular specialty. At the world's congress of ornithologists at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Mr. Baskett presented a paper on _Some Hints at the Kinship of Birds as Shown by Their Eggs_, which won him the respect of scientists from many lands. He has published three scientific works and three novels: _The Story of the Birds_ (New York, 1896); _The Story of the Fishes_ (New York, 1899); _The Story of the Amphibians and Reptiles_ (New York, 1902); and his novels: _At You All's House_ (New York, 1898); _As the Light Led_ (New York, 1900); and his most recent book, _Sweet Brier and Thistledown_ (Boston, 1902). Of this trio of tales the first one, _At You All's House_, is the best and the best known, Mr. Baskett's masterpiece hitherto. For the Texas Historical Society he wrote, in 1907, a series of papers upon the _Early Spanish Expedition in the South and Southwest_. With the exception of three years spent in Colorado for the benefit of his health, Mr. Baskett has resided at Mexico, Missouri, since leaving Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Athenaeum_ (July 28, 1900); _The Book Buyer_ (October, 1900); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. i). "I 'OVES 'OO BEST, 'TAUS 'OO BEAT 'EM ALL"[1] [From _As the Light Led_ (New York, 1900)] They had been boy and girl together, not schoolmates nor next-farm neighbors, but their homes were in the same region. Her father's house was far enough away to make the boy's visits not so frequent as to foster the familiarity which breeds contempt, yet they gave him an occasional little journey out of the humdrum of home lanes, and away from the monotonous sweep of the prairie's flat horizon. Hers was rather a timber farm, located on the other side of Flint Creek, where the woods began to fringe out upon the treeless plain again; but his was high out eastward upon the prairie swell, several miles from water. From his place the wooded barrier between them seemed only a brown level brush-stroke upon the sky's western margin. Sometimes, when he was tired from his day's work afield, he watched the sun sink behind this border, which the distance made so velvety; and, if the day were clear, it looked to him as if the great glowing ball were lying down upon a cushion for its comfort. If it set in a bank of cloud or storm, it seemed to send up long streaming, reaching stripes, as if it waved a farewell to the sky, and stretched a last grasp at the day as it left it, or shot a rocket of distress as it sank. When a child he had often sent her his good-will upon the westering messenger, and he imagined that the beams, sometimes shot suddenly out from beneath a low-hung cloudy curtain, were answers to his greetings. Long after it was dreary at his place, he fancied the light was still cuddling somewhere in the brush near her and that it was cheery yet over there. When he was seven and she was three, he was visiting at her house one day. She was sitting on a bench in the old, long porch, shouting to him, her elder brother, and some others, as they came toward her from a romp out in the orchard. Suddenly Bent bantered the boys for a race to the baby; and, swinging their limp wool hats in their hands, they sped toward her. The child caught the jubilance of the race, and when Bent dropped first beside her, she grabbed him about the neck, laid the rose of her cheek against the tan of his, and said: "I 'oves 'oo best, 'tause 'oo beat 'em all." The act was an infant tribute to prowess, a bound here in babyhood of the heart which wants but does not weigh; of the body which asks but does not question. The boy felt his heart go to meet hers, so that the little girl stood ever after as his idol. As time went on, his reverence for her as a lisper grew as she became a lass; and though, out of the dawning to them of what the years might bring, there came eras of pure embarrassment, wherein their firmness and trust wavered a little, yet confiding companionship came anew and stayed, till some new revelation of each to self or other barred for a time again their ease and intimacy. They were man and woman now, with a consciousness of much that the grown-up state must finally mean to them, if this continued. There was the freedom from embarrassment which experience brings; but there came with all this a sort of proximity of hopes and aims, which, burdened sweetly with its own importance, persisted with a presage of a crisis down the line. He could no longer ride up to her side as she left the stile at church, and, without a previous engagement or the lubricant of a commonplace, open a conversation right into the heart of things. When she responded to him now it was with a shy sort of confidence which admits so much yet defines so little. Yet never when they met did they fail to pick up the thread, which tended to bind them closer and closer, and give it a conscious snatch of greater strain, till, as either looked back at the skein of incidents, there came a delightful feeling of hopeless entanglement in this fibre of their fate. However, the ends of the filament were free and floating yet, as the fray of a swirling gossamer in the autumn wind. Day by day these two felt that these frayed ends would meet sometime; and hold? or snap? and then? and then! Nothing had ever strongly tried their attachment. Yet there was creeping now into the heart of each a sort of heaviness--a wondering, at least--if the other was still holding true to the childish troth; a definite sort of mental distrust was abiding between them, along with a readiness to be equal to anything which an emergency might bring. But in their hearts they were lovers still. FOOTNOTE: [1] Copyright, 1900, by the Macmillan Company. JAMES LANE ALLEN James Lane Allen, the foremost living American master of English prose, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, December 21, 1849. His home was situated some five miles from Lexington, on the old Parker's Mill road, and it was burned to the ground more than thirty years ago. He was the seventh and youngest child of Richard Allen, a Kentuckian, and his wife, Helen Foster Allen, a native of Mississippi. Lane Allen, as he was known in Kentucky until he became a distinguished figure in contemporary letters, was interested in books and Nature when a boy under his mother's tutelage. He was early at Kentucky University, now rechristened with its ancient name, Transylvania. Mr. Allen was valedictorian of the class of 1872; and five years later the degree of Master of Arts was granted him, after an amusing quibble with the faculty regarding the length of his oration, _The Survival of the Fittest_. He began his career as teacher of the district school at the rural village of Slickaway, which is now known as Fort Spring, about two miles from his birthplace. He taught this school but one year, when he went to Richmond, Missouri, to become instructor of Greek in the high school there. A few years later he established a school for boys at Lexington, Missouri. Mr. Allen returned to Kentucky to act as tutor in a private family near Lexington; and in 1878, he was elected principal of the Kentucky University Academy. He resigned this position, in 1880, to accept the chair of Latin and English in Bethany College, Bethany, West Virginia, which he occupied for two years, when he returned once more to Lexington, Kentucky, to open a private school for boys in the old Masonic Temple. In 1884 Mr. Allen discarded the teacher's garb for that of a man of letters, and since that time he has devoted his entire attention to literature. While his kinsfolk and acquaintances regarded him with quiet wonder, if not alarmed astonishment, he carefully arranged his traveling bags and set his face toward the city of his dreams and thoughts--New York. Once there he shortly discovered that it was a deal easier to get into the kingdom of heaven than into the pages of the great periodicals, yet he had come to the city to make a name for himself in literature and he was not to be denied. His struggle was most severe, but his victory has been so complete that the bitterness of those days has been blown aside. The first seven or eight years of his life as a writer, Mr. Allen divided between New York, Cincinnati, and Kentucky. He finally quit Kentucky in 1893, and he has not been in the state since 1898, at which time his _alma mater_ conferred the honorary degree of LL. D. upon him. He now resides in New York. Mr. Allen began with short essays for _The Critic_, _The Continent_, _The Independent_, _The Manhattan_, and other periodicals; and he contributed some strong and fine poems to _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The Interior_, _Harper's Monthly_, _Lippincott's Magazine_, _The Independent_, and elsewhere. But none of these represented the true beginning of his work, of his career. His first short-story to attract general attention was _Too Much Momentum_, published in _Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1885. It, however, was naturally rather stiff, as the author was then wielding the pen of a 'prentice. This was followed by a charming essay, _The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky_, in _Harper's_ for February, 1886, and which really pointed the path he was to follow so wonderfully well through the coming years. His first noteworthy story, _Two Gentlemen of Kentucky_, appeared in _The Century Magazine_ for April, 1888. Then followed fast upon each other's heels, _The White Cowl_; _King Solomon of Kentucky_, perhaps the greatest short-story he has written; _Posthumous Fame_; _Flute and Violin_; and _Sister Doloroso_, all of which were printed in the order named, and in _The Century_, save _Flute and Violin_, which was originally published in _Harper's Magazine_ for December, 1890. These "Kentucky tales and romances" were issued as Mr. Allen's first book, entitled _Flute and Violin_ (New York, 1891; Edinburgh, 1892, two volumes). Many of the author's admirers have come to regard these stories as the finest work he has done. As backgrounds for them he wrote a series of descriptive and historical papers upon Kentucky, originally published in _The Century_ and _Harper's_, and collected in book form under the title of the first of them, _The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_ (New York, 1892). Up to this time Mr. Allen had written nothing but short-stories, verses, and sketches. While living at Cincinnati he wrote his first novelette, _John Gray_ (Philadelphia, 1893), which first appeared in _Lippincott's Magazine_ for June, 1892. This is one of the author's strongest pieces of prose fiction, though it has been well-nigh forgotten in its original form. These three books fitted Mr. Allen for the writing of an American classic, _A Kentucky Cardinal_ (New York, 1894), another novelette, which was published in two parts in _Harper's Magazine_ for May and June, 1894, prior to its appearance in book form. This, with its sequel, _Aftermath_ (New York, 1895), is the most exquisite tale of nature yet done by an American hand. It at once defies all praise, or adverse criticism, being wrought out as perfectly as human hands can well do. At the present time the two stories may be best read in the large paper illustrated edition done by Mr. Hugh Thomson, the celebrated English artist, to which Mr. Allen contributed a charming introduction. _Summer in Arcady_ (New York, 1896), which passed through the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ as _Butterflies_, was a rather realistic story of love and Nature, and somewhat strongly drawn for the tastes of many people. When his complete works appear in twelve uniform volumes, in 1913 or 1914, this "tale of nature" will be entitled _A Pair of Butterflies_. _The Choir Invisible_ (New York, 1897), Mr. Allen's first really long novel, was an augmented _John Gray_, and it placed him in the forefront of American novelists. Mr. Orson Lowell's illustrated edition of this work is most interesting; and it was dramatized in 1899, but produced without success, as the author had prophesied. Later in the same year _Two Gentlemen of Kentucky_ appeared as a bit of a book, and was cordially received by those of the author's admirers who continued to regard it as his masterpiece. _The Reign of Law_ (New York, 1900), a tale of the Kentucky hemp-fields, of love, and evolution, was published in London as _The Increasing Purpose_, because of the Duke of Argyll's prior appropriation of that title for his scientific treatise. The prologue upon Kentucky hemp strengthened Mr. Allen's reputation as one of the greatest writers of descriptive prose ever born out of Europe. It was widely read and discussed--in at least one quarter of the country--with unnecessary bitterness, if not with blind bigotry. _The Mettle of the Pasture_ (New York, 1903), which was first announced as _Crypts of the Heart_, is a love story of great beauty, saturated with the atmosphere of Kentucky to a wonderful degree, yet it has not been sufficiently appreciated. For the five years following the publication of _The Mettle_, Mr. Allen was silent; but he was working harder than ever before in his life upon manuscripts which he has come to regard as his most vital contributions to prose fiction. In the autumn of 1908 his stirring speech at the unveiling of the monument to remember his hero, King Solomon of Kentucky, was read; and three months later _The Last Christmas Tree_, brief prelude to his Christmas trilogy, appeared in _The Saturday Evening Post_. _The Bride of the Mistletoe_ (New York, 1909), part first of the trilogy, is one of the finest fragments of prose yet published in the United States. It aroused criticism of various kinds in many quarters, one declaring it to be one thing, and one another, but all agreeing that it was something new and wonderful under our literary sun. The critics of to-morrow may discover that _The Bride_ was the foundation-stone of the now much-heralded _Chunk of Life School_ which has of late taken London by the ears. Yet, between _The Bride_ and _The Widow of the Bye Street_ a great gulf is fixed. Part two of the trilogy was first announced as _A Brood of the Eagle_, but it was finally published as _The Doctor's Christmas Eve_ (New York, 1910). This, one of Mr. Allen's longest novels, was met by adverse criticism based on several grounds, but upon none more pointedly than what was alleged to be the unnatural precocity of the children, who do not appear to lightly flit through the pages in a way that our old-fashioned conventions would prescribe they should, but somewhat seem to clog the unfolding of the tale. Whatever estimate one may place upon _The Doctor_, he can scarcely be held to possess the subtile charm of _The Bride_. The third and final part of this much-discussed trilogy will hardly be published before 1914, or perhaps even subsequent to that date. _The Heroine in Bronze_ (New York, 1912), is Mr. Allen's latest novel. It is an American love story with all of the author's exquisite mastery of language again ringing fine and true. For the first time Mr. Allen largely abandons Kentucky as a landscape for his story, the action being in New York. The phrase "my country," that recurs throughout the book, succeeds the "Shield," which, in _The Bride of the Mistletoe_, was the author's appellation for Kentucky. The sequel to _The Heroine_--the story the boy wrote for the girl--is now preparing. Twenty years ago Mr. Allen wrote, "Kentucky has little or no literature;" and while he did not write, perhaps, with the whole horizon of its range before him, there was substantial truth in the statement. The splendid sequel to his declaration is his own magnificent works. He pointed out the lack of merit in our literature, but he did a far finer and more fitting thing: he at once set out upon his distinguished career and has produced a literature for the state. He has created Kentucky and Kentuckians as things apart from the outside world, a miniature republic within a greater republic; and no one knows the land and the people other than imperfectly if one cannot see and feel that his conception is clear and sentient. With a light but firm touch he has caught the shimmering atmosphere of his own native uplands and the idiosyncrasies of their people with all the fidelity with which the camera gives back a material outline. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Stories of James Lane Allen_, by L. W. Payne, Jr., in _The Sewanee Review_ (January, 1900); _James Lane Allen's Country_, by Arthur Bartlett, _The Bookman_ (October, 1900); _Famous Authors_, by E. F. Harkins (Boston, 1901); _Authors of Our Day in Their Homes_, by F. W. Halsey (New York, 1902); _Social Historians_, by H. A. Toulmin, Jr. (Boston, 1911). KING SOLOMON OF KENTUCKY: AN ADDRESS[2] [From _The Outlook_ (December 19, 1908)] We are witnessing at present a revival of conflict between two ideas in our civilization that have already produced a colossal war; the idea of the greatness of our Nation as the welded and indissoluble greatness of the States, and the idea of the separate dignity and isolated power of each sovereign commonwealth. The spirit of the Nation reaches out more and more to absorb into itself its own parts, and each part draws back more and more into its own Attic supremacy and independence, feeling that its earlier struggles were its own struggles, that its heroes were its own heroes, and that it has memories which refuse to blend with any other memories. It will willingly yield the luster of its daily life to the National sun, but by night it must see its own lighthouses around its frontiers--beacons for its own wandering mariner sons and a warning to the Nation itself that such lights are sacred wherever they stand and burn. But if the State more and more resists absorption into the Federal life, then less and less can it expect the Nation to do what it insists is its own peculiar work; the greater is the obligation resting upon it to make known to the Nation its own peculiar past and its own incommunicable greatness. Among the States of the Union none belongs more wholly to herself and less to the Nation than does Kentucky; none perhaps will resist more passionately the encroachments of Federal control; and upon her rests the very highest obligation to write her own history and make good her Attic aloofness. But there is no nobler or more eloquent way in which a State can set forth its annals than by memorializing its great dead. The flag of a nation is its hope; its monuments are its memories. But it is also true that the flag of a country is its memory, and that its monuments are its hopes. And both are needed. Each calls aloud to the other. If you should go into any land and see it covered with monuments and nowhere see its flag, you would know that its flag had gone down into the dust and that its hope was ended. If you should travel in a land and everywhere see its flag and nowhere its monuments, you would ask yourself, Has this people no past that it cares to speak of? and if it has, why does it not speak of it? But when you visit a country where you see the flag proudly flying and proud monuments standing everywhere, then you say, Here is a people who are great in both their hopes and in their memories, and who live doubly through the deeds of their dead. Where are Kentucky's monuments for her battlefields? There are some; where are the others? Where are her monuments for her heroes that she insists were hers alone? Over her waves the flag of her hopes; where are the monuments that are her memories? This man whom you memorialize to-day was not, in station or habiliment, one of Kentucky's higher heroes; his battlefield was the battlefield of his own character; but the honor rightly heaped upon him at last makes one remember how many a battlefield and how many a hero remain forgotten. Not alone the fields and heroes of actual war, but of civic and moral and scientific and artistic leadership. These ceremonies--whom will they incite to kindred action elsewhere? What other monuments will they build? There is a second movement broader than any question of State or National patriotism, in which these ceremonies also have their place. It is the essential movement of our time in the direction of a new philanthropy. No line of Shakespeare has ever been perhaps more quoted than this: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." It is true that he put the words into the mouth of a Roman of old; but they were true of the England of his time and they remained true for centuries after his death. But within the last one hundred years or less an entirely new spirit has been developed; a radically new way of looking at human history and at human character has superseded the old. The spirit and genius of our day calls for the recasting of Shakespeare's lines: Let the evil that men do be buried with them; let the good they did be found out and kept alive. I wish to take one illustration of the truth of this from the history of English literature. Do you know when and where it was that satire virtually ceased to exist in English literature? It was at the birthplace and with the birth of Charles Darwin. From Darwin's time, from the peak on which he stood, a long slope of English literature sinks backward and downward toward the past; and on that shadowy slope stand somewhere the fierce satirists of English letters. Last of them all, and standing near where Darwin stood, is the great form of Thackeray. All his life he sought for perfection in human character and never found it. He searched England from the throne down for the gentleman and never found the gentleman. The life-long quest sometimes left him bitter, always left him sad. For all of Thackeray's work was done under the influence of the older point of view, that the frailties of men should be scourged out of them and could be. Over his imagination brooded the shadow of a vast myth--that man had thrown away his own perfection, that he was a fallen angel, who wantonly refused to regain his own paradise. And now from the peak of the world's thought on which Darwin stood, the other slope of English literature comes down to us and will pass on into the future. And as marking the beginning of the modern spirit working in literature, there on this side of Darwin, near to him as Thackeray stood near to him on the other side, is the great form of George Eliot. George Eliot saw the frailties of human nature as clearly as Thackeray saw them; she loved perfection as greatly as he loved perfection; but on her lips satire died and sympathy was born. She was the first of England's great imaginative writers to breathe in the spirit of modern life and of modern knowledge--that man himself is a developing animal--a creature crawling slowly out of utter darkness toward the light. You can satirize a fallen angel who willfully refuses to regain his paradise; but you cannot satirize an animal who is developing through millions of years his own will to be used against his own instincts. And this new spirit of charity not only pervades the new literature of the world, but has made itself felt in every branch of human action. It has affected the theatre and well-nigh driven the drama of satire from the stage. Every judge knows that it goes with him to the bench; every physician knows that it accompanies him into the sick-room; every teacher knows that he must reckon with it as he tries to govern and direct the young; every minister knows that it ascends with him into his pulpit and takes wing with his prayer. And thus we come back around a great circle of the world's endeavor to the simple ceremony of this hour and place. There is but one thing to be said; it is all that need be said; it is an attempt to burnish one corner of a hero's dimmed shield. It is autumn now, the season of scythe and sickle. Time, the Reaper, long ago reaped from the field of this man's life its heroic deed; and now after so many years it has come back to his grave and thrown down the natural increase. On the day when King Solomon was laid here the grass began to weave its seamless mantle across his frailties; but out of his dust sprang what has since been growing--what no hostile hand can pluck away, nor any wind blow down--the red flower of a man's passionate service to his fellow-men when they were in direst need of him. And so, long honor to his name! A new peace to his ashes! THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE[3] [From _The Saturday Evening Post_ (Philadelphia, December 5, 1908)] The stars burn out one by one like candles in too long a night. Children, you love the snow. You play in it, you hunt in it; it brings the tinkling of sleighbells, it gives white wings to the trees and new robes to the world. Whenever it falls in your country, sooner or later it vanishes: forever falling and rising, forming and falling and melting and rising again--on and on through the ages. If you should start from your homes and travel northward, after a while you would find that everything is steadily changing: the air grows colder, living things begin to be left behind, those that remain begin to look white, the music of the earth begins to die out; you think no more of color and joy and song. On you journey, and always you are traveling toward the silent, the white, the dead. And at last you come to the land of sunlessness and silence--the reign of snow. If you should start from your homes and travel southward, as you crossed land after land, in the same way you would begin to see that life was failing, colors fading, the earth's harmonies being replaced by the discords of Nature's lifeless forces, storming, crushing, grinding. And at last you would reach the threshold of another world that you dared not enter and that nothing alive ever faces--the home of the frost. If you should rise straight into the air above your housetops, as though you were climbing the side of an unseen mountain, you would find at last that you had ascended to a height where the mountain would be capped with snow. All round the earth, wherever its mountains are high enough, their summits are capped with the one same snow; for above us, everywhere, lies the upper land of eternal cold. Some time in the future, we do not know when, but some time in the future, the Spirit of the Cold at the north will move southward; the Spirit of the Cold at the south will move northward; the Spirit of the Cold in the upper air will move downward to meet the other two. When the three meet there will be for the earth one whiteness and silence--rest. * * * * * A great time had passed--how great no one knew; there was none to measure it. It was twilight and it was snowing. On a steep mountainside, near its bald summit, thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this lone height, and there had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the sturdiest gale had never been able to dislodge them; and now the twain occupied that beetling rock as the final sentinels of mortal things. They looked out toward the land on one side of the mountain; at the foot of it lay a valley, and there, in old human times, a village had thriven, church spires had risen, bridal candles had twinkled at twilight. On the opposite side they looked toward the ocean--once the rolling, blue ocean, singing its great song, but level now and white and still at last--its voice hushed with all other voices--the roar of its battleships ended long ago. One fir tree grew lower down than the other, its head barely reached up to its comrade's breast. They had long shared with each other the wordless wisdom of their race; and now, as a slow, bitter wind wandered across the delicate green harps of their leaves, they began to chant--harping like harpers of old who never tired of the past. The fir below, as the snowflakes fell on its locks and sifted closely in about its throat, shook itself bravely and sang: "Comrade, the end for us draws nigh; the snow is creeping up. To-night it will place its cap upon my head. I shall close my eyes and follow all things into their sleep." "Yes," thrummed the fir above, "follow all things into their sleep. If they were thus to sleep at last, why were they ever awakened? It is a mystery." The whirling wind caught the words and bore them to the right and to the left over land and over sea: "Mystery--mystery--mystery." Twilight deepened. The snow scarcely fell; the clouds trailed through the trees so close and low that the flakes were formed amid the boughs and rested where they were created. At intervals out of the clouds and darkness the low musings went on: "Where now is the Little Brother of the Trees--him of the long thoughts and the brief shadow?" "He thought that he alone of earthly things was immortal." "Our people, the Evergreens, were thrust forth on the earth a million ages before he appeared; and we are still here, a million ages since he left, leaving not a trace of himself behind." "The most fragile moss was born before he was born; and the moss outlasted him." "The frailest fern was not so perishable." "Yet he believed he should have eternal youth." "That his race would return to some Power who had sent it forth." "That he was ever being borne onward to some far-off, divine event, where there was justice." "Yes, where there was justice." "Of old it was their custom to heap white flowers above their dead." "Now white flowers cover them--the frozen white flowers of the sky." It was night now about the mountaintop--deep night above it. At intervals the communing of the firs started up afresh: "Had they known how alone in the universe they were, would they not have turned to each other for happiness?" "Would not all have helped each?" "Would not each have helped all?" "Would they have so mingled their wars with their prayers?" "Would they not have thrown away their weapons and thrown their arms around one another? It was all a mystery." "Mystery--mystery." Once in the night they sounded in unison: "And all the gods of earth--its many gods in many lands with many faces--they sleep now in their ancient temples; on them has fallen at last their unending dusk." "And the shepherds who avowed that they were appointed by the Creator of the universe to lead other men as their sheep--what difference is there now between the sheep and the shepherds?" "The shepherds lie with the sheep in the same white pastures." "Still, what think you became of all that men did?" "Whither did Science go? How could it come to naught?" "And that seven-branched golden candlestick of inner light that was his Art--was there no other sphere to which it could be transferred, lovely and eternal?" "And what became of Love?" "What became of the woman who asked for nothing in life but love and youth?" "What became of the man who was true?" "Think you that all of them are not gathered elsewhere--strangely changed, yet the same? Is some other quenchless star their safe habitation?" "What do we know; what did he know on earth? It was a mystery." "It was all a mystery." If there had been a clock to measure the hour it must now have been near midnight. Suddenly the fir below harped most tenderly: "The children! What became of the children? Where did the myriads of them march to? What was the end of the march of the earth's children?" "Be still!" whispered the fir above. "At that moment I felt the soft fingers of a child searching my boughs. Was not this what in human times they called Christmas Eve?" "Hearken!" whispered the fir below. "Down in the valley elfin horns are blowing and elfin drums are beating. Did you hear that--faint and far away? It was the bells of the reindeer! It passed: it was the wandering soul of Christmas." Not long after this the fir below struck its green harp for the last time: "Comrade, it is the end for me. Good-night!" Silently the snow closed over it. The other fir now stood alone. The snow crept higher and higher. It bravely shook itself loose. Late in the long night it communed once more, solitary: "I, then, close the train of earthly things. And I was the emblem of immortality; let the highest be the last to perish! Power, that put forth all things for a purpose, you have fulfilled, without explaining it, that purpose. I follow all things into their sleep." In the morning there was no trace of it. The sun rose clear on the mountaintops, white and cold and at peace. The earth was dead. FOOTNOTES: [2] Copyright, 1908, by the Outlook Company. [3] Copyright, 1908, by the Curtis Publishing Company. NANCY HUSTON BANKS Mrs. Nancy Huston Banks, novelist, was born at Morganfield, Kentucky, about 1850. She is the daughter of the late Judge George Huston, who for many years was an attorney and banker of her native town. When a young woman Miss Huston was married to Mr. James N. Banks, now a lawyer of Henderson, Kentucky. Mrs. Banks's first book, _Stairs of Sand_ (Chicago, 1890), has been forgotten by author and public alike, but shortly after its publication, she went to New York, and there she resided at the Hotel St. James for many years. At the present time she is living in London. She became a contributor to magazines, her critical paper on Mr. James Lane Allen and his novels, which appeared in _The Bookman_ for June, 1895, being her first work to attract serious attention. A few years later Mrs. Banks dropped her magazine work in order to write her charming novel of life in southern Kentucky, _Oldfield_ (New York, 1902). This story was highly praised in this country and in England, the critics of London coining a descriptive phrase for it that has stuck--"the Kentucky Cranford." Her next novel, _'Round Anvil Rock_ (New York, 1903), was a worthy follower of _Oldfield_. One reviewer called it "a blend of an old-fashioned love story and an historical study." Mrs. Banks's most recent novel is _The Little Hills_ (New York, 1905). The opening words of this story: "The air was the breath of spice pinks," was seized upon by the critics and set up as a sign-post for the book's tone. Mrs. Banks has been a great traveler. She was sent to South Africa during the Boer war by _Vanity Fair_ of London, and her letters to that publication were most interesting. She knew Cecil Rhodes and George W. Steevens, the war correspondent, and, with her beauty and charm, she became a social "star" in the life about her. Mrs. Banks's one eccentricity--according to the literary gossips of New York--is her distaste for classical music; and that much of her success is due to the fact that she knows how to handle editors and publishers, we also learn from the same source. At least one of her contemporaries once held--though he has since wholly relented and regretted much--that, in a now exceedingly scarce first edition, she out-ingramed Ingram! But, of course, that is another story. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (September, 1902); _The Nation_ (February 5, 1903); _The Bookman_ (February, 1904). ANVIL ROCK[4] [From _'Round Anvil Rock_ (New York, 1903)] The courage and calmness which he had found in himself under this test, heartened him and made him the more determined to control his wandering fancy. Looking now neither to the right nor the left, he pressed on through the clearing toward the buffalo track in the border of the forest which would lead him into the Wilderness Road. Sternly setting his thoughts on the errand that was taking him to the salt-works, he began to think of the place in which they were situated, and to wonder why so bare, so brown, and so desolate a spot should have been called Green Lick. There was no greenness about it, and not the slightest sign that there ever had been any verdure, although it still lay in the very heart of an almost tropical forest. It must surely have been as it was now since time immemorial. Myriads of wild beasts coming and going through numberless centuries to drink the salt water, had trodden the earth around it as hard as iron, and had worn it down far below the surface of the surrounding country. The boy had seen it often, but always by daylight, and never alone, so that he noted many things now which he had not observed before. The huge bison must have gone over that well-beaten track one by one, to judge by its narrowness. He could see it dimly, running into the clearing like a black line beginning far off between the bordering trees; but as he looked, the darkness deepened, the mists thickened, and a look of unreality came over familiar objects. And then through the wavering gloom there suddenly towered a great dark mass topped by something which rose against the wild dimness like a colossal blacksmith's anvil. It might have been Vulcan's own forge, so strange and fabulous a thing it seemed! The boy's heart leaped with his pony's leap. His imagination spread its swift wings ere he could think; but in another instant he reminded himself. This was not an awful apparition, but a real thing, wondrous and unaccountable enough in its reality. It was Anvil Rock--a great, solitary rock rising abruptly from the rockless loam of a level country, and lifting its single peak, rudely shaped like a blacksmith's anvil, straight up toward the clouds. THE OLD-FASHIONED FIDDLERS [From the same] Those old-time country fiddlers--all of them, black or white--how wonderful they were! They have always been the wonder and the despair of all musicians who have played by rule and note. The very way that the country fiddler held his fiddle against his chest and never against his shoulder like the trained musician! The very way that the country fiddler grasped his bow, firmly and squarely in the middle, and never lightly at the end like a trained musician! The very way that he let go and went off and kept on--the amazing, inimitable spirit, the gayety, the rhythm, the swing! No trained musician ever heard the music of the country fiddler without wondering at its power, and longing in vain to know the secret of its charm. It would be worth a good deal to know where and how they learned the tunes that they played. Possibly these were handed down by ear from one to another; some perhaps may have never been pent up in notes, and others may have been given to the note reader under other names than those by which the country fiddlers knew them. This is said to have been the case with "Old Zip Coon," and the names of many of them would seem to prove that they belonged to the time and the country. But there is a delightful uncertainty about the origin and the history of almost all of them--about "Leather Breeches" and "Sugar in the Gourd" and "Wagoner" and "Cotton-eyed Joe," and so on through a long list. FOOTNOTE: [4] Copyright, 1903, by the Macmillan Company. WILLIAM B. SMITH William Benjamin Smith, perhaps the greatest scholar ever born on Kentucky soil, first saw the light at Stanford, Kentucky, October 26, 1850. Kentucky (Transylvania) University conferred the degree of Master of Arts upon him in 1871; and the University of Göttengen granted him his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1879. Dr. Smith was professor of mathematics in Central College, Missouri, from 1881 to 1885, when he accepted the chair of physics in the University of Missouri. In 1888 he was transferred to the department of mathematics in the same institution, which he held until 1893, when he resigned to accept a similar position at Tulane University. In 1906 Dr. Smith was elected head of the department of philosophy at Tulane, which position he holds at the present time. He was a delegate of the United States government to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress, held at Santiago, Chile, in 1908. Dr. Smith is the author of the following books, the very titles of which will show his amazing versatility: _Co-ordinate Geometry_ (Boston, 1885); _Clew to Trigonometry_ (1889); _Introductory Modern Geometry_ (New York, 1893); _Infinitesimal Analysis_ (New York, 1898); _The Color Line_ (New York, 1905), a stirring discussion of the Negro problem from a rather new perspective; two theological works, written originally in German, _Der Vorchristliche Jesus_ (Jena, Germany, 1906); and _Ecce Deus_ (Jena, Germany, 1911), the English translation of which was issued at London and Chicago in 1912. These two works upon proto-Christianity have placed Dr. Smith among the foremost scholars of his day and generation in America. Besides his books he wrote two pamphlets of more than fifty pages each upon _Tariff for Protection_ (Columbia, Missouri, 1888); and _Tariff Reform_ (Columbia, Missouri, 1892). These show the author at his best. And his biography of James Sidney Rollins, founder of the University of Missouri, was published about this time. During the month of October, 1896, Dr. Smith published six articles in the Chicago _Record_, on the sliver question and in defense of the gold standard, which were certainly the most thorough brought out by the presidential campaign of that year. Among his many public addresses, essays, and articles, _The Pauline Codices F and G_ may be mentioned, as well as his articles on _Infinitesimal Calculus_ and _New Testament Criticism_ in the _Encyclopaedia Americana_ (New York, 1906); and he compiled the mathematical definitions for the _New International Dictionary_ (New York, 1908). Dr. Smith's fine poem, _The Merman and the Seraph_, was crowned in the _Poet Lore_ competition of 1906. As a mathematician, philosopher, sociologist, New Testament critic, publicist, poet, and alleged prototype of _David_, hero of Mr. James Lane Allen's _The Reign of Law_--which he most certainly was not!--Dr. Smith stands supreme among the sons of Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Current Literature_ (June, 1905); _The Nation_ (November 23, 1911). A SOUTHERN VIEW OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM[5] [From _The Color Line_ (New York, 1905)] It is idle to talk of education and civilization and the like as corrective or compensative agencies. All are weak and beggarly as over against the almightiness of heredity, the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ-plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it be soiled in its millenial purity and integrity, and nothing shall ever restore it; neither wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion--not even Christianity itself. Here and there these may redeem some happy spontaneous variation, some lucky freak of nature; but nothing more--they can never redeem the race. If this be not true, then history and biology are alike false; then Darwin and Spencer, Haeckel and Weismann, Mendel and Pearson, have lived and laboured in vain. Equally futile is the reply, so often made by our opponents, that miscegenation has already progressed far in the Southland, as witness millions of Mulattoes. Certainly; but do not such objectors know in their hearts that their reply is no answer, but is utterly irrelevant? We admit and deplore the fact that unchastity has poured a broad stream of white blood into black veins; but we deny, and perhaps no one will affirm, that it has poured even the slenderest appreciable rill of Negro blood into the veins of the Whites. We have no excuse whatever to make for these masculine incontinences; we abhor them as disgraceful and almost bestial. But, however degrading and even unnatural, they in nowise, not even in the slightest conceivable degree, defile the Southern Caucasian blood. That blood to-day is absolutely pure; and it is the inflexible resolution of the South to preserve that purity, no matter how dear the cost. We repeat, then, it is not a question of individual morality, nor even of self-respect. He who commerces with a negress debases himself and dishonours his body, the temple of the Spirit; but he does not impair, in anywise, the dignity or integrity of his race; he may sin against himself and others, and even against his God, but not against the germ-plasma of his kind. Does some one reply that some Negroes are better than some Whites, physically, mentally, morally? We do not deny it; but this fact, again, is without pertinence. It may very well be that some dogs are superior to some men. It is absurd to suppose that only the elect of the Blacks would unite with only the non-elect of the Whites. Once started, the _pamnixia_ would spread through all classes of society and contaminate possibly or actually all. Even a little leaven may leaven the whole lump. Far more than this, however, even if only very superior Negroes formed unions with non-superior Whites, the case would not be altered; for it is a grievous error to suppose that the child is born of its proximate parents only; it is born of all its ancestry; it is the child of its race. The eternal past lays hand upon it and upon all its descendants. However weak the White, behind him stands Europe; however strong the Black, behind lies Africa. Preposterous, indeed, is this doctrine that _personal excellence is the true standard_, and that only such Negroes as attain a certain grade of merit should or would be admitted to social equality. A favourite evasion! _The Independent_, _The Nation_, _The Outlook_, the whole North--all point admiringly to Mr. Washington, and exclaim: "But only see what a noble man he is--so much better than his would-be superiors!" So, too, a distinguished clergyman, when asked whether he would let his daughter marry a Negro, replied: "We wish our daughters to marry Christian gentlemen." Let, then, the major premise be, "All Christian gentlemen are to be admitted to social equality;" and add, if you will, any desired degree of refinement or education or intellectual prowess as a condition. Does not every one see that any such test would be wholly impracticable and nugatory? If Mr. Washington be the social equal of Roosevelt and Eliot and Hadley, how many others will be the social equals of the next circle, and the next, and the next, in the long descent from the White House and Harvard to the miner and the ragpicker? And shall we trust the hot, unreasoning blood of youth to lay virtues and qualities so evenly in the balance and decide just when some "olive-coloured suitor" is enough a "Christian gentleman" to claim the hand of some simple-hearted milk-maid or some school-ma'am "past her bloom?" The notion is too ridiculous for refutation. If the best Negro in the land is the social equal of the best Caucasian, then it will be hard to prove that the lowest White is higher than the lowest Black; the principle of division is lost, and complete social equality is established. We seem to have read somewhere that, when the two ends of one straight segment coincide with the two ends of another, the segments coincide throughout their whole extent. THE MERMAN AND THE SERAPH[6] [From _Poet-Lore_ (Boston, 1906)] I Deep the sunless seas amid, Far from Man, from Angel hid, Where the soundless tides are rolled Over Ocean's treasure-hold, With dragon eye and heart of stone, The ancient Merman mused alone. II And aye his arrowed Thought he wings Straight at the inmost core of things-- As mirrored in his magic glass The lightning-footed Ages pass-- And knows nor joy nor Earth's distress, But broods on Everlastingness. "Thoughts that love not, thoughts that hate not, Thoughts that Age and Change await not, All unfeeling, All revealing, Scorning height's and depth's concealing, These be mine--and these alone!"-- Saith the Merman's heart of stone. III Flashed a radiance far and nigh As from the vortex of the sky-- Lo! a maiden beauty-bright And mantled with mysterious might Of every power, below, above, That weaves resistless spell of Love. IV Through the weltering waters cold Shot the sheen of silken gold; Quick the frozen heart below Kindled in the amber glow; Trembling heavenward Nekkan yearned, Rose to where the Glory burned. "Deeper, bluer than the skies are, Dreaming meres of morn thine eyes are; All that brightens Smile or heightens Charm is thine, all life enlightens, Thou art all the soul's desire"-- Sang the Merman's heart of fire. "Woe thee, Nekkan! Ne'er was given Thee to walk the ways of Heaven; Vain the vision, Fate's derision, Thee that raps to realms elysian, Fathomless profounds are thine"-- Quired the answering voice divine. V Came an echo from the West, Pierced the deep celestial breast; Summoned, far the Seraph fled, Trailing splendours overhead; Broad beneath her flying feet, Laughed the silvered ocean-street. VI On the Merman's mortal sight Instant fell the pall of Night; Sunk to the sea's profoundest floor He dreams the vanished vision o'er, Hears anew the starry chime, Ponders aye Eternal Time. "Thoughts that hope not, thoughts that fear not, Thoughts that Man and Demon veer not, Times unending Comprehending, Space and worlds of worlds transcending, These are mine--but these alone!"-- Sighs the Merman's heart of stone. FOOTNOTES: [5] Copyright, 1905, by McClure, Phillips and Company. [6] Copyright, 1906, by Richard G. Badger. ANDERSON C. QUISENBERRY Anderson Chenault Quisenberry, historical writer, was born near Winchester, Kentucky, October 26, 1850. He was educated at Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky. In 1870 Mr. Quisenberry engaged in Kentucky journalism, being editor of several papers at different periods, until 1889, when he went to Washington to accept a position in the War Department; but he has continued his contributions to the Kentucky press to the present time. His first volume was _The Life and Times of Hon. Humphrey Marshall_ (Winchester, Kentucky, 1892). This was followed by his other works: _Revolutionary Soldiers in Kentucky_ (1896); _Genealogical Memoranda of the Quisenberry Family and Other Families_ (Washington, D. C., 1897); _Memorials of the Quisenberry Family in Germany, England, and America_ (Washington, D. C., 1900); _Lopez's Expeditions to Cuba, 1850-51_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1906), one of the most attractive of the Filson Club publications; and _History by Illustration: General Zachary Taylor and the Mexican War_ (Frankfort, Kentucky, 1911), the most recent volume in the Kentucky Historical Series of the State Historical Society. Mr. Quisenberry resides at Hyattsville, Maryland, going into Washington every day for his official duties. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Quisenberry to the present writer; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE DEATH OF CRITTENDEN[7] [From _Lopez's Expeditions to Cuba, 1850-1851_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1906)] The victims, bound securely, were brought out of the boat twelve at a time; of these, six were blindfolded and made to kneel down with their backs to the soldiers, who stood some three or four paces from them. These six executed, the other six were put through the same ghastly ceremony; then twelve others were brought from the boat; and so on, until the terrible and sickening tragedy was over. As each lot were murdered their bodies were cast aside to make room for the next lot. An eyewitness says of these martyrs to liberty: "They behaved with firmness, evincing no hesitation or trepidation whatever." Among those shot was a lad of fifteen who begged earnestly on his knees that some one be sent to him who could speak English, but not the slightest attention was paid to him. One handsome young man desired that his watch be sent to his sweetheart. After the first discharge those who were not instantly killed were beaten upon the head until life was extinct. One poor fellow received three balls in his neck, and, raising himself in the agonies of death, was struck by a soldier with the butt of a musket and his brains dashed out. Colonel Crittenden, as the leader of the party, was shot first, and alone. One of the rabble pushed through the line of soldiers, and rushed up to Crittenden and pulled his beard. The gallant Kentuckian, with the utmost coolness, spit in the coward's face. He refused to kneel or to be blindfolded, saying in a clear, ringing voice: "A Kentuckian kneels to none except his God, and always dies facing his enemy!"--an expression that became famous. Looking into the muzzles of the muskets that were to slay him, standing heroically erect in the very face of death, with his own hands, which had been unbound at his request, he gave the signal for the fatal volley; and died, as he had lived, "Strong in Heart." Captain Ker also refused to kneel. They stood up, faced their enemies, were shot down, and their brains were beaten out with clubbed muskets. FOOTNOTE: [7] Copyright, 1906, by the Filson Club. ROBERT BURNS WILSON Robert Burns Wilson, poet of distinction, the son of a Pennsylvania father and a Virginia mother, was born in his grandfather's house near Washington, Pennsylvania, October 30, 1850. When a very small child he was taken to his mother's home in Virginia; and there the mother died when her son was but ten years old, which event saddened his subsequent life. Mr. Wilson was educated in the schools of Wheeling, West Virginia, after which he went to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to study art. When but nineteen he was painting portraits for a living. In 1871 he and John W. Alexander, now the famous New York artist, chartered a canoe and started down the Ohio river from Pittsburgh, hoping in due course to dock at Louisville, Kentucky. They had hardly reached the Kentucky shore, however, when they disagreed about something or other, and young Alexander left him in the night and returned to Pittsburgh. The next day Mr. Wilson ran his boat into a bank in Union county, Kentucky; he lived in that county a year, when he went up to Louisville. He gained more than a local reputation with a crayon portrait of Henry Watterson, and he was actually making considerable headway as an artist when he was discovered by the late Edward Hensley, of Frankfort, Kentucky, who persuaded him to remove to that town. Mr. Wilson settled at Frankfort in 1875, and he lived there for the following twenty-five years. His literary and artistic labors are inseparably interwoven with the history and traditions of that interesting old town, for he was its "great man" for many years, and its toast. As painter and poet he was heralded by the folk of Frankfort until the outside world was attracted and nibbled at his work. The first public recognition accorded his landscapes was at the Louisville and New Orleans Expositions of 1883 and 1884. Mr. Wilson's first poem, _A Wild Violet in November_, was followed by the finest flower of his genius, _When Evening Cometh On_, which was originally printed in _Harper's Magazine_ for October, 1885. This is the only Southern poem or, perhaps, American, that can be mentioned in the same breath with Gray's _Elegy_. Many of his poems and prose papers were published in _Harper's_, _The Century_, and other periodicals. His first book, _Life and Love_ (New York, 1887), contained the best work he has ever done. The dedicatory lines to the memory of his mother were lovely; and there are many more poems to be found in the volume that are very fine. _Chant of a Woodland Spirit_ (New York, 1894), a long poem of more than fifty pages, portions of which had originally appeared in _Harper's_ and _The Century_, was dedicated to John Fox, Jr., with whom Mr. Wilson was friendly, and who spent a great deal of his time at the poet's home in Frankfort. His second and most recent collection of lyrics, _The Shadows of the Trees_ (New York, 1898), was widely read and warmly received by all true lovers of genuine poesy. Mr. Wilson's striking poem, _Remember the Maine_, provoked by the tragedy in Havana harbor, was printed in _The New York Herald_; and another of his several poems inspired by that fiasco of a fight that is remembered, _Such is the Death the Soldier Dies_, appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_. The Kentucky poet's battle-hymns to the boys in blue were excelled by no other American singer, unless it was by the late William Vaughn Moody. Mr. Wilson's fourth and latest work, a novel, _Until the Day Break_ (New York, 1900), is unreadable as a story, but the passages of nature prose are many and exquisite. While he has always been a writing-man of very clear and definite gifts, Mr. Wilson has painted many portraits and landscapes, working with equal facility in oils, water-color, and crayon. He is held in esteem by many competent critics as an artist of ability, but nearly all of his work in any of three mediums indicated, is exceedingly moody and pessimistic; and his water-colors, especially, are "muddy." It is greatly to be regretted that he did not remain the poet he was born to be, instead of drawing his dreams--many use a stronger word--in paints. As has been said, Mr. Wilson was the presiding genius of the town of Frankfort during his life there; and he was a bachelor! Thereby hangs a tale with a meaning and a moral. For many years the widows and the other women past their bloom, burned incense at the shrine of the mighty man who could wrap himself in his great-coat, dash through a field and over a fence, punching plants with his never-absent stick, and return to town with a poem pounding in his pulses, and another landscape in his brain. Ah, he was a great fellow! But the tragedy of it all: after all these years of adoration from ladies overanxious to get him into their nets, they awoke one morning in 1901 to find that little Anne Hendrick, schoolgirl, and daughter of a former attorney-general of Kentucky, had married their heart's desire, that their dreams were day-dreams after all. The marriage took place in New York, after which they returned to Frankfort. The following year their child, Elizabeth, was born; and a short time afterwards he removed to New York, where he has lived ever since. Rumors of his art exhibitions have reached Kentucky; but the only tangible things have been prose papers and lyrics in the magazines. A short time before his death, Paul Hamilton Hayne, the famous Southern poet, sent Wilson this greeting: "The old man whose head has grown gray in the service of the Muses, who is about to leave the lists of poetry forever, around whose path the sunset is giving place to twilight, with no hope before him but 'an anchorage among the stars,' extends his hand to a younger brother of his art with an earnest _Te moriturus saluto_." These charming words were elicited by _June Days_, and _When Evening Cometh On_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Recent Movement in Southern Literature_, by C. W. Coleman, Jr. (_Harper's Magazine_, May, 1887); _Who's Who in America_ (1901-1902); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, v. xv, 1910), an excellent study by Mrs. Ida W. Harrison. LOVINGLY TO ELIZABETH, MY MOTHER[8] [From _Life and Love. Poems_ (New York, 1887)] The green Virginian hills were blithe in May, And we were plucking violets--thou and I. A transient gladness flooded earth and sky; Thy fading strength seemed to return that day, And I was mad with hope that God would stay Death's pale approach--Oh! all hath long passed by! Long years! Long years! and now, I well know why Thine eyes, quick-filled with tears, were turned away. First loved; first lost; my mother:--time must still Leave my soul's debt uncancelled. All that's best In me, and in my art, is thine:--Me-seems, Even now, we walk afield. Through good and ill, My sorrowing heart forgets not, and in dreams I see thee, in the sun-lands of the blest. Frankfort, Kentucky, October 6, 1887. WHEN EVENING COMETH ON [From the same] When evening cometh on, Slower and statelier in the mellowing sky The fane-like, purple-shadowed clouds arise; Cooler and balmier doth the soft wind sigh; Lovelier, lonelier to our wondering eyes The softening landscape seems. The swallows fly Swift through the radiant vault; the field-lark cries His thrilling, sweet farewell; and twilight bands Of misty silence cross the far-off lands When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Deeper and dreamier grows the slumbering dell, Darker and drearier spreads the bristling wold, Bluer and heavier roll the hills that swell In moveless waves against the shimmering gold. Out from their haunts the insect hordes, that dwell Unseen by day, come thronging forth to hold Their fleeting hour of revel, and by the pool Soft pipings rise up from the grasses cool, When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Along their well-known paths with heavier tread The sad-eyed, loitering kine unurged return; The peaceful sheep, by unseen shepherds led, Wend bleating to the hills, so well they learn Where Nature's hand their wholesome couch hath spread; And through the purpling mist the moon doth yearn; Pale gentle radiance, dear recurring dream, Soft with the falling dew falls thy faint beam, When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Loosed from the day's long toil, the clanking teams, With halting steps, pass on their jostling ways, Their gearings glinted by the waning beams; Close by their heels the heedful collie strays; All slowly fading in a land of dreams, Transfigured specters of the shrouding haze. Thus from life's field the heart's fond hope doth fade, Thus doth the weary spirit seek the shade, When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Across the dotted fields of gathered grain The soul of summer breathes a deep repose, Mysterious murmurings mingle on the plain, And from the blurred and blended brake there flows The undulating echoes of some strain Once heard in paradise, perchance--who knows? But now the whispering memory sadly strays Along the dim rows of the rustling maize When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Anon there spreads upon the lingering air The musk of weedy slopes and grasses dank, And odors from far fields, unseen but fair, With scent of flowers from many a shadowy bank. O lost Elysium, art thou hiding there? Flows yet that crystal stream whereof I drank? Ah, wild-eyed Memory, fly from night's despair; Thy strong wings droop with heavier weight of care When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, No sounding phrase can set the heart at rest. The settling gloom that creeps by wood and stream, The bars that lie along the smouldering west, The tall and lonely, silent trees that seem To mock the groaning earth, and turn to jest This wavering flame, this agonizing dream, Ah, all bring sorrow as the clouds bring rain, And evermore life's struggle seemeth vain When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Anear doth Life stand by the great unknown, In darkness reaching out her sentient hands; Philosophies and creeds, alike, are thrown Beneath her feet, and questioning she stands, Close on the brink, unfearing and alone, And lists the dull wave breaking on the sands; Albeit her thoughtful eyes are filled with tears, So lonely and so sad the sound she hears When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Vain seems the world, and vainer wise men's thought. All colors vanish when the sun goeth down. Fame's purple mantle some proud soul hath caught No better seems than doth the earth-stained gown Worn by Content. All names shall be forgot. Death plucks the stars to deck his sable crown. The fair enchantment of the golden day Far through the vale of shadows melts away When evening cometh on. When evening cometh on, Love, only love, can stay the sinking soul, And smooth thought's racking fever from the brow: The wounded heart Love only can console. Whatever brings a balm for sorrow now, So must it be while this vexed earth shall roll; Take then the portion which the gods allow. Dear heart, may I at last on thy warm breast Sink to forgetfulness and silent rest When evening cometh on? FOOTNOTE: [8] Copyright, 1887, by O. M. Dunham. DANIEL HENRY HOLMES Daniel Henry Holmes is, with the possible exceptions of Theodore O'Hara and Madison Cawein, the foremost lyric poet Kentucky can rightfully claim, although he happened to be born at New York City, July 16, 1851; and that single fact is the only flaw in Kentucky's fee simple title to his fame. His father, Daniel Henry Holmes, Senior, was a native of Indiana; his mother was an Englishwoman. Daniel Henry Holmes, Senior, settled at New Orleans when a young man as a merchant; but a year after the birth of Daniel Henry Junior--as the future poet always signed himself while his father lived--or in 1852, he purchased an old colonial house back of Covington, Kentucky, as a summer place for his family, and called it Holmesdale. So Daniel Henry Junior Holmes became a warm-weather Kentuckian when but one year old; and he spent the following nine summers at Holmesdale, returning each fall to New Orleans for the winter. When the Civil War began his father, whose sympathies were entirely Southern, removed his family to Europe, where eight years were spent in Tours and Paris. In 1869, at the age of eighteen years, Daniel Henry Junior, with his family, returned to the United States, and entered his father's business at New Orleans. His dislike for commercialism in any form became so great that his father wisely permitted him to return to Holmesdale, which was then in charge of an uncle, and to study law at Cincinnati. In the same year that he returned to Holmesdale (1869), the house was rebuilt; and it remains intact to-day. His family shortly afterwards joined him, and Holmesdale became the manor-place of his people for many years. Holmes was graduated in law in 1872, and he practiced in a desultory manner for some years. In 1883 he married Miss Rachel Gaff, of Cincinnati, daughter of one of the old and wealthy families of that city. He and his bride spent the year of their marriage at Holmesdale, and, in 1884, went abroad. Holmes's first and finest book of poems, written at Covington, was entitled _Under a Fool's Cap: Songs_ (London, 1884), and contained one hundred and forty-four pages in an edition that did not exceed five hundred copies. The poet whimsically placed his boyhood name of "Daniel Henry Junior" upon the title-page. This little volume is one of the most unique things ever done by an American hand. Holmes took twenty-four old familiar nursery jingles, which are printed in black-face type at the top of the lyrics relating to them, and he worked them over and turned them over and did everything but parody them; and in only one of them--_Margery Daw_--did he discard the original metres. He employed "three methods of dealing with his nursery rhymes; he either made them the basis of a story, or he took them as an allegory and gave the 'modern instance,' or he simply continued and amplified. The last method is, perhaps, the most effective and successful of all," the poems done in this manner being far and away the finest in the book. Holmes spent the seven years subsequent to the appearance of _Under a Fool's Cap_, in France, Italy, and Germany. In 1890 his father gave him Holmesdale. He returned to Kentucky, and the remaining years of his life were spent at Covington, save several winters abroad. Holmes's second book of lyrics, _A Pedlar's Pack_ (New York, 1906), which was largely written at Holmesdale, contained many exceedingly clever and charming poems, but, with the exception of some fine sonnets, _A Pedlar's Pack_ is verse, while _Under a Fool's Cap_ is genuine poetry. Holmes was an accomplished musician, and his _Hempen Homespun Songs_ (Cincinnati, 1906), mostly written in Dresden, contained fourteen songs set to music, of which four had words by the poet. Of the other ten songs, three were by W. M. Thackeray, two by Alfred de Musset, and Austin Dobson, Henri Chenevers, W. E. Henley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Tennyson were represented by having one of their songs set to music. This was his only publication in the field of music, and his third and final book. Holmes's last years were spent at the old house in Covington, devoted to arranging his large library, collected from the bookshops of the world, and to his music. His life was one of endless ease, the universal pursuit of wealth being neither necessary nor engaging. He had lived parts of more than forty years of his life at Holmesdale when he left it for the last time in the fall of 1908 to spend the winter at Hot Springs, Virginia, where he died suddenly on December 14, 1908. He had hardly found his grave at Cincinnati before lovers of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic arose and demanded word of his life and works. This demand has been in part supplied by Mr. Thomas B. Mosher, the Maine publisher, who has exquisitely reprinted _Under a Fool's Cap_, and written this beautiful tribute to the poet's memory: "One vital point of interest should be restated: the man who took these old tags of nursery rhymes and fashioned out of them some of the tenderest lyrics ever written was an American by birth and in the doing of this unique thing did it perfectly. That he never repeated these first fine careless raptures is nothing to his discredit. That he _did_ accomplish what he set himself to do with an originality and a proper regard to the quality of his work rather than its quantity is the essential fact; and in his ability to touch a vibrating chord in the hearts of all who have come across these lyrics we feel that the mission of Daniel Henry Holmes was fulfilled both in letter and in spirit." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Hesperian Tree_, edited by J. J. Piatt (Cincinnati, 1900); _The Cornhill Magazine_ (August, 1909), review of _Under a Fool's Cap_, by Norman Roe; _The Bibelot_ (May, 1910); _Under a Fool's Cap_ (Portland, Maine, 1910; 1911), lovely reprints of the 1884 edition, with Mr. Roe's review and foreword by Mr. Mosher; letters from Mrs. Holmes, the poet's widow, who has recently reopened Holmesdale. BELL HORSES [From _Under a Fool's Cap_ (London, 1884)] Bell horses, Bell horses, What time of day? One o'clock! Two o'clock! Three! and away. I shall wait by the gate To see you pass, Closely press'd, three abreast, Clanking with brass: With your smart red mail-cart Hard at your heels, Scarlet ground, fleck'd around With the Queen's seals. Up the hills, down the hills, Till the cart shrink To a faint dab of paint On the sky-brink, Never stop till you drop, On to the town, Bearing great news of state To Lords and Crown. And down deep in the keep Of your mail-cart, There's a note that I wrote To my sweetheart. I had no words that glow, No penman's skill, And high-born maids would scorn Spelling so ill; But what if it be stiff Of hand and thought, And ink-blots mark the spots Where kisses caught, He will read without heed Of phrases' worth, That I love him above All things on earth. I must wait here, till late Past Evensong, Ere you come tearing home-- Days are so long!-- But I'll watch, till I catch Your bell's chime clear ... If you'll bring _me_ something-- Won't you please, dear? MY LADY'S GARDEN [From the same] How does my Lady's garden grow? How does my Lady's garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle-shells, And pretty girls all in a row. All fresh and fair, as the spring is fair, And wholly unconscious they are so fair, With eyes as deep as the wells of sleep, And mouths as fragrant as sweet June air. They all have crowns and all have wings, Pale silver crowns and faint green wings, And each has a wand within her hand, And raiment about her that cleaves and clings. But what have my Lady's girls to do? What maiden toil or spinning to do? They swing and sway the live-long day While beams and dreams shift to and fro. And are so still that one forgets, So calm and restful, one forgets To think it strange they never change, Mistaking them for Margarets. But when night comes and Earth is dumb, When her face is veil'd, and her voice is dumb, The pretty girls rouse from their summer drowse, For the time of their magic toil has come. They deck themselves in their bells and shells, Their silver bells and their cockle-shells, Like pilgrim elves, they deck themselves And chaunting Runic hymns and spells, They spread their faint green wings abroad, Their wings and clinging robes abroad, And upward through the pathless blue They soar, like incense smoke, to God. Who gives them crystal dreams to hold, And snow-white hopes and thoughts to hold, And laughter spun of beams of the sun, And tears that shine like molten-gold. And when their hands can hold no more, Their chaliced hands can hold no more, And when their bells, and cockle-shells, With holy gifts are brimming o'er, With swift glad wings they cleave the deep, As shafts of starlight cleave the deep, Through Space and Night they take their flight To where my Lady lies asleep; And there, they coil above her bed,-- A fairy crown above her bed-- While from their hands, like sifted sands, Falls their harvest winnowèd. And this is why my Lady grows, My own sweet Lady daily grows, In sorcery such, that at her touch, Sweet laughter blossoms and songs unclose. And this is what the pretty girls do, This is the toil appointed to do, With silver bells, and cockle-shells, Like Margarets all in a row. LITTLE BLUE BETTY [From the same] Little Blue Betty lived in a lane, She sold good ale to gentlemen. Gentlemen came every day, And little Blue Betty hopp'd away. A rare old tavern, this "Hand and Glove," That Little Blue Betty was mistress of; But rarer still than its far-famed taps Were Betty's trim ankles and dainty caps. So gentlemen came every day-- As much for the caps as the ale, they say-- And call'd for their pots, and her mug to boot: If it bettered their thirst they were welcome to't; For Betty, with none of those foolish qualms Which come of inordinate singing of psalms, Thought kissing a practice both hearty and hale, To freshen the lips and smarten the ale. So gallants came, by the dozen and score, To sit on the bench by the trellised door, From the full high noon till the shades grew long, With their pots of ale, and snatches of song. While little Blue Betty, in shortest of skirts, And whitest of caps, and bluest of shirts, Went hopping away, rattling pots and pence, Getting kiss'd now and then as pleased Providence. How well I remember! I used to sit down By the door, with Byronic, elaborate frown Staring hard at her, as she whisk'd about me,-- Being jealous as only calf-lovers can be, Till Betty would bring me my favourite mug, Her lips all a-pucker, her shoulders a-shrug, And wheedle and coax my young vanity back, So I fancied myself the preferred of the pack. Ah! the dear old times! I turn'd out of my way, As I travell'd westward the other day, For a ramble among those boy-haunts of mine, And a friendly nod to the crazy old sign. The inn was gone--to make room, alas! For a railroad buffet, all gilding and glass, Where sat a proper young person in pink, Selling ale--which I hadn't the heart to drink. THE OLD WOMAN UNDER THE HILL [From the same] There was an old woman lived under the hill, And if she's not gone, she lives there still; Baked apples she sold and cranberry pies, And she's the old woman who never told lies. A queer little body, all shrivelled and brown, In her earth-colour'd mantle and rain-colour'd gown, Incessantly fumbling strange grasses and weeds, Like a rickety cricket, a-saying its beads. In winter or summer, come shine or come rain, When the bustles and beams into twilight wane, To the top of her hill, one can see her climb, To sit out her watch through the long night-time. The neighbourhood gossips have strange tales to tell-- As they sit at their knitting and tongues waggle well Of the queer little crone who lived under the hill When the grannies among them were hoppy-thumbs still. She was once, they say, a young lassie, as fair As white-wing'd hawthorn in April air, When under the hill--one fine evening--she met A stranger, the strangest maid ever saw yet: From his crown to his heels he was clad all in red, And his hair like a flame on his shoulders was shed; Not a word spake he, but clutching her hand, Led her off through the darkness to Shadowland. What befell her there no mortal can tell, But it must have been things indescribable, For when she returned, at last, alone, Her beauty was dead, and her youth was gone. They gather'd about her: she shook her head --She had been through Hell--that was all she said In answer to whens, and hows, and whys; So they took her word, for she never told lies. And now, they say, when the sun goes down This queer little woman, all shrivell'd and brown Turns into a beautiful lass, once more, With gold-stranded hair and soft eyes of yore, And out of the hills in the stills and the gloams Her beautiful fabulous lover comes, In scarlet doublet and red silken hose, To woo her again--till the Chanticleer crows. And she, poor old crone, sits up on her hill Through the long dreary night, till the dawn turns chill, And suffers in silence and patience alway, In the hope that God will forgive, some day. MARGERY DAW [From the same] See-Saw! Margery Daw! Sold her bed to lie upon straw; Was she not a dirty slut To sell her bed, and live in dirt? And yet perchance, were the circumstance But known, of Margery's grim romance, As sacred a veil might cover her then As the pardon which fell on the Magdalen. It's a story told so often, so old, So drearily common, so wearily cold: A man's adventure,--a poor girl's fall-- And a sinless scapegoat born--that's all. She was simple and young, and the song was sung With so sweet a voice, in so strange a tongue, That she follow'd blindly the Devil-song Till the ground gave way, and she lay headlong. And then: not a word, not a plea for her heard, Not a hand held out to the one who had err'd, Her Christian sisters foremost to condemn-- God pity the woman who falls before them! They closed the door for evermore On the contrite heart which repented sore, And she stood alone, in the outer night, To feed her baby as best she might. So she sold her bed, for its daily bread, The gown off her back, the shawl off her head, Till her all lay piled on the pawner's shelf, Then she clinch'd her teeth and sold herself. And so it came that Margery's name Fell into a burden of Sorrow and Shame, And Margery's face grew familiar in The market-place where they trade in sin. What use to dwell on this premature Hell? Suffice it to say that the child did well, Till one night that Margery prowled the town, Sickness was stalking, and struck her down. Her beauty pass'd, and she stood aghast In the presence of want, and stripped, at the last, Of all she had to be pawned or sold, To keep her darling from hunger and cold. So the baby pined, till Margery, blind With hunger of fever, in body and mind, At dusk, when Death seem'd close at hand, Snatch'd a loaf of bread from a baker's stand. Some Samaritan saw Margery Daw, And lock'd her in gaol to lie upon straw: Not a sparrow falls, they say--Oh well! God was not looking when Margery fell. With irons girt, in her felon's shirt, Poor Margery lies in sorrow and dirt, A gaunt, sullen woman untimely gray, With the look of a wild beast, brought to bay. See-saw! Margery Daw! What a wise and bountiful thing, the Law! It makes all smooth--for she's out of her head, And her brat is provided for. It's dead. WILLIAM H. WOODS William Hervey Woods, poet, was born near Greensburg, Kentucky, November 17, 1852, the son of a clergyman. He was educated at Hampden-Sidney College, in Virginia, after which he studied for the church at Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia. Mr. Woods was ordained to the ministry of the Southern Presbyterian church in 1878; and since 1887 he has been pastor of the Franklin Square church at Baltimore. For the past several years he has contributed poems to _Scribner's_, _Harper's_, _The Century_, _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The Youth's Companion_, _The Independent_, and several other periodicals. This verse was collected and published in a pleasing little volume of some hundred and fifty pages under the title of _The Anteroom and Other Poems_ (Baltimore, 1911). As is true of the purely literary labors of most clergymen, a few of the poems are somewhat marred by the homiletical tone--they simply must point a moral, even though that moral does not adorn the tale. Several of the poems reveal the author's love for his birthplace, Kentucky; and, taken as a whole, the book is one of which any of our singers might be proud. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (January 16, 1912); _Scribner's Magazine_ (July; August, 1912). SYCAMORES[9] [From _The Anteroom and Other Poems_ (Baltimore, 1911)] They love no crowded forest dark, They climb no mountains high, But ranged along the pleasant vale Where shining waters lie, Their brown coats curling open show A silvery undergleam, Like the white limbs of laughing boys Half ready for the stream. What if they yield no harvests sweet, Nor massive timbers sound, And all their summer leafage casts But scanty shade around; Their slender boughs with zephyrs dance, Their young leaves laugh in tune, And there's no lad in all the land Knows better when 'tis June. They come from groves of Arcady, Or some lost Land of Mirth, That Work-a-day and Gain and Greed May not possess the earth, And though they neither toil nor spin, Nor fruitful duties pay, They also serve, mayhap, who help The world keep holiday. FOOTNOTE: [9] Copyright, 1911, by the Author. ANDREW W. KELLEY Andrew W. Kelley ("Parmenas Mix"), poet preëminent of life on a country newspaper, was born in the state of New York about 1852. When twenty years of age he left Schenectady, New York, for Tennessee, but in 1873 he settled at Franklin, Kentucky, where he spent the remainder of his life. He was associate editor of Opie Read's paper, _The Patriot_, for some time, but when that sheet died, he drifted from pillar to post until a kindly death discovered him. The gossips of the quiet little town of Franklin will to-day tell the enquirer for facts regarding Kelley's life that he was engaged to a New York girl, all things were ready for the celebration of the ceremony, when the bride-to-be suddenly changed her mind, and poor _Parmenas Mix_ was thus started in the drunkard's path. He planned to go East for several years prior to his death, to seek his literary fortunes, but he sat in his room and dreamed his life away. Kelley died at Franklin, Kentucky, in 1885. He was buried in the potter's field, a pauper and an outcast, which condition was wholly caused by excessive drinking. The very place of his grave can only be guessed at to-day. Kelley wrote many poems, nearly all of which celebrated some phase of life on a country newspaper, but his masterpiece is _The Old Scissors' Soliloquy_, which was originally published in _Scribner's Monthly_--now _The Century Magazine_--for April, 1876. It appeared in the "Bric-a-Brac Department," illustrated with a single tail-piece sketch of editorial scissors "lying at rest" upon newspaper clippings, with "a whopping big rat in the paste." Many of his other poems were also published in _Scribner's_. _The New Doctor_, _Accepted and Will Appeal_, and _He Came to Pay_, done in the manner of Bret Harte's _The Aged Stranger_, are exceedingly clever. A slender collection of his poems could be easily made, and should be. Opie Read wrote a tender tribute to the memory of his former friend, in which his merits were thus summed up: "The country has surely produced greater poets than 'Parmenas Mix,' but I doubt if we shall ever know a truer lover of Nature's divine impulses. He lightened the heart and made it tender, surely a noble mission; he talked to the lowly, he flashed the diamond of his genius into many a dark recess. He preached the gospel of good will; he sang a beautiful song." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Blue Grass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _Poetry of American Wit and Humor_, by R. L. Paget (Boston, 1899). THE OLD SCISSORS' SOLILOQUY [From _Scribner's Monthly_, April, 1876] I am lying at rest in the sanctum to-night,-- The place is deserted and still,-- To my right lie exchanges and manuscripts white, To my left are the ink and the quill-- Yes, the quill, for my master's old-fashioned and quaint, And refuses to write with a pen; He insists that old Franklin, the editor saint, Used a quill, and he'll imitate Ben. I love the old fellow--together for years We have managed the _Farmer's Gazette_, And although I am old, I'm his favorite shears And can crowd the compositors yet. But my duties are rather too heavy, I think, And I oftentimes envy the quill As it lazily leans with its nib in the ink While I'm slashing away with a will. But when I was new,--I remember it well, Though a score of long years have gone by,-- The heaviest share of the editing fell On the quill, and I think with a sigh Of the days when I'd scissor an extract or two From a neighboring editor's leader, Then laugh in my sleeve at the quill as it flew In behalf of the general reader. I am being paid off for my merriment then, For my master is wrinkled and gray, And seldom lays hold on his primitive pen Except when he wishes to say: "We are needing some money to run this machine, And subscribers will please to remit;" Or, "That last load of wood that Jones brought us was green, And so knotty it couldn't be split." He is nervous and deaf and is getting quite blind (Though he hates to acknowledge the latter), And I'm sorry to say it's a puzzle to find Head or tale to the most of his matter. The compositors plague him whenever they see The result of a luckless endeavor, But the darling old rascal just lays it to me, And I make no remonstrance whatever. Yes, I shoulder the blame--very little I care For the jolly compositor's jest, For I think of a head with the silvery hair That will soon, very soon be at rest. He has labored full long for the true and the good 'Mid the manifold troubles that irk us-- His only emolument raiment and food, And--a pass, now and then, to the circus. Heigho! from the past comes a memory bright Of a lass with the freshness of clover Who used me to clip from her tresses one night A memorial lock for her lover. That dear little lock is still glossy and brown, But the lass is much older and fatter, And the youth--he's an editor here in the town-- I'm employed on the staff of the latter. I am lying at rest in the sanctum to-night-- The place is deserted and still-- The stars are abroad and the moon is in sight Through the trees on the brow of the hill. Clouds hurry along in undignified haste And the wind rushes by with a wail-- Hello! there's a whooping big rat in the paste-- How I'd like to shut down on his tail! LATE NEWS [From _Scribner's Monthly_, December, 1876] In the sanctum I was sitting, Engaged in thought befitting A gentleman of letters--dunning letters, by the way-- When a seedy sort of fellow, Middle-aged and rather mellow, Ambled in and questioned loudly, "Well, sir, what's the news to-day?" Then I smiled on him serenely-- On the stranger dressed so meanly-- And I told him that the Dutch had taken Holland, sure as fate; And that the troops in Flanders, Both privates and commanders, Had been dealing very freely in profanity of late. Then the stranger, quite demurely, Said, "That's interesting, surely; Your facilities for getting news are excellent, that's clear; Though excuse me, sir, for stating That the facts you've been narrating Are much fresher than the average of items gathered here!" YOUNG E. ALLISON Young Ewing Allison, one of the most versatile of the Kentucky writers of the present school, was born at Henderson, Kentucky, December 23, 1853. He left school at an early age to become the "devil" in a Henderson printing office. At seventeen years of age Mr. Allison was a newspaper reporter. At different times he has been connected with _The Journal_, of Evansville, Indiana; city and dramatic editor of _The Courier-Journal_; editor of _The Louisville Commercial_; and from 1902 to 1905 he was editor of _The Louisville Herald_. Mr. Allison founded _The Insurance Field_ at Louisville, in 1887, and has since edited it. He has thus been a newspaper man for more than forty years; and though always very busy, he has found time to write fiction, verse, literary criticism, history, and librettos. In prose fiction Mr. Allison is best known by three stories: _The Passing of Major Kilgore_, which was published as a novelette in _Lippincott's Magazine_ in 1888; _The Longworth Mystery_ (_Century Magazine_, October, 1889); and _Insurance at Piney Woods_ (Louisville, 1896). In half-whimsical literary criticism he has published two small volumes which are known in many parts of the world: _The Delicious Vice_ (Cleveland, 1907, first series; Cleveland, 1909, second series). These papers are "pipe dreams and adventures of an habitual novel-reader among some great books and their people." Mr. Allison's libretto, _The Ogallallas_, a romantic opera, was produced by the Bostonians Opera Company in 1894; and his _Brother Francisco_, a libretto of tragic opera, was presented at the Royal Opera House, Berlin, by order of Emperor William II. The music to both of these operas was composed by Mr. Henry Waller, Liszt's distinguished pupil. In history Mr. Allison has written _The City of Louisville and a Glimpse of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1887); and _Fire Underwriting_ (Louisville, 1907). Of his lyrics, _The Derelict_, a completion of the four famous lines in Robert Louis Stevenson's _Treasure Island_, has been printed by almost every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world, set to music by Mr. Waller, and an illustrated _edition de luxe_ has recently appeared. _The Derelict_ and _The Delicious Vice_ have firmly fixed Mr. Allison's fame. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Confessions of a Tatler_, by Elvira M. Slaughter (Louisville, 1905); letter from Mr. Allison to the writer. ON BOARD THE DERELICT A Reminiscence of _Treasure Island_ [From a leaflet edition] _Fifteen men on the Dead Man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!_ --[_Cap'n Billy Bones his song_] Fifteen men on the Dead Man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! The mate was fixed by the bos'n's pike, The bos'n brained with a marlinspike, And the Cookey's throat was marked belike It had been gripped By fingers ten; And there they lay, All good dead men, Like break-o'-day in a boozin' ken-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Fifteen men of a whole ship's list-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Dead and bedamned, and the rest gone whist! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! The skipper lay with his nob in gore Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore, And the scullion he was stabbed times four. And there they lay And the soggy skies Dreened all day long In up-staring eyes-- At murk sunset and at foul sunrise-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Fifteen men of 'em stiff and stark-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Ten of the crew had the Murder mark-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! 'Twas a cutlass swipe, or an ounce of lead, Or a yawing hole in a battered head-- And the scuppers glut with a rotting red. And there they lay-- Aye, damn my eyes!-- All lookouts clapped On paradise, All souls bound just the contra'wise-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Fifteen men of 'em good and true-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Every man Jack could ha' sailed with Old Pew-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! There was chest on chest full of Spanish gold, With a ton of plate in the middle hold, And the cabins riot of loot untold. And they lay there That had took the plum With sightless glare And their lips struck dumb, While we shared all by the rule of thumb-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! _More was seen through the sternlight screen-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Chartings undoubt where a woman had been-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! A flimsy shift on a bunker cot, With a thin dirk slot through the bosom spot, And the lace stiff-dry in a purplish blot. Or was she wench ... Or some shuddering maid...? That dared the knife And that took the blade?... By God! she was stuff for a plucky jade!-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!_ Fifteen men on the Dead Man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! We wrapp'd 'em all in a mains'l tight, With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight And we heaved 'em over and out of sight-- With a yo-heave-ho! And a fare-you-well! And a sullen plunge In the sullen swell, Ten-fathoms deep on the road to hell-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! HESTER HIGBEE GEPPERT Mrs. Hester Higbee Geppert ("Dolly Higbee"), newspaper woman and novelist, was born near Edina, Missouri, March 12, 1854. She was the daughter of James Parker Higbee, a Kentuckian, and his second wife, Martha Lane (Galleher) Higbee, a woman of Virginian parentage. Both of Miss Higbee's parents died before she was fourteen years old, and she came to Lexington, Kentucky, to live in the family of Dr. Samuel H. Chew, who had married her half-sister. Dr. Chew's farm was situated some seven miles from Lexington, and there Miss Higbee lived for ten years. She was educated in Midway, Kentucky, and then taught for several years. She detested teaching and, "in January, 1878, while it was still quite dark, I stole down stairs with five dollars in my pocket and such luggage as I could carry in a handbag, tiptoed into the drizzle and 'lit out.'" The flip of a nickle determined that her new home should be Louisville, and to that city she went. Miss Higbee was the first woman in Kentucky, if not in the South, to adopt journalism as a profession. The following fourteen years of her life were spent in the daily grind of newspaperdom, she having held almost every position on _The Courier-Journal_, save that of editor-in-chief. In the four hottest weeks of the year, and in the brief intervals of leisure she could snatch from her daily duties, Miss Higbee wrote her now famous novel, _In God's Country_ (New York, 1890). After the Lippincotts had refused this manuscript, _Belford's Monthly Magazine_ accepted it by telegram, paying the author two hundred dollars for it, and publishing it in the issue for November, 1889; and in the following May the story appeared in book form. Colonel Henry Watterson wrote a review of _In God's Country_ that was afterwards published as an introduction for it, and this did much to bring the tale into wide notice. Miss Higbee went to Chicago in 1893 to accept a position on _The Tribune_. On April 4, 1894, she was married to Mr. William Geppert of Atlanta, and the first five years of their married life were spent at Atlanta. It was during this time that Mrs. Geppert's best story was written, _Burton's Scoop_, one of the first American stories written upon hypnotism and related phenomena. The opening chapters of this appeared in the author's little literary magazine, _The Autocrat_, which she conducted at Atlanta for about two years, but it has never been published in book form. Two musical romances, entitled _The Scherzo in B-Flat Minor_ (Atlanta, 1895), and _Un Ze Studio_ (Atlanta, 1895), attracted considerable attention, and a third was announced as _Side Lights_, but was never published. _In God's Country_ was dramatized, with Miss Catherine Gray cast in the role of _Lydia_, and opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, September 5, 1897, but the work of the playwright and actors was most displeasing to the author. In 1900 Mr. Geppert became one of the editors of the New York _Musical Courier_, and he and his wife have since resided at Croton-on-the-Hudson. Mrs. Geppert has abandoned literature, but _In God's Country_ has given her a permanent place among the writers of Kentucky.[10] BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Confessions of a Tatler_, by Elvira M. Slaughter (Louisville, 1905); _Lexington Leader_ (July 25, 1909). THE GARDENER AND THE GIRL[11] [From _In God's Country_ (New York, 1890)] Her hair had come down and was tumbling about her neck; she whipped it out and caught it back with a hairpin, took up the guitar, and skirted the shadowy porch to the room over the kitchen. The window was open and she could see Karl sitting in the middle of the room with his head bowed upon his hands. She tapped lightly on the pane. He looked up and saw her standing in the dim light with the guitar in her hand. "Karl," she said, "I want you to sing me that song before you go--the one you sung me that day for your dinner." He came forward and took the instrument. He saw she had been crying, but the experience of the summer had been so crushing, he was so subdued by her past behavior, that he did not dream the tears were for him. "You are grieved for someding," he said, with touching sympathy. He opened the door and gave her a chair, and, sitting near her on the sill of the window, began to sing the song with all the tenderness and pathos his own yearning and bitter disappointment could put into it. It brought back all the old tumult. She saw now, when it was too late, that she had overestimated her strength. When he finished, she was sobbing; and in an instant he was kneeling by her chair, raising to her a face sad, searching, but shining with the tremulous glow of a hope just born. "You weep. Liebchen, is it for me?" She did not answer, but laid a hand gently on his head and looked at him, with all the pent yearning of her full heart, all the agony of that long, weary struggle, and all the pathos of defeat in her eyes. It was no use. At that moment it seemed that there was nothing else in the world but him. Everything else was remote, dim, and unreal. He clasped her with a fierce, exultant joy. "You love me in spite of dis?" he asked, looking down at his coarse attire. "You love me in spite of dat I am your nigga?" "In spite of all," she faltered. It was out at last: the crest of victory sank in inglorious surrender. Her humiliation was his triumph. He looked at her with a face radiant, shining with a beauty not of earth. "Liebchen," he whispered, "it is divine." "You vill gome mit me to mein gountry?" he asked presently. She laid a finger on his lips. "Don't," she said; "I can't bear it." "I vill not be a vagabond in mein own gountry; we vill be very happy. Gome mit me, Liebchen." He would not be a vagabond in his own country. The information that would have been worth much to her once was worth nothing now. She scarcely heard it. "I can't do that," she said. "You must go, and I must stay here and do as I have promised; but I wanted to tell you that I know I have been very cruel, and that I am very sorry. It was hard for me, too, and I could not trust myself to be kind." It seemed but a moment she had been sitting there with his arms around her and his head upon her breast, but the east was red and the sun was almost up. Lydia rose wearily. The sense of defeat, that was more fatiguing than the struggle, clung to her. "It's time you were gone," she said. He took her hands in his and asked, with searching earnestness, "If you love me, vy vill you not gome mit me?" "I can't," she answered, too tired for explanation. "Is it your fader?" he asked. She nodded, and said good-bye, looking up at him with a tender glow on her face. The hair streaming about her shoulders had caught the flame of sunrise like a torch. He stooped and touched it with his lips as reverently as he would have kissed the garment of a saint. FOOTNOTES: [10] Mrs. Geppert died at Scarsborough-on-the-Hudson, New York, February 23, 1913. Her remains were not brought to Kentucky for interment. [11] Copyright, 1890, by the Belford Company. HENRY C. WOOD Henry Cleveland Wood, novelist and verse-maker, was born at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in January, 1855. His mother was a writer of local reputation. In 1874 Mr. Wood's poems and stories began to appear in English and American magazines; and he has continued his work for them until this day. Seven of his novels have been serialized by the following publications: _Pretty Jack and_ _Ugly Carl_ (_The Courier-Journal_); _Impress of Seal and Clay_ (_New York Ledger_, in collaboration with his uncle, Henry W. Cleveland, author of a biography of Alexander H. Stephens); _The Kentucky Outlaw_, and _Love that Endured_ (_New York Ledger_); _Faint Heart and Fair Lady_ (_The Designer_); _The Night-Riders_ (_Taylor-Trotwood Magazine_); and _Weed and War_ (_The Home and Farm_). Of these only one has been issued in book form, _The Night Riders_ (Chicago, 1908). This was a tale of love and adventure, depicting the protest against the toll-gate system in Kentucky years ago, with a brief inclusion of the more recent tobacco troubles. Mr. Wood's verse has been printed in _Harper's Weekly_, _Cosmopolitan_, _Ainslee's Magazine_, _The Smart Set_, _The Youth's Companion_, and other periodicals. Two of his librettos, _The Sultan's Gift_ and _Amor_, have been set to music; and at least one of his plays has been produced, entitled _The Pretty Shakeress_. Mr. Wood conducts a little bookshop in his native town of Harrodsburg. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Blue Grass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _Illustrated Kentuckian_ (November, 1894). THE WEAVER [From _The Quiver_ (London, England)] The sun climbed up the eastern hills, And through the dewy land Shot gleams that fell athwart the rills That sang on every hand. Upon the wood and in the air There hung a mystic spell, And on the green sward, every where, Soft shadows lightly fell. And in a cottage where the bloom Of roses on the wall Filled all the air, there was a loom Well built of oak and tall. All through the fragrant summer day A maiden, blithe and fair, Sat at the loom and worked away, And hummed a simple air;-- "Oh! idle not, ye leafy trees, Weave nets of yellow sun, And kiss me oft, O! balmy breeze, My task is but begun." Still higher in the hazy sky The sun climbed on and on, And autumn winds came rushing by, The summer's bloom was gone; Now sat a mother at the loom, The shuttle flew along, With whirr that filled the little room Together with her song;-- "O! shuttle! faster, faster fly, For know ye not the sun Is climbing high across the sky, And yet my work's not done?" The sun shot gleams of amber light Along the barren ground, And shadows of the coming night Fell softly all around. And in the little cottage room From early dawn till night, A woman sat before the loom With hair of snowy white. The hands were palsied now that threw The shuttle to and fro, While as the fabric longer grew She sang both sweet and low;-- "Half hidden in the rosy west I see the golden sun, And I shall soon begin my rest, My task is almost done!" * * * * * The spring again brought joy and bloom, And kissed each vale and hill; But in the little cottage room The oaken beam was still. The swaying boughs with rays of gold Wove nets of yellow sun, And cast them where a headstone told-- The weaver's task was done. WILLIAM E. CONNELLEY William Elsey Connelley, historian and antiquarian, was born near Paintsville, Kentucky, March 15, 1855, the son of a soldier. At the age of seventeen he became a teacher in his native county of Johnson; and for the following ten years he continued in that work. John C. C. Mayo, the mountain millionaire, was one of his pupils. In April, 1881, Mr. Connelley went to Kansas; and two years later he was elected clerk of Wyandotte county, of which Kansas City, Kansas, is the county-seat. In 1888 he engaged in the lumber business in Missouri; and four years thereafter he surrendered that business in order to devote himself to his banking interests, which have hitherto required a considerable portion of his time. In 1905 Mr. Connelley wrote the call for the first meeting of the oil men of Kansas, which resulted in the organization of an association that began a crusade upon the Standard Oil Company, and which subsequently resulted in the dissolution of that corporation by the Supreme Court of the United States. This is set down here because Mr. Connelley is, perhaps, prouder of it than of of any other thing he has done. He is well-known by students of Western history, but, of course, his fame as a writer has not reached the general reader. He is a member of many historical societies and associations, including the American, Nebraska, Missouri, Ohio, and Kansas, of which he was president in 1912. Mr. Connelley has made extensive investigations into the language and history of several of the Indian tribes of Kansas, his vocabulary of the Wyandot tongue being the first one ever written. He has many original documents pertaining to the history of eastern Kentucky; and the future historian of that section of the state cannot proceed far without consulting his collection. The novelist of the mountains, John Fox, Jr., has sat at the feet of the historian and learned of his people. Mr. Connelley lives at Topeka, Kansas. A complete list of his works is: _The Provisional Government of Nebraska Territory_ (Topeka, 1899); _James Henry Lane, the Grim Chieftain of Kansas_ (Topeka, 1899); _Wyandot Folk-Lore_ (Topeka, 1899); _Kansas Territorial Governors_ (Topeka, 1900); _John Brown--the Story of the Last of the Puritans_ (Topeka, 1900); _The Life of John J. Ingalls_ (Kansas City, Missouri, 1903); _Fifty Years in Kansas_ (Topeka, 1907); _The Heckewelder Narrative_ (Cleveland, Ohio, 1907), being the narrative of John G. E. Heckewelder (1743-1823), concerning the mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians from 1740 to the close of 1808, and the finest book ever issued by a Western publisher, originally selling for twenty dollars a copy, but now out of print and very scarce; _Doniphan's Expedition_ (Topeka, 1907); _The Ingalls of Kansas: a Character Study_ (Topeka, 1909); _Quantrill and the Border Wars_ (Cedar Rapids, 1910), one of his best books; and _Eastern Kentucky Papers_ (Cedar Rapids, 1910), "the founding of Harman's Station, with an account of the Indian Captivity of Mrs. Jennie Wiley." In 1911 Baker University conferred the honorary degree of A. M. upon him. For the last three years Mr. Connelley has been preparing a biography of Preston B. Plumb, United States Senator from Kansas for a generation, which will be published in 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913); letters from Mr. Connelley to the writer. KANSAS HISTORY [From _History as an Asset of the State_ (Topeka, Kansas, 1912)] Kansas history is like that of no other State. The difference is fundamental--not a dissimilarity in historical annals. This fact has been long recognized. A quarter of a century ago Ware wrote that-- Of all the States, but three will live in story: Old Massachusetts with her Plymouth Rock, And old Virginia with her noble stock, And sunny Kansas with her woes and glory. The south line of Kansas is the modified line between free soil and slave territory as those divisions existed down to the abolition of slavery. For almost half a century it was the policy of the Government to send here the remnants of the Indian tribes pushed west by our occupation of their country. The purpose in this was to make the Western prairies the Indian country of America and thus prevent its settlement until the slave-power was ready to utilize it for its peculiar institution. Many things occurred which had not been counted on, and the country was forced open before the South was ready to undertake its settlement. While the crisis was premature, the slave-power entered upon the contest with confidence. It had never lost a battle in its conflict with the free-soil portion of the Union, and it expected to win in Kansas. The struggle was between the two antagonistic predominant ideas developed in our westward expansion, and ended in a war which involved the entire nation and threatened the existence of the Union. Politically, Kansas was the rock about which the troubled waters surged for ten years. The Republican party grew largely out of the conditions and influence of Kansas. When hostilities began the Kansans enlisted in the armies of the Union in greater proportion to total population than did the people of any other State. Here the war was extremely bitter, and in some instances it became an effort for extermination. Kansas towns were sacked, and non-combatants were ruthlessly butchered. The border embraced at that time all the settled portion of the State, and it would be difficult indeed to make the people of this day comprehend what occurred here. Kansas was founded in and by a bloody struggle, which, within her bounds, continued for ten years. No other State ever fought so well. Kansas was for freedom. She won, and the glory of it is that the victory gave liberty to America. That is why we maintain that Kansas history stands alone in interest and importance in American annals. The history of a State is a faithful account of the events of its formation and development. If the account is set out in sufficient detail there will be preserved the fine delineations of the emotions which moved the people. These emotions arise out of the experiences of the people. And the pioneers fix the lines of their experiences. They lay the pattern and mark out the way the State is to go, and this way can never be altered, and can, moreover, be but slightly modified for all time. These emotions produce ideals which become universal and the common aim of the State, and they wield a wonderful influence on its progress, growth, and achievement. A people devoid of ideals can scarcely be found, but ideals differ just as the experiences which produced the emotions from which they result differed. If there be no particular principle to be striven for in the founding of a State, then no ideals will appear, and such as exist among the people will be found to have come over the lines from other and older States. Or, if by chance any be developed they will be commonplace and ordinary, and will leave the people in lethargy and purposeless so far as the originality of the thought of the State is concerned. The ideals developed by a fierce struggle for great principles are lofty, sublime in their conception and intent. The higher the ideals, the greater the progress; the more eminent the achievement, the more marked the individuality, the stronger the characteristics of the people. CHARLES T. DAZEY Charles Turner Dazey, author of _In Old Kentucky_, was born at Lima, Illinois, August 13, 1855, the son and grandson of Kentuckians. When a lad the future dramatist was brought to Kentucky for a visit at the home of his grandparents in Bourbon county, whom he was to visit again before returning to Kentucky, in 1872, to enter the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky University, where he studied for a year. In the fall of 1873 young Dazey matriculated in the Arts College of the University. Ill-health caused him to miss the following year, but he returned in 1875 and remained a student in the University until the summer of 1877. He was a member of the old Periclean Society, the society of James Lane Allen and John Fox, Jr., while at the University. When he left Lexington he lacked two years of graduation. Mr. Dazey later went to Harvard University, where he was one of the editors of the _Harvard Advocate_, and the poet of his class of 1881. While a Senior at Cambridge he had begun dramatic composition, and after leaving the University he became a full-fledged playwright. His plays include: _An American King_; _That Girl from Texas_--first called _A Little Maverick_--with Maggie Mitchell in the title-role; _The War of Wealth_; _The Suburban_; _Home Folks_; _The Stranger_, in which Wilton Lackaye played for two seasons; _The Old Flute-Player_; and _Love Finds a Way_. In collaboration with Oscar Weil Mr. Dazey wrote _In Mexico_, a comic opera, produced by The Bostonians; and with George Broadhurst he wrote two plays: _An American Lord_, with William H. Crane as the star; and _The Captain_, played by N. C. Goodwin. The play by Mr. Dazey in which we are especially interested here, is, of course, _In Old Kentucky_, a drama in four acts, first written to order for Katie Putnam, a soubrette star, who was very popular a quarter of a century ago. She, however, did not consider the play suited to her, and it was then offered to several managers without success, until it was finally accepted by Jacob Litt. When first produced by Mr. Litt at St. Paul on August 4, 1892, it had a most distinguished cast: Julia Arthur, the beautiful, appeared as _Barbara Holton_; Louis James as _Col. Doolittle_; Frank Losee as _Joe Lorey_; and Marion Elmore made a most alluring _Madge Brierly_. This was only a trial production, and the play went into the store-house for a year, when, in August, 1893, it began its first annual tour at the Bijou Theatre (now the Lyceum), at Pittsburgh. In that first regular company Bettina Gerard played _Madge_; Burt Clark, _Col. Doolittle_; George Deyo, _Joe Lorey_; William McVey, _Horace Holton_; Harrison J. Wolfe, _Frank Layson_; Charles K. French, _Uncle Neb_; Edith Athelston, _Barbara_; and Lottie Winnett was _Aunt Alathea_. Mr. Litt and his associate, A. W. Dingwall, have always mounted _In Old Kentucky_ handsomely, and this has been an important element in its great success. For twenty years this drama of the bluegrass and the mountains has held the boards, more than seven million people have seen it, and even to-day it is being produced almost daily with no signs of loss in popular interest. It is the only play Mr. Dazey has written with a Kentucky background, and it would be "a hazard of new fortunes" for him to attempt to do so; he could hardly improve upon his masterpiece. In 1897 Mr. Litt had a small edition of _In Old Kentucky_ privately printed from the prompt-books; and in 1910 Mr. Dazey collaborated with Edward Marshall in a novelization of the play, which was published as an attractive romance by the G. W. Dillingham Company, of New York. With Mr. Marshall he also novelized _The Old Flute-Player_ (New York, 1910). Mr. Dazey has recently dramatized _Fran_, John Breckinridge Ellis's popular novel; and at the present time he is engaged upon a new play, which he thinks, promises better than anything he has so far written. Mr. Dazey was in Kentucky several times between 1877 and 1898, the date of his most recent visit, at which time he found John Fox, Jr., giving one of his inevitable readings in Lexington, and James Lane Allen looking for the last time, mayhap, upon the scenes of his books. He spent several weeks with friends and relatives near Paris; and, like all good Kentuckians, he "hopes to revisit the dear old state in the near future." Mr. Dazey has an attractive home at Quincy, Illinois. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Who's Who in the Theatre_, by John Porter (Boston, 1912); letters from Mr. Dazey to the writer. THE FAMOUS KNOT-HOLE[12] [From _In Old Kentucky_ (1897)] _Act III, Scene IV. The exterior of the race-track. Fence, tree, etc._ _Colonel._ (_Enter L._) I didn't go in. I kept my word, though it nearly finished me. (_Shouts heard._) They're bringing out the horses. (_Looks through knot-hole._) I can't see worth a cent. It's not hole enough for me. To Hades with dignity! I'll inspect that tree. (_Goes to tree; puts arm around it._) [_Enter_ Alathea, _R._] _Alathea._ (_Pauses, R. C._) Everyone's at the races. I'm perfectly safe. There is that blessed knot-hole. (_Goes to hole; looks through._) _Col._ (_Comes from behind tree; sees Alathea._) A woman, by all that's wonderful--a woman at my knot-hole. (_Approaches._) Madam! (_Lays hand on her shoulder._) _Alathea._ (_Indignantly._) Sir! (_Turns._) Col. Sundusky Doolittle! _Col._ Miss Alathea Layson! (_Bus. bows._) _Alathea._ Colonel, what are you all doing here? _Col._ Madam, what are you all doing here? _Alathea._ Colonel, I couldn't wait to hear the result. _Col._ No more could I. _Alathea._ But I didn't enter the race-track. _Col._ I was equally firm. _Alathea._ Neb. told me of the knot-hole. _Col._ The rascal, he told me, too! _Alathea._ Colonel, we must forgive each other. If you really must look, there is the knot-hole. _Col._ No, Miss Lethe, I resign the knot-hole to you. I shall climb the tree. _Alathea._ (_As Colonel climbs tree._) Be careful, Colonel, don't break your neck, but get where you can see. _Col._ (_Up tree._) Ah, what a gallant sight! There's Catalpa, Evangeline--and there's Queen Bess! (_Shouts heard._) _Alathea._ What's that? (_To tree._) _Col._ A false start. They'll make it this time. (_Shouts heard._) They're off--off! Oh, what a splendid start! _Alathea._ Who's ahead? Who's ahead? (_To tree._) _Col._ Catalpa sets the pace, the others lying well back. _Alathea._ Why doesn't Queen Bess come to the front? Oh, if I were only on that mare. (_Back to fence._) _Col._ At the half, Evangeline takes the lead--Catalpa next--the rest bunched. Oh, great heavens!--(_Lethe to tree._)--there's a foul--a jam--and Queen Bess is left behind ten lengths! She hasn't the ghost of a show! Look! (_Lethe back to tree._) She's at it again. But she can't make it up. It's beyond anything mortal. And yet she's gaining--gaining! _Alathea._ (_Bus._) Keep it up--keep it up! _Col._ At the three quarters; she's only five lengths behind the leader, and gaining still! _Alathea._ (_Bus._) Oh, push!--push!--I can't stand it! I've got to see! (_Climbs tree._) _Col._ Coming up, Miss Lethe! All right, don't break your neck, but get where you can see. In the stretch. Her head's at Catalpa's crupper--now her saddle-bow, but she can't gain another inch! But look--look! she lifts her--and, Great Scott! she wins! (_As he speaks, flats forming fence are drawn. Horses dash past, Queen Bess in the lead. Drop at back shows grand stand, with fence in front of same. Spectators back of fence._ Neb. _and_ Frank. _Band playing "Dixie."_ Holton _standing near, chagrined._ Col. _waves hat and_ Alathea _handkerchief, in tree. Spectators shout._) (_For second curtain_, Madge _returns on Queen Bess_. Col. _and_ Alathea _down from tree and passing near. Other horses enter as curtain falls._) [_Curtain_] FOOTNOTE: [12] Copyright, 1897, by Jacob Litt. JOHN P. FRUIT John Phelps Fruit, the distinguished Poe scholar, was born at Pembroke, Kentucky, November 22, 1855. He was graduated from Bethel College, Russellville, Kentucky, in 1878, after which he became a teacher. For two years Professor Fruit was president of Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky; and from 1883 to 1897 he was professor of English in his _alma mater_, Bethel College. In 1895 the University of Leipzig granted him the Ph. D. degree; and three years later he was elected to the chair of English in William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri, which he still occupies. Dr. Fruit's first work was an edition of Milton's _Lycidas_ (Boston, 1894), and this was followed by his edition of Coleridge's _The Ancient Mariner_ (Boston, 1899). Both of these little volumes have been used in many schools and colleges. Dr. Fruit devoted many years to the study of Edgar Allan Poe and his works, and his researches he brought together in _The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry_ (New York, 1899). This book gave Dr. Fruit a foremost place among the Poe scholars of his time. His work was officially recognized by the University of Virginia, the poet's college, and it has been widely and cordially reviewed. At the present time Dr. Fruit is engaged in a comprehensive study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his pamphlet, entitled _Hawthorne's Immitigable_ (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.), having attracted a deal of attention. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913); letters from Prof. Fruit to the writer. THE CLIMAX OF POE'S POETRY[13] [From _The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry_ (New York, 1899)] Accustomed as we are, from infancy up, to so much "rhyme without reason," in our nursery jingles and melodies, we associate some of Poe's poetry, remotely, at first blush, with the negroes singing "in the cotton and the corn." So much sound makes us suspicious of the sense, but a little closer ear appreciates delicate and telling onomatopoetic effects. Liquids and vowels join hands in sweetest fellowship to unite "the hidden soul of harmony." As if, at last, to give the world assurance that he had been trifling with rhythm and rhyme, he wrote _The Bells_. The secret of the charm resides in the humanizing of the tones of the bells. It is not personification, but the speaking in person to our souls. To appreciate this more full, observe how Ruskin humanizes the sky for us. "Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential." Poe made so much of music in his doctrine of poetry, yet he never humanized the notes of a musical instrument.... He took the common bells,--the more praise for his artistic judgment,--and rang them through all the diapason of human sentiment. If we have imagined a closer correspondence between expression and conception, in the previously considered poems, than really exists, there can be no doubt on that point, even to the mind of the wayfaring man, in reading _The Bells_. If it be thought that the poet could harp on only one theme, let the variety of topic in _The Bells_ protest. Again, Poe's doctrine of "rhythm and rhyme" finds its amplest verification in _The Bells_. Reason and not "ecstatic intuition," led him to conclude that English versification is exceedingly simple; that "one-tenth of it, possibly, may be called ethereal; nine-tenths, however, appertain to the mathematics; and the whole is included within the limits of the commonest common-sense." It must be believed that Poe appropriated, with the finest artistic discernment, the vitalizing power of rhythm and rhyme, and nowhere with more skill than in _The Bells_. It is the climax of his art on its technical side. Read the poem and think back over the course of the development of poet's art-instincts. FOOTNOTE: [13] Copyright, 1899, by A. S. Barnes and Company. HARRISON ROBERTSON Thomas Harrison Robertson, erstwhile poet and novelist, and now a well-known journalist, was born at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, January 16, 1856. He was educated at the University of Virginia, after which he settled at Louisville, Kentucky, as a newspaper man, verse-maker, and fictionist. Mr. Robertson has held almost every position on _The Courier-Journal_, being managing editor at the present time. He won his first fame with a Kentucky racing story, the best one ever written, entitled _How the Derby Was Won_, which was originally published in _Scribner's Magazine_ for August, 1889. Ten years later his first long novel, _If I Were a Man_ (New York, 1899), "the story of a New-Southerner," appeared, and it was followed by _Red Blood and Blue_ (New York, 1900); _The Inlander_ (New York, 1901); _The Opponents_ (New York, 1902); and his most recent novel, _The Pink Typhoon_ (New York, 1906), an automobile love story of slight merit. In the early eighties "T. H. Robertson" wrote some of the very cleverest verse, so-called society verse for the most part, that has ever been done by a Kentucky hand; but he soon abandoned "Thomas" and the Muse. The writer has always held that our literature lost a charming poet to win a feeble fictionist when Harrison Robertson changed literary steads, although his _How the Derby Was Won_ must not be forgotten. Now, however, he has given up the literary life for the daily grind of a great newspaper; and he may never publish another poem or novel. More's the pity! BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Book Buyer_ (April, 1900; April, 1901); _Scribner's Magazine_ (October, 1907); _The Bookman_ (December, 1910). TWO TRIOLETS[14] [From _A Vers de Socíeté Anthology_, by Caroline Wells (New York, 1907)] I What He Said: This kiss upon your fan I press-- Ah! Sainte Nitouche, you don't refuse it? And may it from its soft recess-- This kiss upon your fan I press-- Be blown to you, a shy caress, By this white down, whene'er you use it. This kiss upon your fan I press-- Ah, Sainte Nitouche, you _don't_ refuse it! II What She Thought: To kiss a fan! What a poky poet! The stupid man, To kiss a fan, When he knows that--he--can-- Or ought to know it-- To kiss a _fan_! What a poky poet! STORY OF THE GATE [From the same] Across the pathway, myrtle-fringed, Under the maple, it was hinged-- The little wooden gate; 'Twas there within the quiet gloam, When I had strolled with Nelly home, I used to pause and wait. Before I said to her good-night Yet loath to leave the winsome sprite Within the garden's pale; And there, the gate between us two, We'd linger as all lovers do, And lean upon the rail. And face to face, eyes close to eyes, Hands meeting hands in feigned surprise, After a stealthy quest,-- So close I'd bend, ere she'd retreat, That I'd grow drunken from the sweet Tuebrose upon her breast. We'd talk--in fitful style, I ween-- With many a meaning glance between The tender words and low; We'd whisper some dear, sweet conceit, Some idle gossip we'd repeat, And then I'd move to go. "Good-night," I'd say; "good-night--good-by!" "Good-night"--from her with half a sigh-- "Good-night!" "_Good_-night!" And then-- And then I do _not_ go, but stand, Again lean on the railing, and-- Begin it all again. Ah! that was many a day ago-- That pleasant summer-time--although The gate is standing yet; A little cranky, it may be, A little weather-worn--like me-- Who never can forget The happy--"End?" My cynic friend, Pray save your sneers--there was no "end." Watch yonder chubby thing! That is our youngest, hers and mine; See how he climbs, his legs to twine About the gate and swing. FOOTNOTE: [14] Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons. INGRAM CROCKETT Ingram Crockett, whom a group of critics have hailed as one of the most exquisite poets of Nature yet born in Kentucky, first saw the light at Henderson, Kentucky, February 10, 1856. His father, John W. Crockett, was a noted public speaker in his day and generation, and a member of the Confederate Congress from Kentucky. Ingram Crockett was educated in the schools of his native town, but he never went to college. For many years past Mr. Crockett has been cashier of the Planters State Bank, Henderson, but the jingle of the golden coins has not seared the spirit of song within his soul. In 1888 he began his literary career by editing, with the late Charles J. O'Malley, the Kentucky poet and critic, _Ye Wassail Bowle_, a pamphlet anthology of Kentucky poems and prose pieces. A small collection of Mr. Crockett's poems, entitled _The Port of Pleasant Dreams_ (Henderson, 1892), was followed by a long poem, _Rhoda, an Easter Idyl_. The first large collection of his lyrics was _Beneath Blue Skies and Gray_ (New York, 1898). This volume won the poet friends in all parts of the country, and proclaimed him a true interpreter of many-mooded Nature. _A Year Book of Kentucky Woods and Fields_ (Buffalo, New York, 1901), a prose-poem, contains some excellent writing. A story of the Christiandelphians of western Kentucky, _A Brother of Christ_ (New York, 1905), is Mr. Crockett's only novel, and it was not overly successful. _The Magic of the Woods and Other Poems_ (Chicago, 1908), is his most recent volume of verse. "It contains poems as big as the world," one enthusiastic critic exclaimed, but it has not brought the author the larger recognition that he so richly deserves. This work surely contains Mr. Crockett's best work so far. One does not have to travel far in any direction in Kentucky in order to find many persons declaring that Ingram Crockett is the finest poet living in the state to-day. His latest book, _The Greeting and Goodbye of the Birds_ (New York, 1912), is a small volume of prose-pastels, somewhat after the manner of his _Year Book_. It again reveals the author's close companionship with Nature, and his exquisite expression of what it all means to him. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Blue Grass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _The Courier-Journal_ (August 3, 1912). AUDUBON[15] [From _Beneath Blue Skies and Gray_ (New York, 1898)] Not with clash of arms, Not 'midst war's alarms, Thy splendid work was done, Thy great victory won. Unknown, thro' field and brake, By calm or stormy lake, Lured by swift passing wings-- Songs that a new world sings-- Thou didst untiring go Led by thine ardor's glow, Cheered by thy kindling thought Beauty thy hand had wrought. Leaving thy matchless page Gift to a later age That would revere thy name-- Build for thee, surely fame. O, to have been with thee, In that wild life and free, While all the birds passed by Under the new world sky! O, to have heard the song Of that glad-hearted throng, Ere yet the settlers came Giving the woods to flame! O, to have with thee gone Up the white steps of Dawn! Or where the burning west Crimsoned the wild drake's breast! Yet better than bays we bring Are the woods whispering When life and leaf are new Under the tender blue! Master, awake! for May Comes on her rainbowed way-- Hear thou bird-song again Sweeter than praise of men! THE LONGING[16] [From _The Magic of the Woods and Other Poems_ (Chicago, 1908)] I am weary of thought, forever the world goes by With laughter and tears, and no one can tell me why-- I am weary of thought and all it may ever bring-- _But oh, for the light-loving fields where the meadow-larks sing!_ I have toiled at the mills, I've known the grind and the roar Over and over again one day as the day before-- And what does it all avail and the end of it--where? _But oh, for the clover in bloom and the breeze blowing there!_ Fame? What is fame but a glimmering mote, earth cast, That e'en as we grasp it dulls--dust of the dust at last. For what have the ages to say of the myriad dead? _But oh, for the frost-silvered hills and the dawn breaking red!_ Ah, God! the day is so short and the night comes so soon! And who will remember the time, or the wish, or the boon? And who can turn backward our feet from the destined place? _But oh, for the bobolink's cheer and the beauty of April's face!_ DEAREST [From the same] Dearest, there is a scarlet leaf upon the blackgum tree, And in the corn the crickets chirp a ceaseless threnody-- And scattered down the purple swales are clumps of marigold, And hazier are the distant fields in many a lilac fold. Dearest, the elder bloom is gone, and heavy, dark maroon, The elderberries bow beneath a mellow, ripening noon-- And, shaking out its silver sail, the milkweed-down is blown Through deeps of dreamy amber air in search of ports unknown. Dearest, full many a flower now lies withered by the path, Their fragrance but a memory, the soul's sad aftermath-- The birds are flown, save now and then some loiterer thrills the way With joyous bursts of lyric song born of the heart of May. Ah, dearest, it is good-bye time for Summer and her train, And many a golden hour will pass that ne'er shall come again-- But, dearest, Love with us abides tho' all the rest should go, And in Love's garden, dearest one, there is no hint of snow. FOOTNOTES: [15] Copyright, 1898, by R. H. Russell. [16] Copyright, 1908, by the Author. ELIZA CALVERT OBENCHAIN Mrs. Eliza Calvert Obenchain, ("Eliza Calvert Hall"), creator of _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_, was born at Bowling Green, Kentucky, February 11, 1856; and she has lived in that little city all her life. Miss Calvert was educated in the private schools of her town, and then spent a year at "The Western," a woman's college near Cincinnati, Ohio. Her first poems appeared in the old _Scribner's_, when John G. Holland was the editor; and her first prose papers were published in _Kate Field's Washington_. She was married to Professor William A. Obenchain, of Ogden College, Bowling Green, on July 8, 1885, and four children have been born to them. _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_ (Boston, 1907), the memories of an old lady done into short stories, opens with one of the best tales ever written by an American woman, entitled _Sally Ann's Experience_. This charming prose idyl first appeared in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_, for July, 1898, since which time it has been cordially commended by former President Roosevelt, has been reprinted in _Cosmopolitan_, _The Ladies' Home Journal_, and many other magazines, read by many public speakers, and finally issued as a single book in an illustrated _edition de luxe_ (Boston, 1910). Many of the other stories in _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_ are very fine, but _Sally Ann_ is far and away superior to any of them. Mrs. Obenchain's _The Land of Long Ago_ (Boston, 1909), was another collection of Aunt Jane stories. _To Love and to Cherish_ (Boston, 1911), is the author's first and latest novel. Upon these four volumes Mrs. Obenchain's fame rests secure, but _Sally Ann's Experience_ will be read and enjoyed when her other books have been forgotten. She struck a universal truth in this little tale, and the world will not willingly let it die. Her most recent work is a _A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets_ (Boston, 1912), a large and delightful volume on coverlet collecting and the study of coverlet making. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (July, 1908); _The Bookman_ (October, 1910). "SWEET DAY OF REST"[17] [From _Aunt Jane of Kentucky_ (Boston, 1907)] "I ricollect some fifty-odd years ago the town folks got to keepin' Sunday mighty strict. They hadn't had a preacher for a long time, and the church'd been takin' things easy, and finally they got a new preacher from down in Tennessee, and the first thing he did was to draw lines around 'em close and tight about keepin' Sunday. Some o' the members had been in the habit o' havin' their wood chopped on Sunday. Well, as soon as the new preacher come, he said that Sunday wood-choppin' had to cease amongst his church-members or he'd have 'em up before the session. I ricollect old Judge Morgan swore he'd have his wood chopped any day that suited him. And he had a load o' wood carried down cellar, and the nigger man chopped all day long in the cellar, and nobody ever would 'a' found it out, but pretty soon they got up a big revival that lasted three months and spread 'way out into the country, and bless your life, old Judge Morgan was one o' the first to be converted; and when he give in his experience, he told about the wood-choppin', and how he hoped to be forgiven for breakin' the Sabbath day. "Well, of course us people out in the country wouldn't be outdone by the town folks, so Parson Page got up and preached on the Fourth Commandment and all about that pore man that was stoned to death for pickin' up a few sticks on the seventh day. And Sam Amos, he says after meetin' broke, says he, 'It's my opinion that that man was a industrious, enterprisin' feller that was probably pickin' up kindlin'-wood to make his wife a fire, and,' says he, 'if they wanted to stone anybody to death they better 'a' picked out some lazy, triflin' feller that didn't have energy enough to work Sunday or any other day.' Sam always would have his say, and nothin' pleased him better'n to talk back to the preachers and git the better of 'em in a argument. I ricollect us women talked that sermon over at the Mite Society, and Maria Petty says: 'I don't know but what it's a wrong thing to say, but it looks to me like that Commandment wasn't intended for anybody but them Israelites. It was mighty easy for them to keep the Sabbath day holy, but,' says she, 'the Lord don't rain down manna in my yard. And,' says she, 'men can stop plowin' and plantin' on Sunday, but they don't stop eatin', and as long as men have to eat on Sunday, women'll have to work.' "And Sally Ann, she spoke up, and says she, 'That's so; and these very preachers that talk so much about keepin' the Sabbath day holy, they'll walk down out of their pulpits and set down at some woman's table and eat fried chicken and hot biscuits and corn bread and five or six kinds o' vegetables, and never think about the work it took to git the dinner, to say nothin' o' the dish-washin' to come after.' "There's one thing, child, that I never told to anybody but Abram; I reckon it was wicked, and I ought to be ashamed to own it, but"--here her voice fell to a confessional key--"I never did like Sunday till I begun to git old. And the way Sunday used to be kept, it looks to me like anybody could 'a' been expected to like it but old folks and lazy folks. You see, I never was one o' these folks that's born tired. I loved to work. I never had need of any more rest than I got every night when I slept, and I woke up every mornin' ready for the day's work. I hear folks prayin' for rest and wishing' for rest, but, honey, all my prayer was, 'Lord, give me work, and strength enough to do it.' And when a person looks at all the things there is to be done in this world, they won't feel like restin' when they ain't tired. "Abram used to say he believed I tried to make work for myself Sunday and every other day; and I ricollect I used to be right glad when any o' the neighbors'd git sick on Sunday and send for me to help nurse 'em. Nursing the sick was a work o' necessity, and mercy, too. And then, child, the Lord don't ever rest. The Bible says He rested on the seventh day when He got through makin' the world, and I reckon that was rest enough for Him. For, jest look; everything goes on Sundays jest the same as week-days. The grass grows, and the sun shines, and the wind blows and He does it all." "'For still the Lord is Lord of might; In deeds, in deeds He takes delight,'" I said. "That's it," said Aunt Jane, delightedly. "There ain't any religion in restin' unless you're tired, and work's jest as holy in his sight as rest." Our faces were turned toward the western sky, where the sun was sinking behind the amethystine hills. The swallows were darting and twittering over our heads, a somber flock of blackbirds rose from a huge oak tree in the meadow across the road, and darkened the sky for a moment in their flight to the cedars that were their nightly resting place. Gradually the mist changed from amethyst to rose, and the poorest object shared in the transfiguration of the sunset hour. Is it unmeaning chance that sets man's days, his dusty, common days, between the glories of the rising and the setting sun, and his life, his dusty, common life, between the two solemnities of birth and death? Bounded by the splendors of the morning and evening skies, what glory of thought and deed should each day hold! What celestial dreams and vitalizing sleep should fill our nights! For why should day be more magnificent than life? As we watched in understanding silence, the enchantment slowly faded. The day of rest was over, a night of rest was at hand; and in the shadowy hour between the two hovered the benediction of that peace which "passeth all understanding." FOOTNOTE: [17] Copyright, 1907, by Little, Brown and Company. KATE SLAUGHTER McKINNEY Mrs. Kate Slaughter McKinney ("Katydid"), poet and novelist, was born at London, Kentucky, February 6, 1857. She was graduated from Daughters', now Beaumont, College, Harrodsburg, Kentucky, when John Augustus Williams was president. On May 7, 1878, Miss Slaughter was married at Richmond, Kentucky, to James I. McKinney, now superintendent of the Louisville and Nashville railroad. Mrs. McKinney's best work is to be found in her first book of verse, _Katydid's Poems_ (Louisville, 1887). This slender volume was extravagantly praised by the late Charles J. O'Malley, but it did contain several lyrics of much merit, especially "The Little Face," a lovely bit of verse surely. Mrs. McKinney's first novel, _The Silent Witness_ (New York, 1907), was followed by _The Weed by the Wall_ (Boston, 1911). Both of these works prove that the author's gift is of the muses, and not of the gods of the "six best sellers." Neither of her novels was overly successful, making one wish she had held fast to her earlier love, verse-making. Besides these three volumes, Mrs. McKinney has published a group of songs which have attracted attention. She resides at Montgomery, Alabama. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). A LITTLE FACE[18] [From _Katydid's Poems_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1887)] A little face to look at, A little face to kiss; Is there anything, I wonder, That's half so sweet as this? A little cheek to dimple When smiles begin to grow; A little mouth betraying Which way the kisses go. A slender little ringlet, A rosy little ear; A little chin to quiver When falls the little tear. A little face to look at, A little face to kiss; Is there anything, I wonder, That's half so sweet as this? A little hand so fragile All through the night to hold; Two little feet so tender To tuck in from the cold. Two eyes to watch the sunbeam That with the shadow plays-- A darling little baby To kiss and love always. FOOTNOTE: [18] Copyright, 1887, by the Author. CHARLES J. O'MALLEY Charles J. O'Malley, the George D. Prentice of modern Kentucky literature, the praiser extraordinary and quite indiscriminately of all things literary done by Kentucky hands, and withal a poet of distinguished ability, was born near Morganfield, Kentucky, February 9, 1857. Through his father O'Malley was related to Father Abram J. Ryan, the poet-priest of the Confederacy; and his mother was of Spanish descent. He was educated at Cecilian College, in Hardin county, Kentucky, and at Spring Hill, a Jesuit institution near Mobile, Alabama, from which he returned to Kentucky and made his home for some years at Henderson. His contributions in prose and verse to the newspapers of southwest Kentucky made him well-known in the State. A series of prose papers included _Summer in Kentucky_, _By Marsh and Pool_, and _The Poets and Poetry of Southwest Kentucky_, attracted much favorable comment. His finest poem, _Enceladus_, appeared in _The Century Magazine_ for February, 1892, and much of his subsequent work was published in that periodical. In 1893 O'Malley removed to Mt. Vernon, Indiana, to become editor of _The Advocate_, a Roman Catholic periodical. His first and best known book, _The Building of the Moon and Other Poems_ (Mt. Vernon, Indiana, 1894), brought together his finest work in verse. From this time until his death he was an editor of Roman Catholic publications and a contributor of poems to _The Century_, _Cosmopolitan_, and other high-class magazines. For several years O'Malley was editor of _The Midland Review_, of Louisville, and this was the best periodical he ever edited. Many of the now well-known writers of the South and West got their first things printed in _The Review_. It did a real service for Kentucky authors especially. During his later life O'Malley seemed to realize that he had devoted far too much time in praising the literary labors of other writers, and he turned most of his attention to creative work, which was making him better known with the appearance of each new poem. O'Malley may be ranked with John Boyle O'Reilly, the Boston editor and poet, and he loses nothing by comparison with him. He was ever a Roman Catholic poet, and his religion marred the beauty of much of his best work. Besides _The Building of the Moon_, O'Malley published _The Great White Shepherd of Christendom_ (Chicago, 1903), which was a large life of Pope Leo XIII; and _Thistledrift_ (Chicago, 1909), a little book of poems and prose pastels. For several years prior to his passing, he planned a complete collection of his poems to be entitled _Songs of Dawn_, but he did not live to finish this work. At the time of his death, which occurred at Chicago, March 26, 1910, O'Malley was editor of _The New World_, a Catholic weekly. Today he lies buried near his Kentucky birthplace with no stone to mark the spot. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Century Magazine_ (October, 1907); _The New World_ (Chicago, April 2, 1910). ENCELADUS[19] [From _The Building of the Moon and Other Poems_ (Mount Vernon, Indiana, 1894)] I shall arise; I am not weak; I feel A strength within me worthy of the gods-- A strength that will not pass in gray despair. Ten million years I have lain thus, supine, Prostrate beneath the gleaming mountain-peaks, And the slow centuries have heard me groan In passing, and not one has pitied me; Yea, the strong gods have seen me writhe beneath This mighty horror fixed upon my chest, And have not eased me of a moment's pain. Oh, I will rise again--I will shake off This terror that outweighs the wrath of Jove! Lo, prone in darkness I have gathered hope From the great waters walking speaking by! These unto me give mercy, thus forshown: "We are the servants of a mightier Lord Than Jupiter, who hath imprisoned thee. We go forth at His bidding, laying bare The sea's great floor and all the sheer abysms That drop beneath the idle fathoms of man, And shape the corner-stones, and lay thereon The mighty base of unborn continents. The old earth, when it hath fulfilled His will, Is laid to rest, and mightier earths arise And fuller life, and like unto God, Fills the new races struggling on the globe. "Profoundest change succeeds each boding calm, And mighty order from the deep breaks up In all her parts, and only Night remains With all her starts that minister to God, Who sits sublimely, shaping as He wills, Creating always." These things do they speak. "The mountain-peaks, that watch among the stars, Bow down their heads and go like monks at dusk To mournful cloisters of the under-world; And then, long silence, while blind Chaos' self Beats round the poles with wings of cloudy storm." These things, and more, the waters say to me, How this old earth shall change, and its life pass And be renewed from fathomless within; How other forms, and likelier to God, Shall walk on earth and wing the peaks of cloud; How holier men and maids, with comelier shapes, In that far time, when He hath wrought His plan, Shall the new globe inherit, and like us Love, hope, and live, with bodies formed of ours-- Or of our dust again made animate. These things to me; yet still his curse remains, His burden presses on me. God! thou God! Who wast before the dawn, give ear to me! Thou wilt some day shake down like sifted dust This monstrous burden Jove hath laid on me, When the stars ripen like ripe fruit in heaven, And the earth crumbles, plunging to the void With all its shrieking peoples!--Let it fall! Let it be sown as ashes underneath The base of all the continents to be Forever, if so rent I shall be freed! Shall I not wait? Shall I despair now Hope On the horizon spreads her dawn-white wings? Ah, sometimes now I feel earth moved within Through all its massive frame, and know His hand Again doth labor shaping out His plan. Oh, I shall have all patience, trust and calm, Foreknowing that the centuries shall bring, On their broad wings, release from this deep hell, And that I shall have life yet upon earth, Yet draw the morning sunlight in my breath, And meet the living races face to face. NOON IN KENTUCKY [From the same] All day from the tulip-poplar boughs The chewink's voice like a gold-bell rings, The meadow-lark pipes to the drowsy cows, And the oriole like a red rose swings, And clings, and swings, Shaking the noon from his burning wings. A flash of purple within the brake The red-bud burns, where the spice-wood blows, And the brook laughs low where the white dews shake, Drinking the wild-haw's fragrant snows, And flows, and goes Under the feet of the wet, wood-rose. Odors of may-apples blossoming, And violets stirring and blue-bells shaken-- Shadows that start from the thrush's wing And float on the pools, and swim and waken-- Unslaken, untaken-- Bronze wood-Naiads that wait forsaken. All day the lireodendron droops Over the thickets her moons of gold; All day the cumulous dogwood groups Flake the mosses with star-snows cold, While gold untold The oriole pours from his song-thatched hold! Carol of love, all day in the thickets, Redbird; warble, O thrush, of pain! Pipe me of pity, O raincrow, hidden Deep in the wood! and, lo! the refrain Of pain, again Shall out of the bosom of heaven bring rain! FOOTNOTE: [19] Copyright, 1894, by the Advocate Publishing Company. LANGDON SMITH Langdon ("Denver") Smith, maker of a very clever and learned poem, was born in Kentucky, January 4, 1858. From 1864 to 1872 he attended the public schools of Louisville. As a boy Smith served in the Comanche and Apache Wars, and he was later a correspondent in the Sioux War. In 1894 Smith was married to Marie Antoinette Wright, whom he afterwards memorialized in his famous poem, and who survived him but five weeks. In the year following his marriage, he went to Cuba for _The New York Herald_ to "cover" the conflict between Spain and Cuba; and three years later he represented the New York _Journal_ during the Spanish-American War. Smith was at the bombardment of Santiago and at the battles of El Caney and San Juan. After the war he returned to New York, in which city he died, April 8, 1908. He was the author of a novel, called _On the Pan Handle_, and of many short stories, but his poem, _Evolution_, made him famous. The first stanzas of this poem were written in 1895; and four years later he wrote several more stanzas. Then from time to time he added a line or more, until it was completed. _Evolution_ first appeared in its entirety in the middle of a page of want advertisements in the New York _Journal_. It attracted immediate and wide notice, but copies of it were rather difficult to obtain until it was reprinted in _The Scrap-Book_ for April, 1906, and in _The Speaker_ for September, 1908. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Evolution, a Fantasy_ (Boston, 1909), is a beautiful and fitting setting for this famous poem. In the introduction to this edition Mr. Lewis Allen Browne brings together the facts of Langdon Smith's life and work with many fine words of criticism for the poem. In 1911 W. A. Wilde and Company, the Boston publishers, issued an exquisite edition of _Evolution_. Thus it will be seen that Smith and his masterpiece have received proper recognition from the publishers and the public; the judgment of posterity cannot be hurried; but that judgment can be anticipated, at least in part. That it will be favorable, characterizing _Evolution_ as one of the cleverest, smartest things done by a nineteenth century American poet, the present writer does not for a moment doubt. EVOLUTION[20] [From _Evolution, a Fantasy_ (Boston, 1909)] I When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, In the Paleozoic time. And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then. II Mindless we lived and mindless we loved, And mindless at last we died; And deep in a rift of the Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death, And crept into light again. III We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead man's hand; We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees, Or trailed through the mud and sand, Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come. IV Yet happy we lived, and happy we loved, And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold Of a Neocomian shore. The eons came, and the eons fled, And the sleep that wrapped us fast Was riven away in a newer day, And the night of death was past. V Then light and swift through the jungle trees We swung in our airy flights, Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms, In the hush of the moonless nights. And oh! what beautiful years were these, When our hearts clung each to each; When life was filled, and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech. VI Thus life by life, and love by love, We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath, and death by death, We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When over the nursing sod The shadows broke, and the soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God. VII I was thewed like an Auroch bull, And tusked like the great Cave Bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet, Were gowned in your glorious hair. Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave, When the night fell o'er the plain, And the moon hung red o'er the river bed. We mumbled the bones of the slain. VIII I flaked a flint to a cutting edge, And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland dank, And fitted it, head and haft. Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the Mammoth came to drink;-- Through brawn and bone I drave the stone, And slew him upon the brink. IX Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came trooping in. O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof, We fought, and clawed and tore, And cheek by jowl, with many a growl, We talked the marvel o'er. X I carved that fight on a reindeer bone, With rude and hairy hand, I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand. For we lived by blood, and the right of might, Ere human laws were drawn. And the Age of Sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone. XI And that was a million years ago, In a time that no man knows; Yet here to-night in the mellow light, We sit at Delmonico's; Your eyes are as deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is as dark as jet, Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet-- XII Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay, And the scarp of the Purbeck flags, We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones, And deep in the Coraline crags; Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain; Should it come to-day, what man may say We shall not live again? XIII God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly; He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die; Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook-boned men made war, And the ox-wain creaks o'er the buried caves, Where the mummied mammoths are. XIV Then as we linger at luncheon here, O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. FOOTNOTE: [20] Copyright, 1909, by L. E. Bassett and Company. WILL J. LAMPTON William James Lampton ("Will J. Lampton"), founder of the "Yawp School of Poetry," was born in Lawrence county, Ohio, May 27, 185-, within sight of the Kentucky line. (Being a bachelor, like Henry Cleveland Wood, he has hitherto declined to herald the exact date of his birth.) His parents were Kentuckians and at the age of three years he was brought to this State. His boyhood and youth was spent in the hills of Kentucky. He was fitted at private schools in Ashland and Catletsburg, Kentucky, for Ohio Wesleyan University, which he left for Marietta College. In 1877 Mr. Lampton established the _Weekly Review_--spelled either way!--at Ashland, Kentucky. Although he had had no prior training in journalism, he wrote eleven columns for his first issue. His was a Republican sheet, and the good Democrats of Boyd county saw to it that it survived not longer than a year. From Ashland Mr. Lampton went to Cincinnati and joined the staff of _The Times_. _The Times_ was too rapid for him, however, and from Cincinnati he journeyed to Steubenville, Ohio, to take a position on _The Herald_. Mr. Lampton remained on that paper for three years, when he again came to Kentucky to join the staff of the Louisville _Courier-Journal_. Some time later his paper sent him to Cincinnati, which marked his retirement from Kentucky journalism. It will thus be seen that he "lapsed out of Kentucky for a time, and lapsed again at the close of 1882." Leaving Cincinnati he went to Washington and originated the now well-known department of "Shooting Stars" for _The Evening Star_. For some years past he has resided in New York, working as a "free-lance." For a long time he contributed a poem almost every day to _The Sun_, _The World_, or some other paper. In 1910 the governor of Kentucky created the poet a real Kentucky colonel; and this momentous elevation above earth's common mortals is heralded to-day upon his stationery. Colonel Lampton, then, has published six books, the editions of three of which are exhausted, and he is now happy to think that his works are "rare, exceedingly scarce." The first of them, _Mrs. Brown's Opinions_ (New York, 1886), was followed by his chief volume hitherto, _Yawps and Other Things_ (Philadelphia, 1900). The "other things" were poems, not yawps. Colonel Henry Watterson contributed a clever introduction to the attractive volume; and another form of verse was born and clothed. _The Confessions of a Husband_ (New York, 1903), was a slight offset to Mary Adams's _The Confessions of a Wife_. Colonel Lampton's other books are: _The Trolley Car and the Lady_ (Boston, 1908), being "a trolley trip from Manhattan to Maine;" _Jedge Waxem's Pocket-Book of Politics_ (New York, 1908), which was "owned by Jedge Wabash Q. Waxem, Member of Congress from Wayback," bound in the form of an actual pocket-book; and his latest collection of cleverness, _Tame Animals I Have Known_ (New York, 1912). The tall--and bald!--Kentuckian lives at the French Y. M. C. A., New York, in order, as he himself has said, "to give a Parisian tinge to his religion." His "den" is a delight to Bohemians, a replica of many a country newspaper office in Kentucky. He is one of the joys of life surely. And though he has turned out almost as much as Miss Braddon, he can recall but the four lines he wrote in 1900 upon Mr. James Lane Allen: "The Reign of Law"-- Well, Allen, you're lucky; It's the first time it ever Rained law in Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (September, 1900); _The Bookman_ (May, 1902); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (November, 1907); _Lippincott's Magazine_ (August, 1911). THESE DAYS[21] [From _Pearson's Magazine_ (April, 1907)] Pray, What is it to-day That it should be worse than the early days? Are the modern ways Darker for all the light That the years have shed? Is the right Dead-- Under the wheels of progress By the side of the road to success, Bleeding and bruised and broken, Left in forgetfulness? Is truth Stronger in youth Than in age? Does it grow Feeble with years, and move slow On the path that leads To the world's needs? Does man reach up or down To take the victor's crown Of progress in science, art and commerce? In all the works that plan And purpose to accomplish The betterment of man? Does the soul narrow With the broadening of thought? Does the heart harden By what the hand has wrought? Who shall say That decay Marks the good of to-day? Who dares to state That God grows less as man grows great? OUR CASTLES IN THE AIR[22] [From _Pearson's Magazine_ (September, 1908)] I builded a castle in the air, A magical, beautiful pile, As the wonderful temples of Karnak were, By the thirsty shores of the Nile. Its glittering towers emblazoned the blue, Its walls were of burnished gold, Which up from the caverns of ocean grew, Where pearls lay asleep in the cold. Its windows were gems with the glint and the gleam Of the sun and the moon and the stars. Like the eyes of a god in a Brahmin's dream Of the land of the deodars. It stood as the work of a master, alone, Whose marvelous genius had played The music of heaven in mortar and stone With the tools of his earthly trade. I builded a castle in the air, From its base to its turret crown; I stretched forth my hand to touch it there And the whole darn thing fell down. CHAMPAGNE [From _The Bohemian_] Gee whiz, Fizz, You shine in our eyes Like the stars in the skies; You glint and gleam Like a jeweled dream; You sparkle and dance Like the soul of France, Your bubbles murmur And your deeps are gold, Warm is your spirit, And your body, cold; You dazzle the senses, Dispelling the dark; You are music and magic, The song of the lark; O'er all the ills of life victorious, You touch the night and make it glorious. But, say, The next day? Oh, go away! Go away And stay! Gee whiz, Fizz! ! ! FOOTNOTES: [21] Copyright, 1907, by the Pearson Publishing Company, New York. [22] Copyright, 1908, by the Pearson Publishing Co., New York. MARY ANDERSON DE NAVARRO Mrs. Mary Anderson de Navarro, the celebrated actress of the long ago, and a writer of much ability, is a product of Kentucky, although she happened to be born at Sacramento, California, July 28, 1859. When but six months old she was brought to Louisville, Kentucky, and there her girlhood days were spent. Miss Anderson was educated at the Ursuline Convent and the Presentation Academy, two Roman Catholic institutions of Louisville. At the age of seventeen years, or, on November 27, 1876, she made her _debut_ as _Juliet_ in "Romeo and Juliet," at Macauley's Theatre, Louisville, and her "hit" was most decided, both press and public agreeing that a brilliant career was before her. Miss Anderson's superb figure, her glorious hair, her magnificent voice, made her the great beauty she was, and thoroughly delightful. Leaving Louisville for a tour of the principal cities of the country, she finally arrived in New York, where she was seen in several Shakespearian roles. Some time later she put on "Pygmalion and Galatea," one of her greatest successes. In London Miss Anderson won the hearts of the Britishers with "The Lady of Lyons," "Pygmalion and Galatea," and other plays. Her second season on the stage saw a gorgeous production of "Romeo and Juliet" in London, with the American girl in her first role, _Juliet_. This "held the boards" for an hundred nights. She returned to the United States, but she was soon back in London, where "The Winter's Tale," her next play, ran for nearly two hundred nights. Short engagements on the continent followed, after which she came again to this country, and to her old home, Louisville, which visit she has charmingly related in her autobiography, _A Few Memories_ (London and New York, 1896), which work Joseph Jefferson once declared would make permanent her stage successes. From Louisville "Our Mary," as she was called by Kentuckians, was seen in Cincinnati, from which city she went to Washington, where she forever rang down the curtain upon her life as an actress. That was in the spring of 1889, and in June of that year she was married to Antonio F. de Navarro, since which event she has resided in England. In recent years Mary Anderson, that was, has visited in New York, but she has not journeyed out to Kentucky. In 1911 she collaborated in the dramatization of Robert Hichens's novel, _The Garden of Allah_, and she was in New York for its _premier_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _A Few Memories_ is delightfully set down, and, though the author made no especial claims as a writer, her book will keep her fame green for many years; _McClure's Magazine_ (July, 1908); _Harper's Weekly_ (January 9, 1909); _Century Magazine_ (March, 1910). LAZY LOUISVILLE[23] [From _A Few Memories_ (London, 1896)] After visiting many of the principal States, I was delighted to find myself again in quaint, charming Louisville, Kentucky. Everything goes along so quietly and lazily there that no one seems to change or grow older. Having no rehearsals I used my first free time since I had left the city soon after my _debut_ to see the places I liked best. Many of my childhood's haunts were visited with our old nurse "Lou." At the Ursuline Convent, with its high walls, where music had first cast a veritable spell, and made a willing slave of me for life, most of the nuns looked much the same, though I had not seen them in nineteen years. The little window of the den where I had first resolved to go upon the stage, was as bright and shining as ever; and I wondered, in passing the old house, whether some other young and hopeful creature were dreaming and toiling there as I had done so many years before. At the Presentation Academy I found the latticed summer-house (where, as a child, I had reacted for my companions every play seen at the Saturday matinées, instead of eating my lunch) looking just as cool and inviting as it did then. My little desk, the dunce-stool, everything seemed to have a friendly greeting for me. Mother Eulalia was still the Superioress, and in looking into her kind face and finding so little change there, it seemed that the vortex I had lived in since those early years was but a restless dream, and that I must be a little child again under her gentle care. No one was changed but myself. I seemed to have lived a hundred years since leaving the old places and kindly faces, and to have suddenly come back again into their midst (unlike Rip Van Winkle) to find them as I had left them. Many episodes, memorable to me, occurred in Louisville. Not the least pleasant was Father Boucher's acknowledgment (after disapproving of my profession for years) that my private life had not fallen under the evils which, at the beginning, he feared to be inevitable from contact with the theatre. Father Boucher was a dear old Frenchman, who had known and instructed me in matters religious since my childhood. My respect and affection for him had always been deep. When he condemned my resolution to go upon the stage quite as bitterly as did my venerated guardian, Pater Anton, my cup of unhappiness overflowed. All my early successes were clouded by the alienation of such unique friends. My satisfaction and delight may be imagined when, after years of estrangement, Father Boucher met me with the same trust with which he had honoured me as a child, and heartily gave me his blessing. It was also at Louisville that the highly complimentary "resolutions" passed by the Senate of Kentucky, and unanimously adopted by that body, were presented to me. They were the State's crowning expression of goodwill to their grateful, though unworthy, country-woman. FOOTNOTE: [23] Copyright, 1896, by Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, London. MARY R. S. ANDREWS Mrs. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, short-story writer and novelist, was born at Mobile, Alabama, in 1860, but she was brought to Lexington, Kentucky, in September, 1861, when her father, Rev. Jacob S. Shipman, an Episcopal clergyman, was chosen rector of Christ Church. When six years old she was sent to Christ Church Seminary, the church's school, conducted by Rev. Silas Totten and his daughters. One of these daughters tells with a smile to-day that "May" Shipman's first story, written at the age of seven, was upon her dog, "Shep." When thirteen years of age she discovered that the older girls in the school were studying French, when she was not, and she went to her father with the request that she be permitted to join the class. But the rector's question, "May, would you put in your furniture before you built your walls?" sent her back to her Latin and mathematics without further protest. She attended the school for eleven years, and at it received her education, never having attended any other institution. On November 26, 1877, when the future writer was seventeen years of age, her father accepted the rectorship of Christ Church, New York, and the family shortly afterwards removed to that city. She has been in Kentucky but twice since: five years after her departure, and about ten years ago. But that she has not forgotten her Kentucky home is evinced in the signed copies of her books which have found their way to the Blue Grass country and in her letters to former friends. On the last day of December, 1884, Miss Shipman married William Shankland Andrews, now associate justice of the supreme court of New York. Mrs. Andrews spends her summers in the Canadian woods, and the winters at her home in Syracuse, New York. Her first novel, _Vive L'Empereur_ (New York, 1902), a story of the king of Rome, was followed by _A Kidnapped Colony_ (New York, 1903), with Bermuda as the background. _Bob and the Guides_ (New York, 1906), was the experiences of a boy, "Bob," with the French guides of the Canadian woods who pursue caribou. _A Good Samaritan_ (New York, 1906), has been called the best story ever printed in _McClure's Magazine_, in which form it first appeared. _The Perfect Tribute_ (New York, 1906), a quasi-true story of Lincoln and the lack of enthusiasm with which the crowd received his Gettysburg speech, adorned with a love episode at the end, is Mrs. Andrews's finest thing so far. This little tale has made her famous, and stamped her as one of the best American writers of the short-story. It was originally printed in _Scribner's Magazine_ for July, 1906. Her other books are: _The Militants_ (New York, 1907), a collection of stories, several of which are set in Kentucky, and all of them inscribed to her father in beautiful words; _The Better Treasure_ (Indianapolis, 1908), is a charming Christmas story, with a moral attached; _The Enchanted Forest and Other Stories_ (New York, 1909), a group of stories first told to her son and afterwards set down for other people's sons; _The Lifted Bandage_ (New York, 1910), a most unpleasant, disagreeable tale as may well be imagined; _The Courage of the Commonplace_ (New York, 1911), a yarn of Yale and her ways, one of the author's cleverest things; _The Counsel Assigned_ (New York, 1912), another story of Lincoln, this time as the young lawyer, is not greatly inferior to _The Perfect_ _Tribute_. Mrs. Andrews's latest volume, _The Marshal_ (Indianapolis, 1912), is her first really long novel. It is a story of France, somewhat in the manner of her first book _Vive L'Empereur_, but, of course, much finer than that work of her 'prentice years. It has been highly praised in some quarters, and rather severely criticized in others. At any rate it has not displaced _The Perfect Tribute_ as her masterpiece. That little story, with _A Good Samaritan_, _The Courage of the Commonplace_, and _Crowned with Glory and Honor_, fairly entitle Mrs. Andrews to the first and highest place among Kentucky women writers of the short-story. She has attained a higher note in a most difficult art than any other woman Kentucky has produced; and it is only right and just that her proper position be allotted her in order that she may occupy it; which she will do with a consensus of opinion when her Kentucky life is more widely heralded. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _American Magazine_ (May, 1909); _Scribner's Magazine_ (September, 1911; August, 1912). THE NEW SUPERINTENDENT[24] [From _The Courage of the Commonplace_ (New York, 1911)] Three years later the boy graduated from the Boston "Tech." As his class poured from Huntington Hall, he saw his father waiting for him. He noted with pride, as he always did, the tall figure, topped with a wonderful head--a mane of gray hair, a face carved in iron, squared and cut down to the marrow of brains and force--a man to be seen in any crowd. With that, as his own met the keen eyes behind the spectacles, he was aware of a look which startled him. The boy had graduated at the very head of his class; that light in his father's eyes all at once made two years of work a small thing. "I didn't know you were coming, sir. That's mighty nice of you," he said, as they walked down Boylston Street together, and his father waited a moment and then spoke in his usual incisive tone. "I wouldn't have liked to miss it, Johnny," he said. "I don't remember that anything in my life has ever made me as satisfied as you have to-day." With a gasp of astonishment the young man looked at him, looked away, looked at the tops of the houses, and did not find a word anywhere. His father had never spoken to him so; never before, perhaps, had he said anything as intimate to any of his sons. They knew that the cold manner of the great engineer covered depths, but they never expected to see the depths uncovered. But here he was, talking of what he felt, of character, and honor, and effort. "I've appreciated what you have been doing," the even voice went on. "I talk little about personal affairs. But I'm not uninterested; I watch. I was anxious about you. You were a more uncertain quantity than Ted and Harry. Your first three years at Yale were not satisfactory. I was afraid you lacked manliness. Then came--a disappointment. It was a blow to us--to family pride. I watched you more closely, and I saw before that year ended that you were taking your medicine rightly. I wanted to tell you of my contentment, but being slow of speech, I--couldn't. So"--the iron face broke for a second time into a whimsical grin--"so I offered you a motor. And you wouldn't take it. I knew, though you didn't explain, that you feared it would interfere with your studies. I was right?" Johnny nodded. "Yes. And your last year at college was--was all I could wish. I see now that you needed a blow in the face to wake you up--and you got it. And you waked." The great engineer smiled with clean pleasure. "I have had"--he hesitated--"I have had always a feeling of responsibility to your mother for you--more than for the others. You were so young when she died that you seem more her child. I was afraid I had not treated you right well--that it was my fault if you failed." The boy made a gesture--he could not very well speak. His father went on: "So when you refused the motor, when you went into engineers' camp that first summer, instead of going abroad, I was pleased. Your course here has been a satisfaction, without a drawback--keener, certainly, because I am an engineer, and could appreciate, step by step, how well you were doing, how much you were giving up to do it, how much power you were gaining by that long sacrifice. I've respected you through these years of commonplace, and I've known how much more courage it meant in a pleasure-loving lad such as you than it would have meant in a serious person such as I am--such as Ted and Harry are, to an extent, also." The older man, proud and strong and reserved, turned on his son such a shining face as the boy had never seen. "That boyish failure isn't wiped out, Johnny, for I shall remember it as the corner-stone of your career, already built over with an honorable record. You've made good. I congratulate and I honor you." The boy never knew how he got home. He knocked his shins badly on a quite visible railing, and it was out of the question to say a single word. But if he staggered, it was with an overload of happiness, and if he was speechless and blind, the stricken faculties were paralyzed with joy. His father walked beside him and they understood each other. He reeled up the streets contented. That night there was a family dinner, and with the coffee his father turned and ordered fresh champagne opened. "We must have a new explosion to drink to the new superintendent of the Oriel mine," he said. Johnny looked at him, surprised, and then at the others, and the faces were bright with the same look of something which they knew and he did not. "What's up?" asked Johnny. "Who's the superintendent of the Oriel mine? Why do we drink to him? What are you all grinning about, anyway?" The cork flew up to the ceiling, and the butler poured gold bubbles into the glasses, all but his own. "Can't I drink to the beggar, too, whoever he is?" asked Johnny, and moved his glass and glanced up at Mullins. But his father was beaming at Mullins in a most unusual way, and Johnny got no wine. With that Ted, the oldest brother, pushed back his chair and stood and lifted his glass. "We'll drink," he said, and bowed formally to Johnny, "to the gentleman who is covering us all with glory, to the new superintendent of the Oriel mine, Mr. John Archer McLean," and they stood and drank the toast. Johnny, more or less dizzy, more or less scarlet, crammed his hands in his pockets and stared and turned redder, and brought out interrogations in the nervous English which is acquired at our great institutions of learning. "Gosh! are you all gone dotty?" he asked. And "is this a merry jape?" And "Why, for cat's sake, can't you tell a fellow what's up your sleeve?" While the family sipped champagne and regarded him. "Now, if I've squirmed for you enough, I wish you'd explain--father, tell me!" the boy begged. And the tale was told by the family, in chorus, without politeness, interrupting freely. It seemed that the president of the big mine needed a superintendent, and wishing young blood and the latest ideas, had written to the head of the Mining Department in the School of Technology, to ask if he would give him the name of the ablest man in the graduating class--a man to be relied on for character as much as brains, he specified, for the rough army of miners needed a general at their head almost more than a scientist. Was there such a combination to be found, he asked, in a youngster of twenty-three or twenty-four, such as would be graduating at the "Tech?" If possible, he wanted a very young man--he wanted the enthusiasm, he wanted the athletic tendency, he wanted the plus-strength, he wanted the unmade reputation which would look for its making to hard work in the mine. The letter was produced and read to the shamefaced Johnny. "Gosh!" he remarked at intervals, and remarked practically nothing else. There was no need. They were so proud and so glad that it was almost too much for the boy who had been a failure three years ago. On the urgent insistence of every one, he made a speech. He got to his six-feet-two slowly, and his hand went into his trousers as usual. "Holy mackerel," he began--"I don't call it decent to knock the wind out of a man and then hold him up for remarks. They all said in college that I talked the darnedest hash in the class, anyway. But you will have it, will you? I haven't got anything to say, so's you'd notice it, except that I'll be blamed if I see how this is true. Of course I'm keen for it--Keen! I should say I was! And what makes me keenest, I believe, is that I know it's satisfactory to Henry McLean." He turned his bright face to his father. "Any little plugging I've done seems like thirty cents compared to that. You're all peaches to take such an interest, and I thank you a lot. Me, the superintendent of the Oriel mine! Holy mackerel!" gasped Johnny, and sat down. FOOTNOTE: [24] Copyright, 1911, by Charles Scribner's Sons. ELVIRA MILLER SLAUGHTER Mrs. Elvira (Sydnor) Miller Slaughter, the "Tatler" of _The Louisville Times_ in the old days, and a verse-writer of considerable reputation, was born at Wytheville, Virginia, October 12, 1860. When a child Miss Miller was brought to Kentucky, as her mother had inherited money which made necessary her removal to this State in order to obtain it. She was educated at the Presentation Academy, in Louisville, by the same nuns that had instructed Mary Anderson de Navarro, the famous actress. She was subsequently gold medalist at a private finishing school, but she still clings to the Catholicism instilled at the Presentation Academy. Shortly after having left school Miss Miller published her first and only book of poems, _Songs of the Heart_ (Louisville, 1885), with a prologue by Douglass Sherley.[25] About this time her parents lost their fortune, and she secured a position on _The Louisville Times_, where she was trained by Mr. Robert W. Brown, the present managing editor of that paper. After three years of general reporting, Miss Miller became editor of "The Tatler Column," and this she conducted for fourteen years with cleverness and success, only resigning on the day of her marriage to Mr. W. H. Slaughter, Jr. Her second book, _The Tiger's Daughter and Other Stories_ (Louisville, 1889), is a group of fairy tales, several of which are entertaining. _The Confessions of a Tatler_ (Louisville, 1905), is a booklet of the best things she did for her department on _The Times_. She surely handled some men, women, books, and things in this brochure in a manner that even he who runs may read and--understand! From 1909 to 1912 she lived at Camp Dennison, near Cincinnati, Ohio, but at the present time she is again at Louisville, engaged in literary work. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Blades o' Bluegrass_, by Fannie P. Dickey (Louisville, 1892); _Dear Old Kentucky_, by G. M. Spears (Cincinnati, 1900). THE SOUTH AND SONG [From _The Midland Review_ (Louisville, Kentucky)] I.--THE SOUTH Spirit, whose touch of fire Wakens the sleeping lyre-- Thou, who dost flood with music heaven's dominions, Where hast thou taken flight-- Thou comfort, thou delight? In what blest regions furled thy gloomy pinions, Since from the cold North voices call to me: "Thou South, thou South! Song hath abandoned thee!" II.--VOICES We cry out on the air: Thy palace halls are bare, Shorn of the glory of the dream-gods' faces: Thy sweetest strain were sung When thy proud heart was young; Fame hath no crowns, nay, nor no vacant places-- So, all in vain, thy poet-songs awaken: Thou serenadest casements long forsaken. Thy rivers proudly flow, As in the long ago. Like kings who lead their rushing hosts to battle: Thy sails make white the seas-- They fly before the breeze, As o'er the wide plains fly storm-drifted cattle: Laughter and light make beautiful thy portals, Spurned by the bright feet of the lost immortals. What gavest thou to him Whose fame no years may dim, Song's great archangel, glorious, yet despairing-- Who, o'er earth's warring noises Heard Heaven's and Hell's great voices-- Who, from his shoulders the rude mantle tearing, Wrapt the thin folds about his dying wife, The angel and the May-time of his life? And what to him whose name Is consecrate to Fame-- Whose songs before the winds of war were driven-- Who swept his lute to mourn That banner soiled and torn, For which a million valiant hearts had striven-- Who set God's cross high o'er the battling horde, And sheltered neath its arms the lyre and sword? What gav'st thou that true heart That shrined its dreams apart, From want and care and sorrow evermore-- Him, who mid dews and damp, Burned out life's feeble lamp, Striving to keep the wolf from out his door, And while the land was ringing with his praise, Slumbered in Georgia, tired and full of days? And what to him whose lyre, Prometheus-like, stole fire From heaven; whom sea and air gave fancies tender-- Whose song, winged like the lark, Died out in death's great dark; Whose soul, like some bright star, clothed on in splendor, Went trembling down the viewless fields of air, Wafted by music and the breath of prayer? What gav'st thou these? A crust: A coffin for their dust: Neglect, and idle praise and swift forgetting-- Stones when they asked for bread: Green bays when they were dead-- Who sang of thee from dawn till life's sun-setting, And whose tired eyes, thank God! could never see Thy shallow tears, thy niggard charity. Yet fair as is a night, O strong, O darkly bright! Thou shinest ever radiant and tender, Drawing all hearts to thee, As from the vassal sea The waves are lifted by the moon's white splendor: So poet strains awake, and fancies gleam Like winds and summer lightning through thy dream. SUNDOWN LANE [From _The Louisville Times_] Through a little lane at sundown in the days that used to be, When the summer-time and roses lit the land, My sweetheart would come singing down that leafy way to me With her dainty pink sunbonnet in her hand. Oh, I threw my arms about her as we met beside the way, And her darling, curly head lay on my breast, While she told me that she loved me in her simple, girlish way, And then kisses that she gave me told the rest; For a kiss is all the language that you wish from your sweetheart, When you meet her in the gloaming there, so lonely and apart, And she set my life to music and made heaven on earth for me In that little lane at sundown in the days that used to be. Through a little lane at sundown we went walking hand in hand, 'Mid the summer-time and roses long ago, And the path that we were treading seemed to lead to fairyland, The place where happy lovers long to go; Oh, we talked about our marriage in the quiet, evening hush, And I bent to whisper love words in her ear, And her dainty pink sunbonnet was no pinker than her blush For she thought the birds and flowers all might hear; Oh, that dainty pink sunbonnet, bright in memory still it glows, It hid her smiles and blushes as the young leaves veil the rose, When she set my life to music and made heaven on earth for me, In that little lane at sundown in the days that used to be. Through a little lane at sundown I go roaming all forlorn, Though the summer-time once more smiles o'er the land, And the roses seem to ask me where their sister rose has gone With her dainty pink sunbonnet in her hand. But false friends came between us and I found out to my cost, When I learned too late her sweetness and her truth, That the love we hold the dearest is the love that we have lost, With the roses and the fairyland of youth. Now the flowers all bend above her through the long, bright summer day, And my heart grows homesick for her as she dreams the hours away, She who set my life to music and made heaven on earth for me In that little lane at sundown in the days that used to be. FOOTNOTE: [25] (George) Douglass Sherley, born at Louisville, Kentucky, June 27, 1857; educated at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and University of Virginia; joined staff of the old Louisville _Commercial_; made lecture tour with James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet; now resides near Lexington, Kentucky. Author of: _The Inner Sisterhood_ (Louisville, 1884); _The Valley of Unrest_ (New York, 1884); _Love Perpetuated_ (Louisville, 1884); _The Story of a Picture_ (Louisville, 1884). Mr. Sherley has done much occasional writing since his four books were published, which has appeared in the form of calendars, leaflets, and in newspapers. JOSEPH S. COTTER Joseph Seaman Cotter, Kentucky's only negro writer of real creative ability, was born near Bardstown, Kentucky, February 2, 1861. From his hard day-labor, he went to night school in Louisville, and he has educated himself so successfully that he is at the present time principal of the Tenth Ward colored school, Louisville. Cotter has published three volumes of verse, the first of which was _Links of Friendship_ (Louisville, 1898), a book of short lyrics. This was followed by a four-act verse drama, entitled _Caleb, the Degenerate_ (Louisville, 1903). His latest book of verse is _A White Song and a Black One_ (Louisville, 1909). Cotter's response to Paul Lawrence Dunbar's _After a Visit_ to Kentucky, was exceedingly well done, but his _Negro Love Song_ is the cleverest thing he has written hitherto. His work has been praised by Alfred Austin, Israel Zangwill, Madison Cawein, Charles J. O'Malley, and other excellent judges of poetry. Cotter is a great credit to his race, and he has won, by his quiet, unassuming life and literary labors, the respect of many of Louisville's most prominent citizens. One of his admirers has ranked his work above Dunbar's, but this rating is much too high for any thing he has done so far. In the last year or two he has turned his attention to the short-story, and his first collection of them has just appeared, entitled _Negro Tales_ (New York, 1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lexington Leader_ (November 14, 1909); _Lore of the Meadowland_, by J. W. Townsend (Lexington, Kentucky, 1911). NEGRO LOVE SONG[26] [From _A White Song and a Black One_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1909)] I lobes your hands, gal; yes I do. (I'se gwine ter wed ter-morro'.) I lobes your earnings thro' an' thro'. (I'se gwine ter wed ter-morro'.) Now, heah de truf. I'se mos' nigh broke; I wants ter take you fer my yoke; So let's go wed ter-morro'. Now, don't look shy, an' don't say no. (I'se gwine ter wed ter-morro'.) I hope you don't expects er sho' When we two weds ter-morro'. I needs er licends--you know I do-- I'll borrow de price ob de same frum you, An' den we weds ter-morro'. How pay you back? In de reg'ler way. When you becomes my honey You'll habe myself fer de princ'pal pay, An' my faults fer de inter's' money. Dat suits you well? Dis cash is right. So we two weds ter-morro' night, An' you wuks all de ter-morro's. FOOTNOTE: [26] Copyright, 1909, by the Author. ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD Ethelbert Dudley Warfield, historical writer, was born at Lexington, Kentucky, March 16, 1861, the brother of Dr. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, the distinguished professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. President Warfield was graduated from Princeton, continued his studies at the University of Oxford, and was graduated in law from Columbia University, in 1885. He practiced law at Lexington, Kentucky, for two years, when he abandoned the profession for the presidency of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. In 1891 he left Miami for the presidency of LaFayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, where he has remained ever since. In 1899 Dr. Warfield was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry. He teaches history at LaFayette. Besides several interesting pamphlets upon historical subjects, Dr. Warfield has published three books, the first of which was _The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798: an Historical Study_ (New York, 1887), his most important work so far. _At the Evening Hour_ (Philadelphia, 1898), is a little book of talks upon religious subjects; and his most recent volume, _Joseph Cabell Breckinridge, Junior_ (New York, 1898), is the pathetic tale of the years of an early hero of the Spanish-American war, graphically related. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Munsey's Magazine_ (August, 1901); _The Independent_ (December 25, 1902); _The Independent_ (July 13, 1905). CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS [From _The Presbyterian and Reformed Review_ (April, 1892)] Columbus is one of the few men who have profoundly changed the course of history. He occupies a unique and commanding position, seeming to stand out of contemporary history, and to be a force separate and apart. He is the gateway to the New World. His career made a new civilization possible. His achievement conditions the expansion and development of human liberty. His position is simple but certain. His figure is as constant and as inexorable as the ice floes which girdle and guard the pole are to us, or as the sea of darkness which he spanned was to his predecessors. He inserted a known quantity into the hitherto unsolvable problem of geography, and not only rendered it solvable, but afforded a key to a vast number of problems dependent upon it, problems not merely geographical, but economical, sociological and governmental as well. Yet in all this there mingles an element of error. Great events do not come unanticipated and unheralded. "Wass Gott thut, das ist wohl gethan," sang Luther, knowing well that God hath foreordained from the foundation of the world whatsoever cometh to pass. "In the fullness of time" God does all things in His benign philosophy. In the fullness of time man was set in the midst of his creation; in the fullness of time Christ came; in the fullness of time God opened the portals of the west. If the Welsh were driven on our shores under Madoc, if the Norsemen came and sought to found here "Vinland, the good," they did not light upon the fullness of time. God had no splendid purpose for the Welsh; the Northland force was needed to make bold the hearts of England, France, and Italy, to unify the world with fellow-service in the Orient, to break the bonds of feudalism, and to wing the sandals of liberty. As Isaac Newton sat watching the apple fall in his garden, he was but resting from the labor of gathering into his mind the labors of men who had in this or that anticipated his discovery of the law of gravitation. In all scientific advance many gather facts. One comes at length and in a far-reaching synthesis arranges the facts of many predecessors around some central truth and rises to some great principle. So generalizations follow generalizations, and the field of truth expands in ever-widening circles from the central fact of God's establishment. Columbus is not like Melchisedec. He had antecedents--antecedents many and obvious. The highest tribute we can pay him is to say that he fixed upon one of the world's great problems, studied it in all its relations, embraced clear and definite views upon it, and staked his all upon the issue; and that not in a spirit of mere adventure, but of dedication to a noble purpose. He gave to a speculative question reality, and thereby gave a hemisphere to Christendom. But like the girl who admitted the Gauls to the Capitol at Rome in return for "what they wore on their left arms," Columbus was overwhelmed by the reward which he demanded for his services. Without natural ability to command, and without experience, he demanded and obtained a fatal authority. EVELYN S. BARNETT Mrs. Evelyn Snead Barnett, a novelist of strength and promise, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, June 9, 1861, the daughter of Charles Scott Snead. On June 8, 1886, Miss Snead became the wife of Mr. Ira Sayre Barnett, a Louisville business man. Mrs. Barnett was literary editor of _The Courier-Journal_ for seven years, and her Saturday page upon "Books and Their Writers" was carefully edited. She did a real service for Kentucky letters in that she never omitted comment and criticism upon the latest books of our authors, with an occasional word upon the writers of the long ago. She was succeeded by the present editor, Miss Anna Blanche Magill. Mrs. Barnett's first story, entitled _Mrs. Delire's Euchre Party and Other Tales_ (Franklin, Ohio, 1895), the "other tales" being three in number, was followed by _Jerry's Reward_ (Boston, 1902). These novelettes made clear the path for the author's big novel, _The Dragnet_ (New York, 1909), now in its second edition. This is a great mystery story, one reviewer ranking it with the best detective tales of the present-day school. The American trusts and the hearts of women furnish the setting for _The Dragnet_, which is bigger in promise than in achievement, and which bespeaks even greater merit for Mrs. Barnett's new novel, now in preparation. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Kentuckians in History and Literature_, by J. W. Townsend (New York, 1907); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE WILL[27] [From _The Dragnet_ (New York, 1909)] Soon after their return, the Alexanders were forced to move to town. Charles needed the time he had to spend on the road going to and fro, and he was unwilling to put unnecessary hours of work on Trezevant, who not only bore his share during the day, but was sleeping with one eye open in a dingy corner of the shops. As the Dinsmore was expensive, they rented a modern flat, with tiny rooms, but plenty of sunlight. Constance knew they could save here, especially as Diana still wished to make her home with them. Finally, the last day at Hillside came. Charles drove Diana and Lawson to town, to get things ready there, leaving Constance to see the last load off, and to make sure that everything was in good shape for the Clarks, who intended to take possession in the spring. Constance went into every room, list in hand, checking the things the new owners had purchased. Then she tried the window bolts, and snapped the key in the lock of the front door. She blew the horn for the brougham. The coachman came up. In a business-like, everyday manner, she ordered him to drive to town, and, getting in, without one look from the window, she left Hillside. When she arrived at the new home, she was pleased to find that Diana and Lawson had arranged the furniture in the small rooms, and had a dainty little luncheon awaiting. As she was sitting down to enjoy it, her first visitor rang the bell--Aunt Sarah, just returned from the East and the latest fashions, looking younger than ever, and with a torrent of society gossip that was almost Sanscrit to Constance, occupied so long with the realities. "What was your idea, Constance, in coming to this tiny place?" she asked, when she had given a full account of the delights of her summer. Constance hesitated, but only for a moment. "Economy," she said, boldly. Aunt Sarah looked anxious. "My dear child, has your husband been preaching? Don't let him fool you; they all try it. It's a trick. Every now and then they think it their duty to cry hard times, when it is no such thing. You go to scrimping and saving, like an obedient wife, and the first thing you know he buys an automobile or a yacht, or wants you to give a ball." Constance smiled. "But this is real, Aunt Sarah. You know we are fighting a big trust, and while, eventually, we expect to win, we have to be content with little or no profits for a few years." "Trusts! Profits! What difference do they make as long as you have a steady income of your own?" Constance was debating with herself whether she ought to speak plainly and have it out with the Parker pride then and there, or wait until she were not quite so tired and unstrung, when she was happily spared a decision by her aunt's switching off to another track. "Talking of money reminds me that I heard a piece of news to-day," she said, lowering her voice in deference to Diana's presence behind thin walls. "I heard that Horace Vendire made a will shortly after his engagement to ---- and has left her millions." "Oh, aunt! I wonder if it is true! How dreadful it would be!" Aunt Sarah put up her jeweled lorgnette. "Constance Parker, what on earth is the matter with you to-day? You seem to be getting everything distorted, looking at the world upside down. It's that country business--" she continued emphatically; "the very moment you developed a fondness for that sort of life, I knew you were bound to grow careless and indifferent in thoughts, ways, and opinions. People who love the country always seem to think they have to sneer at civilization." Constance was too tired to argue, and too disturbed over the last piece of gossip to explain; so she said weakly that she supposed she had changed, and let the rest of the visit pass in banalities. The next day a little lawyer sprang a sensation by notifying those whom it concerned that he held the last Will and Testament of Horace Vendire, duly signed, attested, and sealed in his presence, a month before the disappearance. Charles came to tell the two women. "No, no!" cried Diana: "It's a mistake! He did not intend it to stand!" "You surmise the contents of the will?" "If it was made only a month before he disappeared. Had he lived, he would have altered it. I begged him to. Must I go to the meeting of the heirs?" "I think it is best. Cheer up; there are many things worse than money. Constance and I will go with you. Mr. James is back, and has asked us." So Diana went, and she could not have looked more terrified had she been listening to the last trump, instead of to the smooth voice of a young lawyer reading the bequests of her dead lover. The will was dated, July 26th, 1900. By it, Horace Vendire's life insurance was left to his brother James, an annuity of five thousand dollars to his mother, and an income of only three thousand a year to his fiancée, Diana Frewe, as long as she remained unmarried. It was evident to Charles that Vendire did not wish to give her enough to help her friends. The residue, and, eventually, the principal, were to be used in building and endowing the Horace Vendire Public Library in the city of New York. In a codicil, he directed that his stock in the American Blade and Trigger Company should be sold, the directors of that company being given the option of buying it at par before it was offered elsewhere. Mr. James Vendire was the first to congratulate Diana. "Oh, don't!" she cried, shrinking from his proffered hand. "I cannot bear it. It is yours; you must take it." She grew almost incoherent. Constance petted and soothed. "Be still, dear. Remember you are weak and unstrung. We will go home now, and see what can be done later." FOOTNOTE: [27] Copyright, 1909, by B. W. Huebsch and Company. JOHN PATTERSON John Patterson, "a Greek prophet not without honor in his own American land," was born near Lexington, Kentucky, June 10, 1861. He was graduated from Kentucky State University in 1882; and the following year Harvard granted him the degree of Bachelor of Arts. He took his Master's degree from Kentucky University in 1886. The late Professor John Henry Neville, one of Kentucky's greatest classical scholars, first taught John Patterson Greek; and to his old professor he is indebted for much of his success as a teacher of Greek and a translator and critic of its literature. Professor Patterson's first school after leaving Harvard was a private one for boys near Midway, Kentucky; and he was for several years principal of the high school at Versailles, Kentucky. His first book, _Lyric Touches_ (Cincinnati, 1893), is his only really creative work so far. It contains several fine poems and was widely admired at the time of its appearance. In 1894 Professor Patterson was made instructor of Greek in the Louisville High School, which position he held for seven years. His first published translation was _The Medea of Euripides_ (Louisville, 1894), which he edited with an introduction and notes. This was followed by _The Cyclops of Euripides_ (London, 1900), perhaps his finest work hitherto. In 1901 Kentucky University conferred the honorary degree of Master of Literature upon Professor Patterson; and in the same year he helped to establish the Patterson-Davenport school of Louisville. In 1907 he became professor of Greek in the University of Louisville; and since September, 1908, he has been Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University with full executive powers, practically president. His institution granted him the honorary degree of LL. D. in 1909. Doctor Patterson's latest work is a translation into English of _Bion's Lament for Adonis_ (Louisville, 1909). At the present time he is engaged upon a critical edition of the Greek text of the _Lament_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909), v. ix; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). A CLUSTER OF GRAPES[28] [From. _Lyric Touches_ (Cincinnati, 1893)] Misty-purple globes, Beads which brown autumn strings Upon her robes, Like amethyst ear-rings Behind a bridal veil Your veils of bloom their gems reveal. Mellow, sunny-sweet, Ye lure the banded bee To juicier treat, Aiding his tipsy spree With more dulcet wine Than clover white or wild woodbine. Dripping rosy dreams To me of happy hall Where laughter trims The lamps till swallow-call; Of flowery cup and throng Of men made gods in wit and song. Holding purer days Your luscious fruitfulness, When prayer and praise The bleeding ruby bless, And memory sees the blood Of Christ, the Savior, God and good. Monks of lazy hills, Stilling the rich sunshine Within your cells, Teach me to have such wine Within my breast as this, Of faith, of song, of happiness. CHORAL ODE (ERIPIDES' MEDEA, LINES 627-662.) [From the same] The loves in excess bring nor virtue nor fame, But if Cypris gently should come, No goddess of heaven so pleasing a dame: Yet never, O mistress, in sure passion steeped, Aim at me thy gold bow's barbed flame. May temperance watch o'er me, best gift of the gods, May ne'er to wild wrangling and strifes Dread Cypris impel me soul-pierced with strange lust; But with favoring eye on the quarrelless couch Spread she wisely the love-beds of wives! Oh fatherland! Oh native home! Never city-less May I tread the weary path of want Ever pitiless And full of doom; But on that day to death, to death be slave! Without a country's worse than in a grave. Mine eye hath seen, nor do I muse On other's history. Nor home nor friend bewails thy nameless pangs.-- Perish dismally The fiend who fails To cherish friends, turning the guileless key Of candor's gate! Such friend be far from me! FOOTNOTE: [28] Copyright, 1893, by Robert Clarke and Company. WILLIAM E. BARTON William Eleazar Barton, novelist and theologian, was born at Sublette, Illinois, June 28, 1861. He reached Kentucky for the first time on Christmas Day of 1880, and matriculated as a student in Berea College, where he spent the remainder of the college year of 1880-1881, and four additional years. During two summers and autumns he taught school in Knox county, Kentucky, then without a railroad, taking long rides to Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Falls and other places which have since appeared in his stories. The two remaining vacations he spent in travel through the mountains, journeying by Ohio river steamer along the northern counties, and by horseback far into the Kentucky hills in various directions. In 1885 Mr. Barton graduated from Berea with the B. S. degree; and three years later the same institution granted him M. S., and, in 1890, A. M. He was ordained to the Congregational ministry at Berea, Kentucky, June 6, 1885, and he preached for two years in southern Kentucky and in the adjacent hills of east Tennessee, living at Robbins, Tennessee. Mr. Barton's first book was a Kentucky mountain sketch, called _The Wind-Up of the Big Meetin' on No Bus'ness_ (1887), now out of print. This was followed by _Life in the Hills of Kentucky_ (1889), depicting actual conditions. He became pastor of a church at Wellington, Ohio, in 1890, and his next two works were church histories. Berea College conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity upon Mr. Barton in 1895; and he has been a trustee of the college for the last several years. He was pastor of a church in Boston for six years, but since 1899, he has been in charge of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park, Illinois. Dr. Barton's other books are: _A Hero in Homespun_ (New York, 1897), a Kentucky story, the first of his books that was widely read and reviewed; _Sim Galloway's_ _Daughter-in-Law_ (Boston, 1897), the Kentucky mountains again, which reappear in _The Truth About the Trouble at Roundstone_ (Boston, 1897); _The Story of a Pumpkin Pie_ (Boston, 1898); _The Psalms and Their Story_ (Boston, 1898); _Old Plantation Hymns_ (1899); _When Boston Braved the King_ (Boston, 1899); _The Improvement of Perfection_ (1900); _The Prairie Schooner_ (Boston, 1900); _Pine Knot_ (New York, 1900), his best known and, perhaps, his finest tale of Kentucky; _Lieut. Wm. Barton_ (1900); _What Has Brought Us Out of Egypt_ (1900); _Faith as Related to Health_ (1901); _Consolation_ (1901); _I Go A-Fishing_ (New York, 1901); _The First Church of Oak Park_ (1901); _The Continuous Creation_ (1902); _The Fine Art of Forgetting_ (1902); _An Elementary Catechism_ (1902); _The Old World in the New Century_ (1902); _The Gospel of the Autumn Leaf_ (1903); _Jesus of Nazareth_ (1904); _Four Weeks of Family Worship_ (1906); _The Sweetest Story Ever Told_ (1907); with Sydney Strong and Theo. G. Soares, _His Last Week, His Life, His Friends, His Great Apostle_ (1906-07); _The Week of Our Lord's Passion_ (1907); _The Samaritan Pentateuch_ (1906); _The History and Religion of the Samaritans_ (1906); _The Messianic Hope of the Samaritans_ (1907); _The Life of Joseph E. Roy_ (1908); _Acorns From an Oak Park Pulpit_ (1910); _Pocket Congregational Manual_ (1910); _Rules of Order for Ecclesiastical Assemblies_ (1910); _Bible Classics_ (1911); and _Into All the World_ (1911). Since 1900 Dr. Barton has been on the editorial staff of _The Youth's Companion_. The _locale_ of his novels was down on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, amid ignorance and poverty--a background upon which no other writer has painted. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (August 9, 1900); _The Book Buyer_ (November, 1900); _The Independent_ (July 7, 1910). A WEARY WINTER[29] [From _The Truth About the Trouble at Roundstone_ (Boston, 1897)] The winter came and went, and the breach only widened with the progress of the months. The men dropped all pretense of religious observance. They grew more and more taciturn and sullen in their homes. They cared less and less for the society of their neighbors, and as they grew more miserable they grew more uncompromising. When little Ike was sick and Jane going to the spring just before dinner found a gourd of chicken broth, so fresh and hot that it had evidently been left but a few minutes before, she knew how it had come there, and hastened to the house with it. But Larkin saw the gourd and at a glance understood it, and asked,-- "Whar'd ye git that ar gourd? Whose gourd is that?" and snatching it from her, he took it to the door and flung it with all his might. Little Ike cried, for the odor of the broth had already tempted his fickle appetite, and Larkin bribed him to stop crying with promises of candy and all other injurious sweetmeats known to children of the Holler. But when the illness proved to be a sort of winter cholera terminating in flux, he was glad to maintain official ignorance of a bottle of blackberry cordial which also was left at the spring, and which proved of material benefit in the slow convalescence of Ike. It was thought, at first, that Captain Jack Casey would be able to effect a reconciliation between the men. He was respected in the Holler, and was often useful in adjusting differences between neighbors. He was a justice of the peace, for that matter, and had the law behind him. But his military title and his reputation for fair dealing gave him added authority. He was the friend of both men, and had known them both in the army. He was Eph's brother-in-law, beside, and their wives' friendship, like their own, dated from that prehistoric period, "before the war." But even Captain Jack failed to move either of the two enraged neighbors. Brother Manus made several ineffectual attempts at a reconciliation, but at last gave up all hope. "I'll pray fur 'em," he said, "but I cyant do no more." Great was his professed faith in prayer; it may be doubted whether this admission did not indicate in his mind a desperate condition of affairs. But there was one person who could never be brought to recognize the breach between the families. Shoog made her frequent visits back and forth unhindered. To be sure, Ephraim tried to prevent her. He scolded her; he explained to her, and once he even whipped her. But while she seemed to understand the words he spoke, and grieved sorely over her punishments, she could not get through her mind the idea of an estrangement, and at length they gave up trying to have her understand. So, almost daily, when the weather permitted, Shoog crossed the foot log, and wended her way across the bottoms to Uncle Lark's. Larkin at first attempted to ignore her presence, but the attempt failed, and she was soon as much in his arms and heart as she had ever been; and many prayers and good wishes went with her back and forth, as Jane and Martha saw her come and go, and often went a piece with her, though true to their unspoken parole of honor to their husbands, speaking no word to each other. FOOTNOTE: [29] Copyright, 1897, by the Author. BENJ. H. RIDGELY Benjamin Howard Ridgely, short-story writer, was born at Ridgely, Maryland, July 13, 1861. In early childhood he was brought to Woodford county, Kentucky, where he grew to manhood. He was educated in private schools and at Henry Academy. He studied law but abandoned it for journalism. Ridgely removed to Louisville in 1877 to accept a position on _The Daily Commercial_, which later became _The Herald_. He went with _The Courier-Journal_ and in a short time he was made city editor. Ridgely left _The Courier-Journal_ to establish _The Sunday Truth_, of which he was editor, with his friend, Mr. Young E. Allison, as associate editor. President Cleveland, urged by Col. Henry Watterson and other leading Democrats, appointed Ridgely consul to Geneva, Switzerland, on June 20, 1892, which post he held for eight years. Being able to speak French and Spanish fluently, he was well fitted for the consular service. On May 8, 1900, President McKinley transferred Ridgely to Malaga, Spain, where he remained for two years, when he was again transferred, this time going to Nantes, France, where he also staid for two years. President Roosevelt sent Ridgely to Barcelona, Spain, on November 3, 1904, as consul-general. He resided at that delightful place until March, 1908, when he was made consul-general to Mexico, with his residence at Mexico City. Ridgely died very suddenly at Monterey, Mexico, on October 9, 1908. His body was brought back to Kentucky and interred in Cave Hill cemetery, Louisville; and there he sleeps to-day with no stone to mark the spot. Ridgely's reports to the state department are now recognized as papers of importance, but is upon his short-stories and essays that he is entitled to a place in literature. His stories of consular life, set amid the changing scenes of his diplomatic career, appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _Harper's Magazine_, _The Century_, _McClure's_, _Scribner's_, _The Strand_, _The Pall Mall Magazine_, and elsewhere. Writing a miniature autobiography in 1907 he set himself down as the author of a volume of short-stories, which, he said, bore the imprint of The Century Company, New York, were entitled _The Comedies of a Consulate_, and, strangest thing of all, were published two years prior to the time he was writing, or, in 1905! It is indeed too bad that his alleged publishers fail to remember having issued his book, for one would be worth while. What a castle in Spain for this spinner of consular yarns! BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Who's Who in America_ (1908-1909); _The Courier-Journal_ (Louisville, October 10, 1908). A KENTUCKY DIPLOMAT[30] [From _The Man the Consul Protected_ (_Century Magazine_, January, 1905)] Colonel Gillespie Witherspoon Warfield of Kentucky was an amiable and kindly man of fifty, with the fluent speech and genial good breeding of a typical Blue-grass gentleman. In appearance and dress he was still an ante-bellum Kentuckian, with a weakness for high-heeled boots, long frock-coats, and immaculate linen. When he said, "Yes, sah," or "No, sah," it was like a breath right off the old plantation. It should be added that he was a bachelor and a Mugwump. Being a Kentuckian, he was naturally a colonel; though, as a matter of fact, it was due solely to the courtesy of the press and the amiable custom of the proud old commonwealth that he possessed his military title. Nor had the genial colonel been otherwise a brilliant success in life. Indeed, I am pained to recite that he had achieved in his varied professional career only a sort of panorama of failures. He had failed at the bar, failed in journalism, failed as a real-estate broker, and, having finally taken the last step, had failed as a life-insurance agent. In this emergency his relatives and friends hesitated as to whether they should run him for Congress or unload him on the consular service. His younger brother, who was something of a cynic, insisted that Gillespie was fitted by intelligence to be only a family physician; but it was finally decided at a domestic council that he would particularly ornament the consular service. In pursuance of this happy conclusion, an organized onslaught was made upon the White House. The President yielded, and one day the news came that Colonel Gillespie Witherspoon Warfield had been appointed consul of the United States to Esperanza. It is needless to suggest that Colonel Warfield took himself very seriously in his new official capacity. It had not occurred to him, however, that his consular mission was rather a commercial than a patriotic one: he believed that he was going abroad to see that the flag of his country was treated with respect, and to protect those of his fellow-countrymen who in any emergency might have need of the services of an astute and fearless diplomat. In fact, the feeling that his chief official function was to be that of a sort of diplomatic protecting angel took such possession of him that he assumed a paternal attitude toward the whole country. Thus, bursting with patriotism, he set sail one day from New York for Gibraltar, and was careful during the voyage to let it be understood on shipboard that if anybody needed protection he stood ready to run up the flag and make the eagle scream violently. Esperanza lies just around the corner from Gibraltar, and nowhere along all the Iberian littoral of the Mediterranean is the sky fairer or the sun more genial. The fertile _vega_ stretches back to the foot-hills of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. Across the blue-sea way lies Morocco. It is a picturesque and beautiful spot, and if the consul be a dreamer, he may find golden hours for reverie. But I fear that neither the poetry nor the picturesqueness of the entourage appealed to Consul Warfield as he reached Esperanza that blazing September morning. He was more impressed with the shrill noises of the foul and shabby streets; with the dust that was upon everything, giving even to the palm-trees in the _parque_ a gray and dreary look; with the flies that seemed to be hunting their prey in swarms like miniature vultures; with the uncompromising mosquitos singing shrilly for blood, and the bold, busy fleas that held no portion of his official person sacred. The colonel was a buoyant man, but his exuberant soul felt a certain sinking that hot morning. It was a busy moment at Esperanza, and not much attention was paid to the new consul at the crowded Fonda Cervantes, whither, after a turbulent effort, he had persuaded his _cochero_ to conduct him. He had been much disappointed that the vice-consul was not on hand to receive him at the railway station. The fact is, the consul had thought rather earnestly of a committee and a brass band at the depot, and the complete lack of anything akin to a reception had been something of a shock to his official and personal vanity. However, he was not easily discouraged, and after having convinced the proprietor of the fonda that he was the new American consul, and therefore entitled to superior consideration, he set out to find the consulate. He found it in a narrow little street that went twisting back from the quay toward the great dingy cathedral, and certainly it was not what his imagination had fondly pictured it. He had thought of a fine old Moorish-castle sort of house, with a great carved door opening into a spacious _patio_, splendid with Arabic columns, and in the background a broad marble staircase leading up to the consulate. He had expected to see the flag of his country flying in honor of his arrival, and a uniformed soldier on duty at the entrance, ready to present arms and stand at attention when the new consul appeared. As a matter of fact, there was a very narrow little door opening into a very narrow little hallway that ran through the center of a very narrow, squalid little house. Over the doorway was perched the consular coat of arms. It was the poorest, dingiest, dustiest little escutcheon that ever bore so pretentious a device. The dingy gilt letters were almost invisible, but the colonel managed to make them out. He could also see that the figure in the center of the shield was intended to represent a proud and haughty eagle-bird in the act of screaming; but the poor old eagle had been so rained upon and so shone upon, and the dust had gathered so heavily upon him, that he looked like a mere low-spirited reminiscence of the famous _Haliaëtus leucocephalus_ which he was originally meant to represent. Colonel Warfield of Kentucky was not discouraged. Being, as I have said, a buoyant man, he simply remarked to himself: "I'll have that disreputable-looking fowl taken down and painted." Then he walked on into the squalid little consulate. An old man with shifty little blue eyes; a thin, keen face; long, straggling gray hair; and a long, thin tuft of gray beard, which looked all the more straggling and wretched because of the absence of an accompanying mustache, sat at a table reading a Spanish newspaper. This was Mr. Richard Brown of Maine, "clerk and messenger" to the United States consulate, who drew the allowance of four hundred dollars a year, and was the recognized bulwark of official Americanism at Esperanza. For forty years, during all the vicissitudes of war and politics, Richard Brown had sat at his desk in the shabby little consulate, watching the procession of American consuls come and go, doing nearly all the clerical work of the office himself, and contemplating with cynical delight the tortuous efforts of the various untrained new officers to acquaint themselves with their duties and the language of the post. In his affiliations he had become entirely Spanish, having acquired a fluent knowledge of the language and a wide acquaintance with the people and their ways. None the less, in his speech and appearance he remained a typical down-east Yankee, and it is said at Esperanza that his one conceit was to look like the popular caricature of Uncle Sam. In this it is not to be denied that he succeeded. The "billy-goat" beard; the lantern-jaw; the thin, long hair; the thin, long arms; and the thin, long legs--these he had as if modeled from the caricature. And the nasal twang and the down-east dialect--alas! it would have filled the average melodramatic English novelist's devoted soul with untold satisfaction and delight to hear Richard Brown say "Wal" and "I gaiss," and otherwise mutilate the English language. To the Spaniards he was known as Don Ricardo. The small Anglo-American colony at Esperanza referred to him as "old Dick Brown." He was a cynical, crusty, sour old man, who had become a sort of consular heirloom at Esperanza, and without whose knowledge and assistance no new American consul could at the outset have performed the simplest official duty. Knowing this, Richard Brown felt a very well-developed sense of his own importance, and looked upon each of his newly arrived superiors with ill-concealed contempt. There was also a vice-consul at Esperanza; but as he was a busy merchant, who could find time to sign only such papers as old Brown presented to him in the absence of the consul, he was seen little at the consulate. He generally knew when a new consul was coming along or an old consul going away, but in this instance Brown had failed to advise him either of Major Ransom's departure or of Colonel Warfield's arrival. Thus it happened that only the amiable Mr. Brown was on hand when Colonel Warfield came perspiring upon the scene on the warm morning in September of which we write. "Come in," he said sharply, as the consul hesitated upon the threshold. "What's your business?" Colonel Warfield gave Mr. Brown a look that would have completely withered an ordinary person, but which was entirely lost upon the old man in question, and with magnificent dignity handed him the following card: COLONEL G. WITHERSPOON WARFIELD, Consul of the United States of America. ESPERANZA. Mr. Richard Brown looked the card over carefully. "Another colonel," he observed grimly. "The last one was a major; the one before him was a capting. Ain't they got nothin' but soldiers to send out here? Who's goin' to run the army? Are you a real colonel or jest a newspaper colonel, or are you a colonel on the governor's staff? There's your office over there on the other side of the hall. Kin you speak Spanish?" FOOTNOTE: [30] Copyright, 1905, by the Century Company. ZOE A. NORRIS Mrs. Zoe Anderson Norris, novelist and editor, was born at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in 1861, the daughter of Rev. Henry T. Anderson, who held pastorates in many Kentucky towns. She was graduated from Daughters, now Beaumont, College, when she was seventeen years of age, or in 1878; and two days later she married Spencer W. Norris, of Harrodsburg, and removed to Wichita, Kansas, to live. Years afterwards Mrs. Norris divorced her husband and went to New York to make a name for herself in literature. She began with a Western story, _Georgiana's Mother_, which appeared in George W. Cable's magazine, _The Symposium_. Some time thereafter Mrs. Norris went to England--"like an idiot," as she now puts it. In London she "got swamped among the million thieving magazines, threw up the whole job," and traveled for two years on the Continent, writing for American periodicals. When she returned to New York she again wrote for _McClure's_, _Cosmopolitan_, _The Smart Set_, _Everybody's_, and several other magazines. Mrs. Norris's first novel, _The Quest of Polly Locke_ (New York, 1902) was a story of the poor of Italy. It was followed by her best known novel, _The Color of His Soul_ (New York, 1903), set against a background of New York's Bohemia, and suppressed two weeks after its publication because of the earnest objections of a young Socialist, who had permitted the author to make a type of him, and, when the story was selling, became dissatisfied because he was not sharing in the profits. The publishers feared a libel suit, and withdrew the little novel. Their action scared other publishers, and she could not find any one to print her writings. A short time later Mrs. Norris narrowly escaped dying as a charity patient in a New York hospital. When she did recover she worked for two years on _The Sun_, _The Post_, _The Press_, and several other newspapers in Manhattan. _Twelve Kentucky Colonel Stories_ (New York, 1905), which were originally printed in _The Sun_, "describing scenes and incidents in a Kentucky Colonel's life in the Southland," were told Mrs. Norris by Phil B. Thompson, sometime Congressman from Kentucky. The stories have enjoyed a wide sale; and she is planning to issue another set of them shortly. Being badly treated by a well-known magazine, she became so infuriated that she decided to establish--at the suggestion of Marion Mills Miller--a magazine of her own. Thus _The East Side_, a little thing not so large--speaking of its physical size--as Elbert Hubbard's _The Philistine_, was born. That was early in 1909; and it has been issued every other month since. Mrs. Norris is nothing if not original; her opinions may not matter much, but they are hers. The four bound volumes of _The East Side_ lie before me now, and they are almost bursting with love, sympathy, and understanding for the poor of New York. She has been and is everything from printer's "devil" to editor-in-chief, but she has made a success of the work. Her one eternal theme is the poor, in whom she has been interested all her life. For the last seven years she has lived among them; and among them she hopes to spend the remainder of her days. Her one best friend has been William Oberhardt, the artist, who has illustrated _The East Side_ from its inception until the present time. To celebrate the little periodical's first anniversary, Mrs. Norris founded--at the suggestion of Will J. Lampton--The Ragged Edge Klub, which is composed of her friends and subscribers, and which gave her an opportunity to meet all of her "distinguished life preservers" in person. The Klub's dinners delight the diners--and the newspapers! Mrs. Norris's latest novel, _The Way of the Wind_ (New York, 1911), is a story of the sufferings of the Kansas pioneers, and is generally regarded as her finest work. So long as _Zoe's Magazine_--which is the sub-title of _The East Side_--continues to come from the press, the pushcart people, the rag pickers, the turkish towel men, the kindling-wood women, the homeless of New York's great East Side will have a voice in the world worth having. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Everybody's Magazine_ (September, 1909); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (January, 1910). THE CABARET SINGER[31] [From _The East Side_ (September, 1912)] For a few moments the orchestra, with dulcet wail of cello and violin, held the attention of those at the tables, then the Cabaret singer stepped out upon the soft, red carpet. Against the mirrored wall at a small table set a young chap with his wife. The eyes of his wife followed his quick, admiring glances at the singer. She began to sing "Daddy," sweeping the crowd with her long, soft glance, selecting her victim for the chorus. She advanced toward the couple. She stood by the husband, pressed her rosy, perfumed cheek upon his hair, and began to sing. The young wife flushed crimson as she watched her husband in this delicate embrace, the crowd applauded; and the Cabaret singer, leaving him, went from one to the other of the men, some bald, some young, singing the chorus of "Daddy." The young wife sighed as the flashing eyes of her husband followed the singer. "Shall we go home?" she asked presently. "Not yet!" he implored. "I wish I could go home," she repeated, by and by. "My baby is crying for me. I know he is. I wish I could go home." The song finished, the singer ran into the dressing room and threw herself into the arms of the old negress half asleep there. She began to cry softly. The negress patted her white shoulder. "What's de mattah, honey," she purred. "I want to go home," the singer sobbed. "I am sick of that song. I am sick of these men. My baby is crying for me. I know he is. I want to go home!" IN A MOMENT OF WEARINESS [From the same] I'm tired of the turmoil and trouble of life, I'm tired of the envy and malice and strife, I'm tired of the sunshine, I'm sick of the rain, If I could go back and be little again, I'd like it. I'm tired of the day that must end in the night, I'm afraid of the dark and I faint in the light, I'm sick of the sorrow and sadness and pain, If I could be rocked in a cradle again, I'd like it. But tired or not, we must keep up the fight, We must work thru the day, lie awake thru the night, Stand the heat of the sun and the fall of the rain, Be brave in the dark and endure the pain; For we'll never, never be little again, And we'll never be rocked in a cradle again, Tho we'd most of us like it. FOOTNOTE: [31] Copyright, 1912, by the Author. LUCY CLEAVER McELROY Mrs. Lucy Cleaver McElroy, author of "uneuphonious feminine, but very characteristic Dickensy sketches," was born near Lebanon, Kentucky, on Christmas Day of 1861. She was the daughter of the late Doctor W. W. Cleaver, a physician of Lebanon. Miss Cleaver was educated in the schools of her native town, and, on September 28, 1881, she was married to Mr. G. W. McElroy, who now resides at Covington, Kentucky. Mrs. McElroy was an invalid for many years, but she did not allow herself to become discouraged and she produced at least one book that was a success. She began her literary career by contributing articles to _The Courier-Journal_, of Louisville, _The Ladies' Home Journal_, and other newspapers and periodicals. Mrs. McElroy's first volume, _Answered_ (Cincinnati), a poem, was highly praised by several competent critics. The first book she published that won a wide reading was _Juletty_ (New York, 1901), a tale of old Kentucky, in which lovers and moonshiners, fox-hunters and race horses, Morgan and his men, and a girl with "whiskey-colored eyes," make the _motif_. _Juletty_ was followed by _The Silent Pioneer_ (New York, 1902), published posthumously. "The silent pioneer" was, of course, Daniel Boone. Both of these novels are now out of print, and they are seldom seen in the old book-shops. Mrs. McElroy died at her home on the outskirts of Lebanon, Kentucky, which she called "Myrtledene," on December 15, 1901. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (May, 1901); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xiv). OLD ALEC HAMILTON[32] [From _Juletty_ (New York, 1901)] "If you remember him at all, doctor, you remember that he was a curious man; curious in person, manner, habits, and thoughts. "He was six feet two inches in height and tipped the Fairbanks needle at the two hundred notch; I believe he had the largest head and the brightest eyes I have ever seen. That big head of his was covered by a dense growth of auburn hair, and as every hair stood separately erect it looked like a big sunburned chestnut burr; his eyes twinkled and snapped, sparkled and glowed, like blue blazes, though on occasion they could beam as softly and tenderly through their tears as those of some lovesick woman. His language was a curious idiom; the result of college training and after association with negroes and illiterate neighbors. Of course, as a child, I did not know his peculiarities, and looked forward with much pleasure to seeing him and my grandmother, of whose many virtues I had heard. My father had expatiated much on the beauty of my grandfather's farm--three thousand broad acres (you have doubtless noticed, doctor, that Kentucky acres always are broad, about twice as broad as the average acre) in the heart of the Pennyrile District. As good land, he said, as a crow ever flew over; red clay for subsoil, and equal to corn crops in succession for a hundred years. But I am going to tell you, doctor, of my visit as a child to my grandfather. I had never seen him, and felt a little natural shrinking from the first meeting. My mother had only been dead a few weeks and--well, in short, my young heart was pretty full of conflicting emotions when I drew near the old red brick house. He was not expecting me, and I had to walk from the railway station. It was midsummer, and the old gentleman sat, without hat, coat, or shoes, outside his front door. As I drew near he called out threateningly: "'Who are you?' "'Why, don't you know me?' I asked pleasantly. "'No, by Jacks! How in hell should I know you?' he thundered. "There was nothing repulsive about his profanity; falling from his lips it seemed guileless as cooings of suckling doves, so nothing daunted, I cried out cheerily as one who brings good news: "'I'm Jack Burton, your grandson!' "'What yer want here?' "'Why, I've come to see you, grandfather,' I answered quiveringly. "'Well, dam yer, take er look an' go home!' he roared. "'I will!' I shouted indignantly, and more deeply hurt than ever before or since, I turned and ran from him. "Then almost before I knew it he had me in his great, strong arms, his tears and kisses beating softly down like raindrops on my face, while he mumbled through his sobs: "'Why, my boy, don't you know your old grandfather's ways? Eliza's son! First-born of my first-born, you are more welcome than sunshine after a storm. Never mind what grandfather says, little man; just always remember he loves you like a son.' "He had by that time carried me back to his door; there all at once his whole manner changed, and putting me on my feet, he cried: 'Thar, yer damned lazy little rascal, yer expec' me ter carry yer eround like er nigger? Use yer own legs and find yer grandmother.' "But he could not frighten me then nor ever any more; I had seen his heart, and it was the heart of a poet, a lover, a gentleman, do what he might to hide it." The doctor had allowed me to have my head, and talk in my rambling, reminiscent fashion, and agreed in my estimate of my grandsire. "Yessir, just like him for the world!" he cried. "I was at his house one day when the ugliest man in Warren County came out; he did not wait to greet him, but shouted, 'My God, man, don't you wish ugliness was above par? You'd be er Croesus.'" FOOTNOTE: [32] Copyright, 1901, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. MARY F. LEONARD Miss Mary Finley Leonard, maker of many tales for girls, was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 11, 1862, but she was brought to Louisville, Kentucky, when but a few months old. Louisville has been her home ever since. Miss Leonard was educated in private schools, and at once entered upon her literary labors. She has published ten books for girls from fourteen to sixteen years of age, but several of them may be read by "grown-ups." The style of all of them is delightfully simple and direct. _The Story of the Big Front Door_ (New York, 1898), was her first story, and this was followed by _Half a Dozen Thinking Caps_ (New York, 1900); _The Candle and the Cat_ (New York, 1901); _The Spectacle Man_ (Boston, 1901); _Mr. Pat's Little Girl_ (Boston, 1902); _How the Two Ends Met_ (New York, 1903); _The Pleasant Street Partnership_ (Boston, 1903); _It All Came True_ (New York, 1904); _On Hyacinth Hill_ (Boston, 1904); and her most recent book, _Everyday Susan_ (New York, 1912). These books have brought joy and good cheer to girls in many lands, and they have been read by many mothers and fathers with pleasure and profit. Miss Leonard has made for herself a secure place in the literature of Kentucky, a place that is peculiarly her own. She has a novel of mature life in manuscript, which is said to be the finest thing she has done so far, and which will be published in 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Munsey's Magazine_ (March, 1900); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). GOODBY[33] [From _The Candle and the Cat_ (New York, 1901)] Trolley sat on the gate-post. If possible he was handsomer than ever, for the frosty weather had made his coat thick and fluffy, besides this he wore his new collar. His eyes were wide open to-day, and he looked out on the world with a solemn questioning gaze. He had been decidedly upset in his mind that morning at finding an open trunk in Caro's room, and clothes scattered about on chairs and on the bed. Of course he did not know what this meant, but to the cat mind anything unusual is objectionable, and it made him unhappy. Finally he stretched himself in the tray, where Caro found him. "You darling pussie!" she cried, "Mamma do look at him. I believe he wants to go home with us. I wish we could take him." But Mrs Holland said one little girl was all the traveling companion she cared for. "It wouldn't do dear, he would be unhappy on the train," she added. "I don't know what I should have done without him. He and my candle were my greatest comforts--except grandpa," and Caro put her cheek down on Trolley's soft fur. "What am I to do without my little candle?" her grandfather asked. "Why, you can have the cat," Caro answered merrily. No wonder Trolley's mind was disturbed that morning with such a coming and going as went on,--people running in to say goodby, and Aunt Charlotte thinking every few minutes of something new for the traveler's lunch, tickling his nose with tantalizing odors of tongue and chicken. It was over at last, trunks and bags were sent off, Aunt Charlotte was hugged and kissed and then Trolley had his turn, and the procession moved, headed by the president. "Goodby Trolley; don't forget me!" Caro called, walking backwards and waving her handkerchief. When they were out of sight Trolley went and sat on the gate-post and thought about it. After a while he jumped down and trotted across the campus with a businesslike air as if he had come to an important decision. He took his way through the Barrows orchard to the Grayson garden where there was now a well-trodden path through the snow. Miss Grayson and her brother were sitting in the library. They had been talking about Caro when Walter glancing toward the window saw a pair of golden eyes peering in at him. "There is Trolley," he said, and called Thompson to let him in. Trolley entered as if he was sure of a welcome, and walking straight to Miss Elizabeth, sprang into her lap; and from this on he became a frequent visitor at the Graysons' dividing his time in fact about evenly between his two homes. And thus an unfortunate quarrel which had disturbed the peaceful atmosphere of Charmington and separated old friends, was forgotten, and as the president often remarked, it was all owing to the candle and the cat. FOOTNOTE: [33] Copyright, 1901, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER Joseph Alexander Altsheler, the most prolific historical novelist Kentucky has produced, was born at Three Springs, Kentucky, April 29, 1862. He was educated at Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky, and at Vanderbilt University. His father's death compelled him to leave Vanderbilt without his degree, and he entered journalism at Louisville, Kentucky. Mr. Altsheler was on the Louisville _Evening Post_ for a year, when he went with _The Courier-Journal_, with which paper his remained for seven years. During his years on _The Courier-Journal_ he filled almost every position except editor-in-chief. He later went to New York, and, since 1892, has been editor of the tri-weekly edition of _The World_. Mr. Altsheler was married, in 1888, to Miss Sara Boles of Glasgow, Kentucky, and they have an attractive home in New York. He began his literary career with a pair of "shilling shockers," entitled _The Rainbow of Gold_ (New York, 1895), and _The Hidden Mine_ (New York, 1896), neither of which did more than start him upon his real work. The full list of his tales hitherto is: _The Sun of Saratoga_ (New York, 1897); _A Soldier of Manhattan_ (New York, 1897); _A Herald of the West_ (New York, 1898); _The Last Rebel_ (Philadelphia, 1899); _In Circling Camps_ (New York, 1900), a story of the Civil War and his best work so far; _In Hostile Red_ (New York, 1900), the basis of which was first published in _Lippincott's Magazine_ as "A Knight of Philadelphia;" _The Wilderness Road_ (New York, 1901); _My Captive_ (New York, 1902); _Guthrie of the Times_ (New York, 1904), a Kentucky newspaper story of success, one of Mr. Altsheler's finest tales; _The Candidate_ (New York, 1905), a political romance. The year 1906 witnessed no book from the author's hand, but in the following year he began the publication of a series of books for boys, as well as several other novels. His six stories for young readers are: _The Young Trailers_ (New York, 1907); _The Forest Runners_ (New York, 1908); _The Free Rangers_ (New York, 1909); _The Riflemen of the Ohio_ (New York, 1910); _The Scouts of the Valley_ (New York, 1911); and _The Border Watch_ (New York, 1912). "All the six volumes deal with the fortunes and adventures of two boys, Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, and their friends, Shif'less Sol Hyde, Silent Tom Ross and Long Jim Hart, in the early days of Kentucky." Mr. Altsheler's latest historical novels are: _The Recovery_ (New York, 1908); _The Last of the Chiefs_ (New York, 1909); _The Horsemen of the Plains_ (New York, 1910); and _The Quest of the Four_ (New York, 1911). He is at the present time engaged upon a trilogy dealing with the Texan struggle for independence against Mexico, the first of which has recently appeared, _The Texan Star_ (New York, 1912). This tale, with the other two that are to be issued in 1913, to be entitled, _The Texan Scouts_, and _The Texan Triumph_, are written chiefly for the young. He will also publish in 1913 a story to be called _Apache Gold_. "Joseph A. Altsheler has made a fictional tour of American history," one of his keenest critics has well said; and his work has been linked with James Fenimore Cooper's by no less a judge of literary productions than the late Richard Henry Stoddard. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Independent_ (August 9, 1900); _The Book Buyer_ (September, 1900); _The Bookman_ (February, 1903). THE CALL OF THE DRUM[34] [From _In Circling Camps_ (New York, 1900)] Then I listened to the call of the drum. Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the first cannon shot there set this war drum to beating in every village; it was never silent; its steady roll day after day was calling men up to the cannon mouth; it was persistent, unsatisfied, always crying for more. Its beat was heard throughout a vast area, over regions whose people knew of each other as part of the same nation but had never met, calling above this line to the North, calling below it to the South, summoning up the legions for a struggle in which old jealousies and old quarrels, breeding since the birth of the Union, were to be settled. The drum beat its martial note in the great cities of the Atlantic, calling the men away from the forges and the shops and the wharves--clerks, moulders, longshoremen, the same call for all; it passed on, and its steady beat resounded among the hills and mountains of the North, calling to the long-limbed farmer boys to drop the plough and take up the rifle, sending them on to join the moulders, and clerks, and longshoremen, and putting upon all one stamp, the stamp of the soldier, food for the cannon--and this food supply was to be the largest of its time, though few yet dreamed it. The roll of the drum went on, through the fields, along the rivers, by the shores of the Great Lakes, out upon the plains, where the American yet fought with the Indian for a foothold, and into the interminable forests whose shades hid the pioneers; over levels and acres and curves of thousands of miles, calling up the deep-chested Western farmers, men of iron muscles and no pleasures, to whom unbroken hardship was the natural course of life, and sending them to join their Eastern brethren at the cannon mouth. It was an insistent drum, beating through all the day and night, over the mountains, through the sunless woods and on the burnt prairies, never resting, never weary. The opportunity was the greatest of the time, and the drum did not neglect a moment; it was without conscience, and had no use for mercy, calling, always calling. Another drum and yet the same was beating in the South, and those who came at its call differed in little from the others who were marching to the Northern beat, only the clerks and the mill hands were much fewer; the same long-limbed and deep-chested race, spare alike of figure and speech, brown-faced men from the shores of the Gulf, men of South Carolina in whom the original drop of French blood still tinctured the whole; brethren of theirs from Louisiana, gigantic Tennesseans, half-wild horsemen from the Texas plains--all burning with enthusiasm for a cause that they believed to be right. This merciless drum rolling out its ironical chuckle noted that these Northern and Southern countrymen gathering to their standards were alike in their lack of pleasure; they were a serious race; life had always been a hard problem for them, a fight, in fact, and this fight into which they were going was merely another kind of battle, with some advantages of novelty and change and comradeship that made it attractive, especially to the younger, the boys. They had been hewers of wood and drawers of water in every sense of the word, though for themselves; generations of them had fought Indians, some suffering torture and death; they had endured bitter cold and burning heat, eaten at scanty tables, and lived far-away and lonely lives in the wilderness. They were a rough and hard-handed race, taught to work and not to be afraid, knowing no masters, accustomed to no splendours either in themselves or others, holding themselves as good as anybody and thinking it, according to Nature; their faults those of newness and never of decay. These were the men who had grown up apart from the Old World, and all its traditions, far even from the influence which the Atlantic seaboard felt through constant communication. This life of eternal combat in one form or another left no opportunity for softness; the dances, the sports, and all the gaieties which even the lowest in Europe had were unknown to them, and they invented none to take their place. They knew the full freedom of speech; what they wished to say they said, and they said it when and where they pleased. But on the whole they were taciturn, especially in the hour of trouble; then they made no complaints, suffering in silence. They imbibed the stoicism of the Indians from whom they won the land, and they learned to endure much and long before they cried out. This left one characteristic patent and decisive, and that characteristic was strength. These men had passed through a school of hardship, one of many grades; it had roughened them, but it gave them bodies of iron and an unconquerable spirit for the struggle they were about to begin. Another characteristic of those who came at the call of the drum was unselfishness. They were willing to do much and ask little for it. They were poor bargain-drivers when selling their own flesh and bones, and their answer to the call was spontaneous and without price. They came in thousands, and scores of thousands. The long roll rumbling from the sea to the Rocky Mountains and beyond cleared everything; the doubts and the doubters were gone; no more committees; an end to compromises! The sword must decide, and the two halves of the nation, which yet did not understand their own strength, swung forward to meet the issue, glad that it was obvious at last. There came an exultant note into the call of the drum, as if it rejoiced at the prospects of a contest that took so wide a sweep. Here was long and happy work for it to do; it could call to many battles, and its note as it passed from village to village was resounding and defiant; it was cheerful too, and had in it a trick; it told the long-legged boys who came out of the woods of victories and glory, of an end for a while to the toil which never before had been broken, of new lands and of cities; all making a great holiday with the final finish of excitement and reasonable risk. It was no wonder that the drum called so effectively when it mingled such enticements with the demands of patriotism. Most of those who heard were no strangers to danger, and those who did not know it themselves were familiar with it in the traditions of their fathers and forefathers; every inch of the land which now swept back from the sea three thousand miles had been won at the cost of suffering and death, with two weapons, the rifle and the axe, and they were not going to shun the present trial, which was merely one in a long series. The drum was calling to men who understood its note; the nation had been founded as a peaceful republic, but it had gone already through the ordeal of many wars, and behind it stretched five generations of colonial life, an unbroken chain of combats. They had fought everybody; they had measured the valour of the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Hessian, the Mexican, and the red man. Much gunpowder had been burned within the borders of the Union, and also its people had burned much beyond them. Those who followed the call of the drum were flocking to no new trade. By a country with the shadow of a standing army very many battles had been fought. They came too, without regard to blood or origin; the Anglo-Saxon predominated; he gave his characteristics to North and South alike, all spoke his tongue, but every race in Europe had descendants there, and many of them--English, Irish, Scotch, French, German, Spanish, and so on through the list--their blood fused and intermingled, until no one could tell how much he had of this and how much of that. The untiring drumbeat was heard through all the winter and summer, and the response still rolled up from vast areas; it was to be no common struggle--great armies were to be formed where no armies at all existed before, and the preparations on a fitting scale went on. The forces of the North and South gathered along a two-thousand-mile line, and those trying to look far ahead saw the nature of the struggle. The preliminary battles and skirmishes began, and then the two gathered themselves for their mightiest efforts. FOOTNOTE: [34] Copyright, 1900, by D. Appleton and Company. OSCAR W. UNDERWOOD Oscar Wilder Underwood, orator and magazine writer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, May 6, 1862. He is the grandson of Joseph Rogers Underwood, a celebrated Kentucky statesman of the old _regime_. Mr. Underwood was prepared for the University of Virginia at the Rugby School of Louisville. In 1884 he was admitted to the bar and entered upon the practice of his profession at Birmingham, Alabama, his present home. He was prominent in Alabama politics prior to his election to the lower house of Congress, in 1895, as the representative of the Ninth Alabama district; and he has been regularly returned to that body ever since. Mr. Underwood is chairman of the committee on ways and means of the Sixty-second Congress, as well as majority leader of the House. In the Democratic pre-convention presidential campaign of 1912, the South almost unanimously endorsed Mr. Underwood for the nomination. Led by Alabama he was hailed in many quarters as the first really constructive statesman the South has sent to Congress in more than twenty years; further, his friends said, he has devoted his life to the study of the tariff and is now the foremost exponent of the subject living; his tariff policy is simply this: stop protecting the profits of the manufacturers; and that Underwood is Democracy's best asset. Earlier in the year, Mr. Underwood had been attacked by William J. Bryan, and his retorts in the House were so severe and unanswerable, he being the only man up to that time able to cope with the Colonel, that, of course, he had that distinguished gentleman's influence against him at the Baltimore convention. Nevertheless, every roll-call found him in third place, just behind Champ Clark, who was also born in Kentucky, and Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey. He was running so strong as the convention neared its close, that at least one Kentucky editor came home and wrote a long editorial calling upon the Kentucky delegation to change its vote from Clark to Underwood; but on the following day the governor of New Jersey was nominated. A few of Mr. Underwood's contributions to periodicals may be pointed out: two articles in _The Forum_ on "The Negro Problem in the South;" "The Corrupting Power of Public Patronage;" "What About the Tariff?" (_The World To-day_, January, 1912); "The Right and Wrong of the Tariff Question" (_The Independent_, February 1, 1912); and "High Tariff and American Trade Abroad" (_The Century_, May, 1912). By friend and foe alike Mr. Underwood is admitted to be the greatest living student of the tariff; and his speeches in Congress and out of it on this subject have given him a national reputation. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The World's Work_ (March, 1912); _Harper's Weekly_ (June 1, 1912); _North American Review_ (June, 1912). THE PROTECTION OF PROFITS [Delivered before the Southern Society of New York City (December 16, 1911)] The kaleidoscope of political issues must and will continually change with the changing conditions of our Republic but there is one question that was with us in the beginning and will be in the end, and that is the most effective, efficient and fairest way of equalizing the burdens of taxation that are levied by the National Government. Of all the great powers that were yielded to the Federal Government by the States when they adopted the Constitution of our country, the one indispensable to the administration of public affairs is the right to levy and collect taxes. Without the exercise of that power we could not maintain an army and navy; we could not establish the courts of the land; the government would fail to perform its function if the power to tax were taken away from it. The power to tax carries with it the power to destroy, and it is, therefore, a most dangerous governmental power as well as a most necessary one. There is a very clear and marked distinction between the position of the two great political parties of America as to how power to tax should be exercised in the levying of revenue at the custom houses. The Republican party has maintained the doctrine that taxes should not only be levied for the purpose of revenue, but also for the purpose of protecting the home manufacturer from foreign competition. Of necessity protection from competition carries with it a guarantee of profits. In the last Republican platform this position of the party was distinctly recognized when they declared that they were not only in favor of the protection of the difference in cost at home and abroad but also a reasonable profit to American industries. The Democratic party favors the policy of raising its taxes at the custom house by a tariff that is levied for revenue only, which clearly excludes the idea of protecting the manufacturer's profits. In my opinion, the dividing line between the positions of the two great parties on this question is very clear and easily ascertained in theory. Where the tariff rates balance the difference in cost at home and abroad, including an allowance for the difference in freight rates, the tariff must be competitive, and from that point downward to the lowest tariff that can be levied it will continue to be competitive to a greater or less extent. Where competition is not interfered with by levying the tax above the highest competitive point, the profits of the manufacturer are not protected. On the other hand, when the duties levied at the custom house equalizes the difference in cost at home and abroad and in addition thereto they are high enough to allow the American manufacturer to make a profit before his competitor can enter the field, we have invaded the domain of the protection of profits. Some men assert that the protection of reasonable profits to the home manufacturer should be commended instead of being condemned, but in my judgment, the protection of any profit must of necessity have a tendency to destroy competition and create monopoly, whether the profit protected is reasonable or unreasonable. You should bear in mind that to establish a business in a foreign country requires a vast outlay both in time and capital. Should the foreigner manufacturer attempt to establish himself in this country he must advertise his goods, establish selling agencies and points of distribution before he can successfully conduct his business. After he has done so, if the home producer is protected by a law that not only equals the difference in cost at home and abroad, but also protects a reasonable or unreasonable profit, it is only necessary for him to drop his prices slightly below the point that the law has fixed to protect his profits and his competitor must retire from the country or become a bankrupt, because he would then have to sell his goods at a loss and not a profit, if he continued to compete. The foreign competitor having retired, the home producer could raise his prices to any level that home competition would allow him and it is not probable that the foreigner who had already been driven out of the country would again return, no matter how inviting the field, as long as the law remained on the Statute Books that would enable his competitor to again put him out of business. Thirty or forty years ago, when we had numbers of small manufacturers, when there was honest competition without an attempt being made to restrict trade and the home market was more than able to consume the production of our mills and factories, the danger and the injury to the consumer of the country was not so great or apparent as it is to-day, when the control of many great industries has been concentrated in the hands of a few men or a few corporations, because domestic competition was prohibited. When we cease to have competition at home and the law prohibits competition from abroad by protecting profits, there is no relief for the consumer except to cry out for government regulation. To my mind, there is no more reason or justice in the government attempting to protect the profits of the manufacturers and producers of this country than here would be to protect the profits of the merchant or the lawyer, the banker or the farmer, or the wages of the laboring man. In almost every line of industry in the United States we have as great natural resources to develop as that of any country in the world. It is admitted by all that our machinery and methods of doing business are in advance of the other nations. By reason of the efficient use of American machinery by American labor, in most of the manufactures of this country, the labor cost per unit of production is no greater here than abroad. It is admitted, of course, that the actual wage of the American laborer is in excess of European countries, but as to most articles we manufacture the labor cost in this country is not more than double the labor cost abroad. When we consider that the average _ad valorem_ rate of duty levied at the custom house on manufactures of cotton goods is 53% of the value of the article imported and the total labor cost of the production of cotton goods in this country is only 21% of the factory value of the product, that the difference in labor cost at home and abroad is only about as one is to two, and that ten or eleven per cent of the value of the product levied at the custom house would equal the difference in the labor wage, it is apparent that our present tariff laws exceed the point where they equalize the difference in cost at home and abroad, and we realize how far they have entered into the domain of protecting profits for the home manufacturer. This is not only true of the manufacture of cotton goods, but of almost every schedule in the tariff bill. To protect profits of necessity means to protect inefficiency. It does not stimulate industry because a manufacturer standing behind a tariff wall that is protecting his profits is not driven to develop his business along the lines of greatest efficiency and greatest economy. This is clearly illustrated in a comparison of the wool and the iron and steel industries. Wool has had a specific duty that when worked out to an _ad valorem_ basis amounts to a tax of about 90% of the average value of all woolen goods imported into the United States, and the duties imposed have remained practically unchanged for forty years. During that time the wool industry has made comparatively little progress in cheapening the cost of its product and improving its business methods. On the other hand, in the iron and steel industry the tariff rate has been cut every time a tariff bill has been written. Forty years ago the tax on steel rails amounted to $17.50 a ton, to-day it amounts to $3.92. Forty years ago the tax on pig iron was $13.60 a ton, to-day it is $2.50. The same is true of most of the other articles in the iron and steel schedule, and yet the iron and steel industry has not languished; it has not been destroyed and it has not gone to the wall. It is the most compact, virile, fighting force of all the industries of America to-day. It has long ago expanded its productive capacity beyond the power of the American people to consume its output and is to-day facing out towards the markets of the world, battling for a part of the trade of foreign lands, where it must meet free competition, or, as is often the case, pay adverse tariff rates to enter the industrial fields of its competitor. Which course is the wiser for our government to take? The one that demands the protection of profits the continued policy of hot-house growth for our industries? The stagnation of development that follows where competition ceases, or, on the other hand, the gradual and insistent reduction of our tariff laws to a basis where the American manufacturer must meet honest competition, where he must develop his business along the best and most economic lines, where when he fights at home to control his market he is forging the way in the economic development of his business to extend his trade in the markets of the world. In my judgment, the future growth of our great industries lies beyond the seas. A just equalization of the burdens of taxation and honest competition, in my judgment, are economic truths; they are not permitted to-day by the laws of our country; we must face toward them, and not away from them. What I have said does not mean that I am in favor of going to free trade conditions or of being so radical in our legislation as to injure legitimate business, but I do mean that the period of exclusion has passed and the era of honest competition is here. Let us approach the solution of the problem involved with the determination to do what is right, what is safe, and what is reasonable. ELIZABETH ROBINS Mrs. Elizabeth Robins Parkes, the well-known novelist of the psychological school, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, August 6, 1862. She was taken from Louisville as a young child by her parents for the reason that her father had built a house on Staten Island, where she lived until her eleventh year, when she went to her grandmother's at Zanesville, Ohio, to attend Putnam Female Seminary, an institution of some renown, where her aunts on both sides of the house had received their training. _Mrs. Gano_, the one fine character of Miss Robins's first successful novel, _The Open Question_, is none other than her own grandmother, Jane Hussey Robins, to whom she dedicated the story; and the house in which she lived is faithfully described in that story. In 1874, when she was twelve years of age, Miss Robins made her first visit to Kentucky since having left the State some years before; and she has been back many times since, her latest visit being made in 1912. Her mother and many of her kinsfolk are buried in Cave Hill cemetery; and her brother, uncle, and other relatives, including Charles Neville Buck, the young Kentucky novelist, reside at Louisville. She is, therefore, a Kentuckian to the core. On January 12, 1885, she was married to George Richmond Parkes, of Boston, who died some years ago. While passing through London, in 1889, Mrs. Parkes decided it was the most pleasing city she had seen, and she established herself there. She now maintains Backset Town Farm, Henfield, Sussex; and a winter home at Chinsegut, Florida. Mrs. Parkes won her first fame as an actress, appearing in several of Ibsen's plays, and attracting wide attention for her work in _The Master Builder_, especially. While on the stage she began to write under the pen-name of "C. E. Raimond," so as not to confuse the public mind with her work as an actress; and this name served her well until _The Open Question_ appeared, at which time it became generally understood that the actress and author were one and the same person. She soon after began to write under her maiden name of Elizabeth Robins--and thus confounded herself with the wife of Joseph Pennell, the celebrated American etcher. With her long line of novels Miss Robins takes her place as one of the foremost writers Kentucky has produced. A full list of them is: _George Mandeville's Husband_ (New York, 1894); _The New Moon_ (New York, 1895); _Below the Salt_ (London, 1896), a collection of short-stories, containing, among others, _The Fatal Gift of Beauty_, which was the title of the American edition (Chicago, 1896); _The Open Question_ (New York, 1898). Miss Robins was friendly with Whistler, the great artist, and he designed the covers for _Below the Salt_ and _The Open Question_, a morbid but powerful novel. She has been especially fortunate in seizing upon a subject of vital, timely importance against which to build her books; and that is one of the real reasons for her success. What the public wants is what she wants to give them. When gold was discovered in the Klondike, and all the world was making a mad rush for those fields, Miss Robins wrote _The Magnetic North_ (New York, 1904). That fascinating story was followed by _A Dark Lantern_ (New York, 1905), "a story with a prologue;" _The Convert_ (New York, 1907), a novel based upon the suffragette movement in London, with which the author has been identified for seven years, and for which she has written more, perhaps, than any one else; _Under the Southern Cross_ (New York, 1907); _Woman's Secret_ (London, 1907); _Votes for Women: A Play in Three Acts_ (London, n. d. [1908]), a dramatization of _The Convert_, produced by Granville Barker at the Court Theatre, London, with great success. The title of this play, if not the contents, has gone into the remotest corners of the world as the accepted slogan of the suffragette cause. _Come and Find Me!_ (New York, 1908), another story of the Alaska country, originally serialized in _The Century Magazine_; _The Mills of the Gods_ (New York, 1908); _The Florentine Frame_ (New York, 1909); _Under His Roof_ (London, n. d. [1910]), yet another short-story of the suffragette struggle in London, printed in an exceedingly slender pamphlet; and _Why?_ (London, 1912), a brochure of questions and answers concerning her darling suffragettes. Upon these books Elizabeth Robins has taken a high place in contemporary letters. Her very latest story is _My Little Sister_, based upon a background of the white slave traffic in London, the shortened version of which appeared in _McClure's Magazine_ for December, 1912, concluded in the issue for January, 1913, after which it will be published in book form in America under the original title; but the English edition will bear this legend, "Where Are You Going To?" When the first part of this strong story was printed in _McClure's_ it attracted immediate and very wide attention, and again illustrated the ancient fact concerning the author's novels: her ability to make use of one of the big questions of the day as a scene for her story. Another book on woman's fight for the ballot, to be entitled _Way Stations_ may be published in March, 1913. Miss Robins is the ablest woman novelist Kentucky has produced; but her short-stories are not comparable to Mrs. Andrew's. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (June, 1904); _The Bookman_ (November, 1907); _McClure's Magazine_ (December, 1910); _Harper's Magazine_ (August, 1911). A PROMISING PLAYWRIGHT[35] [From _The Florentine Frame_ (New York, 1909)] Mrs. Roscoe invoked the right manager. _The Man at the Wheel_ was not only accepted, it was announced for early production. Special scenery was being painted. The rehearsals were speedily in full swing. The play had been slightly altered in council--one scene had been rewritten. Generously, Keith made his acknowledgements. "I should not have gone at it again, but for you," he told Mrs. Roscoe. "It had got stale--I hated it, till that day I read it to you." She smiled. "Nobody needs an audience so much as a dramatist. I was audience." "You brought the fresh eye, you saw how the _scène à faire_ could be made more poignant. Do you know," he said in that way he was getting into, re-envisaging with this companion some old outlook, "I sometimes feel the only difference between the poor thing and the good thing is that in one, the hand fell away too soon, and in the other it was able to give the screw just one more turn. You practically helped me to give the final turn that screwed the thing into shape." She shook her head, and then he told her that after a dozen rebuffs he had made up his mind to abandon the play that very day he and the Professor had talked of cinque cento ivories. It was not unnatural that the scant cordiality of Mrs. Mathew, whenever Keith encountered that lady at her sister's house, was insufficient to make him fail in what he acknowledged to Fanshawe as a sort of duty. This was: keeping Mrs. Roscoe fully informed of all the various stages in the contract-negotiation, the cast decisions, and the checkered fortunes of rehearsal. It is only fair to Mrs. Mathew to admit that she had one reason more cogent even than she quite realized for objecting to the new addition to a circle that had, as Genie complained, grown very circumscribed during the days of mourning. If keeping Mrs. Roscoe _au courant_ with the fortunes of the play had appeared to Keith in the light of an obligation imposed by common gratitude, Mrs. Mathew conceived it as no less her duty not to allow dislike of the new friend's presence to interfere with the sisterly relation--a relation which on the older woman's part had always had in it a touch of the maternal. If that young man was "getting himself accepted upon an intimate footing"--all the more important that Isabella's elder sister should be there at least as much as usual, if only to prevent the curious from "talking." In pursuance to this conception of her duty, one evening during the later rehearsals, Mrs. Mathew stood just inside the door of the cloak room that opened out of the famous gray and white marble entrance hall of the Roscoe house. Engaged in the homely occupation of depositing her "artics" in a corner where they would not be mixed up with other people's, Mrs. Mathew was arrested by a slight noise. Upon putting out her head she descried Miss Genie creeping down the stairs with a highly conspiratorial air. The girl, betraying every evidence of suppressed excitement, came to a halt before the closed doors of the drawing-room. The sound of Keith's voice reading aloud came softened through the heavy panels, and seemed to reassure the eavesdropper. She ran on noiseless feet to the low seat, where a man's hat showed black against the soft tone of the marble. She lifted the hat and appeared to be fumbling with the coat that was lying underneath. Suddenly the flash of a small square envelope on its way to the recesses of the visitor's overcoat! "What are you doing?" demanded Aunt Josephine, coming down the hall. "Oh! How you startled me! I'm not doing anything in particular--just waiting about till that blessed reading's over." She left the letter concealed in the folds of the coat, and for an instant she held the hat in front of her perturbed face: "Don't men's things have a nice Russia-leathery smell?" she remarked airily. "Genie Roscoe, what pranks are you playing?" As Mrs. Mathew took hold of the coat, the girl's self-possession failed her a little. She clung to the garment, sending anxious glances toward the door, whispering her nervous remonstrances and begging Aunt Josephine not to talk so loud. "You'll interrupt them." "What is going on?" demanded Aunt Josephine, relaxing her hold on the coat. "He's reading." "Your poor mother!" "Oh, she likes it." "Humph! And that young man--does he never get tired of his own works?" "It isn't _his_ works that he's reading. It's other people's--to make him forget the way they murder the play at rehearsal. It's French things they read, usually." Genie hurried on with a nervous attempt to be diverting. "There's a new poet, did you know? I like the new ones best, don't you? What I can't stand is when they are so ancient, that they're like that decayed old Ronsard--" The form Mrs. Mathew's literary criticism took was a violent shake of the visitor's coat. Out of the folds dropped a note. It was addressed in Genie's hand to Mr. Chester Keith. "What foolishness is this--" "Don't tell mother," prayed the girl, trying in vain to recover the envelope. Mrs. Mathew's face grew graver as she took in the girl's feverish anxiety. "Dear Aunt Josephine!" Genie slipped her hand coaxingly through the arm of the forbidding-looking lady. "I know you wouldn't be so unkind. For all mother seems so gentle and you sometimes look so severe, you're ten times as forgiving, really, as mother is. You're more broadminded," said the unblushing flatterer. "Oh, really"--Mrs. Mathew smiled a little grimly--but she had ere now proved herself as accessible to coaxing as the cast-iron seeming people often are. They betray, on occasion, a touching gratitude at not being taken at their own grim word. "Why should I hesitate to tell what you don't hesitate to do?" But Genie's arm was round her. "Oh, _you_ know why. Mother has such extravagantly high ideas about what people ought to do." In the other hand Mrs. Mathew still held the note, out of the girl's reach. "You make a practice of this?" "No, no. It's the first time, and I'll never do it again, if you'll promise not to tell on me." Mrs. Mathew hesitated. "Dearest auntie, _be nice_! If you tell," the girl protested, "I'll have no character to keep up and I'll write him real--well, real letters." "What do you mean? Isn't this a real letter?" "No. It doesn't say half. It's _nothing_ to what I could--" "Very well, if it's nothing--" Mrs. Mathew tore open the note. Before she could so much as unfold it, Genie had plucked it out of her hand and fled upstairs. Half way to the top she leaned over the bannisters. "If you tell I'll remember it all my life. If you don't I'll love you for ever and ever." "You're a very silly child. And I'm not at all sure I won't speak to your mother." "But I am!" the coppery head was hung ingratiatingly over the hand rail. Aunt Josephine was already thinking of matters more important than a school girl's foolishness. "How long has that man been here?" "Oh, hours and hours!" said Genie, accepting the diversion with due gratitude. "He stays longer and longer." "Humph! that's what I think!" Aunt Josephine stalked into the drawing-room. FOOTNOTE: [35] Copyright, 1909, by the Macmillan Company. ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE Miss Ellen Churchill Semple, Kentucky's distinguished anthropo-geographer, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1863. Vassar College conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts upon her in 1882, and the Master of Arts in 1891. She then studied for two years at the University of Leipzig. Miss Semple has devoted herself to the new science of anthropo-geography, which is the study of the influence of geographic conditions upon the development of mankind. Since 1897 she has contributed articles upon her subject to the New York _Journal of Geography_, the London _Geographical Journal_, and to other scientific publications. Miss Semple's first book, entitled _American History and Its Geographic Conditions_ (Boston, 1903), proclaimed her as the foremost student of the new science in the United States. A special edition of this work was published for the Indiana State Teachers' Association, which is said to be the largest reading circle in the world. In 1901 Miss Semple prepared an interesting study of _The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains_, which was issued in 1910 as a bulletin of the American Geographical Society. Miss Semple's latest work is an enormous volume, entitled _Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography_ (New York, 1911). This required seven long years of untiring research to prepare, and with its publication she came into her own position, which is quite unique in the whole range of American literature. Although scientific to the last degree, her writings have the real literary flavor, which is seldom found in such work. Miss Semple lectured at Oxford University in 1912, and in the late autumn of that year she discussed Japan, in which country she had experienced much of value and interest, before the Royal British Geographical Society in London, and later before the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh. Between various lectures in Scotland and England she continued her researches in the London libraries, returning to the United States as the year closed. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (December 31, 1903); _Political Science Quarterly_ (September, 1904). MAN A PRODUCT OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE[36] [From _Influences of Geographic Environment_ (New York, 1911)] Man is a product of the earth's surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust; but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the windswept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herds gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert, and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests. Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat. Man's relation to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems, largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked. FOOTNOTE: [36] Copyright, 1911, by Henry Holt and Company. MRS. ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON Mrs. Annie Fellows Johnston, creator of the famous "Little Colonel Series," was born at Evansville, Indiana, May 15, 1863, the daughter of a clergyman. Miss Fellows was educated in the public schools of Evansville, and then spent the year of 1881-1882 at the State University of Iowa. She was married at Evansville, in 1888, to William L. Johnston, who died four years later, leaving her a son and daughter. Mrs. Johnston's first arrival in Kentucky as a resident (though not as a visitor), was in 1898, and then she stayed only three years. Her son's quest of health led her first to Walton, New York, then to Arizona, where they spent a winter on the desert in sight of Camelback mountain, which suggested the legend of _In the Desert of Waiting_. From Arizona they went to California and then, in 1903, decided to try the climate of Texas, up in the hill country, north of San Antonio. Mrs. Johnston called her home "Penacres," and she lived there until her son's death in the fall of 1910. She and her daughter returned to Pewee Valley, Kentucky, in April, 1911, and purchased "The Beeches," the old home of Mrs. Henry W. Lawton, the widow of the famous American general. The house is situated in a six acre grove of magnificent beech-trees, and is a place often mentioned in "The Little Colonel" stories. Mrs. Johnston's books are: _Big Brother_ (Boston, 1893); _The Little Colonel_ (Boston, 1895); _Joel: A Boy of Galilee_ (Boston, 1895; Italian translation, 1900); _In League with Israel_ (Cincinnati, 1896), the second and last of Mrs. Johnston's books that was not issued by L. C. Page and Company, Boston; _Ole Mammy's Torment_ (1897); _Songs Ysame_ (1897), a book of poems, written with her sister, Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon, the social reformer of Evansville, Indiana; _The Gate of the Giant Scissors_ (1898); _Two Little Knights of Kentucky_ (1899), written in Kentucky; _The Little Colonel's House Party_ (1900); _The Little Colonel's Holidays_ (1901); _The Little Colonel's Hero_ (1902); _Cicely_ (1902); _Asa Holmes, or At the Crossroads_ (1902); _Flip's Islands of Providence_ (1903); _The Little Colonel at Boarding-School_ (1903), the children's "Order of Hildegarde" was founded on the story of _The Three Weavers_ in this volume; _The Little Colonel in Arizona_ (1904); _The Quilt that Jack Built_ (1904); _The Colonel's Christmas Vacation_ (1905); _In the Desert of Waiting_ (1905; Japanese translation, Tokio, 1906); _The Three Weavers_ (1905), a special edition of this famous story; _Mildred's Inheritance_ (1906); _The Little Colonel, Maid of Honor_ (1906); _The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding_ (1907); _Mary Ware_ (1908); _The Legend of the Bleeding Heart_ (1908); _Keeping Tryst_ (1908); _The Rescue of the Princess Winsome_ (1908); _The Jester's Sword_ (1909; Japanese translation, Tokio, 1910); _The Little Colonel's Good Times Book_ (1909); _Mary Ware in Texas_ (1910); and _Travellers Five_ (1911), a collection of short-stories for grown people, previously published in magazines, with a foreword by Bliss Carman. The little Kentucky girl--called the "Little Colonel" because of her resemblance to a Southern gentleman of the old school--has had Mrs. Johnston's attention for seventeen years, and she has recently announced that she is at work upon the twelfth and final volume of the "Little Colonel Series," as she feels that work for grown-ups is more worth her while. This last story of the series was published in the fall of 1912, entitled _Mary Ware's Promised Land_; and needless to say her "promised land" is Kentucky. There are "Little Colonel Clubs" all over the world, as Mrs. Johnston has learned from thousands of letters from children, and when she rings down the curtain upon her heroine many girls and boys in this and other countries will be sad. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Current Literature_ (April, 1901); _The Century_ (September, 1903). THE MAGIC KETTLE[37] [From _The Little Colonel's Holidays_ (Boston, 1901)] Once upon a time, so the story goes (you may read it yourself in the dear old tales of Hans Christian Andersen), there was a prince who disguised himself as a swineherd. It was to gain admittance to a beautiful princess that he thus came in disguise to her father's palace, and to attract her attention he made a magic caldron, hung around with strings of silver bells. Whenever the water in the caldron boiled and bubbled, the bells rang a little tune to remind her of him. "Oh, thou dear Augustine, All is lost and gone," they sang. Such was the power of the magic kettle, that when the water bubbled hard enough to set the bells a-tinkling, any one holding his hand in the steam could smell what was cooking in every kitchen in the kingdom. It has been many a year since the swineherd's kettle was set a-boiling and its string of bells a-jingling to satisfy the curiosity of a princess, but a time has come for it to be used again. Not that anybody nowadays cares to know what his neighbor is going to have for dinner, but all the little princes and princesses in the kingdom want to know what happened next. "What happened after the Little Colonel's house party?" they demand, and they send letters to the Valley by the score, asking "Did Betty go blind?" "Did the two little Knights of Kentucky ever meet Joyce again or find the Gate of the Giant Scissors?" "Did the Little Colonel ever have any more good times at Locust, or did Eugenia ever forget that she too had started out to build a Road of the Loving Heart?" It would be impossible to answer all these questions through the post-office, so that is why the magic kettle has been dragged from its hiding-place after all these years, and set a-boiling once more. Gather in a ring around it, all you who want to know, and pass your curious fingers through its wreaths of rising steam. Now you shall see the Little Colonel and her guests of the house party in turn, and the bells shall ring for each a different song. But before they begin, for the sake of some who may happen to be in your midst for the first time, and do not know what it is all about, let the kettle give them a glimpse into the past, that they may be able to understand all that is about to be shown to you. Those who already know the story need not put their fingers into the steam, until the bells have rung this explanation in parenthesis. (In Lloydsboro Valley stands an old Southern mansion, known as "Locust." The place is named for a long avenue of giant locust-trees stretching a quarter of a mile from house to entrance gate in a great arch of green. Here for years an old Confederate colonel lived all alone save for the negro servants. His only child, Elizabeth, had married a Northern man against his wishes, and gone away. From that day he would not allow her name to be spoken in his presence. But she came back to the Valley when her little daughter Lloyd was five years old. People began calling the child the Little Colonel because she seemed to have inherited so many of her grandfather's lordly ways as well as a goodly share of his high temper. The military title seemed to suit her better than her own name for in her fearless baby fashion she won her way into the old man's heart and he made a complete surrender. Afterward when she and her mother and "Papa Jack" went to live with him at Locust, one of her favorite games was playing soldier. The old man never tired of watching her march through the wide halls with his spurs strapped to her tiny slipper heels, and her dark eyes flashing out fearlessly from under the little Napoleon cap she wore. She was eleven when she gave her house party. One of the guests was Joyce Ware, whom some of you have met, perhaps, in "The Gate of the Giant Scissors," a bright thirteen-year-old girl from the West. Eugenia Forbes was another. She was a distant cousin of Lloyd's, who had no home-life like other girls. Her winters were spent in a fashionable New York boarding-school, and her summers at the Waldorf-Astoria, except the few weeks when her busy father could find time to take her to some seaside resort. The third guest, Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis, or Betty, as every one lovingly called her, was Mrs. Sherman's little god-daughter. She was an orphan, boarding on a backwoods farm on Green River. She had never been on the cars until Lloyd's invitation found its way to the Cuckoo's Nest. Only these three came to stay in the house, but Malcolm and Keith MacIntyre (the two little Knights of Kentucky) were there nearly every day. So was Rob Moore, one of the Little Colonel's summer neighbors. The four Bobs were four little foxterrier puppies named for Rob, who had given one to each of the girls. They were so much alike they could only be distinguished by the colour of the ribbons tied around their necks. Tarbaby was the Little Colonel's pony, and Lad the one that Betty rode during her visit. After six weeks of picnics and parties, and all sorts of surprises and good times, the house party came to a close with a grand feast of lanterns. Joyce regretfully went home to the little brown house in Plainsville, Kansas, taking her Bob with her. Eugenia and her father went to New York, but not until they had promised to come back for Betty in the fall, and take her abroad with them. It was on account of something that had happened at the house party, but which is too long a tale to repeat here. Betty stayed on at Locust until the end of the summer in the House Beautiful, as she called her god-mother's home, and here on the long vine-covered porch, with its stately white pillars, you shall see them first through the steam of the magic caldron). Listen! Now the kettle boils and the bells begin the story! FOOTNOTE: [37] Copyright, 1901, by L. C. Page and Company. EVA A. MADDEN Miss Eva Anne Madden, author of a group of popular stories for children, was born near Bedford, Kentucky, October 26, 1863, the elder sister of Mrs. George Madden Martin, creator of _Emmy Lou_. Miss Madden was educated in the public schools of Louisville, Kentucky, after which she took a normal course. At the mature age of fourteen she was writing for _The Courier-Journal_; two years later she was doing book reviews for _The Evening Post_; and when eighteen years of age she became a teacher in the public schools. Miss Madden taught for more than ten years, or until 1892, when she went to New York and engaged in newspaper work. Her first book, _Stephen, or the Little Crusaders_ (New York, 1901), was published only a few months before she sailed for Europe, where she has resided for the last eleven years. Miss Madden's _The I Can School_ (New York, 1902), was followed by her other books, _The Little Queen_ (Boston, 1903); _The Soldiers of the Duke_ (Boston, 1904); and her most recent story, _Two Royal Foes_ (New York, 1907). Miss Madden has been the Italian representative of a London firm since 1907; and since 1908 she has been the correspondent of the Paris edition of the _New York Herald_ for the city in which she lives, Florence, Italy. She had a very good short-story in _The Century_ for February, 1911, entitled _The Interrupted Pen_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE END OF "THE I CAN SCHOOL."[38] [From _The I Can School_ (New York, 1902)] "Good-bye, Miss Ellison," she said, putting up her little mouth to be kissed. "I'm sorry that it's the end of the 'I Can School.'" Then Miss Ellison was all smiles. "You sweet little thing," she said, which was exactly what she had done ten months before. How long ago that seemed to Virginia. How stupid she had been about learning to spell that easy "cat." Now she could read a whole page about a black cat which got into the nest of a white hen, and she could add numbers, and "write vertical." She had painted in a book, and modeled a lovely half-apple, made real by a stem and the seeds of a russet she had had for lunch one day. She knew the name of all the birds about Fairview, and she could tell about the wild flowers. Altogether she felt very learned and scornful of a certain small person who had thought Kentucky the name of a little girl, and who had known nothing of George Washington, and who had called C-A-T kitten-puss. Virginia's mamma was very proud of all her little girl knew. She did not wait for Virginia to get her work from the janitor. She took it all carefully home to show her husband. "Papa," said Virginia, the moment Mr. Barton entered the house that evening, "it's vacation!" "Vacation!" said her father. "My! my! I remember that there was a time, Miss Barton, when I loved it better than school; do you?" Virginia hesitated. "Ten months," she said at last, "is a lot of school. Lucretia and Catherine seem just as tired, papa. Their lessons don't interest them now that it's so hot. I love the 'I Can School,' papa; but it's nice to stay at home and play 'Lady come to see.'" This was a very long speech for Virginia, the longest that she ever had made. Her papa laughed. "Miss Barton," he said, "profound student that you are, I see that in some things you are not altogether different from your parent. But let me remind you, Miss Barton, when you feel at times a little tired of vacation, that the 'I Can' will begin again on the tenth of September." "And Miss Ellison will be so glad to see me!" said Virginia confidently. Her papa laughed. "As for that, Miss Barton--" "Now don't, Edward," interrupted his wife. "I am sure, Virginia, that Miss Ellison will be glad to see you in the fall. If I were you I would write her a little letter in the vacation. I have her address." "And I'll tell Billy and Carter and Harry and all the children, and we'll all write so that she won't forget us. And she'll answer them, mamma, won't she?" "I think she will," answered her mother. "It will be very nice for you to write to her." But her husband said in a low voice, "Poor Miss Ellison." "Good Miss Ellison, papa," said Virginia. "She's nice and I love her." FOOTNOTE: [38] Copyright, 1902, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. JOHN FOX, Jr. John Fox, Junior, Kentucky's master maker of mountain myths, was born at Stony Point, near Paris, Kentucky, December 16, 1863, the son of a schoolmaster. He was christened "John William Fox, Junior," but he early discarded his middle name. By his father he was largely fitted for Kentucky, now Transylvania, University, which institution he entered at the age of fifteen, spending the two years of 1878-1880 there, when he left and went to Harvard. Mr. Fox was graduated from Harvard in 1883, the youngest man in his class. Though he had written nothing during his collegiate career, upon quitting Cambridge he joined the staff of the New York _Sun_ and later entered Columbia Law School. He soon abandoned law and went with the _New York Times_, where he remained several months, when illness--blind and blessed goddess in disguise!--compelled him to go south in search of health. At length he found himself high up in the Cumberland Mountains, associated with his father and brother in a mining venture. He also taught school for a time, but the mountaineers of Kentucky were upon him, and he began to weave romances about them. Mr. Fox's first story, _A Mountain Europa_ (New York, 1894), originally appeared in two parts in _The Century Magazine_ for September and October, 1892. It was dedicated to James Lane Allen, whom its author had to thank for encouragement when he stood most in need of it. _On Hell-fer-Sartain Creek_, which followed fast upon the heels of his first book, made Mr. Fox famous in a fortnight. Written in a day and a half, _Harper's Weekly_ paid him the munificent sum of six dollars for it, and printed it back with the advertisements in the issue for November 24, 1894. The ending was transposed just a bit and a word or two discarded for apter words before it was published in book form; and these revisions were very fine, greatly improving the tale. In its most recent dress it counts less than five small pages; and it may be read in as many minutes. The mountain dialect prevails throughout. It "admits an epic breadth," the biggest thing Mr. Fox has done hitherto, and now generally regarded as a very great short-story. _A Cumberland Vendetta and Other Stories_ (New York, 1895), contained, besides the title-story, first published in _The Century_, a reprinting of _A Mountain Europa_--which made the third time it had been printed in three years--_The Last Stetson_, and _On Hell-fer-Sartain Creek_. This volume was followed by Mr. Fox's finest work, entitled _Hell-fer-Sartain and Other Stories_ (New York, 1897). Of the ten stories in this little volume but four of them are in correct English, the others, the best ones, being in dialect. The last and longest story, _A Purple Rhododendron_, originally appeared in _The Southern Magazine_, a now defunct periodical of Louisville, Kentucky. _The Kentuckians_ (New York, 1897), was published a short time after _Hell-fer-Sartain and Other Stories_. This novelette pitted a man of the Blue Grass against a man of the Kentucky hills, and the struggle was not overly severe; the reading world did little more than remark its appearance and its passing. When the Spanish-American war was declared Mr. Fox went to Cuba as a Rough Rider, but left that organization to act as correspondent for _Harper's Weekly_. He witnessed the fiercest fighting from the firing lines, and his own experiences were largely written into his first long novel, entitled _Crittenden_ (New York, 1900). This tale of love with war entwined was well told; and its concluding clause: "God was good that Christmas!" has become one of his most famous expressions. After the war Mr. Fox returned to the South. _Bluegrass and Rhododendron_ (New York, 1901), was a series of descriptive essays upon life in the Kentucky mountains, in which Mr. Fox did for the hillsmen what Mr. Allen had done for the customs and traditions of his own section of the state in _The Bluegrass Region of Kentucky_. It also embodied his own personal experiences as a member of the police guard in Kentucky and Virginia. The word "rhododendron" is Mr. Fox's shibboleth, and he seemingly never tires of writing it. _The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come_ (New York, 1903), is his best long novel so far. The boy, Chad, is, perhaps, his one character-contribution to American fiction; and the boy's dog, "Jack," stands second to the little hero in the hearts of the thousands who read the book. The opening chapters are especially fine. The love story of _The Little Shepherd_ is most attractive; and the Civil War is presented in a manner not wholly laborious. After _Hell-fer-Sartain_ this novel is far and away the best thing Mr. Fox has done. _Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories_ (New York, 1904), contained the title-story and five others, including _The Last Stetson_, which had appeared many years before in _Harper's Weekly_, and later in _A Cumberland Vendetta_. Mr. Fox attempted to reach the theatre of the Russian-Japanese War, as a correspondent for _Scribner's Magazine_, but he was not allowed to join the ever advancing armies. His experiences may be read in _Following the Sun-Flag_ (New York, 1905), with its tell-tale sub-title: "a vain pursuit through Manchuria." His next work was a novelette, _A Knight of the Cumberland_ (New York, 1906), first published as a serial in _Scribner's Magazine_. It was well done and rather interesting. Mr. Fox spent the greater part of the year of 1907 in work upon _The Trail of the Lonesome Pine_ (New York, 1908), a story that must be placed beside _The Little Shepherd_ when any classification of the author's work is made. The heroine, June, is none other than Chad in feminine garb. The book contains some of the most excellent writing Mr. Fox has done, the descriptions being especially fine. It was dramatized by Eugene Walter and successfully produced. A few months after the publication of _The Trail_, the author married Fritzi Scheff, the operatic star, to whom he had inscribed his story. They have a home at Big Stone Gap, in the Virginia mountains. In April, 1912, Mr. Fox's most recent novel, _The Heart of the Hills_, began as a serial in _Scribner's_, to be concluded in the issue for March, 1913. It is red with recent happenings in Kentucky, happenings which are, at the present time, too hackneyed to be of very great interest to the people of that state.[39] It must be remembered always that Mr. Fox is a story-teller pure and simple, and that he seemingly makes little effort to arrive at the stage of perfection in the mere matter of writing that characterizes the work of a group of his contemporaries. That he is a wonderful maker of short-stories in the mountain dialect is certain; but that he is a great novelist is yet to be established. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Current Literature Magazine_ (New York, September, 1903); _Little Pilgrimages Among the Men Who Have Written Famous Books_, by E. F. Harkins, (Boston, 1903, Second Series); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. iv). THE CHRISTMAS TREE ON PIGEON[40] [From _Collier's Weekly_ (December 11, 1909)] The sun of Christmas poured golden blessings on the head of the valley first; it shot winged shafts of yellow light through the great Gap and into the month of Pigeon; it darted awakening arrows into the coves and hollows on the Head of Pigeon, between Brushy Ridge and Black Mountain; and one searching ray flashed through the open door of the little log schoolhouse at the forks of Pigeon and played like a smile over the waiting cedar that stood within--alone. Down at the mines below, the young doctor had not waited the coming of that sun. He had sprung from his bed at dawn, had built his own fire, had dressed hurriedly, and gone hurriedly on his rounds, leaving a pill here, a powder there, and a word of good cheer everywhere. That was his Christmas tree, the cedar in the little schoolhouse--his and _hers_. And _she_ was coming up from the Gap that day to dress that tree and spread the joy of Christmas among mountain folks, to whom the joy of Christmas was quite unknown. An hour later the passing mail-carrier, from over Black Mountain, stopped with switch uplifted at his office door. "Them fellers over the Ridge air comin' over to shoot up yo' Christmas tree," he drawled. The switch fell and he was gone. The young doctor dropped by his fire--stunned; for just that thing had happened ten years before to the only Christmas tree that had ever been heard of in those hills except his own. From that very schoolhouse some vandals from the Crab Orchard and from over Black Mountain had driven the Pigeon Creek people after a short fight, and while the surprised men, frightened women and children, and the terrified teacher scurried to safety behind rocks and trees, had shot the tree to pieces. That was ten years before, but even now, though there were some old men and a few old women who knew the Bible from end to end, many grown people and nearly all of the children had never heard of the Book, or of Christ, or knew that there was a day known as Christmas Day. That such things were so had hurt the doctor to the heart, and that was why, as Christmas drew near, he had gone through the out-of-the-way hollows at the Head of Pigeon, and got the names and ages of all the mountain children; why for a few days before Christmas there had been such a dressing of dolls in the sweetheart's house down in the Gap as there had not been since she herself was a little girl; and why now the cedar tree stood in the little log schoolhouse at the forks of Pigeon. Moreover, there was as yet enmity between the mountaineers of Pigeon and the mountaineers over the Ridge and Black Mountain, who were jealous and scornful of any signs of the foreign influence but recently come into the hills. The meeting-house, courthouse, and the schoolhouse were yet favorite places for fights among the mountaineers. There was yet no reverence at all for Christmas, and the same vandals might yet regard a Christmas tree as an imported frivolity to be sternly rebuked. The news was not only not incredible, it probably was true; and with this conclusion some very unpleasant lines came into the young doctor's kindly face and he sprang from his horse. Two hours later he had a burly mountaineer with a Winchester posted on the road leading to the Crab Orchard, another on the mountainside overlooking the little valley, several more similarly armed below, while he and two friends, with revolvers, buckled on, waited for the coming party, with their horses hitched in front of his office door. This Christmas tree was to be. It was almost noon when the doctor heard gay voices and happy laughter high on the ridge, and he soon saw a big spring wagon drawn by a pair of powerful bays--Major, the colored coachman, on the seat, the radiant faces of the Christmas-giving party behind him, and a big English setter playing in the snow alongside. Up Pigeon then the wagon went with the doctor and his three friends on horseback beside it, past the long batteries of coke-ovens with grinning darkies, coke-pullers, and loaders idling about them, up the rough road through lanes of snow-covered rhododendrons winding among tall oaks, chestnuts, and hemlocks, and through circles and arrows of gold with which the sun splashed the white earth--every cabin that they passed tenantless, for the inmates had gone ahead long ago--and on to the little schoolhouse that sat on a tiny plateau in a small clearing, with snow-tufted bushes of laurel on every side and snowy mountains rising on either hand. The door was wide open and smoke was curling from the chimney. A few horses and mules were hitched to the bushes near by. Men, boys, and dogs were gathered around a big fire in front of the building; and in a minute women, children, and more dogs poured out of the schoolhouse to watch the coming cavalcade. Since sunrise the motley group had been waiting there: the women thinly clad in dresses of worsted or dark calico, and a shawl or short jacket or man's coat, with a sunbonnet or "fascinator" on their heads, and men's shoes on their feet--the older ones stooped and thin, the younger ones carrying babies, and all with weather-beaten faces and bare hands; the men and boys without overcoats, their coarse shirts unbuttoned, their necks and upper chests bared to the biting cold, their hands thrust in their pockets as they stood about the fire, and below their short coat sleeves their wrists showing chapped and red; while to the little boys and girls had fallen only such odds and ends of clothing as the older ones could spare. Quickly the doctor got his party indoors and to work on the Christmas tree. Not one did he tell of the impending danger, and the Colt's .45 bulging under this man's shoulder or on that man's hip, and the Winchester in the hollow of an arm here and there were sights too common in these hills to arouse suspicion in anybody's mind. The cedar tree, shorn of its branches at the base and banked with mosses, towered to the angle of the roof. There were no desks in the room except the one table used by the teacher. Long, crude wooden benches with low backs faced the tree, with an aisle leading from the door between them. Lap-robes were hung over the windows, and soon a gorgeous figure of Santa Claus was smiling down from the very tiptop of the tree. Ropes of gold and silver tinsel were swiftly draped around and up and down; enmeshed in these were little red Santas, gaily colored paper horns, filled with candy, colored balls, white and yellow birds, little colored candles with holders to match, and other glittering things; while over the whole tree a glistening powder was sprinkled like a mist of shining snow. Many presents were tied to the tree, and under it were the rest of the labeled ones in a big pile. In a semicircle about the base sat the dolls in pink, yellow, and blue, and looking down the aisle to the door. Packages of candy in colored Japanese napkins and tied with a narrow red ribbon were in another pile, with a pyramid of oranges at its foot. And yet there was still another pile for unexpected children, that the heart of none should be sore. Then the candles were lighted and the door flung open to the eager waiting crowd outside. In a moment every seat was silently filled by the women and children, and the men, stolid but expectant, lined the wall. The like of that tree no soul of them had ever seen before. Only a few of the older ones had ever seen a Christmas tree of any kind and they but once; and they had lost that in a free-for-all fight. And yet only the eyes of them showed surprise or pleasure. There was no word--no smile, only unwavering eyes mesmerically fixed on the wonderful tree. The young doctor rose, and only the sweetheart saw that he was nervous, restless, and pale. As best he could he told them what Christmas was and what it meant to the world; and he had scarcely finished when a hand beckoned to him from the door. Leaving one of his friends to distribute the presents, he went outside to discover that one vandal had come on ahead, drunk and boisterous. Promptly the doctor tied him to a tree, shouldered a Winchester, and himself took up a lonely vigil on the mountainside. Within, Christmas went on. When a name was called a child came forward silently, usually shoved to the front by some relative, took what was handed to it, and, dumb with delight, but too shy even to murmur a word of thanks, silently returned to its seat with the presents hugged to its breast--presents that were simple, but not to those mountain mites; colored pictures and illustrated books they were, red plush albums, simple games, fascinators and mittens for the girls; pocket-knives, balls, firecrackers, and horns, mittens, caps, and mufflers for the boys; a doll dressed in everything a doll should wear for each little girl, no one of whom had ever seen a doll before, except what was home-made from an old dress or apron tied in several knots to make the head and body. Twice only was the silence broken. One boy quite forgot himself when given a pocket-knife. He looked at it suspiciously and incredulously, turned it over in his hand, opened it and felt the edge of the blade, and, panting with excitement, cried: "Hit's a shore 'nough knife!" And again when, to make sure that nobody had been left out, though all the presents were gone, the master of ceremonies asked if there was any other little boy or girl who had received nothing, there arose a bent, toothless old woman in a calico dress and baggy black coat, her gray hair straggling from under her black sunbonnet, and her hands gnarled and knotted from work and rheumatism. Simply as a child, she spoke: "I hain't got nothin'." Gravely the giver of the gifts asked her to come forward, and, nonplussed, searched the tree for the most glittering thing he could find. Then all the women pressed forward and then the men, until all the ornaments were gone, even the half-burned candles with their colored holders, which the men took eagerly and fastened in their coats, clasping the holders to their lapels or fastening the bent wire in their button-holes, and pieces of tinsel rope, which they threw over their shoulders--so that the tree stood at last just as it was when brought from the wild woods outside. Straightway then the young doctor hurried the departure of the merry-makers from the Gap. Already the horses stood hitched, and, while the laprobes were being carried out, a mountaineer, who had brought along a sack of apples, lined up the men and boys, and at a given word started running down the road, pouring out the apples as he ran, while the men and boys scrambled for them, rolling and tussling in the snow. As the party moved away, the mountaineers waved their hands and shouted good-by to the doctor, too shy still to pay much heed to the other "furriners" in the wagon. The doctor looked back once with a grateful sigh of relief but no one in the wagon knew that there had been any danger that day. How great the danger had been not even the doctor knew then. For the coming vandals had got as far as the top of the Dividing Ridge, had there quarreled and fought among themselves, so that, as the party drove away, one invader was at that minute cursing his captors, who were setting him free, and high upon the ridge another lay dead in the snow. In time there was a wedding at the Gap, and long afterward the doctor, riding by the little schoolhouse, stopped at the door, and from his horse shoved it open. The Christmas tree stood just as he had left it on Christmas Day, only, like the evergreens on the wall and over the windows, it, too, was brown, withered and dry. Gently he closed the door and rode on. FOOTNOTES: [39] When Mr. Fox followed the trail of the Goebel tragedy he was poaching upon the especial preserves of Miss Eleanor Talbot Kinkead, whose romance of the "autocrat," _The Courage of Blackburn Blair_ (New York, 1907), was widely read and reviewed. Miss Kinkead was born in Kentucky, and, besides the story mentioned above, is the author of _'Gainst Wind and Tide_ (Chicago, 1892); _Young Greer of Kentucky_ (Chicago, 1895); _Florida Alexander_ (Chicago, 1898); and _The Invisible Bond_ (New York, 1906). [40] Copyright, 1909, by P. F. Collier and Son. FANNIE C. MACAULAY Mrs. Fannie Caldwell Macaulay ("Frances Little"), "the lady of the Decoration," was born at Shelbyville; Kentucky, November 22, 1863, the daughter of a jurist. She was educated at Science Hill Academy, Shelbyville, a noted school for girls. Miss Caldwell was married to James Macaulay of Liverpool, England, but her marriage proved unhappy. From 1899 to 1902 Mrs. Macaulay was a kindergarten teacher in Louisville, Kentucky; and from 1902 to 1907 she was engaged as supervisor of kindergarten work at Hiroshima, Japan. From Japan she wrote letters home which were so charming and clever that her niece, Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice, the Louisville novelist, insisted that she make them into a book. The result was _The Lady of the Decoration_ (New York, 1906), for more than a year the most popular book in America. This little epistolary tale of heroic struggle for one's work and one's love, was read in all parts of the English-speaking world. It set the high-water mark, probably, for even the "six best sellers." Mrs. Macaulay's second book, _Little Sister Snow_ (New York, 1909), was the tender love story of a young American and a Japanese girl. The lad sailed away to his American sweetheart, leaving "Little Sister Snow" blowing him kisses from her native shore. Mrs. Macaulay's latest story, _The Lady and Sada San_ (New York, 1912), was published in London under the title of _The Lady Married_, which was clearer, as it is the sequel to _The Lady of the Decoration_. The Lady's husband, Jack, sails away to China in pursuit of his scientific duties, leaving her lonely in Kentucky. She decides to make another journey to Japan; and on the way over she falls in with a charming young American-Japanese girl, Sada San, whom she subsequently saves from a most cruel fate. She then finds her husband, ill and exhausted with his long trip, and returns with him to Kentucky. The descriptions of the countries through which she passes are very fine: the best writing the author has shown hitherto. The little volume was reported as the best selling book in America at Christmas time of 1912. Mrs. Macaulay has spent much of her life during the last several years in Japan, but her home is at Louisville. She is a prominent club woman, and a charming lecturer upon the beauties of Nippon. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (June, 1906); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). APPROACHING JAPAN[41] [From _The Lady of the Decoration_ (New York, 1906)] Still on Board. August 18th. DEAR MATE: I am writing this in my berth with the curtains drawn. No I am not a bit sea-sick, just popular. One of the old ladies is teaching me to knit, the short-haired missionary reads aloud to me, the girl from South Dakota keeps my feet covered up, and Dear Pa and Little Germany assist me to eat. The captain has had a big bathing tank rigged up for the ladies, and I take a cold plunge every morning. It makes me think of our old days at the cottage up at the Cape. Didn't we have a royal time that summer and weren't we young and foolish? It was the last good time I had for many a long day--but there, none of that! Last night I had an adventure, at least it was next door to one. I was sitting up on deck when Dear Pa came by and asked me to walk with him. After several rounds we sat down on the pilot house steps. The moon was as big as a wagon wheel and the whole sea flooded with silver, while the flying fishes played hide and seek in the shadows. I forgot all about Dear Pa and was doing a lot of thinking on my own account when he leaned over and said: "I hope you don't mind talking to me. I am very, very lonely." Now I thought I recognized a grave symptom, and when he began to tell me about his dear departed, I knew it was time to be going. "You have passed through it," he said. "You can sympathize." I crossed my fingers in the dark. "We are both seeking a life work in a foreign field--" he began again, but just here the purser passed. He almost stumbled over us in the dark and when he saw me and my elderly friend, he actually smiled! Don't you dare tell Jack about this, I should never hear the last of it. Can you realize that I am three whole weeks from home! I do, every second of it. Sometimes when I stop to think what I am doing my heart almost bursts! But then I am so used to the heartache that I might be lonesome without it; who knows? If I can only do what is expected of me, if I can only pick up the pieces of this smashed-up life of mine and patch them into a decent whole that you will not be ashamed of, then I will be content. The first foreign word I have learned is "Alohaoe," I think it means "my dearest love to you." Anyhow I send it laden with the tenderest meaning. God bless and keep you all, and bring me back to you a wiser and a gladder woman. FOOTNOTE: [41] Copyright, 1906, by the Century Company. JAMES D. BRUNER James Dowden Bruner, editor of many masterpieces of French literature, as well as an original critic of that literature, was born near Leitchfield, Kentucky, May 19, 1864. He was graduated from Franklin College, Franklin, Indiana, in 1888, and then taught French and German at Franklin for two years. Professor Bruner studied a year in Paris and Florence and, on his return to this country, in 1893, he was elected professor of Romance languages in the University of Illinois. Johns Hopkins University conferred the degree of Ph. D. upon him, in 1894, his dissertation being _The Phonology of the Pistojese Dialect_ (Baltimore, 1894, a brochure). From 1895 to 1899 Dr. Bruner was professor of Romance languages and literatures in the University of Chicago; from 1901 to 1909 he held a similar chair in the University of North Carolina; and since 1909 he has been president of Chowan College, Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Dr. Bruner has edited, with introductions and critical notes, _Les Adventures du Dernier Abencerage_, par Chateaubriand (New York, 1903); _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, par Octave Feuillet (Boston, 1904); _Hernani_, par Victor Hugo (New York, 1906); and _Le Cid_, par Pierre Corneille (New York, 1908), his finest critical edition of any French classic hitherto. His _Studies in Victor Hugo's Dramatic Characters_ (Boston, 1908), announced the advent of a new critic of the great Frenchman's plays. It is an excellent piece of work. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE FRENCH CLASSICAL DRAMA[42] [From _Le Cid_, par Pierre Corneille (New York, 1908)] Corneille in the _Cid_ founded the French classical drama. Before the appearance of this masterpiece, a transition drama containing characteristics of the tragi-comedy as well as of the regular classical tragedy, of which Corneille's next three plays, _Horace_, _Cinna_, and _Polyeucte_, were to be perfect examples, the tragi-comedy prevailed in France. This tragi-comedy, or irregular drama, was a Renaissance product, having a history and characteristics of its own, being largely influenced by the tragedies of Seneca. Its most important characteristics are non-historic subjects, serious or tragic plots, the mixture of comic and tragic elements or tones, the high rank of the leading characters, the _style noble_, looseness of structure, the disregard of the minor or Italian unities of time and place, the classical form of verse and number of acts, romanesque elements, and a happy ending. The most striking characteristic of the French classical drama of the seventeenth century, as of the modern short story, is that of compression. This statement is true both as to its form and its content. The accidental accessories of splendid decorations, magnificent costumes, subsidiary plots, and secondary characters that might detract from the main situation or obscure the general impression, are, as far as possible, sacrificed to the essential or necessary interests of dramatic art. Improbable and irrational elements are reduced to a minimum. Digressions, episodes, long soliloquies, oratorical tirades, minute descriptions of external nature, and complicated machinery that would encumber the plot or destroy proportion, are largely eliminated. The classical dramatist is too sensitive to the beautiful, the sublime, the essential, and the universal to admit into his conception of fine art either moral and physical deformity or the accidental and particular aspects of life. Classical tragedy is furthermore narrow in its choice of subject and form, in its number and range of characters, in its representation of material and physical action on the stage, and in its number of events, incidents, and actions. Its subjects and materials are taken almost wholly from ancient classical and Hebrew sources. Mediaeval, national, and modern foreign raw material, whether life, history, legend, or literature, is seldom utilized. Its manners and ideas are those of the court and the _salons_, and its religion is pagan. Its language is general, cold, regular, and conventional, and its versification is confined to rimed Alexandrine couplets, with the immovable caesura and little _enjambement_. The Frenchman's love of proportion, symmetry, restraint, and logical order led him to the cult of form. In striving after perfection of form, he naturally adopted compression as the best method of expressing this innate artistic reserve. This compactness and concentration of form, this compressed brevity, which the Frenchman inherited from the Latins, is well illustrated by the following lines from Wordsworth: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of hand, And eternity in an hour. FOOTNOTE: [42] Copyright, 1909, by the Author. MADISON CAWEIN Madison Cawein, whom English critics name the greatest living American poet, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 23, 1865. He was christened "Madison Julius Cawein," but he had not gotten far in the literary lane before his middle name was dropped, though the "J." may be found upon the title-pages of his earlier books. After some preparatory work he entered the Louisville Male High School, in 1881, at the age of sixteen years. At high school Madison Cawein began to write rhymes which he read to the students and teachers upon stated occasions, and he was hailed by them as a true maker of song. He was graduated in 1886 in a class of thirteen members. Being poor in purse, Mr. Cawein accepted a position in a Louisville business house, and he is one of the few American poets who wrote in the midst of such commercialism. His was the singing heart, not to be crushed by conditions or environment of any kind. The year after his graduation he collected the best of his school verse and published them as his first book, _Blooms of the Berry_ (Louisville, 1887). In some way William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich saw this volume, praised it, and fixed the future poet in his right path. _The Triumph of Music_ (Louisville, 1888), sounded after _The Blooms of the Berry_, and since that time hardly a year has passed without the poet putting forth a slender volume. The next few years saw the publication of his _Accolon of Gaul_ (Louisville, 1889); _Lyrics and Idyls_ (Louisville, 1890); _Days and Dreams_ (New York, 1891); _Moods and Memories_ (New York, 1892); _Red Leaves and Roses_ (New York, 1893); _Poems of Nature and Love_ (New York, 1893); _Intimations of the Beautiful_ (New York, 1894), one of his longest poems; _The White Snake_ (Louisville, 1895), metrical translations from the German poets; _Undertones_ (Boston, 1896), which contained some of the finest lyrics he has done so far; _The Garden of Dreams_ (Louisville, 1896); _Shapes and Shadows_ (New York, 1898); _Idyllic Monologues_ (Louisville, 1898); _Myth and Romance_ (New York, 1899); _One Day and Another_ (Boston, 1901), a lyrical eclogue; _Weeds by the Wall_ (Louisville, 1901); _A Voice on the Wind_ (Louisville, 1902). A glance at these titles, following fast upon each other, convinces the reader that Mr. Cawein was writing and publishing far too much, that he was not sufficiently critical of his work. Edmund Gosse, the famous English critic, has always been one of Mr. Cawein's most ardent admirers, and, in 1903, he selected the best of his poems, wrote a delightful introduction for them, and they were published in London under the title of _Kentucky Poems_. This volume brought the poet many new friends, as it assembled the best of his work from volumes long out of print and rather difficult to procure. _The Vale of Tempe_ (New York, 1905), contained the best of Mr. Cawein's work written since the publication of _Weeds by the Wall_ in 1901. _Nature-Notes and Impressions_ (New York, 1906), a collection of poems and prose-pastels, was especially notable for the fact that it contained the first and only short-story the poet has written, entitled "Woman or--What?" _The Poems of Madison Cawein_ (Indianapolis, 1907, five volumes), charmingly illustrated by Mr. Eric Pape, the Boston artist, with Mr. Gosse's introduction, brought together all of Mr. Cawein's work that he cared to rescue from many widely scattered volumes. He made many revisions in the poems, some of which (in the judgment of the writer) tend to mar their original beauty. But it is a work of which any poet may be proud; and it is not surpassed in quality or quantity by any living American. Mr. Cawein's _Ode in Commemoration of the Founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony_ (Louisville, 1908), which he read at Gloucester in August, 1907, was rather lengthy, but it contained many strong and fine lines; and a group of New England sonnets, some of the best he has done, appeared at the end of the ode. His _New Poems_ (London, 1909), was followed by _The Giant and the Star_ (Boston, 1909), a small collection of children's verse, dedicated to his little son, who furnished their inspiration. _Let Us Do the Best that We Can_ (Chicago, 1909), was a beautiful brochure; and _The Shadow Garden and Other Plays_ (New York, 1910), was four chamber-dramas which have been highly praised, and which contain some of the most delicate work the poet has done. _So Many Ways_ (Chicago, 1911), was another pamphlet-poem; and it was followed by _Poems_ (New York, 1911), selected from the whole range of his work by himself, with a foreword by William Dean Howells. Mr. Cawein's latest volume is entitled _The Poet, the Fool and the Faeries_ (Boston, 1912). It brings together his work of the last two or three years, both in the field of the lyric and of the drama. And from the mechanical aspect it is his most beautiful book. The poet will publish two books through a Cincinnati firm in 1913, to be entitled _The Republic--a Little Book of Homespun Verse_, and _Minions of the Moon_. In March, 1912, literary Louisville celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of _Blooms of the Berry_, and the forty-seventh birthday of its author, Madison Cawein, the city's most distinguished man of letters. This was the first public recognition Mr. Cawein has received in the land of his birth, though it is now proposed to place a bust of him in the public library of Louisville. He is better known in New York or London than he is in Kentucky, but it will not be long before the people of his own land realize that they have been entertaining a world-poet, possibly, unawares. He is so far removed from any Kentucky poet of the present school that to mention him in the same breath with any of them is to make one's self absurd. Looking backward to the beginnings of our literature and coming carefully down the slope to this time, but two poets rise out of the mist of yesterday to greet Cawein and challenge him for the laureateship of Kentucky makers of song: Theodore O'Hara with his immortal elegy, and Daniel Henry Holmes with his sheaf of tender lyrics. These three are the nearest approach to the ineffable poets--who left the earth with the passing of Tennyson--yet nurtured upon Kentucky soil. Mr. Cawein is, of course, a poet of Nature, a landscape poet in particular who paints every color on the palette into his work. Had he been an artist he would have exhausted all colors conceived thus far by man, and would fain have originated new ones. There are literally hundreds of his poems in which every line is as surely a stroke as if done with the brush of a painter. Color, color, is his shibboleth-scheme, and he who would woo Nature in her richest robes may read Cawein and be content. Amazing as it may seem Mr. Cawein has thirty-four volumes to his credit--almost one for every year of his life. This statement stamps him as one of the most prolific poets of modern times, if not, indeed, of all time. And that it is not all quantity, may be seen in the recent declaration of _The Poetry Review_ of London: "He appears quite the biggest figure among American poets; his _return to nature_ has no tinge of affectation; it is genuine to the smallest detail. If he suffers from fatigue, it is in him, at least, not through that desperate satiety of town life which with so many recent poets has ended in impressionism and death." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Poets of the Younger Generation_, by William Archer (London, 1901); _The Younger American Poets_, by Jessie B. Rittenhouse (Boston, 1904); _History of American_ _Literature_, by R. P. Halleck (New York, 1911); _The Poetry Review_ (London, October, 1912). CONCLUSION[43] [From _Undertones_ (Boston, 1896)] The songs Love sang to us are dead: Yet shall he sing to us again, When the dull days are wrapped in lead, And the red woodland drips with rain. The lily of our love is gone, That touched our spring with golden scent; Now in the garden low upon The wind-stripped way its stalk is bent. Our rose of dreams is passed away, That lit our summer with sweet fire; The storm beats bare each thorny spray, And its dead leaves are trod in mire. The songs Love sang to us are dead; Yet shall he sing to us again, When the dull days are wrapped in lead, And the red woodland drips with rain. The marigold of memory Shall fill our autumn then with glow; Haply its bitterness will be Sweeter than love of long ago. The cypress of forgetfulness Shall haunt our winter with its hue; The apathy to us not less Dear than the dreams our summer knew. INDIAN SUMMER[44] [From _Kentucky Poems_ (London, 1903)] The dawn is warp of fever, The eve is woof of fire; And the month is a singing weaver Weaving a red desire. With stars Dawn dices with Even For the rosy gold they heap On the blue of the day's deep heaven, On the black of the night's far deep. It's--'Reins to the blood!' and 'Marry!'-- The season's a prince who burns With the teasing lusts that harry His heart for a wench who spurns. It's--'Crown us a beaker with sherry, To drink to the doxy's heels; A tankard of wine o' the berry, To lips like a cloven peel's. ''S death! if a king be saddened, Right so let a fool laugh lies: But wine! when a king is gladdened, And a woman's waist and her eyes.' He hath shattered the loom of the weaver, And left but a leaf that flits, He hath seized heaven's gold, and a fever Of mist and of frost is its. He hath tippled the buxom beauty, And gotten her hug and her kiss-- The wide world's royal booty To pile at her feet for this. HOME[45] [From _Nature-Notes and Impressions_ (New York, 1906)] A distant river glimpsed through deep-leaved trees. A field of fragment flint, blue, gray, and red. Rocks overgrown with twigs of trailing vines Thick-hung with clusters of the green wild-grape. Old chestnut groves the haunt of drowsy cows, Full-uddered kine chewing a sleepy cud; Or, at the gate, around the dripping trough, Docile and lowing, waiting the milking-time. Lanes where the wild-rose blooms, murmurous with bees, The bumble-bee tumbling their frowsy heads, Rumbling and raging in the bell-flower's bells, Drunken with honey, singing himself asleep. Old in romance a shadowy belt of woods. A house, wide-porched, before which sweeps a lawn Gray-boled with beeches and where elder blooms. And on the lawn, whiter of hand than milk, And sweeter of breath than is the elder bloom, A woman with a wild-rose in her hair. LOVE AND A DAY[46] [From _The Poems of Madison Cawein_ (Indianapolis, 1907, v. ii)] I In girandoles and gladioles The day had kindled flame; And Heaven a door of gold and pearl Unclosed, whence Morning,--like a girl, A red rose twisted in a curl,-- Down sapphire stairways came. Said I to Love: "What must I do? What shall I do? what can I do?" Said I to Love: "What must I do, All on a summer's morning?" Said Love to me: "Go woo, go woo." Said Love to me: "Go woo. If she be milking, follow, O! And in the clover hollow, O! While through the dew the bells clang clear, Just whisper it into her ear, All on a summer's morning." II Of honey and heat and weed and wheat The day had made perfume; And Heaven a tower of turquoise raised, Whence Noon, like some pale woman, gazed-- A sunflower withering at her waist-- Within a crystal room. Said I to Love: "What must I do? What shall I do? what can I do?" Said I to Love: "What must I do, All in the summer nooning?" Said Love to me: "Go woo, go woo." Said Love to me: "Go woo. If she be 'mid the rakers, O! Among the harvest acres, O! While every breeze brings scents of hay, Just hold her hand and not take 'nay,' All in the summer nooning." III With song and sigh and cricket cry The day had mingled rest; And Heaven a casement opened wide Of opal, whence, like some young bride, The Twilight leaned, all starry eyed, A moonflower on her breast. Said I to Love: "What must I do? What shall I do? what can I do?" Said I to Love: "What must I do, All in the summer gloaming?" Said Love to me: "Go woo, go woo." Said Love to me: "Go woo. Go meet her at the trysting, O! And 'spite of her resisting, O! Beneath the stars and afterglow, Just clasp her close and kiss her--so, All in the summer gloaming." IN A SHADOW GARDEN[47] [From _The Shadow Garden, and Other Plays_ (New York, 1910)] Shadow of the Man: Elfins haunt these walks. The place is most propitious and the time.-- See how they trip it!--There one rides a snail. And here another teases at a bee.-- In spite of grief my soul could almost smile.-- Elfins! frail spirits of the Stars and Moon, 'Tis manifest to me 'tis you we see.-- We never knew, or cared, once.--Would we had!-- Our lives had proved less empty; and the joy, That comes with beautiful belief in everything That makes for childhood, had then touched us young And kept us young forever; young in heart-- The only youth man has. But man believes In only what he contacts; what he sees; Not what he feels most. Crass, material touch And vision are his all. The loveliness, That ambuscades him in his dreams and thoughts, Is merely portion of his thoughts and dreams And counts for nothing that he reckons real; But is, in fact, less insubstantial than The world he builds of matter-of-fact and stone. That great inhuman world of evidence, Which doubts and scoffs and steadily grows old With what it christens wisdom.--Did it know, The wise are only they who keep their minds As little children's, innocent of doubt, Believing all things beautiful are true. UNREQUITED[48] [From _Poems_ (New York, 1911)] Passion? not hers! who held me with pure eyes: One hand among the deep curls of her brow, I drank the girlhood of her gaze with sighs: She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow. So have I seen a clear October pool, Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sere Gold of the woodland, tremorless and cool, Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year. Sweetheart? not she! whose voice was music-sweet; Whose face loaned language to melodious prayer. Sweetheart I called her.--When did she repeat Sweet to one hope, or heart to one despair! So have I seen a wildflower's fragrant head Sung to and sung to by a longing bird; And at the last, albeit the bird lay dead, No blossom wilted, for it had not heard. A TWILIGHT MOTH [From the same] Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on its state Of gold and purple in the marbled west, Thou comest forth like some embodied trait, Or dim conceit, a lily bud confessed; Or of a rose the visible wish; that, white, Goes softly messengering through the night, Whom each expectant flower makes its guest. All day the primroses have thought of thee, Their golden heads close-harmed from the heat; All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly Veiled snowy faces,--that no bee might greet, Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;-- Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last, Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet. Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays Nocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith, O bearer of their order's shibboleth, Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks. What dost thou whisper in the balsam's ear That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,-- A syllabled silence that no man may hear,-- As dreamily upon its stem it rocks? What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant, Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant, Some specter of some perished flower of phlox? O voyager of that universe which lies Between the four walls of this garden fair,-- Whose constellations are the fireflies That wheel their instant courses everywhere,-- Mid faery firmaments wherein one sees Mimic Bootes and the Pleiades, Thou steerest like some faery ship of air. Gnome-wrought of moonbeam-fluff and gossamer, Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest Mab or King Oberon; or, haply, her His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.-- Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy, That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me! And all that world at which my soul hath guessed! FOOTNOTES: [43] Copyright, 1896, by Copeland and Day. [44] Copyright, 1903, by the Author. [45] Copyright, 1906, by the Author. [46] Copyright, 1907, by the Author. [47] Copyright, 1910, by the Author. [48] Copyright, 1911, by the Macmillan Company. GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN Mrs. George Madden Martin, the mother of _Emmy Lou_, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, May 3, 1866. She is the sister of Miss Eve Anne Madden, who has also written several delightful books for children. She was educated in the public schools of Louisville, but on account of ill-health her training was concluded at home. In 1892 Miss Madden was married to Mr. Attwood R. Martin, and they have made their home at Anchorage, Kentucky, some miles from Louisville, ever since. Mrs. Martin's first book was _The Angel of the Tenement_ (New York, 1897), now out of print, which she seemingly regards with so little favor that it is seldom found in the list of her works. _Emmy Lou--Her Book and Heart_ (New York, 1902), made her famous throughout the English-reading world. It ran serially in _McClure's Magazine_ during 1900. It is a masterpiece and, though she has published several stories since, this remains as her best book hitherto. Little "Emmy Lou" gets into the reader's heart in the most wonderful way, and, once there, she will not be displaced. She is the most charming child in Kentucky literature, a genuine creation. Mrs. Martin's short novel, _The House of Fulfillment_ (New York, 1904) won her praise from people who could not care for her child, though the heroine was none other than "Emmy Lou" in long skirts. This was followed by _Abbie Ann_ (New York, 1907); _Letitia: Nursery Corps, U. S. A._ (New York, 1907), was a very winsome little girl, who causes the men of the army many trials and vexations at various military posts where her parents happened to be stationed. _Emmy Lou_ and _Letitia_, as has been pointed out by one of Mrs. Martin's keenest critics, regard childhood through the eyes of age and are best appreciated, perhaps, by adults; while _Abbie Ann_ sees childhood through a child's eyes, and is certainly more appreciated by children than by grown-ups. Two of Mrs. Martin's most recent stories, _When Adam Dolve and Eve Span_, appeared in _The American Magazine_ for October, 1911; and _The Blue Handkerchief_, in _The Century_ for December, 1911. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _McClure's Magazine_ (February, 1903); _The Outlook_ (October 1, 1904); _McClure's Magazine_ (December, 1904). EMMY LOU'S VALENTINE[49] [From _Emmy Lou--Her Book and Heart_ (New York, 1902)] About this time rumors began to reach Emmy Lou. She heard that it was February, and that wonderful things were peculiar to the Fourteenth. At recess the little girls locked arms and talked Valentines. The echoes reached Emmy Lou. The Valentines must come from a little boy, or it wasn't the real thing. And to get no valentine was a dreadful thing--dreadful thing. And even the timidest of the sheep began to cast eyes across at the goats. Emmy Lou wondered if she would get a valentine. And if not, how was she to survive the contumely and shame? You must never, never breathe to a living soul what was on your valentine. To tell even your best and truest little girl friend was to prove faithless to the little boy sending the valentine. These things reached Emmy Lou. Not for the world would she tell. Emmy Lou was sure of that, so grateful did she feel she would be to anyone sending her a valentine. And in doubt and wretchedness did she wend her way to school on the Fourteenth day of February. The drug-store window was full of valentines. But Emmy Lou crossed the street. She did not want to see them. She knew the little girls would ask her if she had gotten a valentine. And she would have to say, No. She was early. The big, empty room echoed back her footsteps as she went to her desk to lay down book and slate before taking off her wraps. Nor did Emmy Lou dream the eye of the little boy peeped through the crack of the door from Miss Clara's dressing-room. Emmy Lou's hat and jacket were forgotten. On her desk lay something square and white. It was an envelope. It was a beautiful envelope, all over flowers and scrolls. Emmy Lou knew it. It was a valentine. Her cheeks grew pink. She took it out. It was blue. And it was gold. And it had reading on it. Emmy Lou's heart sank. She could not read the reading. The door opened. Some little girls came in. Emmy Lou hid her valentine in her book, for since you must not--she would never show her valentine--never. The little girls wanted to know if she had gotten a valentine, and Emmy Lou said, Yes, and her cheeks were pink with the joy of being able to say it. Through the day, she took peeps between the covers of her Primer, but no one else might see it. It rested heavy on Emmy Lou's heart, however, that there was reading on it. She studied surreptitiously. The reading was made up of letters. It was the first time Emmy Lou had thought about that. She knew some of the letters. She would ask someone the letters she did not know by pointing them out on the chart at recess. Emmy Lou was learning. It was the first time since she came to school. But what did the letters make? She wondered, after recess, studying the valentine again. Then she went home. She followed Aunt Cordelia about. Aunt Cordelia was busy. "What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou. Aunt Cordelia listened. "B," said Emmy Lou, "and e?" "Be," said Aunt Cordelia. If B was Be, it was strange that B and e were Be. But many things were strange. Emmy Lou accepted them all on faith. After dinner she approached Aunt Katie. "What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, "m and y?" "My," said Aunt Katie. The rest was harder. She could not remember the letters, and had to copy them off on her slate. Then she sought Tom, the house-boy. Tom was out at the gate talking to another house-boy. She waited until the other boy was gone. "What does it read?" asked Emmy Lou, and she told the letters off the slate. It took Tom some time, but finally he told her. Just then a little girl came along. She was a first-section little girl, and at school she never noticed Emmy Lou. Now she was alone, so she stopped. "Get any valentines?" "Yes," said Emmy Lou. Then moved to confidence by the little girl's friendliness, she added, "It has reading on it." "Pooh," said the little girl, "they all have that. My mamma's been reading the long verses inside to me." "Can you show them--valentines?" asked Emmy Lou. "Of course, to grown-up people," said the little girl. The gas was lit when Emmy Lou came in. Uncle Charlie was there, and the aunties, sitting around, reading. "I got a valentine," said Emmy Lou. They all looked up. They had forgotten it was Valentine's Day, and it came to them that if Emmy Lou's mother had not gone away, never to come back, the year before, Valentine's Day would not have been forgotten. Aunt Cordelia smoothed the black dress she was wearing because of the mother who would never come back, and looked troubled. But Emmy Lou laid the blue and gold valentine on Aunt Cordelia's knee. In the valentine's centre were two hands clasping. Emmy Lou's forefinger pointed to the words beneath the clasped hands. "I can read it," said Emmy Lou. They listened. Uncle Charlie put down his paper. Aunt Louise looked over Aunt Cordelia's shoulder. "B," said Emmy Lou, "e--Be." The aunties nodded. "M," said Emmy Lou, "y--my." Emmy Lou did not hesitate. "V," said Emmy Lou, "a, l, e, n, t, i, n, e--Valentine. Be my Valentine." "There!" said Aunt Cordelia. "Well!" said Aunt Katie. "At last!" said Aunt Louise. "H'm!" said Uncle Charlie. FOOTNOTE: [49] Copyright, 1902, by McClure, Phillips and Company. MARY ADDAMS BAYNE Mrs. Mary Addams Bayne, novelist, was born near Maysville, Kentucky, in 1866. Upon the death of her parents, she made her home with her brother, Mr. William Addams of Cynthiana, Kentucky, recently an aspirant for the gubernatorial chair of Kentucky. Miss Addams was married to Mr. James C. Bayne, a banker and farmer of Bagdad, Kentucky. Mrs. Bayne was a teacher and a short-story writer for some years before she became a novelist. Her first book, _Crestlands_ (Cincinnati, 1907) was a centennial story of the famous Cane Ridge meeting-house, near Paris, Kentucky, the birthplace of the Stoneite or Reformed church. _Crestlands_ is important as history and entertainingly told as a story. It was followed by _Blue Grass and Wattle_ (Cincinnati, 1909), the sub-title of which is more illuminating, "The Man from Australia." This novel relates the religious life of a young Australian, educated in Kentucky, and his many fightings within and without form an interesting story. From the literary standpoint _Blue Grass and Wattle_ is an advance over _Crestlands_, and it is an earnest for yet superior work in Mrs. Bayne's new novel, now in preparation. In the fall of 1912 Mrs. Bayne purchased the old Burnett place at Shelbyville, Kentucky, and this she has converted into the most charming home of that town. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters of Mrs. Bayne to the Author; _The Christian Standard_ (December, 1907). THE COMING OF THE SCHOOLMASTER[50] [From _Crestlands_ (Cincinnati, 1907)] The spirit of Indian Summer, enveloped in a delicate bluish haze, pervaded the Kentucky forest. Through the treetops sounded a sighing minor melody as now and then a leaf bade adieu to the companions of its summer revels, and sought its winter's rest on the ground beneath. On a fallen log a red-bird sang with jubilant note. What cared he for the lament of the leaves? True, he must soon depart from this summer-home; but only to wing his way to brighter skies, and then return when mating-time should come again. Near a group of hickory-trees a colony of squirrels gathered their winter store of nuts; and a flock of wild turkeys led by a pompous, bearded gobbler picked through the underbrush. At a wayside puddle a deer bent his head to slake his thirst, but scarcely had his lips touched the water when his head was reared again. For an instant he listened, limbs quivering, nostrils dilating, a startled light in his soft eyes; then with a bound he was away into the depths of the forest. The turkeys, heeding the tocsin of alarm from their leader, sought the shelter of the deeper undergrowth; the squirrels dropped their nuts and found refuge in the topmost branches of the tree which they had just pilfered; but the red-bird, undisturbed, went on with his caroling, too confident in his own beauty and the charm of his song to fear any intruder. The cause of alarm was a horseman whose approach had been proclaimed by the crackling of dried twigs in the bridle-path he was traversing. He was an erect, broad-shouldered, dark-eyed young man with ruddy complexion, clear-cut features, and a well-formed chin. A rifle lay across his saddle-bow, and behind him was a pair of bulky saddle-bags. He wore neither the uncouth garb of the hunter nor the plain home-spun of the settler, but rather the dress of the Virginian cavalier of the period, although his hair, instead of being tied in a queue, was short, and curled loosely about his finely shaped head. The broad brim of his black hat was cocked in front by a silver boss; the gray traveler's cape, thrown back, revealed a coat of dark blue, a waistcoat ornamented with brass buttons, and breeches of the same color as the coat, reaching to the knees, and terminating in a black cloth band with silver buckles. He rode rapidly along the well-defined bridle-way, and soon emerged into a broader thoroughfare. Presently he heard the high-pitched, quavering notes of a negro melody, faint at first and seeming as much a part of nature as the russet glint of the setting sun through the trees. The song grew louder as he advanced, until, emerging into an open space, he came upon the singer, a gray-haired negro trudging sturdily along with a stout hickory stick in his hand. The negro doffed his cap and bowed humbly. "Marstah, hez you seed anythin' ob a spotted heifer wid one horn broke off, anywhars on de road? She's pushed down de bars an' jes' skipped off somewhars." "No, uncle. I've met no stray cows; but can you tell me how far it is to Major Hiram Gilcrest's? I'm a stranger in this region." "Major Gilcrest's!" exclaimed the darkey. "You'se done pass de turnin' whut leads dar. Did' you see a lane forkin' off 'bout a mile back by de crick, close to de big 'simmon-tree? Dat's de lane whut leads to Marstah Gilcrest's, suh." "Ah, I see! but perhaps you can direct me to Mister Mason Rogers' house? My business is with him as well as with Major Gilcrest." "I shorely kin," answered the negro, with a grin. "I b'longs to Marse Mason; I'se his ole uncle Tony. We libs two mile fuddah down dis heah same road, an' ef you wants to see my marstah an' Marstah Gilcrest bofe, you might ez well see Marse Mason fust, anyways; kaze whutevah he say, Marse Hiram's boun' to say, too. Dey's mos' mighty thick." The stranger turned his head to hide a momentary smile. "You jes' ride straight on," continued Uncle Tony, pointing northward with his stick; "fus' you comes to a big log house wid all de shettahs barred up, settin' by itse'l a leetle back frum de road, wid a woods all roun' it--dat's Cane Redge meetin'-house. Soon's you pass it, you comes to de big spring, den to a dirty leetle cabin whar dem pore white trash, de Simminses, libs. Den you strikes a cawnfiel', den a orchid. Den you's dar. De dawgs and chickens will sot up a tur'ble rumpus, but you jes' ride up to the stile and holler, 'Hello!' and some dem no-'count niggahs'll tek you' nag and construct you inter Miss Cynthy Ann's presence. I'd show you de way myse'f, on'y Is'e bountah fin' dat heifer; but you carn't miss de way." With this he hobbled off down the road in search of the errant heifer. Meanwhile our traveler rode steadily forward until, in another half-hour, he came in sight of a more prosperous-looking clearing than any he had seen since leaving Bourbonton. FOOTNOTE: [50] Copyright, 1907, by the Standard Publishing Company. ELIZABETH CHERRY WALTZ Mrs. Elizabeth Cherry Waltz, creator of _Pa Gladden_, was born at Columbus, Ohio, December 10, 1866, the daughter of Major John Nichols Cherry, to whose memory she inscribed her first book. Miss Cherry was graduated from the Columbus High School; and a short time thereafter she was married. The death of her husband compelled her to become the breadwinner for her several children, and in 1895 she joined the staff of the _Cincinnati Tribune_, which she left after two years for the Springfield, Ohio, _Republic-Times_, with which she was connected for a year. On July 4, 1898, she was married to Frederick Hastings Waltz, a few years her junior, and they settled at Louisville, where he had a position on _The Courier-Journal_. Mrs. Waltz became literary editor of _The Courier-Journal_, and this position she held until her death. Though she followed Miss Mary Johnston, W. H. Fields, Mrs. Hester Higbee Geppert, and Ernest Aroni[51] in assuming charge of the paper's literary page, and the standards were thus high, she was one of the ablest writers that has ever conducted that department. Mrs. Waltz was a tremendous worker, one of her associates having written that, after a hard day's work on the paper, she would "go home, cook, wash and iron, clean house, do assignments, then write until after midnight on her 'Pa Gladden' stories; she wrote while going and coming on the street cars, and sometimes wrote on her cuffs with a lead pencil!" Mrs. Waltz's chief contribution to prose fiction is her well-known character, "Pa Gladden." These stories were accepted by _The Century Magazine_ in 1902, and they were published from time to time, being brought together in a charming book, entitled _Pa Gladden--The Story of a Common Man_ (New York, 1903; London, n. d. [1905]). "Pa Gladden" is certainly a real creation. Christian, optimist, lover of his kind, and above all companionable, he preached and lived the gospel of goodness. Some critics of the stories have quarreled with the great amount of dialect, most of which is used by Pa Gladden, but this is the only adverse comment that was made. The prayers of Pa, said throughout the book, are always very beautiful. Mrs. Waltz's death occurred very suddenly at her home in Louisville, "Meadowbrook," September 19, 1903, almost simultaneous with the appearance of her book. She was buried at Columbus, Ohio; and her grave is unmarked. _The Ancient Landmark_ (New York, 1905), her posthumous novel, was a vigorous attack upon the divorce evil. She died before her time, worn out with work, and thus Kentucky and the whole country lost a writer of real achievement and greater promise. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Outlook_ (December 5, 1903); _Who's Who in America_ (1903-1905). PA GLADDEN AND THE WANDERING WOMAN[52] [From _Pa Gladden_ (New York, 1903)] In the early darkness of the winter night Pa Gladden returned to the barn laden with a lamp, a candle, tea, and food. He felt glad he had sent for the doctor, although he attributed the young woman's illness to exposure and anxiety. She was tossing on the warm bed, at times unable to speak intelligibly. She drank the warm tea he gave her, and again asked for the doctor. Being assured that he would soon come, she turned her face to the wall. It was such a sorrowful sight that, setting the candle down on the floor, Pa Gladden knelt upon the boards and prayed fervently: "Father of love, look down on our sorrerful darter this holy night when redeemin' love should fill all our hearts, this Christmas night when ye sent yer Son inter the world ter bear all our sins an' ignorances. Heal 'er sore heart, O Lord, heal 'er wounds with the soothin' balm o' thy love. Hold 'er in thy arms in all 'er trouble an' tribbelations, an' let Christmas day be a real turnin'-point in 'er life." When he rose, the young woman was sitting up, her eyes full of deep meaning. "You are a good man," she said. "I want to say I deserve it, all your goodness. I am not"--her voice rose to a shriek--"I am not wicked. You can pray for me, and over me if I should die. I am not afraid to be here. It's quiet and peaceful. I will try to be patient. Please tell me your name, sir." "Pa Gladden." "Mine is Mary, plain Mary. Have you any daughter?" "No"--with lingering regret; "but I'm allers Pa Gladden ter all the folks." "If you had a daughter, Pa Gladden, she'd likely be grown up." "Prubable." "And married; and you might be praying for her, right by her side, like you are here. God bless you forever and forever, Pa Gladden!" She ended with a sob. "Don't take on so. Won't ye come inter the house, my darter? I'll make it all right with Drusilly. Hers is a good heart." "No, no. I'm afraid of women. Does it make you feel bad to see me cry, Pa Gladden? Then I'll set my lips tighter. Just let me stay here. If you had a daughter she'd want to be quiet now, peaceful and quiet." He sat by her for a few moments longer. "The doctor wull be comin' ter the house presently," he said cheerfully. "I must go an' pilot him here. Lie still, darter; he'll soon git something' outen them old leather saddle-bags ter quiet ye down. Doc Briskett knows his business." She held out her hand to him. "Yes, go, Pa Gladden, but leave me the little candle. It's lonesome in the dark when one is in misery. And I'll listen for your footsteps." Pa was not much too soon. He heard the bump and rattle of the doctor's cart over the hard road before he reached the red gate. "Now hold hard, doc," he called out as he swung it open. "Go out the barn road. Yer patient air out thar." "Jee whillikins!" exclaimed Doc Briskett. "You never have brought me 'way out here to see a sick cow on a church-festival night!" Pa climbed in beside him. "It's a pore woman thet's sick," he announced calmly, and unfolded his story for the doctor's amazed ears. "Pa Gladden!" exclaimed the doctor. "God alone knows what sort of an illness she may have. However, I'll see her. A tramp is likely to have any disease traveling." A lamp stood on the old table in the room, and the burly doctor took it and climbed to the upper room. Pa Gladden paused at the doorway to look over the white world of Christmas eve. On such a night, he thought, the shepherds watched, the star shone, the angels sang, the Child was born. Pa Gladden heard the voice of his mother in the long ago: Carol, carol, Christians, Carol joyfully, Carol for the coming Of Christ's nativity! Then, hoarse and terrible, came the doctor's voice as he almost tumbled down the ladder: "Pa, pa, get in that cart and drive like mad to Dilsaver's. Meenie is at home, and tell her I said to come back with you. Bring her here; bring some woman, for the love of God!" FOOTNOTES: [51] Ernest ("Pat") Aroni, was far and away the finest dramatic critic Kentucky has produced, and a delightful volume of his work could be gathered from the files of _The Courier-Journal_. Mr. Aroni's fame has lingered in Kentucky in a rather remarkable manner, as he never published a book or wrote for the magazines. He is now chief editorial writer on _The North American_, Philadelphia. [52] Copyright, 1903, by the Century Company. REUBENA HYDE WALWORTH Miss Reubena Hyde Walworth, author of a brief comedy that has come down to posterity with a deal of the perfume of permanency, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, February 21, 1867. She was the granddaughter of Reuben Hyde Walworth (1788-1867), the last chancellor of New York State, the feminine form of whose name she bore. Her father was the well-known novelist, Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830-1873); and her mother and sister were writers of reputation. So it will be seen at a glance that Miss Walworth inherited her literary tastes legitimately. She began by contributing poems to the periodicals, but her one-act comediette, entitled _Where was Elsie? or the Saratoga Fairies_ (New York, 1888), written before she was of age, made her widely known. This little comedy is now out of print, and it is exceedingly scarce. Miss Walworth was graduated from Vassar College in 1896, being poet of the class, and one of the editors of _The Vassarian_. She then taught in a woman's college for a time, when the war with Spain was declared and she determined to go to the front as a volunteer nurse. Miss Walworth was one of the higher heroines of that war. The last months of her life were spent at the detention hospital, Montauk, New York, where she rendered noble service in her country's cause. She was stricken with fever and died on October 18, 1898. Her body was taken to her home at Saratoga Springs, New York, and buried with military honors. Miss Walworth's comedy and lyrics should be republished. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1889, v. vi); _A Dictionary of American Authors_, by O. F. Adams (Boston, 1905). THE UNDERGROUND PALACE OF THE FAIRIES [From _Where was Elsie?_ (New York, 1888)] Act I, Scene IV. _Enter Jack and Elsie with fairy flask and taper._ _Elsie._ Is this the room, Mr. Jack o' Lantern? _Jack._ Yes, Elsie, this is the room where the King told me to take you and await his presence. What a pity it is the Prince--[_Stops_]. _Elsie._ Prince! what Prince? _Jack._ Sh! walls have ears, Elsie, and, indeed, I forgot that the King had forbidden us ever to speak of him again. But I must be off to dance attendance on the Queen. Her majesty, be it said with all due reverence, is not over-sweet when her loyal subjects are slow to obey her commands. [_Exit, but immediately puts his head in the door._] Don't forget the magical water, Elsie. [_Exit._] _Elsie._ That's so; I had forgotten that I must drink this. [_Looks at flask in her hand._] Jack says that it keeps anybody from growing old so fast; but if you get it from the fairies on Christmas eve, the way I did, you won't ever grow old. Oh dear! I don't want to be young forever. I want to grow up, and be sixteen. Then I'd wear my hair high, and have a long train. [_Struts up and down, but stops suddenly._] Well, I don't care, you couldn't play hop-scotch in a train. [_Looking about her._] I don't think this room's pretty, a bit. [_Catches sight of something shining on the wall._] Oh my! what's that shiny thing? Wouldn't it be fun if there were a secret door there, just like a story book! I'm going to see what it is. [_Stops._] Dear me! I forgot that horrid flask! [_Brightening up._] Maybe it'll make me nice and old, though. I'll take the old spring water first, anyhow, and then I'll see what that thing is over there. I wonder what will happen. [_Drinks._] Curtain. CRITTENDEN MARRIOTT Crittenden Marriott, novelist, was born at Baltimore, March 20, 1867, the great grandson of Kentucky's famous statesman, John J. Crittenden, the grandson of Mrs. Chapman Coleman, who wrote her father's biography, and the son of Cornelia Coleman, who was born at Louisville, Kentucky, and lived there until her marriage. Mr. Marriott's mother, grandmother, and aunts translated several of Miss Muhlbach's novels and a volume of French fairy tales. The future novelist first saw Kentucky when he was nine years old, and for the two years following he lived at Louisville and attended a public school. From 1878 to 1882 he was at school in Virginia, but he spent two of the vacations in Louisville. In 1883 he was appointed to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but two years later he was compelled to resign on account of deficient eyesight. He returned to Louisville where he clerked in an insurance office, the American Mutual Aid Society, which position he held until 1887, when he resigned and removed to Baltimore as an architectural draughtsman. He subsequently went to Washington, and from there to California. In 1890 Mr. Marriott joined the staff of the San Francisco _Chronicle_, and acted as representative of the Associated Press. Two years later he went to South Africa as a correspondent, tramping sixteen hundred miles in the interior, mostly alone. After this strenuous journey he returned to his aunt's home at Louisville, spending some of the time in Shelby county, Kentucky. He shortly afterwards went to New York as ship news reporter for _The Tribune_, which he held for six months. In 1893 Mr. Marriott went to Brazil for the Associated Press on the dynamite cruiser _Nictheroy_. The fall of 1894 found him again in Shelby county, this time meeting his future wife, a Louisville girl, whom he married in June, 1895. At the time of his wedding he was a newspaper correspondent in Washington. Mr. Marriott's health broke shortly afterwards, and from January to September, 1896, he was ill at Louisville. In 1897 he went to Cuba for the Chicago _Record_. When the now defunct Louisville _Dispatch_ was established, Mr. Marriott became telegraph editor, which position he held for six months in 1898. Although he has resided in Washington since leaving the _Dispatch_, he regards Louisville as his real home, and he has visited there several times within the last few years, his most recent visit being late in 1912, when he came for his sister's wedding. Since 1904 Mr. Marriott has been one of the assistant editors of the publications of the United States Geological Survey. At the present time he is planning to surrender his post and establish a permanent home at Louisville. Mr. Marriott's first book, _Uncle Sam's Business_ (New York, 1908), was an excellent study of our government at work, "told for young Americans." It was followed by a thrilling, wildly improbable tale of the Sargasso Sea, _The Isle of Dead Ships_ (Philadelphia, 1909), the scene of which he saw several times on his various journeys around the world. _How Americans Are Governed in Nation, State, and City_ (New York, 1910), was an adultiazation and elaboration of his first book, fitting it for institutions of learning and for the general reader. Mr. Marriott's second novel, _Out of Russia_ (Philadelphia, 1911), a story of adventure and intrigue, was somewhat saner than _The Isle of Dead Ships_. From June to October, 1912, his _Sally Castleton, Southerner_, a Civil War story, ran in _Everybody's Magazine_, and it will be issued by the Lippincott's in January, 1913. The love story of a Virginia girl, daughter of a Confederate general, and a Kentuckian, who is a Northern spy, it is far and away the finest thing Mr. Marriott has done--one of the best of the recent war novels. In the past five years he has sold more than one hundred short-stories, some fifteen serials, and his fifth book is now in press, which is certainly a most creditable record. He has published two Kentucky stories, one for _Gunter's Magazine_, the other for _The Pocket Magazine_ (which periodical was swallowed up by _Leslie's Weekly_); and he has recently finished a third Kentucky romance, which he calls _One Night in Kentucky_, and which will appear in _The Red Book Magazine_ sometime in 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Marriott to the Author; _Who's Who in America_, (1912-1913). THE ARRIVAL OF THE ENEMY[53] [From _Sally Castleton, Southerner_ (_Everybody's Magazine_, June, 1912)] With her heart beating so that she could not speak, she opened the door. She knew that she must be calm, must not show too great terror, must not try to deny the enemy the freedom of the house. She clung to the door, half fainting, while the world spun round her. Slowly the haze cleared. Dully, as from afar off, she heard some one addressing her and realized that a boy was standing on the porch steps holding his horse's bridle--a boy, short, rotund, friendly looking, with gilt and yellow braid upon his dusty blue uniform; just a boy--not an enemy. "Well, sir?" she faltered. The boy snatched off his slouch hat with its yellow cord. He stood swinging it in his hand, staring admiringly at the girls. "General Haverhill's compliments," he said. "He regrets to cause inconvenience, but he must occupy this house as headquarters for a few hours. He will be here immediately." He gestured toward a little knot of horsemen, who had paused at the foot of the lawn and were staring down the valley with field-glasses. Sally managed to bow with some degree of calmness. "The house is at General Haverhill's disposal," she answered steadily. "I am sorry that I have only one aged servant and therefore cannot serve him as I should." The boy smiled. He seemed unable to take his eyes from her face. "Oh, that's all right," he exclaimed cheerfully. "We are used to looking out for ourselves. Don't trouble yourself a bit. The general only wants a place to rest for a few hours." "He may have that," Miss Castleton smiled faintly. After all, there were pleasant people among the Yankees. Besides, it was just as well to conciliate while she could. "In fact, he can have more. Uncle Claban is a famous cook and our pantry is not quite empty. May I offer supper to him and his staff?" Her tones were quite natural. She felt surprised at her lack of fear; now that the shock of the meeting was over, the danger seemed somehow less. The subaltern's white teeth flashed. "Really, truly supper at a table, with a table-cloth! It's too good to be true. I'll tell the general." He turned toward the horsemen, who were coming toward the steps. Sally waited, watching curiously. She felt 'Genie's convulsive grasp on her hand and squeezed back reassuringly. "Don't be afraid, dear!" she murmured. "They're only men, after all. Try to forget that they are Yankees, and everything will come right." She turned once more to meet her guests. On all sides of the house the busy scene was rapidly changing. The dusty cavalrymen, saddle-weary after a hard ride, were taking advantage of a few hours' halt. The troopers, gaunt, sun-burned, unshaven, covered with mud and dust, moved about this way and that. Company lines were formed, and long strings of picketed horses munched the clover, while other strings of horses, with a trooper riding bare-back, half a dozen bridles in his hands, clattered toward the creek. Stacked arms glittered in the sunlight. Men with red crosses on their sleeves established a tiny hospital tent and looked to the slightly wounded who had accompanied the flying column. Some of the Castleton fences went for farrier's fires, and his hammer clanked noisily. The troops were too thoroughly seasoned campaigners to get out of hand, but the officers were as tired as the men, and there was no little foraging. The clusters of cherries, the yellow June apples, and the welcome "garden truck" were temptations not to be wholly resisted. It was all new and strange to Sally and, hard as it was to see the Castleton acres trampled and overrun, she watched the busy scene with unconscious interest. The voice of the young officer recalled her to herself. "General Haverhill," he was saying, in deference to a half-forgotten convention. "General Haverhill--Miss--?" He paused interrogatively. The girl bowed. "I'm Miss Castleton," she said. "Miss Castleton." The general swept off his slouch hat. "I suppose Lieutenant Rigby here has told you that we must use your house?" "Yes, general. Will you come in?" The subaltern interposed. "Miss Castleton has offered us supper, general," he said. The general smiled. He was a powerful-looking man of forty; the scar of a saber gash across his face gave it a sinister aspect, but his smile was pleasant. "You are--loyal?" he questioned doubtfully. The question seemed unnecessary. "Yes--to Virginia!" Sally met his eyes steadily. "Oh! I see!" Quizzically he contemplated the girl from under his bushy brows. "And this is--" he turned toward the younger girl. "My sister, Miss Eugenia Castleton." "Ah!" The general bowed. "I suppose you, too, are loyal--to Virginia, Miss Eugenia?" he said. Perhaps it was the patronizing note in the question that touched 'Genie on the raw. Perhaps it was sheer terror. Whatever the cause, she flashed up, suddenly furious. "Oh!" she cried, stamping her small foot. "Oh! I wish I were a man! I wish I were a man!" The grizzled Federal looked at her steadily, and not without admiration. "Perhaps it's lucky for me you're not," he answered, smiling. Bowing, he stood aside to let the girls pass at the door, then clanked after them into the cool, wide hall with its broad center-table, its chairs and lounge--the lounge on which Philip Byrd had so lately lain--and the big black stove. To save their lives neither Sally nor her sister could help glancing at that stove. It was Sally's part to play hostess, and she did it valiantly. "Please sit down, general," she invited. "If you will excuse me, I will see about supper." With a smile she rustled from the room, 'Genie following rather sullenly. In the wide kitchen she dropped into a chair, trembling. Had she acted her part well, she wondered, or had she overdone it? Was it suspicion that she had seen in the general's eyes as she left him? Would he search--and find? How long would he stay? Philip was wounded, suffering, probably hungry and thirsty. If the Yankees stayed very long, he might have to surrender. What would they do to him? Would they consider him a spy and--and---- A hand clutched her and she looked up. 'Genie was on her knees beside her, flushed, tear-stained face uplifted. "Oh, Sally, Sally!" she wailed. "Did I do wrong? Did I make him suspect? Oh, if anything happens to Philip through my fault, I'll die!" Sally laid her hand on the bright hair of the girl beside her. "You didn't harm Philip," she comforted. "It wouldn't do for us to be too friendly. That would be the surest way to make them suspicious." "But--but--he'll starve!" "Oh, no he won't! I don't think they'll stay long. 'For a few hours,' that young officer said. But come!" Sally jumped up. "Come. Let's get supper for them. That'll give us something to do, and will keep them occupied--when it's ready. Men will always eat. Come!" 'Genie rose obediently, if not submissively. "Supper!" she flashed. "Supper! And we've got to feed those tyrants, with poor Philip starving right under their noses." The elder sister smiled. "I'm sorry," she said gently; "but there are worse things than missing a meal or two. Perhaps it may be better for him, after all; for he must have some fever after that wound and that ride. Anyhow, we've got to feed these Yankees, so let's do it with a good grace. Men are easiest managed when they've eaten. If we've got to feed the brutes, let's do it." FOOTNOTE: [53] Copyright, 1912, by the Ridgway Company. ABBIE CARTER GOODLOE Miss Abbie Carter Goodloe, novelist and short-story writer, was born at Versailles, Kentucky, in 1867. In 1883 she was graduated from the Girls' High School, Louisville; and in 1889 she received the degree of Bachelor of Science from Wellesley College. The next two years were spent in studying and traveling in Europe. On her return to the United States Miss Goodloe made her home at Louisville, of which city she has been a resident ever since. Her first book, _Antinous_ (Philadelphia, 1891), a blank verse tragedy, was followed by _College Girls_ (New York, 1895), an entertaining collection of short stories of college life. Miss Goodloe's first novel, _Calvert of Strathore_ (New York, 1903), was set, for the most part, in the sunny land of France. _At the Foot of the Rockies_ (New York, 1905), a group of short stories, is Miss Goodloe's best work so far. Several of the tales are of great merit and interest, one enthusiastic critic comparing them to Kipling's finest work. The author spent one glorious summer in Alberta, Canada, surrounded by the Northwest Mounted Police, Indians, Englishmen, Americans, and the romance of it all quite possessed her. These were the backgrounds for the eight stories which have won her wider fame than any of her other writings. A winter in Mexico furnished materials for her latest novel, _The Star-Gazers_ (New York, 1910). The reader is presented to the late president of that revolutionary-ridden republic, Porfirio Diaz, together with the other celebrities of his country. The epistolary form of narration is adopted, and the result is not especially noteworthy. In no way does this work rank with _At the Foot of the Rockies_. The short-story is certainly Miss Goodloe's greatest gift, and in that field she should go far. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Anna Blanche McGill's excellent study in the _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. v); _Scribner's Magazine_ (January, April, 1910; July, 1911). A COUNTESS OF THE WEST[54] [From _At the Foot of the Rockies_ (New York, 1905)] She looked at the Honorable Arthur, abashed and weakly unhappy, and a wave of disgust swept over her. He was so big and stupid and irresolute. She would have liked him better if he had told her with brutal frankness that he no longer cared for her and wouldn't marry her. She had thought him grateful at least, and he wasn't even that. The affection he had inspired in her fell from her like a discarded garment. Suddenly she unfastened a button of her shirtwaist and drew from around her neck a little blue ribbon on which hung a seal ring. With a jerk she snapped the ribbon and slipped off the ring. She held it out to him. "There," she said, cooly, "take it back to Rigby Park and give it to some fine English girl whom your father happens to know! I hope you'll enjoy your England. Montana's good enough for me!" As she swept the Honorable Arthur with a scornful glance, she suddenly saw his jaw drop and a curious look spring into his eyes. Following the direction of his gaze she beheld two riders approaching at a hand gallop, a Mounted Police officer from Fort Macleod, whom she knew, and following briskly in his wake, a handsome Englishman of middle age. The hair about his temples was heavily tinged with white, but his complexion was as fresh and pink and white as a baby's, and he was most immaculately got up in riding things. "It's the governor," she heard the Honorable Arthur whisper incredulously to himself. The meeting between the two was cold and formal, after the fashion of the Anglo-Saxon male. Miss Ogden looked on in fascinated silence. The Earl of Rigby put up a single eyeglass and surveyed his son. "By gad, my boy, I'm glad to see you again. You aren't looking any too fit, you know." "Thanks, father--yes, I know it. When did you get here?" "Just stepped off the train at Macleod two hours ago. Beastly train." "Yes, isn't it? Howd'y do, Nevin?" "Howd'y do, St. John? Howd'y do, Miss Ogden? Haven't seen you for a long while. May--may I--the Earl of Rigby, Miss Ogden." The Earl of Rigby screwed his glass in again--it had fallen out when he had shaken his son's hand--and stared at the young woman before him. "Awfully glad to meet you, I'm sure," he said, affably. "I--I had always understood that this country was an Eveless paradise. I'm glad to see I'm mistaken." Miss Lily Ogden surveyed the Earl of Rigby imperturbably. Not one of the thrills which an hour before she would have supposed necessarily attendant on an introduction to a noble earl now disturbed her composure. Even his exaggeratedly polite compliment left her perfectly cool. He simply seemed to her an extremely handsome man, a good deal cleverer and stronger-looking than his son. "This country wouldn't be a paradise at all without Miss Ogden," said Nevin, gallantly. "She's the best horsewoman in Port Highwood and she'll help St. John show you the country, my lord." "Thanks, Captain Nevin." She smiled on him sweetly, showing the white, even teeth between the scarlet lips, and then she turned to the Earl of Rigby. "I shall be delighted to show you the country--specially as Mr. St. John is obliged to go away in two or three days." "I should like nothing better," said the earl, with conviction. "Have to go on the round-up," murmured the Honorable Arthur. "That's hard luck," said Nevin, sympathetically. "Two weeks, I suppose." "Yes--father'll have to stop for a bit at the Highwood House. I fancy he'll wish he were back in England!" "Not if Miss Ogden will ride with me," observed the earl. A curious light came into the girl's gray eyes. "I could show your lordship a new trail every day for the two weeks, and at the end of the time I am sure you could not decide which to call the prettiest," she asserted. "I dare say," assented the earl, eagerly; "but I would like to try." "Oh, Miss Ogden will take good care of you," said Nevin. "And now, as you have two guides, if you will excuse me, I think I won't go on into Highwood. Your lordship's things will be sent over early in the morning. His lordship was so anxious to see you, St. John, that we couldn't even persuade him to mess with us to-night," he remarked, jocularly, to the Honorable Arthur. "And now I will turn back, I think. Good-bye!" He waved a gauntleted hand, and wheeling his horse set off at an easy canter for the fort. A somewhat awkward constraint fell upon the three so left, which Miss Ogden dispelled by turning her horse toward Highwood, and riding on slightly ahead of the Honorable Arthur and his father. The earl gazed admiringly at her slim back. "By gad, she's a beauty, Arthur, my deah boy, and she sits her horse perfectly." "She's an American," remarked the young man, aggressively. "She's beautiful enough to be English," retorted the earl, warmly. He spurred forward and rode at her right hand. The Honorable Arthur rather sulkily closed up on the left. "I was just saying to Arthur, Miss Ogden, that he could go on the round-up and jolly welcome as long as you have promised to show me the country. I am most deeply interested in our Canadian possessions, you know," said the earl. She shot him a glance from under the black lashes of her gray eyes which made the Earl of Rigby fairly gasp. "I shall try my best to keep your lordship from being bored while Mr. St. John is away," she said, sweetly. It was two weeks later, or to be perfectly exact, two weeks and four days later, that a half-breed was sent down to the Morgan round-up, twenty-five miles west of Calgary, with a telegram for St. John. The Honorable Arthur was so dirty, tired, dusty, and sunburnt that the half-breed had difficulty in picking him out from the rest of the dirty, tired, dusty, and sunburnt round-up crew. The sight of the telegram filled the young man with an indefinable fear, and the paper fluttered in his trembling hand like a withered leaf on a windshaken bough. "Meet the 2:40 from Macleod at Calgary. Will be on train. Most important. RIGBY." His swollen tongue and parched lips got drier, his cracked and tanned skin paled as he read and reread the message. Suddenly a joyous thought came to him. "The old boy's relented sure, and wants me to go back with him," he told himself over and over. He thrust his few things into the one portmanteau he had brought with him and made such good time going the twenty-five miles into Calgary that he had been pacing up and down the station platform for ten minutes when the train pulled in. The Earl of Rigby, who had been hanging over the vestibule rail of the observation car, swung himself lightly down and cordially grasped his son's hand. The Honorable Arthur was struck afresh by the good looks and youthfulness of his aristocratic father. "By Jove, Arthur, I'm glad to see you got my telegram, and I'm glad you got here in time. What? No, you won't need your portmanteau. The truth is," he gave an infectious laugh, "the Countess of Rigby--she was Miss Lily Ogden until last night, my deah boy--and I are on our way to England, and we couldn't leave the country without seeing you again. Won't you step into the coach and speak to her?" FOOTNOTE: [54] Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner's Sons. GEORGE LEE BURTON George Lee Burton, magazinest, was born at Danville, Kentucky, April 17, 1868. He was fitted at the Louisville Rugby School for the University of Virginia, from which he was graduated, after which he returned to Louisville, and studied law in the University of Louisville. Upon his graduation from that institution he was admitted to the bar, and he has since practiced his profession at Louisville with success. Mr. Burton began to write some years ago, contributing short-stories and sketches to the eastern periodicals. _The Century_ published his clever story, _As Seen By His Bride_; and _Ainslee's Magazine_ printed his _The Training of the Groom_, _The Deferred Proposal_, _Cupid's Impromptu_, and several other stories. His work for _The Saturday Evening Post_, however, has been his most noteworthy performance. For that great weekly he has written: _Getting a Start at Sixty_ (published anonymously); _The Making of a Small Capitalist_, _A Fresh Grip_, _A Rebuilt Life_, and _Tackling Matrimony_, the last of which titles appeared in two parts in _The Post_ for November 23 and November 30, 1912, was exceedingly well done. He has recently re-written _Tackling Matrimony_, greatly developing the story-part, and more than doubling its length, for the Harper's, who will issue it in book form early in the spring of 1913. Mr. Burton is a bachelor who has won wide reputation as a writer upon various phases of matrimonial mixups. He also has a certain sympathy with those who waste their youth in riotous living, but who win their true positions in the world after all seems lost. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Burton to the Author; _Outing_ (May, 1900). AFTER PRISON--HOME[55] [From _A Rebuilt Life_ (_Saturday Evening Post_, March 23, 1912)] "Well, sir, when I got out I was shipped back to my own town, or rather the town from which I had been sent up. I was born five hundred miles from there; but my people had died when I was young and I had drifted in there when I was only sixteen years old--I guess that makes it my town after all. Now, at thirty-five I was back there from the pen and I stayed there. "Maybe that was a mistake. I guess it was harder for me; but I had that much fight left in me. I wanted to show people that there was still some man in me, even if I had spent ten years in the pen that I deserved to spend there. Besides, I wouldn't like to start off fresh in a new place and build up a little, and just as I got to going have somebody from my home town come along and tell everybody that respected me that I was a murderer and an ex-convict and a lowdown sort of nobody. "I believe after all I'd rather start in as I did, back where they thought that about me to begin with, and build up fresh from that. I wanted to live down the killing and those ten years--and I believe I've sorter done it. It may sound foolish, but--though I don't excuse all that, remember--I have got to sorter respect myself again, and I tell you it feels good! "They didn't have prison reform in that state then, with an employment officer and a job all ready to help a poor devil start out again when he got back to freedom. They gave me a suit of clothes and five dollars and shipped me back to the town I came from, then turned me loose as an ex-convict to hump for myself like the other "exes," branded by those years of living in there. "It certainly seemed strange to see the place again. There had been many changes in those years. I put up at one of these twenty-five-cents-a-night men's hotels, and took fifteen-cent meals--skipping one every day to make my five dollars last longer; and I commenced looking for a job. "There didn't seem any need of more help anywhere. I tried many of my old acquaintances to see if I could get a place--I did not seem to have any friends left! I found ten years in the pen seemed to wipe out the claim of being even an acquaintance with most of them. They all looked at me curiously, as if I was a different brand of man--a cannibal, or Eskimo, or something. "I'd rather they wouldn't have showed so plain they thought me dangerous or worse; yet I'd have swallowed that if they had only given me work. They didn't though; some of them weren't as cold with me as others, but none of them had anything for me. "Of course I tackled all sorts of strangers, too, for work; but usually they didn't have any--and when they had they wanted references. I couldn't blame them; I guess I had a sort of pasty face and hangdog look. "They had such a habit of asking: 'Where did you work last?' "'I've been away a long time--have not worked here for several years,' I would say. "'Where did you work while you were away?' came next. "'I worked at broom-making part of the time,' I got to answering. "Then, like as not, the boss would look at me suspiciously and say: 'No, I don't believe I need you just now; if I do I will let you know. Where do you live?" "When I gave the number of the bum lodging house he would look as if that settled it; he had known all along I wasn't any good. And I felt so shamed and low down all the time I looked like he was right. "Five dollars don't last very long, even with two meals a day. I got work one day on a wrecker's force, tearing down an old building; but the foreman drove his men hard and I wasn't used to real work anyway. I couldn't stand up to it, and--I'm ashamed to tell it even now--I fainted about four o'clock that afternoon. "Another day I got a place with the gang working repairs on the street-railroad tracks; but the man in charge said I was too slow and not strong enough--had better get some different kind of work. As if I hadn't tried everything I could! He didn't pay me for a full day either--said I wasn't worth it; and the worst was that I knew he was right. I was about at the end of my rope when my money gave out, and I was looking so weak and shamefaced that I didn't stand any sort of a chance. I got to feeling desperate. "I remember that about this time I went in to answer an ad--'Man wanted as porter in well-established wholesale drug house.' The head of the place was a mild-mannered old man, who sat in the back office, but who always looked over the new men before they were employed. He began as usual: "'Where did you work last?' "'With the street-railroad gang,' I answered. "'U-um! How long?' "'One day,' I told him. "'Ah!' he said, as if he had discovered something--'and before that?' "'With a house-wrecking gang on Flint Street.' "'Yes--how long there?' "'Part of a day,' I said. 'I couldn't stand up to the work.' "I thought he looked a little sympathetic then, but was not sure until he sniffed and asked the next question in a hard, thin voice: "'And where before that?' "I hesitated a moment; he looked at me more closely and said in that same tone: "'Where?' "I had been looked at and questioned so much that way and had got so raw about it that now I almost shouted: 'In the penitentiary!' "'Why, bless my soul!' the mild little man gasped. 'No, I don't need you. Good day! Good day!' "He looked so shocked and I felt so desperate that I could not help adding, while I looked at him hard: "'I was put in for manslaughter too--voluntary manslaughter!' "There wasn't any clerk in the room at the time. "Oh, oh, indeed!' he gulped out, rising and backing away, big-eyed and trembly. He almost got to the back window before I turned and left. "Maybe I didn't feel bitter and like 'what's the use--what's the use of anything!' I don't know what would have happened--I guess I'd have starved to death or worse--if it hadn't been for the hoboes' hotel--Welcome Hall--'Headquarters for the Unemployed,' as it's advertised. "You don't know about the place? Well, sir, it's a dandy!--at least, that's the way I think about it--and a good many others do too. The worst of the hoboes won't go there if they can help it--they'd rather bum a dime and get a bed for the night in one of those ten-cent places. "This Welcome Hall is a sort of industrial kindling-splitting joint. You blow in there and saw and split kindling for a bed and meals--you give them six hours' work. "You see, in that way you can live off six hours' work a day and have some time left to look for a job. It's a good thing, and it's been a moneymaker too; it's the only charity I know of that's not a charity but a moneymaking concern. Of course people had to give it a place and start it; but it more than pays expenses, and at the same time helps to build up a man instead of making him a pauper or a deadbeat bum. "I certainly was glad to find some place where I could at least earn my lodging and meals. I rested up some there and was glad I could just stay somewhere. Though I looked about for work a little, nearly every day, I lived along there for three weeks on my six hours a day of work--still out of a job. At last I guess my fighting blood got up again, I determined I would get a job of some kind, even if it was cleaning vaults. I decided no honest work was beneath me when it all seemed so far above me as to be out of reach. "'If I keep my eyes open and am not too choosy I must find something to do,' I said to myself, and set out to look for it in earnest. It was Saturday morning, I remember, for I thought of the next day being Sunday, when I could not even hunt for work. I had walked a good way and asked for work at a lot of places without getting anything to do, when I saw an old negro man sweeping leaves off the sidewalk and washing off the front steps of a plain two-story house with a bucket of water and a cloth. "'I may not be much account but I sure can do that,' I thought, and asked him how much he got for it. "'For dese here, boss, I gits ten cents; but when I wuks all de way roun' to de back do' I gits some dinner th'owed in,' he said with a grin. "That wasn't so bad; and 'boss'!--how good that sounded! I went on down the street feeling almost like a man again and not a down-and-out ex-convict. "About a square away I began to ask at every house if they didn't want the leaves swept off and the front steps washed. Maybe I looked too much like a tramp or too much above one with that 'boss' still ringing in my ears--the first time I had been spoken to that way for more than ten years! Anyway I got turned down at first. "At the tenth place, however, a two-story-and-attic red brick, they gave me a job. The woman asked me in a sharp voice, as if she were defending herself from being overcharged: "'How much?' "'Ten cents,' I answered, as meekly as I could. "She seemed to think that was reasonable; and after waiting a minute, as if she wanted the work done and couldn't find any excuse for not letting me do it, she handed me a bucket and mop and broom and set me at it. "I finished the job in about an hour; and I tell you I enjoyed that work! Beneath me? Why, it couldn't get beneath me--I was that low down in mind and living and even hope. I was just about all in, you understand; and I wasn't a plumb out-and-out fool. "I have got that dime yet; see here," he said, holding out a brightly polished dime surrounded by a narrow gold band, which he wore as a charm on his watch-chain; "whenever I begin to feel ashamed of my work I look at that and get thankful, and remember how proud and happy I felt when that sharp-looking woman handed it to me. I had done a little extra work in cleaning up the yard, and she said as she gave it to me: "'That looks a whole lot better! You certainly earned that dime.' "I wouldn't have spent that money if I had had to go without food for two days! It seemed to put springs in my feet and I went down the street hustling for another job of the same kind. I found it before dinner; it was another ten cent job with twenty cents' worth of work; but I sure was glad to get it. "I felt that, so long as Welcome Hall was making money, I was earning my way by those six hours of work a day, and I stayed on there for some time longer." FOOTNOTE: [55] Copyright, 1912, by the Curtis Publishing Company. JAMES TANDY ELLIS James Tandy Ellis, "Shawn's" father, was born at Ghent, Kentucky, June 9, 1868. He spent his boyhood days in one of the most romantically beautiful sections of Kentucky, on the Ohio river between Cincinnati and Louisville. He was educated at Ghent College and the State College of Kentucky at Lexington. Mr. Ellis has always been a great lover of Nature and his leisure-hours are usually spent with dog and gun or in angling. He engaged in newspaper work in Louisville and his character sketches soon made him well-known throughout the State. His first book, _Poems by Ellis_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1898), contained some very clever verse. _Sprigs o' Mint_ (New York, 1906), was an attractive little volume of pastels in prose and verse. Mr. Ellis next issued three pamphlets: _Peebles_ (Carrollton, Kentucky, 1908); _Awhile in the Mountains_ (Lexington, Kentucky, 1909); and _Kentucky Stories_ (Lexington, 1909). His latest book, entitled _Shawn of Skarrow_ (Boston, 1911), is a novelette of river life in northern Kentucky, and the simple, direct manner of the little tale was found "refreshing" by the "jaded" reviewers. Colonel Ellis is now assistant Adjutant-General of Kentucky, and he resides at Frankfort, the capitol of the Commonwealth. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Ellis to the Author; _Lexington Leader_ (December 24, 1911). YOUTHFUL LOVERS[56] [From _Shawn of Skarrow_ (Boston, 1911)] The winter had passed away. Shawn had been working hard in school, and under the encouragement of Mrs. Alden, was making fair progress, but Sunday afternoons found him in his rowboat, wandering about the stream and generally pulling his boat out on the beach at Old Meadows, for Lallite was there to greet him, and already they had told each other of their love. What a dream of happiness, to wander together along the pebbled beach, or through the upland woods, tell each other the little incidents of their daily life, and to pledge eternal fidelity. Oh, dearest days, when the rose of love first blooms in youthful hearts, when lips breathe the tenderest promises, fraught with such transports of delight; when each lingering word grows sweeter under the spell of love-lit eyes. Oh, blissful elysium of love's young dream! They stood together in the deepening twilight, when the sun's last bars of gold were reflected in the stream. "Oh, Shawn, it was a glad day when you first came with Doctor Hissong to hunt." "Yes," said Shawn, as he took her hand, "and it was a hunt where I came upon unexpected game, but how could you ever feel any love for a poor river-rat?" "I don't know," said Lallite, "but maybe, it is that kind that some girls want to fall in love with, especially if they have beautiful teeth, and black eyes and hair, and can be unselfish enough to kill a bag of game for two old men, and let them think they did the shooting." "Lally, when they have love plays on the show-boats, they have all sorts of quarrels and they lie and cuss and tear up things generally." "Well, Shawn, there's all sorts of love, I suppose, but mine is not the show-boat kind." "Thank the Lord," said Shawn. He drew out a little paste-board box. Nestling in a wad of cotton, was the pearl given to him by Burney. "Lally, this is the only thing I have ever owned in the way of jewelry, and it's not much, but will you take it and wear it for my sake?" "It will always be a perfect pearl to me," said the blushing girl. FOOTNOTE: [56] Copyright, 1911, by the C. M. Clark Company. GEORGE HORACE LORIMER George Horace Lorimer, editor and novelist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, October 6, 1868, the son of Dr. George C. Lorimer (1838-1904), the distinguished Baptist clergyman and author, who held pastorates at Harrodsburg (where he married a wife), Paducah, and Louisville, but who won his widest reputation in Tremont Temple, Boston. His son was educated at Colby College and at Yale. Since Saint Patrick's Day of 1899, Mr. Lorimer has been editor-in-chief of _The Saturday Evening Post_. He resides with his family at Wyncote, Pennsylvania, but he may be more often found near the top of the magnificent new building of the Curtis Publishing Company in Independence Square. As an author Mr. Lorimer is known for his popular _Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ (Boston, 1902), which was one of the "six best sellers" for a long time. It was actually translated into Japanese. Its sequel, _Old Gorgon Graham_ (New York, 1904), was more letters from the same to the same. The original of _Old Gorgon Graham_ was none other than Philip Danforth Armour, the Chicago packer, under whom Mr. Lorimer worked for several years. Both of the books made a powerful appeal to men, but it is doubtful if many women cared for either of them. _The False Gods_ (New York, 1906), is a newspaper story in which "the false gods" are the faithless _flares_ which lead a "cub" reporter into many mixups, only to have everything turn out happily in the end. Mr. Lorimer's latest story, _Jack Spurlock--Prodigal_ (New York, 1908), an adventurous young fellow who is expelled from Harvard, defies his father, and finds himself in the maw of a cold and uncongenial world, is deliciously funny--for the reader! All of Mr. Lorimer's books are full of the _Poor Richard_ brand of worldly-wise philosophy, which he is in the habit of "serving up" weekly for the readers of _The Post_. That he is certainly an editor of very great ability, and that he has exerted wide influence in his field, no one will gainsay. The men who help him make his paper call him "the greatest editor in America;" and he is undoubtedly the highest salaried one in this country to-day. _The Post_, which was nothing before he assumed control of it, is one of the foremost weeklies in the English-reading world at the present time; and its success is due to the longheadedness and hard common sense of its editor, George Horace Lorimer. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (June, 1903); _The Bookman_ (October, November, 1904); _Little Pilgrimages Among the Men Who Have Written Famous Books_, by E. F. Harkins (Boston, 1903, Second Series). HIS SON'S SWEETHEART[57] [From _Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ (Boston, 1902)] NEW YORK, November 4, 189-. _Dear Pierrepont_: Who is this Helen Heath, and what are your intentions there? She knows a heap more about you than she ought to know if they're not serious, and I know a heap less about her than I ought to know if they are. Hadn't got out of sight of land before we'd become acquainted somehow, and she's been treating me like a father clear across the Atlantic. She's a mighty pretty girl, and a mighty nice girl, and a mighty sensible girl--in fact she's so exactly the sort of girl I'd like to see you marry that I'm afraid there's nothing in it. Of course, your salary isn't a large one yet, but you can buy a whole lot of happiness with fifty dollars a week when you have the right sort of a woman for your purchasing agent. And while I don't go much on love in a cottage, love in a flat, with fifty a week as a starter, is just about right, if the girl is just about right. If she isn't, it doesn't make any special difference how you start out, you're going to end up all wrong. Money ought never to be _the_ consideration in marriage, but it ought always to be _a_ consideration. When a boy and a girl don't think enough about money before the ceremony, they're going to have to think altogether too much about it after; and when a man's doing sums at home evenings, it comes kind of awkward for him to try to hold his wife on his lap. There's nothing in this talk that two can live cheaper than one. A good wife doubles a man's expenses and doubles his happiness, and that's a pretty good investment if a fellow's got the money to invest. I have met women who had cut their husbands' expenses in half, but they needed the money because they had doubled their own. I might add, too, that I've met a good many husbands who had cut their wives' expenses in half, and they fit naturally into any discussion of our business, because they are hogs. There's a point where economy becomes a vice, and that's when a man leaves its practice to his wife. An unmarried man is a good deal like a piece of unimproved real estate--he may be worth a whole lot of money, but he isn't of any particular use except to build on. The great trouble with a lot of these fellows is that they're "made land," and if you dig down a few feet you strike ooze and booze under the layer of dollars that their daddies dumped in on top. Of course, the only way to deal with a proposition of that sort is to drive forty-foot piles clear down to solid rock and then to lay railroad iron and cement till you've got something to build on. But a lot of women will go right ahead without any preliminaries and wonder what's the matter when the walls begin to crack and tumble about their ears. FOOTNOTE: [57] Copyright, 1902, by Small, Maynard and Company. SISTER IMELDA Sister Imelda ("Estelle Marie Gerard"), poet, was born at Jackson, Tennessee, January 17, 1869, the daughter of Charles Brady, a native of Ireland, and soldier in the Confederate army. After the war he went to Jackson, Tennessee, and married Miss Ann Sharpe, a kinswoman of Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi. Their second child was Helen Estelle Brady, the future poet. She was educated by the Dominican sisters at Jackson and, at the age of eighteen years, entered the sisterhood, taking the name of "Sister Imelda." For the next twenty-three years she lived in Kentucky, teaching music in Roman Catholic institutions at Louisville and Springfield, but she is now connected with the Sacred Heart Institute, Watertown, Massachusetts. Sister Imelda's booklet of poems has been highly praised by competent critics. It was entitled _Heart Whispers_ (1905), and issued under her pen-name of "Estelle Marie Gerard." Many of these poems were first published in _The Midland Review_, a Louisville magazine edited by the late Charles J. O'Malley, the poet and critic. Sister Imelda is a woman of rare culture and a real singer, but her strict religious life has hampered her literary labors to an unusual degree. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Hesperian Tree_ (Columbus, Ohio, 1903); letters from Sister Imelda to the Author. A JUNE IDYL[58] [From _Heart Whispers_ (1905)] Every glade sings now of summer-- Songs as sweet as violets' breath; And the glad, warm heart of nature Thrills and gently answereth. Answers through the lily-lyrics And the rosebud's joyous song, Faintly o'er the valley stealing, As the June days speed along. And we, pausing, fondly listen To their tuneful minstrelsy, Floating far beyond the wildwood To the ever restless sea. Till the echoes, softly, lowly, Trembling on the twilight air-- Tells us that each rose and lily Bows its scented head in prayer. HEART MEMORIES [From the same] In fancy's golden barque at eventide My spirit floateth to the Far Away, And dreamland faces come as fades the day. They lean upon my heart. We gently glide Adown the magic shores of long ago, While memories, like silver lily bells, Are tinkling in my heart's fair woodland dells And breathing songs full sweetly soft and low. When eventide has slowly winged its flight, And moonbeams clothe the flowers with radiant light, Ah, then there swiftly come again to me, Like echoes of some song-bird melody, Borne on the breeze from far-off mountain height, Fond thoughts of home, and Mother dear, of Thee. A NUN'S PRAYER [From the same] When lilies swing their voiceless silver bells, And twilight's kiss doth linger on the sea, I wander silently o'er the scented lea By brooks that murmur through the sleeping dells, And rippling onward, chant the funeral knells Of leaves they bear upon their breasts. On Thee, Dear Lord, I lean! The grandest destiny Of life is mine. Within my heart there wells For thee a deep love, and sweetest peace Doth glimmer star-like on the wavelet's crest. Grant, Thou, O Christ, its gleaming ne'er may cease, Until Death's angel makes the melody That calls my pinioned spirit home to Thee, Then only will it know eternal rest. FOOTNOTE: [58] Copyright, 1905, by the Author. HARRISON CONRARD Harrison Conrard, poet, was born at Dodsonville, Ohio, September 21, 1869. He was educated at St. Xavier's College, Cincinnati. From 1892 until the spring of 1899 Mr. Conrard lived at Ludlow, Kentucky, when he removed to Arizona to engage in the lumber business at Flagstaff, his present home. While living at Ludlow he published his first book of poems, entitled _Idle Songs and Idle Sonnets_ (1898), which is now out of print. Mr. Conrard's second and best known volume of verse, called _Quivira_ (Boston, 1907), contained a group of singing lyrics of almost entrancing beauty. These are the only books he has so far published. "Some day," the poet once wrote, "I shall roll up my bedding, take my fishing rod and wander back east, and Kentucky will be good enough for me." He has, however, never come back. A new volume of his verse is to be issued shortly. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Conrard to the Author; _Poet-Lore_ (Boston, Fall Issue, 1907). IN OLD TUCSON[59] [From _Quivira_ (Boston, 1907)] In old Tucson, in old Tucson, What cared I how the days ran on? A brown hand trailing the viol-strings, Hair as black as the raven's wing, Lips that laughed and a voice that clung To the sweet old airs of the Spanish tongue Had drenched my soul with a mellow rime Till all life shone, in that golden clime, With the tender glow of the morning-time. In old Tucson, in old Tucson, How swift the merry days ran on! In old Tucson, in old Tucson, How soon the parting day came on! But I oft turn back in my hallowed dreams, And the low adobe a palace seems, Where her sad heart sighs and her sweet voice sings To the notes that throb from her viol-strings. Oh, those tear-dimmed eyes and that soft brown hand! And a soul that glows like the desert sand-- The golden fruit of a golden land! In old Tucson, in old Tucson, The long, lone days, O Time, speed on! A KENTUCKY SUNRISE [From the same] Faint streaks of light; soft murmurs; sweet Meadow-breaths; low winds; the deep gray Yielding to crimson; a lamb's bleat; Soft-tinted hills; a mockbird's lay: And the red Sun brings forth the Day. A KENTUCKY SUNSET [From the same] The great Sun dies in the west; gold And scarlet fill the skies; the white Daisies nod in repose; the fold Welcomes the lamb; larks sink from sight: The long shadows come, and then--Night. FOOTNOTE: [59] Copyright, 1907, by Richard G. Badger. ALICE HEGAN RICE Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice, creator of "Mrs. Wiggs," was born at Shelbyville, Kentucky, January 11, 1870. She was educated at Hampton College, Louisville. On December 18, 1902, she was married to Mr. Cale Young Rice, the Louisville poetic dramatist. Mrs. Rice is a member of several clubs, and to this work she has devoted considerable attention. Her first book, published under her maiden name of Alice Caldwell Hegan, the redoubtable _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ (New York, 1901), is an epic of optimism, "David Harum's Widow," to its admirers; and a platitudinous production, to its non-admirers. At any rate, it achieved the success it was written to achieve: one of the "six best sellers" for more than a year, and now in its forty-seventh edition! That, surely, is glory--and money--enough for the most exacting. The love episode running through the little tale did not greatly add to its merit, and when the old woman of the many trials and tribulations is absent, it drags itself endlessly along. _Lovey Mary_ (New York, 1903), was a weakish sequel, partly redeemed by the one readable chapter upon the old Kentucky woman of Martinsville, Indiana, and her _Denominational Garden_. That chapter and _The 'Christmas Lady'_ from _Mrs. Wiggs_, were reprinted in London as very slight volumes. _Sandy_ (New York, 1905), was the story of a little Scotch stowaway in Kentucky; _Captain June_ (New York, 1907), related the experiences of an American lad in Japan; _Mr. Opp_ (New York, 1909), was a rather unpleasant tale of an eccentric Kentucky journalist, yet quite the strongest thing she has done. Mrs. Gusty, Jimmy Fallows, Cove City, _The Opp Eagle_, its editor, D. Webster Opp, his half-crazed sister, Kippy, are very real and very pathetic. Mrs. Rice's latest story, _A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill_ (New York, 1912), was heralded as a "delightful blend of Cabbage Patch philosophy and high romance;" and it was said to have been the result of a suggestion made to the author by the late editor and poet, Richard Watson Gilder, that she should paint upon a larger canvas--which suggestion was both good and timely. That the "Cabbage Patch philosophy" is present no one will deny; but the "high romance" is reached at the top of Billy-Goat Hill which is, after all, not a very dizzy altitude. It was, of course, one of the "six best sellers" for several months. Indeed, more than a million copies of her books have been sold; and nearly as many people have seen the dramatization of _Mr. Opp_ and _Mrs. Wiggs_.[60] BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Outlook_ (December 6, 1902); _The Bookman_ (May, 1903); _The Critic_ (June, 1904). THE OPPRESSED MR. OPP DECIDES[61] [From _Mr. Opp_ (New York, 1909)] Half an hour later Mr. Opp dragged himself up the hill to his home. All the unfairness and injustice of the universe seemed pressing upon his heart. Every muscle in his body quivered in remembrance of what he had been through, and an iron band seemed tightening about his throat. His town had refused to believe his story! It had laughed in his face! With a sudden mad desire for sympathy and for love, he began calling Kippy. He stumbled across the porch, and, opening the door with his latch-key, stood peering into the gloom of the room. The draft from an open window blew a curtain toward him, a white, spectral, beckoning thing, but no sound broke from the stillness. "Kippy!" he called again, his voice sharp with anxiety. From one room to another he ran, searching in nooks and corners, peering under the beds and behind the doors, calling in a voice that was sometimes a command, but oftener a plea: "Kippy! Kippy!" At last he came back to the dining-room and lighted the lamp with shaking hands. On the hearth were the remains of a small bonfire, with papers scattered about. He dropped on his knees and seized a bit of charred cardboard. It was a corner of the hand-painted frame that had incased the picture of Guinevere Gusty! Near it lay loose sheets of paper, parts of that treasured package of letters she had written him from Coreyville. As Mr. Opp gazed helplessly about the room, his eyes fell upon something white pinned to the red table-cloth. He held it to the light. It was a portion of one of Guinevere's letters, written in the girl's clear, round hand: Mother says I can never marry you until Miss Kippy goes to the asylum. Mr. Opp got to his feet. "She's read the letter," he cried wildly; "she's learned out about herself! Maybe she's in the woods now, or down on the bank!" He rushed to the porch. "Kippy!" he shouted. "Don't be afraid! Brother D.'s coming to get you! Don't run away, Kippy! Wait for me! Wait!" and leaving the old house open to the night, he plunged into the darkness, beating through the woods and up and down the road, calling in vain for Kippy, who lay cowering in the bottom of a leaking skiff that was drifting down the river at the mercy of the current. Two days later, Mr. Opp sat in the office of the Coreyville Asylum for the Insane and heard the story of his sister's wanderings. Her boat had evidently been washed ashore at a point fifteen miles above the town, for people living along the river had reported a strange little woman, without hat or coat, who came to their doors crying and saying her name was "Oxety," and that she was crazy, and begging them to show her the way to the asylum. On the second day she had been found unconscious on the steps of the institution, and since then, the doctor said, she had been wild and unmanageable. "Considering all things," he concluded, "it is much wiser for you not to see her. She came of her own accord, evidently felt the attack coming on, and wanted to be taken care of." He was a large, smooth-faced man, with the conciliatory manner of one who regards all his fellow-men as patients in varying degrees of insanity. "But I'm in the regular habit of taking care of her," protested Mr. Opp. "This is just a temporary excitement for the time being that won't ever, probably, occur again. Why, she's been improving all winter; I've learnt her to read and write a little, and to pick out a number of cities on the geographical atlas." "All wrong," exclaimed the doctor; "mistaken kindness. She can never be any better, but she may be a great deal worse. Her mind should never be stimulated or excited in any way. Here, of course, we understand all these things and treat the patient accordingly." "Then I must just go back to treating her like a child again?" asked Mr. Opp, "not endeavoring to improve her intellect, or help her grow up in any way?" The doctor laid a kindly hand on his shoulder. "You leave her to us," he said. "The State provides this excellent institution for just such cases as hers. You do yourself and your family, if you have one, an injustice by keeping her at home. Let her stay here for six months or so, and you will see what a relief it will be." Mr. Opp sat with his elbow on the desk and his head propped in his hand and stared miserably at the floor. He had not had his clothes off for two nights, and he had scarcely taken time from his search to eat anything. His face looked old and wizened and haunted from the strain. Yet here and now he was called upon to make his great decision. On the one hand lay the old, helpless life with Kippy, and on the other a future of dazzling possibility with Guinevere. All of his submerged self suddenly rose and demanded happiness. He was ready to snatch it, at any cost, regardless of everything and everybody--of Kippy; of Guinevere, who, he knew, did not love him, but would keep her promise; of Hinton, whose secret he had long ago guessed. And, as a running accompaniment to his thoughts, was the quiet, professional voice of the doctor urging him to the course that his heart prompted. For a moment the personal forces involved trembled in equilibrium. After a long time he unknotted his fingers, and drew his handkerchief across his brow. "I guess I'll go up and see her now," he said, with the gasping breath of a man who has been under water. In vain the doctor protested. Mr. Opp was determined. As the door to the long ward was being unlocked, he leaned for a moment dizzily against the wall. "You'd better let me give you a swallow of whiskey," suggested the doctor, who had noted his exhaustion. Mr. Opp raised his hand deprecatingly, with a touch of his old professional pride. "I don't know as I've had occasion to mention," he said, "that I am the editor and sole proprietor of 'The Opp Eagle'; and that bird," he added, with a forced smile, "is, as everybody knows, a complete teetotaler." At the end of the crowded ward, with her face to the wall, was a slight, familiar figure. Mr. Opp started forward; then he turned fiercely upon the attendant. "Her hands are tied! Who dared to tie her up like that?" "It's just a soft handkerchief," replied the matronly woman, reassuringly. "We were afraid she would pull her hair out. She wants it fixed a certain way; but she's afraid for any of us to touch her. She has been crying about it ever since she came." In an instant Mr. Opp was on his knees beside her. "Kippy, Kippy darling, here's brother D.; he'll fix it for you! You want it parted on the side, don't you, tied with a bow, and all the rest hanging down? Don't cry so, Kippy. I'm here now; brother D.'ll take care of you." She flung her loosened arms around him and clung to him in a passion of relief. Her sobs shook them both, and his face and neck were wet with her tears. As soon as they could get her sufficiently quiet, they took her into her little bedroom. "You let the lady get you ready," urged Mr. Opp, still holding her hand, "and I'll take you back home, and Aunt Tish will have a nice, hot supper all waiting for us." But she would let nobody else touch her, and even then she broke forth into piteous sobs and protests. Once she pushed him from her and looked about wildly. "No, no," she cried, "I mustn't go; I am crazy!" But he told her about the three little kittens that had been born under the kitchen steps, and in an instant she was a-tremble with eagerness to go home to see them. An hour later Mr. Opp and his charge sat on the river-bank and waited for the little launch that was to take them back to the Cove. A curious crowd had gathered at a short distance, for their story had gone the rounds. Mr. Opp sat under the fire of curious glances, gazing straight in front of him, and only his flushed face showed what he was suffering. Miss Kippy, in her strange clothes and with her pale hair flying about her shoulders, sat close by him, her hand in his. "D.," she said once in a high, insistent voice, "when will I be grown up enough to marry Mr. Hinton?" Mr. Opp for a moment forgot the crowd. "Kippy," he said, with all the gentle earnestness that was in him, "you ain't never going to grow up at all. You are just always going to be brother D.'s little girl. You see, Mr. Hinton's too old for you, just like--" he paused, then finished it bravely--"just like I am too old for Miss Guin-never. I wouldn't be surprised if they got married with each other some day. You and me will just have to take care of each other." She looked at him with the quick suspicion of the insane, but he was ready for her with a smile. "Oh, D.," she cried, in a sudden rapture, "we are glad, ain't we?" FOOTNOTES: [60] _Mr. Opp_ was dramatized by Douglas Z. Doty, a New York editor, and presented at Macaulay's Theatre, in Louisville, but it was shortly sent to the store-house. _Mrs. Wiggs_ was put into play-form by Mrs. Anne (Laziere) Crawford Flexner, in 1904, with Madge Carr Cook in the title-role. Mrs. Flexner was born at Georgetown, Kentucky; educated at Vassar; married Abraham Flexner of Louisville, June 23, 1898; lived at Louisville until June, 1905, since which time she has spent a year in Cambridge, Mass., and a year abroad; now residing in New York City. She has written two original plays: _A Man's Woman_, in four acts; and _A Lucky Star_, the fount of inspiration being a novel by C. N. and A. M. Williamson, entitled _The Motor Chaperon_, which was produced by Charles Frohman, with Willie Collier in the steller part, at the Hudson Theatre, New York, in 1910. She also dramatized A. E. W. Mason's story, _Miranda of the Balcony_ (London, 1899), which was produced in New York by Mrs. Fiske in 1901. Mrs. Flexner is the only successful woman playwright Kentucky has produced; and it is a real pity that none of her plays have been published. _Mrs. Wiggs_ has held the "boards" for eight year; and it seems destined to go on forever. [61] Copyright, 1909, by the Century Company. RICHARD H. WILSON Richard Henry Wilson ("Richard Fisguill"), novelist and educator, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, March 6, 1870. He received the degrees of B. A. and M. A. from South Kentucky College, and Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins in 1898. Dr. Wilson spent ten years in Europe studying at universities in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain; and he married a Frenchwoman. He has been a great "globe-trotter," and he speaks a dozen languages fluently. Since 1899 Dr. Wilson has been professor of Romantic languages at the University of Virginia. All the appointments of his home are in the French style, and French is the language of the family. Professor Wilson is a good Kentuckian, nevertheless, and he knows the land and the people well. He is to the University of Virginia what Professor Charles T. Copeland is to Harvard. His first book, _The Preposition A_, is now out of print. His novel, _Mazel_ (New York, 1902), takes rather the form of a satire upon life at the University of Virginia. Professor Wilson's next story, _The Venus of Cadiz_ (New York, 1905), is a rollicking extravaganza of cave and country life at Cadiz, Kentucky. Both of his novels have been issued under his pen-name of "Richard Fisguill"--"Fisguill" being bastard French for "Wilson." Professor Wilson contributes much to the magazines. Four of his short-stories were printed in _Harper's Weekly_ between April and October of 1912, under the following titles, and in the order of their appearance: _Orphanage_, _The Nymph_, _Seven Slumbers_, and _The Princess of Is_. Another story, _The Waitress at the Phoenix_, was published in _Collier's_ for September 7, 1912. A collection of his short-stories may be issued in 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). SUSAN--THE VENUS OF CADIZ[62] [From _The Venus of Cadiz_ (New York, 1905)] Colonel Norris was as laconic as usual, not even giving his address. He had written four letters in twelve years. "The Colonel means a million francs," explained Captain Malepeste. "His letter was addressed to me, and he knows I always count in francs." "The Colonel means a million marks," replied Captain Bisherig. "He began his letter: 'Dear Malepeste and Bisherig,' and I don't believe Colonel Norris would think in francs when he had me in mind." "But the Colonel is an American," observed Gertrude. "Don't you think it would be more natural for him to count and think in dollars--a million dollars?" "No, I do not," replied Doctor Alvin. "I believe all of you are wrong. The Colonel is in Australia. His business relations are doubtless with English houses. And in my opinion he means pounds, English money--a million pounds sterling." "Why, that would make five million dollars!" exclaimed Gertrude. "Twenty million marks!" ejaculated Captain Bisherig. "Twenty-five million francs!" echoed Captain Malepeste. "That is what it would be," assented Doctor Alvin, "and that is what the Colonel means, I feel sure. Nor am I surprised. Norris is a man of remarkable business instincts. He is as cool and collected on the floor of a stock exchange as he was on the field of battle. Then he had every incentive to make a fortune. And he has made one, take my word for it." "Nom d'une pipe!" exclaimed Captain Malepeste. "We will all go to Paris, and buy a hôtel on the Champs-Elysees!" "We will do no such thing," objected Captain Bisherig. "Your modern Babylon is no place for respectable folks to live in." Captain Malepeste retorted: "Well, if you think we should be willing to put up with more than one 'Dutchman,' and live in Germany--God forbid!" Captain Bisherig and Captain Malepeste retired to the Music Room that they might settle with swords the question of the respective merits of Germany and France. Gertrude followed in the capacity of second and surgeon to both men. Susan and Doctor Alvin remained alone. Catherine had retired to her bedroom. "So papa is coming back with a fortune," observed Dr. Alvin, affectionately. "And ... and what is our Susie going to do--give a ball, and invite the Governor of Kentucky?" "If father comes back with a million, I am going somewhere to study art," replied Susan. The reply came so quickly that Dr. Alvin was startled. Susan had fought out her battles alone. Unperceived she had crossed the threshold of womanhood. "Study art ... be an artist, when a girl is as pretty as you are, and heiress to five million dollars!" cried Doctor Alvin, laying aside the mask he had worn so long. It was Susan's turn to be astonished. She looked at her guardian fixedly, expressing pain in her look. At length, in a low voice, she said: "I do not see why." "Susan!" began Doctor Alvin. Then he hesitated, as if in doubt as to whether he should continue. "I do not see why," repeated Susan, in the same low voice. Doctor Alvin passed his hand over his forehead. He resumed: "Susan, your father is coming back shortly. My guardianship is ended. Your father made me swear on Julia's coffin, that I would discourage in you all thoughts of marriage until he returned. He was afraid you might follow in Julia's footsteps. I was to represent sentiment as sentimentality, substitute art for love, and prevent your fancy crystallizing into some man-inspired desire. I have kept my promise. Your father will find you fancy-free, will he not?" "Yes." "But, Susan--" and Doctor Alvin's voice again expressed excitement. "But--" Doctor Alvin's voice trembled so that he was obliged to start over again: "Susan, you do not know what you are. You--you--are a beautiful woman. You are more beautiful than Julia was at the height of her beauty. You are more beautiful than your mother was--" Doctor Alvin's voice echoed mournfully as if he were calling upon the dead. "Susan, you have only to look upon men to conquer them. You can achieve with a gesture what artists accomplish with a masterpiece. What can artists do, other than quicken the pulse of sluggard humanity? But, Susan--God guide your power--you will make blood boil, heads reel, hearts throb until they burst, if so you will it. Art--artists! There is no need of you studying art. Artists will study you. Have you never looked at yourself in the glass, child? Have you never, when--when--You have studied art with Malepeste, and you know what lines are. Have you never thought of studying your own lines? None of the great statues or paintings, of which Malepeste has the photographs, is so harmoniously perfect as you. Art!--You are the genius of art. I have influenced you into taking up various lines of work, that I might keep you from the pitfalls of love, until the proper time. But, now, my guardianship is ended. I have played a part. I must lay aside my mask. Susan, I have been deceiving you. Love is by all odds the greatest thing in the world. You must love. And you must let some one love you--some one of the many who will be ready to lay down their lives for you--" FOOTNOTES: [62] Copyright, 1905, by Henry Holt and Company. LUCY FURMAN Miss Lucy Furman, short-story writer, was born at Henderson, Kentucky, in 1870, the daughter of a physician. Her parents died when she was quite young, and she was brought up by her aunt. Miss Furman attended public and private schools at Henderson, and at the age of sixteen years, graduated from Sayre Institute at Lexington, Kentucky. The three years following her graduation were spent at Henderson and at Shreveport, Louisiana, the home of her grandparents, in both of which places she was a social leader. At the age of nineteen, it became necessary for her to make her own way in the world, and for about four years she was court stenographer at Evansville, Indiana. Miss Furman's earliest literary work was done at Evansville. The first stories she ever wrote were accepted by _The Century Magazine_ when she was but twenty-three years of age. These were some of the _Stories of a Sanctified Town_ (New York, 1896), one of the most charming books yet written by a Kentucky woman. At the age of twenty-five, when her prospects were exceedingly bright, Miss Furman's health failed entirely, and during the next ten years she was an invalid, seeking health in Florida, southern Texas, on the Jersey coast, and elsewhere, but without much success, and being always too feeble to do any writing. In 1907 she went up into the mountains of her native State to become a teacher in the W. C. T. U. Settlement School at Hindman, Knott county, Kentucky. She did very little at first, but gradually her strength came back, and for the last two years she has been writing stories and sketches of the Kentucky mountains for _The Century Magazine_. In 1911 _The Century_ published a series of stories under the title of _Mothering on Perilous_, which will be brought out in book form. In 1912 Miss Furman had several stories in the same magazine, one of the best of which was _Hard-Hearted Barbary Allen_. Her lack of physical strength has compelled her to work very slowly, and it is only by living out-of-doors at least half the time that she can live at all. "I have charge of the gardening and outdoor work at the Settlement School," Miss Furman wrote recently, "but the happiest part of my life is my residence at the small boys' cottage, about which I have told in the 'Perilous' stories, and in which I find endless pleasure and entertainment. Here I hope to spend the remainder of my days." Very pathetic, reader, and very heroic! BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Miss Furman to the Author; _The Century Magazine_ (July, August, November, December, 1912). A MOUNTAIN COQUETTE[63] [From _Hard-Hearted Barbary Allen_ (_The Century Magazine_, March, 1912)] Beneath the musket, on the "fire-board," lay a spindle-shaped, wooden object, black with age. "A dulcimer," Aunt Polly Ann explained. "My man made it, too, always-ago. Dulcimers used to be all the music there was in this country, but banjos is coming in now." Miss Loring knew that the dulcimer was an ancient musical instrument very popular in England three centuries ago. She gazed upon the interesting survival with reverence, and expressed a wish to hear it played. "Beldory she'll pick and sing for you gladly when she gets the dishes done," promised Aunt Polly Ann. "Picking and singing is her strong p'ints, and she knows any amount of song-ballads." At last Beldora came out on the porch and seated herself on a low stool near the loom. Laying the dulcimer across her knees, she began striking the strings with two quills, using both shapely hands. The music was weird, but attractive; the tune she played, minor, long-drawn, and haunting. Miss Loring received the second shock of the day when she caught the opening words of the song: All in the merry month of May, When the green buds they were swelling, Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay, For the love of Barbary Allen. Often had she read and heard of the old English ballad "Barbara Allen"; never had she thought to encounter it in the flesh. As she listened to the old song, long since forgotten by the rest of the world, but here a warm household possession; as she gazed at Beldora, so young, so fair against the background of ancient loom and gray log wall, she felt as one may to whom the curtain of the past is for an instant lifted, and a vision of dead-and-gone generations vouchsafed. * * * * * Beldora went off to fetch the nag, and Aunt Polly Ann accompanied the guest to the horse-block, laying an anxious hand on her arm. "You heared the song-ballad Beldory sung to you. She knows dozens, but that's always her first pick. It's her favor_rite_, and why? Because it's similar to her own manoeuvers. Light and cruel and leading poor boys on to destruction is her joy and pastime, same as Barbary's. Did you mind her eyes when she sung them words about As she were walking through the streets, She heard them death-bells knelling, And every stroke it seemed to say, "Hard-hearted Barbary Allen!" like it was something to take pride in, instead of sorrow for? Yes, woman, them words, 'Hard-hearted Barbary Allen,' is her living description, and will be to the end of time." Ten days later the shocking news reached the school that Robert and Adriance Towles had fought on the summit of Devon Mountain for Beldora Wyant's sake, and Robert had fallen dead, with five bullets in him, Adriance being wounded, though not fatally. It was said that Beldora, pressed to choose between the two, had told them she would marry the best man; that thereupon, with their bosom friends, they had ridden to the top of Devon, measured off paces, and fired. Adriance had fled, but word came the next day that, weak from loss of blood, he had been captured and was on the way to jail in the county-seat near the school. In the weeks until court sat and the trial came off there was much excitement. Sympathy for Adriance and blame for Beldora were everywhere felt. Most of the county and all of the school-women attended the trial, and interest was divided between the haggard, harassed young face of Adriance and the calm, opulent loveliness of Beldora. When she took the stand, people scarcely breathed. Yes, she had told the Towles boys she would marry the best man of them. She had had to tell them something,--they were pestering her to death,--and the law didn't allow her to marry both. She had had no notion they would be such fools as to try to kill each other. Miss Loring and the other women watched anxiously for some sign of pity or remorse in her, but there was not so much as a quiver of the lips or a tremor in her voice. As she sat there in the lone splendor of her beauty, somewhat scornfully enjoying the gaze of every eye in the court-room, one phrase of her "favor_rite_" song rang ceaselessly through Miss Loring's head--"Hard-hearted Barbary Allen." Her lack of feeling intensified the sympathy for Adriance, and, to everybody's joy, the light verdict of only one year in the penitentiary was brought in. Half an hour later, Aunt Polly Ann, tragic in face and air, and with Beldora on the nag behind her, drew rein before the settlement school. "Women," she said with sad solemnity on entering, "for four year' you have been bidding Beldory come and set down and partake of your feast of learning and knowledge; for four year' she has spurned your invite. At last she is minded to come. Here she is. Take her, and see what you can accomplish on her. My raising of her has requited me naught but tenfold tribulation. In vain have I watched and warned and denounced and prophesied; her inordinate light-mindedness and perfidity has now brung one pore boy to a' ontimely grave and another to Frankfort. Take her, women, and see if you can learn her some little demeanor and civility. Keep her under your beneficent and God-fearing roof, and direct her mind off of her outward and on to her inward disabilities! Women, I now wash my hands." Receiving Beldora into the school was felt to be a somewhat hazardous undertaking, but affection and sympathy for Aunt Polly Ann moved the heads to do it. To the general surprise, Beldora settled down very adaptably to the new life, being capable enough about the industries, and passably so about books. But it was in music that she excelled. Miss Loring gave her piano lessons, and rarely had teacher a more gifted pupil. Needless to say, when Beldora picked the dulcimer and sang song-ballads at the Friday night parties, all the children and grown-ups sat entranced. For three or four weeks, on these occasions, she had the grace to choose other ballads than "Barbara Allen"; but one night in early November, after singing "Turkish Lady" and "The Brown Girl," she suddenly struck into the haunting melody and tragic words of "Barbara Allen." A thrill and a shock went through all her hearers. Miss Loring saw Howard Cleves start forward in his chair with a look of horror, almost repulsion, on his fine, intelligent face. Howard was the most remarkable boy in the school. Five years before, when not quite fifteen, he had walked over, barefoot, from his home on Millstone, forty miles distant, and presented himself to "the women" with this plea: "I hear you women run a school where boys and girls can work their way through. I am the workingest boy on Millstone, and have hoed corn, cleared new-ground, and snaked logs since I turned my fifth year. I have heard tell, over yander on Millstone, that there is a sizable world outside these mountains, full of strange, foreign folk and wonderly things. I crave to know about it. I can't set in darkness any longer. My hunger for learning ha'nts me day and night, and burns me like a fever. I'll pine to death if I don't get it. Women, give me a chance. Hunt up the hardest job on your place, and watch me toss it off." They gave him the chance; and never had they done anything that more richly rewarded them. Not only were his powers of work prodigious, but his eager, brilliant mind opened amazingly day by day, progressing by leaps and bounds. The women set their chief hopes upon Howard, believing that in him they would give a great man to the nation. Promise of a scholarship in the law school of a well-known university had already been obtained for him, and in one more year, such was his astonishing progress, he would be able to enter it, if all went well. Miss Loring had observed that, in common with every other boy, big or little, in the school, Howard had been at first much taken with Beldora's looks, and it was with relief that she beheld his expression of repulsion at Beldora's complacent singing of "Barbara Allen." The first real warning came at the Thanksgiving party. During a game of forfeits, Beldora was ordered to "claim the one you like the best." Miss Loring saw her first approach Howard with a dazzling and tender look in her splendid eyes, and even put out a hand to him; then suddenly, with a wicked little smile, she turned and gave both hands to Spalding Drake, a young man from the village. A deep flush sprang to Howard's face, his jaws clenched, his eyes blazed tigerishly. It might have been only chagrin at the public slight; still, it made Miss Loring anxious enough to have a long talk with Beldora next day and explain to her the hopes and plans for Howard's future and the tragedy and cruelty of interfering with them in any way. One morning, three days before Christmas, Beldora's bed had not been slept in at all, and under the front door was a note in Howard's handwriting, as follows: DEAR FRIENDS: Beldora told me last week she aimed to marry Spalding Drake Christmas. Though he is a nice boy and I like him, I knew, if she did, I would kill him on the spot. Rather than do this, it is better for me to marry her myself beforehand. I have hired a nag, and we will ride to Tazewell by moonlight for a license and preacher. I know a man is a fool that throws away his future for a woman, that Beldora is not worth it, and that I am doing what I will never cease to regret. It is like death to me to know I will never accomplish the things you set before me, and be the man you wanted me to be. I wish I had never laid eyes on Beldora. I have agonized and battled and tried to give her up; but she is too strong for me. I can fight no longer with fate. It would be better if women like Beldora never was created. She has cost the life of one boy, the liberty of another, and now my future. But it had to be. Respectfully yours, HOWARD. FOOTNOTE: [63] Copyright, 1912, by the Century Company. BERT FINCK Edward Bertrand Finck ("Bert Finck"), prose pastelist and closet dramatist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, October 16, 1870, the son of a German father and American mother. His parents were fond of traveling and much of his earlier life was spent in various parts of this country and abroad. He was educated in the private schools of his native city, finishing his academic training at Professor M. B. Allmond's institution. Mr. Finck began to write at an early age, and he has published four books: _Pebbles_ (Louisville, 1898), a little volume of epigrams; _Webs_ (Louisville, 1900), being reveries and essays in miniature; _Plays_ (Louisville, 1902), a group of allegorical dramas; and _Musings and Pastels_ (Louisville, 1905). All of these small books are composed of poetic and philosophical prose, many passages possessing great truth and beauty. In 1906 Mr. Finck was admitted to the bar of Louisville, and he has since practiced there with success. He seemingly took Blackstonian leave of letters some years ago, but the gossips of literary Louisville have been telling, of late, of a new book of prose pastels that he has recently finished and will bring out in the late autumn of 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mr. Finck's letters to the Author; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). BEHIND THE SCENES[64] [From _Webs_ (Louisville, 1900)] Could we but lift the countenance which pleases or repels, what seems so sweet might thrust away, and what is repugnant charm or win our sympathy and aid. Is not indifference often a net to catch or to conceal? Modesty, diplomatic egotism? Wit, brilliant misery? Contentment, wallowing despair? Langor, shrewd energy? Frivolity, woe burlesquely masked by unselfishness or pride? Is not philosophy, at times, resignation in delirium? The enthusiastic are ridiculed as being self-conceited; the patient condemned for having no heart. We stigmatize them as idle whose natures are toiling the noblest toil of all, for not rarely do thought-gods drift through a spell of idleness; a butterfly-fancy may breed a spirit that turns the way of an age's career; there are sleeps that are awakenings; awakenings, sleeps; none so worthless as many who are busy all the time. Smiles are sometimes selfish triumphs; peace, the swine-heart's well-filled trough. Cheeks rich with the fire of fever are envied as glow of health; steps, eager to escape from a spectre, we laudingly call enthusiasm in work; and the brain's desperate efforts to stifle bitter thoughts sharpen tongues that fascinate with their brilliant gayety--the world dances to the music of its sighs. FOOTNOTE: [64] Copyright, 1900, by the Author. OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN Mrs. Olive Tilford Dargan, poet and dramatist, was born at Tilfordsville, near Leitchfield, Kentucky, in 1870. She attended the public schools, in which her parents were teachers, until she was ten years of age, when they left Kentucky and established a school at Donophan, Missouri. Three years later she was ready for college, but her mother's health broke, and the family settled in the Ozark Mountains, near Warm Springs, Arkansas, where another school was conducted, this time with the daughter as her father's assistant. For the following five years she taught the young idea of backwoods Arkansas how to shoot; and during these years she herself was always hoping and planning for a college education, which hopes and plans seemed to crumble beneath her feet when her mother died, in 1888, and she returned to Kentucky with her invalid father. She had purposed in her heart, however, and finally obtained a Peabody scholarship, which took her to the University of Nashville, Tennessee, from which institution she was graduated two years later. Miss Tilford then accepted a position to teach in Missouri, but the climate so affected her health that she was forced to resign and repair to Houston, Texas, to recuperate. She shortly afterwards took a course in a business college and, for a brief period, held a position in a bank. Teaching again called her and for two years she taught in the schools of San Antonio, Texas. In 1894 Miss Tilford did work in English and philosophy at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a year later she turned again to teaching, holding a position in Acadia Seminary, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. This was followed by a year spent in reading in the libraries of Boston, in which city she also worked as a stenographer. Several of her articles were accepted by the magazines about this time, which decided her to settle upon literature as her life work. She worked too hard at the outset, however, her health gave way, and she spent some months in the mountains of Georgia in order to regain her strength. Miss Tilford was married, in 1898, to Mr. Pegram Dargan, of Darlington, South Carolina, a Harvard man, whom she had met while at Radcliffe. Not long after she went to New York, and there resumed her literary labors with a high and serious purpose. Mrs. Dargan's first volume of dramas, _Semiramis and Other Plays_, was published by Brentano's in 1904, and taken over by the Scribner's in 1909. Besides the title-play, _Semiramis_, founded on the life of the famous Persian queen, this book contained _Carlotta_, a drama of Mexico in the days of Maximilian, and _The Poet_, which is Edgar Allan Poe's life dramatized. Mrs. Dargan's second volume of plays bore the attractive title of _Lords and Lovers and Other Dramas_ (New York, 1906), the second edition of which appeared in 1908. This also contains three plays, the second being _The Shepherd_, with the setting in Russia, and the third, _The Siege_, a Sicilian play, the scene of which is laid in Syracuse, three hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. Mrs. Dargan's _Lords and Lovers_, set against an English background, is generally regarded as the best work she has done hitherto. Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie has praised this play highly, placing the author beside Percy MacKaye and Josephine Preston Peabody Marks. Mrs. Dargan is Kentucky's foremost poetic dramatist, and the work she has so far accomplished may be considered but an earnest of what she will ultimately produce. Her beautiful masque, _The Woods of Ida_, appeared in _The Century Magazine_ for August, 1907, and it has taken its place with the finest English work in that branch of the drama. She has had lyrics in _Scribner's_, _McClure's_, _The Century_, and _The Atlantic Monthly_, her most recent poem, "In the Blue Ridge," having appeared in _Scribner's_ for May, 1911. Mrs. Dargan's home is in Boston, but for the last three years she has traveled abroad, spending much time in England, the background of her greatest work. Her third and latest volume contains three dramas, entitled _The Mortal Gods and Other Plays_ (New York, 1912). This was awaited with impatience by her admirers on both sides of the Atlantic and read with delight by them. "Mrs. Dargan has so recently achieved fame that it may seem premature to pronounce a critical judgment on her work," wrote Dr. George A. Wauchope, professor of English in the University of South Carolina, in claiming her for his State. "It is certain, however," he continued, "that it marks the high tide of dramatic poetry in this country, and is, indeed, not unworthy of comparison with all but the greatest in English literature. One is equally impressed by the creative inspiration and the mastery of technique displayed by the author. Each of her plays reveals a dramatic power and a poetic beauty of thought and diction that are surprising. The numerous songs, also, with which her plays are interspersed, yield a rich and haunting melody that is redolent of the charming Elizabethan lyrics. The dramas as a whole are audacious in plot and vigorous in characterization. In the handling of the blank verse, in the witty scenes of the sub-plots, in the splendor of the phrasing, in the strong undercurrent of reflection, and, above all, in their spiritual uplift and noble emotion, these dramas give evidence of a remarkably gifted playwright who not only possesses a deep feeling for art at its highest and best, but who also has command of all the varied resources of dramatic expression." It would be difficult for a critic to say more in praise of an author, would it not? BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The University of Virginia Magazine_ (January, 1909), containing Wm. Kavanaugh Doty's review of Mrs. Dargan's _The Poet_; _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. iii); _The Writers of South Carolina_, by G. A. Wauchope (Columbia, S. C., 1910). NEAR THE COTTAGE IN GREENOT WOODS[65] [From _Lords and Lovers_ (New York, 1906)] Act IV, Scene I. _Henry, with lute, singing._ Ope, throw ope thy bower door, And come thou forth, my sweet! 'Tis morn, the watch of love is o'er, And mating hearts should meet. The stars have fled and left their grace In every blossom's lifted face, And gentle shadows fleck the light With tender memories of the night. Sweet, there's a door to every shrine; Wilt thou, as morning, open thine? Hark! now the lark has met the clouds, And rains his sheer melodious flood; The green earth casts her mystic shrouds To meet the flaming god! Alas, for me there is no dawn If Glaia come not with the sun. [_Enter Glaia. The king kneels as she approaches._] _Gla._ 'Tis you! _Hen._ [Leaping up] Pardoned! Queen of this bowerland, Your glad eyes tell me that I have not sinned. _Gla._ How cam'st thou here? Now who plays Hubert false? Nay, I'm too glad thou'rt come to question so. 'Tis easy to forgive the treachery That opes our gates to angels. _Hen._ O, I'm loved? _Gla._ Yes, Henry. All the morn I've thought of you, And I rose early, for I love to say Good-by to my dear stars; they seem so wan And loath to go away, as though they know The fickle world is thinking of the sun And all their gentle service of the night Is quite forgot. _Hen._ And what didst think of me? _Gla._ That you could come and see this beauteous wood, Fair with Spring's love and morning's kiss of grace, You'd be content to live awhile with me, Leave war's red step to follow living May Passing to pour her veins' immortal flood To each decaying root; and rest by springs Where waters run to sounds less rude than song, And hiding sibyls stir sweet prophecies. _Hen._ The only springs I seek are in your eyes That nourish all the desert of myself. Drop here, O, Glaia, thy transforming dews, And start fair summer in this waste of me! _Gla._ Poor Henry! What dost know of me to love? _Hen._ See yon light cloud half-kirtled with faint rose? What do I know of it but that 'tis fair? And yet I dream 'twas born of flower dews And goes to some sweet country of the sky, So cloud-like dost thou move before my love, From beauty coming that I may not see, To beauty going that I can but dream. O, love me, Glaia! Give to me this hand, This miracle of warm, unmelting snow, This lily bit of thee that in my clasp Lies like a dove in all too rude a cote-- Wee heaven-cloud to drop on monarch brows And smooth the ridgy traces of a crown! Rich me with this, and I'll not fear to dare The darkest shadow of defeat that broods O'er sceptres and unfriended kings. _Gla._ Why talk Of crowns and kings? This is our home, dear Henry, For if you love me you will stay with me. _Hen._ Ah, blest to be here, and from morning's top Review the sunny graces of the world, Plucking the smilingest to dearer love, Until the heart becomes the root and spring Of hopes as natural and as simply sweet As these bright children of the wedded sun And dewy earth! _Gla._ I knew you'd stay, my brother! You'll live with me! _Hen._ But there's a world not this, O'er-roofed and fretted by ambition's arch, Whose sun is power and whose rains are blood, Whose iris bow is the small golden hoop That rims the forehead of a king,--a world Where trampling armies and sedition's march Cut off the flowers of descanting love Ere they may sing their perfect word to man, And the rank weeds of envies, jealousies, Push up each night from day's hot-beaten paths-- _Gla._ O, do not tell me, do not think of it! _Hen._ I must. There is my world, and there my life Must grow to gracious end, if so it can. If thou wouldst come, my living periapt, With virtue's gentle legend overwrit, I should not fail, nor would this flower cheek, Pure lily cloister of a praying rose, E'er know the stain of one despoiling tear Shed for me graceless. Will you come, my Glaia? _Gla._ Into that world? No, thou shalt stay with me. Here you shall be a king, not serve one. Ah, The whispering winds do never counsel false, And senatorial trees droop not their state To tribe and treachery. Nature's self shall be Your minister, the seasons your envoys And high ambassadors, bearing from His court The mortal olive of immortal love. _Hen._ To man my life belongs. Hope not, dear Glaia, To bind me here; and if you love me true, You will not ask me where I go or stay, But that your feet may stay or go with mine. Let not a nay unsweet those tender lips That all their life have ripened for this kiss. [_Kisses her_] O ruby purities! I would not give Their chaste extravagance for fruits Iran Stored with the honey of a thousand suns Through the slow measure of as many years! _Gla._ Do brothers talk like that? _Hen._ I think not, sweet _Gla._ But you will be my brother? _Hen._ We shall see. _Gla._ And you will stay with me? No? Ah, I fear All that you love in me is born of these Wild innocences that I live among, And far from here, all such sweet value lost, I'll be as others are in your mad world, Or wither mortally, even as the sprig A moment gone so pertly trimmed this bough. Let us stay here, my Henry. We shall be Dear playmates ever, never growing old,-- Or if we do 'twill be at such a pace Time will grow weary chiding, leaving us To come at will. _Hen._ No, Glaia. Even now I must be gone. I came for this----to say I'd come again, and bid you watch for me. A tear? O, love! One moment, then away! [_Exeunt. Curtain_] FOOTNOTE: [65] Copyright, 1906, by Charles Scribner's Sons. HARRY L. MARRINER Harry Lee Marriner, newspaper poet, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 24, 1871, the son of a schoolman. He was educated by his father and in the public schools of his native city. He engaged in a dozen different businesses before he suddenly discovered that he could write, which discovery caused him to accept a position on the now defunct _Chicago Dispatch_, from which he went to _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, remaining with that paper for several years. In 1902 Mr. Marriner went to Texas and became assistant city editor of the _Dallas News_; and he has since filled practically all the editorial positions, being at the present time Sunday editor of both the _Dallas News_ and the _Galveston News_, which are under the same management. In 1907 Mr. Marriner originated a feature consisting of a daily human interest poem, printed on the front page of his two papers. For some time he concealed his identity under the title of "The News Staff Poet," but in 1909 he discarded his cloak and came out into the sunlight of reality in order that his hundreds of admirers throughout the Southwest might be content. Mr. Marriner's "poetry" is rather homely verse based upon the everyday things and thoughts and experiences of everyday people. This verse has had a wonderful vogue in Texas and Oklahoma, and the surrounding States. Dealing with dogs and "kids," with sore toes and sentiment, with joys and griefs, dolls and ball gowns, country stores and city life, street cars and prairie schooners, mint-fringed creeks and bucking bronchos, it is a medley of everything human. The cream of his verse has been brought together in three charming little books: _When You and I Were Kids_ (New York, 1909); _Joyous Days_ (Dallas, 1910); and _Mirthful Knights in Modern Days_ (Dallas, 1911). Mr. Marriner has written the lyrics for two musical comedies; and he has had short-stories in the periodicals. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Marriner to the Author; _The Dallas News_ (December 2, 1911). WHEN MOTHER CUTS HIS HAIR[66] [From _When You and I Were Kids_ (New York, 1909)] How doth the mind of man go back to when he was a boy; When feet were full of tan and dust, and life was full of joy; But many a man looks back in fear, for in a time-worn chair, He sees himself draped in a sheet, while Mother cuts his hair. The scissors drag, and sniffles rise when ears lop in the way, And on the porch rain locks of hair like tufts of prairie hay, 'Til in the glass a little boy, his anguish scarcely hid, Looks on himself and views with pain the job that Mother did. The mule may shed in summertime the felt that Nature grew, The rabbit may lose bits of fur, and look like blazes, too; But neither bears that patchwork look, that war map of despair, That zigzags on the small boy's head when Mother cuts his hair. SIR GUMSHOO[67] [From _Mirthful Knights in Modern Days_ (Dallas, 1911)] Sir Gumshoo, known as Wot d'Ell, a noble Knight from Spain, Was one who was so strong a Pro he'd water on the brain. He would not drink a dram at all, or even sniff at it, And just the sight of lager beer would throw him in a fit. It chanced one day Sir Gumshoo rode upon a noble quest-- His lady had acquired a cold that settled on her chest, And to the rural districts he repaired, for it was plain He must secure some goosegrease that she might get well again. He found a rude, bucolic rube who had goosegrease to sell; Sir Gumshoo bought about a quart, and all was going well When he who rendered geese to grease made him a stealthy sign And led him to a bottle filled with elderberry wine. The Knight declined; he was a Pro, which fact he did explain; The farmer, sore disgusted, took his goosegrease back again, Whereat the Knight in anguish sore gave up himself for lost And took a fierce and fiery drink with all his fingers crossed. That night he rode as rides a pig upon a circus steed; He clutched his charger 'round the neck, for he was stewed indeed, And, bowing to his lady fair, as bows the wind-tossed pine, He handed her part of a quart of elderberry wine. FOOTNOTES: [66] Copyright, 1909, by the Author. [67] Copyright, 1911, by the Author. LUCIEN V. RULE Lucien V. Rule, poet, was born at Goshen, Kentucky, August 29, 1871. He spent one year at State College, Lexington, when he went to Centre College, Danville, from which he was graduated in 1893. Mr. Rule studied for the ministry, but he later engaged in newspaper work, in which he spent six or seven years. During the last few years he has devoted his time to writing and speaking upon social and religious subjects. His first book of poems, entitled _The Shrine of Love and Other Poems_ (Chicago, 1898), is his best known work. He is also the author of a small pamphlet of social and political satires, entitled _When John Bull Comes A-Courtin'_ (Louisville, 1903). This contains the title-poem, the sub-title of which reads: "Sundry Meditations on the Rumored Matrimonial Alliance between J. Bull, Bart., and his cousin, Lady Columbia;" and several shorter poems. Those inscribed to Tolstoi, Whittier, and Walt Whitman are very strong. Mr. Rule's latest book is _The House of Love_ (Indianapolis, 1910). In 1913 he will probably publish a group of poetic dramas-in-cameo for young people, and a brief collection of biographical studies. Mr. Rule resides at his birthplace, Goshen, Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Southern Writers_, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1905); letters from Mr. Rule to the Author. WHAT RIGHT HAST THOU?[68] [From _When John Bull Comes A Courtin'_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1903)] What right hast thou to more than thou dost need While others perish for the want of bread? What right hast thou upon a palace bed To idly slumber while the homeless plead; A vicious and voluptuous life to lead, While millions struggle on in rags and shame? What right hast thou thus vilely to inflame Thy fellow men with hate, O fiend of greed? What right hast thou to take the hallowed name Of God upon thy lips, or Christ's, who came To save the race from sorrows thou dost cause? Not always helpless 'neath thy cruel paws, O Beast of Capital, shall Labor lie; Thy doom this day is thundered from the sky! THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD [From the same] Arise, my soul, put off thy dark despair; Say not the age of chivalry is gone; For lo, the east is kindling with its dawn, And bugle echoes bid thee wake to wear Majestic moral armour, and to bear A worthy part in truth's eternal fray. Say not the muse inspires no more to-day, Nor that fame's flowers no longer flourish fair. Live thou sublimely and then speak thy heart, If thou wouldst build an altar unto art. Stand with the struggling and the stars above Will shower celestial thoughts to thrill thy pen. Put self away and walk alone with Love, And thou shalt be the marvel of all men! FOOTNOTE: [68] Copyright, 1903, by the Author. EVA WILDER BRODHEAD Mrs. Eva Wilder (McGlasson) Brodhead, novelist and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 187-. Her parents were not of Southern origin, her father having been born in Nova Scotia, and her mother at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was educated in New York City and in her native town of Covington. She began to write when but eighteen years of age, and a short time thereafter her first novel appeared, _Diana's Livery_ (New York, 1891). This was set against a background most alluring: the Shaker settlement at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, into which a young man of the world enters and falls in love with a pretty Shakeress. Her second story, _An Earthly Paragon_ (New York, 1892), which was written in three weeks, ran through _Harper's Weekly_ before being published in book form. It was a romance of the Kentucky mountains, laid around Chamouni, the novelist's name for Yosemite, Kentucky. It was followed by a novelette of love set amidst the salt-sea atmosphere of an eastern watering place, _Ministers of Grace_ (New York, 1894). Hildreth, the scene of this little story, is anywhere along the Jersey coast from Atlantic City to Long Branch. _Ministers of Grace_ also appeared serially in _Harper's Weekly_, and when it was issued in book form Col. Henry Watterson called the attention of Richard Mansfield to it as a proper vehicle for him, and the actor promptly secured the dramatic rights, hoping to present it upon the stage; but his untimely death prevented the dramatization of the tale under highly favorable auspices. It was the last to be published under the name of Eva Wilder McGlasson, as this writer was first known to the public, for on December 5, 1894, she was married in New York to Mr. Henry C. Brodhead, a civil and mining engineer of Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Brodhead's next novelette, _One of the Visconti_ (New York, 1896), the background of which was Naples, the hero being a young Kentuckian and the heroine of the old and famous Visconti family, was issued by the Scribner's in their well-known Ivory Series of short-stories. Her last Kentucky novel, _Bound in Shallows_ (New York, 1896), originally appeared in _Harper's Bazar_. That severe arbiter of literary destinies, _The Nation_, said of this book: "No such work as this has been done by any American woman since Constance Fenimore Woolson died." It was founded on material gathered at Burnside, Kentucky, where Mrs. Brodhead spent two summers. Her most recent work, _A Prairie Infanta_ (Philadelphia, 1904), is a Colorado juvenile, first published in _The Youth's Companion_. Aside from her books, Mrs. Brodhead won a wide reputation as a short-story writer and maker of dialect verse. More than fifty of her stories have been printed in the publications of the house of Harper, the publishers of four of her books; in _The Century_, _Scribner's_, and other leading periodicals. Many of her admirers hold that the short-story is her especial forte. Five of them may be mentioned as especially well done: _Fan's Mammy_, _A Child of the Covenant_, _The Monument to Corder_, _The Eternal Feminine_, and _Fair Ines_. She has written much dialect verse which appeared in the Harper periodicals, _The Century_, _Judge_, _Puck_, and other magazines. Neither her short-stories nor her verse has been collected and issued in book form. Since her marriage Mrs. Brodhead has traveled in Europe a great deal, and in many parts of the United States, traveled until she sometimes wonders whether her home is in Denver or New York, and, although she is in the metropolis more than she is in the Colorado capital, her legal residence is Denver, some distance from the mining town of Brodhead, named in honor of her husband's geological discoveries and interests. In 1906 she was stricken with a very severe illness, followed by her physician's absolute mandate of no literary work until her health should be reëstablished, which has been accomplished but recently. She has published but a single story since her sickness, _Two Points of Honor_, which appeared in _Harper's Weekly_ for July 4, 1908. At the present time Mrs. Brodhead is quite well enough to resume work; and the next few years should witness her fulfilling the earnest of her earlier novels and stories, firmly fixing her fame as one of the foremost women writers of prose fiction yet born on Kentucky soil. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Weekly_ (September 3, 1892); _The Book-buyer_ (September, 1896). THE RIVALS[69] [From _Ministers of Grace_ (New York, 1894)] As the days merged towards the end of August, Hildreth was packed to the very gates. The wiry yellow grasses along the neat walks were trampled into powder. The very sands, for all the effacing fingers of the tides, seemed never free of footprints, and by day and night the ocean promenade, the interior of the town, lake-sides, hotels, and the surf itself, were a press of holiday folk. In these times Mr. Ruley seldom went forth in his rolling-chair, except early of a morning, when the beach was yet way-free, and the sands unfrequented save for a few barelegged men, who, with long wooden rakes, cleaned up the sea-verge for the day. Sometimes Wade pushed the chair. But since the night when he gave Elizabeth the honeysuckles he had in some measure avoided the old preacher's small circle. There had been, on that occasion, a newness of impulse in his spirit which made him feel the advisability of keeping himself out of harm's way, however sweet that way might seem. Graham was the favored suitor. He, Wade, having no chance for the rose, could at least withhold his flesh from the thorn. "So," said Gracie Gayle, "you're out of the running?" "Ruled off," smiled Wade. "Don't you make any mistakes," wisely admonished Miss Gayle. "I've seen her look at him, and I've seen her look at _you_." "This is most surprising," indicated Wade, with a feigned accent. "You will pardon me, Gracie, if I scarcely credit your statement." "Be sarcastic if you want to," said Gracie. "If you knew anything at all, you'd know that straws show which way the wind blows. When a woman regards a man with a kind of flat, frank sincerity, it's because her heart's altogether out of his reach. When she looks _around_ him rather than _at_ him, it's because----" Gracie lifted her shoulders suggestively. "Grace," breathed Wade, gravely, "I am hurt to the quick to see you developing the germs of what painfully resembles thought. For Heaven's and your sex's sake, pause while there is yet time! Women who form the pernicious habit of thinking lose in time the magic key which unlocks the hearts of men." Grace sniffed. "Men's hearts are never locked," she said, sagaciously. "The heavier the padlock the smoother the hinges." She shook her crisp curls as she tripped away with her airy, mincing, soubrette tread. Notwithstanding the inconsequent nature of this talk, it set Wade to thinking. Perhaps he had carried his principle of self-effacement too far. At all events, when he next saw Miss Ruley, he went up to her and stopped for a moment's conversation. It chanced to be on the sands. Elizabeth was sitting by herself under the arch of a lace-hung sunshade, which cast shaking little shadows on her face, sprigging it with such delicate darkness as lurk in the misty milk of moss-agate. "You are going in, then?" she asked, smiling up rather uncertainly, and noticing his flannel attire. "Mr. Graham is already very far out. That is he, I think, taking that big breaker. What a stroke!" Wade, focussing an indulgent eye, saw a figure away beyond the other bathers, rising to the lift of a great billow. The man swam with a splendid motion. Whether he dived, or floated, or circled his arms in that whirling stroke of his, he seemed in subtle sympathy with the sea, possessed of a kinship with it, and in an element altogether his own. Wade expressed an appropriate sentiment of admiration. Just then Gracie Gayle came gambolling along, a childish shape, kirtled to the knee in bright blue, and turbaned in vivid scarlet. Among the loose-waisted figures on the sands she was like a humming-bird scintillating in a staid gathering of barnyard fowls. Bailey was with her, having returned after a fortnight's absence. The two paused beside Elizabeth, and Wade went on, confused by the singular way in which that small fair face, shadow-streaked and faintly smiling, lingered in his vision. He was still perplexed with a half-pleasant, half-pained consciousness of it as he plunged into the pushing surf and felt a dizzy world of water heave round him. The surge was strong to-day, and the splashing and screaming of the shore bathers sent him farther and still farther out. Gradually their cries lessened in his ear, and there was with him presently only the hollow thud of the waves and the rushing hiss of the crestling foam. Once, as he rose to a sea-lift, it seemed to him that he heard a sound that was not the boom of the breakers nor the song of the slipping froth. It came again, whatever it was, and as he gave ear he took in a human intonation, sharp and agonized. It was a cry for help. Wade shook the brine from his hair, freeing his gaze for an outlook. In the glassy mound of water to his right a face, lean and white with alarm, gleamed and faded. That the sinking man was Graham came instantly to Wade's mind--Graham, a victim to some one of the mischances which the sea reserves for those who adventure too confidently with her. Wade struck out instantly for the spot where Graham's appalled features had briefly glimpsed. Shoreward he could note an increasing agitation among the multitudes. Evidently the people had noticed the peril of the remote swimmer whose exploits had so lately won admiring comment. The beachguard no doubt was buckling to his belt the life-rope coiled always on the sands for such emergencies. Cries of men and women rang stifled over the water--exclamations of fear and advice and excitement, mingled in a long continuous wail. Graham's head rose in sight, a mere speck upon the dense green of the bulging water. Wade, fetching nearer in wide strokes, suddenly felt himself twisted violently out of his course, and whirled round in a futile effort with some mysterious current. He was almost near enough to lay hold of Graham when this new sensation explained lucidly the cause of Graham's danger. They were both in the claws of an undertow, which, as Wade realized its touch, appeared as if wrenching him straight out to the purring distance of the farther sea. Even in the first consternation of this discovery he felt himself thrust hard against a leaden body, and in the same instant Graham's hands snatched at him in a desperate reach for life. "For God's sake don't hold me like this!" Wade expostulated. "Let go. Trust me to do what I can. You're strangling me, man!" But Graham was past sanity. He only clutched with the more frenzy at the thing which seemed to keep him from the ravenous mouth of the snarling waters. Wade, in a kind of composed despair, sent a look towards the beach. They were putting out a boat, a tiny sheel which frisked in the surf, and seemed motionless in the double action of the waves. Men laid hard at the oars. The little craft took the first big wave as a horse takes a hurdle. It dropped from the glassy height, and Wade saw it sink into a breach of the sea. Then flashing with crystal, it bore up again and outward. The figures running and gesticulating on the beach had a marvellous distinctness to Wade's submerging eyes. He noticed the blue sky, flawed with scratches of white, the zigzag roof-lines of the great town, the twisting flags and meshes of the dark wire. Everything oppressed him with a sort of deadly clearness, as if a metal stamp should press in melting wax. He was momently sinking, drawn ever outward by the undercurrent, and downward by the weighty burden throttling him in its senseless grasp. He looked once more through a blinding veil of foam, and saw the boat dipping far to the left. A phantasm of life flickered before him. Unsuspected trivialities shook out of their cells, and amazed him with the pygmy thrift of memory. Then came a sense of confusion, as if the spiritual and corporal lost each its boundary and ranged wild, and Wade felt the sea in his eyes, stroking them down as gently as ever any watcher by the dying. FOOTNOTE: [69] Copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers. CORDIA GREER PETRIE Mrs. Cordia Greer Petrie, a talented writer of very great promise and of decided performance, was born near Merry Oaks, Kentucky, February 12, 1872. When she was a child her parents removed to Louisville, Kentucky, and in the public schools of that city she was educated, after which she spent a half-year at old Eminence College, Eminence, Kentucky. In July, 1894, Miss Greer was married to Dr. Hazel G. Petrie, of Fairview, Kentucky, who, for the past ten years, has been mine physician in various sections of eastern Kentucky. At the present time he is serving six mines and making his home at Chenoa, near Pineville, Kentucky. In her writings Mrs. Petrie has created a character of great originality in Angeline Keaton, an unlettered inhabitant of a remote Kentucky hamlet. "Of the original Angeline," Mrs. Petrie once wrote, "I know but little. She and her shiftless, 'no-erkount' husband, Lum, together with her son, Jeems Henry, lived in Barren county, not far from Glasgow. Angeline supported the family by working on the 'sheers,' 'diggin one half the taters fur tother half!' She was very anxious for her boy to 'git an edjycation' and no sooner would he get comfortably settled in a 'cheer' until she would exclaim, 'Jeems Henry! Git up offen them britches, you lazy whelp! Git yer book and be gittin some larnin in your head!' Without a word Jim Henry would climb up the log wall and from under the rafters abstract his blue back speller." Characterization is Mrs. Petrie's chief strength; and she is a positive refutation of the masculine dictum that women lack humor. With her friend, Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, the short-story writer, she collaborated on an Angeline sketch, entitled "When the Bees Got Busy," which was published in the _Overland Monthly_ for August, 1904; and the prize story reprinted at the end of this note is the only other Angeline story that has been published so far. She has won several prizes with other stories, but a group of the Angeline sketches are in manuscript, and they will shortly appear in book form. _Angeline Keaton_, "with her gaunt angular form clad in its scant calico gown," is sure to "score" when she makes her bow between the covers of a book. She is every bit as cleverly conceived as _Mrs. Wiggs_, _Susan Clegg_, or any of the other quaint women who have recently won the applause of the American public. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mrs. Petrie to the Author; Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner's study in _The Southern Home Journal_ (Louisville). ANGELINE JINES THE CHOIR [From _The Evening Post_ (Louisville, Kentucky)] She sat upon the edge of the veranda, fanning herself with her "split" sunbonnet, a tall, angular woman, whose faded calico gown "lost connection" at the waist line. Her spring being dry, she came to our well for water. Discovering that Angeline Keaton was a "character," I invariably inveigled her to rest awhile on our cool piazza before retracing her steps up the steep, rocky hillside to her cabin home. "I missed you yesterday," I said as a starter. "Yes'm," she answered in a voice harsh and strident, yet touched with a peculiar sibilant quality characteristic of the Kentucky backwoodsman, "and thar wuz others that missed me, too!" Settling herself comfortably, she produced from some hidden source a box of snuff and plied her brush vigorously. "We-all have got inter a wrangle over at Zion erbout the church music," she began. "I and Lum, my old man, has been the leaders ever since we moved here from Lick-skillet. We wuz alluz on hand--Lum with his tunin' fork and me with my strong serpraner. When it come to linin' off a song, Lum wuz pintedly hard to beat. Why, folks come from fur and near to hear us, and them city folks, at Mis' Bowles' last summer, 'lowed thar warn't nothing in New York that could tech us. One of 'em offered us a dollar to sing inter a phonygraf reckerd, but we wuz afeerd to put our lives in jopperdy by dabblin' in 'lectricerty. But even celebrerty has its drawbacks, and a 'profit is not without honor in his own country,' as the saying is. A passel of 'em got jellus, a church meeting was called, unbeknownst to us, and ermong 'em they agreed to make a change in the music at old Zion. That peaked-faced Betty Button wuz at the bottom of it. Ever since she tuk that normal course at Bowling Green she's been endeverin' to push herself inter promernence here at Bear Waller. Fust she got up a class in delsarty, but even Bear Waller warn't dull ernough to take to that foolishness! Then she canvassed the county with a cuttin' system and a book called 'Law at a Glance.' Now she's teaching vokle culshure. She orter know singers, like poits, is born, not made! Jest wantin' to sing won't do it. It takes power. It's give up mine's the powerfullest voice in all Bear Waller. I kin bring old Brindle in when she's grazing in the woods, back o' Judge Bowles' medder, and I simply step out on the portico and call Lum to dinner when he's swoppin' yarns down to the store quarter o' mile away. Fur that matter, though, a deef and dum man could fetch Lum to _vittles_. "Do you know Bear Waller owes its muserkil educashun to me? Mine wuz the fust accordyon brought to the place, and I wuz allus ready to play fur my nabers. I didn't hafter be _begged_. I orgernized the Zobo band, I lent 'em my ballads, but whar's my thanks? At the battin' of an eye they're ready to drop me for that quavery-voiced Button gal and them notes o' hern that's no more'n that many peryids and commers. "When the committee waited on me and Lum we jest flew mad and 'lowed we'd quit. Maybe we wuz hasty, but it serves 'em right. Besides, these Bear Wallerites ain't compertent to appreshiate a voice like mine, nohow. I decided I'd take my letter to Glasgow and jine that brag choir of their'n. It did me good to think how it 'ud spite some folks to see me leadin' the singin' at the county seat! "Lum wuz dead set ergin it, but armin' myself with the rollin' pin and a skillet o' bilin grease, I finally pervailed on him to give in. Lum is of a yieldin' dispersishun if a body goes at 'im right. "Jim Henry, that's my boy, an' I tuk a early start. We had tied up the colt in the cow shed and I wuz congratulatin' myself on bein' shet of the pesky critter when I heerd him nicker. Lookin' back, I saw him comin' in a gallerp, his head turned to one side, while he fairly obscured the landscape with great clouds o' pike dust! "We wuz crossin' the railroad when old Julie heered that nicker, an' right thar she balked. Neither gentle persuasion from the peach tree switch which I helt in my hand, nor well-aimed kicks of Jim Henry's boots in her flanks could budge her till that colt come up pantin' beside her. We jest did clear the track when the accomerdashun whizzed by. Well, sir, when old Julie spied them kyars she began buck-jumpin' in a manner that would'er struck terror to a less experienced hosswoman. Jim Henry, who wuz gazin' at the train with childlike pleasure, wuz tuk wholly by suprise, and before he knowed what wuz up he wuz precippytated inter the branches o' a red-haw tree. He crawled out, a wreck, his face and hands scratched and bleedin' and his britches hangin' in shreds, and them his Sundays, too! I managed to pin 'em tergether with beauty pins, and cautionin' him not to turn his back to the ordiance, we finally resumed our journey. That colt alluz tries hisself, and jest as we reached the square, in Glasgow, his appertite began clammerin', and Julie refused to go till the pesky critter's wants wuz appeased. Them Glasgowites is dear lovers of good hoss flesh, and quite a crowd gethered to discuss the good pints of the old mare and that mule colt. "Some boys mistook Jim Henry for somebody they knowed and hollered, 'Say, Reube!' 'Hey, Reube!' at him. Jim Henry wuz fur explainin' to 'em their mistake, till one of 'em began to sing, 'When Reuben comes to town, he's shore to be done brown!' 'Jim Henry,' says I, sternly, 'you're no child o' mine ef you take _that_! Now, if you don't get down and thrash him I'm agoin' to set you afire when I get you home.' "Jim Henry needed no second biddin'. He wuz off that nag in a jiffy, and the way he did wallerp that boy wuz a cawshun! He sellerbrated his victry by givin' the Bear Waller war-whoop. Then crawlin' up behind me, he said he wuz _now_ ready fur meetin'. That boy's a born fiter. He gets it honest, for me and Lum are both experts, but then practice makes perfect, as the sayin' is. "Our arrival created considerable stir in meetin'. Why is it that when a distinguished person enters a church it allus perduces a flutter? Owin' to the rent in Jim Henry's britches, I shoved him inter the back seat. Cautionin' him not to let me ketch him throwin' paper wads, I swept merjestercally up the ile and tuk a seat by the orgin. A flood of approvin' glances fastened themselves on my jet bonnet and fur-lined dolman. I wuz sorry I didn't know the fust song. It must have been a new one to that choir. Thar wuz four of 'em and each one wuz singin' it to a different tune, and they jest couldn't keep tergether! The coarse-voiced gal to my rear lagged dretfully. When the tall blonde, who wuz the only one of 'em that knowed the tune, when she'd sing, "'Wake the song!' that gal who lagged would echo, "'Wake the song!' in a voice as coarse as Lum's. She 'peared to depend on the tall gal for the words, for when the tall 'un would sing, "'Song of Ju-ber-lee,' the gal that lagged, and the two gents, would repeat, 'Of Ju-ber-lee.' "I passed her my book, thinkin' the words wuz tore out o' hern, but, la! she jest glared at me, and she and them gents, if anything, bellered louder'n ever. I looked at the preacher, expecting to see him covered with shygrin, but, la! he wuz takin' it perfectly cam, with his eyes walled up at the ceilin' and his hands folded acrost his stummick like he might be havin' troubles of his own. "I kept hopin' that tryo would either ketch up with the leader or jest have the curridge to quit. Goodness knows, I done what I could fur 'em, by beatin' time with my turkey wing. "Somebody must have give 'em a tip, for the next song which the preacher give out as 'a solo,' that tryo jest pintedly giv it up and set thar is silent as clambs. The tall gal riz and commenced singin' and that tryo never pertended to help her out! My heart ached in symperthy fur her as she stood thar alone, singin' away with her voice quaverin', and not a human bein' in that house jined in, not even the _preacher_! But she had _grit_, and kept right on! Most people would'er giv right up. She's a middlin' good singer, but is dretfully handercapt by that laggin' tryo and a passel o' church members that air too triflin' to sing in meetin'. The song wuz a new 'un to me, but havin' a nacheral year for music, I soon ketched the tune and jined in on the last verse with a vim. Of course I could only hummit, not knowin' the words, but I come down on it good and strong and showed them folks that Angeline Keaton ain't one to shirk a duty, if they wuz. After the sermon the preacher giv out 'Thar Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.' Here wuz my chanct to show 'em what the brag-voice of Bear Waller wuz like! "With my voice risin' and falling and dwellin' with extry force on the fust syllerbles of foun-tin and sin-ners, in long, drawn-out meeter, I fairly lost myself in the grand old melerdy. I wuz soarin' inter the third verse when I discovered I wuz the only one in the house that knowed it! The rest of 'em wuz singin' it to a friverlous tune like them Mose Beasley plays on his fiddle! What wuz more, they wuz titterin' like I wuz in errer! The very idy! That wuz too much fur me, and beckernin' Jim Henry to foller, I marched outer meetin'! "We found the old mare had slipped the bridle and gone home, so thar wuz nothin' left fur us to do but foot it. The last thing I heered as we struck the Bear Waller pike and set out fur home wuz that coarse-voiced gal, still lagging behind, as she sang, "'The Blood of the Lamb!'" MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS Miss Maria Thompson Daviess, author of _The Melting of Molly_, was born at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in October, 1872, the descendant of the famous Joseph Hamilton Daviess, the granddaughter of the historian of Harrodsburg, whose full name she bears, and the niece of Mrs. H. D. Pittman and Miss Annie Thompson Daviess, the Kentucky novelists. Miss Daviess was graduated from Science Hill Academy, Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1891, after which she studied English for a year at Wellesley College. She then went to Paris to study art at Julien's, and several of her pictures have been hung in the Salon. As a miniature painter she excelled. At the conclusion of her art course, Miss Daviess returned to America, making her home at Nashville, Tennessee, where she resides at the present time. She taught at Belmont College, Nashville, for a year or more, and set up as a painter of miniatures for a public that demanded values in their portraits that she could not see fit to grant, so she finally decided to write. Miss Daviess's first book, and the one that she is still best known by, was _Miss Selina Lue and the Soap-Box Babies_ (Indianapolis, 1909). Miss Lue, spinster, tucks babies into a row of soap-boxes, maintaining sort of a free day-nursery, and the reader has much delicious humor from her duties. _Miss Selina Lue_ was followed by _The Road to Providence_ (Indianapolis, 1910), dominated by the character of Mother Mayberry, guide, philosopher, and friend to a Tennessee town; _Rose of Old Harpeth_ (Indianapolis, 1911), was a love story "as ingenuous and sweet as a boy's first kiss under a ruffled sunbonnet." Selina Lue and Mother Mayberry were both past their bloom; Rose possessed the power and glory of youth. _The Treasure Babies_ (Indianapolis, 1911), was a delightful children's story, which has been dramatized and produced, but Miss Daviess's most charming novel, _The Melting of Molly_ (Indianapolis, 1912), was "the saucy success of the season," for eight months the best selling book in America. Molly must melt from the plumpest of widows to the slenderest of maidens in just three months because the sweetheart of her girlhood days, now a distinguished diplomat, homeward bound, demands a glimpse of her in the same blue muslin dress which she wore at their parting years ago. The melting process, with the O. Henry twist at the end, is the author's business to narrate, and she does it in the most fetching manner. The little novel is "gay, irresistible, all sweetness and spice and everything nice." Miss Daviess's latest story, _Sue Jane_ (New York, 1912), has for its heroine a little country girl who comes to Woodlawn Seminary (which is none other than the author's _alma mater_, Science Hill), is at first laughed at and later loved by the girls of that school. She is as quaint and charming a child as one may hope to meet in the field of juvenile fiction. _The Elected Mother_ (Indianapolis, 1912), the best of the three short-stories tucked in the back of the Popular edition of _Miss Selina Lue_ (New York, 1911), was a rather unique argument for woman's equal rights. It proves that motherhood and mayoralties may go hand and hand--in at least one modern instance. _Harpeth Roses_ (Indianapolis, 1912), were wise saws culled from the pages of her first four books, made into an attractive little volume. Just as the year of 1912 came to a close Miss Daviess's publishers announced that her new novel, _Andrew the Glad_, a love story, would appear in January, 1913. _Phyllis_, another juvenile, will also be issued in 1913, but will first be serialized in _The Visitor_, a children's weekly, of Nashville. That Miss Daviess has been an indefatigable worker may be gathered at a glance. She has the "best seller touch," which is the most gratifying thing a living writer may possess. The present public demands that its reading shall be as light as a cream puff and sparking as a brook, and, in order to qualify for _The Bookman's_ monthly handicap, a writer must possess those two requisites: deftness of touch and brightness. These Miss Daviess has. And so, when the summer-days are over-long and the winter's day is dull, Maria Thompson Daviess and her brood of books will be found certain dispellers of earthly woes and bringers of good cheer. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (December, 1909); _The Bookman_ (July, 1912). MRS. MOLLY MORALIZES[70] [From _The Melting of Molly_ (Indianapolis, 1912)] Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter when she married me to him. Poor Mr. Carter! No, I wasn't twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They all said with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you, Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay, dancing, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous bridle. But God didn't want to see me always trotting along slow and tired and not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of plumpness, so he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this world, and I feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens. If some of the women in my missionary society knew how friendly I feel with God, they would put me out for contempt of court. No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr. Carter, and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. Alfred was one of them. And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's what I did. I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too. All that money would make me nervous if Mr. Carter hadn't made Doctor John its guardian, though I sometimes feel that the responsibility of me makes him treat me as if he were my step-grandfather-in-law. But all in all, though stiff in its knees with aristocracy, Hillsboro is lovely and loving; and couldn't inquisitiveness be called just real affection with a kind of squint in its eye? And there I sat on my front steps, being embraced in a perfume of everybody's lilacs and peachblow and sweet syringa and affectionate interest and moonlight, with a letter in my hand from the man whose two photographs and many letters I had kept locked up in the garret for years. Is it any wonder I tingled when he told me that he had never come back because he couldn't have me and that now the minute he landed in America he was going to lay his heart at my feet? I added his honors to his prostrate heart myself and my own beat at the prospect. All the eight years faded away and I was again back in the old garden down at Aunt Adeline's cottage saying good-by, folded up in his arms. That's the way my memory put the scene to me, but the word "folded" made me remember that blue muslin dress again. I had promised to keep it and wear it for him when he came back--and I couldn't forget that the blue belt was just twenty-three inches and mine is--no, I _won't_ write it. I had got that dress out of the old trunk not ten minutes after I had read the letter and measured it. No, nobody would blame me for running right across the garden to Doctor John with such a real trouble as that! All of a sudden I hugged the letter and the little book up close to my breast and laughed until the tears ran down my cheeks. Then before I went into the house I assembled my garden and had family prayers with my flowers. I do that because they are all the family I've got, and God knows that all His budding things need encouragement, whether it is a widow or a snowball-bush. He'll give it to us! And I'm praying again as I sit here and watch for the doctor's light to go out. I hate to go to sleep and leave it burning, for he sits up so late and he is so gaunt and thin and tired-looking most time. That's what the last prayer is about, almost always,--sleep for him and no night call! FOOTNOTE: [70] Copyright, 1912, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. CALE YOUNG RICE Cale Young Rice, poet and dramatist, was born at Dixon, Kentucky, December 7, 1872. He graduated from Cumberland University, in Tennessee, and then went to Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895, and his Master's degree in the following year. In 1902 Mr. Rice was married to Miss Alice Caldwell Hegan, whose _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ had been published the year before. Mr. Rice has been busy for years as a lyric poet and maker of plays for the study, though several of them, indeed, have received stage presentation. His several books of shorter poems are: _From Dusk to Dusk_ (Nashville, Tennessee, 1898); _With Omar_ (Lebanon, Tennessee, 1900), privately printed in an edition of forty copies; _Song Surf_ (Boston, 1901), in which _With Omar_ was reprinted; _Nirvana Days_ (New York, 1908); _Many Gods_ (New York, 1910); and his latest book of lyrics, _Far Quests_ (New York, 1912). Mr. Rice's plays have been published as follows: _Charles di Tocca_ (New York, 1903); _David_ (New York, 1904); _Plays and Lyrics_ (London and New York, 1906), a large octavo containing _David_, _Yolanda of Cyprus_, a poetic drama, and all of his best work; _A Night in Avignon_ (New York, 1907), a little one-act play based upon the loves of Petrarch and Laura, which was "put upon the boards" in Chicago with Donald Robertson in the leading _role_. It was part one of a dramatic trilogy of the Italian Renaissance. Next came a reprinting in an individual volume of his _Yolanda of Cyprus_ (New York, 1908); and _The Immortal Lure_ (New York, 1911), four plays, the first of which, _Giorgione_, is part two of the trilogy of one-act plays of which _A Night in Avignon_ was the first part. The trilogy will be closed with another one-act drama, _Porzia_, which is now announced for publication in January, 1913. Mr. Rice has been characterized by the _New York Times_ as a "doubtful poet," but that paper's recent and uncalled for attack upon Madison Cawein, together with many other seemingly absurd positions, makes one wonder if it is not a "doubtful judge." After all is said, it must be admitted that Mr. Rice has done a small group of rather pleasing lyrics, and that his plays, perhaps impossible as safe vehicles for an actor with a reputation to sustain, are not as turgid as _The Times_ often is, and not as superlatively poor as some critics have held. Of course, Mr. Rice is not a great dramatist, nor a great poet, yet the body of his work is considerable, and our literature could ill afford to be rid of it. The Rices have an attractive home in St. James Court, Louisville, Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Critic_ (September, 1904); _The Atlantic Monthly_ (September, 1904); _The Bookman_ (December, 1911); _Lippincott's Magazine_ (January, 1912). PETRARCA AND SANCIA[71] [From _A Night in Avignon_ (New York, 1907)] _Petrarca._ While we are in the world the world's in us. The Holy Church I own-- Confess her Heaven's queen; But we are flesh and all things that are fair God made us to enjoy-- Or, high in Paradise, we'll know but sorrow. You though would ban earth's beauty, Even the torch of Glory That kindled Italy once and led great Greece-- The torch of Plato, Homer, Virgil, all The sacred bards and sages, pagan-born! I love them! they are divine! And so to-night--I-- (_Voices._) They! it is Lello! Lello! Lello! Sancia!-- (_Hears a lute and laughter below, then a call, "Sing, Sancia"; then Sancia singing:_) To the maids of Saint Rèmy All the gallants go for pleasure; To the maids of Saint Rèmy-- Tripping to love's measure! To the dames of Avignon All the masters go for wiving; To the dames of Avignon-- That shall be their shriving! (_He goes to the Loggia as they gayly applaud. Then Lello cries:_) _Lello._ Ho-ho! Petrarca! Pagan! are you in? What! are you a sonnet-monger? _Petrarca._ Ai, ai, aih! (_Motions_ Gherhardo--_who goes_.) _Lello._ Come then! Your door is locked! down! let us in! (_Rattles it._) _Petrarca._ No, ribald! hold! the key is on the sill! Look for it and ascend! (Orso _enters_.) Stay, here is Orso! (_The old servant goes through and down the stairs to meet them. In a moment the tramp of feet is heard and they enter--_Lello_ between them--singing_:) Guelph! Guelph! and Ghibbeline! Ehyo! ninni! onni! onz! I went fishing on All Saints' Day And--caught but human bones! I went fishing on All Saints' Day, The Rhone ran swift, the wind blew black! I went fishing on All Saints' Day-- But my love called me back! She called me back and she kissed my lips-- Oh, my lips! Oh! onni onz! "Better take love than--bones! bones! (Sancia _kisses_ Petrarca.) Better take love than bones." (_They scatter with glee and_ Petrarca _seizes_ Sancia _to him_.) _Petrarca._ Yes, little Sancia! and you, my friends! Warm love is better, better! And braver! Come, Lello! give me your hand! And you, Filippa! No, I'll have your lips! _Sancia._ (_interposing_). Or--less? One at a time, Messer Petrarca! You learn too fast. Mine only for to-night. _Petrarca._ And for a thousand nights, Sancia fair! _Sancia._ You hear him? Santa Madonna! pour us wine, To pledge him in! _Petrarca._ The tankards bubble o'er! (_They go to the table._) And see, they are wreathed of April, With loving myrtle and laurel intertwined. We'll hold symposium, as bacchanals! _Sancia._ And that is--what? some dull and silly show Out of your sallow books? _Petrarca._ Those books were writ With ink of the gods, my Sancia, upon Papyri of the stars! _Sancia._ And--long ago? Ha! long ago? _Petrarca._ Returnless centuries! _Sancia._ (_contemptuously_). Who loves the past, Loves mummies and their dust-- And he will mould! Who loves the future loves what may not be, And feeds on fear. Only one flower has Time--its name is Now! Come, pluck it! pluck it! _Lello._ Brava, maid! the Now! _Sancia._ (_dancing_). Come, pluck it! pluck it! _Petrarca._ By my soul, I will: (_Seizes her again._) It grows upon these lips--and if to-night They leant out over the brink of Hell, I would. (_She breaks from him._) _Flippa._ Enough! the wine! the wine! _Sancia._ O ever-thirsty And ever-thrifty Pippa! Well, pour out! (_She lifts a brimming cup._) We'll drink to Messer Petrarca-- Who's weary of his bed-mate, Solitude. May he long revel in the courts of Venus! _All (drinking)._ Aih, long! _Petrarca._ As long as Sancia enchants them! _Flippa._ I'd trust him not, Sancia. Put him to oath. _Sancia._ And, to the rack, if faithless? This Flippa! Messer Petrarca, should not be made High Jurisconsult to our lord, the Devil, Whose breath of life is oaths?... But, swear it!--by the Saints! Who were great sinners all! And by the bones of every monk or nun Who ever darkened the world! _Lello._ Or ever shall! (_A pause._) _Petrarca._ I'll swear your eyes are singing Under the shadow of your hair, mad Sancia, Like nightingales in the wood! _Sancia._ Pah! Messer Poet-- Such words as those you vent without an end-- To the Lady Laura! _Petrarca._ Stop! (_Grows pale._) Not _her_ name--here! (_All have sat down; he rises._) _Sancia._ O-ho! this air will soil it? and it might Not sound so sweet in sonnets ever after? (_To the rest--rising._) Shall we depart, that he may still indite them? "To Laura--On the Vanity of Passion?" "To Laura--Unrelenting?" "To Laura--Whose Departing Darkens the Sky?" (_Laughs._) "To Laura--Who Deigns Not a Single Tear?" (Orso _enters_.) Shall we depart? FOOTNOTE: [71] Copyright, 1907, by McClure, Phillips and Company. ROBERT M. McELROY Robert McNutt McElroy, author of the best of the recent histories of Kentucky, was born at Perryville, Kentucky, December 28, 1872. He took the three degrees conferred by Princeton University; and since 1901 he has been assistant professor of American history in that institution. For the _Metropolitan Magazine_ of New York Dr. McElroy wrote an excellent _History of the Mexican War_, but this work has not yet appeared in book form. His _Kentucky in the Nation's History_ (New York, 1909), gave him an honorable place among the younger generation of American historians, and certainly a high place in Kentucky literature. Upon his history of Kentucky Dr. McElroy labored for many years, no sacrifice was too great for him to make, no journey too long for him to undertake, provided a better perspective were to be obtained at the end of his travels. He spent many months with Colonel Reuben T. Durrett at Louisville, working in his library, and sitting at his feet drinking from the well of Western history which the Colonel has kept undefiled. This, too, was what so sadly mars his work: he does in the discussion of several great questions, hardly more than serve as amanuensis for Colonel Durrett and the late Colonel John Mason Brown. Their opinions and conclusions are accepted _carte-blanche_, and all other authorities are ruthlessly set aside. Dr. McElroy accepts Colonel Brown's book upon the Spanish Conspiracy, and writes a single line concerning Thomas Marshall Green's great work! He brings his narrative down to the commencement of the Civil War, which probably indicates that a second volume is in preparation in order that the entire field may be surveyed. His work is most scholarly, the latest historical procedure is sustained throughout, and the pity is that he so slavishly followed one or two authorities, though both of them were wholly excellent and profound, to the exclusion of all others. Originality of opinion is what the work lacks, a lack which it might have easily possessed with the author's undoubted ability, had he not lingered so long in literary Louisville. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Dr. McElroy to the Author; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). GEORGE ROGERS CLARK[72] [From _Kentucky in the Nation's History_ (New York, 1909)] It was at this critical moment that George Rogers Clark, the future conqueror of the Northwest territory, took up his permanent abode among the Kentucky pioneers. Clark had visited Kentucky, on a brief tour of inspection, during the previous autumn (Sept., 1775), and had been placed in command of the irregular militia of the settlements. He had returned to Virginia, filled with the importance of establishing in Kentucky an extensive system of public defence, and with the firm conviction that the claims of Henderson & Company ought to be disallowed by Virginia. His return to Kentucky, in 1776, marks the beginning of the end of the Transylvania Company. In spite of his youth (he was only twenty-four) he was far the most dangerous opponent that Henderson & Company had in the province. A military leader by nature, he had served in Lord Dunmore's war with such conspicuous success that he had been offered a commission in the British Army. This honor he had declined, preferring to remain free to serve his country in the event of a revolt from British tyranny. Shortly after his arrival, Clark proposed that, in order to bring about a more certain connection with Virginia, and the more definitely to repudiate the authority of the Transylvania Company, a regular representative assembly should be held at Harrodsburg. His own views he expressed freely in advancing his suggestion. Agents, he said, should be appointed to urge once more the right of the region to be taken under the protection of Virginia, and, if this request should again be unheeded, we should "employ the lands of the country as a fund to obtain settlers, and establish an independent state." The proposed assembly convened at Harrodsburg on the 6th of June. Clark was not present when the session began, and when he arrived, he found that the pressing question of the day had already been acted upon, and that he himself, with Gabriel John Jones, had been elected a delegate to represent the settlements in the Virginia Assembly. Clark knew that such an election would not entitle them to seats, but he agreed to visit Williamsburg, and present the cause of his fellow pioneers. Provided with a formal memorial to the Virginia Assembly, he started, with Jones, for Virginia and, after a very painful journey, upon which, Clark declared, I suffered "more torment than I ever experienced before or since," they reached the neighborhood of Charlottesville, only to learn that the Assembly had adjourned. Jones set off for a visit to the settlements on the Holston; but Clark, intent upon his mission, pushed on to Hanover County, where he secured an interview with Patrick Henry, then Governor of Virginia. After listening to Clark's report of the troubles of the frontier colony, and doubtless enjoying his denunciation of the Transylvania Company, Governor Henry introduced him to the executive Council of the State, and he at once requested from them five hundred pounds of powder for frontier defence. He had determined to accomplish the object of his mission in any manner possible, and he knew that if he could induce the authorities of Virginia to provide for the defence of the frontier settlements, the announcement of her property rights in them would certainly follow, to the destruction of the plans of Henderson and his colleagues. The Council, however, doubtless also foreseeing these consequences, declared that its powers could not be so construed as to give it authority to grant such a request. But Clark was insistent, and urged his case so effectively that, after considerable discussion, the Council announced that, as the call appeared urgent, they would assume the responsibility of lending five hundred pounds of powder to Clark, making him personally responsible for its value, in case their assumption of authority should not be upheld by the Burgesses. They then presented him with an order to the keeper of the public magazine, calling for the powder desired. This was exactly what Clark did not want, as the loan of five hundred pounds of powder to George Rogers Clark, could in no sense be interpreted as an assumption by Virginia, of the responsibility of defending the western frontier, and his next act was most characteristic of the man. He returned the order with a curt note, declaring his intention of repairing at once to Kentucky, and exerting the resources of that country to the formation of an independent State, for, he frankly declared, "a country which is not worth defending is not worth claiming." This threat proved instantly successful. The Council recalled Clark to their presence and, on August 23, 1776, delivered him another order calling for five hundred pounds of gunpowder, which was to be conveyed to Pittsburg by Virginia officials, there "to be safely kept and delivered to George Rogers Clark or his order, for the use of the said inhabitants of Kentucky." With this concession Clark was completely satisfied, for he felt that by it Virginia was admitting her obligation to defend the pioneers of the West, and that an open declaration of sovereign rights over the territory must soon follow. He accordingly wrote to his friends in Kentucky, requesting them to receive the powder at Pittsburg, and convey it to the Kentucky stations, while he himself awaited the opening of the autumn session of the Virginia Assembly, where he hoped to procure a more explicit verdict against the claims of Henderson's Company. At the time appointed for the meeting, Clark, accompanied by his colleague, Gabriel John Jones, proceeded to Williamsburg and presented his petition to the Assembly, where again his remarkable personality secured a victory. In spite of the vigorous exertions of Henderson and Campbell in behalf of the Transylvania Company, the Virginia Assembly (December 7, 1776) passed an act dividing the vast, ill-defined region, hitherto known as Fincastle County, into three sections, to be known as Kentucky County, Washington County, and Montgomery County, Virginia. The County of Kentucky, comprising almost the same territory as is contained in the present State of Kentucky, was thus recognized as a political unit of the Virginia Commonwealth, and as such was entitled to representation. This statute decided the fate of the Transylvania Company, as there could not be two Sovereign Proprietors of the soil of Kentucky County. And so passed, a victim to its own lust of gain, the last attempt to establish a proprietary government upon the free soil of the United States; and George Rogers Clark, as founder of Kentucky's first political organization, became the political father of the Commonwealth, even as Daniel Boone had been the father of her colonization. FOOTNOTE: [72] Copyright, 1909, by Moffat, Yard and Company. EDWIN D. SCHOONMAKER Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, poet, was born at Scranton, Pennsylvania, February 1, 1873. He removed from Ohio to Kentucky in 1886, and he lived at Lexington almost continuously until 1904. Mr. Schoonmaker was educated at old Kentucky (Transylvania) University; and in 1904 he married a Kentucky woman, who has published a play and a novel. For the last several years he and his wife have lived at Bearsville, New York, high up in the Catskills. Mr. Schoonmaker's first book was a verse play, entitled _The Saxons--a Drama of Christianity in the North_ (Chicago, 1905). This was based upon the attempt on the part of Rome to force the religion of Christ upon the pagans in the forests of the North, and it was a very strong piece of work. His second work, another verse drama, will appear in 1913, entitled _The Americans_. It will be published by Mr. Mitchell Kennerley, for whom Mr. Schoonmaker is planning two other plays. Mr. Schoonmaker has had short lyrics in many of the leading magazines. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Arena_ (May, 1906); _Hampton's Magazine_ (June, 1910); _The Forum_ (August, 1912). THE PHILANTHROPIST[73] [From _The American Magazine_ (October, 1912)] I neither praise nor blame thee, aged Scot, In whose wide lap the shifting times have poured The heavy burden of that golden hoard That shines far off and shall not be forgot. I only see thee carving far and wide Thy name on many marbles through the land, Or flashing splendid from the jeweler's hand Where medaled heroes show thy face with pride. Croesus had not such royal halls as thou, Nor Timon half as many friends as crowd Thy porches when thy largesses are loud, Learning and Peace are stars upon thy brow. And still thy roaring mills their tribute bring As unto Cæsar, and thy charities Have borne thy swelling fame beyond the seas, Where thou in many realms art all but king. Yet when night lays her silence on thine ears And thou art at thy window all alone, Pondering thy place, dost thou not hear the groans Of them that bear thy burdens through the years? FOOTNOTE: [73] Copyright, 1912, by the Phillips Publishing Company. CREDO HARRIS Credo Harris, novelist, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, January 8, 1874. He was educated in the schools of Louisville and finished at college in the East. He settled in New York as a newspaper man and the following ten years of his life were given to that work. In 1908 Mr. Harris abandoned daily journalism in order to devote himself to fiction. Only a few of his short-stories had gotten into the magazines when his first book, entitled _Toby, a Novel of Kentucky_ (Boston, 1912), appeared. In spite of the fact that the author's literary models were, perhaps, too manifest, _Toby_ was well liked by many readers. Mr. Harris's second story, _Motor Rambles in Italy_ (New York, 1912), was cordially received by those very critics who assailed his first volume with vehemence. It is both a book of travels and a romance, the recital being in the form of love letters to his sweetheart, Polly, and also descriptive of the country from Baden-Baden to Rome seen from the tonneau of a big touring-car. Mr. Harris has a new story well under way, which will probably appear in 1913. He resides at Glenview, Kentucky, with his father, but his work on _The Louisville Herald_ takes him into town almost every day. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Harris to the Author; _The Courier-Journal_ (November 30, 1912). BOLOGNA[74] [From _Motor Rambles in Italy_ (New York, 1912)] Bologna! Home of the sausage! Does not your mouth water at just the thought of it! I can see your pretty nose turn up in a curve that simply screams "Disgusting"--but you have never been quite fair to this relic of menageries. To-day at luncheon our waiter first pranced up with a dish I did not recognize. It has long been a rule of mine--especially in Italy--that when I do not recognize a dish I wave it by. But rules are sent broadcast before the Bolognese spirit of patriotism. Would I be permitted to refuse this dish? No. He poked it still nearer and gave me a polite look. "No," I said, "not any." He poked it still nearer and his look became troubled. "No," I said again. This time his look was indignant as he exclaimed: "But, signor, it is _mortadella_!" Indeed, we found his persistence quite justifiable. I could be satisfied to linger here. It is a pleasant mixture of cosmopolitan and mediaeval, blending a touch of geniality which adds much to its charm. The people are happier, perhaps it would be best to say more smiling, in Bologna than farther north. If one can be reconciled to the incongruity of living in a hotel that was a fifteenth century palace overlooking the solemn tombs of jurists, and then stepping to the corner for a twentieth century electric car, he can steel himself to put up with many other temperamental contradictions to be found in this capital of the Emilia. But because of its cosmopolitanism I shall tell you little. In big places like this there is so much to see, so much to digest, so much to read out of guide books, that--what's the use? My letters are permitted, you have threatened, only so long as I tell an occasional thing which may serve you and the Dowager when you come through next year by motor, and while I do not believe you quite mean this, or would throw it down if you saw me heading toward the tender realms of nothingness, your wish shall, nevertheless, constitute my aim. Should I digress, it will be because my love for you is stronger than myself--an assertion of doubtful value at the present time. So if you want to know Bologna, read your guide books. Here, you shall have only the more untrodden paths, which, if you follow as I have done, you may be fortunate. For you must know that all I have seen has been discovered by your eyes alone. Many a day has passed since you brought and taught me the things truly beautiful in this world. Great sculptures, rich paintings, magnificent architecture, are in the well worn paths of every one's progress which those who pass cannot help seeing, but a changing leaf, the sweep of a bird, a child's laugh at the roadside, ah, those are the bounties your hands have poured into my lap! Thousands pass along this way, piled high with perishable treasures, and never dream that they are trampling a masterpiece with every crunch of their bourgeoise boots. FOOTNOTE: [74] Copyright, 1912, by Moffat, Yard and Company. HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES Mrs. Hallie Erminie Rives-Wheeler, maker of mysteries, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, May 2, 1874, the daughter of Colonel Stephen T. Rives. She is a cousin of Princess Troubetzkey, the celebrated Virginia novelist. Miss Rives, to give her her old name, was educated in Kentucky schools, after which she went to New York with her mother. In 1896 Miss Rives's mother died and she and her father moved to Amherst county, Virginia, which is her present American home. Her literary labors fall naturally into two periods: the first, which included five "red-hot" books, as follows: _The Singing Wire and Other Stories_ (Clarksville, Tennessee, 1892), the "other stories" being four in number and nameless here; _A Fool in Spots_ (St. Louis, 1894); _Smoking Flax_ (New York, 1897); _As the Hart Panteth_ (New York, 1898); and _A Furnace of Earth_ (New York, 1900). Miss Rives's second period of work began with _Hearts Courageous_ (Indianapolis, 1902), a romance of Revolutionary Virginia, and continues to the present time. This was followed by _The Castaway_ (Indianapolis, 1904), based upon the career of Lord Byron; and the great poems of the Englishman are made to swell the length of the story. In _Tales from Dickens_ (Indianapolis, 1905), Miss Rives did for the novelist what Lamb did for Shakespeare--made him readable for children. _Satan Sanderson_ (Indianapolis, 1907), a wild and thrilling tale of today, one of the "six best sellers" for many months, was followed by what is, perhaps, her best book, a story set in Japan, entitled _The Kingdom of Slender Swords_ (Indianapolis, 1910). Her latest novel is _The Valiants of Virginia_ (Indianapolis, 1912), the action of which begins in New York, but is transferred to Virginia. Miss Rives was married in Tokyo, Japan, December 29, 1906, to Mr. Post Wheeler, writer and diplomat, now connected with the American embassy at Rome. While none of her novels is set against Kentucky backgrounds, several of her short stories published in the magazines are Kentucky to the core. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The American Review of Reviews_ (October, 1902); _The Nation_ (August 11, 1904). THE BISHOP SPEAKS[75] [From _Satan Sanderson_ (Indianapolis, 1907)] Inside the study, meanwhile, the bishop was greeting Harry Sanderson. He had officiated at his ordination and liked him. His eyes took in the simple order of the room, lingering with a light tinge of disapproval upon the violin case in the corner, and with a deeper shade of question upon the jewel on the other's finger--a pigeon-blood ruby in a setting curiously twisted of the two initial letters of his name. There came to his mind for an instant a whisper of early prodigalities and wildness which he had heard. For the lawyer who had listened to Harry Sanderson's recital on the night of the making of the will had not considered it a professional disclosure. He had thought it a "good story," and had told it at his club, whence it had percolated at leisure through the heavier strata of town-talk. The tale, however, had seemed rather to increase than to discourage popular interest in Harry Sanderson. The bishop knew that those whose approval had been withheld were in the hopeless minority, and that even these could not have denied that he possessed desirable qualities--a manner by turns sparkling and grave, picturesqueness in the pulpit, and the unteachable tone of blood--and had infused new life into a generally sleepy parish. He had dismissed the whisper with a smile, but oddly enough it recurred to him now at sight of the ruby ring. "I looked in to tell you a bit of news," said the bishop. "I've just come from David Stires--he has a letter from Van Lennap, the great eye-surgeon of Vienna. He disagrees with the rest of them--thinks Jessica's case may not be hopeless." The cloud that Hugh's call had left on Harry's countenance lifted. "Thank God!" he said. "Will she go to him?" The bishop looked at him curiously, for the exclamation seemed to hold more than a conventional relief. "He is to be in America next month. He will come here to examine, and perhaps to operate. An exceptional girl," went on the bishop, "with a remarkable talent! The angel in the chapel porch, I suppose you know, is her modelling, though that isn't just masculine enough in feature to suit me. The Scriptures are silent on the subject of woman-angels in Heaven; though, mind you, I don't say they're not common on earth!" The bishop chuckled mildly at his own epigram. "Poor child!" he continued more soberly. "It will be a terrible thing for her if this last hope fails her, too! Especially now, when she and Hugh are to make a match of it." Harry's face was turned away, or the bishop would have seen it suddenly startled. "To make a match of it!" To hide the flush he felt staining his cheek, Harry bent to close the safe. A something that had darkled in some obscure depth of his being, whose existence he had not guessed, was throbbing now to a painful resentment. Jessica to marry Hugh! "A handsome fellow--Hugh!" said the bishop. "He seems to have returned with a new heart--a brand plucked from the burning. You had the same _alma mater_, I think you told me. Your influence has done the boy good, Sanderson!" He laid his hand kindly on the other's shoulder. "The fact that you were in college together makes him look up to you--as the whole parish does," he added. Harry was setting the combination, and did not answer. But through the turmoil in his brain a satiric voice kept repeating: "No, they don't call me 'Satan' now!" FOOTNOTE: [75] Copyright, 1907, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. EDWIN CARLILE LITSEY Edwin Carlile Litsey, author of _The Love Story of Abner Stone_, was born at Beechland, Kentucky, June 3, 1874. He was educated in public and private schools, but he did not go to college. At the age of seventeen years Mr. Litsey entered the banking business, and he is now connected with the Marion National Bank, of his present home, Lebanon, Kentucky. His first novel, _The Princess of Gramfalon_ (Cincinnati, 1898), was a daring piece of imagination, creating impossible lands and peoples, and it has been forgotten by author and public alike. Mr. Litsey's strongest and best work so far is a beautiful tale of Nature, entitled _The Love Story of Abner Stone_ (New York, 1902). This novelette made the author many friends, as it is a charming story. In 1904 he won first prize in _The Black Cat_ story-contest, over ten thousand competitors, with _In the Court of God_. His stories of wild animals in their haunts were brought together in _The Race of the Swift_ (Boston, 1905). This contains some of his best work, the first story being especially fine and strong. Mr. Litsey's latest novel, _The Man from Jericho_ (New York, 1911), was not up to the standard set in his earlier works, and in no sense is it a noteworthy production. It shows a decided falling off, and it brought disappointment to many admirers of _The Love Story of Abner Stone_ and _The Race of the Swift_. In 1912 Mr. Litsey contributed several short-stories to _The Cavalier_, and next year he will issue another novel, to be entitled _A Maid of the Kentucky Hills_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Book Buyer_ (July, 1902); _Munsey's Magazine_ (April, 1903). THE RACE OF THE SWIFT[76] [From _The Race of the Swift_ (Boston, 1905)] The next morning, near midday, her merciless offsprings teased and worried her so that the she-fox crept forth in spite of the warning of the day before, and set her sharp muzzle towards the crest of the range, with the intention of invading territory which hitherto her feet had never pressed. There were wild turkeys back in the hills, and wary and suspicious as she knew them to be, they were no match for her wily woodcraft. But scarcely had her noiseless feet gone over the top of the knob, when a sharp yelp immediately behind her caused her to jump and turn quickly. They were there--her enemies--and their noses were smelling out her trail, for as yet they had not seen her. Even as she leaped for the nearest cover like a yellow flash, her first thought was of the little ones biding at home. She must lead her foes away from that cleft in the rocks where her love-children lay awaiting her return. And though her life should be given up, yet would she die alone, and far away, before she would sacrifice her young. It was a hard and stubborn race which she ran for the next six hours. At times her loyal, loving heart seemed ready to burst from the strain she thrust upon it. At times fleet feet were pattering almost at her heels, and pitiless jaws were held wide to grasp her; then again only the echo of the stubborn cry of her pursuers reached her. She had doubled time and again. Once a brief respite was granted her when she dashed up a slanting tree-trunk which, in falling, had lodged in the branches of another tree. Eight tawny forms dashed hotly, furiously by, then she descended and took the back track. Only for a moment, however, were the cunning dogs deceived. They discovered the artifice almost as soon as it was perpetrated, and came harking back themselves with redoubled zeal. So the long hours of the afternoon wore away. Not a moment that was free from effort; not an instant that death did not hover over the mother fox, awaiting the least misstep to descend. Back and forth, around and across, and still the subtlety of the fox eluded the haste and fury of the hounds. All were tired to the point of exhaustion, but none would give up. The sun went down; tremulous shadows, like curtains hung, were draped among the trees. The timid stars came out again and the halfed moon arose, a little larger than the night before. And still, with inveterate hate on the one side, and the undying strength of despair on the other, the grim chase swept through the night. At last the blood-rimmed eyes of the reeling quarry saw familiar landmarks. Unconsciously, in her blind efforts, she had come to the neighborhood of her den. Perhaps the love within her heart had guided her back. She found her strength quickly failing, and with a realization of this her scheming brain awoke as from a trance, and drove her to deeper guile. Two rods away was the creek. To it she staggered, splashed through the low water for a dozen yards, and hid herself beneath the gnarled roots of a tree from the base of which the stream had eaten away the soil. She listened intensely. She heard the pack lose the scent, search half-heartedly for a few minutes, for they, too, were weary to dropping, then withdraw one at a time, beaten. But for half an hour the brave animal lay against the tree roots, waiting and resting. Then she came out cautiously, looked around her, and with difficulty gained the mouth of her den. Casting one keen glance over her shoulder through the checkered spaces of the forest, she glided softly within, and lying down, curled her tired body protectingly around her sleeping little ones. FOOTNOTE: [76] Copyright, 1905, by Little, Brown and Company. MILTON BRONNER Milton Bronner, literary critic and journalist, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, November 10, 1874. He was graduated from the University of Virginia, in 1895, when he returned to his home to join the staff of the old _Louisville Commercial_. In 1900 Mr. Bronner removed to Covington, Kentucky, to become city editor of _The Kentucky Post_, of which paper he is now editor-in-chief. Mr. Bronner's first book, called _Letters from the Raven_ (New York, 1907), was a work about Lafcadio Hearn with many of Hearn's hitherto unpublished letters. His second and most important volume so far, _Maurice Hewlett_ (Boston, 1910), is the first adequate discussion of the novels and poems of the celebrated English author. His method was to treat the works in the order of their publication, together with a brief word upon Mr. Hewlett's life. His little book must have pleased the novelist as much as it did the public. Mr. Bronner seems to have a _flair_ for new writers who later "arrive." Thus years ago _Poet-Lore_ published his paper on William Ernest Henley, before Henley's fame was so firmly established. Some years later _The Independent_ had his essay on Francis Thompson, whom all the world now declares to have been a great and true poet. Still later _The Forum_ printed his criticism of John Davidson, in which high estimates were set upon the unfortunate fellow's works; and _The Bookman_ has printed a series of his critical appreciations of such men as John Masefield, Ezra Pound, Wilbur Underwood, W. H. Davies, W. W. Gibson, and Lionel Johnson, which introduced these now celebrated poets to the American public. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Forum_ (September, 1910); _The Bookman_ (August; November, 1911); _The Bookman_ (April; October, 1912). MR. HEWLETT'S WOMEN[77] [From _Maurice Hewlett_ (Boston, 1910)] Mr. Hewlett is mainly interested in his women. They are the pivots about whom his comedies and tragedies move. And his treatment of them differs from all the great contemporary novelists. Kipling gives snapshot photographs of women. He shows them in certain brief moments of their existence, in vivid blacks and whites, caught on the instant whether the subjects were laughing or crying. Stevenson's few women are presented in silhouette. Barrie and Hardy give etchings in which line by line and with the most painstaking art, the features are drawn. But Meredith and Mr. Hewlett give paintings in which brush stroke after brush stroke has been used. The reader beholds the finished work, true not only in features, but in colouring. * * * * * Now Mr. Hewlett is purely medieval. The Hewlett woman is forever the plaything of love. She is always in the attitude of the pursuing who is pursued. She is forever the subject of passion, holy or unholy. Men will fight for her, plunge kingdoms and cities in war or ruin for her, die for her. Sometimes, as in "The Stooping Lady," she is the willing object of this love and stoops to enjoy its divine benison; sometimes she flees from it when it displays a satyr face as in "The Duchess of Nona;" sometimes she is caught up in its tragic coil as in "The Queen's Quair," and destroyed by it. Hewlett's women, like Hardy's, are stray angels, but like Meredith's they are creatures of the chase. And, note the difference from Meredith!--this, according to the gospel of Mr. Hewlett, is as it should be. Since it is woman's proper fate to be loved, it would seem to be impossible for Mr. Hewlett to write a story in which there is not some romantic love interest. And in each case there is a stoop on the part of one. The stoop may be happy or the reverse, but it is there. He recurs to the idea again and again, but each time with a difference that prevents monotony. In the main, Mr. Hewlett's women are good women. They are loyal and loving, ready alike to take beatings or kisses. There is no ice in their bosoms which must needs be thawed. Nor are Mr. Hewlett's women "kind" after the manner of the Stendhal characters. They are not women who make themselves common. For the most part, they are Rosalinds and Perditas of an humbler sort, with the beauty of those immortal girls, but without their supreme wit and high spirits. They are girls who are stricken down with love's dart and who make no effort to remove the dear missiles. They are true dwellers in romance-land, beautiful creatures who give themselves to their chosen lords without thought of sin or of the future. FOOTNOTE: [77] Copyright, 1910, by L. E. Bassett. A. ST. CLAIR MACKENZIE Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, author of _The Evolution of Literature_, was born at Inverness, Scotland, February 17, 1875. "Blue as a molten sapphire gleams the Moray Firth below Culloden Moor, under whose purple heather sleep some of the warrior ancestors of Alastair St. Clair Mackenzie, near which he was born." The University of Glasgow conferred the degree of Master of Arts upon him in 1892. He then did graduate work in English at the University of Edinburgh for a year, after which he studied for some months under Sir Richard C. Jebb of the University of Cambridge, and Edward Caird of Oxford University. Mackenzie met S. R. Crockett, Henry Drummond, William Black, Alfred Tennyson, and many other distinguished men of letters, before he came to America. After a brief residence in Philadelphia he came to the State University of Kentucky, at Lexington, in September, 1899, as head of the department of English, and under his supervision the curriculum has been extended from three courses to thirty. Among Kentucky educators he has been the pioneer in introducing Journalism, Comparative Philology, and Comparative Literature. In 1911 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Kentucky Wesleyan College, the only degree of the kind ever conferred by that institution. In 1912 Dr. Mackenzie was Ropes Foundation lecturer at the University of Cincinnati. He is now dean of the Graduate School of the University of Kentucky. Besides contributing many articles to periodicals, Dr. Mackenzie wrote, in 1904, the first history of Lexington Masonic Lodge, No. 1, the earliest in the West; and, in 1907, the article on Hew Ainslie, the Scottish-Kentucky poet, published in the _Library of Southern Literature_, and pronounced by many competent critics to be the finest essay in that great collection. His _The Evolution of Literature_ (New York, 1911), the English edition of which was issued by John Murray, London, deals with the origins of literature, as its title indicates, and it has placed Dr. Mackenzie at the head of Southern students of this subject. Into this work went the researches and deliberate judgments of a lifetime; and that a scholar should produce such a work in the West or South, without a great library near at hand, is in itself remarkable. Dr. Mackenzie has done what will probably come to be regarded as the most scholarly production of a Kentucky hand, although the work is more suggestive than it is conclusive. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). A KELTIC TALE[78] [From _The Evolution of Literature_ (New York, 1911)] Here is an old Keltic tale of farewell. It was a night of mist, a low moon brooding over the braes, the heathery braes. The man sat by the seashore, as he sang quaint ballads of a land across the water, where men never see death. There was none to reveal the secrets of the glens, nor could any one tell him what the eagle cried to the stag at the corrie, while the burn wimpled on with its song of sobbing. He sat and listened, but he was knowing naught of sadness. To his ears came only the accents of the fairies of joy, and they called him to seek the fountain where song had its birth. Away from the sea he climbed till its voice came faint, faint across the bracken. At last, full weary, he slept. The night passed, and a leveret stood up, gazing upon his face without fear. A deer came to the stream, beheld the sleeping figure, and fled not. A grey linnet perched upon the pale hand lying across the bosom; it looked the sun in the face, and sang, but the man did not awake. Again the shadows melted into the night of stars, and the hills said to one another, "He has found Death and Life. For we know, and God knows, all his dreams. He has found the secret of the sea, the message of all the streams, and the fountain-head of song." In quest of literary strivings and achievements, lowly as well as exalted, we have journeyed through all the principal lands of the globe. The forests of Africa have shaded us from the scorching sun, and the tang of the salt sea has smitten us off Cape Horn. Visions of scenes familiar have mingled with sights and sounds of cities that flourished forty centuries ago. Wherever we have gone, we have noticed that vitality is the quality which gives permanent value to all true art. Popular opinion, blind perhaps to the qualities of art as art, caring nothing about the more elusive charms of verse and prose, is quick to detect the presence or absence of a vital relationship between literature and humanity. Literary art voices life and gives life. The higher the art the more effectively does it fill the onlooker with a sense of life, personal and racial, dignified, wholesome, inexhaustible. Apparently it is the ideal within the real that becomes ever more manifest in the course of the evolution of literature. FOOTNOTE: [78] Copyright, 1911, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company. LAURA SPENCER PORTOR Miss Laura Spencer Portor, poet and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 1875. She lived at Covington until ten years old, when she was taken to Paris, France, where she attended private schools for two years. She returned to Kentucky, and attended school at Cincinnati, but she afterwards entered the old Norwood Institute, Washington. Her education being finished, Miss Portor again made her home at Covington, where she resided until a few years ago, when she went to New York, her home at the present time. She has worked in many literary fields. Children's work; essays; short-stories; feature and editorial work of all kinds; and verse for children and "grown-ups." Miss Portor is now children's editor of _The Woman's Home Companion_. She has been so very busy with her magazine work that she has found time to publish but one book, _Theodora_ (Boston, 1907), a little tale for children, done in collaboration with Miss Katharine Pyle, sister of the famous American artist, the late Howard Pyle, and herself an artist and author of ability and reputation. The next few years will certainly see several of Miss Portor's manuscripts published in book form. Among her magazine stories and verse that have attracted attention may be mentioned her purely Kentucky tales, such as "A Gentleman of the Blue Grass," published in _The Ladies' Home Journal_; "The Judge," which appeared in _The Woman's Home Companion_; "Sally," a Southern story, printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; and "My French School Days," an essay, also printed in _The Atlantic_, are thought to be the best things in prose Miss Portor has written so far. Her poems, "The Little Christ" (_Atlantic Monthly_), and "But One Leads South" (_McClure's Magazine_), are her most characteristic work in verse. She has written much for children in both prose and poetry. Miss Portor is one of Kentucky's proudest hopes in fiction or verse, and the books that are to be published from her pen will bring together her work in a manner that will be highly pleasing to her admirers. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Magazine_ (August, 1900); _St. Nicholas Magazine_ (October, 1912). THE LITTLE CHRIST[79] [From _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1905] Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why weepest thou? _Hush! for I see a crown of thorns, A bleeding brow._ Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why dost thou sigh? _Hush! for the shadow of the years Stoopeth more nigh!_ Mother, I am thy little Son-- Oh, smile on me. The birds sing blithe, the birds sing gay, The leaf laughs on the tree. _Oh, hush thee! The leaves do shiver sore That tree whereon they grow, I see it hewn, and bound, to bear The weight of human woe!_ Mother, I am thy little Son-- The Night comes on apace-- When all God's waiting stars shall smile On me in thy embrace. _Oh, hush thee! I see black starless night! Oh, could'st thou slip away Now, by the hawthorn hedge of Death,-- And get to God by Day!_ BUT ONE LEADS SOUTH[80] [From _McClure's Magazine_, December, 1909] So many countries of the earth, So many lands of such great worth; So stately, tall, and fair they shine,-- So royal, all,--but one is mine. So many paths that come and go, Busy and freighted, to and fro; So many that I never see That still bring gifts and friends to me; So many paths that go and come, But one leads South,--and that leads home. Oh, I would rather see the face Of that dear land a little space Than have earth's richest, fairest things My own, or touch the hands of kings.-- I'm homesick for it! When at night The silent road runs still and white,-- Runs onward, southward, still and fair, And I know well it's going there, And I know well at last 'twill come To that old candle-lighted home,-- Though all the candles of heaven are lit, I'm homesick for the sight of it! FOOTNOTES: [79] Copyright, 1905, by Houghton, Mifflin Company. [80] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company. LEIGH GORDON GILTNER Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, poet and short-story writer, was born at Eminence, Kentucky, in 1875. She is the daughter of the Rev. W. S. Giltner, who was for many years president of Eminence College, from which the future writer was graduated. She later pursued a course in English at the University of Chicago, and studied Shakespeare and dramatic art with Hart Conway of the Chicago School of Acting. Miss Giltner's book of lyrics, _The Path of Dreams_ (Chicago, 1900), brought her many kind words from the reviewers. This little book contained some very excellent verse, but, shortly after its appearance, the author abandoned poesy for the short-story. Her stories and sketches have appeared in the _New England Magazine_, _The Century_, _Munsey's Overland Monthly_, _The Reader_, _The Era_, and several other periodicals. Within the last year or so she has had quite a number of short-stories in _Young's Magazine_ "of breezy stories." At the present time Miss Giltner has a Kentucky novel and a comedy in preparation, both of which should appear shortly. She is one of the most beautiful of Kentucky's writers: her frontispiece portrait in _The Path of Dreams_ is said to have disarmed many carping critics who untied the little volume with malice aforethought. But back of her personal loveliness, is a mind of much power, cleverness, and originality. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (September 6, 1900); _Munsey's Magazine_ (October, 1902); _The Overland_ (October, 1910). THE JESTING GODS[81] [From _Munsey's Magazine_ (July, 1904)]. From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins--which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise. Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot. Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze. When a man is a fool and knows it, his folly not infrequently attains the measure of wisdom. Let him but conceal his motley beneath a cloak of weighty silence and he will presently acquire a reputation for solid intelligence and a wise conservatism. But Tompkins was not one of these. He joyously jangled his bells and flourished his bauble, wholly unaware the while of the spectacle he was making of himself. If he could have been persuaded to take on a neutral tint and keep himself well in the background, inanity might, in time, have assumed the dignity of intellectuality: but he lacked the sense of proportion, of values. He was always in the foreground and always a more or less inharmonious element in the _ensemble_. Tompkins had published an impossible volume of prose, followed by a yet more impossible volume of verse: his crudely impressionistic essays at art made the judicious grieve: he dabbled in music and posed as a lyric tenor, though he had neither voice nor ear. A temperament essentially histrionic kept him constantly in the centre of the stage. With no remote realization of his limitations, he aspired to play leads and heavies, when Fate had inexorably cast him for a line of low comedy. He contrived to make divers and sundry kinds and degrees of an idiot of himself on all possible occasions--and even when there was no possible occasion therefor. He had a faculty for doing the wrong thing which amounted to inspiration. We had been wont to speculate at the Club as to whether Tompkins would ever find a woman the measure of whose folly should so far exceed his own as to impel her to marry him. We wondered much when we heard that he had at last achieved this feat. We wondered more when we saw the woman who had made it a possibility. "_Titania_ and _Bottom_, by Jove!" whispered Ronalds to me as Tompkins followed his wife into the drawing-room on the evening of their arrival at Grantleigh Manor. (Tompkins is asked everywhere on account of his relationship to old Lord Wrexford.) My fancy, which I had allowed to play freely about the lady of Tompkins' choice since I had heard of his marriage, had wavered between a spinster of uncertain age who had accepted him as a _dernier resort_ and a simpering school girl too young to know her own mind. I now glanced at the bride--and gasped. She was one of those women whose beauty is so absolute, so compelling, as to admit of neither question nor criticism. It quite took away one's breath. Every man in the room was gaping at her, but she bore the ordeal with all grace and calm, though she was the daughter of a struggling curate in some obscure locality remote from social advantages. She was of a singularly striking type: the beauty of her face was almost tragic in its intensity: the ghost of some immemorial sorrow seemed to lurk in the depths of her dark eyes: but when her too sombre expression was irradiated by the transient gleam of her rare smile, she was positively dazzling. (I am aware that I shall seem to "promulgate rhapsodies for dogmas" so to speak, but my proverbial indifference to feminine charm should endorse me.) * * * * * As the days passed--we were at Grantleigh for a fortnight--I found myself watching for some flaw in her conception, some inaccuracy in her interpretation of her _role_. But I watched in vain. There was always a perfect appreciation of the requirements of the situation, always the perfection of taste in its treatment. Evidently she had thrown herself into the part and was playing it--would play it, perhaps, to the end--with artistic _abandon_, tempered by a fine discretion and discrimination. If her yoke galled, this proud woman made no sign. But even the subtlest artiste has her unguarded moment, and it was in such a moment that I chanced to see her the night before the last of our stay. The men had come in late from a day's shooting over the moors and were on their way to their rooms to dress for dinner. Tompkins had gone up stairs just ahead of me (his apartments were next mine) and had carelessly left a door opening on the corridor slightly ajar. In passing I unconsciously glanced that way and my eyes fell full upon the mirrored face of Elinor Tompkins as her husband crossed toward where she sat at her dressing table. The flash of feeling that crossed her countenance held me for a moment transfixed. Such a look, such an unbelievable complex of shrinking, repugnance, utter loathing and self-contempt I had never seen or imagined.... Like a flash it came and went. The next instant she had forced herself to smile and was lifting her face for her husband's caress, while Tompkins, physically and mentally short-sighted, bent and inclined his lips to hers. I caught my breath sharply. A choking sensation in my throat paid tribute to her art. Not even Duse was more a mistress of emotional control, expression, and repression. But this was something more than the perfection of acting: it was courage, the courage of endurance long drawn out--a greater than that which impels men to the cannon's mouth and a swift and sure surcease from suffering. That evening at dinner, Villars, who had run up to town for the day, and found time for a gossip at the Club, proceeded to open his budget. He had had the satisfaction of surprising us with the rumored engagement of Lady Agatha Trelor to the scapegrace son of an impoverished peer: he had hinted delicately at a scandal in high official life: and had made his climax with the announcement of the sudden demise of old Lord Ilverton and the consequent succession of Delmar to his title and estates--when I glanced, by purest chance, at Mrs. Tompkins. (I had fallen into a way of looking at her often--she was certainly an interesting study.) Her face was white, even to the lips. Chancing to turn, she found my eyes upon her. In an instant she had somehow compelled the color to her cheeks and recovered her wonted perfect poise and calm. That night in the smoking room, Villars shed light upon the subject. Tompkins was presumably haunting his wife's footsteps at the moment. In his unconscious egotism he never spared her: there was seldom a moment when she might drop her smiling mask: the essence of his personality pervaded her whole atmosphere. "I met old Waxby at the Club to-day," Villars was saying, "and--_apropos_ of Delmar's succession to the title--he mentioned that there had been a serious affair of the heart between him and our fellow-guest, Mrs. Tompkins, then Elinor Barton. It seems one of Ilverton's innumerable country places was near the village where the Bartons lived and Delmar met the girl there last Autumn. The affair soon assumed serious proportions: Ilverton heard of the engagement: cut up an awful shindy: had a scene with Del, and finally bundled him off to India post haste. The girl had grit, though. She sent her compliments to Lord Ilverton with the assurance that he need have given himself no uneasiness, as she had already twice refused his son and heir, and was prepared to repeat the refusal should occasion arise. They say his Lordship, who had cooled down a bit, chuckled mightily over the message and vowed that had it only been one of his younger sons, she should have had him, by Jupiter!... But things weren't easy for the girl at home. She had an invalid mother, a nervous, nagging creature, who dinned it into her ears that she'd lost the chance of a lifetime: that she was standing in the light of three marriageable younger sisters: that with her limited social advantages few matrimonial opportunities might be expected to come her way--and more to the same effect till the poor girl was nearly driven frantic." "Why not have tried the stage--with her voice and presence any manager would have been glad to take her on," Landis suggested. "She considered it, they say, but her reverend father turned a fit at the bare suggestion. At this juncture, Tompkins presented himself as a suitor: it was duly pointed out to Miss Barton by her loving parents that he was rather an eligible _parti_: rich, not bad looking, and a nephew of Wrexford's, and that she would better take the goods the gods provided, which, in sheer desperation, she ultimately did. You can see she loathes him, but she's evidently made up her mind to be decent to him--and by Jove, she doesn't do it by halves! She's got sand, all right, and I honor her for the way she makes the best of a bad bargain--though it's not a pleasant thing to see." "It's a beastly pity!" broke in Ronalds warmly. "It makes me ill to see her wasting herself and her subtleties on a dolt like Algy. What a splendid pair she and Del would have made, and what a shame his Lordship didn't obligingly die a few months sooner--since it had to be!" At this precise moment I caught sight of Tompkins standing just without the parted portierres. How long he had been there I could not guess, but doubtless quite long enough. He looked like a man who had had a facer and was a bit dazed in consequence. I think I gasped, for on the instant he looked my way with a glance that held an appeal, which I must somehow have answered. In an instant he was gone and the other men, all unaware of his proximity, pursued their theme. I did not see Tompkins at our hurried buffet breakfast next morning, and I began to hope he would not go out with the guns that day, thus sparing me the awkward necessity of meeting him again. But he presently appeared on the terrace in his shooting togs, and I knew I was in for it. His manner, however, which was entirely as usual, reassured me. Either he had heard less than I had feared or the callousness of stupidity protected him. He chatted with his wonted gayety with the men: he made the ladies at hand to see us off a labored compliment or two, and met my eye without consciousness or embarassment. I wondered if it were stolidity or stoicism? All day he was in the best of spirits: he was positively hilarious when we gathered at the gamekeeper's cottage for luncheon--and I decided upon the former with a sense of relief, for the thing had somehow got on my nerves. But later, as we returned to the field, he so palpably waited for me to come up with him (we always put Tompkins in the van for safety's sake--he did such fearful and wonderful things with his gun) that I was forced to join him. After a moment he said, with an effort: "Sibley, I want to ask, as a very great personal favor, that you will never, under any circumstances, mention to anyone--to _any one_," he repeated, with a curious effect of earnestness, "about--last night." I hastened to give him my assurance. It was the least I could do. "Thank you," he said simply. "I felt I might depend upon you." Then, because we were men--and Englishmen--we spoke of other things. Late that afternoon, as we bent our steps homeward, Tompkins and I found ourselves again together. We had somehow strayed from the rest, and under the guidance of a keeper, striding ahead, laden with trappings of the hunt, were making our way toward Grantleigh. Tompkins' manner was entirely simple and unconstrained. A respect I had not previously accorded him was growing upon me. We were both dead tired, and when we spoke at all it was of the day's sport. As we neared the Manor, the keeper, far in the lead, vaulted lightly over a stile in a hedgerow. I followed less lightly (my enemies aver that I am growing stout) with Tompkins in the rear.... Suddenly a shot, abnormally loud and harsh in the twilight hush, rang out at my back. Blind and deaf--fatally blind and deaf as I had been--I realized its import on the instant. Even before I turned I knew what I should see. Tompkins was lying in a huddled heap at the foot of the stile, and as I bent over him I saw that it was a matter of moments. He had bungled things all his life, poor fellow, but he had not bungled this. "An accident, Sibley," he gasped, as I knelt beside him. "I was--always--awkward--with a gun, you know. _An accident_--you'll remember, old man? Elinor must not--" Speech failed him for an instant. An awful agony was upon him, but no moan escaped his lips. His life had been a farce, a failure, but if he had not known how to live, assuredly he knew how to die.... The shadows were closing round him. He put out a groping hand for mine. "I think I'm--going, Sibley," he whispered. "Tell Elinor--" And with her name upon his lips, he went out into the dark. FOOTNOTE: [81] Copyright, 1904, by the Frank A. Munsey Company. MARGARET S. ANDERSON Miss Margaret Steele Anderson, poet and critic, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1875. She was educated in the public schools, with a short special course at Wellesley College. Since 1901 Miss Anderson has been literary editor of _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, having a half-page of book reviews and literary notes in the Saturday edition. From 1903 to 1908 she was "outside reader" for _McClure's Magazine_; and since quitting _McClure's_, she has been a public lecturer upon literature and art in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Memphis, and Lake Chautauqua. Miss Anderson's fine poems have appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The Century_, _McClure's_, but the greater number of them have been published in _The American Magazine_. She has also contributed considerable verse to the minor magazines. The next year will witness Miss Anderson's poems brought together in a charming volume, entitled _The Flame in the Wind_, which form they very certainly merit. No Kentucky woman of the present time has done better work in verse than has she. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _McClure's Magazine_ (August, 1902); _The Century_ (September, 1904). THE PRAYER OF THE WEAK[82] [From _McClure's Magazine_ (September, 1909)] Lord of all strength--behold, I am but frail! Lord of all harvest--few the grapes and pale Allotted for my wine-press! Thou, O Lord, Who holdest in Thy gift the tempered sword, Hast armed me with a sapling! Lest I die, Then hear my prayer, make answer to my cry: Grant me, I pray, to tread my grapes as one Who hath full vineyards, teeming in the sun; Let me dream valiantly; and undismayed Let me lift up my sapling like a blade; Then, Lord, Thy cup for mine abundant wine! Then, Lord, Thy foeman for that steel of mine! NOT THIS WORLD[83] [From _McClure's Magazine_ (November, 1909)] Shall I not give this world my heart, and well, If for naught else, for many a miracle Of spring, and burning rose, and virgin snow?-- _Nay, by the spring that still shall come and go When thou art dust, by roses that shall blow Across thy grave, and snows it shall not miss, Not this world, oh, not this!_ Shall I not give this world my heart, who find Within this world the glories of the mind-- That wondrous mind that mounts from earth to God?-- _Nay, by the little footways it hath trod, And smiles to see, when thou art under sod, And by its very gaze across the abyss, Not this world, oh, not this!_ Shall I not give this world my heart, who hold One figure here above myself, my gold, My life and hope, my joy and my intent?-- _Nay, by that form whose strength so soon is spent, That fragile garment that shall soon be rent, By lips and eyes the heavy earth shall kiss, Not this world, oh, not this!_ Then this poor world shall not my heart disdain? Where beauty mocks and springtime comes in vain, And love grows mute, and wisdom is forgot? _Thou child and thankless! On this little spot_ _Thy heart hath fed, and shall despise it not; Yea, shall forget, through many a world of bliss, Not this world, oh, not this!_ WHISTLER (AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM)[84] [From _The Atlantic Monthly_ (August, 1910)] So sharp the sword, so airy the defense! As 'twere a play, or delicate pretense; So fine and strange--so subtly-poisèd, too-- The egoist that looks forever through! That winged spirit--air and grace and fire-- A-flutter at the frame, is your desire; Nay, it is you--who never knew the net, Exquisite, vain--whom we shall not forget! FOOTNOTES: [82] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company. [83] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company. [84] Copyright, 1910, by the Atlantic Monthly Company. ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH Mrs. Abby Meguire Roach, "the very cleverest of the Louisville school of women novelists," was born at Philadelphia in 1876. She was educated in the schools of her native city, finishing her training with a year at Wellesley College. In 1899 she was married to Mr. Neill Roach, of Louisville, Kentucky, and that city has been her home since. Mrs. Roach wrote many stories of married life for the New York magazines, which were afterwards collected and published as _Some Successful Marriages_ (New York, 1906). These have been singled out by the reviewers as "charming" and "most beautiful"; and her work has been compared to Miss May Sinclair's, the famous English novelist. One of Mrs. Roach's most recent stories was published in _The Century Magazine_ for July, 1907, entitled "Manifest Destiny," but this has not been followed by any others in the last year or so. "Unremembering June," one of the best of the tales in _Some Successful Marriages_, relates the love of Molly-Moll for her invalid husband, after whose death she falls in love with Reno, the father of Lola, "who had been his salvage from the wreck of his marriage." BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Magazine_ (May, 1907); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1909, v. xv), contains Miss Marilla Waite Freeman's excellent study of Mrs. Roach. UNREMEMBERING JUNE[85] [From _Some Successful Marriages_ (New York, 1906)] "And you will let me have word of you? Surely? And give me a chance to be of use? Won't you?" he persisted, taking leave. She swept his face swiftly with a glance of inquiry, intelligence. "Won't you?" "O-h--perhaps," with just the faintest puckering of the mouth. But spring passed without word from her, until there were times when Reno's impatience seethed like a colony of bees at hiving-time. At last he wrote. With unpardonable deliberation a brief answer came: Molly's son was a couple months old, but not yet finished enough to be much to look at. He wrote again: Lola was pale from the city, and bored with herself and her maid; a farm with other children on it sounded like fairyland to her. Could some arrangement be made...? Lola had been there a month before he had any word but her own hard-written and naturally not very voluminous love-letters, letters in which the homesickness was an ever fainter and fainter echo of the first wild cry, and in which the references to "Dandie" made it plain that she had adopted the other children's auntie into a peculiar relationship with herself. At last a postscript from Mrs. Loring herself: "Wouldn't you like to come to see her? It's worth a longer trip." "Of course I would. You're uncommon slow asking me. What kind of father, and man, do you think me?" Molly was standing with the baby in her arms, chewing its chub of fist. In the warm wind soft wisps of blown brown hair curled all around forehead and neck. Her flesh was firm, transparent, aglow; her skin as clear, satiny, pink as the baby's. And what generous, sweet plumpness! She was at perhaps the most beautiful time of a woman's life--in the glamour of first young motherhood, with the beauty of perfect health and uncoarsened maturity. And in the black-and-white of her shirt-waist suit there was no more suggestion of mourning than there is thought of winter in full June--rich, warm, full of promise, "unremembering June," the present and future tenses of the year's declension. As she stood biting the baby, Reno understood why. His look devoured her. Seeing him, her eyes only gave greeting, and, smiling, directed his to the group of animated children's overalls in a sand-pile in front of her. One particular occupant of one particular pair of overalls spied him. Lola flew. He held her off, brown, round, rosy. "Why, who is this? Whose little girl--or boy--are you?" Her head dropped; she dropped from his hand like a nipped flower. "Whose little girl _are_ you?" coached a rich voice with an undercurrent of laughter. Like a flower again, the child swayed at the breath of that elemental nature. "Dandie's little girl," ventured a small voice. At sight of the father's face, Molly laughed, a laugh of many significances. And with a flood of recollected loyalty, "_Papa's!_" gasped the child, and smothered him with remorse. "Wouldn't you like to be Dandie's and papa's little girl all at once?" ("Well! I like that!") "Why, yes. Ain't I? Can't I?" "I think you can." ("Oh, you do?") "No?" His grip on her wrist hurt, and forced her to look up. ("Is it only a mother you want for Lola--and yourself?"); and, looking, she was satisfied; and, looking, she flushed slowly from head to foot, answering him. "The most loyal, affectionate woman in the world!" he added, after a little. "Oh, never mind the fairy tales!" she scoffed, pleased, waiting. He spoke none of the time-honored commonplaces that belittle or dignify or mask the real individual feeling under the stereotype of what it is assumed love ought to be. He could foresee her amusement. Besides, it would have been about as appropriate as trying to capture a bird with a smile. "But I would never marry any woman that I wasn't sure would be kind to Lola and fond of her." "Oh, Lola!" Her whole look was soft and sweet. "I am fond of her now." Then a mischievous laugh bubbled in her throat. "And could be of you, too, if you insist." Even with the laugh her eyes were deeper than words, grave and tender. "As to that, also, Molly-Moll, what you will be to me I am quite satisfied, quite." FOOTNOTE: [85] Copyright, 1906, by Harper and Brothers. IRVIN S. COBB Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, humorist and short-story writer, was born at Paducah, Kentucky, June 23, 1876. He was educated in public and private schools, but the newspaper field loomed large before him, and at the age of nineteen he became editor of the Paducah _Daily News_. For three years he conducted the "Sour Mash" column in the Louisville _Evening Post_, when he returned to Paducah to become managing editor of the _News-Democrat_, which position he held from 1901 to 1904. Late in the year of 1904 Mr. Cobb went to New York, and for a year he was editor of the humorous section and special writer for _The Evening Sun_. In 1905 he became staff humorist for _The World_, and for the following six years he remained with that paper. Mr. Cobb has written several plays, none of which have been published in book form, but they have been produced upon the stage. They include: _The Campaigner_, _Funabashi_, _Mr. Busybody_, _The Gallery God_, _The Yeggman_, and _Daffy-Down-Dilly_. He has written many humorous stories, among which may be mentioned: _New York Through Funny Glasses_, _The Hotel Clerk_, _Live Talks with Dead Ones_, _Making Peace at Portsmouth_, _The Gotham Geography_, and _The Diary of Noah_. Then, one day, the daily grind racked his nerves, he rebelled and bethought himself of the good old days in Kentucky years agone. Ah, what a fine chapter was added to the history of our native letters when Cobb looked backward! Now, when he was but twenty-four years of age, he had written a story, a horror tale of Reelfoot Lake, which he named "Fishhead" and immediately forgot, but which he had brought on East with him. On this he made some minor revisions and started it on its round of the magazine editors. But Cobb didn't wait for the fate of "Fishhead"; and it's a good thing that he didn't! He wrote what he now regards as his first fiction story, The Escape of Mr. Trimm; and _The Saturday Evening Post_ accepted it so quickly, printing it in the issue for November 27, 1909, that Cobb gleefully cashed the cheque and sent them another shortly thereafter. The editor of _The Post_, George Horace Lorimer, whom many competent judges considered the greatest editor in the United States, realized that a new literary planet had swam into his ken; and in 1911 he asked Cobb to become a staff contributor, which the Kentuckian was delighted to do. All of his stories have appeared in that publication, all save _Fishhead_, which Mr. Lorimer regarded as a bit too strong medicine for his subscribers. Mr. Cobb's next big story in _The Post_ was one that he has come to regard as the best thing he has done hitherto, "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," which appeared in the issue for January 21, 1911. This was a real horror tale, a "thriller," making one couple the name of Cobb with Poe, a comparison which has gathered strength with the passing of the months. For _The Post_ Mr. Cobb created Judge Priest, a character that has made him famous. He did a group of tales about and around this leading citizen of a certain Southern town--which town was none other than his own Paducah; and which character was none other than old Judge Bishop, whom many Kentuckians recall with pleasure. Cobb is a great realist and he has never had any patience with the romanticists. He painted the old town and the old judge and the judge's friends and enemies--if he had any--just as he remembered them. The best of these yarns, perhaps, was "Words and Music," printed in the issue for October 28, 1911; and when they were collected the other day and published under the title of _Back Home_ (New York, 1912), that story, in which the old judge "rambles," was the first of the ten tales the book contained. Some reviewers of this work have rather loosely characterized it as a novel, and in a certain big sense it is; but the sub-title is a better description: "the narrative of Judge Priest and his people." The book is really a series of pictures; and what Francis H. Underwood did so well in his Kentucky novel, _Lord of Himself_, and what William C. Watts did much better in his _Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement_, Irvin S. Cobb has done in a manner superior to either of them in his _Back Home_. Judge Priest is a worthy and welcome addition to the gallery of American heroes of prose fiction, hung next to Bret Harte's highest heroes. Cohan and Harris have acquired the dramatic rights of his book, and it is to be made into play-form by Bayard Veiller, author of _Within the Law_, the great "hit" of the 1912 New York season, in collaboration with the Kentuckian, who once wrote of his original plays, which have already been listed: "One was accidentally destroyed, one was lost, and one was loaned out and never returned." Let us hope that none of these things may overtake the present work; and that, when Thomas Wise struts across the boards in the autumn of 1913 as Judge Priest he may receive a bigger "hand" than he ever drew in _The Gentleman from Mississippi_. Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached short-stories, and many humorous articles for _The Post_ during 1912. The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with _Back Home_, in a delightful little book, called _Cobb's Anatomy_ (New York, 1912). This contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length: it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of _Cobb's Bill of Fare_, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his Judge Priest yarns, which began in _The Post_ in the autumn of 1911 and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (_The Post_, September 28, 1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead," which is to be published in _The Cavalier_ for January 11, 1913, after having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America, form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr. Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled _The Escape of Mr. Trimm_. In summing up Cobb's work for the New York _Sun_, Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the trade-mark of his future. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Everybody's Magazine_ (April, 1911); _Hampton's Magazine_ (October, 1911); _The American Magazine_ (November, 1912); _Who's Cobb and Why_, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a brochure). THE BELLED BUZZARD[86] [From _The Saturday Evening Post_ (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)] There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by those who knew it well--an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself. On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering. They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a man's head. Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weedstems rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a turkey-gobbler. He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was afraid of being found out. He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet and, taken with an idea, he stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill. He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself and his morning's work. And he was safe--that was the main thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months. There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire emerge, three hours later, alone. The gun, having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his shoulderblades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood that inquiry would ever be made for him--let alone a search. He was a stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again would be taken as a matter of course--just one of those shiftless, wandering dagoes, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That was one of the best things about it--these dagoes never had any people in this country to worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from his mind for good, and mended his gait. He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present wife would philander no more--before his very eyes--with these young dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked pretty good to him--the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flowerbeds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout. At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should be--the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it, massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all right, but----. The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A buzzard--hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about--almost any time you could see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for them. But this particular buzzard now--wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool? The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the small salvage of hide and hoofs--but the owner's doubts would be set at rest for good and all. There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to drive the thought away--yet it persisted, coming back like a midge dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard to peer up into the sky and all about him. To the second Mrs. Gathers he explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still as this one was a regular weather-breeder; there ought to be rain before night. "Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain." Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard--or, anyhow, he judged it was the first one he had seen--was swinging back and forth in great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp--closer and closer--until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. Were there four of them? No; there were five--five in all. Such is the way of the buzzard--that shifting black question-mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. In broad loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jibe and drop nearer, coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast. There is no haste--the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing, with awkward outthrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls too tight--but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect--he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, has chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard. * * * * * The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire--not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them any more; but he did--unceasingly. By supper-time there were seven of them. * * * * * He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether. Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked drowsily what ailed him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything? Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering him, he told her. It was a hot-enough night--wasn't it? And when a man got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper--wasn't that so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light, purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day to come. At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there, in his shirt in the half light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck-opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing, splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out--six or seven, or maybe eight. An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the weed field to the country road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp. There were sheep grazing there--and it might be that a sheep had died. Buzzards were notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the swamp he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road, drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the man pulled up. "Hi, squire!" he began. "Goin' somewheres?" "No; jest knockin' about," the squire said--"jest sorter lookin' the place over." "Hot agin--ain't it?" said the other. The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of gossip followed this--county politics, and a neighbor's wife sick of breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre, cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds. "Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said, pointing upward with his whipstock. "Whut buzzards--where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of carelessness in his voice. "Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool--see 'em there?" "Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin' nothin, I reckin--jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather." "Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy. "A hawg probably," said the squire promptly--almost too promptly. "There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over the other side from here--he's got a big drove of hawgs." "Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the mare's flank and jogged off through the dust. He could not have suspected anything--that man couldn't. As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious--made them ask questions. He was halfway across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking--an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer--tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly. A cowbell--that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another--from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on four legs. One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings--a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven--and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too--an ordinary cowbell--that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him. Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen a hundred times--and heard oftener--over an area as wide as half the continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Florida, now in North Carolina--now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf. Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution. There must be more than one of them. It seems hard to believe that one bird, even a buzzard in his prime, and protected by law in every Southern state and known to be a bird of great age, could live so long and range so far, and wear a clinking cowbell all the time! Probably other jokers have emulated the original joker; probably if the truth were known there have been a dozen such; but the country people will have it that there is only one Belled Buzzard--a bird that bears a charmed life and on his neck a never-silent bell. * * * * * Squire Gathers regarded it a most untoward thing that the Belled Buzzard should have come just at this time. The movements of ordinary, unmarked buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor, this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some one followed it to-day--maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool! But at this particular moment the Belled Buzzard was heading directly away from that quarter. Could it be following him? Of course not! It was just by chance that it flew along the course the squire was taking. But, to make sure, he veered off sharply, away from the footpath into the high weeds. He was right; it was only a chance. The Belled Buzzard swung off, too, but in the opposite direction, with a sharp tonking of its bell, and, flapping hard, was in a minute or two out of hearing and sight, past the trees to the westward. Again the squire skimped his dinner, and again he spent the long, drowsy afternoon upon his front gallery. In all the sky there were now no buzzards visible, belled or unbelled--they had settled to earth somewhere; and it served somewhat to soothe the squire's pestered mind. This does not mean, though, that he was by any means easy in his thoughts. Outwardly he was calm enough, with the ruminative judicial air befitting the oldest justice of the peace in the county; but, within him, a little something gnawed unceasingly at his nerves like one of those small white worms that are to be found in seemingly sound nuts. About once in so long a tiny spasm of the muscles would contract the dewlap under his chin. The squire had never heard of that play, made famous by a famous player, wherein the murdered victim was a pedler, too, and a clamoring bell the voice of unappeasable remorse in the murderer's ear. As a strict church goer the squire had no use for players or for play-actors, and so was spared that added canker to his conscience. It was bad enough as it was. That night, as on the night before, the old man's sleep was broken and fitful, and disturbed by dreaming, in which he heard a metal clapper striking against a brazen surface. This was one dream that came true. Just after daybreak he heaved himself out of bed, with a flop of his broad bare feet upon the floor, and stepped to the window and peered out. Half seen in the pinkish light, the Belled Buzzard flapped directly over his roof and flew due south, right toward the swamp--drawing a direct line through the air between the slayer and the victim--or, anyway, so it seemed to the watcher, grown suddenly tremulous. * * * * * Kneedeep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a logcock clung lengthwise to a snag, watching him. Snake-doctors, insects with bronze bodies and filmy wings, went back and forth like small living shuttles. Other buzzards passed and repassed, but the squire waited, forgetting the cramps in his elderly limbs and the discomfort of the water in his shoes. At length he heard the bell. It came nearer and nearer, and the Belled Buzzard swung overhead not sixty feet up, its black bulk a fair target against the blue. He aimed and fired, both barrels bellowing at once and a fog of thick powder smoke enveloping him. Through the smoke he saw the bird careen, and its bell jangled furiously; then the buzzard righted itself and was gone, fleeing so fast that the sound of its bell was hushed almost instantly. Two long wing feathers drifted slowly down; torn disks of gunwadding and shredded green scraps of leaves descended about the squire in a little shower. He cast his empty gun from him, so that it fell in the water and disappeared; and he hurried out of the swamp as fast as his shaky legs would take him, splashing himself with mire and water to his eyebrows. Mucked with mud, breathing in great gulps, trembling, a suspicious figure to any eye, he burst through the weed curtain and staggered into the open, his caution all gone and a vast desperation fairly choking him--but the gray road was empty and the field beyond the road was empty; and, except for him, the whole world seemed empty and silent. As he crossed the field Squire Gathers composed himself. With plucked handfuls of grass he cleaned himself of much of the swamp mire that coated him over; but the little white worm that gnawed at his nerves had become a cold snake that was coiled about his heart, squeezing it tighter and tighter! * * * * * This episode of the attempt to kill the Belled Buzzard occurred in the afternoon of the third day. In the forenoon of the fourth, the weather being still hot, with cloudless skies and no air stirring, there was a rattle of warped wheels in the squire's lane and a hail at his yard fence. Coming out upon his gallery from the innermost darkened room of his house, where he had been stretched upon a bed, the squire shaded his eyes from the glare and saw the constable of his own magisterial district sitting in a buggy at the gate waiting for some one. The old man came down the dirtpath slowly, almost reluctantly, with his head twisted up sidewise, listening, watching; but the constable sensed nothing strange about the other's gait and posture; the constable was full of the news he brought. He began to unload the burden of it without preamble. "Mornin', Squire Gathers. There's been a dead man found in Little Niggerwool--and you're wanted." He did not notice that the squire was holding on with both hands to the gate; but he did notice that the squire had a sick look out of his eyes and a dead, pasty color in his face; and he noticed--but attached no meaning to it--that when the Squire spoke his voice seemed flat and hollow. "Wanted--fur--whut?" The squire forced the words out of his throat. "Why, to hold the inquest," explained the constable. "The coroner's sick abed, and he said you bein' the nearest jestice of the peace should serve." "Oh," said the squire with more ease. "Well, where is it--the body?" "They taken it to Bristow's place and put it in his stable for the present. They brought it out over on that side and his place was the nearest. If you'll hop in here with me, squire, I'll ride you right over there now. There's enough men already gathered to make up a jury, I reckin." "I--I ain't well," demurred the squire. "I've been sleepin' porely these last few nights. It's the heat," he added quickly. "Well, such, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact," said the constable; "but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's in such shape--the body is--that there ain't no way of makin' out who the feller was, nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin' in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh--if you'll go along now." "I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. "I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips demanding to be asked--the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded. "How did they come to find--it?" "Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this mornin' Bristow's oldest boy--that one they call Buddy--he heared a cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin' after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it--this body. "But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck--that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They tell me he ain't been seen round here sence the year of the yellow fever--I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say--the niggers do--that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!" The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea-hen. The squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the faraway, faint tonk-tonk! They were about halfway to Bristow's place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before the constable heard it too. The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder. "Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day--he's got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!" Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy-top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard. "Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat voice. "Which--him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No, he's gone now--gone off to the left--jest a-zoonin', like he'd forgot somethin'." And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground--those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow's farm buildings. The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields, and was in other respects much like the squire's own house, except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye-hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings--a barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib--was a little peach orchard; and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of stock at this hour, with feeding racks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted, and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feedracks. To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily. Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it--if they noted it at all--subconsciously. For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall, the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes, and entered a good-sized room that had in it, among other things, a high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ--Bristow's best room, now to be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest. The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could find room--all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's jury, and who backed themselves against the wall. The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only witness--Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat on a cane-bottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads, listening as though it were a brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head, listening--listening. The witness began--but had no more than started when the squire gave a great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward, his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and they struck together heavily and went down--both on all fours--right in front of the fireplace. The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus greens--a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech resolved itself into articulate speech. "I done it!" they made out his shrieked words. "I done it! I own up--I killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look fur it. I done it--oh, I done it--and I'll tell everything jest like it happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy! Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter--it's a-comin' after me! Keep it away----" His voice gave out and he buried his head in his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet. And now they heard what he had heard first--they heard the tonk-tonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards--and the bell jangled faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chairlegs. The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and naked except for a single garment, eying them with serious, rolling eyes--and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but solemnly tolling a small, rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard. FOOTNOTE: [86] Copyright, 1912, by the Curtis Publishing Company. ISAAC F. MARCOSSON Isaac Frederick Marcosson, editor and author, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, September 13, 1876, of Jewish ancestry. He was educated in the public schools of Louisville, and attended High School for a year. In 1894 he entered journalism, joining the staff of the Louisville _Times_, of which he was subsequently literary and city editor. In 1903 Mr. Marcosson went to New York, and became associate editor of _The World's Work_; and in connection with this work he served its publishers, Doubleday, Page and Company, as literary adviser. While with _The World's Work_ he wrote many articles on topics of vital interest. From March, 1907, to 1910, Mr. Marcosson was financial editor of _The Saturday Evening Post_ of Philadelphia. For _The Post_ he conducted three popular departments: "Your Savings"; "Literary Folks"; and "Wall Street Men." Every other week he had a signed article upon some subject of general interest. Some of his articles upon "Your Savings" have been collected and published in a small book, called _How to Invest Your Savings_ (Philadelphia, 1907). Mr. Marcosson's latest book, _The Autobiography of a Clown_ (New York, 1910), written upon an unusual subject, attracted wide attention. A part of it was originally published anonymously as a serial in _The Post_, and the response it evoked encouraged Mr. Marcosson to make a little book of his hero, who was none other than Jules Turnour, the famous Ringling clown. Jules furnished the facts, or part of them, perhaps, but Mr. Marcosson made him more attractive in cold type than he had ever been under the big tent. _The Autobiography of a Clown_ deserved all the kind things that were said about it. Since 1910 Mr. Marcosson has been associate editor of _Munsey's Magazine_ and the other periodicals that are owned by Mr. Munsey. His articles usually lead the magazine. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (April; June; December, 1910). THE WAGON CIRCUS[87] [From _The Autobiography of a Clown_ (New York, 1910)] All the circuses then were wagon shows. They traveled from town to town in wagons. The performers went ahead to the hotel in 'buses or snatched what sleep they could in specially built vans. The start for the next town was usually made about three o'clock in the morning. No "run" from town to town was more than twenty miles, and more often it was considerably less. At the head of the cavalcade rode the leader, on horseback, with a lantern. Torches flickered from most of the wagons, and cast big shadows. The procession of creaking vehicles, neighing horses, and sometimes roaring beasts was an odd picture as it wound through the night. Many of the drivers slept on their seats. The elephant always walked majestically, with a sleepy groom alongside. The route was indicated by flaming torches left at points where the roads turned. Sometimes these torches went out, and the show got lost. More than once a farmer was rudely aroused from his slumbers, and nearly lost his wits when he poked his head out of his window and saw the black bulk of an elephant in his front yard. It was, indeed, the picturesque day of the circus. My first engagement was with the Burr Robbins circus, which was a big wagon show. The night traveling in the wagons was new to me, and at first strange. But I got to like it very much. It was a great relief to lie in the wagons, out under the stars, and feel the sweet breath of the country. Often the nights were so still that the only sounds were the creaking of the wagons, and occasionally the words, "Mile up," that the elephant driver always used to urge his patient, plodding beast. The circus arrangement then was much different from now. Then the whole outfit halted outside the town, which was never reached until after daylight. The canvas men would hurry to the "lot" to put up the tents while we remained behind to spruce up for the parade. Gay flags were hoisted over the dusty wagons; the tired and sleepy performers turned out of tousled beds to put on the finery of the Orient. A gorgeous howdah was placed on the elephant's back, and a dark-eyed beauty, usually from some eastern city, was hoisted aloft to ride in state, and to be the envy and admiration of every village maiden. No matter how long, wet, or dusty had been our journey from the last town, everybody, man and beast, always braced up for the parade. Of course, by this time we were surrounded by a crowd of gaping countrymen. Often the triumphant parade of the town was made on empty stomachs, for there was to be no let-up until the people of the community had had every bit of "free doing" that the circus could supply. The clowns always drove mules in the parade. When the parade reached the grounds, the performers changed clothes, hastened back to the village hotel, and ate heartily. If there was time, we snatched a few hours of sleep. But sleep and the circus man are strangers during the season. Ask any circus man when he sleeps, and he will say, "In the winter time." FOOTNOTE: [87] Copyright, 1910, by Moffat, Yard and Company. GERTRUDE KING TUFTS Mrs. Gertrude King Tufts, author of _The Landlubbers_, was born in Boone county, Kentucky, in 1877, the daughter of Col. William S. King. She was educated in Kentucky and at private schools in Philadelphia, after which she took a library course and went to New York to work. The property she had inherited had been squandered, so she was compelled to seek her own fortune. For a while she did well, but her struggle for success was most severe. For nearly two years Miss King knew "physical pain and the utter want of money." Finally, however, in 1907, she became editor of the educational department of the Macmillan Company, and then she set to work upon her novel, _The Landlubbers_ (New York, 1909), which was first conceived as a short story, and was finished in the hot summer of 1908. Polly, heroine, is a school teacher out West, who hates her job, saves her money, and decides to see the world. On the trip across the Atlantic, she falls in with Flossie, confidence queen, and she is soon "broke." Suicide seems to be the only way out of her predicament and, at midnight, she quits her state-room to silently slip into the ocean. She is no sooner on deck, however, than she is confronted with cries from the crew and captain that the ship has struck an iceberg and is sinking. The next day Polly finds herself and Dick, hero-lover, on the old battered ship and alone. They, then, are "the landlubbers," and their experiences on the drifting, water-soaked craft, is the story. Miss King dramatized her novel, as she is anxious to become famous as a playwright, "not as a mere yarn-spinner." She also prepared a wonderful human document of her struggles in New York that was most interesting as an excellent piece of writing, and as an advertisement for her book. At the present time Miss King is said to be engaged upon a "long novel----a leisurely, picturesque thing into which I want to put a good deal of life." Miss King was married on February 26, 1912, to Mr. Walter B. Tufts, a New York business man. She is a kinswoman of Mr. Credo Harris, the Kentucky novelist. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (May, 1909); _Lexington Leader_ (May 16, 1909). SHIPWRECKED[88] [From _The Landlubbers_ (New York, 1909)] I woke, not roused by any unusual sound or motion, but disturbed by a sense of hovering evil, a horror imminent and unescapable. I sat up, looked at my watch--for I had not turned off the light--and saw that it was toward half-past eleven o'clock. The great ship was silent, save for the throbbing of her iron pulses. As I listened, the fog-horn moaned out its warning, and as the deep note died away seven bells rang faintly from above. My watch, then, was right--and it was time! I remembered what I had to do, and obeyed the decision of my more wakeful self, though I was far more influenced by the sense of vague, impersonal fear. Still muffled in the stupor of sleep, and shaken from head to foot by a nervous trembling, I rose, put on my long cloak, and flung a scarf over my disordered hair, for if I were to meet anyone I must seem merely a restless passenger seeking a breath of fresh air. I moved rapidly as I grew more wakeful, and tried not to think. From habit I folded my rugs neatly, and plumped up the pillow on which I had been lying. My throat and lips were dry, and I drank a glass of water before I unlocked my door and stepped out into the passage. There rose above me a long, horrible cry, a shout blent discordantly of the voices of two-score men, a fearful sound as of the essence of brute fear. Many feet pattered upon the deck. There were wordless shouts, shrieked oaths, sharp commands, the boatswain's whistle piercing through the whole mass of confused sound. The great horn boomed just once more--I heard it through my hands upon my ears as I cowered against the wall. Then the deck quivered under my feet as a horrible, grinding, rending crash shut out every other sound, and the great ship trembled throughout her length, and began to reel drunkenly from side to side, settling over, with every swing, further and further to port. A new, more deafening clamour arose all about me, as the sleepers were aroused, and in half a minute the corridor was filled with whitefaced people in all sorts of dress and undress, carrying all kinds of queer treasures, weeping, shrieking, cursing; there was even laughter, hysterical and uncontrollable, and strange stammered words of blasphemy, prayer, reassurance, were shaken out between chattering teeth. A fat steward ran by, shoving rudely aside those whom till now he had lovingly tended as the source of tips. Now he struck away the trembling hands which clutched at his white jacket, ignoring the shivering inquiries as to "What was the matter?" The rapid passage of him gave the excited crowd the impulse it needed, and as one man they surged toward the stair--I with the rest. But at the foot of the stair reason returned to me, and I reflected that it was absurd for me to join in the struggle for that life which I had just prepared to renounce. Here was death held out to me in the cold hand of Fate, as I could not doubt--and here was I pitiably trying to thrust away the gift! I wrenched myself out of that frantic crowd, and made my way back to my stateroom with some difficulty, owing to the ship's unusual motion and the increasing list to port. She quivered no longer, indeed, but there passed through her from time to time a long, waving shudder, like the throe of a dying thing, unspeakably fearful and very sickening. As I passed beyond the close-packed crowd the sounds of their terror became more awful. I could discern the cries of little children, the quavering clamour of the very old. The pity of it overcame me, and I staggered into my stateroom and closed the door upon it all. But overhead there was still the swift tramp of feet, the harsh sound of voices--steadier now, and less multiplied, the tokens of a brave and awful preparation. The next quarter of an hour--for I am sure that the time could not have been as much as twenty minutes, though it seemed that I sat with clenched hands for several days--was spent in a struggle with myself which devoured all my strength. I had heard much, and, in the folly of my peaceful, untempted youth, had often spoken of the cowardice of suicide. But now it required more courage and strength of will than I had ever believed myself capable of just to sit upon that divan, passively waiting to give back my warm, vigorous life to the infinity whence it came. Several times I gave in, and rose and laid my hand upon the doorknob--and conquered myself and went back to the divan and sat down again. Meanwhile, the noise went on above and about me; the fat steward, his face green with fear, flung my door open without knocking. "To the boats, Miss--captain's orders--no luggage----" He went on to the next room: "To the boats, sir!" The room was empty, and he passed to the next: "To the boats----" His teeth knocked against each other, tears of fright glittered down his broad face, but I heard him open doors faithfully the length of the starboard passage. It was, I suppose, his great hour. I went to close the door, and found myself confronted by a man, barefooted, clad in shirt and trousers. It was Champion. "You awake, miss? I came to call you--All right? I'm going to get Mr. Darragh on deck," and he vanished. His friendly, anxious look broke down something in me, and I was on a sudden overwhelmed by the passion of life; my humanity awoke again, and I longed for life, for life however stern, painful, hardwrung from peril and deprivation, for life snatched with bleeding hands out of the fanged jaws of the universe. I stood irresolute, the handle of the door in my hand, for I know not how long. The swaying of the ship became less regular, and the sounds of her straining, wrenched framework sickened me. I stepped over the threshold--the ship gave a last long trembling lurch from which it seemed she could not right herself; there rose a mighty hissing roar and the shriek of the steam from the hold, louder cries from the deck, the lights went out. I stumbled in the dark and fell, striking my head, and something warm and wet trickled down my face as a huge silence settled down upon me, swift and gentle as the wing of a great brooding bird, and I was very peaceful and very happy, for was I not being rocked--no, I was swinging, "letting the old cat die" in the big backyard at Carsonville, Illinois. No, it was better than that--I was dying, for the dark was shot by flashes of golden light, throbbing and raying painfully from my head, and then everything ebbed quietly, gently away. FOOTNOTE: [88] Copyright, 1909, by Doubleday, Page and Company. CHARLES HANSON TOWNE Charles Hanson Towne, poet of New York's many-sided life, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, February 2, 1877, the son of Professor Paul Towne. He left Kentucky before he was five years old, and he has been living in New York practically ever since. Mr. Towne was educated in the public schools of New York, and then spent a year at the College of the City of New York. He was editor of _The Smart Set_ for several years, but he resigned this position to become literary editor of _The Delineator_. At the present time Mr. Towne is managing editor of _The Designer_, one of the Butterick publications. With H. Clough-Leighter he published two song-cycles, entitled _A Love Garden_, and _An April Heart_; and with Amy Woodforde-Finden he collaborated in the preparation of three song-cycles, entitled _A Lover in Damascus_, _Five Little Japanese Songs_, and _A Dream of Egypt_. His original and independent work is to be found in his three volumes of verse, the first of which was _The Quiet Singer and Other Poems_ (New York, 1908), a collection of lyrics reprinted from various magazines; _Manhattan: a Poem_ (New York, 1909), an epic of New York City; and _Youth and Other Poems_ (New York, 1911), a metrical romance of domestic happiness, with a group of pleasing shorter poems. _Manhattan_ is the best thing Mr. Towne has done so far. The poem is the life of the present-day New Yorker, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, from many points of view. The poet has turned the most commonplace events of every-day life into verse of exceptional quality and much strength. As the singer of the passing show in New York City, Mr. Towne has done his best work. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (March, 1910); _The Forum_ (June, 1911); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (December, 1912). SPRING[89] [From _Manhattan, a Poem_ (New York, 1909)] Spring comes to town like some mad girl, who runs With silver feet upon the Avenue, And, like Ophelia, in her tresses twines The first young blossoms--purple violets And golden daffodils. These are enough-- These fragile handfuls of miraculous bloom-- To make the monster City feel the Spring! One dash of color on her dun-grey hood, One flash of yellow near her pallid face, And she and April are the best of friends-- Benighted town that needs a friend so much! How she responds to that first soft caress, And draws the hoyden Spring close to her heart, And thrills and sings, and for one little time Forgets the foolish panic of her sons, Forgets her sordid merchandise and trade, And lightly trips, while hurdy-gurdies ring-- A wise old crone upon a holiday! SLOW PARTING[90] [From _Youth and Other Poems_ (New York, 1911)] There was no certain hour Wherein we said good-bye; But day by day, and year by year We parted--you and I; And ever as we met, each felt The shadow of a lie. It would have been too hard To say a swift farewell; You could not goad your tongue to name The words that rang my knell; But better that quick death than this Glad heaven and mad hell! OF DEATH (To Michael Monahan) [From the same] Why should I fear that ultimate thing-- The Great Release of clown and king? Why should I dread to take my way Through the same shadowed path as they? But can it be a shadowy road Whereon both Youth and Genius strode? Can it be dark, since Shakespeare trod Its unknown length, to meet our God; Since Shelley, with his valiant youth, Fared forth to learn the final Truth; Since Milton in his blindness went With wisdom and a high content; And Angelo lit with white flame The pathway when God called his name; And Dante, seeking Beatrice, Marched fearless down the deep abyss? Where Plutarch went, and Socrates, Browning and Keats, and such as these, Homer, and Sappho with her song That echoes still for the vast throng; Lincoln and strong Napoleon, And calm, courageous Washington; Great Alexander, Nero--names That swept the world with deathless flames-- I need not fear that I shall fall When the Lord God's great Voice shall call; For I shall find the roadway bright When I go forth some quiet night. FOOTNOTES: [89] Copyright, 1909, by Mitchell Kennerley. [90] Copyright, 1911, by Mitchell Kennerley. WILLIAM E. WALLING William English Walling, writer upon sociological subjects, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 14, 1877. When twenty years of age he was graduated from the University of Chicago with the B. S. degree; and he subsequently did graduate work in economics and sociology for a year at the same institution. Since 1902 Mr. Walling has been a resident at the University Settlement in New York. He has contributed to many of the high-class magazines, but he is best seen as a writer in his two books, entitled _Russia's Message_ (New York, 1908); and _Socialism As It Is_ (New York, 1912). The first title, _Russia's Message_, is one of the authoritative works upon that race; and it has been received as such in many quarters. And the same statement may be made of his excellent discussion of socialism. Mr. Walling is a member of many political and social societies. He has an attractive home at Cedarhurst, Long Island. In the early spring of 1913 the Macmillan Company will issue another book for Mr. Walling, entitled _The Larger Aspects of Socialism_. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (August 6, 1908); _Review of Reviews_ (August, 1908); _The Independent_ (May 16, 1912). RUSSIA AND AMERICA[91] [From _Russia's Message_ (New York, 1908)] Russia, like the United States, is a self-sufficient country; more than a country, a world. Like the new world, the Russian world forms an almost complete economic whole, embracing under a single government nearly all, if not all, climates and nearly all the raw products used in modern life; both countries are large exporters of agricultural products, both are devoted more to agriculture than to manufacturing industry. Both of these worlds are composed largely of newly acquired and newly settled territory; though both are inhabited by very many races, in each a single race prevails numerically and in most other respects over all the rest, and keeps them together as a single whole. As the result of the mixture of races and the recent settlement of large parts of both countries, their culture is international, world-culture, unmarked by the comparatively provincial nationalistic tendencies of England, Germany, or France. We may look, according to a great German publicist, Kautsky, to America for the great economic experiments of the near future and to Russia for the new (social) politics. America is essentially a country of rapid economic evolution, while Russia is undeveloped, economically and financially dependent. America is the country of economic genius, a nation whose conceptions of material development have reached even a spiritual height. The great American qualities, the American virtues, the American imagination, have thrown themselves almost wholly into business, the material development of the country. Americans are the first of modern peoples that have learned to respect the repeated failures of enterprising individuals with a genius for affairs, knowing that such failures often lead to greater heights of success. They have learned how to excuse enormous waste when it was made for the sake of economics lying in the distant future. They can appreciate the enterprise of persons who, instead of immediately exploiting their properties, know how to wait, like some of our most able builders that, foreseeing the brilliant future of the locality in which they are situated, are satisfied with temporary structures and poor incomes until the time is ripe for some of the magnificent modern achievements in architecture, in which we so clearly lead. All three of these types of men we admire are true revolutionists, who prefer to wait, to waste, or to fail, rather than to accept the lesser for the greater good. So it is with Russians in their politics. There seems no reason for doubting that the near future will show that the political failures now being made by the Russians are the failures of political genius, that the waste of lives and property will be repaid later a hundredfold, and that the hopeful and planful patience with which the Russians are looking forward and working to a great social transformation promises the greatest and most magnificent results when that transformation is achieved. Already the political revolution of the Russian people, though not yet embodied in political institutions, is becoming as rapid, as remarkable, as phenomenal, as the economic revolution of the United States. FOOTNOTE: [91] Copyright, 1908, by Doubleday, Page and Company. THOMPSON BUCHANAN Thompson Buchanan, novelist and playwright, was born at New York City, June 21, 1877. Before he was thirteen years of age his family settled at Louisville, Kentucky; and from 1890 to 1894 he attended the Male High School in that city. Being the son of a retired clergyman of the Episcopal church, it was fitting that he should select the University of the South as his college, and in September, 1895, he reached the little town of Sewanee, in the Tennessee mountains, and matriculated in the University. He left college without a degree in July, 1897, and returned to his home at Louisville, where he shortly afterwards became police court reporter for the now defunct _Louisville Commercial_. Mr. Buchanan was connected with the _Commercial_ until 1900, save six months of service as a private in the First Kentucky Volunteer Infantry during the Spanish-American War. He saw service in the Porto Rico campaign with his regiment and, after peace was declared, returned to his home and to his position on the paper. In 1900 Mr. Buchanan went with _The Courier-Journal_; and during the same year he was dubbed a lieutenant in the Kentucky State Guards. In 1902 he left Colonel Watterson's paper for _The Louisville Herald_, of which he was dramatic critic for more than a year. The year of 1904 found Mr. Buchanan in New York on _The Evening Journal_, with which he was connected for four years, when he abandoned journalism in order to devote his entire attention to literature. Mr. Buchanan's first book, _The Castle Comedy_ (New York, 1904), a romance of the time of Napoleon, which many critics compared to Booth Tarkington's _Monsieur Beaucaire_, was followed by _Judith Triumphant_ (New York, 1905), another novel, set in the ancient city of Bethulia, with the Judith of the Apocrypha as the heroine. His dramatization of _The Castle Comedy_ was so generally commended, that he decided to desert the field of fiction for the writing of plays. His first effort, _Nancy Don't Care_, was met with a like response from the public, and the young playwright presented _The Intruder_, which certainly justified belief in his ultimate arrival as a dramatist, if it did nothing more. The play that brought Mr. Buchanan wider fame than anything he has done hitherto was _A Woman's Way_, a comedy of manners, in which Miss Grace George created the character of the wife with convincing power. _Marion Stanton_ is quite unfortunately in love with her exceedingly rich, but bored, husband, Howard Stanton, who seeks the society of other women, one of whom happens to be with him when his motor car is wrecked near New Haven at a most unseemly hour. The New York "yellows" are advised of the accident and they, of course, desire details--which desire precipitates the action of the play. "Scandal," in type the size of an ordinary country weekly, is flashed across the "heads" of the big dailies, extras are put forth hourly, a family conference is called at the home of the Stantons, a rich young widow from the South is regarded by the papers as Stanton's partner in the accident, and a very merry time is had by all concerned. The way the woman took out of her difficulties is unfrequented by many, although it should have been well-worn long before _Marion_ made it famous. The drama was one of the authentic successes of 1909, and it certainly established its author's reputation. A novelization of _A Woman's Way_ (New York, 1909), was made by Charles Somerville, and accorded a large sale, but how infinitely better would have been a publication of the play as produced! Quite absurd novelizations of plays are at the present time one of the literary fads which should have been in at the birth and death of Charles Lamb. _The Cub_, produced in 1910, a comedy with a mixture of melodrama and farce, was concerned with a young Louisville newspaper man, "a cub," who is assigned to "cover" a family feud in the Kentucky mountains. That he finds himself in many situations, pleasant and otherwise, we may be sure. A celebrated critic called _The Cub_ "one of the wittiest of plays"--which opinion was shared by many who saw it. _Lula's Husbands_, a farce from the French, was also produced in 1910. _The Rack_, produced in 1911, was followed by _Natalie_, and _Her Mother's Daughter_, all of which were given stage presentation. Mr. Buchanan spent most of the year of 1912 writing and rehearsing his new play, _The Bridal Path_, a matrimonial comedy in three acts, which is to be produced in February, 1913. None of his plays have been issued in book form, but, besides his first two romances and the novelization of _A Woman's Way_, two other novels have appeared, entitled _The Second Wife_ (New York, 1911); and _Making People Happy_ (New York, 1911). That Thompson Buchanan is the ablest playwright Kentucky has produced is open to no sort of serious discussion; with the exception of Mr. Dazey and Mrs. Flexner he is, indeed, quite alone in his field. Kentucky has poetic dramatists almost without number, but the practical playwright, whose lines reach his audience across the footlights, is a _rara avis_. Augustus Thomas, the foremost living American playwright, resided at Louisville for a short time, and his finest drama, _The Witching Hour_, is set wholly at Louisville, although written in New York, but Kentucky's claim upon him is too slender to admit of much investigation. Mr. Buchanan has done so much in such a short space of time that one is tempted to turn his own favorite shibboleth upon him and exclaim: "Fine!" BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Theatre Magazine_ (April; May, 1909); _The American Magazine_ (November, 1910); _The Green Book_ (January, 1911). THE WIFE WHO DIDN'T GIVE UP[92] [From _A Woman's Way_ (_Current Literature_, New York, June, 1909)] _Act III, Scene I. Mr. Lynch, the reporter, enters, joining General Livingston, Mrs. Stanton's father, and Bob, Morris, and Whitney, all of whom have had escapades with the winsome widow._ _General Livingston._ I represent Mr. Stanton, and I tell you, sir, I do not propose to have him hounded in this damnable fashion any longer. I shall hold you personally responsible. _Lynch._ General, you're the fifth man who's said that to me since three o'clock. _General Livingston._ (_Sharp._) What! _Lynch._ And if you do physically assault me, General, I shall certainly land you in the night court, and collect space on the story spread on the front page, sure--"Famous old soldier fined for brutally assaulting innocent young newspaper man." (_General Livingston stands completely dumbfounded, his hands twitching, quivering with rage._) _General Livingston._ (_Gasps almost tearfully._) Have you newspaper men no sense of personal decency, personal dignity? _Lynch._ Don't be too hard on us, General. During business hours, our associations are very bad. _General Livingston._ What do you mean? _Lynch._ We have the name of the lady who was with Mr. Stanton in his car at the time of his accident. We have learned all about the trip and we have the woman's name. So I have come to give Mr. Stanton a---- _General Livingston._ (_Interrupting._) Would the papers print that? _Lynch._ Would they print it? Well--(_Smiles significantly._) _General Livingston._ Then I shall say nothing, but our lawyers will take action. _Lynch._ They'd better take it quick. You'll have fifty reporters up here by to-morrow night. If Mr. Stanton refuses to say anything, we will simply send out the story that the woman in the car with him at the time of his automobile accident was----(_Pauses, then with dramatic emphasis._) Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore. _General Livingston._ (Starting back in amazement.) Good gracious!! _Bob and Morris._ (_Turn, face each other, absolute amazement showing on their faces, speak together._) Well, what do you think of that? (_Whitney alone is not surprised. The situation is held a moment, then Stanton enters. He does not see Lynch at first._) _Stanton._ (_As he comes on._) General, I wish to apologize----(_Stops short, seeing Lynch._) _General Livingston._ (_Whirling on Stanton._) Apologize! Apologize! How dare you, sir! (_Losing his self-control._) My great-grandfather killed his man for just such an insult---- [_Marion enters to save the situation. The reporter withdraws for a moment, while the general informs her that Mrs. Blakemore must leave the house at once. Marion demurs._] _Marion._ Father, I told you once what concerns my own life I must settle my own way. I don't want to appear disrespectful, but you cannot coerce me in my own house. (_Walks past him to the door and opens it._) Good evening, Mr. Lynch. _Lynch._ (_Sincere tone._) I hope you will believe me, Mrs. Stanton, when I tell you it is not a pleasure to me to have to come on this errand. _Marion._ Thank you, Mr. Lynch. _Lynch._ I'd rather talk to Mr. Stanton. _Marion._ Sorry, but----(_Her manner is pleasant and friendly, but firm. Lynch evidently likes her and with a shrug he accepts situation._) _Lynch._ Then please understand my position, and how I regret personally the question that, as a newspaper man, I must put. (_Marion bows._) Bluntly, Mrs. Stanton, we have the name of that woman. _Marion._ Yes. _Lynch._ And we are going to publish it unless it can be proven wrong. _Marion._ I'd expect that. Who is she? _Lynch._ Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore. (_Lynch pronounces the name regretfully. Marion stares at him a moment in amazement, then throws back her head and gives way to a peal of laughter. The men on the stage stare at Marion amazed._) _Marion._ Oh, this is too good! Too good! Forgive me, Mr. Lynch. (_Goes off into another peal of laughter, turns to the men._) Howard, Dad, all of you, did you hear that? What a splendid joke! (_The men try awkwardly to back her up._) _General Livingston._ Splendid! Haw! Haw! _Bob._ Fine, he, he! _Morris._ (_At head of table._) Ho, ho. I never knew anything like it. _Whitney._ I told Mr. Lynch he was on a cold trail. _Lynch._ (_Grimly._) You can't laugh me off. _Marion._ (_Struggling for self-control._) Of course not. But you must forgive my having my laugh first. I'll offer more substantial proof. (_Opens door, letting in immediately the sound of women's talking and laughter which stop short as though the women had looked around at the opening of the door. Calling in her most dulcet tone._) Elizabeth! _Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Her voice heard off stage._) Yes, Marion, dear. (_An amazed gasp from the men. Mrs. Blakemore appears at the door._) _Marion._ Come in! (_Mrs. Blakemore enters, looks about quickly, almost fearfully. Marion slips her arm about Mrs. Blakemore's waist in reassuring fashion, laughing, but at the same time giving Mrs. Blakemore a warning pressure with her arm._) Don't say a word, dear. The greatest joke you ever heard! Come! (_Mrs. Blakemore, following suit, slips her arm about Marion. They come down stage to Lynch, their arms about each other's waist most affectionately. The men are staring at them dumfounded. Marion and Mrs. Blakemore stop opposite Lynch. Marion speaks gaily._) Mr. Lynch, of the City News, may I present Mrs. Elizabeth Blakemore? _Lynch._ (_In amazement._) Mrs. Blakemore! _Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Bowing pleasantly._) Glad to meet you, Mr. Lynch. _Lynch._ (_Repeating, dazed._) Mrs. Blakemore! _Marion._ (_Gaily._) And you see she's not lame a bit from her broken leg. _Mrs. Blakemore._ What's the joke? _Marion._ (_Taunting._) You would not expect, Mr. Lynch, to find plaintiff and corespondent so friendly. _Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Gasping._) Plaintiff! Corespondent! _Marion._ Yes, dear. Mr. Lynch came all the way up from down town to tell me that I am going to bring a divorce suit against Howard, naming you as corespondent. Now wasn't that sweet of him? (_She keeps her warning pressure about Mrs. Blakemore's waist._) _Mrs. Blakemore._ (_Taking the cue._) This is awful! Horrible! _Marion._ Now, dear, don't lose your sense of humor. (_To Lynch._) Are you satisfied, Mr. Lynch? _Lynch._ Forgive me. Mrs. Stanton, but you are so confounded clever you might run in a "ringer." (_Reaches in his pocket, brings out a picture, holds it up and compares the picture with Mrs. Blakemore. Finally looks up._) Guess you win, Mrs. Stanton. _Marion._ Thanks. (_Bows satirically._) _Lynch._ Yes, you must be right I don't believe even you could put your arm about the _other woman_. (_A suppressed, gasping exclamation from the men._) _Marion._ That observation hardly requires an answer, Mr. Lynch. _Lynch._ Sorry to have disturbed you. Good night! _All._ (_With relief._) Good night. [_The flabbergasted reporter withdraws, but Marion still keeps her arm about Mrs. Blakemore. When he re-opens the door, as if he had forgotten something, he finds the picture undisturbed. Mrs. Blakemore thanks Marion for her generosity, and goes out, followed by the others._ "Good night, my friend," the widow remarks, "you'll get all that is coming to you." _Stanton calls back Marion who has also deserted the room._] _Stanton._ Marion! Marion! _Marion._ (_Enters._) Has she gone? _Stanton._ Who? _Marion._ Puss? _Stanton._ Oh, she's not my Puss. _Marion._ Not your Puss, Howard? Then whose Puss is she? _Stanton._ God knows--maybe. Marion. I've loved you all the time. I've been a fool, a weak, dazzled fool. I love you. Won't you forgive me and take me back? _Marion._ Take you back? Why, I've never even given you up. Do you think I could stand for that cat--Puss, I mean--in this house and me off to Reno? CURTAIN. FOOTNOTE: [92] Copyright, 1909, by the Current Literature Publishing Company. WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT Will Levington Comfort, "the new style novelist," was born at Kalamazoo, Michigan, January 17, 1878. He was educated in the grammar and high schools of Detroit, and was at Albion College, Albion, Michigan, for a short time. Mr. Comfort was a newspaper reporter in Detroit for a few months, but, in 1898, he did his first real reporting on papers in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. During the Spanish-American War he served in the Fifth United States Cavalry; and in 1899 he was war correspondent in the Philippines and China for the "Detroit Journal Newspaper Syndicate;" and in 1904 he was in Russia and Japan during the war for the "Pittsburgh Dispatch Newspaper Syndicate." Thus he followed the war-god almost around the world; and out of his experiences he wrote his anti-war novel, _Routledge Rides Alone_ (Philadelphia, 1909). This proved to be one of the most popular of recent American novels, now in its ninth edition. It was followed by _She Buildeth Her House_ (Philadelphia, 1911), his quasi-Kentucky novel. In order to get the local color for this book, Mr. Comfort spent some months at Danville, Kentucky, the _Danube_ of the story, and of his stay in the little town, together with his opinion of the Kentucky actress in the book, Selma Cross, he has written: "I always considered Selma Cross the real thing. I had quite a wonderful time doing her, and she came to be most emphatically in Kentucky. It was a night in Danville when some amateur theatricals were put on, that I got the first idea of a big crude woman with a handicap of beauty-lack, but big enough to win against every law. She had to go on the anvil, hard and long. I was interested to watch her in the sharp odor of decadence to which her life carried her. She wabbles, becomes tainted a bit, but rises to shake it all off. I did the Selma Cross part of _She Buildeth Her House_ in the Clemons House, Danville.... I also did a novelette while I was in Kentucky. The Lippincotts published it under the caption, _Lady Thoroughbred, Kentuckian_." No critic has written nearer the truth of Selma Cross than the author himself: "She was a bit strong medicine for most people." Mr. Comfort has made many horseback trips through Kentucky, and he has "come to feel authoritative and warmly tender in all that concerns the folk and the land." His latest novel, _Fate Knocks at the Door_ (Philadelphia, 1912), is far and away the strongest story he has written. Mr. Comfort has created a style that the critics are calling "new, big, but crude in spots;" and it certainly does isolate him from any other American novelist of today. Whatever may be said for or against his style, this much is certain: he who runs may read it--some other time! His work is seldom clear at first glances. Mr. Comfort devoted the year 1912 to the writing of a new novel, _The Road of Living Men_, which will be issued by his publishers, the Lippincotts, in March, 1913. He has an attractive home and family at Detroit. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Lippincott's Magazine_ (March, 1908); _Lippincott's Magazine_ (March; April; August, 1912). AN ACTRESS'S HEART[93] [From _She Buildeth Her House_ (Philadelphia, 1911)] Selma Cross was sick for a friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there was something pitiful in the need of her heart. "New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes, Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not endured." The other leaned forward eagerly. "I liked you from the first moment, Paula," she said. "You were so rounded--it seemed to me. I'm all streaky, all one-sided. You're bred. I'm cattle.... Some time I'll tell you how it all began. I said I would be the greatest living tragedienne--hurled this at a lot of cat-minds down in Kentucky fifteen years ago. Of course, I shall. It does not mean so much to me as I thought, and it may be a bauble to you, but I wanted it. Its far-away-ness doesn't torture me as it once did, but one pays a ghastly price. Yes, it's a climb, dear. You must have bone and blood and brain--a sort of brain--and you should have a cheer from below; but I didn't. I wonder if there ever was a fight that can match mine? If so, it would not be a good tale for children or grown-ups with delicate nerves. Little women always hated me. I remember one restaurant cashier on Eighth Avenue told me I was too unsightly to be a waitress. I have done kitchen pot-boilers and scrubbed tenement-stairs. Then, because I repeated parts of plays in those horrid halls--they said I was crazy.... Why, I have felt a perfect lust for suicide--felt my breast ache for a cool knife and my hand rise gladly. Once I played a freak part--that was my greater degradation--debased my soul by making my body look worse than it is. I went down to hell for that--and was forgiven. I have been so homesick, Paula, that I could have eaten the dirt in the road of that little Kentucky town.... Yes, I pressed against the steel until something broke--it was the steel, not me. Oh, I could tell you much!"... She paused but a moment. "The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies. Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat--all these I have been likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This a part of culture, I guess--breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white trash, who knows, but a speck of 'nigger'? I don't care now, only it gave me a temper of seven devils, if it was so. These are some of the things I have contended with. I would go to a manager and he would laugh me along, trying to get rid of me gracefully, thinking that some of his friends were playing a practical joke on him. Vhruebert thought that at first. Vhruebert calls me _The Thing_ now. I could have done better had I been a cripple; there are parts for a cripple. And you watch, Paula, next January when I burn up things here, they'll say my success is largely due to my figure and face!" FOOTNOTE: [93] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Company. FRANK WALLER ALLEN Frank Waller Allen, novelist, was born at Milton, Kentucky, September 30, 1878, the son of a clergyman. He spent his boyhood days at Louisville, and, in the fall of 1896, he entered Kentucky (Transylvania) University, Lexington, Kentucky. While in college he was editor of _The Transylvanian_, the University literary magazine; and he also did newspaper work for _The Louisville Times_, and _The Courier-Journal_. Mr. Allen quit college to become a reporter on the Kansas City _Journal_, later going with the Kansas City _Times_ as book editor. He resigned this position to return to Kentucky University to study theology. He is now pastor of the First Christian (Disciples) church, at Paris, Missouri. Mr. Allen's first stories were published in _Munsey's_, _The Reader_, and other periodicals, but it is upon his books that he has won a wide reputation in Kentucky and the West. The first title was a sketch, _My Ships Aground_ (Chicago, 1900), and his next work was an exquisite tale of love and Nature, entitled _Back to Arcady_ (Boston, 1905), which has sold far into the thousands and is now in its third edition. A more perfect story has not been written by a Kentuckian of Mr. Allen's years. _The Maker of Joys_ (Kansas City, 1907), was so slight that it attracted little attention, yet it is exceedingly well-done; and in his latest book, _The Golden Road_ (New York, 1910), he just failed to do what one or two other writers have recently done so admirably. His Nature-loving tinker falls a bit short, but some excellent writing may be found in this book. Mr. Allen has recently completed another novel, _The Lovers of Skye_, which will be issued by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in the spring of 1913. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Reader Magazine_ (October, 1905); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). A WOMAN ANSWERED [From _The Maker of Joys_ (Kansas City, Missouri, 1907)] At this moment the servant lifted the tapestries and announced: "The lady, sir." This time, before he could stop her, she took his hand and kissed it. "There was little use in my coming today," she said, "except to thank you." "Why, I do not quite understand you. What for?" asked the rector in surprise. "For answering my question." "Tell me?" he replied. "You've known me a long time," she answered, "and being Jimmy Duke, it isn't necessary for me to tell you how I've lived. But you and me--once youth is gone, sir, and people are a long time old. I've thought of this a great deal lately, and I've been trying to decide what's right and what's wrong.... Then I read in the papers about you. About the things you preach and the like, and I knew you could tell me. I knew you'd know whether good people are faking, and which life is best. You see, I'd never thought of it in all my life before until just a little while ago. Just a month or such a matter." "And now?" asked the Shepherd of St. Mark's. "I could have left the old life years ago if I had wanted to," she continued, ignoring his question. "There is a man--well, there's several of them--but this a special one, who, for years, has wanted me to marry him. I always liked him better than anybody I knew, but I just couldn't give up the life. He is a plain man in a little village in Missouri, and I thought I'd die if I went. He offered to move to the city and I was afraid for him. You see I just didn't know what was good and what was bad, yet I didn't want this man to become like other men I knew." "Tell me, what are you going to do?" he asked eagerly. He had almost said, "Tell me what to do." "Well," she answered, "since I have been thinking it all over, things as they are have become empty. There is no joy in it, and I am weary of it all.... Yesterday I came to you. I wanted to ask you whether it was best or not to leave the old life. But I did not have to ask you. I saw how it was when you told me what you had done. And O, how I thank you for straightening it all out for me. Besides," she added with hesitancy, "after I left you last night I telegraphed for the man in the little village out west." When she had gone he gazed out of the window after her as she walked buoyant and happy through the night. "Perhaps," softly said the Maker of Joys, "it is the memory of the old days that is sweetest after all." VENITA SEIBERT Miss Venita Seibert, whose charming stories of German-American child life have been widely read and appreciated, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, December 29, 1878. Miss Seibert was educated in the Louisville public schools, and almost at once entered upon a literary career. She contributed short stories and verse to the leading periodicals, her first big serial story being published in _The American Magazine_ during 1907 and 1908, entitled _The Different World_. This dealt with the life and imaginings of a little German-American girl, a dreamy, sensitive child, and showing the poetry of German home life and the originality of childhood. The story was highly praised by Miss Ida M. Tarbell and other able critics. Under the title of _The Gossamer Thread_ (Boston, 1910), Miss Seibert brought these tales together in one volume. There "the chronicles of Velleda, who understood about 'the different world,'" may be read to the heart's desire. Miss Seibert, who resides at Louisville, Kentucky, promises big for the future, and her next book should bring her a wider public, as well as greater growth in literary power. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _McClure's Magazine_ (September, 1903); _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v. xv). THE ORIGIN OF BABIES[94] [From _The Gossamer Thread_ (Boston, 1910)] Oh, it was a puzzling world. Not the least puzzling thing was babies. Mrs. Katzman had come several times with a little brown satchel and brought one to Tante--a little, little thing that had to be fed catnip tea and rolled in a shawl and kept out of draughts. The advantage of having a new baby in the house was that it meant a glorious period of running wild, for of course one did not pretend to obey the girl who came to cook. Also, there was much company who brought nice things to eat for Tante, who naturally left the biggest part for the children. Of course God sent the little babies, but how did he get them down to Mrs. Katzman? She averred that she got them out of the river, but this Velleda knew to be a fib, for of course they would drown in the river. Tante said they fell down from Heaven, but of course such a fall would kill a little baby. Gros-mamma Wallenstein said a stork brought them, and for a time Velleda thought Mrs. Katzman must be a stork; but when she saw a picture of one she knew that it was only a bird. Then she decided that the stork carried the babies to Mrs. Katzman's and she divided them around; but Mrs. Katzman's little boy, questioned in the most searching manner, declared that he had never seen a sign of any stork about the premises. Just after Baby Ernest's coming, Velleda and Freddy went all the way to Mrs. Katzman's house--and it was quite a long way, fully three blocks--to beg her to exchange him for a girl. "We've only used him two days and he's just as good as new," stated Velleda, guiltily concealing the fact that he cried a great deal. But Mrs. Katzman said she really couldn't think of it, as God settled all those matters himself. It was on this occasion that Velleda had cross-examined Mrs. Katzman's little boy regarding the stork. There was no doubting the truth of Georgie's statements, for he told Velleda dolefully that he himself had long desired a brother or a sister, but never a baby had he seen in that house. Evidently Mrs. Katzman fetched them from somewhere else in the brown satchel. "You might have had ours," said Velleda. "We didn't want him. We prayed for a girl." "Oh, you'll soon find out _that_ don't do any good." Georgie kicked gloomily at a stone. "I used to pray, too, but God's awful stubborn when it comes to babies." Velleda wondered at the strangeness of things. All the little girls and some of the little boys who had no baby brother or sister to take care of, thought it a great treat to be allowed to wheel the baby-buggy up and down the square, really a most irksome task, as Velleda could testify. At Velleda's house they believed with the poet that "Time's noblest offspring is the last," so the baby reigned king, which was not always pleasant for his smaller slaves. Therefore she wondered at Georgie's taste. However, since he evidently regarded his brotherless state as a deep misfortune, she was full of sympathy and would do what she could for him. "You just pray a little harder," she advised; "and," struck by a brilliant thought, "look in the brown satchel every night! Maybe you'll find one left over." She and Freddy went home feeling very sorry for Georgie. He was only another illustration of the old saying which Onkel often commented on--the shoemaker's children wear ragged shoes, the painter's own house is the last to receive a fresh coat, and the stork woman has no baby of her own. Regarding this great question there was one point upon which everybody agreed. Velleda had her own system of deciding questions; she sifted the versions of her various informants, retained those points upon which all agreed, and upon this common ground proceeded to erect the structure of her own reasoning. Grown-ups, she knew, had a weakness for mild fibbing, which was not lying and not wrong at all, but was naturally very disconcerting when one burned to learn the real truth about a thing. The stork theory, the river theory, the falling from Heaven theory--all possessed one mutual starting point: God sent the little babies. There was of course no doubt in that regard, and Velleda finally decided that God placed them in the woods in a certain spot, marked where they were to go, and then vanished into Heaven (for of course no one had ever seen God), whereupon Mrs. Katzman approached with the brown satchel. This was a most satisfactory theory, with no flaws in its logic, reasonable and probable, and conflicting with no known law. The question was shelved. Velleda, going up to the third floor room of Nellie Johnson with a pitcher of milk which the dairywoman had asked her to deliver, found the girl huddled up before a small stove, looking so white and miserable that Velleda's heart ached for her, although she knew that Nellie was a very wicked person and nobody in the neighborhood spoke to her. Across her knees lay a white bundle. Velleda considered the matter. "I guess God loves you anyway, Nellie," she concluded. "He has sent you a little baby." The girl tossed the bundle upon the bed with a fierce gesture. "God?" she said bitterly. "It ain't God sent that baby. The Devil sent him!" Velleda fled down the stairs. It is indeed a puzzling world. FOOTNOTE: [94] Copyright, 1910, by Small, Maynard and Company. CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK Charles Neville Buck, novelist and short-story writer, was born near Midway, Kentucky, April 15, 1879. He spent the first fifteen years of his life at his birthplace, save the four years he was in South America with his father, the Hon. C. W. Buck, who was United States Minister to Peru from 1885 to 1889, and the author of _Under the Sun_, a Peruvian romance. At the age of fifteen years, Charles Neville Buck went to Louisville to enter the high school; and, in 1898, he was graduated from the University of Louisville. He studied art and joined the staff of _The Evening Post_, of Louisville, as cartoonist, which position he held for a year, when he became an editorial writer on that paper. Mr. Buck studied law and was admitted to the bar, but he did not practice. In 1908 he quit journalism for prose fiction. His short-stories were accepted by American and English magazines, but he won his first real reputation with a novel of mental aberration, entitled _The Key to Yesterday_ (New York, 1910), the scenes of which were set against Kentucky, France, and South America. Mr. Buck's next novel, _The Lighted Match_ (New York, 1911), was an international love romance in which a rich young American falls in love with the princess, and about-to-be-queen, of a bit of a kingdom near Spain. Benton, hero, has a rocky road to travel, but he, of course, demolishes every barrier and proves again that love finds a way. _The Lighted Match_ is a rattling good story, and it contains many purple patches between the hiss of the revolutionist's bomb and lovers' sighs. Mr. Buck's latest novel, _The Portal of Dreams_ (New York, 1912), was a very clever story. His first Kentucky novel, and the finest thing he has done, he and his publisher think, is _The Strength of Samson_, which will appear in four parts in _The Cavalier_, a weekly magazine, for February, 1913, after which it will be almost immediately published in book form under the title of _The Call of the Cumberlands_. Mr. Buck's home is at Louisville, Kentucky, but he spends much of his time in New York, where he lives at the Hotel Earle, in Waverly Place, a stone's throw from the apartments of his friend, Thompson Buchanan, the Kentucky playwright. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Weekly_ (October 8, 1910); _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (August, 1911); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913). THE DOCTRINE ACCORDING TO JONESY[95] [From _The Lighted Match_ (New York, 1911)] Despite the raw edge on the air, the hardier guests at "Idle Times" still clung to those outdoor sports which properly belonged to the summer. That afternoon a canoeing expedition was made up river to explore a cave which tradition had endowed with some legendary tale of pioneer days and Indian warfare. Pagratide, having organized the expedition with that object in view, had made use of his prior knowledge to enlist Cara for the crew of his canoe, but Benton, covering a point that Pagratide had overlooked, pointed out that an engagement to go up the river in a canoe is entirely distinct from an engagement to come down the river in a canoe. He cited so many excellent authorities in support of his contention that the matter was decided in his favor for the return trip, and Mrs. Porter-Woodleigh, all unconscious that her escort was a Crown Prince, found in him an introspective and altogether uninteresting young man. Benton and the girl in one canoe, were soon a quarter of a mile in advance of the others, and lifting their paddles from the water they floated with the slow current. The singing voices of the party behind them came softly adrift along the water. All of the singers were young and the songs had to do with sentiment. The girl buttoned her sweater closer about her throat. The man stuffed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and bent low to kindle it into a cheerful spot of light. A belated lemon afterglow lingered at the edge of the sky ahead. Against it the gaunt branches of a tall tree traced themselves starkly. Below was the silent blackness of the woods. Suddenly Benton raised his head. "I have a present for you," he announced. "A present?" echoed the girl. "Be careful, Sir Gray Eyes. You played the magician once and gave me a rose. It was such a wonderful rose"--she spoke almost tenderly--"that it has spoiled me. No commonplace gifts will be tolerated after that." "This is a different sort of present," he assured her. "This is a god." "A what!" Cara was at the stern with the guiding paddle. The man leaned back, steadying the canoe with a hand on each gunwale, and smiled into her face. "Yes," he said, "he is a god made out of clay with a countenance that is most unlovely and a complexion like an earthenware jar. I acquired him in the Andes for a few _centavos_. Since then we have been companions. In his day he had his place in a splendid temple of the Sun Worshipers. When I rescued him he was squatting cross-legged on a counter among silver and copper trinkets belonging to a civilization younger than his own. When you've been a god and come to be a souvenir of ruins and dead things--" the man paused for a moment, then with the ghost of a laugh went on "--it makes you see things differently. In the twisted squint of his small clay face one reads slight regard for mere systems and codes." He paused so long that she prompted him in a voice that threatened to become unsteady. "Tell me more about him. What is his godship's name?" "He looked so protestingly wise," Benton went on, "that I named him Jonesy. I liked that name because it fitted him so badly. Jonesy is not conventional in his ideas, but his morals are sound. He has seen religions and civilizations and dynasties flourish and decay, and it has all given him a certain perspective on life. He has occasionally given me good council." He paused again, but, noting that the singing voices were drawing nearer, he continued more rapidly. "In Alaska I used to lie flat on my cot before a great open fire and his god-ship would perch crosslegged on my chest. When I breathed, he seemed to shake his fat sides and laugh. When a pagan god from Peru laughs at you in a Yukon cabin, the situation calls for attention. I gave attention. "Jonesy said that the major human motives sweep in deep channels, full-tide ahead. He said you might in some degree regulate their floods by rearing abutments, but that when you tried to build a dam to stop the Amazon you are dealing with folly. He argued that when one sets out to dam up the tides set flowing back in the tributaries of the heart it is written that one must fail. That is the gospel according to Jonesy." He turned his face to the front and shot the canoe forward. There was silence except for the quiet dipping of their paddles, the dripping of the water from the lifted blades, and the song drifting down river. Finally Benton added: "I don't know what he will say to you, but perhaps he will give you good advice--on those matters which the centuries can't change." Cara's voice came soft, with a hint of repressed tears. "He has already given me good advice, dear--" she said, "good advice that I can't follow." FOOTNOTE: [95] Copyright, 1911, by W. J. Watt and Company. GEORGE BINGHAM George Bingham ("Dunk Botts"), newspaper humorist, was born near Wallonia, Kentucky, August 1, 1879. He quit school at the age of ten years to become "the devil" in a printing office at Eddyville, Kentucky. Two years later he removed to Mayfield, Kentucky, and accepted a position on _The Mirrow_. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first ficticious "news-letter" from an imaginary town called Boney Ridge, Kentucky, and submitted it to the critical eye of a tramp printer. This nomad at once saw the boy's design: to burlesque the letters received from the _Mirrow's_ crossroad correspondents; and he encouraged him. Mr. Bingham remained at Mayfield until he was twenty years of age, at which time he felt important enough to go out and see the world. Like most prodigals homesickness seized him for its very own; and he started home perched high on a freight train. Homeward bound he first had the name of his future paper suggested to him. Battling through a tiny town in Tennessee he enquired of the brakeman as to its name. "Walhalla," answered the "shack." "Hogwallow?" repeated the young Kentuckian. "Hell no! Who ever heard of a place called 'Hogwallow'?" Upon reaching home Mr. Bingham decided to put the village of Hogwallow, Kentucky, on the map. His first letter from that town was printed in the old _Mayfield Monitor_, under the pen-name of "Dunk Botts," which he has retained hitherto. After having written several Hogwallow letters, he was compelled to accept a position on a small newspaper; then nothing more was heard of Hogwallow until 1901, when he wrote a letter every few weeks, for a year, and then went to California. He "arrived back home on June 1, 1905, had a chill a week later, and launched _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ on July 15." He took the public into his confidence, telling them that his object was to conduct a burlesque newspaper, or, rather, a parody on one. He peopled his imaginary town and its environs with forty or more characters whose names summed them up without further ado; and he founded such important places as Rye Straw, Tickville, Hog Hill church and graveyard, Wild Onion schoolhouse, Gander Creek, and several other necessary hamlets and institutions. On May 15, 1909, Mr. Bingham suspended publication in order to make another trip to California. Two years later he returned to Kentucky for the sole purpose of resurrecting his paper. He resumed publication on June 17, 1911, at Paducah, but Irvin Cobb's town seemingly got on his nerves and, after three months, he tucked his "sheet" under his arm and returned to his first love, Mayfield, where he has remained ever since. _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ is published every Saturday night, read in thirty-seven states, and copied by the leading newspapers of America and England. Mr. Bingham has written more than five thousand "news items" for the paper, besides some five hundred short-stories, sketches, and paragraphs. He contributes considerable Hogwallow news to Charles Hamilton Musgrove's[96] page in _The Evening Post_ of Louisville; but he is an "outside contributor," doing his work at Mayfield. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Bingham to the Author; the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_ (January 14, 1912). HOGWALLOW NEWS [From _The Hogwallow Kentuckian_ (December 21, 1912)] Atlas Peck can't see why his left shoe wears out so much quicker than his right one, when his right one does just as much walking as his left. Until times get better and the financial questions of the nation gets fully settled the Old Miser on Musket Ridge will live on two hickorynuts per day. Sim Flinders has brought back with him from the Calf Ribs neighborhood a feather bed made of owl feathers. While coming home with it on his back the other night it was so soft and downy he fell to sleep while walking along the road. Yam Sims appeared in public last Sunday with a new pair of pants and a striped necktie. They have made a wonderful change in his appearance, and until they wear out he will rank among our best people. A dawg fight attracted a lot of attention and broke up the conversation at the Hog Ford moonshine still house the other day. One of the dawgs belonged to Poke Eazley and the other to Jefferson Potlocks, and the difficulty came up over some misunderstanding between their owners. Ellick Hellwanger is fixing to celebrate his wooden wedding next week with a quart of wood alcohol. Tobe Moseley's mule is able to walk around again after being propped up against a persimmon tree for several days. Tobe Moseley took his jug over to the sorghum mill early Tuesday morning of last week after some molasses, and has not yet returned. No grave fears, however, are entertained on account of his protracted absence, as sorghum molasses run slow in cold weather. Bullets have been falling in Hogwallow for the past few days. They are thought to be those Raz Barlow fired at the moon a few nights ago. Luke Mathewsla has a good hawg pen for sale cheap. It would make a good front yard, and Luke may move his house up behind it. Cricket Hicks has gone up to Tickville to get an almanac, as he is on the program for a lot of original jokes at Rye Straw Saturday night. Isaac Hellwanger fell off of a foot lawg while watching a panel of fence float down Gander creek the other morning. He says it don't pay to get too interested in one thing. Slim Pickens has received through the mails a bottle of dandruff cure, and he is taking two teaspoonfuls after each meal. Poke Eazley has been puny this week with lumbago, and had to be excused from singing at the Dog Hill church Sunday, being too weak to carry a tune, or lift his voice. Fit Smith is having his shoes remodeled, and will occupy them next week. Columbus Allsop's head has been itching for several days. He says that is a sign Christmas is coming. The Dog Hill Preacher will be surprised by his congregation next Sunday morning when they will give him a Christmas present, which they have already bought. The preacher is greatly surprised every time his congregation gives him anything. Fletcher Henstep's geese are being fattened for Christmas, and have been turned loose in the Musket Ridge corn patches. They all wear lanterns as it is late before they get in at night. FOOTNOTE: [96] Mr. Musgrove, who is to leave _The Post_ at the end of 1912 to become humorist editor of _The Louisville Times_, was born in Kentucky, and is the author of a charming volume of verse, _The Dream Beautiful and Other Poems_ (Louisville; 1898). He is to issue in 1913 another book of poems, through a Louisville firm, to be entitled _Pan and Aeolus_. When Mr. Musgrove joins _The Times_ he will take _The Post's_ clever cartoonist, Paul Plaschke, with him; and they will occupy an office next to Colonel Henry Watterson's in the new Courier-Journal and Times building. MABEL PORTER PITTS Miss Mabel Porter Pitts, poet, was born near Flemingsburg, Kentucky, January 5, 1884. Her family removed to Seattle, Washington, when she was a girl, and her education was received at the Academy of the Holy Names. Miss Pitts lived at Seattle for a number of years, but she now resides at San Francisco. Her verse and short-stories have appeared in several of the eastern magazines, and they have been read with pleasure by many people. Her first book of poems, _In the Shadow of the Crag and Other Poems_ (Denver, Colorado, 1907), is now in its third edition, five thousand copies having been sold so far. This seems to show that there are people in the United States who care for good verse. Miss Pitts is well-known on the Pacific coast, where she has spent nearly all her life, but she must be introduced to the people of her native State, Kentucky. Her short-stories are as well liked as her poems, a collection of them is promised for early publication, and she should have a permanent place in the literature of Kentucky. BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Overland Monthly_ (January; December, 1904; April, 1908). ON THE LITTLE SANDY[97] [From _In the Shadow of the Crag and Other Poems_ (Denver, 1907)] Just within the mystic border of Kentucky's blue grass region There's a silver strip of river lying idly in the sun, On its banks are beds of fragrance where the butterflies are legion And the moonbeams frame its glory when the summer day is done. There's a little, rose-wreathed cottage nestling close upon its border Where a tangled mass of blossoms half conceals an open door, There's a sweet, narcotic perfume from a garden's wild disorder, And the jealous poppies cluster where its kisses thrill the shore. From across its dimpled bosom comes the half-hushed, careful calling Of a whippoorwill whose lonely heart is longing for its mate, And the sun aslant the sleepy eyes of fox-gloves gently falling Tells the fisherman out yonder that the hour is growing late. From the branches of the poplars a spasmodic sleepy twitter Comes, 'twould seem, in careless answer to the pleading of a song, And perhaps the tiny bosom holds despair that's very bitter For his notes are soon unheeded by the little feathered throng. Then the twilight settling denser shows a rush-light dimly burning-- Ah, how well I know the landing drowsing 'neath its feeble beams, And my homesick heart to mem'ries of the yesterday is turning While I linger here, forgotten, with no solace but my dreams. FOOTNOTE: [97] Copyright, 1907, by the Author. MARION FORSTER GILMORE Miss Marion Forster Gilmore, the young Louisville poet and dramatist, was born at Anchorage, Kentucky, November 27, 1887. She was educated at Hampton College, Louisville, and at a private school in Washington, D. C. At the age of fourteen years she wrote a poem while crossing the Rocky Mountains that attracted the attention of Joaquin Miller and Madison Cawein, and won her the friendship of both poets. When but fifteen years old she had completed her three-act tragedy of _Virginia_, set in Rome during the days of the Decemvirs. This is purely a play for the study, and hardly fitted for stage presentation, yet it has been praised by William Faversham, the famous actor. Miss Gilmore contributed lyrics to the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ and _Leslie's Weekly_, which, with her play, she published in a charming book, entitled _Virginia, a Tragedy, and Other Poems_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1910). _The Cradle Song_, originally printed in the _Cosmopolitan_ for May, 1908, is one of the best of her shorter poems. Miss Gilmore has recently returned to her home at Louisville, after having spent a year in European travel and study.[98] BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ (January, 1909); _Current Literature_ (August, 1910). THE CRADLE SONG[99] [From _Virginia, a Tragedy, and Other Poems_ (Louisville, Kentucky, 1910)] Adown the vista of the years, I turn and look with silent soul, As though to catch a muted strain Of melody, that seems to roll In tender cadence to my ear. But, as I wait with eyes that long The singer to behold--it fades, And silence ends the Cradle Song. But when the shadows of the years Have lengthened slowly to the West, And once again I lay me down To sleep, upon my mother's breast, Then well I know I ne'er again Shall cry to God, "How long? How long?" For, to my soul, her voice will sing A never-ending Cradle Song. FOOTNOTES: [98] There are two other young women poets of Louisville who should be mentioned in the same breath with Miss Gilmore: Miss Ethel Allen Murphy, author of _The Angel of Thought and Other Poems_ (Boston, 1909), and contributor of brief lyrics to _Everybody's Magazine_; and Miss Hortense Flexner, on the staff of _The Louisville Herald_, whose poems in the new _Mammoth Cave Magazine_ have attracted much attention. Miss Flexner is to have a poem published in _The American Magazine_ in 1913. [99] Copyright, 1910, by the Author. APPENDIX MRS. AGNES E. MITCHELL Dr. Henry A. Cottell, the Louisville booklover, is authority for the statement that Mrs. Agnes E. Mitchell, author of _When the Cows Come Home_, one of the loveliest lyrics in the language, lived at Louisville for some years, and that she wrote her famous poem within the confines of that city. The date of its composition must have been about 1870. Mrs. Mitchell was the wife of a clergyman, but little else is known of her life and literary labors. It is a real pity that her career has not come down to us in detail. She certainly "lodged a note in the ear of time," and firmly fixed her fame with it. WHEN THE COWS COME HOME [From _The Humbler Poets_, edited by S. Thompson (Chicago, 1885)] With Klingle, Klangle, Klingle, 'Way down the dusty dingle, The cows are coming home; Now sweet and clear, and faint and low, The airy tinklings come and go, Like chimings from some far-off tower, Or patterings of an April shower That makes the daisies grow; Koling, Kolang, Kolinglelingle, 'Way down the darkening dingle, The cows come slowly home; And old-time friends, and twilight plays And starry nights and sunny days, Come trooping up the misty ways, When the cows come home. With Jingle, Jangle, Jingle, Soft sounds that sweetly mingle, The cows are coming home; Malvine and Pearl and Florimel, DeCamp, Red Rose and Gretchen Schnell, Queen Bess and Sylph and Spangled Sue, Across the fields I hear her OO-OO, And clang her silver bell; Goling, Golang, Golinglelingle, With faint far sounds that mingle, The cows come slowly home; And mother-songs of long-gone years, And baby joys, and childish tears, And youthful hopes, and youthful fears, When the cows come home. With Ringle, Rangle, Ringle, By twos and threes and single, The cows are coming home; Through the violet air we see the town, And the summer sun a-slipping down; The maple in the hazel glade Throws down the path a longer shade, And the hills are growing brown; To-ring, to-rang, to-ringleingle, By threes and fours and single, The cows come slowly home. The same sweet sound of wordless psalm, The same sweet June-day rest and calm, The same sweet scent of bud and balm, When the cows come home. With a Tinkle, Tankle, Tinkle, Through fern and periwinkle, The cows are coming home. A-loitering in the checkered stream, Where the sun-rays glance and gleam, Starine, Peach Bloom and Phoebe Phyllis Stand knee-deep in the creamy lilies In a drowsy dream; To-link, to-lank, to-linkleinkle, O'er banks with buttercups a-twinkle, The cows come slowly home; And up through memory's deep ravine Come the brook's old song--its old-time sheen, And the crescent of the silver queen, When the cows come home. With a Klingle, Klangle, Klingle, With a loo-oo and moo-oo and jingle. The cows are coming home; And over there on Morlin hill Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill; The dew drops lie on the tangled vines, And over the poplars Venus shines. And over the silent mill; Ko-link, ko-lang, ko-lingleingle; With a ting-a-ling and jingle, The cows come slowly home; Let down the bars; let in the train Of long-gone songs, and flowers and rain, For dear old times come back again When the cows come home. INDEX Ainslie, Hew, I, 87-91 Allen, Frank Waller, II, 366-368 Allen, James Lane, II, 4-17 Allison, Young E., II, 53-56 Altsheler, Joseph A., II, 144-149 Anderson, Miss Margaret S., II, 318-320 Andrews, Mrs. Mary R. S., II, 104-110 Aroni, Ernest, II, 206 Audubon, John J., I, 45-51 Audubon, John W., I, 185-187 Badin, Stephen T., I, 30-34 Banks, Mrs. Nancy Huston, II, 17-20 Barnett, Mrs. Evelyn S., II, 119-122 Bartlett, Elisha, I, 147-150 Barton, William E., II, 126-129 Bascom, Henry B., I, 98-102 Baskett, James Newton, II, 1-4 Bayne, Mrs. Mary Addams, II, 202-205 Beck, George, I, 23-26 Betts, Mary E. W., I, 237-239 Bingham, George, II, 375-378 Bird, Robert M., I, 135-139 Birney, James G., I, 91-95 Blackburn, J. C. S., I, 232 Bledsoe, Albert T., I, 169-172 Bolton, Mrs. Sarah T., I, 228-230 Bradford, John, I, 5-7 Breckinridge, John C., I, 231-234 Breckinridge, Robert J., I, 112-114 Breckinridge, W. C. P., I, 319-323 Brodhead, Mrs. Eva Wilder, II, 267-273 Broadus, John A., I, 261-265 Bronner, Milton, II, 303-305 Brown, John Mason, I, 240 Browne, J. Ross, I, 200-204 Bruner, James D., II, 184-186 Buchanan, Thompson, II, 355-362 Buck, Charles Neville, II, 371-375 Burton, George Lee, II, 222-228 Butler, Mann, I, 59-62 Butler, William O., I, 84-87 Caldwell, Charles, I, 34-37 Call, Richard E., I, 240 Cawein, Madison, II, 187-198 Childs, Mrs. Mary F., I, 356-359 Chivers, Thomas H., I, 152-156 Clay, Henry, I, 39-44 Clay, Mrs. Mary R., I, 240 Cobb, Irvin S., II, 323-342 Collins, Lewis, I, 104-106 Collins, Richard H., 244-247 Comfort, Will Levington, II, 363-366 Connelley, Wm. E., II, 63-67 Conrard, Harrison, II, 236-237 Corwin, Thomas, I, 95-98 Cosby, Fortunatus, Jr., I, 119-123 Cottell, Dr. Henry A., II, 384 Cotter, Joseph S., II, 115-116 Crittenden, John J., I, 71-74 Crittenden, William L., I, 238 Crockett, Ingram, II, 77-80 Cutter, George W., I, 176-179 Dargan, Mrs. Olive Tilford, II, 255-262 Davie, George M., I, 363-364 Daviess, Miss Maria Thompson, II, 279-283 Davis, Jefferson, I, 156-160 Dazey, Chas. Turner, II, 67-71 Dinsmore, Miss Julia S., I, 295-297 Dixon, Mrs. Susan B., I, 220 Doneghy, George W., I, 146 Doty, Douglas Z., II, 239 Drake, Daniel, I, 65-68 Duke, Basil W., I, 323-325 Durbin, John P., I, 117-119 Durrett, Reuben T., I, 239-243 Ellis, James Tandy, II, 228-230 Filson, John, I, 1-4 Filson Club, I, 240-241 Finck, Bert, II, 254-255 Flagg, Edmund, I, 194-196 Fleming, Walter L., I, 158 Flexner, Mrs. Anne Crawford, II, 239 Flexner, Miss Hortense, II, 381 Ford, Mrs. Sallie R., I, 272-275 Foster, Stephen C., I, 255-257 Fox, John, Jr., II, 172-181 Frazee, Lewis J., I, 216-218 Fruit, John Phelps, II, 72-74 Furman, Miss Lucy, II, 247-253 Gallagher, Wm. D., I, 160-163 Geppert, Mrs. Hester Higbee, II, 57-60 Gilmore, Miss Marion F., II, 380-381 Giltner, Miss Leigh Gordon, II, 311-317 Goodloe, Miss Carter, II, 217-222 Green, Thomas M., I, 310-313 Griffin, Gilderoy W., I, 331-333 Gross, A. Haller, I, 151 Gross, Samuel D., I, 150-152 Harney, John M., I, 74-78 Harney, Will Wallace, I, 291-292 Harris, Credo, II, 295-297 Hatcher, John E., I, 276-278 Hentz, Mrs. Caroline L., I, 114-116 Herrick, Mrs. Sophia, I, 171 Holley, Horace, I, 52-56 Holley, Mrs. Mary A., I, 69-71 Holmes, Daniel Henry, II, 36-47 Holmes, Mrs. Mary J., I, 265-269 Imelda, Sister, II, 233-235 Imlay, Gilbert, I, 11-16 Jeffrey, Mrs. Rosa V., I, 269-272 Johnson, Thomas, Jr., I, 19-23 Johnston, Mrs. Annie Fellows, II, 165-169 Johnston, J. Stoddard, I, 292-294 Johnston, William P., I, 288-290 Kelley, Andrew W., II, 49-53 Ketchum, Mrs. Annie C., I, 247-249 Kinkead, Miss Eleanor T., II, 175 Knott, J. Proctor, I, 282-284 Lampton, Will J., II, 96-101 Leonard, Miss Mary F., II, 142-144 Litsey, Edwin Carlile, II, 300-302 Lloyd, John Uri, I, 364-368 Lorimer, George Horace II, 230-233 Lyon, Matthew, I, 8-11 McAfee, Mrs. Nelly M., I, 353-356 McClung, John A., I, 139-142 McElroy, Mrs. Lucy Cleaver, II, 139-142 McElroy, Robert M., II, 289-293 McKinney, Mrs. Kate S., II, 85-86 Macaulay, Mrs. Fannie C., II, 181-184 MacKenzie, A. S., II, 305-307 Madden, Miss Eva A., II, 170-172 Magruder, Allan B., I, 37-39 Marcosson, Isaac F., II, 343-345 Marriner, Harry L., II, 262-264 Marriott, Crittenden, II, 211-217 Martin, Mrs. George M., II, 198-202 Marshall, Humphrey, I, 26-29 Marshall, Thomas F., I, 123-126 Marvin, William F., I, 145-147 Mason, Miss Emily V., I, 191-193 Menefee, Richard H., I, 173-175 Mulligan, James H., I, 348-352 Murphy, Miss Ethel Allen, II, 381 Musgrove, Charles Hamilton, II, 377 Mitchel, Ormsby M., I, 166-169 Mitchell, Mrs. Agnes E., II, 385-386 Morehead, James T., I, 102-104 Morehead, Mrs. L. M., I, 103 Morris, Rob, I, 205-207 Navarro, Mary Anderson de, II, 101-104 Norris, Mrs. Zoe A., II, 135-139 Obenchain, Mrs. Eliza Calvert, II, 81-84 O'Hara, Theodore, I, 218-228 O'Malley, Charles J., II, 86-91 Patterson, John, II, 123-125 Pattie, James O., I, 142-144 Penn, Shadrach, I, 82-83 Perrin, William H., I, 240 Perry, Bliss, I, 252 Peter, Dr. Robert, I, 240-241 Petrie, Mrs. Cordia G., II, 273-279 Piatt, Mrs. Sarah M. B., I, 303-307 Pickett, Thomas E., I, 241 Pirtle, Alfred, I, 240 Pitts, Miss Mabel Porter, II, 379-380 Plaschke, Paul, II, 377 Polk, Jefferson J., I, 126-128 Portor, Miss Laura S., II, 308-310 Prentice, George D., I, 129-135 Price, Samuel W., I, 240 Price, William T., I, 359-362 Quisenberry, A. C., II, 27-28 Rafinesque, C. S., I, 56-58 Ranck, George W., I, 240 Rankin, Adam, I, 17-19 Rice, Mrs. Alice Hegan, II, 238-243 Rice, Cale Young, II, 284-289 Ridgely, Benj. H., II, 129-135 Rives, Mrs. Hallie Erminie, II, 297-300 Roach, Mrs. Abby Meguire, II, 320-323 Robertson, George, I, 78-82 Robertson, Harrison, II, 74-77 Robins, Miss Elizabeth, II, 156-162 Rouquette, Adrien E., I, 187-191 Rule, Lucien V., II, 265-266 Schoonmaker, E. D., II, 293-294 Seibert, Miss Venita, II, 368-371 Semple, Miss Ellen C., II, 162-165 Shaler, Nathaniel S., I, 336-342 Sherley, Douglass, II, 110 Shindler, Mrs. Mary P., I, 179-180 Shreve, Thomas H., I, 163-166 Slaughter, Mrs. Elvira M., II, 110-114 Smith, Langdon, II, 91-96 Smith, William B., II, 20-26 Smith, Z. F., I, 258-261 Spalding, John L., I, 334-335 Spalding, Martin J., I, 181-184 Speed, Thomas, I, 240 Stanton, Henry T., I, 297-302 Taylor, Zachary, I, 62-65 Tevis, Mrs. Julia A., I, 107-111 Towne, Charles Hanson, II, 350-353 Tufts, Mrs. Gertrude King, II, 345-349 Underwood, Francis H., I, 250-254 Underwood, Oscar W., II, 150-155 Verhoeff, Miss Mary, I, 241 Vest, George G., I, 285-287 Visscher, William L., I, 342-344 Walling, W. E., II, 353-355 Waltz, Mrs. Elizabeth Cherry, II, 205-209 Walworth, Miss Reubena H., II, 209-211. Warfield, Mrs. Catherine A., I, 197-200 Warfield, Ethelbert D., II, 116-118 Watterson, Henry, I, 325-331 Watts, William C., I, 279-282 Webber, Charles W., I, 211-215 Weir, James, Senior, I, 234-237 Welby, Mrs. Amelia B., I, 207-211 Whitsitt, William H., I, 240 Willson, Forceythe, I, 313-319 Wilson, Richard H., II, 244-247 Wilson, Robert Burns, II, 29-35 Winchester, Boyd, I, 307-310 Wood, Henry Cleveland, II, 60-63 Woods, William Hervey, II, 47-49 Young, Bennett H., I, 344-348 Transcriber's Notes Obvious punctuation and spelling errors fixed throughout. The oe ligature in this etext has been replaced with oe. Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original. Page 106: The title and italicization has been changed from (... little story, _With A Good Samaritan_ ...) to this (... little story, with _A Good Samaritan_ ...) to match the title in the rest of the text. Page 392: In the Index Mulligan, Murphy and Musgrove are entered out of alphabetic order as in the original. 
405	----	ADVENTURES AND LETTERS OF RICHARD HARDING DAVIS EDITED BY CHARLES BELMONT DAVIS CONTENTS CHAPTER I. THE EARLY DAYS II. COLLEGE DAYS III. FIRST NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES IV. NEW YORK V. FIRST TRAVEL ARTICLES VI. THE MEDITERRANEAN AND PARIS VII. FIRST PLAYS VIII. CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA IX. MOSCOW, BUDAPEST, LONDON X. CAMPAIGNING IN CUBA, AND GREECE XI. THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR XII. THE BOER WAR XIII. THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH CORONATIONS XIV. THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR XV. MOUNT KISCO XVI. THE CONGO XVII. A LONDON WINTER XVIII. MILITARY MANOEUVRES XIX. VERA CRUZ AND THE GREAT WAR XX. THE LAST DAYS CHAPTER I THE EARLY DAYS Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia on April 18, 1864, but, so far as memory serves me, his life and mine began together several years later in the three-story brick house on South Twenty-first Street, to which we had just moved. For more than forty years this was our home in all that the word implies, and I do not believe that there was ever a moment when it was not the predominating influence in Richard's life and in his work. As I learned in later years, the house had come into the possession of my father and mother after a period on their part of hard endeavor and unusual sacrifice. It was their ambition to add to this home not only the comforts and the beautiful inanimate things of life, but to create an atmosphere which would prove a constant help to those who lived under its roof--an inspiration to their children that should endure so long as they lived. At the time of my brother's death the fact was frequently commented upon that, unlike most literary folk, he had never known what it was to be poor and to suffer the pangs of hunger and failure. That he never suffered from the lack of a home was certainly as true as that in his work he knew but little of failure, for the first stories he wrote for the magazines brought him into a prominence and popularity that lasted until the end. But if Richard gained his success early in life and was blessed with a very lovely home to which he could always return, he was not brought up in a manner which in any way could be called lavish. Lavish he may have been in later years, but if he was it was with the money for which those who knew him best knew how very hard he had worked. In a general way, I cannot remember that our life as boys differed in any essential from that of other boys. My brother went to the Episcopal Academy and his weekly report never failed to fill the whole house with an impenetrable gloom and ever-increasing fears as to the possibilities of his future. At school and at college Richard was, to say the least, an indifferent student. And what made this undeniable fact so annoying, particularly to his teachers, was that morally he stood so very high. To "crib," to lie, or in any way to cheat or to do any unworthy act was, I believe, quite beyond his understanding. Therefore, while his constant lack of interest in his studies goaded his teachers to despair, when it came to a question of stamping out wrongdoing on the part of the student body he was invariably found aligned on the side of the faculty. Not that Richard in any way resembled a prig or was even, so far as I know, ever so considered by the most reprehensible of his fellow students. He was altogether too red-blooded for that, and I believe the students whom he antagonized rather admired his chivalric point of honor even if they failed to imitate it. As a schoolboy he was aggressive, radical, outspoken, fearless, usually of the opposition and, indeed, often the sole member of his own party. Among the students at the several schools he attended he had but few intimate friends; but of the various little groups of which he happened to be a member his aggressiveness and his imagination usually made him the leader. As far back as I can remember, Richard was always starting something--usually a new club or a violent reform movement. And in school or college, as in all the other walks of life, the reformer must, of necessity, lead a somewhat tempestuous, if happy, existence. The following letter, written to his father when Richard was a student at Swarthmore, and about fifteen, will give an idea of his conception of the ethics in the case: SWARTHMORE--1880. DEAR PAPA: I am quite on the Potomac. I with all the boys at our table were called up, there is seven of us, before Prex. for stealing sugar-bowls and things off the table. All the youths said, "O President, I didn't do it." When it came my turn I merely smiled gravely, and he passed on to the last. Then he said, "The only boy that doesn't deny it is Davis. Davis, you are excused. I wish to talk to the rest of them." That all goes to show he can be a gentleman if he would only try. I am a natural born philosopher so I thought this idea is too idiotic for me to converse about so I recommend silence and I also argued that to deny you must necessarily be accused and to be accused of stealing would of course cause me to bid Prex. good-by, so the only way was, taking these two considerations with each other, to deny nothing but let the good-natured old duffer see how silly it was by retaining a placid silence and so crushing his base but thoughtless behavior and machinations. DICK. In the early days at home--that is, when the sun shone--we played cricket and baseball and football in our very spacious back yard, and the programme of our sports was always subject to Richard's change without notice. When it rained we adjourned to the third-story front, where we played melodrama of simple plot but many thrills, and it was always Richard who wrote the plays, produced them, and played the principal part. As I recall these dramas of my early youth, the action was almost endless and, although the company comprised two charming misses (at least I know that they eventually grew into two very lovely women), there was no time wasted over anything so sentimental or futile as love-scenes. But whatever else the play contained in the way of great scenes, there was always a mountain pass--the mountains being composed of a chair and two tables--and Richard was forever leading his little band over the pass while the band, wholly indifferent as to whether the road led to honor, glory, or total annihilation, meekly followed its leader. For some reason, probably on account of my early admiration for Richard and being only too willing to obey his command, I was invariably cast for the villain in these early dramas, and the end of the play always ended in a hand-to-hand conflict between the hero and myself. As Richard, naturally, was the hero and incidentally the stronger of the two, it can readily be imagined that the fight always ended in my complete undoing. Strangulation was the method usually employed to finish me, and, whatever else Richard was at that tender age, I can testify to his extraordinary ability as a choker. But these early days in the city were not at all the happiest days of that period in Richard's life. He took but little interest even in the social or the athletic side of his school life, and his failures in his studies troubled him sorely, only I fear, however, because it troubled his mother and father. The great day of the year to us was the day our schools closed and we started for our summer vacation. When Richard was less than a year old my mother and father, who at the time was convalescing from a long illness, had left Philadelphia on a search for a complete rest in the country. Their travels, which it seems were undertaken in the spirit of a voyage of discovery and adventure, finally led them to the old Curtis House at Point Pleasant on the New Jersey coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very little in common with the present well-known summer resort. In those days the place was reached after a long journey by rail followed by a three hours' drive in a rickety stagecoach over deep sandy roads, albeit the roads did lead through silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point Pleasant itself was then a collection of half a dozen big farms which stretched from the Manasquan River to the ocean half a mile distant. Nothing could have been more primitive or as I remember it in its pastoral loveliness much more beautiful. Just beyond our cottage the river ran its silent, lazy course to the sea. With the exception of several farmhouses, its banks were then unsullied by human habitation of any sort, and on either side beyond the low green banks lay fields of wheat and corn, and dense groves of pine and oak and chestnut trees. Between us and the ocean were more waving fields of corn, broken by little clumps of trees, and beyond these damp Nile-green pasture meadows, and then salty marshes that led to the glistening, white sand-dunes, and the great silver semi-circle of foaming breakers, and the broad, blue sea. On all the land that lay between us and the ocean, where the town of Point Pleasant now stands, I think there were but four farmhouses, and these in no way interfered with the landscape or the life of the primitive world in which we played. Whatever the mental stimulus my brother derived from his home in Philadelphia, the foundation of the physical strength that stood him in such good stead in the campaigns of his later years he derived from those early days at Point Pleasant. The cottage we lived in was an old two-story frame building, to which my father had added two small sleeping-rooms. Outside there was a vine-covered porch and within a great stone fireplace flanked by cupboards, from which during those happy days I know Richard and I, openly and covertly, must have extracted tons of hardtack and cake. The little house was called "Vagabond's Rest," and a haven of rest and peace and content it certainly proved for many years to the Davis family. From here it was that my father started forth in the early mornings on his all-day fishing excursions, while my mother sat on the sunlit porch and wrote novels and mended the badly rent garments of her very active sons. After a seven-o'clock breakfast at the Curtis House our energies never ceased until night closed in on us and from sheer exhaustion we dropped unconscious into our patch-quilted cots. All day long we swam or rowed, or sailed, or played ball, or camped out, or ate enormous meals--anything so long as our activities were ceaseless and our breathing apparatus given no rest. About a mile up the river there was an island--it's a very small, prettily wooded, sandy-beached little place, but it seemed big enough in those days. Robert Louis Stevenson made it famous by rechristening it Treasure Island, and writing the new name and his own on a bulkhead that had been built to shore up one of its fast disappearing sandy banks. But that is very modern history and to us it has always been "The Island." In our day, long before Stevenson had ever heard of the Manasquan, Richard and I had discovered this tight little piece of land, found great treasures there, and, hand in hand, had slept in a six-by-six tent while the lions and tigers growled at us from the surrounding forests. As I recall these days of my boyhood I find the recollections of our life at Point Pleasant much more distinct than those we spent in Philadelphia. For Richard these days were especially welcome. They meant a respite from the studies which were a constant menace to himself and his parents; and the freedom of the open country, the ocean, the many sports on land and on the river gave his body the constant exercise his constitution seemed to demand, and a broad field for an imagination which was even then very keen, certainly keen enough to make the rest of us his followers. In an extremely sympathetic appreciation which Irvin S. Cobb wrote about my brother at the time of his death, he says that he doubts if there is such a thing as a born author. Personally it so happened that I never grew up with any one, except my brother, who ever became an author, certainly an author of fiction, and so I cannot speak on the subject with authority. But in the case of Richard, if he was not born an author, certainly no other career was ever considered. So far as I know he never even wanted to go to sea or to be a bareback rider in a circus. A boy, if he loves his father, usually wants to follow in his professional footsteps, and in the case of Richard, he had the double inspiration of following both in the footsteps of his father and in those of his mother. For years before Richard's birth his father had been a newspaper editor and a well-known writer of stories and his mother a novelist and short-story writer of great distinction. Of those times at Point Pleasant I fear I can remember but a few of our elders. There were George Lambdin, Margaret Ruff, and Milne Ramsay, all painters of some note; a strange couple, Colonel Olcott and the afterward famous Madam Blavatsky, trying to start a Buddhist cult in this country; Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, with her foot on the first rung of the ladder of fame, who at the time loved much millinery finery. One day my father took her out sailing and, much to the lady's discomfiture and greatly to Richard's and my delight, upset the famous authoress. At a later period the Joseph Jeffersons used to visit us; Horace Howard Furness, one of my father's oldest friends, built a summer home very near us on the river, and Mrs. John Drew and her daughter Georgie Barrymore spent their summers in a near-by hostelry. I can remember Mrs. Barrymore at that time very well---wonderfully handsome and a marvellously cheery manner. Richard and I both loved her greatly, even though it were in secret. Her daughter Ethel I remember best as she appeared on the beach, a sweet, long-legged child in a scarlet bathing-suit running toward the breakers and then dashing madly back to her mother's open arms. A pretty figure of a child, but much too young for Richard to notice at that time. In after-years the child in the scarlet bathing-suit and he became great pals. Indeed, during the latter half of his life, through the good days and the bad, there were very few friends who held so close a place in his sympathy and his affections as Ethel Barrymore. Until the summer of 1880 my brother continued on at the Episcopal Academy. For some reason I was sent to a different school, but outside of our supposed hours of learning we were never apart. With less than two years' difference in our ages our interests were much the same, and I fear our interests of those days were largely limited to out-of-door sports and the theatre. We must have been very young indeed when my father first led us by the hand to see our first play. On Saturday afternoons Richard and I, unattended but not wholly unalarmed, would set forth from our home on this thrilling weekly adventure. Having joined our father at his office, he would invariably take us to a chop-house situated at the end of a blind alley which lay concealed somewhere in the neighborhood of Walnut and Third Streets, and where we ate a most wonderful luncheon of English chops and apple pie. As the luncheon drew to its close I remember how Richard and I used to fret and fume while my father in a most leisurely manner used to finish off his mug of musty ale. But at last the three of us, hand in hand, my father between us, were walking briskly toward our happy destination. At that time there were only a few first-class theatres in Philadelphia--the Arch Street Theatre, owned by Mrs. John Drew; the Chestnut Street, and the Walnut Street--all of which had stock companies, but which on the occasion of a visiting star acted as the supporting company. These were the days of Booth, Jefferson, Adelaide Neilson, Charles Fletcher, Lotta, John McCullough, John Sleeper Clark, and the elder Sothern. And how Richard and I worshipped them all--not only these but every small-bit actor in every stock company in town. Indeed, so many favorites of the stage did my brother and I admire that ordinary frames would not begin to hold them all, and to overcome this defect we had our bedroom entirely redecorated. The new scheme called for a gray wallpaper supported by a maroon dado. At the top of the latter ran two parallel black picture mouldings between which we could easily insert cabinet photographs of the actors and actresses which for the moment we thought most worthy of a place in our collection. As the room was fairly large and as the mouldings ran entirely around it, we had plenty of space for even our very elastic love for the heroes and heroines of the footlights. Edwin Forrest ended his stage career just before our time, but I know that Richard at least saw him and heard that wonderful voice of thunder. It seems that one day, while my mother and Richard were returning home, they got on a street-car which already held the great tragedian. At the moment Forrest was suffering severely from gout and had his bad leg stretched well out before him. My brother, being very young at the time and never very much of a respecter of persons, promptly fell over the great man's gouty foot. Whereat (according to my mother, who was always a most truthful narrator) Forrest broke forth in a volcano of oaths and for blocks continued to hurl thunderous broadsides at Richard, which my mother insisted included the curse of Rome and every other famous tirade in the tragedian's repertory which in any way fitted the occasion. Nearly forty years later my father became the president of the Edwin Forrest Home, the greatest charity ever founded by an actor for actors, and I am sure by his efforts of years on behalf of the institution did much to atone for Richard's early unhappy meeting with the greatest of all the famous leather-lunged tragedians. From his youth my father had always been a close student of the classic and modern drama, and throughout his life numbered among his friends many of the celebrated actors and actresses of his time. In those early days Booth used to come to rather formal luncheons, and at all such functions Richard and I ate our luncheon in the pantry, and when the great meal was nearly over in the dining-room we were allowed to come in in time for the ice-cream and to sit, figuratively, at the feet of the honored guest and generally, literally, on his or her knees. Young as I was in those days I can readily recall one of those lunch-parties when the contrast between Booth and Dion Boucicault struck my youthful mind most forcibly. Booth, with his deep-set, big black eyes, shaggy hair, and lank figure, his wonderfully modulated voice, rolled out his theories of acting, while the bald-headed, rotund Boucicault, his twinkling eyes snapping like a fox-terrier's, interrupted the sonorous speeches of the tragedian with crisp, witty criticisms or "asides" that made the rest of the company laugh and even brought a smile to the heavy, tragic features of Booth himself. But there was nothing formal about our relations with John Sleeper Clark and the Jefferson family. They were real "home folks" and often occupied our spare room, and when they were with us Richard and I were allowed to come to all the meals, and, even if unsolicited, freely express our views on the modern drama. In later years to our Philadelphia home came Henry Irving and his fellow player Ellen Terry and Augustin Daly and that wonderful quartet, Ada Rehan, Mrs. Gilbert, James Lewis, and our own John Drew. Sir Henry I always recall by the first picture I had of him in our dining-room, sitting far away from the table, his long legs stretched before him, peering curiously at Richard and myself over black-rimmed glasses and then, with equal interest, turning back to the ash of a long cigar and talking drama with the famous jerky, nasal voice but always with a marvellous poise and convincing authority. He took a great liking to Richard in those days, sent him a church-warden's pipe that he had used as Corporal Brewster, and made much of him later when my brother was in London. Miss Terry was a much less formal and forbidding guest, rushing into the house like a whirlwind and filling the place with the sunshine and happiness that seemed to fairly exude from her beautiful magnetic presence. Augustin Daly usually came with at least three of the stars of his company which I have already mentioned, but even the beautiful Rehan and the nice old Mrs. Gilbert seemed thoroughly awed in the presence of "the Guv'nor." He was a most crusty, dictatorial party, as I remember him with his searching eyes and raven locks, always dressed in black and always failing to find virtue in any actor or actress not a member of his own company. I remember one particularly acrid discussion between him and my father in regard to Julia Marlowe, who was then making her first bow to the public. Daly contended that in a few years the lady would be absolutely unheard of and backed his opinion by betting a dinner for those present with my father that his judgment would prove correct. However, he was very kind to Richard and myself and frequently allowed us to play about behind the scenes, which was a privilege I imagine he granted to very few of his friends' children. One night, long after this, when Richard was a reporter in New York, he and Miss Rehan were burlesquing a scene from a play on which the last curtain had just fallen. It was on the stage of Daly's theatre at Thirtieth Street and Broadway, and from his velvet box at the prompt-entrance Daly stood gloomily watching their fooling. When they had finished the mock scene Richard went over to Daly and said, "How bad do you think I am as an actor, Mr. Daly?" and greatly to my brother's delight the greatest manager of them all of those days grumbled back at him: "You're so bad, Richard, that I'll give you a hundred dollars a week, and you can sign the contract whenever you're ready." Although that was much more than my brother was making in his chosen profession at the time, and in spite of the intense interest he had in the theatre, he never considered the offer seriously. As a matter of fact, Richard had many natural qualifications that fitted him for the stage, and in after-years, when he was rehearsing one of his own plays, he could and frequently would go up on the stage and read almost any part better than the actor employed to do it. Of course, he lacked the ease of gesture and the art of timing which can only be attained after sound experience, but his reading of lines and his knowledge of characterization was quite unusual. In proof of this I know of at least two managers who, when Richard wanted to sell them plays, refused to have him read them the manuscript on the ground that his reading gave the dialogue a value it did not really possess. In the spring of 1880 Richard left the Episcopal Academy, and the following September went to Swarthmore College, situated just outside of Philadelphia. I fear, however, the change was anything but a success. The life of the big coeducational school did not appeal to him at all and, in spite of two or three friendships he made among the girls and boys, he depended for amusement almost wholly on his own resources. In the afternoons and on holidays he took long walks over the country roads and in search of adventure visited many farmhouses. His excuse for these calls was that he was looking for old furniture and china, and he frequently remained long enough to make sketches of such objects as he pretended had struck his artistic fancy. Of these adventures he wrote at great length to his mother and father, and the letters were usually profusely decorated with illustrations of the most striking incidents of the various escapades. Several of these Swarthmore experiences he used afterward in short stories, and both the letters and sketches he sent to his parents at the time he regarded in the light of preparation for his future work. In his studies he was perhaps less successful than he had been at the Episcopal Academy, and although he played football and took part in the track sports he was really but little interested in either. There were half-holidays on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and when my brother did not come to town I went to Swarthmore and we spent the afternoons in first cooking our lunch in a hospitable woods and then playing some games in the open that Richard had devised. But as I recall these outings they were not very joyous occasions, as Richard was extremely unhappy over his failures at school and greatly depressed about the prospects for the future. He finished the college year at Swarthmore, but so unhappy had he been there that there was no thought in his mind or in that of his parents of his returning. At that time my uncle, H. Wilson Harding, was a professor at Lehigh University, and it was arranged that Richard should go to Bethlehem the following fall, live with his uncle, and continue his studies at Ulrich's Preparatory School, which made a specialty of preparing boys for Lehigh. My uncle lived in a charming old house on Market Street in Bethlehem, quite near the Moravian settlement and across the river from the university and the iron mills. He was a bachelor, but of a most gregarious and hospitable disposition, and Richard therefore found himself largely his own master, in a big, roomy house which was almost constantly filled with the most charming and cultivated people. There my uncle and Richard, practically of about the same age so far as their viewpoint of life was concerned, kept open house, and if it had not been for the occasional qualms his innate hatred of mathematics caused him, I think my brother would have been completely happy. Even studies no longer worried him particularly and he at once started in to make friendships, many of which lasted throughout his life. As is usual with young men of seventeen, most of these men and women friends were several times Richard's age, but at the period Richard was a particularly precocious and amusing youth and a difference of a few decades made but little difference--certainly not to Richard. Finley Peter Dunne once wrote of my brother that he "probably knew more waiters, generals, actors, and princes than any man who lived," and I think it was during the first year of his life at Bethlehem that he began the foundation for the remarkable collection of friends, both as to numbers and variety, of which he died possessed. Although a "prep," he made many friends among the undergraduates of Lehigh. He made friends with the friends of his uncle and many friends in both of the Bethlehems of which his uncle had probably never heard. Even at that early age he counted among his intimates William W. Thurston, who was president of the Bethlehem Iron Company, and J. Davis Brodhead, one of Pennsylvania's most conspicuous Democratic congressmen and attorneys. Those who knew him at that time can easily understand why Richard attracted men and women so much older than himself. He was brimming over with physical health and animal spirits and took the keenest interest in every one he met and in everything that was going on about him. And in the broadest sense he saw to it then, as he did throughout his life, that he always did his share. During those early days at Bethlehem his letters to his family were full of his social activities, with occasional references to his work at school. He was always going to dinners or dances, entertaining members of visiting theatrical companies; and on Friday night my mother usually received a telegram, saying that he would arrive the next day with a party of friends whom he had inadvertently asked to lunch and a matinee. It was after one of these weekly visits that my mother wrote Richard the following: Monday Night. MY DARLING Boy: You went off in such a hurry that it took my breath at the last. You say coming down helps you. It certainly does me. It brings a real sunshine to Papa and me. He was saying that to-day. I gave Nolly a sort of holiday after her miseries last night. We went down street and got Papa a present for our wedding day, a picture, after all, and then I took Miss Baker some tickets for a concert. I saw her father who said he "must speak about my noble looking boy." I always thought him a genius but now I think him a man of penetration as well. Then Nolly and I went over to see the Russians. But they are closely boxed up and not allowed to-day to see visitors. So we came home cross and hungry. All evening I have been writing business letters. Papa has gone to a reception and Charley is hard at work at his desk. I answered Mr. Allen's letter this morning, dear, and told him you would talk to him. When you do, dear, talk freely to him as to me. You will not perhaps agree with all he says. But your own thoughts will be healthier for bringing them--as I might say, out of doors. You saw how it was by coming down here. Love of Christ is not a melancholy nor a morbid thing, dear love, but ought to make one more social and cheerful and alive. I wish you could come home oftener. Try and get ahead with lessons so that you can come oftener. And when you feel as if prayer was a burden, stop praying and go out and try to put your Christianity into real action by doing some kindness--even speaking in a friendly way to somebody. Bring yourself into contact with new people--not John, Hugh, Uncle and Grandma, and try to act to them as Christ would have you act, and my word for it, you will go home with a new light on your own relations to Him and a new meaning for your prayers. You remember the prayer "give me a great thought to refresh me." I think you will find some great thoughts in human beings--they will help you to understand yourself and God, when you try to help them God makes you happy my darling. MAMA. It was in this year that Richard enjoyed the thrill of seeing in print his first contribution to a periodical. The date of this important event, important, at least, to my brother, was February 1, the fortunate publication was Judge, and the effusion was entitled "The Hat and Its Inmate." Its purport was an overheard conversation between two young ladies at a matinee and the editors thought so well of it that for the privilege of printing the article they gave Richard a year's subscription to Judge. His scrap-book of that time shows that in 1884 Life published a short burlesque on George W. Cable's novel, "Dr. Sevier," and in the same year The Evening Post paid him $1.05 for an article about "The New Year at Lehigh." It was also in the spring of 1884 that Richard published his first book, "The Adventures of My Freshman," a neat little paper-covered volume including half a dozen of the short stories that had already appeared in The Lehigh Burr. In writing in a copy of this book in later years, Richard said: "This is a copy of the first book of mine published. My family paid to have it printed and finding no one else was buying it, bought up the entire edition. Finding the first edition had gone so quickly, I urged them to finance a second one, and when they were unenthusiastic I was hurt. Several years later when I found the entire edition in our attic, I understood their reluctance. The reason the book did not sell is, I think, because some one must have read it." In the summer of 1882 Richard went to Boston, and in the following letter unhesitatingly expressed his opinion of that city and its people. BOSTON, Wednesday. July 1882. DEAR FAMILY:-- I left Newport last night or rather this morning. I stopped at Beverly and called on Dr. Holmes. He talked a great deal about mama and about a great many other things equally lovely in a very easy, charming way. All I had to do was to listen and I was only too willing to do that. We got along splendidly. He asked me to stay to dinner but I refused with thanks, as I had only come to pay my respects and put off to Dr. Bartol's. Dr. Holmes accompanied me to the depot and saw me safely off. Of all the lovely men I ever saw Dr. Bartol is the one. He lives in a great, many roomed with as many gables, house. Elizabethan, of course, with immense fireplaces, brass and dark woods, etchings and engravings, with the sea and rocks immediately under the window and the ocean stretching out for miles, lighthouses and more Elizabethan houses half hid on the bank, and ships and small boats pushing by within a hundred rods of the windows. I stayed to dinner there and we had a very jolly time. There were two other young men and another maiden besides Miss Bartol. They talked principally about the stage; that is, the Boston Stock Company, which is their sole thought and knowledge of the drama. The Dr. would strike off now and then to philosophizing and moralizing but his daughter would immediately sit upon him, much to my disgust but to the evident relief of the rest. His wife is as lovely as he is but I can't give it to you all now. Wait until I get home. The young lady, the youths and myself came up to Boston together and had as pleasant a ride, as the heat would allow. I left them at the depot and went up to the Parker House and then to the Art Museum. The statuary is plaster, the coins are copies, and by the way, I found one exactly like mine, which, if it is genuine is worth, "well considerable", as the personage in charge remarked. The pictures were simply vile, only two or three that I recognized and principally Millet and some charcoal sketches of Hunt's, who is the Apostle of Art here. The china was very fine but they had a collection of old furniture and armor which was better than anything else. Fresh from or rather musty from these antiques, who should I meet but the cheerful Dixey and Powers. We had a very jolly talk and I enjoyed it immensely, not only myself but all the surrounding populace, as Dixey would persist in showing the youthful some new "gag," and would break into a clog or dialect much to the delectation of the admiring Bostonians. I am stranded here for to night and will push on to Newport to-morrow. I'll go see the "babes" to night, as there is nothing else in the city that is worth seeing that I haven't investigated. I left the Newburyportians in grief with regret. I met lots of nice people and every one was so very kind to me, from the authoresses to the serving maids. Good-bye. DICK. CHAPTER II COLLEGE DAYS In the fall of 1882 Richard entered Lehigh, but the first year of his college life varied very little from the one he had spent in the preparatory school. During that year he had met most of the upper classmen, and the only difference was that he could now take an active instead of a friendly interest in the life and the sports of the college. Also he had formed certain theories which he promptly proceeded to put into practical effect. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these was his belief that cane-rushes and hazing were wholly unnecessary and barbarous customs, and should have no place in the college of his day. Against the former he spoke at college meetings, and wrote long letters to the local papers decrying the custom. His stand against hazing was equally vehement, and he worked hand in hand with the faculty to eradicate it entirely from the college life. That his stand was purely for a principle and not from any fear of personal injury, I think the following letter to his father will show: BETHLEHEM, February 1882. DEAR DAD: You may remember a conversation we had at Squan about hazing in which you said it was a very black-guardly thing and a cowardly thing. I didn't agree with you, but when I saw how it really was and how silly and undignified it was, besides being brutal, I thought it over and changed my mind completely, agreeing with you in every respect. A large number of our class have been hazed, taking it as a good joke, and have been laughed at by the whole college. I talked to the boys about it, and said what I would do and so on, without much effect. Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night. After that a great many came to me and advised and warned me as to what I should do. I decided to get about fifty of our class outside and then fight it out; that was before I changed my mind. As soon as I did I regretted it very much, but, as it turned out, the class didn't come, so I was alone, as I wished to be. You see, I'd not a very good place here; the fellows looked on me as a sort of special object of ridicule, on account of the hat and cane, walk, and so on, though I thought I'd got over that by this time. The Opera House was partly filled with college men, a large number of sophomores and a few upper class men. It was pretty generally known I was going to have a row, and that brought them as much as the show. Poor Ruff was in agony all day. He supposed I'd get into the fight, and he knew he'd get in, too, sooner or later. If he did he'd be held and not be able to do anything, and then the next day be blamed by the whole college for interfering in a class matter. He hadn't any money to get into the show, and so wandered around outside in the rain in a great deal more excited state than I was. Howe went all over town after putting on his old clothes, in case of personal damage, in search of freshmen who were at home out of the wet. As I left the building a man grabbed me by my arm, and the rest, with the seniors gathered around; the only freshman present, who was half scared to death, clung as near to me as possible. I withdrew my arm and faced them. "If this means hazing," I said, "I'm not with you. There's not enough men here to haze me, but there's enough to thrash me, and I'd rather be thrashed than hazed." You see, I wanted them to understand exactly how I looked at it, and they wouldn't think I was simply hotheaded and stubborn. I was very cool about it all. They broke in with all sorts of explanations; hazing was the last thing they had thought of. No, indeed, Davis, old fellow, you're mistaken. I told them if that was so, all right, I was going home. I saw several of my friends in the crowd waiting for me, but as I didn't want them to interfere, I said nothing, and they did not recognize me. When among the crowd of sophomores, the poor freshman made a last effort, he pulled me by the coat and begged me to come with him. I said no, I was going home. When I reached the next corner I stopped. "I gave you fair warning, keep off. I tell you I'll strike the first man, the first one, that touches me." Then the four who had been appointed to seize me jumped on me, and I only got one good blow in before they had me down in the gutter and were beating me on the face and head. I put my hands across my face, and so did not get any hard blows directly in the face. They slipped back in a moment, and when I was ready I scrambled up pretty wet and muddy, and with my face stinging where they had struck. It had all been done so quickly, and there was such a large crowd coming from the theatre, that, of course, no one saw it. When I got up there was a circle all around me. They hadn't intended to go so far. The men, except those four who had beaten me, were rather ashamed and wished they were out of it. I turned to Emmerich, a postgraduate, and told him to give me room. "Now," I said, "you're not able to haze me, and I can't thrash twelve of you, but I'll fight any one man you bring out." I asked for the man that struck me, and named another, but there was no response. The upper classmen, who had just arrived, called out that was fair, and they'd see it fair. Goodnough, Purnell and Douglas, who don't like me much, either. Ruff was beside me by this time. He hadn't seen anything of it, and did not get there until he heard me calling for a fair chance and challenging the class for a man. I called out again, the second time, and still no one came, so I took occasion to let them know why I had done as I did in a short speech to the crowd. I said I was a peaceable fellow, thought hazing silly, and as I never intended to haze myself, I didn't intend any one to haze me. Then I said again, "This is the third time, will one of your men fight this fair? I can't fight twelve of you." Just then two officers who had called on some mill-hands, who are always dying for a fight, and a citizen to help them, burst into the crowd of students, shouldering them around like sheep until they got to me, when one of them put his arm around me, and said, "I don't know anything about this crowd, but I'll see you're protected, sir. I'll give 'em fair play." One officer got hold of Ruff and pretty near shook him to pieces until I had to interfere and explain. They were for forming a body-guard, and were loud in their denunciations of the college, and declaring they'd see me through if I was a stranger to 'em. Two or three of the sophomores, when they saw how things were going, set up a yell, but Griffin struck out and sent one of them flying one way and his hat another, so the yells ended. Howe and Murray Stuart took me up to their rooms, and Ruff went off for beefsteak for my eye, and treated the crowd who had come to the rescue, at Dixon's, to beer. The next day was Saturday, and as there was to be a meeting of the Athletic Association, of course, I wanted to show up. The fellows all looked at my eye pretty hard and said nothing. I felt pretty sure that the sympathy was all with me. Four men are elected from the college to be on the athletic committee. They can be nominated by any one, though generally it is done by a man in their own class. We had agreed the day before to vote for Tolman for our class, so when the president announced nominations were in order for the freshmen class, Tolman was instantly nominated. At the same time one of the leading sophomores jumped up and nominated Mr. Davis, and a number of men from the same class seconded it. I knew every one in the college knew of what had happened, and especially the sophomores, so I was, of course, very much surprised. I looked unconscious, though, and waited. One of the seniors asked that the nominees should stand up, as they didn't know their names only their faces. As each man rose he was hissed and groaned down again. When I stood up the sophomores burst into a yell and clapped and stamped, yelling, "Davis! Davis! vote for D!" until I sat down. As I had already decided to nominate Tolman, I withdrew my name from the nominees, a movement which was received by loud cries of "No! No!" from the sophs. So, you see, Dad, I did as you said, as I thought was right, and came out well indeed. You see, I am now the hero of the hour, every one in town knows it, and every one congratulates me, and, "Well done, me boy," as Morrow '83 said, seems to be the idea, one gets taken care of in this world if you do what's the right thing, if it is only a street fight. In fact, as one of the seniors said, I've made five friends where I had one before. The sophs are ashamed and sorry, as their conduct in chapel, which was more marked, than I made it, shows. I've nothing to show for it but a red mark under the eye, and so it is the best thing that could possibly have happened. Poor Ruff hugged me all the way home, and I've started out well in a good way, I think, though not a very logical one. Uncle says to tell you that my conduct has his approval throughout. DICK. To which letter my father promptly replied: PHILADELPHIA. February 25th, 1882. DEAR OLD BOY: I'm glad the affair ended so well. I don't want you to fight, but if you have to fight a cuss like that do it with all your might, and don't insist that either party shall too strictly observe the Markis O' Queensbury rules. Hit first and hardest so that thine adversary shall beware of you. DAD. At that time the secret societies played a very important part in the college life at Lehigh, and while I do not believe that Richard shared the theory of some of the students that they were a serious menace to the social fabric, he was quite firm in his belief that it was inadvisable to be a member of any fraternity. In a general way he did not like the idea of secrecy even in its mildest form, and then, as throughout his life, he refused to join any body that would in any way limit his complete independence of word or action. In connection with this phase of his college life I quote from an appreciation which M. A. De W. Howe, one of Richard's best friends both at college and in after-life, wrote for The Lehigh Burr at the time of my brother's death: "To the credit of the perceptive faculty of undergraduates, it ought to be said that the classmates and contemporaries of Richard Harding Davis knew perfectly well, while he and they were young together, that in him Lehigh had a son so marked in his individuality, so endowed with talents and character that he stood quite apart from the other collegians of his day. Prophets were as rare in the eighties as they have always been, before and since, and nobody could have foreseen that the name and work of Dick Davis would long before his untimely death, indeed within a few years from leaving college, be better known throughout the world than those of any other Lehigh man. We who knew him in his college days could not feel the smallest surprise that he won himself quickly a brilliant name, and kept a firm hold upon it to the last. "What was it that made him so early a marked man? I think it was the spirit of confidence and enthusiasm which turned every enterprise he undertook into an adventure,--the brave and humorous playing of the game of life, the true heart, the wholesome body and soul of my friend and classmate. He did not excel in studies or greatly, in athletics. But in his own field, that of writing, he was so much better than the rest of us that no one of his fellow-editors of the Epitome or Burr needed to be considered in comparison with him. No less, in spite of his voluntary nonmembership in the fraternities of his day, was he a leader in the social activities of the University. The 'Arcadian Club' devoted in its beginnings to the 'pipes, books, beer and gingeralia' of Davis's song about it and the 'Mustard and Cheese' were his creations. In all his personal relationships he was the most amusing and stimulating of companions. With garb and ways of unique picturesqueness, rarer even in college communities a generation ago than at present, it was inevitable that he sometimes got himself laughed at as well as with. But what did it all matter, even then? To-day it adds a glow of color to what would be in any case a vivid, deeply valued memory. "It is hard to foresee in youth what will come most sharply and permanently in the long run. After all these years it is good to find that Davis and what his companionship gave one hold their place with the strongest influences of Lehigh." But Richard was naturally gregarious and at heart had a great fondness for clubs and social gatherings. Therefore, having refused the offer of several fraternities that did him the honor to ask him to become a member, it was necessary for him to form a few clubs that held meetings, but no secrets. Perhaps the most successful of these were "The Mustard and Cheese," a dramatic club devoted to the presentation of farces and musical comedies, and The Arcadia Club, to the fortnightly meetings of which he devoted much time and thought. The following letter to his father will give some idea of the scope of the club, which, as in the case of "The Mustard and Cheese," gained a permanent and important place in the social life of Lehigh. DEAR DAD: We have started the best sort of a club up here which I am anxious to tell you of. It consists of a spread, net price of which will be about 30 cents each, every two or three weeks. Only six fellows belong and those the best of the College. Purnell, Haines and myself founded it. I chose Charley, Purnell, Reeves, Haines and Howe. We will meet Saturday nights at 9 so as not to interfere with our work, and sing, read, eat and box until midnight. It is called the "Pipe and Bowl," and is meant to take the place that The Hasty Pudding, Hammer and Tongs and Mermaid do at other colleges. Two of us are to invite two outsiders in turn each meeting. We will hope to have Dad a member, honorary, of course, when we can persuade him to give us a night off with his company. We want to combine a literary feature and so will have selected readings to provoke discussions after the pipes are lit. The men are very enthusiastic about it and want to invite Mr. Allen and you and every one that they can make an honorary member of immediately. It was first as an associate editor and afterward as editor-in-chief of the college paper, The Lehigh Burr, that Richard found his greatest pleasure and interest during his three years at Lehigh. In addition to his editorial duties he wrote a very great part of every issue of the paper, and his contributions included short stories, reports of news events, editorials, and numerous poems. As, after his life at college, Richard dropped verse as a mode of expression, I reprint two of the poems which show him in the lighter vein of those early days. A COMMENCEMENT IDYL "I'm a Freshman who has ended his first year, But I'm new; And I do whate'er the Juniors, whom I fear, Bid me do. Under sudden showers I thrive; To be bad and bold I strive, But they ask--'Is it alive?' So they do. I'm a Sophomore who has passed off his exams, Let me loose! With a mark as high as any other man's, As obtuse I'm fraternal. I am Jolly. I am seldom melancholy And to bone I think is folly, What's the use? I'm a Junior whom exams. have left forlorn, Flunked me dead; So I'll keep the town awake 'till early morn; Paint it red. At class-meetings I'm a kicker, Take no water with my liquor, And a dumb-bell's not thicker Than my head. I'm a Senior whose diploma's within reach, Eighty-four. On Commencement Day you'll hear my maiden-speech; I will soar! I got through without condition; I'm a mass of erudition; Do you know of a position!" OUR STREET "Our street is still and silent, Grass grows from curb to curb, No baker's bells With jangling knells Our studious minds disturb. No organ grinders ever call, No hucksters mar our peace; For traffic shuns our neighborhood And leaves us to our ease. But now it lives and brightens, Assumes a livelier hue; The pavements wide, On either side, Would seem to feel it too. You might not note the difference, The change from grave to gay, But I can tell, and know full well, Priscilla walks our way." Shortly after his return to college Richard celebrated his nineteenth birthday, and received these letters from his father and mother: April 17th, 1883. MY DEAR BOY: When I was thinking what I could give to you to-morrow, I remembered the story of Herder, who when he was old and weak and they brought him food and wine asked for "a great thought to quicken him." So I have written some old sayings for you that have helped me. Maybe, this year, or some other year, when I am not with you, they may give you, sometimes, comfort and strength. God bless you my son-- YOUR OLD MOTHER who loves you dearly--dearly. THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER PHILADELPHIA, April 17th, 1883. MY DEAR BOY: You are to be nineteen years old on Wednesday. After two years more you will be a man. You are so manly and good a boy that I could not wish you to change in any serious or great thing. You have made us very happy through being what you have been, what you are. You fill us with hope of your future virtue and usefulness. To be good is the best thing of all; it counts for more than anything else in the world. We are very grateful that you have even in youth been wise enough to choose the right road. You will find it not easy to keep upon it always, but remember if you do get off struggle back to it. I do not know but I think God loves the effort to do as well as the act done. I congratulate you my dear son, on your new birthday. I wish you health, happiness and God's loving care. May he bless you my son forever. I enclose a trifle for your pleasure. My love to you always, but God bless you dear Dick. DAD. In the fall of 1885, Richard decided to leave Lehigh and go to John Hopkins University, where he took a special course in such studies as would best benefit him in the career which he had now carefully planned. During this year in Baltimore Richard's letters show that he paid considerable attention to such important subjects as political economy and our own labor problems, but they also show that he did not neglect football or the lighter social diversions. In a short space of time he had made many friends, was very busy going to dinners and dances, and had fallen in love with an entirely new set of maids and matrons. Richard had already begun to send contributions to the magazines, and an occasional acceptance caused him the satisfaction common to all beginners. It was in regard to one of these early contributions that my mother wrote Richard the following letter: PHILADELPHIA January 1887. DEAR BOY: What has become of The Current? It has not come yet. If it has suspended publication be sure and get your article back. You must not destroy a single page you write. You will find every idea of use to you hereafter. Sometimes I am afraid you think I don't take interest enough in your immediate success now with the articles you send. But I've had thirty years experience and I know how much that sort of success depends on the articles suiting the present needs of the magazine, and also on the mood of the editor when he reads it. Besides--except for your own disappointment--I know it would be better if you would not publish under your own name for a little while. Dr. Holland--who had lots of literary shrewdness both as writer and publisher--used to say for a young man or woman to rush into print was sure ruin to their lasting fame. They either compromised their reputations by inferior work or they made a great hit and never played up to it, afterwards, in public opinion. Now my dear old man this sounds like awfully cold comfort. But it is the wisest idea your mother has got. I confess I have GREAT faith in you--and I try to judge you as if you were not my son. I think you are going to take a high place among American authors, but I do not think you are going to do it by articles like that you sent to The Current. The qualities which I think will bring it to you, you don't seem to value at all. They are your dramatic eye. I mean your quick perception of character and of the way character shows itself in looks, tones, dress, etc., and in your keen sympathy--with all kinds of people--Now, these are the requisites for a novelist. Added to that your humour. You ought to make a novelist of the first class. But you must not expect to do it this week or next. A lasting, real success takes time, and patient, steady work. Read Boz's first sketches of "London Life" and compare them with "Sydney Carton" or "David Copperfield" and you will see what time and hard work will do to develop genius. I suppose you will wonder why I am moved to say all this? It is, I think, because of your saying "the article sent to St. Nicholas was the best you would be able to do for years to come" and I saw you were going to make it a crucial test of your ability. That is, forgive me, nothing but nonsense. Whatever the article may be, you may write one infinitely superior to it next week or month. Just in proportion as you feel more deeply, or notice more keenly, and as you acquire the faculty of expressing your feelings or observations more delicately and powerfully which faculty must come into practice. It is not inspiration--it never was that--without practice, with any writer from Shakespeare down. me. I don't say, like Papa, stop writing. God forbid. I would almost as soon say stop breathing, for it is pretty much the same thing. But only to remember that you have not yet conquered your art. You are a journeyman not a master workman, so if you don't succeed, it does not count. The future is what I look to, for you. I had to stop my work to say all this, so good-bye dear old chum. Yours, MOTHER. If anything worried Richard at all at this period, I think it was his desire to get down to steady newspaper work, or indeed any kind of work that would act as the first step of his career and by which he could pay his own way in the world. It was with this idea uppermost in his mind in the late spring of 1886, and without any particular regret for the ending of his college career, that he left Baltimore and, returning to his home in Philadelphia, determined to accept the first position that presented itself. But instead of going to work at once, he once more changed his plans and decided to sail for Santiago de Cuba with his friend William W. Thurston, who as president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, was deeply interested in the iron mines of that region. Here and then it was that Richard first fell in love with Cuba--a love which in later years became almost an obsession with him. Throughout his life whenever it was possible, and sometimes when it seemed practically impossible, my brother would listen to the call of his beloved tropics and, casting aside all responsibilities, would set sail for Santiago. After all it was quite natural that he should feel as he did about this little Cuban coast town, for apart from its lazy life, spicy smells, waving palms and Spanish cooking, it was here that he found the material for his first novel and greatest monetary success, "Soldiers of Fortune." Apart from the many purely pleasure trips he made to Santiago, twice he returned there to work--once as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, and again when he went with Augustus Thomas to assist in the latter's film version of the play which years before Thomas had made from the novel. CHAPTER III FIRST NEWSPAPER EXPERIENCES In the late summer of 1886 Richard returned from Cuba and settled down in Philadelphia to write an article about his experiences at Santiago and to look for regular newspaper work. Early in September he wrote his mother: September, 1886. DEAR MOTHER: I saw the Record people to-day. They said there was not an opening but could give me "chance" work, that is, I was to report each day at one and get what was left over. I said I would take it as I would have my mornings free to write the article and what afternoons I did not have newspaper work besides. This is satisfactory. They are either doing all they can to oblige Dad or else giving me a trial trip before making an opening. The article is progressing but slowly. To paraphrase Talleyrand, what's done is but little and that little is not good. However, since your last letter full of such excellent "tips" I have rewritten it and think it is much improved. I will write to Thurston concerning the artist to-morrow. He is away from B. at present. On the whole the article is not bad. Your boy, DICK. Richard's stay on The Record, however, was short-lived. His excuse for the brevity of the experience was given in an interview some years later. "My City Editor didn't like me because on cold days I wore gloves. But he was determined to make me work, and gave me about eighteen assignments a day, and paid me $7. a week. At the end of three months he discharged me as incompetent." From The Record Richard went to The Press, which was much more to his liking, and, indeed it was here that he did his first real work and showed his first promise. For nearly three years he did general reporting and during this time gained a great deal more personal success than comes to most members of that usually anonymous profession. His big chance came with the Johnstown flood, and the news stories he wired to his paper showed the first glimpse of his ability as a correspondent. Later on, disguised as a crook, he joined a gang of yeggmen, lived with them in the worst dives of the city, and eventually gained their good opinion to the extent of being allowed to assist in planning a burglary. But before the actual robbery took place, Richard had obtained enough evidence against his crook companions to turn them over to the police and eventually land them in prison. It was during these days that he wrote his first story for a magazine, and the following letter shows that it was something of a milestone in his career. PHILADELPHIA. August, 1888. DEAR FAMILY: The St. Nicholas people sent me a check for $50 for the "pirate" story. It would be insupportable affectation to say that I was not delighted. Jennings Crute and I were waiting for breakfast when I found the letter. I opened it very slowly, for I feared they would bluff me with some letter about illustrations or revision, or offering me a reduced subscription to the magazine. There was a letter inside and a check. I read the letter before I looked at the check, which I supposed would be for $30, as the other story was valued at $20. The note said that a perfect gentleman named Chichester would be pleased if I would find enclosed a check for $50. I looked at Jenny helplessly, and said, "It's for fifty, Jenny." Crute had an insane look in his eyes as he murmured "half a hundred dollars, and on your day off, too." Then I sat down suddenly and wondered what I would buy first, and Crute sat in a dazed condition, and abstractedly took a handful of segars out of the box dear old Dad gave me. As I didn't say anything, he took another handful, and then sat down and gazed at the check for five minutes in awe. After breakfast I calculated how much I would have after I paid my debts. I still owe say $23, and I have some shoes to pay for and my hair to cut. I had a wild idea of going over to New York and buying some stocks, but I guess I'll go to Bond's and Baker's instead. I'm going down street now to see if Drexel wants to borrow any ready money-on the way down I will make purchases and pay bills so that my march will be a triumphal procession. I got a story on the front page this morning about an explosion at Columbia Avenue Station--I went out on it with another man my senior in years and experience, whom Watrous expected to write the story while I hustled for facts. When we got back I had all the facts, and what little he had was incorrect--so I said I would dispense with his services and write the story myself. I did it very politely, but it queered the man before the men, and Watrous grew very sarcastic at his expense. Next time Andy will know better and let me get my own stories alone. Your Millionaire Son, DICK. I'm still the "same old Dick"; not proud a bit. This was my mother's reply: Thursday. August 1888. DEAR DICK: Your letter has just come and we are all delighted. Well done for old St. Nicholas! I thought they meant to wait till the story was published. It took me back to the day when I got $50. for "Life in the Iron Mills." I carried the letter half a day before opening it, being so sure that it was a refusal. I had a great mind to read the letter to Davis and Cecile who were on the porch but was afraid you would not like it. I did read them an extremely impertinent enclosure which was so like the letter I sent yesterday. That I think you got it before writing this. . . . Well I am glad about that cheque! Have you done anything on Gallagher? That is by far the best work you've done--oh, by far--Send that to Gilder. In old times The Century would not print the word "brandy." But those days are over. Two more days--dear boy-- MOTHER. In addition to his work on The Press, Richard also found time to assist his friend, Morton McMichael, 3d, in the editing of a weekly publication called The Stage. In fact with the exception of the services of an office boy, McMichael and Richard were The Stage. Between them they wrote the editorials, criticisms, the London and Paris special correspondence, solicited the advertisements, and frequently assisted in the wrapping and mailing of the copies sent to their extremely limited list of subscribers. During this time, however, Richard was establishing himself as a star reporter on The Press, and was already known as a clever news-gatherer and interviewer. It was in reply to a letter that Richard wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson enclosing an interview he had had with Walt Whitman, that Stevenson wrote the following letter--which my brother always regarded as one of his greatest treasures: Why, thank you so much for your frank, agreeable and natural letter. It is certainly very pleasant that all you young fellows should enjoy my work and get some good out of it and it was very kind in you to write and tell me so. The tale of the suicide is excellently droll, and your letter, you may be sure, will be preserved. If you are to escape unhurt out of your present business you must be very careful, and you must find in your heart much constancy. The swiftly done work of the journalist and the cheap finish and ready made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when I say "writing"--O, believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you some day. Please excuse this sermon from Your obliged ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. In the spring of 1889 Richard as the correspondent of the Philadelphia Telegraph, accompanied a team of Philadelphia cricketers on a tour of Ireland and England, but as it was necessary for him to spend most of his time reporting the matches played in small university towns, he saw only enough of London to give him a great longing to return as soon as the chance offered. Late that summer he resumed his work on The Press, but Richard was not at all satisfied with his journalistic progress, and for long his eyes had been turned toward New York. There he knew that there was not only a broader field for such talent as he might possess, but that the chance for adventure was much greater, and it was this hope and love of adventure that kept Richard moving on all of his life. On a morning late in September, 1889, he started for New York to look for a position as reporter on one of the metropolitan newspapers. I do not know whether he carried with him any letters or that he had any acquaintances in the journalistic world on whose influence he counted, but, in any case, he visited a number of offices without any success whatever. Indeed, he had given up the day as wasted, and was on his way to take the train back to Philadelphia. Tired and discouraged, he sat down on a bench in City Hall Park, and mentally shook his fist at the newspaper offices on Park Row that had given him so cold a reception. At this all-important moment along came Arthur Brisbane, whom Richard had met in London when the former was the English correspondent of The Sun. Brisbane had recently been appointed editor of The Evening Sun, and had already met with a rather spectacular success. On hearing the object of Richard's visit to New York, he promptly offered him a position on his staff and Richard as promptly accepted. I remember that the joyous telegram he sent to my mother, telling of his success, and demanding that the fatted calf be killed for dinner that night was not received with unalloyed happiness. To my mother and father it meant that their first-born was leaving home to seek his fortune, and that without Richard's love and sympathy the home could never be quite the same. But the fatted calf was killed, every one pretended to be just as elated as Richard was over his good fortune, and in two days he left us for his first adventure. The following note to his mother Richard scribbled off in pencil at the railway-station on his way to New York: I am not surprised that you were sad if you thought I was going away for good. I could not think of it myself. I am only going to make a little reputation and to learn enough of the business to enable me to live at home in the centre of the universe with you. That is truth. God bless you. DICK. CHAPTER IV NEW YORK Of the many completely happy periods of Richard's life there were few more joyous than the first years he spent as a reporter in New York. For the first time he was completely his own master and paying his own way--a condition which afforded him infinite satisfaction. He was greatly attached to Brisbane and as devoted to the interests of The Evening Sun as if he had been the editor and publisher. In return Brisbane gave him a free rein and allowed him to write very much what and as he chose. The two men were constantly together, in and out of office hours, and planned many of the leading features of the paper which on account of the brilliancy of its news stories and special articles was at that time attracting an extraordinary amount of attention. Richard divided his working hours between reporting important news events, writing specials (principally about theatrical people), and the Van Bibber stories, nearly all of which were published for the first time in The Evening Sun. These short tales of New York life soon made a distinct hit, and, while they appeared anonymously, it was generally known that Richard was their author. In addition to his newspaper work my brother was also working on short stories for the magazines, and in 1890 scored his first real success in this field, with "Gallegher," which appeared in Scribner's. This was shortly followed by "The Other Woman," "Miss Catherwaite's Understudy," "A Walk up the Avenue," "My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegen," "An Unfinished Story," and other stories that soon gave him an established reputation as a writer of fiction. But while Richard's success was attained in a remarkably short space of time and at an extremely early age, it was not accomplished without an enormous amount of hard work and considerable privation. When he first went to New York his salary was but thirty dollars a week, and while he remained on The Evening Sun never over fifty dollars, and the prices he received for his first short stories were extremely meagre. During the early days on The Evening Sun he had a room in a little house at 108 Waverly Place, and took his meals in the neighborhood where he happened to find himself and where they were cheapest. He usually spent his week-ends in Philadelphia, but his greatest pleasure was when he could induce some member of his family to visit him in New York. I fear I was the one who most often accepted his hospitality, and wonderful visits they were, certainly to me, and I think to Richard as well. The great event was our Saturday-night dinner, when we always went to a little restaurant on Sixth Avenue. I do not imagine the fifty-cent table d'hote (vin compris) the genial Mr. Jauss served us was any better than most fifty-cent table-d'hote dinners, but the place was quaint and redolent of strange smells of cooking as well as of a true bohemian atmosphere. Those were the days when the Broadway Theatre was given over to the comic operas in which Francis Wilson and De Wolfe Hopper were the stars, and as both of the comedians were firm friends of Richard, we invariably ended our evening at the Broadway. Sometimes we occupied a box as the guests of the management, and at other times we went behind the scenes and sat in the star's dressing-room. I think I liked it best when Hopper was playing, because during Wilson's regime the big dressing-room was a rather solemn sort of place, but when Hopper ruled, the room was filled with pretty girls and he treated us to fine cigars and champagne. Halcyon nights those, and then on Sunday morning we always breakfasted at old Martin's on University Place eggs a la Martin and that wonderful coffee and pain de menage. And what a wrench it was when I tore myself away from the delights of the great city and scurried back to my desk in sleepy Philadelphia. Had I been a prince royal Richard could not have planned more carefully than he did for these visits, and to meet the expense was no easy matter for him. Indeed, I know that to pay for all our gayeties he usually had to carry his guitar to a neighboring pawn-broker where the instrument was always good for an eight-dollar loan. But from the time Richard first began to make his own living one of the great pleasures of his life was to celebrate, or as he called it, to "have a party." Whenever he had finished a short story he had a party, and when the story had been accepted there was another party, and, of course, the real party was when he received the check. And so it was throughout his life, giving a party to some one whom a party would help, buying a picture for which he had no use to help a struggling artist, sending a few tons of coal to an old lady who was not quite warm enough, always writing a letter or a check for some one of his own craft who had been less fortunate than he--giving to every beggar that he met, fearing that among all the thousand fakers he might refuse one worthy case. I think this habit of giving Richard must have inherited from his father, who gave out of all proportion to his means, and with never too close a scrutiny to the worthiness of the cause. Both men were too intensely human to do that, but if this great desire on the part of my father and brother to help others gave the recipients pleasure I'm sure that it caused in the hearts of the givers an even greater happiness. The following letters were chosen from a great number which Richard wrote to his family, telling of his first days on The Evening Sun, and of his life in New York. YORK Evening Sun--1890 DEAR MOTHER: Today is as lovely and fresh as the morning, a real spring day, and I feel good in consequence. I have just come from a couple of raids, where we had a very lively time, and some of them had to pull their guns. I found it necessary to punch a few sports myself. The old sergeant from headquarters treats me like a son and takes the greatest pride in whatever I do or write. He regularly assigns me now to certain doors, and I always obey orders like the little gentleman that I am. Instead of making me unpopular, I find it helps me with the sports, though it hurts my chances professionally, as so many of them know me now that I am no use in some districts. For instance, in Mott and Pell streets, or in the Bowery, I am as safe as any precinct detective. I tell you this to keep you from worrying. They won't touch a man whom they think is an agent or an officer. Only it spoils my chances of doing reportorial-detective work. For instance, the captain of the Bowery district refused me a detective the other morning to take the Shippens around the Chinese and the tougher quarters because he said they were as safe with me as with any of the other men whose faces are as well known. To-night I am going to take a party to the headquarters of the fire department, where I have a cinch on the captain, a very nice fellow, who is unusually grateful for something I wrote about him and his men. They are going to do the Still Alarm act for me. These clippings all came out in to-day's paper. The ladies in the Tombs were the Shippens, of course; and Mamie Blake is a real girl, and the story is true from start to finish. I think it is a pathetic little history. Give my love to all. I will bring on the story I have finished and get you to make some suggestions. It is quite short. Since Scribner's have been so civil, I think I will give them a chance at the great prize. I am writing a comic guide book and a history of the Haymarket for the paper; both are rich in opportunities. This weather makes me feel like another person. I will be so glad to get home. With lots of love and kisses for you and Nora. DICK-O. NEW YORK--1890. DEAR CHAS: Brisbane has suggested to me that the Bradley story would lead anyone to suppose that my evenings were spent in the boudoirs of the horizontales of 34th Street and has scared me somewhat in consequence. If it strikes you and Dad the same way don't show it to Mother. Dad made one mistake by thinking I wrote a gambling story which has made me nervous. It is hardly the fair thing to suppose that a man must have an intimate acquaintance with whatever he writes of intimately. A lot of hunting people, for instance, would not believe that I had written the "Traver's Only Ride" story because they knew I did not hunt. Don't either you or Dad make any mistake about this. DICK. As a matter of fact they would not let me in the room, and I don't know whether it abounded in signed etchings or Bougereau's nymphs. NEW YORK--1890. DEAR FAMILY: Today has been more or less feverish. In the morning's mail I received a letter from Berlin asking permission to translate "Gallegher" into German, and a proof of a paragraph from The Critic on my burlesque of Rudyard Kipling, which was meant to please but which bored me. Then the "Raegen" story came in, making nine pages of the Scribner's, which at ten dollars a page ought to be $90. Pretty good pay for three weeks' work, and it is a good story. Then at twelve a young man came bustling into the office, stuck his card down on the desk and said, "I am S. S. McClure. I have sent my London representative to Berlin and my New York man to London. Will you take charge of my New York end?" If he thought to rattle me he was very much out of it, for I said in his same tone and manner, "Bring your New York representative back and send me to London, and I'll consider it. As long as I am in New York I will not leave The Evening Sun." "Edmund Gosse is my London representative," he said; "you can have the same work here. Come out and take lunch." I said, "Thank you, I can't; I'll see you on Tuesday." "All right," he said. "I'll come for you. Think of what I say. I'll make your fortune. Bradford Merrill told me to get you. You won't have anything to do but ask people to write novels and edit them. I'll send you abroad later if you don't like New York. Can you write any children's stories for me?" "No," I said, "see you Tuesday." This is a verbal report of all and everything that was said. I consider it a curious interview. It will raise my salary here or I go. What do YOU think? DICK. NEW YORK--1890. DEAR FAMILY: The more I thought of the McClure offer the less I thought of it. So I told him last night I was satisfied where I was, and that the $75 he offered me was no inducement. Brisbane says I will get $50 about the first of October, which is plenty and enough for a young man who intends to be good to his folks. I cannot do better than stay where I am, for it is understood between Brisbane and Laffan that in the event of the former's going into politics I shall take his place, which will suit very well until something better turns up. Then there is the chance of White's coming back and my going to Lunnon, which would please me now more for what I think I could make of it than what I think others have made of it. If I had gone to McClure I would have been shelved and side-tracked, and I am still in the running, and learning every day. Brisbane and I have had our first serious difficulty over Mrs. R----, who is staying with Mrs. "Bill." There is at present the most desperate rivalry, and we discuss each other's chances with great anger. He counts on his transcontinental knowledge, but my short stories hit very hard, and he is not in it when I sing "Thy Face Will Lead Me On" and "When Kerrigan Struck High C." She has a fatal fondness for Sullivan, which is most unfortunate, as Brisbane can and does tell her about him by the half hour. Yesterday we both tried to impress her by riding down in front of the porch and showing off the horses and ourselves. Brisbane came off best, though I came off quickest, for my horse put his foot in a hole and went down on his knees, while I went over his head like the White Knight in "Alice." I would think nothing of sliding off a roof now. But I made up for this mishap by coming back in my grey suit and having it compared with the picture in The Century. It is a very close fight, and, while Brisbane is chasing over town for photographs of Sullivan, I am buying books of verses of which she seems to be fond. As soon as she gets her divorce one of us is going to marry her. We don't know which. She is about as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and very witty and well-informed, but it would cost a good deal to keep her in diamonds. She wears some the Queen gave her, but she wants more. DICK. NEW YORK--1890. DEAR MOTHER (LATE MA): I am well and with lots to do. I went up to see Hopper the other night, which was the first time in three months that I have been back of a theater, and it was like going home. There is a smell about the painty and gassy and dusty place that I love as much as fresh earth and newly cut hay, and the girls look so pretty and bold lying around on the sets, and the men so out of focus and with such startling cheeks and lips. They were very glad to see me and made a great fuss. Then I've been to see Carmencita dance, which I enjoyed remarkably, and I have been reading Rudyard Kipling's short stories, and I think it is disgusting that a boy like that should write such stories. He hasn't left himself anything to do when he gets old. He reminds me of Bret Harte and not a bit of Stevenson, to whom some of them compare him. I am very glad you liked the lady in mid-air story so much, but it wasn't a bit necessary to add the MORAL from a MOTHER. I saw it coming up before I had read two lines; and a very good moral it is, too, with which I agree heartily. But, of course, you know it is not a new idea to me. Anything as good and true as that moral cannot be new at this late date. I went to the Brooklyn Handicap race yesterday. It is one of the three biggest races of the year, and a man stood in front of me in the paddock in a white hat. Another man asked him what he was "playing." "Well," he said, "I fancy Fides myself." "Fides!" said his friend, "why, she ain't in it. She won't see home. Raceland's the horse for your money; she's favorite, and there isn't any second choice. But Fides! Why, she's simply impossible. Raceland beat HER last Suburban." "Yes, I remember," said the man in the white hat, "but I fancy Fides." Then another chap said to him, "Fides is all good enough on a dust track on a sunny, pleasant day, but she can't ran in the mud. She hasn't got the staying powers. She's a pretty one to look at, but she's just a 'grandstand' ladies' choice. She ain't in it with Raceland or Erica. The horse YOU want is not a pretty, dainty flyer, but a stayer, that is sure and that brings in good money, not big odds, but good money. Why, I can name you a dozen better'n Fides." "Still, somehow, I like Fides best," said the obstinate man in the white hat. "But Fides will take the bit in her mouth and run away, or throw the jock or break into the fence. She isn't steady. She's all right to have a little bet on, just enough for a flyer, but she's not the horse to plunge on. If you're a millionaire with money to throw away, why, you might put some of it up on her, but, as it is, you want to put your money where it will be sure of a 'place,' anyway. Now, let me mark your card for you?" "No," said the man, "what you all say is reasonable, I see that; but, somehow, I rather fancy Fides best." I've forgotten now whether Fides won or not, and whether she landed the man who just fancied her without knowing why a winner or sent him home broke. But, in any event, that is quite immaterial, the story simply shows how obstinate some men are as regards horses and--other uncertain critters. I have no doubt but that the Methodist minister's daughter would have made Hiram happy if he had loved her, but he didn't. No doubt Anne ----, Nan ----, Katy ---- and Maude ---- would have made me happy if they would have consented to have me and I had happened to love them, but I fancied Fides. But now since I have scared you sufficiently, let me add for your peace of mind that I've not enough money to back any horses just at present, and before I put any money up on any one of them for the Matrimonial stakes, I will ask you first to look over the card and give me a few pointers. I mayn't follow them, you know, but I'll give you a fair warning, at any rate. "You're my sweetheart, I'm your beau." DICK. NEW YORK, May 29, 1890. This is just a little good night note to say how I wish I was with you down at that dear old place and how much I love you and Nora who is getting lovelier and sweeter and prettier everyday and I know a pretty girl when I see 'em, Fides, for instance. But I won't tease you about that any more. I finished a short silly story to night which I am in doubt whether to send off or not. I think I will keep it until I read it to you and learn what you think. Mr. Gilder has asked me to stay with them at Marion, and to go to Cambridge with Mrs. Gilder and dear Mrs. Cleveland and Grover Cleveland, when he reads the poem before D. K. E. I have bought a book on decorations, colored, and I am choosing what I want, like a boy with a new pair of boots. Good-night, my dearest Mama. DICK. In addition to his regular work on The Evening Sun, my brother, as I have already said, was devoting a great part, of his leisure moments to the writing of short stories, and had made a tentative agreement with a well-known magazine to do a series of short sketches of New York types. Evidently fearful that Richard was writing too much and with a view to pecuniary gain, my mother wrote the following note of warning: PHILADELPHIA, 1890. DEAR DICK: I wouldn't undertake the "types." For one thing, you will lose prestige writing for ----'s paper. For another, I dread beyond everything your beginning to do hack work for money. It is the beginning of decadence both in work and reputation for you. I know by my own and a thousand other people. Begin to write because it "is a lot of money" and you stop doing your best work. You make your work common and your prices will soon go down. George Lewes managed George Eliot wisely. He stopped her hack work. Kept her at writing novels and soon one each year brought her $40,000. I am taking a purely mercenary view of the thing. There is another which you understand better than I-- Mind your Mother's advice to you--now and all the time is "do only your best work--even if you starve doing it." But you won't starve. You'll get your dinner at Martin's instead of Delmonico's, which won't hurt you in the long run. Anyhow, $1000. for 12,500 words is not a great price. That was a fine tea you gave. I should like to have heard the good talk. It was like the regiment of brigadier generals with no privates. Your MOTHER. This is a letter written by my father after the publication of Richard's story "A Walk up the Avenue." Richard frequently spoke of his father as his "kindest and severest critic." PHILADELPHIA, July 22nd, 1890. 10.30 P. M. MY DEAR Boy: You can do it; you have done it; it is all right. I have read A Walk up the Avenue. It is far and away the best thing you have ever done--Full of fine subtle thought, of rare, manly feeling. I am not afraid of Dick the author. He's all right. I shall only be afraid--when I am afraid--that Dick the man will not live up to the other fellow, that he may forget how much the good Lord has given him, and how responsible to the good Lord and to himself he is and will be for it. A man entrusted with such talent should carry himself straighter than others to whom it is denied. He has great duties to do; he owes tribute to the giver. Don't let the world's temptations in any of its forms come between you and your work. Make your life worthy of your talent, and humbly by day and by night ask God to help you to do it. I am very proud of this work. It is good work, with brain, bone, nerve, muscle in it. It is human, with healthy pulse and heartsome glow in it. Remember, hereafter, you have by it put on the bars against yourself preventing you doing any work less good. You have yourself made your record, you can't lower it. You can only beat it. Lovingly, DAD. In the latter part of December, 1890, Richard left The Evening Sun to become the managing editor of Harper's Weekly. George William Curtis was then its editor, and at this time no periodical had a broader or greater influence for the welfare of the country. As Richard was then but twenty-six, his appointment to his new editorial duties came as a distinct honor. The two years that Richard had spent on The Evening Sun had been probably the happiest he had ever known. He really loved New York, and at this time Paris and London held no such place in his affections as they did in later years. And indeed there was small reason why these should not have been happy years for any young man. At twenty-six Richard had already accomplished much, and his name had become a familiar one not only to New Yorkers but throughout the country. Youth and health he had, and many friends, and a talent that promised to carry him far in the profession he loved. His new position paid him a salary considerably larger than he had received heretofore, and he now demanded and received much higher terms for his stories. All of which was well for Richard because as his income grew so grew his tastes. I have known few men who cared less for money than did my brother, and I have known few who cared more for what it could buy for his friends and for himself. Money to him, and, during his life he made very large sums of it, he always chose to regard as income but never capital. A bond or a share of stock meant to him what it would bring that day on the Stock Exchange. The rainy day which is the bugaboo for the most of us, never seemed to show on his horizon. For a man whose livelihood depended on the lasting quality of his creative faculties he had an infinite faith in the future, and indeed his own experience seemed to show that he was justified in this belief. It could not have been very long after his start as a fiction writer that he received as high a price for his work as any of his contemporaries; and just previous to his death, more than twenty years later, he signed a contract to write six stories at a figure which, so far as I know, was the highest ever offered an American author. In any case, money or the lack of it certainly never caused Richard any worriment during the early days of which I write. For what he made he worked extremely hard, but the reputation and the spending of the money that this same hard work brought him caused him infinite happiness. He enjoyed the reputation he had won and the friends that such a reputation helped him to make; he enjoyed entertaining and being entertained, and he enjoyed pretty much all of the good things of life. And all of this he enjoyed with the naive, almost boyish enthusiasm that only one could to whom it had all been made possible at twenty-six. Of these happy days Booth Tarkington wrote at the time of my brother's death: "To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the 'beau ideal of jeunesse doree,' a sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but already an editor--already publishing books! His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed, and we cut an exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion to see the world at lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard Harding Davis came into the Palm Room--then, oh, then, our day was radiant! That was the top of our fortune; we could never have hoped for so much. Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see." Richard's intimate friends of these days were Charles Dana Gibson, who illustrated a number of my brother's stories, Robert Howard Russell, Albert La Montagne, Helen Benedict, now Mrs. Thomas Hastings, Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, E. H. Sothern, his brother, Sam, and Arthur Brisbane. None of this little circle was married at the time, its various members were seldom apart, and they extracted an enormous amount of fun out of life. I had recently settled in New York, and we had rooms at 10 East Twenty-eighth Street, where we lived very comfortably for many years. Indeed Richard did not leave them until his marriage in the summer of 1899. They were very pleasant, sunny rooms, and in the sitting-room, which Richard had made quite attractive, we gave many teas and supper-parties. But of all the happy incidents I can recall at the Twenty-eighth Street house, the one I remember most distinctly took place in the hallway the night that Richard received the first statement and check for his first book of short stories, and before the money had begun to come in as fast as it did afterward. We were on our way to dinner at some modest resort when we saw and at once recognized the long envelope on the mantel. Richard guessed it would be for one hundred and ninety dollars, but with a rather doubting heart I raised my guess to three hundred. And when, with trembling fingers, Richard had finally torn open the envelope and found a check for nine hundred and odd dollars, what a wild dance we did about the hall-table, and what a dinner we had that night! Not at the modest restaurant as originally intended, but at Delmonico's! It was during these days that Seymour Hicks and his lovely wife Ellaline Terriss first visited America, and they and Richard formed a mutual attachment that lasted until his death. Richard had always taken an intense interest in the drama, and at the time he was managing editor of Harper's Weekly had made his first efforts as a playwright. Robert Hilliard did a one-act version of Richard's short story, "Her First Appearance," which under the title of "The Littlest Girl" he played in vaudeville for many years. E. H. Sothern and Richard had many schemes for writing a play together, but the only actual result they ever attained was a one-act version Sothern did at the old Lyceum of my brother's story, "The Disreputable Mr. Raegen." It was an extremely tense and absorbing drama, and Sothern was very fine in the part of Raegen, but for the forty-five minutes the playlet lasted Sothern had to hold the stage continuously alone, and as it preceded a play of the regulation length, the effort proved too much for the actor's strength, and after a few performances it was taken off. Although it was several years after this that my brother's first long play was produced he never lost interest in the craft of playwriting, and only waited for the time and means to really devote himself to it. BOSTON, January 22nd, 1891. DEAR FAMILY:-- This is just to say that I am alive and sleepy, and that my head is still its normal size, although I have at last found one man in Boston who has read one of my stories, and that was Barrymore from New York. The Fairchilds' dinner was a tremendous affair, and I was conquered absolutely by Mr. Howells, who went far, far out of his way to be as kind and charming as an old man could be. Yesterday Mrs. Whitman gave a tea in her studio. I thought she meant to have a half dozen young people to drink a cup with her, and I sauntered in in the most nonchalant manner to find that about everybody had been asked to meet me. And everybody came, principally owing to the "Harding Davis" part of the name for they all spoke of mother and so very dearly that it made me pretty near weep. Everybody came from old Dr. Holmes who never goes any place, to Mrs. "Jack" Gardner and all the debutantes. "I was on in that scene." In the evening I went with the Fairchilds to Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's to meet the S----s but made a point not to as he was talking like a cad when I heard him and Mrs. Fairchild and I agreed to be the only people in Boston who had not clasped his hand. There were only a few people present and Mrs. Howe recited the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which I thought very characteristic of the city. To-day I posed again and Cumnock took me over Cambridge and into all of the Clubs where I met some very nice boys and felt very old. Then we went to a tea Cushing gave in his rooms and to night I go to Mrs. Deland's. But the mornings with the Fairchilds are the best. DICK. In the spring of 1891 my mother and sister, Nora, went abroad for the summer, and the following note was written to Richard just before my mother sailed: DEAR DICK: This is just to give my dearest love to you my darling. Some day at sea when I cannot hear you nor see you, whenever it is that you get it--night or morning---you may be sure that we are all loving and thinking of you. Keep close to the Lord. Your Lord who never has refused to hear a prayer of yours. Just think that I have kissed you a thousand times. MOTHER. FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK. June, 1891. DEAR MOTHER: Your letters are a great delight to me but I think you are going entirely too quickly. You do not feel it now but you are simply hurrying through the courses of your long dinner so rapidly that when dessert comes you will not be up to it. A day or two's rest and less greed to see many things would be much more fun I should think, and you will enjoy those days more to look back to when you wandered around some little town by yourselves and made discoveries than those you spent doing what you feel you ought to do. Excuse this lecture but I know that when I got to Paris I wanted to do nothing but sit still and read and let "sights" go-- You will soon learn not to duplicate and that one cathedral will answer for a dozen. And I am disappointed in your mad desire to get to Edinboro to get letters from home, as though you couldn't get letters from me every day of your life and as if there were not enough of you together to keep from getting homesick. I am ashamed of you. But that is all the scolding I have to do for I do not know what has given me more pleasure than your letters and Nora's especially. They tell me the best news in the world and that is, that you are all getting as much happiness out of it as I have prayed you would. I may go over in September myself. But I would only go to London. Now, then for Home news. I have sold the "Reporter Who Made Himself King" to McClure's for $300. to be published in the syndicate in August. I have finished "Her First Appearance" and Gibson is doing the illustrations, three. I got $175. for it. I am now at work on a story about Arthur Cumnock, Harvard's football captain who was the hero of Class Day. It will come out this week and will match Lieut. Grant's chance. In July I begin a story called the "Traveller's Tale" which will be used in the November Harper. That is all _I_ am doing. So far the notices of "Gallegher" have been very good, I mean the English ones. I went up to Class Day on Friday and spent the day with Miss Fairchild and Miss Howells and with Mr. H. for chaperone. He is getting old and says he never deserved the fuss they made over him. We had a pretty perfect day although it threatened rain most of the time. We wandered around from one spread to another meeting beautifully dressed girls everywhere and "lions" and celebrities. Then the fight for the roses around the tree was very interesting and picturesque and arena like and the best of all was sitting in the broad window seats of the dormitories with a Girl or two, generally "a" girl and listening to the glee club sing and watching the lanterns and the crowds of people as beautiful as Redfern could make them. Half of Seabright was burnt down last week but not my half, although the fire destroyed all the stores and fishermen's houses and stopped only one house away from Pannachi's, where I will put up. I am very well and content and look forward to much pleasure this summer at Seabright and much work. I find I have seldom been so happy as when working hard and fast as I have been forced to do these last two weeks and so I will keep it up. Not in such a way as to hurt me but just enough to keep me happy. DICK. NEW YORK, August 1891. From The Pall Mall Budget Gazette. "The Americans are saying, by the way, that they have discovered a Rudyard Kipling of their own. This is Mr. Richard Harding Davis, a volume of whose stories has been published this week by Mr. Osgood. Mr. Davis is only twenty-six, was for sometime on the staff of the New York Evening Sun. He is now the editor of Harper's Weekly." That is me. I have also a mother and sister who once went to London and what do you think they first went to see, in London, mind you. They got into a four wheeler and they said "cabby drive as fast as you can," not knowing that four wheelers never go faster than a dead march--" to-- "where do you think? St. Paul's, the Temple, the Abbey, their lodgings, the Houses of Parliament--the Pavilion Music Hall--the Tower--no to none of these--"To the Post Office." That is what my mother and sister did! After this when they hint that they would like to go again and say "these muffins are not English muffins" and "do you remember the little Inn at Chester, ah, those were happy days," I will say, "And do you remember the Post Office in Edinburgh and London. We have none such in America." And as they only go abroad to get letters they will hereafter go to Rittenhouse Square and I will write letters to them from London. All this shows that a simple hurriedly written letter from Richard Harding Davis is of more value than all the show places of London. It makes me quite PROUD. And so does this: "'Gallegher' is as good as anything of Bret Harte's, although it is in Mr. Davis's own vein, not in the borrowed vein of Bret Harte or anybody else. 'The Cynical Miss Catherwaight' is very good, too, and 'Mr. Raegen' is still better." But on the other hand, it makes me tired, and so does this: "'The Other Woman' is a story which offends good taste in more than one way. It is a blunder to have written it, a greater blunder to have published it, and a greater blunder STILL to have republished it." I suppose now that Dad has crossed with Prince George and Nora has seen the Emperor, that you will be proud too. But you will be prouder of your darling boy Charles, even though he does get wiped out at Seabright next week and you will be even prouder when he writes great stories for The Evening Sun. RICHARD. The Players, 16 Gramercy Park. 24th, 1891. DEAR FAMILY: I had a great day at the game and going there and coming back. I met a great many old football men and almost all of them spoke of the "Out of the Game" story. Cumnock, Camp, Poe, Terry and lots more whose names mean nothing to you, so ignorant are you, were there and we had long talks. I went to see Cleveland yesterday about a thing of which I have thought much and talked less and that was going into politics in this country. To say he discouraged me in so doing would be saying the rain is wet. He seemed to think breaking stones as a means of getting fame and fortune was quicker and more genteel. I also saw her and the BABY. She explained why she had not written you and also incidentally why she HAD written Childs. I do not know as what Cleveland said made much impression upon me--although I found out what I could expect from him--that is nothing here but apparently a place abroad if I wanted it. But he thought Congress was perfectly feasible but the greatest folly to go there. DICK. CHAPTER V FIRST TRAVEL ARTICLES For Richard these first years in New York were filled to overflowing with many varied interests, quite enough to satisfy most young men of twenty-seven. He had come and seen and to a degree, so far as the limitation of his work would permit, had conquered New York, but Richard thoroughly realized that New York was not only a very small part of the world but of his own country, and that to write about his own people and his own country and other people and other lands he must start his travels at an early age, and go on travelling until the end. And for the twenty-five years that followed that was what Richard did. Even when he was not on his travels but working on a novel or a play at Marion or later on at Mount Kisco, so far as it was possible he kept in touch with events that were happening and the friends that he had made all over the globe. He subscribed to most of the English and French illustrated periodicals and to one London daily newspaper which every day he read with the same interest that he read half a dozen New York newspapers and the interest was always that of the trained editor at work. Richard was not only physically restless but his mind practically never relaxed. When others, tired after a hard day's work or play, would devote the evening to cards or billiards or chatter, Richard would write letters or pore over some strange foreign magazine, consult maps, make notes, or read the stories of his contemporaries. He practically read every American magazine from cover to cover--advertisements were a delight to him, and the finding of a new writer gave him as much pleasure as if he had been the fiction editor who had accepted the first story by the embryo genius. The official organs of our army and navy he found of particular interest. Not only did he thus follow the movements of his friends in these branches of the service but if he read of a case wherein he thought a sailor or a soldier had been done an injustice he would promptly take the matter up with the authorities at Washington, and the results he obtained were often not only extremely gratifying to the wronged party but caused Richard no end of pleasure. According to my brother's arrangement with the Harpers, he was to devote a certain number of months of every year to the editing of The Weekly, and the remainder to travel and the writing of his experiences for Harper's Monthly. He started on the first of these trips in January, 1892, and the result was a series of articles which afterward appeared under the title of "The West from a Car Window." January, 1892. (Some place in Texas) I left St. Louis last night, Wednesday, and went to bed and slept for twelve hours. To-day has been most trying and I shall be very glad to get on dry land again. The snow has ceased although the papers say this is the coldest snap they have had in San Antonio in ten years. It might have waited a month for me I think. It has been a most dreary trip from a car window point of view. Now that the snow has gone, there is mud and ice and pine trees and colored people, but no cowboys as yet. They talk nothing but Chili and war and they make such funny mistakes. We have a G. A. R. excursion on the train, consisting of one fat and prosperous G. A. R., the rest of the excursion having backed out on account of Garza who the salient warriors imagine as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. One old chap with white hair came on board at a desolate station and asked for "the boys in blue" and was very much disgusted when he found that "that grasshopper Garza" had scared them away-- He had tramped five miles through the mud to greet a possible comrade and was much chagrined. The excursion shook hands with him and they took a drink together. The excursion tells me he is a glass manufacturer, an owner of a slate quarry and the best embalmer of bodies in the country. He says he can keep them four years and does so "for specimens" those that are left on his hands and others he purchases from the morgue. He has a son who is an actor and he fills me full of the most harrowing tales of Indian warfare and the details of the undertaking business. He is SO funny about the latter that I weep with laughter and he cannot see why-- Joe Jefferson and I went to a matinee on Wednesday and saw Robson in "She stoops to Conquer." The house was absolutely packed and when Joe came in the box they yelled and applauded and he nodded to them in the most fatherly, friendly way as though to say "How are you, I don't just remember your name but I'm glad to see you--" It was so much sweeter than if he had got up and bowed as I would have done. SAN ANTONIO I knew more about Texas than the Texans and when they told me I would find summer here I smiled knowingly-- That is all the smiling I have done---Did you ever see a stage set for a garden or wood scene by daylight or Coney Island in March--that is what the glorious, beautiful baking city of San Antonio is like. There is mud and mud and mud--in cans, in the gardens of the Mexicans and snow around the palms and palmettos-- Does the sun shine anywhere? Are people ever warm-- It is raw, ugly and muddy, the Mexicans are merely dirty and not picturesque. I am greatly disappointed. But I have set my teeth hard and I will go on and see it through to the bitter end-- But I will not write anything for publication until I can take a more cheerful view of it. I already have reached the stage where I admit the laugh is on me-- But there is still London to look forward to and this may get better when the sun comes out---I went to the fort to-day and was most courteously received. But they told me I should go on to Laredo, if I expected to see any campaigning-- There is no fighting nor is any expected but they say they will give me a horse and I can ride around the chaparral as long as I want. I will write you from Laredo, where I go to-morrow, Saturday-- DICK. At Laredo Richard left the beaten track of the traveller, and with Trooper Tyler, who acted as his guide, joined Captain Hardie in his search for Garza. The famous revolutionist was supposed to be in hiding this side of the border, and the Mexican Government had asked the United States to find him and return him to the officials of his own country. In Camp, February 2nd. DEAR MOTHER:-- We have stopped by the side of a trail for a while and I will take the chance it gives me to tell you what I have been doing. After Tyler and I returned to camp, we had a day of rest before Captain Hardie arrived. He is a young, red-moustached, pointed-bearded chap with light blue eyes, rough with living in the West but most kind hearted and enthusiastic. He treats me as though I were his son which is rather absurd as he is only up to my shoulder. It is so hot I cannot make the words go straight and you must not mind if I wander. We are hugging a fence for all the shade there is and the horses and men have all crawled to the dark side of it and are sleeping or swearing at the sun. It is about two o'clock and we have been riding since half-past seven. I have had a first rate time but I do not see that there has been much in it to interest any one but myself and where Harper Brothers or the "gentle reader" comes in, I am afraid I cannot see, and if I cannot see it I fear he will be in a bad way. It has pleased and interested me to see how I could get along under difficult circumstances and with so much discomfort but as I say I was not sent out here to improve my temper or my health or to make me more content with my good things in the East. If we could have a fight or something that would excuse and make a climax for all this marching and reconnoitering and discomfort the story would have a suitable finale and a raison d'etre. However, I may get something out of it if only to abuse the Government for their stupidity in chasing a jack rabbit with a brass band or by praising the men for doing their duty when they know there is no duty to be done. This country is more like the ocean than anything else and drives one crazy with its monotony and desolation. And to think we went to war with Mexico for it-- To-day is my tenth day with the troops in the camp and in the field and I will leave them as soon as this scout is over which will be in three days at the most. Then I will go to Corpus Christi and from there to the ranches but I will wait until I get baths, hair cuts and a dinner and cool things to drink-- One thing has pleased me very much and that is that I, with Tyler and the Mexican Scout made the second best riding record of the troop since they have been in the field this winter. The others rode 115 miles in 32 hours, four of them under the first Sergeant, after revolutionists, and we made 110 miles in 33 hours. The rest of the detachment made 90 miles and our having the extra thirty to our credit was an accident. On the 31st Hardie sent out the scout and two troopers, of which Tyler was one, to get a trail and as I had been resting and loafing for three days, I went out with them. We left at eight after breakfast and returned at seven, having made thirty miles. When we got in we found that a detachment was going out on information sent in while we were out. Tyler was in it and so we got fresh horses and put out at nine o'clock by moonlight. That was to keep the people in the ranch from knowing we were going out. We rode until half-past three in the morning and then camped at the side of the road until half--past six, when we rode on until five in the afternoon. The men who were watching to see me give up grew more and more interested as the miles rolled out and the First Sergeant was very fearful for his record for which he has been recommended for the certificate of merit. The Captain was very much pleased and all the men came and spoke to me. It must have been a good ride for Tyler who is a fifth year man was so tired that he paid a man to do his sentry duty. We slept at Captain Hunter's camp that last night and we both came on this morning, riding thirty miles up to two o'clock to-day. From here we go on into the brush again. I am very proud of that riding record and of my beard which is fine. I will finish this when we get near a post-office. DICK. February 4th-- We rode forty miles through the brush but saw nothing of Garza, who was supposed to be in it. But we captured 3 revolutionists, one of whom ran away but the scout got him. Hardie, Tyler, who is his orderly, and the scout and I took them in because the rest of the column was lagging in the rear and the Lieutenant got bally hooly for it. Tyler disarmed one and I took away the other chaps things. Then we took a fourth in and let them all go for want of evidence and after some of the ranch men had identified them. CORPUS CHRISTI, February 6. We ended our scout yesterday, and camped at Captain Hunter's last night-- Mother can now rest her soul in peace as I have done with scoutings and have replaced the free and easy belt and revolver for the black silk suspenders and the fire badge of civilization. I am still covered with 11 days dirt but will get lots of good things to eat and drink and smoke at Corpus Christi to night, where I will stay for two days. I am writing this on the car and a ranger is shooting splinters out of the telegraph poles from the window in front and has a New York drummer in a state of absolute nervous prostration. I met the Rangers last night as we came into camp and find them quite the most interesting things yet. They are just what I expected to find here and have not disappointed me. Everything else is either what we know it to be and know all about or else is disappointingly commonplace. I mean we know certain things are picturesque and I find them so but they have been "done" to death and new material seems so scarce. I am sometimes very fearful of the success of the letters-- However, the Rangers I simply loved. They were gentle voiced and did not swear as the soldiers do and some of them were as handsome men as I ever saw and SO BIG. And such children. They showed me all their tricks at the request of the Adjutant General, who looks upon them as his special property. They shot four shots into a tree with a revolver, going at full gallop, hit a mark with both hands at once, shot with the pistol upside down and the Captain put eight shots into a board with a Winchester, while I was putting two into the field around it. We got along very well indeed and they were quite keen for me to go back and chase Garza. They are sure they have him now. I gave the Captain permission to put four shots into my white helmet. He only put two and the rest of the company thinking their reputations were at stake whipped out their guns and snatched up their rifles and blazed away until they danced the hat all over the ranch. Then remorse overcame them and they proposed taking up a collection to get me a sombrero, which I stopped. So Nora's hat is gone but I am going to get another and save myself from sunstroke again. The last part of the ride was enlivened by the presence of three Mexican murderers handcuffed and chained with iron bands around the neck, that is Texas civilization isn't it-- I have had my dinner and a fine dinner it was with fresh fish and duck and oysters and segars which I have not had for a week. I am finishing this at Constantine's and will be here for two days to write things and will then go on to King's ranch and from there to San Antonio, where I will also rest a week. I will just about get through my schedule in the ten weeks at this rate. I had a good time in the bush and am enjoying it very much though it is lonely now and then-- Still, it is very interesting and if the stories amount to anything I will be pleased but I am constantly wondering how on earth Chas stood it as he did. He is a hero to me for I have some hope of getting back and he had not-- He is a sport-- How I will sleep to night--a real bed and sheets and pajamas, after the ground and the same clothes for eleven days. of love. DICK. While Richard was travelling in the West, his second volume of short stories, "Van Bibber and Others," was published. The volume was dedicated to my father, who wrote Richard the following letter: PHILADELPHIA, February 15, 1892. MY DEAR OWN DICK: I have not been the complete letter writer I should have been, as I told you on Saturday, but I know you will understand. Your two good letters came this evening, one to Mamma and one to Nora. They were a good deal to us all, most, of course, to your dear mother and sister, who have a fond, foolish fancy or love for you--strange--isn't it? Yes, dear boy, I liked the new story very, very much. It was in your best book and in fine spirit, and I liked, too, the dedication of the book--its meaning and its manner. I am glad to be associated with my dear boy and with his work even in that brief way. You may not yet thought about it after this fashion, but I have thought a good deal about it. Reports come to me of you from many sources, and they are all good, and they all reflect honor upon me-- Upon me as I'm getting ready to salute the world, as our French friends say. It is very pleasant to me as I think it over to feel and to know that my boy has honored my name, that he has done something good and useful in the world and for the world. I have something more than pride in you. I am grateful to you. If this is a little prosie, dear old fellow, forgive it. It is late at night and I am a little tired, and being tired stupid. You saw The Atlantic notice of your work. I wish you could have heard Nora on the author of it, who would not have been happy in his mind if he had unhappily heard her. She went for that Heathen Chinee like a wild cat. No disrespect to her, but, all the same, like a wild cat. To me it was interesting. I did not agree with it, but here and there I saw the flash of truth even in the adverse praise. I should have had more respect for the author's opinion if he had liked that vital speck, Raegen. If he could not see the divine, human spark in that--a flash from Calvary, what is the use of considering him? My greatest pride in you, that which has added some sweetness and joy to my life, has been the recognition that something of the divine element was given you, and that your voice rang out sweet and pure at a time when other voices were sounding the fascinations of impurity. That, like Christ, you taught humanity. Don't be afraid of being thought "fresh," fear to be thought "knowing." Life isn't much worth at best,--it is worth nothing at all unless some good be done in it---the more, the better. Don't make it too serious either. Enjoy it as you go, but after a fashion that will bring no reproach to your manhood. Don't be afraid to preach the truth and above all the religion of humanity. Good night, dear boy. I'm a little tired to night. With great love, DAD. ANADARKO--February 26th, 1892. DEAR FAMILY:-- I could not write you before as I have been traveling from pillars to posts, (a joke), in a stage, night and day. I went to Fort Reno from Oklahoma City where they drove me crazy almost with town lots and lot sites and homestead holdings. It was all raw and mean, and greedy for money and a man is much better off in every way in a tenement on Second Avenue than the "owner of his own home" in one of these mushroom cities-- So I think. I went to Fort Reno by stage and it seemed to me that I was really in the West for the first time-- The rest has been as much like the oil towns around Pittsburgh as anything else. But here there are rolling prairie lands with millions of prairie dogs and deep canons and bluffs of red clay that stand out as clear as a razor hollowed and carved away by the water long ago. And the grass is as high as a stirrup and the trees very plentiful after the plains of Texas. The men at Fort Reno were the best I have met, indeed I am just a little tired of trying to talk of things of interest to the Second Lieutenant's intellect. But I had to leave there because I had missed the beef issue and had to see it and as it was due here I pushed on. This post is very beautiful but the men are very young and civil appointments mainly, which means that they have not been to West Point but had fathers and have friends with influence and they are fresh. But the scenery around the post is delightfully wild and big and there is an Indian camp at the foot of the hill on which the fort is stuck. Mother, instead of going to Europe, should come here and see her Indians. Only if she did she would bring a dozen or more of the children back with her. They are the brightest spot in my trip and I spend the mornings and afternoons trying to get them to play with me. They are very shy and pretty and beautifully barbaric and wear the most gorgeous trappings. The women, the older ones, are the ugliest women I ever saw. But the men are fine. I never saw such color as they give to the landscape and one always thinks they have dressed up just to please you. I have spent most of my time and money in buying things from them but they are very dear because the Indians take long to make them and do not like to part with them. I have had rough times lately but I think I would be content to remain in the west six months if I could. It is the necessity of leaving places I like and pushing on to places I don't, I dislike. Reno was fine with a band and lots of fine fellows. This post is not so queer but they are so young-- It makes a great bit of color though with the yellow capes of the cavalry and the soldiers wig--waging red and white flags at other soldiers eight miles away on other mountains and the Indians in yellow buckskin and blankets and their faces painted too. I went to the beef issue to-day--it was not a pretty sight and most barbarous and cruel. I also went to a council at which the chiefs were protesting against the cutting down of their rations which is Commissioner Morgan's doing and which it is expected will lead to war-- We went in out of curiosity and without knowing it was a Council and were very much ashamed when one of the Chiefs rose and said he was glad to see the officers present as they were the best friends the Indians had and the only men they could respect in times of peace as a friend, or in times of war as an enemy. At which we took off our hats and sat it through. Mother's blood would rise if she could hear the stories they tell, and they are so dignified and polite. They have an Indian troop here, like the one described in The Weekly, which you should read and the Captain told them I was a great Chief from the East, whereat all the soldiers who were of noble lineage claimed their privilege of shaking hands with me, which had a demoralizing effect upon the formation and the white privates were either convulsed with mirth or red with indignation. But you cannot treat them like white men who do not know their ancestors-- Dad's letter was the best I have ever got from him and he had always better write when he is tired. I will always keep it. DICK. DENVER--March 7, 1892. DEAR FAMILY: I arrived in Denver Friday night and realized that I was in a city again where the more you order people about the more they do for you, being civilized and so understanding that you mean to tip them. I found my first letter on the newsstand and was very much pleased with it, and with the way they put it out. The proof was perfect and if there had been more pictures I would have been entirely satisfied, as it was I was very much pleased. My baggage had not come, so covered with mud and dust and straw from the stages and generally disreputable I went to see a burlesque, and said "Front row, end seat," just as naturally as though I was in evening dress and high hat--and then I sank into a beautiful deep velvet chair and saw Amazon marches and ladies in tights and heard the old old jokes and the old old songs we know so well and sing so badly. The next morning I went for my mail and the entire post office came out to see me get it. It took me until seven in the evening to finish it, and I do not know that it will ever be answered. The best of it was that you were all pleased with my letters. That put my mind at rest. Then there was news of deaths and marriages and engagements and the same people doing the same things they did when I went away. I did not intend to present any letters as I was going away that night to Creede, but I found I could not get any money unless some one identified me so I presented one to a Mr. Jerome who all the bankers said they would be only too happy to oblige. After one has been variously taken for a drummer, photographer and has been offered so much a line to "write up" booming towns, it is a relief to get back to a place where people know you.--I told Mr. Jerome I had a letter of introduction and that I was Mr. Davis and he shook hands and then looked at the letter and said "Good Heavens are you that Mr. Davis" and then rushed off and brought back the entire establishment brokers, bankers and mine owners and they all sat around and told me funny stories and planned more things for me to do and eat than I could dispose of in a month. I am now en route to Creede. Creede when you first see it in print looks like creede but after you have been in Denver or Colorado even for one day it reads like C R E E D E. All the men on this car think they are going to make their fortunes, and toward that end they have on new boots and flannel shirts, and some of them seeing my beautiful clothing and careful array came over and confided to me that they were really not so tough as they looked and had never worn a flannel shirt before. This car is typical of what they told me I would find at Creede. There are rich mine owners who are pointed out by the conductor as the fifth part owner of the "Pot Luck" mine, and dudes in astrakan fur coats over top boots and new flannel shirts, and hardened old timers with their bedding and tin pans, who have prospected all over the state and women who are smoking and drinking. I feel awfully selfish whenever I look out of the car window. Switzerland which I have never seen is a spot on the map compared to this. The mountains go up with snow on one side and black rows of trees and rocks on the other, and the clouds seem packed down between them. The sun on the snow and the peaks peering above the clouds is all new to me and so very beautiful that I would like to buy a mountain and call it after my best girl. I will finish this when I get to Creede. I expect to make my fortune there. DICK. CREEDE, March 7. A young man in a sweater and top boots met me at the depot and said that I was Mr. Davis and that he was a young man whose life I had written in "There was 90 and 9." He was from Buffalo and was editing a paper in Creede. He said I was to stop with him-- Creede is built of new pine boards and lies between two immense mountains covered with pines and snow. The town is built in the gulley and when the spring freshets come will be a second Johnstown. Faber, the young man, took me to the Grub State Cabin where I found two most amusing dudes and thoroughbred sports from Boston, Harvard men living in a cabin ten by eight with four bunks and a stove, two banjos and H O P E. They own numerous silver mines, lots, and shares, but I do not believe they have five dollars in cash amongst them. They have a large picture of myself for one of the ORNAMENTS and are great good fellows. We sat up in our bunks until two this morning talking and are planning to go to Africa and Mexico and Asia Minor together.--Lots of love. DICK. Very happy indeed to be back in his beloved town, Richard returned to New York late in March, 1892, and resumed his editorial duties. But on this occasion his stay was of particularly short duration, and in May, he started for his long-wished-for visit to London. The season there was not yet in full swing, and after spending a few days in town, journeyed to Oxford, where he settled down to amuse himself and collect material for his first articles on English life as he found it. In writing of this visit to Oxford, H. J. Whigham, one of Richard's oldest friends, and who afterward served with him in several campaigns, said: "When we first met Richard Harding Davis he was living, to all practical purposes, the life of an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. Anyone at all conversant with the customs of universities, especially with the idiosyncrasies of Oxford, knows that for a person who is not an undergraduate to share the life of undergraduates on equal terms, to take part in their adventures, to be admitted to their confidence is more difficult than it is for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle or for the rich man to enter heaven. It was characteristic of Davis that although he was a few years older than the average university "man" and came from a strange country and, moreover, had no official reason for being at Oxford at all, he was accepted as one of themselves by the Balliol undergraduates, in fact, lived in Balliol for at least a college term, and happening to fall in with a somewhat enterprising generation of Balliol men he took the lead in several escapades which have been written into Oxford history. There is in the makeup of the best type of college undergraduate a wonderful spirit of adventure, an unprejudiced view of life, an almost Quixotic feeling for romance, a disdain of sordid or materialistic motives, which together make the years spent at a great university the most golden of the average man's career. These characteristics Davis was fortunate enough to retain through all the years of his life. The same spirit that took him out with a band of Oxford youths to break down an iron barrier set by an insolent landowner across the navigable waters of Shakespeare's Avon carried him, in after years, to the battlefields where Greece fought against the yoke of Turkey, to the insurrecto camps of Cuba, to the dark horrors of the Congo, to Manchuria, where gallant Japan beat back the overwhelming power of Russia, to Belgium, where he saw the legions of Germany trampling over the prostrate bodies of a small people. Romance was never dead while Davis was alive." That Richard lost no time in making friends at Oxford as, indeed, he never failed to do wherever he went, the following letters to his mother would seem to show: OXFORD--May, 1892. DEAR FAMILY: I came down here on Saturday morning with the Peels, who gave an enormous boating party and luncheon on a tiny little island. The day was beautiful with a warm brilliant sun, and the river was just as narrow and pretty as the head of the Squan river, and with old walls and college buildings added. We had the prettiest Mrs. Peel in our boat and Mrs. Joseph Chamberlain, who was Miss Endicott and who is very sweet and pretty. We raced the other punts and rowboats and soon, after much splashing and exertion, reached the head of the river. Then we went to, tea in New College and to see the sights of the different colleges now on the Thames. The barges of the colleges, painted different colors and gilded like circus band-wagons and decorated with coats of arms and flying great flags, lined the one shore for a quarter of a mile and were covered by girls in pretty frocks and under-grads in blazers. Then the boats came into sight one after another with the men running alongside on the towpath. This was one of the most remarkable sights of the country so far. There were over six hundred men coming six abreast, falling and stumbling and pushing, shouting and firing pistols. It sounded like a cavalry charge and the line seemed endless. The whole thing was most theatrical and effective. Then we went to the annual dinner of the Palmerston Club, where I made a speech which was, as there is no one else to tell you, well received, "being frequently interrupted with applause," from both the diners and the ladies in the gallery. It was about Free Trade and the way America was misrepresented in the English papers, and composed of funny stories which had nothing to do with the speech. I did not know I was going to speak until I got there, and considering the fact, as Wilson says, that your uncle was playing on a strange table with a crooked cue he did very well. The next morning we breakfasted with the Bursar of Trinity and had luncheon with the Viscount St. Cyres to meet Lord and Lady Coleridge. St. Cyres is very shy and well-bred, and we would have had a good time had not the M. P.'s present been filled with awe of the Lord Chief Justice and failed to draw him out. As it was he told some very funny stories; then we went to tea with Hubert Howard, in whose rooms I live and am now writing, and met some stupid English women and shy girls. Then we dined with the dons at New College, so--called because it is eight hundred years old. We sat at a high table in a big hall hung with pictures and lit by candles. The under-grads sat beneath in gowns and rattled pewter mugs. We all wore evening dress and those that had them red and white fur collars. After dinner we left the room according to some process of selection, carrying our napkins with us. We entered a room called the Commons, where we drank wines and ate nuts and raisins. It was all very solemn and dull and very dignified. Outside it was quite light although nine o'clock. Then we marched to another room where there were cigars and brandy and soda, but Arthur Pollen and I had to go and take coffee with the Master of Balliol, the only individual of whom Pollen stands in the least awe. He was a dear old man who said, "O yes, you're from India," and on my saying "No, from America"; he said, "O yes, it's the other one." I found the other one was an Indian princess in a cashmere cloak and diamonds, who looked so proud and lovely and beautiful that I wanted to take her out to one of the seats in the quadrangle and let her weep on my shoulder. How she lives among these cold people I cannot understand. We were all to go to a concert in the chapel, and half of the party started off, but the Master's wife said, "Oh, I am sure the Master expects them to wait for him in the hall. It is always done." At which all the women made fluttering remarks of sympathy and the men raced off to bring the others back. Only the Indian girl and I remained undisturbed and puzzled. The party came back, but the Master saw them and said, "Well, it does not matter, but it is generally done." At which we all felt guilty. When we got to the chapel everybody stood up until the Master's party sat down, but as it was broken in the middle of the procession, they sat down, and then, seeing we had not all passed, got up again, so that I felt like saying, "As you were, men," as they do out West in the barracks. Then Lord Coleridge in taking off his overcoat took off his undercoat, too, and stood unconscious of the fact before the whole of Oxford. The faces of the audience which packed the place were something wonderful to see; their desire to laugh at a tall, red-faced man who looks like a bucolic Bill Nye struggling into his coat, and then horror at seeing the Chief Justice in his shirt-sleeves, was a terrible effort--and no one would help him, on the principle, I suppose, that the Queen of Spain has no legs. He would have been struggling yet if I had not, after watching him and Lady Coleridge struggling with him, for a full minute, taken his coat and firmly pulled the old gentleman into it, at which he turned his head and winked. I will go back to town by the first to see the Derby and will get into lodgings there. I AM HAVING A VERY GOOD TIME AND AM VERY WELL. The place is as beautiful as one expects and yet all the time startling one with its beauty. DICK. When the season at Oxford was over Richard returned to London and took a big sunny suite of rooms in the Albany. Here he settled down to learn all he could of London, its ways and its people. In New York he had already met a number of English men and women distinguished in various walks of life, and with these as a nucleus he soon extended his circle of friends until it became as large as it was varied. In his youth, and indeed throughout his life, Richard had the greatest affection for England and the English. No truer American ever lived, but he thought the United States and Great Britain were bound by ties that must endure always. He admired British habits, their cosmopolitanism and the very simplicity of their mode of living. He loved their country life, and the swirl of London never failed to thrill him. During the last half of his life Richard had perhaps as many intimate friends in London as in New York. His fresh point of view, his very eagerness to understand theirs, made them welcome him more as one of their own people than as a stranger. LONDON, June 3, 1892. DEAR FAMILY: I went out to the Derby on Wednesday and think it is the most interesting thing I ever saw over here. It is SO like these people never to have seen it. It seems to be chiefly composed of costermongers and Americans. I got a box-seat on a public coach and went out at ten. We rode for three hours in a procession of donkey shays, omnibuses, coaches, carriages, vans, advertising wagons; every sort of conveyance stretching for sixteen miles, and with people lining the sides to look on. I spent my time when I got there wandering around over the grounds, which were like Barnum's circus multiplied by thousands. It was a beautiful day and quite the most remarkable sight of my life. Much more wonderful than Johnstown, so you see it must have impressed me. We were five hours getting back, the people singing all the way and pelting one another and saying funny impudent things. My rooms are something gorgeous. They are on the first floor, looking into Piccadilly from a court, and they are filled with Hogarth's prints, old silver, blue and white china, Zulu weapons and fur rugs, and easy chairs of India silk. You never saw such rooms! And a very good servant, who cooks and valets me and runs errands and takes such good care of me that last night Cust and Balfour called at one to get some supper and he would not let them in. Think of having the Leader of the House of Commons come to ask you for food and having him sent away. Burdett-Coutts heard of my being here in the papers and wrote me to dine with him tonight. I lunched with the Tennants today; no relation to Mrs. Stanley, and it was informal and funny rather. The Earl of Spender was there and Lord Pembroke and a lot of women. They got up and walked about and changed places and seemed to know one another better than we do at home. I think I will go down to Oxford for Whitsuntide, which is a heathen institution here which sends everyone away just as I want to meet them. I haven't written anything yet. I find it hard to do so. I think I would rather wait until I get home for the most of it. Chas. will be here in less than a week now and we will have a good time. I have planned it out for days. He must go to Oxford and meet those boys, and then, if he wishes, on to Eastnor, which I learn since my return is one of the show places of England. I am enjoying myself, it is needless to say, very much, and am well and happy. DICK. During these first days in England Richard spent much of his time at Eastnor, Lady Brownlow's place in Lincolnshire, and one of the most beautiful estates in England. Harry Cust, to whom my brother frequently refers in his letters, was the nephew of Lady Brownlow, and a great friend of Richard's. At that time Cust was the Conservative nominee for Parliament from Lincolnshire, and Richard took a most active part in the campaign. Happily, we were both at Lady Brownlow's during its last few tense days, as well as on the day the votes were counted, and Cust was elected by a narrow margin. Of our thrilling adventures Richard afterward wrote at great length in "Our English Cousins." LONDON, July 6, 1892. DEAR MOTHER: On the Fourth of July, Lady Brownlow sent into town and had a big American flag brought out and placed over the house, which was a great compliment, as it was seen and commented on for miles around. Cushing of Boston, a very nice chap and awfully handsome, is there, too. The same morning I went out to photograph the soldiers, and Lord William Frederick, who is their colonel, charged them after me whenever I appeared. It seems he has a sense of humor and liked the idea of making an American run on the Fourth of July from Red-coats. I doubt if the five hundred men who were not on horseback thought it as funny. They chased me till I thought I would die. The Conservative member for the county got in last night and we rejoiced greatly, as the moral effect will help Harry Cust greatly. His election takes place next Monday. The men went in to hear the vote declared after dinner, and so did two of the girls, who got Lady Brownlow's consent at dinner, and then dashed off to change their gowns before she could change her mind. As we were intent on seeing the fun and didn't want them, we took them just where we would have gone anyway, which was where the fighting was. And they showed real sporting blood and saw the other real sort. There were three of us to each girl, and it was most exciting, with stones flying and windows crashing and cheers and groans. A political meeting or election at home is an afternoon tea to the English ones. When we came back the soldiers were leaving the Park to stop the row, and as we flew past, the tenants ran to the gate and cheered for the Tory victory in "good old lopes." When we got to the house the servants ran cheering all over the shop and rang the alarm bell and built fires, and we had a supper at one-fifteen. What they will do on the night of Cust's election, I cannot imagine-- burn the house down probably. Cushing and I enjoy it immensely. We know them well enough now to be as funny as we like without having them stare. They are nice when you know them, but you've GOT to know them first. I had a great dinner at Farrar's. All the ecclesiastical lights of England in knee-breeches were there, and the American Minister and Phillips Brooks. It was quite novel and fun. Lots of love. I have all the money I want. DICK. With Cust properly elected, Richard and I returned to the Albany and settled down to enjoy London from many angles. Although my brother had been there but a few weeks, his acquaintances among the statesmen, artists, social celebrities, and the prominent actors of the day was quite as extraordinary as his geographical and historical knowledge of the city. We gave many jolly parties, and on account of Richard's quickly acquired popularity were constantly being invited to dinners, dances, and less formal but most amusing Bohemian supper-parties. During these days there was little opportunity for my brother to do much writing, but he was very busy making mental notes not only for his coming book on the English people, but for a number of short stories which he wrote afterward in less strenuous times. We returned to New York in August, and Richard went to Marion to rest from his social activities, and to work on his English articles. CHAPTER VI THE MEDITERRANEAN AND PARIS It was, I think, the year previous to this that my mother and father had deserted Point Pleasant as a place to spend their summer vacations in favor of Marion, on Cape Cod, and Richard and I, as a matter of course, followed them there. At that time Marion was a simple little fishing village where a few very charming people came every summer and where the fishing was of the best. In all ways the life was most primitive, and happily continued so for many years. In, these early days Grover Cleveland and his bride had a cottage there, and he and Joseph Jefferson, who lived at Buzzard's Bay, and my father went on daily fishing excursions. Richard Watson Gilder was one of the earliest settlers of the summer colony, and many distinguished members of the literary and kindred professions came there to visit him. It was a rather drowsy life for those who didn't fish--a great deal of sitting about on one's neighbor's porch and discussion of the latest novel or the newest art, or of one's soul, and speculating as to what would probably become of it. From the first Richard formed a great affection for the place, and after his marriage adopted it as his winter as well as his summer home. As a workshop he had two rooms in one of the natives' cottages, and two more charming rooms it would be hard to imagine. The little shingled cottage was literally covered with honeysuckle, and inside there were the old wall-papers, the open hearths, the mahogany furniture, and the many charming things that had been there for generations, and all of which helped to contribute to the quaint peaceful atmosphere of the place. Dana Gibson had a cottage just across the road, and around the corner Gouverneur Morris lived with his family. At this time neither of these friends of Richard, nor Richard himself, allied themselves very closely to the literary colony and its high thoughts, but devoted most of their time to sailing about Sippican Harbor, playing tennis and contributing an occasional short story or an illustration to a popular magazine. But after the colony had taken flight, Richard often remained long into the fall, doing really serious work and a great deal of it. At such times he had to depend on a few friends who came to visit him, but principally on the natives to many of whom he was greatly attached. It was during these days that he first met his future wife, Cecil Clark, whose father, John M. Clark of Chicago, was one of the earliest of the summer colonists to build his own home at Marion. A most charming and hospitable home it was, and it was in this same house where we had all spent so many happy hours that Richard was married and spent his honeymoon, and for several years made his permanent home. Of the life of Marion during this later period, he became an integral part, and performed his duties as one of its leading citizens with much credit to the town and its people. For Marion Richard always retained a great affection, for there he had played and worked many of his best years. He had learned to love everything of which the quaint old town was possessed, animate and inanimate, and had I needed any further proof of how deeply the good people of Marion loved Richard, the letters I received from many of them at the time of his death would show. In the early fall of 1892 Richard returned to his editorial work on Harper's Weekly, and one of the first assignments he gave was to despatch himself to Chicago to report the Dedication Exercises of the World's Fair. That the trip at least started out little to my brother's liking the following seems to show. However, Richard's moods frequently changed with the hour, and it is more than possible that before the letter was sent he was enjoying himself hugely and regarding Chicago with his usual kindly eyes. Chicago Club, October 2, 1892. DEAR FAMILY: Though lost to sight I am still thinking of you sadly. It seems that I took a coupe after leaving you and after living in it for a few years I grew tired and got out on the prairie and walked along drinking in the pure air from the lakes and reading Liebig's and Cooper's advs. After a brisk ten mile walk I reentered my coupe and we in time drew up before a large hotel inhabited by a clerk and a regular boarder. I am on the seventh floor without a bathroom or electric button--I merely made remarks and then returned to town in a railroad train which runs conveniently near. After gaining civilization I made my way through several parades or it may have been the same one to the reviewing stand. My progress was marked by mocking remarks by the police who asked of each other to get on to my coat and on several occasions I was mistaken by a crowd of some thousand people for the P----e of W----s, and tumultuously cheered. At last I found an inspector of police on horseback, who agreed to get me to the stand if it took a leg. He accordingly charged about 300 women and clubbed eight men--I counted them--and finally got me in. He was very drunk but he was very good to me. Once back from Chicago Richard divided his time between his desk at Franklin Square, his rooms on Twenty-eighth Street, and in quickly picking up the friendships and the social activities his trip to England had temporarily broken off. Much as he now loved London, he was still an enthusiastic New Yorker, and the amount of work and play he accomplished was quite extraordinary. Indeed it is difficult to understand where he found the time to do so much. In addition to his work on Harper's he wrote many short stories and special articles, not only because he loved the mere writing of them, but because he had come to so greatly enjoy the things he could buy with the money his labors now brought him. His pleasures had increased as steadily as the prices he could now command for his stories, and in looking back on those days it is rather remarkable when one considers his age, the temptations that surrounded him, and his extraordinary capacity for enjoyment, that he never seems to have forgotten the balance between work and play, and stuck to both with an unswerving and unceasing enthusiasm. However, after four months of New York, he decided it was high time for him to be off again, and he arranged with the Harpers to spend the late winter and the spring in collecting material for the two sets of articles which afterward appeared in book form under the titles of "The Rulers of the Mediterranean" and "About Paris." He set sail for Gibraltar the early part of February, 1893, and the following letters describe his leisurely progress about the Mediterranean ports. NEW YORK, February 3, 1893. DEAREST MOTHER: This is a little present for you and a goodby. Your packing-case is what I need and what I shall want, and I love it because you made it. But as YOU say, we understand and do not have to write love letters; you have given me all that is worth while in me, and I love you so that I look forward already over miles and miles and days and months, and just see us sitting together at Marion and telling each other how good it is to be together again and holding each other's hands. I don't believe you really know how HAPPY I am in loving you, dear, and in having you say nice things about me. God bless you, dearest, and may I never do anything to make you feel less proud of your wicked son. DICK. Off Gibraltar, February 12, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: Today is Sunday. We arrive at Gibraltar at five tomorrow morning and the boat lies there until nine o'clock. Unless war and pestilence have broken out in other places, I shall go over to Tangiers in a day or two, and from there continue on my journey as mapped out when I left. I have had a most delightful trip and the most enjoyable I have ever taken by sea. These small boats are as different from the big twin-screw steamers as a flat from a Broadway hotel. Everyone gets to know everything about everyone else, and it has been more like a yacht than a passenger steamer. When I first came on board I thought I would not find in any new old country I was about to visit anything more foreign than the people, and I was right, but they are most amusing and I have learned a great deal. They are different from any people I know, and are the Americans we were talking about. The ones of whom I used to read in The Atlantic and Blackwood's, as traveling always and sinking out of sight whenever they reached home. They, with the exception of a Boston couple, know none of my friends or my haunts, and I have learned a great deal in meeting them. It has been most BROADENING and the change has been SUCH a rest. I had no idea of how tired I was of talking about the theater of Arts and Letters and Miss Whitney's debut and my Soul. These people are simple and unimaginative and bourgeois to a degree and as kind-hearted and apparent as animal alphabets. I do not think I have had such a complete change or rest in years, and I am sure I have not laughed so much for as long. Of course, the idea of a six months' holiday is enough to make anyone laugh at anything, but I find that besides that I was a good deal harassed and run down, and I am glad to cut off from everything and start fresh. I feel miserably selfish about it all the time. These Germans run everything as though you were the owner of the line. The discipline is like that of the German Army or of a man-of-war, everything moves by the stroke of a bell, and they have had dances and speeches and concerts and religious services and lectures every other minute. Into all of these I have gone with much enthusiasm. We have at the captain's table Dr. Field, the editor of The Evangelist, John Russell, a Boston Democrat, who was in Congress and who has been in public life for over forty years. A Tammany sachem, who looks like and worships Tweed, and who says what I never heard an American off the stage say: "That's me. That's what I do," he says. "When I have insomnia, I don't believe in your sleeping draughts. I get up and go round to Jake Stewart's on Fourteenth Street and eat a fry or a porterhouse steak and then I sleep good---that's me." There is also a lively lady from Albany next to me and her husband, who tells anecdotes of the war just as though it had happened yesterday. Indeed, they are all so much older than I that all their talk is about things I never understood the truth about, and it is most interesting. I really do not know when I have enjoyed my meal time so much. The food is very good, although queer and German, and we generally take two hours to each sitting. Dr. Field is my especial prey and he makes me laugh until I cry. He is just like James Lewis in "A Night Off," and is always rubbing his hands and smacking his lips over his own daring exploits. I twist everything he says into meaning something dreadful, and he is instantly explaining he did not really see a bullfight, but that he walked around the outside of the building. I have promised to show him life with a capital L, and he is afraid as death of me. But he got back at me grandly last night when he presented a testimonial to the captain, and referred to the captain's wife and boy whom he is going to see after a two years' absence, at which the captain wept and everybody else wept. And Field, seeing he had made a point, waved his arms and cried, "I have never known a man who amounted to anything who had not a good wife to care for--except YOU--" he shouted, pointing at me, "and no woman will ever save YOU." At which the passengers, who fully appreciated how I had been worrying him, applauded loudly, and the Doctor in his delight at having scored on me forgot to give the captain his testimonial. There are two nice girls on board from Chicago and a queer Southern girl who paints pictures and sings and writes poetry, and who is traveling with an odd married woman who is an invalid and who like everyone else on board has apparently spent all her life away from home. I have spent my odd time in writing the story I told Dad the night before I sailed and I think it in some ways the best, quite the best, I have written. I read it to the queer girl and her queer chaperon and they weep whenever they speak of it, which they do every half hour. All the passengers apparently laid in a stock of "Gallegher" and "The West" before starting, and young women in yachting caps are constantly holding me up for autographs and favorite quotations. Yesterday we passed the Azores near enough to see the windows in the houses, and we have seen other islands at different times, which is quite refreshing. Tomorrow I shall post this and the trip will be over. It has been a most happy start. I am not going to write letters often, but am going head over ears into this new life and let the old one wait awhile. You cannot handle Africa and keep up your fences in New York at the same time. I am now going out to talk to the Boston couple, or to propose a lion hunt to Dr. Field. Since I wrote that last I have seen Portugal. It made me seem suddenly very far away from New York. Portugal is a high hill with a white watch tower on it flying signal flags. It is apparently inhabited by one man who lives in a long row of yellow houses with red roofs, and populated by sheep who do grand acts of balancing on the side of the hill. There is also a Navy of a brown boat with a leg-of-mutton sail and a crew of three men in the boat--not to speak of the dog. It is a great thing to have a traveled son. None of you ever saw Portugal, yah! I am now in Gibraltar. It is a large place and there does not seem to be room in this letter, in which to express my feelings about Moors in bare legs and six thousand Red-coats and to hear Englishmen speak again. When I woke up Gibraltar was a black silhouette against the sky, but toward the south there was a low line of mountains with a red sky behind them, dim and mysterious and old, and that was Africa. Then Spain turned up all amethyst and green, and the Mediterranean as blue as they tell you it is. They wouldn't let me take my gun into Gibraltar. They know my reputation for war. DICK. GIBRALTAR. February 14th, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: The luck of the British Army which I am modestly fond of comparing with my own took a vacation yesterday as soon as I had set foot on land. In the first place Egypt had settled down to her sluggish Nile like calm and cholera had quarantined the ship I wanted to take to Algiers, shutting off Algiers and what was more important Tunis. The Governor was ill shutting off things I wanted and his adjutant was boorish and proud and haughty. Then I determined to go to Spain but found I had arrived just one day too late for the last of the three days of the Mardi Gras and too early for bull fights. Had I taken Saavedra's letters I should have gone to Madrid and met the Queen and other proud folks. So on the whole I was blue. But I have now determined to take a boat for Tangier at once where I have letters to the Duke de Tnas who is the Master of the Hounds there and a great sport and they say it is very amusing and exciting. In a fortnight I shall go to Malta. I called on Harry Cust's brother and told him who I was and he took me in and put me at the head of the table of young subalterns in grand uniforms and we had marmalade and cold beef and beer and I was happy to the verge of tears to hear English as she is spoke. Then we went to a picnic and took tea in a smuggler's cave and all the foxterriers ran over the table cloth and the Captain spilt hot water over his white flannels and jumped around on one leg. After which we played a handkerchief game sitting in a row and pelting the girls with a knotted handkerchief and then fighting for it-- During one of these scrimmages Mulvaney, two others and Learoyd came by and with eyes front and hands at their caps marched on with stolid countenances, but their officers were embarrassed. It is hard to return a salute with your face in the sand and a stout American sitting on your neck and pulling your first lieutenant's leg. I am now deeply engaged for dinners and dances and teas and rides and am feeling very cheerful again. I am also very well thank you and have no illnesses of any sort. You told me to be sure and put that in-- As you see, I have cut out half of my trip to avoid the cholera, so you need not worry about THAT. To-day I am going over the ramparts as much as they will allow and to-morrow I go to Tangier where I expect to have some boar hunting. I would suggest your getting The Evangelist in a week or two as Dr. Field's letters cover all I have seen. I do not tell you anything about the place because you will read that in the paper to the H. W. but I can assure you the girls are very pretty and being garrison girls are not as shy as those at home in England. I am the first American they ever met they assure me every hour and we get on very well notwithstanding. You can imagine what it is like when Spaniards, Moors and English Soldiers are all crowded into one long street with donkeys and geese and priests and smugglers and men in polo clothes and soldiers in football suits and sailors from the man-of-war. Of course, the Rock is the best story of it all. It is a fair green smiling hill not a fortress at all. No more a fortress to look at than Fairmont Park water works, but the joke of it is that under every bush there is a gun and every gun is painted green and covered with hanging curtains of moss and every promenade is undermined and the bleakest face of the rock is tunnelled with rooms and halls. Every night we are locked in and the soldiers carry the big iron keys clanking through the streets. It is going to make interesting reading. DICK. GIBRALTAR. February 23rd, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: Aeneas who "ran the round of so many chances" in this neighborhood was a stationary stay at home to what I have to do. If I ever get away from the Rock I shall be a traveller of the greatest possible experience. I came here intending to stay a week and to write my letter on Gib. and on Tangier quietly and peacefully like a gentleman and then to go on to Malta. I love this place and there is something to do and see every minute of the time but what happened was this: All the boats that ever left here stopped running, broke shafts, or went into quarantine or just sailed by, and unless I want to spend two weeks on the sea in order to have one at Malta, which is only a military station like this, I must go off to-morrow with my articles unwritten, my photos undeveloped and my dinner calls unpaid. I am now waiting to hear if I can get to Algiers by changing twice from one steamer to another along the coast of Spain. It will be a great nuisance but I shall be able to see Algiers and Tunis and Malta in the three weeks which would have otherwise been given to Malta alone. And Tunis I am particularly keen to see. While waiting for a telegram from Spain about the boats, I shall tell you what I have been doing. Everybody was glad to see me after my return from Tangier. I dined with the Governor on Monday, in a fine large room lined with portraits of all the old commanders and their coats-of-arms like a little forest of flags and the Governor's daughter danced a Spanish dance for us after it was over. Miss Buckle, Cust's fiancee, dances almost as well as Carmencita, all the girls here learn it as other girls do the piano. On Tuesday Cust and Miss B. and another girl and I went over into Spain to see the meet and we had a short run after a fox who went to earth, much to my relief, in about three minutes and before I had been thrown off. There are no fences but the ground is one mass of rocks and cactus and ravines down which these English go with an ease that makes me tremble with admiration. We had not come out to follow, so we, being quite soaked through and very hungry, went to an inn and it was such an inn as Don Quixote used to stop at, with the dining-room over the stable and a lot of drunken muleteers in the court and beautiful young women to wait on us. It is a beautiful country Spain, with every sort of green you ever dreamed of. We had omelettes and native wine and black bread and got warm again and then trotted home in the rain and got wet again, so we stopped at the guard house on the outside of the rock and took tea with the officer in charge and we all got down on our knees around his fire and he hobbled around dropping his eyeglasses in his hot water and very much honored and exceedingly embarrassed. I amused myself by putting on all the uniforms he did not happen to have on and the young ladies drank tea and thawed. This is the most various place I ever came across. You have mountains and seashore and allamandas like Monte Carlo in their tropical beauty and soldiers day and night marching and drilling and banging brass bands and tennis and guns firing so as to rattle all the windows, and picnics and teas. I am engaged way ahead now but I must get off tomorrow. On Washington's birthday I gave a luncheon because it struck me as the most inappropriate place in which one could celebrate the good man's memory and the Governor would not think of coming at first, but I told him I was not a British subject and that if I could go to his dinner he could come to my lunch, so that, or the fact that the beautiful Miss Buckle was coming decided him to waive etiquette and he came with his A. D. C. and his daughter and officers and girls came and I had American flags and English flags and a portrait of Washington and of the Queen and I ransacked the markets for violets and banked them all up in the middle. It was fine. I turned the hotel upside down and all the servants wore their best livery and everybody stood up in a row and saluted His Excellency and I made a speech and so did his Excellency and the chef did himself proud. I got it up in one morning. Helen Benedict could not have done it better. I had a funny adventure the morning I left Tangier-- There was a good deal of talk about Field (confound him) and my getting into the prison and The Herald and Times correspondents were rather blue about it and some of the English residents said that I had not been shown the whole of the prison, that the worst had been kept from us. Field who only got into the prison because I had worked at it two days, said there was an additional ward I had not seen. I went back into this while he and the guard were getting the door open to go out and saw nothing, but to make sure that the prison was as I believed an absolute square, I went back on the morning of my departure and climbed a wall and crawled over a house top and photographed the top of the prison. Then a horrible doubt came to me that this house upon which I was standing and which adjoined the prison might be the addition of which the English residents hinted. There was an old woman in the garden below jumping up and down and to whom I had been shying money to keep her quiet. I sent the guide around to ask her what was the nature of the building upon which I had trespassed and which seemed to worry her so much-- He came back to tell me that I was on the top of a harem and the old woman thought I was getting up a flirtation with the gentleman's wives. So I dropped back again. It will be a couple of months at least before my first story comes out in The Weekly. I cannot judge of them but I think they are up to the average of the Western stories, the material is much richer I know, but I am so much beset by the new sights that I have not the patience or the leisure I had in the West-- Then there were days in which writing was a relief, now there is so much to see that it seems almost a shame to waste it. By the grace of Providence I cannot leave here until the 28th, much to my joy and I have found out that I can do better by going direct to Malta and then to Tunis, leaving Algiers which I did not want to see out of it-Hurrah. I shall now return to the calm continuation of my story and to writing notes which Chas will enjoy. DICK. GIBRALTAR--February 1893. DEAR MOTHER: Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization. Not nice civilization but the dregs of it, the broken down noblemen of Spain and cashiered captains of England and the R---- L----'s of America. They hunt and play cricket and gamble and do nothing to maintain what is best in the place or to help what is worst. I love the Moors and the way they hate the Christian and the scorn and pride they show. They seem to carry all the mystery and dignity of Africa and of foreign conquests about them, and they are wonderfully well made and fine looking and self-respecting. The color is very beautiful, but the foreign element spoils it at every turn. One should really go inland but I shall not because I mean to do that when I reach Cairo. Everybody goes inland from here and Bonsal has covered it already. He is a great man here among all classes. I have bought two long guns and three pistols three feet long and a Moorish costume for afternoon teas. I shall look fine. My guide's idea of pleasing me is to kick everybody out of the way which always brings down curses on me so I have to go back and give them money and am so gradually becoming popular and much sought after by blind beggars. You can get three pounds of copper for a franc and it lasts all day throwing it right and left all the time. I made a great tear in Bonsal's record today by refusing to pay a snake charmer all he wanted and then when he protested I took one of the snakes out of his hands and swung it around my head to the delight of the people. I wanted to show him he was a fakir to want me to pay for what I would do myself. It was a large snake about four feet long. Then my horse and another horse got fighting in the principal street in the city standing up on their hind legs and boxing like men and biting and squealing. It was awful and I got mine out of the way and was trod on and had my arm nearly pulled off and the crowd applauded and asked my guide whether I was American or English. They do not like the English. So with the lower classes I may say that I am having a social success. DICK. Off Malta--March 1, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: I have been having a delightful voyage with moonlight all night and sunlight all day. Africa kept in sight most of the time and before that we saw beautiful mountains in Spain covered with snow and red in the sunset. There were a lot of nice English people going out to India to meet their husbands and we have "tiffin" and "choota" and "curry," so it really seemed oriental. The third night out we saw Algiers sparkling like Coney Island. I play games with myself and pretend I am at my rooms reading a story which is very hard to pretend as I never read in my rooms and then I look up and exclaim "Hello, I'm not in New York, that's Algiers." The thing that has impressed me most is how absolutely small the world is and how childishly easy it is to go around it. You and Nora MUST take this trip; as for me I think Willie Chanler is the most sensible individual I have yet met. All the fascination of King Solomon's Mines seems to be behind those great mountains and this I may add is a bit of advance work for mother, an entering wedge to my disappearing from sight for years and years in the Congo. Which, seriously, I will not do; only it is disappointing to find the earth so small and so easily encompassed that you want to go on where it is older, and new. The worst of it is that it is hard leaving all the nice people you meet and then must say good-bye to. The young ladies and Capt. Buckle and Cust came down to see me off and Buckle brought me a photo four feet long of Gib, an official one which I had to smuggle out with a great show of secrecy and now I shall be sorry to leave these people. Just as I wrote that one of the officers going out to join his regiment came to the door and blushing said the passengers were getting up a round robin asking me to stop on and go to Cairo. Since writing the above lots of things have happened. I bid farewell to everyone at Malta and yet in four hours I was back again bag and baggage and am now on my way to Cairo. Tunis and the Bey are impossible. As soon as I landed at Malta I found that though I could go to Tunis I could not go away without being quarantined for ten days and if I remained in Malta I must stay a week. On balancing a week of Egypt against a week of Malta I could not do it so I put back to this steamer again and here I am. Tomorrow we reach Brindisi and we have already passed Sicily and had a glimpse of the toe of Italy and it is the coldest sunny Italy that I ever imagined. I am bitterly disappointed about Tunis. I have no letters to big people in Cairo only subalterns but I shall probably get along. I always manage somehow with my "artful little Ikey ways." It was most gratifying to mark my return to this boat. One young woman danced a Kangaroo dance and the Captain wept and all the stewards stood in a line and grinned. I sing Chevalier's songs and they all sit in the dining room below and forget to lay out the plates and last night some of the Royal Berkshire with whom I dined at Malta came on board and after hearing the Old Kent Road were on the point of Mutiny and refused to return to barracks. Great is the Power of Chevalier and great is his power for taking you back to London with three opening bars. Malta was the queerest place I ever got into. It was like a city, country and island made of cheese, mouldy cheese, and fresh limburger cheese with holes in it. You sailed right up to the front door as it were and people were hanging out of the windows smoking pipes and looking down on the deck as complacently as though having an ocean steamer in the yard was as much a matter of course as a perambulator. There were also women with black hoods which they wear as a penance because long ago the ladies of Malta got themselves talked about. I was on shore about five hours and saw some interesting things and with that and Brindisi and the voyage I can make a third letter but Tunis is writ on my heart like Calais. Today Cleveland is inaugurated and I took all the passengers down at the proper time and explained to them that at that moment a great man was being made president and gave them each an American cocktail to remember it by and in which to toast him I am getting to be a great speech maker and if there are any more anniversaries in America I shall be a second Depew. It is late but it is still the season here and it will be gay, but what I want to do now is to go off on a little trip inland although Cairo is the worst of all for it is surrounded by deserts and nothing to shoot but antelope and foxes and those I SCORN. I want Zulus and lions. I shall be greatly disappointed if I do not have something to do outside of Cairo for I have had no adventures at all. It is just as civilized as Camden only more exciting and beautiful although Camden is exciting when you have to get there and back in time for the last edition. From what I have already seen I am ready to spend a month in Cairo and then confess to knowing nothing of it. But we shall see. There may be a W A R or a lion hunt or something yet if there is not I shall come back here again. I must fire that Winchester off at least once just for all the trouble it has given me at custom houses. Something exciting must happen or I shall lose faith in the luck of the British army which marches shoulder to shoulder with mine. If I don't have any adventures I shall write essays on art after this like Mrs. Van. Love and lots of it. DICK. CAIRO, March 11, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: In a famous book this line occurs, "He determined to go to that hotel in Cairo where they were to have spent their honeymoon," or words like that. He is now at that hotel and you can buy the famous book across the street. It is called "Gallegher." So--in this way everything comes to him who waits and he comes to it. "Gallegher" is not the only thing you buy in Egypt. You ride to the Pyramids on a brake with a man in a white felt hat blowing a horn, and the bugler of the Army of Occupation is as much in evidence as the priest who calls them to prayer from the minaret. I left the people I liked on the Sultey last Thursday in the Suez Canal and came on here in a special train. It is very cold here, and it is not a place where the cold is in keeping with the surroundings. You see people in white helmets and astrakan overcoats. It is an immense city and intensely interesting, especially the bazaars, but you feel so ignorant about it all that it rather angers you. I wish I was not such a very bad hand at languages. That is ONE THING I cannot do, that and ride. I need it very much, traveling so much, and I shall study very hard while I am in Paris. Our consul-general here is a very young man, and he showed me a Kansas paper when I called on him, which said that I was in the East and would probably call on "Ed" L. He is very civil to me and gives me his carriages and outriders with gold clothes and swords whenever I will take them. It is so beastly cold here that it spoils a lot of things, and there are a lot of Americans who say, "I had no idea you were so young a man," and that, after being five years old for a month and playing children's games with English people who didn't know or care anything about you except that you made them laugh, is rather trying. I am disappointed so far in the trip because it has developed nothing new beyond the fact that going around the world is of no more importance than going to breakfast, and I am selfish in my sightseeing and want to see things others do not. And if you even do see more than those who are not so fortunate and who have to remain at home, still you are so ignorant in comparison with those who have lived here for years and to whom the whole of Africa is a speculation in land or railroads, it makes you feel like such a faker and as if it were better to turn correspondent for the N. Y. Herald, Paris edition, and send back the names of those who are staying at the hotels. That is really all you can speak with authority about. When you have Gordon and Stanley dishes on the bill-of-fare, you feel ashamed to say you've been in Egypt. Anyway, I am a faker and I don't care, and I proved it today by being photographed on a camel in front of the Pyramids, and if that wasn't impertinence I do not know its name. I accordingly went and bought a lot of gold dresses for Nora as a penance. As a matter of fact, unless I get into the interior for a month and see something new, I shall consider the trip a failure, except as a most amusing holiday for one, and that was not exactly what I wanted or all I wanted. After this I shall go to big cities only and stay there. Everybody travels and everybody sees as much as you do and says nothing of it, certainly does not presume to write a book about it. Anyway, it has been great fun, so I shall put it down to that and do some serious work to make up for it. I'd rather have written a good story about the Inauguration than about Cairo. I am well, as usual, and having a fine loaf, only I don't think much of what I have written--that's all. DICK. CAIRO, March 19th, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: I went up the Pyramids yesterday and I am very sore today. It sounds easy because so many people do it, but they do it because they don't know. I have been putting it off, and putting it off, until I felt ashamed to such a degree that I had to go. Little had never been either, so we went out together and met Stanford White and the Emmetts there, and we all went up. I would rather go into Central Africa than do it again. I am getting fat and that's about it--and I had to half pull a much fatter man than myself who pretended to help me. I finally told them I'd go alone unless the fat man went away, so the other two drove him off. Going down is worse. It's like looking over a precipice all the time. I was so glad when I got down that I sang with glee. I hate work like that, and to make it worse I took everybody's picture on top of the Pyramid, and forgot to have one of them take me, so there is no way to prove I ever went up. Little and I hired two donkeys and called them "Gallegher" and "Van Bibber" and raced them. My donkey was so little that they couldn't see him--only his ears. Gallegher won. The donkey-boys called it Von Bebey, so I don't think it will help the sale of the book. Today we went to call on the Khedive. It was very informal and too democratic to suit my tastes. We went through a line of his bodyguard in the hall, and the master of ceremonies took us up several low but wide stairways to a hall. In the hall was a little fat young man in a frock coat and a fez, and he shook hands with us, and walked into another room and we all sat down on chairs covered with white muslin. I talked and Little talked about me and the Khedive pretended to be very much honored, and said the American who had come over after our rebellion had done more for the officers in his army than had anyone else, meaning the English. He did not say that because we were Americans, but because he hates the English. He struck me as being stubborn, which is one side of stupidness and yet not stupid, and I occasionally woke him to bursts of enthusiasm over the Soudanese. His bursts were chiefly "Ali." Little seemed to amuse him very much, and Little treated him exactly like a little boy who needed to be cheered up. I think in one way it was the most curious contrast I ever saw. "Ed" Little of Abilene, Kansas, telling the ruler of Egypt not to worry, that he had plenty of years in which to live and that he would get ahead of them all yet. Those were not his words, but that was the tone, he was perfectly friendly and sincere about it. This place appeals to me as about the best place with which to get mixed up with that I know, and I've gone over a great many maps since I left home and know just how small the world is. So, I sent the Khedive my books after having asked his permission, and received the most abject thanks. And as Cromer called on me, I am going to drop around on him with a few of them. Some day there will be fine things going on here, and there is only one God, and Lord Cromer is his Prophet in this country. They think that Mohammed is but they are wrong. He is a very big man. The day he sent his ultimatum to the Khedive telling him to dismiss Facta Pasha and put back Riaz Pasha, he went out in full view of the Gezerik drive and played lawn tennis. Any man who can cable for three thousand more troops to Malta and stop a transport full of two thousand more at Aden with one hand, and bang tennis balls about with the other, is going in the long run to get ahead of a stout little boy in a red fez. It is getting awfully hot here, almost hot enough for me, and I can lay aside my overcoat by ten o'clock in the morning. Everyone else has been in flannels and pith helmets, but as they had to wear overcoats at night I could not see the advantage of the costume. DICK. I open this to say that ALL of your letters have just come, so I have intoxicated myself with them for the last hour and can go over them again tomorrow. I cannot tell you, dearest, what a delight your letters are and how I enjoy the clippings. I think of you all the time and how you would love this Bible land and seeing the places where Pharaoh's daughter found Moses, and hearing people talk of St. Paul and the plagues of Egypt and Joseph and Mary just as though they had lived yesterday. I have seen two St. Johns already, with long hair and melancholy wild eyes and bare breasts and legs, with sheepskin covering, eating figs and preaching their gospel. Yesterday two men came running into town and told one of the priests that they had seen the new moon in a certain well, and the priest proclaimed a month of fasting, and the men who pulled us up the Pyramid had to rest because they had not eaten or drunk all day. At six a sheik called from the village and all the donkey--boys and guides around the Sphinx ran to get water and coffee and food. Think of that--of two men running through the street to say that they had seen the new moon in a well, when every shop sells Waterbury watches and the people who passed them were driving dogcarts with English coachmen in top-boots behind. Is there any other place as incongruous as this, as old and as new? DICK. ATHENS, March 30, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: I am now in Athens, how I got here is immaterial. Suffice it to say that never in all my life was I so ill as I was in the two days crossing from Alexandria to Piraeus, which I did with two other men in the same cabin more ill than I and praying and swearing and groaning all the time. "It was awful." "I have crossed in many ships upon the seas And some of them were good and some were not; In German, P & O's and Genoese, But the Khedive's was the worst one of the lot. We never got a moment's peace in her For everybody'd howl or pray or bellow; She threw us on our heads or on our knees, And turned us all an unbecoming yellow." Athens is a small town but fine. It is chiefly yellow houses with red roofs, and mountains around it, which remind you of pictures you have seen when a youth. Also olive trees and straight black pines and the Acropolis. There is not much of it left as far as I can see from the city, but what there is is enough to make you wish you had brushed up your Greek history. I have now reached the place where Pan has a cave, where the man voted against Aristides because he was humanly tired of hearing him called the Just and where the Minotaur ate young women. What was in the Isle of Crete but the rock from which the father of Theseus threw himself--is still here! Also the hill upon which Paul stood and told the Athenians they were too superstitious. You can imagine my feelings at finding all of these things are true. After this I am going to the North Pole to find Santa Claus and so renew my youth. I regret to say that it is raining very hard and Athens is not set for a rainstorm. It is also cold but as I have not been warm since I crossed the North River with Chas. amid cakes of ice that is of no consequence. When I come here again I come in the summer. The good old rule that it is cold in winter and warm in summer is a good enough rule to follow. You have only to travel to find out how universally cold winter is. last night I was in Cairo, I got in a carriage and drove out alone to the Pyramids. It was beautiful moonlight. I got a donkey and rode up around them and then walked over to the Sphinx. I had never understood or seen it before. It was the creepiest and most impressive thing I ever had happen to me, I do believe. There was no one except the two donkey-boys and myself and the Sphinx. All about was the desert and above it the purple sky and the white stars and the great negro's head in front of you with its paws stretched out, and the moonlight turning it into shadows and white lines. I think I stood there so long that I got sort of dizzy. It was just as if I had been the first man to stumble across it, and I felt that I was way back thousands of years and that the ghosts of Caesar and Napoleon and Cleopatra and the rest were in the air. That was worth the entire trip to me. This place promises to be most exciting, the New York artists are all here, they are the most jauntily dull people I ever met. Do you know what I mean? They are very nice but so stupid. I don't let them bother me. Who was the chap who wrote about the bottle of Malvoisie? because I got a bottle of it for BREAKFAST and it is NO GOOD. It is like sweet port. But on account of the poem and its being vin du pays I got it. Dear Mother, I wish you were here now and enjoying all these beautiful things. I got you a present in Cairo that will amuse you. Had I stayed on in Cairo I should have had much and many marks of distinction from the English. Lady Gower-Browne, who found out from them that I had called and that they had done nothing except to be rude, raised a great hue and cry and everything changed. What she said of me I don't know but it made a most amusing difference. General Walker galloped a half mile across the desert to give me his own copy of the directions for the sham battle, and I was to have met Cromer at dinner tete-a-tete, and General Kitchener sent apologies by two other generals and all the subalterns called on me in a body. That was the day before I left. I don't know what Lady Gower-Browne said, but it made a change which I am sorry I could not avail myself of as I want politics as well as memories. The next time I come I shall go to even fewer places and see more people. If the Harpers don't look out our interests will clash. I look at it like this. I can always see the old historical things and take my children up the Nile, but I want now to make friends with the Mammon of unrighteousness and the men of the hour. I may want to occupy an hour or two myself some day and they can help me. If America starts in annexing islands she will need people to tell her how it is generally done and it is generally done, I find, by the English. I may give up literature and start annexing things like Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon. They say there will be another crisis in Cairo in a month or so. If that be true I am all right and solid with both parties. But it has got to be worth while of course or I won't go back. There is a king living in a fine palace across the square from my window, one of his officers is now changing the guard in the rain. I hope to call on the king because I like his guard. They wear petticoats and toes turned up in front. Don't you mind what I say about liking politics and don't think I am not enjoying the show things. I have a capacity for both that is so far unsatisfied, and I am now going out in the rain to try and find the post-office. Lots of love. DICK. I am well and have been well (except sea sick) since February P. S.--A funeral is just passing the window with the corpse exposed to view as is the quaint custom here, to add to its horror they rouge the face of the corpse and everybody kisses it. In the Greek church they burn candles for people and the number of candles I have burnt for you would light St. Paul's, and you ought to be good with so much war being expended all over Athens for you. You buy candles instead of tipping the verger or putting it in the poor box, or because you are superstitious and think it will do some good, as I do. Orient Express. Somewhere in Bulgaria on the way to London. April 14th, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: Tuesday I wrote you a letter in the club at Constantinople telling you how glad I would be to get out of that City on April 17th on the Orient Express which only leaves twice a week on Thursdays and Mondays. So any one who travels by the Orient is looked upon first as a millionaire and second, if he does not break the journey at Vienna, as a greater traveller than Col. Burnaby on his way to Khiva. Imagine a Kansas City man breaking the journey to New York. After I wrote you that letter I went in the next room and read of the Nile Expedition in search of Gordon--this went through three volumes of The Graphic and took some time, so that when I had reached the picture which announced the death of Gordon it was half past five and I had nothing more to do for four days-- It was raining and cold and muddy and so I just made up my mind I would get up and get out and I jumped about for one hour like a kangaroo and by seven I was on the Orient with two Cook men to help me and had shaken my fist at the last minaret light of that awful city. So, now it is all over and it is done-- I have learned a great deal in an imperfect way of the juxtaposition of certain countries and of the ease with which one can travel without speaking any known languages and of the absolute necessity for speaking one, French. I am still disappointed about the articles but selfishly I have made a lot out of the trip. You have no idea how hard it is not to tell about strange things and yet you know people do not care half as much for them as things they know all about-- No matter, it is done and with the exception of the last week it was F I N E. "I'm going back to London, to 'tea' and long frock coats I'm done with Cook and seeing sights I'm done with table d'hotes So clear the track you signal man From Sofia to Pless, I'm going straight for London On the Orient Express. I'm going straight for London O'er Bulgaria's heavy sands To Rotten Row and muffins, soles, Chevalier and Brass Bands Ho' get away you bullock man You've heard the whistle blowed a locomotive coming down the Grand Trunk Road." This is a great country and I want to ask all the natives if they know "Stenie" Bonsal. They are all his friends and so are the "Balkans," and all the little Balkans. Nobody wears European clothes here. They are all as foreign and native and picturesque as they can be, the women with big silver plates over their stomachs and the men in sheepskin and tights and the soldiers are grand. We have been passing all day between snow covered mountains and between herds of cattle and red roofed, mud villages and long lakes of ice and snow-- It is a beautiful day and I am very happy. (Second day out) 15th---We are now in Hungary and just outside of Buda Pesth "the wickedest city in the world," still in spite of that fact I am going on. I am very glad I came this way-- The peasants and soldiers are most amusing and like German picture-papers with black letter type-- I shall stop a day in Paris now that I have four extra days. DICK. In sight of Paris--April 16, 1893. DEAREST MOTHER: has been the most beautiful day since February 4th. It is the first day in which I have been warm. All through I have had a varnish of warmth every now and again but no real actual internal warmth--I am now in sight of Paris and it is the 16th of April, in the eleven weeks which have elapsed since the 4th of February I have been in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Morocco. I have sat on the Rock of Gibraltar, sailed on the Nile and the Suez Canal and crossed through the Dardanelles, over the Balkans, the steppes of Hungary and the Danube and Rhine. I have seen the sphinx by moonlight, the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and in two days more I shall have seen St. Paul's. What do you think I should like to see best now? YOU. I have been worrying of late as to whether or not I should not come home now and leave Paris for another time because it seems so rough on you to leave you without either of your younger sons for so long. But I have thought it over a great deal and I think it better that I should do Paris now and leave myself clear for the rest of the year. I promise you one thing however that I shall not undertake to stay away so long again; it is too long and one grows out of things. But nothing I feel, will be so easy or so amusing as Paris and I intend to get through with it soon and trot home to you by the middle of August AT THE VERY LATEST. So, please write me a deceitful letter and say you do not miss me at all and that my being so near as Paris makes a great difference and that I am better out of the way and if Chas goes to London I shall be near him in case he forgets to put on his overshoes or involves us in a war with G. B. Now, mother dear, do write me a cheerful letter and say that you do not mind waiting until the middle of August for me and when I come back this time I shall make a long stay with you at Marion and tell you lots of things I have not written you and I shall not go away again for ever so long and if I do go I shall only stay a little while. You have no idea how interesting this rush across the continent has been. I started in snow and through marshes covered with ice and long horned cattle and now we are in such a beautiful clean green land with green fields and green trees and flowering bushes which you can smell as the train goes by. I now think that instead of being a cafe-chantant singer I should rather be an Austrian baron and own a castle on a hill with a red roofed village around it. I have spent almost all of the trip sitting on the platform and enjoying the sight of the queer peasants and the soldiers and old villages. Tonight I shall be in "Paris, France" as Morton used to say and I shall get clean and put on my dress clothes but whether I shall go see Yvette Guilbert or Rusticana again I do not know. Perhaps I shall just paddle around the fountain in the Place de la Concorde and make myself thoroughly at home. With a great deal of love to Dad and Nora and Chas and all. DICK. At the time that Richard's first travel articles appeared some of his critics took umbrage at the fact that he was evidently under the delusion that he had discovered London, Gibraltar, Athens, Paris, and the other cities he had visited, and that no one else had ever written about them. As a matter of fact no one could have been more keenly conscious of what an oft-told tale were the places that he had chosen to describe. If Richard took it for granted that the reader was totally unacquainted with the peoples of these cities and their ways, it was because he believed that that was the best way to write a descriptive article, always had believed it, and believed it so long as he wrote. And whatever difference of opinion may have existed among the critics and the public as to Richard's fiction, I think it is safe to say that as a reporter his work of nearly thirty years stood at least as high as that of any of his contemporaries or perhaps as that of the reporters of all time. As an editor, when he gave out an assignment to a reporter to write an article on some well-worn subject and the reporter protested, Richard's answer was the same: "You must always remember that that story hasn't been written until YOU write it." And when he suggested to an editor that he would like to write an article on Broadway, or the Panama Canal, or the ruins of Rome and the editor disapproved, Richard's argument was: "It hasn't been done until _I_ do it." And it was not because he believed for a moment that he could do it better or as well as it had been done. It was simply because he knew the old story was always a good story, that is, if it was seen with new eyes and from a new standpoint. At twenty-eight he had written a book about England and her people, and the book had met with much success both in America and England. At twenty-nine, equally unafraid, he had "covered" the ancient cities that border the Mediterranean, and now Paris lay before him! This thought--indeed few thoughts--troubled Richard very much in those days of his early successes. He had youth, friends, a marvellous spirit of adventure, and besides there are many worse fates than being consigned to spending a few months in Paris, having a thoroughly joyous time, taking a few mental notes, and a little later on transferring them to paper in the quiet of a peaceful summer home at Marion. Chief among his friends in Paris at this time was Charles Dana Gibson, who was living in a charming old house in the Latin Quarter, and where the artist did some of his best work and made himself extremely popular with both the Parisians and the American colony. In addition to Gibson there were Kenneth Frazier, the portrait-painter, and Tina, Newton, and James Eustis, the daughter and sons of James B. Eustis, who at that time was our ambassador to France, a most genial and kindly host, who made much of Richard and his young friends. PARIS, May 5, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: It is a narrow street with apartment houses of gray stone and iron balconies along either side of it. The sun sets at one end of the street at different times during the day and we all lean out on the balconies to look. On the house, one below mine, on the other side of our street, is a square sign that says: ALFRED DE MUSSET EST MORT DANS CETTE MAISON A great many beautiful ladies with the fashionable red shade of hair still call there, as they used to do when the proper color was black and it was worn in a chignon and the Second Empire had but just begun. While they wait they stretch out in their carriages and gaze up at the balconies until they see me, and as I wear a gold and pink silk wrapper and not much else, they concentrate all their attention on the wrapper and forget to drop a sigh for the poet. There are two young people on the sixth floor opposite, who come out on the balcony after dinner and hold on to each other and he tells her all about the work of the day. Below there is a woman who sews nothing but black dresses, and who does that all day and all night by the light of a lamp. And below the concierge stands all day in a lace cap and black gown and blue, and looks up the street and down the street like the woman in front of Hockley's. BUT on the floor opposite mine there is a beautiful lady in a pink and white wrapper with long black hair and sleepy black eyes. She does not take any interest in my pink wrapper, but contents herself with passing cabs and stray dogs and women with loaves of bread and bottles in their hands who occasionally stray into our street. At six she appears in another gown and little slippers and a butterfly for a hat and says "Good-by" to the old concierge and trips off to dinner. Lots of love to all. DICK. PARIS, May 11th, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: I am still somewhat tentative as regards my opinion of the place, what it will bring me in the way of material I cannot tell. So far, "Paris Decadent" would be a good title for anything I should write of it. It is not that I have seen only the worst side of it but that that seems to be so much the most prominent. They worship the hideous Eiffel Tower and they are a useless, flippant people who never sleep and yet do nothing while awake. To-morrow I am going to a pretty inn surrounded by vines and trees to see a prize fight with all the silly young French men and their young friends in black and white who ape the English manners and customs even to "la box." To night at the Ambassadeurs the rejected lover of some actress took a gang of bullies from Montmartre there and hissed and stoned her. I turned up most innocently and greatly bored in the midst of it but I was too far away to pound anybody-- I collected two Englishmen and we went in front to await her re-appearance but she had hysterics and went off in a cab and so we were not given a second opportunity of showing them they should play fair. It is a typical incident of the Frenchman and has made me wrathy. The women watching the prize fight will make a good story and so will the arms of the red mill, "The Moulin Rouge" they keep turning and turning and grinding out health and virtue and souls. I dined to night with the C-----s and P----s, the Ex-Minister and disagreed with everybody and found them all very middle class as to intellect. An old English lady next to me said apropos of something "that is because you are not clever like Mr. ---- and do not have to work with your brains." To which I said, I did not mind not being clever as my father was a many times millionaire," at which she became abjectly polite. Young Rothenstein is going to do a picture of me to-morrow morning. There is nothing much more to tell except that a horse stood on his fore legs in the Bois the other day and chucked me into space. I was very sore but I went on going about as it was the Varnishing day at the new salon and I wished to see it. I am over my stiffness now and if "anybody wants to buy a blooming bus" I have one for sale and five pairs of riding breeches and two of ditto boots. No more riding for me--- The boxing bag is in good order now and I do not need for exercise. The lady across the street has a new wrapper in which she is even more cold and haughty than before. "I sing Tarrara boom deay and she keeps from liking me." DICK. PARIS, May 14th, 1893. DEAR NORA: Things are getting more interesting here and I shall probably have something to write about after all, although I shall not know the place as I did London. Will Rothenstein has drawn a picture of me that I like very much and if mother likes it VERY, VERY much she may have it as a loan but she may not like it. I did not like to take it so I bought another picture of him, one of Coquelin cadet and now I have two. Coquelin gave him his first commission when he was nineteen, two years ago, and then asked him to do two sketches. After these were done Coquelin told him by letter that he would give him half what they had agreed upon for the big picture for the two sketches and begged the big picture as a gift. So Rothenstein cut the head and shoulders out of the big one and sent him the arms and legs. It is the head he cut out that I have. When Rothenstein and I and Coquelin become famous, that will make a good story. I have also indulged myself in the purchase of several of Cherets works of art. They cost three francs apiece. We have had some delightful lunches at the Ambassadeurs with Cushing and other artists and last night I went out into the Grande Monde to a bal masque for charity at the palace of the Comtesse de la Ferrondeux. It was very stupid and the men outnumbered the women 30 to 1, which are interesting odds. To-day we went to Whistler's and sat out in a garden with high walls about it and drank tea and laughed at Rothenstein. The last thing he said was at the Ambassadeurs when one of the students picking up a fork said, "These are the same sort of forks I have." Rothenstein said "yes, I did not know you dined here that often." Some one asked him why he wore his hair long, "To test your manners" he answered. He is a disciple of Whistler's and Wilde's and said "yes, I defend them at the risk of their lives." Did I tell you of his saying "It is much easier to love one's family than to like them." And when some one said "Did you hear how Mrs. B. treated Mr. C., (a man he dislikes) he said, "no, but I'm glad she did." It was lovely at Whistler's and such a contrast to the other American salon I went to last Sunday. It was so quiet, and green and pretty and everybody was so unobtrusively polite. Rothenstein wore my rosette and made a great sensation and I was congratulated by Whistler and Abbey and Pennell. Rothenstein said he was going to have a doublebreasted waistcoat made with rosettes of decorations for buttons. Tomorrow Lord Dufferin has asked me to breakfast at the Embassy. He was at the masked ball last night and was very nice. He reminds me exactly of Disraeli in appearance. It is awfully hot here and a Fair for charity has asked me to put my name in "Gallegher" to have it raffled for. "Dear" Bonsal arrives here next Sunday, so I am in great anticipation. I am very well, tell mother, and amused. Lots of love. DICK. PARIS, June 13, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: There is nothing much to say except that things still go on. I feel like one of those little India rubber balls in the jet of a fountain being turned and twisted and not allowed to rest. Today I have been to hear Yvette Guilbert rehearse and thought her all Chas thinks her only her songs this season are beneath the morals of a medical student. It is very hot and it is getting hotter. I had an amusing time at the Grand Prix where Tina won a lot of money on a tip I gave her which I did not back myself. In the evening Newton took me to dinner and to the Jardin de Paris where they had 10 franc admittance and where every thing went that wasn't nailed. The dudes put candles on their high hats and the girls snuffed them out with kicks and at one time the crowd mobbed the band stand and then the stage and played on all the instruments. The men were all swells in evening dress and the women in beautiful ball dresses and it was a wonderful sight. It only happens once a year like the Yale-Princeton night at Koster and Bials except that the women are all very fine indeed. They rode pig-a-back races and sang all the songs. I had dinner with John Drew last night. I occasionally sleep and if Nora doesn't come on time I shall be a skeleton and have no money left. As a matter of fact I am fatter than ever and can eat all sorts of impossible things here that I could never eat at home. I lunch every day with the Eustises and we dine out almost every night. I consort entirely with the poorest of art students or the noblest of princesses and so far have kept out of mischief, but you can never tell for this is a wicked city they say, or it strikes me as most amusing at present only I cannot see what Harper and Bros. are going to get out of it. I said that of London so I suppose it will all straighten out by the time I get back. DICK. CHAPTER VII FIRST PLAYS When the season in Paris had reached its end, Richard returned to London and later on to Marion, where he spent the late summer and early fall, working on his Mediterranean and Paris articles, and completing his novel "Soldiers of Fortune." In October he returned to New York and once more assumed his editorial duties and took his usual active interest in the winter's gayeties. The first of these letters refers to a dinner of welcome given to Sir Henry Irving. The last two to books by my mother and Richard, and which were published simultaneously. NEW YORK, November 27, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: The dinner was very fine. I was very glad I went. Whitelaw Reid sat on one side of Sir Henry Irving and Horace Porter on the other. Howells and Warner came next. John Russell Young and Mark Twain, Millet, Palmer, Hutton, Gilder and a lot more were there. There were no newspaper men, not even critics nor actors there, which struck me as interesting. The men were very nice to me. Especially Young, Reid, Irving and Howells. Everybody said when I came in, "I used to know you when you were a little boy," so that some one said finally, "What a disagreeable little boy you MUST have been." I sat next a chap from Brazil who told me lots of amusing things. One story if it is good saves a whole day for me. One he told was of a German explorer to whom Don Pedro gave an audience. The Emperor asked him, with some touch of patronage, if he had ever met a king before. "Yes," the German said thoughtfully; "five, three wild and two tame." Mark Twain told some very funny stories, and captured me because I never thought him funny before, and Irving told some about Stanley, and everybody talked interestingly. Irving said he was looking forward to seeing Dad when he reached Philadelphia. "It is nice to have seen you," he said, "but I have still to see your father," as though I was not enough. DICK. NEW YORK, 1893. DEAREST MOTHER: I cannot tell you how touched and moved I was by the three initials in the book. It was a genuine and complete surprise and when I came across it while I was examining the letterpress with critical approbation and with no idea of what was to come, it left me quite breathless-- It was so sweet of you-- You understand me and I understand you and you know how much that counts to me-- I think the book is awfully pretty and in such good taste-- It is quite a delight to the eye and I am much more keen about it than over any of my own-- I have sent it to some of my friends but I have not read it yet myself, as I am waiting until I get on the boat where I shall not be disturbed-- Then I shall write you again-- It was awfully good of you, and I am so pleased to have it to give away. I never had anything to show people when they asked for one of your other books and this comes in such an unquestionable form-- With lots of love. DICK. NEW YORK, 1893. DEAR MOTHER: I got your nice letter and one from Dad. Both calling me many adjectives pleasing to hear although they do not happen to fit. So you are in a third edition are you? These YOUNG writers are crowding me to the wall. I feel thrills of pride when I see us sitting cheek by jowl on the news-stands. Lots of love. In February, 1894, Richard was forced by a severe attack of sciatica to give up temporarily the gayeties of New York and for a cure he naturally chose our home in Philadelphia, where he remained for many weeks. Although unable to leave his bed, he continued to do a considerable amount of work, including the novelette "The Princess Aline," in the writing of which I believe my brother took more pleasure than in that of any story or novel he ever wrote. The future Empress of Russia was the heroine of the tale, and that she eventually read the story and was apparently delighted with it caused Richard much human happiness. PHILADELPHIA. March 5th. DEAR CHAS: I am getting rapidly better owing to regular hours and light literature and home comforts. I am not blue as I was and my morbidness has gone and I only get depressed at times. I am still however feeling tired and I think I will take quite a rest before I venture across the seas. But across them I will come no matter if all the nerves on earth jump and pull. Still, I think it wiser for all concerned that I get thoroughly well so that when I do come I won't have to be cutting back home again as I did last time. We are young yet and the world's wide and there's a new farce comedy written every minute and I have a great many things to do myself so I intend to get strong and then do them. I enclose two poems. I am going to have them printed for my particular pals later. I am writing one to all of you folks over there. DICK. TAKE ME BACK TO BROADWAY, WHERE THE ORCHIDS GROW WITH APOLOGIES TO THE WESTERN DIALECT POETS "I have wandered up and down somewhat in many different lands I have been to Fort Worth, Texas, and I've tramped through Jersey sands, I have seen Pike's Peak by Moonlight, and I've visited the Fair And to save enumeration I've been nearly everywhere. But no matter where I rested and no matter where I'd go, I have longed to be on Broadway Where the Orchids Grow. Some people love the lilies fair that hide in mossy dells Some folks are fond of new mown hay, before the rainy spells But give to me the orchids rare that hang in Thorley's store, And in Fleischman's at the Hoffman, and in half a dozen more And when I see them far from home they make my heart's blood glow For they take me back to Broadway Where the Orchids Grow. Let Paris boast of boulevards where one can sit and drink There is no such chance on Broadway, at the Brower House, 'I don't think.' And where else are there fair soubrettes in pipe clayed tennis shoes, And boys in silken sashes promenading by in twos Oh you can boast of any street of which you're proud to know But give me sleepy Broadway Where the Orchids Grow. Let poets sing of chiming bells and gently lowing kine I like the clanging cable cars like fire engines in line And I never miss the sunset and for moonlight never sigh When 'Swept by Ocean Breezes.' flashes out against the sky. And when the Tenderloin awakes, and open theatres glow I want to be on Broadway Where the Orchids Grow." A VOUS, JOHN DREW "John Drew, I am your debtor For a very pleasant letter And a lot of cabinet photos Of the 'Butterflies' and you And I think it very kind That you kept me so in mind And pitied me in exile So I do, John Drew. 2 John Drew, 'twixt you and me Precious little I can see Of that good there is in Solitude That poets say they view. For _I_ hate to be in bed With a candle at my head Sitting vis a vis with Conscience. So would you, John Drew. 3 John Drew, then promise me That as soon as I am free I may sit in the first entrance As Lamb always lets me do. And watch you fume and fret While the innocent soubrette Takes the centre of the stage a-- Way from you, John Drew." R. H. D. In the summer of 1894 Richard went to London for a purely social visit, but while he was there President Carnot was assassinated, and he went to Paris to write the "story" of the funeral and of the election of the new President. VERSAILLES, June 24, 1894. I am out here to see the election of the new President. I jumped on the mail coach and came off in a hurry without any breakfast, but I had a pretty drive out, and the guard and I talked of London. The palace is closed and no one is admitted except by card, so I have seen only the outside of it. It is most interesting. There is not a ribbon or a badge; not a banner or a band. The town is as quiet as always, and there are not 200 people gathered at the gate through which the deputies pass. Compared to an election convention in Chicago, it is most interesting. How lively it is inside of the chamber where the thing is going on I cannot say. I shall not wait to hear the result, but will return on the coach. Nothing could be more curious than the apparent indifference of the people of Paris to the assassination of the President. Two days after he died there was not a single flag at half mast among the private residences. The Government buildings, the hotels and the stores were all that advertised their grief. I shall have an interesting story to write of it for the Parisian series. Dana Gibson and I will wait until after the funeral and then go to Andorra. If he does not go, I may go alone, but perhaps I shall go back to London at once. This has been an interesting time here, but only because it is so different from what one would expect. It reads like a burlesque to note the expressions of condolence from all over the world, and to mark the self-satisfaction of the French at attracting so much sympathy, and their absolute indifference to the death of Carnot. It is most curious. We have an ideal time. Never before have I had such jolly dinners, with such good talk and such amusing companions. DICK. LONDON, July 15, 1894. DEAR MOTHER: Mr. Irving gave a supper last night to Mme. Bernhardt and Mme. Rejane. There were about twenty people, and we ate in the Beefsteak Room of the Lyceum Theater, which is so called after the old Beefsteak Club which formerly met there. I had a most delightful time, and talked to all the French women and to Miss Terry, who sent her love to Dad. She said, "I did not SEE him this last visit; that is, I saw him but I did not see him." Her daughter is a very sweet girl, and the picture Miss Terry made on her knees looking up at Bernhardt and Rejane when they chattered in French was wonderful. Neither she nor Irving could speak a word of French, and whenever any one else tried, the crowd all stood in a circle and applauded and guyed them. After it was over, at about three in the morning, Miss Terry offered me a lift home in her open carriage, so she and her daughter and I rode through the empty streets in the gray light for miles and miles, as, of course, I did not get out of such company any sooner than I had to do. They had taken Irving's robe of cardinal red and made it into cloaks, and they looked very odd and eerie with their yellow hair and red capes, and talking as fast as they could. DICK. CHAPTER VIII CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA About January 1, 1895, Richard accompanied by his friends Somers Somerset and Lloyd C. Griscom, afterward our minister to Tokio and ambassador to Brazil and Italy, started out on a leisurely trip of South and Central America. With no very definite itinerary, they sailed from New Orleans, bent on having a good time, and as many adventures as possible, which Richard was to describe in a series of articles. These appeared later on in a volume entitled "Three Gringos in Venezuela." January, 1895. DEAR FAM: On board Breakwater at anchor. You will be pleased to hear that I am writing this in a fine state of perspiration in spite of the fact that I have light weight flannels, no underclothes and all the windows open. It is going to storm and then it will be cooler. We have had a bully time so far although the tough time is still to come, that will be going from Puerto Cortez to Tegucigalpa. At Belize the Governor treated us charmingly and gave us orderlies and launches and lunches and advice and me a fine subject for a short story. For nothing has struck me as so sad lately as did Sir Anthony Moloney K. C. M. G. watching us go off laughing and joking in his gilded barge to wherever we pleased and leaving him standing alone on his lawn with some papers to sign and then a dinner tete-a-tete with his Secretary and so on to the end of his life. It was pathetic to hear him listen to all the gossip from the outside world and to see how we pleased him when we told him we were getting more bald than he was and that he would make a fine appearance in the Row at his present weight. He had not heard of Trilby!! We struck a beautiful place today called Livingston where we went ashore and photographed the army in which there was no boy older than eighteen and most of them under ten. It was quite like Africa, the homes were all thatched and the children all naked and the women mostly so. We took lots of photographs and got on most excellently with the natives who thought we were as funny as we thought them. Almost every place we go word has been sent ahead and agents and consuls and custom house chaps come out to meet me and ask what they can do. This is very good and keeps Griscom and Somerset in a proper frame of awe. But seriously I could not ask for better companions, they are both enormously well informed and polite and full of fun. The night the Governor asked Somers to dinner and did not ask us we waited up for him and then hung him out over the side of the boat above the sharks until he swore he would never go away from us again. Griscom is more aggravatingly leisurely but he has a most audacious humor and talks to the natives in a way that fills them with pleasure but which nearly makes Somers and I expose the whole party by laughing. Today we lie here taking in banannas and tomorrow I will see Conrad, Conrad, Conrad!! Send this to the Consul. Lots of love. DICK. SAN PEDRO--SULA--February, 1895. MY DEAR FAMILY: The afternoon of the day we were in Puerto Cortez the man of war Atlanta steamed into the little harbor and we all cheered and the lottery people ran up the American flag. Then I and the others went out to her as fast as we could be rowed and I went over the side and the surprise of the officers was very great. They called Somers and Griscom to come up and we spent the day there. They were a much younger and more amusing lot of fellows than those on the Minneapolis and treated us most kindly. It was a beautiful boat and each of us confessed to feeling quite tempted to go back again to civilization after one day on her. Their boat had touched at Tangier and so they claimed that she was the one meant in the Exiles. They told me that the guide Isaac Cohen whom I mentioned in Harper's Weekly carries it around as an advertisement and wanted to ship with them as cabin boy. We left the next day on the railroad and the boys finding that two negroes sat on the cowcatcher to throw sand on the rails in slippery places bribed them for their places and I sat on the sand box. I never took a more beautiful drive. We did not go faster than an ordinary horse car but still it was exciting and the views and vistas wonderful. Sometimes we went for a half mile under arches of cocoanut palms and a straight broad leafed palm called the manaca that rises in separate leaves sixty feet from the ground. Imagine a palm such as we put in pots at weddings and teas as high as Holy Trinity Church and hundreds and hundreds of them. The country is very like Cuba but more luxuriant in every way. There are some trees with marble like trunks and great branches covered with oriole nests and a hundred orioles flying in and out of them or else plastered with orchids. If Billy Furness were to see in what abundance they grew he would be quite mad. It is a great pity he did not come with us. This little town is the terminus of the railroad and we have been here four days while Jeffs the American Colonel in the Hondurean Army is getting our outfit. It has been very pleasant and we are in no hurry which is a good thing for us. It is a most exciting country and as despotic as all uncivilized and unstable governments must be. But we have called on the Governor of the district with Jeffs and he gave us a very fine letter to all civil and unmilitary authorities in the district calling on them to aid and protect us in every way. I am getting awfully good material for my novel and for half a dozen stories to boot only I am surprised to find how true my novel was to what really exists here. About ten years ago ---- disappeared, having as I thought drunk himself to death. He came up to me here on my arrival with a lot of waybills in his hand and I learned that he had been employed in this hole in the ground by a railroad for two years. I remembered meeting him at Newport when I was still at Lehigh, and last night he asked me to dinner and told me what he had been doing which included everything from acting in South America to blacking boots in Australia. His boss was a Pittsburgh engineer who is apparently licking him into shape and who told me to tell his father that he had stopped drinking absolutely. His colored "missus" sat with us at the table and played with a beetle during the three hours I stayed there during which time he asked me about ---- who he said had ruined him. He told me of how ---- had done and said this, and the contrast to the thatched roof and the mud floor and the Scotch American engineer and the mulatto girl was rather striking. I never had more luck in any trip than I have had on this one and the luck of R. H. D. of which I was fond of boasting seems to hold good. That man of war, for instance, was the only American one that had touched at Puerto Cortez in TEN years and it came the day we did and left the day we did. We saw a big lithograph of Eddie Sothern in a palm hut here so we went before a notary and swore to it and had three seals put on the paper and sent it him as a joke. We start tomorrow the 22nd so you see we are behind our schedule and I suppose you people are all worried to death about us. We will be much longer than six days on our way to Tegucigalpa as we are going shooting and also to pay our respects to Bogran the ex-president and the man who is getting up the next revolution. But we take care to tell everyone we are travelling for pleasure and are great admirers of Bonilla the present president. Somers and I are getting on famously. He is a very fine boy with a great sense of humor and apparently very fond of me. We had five men counting Jeffs who we call our military attache and Charwood and four drivers and eleven mules so it is quite an outfit. In Ecuador with one more man it would constitute a revolution. DICK. SANTA BARBARA--January 25, 1895. DEAR FAM: We are not at Tegucigalpa as you observe but travelling in this country. "As you see it on Broadway " and as you see it here are two different things. We have had five days of it so far and rested here today in order to pay our respects to General Bogran the ex-president of the Republic. It is still six days to Tegucigalpa. The trip across Central America will certainly be one of the most interesting experiences of my life. It is the most beautiful country I have seen and the most barbarous. It is also the hottest and the most insect-ious and the dirtiest. This latter seems a little view to take of it but it means a great deal as the insects prevent your doing anything in a natural way; as for instance sitting on the grass or sleeping on the ground or hunting through the bushes. It is pretty much as you imagine it is from what you have read, that covers it, and I have discovered nothing new by coming to see it. I only verify what others have seen. The people are most uninteresting chiefly because they are surly to Americans and do not make you feel welcome. I do not mean that I did not do well to come for I am more glad that I did than I can say only I have not, as I have been able to do before, found something that others have not seen. I never expect to see such a country again unless in Africa. If you leave the path for ten yards you would never get back to it except by accident and you could not get that far away unless you cut yourself a trail. In some places the mail route which we follow and over which the mail is carried on the backs of runners is cut in the rock and we go down steps as even as those of the City Hall and for hours we travel over rough rocks and stones and a path so narrow that your knees catch in the vines at the side. The mules are wonderfully sure footed and never slip although they are very little, and I am pretty heavy. The heat is something awful. It bakes you and will dry your pith helmet in ten minutes after you have soaked it in water. But the scenery is magnificent, sometimes we ride above the clouds and look down into valleys stretching fifty miles away and see the buzzards half a mile below us. Then we go through forests of manaca palms that spread out on a single stem sideways and form arches over our heads with the leaves hanging in front of us like portiers or we cross great plains of grass and cactus and rock. The best fun is the baths we take in the mountain streams. They are almost as cool as one could wish and we shoot the rapids and lie under the waterfalls and come out with all the soreness rubbed out of us as though we had been massaged. We went shooting for two days but as they had no dogs we did not do much. I got the best shot of the trip and missed it. It was a large wild cat and he turned his side full on but I fired over him. Somers and I spent most of the time firing chance shots at alligators, but they never gave us a good chance as the birds warn them when they are in danger. One old fellow fifteen feet long beat us for some time and then Somers and I started across the river to catch him asleep. It was like the taking of Lungtepen. We had our money belts around our necks and our shoes in one hand and rifles in the other. The rapids ran very fast and the last I saw of Somerset he was sitting on the bank he had started from counting out wet bank notes and blowing the water out of his gun barrel. I got across all right by sticking my feet between rocks and put on my shoes and crawled up on the old Johnnie. He smelt of musk so strong that you could have found him in the dark. I had, a beautiful shot at him at fifty yards but I was too greedy and ran around some rocks to get nearer and he heard me and dived. I shot a macaw, one of those overgrown parrots with tail feathers three feet from tip to tip. I got him with a rifle and as Griscom had got his with a shotgun I came out all right as a marksman although I was very sore at missing the wild cat. We sleep in hats and we sleep precious little for the dogs and pigs and insects all help to keep us awake and I cannot get used to a hammock. The native beds are made of matting such as they put over tea chests, or bull's hide stretched. Last night I slept in a hut with a woman and her three daughters all over fifteen and they sat up and watched me prepare for bed with great interest. I would not have missed this trip for any other I know. I wanted to rough it and we've roughed it and we will have another week of it too. We have some remarkable photographs and the article ought to be most interesting. Bogran proved to be a very handsome and remarkable man and we had a very interesting talk with him. From Tegucigalpa we will probably go directly to Venezuela across the Isthmus of Panama and not visit another Republic. We have all travelled too much to care to duplicate, and that is what we would be doing by remaining longer in Central America. A month of it will be enough of it and we will not get away from Amapala before the first of February. We are all well and happy and dirty and sing and laugh and tell stories and listen to Griscom's anecdotes of the aristocracy as we pick our way along. So goodbye and God bless you all. DICK. TEGUCIGALPA, CENTRAL AMERICA. February 1st, 1895. 4th, 1895. DEAR FAMILY-- Here we are at last, the trip from Santa Barbara where I last wrote you was made in six days. It was not so interesting as the first part because it was very high up and the tropical scenery gave way to immensely tall pines and other trees that might have been in California, or the Rockies. The Corderillas which is the name of the mountains we crossed are a continuation, by the way, of the Rockies, and the Andes but are not more than 4,000 feet high. We had two very hot days of it in the plains of Comgaqua where there was once a city of 60,000 founded by Cortez but where there are not now more than 6,000. The heat was awful. We peeled all over our faces and hands and dodged and ducked our heads as though some one were biting at us. My saddle and clothes were so hot that I could not place my hand on them. At one village we heard that a bull fight was to be given at the next fifteen miles away, so we rode on there and arrived in time to take part. They had enclosed the plaza with a barricade of logs seven feet high, bound together with vines. They roped a big bull and lassoed him all over and then a man got on his back with spurs on his bare feet and held on by the ropes around the bull's body and by his toes and threw a cloak over the bull's eyes when ever it got too near any one-- They stuck it with spears until it was mad and then let the lassoes slip and the bull started off to tear out the torreadors. I thought it would be a great sporting act to kodak a bull while it was charging you and so we all volunteered to act as torreadors and it was most exciting and funny. It was rather late to get good results but I got some pretty good pictures of the bull coming at me with his head down and then I'd skip into a hole in the wall. The best pictures I got were of Somers and Griscom scrambling over the seven foot barriers with the bull in hot chase. We all looked so funny in our high boots and helmets and so much alike that the savages yelled with delight and thought we had been engaged especially for their pleasure. Our "mosers," or mule drivers treated us most insolently but we could not do anything because Jeffs. had engaged them and we did not want to interfere with his authority but at a place the last day out one of them told Jeffs. he lied and that we all lied. He had lost or stolen a canteen of Griscom's and they had said we had not given it to him. Jeffs. went at him right and left and knocked him all over the shop. There were half a dozen drunken mule drivers at the place and we thought they would take a hand but they did not. That night Jeffs. thought to try us to see what we would have done and left us bathing in a mountain stream and rode on ahead and hid himself behind a rock in a canon and lay in ambush for us. We were jogging along in the moonlight and Somerset was reciting the "Walrus and the Carpenter," when suddenly Jeffs. let out a series of yells in Spanish and opened fire on us over our heads. Somerset was riding my mule and I had no weapons, so I yelled at him to shoot and he fell off his mule and ran to mine and let go at the rock behind which Jeffs. was with the carbines. So that in about five seconds Jeffs.' curiosity was perfectly satisfied as to what we would do, and he shouted for mercy. We thought it was a sentry or brigands and were greatly disappointed when it turned out to be Jeffs. We got here last night and a dirtier or more dismal place you never saw. We had telegraphed ahead for rooms but nothing was in order and we were lodged much worse than we had been several times in the interior where there was occasionally a clean floor. This morning we wrote direct to the President, asking for an interview or audience and did not ask our Consul to help us because Jeffs. had asked him in our presence to come meet us and he said he would after he had done talking to some other men, but he never came. Before we heard from Bonilla however, we learned that the Vice-president who has the same name was to be sworn in so we went to the palace along with the populace in their bare feet. We sat out of sight but the English Consul who was the finest looking person in the chamber--all over gold lace--saw us and asked that we be given places in front, which the minister of something asked us to take but we objected on account of our clothes. Somers had on a flannel suit that looked exactly like pajamas and lawn tennis shoes. But as soon as the ceremony was over they insisted on our going in to the banquet hall and in spite of our objections we were there conveyed and presented to Bonilla who behaved very well and after saying he had received our letters but had not had time to read them left us and avoided us, which was what we wanted for we looked like the devil. We met everybody else though and took the English and Guatemalian Consuls back to our rooms and gave them drinks and then we went to their rooms, so the day went very pleasantly. The President sent us a funny printed card appointing an audience at eleven to-morrow. It is exactly what you would imagine it would be, the soldiers are barefooted except about fifty and the President leaned out of the window in his shirt sleeves after the review and they have not plastered up the holes in his palace that his cannon made in it just a year ago to-day, when he was fighting Vasquez, and Vasquez was then on the inside and Bonilla on the hills. I forgot to tell you that this morning a boy about sixteen years old, with a policeman's badge and club came to our window and talked pleasantly with us or at us rather, while we shaved and guyed him in English. Finally we found that he had come to arrest Jeffs. so we told him where Jeffs. was but he preferred to watch us shave and we finished it under his custody. Then we went to the Commandante and found that the mosers had had Jeffs. arrested for not paying them on their arrival at Tegucigalpa, as we had distinctly told them we would not do but at San Pedro from where we took them, on their return. It was only a spite case suggested by Jeffs. thrashing their leader. The Commandante gave them a scolding and we went out in triumph. February 4th-- Your cable received all right. We were very glad to hear. We have decided to go on by mules to Manaqua, the Capital of Nicaragua, and from there either to Corinto or to Lemon on the Atlantic side. We had to do this or wait here ten days for the boat going south at Amapala. It is moonlight now so that we can avoid the heat of the day. Yesterday we went out riding with the President, who put a gold revolver in his hip pocket before he started and made us feel that uneasy lies the head that rules in this country. He had two horses that had never been ridden before, as a compliment to our powers, the result was that the Vice-president's horse almost killed him, which I guess the President intended it should and the horse Griscom rode backed all over the town. He was a stallion and had never been ridden before that day. Mine was a gentle old gee-gee and yet I felt good when we were all on the ground again. The British consul gave Somers a fine reception and raised the flag for him and had the band there to play "God Save the Queen," which he had spent the whole morning in teaching them. Griscom and I called on our Consul and played his guitar. We bought one for ourselves for the rest of the trip. I want you to do something for me: keep all the unfavorable notices you get. I know Mother won't do it, so I shall expect Nora to make a point of saving them from the waste-paper basket. If there is not a lot of them when I get back, I will raise a row. DICK. MANAQUA--NICARAGUA--February 13, 1895. DEAR FAM: I had a great deal to tell you, but we have just received copies of the Panama Star and have read of the trolley riots in Brooklyn, a crisis in France, War in the Balkans, a revolution in Honolulu and another in Colombia. The result is that we feel we are not in it and we are all kicking and growling and abusing our luck. How Claiborne and Russell will delight over us and in telling how the militia fired on the strikers and how Troop A fought nobly. Never mind our turn will come someday and we may see something yet. We have had the deuce of a time since we left Tegucigalpa. Now we are in a land where there are bull hide beds and canvas cots instead of hammocks and ice and railroads and direct communication with steamship lines. Hereafter all will be merely a matter of waiting until the boat sails or the train starts and the uncertainties of mules and cat boats are at an end. It is hard to explain about our difficulties after we left Tegucigalpa but they were many. We gave up our idea of riding here direct because they assured us we could get a steam launch from Amapala to Corinto so we rode three days to San Lorenzo on the Pacific side and took an open boat from there to Amapala. It was rowed by four men who walked up a notched log and then fell back dragging the sweeps back, with the weight of their bodies. It was a moonlight night and they looked very picturesque rising and sinking back and outlined against the sky. They were naked to the waist and rowed all night and I had a good chance to see them as I had to lie on the bottom of the boat on three mahogany logs. By ten the next day we were too cramped to stand it, so we put ashore on a deserted island and played Robinson Crusoe. We had two biscuits and a box of sardines among five of us but we found oysters on the rocks and knocked a lot off with clubs and stones and the butts of our guns. They were very good. We also had a bath until a fish ran into me about three feet long and cut two gashes in my leg. We reached Amapala about four in the afternoon. It was an awful place; dirt and filth and no room to move about, so we chartered an open boat to sail or row to Corinto sixty miles distant. You see, we could not go back to Tegucigalpa until the steamer arrived which is to take us South of Panama and we could not go to Manaqua either and for the same reason that we had sent back our mule train and we would not wait in Amapala partly because of fever which had been there and partly because we wanted to get to Corinto where they have ice and to see Manaqua. The boat was about as long as the Vagabond and twice as deep and a foot or two more across her beam. There were four of us, five of the crew and two natives who wanted to make the trip and who we took with us. It was pretty awful. The old tub rocked like a milk shake and I was never so ill in my life, we all lay packed together on the ribs of the boat and could not move and the waves splashed over us but we were too ill to care. The next day the sun beat in on us and roasted us like an open furnace. The boat was a pit of heat and outside the swell of the Pacific rose and fell and reflected the sun like copper. We reached Corinto in about twenty four hours and I was never so glad to get any place before. The town turned out to greet us and some Englishmen ran to ask from what boat we had been ship wrecked. They would not believe we had taken the trip for any other reason. They helped us very kindly and would not let us drink all the iced water we wanted and sent us in to bathe in a place surrounded by piles to keep out the sharks and by a roof to shelter one from the sun. Corinto proved to be all that Amapala was not; clean, cool with very excellent food and broad beds of matting. I liked it better than any place at which we have been, we came on here the next day to see the President and found the city hot, dusty and of no interest. There is an excellent hotel however and we had a talk with the President who was a much better chap than Bonilla being older and more civilized. Of course there is absolutely no reason or excuse for us if we do not get control of this canal. If only that it would allow our ships of war to pass from Ocean to Ocean instead of going around the horn. The women are really beautiful but that has nothing to do with the canal. Tomorrow morning we return to Corinto as Somers and I like it best. Griscom would like to go on across by the route of the canal which would be a good thing were we certain of meeting a steamer at Simon or Greytown, but the Minister who went last month that way had to wait there sixteen days. So, we will probably leave Corinto on the 17th or 20th, there are two steamers, one that stops at ports and one that does not. They both arrive together. I do not know which we will take but--this letter will go with me. Up to date I think the trip will make a good story but it will have to be a personal one about the three of us for the country as it stands is uninteresting to the general reader for the reason that it DUPLICATES itself in everything. But with our photographs and a humorous story, it ought to be worth reading and I have picked enough curious things to make it of some value. February 15,--Corinto. We are back here now and rid of that dusty, dirty city. You would be amused if you saw this place and tried to understand why we prefer it to any place we have seen. There is surf bathing at a half mile distant and a good hotel with a great bar where a Frenchman gives us ice and the sea captains and agents for mines and plantations in the interior gather to play billiards. Outside there are rows of handsome women with decollete gowns and shining black hair and colored silk scarfs selling fruit and down the one street which faces the bay are a double row of palms and the store where two American boys have a phonograph. They are the only Americans I have met who have or are taking a dollar out of this country. They play the guitar and banjo very well. One of them was on the Princeton glee club and their stories of how they have toured Central America are very amusing. Lots of Love. DICK. S. S. Barracouta--Off San Juan February 21, 1895. DEAR MOTHER: Today I believe is the 21st. We are out two days from Corinto off San Juan on the boundary of Costa Rica and lie here some hours. Then we go on without stopping to Panama arriving there about the 25th. On the 28th we take the steamer to Caracas. We will be at Caracas a week and then go straight home. But in the meanwhile we will have got one mail at Colon when we go there to take the boat for Caracas and glad I will be to get it. We have had a summary of the news in the Panama Star and a bundle of Worlds telling all about the trolley strike and that is all except Dad's cable at Tegucigalpa that we have heard in nearly two months. I am very sorry that the distances have turned out so much longer than we expected and that we had that unfortunate ten days wait for the steamer. I know you want me home and I would like to be there but I do not think I ought to go without seeing Caracas. It helps the book so much too if one runs it into South America for no one in the States thinks much of Central and does not want to read about it. At least I know I never did. We have had a most amusing time with the two phonograph chaps. One of them has been an advertising agent and a deputy sheriff and chased stage coach robbers and kept a hard-ware store and is only twenty-five and the other has not had quite as much experience but has been to Princeton, he is 23. The mixture of narratives which change from tricks of the hard-ware trade to dances at Buckingham Palace and anecdotes of Cliff House supper parties at San Francisco are very interesting. I am going to write a book for them and call it "Through Central America with a Phonograph" or "Who We Did, and How We Done Them." We sing the most beautiful medleys and contribute to the phonograph. I had to protest against them announcing "Her Golden Hair was Hanging Down her Back" by Richard Harding Davis and Somerset kicked at their introducing "God Save the Queen" as sung by "His Grace the Duke of Bedford" which they insist in thinking his real title and his name; if he would only confess the truth. You cannot have any idea of how glad I am that I took this trip, just this particular trip, not for any interest it will be to the gentle reader but for the benefit it has been to me. All the things I was nervous about have been done and should I get nerves again as I suppose I always will in one form or another I can get rid of them by remembering how I got rid of them before during this most peculiar excursion. For though I and we all told the truth about being well, we were in a most trying place at times and the ride we took and the sail to get away from possible fever was very much of a strain. I do not see how Griscom kept up as he did for he was an invalid and very nervous when he started. But he showed great sporting blood. It was much better having three than two and he furnished us with much amusement at which he never complains. His artlessness and his bad breaks which keep us filled with terror make the most entertaining narratives and he tells them on himself and then keeps on making new ones. One night Jeffs came down with fever through bathing in the mountain streams, a practice which did not hurt us but which natives of the country cannot do in safety, and I confess I was scared. Jeffs pulled through in a few days. It was odd that the man who had lived here eleven years should have been the only one to give up throughout the whole trip and he was a good sport, too. I will have the Central American stories all done or nearly so by the time we reach New York which is one of the comforts of this over abundance of sea voyages. I have the lottery story nearly written and am wondering now if Bissell will let me publish it. Would it not be a good idea to have Dad, if he knows him, explain about how I went South to write it and just what it is and get his official sanction or shall I write or get the Harper's to write when I get back. The lottery people in joke offered $10,000 if they could write the story themselves. And sometimes I wish they would for it is the hardest kind of work. I do not want to advertise their old game and yet I cannot help doing it, in a way. We put in at Punta Arenas and I found a woman looking at us with an opera glass and shortly after she sent out to say she knew me and that she wanted me to come up. It seemed I met her in Elizabeth, New Jersey with Eddie Coward where she was playing in private theatricals. Since then as a punishment no doubt she has lived here and her husband is Minister of the Navy with one gun boat. This trip is very hot and I sleep on deck and look up at the stars and the light on the jib and the smoke spoiling the firmament. It makes you feel terribly far away from the centre of civilization in front of the fire and you all trying to make out where we are at. I hope you know more about it than we do. It is the worst country for getting about that I ever heard of. It has revived my interest and belief in all such beautiful things as buried treasures and hidden cities and shooting men against stone walls and filibusters. There are not many of these stories but every man tells them differently so they have all the freshness of a new tale. There is no ice on this boat or lemons or segars. It is the first time so they say that it has happened in twelve months, but after this it must be better. At Panama they fine the ice man $1000 every day his machine breaks and so we have hopes. I feel so very, very selfish off down here and leaving you all alone and it makes me lose my temper more than usual when all these delays occur but I promise to be good hereafter and we will be together soon now by the end of March sure and I hope you will not miss me too much, as much as I miss all of you. Sometimes I wish you could see some of these islands and the long shadowy sharks and the turtles, there are thousands of turtles as big as tubs just floating around like empty bottles, but I have never on the whole taken a trip when I so seldom wished that the family were around to enjoy it. It used to hurt me during the Mediterranean trip but there is not much that would please you in this outfit. I like it because I am satisfied to go dirty for weeks at a time and to talk to the engineer or the queer passengers and to pick up stories and improve my geography but I do not think the scenery would compensate either Nora or you or Dad for the lack of necessities and CLEANTH. When we were crossing the continent I don't believe I had a spot on me as big as a nickel without three bites on it, all sorts of bites, they just swarmed over you all sizes, colors and varieties. They came from dogs, from the sand, from trees, from the grass, from the air. The worst were little red bugs that lay under the leaves called carrapati's and that came off on you in a hundred at a time. And there were also "jiggers" that get under your nails and leave eggs there. Some times we could not sleep at all for the bites and you had to carry a brush to brush the carripats off every time you passed through bushes. It's the damnedest country I was ever in now that I have time to think of it. The other day I was going in to bathe and the sand was so hot that I could not get to the breakers and so I went yelling and jumping back to the grass and the grass was just one mass of burrs, so I gave another yell and leaped on to a big log and the log was full of thorns. That's the sort of country it is. And then after you do make a dash for the surf a shark makes a dash for you and you don't know what you are here for anyway. It had its humorous side and it was very funny, especially as it never turned out otherwise, to see the men scamper when the sharks came in. They never scented us for ten minutes or so and then they would swim up and we would give a yell and all make for the shore head over heels and splashing and shrieking and scared and excited. There would always be one man who was further out than the rest and he could not hear on account of the waves and we would all line up on the beach and yell and dance up and down and try to attract his attention. But you would see him go on diving and playing along in horrible loneliness until he turned to speak to some one and found the man gone and then he would look for the others and when he saw us all on the shore he would give one wild whoop out of him and go falling over himself with his hair on end and his eyes and mouth wide open. I saw one shark ten feet long but we would have died of the heat if we had not bathed so we thought it was worth it. That's over now because we cannot get any more sea bathing. Just around Panama. Finest place seen yet. RICHARD. PANAMA, February 28th, 1895. DEAR MOTHER: Griscom has awakened to the fact that he is a Press correspondent and is interviewing rebels who come stealthily by night followed by spies of the government and sit in Griscom's room with the son of the Consul General, as interpreter. Somerset and I refuse to be implicated and sit in the plaza waiting for a file of soldiers to carry Griscom off which is our cue for action. There is a man-of-war, the Atlanta, the one we made friends with at Puerto Cortez, lying at Colon and so we feel safe. We may now be said to be absorbing local color. That is about all we have done since we left Amapala. And if it were not that you are all alone up there, I would not mind it. I would probably continue on. We know it now as we do London or Paris. We can distinguish sea captains, lawyers in politics, commandantes, oldest residents, gentlemenly good for nothings, shipping agents and commission dealers, coffee planters and men who are "on the beach" with unerring eye. We know the story of each before he tells it, or it is told by some one else. The Commandante shot a lot of men by the side of a road during the last revolution, first allowing them to dig their own graves and is here now so that he can pay himself by stealing the custom dues, the lawyer politician has been to Cornell and taken a medical degree in Paris and aspires to be a deputy and only remembers New York as the home of Lillian Russell. The commission merchants are all Germans and the coffee planters are all French. They point with pride to little bare-foot boys selling sea shells and cocoanuts as their offspring, although they cannot remember their names. The sea captains you can tell by their ready made clothes of a material that would be warm in Alaska and by them wearing Spanish dollars for watch guards and by the walk which is rolling easily when sober and pitching heavily toward the night. The oldest resident always sits in front of the hotel and in the same seat, with a tortoise shell cane and remembers when Vasquez or Mendoza or Barrios, or Bonilla occupied the Cathedral and fired hot shot into the Palace and everybody took refuge in the English Consulate and he helped guard the bank all night with a Springfield rifle. The men who are on the beach have just come out of the hospital where they have had yellow fever and they want food. This story is intended to induce you to get rid of them hurriedly by a small token. Sometimes out of this queer combination you will get a good story but generally they want to show you a ruined abbey or a document as old as the Spanish occupation or to make you acquainted with a man who has pearls to sell, or a coffee plantation or a collection of unused stamps which he stole while a post-office employee. Our chief sport now is to go throw money at the prisoners who are locked up in a row of dungeons underneath the sea wall. The people walk and flirt and enjoy the sea breeze above them and the convicts by holding a mirror between the bars of the dungeons can see who is leaning over the parapet above them. Then they hold out their hands and you drop nickels and they fail to catch them and the sentry comes up and teases them by holding the money a few inches beyond their reach. They climb all over the crossbars in their anxiety to get the money and look like great monkeys. At night it is perfectly tremendous for their is only a light over their heads and they crawl all over the bars beneath this, standing on each other's shoulders and pushing and fighting and yelling half naked and wholey black and covered with sweat. As a matter of fact they are better content to stay in jail than out and when the British Consul offered to send eight of them back to Jamaica they refused to go and said they would rather serve out their sentence of eight years. This is the way the place looks and I am going to introduce it in a melodrama and have some one lower files down to the prisoners. DICK. After some not very eventful or pleasant days at Caracas, Richard sailed for home and from the steamer wrote the following letter: March 26th--On board S. S. Caracas. DEAR CHAS: Off the coast of God's country. Hurrah! H---- did not come near us until the morning of our departure when he arrived at the Station trembling all over and in need of a shave. But in the meanwhile the consul at Caracas picked Griscom and myself up in the street and took us in to see Crespo who received us with much dignity and politeness. So we met him after all and helped the story out that much. There is not much more to tell except that I was never so glad to set my face home as I am now and even the roughness of this trip cannot squelch my joy. It seems to me as if years had passed since we left and to think we are only three days off from Sandy Hook seems much too wonderfully good to be possible. Some day when we have dined alone together at Laurent's I will tell you the long story of how Somers and Gris came to be decorated with the Order of the Bust of Bolivar the Liberator of Venezuela of the 4th class but at present I will only say that there is a third class of the order still coming to me in Caracas, as there is 20 minutes still coming to Kelly in Brooklyn. It was a matter of either my getting the third class, which I ought to have had anyway having the third class of another order already, and THEIR GETTING NOTHING, or our all getting the 4th or 5th class and of course I choose that they should get something and so they did and for my aimable unselfishness in the matter they have frequently drunken my health. I was delighted when Somers got his for he was happier over it than I have ever seen him over anything and kept me awake nights talking about it. I consider it the handsomest order there is after the Legion of Honor and I have become so crazy about Bolivar who was a second Washington and Napoleon that I am very glad to have it, although I still sigh for the third class with its star and collar. The boys are especially glad because we have organized a Traveller's Club of New York of which we expect great things and they consider that it starts off well in having three of the members possessors of a foreign order. We formed the club while crossing Honduras in sight of the Pacific Ocean and its object is to give each other dinners and to present a club medal to people who have been nice to and who have helped members of the club while they were in foreign parts. It is my idea and I think a good one as there are lots of things one wants to do for people who help you and this will be as good as any. Members of the club are the only persons not eligible to any medal bestowed by the club and the eligibility for membership is determined by certain distances which a man must have travelled. Although the idea really is to keep it right down to our own crowd and make each man justify the smallness of the club's membership by doing something worth while. I am President. Bonsal is vice president. Russell treasurer and Griscom Secretary. Somerset is the solitary member. You and Sam and Helen and Elizabeth Bisland are at present the only honorary members. We are also giving gold medals to the two chaps who crossed Asia on bicycles, to Willie Chanler and James Creelman, but that does not make them members. It only shows we as a club think they have done a sporting act. I hope you like the idea. We have gone over it for a month and considered it in every way and I think we are all well enough known to make anybody pleased to have us recognize what they did whether it was for any of us personally or for the public as explorers. On this trip for instance we would probably send the club medals in silver to Admiral Meade, to Kelly, to Royas the Venezuelan Minister for the orders to the Governor of Belize, to the consul at La Guayra and to one of the phonograph chaps. In the same way if you would want to send a medal to any man or woman prince or doctor who had been kind, courteous, hospitable or of official service to you you would just send in a request to the committee. Write me soon and with lots of love DICK. In April, 1895, Richard was back in New York, at work on his South and Central American articles, and according to the following letters, having a good time with his old friends. NEW YORK, April 27, 1895. DEAR CHAS: I read in the paper the other morning that John Drew was in Harlem, so I sent him a telegram saying that I was organizing a relief expedition, and would bring him out of the wilderness in safety. At twelve I sent another reading, "Natives from interior of Harlem report having seen Davis Relief Expeditionary Force crossing Central Park, all well. Robert Howard Russell." At two I got hold of Russell, and we telegraphed "Relief reached Eighty-fifth street; natives peacefully inclined, awaiting rear column, led by Griscom; save your ammunition and provisions." Just before the curtain fell we sent another, reading: "If you can hold the audience at bay for another hour, we guarantee to rescue yourself and company and bring you all back to the coast in safety. Do not become disheartened." Then we started for Harlem in a cab with George and another colored man dressed as African warriors, with assegai daggers and robes of gold and high turbans and sashes stuck full of swords. I wore my sombrero and riding breeches, gauntlets and riding boots, with cartridge belts full of bum cartridges over my shoulder and around the waist. Russell had my pith helmet and a suit of khaki and leggins. Griscom was in one of my coats of many pockets, a helmet and boots. We all carried revolvers, canteens and rifles. We sent George in with a note saying we were outside the zareba and could not rescue him because the man on watch objected to our guns. As soon as they saw George they rushed out and brought us all in. Drew was on the stage, so we tramped into the first entrance, followed by all the grips, stage hands and members of the company. The old man heard his cue just as I embraced him, and was so rattled that when he got on the stage he could not say anything, and the curtain went down without any one knowing what the plot was about. When John came off, I walked up to him, followed by the other four and the entire company, and said: "Mr. Drew, I presume," and he said: "Mr. Davis, I believe. I am saved!" Helen Benedict happened to be in Maude Adams' dressing-room, and went off into a fit, and the company was delighted as John would have been had he been quite sure we were not going on the stage or into a box. We left them after we had had a drink, although the company besought us to stay and protect them, and got a supper ready in Russell's rooms, at which Helen, Ethel Barrymore, John and Mrs. Drew, Maude Adams and Griscom were present. DICK. NEW YORK, November, 1895. DEAR MOTHER:-- The china cups have arrived all right and are a beautiful addition to my collection and to my room, in which Daphne still holds first place. What do you think Sir Henry sent me? The medal and his little black pipe in a green velvet box about as big as two bricks laid side by side with a heavy glass top with bevelled edges and the medal and pipe lying on a white satin bed, bound down with silver--and a large gold plate with the inscription "To Richard Harding Davis with the warmest greetings from Gregory Brewster--1895"-- You have no idea how pretty it is, Bailey, Banks and Biddle made it-- It is just like him to do anything so sweet and thoughtful and it has attracted so many people that I have had it locked up-- No Burden jewel robbers here-- My friend, the Russian O---- lady still pursues me and as she has no sense of humor and takes everything seriously, she frightens me-- I am afraid she will move in at any moment-- She has asked me to spend the summer with her at Paris and Monte Carlo, and at her country place in Norfolk and bombards me with invitations to suppers and things in the meantime. She has just sent me a picture of herself two feet by three, with writing all over it and at any moment, I expect her to ring the bell and order her trunks taken up stairs-- I am too attractive-- Last night I dined with Helen and Maude Adams, who is staying with her. I want them to board me too. Maude sang for us after dinner and then went off to see Yvette Guilbert at a "sacred concert" to study her methods. I went to N----'s box to hear Melba and we chatted to the accompaniment of Melba, Nordica and Plancon in a trio--the Ogre, wore fur, pearls, white satin and violets. It was a pink silk box. Then I went down to a reception at Mrs. De Koven's and found it was a play. Everybody was seated already so I squatted down on the floor in front of Mrs. De Koven and a tall woman in a brocade gown cut like a Japanese woman's-- It was very dark where the audience was, so I could not see her face but when the pantomime was over I looked up and saw it was Yvette Guilbert. So I grabbed Mrs. De Koven and told her to present me and Guilbert said in English-- "It is not comfortable on the floor is it?" and I said, "I have been at your feet for three years now, so I am quite used to it"--for which I was much applauded-- Afterwards I told some one to tell her in French that I had written a book about Paris and about her and that I was going to mark it and send it and before the woman could translate, Guilbert said, "No, send me the Van Bippere book"-- So we asked her what she meant and she said, " M. Bourget told me to meet you and to read your Van Bippere Book, you are Mr. Davis, are you not?"-- So after that I owned the place and refused to meet Mrs. Vanderbilt. Yvette has offered to teach me French, so I guess I won't go to Somerset's wedding, unless O---- scares me out of the country. I got my $2,000 check and have paid all my debts. They were not a third as much as I thought they were, so that's all right. Do come over mother, as soon as you can and we will meet at Jersey City, and have a nice lunch and a good talk. Give my bestest love to Dad and Nora. How would she like Yvette for a sister-in-law? John Hare has sent me seats for to night-- He is very nice-- I have begun the story of the "Servants' Ball" and got well into it. and lots of love. DICK. The following letter was written to me at Florence. The novel referred to was "Soldiers of Fortune," which eventually proved the most successful book, commercially, my brother ever wrote. Mrs. Hicks, to whom Richard frequently refers, is the well-known English actress Ellaline Terriss, the wife of Seymour Hicks. Somerset is Somers Somerset, the son of Lady Henry Somerset, and the Frohman referred to is Daniel Frohman, who was the manager of the old Lyceum Theatre. Early in November, William R. Hearst asked my brother to write a description of the Yale-Princeton football game for The Journal. Richard did not want to write the "story" and by way of a polite refusal said he could not undertake it for less than $500.00. Greatly to his surprise Hearst promptly accepted the offer. At the time, I imagine this was by far the largest sum ever paid a writer for reporting a single event. December 31st, 1895. New York. The Players. New Year's Eve. DEAR CHAS: I am not much of a letter writer these days, but I have finished the novel and that must make up for it. It goes to the Scribners for $5,000 which is not as much as I think I should have got for it. I am now lying around here until the first of February, when I expect to sail to Somerset's wedding, reaching you in little old Firenzi in March. We will then paint it. After that I do not know what I shall do. The Journal is after me to do almost anything I want at my own figure, as a correspondent. They have made Ralph London correspondent and their paper is the only one now to stick to. They are trying to get all the well known men at big prices. I have had such a good time helping Mrs. Hicks in Seymour's absence. She had about everything happen to her that is possible and she is just the sort of little person you love to do things for. She finally sailed and I am now able to attend to my own family. The Central American and Venezuelan book comes out on February lst. Several of the papers here jokingly alluded to the fact that my article on the Venezuelan boundary had inspired the President's message. Of course you get garbled ideas of things over there and exaggerated ones, as for instance, on the Coxey army. But you never saw anything like the country after that war message. It was like living with a British fleet off Sandy Hook. Everybody talked of it and of nothing else. I went to a dinner of 300 men all of different callings and I do not believe one of them spoke of anything else. Cabmen, car conductors, barkeepers, beggars and policemen. All talked war and Venezuela and the Doctrine of Mr. Monroe. In three days the country lost one thousand of millions of dollars in values, which gives you an idea how expensive war is. It is worse than running a newspaper. Now, almost everyone is for peace, peace at any price. I do not know of but one jingo paper, The Sun, and war talk is greeted with jeers. It was as if the people had suddenly had their eyes opened to what it really meant and having seen were wiser and wanted no more of it. Your brother, personally, looks at it like this. Salisbury was to blame in the first place for being rude and not offering to arbitrate as he had been asked to do. When he said to Cleveland, "It's none of your business" the only answer was "Well, I'll make it my business" but instead of stopping there, Cleveland uttered a cast iron ultimatum instead of leaving a loophole for diplomacy and a chance for either or both to back out. That's where I blame him as does every one else. Sam Sothern is in Chicago and we all wrote him guying letters about the war. Helen said she was going to engage "The Heart of Maryland" company to protect her front yard, while Russell and I have engaged "The Girl I Left Behind Me" company with Blanch Walsh and the original cast. We sent Somerset a picture of himself riddled with bullets. And Mrs. Hicks made herself famous by asking if it was that odious Dunraven they were going to war about. My article was a very lucky thing and is greatly quoted and in social gatherings I am appealed to as a final authority. The football story, by the way, did me a heap of good with the newspapers and the price was quoted as the highest ever paid for a piece of reporting. People sent for it so that the edition was exhausted. The Journal people were greatly pleased. Yvette Guilbert is at Hammerstein's and crowds the new music hall nightly, at two dollars a seat. Irving and Miss Terry have been most friendly to me and to the family. Frohman is going to put "Zenda" on in New York because he has played a failure, which will of course kill it for next year for Eddie, when he comes out as a star. I have never seen such general indignation over a private affair. Barrymore called it a case of Ollaga Zenda. They even went to Brooklyn when Eddie was playing there and asked him to stage the play for them and how he made his changes and put on his whiskers. Poor Eddie, he lacks a business head and a business manager--and Sam talks and shakes his head but is little better. Lots of love and best wishes for the New Year. DICK. CHAPTER IX MOSCOW, BUDAPEST, LONDON The years 1896--1897 were probably the most active of Richard's very active life. In the space of twelve months he reported the Coronation at Moscow, the Millennial Celebration at Budapest, the Spanish-Cuban War, the McKinley Inauguration, the Greek-Turkish War and the Queen's Jubilee. Although this required a great deal of time spent in travelling, Richard still found opportunity to do considerable work on his novel "Captain Macklin," to which he refers in one of his letters from London. As correspondent of the New York American, then The Journal, Richard went from Florence, where he was visiting me, to Moscow. He was accompanied by Augustus Trowbridge, an old friend of my brother's and a rarely good linguist. The latter qualification proved of the greatest possible assistance to Richard in his efforts to witness the actual coronation ceremony. To have finally been admitted to the Kremlin my brother always regarded as one of his greatest successes as a correspondent. En route--May 1896. DEAR CHAS: The night is passed and with the day comes "a hope" but during the blackness I had "a suffer"-- I read until two--five hours--and then slept until five when the middle man who had slept on my shoulder all night left the train and the second one to whom Bernardi was so polite left me alone and had the porter fit me up a bed so that I slept until seven again-- Then the Guardian Angel returned for his traps and I bade him a sleepy adieu and was startled to see two soldiers standing shading their eyes in salute in the doorway and two gentlemen bowing to my kind protector with the obsequiousness of servants-- He sort of smiled back at me and walked away with the soldiers and 13 porters carrying his traps. So I rung up the conductor and he said it was the King's Minister with his eyes sticking out of his head--the conductor's eyes--not the Minister's. I don't know what a King's Minister is but he liked your whiskey-- I am now passing through the Austrian Tyrol which pleases me so much that I am chortling with joy-- None of the places for which my ticket call are on any map--but don't you care, I don't care-- I wish I could adequately describe last night with nothing but tunnels hours in length so that you had to have all the windows down and the room looked like a safe and full of tobacco smoke and damp spongey smoke from the engine, and bad air. That first compartment I went in was filled later with German women who took off their skirts and the men took off their shoes. Everybody in the rear of the car is filthy dirty but I had a wash at the Custom house and now I am almost clean and quite happy. The day is beautiful and the compartment is all my own-- I am absolutely enchanted with the Tyrol-- I have never seen such quaint picture book houses and mills with wheels like that in the Good for Nothing and crucifixes wonderfully carved and snow mountains and dark green forests-- The sky is perfect and the air is filled with the sun and the train moves so smoothly that I can see little blue flowers, baby blue, Bavarian blue flowers, in the Spring grass. Such dear old castles like birds nests and such homelike old mills and red-faced millers with feathers in their caps you never saw out of a comic opera-- The man in here with me now is a Russian, of course, and saw the last Coronation and knows that my suite is on the principal Street and attends to my changing money and getting an omelette-- I can survive another night now having had an omelette not so good as Madam Masi's but still an omelette-- I have now left Munich and the Russian and a conductor whom I mistook for a hereditary prince of Bavaria, with tassels down his back, has assured me he is going to Berlin, and that I am going to Berlin and much else to which I smile knowingly and say mucho gracia, wee wee, ya ya, ich ich limmer and other long speeches ending with "an er--" DICK. May 15th, 1896. Moscow. DEAR CHAS: We left Berlin Monday night at eleven and slept well in a wagon-lit. That was the only night out of the five that I spent in the cars that I had my clothes off, although I was able to stretch out on the seats, so I am cramped and tired now. At seven Monday morning the guard woke us and told us to get ready for the Custom House and I looked out and saw a melancholy country of green hills and black pines and with no sign of human life. It was raining and dreary looking and then I saw as we passed them a line of posts painted in black and white stripes a half mile apart on each side of the train and I knew we had crossed the boundary and that the line of posts stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Pacific to the Caucasus Mountains and the Pamirs. It gave me a great thrill but I have had so many to-day, that I had almost forgotten that one. For two days we jogged along through a level country with meanthatched huts and black crows flying continually and peasants in sheepskin coats, full in the skirt and tight at the waist, with boots or thongs of leather around their feet. The women wore boots too and all the men who were not soldiers had their hair cropped short like mops. We could not find any one who understood any language, so as we never knew when we would stop for food, we ate at every station and I am of the opinion that for months I have been living on hot tea and caviar and hash sandwiches. The snow fell an inch deep on Wednesday and dried up again in an hour and the sun shone through it all. So on the whole it was a good trip and most interesting. But here we are now in a perfect pandemonium and the Czar has not yet come nor one-fifth even of the notables. It is a great city, immense and overpowering in its extent. The houses are ugly low storied and in hideous colors except the churches which are like mosques and painted every color. I confess I feel beaten to night by the noise and rush and roar and by so many strange figures and marvellous costumes. Our rooms are perfect that is one thing and the situation is the very best. If the main street were Fifth Avenue and Madison Square the Governor's Square, his palace would be Delmonico's and our rooms would be the corner rooms of the Brunswick, so you can see how well we are placed. We can sit in our windows and look down and up the main street and see every one who leaves or calls upon the Governor. We are now going out for a dinner and to one of many cafe-chantants and I will tell you the rest to-morrow, when I get sleep, for after five nights of it I feel done up, but I feel equally sure it is going to be a great experience and I cannot tell you how glad 1 am that I came. Love to you all and to dear Florence in which Trowbridge, who is a brick, joins me. DICK. Moscow--May 1896. DEAR CHAS: There was a great deal to tell when I shut down last night, but I thought I would have had things settled by this time and waited, but it looks now as though there was to be no rest for the weary until the Czar has put his crown on his head. The situation is this: there are ninety correspondents, and twelve are to get into the coronation, two of these will be Americans. There are five trying for it. Count Daschoff, the Minister of the Court, has the say as to who gets in of those five. T. and I called on him with my credentials just as he was going out. Never have I seen such a swell. He made us feel like dudes from Paterson, New Jersey. He had three diamond eagles in an astrakan cap, a white cloak, a gray uniform, top boots and three rows of medals. He spoke English perfectly, with the most politely insolent manner that I have ever had to listen to; and eight servants, each of whom we had, in turn, mistaken for a prince royal, bowed at him all the brief time he talked over our heads. He sent us to the bureau for correspondents, where they gave me a badge and a pocketbook, with my photo in it. They are good for nothing, except to get through the police lines. No one at the bureau gave us the least encouragement as to my getting in at the coronation. We were frantic, and I went back to Breckenridge, our Minister, and wrote him a long letter explaining what had happened, and that what I wrote would "live," that I was advertised and had been advertised to write this story for months. I dropped The Journal altogether, and begged him to represent me as a literary light of the finest color. This he did in a very strong letter to Daschoff, and I presented it this morning, but the Minister, like Edison, said he would let me know when he could see me. Then I wrote Breck a letter of thanks so elegant and complimentary that he answered with another, saying if his first failed he would try again. That means he is for me, and at the bureau they say whichever one he insists on will get in, but they also say he is so good-natured that he helps every one who comes. I told him this, and he has promised to continue in my behalf as soon as we hear from Daschoff. The second thing of importance is the getting the story, IF WE GET IT, on the wire. That, I am happy to say, we are as assured of as I could hope to be. I own the head of the Telegraph Bureau soul, body and mind. He loves the ground T. and I spurn, and he sent out my first cable today, one of interrogation merely, ahead of twelve others; he has also given us the entree to a private door to his office, all the other correspondents having to go to the press-rooms and undergo a sort of press censorship, which entails on each man the cutting up of his story into three parts, so as to give all a chance. I gave T. three dictums to guide him; the first was that we did not want a fair chance--we wanted an unfair advantage over every one else. Second, to never accept a "No" or a "Yes" from a subordinate, but to take everything from head-quarters. Third, to use every mouse, and not to trust to the lions. He had practise on the train. When he told me we would be in Moscow in ten hours, I would say, "Who told you that," and back he would go to the Herr Station Director in a red gown, and return to say that we would get there in twenty hours. By this time I will match him against any newspaper correspondent on earth. He flatters, lies, threatens and bribes with a skill and assurance that is simply beautiful, and his languages and his manners pull me out of holes from which I could never have risen. With it all he is as modest as can be, and says I am the greatest diplomat out of office, which I really think he believes, but I am only using old reporters' ways and applying the things other men did first. My best stroke was to add to my cable to The Journal, "Recommend ample recognition of special facilities afforded by telegraph official"--and then get him to read it himself under the pretext of wishing to learn if my writing was legible. He grinned all over himself, and said it was. After my first story is gone I will give him 200 roubles for himself in an envelope and say Journal wired me to do it. That will fix him for the coronation story, as it amounts to six months' wages about. But, my dear brother, in your sweet and lovely home, where the sun shines on the Cascine and the workmen sleep on the bridges, and dear old ladies knit in the streets, that is only one of the thousand things we have had to do. It would take years to give you an account of what we have done and why we do it. It is like a game of whist and poker combined and we bluff on two flimsy fours, and crawl the next minute to a man that holds a measly two-spot. There is not a wire we have not pulled, or a leg, either, and we go dashing about all day in a bath-chair, with a driver in a bell hat and a blue nightgown, leaving cards and writing notes and giving drinks and having secretaries to lunch and buying flowers for wives and cigar boxes for husbands, and threatening the Minister with Cleveland's name. John A. Logan, Jr., is coming dressed in a Russian Uniform, and he wore it on the steamer, and says he is the special guest of the Czar and the Secretary of the visiting mission. Mrs. P. P. is paying $10,000 for a hotel for one week. That is all the gossip there is. We lunched with the McCooks today and enjoyed hearing American spoken, and they were apparently very glad to have us, and made much of T. and of me. We only hope they can help us; and I am telling the General the only man to meet is Daschoff, and when he does I will tell him to tell Daschoff I am the only man to be allowed in the coronation. I wish I could tell you about the city, but we see it only out of the corner of our eyes as we dash to bureau after bureau and "excellency" and "royal highness" people, and then dash off to strengthen other bridges and make new friends. It is great fun, and I am very happy and T. is having the time of his life. He told me he would rather be with me on this trip than travel with the German Emperor, and you will enjoy to hear that he wrote Sarah I was the most "good-natured" man he ever met. God bless you all, and dear, dear Florence. Lots of love. DICK. Moscow--May, 1896. DEAR CHAS: I have just sent off my coronation story, and the strain of this thing, which has really been on me for six months, is off. You can imagine what a relief it is, or, rather, you cannot, for no one who has not been with us these last ten days can know what we have had to do. The story I sent is not a good one. It was impossible to tell it by cable, and the first one on the entry was a much better one. I do not care much, though; of course, I do care, as I ought to have made a great hit with it, but there was no time, and there was so much detail and minutia that I could not treat it right. However, after the awful possibility, or rather certainty, that we have had to face of not getting any story at all, I am only too thankful. I would not do it again for ten thousand dollars. Edwin Arnold, who did it for The Telegraph, had $25,000, and if I told you of the way Hearst acted and Ralph interfered with impertinent cables, you would wonder I am sane. They never sent me a cent for the cables until it was so late that I could not get it out of the bank, and we have spent and borrowed every penny we have. Imagine having to write a story and to fight to be allowed a chance to write it, and at the same time to be pressed for money for expenses and tolls so that you were worn out by that alone. The brightest side of the whole thing was the way everybody in this town was fighting for me. The entire town took sides, and even men who disliked me, and who I certainly dislike, like C. W. and R---- of the Paris Embassy, turned in and fought for my getting in like relations. And the women--I had grand dukes and ambassadors and princes, whom I do not know by sight, moving every lever, and as Stanhope of The Herald, testified "every man, woman and child in the visiting and resident legation is crazy on the subject of getting Davis into the coronation." They made it a personal matter, and when I got my little blue badge, the women kissed me and each other, and cheered, and the men came to congratulate me, and acted exactly as though they had got it themselves. It was a beautiful sight; the Czarina much more beautiful and more sad-looking than ever before. But it was not solemn enough, and the priests groaned and wailed and chanted and sang, and every one stood still and listened. All that the Czar and Czarina did was over ten minutes after they entered the chapel, and then for three hours the priests took the center of the stage and groaned. I was there from seven until one. Six solid hours standing and writing on my hat. It was a fine hat, for we were in court costume, I being a distinguished visitor, as well as a correspondent. That was another thing that annoyed me, because Breckinridge, who has acted like a brick, did not think he could put me on both lists, so I chose the correspondents' list, of course, in hopes of seeing the ceremony, but knowing all the time that that meant no balls or functions, so that had I lost the ceremony I would have had nothing; but he arranged it so that I am on both lists. Not that I care now. For I am tired to death; and Trowbridge did not get on either list, thanks to the damned Journal and to his using all his friends to help me, so that I guess I will get out and go to Buda Pest and meet you in Paris. Do not consider this too seriously, for I am writing it just after finishing my cable and having spent the morning on my toes in the chapel. I will feel better tomorrow. Anyway, it is done and I am glad, as it was the sight of the century, and I was in it, and now I can spend my good time and money in gay Paree. Love to all. DICK. From Moscow Richard went direct to Buda Pest, where he wrote an article on the Hungarian Millennial. BUDA PEST May 8th, 1896. CHAS: I have just returned from the procession of the Hungarian Nobles. It was even more beautiful and more interesting than the Czar's entry than which I would not have believed anything could have been more impressive-- But the first was military, except for the carriages, which were like something out of fairyland--to-day, the costumes were all different and mediaeval, some nine hundred years old and none nearer than the 15th Century. The mis en scene was also much better. Buda is a clean, old burgh, with yellow houses rising on a steep green hill, red roofs and towers and domes, showing out of the trees-- It is very high but very steep and the procession wound in and out like a fairy picture-- I sat on the top of the hill, looking down it to the Danube, which separates Buda from Pest-- The Emperor sat across the square about 75 yards from our tribune in the balcony of his palace. We sat in the Palace yard and the procession passed and turned in front of us-- There were about 1,500 nobles, each dressed to suit himself, in costumes that had descended for generations--of brocade, silk, fur, and gold and silver cloth-- Each costume averaged, with the trappings of the horse, 5,000 dollars. Some cost $1,000, some $15,000. Some wore complete suits of chain armor, with bearskins and great black eagle feathers on their spears just as they were when they invaded Rome-- Others wore gold chain armor and leopard or wolf skins and their horses were studded with turquoises and trappings of gold and silver and smothered in silver coins-- It would have been ridiculous if they had not been the real thing in every detail and if you had not known how terribly in earnest the men were. There is no other country in the world where men change from the most blase and correct of beings, to fairy princes in tights and feathers and jewelled belts and satin coats-- They were an hour in passing and each one seemed more beautiful than the others-- I am very glad I came although I was disappointed at missing the accident at Moscow. It must have been more terrible than Johnstown. I found the ----s quite converted into the most awful snobs but the people they worship are as simple and well bred as all gentle people are and I have had the most delightful time with them. It is so small and quiet after Moscow, and instead of being lost in an avalanche of embassies and suites and missions, I have a distinct personality, as "the American," which I share with "the" Frenchman and four Englishmen. We are the only six strangers and they give us the run of all that is going on-- At night we dine at the most remarkable club in the world, on the border of the Park, where the best of all the Gypsey musicians plays for us-- The music is alone worth having come to hear, and the dear souls who play it, having been told that I like it follow me all around the terrace and sit down three feet away and fix their eyes on you, and then proceed to pull your nerves and heart out of you for an hour at a time-- One night a man here dipped a ten thousand franc note in his champagne and pasted it on the leader's violin and bowed his thanks, and the leader bowed in return and the next morning sent him the note back in an envelope, saying that the compliment was worth more than the money-- The leader's name is Berchey and the Hungarians have never allowed him to leave the country for fear he would not be allowed to come back-- He is a fat, half drunken looking man, with his eyes full of tears half the time he plays. He looks just like a setter dog and he is so terribly in earnest that when he fixes me with his eyes and plays at me, the court ladies all get up and move their chairs out of his way just as though he were a somnambulist-- I leave here Wednesday and reach Paris Friday MORNING the eleventh-- You must try to meet me at the Cafe de la Paix at half past nine-- Wait in the corner room if you don't wish to sit outside and as soon as I get washed I will join you for coffee. It will be fine to see you again and to be done with jumping about from hotel to hotel and to be able to read the signs and to know how to ask for food. Russian, German and Hungarian have made French seem like my mother tongue-- DICK. CHAPTER X CAMPAIGNING IN CUBA AND GREECE In December, 1896, Richard and Frederic Remington, the artist, were commissioned by the New York Journal to visit Cuba which was then at war with Spain. It was their intention to go from Key West in the Vamoose, a very fast but frail steam-launch, and to make a landing at some uninhabited point on the Cuban coast. After this their plans seem to have been to trust to luck and the kindliness of the revolutionists. After waiting for some time at Key West for favorable weather, they at last started out on a dark night to make the crossing. A few hours after the Vamoose had left Key West a heavy storm arose--apparently much too violent for the slightly built launch. The crew struck and the captain finally refused to go on to Cuba and put back to Key West. Shortly after this Remington and my brother reached Havana by a more simple and ostentatious route. This was my brother's first effort as a war correspondent, and I presume it was this fact and the very indefiniteness of the original plan that caused his mother and father so much uneasiness. And, indeed, it did prove eventually a hazardous exploit. way to Key West. December 19, 1896. DEAR MOTHER: I hope you won't be cross with me for going off and not letting you know, but I thought it was better to do it that way as there was such delay in our getting started. I am going to Cuba by way of Key West with Frederic Remington and Michaelson, a correspondent who has been there for six months. We are to be taken by the Vamoose the fastest steam yacht made to Santa Clara province where the Cubans will meet us and take us to Gomez. We will stay a month with him, the yacht calling for copy and sketches once a week, and finally for us in a month. I get all my expenses and The Journal pays me $3,000 for the month's work. The Harper's Magazine also takes a story at six hundred dollars and Russell will reprint Remington's sketches and my story in book form, so I shall probably clear $4,000 in the next month or six weeks. I was a week in getting information on the subject so I know all about it from the men who have just been there and I want you to pay attention to what I tell you they told me and not to listen to any stray visitor who comes in for tea and talks without any tact or knowledge. There is no danger in the trip except the problem of getting there and getting away again, and that is now removed by The Journal's yacht. I would have gone earlier had any of the periodicals that asked me to go shown me any way to get there-- THERE IS NO FEVER THIS TIME OF YEAR and as you know fever never touches me. It got all the others in Central America and never worried me at all. There is no danger of getting shot, as the province into which we go, the Santa Clara province, is owned and populated and patrolled by the Cubans. It is no more Spanish than New Jersey and the Spaniards cannot get in there. We have the strongest possible letters from the Junta, and I have from Lamont, Bayard and Olney and credentials in every language. We will sit around the Gomez camp and send messengers back to the coast. It is a three days trip and as Gomez may be moving from place to place you may not hear from us for a month and we may not hear from you but remember it was a much longer time than that before you heard from me when I went to Honduras. Also keep in mind that I am going as a correspondent only and must keep out of the way of fighting and that I mean to do so, as Chamberlain says we want descriptive stories not brave deeds-- Major Flint who has arranged the trip for us was down there with Maceo as a correspondent. He saw six fights and never shot off his gun once because as he said it was not his business to kill people and he has persuaded me that he is right, so I won't do anything but look on-- I have bought at The Journal's expense a fifty dollar field glass which is a new invention and the best made. I have marked it so that you can see a man five miles off and as soon as I see him I mean to begin to ride or run the other way--no one loves himself more than I do so you leave me to take care of myself. I wish I could give you any idea of the contempt the four returned correspondents who talked to me, have for the Spaniards. They have seen them shoot 2,500 rounds without hitting men at 200 yards and they run away if the enemy begins on them first. However, you trust to Richard-- We have a fine escort arranged for us and Michaelson speaks Spanish perfectly and has been six months scouting over the country. DICK. KEY West, December 26, 1896. DEAR FAMILY: I got your letters late last night and they made me pretty solemn. It is an awfully solemn thing to have people care for you like that and to care for them as I do. I can't tell you how much I love you. You don't know how much the pain of worrying you for a month has meant to me, but I have talked it all out with myself, and left it to God and I am sure I am doing right. As Mrs. Crown said, "There's a whole churchful up here praying for you," and I guess that will pull me through. Of course, dear, dear Mother thought she was cross with me. She could not be cross with me, and her letter told me how much she cared, that was all, and made me be extra careful. But I need not promise you to be careful. You have an idea I am a wild, filibustering, hot-headed young man. I am not. I gave the guides to understand their duty was to keep us out of danger if we had to walk miles to avoid it. We are men of peace, going in, as real estate agents and coffee-planters and drummers are going in on every steamer, to attend to our especial work and get out again quick. I have just as strong a prejudice against killing a man as I have against his killing me. Lots and lots of love. Don't get scared if you don't hear for a month, although we will try to get our stories back once a week, but you know we are at the convenience of the Cubans who will pocket our despatches and money and not take the long trip back. Thank dear Dad for his letter full of good advice. It was excellent. Remington and Michelson are good men and I like them immensely. Already we are firm friends. Love, KEY WEST--January 1, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: As you will know by my telegram we are either off on a safe sea going boat or waiting for one. There is no turning back from here and the only reason I thought of doing so was the knowledge of the way you would suffer and worry. I argued it out that it was selfish in me to weigh my getting laughed at and paragraphed as the war correspondent that always Turned Back against a month of uneasiness for you, but later I saw I could not do it much as I love you for the element of danger to me is non-existent; it is merely an exciting adventure and you will have to believe me and not worry but be a Spartan mother. I would not count being laughed at and the loss of my own self respect if I really thought there was great danger, but I do not. You will not lose me and if I go now I can sit still next time and say "I have done better things than that." If I had not gone it would have meant that I would have had to have done just that much harder a stunt next time to make people forget that I had failed in this one. Now do cheer up and believe in the luck of Richard Harding Davis and the British Army. We have carte blanche from The Journal to buy or lease any boat on the coast and I rocked them for $1000 in advance payment because of the delay over the Vamoose. I am so happy at thinking I am going, I could not have faced anyone had I not, although we had nothing to do with the failure, we tried to cross fairly in the damn tub and it was her captain who put back. I lay out on the deck and cried when he refused to go ahead, we had waited so long. The Cubans and Remington and Michelson had put on all their riding things but fortunately I had not and so was spared that humiliation. What I don't know about the Fine Art of Filibustering now is unnecessary. I find many friends of my Captain Boynton or "Capt. Burke." Tonight the officers of the Raleigh give me a grand dinner at which I wear a dress suit and make speeches--they are the best chaps I ever met in the Navy. Lots of love and best wishes to Dad and to Nora for a happy, happy New Year. You know me and you know my conscience but it would not let me go back in order to save you anxiety so you won't think me selfish. God bless you. DICK. KEY WEST, January 2nd, 1897. DEAR FAMILY: I have learned here that the first quality needed to make a great filibuster is Patience, it is not courage, or resources or a knowledge of the Cuban Coast line, it is patience. Anybody can run a boat into a dark bayou and dump rifles on the beach and scurry away to sea again but only heroes can sit for a month on a hotel porch or at the end of a wharf, and wait. That is all we do and that is my life at Key West. I get up and half dress and take a plunge in the bay and then dress fully and have a greasy breakfast and then light a huge Key West cigar, price three cents and sit on the hotel porch with my feet on a rail-- Nothing happens after that except getting one's boots polished as the two industries of this place are blacking boots and driving cabs. I have two boys to black mine at the same time every morning and pay the one who does his the better of the two-- It generally ends in a fight so that affords diversion-- Then a man comes along, any man, and says, "Remmington's looking for you" and I get up and look for Remington. There is only a triangle of streets where one can find him and I call at "Josh" Curry's first and then at Pendleton's News Store and read all the back numbers of the Police Gazette for the hundredth time and then call here at the Custom House and then look in at the Cable office, where Michaelson lives sending telegrams about anything or nothing and that brings me back to the hotel porch again, where I have my boots shined once more and then go into mid-day dinner. In the meanwhile Remington is looking for me a hundred yards in the rear. He generally gets to "Josh's" as I leave the Custom House-- In the afternoon I study Spanish out of a text book and at three take a bicycle ride, at five I call at the garrison to take tea with the doctor and his wife, who is sweeter than angel's ever get to be with a miniature angel of a baby called Martha. I wait until retreat is sounded and the gun is fired at sunset and having commented unfavorably on the way the soldiers let the flag drop on the grass instead of catching it on the arms as a bluejacket does, I ride off to the bay for another bath-- Then I take the launch to the Raleigh and dine with the officers and rejoice in the clean fresh paint and brass and decks and the lights and black places of a great ship of war, than which nothing is more splendid. We sit on the quarter-deck and smoke and play the guitar and I go home again, in time for bed. I vary this programme occasionally by spending the morning on the end of a wharf watching another man fish and reading old novels and the "Lives of Captain Walker" and "Captain Fry of the Virginius," two great books from each of which I am going to write a short story like the one of the Alamo or of the Jameson Raid-- The life of Walker I found on the Raleigh and the life of Captain Fry with all the old wood cuts and the newspaper comments of the time at a book store here. I don't know when we shall get away but it is no use kicking about it, Michaelson is doing all he can and the new tug will be along in a week anyway. I shall be so glad to get to Cuba that I will dance with glee. DICK. MATANZAS, January 15th, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: I sent you a note by Remington which he will mail in the States-- From here I go to Sagua La Grande. It is on the northern coast. I think from there I shall cross over to Cienfuegos on the Southern coast and then if I can catch a steamer go to Santiago to see my old friends, at the Juraqua mines and MacWilliams' ore road and "the Palms"-- Everywhere I am treated well on account of Weyler's order and I am learning a great deal and talking very little, my Spanish being bad. There is war here and no mistake and all the people in the fields have been ordered in to the fortified towns where they are starving and dying of disease. Yesterday I saw the houses of these people burning on both sides of the track-- They gave shelter to the insurgents and so very soon they found their houses gone. I am so relieved at getting old Remington to go as though I had won $5000. He was a splendid fellow but a perfect kid and had to be humored and petted all the time. I shall if I have luck be through with this in a few weeks but it has had such a set back at the start that I am afraid it can never make a book and I doubt if I can write a decent article even. I am so anxious not to keep you worrying any longer than is necessary and so I am hurrying along taking only a car window view of things. Address me care of Consul General Lee, Havana and confine your remarks to what is going on at home. I know what is going on here. I don't believe half I hear but I am being slowly converted. Remington is more excitable than I am, so don't misunderstand if he starts in violently. I am getting details and verifying things. He is right on a big scale but every one has lied so about this island that I do not want to say anything I do not believe is true. This is a beautiful little city and after Jaruco, where we slept two days ago, it is Paris. There we slept off the barnyard and cows and chickens walked all over the floor and fleas all over us. It was like Honduras only filthier. Speaking of Paris, tell the Kid I expect to go over to him soon after I return to New York. of love. DICK. CARDENAS--North Coast of Cuba. January 16th, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: It is very funny not knowing what sort of a place you are to sleep in next and taking things out of a grab bag, as it were-- In Europe you can always guess what the well known towns will give you for you have a guide book, but here it is all luck. Matanzas was a pretty city but the people were awful, the hotel was Spanish and the proprietor insolent, though I was spending more of Willie Hearst's money than all of the officers spend in a week, the Consul could not talk English or Spanish, he said he hadn't come there "to go to school to no Spaniard" and he gloried in the fact he had been there three years without knowing a word of the language. His vice-Consul was worse and everything went wrong generally. Every one I met was an Alarmist and that is polite for liar. They asked Remington if he was the man who manufactured the rifles and gave us the Iowa Democrat to read. To night I reached here after a six hours ride through blazing fields of sugar cane and stopped on my way to the hotel to ask the Consul when the next boat went to Saqua la Grande-- I had no letter of introduction to him as I had to the Matanzas consul, but as soon as he saw my card he got out of his chair and shook hands again and was as hearty and well bred and delightful as Charley himself and unlike Chas he did not ask me 14 francs for looking on him. He is out now chasing around to get me a train for to-morrow. But I won't go to-morrow. My hotel looks on the plaza and the proprietor and the whole suite of attendants are my slaves. It is just as different as can be. My interpreter does it, he calls himself MY VALET, although I point out to him that two shirts and twelve collars do not constitute a wardrobe even with a rubber coat thrown in. But he likes to play at my being a distinguished stranger and I can't say I object. Only when you remember the way I was invited to see Cuba and expected to see it, and now the way I am seeing it from car windows with A VALET. What would the new school of yellow kid journalists say if they knew that. For the first time on this trip I have wished you were both with me, that was to night. I never see anything really beautiful but that it instantly makes me feel selfish and wish you could see it too. It has happened again and again and to night I wish you could be here with me on this balcony. The town runs down a slope to the bay and in the middle of it is the Plaza with me on the balcony which lets out of my sleeping room-- "the room" so the proprietor tells me, "reserved only for the Capitain General." It is just like the description in that remarkable novel of mine where Clay and Alice sit on the balcony of the restaurant. I have the moonlight and the Cathedral with the open doors and the bronze statue in the middle and the royal palms moving in the breeze straight from the sea and the people walking around the plaza below. If it was in any way as beautiful as this Clay and Alice would have ended the novel that night. I got a grand lot of letters to-day which Otto, my interpreter brought back from Havana after having conducted Remington there in safety. I must say you are writing very cheerfully now, but I don't wonder you worried at first but now that I am a commercial traveller with an order from Weyler which does everything when I find it necessary, you really must not worry any more but just let me continue on my uneventful journey and then come home. I shall have been gone so long and my friends, judging from Russell and Dana and Irene's letters, will be so glad to see me, that they will have forgotten I went out to do other things than coast around in trains. As a matter of fact this is a terribly big problem and most difficult to get the truth of, I find myself growing to be the opposite of the alarmist, whatever that is, although you would think the picturesque and dramatic and exciting thing would be the one I would rather believe because I want to believe it, but I find that that is not so, I see a great deal on both sides and I do not believe half I am told. As we used to say at college, "it is against history," and it is against history for men to act as I am told they are acting here-- They show me the pueblo huddled together around the fortified towns, living in palm huts but I know that they have always lived in palm huts, the yellow kid reporters don't know that or consider it, but send off word that the condition of the people is terrible, that they have only leaves to cover them, and it sounds very badly. That is an instance of what I mean. In a big way there is no doubt that the process going on here is one of extermination and ruin. Two years ago the amount of sugar shipped from the port of Matanzas to the U. S. was valued at 11 millions a year. This last year just over shows that sugar to the amount of $800,000 was sent out. In '94, 154 vessels touched at Matanzas on their way to America. In '95 there were 80 and in '96 there are 16. I always imagined that houses were destroyed during a war because they got in the way of cannon balls or they were burned because they might offer shelter to the enemy, but here they are destroyed, with the purpose of making the war horrible and hurrying up the end. The insurgents began first by destroying the sugar mills, some of which were worth millions of dollars in machinery, and now the Spaniards are burning the homes of the people and herding them in around the towns to starve out the insurgents and to leave them without shelter or places to go for food or to hide the wounded. So all day long where ever you look you see great heavy columns of smoke rising into this beautiful sky above the magnificent palms the most noble of all palms, almost of all trees-- It is the most beautiful country I have ever visited. I had no recollection of how beautiful it was or else I had not the knowledge of other places with which to compare it. Nothing out of the imagination can approach it in its great waterfalls and mossy rocks and grand plains and forests of white pillars with plumes waving above them. Only man is vile here and it is cruel to see the walls of the houses with blind eyes, with roofs gone and gardens burned, every church but one that I have seen was a fortress with hammocks swung from the altars and rude barricades thrown up around the doorways-- If this is war I am of the opinion that it is a senseless wicked institution made for soldiers, lovers and correspondents for different reasons, and for no one else in the world and it is too expensive for the others to keep it going to entertain these few gentlemen-- I have seen very little of it yet and I probably won't see much more, but I have seen all I want. Remington had his mind satisfied even sooner--but then he is an alarmist and exaggerates things-- The men who wear the red badge of courage, I don't feel sorry for, they have their reward in their bloody bandages and the little cross on their tunic but those you meet coming back sick and dying with fever are the ones that make fighting contemptible--poor little farmers, poor little children with no interest in Cuba or Spain's right to hold it, who have been sent out to die like ants before they have learned to hold a mauser, and who are going back again with the beards that have grown in the field hospitals on their cheeks and their eyes hollow, and too weak to move or speak. Six of them died while I was in Jaroco, a town as big as Marion and that had been the average for two months, think of that, six people dying in Marion every day through July and August-- I didn't stay in that town any longer than the train did-- Well I have been writing editorials here instead of cheering you up but I guess I'm about right and when I see a little more I'll tell it over again to The Journal-- It is not as exciting reading as deeds of daring by our special correspondent and I haven't changed my name or shaved my eyebrows or done anything the other men have done but I believe I am getting near the truth. They have shut off provisions going or coming from the towns, they have huddled hundreds of people who do not know what a bath means around these towns, and this is going to happen-- As soon as the rains begin the yellow fever and smallpox will set in and all vessels leaving Cuban ports will be quarantined and the island will be one great plague spot. The insurgents who are in the open fields will live and the soldiers will die for their officers know nothing of sanitation or care nothing. The little Consul has just been here to see me and we have had a long talk and I got back at him. He told me he had seen the Franco-German war as a correspondent of The Tribune and I asked him if he had ever met another correspondent of The Tribune at that time a German student named Hans who cabled the story of the battle of Gravellote and who Archibald Forbes says was the first correspondent to use the cable. The Consul who looks like William D. Howells wriggled around in his chair and said "I guess you mean me but I was not a German student, I was born and raised in Philadelphia and Forbes got my name wrong, it is Hance." So then I got up and shook hands with him in my turn and told him I had always wanted to meet that correspondent and did not expect to do so in Cardenas, on the coast of Cuba. Thank you all for your letters. I am glad you liked the Jameson book. I thought you knew I was a F. R. G. S. It was George Curzon proposed me and as he is a gold medallist of the Society it was easy getting in. Lots of love. DICK. Richard returned to New York from Cuba in February, 1897, but the following month started for Florence to pay me a long-promised visit. On his way he stopped for a few days in London and Paris. ABASSADE DES ETATS-UNIS 59 Rue Galilee, Paris, April 1st, 1897. DEAR FAMILY: I got over here to-day after the heaviest weather I ever tackled on this channel. Stephen Crane came with me. I gave him a lunch on Wednesday. Anthony Hope, McCarthy, Harold Frederic and Barrie came. Sir Evelyn Wood instead of coming was detained at the war office and sent instead a lance Sergeant on horseback with a huge envelope marked "On Her Majesty's Service," which was to be delivered into my hands-- The entire Savoy was upset and it was generally supposed that war had been declared and that I was being ordered to the front-- The whole hotel hung over us until I had receipted for the package and the soldier had saluted and clanked away. I gave Crane the letter as a souvenir. I also saw Seymour Hicks' first night and recognized 15 American songs in it. The London Times offered me the position of correspondent on the Greek frontier. Every one in London thought it an enormous compliment and Harold Frederic, Ralph, Ballard Smith and the rest were very envious. I told them I could not go, but I was glad to have had the compliment paid me. Barrie has made out a scenario of the "Soldiers" for dramatic purposes and has asked the Haymarket management to consider it. So, that I guess that it must be good-- So, I also guess I had better finish it-- I leave for Florence to night. I am having a fine, fine time and I am so glad you are all well. Lots of love, DICK. Of the many happy days we have spent together, I do not believe there were any much more happy than the three weeks Richard remained with me. It was his first long visit to Italy and from the day of his arrival he loved the old town and its people who gave him a most friendly welcome. He had come at a time when Florence was at its best, its narrow quaint streets filled with sunshine and thronged with idling natives and the scurrying tourists that always came with the first days of spring. The Cascine and the pink-walled roads of the environs were ablaze with wild roses and here, after his rather strenuous experience in Cuba, Richard gave himself up to long days of happy idleness. Together we took voyages of discovery to many of the little walled and forgotten towns where the tourists seldom set foot. Once we even wandered so far as Monte Carlo, where my brother tried very hard to break the bank and did not succeed. But the Richard Harding Davis luck did not fail him completely and I remember I greatly envied him the huge pile of gold and notes that represented his winnings and which we did our very best to spend before we left the land of the Prince of Monaco. However, having had his first taste of war, Richard felt that he must leave the peace and content of Florence to see how the Greeks, with whom he had much sympathy, were faring with their enemies the Turks. As it happened, this expedition proved but a short interruption, and in less than a month he was once more back with his new-found friends in Florence. April 28, 1897 On the Way to Patras on a Steamer. DEAR FAMILY: It has been a week since I wrote you last, when I sent you the Inauguration article. Since then I have been having the best time I ever had any place ALONE. I have had more fun with a crowd, but never have been so happy by myself. What I would have been had I taken some other chap with me I cannot imagine. But the people of this part of Greece have been so kind that I cannot say I have been alone. I never met with strangers anywhere who were so hospitable, so confiding and polite. After that slaughter-yard and pest place of Cuba, which is much more terrible to me now than it was when I was there, or before I had seen that war can be conducted like any other evil of civilization, this opera bouffe warfare is like a duel between two gentlemen in the Bois. Cuba is like a slave-holder beating a slave's head in with a whip. I am a war correspondent only by a great stretch of the imagination; I am a peace correspondent really, and all the fighting I have seen was by cannon at long range. (I was at long range, not the cannon.) I am doing this campaign in a personally conducted sense with no regard to the Powers or to the London Times. I did send them an article called "The Piping Times of War." If they do not use it I shall illustrate it with the photos I have taken and sell it, for five times the sum they would give, to the Harpers who are ever with us. As I once said in a noted work, "Greece, Mrs. Morris, restores all your lost illusions." For the last week I have been back in the days of Conrad, the Corsair, and "Oh, Maid of Athens, ere We Part." I have been riding over wind-swept hills and mountains topped with snow, and with sheep and goats and wild flowers of every color spreading for acres, and in a land where every man dresses by choice like a grand opera brigand, and not only for photographic purposes. I have been on the move all the time, chasing in the rear of armies that turn back as soon as I approach and apologize for disappointing me of a battle, or riding to the scene of a battle that never comes off, or hastening to a bombardment that turns out to be an attack on an empty fort. I live on brown bread and cheese and goat's milk and sleep like a log in shepherds' huts. It is so beautiful that I almost grudge the night. Nora and Mother could take this trip as safely as a regiment and would see things out of fairyland. And such adventures! Late in life I am at last having adventures and honors heaped upon me. I was elected a captain of a band of brigands who had been watching a mountain pass for a month, and as it showed no signs of running away had taken to dancing on the green. I caught them at this innocent pastime and they allowed me to photograph them and give them wine at eight cents a quart which we drank out of a tin stovepipe. They drank about four feet of stovepipe or thirty-six cents' worth, then they danced and sang for me in a circle, old men and boys, then drilled with their carbines, and I showed them my revolver and field-glasses and themselves in the finder of the camera; and when I had to go they took me on their shoulders and marched me around waving their rifles. Then the old men kissed me on the cheek and we all embraced and they wept, and I felt as badly as though I were parting from fifty friends. They told my guide that if I would come back they would get fifty more "as brave as they" and I could be captain. I could not begin to tell you all the amusing things that have happened in this one week. I did not want to come at all, only a stern sense of duty made me. For I wanted to write the play in Charley's gilded halls and get to Paris and London. But I can never cease rejoicing that I took this trip. And it will make the book, "A Year from a Reporter's Diary," as complete as it can be. That was why I came. Now I have the Coronation of the Czar, the Millennial at Hungary, the Inauguration at Washington, the Queen's Jubilee, the War in Cuba, and the Greco-Turkish War. That is a good year's work and I mean to loaf after it. You will laugh and say that that is what I always say, but if you knew how I had to kick myself out of Florence and the Cascine to come here you would believe me. I want a rest and I am cutting this very short. Don't fail to cut anything Dad and Mother don't like out of the Inauguration article. You will have me with you this winter on my little bicycle and going to dances and not paying board to anyone. Remember how I used to threaten to go to Greece when the coffee was not good. It seems too funny now, for I never was in a better place, or had more fun or saw less of war or the signs of war. DICK. May 7, 1897. 10 East Twenty-Eighth Street-NIT Sponitza. DEAR CHAS. This is one of the places out of Phroso, but as you never read Phroso I will cut all that-- I hate to say it so soon again but this is the most beautiful country to travel over I have seen-- It is a fairy theatrical grand opera country where everybody dresses in petticoats and gold braided vests and carry carbines to tend sheep with-- I rode from Santa Maura (see map) to a spot opposite Prevesa where they said there was going to be bombarding-- There was not of course but I had I think the most beautiful ride of my life. I was absolutely happy--little lambs bleated and kids butted each other and peasants in fur cloaks without sleeves and in tights like princes sat on rocks and played pipes and the sky was blue, the mountains covered with snow and the fields and hills full of purple bushes and yellow and blue flowers and sheep-- There was a cable station of yellow adobe. It was the only building and it looked across at Prevesa but nobody bombarded. The general gave me cognac and the cable operator played a guitar for me and the preyor sang a fine bass, the corporal not to be out done gave me chocolate and the army stood around in the sun and joined in the conversation correcting the general and each other and taking off their hats to all the noble sentiments we toasted. It was just like a comic opera. After a while when I had finished a fine hunck of cheese and hard eggs and brown bread I took a photograph of the General and the cable operator and the officer with the bass voice and half of the army-- The other half was then sent to escort me to this place. It walked and I rode and there were many halts for drinks and cigarettes. They all ran after a stray colt and were lost for some time but we re-mobilized and advanced with great effect into this town. I was here taken in charge by at least fifty sailors and as many soldiers and comic opera brigands in drawers and white petticoats, who conducted me to a house on the hill where the innkeeper brought me a live chicken to approve of for dinner. Then the mayor of the town turned up in gold clothes and Barrison Sister skirts and said the General had telegraphed about me and that I was his-- The innkeeper wept and said he had seen me first and the chorus of soldiers, sailors and brigands all joined in. I kept out of it but I knew the Mayor would win and he did. Then we went out to a man-of-war the size of the Vagabond and were solemnly assured there would be bombarding of Prevesa to-morrow-- I go to sleep in that hope. We leave here at seven crossing the river and ride after the Greeks who are approaching Prevesa from the land side while the men-of-war bombard it from the river. At least that is what they say. I think it is the mildest war on both sides I ever heard of and I certainly mean to be a Times correspondent next time I play at going to war-- After being insulted and frightened to death all over Cuba, this is the pleasantest picnic I was ever on-- They seriously apologized for not bombarding while I was there and I said not to mention it-- With lots of love, old man, and to the family DICK. FLORENCE May 16, 1897. DEAR FAMILY: Here I am safe and sound again in the old rooms in Florence. I was gone twenty-three days and was traveling nineteen of them, walking, riding; in sailboats, in the cars, and on steamers. I have had more experiences and adventures than I ever had before in three months and quite enough to last me for years. After my happy ride through Turkey and the retreat of the Greek army in Arta, of which I wrote you last, I have been in Thessaly where I saw the two days' battle of Velestinos from the beginning up to the end. It was the one real battle of the war and the Greeks fought well from the first to the last. I left Athens on the 29th of April with John Bass, a Harvard graduate, and a most charming and attractive youth who is, or was, in charge of the Journal men; Stephen Crane being among the number. He seems a genius with no responsibilities of any sort to anyone, and I and Bass left him at Velestinos after traveling with him for four days. Crane went to Volo, as did every other correspondent, leaving Bass and myself in Velestinos. As the villagers had run away, we burglarized the house of the mayor and made it our habitation while the courier hunted for food. It was like "The Swiss Family Robinson," and we rejoiced over the discovery of soap and tablecloths and stray knives and forks, just as though we had been cast on a desert island. Bass did the cooking and I laid the table and washed up and made the beds, which were full of fleas. But we had been sleeping on chairs and on the floor for a week so we did not mind much. The second day we were awakened by cannon and you can imagine our joy and excitement. We had it all to ourselves for eight hours, as it took the other correspondents that long to arrive. It was an artillery and infantry battle and about 20,000 men were engaged on both sides. The Greeks fought from little trenches on the hills back of the town and the Turks advanced across a great green prairie. It was very long range and only twice did they get to within a quarter of a mile of our trenches. Bass and I went all over the Greek lines, for you were just as safe in one place as in another, which means that it wasn't safe anywhere, so we gave up considering that and followed the fight as best we could from the first trench, which was the only one that gave an uninterrupted view of the Turkish forces. It was a brilliantly clear day but opened with a hail storm, which enabled the Turks to crawl up half a mile in the sudden darkness. It also gave me the worst attack of sciatica I ever had. Fortunately, it did not come on badly until I reached Volo, when it suddenly took hold of me so that I could not walk. The trenches were wet with the rain and we had no clothes to change to, and two more showers kept us more or less wet all day. We had a fine view of everything and I learned a lot. We were under a heavy fire for thirteen hours and certainly had some very close escapes. At times the firing was so fierce that if you had raised your arm above your head, the hand would have been instantly torn off. We had to lie on our stomachs with our chins in the dirt and not so much as budge. This was when the Turkish fire happened to be directed on our trench. At such times all the other trenches would fire so as to draw the attack away, and we would have to wait until it was over. The shells sounded like the jarring sound of telegraph wires when one hits the pole they hang from with a stone; and when the shells were close they sounded like the noise made by two trains passing in opposite directions when the wind is driven between the cars. The bullets were much worse than the shells as you could always hear them coming, and the bullets slipped up and passed you in a sneaking way with a noise like rustling silk, or if some one had torn a silk handkerchief with a sharp pull. One shell struck three feet from me and knocked me over with the dirt and stones and filled my nose and mouth with pebbles. I went back and dug it out of the ground while it was still hot and have it as a souvenir. I swore terribly at the bullets and Bass used to grin in a sickly way. It made your hair creep when they came very close. One man next me got a shot through the breast while he was ramming his cleaner down the barrel, and there were three killed within the limits of our fifty yards. We could not get back because there was a cross fire that swept a place we had to pass through, just about the way the wind comes around the City Hall in the times of a blizzard. We called it Dead Man's Curve, after that at Fourteenth Street and Union Square, because it was sprinkled with dead ammunition, mules and soldiers. We came through it the first time without knowing what we were getting into and we had no desire to go back again. So we waited until the sun set. I took some of the finest photographs and probably the only ones ever taken of a battle at such close range. Whenever the men fired, I would shoot off the camera and I expect I have some pretty great pictures. Bass took some of me so if there is any question as to whether I was at the Coronation, there will be none as to whether I was at Velestinos. Our house was hit with two shells and bullets fell like the gentle rain from heaven all over the courtyard, so we would have been no safer there than behind the trenches. We sent off the first account of the battle written by anybody by midday, and stayed on until the next day at four when the place was evacuated in good order because, as usual, the Crown Prince was running away--from Pharsalia this time. They say in Greece "Lewes, the peasant, won the race from Marathon, but Constantine the prince, won the race from Larissa." I was all right until I got to Volo when my right leg refused absolutely to do its act and I had to be carried on a donkey. A Greek thought I looked funny sitting groaning on the little donkey; which I did--I looked ridiculous. So he laughed, and Bass and a French journalist batted him over the face and left me clinging to the donkey's neck and howling to them to come back and hold me up. But they preferred to fight, and a policeman came along and arrested the unhappy Greek and beat him over the head, just for luck, and marched him off to jail, just for laughing. They took me to the hospital ship which was starting, and I came to Athens that way with one hundred and sixteen wounded; the man on my right had his ankles gone and the man on the left had a bullet in his side. They groaned all night and so did I. Then when the sun rose they sang, which was worse. I never saw anything more beautiful than the red-cross nurses, and I guess that is the most beautiful picture I shall ever see--those sweet-faced girls in blue and white bending over the dirty frightened little peasant boys and taking care of their wounds. I made love to all of them and asked three to marry me. I was in bed for two days after I got to Athens but had a fine time, as all the officers from the San Francisco, from the admiral down, came to see me, and the minister, consul and the rest did all that could have been done. I am now all right and was bicycling in the dear old Cascine this morning. On the whole it was a most successful trip. Sylvester Scovel and Phillips of The World arrived just as it was all over, and so Bass and I are about the only two Americans who were in it. The train from Brindisi stopped at Rome on the way back and I went to see the Pages. They took me out and showed me Rome by moonlight in one hour. It was like a cinematograph. They are here now and coming to dinner tonight. Last night the consul had all our friends to dinner to welcome me back, and maybe I was not glad. I had been living on cheese and brown bread and cold lamb for two weeks, with no tobacco, and sleeping five hours a night on floors and sofas. Sometimes the officers and men fought for food, and we never got anything warm to eat except occasionally tinned things which we cooked in my kit. It was the most satisfactory trip all round I ever had. I have been twenty years trying to be in a battle and it will be twenty years more before I will want to be in another. On the eighteenth I start for London, stopping one day in Paris to see the Clarks and Eustises. It is going to be bigger than the Coronation for crowds, and Mother need not worry, I shall keep out of it. The Minister to Russia sent me word that the Czar's prime minister has given him my article and that the Czar said thank him very much. So that is all right. Also Hay is to present me to the Prince at the levee on the 31st of May, and I shall send him a copy, too. I am looking forward to London with such joy. Tell Mother to send me the Bookbuyer with her article in it. I have only read the reviews of it, and they are so enthusiastic that I must have the whole thing quick. It was such a fine thing to do about Poe, and to give those other two fetishes the coup de grace. It reads splendidly and I want it all. What did Dad think of the Inauguration article? I send you all my dearest love and will have lots to tell you when I get back this time. God bless you all. DICK. Richard left Florence the latter part of May, and went to London where he had made arrangements to report the Queen's Jubilee. He began his round of gayeties by being presented at Court. The Miss Groves and Miss Wather to whom he refers in the following letter were the clerks at Cox's hotel. LONDON, June 2nd, 1897. DEAR FAMILY: I was a beautiful sight at the Levee. I wore a velvet suit made especially for me but no dearer for that and steel buttons and a beautiful steel sword and a court hat with silver on the side and silk stockings that I wore at Moscow and pumps with great buckles. I was too magnificent for words and so you would have said. I waited a long time in a long hall crowded with generals and sea captains and highlanders and volunteers and cavalry men and judges and finally was admitted past a rope and then past another rope and then rushed along into the throne room where I saw beefeaters and life guardsmen and chamberlains with white wands and I gave one my card and he read out "R. H. D. of the United States by the American Ambassador" and then I bowed to the Prince and Duke of York, Connaught and Edinburgh and to the American Ambassador and then Henry White and Spencer Eddy, the two Secretaries and the naval attache all shook hands with me and I went around in a hansom in the bright sunshine in hopes of finding some one who would know me. But no one did so I went to Cox's Hotel and showed myself to Miss Groves and Miss Wather. I went on the Terrace yesterday with the Leiters and at O'Connor's invitation brought them to tea. Labouchere was there and Dillon just out of jail and it was most interesting. I am very, very busy doing nothing and having a fine time-- DICK. LONDON, June 21, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: Words cannot tell at least not unless I am well paid for it what London is like to-day. In the first place it is so jammed that no one can move and it is hung with decorations so that no one can see. Royal carriages get stuck just as do the humble drayman or Pickford's Van and royalties are lodging in cheap hotels with nothing but a couple of Grenadier's in sentry boxes to show they are any better blooded than the rest of the lodgers. I also added to the confusion by giving a lunch to the Ambassador and Miss Hay in return for the presentation. Lady Henry and Mrs. Asquith sat on either side of him and Mrs. Clark had Asquith and Lord Basil Blackwood to talk to-- There was also Anthony Hope, the beautiful Julia Neilson and her husband Fred Terry and Lady Edward Cecil and Lord Lester-- It went off fine and the Savoy people sent in an American Eagle of ice, decorated with American flags and dripping icy tears from its beak. It cost me five shillings a head and looked as though it cost that in pounds-- To night I dine with the Goulds and then go to a musical where Melba sings, Padewreski plays and then walk the streets if I can until daybreak as I think of making the night before the procession the greater part of the story. I send you a plan showing my seat which cost me twenty-five dollars, the advertised price being $125. but there has been a terrible slump in seats. Love to dear Dad and Nora. DICK. LONDON. 89 Jermyn Street, June 25th, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: The Jubilee turned out to be the easiest spectacle to get at and to get away from that I ever witnessed. Experience in choosing a place and police regulations made it so simple that we went straight to our seats and got away again without as much trouble as it would have taken to have gone to a matinee. The stage management of the thing almost impressed me more than anything else. For grandeur and show it about equalled the procession of the Czar and in many ways it was more interesting because it was concerned with our own people and with our own part of the world. Next to the Queen, Lord Roberts got all of the applause. He rode a little white pony that had been with him in six campaigns and had carried him on his march to Candahar. It had all the campaign medals presented to it by the War Department and wore them in a line on its forehead, and walked just as though he knew what a great occasion it was. After Roberts came in popularity a Col. Maurice Clifford with the Rhodesian Horse in sombrero's and cartridge belts and khaki suits. He had lost his arm and was easily recognized. Wilfred Laurier the French Premier of Canada and the Lord Mayor were the other favourites. The scene in front of St. Paul's was absolutely magnificent with the sooty pillars behind the groups of diplomats, bishops and choir boys in white, University men in pink silk gowns, and soldiers, beef eaters, gentlemen at arms and the two Archbishops. The best moment was when the collected troops; negroes, Chinamen, East Indians, West Indians, African troopers, Canadian Mounted Police, Australians, Borneo police and English Grenadiers all sang the doxology together in the beautiful sunshine and under the shadow of that great facade of black and white marble. Also when the Archbishop of Canterbury without any warning suddenly after kissing the Queen's hand threw up his arm and cried out so that you could have heard him a hundred yards off "Three Cheers for Her Majesty" and the diplomats, and foreign rajahs and bishops and Salvation Army captains waved their hats and mortar boards and the soldiers ran their bearskins and helmets on their bayonets and spun them around in the air. The weather was absolutely perfect and there were no accidents. Last night the carriages were allowed to parade the streets and for hours the route was blocked with omnibuses hired by private parties, coster carts, private carriages, court carriages and the hansoms. The procession formed by these was two hours in going one mile. They passed my windows in Jermyn Street for three hours and a party of us sat inside and guyed the life out of them until one in the morning. We got very clever at it finally and very impudent and as the people were only two yards from us my windows being on a level with the tops of the buses and as we had a flaring illumination that lit up the street completely we had lots of fun with them especially with the busses, as we pretended to believe that the advertisements referred to the people on the top, and we would ask anxiously which lady was "Lottie Collins" and which gentleman had been brought up on " Mellin's Food"-- We had even more fun with the swells coming home from the Gala night at the opera and hemmed in between costers and Pickford's vans loaded down with women and children. They called on us for speeches and matches and segars and we kept the procession supplied with food and drink. Nobody got mad and they answered back but we were prepared with numerous repartees and they were apparently so surprised by finding a party of ladies and gentlemen engaged in chaffing court officials that they would forget to reply until they had moved on. One bus driver said "Oh, you can larff, cause your at 'ome. We are 'unting for Jensen on a North Pole Expedition. We won't be home for three years yet--" Charley seems very happy and he got a most hearty welcome. I shall follow him over. I do not think I shall go when he does as that would mean seeing people and getting settled and I must get the Greek war done by the 12th of July and the Jubilee by the 15th of August. I know you will not mind, but I have been terribly interrupted by the Jubilee and by so many visitors. They are running in all the time, so I shall try to get the Greek war article done before I sail and also have a little peaceful view of London. I have seen nothing of it really yet. It has been like living in a circus, and moving about on an election night. I am well as can be except for occasional twinges of sciatica but I have not had to go to bed with it and some times it disappears for a week. A little less rain and more sun will stop it. I hope you do not mind my not returning but we will all be together for many months this Fall and I really feel that I have not had a quiet moment here for pleasure and work. It has been such a rush. I do wish to see dear Dad. I am so very sorry about his being ill, and I hope he is having lots of fishing. Love to all at Marion--and God bless you. RICHARD. LONDON July 13, 1897. DEAR MOTHER: Today Barrie gave a copyright performance of "The Little Minister" which Maude Adams is to play in the States. It was advertised by a single bill in front of the Haymarket Theater and the price of admission was five guineas. We took in fifteen guineas, the audience being Charley Frohman, Lady Craig and a man. Cyril Maude played the hero and Brandon Thomas and Barrie the two low comedy parts--two Scotchmen of Thrums. I started to play one of them, but as I insisted on making it an aged negro with songs, Barrie and Frohman got discouraged and let me play the villain, Lord Rintoul, in which character I was great. Maude played his part in five different ways and dialects so as to see which he liked best, he said. It was a bit confusing. Then one of the actors went up in the gallery and pretended to be a journalist critic who had sneaked in, and he abused the play and the actors with the exception of the man who played Whamond (himself) whom he said he thought showed great promise. Maude pretended not to know who he was and it fooled everybody. Mrs. Barrie played the gipsy and danced most of the time, which she said was her conception of the part as it was in the book. Her husband explained that this was a play, not a book, but she did not care and danced on and off. She played my daughter, and I had a great scene in which I cursed her, which got rounds of applause. Lady Lewis's daughters in beautiful Paquin dresses played Scotch lassies, and giggled in all the sad parts, and one actress who had made a great success as one of the "Two Vagabonds" made everybody weep by really trying to act. At one time there were five men on the stage all talking Scotch dialect and imitating Irving at the same time. It was a truly remarkable performance. Ethel Barrymore goes back on Saturday with Drew to play a French maid in "A Marriage of Convenience." She is announced to be engaged to Hope, I see by the papers. They are not engaged, of course, but the papers love to make matches. Look for me as sailing either on the 31st on the St. Louis or a week later. With lots and lots of love. DICK. In the late summer Richard returned to Marion and from there went to New York. However, at this time, the lure of England was very strong with my brother, and early December found him back in London. LONDON, December 29th, 1897. DEAR MOTHER:-- I had a most exciting Christmas, most of which I spent in Whitechapel in the London Hospital. I lunched with the Spenders and then went down with them carrying large packages for distribution to the sick. I expected to be terribly bored, but thought I would feel so virtuous that I would the better enjoy my dinner which I had promised to take with the McCarthys-- On the contrary, I had the most amusing time and much more fun than I had later. The patients seemed only to be playing sick, and some of them were very humorous and others very pathetic and I played tin soldiers with some, and distributed rich gifts, other people had paid for, with a lavish hand. I also sat on a little girl's cot and played dolls for an hour. She had something wrong with her spine and I wept most of the time, chiefly because she smiled all the time. She went asleep holding on to my middle finger like the baby in "The Luck of Roaring Camp." There were eighty babies in red flannel nightgowns buttoned up the back who had pillow fights in honor of the day and took turns in playing on a barrel organ, those that were strong and tall enough. In the next ward another baby in white was dying-- Its mother was a coster girl, seventeen years old, with a big hat and plumes like those the flower girls wear at Piccadilly Circus. The baby was yellow like old ivory and its teeth and gums were blue and it died while we were watching it. The mother girl was drinking tea and crying into it out of red swollen eyes, and twenty feet off one of the red nightgowned kids was playing "Louisiana Lou" on the barrel organ. The nurse put the baby's arms under the sheets and then pulled one up over its face and took the teacup away from the mother who didn't see what had happened and I came away while three young nurses were comforting the girl. Most of the nurses were very beautiful, and I neglected my duties as Santa Claus to talk to them. They would stop talking to get down on their knees and dust up the floor, which was most embarrassing, you couldn't very well ask to be let to help. There was one coster who had his broken leg in a cage which moved with the leg no matter how much he tossed. He was like the man "who sat in jail without his boots, admiring how the world was made," he spent all his waking hours in wrapt admiration of the cage-- He said to me "I've been here a fortnight now, come Monday, and I can't break my leg no how. Yer can't do it, that's all-- Yer can twist, and kick, and toss, and it don't do no good. Yer jest can't do it-- Now you take notice." Then he would kick violently and the cage would run around on trolleys and keep the broken limb straight. "See!" he would exclaim, "Wot did I tell you-- Its no use of trying, yer just can't do it. 'ere I've been ten days a trying and it can't be done." We had a very fine Christmas dinner just Ethel, the McCarthy's and I. Fanny, tell Charles, brought in the plum pudding with a sprig of holly in it and blazing, and after dinner I read them the Jackall-- About eleven I started to take Ethel to Miss Terry's, who lives miles beyond Kensington. There was a light fog. I said that all sorts of things ought to happen in a fog but that no one ever did have adventures nowadays. At that we rode straight into a bank of fog that makes those on the fishing banks look like Spring sunshine. You could not see the houses, nor the street, nor the horse, not even his tail. All you could see were gas jets, but not the iron that supported them. The cabman discovered the fact that he was lost and turned around in circles and the horse slipped on the asphalt which was thick with frost, and then we backed into lamp-posts and curbs until Ethel got so scared she bit her under lip until it bled. You could not tell whether you were going into a house or over a precipice or into a sea. The horse finally backed up a flight of steps, and rubbed the cabby against a front door, and jabbed the wheels into an area railing and fell down. That, I thought, was our cue to get out, so we slipped into a well of yellow mist and felt around for each 'other until a square block of light suddenly opened in mid air and four terrified women appeared in the doorway of the house through which the cabman was endeavoring to butt himself. They begged us to come in, and we did-- Being Christmas and because the McCarthy's always call me "King" I had put on all my decorations and the tin star and I also wore my beautiful fur coat, to which I have treated myself, and a grand good thing it is, too-- I took this off because the room was very hot, forgetting about the decorations and remarked in the same time to Ethel that it would be folly to try and get to Barkston Gardens, and that we must go back to the "Duchess's" for the night. At this Ethel answered calmly "yes, Duke," and I became conscious of the fact that the eyes of the four women were riveted on my fur coat and decorations. At the word "Duke" delivered by a very pretty girl in an evening frock and with nothing on her hair the four women disappeared and brought back the children, the servants, and the men, who were so overcome with awe and excitement and Christmas cheer that they all but got down on their knees in a circle. So, we fled out into the night followed by minute directions as to where "Your Grace" and "Your Ladyship" should turn. For years, no doubt, on a Christmas Day the story will be told in that house, wherever it may be in the millions of other houses of London, how a beautiful Countess and a wicked Duke were pitched into their front door out of a hansom cab, and after having partaken of their Christmas supper, disappeared again into a sea of fog. The only direction Ethel and I could remember was that we were to go to the right when we came to a Church, so when by feeling our way by the walls we finally reached a church we continued going on around it until we had encircled it five times or it had encircled us, we were not sure which. After the fifth lap we gave up and sat down on the steps. Ethel had on low slippers and was shivering and coughing but intensely amused and only scared for fear she would lose her voice for the first night of "Peter"-- We could hear voices sometimes, like people talking in a dream, and sometimes the sound of dance music, and a man's voice calling "Perlice" in a discouraged way as if he didn't much care whether the police came or not, but regularly like a fog siren-- I don't know how long we sat there or how long we might have sat there had not a man with a bicycle lamp loomed up out of the mist and rescued us. He had his mother with him and she said with great pride that her boy could find his way anywhere. So, we clung to her boy and followed. A cabman passed leading his horse with one of his lamps in his other hand and I turned for an instant to speak to him and Ethel and her friends disappeared exactly as though the earth had opened. So, I yelled after them, and Ethel said "Here, I am," at my elbow. It was like the chesire cat that kept appearing and disappearing until he made Alice dizzy. We finally found a link-boy and he finally found the McCarthy's house, and I left them giving Ethel quinine and whiskey. They wanted me to stay, but I could not face dressing, in the morning. So I felt my way home and only got lost twice. The Arch on Constitution Hill gave me much trouble. I thought it was the Marble Arch, and hence-- In Jermyn Street I saw two lamps burning dimly and a voice said, hearing my footsteps "where am I? I don't know where I am no more than nothing--" I told him he was in Jermyn Street with his horse's head about twenty feet from St. James-- There was a long dramatic silence and then the voice said-- "Well, I be blowed I thought I was in Pimlico!!!" This has been such a long letter that I shall have to skip any more. I have NO sciatica chiefly because of the fur coat, I think, and I got two Christmas presents, one from Margaret Fraser and one from the Duchess of Sutherland-- Boxing Day I took Margaret to the matinee of the Pantomine and it lasted five hours, until six twenty, then I dressed and dined with the Hay's and went with them to the Barnum circus which began at eight and lasted until twelve. It was a busy day. Lots of love. DICK. LONDON, March 20, 1898. DEAR MOTHER: The Nellie Farren benefit was the finest thing I have seen this year past. It was more remarkable than the Coronation, or the Jubilee. It began at twelve o'clock on Thursday, but at ten o'clock Wednesday night, the crowd began to gather around Drury Lane, and spent the night on the sidewalk playing cards and reading and sleeping. Ten hours later they were admitted, or a few of them were, as many as the galleries would hold. Arthur Collins, the manager of the Drury Lane and the man who organized the benefit, could not get a stall for his mother the day before the benefit. They were then not to be had, the last having sold for twelve guineas. I got TWO the morning of the benefit for three pounds each, and now people believe that I did get into the Coronation! The people who had stalls got there at ten o'clock, and the streets were blocked for "blocks" up to Covent Garden with hansoms and royal carriages and holders of tickets at fifty dollars apiece. It lasted six hours and brought in thirty thousand dollars. Kate Vaughan came back and danced after an absence from the stage of twelve years. Irving recited The Dream of Eugene Aram, Terry played Ophelia, Chevalier sang Mrs. Hawkins, Dan Leno gave Hamlet, Marie Tempest sang The Jewel of Asia and Hayden Coffin sang Tommy Atkins, the audience of three thousand people joining in the chorus, and for an encore singing "Oh, Nellie, Nellie Farren, may your love be ever faithful, may your pals be ever true, so God bless you Nellie Farren, here's the best of luck to you." In Trial by Jury, Gilbert played an associate judge; the barristers were all playwrights, the jury the principal comedians, the chorus girls were real chorus girls from the Gaiety mixed in with leading ladies like Miss Jeffries and Miss Hanbury, who could not keep in step. But the best part of it was the pantomime. Ellaline came up a trap with a diamond dress and her hair down her back and electric lights all over her, and said, "I am the Fairy Queen," and waved her wand, at which the "First Boy" in the pantomime said, "Go long, now, do, we know your tricks, you're Ellaline Terriss"; and the clown said, "You're wrong, she's not, she's Mrs. Seymour Hicks." Then Letty Lind came on as Columbine in black tulle, and Arthur Roberts as the policeman, and Eddy Payne as the clown and Storey as Pantaloon. The rest of it brought on everybody. Sam Sothern played a "swell" and stole a fish. Louis Freear, a housemaid, and all the leading men appeared as policemen. No one had more than a line to speak which just gave the audience time to recognize him or her. The composers and orchestra leaders came on as a German band, each playing an instrument, and they got half through the Washington Post before the policemen beat them off. Then Marie Lloyd and all the Music Hall stars appeared as street girls and danced to the music of a hand-organ. Hayden Coffin, Plunkett Greene and Ben Davies sang as street musicians and the clown beat them with stuffed bricks. After that there was a revue of all the burlesques and comic operas, then the curtain was raised from the middle of the stage, and Nellie Farren was discovered seated at a table on a high stage with all the "legitimates" in frock-coats and walking dresses rising on benches around her. The set was a beautiful wood scene well lighted. Wyndham stood on one side of her, and he said the yell that went up when the curtain rose was worse than the rebel yell he had heard in battles. In front of her, below the stage, were all the people who had taken part in the revue, forming a most interesting picture. There was no one in the group who had not been known for a year by posters or photographs: Letty Lind as the Geisha, Arthur Roberts as Dandy Dan. The French Girl and all the officers from The Geisha, the ballet girls from the pantomime, the bareback-riders from The Circus Girl; the Empire costumes and the monks from La Poupee, and all the Chinese and Japanese costumes from The Geisha. Everybody on the stage cried and all the old rounders in the boxes cried. It was really a wonderfully dramatic spectacle to see the clown and officers and Geisha girls weeping down their grease paint. Nellie Farren's great song was one about a street Arab with the words: "Let me hold your, nag, sir, carry your little bag, sir, anything you please to give--thank'ee, sir!" She used to close her hand, then open it and look at the palm, then touch her cap with a very wonderful smile, and laugh when she said, "Thank'ee, sir!" This song was reproduced for weeks before the benefit, and played all over London, and when the curtain rose on her, the orchestra struck into it and the people shouted as though it was the national anthem. Wyndham made a very good address and so did Terry, then Wyndham said he would try to get her to speak. She has lost the use of her hands and legs and can only walk with crutches, so he put his arm around her and her son lifted her from the other side and then brought her to her feet, both crying like children. You could hear the people sobbing, it was so still. She said, "Ladies and Gentleman," looking at the stalls and boxes, then she turned her head to the people on the stage below her and said, "Brothers and Sisters," then she stood looking for a long time at the gallery gods who had been waiting there twenty hours. You could hear a long "Ah" from the gallery when she looked up there, and then a "hush" from all over it and there was absolute silence. Then she smiled and raised her finger to her bonnet and said, "Thank'ee, sir," and sank back in her chair. It was the most dramatic thing I ever saw on a stage. The orchestra struck up "Auld Lang Syne" and they gave three cheers on the stage and in the house. The papers got out special editions, and said it was the greatest theatrical event there had ever been in London. DICK. CHAPTER XI THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR When the news reached Richard that the Spanish-American War seemed inevitable he returned at once to New York. Here he spent a few days in arranging to act as correspondent for the New York Herald, the London Times, and Scribner's Magazine, and then started for Key West. Off Key West--April 24th, 1898. On Board Smith, Herald Yacht. DEAR MOTHER: I wrote you such a cross gloomy letter that I must drop you another to make up for it. Since I wrote that an hour ago we have received word that war is declared and I am now on board the Smith. She is a really fine vessel as big as Benedict's yacht with plenty of deck room and big bunks. I have everything I want on board and The Herald men are two old Press men so we are good friends. If I had had another hour I believe I could have got a berth on the flag ship for Roosevelt telegraphed me the longest and strongest letter on the subject a man could write instructing the Admiral to take me on as I was writing history. Chadwick seemed willing but then the signal to set sail came and we had to stampede. All the ships have their sailing pennants up. It is as calm as a mirror thank goodness but as hot as hell. We expect to be off Havana tomorrow at sunset. Then what we do no one knows. The crew is on strike above and the mate is wrestling with them but as it seems to be only a question of a few dollars it will come out all right. We expect to be back here on Sunday but may stay out later. Don't worry if you don't hear. It is grand to see the line of battleships five miles out like dogs in a leash puffing and straining. Thank God they'll let them slip any minute now. I don't know where "Stenie" is. I am now going to take a nap while the smooth water lasts. DICK. --Flagship New York-- Off Havana, April 26, 1898. DEAR FAMILY: I left Key West on the morning of the 24th in the Dolphin with the idea of trying to get on board the flagship on the strength of Roosevelt's letter. Stenie Bonsal got on just before she sailed, not as a correspondent, but as a magazine-writer for McClure's, who have given him a commission, and because he could act as interpreter. I left the flagship the morning of the day I arrived. The captain of the Dolphin apologized to his officers while we were at anchor in the harbor of Key West, because his was a "cabin" and not a "gun" ship, and because he had to deliver the mails at once on board the flagship and not turn out of his course for anything, no matter how tempting a prize it might appear to be. He then proceeded to chase every sail and column of smoke on the horizon, so that the course was like a cat's cradle. We first headed for a big steamer and sounded "general quarters." It was fine to see the faces of the apprentices as they ran to get their cutlasses and revolvers, their eyes open and their hair on end, with the hope that they were to board a Spanish battleship. But at the first gun she ran up an American flag, and on getting nearer we saw she was a Mallory steamer. An hour later we chased another steamer, but she was already a prize, with a prize crew on board. Then we had a chase for three hours at night; after what we believed was the Panama, but she ran away from us. We fired three shells after her, and she still ran and got away. The next morning I went on board the New York with Zogbaum, the artist. Admiral Sampson is a fine man; he impressed me very much. He was very much bothered at the order forbidding correspondents on the ship, but I talked like a father to him, and he finally gave in, and was very nice about the way he did it. Since then I have had the most interesting time and the most novel experience of my life. We have been lying from three to ten miles off shore. We can see Morro Castle and houses and palms plainly without a glass, and with one we can distinguish men and women in the villages. It is, or was, frightfully hot, and you had to keep moving all the time to get out of the sun. I mess with the officers, but the other correspondents, the Associated Press and Ralph Paine of The World and Press of Philadelphia, with the middies. Paine got on because Scovel of The World has done so much secret service work for the admiral, running in at night and taking soundings, and by day making photographs of the coast, also carrying messages to the insurgents. It is a wonderful ship, like a village, and as big as the Paris. We drift around in the sun or the moonlight, and when we see a light, chase after it. There is a band on board that plays twice a day. It is like a luxurious yacht, with none of the ennui of a yacht. The other night, when we were heading off a steamer and firing six-pounders across her bows, the band was playing the "star" song from the Meistersinger. Wagner and War struck me as the most fin de siecle idea of war that I had ever heard of. The nights have been perfectly beautiful, full of moonlight, when we sit on deck and smoke. It is like looking down from the roof of a high building. Yesterday they brought a Spanish officer on board, he had been picked up in a schooner with his orderly. I was in Captain Chadwick's cabin when he was brought in, and Scovel interpreted for the captain, who was more courteous than any Spanish Don that breathes. The officer said he had been on his way to see his wife and newly born baby at Matanzas, and had no knowledge that war had been declared. I must say it did me good to see him. I remembered the way the Spanish officers used to insult me in a language which I, fortunately for me, could not understand, and how I hated the sight of them, and I enjoyed seeing his red and yellow cockade on the table before me, while I sat in a big armchair and smoked and was in hearing of the marines drilling on the upper deck. He was invited to go to breakfast with the officers, and I sat next to him, and as it happened to be my turn to treat, I had the satisfaction of pouring drinks down his throat. I told stories about Spanish officers all the time to the rest of the mess, pretending I was telling them something else by making drawings on the tablecloth, so that the unhappy officer on his other side, who was talking Spanish to him, had a hard time not to laugh. I told Zogbaum he ought to draw a picture of him at the mess to show how we treated prisoners, and a companion one of the captain of the Compeliton, who came over with us on the Dolphin, and who showed us the marks of the ropes on his wrists and arms the Spaniards had bound him with when he was in Cabanas for nine months. The orderly messed with the bluejackets, who treated him in the most hospitable manner. He was a poor little peasant boy, half starved and hollow-eyed, and so scared that he could hardly stand, but they took great pride in the fact that they had made him eat three times of everything. They are, without prejudice, the finest body of men and boys you would care to see, and as humorous and polite and keen as any class of men I ever met. The war could be ended in a month so far as the island of Cuba is concerned, if the troops were ready and brought over here. The coast to Havana for ten miles is broad enough for them to march along it, and the heights above could be covered the entire time by the fleet, so that it would be absolutely impossible for any force to withstand the awful hailstorm they would play on it. Transports carrying the provisions would be protected by the ships on the gulf side, and the guns at Morro could be shut up in twenty-four hours. This is not a dream, but the most obvious and feasible plan, and it is a disgrace if the Washington politicians delay. As to health, this is the healthiest part of the coast. The trade winds blow every day of the year, and the fever talk is all nonsense. The army certainly has delayed most scandalously in mobilizing. This talk of waiting a month is suicide. It is a terrible expense. It keeps the people on a strain, destroys business, and the health of the troops at Tampa is, to my mind, in much greater danger than it would be on the hills around Havana, where, as Scovel says, there is as much yellow fever as there is snow. Tell Dad to urge them to act promptly. In the meanwhile I am having a magnificent time. I am burned and hungry and losing about a ton of fat a day, and I sleep finely. The other night the Porter held us up, but it was a story that never got into the papers. I haven't missed a trick so far except not getting on the flagship from the first, but that does not count now since I am on board. I haven't written anything yet, but I am going to begin soon. I expect to make myself rich on this campaign. I get ten cents a word from Scribner's for everything I send them, if it is only a thousand words, and I get four hundred dollars a week salary from The Times, and all my expenses. I haven't had any yet, but when I go back and join the army, I am going to travel en suite with an assistant and the best and gentlest ponies; a courier and a servant, a tent and a secretary and a typewriter, so that Miles will look like a second lieutenant. When I came out here on the Dolphin I said I was going to Tampa, lying just on the principle that it is no other newspaper-man's business where you are going. So, The Herald man at Key West, hearing this, and not knowing I WAS GOING TO THE FLAGSHIP, called Long, making a strong kick about the correspondents, Bonsal, Remington and Paine, who are, or were, with the squadron. Stenie left two days ago, hoping to get a commission on the staff of General Lee. So yesterday Scovel told me Long had cabled in answer to The Herald's protests to the admiral as follows: "Complaints have been received that correspondents Paine, Remington and Bonsal are with the squadron. Send them ashore at once. There must be no favoritism." Scovel got the admiral at once to cable Long on his behalf because of his services as a spy, but as Roosevelt had done so much for me, I would not appeal over him, and this morning I sent in word to the admiral that I was leaving the ship and would like to pay my respects. Sampson is a thin man with a gray beard. He looks like a college professor and has very fine, gentle eyes. He asked me why I meant to leave the ship, and I said I had heard one of the torpedo boats was going to Key West, and I thought I would go with her if he would allow it. He asked if I had seen the cable from Long, and I said I had heard of it, and that I was really going so as not to embarrass him with my presence. He said, "I have received three different orders from the Secretary, one of them telling me I could have such correspondents on board as were agreeable to me. He now tells me that they must all go. You can do as you wish. You are perfectly welcome to remain until the conflict of orders is cleared up." I saw he was mad and that he wanted me to stay, or at least not to go of my own wish, so that he could have a grievance out of it--if he had to send me away after having been told he could have those with him who were agreeable to him. Captain Chadwick was in the cabin, and said, "Perhaps Mr. Davis had better remain another twenty-four hours." The admiral added, "Ships are going to Key West daily." Then Chadwick repeated that he thought I had better stay another day, and made a motion to me to do so. So I said I would, and now I am waiting to see what is going to happen. Outside, Chadwick told me that something in the way of an experience would probably come off, so I have hopes. By this time, of course, you know all about it. I shall finish this later. We began bombarding Matanzas twenty minutes after I wrote the above. It was great. I guess I got a beat, as The Herald tug is the only one in sight. DICK. Flagship--Off Havana April 30th, 1898. DEAR FAMILY: You must not mind if I don't write often, but I feel that you see The Herald every day and that tells you of what I am seeing and doing, and I am writing so much, and what with keeping notes and all, I haven't much time-- What you probably want to know is that I am well and that my sciatica is not troubling me at all--Mother always wants to know that. On the other hand I am on the best ship from which to see things and on the safest, as she can move quicker and is more heavily armored than any save the battleships-- The fact that the admiral is on board and that she is the flagship is also a guarantee that she will not be allowed to expose herself. I was very badly scared when I first came to Key West for fear I should be left especially when I didn't make the flagship-- But I have not missed a single trick so far-- Bonsal missed the bombardment and so did Stephen Crane-- All the press boats were away except The Herald's. I had to write the story in fifteen minutes, so it was no good except that we had it exclusively-- I am sending a short story of the first shot fired to the Scribner's and am arranging with them to bring out a book on the Campaign. I have asked them to announce it as it will help me immensely here for it is as an historian and not as a correspondent that I get on over those men who are correspondents for papers only. I have made I think my position here very strong and the admiral is very much my friend as are also his staff. Crane on the other hand took the place of Paine who was exceedingly popular with every one and it has made it hard for Crane to get into things-- I am having a really royal time, it is so beautiful by both night and day and there is always color and movement and the most rigid discipline with the most hearty good feeling-- I get on very well with the crew too, one of them got shot by a revolver's going off and I asked the surgeon if I might not help at the operation so that I might learn to be useful, and to get accustomed to the sight of wounds and surgery-- It was a wonderful thing to see, and I was confused as to whether I admired the human body more or the way the surgeon's understood and mastered it-- The sailor would not give way to the ether and I had to hold him for an hour while they took out his whole insides and laid them on the table and felt around inside of him as though he were a hollow watermelon. Then they put his stomach back and sewed it in and then sewed up his skin and he was just as good as new. We carried him over to a cot and he came to, and looked up at us. We were all bare-armed and covered with his blood, and then over at the operating table, which was also covered with his blood. He was gray under his tan and his lips were purple and his eyes were still drunk with the ether-- But he looked at our sanguinary hands and shook his head sideways on the pillow and smiled-- "You'se can't kill me," he said, "I'm a New Yorker, by God--you'se can't kill me." The Herald cabled for a story as to how the crew of the New York behaved in action. I think I shall send them that although there are a few things the people had better take for granted-- Of course, we haven't been "in action" yet but the first bombardment made me nervous until it got well started. I think every one was rather nervous and it was chiefly to show them there was nothing to worry about that we fired off the U. S. guns. They talk like veterans now-- It was much less of a strain than I had expected, there was no standing on your toes nor keeping your mouth open or putting wadding in your ears. I took photographs most of the time, and they ought to be excellent--what happened was that you were thrown up off the deck just as you are when an elevator starts with a sharp jerk and there was an awful noise like the worst clap of thunder you ever heard close to your ears, then the smoke covered everything and you could hear the shot going through the air like a giant rocket-- The shots they fired at us did not cut any ice except a shrapnel that broke just over the main mast and which reminded me of Greece-- The other shots fell short-- The best thing was to see the Captains of the Puritan and Cincinnati frantically signalling to be allowed to fire too-- A little fort had opened on us from the left so they plugged at that, it was a wonderful sight, the Monitor was swept with waves and the guns seemed to come out of the water. The Cincinnati did the best of all. Her guns were as fast as the reports of a revolver, a self-cocking revolver, when one holds the trigger for the whole six. We got some copies of The Lucha on the Panama and their accounts of what was going on in Havana were the best reading I ever saw-- They probably reported the Matanzas bombardment as a Spanish victory-- The firing yesterday was very tame. We all sat about on deck and the band played all the time-- We didn't even send the men to quarters-- I do not believe the army intends to move for two weeks yet, so I shall stay here. They seem to want me to do so, and I certainly want to-- But that army is too slow for words, and we love the "Notes from the Front" in The Tribune, telling about the troops at Chickamauga-- I believe what will happen is that a chance shot will kill some of our men, and the Admiral won't do a thing but knock hell out of whatever fort does it and land a party of marines and bluejackets-- Even if they only occupy the place for 24 hours, it will beat that army out and that's what I want. They'll get second money in the Campaign if they get any, unless they brace up and come over-- I have the very luck of the British Army, I walked into an open hatch today and didn't stop until I caught by my arms and the back of my neck. It was very dark and they had opened it while I was in a cabin. The Jackie whose business it was to watch it was worse scared than I was, and I looked up at him while still hanging to the edges with my neck and arms and said "why didn't you tell me?" He shook his head and said, "that's so, Sir, I certainly should have told you, I certainly should"-- They're exactly like children and the reason is, I think, because they are so shut off from the contamination of the world. One of these ships is like living in a monastery, and they are as disciplined and gentle as monks, and as reckless as cowboys. When I go forward and speak to one of them they all gather round and sit on the deck in circles and we talk and they listen and make the most interesting comments-- The middy who fired the first gun at Matanzas is a modest alert boy about 18 years old and crazy about his work-- So, the Captain selected him for the honor and also because there is such jealousy between the bow and stern guns that he decided not to risk feelings being hurt by giving it to either-- So, Boone who was at Annapolis a month ago was told to fire the shot-- We all took his name and he has grown about three inches. We told him all of the United States and England would be ringing with his name-- When I was alone he came and sat down on a gull beside me and told me he was very glad they had let him fire that first gun because his mother was an invalid and he had gone into the navy against her wish and he hoped now that she would be satisfied when she saw his name in the papers. He was too sweet and boyish about it for words and I am going to take a snapshot at him and put his picture in Scribner's--"he only stands about so high--" DICK. I enclose a souvenir of the bombardment. Please keep it carefully for me-- It was the first shot "in anger" in thirty years. TAMPA, May 3rd, 1898. DEAR NORA: We are still here and probably will be. It is a merry war, if there were only some girls here the place would be perfect. I don't know what's the matter with the American girl--here am I--and Stenie and Willie Chanler and Frederick Remington and all the boy officers of the army and not one solitary, ugly, plain, pretty, or beautiful girl. I bought a fine pony to-day, her name was Ellaline but I thought that was too much glory for Ellaline so I diffused it over the whole company by re-christening her Gaiety Girl, because she is so quiet, all the Gaiety Girls I know are quiet. She never does what I tell her anyway, so it doesn't matter what I call her. But when this cruel war is over ($6 a day with bath room adjoining) I am going to have an oil painting of her labelled "Gaiety Girl the Kentucky Mare that carried the news of the fall of Havana to Matanzas, fifty miles under fire and Richard Harding Davis." To-morrow I am going to buy a saddle and a servant. War is a cruel thing especially to army officers. They have to wear uniforms and are not allowed to take off their trousers to keep cool-- They take off everything else except their hats and sit in the dining room without their coats or collars-- That's because it is war time. They are terrible brave--you can see it by the way they wear bouquets on their tunics and cigarette badges and Cuban flags and by not saluting their officers. One General counted today and forty enlisted men passed him without saluting. The army will have to do a lot of fighting to make itself solid with me. They are mounted police. We have a sentry here, he sits in a rocking chair. Imagine one of Sampson's or Dewey's bluejackets sitting down even on a gun carriage. Wait till I write my book. I wouldn't say a word now but when I write that book I'll give them large space rates. I am writing it now, the first batch comes out in Scribner's in July. to you all. DICK. During the early days of the war, Richard received the appointment of a captaincy, but on the advice of his friends that his services were more valuable as a correspondent, he refused the commission. The following letter shows that at least at the time my brother regretted the decision, but as events turned out he succeeded in rendering splendid service not only as a correspondent but in the field. TAMPA--May 14, 1898. DEAR CHAS. On reflection I am greatly troubled that I declined the captaincy. It is unfortunate that I had not time to consider it. We shall not have another war and I can always be a war correspondent in other countries but never again have a chance to serve in my own. The people here think it was the right thing to do but the outside people won't. Not that I care about that, but I think I was weak not to chance it. I don't know exactly what I ought to do. When I see all these kid militia men enlisted it makes me feel like the devil. I've no doubt many of them look upon it as a sort of a holiday and an outing and like it for the excitement, but it would bore me to death. The whole thing would bore me if I thought I had to keep at it for a year or more. That is the fault of my having had too much excitement and freedom. It spoils me to make sacrifices that other men can make. Whichever way it comes out I shall be sorry and feel I did not do the right thing. Lying around this hotel is enough to demoralize anybody. We are much more out of it than you are, and one gets cynical and loses interest. On the other hand I would be miserable to go back and have done nothing. It is a question of character entirely and I don't feel I've played the part at all. It's all very well to say you are doing more by writing, but are you? It's an easy game to look on and pat the other chaps on the back with a few paragraphs, that is cheap patriotism. They're taking chances and you're not and when the war's over they'll be happy and I won't. The man that enlists or volunteers even if he doesn't get further than Chickamauga or Gretna Green and the man who doesn't enlist at all but minds his own business is much better off than I will be writing about what other men do and not doing it myself, especially as I had a chance of a life time, and declined it. I'll always feel I lost in character by not sticking to it whether I had to go to Arizona or Governor's Island. I was unfortunate in having Lee and Remington to advise me. We talked for two hours in Fred's bedroom and they were both dead against it and Lee composed my telegram to the president. Now, I feel sure I did wrong. Shafter did not care and the other officers were delighted and said it was very honorable and manly giving me credit for motives I didn't have. I just didn't think it was good enough although I wanted it too and I missed something I can never get again. I am very sad about it. I know all the arguments for not taking it but as a matter of fact I should have done so. I would have made a good aide, and had I got a chance I certainly would have won out and been promoted. That there are fools appointed with me is no answer. I wouldn't have stayed in their class long. DICK. TAMPA, May 29, 1898. DEAR CHAS.: The cigars came; they are O. K. and a great treat after Tampa products. Captain Lee and I went out to the volunteer camps today: Florida, Alabama, Ohio and Michigan, General Lee's push, and it has depressed me very much. I have been so right about so many things these last five years, and was laughed at for making much of them. Now all I urged is proved to be correct; nothing our men wear is right. The shoes, the hats, the coats, all are dangerous to health and comfort; one-third of the men cannot wear the regulation shoe because it cuts the instep, and buy their own, and the volunteers are like the Cuban army in appearance. The Greek army, at which I made such sport, is a fine organization in comparison as far as outfit goes; of course, there is no comparison in the spirit of the men. One colonel of the Florida regiment told us that one-third of his men had never fired a gun. They live on the ground; there are no rain trenches around the tents, or gutters along the company streets; the latrines are dug to windward of the camp, and all the refuse is burned to WINDWARD. Half of the men have no uniforms nor shoes. I pointed out some of the unnecessary discomforts the men were undergoing through ignorance, and one colonel, a Michigan politician, said, "Oh, well, they'll learn. It will be a good lesson for them." Instead of telling them, or telling their captains, he thinks it best that they should find things out by suffering. I cannot decide whether to write anything about it or not. I cannot see where it could do any good, for it is the system that is wrong--the whole volunteer system, I mean. Captain Lee happened to be in Washington when the first Manila outfit was starting from San Francisco, and it was on his representations that they gave the men hammocks, and took a store of Mexican dollars. They did not know that Mexican dollars are the only currency of the East, and were expecting to pay the men in drafts on New York. Isn't that a pitiable situation when a captain of an English company happens to stray into the war office, and happens to have a good heart and busies himself to see that our own men are supplied with hammocks and spending money. None of our officers had ever seen khaki until they saw Lee's, nor a cork helmet until they saw mine and his; now, naturally, they won't have anything else, and there is not another one in the country. The helmets our troops wear would be smashed in one tropical storm, and they are so light that the sun beats through them. They are also a glaring white, and are cheap and nasty and made of pasteboard. The felt hats are just as bad; the brim is not broad enough to protect them from the sun or to keep the rain off their necks, and they are made of such cheap cotton stuff that they grow hard when they are wet and heavy, instead of shedding the rain as good felt would do. They have always urged that our uniforms, though not smart nor "for show," were for use. The truth is, as they all admit, that for the tropics they are worse than useless, and that in any climate they are cheap and poor. I could go on for pages, but it has to be written later; now they would only think it was an attack on the army. But it is sickening to see men being sacrificed as these men will be. This is the worst season of all in the Philippines. The season of typhoons and rainstorms and hurricanes, and they would have sent the men off without anything to sleep on but the wet ground and a wet blanket. It has been a great lesson for me, and I have rubber tents, rubber blankets, rubber coats and hammocks enough for an army corps. I have written nothing for the paper, because, if I started to tell the truth at all, it would do no good, and it would open up a hell of an outcry from all the families of the boys who have volunteered. Of course, the only answer is a standing army of a hundred thousand, and no more calling on the patriotism of men unfitted and untrained. It is the sacrifice of the innocents. The incompetence and, unreadiness of the French in 1870 was no worse than our own is now. It is a terrible and pathetic spectacle, and the readiness of the volunteers to be sacrificed is all the more pathetic. It seems almost providential that we had this false-alarm call with Spain to show the people how utterly helpless they are. love, DICK. TAMPA, June 9th, 1898. Well, here we are again. Talk of the "Retreat from Ottawa" I've retreated more in this war than the Greeks did. If they don't brace up soon, I'll go North and refuse to "recognize" the war. I feel I deserve a pension and a medal as it is. We had everything on board and our cabins assigned us and our "war kits" in which we set forth taken off, and were in yachting flannels ready for the five days cruise. I had the devil of a time getting out to the flagship, as they call the headquarters boat. I went out early in the morning of the night when I last wrote you. I stayed up all that night watching troops arrive and lending a helping hand and a word of cheer to dispirited mules and men, also segars and cool drinks, none of them had had food for twenty-four hours and the yellow Florida people having robbed them all day had shut up and wouldn't open their miserable shops. They even put sentries over the drinking water of the express company which is only making about a million a day out of the soldiers. So their soldiers slept along the platform and trucks rolled by them all night, shaking the boards on which they lay by an inch or two. About four we heard that Shafter was coming and an officer arrived to have his luggage placed on the Seguranca. I left them all on the pier carrying their own baggage and sweating and dripping and no one having slept. Their special train had been three hours in coming nine miles. I hired a small boat and went off to the flagship alone but the small boat began to leak and I bailed and the colored boy pulled and the men on the transports cheered us on. Just at the sinking point I hailed a catboat and we transferred the Admiral's flag to her and also my luggage. The rest of the day we spent on the transport. We left it this morning. Some are still on it but as they are unloading all the horses and mules from the other transports fifteen having died from the heat below deck and as they cannot put them on again under a day, I am up here to get cool and to stretch my legs. The transport is all right if it were not so awfully crowded. I am glad I held out to go with the Headquarter staff. I would have died on the regular press boat, as it is the men are interesting on our boat. We have all the military attaches and Lee, Remington, Whitney and Bonsal. The reason we did not go was because last night the Eagle and Resolute saw two Spanish cruisers and two torpedo boats laying for us outside, only five miles away. What they need with fourteen ships of war to guard a bottled up fleet and by leaving twenty-six transports some of them with 1,400 men on them without any protection but a small cruiser and one gun boat is beyond me. The whole thing is beyond me. It is the most awful picnic that ever happened, you wouldn't credit the mistakes that are made. It is worse than the French at Sedan a million times. We are just amateurs at war and about like the Indians Columbus discovered. I am exceedingly pleased with myself at taking it so good naturedly. I would have thought I would have gone mad or gone home long ago. Bonsal and Remington threaten to go every minute. Miles tells me we shall have to wait until those cruisers are located or bottled up. I'm tired of bottling up fleets. I like the way Dewey bottles them. What a story that would have made. Twenty-six transports with as many thousand men sunk five miles out and two-thirds of them drowned. Remember the Maine indeed! they'd better remember the Main and brace up. If we wait until they catch those boats I may be here for another month as we cannot dare go away for long or far. If we decide to go with a convoy which is what we ought to do, we may start in a day or two. Nothing you read in the papers is correct. Did I tell you that Miles sent Dorst after me the other night and made me a long speech, saying he thought I had done so well in refusing the commission. I was glad he felt that way about it. Well, lots of love. I'm now going to take a bath. God bless you, this is a "merry war." RICHARD. In sight of Santiago-- June 26th, 1898. DEAR CHAS.: We have come to a halt here in a camp along the trail to Santiago. You can see it by climbing a hill. Instead of which I am now sitting by a fine stream on a cool rock. I have discovered that you really enjoy things more when you are not getting many comforts than you do when you have all you want. That sounds dull but it is most consoling. I had a bath this morning in these rocks that I would not have given up for all the good dinners I ever had at the Waldorf, or the Savoy. It just went up and down my spine and sent thrills all over me. It is most interesting now and all the troubles of the dull days of waiting at Tampa and that awful time on the troopship are over. The army is stretched out along the trail from the coast for six miles. Santiago lies about five miles ahead of us. I am very happy and content and the book for Scribners ought to be an interesting one. It is really very hard that my despatches are limited to 100 words for there are lots of chances. The fault lies with the army people at Washington, who give credentials to any one who asks. To The Independent and other periodicals--in no sense newspapers, and they give seven to one paper, consequently we as a class are a pest to the officers and to each other. Fortunately, the survival of the fittest is the test and only the best men in every sense get to the front. There are fifty others at the base who keep the wire loaded with rumors, so when after great difficulty we get the correct news back to Daiquire a Siboney there is no room for it. Some of the "war correspondents" have absolutely nothing but the clothes they stand in, and the others had to take up subscriptions for them. They gambled all the time on the transports and are ensconced now at the base with cards and counters and nothing else. Whitney has turned out great at the work and I am glad he is not on a daily paper or he would share everything with me. John Fox, Whitney and I are living on Wood's rough riders. We are very welcome and Roosevelt has us at Headquarters but, of course, we see the men we know all the time. You get more news with the other regiments but the officers, even the Generals, are such narrow minded slipshod men that we only visit them to pick up information. Whitney and I were the only correspondents that saw the fight at Guasimas. He was with the regulars but I had the luck to be with Roosevelt. He is sore but still he saw more than any one else and is proportionally happy. Still he naturally would have liked to have been with our push. We were within thirty yards of the Spaniards and his crowd were not nearer than a quarter of a mile which was near enough as they had nearly as many killed. Gen. Chaffee told me to-day that it was Wood's charge that won the day, without it the tenth could not have driven the Spaniards back-- Wood is a great young man, he has only one idea or rather all his ideas run in one direction, his regiment, he eats and talks nothing else. He never sleeps more than four hours and all the rest of the time he is moving about among the tents-- Between you and me and the policeman, it was a very hot time-- Maybe if I drew you a map you would understand why. Wood and Gen. Young, by agreement the night before and without orders from anybody decided to advance at daybreak and dislodge the Spaniards from Las Guasimas. They went by two narrow trails single file, the two trails were along the crests of a line of hills with a valley between. The dotted line is the trail we should have taken had the Cubans told us it existed, if we had done so we would have had the Spaniards in the frontband rear as General Young would have caught them where they expected him to come, and we would have caught them where they were not looking for us. Of course, the Cubans who are worthless in every way never told us of this trail until we had had the meeting. No one knew we were near Spaniards until both columns were on the place where the two trails meet. Then our scouts came back and reported them and the companies were scattered out as you see them in the little dots. The Spaniards were absolutely hidden not over 25 per cent of the men saw one of them for two hours-- I ran out with the company on the right of the dotted line, marked "our position." I thought it was a false alarm and none of us believed there were any Spaniards this side of Santiago. The ground was covered with high grass and cactus and vines so that you could not see twenty feet ahead, the men had to beat the vines with their carbines to get through them. We had not run fifty yards through the jungle before they opened on us with a quick firing gun at a hundred yards. I saw the enemy on the hill across the valley and got six sharp shooters and began on them, then the fire got so hot that we had to lie on our faces and crawl back to the rear. I had a wounded man to carry and was in a very bad way because I had sciatica, Two of his men took him off while I stopped to help a worse wounded trooper, but I found he was dead. When I had come back for him in an hour, the vultures had eaten out his eyes and lips. In the meanwhile a trooper stood up on the crest with a guidon and waved it at the opposite trail to find out if the firing there was from Spaniards or Len Young's negroes. He was hit in three places but established the fact that Young was up on the trail on our right across the valley for they cheered. He was a man who had run on the Gold Ticket for Congress in Arizona, and consequently, as some one said, naturally should have led a forlorn hope. A blackguard had just run past telling them that Wood was killed and that he had been ordered to Siboney for reinforcements. That was how the report spread that we were cut to pieces-- A reporter who ran away from Young's column was responsible for the story that I was killed. He meant Marshall who was on the left of the line and who was shot through the spine-- There was a lot of wounded at the base and the fighting in front was fearful to hear. It was as fast as a hard football match and you must remember it lasted two full hours; during that time the men were on their feet all the time or crawling on their hands-- Not one of them, with the exception of ----, and a Sergeant who threw away his gun and ran, went a step back. It was like playing blindman's buff and you were it. I got separated once and was scared until I saw the line again, as my leg was very bad and I could not get about over the rough ground. I went down the trail and I found Capron dying and the whole place littered with discarded blankets and haversacks. I also found Fish and pulled him under cover--he was quite dead-- Then I borrowed a carbine and joined Capron's troop, a second lieutenant and his Sergeant were in command. The man next me in line got a bullet through his sleeve and one through his shirt and you could see where it went in and came out without touching the skin. The firing was very high and we were in no danger so I told the lieutenant to let us charge across an open place and take a tin shack which was held by the Spaniards' rear guard, for they were open in retreat. Roosevelt ordered his men to do the same thing and we ran forward cheering across the open and then dropped in the grass and fired. I guess I fired about twenty rounds and then formed into a strategy board and went off down the trail to scout. I got lonely and was coming back when I met another trooper who sat down and said he was too hot to run in any direction Spaniard or no Spaniard. So we sat down and panted. At last he asked me if I was R. H. D. and I said I was and he said "I'm Dean, I met you in Harvard in the racquet court." Then we embraced--the tenth came up then and it was all over. My leg, thank goodness, is all right again and has been so for three days. It was only the running about that caused it. I won't have to run again as I have a horse now and there will be no more ambushes and moreover we have 12,000 men around us-- Being together that way in a tight place has made us all friends and I guess I'll stick to the regiment. Send this to dear Mother and tell her I was not born to be killed. I ought to tell you more of the charming side of the life--we are all dirty and hungry and sleep on the ground and have grand talks on every subject around the headquarters tent. I was never more happy and content and never so well. It is hot but at night it is quite cool and there has been no rain only a few showers. 'No one is ill and there have been no cases of fever. I have not heard from you or any one since the 14th, which is not really long but so much goes on that it seems so. Lots of love to you all. DICK. After reading this over I ought perhaps to say that the position of the real correspondents is absolutely the very best. No one confounds us with the men at the base, and nothing they have they deny us. We are treated immeasurably better than the poor attaches who are still on the ship and who if they were spies could not be treated worse. But for Whitney, Remington and myself nothing is too good. Generals fight to have us on their staffs and all that sort of thing, so I really cannot complain, except about the fact that our real news is crowded out by the faker in the rear. SANTIAGO. Headquarters Cavalry Division, U. S. Army. Headqrs. Wood's Rough Riders. June 29th, 1898. DEAR DAD: I suppose you are back from Marion now and I have missed you. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I wanted to see you coming up the street this summer in your knickerbockers and with no fish, but still happy. Never mind, we shall do the theatres this Fall, and have good walks downtown. I hope Mother will come up and visit me this September, at Marion and sit on Allen's and on the Clarks' porch and we can have Chas. too. I suppose he will have had his holiday but he can come up for a Sunday. We expect to move up on Santiago the day after to-morrow, and it's about time, for the trail will not be passable much longer. It rains every day at three o'clock for an hour and such rain you never guessed. It is three inches high for an hour. Then we all go out naked and dig trenches to get it out of the way. It is very rough living. I have to confess that I never knew how well off I was until I got to smoking Durham tobacco and I've only half a bag of that left. The enlisted men are smoking dried horse droppings, grass, roots and tea. Some of them can't sleep they are so nervous for the want of it, but to-day a lot came up and all will be well for them. I've had a steady ration of coffee, bacon and hard tack for a week and one mango, to night we had beans. Of course, what they ought to serve is rice and beans as fried bacon is impossible in this heat. Still, every one is well. This is the best crowd to be with--they are so well educated and so interesting. The regular army men are very dull and narrow and would bore one to death. We have Wood, Roosevelt, Lee, the British Attache, Whitney and a Doctor Church, a friend of mine from Princeton, who is quite the most cheerful soul and the funniest I ever met. He carried four men from the firing line the other day back half a mile to the hospital tent. He spends most of his time coming around headquarters in an undershirt of mine and a gold bracelet fighting tarantulas. I woke up the other morning with one seven inches long and as hairy as your head reposing on my pillow. My sciatica bothers me but has not prevented me seeing everything and I can dig rain gutters and cut wood with any of them. It is very funny to see Larned, the tennis champion, whose every movement at Newport was applauded by hundreds of young women, marching up and down in the wet grass. Whitney and I guy him. To-day a sentry on post was reading "As You Like It" and whenever I go down the line half the men want to know who won the boat race-- To-day Wood sent me out with a detail on a pretense of scouting but really to give them a chance to see the country. They were all college boys, with Willie Tiffany as sergeant and we had a fine time and could see the Spanish sentries quite plainly without a glass. I hope you will not worry over this long separation. I don't know of any experience I have had which has done me so much good, and being with such a fine lot of fellows is a great pleasure. The scenery is very beautiful when it is not raining. I have a cot raised off the ground in the Colonel's tent and am very well off. If Chaffee or Lawton, who are the finest type of officers I ever saw, were in command, we would have been fighting every day and would probably have been in by this time. This weather shows that Havana must be put off after Porto Rico. They cannot campaign in this mud. DICK. SANTIAGO, July 1898. DEAR FAMILY: This is just to reassure you that I am all right. I and Marshall were the only correspondents with Roosevelt. We were caught in a clear case of ambush. Every precaution had been taken, but the natives knew the ground and our men did not. It was the hottest, nastiest fight I ever imagined. We never saw the enemy except glimpses. Our men fell all over the place, shouting to the others not to mind them, but to go on. I got excited and took a carbine and charged the sugar house, which was what is called the key to the position. If the men had been regulars I would have sat in the rear as B---- did, but I knew every other one of them, had played football, and all that sort of thing, with them, so I thought as an American I ought to help. The officers were falling all over the shop, and after it was all over Roosevelt made me a long speech before some of the men, and offered me a captaincy in the regiment any time I wanted it. He told the Associated Press man that there was no officer in his regiment who had "been of more help or shown more courage" than your humble servant, so that's all right. After this I keep quiet. I promise I keep quiet. Love to you all. RICHARD. From Cuba Richard sailed with our forces to Porto Rico, where his experiences in the Spanish-American war came to an end, and he returned to Marion. He spent the fall in New York, and early in 1899 went to London. One of the most interesting, certainly the most widely talked of, "sporting events" for which Richard was responsible was the sending of an English district-messenger boy from London to Chicago. The idea was inspired by my brother's general admiration of the London messenger service and his particular belief in one William Thomas Jaggers, a fourteen-year-old lad whom Richard had frequently employed to carry notes and run errands. One day, during a casual luncheon conversation at the Savoy with his friend Somers Somerset, Richard said that he believed that if Jaggers were asked to carry a message to New York that he could not only do it but would express no surprise at the commission. This conversation resulted in the bet described in the following letters. The boy slipped quietly away from London, but a few days later the bet became public and the newspapers were filled with speculation as to whether Jaggers could beat the mails. The messenger carried three letters, one to my sister, one to Miss Cecil Clark of Chicago, whom Richard married a few months later, and one to myself. As a matter of fact, Jaggers delivered his notes several hours before letters travelling by the same boat reached the same destinations. The newspapers not only printed long accounts of Jaggers's triumphal progress from New York to Chicago and back again, but used the success of his undertaking as a text for many editorials against the dilatory methods of our foreign-mail service. Jaggers left London on March 11, 1899, and was back again on the 29th, having travelled nearly eighty-four hundred miles in eighteen days. On his return he was received literally by a crowd of thousands, and his feat was given official recognition by a gold medal pinned on his youthful chest by the Duchess of Rutland. Also, later on, at a garden fete he was presented to the Queen, and incidentally, still later, returned to the United States as "buttons" to my brother's household. Bachelors' Club, Piccadilly, W. March 15th, 1899. DEAR CHAS. I hope you are not annoyed about Jaggers. When he started no one knew of it but three people and I had no idea anyone else would, but the company sent it to The Mail without my name but describing me as "an American gentleman"-- Instantly the foreign correspondents went to them to find out who I was and to whom I was sending the letter-- I told the company it was none of their damned business--that I employed the boy by the week and that I could send him where-ever I chose. Then the boy's father got proud and wrote to The Mail about his age and so they got the boy's name. Mine, however, is still out of it, but in America they are sure to know as the people on the steamer are crazy about him and Kinsey the Purser knows he is sent by me. After he gets back from Chicago and Philadelphia, you can do with him as you like until the steamer sails. If the thing is taken up as it is here and the fat is in the fire, then you can do as you please-- I mean you can tell the papers about it or not-- Somerset holds one end of the bets and I the other. There are two bets: one that he will beat the mail to Chicago, Somerset agreeing to consider the letter you give him to Bruce, as equivalent to one coming from here. The other bet is that he will deliver and get receipts from you, Nora and Bruce, and return here by the 5th of April-- You and Bobby ought to be able to do well by him if it becomes, as I say, so far public that there is no possibility of further concealment-- You have my permission to do what you please-- He is coming into my employ as soon as he gets back and as soon as the company give him a medal. Over here there is the greatest possible interest in the matter-- At the Clubs I go to, the waiters all wait on me in order to have the latest developments and when it was cabled over here that the Customs' people intended stopping him, indignation raged at the Foreign office. of love, DICK. 89 Jermyn Street, S. W. March--1899 DEAR NORA: This is to be handed to you by my special messenger, who is to assure you that I am in the best of health and spirits-- Keep him for a few hours and then send him on to Chicago-- As he is doing this on a bet, do not give him any written instructions only verbal ones. I am very well and happy and send you all my love-- Jaggers has been running errands for me ever since I came here, and a most loyal servitor when I was ill-- On his return I want to keep him on as a buttons. See that he gets plenty to eat-- If he comes back alive he will have broken the messenger boy service record by three thousand miles. Personally, it does not cost me anything to speak of. The dramatization of the Soldiers continues briskly, and Maude is sending Grundy back the Jackal, to have a second go at it. Maude insists on its being done--so I stand to win a lot. RICHARD. Beefsteak Club, 9, Green Street, Leicester Square, W. C. Tuesday. March--1899. DEAR MOTHER:-- The faithful Jaggers should have arrived to-day, or will do so this evening-- I am sure you will make the poor little chap comfortable-- I do regret having sent him on such a journey especially since the papers here made such an infernal row over it-- However, neither of us will lose by it in the end-- I dined with Lady Clarke last night and met Lord Castleton there and he invited me up to Dublin for the Punchtown Races-- I have a great mind to go and write a story on them-- Castleton is a great sport and very popular at home and in England and it would be a pleasant experience. Kuhne Beveridge is doing a bust of me in khaki outfit for the Academy and also for a private exhibition of her own works, which includes the Prince of Wales, and the Little Queen of Holland. Hays Hammond has invited me down to South Africa again, with a promise of making my fortune, but I am not going as it takes too long. DICK. CHAPTER XII THE BOER WAR On May 4, 1899, at Marion, Massachusetts, Richard was married to Cecil Clark, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John M. Clark of Chicago. After the marriage Richard and his wife spent a few weeks in Marion and the remainder of the summer in London and Aix-les-Bains. MARION, May 28th, 1899. DEAR MOTHER: You sent me such a good letter about the visit of the three selected chorus girls. But what was best, was about your wishing to see me. Of course, you know that I feel that too. I would have it so that we all lived here, so that Dad could fish, and Nora and Cecil could discuss life, and you and I could just take walks and chat. But because that cannot be, we are no further away than we ever were and when the pain to see you comes, I don't let it hurt and I don't kill it either for it is the sweetest pain I can feel. If sons will go off and marry, or be war-correspondents, or managers, it does not mean that Home is any the less Home. You can't wipe out history by changing the name of a boulevard, as somebody said of the French, and if I were able to be in two places at once, I know in which two places I would be here with Cecil at Marion, and at Home in the Library with you and Dad and The Evening Telegraph, and Nora and Van Bibber. You will never know how much I love you all and you must never give up trying to comprehend it. God bless you and keep you, and my love to you every minute and always. DICK. Late in January, 1900, Richard and his wife started on their first great adventure together to the Boer War. Arriving at Cape Town, Richard left his wife there and, acting as correspondent with the British forces for the New York Herald and London Mail, saw the relief of Ladysmith. After this he returned to Cape Town, with the intention of joining Lord Roberts in his advance on Pretoria. But on arriving at Cape Town he learned that Lord Roberts did not intend to move for three weeks, and so decided to say farewell to the British army and to return to London in a leisurely and sightseeing fashion along the east coast. It was after they were well started on this return voyage that Richard conceived the idea of leaving the ship at Durban, going to Pretoria, and, as he expressed it, "watch the Boers fighting the same men I had just seen fighting them." R. M. S. Scot February 4th, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: A great change has come since I wrote you from Madeira. We are now on Summer seas and have regulated the days so that they pass very pleasantly--not that we do not want to be on land-- I never so much wanted it-- Somers is with us and is such a comfort. He is even younger than he used to be and so quick and courteous and good tempered. He is like a boy off on a holiday-- I think he is very much in love with his wife, but in spite of himself he is glad to get a holiday, and like all of us he will be so much more glad when he is homeward bound. They threatened to shut us out of our only chance of putting foot on land at Madeira-- In the first place, we were so delayed by the storm that we arrived at eight o'clock at night, so that we missed seeing it in its beauty of flowers and palms. And then it was so rough that they said it was most unsafe for us to attempt to go ashore. It was a great disappointment but I urged that every one loved his own life, and if the natives were willing to risk theirs to sell us photographs and wicker baskets it was probably safer than it looked-- So we agreed to die together, and with Somers got our rain coats, and the three of us leaped into a row boat pulled by two Portugese pirates and started off toward a row of lamps on a quay that seemed much lower than the waves. The remainder on the ship watched us disappear with ominus warnings-- We really had a most adventurous passage--towards shore the waves tossed us about like a lobster pot and we just missed being run down by a coal barge and escaped an upset over the bow anchor chain of a ship. It was so close that both Somers and I had our coats off and I told Cecil to grab the chain-- But we weathered it and landed at a high gangway cut in the solid rock the first three steps of which were swamped by the waves. A rope and chain hung from the top of the wharf and a man swung his weight on this and yanked us out to the steps as the boat was on the wave. The rain beat and the wind roared and beautiful palms lashed the air with their fronds-- It was grand to get on shore once again-- At the end of the wharf we were hustled into a sled on steel runners, like a hearse with curtains around it and drawn by bullocks-- The streets were all of mosaic, thousands of little stones being packed together like corn on a cob. Over this the heavy sledge was drawn by the bullocks while a small boy ran ahead through the narrow streets to clear the way-- He had a feather duster made of horse's tail as a badge of authority and he yelled some strange cry at the empty streets and closed houses. Another little boy in a striped jersey ran beside and assured us he was a guide. It was like a page out of a fairy story. The strange cart sliding and slipping over the stones which were as smooth as ice, and the colored house fronts and the palms and strange plants. The darkness made it all the more unreal-- There was a governor's palace buttressed and guarded by sentinels in a strange uniform and queer little cafe's under vines--and terraces of cannon, and at last a funny, pathetic little casino. It was such a queer imitation of Aix and Monte Carlo-- There were chasseurs and footmen in magnificent livery and stucco white walls ornamented with silk SHAWLS. Also a very good band and a new roulette table-- Coming in out of the night and the rain it was like a theatre after the "dark scene" has just passed-- There were some most dignified croupiers and three English women and a few sad English men and some very wicked looking natives in diamonds and white waistcoats. We had only fifteen minutes to spare so we began playing briskly with two shilling pieces Cecil with indifferent fortune and Somers losing-- But I won every time and the croupiers gave me strange notes of the Bonco de Portugal which I put back on the board only to get more of a larger number-- I felt greatly embarrassed as I was not a real member of the club and I hated to blow in out of a hurricane and take their money and sail away again-- So I appealed to one of the sad eyed Englishmen and he assured me it was all right, that they welcomed the people from the passing steamers who generally left a few pounds each with the bank. But the more I spread the money the more I won until finally the whole room gathered around. Then I sent out and ordered champagne for everybody and spare gold to all the waiters and still cashed in seventy-five dollars in English money. It was pretty good for fifteen minutes and we went out leaving the people open-eyed, and hitting the champagne bottles-- It was all a part of the fun especially as with all our gold we could get nothing for supper but "huevos frite" which was all the Spanish I could remember and which meant fried eggs-- But we were very wet and hungry and we got the eggs and some fruit and real Madeira wine and then rowed out again rejoicing. The pirates demanded their pay half way to the boat while we were on the high seas but they had struck the very wrong men, and I never saw a mutiny quelled so abruptly-- Somers and I told them we'd throw them overboard and row ourselves and they understood remarkably well-- The next day we were the admired and envied of those who had not had the nerve "to dare to attempt." It was one of the best experiences altogether we ever had and I shall certainly put Madeira on my silver cup. RICHARD. After their arrival at Cape Town, where Richard arranged for his wife to stay during his absence at the British front, he started for Ladysmith, sailing on the same vessel on which he had left England. February 18th, 1900 board Scot. DEAR MOTHER: I got off yesterday and am hoping to get to Buller before Ladysmith is relieved. I could not get to go with Roberts because Ralph has been here four months and has borne the heat and burden of the day, so although I only came in order to be with Roberts and Kitchener I could not ask to have Ralph recalled-- They wanted me with Roberts and I wanted it but none of us could make up our minds to turn down Ralph. So I am going up on this side track on the chance of seeing Ladysmith relieved and of joining Roberts with Buller later. I shall be satisfied if I see Ladysmith fall. Fortunately I am to do a great deal of cabling for The Mail every day and that counts much more with the reading public than letters-- Cape Town is a dusty, wind ridden western town with a mountain back of it which one man said was a badly painted back drop-- The only attractive thing about the town is this mountain and a hotel situated at its base in perfectly beautiful gardens. Here Cecil is settled. I got her a sitting room and a big bedroom and The Mail agent or Pryor pays her $150 a week and will take good care of her. It really is a beautiful and comfortable hotel and grounds and she has made many friends, and also I forced a pitch battle with a woman who was rude to her when we visited the hospital-- So, as the hospital people were very keen to have me see and praise their hospital they have taken up arms against the unfortunate little bounder and championed Cecil and me. Cecil had really nothing to do with it as you can imagine-- She only laughed but I gave the lady lots to remember. On the other hand every one is as kind and interested in Cecil as can be. Mrs. Waldron whose son is Secretary to Milner and his secretary were more than polite to each of us. Milner spent the whole evening we were there talking to Cecil and not to the lady we had had the row with, which was a pleasing triumph. He sent me unsolicited a most flattering personal letter to the Governor of Natal, saying that I had come to him with my strong letters but that he had so enjoyed meeting me that he wished to pass me on on his own account. Cecil asked me what it was I had talked so much to him about and I asked her if it were possible she couldn't guess that of course I would be telling him how to run the colony. My advice was to bombard Cape Town and make martial law, for the Cape Towners are the most rotten, cowardly lot of rebels I ever imagined as being possible. He seemed so glad to find any one who appreciated that it was a queen's colony in name only and said, "Mr. Davis, it is as bad as this--I can take a stroll with you from these gardens (we were at the back of the Government House) and at the end of our stroll we will be in hostile territory." We spent the last day after I had got my orders to join Buller (who seemed very pleased to have me) calling on the officials for passes together and they were in a great state falling into their coats and dressing guard for her and were all so friendly and hearty. The Censor seems to think I am a sort of Matthew Arnold and should be wrapped in cotton, so does Pryor The Mail agent who apologizes for asking me to cable, which is just what I want to do. They are very generous and are spending money like fresh air. I am to cable letters to Cape Town, only to save three days. So, now all that is needed is for something to happen. Everything else is arranged. All I want is to see three or four good fights and a big story like the relief of Ladysmith and I am ready and anxious to get home. I shall observe them from behind an ant hill--I don't say this to please you but because I mean it. This is not my war and all I want is to earn the very generous sums I have been offered and get home. We are just off Port Elizabeth. I will go on shore and post this there. With all love. DICK. Deal's Central Hotel, East London. February 20th, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: We are stopping at every port now, as though the Scot were a ferry boat. We came over the side to get here in baskets with a neat door in the side and were bumped to the deck of the tender in all untenderness. This is more like Africa than any place I have seen. The cactus and palms abound and the Kaffirs wear brass anklets and bracelets. A man at lunch at this hotel asked me if I was R. H. D. and said he was an American who had got a commission in Brabants horse-- He gave me the grandest sort of a segar and apparently on his representation the hotel brought me two books to sign, marked "Autographs of Celebrities of the Boer War." It seemed in my case at least to be premature and hopeful. Good luck and God bless you. This will be the last letter you will get for ten days or two weeks, as I am now going directly away from steamers. This one reaches you by a spy gentleman who is to give it to Rene Bull of The Graphic and who will post it in Cape Town-- He and all the other correspondents are abandoning Buller for Roberts. Let 'em all go. The fewer the better, I say. My luck will keep I hope. DICK. Imperial Hotel, Maritzburg, Natal. Feb. 23rd, 1900. DEAR MOTHER:-- I reached Durban yesterday. They paraded the band in my honour and played Yankee Doodle indefinitely-- I had corrupted them by giving them drinks to play the "Belle of New York" nightly. The English officers thought Yankee Doodle was our national anthem and stood with their hats off in a hurricane balancing on the deck of the tender on one foot-- The city of Durban is the best I have seen. It was as picturesque as the Midway at the Fair-- There were Persians, Malay, Hindoo, Babu's Kaffirs, Zulu's and soldiers and sailors. I went on board the Maine to see the American doctors--one of them said he had met me on Walnut Street, when he had nearly run me down with his ambulance from the Penna Hospital. Lady Randolph took me over the ship and was very much puzzled when all the hospital stewards called me by name and made complimentary remarks. It impressed her so much apparently that she and the American nurses I hadn't met on board came to see me off at the station, which was very friendly. I have had a horrible day here and got up against the British officer in uniform and on duty bent-- The chief trouble was that none of them knew what authority he had to do anything--and I had to sit down and tell them. I wonder with intelligence like theirs that their Intelligence Department did not tell them the Boers fought with war clubs and spears. I bought a ripping pony and my plan is to cut away from all my magnificent equipment and try to overtake Buller before he reaches Ladysmith and send back for the heavy things later. It is just a question of minutes really and it seems hard to have come 1500 miles and then to miss it by an hour-- I arrive at Chievely tomorrow at five--that is only ten miles from where Buller is to night, so were it not for their d----d regulations I could ride across country and join them by midday but I bet they won't let me and I also bet I'll get there in time. Of course you'll, know before you see this. Marelsburg is the capital and its chief industry is rickshaw's pulled by wild Kaffi's, with beads and snake skins around them and holes in their ears into which they stick segars and horn spoons for dipping snuff. The women wear less than the men and have their hair done up in red fungus. Well, love to you all, to Nora and Dad and Chas, and God bless you. DICK. 1900. DEAR DEAR MOTHER:-- I am here at last and counting the days when I shall get away. War does not soothe my savage breast. I find I want Cecil, and Jaggers, and Macklin to write, and plays to rehearse. Without Cecil bored to death at Cape Town, I would not mind it at all. I know how to be comfortable and on my second day I beat all these men who have been here three months in getting my news on the wire. For I am a news man now, and have to collect horrid facts and hosts of casualties and to find out whether it was the Dubblins or the Durbans that did it and what it was they did. I was in terrible fear that I would be too late to see the relief of Ladysmith but I was well in time and saw a fight the first few hours I arrived. It is terribly big and overwhelming like eighty of Barnum circuses all going at once in eighty rings and very hard to understand the geography. The Tugela is like a snake and crosses itself every three feet so that you never know whether you have crossed it yourself or not. Every one is most kind and I am as comfortable as can be. Indeed I like my tent so much that I am going to take it to Marion. It has windows in it and the most amusing trap doors and pockets in the walls and clothes lines and hooks and ventilators-- It is colored a lovely green-- I have also two chairs that fold up and a table that does nothing else and a bed and two lanterns, 3 ponies, one a Boer pony I bought for $12. from a Tommy who had stolen it. I had to pay $125 each for the other two and one had a sore back and the other gets lost in my saddle. But war as these people do it bores one to destruction. They are terribly dull souls. They cannot give an order intelligently. The real test of a soldier is the way he gives an order. I heard a Colonel with eight ribbons for eight campaigns scold a private for five minutes because he could not see a signal flag, and no one else could. It is not becoming that a Colonel should scold for five minutes. Friday they charged a hill with one of their "frontal" attacks and lost three Colonels and 500 men. In the morning--it was a night attack--when the roll was called only five officers answered. The proper number is 24. A Captain now commands the regiment. It is sheer straight waste of life through dogged stupidity. I haven't seen a Boer yet except some poor devils of prisoners but you can see every English who is on a hill. They walk along the skyline like ships on the horizon. It must be said for them that it is the most awful country to attack in the world. It is impossible to give any idea of its difficulties. However I can tell you that when I get back to the center of civilization. Do you know I haven't heard from you since I left New York on the St. Louis. All your letters to London went astray. What lots you will have to tell me but don't let Charley worry. I won't talk about the war this time. I never want to hear of it again. DICK. LADYSMITH. March 1st, 1899. DEAR CHAS: This is just a line to say I got in here with the first after a gallop of twelve miles. Keep this for me and the envelope. With my love and best wishes-- DICK. LADYSMITH, March 3, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: The column came into town today, 2200 men, guns, cavalry, ambulances, lancers, navy guns and oxen. It was a most cruel assault upon one's feelings. The garrison lined the streets as a saluting guard of honor but only one regiment could stand it and the others all sat down on the curb only rising to cheer the head of each new regiment. They are yellow with fever, their teeth protruding and the skin drawn tight over their skeletons. The incoming army had had fourteen days hard fighting at the end of three months campaigning but were robust and tanned ragged and caked with mud. As they came in they cheered and the garrison tried to cheer back but it was like a whisper. Winston Churchill and I stood in front of Gen. White and cried for an hour. For the time you forgot Boers and the cause, or the lack of cause of it all, and saw only the side of it that was before you, the starving garrison relieved by men who had lost almost one out of every three in trying to help them. I was rather too previous in getting in and like every-one else who came from outside gave away everything I had so that now I'm as badly off as the rest of them. Yesterday my rations for the day were four biscuits and an ounce of coffee and of tea, with corn which they call mealies which I could not eat but which saved my horse's life. He is a Boer pony I bought from a Tommy for two pounds ten and he's worth both of the other two for which I paid $125 a piece. Tomorrow the wagon carrying my supplies will be in and I can get millions of things. It almost apalls me to think how many. Especially clean clothes. I've slept in these for four days. I got off some stories which I hope will read well. I can't complain now that I saw the raising of this siege. But I hope we don't stay still. I want to see a lot quickly and get out. This is very safe warfare. You sit on a hill and the army does the rest. My sciatica is not troubling me at all. Love to you all and God bless you. DICK. LADYSMITH, March 4th, 1900. DEAR, DEAR MOTHER: Today I got the first letter I have had from you since we left home. It was such happiness to see your dear sweet handwriting again. It was just like seeing you for a glimpse, or hearing you speak. I am so hungry for news of Nora and Chas and you all. I know you've written, but the letters have missed somehow. I sent yours right back to Cecil who is very lonely at present. Somerset has gone to the front and Jim--home--Blessed word! A little middy rode up to me today and began by saying "I'm going home. I'm ORDERED there. Home-- To England!" He seemed to think I would not understand. He prattled on like a child saying what luck he had had, that he had been besieged in Ladysmith and seen lots of fighting and would get a medal and all the while he was "just a middy." "But isn't it awful to think of our chaps that were left on the ship" he said quite miserably. It is a beastly dull war. The whole thing is so "class" and full of "form" and tradition and worrying over "putties" and etiquette and rank. It is the most wonderful organization I ever imagined but it is like a beautiful locomotive without an engineer. The Boers outplay them in intelligence every day. The whole army is officered by one class and that the dull one. It is like the House of Peers. You would not believe the mistakes they make, the awful way in which they sacrifice the lives of officers and men. And they let the Boers escape. I watched the Boers for four hours the other day escaping after the battle of Pieters and I asked, not because I wanted them captured but just as a military proposition "Why don't you send out your cavalry and light artillery and take those wagons?" The staff officer giggled and said "They might kill us." I don't know what he meant; neither did he. However, I'm sick of it but there's nothing else to talk of. I hate all the people about me and this dirty town and I wish I was back. And I'm going too. I'll have started by the time you get this. I mean to cut out of this soon but don't imagine I'm in any danger. I'm taking d---d good care to keep out of danger. No one is more determined on that than I am. Dear Mother, this is such a dull letter but you must forgive me. I was never so homesick and bored in my life. It will be better when I go out tomorrow in my green tent and leave this beastly hole. I like the tent life, and the horses and being clean. I've really starved here for four days and haven't had a clean thing on me. God bless you all and dear Nora God bless her and Chas and the Lone Fisherman. DICK. Outside Ladysmith. 5th March, 1900. DEAREST MOTHER: I was a brute to write as I did last night. But I was so blue in that miserable town!!! It was so foul and dirty. The town smelt as bad as Johnstown. My room in the so called hotel stunk, the dirt was all over the floor and the servants had to be paid to do everything even to bring you a towel--and then I had no place to write or be alone, and nothing to eat-- The poor souls at my table who had been in the siege, when they got a little bit of sugar or a can of condensed milk would carry it off from the table as though it were a diamond diadem-- I did the same thing myself for I couldn't eat what they gave me and so I corrupted the canteen dealer and bought tin things-- I've really never wanted tobacco so much and food as I have here--to give away I mean, for it was something wonderful to see what it meant to them. Three troopers came into the dining room yesterday and asked if they could buy some tea and were turned out so rudely that it seemed to hurt them much more than the fact that they were hungry: I followed them out and begged them to come back to my verandah and have tea with me but they at first would not because they knew I had witnessed what had happened in the hotel. They belonged to a very good regiment and they had been starved for four months. But in spite of their independence I got them to my porch. I had just purchased at awful prices a few delicacies like sugar and tobacco, marmalade and a bottle of whiskey. So I gave them to them and I never enjoyed anything so much-- The poor yellow faced skeletons ate in absolute silence still fighting with their pride until I told them I was an American and was a canteen contractor's friend-- Then I gave them segars and it was too pitiful-- In our column, if you give a man something extra he says a lot and swears it's the best drink or the best segar or that you're the best chap he ever met-- Just as I say it to them when they give me things. But these starved bodies tried to be very polite and conversational on every subject except food--when I offered them the segars which could only be got then at a dollar twenty-five a piece (they had not cost me that as I had bought them in Cape Town for two cents apiece!) What has Dad to say to that for economy? They accepted them quite as though it was in Havana--and then leaned back and went off into opium dreams-- Imagine the first segar after three months. I am out here now on a bluff, with two trees in front and great hills with names historical of the siege of Ladysmith--names which I refuse to learn or remember--I am perfectly comfortable and were it not for Cecil perfectly content-- If she were only here it would be perfectly magnificent-- I have a retinue that would do credit to the Warringtons in the Virginians-- Three Kaffir boys who refuse to yield to my sense of the picturesque and go naked like their less effete brothers, two oxen and three ponies, a little puppy I found starved in Ladysmith and fed on compressed beef tablets. I call her Ladysmith and she sleeps beside my cot and in my lap when I am reading--I have also a beautiful tent with tape window panes, ventilators, pockets inside, doors that loop up and red knobs; also, it is green so that the ants won't eat it. Also two tables, two chairs, a bath tub, two lanterns, and a cape cart--and a folding bed-- In Cuba I had two saddle bags and was just as clean and just as happy. One boy does nothing but polish my boots and gaiters and harness, so that I look as well as the officers who are not much good at anything but that. I must tell you what I think is the saddest story of the siege-- They could not feed the horses, so they kept part of them for scouting, part to eat and drove 3,000 of them towards the Boers. Being, well trained cavalry horses, they did not know how to eat grass, so at bugle call the whole 3,000 came trotting back again and sentries were placed at every street to stampede them back into the veldt-- One horse from one battery met out in the prairie another horse that had been its gun mate in an artillery regiment five years before in India and the two poor things came galloping back side by side and passed the sentries and into the lines and drew up beside their battery. Another horse found its rider acting as sentry and when the man tried to drive it away it thought he was playing with it and kept coming back and finally the man brought it in to the colonel and cried and asked if it might have half of his rations of corn. Good night and God bless you all with all my love. DICK. March 15th, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: I am on my way back to Cape Town. This seemed better than staying with Buller who will not move for two or three weeks. I shall either go straight up to Roberts, or we will return to London. I have seen the relief of Ladysmith and got a very good idea of it all, and I do not know but what I shall quit now. I started in too late to do much with it and as it is I have seen a great deal. It is neither an interesting country nor an interesting war. But I don't have to stay here to oblige anybody. If I do go up to Roberts it will only be to stay for three weeks at the most and only then if there is fighting. I won't go if he is resting as Buller is. So this will explain why we start home so soon. I am very glad I came. I would have been very sorry always if I had not, but my heart is not in it as, of course, it was in our war. Sometimes they fight all day using seven or eight regiments and kill a terrible lot of fine soldiers and capture forty Boer farmers and two women. It is not the kind of war I care to report. "Nor mean to!" I cannot make a book out of what little I've seen but I will come out about even. It has been very rough on Cecil. Today I went to the Maine and asked Lady Randolph to give me a lift down to Cape Town as the ship gets there two days ahead of the Castle Steamer. So, they were apparently very glad to have me and I am going on Saturday. I like it on the ship where I have been spending the day as it is fun taking care of the wounded and listening to their stories. I am to write an article for her next Anglo Saxon magazine on the Passing of the War Correspondent. The idea is that he must either disappear altogether like the Vivandiere or be allowed to do his work. As it is now the Government forces him upon the Generals against their will and so they get back by taking it out of him. Either they should persuade the Government that their objections to him are weighty and suppress him altogether, or recognize him as a part of the outfit. I don't much care which as I certainly would never again go with an English army. I am sorry the letters home have been so dull but I have had rather hard luck straight through, and the distances are so very great and the time spent in covering them seems very wasteful. I shall be glad I saw it because it is the biggest thing as to scale that I ever saw of the sort, and I could not have afforded to have missed being in it. It is the first big modern war and all the conditions and weapons are new. I don't think the English have learned anything by it, because the fault lies entirely with their officers who are all or nearly all of one class. DICK. March 25th, 1900. Cape Town. This is just to explain our plans and as they take a bit of explaining this is meant for the Houses of Clark and of Davis. So, pass it on-- After Ladysmith was relieved Buller decided he would not move for a month, so I came back to join Roberts. I could not do that on first arriving because there was a Mail man with him. I meant to do it later as a Herald man, and to let The Mail go. But on arriving here, having spent a week in coming and having sold all my outfit at a loss, I found that Roberts did not intend to move for three weeks either. So I decided I had seen enough to justify my returning. There were other reasons, the chief one being that the English irritated me and I had so little sympathy with them that I could not write with any pleasure of their work. My sporting blood refused to boil at the spectacle of such a monster Empire getting the worst of it from an untrained band of farmers-- I found I admired the farmers. So we decided to chuck it and go to London. I would not have missed it for anything. I would never have been satisfied, if we had not come. I have seen much of the country and the people, and of the army and its wonderful organization and discipline. I enjoyed two battles--and the relief of Ladysmith is one of the things to have seen, almost the best, if not the best. Every officer and correspondent agrees that I got the pick of the fighting and the "best story." By the way, I beat all the London papers in getting out the news by one day. At least, so Pryor, The Mail manager tells me. The paper was very much pleased. We have now decided to come home by the East Coast. It was Cecil's idea and wish and I was only too glad to do it. She says we certainly will never come to this country again. God help us if we do--and that it would be criminal to spend seventeen blank days on the West coast when we could fill in the entire trip North on the East Coast at many ports. It is a rather complicated trip as one has to change frequently but it will be a great thing to have seen. Cecil has really seen nothing at Cape Town and on this trip she will be paid for all the boredom that has gone before. I have been over part of it and am sure. Durban alone is one of the most curious cities I ever saw. It is like the Midway at the Fair. I want her to have some fun out of this. She has been so unselfish and fine all through and I hope I can make the rest of the adventure to her liking-- It is sure to be for after Delagoa Bay it is all real Africa not the shoddy "colonial" shopkeepers' paradise that we have here. And we are going to stop off at Zanzibar for some time where we have letters to everybody and where Cecil is to draw the Sultan and I am to play him the "Typical Tune of Zanzibar." You will see by our route that we spend two days or a day at many places and so shall get a good idea of the country. The Konig is a 5,000 ton ship and we have two cabins-- From Port Said we will run up to Cairo to get a dinner and then over to Constantinople to see Lloyd Griscom and the city which Cecil has never visited. Then to Paris by way of the Orient Express. Then London and back with Charley to Aix. I feel sure that one more course there will cure my leg for always. As it is it has not touched me once even during the campaign when I was wet and had to climb hills, and at Ladysmith, where I had no food for a week. Of course, if we get tired on the way up we may go straight on from Port Said to Marseilles and so to London. It seems funny to look upon Port Said as being at home, but from this distance it seems as near New York as Boston-- You will get this when we reach Zanzibar or later and we will cable when we can. DICK. It was said at the time that Richard left the British forces because the censors would not permit him to send out the truth about Buller's advance, and that the English officials resented his going to report the war from the Boer side. The first statement my brother flatly denied, and the fact that it was through the direct intervention of Sir Alfred Milner, assisted by the efforts of our consul Adelbert S. Hay at Pretoria, that Richard was enabled to reach the Boer capital seems to prove the latter charge equally false. Although throughout the war my brother's sympathies were with the Boers, and in spite of the fact that the papers he represented wanted him to report the war from the Boer side, he persisted in going at first with the British forces. His reasons were that he wished to see a great army, with all modern equipment in action, and that practically all of his English friends were with the British army. "My only reason for leaving it", he wrote, "was the fact that I found myself facing a month of idleness. Had General Buller continued his advance immediately after his relief of Ladysmith I would have gone with his column and would probably have never seen a Boer, except a Boer prisoner." Royal Hotel, Durban, Natal. April 5th, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: We arrived here to-day and got off in a special tug together. We did the basket trick all right, although the next time it came down a swell raised the tug and fractured every one in the basket except Sangree and Rogers, the two New York correspondents who were hanging on by the upper edges. Cecil loved the place which is the Midway Plaisance of cities and we had a good lunch and managed to get into the hotel where there are over twenty cots in the reading room, and hall. The Commandant objected to our going to Praetoria and seemed inclined to refuse us passes to leave Durban for Delagoa Bay. He also was rather fresh to Cecil, so I called him down very hard, and told him if he couldn't make up his mind whether we would go or not, I'd wire to some others who would help him to make up his mind quickly. He said I was at liberty to do that, so I went out and burned wires over all of South Africa. As he reads all the telegrams he naturally read mine and the next morning he was as humble and white as a head waiter. But by ten o'clock my wires began to bear fruit and he began to catch it. Milner wired him to send us on at once and apologized to us by another wire so all is well and we go vouched for by the High Commissioner. DICK. PRETORIA, May 18th, 1900. DEAR DAD--AND OTHERS OF THE CLARK AND DAVIS FAMILIES: I have not had time to write such a long letter as this one must be, as I have been working on my Ledger and Scribner stories. Cecil and I started to the "front," which was then May 4th, at Brandfort with Captain Von Loosberg, a German baron who married in New Orleans and became an American citizen and who is now in command of Loosberg's Artillery in the Free State. The night we left, the English took Brandfort, so we decided to go only as far as Winburg. The next morning the train despatcher informed us Winburg was taken, so we decided to go to Smalldeel, but that went during the afternoon, so we stopped at Kronstad. From there, after a day's rest, we went to Ventersberg station, and rode across to Ventersberg town, about two hours away, and put up in Jones's Hotel. The next day we went down to the Boer laagers on the Sand river and met President Steyn on the way. He got out of his Cape Cart and gave Cecil a rose and Loosberg his field glasses, which Cecil took from Loosberg in exchange for her own Zeiss glass, and he gave me a drink and an interview. He also gave us a letter to St. Reid, who had established an ambulance base on Cronje's farm, telling him to give Cecil something to sleep upon. The, Boers were very polite to Cecil and as she rode through the different camps every man took off his hat. We went back to Ventersberg that night and about two o'clock Cecil came to my room and woke me up with the intelligence that the British were only two hours away. She had heard the commandant informing the landlady, a grand low comedy character from Brooklyn, who had the room next to Cecil's. I interviewed the landlady who was sitting up in bed in curl papers, and with a Webley revolver. She was quite hysterical so I aroused Loosberg who was too sleepy to understand. The commandant could be heard in the distance offering his kingdom for a horse and a Cape cart. Cecil and I decided our horses were done up and that we were too ignorant of the trail to know where to run. So we decided to go to sleep. In the morning we confessed that each had been afraid the other would want to escape, and each wanted only to be allowed to go to sleep again. Loosberg's Cape Cart and five mules having arrived we packed our things on it and started again for the Sand River where we spent the night on Cronje's farm. Mrs. Cronje had taken away all the bedding but Dr. Reid gave Cecil his field mattress and I made one out of rugs and piano covers. In the morning I found that the iron straps of the mattress had marked me for life like a grilled beefsteak. There were only Reid and his assistant surgeon in the farmhouse and they were greatly excited at having a woman to look after. We bade farewell to Loosberg who had found his artillery push, and started off in his Cape Cart which he wished us to use and take back for him for safety to Del Hay at Pretoria. Our objective point was the railroad bridge over the sand. The Boers were on one bank, the British about seven miles back on the other, the trail ran along the British side of the river which was sad of it. However, we drove on, I riding and Cecil and Christian, the Kaffir, in the Cart. We saw no one for several hours except some Kaffir Kraals and we almost ran into two herds of deer. I counted twenty-six in one herd, they were about a quarter of a mile away. We came to a cross road and I decided to put back as we had lost track of the river and were bearing straight into the English lines. Just as we found the river again and had got across a drift cannon opened on our right. We then knew we were in between the Boers and the English but we had no other knowledge of our geographical position. Such being the case we decided to outspan and lunch. Out-spanning is setting the mules and horses at liberty, in-spanning trying to catch them again. It takes five minutes to out-span, and three hours to in-span. We had Armour's corned beef and Libby's canned bacon. Cecil cooked the bacon on a stick and we ate it with biscuits captured by our Boer friends at Cronje's farm from the English Tommies. About three o'clock we started off again, and were captured by three Boers. I was riding behind the cart and threw up my hands "that quick," but Cecil could not hear me yelling at her to stop on account of the noise of the cart. I knew if I rode after her they would shoot at me, and that if she didn't stop, as they were shouting at her to do, they would shoot her. Under these trying circumstances I sat still. It caused quite a coolness on Cecil's part. However the Boers could see I was trying to get her to halt so they only rode around and headed her off. We were so glad to see them that they could not be suspicious. Still, as we had come directly from the English lines they had doubts. We told them we had lost ourselves and the more they threatened to take us to the commandant the more satisfied we were. I insisted on taking photos of them reading Cecil's passport. It annoyed them that we refused to be serious, we assured them we had never met anyone we were so glad to see. They finally believed us, and our passports which describe Cecil as my "frau," and artist of Harper's Weekly, an idea of Loosberg's. We all smoked and then shook hands and they went back to their positions. We next met Christian De Vet one of the two big generals who is a grand character. Nothing could match the wonderful picturesqueness of his camp spread out over the side of a hill with the bearded fine featured old Van Dyck and Hugonot heads under great sombreros. De Vet made us a long speech saying it was only to be expected that the Great Republic would send men to help the little Republics, but he had not hoped that the women would show their sympathy by coming too. All this with the most simple earnest courtesy. He said "No English woman would dare do what you are doing." He showed us a farin house on a kopje about five miles off where he said we could get shelter and where we would be near the fighting on the morrow. We rode in the moonlight for some time but when we reached the house it was filthy and the people were in such terror that we decided to camp out in the veldt. We found a grove of trees near by and a stream of water running beside it so we made a fire there. We had only one biscuit left but several cans of bacon and tea. It was great fun and we sat up as late as we could around the fire on account of the cold. We could see the Boer fires in the moonlight on the hills and across the Sand, the English flashlights signalling all night. We put a rubber blanket on the grass and wrapped up in steamer rugs but both of us died several times of cold and even sitting on the fire failed to warm me. We were awakened out of a cold storage sort of sleep by pom-poms going off right over our They sounded just as disturbing I found from the rear as when you are in front of them. They are the most effective of all the small guns for causing your nerves to riot. We climbed up the hill and saw the English coming in their usual solid formation stretching out for three miles. We went back and got the cart and drove to a nearer kopje, but just as we reached it the Boers abandoned it. Roberts's column was now much nearer. We then drove on still further in the direction of the bridge. I kept telling Cecil that the firing was all from the Boers as I did not want Christian to bolt and run away with the cart and mules. But Cecil remembered the pictures in Harper's Weekly showing the shrapnel smoke making rings in the air and as she saw these floating over our head, she knew the English were firing on us, but said nothing for fear of scaring Christian. I had promised to get her under fire which was her one wish so I said that she was now well under fire for the first and the last time. To which she replied "Pshaw!" I never saw any one show such self possession. We halted the cart behind a deserted farm house, and saddled her pony. The shells were now falling all over the shop, and I was scared to distraction. But she took about five minutes to see that her saddle was properly tightened and then we rode up to the hill. Again the Boers were leaving and only a few remained. They warned her to keep back but we dismounted and walked up to the hill. It was a very hot place but Cecil was quite unmoved. We showed her the shells striking back of her and around her but she refused to be impressed with the danger. She went among the Boers begging them to make a stand very quietly and like one man to another and they took it just in that way and said "But we are very tired. We have been driven back for three days. We are only a thousand, they are twenty thousand." Some of them only sat still too proud to run, too sick to fight! When the British got within five hundred yards of the artillery I told her she must run. At the same moment Botha's men a mile on our right broke away in a mad gallop, as though the lancers were after them. I finally got her on her pony and we raced for Ventersberg with Christian a good first. He had lost all desire to out-span. At Ventersberg we found every one harnessing up in the street and abandoning everything. We again felt this untimely desire for food, and had lunch at Jones's hotel on scraps and Cecil went off to see if she could loot the cook, as everyone but her had left the hotel and as we needed one in Pretoria. A despatch-rider came running to me as I was smoking in the garden and shouted that the "Roinekes" were coming in force over the hill. I ran out in the street and saw their shells falling all over the edge of the village. They were only a quarter of an hour behind us. I yelled for Cecil who was helping the looted cook pack up her own things and anyone else's she could find in a sheet. I gathered up a dog and a kitten Cecil wanted and left a note for the next English officer who occupied my room with the inscription "I'd leave my happy home for you." We then put the cook, the kitten, the dog and Cecil in the cart and I got on the horse and we let out for Kronstad at a gallop. We raced the thirty miles in five hours without one halt. That was not our cruelty to animals but Christian's who whenever I ordered him to halt and let us rest, yelled that the Englesses were after us and galloped on. The retreat was a terribly pathetic spectacle; for hours we passed through group after group of the broken and dispirited Boers. At Kronstad President Steyn whom I went to see on arriving ordered a special car for me, and sent us off at once. We reached here the next morning, Christian arriving a day later having killed one mule and one pony in his eagerness to escape. We are going back again as soon as Roberts reaches the Vaal. There there must be a stand. Love and best wishes to you all---- DICK. June 8th, 1900. On board the Kausler. DEAR MOTHER: We engaged our passage on this ship some weeks ago not thinking we would have the English near Pretoria until August. But as it happened they came so near that we did not know whether or not to wait over and see them enter the capital. I decided not, first, because after that one event, there would be nothing for us to see or do. We could not leave until the 2nd of July and a month under British martial law was very distasteful to me. Besides I did not care much to see them enter, or to be forced to witness their rejoicing. As soon as we got under way and about half the distance to the coast, it is a two days' trip. We heard so many rumors of Roberts's communication having been cut off and that the war was not over, that we thought perhaps we ought to go back-- As we have no news since except that the British are in Pretoria we still do not know what to think. Personally I am glad I came away as I can do just as much for the Boers at home now as there where the British censor would have shut me off from cabling and mails are so slow. With the local knowledge I have, I hope to keep at it until it is over. But when I consider the magnitude of the misrepresentation about the burghers I feel appalled at the idea of going up against it. One is really afraid to tell all the truth about the Boer because no one would believe you-- It is almost better to go mildly and then you may have some chance. But personally I know no class of men I admire as much or who to-day preserve the best and oldest ideas of charity, fairness and good-will to men. DICK. June 29th, 1900. DEAR MOTHER: We are now just off Crete, and our next sight of the blue land will be Europe. It means so many things; being alone with Cecil again, instead of on a raft touching elbows with so many strangers, and it means a shop where you can buy collars, and where they put starch in your linen. Also many beautiful ladies one does not know and men in evening dress one does not know and green tables covered with gold and little green and red bits of ivory where one passes among the tables and wonders what they would think if they knew we two had found our greatest friends in the Boer farmers, in Dutch Station Masters who gave us a corner under the telegraph table in which to sleep, with Nelson who kept the Transvaal Steam Laundry, Col. Lynch of the steerage who comes to the dividing line to beg French books from Cecil, and that we had cooked our food on sticks, drunk out of the same cups with Kaffir servants and slept on the ground when there was frost on it. It will be so strange to find that there are millions of people who do not know Komali poort, who have thought of anything else except burghers and roor-i-neks-- It seems almost disloyal to the Boers to be glad to see newspapers only an hour old instead of six weeks old, and to welcome all the tyranny of collar buttons, scarf pins, watch chains, walking sticks and gloves even. I love them both and I can hardly believe it is true that we are to go to a real hotel with a lift and a chasseur, where you cannot smoke in the dining-room. As for Aix, that I cannot believe will ever happen-- It was just a part of one's honeymoon and I refuse to cheat myself into thinking that within a week I will be riding through the lanes of the little villages, drinking red wine at Burget, watching Chas spread cheese over great hunks of bread and listening to three bands at one time. And then the joy to follow of Home and America and all that is American. Even the Custom House holds nothing but joy for me--and then "mine own people!" It has been six weeks since we have heard from you or longer, nearly two months and how I miss you and want you. It will be a happy day when Dad meets me at the wharf and I can see his blue and white tie again and his dear face under the white hat--where you and Nora will be I cannot tell, but I will seek you out. We will be happy together--so happy-- It has been the longest separation we have known and such a lot of things have happened. It will be such peace to see you and hold you once again. DICK. AIX-LES-BAINS. July 6th, 1900. DEAR FAMILY: Cecil and I arrived last night tired and about worn out--we had had a month on board ship and two days in the cars and when we got out at Aix and found our rooms ready and Francois waiting, we shouted and cheered. It was never so beautiful as it looked in the moonlight and we walked all over it, through the silent streets chortling with glee. They could not give us our same rooms but we got the suite just above them, which is just as good. They were so extremely friendly and glad to see us and had flowers in all the rooms. We have not heard a word about Chas yet, as our mail has not arrived from Paris, but I will cable in a minute and hear. We cannot wait any longer for news of him. I got up at seven this morning so excited that I could not sleep and have been to the baths, where I was received like the President of the Republic. In fact everybody seems to have only the kindest recollections of us and to be glad to have us back. Such a rest as it is and so clean and bright and good--Only I have absolutely nothing to wear except a two pound flannel suit I bought at Lorenzo Marquez until I get some built by a French tailor. I must wear a bath robe or a bicycle suit until evening. We have not been to the haunts of evil yet but we are dining there to night and all will be well. Cecil sends her love to you all-- Goodbye and God bless you. Richard and his wife returned to America in the early fall of 1900 and, after a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Clark at Marion, settled for the winter in New York. They took a house in East Fifty-eighth Street where they did much entertaining and lived a very social existence, but I do not imagine that either of them regarded the winter as a success. Richard was unable to do his usual amount of work, and both he and his wife were too fond of the country to enjoy an entire winter in town. In the spring they went back to Marion. MARION, MASSACHUSETTS. May, 1901. We arrived here last night in a glowing sunset which was followed by a grand moon. The house was warm and clean and bright, with red curtains and open fires and everything was just as we had left it, so that it seemed as though we had just come out of a tortuous bad dream of asphalt and L. roads and bad air. I was never so glad to get away from New York. Outside it is brisk and fine and smells of earth and melting snow and there is a grand breeze from the bay. We took a long walk to-day, with the three dogs, and it was pitiful to see how glad they were to be free of the cellar and a back yard and at large among grass and rocks and roots of trees. I wanted to bottle up some of the air and send it to all of my friends in New York. It is so much better to smell than hot-house violets. Seaton came on with us to handle the dogs and to unpack and so to-day we are nearly settled already with silver, pictures, clothes and easels and writing things all in place. The gramophone is whirling madly and all is well-- Lots and lots of love. DICK. The following was written by Richard to his mother on her birthday: MARION, MASSACHUSETTS. June 27th, 1901. DEAR MOTHER: In those wonderful years of yours you never thought of the blessing you were to us, only of what good you could find in us. All that time, you were helping us and others, and making us better, happier, even nobler people. From the day you struck the first blow for labor, in The Iron Mills on to the editorials in The Tribune, The Youth's Companion and The Independent, with all the good the novels, the stories brought to people, you were always year after year making the ways straighter, lifting up people, making them happier and better. No woman ever did better for her time than you and no shrieking suffragette will ever understand the influence you wielded, greater than hundreds of thousands of women's votes. We love you dear, dear mother, and we KNOW you and may your coming years be many and as full of happiness for yourself as they are for us. RICHARD. CHAPTER XIII THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH CORONATIONS Interrupted by frequent brief visits to New York Philadelphia, and Boston, Richard and his wife remained in Marion from May, 1901, until the early spring of 1902. During this year Richard accomplished a great deal of work and lived an ideal existence. In the summer months there were golf and tennis and an army of visitors, and during the winter many of their friends came from New York to enjoy a most charming hospitality and the best of duck shooting and all kinds of winter sports. Late in April, they sailed for Gibraltar on their way to Madrid, where Richard was to report the coronation ceremonies, and from Madrid they went to Paris and then to London to see the coronation of King Edward. It was while on a visit to the Rudyard Kiplings that they heard the news that Edward had been suddenly stricken with a serious illness and that the ceremony had been postponed. 11, St. James's Place, St. James's Street, S. W. London. June, 1902. DEAR MOTHER:-- This is only to say that at the Kipling's we heard the news, and being two newspaper men, refused to believe it and went to the postoffice of the little village to call up Brighton on the 'phone. It was very dramatic, the real laureate of the British Empire asking if the King were really in such danger that he could not be crowned, while the small boy in charge of the grocery shop, where the postoffice was, wept with his elbows on the counter. They sent me my ticket--unasked--for the Abbey, early this morning, and while I was undecided whether to keep it--or send it back, this came. So, now, I shall frame it as a souvenir of one of the most unhappy occasions I ever witnessed. You can form no idea of what a change it has made. It really seems to have stunned every one--that is the usual and accepted word, but this time it describes it perfectly. Goodbye, DICK. During the summer of 1903 my mother and father occupied a cottage at Marion, and every morning Richard started the day by a visit to them. My brother had already bought his Crossroads Farm at Mount Kisco, and the new house was one of the favorite topics of their talk. The following letter was written by my mother to Richard, after her return to Philadelphia. September, 1903. Here we are in the old library and breakfast over. There seemed an awful blank in the world as I sat down just now, and I said to Dad "Its Dick--he must come THIS morning." You don't know how my heart used to give a thump when you and Bob came in that old door. It has been such a good month--everybody was so friendly--and Dad was so well and happy--but your visits were the core of it all. And our good drives! Well we'll have lots of drives at the Crossroads. You'll call at our cottage every morning and I'm going to train the peacocks to run before the trap and I'll be just like Juno. There isn't a scrap of news. It is delightfully cool here. M. CHAPTER XIV THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR During the fall and early winter of 1903 Richard and his wife lingered on in Marion, but came to New York after the Christmas holidays. The success of his farce "The Dictator" had been a source of the greatest pleasure to Richard, and he settled down to playwriting with the same intense zeal he put into all of his work. However, for several years Robert J. Collier and my brother had been very close friends, and Richard had written many articles and stories for Collier's Weekly, so that when Collier urged my brother to go to the Japanese-Russian War as correspondent with the Japanese forces, Richard promptly gave up his playwriting and returned to his old love--the role of reporter. Accompanied by his wife, Richard left New York for San Francisco in February. February, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: We are really off on the "long trail" bound for the boundless East. We have a charming drawing-room, a sympathetic porter and a courtly conductor descended from one of the first Spanish conquerors of California. We arranged the being late for lunch problem by having dinner at five and cutting the lunch out. Bruce and Nan came over for dinner and we had a very jolly time. They all asked after you all, and drank to our re-union at Marion in July. Later they all tried to come with us on the train. It looked so attractive with electric lights in each seat, and observation car and library. A reporter interviewed us and Mr. Clark gave us a box of segars and a bottle of whiskey. But they will not last, as will Dad's razors and your housewife. I've used Dad's razors twice a day, and they still are perfect. It's snowing again, but we don't care. They all came to the station to see us off but no one cried this time as they did when we went to South Africa. Somehow we cannot take this trip seriously. It is such a holiday trip all through not grim and human like the Boer war. Just quaint and queer. A trip of cherry blossoms and Geisha girls. I send all my love to you. DICK. SAN FRANCISCO, February 26th. DEAR MOTHER: We got in here last night at midnight just as easily as though we were coming into Jersey City. Before we knew it we had seen the Golden Gate, and were snug in this hotel. Today as soon as we learned we could not sail we started in to see sights and we made a record and hung it up high. We went to the Cliff House and saw the seals on the rocks below, to the Park, the military reservation, Chinatown, and the Poodle Dog Restaurant. We also saw the Lotta monument, the Stevenson monument, the Spreckles band stand, the place where the Vigilance Committee hung the unruly, and tonight I went to a dinner the Bohemian Club gave to the War correspondents. I made a darned good speech. Think of ME making a speech of any sort, but I did, and I had sense enough not to talk about the war but the "glorious climate of California" instead and of all the wonders of Frisco. So, I made a great hit. It certainly is one of the few cities that lives up to it's reputation in every way. I should call it the most interesting city, with more character back of it than any city on this continent. There are only four deck rooms and we each have one. The boat is small, but in spite of the crowd that is going on her, will I think be comfortable. I know it will be that, and it may be luxurious. DICK. On way to Japan. March 13th, 1904. About four this afternoon we saw an irregular line of purple mountains against a yellow sky, and it was Japan. In spite of the Sunday papers, and the interminable talk on board, the guide books and maps which had made Japan nauseous to me, I saw the land of the Rising Sun with just as much of a shock and thrill as I first saw the coast of Africa. We forgot entirely we had been twenty days at sea and remembered only that we were ten miles from Japan, only as far as New Bedford is from Marion. We are at anchor now, waiting to go in in the morning. Were it not for war we could go in now but we must wait to be piloted over the sunken mines. That and the flashlights moving from the cruisers ten miles away gave us our first idea of war. To-morrow early we will be off for Tokio, as it is only forty miles from Yokohama. Of course, I may get all sorts of news before we land, but that is what we expect to do. It will be good to feel solid earth, and to see the kimonos and temples and geishas and cherry blossoms. I am almost hoping the Government won't let us go to the front and that for a week at least Cecil and I can sit in tea houses with our shoes off while the nesans bring us tea and the geishas rub their knees and make bows to us. I am sending you through Harper's, a book on Hawaii and one of Japan that I have read and like and which I think will help you to keep in touch with the wanderers. With all my love to all. DICK. TOKYO, March 22nd, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: The "situation" here continues to remain in such doubt that I cannot tell of it, as it changes hourly. There are three "columns," so far existing only in imagination. That is, so far as they concern the correspondents. The first lot have chosen themselves, and so have the second lot. But the first lot are no nearer starting than they were two weeks ago. I may be kept waiting here for weeks and weeks. I do not like to turn out Palmer, although I very much want to go with the first bunch. On the other hand I am paid pretty well to get to the front, and I am uncertain as to what I ought to do. If the second column were to start immediately after the first, we then would have two men in the field, but if it does not, then Collier will be paying $1000. a week for stories of tea houses and "festivals." Palmer threatens to resign if I take his place in the first column and that would be a loss to the paper that I do not feel I could make up. If it gets any more complicated I'll wire Collier to decide. Meanwhile, we are going out to dinners and festivals and we ride. I have a good pony the paper paid for Cecil has hired another and we find it delightful to scamper out into the country. We have three rooms in a row. One we use for a sitting room. They look very welland as it is still cold we keep them cheerful with open fires. We have a table in the dining-room to ourselves and to which we can ask our friends. The food is extremely good. Griscom and the Secretaries have all called and sent pots of flowers, and we are dining out every other night. In the day we shop and ride. But all day and all night we the correspondents plot and slave and intrigue over the places on the columns. I got mine on the second column all right but no one knows if it ever will move. So, naturally, I want to be on the first. The rows are so engrossing that I have not enjoyed the country as I expected. Still, I am everlastingly glad we came. It is an entirely new life and aspect. It completes so much that we have read and seen. In spite of the bother over the war passes I learn things daily and we see beautiful and curious things, and are educated as to the East, as no books could have done it for us. John Bass who was my comrade in arms in Greece and his wife are here. They are the very best. Also we see Lloyd daily, and the hotel is full of amusing men, who are trying to get to the front. Of course, we know less of the war than you do. None of the news from Cheefoo, none of the "unauthorized" news reaches us. Were it not for our own squabbles we would not know not only that the country was at war but not even that war existed ANYWHERE in the world. We are here entirely en tourist and it cannot be helped. The men who tried to go with the Russians are equally unfortunate. Think of us as wandering around each with a copy of Murray seeing sights. That is all we really do, All my love. DICK. YOKOHAMA--April 2, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: I just got your letter dated the 28th of February and the days following in which you worried over me in the ice coated trenches of Korea. I read it in a rickshaw in a warm sun on my way to buy favors for a dinner to Griscom. We have had three warm days and no doubt the sun will be out soon. The loss of the sun, though, is no great one. We have lots of pleasures and lots of troubles in spite of the Sun. Yesterday the first batch of correspondents were sent on their way. I doubt if they will get any further than Chemulpo but their going cheered the atmosphere like a storm in summer. The diplomats and Japanese were glad to get rid of them, they were delighted to be off. Some had been here 58 days, and we all looked at it as a good sign as it now puts us "next." But after they had gone it was pretty blue for some of them were as good friends as I want. I know few men I like as well as I do John Bass. Many of them were intensely interesting. It was, by all odds, the crowd one would have wished to go with. As it is, I suspect we all will meet again and that the two columns will be merged on the Yalu. None of the attaches have been allowed to go, so it really is great luck for the correspondents. Tell Chas I still am buying my Kit. It's pretty nearly ready now. I began in New York and kept on in Boston, San Francisco, and here. It always was my boast that I had the most complete kit in the world, and in spite of Charley's jeers at my lack of preparedness everybody here voted it the greatest ever seen. For the last ten days all the Jap saddlers, tent makers and tinsmiths have been copying it. DICK. TOKIO--May 2, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: Today, we walked into our new house and tomorrow we will settle down there. We rented the furniture for the two unfurnished rooms; knives, forks, spoons, china for the table and extras for 35 dollars gold for two months. It took six men to bring the things in carts. They got nothing. Yesterday, I took two rickshaw men from half past twelve to half past five. Out of that time they ran and pushed me for two solid hours. Their price for the five hours was eighty cents gold. What you would pay a cabman to drive you from the Waldorf to Martin's. I wish you could see our menage. Such beautiful persons in grey silk kimonos who bow, and bow and slip and slide in spotless torn white stockings with one big toe. They make you ashamed of yourself for walking on your own carpet in your own shoes. Today we got the first news of the battle on the Yalu, the battle of April 26-30th. I suppose Palmer and Bass saw it; and I try to be glad I did what was right by Collier's instead of for myself. But I don't want to love another paper. I suppose there will be other fights but that one was the first, and it must have been wonderful. On the 4th we expect to be on our way to Kioto with Lloyd and his wife and John Fox. By that time we expect to be settled in the new house. DICK. TOKIO, May 22nd, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: You will be glad to hear that the correspondents at the front are not allowed within two and a half miles of the firing line. This I am sure you will approve. Their tales of woe have just been received here, and they certainly are having a hard time. The one thing they all hope for is that the Japs will order them home. My temper is vile to-day, as I cannot enjoy the gentle pleasures of this town any longer and with this long trip to Port Arthur before I can turn towards home. I am as cross as a sick bear. We were at Yokohama when your last letters came and they were a great pleasure. I got splendid news of The Dictator. Yesterday we all went to Yokohama. There are four wild American boys here just out of Harvard who started the cry of "Ping Yang" for the "Ping Yannigans" they being the "Yannigans." They help to make things very lively and are affectionately regarded by all classes. Yesterday, they and Fox and Cecil and I went to the races, with five ricksha boys each, and everybody lost his money except myself. But it was great fun. It rained like a seive, and all the gentlemen riders fell off, and every time we won money our thirty ricksha men who would tell when we won by watching at which window we had bet, would cheer us and salaam until to save our faces we had to scatter largesses. Egan turned up in the evening and dined with John and Cecil and me in the Grand Hotel and told us first of all the story the correspondents had brought back to Kobbe for which every one from the Government down has been waiting. It would make lively reading if any of us dared to write it. To-day he made his protests to Fukushima as we mapped them out last night and the second lot will I expect be treated better. But, as the first lot were the important men representing the important syndicates the harm, for the Japs, has been done. Of course, much they do is through not knowing our points of view. To them none of us is of any consequence except that he is a nuisance, and while they are conversationally perfect in politeness, the regulations they inflict are too insulting. However, you don't care about that, and neither do I. I am going to earn my money if I possibly can, and come home. DICK. TOKIO, June 13th, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: We gave a farewell dinner last night to the Ping Yannigans two of whom left on the Navy expedition and another one to-morrow for God's country. There were eight men and we had new lanterns painted with the arms of Corea and the motto of the Ping Yannigans. Also many flags. All but the Japanese flag. One of them with a side glance at the servants said, "Gentleman and Lady: I propose a toast, Japan for the Japanese and the Japanese for Japan." We all knew what he meant but the servants were greatly pleased. Jack London turned up to-day on his way home. I liked him very much. He is very simple and modest and gave you a tremendous impression of vitality and power. He is very bitter against the wonderful little people and says he carries away with him only a feeling of irritation. But I told him that probably would soon wear off and he would remember only the pleasant things. I did envy him so, going home after having seen a fight and I not yet started. Still THIS TIME we may get off. Yokoyama the contractor takes our stuff on the 16th, and so we feel it is encouraging to have our luggage at the front even if we are here. DICK. YOKOHAMA, July 26th, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: We gave in our passes to-day, and sail to-morrow at five. They say we are not to see Port Arthur fall but are to be taken up to Oku's army. That means we miss the "popular" story, and may have to wait around several weeks before we see the other big fight. They promised us Port Arthur but that is reason enough for believing they do not intend we shall see it at all. John and I are here at a Japanese hotel, the one Li Hung Chang occupied when he came over to arrange the treaty between China and Japan. It is a very beautiful house, the best I have seen of real Japanese and the garden and view of the harbor is magnificent. I wish Cecil could see it too, but I know she would not care for a room which is as free to the public view as the porch at Marion. It has 48 mats and as a mat is 3 x 5 you can work it out. We eat, sleep and dress in this room and it is like trying to be at home on top of a Chickering Grand. But it is very beautiful and the moonlight is fine and saddening. No one of us has the least interest in the war or in what we may see or be kept from seeing. We have been "over trained" and not even a siege of London could hold our thoughts from home. I have just missed the mail which would have told me you were at Marion. I should so love to have heard from you from there. I do not think you will find the Church house uncomfortable; and you can always run across the road when the traffic is not too great, and chat with Benjamin. I do hope that Dad will have got such good health from Marion and such lashers of fish. I got a good letter from Charles and I certainly feel guilty at putting extra work on a man as busy as he. Had I known he was the real judge of those prize stories I would have sent him one myself and given him the name of it. Well, goodbye for a little time. We go on board in a few hours, and after that everything I write you is read by the Censor so I shall not say anything that would gratify their curiosity. They think it is unmanly to write from the field to one's family and the young princes forbade their imperial spouses from writing them until the war is over. However, not being an imperial Samaari but a home loving, family loving American, I shall miss not hearing very much, and not being able to tell you all how I love you. DICK. DALNY, July 27th, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: We left Shimonoseki three days ago and have had very pleasant going on the Heijo Maru a small but well run ship of 1,500 tons. Fox and I got one of the two best rooms and I have been very comfortable. We are at anchor now at a place of no interest except for its sunsets. We have just been told as the anchor is being lowered that we can send letters back by the Island, so I can just dash this off before leaving. We have reached Dalny and I have just heard the first shot fired which was to send me home. All the others came and bid John and me a farewell as soon as we were sure it was the sound of cannon. However, as it is 20 miles away I'll have to hang on until I get a little nearer. We have had a very pleasant trip even though we were delayed two days by fog and a slow convoy. Now we are here at Dalny. It looks not at all like its pictures, which, as I remember them were all taken in winter. It is a perfectly new, good brick barracks-like town. I am landing now. The two servants seem very satisfactory and I am in excellent health. Today Cecil has been four days at Hong Kong. Please send the gist of this letter dull as it is to Mrs. Clark. When I began it I thought I would have plenty of time to finish it on shore. Of course, after this all I write and this too, I suppose will be censored. So, there will not be much liveliness. I have no taste to expose my affections to the Japanese staff. So, goodbye. R. July 31st, 1904. DEAR MOTHER: We have been met here with a bitter disappointment. We are all to be sent north, although only 18 hours away. We can hear the guns at Port Arthur the fall of which they promised us we would see. To night we are camping out in one of the Russian barracks. To-morrow we go, partly by horse and partly by train. A week must elapse before we can get near headquarters. And then we have no guarantee that we will see any fighting. This means for me a long delay. It is very disappointing and the worst of the many we have suffered in the last four months. I have written Cecil asking her to seriously think of going home but I am afraid she will not. Were it not for that and the disappointment one feels in travelling a week's journey away from the sound of guns I would be content. My horse is well and so am I. It is good to get back to drawing water, and carrying baggage and skirmishing about for yourself. The contractor gave us a good meal and the servants are efficient but I like doing things myself and skirmishing for them. We make a short ride this morning of six miles to Kin Chow and then 30 miles by rail. "Headquarters" is about a five days ride distant. Tell Chas my outfit seems nearly complete. Maybe I can buy a few things I forgot in Boston at Kin Chow. Fox and I will get out just as soon as we see fighting but before you get this you will probably hear by cable from me. If not, it will mean we still are waiting for a fight. The only mistake I made was in not going home the first time they deceived us instead of waiting for this and worst of all. to you all. DICK. MANCHURIA, August 14, 1904. We have been riding through Manchuria for eleven days. Nine days we rode then two days we rested. By losing the trail we managed to average about 20 miles a day. I kept well and enjoyed it very much. As I had to leave my servant behind with a sick horse, I had to take care of my mule and pony myself and hunt fodder for them, so I was pretty busy. Saiki did all he could, but he is not a servant and sooner than ask him I did things myself. We passed through a very beautiful country, sleeping at railway stations and saw two battle fields of recent fights. Now we are in a Chinese City and waiting to see what should be the biggest fight since Sedan. The Russians are about ten miles from us, so we are not allowed outside the gates of the city without a guide. Of course, we have none of that freedom we have enjoyed in other wars, but apart from that they treat us very well indeed. And in a day or two they promise us much fighting, which we will be allowed to witness from a hill. This is a very queer old city but the towns and country are all very primitive and we depend upon ourselves for our entertainment. I expect soon to see you at home. In three more days I shall have been out here five months and that is too long. Good luck to you all. R. H. D. MANCHURIA, August 18th, 1904. We still are inside this old Chinese town. It has rained for five days, and this one is the first in which we could go abroad. Unless you swim very well it is not safe to cross one of these streets. We have found an old temple and some of us are in it now. It is such a relief to escape from that compound and the rain. This place is full of weeds and pine trees, cooing doves and butterflies. The temples are closed and no one is in charge but an aged Chinaman. We did not come here to sit in temples, so John and I will leave in a week, battle or no battle. The argument that having waited so long one might as well wait a little longer does not touch us. It was that argument that kept us in Tokio when we knew we were being deceived weekly, and the same man who deceived us there, is in charge here. It is impossible to believe anything he tells his subordinates to tell us, so, we will be on our way back when you get this. I am well, and only disappointed. Had they not broken faith with us about Port Arthur we would by now have seen fighting. As it is we will have wasted six months. Love to Dad, and Chas and Nora and you. DICK. In writing of his decision to leave the Japanese army, Richard, after his return to the United States, said: "On the receipt of Oku's answer to the Correspondents we left the army. Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten days later, but that their work and Kuroki, so far from being fifty miles north toward Mukden, as Okabe said he was, was twenty miles to the east on our right preparing for the, closing-in movement which was just about to begin. Three days after we had left the army, the greatest battle since Sedan was waged for six days. "So, our half-year of time and money, of dreary waiting, of daily humiliations at the hands of officers with minds diseased by suspicion, all of which would have been made up to us by the sight of this one great spectacle, was to the end absolutely lost to us. Perhaps we made a mistake in judgment. As the cards fell we certainly did. "The only proposition before us was this: There was small chance of any immediate fighting. If there were fighting we would not see it. Confronted with the same conditions again, I would decide in exactly the same manner. Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience with other armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen speak the truth, that men with titles of nobility, and with the higher titles of General and Major-General, do not lie. In that we were mistaken." Greatly disappointed at his failure to see really anything of the war, much embittered at the Japanese over their treatment of the correspondents, Richard reached Vancouver in October. As my father was seriously ill he came to Philadelphia at once and divided the next two months between our old home and Marion. On December 14, 1904, my father died, and it was the first tragedy that had come into Richard's life, as it was in that of my sister or myself. As an editorial writer, most of my father's work had been anonymous, but his influence had been as far-reaching as it had been ever for all that was just and fine. All of his life he had worked unremittingly for good causes and, in spite of the heavy burdens which of his own will he had taken upon his none too strong shoulders, I have never met with a nature so calm , so simple, so sympathetic with those who were weak--weak in body or soul. As all newspaper men must, he had been brought in constant contact with the worst elements of machine politics, as indeed he had with the lowest strata of the life common to any great city. But in his own life he was as unsophisticated; his ideals of high living, his belief in the possibilities of good in all men and in all women, remained as unruffled as if he had never left his father's farm where he had spent his childhood. When my father died Richard lost his "kindest and severest critic" as he also lost one of his very closest friends and companions. During the short illness that preceded my brother's death, although quite unconscious that the end was so near, his thoughts constantly turned back to the days of his home in Philadelphia, and he got out the letters which as a boy and as a young man he had written to his family. After reading a number of them he said: "I know now why we were such a happy It was because we were always, all of us, of the same age." CHAPTER XV MOUNT KISCO During my brother's life there were four centres from which he set forth on his travels and to which he returned to finish the articles for which he had collected the material, or perhaps to write a novel, a few short stories, or occasionally a play, but unlike most of the followers of his craft, never to rest. Indeed during the last twenty-five years of his life I do not recall two consecutive days when Richard did not devote a number of hours to literary work. The centres of which I speak were first Philadelphia, then New York, then Marion, and lastly Mount Kisco. Happy as Richard had been at Marion, the quaint little village, especially in winter, was rather inaccessible, and he realized that to be in touch with the numerous affairs in which he was interested that his headquarters should be in or near New York. In addition to this he had for long wanted a home of his very own, and so located that he could have his family and his friends constantly about him. Some years, however, elapsed between this dream and its realization. In 1903 he took the first step by purchasing a farm situated in the Westchester Hills, five miles from Mount Kisco, New York. He began by building a lake at the foot of the hill on which the home was to stand, then a water-tower, and finally the house itself. The plans to the minutest detail had been laid out on the lawn at Marion and, as the architect himself said, there was nothing left for him to do but to design the cellar. Richard and his wife moved into their new home in July, 1905, and called it Crossroads Farm, keeping the original name of the place. In later years Richard added various adjoining parcels of land to his first purchase, and the property eventually included nearly three hundred acres. The house itself was very large, very comfortable, and there were many guest-rooms which every week-end for long were filled by the jolliest of house-parties. In his novel "The Blind Spot," Justus Miles Forman gives the following very charming picture of the place: "It was a broad terrace paved with red brick that was stained and a little mossy, so that it looked much older than it had any right to, and along its outer border there were bay-trees set in big Italian terracotta jars; but the bay-trees were placed far apart so that they should not mask the view, and that was wise, for it was a fine view. It is rugged country in that part of Westchester County--like a choppy sea: all broken, twisted ridges, and abrupt little hills, and piled-up boulders, and hollow, cup-like depressions among them. The Grey house sat, as it were, upon the lip of a cup, and from the southward terrace you looked across a mile or two of hollow bottom, with a little lake at your feet, to sloping pastures where there were cattle browsing, and to the far, high hills beyond. "There was no magnificence about the outlook--nothing to make you catch your breath; but it was a good view with plenty of elbow room and no sign of a neighbor--no huddling--only the water of the little lake, the brown November hillsides, and the clean blue sky above. The distant cattle looked like scenic cattle painted on their green-bronze pasture to give an aspect of husbandry to the scene." Although Richard was now comfortably settled, he had of late years acquired a great dread of cold weather. As soon as winter set in his mind turned to the tropics, and whenever it was possible he went to Cuba or some other land where he was sure of plenty of heat and sunshine. The early part of 1906 found him at Havana, this time on a visit to the Hon. E. V. Morgan, who was then our minister to Cuba. From Havana he went to the Isle of Pines. ISLE OF PINES, March 26th, 1906. DEAR MOTHER:-- We are just returning from the Isle of Pines. We reached there after a day on the water at about six on Wednesday, 22nd. They dropped us at a woodshed in a mangrove swamp, where a Mr. Mason met us with two mules. I must have said I was going to the island because every one was expecting me. Until the night before we had really no idea when we would go, so, to be welcomed wherever we went, was confusing. For four days we were cut off from the world, and in that time, five days in all, we covered the entire island pretty thoroughly-- It was one of the most interesting trips I ever took and Cecil enjoyed it as much as I did. The island is a curious mixture of palm and pines, one minute it looks like Venezuela and the next like Florida and Lakewood. It is divided into two parties of Americans, the "moderates" and the "revolutionists." The Cubans are very few and are all employed by the Americans, who own nine-tenths of the Island. Of course, they all want the U. S. to take it, they differ only as to how to persuade the senators to do it. I had to change all my opinions about the situation. I thought it was owned by land speculators who did not live there, nor wish to live there, but instead I found every one I met had built a home and was cultivating the land. We gave each land company a turn at me, and we had to admire orange groves and pineapples, grapefruit and coffee until we cried for help. With all this was the most romantic history of the island before the "gringos" came. It was a famous place for pirates and buried treasures and slave pens. It was a sort of clearing house for slaves where they were fattened. I do not believe people take much interest in or know anything about it, but I am going to try and make an interesting story of it for Collier. It was queer to be so completely cut off from the world. There was a wireless but they would not let me use it. It is not yet opened to the public. I talked to every one I met and saw much that was pathetic and human. It was the first pioneer settlement Cecil had ever seen and the American making the ways straight is very curious. He certainly does not adorn whatever he touches. But never have I met so many enthusiastics and such pride in locality. To-night we reach the Hotel Louvre, thank heaven! where I can get Spanish food again, and not American ginger bread, and, "the pie like mother used to make." We now are on a wretched Spanish tug boat with every one, myself included, very seasick and babies howling and roosters crowing. But soon that will be over, and, after a short ride of thirty miles through a beautiful part of the island, we will be in Havana in time for a fine dinner, with ice. What next we will do I am not sure. After living in that beautiful palace of Morgan's, it just needed five days of the "Pinero's" to make us enjoy life at a hotel-- If we can make connections, I think I will go over to Santo Domingo, and study up that subject, too. But, even if we go no where else the trip to the I. of P. was alone well worth our long journey. I don't know when I have seen anything as curious, and as complicated a political existence. Love to all of you dear ones. DICK. HAVANA--April 9, 1906. ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE, ESQ. MY DEAR MAURICE: I have just read about myself, in the April Bookman, which I would be very ungrateful if I did not write and tell you how much it pleased me. That sounds as though what pleased me was, obviously, that what you said was so kind. But what I really mean, and that for which I thank you, was your picking out things that I myself liked, and that I would like to think others liked. I know that the men make "breaks," and am sorry for it, but, I forget to be sorry when you please me by pointing out the good qualities in "Laquerre," and the bull terrier. Nothing ever hurt me so much as the line used by many reviewers of "Macklin" that "Mr. Davis' hero is a cad, and Mr. Davis cannot see it." Macklin I always thought was the best thing I ever did, and it was the one over which I took the most time and care. Its failure was what as Maggie Cline used to say, "drove me into this business" of play writing. All that ever was said of it was that it was "A book to read on railroad trains and in a hammock." That was the verdict as delivered to me by Romeike from 300 reviewers, and it drove me to farces. So, I was especially glad when you liked "Royal Macklin." I tried to make a "hero" who was vain, theatrical, boasting and selfconscious, but, still likable. But, I did not succeed in making him of interest, and it always has hurt me. Also, your liking the "Derelict" and the "Fever Ship" gave me much pleasure. You see what I mean, it was your selecting the things upon which I had worked, and with which I had made every effort, that has both encouraged and delighted me. Being entirely unprejudiced, I think it is a fine article, and as soon as I stamp this, I will read it over again. So, thank you very much, indeed, for to say what you did seriously, over your own name, took a lot of courage, and for that daring, and for liking the same things I do, I thank you many times. Sincerely yours, RICHARD HARDING DAVIS. In reading this over, I find all I seem to have done in it is to complain because no one, but yourself and myself liked "Macklin." What I wanted to say is, that I am very grateful for the article, for the appreciation, although I don't deserve it, and for your temerity in saying so many kind things. Nothing that has been written about what I have written has ever pleased me so much. R. H. D. In the spring of 1906 while Richard was on a visit to Providence, R. I., Henry W. Savage produced a play by Jesse Lynch Williams and my brother was asked to assist at rehearsals, a pastime in which he found an enormous amount of pleasure. The "McCloy" mentioned in the following letter was the city editor of The Evening Sun when my brother first joined the staff of that paper as a reporter. NEW YORK, May 4, 1906. DEAR NORA: I left Providence Tuesday night and came on to New York yesterday. Savage and Williams and all were very nice about the help they said I had given them, and I had as much fun as though it had been a success I had made myself, and I didn't have to make a speech, either. Yesterday I spent in the newspaper offices gathering material from their envelopes on Winston Churchill, M. P. who is to be one of my real Soldiers of Fortune. He will make a splendid one, in four wars, twice made a question; before he was 21 years old, in Parliament, and a leader in BOTH parties before he was 36. In the newspaper offices they had a lot of fun with me. When I came into the city room of The Eve. Sun, McCloy was at his desk in his shirt spiking copy. He just raised his eyes and went on with his blue pencil. I said "There's nothing in that story, sir, the man will get well, and the woman is his wife." "Make two sticks of it," said McCloy, "and then go back to the Jefferson police court." When I sat down at my old desk, and began to write the copy boy came and stood beside me and when I had finished the first page, snatched it. I had to explain I was only taking notes. At The Journal, Sam Chamberlain who used to pay me $500 a story, touched me on the shoulder as I was scribbling down notes, and said "Hearst says to take you back at $17 a week." I said "I'm worth $18 and I can't come for less." So he brought up the business manager and had a long wrangle with him as to whether I should get $18. The business manager, a Jew gentleman, didn't know me from Adam, and seriously tried to save the paper a dollar a week. When the reporters and typewriter girls began to laugh, he got very mad. It was very funny how soothing was the noise of the presses, and the bells and typewriters and men yelling "Copy!" and "Damn the boy!" I could write better than if I had been in the silence of the farm. It was like being able to sleep as soon as the screw starts. DICK. CHAPTER XVI THE CONGO During the winter of 1907 the world rang with the reports of the atrocities in the Congo, and Robert J. Collier, of Collier's Weekly, asked Richard to go to the Congo and make an investigation. I do not believe that my brother was ever in much sympathy with the commission, as he did not feel that he could afford the time that a thorough investigation demanded. However, with his wife he sailed for Liverpool on January 5, 1907, and three weeks later started for Africa. Regarding this trip, in addition to the letters he wrote to his family, I also quote from a diary which he had just started and which he conscientiously continued until his death. From diary of January 24th, 1907. Last day in London. Margaret Frazer offered me gun from a Captain Jenkins of Nigeria. Instead bought Winchester repeating, hoping, if need it, get one coast. Lunched Savoy-Lynch, Mrs. Lynch, her sister--very beautiful girl. In afternoon Sam Sothern and Margaret came in to say "Good bye." Dined at Anthony Hope's--Barrie and Mrs. Barrie and Jim Whigham. Mrs. Barrie looking very well, Barrie not so well. As silent as ever, only talked once during dinner when he told us about the first of his series of cricket matches between authors and artists. Did not have eleven authors, so going along road picked up utter strangers one a soldier in front of embracing two girls. Said he would come if girls came too--all put in brake. Mrs. Barrie said the Llewellen Davis' were the originals for the Darlings and their children in Peter Pan. They played a strange game of billiards suggested by Barrie who won as no one else knew the rules and they claimed he invented them to suit his case. Sat up until three writing and packing. The dinner was best have had this trip in London. Compagnie Belge Maritime Du Congo. S. S. February 11th, 1907. To-morrow, we will be in Banana, which is the first port in the Congo. When I remember how far away the Congo seemed from New York and London, it is impossible to believe we are less than a day from it. I am so very glad I came. The people who have lived here for years agree about it in no one fact, so, it is a go-as-you-please for any one so far as accurate information is concerned, and I am as likely to be right as any one else. It has been a pleasant trip and for us will not be over until some days, for at Matadi, which is up the river, we will probably live on the steamer as the shore does not sound attractive. Then I shall probably go on up the river and after a month or six weeks come back again. At Boma I am to see the Governor, one of the inspectors on board is to introduce me, and I have an idea they will make me as comfortable as possible, so that I may not see anything. Not that I would be likely to see anything hidden under a year. Yesterday was the crossing of the Equator. The night before Neptune, one of the crew, and his wife, the ship's butcher, and a kroo boy, as black as coal for the heir apparent came over the side and proclaimed that those who never before had crossed the Equator must be baptized. We had crossed but I was perfectly willing to go through it for the fun. The Belgians went at it as seriously as children, and worked up a grand succession of events. First we had gymkana races among the kroo boys. The most remarkable was their placing franc pieces in tubs of white and red flour, for which the boys dived, they then dug for more money into a big basket fitted with feathers and when they came out they were the most awful sights imaginable. You can picture their naked black bodies and faces spotted with white and pink and stuck like chickens with feathers. Then the next day we were all hauled before a court and judged, and having all been found guilty were condemned to be shaved and bathed publicly at four. Meantime the Italians, is it not the picture of them, had organized a revolution against the Tribunal, with the object of ducking them. They went into this as though it were a real conspiracy and had signs and passwords. At four o'clock, in turn they sat us on the edge of the great tank on the well deck and splashed us over with paste and then tilted us in. I tried to carry the Frenchman who was acting as barber, with me but only got him half in. But Milani, one of the Italians, swung him over his head plumb into the water. The Frenchman is a rich elephant hunter who is not very popular. When the revolution broke loose we all yelled "A bas le Tribunal" "Vive la Revolution!" and there was awful rough house. I made for the Frenchman and went in with him and nearly drowned him, and everybody was being thrown into the tank or held in front of a fire cross. After dinner there was a grand ceremony, the fourth, in which certificates were presented by an Inspecteur d'Etat who is on board, and is a Deputy Governor of a district. Then there was much champagne and a concert and Cecil and I sat with the Captain, the Bishop, in his robes and berretta and the two inspectors and they were very charming to both of us. DICK. Compagnie Belge Maritime Du Congo. S. S. February 13th, 1907. DEAR MOTHER: We reached Banana yesterday morning, and the mouth of the Congo, and as the soldier said when he reached the top of San Juan Hill, "Hell! well here we are!" Banana looks like one of the dozen little islands in the West Indies, where we would stop to take on some "brands of bananas," instead of the port to a country as big as Europe. We went ashore and wandered around under the palm trees, and took photos, and watched some men fishing in the lagoons, and we saw a strange fish that leaps on the top of the water just as a frog jumps on land. It is certainly hot. Milani and I went in swimming in the ocean, and got finely cool. Then we paddled the canoe back to the ship to show the blacks how good we were, and got very hot, and the blacks charged us a franc for the voyage. To-morrow we will be in Boma, the capital, which is much of a place with shops and a lawn tennis court. BOMA, February 15th. Boma is more or less laid out and contains the official residences of the Government. I walked all over it in an hour, and here you walk very slow. There are three or four big trading stores AND a tennis court. It is, however, a dreary place. We called on the missionary and his wife, but she does not speak English and their point of view of everything was not cheerful or instructive. Cecil plans to remain on board while at Matadi and return with this same boat to Boma. I want her to go home in this boat or in some other, as I believe Boma most unhealthy and I know it to be most uncomfortable. She would have to go to a hotel which is very hot and rough, although it is clean and well run. I am undecided whether to go up the river for ten days, to where it crosses the equator, or to leave the upper Congo and go up the Kasai river. This is off the beaten track, and one may see something of interest. I will know better what I will do in an hour, when I get to Matadi. MATADI--Feby. 21. We are now at Matadi. The Captain invited us to stop on board and it is well he did. We dine on deck where the wind blows but the rest of the ship is being cleaned and painted for the trip North. Four hatches are discharging cargo all at once, from four in the morning until midnight. Officers and kroo boys get four hours sleep out of the twenty-four, but I sleep right through it, so does Cecil. Sometimes they take out iron rails and then zinc roofs and steel boats, 6000 cases of gin and 1000 tons of coal. Still, it is much better than in the Hotel Africa on shore. Matadi is a hill of red iron and the heat is grand. Everything in this country is grand. The river is, in places, seven miles wide, the sunsets are like nothing earthly, and the black people are like brooding shadows of lost souls, that is, if souls have shadows. Most of the blacks in this town are "prisoners" with a steel ring around the neck, and chained in long lines. I leave on the 23d to go up the Kasai River, because that is where the atrocities come from and up there there are many missionaries. I don't want you to think I say this to "calm your fears," but I say it because it is as true of this place as of every other one in the world, and that is, that it is as easy to get about here as it is in Rhode Island. It is not half as dangerous as automobiling. I have not even felt feverish, neither has Cecil. I never felt better. Cecil stays on board and goes back to Boma. There she stops a week and then takes another ship back to London. She will not wait at Boma for me, at least, I hope not and cannot imagine her doing so. In any event, after I start, there will be no way for us to communicate, and I will act on the understanding that she has started North. I have two very good boys and both speak English, and are from Sierra Leone. I take a two-day trip of 200 miles by rail, then four days by boat up the Kasai and then I may come back by boat or walk. It depends on how I like it, how long I stay, for I can hope to see very little, as under a year it would be impossible to write with authority of this country. But I'll see more of it than some at home, and I'll hear what those who have lived here for years have to say. It is awfully interesting, absolutely different and more uncivilized than anything I ever saw. But all the time you are depressed with how little you know and can know of it. I will be here six weeks or two months and then should get up the coast to London about the middle of May or sooner. DICK. From diary of February 22nd, 1907. Spent about the worst night of my life. No mattress, no pillow. Not space enough for my own cot. Every insect in the world ate me. After a bath and coffee felt better. It rained heavily until three P. M. Read Pendennis, and loved it. The picture of life at Clavering and Fairoaks, and Dr. Portman and Foker are wonderful. I do not know when I have enjoyed and admired a work so much. For some reason it is all entirely new again. I will read them all now in turn. After rain cleared took my slaves and went after "supplies." Met a King. I thought he was a witch doctor, and the boys said he was a dancing man. All his suite, wives and subjects followed, singing a song that made your flesh creep. At Hatton and Cookson's bought "plenty chop" for "boys" who were much pleased. Also a sparklet bottle, some whiskey and two pints of champagne at 7 francs the pint. Blush to own it was demi Sec. Also bacon, jam, milk, envelopes, a pillow. Saw some ivory State had seized and returned. 15 Kilo's. Some taken from Gomez across street not returned until he gave up half. No reason given Taylor agent H. & C. why returned Apparently when called will come down on the ivory question. Cuthbert Malet, coffee planter, came call on me. Only Englishman still in Service State. Had much to say which did not want printed until he out of country which will be in month or two. Anstrossi has given me side of cabin where there is room for my cot, so expect to sleep. STANLEY POOL, Feb. 22nd, 1907. DEAR MOTHER: When you get this, I will be on my way to London. The rest of my stay here will be on board two boats, touching at the banks of the Kasai river. One I now am on takes me up and another takes me down. I will see a great deal that is strange and it is very interesting. Yesterday, for example, only an hour before our train reached Gongolo Station, there were three elephants that wandered across the track. We were very disappointed not to have seen them. At the mission house on the way up, I brought the first ice the mission boys had seen and when I put a piece in the hand of one, he yelled and danced about as though it were a coal. The higher up you go the tougher it gets. Back in the jungle, one can only imagine what it is like. Here all the white men have black wives, and the way the whip is used on the men is very different from the lower congo. The boat is about as large as a touring car, with all the machinery exposed. I am very comfortable though, with my bed and camp chair, and, books to read, when one gets tired of this great, dirty river. I, expect to see hippopotamuses and many crocodiles and to learn something of the "atrocities" by hearsay. To see for oneself, would take months. I return from the Kasai district by a boat like this one, burning wood and with a stern wheel, reaching Leopoldville, this place, about the 12th of March, and sailing on the Albertville for Southampton on the 19th of March. So I should be in London and so very near you by the 8th of April. Of course, if I take a later boat from here, I will be just that much later. I am perfectly well, never better. No fever, no "tired feeling" good appetite, in spite of awful tough food. From this place money cannot be used and I carry a bag of salt and rolls of cloth. For a bottle of salt you get a fowl or a turkey, for a tablespoonful an egg, or a bunch of fruit. When you write be sure and tell me ALL your plans for the summer; that is, after you have been to see us. My dearest love to you all. DICK. From diary of February 27th, 1907. Saw two hippos. Thought Anstrossi said they were buffalo. So was glad when I found out what they were. I did not want to go home without having seen only two dead ones. In a few minutes I saw two more. Anstrossi fired at them but I did not, as thought it not the game when one could not recover them. Before noon saw six in a bunch--and then what I thought was a spit of rock with a hippo lying on the end of it, turned out to be fifteen hippos in a line! Burnham has told he had seen eleven in the Volta in one day. Before one o'clock, I had seen twenty-six, and, later in the day Anstrossi fired at another, and shot a hole in the awning. That made twenty-seven in one day. Also some monkeys. The hippos were delightful. They seemed so aristocratic, like gouty old gentlemen, puffing and blowing and yawning, as though everything bored them. From diary of February 28th, 1907. When just going up for coffee, saw what was so big, looking at it against horizon, thought it must be an elephant. Was a young hippo. Captain Jensen brought boat within eighty yards of him, and both Anstrossi and I fired, apparently knocking him off his legs, for he rolled on his side as though his back was broken. I missed him the second shot, which struck the water just in front of him. The other three shots caught him in the head, in the mouth and ear. He lay quite still, and the boys rushed out a gang plank and surrounded him singing and shouting and cutting his tail to make him bleed and weaken him. They don't die for an hour but he seemed dead enough, so I went to my cabin to re-load my gun and my camera. In three minutes I came out, and found the hippo still quiet. Then he began to toss his head and I shot him again, to put him out of pain. In return for which he rolled over into the water and got away. I was mad. Later saw four more. Just at sunset while taking bath another was seen on shore. We got within sixty yards of him and all of us missed him or at least did not hurt him. He then trotted for the river with his head up and again I must have missed, although at one place he was but fifty yards away, when he entered the water, a hundred. I stepped it off later in the sand. I followed him up and hit him or some one of us hit him and he stood up on his hind legs. But he put back to land for the third time. Captain said wait until moon came out. But though we hunted up to our waists saw none. One came quite close at dinner. Seven on the day. CONGO RIVER--March 1, 1907. DEAR MOTHER: I have been up the Congo as far as the Kasai river, and up that to a place called Dima. There I found myself in a sort of cul de sac. I found that the rubber plantations I had come to see, were nine days journey distant. In this land where time and distance are so differently regarded than with us, a man tells you to go to Dima to see rubber. He means after getting to Dima, you must catch a steamer that leaves every two weeks and travel for five days. But he forgets that that fact is important to visitors. As he is under contract to stay here three years, it does not much matter to him how he spends a month, or so. Dima was two hundred yards square, and then the jungle. In half an hour, I saw it all, and met every one in it. They gave me a grand reception, but I could not spend ten days in Dima. The only other thing I could do was to take a canoe to the Jesuit Mission where the Fathers promised me shooting, or, try to catch the boat back to England that stops at interesting ports. Sooner than stop in Boma, I urged Cecil to take that boat. So, if I catch it, we will return together. It is a five weeks journey, and rather long to spend alone. In any event my letters will go by a faster boat. I have had a most wonderfully interesting visit, at least, to me. I hope I can make it readable. But, much of its pleasure was personal. I have just had to stop writing this, for what when I get back to New York will seem a perfectly good reason for interrupting a letter to even you. A large hippopotamus has just pushed past us with five baby hippos in front of her. She is shoving them up stream, and the papa hippo is in the wake puffing and blowing. They are very plenty here and on the way up stream, I saw a great many, and every morning and evening went hunting for them on shore. I wanted the head of a hippopotamus awfully keenly for the farm. But of the only two I saw on land, both got away from me. I did not shoot at any I saw in the water, although the other idiot on board did, because if you kill them, you cannot recover them, and it seems most unsportsmanlike. Besides, I was so grateful to them for being so proud and pompous, and real aristocrats dating back from the flood. But I was terribly disappointed at losing both of those I saw on land. One I dropped at the first shot, and the other I missed, as he was running, to get back into the water. The one I shot, and that everyone thought was dead, AFTER THE "BOYS" BEGAN TO CUT HIM UP, decided he was not going to stand for that, and to our helpless dismay suddenly rolled himself into the water. If that is not hard luck, I don't know it. All I got was a bad photograph of him, and I had already decided where I would hang his head, and how much I would tip the crew for cutting him up. It was a really wonderful journey. I loved every minute of it and never was I in better health. If I only could have known that you knew that I was all right, but instead you were worrying. The nights were bright moonlight, and the days were beautiful; full of strange people and animals, birds and views. We three sat in the little bridge of the tinpot boat, and smoked pipes and watched the great muddy river rushing between wonderful banks. There was the Danish Captain, an Italian officer and the engineer was from Finland. The Italian spoke French and the two others English, and I acted as interpreter!! Can you imagine it? I am now really a daring French linguist. People who understand me, get quick promotion. If I only could have been able to tell you all was well and not to be worried. At Kwarmouth I have just received a wire from Cecil saying she expects to leave by the slow boat but will stay if I wish it. So, now we can both go by the slow boat if I can catch it. I hope so. must have found Boma as bad as it looked. God bless you all. DICK. On April 13, Richard was back in London and in his diary of that date he writes, "Never so glad to get anywhere. Went to sleep to the music of motorcars. Nothing ever made me feel so content and comfortable and secure as their 'honk, honk.'" From diary of April 22nd, 1907. A blackmailer named H---- called, with photos of atrocities and letters and films. He wanted 30 Pounds for the lot. I gave him 3 Pounds for three photos. One letter he showed me signed Bullinger, an Englishman, said he had put the fear of God in their hearts by sticking up the chief's head on a pole, and saying, "Now, make rubber, or you will look like that." Went to lunch with Pearson but it was the wrong day, and so missed getting a free feed. Thinking he would turn up, I ordered a most expensive lunch. I paid for it. Evening went Patience, which liked immensely and then Duchess of Sutherland's party to Premiers. Saw Churchill and each explained his share of the Real Soldiers row. From diary of April 28th, 1907. We went down by train to Cliveden going by Taplow to Maidenhead where Astor had sent his car to meet us. It is a wonderful place and the view of the Thames is a beautiful one. They had been making alterations, bathrooms, and putting white enamel tiles throughout the dungeons. If Dukes lived no more comfortably than those who owned Cliveden, I am glad I was not a Duke. What was most amusing was the servant's room which was quite as smart as any library or study, with fine paintings, arm chairs and writing material. Nannie and Astor were exceedingly friendly and we walked all over the place. It was good to get one's feet on turf again. They sent us back by motor, so we arrived most comfortably. I gave a dinner to the Hopes, Wyndham, Miss Mary Moore, Ashmead-Bartlett and Margaret. Websters could not come. Later, came on here, and had a chat, the Websters coming too. I read Thaw trial. Early in May Richard and his wife returned to Mount Kisco and my brother at once started in to change his farce "The Galloper" into a musical comedy. It was produced on August 12, at the Astor Theatre, under the title of the "Yankee Tourist," with Raymond Hitchcock as the star. The following I quote from Richard's diary of that date: Monday, August 12th, 1907. Was to have lunched with Ned Stone but he was in court. Met Whigham in street. Impulsively asked him to lunch. Ethel and Jack turned up at Martin's; asked them to lunch. Ethel and I drove around town doing errands, mine being the purchase of tickets for numerous friends. Called on Miss Trusdale to inquire about Harden-Hickey. She wants her to go to the country. Cecil arrived at six. We had a suite of eighty-nine rooms. We dined at Sherry's with Ethel and Jack, Ethel being host. Taft was there. Hottest night ever. I sat with Jack. In spite of weather, play went well. Bonsals, Ethel, Arthur Brisbane were in Cecil's box. Booth Tarkington in Irwin's. Surprise of performance was "Hello, Bill" which Raymond had learned only that morning. Helen Hale helped him greatly with dance. People came to supper at Waldorf, and things went all wrong. Next time I have a first Night I want no friends during or after. Missed the executive ability of Charles Belmont greatly. CHAPTER XVII A LONDON WINTER From the fall of 1907 to that of 1908 Richard divided his time between Mount Kisco, Marion, and Cuba. In December of 1908 he sailed for London where he took Turner the artist's old house in Chelsea for the winter. Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. December 25. Christmas Day. DEAR MOTHER: We are settled here in Darkest Chelsea as though we had been born here. I am thinking of putting in my time of exile by running for Mayor. Meanwhile, it is a wonderful place in which to write the last chapters of "Once Upon a Time." The house is quite wonderful. In Spring and Summer it must be rarely beautiful. It has trees in front and a yard and a garden and a squash court: a sort of tennis you play against the angles of walls covered smooth with cement. Also a studio as large as a theatre. Outside the trees beat on the windows and birds chirp there. The river flows only forty feet away, with great brown barges on it, and gulls whimper and cry, and aeroplane all day. I have a fine room, and about the only one you can keep as warm as toast SHOULD be, and in England never is. Cecil has engaged a teacher, and a model and he is coming here to work. He is twenty years old, and called the "boy Sargent." So, as soon as the British public gets sober, we will begin life in earnest, and both work hard. I need not tell you how glad I am to be at it. I was with you all in heart last night and recited as much as I could remember of "Twas the Night Before Christmas," which always means Dad to me, as he used to read it to us. How much he made the day mean to us. I wish I could just slip in for a kiss, and a hug. But tonight we will all drink to you, and a few hours later you will drink to us. God bless you all. DICK. December 29th. DEAR MOTHER: A blizzard has swept over London. The last one cost the City Corporation $25,000!! The last man who contracted to clean New York of snow was cleaned out by two days of it, to the tune of $200,000. Still, in spite of our alleged superiority in all things, one inch of snow in Chelsea can do more to drive one to drink and suicide than a foot of it "on the farm." At the farm we threw a ton of coal against it, and lit log fires and oil lamps, and were warm. Here, they try to fight it with two buckets of soft chocolate cake called Welch coal, and the result is you freeze. Cecil's studio is like one vast summer hotel at Portland Maine in January. You cannot go near it except in rubber boots, fur coats and woolen gloves. My room still is the only one that is livable. It is four feet square, heavily panelled in oak and the coal fire makes it as warm as a stoke hole. So, I am all right and can work nicely. Janet Sothern came to lunch today and Cecil and she in furs went picture gazing. Tomorrow we have Capt. Chule to dinner. He came up the West coast with us and is accustomed to a temperature of 120 degrees. New Year's eve we spend with Lady Lewis where we dine and keep it up until four in the morning. We will easily be able to get back here but how we can get a hansom from here to the great city, I can't imagine. I have seen none in five days. It is fine to be surrounded by busts of Carlyle, Whistler, Rosetti and Turner's own, but occasionally you wish for a taxicab. Tomorrow I am going on a spree to the great city of London. The novel goes on smoothly, and all is well. I am still running for Mayor of Chelsea. Love to you all. DICK. LONDON--January 1, 1909. DEAR MOTHER: I drank your health and Noll's and Charley's last night and so we all came into the New Year together. I hope it will be as good for me as the last. Certainly Chas. is coming on well with another book. It is splendid. I am so very, very glad. Some of the very best stories anybody has written will be in his next book. We dined at the Lewis's. There were 150 at dinner and as we live in Chelsea now--one might as well be in Brooklyn--we were a half hour late. Fancy feeling you were keeping 150 people hungry. I sat at Lady Lewis's table with some interesting men and one beautiful woman all dressed in glass over pink silk, and pearls, and pearls and then, pearls. She said "Who am I" and I said "You look like a girl in America, who used to stand under a green paper lamp shade up in a farm house in New Hampshire and play a violin." Whereat there was much applause, because it seemed she was that girl, the daughter of a Mrs. Van S----, who wrote short stories. Her daughter was L---- Van S---- now the wife of a baronet and worth five million dollars. The board we paid then was eight dollars a week. Now, we are dining with her next Monday and as I insisted on gold plate she said "Very well, I'll get out the gold plate." But wasn't it dramatic of me to remember her after twenty two years? DICK. LONDON-February 23, 1909. DEAR MOTHER: George Washington's health was celebrated by drinking it at dinner. I had been asked to speak at a banquet but for some strange reason could not see myself in the part. The great Frohman arrived last night and we are all agitated until he speaks. If he would only like my plays as some of the actors do, I would be passing rich. Barrie asked himself to lunch yesterday and was very entertaining. He told us of a letter he received from Guy DuMaurier who wrote "An Englishman's Home" which has made a sensation second to nothing in ten years. He is an officer stationed at a small post in South Africa. He wrote Barrie he was at home, very blue and homesick, and outside it was raining. Then came Barrie's long cable, at 75 cents a word, saying his play was the success of the year. He did not know even it had been ACCEPTED. He shouted to his wife, and they tried to dance but the hut was too small, so they ran out into the compound and danced in the rain. Then he sent the Kaffir boys to the mess to bring all the officers and all the champagne and they did not go to bed at all. The next day cables, still at three shillings a word came from papers and magazines and publishers, managers, syndicates. And, in his letter he says, still not appreciating what a fuss it has made, "I suppose all it needs now is to be made a question in the House," when already it has been the text of half a dozen speeches by Cabinet Ministers, and three companies are playing it in the provinces. What fun to have a success come in such a way, not even to know it was being rehearsed. Today Sargent is here to see what is wrong with Cecil's picture of Janet. He came early and said he couldn't tell until he saw Janet, so now he is back again, and both Janet and Cecil are shaking with excitement. He is the most simple, kindly genius I ever met. He says the head is very fine and I guess Cecil suspected that, before she called him in. He says she must send it to the Royal Academy. I am now going out to hear more words fall from the great man, and so farewell. Seymour and I began work yesterday on the Dictator. It went very smooth. All my love to Noll and to you. DICK. Read the other letter first and then, let me tell you that when I went out to see Sargent, I found Cecil complaining that she could not understand just how it was he wanted Janet to pose. Whereat she handed him a piece of chalk and he made a sketch of Janet as exquisite as the morning and rubbed his hands of the charcoal and left it there! It's only worth a hundred pounds! Can you imagine the nerve of Cecil. I was so shocked I could only gasp. But, he was quite charming and begged her to call him next time she got in a scrape, and gave her his private telephone number. Fancy having Sargent waiting to be called up to make sketches for you. I left Janet and Cecil giggling with happiness. Janet because she had been sketched by him and Cecil because she has the sketch. It's a three fourths length three feet high, and he did it in ten minutes. I am now going to ask her to invite the chef of the Ritz in, to give us a sketch of cooking a dinner. DICK. CHAPTER XVIII MILITARY MANOEUVRES In August, 1909, Richard and his wife left Mount Kisco for a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Clark at Marion. While there my brother attended and later on wrote an article on the war manoeuvres held at Middleboro, Massachusetts. MARION, MASSACHUSETTS. August 16th, 1909. DEAR MOTHER: We had a splendid day to day. I arranged to have Cecil meet me at eleven at Headquarters in the woods below Middleboro, and I spent the morning locating different regiments. Then, after I "met up" with her, I took her in my car. Both she and Hiller were awfully keen over it, so, we got on splendidly. And, of course, Hiller's knowledge of the country was wonderfully convenient. We had great luck in seeing the only fight of the day, the first one of the war. Indeed, I think we caused it. There was a troop of cavalry with a Captain who was afraid to advance. I chided him into doing something, the umpire having confided to me, he would mark him, if he did not. But, he did it wrong. Anyway, he charged a barn with 36 troopers and lost every fourth man. In real warfare he would have lost all his men and all his horses. Cecil and Hiller pursued in the car at the very heels of the cavalry, and I ran ahead with the bicycle scouts. It was most exciting. I am going out again to-morrow. Lots of Love to you all. DICK. MARION, MASSACHUSETTS. August 19th, 1909. DEAR MOTHER: I got in last night too late to write and I am sorry. To-day, the war came to an end with our army, the Red one, with the road to Boston open before it. Indeed, when the end came, they were fighting with their backs to that City, and could have entered it to-night. I begged both Bliss and Wood to send in the cavalry just for the moral effect, but they were afraid of the feeling, that was quite strong. I had much fun, never more, and saw all that was worth seeing. I was glad to see I am in such good shape physically, but with the tramping I do over the farm, it is no wonder. I could take all the stone walls at a jump, while the others were tearing them down. I also met hundreds of men I knew and every one was most friendly, especially the correspondents. Just as I liked to be on a story with a "star" man when I was a reporter, they liked having a real "war" correspondent, take it seriously. They were always wanting to know if it were like the Real Thing, and as I assured them it was, they were satisfied. Some incidents were very funny. I met a troop of cavalry this morning, riding away from the battle, down a crossroad, and thinking it was a flanking manoeuvre, started to follow them with the car. "Where are you going?" I asked the Captain. "Nowhere," he said, "We are dead." An Umpire was charging in advance of two troops of the 10th down a state road, when one trooper of the enemy who were flying, turned back and alone charged the two troops. "You idiot"! yelled the Umpire, "don't you know you and your horse are shot to pieces?" "Sure, I know it," yelled the trooper "but, this ---- horse don't know it." RICHARD. Early in the fall of 1909 Richard returned from Marion to New York and went to Crossroads, where for the next three years he remained a greater part of the time. They were years of great and serious changes for him. An estrangement of long standing between him and his wife had ended in their separation early in 1910, to be followed later by their divorce. In September of that year my mother died while on a visit to Crossroads. After my father's death life to her became only a period of waiting until the moment came when she would rejoin him--because her faith was implicit and infinite. She could not well set about preparing herself because all of her life she had done that and, so, smiling and with a splendid bravery and patience she lived on, finding her happiness in bringing cheer and hope and happiness to all who came into the presence of her wonderful personality. The old home in Philadelphia was just the same as it had been through her long married life--that is with one great difference, but on account of this difference I knew that she was glad to spend her last days with Richard at Crossroads. And surely nothing that could be done for a mother by a son had been left undone by him. Through these last long summer days she sat on the terrace surrounded by the flowers and the sunshine that she so loved. Little children came to play at her knee, and old friends travelled from afar to pay her court. In the winter of 1910-11 my brother visited Aiken, where he spent several months. The following June he went to London at the time of King George's coronation, but did not write about it. Again, in November, 1911, he visited my sister in London, but returned to New York in January, 1912, and spent a part of the winter in Aiken and Cuba. At Aiken he found at least peace and the devotion of loving friends that he so craved, but in London and Cuba, which once had meant so much to him, he seemed to have lost interest entirely. But not once during these years did he cease working, and working hard. On almost every page of his diary at this period I find such expressions as "wrote 500 words for discipline." And again "Satisfaction in work of last years when writing for existence, has been up to any I ever wrote." And in spite of all of the trouble of these days, he not only wrote incessantly but did some of his very finest work. Personally I have never seen a man make a more courageous fight. To quote again from his diary of this time: "Early going to my room saw red sunrise and gold moon. I seemed to stop worrying about money. With such free pleasures I found I could not worry. Every day God gives me greater delight in good things, in beauty, and in every simple exercise and amusement." Twice during these difficult days he went to visit Gouverneur Morris and his wife at Aiken, and after Richard's death his old friend wrote of the first of these visits: "It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways. "Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where there were children. Before he came that first year our house had no name. Now it is called 'Let's Pretend.' "Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first days of the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't draw all the time, but we pretended that it did, and with much pretense came faith. From the fireplace that smoked to the serious things of life we extended our pretendings, until real troubles went down before them--down and out. "It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after Christmas. The spiraeas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke because of pretending) and talked until the next morning. "He was one of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest pleasure not in looking backward or forward, but in what is going on at the moment. Weeks did not have to pass before it was forced upon his knowledge that Tuesday, the fourteenth (let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew it the moment he waked at 7 A. M., and perceived the Tuesday sunshine making patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before breakfast there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life. That day began with attentions to his physical well-being. There were exercises conducted with great vigor and rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous singing of ballads. "The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at his door you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly. He was hard at work, doing unto others what others had done unto him. You were a stranger to him; some magazine had accepted a story that you had written and published it. R. H. D. had found something to like and admire in that story (very little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure to tell you so. If he had liked the story very much he would send you instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden promise in a half column of unsigned print, R. H. D. would find you out, and find time to praise you and help you. So it was that when he emerged from his room at sharp eight o'clock, he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and whistled and double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy, and carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters and telegrams. "Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen, laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things were as important as sausages and thick cream. "Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so much as a wistful glance, and hurry to his workroom. "He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of corresponding, the German March through Brussels, was probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks, he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself, 'Does the picture remain?' If it did not, he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned. "But it is quarter to eleven, and this being a time of holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do. Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch. "A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits. I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best Havana tobacco. At a time of his own deliberate choosing, often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar. He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used all the smoke there was in it. "He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch whiskey. But these things were friends to him, and not enemies. He had toward food and drink the continental attitude; namely, that quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from the champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions of right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he moved resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and although that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples." In June of 1912 Richard reported the Republican convention at Chicago. Shortly after this, on July 8, he married at Greenwich, Connecticut, Miss Elizabeth Genevieve McEvoy, known on the stage as Bessie McCoy, with whom he had first become acquainted in 1908 after the estrangement from his wife. Richard and his wife made their home at Crossroads, where he devoted most of his working hours to the writing of short stories. In August of that year my brother, accompanied by his wife, returned to Chicago to report the Progressive convention. During the year 1913 he wrote and produced the farce "Who's Who," of which William Collier was the star, and in the fall of the same year spent a month in Cuba, with Augustus Thomas, where they produced a film version of "Soldiers of Fortune." In referring to this trip, Thomas wrote at the time of Richard's death: "In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where, twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company. With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his published tales. "At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there were his helpful suggestions of work and make up to the actors, and on the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal. "The element that he could not put into the account and which is particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of 'Soldiers of Fortune' as he revealed himself to me both with intention and unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes. "For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our evenings together at a cafe table overlooking 'The Great Square,' which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and Stuart dine there. At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace. "Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had gone between. From one long silence he said: 'I think I'll come back here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of months.' What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background. "The picture people began their film with a showing of the 'mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water.' That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago. 'The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains and then they had to fall back.' How natural for one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape and yet how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book. "We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead. Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked his grave. CHAPTER XIX VERA CRUZ AND THE GREAT WAR Late in April, 1914, when war between the United States and Mexico seemed inevitable Richard once more left the peace and content of Crossroads and started for Vera Cruz, arriving there on April 29. He had arranged to act as correspondent for a syndicate of newspapers, and as he had for long been opposed to the administration's policy of "watchful waiting" was greatly disappointed on his arrival at the border to learn of the President's plan of mediation. He wrote to his wife: CRUZ, April 24, 1914. DEAREST ONE: We left today at 5.30. It was a splendid scene, except for the children crying, and the wives of the officers and enlisted men trying not to cry. I got a stateroom to myself. With the electric fan on and the airport open, it is about as cool as a blast furnace. But I was given a seat on the left of General Funston, who is commanding this brigade, and the other officers at the table are all good fellows. As long as I was going, I certainly had luck in getting away as sharply as I did. One day's delay would have made me miss this transport, which will be the first to land troops. April 25th. A dreadnaught joined us today, the Louisiana. I wirelessed the Admiral asking permission to send a press despatch via his battleship, and he was polite in reply, but firm. He said "No." There are four transports and three torpedo boats and the battleship. We go very slowly, because we must keep up with one of the troop ships with broken engines. At night it is very pretty seeing the ships in line, and the torpedo boats winking their signals at each other. I am writing all the time or reading up things about the army I forget and getting the new dope. Also I am brushing up my Spanish. Jack London is on board, and three other correspondents, two of whom I have met on other trips, and one "cub" correspondent. He was sitting beside London and me busily turning out copy, and I asked him what he found to write about. He said, "Well, maybe I see things you fellows don't see." What he meant was that what was old to us was new to him, but he got guyed unmercifully. April 27, 1914. The censor reads all I write, and so do some half-dozen Mexican cable clerks and 60 (sixty) correspondents. So when I cable "love," it MEANS devotion, adoration, and worship; loyalty, fidelity and truth, wanting you, needing you, unhappy for you. It means ALL that. RICHARD. VERA CRUZ, April 30, 1914. This heat--humid and moist--would sweat water out of a chilled steel safe; so imagine what it does to me with all the awful winter's accumulation of fat. I hate to say it, but I LIKE these Mexicans--much better than Cubans, or Central Americans. They are human, kindly; it is only the politicians and bandits like Villa who give them a bad name. But, though they ought to hate us, whenever I stop to ask my way they invite me to come in and have "coffee" and say, "My house is yours, senor," which certainly is kind after people have taken your town away from you and given you another flag and knocked your head off if you did not salute it. I now have a fine room. The Navy moved out today and I got the room of the paymaster. It faces the plaza and the cathedral. I burned a candle there today for our soon meeting. The priests all had run away, so I had to hunt up the candle, and pay the money into the box marked for that purpose, but the Lord does not run away, and He will see we soon meet. May 2nd. Yesterday I went out on the train that brings in refugees and saw the Mexicans. They had on three thousand cartridges, much hair, hats as high as church steeples, and lots of dirt. The Selig Moving Picture folks took many pictures of us and several "stills," in which the war correspondent was shown giving cigarettes to the brigands. Also, I had a wonderful bath in the ocean off the aviation camp. I borrowed a suit from one of the aviators, and splashed and swam around for an hour. My! it was good. It reminded me of my dear Bessie, because the last time I was in the ocean was with her. Maybe you know what is going on, but we do not. So I just hustle around all day trying to find news as I did when I was a reporter. It is hot enough here even for me, and I have lost about eight pounds of that fat I laid in during our North Pole winter! VERA CRUZ--May 8, 1914. DEAR CHAS.: Today, when Wilson ordered Huerta not to blockade Tampico which was an insult to Mediators and the act of a bully and a coward, AND a declaration of war, we all got on our ponies to "advance." Then came word Huerta would not blockade. It is like living in a mad house. We all are hoping mediators refuse to continue negotiations. If they have self respect that is what they will do. Tonight if Wilson and Huerta ran for President, Huerta would get all our votes. He may be an uneducated Indian, but at least he is a man. However, that makes no never mind so far as to my getting back. The reason I cannot return is because I have "credentials." It is not that they want ME here, but they want my credentials here. The administration is using, as I see it, the privilege of having a correspondent at the front as a club. It says until war is declared it won't issue any more. So those syndicates who have no correspondent and the papers forming them, are afraid to attack or to criticise the administration for fear they will be blacklisted. And those who have a correspondent with his three thousand dollar signed and sealed pass in his pocket aren't taking any chance on losing him. So, I see before me an endless existence in Vera Cruz. RICHARD. On May 7 Richard started for Mexico City where, if possible, he intended to interview Huerta. At Pasco de Macho he was arrested, but afterward was allowed to proceed to Mexico City. Here he was again arrested, and without being allowed to interview Huerta was sent back the day after his arrival to Vera Cruz. Of this Vera Cruz experience John N. Wheeler, a friend of Richard's and the manager of the syndicate which sent him to Mexico, wrote the following after my brother's death: "Richard Harding Davis went to Vera Cruz for a newspaper syndicate, and after the first sharp engagement in the Mexican seaport there was nothing for the correspondent to do but kill time on that barren, low lying strip of Gulf coast, hemmed in on all sides by Mexicans and the sea, and time is hard to kill there. Yet there was a story to be got, but it required nerve to go after it. "In Mexico City was Gen. Huerta, the dictator of Mexico. If a newspaper could get an interview with him it would be a 'scoop,' but the work was inclined to be dangerous for the interviewer, since Americans were being murdered rather profusely in Mexico at the time in spite of the astute assurances of Mr. Bryan, and no matter how substantial his references the correspondent was likely to meet some temperamental and touchy soldier with a loaded rifle who would shoot first and afterward carry his papers to some one who could read them. "One of the newspapers taking the stories by Mr. Davis from the syndicate had a staff man at Vera Cruz as well, and thought to 'scoop' the country by sending this representative to see Huerta, in this way 'beating' even the other subscribers to the Davis service. An interview in Mexico City was consequently arranged and the staff man was cabled and asked to make the trip. He promptly cabled his refusal, this young man preferring to take no such chances. It was then suggested that Mr. Davis should attempt it. By pulling some wires at Washington it was arranged, through the Brazilian and English Ambassadors at the Mexican capital, for Mr. Davis to interview President Huerta, with safe conduct (this being about as safe as nonskid tires) to Mexico City. Mr. Davis was asked if he would make the trip. In less than two hours back came this laconic cable: "'Leaving Mexico City to-morrow afternoon at 3 o'clock.' "That was Richard Harding Davis--no hesitancy, no vacillation. He was always willing to go, to take any chance, to endure discomfort and all if he had a fighting opportunity to get the news. The public now knows that Davis was arrested on this trip, that Huerta refused to make good on the interview, and that it was only through the good efforts of the British Ambassador at the Mexican capital he was released. But Davis went. "There was an echo of this journey to the Mexican capital several months later after the conflict in Europe had been raging for a few weeks. Lord Kitchener announced at one stage of the proceedings he would permit a single correspondent, selected and indorsed by the United States Government, to accompany the British army to the front. Of course, all the swarm of American correspondents in London at the time were eager for the desirable indorsement. Mr. Davis cabled back the conditions of his acceptance. Immediately Secretary of State Bryan was called in Washington on the long-distance telephone. "'Lord Kitchener has announced,' the Secretary of State was told, 'that he will accept one correspondent with the British troops in the field, if he is indorsed by the United States Government. Richard Harding Davis, who is in London, represents a string of the strongest newspapers in the United States for this syndicate, and we desire the indorsement of the State Department so he can obtain this appointment.' "'Mr. Davis made us some trouble when he was in Mexico,' answered Mr. Bryan. 'He proceeded to the Mexican capital without our consent and I will have to consider the matter very carefully before indorsing him. His Mexican escapade caused us some diplomatic efforts and embarrassment.' (What the Secretary of State did to bring about Mr. Davis's release on the occasion of his Mexican arrest is still a secret of the Department.) "Mr. Bryan did not indorse Mr. Davis finally, which was well, since Lord Kitchener of Khartum kept the selected list of correspondents loafing around London on one pretext or another so long they all became disgusted and went without an official pass from 'K. of K.' As soon as Mr. Davis was told he would not be appointed he proceeded to Belgium and returned some of the most thrilling stories written on this conflict at great personal risk." May 13, 1914. MY DEAREST ONE: DO NOT BLAME me for this long delay in writing. God knows I wanted every day to "talk" to you. But we were on the "suspect" list, and to make even a note was risky. The way I did it was to exclaim over the beauty of some flower or tree, and then ask the Mexican nearest me to write the name of it HIMSELF in MY notebook. Then I would say, "In English that would be----" and I would pretend to write beside it the English equivalent, but really would write the word that was the key to what I wished to remember. So, you see, a letter at that rate of progress was impossible. It was a case of "Can't get away to cable you today; police won't let me!" However, we are all safe at home again. As a matter of fact, I had a most exciting time, and am dying to tell you the "insie" story. But the one I sent the papers must serve. I promised myself I would give the FIRST soldier, marine and sailor I met on returning a cigar, and the first sailor was the CHAPLAIN OF THE FLEET, Father Reany. But he took the cigar and gave me his blessing. I am now burning candles to St. Rita. What worried me the MOST was how worried YOU would be; and I begged Palmer not to send the story of our first arrest. But other people told of it, and he had to forward it. You certainly made the wires BURN! and had the army guessing. One officer said to me, "I'm awfully sorry to see you back. If you'd only have stayed in jail another day your wife would have had us all on our way to Mexico." And the censor said, "My God! I'm glad you're safe! Your wife has MADE OUR LIVES HELL!" And quite right, too, bless you! None of us knows anything, but it looks to me that NOTHING will induce Wilson to go to war. But the Mexicans think we ARE at war, and act accordingly. They may bring on a conflict. That is why I am making ready in case we advance and that is why I cabled today for the rest of my kit. I have a fine little pony, and a little messenger boy who speaks Spanish, to look after the horse, and me. And now, as to your LETTERS, they came to-day, five of them, COUNT 'EM, and the pictures did make me laugh. I showed those of the soldier commandeering the vegetables to Funston and he laughed. And, I did love the flowers you sent no matter HOW homesick they made me! (Oh). I do not want a camera. I have one, and those fancy cameras I don't understand. The letters you forwarded were wonderfully well selected. I mean, those from other people. One of them was from Senator Root telling me Bryan is going to reward our three heroic officers who jumped into the ocean. I know you will be glad. There are NO mosquitoes! Haven't met up with but three and THEY are not COMING BACK. I send you a picture of my room from the outside. From the inside the view is so "pretty." Across the square is the cathedral and the trees are filled with birds that sing all night, and statues, and pretty globes. The band plays every night and when it plays "Hello, Winter Time," I CRY for you. I paid the band-master $20 to play it, and it is WORTH IT. I sit on the balcony and think of you and know just what you are doing, for there is only an hour and a half difference. That is, when with you it is ten o'clock with me it is eight-thirty. So when you and Louise are at dinner you can know I am just coming in from my horseback ride to bathe and "nap." And when at eight-thirty you are playing the Victor, I am drinking a cocktail to you, and shooing away the Colonels and Admirals who interfere with my ceremony of drinking to my dear wife. VERA CRUZ, May 20th, 1914. DEAREST WIFE: I got SUCH a bully letter yesterday from you, written long ago from the Webster. It said you missed me, and it said you loved me, and there were funny pictures of you reading the war and peace news each with a different expression, and you told me about Padrigh and how he runs down the road. It made me very sad and homesick, but very glad to feel I was so missed. Also you told me cheerful falsehoods about my Tribune stories. I know they are no good, and as they are no good, the shorter the better, but I like to be told they are good. Anyway, I sat down at once and wrote a long screed on Vera Cruz and the sleepy people that five here. We all live on the sidewalk under the stone porch. Every night a table is reserved and by my orders ALL chairs, except mine, are removed. So no one can sit down and bore me while I am dining. Another trick I have to be left alone is to carry a big roll of cable blanks, and I pretend to write out cables if anyone tries to talk. Then I beckon the messenger (he always sits in the plaza) and say "File that!" and he goes once around the block and reports back that it is "filed." If the bore renews the attack I write another cable, and the unhappy messenger makes another tour. The band plays from seven to eight every night. There are five bands, and I saw no reason why there should not be music every evening. After a day in this dirty hotel or dirty city a lively band helps. Funston agreed, but forgot, until after three nights with no band, I wrote him a letter. It was signed by fake names, asking if he couldn't get nineteen German musicians into a bandstand how could he hope to get ten thousand soldiers into Mexico City. So now we have a band each night. That is all my day. After dinner I sit at table and the men bring up chairs, or else I go to some other table. There are some damn fool women here who are a nuisance, and they now have dancing in the hotel adjoining, but I don't know them, except to bow, and I approve of the tango parties because it keeps them away from the sidewalk. They ire "refugees," the sort of folks you meet at Ocean Grove, or rather DON'T meet! All love to you, and give Patrigh a pat from his Uncle Richard for looking after you and looking for me, and remember me to Louise and Shu and everything at home. I love you so. RICHARD. VERA CRUZ, May 28, 1914. I want to be home to see the daisy field with you. That knee you nearly busted tobogganing when the daisy field was an iceberg is now recovered. The one and all came this morning and as I expected it was all full of love from you. I DID get happiness out of the thought you put in it. And all done in an hour. The underclothes made me weep. I could get none here. Not because Mexicans are not as large as I am, but because no Mexican of any size would wear 'em. So I've had to wash the few that the washer-woman didn't destroy myself. And when I saw the lot you sent! It was like a white sale! Also the quinine which I tasted just for luck, and the soap in the little violet wrapper made me quite homesick. Especially was I glad to get socks and pongee suits, and shirts. I really was getting desperate. God knows what I would have done without them. I want to see you so much, and I want to see you in the same setting of other days, I want to walk with you in the daisy field, and in the laurel blossoms, and clip roses. But to be with you I'd be willing to walk on broken glass. Not you, too. Just me. RICHARD. VERA CRUZ--June 4, 1914. DEAR OLD MAN: I am awfully sorry for your sake, you could not get away. Of course for myself I am glad that I am to see you and Dai. At least, I hope I am. God alone knows when we will get out of here. I am sick of it. Next time I go to war both armies must fight for two months before I will believe they mean it, and BEFORE I WILL BUDGE. It is true I am getting good money, but also there is absolutely NOTHING to write about. Bryan doesn't know that unless he talks by code every radio on sixteen ships can read every message he sends to these waters. And the State Department saying it could not understand the Hyranga giving up her cargo is a damn silly lie. No one is so foolish as to think the Chester and Tacomah let her land those arms under their guns unless they had been told to submit to it. And yet today, we get papers of the 29th in which Bryan says he has twice cabled Badger for information, when for a week Badger has been reading Bryan's orders to consuls to let the arms be landed. Can you beat that? This is an awful place, and if I don't write it is because I hate to harrow your feelings. It is a town of flies, filth and heat. John McCutcheon is the only friend I have seen, and he sensibly lives on a warship. I can't do that, as cables come all the time suggesting specials, and I am not paid to loaf. John is here on a vacation, and can do as he pleases. But I ride around like any cub reporter. And there is no news. Since I left home I have not talked five minutes to a woman "or mean to!" The Mexican women are a cross between apes and squaws. Of all I have seen here nothing has impressed me so as the hideousness of the women, girls, children, widows, grandmothers. And the refugees, as Collier would say it, are "terrible!" I live a very lonely existence. I find it works out that way best. And at the same time all the correspondents are good friends, and I don't find that there is one of them who does not go out of his way to SHOW he is friendly. What I CAN'T understand is why no one at home never guesses I might like to read some of my own stories. . . . DICK. Of these days in Vera Cruz John T. McCutcheon wrote the following shortly after Richard's death: "Davis was a conspicuous figure in Vera Cruz, as he inevitably had been in all such situations. Wherever he went, he was pointed out. His distinction of appearance, together with a distinction in dress, which, whether from habit or policy, was a valuable asset in his work, made him a marked man. He dressed and looked the 'war correspondent,' such a one as he would describe in one of his stories. He fulfilled the popular ideal of what a member of that fascinating profession should look like. His code of life and habits was as fixed as that of the Briton who takes his habits and customs and games and tea wherever he goes, no matter how benighted or remote the spot may be. "He was just as loyal to his code as is the Briton. He carried his bath-tub, his immaculate linen, his evening clothes, his war equipment--in which he had the pride of a connoisseur--wherever he went, and, what is more, he had the courage to use the evening clothes at times when their use was conspicuous. He was the only man who wore a dinner coat in Vera Cruz, and each night, at his particular table in the crowded 'Portales,' at the Hotel Diligencia, he was to be seen, as fresh and clean as though he were in a New York or London restaurant. Each day he was up early to take the train out to the 'gap,' across which came arrivals from Mexico City. Sometimes a good 'story' would come down, as when the long-heralded and long-expected arrival of Consul Silliman gave a first-page 'feature' to all the American papers. "In the afternoon he would play water polo over at the navy aviation camp, and always at a certain time of the day his 'striker' would bring him his horse and for an hour or more he would ride out along the beach roads within the American lines." . . . . . . . . . On June 15 Richard sailed on the Utah for New York, arriving there on the 22d. For a few weeks after his return he remained at Mount Kisco completing his articles on the Mexican situation but at the outbreak of the Great War he at once started for Europe, sailing with his wife on August 4, the day war was declared between England and Germany. On Lusitania--August 8, 1914. DEAR CHAS: We got off in a great rush, as the Cunard people received orders to sail so soon after the Government had told them to cancel all passengers, that no one expected to leave by her, and had secured passage on the Lorraine and St. Paul. They gave me a "regal" suite which at other times costs $1,000 and it is so darned regal that I hate to leave it. I get sleepy walking from one end of it to the other; and we have open fires in each of the three rooms. Generally when one goes to war it is in a transport or a troop train and the person of the least importance is the correspondent. So, this way of going to war I like. We now are a cruiser and are slowly being painted grey, and as soon as they got word England was at war all lights were put out and to find your way you light matches. You can imagine the effect of this Ritz Carlton idea of a ship wrapped in darkness. Gerald Morgan is on board, he is also accredited to The Tribune, and Frederick Palmer. I do not expect to be allowed to see anything but will try to join a French army. I will leave Bessie near London with Louise at some quiet place like Oxford or a village on the Thames. We can "take" wireless, but not send it, so as no one is sending and as we don't care to expose our position, we get no news. We are running far North and it is bitterly cold. I think Peary will sue us for infringing his copyrights. I will try to get in touch with Nora. I am worried lest she cannot get at her money. As British subjects no other thing should upset them. Address me American Embassy, London. I send such love to you both. God bless you. DICK. Richard arrived in Liverpool August 13, and made arrangements for his wife to remain in London. Unable to obtain credentials from the English authorities, he started for Brussels and arrived there in time to see the entry of the German troops, which he afterward described so graphically. Indeed this article is considered by many to be one of the finest pieces of descriptive writing the Great War has produced. For several days after Brussels had come under the control of the Germans Richard remained there and then decided to go to Paris as the siege of the French capital at the time seemed imminent. He and his friend Gerald Morgan, who was acting as the correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, decided to drive to Hal and from there to continue on foot until they had reached the English or French armies where they knew they would be among friends. At Hal they were stopped by the German officials and Morgan wisely returned to Brussels. However, Richard having decided to continue on his way, was promptly seized by the Germans and held as an English spy. For a few days he had a most exciting series of adventures with the German military authorities and his life was frequently in danger. It was finally due to my brother's own strategy and the prompt action of our Ambassador to Belgium, Brand Whitlock, that he was returned to Brussels and received his official release. On August 27, Richard left Brussels for Paris on a train carrying English prisoners and German wounded, and en route saw much of the burning and destruction of Louvain. BRUSSELS, August 17, 1914. DEAREST: Write me soon and often! All is well here so long as I know you are all right, so do not fail to tell me all, and keep me in touch. If _I_ do not write much it is because letters do not get through always, and are read. But you know I love you, and you know twice each day I pray for you and wish for you all the time. I feel as though I had been gone a month. Gerald Morgan and I got in last night; this is a splendid new hotel; for $2.50 I get a room and bath like yours on the "royal suite," only bigger. This morning the minister did everything he could for us. There are about twenty Americans who want credentials. They say they will take no Americans, but to our minister they said they would make exception in favor of three, so I guess the three will be John McCutcheon, Palmer and myself. John and I, if anyone gets a pass, are sure. With the passes we had, Gerald and I started out in a yellow motor, covered with flags of the Allies, and saw a great deal. How I wished you were with me, you would so have loved it. The country is absolutely beautiful. We were stopped every quarter mile to show our passes and we got a working idea of how it will be. Tonight I dined with Mr. Whitlock, the minister, and John McCutcheon came in and Irving Cobb. John and I will get together and go out. All you need is a motor car and you can go pretty much everywhere, EXCEPT near where there is fighting. So what I am to do to earn my wages I don't know. I am now going to bed and I send my darlin' all love. Today I sent you a wire. If it got to you let me know. Take such good care of yourself. Remember me to Louise, and, WRITE ME. All love, DEAR, DEAR one. My wife and my sweetheart. Your husband, RICHARD. The following is the last letter that got through. BRUSSELS, August 21, 1914. DEAREST ONE: I cannot say much, as I doubt if this will be opened by you. The German army came in and there was no fighting and I am very well. I am only distressed at not being able to get letters from you, and not being able to send them. I will write a long one, and hold it until I am sure of some way by which it can reach you. YOU KNOW WHAT I WOULD SAY. Mrs. Davis had waited in London to meet Richard on his return from the war, but a misunderstanding as to the date of his return, coupled with her strong sense of duty to his interests at home, gave occasion for the letter which follows: LONDON, August 31, 1914. DEAREST ONE: Not since the Herald Square days have I had such a blow as when I drove up to 10 Clarges, and found you gone! IT WAS NOBODY'S FAULT! YOU WERE SO RIGHT to go; and I COULD NOT COME. I am so distressed lest it was my cable saying I could not get back that decided you to go before the fifth. But Ashford says it was not. He tells me the cable came at THREE in the morning and that you had arranged to be called at six-thirty in order to leave for Scotland. So, for sending that cable I need not blame myself too much. I sent you so many messages I do not know which got through. But I think it must have been one saying I could not return in time to see you before the fifth. THEN, no trains were running. The very NEXT DAY the Germans started a troop train, and I took it. The reason I could not come by automobile was because I had a falling out with the "mad dogs" and they would not give me a pass. So Evans, with whom I was to motor to Holland, got through Friday afternoon and sent the cable. As soon as I reached Holland, I cabled I was coming and kept on telegraphing every step of the journey, which lasted three days. I telegraphed last from Folkestone; even telling you what to have for my supper. As you directed, Ashford opened the cables, and when I drove up, he was at the door in tears. He had made a light in your rooms and, of course, as I looked up I thought you still were in them. When they told me I was a day late, I cried, too. It was the bitterest disappointment I ever knew. I had taken the very first train out of Brussels, the one with the wounded, and for three days had been having one hell of a time. But I kept thinking of seeing you, and hearing your dear voice. So the trip did not matter. I was only thinking of SEEING YOU, and thanking God I was shut of the dirty Germans. We had nothing to eat, and we slept on the floor of the train, the Germans kept us locked in, and, all through even Holland, we were under arrest. But nothing mattered, because I was so happy at thought of meeting you. As I said neither of us was at fault. You just HAD to go, and I could NOT COME. But, you can feel how I felt to learn you were at sea. I was so glad I could use your old rooms. I went to the table where you used to write and was so glad I could at least be as near to you as that. No other place in London could have held me that night. Not Buckingham Palace. I found little things you had left. I loved even the funny pictures on the wall because we had talked of them together. It was ROTTEN, ROTTEN luck. But only the Germans and their hellish war were to blame. I drove straight to the cable office, and tried to wireless you, knowing you would feel glad to know I was well, and safe and sound. But the cable people could not send my message. You were then out of reach of wireless, on the Irish coast. And for nine days there was no way to tell you I had come back as fast as trains and boats and the dirty Germans would let me. Oh, my dear, dear one, HOW I LOVE you. If only I could have seen you for just five minutes. As it was, I thought for five days more we would be together. What I shall do now, I don't know. I must go back with either the French or the English until my contract expires, and then, I can join you. Tomorrow I am trying to see Asquith and Churchill to get with the army. And I will at once return across the channel. But, do not worry! I will never again let a German come within ONE MILE of me! After this, between me and the Germans, there will be some hundreds of thousands of English or French. So after this reaches you I will soon be on my way HOME. Don't worry. Get James back and Amelia and everyone else who can make you comfortable, and trust in the good Lord. I have your cross and St. Rita around my neck, and in spite of what the Kaiser says, God is looking after other people than Germans. Certainly he has taken good care of me. And he will guard you, and our "blessed" one. And in a little time, dear, DEAR heart, I will be back, and I will become a grocer. God love you and keep you, as he does. And you will never know HOW I LOVE YOU! Good night, dearest, sweetheart and wife! I am writing this at your table, and, thanking God you are going to the farm, and to peace and happiness. I SEND YOU ALL THE LOVE IN ALL THE WORLD. RICHARD. LONDON, September 3rd. MY DEAREST ONE: It was a full moon again tonight and I think you were on deck and saw it, because by now, you have passed the four days at sea and should be in the St. Lawrence. So I knew you saw the moon, too, and I sent you a kiss, via it. It was just over St. James Palace but also it was just over you. Today has been a day of worries. Wheeler cabled that the papers wanted me to be "neutral" and not write against the Germans. As I am not interested in the German vote, or in advertising of German breweries (such a hard word to SAY) I thought, considering the EXCLUSIVE stories I had sent them, instead of kicking, they ought to be sending me a few bouquets. Especially, as I got cables from Gouvey, Whigham, Scribner's and others congratulating me on the anti-German stories. So I cabled Wheeler to tell papers of his syndicate, dictation from them as to what I should write was "unexpected," that they could go to name-of-place censored and that if he wished I would release him from his contract tonight. Considering that without credentials I was with French, Belgian and German armies and saw entry of Germans into Brussels and sacking of Louvain and got arrested as a spy, they were a bit ungrateful. I am now wondering WHAT I would have seen HAD I HAD credentials. I saw Anthony Hope at the club last night. He had to go back to the country, so I dined alone on English oysters. Fancy anyone being NEUTRAL in this war! Germany dropping bombs in Paris and Antwerp on women and churches and scattering mines in the channel where they blow up fishermen and burning the cathedrals! A man who now would be neutral would be a coward. Good night, NEAR, DEAR, DEAR one. It has been several weeks since I had sleep, so if I rave and wander in my letters forgive me. You know how I am thinking of you. God bless you. God keep you for me. Your husband who loves you SO! LONDON, September 7th. DEAREST: I just got your cable saying you were at the farm, and well! HOW HAPPY IT MADE ME! I cabled you to Quebec, and to Mt. Kisco, and when two days passed and I heard nothing, today I was scared, so I cabled Gouvey to look after you, and also to Wheeler. I went to the Brompton Oratory today, which is the second most important church here (the cardinal lives at Westminster) and burned the BIGGEST CANDLE they had for you and the "blessing." A big woman all in black was kneeling in the little chapel and when I could not get the candle to stand up, she beckoned to one of the priests, and he ran and fixed it. Then she went on praying. And WHO do you think she was? Queen Amelie of Portugal, you see her pictures in the Tattler and Sphere opening bazaars. So she must be very good or she would not be saying her prayers all alone with the poor people and seeing that my Bessie's candle was burning. I have been waiting here hoping to get some sort of credentials from Kitchener. But though Winston Churchill has urged him, and tomorrow is going to urge him again, they give me no hope. So I'll just go over "on my own" and I bet I'll see more than anyone else. I have fine papers, anyhow. I am now writing Scribner article, so THAT is off my mind. And now that you are home, I have no "worries." I wish I had got your cable earlier. I would have had oysters and champagne in BATH TUBS. Give my love to all the flowers, and to Shea and Paedrig, and Tom, and Louise, and Gouvey and the lake. And take SUCH good care of yourself, and love me, and be happy for I do so love you dear one. I DO SO LOVE YOU. YOUR HUSBAND. September 15th. DEAREST: Tonight I got your cable in answer to mine asking if you were well. All things considered twenty-four hours was not so long for them to get the answer to me. You BET I will be careful. I don't want to get nearer to a German than twenty miles. At the battlefield I collected five German spiked helmets but at the Paris gate they took ALL of them from me. I WAS mad! I wanted to keep them in my "gym," and pound them with Indian clubs. I wrote all day yesterday, so today I did not work. There is nothing more here to do. And as soon as my contract is up October 1st, I will make towards YOU! Seeing the big battle was great luck. So far I have seen more than anyone. I have had no credentials; and yet have been with ALL the armies. Now I am just beating time, until I can get home. The fighting is too far away even if I could go to it. But I can't without being arrested. And I am fed up on being arrested. Today all the little children came out of doors. They have been locked up for fear of airships. It was fine to see them playing in the Champs Elysees and making forts out of pebbles, and rolling hoops. God loves you, dear one, and I trust in Him. But I am awful sick for a sight of you. What a lot we will have to tell each other. One thing I never have to tell you, but it makes me happy when I can. It is this: I LOVE YOU! And every minute I think of you. With all my love. Your RICHARD. PARIS, September 15th, 1914. DEAR CHAS.: I got this morning your letter of August 25th. In it you say kind things about my account of the Germans entering Brussels. Nothing so much pleases me as to get praise from you or to know my work pleases you. Since the Germans were pushed in every one here is breathing again. But for me it was bad as now the armies are too far to reach by taxicab, and if you are caught anywhere outside the city you are arrested and as a punishment sent to Tours. Eight correspondents, among them two Times men and John Reed and Bobby Dunn, were sent to Tours Sunday. I had another piece of luck that day with Gerald Morgan. I taxicabed out to Soissons and saw a wonderful battle. So, now I can go home in peace. Had I been forced to return without seeing any fighting I never would have lived it down. I am in my old rooms of years ago. I got the whole imperial suite for eight francs a day. It used to be 49 francs a day. Of course, Paris that closes tight at nine is hardly Paris, but the beauty of the city never so much impressed me. There is no fool running about to take your mind off the gardens and buildings. What MOST makes me know I am in Paris, though, are the packages of segars lying on the dressing table. Give my love to Dai, and tell her I hope soon to see you. The war correspondent is dead. My only chance was to get with the English who will take one American and asked Bryan to choose, he passed it to the Press Association and they chose Palmer. But I don't believe the official correspondents will be allowed to see much. I saw the Germans enter Brussels, the burning of Louvain and the Battle of Soissons and had a very serious run in with the Germans and nearly got shot. But now if you go out, every man is after you, and even the gendarmes try to arrest you. It is sickening. For never, of course, was there such a chance to describe things that everyone wants to read about. Again my love to Dai and you. I will see you soon. RICHARD. In October Richard returned to the United States and settled down to complete his first book on the war. During this period and indeed until the hour of his death my brother devoted the greater part of his time to the cause of the Allies. He had always believed that the United States should have entered the war when the Germans first outraged Belgium, and to this effect he wrote many letters to the newspapers. In addition to this he was most active in various of the charities devoted to the causes of the Allies, wrote a number of appeals, and contributed money out of all proportion to his means. The following appeal he wrote for the Secours National: "You are invited to help women, children and old people in Paris and in France, wherever the war has brought desolation and distress. To France you owe a debt. It is not alone the debt you incurred when your great grandfathers fought for liberty, and to help them, France sent soldiers, ships and two great generals, Rochambeau and La Fayette. You owe France for that, but since then you have incurred other debts. "Though you may never have visited France, her art, literature, her discoveries in Science, her sense of what is beautiful, whether in a bonnet, a boulevard or a triumphal arch, have visited you. For them you are the happier; and for them also, to France you are in debt. "If you have visited Paris, then your debt is increased a hundred fold. For to whatever part of France you journeyed, there you found courtesy, kindness, your visit became a holiday, you departed with a sense of renunciation; you were determined to return. And when after the war, you do revisit France, if your debt is unpaid, can you without embarrassment sink into debt still deeper? What you sought Paris gave you freely. Was it to study art or to learn history, for the history of France is the history of the world; was it to dine under the trees or to rob the Rue de la Paix of a new model; was it for weeks to motor on the white roads or at a cafe table watch the world pass? Whatever you sought, you found. Now, as in 1776 we fought, to-day France fights for freedom, and in behalf of all the world, against militarism that is 'made in Germany.' "Her men are in the trenches; her women are working in the fields, sweeping the Paris boulevards, lighting the street lamps. They are undaunted, independent, magnificently capable. They ask no charity. But from those districts the war has wrecked, there are hundreds of thousands of women and little children without work, shelter or food. To them throughout the war zone the Secours National gives instant relief. In one day in Paris alone it provides 80,000 free meals. Six cents pays for one of these meals. One dollar from you will for a week keep a woman or child alive. "The story is that one man said, 'In this war the women and children suffer most. I'm awfully sorry for them!' and the other man said, 'Yes I'm five dollars sorry. How sorry are you?' "If ever you intend paying that debt you owe to France do not wait until the war is ended. Now, while you still owe it, do not again impose yourself upon her hospitality, her courtesy, her friendship. "But, pay the debt now. "And then, when next in Paris you sit at your favorite table and your favorite waiter hands you the menu, will you not the more enjoy your dinner if you know that while he was fighting on the Aisne, it was your privilege to help a little in keeping his wife and child alive." The winter of 1914-15 Richard and his wife spent in New York, and on January 4, 1915, their baby, Hope, was born. No event in my brother's life had ever brought him such infinite happiness, and during the short fifteen months that remained to him she was seldom, if ever, from his thoughts, and no father ever planned more carefully for a child's future than Richard did for his little daughter. On April 11 my brother and his wife took Hope to Crossroads for the first time. In his diary of this time he writes, "Only home in the world is the one I own. Everything belongs. It is so comfortable and the lake and the streams in the woods where you can get your feet wet. The thrill of thinking a stump is a trespasser! You can't do that on ten acres." A cause in which Richard was enormously interested at this time was that of the preparedness of his own country, and for it he worked unremittingly. In August, 1915, he went to Plattsburg, where he took a month of military training. PLATTSBTTRG, N. Y. August, 1915. DEAR OLD MAN: This is a very real thing, and STRENUOUS. I know now why God invented Sunday. The first two days were mighty hard, and I had to work extra to catch up. I don't know a darned thing, and after watching soldiers for years, find that I have picked up nothing that they have to learn. The only things I have learned don't count here, as they might under marching conditions. My riding I find is quite good, and so is my rifle shooting. As you could always beat me at that you can see the conditions are not high. But being used to the army saddle helps me a lot. I have a steeple chaser on one side and a M. F. H. on the other, and they can't keep in the saddle, and hate it with bitter oaths. The camp commander told me that was a curious development; that the best gentlemen jockeys and polo players on account of the saddle, were sore, in every sense. Yesterday I rose at 5-30, assembled for breakfast at six, took down tent to ventilate it, when a cloud meanly appeared, and I had to put it up again. Then in heavy marching order we drilled two hours as skirmishers, running and hurling ourselves at the earth, like falling on the ball, and I always seemed to fall where the cinder path crossed the parade ground. We got back in time to clean ourselves for dinner at noon. And then practised firing at targets. At two we were drilled as cavalry in extended order. We galloped to a point, advanced on foot, were driven back by an imaginary enemy, and remounted. We galloped as a squadron, and the sight was really remarkable when you think the men had been together only four days. But the horses had been doing it for years. All I had to do to mine was to keep on. He knew what was wanted as well as did the Captain. After that we put on our packs and paraded at retreat to the band. Then had supper and listened to a lecture. I ache in every bone, muscle, and joint. But the riding has not bothered me. It is only hurling the damned rifle at myself. At nine I am sound asleep. It certainly is a great experience, and, all the men are helping each other and the spirit is splendid. The most curious meetings come off and all kinds of men are at it from college kids to several who are great grand fathers. Russell Colt turned up and was very funny over his experiences. He said he saluted everybody and one man he thought was a general and stood at attention to salute was a Pullman car conductor. The food is all you want, and very good. I've had nothing to drink, but sarsaparilla, but with the thirst we get it is the best drink I know. I have asked to have no letters forwarded and if I don't write I hope you will understand as during the day there is not a minute you are your own boss and at night I am too stiff and sleepy to write. All love to you. DICK. DEAREST: It is now seven-thirty, and I have had twelve busy hours. They made me pass an examination as though for Sing Sing, then a man gave me a gun that at first weighed eight pounds and then twenty. He made me do all sorts of things with it, such as sentries used to do to me. Then I was given the gun to keep, and packs, beds, blankets, and I made myself at home in a tent; then I was moved to another tent with five other men. Then I got a horse and they galloped us up and down a field for two hours. I lost ten pounds. Then we were marched around to a band. I had a sergeant on either side of me, so I did not go wrong, OFTEN. Then, aching in every bone and with my head filled with orders and commands, I got into the lake and escaped. You can believe I enjoyed that bath. It certainly is a fine thing, and I am glad I enrolled (for every one has been as nice as could be), but I miss you and Hope terribly. It seems years since I saw you. I am going to my cot quick. It is now eight o'clock, and I feel like I had been beaten in a stone crusher. Kiss Hope's foot for me. Your loving husband, DICK. Monday. DEAREST ONE: I got such a beautiful letter from you! With pictures of Hope playing with the Bunny. It is the best picture yet. I carry it next to my heart because you made it, because it is of her. And she sits up now? Well, I will miss the big clothes-basket. I loved to see her in it. Years ago, when I left home, she was trying to crawl out of it. What you tell me of her--knowing what you mean when you say "Kitty" and "Bunny"--is wonderful. How good it will be! You must come close under my arm, and tell me every little thing. I feel so much better now that we have broken into the last week, and are on the home stretch. We have broken the backbone of the long absence, and, the first thing you know, I'll be telephoning to have you meet me at White Plains. This is me sewing up a hole in my breeches. The socks are drying on the line, my rubber bath is on the right. I am now going to Canada. But I'll be back in half an hour; it's only 200 yards distant. All the folks here are French, and the signs are in French. Last place we halted I bought lumberman's socks to wear at night. I sleep very well, for I buy my raincoat full of hay from the nearest farmer, and sleep on that. Today we had another "battle." It began at 7.30 and ended at one o'clock. We were kept going all that time, taking "cover" behind railroad embankments and stone walls and in plowed fields, finally ending with a bayonet charge. I killed so many I stopped counting. Don't let Hope forget her father. Better put on a wrist-watch and my horn spectacles, and hold her the wrong way, so she will be reminded of her Dad. Good-night, my dearest one. You will never know how terribly I miss you and love you, and want you in my arms, and you holding Hope so that I can have all my happiness in one big armful of all that is good. YOUR LOVING HUSBAND. Wednesday. DEAREST ONE: The Vitagraph people came today. They have a great film to stir people to preparedness called "The Battle Cry of Peace." It shows New York destroyed by Germans. They took pictures of several of the better-known men showing "them" preparing. I was taken cleaning my rifle, and, as the captain was passing, I asked him to get in the picture with me and be shown instructing me. He was delighted, but right in the middle of the picture he "inspected" my barrel. I had not cleaned it, and he forgot the camera, and gave me the devil. You can imagine how the crowd roared, and the camera director man was delighted. I wanted it retaken showing the captain patting me on the back. Roosevelt turned up today, and was very nice. Martin Egan came with him and the British Naval Attache, and they have asked me to dine at a real table at Hotel Champlain with two other men. It will be fine to eat off china. The "hike" begins Friday, and we sleep each night on the ground, but the country we march through is beautiful. All that counts is getting the days behind me and getting you in my arms. Doing one's "bit" for one's country is right, but as the man said, "God knows I love my country and want to fight for her, but I hope to God I never love another country." Good-night, dear, dear one! How wonderful it will be to see and hear you again. Kiss Hope for her Dad. RICHARD. Saturday. DEAREST: This is writing with all the love, but with difficulties. I am sitting on a log and the light is a candle. Today we had our first fight. It happened the squad of eight men I am in was sent in advance, and I was 100 yards in front, so I was the first to come in touch with the scouts of the Red Army, and I killed a lot. My squad was so brave that we all got killed THREE TIMES. But as soon as the umpire rode away we would come to life, and go on fighting. Finally, he took us prisoners, and made us sit down and look on at the battle. As we had been running around and each carrying a forty-pound pack, we were glad to remain dead. But we have declared that nothing can kill us tomorrow but asphyxiating gas. I have terrible nightmares for fear something has happened to one of you, and then I trust in the good Lord, and pray him to make the time pass swiftly. Good-night, and all the love and kisses for you both. RICHARD. On October 19, 1915, Richard sailed on the Chicago for France and his second visit to the Great War. He arrived at Paris on October 30, and shortly afterward visited the Western front at Amiens and Artois. He also interviewed Poincare, and through him the French President sent a message to the American people. At this time my brother had received permission from the authorities to visit all of the twelve sectors of the French front under particularly advantageous conditions, and was naturally most anxious to do so. However, through a misunderstanding between the syndicate he represented and certain of the newspapers using its service, he found it advisable, even although against his own judgment, to go to Greece, and to postpone his visit to the sectors of the French front he had not already seen. On November 13 he left Paris bound for Salonica. On Way to France, Oct. 18, 1915. DEAREST ONE: You are much more brave than I am. Anyway, you are much better behaved. For all the time you were talking I was crying, not with my eyes only, but with ALL of me. I am so sad. I love you so, and I will miss you so. I want you to keep saying to yourself all the time, "This is the most serious effort he ever made, because the chances of seeing anything are so SMALL, and because never had he such a chance to HELP. But, all the time, every minute he thinks of me. He wants me. He misses my voice, my eyes, my presence at his side when he walks or sleeps. He never loved me so greatly, or at leaving me was so unhappy as he is now." Goodby, dear heart. My God-given one! Would it not be wonderful, if tonight when I am up among the boats on the top deck that girl in the Pierrot suit, and in her arms Hope, came, and I took them and held them both? You will walk with her at five, and I will walk and think of you and love you and long for you. God keep you, dearest of wives, and mothers. RICHARD. October 24. MY DEAR DAUGHTER: So many weeks have passed since I saw you that by now you are able to read this without your mother looking over your shoulder and helping you with the big words. I have six sets of pictures of you. Every day I take them down and change them. Those your dear mother put in glass frames I do not change. Also, I have all the sweet fruits and chocolates and red bananas. How good of you to think of just the things your father likes. Some of them I gave to a little boy and girl. I play with them because soon my daughter will be as big. They have no mother like you, OF COURSE; they have no mother like YOURS--for except my mother there never was a mother like yours; so loving, so tender, so unselfish and thoughtful. If she is reading this, kiss her for me. These little children have a little father. He dresses them and bathes them himself. He is afraid of the cold; and sits in the sun; and coughs and shivers. His children and I play hide-and-seek, and, as you will know some day, for that game there is no such place as a steamer, with boats and ventilators and masts and alleyways. Some day we will play that game hiding behind the rocks and trees and rose bushes. Every day I watch the sun set, and know that you and your pretty mother are watching it, too. And all day I think of you both. Be very good. Do not bump yourself. Do not eat matches. Do not play with scissors or cats. Do not forget your dad. Sleep when your mother wishes it. Love us both. Try to know how we love you. THAT you will never learn. Good-night and God keep you, and bless you. YOUR DAD. PARIS, November 1. DEAREST ONE: Today is "moving" day, and I feel like ---- censored word, at the thought of your having the moving to direct and manage by yourself. I can picture Barney and Burke loading, and unloading, and coal and wood being stored, and provisions and ice, and finally Hope brought down to take her third--no--fourth motor ride. And God will see she makes it all safely, and that in her new house you are comfortable. Last night I dreamed about Hope and you, a long dream, and it made me so happy. Something happened today that you will like to hear. When the war came the French students at the Beaux Arts had to go to fight. The wives and children had nothing to live on. So, the American students, about a dozen of them, organized a relief league. The Beaux Arts is in a most wonderful palace built by Cardinal Richelieu and decorated later by Napoleon. In this they were gathering socks, asphyxiating masks, warm clothes. They were hand painting postcards for fifty cents apiece. The "masters" as they call their teachers, also were painting them. I gave them some money which was received politely, but, as it would not go far, without much enthusiasm. As I was going, I said, "I'll be back tomorrow to get some facts and I'll write a story about what you're doing." This is the part that is embarrassing to write, but you will understand. They gave a cheer and a yell just as though I had said, "Peace is declared" or "I will give you Carnegie's fortune." And they danced around, and shook hands, and Whitney Warren, who is at the head of it, all but cried. Later, he told me the letter I had written for his wife's fund for orphans by the war had brought in $5000, that was why they were so pleased. So we, you and I, will try to look at it that way, and try to believe that from this separation, which is cruel for us, others may get some benefit. Tomorrow, I am to be received at the Elysee by the President, and I am going to try to make him say something that will draw money from America for the French hospitals. If he will only ask, I know our people will give. In a day or two, I think I will be allowed to see something, but, that you will know best by reading The Times. Your loving husband is lonely for you, and so it will be always. RICHARD. November 17th. DEAR SWEETHEART: My last letter was such a complaining one that I am ashamed. But, not leaving me to decide what was best for the papers, made me mad. Since I wrote, I ought to be madder, for I have been to the trenches outside of Rheims in Champagne; and, had they not deviled the spirit out of me with cables, I believe I could have written such a lot of stories of France that no one else has had the opportunity to write. Believe me no one has yet told the story of the trench war. Anyway, in spite of all the photographs and articles, to me it was all new. I was allowed to go alone, and given carte blanche to see whatever I wished. I saw everything, but it would not be possible to write of it yet. It was wonderful. I was in the three lines, reaching the FIRST line by moonlight. No one spoke above a whisper. The Germans were only 300 to 400 yards distant. But worst of all were the rats. They ran over my feet and I was a darned sight more afraid of them than the Germans. I saw the Cathedral, and the only hotel open (from which I sent you and Hope a postal) was the same one in which we stopped a year ago. I had sent the hotel my book in which I said complimentary things, and I got a great welcome. They even gave me a room with a fire in it, and so I was warm for the first time since I left the Crossroads. And this morning it SNOWED. On my way back to Paris, I stopped to tell the General what I had seen and to thank him. He said, "Oh, that is nothing. When you return, I will take you out myself, and I will show you something worth while." I am going to carry a rat-trap, and two terriers on a leash. Tonight, when I got back, there was a letter from you, but no writing, but there was a photo of Her, and me holding her. How is it possible that any living thing is so beautiful as my child? How fat, and wonderful, and dear, and lovable, and how terribly I want to hold her as I am holding her in the picture, and how much better as I really don't need my left arm to hold such a mite), if I had you close to me in it. I miss you so, and love you so! I told Wheeler before I left as I was not going to waste time traveling I would not go to Servia. So, as soon as I arrived, I was fretted with cables to go. I cabled to stop giving me advice, that I had a much better chance in France than anyone could have anywhere else. Maybe, before I arrive, the Greeks will have joined the Germans, in which case, I WON'T LEAVE THE SHIP. I'll come straight back on her to the Allies. RICHARD. November 20th. This is the way Hope's cat looks, "My whiskers!" she says, "I never knew I was to be let in for anything like this!" When I told her about the big rats in the trenches she wanted to go with me next time, but, today when I told her that the Crown Prince of Servia made his servants eat live mice (he is no longer Crown Prince), she looked just as she does in the picture. "Then, what do _I_ eat in Servia?" she said, and I told her both of us would live on goat's milk. You will be glad when I tell you I have been, warm. We came pretty far south in two days, and, the damp chill of Paris is gone. On the train a funny thing happened. An English officer and I got talking and he was press censor at Salonica where I am going after Athens. I asked him to look over the many letters I had and tell me if any of them would be likely to get me in bad, being addressed to pro-Germans, for example. He said, "Well, THIS chap is all right anyway. I'll vouch for him, because this letter is addressed to me." SEE THE CAT! HOPE GAVE THE CAT TO HER DAD. IS THE CAT SAD? YES IS THE DAD SAD? VERY!! WHY IS THE CAT AND THE DAD SAD? THEY WANT HOME AND HOPE. DO THEY LOVE HOPE? DON'T MAKE THEM LAUGH! We leave, the Basses, the English officer and I, in a small tub of a boat for Patras, and train to Athens. I will try to go at once to Servia. Harjes, who are the Paris house of J. P. Morgan, gave me a "mission" to try and organize for the Servians the same form of relief as has been arranged for the Belgians. He gave me permission if I saw the need for help was imminent (and it will be) to cable him for whatever I thought the Serbs most needed. So, it is a chance to do much. To get out news will be impossible. However, here I am and tomorrow I'll be good and seasick. I have your charm around my neck, and all the pictures, and the luck-bringing cat, and the scapular, and the love you give me to keep me well and bring us soon together. That is the one thing I want. God bless you both, Hope's dad and your husband. ATHENS, November 26th. DEAR HEART: I am off tonight for Salonica. I am not very cheerful for I miss you very, very terribly, and the further I go, the worse I feel. But now I am nearly as far as I can get, and when you receive this I will--thank God--be turned back to Paris, and London, and HOME! I thought so often of you this morning when I took a holiday and climbed the Acropolis. On the top of it I picked a dandelion for you. It was growing between the blocks of marble that have been there since 400 years before our Lord: before St. Paul preached to the Athenians. I was all alone on the rock, and could see over the AEgean Sea, Corinth, Mount Olympus, where the Gods used to sit, and the Sphinx lay in wait for travelers with her famous riddle. It takes two days and one night to go to Salonica, and the boats are so awful no one undresses but sleeps in his clothes on top of the bed. Goodby, sweetheart, and give SUCH a kiss to my precious daughter. How beautiful she is. Even the waiter who brought me a card stopped to exclaim about her picture. So, of course, being not at all proud I showed him her in my arms. I want you both so and I love you both SO. And, I wanted you so this morning as I always do when there is a beautiful landscape, or flowers, or palms. I know how you love them. The dandelion is very modest and I hope the censor won't lose it out, for she has a long way to go and carries a burden of love. I wish I was bringing them in the door of the Scribner cottage at this very minute. RICHARD. VOLO, November 27. I got here today, after the darnedest voyage of two days in a small steamer. We ran through a snow storm and there was no way to warm the boat. So, I DIED. You know how cold affects me--well--this was the coldest cold I ever died of. I poured alcohol in me, and it was like drinking iced tea. Now, I am on shore in a cafe near a stove. We continue on to Salonica at midnight. There are 24 men and one woman, Mrs. Bass, on board. I am much too homesick to write more than to say I love you, and I miss you and Hope so, that I don't look at the photos. Did you get the cable I sent Thanksgiving--from Athens, it read: "Am giving thanks for Hope and you." I hope the censor let that get by him. The boat I was on was a refrigerator ship; it was also peculiar in that the captain dealt baccarat all day with the passengers. It was a sort of floating gambling house. This is certainly a strange land. Snow and roses and oranges, all at once. I must stop. I'm froze. Give the kiss I want to give to Her, and know, oh! how I love and love and love her mother--NEVER SO MUCH AS NOW. SALONICA November 30th, 1915. DEAR OLD MAN: I got here to night and found it the most picturesque spot I ever visited. I am glad I came. It was impossible to get a room but I found John McCutcheon and two other men occupying a grand suite and they have had a cot put in for me. To-morrow I hope to get a room. The place is filled with every nation except Germans and even they are here out of uniforms. We had a strange time coming. The trip from Athens should have taken two nights and a day but we took four. The Captain of the boat anchored and played baccarat whenever he thought there were enough passengers not seasick to make it worth his while. He played from eleven in the morning until four in the morning. I don't know now who ran the ship. It is so cold when you bathe, the steam runs off you. I never have suffered so. But, it looked as though every one else was singing "Its going to be a hard, hard winter" from the way they, dress. Tomorrow I am going to buy fur pants. You can't believe what a picture it is. Servians, French, Greeks, Scots in kilts, London motor cars, Turks, wounded and bandaged Tommies and millions of them fighting for food, for drink, for a place at the "movies," and more "rumors" than there are words in the directory. To-morrow, I present my letters and hope to get to the "front." I only hope the front doesn't come to us. But, it ought to be a place for great stories. All love to you old man, and bless you both. How I look forward to our first lunch in your wonderful home! And to sit in front of your fire, and hear all the news. All love to you both. RICHARD. December 6, 1915. DEAREST ONE: I have been away so could not write. They took us to the French and English "front" and away from Greece; we were in Bulgaria and Servia. It was at a place where the three boundaries met. We saw remarkable mountain ranges and deep snow, and some fine artillery. But throwing shells into that bleak, white jumble of snow and rocks--there was fifty miles of it--was like throwing a baseball at the Rocky Mountains. Still, it was seeing something. Now, I have a room, and a very wonderful one. I had to bribe everyone in the hotel to get it; and I have something to write and, no more moving about I hope, for at least a week. I am able to see the ships at anchor for miles, and the landing stage for all the warships is just under my window. As near as McCoy Rock from the terrace. It is like a moving picture all the time. I bought myself an oil stove and a can of Standard oil, and, instead of trying to warm the hotel with my body, I let George do it. But it is a very small stove, and to really get the good of it, I have to sit with it between my legs. Still, it is such a relief to be alone, and not to pack all the time. McCutcheon and Bass, Hare and Shepherd are fine, but I felt like the devil, imposing on them, and working four in a room is no joke. We dine together each night. Except them, I see no one, but have been writing. Also, I have been collecting facts about Servian relief. Harjes, Morgan's representative in Paris, gave me carte blanche to call on him for money or supplies; but I waited until today to cable, so as to be sure where help was most needed. It is still cold, but that AWFUL cold spell was quite unprecedented and is not likely to come again. I NEVER suffered so from cold, and, as you know, I suffer considerable. All the English officers who had hunted in cold places, said neither had they ever felt such cold. Seven hundred Tommies were frost bitten and toes and fingers fell off. I do not say anything about how awful it is not to hear. But, if I had had your letters forwarded to this dump of the Levant, I never would have got them. Now, I have to wait for them until I get to Paris, but there I will surely get them. Cables, of course, can reach me, but no cables mean to me that you are all right. Nor do I want to "talk" about Christmas. You know how I feel about that, and about missing the first one SHE has had. But it will be the LAST one we will know apart. Never again! I want you in my arms and to hear you laugh and see your eyes. I am in need of you to make a fuss over me. McCutcheon and Co. don't care whether I have cold hands or not. You do. Your ointment and gloves saved my fingers from falling off like the soldiers' did. And your "housewife" I use to put on buttons, and, your scapular and medal keep me well. But your love is what really lifts me up and consoles me. When I think how you and I care for each other, then, I am scared, for it is very beautiful. And we must not ever be away from each other again. God keep you my beloved, and both my blessings. I cannot bear it--when I think of all I am missing of her, and, all that she is doing. God guard you both. My darling and dear wife and mother of Hope. Your husband, RICHARD. SALONICA, December 18th. DEAREST WIFE AND SWEETHEART: I am very blue tonight, and NEVER was so homesick. Yesterday just to feel I was in touch with you I sent a cable through the fog, it said, "Well, homesick, all love to you both." I did not ask if you and Hope were well, because I KNOW the good Lord will not let any harm come to you. I am certainly caught by the heels this time. And it will be the last time. As you know, I meant only to go to France where no time would be wasted in travel, and I would be able to get back soon. But the blockade held up the ship and on the other one the captain stayed at anchor, and, then when I got here, the Allies retreated, and I had to stay on to cover what is to come next. What that is, or whether nothing happens, you will know by the time this reaches you. So, here I am. For TEN days until this morning we have never seen the sun. In sixty years nothing like it has happened. The Salonicans said the English transports brought the fog with them. Anyway, I got it. My room is right on the harbor. I never thought I would LOVE an oil stove. I always thought they were ill-smelling, air-destroying. But this one saved my life. I wrote with it between my knees, I dry my laundry on it, and use the tin pan on top of it to take the dampness out of the bed. The fog kept everything like a sponge. Coal is thirty dollars a ton. To get wood for firewood the boatmen row miles out, and wait below the transports to get the boxes they throw overboard. I go around asking EVERYBODY if this place is not now a dead duck for news. But they all give me no encouragement. They say it is the news center of the world. I hope it chokes. I try to comfort myself by thinking you are happy, because you have Hope, and I have nobody, except John McCutcheon and Bass and Jimmie Hare, and they are as blue as I am, and no one can get any money. I cabled today to Wheeler for some via the State Department. I went to the Servian camp for the little orphans whose fathers have been killed, and they all knelt and kissed my hands. It was awful. I thought of Hope, and hugged a few and carried them around in my arms and felt much better. Today for the first time, I quit work and went to see an American film at the cinema to cheer me. But when I saw the streetcars, and "ready to wear" clothes, and the policemen I got suicidal. I went back and told the others and they all rushed off to see "home" things, and are there now. This is a yell of a letter, but it's the only kind I can write. My stories and cables are rotten, too. I have seen nothing--just traveled and waited for something to happen. Goodnight, dearest one. I love you so. You will never know how much I love you. Kiss my darling for me, and, think only of the good days when we will be together again. Such good days. Goodnight again--all love. RICHARD. HARBOR SALONICA, December 19th. I am a happy man tonight! And that is the first time I have been able to say so since I left you. The backbone of the trip is broken! and my face is turned West--toward you and Hope. John McCutcheon gave me a farewell dinner tonight of which I got one half, as the police made me go on board at nine, although we do not sail until five in the morning. So there was time for only one toast, as I was making for the door. Was it to your husband? It was not. It was to Hope Davis, two weeks yet of being one year old, and being toasted by the war correspondents in Salonica. They knew it would please me. And I went away very choken and happy. SUCH a boat as this is! I have a sofa in the dining-room, and at present it is jammed with refugees and all smoking and not an air port open. What a relief it will be to once more get among clean people. We must help the Servians, and God knows they need help. But, if they would help each other, or themselves, I would like them better. I am now on deck under the cargo light and, on the top floor of the Olympus Hotel, can see John's dinner growing gayer and gayer. It is like the man who went on a honeymoon alone. I am so happy tonight. You seem so near now that I am coming West. How terribly I have missed you, and wanted you, and longed for your voice and LAUGH, and to have you open the door of my writing room, and say, "A lady is coming to call on you," and then enter the dearest wife and dearest baby in the world! God bless you, and all my love. RICHARD. ROME, Christmas Eve, 1915. MY DEAREST, DEAREST, DEAREST: I planned to get to Paris late Christmas night. I cabled Frazier at the Embassy, to have all my letters at the Hotel de l'Empire. I MEANT to spend the night reading of you and Hope. I made a record trip from Salonica. By leaving the second steamer at Messina and taking an eighteen-hour trip across Italy I saved ten hours. But when I got here I found the French Consul had taken a holiday, AND WAS OUT BUYING CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! So, I could not get permission to enter France. With some Red Cross Americans, I raged around the French Consulate, but it was no use. So I am here, and cannot leave UNTIL MIDNIGHT CHRISTMAS. When I found I could not get away, I told Cook's to give me their rapid-fire guide, and I set out to SEE ROME. The Manager of Cook's was the same man who, 19 years ago, sold me tickets to the Greek war in Florence, when the American Consulate was in the same building with Cook's, and Charley was Consul. So he gave me a great guide. We began at ten this morning and we stopped at six. They say it takes five years to see Rome, but when I let the rapid-fire guide escape, he said he had to compliment me; we climbed more stairways and hills than there are in all New York and Westchester County; and there is just one idea in my mind, and that is that you and I must see this sacred place together. On all this trip I have wanted YOU, but NEVER so as today. And I particularly inquired about the milk. It is said to be excellent. So we will come here, and you, with all your love of what is fine and beautiful, will be very happy, and Hope will learn Italian, and to know what is best in art, and statues and churches. I have seen 2900 churches, and all of them built by Michael Angelo and decorated by Raphael; and it was so wonderful I cried. I bought candles and prayers, and I am afraid Christian Science had a dull day. Tomorrow we start at nine, and go to high mass at St. Peter's, and then into the country to the catacombs, where the early Christians hid from the Romans. It is not what you would call an English Christmas, but it is so beautiful and wonderful that you BOTH ARE VERY NEAR. I sent you a cable, the second one, because it is not sure they are forwarded, and I hung up a stocking for Hope. One of the peasant women made in Salonica. I am bringing it with me. And the cat is on my window--still looking out on the Romans. The green leaf I got in the forum, where Mark Antony made his speech over Caesar's body. It is the plant that gave Pericles the idea of the Corinthian column. You remember. It was growing under a tile some one had laid over it--and the yellow flower was on my table at dinner, so I send it, that we may know on Christmas Eve we dined together. Good-night, now, and God bless you. I am off to bed now, in a bed with sheets. The first in six days. How I LOVE you, and LOVE you. Such good wishes I send you, and such love to you both. May the good Lord bless you as he has blessed me--with the best of women, with the best of daughters. I am a proud husband and a proud father; and soon I will be a HAPPY husband and a HAPPY father. Good-night, dear heart. RICHARD. PARIS, December 28th, 1915. DEAR OLD MAN: Hurrah for the Dictator! He has been a great good friend to me. I will know to-day about whether I can go back to the French front. If not I will try the Belgians and then London, and home. I spent Christmas day in Rome in the catacombs. I could not wear my heart upon my sleeve for duchesses to peck at. It is just as you say, Dad and Mother made the day so dear and beautiful. I did not know how glad I would be to be back here for while the trip East led to no news value, to me personally it was interesting. But I am terribly tired after the last nine days, sleeping on sofas, decks, a different deck each night and writing all the time and such poor stuff. But, oh! when I saw Paris I knew how glad I was! WHAT a beautiful place, what a kind courteous people. We will all be here some day. Tell Dai she must be my interpreter. All love to her, and you, and good luck to the syndicate. YOUR syndicate. I have not heard from mine for six weeks. They have not sent me a single clipping of anything, so I don't know whether anything got through or not, and I have nothing to show these people here that might encourage them to send me out again. They certainly have made it hard hoeing. Tell Guvey his letter about the toys was a great success here, and copied into several papers. Goodbye, and God bless you, and good luck to you. DICK. PARIS, December 31st, 1915. DEAR OLD MAN: To wish you and Dai a Happy New Year. It will mean a lot to us when we can get together, and take it together, good and bad. I am awfully pleased over the novel coming out by the Harper's and, in landing so much for me out of The Dictator. You have started the New Year for me splendidly. I expect I will be back around the first of February. I am now trying to "get back," but, I need more time. I can only put the trip down to the wrong side of the ledger. Personally, I got a lot out of it, but I am not sent over here to improve my knowledge of Europe, but to furnish news and stories and that has not happened. I am constantly running against folks who knew you in Florence, and I regret to say most of them are in business at the Chatham bar. What a story they make; the M----'s and the like, who know Paris only from the cocktail side. One of our attaches told me to-day he had been lunching for the last 18 months at the grill room of the Chatham, where the "mixed grill" was as good as in New York. He had no knowledge of any other place to eat. The Hotel de l'Empire is a terrible tragedy. They are so poor, that I believe it is my eight francs a day keeps them going; nothing else is in sight. But, it is the exception. Never did a people take a war as the French take this worst of all wars. They really are the most splendid of people. I only wish I could have had one of them for a grandfather or grandmother. Bessie writes that Hope is growing wonderfully and beautifully, and I am sick for a sight of her, and for you. Good night and God bless you and the happiest of New Years to you both. Your loving brother, DICK. These postcards are "originals" painted by students of the Beaux-Arts to keep alive, and to keep those students in the trenches. They are for Dai. PARIS, December 31, 1915. DEAREST ONE: The old year, the dear, old year that brought us Hope, is very near the end. I am not going to watch him go. I have drunk to the New Year and to my wife and daughter, and before there is "a new step on the floor, and a new face at the door," I will be asleep. Of all my many years, the old year, that is so soon to pass away, has been the best, for it has brought you to me with a closer tie, has added to the love I have for every breath you breathe, for your laugh and your smile, and deep concern, that comes if you think your worthless husband is worried, or cross, or dismayed. Each year I love you more; for I know you more, and to know more of the lovely soul you are, is to love more. Just now we are in a hard place. I am sure you cannot comprehend how her father, her "Dad" and your husband can keep away. Neither do I understand. But, for both your sakes, I want, before I own up that this adventure has been a failure, to try and pull something out of the wreck. If the government says I CAN, then I still may be able to do something. If it says, "NO," then it's Home, boys, Home, and that's where I want to be. It's home, boys, home, in the old countree. 'Neath the ash, and the oak, and the spreading maple tree, it's home, boys, home, to mine own countree! This is Hope and you. So know, that in getting to you I have not thrown away a minute. I have been a slave-driver, to others as well as to myself. But you cannot get favors with a whip; and, the French war office has other matters to occupy it, that it considers of more importance than an impatient war correspondent. So long as you understand, it will not matter. Nothing hurts, except that you may not understand. The moment I see you, and you see me, you will understand. So, goodnight, and God bless you, you, my two blessings. Here is to our own year of 1915, your year and Hope's year, and, because I have you both, my year. I send you all the love in all the world. RICHARD. January 5, 1916. MY DEAREST ONE: WHAT PICTURES! WHAT HAPPINESS! What a proud Richard! On top of my writing yesterday that I had had no sketches of yours, and no kodaks of Hope, eight came to-night, and oh! I am so proud, so homesick. What a wonderful nurse and mother you are! Was ever there anything so lovable? And that she should be ours, to hold and to love, and to make happy. These last eight days in Paris, in and out, have made me so homesick for those I love, that you will never know what the delays meant. I felt just the way poor women feel who kidnap babies. In the parks I know the nurse-maids are afraid of me. I stick my head under the hoods of the baby carriages, and stop and stand watching them at play. And tonight when all these beautiful pictures came, I was the happiest father anywhere. The delay was no one's fault, not mine anyway, nor can I blame anyone. These people are splendid. They are willing to do anything for one, but it takes time. When they are fighting for their lives and have not seen their own babies in a year, that you want to see yours is only natural and to oblige you they can't see why they should upset the whole war. But now it looks less as though I would have to call it a failure. And Hope may be proud of me, and you may be proud of me, and I will have enough ammunition to draw on for many articles and letters, and another book. It has been a cruel time; and when I tell you how I worked to get it over, and to be back with you, you will understand many things. The most important of all will be how I love you. Only wait until I can lay eyes on you, you will just take one look and know that it couldn't be helped, that the delay was the work of others, that, all I wanted was my Bessie and my Hope. How heavy she will be, if she is anything like the picture of her on the coverlet, she is a prize baby. And if she is anything like as beautiful as in the baby carriage she is an angel straight from God. I want to sit in the green chair and have you on one knee and her majesty on the other, and have her climb over me, and pull my hair and bang my nose, and in time to know how I love you both. Goodnight, dear heart, I wish you had had yourself in the picture. I have three in the summer time with you holding her and that is the way I like to see you, that is the way I think of you. I love you, and I love her for making you so happy, and I love her for her sake, and because she is OURS: and has tied us tighter and closer even than it has ever been. I love you so that I can't write about it, and I am going to do nothing all spring but just sit around, and be in everybody's way, watching you together. How jealous I am of you, and homesick for you. Of course, she knows "mamma" is YOU; and to look at you when they ask, "Where's mother?" Who else could be her mother BUT THE DEAREST WOMAN IN THE WORLD, and the one who loves her so, and in so wonderful a way. She is beautiful beyond all things human I know. If ever a woman deserved a beautiful daughter, YOU DO, for you are the best of mothers, and you know how "to care greatly." Good-night, my precious, dear one, and God keep you, as He will, and help me to keep you both happy. What you give me you never will know. RICHARD. CHAPTER XX THE LAST DAYS After a short visit to London, Richard returned to New York in February, 1916. During his absence his wife and Hope had occupied the Scribner cottage at Mount Kisco, about two miles from Crossroads. Here my brother finished his second book on the war, and wrote numerous articles and letters urging the immediate necessity for preparedness in this country. As to Richard's usefulness to his country at this time, I quote in part from two appreciations written after my brother's death by the two most prominent exponents of preparedness. Theodore Roosevelt said: "He was as good an American as ever lived, and his heart flamed against cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book of Americanism which all our people would do well to read at the present time." Major-General Leonard Wood said: "The death of Richard Harding Davis was a real loss to the movement for preparedness. Mr. Davis had an extensive experience as a military observer, and thoroughly appreciated the need of a general training system like that of Australia or Switzerland and of thorough organization of our industrial resources in, order to establish a condition of reasonable preparedness in this country. A few days before his death he came to Governors Island for the purpose of ascertaining in what line of work he could be most useful in building up sound public opinion in favor of such preparedness as would give us a real peace insurance. His mind was bent on devoting his energies and abilities to the work of public education on this vitally important subject, and few men were better qualified to do so, for he had served as a military observer in many campaigns. "Throughout the Cuban campaign he was attached to the headquarters of my regiment in Cuba as a military observer. He was with the advanced party at the opening of the fight at Las Guasiinas, and was distinguished throughout the fight by coolness and good conduct. He also participated in the battle of San Juan and the siege of Santiago, and as an observer was always where duty called him. He was a delightful companion, cheerful, resourceful, and thoughtful of the interests and wishes of others. His reports of the game were valuable and among the best and most accurate. "The Plattsburg movement took a very strong hold of him. He saw in this a great instrument for building up a sound knowledge concerning our military history and policy, also a very practical way of training men for the duties of junior officers. He realized fully that we should need in case of war tens of thousands of officers with our newly raised troops, and that it would be utterly impossible to prepare them in the hurry and confusion of the onrush of modern war. His heart was filled with a desire to serve his country to the best of his ability. His recent experience in Europe pointed out to him the absolute madness of longer disregarding the need of doing those things which reasonable preparedness dictates, the things which cannot be accomplished after trouble is upon us. He had in mind at the time of his death a series of articles to be written especially to build up interest in universal military training through conveying to our people an understanding of what organization as it exists to-day means, and how vitally important it is for our people to do in time of peace those things which modern war does not permit done once it is under way. "Davis was a loyal friend, a thoroughgoing American devoted to the best interests of his country, courageous, sympathetic, and true. His loss has been a very real one to all of us who knew and appreciated him, and in his death the cause of preparedness has lost an able worker and the country a devoted and loyal citizen." Although suffering from his strenuous experiences in France, and more particularly from those in Greece, Richard continued to accomplish his usual enormous amount of work, and during these weeks wrote his last short story, "The Deserter." The following letter was written to me while I was in the Bahamas and was in reference to a novel which I had dedicated to Hope: MOUNT KISCO--February 28, 1916. DEAR OLD MAN: No word yet of the book, except the advts. I enclose. I will send you the notices as soon as they begin to appear. I am so happy over the dedication, and, very proud. So, Hope will be when she knows. As I have not read the novel it all will come as a splendid and pleasant surprise. I am looking forward to sitting down to it with all the pleasure in the world. You chose the right moment to elope. Never was weather so cold, cruel and bitter. Hope is the only one who goes out of doors. I start the fires in the Big House tomorrow and the plumbers and paper hangers, painters enter the day after. The attack on Verdun makes me sick. I was there six weeks ago in one of the forts but of course could not then nor can I now write of it. I don't believe the drive ever can get through. For two reasons, and the unmilitary one is that I believe in a just God. Give my love to Dai, and for you always DICK. P. S. I am happy you are both so happy, but those post cards with the palms were cruelty to animals. On the 21st of March, 1916, Richard and his wife and daughter moved from the Scribner cottage to Crossroads, and a few days later he was attacked by the illness that ended in his death on April 11. He had dined with his wife and afterward had worked on an article on preparedness, written some letters and telegrams concerning the same subject and, while repeating one of the latter over the telephone, was stricken. Within a week of his fifty-third year, just one year from the day he had first brought his baby daughter to her real home, doing the best and finest work of his career in the cause of the Allies and preparedness, quite unconscious that the end was near, he left us. In those fifty-two years he had crowded the work, the pleasures, the kind, chivalrous deeds of many men, and he died just as I am sure he would have wished to die, working into the night for a great cause, and although ill and tired, still fretful for the morning that he might again take up the fight. 
38035	----	[Illustration: _Henry James._ _1912._] /* THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES SELECTED AND EDITED BY PERCY LUBBOCK VOLUME II NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS */ CONTENTS /* VI. RYE (_continued_): 1904-1909 PAGE PREFACE 1 LETTERS: To W. D. Howells 8 To Edward Lee Childe 10 To W. E. Norris 12 To Mrs. Julian Sturgis 14 To J. B. Pinker 15 To Henry James, junior 16 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 18 To Edmund Gosse 19 To W. E. Norris 22 To Edmund Gosse 24 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 29 To Edward Warren 31 To Mrs. William James 32 To William James 34 To Miss Margaret James 36 To H. G. Wells 37 To William James 42 To W. E. Norris 45 To Paul Harvey 47 To William James 50 To William James 52 To Miss Margaret James 53 To Mrs. Dew-Smith 55 To Mrs. Wharton 56 To W. E. Norris 58 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 61 To Gaillard T. Lapsley 62 To Bruce Porter 65 To Miss Grace Norton 67 To William James, junior 71 To Howard Sturgis 72 To Howard Sturgis 74 To Madame Wagnière 76 To Mrs. Wharton 78 To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave 81 To William James 82 To W. E. Norris 84 To W. E. Norris 87 To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White 88 To Mrs. Wharton 90 To Gaillard T. Lapsley 92 To Mrs. Wharton 94 To Henry James, junior 96 To W. D. Howells 98 To Mrs. Wharton 104 To J. B. Pinker 105 To Miss Ellen Emmet 107 To George Abbot James 110 To Hugh Walpole 112 To George Abbot James 113 To W. E. Norris 114 To Mrs. Henry White 117 To W. D. Howells 118 To Edward Lee Childe 120 To Hugh Walpole 122 To Mrs. Wharton 123 To Arthur Christopher Benson 125 To Charles Sayle 127 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 129 To Miss Grace Norton 131 To William James 134 To H. G. Wells 137 To Miss Henrietta Reubell 139 To William James 140 To Mrs. Wharton 142 To Madame Wagnière 144 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 146 To Owen Wister 148 VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914 PREFACE 151 LETTERS: To T. Bailey Saunders 155 To Mrs. Wharton 156 To Miss Jessie Allen 158 To Mrs. Bigelow 159 To W. E. Norris 160 To Mrs. Wharton 161 To Mrs. Wharton 163 To Bruce Porter 164 To Miss Grace Norton 165 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 167 To Mrs. Wharton 168 To Mrs. Charles Hunter 170 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 171 To W. E. Norris 173 To Mrs. Wharton 175 To Miss Rhoda Broughton 178 To H. G. Wells 180 To C. E. Wheeler 183 To Dr. J. William White 184 To T. Bailey Saunders 186 To Sir T. H. Warren 188 To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand) 189 To Howard Sturgis 192 To Mrs. William James 194 To Mrs. John L. Gardner 195 To Mrs. Wharton 197 To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 199 To Miss Alice Runnells 201 To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 202 To Miss Theodora Bosanquet 204 To Mrs. William James 205 To Mrs. Wharton 208 To W. E. Norris 211 To Miss M. Betham Edwards 213 To Wilfred Sheridan 215 To Walter V. R. Berry 217 To W. D. Howells 221 To Mrs. Wharton 227 To H. G. Wells 229 To Lady Bell 231 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 234 To Hugh Walpole 236 To Miss Rhoda Broughton 238 To Henry James, junior 239 To R. W. Chapman 241 To Hugh Walpole 244 To Edmund Gosse 246 To Edmund Gosse 248 To Edmund Gosse 250 To Edmund Gosse 252 To Edmund Gosse 255 To Edmund Gosse 257 To H. G. Wells 261 To Mrs. Humphry Ward 264 To Mrs. Humphry Ward 265 To Gaillard T. Lapsley 267 To John Bailey 269 To Dr. J. William White 272 To Edmund Gosse 274 To Mrs. Bigelow 278 To Robert C. Witt 280 To Mrs. Wharton 281 To A. F. de Navarro 286 To Henry James, junior 288 To Miss Grace Norton 293 To Mrs. Henry White 296 To Mrs. William James 299 To Bruce Porter 302 To Lady Ritchie 304 To Mrs. William James 305 To Percy Lubbock 310 To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends 311 To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 313 To William James, junior 314 To Miss Rhoda Broughton 317 To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 319 To Hugh Walpole 322 To Mrs. Archibald Grove 324 To William Roughead 327 To Mrs. William James 329 To Howard Sturgis 330 To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 332 To H. G. Wells 333 To Logan Pearsall Smith 337 To C. Hagberg Wright 339 To Robert Bridges 341 To André Raffalovich 343 To Henry James, junior 345 To Edmund Gosse 348 To Bruce L. Richmond 350 To Hugh Walpole 352 To Compton Mackenzie 354 To William Roughead 356 To Mrs. Wharton 357 To Dr. J. William White 358 To Henry Adams 360 To Mrs. William James 361 To Arthur Christopher Benson 364 To Mrs. Humphry Ward 366 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 367 To Mrs. Wharton 369 To William Roughead 371 To William Roughead 373 To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 375 To Sir Claude Phillips 376 VIII. THE WAR 1914-1916 PREFACE 379 LETTERS: To Howard Sturgis 382 To Henry James, junior 385 To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 387 To Miss Rhoda Broughton 389 To Mrs. Wharton 391 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 392 To William James, junior 394 To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 397 To Mrs. Wharton 399 To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 401 To Mrs. Wharton 403 To Mrs. Wharton 405 To Mrs. T. S. Perry 406 To Miss Rhoda Broughton 408 To Edmund Gosse 409 To Miss Grace Norton 412 To Mrs. Wharton 414 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 416 To Henry James, junior 419 To Hugh Walpole 423 To Mrs. Wharton 425 To Mrs. T. S. Perry 427 To Edmund Gosse 430 To Miss Grace Norton 431 To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 434 To the Hon. Evan Charteris 436 To Compton Mackenzie 437 To Miss Elizabeth Norton 441 To Hugh Walpole 444 To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge 447 To Mrs. William James 449 To Mrs. Wharton 452 To the Hon. Evan Charteris 453 To Mrs. Wharton 456 To Thomas Sergeant Perry 459 To Edward Marsh 462 To Edward Marsh 464 To Mrs. Wharton 465 To Edward Marsh 468 To G. W. Prothero 469 To Wilfred Sheridan 470 To Edward Marsh 472 To Edward Marsh 474 To Compton Mackenzie 475 To Henry James, junior 477 To Edmund Gosse 480 To J. B. Pinker 482 To Frederic Harrison 483 To H. G. Wells 485 To H. G. Wells 487 To Henry James, junior 490 To Edmund Gosse 492 To John S. Sargent 493 To Wilfred Sheridan 494 To Edmund Gosse 496 To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 499 To Hugh Walpole 501 INDEX 503 */ ILLUSTRATIONS /* HENRY JAMES, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY E. O. HOPPÉ _Frontispiece_ PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY JAMES, 1906 _to face page 70._ */ VI RYE (_continued_) (1904-1909) The much-debated visit to America took place at last in 1904, and in ten very full months Henry James secured that renewed saturation in American experience which he desired before it should be too late for his advantage. He saw far more of his country in these months than he had ever seen in old days. He went with the definite purpose of writing a book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his youth. But his memories were practically of New York, Newport and Boston only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. The American Scene, rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir of movement, gives his account of the adventure. On the spot the daily assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his power of absorption. But the book he eventually wrote shews how fully that power was equal to it all--losing or wasting none of it, meeting and reacting to every moment. Ten months of America poured into his imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange material--the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage of interest. He was now more than sixty years old, but for such adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater than ever. He sailed from England at the end of August, 1904, and spent most of the autumn with William James and his family, first at Chocorua, their country-home in the mountains of New Hampshire, and then at Cambridge. The rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too many opportunities for extending and enlarging them. With Cambridge still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of New England, which had never reached far into the countryside. At Christmas he was in New York--the place that was much more his home, as he still felt, than Boston had ever become, yet of all his American past the most unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. He struck south, through Philadelphia and Washington, in the hope of meeting the early Virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. He found the right sub-tropical benignity in Florida, but a particular series of engagements brought him back after a brief stay. It had been natural that he should be invited to celebrate his return to America by lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment, was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. He began by delivering a discourse on "The Lesson of Balzac"--a closely wrought critical study, very attractive in form and tone--at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. He did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more travel and observation than he had expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis he reached California in April, 1905. "The Lesson of Balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to Bryn Mawr he wrote another paper, "The Question of our Speech"--an amusing and forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken English. The two lectures were afterwards published in America, but have not appeared in England. The beauty and amenity of California was an unexpected revelation to him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone before. Unluckily he did not write the continuation of The American Scene, which was to have carried the record on from Florida to the Pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed in a few hurried letters of the time. He was soon back in the east, at New York and Cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. The longing to discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. But he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was definitely in this American summer that he acquired a taste which was to bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of his life. The use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to which many friends were glad to help him--in New England at this time, later on at home, in France and in Italy. It renewed the romance of travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings, and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway. He reached Lamb House again in August, 1905, and immediately set to work on his American book. It grew at such a rate that he presently found he had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it impossible to go further with it. The wreckage of San Francisco, moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of 1906, drove his own Californian recollections still further from his mind. He left The American Scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation which engaged him very closely for the next two years. This was the preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited number of volumes. To read his own books was an entirely new amusement to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. He took each of them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying its substance in any way--where he was dissatisfied with the substance he rejected it altogether--but of bringing its surface, every syllable of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. At the same time, in the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the much-forgotten pages. It all represented a great expenditure of time and trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements. While he was on this work he scarcely stirred from Lamb House except for occasional interludes of a few weeks in London; and it was not until the spring of 1907 that he allowed himself a real holiday. He then went abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wharton in Paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and southern France. With all his French experience, Paris of the Faubourg St. Germain and France of the remote country-roads were alike almost new to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his imagination. From The American to The Ambassadors he had written scores of pages about Paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of The Velvet Glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time--a sight of the quays and the Seine on a blue and silver April night. From Paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved Italy. It was the tenth he had made since his settlement in England in 1876. Like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known Rome in youth, he found Rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly "chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, and in the Capuan plain. He spent a few days at a friend's house on the mountain-slope below Vallombrosa, and a few more, the best of all, in Venice, at the ever-glorious Palazzo Barbaro. That was the end of Italy, but he was again in Paris for a short while in the following spring, 1908, motoring thither from Amiens with his hostess of the year before. Meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure of the laborious edition of his works. He had taken no active step himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. The one-act "Covering End" (which had appeared in The Two Magics, disguised as a short story) became "The High Bid," in three acts; it was produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson at Edinburgh in March, 1908, and repeated by them in London in the following February, for a few afternoon performances at His Majesty's Theatre. "The Other House," a play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by another company, and "The Outcry" was written for a third. The two latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of the troubled time of illness which fell on Henry James with the beginning of 1910 and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all work for many months. But this new intrusion of the theatre into his life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his composure was more securely based. The misfortune was that again a considerable space of time was lost to the novel--and in particular to the novel of American life that he had designed to be one of the results of his year of repatriation. The blissful hours of dictation in the garden-house at Rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays; he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which came while he created aloud. But his keenest wish was to get back to the novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of 1909 when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. He never reached the American novel until four years later, and he did not live to finish it. _To W. D. Howells._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Jan. 8th, 1904. */ /* My dear Howells, */ I am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and greeting me most benevolently as I rise from the couch of solitary pain. Which means nothing worse than that I have been in bed with odious and inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of Christmas and New Year's correspondence. Not yet at my ease for writing, I thus inflict on you without apology this unwonted grace of legibility. It warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and sustaining a sense--in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous doubt of the energy of my intention. I know now more than ever how much I want to "go"--and also a good deal of why. Surely it will be a blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. Will you kindly say to Harvey for me that I shall have much pleasure in talking with him here of the question of something serialistic in the North American, and will broach the matter of an "American" novel in _no_ other way until I see him. It comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely long absence, I am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in presence of the native phenomena. I only feel tolerably confident that a reaction of some sort there will be. What affects me as indispensable--or rather what I am conscious of as a great personal desire--is some such energy of direct _action_ as will enable me to cross the country and see California, and also have a look at the South. I am hungry for Material, whatever I may be moved to do with it; and, honestly, I think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. You speak of one's possible "hates" and loves--that is aversions and tendernesses--in the dire confrontation; but I seem to feel, about myself, that I proceed but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions _lose_ themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction. However, you are much more passionate than I, and I will wait upon _your_ words, and try and learn from you a little to be shocked and charmed in the right places. What mainly appals me is the idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that I shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. If some gifted creature only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its customary bower, over there, for dear little Lamb House here, a really delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. However, I see I must wait for all tricks. This is all, or almost all, to-day--all except to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the _Ambassadors_ and cognate topics. The "International" is very presumably indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what I am _chronically_ booked for, so that truly, even, I feel it rather a pity, in view of your so benevolent colloquy with Harvey, that a longish thing I am just finishing should not be _disponible_ for the N.A.R. niche; the niche that I like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible niches. But "The Golden Bowl" isn't, alas, so employable.... Fortunately, however, I still cling to the belief that there are as good fish in the sea--that is, _my_ sea!... You mention to me a domestic event--in Pilla's life--which interests me scarce the less for my having taken it for granted. But I bless you all. Yours always, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Lee Childe._ /# The name of this friend, an American long settled in France, has already occurred (vol. i. p. 50) in connection with H. J.'s early residence in Paris. Mr. Childe (who died in 1911) is known as the biographer of his uncle, General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Confederate forces in the American Civil War. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. January 19th, 1904. */ /* My dear old Friend, */ ...You write in no high spirits--over our general _milieu_ or moment; but high spirits are not the accompaniment of mature wisdom, and yours are doubtless as good as mine. Like yourself, I put in long periods in the country, which on the whole (on this mild and rather picturesque south coast) I find in my late afternoon of life, a good and salutary friend. And I haven't your solace of companionship--I dwell in singleness save for an occasional imported visitor--who is usually of a sex, however, not materially to mitigate my celibacy! I have a small--a very nice perch in London, to which I sometimes go--in a week or two, for instance, for two or three months. But I return hither, always, with zest--from the too many people and things and words and motions--into the peaceful possession of (as I grow older) my more and more precious home hours. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience--or rather to _become_ itself (pour qui sait lire) experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. Besides, as an antidote to it, I have committed myself to going some time this year to America--my first expedition thither for 21 years. If I do go (and it is inevitable,) I shall stay six or eight months--and shall be probably much and variously impressed and interested. But I am already gloating over the sentiments with which I shall expatriate myself here. You ask what is being published and "thought" here--to which I reply that England never was the land of ideas, and that it is now less so than ever. Morley's Life of Gladstone, in three big volumes, is formidable, but rich, and is very well done; a type of frank, exhaustive, intimate biography, such as has been often well produced here, but much less in France: partly, perhaps, because so much cannot be told about the lives--private lives--of the grands hommes there. Of course the book is largely a history of English politics for the last 50 years--but very human and vivid. As for talk, I hear very little--none in this rusticity; but if I pay a visit of three days, as I do occasionally, I become aware that the Free Traders and the Chamberlainites _s'entredévorent_. The question bristles for me, with the rebarbative; but my prejudices and dearest traditions are all on the side of the system that has "made England great"--and everything I am most in sympathy with in the country appears to be still on the side of it, notably the better--the best--sort of the _younger_ men. Chamberlain hasn't in the least captured these.... But it's the midnight hour, and my fire, while I write, has gone out. I return again, most heartily, your salutation; I send the friendliest greeting to Mrs. Lee Childe and to the dear old Perthuis, well remembered of me, and very tenderly, and I am, my dear Childe, your very faithful old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* Lamb House, Rye. January 27th, 1904. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I have as usual a charming letter from you too long unanswered; and my sense of this is the sharper as, in spite of your eccentric demonstration of your--that is of _our_ disparities, or whatever (or at least of your lurid implication of them,) it all comes round, after all, to our having infinitely much in common. For I too am making arrangements to be "cremated," and my mind keeps yours company in whatever pensive hovering yours may indulge in over the graceful operations at Woking. If you will only agree to postpone these, on your own part, to the latest really convenient date, I would quite agree to testify to our union of friendship by availing myself of the same occasion (it might come cheaper for two!) and undergoing the process _with_ you. I find I do desire, from the moment the question becomes a really practical one, to throw it as far into the future as possible. Save at the frequent moments when I desire to die very _soon_, almost immediately, I cling to life and propose to make it last. I blush for the frivolity, but there are still so many things I want to do! I give you more or less an illustration of this, I feel, when I tell you that I go up to town tomorrow, for eight or ten weeks, and that I believe I have made arrangements (or incurred the making of them by others) to meet Rhoda Broughton in the evening (à peine arrivé) at dinner. But I shall make in fact a shorter winter's end stay than usual, for I have really committed myself to what is for me a great adventure later in the year; I have _taken_ my passage for the U.S. toward the end of August, and with that long absence ahead of me I shall have to sit tight in the interval. So I shall come back early in April, to begin to "pack," at least morally; and the moral preparation will (as well as the material) be the greater as it's definitely visible to me that I must, if possible, let this house for the six or nine months.... But what a sprawling scrawl I have written you! And it's long past midnight. Good morning! Everything else I meant to say (though there isn't much) is crowded out. /* Yours always and ever, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Julian Sturgis._ /# Julian Sturgis, novelist and poet, a friend of H. J.'s by many ties, had died on the day this letter was written. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. April 13, 1904. */ /* Dearest Mrs. Julian, */ I ask myself how I can write to you and yet how I cannot, for my heart is full of the tenderest and most compassionate thought of you, and I can't but vainly say so. And I feel myself thinking _as_ tenderly of him, and of the laceration of his consciousness of leaving you and his boys, of giving you up and ceasing to be for you what he so devotedly was. And that makes me pity him more than words can say--with the wretchedness of one's not having been able to contribute to help or save him. But there he is in his sacrifice--a beautiful, noble, stainless memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a single grossness or meanness or ugliness--the world's dust on the nature of thousands of men. Everything that was high and charming in him comes out as one holds on to him, and when I think of my friendship of so many years with him I see it all as fairness and felicity. And then I think of _your_ admirable years and I find no words for your loss. I only desire to keep near you and remain more than ever yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ TO J. B. PINKER. /# Mr. Pinker was now acting, as he continued to do till the end, as H. J.'s literary agent. This letter refers to _The Golden Bowl_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. May 20th, 1904. */ /* Dear Mr. Pinker, */ I will indeed let you have the whole of my MS. on the very first possible day, now not far off; but I have still, absolutely, to finish, and to finish right.... I have been working on the book with unremitting intensity the whole of every blessed morning since I began it, some thirteen months ago, and I am at present within but some twelve or fifteen thousand words of Finis. But I can work only in my own way--a deucedly good one, by the same token!--and am producing the best book, I seem to conceive, that I have ever done. I have really done it fast, for what it is, and for the way I do it--_the_ way I seem condemned to; which is to _overtreat_ my subject by developments and amplifications that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most durable in its quality. I have written, in perfection, 200,000 words of the G.B.--with the rarest perfection!--and you can imagine how much of that, which has taken time, has had to come out. It is not, assuredly, an economical way of work in the short run, but it is, for me, in the long; and at any rate one can proceed but in one's own manner. My manner however is, at present, to be making every day--it is now a question of a very moderate number of days--a straight step nearer my last page, comparatively close at hand. You shall have it, I repeat, with the very minimum further delay of which I am capable. I do not seem to know, by the way, _when_ it is Methuen's desire that the volume shall appear--I mean after the postponements we have had. The best time for me, I think, especially in America, will be about next October, and I promise you the thing in distinct time for that. But you will say that I am "over-treating" this subject too! Believe me yours ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 26th, 1904. */ /* Dearest H. */ Your letter from Chocorua, received a day or two ago, has a rare charm and value for me, and in fact brings to my eyes tears of gratitude and appreciation! I can't tell you how I thank you for offering me your manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror--which I foresee as a certainty; so that I accept without shame or scruple the beautiful and blessed offer of aid and comfort that you make me. I have it at heart to notify you that you will in all probability bitterly repent of your generosity, and that I shall be sure to become for you a dead-weight of the first water, the most awful burden, nuisance, parasite, pestilence and plaster that you have ever known. But this said, I prepare even now to _me cramponner_ to you like grim death, trusting to you for everything and invoking you from moment to moment as my providence and saviour. I go on assuming that I shall get off from Southampton in the Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the North German Lloyd line, on August 24th--the said ship being, I believe, a "five-day" boat, which usually gets in sometime on the Monday. Of course it will be a nuisance to you, my arriving in New York--if I do arrive; but that got itself perversely and fatefully settled some time ago, and has now to be accepted as of the essence. Since you ask me what my desire is likely to he, I haven't a minute's hesitation in speaking of it as a probable frantic yearning to get off to Chocorua, or at least to Boston and its neighbourhood, by the very first possible train, and it may be on the said Monday. I shall not have much heart for interposing other things, nor any patience for it to speak of, so long as I hang off from your mountain home; yet, at the same time, if the boat should get in late, and it were possible to catch the Connecticut train, I believe I could bend my spirit to go for a couple of days to the Emmets', _on the condition that you can go with me_. So, and so only, could I think of doing it. Very kindly, therefore, let them know this, by wire or otherwise, in advance, and determine for me yourself whichever you think the best move. Grace Norton writes me from Kirkland Street that she expects me _there_, and Mrs. J. Gardner writes me from Brookline that _she_ absolutely counts on me; in consequence of all of which I beseech you to hold on to me tight and put me through as much as possible like an express parcel, paying 50 cents and taking a brass check for me. I shall write you again next month, and meanwhile I'm delighted at the prospect of your being able to spend September in the mountain home. I have all along been counting on that as a matter of course, but now I see it was fatuous to do so--and yet rejoice but the more that this is in your power.... But good-night, dearest H.--with many caresses all round, ever your affectionate /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ /* Chocorua, N.H., U.S.A. September 16th, 1904. */ /* My dear, dear Lucy C.! */ One's too dreadful--I receive your note and your wire of August 23rd, in far New England, under another sky and in _such_ another world. I don't know by what deviltry I missed them at the _last_, save by that of the Reform being closed for cleaning and the use of the _Union_ (other Club) fraught with other errors and delays. But the Wednesday a.m. at Waterloo was horrible for crowd and confusion (passengers for ship so in their _thousands_,) and I can't be sorry you weren't in the crush (mainly of rich German-American Jews!) But that is ancient history, and the worst of this, now, here, is that, spent with letter-writing (my American postbag swollen to dreadfulness, more and more, and interviewers only kept at bay till I get to Boston and New York,) I can only make you to-night this incoherent signal, waiting till some less burdened hour to be more decent and more vivid. I came straight up here (where I have been just a fortnight,) and these New Hampshire mountains, forests, lakes, are of a beauty that I hadn't (from my 18th-20th years) dared to remember as so great. And such _golden_ September weather--though already turning to what the leaf enclosed (picked but by reaching out of window) is a very poor specimen of. It is a pure bucolic and Arcadian, wildly informal and un-"frilled" life--but sweet to me after long years--and with many such good old homely, farmy New England things to eat! Yet a she-interviewer pushed into it yesterday all the way from New York, 400 _miles_, and we ten miles from a station, on the mere _chance_ of me, and I took pity and _your_ advice, and surrendered to her more or less, on condition that I shouldn't have to read her stuff--and I _shan't_! So you see I am well _in_--and to-morrow I go to other places (one by one) and shall be in deeper. It's a vast, queer, wonderful country--too unspeakable as yet, and of which this is but a speck on the hem of the garment! Forgive this poverty of wearied pen to your good old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /* The Mount, Lenox, Mass. October 27th, 1904. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ The weeks have been many and crowded since I received, not very many days after my arrival, your incisive letter from the depths of the so different world (from this here;) but it's just because they have been so animated, peopled and pervaded, that they have rushed by like loud-puffing motor-cars, passing out of my sight before I could step back out of the dust and the noise long enough to dash you off such a response as I could fling after them to be carried to you. And during my first three or four here my postbag was enormously--appallingly--heavy: I almost turned tail and re-embarked at the sight of it. And then I wanted above all, before writing you, to make myself a notion of how, and where, and even _what_, I was. I have turned round now a good many times, though still, for two months, only in this corner of a corner of a corner, that is round New England; and the postbag has, happily, shrunken a good bit (though with liabilities, I fear, of re-expanding,) and this exquisite Indian summer day sleeps upon these really admirable little Massachusetts mountains, lakes and woods, in a way that lulls my perpetual sense of precipitation. I have moved from my own fireside for long years so little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten years previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains something of a terror and a paralysis to me--though I am getting to brave it, and to like it, as the sense of adventure, of holiday and romance, and above all of the great so visible and observable world that stretches before one more and more, comes through and makes the tone of one's days and the counterpoise of one's homesickness. I am, at the back of my head and at the bottom of my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a sustaining private reference, all the while (at every moment, verily,) to the fact that I have a tight anchorage, a definite little downward burrow, in the ancient world--a secret consciousness that I chink in my pocket as if it were a fortune in a handful of silver. But, with this, I have a most charming and interesting time, and [am] seeing, feeling, how agreeable it is, in the maturity of age, to revisit the long neglected and long unseen land of one's birth--especially when that land affects one as such a living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster as this one is. It is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic--partly, or largely from my intense impression (all this glorious golden autumn, with weather like tinkling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of the sweetness of the country itself, this New England rural vastness, which is all that I've seen. I've been only in the country--shamelessly visiting and almost only old friends and scattered relations--but have found it far more beautiful and amiable than I had ever dreamed, or than I ventured to remember. I had seen too little, in fact, of old, to have anything, to speak of, to remember--so that seeing so many charming things for the first time I quite thrill with the romance of elderly and belated discovery. Of Boston I haven't even had a full day--of N.Y. but three hours, and I have seen nothing whatever, thank heaven, of the "littery" world. I have spent a few days at Cambridge, Mass., with my brother, and have been greatly struck with the way that in the last 25 years Harvard has come to mass so much larger and to have gathered about her such a swarm of distinguished specialists and such a big organization of learning. This impression is increased this year by the crowd of foreign experts of sorts (mainly philosophic etc.) who have been at the St. Louis congress and who appear to be turning up overwhelmingly under my brother's roof--but who will have vanished, I hope, when I go to spend the month of November with him--when I shall see something of the goodly Boston. The blot on my vision and the shadow on my path is that I have contracted to write a book of Notes--without which contraction I simply couldn't have come; and that the conditions of life, time, space, movement etc. (really to _see_, to get one's material,) are such as to threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous work--which is the rock on which I may split altogether--wherefore my alarm is great and my project much disconcerted; for I have as yet scarce dipped into the great Basin at all. Only a large measure of Time can help me--to do anything as decent as I want: wherefore pray for me constantly; and all the more that if I can only arrive at a means of application (for I see, already, from here, my _Tone_) I shall do, verily, a lovely book. I am interested, up to my eyes--at least I think I am! But you will fear, at this rate, that I am trying the book on you already. I _may_ have to return to England only as a saturated sponge and wring myself out there. I hope meanwhile that your own saturations, and Mrs. Nelly's, prosper, and that the Pyrenean, in particular, continued rich and ample. If you are having the easy part of your year now, I hope you are finding in it the lordliest, or rather the _un_lordliest leisure.... I commend you all to felicity and am, my dear Gosse, yours always, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* Boston. [Dec. 15, 1904.] */ /* My dear Norris, */ There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st, to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th (from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland Torquay (_bland_, not blond)--a process having, to my fancy, a certain analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is neither Tokay nor Torquay--this slightly arduous process, or adventure, of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with the Dentist--which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it--but the experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated that anguish and dismay _only_ attend it while it goes on--embellished at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very precious for me here) and in my pocket--the latter of such a nature that I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak. But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only when I know I am quite whiningly homesick _en dessous_, for L.H. and Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience, and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like (in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day--I don't go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates notewriting as I do--but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few days--where I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I hope for sweeter things--Washington, which is amusing, and the South, and eventually California--with, probably, Mexico. But many things are indefinite--only I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I am much interested--for the time passes inordinately fast. Also the country is _unlike_ any other--to one's sensation of it; those of Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other than they are all different from this--or rather this from them. But forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really _done_ and demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal. Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear Norris, very constantly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /* The Breakers Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida. February 16th, 1905. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ I seem to myself to be (under the disadvantage of this extraordinary process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and yet I blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to _you_ again--since the arrival of your so genial New Year's greeting. I have been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of _recueillement_ and meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize. And when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the sense of accumulated and congested matter. So I won't attempt to remount the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. It was from Lenox, Mass., I think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that I last wrote you. I reverted thence to Boston, or rather, mainly, to my brother's kindly roof at Cambridge, hard by--where, alas, my five or six weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of American transcendent _Dentistry_--a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and expense, into which I sank unwarily (though, I now begin to see, to my great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which I have not yet touched the _fin fond_. (I mention it as accounting for treasures of wrecked _time_--I could do nothing else whatever in the state into which I was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated as to everything--"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through the land.) But I was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to New York, where I passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (Dec. and early Jan.;) appalled, mainly, I mean, by the ferocious discomfort this season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether unspeakable city--from which I fled in turn to Philadelphia and Washington. (I am going back to N.Y. for three or four weeks of developed spring--I haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done" it.) Things and places southward have been more manageable--save that I lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched Biltmore, in North Carolina, the extraordinary colossal French château of George Vanderbilt in the said N.C. mountains--the house 2500 feet in air, and a thing of the high Rothschild manner, but of a size to contain two or three Mentmores and Waddesdons.... Philadelphia and Washington would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to face--will yield it me then; but I can only glance and pass--glance at the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating President--who was kind to me, as was dear J. Hay even more, and wondrous, blooming, aspiring little Jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. But I liked poor dear queer flat comfortable Philadelphia almost ridiculously (for what it is--extraordinarily _cossu_ and materially civilized,) and saw there a good deal of your friend--as I think she is--Agnes Repplier, whom I liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (You'll be glad to hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) However, I am tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt away--and my letter mustn't grow out of my control. I have worked down here, yearningly, and for all too short a stay--but ten days in all; but Florida, at this southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify me--giving me my first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or _à peu près_, the subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which I had no idea. This is an amazing winter-resort--the well-to-do in their tens, their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the extraordinary agrément of which (I mean of course the high pitch of mere monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way _in_ which, things are done over here changes and changes. When I remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! It will give me brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. Alas, however, with perpetual movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get themselves written--so little can they be notes of the current picturesque--like one's European notes. They can only be notes on a social order, of vast extent, and I see with a kind of despair that I shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my intellectual sponge--reserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah, the so yearned-for peace of Lamb House. It's all interesting, but it isn't thrilling--though I gather everything is more really curious and vivid in the West--to which and California, and to Mexico if I can, I presently proceed. Cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of steamer--and I am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that flamboyant flower. _Saint Augustine, Feb. 18th._ I had to break off day before yesterday, and I have completed meanwhile, by having come thus far north, my sad sacrifice of an intenser exoticism. I am stopping for two or three days at the "oldest city in America"--two or three being none too much to sit in wonderment at the success with which it has outlived its age. The paucity of the signs of the same has perhaps almost the pathos the signs themselves would have if there _were_ any. There is rather a big and melancholy and "toned" (with a patina) old Spanish fort (of the 16th century,) but horrible little modernisms surround it. On the other hand this huge modern hotel (Ponce de Leon) is in the style of the Alhambra, and the principal church ("Presbyterian") in that of the mosque of Cordova. So there are compensations--and a tiny old Spanish cathedral front ("earliest church built in America"--late 16th century,) which appeals with a yellow ancientry. But I must pull off--simply sticking in a memento[A] (of a public development, on my desperate part) which I have no time to explain. This refers to a past exploit, but the leap is taken, is being renewed; I repeat the horrid act at Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco and later on in New York--_have_ already done so at Philadelphia (always to "private" "literary" or Ladies' Clubs--at Philadelphia to a vast multitude, with Miss Repplier as brilliant introducer. At Bryn Mawr to 700 persons--by way of a _little_ circle.) In fine I have waked up _conférencier_, and find, to my stupefaction, that I can do it. The fee is large, of course--otherwise! Indianapolis offers £100 for 50 minutes! It pays in short travelling expenses, and the incidental circumstances and phenomena are full of illustration. I can't do it _often_--but for £30 a time I should easily be able to. Only that would be death. If I could come back here to abide I think I should really be able to abide in (relative) affluence: one can, on the spot, make so much more money--or at least I might. But I would rather live a beggar at Lamb House--and it's to that I shall return. Let my biographer, however, recall the solid sacrifice I shall have made. I have just read over your New Year's eve letter and it makes me so homesick that the bribe itself will largely seem to have been on the side of the reversion--the bribe to one's finest sensibility. I have published a novel--"The Golden Bowl"--here (in two vols.) in advance (15 weeks ago) of the English issue--and the latter will be (I don't even know if it's out yet in London) in so comparatively mean and fine-printed a London form that I have no heart to direct a few gift copies to be addressed. I shall convey to you somehow the handsome New York page--don't read it till then. The thing has "done" much less ill here than anything I have ever produced. But good-night, verily--with all love to all, and to Mrs. Nelly in particular. /* Yours always, HENRY JAMES. */ [A] Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of Balzac), Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905. _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ /* Hotel Ponce de Leon, St. Augustine, Florida. February 21st, '05. */ /* Dearest old Friend! */ I am leaving this subtropical Floridian spot from one half hour to another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me, that I simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare at it till it pauses long enough to let me--as it were--embrace you. Yet I feel, have felt, all along, that you will have _understood_, and that words are wasted in explaining the obvious. Letters, all these weeks and weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a dense crowd even as the San Marco pigeons, in Venice, round him who appears _to_ have corn to scatter. So the whole queer time has gone in my scattering corn--scattering and chattering, and being chattered and scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people (the _only_ thing to do here--since things, apart from people, are _nil_;) in _staying_ with them, literally, from place to place and week to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone--that is mostly, thank God--to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of the problem of "seeing" the country. I _am_ seeing, very well--but the weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at times, surpassing. It would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,) _anywhere_; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here. Vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with a country that has fifty principal cities--each a law unto itself--and unto _you_: England, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. On the other hand it is distinctly interesting--the business and the country, as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a _funniness_ that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't _get_ something....And meanwhile I am _lecturing_ a little to pay the Piper, as I go--for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times. But they give me gladly £50 for 50 minutes (a pound a minute--like Patti!)--and always for the same lecture (as yet:) _The Lesson of Balzac_. I do it beautifully--feel as if I had discovered my vocation--at any rate amaze myself. It is _well_--for without it I don't see how I could have held out. ...This winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards, blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their usual soft selves. Yet the very south tiptoe of Florida, from which I came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement. I _wanted_ to put over to Cuba--but one night from this coast; but it was, for reasons, not to be done--reasons of time and money. I _shall_ try for Mexico--and meanwhile pray for me hard. My visit is doing--_has_ done--my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. _The Golden Bowl_ is in its _fourth_ edition--unprecedented! You see I "answer" your last newses and things not at all--not even the note of anxiety about T. Such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. But I drink in everything you tell me, and I cherish you all always and am yours and the children's twain ever so constantly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Warren._ /* University Club, Chicago. March 19th, 1905. */ /* Dearest Edward, */ This is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were, between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter (of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here. I'm not pretending to write--I can't; it's impossible amid the movement and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming _muchness_ of space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people (consuming.) I start in a few hours straight for California--enter my train this, Monday, night 7.30, and reach Los Angeles and Pasadena at 2.30 Thursday afternoon. The train has, I believe, barber's shops, bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if I can add a postscript, without too much joggle, I will. But you will say "_Here_ is joggle enough," for alack, I am already (after 17 days of the "great Middle West") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of such an unimagined dreariness of _ugliness_ (on many, on most sides!) and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one doesn't like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! So much of it is rank with good intentions. And then the "kindness"--the princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of _power_, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social, financial) everywhere! This Chicago is huge, _infinite_ (of potential size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, _old_-looking, very like some preternaturally _boomed_ Manchester or Glasgow lying beside a colossal lake (Michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. Yet this club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a benediction to me in the looming largeness; I _live_ here, and they put one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the _universal_ joy of this country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost a consolation for many things.) I have been to the south, the far end of Florida &c--but prefer the far end of Sussex! In the heart of golden orange-groves I yearned for the shade of the old L.H. mulberry tree. So you see I am loyal, and I sail for Liverpool on July 4th. I go up the whole Pacific coast to Vancouver, and return to New York (am due there April 26th) by the Canadian-Pacific railway (said to be, in its first half, sublime.) But I scribble beyond my time. Your letters are really a blessed breath of brave old Britain. But oh for a talk in a Westminster panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining Camber sands! All love to Margaret and the younglings. I have again written to Jonathan--he will have more news of me for you. Yours, dearest Edward, almost in nostalgic _rage_, and at any rate in constant affection, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ /* Hotel del Coronado, Coronado Beach, California. Wednesday night, April 5th, 1905. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ I must write you again before I leave this place (which I do tomorrow noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. I haven't all this while--that is these several days--had the letters which I am believing you will have forwarded to Monterey sent down to me here. This I have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article, and wishing to finish it at any price, I have felt that I should go to pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come tumbling in upon me--and particularly if any of it should be troublous. However, I devoutly hope none of it has been troublous--and I have done my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where I have been. Also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this spot. California, on these terms, when all is said (Southern C. at least--which, however, the real C., I believe, much repudiates,) has completely bowled me over--such a delicious difference from the rest of the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate, fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.) The days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, which fairly _rage_, with radiance, over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than this. I live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid list of the Pacific, which my windows overhang. I wish poor heroic Harry could be here--the thought of whose privations, while I wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and poisons much of my profit. I go back to Los Angeles to-morrow, to (as I wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) Lecture to a female culture club of 900 members (whom I make pay me through the nose,) and on Saturday p.m. 8th, I shall be at Monterey (Hotel del Monte.) But my stay there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that I see myself _brûlant mes étapes_, alas, without exception, and cutting down my famous visit to Seattle to a couple of days. It breaks my heart to have so stinted myself here--but it was inevitable, and no one had given me the least inkling that I should find California so sympathetic. It is strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever takes the trouble to give one beforehand. I should like to stay here all April and May. But I am writing more than my time permits--my article is still to finish. I ask you no questions--you will have told me everything. I live in the hope that the news from Wm. will have been good. At least at Monterey, may there be some.... But good night--with great and distributed tenderness. Yours, dearest Alice, always and ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James._ _Dictated._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. July 2nd, 1905. */ /* Dearest W., */ I am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be even greater for yourself, I think, than for me.... Your good letter of farewell reached me at Lenox, from which I returned but last evening--to learn, however, from A., every circumstance of your departure and of your condition, as known up to date. The grim grey Chicago will now be your daily medium, but will put forth for you, I trust, every such flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. May you not regret, at any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. Alice tells me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little interval here, as I sympathetically understand) to the Adirondacks: where I hope for you as big a bath of impersonal Nature as possible, with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of _personal_: in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. I seem greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the Adirondack boarder....I greatly enjoyed the whole Lenox countryside, seeing it as I did by the aid of the Whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and one may get from it. The potent way it deals with a country large enough for it not to _rudoyer_, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge netful of impressions at once--this came home to me beautifully, convincing me that if I were rich I shouldn't hesitate to take up with it. A great transformer of life and of the future! All that country charmed me; we spent the night at Ashfield and motored back the next day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of 80 miles between luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged for the sake of good roads....But I mustn't rattle on. I have still innumerable last things to do. But the portents are all propitious--_absit_ any ill consequence of this fatuity! I am living, at Alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet light to carry. But good bye now. Your last hints for the "Speech" are much to the point, and I will try even thus late to stick them in. May every comfort attend you! /* Ever yours, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Margaret James._ /# The project of a book on London was never carried further, though certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, _The Middle Years_, written in 1914-15, no doubt shew the kind of line it would have taken. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 3rd, 1905. */ /* Dearest Peg, */ ...In writing to your father (which, however, I shall not be able to do by this same post) I will tell him a little better what has been happening to me and why I have been so unsociable. This unsociability is in truth all that has been happening--as it has been the reverse of the medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to work) that awaited me here after I parted with you. I have been working in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my American Book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked it off. It does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way--and yet I did, I think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain thing. I really find in fact that I have more impressions than I know what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate I am going, I shall have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. I have already produced almost the substance of one--which I have been sending to "Harper" and the N.A.R., as per contract; though publication doesn't begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. And then (please mention to your Dad) all the time I haven't been doing the American Book, I have been revising with extreme minuteness three or four of my early works for the Edition Définitive (the settlement of some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between my "agent" and my New York publishers; not, however, in a manner to indicate, I think, a real hitch.) Please, however, say nothing whatever, any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. These things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. That for your Dad--I mean the information as well as the warning, in particular; on whom, you see, I am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal of my letter. Mention to him also that still other tracts of my time, these last silent weeks, have gone, have _had_ to go, toward preparing for a job that I think I mentioned to him while with you--my pledge, already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial "social" _London_ (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of Marion Crawford's _Ave Roma Immortalis_) for the Macmillans; and I have been feeling so nervous of late about the way America has crowded me off it, that I have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require of me. All this to show you that I haven't been wantonly uncommunicative. But good-night, dear Peg; I am going to do another for Aleck. With copious embraces, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 19th, 1905. */ /* My dear Wells, */ If I take up time and space with telling you why I have not _sooner_ written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, I shall have, properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more important matter. And yet I _must_ say, in three words, that my course has been inevitable and natural. I found your first munificence here on returning from upwards of 11 months in America, toward the end of July--returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. I recognized, even from afar (I had already done so) that the Utopia was a book I should desire to read only in the right conditions of _coming_ to it, coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention, adequate honours, for it of every sort. So, not bolting it like the morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and knowing, moreover, I had already shown you that though I was slow I was safe, and even certain, I "came to it" only a short time since, and surrendered myself to it absolutely. And it was while I was at the bottom of the crystal well that Kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. I took my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little by little, in the dingy air of the actual, I found Kipps, in his place, awaiting me--and from his so different but still so utterly coercive embrace I have just emerged. It was really very well he was there, for I found (and it's even a little strange) that I could read _you_ only--_after you_--and don't at all see whom else I could have read. But now that this is so I don't see either, my dear Wells, how I can "write" you about these things--they make me want so infernally to talk with you, to see you at length. Let me tell you, however, simply, that they have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation--in fact, the only interesting one. These things do you, to my sense, the highest honour, and I am lost in amazement at the diversity of your genius. As in everything you do (and especially in these three last Social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily (in the Utopia) obsesses me and reduces me--to that degree that even the colossal dimensions of your Cheek (pardon the term that I don't in the least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. Indeed your Cheek is positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when I say it doesn't break the charm, I probably mean that it largely constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony that no one else among us begins to have--so that we are starving, in our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist _with_ irony--as poor dear old Thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you come, admirably, to save us. There are too many things to say--which is so exactly why I can't write. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is _any_ young-man-at-Sandgate's offered Plan for the life of Man--but so far from thinking that a disqualification of your book, I think it is positively what makes the performance heroic. I hold, with you, that it is only by our each contributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that anything will come, and I think there is nothing in the book truer and happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of the future. Meantime you set a magnificent example--of _caring_, of feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the shockingly sick actuality of things. Your epilogue tag in italics strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty. Bravo, bravo, my dear Wells! And now, coming to Kipps, what am I to say about Kipps but that I am ready, that I am compelled, utterly to _drivel_ about him? He is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem--you having, I know not how, taken a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how immitigably the thing is done--it is of such a brilliancy of _true_ truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first time treated the English "lower middle" class, etc., without the picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its _own_ strong light. And then the book has throughout such extraordinary life; everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so vivid and sharp and _raw_. Kipps himself is a diamond of the first water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; Coote is consummate, Chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with Chitterlow perhaps the most brilliant thing in the book--unless that glory be reserved for the way the entire matter of the _shop_ is done, including the admirable image of the boss.) It all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition. I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a night--some time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31st--when I go up to London for three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmas--and I go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would await you with rapture. And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent) meanness over the _Golden Bowl_. I was in America when that work appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible, handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it, and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your disposition--but I have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it. You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will have it. I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my dear Wells, more than ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 23rd, 1905. */ /* Dearest William, */ I wrote not many days since to Aleck, and not very, very many before to Peggy--but I can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging your so liberal letter of Oct. 22nd (the one in which you enclosed me Aleck's sweet one,) albeit I have been in the house all day without an outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now 11 p.m. and I am rather fagged.... However, I shall write to Alice for information--all the more that I deeply owe that dear eternal Heroine a letter. I am not "satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only I hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited contribution to the post. The worst of these bad manners are now over, and please tell Alice that my very next letter shall be to her. Only _she_ mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it, before she hears from me. I take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the while--especially Harry and Bill, and especially Peg, and above all, Aleck--in addition to Alice and you. I turn you over (in my spiritual pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my use) tied-up fortune. I have great joy (tell him with my love) of the news of Bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint at it. Tell him, at any rate, how I await him, for his holidays, out here--on this spot--and I wish I realized more richly Harry's present conditions. I await him here not less. I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the _Golden B._) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as Brother--but let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you _do_ like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written. Still I _will_ write you your book, on that two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds us is produced, and _then_ descend to my dishonoured grave--taking up the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush (vide my lecture on Balzac.) But it is, seriously, too late at night, and I am too tired, for me to express myself on this question--beyond saying that I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, _as_ mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions that have been its main reason for being (with _me_) appear never to have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life, the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge. I see nowhere about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the _interest_ of the doing of the novel--and yet it is in a sacrifice of them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently consists. It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual lives. And yet I can read _you_ with rapture--having three weeks ago spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching there (by the habit of the house,) I found time to read several of--with the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that I so often, in Irving St., saw you address to others who were not your brother. I had no time to read them there. Philosophically, in short, I am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this and get me over altogether.--There are two books by the way (one fictive) that I permit you to _raffoler_ about as much as you like, for I have been doing so myself--H. G. Wells's _Utopia_ and his _Kipps_. The _Utopia_ seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his characteristic cheek, and _Kipps_ is quite magnificent. Read them both if you haven't--certainly read Kipps.--There's also another subject I'm too full of not to mention the good thing I've done for myself--that is, for Lamb House and my garden--by moving the greenhouse away from the high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up better--against the _street_ wall) and thereby throwing the liberated space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and beautification.... /* But oh, fondly, good-night! Ever your HENRY. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 23rd, 1905. */ /* My dear Norris, */ It is my desire that this, which I shall post here to-morrow, shall be a tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on Christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. But the aged and infirm propose and the postman disposes and I can only hope I shall not be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. If my mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) Underbank, I still see you in a Devonshire mild light and feel your Torquay window letting in your Torquay air--which, at this distance, in this sadly Southeasternized corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. It was a real pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the same moment. But there are hours and seasons--and I know the face of them well--when my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing else, becomes absolute--London tending rather over-much, moreover, to set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too susceptible and guileless old country mouse. All my consciousness centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of managing to do an "American book" (or rather a couple of them,) that I had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that I had there, in fact, utterly to forswear--time, energy, opportunity to write, every possibility quite failing me--with the consequence of my material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of still _seeing_ it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand lengths ahead of me. I shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce my copy somehow (I have indeed practically done one vol. of "Impressions"--there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;) but I am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the way--the sweet wayside of Pall Mall--or to turn either to the right or the left. (My subject--unless I grip it tight--melts away--Rye, Sussex, is so little like it; and then where am I? And yet the thing interests me to do, though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. But I didn't mean to tell you this long story about it.) I hope you are plashing yourself in more pellucid waters--and I find I _assume_ that there is in every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of the neighbouring presence of your (as I again, and I trust not fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. I should greatly like, here, a collateral or two myself--to find the advantage, across the sea, of the handful of those of mine who _are_ sympathetic, makes me miss them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which is more than kind, but less than kin.... I spend the month of January, further, in this place--then I do seek the metropolis for 12 or 14 weeks. I expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or other (sculling for preference) in your Bank Holiday Sports--so for heaven's sake don't disappoint me. You're my one link with the Athletic world, and I like to be able to talk about you. Therefore, àpropos of cups, all power to your elbow! I know none now--no cup--but the uninspiring cocoa--which I carry with a more and more doddering hand. But I am still, my dear Norris, very lustily and constantly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Paul Harvey._ /* Lamb House, Rye. March 11, 1906. */ /* My dear Paul, */ ...It is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of you--ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim confines of the Empire, and make you thereby more accessible and conversible. Only I reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of South Kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, I, alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which Salonica and even furthest Ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no crown at all, most probably--not even "heavenly," and no communication with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling communication I have just had from--or through--a "Medium" in America (near Boston,) a message purporting to come from my Mother, who died 25 years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a séance at which my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but _me_--not _possibly_ either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and _initiated_ and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I repeat, I am astounded!--and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this importunate mention of it to you! But the letter retailing it arrived only this a.m. and I have been rather full of it.)--I had heard of your present whereabouts from Edward Childe ... and I give you my word of honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my inextinguishable interest in you. I came back from the U.S. after an absence of nearly a year (11 months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy at returning to this so little American nook took the form of my having stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till almost the other day ... I found my native land, after so many years, interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult to see and deal with in any extended and various way than I had supposed. I was able to do with it far less than I had hoped, in the way of visitation--I found many of the conditions too deterrent; but I did what I could, went to the far South, the Middle West, California, the whole Pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the Eastern cities. It is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say there, giving one, I think, an immense impression of material and political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at Lamb House, Rye--if one happens to have a poor little L.H., R., to crouch in. This I am accordingly doing very hard--with intervals of London inserted a good deal at this Season--I go up again, in a few days, to stay till about May. So I am not making history, my dear Paul, as you are; I am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. Vous avez beau dire, you, and Mrs Paul, and Miss Paul, are making that of Europe--though you don't appear to realize it any more than M. Jourdain did that he was talking prose. Have patience, meanwhile--you will have plenty of South Kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and where Miss Paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the L.H. point of view, a family of thrilling Romance. And it _must_ be interesting to améliorer le sort des populations--and to see real live Turbaned Turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea, a house from which you look at divine Olympus. You live with the gods, if not like them--and out of all this unutterable Anglo-Saxon banality--so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear Arthur Balfour. I take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three, next summer. I count, fondly, on your presence here and I send the very kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. The elder is of course still very young, but how old the younger must now be! ...Yours, my dear Paul, always and ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James._ /# Professor and Mrs. William James had been in California at this time of the great San Francisco earthquake and conflagration. They fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days H. J. had been in deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 4th, 1906. */ /* Beloved Ones! */ I wrote you, feverishly, last Saturday, but now comes in a blest cable from Harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at Denver and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for which I have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that I scrawl you these still agitated words of jubilation--though I can't seem to you less than incoherent and beside the mark, I fear, till I have got your letter from Stanford which Harry has already announced his expedition of on the 28th. (This must come in a day or two more.) Meanwhile there was three days ago an excellent letter in the _Times_ from Stanford itself (or P.A.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. I had at first believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of phenomena about you. But how do I know, after all, even yet? and I await your light with an anxiety that still endures. I have just parted with Bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow--(I going in the evening to the "Academy Dinner.") I have, since the arrival of Harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance--the second to that effect, not this of to-day, which makes the third and best--I have been, as I say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the Whartons, much frustrated by bad weather and from which I impatiently and prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that I have been separated from B. for 48 hours. But I tell you of him rather than talk to you, in the air, of your own weird experiences. He is to go on to Paris on the 6th, having waited over here to go to the Private View of the Academy, to see me again, and to make use of Sunday 6th (a _dies non_ in Paris as here) for his journey. It has been delightful to me to have him near me, and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the National Gallery, from which he derives (as also from the Wallace Collection) great stimulus and profit. I am extremely struck with his _seriousness_ of spirit and intention--he seems to me _all_ in the thing he wants to do (and awfully intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... What a family--with the gallantries of the pair of _you_ thrown in! Well, you, beloved Alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and I was preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or perish--whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and I hope the effects will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. What I really now _most_ feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. I really think I must go over to you again for a month--just to listen to you. But I wait and am ever more and more fondly your /* HENRY. */ _To William James._ /* The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W. May 11th, 1906. */ /* Dearest William, */ To-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of April 19th and Alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the same,) addressed to Irving St. and forwarded by dear Peg, to whom all thanks ... I have written to Harry a good deal from the first, and to your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck into it. Most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures dashed down--or rather so calmly committed to paper--by both of you in the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had altogether. What a noble act your taking your Miss Martin to the blazing and bursting San Francisco--and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must have given to the sublime Alice. Dearest sublime Alice, your details of feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes. I hope all the later experience didn't turn to _worse_ dreariness and weariness--it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole associated elements of drama. Yet how differently I read it all from knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood--where I hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. How your mother must have folded you in! I kept thinking of her, for days, please tell her, almost more than of you! It's hideous to want to condemn you to _write_ on top of everything else--yet I sneakingly hope for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight home--just to talk with you for a week. ...I return to Rye on the 16th with rapture--after too long a tangle of delays here. However, it is no more than the right moment for adequate charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.--But why do I talk of these trifles when what I am after all really full of is the hope that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you with flowers at Cambridge. Also, greedily (for you), with the hope that you didn't come away _minus_ any lecture-money due to you.... But good-bye for now--with ever so tender love. /* Ever your HENRY. */ _To Miss Margaret James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 8th, 1906. */ /* Dearest Peggot, */ I have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat agitating letter of October 29th, and I am so touched by your faithful memory of your poor fond old Uncle, and by your snatching an hour to devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that I scribble you this joyous acknowledgment before I go to bed. I have been immensely interested in your whole Collegiate adventure--fragments of the history of which, so far as you've got, I've had from your mother--and all the more interested that, by a blest good fortune, I happen to _know_ your scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and follow you round. I seem to make out that you are very physically comfortable, all round, and I have indeed a very charming image of Bryn Mawr, though I dare say these months adorn it less than my June-time. I yearn tenderly over your home-sickness--and fear I don't help you with it when I tell you how well I understand it as, at first, your inevitable portion. To exchange the realm of talk and taste of Irving St. and the privileges and luxury of your Dad's and your Mother's company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and effluence of other American homes, represents a sorry drop--which can only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of sorts these other homes may have had that Irving St. lacks. You may not find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. It doesn't remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with again. And you will make your little sphere of relations--which will give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and augmentation of your power. Your poor old uncle groans with shame when he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative opportunity, _he_ had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. No one took any interest whatever in _his_ development, except to neglect or snub it where it might have helped--and any that he was ever to have he picked up wholly by himself. But that is very ancient history now--and he is very glad to have picked up Lamb House, where he sits writing you this of a wet November night and communes, so far as possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down from Harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and Waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... I rejoice greatly in your sweet companion--I mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, _for_ you, and I send, I hope not presumptuously, a slice of your Uncle's blessing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you find Miss Carey Thomas benevolent and inspiring--she struck me as a very able and accomplished and intelligent lady, and I should like to send her through you, if you have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly for her appreciation of my niece. But I hope she doesn't, or won't, work you to the bone! Goodnight, dear Child. /* Your fond old Uncle. */ _To Mrs. Dew-Smith._ /# This refers to the revision of _Roderick Hudson_, which was to head the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 12th, 1906. */ /* Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith, */ Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life. As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your view of that process erratic and--quite of course--my own view well inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the _substance_ of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a _done_ and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in many places quite _vilely_ written! The essence of the matter is wholly unaltered--save for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought out. At any rate the deed is already perpetrated--and I do continue to wish perversely and sorely that you had waited--to re-peruse--for this prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly grateful--as in fact I am--for your power to re-peruse at all, and will come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. November 17th, 1906. */ /* Dear Mrs. Wharton, */ I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting letter--into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your "line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and impression of Nohant--as to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars. Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passion--as I make no doubt--you will be going there once more--in which case _do_ take me! And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish you--and such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I "presume"--if it isn't presumptuous--before embarking? and I do so for the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and sympathise--being in all sorts of _embarras_ now, myself, over the finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired your single story in the Aug. _Scribner_--beautifully done, I thought, and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same, with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the "Franco-American" subject--the real field of your extension is _here_--it has far more fusability with _our_ native and primary material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life led in--sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and swimmers--or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing meanwhile climbing or swimming?--I take much interest in its fate. But you will tell me of these things--in February! It will be _then_ I shall scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as possible) after a night--only--spent in town. The perpetual summonses and solicitations of London (some of which _have_ to be met) are at times a maddening worry--or almost. I am wondering if you are not feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently delightful old 1840 way--a good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it all--the gossip of the countryside--from you! Some of it has come to me as rather dreadful ... and that is what some of the lone houses in the deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!... /* I am meanwhile yours very constantly, HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris_ /* 16 Lewes Crescent, Brighton. December 23rd, 1906. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations, protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even, you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation. Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and _you_) is that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful brazenness--this "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to poor dear Hamilton Aïdé's memorial service (where I didn't see her, though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical service. But I haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) Of course I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morning--in all sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard, though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things (the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way, in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c. included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated letters to the _Times_ about. I figure you at all events exempt from any indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you. But when I reflect that I don't _know_, for certain, any of your actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately more and more marked. I spent last summer there--the most beautiful of one's life I think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place, alas, becomes itself--like all places save Torquay, I judge--more and more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five or six weeks to Paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to Rome; one of the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall fly at the best, I fear, very low!... I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day--yet I take for granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the rest of opposing nature--though I make this imputation only on behalf of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous sign to yours very constantly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ /# Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time living in Paris. #/ /* Brighton. Boxing Day, 1906. */ /* My dear Thomas, */ I have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a great stress of correspondence _de fin d'année_; which you on your side must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate, please, unreservedly to les vôtres around the Xmastide hearth. I am spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we Protestants"--you and I--will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur" was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all _pen_, as if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of consciousness--save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression, that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently as by the _langue_ of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the little Goncourt Academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind I shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will get the book. Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that he might and as I don't quite envy him. But à cet âge--!... I think I really shall see you dans le courant de février. I presently go home to work toward that end, _ferme_. I send again a thousand friendships to Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Gaillard T. Lapsley._ Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor--the "Islander" and the "Librarian" of the following letter. /* 16 Lewes Crescent, Brighton. December 27th, 1906. */ /* My dear, dear Gaillard, */ I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter, and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion. It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity, that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however, even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a couple of deeply amicable days?... I don't quite know what your holidays are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but I seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are, with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that the dear old _4.28_ from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really warm--even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard--and the further fact that I intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with _me_, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and everything; but come if you humanly can. When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly bedight, I kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. I rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the lone Islander--how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!--and tell Percy Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in America, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which I wholly disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy of yours always and ever, /* HENRY JAMES */ _To Bruce Porter._ /# Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the earthquake of the preceding spring. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. February 19th, 1907. */ /* My dear Bruce Porter, */ I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly those resulting from my being in London (the _hourly_ importunate) when it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast. Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days, and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town "somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little, for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and constantly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Grace Norton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. March 5th, 1907. */ /* Dearest Grace, */ Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.--I won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the present moment. I came straight back here--to a great monotony and regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,) or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I _yearn_ to hear from you, and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm _talking_ with you now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I leave this place tomorrow for Paris--that is sleep at Dover--but an hour and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio-- ...If I can I shall dash down to Italy--to Florence and Venice--for a short spell before restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, I daresay, that I shall ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_ little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I really think I should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. But the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my _ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great, every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration. I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't know, and how should I? much about you in detail--but I think I have a kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and responding to,) I boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. I hope at least the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for you--well, what shall I say?--an _interest_!! Even the most worrying businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out--as I used to--by your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane, that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome vitality.... I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition--of which I even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened--the whole matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts here and in America,) and a "handsome"--I hope really handsome and not too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, I'm convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol. or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and competent perhaps to _pousser à la vente_. The Edition is to be of 23 vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which I have this winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to do--but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I--not at all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace, will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ [Illustration: PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY JAMES, 1906] _To William James, junior._ /* Grand Hotel, Pau. March 26, 1907. */ /* Dearest Bill, */ This is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying Uncle is safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after étapes consisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops, déjeuners and other impressions in between. We got here last night--into the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to Lourdes and back. This large, smooth old France is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are seeing it,) and I know it already much more infinitely well. The motor is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,) so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including our most admirable American chauffeur from Lee, Mass., whose native Yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his Panhard car. On Thursday or Friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to Paris--but of course with other stops and impressions--though none, I think, of more than one night. Don't dream of troubling to write--I will write again as we draw nearer. I hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the Julian broth. I already long to see you again. /* Ever your affectionate HENRY JAMES. */ _To Howard Sturgis._ /# The plan of approaching Italy through South Germany and Austria was not carried out. He presently went straight from Paris to Rome. #/ /* 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris. April 13th, 1907. */ /* Dearest Howard, */ I find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous, miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. We got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery I can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. You talk of sad and fearful things ... and I don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor inky, scratchy way.) What I should like to be able to say is that I will come down to Rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and combinations already made. I do hope to go to Rome for a little--a very little--stay later; but not before the middle or 20th of May; a time--a generally emptier, quieter time--I greatly prefer there to any other. It is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in Paris till May 1st--I haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my natural life. _Ergo_ I am taking what there is of it for me--I can't afford, as it were, not to. And I have made my plans (if they hold) for approaching Italy by South Germany, Vienna, Trieste, Venice &c.--all of which will bring me to Rome by the 20th of May about, when, I fear, you will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. From Rome and Florence ... I shall return straight home--where at least, then, I must infallibly see you. Or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before May 1st? The gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest welcome you would have from them. Hold up your heart, meanwhile, and remember, for God's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage and wreck our own independence of soul. That quantity is too precious a contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are responsible for the _entretien_ of it. So keep yours, shake yours, up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your admirable human use. To be "crushed" is to be of no use; and I for one insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. Feel everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. We shall judge it all sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even) thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and I depend on your keeping that appointment with me. This is all, dearest Howard, now. I almost blush to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable France in our friend's chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. It's the old travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power. Will you very kindly say to Maud Story for me, with my love, that I am coming to Rome very nearly _all_ to see her. I bless your companions and am your tout dévoué /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Howard Sturgis._ /# From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Boit's villa near Vallombrosa. #/ /* Hôtel de Russie, Rome. May 29th, 1907. */ /* Dearest Howard, */ I've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed letter--but the waters of Rome have been closing over my head, for I have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people" bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my years and my inclinations. I am "sitting for my bust," into the bargain--to Hendrik Andersen (it will be, I think, better than some other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to hold out to the end of the ordeal,) I should already have broken away from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. My days "abroad" are violently shrinking--I am long since due at home; and my yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. However, I didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (I trust) liberation from the Roman yoke and your probable inhalation at this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence of admirable friends. Need I say that I number poor dear deafened Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal _dumbness_--and I'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. But I'm very sorry--I mean for her I trust temporary trouble--and if I but knew where she is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying, would reach her if I might. I cherish the thought of getting off Tuesday at very latest--if I return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me at the hands of the Filippo Filippis on Saturday--as I believe. I drove with Mrs. Mason out yesterday afternoon to the Abbotts' villa--that is a very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon to have them at Cernitoio. Expansive (not to say expensive) and illimitable you! All this time I don't tell you--tell Mildred Seymour--a tenth of the comfort I am deriving amid continued tension from the sense that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the Vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... I expect to be here till Tuesday a.m.--but I see I've said so. You shall then, and so shall Edward Boit (to whom and his girls I send tanti saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent Mr. William) have further news of yours, my dear Howard, ever affectionately, /* _Henry James_. */ _To Madame Wagnière._ /# The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at Florence, described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 28). Madame Wagnière (born Huntington) was now living in Switzerland. #/ /* Palazzo Barbaro, Venice. June 23rd, 1907. */ /* Dear Laura Wagnière, */ I have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the little house with the "_Giardinetto_" on the Canal Grande, to the right of Guggenheim as you face Guggenheim. I hung about it yesterday afternoon in the gondola with Mrs. Curtis, and we both thought it very charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely) heard it spoken of as "damp" which I confess it looks to me just a trifle. However, this may be the vainest of calumnies. It does look expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. For myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (I mean Venice generally), I kind of feel that even the bribe of the Canal Grande and a _giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... Mrs. Curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here) if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "Canal Grande" at any price. She makes me feel afresh what I've always felt, that what I should probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality, especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so I got there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other conveniences! In fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little "fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to Venice" if one can, I have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times Yes! It would be for me, I feel, in certain circumstances (were I free, with a hundred other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and the consolation of my declining years. Never has the whole place seemed to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. It leaves everything else out in the cold. I wish I could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_ (except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. I presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. Happy you to be able even to discuss it.... This place and this large cool upper floor of the Barbaro, with all the space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... The breath of the lagoon still plays up, but I mingle too much of another fluid with my ink, and I have no more clothes to take off.... I greet affectionately, yes affectionately, kind Henry, and the exquisite gold-haired maiden, and I am, dear Laura Wagnière, your very faithful old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The Vicomte Robert d'Humières, poet and essayist, fell in action in France, April 26, 1915. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 11th, 1907. */ /* My dear Edith and my dear Edward, */ The d'Humières have just been lunching with me, and that has so reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of last March to the first of those of May--wasn't it?--that I feel it a folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as I have been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from Italy about a month ago. You flung me the handkerchief, Edith, just at that time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly, bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as I recrossed my threshold after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, I am well aware, all the more graceless. And then came the charming little picture-card of the poor Lamb House hack grinding out his patient prose under your light lash and dear Walter B.'s--which should have accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if benefit it be. The charming d'Humières both, as I say, touring--_training_--in England, through horrid wind and weather, with a _bonne grace_ and a wit and a Parisianism worthy of a better cause, amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to Folkestone, and so back to Plassac (don't you _like_ "Plassac," down in our dear old Gascony?) the seat of M. de Dampierre--to whom, à ce qu'il paraît, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! Well, it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild vain dreams, though I didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow being together again.... But oh, I should like to remount the stream of time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it somehow always is when I get at urgent letters) ever so much past midnight. It was only with my final return hither that my deep draught of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been held to my lips all by your hands I somehow felt in presence of your interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely should have been _avertie_ from day to day--I did the matter that justice at least. Too much of the story has by this time dropped out; but there are bits I wish I could save for you.... But I must break off--it's 1.15 a.m.! _Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis.... My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old _coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes, I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne "burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine "eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan loveliness and a really admirable séjour.... I spent at the last two divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 27, 1907. */ /* My dear Gwenllian Palgrave, */ It is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and embarrassed. The perverse collectress proposes, I fear, to collect the impossible! I haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more than I have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! And the collectress, in general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and I am too aged and obstinate and brutal to change! Such is the sorry tale I have to ask you all patiently to hear. I wish you were, or had been, coming over to see me from Canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of other friendship. Do come without fail the next time you are there; and believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 17th, 1907. */ /* Dearest William, */ ...I seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast "shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience. But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ça--for _me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed the tribute of your calling the whole thing "köstlich stuff" and saying it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol. would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short _contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be.... But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless) Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always, /* HENRY. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 23rd, 1907. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that, whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris, roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_ interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where, in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden of my years. But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_ colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all faithfully and fondly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /# H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W. Norris Esq.' #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 26: 1907. */ /* My dear Norris, */ It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days, when I didn't know I was thinking of you? Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of yours remorsefully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all! _To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White._ /# H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia, during his last visit to America. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Jan. 1, 1908. */ /* Dear William and Letitia! */ It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's _presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William, my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to burdens! It was delightful, I _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration; and I tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at least--I mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a "banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely "fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter--this last--is a noble picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors (from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away--as, for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it--that these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole, seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at Fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.--and, having so little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands, the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful, vigilant, steady, sturdy friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. January 2nd, 1908. */ /* My dear Edith, */ G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for which I have found a very effective position on the little old oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have, you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it, on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must _taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is, alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Gaillard T. Lapsley._ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. March 17th, 1908. */ /* My dear, dear Gaillard! */ I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack, how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However, you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me whether I think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard, and at the risk of aggravating you, I _like_ to keep you a little before me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms of your noble surrender. Lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed interlude, and cela ne tient qu'à vous (I mean to the wave of your white hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _Comus_. _Cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of the most promising little good boys that ever was. Après quoi the whole process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making (history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to miss. Some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you are and consigned exactly to your place, I think--or rather no, to a pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since _sauté'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so shining, I feel--little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H. yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V., through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your _mouvement ascensionnel_ I shall see you--for I hope they won't be sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G., that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more affectionately than ever yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The first performance of _The High Bid_ took place in Edinburgh three days after the date of the following. #/ /* Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh. March 23rd, 1908. */ /* My dear Edith! */ This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those of jealousy and _guignon_) that I feel sure you have instituted for me will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after much agitation--and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--I travelling with the animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariolé Bohemian or _picaresque_ note of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and _vaillance_, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap (personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression; but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and instinct are capables de tout--so that I still hope. And each time they worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself I mean; and not other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish you and Teddy were to be here--even so far as that do I go! But wire me a word--_here_--on Thursday a.m.--and I shall be almost as much heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course--however, à la guerre comme à la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings. More, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and Edward's right recklessly even though ruefully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ /* 105 Pall Mall, S.W. April 3rd, 1908. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ ...The Nightmare of the Edition (of my Works!) is the real _mot de l'Enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it (all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that I have let other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me--whereby I keep _at_ it in order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly, moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th last in Edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")--which is just only the little one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one, dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of time and place preserved, etc.... It had a _great_ and charming success before a big house at Edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard (every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the production--having already, three weeks before that in London, given up a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,) and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_ here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work. I go to Paris about the 20th to stay _10_ days, at the most, with Mrs Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated _expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why, "druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let it convey to them, all tenderly, that I _live_ in the hope of their operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch. ...But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. D. Howells._ /# The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to twenty-four, but _The Bostonians_ was not included. The "one thing" referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve another visit to America would seem to be the possible production there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel of which the scene was to be laid in America--the novel that finally became _The Ivory Tower_. #/ /* _Dictated_. Lamb House, Rye. 17th August, 1908. */ /* My dear Howells, */ A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. You were so far from having distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_ Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so, in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity, since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--I've now but a couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23 only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant array--and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel, tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience, received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal of artful re-doing--and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been dropped so completely out. _Basta pure--basta!_ I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your being moved to-day to Roman utterance--I mean in presence of the so bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly _commonised_) and transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could _less_ do than write again, in the whole presence--when I was there some fifteen months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite, all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, I fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any convenient journalistic ease--I am just beginning to re-do ... certain little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best ability, at any rate--and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have retitivation on the brain. I haven't--I only have it on (to the end that I may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. The system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back, after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain. We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated with me:) "Ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_ they?"--and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery _genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a decent English season can be.... Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged, but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed creative (again!) intention. I _may_ burst before this intention fairly or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the _contorni_ of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what might happen. _Then_ I should take grateful counsel of you with all the appreciation in the world. And I _want_ very much to go back for a certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you, decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount--but can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for me, as who knows what may be at the end? _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 13th, 1908. */ /* My very dear Friend, */ I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to sailing ... on the 20th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you--however briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after receiving your two last, of rapprochées dates, which have come within a very few days of each other--that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to imagine.... Only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of life_. That keeps up our connection with life--I mean of the immediate and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it! Live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon dire_--waitingly!... What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and we'll talk à perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more than ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To J.B. Pinker._ /# By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York" edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be inferred from the following letter. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 23rd, 1908. */ /* My dear Pinker, */ All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say--by the 4.25, and dine and spend the night. If Monday _isn't_ convenient to you, I must wait to indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of. I am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." I warned _myself_ indeed, and kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. The non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered the perspective and proportion of things--I have committed, thank God, no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby I shall have early in 1909 to pay--as I even did last year--on parts of an income I have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_That_ is the real hitch!) I am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though so grim-looking!--figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. But as you say nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! Which is all that is wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were, prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk _absolutely_ clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor, _such_ voluminosities of Proof--of the Edition--to be carefully read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably relieve me. And I have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! But of these we will speak--and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can come Monday. Believe me, yours ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Ellen Emmet._ /# H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258). #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 2d, 1908. */ ...I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing _you_ and the generous and delightful letter I so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head, of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms whatever.... _November 3d._ I had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days, by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery autumn show--he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the Bay Emmet of the London--in particular--portrait world, and does all the billionaires and such like: that's where _I_ come in--very big and fat and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself--so that I now quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous thing of Thomas Hardy--who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to this after I have been to the N.G., and if I _am_ as unnatural as I fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... When you see William, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which I am infinitely and yearningly interested--as I am in every invisible stroke of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or wonderment--when you _do_ go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I _must_ go to bed, dearest Bay--I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is. But I've not done with you yet. _105 Pall Mall._ November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days without having a moment to return to this--for the London tangle immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered, the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body (and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful _tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine" (for _me_)--_considering_! I think one sees a little that it's a _chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs (of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's sake. But I really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation of H.J.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all your own triumphs first. However, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear Bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me explained _half_ the "run" on you!... Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth--in which I have rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care of _each other_ (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _But_, beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel, here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To George Abbot James._ /# This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H. Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in _Notes of a Son and Brother_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Nov. 26th, 1908. */ /* My dear old Friend, */ Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with Boston are few and faint in these days--though what I do hear has in general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth--charming and young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long years--sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and incalculable things with us all--life which I myself still find interesting. I have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. I wish I hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. How I should hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your past.... I don't _know_, you see, and I can only make you these uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you about myself is that I have no second self to part with--having lived always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you have--a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever so tenderly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 13th, 1908. */ /* My dear young friend Hugh Walpole, */ I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and inexplicably mislaid--at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it. But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist the generous movement--since I always find myself (when the rare and blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young. I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly transmit it to you--since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B. in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues I shall have to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of a link. Believe me very truly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To George Abbot James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 21st, 1908. */ /* My dear dear George-- */ How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of _inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any one and absorbing relation less intense--I don't pretend to say! But you sound to me so lonely--and I wish I could read more human furniture, as it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and I ask myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected independence. Still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere tenderness--and so I say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through everything--through everything. Things abide--_good_ things--for that time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's. You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought of yours always, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W.E. Norris._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 23rd, 1908. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,) or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes, in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests, profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place 60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow. It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it, has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up _all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Henry White._ /# Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 29, 1908. */ /* Dearest Margaret White, */ I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the _only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne année_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58 Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me, and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these _with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. D. Howells._ /# H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E. Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. New Year's Eve, 1908. */ /* My dear Howells, */ I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge _date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged 18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours all, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Lee Childe._ /* Lamb House, Rye. [Jan. 8, 1909.] */ /* My dear old Friend, */ Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense that _vous y faites autorité_, and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray.... Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt.... I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* Lamb House, Rye. March 28th, 1909. */ /* My dear Hugh, */ I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings! Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter. Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons, much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C. B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him; I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh, it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. April 19th, 1909. */ /* My dear Edith, */ I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter, even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven, averted! (I once had it, and _basta così_;) so that I am a little shaky and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous; (which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed; and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel, you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!... I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Arthur Christopher Benson._ /* Queen's Acre, Windsor. June 5th, 1909. */ /* My dear Arthur, */ Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago) to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity _him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction, and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure. I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection, what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls. I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the _inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_ fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Charles Sayle._ /# For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. June 16th, 1909. */ /* My dear Charles Sayle, */ I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place, in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you. I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am ever so faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will greatly oblige yours again (and hers), /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_. /# The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_ (written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 19th, 1909. */ /* Dearest Lucy C! */ I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults, invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated, and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel (which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic, that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static" kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the _actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be, illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_, after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_ damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly and faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Grace Norton_. /* Lamb House, Rye. August 10th, 1909. */ ....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show, given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing "Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its "advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows? Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers," and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30 a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again, when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all; for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you? But goodnight and à demain. _August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of "92° in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92° in the shade, or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here (which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace, than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you, without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be, altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce _sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 17th, 1909. */ /* Dearest William, */ I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904), the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey, to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs. Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications, of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out, I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily, more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly, please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry, and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress. If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things. Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I embrace. /* Ever your HENRY. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 14th, 1909. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_ than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_ (lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.) But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of you--in his grave. I don't think the girl herself--her projected Ego--the best thing in the book--I think it rather wants clearness and _nuances_. But the _men_ are prodigious, all, and the total result lives and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares--I mean hangs there in the very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed and that I am your very gaping and grateful /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Henrietta Reubell_. /# _Crapy Cornelia_, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will be remembered as one of the stories in _The Finer Grain_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 19, 1909. */ /* Dearest Etta Reubell--my very old friend indeed! */ Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write it. You have _understood_ "Crapy Cornelia"--and people so very often seem not to understand--that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you tell me also of my now _living_, really, in green and gold, in the dear little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa on which--in other days--I so often myself have rested, and which figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours, the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of _success in life_ that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good year--a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa, and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musée and figure as a class by Themselves among your relics--and to have that emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional _bouffées_ of fond memory and longing from our dear old _past_ Paris. It affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire. /* Your tout-dévoué HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James_. /* Lamb House, Rye. October 31st, 1909. */ /* Dearest William, */ I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and unrequited--though I shall speak for the present but of the two most prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively--not counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have quite passionately absorbed--to within 50 pages of the end; a great number previous to which I have read this evening--which makes me late to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and easy summer achieved--and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human _incubi_, the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen--over which I hope dear Alice hasn't _lieu_ to smile!... _November 1st._ I broke this off last night and went to bed--and now add a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day (under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all you write plays into _my_ poor "creative" consciousness and artistic vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers--that is thank _yours_!--for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest William, the effect of these collected papers of your present volume--which I had read all individually before--seems to me exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much will this _suffrage_ help the cause!--Not less inspiring to me, for that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter.... ...But good-night again--as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only _can_ next summer come out for two years! This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never, never, even, before. I embrace you all--I send my express love to Mrs. Gibbens--and am your fondest of brothers, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. [December 13th, 1909.] */ /* Dear Edith, */ I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in particular--which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully, for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic _au possible_ your image and echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a fortnight spent in London--and all letters that reach me there, when I'm merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in sympathy and curiosity at points enough--and leaping with you breathless from Schiller to Tiepolo--through all the Gothicry of Augsburg, Würzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less--_all_ the rest, after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again--in respect to which gaping contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it is at _Cabale und Liebe_ that I ache and groan to the core for not having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic _souffles_ and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race of Goethe and Heine and Dürer and _their_ kinship. At any rate I rejoice that you had your plunge--which (the whole pride and pomp of which) makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back here for--I hope--many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some, even most--though not all--of the midwinter conditions of this place. Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!... But good night--tanti saluti affetuosi. /* Ever your H. J. */ _To Madame Wagnière._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 22nd, 1909. */ /* My dear Laura Wagnière, */ The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever found it before, some dozen years ago in _this_ decent nook, and I feel I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of my small impregnable stronghold--or better still, incorruptible hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't--in spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and doubtless by reason of them)--have wives or female friends: and _very_ holy women don't even have husbands. But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my _première jeunesse_, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore. I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;) and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal, granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the spokes from the hub of a wheel--which remarks, however, you will have all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to be always on the way to Boston only. I hope you are having _là-bas_ a less odious year than we _poverini_, who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge _en permanence_, with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps and lighted shop fronts--places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at 6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the abysmal _crotte_ aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient, and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door. I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send _her_ my kindest remembrance and the same to her father. I catch the distracted post (_so_ distracted and distracting at this British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagnière, your affectionate old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 22, 1909. */ /* My dear Thomas, */ As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your family--were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security--as my whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)--is that we are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit bewilderingly)--treasured it for the last month as a link with your receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the--to any--frequency with which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment constitutes toward your soon coming back--and really feel that with a return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have liked again to taste of the natal air--and perhaps even in a wider draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth, your sinews, nor your fortune--let alone your other domestic blessings and reinforcements--and somehow the memory of what was fierce and formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence--I mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking as well as _this_ more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;--and I have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness, confinement and despair--in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as you see, of literally _talking_ weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I trust, promptly, in your rich art-world là-bas, and I beg you to add your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a fortnight in April--but it would be a more positive prospect, I think, if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla, please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see Howells chez lui--so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most--or least?--energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Owen Wister._ /# The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 26th, 1909. */ /* Dearest Owen! */ Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much--save indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward me; and that verily--though I am incapable of supposing the contrary--is not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how you are--deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends _how_ ill one is--or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you--and I possess my soul, and my desire for you, in patience--or I try to. I don't see any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you--for I missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently couldn't manage it--nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days in September (quite incredibly--for the Hereford Festival,) and they were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize and yearn over you--and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and tending somehow hitherward--that I hope this with fierce intensity I need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last left me--and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on which you stretched yourself is there behind me--and it holds out appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any particular nearness for my being able to revisit _your_ prodigious scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here--for a few months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide--which I have spent at home for the first time for four years--a lone and lorn and stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however--and the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head--but please feel and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all the old affection of your devoted /* HENRY JAMES. */ VII RYE AND CHELSEA (1910-1914) For the next year--that is for the whole of 1910--Henry James was under the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again, and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law was the best in the world for him--indeed he could scarcely face any other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother, Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a Son and Brother." William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James, that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America, however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of appreciation that reached him almost at the same time--the offer of honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate. As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more convenient dwelling--a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the height of the summer. April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr. Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence--from its happy completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood. Early in 1914, after an interval of all but ten years, Henry James began what he had often said he should never begin again--a long novel. It was the novel, at last, of American life, long ago projected and abandoned, and now revived as The Ivory Tower. Slowly and with many interruptions he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left Chelsea for Lamb House in July 1914. His health was now on a better level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful autumn of work at Rye. _To T. Bailey Saunders._ /* L. H. Jan. 27th [1910]. */ /* My dear Bailey, */ I am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and mending _now_ very steadily and smoothly--so that I hope to be practically up early next week. Also I am touched by, and appreciative of, your solicitude. (You see I still cling to syntax or style, or whatever it is.) But I have had an infernal time really--I may now confide to you--pretty well all the while since I left you that sad and sinister morning to come back from the station. A digestive crisis making food loathsome and nutrition impossible--and sick inanition and weakness and depression permanent. However, _bed_, the good Skinner, M.D., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every 2 hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and I am now hungry and redeemed and convalescent. The Election fight has revealed to me how ardent a Liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The allusions in the following are to articles by Mr. W. Morton Fullerton (in the _Times_) on the disastrous floods in Paris, and to Alfred de Musset's "Lettres d'amour à Aimée d'Alton." #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. February 8th, 1910. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me--while they cast their Tyrian glamour about--ask more ruefully than ever what porridge poor _non_-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite appeal and approach to the good--the really admirable Skinner, who has now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand--which treats _my_ stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong--even when one has wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is that we always tumble together--more and more never apart; and that for that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for everything--and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ... more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This is steadily bettering--thanks above all to three successive morning motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each (to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask you about poor great Paris--I make out as I can by Morton's playing flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler--which sounds rather like a glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimée--unprofitable pair. What a strange and compromising French document--in this sense that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others unknowingly _grouillent_ on the other side of the cloison that shall make their _nid d'amour_, and _la façon dont elle y vole_ react back even upon dear old George rather fatally--àpropos of dirty bedrooms, thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour. What an Aimée and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an everything! /* Ever your H. J. */ _To Miss Jessie Allen._ /# The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace, where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. February 20th, 1910. */ /* My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody, */ I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened consciousness the added load of _my_ base woes (as if you weren't lying stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over--if they ever _should_ be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most want is _not_ to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black despair--with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a _very_ famous one to-day--I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I _eat_--after a fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me--and that alone lifts up my heart--for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the other hand been excellent--my servants angels of affection and devotion. (I have indeed been _all_ in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look in _there_ and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing _that_ will do me more good than anything else.... I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile from some of the resources of civilization in winter--and deliriously dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a house--unfurnished of course (a little good _inside_ one)--in your Terrace?--and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms? Don't answer this absurdity now--but wait till we go and look at 2 or 3 together! Such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not beaten--you can see by this scrawl--old /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. Bigelow._ /* Lamb House, Rye. April 19th, 1910. */ /* My dear Edith, */ I have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too "bad" to write--to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and suffer and surrender. I have had a perfect Hell of a Time--since just after Xmas--nearly 15 long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness (with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) But the tide, thank the Powers, has at last definitely turned and I am on the way to getting not only better, but, as I believe, creepily and abjectly well. I sent my Nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. I must have patience, much, yet--but my face is toward the light, which shows, beautifully, that I look ten years older, with my bonny tresses ten degrees whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Conciergerie.) However if I've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my money, I rejoice I've kept my friends, and I shall come and show you _that_ appreciation yet. I am so delighted that you and the Daughterling had your go at Italy--even though I was feeling so pre-eminently un-Italian. The worst of that Paradise is indeed that one returns but to Purgatories at the best. Have a little patience yet with your still struggling but all clinging /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* Hill Hall, Theydon Bois, Epping. May 22nd, 1910. */ /* My dear Norris, */ Forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which I must explain long and complicated things in a very few words. I have had a dismal--the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five months nearly, since Christmas--and of which the end is not yet; and of which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black melancholia and weakness) of a--the most--formidable and distressing kind. My brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from America several weeks ago; without them I had--should have--quite gone under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of air, scene, food, everything, I came here with my sister-in-law--to some most kind friends and a beautiful place--as a very arduous experiment. But I'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as possible. I'm afraid I can't see you in London--I can plan nor do nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and afflicted old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Bittongs Hotel Hohenzollern, Bad Nauheim. June 10th, 1910. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening. We are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there had been, and could be, no question for us of Paris--formidable at best (that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. I had, to my sorrow, a baddish drop on coming back from high Epping Forest (that is "Theydon Mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted Rye--and I felt, my Dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the straightest way (Calais, Brussels, Cologne, and Frankfort,) to this place of thick woods, groves, springs and general Kurort soothingness, where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. Here I am then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than I feared. Slowly but definitely I _am_ emerging--yet with nervous possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but cling for as much longer as possible to my Brother and sister. I am wholly unfit to be alone--in spite of amelioration. That (being alone) I can't even as yet think of--and yet feel that I must for many months to come have none of the complications of society. In fine, to break to you the monstrous truth, I have taken my passage with them to America by the Canadian Pacific Steamer line ("short sea") on August 12th--to spend the winter in America. I must break with everything--of the last couple of years in England--and am trying if possible to let Lamb House for the winter--also am giving up my London perch. When I come back I must have a better. There are the grim facts--but now that I have accepted them I see hope and reason in them. I feel that the completeness of the change là-bas will help me more than anything else can--and the amount of corners I have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. I cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and protector--but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak. This place is insipid, yet soothing--very bosky and sedative and admirably arranged, à l'allemande--but with excessive and depressing heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. The admirable ombrages and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. We shall be here for three weeks longer (I seem to entrevoir) and then try for something Swiss and tonic. We must be in England by Aug. 1st. And now I simply _fear_ to challenge you on your own complications. I can _bear_ tragedies so little. Tout se rattache so à _the_ thing--the central depression. And yet I want so to know--and I think of you with infinite tenderness, participation--and such a large and helpless devotion. Well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face to face--wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) This address, I foresee, will find me for the next 15 days--and we might be worse abrités. Germany has become _comfortable_. Note that much as I yearn to you, I don't nag you with categorical (even though in Germany) questions.... Ever your unspeakable, dearest Edith, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 29th, 1910. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ It's intense joy to hear from you, and when I think that the last news I gave you of myself was at Nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare of Switzerland that followed--"Munich and the Tyrol etc.," which I believe I then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a moment--I feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me really became. That dire ordeal (attempted Nach-Kurs for my poor brother at _low_ Swiss altitudes, Constance, Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva, &c.) terminated however a fortnight ago--or more--and after a bad week in London we are here waiting to sail on Aug. 12th. I am definitely much better, and on the road to be _well_; a great gain has come to me, in spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. I say in spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on leaving the treacherous and disastrous Nauheim, has gone steadily on to worse--he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite _struggling_ upward state. But I stand and hold my ground none the less, and we have really brought him on since we left London. But the dismalness of it all--and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our younger brother in the U.S. by heart-failure in his sleep--a painless, peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career--makes our common situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable. However, I am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely done, will do much for William--and I am myself now on a much "higher plane" than I expected a very few weeks since to be. I kind of _want_, uncannily, to go to America too--apart from several absolutely imperative reasons for it. I rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing you ... here--or even in London or at Windsor--one of these very next days.... /* Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Bruce Porter._ /# The "bêtises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America to investigate. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. [August 1910.] */ /* My dear--very!--Bruce, */ I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage--for I hate to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most provincial _bêtises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it (given over to a, to _the_ Bêtise!) in a fine finished old England with which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a really _deep_ discomfort. But nothing can--I too tenderly look the other way. So there we are. Besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. At any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother, too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the 12th definitely. So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Grace Norton._ /* Chocorua, New Hampshire. August 26, 1910. */ /* Dearest Grace, */ I am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago to-night--after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But _my_ slowly recuperative process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions, meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable, damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you--with all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of our common initiations. I have come for a long stay--though when we shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. It's to-day blessedly cooler here--and I hope you also have the reprieve! P.S. I open my letter of three hours since to add that William passed unconsciously away an hour ago--without apparent pain or struggle. Think of us, dear Grace, think of us! _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ /* Chocorua, N.H. Sept. 2nd, 1910. */ /* My dear old Thomas, */ I sit heavily stricken and in darkness--for from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of life for me--besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at its climax--he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast them away, however, at the end--I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from far off--he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast. I cling for the present to _them_--and so try to stay here through this month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more--we shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in villeggiatura. _If_ so I _will_ come. You knew him--among those living now--from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Chocorua, N.H. Sept. 9th, 1910. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Your letter from Annecy ... touches me, as I sit here stricken and in darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day--and it seems six!) to find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the 11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in the best accommodations &c we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully (with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang--my sense of what he had still to _give_, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters; fortunately, as there would be so _much_ to say about them if I said anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for the present--for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now--I cling to my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say) such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th--there is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle consecration which plays out the more where so few other things interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American "beauty"--which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New Year--which is all that seems definite for the present.... All devotedly yours, dearest Edith, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Charles Hunter._ /* Chocorua, N.H. Oct: 1: 1910. */ /* Dearest Mary Hunter, */ Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you--and that follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will (if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England--was a dreadful time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all affectionately always, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. October 29th, 1910. */ /* Dearest Lucy! */ My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you _know_, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground again--more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy, were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so gently and intelligently, _with_ me. The extinction of such a presence in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow) brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!) and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring. I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned, while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am staying. I am getting back to work--though the flood of letters to be breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over. My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be absolutely better than at any time for three or four--and shall even feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.) Dreams of work come back to me--which I've a superstitious dread still, however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my "comfort"--odious word!--in a most pleasant, commodious house, is absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about yourself--in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go and see you and make me some sign of you--which going and gathering-in I hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always heroic--but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But such things as I wish to talk about--I mean that we _might_! But with patience the hour will strike--like silver smiting silver. Till then I am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. E. Norris._ /* 95 Irving St. Cambridge, Mass. Dec. 13th, 1910. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I _can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question, formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an _année terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole, the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had died just a month before--and I am alone now, of my father's once rather numerous house. But there--I am trying to pick up lost chords--which is what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January and then go for a couple of months to New York--after which I shall begin to turn my face to England--heaven send that day! The detail of this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your (or verily _my_) distressed country; for which I unceasingly languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights. This does me a world of good--and the fact that I have brought with me my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the _Times_ have just come in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all.... Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. Feb. 9th, 1911. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce _to report of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and dismally--and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_ report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report _at all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!) generously and à deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try--though it was after all pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from 23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore. I got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come up again and quite well up--as how can I not in order again to re-taste the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it will eventually--the whole case--become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair (if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and _done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of the comparison!) Work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June. Therefore should you come May 1st--well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying longer. Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't brighter and richer. I am but _just_ pulling through--and I am doing _that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to _grow_ some again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they love me--as I love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty, "pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination" (_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in N.Y.--but the place relieved and beguiled me--so long as I was _debout_--and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the whole day long. I really think I shall take--shall risk--another go of it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de toutes les forces de mon être and am always your fondly faithful old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Rhoda Broughton._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. February 25th, 1911. */ /* Dear Rhoda Broughton, */ I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient commerce--that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a hearty call--so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered breast--for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others. ...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years! However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more. ...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. March 3rd, 1911. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli--which she has forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious indebtedness. I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation (or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden splotches, _creating_ them about the field--shining scattered innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there can be no better proof of your great gift--_The N.M._ makes me most particularly feel it--than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride roughshod and triumphant--when you don't, that is, with a strange and brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which _is_ indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste--this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well, I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and kicking--and sprawling!--so vivid and rich and strong--above all so _amusing_ (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance--for I do remonstrate--bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming thing of Stevenson's with the bad title--"Kidnapped"?) it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force--its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no _beautiful_, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part--and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the _N.M._--and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less floundering fashion than this--but give me time (I return to England in June, never again, D.V., to leave it--surprise Mr. Remington thereby as I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I don't _want_ to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"--functional Love--always suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness (for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by roundabout arts--as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect--to keep it somehow interesting and productive (though I don't mean _re_productive!) But this again is a big subject. _P.S. 2._ I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know _having_ things (the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by _keeping_ them. So, and so only, I _do_ have them! _To C. E. Wheeler._ /# "The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might be performed by the Stage Society. #/ /* 21 East Eleventh Street, New York City. April 9th, 1911. */ /* Dear Christopher Wheeler, */ I am _not_ back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the end of June. I have _almost_ recovered from the very compromised state in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the "Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a "literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on the other) which isn't propitious to any other _present_ dealing with it--though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable] to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question, and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere _theatrical_ mystery: the drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me, so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary cynicism--and try me again later. The conditions--the theatre-question generally--in this country are horrific and unspeakable--utter, and so far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any _drama_ worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization. However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Dr. J. William White._ /* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. May 12th, 1911. */ /* My dear J. William, */ I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a perfection of schooling--quite my prize pupils and little show performers in short--I can be certain that you won't so much as have turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified (even quite intelligent--like true heads of the class) now that I do write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave, beautifully, as if you _did_--which comes to the same thing. Above all I can trust you to believe that if _your_ discipline has been stiff, that of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been stiffer--incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and bewildered with it all--yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day, never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will remember how she crowned the victor--I modestly forbear to name him: and what a ruinously--to _him_--genial _feu de joie_ resulted from the expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June 14th--but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd--urgent and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out those sweet September days a little even now--let _me_ at least dream of them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going back even with a further delay--I am wasted to a shadow (even though the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I once had--before we applied the match. You see the loss for you _now_--by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"--and won them by ballot--for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my female victims--after _such_ a quandary in the choice! Apropos of coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too--while his hand is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me.... Such is this babyish democracy. Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To T. Bailey Sanders._ /* Barack-Matiff Farm, Salisbury, Conn. May 27, 1911. */ /* My dear Bailey, */ It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you--even though I have to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last) postponement of my re-appearance. I _like_ to think that you may be a little wounded--wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England--than which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I thank the "powers"--and even presume to figure it out that I shall next slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over ills. Don't lament my small procrastination--a matter of only six weeks; for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the more amiable sex--supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the cousins, but about the sex)--in the deep warm heart of "New England at its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale, recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself, the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and made--on its great scale of extent--to be dealt with by the blest motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many reflections--but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand même) the whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I embark--that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain. However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Sir T. H. Warren._ /# The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in 1912. #/ /* Salisbury, Connecticut. May 29th, 1911. */ /* My dear President, */ I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd. Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence. I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America.... I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Ellen Emmet._ /# Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 15th, 1911. */ /* Beloved dearest darling Bay! */ Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m. through Harry--who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and exquisitely touches me--so bowed down under the shame of my long silence to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated close--which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle. I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed) unbroken visitation just after leaving you--and, frankly, it simply demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless, stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and desired nothing but to melt utterly away--and could only treat my nearest and dearest as if _they_ expected and desired no more. I am convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you have mainly spent your time--though in your letter you're too delicate to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps--I mean places of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans, themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back _here_, myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time; though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I left behind me--it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S. Everything is scorched and blighted--my garden a thing almost of cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have rain. _Then_ I think all troubles would end, or mend--and at least I should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to see how and where I am. I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little old--ever so ancient--ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have copied--her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it--though she will believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like _her_ about that time too--we were always thought to look a little alike.... My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered _ferry_, making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Howard Sturgis._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 17th, 1911. */ /* Beloved creature! */ As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from là-bas, dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions, been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that time--and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time I last heard from you, pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while _in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be removed. I _was_ removed--at the date I mention--pressing your supreme benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest ebb. _Such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go, _go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader--and eke with Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire--but that will probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! But one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so yearningly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may have been--but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to me, from far back, in so amiable a light.... _To Mrs. William James._ /* Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. August 27th, 1911. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ I want to write you while I am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black anniversary--just a little. I have been dreading this day--as I have been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago (quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad I came, just as I am glad that you were here then--in spite of everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of May 1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. It has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old room--and I have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... Mrs. Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative competition--the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe: Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing--finishing--the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year. ...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. I bless your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest Alice. Your all faithful /* HENRY. */ _To Mrs. John L. Gardner._ /* Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. September 3rd, 1911. */ /* Dearest Isabella Gardner, */ Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you--so kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary (and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs. Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few (or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house--and though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes' motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that "happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse. Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling desert now--such is the magic of fond association. George James's shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them. I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could, I'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. You will find in the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than you have ever let yourself find out--and I hereby give you my blessing on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of your many gardens. Become rich in indifference--to almost everything but your fondly faithful old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the chauffeur as "she." #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Sept. 27th, 1911. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Alas it is not possible--it is not even for a moment thinkable. I returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me with--let me frankly say--absolute terror and dismay--the desire, the frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. _Her_!) get me!" In fine I _want_ as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of exile--_time_, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now--as I want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin immediately to address myself--and even if my desire were intense indeed there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough--don't let me pile up the agony of the ungracious--as any failure of response to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and general resources--or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly bow!) on my _ever_ leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of saying this to you--your beautiful genius being so for great globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is, incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it, since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't despise me for a spiritless worm, only _livrez-vous-y_ yourself ... with all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully fond old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 2nd, 1911. */ /* Dear incomparable Child! */ What is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of such a letter? Yes, I _have_--through the force of dire accidents--treated you to the most confused and aching void that could pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine upon me still with your own sole light--the absolute dazzle of which very naturally brings tears to my eyes. You are a monster--or almost!--of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all, clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, I quite recognise, but to collapse and grovel. Behold me before you worm-like therefore--a pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility and quite inoffensively transportable--whether by motor-car or train, or the local, frugal fly. There is an almost incredible kindness for me in your and Wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets, I know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of altruism, and I surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very most pious hope that you won't repent of it. You shall not at any point, I promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid situation can possibly stave it off. I will bravely come then on Friday 27th--arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good as to instruct me to adopt. And even as the earthworm might aspire--occasion offering--to mate with the silkworm, I will gladly arrange with dear glossy Howard to present myself if possible in _his_ company. I rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is a rare felicity in it: for Howard is the person in all the world who is kindest to me _next after you_. I shall rejoice to see Wilfred again, and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by adversity. This splendidly makes up--and all the good I thought of him is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. It will thrill me likewise to see your bower of bliss--a _fester Burg_ in a distracted world just now, and where I pray that good understandings shall ever hold their own. It mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you, dear Clare, and you will see how I, for my permitted part, shall pull it off. I was lately very happy in Scotland--happy for _me_, and for Scotland!--and it must have been something to do with the fact that (I being in Forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown to me, in the neighbouring county. This created an atmosphere--over and above the bonny Scotch; I kind of sniffed your great geniality--from afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. It's rapture to think that you'll do me yet more--at closer quarters, and I am yours, my dear Clare, all affectionately, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Alice Runnells._ /# H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become engaged to Miss Runnells. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 4th, 1911. */ /* My very dear Niece, */ I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel--all you say--how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I am going to take in you--and how I want you to multiply for me the occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest interest in Bill--and you and I feel then exactly together about that. We shall do--always more or less together!--everything we can think of to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of him--and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and _entier_; it's a great thing to be as _entier_ as that. And he has great ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we can give them--as faith and affection can do these things; though of a certainty they would go their own way in spite of us--the fine powers would--if, unluckily for us, they _didn't_ appeal to us. I like to think of you working out your ideas--planning all those possibilities together--in the wondrous Chocorua October--where I hope you are staying to the end--and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely intense--which is a bit of a waste; if one _is_ intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better yet--only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy and profit--and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Frederic Harrison._ /# The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was _The Outcry_. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. Oct. 19, 1911. */ /* Dear Mrs. Harrison, */ I am more touched than I can say by your gentle and generous acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great sorrow months and months ago--I am ashamed to remind you of how many! You now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head--and I can scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. I was in truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged--at once horribly bereft and very ill physically, but I was really almost as much touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as I was either. Only I was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition--at the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last I did begin to emerge--after a very difficult year in America which came to an end only two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing--my long silence required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. However, I _have_ little by little explained--to some friends; though I think not to those I count as closest--for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders, without one's having to tell too much. I am in town, you see--not at Rye, having gone back there definitely, three weeks ago, to the questionable experiment of taking up my abode there for the season to come. The experiment broke down--I can no longer stand the solitude and confinement, the _immobilisation_, of that contracted corner in these shortening and darkening weeks and months. These things have the worst effect upon me--and I fled to London pavements, lamplights, shopfronts, taxi's--and friends; amid all of which I have recovered my equilibrium excellently, and shall do so still more. It means definitely for me no more winters at rueful Rye--only summers, though I hope plenty of _them_. I go down there, however, for bits, to keep my small household together--I can't yet, or till I arrange some frugal footing, bring it up here; and I shall be delighted to profit by one of those occasions to seek your hospitality in a neighbourly way for a couple of nights. I shall be eager for this, and will communicate with you as soon as the opportunity seems to glimmer. Please express to Frederic Harrison my hearty participation, by sympathy and sense, in all the fine things that are now so handsomely happening to him; he is a splendid example and incitement (_ex_citement in fact) for those climbing the great hill--the hill of the long faith and the stout staff--just after him, and who see him so little spent and so erect against the sky at the top. We see you _with_ him, dear Mrs. Harrison, making scarcely less brave a figure--at least to your very faithful old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I have it at heart to mention that my small fiction was written two years ago--in 1909. _To Miss Theodora Bosanquet._ /# On this appeal Miss Bosanquet, H. J.'s amanuensis, secured rooms for him in Lawrence Street, Chelsea. #/ /* 105 Pall Mall, S.W. October 27th, 1911. */ /* Dear Miss Bosanquet, */ Oh if you _could_ only have the real right thing to miraculously propose to me, you and Miss Bradley, when I see you on Tuesday at 4.30! For you see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't _repeat_ those expressions!) from Rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger within me. But I haven't a seat and temple for the Remington and its priestess--_can't_ have here at this club, and on the other hand can't now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the London winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (_wasting, now_) time and thought. I want a small, very cheap and very clean _furnished_ flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under the King's Cross delusion--only better _and_ with some, a very few, tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that I could hire for 2 or 3--_3 or 4_--months to drive ahead my job in--the Remington priestess and I converging and meeting there morning by morning--and it being preferably nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! I must keep on _this_ place for food and bed etc.--I have it by the year--till I really _have_ something else by the year--for winter purposes--to supersede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.) Your researches can have only been for the _un_furnished--but look, _think, invent_! Two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms would do. I catch a train till Monday, probably late. But on Tuesday! /* Yours ever, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ /# The book on which H. J. was now at work was _A Small Boy and Others_. #/ /* The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W. Nov. 13th, 1911. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ I must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the 22nd--continued on the 31st. I clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from you all that I kind of pine for the need of it all the while--or at any rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old Library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... I find, naturally, that I can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so much more vividly than I could of old--through the effect of all those weeks and months of last year--which have had at any rate that happy result, that I have the constant image of your days and doings. You must think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine--because distinctly, yes, dear brave old London is working my cure. The _conditions_ here were what I needed all the while that I was so far away from them--I mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... I shall see how it works--from 10.30 to 1.30 each day--and let you hear more; but it represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly now, up to my neck into the book about William and the rest of us. I have written to Harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful letters (copies of them) which I didn't bring away with me--on the other hand I have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the mass of Father's that I have with me (thrust into Father's envelopes etc.) Of Father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely domestic, private and personal. _November 19th._ I find with horror, dearest Alice, that I have inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted where I broke off above,) under the impression that I had finished and posted it. This is dreadful, and I am afraid shows how the beneficent London, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract, giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. What sickened me is that I have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted week--so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. On the other hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the present states to you.... In the third place a most valued letter from Harry has come, accompanying a packet of more of William's letters typed, for which I heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. I am writing to him in a very few days, and will then tell him how I am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as _my_ book, my play of reminiscence and almost of brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. The book I see and feel will be difficult and unprecedented and perilous--but if I bring it off it will be exquisite and unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it and oh so devoutly desire it. I greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of letters from Alice. She clearly destroyed after Father's death all the letters she had written to _them_--him and Mother--in absence, and this was natural enough. But it leaves a perfect blank--though there are on the other hand all my own intimate memories. Could you see--ask--if Fanny Morse has kept any? that is just possible. She wrote after all so little. I marvel that _I_ have none--during the Cambridge years. But she was so ill that writing was rare for her--_very_ rare. However, I must end this. I hope the Irving St. winter wears a friendly face for you. I think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour--blest refuge. I re-embrace dearest Peg and I do so want some demonstration of what Aleck is doing. It's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so well physically." What does that sadly mean? I send him all my love and to your mother. Ever your /* HENRY. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. Nov. 19th, 1911. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality--and it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed." And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration.... But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving" anywhere--as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It requires an association of ease--with the whole heroic question (of the "up and doing" state)--which I don't possess, to presume to suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able, marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again--and here I am (mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work--and n'ai pas maintenant d'autre idée. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic--for I don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable and formidable job of my producing à mon âge another Golden Bowl--the most arduous and thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien des choses à dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write it (living on dried herbs and cold water--for "staying power"--meanwhile;) and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages more) than the Outcry. That is déjà assez difficile--the "artistic economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression) crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me--sates me; whereas the steel structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s--and vous-même, chère Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?) Outcries--and on données autrement rich. About this present one hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back to work--on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter, when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration--to which our blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself to the sense worn by "away"--as it clearly so gracefully will! For there are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by first coming away--away hither.... /* Yours all and always, HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. This was begun five days ago--and was raggedly and ruthlessly broken off--had to be--and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m. where I took it up again--on page 6th. But I put only today's date--as I didn't put the other day's at the time. _To W. E. Norris._ /* Lamb House, Rye. January 5th, 1912. */ /* My dear Norris, */ I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously _in_ for those just now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind; whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have had the promptest and most beautiful one from you--a miracle of the perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace--I make bold to feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I offer you still all the compliments of the Season--sated and gorged as you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it--but I leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here--in order to bore if possible _through_ my huge heap of postal obligations, the accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life written so many letters within the same space of time--and I really think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my recovery of a _normal_ senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again--that is, write 300 more letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon London. Now that I am not _obliged_ to be in this place (by having so committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find I quite like it--having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to stay, and that takes some doing--which I shall have set about by the 15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide--the four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing phenomenon--they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of disappearance, void of them--whereas the old things _had_, through their slowness, to hang about. One _gets_ a taxi, by the way, much faster than one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to _write_ the extinct object!)--and yet one gets it from so much further away and from such an at first hopeless void.... Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George--from all across Europe--for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which he must have been awfully glad. And àpropos of such felicities--or rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily hope that you _will_ go on to Spain with your niece in the spring--I'm convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly ceased to travel--I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends. My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss M. Betham Edwards._ /* Lamb House, Rye, Jan. 5th, 1912. */ /* Dear Miss Betham Edwards, */ I can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for Emily Morgan--which I am having put up to go to you with this; as well as explain a little my long silence. The very day, or the very second day, after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; I departed under that stress for London, practically to spend the winter, and have come back but for a very small number of days--I return there next week. "But," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for E. M. from _London_ then? What matter to us where it came from so long as it came?" To which I reply: "Well, I had in this house a small row of books available for the purpose and among which I could choose--also which I came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. In London I should have to go and _buy_ the thing, my own production--while I _have_ two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of _The Outcry_ that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay for--his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but six." "Why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in question sent you?--or have it sent to Hastings directly from your house?" "Because I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who _loves_ doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully, and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have to do it up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no skill and which I dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely! Besides I was vague as to which of my works I _did_ have on the accessible shelf--I only knew I had some--and would have to look and consider and decide: which I have now punctually done. And the thing will be beautifully wrapped!" "That's all very well; but why then didn't you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and uninformed?" "Oh, because from the moment I go up to town I _plunge_--plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of _cerebration_--having got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so _postally_ submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and heartless." But you see the penalty of all is that I have to write all _this_ now. ...I'm glad you like adverbs--I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying--or in thinking--that the sense for them is _the_ literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of. But I hope my volume won't contain too many for Emily Morgan. Don't let her dream of "acknowledging" it. She can do so when we meet again. Perhaps you can even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the Beast in the Jungle, say--or the Birthplace. May our generally so ambiguous 1912 be all easy figuring for _you_. Yours, dear Miss Betham Edwards, all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Wilfred Sheridan._ /# Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan had asked him to be godfather to their eldest child. #/ /* 105 Pall Mall, S.W. Jan. 12th, 1912. */ /* My dear Wilfred, */ Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's, but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but _one_ h there--don't teach her to _spell_ by me!) under some more valid and more charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so _concluding_ years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather's tomb--as would certainly be the case were I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of wisdom and experience--life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some I have been fatal)--two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me--at considerable length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is purely veracious history--a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add another--let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence. Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on easier reflection--just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence. You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension--I gathered from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir--with a scandalous splash. It will take more than me--! (though you may well say you don't _want_ more--after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am devotedly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Walter V. R. Berry._ /# H. J. never at any time received presents easily, and the difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent him by Mr. Berry. It may not be obvious that the gift in question was a leather dressing-case. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. February 8th, 1912. */ /* Très-cher et très-grand ami! */ How you must have wondered at my silence! But it has been, alas, inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. Just after you passed through London--or rather even _while_ you were passing through it--I began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in those awkward Pall Mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling back here as best I might, where I have been these several days but a poor ineffectual rag. I shall get better here if I can still further draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile I am capable but of this weak and appealing grimace--so deeply discouraged am I to feel that there are still, and after I have travelled so far, such horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (This has been a deeper one than for many months, though I am, I believe, slowly scrambling out; and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here--for better aid and comfort.) ... The case has really and largely been, however, all the while, dearest Walter, that of my having had to yield, just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming _coup de massue_ of your--well, of your you know what. It was _that_ that knocked me down--when I was just trembling for a fall; it was that that laid me flat. _February 14th._ Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for me but resignedly to intermit and _me recoucher_. You had done it with your own mailed fist--mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving and groaning as a result _de vos oeuvres_--and forced thereby quite to neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me. That is the grand fact of the situation--that is the tawny lion, portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see; because I can't live _up_ to him. His claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale--all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't regild that rusty metal--he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if I had stolen _somebody else's_ (re-garnished _blason_) and were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply can't _afford_ him, and that is the sorry homely truth. _He is out of the picture_--out of _mine_; and behold me condemned to live forever with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?--to have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about _with_. Bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though I may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never _fait jaser_. All this I have to think of--and I put it candidly to you while yet there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost--to yourself--that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but that you shouldn't have counted the cost to _me_, to whom it spells ruin: _that_ ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the most lyric acts recorded in history--and one of the most finely aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, _has_ a prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence and generosity of your procédé, and I have gasped under it while tossing on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it _has_, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after--or rather quite intensely _before_--it! What is a poor man to do, mon prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised upon? There is _nothing_, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (_such_ a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the heavens open--that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand celestial shopfront does--and discharge straight into one's lap the perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well _may_ they have raved--but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter, Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're not--well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as mention the subject. It's better so. Perhaps your conscience will tell you why--tell you, I mean, that great supreme _gestes_ are only fair when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. I can't--and it makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. I go about trying--so as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come off--practice _doesn't_ make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh irresistible one--you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down forever, and I must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless your name--even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest Walter, all too abjectly and too touchedly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To W. D. Howells._ /# The following "open letter" was written to be read at the dinner held in New York in celebration of Mr. Howells's seventy-fifth birthday. #/ /* 105 Pall Mall, S.W. February 19th, 1912. */ /* My dear Howells, */ It is made known to me that they are soon to feast in New York the newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and reaffirm their allegiance. I shall not be there, to my sorrow, and though this is inevitable I yet want to be missed, peculiarly and monstrously missed; so that these words shall be a public apology for my absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but better still read _to_ you and in fact straight _at_ you, by whoever will be so kind and so loud and so distinct. For I doubt, you see, whether any of your toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being with you at such an hour. There can scarce be one, I think, to-day, who has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so long, and who has such fine old reasons--so old, yet so well preserved--to feel your virtue and sound your praise. My debt to you began well-nigh half a century ago, in the most personal way possible, and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth--but always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to write--and I allude especially to the summer of 1866--with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened me the door; you wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me--I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of _that_. You published me at once--and paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude; magnificently, I felt, and so that nothing since has ever quite come up to it. More than this even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was in itself an inspiration. I mean that you talked to me and listened to me--ever so patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and consorted with me. This won me to you irresistibly and made you the most interesting person I knew--lost as I was in the charming sense that my best friend was an editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being as that was a kind of property of my own. Yet how didn't that interest still quicken and spread when I became aware that--with such attention as you could spare from us, for I recognised my fellow beneficiaries--you had started to cultivate _your_ great garden as well; the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to this day, and in which you have grown so grand a show of--well, really of everything. Your liberal visits to _my_ plot, and your free-handed purchases there, were still greater events when I began to see you handle, yourself, with such ease the key to our rich and inexhaustible mystery. Then the question of what you would make of your own powers began to be even more interesting than the question of what you would make of mine--all the more, I confess, as you had ended by settling this one so happily. My confidence in myself, which you had so helped me to, gave way to a fascinated impression of your own spread and growth; for you broke out so insistently and variously that it was a charm to watch and an excitement to follow you. The only drawback that I remember suffering from was that _I_, your original debtor, couldn't print or publish or pay you--which would have been a sort of ideal _re_payment and of enhanced credit; you could take care of yourself so beautifully, and I could (unless by some occasional happy chance or rare favour) scarce so much as glance at your proofs or have a glimpse of your "endings." I could only read you, full-blown and finished--and see, with the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again. That then was what I had with time to settle down to--the common attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to practise meaner economies, I have admired, from period to period, your so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively a little--what do I say a little? I mean a magnificent deal!--of Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage, after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of sitting up to your neck, as I may say--or at least up to your waist--amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what American life _was_--or thought we did, deluded though we may have been! I don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called assimilations of this later time; I can only feel and speak for those conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The _real_ affair of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp and sweet. To observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put forth A Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, and The Landlord at Lion's Head, and The Kentons (that perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude A Foregone Conclusion, and The Undiscovered Country, and The Lady of the Aroostook, and The Minister's Charge--to make of a long list too short a one; with the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree _documentary_; so that none other, through all your fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore Cooper's Leather-stocking--so knowing to be able to do it!--comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves. However, these things take us far, and what I wished mainly to put on record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will keep you from ever being neglected. The critical intelligence--if any such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our sphere--has not at all begun to render you its tribute. The more inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the American life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have used one's genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that they fall by their own weight into that happy service. You may remember perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and admirable Taine, in one of the fine excursions of his French curiosity, greeted you as a precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his appreciation, I want you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and then--though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not understood--your really beautiful time will come. Nothing so much as feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can give pleasure to yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The following refers to the third volume (covering the years 1838 to 1848) of Mme Vladimir Karénine's "George Sand, sa Vie et ses OEuvres," an article on which, written by H. J. for the _Quarterly Review_, appears in _Notes on Novelists_. #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. March 13th, 1912. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Just a word to thank you--so inadequately--for everything. Your letter of the 1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of the amazing Vladimir (amazing for _acharnement_ over her subject) has rejoiced my heart the more that I had quite given up expecting it. The two first vols. had long ago deeply held me--but I had at last had to suppose them but a colossal fragment. Fortunately the whole thing proves less fragmentary _than_ colossal, and our dear old George _ressort_ more and more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. The passages you marked contribute indeed _most_ to this ineffable effect--and the long letter to sweet Solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human intelligence, one of the great things of literature. And what a value it all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what _moeurs_, what habits, what conditions and relations every way--and what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!--not diminished by all the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and _so_ many other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chop!--not naturally at home in grease--but having been originally _pulled_ in--and floundering there at last to extinction! _Ce qui dépasse_, however--and it makes the last word about dear old G. really--is her overwhelming _glibness_, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to Gryzmala (or whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at Stockbridge, as to all her _amours_. To have such a flow of remark on that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps somehow to make one feel that Providence laid up for the French such a store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall, that their conduct and _moeurs_, coming _after_, had positively to justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and, as I say, glibnesses--so that as there were at any rate such things there for them to inevitably _say_, why not simply _do_ all the things that would give them a _rapport_ and a sense? The things _we_, poor disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without the sense of any such beautiful _cadres_ awaiting us--and therefore poorly and going but half--or a tenth--of the way. It makes a difference when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact: you do it so miserably compared with Providence--especially Providence aided by the French language: which by the way convinces me that Providence thinks and _really_ expresses itself only in French, the language of gallantry. It will be a joy when we can next converse on these and cognate themes--I know of no such link of true interchange as a community of interest in dear old George. I don't know what else to tell you--nor where this will find you.... I kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of some sort--to have arrived at some _modus vivendi_. The impossible wears on us, but we wear a little here, I think, even on the coal-strike and the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the window-smashing women add a darker shade. I am blackly bored when the latter are at large and at work; but somehow I am still _more_ blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.... Yours all and always, dearest Edith, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /# This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr. Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. #/ /* 105 Pall Mall, S.W. March 25th, 1912. */ /* My dear Wells, */ Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I believed it might be; in spite of which interest--or in spite of which belief at least--here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards, on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is precisely my own state of mind--really caring as I do for nothing in the world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company. Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under earnest invitation, for me--in your having said and felt all those things _and then joined_--for the general amenity and civility and unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt--for the sake of the good-nature. You will say that you _had_ no doubt and couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter sought to implant--in addition to its not being a question of your acting, but simply of your _not_ (that is of your not refusing, but simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under your feet so _naturally_ and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it would be _we_ gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational _appeal_--that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some sort of interesting or curious _order_: I utterly defy it in short not to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it unmakes--just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention aiding, in short _you_ aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest inconsistency. So it is that you are _in_ our circle anyhow you can fix it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and watch--all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one American blotch upon it. Oh _patriotism_!--that mine, the mere paying guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry or to weary (I wish it _could_!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might have done for _our_ freedom--and how little we could do against yours! Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh _do_!--though I must warn you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death! /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Lady Bell._ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 17th, 1912. */ /* My dear Florence Bell, */ A good friend of ours--in fact one of our very best--spoke to me here a few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to wonder whether just such a mercy as _this_ may not be even below the worst--but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that you must _never_, and that you _will_ never, dream of any "acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams, I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me--who had a very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I want you to be complacent too--though at this rate there won't be much for you to be so _about_! I really hope you go on smoothly and serenely--and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible (that is, mainly good) news--such as, given your constitutional charity, will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days--I speak of my own very personal ones--don't _make_ news; I even rather dread breaking out into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener-- _May 26th._ Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping. I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day--broken off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle _is_ a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it--even if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I am--that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items the texture of my life has bristled--even to the effect of a certain fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure among the great issues and processions of Rounton--as I believe that great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having come down here yesterday for a couple of days--in order not to prevent my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim protection--so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash into the world--where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity--which is quite the wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to me; but I blush for it--can't brazen it out that they are no loss. Brazening it out is the secret of life--for the _peu doués_. But what need of that have _you_, lady of the full programme and the rich performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness _de toute cette jeunesse_) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered, and strikingly as rural--in the Constable way--as if it were on the other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon you--assuming my balance preserved--at some hour gently appointed by yourself. Then I shall tell you more--if you can stand more after this--fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but _too_ aware there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of) yours all constantly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ /# On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr. Filson Young described his voice as "old." #/ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 18th, 1912. */ /* Dearest Lucy! */ Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young _enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I _have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old /* H. J. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 19th, 1912. */ ...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of heated turmoil and dusty despair--which, however, re-awaits you! Never mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace, and teach yourself--by which I mean let your grandmother teach you--that with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of _my_ old London--_this_ isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even when here (for I _feel_ you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the getting on of your work--how splendidly copious your flow; and am much interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary emotions. These latter indeed--or some of them, as you express them, I don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and that the older I grow and the more I _go_ the more sacred to me do picking and composing become--though I naturally don't limit myself to Stevenson's _kind_ of the same. Don't let any one persuade you--there are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it--that strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and that Form _is_ [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely no substance without it. Form alone _takes_, and holds and preserves, substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings, though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong, rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; _then_, as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a _leak_ in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the _found_ (because the sought-for) form is the absolute citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading you--though a very imperfect one--which you have drawn upon yourself (as moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter--I shall go for you again--as soon as I find you in a lone corner.... Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you _can_) for this letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Rhoda Broughton._ /* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. June 2nd, 1912. */ /* My dear Rhoda, */ Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter--but London days do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise them--as I do; they fall, as it were, from--or, better still, they utterly dissolve _in_--my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at last _ought_ to be auspicious--though indeed that merely tends to make me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all except three days (about) of the week--speaking from the social point of view. The old Victorian _social_ Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession--which however, after all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens, meanwhile, know me no more--the region has turned to sadness, as if, with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter, the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably, without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ... Good-night, however, now--I must stagger (really from the force of too total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 16th, 1912. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ ...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely, after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous wave of heat is sweeping over the land--passed on apparently from "your side"--and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here--where nothing could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions. ...The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the "literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter--the fact that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with--to do with, that is, in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since established) difficulty always, that I have to project and _do_ a great deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as regards time, material etc.--at least in the short run. In the long run, and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill--as a kind of precaution and forewarning--for your inevitable sense of my "slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical conditions--and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily, and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort to work really helps me physically--to say nothing of course of (a thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the money-question--by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though myself much more than others!)--and that this is largely the result of these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on. But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for _that_! And now, for the moment--for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!--as to which I sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all! Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever, /* H. J. */ _To R. W. Chapman._ /# Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of _The Awkward Age_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 17th, 1912. */ /* Dear Mr. Chapman, */ I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so _many_ letters to answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours. I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. But one is simply in the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much--as to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham--which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. I _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 14th, 1912. */ ...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose--by which I mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there for long years--was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers' tales--especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners--so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a creature to talk of _you_ with--but I see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. Clearly _you_ move still in the human maze--but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say nothing of any return to _these_ platitudes, so I suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and ask _me_ for a light. It's good for you to have read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks _waste_ of acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, I think, of being so off, so _far_ (given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. It's charming to me to hear that _The Ambassadors_ have again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a very _packed_ production, with a good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and _all_ your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure that I quite understand what in that connection you miss--I mean in the way of what _could_ be there. The whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations--and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken _other_ relations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to me given--given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However, instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return, for a couple of days--when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart of your truest old /* H. J. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on Swinburne in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, further dealt with in the next letter. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. 7th October, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Forgive this cold-blooded machinery--for I have been of late a stricken man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August, through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain; which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"--my impression of the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect. It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body, who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my respectability--as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled. Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have only wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting. /* Yours always, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 10th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed. Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty--of the rarest and charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature (though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the Chelsea Flat _won't_ apply to you for a character of me if they haven't done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you, reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. It was only a question of a word in case they _should_ appeal; kindly don't dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.) I received with pleasure the small Swinburne--of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at my ease--so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy Lord Redesdale's contribution--showing, afresh, how _everything_ about such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does Redesdale write--and prettily will ---- have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him. I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters; and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. We must have more talk of them--and also of Wells' book, with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing--the absence of any attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness to go a-begging!-- ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread--I had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 11th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing, and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter. Very interesting your note--in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously _like_ him--but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art--in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little à la hauteur--! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was _starved_, to my vision, in many ways--and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights--while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so content itself to _be_ one, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I never _rang_ it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough observing that same discretion to _you_--! I slowly mend, but it's absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost propose. /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# _The Morning Post_ article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the _Letters of George Meredith_. #/ _Dictated._ Lamb House, Rye. October 13th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence--but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins--and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic _facture_. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet--this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation. I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of it a little before--I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to--which is an observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he _isn't_ ever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours. However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse _some_ of the sting will, I trust, have been drawn. /* Yours rather wearily, HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I _am_ having, it appears--Sunday, 2 p.m.--to tumble back into bed; though I rose but at 10! _To Edmund Gosse._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 15th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Here I am at it again--for I can't not thank you for your two notes last night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no one left to lose--as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend. With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, I mean, the value of his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76, when Maupassant, still _inédit_, but always "round," regaled me with a fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously Victorian that too--I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay. I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever, about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces messieurs_; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_ were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it, than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call "spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois. However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and wisdom. Still, I _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48 hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me back there--and I'm yours with no word more, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J. Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more than once afterwards. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 17th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that I _am_ perhaps the last living depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how little I could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. I didn't in the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as "Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character, are--or were especially then--viewed in French circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_, than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment! At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely, that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there, Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained with me is but the note of two elements--that of the Monkey's jealousy, and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed _himself_, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it, and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are my data! _How_ I wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis or exhibition of the national character (of _either_ of the national characters) so involved would I have failed to catch in the act. Yet I do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about _this_--that, whatever turn the dénouement took, whichever life was most luridly sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last _cocasserie_, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it as you can--I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any rate--the best I can do for you--throw any sufficient light? I recognise the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly worked-out view of it. _Such_ a pity, with this, that as I recover the fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active figuration of the so tremendously _averti_ young Guy's intellectual, critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me, rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or less originality of ces messieurs!--even though, with this, highly original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another, still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, àpropos of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which now escape me--it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers one _might_ have gathered up and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious British existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in "La Faustin" (not, by the way, "_Le_ Faustin," as I think the printer has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling, the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition, out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES, */ _To H. G. Wells._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 18th, 1912. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire, the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered--with all of which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"--under which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off--and perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses--I see no hope of my leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has most fortunately reigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality. Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam, which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your spell I do advance--save when I pull myself up stock still in order not to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you and in you and (almost cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you H. G. W., to the sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression--I mean your fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see you "behave," all along, much more than I see them even when they behave (as I'm not sure they behave _most_ in "Marriage") with whatever charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the drama is somehow most of all the adventure for _you_--not to say of you--the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those you are by way of letting _them_ in for. I don't say that those you let them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your "story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs. You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling, to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of all to me. I simply decline--that's the way the thing works--to pass you again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and remaining thus yours abjectly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Humphry Ward._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 22nd, 1912. */ /* Dear Mary Ward, */ Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so vulgarly and inadequately called--the medical _herpes zonalis_ meeting much better the malign intensity of the case--and the end is not yet. I am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only _tout doucement_, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged, infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement, please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual, or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it important positively to cultivate--even at the risk of affecting you as solemn and pompous and ridiculous. I will admit to you (should you be so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place--effected with impunity--as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed you to that spatterment! But I pull up--this is too lame a gait; and am yours all not less faithfully than feebly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Humphry Ward._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 24th, 1912. */ /* My dear Mary Ward, */ I feel I _must_ really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness--very soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your generous accents touch me--making me verily yearn as I think of the balm I should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of remark to H.G. Wells--who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case comparatively irrelevant--whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to me--in his affair--the coexistence of so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to talk--which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant _coup_ and being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as if people only did these things in Marie--and in Mary! Do while you are there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton; if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant, braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you, "acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having, as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately _in_ them. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the "outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of your pass-words--yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is so compatible with more _other_ initiations than I know, on the whole, almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given--for it does happen that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however, is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect benevolence. Still, still, still--well, _still_ I am harmoniously yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY. _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 24th, 1912. My dear grand Gaillard, */ I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious advances--and all in connection with the noble shades and the social scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal. Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain _gestes_ from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this whole month sharply ill--under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease. It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke--to make confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities, and I should add despairs--were my resolution not to be beaten, however battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption. Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I look forward to being fit within no _calculable_ time either to prance in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from là-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent Howard last night some express message to you--which kindly see that he delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To John Bailey._ /# The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of the chairmanship of the English Association. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 11th, 1912. */ /* My dear John, */ Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am stricken and helpless still--I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless visitation--being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my form of utterance only--for my matter (given that of your own charming appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of _Dis_sociation and Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things, but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them--to the best of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the _reasons_--! for my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into the bargain)--but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts--or of my own poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me, and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your kindest of letters--until at some easier hour I am able to make you a less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I _will_ appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for private association, for the banquet of _two_ and the fellowship of _that_ fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I won't say more now--except that I venture all the same to commend myself brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Dr. J. William White._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 14th, 1912. */ /* My dear William, */ I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I _never_ let your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"--herpes zonalis, you see I know!--of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell (saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a mysterious providence has held me worthy only of _that_) the pain and the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing. The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on--and feel as if I might for the rest of my life--or _would_ honestly so feel were it not that I have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge--he can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state. This is a dismal tale to regale you with--accustomed as even you are to dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure] to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear William, that I can't so much as _think_ of Mr. Roosevelt for two consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he lately took toward that effect--of presenting himself as the noisiest figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human race--having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which you will say I deserve), _not_ to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be roared at _by_ it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster, as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your letter--this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars, such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear William, that I suppose _you_ yell--my auditive nerve cherishes in spite of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must now fall back upon them--and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the picture of Letitia's "form"--knowing as I do with what inveterate devotion she ever forms herself _upon_ you. I embrace you both, my dear William--so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia, which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately yours and hers, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# Mr. Gosse's volume was his _Portraits and Sketches_, just published. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 19th, 1912. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my 8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation--really with none worth speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent--when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate--it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further _critically_--that is, I mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very well have been out of your frame--it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton--this last very rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most suspense--and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off--but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting _real_ truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. Where I can't but feel that he _should_ be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, I admit!)--give-away, I mean, by his _cultivation_, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study--for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question--merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary _voulu_ Scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely _at_ Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again bristlingly yet _bêtement_ wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right! However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish _you_ would, all the same--since it may still somehow come your way. Your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye--I can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact can't _possibly_ be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more news--"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to make. /* Yours all, and all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend--it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!--gave you something of the light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed--charming, I think--speech: "the best thing he has done." _To Mrs. Bigelow._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 21st, 1912. */ /* My dear Edith, */ It is interesting to hear from you on any ground--even when I am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way--this way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other, if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile--you and Baby, and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering. As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly _hadn't_ occurred to him to put forth the _banal_ claim. My heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm _sure_ you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! Put him off with _them_--and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, _intelligent_, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more. What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him--and even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show _you_, later on, so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull inhuman view of the River--which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your Bosom (worse luck for him)--so I scrawl him my sign independently of this. But the moral holds! _To Robert C. Witt._ /# It will be remembered that the story of _The Outcry_ turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano." #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 27th, 1912. */ /* Dear Sir, */ I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I should have a strictly supposititious one--with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So _my_ Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy--and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it to you none the less that I shall be able--after I have recovered from this humiliation--to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank you for this and am faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, _The Reef_. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 4th, 1912. */ /* My dear E. W. */ Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I fear I have left it a trifle bumped and _bousculé_ in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way--so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those _mauvais_ tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a Patient ever survives _any_ relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or _have_ owed you at moments that at all lent themselves--in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment. There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my "first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think, quite the finest thing you have done; both _more_ done than even the best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value, interest and beauty. _December 9th._ I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever since--I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its quality and of the unspeakably _fouillée_ nature of the situation between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and _justesse_; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him--which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout as an Eriphyle or a Bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a little for something _qui me chiffonne_ throughout: which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its _milieu_ and background, and to any determining or qualifying _entourage_, takes place _comme cela_, and in a specified, localised way, in France--these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh, if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston Givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious _fond_ you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite _moments_, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your _façon de dire_; examples of which I could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot--the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom _she_ might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in _her_ texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say _mieux_, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (_comme moi, par exemple_!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)--makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux--but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the _colonnade_ and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent--after such an example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come. These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really--the weariness of pain so great--of not knowing _à quel saint me vouer_. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of the regular process of _dénouement_ of my accursed ill, I am in all probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week, even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street, where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks, be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To A. F. de Navarro._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. December 12th, 1912. */ /* My dear delightful Tony, */ Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one tosses on the couch of pain--and mine has been, from the nature of my situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet--all one's visionary and imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff. That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you--clearly you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness. There is nothing left for _me_ personally to like but the little mouldy nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else (including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers--so that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these morbid, _maussade_ remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your beauty--in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the blight, by going up to town--almost straight out of bed and dangling my bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel. I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours always, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 19th, 1913. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so: unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful for that I must express to you something of it to-day--even at the risk of a glut of information. My long silence--since I came up to town, including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill association--has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an "asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings, have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in it--but I _am_ too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me rapidly--all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of "Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother--waiting to do it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of, some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice, written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to do, with her.... _Jan. 23rd, 1913._ I have been unable to go on with this these several days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more things I wanted--so the long letter I _have_ got off to your Mother will precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,) but this is diminishing substantially though slowly--and I mainly mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters. My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)--I mean these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still and yet so animated--are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain it to you--so far as you won't have noted it for yourself--how and why it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago--and that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current gains--through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910 descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting back to decent continuity of work it becomes _vital_ for me to aim at returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and imagination--artistically in short--and only when this relation is renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only _how_ I want to complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first! Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do, with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book--for all last winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the other way round. _Jan. 28th._ I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not take it up again--through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and whole evenings--my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is 5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment grows in grace--nothing really could have been better for me. I went into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to this momentary _gêne_, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance of too squalid a helplessness--for an early return to fond fiction will alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my cable) has just come in. All tenderest love. _To Miss Grace Norton._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Feb. 6th, 1913. */ /* Dearest old friend! */ Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility--even when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so much _too_ long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can. There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed _punctually_ enough to help you, if need be, to feel--especially as of any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so much better--and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance--even if I have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by the same token, my dear Grace, treat _you_ to. Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy--while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently, nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that I feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here, while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_ great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained. Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang--quite as if I had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster, of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However, I am drenching you with numbered pages--I ask no credit for the number!--and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Henry White._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Feb. 23rd, 1913. */ /* My dear old Friend, */ Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes--all the more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure--all the more that I don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish--again and yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_ to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. But it's another London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less _with_ you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry must feel amid your new Washington horizons--and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time, which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say "cross my path"--but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your Washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for I can't rid myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the _formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if I make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"--just as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect. But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your House--which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my way--so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but say that it serves me right not to have managed my life better--especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!... I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you, though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe in happy exemption from parents--or a parent. However, nothing does surprise me now--almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my _trou_, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate remembrance, and am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 5th, 1913. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had lately much longed to hear from you--and when do I not?--and had sent you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself is better than anything else.... I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in perching--even thus modestly for a "real home"--just on this spot. My beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four successive excursions in a Bath-chair--every command of which resource is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me for its own. This of course not "really"--my excellent legs are, thank heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only, if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long, smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety) and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand, straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and again pressed back upon me here--and how, rather suddenly, we had, in the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves of association. This last I keep saying--I mean in the sense that, especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it--and shan't _settle_ to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions. They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry--there would be too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear--in respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative value--very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to "take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally Peg--_and_ your Mother!--again and am your ever affectionate /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Bruce Porter._ /# The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. [March, 1913.] */ ...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly, round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me--I adore your hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of the _justesse_ of your globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because you so beautifully and suddenly _saw_ from afar (and so admirably wanted to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off. But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all, that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate punctuality or grace. Only _this_, you see, is my long-delayed and comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce, taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears about _you_! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium, now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave secret. I am incapable of doubting of this--though after all I now feel how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for a better approach to a real personal _jaw_! It is indeed most strange, this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a grain of contact (_et encore!_) to a ton of separation. It's to the honour of us anyhow that we _can_ and do keep touching without the more platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still--demonstrate, as I say, for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June--but Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years' lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a climate!--yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of climates)--I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her--and tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of reminiscential twaddle.... _To Lady Ritchie._ /# Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the daughter of Thackeray. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 25th, 1913. */ /* Dearest old Friend! */ I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!--so much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow) Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said about it--and I think I shall be able to say them _ALL_! The _furore_ you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!) would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would simply be a _fatal_ Apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish. _But_ we will jaw about it--there is so much to say--and for Hester it would be another matter: _she_ could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the storm. Besides, _she_ isn't the Princess Royal--but only _a remove_ of the Blood! Again, however, _nous en causerons_--on Thursday. I shall so hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's all so faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ /# The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he would sit for his portrait. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 1st, 1913. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been reassured further--I mean beyond my cable--by a letter I lately despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so--in spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less, when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness--and though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow, distinctly--which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditions _here_ are admirably helpful and favouring. You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck" everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, _this_ newly acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and (the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge. Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. To say how the question affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make light of you and the children--but when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the journey (I have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) But you will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little I can dream of any déplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with the charge of making up _all_ my life.... You see my capital--yielding all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other hand, you and Peg and Aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company. I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly near me here--if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side understand all your present complications. _April 16th!_ It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off the above at the hour I _had_ to, I have been unable to go on with it for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself--when I am "bad" I feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I am _not_ feeling differently--for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on correspondentially--instead of attending to my proper work, which has, however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave me the greatest joy. There are several things I want to say to you about the shape and substance of the book--and I will yet; only now I want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness, over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette--the two or three passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting" friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing your London better. What I wish I _could_ send you is the huge harvest of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me--a really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit, or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate; the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against the _giving to me_ of the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending Harry a copy of the Letter too--but do send him on this as well. You see there _must_ be good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em. What I _do_ want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With this _tide_ of gabble you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall! Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so! /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Percy Lubbock._ /# A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 21st, 1913. */ /* My dear blest Percy! */ I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45, whether you think it will do--as being on the one hand not too pompous or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the pro's and con's as to each _tour_. However, we will earnestly speak of it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will pronounce when we meet--heaven speed the hour! Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost _imposes_ itself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my date and address and my Dear Friends All; and that the full list, taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little text should begin. Anything else affects me as _more_ awkward; and I seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed. _To two hundred and seventy Friends._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 21st, 1913. */ /* Dear Friends All, */ Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier, of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to measure--how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased and recaptured--so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation, lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves, in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his labour--even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. And let me say over your names. [There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to the birthday gift.] _To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._ /# Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J. should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 30th, 1913. */ /* Best of Friends Both! */ Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably, not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme. With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance--easily understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. I _am_ so abjectly, so ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well (unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like; and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you see? so permanent, old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James, junior._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 18th, 1913. */ /* Dearest Bill, */ I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and _de gaieté de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably _very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do _something_ to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying of _his_ tag--and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that. To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings--as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves. I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so _fort_ all the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua--where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them to have the good news of it without delay. /* Yours both all affectionately, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Rhoda Broughton._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913. */ /* My dear Rhoda, */ I reply to your quite acclaimed letter--if there can be an acclamation of _one_!--by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you see _I_ continue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained. Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished, _parachevé_ (I sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly--it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity--by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a _nature de grand maître_ to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment.... I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool--absit omen!--I am not in a hurry to flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This has of course been "consideration," but damn _such_ consideration. My imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda, all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._ /# H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry Bernstein's play, _Le Secret_, with Mme. Simone in the principal part. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913. */ /* Dear Mrs. Sutro, */ Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the real last time--it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town--I can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in _her_ relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme, but _souvent femme varie_, and that lady not least. I am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most _expéditif_ way.... Almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, Hedworth Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times--but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just by _having_ those. Thereby it is that Le Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so _unfertilised_ state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For _him_ it may count as almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes--save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* Lamb House, Rye, Aug: 21: 13. */ ...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting young person and _most_ conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit--when she returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see, _you_ will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that I am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition--I dream of sticking on through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I make out that you will then be in London again--I mean _by_ November, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks--the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town--that I ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late. Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and his book along--by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as I can _be_ inoculated. I always _try_ to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's interminable _Peace and War_, and am struck with the fact that I now protest as much as I admire. He doesn't _do_ to read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the _waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer _doing_, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre! /* Ever your fondest of the fond, H. J. */ _To Mrs. Archibald Grove._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 22nd, 1913. */ /* My dear Kate Grove, */ Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest _occasion_, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909--nearly four long years ago--have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day--of our happy encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now--I mean _betterer_!--if I weren't so much older--or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me--that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country--probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_ hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough--I _was_ there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald--I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William Roughead, W. S._ /# Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 24th, 1913. */ /* Dear Mr. Roughead, */ I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have _meant_. That is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in _any_ instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran--I may take such visions too hard, but it has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August--may you therefore have had _some_ benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter. /* Yours most truly, HENRY JAMES. */ P. S. Only send me the next Juridical--and _then_ a wee word. _To Mrs. William James._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 28th, 1913. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, _very_ late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of _him_, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make _you_, of what William's joy of him would have been--something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that _he_ is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us--doesn't it?--at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity _us_ far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of _him_ as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice. /* H. J. */ _To Howard Sturgis._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Sept: 2nd, 1913. */ /* My dearest of all Howards, */ I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object--downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a _request_ for anything, even though I languish in the vague--it's just a renewed "declaration"--of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like _agueish_, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton--more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is _my_ rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist--which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me--really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes--and so it is I have _come_. To where I _am_, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can _do_ with it, for want of anything grander--and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish _you_--for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that _your_ comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't _resent_ creeping--there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it--even if you still _only_ creep--at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having--absit omen!--a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ... But good-night and take all my blessing--all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly, /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._ /# The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following. #/ /* Rye. Sept 14th, 1913. */ This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number--I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to _that_ form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him--! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists: /* 1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The Portrait of a Lady. 3. The Princess Casamassima. 4. The Wings of the Dove. 5. The Golden Bowl. */ /* 1. The American. 2. The Tragic Muse. 3. The Wings of the Dove. 4. The Ambassadors. 5. The Golden Bowl. */ The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on--you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero. /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /# The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, _The Passionate Friends_. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 21st, 1913. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours--I am too impatient to let you know _how_ wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it--before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a _non-naïf_, a questioning, worrying reader--and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of _the_ way--this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves--it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less _matter_ for me than you do, as they occur--who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I _don't_ upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and _almost_ sole performer to this tune roundabout us--in fact absolutely sole by the _force_ of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that _with_ this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the _kind of thing_ undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of _perspective_, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think--with Stratton's _own_ picture (I mean of himself and _his_ immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with _him_ and his 'ideas' altogether--he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly--and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply--for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!--the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising _report_ of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it--and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful--I don't care a fig for the hero's report _as an account of the matter_. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it--you meant ever so much more--and your way strikes me as _not_ the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you _get_ her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable--your wonderful!--reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate--that is of her pretended _own_ immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say--for what you _have_ done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you _keep_ doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Logan Pearsall Smith._ /# Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. October 27th, 1913. */ /* My dear Logan, */ I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so _much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait. /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To C. Hagberg Wright._ /* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 31st, 1913. */ /* Very dear Hagberg--(Don't be alarmed--it's only _me_!) */ I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you--as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old _initiative_ (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt--and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I _should_, I feel now, have signed it, for _you_ and without question and simply because you asked it--against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you--publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: _as_ (even though I grovel before you _generally_ speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time--but also wanted just to oblige you--if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell--very, and uncertain--very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you--and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent _burden_ above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th--about--I hope,) you will perhaps do even _me_ justice--far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery--a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I _did_ write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host--thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness--that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now--but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign--but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Robert Bridges._ /# This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. Nov. 7, 1913. */ /* My dear Bridges, */ How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!--it makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben--which seems to me such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions, after so many years--I mean as by the production of cards from up your sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one--it gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general--it inspires a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine the thing to have been--keeping the course between the too great claim and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all--of so absolutely distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded: such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art--one doesn't really at all know where such another instance lurks--in the like condition. What an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of--in the golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such tenderness--of the measured and responsible sort. How could you _not_ have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of memory!--and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect--and the rare little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for duration--which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I think, what he would have _meant_ had he lived--without making us do so too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness. I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its hanging. There should be _absolutely_ no issue of the poems without your introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them are, bless them!--but it is exactly the best of them that most want it. I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to him. But you always will.--I find myself so glad to be writing to you, however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m. are getting larger ... /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To André Raffalovich._ /# This refers to the gift of the _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_, edited by Father Gray (1904). #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 7th, 1913. */ /* Dear André Raffalovich, */ I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching, and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them extraordinarily base--and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace and play of mind and of temper--how charming and individual an exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite--though one of them rather disconcerting--recollections of him. Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to Edinburgh--on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must, I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you there, but I _won't_--thank you, no!--come to meat with you at Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged now absolutely _never_ to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with _me_, since you have free range--on very different vittles from the Claridge, however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then to tell me, and am yours most truly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior_ /# In quoting some early letters of William James's in _Notes of a Son and Brother_, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his nephew on the subject. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. November 15th-18th, 1913. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ ...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ... the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all sorts of discomfitures and difficulties--and disillusionments, and in which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you _write_ these things?"--with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering vaguely whether I _mightn't_ do something of the sort. But it dated from those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision--a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it, perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole harmony of my text--the general purpose of which was to be a reflection of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth--to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you _can_, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?" And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion--that is do with him everything I seemed to feel him _like_, for being kept up to the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked--from the moment there was no excess of these _soins_ and no violence done to his real identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of _our_ old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I did instinctively regard it at last as all _my_ truth, to do what I would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other--and that makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work--the one in which that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a beauty.... I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my eye--to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"--was a case for change that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either _tout court_ or as "Abe Lincoln"--it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us _then_:) and the form of the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so--and so in a sense it was. But I could _hear_ him say Abraham and couldn't hear him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any "Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However, I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance of wantonness--I should be able to justify myself (_when_ able) only out of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears. /* Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood) had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly with "Dear"--without further formality. It was partly to repair the oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day beside the portrait. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 18th, 1913. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it. The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success--I mean the View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of admiration and, literally, of _intelligence_, that I can intimately testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar Khayyam, _quoi!_) visibly left the original nowhere. I _attended_--most assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said: they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't _mean_ it!" After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really _the_ flower--even if but a little wayward wild flower!--of our success. I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about everything. /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Bruce L. Richmond._ /# The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the _Times Literary Supplement_, and was reprinted in _Notes on Novelists_. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 19th, 1913. */ /* Dear Bruce Richmond, */ Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised (from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting _it_ also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so well understand it on your showing--the case for the Supplement I mean--I am afraid that I shall really _need_ the G.S. paper for the Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire convenience--the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your indulgent hands, and--as the possibility glimmers before me--making you a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my irreverence--I divine in fact that you share it!--somehow suggest competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a different side--as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages that I excised in sending it to you--so monstrously had it rounded itself!--and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the conception of a paper really _related_ to our own present ground and air--which shall gather in several of the better of the younger generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as treatable, and try to do under _their_ suggestion something that may be of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of Novels--in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves. If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times quite said to you: "Won't you let _me_ have a try?" But when it came to considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen _selectable_ cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying me I should like it before very long. I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of my trying to drag you both hither! /* Believe me all faithfully yours, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 2, 1914. */ ...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at _I, Dorotheergasse 6, Vienna_; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up the founts of your genius in writing to me--since you say your letter would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very _most_ juvenile logic possible--and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches me) is why I call you retrogressive--by way of a long stroke of endearment. _There_ was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me _about_--a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling; and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should, and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me, and always have been, and always will be--so that there's doubtless a point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose "romantic" side _is_ rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in his unconsidered trifles. _I've_ just been reading Compton Mackenzie's _Sinister Street_ and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and irresponsibility--_selection_ isn't in him--and at one and the same time so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know of him (I've forgotten what you _did_ tell me, more or less,) but in your own good time. I think--I mean I blindly feel--I should be _with_ you about Auld Reekie--which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome. But I long for illustrations--at your own good time. We have emerged from a very clear and quiet Xmas--quiet for _me_, save for rather a large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what I call--and you will too--very brief.... I wish you the very decentest New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately, /* H. J. */ _To Compton Mackenzie._ /# It will be recalled that Edward Compton, Mr. Mackenzie's father, had played the part of Christopher Newman in H.J.'s play _The American_, produced in 1891. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 21, 1914. */ /* My dear "Monty Compton!"-- */ For that was, I think, as I first heard you named--by a worthy old actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing The American in some touring town to which I had gone for the purpose, showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on the occasion of your birthday. That story-book, weighted with my blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation--for the sharpness of my sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading you, I was moved to emphasise to Pinker. I am glad he let you know of this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me--the only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such prolonged exile on grounds of health. May that dizzying sun of Capri cook every peccant humour out of you. As to this untowardness I mean, frankly, to inquire of your Mother--whom I am already in communication with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! For that, my dear young man, I feel as a need: with the force that I find and so much admire in your talent your _genesis_ becomes, like the rest of it, interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the _kind_ of reaction from the theatre--and from so _much_ theatre--and the reaction in itself is rare--as seldom taking place; and when it does it is mostly, I think, away from the arts altogether--it is violent and utter. But your pushing straight through the door into literature and then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket, as it were--that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! However, it isn't to go into all that that I snatch these too few minutes, but to thank you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of Carnival and Sinister Street, on what I confess I am for the most part (as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to which you belong. When I wrote to Pinker I had only read S.S., but I have now taken down Carnival in persistent short draughts--which is how I took S.S. and is how I take anything I take at all; and I have given myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an account. Yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me care for it--to anxiety--care above all for what shall become of it. You ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as your aspects, and as I am a mere monster of _appreciation_ when I read--by which I mean of the critical passion--I would fain lay an earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil you into proceeding as I feel you most _ought_ to, you know. The great point is that I would so fain personally see you--that we may talk; and I do very much wish that you _had_ given me a chance at one of those moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. You are so intelligent, and it's a blessing--whereby I prefigure it as a luxury to have a go at you. I am to be in town till the end of June--I _hibernate_ no more at Rye; and if you were only to turn up a little before that it would be excellent. Otherwise you must indeed come to me there. I wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately, I fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius--which I also wish myself. I _think_ of Sinister Street II, and am yours most truly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William Roughead, W.S._ /# Mr. Roughead had sent H. J. his edition of the trial of Mary Blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in 1752 for poisoning her father. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 29th, 1914. */ /* Dear Mr. Roughead, */ I devoured the tender Blandy in a single feast; I thank you most kindly for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and I highly appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular, in which you serve her up. You tell the story with excellent art and animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, History herself having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong sense for sequences and the proper march, order and _time_. The only thing is that, as always, one wants to know _more_, more than the mere evidence supplies--and wants it even when as in this case one feels that the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells or expresses about all there was of them. Dear Mary must have consisted but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal affinity, as it were, with the stinking little Cranstoun. Yet, also, one would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a light. The light would throw itself on the Taste, the sense of proportion, of the time. However, dear Mary was a clear barbarian, simply. Enfin!--as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. I continue to have escaped a further sense of ---- and as I think I have told you I cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. Yet not of Blandy, Pritchard and Co.--_there_, perversely, I am all for knowledge. Do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The two novels referred to in the following are M. Marcel Proust's _Du Côté de chez Swann_ and M. Abel Bonnard's _La Vie et l'Amour_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. February 25th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ The nearest I have come to receipt or possession of the interesting volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had _Bernstein's_ assurance, when I met him here some time since, that _he_ would give himself the delight of sending me the Proust production, which he learned from me that I hadn't seen. I tried to dissuade him from this excess, but nothing would serve--he was too yearningly bent upon it, and we parted with his asseveration that I might absolutely count on this tribute both to poor Proust's charms and to my own. But depuis lors--! he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find _me_. So that I shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "Swann" and the "Vie et l'Amour" from you at your entire convenience. It is indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness, little words of love (or is it the other way round?) What I want above all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right is already unmistakeable. It won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do I complain of the muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill--in short it will make me better. As I say, it has already done so, even with my sacrifice for the present imperfect--for I am "keeping on" no less than eight pure pearls, in front seats, till I can deal with them in some less exposed and exposing conditions. Meanwhile tons of implanted and domesticated gold &c (one's caps and crowns and bridges being _most_ anathema to Des Voeux, who regards them as so much installed metallic poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly, eradicated; and it is enough, as I say, to have made a marked difference in my felt state. That is the point, for the time--and I spare you further details.... /* Yours de coeur, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Dr. J. William White._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 2nd, 1914. */ /* My dear J. William, */ I won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from Sumatra in this mean way--since from the point of view of such a life as you are leading nothing I could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would seem less mean than anything else, and I therefore might as well get the good of being legible. I am such a votary and victim of the single impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of programmes, and I should simply go ashore at Sumatra and refuse ever to fall into line again. But that is simply my contemptible capacity, which doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much] of three or four; as to which _then_, I confess, my requirements are inordinate. But I am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above all for you and Letitia, that many great persons, and especially you two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer breaths, to say nothing of purses, that I don't in the least mind your doing such things if _you_ don't; and most positively and richly enjoy sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them. Keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the dose!... I am signing, with J. S. S., three hundred very fine photographs of the Portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and which I think you know about--in order that they be sent to my friends, of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in Rittenhouse Square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated life you lead you do really get back. With it will wait on you probably this, which I hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; I really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in your dissipation while it's at its worst. How embarrassed poor Letitia must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so associated; for that is not _her_ nature; _my_ life here, had she but consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with _that_! I don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores--since my brain reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your own at the climax of your orgy. I realise all that these passions are capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if you do pursue them without a break--shall in fact even be delighted to think I may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at this window, which commands so the prospect. But goodbye, dear good friends; gather your roses while ye may and _don't_ neglect this blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry Adams._ /# The book sent to Mr. Adams was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, now just published. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 21, 1914. */ /* My dear Henry, */ I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. _Of course_ we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss--if the abyss _has_ any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly _wants_ to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one _can_, strange to say, still want to--or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving--and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting--under _cultivation_ of the interest. Cultivate it _with_ me, dear Henry--that's what I hoped to make you do--to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. _Why_ mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it--I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions--as many as possible--and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions--appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing--and I _do_. I believe I shall do yet again--it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself--and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand--I admit indeed alone--your all-faithful /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ /# "Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of _Notes of a Son and Brother_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 29th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there--and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here--scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do for _her_ after all the long years--judged by this test of expressed admiration--strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and ---- 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her--and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way--with tact and taste and without overstrain.... I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again--so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle much more handicapped about _socially_ ministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with people floor me, anginally, _on the spot_, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but the centre of an attractive circle--I am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since--and I am really on a _better_ plane than when she was last with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity--for the sake of the sweet good she can herself do _me_. And I rejoice that she has Margaret P. with her--who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens and auspices seem to me all of the best. The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been--what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so great--but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by night--I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love. /* Your affectionate H. J. */ _To Arthur Christopher Benson._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 21st, 1914. */ /* My dear Arthur, */ What a delightful thing this still more interesting _extension_ of our fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather torment _me_--by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet--than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about ---- or to have told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from you--all in fact about everything!--and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me--and the more we had been able to talk of ---- and his current, and even of ---- and his, the more I should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all--so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it--I having cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's inevitable--that is--for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner--charming as the image is. It's the _corner_ I contest--you're in the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to be _books_, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Humphry Ward._ /# The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition. #/ _Dictated_. /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. May 6th, 1914. */ /* Dear and Illustrious Friend, */ I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage, and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of the experts to be that my wounds are really curable--such rare secrets for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that they _must_ be effective. As for our discomfort from _ces dames_, that is another affair--and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence of the country in the _kind_ of character they shall bring to the transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence! Precious to us that degree of sensibility! But I have just made these reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie. Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant! I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till very soon then at the worst. /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. May 17th, 1914. */ /* My dear Thomas, */ As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties; the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I now address you: not wanting to wait till I _am_ above ground again, for my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored--that is in course of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself. I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the irruption of your Nursery--which, however, with your vast safe countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs. Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the _Times Literary Supplement_ on "The Criticism of Fiction." #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 2nd, 1914. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously silent--small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime inevitability in it--over and above those _general_ reactions in favour of a simplifying and softening _mutisme_ that increase with my increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities, intensities of envy, and eke thereby of _humility_, which I have to check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The _relation_ thus escapes me--and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly and inevitably turn their back--or turn yours--on what one might one's self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make you look round therefore--look round at these small sordidries and poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) _by_ you perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even of modesty or discretion on one's own account--so that, in fine, I have simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious act now performed by you--since I gather you to be back in Paris by this speaking--I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept" in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now--for, though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous tale. I have had echoes--even, in very faint and vague form, that of the burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness does possess me!)--but by the time my sound of indignant participation would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel. Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably _jeté_, the paper has excited great attention and admiration here--and is probably doing an amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow of the little _impayables_ reviews meanders on--but enfin ne désespérons pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything--and am yours all affectionately and not in the least patiently, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William Roughead, W. S._ /# This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 10th, 1914. */ /* My dear Roughead, */ (Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them--never _has_, I think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with them _all_, please--and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (I don't mean _me_, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William Roughead, W. S._ /# Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 16th, 1914. */ /* My dear Roughead, */ Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_ squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon--a boy of 14--in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._ /# "L'Histoire" is George Sand's _Histoire de ma Vie_, sent by H. J. to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 28th, 1914. */ /* Dear Mrs. Sutro, */ I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at Nohant--though I confess that I ask myself what effect the _vulgarization_ of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy (and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for observing it. For Nohant _was_ so shy and remote--and Nohant must be now (handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much to the fore. _Do_ read L'Histoire at any rate first--that is indispensable, and the _lecture_ of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses--though wishing _we_ weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault. However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at this hour of public uproar--so very horrible is the bear-garden of the outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly avert my eyes and stop my ears--scarcely turning round even for a look at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial--and what a suggestion for _us_, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these hungrily--in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming, with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way--and judge what a part _it_ played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn "run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Sir Claude Phillips._ /* Lamb House, Rye. July 31st, 1914. */ /* My dear Claude, */ I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation--in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it _meant_ all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains--it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder whom in the world we are now to live with then--and even if with everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the _active_ great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest in face of such a world--one can only possess one's soul in such dignity as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the dreadfulness, all of it, _may_ become interesting--to the blight and ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well--by some awful brutal justice--be going to get something bad for the exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and folly and blatancy could possibly _not_ be in the long run to be paid for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious--and then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the _intention_, after all, was never so bad--only the stupidity constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react--with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti, representing so much of our _preferred_ intelligence. However, let me pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to--or have come to--quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly watch. I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much _more_ of the current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some fitful tide will bear you to this quarter--though I confess that when I think of the _comparative_ public entertainment on which you would so have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite offensively complacent in the conditions about the established simplicity of my own life--I've not "done" anything for so long, and have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look privation in the face as a very familiar friend. /* Yours all faithfully and fearfully, HENRY JAMES. */ VIII THE WAR (1914-1916) The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time. To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived in the lives of all who were acting and suffering--especially of the young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination; but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off. He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers--in hospital, at the houses of friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration. Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable purposes and now collected in _Within the Rim_ (1919). Even beyond all this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid aside--it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction, supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900--finding its unreality now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of 1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to the _Letters from America_ of Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had never been so close and friendly as they became during those last months. On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards from his own door on the quiet river-side. _To Howard Sturgis._ /* Lamb House, Rye. [August 4th, 1914.] */ /* Dearly beloved Howard! */ I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and separation to _accumulate_--the effort of breaking through the mass becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away. I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however--I _am_ breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put pen to paper--and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I can't particularly "explain." And why _should_ I treat you at this time of day--or, to speak literally, of night--as if you had begun suddenly not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute _inevitability_ in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the unnatural face that they wear to me now--but they had at the time the deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that one was giving up and doing without--even if it didn't resemble them in their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't, from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home--and this appears more confirmed to me--I have you intensely before me again; yes, and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at _me_. I think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick, and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me. It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea--which I was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to be with me--as _I_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, I admit, elicited no word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation--by which I mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again--and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if I were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window. _August 5th._ The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own.... But good-night again--my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to you that I am not here alone?--having with me my niece Peggy and her younger brother--both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled Uncle the kindest company--very much the same sort as William bears you. I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old /* _H. J._ */ _To Henry James, junior._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 6th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ ...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush--the whole thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that _can_ be called sudden, or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely inevitable--never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace, in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and wrong, of the Austrian and the German Emperors. Till the solemnly guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness--that in an hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a night--so that there is at once the most striking and interesting spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of the _implications_ of the Entente; for the reason that we go in only under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had, I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk of "we" and "our"--which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but only to give you our personal news in the midst of it--for it's astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of _being_ in the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full of hung-up and stranded Americans--those unable to get home and waiting for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write you under this aid to lucidity--it's in fact everything, so I shall keep at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised on the strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 8th, 1914. */ /* Dear Mrs. Sutro, */ I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of anything _before_ one speaks of the tremendous public matter--and then how impossible to speak of anything _after_! But here goes for poor dear old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the extent that of course that autobiography (it _is_ a nice old set!) does in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious, veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her. But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is. Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for the hideous matter as one can consent to give--and I confess I live under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already looks--I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on--when, like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not--into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It throws back so livid a light--_this_ was what we were so fondly working for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder, smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it--or mean to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement--and pretty a one as I am to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I, _make_ a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss--and that the preservation of it depends upon our going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not chucking up--wherefore, after all, _vive_ the old delusion and fill again the flowing stylograph--for I am sure Alfred writes with one.... The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely--and so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours, dear Mrs. Sutro, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Rhoda Broughton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 10th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Rhoda! */ It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last week--so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and participation come to a head; and verily I must--or may--almost claim that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to _this_ as its grand Niagara--yet what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to _undo_ everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way--but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!--you can hate it and blush for it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the Channel, blue as _paint_ today, the fields of France and Belgium are being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew, who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us--for I am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only _just_ as he was blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is trapped somewhere in France--she _having_ then started, though not for Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany--though as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they were English. And I have numerous friends--we all have, haven't we?--inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room--it will be like the reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution. So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe me more than ever all-faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 19th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Your letter of the 15th has come--and may this reach you as directly, though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long--the less that the irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as you express that it leaves _you_. I find it the strangest state to have lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_ somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn for luncheon--and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C. gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. I _go_ to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action--yet feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try to "work"--even if I _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_. _They_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my "taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I am your all-faithfully tender and true old /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 22nd, 1914. */ /* Dearest Lucy, */ I have, I know, been quite portentously silent--your brief card of distress to-night (Saturday p.m.--) makes me feel it--but you on your side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say--the rupture with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make _them_ write. And so it has gone--the whole thing defying expression so that one has just stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now, dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair--and this mainly by reason of there being so high a decency in _not_ doing so. I hate not to possess my soul--and oh I should like, while I am _about_ that, to possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose; but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad apprehension which I don't share--and which even our straight outlook here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't _make_ me share. I don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"--with us generally--because I don't believe--I don't admit--that anything so abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as that--however uneasy they may be for ourselves. I _insist_ on a great confidence--I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these days--I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One invents _arts_ for assuaging it--of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find the futility of talk--_about_ the cataclysm: this is so impossible that I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a goodish many people--since one hears that there are so many in town, and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim, even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your heart, dearest friend--I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular, dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To William James, junior._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 31st, 1914. */ /* Dearest Bill, */ Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me, your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find, unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go straight on toward better and better.... Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors--and they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and near. The War blocks out of course--for that you have realised--every other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so far as one can "calmly" reflect, _all_ that I see; on the contrary there is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful, or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all--which is difficult. I mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening.... You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations, precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort--so far as its Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done it _as_ she first designed. The horrors of the crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods, haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail, and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle, /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. August 31st, 1914. */ /* Dearest L. C. */ I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11 and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid these horrors--over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not disseminate, one's forces of resistance--to the prodigious public total of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually, and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, _don't send me on newspapers_--I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and live up to our neck in them; _all_ the London morning ones by 8 a.m., and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just now very exhilarating--but I can only take things in in waiting silence--bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments, for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning. Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with _real_ imagination and magnanimity, and above all with _real_ material generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us, and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present--and if she _should_ have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of you all faithfully and fondly. /* Ever your old devotedest H. J. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to France. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 1st, 1914. */ /* Dear E. W., */ Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked--disembarked from _where, juste ciel_!--at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner (my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they _are_ a rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently corroborative testimony from _seen trains_, with their contents stared at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after all, is our--_our_--refined visual sense! This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this morning received--but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly; the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable Peggy, whom you left under the charm. My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first, inwardly--with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of patriotism and martial ardour _rentrés_ and had kept silent for fear of too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day or two. ...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 2nd, 1914. */ /* My dear Helena, */ ...We are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison with the lacerations of France and the martyrdoms of Belgium. It leaves one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while, with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days I felt in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and hurryings and doings, of 1861, etc., the pressure in question has already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face. It lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in the South--though with difference even in that correspondence. The South was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the German hordes, to speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than our comparatively benign Northern armies ever approached being. However, I didn't mean to go into these historical parallels--any more than I feel able, dear Helena, to go into many points of any kind. One of the effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. Therefore when you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my "Notes" of--another life and planet, as one now can but feel, I have to make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present consciousness. I knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about Minnie Temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the back of my consciousness even while I wrote. I had in mind a small, a very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what I was doing and would really know what I was talking about, as the mass of others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little group. I could but leave you to be as deeply moved as I was sure you would be, and surely I can but be glad to have given you the occasion. I remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that last year to have access to her; but I myself, for most of it, was still further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a right pressure of the spring to bring it out. What is most pathetic in the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree and a way that would be impossible to-day. I thank you at any rate for letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. For the rest your New England summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind anywhere as dreaming. I am delighted to hear that these things are thus comfortable and auspicious with you. The interest of your work on Richard's Life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting, and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing. But, as I say, one sees everything without exception that has been a part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. If you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. I don't speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this moment--because I can't say things in the air about them. But this country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the devastating Huns are thundering but just across the Channel--which looks so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer--she won't have failed, I am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement. /* Yours, my dear Helena, all affectionately, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# It should be mentioned that Mrs. Wharton had come to England, but was planning an early return to Paris. #/ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 3rd, 1914. */ /* My dear E. W., */ It's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. I wired you at once this morning how very glad indeed I shall be to take over your superfluous young man as a substitute for Burgess, if he will come in the regular way, _my_ servant entirely, not borrowed from you (otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me with him, and about the same as Burgess's, if possible, so long as the latter is away.... I am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "Russian" legend doesn't very particularly hold water--some information I have this morning in the way of a positive denial of the War Office points that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable _quand même_. The only thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day, and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as English, were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last week and the beginning of this. It seems difficult that there should have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination, misconception, fantastication or whatever--yet I chuck up the sponge! Far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely I am afraid to act on your disposition to go back to Paris; which I think a very gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time I well understand, within you, the urgent force of. I feel I cannot take upon myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all--any plea against it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing _determined_ for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. I understand too well--that's the devil of such a state of mind about everything. Whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; _sur quoi_ I take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not to worry you with vain words.... I kind of hanker for any scrap of really domestic fact about you all that I may be able to extract from Frederick if he comes. But I shall get at you again quickly in this way, and am your all-faithfullest /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# It will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at that time. The wreckage was of course carried much further before the end of the war. #/ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 21st, 1914. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy--and what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "_for ever and ever_." But no words fill the abyss of it--nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man. There it _was_--and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries--even now--tries to get something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that _that_ will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and ever--and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally, by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this hour begun: how _can't_ they be as a tremendous force fighting on the side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too somehow--though I don't know _why_, practically--of how nothing conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great art-loving country! ...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present, but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your Englishry--it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first signal to him again--and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you, dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. T. S. Perry._ _Dictated._ /* Lamb House, Rye. September 22nd, 1914. */ /* My dear Lilla, */ Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think, we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on, disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer, is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I couldn't talk--and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is intensely with us--and that the appalling and crowning horror of the persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Rhoda Broughton._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 1st, 1914. */ /* My dear Rhoda, */ ...For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous) side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness from the source of information--as our information goes. So, having very blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting--in certain aspects I find it even quite uplifting--and the mere feeling that the huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in _doing_, for all they are worth--to be old and doddering now is for a male person not at all glorious. But if to _feel_, with consuming passion, under the call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that "social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not yet setting it up. Dear little ---- I shall try to see--I grieve deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare and a huge unspeakability--but that isn't my last word or my last _sense_. This great country has found, and is still more finding, certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal lost. But here they are now--magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall _do_, through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We sufficiently want to and we sufficiently _can_--both by material and volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest identity--and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and affectionate old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# The allusions in the following are to an article of Mr. Gosse's on the effect of the war of 1870 upon French literature, and to the publication at this moment of H. J.'s _Notes on Novelists_. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 15th, 1914. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ ...Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest, beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the particular one you deal with) must one feel there is--and the more the further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on Saturday something very long out of order for me--going to spend Sunday with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m., and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient. Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page told me that Jules Lemaître was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other convulsion--it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it with such emphasis for Verhaeren--at present, I have been told, in this country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right--but it takes some doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken it for granted) about the _absolute_ cessation of ---- 's last "big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately--and _if_ gathered in!--up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of ardent activity and ingenious devotion there--a really heroic plunge into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming out now. But no--I also say to myself--nothing serious and felt and sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day, whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any rate away on a high shelf--to be taken down again only in the better and straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Grace Norton._ /# "W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 16th, 1914. */ /* Very dear old Friend, */ How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have _not_ plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely and potently, _with_ the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much greater--this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, _this_ wasn't in the bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"--the perfection of which felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of poor dear fine Jules Lemaître, who, unwell at the end of July and having gone down to his own little native _pays_, on the Loire, to be _soigné_, read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action, like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris, where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of affection if my affection for you had ever been _less_ than lively! I rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back. I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it; so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to having myself! Have me on _yours_, dearest Grace, as much as you like, for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly do; and that does nothing but good--real helpful good, to yours all affectionately, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint André) from H. J.'s letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read at a meeting of the Académie Française, and published in the _Journal des Débats_. The Hôtel d'Iéna was at this time the headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 17th, 1914. */ /* Very dear old Friend! */ Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't express--any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it. Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager, or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed, in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for you from day to day the valid _carapace_, the invincible, if not perhaps strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over at me--and at us all! Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Débats version of the poor old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror--in respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first possible moment write and thank Saint André, from whom I have also had an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage. Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to wipe off the face of the world as a living force--substituting for it apparently _their_ portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom--the race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech, such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find (M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most familiar and most indispensable to him! This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque in hand--wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hôtel d'Iéna. /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S. W. 25th Oct., 1914. */ /* My dear Thomas, */ I have had a couple of letters from you of late for which I thank you, but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions here--the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne. Nevertheless we do bear them--to my sense magnificently; so that if during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now I have lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: I at least feel and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness, whatever dismals. As I think I said in a few words some weeks ago to Lilla, dear old England is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much _finer_ and inwardly wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. She is doing this in the grand manner, and I can only say that I find the spectacle really splendid to assist at. After three months in the country I came back to London early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to information and to supporting and suggestive contact. I don't say it doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending windows: in fine I should feel I had lost something that ministers to life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. Let me not express myself, none the less, as if I could really thus talk about it all: I can't--it's all too close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. The facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they reach us here--or rather with much more licence: and really what I have wanted most to say is how deeply I rejoice in the sympathetic sense of your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. You speak of some other things--that is of the glorious "Institute," and of the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but I suppose you will understand when I say that we are so shut in, roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous realities of the War. Think what it must be when even the interest of the Institute becomes dim and _faint_! But I won't attempt to write you a word of really current history--ancient history by the time it reaches you: I throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations, which I do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the other, to certain deep fundamentals, which I can't go into either, but which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and feels and gratefully takes in. I find the general community, the whole scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring--so great a thing, every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge Belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery, suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented scale--unless it be the way that England is making a tremendous pair of the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap. That is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to pass. All life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice in passing bad moments.... Stand all of you to your guns, and think and believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! Yours, dear Thomas, all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 30th, 1914. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ ...Any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by the time this reaches you--and you know in New York at the moment of my writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope, grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort and shape. If we only had at this moment the extra million of men that the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit toward Germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would be heavenly to think of. And yet on the other hand I partly console myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement _now_, by the shining light it throws on England's moral position and attitude, her predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of which "history furnishes an example." So it is that, though the country has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into armies _after_ instead of before--which has always been England's sweet old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. The stuff and the material fortunately, however, are admirable--having had already time to show to what tune they are; and, as I think I wrote your Mother the other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material, in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so, not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general convictions--primarily perhaps that of the certainty that Germany's last apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal: whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim necessity, from the first. But I am writing you remarks quite as I didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these--at least Irving Street has had--before; and what I would a thousand times rather have, is some remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and participation--as of course whatever else in the world could they be? I am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to find every imagination rise to it: the case--the case of the failure to rise--then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! And yet I remind myself, even as I say [it], that the case has never really once happened to me--I have personally not encountered any low likeness of it; and therefore should rather have said that it _would_ so horrifically affect me _if_ it were supposable. England seems to me, at the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in respect to the history and logic of her action, that I don't see a grain in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it; and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light, to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's association. _Saturday, Oct. 31st._ I had to break this off yesterday, and now can't do much for fear of missing today's, a Saturday's American post. Only everything I tried yesterday to say is more and more before me--all feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do, from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the pressure of _experience_ they from hour to hour receive; such experience and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes, as I was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind it. These are now in London, of course, impressions of every hour, or of every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press forward, on the field itself. Of a like suggestion, in a general way, was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my--already "my"!--poor Belgian wounded at St. Bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which I mean use of idiom, between us--and thanks again to one's so penetrating impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. Not one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their scatterment; and once more I felt the tremendous force of such convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever it is, all the suffering creature _can_ feel. Even more interesting, and in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at St. B's with a couple of wardsful of British wounded, just straight back, by extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about Ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in their condition, at once via Saint-Nazaire and Southampton; three or four of whom, all of the Grenadier Guards, who seemed genuinely glad of one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck me as quite ideal and _natural_ soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite inexhaustible, kind. Those I mention were intelligent specimens of course--one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the ease, as I say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could possibly desire it.... But this is all now--and you'll say it's enough! Ever your affectionate old Uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /# Mr. Walpole was at this time in Russia. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. November 21st, 1914. */ /* Dearest Hugh, */ This is a great joy--your letter of November 12th has just come, to my extreme delight, and I answer it, you see, within a very few hours. It is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and I am touched and interested by it more than I can say. Let me tell you at once that I sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. Your own scrap was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the least to defy legibility; therefore I said to myself that what was flagrantly and blatantly legible _would_ presumably reach you.... I had better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of _our_ affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own eventualities. London is of course under all our stress very interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving--but on a basis and in ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of insignificance. People "meet" a little, but very little, every social habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and utter mistakers (mistakers, I mean, about the decency of things;) and for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to see--only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably on my nerves. Depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently _doing_ the thing. Then right and left are all the figures of mourning--though such proud erect ones--over the blow that has come to them. _There_ the women are admirable--the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular, since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that are offered and taken. The rate at which they are taken is appalling--but then I think of France and Russia and even of Germany herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "The German dead, the German dead!" I above all say to myself--in such hecatombs have _they_ been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me forget Belgium--though when I _remember_ that disembowelled country my heart is at once hardened to _every_ son of a Hun. Belgium we have hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's arms. And the Dutch have been nobly hospitable!...Immensely interesting what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great Russian people--of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration. I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the Canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in Canada and had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion, expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of army-corps in himself.... But goodnight, dearest Hugh. I sit here writing late, in the now extraordinary London blackness of darkness and (almost) tension of stillness. The alarms we have had here as yet come to nothing. Please believe in the fond fidelity with which I think of you. Oh for the day of reparation and reunion! I hope for you that you _may_ have the great and terrible experience of Ambulance service at the front. Ah how I pray you also _may_ receive this benediction from your affectionate old /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H. J. was now carrying forward was _The Sense of the Past_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 1st, 1914. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and I don't want him to go empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is practically left after the overwhelming and _écrasant_ effect of listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to one's self--one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably the case--all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony that has caused it to knock me up--what has permitted this being the nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion, with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more so--and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to glare back at them--as under the effect of many of my impressions here I frequently do--or almost! For the moment I am quite floored--but I suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that matter, that I am down pretty often--for I find I am constantly picking myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting--if the word be not mean for the scale of such tragedy--which you'll have from him all for yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying to work--on one of three books begun and abandoned--at the end of some "30,000 words"--15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of intrinsically resist--and I have hopes. But I must rally now before getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. T. S. Perry._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 11th, 1914. */ /* Dear and so sympathetic Lilla! */ I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of your brave letter and impassioned sonnet--a combination that has done me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what constitutes enough being so high!... Your sonnet strikes me as very well made--which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and uttering as the best of you do--there having come in my way several copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events, the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the weight of style; so that _all_ the good things are literally on our side at once!" It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing circle--it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to you--you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice over, in the very act--while listening to that dear and affable Emile Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy, which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor (Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped "breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable accident in speaking for _us_, all us present and the whole public consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate--its coming, on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French, and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness _we_ were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has had in it a _quality_ of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers, though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French most of all _can_ show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that _we_, in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the Allies--out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people! Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 17th, 1914. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to you--prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered pressure of that question makes me somehow positively _want_ to say that (I think) I don't "think" of them at all--though I try to; that I only feel, and feel, and _toujours_ feel about them unspeakably, and about nothing else whatever--feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations, agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of _time_) grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves the business of yesterday--the women and children (and babes in arms) slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think" enough to believe in retribution for _that_. So I've kind of answered you. /* Ever yours, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Grace Norton._ /# This follows on the letter to Miss Norton of Oct. 16, 1914, dealing with the work in France of her nephew, Richard Norton. #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 1st, 1915. */ /* Dearest Grace! */ I waste no time in explaining again how reduced I am to the use of this machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the huge tension and oppression of our conditions here--to say nothing of the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. I can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and perhaps some fulness--I know it's always his desire that you shall; but even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he is--though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you, for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different matters--he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self; and in fine it is a tremendous tonic--among a good many tonics that we have indeed, thank goodness!--to get the sense of his richly beneficent activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the generalisation most sadly forced upon him--the comparative supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated, and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't able to give you the detail of much of _that_ tragedy, so much the better for you--save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of how he succeeds in occasional mitigations _quand même_, thanks to the positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the matter of going _outside_ of the strict job of carrying the military sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions" confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions, letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. His remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time duly impressed or even floored, and Dick will have, I think, so far as any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free hand. The Germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which I think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be compassed by us when we _can_ compass it.... Richard told me yesterday that the aspect of London struck him as having undergone a great change since his last rush over--in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the pressure of the War; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and without having to go away and come back for it. There corresponds with it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness, worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here, but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you across the sea--when reported at all, as most of them can't be. Goodbye at any rate for this hour. What I most wanted to give you was the strong side-wind and conveyed virtue of Dick's visit. I hope you are seeing rather more than less of Alice and Peggy, to whom I succeed in writing pretty often--and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as I trust they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your tremendously attached old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Dacre Vincent._ /# This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood on the lawn at Lamb House. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 6th, 1915. */ /* My dear Margaret, */ It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in the absence of an _inordinate_ gale--but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast _crinière_ and simply twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making of the garden--he was _it_ in person; and now I feel for the time as if I didn't care what becomes of it--my interest wholly collapses. But what a folly to talk of _that_ prostration, among all the prostrations that surround us! One hears of them here on every side--and they represent (of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business, the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed of the future. The air is full of the sense of all _that_ dreadfulness--the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted to wail to you--and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but vast and dark and damp and very visibly _depleted_ (as well may be!) and yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean that the _reminders_ at every turn are so great. I see a few people--quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance--look at a solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing--as I do to his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"--what will have become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay--positive terror--of a station or a train--more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up.... Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To the Hon. Evan Charteris._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 22, 1915. */ /* My dear Evan, */ I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your opportunity to apply _that_ [spirit of observation] in these immense historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the platitudinous--which I take partly to result from the tremendous collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations. Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your side--it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others, already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow--so that the mere reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is _grey_--in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must that Ypres desolation and desecration be--a baseness of demonism. I find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least _can_ flush. It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Compton Mackenzie._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 23rd, 1915. */ /* My dear Monty, */ I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on being enormous--and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed--even though our whole scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up and at work again may that at least go bravely on--while I marvel again, according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare itself--_as_ a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done _for_, to have been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself, however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences, such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful inquiry--which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly encouraging and rewarding! But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words--I have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather _ugly_--failing to see, as one does, their _casus belli_, and having to see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort of countenance at all. I should-- _January 25th._ I had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning again--though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had perhaps better not say it--as I take, I rather fear, a more detached view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable as _straight_. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country; and now what she publishes is that it _was_ good enough for her so long as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got (by any _other_ alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one feel?--and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth--which only proves, alas, how _many_ hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"? Ugh!--let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you) to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that, however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what "art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it _should_ and how it does and what it means--that is "the funny thing"! However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't yourself so scrutinise _this_ poor animal, but believe me yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Miss Elizabeth Norton._ /# The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance, included in _Within the Rim_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 25th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Lily, */ It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing--for which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to learn them, and _if_ you have been out there to learn them you can say them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to make my remarks practically _of_ nothing, and that the effect of them can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here--I mean on this side of the sea--where scores and scores of such like corps are in operation in France--the number of ambulance-cars is many, many thousand, on all the long line--without its becoming necessary for them that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater nearness--here--the strange and sinister nearness--makes much of the difference; various facts are conveyed by personal--unpublished--report, and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all events, is that there _is_ no devisable means for keeping the enterprise in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes me as having been of the handsomest--as is splendidly the case with all the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop _with_ us--for the resources and the energy of production and creation and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in money are more remarkable--even though here (by which I mean in England, for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough. It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do--though how could you do anything else?--on behalf of the simply sacred cause, as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels that one simply can't--the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience, all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for granted--that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks of the finest young human material--of life--that is an abyss into which one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent _sense_ of the _louche_ and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be _aware_ of nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air. But I am writing you in the key of _mere_ lamentation--which I didn't mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much uplifted--when what _may_ come out of it all seems almost worth it. And then the black nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one proceeds almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my own affection in these months _s'est accrue_ a thousandfold--just as the same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very preponderantly decent and solid people. The race _is_ worth fighting for, immensely--in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your in fact quite clinging, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /# Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian front. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. February 14th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Hugh, */ "When you write," you say, and when _do_ I write but just exactly an hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it, and find it no less interesting than genial--bristling with fine realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs--but as those two things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them home _most_ criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote you to destruction, more or less--after the manner of the blind _quart d'heure_ described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my tenderest sympathy--that nostalgic ache at its worst being the invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it--though even while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the score of my loss of the sight of you till then--that gives the sort of personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England--or in France, which is now so much the same thing--during at least a part of this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be sorry to have missed; there attaches to it--to the being here--something so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter of British phenomena--for I don't suppose you think of reproducing _only_ Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising you--your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you _do_ with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it absolutely through--and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly. Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror--as it has flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter that's upon us the fashion has so much changed--of doing anything consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming British complexion--the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate experience--if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had one's precious _person_ straight up against the facts. I have only had my poor old mind and imagination--but as one _can_ have them here; and I live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have beautifully done without it! I resist more or less--since you ask me to tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work--after a black interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop--but the conditions make it difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, _I_ find, in a sense far other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of one's effort has become _itself_ utterly treacherous and false--its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of _this_--and how represent that horrific capability, _historically_ latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand _not_ represent it either--without putting into play mere fiddlesticks? I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you _don't_ utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate solicitude of your all-faithful old /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. February 16th, 1915. */ /* My dear Mrs. Lodge, */ It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long--you may have magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if things that start at the superlative degree _can_ grow), and I never am sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring contemplation of that as much as possible--and I thought I already knew how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my attachment--which I try to show--that is to apply--the intensity of in small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my dentist a convalesced soldier--a mere sapper of the R.E.--whom I fished out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send "food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same time, with you all at Washington--where I fondly suppose you all to entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't go into the particulars of my sympathy--or at least into the particulars of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind of wealth of divination. London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the world not be here--there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious--but on the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I do--and with _them_ intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond anything of the past. But we are very mature--and that is part of the harmony--the young and the youngish are _all_ away getting killed, so far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise. The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every one. There are really no fiancées by the way--the young men get home for three days and are married--then off into the absolute Hell of it again. But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking _him_ to feel, how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to _know_ how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. William James._ /# H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in Belgium. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Feb. 20th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Alice, */ ...Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing in the least where he now is--and the torment of his spending all this time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in _consequence_, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid, undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull "policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations of the earth, or rather of the sea--though of course there will be a certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that most of these will fall. Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then that remark has been signally confirmed--three neutral ships have been sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen" for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire. Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't _not_ agree with his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure. Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of all that to say--and all I intended was to remark that while Germany roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an enormous--I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess of the arrival of his regiment at Havre--they left the Tower of London but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--Mrs. J. G. Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have "met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians--but to-morrow it is to be British, whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more _gravely_ pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only Flemish and understand almost no French--save as one of them, always included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up for him--at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _This_ obscure hero (a great athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war--I mean by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the "upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up--and it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made.... Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post. Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on either side of me at table were men of the old Army--I mean who had been through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and proportionately more _soldatesques_; but there is nothing, ever, that one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children of history, such creatures of distinction.... /* Ever your affectionate HENRY. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste. Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 5th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter--in which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic _taille_ of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum. I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the _maxima_--condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the poor mesquins _minima_, when really to find myself in closer touch would so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over _your_ overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and your substance--for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry _luxury_ to be able to come back with things and give them then and there straight into the aching voids: do it, _do_ it, my blest Edith, for all you're worth: rather, rather--"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell you not to dream of returning me those £6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of sending to your Belges! So I _wired_ you a day or two ago to that effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any restitution. It made it so _easy_ a sending. Well then à bientôt--Oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) _howls_ for more. Yours all devotedlier than ever, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To the Hon. Evan Charteris._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 13th, 1915. */ /* My dear Evan, */ Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it, at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts, your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends' experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French harbourers that you had been bringing-off--and this in particular by your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race; all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and, frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them--our Allies' doings--more publicly and explicitly--but the want of imagination hereabouts (save as to that of--to the report of--grand things that haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it, as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and responsive to them--it will do _us_ good as well as do them. I am sure their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was exquisite. Very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and absence of morbid analysis in which you are living--in face of all the possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of your relation to things and the drop out of some relations altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering. The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war has made me hang on it in such suspense--though we venture even almost to presume. I see few people--and _try_ to see only those I positively want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things--and indeed I should think meanly of London if there _was_ very much to tell. A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming, Colonel Brancker, just back from the front--both of which high aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted from them so intense a thrill--drawing them out--for they let me--on the subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British temperament with that of the conquering airman--and thereby of the extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to _you_? The great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in April--thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 23rd, 1915. */ /* Chère Madame et Confrère, */ Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of "explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and impressions! I think _the_ reason why I have been so baffled, in a word, is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it, for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with two or three select others--this I candidly confess to you--one of whom was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and the money _is_, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers, and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I may--a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one. _Wednesday, 24th._ I had to break this off yesterday--and it was time, apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day--save so far as the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything whatever just now, and not pretending to--I find myself, much more, quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to wait for--but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead of less and less--which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can.... All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I manage--and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military age would I for a moment consider--and in fact there _are_ none about, putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)--and these are kept tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are alone available--but the matter has in short not the least importance. The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him for the remainder of his days--a trifle on account having sealed the compact on the spot. It all helps, however--helps _me_; which is so much what I do it for. Let it help _you_ by ricochet, even a little too.... ...Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly than you might well, your would-be so decent old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Thomas Sergeant Perry._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 27th, 1915. */ /* My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla: */ Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect of simplification too--producing, that is, a desperate need for the same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is that I should be invidiously writing to _you_, Lilla, in response to your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence about.... You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics of the American theatre of my infancy, à propos of my printed prattle about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again--for ever so long this power was almost blighted--and to want to become as dissociated as possible from the present. ...However, I didn't mean to be black--but only pearly grey, as your letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any scrap of information whatever--you have more of the public, of a hundred sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching some gleam between the chinks--which was idiotic of me, because it's mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world, that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the _bouché_ chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time my small anecdote reaches you, and not have _le moindre rapport_ to anything that in the least concerns us _then_. But I must tear myself from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note--a large choice of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of. Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness together, 40 miles of the land of France--I don't mean in length of front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence. But there I am at an item--and I abjure items, they defy all dealing with, and am your affectionate old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Marsh._ /# A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914" Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst friend and enemy is but death." #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 28th, 1915. */ /* Dear admirable Eddie! */ I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances (so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment involved in that, and makes me just want--oh so exceedingly much--to be moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly, and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they seem to me to have _come_, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though not in every line with an equal _degree_ of those--which indeed is a rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the _right_ to produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of experience. Splendid Rupert--to be the soldier that could beget them on the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that (perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of. I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No. IV--I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author, in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line--to the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that _but_ before the last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition is--or would be--to me not only not objectionable, but would have positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven" rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III. The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches _this_ poor old Anglomaniac. But that is all--and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress--that you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely touch _me_. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am yours all faithfully and gratefully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well), and find I _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance! _To Edward Marsh._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 30th, 1915. */ /* My dear Eddie, */ After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, I think, one can feel--the joy in short that you allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion! I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. But I think--if you won't feel me over-contentious for it--that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Mrs. Wharton._ /# Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras, February 22, 1915. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 3rd, 1915. */ /* Dearest Edith, */ Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M. Séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two _livraisons_ of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me. It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for I myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as I should stare at a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road--where we haven't come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear in the _Times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make communication with almost all others impossible, they living and thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort, which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church, the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the "fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend du Breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of them; Séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that. But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own, little waste as I see you allowing yourself. I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not miss my fond care--so little has any face of the nightmare been reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, _ma foi_, with deep submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor vanquished Jules Lemaître long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of _vente_--in which one takes pleasure. Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old way--we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't truly know what to make of some of them--and yet don't let yourself suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at least is my own indefeasible conviction--or impression. It's the queerest of peoples--with its merits and defects so extraordinarily parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals--in some of these present ways--such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word. Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion--for itself; it does, however, and it will get it--and will act under it. France has had hers in the form of invasion--and I don't know of what form ours will yet have to be. But it will come--and then we shall--damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious _enough_, and immensely capable if we can once get _dry_. _Voilà_ that _I_ am, however; yet with it so yours, /* H. J. */ _To Edward Marsh._ /# Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea, April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 24th, 1915. */ /* My dear dear Eddie, */ This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! But there's something to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To G. W. Prothero._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 24th, 1915. */ /* Dear George, */ I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is much, so long as the individual case of it lasts. As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Wilfred Sheridan._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. May 31st, 1915. */ /* My dear dear Wilfred, */ I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them--with the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act, from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself--such great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts off you at all--not indeed that I have tried!--since those days early in the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy--I couldn't see the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a moment dream that I propose--I mean presume--to lay upon you the smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Marsh._ /# The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's _1914 and other Poems_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 6th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Eddie, */ I thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of Rupert's volume, which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that I should intensely prize. I have been spending unspeakable hours over it--heart-breaking ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching exhibition. His place is now very high and very safe--even though one walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the monument for the man. It's so wretched talking, really, of any "place" but his place _with_ us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power _while_ waiting. He has something, at any rate, one feels in this volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence--the fact that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has _charm_ in a way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature--by which I mean that of his genius. The point is that I think he would still have had it even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for this is what he _would_ have done,) and thereby been almost alone in this idiosyncrasy. Even of Keats I don't feel myself saying that he had charm--it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no chance. But in Rupert (not that I match them!) there is the beauty, so great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring of the very quality of the man. What it comes to, I suppose, is that he touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. And he penetrates me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English--he draws such a real magic from his conscious reference to it. He is extraordinarily so even in the War sonnets--not that that isn't highly natural too; and the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. The present gives them such sincerity--as if they had wanted it! I adore the ironic and familiar things, the most intimately English--the Chilterns and the Great Lover (towards the close of which I recognise the misprint you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one--the more flagrant the better--that you needn't worry:) and the Funeral of Youth, awfully charming; and of course Grantchester, which is booked for immortality. I revel in Grantchester--and how it would have made one love him if one hadn't known him. As it is it wrings the heart! And yet after all what do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?--with his sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the least real harm. He seems to me to have had in his short life so much that one may almost call it everything. And he isn't tragic now--he has only stopped. It's we who are tragic--you and his mother especially, and whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. The portrait has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. However, great beauty does disconnect! But good-night--with the lively sense that I _must_ see you again before I leave town--which won't be, though, before early in July. I hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edward Marsh._ /# This refers to a photograph of Rupert Brooke, sent by Mr. Marsh, and to the death of his friend Denis Browne, who was with R. B. when he died. A letter from Browne, describing Rupert Brooke's burial on the island of Scyros, had been read to H. J. by Mr. Marsh the day before the following was written. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 13th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Eddie, */ The photograph is wonderful and beautiful--and a mockery! I mean encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now _you_ have another of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time--which I presume almost to share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed that for this I might once have _seen_ D. B., kind brothering D. B., the reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of _his_ extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered Rupert--and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered poor old _me_, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any _relation_ you will perhaps still some day tell me.... /* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Compton Mackenzie._ /# Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 18th, 1915. */ /* My dear Monty, */ All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being, alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things, but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks ago that you had finished your new novel--which information took my breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination, your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things. What impressions you are getting, verily--and what a breach must it all not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound up, something self-contained there--for how could you ever go back to it if you hadn't?--under that violence of rupture with the past which makes me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded novel as through a glass darkly--which, however, will not prevent my immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that it is not now likely to do before the summer's end--by which time God knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not getting--though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble, but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever faithful old /* HENRY JAMES. */ P.S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a livelier mouse! _To Henry James, junior._ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 24th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ I am writing to you in this fashion even although I am writing you "intimately"; because I am not at the present moment in very good form for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of particular clearness. That _is_ the case at present--at least I feel I ought to lose no more time. You will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to--but don't be too much alarmed! It is only that my feeling about my situation here has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain particular matters further contributing, I have arranged to seek technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. This state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and I think I can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. My sense of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force ever since the war broke out, and I have thus waited nearly a whole year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that I can only go down to Lamb House now on the footing of an Alien under Police supervision--an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so intensely engaged. I feel that if I take this step I shall simply rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but with my material as well, in every kind of way. Hadn't it been for the War I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as absolutely and ardently as I feel, and not offer them my moral support with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great dignity. I have spent here all the best years of my life--they practically have _been_ my life: about a twelvemonth hence I shall have been domiciled uninterruptedly in England for forty years, and there is not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my ever returning to the U.S. or taking up any relation with it as a country. My practical relation has been to this one for ever so long, and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. I am telling you all this because I can't not want exceedingly to take you into my confidence about it--but again I feel pretty certain that you will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be needed. The real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must speak and determine the case. Well, without haste and without rest, mine has done so, and with the prospect of what I have called the rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness, supervenes. I think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed to suggest any reserves--I think, I say, that I should then still ask you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past year has made quite unspeakably final. I can't imagine at all what these objections should be, however--my whole long relation to the country having been what it is. Regard my proceeding as a simple act and offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it remains perfectly simple. Let me repeat that I feel sure I shouldn't in the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is _in_ the convulsion (I wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act accordingly. I feel all the while too that the tide of American identity of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises, and will rise still more before it rests again--so that every day the difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common sentiment increases. However, I haven't really meant so much to expatiate. What I am doing this afternoon is, I think, simply to get exact information--though I am already sufficiently aware of the question to know that after my long existence here the process of naturalisation is very simple and short.... My last word about the matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up with my innermost personal feeling. I think that will only make you glad, however, and I add nothing more now but that I am your all-affectionate old Uncle, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /# H. J.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were Mr. Asquith, Mr. Gosse, Mr. J. B. Pinker, and Mr. G. W. Prothero. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1915. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Remarkably enough, I should be writing you this evening even if I hadn't received your interesting information about ----, concerning whom nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. He is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and I await to see if he won't somehow swing--! But il ne s'agit pas de ça; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter I should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to a head. It has within these days done so, and in brief it is _this_. The force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years (forty _next_ year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the _geste_ that will best express my devotion--absolutely nothing _else_ will. Therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my Solicitor (whom I have had to consult) to whom the fact has been imparted. Kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. I learned with horror just lately that if I go down into Sussex (for two or three months of Rye) I have at once to register myself there as an Alien and place myself under the observation of the Police. But that is only the _occasion_ of my decision--it's not in the least the cause. The disposition itself has haunted me as Wordsworth's sounding cataract haunted _him_--"like a passion"--ever since the beginning of the War. But the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the simplest, and _may_ be very rapid, if I can obtain four honourable householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable person, "speaking and writing English decently" etc. Will you give me the great pleasure of being one of them?--signing a paper to that effect? I should take it ever so kindly. And I should further take kindly your giving me if possible your sense on _this_ delicate point. Should you say that our admirable friend the Prime Minister would perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?--to whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my sponsors, will accrue. I don't like to approach him without your so qualified sense of the matter first--and he has always been so beautifully kind and charming to me. I will do nothing till I hear from you--but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the Sussex "restricted area" alienship--which it distresses me to carry on my back a day longer than I need. I have in mind my other two sponsors, but if I could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your intimacy with him) as to how the P.M. would "take" my appeal, you would increase the obligations of yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To J. B. Pinker._ /# The two articles here referred to, "The Long Wards" and "Within the Rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 29th, 1915. */ /* My dear Pinker, */ I am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the New York Tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee for the article. I have in point of fact during the last three or four days considerably written one--concerning which a question comes up which I hope you won't think too tiresome. Making up my mind that something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to play, I have done something about the British soldier, his aspect, temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, _as I have seen him since the beginning of the war in Hospital_; where I have in fact largely and constantly seen him. The theme lends itself, by my sense, much; and I dare say I should have it rather to myself--though of course there is no telling! But what I have been feeling in the connection--having now done upwards of 3000 words--is that I should be very grateful for leave to make them 4000 (without of course extension of fee.) I have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so much to say and to feel! Would you mind asking her, in reporting to her of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them. If she really objects to it I think I shall be then disposed to ask you to make some _other_ application of my little paper (on the 4000 basis;) in which case I should propose to the Tribune another idea, keeping it down absolutely to the 3000. (I'm afraid I can't do less than that.) My motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less "concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the Briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of it, even through all this unprecedented stress. It would amount to a statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones; so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development of which it is interesting to watch. I should call this thing something like "The New Vision," or, better still, simply "Insulation": though I don't say _exactly_ that. At all events I should be able to make something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the sympathetic turn. But I would _rather_ keep to the thing I have been trying, if I may have the small extra space.... /* Believe me yours ever, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Frederic Harrison._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 3rd, 1915. */ /* My dear Frederic Harrison, */ I think your so interesting letter of the other day most kind and generous--it has greatly touched me. Mrs. Harrison had written me a short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and I feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. This has been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. How splendid your courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and attention! I am sorry to say I find any such power in myself much impaired and diminished--reduced to the shadow of what it once was. All relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. However, it all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a _part_ of virtue. Also I find one is the better for every successful effort to bring one's attention _home_. I have just read your "English" review of Lord Eversley's book on Poland, which you have made me desire at once to get and read--even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being re-embroidered. I thank you further for letting me know of your paper in the Aberdeen magazine--though on reflection I can wait for it if it's to be included in your volume now so soon to appear--I shall so straightly possess myself of that. As to the U.S.A., I am afraid I suffer almost more than I can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic abominations--I cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing, all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. To drag into our European miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them, and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable wish--but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. I can't help feeling that for the U.S. this line has been crossed, and that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to reckon with. However, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or appoint the hour--the relation between the two countries affects me as being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and _everything_ that takes place between them renders that incline more rapid and shoves the position further down. The material and moral weight that America would be able to throw into the scale by her productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. There would be no question of munitions then. What I mean is that I believe the truculence of Germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to force the American hand. It must indeed be helpful to both of you to breathe your fine air of the heights. The atmosphere of London just now is not positively tonic; but one must _find_ a tone, and I am, with more faithful thought of Mrs. Harrison than I can express, your and her affectionate old friend, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /# H. J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. The following refers to an example of it in Mr. Wells's volume, _Boon_. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 6th, 1915. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I was given yesterday at a club your volume "Boon, etc.," from a loose leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of its pages--though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in that respect beaten for the first time--or rather for the first time but one--by a book of yours; I haven't found the current of it draw me on and on this time--as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which I have repeatedly let you know.) However, I shall try again--I hate to lose any scrap of you that _may_ make for light or pleasure; and meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion--though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course for a writer to put himself _fully_ in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world--and I think the case isn't easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake, can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one can't keep it up--one _has_ to fall back on one's sense of one's good parts--one's own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think, even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal to experience rest upon. They rest upon _my_ measure of fulness--fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both. I don't mean to say I don't wish I could do twenty things I can't--many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully producible. I hold that interest may be, _must_ be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say, and I don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process! /* Faithfully yours, HENRY JAMES. */ _To H. G. Wells._ /# With reference to the following letter, Mr. Wells kindly allows me to quote a passage from his answer, dated July 8, 1915, to the preceding: " ...There is of course a real and very fundamental difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and literature. To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this war. _Boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better grace...." In a further letter to Henry James, dated July 13, Mr. Wells adds: "I don't clearly understand your concluding phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our difference. When you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is technical and special...." #/ _Dictated._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 10th, 1915. */ /* My dear Wells, */ I am bound to tell you that I don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of "Boon," as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned--I say "your" simply because he has _been_ yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony. Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's estimate of one's contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my "view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace--so unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded: I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it somewhat attested in their circulation--which, alas, I have reached a very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I _have_ no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy of its own, that your genius constitutes; and _that_ is in particular why, in my letter of two or three days since I pronounced it curious and interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception (perception of the veracity of _my_ variety) on the part of a talent so generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, I admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most different from my own that I want to get at them--precisely _for_ the extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. But that is another matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically "for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Henry James, junior._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 20th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Harry, */ How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then explained--the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have "gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in, instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also more particularly what has _not_ happened) is greater than I can say. I have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I could--though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more _for_ me. Then I should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But enough--there it is!... /* Ever your affectionate old British Uncle, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 26th, 1915. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum! My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m., and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I virtually was--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute sensation. I _haven't_ any, I blush to confess!... I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within a few days talking with ----, one of the American naval attachés, whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely impregnable and invincible"--and ---- repeated over--"impregnable and invincible!" Which kind of did me good. Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon--I can always be rung up, you know: I _like_ it--and believe me yours and your wife's all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To John S. Sargent._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 30th, 1915. */ /* My dear John, */ I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs. Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking. Yes, I daresay many Americans _will_ be shocked at my "step"; so many of them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting these amiabilities to such an enemy--the very smallest would have sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to come, and the misrepresentation of _my_ attitude becoming at last to me a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really have been _so_ easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!) yours all faithfully, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Wilfred Sheridan._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Aug. 7th, 1915. */ /* Dearest Wilfred, */ I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old--and the reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject. You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one--it showed, I believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance--a poor thing but my own--and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied, have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer, in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from _you_, and that I find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good effect, but yourself--it makes _me_ so often ask if it isn't, when all's said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite _too_, finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head--even if it _now_ be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand même--though heaven save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves possible by tongue and pen, on _that_ day there will be fairly something the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius. Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist _urbi et orbi_ that we live by muddle, and by muddle only--while, all the while, our native character is never _really_ abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit less so than ever--only we should do better if we didn't give so much time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable. That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being _at all_--so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon me--their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you see--I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life absolute--for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times--otherwise I don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope you have harmonious news of Clare--her father has just welcomed me in the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride--and she knows that. /* Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly, HENRY JAMES. */ _To Edmund Gosse._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. August 25th, 1915. */ /* My dear Gosse, */ I have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed--with putting pen to paper quite out of my power: otherwise I should sooner have thanked you for the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how much it has touched me. I am really more overcome than I can say by your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one--which has the grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt ("look on my _works_, ye mighty, and despair!")--round which the lone and level sands stretch further away than ever. It _is_ indeed consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely impelled to make--but my very statement about the matter can only be, alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. That Edition has been, from the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself, practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell--that is, my annual report of what it does--the whole 24 vols.--in this country amounts to about £25 from the Macmillans; and the ditto from the Scribners in the U.S. to very little more. I am past all praying for anywhere; I remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. And the original preparation of that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of labour--all my "earlier" things--of which the Bostonians would have been, if included, one--were so intimately and interestingly revised. The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it--or any sort of critical attention at all paid it--and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and moreover was, as I held, very effectively solved. Only it took such time--_and_ such taste--in other words such aesthetic light. No more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and all--_they_ of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. The immediate inclusion of the Bostonians was rather deprecated by the publishers (the Scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree appreciative: I make no complaint of them at all!)--and there were reasons for which I also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work should eventually come in. Revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were more pressing and more promptly feasible I allowed it to stand over--with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number more of provisional omissions. But by this time it _had_ stood over, disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were--that is when a couple of dozen volumes were out. From that moment, some seven or eight years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series--and there is little enough appearance now that there will ever. Your good impression of the Bostonians greatly moves me--the thing was no success whatever on publication in the Century (where it came out,) and the late R. W. Gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. I felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat of objectivity--but I never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem to recall that I found the subject and the material, after I had got launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than I had assumed it to be. All the same I _should_ have liked to review it for the Edition--it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no question of that, or of the proportionate Preface to have been written with it, at present--or probably ever within my span of life. Apropos of which matters I at this moment hear from Heinemann that four or five of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he must break up the plates. Of course he must; I have nothing to say against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the Edition. But such is "success"! I should have liked to write that Preface to the Bostonians--which will never be written now. But think of noting now that _that_ is a thing that has perished! I am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the first for several! I am exceedingly with you all over Philip's transfer to France. We are with each other now as not yet before over everything and I am yours and your wife's more than ever, /* H. J. */ _To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._ /# Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos, September 25, 1915. #/ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. October 4th, 1915. */ /* Dearest, dearest Clare, */ I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness. The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet, even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"--vainest of dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his charm and his beauty?--everything we so loved him for. But I see you marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always, and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I presume to say such things--I mean poor things only of _mine_, to you, all stricken and shaken as you are--and then again I know how any touch of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions) made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps? Well we are all in them _with_ you, and with his mother--and may I speak of his father?--and with his children, and we cling to you and cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly, /* HENRY JAMES. */ _To Hugh Walpole._ /* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Nov. 13th, 1915. */ ...I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it, and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:) through the effect of a bad--an aggravated--heart-crisis, during the first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front. I shall not let that mask drop till I have heard _your_ thrilling story. Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with you here--where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people--I see as few as possible, I can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me all fondestly yours, /* HENRY JAMES. */ INDEX /* Abbey, Edwin, i. 88, 232; ii. 90, 186. Adams, Henry, letters to, i. 431; ii. 360. Aïdé, Hamilton, ii. 59. Ainger, Canon, i. 177. Alexander, Sir George, i. 146. Allen, Miss Jessie, letters to, i. 379; ii. 158. _Ambassadors, The_, i. 273, 354, 375-7, 413; ii. 10, 245, 333. _American, The_, i. 47, 325; ii. 333. (dramatic version) i. 146, 161, 166, 172-4, 176, 181, 185; ii. 354. _American Scene, The_, ii. 4, 36, 45, 83. Andersen, Hendrik, ii. 74. Anderson, Miss Mary, _see_ Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de. Archer, William, i. 172, 176, 228. Arnold, Matthew, i. 125. _Aspern Papers, The_, i. 86. Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., ii. 460, 480, 481. _Awkward Age, The_, i. 273, 292, 317, 319, 325, 333, 334; ii. 241. Bailey, John, letter to, ii. 269. Balestier, Wolcott, i. 148, 167, 186, 189. Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., ii. 49. Balfour, Graham, i. 386. Balzac, i. 327; ii. 254, 350, 351. Barnard, Frederick, i. 88. Barrès, Maurice, i. 221, 270. Bartholomew, A. T., ii. 127. Beardsley, Aubrey, ii. 343. Bell, Mrs. Hugh (Lady Bell), letters to, i. 173; ii. 231. Bennett, Arnold, ii. 261, 262. Benson, Archbishop, i. 278. Benson, Arthur C., i. 217; ii. 62, 112, 123. Letters to, i. 240, 251, 262, 278; ii. 125, 364. Bernstein, Henry, ii. 319-21, 357. Berry, Walter V. R., ii. 297, 425. Letter to, ii. 217. _Better Sort, The_, i. 273. Bigelow, Mrs., letters to, ii. 159, 278. Biltmore, ii. 25. Björnson, i. 220, 221. Blanche, Jacques, ii. 108-10. Blandy, Mary, ii. 356, 371, 372. Blocqueville, Madame de, i. 46. Blowitz, i. 154. Bolt, Edward, ii. 75. Bonn, i. 5. Bonnard, Abel, ii. 357. Boott, Frank, i. 57, 98. Bosanquet, Miss T, letter to, ii. 204. _Bostonians, The_, i. 86, 115, 121, 135, 325; ii. 98, 498. Boulogne-sur-mer, i. 5; ii. 374. Bourget, Paul, i. 149, 154, 188, 195, 201, 205, 206, 230, 247, 274, 316; ii. 56. Letter to, i. 286. Bourget, Madame Paul, letters to, i. 292, 410. Boutroux, Emile, ii. 428. Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk, ii. 372. Bridges, Robert, ii. 153, 337. Letter to, ii. 341. Bright, John, i. 76. Brighton, ii. 61. Broadway, i. 88. Brooke, Rupert, ii. 127, 380, 462-5, 468, 472-4. Brooks, Cunliffe, i. 63. Broughton, Miss Rhoda, ii. 13, 59, 75, 331. Letters to, ii. 178, 238, 317, 389, 408. Browne, Denis, ii. 474. Browning, Robert, i. 7; ii. 234. Browning, Robert Barrett, i. 168, 169. Bryce, Viscount, ii. 381. Bryn Mawr, ii. 3, 27, 28, 53. Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, i. 125, 196, 307-9, 339, 340. Burton, Sir Richard, ii. 256. Cadwalader, John, ii. 82, 193. California, ii. 32-4. Cambon, Paul, i. 143. Cannan, Gilbert, ii. 324. Carlyle, Thomas, i. 122-4. Caro, E. M., i. 46. Chamberlain, Joseph, ii. 12. Chapman, R. W., letter to, ii. 241. Charmes, Xavier, i. 143. Charteris, Hon. Evan, letters to, ii. 436, 453. Chicago, ii. 31. Childe, Edward Lee, i. 50. Letters to, ii. 10, 120. Chocorua (New Hampshire), ii. 2, 18, 134, 165. Clark, Sir John, i. 62. Clifford, Mrs. W. K., letters to, i. 381; ii. 18, 29, 129, 171, 234, 392, 397. Colvin, Lady, _see_ Sitwell, Mrs. Colvin, Sir Sidney, i. 111, 133, 156, 160, 177, 188, 189, 191, 204, 223; ii. 278. Letters to, i. 224, 236, 330. Compton, Edward, i. 146, 166, 167, 172-4; ii. 354. _Confidence_, i. 43, 69. Conrad, Joseph, i. 390, 405. Coppée, F., i. 154. Cory, William, i. 262. Cotes, Mrs Everard, letter to, i. 346. _Covering End_, i. 298, 299; ii. 6. _Crapy Cornelia_, ii. 139. Crawford, Marion, i. 275, 319. Creighton, Bishop, ii. 275. Crewe, Marquis of, _see_ Houghton, Lord. Curtis, George, i. 197. Curtis, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel, i. 87, 127, 166, 168, 169, 378; ii. 76. _Daisy Miller_, i. 43, 65, 66, 68, 92. Darwin, W. E., ii. 412. Darwin, Mrs. W. E., i. 257. Daudet, Alphonse, i. 41, 102-4, 154, 240, 241, 247, 269; ii. 254. Letter to, i. 108. _Death of the Lion, The_, i. 217. De Vere, Aubrey, i. 16. Dew-Smith, Mrs., letter to, ii. 55. Dickens, Charles, ii. 40, 138. Dickens, Miss, i. 16. Dino, Duchesse de, ii. 121. Dolben, Digby Mackworth, ii. 337-9, 341-3. Doré, Gustave, i. 45. Dostoieffsky, ii. 237. Dresden, i. 148, 186. Dublin Castle, i. 238, 239. Dublin, Royal Hospital, i. 238. Du Breuil, Jean, ii. 457, 465. Du Maurier, George, i. 143, 177. Letters to, i. 98, 212. Dumas, Alexandre, ii. 410. Edwards, Miss M. Betham, letter to, ii. 213. Eliot, George, i. 42, 51, 61, 66; ii. 40, 284. Elliott, Miss Gertrude (Lady Forbes-Robertson), ii. 95. Emerson, R. W., i. 422; ii. 290. Emmet, Miss Ellen (Mrs. Blanchard Rand), letters to, ii. 107, 189. _English Hours_, ii. 101. Esher, Viscount, ii. 193. Etretat, i. 42; ii. 257. _Europeans, The_, i. 43, 65, 66. Fawcett, E., i. 285. Fezandié, Institution (Paris), i. 4. Filippi, Filippo, ii. 75, 80. _Finer Grain, The_, ii. 139, 291. FitzGerald, Edward, i. 260. Flaubert, Gustave, i. 41, 42, 46, 49; ii. 256, 258. Florence, i. 21, 24, 35-7, 43, 57, 127. Florida, ii. 26, 30. Forbes-Robertson, Sir. J., ii. 6, 96. Fox, Lazarus, i. 15. France, Anatole, i. 201; ii. 277. Fullerton, W. Morton, ii. 156. Galton, Sir Douglas, i. 177. Gardner, Mrs. John L, i. 342; ii. 17. Letters to, i. 92, 238; ii. 195. Gautier, Théophile, i. 46; ii. 410. Gay, Walter, ii. 414. Geneva, i. 139, 140. Gilder, R. W., ii. 498. Gilder, Mrs. R. W., letter to, ii. 401. Gissing, George, i. 390. Gladstone, W. E., i. 53, 96; ii. 11. Glehn, Wilfred von, ii. 233. Godkin, E. L., i. 285, 377. _Golden Bowl, The_, i. 273; ii. 10, 15, 28, 30, 41, 43, 209, 333. _Golden Dream, The_, i. 329. Goncourt Academy, the, ii. 62. Goncourt, Edmond de, i. 41, 102, 104, 154, 247; ii. 260. Gordon, Lady Hamilton, i. 62. Gosse, Edmund, i. 138, 148, 251, 362; ii. 85. Reminiscences by, i. 88. Letters to, i. 129, 172, 185, 202, 217, 220, 221, 223, 246, 332, 344, 378, 385; ii. 19, 24, 246, 248, 250, 252, 255, 257, 274, 348, 409, 430, 480, 492, 496. Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, letter to, i. 201. Grainger, Percy, ii 233. Greville, Mrs., i. 66, 71, 80. Groombridge Place, i. 364. Grove, Mrs. Archibald, letter to, ii. 324. _Guy Domville_, i. 147, 149, 210, 226-9, 232-6. Haggard, Rider, i. 156. Haldane, Viscount, ii. 428. Hardy, Thomas, i. 190, 200; ii. 108. Harland, Henry, i. 203, 217. Harrison, Frederic, ii. 204, 398. Letter to, ii. 483. Harrison, Mrs. Frederic, letter to, ii. 202. Harvard, ii. 21, 153, 188. Harvey, Sir Paul, ii. 93, 122. Letter to, ii. 47. _Hawthorne_ (English Men of Letters Series), i. 71, 72. Hay, John, i. 264, 407; ii. 26. Heidelberg, i. 32. Henley, W. E, i. 386, 387. Hennessy, Mrs. Richard, ii. 135. Henschel, Sir George, letter to, i. 229 Hewlett, Maurice, i. 345. _High Bid, The_, ii. 6, 90, 94, 96. Holland, Sidney, i. 63. Holmes, Wendell, i. 244, 295. Hosmer, B. G., i. 18. Houghton, Lord, i. 52, 53. Houghton, Lord (Marquis of Crewe), i. 238. Howells, W. D., i. 10, 14, 30, 60, 267. Letters to, i. 33, 47, 71, 103, 134, 163, 197, 230, 277, 291, 349, 354, 375, 397, 407, 413; ii. 8, 98, 118, 221. Hueffer, Mrs. F. M., _see_ Hunt, Miss Violet. Hugo, Victor, i. 46. Humières, Vicomte Robert d', ii. 78. Hunt, Miss Violet (Mrs. F. M. Hueffer), letter to, i. 424. Hunt, William, i. 5, 7. Hunter, Mrs. Charles, ii. 152, 195, 196, 208, 233, 320. Letter to, ii. 170. Hunter, Mrs. George, letter to, i. 258. Huntington, Mrs., i. 23. Huntly, Marquis of, i. 63. Huxley, T. H., i. 52. Ibsen, i. 212. _International Episode, An_, i. 65, 67. Ireland, i. 121, 153, 216. Italy, i. 37, 43, 106, 126; ii. 80, 439, 440. _Ivory Tower, The_, ii. 98, 154, 380. James, George Abbot, ii. 190, 196. Letters to, ii. 110, 113. James, Henry: character and methods of work, i. xiii-xxxi: birth and early years, i. 1-11: visits to Europe, i. 11-14: settles in Europe, i. 41: life in London, i. 42-44, 84, 85, 87: settles at Lamb House, Rye, i. 150, 151, 272-4: revisits America, i. 276; ii. 1-4: last visit to America, ii. 152, 153: settles in Chelsea, ii. 154: seventieth birthday, ii. 154, 307-12: naturalised as a British subject, ii. 381, 477-81, 491, 492: last illness and death, ii. 381: dramatic work, i. 144, 161-3, 166-8, 179-83, 206, 234, 235; ii 6: collected edition of his fiction, ii. 4, 70, 96, 98-100, 497-9: impressions of England and the English, i. 21-3, 26, 27, 31, 42, 55, 58, 64, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87, 96, 114, 124; ii. 377, 416, 417, 435, 443. James, Henry, senior, i. 1-3, 9, 27, 83, 92, 97, 98, 111, 112. Letters to, i. 28, 32, 45. James, Mrs. Henry, senior (Miss Mary Walsh), i. 2, 82, 92; ii. 47. Letters to, i. 19, 21, 32, 38, 67, 76. James, Henry, junior, letters to, i. 309; ii. 16, 96, 239, 288, 345, 385, 419, 477, 490. James, Miss Alice, i. 1, 13, 84, 86, 112, 120, 140, 143, 148, 187, 189, 214-17. Letters to, i. 15, 62, 166. James, Miss Margaret (Mrs. Bruce Porter), letters to, ii. 36, 53. James, Robertson, i. 1, 97; ii. 152, 164. James, Wilkinson, i. 1, 6, 7, 9. James, William, i. 1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 42, 44, 84, 149, 275, 276, 295, 305, 338, 339, 343, 344; ii. 151, 152, 166-8, 300, 329, 330, 345. Letters to, i. 24, 26, 50, 59, 65, 97, 102, 111, 115, 119, 139, 154, 170, 179, 210, 214, 227, 232, 244, 280, 315, 371, 415; ii. 34, 42, 50, 52, 82, 134, 140. James, Mrs. William, ii. 151, 152. Letters to, i. 263, 301; ii. 32, 194, 205, 299, 305, 329, 361, 449. James, William, junior, letters to, ii. 71, 314, 394. James, Mrs. William, junior, _see_ Runnells, Miss Alice. Jersey, Countess of, letter to, i. 192. Jones, Mrs. Cadwalader, letters to, i. 395, 401. Jusserand, J. J., i. 143; ii. 26. Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, i. 67, 70, 83, 95, 128; ii. 148. Letter to, i. 78. Kempe, C. E., i. 254, 255. Keynes, Geoffrey, ii. 127. Kipling, Rudyard, i. 156, 178, 188, 189, 249, 271, 339, 341. _Lady Barbarina_, i. 103. La Farge, John, i. 402. Lamb House, Rye, description of, i. 265-7; fire at, i. 312-14. Lang, Andrew, i. 138; ii. 275-7. Langtry, Mrs., i. 63. Lapsley, Gaillard T., ii. 90, 110. Letters to, i. 285, 391; ii. 62, 92, 267. Lawrence, D. H., ii. 324. Leighton, Lord, i. 243. Lemaître, Jules, ii. 413, 467. _Lesson of Balzac, The_, ii. 3, 27, 30. _Lesson of the Master, The_, i. 86, 192. Leverett, Rev. W. C., i. 7. Lewes, G. H., i. 61. Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 347, 348. _Little Tour in France, A_, i. 83. Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, letter to, ii. 447. London, i. 42, 43, 54, 55, 59, 70, 74; ii. 36, 37. Loti, Pierre, i. 202, 203, 325, 327. Lowell, James Russell, i. 13, 56, 75, 115, 184, 197. Letter to, i. 118. Lubbock, Percy, letters to, i. 390; ii. 310. Lushington, Miss, i. 54. Lyall, Sir Alfred, i. 177. Lydd, i. 362. Mackenzie, Compton, ii. 353. Letters to, ii. 354, 437, 475. Mackenzie, Miss Muir, letters to, i. 283, 373, 382. McKinley, President, i. 249, 379. Malvern, Great, i. 26, 28. Marble, Manton, ii. 44, 83. Marsh, Edward, letters to, ii. 462, 464, 468, 472, 474. Martin, Sir Theodore, i. 177. Mathew, Lady, ii. 390. Mathews, Mrs. Frank, letter to, i. 406. Maupassant, Guy de, i. 41; ii. 256-60. Meilhac, i. 154. Mentmore, i. 76. Meredith, George, i. 219, 241; ii. 249-57, 438. _Middle Years, The_, i. 1, 65; ii. 36, 380. Milan, i. 78, 122. Millais, Sir J. E., i. 76. Millet, Frank, i. 88, 314. Montégut, Emile de, i. 46. Morley, John, Viscount, i. 52, 53, 372; ii. 11, 251. Morris, William, i. 16-19, 340, 341. Morris, Mrs. William, i. 17, 18, 80. Morse, Miss Frances R., letters to, i. 255, 294. Munich, i. 32; ii. 142, 143, 244. Musset, Alfred de, i. 8; ii. 156, 157. Myers, F. W. H., i. 371. Letter to, i. 300. Naples, i. 43. Nauheim, ii. 152, 163. Navarro, A. F. de, letters to, i. 311, 348, 364, 368; ii. 286. Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de (Miss Mary Anderson), letter to, i. 328. New England, ii. 19, 20, 135. _New Novel, The_, ii. 350. New York, i. 99; ii. 23, 25. Newport, i. 5-9. Norris, W. E, i. 218; ii. 239, 319. Letters to, i. 242, 250, 361, 366, 425; ii. 12, 22, 45, 58, 84, 87, 114, 160, 173, 211. Norton, Charles Eliot, i. 10-12, 15, 353; ii. 69, 118, 119, 295. Letters to, i. 30, 74, 91, 122, 183, 193, 306, 337. Norton, Miss Elizabeth, letter to, ii. 441. Norton, Miss Grace, letters to, i. 35, 54, 56, 69, 93, 100, 113, 126, 268; ii. 67, 131, 165, 293 412, 431. Norton, Richard, ii. 380, 412, 431-3. _Notes of a Son and Brother_, i. 1; ii. 152, 290, 345, 360, 402. _Notes on Novelists_, ii. 118, 153, 227, 234, 350, 409. Oberammergau, i. 166, 169. Ohnet, Georges, ii. 467. Ortmans, F., i. 247. Osbourne, Lloyd, i. 175, 176, 183, 201. Osterley, i. 192, 193. _Other House, The_, i. 251; ii. 6, 129, 131. _Outcry, The_, ii. 6, 129, 183, 202, 209, 214, 280, 291. Oxford, ii. 153, 188, 243. Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, i. 53. Paget, Sir James, i. 177. Palgrave, Miss Gwenllian, letter to, ii. 81. Paris, i. 41, 43, 48, 51, 57, 149, 154; ii. 5, 85, 86. Parsons, Alfred, i. 88, 266. _Partial Portraits_, i. 98, 110, 130. _Passionate Pilgrim, A_, i. 12. Pater, Walter, i. 221, 222. Peabody, Miss, i. 115-17. Pell, Duncan, i. 6. Perry, Thomas Sergeant, reminiscences by, i. 6-9. Letters to, ii. 61, 146, 167, 367, 416, 459. Perry, Mrs. T. S., letters to, ii. 406, 427. Philadelphia, ii. 25, 26. Phillips, Sir Claude, letter to, ii. 376 Pinker, J. B., letters to, ii. 15, 105, 482. Playden, i. 150. Pollock, Sir Frederick, i. 70. Porter, Bruce, letters to, ii. 65, 164, 302. Porter, Mrs. Bruce, _see_ James, Miss Margaret. _Portrait of a Lady, The_, i. 44, 132, 279; ii. 333. _Portraits of Places_, i. 378. Powell, George E. J., ii. 257. Prévost, Marcel i. 220. Primoli, Giuseppe, i. 239. _Princess Casamassima, The_, i. 86, 135, 325; ii. 333. Procter, Mrs., i. 131. Prothero, George W., letter to, ii. 469. Prothero, Mrs. G. W., letters to, ii. 313, 332. Proust, Marcel, ii. 357. _Question of Our Speech, The_, ii. 3, 35. Quilter, Roger, ii. 233. Raffalovich, André, letter to, ii. 343. Rand, Mrs. Blanchard, _see_ Emmet, Miss Ellen. Redesdale, Lord, ii. 249. Renan, Ernest, i. 7. Repplier, Miss Agnes, ii. 26, 28. Reubell, Miss Henrietta, letters to, i. 90, 225, 333; ii. 139. _Reverberator, The_, i. 86. Rheims, ii. 405, 407, 415. Richmond, Bruce L., letter to, ii. 350. Ritchie, Lady, letter to, ii. 304. Rochette, Institution (Geneva), i. 5. _Roderick Hudson_, i. 14, 41, 132; ii. 55, 333. Rome, i. 24, 25, 43, 56, 57; ii. 74, 79, 80, 100, 101. Roosevelt, President, i. 379; ii. 273, 449. Rosebery, Earl of, i. 77. Rossetti, D. G., i. 18; ii. 295. Rostand, Edmond, i. 349, 368, 369. Roughead, William, letters to, ii. 327, 356, 371, 373. Runnells, Miss Alice (Mrs. William James, junior), letter to, ii. 201. Ruskin, John, i. 7, 16, 20. Rye, i. 150, 245, 261, 262, 264-7, 272-6; ii. 4-7. _Sacred Fount, The_, i. 273, 356, 408, 409. St. Augustine (U. S. A.), ii. 27. St. Gaudens, A., i. 255, 257, 259. San Francisco, earthquake at, ii. 50, 52, 65. San Gimignano, i. 195. Sand, George, i. 51; ii. 56, 157, 227, 228, 350, 351, 375, 387, 410. Sands, Mrs. Mahlon, letter to, i. 186. Sargent, John S., i. 88, 102, 334; ii. 154, 233, 309, 316, 318, 348, 359, 366, 368, 437. Letter to, ii. 493. Saunders, T. Bailey, letters to, ii. 155, 186. Saxmundham, i. 260. Sayle, Charles, letter to, ii. 127. Schopenhauer, i. 7. Scott, Clement, i. 228. Sedgwick, Arthur, i. 30. _Sense of the Past, The_, i. 349, 352, 355; ii. 380, 425. Serao, Mathilde, i. 292. Shakespeare, William, i. 424; ii. 62, 164. Sheridan, Wilfred, letters to, ii. 215, 470, 494. Sheridan, Mrs. Wilfred, letters to, ii. 199, 499. _Siege of London, The_, ii. 119. Siena, i. 149, 193-6. Simon, Sir John, ii. 491. Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), i. 152, 177, 200. _Small Boy and Others, A_, i. 2; ii. 153, 205, 289, 307-9. Smalley, G. W., i. 242, 243, 281. Smith, Goldwin, i. 52. Smith, Logan Pearsall, letter to, ii. 337. Smith, Miss Madeleine Hamilton, ii. 373, 374. _Soft Side, The_, i. 273. Spencer, Herbert, i. 60, 61. _Spoils of Poynton, The_, i. 149, 150, 246, 408. Stephen, Sir James, i. 177. Stephen, Sir Leslie, i. 16, 218, 270. Stevenson, Robert Louis, i. 86, 120, 129, 139, 217, 219, 223-5, 236, 237, 330-2, 386, 387; ii. 237, 371. Letters to, i. 110, 130, 132, 136, 152, 155, 158, 174, 181, 188, 190, 199, 204, 207. Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., i. 394; ii. 66, 303. Story, William Wetmore, i. 13, 274, 411-13, 431. Story, Mrs. Waldo, letter to, i. 411. Strasbourg, i. 33. Sturges, Jonathan, i. 304, 313, 331, 334, 376. Letter to, i. 248. Sturgis, Howard O., ii. 200, 267, 456. Letters to, i. 317, 428; ii. 72, 74, 192, 330, 382. Sturgis, Julian R., letter to, i. 212. Sturgis, Mrs. J. R., letter to, ii. 14. Sutro, Mrs. Alfred, letters to, ii. 319, 375, 387. Swedenborg, i. 3. Swinburne, A. C., ii. 246, 248, 249, 255-7, 275. Swynnerton, Mrs., ii. 194, 195. Symonds, John Addington, i. 378. Letter to, i. 106. Syracuse (N. Y.), i. 84. Taine, H., ii. 226, 245. Talleyrand, ii. 122. Temple, Miss Mary, i. 26; ii. 361, 362, 402. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, i. 53, 66. Terry, Miss Marion, i. 146, 235. Thackeray, W. M., ii. 39, 40. _Theatricals_, i. 147. Titian, i. 20. Tolstoy, i. 327; ii. 237, 324. _Tragic Muse, The_, i. 87, 136, 161, 163, 183, 325; ii. 333. _Transatlantic Sketches_, i. 13, 14. Trevelyan, Sir George O., letter to, i. 432. Turgenev, Ivan, i. 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 85. _Turn of the Screw, The_, i. 278, 279, 296, 298, 300, 408. Vallombrosa, i. 171; ii. 5, 75, 81. Vanderbilt, George, i. 256; ii. 25. _Velvet Glove, The_, ii. 5. Venice, i. 87, 168; ii. 5, 76, 77, 81. Vernon, Miss Anna, i. 21. Viardot, Madame, i. 45. Victoria, Queen, i. 372. Vincent, Mrs. Dacre, letter to, ii. 434. Vogüé, Vicomte Melchior de, i. 316. Wagnière, Madame, letters to, ii. 76, 144. Waldstein, Dr. Louis, letter to, i. 296. Walpole, Hugh, ii. 125, 126, 173. Letters to, ii. 112, 122, 236, 244, 322, 352, 423, 444, 501. Walsh, Miss Mary, _see_ James, Mrs. Henry, senior. Walsh, Miss Katharine, i. 2, 13, 97, 143. War, American Civil, i. 9; ii. 401. War, European, ii. 379 to end, _passim_. War, South African, i. 331, 341, 342, 348. War, Spanish-American, i. 280, 292. Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters to, i. 187, 318, 320, 323; ii. 264, 265, 366. Warren, Edward, letters to, i. 261, 315; ii. 31. Warren, Sir T. Herbert, letter to, ii. 188. Washington, i. 91. _Washington Square_, i. 43, 71. _Watch and Ward_, i. 12. Wells, H. G., ii. 44, 249, 266. Letters to, i. 298, 335, 388, 400, 404; ii, 37, 137, 180, 229, 261, 333, 485, 487. Wharton, Mrs., i. 395, 396, 402; ii. 5, 35, 97, 117, 118, 266, 320, 411. Letters to, ii, 56, 78, 90, 94, 104, 123, 142, 156, 161, 163, 168, 175, 197, 208, 227, 281, 357, 369, 391, 399, 403, 405, 414, 425, 452, 456, 465. _What Maisie Knew_, i. 150, 290, 293, 325, 408. Wheeler, C. E., letter to, ii. 183. White, Dr. J. W., letters to, ii. 88, 184, 272, 358. White, Mrs. Henry, letters to, ii. 117, 296. Wilde, Oscar, i. 228, 233. Wilson, President, ii. 301, 443, 469. _Wings of the Dove, The_, i. 87, 273, 399, 402, 405, 407, 408; ii. 333. Wister, Owen, letter to, ii. 148. _Within the Rim_, ii. 380, 441, 482. Witt, Robert C., letter to, ii. 280. Wolff, Albert, i. 154. Wolseley, Viscount, i. 238. Wolseley, Viscountess, i. 239. Letters to, i. 254, 369. Wood, Derwent, ii. 154, 348. Woolson, Miss C. F., i. 105. Worcester, i. 28. Wright, C. Hagberg, letter to, ii. 339. Young, Filson, ii. 235. Young, Stark, ii. 332. Zola, Emile, i. 41, 49, 50, 103-5, 160, 164, 209, 219. */ * * * * * Alterations/corrections made by the etext transcriber: anl conversible=>and conversible the Tyrol etc,=>the Tyrol etc., the Germans will he "here"=>the Germans will be "here" crime ever perpetrated againt=>crime ever perpetrated against overestrained by it as to hurt=>overstrained by it as to hurt magnanimusly forgotten it a little=>magnanimously forgotten it a little night a a young ex-postman from Rye=>night a young ex-postman from Rye 
8222	----	EARLY LETTERS OF GEORGE WM. CURTIS TO JOHN S. DWIGHT: Brook Farm and Concord Edited by George Willis Cooke CONTENTS EARLY LIFE AT BROOK FARM AND CONCORD EARLY LETTERS TO JOHN S. DWIGHT LETTERS OF LATER DATE EARLY LIFE AT BROOK FARM AND CONCORD George William Curtis was born in Providence, February 24, 1824. From the age of six to eleven he was in the school of C.W. Greene at Jamaica Plain, and then, until he was fifteen, attended school in Providence. His brother Burrill, two years older, was his inseparable companion, and they were strongly attached to each other. About 1835 Curtis came under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was heard by him in Providence, and who commanded his boyish admiration. Burrill Curtis has said of this interest of himself and his brother that it proved to be the cardinal event of their youth; and what this experience was he has described. "I still recall," he says, "the impressions produced by Emerson's delivery of his address on 'The Over-Soul' in Mr. Hartshorn's school-room in Providence. He seemed to speak as an inhabitant of heaven, and with the inspiration and authority of a prophet. Although a large part of the matter of that discourse, when reduced to its lowest terms, does not greatly differ from the commonplaces of piety and religion, yet its form and its tone were so fresh and vivid that they made the matter also seem to be uttered for the first time, and to be a direct outcome from the inmost source of the highest truth. We heard Emerson lecture frequently, and made his personal acquaintance. My enthusiastic admiration of him and his writings soon mounted to a high and intense hero-worship, which, when it subsided, seems to have left me ever since incapable of attaching myself as a follower to any other man. How far George shared such feelings, if at all, I cannot precisely say; but he so far shared my enthusiastic admiration as to be led a willing captive to Emerson's attractions, and to the incidental attractions of the movement of which he was the head; and Emerson always continued to command from us both the sincerest reverence and homage." Burrill went so far as to discontinue the use of money and animal food; both the brothers discarded the conventional costumes in matters of dress, and their interest was enlisted in the reforms of the day. The family removed to New York in 1839, George studied at home with tutors, and was an attendant at the church of Dr. Orville Dewey. I The warm and active interest of the brothers in the Transcendental movement, in all its phases, led them to propose to their father that he permit them to attend the school connected with the Brook Farm Association. Permission having been granted, they became boarders there in the spring or summer of 1842. At no time were they members of the association, and they paid for their board and tuition as they would have done at any seminary or college. At this time the Brook Farm Association had two sources of income--the farm of about two hundred acres, and the school which was carried on in connection therewith. In fact, the school was more largely profitable than the farm, and was for a time well patronized by those who were in general sympathy with the leaders of the association. George Ripley was the teacher in philosophy and mathematics, George P. Bradford in literature, John S. Dwight in Latin and music, Charles A. Dana in Greek and German, and John S. Brown in theoretical and practical agriculture. A six years' course was arranged in preparation for college, and three years were given to acquiring a knowledge of farming. The pupils were required to work one hour each day, the idea being that this was conducive to sound intellectual training. It would seem, however, that Curtis gave only a part of his time to study, as is indicated in a letter written to his father in June, 1843, and published in the admirable biography by Mr. Edward Gary. "My life is summery enough here," he writes. "We breakfast at six, and from seven to twelve I am at work. After dinner, these fair days permit no homage but to their beauty, and I am fain to woo their smiles in the shades and sunlights of the woods. A festal life for one before whom the great stretches which must be sailed; yet this summer air teaches sea life-navigation, and I listen to the flowing streams, and to the cool rush of the winds among the trees, with an increase of that hope which is the only pole-star of life." At Brook Farm, Curtis studied Greek, German, music, and agriculture. The teaching was of the best, as good as could have been had in any college of the country at that time, and was thorough and efficient. Much more of freedom was allowed the students than was usual elsewhere, both as to conditions of study and recitation, and as to the relations of the pupils to the instructors. The young people in the school were treated as friends and companions by their teachers; but this familiarity did not breed contempt for the instructors or indifference to the work of the school. On the other hand, it secured an unusual degree of enthusiasm both for the teachers and for the subjects pursued. The work of the school went on with somewhat less of system than is thought desirable in most places of instruction; but in this instance the results justified the methods pursued. The teachers were such as could command success by their personal qualities and by their enthusiastic devotion to their work. The two years spent at Brook Farm formed an important episode in the life of George William Curtis. It is evident that he did not surrender himself to the associationist idea, even when he was a boarder at Brook Farm and a member of its school. He loved the men and women who were at the head of the community; he found the life attractive and genial, the atmosphere was conducive to his intellectual and spiritual development; but he did not surrender himself to the idea that the world can be reformed in that manner. In a degree he was a curious looker-on; and in a still larger way he was a sympathetic, but not convinced, friend and well-wisher. If not a member, he retained throughout life his interest in this experiment, and remembered with delight the years he spent there. He more than once spoke in enthusiastic terms of Brook Farm, and gave its theories and its practice a sympathetic interpretation. In one of his "Easy Chair" essays of 1869 he described the best side of its life: "There is always a certain amount of oddity latent in society which rushes to such an enterprise as a natural vent; and in youth itself there is a similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the antislavery reform and its discussions had developed the 'come-outers,' who bore testimony in all times and places against church and state. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle of the gospel of love and no money who preached zealously but never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the maternal affections of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism and the destruction of the tender germ of life, to swallow an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body.... "These were harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time was like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to devour manners, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and the non-resistants pleaded that these protestants had as good right to speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly minded enough to understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And what was to be said--for you could not call them old dotards--when the younger protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets of Boston and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with hair parted in the middle and falling upon their shoulders, and clad in garments such as no known human being ever wore before--garments which seemed to be a compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the peignoir of a possible sister? For tailoring underwent the same revision to which the whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one ardent youth, asserting that the human form itself suggested the proper shape of its garments, caused trowsers to be constructed that closely fitted the leg, and bore his testimony to the truth in coarse crash breeches. "These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend Doctors and other Dons coming out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going about as dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in a muddy street, lest they be soiled. The Dons seemed to doubt whether the mere contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and described it. With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly laughable, yet all with infinite _bonhomie_ and with a genuine superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as excellent a mime as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher. On Sundays a party always went from the Farm to Mr. Parker's little country church. He was there exactly what he was afterwards when he preached to thousands of eager people in the Boston Musichall; the same plain, simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends. They loved him and admired him and were proud of him; and his geniality and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions. "The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most aesthetic culture and accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers--the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they were associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of high _esprit de corps_--at least, in the earlier or golden age of the colony. There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the founding of an earthly paradise upon a rough New England farm is no pastime. But with the best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of method, and the economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But there was never such witty potato-patches and such sparkling cornfields before or since. The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not drawn to the enterprise by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at good wages to superintend the work, and who always seemed to be regarding the whole affair with the most good-natured wonder as a prodigious masquerade.... "But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of life than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science, the sneer of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a miserably half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of human society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the enjoyment. Man is made, body and soul. The health of each requires reasonable exercise. If every man did his share of the muscular work of the world, no other man would be overwhelmed by it. The man who does not work imposes the necessity of harder toil upon him who does. Thereby the first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture--and at last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with all the inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition. "That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook Farmers did not interpret the words,'the poor ye have always with ye,' to mean,'ye must always keep some of you poor.' They found the practical Christian in him who said to his neighbor, 'Friend, come up higher.' But, apart from any precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring prospect--that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people. Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the stock exchange, Brook Farm was certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with all that is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the field. It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls both wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is diffused, but it is not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the Cottage; when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright humor; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night or a day; when those who may not be publicly named brought beauty and wit and social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of life seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably with good influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm, and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days of Brook Farm." Curtis returned to the same subject in 1874, in discussing Frothingham's biography of George Ripley. Some of the errors into which writers about Brook Farm had fallen he undertook to correct, to point out the real character of the association, and its effort at the improvement of society. "The Easy Chair describes Brook Farm as an Arcadia, for such in effect was the intention, and such is the retrospect to those who recall the hope from which it sprang.... The curious visitors who came to see poetry in practice saw with dismay hard work on every side, plain houses and simple fare, and a routine with little aesthetic aspect. Individual whims in dress and conduct, however, were exceptional in the golden age or early days at Brook Farm, and those are wholly in error who suppose it to have been a grotesque colony of idealogues. It was originally a company of highly educated and refined persons, who felt that the immense disparity of condition and opportunity in the world was a practical injustice, full of peril for society, and that the vital and fundamental principle of Christianity was universally rejected by Christendom as impracticable. Every person, they held, is entitled to mental and moral culture, but it is impossible that he should enjoy his rights as long as all the hard physical work of the world is done by a part only of its inhabitants. Were that work limited to what is absolutely necessary, and shared by all, all would find an equal opportunity for higher cultivation and development, and the evil of an unnatural and cruelly artificial system of society would disappear. It was a thought and a hope as old as humanity, and as generous as old. No common mind would have cherished such a purpose, no mean nature have attempted to make the dream real. The practical effort failed in its immediate object, but, in the high purposes it confirmed and strengthened, it had remote and happy effects which are much more than personal. "It is an error to suppose that many of the more famous 'Transcendentalists' were of the Brook Farm company. Mr. Emerson, for instance, was never there except as a visitor. Margaret Fuller was often a visitor, and passed many days together as a guest, but she was never, except in sympathy, one of the Brook Farmers. Theodore Parker was a neighbor, and had friendly relations with many of the fraternity, but he seldom came to the farm. Meanwhile the enterprise was considered an unspeakable folly, or worse, by the conservative circle of Boston. In Boston, where a very large part of the 'leaders' of society in every way were Unitarians, Unitarian conservatism was peremptory and austere. The entire circle of which Mr. Ticknor was the centre or representative, the world of Everett and Prescott and their friends, regarded Transcendentalism and Brook Farm, its fruit, with good-humored wonder as with Prescott, or with severe reprobation as with Mr. Ticknor. The general feeling in regard to Mr. Emerson, who was accounted the head of the school, is well expressed by John Quincy Adams in 1840. The old gentleman, whose glory is that he was a moral and political gladiator and controversialist, deplores the doom of the Christian Church to be always racked with differences and debates, and after speaking of 'other wanderings of mind' that 'let the wolf into the fold,' proceeds to say: 'A young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once-loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and school-master, starts a new doctrine of Transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach of new revelations.' Mr. Adams was just on the eve of his antislavery career, but he continues: 'Garrison and the non-resistant Abolitionists, Brownson and the Marat Democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, all come in, furnished each with some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the bubbling caldron of religion and politics.' C.P. Cranch, the poet and painter, was a relative of Mr. Adams, and then a clergyman; and the astonished ex-President says: 'Pearse Cranch, _ex ephebis_, preached here last week, and gave out quite a stream of Transcendentalism most unexpectedly.' "This was the general view of Transcendentalism and its teachers and disciples held by the social, political, and religious establishment. The separation and specialty of the 'movement' soon passed. The leaders and followers were absorbed in the great world of America; but that world has been deeply affected and moulded by this seemingly slight and transitory impulse. How much of the wise and universal liberalizing of all views and methods is due to it! How much of the moral training that revealed itself in the war was part of its influence! The transcendental or spiritual philosophy has been strenuously questioned and assailed. But the life and character it fostered are its sufficient vindication." The school at Brook Farm brought together there a large number of bright young people, and they formed one of the chief characteristics of the place. The result was that the life was one of much amusement and healthy pleasure, as George P. Bradford has said: "We were floated away by the tide of young life around us. There was always a large number of young people in our company, as scholars, boarders, etc., and this led to a considerable mingling of amusement in our life; and, moreover, some of our company had a special taste and skill in arranging and directing this element. So we had very varied amusements suited to the different seasons--tableaux, charades, dancing, masquerades, and rural fetes out-of-doors, and in winter, skating, coasting, etc." In her "Years of Experience," Mrs. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, who was at Brook Farm for very nearly the same period as Curtis, has not only given an interesting account of the social life there, but she has especially described the entertainments mentioned by Mr. Bradford. Two of these occasions, when Curtis was a leading participant, she mentions with something of detail. "At long intervals in what most would call our drudgery," she says, "there came a day devoted to amusement. Once we had a masquerade picnic in the woods, where we were thrown into convulsions of laughter at the sight of George W. Curtis dressed as Fanny Ellsler, in a low-necked, short-sleeved, book-muslin dress and a tiny ruffled apron, making courtesies and pirouetting down the path. It was much out of character that I, a St. Francis squaw, in striped shirt, gold beads, and moccasins, should be guilty of such wild hilarity. Ora's movements were free and graceful in white Turkish trousers, a rich Oriental head-dress, and Charles Dana's best tunic, which reached just below her knee. She was the observed of all observers. "In the midwinter we had a fancy-dress ball in the parlors of the Pilgrim House, when the Shaws and Russells, generous friends of the association, came attired as priests and dervishes. The beautiful Anna Shaw was superb as a portly Turk in quilted robe, turban, mustache, and cimeter, and bore herself with grave dignity. "George W. Curtis, as Hamlet, led the quadrille with Carrie Shaw as a Greek girl. His sad and solemn 'reverence' contrasted charmingly with her sunny ease. He acted the Dane to the life, his bearing, the melancholy light in his eyes, his black-plumed head-cover, and his rapier glittering under his short black cloak, which fell apart in the dance, were all perfect. It was a picture long to be remembered, and as long as I could watch these two I had no desire to take part in the dance myself." Another phase of Curtis's life at Brook Farm she also mentions, and it gives a new insight into his character. The occasion described was a social Sunday evening spent in the parlor of the Eyrie: "At supper it was whispered that George W. Curtis would sing at the Eyrie, upon which several young men volunteered to assist with the dishes. My services were also cordially accepted.... And now we ascended the winding, moonlit path to the Eyrie, where Curtis was already singing. We went up the steps of the building cautiously, lest a note of the melody which floated through the open French windows should be lost to us. Entering the large parlor, we found not only the chairs and sofas occupied, but the floor well covered with seated listeners. "I did not at first recognize the operatic air, so admirably modified and retarded it was, and its former rapid words replaced by a sad and touching theme, which called for noble endurance in one borne down by suffering. The accompaniment consisted of simple chords and arpeggios, a very plain and sufficient background. Curtis, though not yet twenty--not nineteen, if I remember rightly--had a grave and mature appearance. He was full of poetic sensibility, and his pure, rich voice had that sympathetic quality that penetrates to the heart.... Curtis was not ever guilty of singing a comic song. It would indeed have been most inappropriate to our intensely earnest mood. Often his brother would join him in a duet with his agreeable tenor. "Low praises and half-spoken thanks were murmured as the grave and gracious young friend, at the expiration of an hour, swung round on the piano-stool and attempted to make his exit." In his "Cheerful Yesterdays," Colonel T.W. Higginson has described the same life as an onlooker. Although not a member of the community at Brook Farm, he was somewhat in sympathy with it--at least, with the people of whom it was composed. At the time he was living in Brookline and teaching the children of a cousin. "Into this summer life," he writes, "there occasionally came delegations of youths from Brook Farm. Among these were George and Burrill Curtis, and Larned, with Charles Dana--all presentable and agreeable, but the first three peculiarly costumed. It was then very common for young men in college and elsewhere to wear what were called blouses--a kind of hunter's frock, made at first of brown holland, belted at the waist, these being gradually developed into garments of gay-colored chintz, sometimes, it was said, an economical transformation of their sisters' skirts or petticoats. All the young men of this party but Dana wore these gay garments, and bore on their heads little round and visorless caps with tassels." "I was but twice at Brook Farm," Higginson continues, "once driving over there to a fancy ball at 'the Community,' as it was usually called, where my cousin Barbara Channing was to appear in a pretty Creole dress made of madras handkerchiefs. She was enthusiastic about Brook Farm, where she went often, being a friend of Mrs. Ripley.... Again, I once went for her in summer and stayed for an hour, watching the various interesting figures, including George William Curtis, who was walking about in shirtsleeves, with his boots over his trousers, yet was escorting a young maiden with that elegant grace which never left him. It was a curious fact that he, who was afterwards so eminent, was then held wholly secondary in interest to his handsome brother Burrill, whose Raphaelesque face won all hearts, and who afterwards disappeared from view in England. But if I did not see much of Brook Farm on the spot, I met its members frequently at the series of exciting meetings for Social Reform in Boston." Other reminiscences of Brook-Farmers tell of the Curtis brothers and their active part in the amusements of the place. They were leaders among the young people, and they had those gifts of social guidance which placed them at the head of whatever entertainment was being organized. Their grace of manner and beauty of face and figure also won consideration for them, so that they were accepted into every circle and found friends on every hand. It seems that Burrill was at this time regarded as the handsomer, but in time George gained the chief place in this regard. Their courtesy led them to help those whose labors were hard, to aid the women in the laundry at their tasks, and to assist them in hanging out the clothes on washing-days. In the evening the clothes-pins which had been thrust into a pocket found their way to the floor of the dancing-room. One of the members of the community has written that the brothers "looked like young Greek gods. Burrill, the elder, with a typical Greek face and long hair falling to his shoulders in irregular curls," she says, "I remember as most unconscious of himself, interested in all about him, talking of the Greek philosophers as if he had just come from one of Socrates' walks, carrying the high philosophy into his daily life, helping the young people with hard arithmetic lessons, trimming the lamps daily at the Eyrie, where the two brothers came to live (my sister saw George assisting him one day, and occasionally, she says, he turned his face with a disgusted expression, trying to puff away the disagreeable odor), never losing control of himself, with the kindest manner to every person. He and George seemed very companionable and fond of each other. "George, though only eighteen, seemed much older, like a man of twenty-five, possibly, with a peculiar elegance, if I may so express it; great and admirable attention, as I recollect, when listening to any one; courteous recognition of others' convictions and even prejudices; and never a personal animosity of any kind--a certain remoteness of manner, however, that I think prevented persons from becoming acquainted with him as easily as with Burrill." In his "Memories of Brook Farm," Dr. John T. Codman mentions the occasional returns of Curtis to the Farm after he had left it, and says he heard him singing the "Erl King," "Kathleen Mavourneen," and "Good-night to Julia" "in his inimitable manner." Everything goes to indicate that he was a favorite, not only with the younger persons, but with those who were older. He had already developed a mature thoughtfulness, and gave indications of his power as a writer and speaker. His fondness for music, and his enthusiastic study of it under Dwight's leadership is an indication of that aesthetic appreciation which he kept through life, and which appeared in his mastership of prose style. At first each one helped himself to the food placed on the table in the dining-room at the Hive, or those at the table helped each other. In this way more or less confusion was produced, and the results were unsatisfactory. Accordingly, Charles Dana organized a group, including Curtis and other young men of character and good breeding, to act as waiters. Dana took his place at the head of this group of voluntary servants, who performed their duties with grace and alacrity. "It is hardly necessary to observe," says Mrs. Kirby, "that the business was henceforth attended to with such courtly grace and such promptness that the new _regime_ was applauded by every one, although it did appear at first as if we were all engaged in acting a play. The group, with their admired chief, took dinner, which had been kept warm for them, afterwards, and were themselves waited upon with the utmost consideration." II While at Brook Farm, Curtis was on intimate terms with most of the persons there. He greatly admired Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and he frequently wrote to Mrs. Ripley and made of her a sort of mother-confessor. He also highly appreciated the scholarly qualities of Charles Dana, and his capacity as a leader. In his letters he frequently mentions "the two Charleses," who were Charles Dana and Charles Newcomb. The latter has been described by Dr. Codman as "the mysterious and profound, with his long, dark, straight locks of hair, one of which was continually being brushed away from his forehead as it continually fell; with his gold-bowed eye-glass, his large nose and peculiar blue eyes, his spasmodic expressions of nervous horror, and his cachinnatious laugh." Newcomb was for many years a resident of Providence, afterwards finding a home in England and in Paris. He was early a member of Brook Farm--a solitary, self-involved person, preferring to associate with children rather than with older persons. He read much in the literature of the mystics, and was laughingly said to prefer paganism to Christianity. He had a feminine temperament, was full of sensibility, and of an indolent turn of mind. Emerson was attracted to him, and at one time had great expectations concerning his genius. His paper, published in _The Dial_, under the title of "The Two Dolons," was much admired by some of the Transcendentalists when it was printed there; and it is referred to by Hawthorne in his "Hall of Phantasy." In June, 1842, Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: "I wish you to know that I have 'Dolon' in black and white, and that I account Charles N. a true genius; his writing fills me with joy, so simple, so subtle, and so strong is it. There are sentences in 'Dolon' worth the printing of _The Dial_ that they may go forth." This paper was given him for publication at Emerson's urgent request, and it is not known that Newcomb has published anything else. In 1850 Emerson said he had come to doubt Newcomb's genius, having found that he did not care for an audience. Another person of whom Curtis speaks is Isaac Hecker, who became a member of the Catholic Church, under the guidance of Orestes Brownson. He was born in New York City, was brought up under Methodist auspices, became a baker, developed a strong taste for philosophy, and went to Brook Farm at the age of twenty-two. He remained for a few months as a student, and then tried Alcott's Fruitlands for a fortnight. He was naturally of an ascetic turn of mind, loved mystic books and philosophy, and found in the Catholic Church his true religious home. He secured at Brook Farm a kind of culture which he much needed, and his abilities were seen by those around him. After his return to New York, Ripley, and Charles Lane, of Fruitlands, wrote him in a way which indicated their faith in him as a man of judgment and liberal aims. He spent some months in Concord, had George P. Bradford for his tutor, and he rented a room of Mrs. Thoreau, the mother of Henry D. Thoreau. There again he met the Curtis brothers; but soon after he went to Holland to prepare for the priesthood, and then entered upon his life-work. A curious phase in the life of this time was the effort of Hecker to convert Curtis to his own way of religious thinking, as Curtis relates in his letters. Even more singular was the attempt of Hecker to persuade Thoreau into the Catholic Church. Mr. Sanborn has read a letter in which he proposed to Thoreau to travel on foot with him in Europe. His real purpose seems to have been to get Thoreau away from Protestants, and among the influences of the Catholic churches and traditions, and thus to make a convert of him. In a letter printed in Father Elliott's biography of Father Hecker, Curtis gave an account of his acquaintance with the founder of the order of the Paulist Fathers. "WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, _February 28, 1890._ Dear Sir,--I fear that my recollections of Father Hecker will be of little service to you, for they are very scant. But the impression of the young man whom I knew at Brook Farm is still vivid. It must have been in the year 1843 that he came to the Farm in West Roxbury, near Boston. He was a youth of twenty-three, of German aspect, and I think his face was somewhat seamed with small-pox. But his sweet and candid expression, his gentle and affectionate manner, were very winning. He had an air of singular refinement and self-reliance combined with a half-eager inquisitiveness, and upon becoming acquainted with him, I told him that he was Ernest the Seeker, which was the title of a story of mental unrest which William Henry Channing was then publishing in _The Dial_. Hecker, or, as I always called him and think of him, Isaac, had apparently come to Brook Farm because it was a result of the intellectual agitation of the time which had reached and touched him in New York. He had been bred a baker, he told me, and I remember with what satisfaction he said to me, 'I am sure of my livelihood, because I can make good bread.' His powers in this way were most satisfactorily tested at the Farm, or, as it was generally called, 'the Community,' although it was in no other sense a community than an association of friendly workers in common. He was drawn to Brook Farm by the belief that its life would be at least agreeable to his convictions and tastes, and offer him the society of those who might answer some of his questions, even if they could not satisfy his longings. By what influence his mind was first affected by the moral movement known in New England as Transcendentalism, I do not know. Probably he may have heard Mr. Emerson lecture in New York, or he may have read Brownson's 'Charles Elwood,' which dealt with the questions that engaged his mind and conscience. But among the many interesting figures at Brook Farm I recall none more sincerely absorbed than Isaac Hecker in serious questions. The merely aesthetic aspects of its life, its gayety and social pleasures, he regarded good-naturedly, with the air of a spectator who tolerated rather than needed or enjoyed them. There was nothing ascetic or severe in him, but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterwards described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business. I do not remember him as especially studious. Mr. Ripley had classes in German philosophy and metaphysics, in Kant and Spinoza, and Isaac used to look in, as he turned wherever he thought he might find answers to his questions. He went to hear Theodore Parker preach in the Unitarian Church in the neighboring village of West Roxbury. He went to Boston, about ten miles distant, to talk with Brownson, and to Concord to see Emerson. He entered into the working life at the Farm, but always, as it seemed to me, with the same reserve and attitude of observation. He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest. The impression that I gathered from my intercourse with him, which was boyishly intimate and affectionate, was that of all 'the apostles of the newness,' as they were gayly called, whose counsel he sought, Brownson was the most satisfactory to him. I thought then that this was due to the authority of Brownson's masterful tone, the definiteness of his views, the force of his 'understanding,' as the word was then philosophically used in distinction from the reason. Brownson's mental vigor and positiveness were very agreeable to a candid mind which was speculatively adrift and experimenting, and, as it seemed to me, which was more emotional than logical. Brownson, after his life of varied theological and controversial activity, was drawing towards the Catholic Church, and his virile force fascinated the more delicate and sensitive temper of the young man, and, I have always supposed, was the chief influence which at that time affected Hecker's views, although he did not then enter the Catholic Church. He was a general favorite at Brook Farm, always equable and playful, wholly simple and frank in manner. He talked readily and easily, but not controversially. His smile was singularly attractive and sympathetic, and the earnestness of which I have spoken gave him an unconscious personal dignity. His temperament was sanguine. The whole air of the youth was that of goodness. I do not think that the impression made by him forecast his career, or, in any degree, the leadership which he afterwards held in his Church. But everybody who knew him at that time must recall his charming amiability. I think that he did not remain at Brook Farm for a whole year, and when later he went to Belgium to study theology at the seminary of Mons he wrote me many letters, which, I am sorry to say, have disappeared. I remember that he labored with friendly zeal to draw me to his Church, and at his request I read some writing of St. Alphonse of Liguori. Gradually our correspondence declined when I was in Europe, and was never resumed; nor do I remember seeing him again more than once, many years ago. There was still in the clerical figure, which was very strange to me, the old sweetness of smile and address; there was some talk of the idyllic days, some warm words of hearty good-will, but our interests were very different, and, parting, we went our separate ways. For a generation we lived in the same city, yet we never met. But I do not lose the bright recollection of Ernest the Seeker, nor forget the frank, ardent, generous, manly youth, Isaac Hecker. Very truly yours, George William Curtis." One of the teachers at Brook Farm was George P. Bradford, who left there at about the same time Curtis did, and was then a tutor in Concord. When the account of philosophy in Boston was left uncompleted by Ripley, Bradford finished it for the "Memorial History of Boston." While living in the Old Manse in Concord, Hawthorne wrote to Margaret Fuller: "I have thought of receiving a personal friend, and a man of delicacy, into my household, and have taken a step towards that object. But in doing so I was influenced far less by what Mr. Bradford is than by what he is not; or, rather, his negative qualities seem to take away his personality, and leave his excellent characteristics to be fully and fearlessly enjoyed. I doubt whether he be not precisely the rarest man in the world." Mrs. Hawthorne wrote of Bradford, that "his beautiful character makes him perennial in interest." After the death of Bradford, Curtis wrote of him in one of the most appreciative of the biographical papers which the "Easy Chair" gave to the public: "Whoever had the happiness of knowing the late George P. Bradford, upon reading that he was the son of a stout sea-captain of Duxbury, must have recalled Charles Lamb's description of one of his comrades at the old South Sea House--'like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter.' A more gentle, truthful, generous, constant, high-minded, accomplished man, or, as Emerson, his friend of many years, said of Charles Sumner, 'a whiter soul,' could not be known. However wide and various and delightful your acquaintance may have been, if you knew George Bradford, you knew a man unlike all others. His individuality was entirely unobtrusive, but it was absolute. "The candor of his nature refused the least deceit, and rejected every degree of indirectness without consciousness or effort. His admirable mind, the natural loftiness of his aim, his instinctive sympathy with every noble impulse and humane endeavor, his fine intellectual cultivation, all made him the friend of the best men and women of his time and neighborhood, and none among them but acknowledged the singular charm of a companion who asserted his convictions by his character, and with whom controversy was impossible. Mr. Bradford had the temperament, the tastes, and the acquirements of a scholar; a fondness for nature, and a knowledge which made him her interpreter; yet still more obvious were the social sympathy and tenderness of feeling that brought him into intimate personal relations which time could not touch. "Something in his appearance and manner, a half-shrinking and smiling diffidence, an unworn and childlike ardor and unconsciousness, a freshness of feeling and frankness of address, invested his personality with what we call quaintness. He was always active, even to apparent restlessness, not from nervous excitement, but from fulness of life and sympathy. You might think of a humming-bird darting from flower to flower, of a honey-bee happy in a garden. He graduated at Harvard, meaning to be a clergyman, but the publicity, the magisterial posture, the incessant constraint of the liberty which he valued more than all else, with the lack of oratorical gifts and of the self-asserting disposition, soon closed that career to him; afterwards he was one of the most cheerful and charming figures at Brook Farm in its pleasantest day. All his life he was a teacher, mainly of private classes, and generally of women, now in Plymouth, now in Cambridge, now elsewhere, but, wherever he was, always beloved and welcomed, and bewailed when he departed. "Mr. Bradford was unmarried, and there was a sentiment of solitude in his life, but it was scarcely more, so affectionate and devoted were his relations to his kindred and his friends. His elder sister, Mrs. Samuel B. Ripley, was one of the most admirably accomplished women in New England, living for some years in the Old Manse in Concord in which Hawthorne had lived. Mr. Ripley was the son of the clergyman who married the widow of his fellow-clergyman who saw from the Manse the battle at Concord Bridge. Mr. Bradford was very fond of the old town, and Mr. Emerson had no friend who was a more welcome or frequent guest than George Bradford, who came to look after the vegetable garden and to trim the trees, and in long walks to Walden Pond or Fairhaven Hill to discuss with his host philosophy and poetry and life. The small gains of a teacher were enough for the simple wants of the scholarly gentleman, and after middle life he went often to Europe, and few Americans have ever gone more admirably equipped. He travelled sometimes with a tried comrade, sometimes alone, and a life already full was enriched and enchanted still more by the happy journeys. "Indeed, the recollection of George Bradford is that of a long life as serene and happy as it was blameless and delightful to others. It was a life of affection and many interests and friendly devotion; but it was not that of a recluse scholar like Edward Fitzgerald, with the pensive consciousness of something desired but undone. George Bradford was in full sympathy with the best spirit of his time. He had all the distinctive American interest in public affairs. His conscience was as sensitive to public wrongs and perilous tendencies as to private and personal conduct. He voted with strong convictions, and wondered sometimes that the course so plain to him was not equally plain to others. "It was a life of nothing of what we call achievement, and yet a life beneficent to every other life that it touched, like a summer wind laden with a thousand invisible seeds that, dropping everywhere, spring up into flowers and fruit. It is a name which to most readers of these words is wholly unknown, and which will not be written, like that of so many of the friends of him who bore it, in our literature and upon the memory of his countrymen. But to those who knew him well, and who therefore loved him, it recalls the most essential human worth and purest charm of character, the truest manhood, the most affectionate fidelity. To those who hear of him now, and perhaps never again, these words may suggest that the personal influences which most ennoble and sweeten life may escape fame, but live immortal in the best part of other lives." Another member of Brook Farm in its earlier period was Minott Pratt, who had been a printer, and the foreman in the office of the _Christian Register_, the Unitarian paper published in Boston. Dr. Codman says of him that he was "a finely formed, large, graceful-featured, modest man. His voice was low, soft, and calm. His presence inspired confidence and respect. Whatever he touched was well done. He was faithful and dignified, and the serenity of his nature welled up in genial smiles. In farm-work he was Mr. Ripley's right hand. They agreed in practical matters, and Ripley deferred to his judgment. His wife was an earnest, strong, faithful worker. They entered into the scheme with fervor." Another Brook Farmer said of him: "No one can ever forget the entire freedom from fret and fume and worry he evinced, while he never neglected a duty or failed to accomplish his full share of work. No one can fail to recall how peaceful and free from criticism his life was, with what rare fidelity he estimated his fellows, and how little apparent thought or recognition of self there was in all his actions. Indeed, the loveliness of his spirit shone through the bodily vesture, and his smile itself was a blessing which one might seek to win, and be proud to have gained by one's exertions. His presence, in all the various spheres of active life and industry, had a wonderful educational power upon both old and young; and to the influence of several individuals of similar beauty of character I attribute the harmony and beauty, in considerable degree, of our Brook Farm life." Pratt spent the remainder of his life, after the Brook Farm episode, in Concord, and there he has, even now, the reputation of having been a model farmer. He was an extremely modest man, very little forthputting, gentle in manner, and most neighborly in spirit. He wrote many papers for the Concord Farmers' Club, and some of these were printed in the _Boston Commonwealth_. In that paper, when Mr. Frank B. Sanborn was the editor, he published a series of articles on country life, which were delightful to read. He was a fine writer, and what he wrote showed the grace and charm of the man. He gave much attention to botany, knew all the plants and flowers in Concord, and knew them both as a scientist and poet. For several years Pratt was in the habit of gathering on the lawn in front of his house, under a large elm-tree, a picnic of such of his Brook Farm associates as he could bring together. Emerson, Phillips, Thoreau, Curtis, George Bradford, and others of note, often attended. The gathering was a delightful one, and it was made an occasion of happy reminiscences and a renewal of old personal ties and affections. Some of the reminiscences of Brook Farm mention that Curtis walked in the moonlight with Caroline Sturgis, who, over the signature of "Z," contributed a number of poems to _The Dial_. She was an intimate friend of Margaret Fuller, and she afterwards published "Rainbows for Children," "The Magician's Show-box," and other children's books. She married William A. Tappan, who rented to Hawthorne the cottage in which he lived at Lenox. Mrs. Lathrop's book about her mother contains many reminiscences of them. She was a daughter of William Sturgis, a wealthy Boston merchant. A sister, Mrs. Ellen H. Hooper, was also a contributor to _The Dial_, in which appeared her poem beginning with the line: "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty." Another well-known poem was written by her: "She stood outside the gate of heaven and saw them entering in." Colonel Higginson speaks of her as "a woman of genius," and Margaret Fuller wrote of her from Rome: "I have seen in Europe no woman more gifted by nature than she." Under date of October 25, 1845, Curtis mentions a religious meeting which had been recently held at Brook Farm. This was a reference to one of the many occasions on which William Henry Channing conducted religious services there, for he was listened to with greater satisfaction than any one else who spoke on religious subjects. When the weather was suitable he preached in the grove near the Margaret Fuller cottage (so called); and on the present occasion he asked those present to join hands and to repeat with him a bond of union or confession of faith, and constitute themselves into a church. Before this time no religious organization had existed at Brook Farm, the utmost liberty of opinion being cultivated there. In fact, the leaders of the movement had been strongly opposed to any religious formalism or organized effort at religious instruction. The freedom of belief was such that Freethinkers on the one side, and devout Catholics on the other, were welcomed with equal cordiality. The majority of the members were undoubtedly of the "liberal" school in theology, and found in the preaching of Theodore Parker the kind of spiritual instruction they desired. At one time there was an enthusiastic interest in the teachings of Swedenborg. It was the tendency towards what was at once practical and mystical which drew the large majority of the Farmers to the preaching of William Henry Channing, who was one of the most gifted preachers which America has produced. He was imaginative, mystical, and eloquent, liberal in his thinking, progressive in his social ideals, and profoundly religious. He was thoroughly in sympathy with the Associationist movement, and more than any other man he was the spiritual leader and confessor of those who found in that movement a practical realization of their religious convictions. The organization which began on that Sunday afternoon in October, 1845, continued to exist at Brook Farm until January, 1847, when "The Religious Union of Associationists" was organized in Boston, with Channing as the minister. For a few years it was successful, and it gave union and purpose to the Associationist movement in Boston and the vicinity. A considerable number of the members of Brook Farm were connected with it actively--as officers, members of the choir, or regular attendants. The organization effected in the pine woods in so informal a manner was quite in harmony with the Brook Farm spirit and methods. Formalism of every kind was dreaded, but yet there was a deeply religious interest pervading the whole life of the community. At all the meetings held by the Farmers, even at little social gatherings, the conversation was likely to run on high themes. While there was present the utmost freedom of opinion and expression, and while there was the greatest effort to avoid cant and conventional phraseology, yet there was in the community a very strong religious feeling; and nearly all the members held serious and earnest convictions, to which they were unusually faithful in their daily living. III The relations of Curtis to his teachers at Brook Farm were cordial and appreciative, but they were especially so with John S. Dwight, with whom he studied music. When he left the farm, an intimate and confidential correspondence began between them, and this continued until Curtis went to Europe. After he returned it was resumed, but the interchange of letters was not so frequent. They continued to write to each other almost to the end of Dwight's life, however, and their friendship was always sympathetic and confidential. The letters of Dwight have not been preserved, with two or three exceptions, but those of Curtis still exist in unbroken succession, and are presented to the public in this volume. In these days, when we complain of the decay of letter-writing, they afford a remarkably good specimen of youthful effort in that kind of literature. To Dwight there were sent by Curtis several poems, which were printed in the _Harbinger_, and he also sent two letters from New York on musical topics. Two of his letters to Dwight from Europe were also printed in the _Harbinger_. After he was settled in New York, Curtis did his part in an effort to get Dwight established in that city. When Dwight began his _Journal of Music_, Curtis wrote for it frequently over the signature of "Hafiz." It is safe to say that these contributions were not paid for, but were the result of a desire to aid his friend in his musical enterprise. They were of the nature of passing comments on the musical performances of the day, but they were worthy of the pages in which they appeared. John Sullivan Dwight was born in Court Street, Boston, May 13, 1813, the son of Dr. John Dwight and his wife Mary. He was educated at the Derne Street Grammar School and the Boston Latin School, from which he entered Harvard College. As a boy he was a devoted reader of books, studious in his habits, but little inclined to active or practical pursuits. When about fifteen, he began to take an interest in music, and from his father he received the best instruction in that art. Young Dwight entered Harvard in 1829, and he carried through the studies of the course with a fair degree of success. He gave much attention to music, joined the Pierian Sodality, and was an earnest reader of the best poetry. He gave the class poem on his graduation, in 1832. During his Senior year he taught at Northborough, and following his graduation he spent a year as a tutor in a family at Meadville, Pennsylvania. In the autumn of 1834 he entered the theological school at Harvard, and graduated therefrom in August, 1836, his dissertation being on "The Proper Character of Poetry and Music for Public Worship," which was published in the _Christian Examiner_ for that year. Dwight's interest in music led him to take a leading part in bringing together, in 1837, those recent graduates of the college who were of like mind with himself; and a society was organized for the purpose of promoting its study. In 1840 the name was changed to that of the "Harvard Musical Association"; in 1845 it was incorporated, and in 1848 the place of meeting was transferred to Boston. It was three years and a half after Dwight left the theological school before he had secured a pulpit. He preached nearly every Sunday, but he had become a member of the Transcendental Club, he was in sympathy with Emerson and Parker, and the churches did not find his preaching acceptable. He wrote several papers for the _Christian Examiner_, and reviewed a number of books in the same periodical. The first review of Tennyson published in this country he gave to the public in that journal. In 1838 he published in the series of translations edited by George Ripley, under the general title of "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," a volume of "Select Minor Poems, Translated from the German of Goethe and Schiller, with Notes." Several of Dwight's friends aided him in this translation, especially on the poems of Schiller; but the valuable notes appended were furnished by himself. The volume was dedicated to Carlyle, who wrote a characteristic letter in giving his permission, and a still more interesting one in acknowledging the receipt of the book. In May, 1840, Dwight became the minister of the little Unitarian parish at Northampton, and the ordination sermon was preached by George Ripley, the address to the minister being given by Dr. W.E. Channing. From the first the people were not fully agreed as to Dwight's preaching, and the objections gradually increased as his strong Transcendental habits of thought began to be more clearly manifest. A few persons of thoughtful and more distinctly spiritual cast of mind were warmly drawn to him, but the majority grew more and more opposed to him, and he withdrew from the parish after a year and a half. During his stay in Northampton he wrote for _The Dial_, for one or two musical journals, planned several extended literary undertakings, and gave lectures before the American Institute of Instruction and the Harvard Musical Association. In _The Dial_ was published one of his sermons, under the title of "Religion of Beauty," and another called "Ideals of Every-day Life." At the end of that on the religion of beauty was printed a poem of Dwight's, which has been often credited to Goethe, and is usually given the title of "REST Sweet is the pleasure, Itself cannot spoil! Is not true leisure One with true toil? Thou that wouldst taste it, Still do thy best; Use it, not waste it, Else 'tis no rest. Wouldst behold beauty Near thee, all round? Only hath duty Such a sight found. Rest is not quitting The busy career; Rest is the fitting Of self to its sphere. 'Tis the brook's motion, Clear without strife, Fleeing to ocean After its life. Deeper devotion Nowhere hath knelt; Fuller emotion Heart never felt. 'Tis loving and serving The Highest and Best! 'Tis onwards! unswerving, And that is true rest." As an intimate friend of George Ripley, Dwight had discussed with him the project of a community at Brook Farm; and it was natural that he should find his place there in November, 1841. Many years later Dwight said of the purposes of Ripley, in this effort to improve upon the usual forms of social life: "His aspiration was to bring about a truer state of society, one in which human beings should stand in frank relations of true equality and fraternity, mutually helpful, respecting each other's occupation, and making one the helper of the other. The prime idea was an organization of industry in such a way that the most refined and educated should show themselves practically on a level with those whose whole education had been hard labor. Therefore, the scholars and the cultivated would take their part also in the manual labor, working on the farm or cultivating nurseries of young trees, or they would even engage in the housework." In the Brook Farm community, Dwight was one of the leaders, his place being next after Ripley and Dana. In the school he was the instructor in Latin and music. His love for music began to make itself strongly manifest at this time; he brought out all the musical talent which could be developed among the members of the community. Of this phase he said: "The social education was extremely pleasant. For instance, in the matter of music we had extremely limited means or talent, and very little could be done except in a very rudimentary, tentative, and experimental way. We had a singing-class, and we had some who could sing a song gracefully and accompany themselves at the piano. We had some piano music; and, so far as it was possible, care was taken that it should be good--sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart, and music of that order. We sang masses of Haydn and others, and no doubt music of a better quality than prevailed in most society at that date, but that would be counted nothing now. Occasionally we had artists come to visit us. We had delightful readings; and, once in a while, when William Henry Channing was in the neighborhood, he would preach us a sermon." At this time a musical awakening was taking place in Boston, a genuine taste for and appreciation of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn was being developed. Dwight was instrumental in promoting a love for these masters, and out of his classes for their study grew what were called "Mass Clubs." He and his pupils often went into Boston to hear the best music, walking both ways. In _The Dial_, and especially in the _Harbinger_, Dwight wrote with enthusiasm and poetic charm of the merits of classical music. He wrote afterwards that the treatment of music in these periodicals told the time of day far ahead; and "such discussion did at least contribute much to make music more respected, to lift it in the esteem of thoughtful persons to a level with the rest of the humanities of culture, and especially to turn attention to the nobler compositions, and away from that which is but idle, sensual, and vulgar." To the _Christian Examiner_, _Boston Miscellany_, _Lowell's Pioneer_, and the _Democratic Review_, Dwight was an occasional contributor at this period. His chief literary work, however, was in the form of lectures on musical subjects, especially on the great composers already named. He gave a successful course of musical lectures in New York, and he lectured in a number of other cities. To the _Harbinger_, which was the organ of Brook Farm after the Fourierite period began, as well as the best advocate of associated life ever published in the country, Dwight was one of the chief contributors. He wrote much in behalf of association, but he also discussed literary topics. His chief contributions were on the subject of music, which was then, as always, so near his heart. He conducted the department devoted to musical criticism and interpretation. During the last year of the publication of the paper at Brook Farm he was associated with Ripley in the editorial management. In 1847 Brook Farm came to an end. The _Harbinger_ was removed to New York, and Ripley was its editor; but it was discontinued in less than two years. Dwight was the Boston correspondent, and continued his editorial connection with the paper. He removed to Boston, continued his interest in association, was an active member of W.H. Channing's "Religious Union of Associationists," was one of the most zealous workers in the organization for promoting associated life, and began to write for the _Daily Chronotype_ on musical subjects. In 1849 he edited a department in the _Chronotype_ devoted to the interests of association, and he had the assistance of Channing, Brisbane, Dana, and Cranch. This arrangement was continued for only a few months, not proving a success. In 1851 he was for six months the musical editor of the _Boston Commonwealth_, he wrote for _Sartain's Magazine_ and other periodicals on musical topics, and he continued to lecture. Ripley and Dana made an earnest effort to secure him a place on one of the daily journals in New York. In February, 1851, Dwight and Mary Bullard, who had been a frequent visitor at Brook Farm, and a member of the choir at Channing's church in Boston, of which Dwight was the musical leader, were married. She was a beautiful and attractive woman, of some musical talent, and of a most unselfish and winning character. They went to live in Charles Street, and there had Dr. O.W. Holmes and his wife for near neighbors. In April, 1852, Dwight issued the first number of _Dwight's Journal of Music_. He was able to do this with the aid of several of his associationist and musical friends, who generously contributed to a guarantee fund for the purpose. The Harvard Musical Association lent its aid to the project, and made it financially possible. In the first number Dwight said of his purposes and plans: "Our motive for publishing a musical journal lies in the fact that music has made such rapid progress here within the last fifteen, and even the last ten, years. Boston has been without such a paper, and Boston has thousands of young people who go regularly to hear all the good performances of the best classic models in this art. Its rudiments are taught in all our schools.... "All this requires an organ, a regular bulletin of progress; something to represent the movement, and at the same time help to guide it to the true end. Very confused, crude, heterogeneous is this sudden musical activity in a young, utilitarian people. A thousand specious fashions too successfully dispute the place of true art in the favor of each little public. It needs a faithful, severe, friendly voice to point out steadfastly the models of the true, the ever beautiful, the divine. "We dare not promise to be all this; but what we promise is, at least, an honest report, week by week, of what we hear and feel and in our poor way understand of this great world of music, together with what we receive through the ears and feeling and understanding of others, whom we trust; with every side-light from the other arts." What was thus promised was carried out successfully, so far as the spirit and purpose were concerned, for more than thirty years. At first the _Journal of Music_ was an eight-page weekly, of about the size of _Harper's Weekly_. After a time it was issued fortnightly, and the number of pages was increased. Though small the _Journal of Music_ was varied in contents, and published much that was of great value. The selections from English, French, and German musical publications were well adapted to give music a higher position in American society. Many works of great value were translated for its pages; and whatever new or of importance was taking place or being said in the musical world was faithfully reported. The circulation was small at the best, for the high quality of the paper, and the refusal of the editor to make it an organ of the interests of publishers did not help to bring it widely before the public. Dwight would make no compromises with what was sensational or merely popular. At the beginning of 1859 the _Journal of Music_ was put into the hands of Oliver Ditson & Co., who undertook its publication, paying Dwight a stated salary for his labors upon it. This arrangement relieved him of much drudgery as publisher, which he had hitherto undertaken. The conduct of the paper did not essentially change, but with each number was added a musical composition; the best works of Mendelssohn, Schubert, Wagner, Gluck, Mozart, and many other composers were thus issued. Dwight also did much translating for Ditson, turning into English the words which accompanied some of the best German music. In July, 1860, Dwight went to Europe for purposes of travel and study. Shortly after his departure his wife was taken ill, and died in a few weeks. The blow nearly crushed him, and it took many months for him to recover himself. In a most sympathetic letter Dr. Holmes told him of the illness, and the scenes which followed: "I listened to the sweet music which was sung over her as she lay, covered with flowers, in the pleasant parlor of her house, by the voices of those that loved her--I and my wife with me--and then we followed her to Mount Auburn, and saw her laid in the earth, and the blossoms showered down upon her with such tokens of affection and sorrow that the rough men, whose business makes them callous to common impressions, were moved as none of us ever saw them moved before. Our good James Clarke, as you know, conducted the simple service. It was one which none of us who were present will ever forget; and in every heart there was one feeling over all others, that for the far-distant husband, brother, friend, as yet unconscious of the bereavement he was too soon to learn." Dwight spent a few days in England, was for a fortnight in Paris, went through Switzerland, and then on to Germany. He went to Frankfort, then to Bonn, where he was for some weeks. In Berlin some months were passed, and visits were made to Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, and other cities. He gave much attention to music, taking every opportunity of making himself better acquainted with its traditions and spirit. He then went to Italy, passed on to France, and reached England in July, 1861. Early in September he sailed on the trial trip of the _Great Eastern_, which encountered a fearful storm, and was nearly wrecked. Dwight landed on the Irish coast, made his way back to London, thought of remaining another year in Europe, but finally returned home in November. In Dwight's absence the _Journal_ had been conducted by Henry Ware, a young musical friend. He now established himself in the Studio Building on Tremont Street, and went on with his tasks as usual. He became an active member of the Saturday Club, and was a constant attendant. He helped to organize, in 1863, the Jubilee Concert, at which Emerson read his "Boston Hymn." On the other hand, he severely criticised Gilmore's National Peace Jubilee of 1869. In 1878 the desire of the Ditson publishing house to make the _Journal of Music_ more popular in its character, and more directly helpful to their business interests, led Dwight to transfer its management to the firm of Houghton, Osgood & Co. It was better printed, the list of contributors was enlarged, and in many ways the paper was improved. A number of Dwight's friends promised to stand behind it for a year or two with definite sums of money, that it might be improved, and an effort made to reach a larger public. From some cause, not easy to understand, the response on the part of the public was not large enough to warrant the additional outlay; the list of paid contributors had to be abandoned, and the paper returned gradually to its old ways. In December, 1880, Dwight's friends joined with the musicians of Boston in giving a testimonial concert for the benefit of the paper, which yielded the sum of $6000. In an editorial Dwight said of this expression of interest in his work: "Greetings and warmest signs of recognition, kindliest notes of sympathy (often from most unexpected quarters), prompt, enthusiastic offers of musical service in any concert that might be arranged, poured in upon the editor, who, all at once, found himself the object of unusual attention. Hand and heart were offered wherever he met an old acquaintance; everybody seemed full of the bright idea that had struck somebody just in the nick of time. We never knew we had so many friends." In September, 1881, the _Journal of Music_ came to an end. The position taken by Dwight was not that of the self-seeker; he had no gift for turning his love for the art of music into financial results. He would not lower the critical attitude of his journal for the sake of pleasing the publishers of music; and he would not pretend to a love of those popular forms of music which he held to be inferior in their character. It may be he was not a great critic, certainly he had not the technical knowledge of music which is desirable in its scientific expositor; but his whole soul was in the art, and he gave it the devotion of his life. His preference was for the older composers, and he did not yield a ready homage to those of the newer schools. Of this he speaks in the closing number of his journal: "Startling as the new composers are, and novel, curious, brilliant, beautiful at times, they do not inspire us as we have been inspired before, and do not bring us nearer heaven. We feel no inward call to the proclaiming of the new gospel. We have tried to do justice to these works as they have claimed our notice, and have omitted no intelligence of them which came within the limits of our columns, but we lack motive for entering their doubtful service; we are not ordained their prophet." Dwight frankly admitted that the causes for the limited success of his journal lay in himself, and said, truly, "We have long realized that we were not made for the competitive, sharp enterprise of modern journalism. The turn of mind which looks at the ideal rather than the practical, and the native indolence of temperament which sometimes goes with it, have made our movements slow. To be the first in the field with an announcement, or a criticism, or an idea, was no part of our ambition; how can one recognize competitors, or enter into competition, and at the same time keep his eye on truth?" The real value of Dwight's work in his _Journal of Music_ was expressed in a letter sent him by Richard Grant White, when the closing number appeared: "I regret very much this close of your valuable editorial labors. You have done great work; and have that consciousness to be sure--some comfort, but it should not be all. There is not a musician of respectability in the country who is not your debtor." In the "Easy Chair" Curtis gave a worthy account of the labors of his friend, and showed how deserving he was of a far greater success than he had reached. "In the midst of the great musical progress of the country," he wrote, "it is a curious fact that the oldest, ablest, and most independent of musical journals in the United States has just suspended publication, on the eve of the completion of its thirtieth year, for want of adequate support. We mean, of course, _Dwight's Journal of Music_, which ended with an admirably manly, candid, and sagacious, but inevitably pathetic, valedictory from its editor--veteran editor, we should say, if the atmosphere of good music in which he has lived had not been an enchanted air in which youth is perpetually renewed.... A more delightful valedictory it would not be easy to find in the swan song of any journal.... "Mr. Dwight does not say, what the history of music in this country will show, that to no one more than to him are we indebted for the intelligent taste which enjoys the best music. His lectures upon the works of the great Germans at the time of their performance by the Boston Academy of Music in the old Odeon forty years ago were a kind of manual for the intelligent audience. They showed that an elaborate orchestral musical composition might be as serious a work of art, as full of thought and passion, and, in a word, of genius, as a great poem, and that no form of art was more spiritually elevating. They lifted the performance of such music from the category of mere amusement, and asserted for the authors a dignity like that of the master poets. If to some hearers the exposition seemed sometimes fanciful and remote, it was only as all criticism of works of the imagination often seems so. If the spectator sometimes sees in a picture more than the painter consciously intended, it is because the higher power may work with unconscious hands, and because beauty cannot be hidden from the eye made to see it. Beethoven, for instance, had never a truer lover or a subtler interpreter than Dwight, and Dwight taught the teachers, and largely shaped the intelligent appreciation of the unapproached master. "Those were memorable evenings at the old Odeon. Francis Beaumont did not more pleasantly recall the things that he and Ben Jonson had seen done at the Mermaid than an old Brook Farmer remembers the long walks, eight good miles in and eight miles out, to see the tall, willowy Schmidt swaying with his violin at the head of the orchestra, to hear the airy ripple of Auber's 'Zanetta,' the swift passionate storm of Beethoven's 'Egmont,' the symphonic murmur of woods and waters and summer fields in the limpid 'Pastorale,' or the solemn grandeur of sustained pathetic human feeling in the 'Fifth Symphony.' The musical revival was all part of the new birth of the Transcendental epoch, although none would have more promptly disclaimed any taint of Transcendentalism than the excellent officers of the Boston Academy of Music. The building itself, the Odeon, was the old Federal Street Theatre, and had its interesting associations.... To all there was now added, in the memory of the happy hearers, the association of the symphony concerts. "As the last sounds died away, the group of Brook Farmers, who had ventured from the Arcadia of co-operation into the Gehenna of competition, gathered up their unsoiled garments and departed. Out of the city, along the bare Tremont road, through green Roxbury and bowery Jamaica Plain, into the deeper and lonelier country, they trudged on, chatting and laughing and singing, sharing the enthusiasm of Dwight, and unconsciously taught by him that the evening had been greater than they knew. Brook Farm has long since vanished. The bare Tremont road is bare no longer. Green Roxbury and Jamaica Plain are almost city rather than suburbs. From the symphony concerts dates much of the musical taste and cultivation of Boston. The old Odeon is replaced by the stately Music Hall. The _Journal of Music_, which sprang from the impulse of those days, now, after a generation, is suspended; nor need we speculate why musical Boston, which demands the Passion music of Bach, permits a journal of such character to expire. Amid all these changes and disappearances two things have steadily increased--the higher musical taste of the country, and the good name of the critic whose work has most contributed to direct and elevate it. If, as he says, it is sad that the little bark which the sympathetic encouragement of a few has kept afloat so long goes down before reaching the end of its thirtieth annual voyage, it does not take down with it the name and fame of its editor, which have secured their place in the history of music in America." From the beginning Dwight was intimately connected with the Harvard Musical Association, which has done so much to promote the interests of music in Boston. He was its first vice-president and chairman of its board of directors. He was active in providing its meetings with attractive musical programmes; about 1844 he secured for it a series of chamber concerts; he took part in procuring the building of Music Hall, and in bringing to it the great organ which was for many years an attraction. From 1855 to 1873 he continuously filled the position of vice-president of the association; and in the latter year was elected president, which place he held until his death. Beginning about 1850 he worked steadily for securing a good musical library, that should be as nearly complete as possible; and his desire was to make this a special feature in the activities of the association. In 1867 a room was secured for it; and in 1869 a suite of rooms was rented for the gatherings, both social and musical, of the members of the association. On his election as president, Dwight went to live in those rooms, cared for the library, and received the members and guests of the association whenever they chose to frequent them. This was in Pemberton Square; but in 1886 there was a removal to Park Square, and another in 1892 to West Cedar Street. Dwight's connection of forty or fifty years with the Harvard Musical Association was most intimate, so that he and the association came to be almost identical in the minds of Boston people. Whatever it accomplished was through his initiative or with his active cooperation. In 1865 Dwight proposed the organization of a Philharmonic Society among the members of the association, and also that a series of concerts be undertaken. This suggestion was carried out, and the concerts were for many years very successful. In time their place was taken by the concerts of Theodore Thomas, and the Symphony Concerts generously sustained by Mr. H.L. Higginson; but it must be recognized that Dwight and the Harvard Musical Association taught the Boston public to appreciate only those concerts at which the best music was produced. One special object in the organization of the Harvard Musical Association was the securing of a place for music in the curriculum of Harvard College. That was an object very dear to the heart of Dwight, and one which he brought forward frequently in the pages of his _Journal of Music_. He maintained that music was not merely for amusement, but that it is the most human and spiritual of all the arts, and must find its place in any systematic effort to secure a full-rounded culture. In a few years Harvard appointed an instructor in music. Mr. John K. Paine was called to that position in 1862, and was made a professor in 1876. Dwight gave a most generous welcome to all young musicians of promise as they came forward. Such men as John C.D. Parker, John K. Paine, Benjamin J. Lang, George W. Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and William F. Apthorp were generously aided by him; and the _Journal of Music_ never failed to speak an appreciative word for them. However Dwight might differ from some of them, he could recognize their true merits, and did not fail to make them known to the public. When Mr. Paine, who had been watched by Dwight with appreciation and approval from the beginning of his musical career, was made a professor of music in Harvard University, when his important musical compositions were published, and when his works were given fit interpretation in Cambridge and elsewhere, these events were welcomed by him as true indications of the development of music in this country. For many years John S. Dwight was the musical autocrat of Boston, and what he approved was accepted as the best which could be obtained. His knowledge of music was literary rather than technical, appreciative rather than scientific; but his qualifications were such as to make him an admirable interpreter of music to the cultivated public of Boston. What a musical composition ought to mean to an intelligent person he could make known in language of a fine literary texture, and with a rare spiritual insight he voiced its poetic and aesthetic values. If the better-trained musicians of more recent years look upon his musical judgments with somewhat of disapproval, as not being sufficiently technical, they ought not to forget that he prepared the way for them as no one else could have done it, and that he had a fine skill in bringing educated persons to a just appreciation of what music is as an art. As Mr. William F. Apthorp has well said, "his musical instincts and perceptions were, in a certain high respect, of the finest. He was irresistibly drawn towards what is pure, noble, and beautiful, and felt these things with infinite keenness." Dwight's last years were spent in furthering the interests of the Harvard Musical Association, in writing about his beloved art, and in the society of his many generous friends. He had a talent for friendship, and during his lifetime he was intimately associated with almost every man and woman of note in Boston. He was of a quiet, gentlemanly habit of life, took the world in the way of one who appreciates it and desires to secure from it the most of good, was warmly attached to the children of his friends and found the keenest delight in their presence, loved all that is graceful and beautiful, and devoted himself with unceasing ardor to the art for which he did so much to secure a just appreciation. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday his friends and admirers were brought together in the rooms of the Harvard Musical Association. It was a red-letter day in his life, and he greatly appreciated it. A few months later, September 5, 1893, his life came to an end--a life that had been in no way great, but that had been spent in the loving and faithful service of his fellow-men. At his funeral, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, an intimate friend of many years, read this just and appreciative tribute: "O Presence reverend and rare, Art thou from earth withdrawn? Thou passest as the sunshine flits To light another dawn. Surely among the symphonies That praise the Ever-blest, Some strophe of surpassing peace Inviteth thee to rest. Thine was the treasure of a life Heart ripened from within, Whose many lustres perfected What youth did well begin. The noble champions of thy day Were thy companions meet, In the great harvest of our race, Bound with its priceless wheat. Thy voice its silver cadence leaves In truth's resistless court, Whereof thy faithful services Her heralds make report. Here thou, a watchful sentinel, Didst guard the gates of song, That no unworthy note should pass To do her temple wrong. Dear are the traces of thy days Mixed in these walks of ours; Thy footsteps in our household ways Are garlanded with flowers. If we surrender, earth to earth, The frame that's born to die, Spirit with spirit doth ascend To live immortally." The letters contained in this volume give fullest indication of the cordial and intimate relations which existed between Dwight and Curtis. This may be seen more distinctly, perhaps, with the help of a few letters not there given, including two or three written by Dwight to his friend. In a letter to Christopher P. Cranch, the preacher, poet, and artist, written at the time when he was starting his _Journal of Music_ on its way, Dwight said: "If you see the Howadji, can you not enlist his active sympathy a little in my cause? A letter now and then from him on music or on art would be a feather in the cap of my enterprise. It is my last, desperate (not very confident), grand _coup d'etat_ to try to get a living; and I call on all good powers to help me launch the ship, or, rather, little boat." Curtis seconded his friend's efforts cordially, subscribed for the new journal, persuaded a number of his friends to subscribe, and wrote frequently for it. He wrote Dwight this letter of appreciation and advice: "Your most welcome letter has been received, and its contents have been submitted to the astute deliberations of the editorial conclave [_Tribune_]. We are delighted at the prospect--but we do not love the name. 1st. _Journal of Music_ is too indefinite and commonplace. It will not be sufficiently distinguished from the _Musical Times_ and the _Musical World_, being of the same general character. 2d. 'Side-glances' is suspicious. It 'smells' Transcendentalism, as the French say, and, of all things, any aspect of a clique is to be avoided. "That is the negative result of our deliberations; the positive is, that you should identify your name with the paper, and call it _Dwight's Musical Journal_, and you might add, _sotto voce_, 'a paper of Art and Literature.' "Prepend: I shall be very glad to send you a sketch of our winter doings in music, especially as I love Steffanone, although she says, 'I smoke, I chew, I snoof, I drink, I am altogether vicious.' You shall have it Sunday morning. Give my kindest regards to your wife. I wish she could sing in your paper." In a letter written in March, 1882, Dwight expressed to Curtis his appreciation of the most friendly words which the "Easy Chair" had said of him and his work as an editor, in making mention of the fact that the _Journal of Music_ had come to the end of its career: "My dear George,--With this I send you formal invitation, on the part of the committee of arrangements, for the celebration of the anniversary of the foundation, by Dr. Howe, of the Institution for the Blind.... We wish to have an address--not long, say half an hour--partly historical; and we all (committee, director, teachers, pupils) have set our hearts upon having _you_ perform that service. It would delight us all; and I know that you would find the occasion, the very sight of those sightless children made so happy, most inspiring.... A more responsive audience than the blind themselves cannot be found. Dear George, do think seriously of it, and tell me you will come. Your own wishes in respect to the arrangements and conditions shall in all respects be consulted. But come, if you wish to have a good time, a memorable time, and make a good time for us. "George, how many times have I been on the point of writing to you since that delightful week we spent at dear old Tweedy's. To me it was a sweet renewal of good old days, and I came away feeling that it must have added some time to my life. Then, too, I wished to thank you for your most friendly, hearty, and delightful talk about me and my _Journal_ in the 'Easy Chair.' It was so like you, like the dear old George. I tell you, it made me feel good, as if life wasn't all a failure. And now I am finding laziness agreeing with me too--too well.... And if I were not so very, very _old_, if it were not my fate to have been sent into the world so long before my time, I verily believe I should confess myself over head and ears in love! At any rate, I love _life_. Yet nearly all my old friends seem to be dead or dying. When I write you again, I hope to be able to say that I am well at work again; but how?--on what? Thank God, I am not a 'critic!'" IV The winter of 1843-44 was spent by the Curtis brothers at their father's house in New York. George studied somewhat, heard much music, and read extensively. In the spring of 1844 they went to live in Concord for purposes of study and recreation. They wished to know country life, and they regarded it as a desirable part of education that they should become acquainted with practical affairs, and especially with agriculture. That tendency of the time which established Brook Farm and sent Thoreau into the Concord woods, worked itself out in this desire of two young men to find life at first hand. Colonel Higginson has said of the fresh life started by the transcendental movement: "Under these combined motives I find that I carefully made out, at one time, a project of going into the cultivation of peaches, thus securing freedom for study and thought by moderate labor of the hands. This was in 1843, two years before Thoreau tried a similar project with beans at Walden Pond; and also before the time when George and Burrill Curtis undertook to be farmers at Concord. A like course was actually adopted and successfully pursued through life by another Harvard man a few years older than myself, the late Marston Watson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Such things were in the air, and even those who were not swerved by 'the Newness' from their intended pursuits were often greatly as to the way in which they were undertaken." A letter written by Burrill Curtis, and printed in part by Mr. Cary, gives the reasons for this experiment. He says it was "for the better furtherance of our main and original end--the desire to unite in our own persons the freedom of a country life with moderate out-door occupation, and with intellectual cultivation and pursuits. At Concord we first took up our residence in the family of an elderly farmer, recommended by Mr. Emerson. We gave up half the day (except in hay-time, when we gave the whole day) to sharing the farm-work indiscriminately with the farm-laborers. The rest of the day we devoted to other pursuits, or to social intercourse or correspondence; and we had a flat-bottomed rowing-boat built for us, in which we spent very many afternoons on the pretty little river. For our second season we removed to another farm and farmer's house, near Mr. Emerson and Walden Pond, where we occupied only a single room, making our own beds, and living in the very simplest and most primitive style. A small piece of ground, which we hired of the farmer, we cultivated for ourselves, raising vegetables only, and selling the superfluous product, and distributing our time much as before." It was to the house of Captain Nathan Barrett, one mile north of Concord village, west of the river, and overlooking it and its meadows, that the Curtis brothers went. Barrett was born in October, 1797, and was of the seventh generation of his family in the town. His house on Punkatassett Hill was pleasantly located, and the farm was large and well cultivated. Judge John S. Keyes, in the sketch of Barrett's life printed in the second series of the "Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord," says of him: "His house was the resort of many of the connections of himself and wife, who had there gay and jolly frolics. He was a captain of the Light Infantry company of the town. He was naturally of an easy, somewhat indolent disposition, so that he did little of the harder work of the farm, but he looked after everything, and he became a thoroughly skilled, practical farmer. His position as the principal man of his section of the town, and his own good sense, made him the leading person in his neighborhood. In person he was tall, nearly six feet, of large frame, and good proportions, weighing two hundred pounds, had a frank, open face, a high forehead, and a large head. He lived plainly but comfortably; drove a poor horse but a good carriage to church and visiting; dressed like his brother farmers about his work, but neatly and in good style when at leisure. He loved good fruit, raised it in large amounts. Neither witty nor humorous, he was slow to appreciate a joke, but he had a hearty laugh when he did comprehend it. He was liberal in his habits, genial in his temperament, and kindly in his disposition. He was very modest, though firm and reliable; honest in every fibre, without guile and cunning; thoroughly simple, and yet clear-headed, cool, and sensible. He was slow in his mental processes, but no one doubted that he believed all that he thought and said and did. His apples were not deaconed, his seeds were sure and reliable, and his milk was never watered. He never made a mistake in his accounts but once, and then it was against himself. Everybody knew him and liked him and praised him, and was sorry when he died." Captain Barrett had a farm of five hundred acres, the largest in the town. He was a large raiser of sheep and milk. He was a deacon in the First Parish Church, thoroughly honest, most neighborly and accommodating in his ways, a loyal citizen, and a true-hearted man. He died in February, 1868, and was lamented by every resident of the town. A typical farmer was Captain Barrett, thoroughly human, loving life and all there is good in it, hard-headed, practical, of sturdy common-sense, faithful to every obligation as he understands it, of a kindly nature, enjoying the doing of good in a plain, simple way, caring little for the supernatural, and yet having a very sturdy faith in the few convictions of a rational religion, without high spiritual insight, he lived his religion in a very honest fashion. It was quite in keeping with the character of Captain Barrett that he put the Curtis brothers at the task of getting out manure, as almost the first labor he required of them after their arrival on his farm. His idea was to "test their metal," to find what stuff they were made of, and to what extent they were in earnest in their expressed wish to become acquainted with practical agriculture. He spoke of it with glee to his neighbors, that he had put such refined gentlemen at that kind of work. It is needless to say that they bore the test well. They were not domiciled in the farm-house, but in a small cottage somewhat lower down the hill, yet in the immediate neighborhood. The love of music which George Curtis had developed at Brook Farm continued during his stay in Concord. He sang on occasion, and he often played a flute. The young singer he mentions was Belinda Randall, a sister of John Randall, who published a volume of poems. She was a daughter of Dr. Randall, of Winter Street, Boston, who had a summer place in Stowe. From there she often visited in Concord, perhaps attended school there, and was an intimate friend of Elizabeth Hoar, the betrothed of Edward Emerson, and the sister of Judge Hoar and Senator Hoar, who, when she visited Mrs. Hawthorne, was described as coming "with spirit voice and tread." Belinda Randall has recently died, and left half a million dollars to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Cambridge Prospect Union. Her sister Elizabeth married Colonel Alfred Cumming, of Georgia, afterwards Governor of Utah. Dr. Randall did not approve of the marriage, and would not have the wedding take place in his house. They were married at the house of Judge Hoar, the father of Elizabeth. She was an excellent musician, but Belinda was the musical genius of the family. Another person mentioned by Curtis was Almira Barlow, who was at Brook Farm during the time he was there. She had been a Miss Penniman of Brookline, and had the reputation of being a famous beauty. She married David Hatch Barlow, a graduate of Harvard in 1824, and of the Theological School in 1829. Their marriage took place in Brookline about 1830, and they were regarded as the handsomest couple that had been seen in the town. He had a parish in Lynn, and was afterwards settled in Brooklyn; but his habits became irregular, he remained but a short time in any place, and he separated from his wife in 1838. There was much gossip about her, owing to her beauty and her fondness for the society of men. With Mrs. Barlow at Brook Farm and Concord was her son Francis Channing, born in 1834, who graduated at Harvard in 1855, was a lawyer in New York, rose to the rank of Major-General during the Rebellion, and was afterwards prominent in his profession. He married as his second wife Miss Ellen Shaw, the sister of Colonel Robert G. Shaw and of Mrs. George William Curtis. Curtis mentions hearing Emerson's address on the anniversary of emancipation in the West Indies, which was delivered in Concord, August 1, 1844. There had existed in Concord for a number of years a Woman's Antislavery Society, of which Mrs. Emerson was a member. Of this society, Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks was the president, and its most active worker. She invited Emerson to speak on this occasion. He felt that he was excused from political action by virtue of his having been a clergyman, and because of his life as a man of letters. Mrs. Brooks thought otherwise, and she gave him good and urgent reasons why he ought to speak, and to speak then. At last she prevailed, partly because she gave him no rest until he had complied with her request, and partly because his conscience went with her arguments. His attitude hitherto had been such as in part justified the statement made by Carlyle to Theodore Parker in 1843, that the negroes were fit only for slavery, and that Emerson agreed with him. V The second abiding place of Curtis and his brother in Concord was the farm of Edmund Hosmer, which was one-half mile east of Emerson's house, about that distance from Walden Pond, and nearly the same from Hawthorne's Wayside of later years, which faced it, and from which it could be seen. Hosmer was a native of Concord, gave his earlier years to his trade as a tanner, and then spent the remainder of his life as a Concord farmer. He was Emerson's authority on agriculture and gardening more than any one; though in later years Samuel Staples (usually known and spoken of as "Sam") superseded him because he was a nearer neighbor. In 1843, when Emerson wrote to George Ripley declining to join the Brook Farm community, he referred to the opinions of Edmund Hosmer, "a very intelligent farmer and a very upright man in my neighborhood." He gave in full his neighbor's reasons for want of faith in the community idea, that co-operation in farming was not successful, that the word of gentlemen-farmers could not be trusted, that the equal payment of ten cents an hour to every laborer was unjust, and that good work could not be secured if the worker was not directly benefited. In his notes on the agriculture of Massachusetts, published in _The Dial_, Emerson described his neighbor in these words: "In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard where boys were grafting apple-trees, and found the farmer in his cornfield. He was holding the plough, and his son driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances--excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field; so honest, withal, that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I still remember with some shame that in some dealing we had together a long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here is the Caesar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer's day and winter's day; not like Napoleon, hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and useless city limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong soldier, for his having done his own work and ours too. What good this man has or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood ballad: 'Much, the miller's son, There was no inch of his body But it was worth a groom.' "Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape. I walked up and down the field as he ploughed his furrow, and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the season and its new labors." The conversation went on, leading to a discussion of the agricultural survey of the State; Hosmer's opinions of it are quoted as of much worth, and as sounder than anything which the writer could himself say on the subject. Mr. Sanborn is of the opinion that Edmund Hosmer was described as Hassan in Emerson's fragments on the "Poet and the Poetic Gift," in the complete edition of his poems: "Said Saadi, 'When I stood before Hassan the camel-driver's door, I scorned the fame of Timour brave; Timour, to Hassan, was a slave: In every glance of Hassan's eye I read great years of victory, And I, who cower mean and small In the frequent interval When wisdom not with me resides, Worship Toil's wisdom that abides. I shunned his eyes, that faithful man's, I shunned the toiling Hassan's glance.'" Hosmer was also described by William Ellery Channing in his "New England": "This man takes pleasure o'er the crackling fire, His glittering axe subdued the monarch oak; He earned the cheerful blaze by something higher Than pensioned blows--he owned the tree he stroke, And knows the value of the distant smoke, When he returns at night, his labor done, Matched is his action with the long day's sun." Channing spoke of him again as the "Spicy farming sage, Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age, Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year, And springs from bed each morning with a cheer. Of all his neighbors he can something tell, 'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well! The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring-- Shoots the last goose bound south on freezing wing." Hosmer was also one of the farmer friends of Thoreau, who much enjoyed his society and the vigor of his conversation. He is described in the fourteenth chapter of "Walden" as among Thoreau's winter visitors at his hut: "On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social 'crack'; one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms'; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple things, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty." In W.E. Channing's book about Thoreau as the "Poet-Naturalist," there is a passage from his journal in which Thoreau speaks of Hosmer as the last of the farmers worthy of mention. "Human life may be transitory and full of trouble," he says, "but the perennial mind whose survey extends from that spring to this--from Columella to Hosmer--is superior to change. I will identify myself with that which will not die with Columella and will not die with Hosmer." At Hosmer's house the two young men lived in a single room, and did their own cooking and house-keeping. Mrs. Hosmer furnished them with milk, and they ate crackers, cheese, and fruit largely. They were Grahamites, and used no meat. They read much, and had with them a large number of books. It was their custom here, as well as at Captain Barrett's, to spend much time in the woods. They were enthusiastic students of botany, and came home from their excursions in the woods with their arms loaded with flowers, and often searched out the rarest which could be found in the Walden and Lincoln woods. It was while the Curtises were living at Hosmer's that they assisted Thoreau in building his hut at Walden Pond. Thoreau says that in March, 1845, he borrowed an axe and went into the woods to build him a house. The axe was procured of Emerson, and he says he returned it sharper than when he received it. He was assisted in building the house, he says, by some of his acquaintances, "rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity." These acquaintances were Emerson, Alcott, W.E. Charming, Burrill and George Curtis, Edmund Hosmer and his sons John, Edmund, and Andrew. Thoreau said that he wished the help of the young men because they had more strength than the older ones, and that no man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than he. It was Thoreau's custom while at Walden to dine on Sundays with Emerson, and to stop at Hosmer's on his way back to the pond, often remaining to supper. After the failure of his experiment at Fruitlands, it was into Hosmer's house that Alcott found himself welcomed; and he was given much of help and encouragement by the farmer and his wife. VI At this time several of the Brook Farmers were living in Concord, and among them were Bradford, Pratt, and Mrs. Barlow; and later on Marianne Ripley, the sister of George Ripley, found a home there, and kept a school for small children. On the third return of the Curtises to Concord, in the summer of 1846, they found a home in the house of Minott Pratt, who was living at the foot of Punkatassett Hill, on the top of which was the house of Captain Barrett. In the same neighborhood lived William Ellery Channing, the poet, whose wife was a sister of Margaret Fuller. They are frequently mentioned in Hawthorne's and his wife's letters from the Old Manse. Pratt's cottage was in a quiet, delightful location; and in the family George Curtis found himself quite at home. Curtis made a very pleasant impression in Concord, for he was social in his ways, paid much deference to others, and always exemplified a fine etiquette. The brothers are remembered by one person who then knew them as having no mannerisms, and as being perfect gentlemen. His article on Emerson, in the "Homes of American Authors," gave much offence in the town, and by Mrs. Alcott, as well as others, was warmly resented. He was exact enough as to facts, but he drew from them wrong inferences. He afterwards said that there was nothing romantic in his paper, and that every incident mentioned was an actual occurrence. He had letters from Emerson and Hawthorne before he wrote his papers on those two authors, to enable him to verify certain details. The relations of Curtis and Hawthorne were cordial if not intimate. In a letter to Hawthorne, written from Europe, Curtis said: "Does Mrs. Hawthorne yet remember that she sent me a golden key to the studio of Crawford, in Rome? I shall never forget that, nor any smallest token of her frequent courtesy in the Concord days." In another letter to Hawthorne he speaks of Concord as "our old home, which is very placid and beautiful in my memory." In his paper on Hawthorne, in the "Homes of American Authors," Curtis gave an interesting account of his acquaintance with that reticent genius during these Concord days: "There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around the house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of twilight which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the few chance visitors there were city friends occasionally, figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the steam shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were seen no more. The owner was as much a vague name to me as any one. "During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord, I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as Webster might have looked had he been a poet--a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long time, watching the dead, white landscape. No appeal was made to him, nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on, as if every one understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same at table. In vain the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So supreme was his silence that it presently engrossed me to the exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, with the 'slow, wise smile' that breaks over his face like day over the sky, said, 'Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night.' "Thus he remained in my memory, a shadow, a phantom, until more than a year afterwards. Then I came to live in Concord. Every day I passed his house, but when the villagers, thinking that perhaps I had some clew to the mystery, said, 'Do you know this Mr. Hawthorne?' I said, 'No,' and trusted to time. "Time justified my confidence, and one day I too went down the avenue and disappeared in the house. I mounted those mysterious stairs to that apocryphal study. I saw 'the cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted paper-hangings, lighting up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the cheery western sunshine.' I looked from the little northern window whence the old pastor watched the battle, and in the small dining-room beneath it, upon the first floor, there were 'Dainty chicken, snow-white bread,' and the golden juices of Italian vineyards, which still feast insatiable memory. "Our author occupied the Old Manse for three years. During that time he was not seen, probably, by more than a dozen of the villagers. His walks could easily avoid the town, and upon the river he was always sure of solitude. It was his favorite habit to bathe every evening in the river, after nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge stood, at which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his boat accompanied another up the stream, and I recall the silence and preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone, but who, with every stroke, neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he would have struggled until he fell senseless, rather than ask his friend to desist. His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it is useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man understands or not. His own sympathy was so broad and sure that, although nothing had been said for hours, his companion knew that nothing had escaped his eye, nor had a single pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to have been said. It was a Barmecide feast of discourse from which a greater satisfaction resulted than from an actual banquet. "When a formal attempt was made to desert this style of conversation, the result was ludicrous. Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call. They were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne presently entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a Roman senator. 'To them,' Hawthorne, like a Dacian King. The call went on, but in a most melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately, and there the thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that only needed the setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole visit was a vague ghost of the Monday Evening Club at Mr. Emerson's--it was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly on the river brink or strolling in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have been utterly different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only 'call' in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved. "In Mr. Emerson's house I said it seemed always morning. But Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple boughs shaded 'A land in which it seemed always afternoon.' "I do not doubt that the lotus grew along the grassy marge of the Concord behind his house, and that it was served, subtly concealed, to all his guests. The house, its inmates, and its life lay dream-like upon the edge of the little village. You fancy that they all came together and belonged together, and were glad that at length some idol of your imagination, some poet whose spell had held you, and would hold you forever, was housed as such a poet should be. "During the lapse of the three years since the bridal tour of twenty miles ended at the 'two tall gate-posts of roughhewn stone,' a little wicker wagon had appeared at intervals upon the avenue, and a placid babe, whose eyes the soft Concord day had touched with the blue of its beauty, lay looking tranquilly up at the grave old trees, which sighed lofty lullabies over her sleep. The tranquillity of the golden-haired Una was the living and breathing type of the dreamy life of the Old Manse. Perhaps, that being attained, it was as well to go. Perhaps our author was not surprised or displeased when the hints came, 'growing more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for his native air.' One afternoon I entered the study and learned from its occupant that the last story he should ever write there was written." In the midnight chapter of his "Blithedale Romance," Hawthorne described an incident which actually took place in Concord. A young girl drowned herself, and her body was found as there set forth. Hawthorne wrote a full account of the drowning in his journal, which is printed by Julian Hawthorne in his biography of "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife." No mention is made of Curtis, who took part in the search, and who gave his own account of the affair in his paper on Hawthorne. When Thoreau went to New York, in 1843, he put his boat into the keeping of Curtis, and he and Channing made their excursions on the river in it. In it they searched for Mary Hunt, who lived near Channing. Curtis's account of this affair deserves to be placed by the side of Hawthorne's: "Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate and shy temperament, who excelled so much in study that she was sent to a fine academy in a neighboring town, and won all the honors of the course. She met at the school and in the society of the place a refinement and cultivation, a social gayety and grace, which were entirely unknown in the hard life she had led at home, and which by their very novelty, as well as because they harmonized with her own nature and dreams, were doubly beautiful and fascinating. She enjoyed this life to the full, while her timidity kept her only a spectator; and she ornamented it with a fresher grace, suggestive of the woods and fields, when she ventured to engage in the airy game. It was a sphere for her capacities and talents. She shone in it, and the consciousness of a true position and genial appreciation gave her the full use of all her powers. She admired and was admired. She was surrounded by gratifications of taste, by the stimulants and rewards of ambition. The world was happy, and she was worthy to live in it. But at times a cloud suddenly dashed athwart the sun--a shadow stole, dark and chill, to the very edge of the charmed circle in which she stood. She knew well what it was, and what it foretold, but she would not pause nor heed. The sun shone again, the future smiled; youth, beauty, and all hopes and thoughts bathed the moment in lambent light. "But school-days ended at last, and with the receding town in which they had been passed, the bright days of life disappeared, and forever. It was probable that the girl's fancy had been fed, perhaps indiscreetly pampered, by her experience there. But it was no fairy-land. It was an academy town in New England, and the fact that it was so alluring is a fair indication of the kind of life from which she had emerged, and to which she now returned. What could she do? In the dreary round of petty details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no companions or any sympathy--for the family of a hard-working New-England farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor the cowboys Corydons--with no opportunity of retirement and cultivation, for reading and studying--which is always voted 'stuff' under such circumstances--the light suddenly quenches out of life, what was she to do? "The simple answer is that she had only used all her opportunities, and that, although it was no fault of hers that the routine of her life was in every way repulsive, she did struggle to accommodate herself to it, and failed. When she found it impossible to drag on at home, she became an inmate of a refined and cultivated household in the village, where she had opportunity to follow her own fancies and to associate with educated and attractive persons. But even here she could not escape the feeling that it was all temporary, that her position was one of dependence; and her pride, now grown morbid, often drove her from the very society which alone was agreeable to her. This was all genuine. There was not the slightest strain of the _femme incomprise_ in her demeanor. She was always shy and silent, with a touching reserve which won interest and confidence, but left also a vague sadness in the mind of the observer. After a few months she made another effort to rend the cloud which was gradually darkening around her, and opened a school for young children. But although the interest of friends secured her a partial success, her gravity and sadness failed to excite the sympathy of her pupils, who missed in her the playful gayety always most winning to children. Martha, however, pushed bravely on, a figure of tragic sobriety to all who watched her course. The farmers thought her a strange girl, and wondered at the ways of the farmer's daughter who was not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork, without further hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town, interested in her situation, sought a confidence she did not care to bestow, and so, doling out a, b, c to a wild group of boys and girls, she found that she could not untie the Gordian knot of her life, and felt with terror that it must be cut. "One summer evening she left her father's house and walked into the fields alone. Night came, but Martha did not return. The family became anxious, inquired if any one had noticed the direction in which she went, learned from the neighbors that she was not visiting, that there was no lecture nor meeting to detain her, and wonder passed into apprehension. Neighbors went into the adjacent woods and called, but received no answer. Every instant the awful shadow of some dread event solemnized the gathering groups. Every one thought what no one dared whisper, until a low voice suggested the river. Then with the swiftness of certainty all friends far and near were roused, and thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches flashed in the boats that put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then living in the Old Manse, was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among them at night, to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service. The boats drifted slowly down the stream, the torches flashed strangely upon the black repose of the waters, and upon the long slim grasses that weeping fringed the marge. Upon both banks silent and awe-stricken crowds hastened along, eager and dreading to find the slightest trace of what they sought. Suddenly they came to a few articles of dress, heavy with the night dew. No one spoke, for no one had doubted the result. It was clear that Martha had strayed to the river, and quietly asked of its stillness the repose she sought. The boats gathered around the spot. With every implement that could be of service the melancholy search began. Long intervals of fearful silence ensued, but at length, towards midnight, the sweet face of the dead girl was raised more placidly to the stars than ever it had been to the sun. "So ended a village tragedy. The reader may possibly find in it the original of the thrilling conclusion of the 'Blithedale Romance,' and learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even in regions apparently so torpid as Concord." Far too much has been made of the realistic elements in the "Blithedale Romance." Hawthorne says in his preface that "he has occasionally availed himself of his actual reminiscences;" but it cannot be claimed that he did anything more. The fact seems to be that he used such reminiscences and incidents merely as stimuli to his imagination, that the real romance of the story was purely of his own creation. So far as he used the facts of his life at Brook Farm it was to give an air of reality to his story; and in no other sense can it be accepted as truthful to Brook Farm life. For instance, his Zenobia was in every sense an original creation, and not a description of any person he had known. Three persons he knew at Brook Farm gave him hints, traits of character, and points of departure for the activity of his imagination. The stately elements in Zenobia resembled those of Mrs. George Ripley, her luxurious tastes were like those of Mrs. Almira Barlow, while her genius and brilliancy had a few similarities to Margaret Fuller. His habit seems to have been to take a single incident in the life of a person, and to make that the chief one in a character. In this way his romances gained a realistic phase of a very impressive kind; but the character of a person as a whole he never copied. It is a strange comment on his powerful writing that so much should have been made of his superficial realism, while the persistent and profound romanticism of his work is too often overlooked. Yet this was one of the weird results of his genius, that his imagination weaves for itself a world more real than life itself, and that claims for itself an acceptance as truer to facts than the word of the historian. In his paper on Emerson, Curtis gives further account of his life in Concord. He said that "Thoreau lives in the berry-pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little house of his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrow-heads abundantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of finding them." His account of the club which gathered for a few evenings in Emerson's study deserves to be placed here in order to complete his story of Concord experiences, the fictitious names used by him being changed to the real ones: "It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in Concord. Towards the end of the autumn, Mr. Emerson suggested that they should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library. 'Monsieur Aubepine,' 'Miles Coverdale,' and other phantoms, since known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse; the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole [Margaret Fuller's name for Alcott], then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house on the Boston Road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook Farmer [George Bradford], then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural gentleman; a sturdy farmer-neighbor [Edmund Hosmer], who had bravely fought his weary way through inherited embarrassment to the small success of a New England husbandman; two city youths [George and Burrill Curtis], ready for the fragments from the feast of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed the club. Ellery Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York _Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of this world was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius, as the club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all other spheres. "I went the first evening very much as Ixion may have gone to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, 'Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said?' It was quite involuntary and unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn 'Saying,' to which, after due pause, the honorable member for Blackberry Pastures responded by some keen and graphic observations, while the Olympian host, anxious that so much material should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Hawthorne, a statue of night and silence, sat a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories; while the shifting presence of the Brook Farmer played like heat lightning around the room. "I remember little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled through three Monday evenings. Alcott was perpetually putting apples of gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts coined by the deep melody of his voice. Thoreau charmed us with the secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a whole of clear, sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples, and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times the number, whose collected genius was not more than that of either of the Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension. Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy grace of undress; not an intellectual, full-dress parade." VII As will have been seen, Curtis never lost his interest in Brook Farm or his faith in the principles on which it was founded. In his letters to Dwight he clearly pointed out its defects, and he indicated in an emphatic manner that he could not accept some of its methods. He showed that he was an individualist rather than an associationist or socialist, that his supreme faith was in individual effort, and in each person making himself right before he undertook to reform society. His "Easy Chair" essays make it clear that he saw with keen vision the limitations of Brook Farm; but it had for him a distinct charm, and one that increased rather than grew less as the years went on. The Brook Farm effort to right the wrongs of society, to give all persons an opportunity in life, and to bring the help of all to the aid of each one, he heartily accepted in its spirit and intent; and to that faith he ever held with unswerving confidence. Not less did the Concord episode remain with Curtis as a bright spot in his life. He gladly went to Concord whenever the opportunity offered; he frequently lectured there, and was always heard with delight; and he gave the Centennial Address, April 19, 1875, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the battle at the old north bridge. It was a part of the Brook Farm and Concord life which Curtis continued in his intimacy with Dwight. So great was the confidence of this friendship that he wrote to Dwight as soon as his marriage had been arranged, telling him of his happiness, and telling him that the promised bride was the daughter of their old Brook Farm friends, the Francis George Shaws. "Do you remember her in Brook Farm days?" he asked. "There was never anything that made parents and children happier." In closing his letter he wrote: "When do you come to New York? I so want you to see her and know her; then of course you will love her. Give my love to your wife--think that love is not for this world, but forever!--and remember your friend who remembers you." In his reply, Dwight said: "You are right, George; link your destinies with _youth_. I scarcely believe in anything else--except Spring and Morning. But then, there is a way of making these--the soul of them--perpetual; and you have the secret of it, I am sure, better than most of us. "To think of that child, who used to play about Brook Farm, and go through finger drudgery under my piano-professorship (Heaven save the mark!), the child of our young friends, Mr. and Mrs. F.S. (how can you think of them as parents?) being the future Mrs. Howadji! or I a dull drudge of an editor! I do wish indeed to see and know her, and doubt not I shall find your glowing statements all confirmed, and that in your height of joy you need not be ashamed to 'blush it east and blush it west.' There is a certain 'Maud'-like ecstasy in your note that makes me think of that. "A small bird had already sung the news in my ear. But it was doubly pleasant to have it straight from you. It was good in you to remember me so.... Would that I might see you in New York! but I must content myself with the not very remote prospect of having you by the hand here. Till then, believe me happy in your happiness, and faithfully as ever your friend." Francis George Shaw, and his wife Sarah B. Shaw, were not members of the Brook Farm community; but they lived in the immediate vicinity, often visited the farm, joined in its entertainments, and were intimate friends of the leaders of the association. He was a contributor to the Harbinger, for which he wrote a number of articles in favor of the associationist social movement. He made an admirable translation of George Sand's "Consuelo" for the paper, in which that novel was for the first time printed in this country. Their children were frequently at the farm, and grew up in the midst of such ideas and influences as it fostered. One of them was that Colonel Robert G. Shaw who was "buried with his niggers" at Fort Wagner, after having led one of the most gallant military movements of modern times. Three of the daughters married, Curtis, General Barlow, and General Charles Russell Lowell. Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell has made for herself a lasting name by her philanthropies, and her generous interest in all good causes. Mrs. Shaw wrote the biography of her son Robert, which was published in the work devoted to the Harvard graduates who fell in the Civil War. The real effect of Brook Farm, and that movement of which it was a part, can be rightly understood only when there is taken into consideration what they did for such persons as Shaw, Curtis, Barlow, Lowell, and Mrs. Lowell. These persons were trained by Brook Farm and Transcendentalism; and their aspirations, philanthropies, chivalrous spirit, and romantic courage were fostered and developed by them. The tone and quality of Shaw's courage, and of his heroic effort for the colored men, found in Brook Farm their motive and incentive; and in Brook Farm because it represented a phase of life much larger than itself, one that fosters the noblest faith in men and in the spiritual future of humanity. Of Barlow and Lowell it may be also said that their heroism and their patriotism were the legitimate products of that movement whose hope and faith were the inspiration of their youth. To this source was due Barlow's love of justice, his unflinching courage in opposing self-seekers and partisan patriots, and his trust in the ultimate worth of what is right and true. The letters printed in this volume have a large interest as indications of how George William Curtis was making ready for his life-work. His independence, his love of humanity, his courage in maintaining his own convictions, his chivalrous and romantic spirit, his literary skill and charm, his profound spiritual convictions, that would not be limited by any sectarian bounds, all find expression here in such form as to give sure promise for his future. It was a somewhat erratic kind of training which Curtis received; but for him it was better than any college of his day could have given him. Admirably fitted to his tastes, it was no less well adapted to his needs. It fostered in him all that was best in his character, and it served to bring out his genius to its rounded expression. The two years which Curtis spent in Concord must have been of the greatest value to him. His contact with Emerson was of itself of inestimable worth, for it gave him that enthusiasm for ideas, that contact with a noble life lived for the highest ends of spiritual development, which fostered in him the enthusiasms which were so genuine a part of his life. Without Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, and Emerson, it is quite safe to say that the life of Curtis would have been less worthy of our admiration. The stay in Concord was a time of seed-planting, and the harvest came in all that the man was in later years. Without the enthusiasms then cherished the independent in politics would have been less courageous. And these letters may suggest anew one of the most important lessons of education, that without enthusiasms no man can do any great or noble work in the world. What will give to youth visions, ideals, and enthusiasms is worth all other parts of culture, for out of these grow the noblest results of human willing, thinking, and doing. EARLY LETTERS TO JOHN S. DWIGHT I PROVIDENCE, _August 18, 1843._ Are you quite recovered from those divine enchantments which held us bound so long? Memory preserves for me those silvery sounds, and almost I seem to catch their echo. Have we indeed heard the Siren song--are we unscathed? Let me be your Father John, and to these reverend years commit the tale of youthful fervor. So good a Catholic as I, of course, has long ago made confession. But another yet remains for me--namely, that I cannot get that song. Yesterday I heard from Isaac, who cannot buy it in New York. Nothing but a copy for the guitar and that Rosalie. Would it be an expensive thing to import? Reed told me he could do that, but as I supposed there was no doubt of its being in New York, I said nothing about it. She should have the song; it would be so fine falling out of her mouth. Mouth-dropped gems would be no longer a fable. As, indeed, we have seen already. For what so universal an Interpreter as music? That art has the gift of tongues (_ecce_, the Singing-School). Burrill met with a mishap on Wednesday. We were walking out of town, and he, springing from a wall, turned his ankle and sprained it. He is therefore laid up for some days. It is a disappointment to him, for he hoped to leave on Monday next, and meanwhile see several persons. I doubt if he can step on his foot so soon. I had yesterday a German letter from Isaac; German in spirit, not in language. He has certainly a great heart, more delicate in his character than I thought, with a constant force, nervous, not muscular strength. Will you accept so city-like a letter? I am busy or I should write more; another time will suffice. Let me accept from you a country-like letter. Yours in the bonds, G.W.C. II PROVIDENCE, _September 1, 1843._ My dear Friend,--Your letter did not reach my hands until last evening, when I returned from Newport, where I have passed the last eight days, how pleasantly I need not tell you. After the quiet beauty of our farm home, there was a striking grandeur in the sea that I never beheld so plainly before. There is something sublimely cheerful about the ocean, altho' it is so stored with woe, and so constantly suggestive it is of that ocean, life, whereon we all float. It was pleasant to me that Nature confirmed my judgment of Tennyson. The little poem that closes one of the volumes, "Break, break, break," etc., is so exquisitely human and tender, with all its vague and dim beauty, that the waves dashed to its music, and silently the whole sea sung the song. Just so the jottings down of poets, the few words that must be said, tho' the Nature which they sing is so limitless, and inexpressible are the blossoms of poetry and all literature. Will not the little song of Shakespeare's, "Take, oh! take those lips away," be as immortal as Hamlet? Not because chance may print them together, but because it is as universal and more delicate an expression. That charm pervades our favorite, Tennyson. There is no rough-marked outline, all fades away upon earnest contemplation into the tones of his songs, into the colors of the sky. So in the landscape, tint fades gently into tint, and the beauty that attracts spreads from leaf to hill, from hill to horizon, till the whole is bathed in sunlight. Is not this fact also recognized in other arts? In painting, the great picture is without marked outline; in music, the truest and deepest is undefined. Beethoven is greater than Haydn. The precision which offends in manner is as disagreeable everywhere else. Is it not because when named as Precision, the depth which necessarily means a graceful form is absent? As when we say a woman has beautiful eyes we indirectly acknowledge her want of universal beauty. Certainly a man of elegant manners is admired not for himself, but what he represents. Indeed, all society is only thus endurable. Nature, and to me particularly the ocean, makes no such partial impression; and therefore the poet who sits nearest to the great heart sings rather the sense of vague beauty and aspiration, of tender remembrance and gentle hope, than a bald description of the sight. The ocean is not fathomless water nor the woods green trees to him, but a presence, and a key that unlocks the chambers of his soul where the diamonds are. Therefore, when I have been into nearer conversation with Nature I have little to say, but my life is deepened. The poet is he who with deepened life chants also a flowing hymn which utters the music of that life. You will understand why the little poem seems to me so fine, therefore. This water I also see; but not in me lies the power of the due expression of its influence. There was another pleasant aspect in Newport, of persons. I walked one evening towards the town (for I was boarding in the outskirts), and passed an encampment of soldiers, who in their gay uniforms glittered among the lighted tents like soldier fays. The band in the shadow of the camp was playing very sweetly airs proper for that fading light, half-mournful, half-tender and hopeful. I passed by the houses brilliantly lighted and filled with finely dressed people, who also thronged the streets. Before one of the principal hotels was a band from the fort serenading, and surrounded with a crowd of easy listeners. The ice-cream resort was filled, the cottages shone among the trees, and an air of entire abandonment to joy filled the place. Old men and young men, women and girls, seemed to have laid aside all business, all care, and to be only gay. It was a vision of the Lotos islands, an earthly portrait of that meek repose which haunts us ideally sometimes. I was surprised upon my return to find Burrill still here. He is able only to crutch about the house, but will probably return to Brook Farm with me during the latter part of next week, which is the commencement week here.... I should have been glad to have seen the gay picnic, and to have heard the O.; let me hope she will not be gone when I return. I am exceedingly obliged for your kind suggestion of "Adelaide," and if you choose to present it as a joint gift, you confer a great pleasure upon me. Commend me particularly to Almira; to the young men whom you will, including mainly Charles D. and James S.; to Mr. and Mrs. R.; and if you will write me again you will be sure that your proxy will be welcome to Your friend, G.W. CURTIS. Will you say to Miss Russell that I shall see my aunt this afternoon, and will perform her commission. Moreover, that I am gratified at so distinguished a mark of her approbation as the permission to escort a plant to her garden. G.W.C. III NEW YORK, _Saturday eve'g, November 11, 1843._ Your letter has just reached me, my dear friend, loaded with much that was not in it, and which needed only a person or a letter from a region so delightful to bear it to me. Already my life at the Farm is removed and transfigured. It stands for so much in my experience, and is so fairly rounded, that I know the experience could never return, tho' the residence might be renewed. When we mend the broken chain, we see ever after the point of union. To-night the wind sighs thro' the chimney, complaining and wailing and melting away in a depth of sadness, as if it would pacify its own sorrow, and found newer grief in that need. The clouds break and roll away in the sky, and the wan moon sails up as if to a weary duty. Yet so calm it is, so pure, that it chides weariness and preaches a deep, still hope. In the city I seem not to breathe quite freely yet, but daily I gain ground and air. It is so different, even more than I tho't; so new, tho' I had seen it for years; so full, tho' I walk miles without speaking or seeing a face seen before. I must constantly say to myself, "Be quiet, be quiet. This huge enigma will gradually explain itself, and out of these conventions and courtesies you shall see the same tender Nature looking that so enchanted your country life." Here is Burrill, and we are of more worth to each other than ever before. Sometimes I fear to think how much. He was as glad to see me as the old Christians a prophet, for I know him best of all. The aspect of things here impresses me mainly with the absolute necessity and duty of making our place good. The stern, stirring activity around me compels me to give account to myself of my silence and repose. The answer is always clear and steady. I have not heard the voice. Yet my mind begins to shape some outline of life. Of this I am assured, that in this world of work, where the hum of business makes music with the stars, I must work too. And how I must work, by what handle I shall grasp the world and justify my consumption of its food, that begins to appear. My Genius is not decided enough to lead me unquestioning in any one direction, and my taste is so equally cultivated and developed that choice seems somewhat arbitrary. Yet it is not so. Above all, I regret no culture, tho' it may have thus multiplied the roads to be chosen. It is a tinge and charm to whatever is performed. A gentleman in never so ragged clothes is a gentleman still. You may be sure nothing has charmed me more than my meeting with Isaac in his mealy clothes and brown-paper cap. His manner had a grand dignity, because he was universally related by his diligent labor, and my conversation with him was as earnest and happy as any intercourse I have had with him. This general activity does not reprove me, for my silence respects itself and gives good reasons why judgment should not proceed. And therefore it views more lovingly what surrounds it. The God stirs within, and presently will say something. Let us plant ourselves there and be lawyers that we may so dispense justice, not that we may get bread; and priests, because the Divine will speaks thro' us; and merchants and doctors and shoemakers and bakers, from the same reason. If we honestly serve in any such profession, bread will come of course. Your letter has quickened my thought upon these things, quite active before. My impulse is to say at once, go. The worst and all you can dread is the foul breath that will befog your fair name, because E.W. has done what he has, because you _were_ a minister and _are_ a Transcendentalist and a seceder from the holy office, and a dweller at _that place_, unknown to perfumed respectability and condemned of prejudice and error. This is the first great reason, and the second is not unlike unto it. It is that you retard your preparation for any permanent pursuit, as a centre of your sensuous life, by passing two or three years in Europe. With respect to the first reason, not your own feelings, but those of your friends, demand some consideration. In Heaven's court will their sorrow at your departure and intimacy with E.W. at this time outweigh your own happiness at the trip, and because so you lend your own good character to one perhaps unjustly condemned. Such a sudden departure and intimacy with him might have an indirect influence upon your future attempts to base yourself in some way. If your mind is determining itself towards no pursuit, and you anticipate the same general employment that has filled the last year or two, I should say go. If God doesn't call here, he may in Europe; and if not for years, your voyage cannot interfere with him. There are privater reasons, which you know, of his character and of your probability of assimilation, and of your independence in intimacies. Perhaps you may link little fingers, if you cannot clasp the whole hand. On the whole, I should say go, though not without due thought of friends, to whom your name and relation may be more than your friendship. You will soon let me know of your movements, will you not? For a week or two, I am man of the house for my cousin, whose husband is in Boston. Burrill fulfils the same duty for an aunt. It is a great separation, though only a step separates us when I am at home; but the fine social sympathy of actual contact, in the early morning and late night, the kind deeds that link the minutes and adorn the hours, the tender sweets of the dignity of friendship without its form--these are buds that bloom only in the warmth of hands perpetually united. To-night Charles Dana and Isaac and Burrill came to see me. I smelled summer leaves and heard summer flutes as I stood with them and talked. Charles was never so important to me; he was himself and all Brook Farm beside. We are all going to hear William Henry Channing in the morning. Last Sunday at the church door I met C.P. Cranch and his wife. I mean to go and see them very soon, though they live _streets_ away. Of Isaac I have seen much for a week's space. He lives two miles or more from us. I have heard no music yet. Max Bohrer concerts on Monday with Timm, Mrs. Sutton, Antogigni, and Schafenberg; I mean to go. The Philharmonic concerts begin a week from this evening. They have four concerts, and the subscription is $10, for which one obtains three tickets to each concert, and the privilege of buying two occasional tickets at $1.50 each. A singular arrangement. They are to play the 8th Symphony next Saturday. I know not what else. Give Almira a great deal of love from me. I shall sing a song to her solitude and patiently await the response. I have begun to read "Wilhelm Meister" in German. I read about three or four hours a day, then an hour or two in Latin, and the rest to poetical reading--Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, Shakespeare, and the Bible, at present. In Worcester I found Montaigne, whom I devoured. What cheerful good sense! I have begun also to learn two or three of B.'s waltzes from note. "La Dobur" I have almost accomplished. Possibly I shall thus pick up some _note_ knowledge, though I do not build any castles. Good-night. Could I but send myself in my letter! Your friend, G.W.C. Tuesday morning. I concluded to retain my letter for Charles, who leaves to-day. Charles and Isaac and Burrill and I all went to Max Bohrer's concert last evening. The hall was full, 1000 or 1500 people present. I was glad to go, for he introduced me to the Instrument, but no more. He has great skill, and has fully mastered it. That is what persevering talent can always do. Bohrer loved his instrument because he could display himself by its aid, not because it was through his genius a minister and revealer of the art to himself and others. His conceit is sublime. It was entire and unique. His posture and air were ridiculously Olympian. Mrs. Sutton is very fat and has a thin voice. There are some good tones in it, but she undertakes the most difficult music. Antignini sings pleasantly but with great effort. All his songs were his own composition, and all Max Bohrer's his. In fact, it was not a musical festival so much as a gymnasium for musical instruments, both mechanical and human. Timm and Scharfenberg both played admirably. I saw Fred'k Rakemann in the crowd; could not conveniently speak to him, and am going, as soon as I can find out where he lives, to see him. His face was so sad that I wanted to go to him and say some tenderer word than I should have said had I spoken. Yet after all he doesn't need tender words, but a calm, grateful demeanor towards him. I wish that I could tell all the glories of my trip to New York. I went from Worcester over the Western R.R. to Albany and down the river. Some other day shall be consecrated to their fit celebration when the recollection may be pleasant and soothing among cares that disturb. Now I expect Charles every moment to go with me to see Cranch. Ask Charles for all news about our "externe." Remember me most tenderly to my many friends at Brook Farm. G.W.C. IV NEW YORK, _November 20, '43._ Certainly, my dear Friend, the concert of the Philharmonic Society on Saturday evening was the finest concert ever given in the country. It is pleasant to see the homage paid to the art indirectly by the whole style of the concert. The room is small, holding 1000 people. Every gentleman goes in full-dress, and the ladies in half-dress. Various members of the society are appointed managers, distinguished by a ribboned button-hole, and they provide seats for the audience. No bills are issued before the night, so there are only rumors of what the _particular_ will be, with a quiet consciousness that the _general_ will be fine. So we arrived on Saturday evening and found the following bill: Symphony No. 7 in A minor (Beethoven); Cavatina from an opera of Nini's (Signora Castellan); Overture to "Zauberflote" (Mozart); Cavatina from Donizetti (Signora Castellan); Overture to "The Jubilee" (Weber). I think we have not had many such concerts. The symphony was interpreted upon the bills as a musical presentment of the mythological story of Orpheus and Eurydicc. That did very well as a figure to represent it, but it was taken by the audience as a theme; and they all fixed their eyes upon the explanation, thereby to judge the symphony. It was grand, and full of his genius. It was another of those earnest, hopeless questionings of Destiny. The very first bars were full of this. It opens with a crash of the whole orchestra, determined and inexorable. Then follows a low deep wailing of the flutes and horns, full of tenderness, of aspiration, of subdued hope; and another crash of the whole, like a lightning flash, instantaneous and scathing the world, sweeps across the plaintiveness of the wind instruments and as instantly is gone. The sad inquiry continues, the determined Thunder of Fate drowns it constantly, and it is lost. Then it becomes more imperious and active, and the call upon the Invisible and the Unanswerable sounds on every side, rises to the top of the flutes, sinks to the lowest bases, appears now among the violins, now vanishes to the rest, until it has disciplined the whole, and the whole orchestra together thunders out the call. Then comes the adagio, where, as always, the mystery seems to be developing itself, where the earnest-seeking solemnly consecrates itself to success; and the minuet and finale conclude--the soaring, mocking, hellish laughter of fiends and demons of the air, at baffled curiosity and blighted hope. Is not that what these symphonies express? The pith of the matter is never reached. The very movement of the adagio, while it expresses a deep, solemn hope, seems to mourn with unutterable sorrow that the hope must be only consecrated and profound, never realized. The climax of the music and the sentiment seems to be always in the adagio. What remained for such a man as he, separate from all others and alone with his life, but to question the Fate that impelled him, now in this tone and now in that? What remained for such unsatisfied, joyless strength but the stern, wild laughter of fiends that the question could not be answered--and the deep wail of Fate, which also is sung in his music, that such strength should have the ruggedness of endurance but not the gracefulness of Faith? How I wished you had been there! Castellan's voice is full and rich; it was very sweet, and she sang with warmth but no passion. She needs some cultivation yet, for her shake is not good. Why did we not hear Mali-bran? who was also so great an actor that she would have been famous without a voice. I could not for a moment suffer my idea of her to be compared with Castellan. Malibran must have been so lovely from her sensibility and passion, so commanding from the majesty of her voice, that the art and not the woman must have found newer worshippers with every new audience. I hope to hear Cinto Damoreau this week. You have heard "The Magic Flute" overture, I think, so fairy-like and graceful, full of tender shadows and heart-rejoicing sunlight and aerial shapes that fade and glint like stars. And the magnificent "Jubilee" concluded with "God save the King." Evening. My aunt sent for me to hear Timm play the "Pathetique." His playing is wonderfully graceful, his touch more delicate than either of the R.'s. But he lacks genius; and time and practice will give Fred. R. all that Timm has. He is very enthusiastic. I spoke to him of "Egmont;" he seemed delighted, said he hadn't heard it for 12 years, but instantly sat down and played portions of it. He promised to play the adagio of the "Pathetique" on the organ next Sunday. We had but a few moments, for his time is all devoted to teaching, or I should have kept him till midnight. He is so simple and natural about the matter that it is very pleasant to be with him. If you mention anything to him, he instantly runs to the piano and plays something from it. Imagine him the other evening standing up straddling the stool, a roll of music under each arm, gloves in hand, and playing a movement from one of the symphonies! I have been to see Cranch; found his wife at home, whom I have not seen since January. They are pleasantly situated, though a good way off. He has a room in the house where he paints. I saw two of his landscapes, views from nature, that were very striking. If I should find fault, I should say they were too warmly colored; and I suspect that is his error, if he has any, from what his wife told me he said of one of Durand's. Mr. Furness preached finely for us on Sunday. Mr. Dewey does not charm me at all. Have heard W.H.C. once, as Charles will have told you. Have not yet seen him, for I have been out to see people hardly at all. Met Isaac at the Saturday concert. He looks fresh and well. Seems better every way than I ever knew him. Has he not found his place? I must see him again to discern the direction of Almira, to whom I have a letter written partly, and know not how to address it. Are you singing Eastward ho! or do you remain? Remember that he who criticises Handel and Mozart, as the "Democratic" witnesseth, owes something to the art--shall I say _his life_? What literary work are you about, or have you still the same reluctance to assume the pen that you had? Let the consideration that the pen is so invaluable a minister to friendship tempt you to honor it more by use. I have squeezed myself into such little space that I must defer an outline of my days till I write again. One moral inquiry for your wits, and I will withdraw into silence and the infinite. Does not one friend who indites many letters, unanswered, to another, thereby heap coals of fire upon somebody's head as effectually as if he fed the hungry? Scatter my love as broadly as you think it will bear, and reserve the carver's share for yourself. G.W.C. V _Saturday night, November 25, '43._ Why do I love music enough to be only a lover, and cannot offer it a life-devoted service? Yet the lover serves in his sort, and if I may not minister to it, it cannot fail to dignify and ennoble my life. I am just from hearing Ole Bull, who this evening made his first appearance in America. How shall I fitly speak to you of him, how can I now, while the new vision of beauty that he caused to sweep by still lingers? Yet itself shall inspire me. The presence of so noble a man allures to light whatever nobility lies in us. He came forward to a house crowded in every part with the calm simplicity of Genius. There was no grimace, no graces, but a fine grace that adorned his presence and assured one that nothing could disappoint--that the simplicity of the man was the seal and crown of his genius. A fair-haired, robust, finely formed man, the full bloom of health shining on his face, he appeared as the master of the great instrument, as the successor, in point of time, of the world-famous Paganini. Yet was one confident that here was no imitator, but a pupil who had sat thoughtfully at the master's feet and felt that beneath the depth of his expression there was yet a lower depth, who knew himself consecrated by a will grander than his will to the service of an art so divine and so loved. In him there was that sure prophecy of latent power which surrounds genius, and assures us that the thing done is an echo only and shadow of the possible performance. The playing followed this simple, majestic appearance. It was full of music, irregular, wild, yearning, trembling. His violin lay upon his arm tenderly as a living thing; and such rich, mellow, silver, shining tones followed his motion that one seemed to catch echoes of that eternal melody whereof music itself is but the shadow and presentment. The adagios reminded me of Beethoven, not as they were imitated, but as all the great ones, in their appearing, summon all the rest. The mechanical execution was faultless. I detected no thick note. It was smooth as the sea of summer, embosoming only deep cloud-shadows and the full sunlight, but no lesser thing. Then he came, and he withdrew; and my heart followed him. Do not be alarmed if the critics call him cold, and speak of him disparagingly when others are mentioned. The noble and heroes serve divine powers, and at last win men. Men of talent and application love their instrument as it introduces the world to them; men of genius as it interprets to them and to the world the mystery of music. Genius men must reverence, and they are not apt to do it boisterously. Is not the influence of fine character, which is only genius for virtue, like the brooding of God over chaos? Which is chaos only to the blind, but teems with generous, melodious laws to the spiritually discerned. Creation is the opening of eyes, not the fabrication of objects. "Let there be light" is the creative fiat, spoken by every God-filled soul. Yet how sure is this power of Genius. The world henceforth gives to Ole Bull the full and generous satisfaction of his needs. It cannot fail to esteem God's messengers when they come, if they be true and collected. Talent wins the same subsistence; earnest, unfailing, unshrinking endeavor wins it anywhere; but what does Talent and Trial do but imitate the action of the result of Genius! How sublime the revelations it makes in this art! While the rest have risen and culminated and paused, this seeks a zenith ever loftier and diviner. That deep nature, that central beauty, which all art strives to reveal, floats to us in these fine harmonies, to me more subtly and surely than elsewhere. But in this region, where my thought bears me, they are all united. This soft, silent face of Urania, which looks upon me sleeplessly and untired, is not its wonderful influence woven of that same essence that has ravished me tonight in the tones of the violin? In the coolness of thought, do not the masters of song, of painting, of sculpture meet in eternal congress, for in each is the appearance of equal skill? Raphael could have sung as Shakespeare, and Milton have hewn these massy forms as Angelo. Yet a divine economy rules these upper spiritual regions, as sure and steadfast as the order of the stars. Raphael must paint and Homer sing, yet the same soul gilds the picture and sweetens the song. So Venus and Mars shine yellow and red, but the same central fire is the light of each. In the capacity of doing all things well lies the willingness to serve one duty. The Jack of all trades is sure to be good at none, for who is good at all is Jack of one only. It seemed a bitter thing to me, formerly, that painters must only paint and sculptors carve; but I see now the wisdom. In one thing well done lies the secret of doing all. Music, painting, are labels that designate the form of action; the soul of it lies below. The earnest merchant and the earnest anti-tradesman do join hands and work together. Not ends are demanded of them, but vital strength and soul. The world does not need that I name my work, but that the work be accomplished. The midnight warns me to pause. The stillness accords with the intercourse of friendship, as the silence of space with the calm, speechless recognition of the planets. Thoughts of all friends circle round me like gentle breezes from the black wing of the night. Friends are equal and noble always to friends. Lovers only know the depths and the heights of lovers. Love prophesies only a surer, diviner friendship, crowned with the dignity and composure of God. I shall re-enter the world through the white gate of dreams, yet more quiet and resolved that I have heard this man, more tender, more tolerant. He has touched strings of that harp whose vibrations never cease, but affirm the infiniteness of our being and its present habitation in Eternity. Your friend, G.W.C. Wednesday. Sunday P.M. I passed with Fred. Rakemann. He was very glad to see me, and I him. His fine face lighted with enthusiasm as we spoke of music, of Germany and its poets. He played magnificently, among others "Adelaide," translated for the piano by Liszt, a beautiful andante of Chopin, some of Henselt, etc., until it was quite twilight. Then I went away. He promised to come and see me, nor shall I fail to see him as often as I think he will endure, though his days are so busy with teaching that I do not hope to find him except on Sundays. To-night Ole Bull plays the second time. I shall go to hear him. The Frenchmen are cliqued against him, for Vieuxtemps has arrived, and they mean to maintain his superiority. He has no announcement as yet. My letter I will not close until to-morrow, and say a final word about Ole Bull. Wednesday night. I have heard him again, and the impression he made on Saturday is only deepened. He played an adagio of Mozart's. It was simple and severely chaste. His beautiful simplicity is just the character to apprehend the delicate touches of the Master, which he drew to us, without any ornament or addition. It was as if Mozart had been in spirit in the instrument, and given us, with all the freshness of creation, the music that can never lose its bloom. Scharfenberg was in the box with us, Fred. Rakemann in the next box. I saw Castellan in a private box, and Isaac H. The evening was glorious. Had you only been there! Yet you will see him in Boston. Do not fail to write me how he impresses you--that is, particularly. I cannot misapprehend his power so much as not to feel that it will seem to you very grand. Observe his manner towards the orchestra, how Olympian, how supreme, yet with all the gentle grace and tenderness of power! Good-night. May you ever hear sweet music! VI N.Y., _Friday, Dec. 15, 1843._ Truly the musical art culminates in our zenith this winter. It gives me other thoughts than of music only, unfolds to me something more of art, and I am charmed constantly to see how calmly we receive the great artists, after the noise of their entry, as the world quietly accepts the light of stars and swings unastonished on its wonderful way. Ole Bull and the rest are the scouts we have sent on before us, and they return to tell us of the Wonderful Land, and bring mementos and captives from the rich Eldorado of our hopes. That country to which nature points, of which all art is the flaming beacon, and which the weary voyager home-returning from fruitless search tells us is in ourselves--not the less far away for that. Ole Bull's quiet, rapt manner is the full remembrance of that land which he has seen, and which he unfolds to us--is always the character and expression of the deepest insight. Just look at our bill for the week which ends to-night: Monday, Vieuxtemps; Tuesday, Artot and Damoreau; Wednesday, Ole Bull, Miss Sperty (the new pianist), and Madame Sphor Zahn; Thursday, Castellan, Antoquin Brough and Sphor Zahn in the "Stabat Mater," followed by the "Battle of Waterloo Symphony," by Beethoven; Friday, Vieuxtemps again! Monday evening I could not hear Vieuxtemps, but went on Tuesday to hear C. Damoreau and Artot. The former, with the smallest voice, sings pleasantly from her wonderful cultivation, of which, however, the technicalities, so to say, are too much obtruded. She shakes through all her songs, and this power, which would render her plain singing so sure and pleasing, demands attention for itself, not because it improves the tone of the singing. Artot is an elegant artist. He plays very finely, wonderfully; but the greater his execution the more marked appeared to me the difference between the highest cultivated talent and the supremacy of Genius. He played difficult music, he shook and warbled and imitated, some of his tones were very exquisite, but it was all lifeless, the passionless semblance of beauty. I was as if walking in a Gorgon's ice-palace, with magnificent, clear crystals, and noble, transparent pillars, and all the artifice of beauty and comfort, but evermore a deep chill from the lavish elegance. When he had done, I knew he had done his utmost, that he had exhausted hope. In him I found none of that depthless background which genius ever offers. He made sing in my ears the old text, "The things seen are temporal; the things unseen are eternal." His performance is a thing seen, not a dim beacon on the outskirts of an unexplored country, wherein we hear birds singing and rivers flowing, and see the great cloud-shadows fall upon the hills, where in the dim distance stately palaces are faintly traced, and the depthless woods fringe unknown seas. Artot's playing seemed to me like the full flower exhausting the plant; Ole Bull's like a star shining out of the infinite space. Flowers wither, but the stars do not fade. We gather the blossoms with joy and hurry home; but the stars light us on our way and make our homes beautiful. Talent has something familiar and social in its impression and greeting; but Genius receives us with a calm dignity that transfigures courtesy and complaisance, and makes our relations healthy and grand. The whole tone of Artot's violin differs from Bull's. I felt they must not be compared, and so listened delightedly, but with a pale, ghastly joy. When I heard Ole, I could not sleep. It was like a fire shining out of heaven, sudden and bright. It kindled within me flames which seek heaven, disturbed the surface of my soul, evoking spirits out of that depth I did not know were there, and it was as if a thousand hopes, which were the substance and object of memory, rose out of their graves and held long vigil with me in those silent hours. How few of us can keep our balance when a regal soul dashes by. I presently recover myself, and serve with a milder and firmer persistence my own nature. The way is made clearer by these bright lights, universal nature shines fairer that there are so many single stars; but they must only be stars in my heaven and fires upon my hearth, nor burn out my heart by inserting themselves in my bosom. The next night I went to hear Ole Bull again at the Tabernacle, which holds 3000 persons. The doors were open at 6, the concert began at 8. At quarter-past 6 the house was full, and at 7 was jammed, and hundreds went away. I arrived too late, but was so satisfied at the triumph that I went gladly home again, pleased to be one who could not hear. Last evening I heard the "Stabat." Castellan has a magnificent voice. Does she not lack passion? She certainly needs cultivation. The symphony was merely a musical picture of the battle--a battle of Prague for the orchestra! It begins with a drum, a bugle-call follows; a march--and what march do you think? "Malbrook." Imagine me, a fervid worshipper of Beethoven, rushing in the crowd to hear a symphony wherein, with all orchestral force, the old song, L-a-w, Law, was banged into my ears. I sat in motionless dismay, while there followed another trumpeting and drumming and marching and imitations of musketry by some watchman's rattle. Then came some good passages, which confounded me only the more. Then, "God save the King," which announced the British victory. Anon followed some marches, with the occasional bang of the bass drum to "disfigure or present" the distant cannon; and then there was a pause, and the people began to get up. I was confounded, looked towards the orchestra, and they were moving away; and I discovered I had heard the whole--alas! the day. What it meant, what Beethoven meant by writing it, how he could be so purely external, how he could so use the orchestra, I cannot comprehend. Perhaps it was a curious relaxation with him, as artists imitate other instruments upon their own--perhaps it is a joke--but that it was a sad disappointment to me admits no perhaps. Since the limitations of life appear most forcibly to correspondents in limited sheets of paper, let me bear away abruptly from music. My German progresses finely. I have read Novalis's poetry, and am just now finishing the "Lehrjahre." I read three or four hours daily, and am pleased at my progress. Burrill and I have just finished Johnson's "Elements of Agricultural Chemistry" and Buel's book. I read to him daily from Bunyan. I am also busy with Beaumont and Fletcher, Paul's Epistles, and St. Augustine. You will easily imagine that my whole day is devoted to literature. After dinner, at 5 o'clock, I sally down Broadway for exercise; and in the evening, if I go to no concert, usually seek my room and books. To-night, for the first time, I am going out to a ball at a friend's, the girl of whom you have heard me speak as singing so well. Cranch I meet very rarely. Have been only once to see him. W.H. Channing do not yet know. At his meeting I see Isaac and C.P. Cranch, and Rufus Dawes, and Parke Godwin, William Chace, and a host of the unconverted and heretical. Him I do not yet know personally, nor Vathek. His enthusiastic manner, and the tranquil fervor of his character, charm me very much. I find that I do not care to go after people. Perhaps I have been rather too much with them; at all events, I will go to see none for curiosity. Isaac is my good friend, and passed Sunday P.M. in my room. We spoke of the church and society, and all topics that do so excite the youthful mind. I must break short off to dress for my party. I shall speak to you again before you know that I have been. Saturday. To-day I have finished the "Lehrjahre." It is very calm and wise. It is full of Goethe, and therefore leaves behind in its impression that almost indefinite want which his character leaves, a want apparently readily designated. Yet to say his intellect was disproportionately developed leaves us in doubt whether a pure natural growth of the moral nature would have harmonized with his peculiar manifestation of intellect. He is to me as a blind God, made wise by laborious experience, not perpetual sight. He is at least too large for the tip of a letter. What do you read, or don't you read? Sunday. To-day I heard a fine sermon from W.H. Channing. There I met Isaac and C.P. Cranch. Walked home with the latter, who during the week had heard Ole Bull. I suppose he will write you of it. Prof. Adam, from Northampton, was there. At our church, a few Sundays since, I saw Mrs. Delano, late Kate Lyman, and her sister Susan. The latter was beautiful. She seemed like a pure, passionless saint. Had I been in a Catholic church I had imagined her to have been some holy being, incarnated by her deep sympathy with the worshippers. I hardly saw her, just enough to receive a poetic impression. How little I have said! My life is very quiet, yet very full. Your letters are very grateful to me. One dares trust so much more to paper than to conversation. Friends living intimately learn of each other from tones and glances, not by conversation. Friends meet intellectually in words, lovers heartfully in words. Macready has gone and I did not see him; he played nothing of Shakespeare. Shall I direct to Brook Farm or Boston? More anon. Yrs ever, G.W.C. VII NEW YORK, _Friday, Dec. 22, '43._ A merry Christmas to you, and to all Christian souls. How brave goes the year to its setting! These calm, cold days impress me like the fine characters of history and the elder time, inspired with a generous wisdom, and prophesying what shall be the newest and best word of hope in our day. The season embraces and surpasses those old men, even the finest. To-day, as I walked, the magnificence of the closing year, so steadfast and sure, sparing no sunshine nor rain, passing quietly out to be renewed nevermore, quite reproved the solemn martyrdoms of men, upon which we hang our hopes. Nature is great that she does not suffer us to define her influence upon ourselves. Like all greatness, she suggests to us beauty and grace, not as attributes of hers, but fair buds and flowers of the soul. Therefore, in the full presence of nature, the grandest deeds seem harmonious and the wisdom of Plato, and actions whose greatness is the centre, not the utmost compression, of our life are harmonious and symmetrical. To the Greeks and Jews the Gospel is blindness and a stumbling-block, but joy and peace to the elect. Nothing is so stern and lofty a cordial to me as this severe inscrutability of nature. I must obey or die, and dying is no help to me, for the spirit that rules now rules evermore. How like a god sits she brooding over the world, announcing her laws by blows and knocks, by agonies and convulsions, by the mouths of wise men, affirming that as the sowing so also is the harvest. And there is no alleviation, no palliation. She heeds no prayers, no sighs; those who fall must raise themselves; the sick must of their own force recover or perish. When thus she has set us upon our legs everything works for us, and the sun and moon are great lamps for our enlightenment, and men and women leaves of a wondrous book. Then, imperceptibly to us, in these snows and blossoms and fruits annually all history is rewritten, and the honest man who knows nothing of Greece and Rome derives from the swelling trees and the bending sky the same subtle infusion of heroism and nobility that is the vitality of history. The vice of our mode of education is that we do not regard life from an eternal point. We want magnanimity and truth, not the names of those who have been magnanimous and true; and I see not why nature to-day does not offer to me all the grandeur of character that has illustrated any period. Men and nature and art all seek to say the same thing. Could we search deeply enough, I doubt not we should find all matter to be one substance; and could we appreciate the worth of every art and every landscape and man, they would be identical. As I am a better man, the more soluble is the great outspreading riddle of nature, and the more distinct and full the delicate grace of art. As an old, quaint divine said of fate and free-will, they are two converging lines which of necessity must somewhere unite, though our human vision does not see the point; so all mysteries are radii, and could we follow one implicitly, then we have found the centre of all. Therefore the best critic of art is the man whose life has been hid with God in nature; and therefore the triumph of art is complete when birds peck at the grapes. I felt this yesterday while looking at Cole's paintings. Each picture of "The Voyage of Life" impressed me somewhat as the voyage itself does. Especially the cold, subdued tone of the last, which suggests infinity by the tone merely. Perhaps you have not seen them, and will suffer a brief account. The pictures are four. The first represents a boat of golden prow and sides wrought into the images of the hours, bearing an infant in a bed of roses, and issuing from a dim cave in a dark, indefinable mountain, and hasting down a flower-crowned stream. The second shows the babe grown to manhood, and, assuming himself the guidance, leaves the guardian spirit upon the bank, and upon a wider stream, piercing a wider prospect, sails away, allured by a dim cloud-castle which seems to hang over the river, yet from which the stream turns. The next shows him dashing along amid clouds and whirlpools and tempests, without rudder or compass, towards threatening rocks, yet serenely, with clasped hands, abiding the issue. In the last, grown to old age, he sails forth upon a fathomless, shoreless sea, leaving behind all rocks and tempests, while the guardian angel again at the helm points to regions of cloudless day. Though very beautiful of themselves, they suggested to me grander pictures of this grandest theme, and so interested me very much. Truly there is nothing final; all is suggestive. When, entranced in summer woods, we demand that nature lend our homes somewhat of her beauty, she replies to us that beauty is so subtle, residing not in the green of this leaf nor in the curve of that branch, and not in the whole, but in the soul that contemplates it, that of herself she has none, and that we her lovers have invested her with such golden charms. The universal wish to realize is only typified by the grasping gain. Most men live to acknowledge in heart the superiority of young dreams over old possessions; and the world feels that in the unshrinking aspirations of the youth lies the hope of the world. That is the lightning that purifies the dense atmosphere, and, glancing for an instant, reveals the keenest light known to men. So the old year sings to me as it goes crowned with crystals and snow-drops to its end. Without shrinking, without sorrow, it folds its white garment around unwithered limbs, and submits gracefully to the past. Nature regards it with that calm face whereon no emotions are written, but a wise serenity forever sits. This year, too, is to many lonely hearts a redeemer; and no heavens will be darkly clouded when it is over, but still stars will shine unsurprised. Pale scholars in midnight vigils, golden gayety wreathing the hours with flowers and gems, unbending sorrow pressing heavy seals upon yielding wretchedness, it will steal surely from all these, and on the morrow be a colorless ghost in the distant past. Its constancy will secure our immortality. The grandeur of the year may be the strength of our character; and as the East receives it, we may enter the inscrutable future reverently and with folded hands. Sunday. I am going to F. Rakemann's to pass the afternoon and give him this for you. He proposes to pass a week in Boston. I have heard Wallace during the week. He has great talent; but I had heard Ole Bull, and Wallace's violin-playing was only good. What think you of Vieuxtemps, who, I see, is in Boston? Shall you not send Knoop hither? So many things I would say! It is wiser to say nothing. Remember me to my West Roxbury friends, Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Shaw and their spouses. Ever your friend, G.W.C. VIII N.Y., _Thursday, January 18, '44._ I have not yet answered your letter by W.H. Channing in words, though I have said a great deal to you that you have not heard. What an interrupter of conversation is this absence! Neither have I told you of my Vieuxtemps experience, nor shall I close my letter without speaking of Knoop, who by the gods' favor concerts to-night. Your letter by W.H. Channing crystallized a resolution which has been quiet in me for the winter, so still that it needed only a powerful jerk to induce crystallization at once. So the day or two succeeding its receipt found me busy in expressing some thoughts about reform and association which I meant for _The Present_. But the necessity for expression seems to have been satisfied without publication. The essay remains as quietly in my portfolio as did the idea in my mind. So it was with an article on Ole Bull that I wrote some weeks since for the _Tribune_. The need seems to give the thought expression and form, whether it then lay still or fly abroad upon paper wings. Besides, printing does give a dignity to thoughts that the author should feel that they deserve, a permanency too. The newspaper that escapes the turmoil and tear and dust of years bears the same aspect as all its fellows of the same date that were ushered into the morning parlors with it; and so some commentator on Ole Bull and Vieuxtemps or what not shall run down to the lower generations more noiselessly, yet as certainly, as Shakespeare and Plato. There is a singular pleasure, too, in publishing what nobody thinks is yours. It is addressing the world not as Geo. Curtis, but as some distinguished messenger, the mystery of whom is a charm, if nothing more. Yet unfortunate me! I could never maintain the secret long. Is that from pride or because you cannot endure to see men go wrong, if you can help them? When Charles Dana came running to me with what he thought Emerson's poem, how could I help saying, "It is mine." In that case, at least, it was sympathy for Emerson's reputation that prompted the speech. There is something that pleases me much in the united works of young authors. Sands and who? in our country published "Yamoyden" and some other poems together. C. Lamb and Lloyd (was not Coleridge one?) published some small verses in company. There is a sort of meanness in it, too, as if they should say, "Here we come, two scribblers, not worthy singly to attract your attention, but together making out something worth your money." After all, a single failure may be better than a double respectability. Imagine the united literary works of Dwight and Curtis rotting in an odd drawer of Ticknor's or James Munroe's; could we ever look each other in the face again? What a still, perpetual suspicion there would be that the one swamped the other. Do you not mean some day to gather your musical essays together, like a whorl of leaves, and suffer them to expand into a book, though not with the cream--colored calyx that Ticknor affects, I beg. Nay, might you not make some arrangements with Greeley to publish them here, in a cheap way, if you would make money, for those who valued them would of course obtain more durable copies. If not, and you would think dignity compromitted, some of the regular publishers might be diplomatized with. They would make an unique work. You know we have nothing similar in American literature, no book of artistic criticism, have we? Why will you not think of it, if you have not done so? And what so poor a man as Hamlet is may do, you shall command. How recreant am I to this noble art, that listen only and celebrate with feeble voice its charms. Tuesday evening, at a small musical party, I heard Euphrasia Borghese sing, whom you may have heard, and who is to be Prima Donna at the new Opera-house, which opens on the 25th or 2eth of the present month. They begin with the "Puritani." It will be altogether devoted to Italian music, I suppose, from the tendency of the New York taste and the collection of musicians. I heard Vieuxtemps both times he played after his return. I was very much delighted; he was so modest and composed and refined. His playing is as wonderful as Ole Bull's, but not so fascinating; his compositions more contemplative and regular, not so wild and throbbing with the irregular pulsations of unsatisfied genius, as are Ole Bull's. I felt no disposition to compare, feeling how different they were. I thanked God when I came away that no one man has sole power, but that many may serve in this boundless temple, each in its various offices. Yet in my memory is Ole Bull the only man who has stirred me up as genius always must. When I heard Vieuxtemps, I knew what to anticipate; the grandeur of the instrumental and the human possibility upon it had been revealed to me, therefore he could not surprise me, and for that revelation I am indebted to Ole Bull. Vieuxtemps prolonged the echo of the deep tone that had been sounded into my spiritual ear. I must say that the first was grandest to me, and remains so. I passed Sunday P.M. with Rakemann; he played all the time, told me of you and Boston and his love for it, asked me if I had heard more of the concerts you mentioned. Timm on Monday played me the "Invitation to the W." very beautifully, beside some Mazurkas of Chopin, also the "Egmont" overture grandly. Saturday evening the second Philharmonic, the "Jupiter Symphony," and some Septuats, etc. It was not a good concert. Castellan sang for the last time. Not a note of Beethoven! Yesterday afternoon and evening I passed with Josephine Maman, who plays and sings finely. We had some of Beethoven, the "Pathetique," etc., and some songs of Schubert, which I had never heard. A singular girl, but delightful to me. My musical appetite has been well appeased; can it ever be satisfied? To-night, Knoop, for whom I have left little space, especially as I find my paper is torn. Evening. Have just come from Knoop's. It was beautiful to see the worthy mate of such men as Ole Bull and Vieuxtemps. From what you and others had told me, I knew I should like him. So calm and grand. Yet when I left the room a mournful feeling came over me, that so he must leave and be heard no more. Beethoven is not done when he is dead, nor Raphael nor Shakespeare; but for him whose glory is action, which leaves no trace but upon the heart, what shall remain? The notes he may transcribe for others, but the charm of the musical artist lies not therein; it is a personal effluence; how shall we measure it? I felt to-night that he played not for an audience, but to the private heart. He was singing to me his deep searching thought, his star-lost aspiration. Indeed, he is worthy to close the brilliant winter; a calm planet fading from us, but with a mild, steady lustre that condemns sorrow. How invisible, insensibly proceeds his fame! My character must needs be strengthened and mellowed by such men, and so my influence upon others is moulded, till perhaps it meets him again. Surrounded by these intimate relations, we cannot touch one but all thrill. In such a subtle shrine is the influence of genius fitly embalmed and there worshipped. How grand an era in my life, when through a winter I may justly use the word genius many times! Good-night! G.W.C. I am 24! Will you write me the numbers of the "Tempest" sonata, and some others that I liked particularly? The op. 14, No. 2, I have got, and Timm played it to me on Monday. How inexorable is this space, that will not let me crowd in that I am ever your friend, G.W.C. IX N.Y., _Sunday evening, Feb. 25, '44._ Do you remember ever to have read a novel called "The Collegians?" A work of great interest, and displaying great dramatic power. I was always anxious to know the author, and chance has thrown his name and history in my way. It was Gerald Griffin, an Irishman of genius, who lived the varied life of a professed literary man. Desirous of having his dramas accepted at the London theatres, and finding no one to favor him. Too noble to be dependent, and going days without food. In 183ty something he published, "Gisippus," a tragedy, famed of the greatest merit. Finally he became weary of his literary life, and entered an Irish convent, where, within two or three years, he died. His father's family in greater part have removed to America, and his elder brother, a physician of note, has recently published his memoirs, the reviews of which I have happened to meet. The reviews say the usual thing of genius, that his writings were full of promise, and that he might have achieved greatly had he lived. Must not this be always a complaint of genius? Its being, not its expression, has the charm which captivates. The dramas are the least part of Shakespeare, and one would give more to have known him than to study them forever. It must seem to us promising, till we have entered into the fulness of its spirit. The necessity of expressing compromises the dignity of being. God is more pleasing to thought as self-contemplation, rather than creation. Expression is degradation to us, not to the genius. That informs everything with its complete Loveliness. But we who must seek in the expression for it, miss its beauty. Critics complain of Tennyson that he writes no epic, as if all poets must do the same thing. "Comus" is as Miltonic as the "Paradise Lost;" and the little songs of Shakespeare as wide and fresh as the dramas. The diamond is no less wonderful than the world. Recently my reading has led me into the old English poetry. A friend gave me a card to the Society Library, the largest in the city; and I have found much good browsing in those fields. I have found "Amadis de Gaul" among the rest, and the complete works of Carew, Suckling, Drayton, Drummond, etc. It has led me to wish some more intimate knowledge of English history, to which I must turn. How imperceptibly and surely spread out these meadows where the rare flowers bloom! There is no end to these threads which place themselves in our hand, and which lead every man of the world his different way. So we sail on through the blue spaces, separate as stars. And you, they tell me, have joined the association. I supposed you were making some move, and thought this might be it. I am glad that you do so so heartily, and more glad that I can say so. After all, the defiance offered us by the varied positions of our friends is what life needs. Each dissimilar act of my friend, while it does not sever him from me, throws me more sternly upon myself. Can we not make our friendship so fine that it shall be only a sympathy of thought, and let the expression differ, and court it to differ? This ray of the sunlight falls upon summer woods, that sinks into the wintry sea, yet are they brothers. The severe loneliness that has sun and moon in its bosom invites us as the vigorous health of the soul. The beautiful isolation of the rose in its own fragrance is self-sufficient. Charles wrote Burrill a manly letter during the week. The Arcadian beauty of the place is lost to me, and would have been lost, had there been no change. Seen from this city life, you cannot think how fair it seems. So calm a congregation of devoted men and true women performing their perpetual service to the Idea of their lives, and clothed always in white garments. Though you change your ritual, I feel your hope is unchanged; and though it seems to me less beautiful than the one you leave, it is otherwise to you. There was a mild grace about our former life that no system attains. The unity in variety bound us very closely together. I doubt if we shall be again among you, as I had hoped. I cannot, in thought, lose my hold upon the place without pain not to be spoken of. On the whole, I cannot say, even to you, just what I would about it. It will leak out from the pores of my hands before we have done with each other. I hear no music here now, except Timm and Rakemann. Charlotte Dana is here; I have heard her only once. The opera is a wretched affair. By-the-by, I gave W.H. Channing an article for _The Present_, very short, upon music and Ole Bull. If he publishes it, it will not be new to you, though I do not remember if I have talked with you about all at which it hints. I await orders and manuscripts about the French stories; though you are very busy, all of you, just now, perhaps too much so for that business. The rest stands adjourned. Give my love to friends. Yrs ever, G.W.C. Will you say to C. Dana that I would like to come for a short visit--at least, before going elsewhere; and that as soon as possible, say in a week. Can I come? If not, ask him to say when. Yours, J. Burrill Curtis. _Feb'y 27._ X NEW YORK, _March 3, 1844._ Your letter was very grateful to me. I had supposed the silence would be broken by some music burst of devotion, and that all friends would be dearer to you the more imperative the call upon your strength to battle for the Ideal. It half reproved me for the meagre sheet the same day brought to your hand. And yet could we see how all the forces of heaven and earth unite to shape the particle that floats idly by us, we should never see meagreness more. I do not think (and what a heresy!) that your life has found more than an object, not yet a centre. The new order will systematize your course; but I do not see that it aids your journey. Is it not the deeper insight you constantly gain into music which explains the social economy you adopt, and not the economy the music? One fine symphony or song leads all reforms captive, as the grand old paintings in St. Peter's completely ignore all sects. Association will only interpret music so far as it is a pure art, as poetry and sculpture and painting explain each other. But necessarily Brook Farm, association and all, do not regard it artistically, but charitably. It regenerates the world with them because it does tangible good, not because it refines. We must view all pursuits as arts before we can accomplish. With respect to association as a means of reform, I have seen no reason to change my view. Though, like the monastic, a life of devotion, to severe criticism it offers a selfish and an unheroic aspect. When your letter first spoke of your personal interest in the movement, I had written you a long statement of my thought, which I did not send, and then partly spun into an article for _The Present_, which I did not entirely finish. It was only a strong statement of Individualism, which would not be new to you, perhaps, and the essential reason of which could not be readily treated. What we call union seems to me only a name for a phase of individual action. I live only for myself; and in proportion to my own growth, so I benefit others. As Fourier seems to me to have postponed his life, in finding out how to live, so I often felt it was with Mr. Ripley. Besides, I feel that our evils are entirely individual, not social. What is society but the shadow of the single men behind it. That there is a slave on my plantation or a servant in my kitchen is no evil; but that the slave and servant should be unwilling to be so, that is the difficulty. The weary and the worn do not ask of me an asylum, but aid. The need of the most oppressed man is strength to endure, not means of escape. The slave toiling in the Southern heats is a nobler aspect of thought than the freed black upon the shore of England. That is just now the point which pains me in association, its lack of heroism. Reform is purification, forming anew, not forming again. Love, like genius, uses the means that are, and the opportunities of to-day. If paints are wanting, it draws charcoal heads with Michael Angelo. These crooked features of society we cannot rend and twist into a Roman outline and grace; but they may be animated with a soul that will utterly shame our carved and painted faces. A noble man purges these present relations, and does not ask beautiful houses and landscapes and appliances to make life beautiful. In Wall Street he gives another significance to trade; in the City Hall he justifies its erection; in the churches he interprets to themselves the weekly assembly of citizens. He uses the pen with which, just now, the coal-man scrawled his bill, and turns off an epic with the fife that in the band so sadly pierced our ears. He moves our trudging lives to the beauties of golden measures. He laughs heartily at our absorbing charities and meetings, upon which we waste our health and grow thin. He answers our distressing plea for the rights of the oppressed, and the "all-men-born-to-be-free-and-equal" with a smiling strength, which assures us therein lies the wealth and the equality which we are trying to manufacture out of such materials as association, organization of society, copartnership, no wages, and the like. While this may be done, why should we retire from the field behind the walls which you offer? Let us die battling or victorious. And this, true for me and you, is true to the uttermost. The love which alone can make your Phalanx beautiful, also renders it unnecessary. You may insure food and lodgings to the starving beggar, I do not see that strength is afforded to the man. Moreover, a stern divine justice ordains that each man stand where he stands, and do his utmost. Retreat, if you will, behind this prospect of comfortable living, but you do so at a sacrifice of strength. Your food must be eternal, for your life is so. I do not feel that the weary man outworn by toil needs a fine house and books and culture and free air; he needs to feel that his position, also, is as good as these. When he has, by a full recognition of that, earned the right to come to you, then his faith is deeper than the walls of association, and the desolate cellar is a cheerful room for his shining lore. Men do not want opportunities, they do not want to start fair, they do not want to reach the same goal; they want only perfect submission. The gospel now to be preached is not, "Away with me to the land where the fields are fair and the waters flow," but, "Here in your penury, while the rich go idly by and scoff, and the chariot wheels choke you with dust, make here your golden age." "Who cannot on his own bed sweetly sleep, Can on another's hardly rest." So sings the saintly George Herbert, no new thought in these days of ours. The effect of a residence at the Farm, I imagine, was not greater willingness to serve in the kitchen, and so particularly assert that labor was divine; but discontent that there was such a place as a kitchen. And, however aimless life there seemed to be, it was an aimlessness of the general, not of the individual life. Its beauty faded suddenly if I remembered that it was a society for special ends, though those ends were very noble. In the midst of busy trades and bustling commerce, it was a congregation of calm scholars and poets, cherishing the ideal and the true in each other's hearts, dedicate to a healthy and vigorous life. As an association it needed a stricter system to insure success; and since it had not the means to justify its mild life, it necessarily grew to this. As reformers, you are now certainly more active, and may promise yourselves heaven's reward for that. That impossibility of severance from the world, of which you speak, I liked, though I did not like that there should be such a protest against the world by those who were somewhat subject to it. This was not my first feeling. When I went, it seemed as if all hope had died from the race, as if the return to simplicity and beauty lay through the woods and fields, and was to be a march of men whose very habits and personal appearance should wear a sign of the coming grace. The longer I stayed, the more surely that thought vanished. I had unconsciously been devoted to the circumstance, while I had earnestly denied its value. Gradually I perceived that only as a man grew deeper and broader could he wear the coat and submit to the etiquette and obey the laws which society demands. Now I feel that no new order is demanded, but that the universe is plastic to the pious hand. Besides, it seems to me that reform becomes atheistic the moment it is organized. For it aims, really, at that which conservatism represents. The merit of the reformer is his sincerity, not his busy effort to emancipate the slaves or to raise the drunkards. And the deeper his sincerity the more deeply grounded seems to him the order he holds to be so corrupt. God always weighs down the Devil. Therefore the church is not a collection of puzzling priests and deceived people, but the representative, now as much as ever, of the religious sentiment. A pious man needs no new church or ritual. The Catholic is not too formal nor the Quaker too plain. If he complains of these, and build another temple and construct a new service, it is not the satisfaction which piety would have. Luther's protest was that of the intellect against the supremacy of sentiment. So was Unitarianism, and now we do not seek in the Boston churches for the profound pietists. Does not our present experience show that as fast as we are emancipated from morality and the dominance of the intellect, we revert to the older rituals, if we need any. And if we have no need, the piety can so fully inform them, that we seek no other. The transcendental is a spiritual movement. It is the effort to regain the lost equilibrium between the intellect and the soul, between morals and piety. Therefore, put of its ranks come Catholics and Calvinists and mystics, and those who continue the reform movement commenced by Luther; and, proceeding at intervals down the stream of history, are the Rationalists. There is indeed a latent movement, badly represented by these reforms, and that is the constant perception of the supremacy of the Individual. But the stronger the feet become the more delicate may be the movements. The more strictly individual I am, the more certainly I am bound to all others. I can reach other men only through myself. So far as you have need of association you are injured by it. You will gather what I think from such hints as these. I recognize the worth of the movement, as I do of all sincere action. Other reasons must bind me peculiarly to the particular me at Brook Farm. "Think not of any severance of our loves," though we should not meet immediately. Burrill will see if there is any such place as we wish about you. I have not much hope of his success. The scent of the roses will not depart, though the many are scattered. I hardly hope to say directly how very beautiful it lies in my memory. What a heart-fresco it has become! All the dignity, the strength, the devotion will be preserved by you; that graceful "aimlessness" comes no more. And yet that was necessary. Long before I knew of the changes I perceived that the growth of the place would overshadow the spots where the sunlight had lain so softly and long. We must still regret the waywardness of the child, though the man is active and victorious; and the delicate odor of the blossom is unrivalled by the juicy taste of the fruit. The one implies necessity; the other a self-obedient impulse. You see I do not forget it was a child; but the philosopher has no better playfellow. I wish this was me instead of my letter, for a warm grasp of the hand might say more than all these words. Yr friend, G.W.C. XI NEW YORK, _March 27, 1844._ At last I imagine our summer destiny is fixed. This morning Burrill received a reply from Emerson informing us of a promising place near Concord. The farmer's name being Captain Nathaniel Barrett, of pleasant family and situation, and a farm on which more farm work than usual is done. Altogether the prospect is very alluring and satisfactory; and I have little doubt of our acceptance of the situation. We shall not then be very far removed from you; and at some AEsthetical tea or Transcendental club or Poet's assembly meet you, perhaps, and other Brook Farmers. At all events, we shall breathe pretty much the same atmosphere as before, and understand more fully the complete pivacy of the country life. Burrill brought pleasant accounts of your appearance at Brook Farm. The summer shall not pass without my looking in upon you, though only for an hour. That time will suffice to show me the unaltered beauty of aspect, though days would be scarce to express all that they suggested. Emerson writes that there is a piano and music at the farm mentioned. I have no faith in pianos under such circumstances; but it shows a taste, a hope, a capability, possibly it is equal to all spiritual significances except music! which want in a piano may be termed a deficiency. I have become acquainted with a fine amateur, a niece of Dr. Channing's, name Gibbs. She is yet young, not more than 17, but plays with great grace and beauty. She played me one of Mendelssohn's songs, translated by Liszt, a beautiful piece, one of F.R.'s, and spoke more sensibly of music than any girl I have met. By-the-way, yesterday I bought the January number of the _Democratic Review_ to read Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler's review of Tennyson, when, to my great surprise, I found your "Haydn." O'Sullivan I have met a great deal, but made no acquaintance. The Tennyson review is very fine. I think she understands him well. Perhaps she is too masculine a woman to judge correctly his delicacy; but she does the whole thing well. Cranch has just painted a scene from the "Lady of Shalott," the scene-- "In among the bearded barley, The reaping late and early," etc.-- represents two reapers standing with sickles among the grain, and turning intently towards the four "gray walls and four gray towers which overlook a space of flowers" in an island covered with foliage to the water, and lying in the midst of the stream. The criticism upon the picture is obvious; if Cranch is as painter what Tennyson is as poet, it is good--if not, it is bad. What do you think? When a man illustrates a poem he is pledged by the poem, hence the absurdity of Martyn's drawings from the "Paradise Lost," and the various pictures of Belshazzar's feast. Only the Madonnas of the greatest painters are satisfactory. But I shall not abandon myself to the tracking of these mysteries of art. I have been reading Goethe's "Tasso." Now I am at the "Sorrows of Werther." I am wonderfully impressed with his dramatic power. The "Egmont," "Iphigenia," and "Tasso" are grander than anything I know in modern literature, than anything else of his which I have read. The serene simplicity of the "Iphigenia" is like a keen blast of ocean air. It stands like a Grecian temple, but in the moonlight. Is not that because, as Fanny Kemble says, and so many have thought, he was a Heathen? He did not enter into the state called the Christian. He served gods, not a God; and had it been otherwise this tragedy had been full-bathed in sunlight. And yet I hardly dare to say anything decidedly of such a man. I shall condemn myself a little while hence if I do. Let me hear from you before I leave New York, which will be in two or three weeks. I shall not leave all my good friends, and all the fine music here, without a pang. But if we stop for pangs! Will you send me the number of the "Mondschein," and the "Tempest" sonata? Yr friend, G.W. CURTIS. XII N.Y., _Monday morning, April 8th, 1844._ The last few days have been like glimpses of Brook Farm, seeing so constantly Mr. Ripley, and Charles, and Liszt, and Isaac, and Georgiana, and Margaret Fuller. The last three days of the past week were occupied by the sessions of the Convention, about which there was no enthusiasm, but an air of quiet resolution which always precedes success. To be sure, the success, to me, is the constant hope in humanity that inspires them, the sure, glowing prophecies of paradise and heaven, being individual not general prophecies, and announcing the advent in their own hearts and lives of the feet beautiful of old upon the mountains. In comparison with this what was done, and what was doing, lost much of its greatness. Leave to Albert Brisbane, and _id omne genus_, these practical etchings and phalansteries; but let us serve the gods without bell or candle. Have these men, with all their faith and love, not yet full confidence in love? Is that not strong enough to sway all institutions that are, and cause to overflow with life? does that ask houses and lands to express its power? does it not ride supreme over the abounding selfishness of the world, and so raise men from their sorrow and degradation, or so inspire them that their hovels are good enough for them? But all difference of thought vanished before the profound, sincere eloquence of these men. Last night, at W.H. Channing's church, the room was full, and the risen Lord Jesus might have smiled upon a worthy worship. From all sections were gathered in that small room men led by the same high thought, and in the light of that thought joining hearts and hands, unknown to each other, never to be seen again, and in the early dawn setting forth with hard hands and stout hearts to hew down the trees which shall be wrought into the stately dwellings for those who come after in the day. So knelt the devoted Pilgrims upon the sands of Holland, and embarked upon that doubtful sea. They fought and perished; their homes were pierced with the Indian's bullet and flames of fire; the solitude of stern forests scared not their hearts, and we follow now and live in peace. It was something to have felt and seen such heroism. The meetings of the convention were made interesting by some speeches of W.H. Channing. His fervor kindles the sympathy of all who listen. I do not think he is a man of great intellect; his views of society are not always correct. He speaks very often as an infidel-in-the-capability- of-men might speak. He is fanatical, as all who perceive by the heart and not the head are, as deeply pious men are apt to be. But I never heard so eloquent a man, one who commanded attention and sympathy, not by his words or thoughts, but the religion that lay far below them. It is a warm, fragrant, southern wind at which the heart leaps, not the pure, cold, ocean air which braces the frame. Between him and some whom I have heard is the same difference as between Goethe and Novalis. The one a June meadow, with flower-scents and cloud-shadows and the soft, sultry music of humming-bees and singing-birds, with clear skies bending over; a deep sea the other, whereon sail stately ships, wafted by health-bearing breezes, in whose waters the sick gain strength, in whose soundless depths the coral and the precious stones repose forever, which supplies the clouds whose shadow makes the meadow beautiful. Indeed, how glorious is the range and variety of character among which we move. Though the stars differ in glory they all make the sky fair, and do not clash in their revolutions. That dissimilarity is the secret of friendship, which educates to stand alone. Indeed--to make a most heretical conclusion--the race exists to teach me to live without it. My friend, God has no need of creatures, but he is not less nearly bound to them. I send you the final number of _The Present_. You will see my article, "a poor thing, but mine own." To you it will be nothing new. It seems to me I have used some of the same sentences in speaking to you. _The Dial_ stops. Is it not like the going out of a star? Its place was so unique in our literature! All who wrote and sang for it were clothed in white garments; and the work itself so calm and collected, though springing from the same undismayed hope which fathers all our best reforms. But the intellectual worth of the time will be told in other ways, though _The Dial_ no longer reports the progress of the day. On Friday we leave for Boston. I do not know precisely if we shall go immediately to Concord, for we are performing at the same time a duty of affection in accompanying to Mount Auburn the body of an uncle. We may possibly be detained in Boston until the following Monday, in which case I shall not fail to come out and see you. So endeth my New York correspondence. Yours truly and ever, G.W. CURTIS. MUSIC AND OLE BULL We know little of the art of music; though our concerts are crowded, and the names of the composers familiar. But our reverence to the Masters in art is like the reverence for the Bible, not a hearty one. A late musical reviewer well says, that the admiration of the Parisians for Beethoven is a conceit. That calculation answers for our meridian. Slight Italian scholars are eloquent in their admiration of Dante, but the depths and majesty of his poem are explored by few. The dullest may recognize the beauty of feature, but the soul which inspires quite eludes them. During the performance of a symphony the audience smile and shake when the airs float out of the orchestra, not observing that they are the breathing-places, the relaxation of the composer. Every one who can play can compose tunes, but to the lover of the art they yield no greater pleasure than the rhymes of a poem. Often the grandest passages are most melodious, as in poems the greatest thought suggests the happiest expression. Tune and song occupy a distinct portion of the realm of music. They are _attaches_ to the royal court. Perhaps the finest music is allied to verse, but if it be a true marriage, the music comprehends the whole. No artist would hear the words of one of Handel's or Haydn's choral hosannas. The words are the translation, but the scholar will not accept that. Music is an art distinct and self-sufficient. It represents the harmony of that interior truth which all art seeks to reveal, and whose beauty and grace appear in painting and sculpture. The interpreters of that harmony are sounds, which are related to music as colors to painting, and the fullest expression is given to them by instrumental combination. The human voice in respect of the art is valuable as an instrument, and in suppleness may exceed mechanical contrivances; wherefore one readily understands why a mighty chorus is introduced in the finale of the grandest symphony, that the whole effect may be duly crowned, and the appeal to the heart be assured by the union of human sounds. But with such an effect words have nothing to do. The charm of the foreign opera to us Americans is, that the full music of the Masters is received with syllables meaning to us no more than the fa-sol-la of the gamut. The reason of this is very evident. If the poetry be good it has a rhythm and cadence of its own which resembles music, but in respect of art belongs to poetry and not to music. Arbitrarily united with melody the words obtrude a meaning which the music may not suggest, though the capacity of fine music is equal to any words. The beauty of Schubert's songs is their completeness. They are lyrics, and the words are only an addition. Those who heard Rakemann play the translated serenade will remember that the instrumentation produced the whole effect of the song. If the music be fine, it gives all the sentiment of the words in its own way. It is like painting a statue to unite them. Sometimes, indeed, one feels that both are written from the same mood in the grandest minds. The mysterious charms of Goethe's song of Mignon, to which Beethoven wrote the music, is that the song is the expression of the same awe-struck yearning which wails and thunders through the music of the master. In the melody alone all the wild vagueness and dim aspiration of the song are manifest, and only because the union is perfect is the impression uniform. Should Wilhelm Meister be lost to literature the blossom of Mignon's life would still bloom in the music. The same necessity which divided art into the arts ordains their practical separation. Because they are divisions of one their impression is similar. They work to the same end, but each has a way. To complete the harmony, the soprano, and the tenor, and the bass, must all strictly observe their parts. So must the arts. It is a mournful degradation when the composer would make his sounds, colors, as those who heard the battle of Waterloo symphony will not soon forget. Without his interference, the relation between his art and the rest will be preserved. In his symphony he is the spiritual significance of the Apollo and the Iliad; and the graceful, romantic songs of Mozart are in the drops of poetry scattered upon the old drama, and in the infinite, tender beauty of Raphael's pictures. Yet this is a likeness as between woods and waters, and with which we have nothing to do. If a reply be sought to the question, why the grandest compositions of this art are more generally impressive than the efforts of the pure science, it may be reached in various ways. The old masters, doubtless, obeyed an unconscious instinct in joining words to their music. Then, as now, the art was in its young years, and the words served as a dictionary to the student. Merely as a dictionary, for the deep significance of the thing could not be apprehended until that was thrown aside, and the scholar read and spoke and lived in that high language as in his daily speech. The best American critic of the art says, speaking of the Messiah, "Feeling that it was time now to do something more worthy his genius, and more fitting his years, as he was getting old, he resolved to draw from all the sources of his art, and put forth all his power, to make an eloquent exposition of his faith in music, and interpret the Bible thus to the hearts of all men." And yet, hitherto, have not the sublime fragments he culled from the Bible served as expositors of the Oratorio? The Messiah is the celebration, in Handel's way, of the great things of his life, which, more or less, are the remarkable experience of all men, and which receive the grandest verbal expression in the Bible. Having this same confession to make, and obeying a different means from Moses and the apostles, a means which few could understand, what remained but to transcribe the sublimest verbal record men knew, and tell them that that was a free translation of his thought. So, in later times, Beethoven replied to one who asked the meaning of a sonata, "Read Shakespeare's Tempest." With the masses and operas of modern times the case is the same. Genius, which is plenitude of power, adapts itself to all facts. It will receive the outline of a story and weave upon it a wonderful web, which the story shall interpret. But an opera of Mozart's reveals to the voiceless player its whole magnificence. Trilling Prima Donnas and silvery Italian are the addenda and vocabulary. They are the "this is the man, this the beast" written under the picture. The severe beauty of the art is immediately injured by any encroachment upon the others. The highest praise awarded to the most successful of such attempts is that of imitation. Haydn would represent the growing of grass and the budding of trees--a beautiful conceit, but a false perception of his art. Art has little to do with imitation. The best portrait is not the fac-simile of a face, but the suggestion of a character. Music has not to do with form but thought. The Germans derive no more pleasure from the songs of their masters than we who may not know their language. The second question is that of persons who do not understand the claims of music to the dignity of an art, whom pleasant old songs pleasantly lull to sleep after dinner; to whom comes no voice of the art separate from all things else, but which stands before him silent and veiled, while an interpreter converses. Often these songs are beautiful ballads, and so have a peculiar grace. If the music is appropriate and simple and melodious it is enough, and henceforth, to such, no artist who does not play tunes is more than a quack; and the complaint of the man who sat hearing Ole Bull for an hour, and then departed because he was so long tuning his fiddle, is the most general criticism upon his performance. But the old Scotch and Irish airs, which endear these songs to us, were doubtless, at some remote period, the wordless singings of maternal love over the rocking-cradle. They become readily united with words as a help to the memory, and as imparting facility of expression. Those who have heard "Auld Robin Gray," "Robin Adair," and the airs which Moore has gratefully accompanied with words, played on summer evenings, with flutes and horns, then realize that the impression lies in that which the words shadow. This fact is recognized in modern music by the introduction of songs without words--by the composition and performance, with more or less success, of Beethoven's symphonies, where most of all words are at fault. The pleasure of him to whom these profound compositions reveal a meaning is more private and enchanting than any he knows. He is very well content to be called enthusiastic, for his presence along justifies the performance of such works. When he meets at the concert-room those who are enraptured with Donizetti, yet who come to do homage to Beethoven, he is reminded that Beethoven would not see Rossini, holding him as one who debased the art; and it seems to him like Jesus calling upon the Jews to become as little children. Everybody reads Shakespeare, but few know what the word means. The theatre is crowded to hear Macready's "Hamlet," but it is to see Macready, not to study the drama. When he is gone the play remains; and though it is spoken by stupid men, their dulness cannot affect its profundity and strength. That is the test of art, that it transcends its instruments; and the artist at his piano realizes the soul, though not the effect of the symphony which has spoken to him so loudly from the orchestra. The music written at this day is gymnastics for the instrument, rather than worthy offerings upon the altar of art. It is a perverse separation of the art and the science. It requires an accurate knowledge of the instrument that it may surprise, and so win applause for the performer; not that it may the better serve music, whether it has auditors or not. Few things could have more deeply pained a worthy musician than the last concert of Max Bohrer. Such profound knowledge of the power of the instrument, such utter ignorance of its intention. It seemed to groan in despair, that he, who knew its changes so well, could not awaken it to melody, but, with solemn conceit, show that he did know them, and gain approbation for that knowledge. Knoop, with the same exact science, showed a hearty reverence for art, and reverently withdrew himself and his violoncello. Castellan's voice was so full that her person was necessarily forgotten. One would not do injustice to the voice; that is frequently the instrument for which fine music is written; but in view of the art, it is an instrument only. Its deeper effect upon many minds springs from its humanity, from that part of it of which nothing can be said, and which the coal-man has as well as Malibran. This constitutes its occasional superiority of influence, but cannot impart to it the effect and artistic manifestation which instruments produce. When the full force of both is united, as in the symphony mentioned, the grandest musical expression appears. The winter has been full of finer musical experience than we have yet had. With Ole Bull, Vieuxtemps, and Knoop, Castellan and Damoreau--the Beethoven symphonies and German overtures of the Philharmonic Society, the art has reached a point hitherto unattained. Yet this is partly deceptive. Most persons heard Ole Bull from curiosity, and the symphonies from fashion. Such music and such artists have no permanent hold of the heart here. The pianos are covered with the songs of Donizetti; and Max Bohrer takes, generally, a higher rank than Knoop. The student of art does not regard these noble artists and fine music as the dawning of the art among us, but as brighter stars flashing across the sky, while still the east is dark. Europe has made these artists and this music after many centuries. In the bosom of a church, full of profound spiritual experiences, this music has been nurtured, and artistic devotion has streamed upon these men. The necessity of this hoary antiquity to the development of art we cannot readily determine. Our painters and sculptors must flock to Italy, and lie down in the shadows of those old fanes, before they are willing to announce their claim to be servants of the art. Our poets sing in self-defence the majesty and grandeur of primeval America, and drink deeply at the stream of letters that flows from the Past. Had foreign literature been cut off from us, we should have had few writers of poetry, and Mr. Griswold's book had been a valuable duodecimo and not a heavy octavo. Our chief poets are cultivated men. Poetry with us is the recreation of elegant scholars. Mr. Percival announces that he writes poetry in more than a hundred ways; and the few young men who seem to advance first claims to the dignity of poets, by their fresh expression, need the overshadowing of Time to make them artists. How especially is this so with music. We have no native artists and few hearty students. The societies which introduce to us the finest music are German, our musical teachers are Germans and Italians, our opera is Italian. Of this no complaint is to be made. The nation is content with a foreign fragrance, as the individual students are content to live in Rome and send home to us the ideas of an old mythology wrought into statues. Art is the flower of life. The man will build his house, then he will have pictures and a piano. The claims of the interior life will surely be heard at last, and art will follow. Yankees and Wall Street govern now, Niagara by-and-by. The prophecies of our American literature, with which the literary anniversaries are annually eloquent, are sure. Contemplating the healthy seed which they represent, we need not fear for the flower. But the literature and art will be American only in respect of culture. The German music is an universal song, sung in a provincial dialect. The immortality of the classics is the universality of their truth. English and Italian art are the several ways that nations regard the same thing. The soul of music, as of painting and poetry, is always one. The foreigner is no longer a foreigner when he hears the music he loves; and silent under its spell, lovers, for the first time, meet. In the Louvre or the Vatican will not the traveller see his home? Yet in our present backwoods life let me not omit to notice the wonderful artist whom we have recently seen. The genius of Ole Bull is so delicate and profound that we must speak of it modestly, but with certainty. It is not to be estimated by comparison. The height assures us of its loftiness, not by the inferior summits below it, but by the wide, full sunlight and the free winds that flow around it and rest upon it. The perception of genius is so sure that we need not attempt to define what it is. Every artist, full of its power, shows something more than the last. Like beauty, it will not be measured, but every beautiful person shames our analysis and philosophy of beauty. Yet the impression of genius is always the same, and its appearance in any one individual makes real to us all the rest. Until we heard Ole Bull, Paganini was a fabulous being of whom, as of Orpheus and Amphion, strange stories were told, which seemed rather prophecies of musical possibility than the history of actual accomplishment. Henceforth Paganini is a household god, and the old Pagans loom more distinctly through the misty centuries and wear something of the aspect of reality. To us, children of a seventy years' nation, plucking the full blossom of European musical culture, the appearance of Ole Bull was like a new star in the sky. Few had predicted its shining. At most, there was a faint hope, in some minds, that we should yet see a worthy minister of art, in honoring whom we should fitly reverence the Masters. Yet it was a hope too faint and limited to inspire confidence in our manager to secure to himself a fair portion of the ample harvest nodding for so sharp a sickle. When he appeared, that wild Norwegian bravery, subdued by a reverence for art and deepened by commanding originality, the shouting theatre, the crowded tabernacle, the press for once speaking confidently in one tone, the silent joy of hearts to whom this was the first vision of genius--these announced a triumph. The ecstatic musical festivals of Europe, the pilgrimages of artists more royally surrounded than the progress of kings, we now understood. The chief value of Ole Bull is that he introduces us more nearly to art. It is the prerogative of genius to illustrate that; therefore he stood before us as one who had in rapt hours pierced a little further into the mystery which envelops life like an atmosphere and came to recite his vision. He had detected some of those fine sunbeams that make the air golden and give it warmth, and painted them for us as well as he could. Yet in his music there was the same melancholy strain, varied by wonderful and wild freaks, like the hysterics of the gods, that hitherto so emphatically characterizes the works of genius. Throughout his compositions there was the want of unity which expressed aspiration not fulfilment, scattered stones of a fairer temple than men have seen, which also are all works of art hitherto, yet each so fair that for these the old shrines are deserted, and here men worship. One perceived that the performance was the least part of the man. It was not his height and limit, a faint beacon-light, rather, trembling over the waters, marking the shore of a wide land, with deep ravines and towering mountains and endless woods fringing depthless seas, and yet a light so bright that we thought the sun was rising. For the genius which enables one to illustrate art is universal power, whose expression is inadequate because thought is quicker than execution. Every work of art represents an era past. Only the whole character of the artist is the present flower of his life. It is no matter of surprise that Ole Bull practises little, that his compositions are unique. A deep rhythm, a subdued, infinite harmony pervades them. The rugged Norway shows in them its influence upon the artist. The rocks and glens and forests of his fatherland are not painted, but their spiritual significance floats through his music, modified and moulded by the individuality of the man. All this appears in his aspect. As he advances, the strong, composed grace of his appearance, deferential not to individuals but to the mind which shall receive the song of his inspiration, destroys conventional ideas of grace, as Mont Blanc might destroy them. His tall, compact figure well becomes a priest of art. Out of his eyes shines the reflection of the perpetual fire of which all artists are the ministers and which communicates energy and warmth to his action. With a slight, respectful motion of the head and violin-bow towards the orchestra, the respect of Olympian power, he draws from them the first notes of the symphony; then, leaning his head upon his instrument caressingly, as if he gratefully heard at once what he is about to unfold to the audience, he draws his bow. Then that violin expresses with intense passion the undefined yearnings that haunt the private heart. It entreats and restrains. Its wildness harmonizes with the deep unrest of a great aspiring soul. Its solemn movement is like the progress of a brave man to an unknown destiny, and as the last yet distinct cadence floats away into the stillness, it is as if a dove disappeared in heaven. At his second concert he played an adagio of Mozart. It was full of tender delicacy and the graceful imagination that makes all his music romance. All this the artist felt, and every tone that followed his bow was exquisite. Then was it seen how all genius meets. It was as if the composer lay in the violin and sang the song anew, as if Raphael recited one of Shakespeare's sonnets. With what has been said about the man one who realizes the genius has little to do. The music was not false, and that is his language. There has been stern opposition and prejudice and ill-will; but so we must all bring our gifts to the altar, and they who have not gold gifts must tender swine. Not the least of his offices is that he has enabled us to appreciate Vieuxtemps. They will not be compared by the reverent worshipper at the shrine of art. The plant needs the sunshine and the dew. It was pleasant to feel that genius abides in one man and realize that one star differeth from another in glory. Surely the firmament of art is wide enough and yet deep enough to contain many planets. Yet the artists are but messengers whom we send before into the undiscovered country. They return and sing to us songs familiar in the Eldorado of our hope, yet of which we have learned no note. Afloat upon the depthless sea we loose doves and ravens, who bear back to us olive boughs and flowers which we cannot analyze, but whose form and fragrance make our homes beautiful. When the first shock of delighted wonder is past we receive great men as the present attainment of an illimitable Nature, as the Earth receives the light of stars, unnoticed save of wandering lovers, and sweeps undisturbed on its way. If sometimes we are warped from our sphere by the apparition of noble persons, wise men presently recover themselves and serve with a milder and firmer persistence their own nature. The way is made clearer by these bright lights, universal nature is fairer that there are so many single stars; but they must be only stars in our heaven and fires on our hearth, nor turn out the heart by inserting themselves in the bosom. G.W.C. XIII CONCORD, _Friday evening, May 10th, 1844._ Since our arrival here I have been busy enough. From breakfast at 6 to dinner at 12-1/2, hard at work, and all the afternoon roaming over the country far and near. When we came the spring was just waking, now it is opening like a rose-bud, with continually deepening beauty. The apple-trees in full bloom, making the landscape so white, seem to present a synopsis of the future summer glory of the flower-world. Our farm lies on one of the three hills of Concord. They call it Punkatassett. Before us, at the foot of the hill, is the river; and the slope between holds a large part of the Captain's orchard. Among the hills at one side we see the town, about a mile away; and a wide horizon all around, which Elizabeth Hoar tells me she has learned is the charm of Concord scenery. The summit of the hill on which we are is crowned with woods, and from a clearing commands a grand prospect. Wachusett rises alone upon the distance, and takes the place of the ocean in the landscape. There is a limitation in the prospect if one cannot see the sea or mountains. The Blue Hill, in a measure, supplies that want at West Roxbury. Otherwise the landscape is a garden which only pleases. We are much pleased with our host and his family. He is that Capt. Nathan Barrett to whom Messrs. Pratt and Brown came for seed, and who raises a good deal of seed for Ruggles, Nourse and Mason. We go into all work. The Captain turns us out with the oxen and plough, and we do our best. Already I have learned a good deal. The men are very courteous and generous. Indeed, I am disposed to think it just the place we wanted. As yet I see no reason to doubt it. It is so still a life after the city, and after the family at Brook Farm. I am glad to be thrown so directly and almost alone into nature, and am more ready than ever to pay my debt in a human way by learning the names of her beautiful flowers and the places where they blossom. We study Botany daily, and have thus far kept pace with the season. I have found here the yellow violet, which I do not remember at West Roxbury. Already we have the rhodora and the columbine, which you have probably found. And with our afternoons surrendered to the meadows and hills, and our mornings to the fields, we find no heavy hours; but every Sunday surprises us. I am to bed at 9, and rise at 4-1/2 or 5. I practise the Orphic, which says: "Baptize thyself in pure water every morning when thou leavest thy couch," which I more concisely render, Wash betimes. For the last three evenings I have been in the village, hearing Belinda Randall play and sing. With the smallest voice she sings so delicately, and understands her power so well, that I have been charmed. It was a beautiful crown to my day, not regal and majestic, like Frances O.'s in the ripe summer, but woven of spring flowers and buds. Last night I saw her at Mr. Hoar's, only herself and Miss E. Hoar, G.P. Bradford, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, and myself and Mr. Hoar. She played Beethoven, sang the "Adelaide Serenade," "Fischer Madchen," "Amid this Green Wood." I walked home under the low, heavy, gray clouds; but the echo lingered about me like starlight. We have a piano in the house, and a very good one. It was made by Currier, and is but a few years old. The evenings do not all pass without reminding me of the flute music of the last summer, and making me half long to hear it again. Yet I am too contented to wish to be back at the Farm. The country about us is wilder than there; but I need now this tender severity of nature and of friendship. With John Hosmer, Isaac, Geo. Bradford, and Burrill, I am not without some actual features of the Farm as I knew it. When I shall see you I cannot say. I shall not willingly break the circle of life here, though occasion will make me willing enough. Let me not remain unmentioned to my friends at Brook Farm and in the village; and when you can _ungroup_ yourself for an hour paint me a portrait of the life you lead. Yr friend, G.W.C. XIV CONCORD, _May 24th, '44._ My dear Friend,--I heard of you at Ole Bull's concert, and have sympathized with you in your delight. I was in Worcester that evening, and had hoped to have come down to Boston and heard him once more. But so many were listening with that pleasure which can come but once, and I knew so many must try in vain to hear, that I was content others should then express that admiration which lies so deeply in my heart. But who of all heard? Was it not as if he walked above the earth, and of his sublime conversation you heard now and then the notes? Did not the singular beauty of the man unite with his performance to make the completest musical festival you have had? Indeed, I owe more to him than one can know, except as he feels the same debt; are you not that one? To Belinda Randall, who has been here, as I told you, I was obliged for revealing Beethoven's tenderness. She is so soft and tender herself that she could not fail unconsciously to express it in her playing. I passed some fine evenings with her. Since I had been here I had heard no music, and felt that I needed to hear some as an adequate expression of all that I felt. When she came that demand was satisfied. Ole Bull satisfies the claim of the same nature which our whole life makes, and of itself creates, rather reveals newer and deeper demands, and so on, I suppose, until the celestial harmonies are heard by us. I heard from a friend of the last Philharmonic in New York. It seems they have made Vieux-temps an honorary member, and he played for them. On the same evening they performed one of Beethoven's symphonies. It is one of those accounts whose beauty is their nakedness. To lovers of music a bare description is as an outline to a painter which he can readily fill up and supply with the shadows and sunlight. Yet not he so magnificently as sunlight and shadows sweep over this landscape. It seems to me that a century of splendor has been rushing by since I have been here. The persons who make Concord famous I have hardly seen. The consciousness of their presence is like the feeling of lofty mountains whom the night and thick forests hide. Of one of them, E. Hoar, I need to say nothing to you. One evening I sat with her and Waldo Emerson and Geo. P. Bradford while Belinda Randall played and sang. Isaac brings you this, and will himself best tell you of himself. Burrill is well, and unites with me in remembrance to all who remember. Your friend, G.W.C. XV CONCORD, _June 26th, 1844._ These are Tophetic times. I doubt if the sturdy faith of those heroes, Shadrack and co., would carry them through this fervor unliquefied. Their much vaunted furnace was but a cool retreat where thoughts of great-coats were possible, compared with this. And if that nether region of whose fires so much is sung by poets and other men possessed, can offer hotter heats, let them be produced. Those Purgatorial ardencies for the gentle suggestion of torment to thin shades can have little in common with these perspiration-compelling torridities. Why does not some ingenious Yankee improve such times for the purchase, at a ruinous discount, of all thick clothes? I tremble lest some one should offer me an ice-cream for my best woollens! Is it human to resist such an offer? Does it not savor something of Devildom, and a too great familiarity with that lower Torrid Zone, to entertain such a proposition cool-ly? when such a word grows suddenly obsolete in such seasons? If I venture to move, such an atmosphere of heat is created immediately around my body that all cool breezes (if the imagination is competent to such a conception) are like arid airs when they reach my mouth. Perhaps we are tending to those final, fiery days of which Miller is a prophet. We are slowly sinking, perhaps, from heat to heat, until entire rarefication and evanishment in imperceptible vapor ensues; and so the great experiment of a world may end in smoke, as many minor ones have ended. If it were not so hot, I should love to think about these things. June 28th. So far I had proceeded on the afternoon I returned to Concord. When I desisted I supposed I had inscribed my final manuscript, and that only a cinder would be found sitting over it when some one should enter. Yet by the providence of God I am preserved for the experience of greater heats. I did not know before what was the capacity of endurance of the human frame. I begin to suspect we are of nearer kin to the Salamander than our pride will allow; and since Devils only are admitted to nether fire, I begin to lapse into the credence of total depravity!! Reflect upon my deplorable condition! As Shelley's body, when lifeless, was caused to disappear in flames and smoke, so may mine before its tenant is departed. Was it not prophetic that on Sunday afternoon the following lines came to me while thinking of that poet? SHELLEY A smoke that delicately curled to heaven, Mingling its blueness with the infinite blue, So to the air the faded form was given, So unto fame the gentle spirit grew. And as Shelley and Keats are associated always together in my mind, immediately the Muse gave me this: KEATS A youth did plight his troth to Poesy. "Thee only," were the fervent words he said, Then sadly sailed across the foaming sea, And lay beneath the southern sunset dead. I was glad that once I could express what I think about those men. These will show you, but you must write your own poem upon them before you will be satisfied. Is it not so always? We cannot speak much about poets until our thought of them sings itself. The day I left you was very hot in Boston. Anna Shaw and Rose Russell passed me like beautiful spirits; one like a fresh morning, the other like an Oriental night. Then I did my business, and met James Sturgis, who carried me to see his head cut in cameo by Mr. King. It is quite good, though it gives him rather a finer head than he has; but that's a good failing. I went to the Athenaeum. There I saw one or two pictures, and much paint upon canvas. Those that I liked I saw belonged to the Athenaeum, and I suppose were old objects to those who are familiar with the gallery. A face of Ophelia interested me. It was very simple and sweet. But I was so warm that I could do little more than lay upon a bench and catch dreamy glimpses of the walls. The sculpture gallery, full of white marble heads, seemed quite cool. My dear Friend, I shall melt and be mailed in this letter as a spot if I do not surcease. May you be blest with frigidity, a blessing far removed from my hope. Of course I must be warmly, nay, _hotly_ remembered to Charles. Yrs ever, G.W.C. XVI CONCORD, _August 7th, 1844._ My regret at not seeing you was only lessened by the beautiful day I passed with Mr. Hawthorne. His life is so harmonious with the antique repose of his house, and so redeemed into the present by his infant, that it is much better to sit an hour with him than hear the Rev. Barzillai Frost! His baby is the most serenely happy I ever saw. It is very beautiful, and lies amid such placid influences that it too may have a milk-white lamb as emblem; and Mrs. Hawthorne is so tenderly respectful towards her husband that all the romance we picture in a cottage of lovers dwells subdued and dignified with them. I see them very seldom. The people here who are worth knowing, I find, live very quietly and retired. In the country, friendship seems not to be of that consuming, absorbing character that city circumstances give it, but to be quite content to feel rather than hear or do; and that very independence which withdraws them into the privacy of their homes is the charm which draws thither. Mr. Emerson read an address before the anti-slavery "friends" last Thursday. It was very fine. Not of that cold, clear, intellectual character which so many dislike, but ardent and strong. His recent reading of the history of the cause has given him new light and warmed a fine enthusiasm. It commenced with allusions to the day "which gives the immense fortification of a fact to a great principle," and then drew in strong, bold outline the progress of British emancipation. Thence to slavery in its influence upon the holders, to the remark that this event hushed the old slander about inferior natures in the negro, thence to the philosophy of slavery, and so through many detached thoughts to the end. It was nearly two hours long, but was very commanding. He looked genial and benevolent, as who should smilingly defy the world, the flesh, and the devil to ensnare him. The address will be published by the society; and he will probably write it more fully, and chisel it into fitter grace for the public criticism. He spoke of your unfortunate call, but said you bore the sulkiness very well. George Bradford was also very sorry; and it was bad that you should come so far, with the faces of friends for a hospitable city before you, and find a mirage only, or (begging Burrill's pardon) one house. For the last six weeks I have been learning what hard work is. Afternoon leisure is now remembered with the holiday which Saturday brought to the school-boy. During the haying we have devoted all our time and faculty to the making of hay, leaving the body at night fit only to be devoted to sheets and pillows, and not to grave or even friendly epistolary intercourse. Oh friends! live upon faith, say I, as I pitch into bed with the ghosts of Sunday morning resolutions of letters tickling my sides or thumping my back, and then sink into dreams where every day seems a day in the valley of Ajalon, and innumerable Joshuas command the sun and moon to stay, and universal leisure spreads over the universe like a great wind. Then comes morning and wakefulness and boots and breakfast and scythes and heat and fatigue, and all my venerable Joshuas endeavor in vain to make oxen stand still, and I heartily wish them and I back in our valley ruling the heavens and not bending scythes over unseen hassocks which do sometimes bend the words of our mouths into shapes resembling oaths! those most crooked of all speech, but therefore best and fittest for the occasional crooks of life, particularly mowing. Yet I mow and sweat and get tired very heartily, for I want to drink this cup of farming to the bottom and taste not only the morning froth but the afternoon and evening strength of dregs and bitterness, if there be any. When haying is over, which event will take place on Saturday night of this week, fair weather being vouchsafed, I shall return to my moderation. Towards the latter part of the month I shall stray away towards Providence and Newport and sit down by the sea, and in it, too, probably. So I shall pass until harvest. Where the snows will fall upon me I cannot yet say. Say to Charles that I was sorry not to have seen him; but if persons of consequence will travel without previous annunciation, they may chance to find even the humblest of their servants not at home. I know you will write when the time comes, so I say nothing but that I am your friend ever. G.W.C. XVII CONCORD, _Sept. 23, 1844._ Shall we not see you on the day of the cattle-show? Certainly Brook Farm will be represented; and I think you may, by this time, be farmer enough to enjoy the cattle and the ploughing. Besides, as I remember a similar excursion last year at which I assisted, the splendor of the early morning, which was not yet awake when we came away from the Farm, will amply repay any extraordinary effort. And still another besides; I do not want the winter to build its white, impenetrable walls between us before I have heard your voice once more. I should hope to come and look at you for one day, at least, in West Roxbury; but our Captain has work, autumnal work, the end whereof is not comprehended by the unassisted human vision. Potato-digging, apple-picking, thrashing, the gathering of innumerable seeds, must be done before winter; and yet to-day is like a despatch from December to announce that snow and ice and wind are to be just as cold this winter as they were the last. And I have had a long vacation, too. I think, on the very day after I wrote my last letter to you, as I was whetting my scythe for the last swath of the season, my hat half fell off, and suddenly raising my hand to catch it, I thrust it against the scythe and cut my thumb just upon the joint. It has healed, but I shall never find it quite as agile as formerly. I could not use the hand--my right hand--for more than a fortnight. It was like losing a sense to lose its use. After a week of inaction in Concord, I went to Rhode Island and remained three weeks, and am now at home a fortnight. I came back more charmed than ever with Concord, which hides under a quiet surface most precious scenes. I suppose we see more deeply into the spirit of a landscape where we have been happy. Then we behold the summer bloom. It is spring or autumn or winter to men generally. We shall remain with Capt. Barrett through the winter. The spring will bring its own arrangements, or rather the conclusion of those which are formed during the winter. I suspect that our affections, like our bodies, have been transplanted to Massachusetts, and that our lives will grow in the new soil. Not at all ambitious of settling and becoming a citizen, I am very well content with the nomadic life until obedience to the law of things shall plant me in some home. And are you still at home in the Farm? Rumors, whose faces I cannot fairly see, pass by me sometimes, breathing your name and others. But I have long ago turned rumor out-of-doors as an impostor and impertinent person, who apes the manners and appearance of its betters. I shall receive none as from you, however loudly they may shout your name, except they show your hand and seal. Autumn has already begun to leave the traces of her golden fingers upon the brakes, and occasionally upon some tall nut-trees. It seems as if she were trying her skill before she comes like a wind over the landscape. She warbles a few glittering notes before the mournful, majestic Death-song. Dear friend, why should I send you this chip of ore out of the mine of regard which is yours in my heart? Come and dig in it. Your friend, G.W. CURTIS. XVIII CONCORD, _January 12, '45._ My dear Friend,--I have written Burrill to look at the Custom-house, and inquire about the method of warming by water. He replies that he has been there, but defers writing to you until he learns more about the matter. Through him I received a message from Isaac to tell you that he (I) can procure an edition of the Beethoven Sonatas (26, I believe) for about $10. I think it highly probable that I shall pass some weeks in Providence next month, and so will defer my day with you at Brook Farm until that time, of which I will inform you. Burrill has not yet returned, and leaves me still a hermit. I am well pleased with my solitude, nor do I care much to go out of the country during the winter; but domestic circumstances make it advisable to go to Providence. There I shall have a good library at hand, which I miss a good deal here. Indeed, I think it likely that every year while my home is in the country I may perform a pilgrimage to the city for two or three months for purposes of art and literature and affection, for, as there seems in the minds of divines to be some doubt of personal identity when this mortal coil is shuffled off, I am fain to embrace my friends' coils while they are yet palpable. This idea of city visits implies a very free life; but there seems now to be no hinderance to it. When the band of Phalanxes, proceeding into desert and free air, no more allow art to rendezvous in cities, I can take one of the nearest radiating railroads and rush from my solitude into the healthily-peopled and cityish-countrified Phalanx. I am loath to forgive Fourier the unmitigated slander upon the moon. I began to suspect that was the only influence alive since the sun lights men to cheating and deviltry; and the moon recalls the sweetest remembrance and best hope. After our evening at Almira's it lighted me home with such forgiving splendor that I could have fallen on my knees in the snow and have prayed its pardon if it would not have chilled those members. Almira I have not seen since Wednesday. She was then well, and went with me to hear Dr. Francis lecture upon Bishop Berkeley. He told the life, which is the most poetical and beautiful of any of his contemporary philosophers, and then suggested that the "limits of a lecture" did not permit an extended notice of his philosophy, and so gave none. Among my holiday gifts was Miss Barrett's poems. She is a woman of vigorous thought, but not very poetical thought, and throwing herself into verse involuntarily becomes honied and ornate, so that her verse cloys. It is not natural, quite. Tennyson's world is purple, and all his thoughts. Therefore his poetry is so, and so naturally. Wordsworth lives in a clear atmosphere of thought, and his poetry is simple and natural, but no more than Tennyson's. Pardon these critical distinctions. I make them to have them expressed, for Burrill did not see why I called Miss Barrett purple. It was because her highly colored robe was not harmonious with her native style of thought. Ben Jonson, too, I have been reading. After him and Beaumont and Fletcher (who are imitators, rather, of Shakespeare), I feel that Shakespeare differed not in degree only but in kind from all others, his contemporaries and successors. In his peculiar path Jonson was unequalled, but Shakespeare includes that and so much more! He seems to be the only one to whom poets are content to be inferior. Remember me to Charles Dana and my other compeers at Brook Farm, especially Charles Newcomb. Yours sincerely, G.W.C. XIX My dear Friend,--If I should come to Brook Farm on Thursday evening will it be convenient, and shall you be at home? If all circumstances favor, I should like to remain with you until Saturday. On Thursday I shall go into Boston to hear what the Texas Convention is saying, and if I hear anything very eloquent or interesting may not see you until Friday. I was very sorry to know nothing of your convention until it was over. I should have run down to have seen you. On Saturday evening I was at the Academy, and on Sunday at the Handel and Haydn. I have by Burrill a letter from Cranch, and a book of German songs from Isaac. More anon. Your friend ever, G.W. Curtis. CONCORD, _January 28th_, 1845. XX PROVIDENCE, _March 5th, '45._ My dear Friend,--I hope to see you at Brook Farm by Friday, intending to remain until Friday P.M. Here in Providence I have been having a quiet good time, though the weeks have flown faster than I thought weeks could fly. Mrs. Burges received a _Phalanx_ from Miss Russell, in which we found a good deal of interesting matter. I hear from her that she will write by me to Miss Russell. To-day it rains merrily, a warm southern April rain; and the weeks of mild weather hint that there must be ploughing and sowing very soon. I anticipate my summer work with a good deal of pleasure. Yours truly and hastily, G.W. Curtis. XXI CONCORD, _March 13, '45._ My dear Friend,--The cold gray days at Brook Farm were the sunniest of the month. I wish I could step into the parlor when my heart is ready for music, and surrender to Beethoven and Mozart or, indeed, when I find men very selfish and mean, look in upon your kindliness and general sympathy. But while your intercourse at the Farm is so gentle and sweet you will not forget that it springs from the characters whose companions are still in outer darkness and civilization! I meet every day men of very tender characters under the roughest mien. Even in the midst of the world I constantly balance my ledger in favor of actual virtue, and enjoy intercourse, not so familiar but as sweet, as that I saw at Brook Farm. Is it not the tendency of a decided institution of reform to be unjust to the Barbarians? I do assure you the warm, tender south winds blow over us here in the unsocial state no less than the chilly east. The snow on the ground belies the season. It is warm to-day and the birds sing. I should have enjoyed more my ride in the soft snow on Tuesday if conscience had not arrayed me against Mr. Billings. But I am most glad to see that I am withdrawing from the argumentative. I begin to enjoy more than ever the pure still characters which I meet. Intellect is not quite satisfying though so alluring. It is a scentless flower; but there is a purer summer pleasure in the sweet-brier than the dahlia, though one would have each in his garden. It is because Shakespeare is not solely intellectual, but equally developed, that his fame is universal. The old philosophers, the sheer intellects, lack as much fitness to life as a man without a hand or an eye. And because life is interpreted by sentiment, the higher the flight of the intellect the colder and sadder is the man. Plato and Emerson are called poets, but if they were so their audience would be as wide as the world. Milton's fame is limited because he lacked a subtlety and delicacy corresponding with his healthiness and strength. Milton fused in Keats would have formed a greater than Shakespeare. If Milton's piety had been Catholic and not Puritanical I do not see why he should not have been a greater poet. I shall not have much work to do before we undertake our garden plot. We take care of the cattle daily, and that is about all. Yesterday in the sunlight I walked in the woods. It was a spectacle finer than the sleet--the flower of winter among the trees. I forgot to take the _Phalanxes_. Geo. Bradford asked me for a half-dozen. If you will send them to me I will give them to him. Almira says that he is now in a Brook Farm way. It is a species of chills and fever with him, as you know. Remember me to the Eaglets, Dolly and her friend, Mary especially; and tell Abby Foord I have already learned the Polonaise which she is practising. I sit and play it over and over, and think I shall never tire of it. It has a peculiar charm to me, as I have never heard it except in the Eyrie parlor. It will always float me back to that room. Will you say to Charles Newcomb that Burrill has destroyed all "the churchmen"? Remember me to your family and believe me, as always, G.W.C. XXII CONCORD, _April 22d, 1845._ Will you forgive me if I flood you with letters now while the mood of writing lasts? It seems that I must so exhaust some of the added life which spring infuses into my veins. The gray herbage of winter fades so slowly, so imperceptibly into the spring greenness, that I watch it with the curious eyes of a lover who sees gradual developments of deeper beauty in the face of his mistress. Do you note how every spring, sliding down from heaven with such intense life, quenches or rather subdues the remembrance of all past springs as a great gem surrounded in the ring by many small ones? And as I stood to-day, as if hearing the throb of the new active life in nature, for winter is more like the unchanged dead face of an intellectual person, the contrast of this steaming and heating life was suggested to me as is always the case, and necessarily so to the perfection of the thought. The idea of day is not symmetrical except when night is implied in thought, for if one could paint a portrait of the day, it would be brightness against darkness. Why are we so troubled or moved at death, elated or depressed? It cannot give anything, nor take. Every sphere satisfies its desires by its hopes, and so seems to show that life is only an effort at equilibrium. At least it does show that to this state. There is a perpetual balance in every experience, never a permanence, as night follows day, but never survives the sunrise. Plato nor Shakespeare have drunk all this beauty, and it seems not right to become cold and callous towards it, externally, as the dead are. If they see the soul of things, do they see the form of nature without the soul, as we do now? If death mark only a general expansion of life and nature, it is no more pleasant. With greater hopes greater desires; and, after all, it is only keeping a larger set of books. There is no standard of life, as there is none of character. A flower is sometimes as pure a satisfaction as a man or the thought of an archangel. It passes into a proverb that the beggar is happier than a king, and proverbs are only the homely disguises in which wisdom roams the world. The "Polarity" which Emerson talks about is the nearest approximation to the universal form of life, but this is constantly marred by a stray thought of permanence and the confusing hint of the passive mind that we suppose the balance to be the law, and are glad to accept night with day, and cold with heat, because there is a blindness in the spiritual eye which will not let us see the riper spirits who are not sated but satisfied with permanency. For there, too, is a reason that we are so glad to hide in the equipoise as an eternal fact that we are surfeited with constancy. Drowning in the malmsey-butt is no better than the Thames. Enjoyment to-day is secured by the certain prospect of sorrow to-morrow, which is not wilful, but a lesson of life, and as we suppose, at last, of the central life, just as the creation at daybreak is supported and adorned in the mind by the prospective tenderness of twilight. And this balancing, so universal in this sphere, in outward if not in real life, is therefore a fact, and why not as profound as any, since there is no standard of life? Is there any law at last? Nature seems so general and yet so intensely individual. As fine harmony results from the accord of distinct tones, and each tone an infinite division of vibrations. At bottom no things are similar. Harmony is only unison, not identity. Nature is like the ocean, which bears whole forests hewn into ships laden with treasure; but no bottom is found to support all the weight, only a drop resting upon a drop forever. The elephant that bore the earth stood upon a tortoise, who fortunately could keep his feet in his shell, and so had no need to stand anywhere! The spring day looks very inscrutably upon all such wandering fancies. Her beauty is very inexorable, yet fascinating beyond resistance. It is not regal and composing and self-finding as is the mellowed summer, but an alluring splendor. It is a bud in inner, as well as outer, expression, and not yet a satisfying flower. Yet in the young days of June is sometimes seen the sereneness of autumn. After the full summer it is quite plain. It is like a child with pale, consumptive hands. Yet this is a constant reference to unity, which just now seemed so far off. Beauty suggests what Truth only can answer and Goodness realize; and the whole circle of nature offers these three only, beauty, truth, and goodness, or, again, poetry, philosophy, religion, or, more subtly, tone, color, feeling. This lies beyond words, because they are an intellectual means. Music foreshadows their interpretation, but always faintly, as it does everything, because music is revealed only enough here that we may not be surprised hereafter in some sphere. This is an intellectual sphere, but music is sentiment, so it is here an accomplishment for women, and for men of finer natures. Music is the science of spiritual form; and poetry, which is the loftiest expression of the intellectual sphere, finds its profound distinction from prose, which is the language of the vulgar, in its spiritual and sensuous rhythm, and so is music applied to the intellectual state. Nature answers questions by removing us out of inquisitiveness. It is wilfully that we are querulous in nature, and not naturally. I just now went to the door, and the still beauty of the moonlight night makes me a little ashamed of my letter. If I had stayed all day in the woods, and seen you there, I should have been content to be silent; but removed from the immediate glow of nature, and sitting in a purely human society, surrounded by circumstances produced humanly, as the house and furniture, the mind is withdrawn into a separate chamber, like one who goes down from the house-top into a room and so looks towards the north or west or south, and does not see all around as before. Good-night, good friend. Yr. aff. G.W.C. XXIII CONCORD, _April 5th, 1845._ Judge, my unitary friend, how grateful was your letter, perfumed with flowers and moonlight, to an unfortunate up to his ears in manure and dish-water! For no happier is my plight at this moment. I snatch a moment out of the week wherein the significance of that fearful word _business_ has been revealed to me to send an echo, a reply to your good letter. Since Monday we have been moving and manuring and fretting and fuming and rushing desperately up and down turnpikes with bundles and baskets, and have arrived at the end of the week barely in order. Yesterday, in the midst, while I was escorting a huge wagon of that invaluable farming wealth, I encountered Mrs. Pratt and family making their reappearance in civilization. All Brook Farm in the golden age seemed to be strapped to the rear of their wagon as baggage, for Mrs. Pratt was the first lady I saw at Brook Farm, where ladyhood blossomed so fairly. Ah! my minute is over, and I must leave you to lie in wait for another. Evening. I have captured an evening instead, my first tolerably quiet evening in this new life, this new system of ours for a summer sojourn. The waves of my nomadic life drift me on strange shores, and sometimes, as I mount them, I dream of a home, quiet and beautiful, that home which allures all young minds and gradually fades into the sad features of such households as we see. In all my experience I think of three happy homes where the impression is uniform, for in all there are May Days and Thanksgivings; and yet to see a complete home would be to see that marriage which, if we may credit Miss Fuller, does not belong to an age when celibacy is the "great fact." As if the divine force could be extinguished! I must marry and spite her theory. You would be amused if you could see some of the letters which I receive, and which discourse of a wife with the same gravity as they do of washing clothes, as if each were a necessary, and that it would not do for me to settle upon a farm until I am married. There is some wisdom in the last advice. An old bachelor upon a farm, with a solitary old maid-servant, is not the most pleasing prospect for young one-and-twenty to contemplate. But I ignore farms and maids and prospects, saving always the natural one. Next year may find me the favored of all three. How gladly I would be with you on Monday, you know; but what candidate for the plough and the broom should I be after the bewilderment of that scene! I remember too well the festivals which graced the younger days to trust myself within their sphere again, save in the midst of a boundless summer leisure. And when, after these chill, moist, April days, the perfect flower of summer shall bloom, I will be in its heart and breathe the enchanted air again. The word reminds me how glad I am that the flowers were so grateful. I committed my memory to delicate guardians, who, dying, did not suffer that to die. And the trinity of tone, color, and sentiment, though I knew not, like you, how to indicate it, is one of the most alluring of mysteries, so much so that I must leave it even unexpressed. Since so little may be known, I will not bring it into the melancholy purlieus of theory, but see it and hear it and feel it in echoes and glimpses. Yet all these rainbows which span the heaven of thought, finely woven of the tears of humility, one would sometimes grasp and crystallize forever. In that I find my satisfaction in what I know of Fourier; but to clutch at the rainbow! can it be crystallized? Let not the spasm of infidelity mar my letter in your eyes or heart, and on your anniversary let one stream flow to the memory of your friend, G.W.C. XXIV CONCORD, _April 17th, 1845._ As a good friend, am I not bound to advise you how my new household works, here in the very bosom of terrible civilization, which yet keeps me very warm? A long wet day like this, when I have been gloriously imprisoned by dropping diamonds, tries well the power of my new solitary life to charm me. It has not failed. It is going away now through the dark, still midnight, but it bears the image of my smile. A long wet day, with my books and fire and Burrill for external, long thoughts for internal, company. After a morning service prolonged far beyond the hour of matins, led by the sweet and solemn Milton, I read Miss Martineau's last tale, founded upon the history of Toussaint L'Ouverture, in whom I have been interested. I have just read Victor Hugo's "Bug Jargal," his first novel, and also based upon the insurrection of St. Domingo. I feel that Miss Martineau's picture is highly colored, but the features must be correct. A strong, sad, long-suffering, far-seeing man, finally privately murdered by one who had been the idol of his manhood. The interest is individual throughout, which is necessary, yet fatal to the novel. I followed the Hero away from St. Domingo to his grave, and afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually unexpressive that you must know the artist to know their meaning. Very few men relate with cold precision what occurs daily, so much are their feelings enlisted; and no less daily experiences are the recorded events of the past to the man whose days are devoted to them, and he too must infuse himself into them. He is a Guelph or a Ghibelline, not a judge of the struggle, wiser by five or six centuries of experience. In Carlyle's book "that shall be" the "Cromwell," I feel there will be so much stress laid upon the gravity and prompt, sturdy heroism of the man that much else will be shoved out of sight. It will be the history of Cromwell as a strong man, for Carlyle loves strong men; but if there are other things to be said, we shall not hear so much about them. So in Emerson's "Napoleon." He commences with saying that Napoleon is the Incarnate Democrat, the representative of the 19th century, and the lecture is an illustration of that position, but most comprehensive and eloquent. Let history and great men fade from our sight. Lately I have grown to be a sad rhymer, and shall end my letter with hints of a life sweeter than these records of mine. More and more I feel that my wine of letters is poured by the poets, not handed as cold sherbet by the philosophers. Some day I may speak more fully upon these things. Meanwhile, secretly and constantly, I turn over pebble after pebble upon the shore, not uncheered by the hope that one day a pearl may glitter in my hands. Even this smacks of history, for Clio had claimed this page. LADY JANE GREY Meek violet of History! there flows A modest fragrance from thy maiden fame Touched with the coolness of the chaste repose Which broods o'er Plato's name. No Wanderer through the dimly arched hall Which Time has reared between thy date and ours Meeting thy form, but sees that on its pall Are broidered Grecian flowers. Thy shrinking virgin fame is wed with one Whose calm celestial teaching was thy King; When sitting in that cloistered nook alone Thou heardst the rude shout ring. To thee that rabble shout foretold a scene Of tearful splendor faded in its birth-- The melancholy mockery of a Queen-- And virgin dust to earth. Ah! Princess of that golden classic hoard, Thy need was other than an earthly crown; But ours was such, for else couldst thou have poured Through time thy pure renown? For us thy blood was spilled; the whetted edge Of that keen axe gave us one jewel more, As a stream-drifted lily by chance sedge Is held beside the shore. Good-night. Let the remembrance of the flowers still hold mine fast, and my solemn sweet Milton shall sing my vespers too. May you "move In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft Recorders...." Your aff. G.W.C. XXV CONCORD, _May 3, '45. I am weary of these winds, which have blown so constantly through the spring; and would so gladly exchange their long wail to-night for some of your music. And yet they are musical, and when I feel vexed at their persistency they seem to fade and breathe against my face with a low sigh, like one who shouts a secret which I cannot understand, and then mourns softly that I cannot. In spite of the wind we went to a new pond near us (new to us) this afternoon. There we separated, and Burrill went roaming over the hills and along the shore; and I sat down with Bettine upon the margin. That is the best workbook that I know. I read it for the first time in the Brook Farm pine-woods on a still Sunday; but to-day, as I followed her vanishing steps through Fairyland, the wind that rustled and raged around was like the tone of her nature interpreting to my heart, rather than to my mind, what I read. She was intellectual, spiritual more than poetical. She was such a glancing, dancing, joyous, triumphant child. I imagine great dark eyes, sparkling to the centre, and heavy locks overhanging--pine-trees drooping over diamonds, deepest brilliancy, with splendor, and a low singing sadness like the wind again, for her position is sad. The ardent, bursting, seeking-ripe girl, and the calm old man, wise and cold, not harsh. A sense of singular unfitness, a sweet-brier and an oak, a feeling as if some string in the great harp had slipped from its harmony, always strikes me when I read Bettine. Will you say no youthful lover would have inspired such a gush of the tenderest and profoundest girlishness? But it was no more than the bursting out of an irrepressible fountain, and it would have flowed as clearly and sweetly through a new wood conduit of to-day as through the polished golden channel which lay there for it. She must love, and love the best, and if only the best had been younger, fitter! Would not the steady massiveness of Goethe's nature have been splendidly adorned by the arabesques and intricately graceful woof of Bettine's? Now it was spring flowers on an old brow, with all the sweetness, but not the freshness, of youth. The imperial Goethe, supreme in wisdom and age, smelling a violet! Ah! though the flowers and the laughter and the dance and the sparkle are for the child, but sadly serious autumnal wreaths for the old man; but the world does the best it knows how to do with the poets, so did Goethe with his young lover. Friendly, cool, gentle, never flattering, Bettine asks him half sadly, as if for once those world-roving eyes were still: Do I speak to you or only speak in your presence? She answered her question by asking it. She speaks much of music. It is beauty impersonized to her; she pours out gems and flowers of words, and sketches grotesquely exquisite shapes dimly all over the landscape, coins all the beautiful fancies that crowd her brain, throws them to Goethe sparkling in the sunlight, and says: This is music, and finds at last that music is God. That is the most orthodox Pantheism. The year has piloted us into the flowery haven of May, but I lay so languidly charmed with the beauty, and looking to see if I cannot this time see the goddess whose smiles I feel, that it will be June and summer before I know it. I treat the season as I do poetry. Sometimes I dissect a line which has fascinated me, or a poem, to expose the secret. But it folds and fades and changes under my glance as a cloud at twilight; and the beauty of the spring is as elusive as the foam upon a wave. In the midst of summer, the summer that we anticipated in January seems farther off. It sinks constantly into itself. The deep solitude of rest, the murmurous silence of woods at noon, these are as real in winter as when we are melting in June. The senses will have their share. It is melancholy that a man with the stomach-ache cannot enjoy Shakespeare; and that this wild, wayward, glowing, and glorious Bettine must disappear in the Frau von Arnim, wearing caps and taking snuff, and instead of these pine-trees, false curls, cut from the last criminal, perhaps, and then croaking and child-bearing and nursing and diapering! things so beautiful for many, but not for her. She is not yet a woman, but belongs to us and the woods and the waters and the midnight. A child singing wonderful songs in the starlight, serenading with tender, passionate love-songs the old man who waves his hand and breathes down a kiss which is chilled by the night air, and falls like a snow-flake into her hot bosom, not as a star upon her brow. We had some May-baskets left for us by unknown hands upon May-day. The flowers drooped over the sides, as if they would not meet my eye to tell the secret; but a group of smiling girls next morning were not so inexorable, and I thanked nature for such almoners of her gifts. These beautiful tributes are touching if one is serious. They are hung upon our wall, which is adorned with the Urania and sketches from Michel Angelo, and one or two drawings of Burrill's. Mrs. Brown (Mrs. Emerson's sister) wishes Charles Newcomb to return some letters he has about little Waldo's death. Will you speak to him and say that Mrs. Brown will like them by the first opportunity? I hope my name is down as a subscriber to the Paper. When shall we see it? Mr. Emerson read us a part of your letter. Here is another of the unconscionable epistles; not to mention answering, it is too audacious to demand that they shall be read. Ever yr G.W.C. XXVI CONCORD, _May 31, '45, Saturday morning._ My dear Friend,--Mr. Hosmer just tells me that he is going to Brook Farm, and I must say a word of regret that I could not come at this time, as Mr. Ripley, whom I saw in Boston, asked me to do. I have no doubt that the essence of all good things which are said, I shall gather from you some day, somehow. I send my subscription to the Harbinger. Almira is well, and would send you love and flowers if she knew that Mr. Hosmer was going. I am fairly launched in "Consuelo," which I must read as fast as I can, for Mr. Hedge is to take it to Maine. Already it interests me as a new life, and, if I could, I would have it developing all summer; but I must feed upon the remembrance. Will you say to Mr. Keith, the postmaster at West Roxbury, that we have despatched sundry messages to Messrs. Greeley and McElrath to have our _Tribune_ come to Concord and not to West Roxbury, and that to-day, upon receipt of his note, we have written a very concise letter upon that subject to the publishers. Tell Mrs. Ripley that she must not fail to come this summer; and how soon are you coming to have a vacation in civilization?--not a day or two in winter, but a week for summer rambles. Give my love to the Eyrie, for I believe all my friends are there save Miss Russell; and forgiving me for using you so unsparingly with messages, believe me always, G.W.C. If Geo. Wells is or shall be at Brook Farm, tell him that Almira and the rest of the Concordians are waiting to see him. XXVII CONCORD, _June 24th, 1845._ My dear Friend,--I finished "Consuelo" some time since, though I have not yet read the "Countess." I read what you said in the _Harbinger_, and am waiting for the promised continuation. Meanwhile you shall hear something of the impression she made upon me. Consuelo is a natural, not a pious person. She lives in the world like a flower, not like a flame; and though you feel that nothing is beyond her, since beauty and fidelity comprehend all, yet she does not directly suggest those personal relations with the Invisible which a saint always does. She sings as a bird, with her whole soul; and though she consents to relinquish the profession if she marries Albert, you feel very well that it will not be so. Porhora constantly urges the art upon her attention, but she grows in that by instinct. She is always in that to which he exhorts her, and the difference between her life and singing is no more perceived than in the life and singing of a bird. She is one of the persons from whom the rules of the art are drawn, because in her they are so clearly but unconsciously expressed. It is a character which fuses everything which it attracts to itself, and in whose outline no seam or crevice is visible. She is entirely impulsive, and every impulse is an inspiration. She leaves the castle of the Giants as soon as it occurs to her to do so, and the perfect submission to her impulse indicates the power and depth of her nature. Therefore, too, though she seems always right, she is free from all self-discipline. In meeting her one should not feel especially that she was a good person. She is not virtuous, for she has no moral struggle; nor pious, for she is too impersonal; and even her love, at least to the end of "Consuelo," is not a life. Her regard for Anzoleto you feel will pass. It is a personal relation, necessary among the flowers and music and moonlight of Venice. It is not the sentiment which love is to such a nature, nor could Anzoleto ever awaken that. With Albert it is much the same in another way. The waters do not at once flow to a level. She is consolation to him, but he is not life and hope to her. Music is, but she is too human to be satisfied so. A character like hers is always seeking for its completeness the strengthening sympathy of love, although its relations are very far from personal. Thus she seems as if she ought to love Albert, and that she will at last. Her life is too self-poised and true to allow you a moment's anxiety. The waves of circumstance roll and break at her feet, and she walks queen-like over the waters. The characters are grouped around her as friends or courtiers; and so she preserves the unity of the book as the figures of Jesus in the old paintings. It is the memoirs of the court of Queen Consuelo. As in life such a person would make every scene in which she was an actor impressive and graceful, so the strong conception of the character makes the book so. I was thirsting for music when I read it, and it satisfied me like a strain of the sweetest and best; like a beautiful picture or a flower, it left nothing to be asked, although suggesting a general and not an individual beauty and satisfaction like itself. The graceful Venetian life wrought of song and fragrance fades so suddenly into the sombre Bohemian forest where the careless girl who dabbles in the water with Anzoleto becomes the mistress of the destiny of the morbid Albert, and all shifts again into the clear, vigorous friendship with Hadyn and the sunny journey where the woman of the castle becomes a girl again, as cheerful but so much wiser than the Venetian girl, singing and saddening and sleeping in barns and leaping abbey walls, that it was like lying on a hillside under the shades and sunlight of the April sky. There is an indirect developing of the character throughout which is very fine as it makes the harmonies more intricate and profound. It is like the reflection of the moon in the water to one who has cast his eyes down from the sky, as where Hadyn silently conquers the love which she has inspired, because in her mien and tone he reads her love for another. That is a golden key to her character. It was pleasant just after reading it to make a trip to Wachusett with Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Bradford. We had soft, warm weather, and a beautiful country to pass. From the mountain the prospect was very grand. It is not too high to make the landscape indistinct, but enough so to throw the line of the level country on the east back into the misty horizon and so leave a sea-like impression. To the north was Monadnock, lonely and grim and cold. A solitary lover he seemed, of the rough Berserkir sort, of the round and virgin-delicate Wachusett. Towards the northwest the lower part of the Green mountain range built a misty wall beyond which we could not have seen had it been away. Nearer were smaller hills and ponds and woods. On the mountain we found the pink azalia and the white _Patenlila tridenta_. It was a fine episode in the summer. About the 12th of July Burrill and I mean to go into Berkshire, and if possible to reach the White Mountains before the autumn catches us. This last is doubtful. But I felt when I came down from Wachusett as if I should love to go on from mountain to mountain until winter stopped me. Last Sunday Father Taylor preached here. All the heretics went to church. In the evening he preached temperance. After the afternoon service we tea'd with him at Mr. Emerson's. He is a noble man, truly the Christian apostle of this time. It is impossible to pin him anywhere. He is like the horizon, wide around, but impossible to seize. I know no man who thrills so with life to the very tips, nor is there any one whose eloquence is so thrilling to me. I have found that one of the best things of living in Concord is that we have here the types of classes of men and in society generally only the members of the class. The types are magnetic to each other and draw each into their vicinity. The lonely life pleases as much as ever. If I sometimes say inwardly that such is not the natural state of man, I contrive to quiet myself by the assurance that such is the best state For bachelors. What disembodied comforter of Job suggests such things? Yr friend, G.W.C. P.S. If you loved some one ardently who wonderfully resembled personally some one you hated ardently what would you do? It is not my case, but a question some evil genius whispered to make me perspire in these torrid days. XXVIII CONCORD, _Sept. 14, 1845._ My dear Friend,--I returned last week from a long and beautiful visit to the mountains, among which I had never been before. I went in the middle of July to Berkshire, and returned home for two or three days to set off for the White Hills, and back again through the length of Berkshire. In all about seven weeks. The garden served us very well. We had weeded so faithfully that weeds did not trouble us, and Burrill stayed in Concord a part of the time I was in New Hampshire. When I first came towards the mountains it was twilight, and they looked very cold and grim; their outline traced against the sky, and seemingly made of some other material than earth or sky--too dense for the one and too ethereal for the other. But when I came to them in broad day, they had lost their terror, as any other night phantom would have done. When I could scale them with my eye, and stand upon their highest peak, I seemed to have subdued them. But as I retreated, and looked back, they resumed their twilight majesty; and I could not realize I had been so proud among them. Yet, after all, they did not command me as the sea does. The charm of that is not robbed by being in it or upon it. All night and all day its murmur sounds an infinite bass to all that is done and said; and in the night, when you awake, it holds you still in thrall. Like the song of the locust in a summer noon, which fills the air with music and intensifies the heat, so the sound of the sea constantly draws thought and life to its depth and sweetness. Among the hills I was haunted with the vague desire of some corresponding sound. They were like a dumb Apollo, a thunderless Jupiter. In Berkshire they are less grand than in New Hampshire, but high enough to cease to be hills, and wooded quite to the summit. They give an endless variety to the landscape, and are full everywhere of beautiful places and commanding prospects through the openings. The aspect of the country and the character of the people were so different from the country and people near a city, that it seemed to be more recently created. Frank Parley is there in Stockbridge, and seems to be very happy. At Williamstown, the northern town in the county, we saw George Wells. He has only changed to become more entirely a collegian, but retains the same cordiality and carelessness that made us love him at Brook Farm. I have so many things to say about my wanderings that I cannot write any more, for I mean to come to Brook Farm and see you some day during the autumn. In the late autumn we are going to New York to pass the winter. Give my love to Mrs. Ripley and the Archon, and to the two Charleses, and believe me, as always, your friend, G.W.C. On the next page I write a little song, which you shall print if you think it worth the space. Nameless and dateless if you please. AUTUMN SONG The gold corn in the field And the asters in the meadow, And the heavy clouds that yield To the hills a crown of shadow, Mark the ending of the Summer, And the Autumn coming in, A crimson-eyed new-comer, Whose voice is cold and thin, As he whispers to the flowers, "Lo, all this time is ours." I remember, long ago, When the soft June days were wasted, That the Autumn and the snow In the after-heats were tasted; For the sultry August weather Burned the freshness from the trees, And the woods and I, together, Mourned the Winter, that must freeze The silver singing streams Which fed our Summer dreams. Through the yellow afternoon Rolls the wagon harvest-laden, And beneath the harvest moon At the husking sings the maiden; While without the winds are flowing Like long aerial waves, And their scythe-sharp breath is mowing The flowers upon the graves. When the husking is all o'er The maiden sings no more. To ---- Thy spirit was a flexile harp, whereon The moonlight fell like delicatest air, Thro' thee its beauty flowing into tone Which charmed the silence with a sound as rare. Thou peaceful maid! the music then I heard, Whose influence had moulded thy soft eyes To their deep tone of tenderness: O! bird, Whose life is fed with thine own melodies. XXIX CONCORD, _Oct. 25, 1845._ My dear Friend,--My Concord days are numbered, but before I go I should like to write you again, although it is not impossible that I may come here again next year. The autumn since I saw you has fulfilled the promise of the day I left Brook Farm--bright, clear, and cool. On Wednesday, the day was so remarkably beautiful that, having nothing especial to do, and seeing that Ole Bull was to give another concert, we walked to Boston and heard him once more, I fear for the last time; and walked back again the next morning. The air was very still and bright, and cold enough to spur us on, without an unpleasant chill. I was very glad to part with Ole Bull having my first impressions deepened and strengthened. The wonder with which I heard him in New York had subsided, and I gave myself, or rather he drew me, wholly to his music. It seems as if he improvised with the orchestra as a poet would at the piano. The music is full of every sort of movement and variety, but has great unity of character, and constantly suggests beautiful and distinct images rather than pictures. I thought of glorious young gladiators leaping into the lists, of fleecy clouds sweeping over starlight skies, and the beach-line of the sea. Every image was of the graceful, vigorous, and entirely healthy character of his person, which I suppose is only a fair expression of his soul. The music should not be criticised as a work of art, but only as the articulate reveries of Genius, for it is such as only he should play, because it is so entirely individual. It is full of delicate tenderness, and each piece is much like a gentle, strong child wandering in Fairyland, melted now by the sweets of child-deep piety in the Adagio Religioso, now leaping down the Polacca Guerricra like a young angel down a ladder from heaven, and roaming wistful and silent and amazed in the solitude of the Prairie, at times leaping and running and shouting, and then sighing and weeping and losing its voice in aerial cadences, until the smiles make rainbows through the tears again. All these things whirled through my mind as I sat listening to him, with my eyes closed to preserve the realm of vision unassailed, last Saturday evening. But there is no end to such stuff. Music is so fully suggestive; and, after all, if you abandon yourself to that you are very apt to find yourself only among corresponding images. The adagio of the Fifth Symphony reminds me in one part of majestic waves, black and crowned with creamy foam; and they swell as if the whole sound of the ocean thundered in each, and when they have almost gained a height through which the sun may shine and reveal the long-haired mermaids, and the splendid colors which hide so much, then they fall upon themselves and stream backward into the sea, the foam uppermost like a shroud. But when I considered this one evening I found it was only the image of the sound transformed to a visible object. It is like watching the clouds and seeing their palaces and mountains. It is easy to sport with the symbol, and shows the greatness of the composer when he arouses the thought of the sea and sky for an echo; but that is only the sensuous influence of his music, and further we cannot go in words, for good music is so because it is inexpressible in words. There is always correspondence but not identity. And the impression of the same object in a poem, painting, or statue should be as different as the different necessities which constituted those arts and the differing direction of the various genius which so expresses itself. Ole Bull's last concert (that I heard) was a cheap one, and the audience was very cheap. I felt at once the want of sympathy between that and him, and that destroyed the unity of the impression, which is so pleasant. The music which he played was of the best and played in the best way, but was played apart from the sympathy of the hearers to the soul of his art. When he was encored he came and showed his mastery of the violin as a juggler his power over cards. I should have been sorry to have seen it in any one but a true artist; but while he satisfied every just claim in the style and selection of the music of the concert, he permitted the rabble to hear what they had paid fifty cents to hear. He could not be accused of lowering or pampering the popular taste, for the music that he played was elevating, and the gymnastics not music at all. I was glad to see Mrs. Ripley last Monday, and to hear from her the result of your Sunday meeting. I was a little sceptical, because I think permanent forms of worship spring from a very deep piety, and the pious persons whom I know I could count on my hands. Such themes are too good for heel-taps to a letter, and I shall wait the issue of your movement with a great deal of interest. Give my love to Mrs. Ripley, and tell her I hope the whole winter will not pass without my hearing from her. I feel sorry to go from Concord, which we shall do in about a fortnight, for it is a quiet place, full of good people and pleasant spots. But I have found the same everywhere, so "To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." Your friend, G.W.C. XXX NEW YORK, _December 22, 1845._ A merry Christmas and happy New Year to you, if you are still alive, for since small-pox has joined your Phalanx I am not sure but his ambition for the supreme power has swept you all away. Yet every Saturday's _Harbinger_ is a missive from Brook Farm which tells of other things than the cosmogonies, etc., of which it ostensibly discourses. I shall be glad to smuggle myself in for a share of the commendation bestowed upon those who have increased your list with the new volume, but my New York friends are pale at Greeley's _Tribune_, and would christen your sheet "An Omen Ill" instead of _Harbinger_. Individually I am grateful for your article upon De Meyer. It gives me an idea of his exhilarating impression, which I had dimly supposed from what I heard of him. I wait eagerly for his reappearance here, and cannot discover why he tarries so long in Boston. Privately I have heard very much good music since I have been here, mainly Mendelssohn and Spohr, with singing of Schubert and "Adelaide," etc. Publicly I have heard Huber, the German opera, and Mendelssohn's "St. Paul," a rich, melodious oratorio, squeezing the utmost drop from the power of the orchestra, and uniform at a point of the most luminous delicacy, refinement, and grace. I missed the heavy choruses of the Handel and Haydn, for, particularly, "Stone him to death," and "Lovely are the messengers," and "Oh, be gracious, ye Immortals" are magnificent. From what I have heard I prefer Mendelssohn to Spohr, as being the most original and luxuriant genius, although I hear that I shall not maintain that opinion when I have heard Spohr more. Rossini and Donizetti are the Musical Gods here; now and then you meet a person who really loves what is better, but in mixed societies and at all concerts, particularly in fashionable circles, where music is a fashion now, the merest exercises for the voice and the fingers elicit the most--rapturous bravoes and tapping of white gloves. Last evening I was at one of my musical friends', who, with another girl, plays the symphonies, etc., and is a most wonderful performer. She has the grand-piano which Miss Gserty (?) owned. For an hour we had the "Fingal's Cave," Schubert's "Wanderer" by Liszt, and Quatuors of Spohr; then entered "our fashionable friends" (for my musical lady is in such a sphere), and songs from Donizetti's operas and Thalberg's "Moses in Egypt," and the "Marche Maracaire," which seems nothing or very little without De Meyer, followed; and two mortal hours of such followed. I am always a little angry that my friends don't do something better on such occasions; but why cast pearls before swine? Yet I have no right to complain. They willingly play good music when they have good listeners. Literature I serve quite faithfully. I have read the "Aminta," and am deep in "Hell." In German I am reading the second part of "Faust," with scraps from Novalis. English reading is Swedenborg and "Festus" and "Cromwell," with dips into the dramatists. I am sorry such good men have no better reader at this present, but trust they find some somewhere. The weather is vile. We are pinched with "nipping" airs which do not remain clear and steady, but unbend themselves in a dirty slush called snow in the papers. And just now I have no business to write you a letter, for I am torn every way by longings and doubts, not at all of a moral nature. This copy of verses, written last summer, is somewhat harmonious with my present mood, and shall be printed if you approve. I have seen Cranch several times, and his pictures. Some I like very much, but they have his faults. I went with him to the Art Union Gallery the other day, and some beautiful landscapes that I saw of his and others made my heart "babble of green fields" to itself for some days afterwards. One does not fully realize the value of art until he is in the city, as away from home you realize the worth of a mother's portrait. A great charm of a picture-gallery is the perfect stillness which belongs to the paintings, and which they suggest. My overcoat seemed superfluous, for I was full of sultry noontide feeling, gathered not from any special picture, but the atmosphere of so many portraits of trees and waters and hills. In New York I feel how life is a glorious opportunity wasted. A halo seems forever to float over our heads everywhere, even on the tips of the hair, which might crown us with glory and honor; but no man is yet crowned. The richest and grandest music of the world is hitherto in a minor key. But, indeed, every sigh is a waste of so much energy that I try to turn my stone towards the erection of the infinite temple without grieving that it was not long since built. I used to despise justice as a shabby virtue, but now it seems to me the only lack. We are unjust in our treatment and in our opinion of persons. In the first we are too sweet, in the last too severe. For we eternally measure men by a standard suggested by our individuality, instead of sympathizing so fully that we stretch them on their own line. But here of all places there can be no sham. If we are not just in our own thought we cannot pretend to be, since only we are the persons concerned, and no man ever cheated himself. I should be very glad to hear from you, for, knowing how busy you are, I have learned to value your letters. Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Ripley, and believe me always Yr friend, G.W.C. DIRGE Time laid within an early grave Those hopes, so delicate and sweet, I wondered not I could not save, But that they did sooner fleet. Life has its fading summer dream, Its hope is crowned with one full hour, And yet its best deservings seem Buds all unworthy such a flower. How well that happy hour is bought By an after-life of sorrow! The golden sunset yields a thought Which adorns the dreary morrow. We meet no more as we have met; Thy heart made music once with mine, Which now is still, and we forget The art that made our youth divine. One glance reaps beauty, nevermore It wears a lustre as at first; We come again--the harvest o'er To no new flow'ring can be nursed. XXXI N.Y., _April 12th, 1846._ My dear Friend,--I meant to have given you some verses when you were here as you asked, but I forgot it. Now I send this. It is so different from Wentworth Higginson's that I do not feel as if the same road had been run over by us[1]. And as each Phalanx will be a centre of innumerable railroads in the age of harmony, why not its paper of paper railroads now? This was written in Concord some time since. [Footnote 1: This refers to a poem by T.W. Higginson with the same title, which had been printed in the _Harbinger,_ a few weeks previously.] Since you went I have done little but study French and Italian. We meet Cranch, and his wife of course, three times a week at that, and I drop into his studio now and then. To-day I was there, and he was hard at work upon a sunset composition, which he hopes to finish for the exhibition of the Boston Athenaeum. He has sent the large landscape, "The Summer Shower," and "The Old Mill with the Bridge and Ducks," to the National Academy, which exhibition opens this week. He has sold one in Washington to a member of Congress for $100, and if he can continue to improve as rapidly as he has for a year or two past he will be a fine painter. These soft, gushing spring days make me yearn for the country. I shall hope to be emancipated from Masters and Mistresses by the first or middle of May and take my place with the other cattle in the pastures. When I do not exactly know. Let me hear from you and about the Farm and its prospects. Burrill's eyes have given out again. He is bound head and foot, for his ankle has a habit of breaking down occasionally. Rest and warm weather and the country may strengthen them all. Give my love "und vergiss nicht euer treur," G.W.C. THE RAILROAD A bright November day. The morning light Shone through the city's mist against my eyes, Soft, chiding them from sleep. Unfolding them They raised their lids and--gave me a new day. A day not freshly breaking on the fields, And waking with a morning kiss the streams That slept beneath the vapor, but on streets, Piles of great majesty and human skill, Stone veins where human passion swiftly runs. Thereon I gazed with tenderness and awe, Remembering the heavy debt I owed To the dim arches of the dingy bricks, Which sternly smiled upon my youngest years And gravely greeted now, as through the crowd By all unknown and knowing none, I passed. The warning whistle thrilled the misty air, And stately forth we rode into the morn, Subduing airy distance silently; The shadow glided by us on the grass, The sole companion of our lonely speed, And all the landscape changing as we went, A shifting picture, of like hues and forms But ever various, trees, rocks, and hills, Rising sublime and stretching pastoral-- How like a noble countenance which shows Endless expression and eternal charm. I leaned against the window as we went. And saw the city mist recede afar, And lost the busy hum which haunts the mind As a voice inarticulate, the tone Of many men whose mouths speak distinct words Which blend in grim confusion, till the sound Like a vague aspiration climbs the sky. The muffled murmur of the iron wheels, And the sharp tinkle of the hurried bell, And a few words between were all the sounds Which peopled that else silent morning air. A busy city darting o'er the plains Across the turnpikes and through hawthorne lanes, O'er wide morasses and profound ravines-- Through stately woods where red deer only run, And grassy lawn and farmer's planted field-- Was that swift train that flashed along the hills, And smoked through sloping valleys, and surprised The mild-eyed milk-maid with her morning pail. I dreamed my dreams until the village lay White in the morning light, and holding up Its modest steeples in the crystal air. A moment, and the picture changed no more, But wore a serious constancy and showed Its bare-boughed trees immovable. I rose, And stepping from the train, it glided on, Sweeping around the hill; the whistle shrill Rang through the stricken air. A moment more It rolled along the iron out of sight. XXXII NEW YORK, _Thursday, May 14th, 1846._ My dear Friend,--You will of course have supposed that I did not receive your letter of the 2d May, or it would have been more promptly answered. On that very day I responded to a most urgent invitation from Mrs. Cranch to go up the river and make a visit with Burrill, at her father's house upon the Hudson. I have only returned to-day, and hasten to send you this, bidding you to come, for the Choral Symphony is to be played, and there are to be various preparatory rehearsals of the orchestra and the chorus. This I know from the papers, but I will to-morrow inquire of Herr Timm the particulars of the concert. If I had not thought of remaining I would certainly do so if you will come. I am only sorry that there is no room fit for such a performance; it will be hard to get far enough away. Immediately that I have ascertained what particulars are ascertainable I will write again, although you must not wait for that, but come as soon as you can. And now, what shall I say to you of the serene, sparkling splendors of the Spring which upon the Hudson have been flowing around me, so that my few days swelled into a fortnight almost, consecrated like a long song to romance and beauty. The tender young green upon the riversides and upon the mountains behind, which receive into their deep, dark mass of foliage the light, golden, smooth, colored fields which rise backward from the ample river, and (at Mr. Downing's at Newburg, opposite, a brother-in-law, and the author of fruit treatises, etc.) the splendid magnolias, which resemble deepest-dyed beakers, whence the fragrance arose almost palpable, it was so strong and sweet, and I looked to see rainbow-colored clouds floating from out the flowers--these, with the white blossoms of the orchards and the spray-like, snowy beauty of the Dogwood; in the early morning the sunlight, streaming down the mountains into the bosom of the river, kisses flashing and fiery, yet most gentle and tender, and at night the round moon, rising suddenly, almost without any preluding splendor over the same line of hills, and threw a yellow brightness all over the landscape like the throbbing heart of the night whose life is mysterious beauty fed by that mysterious light. What could I do but roam and wonder and smile and sing in the moonlight till midnight sent me to lie in a bed whence I looked out from under the plain white curtains through the branches of the trees without upon the sleeping river so wide and deep and still, and the line of hills fading in the night beyond. It was one of those seeds whose flower does not come at once, but which will show a tinge of Spring beauty wherever it unfolds. How have I earned the privilege of such enchantment, and is there not some condition of fairy which I do not yet see, but which some day must be paid? The city is hot and hard after those fields and mountains, yet there are sweet smiles here, and I found three letters from friends, which was a fine welcome. Mrs. Dunlap and her sister are here, and I shall hear some singing; but they can give no music like the panorama I have seen. I have been choking all day, as I always do when I leave any place or person that is specially beautiful. When I am in the midst of the greatest beauty I remind myself that it is so, but I do not seem to touch the very heart; but when I have left it behind then its heart overflows itself in the remembrance, and so the past becomes more beautiful than any possible present, as when you would see a distant, almost indistinct, star you must look just at one side and not directly upon the object. The present must be as really worthy, but time and distance have a character of their own which they impart to all circumstances, as distance in space makes green and rugged mountains soft and purple like the hue of a fruit. I long to leave the city, but I shall yet stay some time, for I shall not see my Father and Mother much during the Summer, and we shall sail probably by the first of August. Perhaps I can arrange so as to return with you if you come. I meant to have passed two or three days at Brook Farm. I could write till you were tired, but I have no time or paper. Cranch is well and sketching. He says something of coming to Boston during the Summer. Come immediately, and believe me as ever, G.W.C. XXXIII NEW YORK, _Saturday, May 16, '46._ My dear Friend,--I learn from Mr. Timm that the concert will take place at the Castle Garden, a spacious enclosure adjoining the Battery. The Choral Symphony, the overtures to "Der Freischutz" and "The Midsummer-Night's Dream," Rico's singing, Burke's playing, and De Meyer's, if he is in town, will make up the bill. The rehearsals of the chorus and orchestra are separate until the night before (I believe); and the Symphony is found so difficult that they almost repent having undertaken it. I suppose there would be no difficulty in your getting to the rehearsals through some of your friends, as you did before. The orchestra is to consist of 150 and the chorus of 300 or 400 persons. "The Desert" is to be played for the fifth time on Monday evening. Trinity Church is to be consecrated on Thursday, the day after the concert, and Pico will doubtless sing somewhere during the week. I heard her and Julia Northall last evening in "The Messiah." Their voices were glorious. After the "Pastoral Symphony" the clear, rich, sunny voice of Miss Northall in the recitative "While Shepherds watched," etc., was most fitting and beautiful. It was a soft stream of pearly light, as the hope of Christ was upon the darkness of his time. Pico sang, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," simply and sweetly, and was obliged to repeat it. The choruses were weak; they did not smite steadily upon the ear, but wavered, ghost-like, through the great tabernacle. The "Hallelujah" seemed to awaken the singers, and there was some tolerable body in that. I heard Walker at his room with the greatest delight. He is so delicately feminine that I felt with him as with a splendid woman in whose nature you do not feel the want of masculine elements, since there is strength enough in a feminine way; with Rakemann I always feel the man with the womanly tenderness and sweetness which belongs to a real man. It was very pleasant to feel such a harmonious difference, as when you see a beautiful man and wife. This being anniversary week, the Unitarians have been holding meetings and discussions. I do not feel impressed by them very much, they stand in such a negative position, "one stocking off and the other stocking on." At Isaac's request I have been reading the life of the founder of his order, St. Alphonse of Liguori. He was a very pious man, and the Church was very jealous of him. It is a painful book to read, for the Catholic Church seems to use heaven as a weapon whereby to conquer the earth. I have not yet written Isaac, as he wanted me to read the book first; but if his promised prayers fall as short as the history, I shall be delivered incontinently to the buffetings of Satan. I hope this will not find you at Brook Farm, for it cannot reach there until Monday; the concert is on Wednesday, if it is pleasant. Charles Newcomb and his mother are here. Yours ever, G.W.C. XXXIV CONCORD, _June 6, 1846._ My dear Friend,--I send you some verses for the Harbinger, which are not a conceit, although they relate to no actual personal experience except that I am sometimes conscious of the main fact, for my dreams do sometimes so surpass the waking reality that the charm of the suggesting person, if not lost, is indefinitely subdued and postponed. It is very pleasant here at Minot's. The family are still, the household goes smoothly on, and we live in a house 150 years old, under a tree of apparently almost equal age and looking across a green meadow to a clump of pines and birches beyond. The scenery in Concord is very gentle but pleasant. I have become attached to it as to a taciturn friend who has no splendid bursts of passion but wears always a soft smile. All the morning we are busy working, and in the afternoons I have been reading Goethe's "Rome." It is very fine, and full of wisdom and beauty. His thoughts are clear and just and profound, and he looks on every side. He was so ready for Italy, too, as the home of art--he a lover and student of art, an artist by nature, and always too much a man. But Goethe, though he is constantly a wise friend, is never a lover. You could not take him always, personally, as the companion of your rambles, your jokes, your silence and sorrows. I think of several persons among those I know, who are by no means lights upon a hill, whom I should select as companions for a journey rather than him. In Rome one would wish to see him as he would Jupiter, and hear all his simple, grave, and catholic discourse; but has he that ineffable and inexplicable human delicacy and sympathy which is worth so much more in a man, as the innocence of the dove is than the wisdom of the serpent. And yet, in the "Elective Affinities," does he not show all that one could wish? But why should he be haunted by the thought that he does not have it and think of particular things to prove it, except that he does not have it? It is like feeling the beauty of single lines which a man writes without being impressed by the whole poem that he is a poet. I had yesterday a long letter from Cranch and his wife. They are now in Washington, and are enjoying the same June weather that we have here. They have a peculiar interest to me as those who are to take the leap into the ocean whence we do not know whether we shall emerge upon some fairy island or upon desolate rocks or shall sink forever deeper and deeper in the sea-caves where the mermaids are. For a residence in Italy is certainly, in its entire uncertainty, in its new enclosures of circumstances and influences, like leaping into an unknown sea. It is a lover's leap, however, and love is beyond the hopes or arrangements of wisdom. The Concordians are all well. I feel a pang in going to-night to take leave of Elizabeth Hoar, who is going away for several weeks, and who will not return until after I have left Concord. She seems to me one who may at any moment become invisible, like a pure flame. Almira is well, and sends love to you. She hopes you will come and make her a visit during the summer, and I hope it may be made in June, as I shall go away by the 1st of July, and move by slow stages towards New York. The summer will fly by on swift wings, and more beautiful than those of a gorgeous butterfly which we examined today; it flitted away among the dark pines, as the summer will disappear in the shadowy pines of autumn, so grave and at last solemn. I hope this late afternoon is as beautiful with you as it is here. Your friend, G.W.C. DESTINY That dream was life, but waking came, Dead silence after living speech, Cold darkness after golden flame, And now in vain I seek to reach, In thought that radiant delight Which girt me with a splendid night. No art can bring again to me Thy figure's grace, lithe-limbed by sleep; No echo drank the melody An after-festival to keep With me, and memory from that place Glides outward with averted face. I loved thy beauty as a gleam Of a sweet soul by beauty nursed, But the strange splendor of that dream All other loves and hopes has cursed-- One ray of the serenest star Is dearer than all diamonds are. Yet would I give my love of thee, If thus of thee I had not dreamed, Nor known that in thine eyes might be What never on my waking gleamed, For Night had then not swept away The possibilities of Day. For had my love of thee been less, Still of my life thou hadst been queen, And that imperial loveliness Hinted by thee I had not seen; Yet proudly shall that love expire The spark of dawn in morning's fire. How was it that we loved so well, From love's excess to such sweet woe, Such bitter honey--for will swell Across my grief that visioned glow Which steals the soul of grief away As sunlight soothes a wintry day. And so we part, who are to each The only one the earth can give. How vainly words will strive to reach Why we together may not live, When barely thought can learn to know The depth of this sublimest woe. XXXV CONCORD, _June 29, '46._ My dear Friend,--I had hoped that you would have come to Concord yesterday, because to-morrow early I leave, and shall be here only one day more, towards the close of the next week. I had not expected to have gone so soon, but I shall accompany a sick friend to Saratoga by slow stages, and, returning to Worcester, make a short visit among my kindred there, and then return to Concord to take my final departure. I shall try to secure some day about that time to come to Brook Farm, if only to say farewell to you; but just now I cannot specify the day. My trip to Monadnock was very beautiful. The minister, Jno. Brown, is the same Brook Farmer in a black coat; and I enjoyed a few days at his house exceedingly. I wrote a long journal while there, and cannot say anything about it here, therefore. This afternoon I have answered Isaac's letter which I received during the winter. With great modesty I attempted to show him how, in the nature of things, proselyting was hopeless, at least upon any who are really worth converting. But the tone, like my feeling, was friendly and gentle. If it does not change his course towards me, he will better understand my feeling and position, for I told him that in men of his nature and tendency the zeal of proselytism is a part of the fervor of sentiment, and therefore I expected and willingly accepted his exhortations, and only deplored them as a loss of time and misuse of opportunities of communication. The Roman Church was such an unavoidable goal for Isaac that one who knows him well cannot possibly grieve to see him prostrate before the altar, and ought to understand and anticipate what was called his arrogance, which is a necessary portion of the sentiment and position. The review of Mr. Hawthorne's book in the last _Harbinger_ is delicately appreciative. The introductory chapter is one of the softest, clearest pictures I know in literature. His feeling is so deep, and so unexaggerated, that it is a profoundly subtle interpreter of life to him, and the pensiveness which throws such a mellow sombreness upon his imagination is only the pensiveness which is the shadow of extreme beauty. There is no companion superior to him in genial sympathy with human feeling. He seems to me no less a successful man than Mr. Emerson, although at the opposite end of the village. For a week or two, if you write, continue to address me at Concord, and believe me, in constant unitary feeling, Your friend, G.W.C. XXXVI CONCORD, _July 14th, '46, Sunday night._ My dear Friend,--I have just returned from Almira's, who sends her love, and will be very happy to see you. I have written Mr. Hawthorne to go to Monadnock with me this week, but I suppose his duties will prevent. If I go I shall probably return before Sunday, as that is John Brown's working day, and we shall stay with him. The night was glorious as I came from Almira's. The late summer twilight held the stars at bay; and in the meadows the fire-flies were flitting everywhere. Suddenly in the north, directly before me, began the flashings of the aurora--piles of splendor, a celestial colonnade to the invisible palace. It is a fitting close for a day so soft and beautiful. We took a long sauntering walk this morning and found the mountain laurel, which is very rare here. I have been busy all my afternoons reading Roman history. Niebuhr and Arnold are fine historians. They are such wise, sincere men and scholars. I sit at the western door of the barn, looking across a meadow and rye-field to a group of pines beyond. My eye fixes upon some point in the landscape which constantly grows more beautiful, winning my eyes from the rest, until they gradually slide along, finding each as pleasant until the whole has a separate and individual beauty like a fall whose expressions you know intimately. It is a "Summer of Summers," as Lizzie Curzon writes me, and I am glad that my last hours in my own country will be so consecrated by beauty in my memory. Burrill goes again to the Hudson to see Mr. Downing on Thursday. He will remain a week, I suppose, and go again to New York in August, when I sail. Let me have my answer in person, for so short and poor a letter does not deserve the exclusive attention of writing. Remember me kindly to all at Brook Farm, to Wm. Channing particularly, if he is there. Your friend ever, G.W.C. XXXVII CONCORD, _July 13th, 1846._ My dear Friend,--It is a miserable piece of business to say my farewell to this blank sheet and send it to you, instead of having you say good-bye to my blank face. But, unless you can come to Ida's on Wednesday or Thursday, it must be so. A sudden trip to Saratoga has deranged my plans. Will you now send my copy of the _Harbinger_ to Almira? We have been too happy together in times past and mean to be so so much more, here or somewhere, that we will not be very serious in our farewells, for we have been as far apart since I left you as we shall be when you are at Brook Farm and I at Palmyra. So good-bye, whether for two or three years, or an indefinite period. When we see each other again we shall _meet_, for our friendship has been of a fine gold which the moth and rust of years cannot corrupt. Will you give my love and say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley and my other friends with you? and remember, as he deserves, Your friend, G.W.C. XXXVIII MILTON HILL, _Midnight, July 16, '46._ My dear Friend,--I could not come this evening, and shall only have time in the morning to go to Boston and take the cars; so we must part so. I will copy some of my verses for you if I can steal the time, and write you from Europe if David Jones permits me to arrive. I must say good-bye and good-night in some lines of Burns's which haunt me at this time, though they have no appropriateness; but they have a speechless woe of farewell, like a wailing wind: "Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met or never parted, We had never been broken hearted." Yr friend G.W.C. I shall write you again. Will you give this to Jno. Cheever? I have no wafer. XXXIX FORT HAMILTON, LONG ISLAND, _July 30, '46._ My dear Friend,--It is very shabby, but I have been so unexpectedly and constantly separated from my manuscripts that I cannot copy, as I hoped, some of my verses. I have but one more day on land, and more than I can well do in it. Could you hear how the sea moans and roars in the moonlight at this moment, it would be a siren song to draw you far away. I strain my eyes over the water as one struggles to comprehend the end of life, but the beauty of the future lies unseen and untouched. God bless you always, my dear Friend; and do not fail to write me often. Affly. yr friend, G.W.C. XL ROME, _November 22d, 1846._ My dear Friend,--Italy is no fable, and the wonderful depth of purity in the air and blue in the sky constantly makes real all the hopes of our American imagination. Sometimes the sky is an intensely blue and distant arch, and sometimes it melts in the sunlight and lies pale and rare and delicate upon the eye, so that one feels that he is breathing the sky and moving in it. The memory of a week is full of pictures of this atmospheric beauty. I looked from a lofty balcony at the Vatican upon broad gardens lustrously green with evergreen and box and orange trees, in whose dusk gleamed the large planets of golden fruit. Palms, and the rich, rounding tuft of Italian pines, and the solemn shafts of cypresses, stood beside fountains which spouted rainbows into the air, which was silver-clear and transparent, and on which the outline of the landscape was drawn as vividly as a flame against the sky at night. Beside me rose floating into the air the dome of St. Peter's, which is not a nucleus of the city, like the Duomo of Florence, but a crown more majestic and imposing as the spectator is farther removed. I had come to this balcony and its realm of sunny silence through the proper palace of the "Apollo" and the "Laocoon" and Raphael's "Transfiguration" and "Stanze." The Vatican is a wilderness of art and association, and in the allotted three hours I could only wander through the stately labyrinth and arrange the rooms, but not their contents, in my mind, but could not escape the "Apollo," which stands alone in a small cabinet opening upon a garden and fountain. It was greater to me than the "Venus de Medici" at Florence, although it has taught me better to appreciate that when I see it again. It is cold and pure and vast, the imagination of a man in the Divine Mind, given to marble because flesh was too recreant a material. The air of the statue is proudly commanding, with disdain that is not human, and a quiet consciousness of power. It does not resemble any figure we see of a man who has drawn a bow, but the ideal of a man in action. Like the "Venus," it shows how entire was the possible abstraction of the old Sculptors into a region of pure form as an expression of what was beyond human passion, with which color seems to correspond. Deities are properly the subject of sculpture because of color; colorless purity of marble accords with the divine superiority to human passion, and although the mythology degraded the gods into the sphere and influence of men, to the mind of the artist they would still sit upon unstained thrones. This was one day. Upon another I stepped from a lovely road upon the Aventine into an old garden where, at the end of a long, lofty, and narrow alley of trimmed evergreens, stood the Dome of St. Peter's filling the vista against an afternoon sky. In these mossy and silent old places, the trees and plants seem to have sucked their vigor from the sun and soil of many long-gone centuries, and to remain ghosts of themselves and hoary reminiscences of their day in the soft splendor of modern light. Italy itself is that garden wherein everything hands you to the past, and stands dim-eyed towards the future. It is a vast university, endowed by the past with the choicest treasures of art, to which come crowds from all nations, as lovers and dreamers and students, who may be won to live among relics so dear, but who mostly return to stand as interpreters of the beauty they have seen. Therefore, Italy is a theme which cannot grow old, as love and beauty cannot. Every book should be a work of art, and Italy, like the Madonna, should have a fresh beauty in the hands of every new artist. It is no longer interesting, statistically, for the names and numbers have been told often enough; but the impression which it leaves upon the mind of men of character and taste is the picture which should be novel and interesting. But it is the relics of the summer prime of the Rome of distant scholars and lovers, and the art which shines with an Indian-summer softness in the autumn of its decay, that rule here yet; for the imperial days have breathed a spirit into the air which broods over the city still. Although it is a modern capital, with noise and dirt and smells and nobility and fashionable drives, and walks and shops, and the red splendor of lacquered cardinals, and the triple-crowned Pope, in the arches which rise over modern chapels and of which they are built, in the ruined forum and acqueducts and baths and walls, are the decayed features of what was once greatest in this world, and which rules it from its grave. My first view of old Rome was in the moonlight. We passed through the silent Forum, not on the level of the ancient city, which recoils from modern footsteps and goes downward towards the dust of those who made it famous, but by the ruined temples and columns whose rent seams were shaped anew into graceful perfection by the magical light, by the wilderness of the ruined Caesar's palace, until we looked wonderingly into the intricacy of arch and corridor and column of which was built the arch-temple of Paganism, the Coliseum. The moonlight silvered the broad spaces of scornful silence as if Fate mused mournfully upon the work it must needs do. Grass and flowers in their luxuriant prime waved where the heads of Roman beauties nodded in theirs; and yet how true to the instincts of their nature were the Romans, who nourished by their recreations the stern will which had won the world for them. And since literature and art and science depend in a certain measure for their development and perfection upon a strong government, the same Roman beauty, in dooming to a bloody death before her eyes the man upon whose life depended other and far-away beauties and loves, may have breathed a sweeter strain into the song of the poet. The Popes have not refrained from obtruding a cross and shrines upon this defenceless ruin. They would not render unto Caesar the things which were his, and although they are shocking at first, the magnificence of silence and decay soon swallows them, and they appear no more except as emblems of modern Rome lost in the broad desolation of the imperial city. One cannot see the present Pope without a hope for Italy. I first saw him at high mass, with the cardinals, in the Palace chapel. The college of cardinals resembled a political and not a religious body, which, although the council of government, it ought to resemble upon religious occasions. When the Pope entered they kissed his hand through his mantle. He is a noble-looking man, of a dignified and graceful presence, and already very dear to the people for what he has done and what he has promised. I could not look at him without sadness as a man sequestered in splendor and removed from the small sympathies in which lies the mass of human happiness. The service seemed a worship of him, but no homage could recompense a man for what a Pope had lost. I have seen him often since, and his demeanor is always marked by the same air of lofty independence. It is good to see him appear equal to a position so solitary and so commanding, and to indicate this vigor of life and the conscience which would prevent him from making his seclusion a bower for his own ease. From one of these wonderful days passed in the Villa Borghese, a spacious estate near the city, equally charming for its nature and art, I went, a day or two since, to watch by the deathbed of a young American. Hicks (a young artist, whom I love and whom the MacDaniels will know) and myself stood by him and closed his eyes. He was without immediate friends, except a connection by marriage who has recently arrived, and who was with him at the last. I was glad that I was here to be with him and lay him decently in his coffin. The handful of Americans in Rome followed him last evening at dusk, close by twilight, and buried him in the Protestant graveyard, near the grave of Shelley's ashes and heart. The roses were in full blossom, as Shelley says they used to be in midwinter. It is a green and sequestered spot under the walls of old Rome, where the sunlight lingers long, and where in the sweet society of roses whose bloom does not wither, Shelley and Keats sleep always a summer sleep. Fate is no less delicate than stern, which has here united them after such lives and deaths. And yet here one feels also the grimness of the Fate which strikes such lips into silence. I force myself to send you this letter, because I want to write you. It is a shadowy hint of what I think and feel, as all letters must be. Cranch and his wife are with me, and will stay the winter. There are not many Americans, but I look every day for Burrill. Hicks I have seen a good deal and like very much. He speaks to me of the MacDaniels. Give my love to all at Brook Farm, and forgive a letter which you will not believe was written in Italy. Cranch sends much love. Always yr G.W.C. How I wish you were going with us this sweet sunny day (23 Nov.), on which I am writing this at my open window, without a fire, to see the "Gladiator" at the capitol. It is a great responsibility to be in Italy, one may justly demand so much of you afterwards. Once more, good-bye, and some day send me a ray from the beautiful past which Brook Farm is to me. G.W.C. XLI NAPLES, _April 27th, 1847._ My dear Friend,--If it would be hopeless and dispiriting to paint the constantly shifting lights and beauties of a summer day, it is no less so to write now and then a letter from Italy to one who would so warmly enjoy all that I see and hear. Every omitted day makes the case worse, a month makes it hopeless; and so I lived in Rome for five months and wrote you only one letter at the beginning. Yet is the magnetism of friendship not yet fine enough for you to know how constantly you were remembered, how I lingered in the moonlit Coliseum, how I felt the commanding beauty of the "Apollo" thrill through me, and the "Laocoon" and the proud heads of Antinous, and the pictures which are what our imaginations demand for Raphael and Leonardo and Michel Angelo, how I stood in the flood of the "Miserere," which was and was not what I knew it must be, how I plucked roses from the graves of Shelley and Keats, and led a Roman life for a winter, not for myself only, but for you! I have written quite regularly to my family, and described some of the many matters which were new and picturesque, but have scarcely snatched a line to a friend except to Lizzie Curson and two letters to Geo. Bradford, who had some intention of coming out to join us in this enchanted land. In my last letter to him, which I wrote at the end of the Holy Week, I mentioned the "Miserere" and the news of that time. He will show you the letter, I suppose, if you wish to see it. But from Rome I broke suddenly off and came to Naples. Is it not fine when things are beautifully different, when you part from one as if you were leaving everything, and find satisfaction in another--not a superiority, but equal difference? So is Naples after Rome. There is nothing solemn or grand in it. It rises in solid banks of cheerful houses from the spacious streets upon the water to the grim castle of St. Elmo, which hovers almost perpendicularly over it. These houses are white and bright, and turn themselves into the sunlight, and stretch in long lines around the bay, blending with the neighboring towns so that the base of Vesuvius is marked with a line of white houses, which go on undistinguishably from Naples. Farther round is Castellamare and Sorrento, whose promontory beyond is one corner of the bay, of which Capri seems like a portion sailed away into the sea. And the bay of Naples is so spacious and stately, so broad and deep, its lines those of mountains and the sea, its gem the sunny city, and the islands of Capri, Ischia, and Procida, so large and high and springing so proudly from the water, that it satisfies the expectation; and sometimes this broad water dashes and rolls like the ocean, then subsides into sunny ripples and gleams like glass in the moonlight. Two or three old castles stand out upon the bay from the city, picturesque objects for artists and lookers on, and in the hazy moonlight black and sharp masses reflected in the water. Sails and steamers and boats of all sorts are constantly dotting this space, and I am never weary of wandering along the shore on which lie the fishermen among their boats, with mournful looking women and black, matted-haired, gypsy-like children. The picturesqueness of cities and life in Italy is more striking to me than anything else. The people are so poetic that, although lazy and dirty and mean, what they do and wear is like an animated picture. The gay costumes of the women--ribbons and bodices and trinkets--with their deep olive skins and bare heads, with hair that is most luxuriantly black, and beautifully twisted and folded in heavy, graceful braids, the broad-browed and outlined Roman women, majestic and handsome, not lovely or interesting, but showing as the remains of an imperial beauty; and in Naples the little figures and arch eyes and Oriental mien of the girls--these persons living in quaint old cities where the brightest flowers bloom amid hanging green over windows far and far above the street and walking in high-walled narrow lanes over which hang the sun-sucking leaves of the indolent aloe, and in which gleam the rich orange and lemon trees, or, as now, the keen lustrous green of just-budding fig-trees, and vines, or entering with quiet enthusiasm into festivals of saints, sprinkling the churches and streets with glossy, fragrant bay-leaves, hanging garlands upon the altars while a troop of virgins, clad in white and crowned, pass with lighted tapers to the Bishop's feet for a blessing, or more grandly drawing St. Peter's in fire upon the wild gloom of a March night, and in vast procession of two or three thousand marching down the narrow Corso singing a national song to the Pope--all this, if you can unravel it, paints for the eye what can never be seen at home. "I pack my trunk and wake up in Naples," and find myself, for which I am grateful; but I also find Italian beauty, which is like American as oranges are like apples. Such deep passionate eyes, such proud, queenly motions, such groups of peasants and girls in gardens listening to music, and lying asleep in the shade of trees, all this material of poetry is also material of life here. This is the true Lotos Eaters' island, this the grateful land of leisure; here people walk slowly and eat slowly and ride slowly, and, I must say, think slowly. But that also is corn to my mill. I find some sympathy with the happy Guy of Emerson's book, for there is no public opinion in Italy. A man feels that he stands alone and enjoys all the joys and sorrows of that consciousness and that position. Your room is your castle. If a man knows where it is he comes to see you, but whatever you do or say (of course excepting what is political) is your own business and not that of infernal society, which at home is grand arbiter of men's destinies. Except you care to do so, you have no state to keep up. The card for a royal ball finds you as readily in your fourth story as in the neighboring palace it finds My Lord; and so you are released from that thraldom which one cannot explain, but which one feels at home whether he consents to it or not. And it is a broad and catholic teacher, this travelling. I have been quite unsphered since I have been here, in various ways, and have discovered how good every man's business is and how wide his horizon. There is a shabby Americanism which prowls proselyting through Europe, defying its spirit or its beauty or its difference to swerve it from what it calls its patriotism. Because America is contented and tolerably peaceful with a Republic, it prophesies that Europe shall see no happy days until all kings are prostrated; and belches that peculiar eloquence which prevails in small debating-clubs in retired villages at home. This is like taunting the bay of Naples with the bay of New York, or apples with oranges, or the dark lustrous beauty of Italian women with the blond fairness of Americans. Why should all men be governed alike rather than all look alike; the north is cold and the south is warm. These monarchies which are decried have been the fostering arms of genius and art; and in Italy and the rest of the countries here lie the grand achievements of all time, which draw the noblest and best from America to contemplate them and suck the heart of their beauty for the refining and adorning their own land. And why fear imitation! Men imitate when they stay at home more preposterously than when they see what is really beautiful and grand in other places; and a fine work of art repels imitation as the virgin beauty of a girl repels licentiousness. And we are elevated by art and mingling with men to know what is noble and best in attainment. We fancy a thousand things fine at home because we do not know how much finer the same may be, perhaps because we do not know that they are copies. Indeed, I feel as if it would be a good fruit of long travel to recover the knowledge of the fact which we so early lose--that we are born into the world with relations to men as men before we are citizens of a country with limited duties. A noble cosmopolitanism is the brightest jewel in a man's crown. I have heard very little music in Italy--never so little in a winter. In Rome the opera was nothing, and there were only two or three concerts. That of a young Pole pianiste whom I knew was good, Maurice Strakosch (perhaps he will come to America). But the great gem of music was the singer Adelaide Kemble. You know she has left the stage and the public, but this was an amateur concert for the Irish. Her singing of "Casta Diva" was by far the finest gem heard. Such richness and volume, such possession and depth and passion, such purity and firmness and ease, I did not believe possible. Although a single song in a concert it seemed to embrace the whole spirit of the opera. She sang also the moon song from "Der Freischutz" simply and exquisitely, also in a trio of Mozart's and a Barcarolle, all of which showed the same genius. I do not see that she lacks anything, for although not beautiful, her face is flexible and really grand when she is excited. Cranch thought her voice not quite sweet in some parts. The "Miserere" was exquisitely beautiful, but not entirely what I expected to hear. In Naples I have heard the "Barber of Seville" and an opera of Mercadanti's. The last is refined street music, and reminds me of the mien and manners of a gentleman. The bands play every day, which is much better than at Rome. But it is unhappy for me that Verdi is the musical god of Italy at present, because the bands play entirely from his operas, which remind me of a diluted Donizetti. He has brought out a new opera, "Macbeth," within the month, at Florence. On the third evening he was called out thirty-eight times; the young men escorted him home in triumph, and the next night various princes and nobles presented him with a golden crown! I have heard various rumors of Brook Farm, none agreeable. I feel as if my letter might not find you there; but what can you be doing anywhere else? I have received no letter from you, no direct news from Brook Farm, except through Lizzie Curzon and Geo. Bradford. But it floats on in my mind, a sort of Flying Dutchman in these unknown seas of life and experience, full of an old beauty and melody. I know how your time is used, and am not surprised at any length of silence. We go into the beautiful country about us for a fortnight, to Salerno, Sorrento, Pestum, and Capri, afterwards Rome again. Florence, the Apennines, Venice, Milan, Como, the Tyrol, Switzerland, and Germany lie before us. What a spring which promises such a summer! You will still go with me as silently as before. At this moment I raise my eyes to Vesuvius, which is opposite my window, and the blue bay beneath. I can see the line of the Mediterranean blending with the sky, and remember that you are at the other side. I write as if Brook Farm still was there, and am more than ever Yr friend G.W.C. LETTERS OF LATER DATE I PROVIDENCE, _Thursday, Oct. 10, '50._ My dear Dwight,--I was very very sorry not to find you the other day; but as I was only a few hours in Boston, I had no opportunity of renewing the attempt. This morning I saw a letter, I suppose from you, in the _Tribune_, about Jenny's Saturday concert in Boston. It reminded me to send you a most rapid criticism(?) of mine published here yesterday. I address the paper as I do this note. This Jenny Lind singing is a matter of such lofty art in the sublimest sense, and we are so young and jejune in all art, that I cannot much wonder at the general impression. It is precisely what would be the fate of really fine pictures and poems. Huge wonder, childish delight, intoxication, delirium, and disappointment--but little of the apprehensive perception of the presence of an artist so profound and grand. I knew, of course, that you must be realizing somewhere the greatness of this gift. Now I have heard you say so, I am glad to send you a kind of echo. When shall I see you? I shall be here for a day or two more, then relapse into New York, for how long I know not. Let me have a line from you, saying that among all your virtues you yet count Memory, as does yours most rememberingly, George W. Curtis. II PROVIDENCE, _March 17th, '51, Monday._ I believe, dear John, that I have not yet had the grace to congratulate you upon "the great change" that you have recently undergone. But, happily, I am equally sure that you have not ascribed my silence to anything but the habit of epistolary silence that has come upon me since my return from the other continent, mainly distinguished, if my memory may confirm universal remark, by the great number of letters written from it. May I also add the satiety of writing, which a man who has just published a book may be supposed to be experiencing? For I have published a book, a copy of which, with the heart of the author, pressed but not dried between the blank leaves, you should have had immediately but for my absence from New York. It is called "Nile Notes of a Howadji," and has thus far, being only a week old, received as flattering notice as any tremulous young author could have wished. One or two chapters are considered somewhat _broad_, I hear; but the whole impression is precisely what I wished. I am here because I was invited to repeat my lecture here; and, as I was not back in New York when the "Notes" were issued, I preferred to tarry in the "ambrosial retirement," as Rev. Osgood calls it, and not serve as foot-notes to my Readers. I shall go home soon, and I trust by way of Boston. If so, I shall of course see you and--yours, I must now say. Will you present my warmest regards and pleasantest recollections to your wife, and believe still in your friend George W.C. III My dear John,--The Lady Emelyn swears by Venus and all the Goddesses that our party at your house must be postponed until Friday evening, that she may bring with us Miss Anna Loring and Miss Augusta King. What can mere men do? They submit. And they walk across the fields to look at a beautiful woman, at a Poet's wife. We are all very hot and very happy down here, and wonder if your ashes are white or quite invisible, for of course, in the city, you have become ash. Present us most kindly to your wife, and forget not that our coming will be much more enchanting with Mrs. S.'s proposed addition. Yours aff., G.W.C. NAHANT, _Wednesday morning Aug 12, '51._ IV My dear John,--We are tapering off. Mrs. Story is not well, and we have not our young ladies yet. Also C.P. Cranch goes to Quincy, where his wife is. So I fear you will have only William and me, and very probably his proof-sheets will retain him. I expect Cranch to come, but he is quite unwell. Yours aff., G.W.C. _Friday, Aug. 15, '51._ V PROVIDENCE, _Friday, Sep. 26, 1851._ My dear John,--This morning I received the enclosed. If you can shed light upon the darkness it indicates will you please do so, sending me what information you have. I am up to my ears in a book I am writing in continuation of the "Notes," "Syrian Sketches"; and shall stay here perhaps two months. I shall hope to slip down to Boston occasionally and see you all. I was there a few hours on Monday, and saw William by chance. Burrill has reached England, and is very much pleased with Malvern. Give my love to your wife, whom I would be glad to hear sing once more. Your aff. G.W.C. VI PROVIDENCE, _25th Nov., '51._ My dear John,--I had intended to see the B. when she came. I have sounded her trumpet here, for auld lang syne. If I can do so heartily I will write a notice of her concert, as I always do when I am here, at the request of _The Journal_. I enclose my last effort in that kind, apropos of Catherine Hayes. I would gladly come to Boston, but I cannot think of it just now. Should Jenny Lind threaten not to sing in Providence I shall very likely run down with my cousin Anna and hear her for an evening. We are trying to have the Germania here, but for music in the general we go hang. My cousin, however, is a very accomplished player, and I enjoy with her Mendelssohn's songs and Liszt's arrangements and "Don Giovanni" and eke Schumann. I see Fred Rackemann has returned. My book is written; but I am now very busily revising it. Hedge much prefers what I have read him to the other. He lives just across the street from me, and we have many a cigar and chat. He preaches superb sermons. Give my heartiest love and remembrances to your wife, and forget not the faithful. I have a line from the Xest of Xtophers the other day, who is painting away for dear life. Tom Hicks, ditto. The latter lives with Charles Dana. Ever your aff. G.W.C. I have unluckily forgotten your no. so I'll put the street, not being quite sure of that!!! VII TRIBUNE OFFICE, N.Y., _19th March, '52._ My dear John,--Your most welcome letter has been received, and its contents have been submitted to the astute deliberations of the editorial conclave. We are delighted at the prospect--but--we do not love the name. _1st. Journal of Music_ is too indefinite and commonplace. It will not be sufficiently distinguished from the _Musical Times_ and the _Musical World_, being of the same general character. 2d. "Side-glances" is suspicious. It "smells" Transcendentalism, as the French say, and, of all things, any aspect of a clique is to be avoided. That is the negative result of our deliberations; the positive is, that you should identify your name with the paper and called it _Dwight's Musical Journal_, and you might add, _sotto voce_, "a paper of Art and Literature." Prepend: I shall be very glad to send you a sketch of our winter doings in music, especially as I love Steffanane, although she says, "I smoke, I chew, I snoof, I drink, I am altogether vicious." You shall have it Sunday morning, and I will address it to you simply at the P.O. My book is ready, is only waiting for the English publisher to move; and I have other irons heating, of which anon. I've had a long letter from Wm. Story, who is happy and busy in Rome--who wouldn't be? VIII I wish you could run on and see us all. Tom Hicks is right busy with his great portrait of the ex-Governor. Indeed, we are all so busy that I have only time to remember--rarely to say--that I am Your ever aff. G.W.C. _J.S. Dwight, Esq._ Give my kindest regards to your wife. I wish she could sing in your paper. IX N.Y., _Saturday, 24th April, '52._ My dear John,--I have been so busy in the last throes of my "Syrian Howadji," which is to be born on Tuesday, that I have not sent you an intended letter about the Philharmonic and the Quartette; and I presume from to-day's number that you have other notes of them. I think, however, I will still send you something by Monday's mail if you will promise not to use it if you don't truly want it. There is rather a flat and barrenness just now in the world of music, but, with the Academy exhibition, Brackett's group, and the Paul Delaroche picture we can make out something. Your paper is a triumph. It is so handsome to the eye and sweet to the mind, it is so pleasantly varied, and its sketches have such completeness of grace in themselves, that the reader is not ashamed of the pleasure it gives him and the interest he has in it, which you may have remarked is not always the case, for instance, in liking Anna Thillard's business at Niblo's (of which very little is certainly enough). I am half ashamed of myself for really enjoying what I know is so utterly artificial. Do you conceive? I just see in the _National Era_ a long notice of you and your _Journal_. It was not mine or the T.'s or I should have sent it to you. But you must find it. You will receive an early copy of my Syrian book, the last of the Howadji, who, leaving the East, becomes a mere traveller. It was a real work of love, and I hope you may have some of the pleasure in reading that I had in writing it. Give my love to your wife, and believe me always, G.W.C. I send you over the page a list of names of my subscribers and enclose you the funds in N.Y. money. [Enclosed were eight subscriptions to _Dwight's Journal of Music_, Curtis himself taking three copies.] X N.Y., _28th Apr., 1852._ My dear John,--I span out my letter so far that I had no room for pictures, but I will not forget them, and they will remain open until the middle of July. I shall be only too delighted to see Mr. Goldschmidt, and sincerely regret that I have enjoyed no such opportunity of seeing Jenny Lind until just as she is going. We are beginning to stir. White and I have both suggested _one_ concert of the true stamp, and the _Times_ came out against us and we pitched back again into the _Times_; and the _Herald_ and other journals have called attention to the warfare, and insist that humbug, Barnumania, and high prices shall be put down. I am going to write an article upon Jenny Lind's right to ask $3 if she thinks fit, on the principle that Dickens, Horace Vernet, and every molasses merchant acts and properly acts. Why not send your papers to the publisher of some Saturday paper to distribute with his? The difficulty is that if people are irregular in getting it, it will lose its character of steadiness, which is fatal to such a paper. Ripley agrees in this. By mail the majority of people who haven't boxes at the P.O. get nothing at all, or only spasmodically. You will have to send it to some agent here, I am confident. Cranch is about breaking up house-keeping preparatory to his summer rustication. He is in a tight place again, as he is too apt to be, poor fellow! The fact is art is poor pay unless you are a great artist. He fights very cheerfully, though, which is a comfort. His children are very interesting, and at his house there is a set of us who have the best of times, the most truly genial and poetic. I enclose you the funds which I so amusingly forgot, and, if I can serve you by seeing any agent or other "fallow deer," I shall be most happy to do it; and don't fail always to call upon me. Yours most truly and ever, G.W.C. Is this sum right? XI NEWPORT, _July 29th, 1852._ My dear John,--I have been running round for two or three weeks, and have forgotten to ask you to change the address of the papers which come to me.... I am charmingly situated here with Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow and Tom Appleton, and with some other pleasant people. It is very lovely and lazy; but I am quite busy. Give my love to your wife and believe me, always, Your aff. G.W.C. XII NEWPORT, _Oct. 11th, 1852._ My dear John,--I leave Newport this evening, and since "friend after friend departs," you will hardly be surprised to hear that I have fallen from the ranks of bachelors; and that when I said I should die such, I had no idea I should live to be married. Prosaically, then, I am engaged to.... Her father is cousin of ... and is of the elder branch of the family, so that I already begin to feel sentimental about Lady Arabella Johnson. On the other side I come plump against plump old Gov. Stuyvesant of the New Netherlands. What with Dutch and Puritan blood, therefore, I shall be sufficiently sobered, you will fancy. Wrong, astutest of Johns, for my girl plays like a sunbeam over the dulness of that old pedigree, and is no whit more Dutch or Puritan than I am. She is, in brief, 22 years old, a very, very pronounced blonde, not handsome (to common eyes), graceful and winning, not accomplished nor talented nor fond of books, gay as a bird, bright as sunshine, and has that immortal youth, that perennial freshness and sweetness which is the secret of permanent happiness. I am as happy as the day, and have no especial intention of marrying directly. Her father has a large property, but she is not, properly, a rich girl. I shall be settled at home in ten days. To-night I am going to Baltimore, and shall return to New York next week. Give my warmest love to your wife, and believe me--Benedict or no Benedict--always Your aff. G.W.C. XIII N.Y., _14th April, 1853._ Caro Don Giovanni,--Any time these six months I have seen a skulking scoundrel who endeavored to avoid my notice, and always turned pale when he saw a copy of _Dwight's Journal of Music_. I pursued him vigorously, and he confessed to me that he was the chief of sinners, and that his name was _Hafiz_. "But," said he, when he saw in my eyes the firm resolve to acquaint the editor with the fact that his correspondent was still living--"but, oh! say that I have just paid to Messrs. Scharfenberg and Luis my subscription for the three copies owing the coming year"--and thereupon he vanished; and I haste to discharge my duty, for if I have a failing, it is doing my duty. Should you see the editor will you please state not only the fact of the subscription paid, but that I have heard this pursued Hafiz swear that not many moons should wane before he wrote to _Dwight's Journal of Music_ a letter about things in New York, "our new music and other things," for instance. Hafiz, who tries to make me believe that he does the music in _Putnam_, says that in the May number he has commended your _Journal_. He is an abandoned fellow. How are you, and how prospers the _Journal_? and have you quite forgiven my wicked silences as well as my imperfect speeches; and will you please not to forget that you are never forgotten by Your aff. G.W.C. XIV N.Y., _Sept. 14, '53._ My dear John,---I have just returned to town, and find your letter suggestive of White Mountains, quiet, artists, and other dissipations; but I am just from the hills, where I have been for six weeks, and am ordered to the sea-shore to be salted. I am not quite sure whether I shall go to Newport or to Long Branch; but I infinitely prefer Newport, although I have very valued friends upon the New Jersey shore. My old head has been bothering me all summer; but Dr. Gray has taken it fairly in hand, and says I shall soon be all right. I hope he is not all wrong. I am coming to Boston some time during the season to lecture before your Mercantile Library, and have promised to make something of a visit; but I fear it will hardly be possible to stay long. X was on my track yesterday, although I havn't seen him for an age. I hear he projects Europe again, but know nothing definite. Today I am just hurrying off to Staten Island to assist at the nuptials of.... So they go, and so, soon--let us pray--may Your aff. G.W.C. XV N.Y., _July 19, '53._ My dear John,--It has been anything but indifference that has prevented my sending you some notices of the pictures. But my head, which was muzzy when you were here, has been muzzier ever since, and my Dr. made me relinquish everything and run out of town, so that I have been gadding for a month, and the August _Putnam_ hasn't a line of mine. You see I have been positively idle; but I hope I am somewhat better. At least I feel so, although I shall not work much for some time to come. I'm going up to Cranch's this evening and to Lenox next week. It is not impossible that some happy gust may blow me to Conway. Give my kindest love to your wife, and believe me--muzzy or no muzzy-- Your aff. G.W.C. XVI HOME, _9th Feb., '54._ My dear John,--Behold me with unspoken farewells and innumerable Boston banquets well (I hope) digested, and with only a glancing word with your wife at Mrs. Ticknor's on Monday morning. One thing thou lackest, O Freunde! You have not heard Miss Skelton sing! It is a young girl who not only does not like "classical" music, but does not even profess to, which I hold to be virtuous in factitious times. But she is a sweet, natural, honest girl, and sings Italian, yea, even "Ah! Non Credea," with a sweet, full, and tender voice which is truly delicious. She is one of Cranch's stars. I heard her at the Greenwoods. I have a vague idea of darting through Boston again about the first of March. I shall be in New Bedford, and might go to Keene. Good-night. I have every reason to love your Boston. Your aff. G.W.C. Friday I hope to see Mrs. Downing, and if I hear of the great X--an unknown quantity to us--I will inform you. XVII N.Y., _Monday, April 10, '54._ My dear John,---I send you my humble duty. The season is over, and I return to an accumulated mass of work. I find nothing pleasanter in my winter's reminiscences than the Boston episode. Give my kindest love to your wife, and my regards to Hurlbut, and believe me as always, G.W.C. XVIII WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., _11 April, 1883._ My dear John,----Your letter reached me safely, and I share your surprise and regret at what seems to me, so far as I can see, a wholly unnecessary act. I will speak of it in the _Weekly_ at once because the _Magazine_ is always so long after! I saw some notice of Cranch's seventieth birthday. Good lack! how the years whiz! I did not hear from him, and I suppose it is not exactly the occasion upon which you ask your friends to make merry. Longfellow, I remember, wrote me when he was seventy that it was like turning the slate over and beginning upon the other side. We are all well and quiet. The Doctors in New York dine Dr. Holmes to-morrow, and I have promised to go. I have heard nothing from Edmund Tweedy for many a day, but I suppose that all goes well with him and his. Good-bye. It is very good to hear from you always, and I am always affectionately yours, George William Curtis. XIX WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., _8 February, 1884._ My dear John,--I read your letter with sincere but hopeless interest, because I know how very slight her chance is in New York. The only hope lies in a circle of ladies who know her and would take pains to help her; but who are they, and how can they care for her? The contest single-armed against established teachers of prestige of a ci-devant Prima Donna, who had small success twenty-five years ago and is forgotten, is only pitiful. I will ask one of the best and most prosperous of our teachers, and who is much interested in my Lizzie, what ought to be done. He knows more than any one with whom I could advise. I had heard with great delight of your portrait and of the becoming disposition which was made of it. I have thought also how sincerely you will deplore the death of our incomparable orator. And I hope that you sometimes think how affectionately I am always yours, George William Curtis. XX NEW YORK, _October 26, 1884._ My dear John,--Your note finds me here on my way to Ashfield. I voted for Edmunds every time, and in the uproar of the vote that made Blaine's nomination I held my peace. But had I voted for Blaine, and had afterwards found good reasons to change my mind, I should not have hesitated to take the course I have taken. I am very busy, and I send you my love always. Your ancient, George William Curtis. XXI WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., _May 17th, 1886._ My dear John,--I do not know your address, but I am sure the Boston postmaster does, and I trust this note to his superior knowledge. It was very good to see your familiar hand again and unchanged, and best of all to read your strong, clear, masterful, and delightful plea for the true saving grace of humanity, common-sense. It is a most admirable piece of work, and a host of readers will wonder that they had never thought of it before. That is the effect of all wise writing, I suppose, which like yours lays us all under obligation. Why don't you oftener bring us reports of your interviews with Egeria? Cranch had already told me of the paper with great praise, in a letter which told me also of your birthnight orgie with Boott and John Holmes. At the Commencement dinner of the year that Harvard made me a Doctor, I said to President Eliot, "Who is that military man who looks like a captain of Dragoons?" and, after making out the one I meant, he laughed and said, "Dragoons? why that is John Holmes!" As I remember him, his whiskers had a military cut; but I have often laughed since. I have the photograph of Carrie Cranch's remarkable portrait of you, which is a precious possession; and when I see Cranch I hear of you and when I don't see him I think of you, and always with the old affection. We are all well, which means my wife and daughter here, and my son and daughter-in-law and two grandchildren at Newton. My whiskers are white, but my hair holds out with its old brown! Goodbye and auf wiedersehen. Most truly yours, George William Curtis. 
8471	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 1. THE 'BODY OF THE NATION' BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. IT WOULD CONTAIN AUSTRIA FOUR TIMES, GERMANY OR SPAIN FIVE TIMES, FRANCE SIX TIMES, THE BRITISH ISLANDS OR ITALY TEN TIMES. Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. AS A DWELLING-PLACE FOR CIVILIZED MAN IT IS BY FAR THE FIRST UPON OUR GLOBE. EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863 Chapter 1 The River and Its History THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so. It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is eighty- seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth. The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half. An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.' This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high. The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all--one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere. The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way--its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO MILES ABOVE Vicksburg. Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut- off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him. The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat BODILY--is always moving bodily SIDEWISE. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original SITE of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. NEARLY THE WHOLE OF THAT ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED MILES OF OLD MISSISSIPPI RIVER WHICH LA SALLE FLOATED DOWN IN HIS CANOES, TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, IS GOOD SOLID DRY GROUND NOW. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places. Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it. But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for the present--I will give a few more of them further along in the book. Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its historical history--so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book. The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;--as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it. The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age. For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,--the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell. Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity. De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the Spanish custom of the day-- and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the SECOND white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other. For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it. But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance. Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia. Chapter 2 The River and Its Explorers LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi. And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.' On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: 'Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.' He continues: 'Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.' A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi cat- fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come. 'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.' The voyagers moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning.' They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful solitude, then. And it is now, over most of its stretch. But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank--a Robinson Crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--if to be received by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians is to be well treated. In the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell. On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below 'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.' By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes; they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol. They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried their great news to Canada. But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof. He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges. At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme. 'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.' Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First, they were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had before been greeted by them--with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case; the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. Then, to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession of the whole country for the king--the cool fashion of the time--while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies. These performances took place on the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river, occurred, by accident, in one and the same place. It is a most curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot, the future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American heirs. The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,' and visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw--better houses than many that exist there now. The chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square; and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by sixty old men clothed in white cloaks. There was a temple in the town, with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun. The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV. A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow of his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware, and from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up: 'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.' Chapter 3 Frescoes from the Past APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no, the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been. Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about. Truly, there were snails in those days. The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous. By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers. But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi. In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white, sweet- smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm- quarters,--and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride. By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:-- But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one. I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was all right-- nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was singing--roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway. He roared through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long. When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and then another was sung. It begun:-- 'There was a woman in our towdn, In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,) She loved her husband dear-i-lee, But another man twyste as wed'l. Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo, Ri-too, riloo, rilay - - - e, She loved her husband dear-i-lee, But another man twyste as wed'l. And so on--fourteen verses. It was kind of poor, and when he was going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.' And another one told him to take a walk. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the lot. They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there jumped up and says-- 'Set whar you are, gentlemen. Leave him to me; he's my meat.' Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together every time. He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says, 'You lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.' Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out-- 'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper- bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!--Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!' All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his breast with his fist, saying, 'Look at me, gentlemen!' When he got through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, and let off a roaring 'Whoo-oop! I'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives!' Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back sagged and his south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out and drawing in in front of him, and so went around in a little circle about three times, swelling himself up and breathing hard. Then he straightened, and jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he begun to shout like this-- 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's a- coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! whoo- oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked glass, here, for all! Don't attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather--don't use the naked eye! I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!' He jumped up and cracked his heels together three times before he lit (they cheered him again), and as he come down he shouted out: 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of calamity's a-coming! ' Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again--the first one--the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called the Child names, and the Child called him names back again: next, Bob called him a heap rougher names and the Child come back at him with the very worst kind of language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it up and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better look out, for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body. The Child said no man was willinger than he was for that time to come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one. Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says-- 'Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and I'll thrash the two of ye!' And he done it, too. He snatched them, he jerked them this way and that, he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could get up. Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs-- and how the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way through, and shout 'Sail in, Corpse-Maker!' 'Hi! at him again, Child of Calamity!' 'Bully for you, little Davy!' Well, it was a perfect pow- wow for a while. Bob and the Child had red noses and black eyes when they got through. Little Davy made them own up that they were sneaks and cowards and not fit to eat with a dog or drink with a nigger; then Bob and the Child shook hands with each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected each other and was willing to let bygones be bygones. So then they washed their faces in the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and some of them went forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft to handle the after-sweeps. I laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again. Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old- fashioned keel-boat break-down. They couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded, so by and by they settled around the jug again. They sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a musing chorus, and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and their different kind of habits; and next about women and their different ways: and next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and next about what ought to be done with the Injuns; and next about what a king had to do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight; and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio water--what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be. The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says-- 'You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.' And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across. Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says-- 'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let me have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard--gaping and stretching, he was--and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says-- '"Why looky-here," he says, "ain't that Buck Miller's place, over yander in the bend." '"Yes," says I, "it is--why." He laid his pipe down and leant his head on his hand, and says-- '"I thought we'd be furder down." I says-- '"I thought it too, when I went off watch"--we was standing six hours on and six off--"but the boys told me," I says, "that the raft didn't seem to hardly move, for the last hour," says I, "though she's a slipping along all right, now," says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says-- '"I've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, "'pears to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last two years," he says. 'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it. Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I says-- '"What's that?" He says, sort of pettish,-- '"Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l." '"An empty bar'l!" says I, "why," says I, "a spy-glass is a fool to your eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" He says-- '"I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might be," says he. '"Yes," I says, "so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that," I says. 'We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and by I says-- '"Why looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, I believe." 'He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it must be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into the crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the moonshine, and, by George, it was bar'l. Says I-- '"Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when it was a half a mile off," says I. Says he-- '"I don't know." Says I-- '"You tell me, Dick Allbright." He says-- '"Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has seen it; they says it's a haunted bar'l." 'I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and I told them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now, and didn't gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having it aboard, but the rest didn't want to. Dick Allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. The captain of the watch said he didn't believe in it. He said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better current than what we was. He said it would leave by and by. 'So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called for another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up to it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers, but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. Then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke, but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. We all just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and oncomfortable. Well, sir, it shut down black and still, and then the wind begin to moan around, and next the lightning begin to play and the thunder to grumble. And pretty soon there was a regular storm, and in the middle of it a man that was running aft stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so that he had to lay up. This made the boys shake their heads. And every time the lightning come, there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around it. We was always on the look-out for it. But by and by, towards dawn, she was gone. When the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we warn't sorry, neither. 'But next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the stabboard side. There warn't no more high jinks. Everybody got solemn; nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set around moody and look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again. When the watch changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in. The storm ripped and roared around all night, and in the middle of it another man tripped and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off. The bar'l left towards day, and nobody see it go. 'Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don't mean the kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone--not that. They was quiet, but they all drunk more than usual--not together--but each man sidled off and took it private, by himself. 'After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody talked; the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of huddled together, forrard; and for two hours they set there, perfectly still, looking steady in the one direction, and heaving a sigh once in a while. And then, here comes the bar'l again. She took up her old place. She staid there all night; nobody turned in. The storm come on again, after midnight. It got awful dark; the rain poured down; hail, too; the thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed a hurricane; and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of glare, and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed up white as milk as far as you could see for miles, and there was that bar'l jiggering along, same as ever. The captain ordered the watch to man the after sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go--no more sprained ankles for them, they said. They wouldn't even walk aft. Well then, just then the sky split wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of the after watch, and crippled two more. Crippled them how, says you? Why, sprained their ankles! 'The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn. Well, not a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men loafed around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none of them herded with Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold shake. If he come around where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away. They wouldn't man the sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted; he didn't believe a man that got ashore would come back; and he was right. 'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. A good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to put him ashore. Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again. 'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here she comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her old tracks. You could a heard a pin drop. Then up comes the captain, and says:-- '"Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this bar'l to be dogging us all the way to Orleans, and YOU don't; well, then, how's the best way to stop it? Burn it up,--that's the way. I'm going to fetch it aboard," he says. And before anybody could say a word, in he went. 'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread to one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head, and there was a baby in it! Yes, sir, a stark naked baby. It was Dick Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so. '"Yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own lamented darling, my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased," says he,--for he could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres. Yes, he said he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night he choked his child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,--which was prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home, and off he went, and struck the northern trail and went to rafting; and this was the third year that the bar'l had chased him. He said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then the bar'l didn't come any more after that. He said if the men would stand it one more night,--and was a-going on like that,--but the men had got enough. They started to get out a boat to take him ashore and lynch him, but he grabbed the little child all of a sudden and jumped overboard with it hugged up to his breast and shedding tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering soul, nor Charles William neither.' 'WHO was shedding tears?' says Bob; 'was it Allbright or the baby?' 'Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead. Been dead three years--how could it cry?' 'Well, never mind how it could cry--how could it KEEP all that time?' says Davy. 'You answer me that.' 'I don't know how it done it,' says Ed. 'It done it though--that's all I know about it.' 'Say--what did they do with the bar'l?' says the Child of Calamity. 'Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.' 'Edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one. 'Did it have its hair parted?' says another. 'What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?' says a fellow they called Bill. 'Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?' says Jimmy. 'Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.' says Davy. 'Him? O, no, he was both of 'em,' says Bob. Then they all haw-hawed. 'Say, Edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill? You look bad-- don't you feel pale?' says the Child of Calamity. 'O, come, now, Eddy,' says Jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bunghole--do--and we'll all believe you.' 'Say, boys,' says Bill, 'less divide it up. Thar's thirteen of us. I can swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.' Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself, and they yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear them a mile. 'Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the Child of Calamity; and he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so he says 'Ouch!' and jumped back. 'Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys--there's a snake here as big as a cow!' So they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me. 'Come out of that, you beggar!' says one. 'Who are you?' says another. 'What are you after here? Speak up prompt, or overboard you go. 'Snake him out, boys. Snatch him out by the heels.' I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. They looked me over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says-- 'A cussed thief! Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!' 'No,' says Big Bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel, and then heave him over!' 'Good, that 's it. Go for the paint, Jimmy.' When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to begin, the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry, and that sort of worked on Davy, and he says-- ''Vast there! He 's nothing but a cub. 'I'll paint the man that tetches him!' So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled, and Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up. 'Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,' says Davy. 'Now set down there and give an account of yourself. How long have you been aboard here?' 'Not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says I. 'How did you get dry so quick?' 'I don't know, sir. I'm always that way, mostly.' 'Oh, you are, are you. What's your name?' I warn't going to tell my name. I didn't know what to say, so I just says-- 'Charles William Allbright, sir.' Then they roared--the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said that, because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor. When they got done laughing, Davy says-- 'It won't hardly do, Charles William. You couldn't have growed this much in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l, you know, and dead at that. Come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong. What IS your name?' 'Aleck Hopkins, sir. Aleck James Hopkins.' 'Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?' 'From a trading scow. She lays up the bend yonder. I was born on her. Pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to swim off here, because when you went by he said he would like to get some of you to speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner, in Cairo, and tell him--' 'Oh, come!' 'Yes, sir; it's as true as the world; Pap he says--' 'Oh, your grandmother!' They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and stopped me. 'Now, looky-here,' says Davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild. Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?' 'Yes, sir, in a trading scow. She lays up at the head of the bend. But I warn't born in her. It's our first trip.' 'Now you're talking! What did you come aboard here, for? To steal?' 'No, sir, I didn't.--It was only to get a ride on the raft. All boys does that.' 'Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?' 'Sometimes they drive the boys off.' 'So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this time, will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?' ''Deed I will, boss. You try me.' 'All right, then. You ain't but little ways from shore. Overboard with you, and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.--Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!' I didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore. When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again. The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I desire to offer in this place. I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination--the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. I believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world. Chapter 4 The Boys' Ambition WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village{footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;' a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, 'S-t-e- a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat IS rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and 'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge- cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more. My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams,--they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or 'striker' on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about 'St. Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was 'passing by the Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless 'cub'-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. He wore a leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand his charms. He 'cut out' every boy in the village. When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months. But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism. This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary--from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river--at least our parents would not let us. So by and by I ran away. I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not manage it. I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting daydreams of a future when I should be a great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for them. Chapter 5 I Want to be a Cub-pilot MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and I found myself without an ambition. But I was ashamed to go home. I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career. I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an expedition sent out by our government. It was said that the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of the river. It was only about fifteen hundred miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship. I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration of the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to the subject. I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans. For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors of 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers. When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio, I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy the envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me. And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other signs of being mightily bored with traveling. I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler. Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck. I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now. We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it. We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger brother to the officers. There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur, or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for those people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman. I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an opportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last. The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way--or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roared a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar. I sprang to his side and said: 'Tell me where it is--I'll fetch it!' If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was. He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me. It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. Then he said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!' and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too abstruse for solution. I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day. I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished. I did not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before. However, my spirits returned, in installments, as we pursued our way down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so, because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him. He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over; he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear. He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrasting the way in which the average landsman would give an order, with the mate's way of doing it. If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say: 'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put the mate in his place and he would roar out: 'Here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now! WHAT're you about! Snatch it! SNATCH it! There! there! Aft again! aft again! don't you hear me. Dash it to dash! are you going to SLEEP over it! 'VAST heaving. 'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear astern? WHERE're you going with that barrel! FOR'ARD with it 'fore I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!' I wished I could talk like that. When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him. So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation. He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice. He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself. He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week-- or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously. What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping. It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it himself. 
8472	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 2. Chapter 6 A Cub-pilot's Experience WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me. It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken deck passage--more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for he never came. It was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1. 'Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]} I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive a new career. The 'Paul Jones' was now bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered. He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating. I entered upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide. The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and it was 'our watch' until eight. Mr. Bixby, my chief, 'straightened her up,' plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at the Levee, and then said, 'Here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you'd peel an apple.' I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape the side off every ship in the line, we were so close. I held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and I had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to get us into such peril, but I was too wise to express it. In half a minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening between the 'Paul Jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds more I was set aside in disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into danger again and flaying me alive with abuse of my cowardice. I was stung, but I was obliged to admire the easy confidence with which my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent. When he had cooled a little he told me that the easy water was close ashore and the current outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream pilot and leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence. Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said he, 'This is Six-Mile Point.' I assented. It was pleasant enough information, but I could not see the bearing of it. I was not conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me. Another time he said, 'This is Nine-Mile Point.' Later he said, 'This is Twelve-Mile Point.' They were all about level with the water's edge; they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject. But no; he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection, and then say: 'The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of China-trees; now we cross over.' So he crossed over. He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I had no luck. I either came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation, or I yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused. The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said-- 'Come! turn out!' And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I said:-- 'What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. Now as like as not I'll not get to sleep again to-night.' The watchman said-- 'Well, if this an't good, I'm blest.' The 'off-watch' was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter from them, and such remarks as 'Hello, watchman! an't the new cub turned out yet? He's delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.' About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here was something fresh--this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it. It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out. The big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at a star and was holding her straight up the middle of the river. The shores on either hand were not much more than half a mile apart, but they seemed wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct. The mate said:-- 'We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir.' The vengeful spirit in me exulted. I said to myself, I wish you joy of your job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good time finding Mr. Jones's plantation such a night as this; and I hope you never WILL find it as long as you live. Mr. Bixby said to the mate:-- 'Upper end of the plantation, or the lower?' 'Upper.' 'I can't do it. The stumps there are out of water at this stage: It's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.' 'All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, I reckon.' And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. I dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace. All I desired to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to really imagine he was going to find that plantation on a night when all plantations were exactly alike and all the same color. But I held in. I used to have fine inspirations of prudence in those days. Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as if it had been daylight. And not only that, but singing-- 'Father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc. It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly reckless outcast. Presently he turned on me and said:-- 'What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?' I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know. 'Don't KNOW?' This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I had to say just what I had said before. 'Well, you're a smart one,' said Mr. Bixby. 'What's the name of the NEXT point?' Once more I didn't know. 'Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of ANY point or place I told you.' I studied a while and decided that I couldn't. 'Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to cross over?' 'I--I--don't know.' 'You--you--don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. 'What DO you know?' 'I--I--nothing, for certain.' 'By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you! You're the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot--you! Why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.' Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again. 'Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?' I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation provoked me to say:-- 'Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought.' This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would TALK BACK. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way-- 'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.' That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel discouraged long. I judged that it was best to make some allowances, for doubtless Mr. Bixby was 'stretching.' Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes on the big bell. The stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as ink. I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I was not entirely certain that I could see the shore. The voice of the invisible watchman called up from the hurricane deck-- 'What's this, sir?' 'Jones's plantation.' I said to myself, I wish I might venture to offer a small bet that it isn't. But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby handled the engine bells, and in due time the boat's nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the bank said, 'Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones,' and the next moment we were standing up the river again, all serene. I reflected deeply awhile, and then said--but not aloud--'Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened; but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years.' And I fully believed it was an accident, too. By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight, and before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in night- work, but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was in my head. It made my heart ache to think I had only got half of the river set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on, day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every time I had slept since the voyage began. My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I stood in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little 'Paul Jones' a large craft. There were other differences, too. The 'Paul Jones's' pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and 'look at the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of a broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. Now this was 'something like,' and so I began to take heart once more to believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. The moment we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost. The boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers! This was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines--but enough of this. I had never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete. Chapter 7 A Daring Deed WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost. Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could make neither head nor tail of it: you understand, it was turned around. I had seen it when coming up-stream, but I had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me. My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got to learn this troublesome river BOTH WAYS. The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.' What is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between St. Louis and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi changes its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage. A deal of this 'looking at the river' was done by poor fellows who seldom had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their being always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot's sudden illness, or some other necessity. And a good many of them constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not because they ever really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being guests of the boat) it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and pay board. In time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only infested boats that had an established reputation for setting good tables. All visiting pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing, winter or summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy the channel or assist the boat's pilots in any way they could. They were likewise welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river they are always understood and are always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings. We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. There were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots. They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. The others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth. I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid. I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest did that when occasion required--and this was pretty much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water. I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me. One visitor said to another-- 'Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?' 'It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the "Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef--quarter less twain--then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming--nine and a half.' 'Pretty square crossing, an't it?' 'Yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.' Another pilot spoke up and said-- 'I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point--mark twain--raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.' One of the gorgeous ones remarked-- 'I don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.' There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the boaster and 'settled' him. And so they went on talk-talk-talking. Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, 'Now if my ears hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never thought of it.' At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the texas, and looked up inquiringly. Mr. Bixby said-- 'We will lay up here all night, captain.' 'Very well, sir.' That was all. The boat came to shore and was tied up for the night. It seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased, without asking so grand a captain's permission. I took my supper and went immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and experiences. My late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of meaningless names. It had tangled me all up in a knot every time I had looked at it in the daytime. I now hoped for respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all through my head till sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare. Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of the river' (as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should overtake us. But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently grounded the boat, and we lost so much time in getting her off that it was plain that darkness would overtake us a good long way above the mouth. This was a great misfortune, especially to certain of our visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait for their return, no matter how long that might be. It sobered the pilot-house talk a good deal. Coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any kind of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. But down-stream work was different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current pushing behind her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at night in low water. There seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get through the intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before night, we could venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water. But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at night. So there was a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day, and a constant ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat Island was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again. For hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed excitement; it was even communicated to me, and I got to feeling so solicitous about Hat Island, and under such an awful pressure of responsibility, that I wished I might have five minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over again. We were standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots ran such portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot house constantly. An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W----stepped aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a doomful sigh-- 'Well, yonder's Hat Island--and we can't make it.' All the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its being 'too bad, too bad--ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!' and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment. Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again. We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--but no words. Insensibly the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note was struck. The watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane deck-- 'Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!' The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck. 'M-a-r-k three!.... M-a-r-k three!.... Quarter-less three! .... Half twain! .... Quarter twain! .... M-a-r-k twain! .... Quarter-less--' Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on--and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks--for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he would meet and fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence now and then--such as-- 'There; she's over the first reef all right!' After a pause, another subdued voice-- 'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!' 'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!' Somebody else muttered-- 'Oh, it was done beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!' Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest impulse to do SOMETHING, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back. 'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered. The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was down to-- 'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven- and--' Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer-- 'Stand by, now!' 'Aye-aye, sir!' 'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and--' We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've got!' then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!' The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a pilot-house before! There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about by river men. Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain. The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby, uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said-- 'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!' Chapter 8 Perplexing Lessons At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler-- 'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?' He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives. I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said-- 'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.' 'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?' 'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it.' 'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?' 'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.' 'I wish I was dead!' 'Now I don't want to discourage you, but--' 'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.' 'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch- dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--' 'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop- shouldered.' 'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.' 'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it. Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?' Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and he said-- 'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore- snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.-- M.T.]} So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this-- 'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point; had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms. 'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet. 'Mark three' is three fathoms.]} with the other.' 'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?' 'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the "Sunny South"- -hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.' And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner{footnote ['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yard or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity. But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night,--a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word. I was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was. But I resolved that I would stand by him any way. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood around, and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch. However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W---- gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o'clock and all well--but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once. Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was. It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment--and not much of a one either. He said, 'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he wanted to know for?' I said I thought it might be a convenience to him. 'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?' 'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me which hall it is; how am I to know?' 'Well you've GOT to, on the river!' 'All right. Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W---- ' 'I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.' I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of being careless, and injuring things. I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said-- 'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use. Take this place where we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside of a year.' It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion-- 'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall, trip before last?' I considered this an outrage. I said-- 'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?' 'My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate.' When I came to myself again, I said-- 'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.' 'Now drop that! When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.' Chapter 9 Continued Perplexities THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. But the result was just the same. I never could more than get one knotty thing learned before another presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the water and pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a book that told me nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water- reading. So he began-- 'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now, that's a reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sand-bar under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house. There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it. If you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. You can climb over there, and not hurt anything. Cross over, now, and follow along close under the reef--easy water there--not much current.' I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr. Bixby said-- 'Now get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the reef; a boat hates shoal water. Stand by--wait--WAIT--keep her well in hand. NOW cramp her down! Snatch her! snatch her!' He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until it was hard down, and then we held it so. The boat resisted, and refused to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted the reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows. 'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. Do you see those fine lines on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan. Well, those are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them, but run them pretty close. Now look out--look out! Don't you crowd that slick, greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it. She begins to smell it; look sharp, I tell you! Oh blazes, there you go! Stop the starboard wheel! Quick! Ship up to back! Set her back! The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was too late. The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell came rolling forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to larboard, and went tearing away toward the other shore as if she were about scared to death. We were a good mile from where we ought to have been, when we finally got the upper hand of her again. During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew how to run the next few miles. I said-- 'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start out from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing and--' 'That's all right. I'll be back before you close up on the next point.' But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my sole charge such a length of time before. I even got to 'setting' her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was imminent--why didn't that villain come! If I committed the crime of ringing a bell, I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So in blind desperation I started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason forsook its throne--we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly into view on the hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude. My distress vanished; I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara, with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took his tooth-pick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a cigar-- we were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scudding astern like rats--and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently-- 'Stop the starboard. Stop the larboard. Set her back on both.' The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical instant, then reluctantly began to back away. 'Stop the larboard. Come ahead on it. Stop the starboard. Come ahead on it. Point her for the bar.' I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning Mr. Bixby came in and said, with mock simplicity-- 'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.' I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail. 'Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will tell you when he wants to wood up.' I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood. 'Indeed? Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the river?' 'No sir,--and I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a bluff reef.' 'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where you were.' 'But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder.' 'Just about. Run over it!' 'Do you give it as an order?' 'Yes. Run over it.' 'If I don't, I wish I may die.' 'All right; I am taking the responsibility.' I was just as anxious to kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows I held my breath; but we slid over it like oil. 'Now don't you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a WIND reef. The wind does that.' 'So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to tell them apart?' 'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally KNOW one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you know them apart' It turned out to be true. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an ITALICIZED passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter. Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark. No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? Chapter 10 Completing My Education WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.{footnote [True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]} I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it. When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs. One day he said-- 'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?' 'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.' 'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.' I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell. I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.' 'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along here last trip?' 'I don't know; I never noticed.' 'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.' 'Why?' 'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you. For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether there's more water or less in the river along here than there was last trip.' 'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantage of him there. 'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so, and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify?' 'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.' 'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?' 'Rising.' 'No it ain't.' 'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floating down the stream.' 'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see this narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher. You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point?' 'Ay, ay, sir.' 'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of that.' 'Why?' 'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.' 'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.' 'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank will keep us posted all along. You don't run close chutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. There's a law of the United States against it. The river may be rising by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it. We are drawing--how much?' 'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.' 'Well, you do seem to know something.' 'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles, month in and month out?' 'Of course!' My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently I said--' And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?' 'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. If the river begins to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.' 'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I already know.' 'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.' 'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into this business.' 'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when you've learned it.' 'Ah, I never can learn it.' 'I will see that you DO.' By and by I ventured again-- 'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river--shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?' 'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water enough in each of these countless places--like that stump, you know. When the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen; the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on: so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the big river; you've got to go through, or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river. There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except when the river is brim full and over the banks.' 'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.' 'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you start into one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere. And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not answer for next.' 'Learn a new set, then, every year?' 'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up through the middle of the river for?' The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction. We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone. Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber- rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from 'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruit and furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out-- 'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!' Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again. And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,' we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment. These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue. Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place. 
8473	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 3. Chapter 11 The River Rises DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance. We were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water. And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged. Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused. You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. It would 'ease all,' in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout, 'Gimme a pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals. If these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. You understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare. No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles. The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible. As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes were utter solitudes. The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep, except at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly. Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and the few farm-animals were huddled together in an empty wood-flat riding at her moorings close at hand. In this flat-boat the family would have to cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again--chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise Providence to enable them to take exercise without exertion. And this sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year: by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise out of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly dispensations, for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions. Now what COULD these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season! Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were. The passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend. From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places. Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles. When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call BAGASSE) into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen. An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel. And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. The plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of the sea. All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty. You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no novelty about it; it had often been done before. I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X., who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things. He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a great New Orleans passenger packet. During a considerable part of the first trip George was uneasy, but got over it by and by, as X. seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep. Late one night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas; the water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition. X. had seen the crossing since Ealer had, and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was considering whether he had not better have X. called to assist in running the place, when the door opened and X. walked in. Now on very dark nights, light is a deadly enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a lighted room, on such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any purpose; but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make out objects in the street pretty well. So, on very dark nights, pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained with huge tarpaulins and the sky-lights to be closely blinded. Then no light whatever issues from the boat. The undefinable shape that now entered the pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice. This said-- 'Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have, and it is so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell you how to do it.' 'It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing. I haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig.' So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished he had not confessed! He stared, and wondered, and finally said-- 'Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another mistake of mine.' X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel and peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position; as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when the shoalest water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep water and safety! Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and said-- 'That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the Mississippi River! I wouldn't believed it could be done, if I hadn't seen it.' There was no reply, and he added-- 'Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a cup of coffee.' A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,' and comforting himself with coffee. Just then the night watchman happened in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed Ealer and exclaimed-- 'Who is at the wheel, sir?' 'X.' 'Dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!' The next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion way, three steps at a jump! Nobody there! The great steamer was whistling down the middle of the river at her own sweet will! The watchman shot out of the place again; Ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with power, and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from a 'towhead' which she was about to knock into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico! By and by the watchman came back and said-- 'Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up here?' 'NO.' 'Well, he was. I found him walking along on top of the railings just as unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement; and I put him to bed; now just this minute there he was again, away astern, going through that sort of tight-rope deviltry the same as before.' 'Well, I think I'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits. But I hope he'll have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what COULDN'T he do if he was dead!' Chapter 12 Sounding WHEN the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the water' there is in the channel,--or a few inches more, as was often the case in the old times,--one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. We used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage. Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in the yawl--provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly-devised 'sounding-boat'--and proceeds to hunt for the best water, the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle, signifying 'try higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. The whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface. When the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to 'hold her up to starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'{footnote [The term 'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand; but was always used on the river in my time]} or 'steady--steady as you go.' When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!' Then the men stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. The next order is, 'Stand by with the buoy!' The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order, 'Let go the buoy!' and over she goes. If the pilot is not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been seen; then the men 'give way' on their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment, turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn't; maybe she 'strikes and swings.' Then she has to while away several hours (or days) sparring herself off. Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it. A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench, with one of the supports left and the other removed. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench, the current would pull the buoy under water. At night, a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness. Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding. There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars; it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows; there is music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer, to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. It is such grandeur, too, to the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will simply say, 'Let her go about!' and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, 'Ease starboard! Strong on the larboard! Starboard give way! With a will, men!' The cub enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the time be daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims away in the remote distance. One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. I fell in love with her. So did Mr. Thornburg's cub, Tom G----. Tom and I had been bosom friends until this time; but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a good many of my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a hero; Tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but then he always had a way of embroidering. However, virtue is its own reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. About this time something happened which promised handsomely for me: the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of 21. This would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night, when the passengers would be still up; it would be Mr. Thornburg's watch, therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. We had a perfect love of a sounding-boat--long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen; one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of 'style' was put on. We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready. It was a foul night, and the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory. As I hurried through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, I met Tom, and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech-- 'Ain't you glad YOU don't have to go out sounding?' Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said-- 'Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax, now, before I'd do it.' 'Who wants you to get it? I don't. It's in the sounding-boat.' 'It ain't, either. It's been new-painted; and it's been up on the ladies' cabin guards two days, drying.' I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command: 'Give way, men!' I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errand to fetch. Then that young girl said to me-- 'Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do you think there is any danger?' I would rather have been stabbed. I went off, full of venom, to help in the pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. Mr. Thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out, and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. Thornburg exclaimed-- 'Hello, the buoy-lantern's out!' He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said-- 'Why, there it is again!' So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads. Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! Mr. Thornburg muttered-- 'Well, I don't understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the reef. Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter, it is safest to run over it anyhow.' So, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light. Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed-- 'My soul, it's the sounding-boat!' A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below--a pause--and then the sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. Thornburg exclaimed-- 'There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer matches! Run! See who is killed!' I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the third mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their danger when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to do; at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of the men and the cub Tom, were missing--a fact which spread like wildfire over the boat. The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing. And often and again I heard them say, 'Poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!' By this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search for the missing. Now a faint call was heard, off to the left. The yawl had disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. By the callings, the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound showed failing strength. The crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words as, 'Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?' But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice said pluckily-- 'I can make it! Stand by with a rope!' What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his stand in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped about him. The next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil Tom. The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men. They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he had done something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I loathed her, any way. The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the buoy- light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of the steamer's course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking; he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef; saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing; it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out, 'Stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the next instant the jump was made. Chapter 13 A Pilot's Needs BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,' instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIR PLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi. I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not. And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work; how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all! Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side- marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself! The cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. But you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort of thing mechanically. Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability. But ONLY IN THE MATTERS IT IS DAILY DRILLED IN. A time would come when the man's faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business. At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief, Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license; a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and night-- and he ranked A 1, too. Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born in him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name. Instantly Mr. Brown would break in-- 'Oh, I knew HIM. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him. There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry Blake" grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half; the "George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the "Sunflower"--' 'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until--' 'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the "Sunflower." Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after 3rd of March,--erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,--they were Alleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things. And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.' And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. He could NOT forget any thing. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. And then without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too. Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering. A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must START with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot. The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment; he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them; all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate. Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all the work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. Bixby seldom made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings, land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the DAY-TIME, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. Well, one matchless summer's day I was bowling down the bend above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe's, when Mr. Bixby said-- 'I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?' This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. I knew all this, perfectly well. 'Know how to RUN it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.' 'How much water is there in it?' 'Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom there with a church steeple.' 'You think so, do you?' The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting. He left, without saying anything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience; and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice-- 'Where is Mr. Bixby?' 'Gone below, sir.' But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly one again, and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together-- 'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!' This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry-- 'D-e-e-p four!' Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath away. 'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!... Half twain!' This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines. 'Quarter twain! Quarter twain! MARK twain!' I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far. 'Quarter LESS twain! Nine and a HALF!' We were DRAWING nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer-- 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, BACK her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal SOUL out of her!' I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said-- 'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, WASN'T it? I suppose I'll never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of 66.' 'Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact I hope you won't; for I want you to learn something by that experience. Didn't you KNOW there was no bottom in that crossing?' 'Yes, sir, I did.' 'Very well, then. You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. That isn't going to help matters any.' It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!' Chapter 14 Rank and Dignity of Piloting IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one's own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects. By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage. When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots-- 'Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall want you about a month. How much will it be?' 'Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.' 'Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I'll divide!' I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the 'Aleck Scott' or the 'Grand Turk.' Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said-- 'Who IS you, any way? Who is you? dat's what I wants to know!' The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those airs on a stinted capital. 'Who IS I? Who IS I? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want you niggers to understan' dat I fires de middle do'{footnote [Door]} on de "Aleck Scott!"' That was sufficient. The barber of the 'Grand Turk' was a spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much given to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), 'You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute! Stannin' out dah foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber offn de "Gran' Turk" wants to conwerse wid you!' My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings Stephen W---- naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating--but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old Captain Y----once, and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y---- shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this:-- 'Why, bless me! I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the world--not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells--I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night--it never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. A queer being--very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me "Johnny." And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man--and his family--was. And reckless. There never was anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-tearing right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth and go to WHISTLING! Yes, sir; whistling "Buffalo gals, can't you come out tonight, can't you come out to-night, can't you come out to-night;" and doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren't related to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!' Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in a very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages, the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference-- 'Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?' 'Well, I should say so! Bank-full IS a pretty liberal stage.' 'Seems to be a good deal of current here.' 'Good deal don't describe it! It's worse than a mill-race.' 'Isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?' 'Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat. It's pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.' The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river. Speech was WRUNG from the captain. He said-- 'Mr. W----, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?' 'I think it does, but I don't know.' 'Don't know! Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?' 'I expect there is, but I am not certain.' 'Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they do?' 'THEY! Why, THEY are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But don't you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five!' The captain surrendered. Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels. Chapter 15 The Pilots' Monopoly ONE day, on board the 'Aleck Scott,' my chief, Mr. Bixby, was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck-- 'For gracious' sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby! give her steam! She'll never raise the reef on this headway!' For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly. Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men. For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month; but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this. Too many pilots were being 'made.' It was nice to have a 'cub,' a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required. Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths. Too late--apparently--the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing. A close organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a dozen of the boldest--and some of them the best--pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the Pilots' Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once--and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by- laws which had the seeds of propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed. Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty- five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances,--any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and calculate their burial bills. By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars--the association figure--and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with. However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain ---- was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said-- 'Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I'll give in with as good a grace as I can. I've come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o'clock.' 'I don't know about that. Who is your other pilot?' 'I've got I. S----. Why?' 'I can't go with him. He don't belong to the association.' 'What!' 'It's so.' 'Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your association?' 'Yes, I do.' 'Well, if this isn't putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?' 'Yes.' 'Show it to me.' So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said-- 'Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S---- for the entire season.' 'I will provide for you,' said the secretary. 'I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.' 'But if I discharge S----, he will come on me for the whole season's wages.' 'Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S----, captain. We cannot meddle in your private affairs.' The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S----, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business 'spurt' was over. Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any 'outsider.' By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a 'wharf-boat' to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one--the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger--for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the association's secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this-- STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC. JOHN SMITH MASTER PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN. + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + | CROSSINGS. | SOUNDINGS. | MARKS. | REMARKS. | + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus-- 'St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.' Then under head of Remarks: 'Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.' The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers) concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid. Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam- whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail. The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it up there,--after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can 'sink the shop,' sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters. Not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he would keep 'posted.' But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive. Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to immediately discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters! It was no time to 'swap knives.' Every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. In many cases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still, the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to vote 'Yes' or 'No' in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. However, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture to employ them. By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the time of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application. The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old, and of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think) should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license. All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him. The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars. The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business, also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats. The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places. In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it. The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed. Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. When the pilots' association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages. So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances. As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past! 
8474	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 4. Chapter 16 Racing Days IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly; every windlass connected with every forehatch, from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De Las' Sack! De Las' Sack!'--inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be packed and black with passengers. The 'last bells' would begin to clang, all down the line, and then the powwow seemed to double; in a moment or two the final warning came,--a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with the cry, 'All dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'--and behold, the powwow quadrupled! People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his head. Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd the decks of boats that are not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best 'voice' in the lot towering from the midst (being mounted on the capstan), waving his hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza! Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river. In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case--that is, after the laws were passed which restricted each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch. No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the 'doctor' and shut off the water supply from the boilers. In the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously fleet steamers was an event of vast importance. The date was set for it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. As the time approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready. Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. The 'spars,' and sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore, and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. When the 'Eclipse' and the 'A. L. Shotwell' ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the 'Eclipse's' chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things. If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact figure--she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her manifest after that. Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add weight but they never will 'trim boat.' They always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level. No way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers would stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and go.' Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning. Double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly done. The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great steamers back into the stream, and lie there jockeying a moment, and apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient creatures; flags drooping, the pent steam shrieking through safety- valves, the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all the air. People, people everywhere; the shores, the house- tops, the steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you know that the borders of the broad Mississippi are going to be fringed with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles, to welcome these racers. Presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes of both steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted on capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews on the forecastles, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth--and here they come! Brass bands bray Hail Columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from the shores, and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind. Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St. Louis, except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord wood- boats alongside. You should be on board when they take a couple of those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each; by the time you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what has become of that wood. Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after day. They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not all alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race. If one of the boats has a 'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior, you can tell which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost some during each four-hour stretch. The shrewdest pilot can delay a boat if he has not a fine genius for steering. Steering is a very high art. One must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stem if he wants to get up the river fast. There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But of course this was at rare intervals. Ferryboats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. This was at still rarer intervals. I had the documents for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid. This boat, the 'John J. Roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it. That was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, any way. She was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty exciting times racing with islands, and rafts, and such things. One trip, however, we did rather well. We went to St. Louis in sixteen days. But even at this rattling gait I think we changed watches three times in Fort Adams reach, which is five miles long. A 'reach' is a piece of straight river, and of course the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively way. That trip we went to Grand Gulf, from New Orleans, in four days (three hundred and forty miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' did it in one. We were nine days out, in the chute of 63 (seven hundred miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' went there in two days. Something over a generation ago, a boat called the 'J. M. White' went from New Orleans to Cairo in three days, six hours, and forty-four minutes. In 1853 the 'Eclipse' made the same trip in three days, three hours, and twenty minutes.{footnote [Time disputed. Some authorities add 1 hour and 16 minutes to this.]} In 1870 the 'R. E. Lee' did it in three days and ONE hour. This last is called the fastest trip on record. I will try to show that it was not. For this reason: the distance between New Orleans and Cairo, when the 'J. M. White' ran it, was about eleven hundred and six miles; consequently her average speed was a trifle over fourteen miles per hour. In the 'Eclipse's' day the distance between the two ports had become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles; consequently her average speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour. In the 'R. E. Lee's' time the distance had diminished to about one thousand and thirty miles; consequently her average was about fourteen and one-eighth miles per hour. Therefore the 'Eclipse's' was conspicuously the fastest time that has ever been made. THE RECORD OF SOME FAMOUS TRIPS (From Commodore Rollingpin's Almanack.) FAST TIME ON THE WESTERN WATERS FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NATCHEZ--268 MILES D. H. M. 1814 Orleans made the run in 6 6 40 1814 Comet " " 5 10 1815 Enterprise " " 4 11 20 1817 Washington " " 4 1817 Shelby " " 3 20 1818 Paragon " " 3 8 1828 Tecumseh " " 3 1 20 1834 Tuscarora " " 1 21 1838 Natchez " " 1 17 1840 Ed. Shippen " " 1 8 1842 Belle of the West " 1 18 1844 Sultana " " 19 45 1851 Magnolia " " 19 50 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 19 49 1853 Southern Belle " " 20 3 1853 Princess (No. 4) " 20 26 1853 Eclipse " " 19 47 1855 Princess (New) " " 18 53 1855 Natchez (New) " " 17 30 1856 Princess (New) " " 17 30 1870 Natchez " " 17 17 1870 R. E. Lee " " 17 11 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO CAIRO--1,024 MILES D. H. M. 1844 J. M. White made the run in 3 6 44 1852 Reindeer " " 3 12 45 1853 Eclipse " " 3 4 4 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 3 3 40 1869 Dexter " " 3 6 20 1870 Natchez " " 3 4 34 1870 R. E. Lee " " 3 1 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO LOUISVILLE--1,440 MILES D. H. M. 1815 Enterprise made the run in 25 2 40 1817 Washington " " 25 1817. Shelby " " 20 4 20 1818 Paragon " " 18 10 1828 Tecumseh " " 8 4 1834 Tuscarora " " 7 16 1837 Gen. Brown " " 6 22 1837 Randolph " " 6 22 1837 Empress " " 6 17 1837 Sultana " " 6 15 1840 Ed. Shippen " " 5 14 1842 Belle of the West " 6 14 1843 Duke of Orleans" " 5 23 1844 Sultana " " 5 12 1849 Bostona " " 5 8 1851 Belle Key " " 3 4 23 1852 Reindeer " " 4 20 45 1852 Eclipse " " 4 19 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 4 10 20 1853 Eclipse " " 4 9 30 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO DONALDSONVILLE--78 MILES H. M. 1852 A. L. Shotwell made the run in 5 42 1852 Eclipse " " 5 42 1854 Sultana " " 4 51 1860 Atlantic " " 5 11 1860 Gen. Quitman " " 5 6 1865 Ruth " " 4 43 1870 R. E. Lee " " 4 59 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO ST. LOUIS--1,218 MILES D. H. M. 1844 J. M. White made the run in 3 23 9 1849 Missouri " " 4 19 1869 Dexter " " 4 9 1870 Natchez " " 3 21 58 1870 R. E. Lee " " 3 18 14 FROM LOUISVILLE TO CINCINNATI--141 MILES D. H. M. 1819 Gen. Pike made the run in 1 16 1819 Paragon " " 1 14 20 1822 Wheeling Packet " " 1 10 1837 Moselle " " 12 1843 Duke of Orleans " " 12 1843 Congress " " 12 20 1846 Ben Franklin (No. 6) " 11 45 1852 Alleghaney " " 10 38 1852 Pittsburgh " " 10 23 1853 Telegraph No. 3 " " 9 52 FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS--750 MILES D. H. M. 1843 Congress made the run in 2 1 1854 Pike " " 1 23 1854 Northerner " " 1 22 30 1855 Southemer " " 1 19 FROM CINCINNATI TO PITTSBURGH--490 MILES D. H. 1850 Telegraph No. 2 made the run in 1 17 1851 Buckeye State " " 1 16 1852 Pittsburgh " " 1 15 FROM ST. LOUIS TO ALTON--30 MILES D. M. 1853 Altona made the run in 1 35 1876 Golden Eagle " " 1 37 1876 War Eagle " " 1 37 MISCELLANEOUS RUNS In June, 1859, the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet, City of Louisiana, made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in 16 hours and 20 minutes, the best time on record. In 1868 the steamer Hawkeye State, of the Northern Packet Company, made the run from St. Louis to St. Paul (800 miles) in 2 days and 20 hours. Never was beaten. In 1853 the steamer Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph, on the Missouri River, in 64 hours. In July, 1856, the steamer Jas. H. Lucas, Andy Wineland, Master, made the same run in 60 hours and 57 minutes. The distance between the ports is 600 miles, and when the difficulties of navigating the turbulent Missouri are taken into consideration, the performance of the Lucas deserves especial mention. THE RUN OF THE ROBERT E. LEE The time made by the R. E. Lee from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870, in her famous race with the Natchez, is the best on record, and, inasmuch as the race created a national interest, we give below her time table from port to port. Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30th, 1870, at 4 o'clock and 55 minutes, p.m.; reached D. H. M. Carrollton 27{half} Harry Hills 1 00{half} Red Church 1 39 Bonnet Carre 2 38 College Point 3 50{half} Donaldsonville 4 59 Plaquemine 7 05{half} Baton Rouge 8 25 Bayou Sara 10 26 Red River 12 56 Stamps 13 56 Bryaro 15 51{half} Hinderson's 16 29 Natchez 17 11 Cole's Creek 19 21 Waterproof 18 53 Rodney 20 45 St. Joseph 21 02 Grand Gulf 22 06 Hard Times 22 18 Half Mile below Warrenton 1 Vicksburg 1 38 Milliken's Bend 1 2 37 Bailey's 1 3 48 Lake Providence 1 5 47 Greenville 1 10 55 Napoleon 1 16 22 White River 1 16 56 Australia 1 19 Helena 1 23 25 Half Mile Below St. Francis 2 Memphis 2 6 9 Foot of Island 37 2 9 Foot of Island 26 2 13 30 Tow-head, Island 14 2 17 23 New Madrid 2 19 50 Dry Bar No. 10 2 20 37 Foot of Island 8 2 21 25 Upper Tow-head--Lucas Bend 3 Cairo 3 1 St. Louis 3 18 14 The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870--6 hours and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez. The officers of the Natchez claimed 7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery. The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P. Leathers. Chapter 17 Cut-offs and Stephen THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much. The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth. Watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to cut a ditch. Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile across, in its narrowest place. You could walk across there in fifteen minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles. In the same way it shortened itself twenty- five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699. Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fifty years ago, I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and seventy- six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!-- shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past, cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84; and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles. Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend; and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more. Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty- seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor 'development of species,' either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe:-- In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty- two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three- quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide. The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly only five miles an hour; now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the distance. I was on board the first boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend, but we did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild night it was--thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go flying up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam, and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was whirling by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet. The next instant we were away down the river, clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment four times. I stood on the forecastle companion way to see. It was astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose. The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank. Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around, we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course. A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so saved ten miles. The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles. There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. It was a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. The old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one. The perplexed pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place. As always happens in such cases, that particular prayer was answered, and the others neglected. So to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out. More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer's lights drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her 'scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her leadsmen. In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter with one more reminiscence of 'Stephen.' Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for borrowed sums, ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. Stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months. Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could no longer borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for new men who did not know him. Such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured young Yates (I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one does, with a Y). Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there! His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while Yates's two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands. The fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous. But innocent Yates never suspected that Stephen's promise to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one. Yates called for his money at the stipulated time; Stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week. He called then, according to agreement, and came away sugar-coated again, but suffering under another postponement. So the thing went on. Yates haunted Stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last gave it up. And then straightway Stephen began to haunt Yates! Wherever Yates appeared, there was the inevitable Stephen. And not only there, but beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to pay. By and by, whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and fly, and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it was of no use; his debtor would run him down and corner him. Panting and red- faced, Stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, invade the conversation, shake both of Yates's arms loose in their sockets, and begin-- 'My, what a race I've had! I saw you didn't see me, and so I clapped on all steam for fear I'd miss you entirely. And here you are! there, just stand so, and let me look at you! just the same old noble countenance.' [To Yates's friend:] 'Just look at him! LOOK at him! Ain't it just GOOD to look at him! AIN'T it now? Ain't he just a picture! SOME call him a picture; I call him a panorama! That's what he is--an entire panorama. And now I'm reminded! How I do wish I could have seen you an hour earlier! For twenty-four hours I've been saving up that two hundred and fifty dollars for you; been looking for you everywhere. I waited at the Planter's from six yesterday evening till two o'clock this morning, without rest or food; my wife says, "Where have you been all night?" I said, "This debt lies heavy on my mind." She says, "In all my days I never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do." I said, "It's my nature; how can I change it?" She says, "Well, do go to bed and get some rest." I said, "Not till that poor, noble young man has got his money." So I set up all night, and this morning out I shot, and the first man I struck told me you had shipped on the "Grand Turk" and gone to New Orleans. Well, sir, I had to lean up against a building and cry. So help me goodness, I couldn't help it. The man that owned the place come out cleaning up with a rag, and said he didn't like to have people cry against his building, and then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming along an hour ago, suffering no man knows what agony, I met Jim Wilson and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account; and to think that here you are, now, and I haven't got a cent! But as sure as I am standing here on this ground on this particular brick,--there, I've scratched a mark on the brick to remember it by,--I'll borrow that money and pay it over to you at twelve o'clock sharp, tomorrow! Now, stand so; let me look at you just once more.' And so on. Yates's life became a burden to him. He could not escape his debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay. He dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find Stephen lying in wait for him at the corner. Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days. They met there about as much to exchange river news as to play. One morning Yates was there; Stephen was there, too, but kept out of sight. But by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town, Stephen suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed for Yates as for a long-lost brother. 'OH, I am so glad to see you! Oh my soul, the sight of you is such a comfort to my eyes! Gentlemen, I owe all of you money; among you I owe probably forty thousand dollars. I want to pay it; I intend to pay it every last cent of it. You all know, without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends; but the sharpest pang I suffer--by far the sharpest--is from the debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement that I have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts! And most especially I wanted HIM to be here when I announced it. Yes, my faithful friend,--my benefactor, I've found the method! I've found the method to pay off all my debts, and you'll get your money!' Hope dawned in Yates's eye; then Stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing his hand upon Yates's head, added, 'I am going to pay them off in alphabetical order!' Then he turned and disappeared. The full significance of Stephen's 'method' did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes; and then Yates murmured with a sigh-- 'Well, the Y's stand a gaudy chance. He won't get any further than the C's in THIS world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as "that poor, ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!" Chapter 18 I Take a Few Extra Lessons DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for Mr. Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else. I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an education. When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men--no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not made. My profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it which I value most is the zest which that early experience has given to my later reading. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river. The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'--the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house. I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man. The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was 'straightening down;' I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi- officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat. There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about--as it seemed to me--a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his countenance and I saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around once more, and this question greeted me-- 'Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?' 'Yes, sir.' After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then-- 'What's your name?' I told him. He repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he ever forgot; for although I was with him many months he never addressed himself to me in any other way than 'Here!' and then his command followed. 'Where was you born?' 'In Florida, Missouri.' A pause. Then-- 'Dern sight better staid there!' By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped my family history out of me. The leads were going now, in the first crossing. This interrupted the inquest. When the leads had been laid in, he resumed-- 'How long you been on the river?' I told him. After a pause-- 'Where'd you get them shoes?' I gave him the information. 'Hold up your foot!' I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, 'Well, I'll be dod derned!' and returned to his wheel. What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have been all of fifteen minutes--fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence-- before that long horse-face swung round upon me again--and then, what a change! It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. Now came this shriek-- 'Here!--You going to set there all day?' I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the surprise. As soon as I could get my voice I said, apologetically:--'I have had no orders, sir.' 'You've had no ORDERS! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have ORDERS! Our father was a GENTLEMAN--owned slaves--and we've been to SCHOOL. Yes, WE are a gentleman, TOO, and got to have ORDERS! ORDERS, is it? ORDERS is what you want! Dod dern my skin, I'LL learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your dod-derned ORDERS! G'way from the wheel!' (I had approached it without knowing it.) I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses stupefied by this frantic assault. 'What you standing there for? Take that ice-pitcher down to the texas- tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!' The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said-- 'Here! What was you doing down there all this time?' 'I couldn't find the texas-tender; I had to go all the way to the pantry.' 'Derned likely story! Fill up the stove.' I proceeded to do so. He watched me like a cat. Presently he shouted-- 'Put down that shovel! Deadest numskull I ever saw--ain't even got sense enough to load up a stove.' All through the watch this sort of thing went on. Yes, and the subsequent watches were much like it, during a stretch of months. As I have said, I soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. The moment I was in the presence, even in the darkest night, I could feel those yellow eyes upon me, and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me. Preliminarily he would say-- 'Here! Take the wheel.' Two minutes later-- 'WHERE in the nation you going to? Pull her down! pull her down!' After another moment-- 'Say! You going to hold her all day? Let her go--meet her! meet her!' Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time. George Ritchie was the other pilot's cub. He was having good times now; for his boss, George Ealer, was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't. Ritchie had steeled for Brown the season before; consequently he knew exactly how to entertain himself and plague me, all by the one operation. Whenever I took the wheel for a moment on Ealer's watch, Ritchie would sit back on the bench and play Brown, with continual ejaculations of 'Snatch her! snatch her! Derndest mud-cat I ever saw!' 'Here! Where you going NOW? Going to run over that snag?' 'Pull her DOWN! Don't you hear me? Pull her DOWN!' 'There she goes! JUST as I expected! I TOLD you not to cramp that reef. G'way from the wheel!' So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was; and sometimes it seemed to me that Ritchie's good-natured badgering was pretty nearly as aggravating as Brown's dead-earnest nagging. I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer. A cub had to take everything his boss gave, in the way of vigorous comment and criticism; and we all believed that there was a United States law making it a penitentiary offense to strike or threaten a pilot who was on duty. However, I could IMAGINE myself killing Brown; there was no law against that; and that was the thing I used always to do the moment I was abed. Instead of going over my river in my mind as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure, and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for months; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones;--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of situation and environment. Brown was ALWAYS watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it; for 'pulling down' when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting FOR orders. In a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with EVERYTHING you did; and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks (to you) into the form of an insult. One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden. Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other, standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.' He cast a furtive glance at me every now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was trying to invent a trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to take. By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way-- 'Here!--See if you've got gumption enough to round her to.' This was simply BOUND to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for he had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no matter how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen: I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what I was about; I started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected my mistake; I started around once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time; I made other false moves, and still managed to save myself; but at last I grew so confused and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all--I got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. Brown's chance was come. His face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath. In the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he was even going to swear--but he didn't this time. 'Dod dern' was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone. That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night, I killed Brown in seventeen different ways--all of them new. Chapter 19 Brown and I Exchange Compliments Two trips later, I got into serious trouble. Brown was steering; I was 'pulling down.' My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck, and shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below. Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything. But that was his way: he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk. The wind was blowing; Brown was deaf (although he always pretended he wasn't), and I very much doubted if he had heard the order. If I had two heads, I would have spoken; but as I had only one, it seemed judicious to take care of it; so I kept still. Presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation. Captain Klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said-- 'Let her come around, sir, let her come around. Didn't Henry tell you to land here?' 'NO, sir!' 'I sent him up to do, it.' 'He did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool. He never said anything.' 'Didn't YOU hear him?' asked the captain of me. Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was no way to avoid it; so I said-- 'Yes, sir.' I knew what Brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was-- 'Shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.' I closed my mouth according to instructions. An hour later, Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew Brown would have no pity on him. Brown began, straightway-- 'Here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?' 'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.' 'It's a lie!' I said-- 'You lie, yourself. He did tell you.' Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me-- 'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry, 'And you leave the pilot-house; out with you!' It was pilot law, and must be obeyed. The boy started out, and even had his foot on the upper step outside the door, when Brown, with a sudden access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him; but I was between, with a heavy stool, and I hit Brown a good honest blow which stretched-him out. I had committed the crime of crimes--I had lifted my hand against a pilot on duty! I supposed I was booked for the penitentiary sure, and couldn't be booked any surer if I went on and squared my long account with this person while I had the chance; consequently I stuck to him and pounded him with my fists a considerable time--I do not know how long, the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was;--but in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel: a very natural solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at the helm! However, Eagle Bend was two miles wide at this bank-full stage, and correspondingly long and deep; and the boat was steering herself straight down the middle and taking no chances. Still, that was only luck--a body MIGHT have found her charging into the woods. Perceiving, at a glance, that the 'Pennsylvania' was in no danger, Brown gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of the pilot-house with more than Comanche bluster. But I was not afraid of him now; so, instead of going, I tarried, and criticized his grammar; I reformed his ferocious speeches for him, and put them into good English, calling his attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard dialect of the Pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted. He could have done his part to admiration in a cross-fire of mere vituperation, of course; but he was not equipped for this species of controversy; so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel, muttering and shaking his head; and I retired to the bench. The racket had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and I trembled when I saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd. I said to myself, 'Now I AM done for!'--For although, as a rule, he was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it. I tried to imagine what he WOULD do to a cub pilot who had been guilty of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly freight and alive with passengers. Our watch was nearly ended. I thought I would go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore. So I slipped out of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to the texas door--and was in the act of gliding within, when the captain confronted me! I dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two, then said impressively-- 'Follow me.' I dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward end of the texas. We were alone, now. He closed the after door; then moved slowly to the forward one and closed that. He sat down; I stood before him. He looked at me some little time, then said-- 'So you have been fighting Mr. Brown?' I answered meekly-- 'Yes, sir.' 'Do you know that that is a very serious matter?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five minutes with no one at the wheel?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Did you strike him first?' 'Yes, sir.' 'What with?' 'A stool, sir.' 'Hard?' 'Middling, sir.' 'Did it knock him down?' 'He--he fell, sir.' 'Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?' 'Yes, sir.' 'What did you do?' 'Pounded him, sir.' 'Pounded him?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Did you pound him much?--that is, severely?' 'One might call it that, sir, maybe.' 'I'm deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be guilty of it again, on this boat. BUT--lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing, do you hear? I'll pay the expenses. Now go--and mind you, not a word of this to anybody. Clear out with you!--you've been guilty of a great crime, you whelp!' I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty deliverance; and I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs after I had closed his door. When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that I be put ashore in New Orleans--and added-- 'I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.' The captain said-- 'But he needn't come round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown. 'I won't even stay on the same boat with him. One of us has got to go ashore.' 'Very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;' and resumed his talk with the passengers. During the brief remainder of the trip, I knew how an emancipated slave feels; for I was an emancipated slave myself. While we lay at landings, I listened to George Ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two bibles, that is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare; or I played chess with him--and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move and ran the game out differently. Chapter 20 A Catastrophe WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed in finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to George Ealer. But I was afraid; I had never stood a watch of any sort by myself, and I believed I should be sure to get into trouble in the head of some chute, or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other. Brown remained in his place; but he would not travel with me. So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'A. T. Lacey,' for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a new pilot there and my steersman's berth could then be resumed. The 'Lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the 'Pennsylvania.' The night before the 'Pennsylvania' left, Henry and I sat chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before--steamboat disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might be of SOME use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly. The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.' We touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody shouted-- 'The "Pennsylvania" is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred and fifty lives lost!' At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by a Memphis paper, which gave some particulars. It mentioned my brother, and said he was not hurt. Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother was again mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help. We did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis. This is the sorrowful story-- It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The 'Pennsylvania' was creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below Memphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being emptied. George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think; the second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room; the second mate had the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood, and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as were also Brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker; Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was preparing to shave him. There were a good many cabin passengers aboard, and three or four hundred deck passengers --so it was said at the time--and not very many of them were astir. The wood being nearly all out of the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next moment four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky! The main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and then, after a little, fire broke out. Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river; among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter. The carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot, and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy--everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared; and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously, and saying, not a word. When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of his coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. He had ample time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning. He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam. All of the many who breathed that steam, died; none escaped. But Ealer breathed none of it. He made his way to the free air as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted out each and every one of his chessmen and the several joints of his flute. By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and groans filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded, a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's body--I think they said he was a priest. He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful. A young French naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a French admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully. Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their posts, nevertheless. They drew the wood-boat aft, and they and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed in safety first. When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted, and Henry returned. By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help. All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless; so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers fell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out. A striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured, but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire was likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would shoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death. The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to listen, helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flames ended his miseries. The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there; it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head of the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their hurts, during the rest of the day. A steamer came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to Memphis, and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming. By this time Henry was insensible. The physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved. Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted. And Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster like the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors, and she was experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan' The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me. Two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was done in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. The fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave. I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human. He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions; so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again. But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive. Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy. 
8475	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 5. Chapter 21 A Section in My Biography IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England. In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot- house. Let us resume, now. Chapter 22 I Return to My Muttons AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April. As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, I could never have kept the name by me at all. We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18. 'EVENING. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York.' I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you take, the fact remains the same. Whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect. 'APRIL 19. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees-- sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.' It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists. 'AFTERNOON. At the railway stations the loafers carry BOTH hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here, never. This is an important fact in geography.' If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still more important, of course. 'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are wanting. This has an ominous look.' By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region. Fifty years ago, the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union. It is greatly restricted now. Next, boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however. Later--away down the Mississippi--they became the rule. They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud; no doubt they will disappear from the river villages, also, when proper pavements come in. We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused, and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances; then he said-- 'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at the St. James, in New York.' An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started to the supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere. How odd and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing under my NOM DE GUERRE and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man attempts an imposture, he is exposed at once. One thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day, if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate: an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis. The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortable time there. It is large, and well conducted, and its decorations do not make one cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House, in Chicago. True, the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period, and the cues and balls of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort; for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities. The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the absence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign, he was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it, which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis. In those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men; given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now, and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time they used to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on the shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these people did it. Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty-one years. When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. He said-- 'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--drink this slush?' 'Can't you drink it?' 'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.' Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing. Next morning, we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It WAS greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint. However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them; whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks, and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was rarer. There was another change--the Forest Park. This was new to me. It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been made mainly by nature. There are other parks, and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens; for St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities. The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course. A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fifty years ago, said--'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.' Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet; but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. The 'Catholic New Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidently called upon to admire it, with its 'species of Grecian portico, surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted by sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself 'quite unable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped him out with the exclamation--'By ---, they look exactly like bed-posts!' St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now, and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its importance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray, if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St. Louis with strong confidence. The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too: changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity. But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woeful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard- saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!{footnote [Capt. Marryat, writing forty-five years ago says: 'St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants. THE RIVER ABREAST OF THE TOWN IS CROWDED WITH STEAMBOATS, LYING IN TWO OR THREE TIERS.']} Here was desolation, indeed. 'The old, old sea, as one in tears, Comes murmuring, with foamy lips, And knocking at the vacant piers, Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.' The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't pay. Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be. The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the river- edge of it seems dead past resurrection. Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called dead. It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question. Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. This is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between St. Paul and New Orleans---of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like management and system, these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry. I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man! He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile. Where now is the once wood-yard man? Chapter 23 Traveling Incognito MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis and New Orleans. To do this, it would be necessary to go from place to place by the short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make, and would have been an easy one to follow, twenty years ago--but not now. There are wide intervals between boats, these days. I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements of St. Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis. There was only one boat advertised for that section--a Grand Tower packet. Still, one boat was enough; so we went down to look at her. She was a venerable rack- heap, and a fraud to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property, whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate. There are places in New England where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. The soil on her forecastle was quite good--the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes. A colored boy was on watch here--nobody else visible. We gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised, 'if she got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she would wait for it. 'Has she got any of her trip?' 'Bless you, no, boss. She ain't unloadened, yit. She only come in dis mawnin'.' He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all; so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. We had one more arrow in our quiver: a Vicksburg packet, the 'Gold Dust,' was to leave at 5 P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave up the idea of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable. She was neat, clean, and comfortable. We camped on the boiler deck, and bought some cheap literature to kill time with. The vender was a venerable Irishman with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket, and from him we learned that he had lived in St. Louis thirty-four years and had never been across the river during that period. Then he wandered into a very flowing lecture, filled with classic names and allusions, which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth, that the speech had been delivered. He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling. A random remark, connecting Irishmen and beer, brought this nugget of information out of him-- They don't drink it, sir. They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir.' At eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river. As we crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle, and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noon-day glare. Another big change, this-- no more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets, now: their day is past. Next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is. We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out at six, we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old stone warehouse--at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed dwelling- houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills; but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen. I wondered if I had forgotten the river; for I had no recollection whatever of this place; the shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar; there was nothing in sight, anywhere, that I could remember ever having seen before. I was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed. We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed, lady-like young girls, together with sundry Russia-leather bags. A strange place for such folk! No carriage was waiting. The party moved off as if they had not expected any, and struck down a winding country road afoot. But the mystery was explained when we got under way again; for these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles below this landing. I couldn't remember that town; I couldn't place it, couldn't call its name. So I lost part of my temper. I suspected that it might be St. Genevieve--and so it proved to be. Observe what this eccentric river had been about: it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly in front of this town, cut off its river communications, fenced it away completely, and made a 'country' town of it. It is a fine old place, too, and deserved a better fate. It was settled by the French, and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the mouths of the Mississippi to Quebec and be on French territory and under French rule all the way. Presently I ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance toward the pilot-house. Chapter 24 My Incognito is Exploded AFTER a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, I was satisfied that I had never seen him before; so I went up there. The pilot inspected me; I re-inspected the pilot. These customary preliminaries over, I sat down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work. Every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,--a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over that thing a considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for. 'To hear the engine-bells through.' It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half a century sooner. So I was thinking, when the pilot asked-- 'Do you know what this rope is for?' I managed to get around this question, without committing myself. 'Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?' I crept under that one. 'Where are you from?' 'New England.' 'First time you have ever been West?' I climbed over this one. 'If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all these things are for.' I said I should like it. 'This,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the fire- alarm; this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the texas-tender; this one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the captain'--and so he went on, touching one object after another, and reeling off his tranquil spool of lies. I had never felt so like a passenger before. I thanked him, with emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. The pilot warmed to his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good old- fashioned way. At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his invention; but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right. He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another, and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations. For instance-- 'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well, when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over sixty feet high and two miles long. All washed away but that.' [This with a sigh.] I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing, in any ordinary way, would be too good for him. Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.' 'An alligator boat? What's it for?' 'To dredge out alligators with.' 'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?' 'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down. But they used to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so on-- places they call alligator beds.' 'Did they actually impede navigation?' 'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we didn't get aground on alligators.' It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk. However, I restrained myself and said-- 'It must have been dreadful.' 'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. It was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around so-- never lie still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything. Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when YOU get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood--all A 1 alligator pilots. THEY could tell alligator water as far as another Christian could tell whiskey. Read it?--Ah, COULDN'T they, though! I only wish I had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off. Yes, and it paid them to do it, too. A good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a month. Nights, other people had to lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators; they never laid up for anything but fog. They could SMELL the best alligator water it was said; I don't know whether it was so or not, and I think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without going around backing up other people's say-so's, though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell. Which is not the style of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom--maybe quarter-LESS.' [My! Was this Rob Styles?--This mustached and stately figure?-A slim enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in five-and- twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After these musings, I said aloud-- 'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good, because they could come back again right away.' 'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's CONVINCED. It's the last you hear of HIM. He wouldn't come back for pie. If there's one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it's being dredged. Besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to Orleans to the Government works.' 'What for?' 'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They last five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property--just like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason--lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if you're a Democrat. The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you can't touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and you've got to let him alone.' 'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?' 'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.' 'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?' 'Just for police duty--nothing more. They merely go up and down now and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and go for the woods.' After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats of his acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished fleet--and then adding-- 'That boat was the "Cyclone,"--last trip she ever made--she sunk, that very trip--captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I struck. He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather. Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He WAS the most scandalous liar! I left him, finally; I couldn't stand it. The proverb says, "like master, like man;" and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live. He paid first-class wages; but said I, What's wages when your reputation's in danger? So I let the wages go, and froze to my reputation. And I've never regretted it. Reputation's worth everything, ain't it? That's the way I look at it. He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged. They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice. If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing. He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. That's what he was, and that's what he is. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear. That "Cyclone" was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that ever walked the waters. Set her amidships, in a big river, and just let her go; it was all you had to do. She would hold herself on a star all night, if you let her alone. You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the Republican vote in a South Carolina election. One morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took her rudder aboard to mend it; I didn't know anything about it; I backed her out from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene. When I had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked crossings--' 'Without any rudder?' 'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me for running such a dark night--' 'Such a DARK NIGHT ?--Why, you said--' 'Never mind what I said,--'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty soon the moon began to rise, and--' 'You mean the SUN--because you started out just at break of--look here! Was this BEFORE you quitted the captain on account of his lying, or--' 'It was before--oh, a long time before. And as I was saying, he--' 'But was this the trip she sunk, or was--' 'Oh, no!--months afterward. And so the old man, he--' 'Then she made TWO last trips, because you said--' He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and said-- 'Here!' (calling me by name), 'YOU take her and lie a while--you're handier at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent!--why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words; and I made up my mind to find out what was your little game. It was to DRAW ME OUT. Well, I let you, didn't I? Now take the wheel and finish the watch; and next time play fair, and you won't have to work your passage.' Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And not six hours out from St. Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had been itching to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed to have forgotten the river, but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it, either. Chapter 25 From Cairo to Hickman THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo--two hundred miles--is varied and beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between. Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch. We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too, there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on the Missouri side of the river--a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork--and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region. For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's Bake Oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table--this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian. Away down the river we have the Devil's Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and lots of other property of his which I cannot now call to mind. The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more. 'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its best now. But he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white- wash on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the West; and added--'On a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' In my own experience I knew the first two items to be true; and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy; therefore there was plausibility in Uncle Mumford's final observation that 'people who make lime run more to religion than whitewash.' Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand Tower was a great coaling center and a prospering place. Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance. There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri! There was another college higher up on an airy summit--a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled--a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my attention to what he called the 'strong and pervasive religious look of the town,' but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. Partialities often make people see more than really exists. Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river. He is a man of practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience of one sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible dash of poetry in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice, and an oath or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his office require a spiritual lift. He is a mate of the blessed old-time kind; and goes gravely damning around, when there is work to the fore, in a way to mellow the ex-steamboatman's heart with sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall come no more. 'GIT up there you! Going to be all day? Why d'n't you SAY you was petrified in your hind legs, before you shipped!' He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they like him, and stay with him. He is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation of mates; but next trip the Anchor Line will have him in uniform--a natty blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the line--and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he is now. Uniforms on the Mississippi! It beats all the other changes put together, for surprise. Still, there is another surprise--that it was not made fifty years ago. It is so manifestly sensible, that it might have been thought of earlier, one would suppose. During fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in need of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for the cook, and the captain for the barber--and being roughly entertained for it, too. But his troubles are ended now. And the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff is another advantage achieved by the dress-reform period. Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau. They used to call it 'Steersman's Bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always; about the only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed to take a boat through, in low water. Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot of it, were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous alteration. Nor the Chain, either--in the nature of things; for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights. A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight; among the rest my first friend the 'Paul Jones;' she knocked her bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me--Uncle Mumford. He said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher. To me, this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did, of course, to Mumford, who added-- 'But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter, and call it superstition. But you will always notice that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher. I went down the river once in such company. We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog; we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the 'Graveyard' behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight; we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold--may have been more, may have been less. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The men lost their heads with terror. They painted the mare blue, in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all. The preacher was fished out and saved. He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame. I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.' That this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason. I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day--it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day--he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse. This is literally true. No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away. I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. It was a bad region-- all around and about Hat Island, in early days. A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house. Between St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;--two hundred wrecks, altogether. I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;' it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it. A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more. The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat. The perilous 'Graveyard,' among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody. One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on the Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is--but it is Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes: singular state of things! Near the mouth of the river several islands were missing--washed away. Cairo was still there--easily visible across the long, flat point upon whose further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around to get to it. Night fell as we were going out of the 'Upper River' and meeting the floods of the Ohio. We dashed along without anxiety; for the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved up stream a long distance out of the channel; or rather, about one county has gone into the river from the Missouri point, and the Cairo point has 'made down' and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly. The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man's farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings. Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. By doing some strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have made good literature. Cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate, as per Mr. Dickens's portrait of it. However, it was already building with bricks when I had seen it last--which was when Colonel (now General) Grant was drilling his first command there. Uncle Mumford says the libraries and Sunday-schools have done a good work in Cairo, as well as the brick masons. Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she cannot well help prospering. When I turned out, in the morning, we had passed Columbus, Kentucky, and were approaching Hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill. Hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great and lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her warehouses from a large area of country and shipping it by boat; but Uncle Mumford says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more, and he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way--took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by 'collaring it along the line without gathering it at her doors.' 
8476	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 6. Chapter 26 Under Fire TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. Columbus was just behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of Belmont. Several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the Mississippi war-fleet. I gathered that they found themselves sadly out of their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got accustomed to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. One of our pilots had his first war experience in the Belmont fight, as a pilot on a boat in the Confederate service. I had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all solitary and alone on high in a pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick and Harry, and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his story was valuable--it filled a gap for me which all histories had left till that time empty. THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE He said-- It was the 7th of November. The fight began at seven in the morning. I was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.' Took over a load of troops from Columbus. Came back, and took over a battery of artillery. My partner said he was going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. I said, no, I wasn't anxious, I would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a coward, and left. That fight was an awful sight. General Cheatham made his men strip their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me to hell or victory!' I heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then he galloped in, at the head of his troops. Old General Pillow, with his white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops as lively as a boy. By and by the Federals chased the rebels back, and here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and Devil take the hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter. I was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window. All at once I noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear. Judged it was a bullet. I didn't stop to think about anything, I just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor, and staid there. The balls came booming around. Three cannon-balls went through the chimney; one ball took off the corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and bursting all around. Mighty warm times--I wished I hadn't come. I lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster. I crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house. Presently a minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head, and cut my hat. I judged it was time to go away from there. The captain was on the roof with a red-headed major from Memphis--a fine-looking man. I heard him say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.' I crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back; raised up and took a look, and I saw about fifteen shot holes through the window panes; had come so lively I hadn't noticed them. I glanced out on the water, and the spattering shot were like a hailstorm. I thought best to get out of that place. I went down the pilot-house guy, head first--not feet first but head first--slid down--before I struck the deck, the captain said we must leave there. So I climbed up the guy and got on the floor again. About that time, they collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between two soldiers. Somebody had said I was killed. He put his head in and saw me on the floor reaching for the backing bells. He said, 'Oh, hell, he ain't shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran below. We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got away all right. The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest, and tell me the truth. Where did you go when you went to see that battle?' He says, 'I went down in the hold.' All through that fight I was scared nearly to death. I hardly knew anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me. Next day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct. I never said anything, I let it go at that. I judged it wasn't so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer. Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the Hot Springs. When there, I got a good many letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back. I declined, because I wasn't well enough or strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had made. A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it. We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy carriage and an intelligent face. We were approaching Island No. 10, a place so celebrated during the war. This gentleman's home was on the main shore in its neighborhood. I had some talk with him about the war times; but presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region. This gentleman said-- 'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons. Nobody don't know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the Darnells and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living, which I don't think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a cow-- anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no consequence--none in the world--both families was rich. The thing could have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do. Rough words had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that. That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling! Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on shooting each other, year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you see --till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever a Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was going to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on the other. They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family. They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A man shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods, and didn't give him no chance. If he HAD 'a' given him a chance, the boy'd 'a' shot him. Both families belonged to the same church (everybody around here is religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss, both tribes was there every Sunday, to worship. They lived each side of the line, and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee. Sundays you'd see the families drive up, all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down, along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don't know; never was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what used to be said. 'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a young man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was the Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their might. Think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him and chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck shore he was dead. Windy Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was captain of the boat. 'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their wives on their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no further--both of them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it-- and died. But his friends shot old Darnell through and through--filled him full of bullets, and ended him.' The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit among educated men in the West is not universal, but it is prevalent-- prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country, say 'never mind, it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE, anyway.' A life-long resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression upon her. She was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the time--a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed, the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer sensitive to such affronts. No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written it--NO one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures for evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they and all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from KNOWINGLY and PURPOSELY debauching their grammar. I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10. The island which I remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, heavily timbered, and lay near the Kentucky shore--within two hundred yards of it, I should say. Now, however, one had to hunt for it with a spy-glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and this was no longer near the Kentucky shore; it was clear over against the opposite shore, a mile away. In war times the island had been an important place, for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily fortified, there was no getting by it. It lay between the upper and lower divisions of the Union forces, and kept them separate, until a junction was finally effected across the Missouri neck of land; but the island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river is without obstruction. In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee. The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses were still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same old forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither grown nor diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water had invaded it and damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in low water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an overflow had always been considered an impossibility. This present flood of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It put all the unprotected low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the Mississippi was SEVENTY MILES wide! a number of lives were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks still under water. Chapter 27 Some Imported Articles WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless! Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the land during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors. A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall. R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says-- 'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything. But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times, that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.' Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi-- 'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Borgia from its horrors. One only object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.' Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years later-- 'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that you begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands, destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.' Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray-- 'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man. Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest (upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon, the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf, polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power of steam.' It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen; still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common sewer,' it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.' Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as follows-- 'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone! Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length, steaming against its tide. I looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.' So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says-- 'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.' The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river--La Salle, whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman-- 'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.' Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence, they chanted the TE DEUM, THE EXAUDIAT, and the DOMINE SALVUM FAC REGEM.' Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth, the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries watered by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this inscription-- LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL, 1682. New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere. Chapter 28 Uncle Mumford Unloads ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost wholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with the peddler's family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent. Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more. She was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth of the Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that she was named for me --or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer. As this was the first time I had ever encountered this species of honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same time call the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my recognition of it. Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island. As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell, but that was nothing to shudder about--in these modern times. For now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two- thousand-mile torchlight procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast. One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there. Dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal when they were created, and have never been shoal since; crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat can take herself through them without any help, after she has been through once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted; it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time, for she can of course make more miles with her rudder amidships than she can with it squared across her stern and holding her back. But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent. It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it. For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was. The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you, on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you; so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole. With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days. With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed, and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than three times as romantic. And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there. They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore. We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now, as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too. Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers. The Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has taken away its state and dignity. Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore; these latter glinting from the fleet of the United States River Commission, and from a village which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the employees of the service. The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again --a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it. They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current; and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver-- not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct. I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question about, I have judged it safest to let it remain. UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS Uncle Mumford said-- 'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT ARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS! Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that kind of a river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock THEIR little game galley-west, don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at Devil's Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what does the river care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged through it. Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there--but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks? Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper. They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs. Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know, I wish I may land in-HUMP YOURSELF, YOU SON OF AN UNDERTAKER!--OUT WITH THAT COAL-OIL, NOW, LIVELY, LIVELY! And just look at what they are trying to do down there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around and make it run several miles UP STREAM. Well you've got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you haven't got to believe they can DO such miracles, have you! And yet you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way, where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win. Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school su-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONS OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION! GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THAT HOGSHEAD ASHORE?' During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission-- with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:-- 1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened shores, etc. 2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent only on building and repairing the great system of levees. 3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a mistake. 4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc. 5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish the Mississippi in low-water seasons. Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, I mean. For you will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. No, there will always be one or two with the other diseases along between. And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things. You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it. You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't; the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag. Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt-- only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have previously got into your system. I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest sick list, for I do not know. In truth, no one can answer the latter question. Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. Every man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each of the several chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but, as I have said, it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the most recruits. All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would make a sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. Very well; since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one, certainly not too large a one. Let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled. One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from Mr. Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union. What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found in the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix B.]} Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. Here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'-- 'The towboat "Jos. B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans with a tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels (seventy- six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel, being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to $18,000. It would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal. At $10 per ton, or $100 per car, which would be a fair price for the distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $180,000, or $162,000 more by rail than by river. The tow will be taken from Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen or fifteen days. It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.' When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial mind. Chapter 29 A Few Specimen Bricks WE passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craighead's Point, and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow, memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war. Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be found in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a size correspondent to that huge and somber title. We have the 'Boston Massacre,' where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and the performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine 'hero,' before we accomplish it. More of the river's freaks. In times past, the channel used to strike above Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down towards Island 39. Afterward, changed its course and went from Brandywine down through Vogelman's chute in the Devil's Elbow, to Island 39--part of this course reversing the old order; the river running UP four or five miles, instead of down, and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of distance. This in 1876. All that region is now called Centennial Island. There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding places of the once celebrated 'Murel's Gang.' This was a colossal combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and counterfeiters, engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty years ago. While our journey across the country towards St. Louis was in progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history; for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the Governor of Missouri, and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers. Cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys. According to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed. It was a mistake. Murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale. James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will! Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now forgotten book which was published half a century ago-- He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain. When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher; and it is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'--interesting the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses, which were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching. But the stealing of horses in one State, and selling them in another, was but a small portion of their business; the most lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters, that they might sell them in another quarter. This was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe. The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi. Even if it was established that they had stolen a negro, before he was murdered, they were always prepared to evade punishment; for they concealed the negro who had run away, until he was advertised, and a reward offered to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this kind warrants the person to take the property, if found. And then the negro becomes a property in trust, when, therefore, they sold the negro, it only became a breach of trust, not stealing; and for a breach of trust, the owner of the property can only have redress by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were never paid. It may be inquired, how it was that Murel escaped Lynch law under such circumstances This will be easily understood when it is stated that he had MORE THAN A THOUSAND SWORN CONFEDERATES, all ready at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble. The names of all the principal confederates of Murel were obtained from himself, in a manner which I shall presently explain. The gang was composed of two classes: the Heads or Council, as they were called, who planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted to about four hundred. The other class were the active agents, and were termed strikers, and amounted to about six hundred and fifty. These were the tools in the hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and received but a small portion of the money; they were in the power of the leaders of the gang, who would sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice, or sinking their bodies in the Mississippi. The general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on the Arkansas side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in the morasses and cane-brakes. The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but so well were their plans arranged, that although Murel, who was always active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained. It so happened, however, that a young man of the name of Stewart, who was looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed away, fell in with him and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into the gang as one of the General Council. By this means all was discovered; for Stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath, and having obtained every information, exposed the whole concern, the names of all the parties, and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against Murel, to procure his conviction and sentence to the Penitentiary (Murel was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so many people who were supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable name in the different States, were found to be among the list of the Grand Council as published by Stewart, that every attempt was made to throw discredit upon his assertions--his character was vilified, and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him. He was obliged to quit the Southern States in consequence. It is, however, now well ascertained to have been all true; and although some blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath, they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct. I will quote one or two portions of Murel's confessions to Mr. Stewart, made to him when they were journeying together. I ought to have observed, that the ultimate intentions of Murel and his associates were, by his own account, on a very extended scale; having no less an object in view than RAISING THE BLACKS AGAINST THE WHITES, TAKING POSSESSION OF, AND PLUNDERING NEW ORLEANS, AND MAKING THEMSELVES POSSESSORS OF THE TERRITORY. The following are a few extracts:-- 'I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends' houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose. Every man's business being assigned him, I started to Natchez on foot, having sold my horse in New Orleans,--with the intention of stealing another after I started. I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I had become tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler. He rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, and then made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He turned around and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth of the best quality. I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last five days. 'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his arms, and I by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two hundred dollars. 'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. It was rather squally times, but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek. 'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity. He sold the negro, first and last, for nearly two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose of his skeleton.' We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War. Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight: Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery, Commodore of the Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active service during the war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity. As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course--Vicksburg. We were so pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. I had an errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas, but perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.' I said as much; so we decided to stick to present quarters. The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river. The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect. Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a German tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he describes. It is from Chapter VII, of his book, just published, in Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'-- 'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. Daily, hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. The city was become a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place, and only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey for the insidious enemy. The houses were closed: little lamps burned in front of many--a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape. The stores were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead. 'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away even the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour of fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the Yellow Death! On the street corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed. Meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air, and turned black. 'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease, and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin, nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard. In the night stillness reigns. Only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance, at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train, which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies, flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.' But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition. We drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel. A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators. Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being added. This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books long time ago. In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope, Memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of mud. That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast. She says-- 'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. They ate in perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of coughing, ETC.' 'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. You will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy pretense-- 'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.' Chapter 30 Sketches by the Way IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land, flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds of miles of it. Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge his trust,--and often in desperate weather. Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent. The Government furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending. A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month. The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. The island has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. No signs left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.' Some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised. We were getting down now into the migrating negro region. These poor people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for the privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them. If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty. If not, a shorter flight will do. During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules, and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark--no other food for them in the flood-wasted land. Sometimes there was a single lonely landing-cabin; near it the colored family that had hailed us; little and big, old and young, roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these consisting of a rusty gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools, a crippled looking-glass, a venerable arm-chair, and six or eight base- born and spiritless yellow curs, attached to the family by strings. They must have their dogs; can't go without their dogs. Yet the dogs are never willing; they always object; so, one after another, in ridiculous procession, they are dragged aboard; all four feet braced and sliding along the stage, head likely to be pulled off; but the tugger marching determinedly forward, bending to his work, with the rope over his shoulder for better purchase. Sometimes a child is forgotten and left on the bank; but never a dog. The usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63--an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip--a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow--left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had originally taken the wheel! A darkey on shore who had observed the boat go by, about thirteen times, said, 'clar to gracious, I wouldn't be s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Sk'ylarks!' Anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of opinion. The 'Eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness. One day she passed along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in his own matters, did not notice what steamer it was. Presently someone asked-- 'Any boat gone up?' 'Yes, sah.' 'Was she going fast?' 'Oh, so-so--loafin' along.' 'Now, do you know what boat that was?' 'No, sah.' 'Why, uncle, that was the "Eclipse."' 'No! Is dat so? Well, I bet it was--cause she jes' went by here a- SPARKLIN'!' Piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people down along here, During the early weeks of high water, A's fence rails washed down on B's ground, and B's rails washed up in the eddy and landed on A's ground. A said, 'Let the thing remain so; I will use your rails, and you use mine.' But B objected--wouldn't have it so. One day, A came down on B's ground to get his rails. B said, 'I'll kill you!' and proceeded for him with his revolver. A said, 'I'm not armed.' So B, who wished to do only what was right, threw down his revolver; then pulled a knife, and cut A's throat all around, but gave his principal attention to the front, and so failed to sever the jugular. Struggling around, A managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver, and shot B dead with it--and recovered from his own injuries. Further gossip;--after which, everybody went below to get afternoon coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone, Something presently reminded me of our last hour in St. Louis, part of which I spent on this boat's hurricane deck, aft. I was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into conversation with me--a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a town in the interior of Wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat until a week before. Also said that on the way down from La Crosse he had inspected and examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate interest that he had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder-blade. Asked me where I was from. I answered, New England. 'Oh, a Yank!' said he; and went chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or denial. He immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of her different parts, and teach me their uses. Before I could enter protest or excuse, he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work; and when I perceived that he was misnaming the things, and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from a far country, I held my peace, and let him have his way. He gave me a world of misinformation; and the further he went, the wider his imagination expanded, and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit. Sometimes, after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or another, to keep me from suspecting. I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished. Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack. 'Anything about this boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of, you come to me and I'll tell you.' I said I would, and took my departure; disappeared, and approached him from another quarter, whence he could not see me. There he sat, all alone, doubling himself up and writhing this way and that, in the throes of unappeasable laughter. He must have made himself sick; for he was not publicly visible afterward for several days. Meantime, the episode dropped out of my mind. The thing that reminded me of it now, when I was alone at the wheel, was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door, with the knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me. I don't know when I have seen anybody look so injured as he did. He did not say anything--simply stood there and looked; reproachfully looked and pondered. Finally he shut the door, and started away; halted on the texas a minute; came slowly back and stood in the door again, with that grieved look in his face; gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then said-- 'You let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?' 'Yes,' I confessed. 'Yes, you did--DIDN'T you?' 'Yes.' 'You are the feller that--that--' Language failed. Pause--impotent struggle for further words--then he gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good. Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold--would not look at me. Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning, I would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness. I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting. First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself. When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering. We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning--scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times, Captain Poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. One night the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft. So he cut into his wife's state-room from above with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull. This bend is all filled up now--result of a cut-off; and the same agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers. Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being of recent birth--Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there. We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. 'Well,' said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, 'It's a hell of a place.' A description which was photographic for exactness. There were several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once more. Still, it is a thriving place, with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it, and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton-seed oil. I had never seen this kind of a mill before. Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth $12 or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost if not entirely odorless. It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals. Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it, and brought it back as olive oil. This trade grew to be so formidable that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it from working serious injury to her oil industry. Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side of the river. In its normal condition it is a pretty town; but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it; whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water, and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards from the foundations. Stranded and discarded scows lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing; the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,--a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing. A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire. We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours' liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles. Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population--which is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000. 
8477	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 7. Chapter 31 A Thumb-print and What Came of It WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad--not best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question: is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities. I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and AGREED to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination. I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it, I presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows: Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION, 1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble- visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest. Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed-- 'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know. He has been a night-watchman there.' He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talon- like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her introduction of me. The man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American. The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together. I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English; thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest. This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day, and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either sight or hearing, when I left the room. When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two months, he one day said, abruptly-- 'I will tell you my story.' A DYING MAN S CONFESSION Then he went on as follows:-- I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too. You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative. Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in miniature. It was the happiest of happy households. One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as for the child--' The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice-- 'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't have come.' 'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help rummage.' Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper-- 'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and revive him up.' The other said-- 'All right--provided no clubbing.' 'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.' They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout-- 'HELLO, the house! Show a light, we want water.' 'The captain's voice, by G--!' said the stage-whispering ruffian, and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their bull's-eye as they ran. The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more. I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak, but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently, but no sound came from the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could you have endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had to endure three. Three hours--? it was three ages! Whenever the clock struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I had heard it last. All this time I was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I got myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. I was able to distinguish details pretty well. The floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. The first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room. Oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended, mine begun! Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I would find the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea who they might be? Nevertheless, I WAS sure-- quite sure, quite confident. I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue which would not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret of how to apply it. I shall come to that, presently--you shall see. Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. There was one circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it--regulars, perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures, carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought, but said nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by G--!'--the one whose life I would have. Two miles away, several regiments were in camp, and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I learned that Captain Blakely, of Company C had passed our way, that night, with an escort, I said nothing, but in that company I resolved to seek my man. In conversation I studiously and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers; and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the soldiers but me. Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made a disguise for myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village I bought a pair of blue goggles. By-and-bye, when the military camp broke up, and Company C was ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I secreted my small hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the night. When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there. Yes, I was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. Not to seem partial, I made friends and told fortunes among all the companies garrisoned there; but I gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions. I made myself limitlessly obliging to these particular men; they could ask me no favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; I became a favorite. I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! And when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was on the right track. This man's name was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company. I watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make the intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle my tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity offered. My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper, studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What was my idea in this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human beings. In these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang his picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference; but that Frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference. He always said that pictures were no good--future disguises could make them useless; 'The thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.' And he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances; it always succeeded. I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone, and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals, with that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger- marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood--to me-- that was ever shed on this earth! And many and many a time I had to repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they NEVER correspond!' But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the forty- third man of Company C whom I had experimented on--Private Franz Adler. An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name, or voice, or figure, or face, or nationality; but now I knew all these things! I believed I might feel sure; the Frenchman's repeated demonstrations being so good a warranty. Still, there was a way to MAKE sure. I had an impression of Kruger's left thumb. In the morning I took him aside when he was off duty; and when we were out of sight and hearing of witnesses, I said, impressively-- 'A part of your fortune is so grave, that I thought it would be better for you if I did not tell it in public. You and another man, whose fortune I was studying last night,--Private Adler,--have been murdering a woman and a child! You are being dogged: within five days both of you will be assassinated.' He dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits; and for five minutes he kept pouring out the same set of words, like a demented person, and in the same half-crying way which was one of my memories of that murderous night in my cabin-- 'I didn't do it; upon my soul I didn't do it; and I tried to keep HIM from doing it; I did, as God is my witness. He did it alone.' This was all I wanted. And I tried to get rid of the fool; but no, he clung to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin. He said-- 'I have money--ten thousand dollars--hid away, the fruit of loot and thievery; save me--tell me what to do, and you shall have it, every penny. Two-thirds of it is my cousin Adler's; but you can take it all. We hid it when we first came here. But I hid it in a new place yesterday, and have not told him--shall not tell him. I was going to desert, and get away with it all. It is gold, and too heavy to carry when one is running and dodging; but a woman who has been gone over the river two days to prepare my way for me is going to follow me with it; and if I got no chance to describe the hiding-place to her I was going to slip my silver watch into her hand, or send it to her, and she would understand. There's a piece of paper in the back of the case, which tells it all. Here, take the watch--tell me what to do!' He was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper and explaining it to me, when Adler appeared on the scene, about a dozen yards away. I said to poor Kruger-- 'Put up your watch, I don't want it. You shan't come to any harm. Go, now; I must tell Adler his fortune. Presently I will tell you how to escape the assassin; meantime I shall have to examine your thumbmark again. Say nothing to Adler about this thing--say nothing to anybody.' He went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil. I told Adler a long fortune--purposely so long that I could not finish it; promised to come to him on guard, that night, and tell him the really important part of it--the tragical part of it, I said--so must be out of reach of eavesdroppers. They always kept a picket-watch outside the town--mere discipline and ceremony--no occasion for it, no enemy around. Toward midnight I set out, equipped with the countersign, and picked my way toward the lonely region where Adler was to keep his watch. It was so dark that I stumbled right on a dim figure almost before I could get out a protecting word. The sentinel hailed and I answered, both at the same moment. I added, 'It's only me--the fortune-teller.' Then I slipped to the poor devil's side, and without a word I drove my dirk into his heart! YA WOHL, laughed I, it WAS the tragedy part of his fortune, indeed! As he fell from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue goggles remained in his hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him, with his foot in the stirrup. I fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the accusing goggles behind me in that dead man's hand. This was fifteen or sixteen years ago. Since then I have wandered aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle; sometimes with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life, and wishing it was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act of that night; and the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction I had, in all those tedious years, was in the daily reflection, 'I have killed him!' Four years ago, my health began to fail. I had wandered into Munich, in my purposeless way. Being out of money, I sought work, and got it; did my duty faithfully about a year, and was then given the berth of night watchman yonder in that dead-house which you visited lately. The place suited my mood. I liked it. I liked being with the dead--liked being alone with them. I used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer into their austere faces, by the hour. The later the time, the more impressive it was; I preferred the late time. Sometimes I turned the lights low: this gave perspective, you see; and the imagination could play; always, the dim receding ranks of the dead inspired one with weird and fascinating fancies. Two years ago--I had been there a year then--I was sitting all alone in the watch-room, one gusty winter's night, chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling alarum over my head! The shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time I had ever heard it. I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging its head slowly from one side to the other--a grisly spectacle! Its side was toward me. I hurried to it and peered into its face. Heavens, it was Adler! Can you divine what my first thought was? Put into words, it was this: 'It seems, then, you escaped me once: there will be a different result this time!' Evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors. Think what it must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and, look out over that grim congregation of the dead! What gratitude shone in his skinny white face when he saw a living form before him! And how the fervency of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell upon the life-giving cordials which I carried in my hands! Then imagine the horror which came into this pinched face when I put the cordials behind me, and said mockingly-- 'Speak up, Franz Adler--call upon these dead. Doubtless they will listen and have pity; but here there is none else that will.' He tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws, held firm and would not let him. He tried to lift imploring hands, but they were crossed upon his breast and tied. I said-- 'Shout, Franz Adler; make the sleepers in the distant streets hear you and bring help. Shout--and lose no time, for there is little to lose. What, you cannot? That is a pity; but it is no matter--it does not always bring help. When you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman and child in a cabin in Arkansas--my wife, it was, and my child!--they shrieked for help, you remember; but it did no good; you remember that it did no good, is it not so? Your teeth chatter--then why cannot you shout? Loosen the bandages with your hands--then you can. Ah, I see-- your hands are tied, they cannot aid you. How strangely things repeat themselves, after long years; for MY hands were tied, that night, you remember? Yes, tied much as yours are now--how odd that is. I could not pull free. It did not occur to you to untie me; it does not occur to me to untie you. Sh--! there's a late footstep. It is coming this way. Hark, how near it is! One can count the footfalls--one--two--three. There--it is just outside. Now is the time! Shout, man, shout!--it is the one sole chance between you and eternity! Ah, you see you have delayed too long--it is gone by. There--it is dying out. It is gone! Think of it--reflect upon it--you have heard a human footstep for the last time. How curious it must be, to listen to so common a sound as that, and know that one will never hear the fellow to it again.' Oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see! I thought of a new torture, and applied it--assisting myself with a trifle of lying invention-- 'That poor Kruger tried to save my wife and child, and I did him a grateful good turn for it when the time came. I persuaded him to rob you; and I and a woman helped him to desert, and got him away in safety.' A look as of surprise and triumph shone out dimly through the anguish in my victim's face. I was disturbed, disquieted. I said-- 'What, then--didn't he escape?' A negative shake of the head. 'No? What happened, then?' The satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer. The man tried to mumble out some words--could not succeed; tried to express something with his obstructed hands--failed; paused a moment, then feebly tilted his head, in a meaning way, toward the corpse that lay nearest him. 'Dead?' I asked. 'Failed to escape?--caught in the act and shot?' Negative shake of the head. 'How, then?' Again the man tried to do something with his hands. I watched closely, but could not guess the intent. I bent over and watched still more intently. He had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his breast with it. 'Ah--stabbed, do you mean?' Affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such peculiar devilishness, that it struck an awakening light through my dull brain, and I cried-- 'Did I stab him, mistaking him for you?--for that stroke was meant for none but you.' The affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing strength was able to put into its expression. 'O, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that, stood a friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would have saved them if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!' I fancied I heard the muffled gurgle of a, mocking laugh. I took my face out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon his inclined board. He was a satisfactory long time dying. He had a wonderful vitality, an astonishing constitution. Yes, he was a pleasant long time at it. I got a chair and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read. Occasionally I took a sip of brandy. This was necessary, on account of the cold. But I did it partly because I saw, that along at first, whenever I reached for the bottle, he thought I was going to give him some. I read aloud: mainly imaginary accounts of people snatched from the grave's threshold and restored to life and vigor by a few spoonsful of liquor and a warm bath. Yes, he had a long, hard death of it--three hours and six minutes, from the time he rang his bell. It is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed since the institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the Bavarian dead-houses has ever rung its bell. Well, it is a harmless belief. Let it stand at that. The chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones. It revived and fastened upon me the disease which had been afflicting me, but which, up to that night, had been steadily disappearing. That man murdered my wife and my child; and in three days hence he will have added me to his list. No matter--God! how delicious the memory of it!--I caught him escaping from his grave, and thrust him back into it. After that night, I was confined to my bed for a week; but as soon as I could get about, I went to the dead-house books and got the number of the house which Adler had died in. A wretched lodging-house, it was. It was my idea that he would naturally have gotten hold of Kruger's effects, being his cousin; and I wanted to get Kruger's watch, if I could. But while I was sick, Adler's things had been sold and scattered, all except a few old letters, and some odds and ends of no value. However, through those letters, I traced out a son of Kruger's, the only relative left. He is a man of thirty now, a shoemaker by trade, and living at No. 14 Konigstrasse, Mannheim--widower, with several small children. Without explaining to him why, I have furnished two-thirds of his support, ever since. Now, as to that watch--see how strangely things happen! I traced it around and about Germany for more than a year, at considerable cost in money and vexation; and at last I got it. Got it, and was unspeakably glad; opened it, and found nothing in it! Why, I might have known that that bit of paper was not going to stay there all this time. Of course I gave up that ten thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out of my mind: and most sorrowfully, for I had wanted it for Kruger's son. Last night, when I consented at last that I must die, I began to make ready. I proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough, from a batch of Adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness, out dropped that long-desired scrap! I recognized it in a moment. Here it is--I will translate it: 'Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row. Stick notice there, saying how many are to come.' There--take it, and preserve it. Kruger explained that that stone was removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation, fourth row from the top, and third stone from the west. The money is secreted behind it. He said the closing sentence was a blind, to mislead in case the paper should fall into wrong hands. It probably performed that office for Adler. Now I want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the river, you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to Adam Kruger, care of the Mannheim address which I have mentioned. It will make a rich man of him, and I shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that I have done what I could for the son of the man who tried to save my wife and child--albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the impulse of my heart would have been to shield and serve him. Chapter 32 The Disposal of a Bonanza 'SUCH was Ritter's narrative,' said I to my two friends. There was a profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations over the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath. Then my friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of occasional volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. For ten minutes now, there was stillness. Then Rogers said dreamily-- 'Ten thousand dollars.' Adding, after a considerable pause-- 'Ten thousand. It is a heap of money.' Presently the poet inquired-- 'Are you going to send it to him right away?' 'Yes,' I said. 'It is a queer question.' No reply. After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly: 'ALL of it?--That is--I mean--' 'Certainly, all of it.' I was going to say more, but stopped--was stopped by a train of thought which started up in me. Thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and I did not catch what he said. But I heard Rogers answer-- 'Yes, it seems so to me. It ought to be quite sufficient; for I don't see that he has done anything.' Presently the poet said-- 'When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. Just look at it--five thousand dollars! Why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime! And it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him--you want to look at that. In a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses, go steadily from bad to worse--' 'Yes, that's it,' interrupted Rogers, fervently, 'I've seen it a hundred times--yes, more than a hundred. You put money into the hands of a man like that, if you want to destroy him, that's all; just put money into his hands, it's all you've got to do; and if it don't pull him down, and take all the usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and everything, then I don't know human nature--ain't that so, Thompson? And even if we were to give him a THIRD of it; why, in less than six months--' 'Less than six WEEKS, you'd better say!' said I, warming up and breaking in. 'Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he couldn't touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than--' 'Of COURSE he wouldn't,' said Thompson; 'I've edited books for that kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty--maybe it's three thousand, maybe it's two thousand--' 'What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, I should like to know?' broke in Rogers, earnestly. 'A man perhaps perfectly contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and BLEST!-- yes, I say blest! blest above all the myriads that go in silk attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly--but just you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen hundred dollars before a man like that, and say--' 'Fifteen hundred devils!' cried I, 'FIVE hundred would rot his principles, paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter, thence to the almshouse, thence to ----' 'WHY put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet earnestly and appealingly. 'He is happy where he is, and AS he is. Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. We could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.' After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. It was manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker SOMETHING. There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we finally decided to send him a chromo. Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. That was not my idea. I said that if they got half of it between them they might consider themselves lucky. Rogers said-- 'Who would have had ANY if it hadn't been for me? I flung out the first hint--but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.' Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very moment that Rogers had originally spoken. I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough, and without anybody's help. I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was sure. This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man got pretty badly battered. As soon as I had got myself mended up after a fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. I found Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit-- 'I have come to say good-bye, captain. I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.' 'Go ashore where?' 'Napoleon.' The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood, stopped that and said-- 'But are you serious?' 'Serious? I certainly am.' The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said-- 'He wants to get off at Napoleon!' 'Napoleon ?' 'That's what he says.' 'Great Caesar's ghost!' Uncle Mumford approached along the deck. The captain said-- 'Uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!' 'Well, by ---?' I said-- 'Come, what is all this about? Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon if he wants to?' 'Why, hang it, don't you know? There ISN'T any Napoleon any more. Hasn't been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!' 'Carried the WHOLE town away?-banks, churches, jails, newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable EVERYTHING ?' 'Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.' or such a matter. Didn't leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that's left of Napoleon. These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town. Take a look behind you--up-stream--now you begin to recognize this country, don't you?' 'Yes, I do recognize it now. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful--and unexpected.' Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news. Thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly-- 'For my share of the chromo.' Rogers followed suit. Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of the 'Pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more--swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney! Chapter 33 Refreshments and Ethics IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river'--a most unstable line. The State of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel'--another shifty and unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi. 'Middle of the river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. That is as I understand the problem. Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this FACT remains: that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither. One man owns the whole island, and of right is 'the man without a country.' Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it to Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required). We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy--steamboat or other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless solitude. Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on the gray and grassless banks--cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back as the shores caved in. As at Pilcher's Point, for instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more. Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the Valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of $2,500,000 annually. A growing town. There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. Colonel Calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot County, Arkansas--some ten thousand acres--for cotton-growing. The purpose is to work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit, say 8 or 10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the place. If this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in Greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest--6 per cent. is spoken of. The trouble heretofore has been--I am quoting remarks of planters and steamboatmen--that the planters, although owning the land, were without cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the business. Consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money takes some risk and demands big interest--usually 10 per cent., and 2{half} per cent. for negotiating the loan. The planter has also to buy his supplies through the same dealer, paying commissions and profits. Then when he ships his crop, the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc. So, taking it by and large, and first and last, the dealer's share of that crop is about 25 per cent.'{footnote ['But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of purchasing their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all their supplies at 100 per cent. profit?'--EDWARD ATKINSON.]} A cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit on planting, in his section: One man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving ten bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost of producing, say $350; net profit, $150, or $15 per acre. There is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which formerly had little value--none where much transportation was necessary. In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint, worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed, worth $12 or $13 per ton. Maybe in future even the stems will not be thrown away. Mr. Edward Atkinson says that for each bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems, and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and potash; that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal (which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities), the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in all the elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone. Heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance. Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store' himself, and supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's pocket and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty Israelite, who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all sorts of things which they could do without--buy on credit, at big prices, month after month, credit based on the negro's share of the growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs to the Israelite,' the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied, restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not know him, does not care for him, will fatten the Israelite a season, and follow his predecessor per steamboat. It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its humane and protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most profitable for both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general adoption of that method will then follow. And where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify? He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary, and WOULD earn it if there were custom enough. He says the people along here in Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come aboard at the landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper. Thinks they 'don't know anything but cotton;' believes they don't know how to raise vegetables and fruit--'at least the most of them.' Says 'a nigger will go to H for a watermelon' ('H' is all I find in the stenographer's report--means Halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go for a watermelon). Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty. 'Why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?' Because they won't have any other. 'They want a big drink; don't make any difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money. You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents--will he touch it? No. Ain't size enough to it. But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful--red's the main thing--and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.' All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm. They furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers 'on salary.' Good liquors? Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. On the other boats? No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. 'Brandy? Yes, I've got brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of it unless you've made your will.' It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.' In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip. A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune. Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do. Yes, indeedy, times are changed. Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at all! Sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.' Chapter 34 Tough Yarns STACK ISLAND. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence, Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--also with truth. A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet. He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man. Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here. One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property, it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down or sneered at. These mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being formidable and lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would have supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,' as he finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way--to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence--they take out a mosquito policy besides.' He told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them try to vote. Noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls 'canvassing.' There was another passenger--friend of H.'s--who backed up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable 'Wait--knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go on;' or, 'Wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down-- you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' He explained privately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his sorrow.' Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.' Chapter 35 Vicksburg During the Trouble WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water --also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it. Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave- refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:-- Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non- combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God- speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh. The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops; silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the war- tempest breaks forth once more. There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all? Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse. Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest. A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect:-- 'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;-- uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter. Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. WHOLE panes were as scarce as news. 'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again. Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey IS SAVED.' And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another taste during the siege. 'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close. Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night, Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk. 'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out. Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first. 'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving. This man had kept a diary during--six weeks? No, only the first six days. The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course. The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety, full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases, both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine. The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. Over the great gateway is this inscription:-- "HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865" The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it. By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove out a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton. Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to the National Cemetery. On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since the day it fell there during the siege. 'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, "Jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!"' Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers; is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions, and has a promising future of prosperity and importance. Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and upbuilding, henceforth. They are acting upon this idea. The signs are, that the next twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in the Valley, in the direction of increased population and wealth, and in the intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these. And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find and use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress. They kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small RETAIL traffic in freights and passengers. Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight. Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns diligently and effectively discouraged it. They could have had many boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high rates compulsory. It was a policy which extended--and extends--from New Orleans to St. Paul. We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project. Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--a college professor--and was called to the surface in the course of a general conversation which began with talk about horses, drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching of the gamblers in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade and protection. 
8478	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 8. Chapter 36 The Professor's Yarn IT was in the early days. I was not a college professor then. I was a humble-minded young land-surveyor, with the world before me--to survey, in case anybody wanted it done. I had a contract to survey a route for a great mining-ditch in California, and I was on my way thither, by sea --a three or four weeks' voyage. There were a good many passengers, but I had very little to say to them; reading and dreaming were my passions, and I avoided conversation in order to indulge these appetites. There were three professional gamblers on board--rough, repulsive fellows. I never had any talk with them, yet I could not help seeing them with some frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deck stateroom every day and night, and in my promenades I often had glimpses of them through their door, which stood a little ajar to let out the surplus tobacco smoke and profanity. They were an evil and hateful presence, but I had to put up with it, of course, There was one other passenger who fell under my eye a good deal, for he seemed determined to be friendly with me, and I could not have gotten rid of him without running some chance of hurting his feelings, and I was far from wishing to do that. Besides, there was something engaging in his countrified simplicity and his beaming good-nature. The first time I saw this Mr. John Backus, I guessed, from his clothes and his looks, that he was a grazier or farmer from the backwoods of some western State--doubtless Ohio--and afterward when he dropped into his personal history and I discovered that he WAS a cattle-raiser from interior Ohio, I was so pleased with my own penetration that I warmed toward him for verifying my instinct. He got to dropping alongside me every day, after breakfast, to help me make my promenade; and so, in the course of time, his easy-working jaw had told me everything about his business, his prospects, his family, his relatives, his politics--in fact everything that concerned a Backus, living or dead. And meantime I think he had managed to get out of me everything I knew about my trade, my tribe, my purposes, my prospects, and myself. He was a gentle and persuasive genius, and this thing showed it; for I was not given to talking about my matters. I said something about triangulation, once; the stately word pleased his ear; he inquired what it meant; I explained; after that he quietly and inoffensively ignored my name, and always called me Triangle. What an enthusiast he was in cattle! At the bare name of a bull or a cow, his eye would light and his eloquent tongue would turn itself loose. As long as I would walk and listen, he would walk and talk; he knew all breeds, he loved all breeds, he caressed them all with his affectionate tongue. I tramped along in voiceless misery whilst the cattle question was up; when I could endure it no longer, I used to deftly insert a scientific topic into the conversation; then my eye fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered, his stopped; life was a joy to me, and a sadness to him. One day he said, a little hesitatingly, and with somewhat of diffidence-- 'Triangle, would you mind coming down to my stateroom a minute, and have a little talk on a certain matter?' I went with him at once. Arrived there, he put his head out, glanced up and down the saloon warily, then closed the door and locked it. He sat down on the sofa, and he said-- 'I'm a-going to make a little proposition to you, and if it strikes you favorable, it'll be a middling good thing for both of us. You ain't a-going out to Californy for fun, nuther am I--it's business, ain't that so? Well, you can do me a good turn, and so can I you, if we see fit. I've raked and scraped and saved, a considerable many years, and I've got it all here.' He unlocked an old hair trunk, tumbled a chaos of shabby clothes aside, and drew a short stout bag into view for a moment, then buried it again and relocked the trunk. Dropping his voice to a cautious low tone, he continued, 'She's all there--a round ten thousand dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my little idea: What I don't know about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing. There's mints of money in it, in Californy. Well, I know, and you know, that all along a line that 's being surveyed, there 's little dabs of land that they call "gores," that fall to the surveyor free gratis for nothing. All you've got to do, on your side, is to survey in such a way that the "gores" will fall on good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me, I stock 'em with cattle, in rolls the cash, I plank out your share of the dollars regular, right along, and--' I was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm, but it could not be helped. I interrupted, and said severely-- 'I am not that kind of a surveyor. Let us change the subject, Mr. Backus.' It was pitiful to see his confusion and hear his awkward and shamefaced apologies. I was as much distressed as he was--especially as he seemed so far from having suspected that there was anything improper in his proposition. So I hastened to console him and lead him on to forget his mishap in a conversational orgy about cattle and butchery. We were lying at Acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happened luckily that the crew were just beginning to hoist some beeves aboard in slings. Backus's melancholy vanished instantly, and with it the memory of his late mistake. 'Now only look at that!' cried he; 'My goodness, Triangle, what WOULD they say to it in OHIO. Wouldn't their eyes bug out, to see 'em handled like that?--wouldn't they, though?' All the passengers were on deck to look--even the gamblers--and Backus knew them all, and had afflicted them all with his pet topic. As I moved away, I saw one of the gamblers approach and accost him; then another of them; then the third. I halted; waited; watched; the conversation continued between the four men; it grew earnest; Backus drew gradually away; the gamblers followed, and kept at his elbow. I was uncomfortable. However, as they passed me presently, I heard Backus say, with a tone of persecuted annoyance-- 'But it ain't any use, gentlemen; I tell you again, as I've told you a half a dozen times before, I warn't raised to it, and I ain't a-going to resk it.' I felt relieved. 'His level head will be his sufficient protection,' I said to myself. During the fortnight's run from Acapulco to San Francisco I several times saw the gamblers talking earnestly with Backus, and once I threw out a gentle warning to him. He chuckled comfortably and said-- 'Oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--want me to play a little, just for amusement, they say--but laws-a-me, if my folks have told me once to look out for that sort of live-stock, they've told me a thousand times, I reckon.' By-and-bye, in due course, we were approaching San Francisco. It was an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing, but there was not much sea. I was on deck, alone. Toward ten I started below. A figure issued from the gamblers' den, and disappeared in the darkness. I experienced a shock, for I was sure it was Backus. I flew down the companion-way, looked about for him, could not find him, then returned to the deck just in time to catch a glimpse of him as he re-entered that confounded nest of rascality. Had he yielded at last? I feared it. What had he gone below for?--His bag of coin? Possibly. I drew near the door, full of bodings. It was a-crack, and I glanced in and saw a sight that made me bitterly wish I had given my attention to saving my poor cattle-friend, instead of reading and dreaming my foolish time away. He was gambling. Worse still, he was being plied with champagne, and was already showing some effect from it. He praised the 'cider,' as he called it, and said now that he had got a taste of it he almost believed he would drink it if it was spirits, it was so good and so ahead of anything he had ever run across before. Surreptitious smiles, at this, passed from one rascal to another, and they filled all the glasses, and whilst Backus honestly drained his to the bottom they pretended to do the same, but threw the wine over their shoulders. I could not bear the scene, so I wandered forward and tried to interest myself in the sea and the voices of the wind. But no, my uneasy spirit kept dragging me back at quarter-hour intervals; and always I saw Backus drinking his wine--fairly and squarely, and the others throwing theirs away. It was the painfullest night I ever spent. The only hope I had was that we might reach our anchorage with speed-- that would break up the game. I helped the ship along all I could with my prayers. At last we went booming through the Golden Gate, and my pulses leaped for joy. I hurried back to that door and glanced in. Alas, there was small room for hope--Backus's eyes were heavy and bloodshot, his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlin and thick, his body sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship. He drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards were being dealt. He took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment. The gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by hardly perceptible signs. 'How many cards?' 'None!' said Backus. One villain--named Hank Wiley--discarded one card, the others three each. The betting began. Heretofore the bets had been trifling--a dollar or two; but Backus started off with an eagle now, Wiley hesitated a moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollars better.' The other two threw up their hands. Backus went twenty better. Wiley said-- 'I see that, and go you a hundred better!' then smiled and reached for the money. 'Let it alone,' said Backus, with drunken gravity. 'What! you mean to say you're going to cover it?' 'Cover it? Well, I reckon I am--and lay another hundred on top of it, too.' He reached down inside his overcoat and produced the required sum. 'Oh, that's your little game, is it? I see your raise, and raise it five hundred!' said Wiley. 'Five hundred better.' said the foolish bull-driver, and pulled out the amount and showered it on the pile. The three conspirators hardly tried to conceal their exultation. All diplomacy and pretense were dropped now, and the sharp exclamations came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramid grew higher and higher. At last ten thousand dollars lay in view. Wiley cast a bag of coin on the table, and said with mocking gentleness-- 'Five thousand dollars better, my friend from the rural districts--what do you say NOW?' 'I CALL you!' said Backus, heaving his golden shot-bag on the pile. 'What have you got?' 'Four kings, you d--d fool!' and Wiley threw down his cards and surrounded the stakes with his arms. 'Four ACES, you ass!' thundered Backus, covering his man with a cocked revolver. 'I'M A PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER MYSELF, AND I'VE BEEN LAYING FOR YOU DUFFERS ALL THIS VOYAGE!' Down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! and the long trip was ended. Well--well, it is a sad world. One of the three gamblers was Backus's 'pal.' It was he that dealt the fateful hands. According to an understanding with the two victims, he was to have given Backus four queens, but alas, he didn't. A week later, I stumbled upon Backus--arrayed in the height of fashion-- in Montgomery Street. He said, cheerily, as we were parting-- 'Ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about those gores. I don't really know anything about cattle, except what I was able to pick up in a week's apprenticeship over in Jersey just before we sailed. My cattle- culture and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--I shan't need them any more.' Next day we reluctantly parted from the 'Gold Dust' and her officers, hoping to see that boat and all those officers again, some day. A thing which the fates were to render tragically impossible! Chapter 37 The End of the 'Gold Dust' FOR, three months later, August 8, while I was writing one of these foregoing chapters, the New York papers brought this telegram-- A TERRIBLE DISASTER. SEVENTEEN PERSONS KILLED BY AN EXPLOSION ON THE STEAMER 'GOLD DUST.' 'NASHVILLE, Aug. 7.--A despatch from Hickman, Ky., says-- 'The steamer "Gold Dust" exploded her boilers at three o'clock to-day, just after leaving Hickman. Forty-seven persons were scalded and seventeen are missing. The boat was landed in the eddy just above the town, and through the exertions of the citizens the cabin passengers, officers, and part of the crew and deck passengers were taken ashore and removed to the hotels and residences. Twenty-four of the injured were lying in Holcomb's dry-goods store at one time, where they received every attention before being removed to more comfortable places.' A list of the names followed, whereby it appeared that of the seventeen dead, one was the barkeeper; and among the forty-seven wounded, were the captain, chief mate, second mate, and second and third clerks; also Mr. Lem S. Gray, pilot, and several members of the crew. In answer to a private telegram, we learned that none of these was severely hurt, except Mr. Gray. Letters received afterward confirmed this news, and said that Mr. Gray was improving and would get well. Later letters spoke less hopefully of his case; and finally came one announcing his death. A good man, a most companionable and manly man, and worthy of a kindlier fate. Chapter 38 The House Beautiful WE took passage in a Cincinnati boat for New Orleans; or on a Cincinnati boat--either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it, the latter the western. Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them. Mr. Dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's position was certainly unassailable. If Mr. Dickens was comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the Taj, or with the Matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right. The people compared them with what they had seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong. The people were as right as was Mr. Dickens. The steamboats were finer than anything on shore. Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.' To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces; they tallied with the citizen's dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it. Every town and village along that vast stretch of double river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. It is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white--in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white and porticoed like a Grecian temple--with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted; iron knocker; brass door knob--discolored, for lack of polishing. Within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet; mahogany center- table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns, by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat; several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them, Tupper, much penciled; also, 'Friendship's Offering,' and 'Affection's Wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; 'Alonzo and Melissa:' maybe 'Ivanhoe:' also 'Album,' full of original 'poetry' of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three goody-goody works--'Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,' etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey's 'Lady's Book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike-- lips and eyelids the same size--each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot. Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. Over middle of mantel, engraving--Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and- lightning crewels by one of the young ladies--work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. Piano--kettle in disguise-- with music, bound and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand near by: Battle of Prague; Bird Waltz; Arkansas Traveler; Rosin the Bow; Marseilles Hymn; On a Lone Barren Isle (St. Helena); The Last Link is Broken; She wore a Wreath of Roses the Night when last we met; Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er that Brow a Shadow fling; Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long Ago; Days of Absence; A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling Deep; Bird at Sea; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it, RO-holl on, silver MOO-hoon, guide the TRAV-el-lerr his WAY, etc. Tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar--guitar capable of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you give it a start. Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses: progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce. Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel-plates, Trumbull's Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar. Copper- plates, Moses Smiting the Rock, and Return of the Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil: papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United States'); guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. These persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord's Prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington's mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. These two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors-- being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential- campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' Bracketed over what-not--place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died. Pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time. Horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. Window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors. Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded. Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort, with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane- seat chairs, splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly --but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers. Nothing else in the room. Not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one. That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis. When he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each an April shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long- drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle! In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers. Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect of that hosannahing citizen. Every state-room had its couple of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs, and public soap. Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory estate. Now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the Cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except the steward's. But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change; neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any. Chapter 39 Manufactures and Miscreants WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended its career as a river town. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the exiled town. In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached Natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground. Famous Natchez-under- the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect-- judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby. It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive. Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its charms: 'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground. The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed wretched- looking in the extreme.' Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her. And like Vicksburg and New Orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day. In Vicksburg and Natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one of the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. But there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place. It was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there. No, not porcelain--they merely seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid milk-white ice. It ought to have melted; for one did not require winter clothing in that atmosphere: but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe was too cold. Sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two feet long, and open at the top end. These were full of clear water; and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the ammonia gases were applied to the water in some way which will always remain a secret to me, because I was not able to understand the process. While the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or two with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, I think. Other men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become hard frozen. They gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water, to melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot the block out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market. These big blocks were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. In certain of them, big bouquets of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in; in others, beautiful silken-clad French dolls, and other pretty objects. These blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of dinner- tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate glass. I was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon, throughout New Orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities, at six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit. This being the case, there is business for ice-factories in the North; for we get ice on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred and fifty pounds at a delivery. The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the town. Two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to $225,000; added a third story to the mill, increased its length to 317 feet; added machinery to increase the capacity to 10,300 spindles and 304 looms. The company now employ 250 operatives, many of whom are citizens of Natchez. 'The mill works 5,000 bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these goods per year.'{footnote [New Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 Aug, 1882.]} A close corporation--stock held at $5,000 per share, but none in the market. The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange, yet were to be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see Natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centers. Speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic which I heard--which I overheard--on board the Cincinnati boat. I awoke out of a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears. I listened-- two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great inundation. I looked out through the open transom. The two men were eating a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else around. They closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it, evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--then they dropped into business. It soon transpired that they were drummers--one belonging in Cincinnati, the other in New Orleans. Brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion. 'Now as to this article,' said Cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade, 'it's from our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it. Put any test on it you want to. Take your own time--no hurry--make it thorough. There now-- what do you say? butter, ain't it. Not by a thundering sight--it's oleomargarine! Yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine. You can't tell it from butter; by George, an EXPERT can't. It's from our house. We supply most of the boats in the West; there's hardly a pound of butter on one of them. We are crawling right along--JUMPING right along is the word. We are going to have that entire trade. Yes, and the hotel trade, too. You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, outside of the biggest cities. Why, we are turning out oleomargarine NOW by the thousands of tons. And we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has GOT to take it--can't get around it you see. Butter don't stand any show--there ain't any chance for competition. Butter's had its DAY--and from this out, butter goes to the wall. There's more money in oleomargarine than--why, you can't imagine the business we do. I've stopped in every town from Cincinnati to Natchez; and I've sent home big orders from every one of them.' And so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid strain. Then New Orleans piped up and said-- Yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty; but it ain't the only one around that's first-rate. For instance, they make olive-oil out of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you can't tell them apart.' 'Yes, that's so,' responded Cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top business for a while. They sent it over and brought it back from France and Italy, with the United States custom-house mark on it to indorse it for genuine, and there was no end of cash in it; but France and Italy broke up the game--of course they naturally would. Cracked on such a rattling impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't stand the raise; had to hang up and quit.' 'Oh, it DID, did it? You wait here a minute.' Goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles, and takes out the corks--says: 'There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the labels. One of 'm's from Europe, the other's never been out of this country. One's European olive-oil, the other's American cotton-seed olive-oil. Tell 'm apart? 'Course you can't. Nobody can. People that want to, can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to Europe and back--it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth six of that. We turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our factory in New Orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything. Well, no, not labels: been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there. You see, there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is, in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor, or something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then to turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody that can detect the true from the false. Well, we know how to get that one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does. And we turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable! We are doing a ripping trade, too--as I could easily show you by my order-book for this trip. Maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon, but we'll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, and that's a dead-certain thing.' Cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration. The two scoundrels exchanged business-cards, and rose. As they left the table, Cincinnati said-- 'But you have to have custom-house marks, don't you? How do you manage that?' I did not catch the answer. We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the war--the night-battle there between Farragut's fleet and the Confederate land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle, two months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse of the Union forces with great slaughter. Chapter 40 Castles and Culture BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it, because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. And there was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air. And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road. Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration- money to the building of something genuine. Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female Institute' of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same advertisement-- 'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.' Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping hotel in a castle. By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough; but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake. Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.' Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter, and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at all-- 'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south. Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and solicit southern patronage.' {footnote (long one) [Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser: KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes after ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to kill him. This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that it was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry then told O'Connor he should not live. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not. The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon Mabry sent word to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This morning Major O'Connor was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which he was president. General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired. Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fell O'Connor fired again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun. About this time Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing down the street, unseen by O'Connor until within forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the shot taking effect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body near the heart. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired, the load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly O'Connor fell dead without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise, but fell back dead. The whole tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the three spoke after he was shot. General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body. A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their clothing pierced by buckshot. The affair caused great excitement, and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Will Mabry was killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was President of the Mechanics' National Bank here, and was the wealthiest man in the State.--ASSOCIATED PRESS TELEGRAM. One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville, Tenn., Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that his brother-in- law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him. Burton, t seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. The Professor armed himself with a double-barreled shot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself. About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreled about a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains. On the 24th the young men met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax. The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man. About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians, clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,' came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes; Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that butcher-knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion; the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. If Dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us. He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are told by a Staunton correspondent of the PHILADELPHIA PRESS that 'every effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--EXTRACTS FROM THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.]} What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle. From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks-- standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street. A most home-like and happy-looking region. And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees. Here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. Mrs. Trollope says-- 'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.' Captain Basil Hall-- 'The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi, in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery. All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses. The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists. Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same. They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls them-- were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood- curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children. The woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides. One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive--but they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt. Basil Hall got. Mrs. Trollope's account of it may perhaps entertain the reader; therefore I have put it in the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix C.]} 
8480	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 10. Chapter 46 Enchantments and Enchanters THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it. Chapter 47 Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said-- 'Why, he 's white!' They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves. Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called 'Sellers.' I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.' Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.' He added-- 'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [Figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers' in future editions. Chapter 48 Sugar and Postage ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of Baton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him an apology-- QUESTION. Where are you? ANSWER. In the spirit world. Q. Are you happy? A. Very happy. Perfectly happy. Q. How do you amuse yourself? A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits. Q. What else? A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary. Q. What do you talk about? A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? No reply. Q. Would you like to come back? A. No. Q. Would you say that under oath? A. Yes. Q. What do you eat there? A. We do not eat. Q. What do you drink? A. We do not drink. Q. What do you smoke? A. We do not smoke. Q. What do you read? A. We do not read. Q. Do all the good people go to your place? A. Yes. Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. A. No reply. Q. When did you die? A. I did not die, I passed away. Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in the spirit land? A. We have no measurements of time here. Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for. You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true? A. Yes. Q. Then name the day of the month. (Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? This was granted to be the case. Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it? (More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH. This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' Chapter 49 Episodes in Pilot Life IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two loads. Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; BUT THERE IS NO INSTANCE OF A PILOT DESERTING HIS POST TO SAVE HIS LIFE WHILE BY REMAINING AND SACRIFICING IT HE MIGHT SECURE OTHER LIVES FROM DESTRUCTION. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be lost but me. I will stay.' There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' He was promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. The captain was on the roof at the time. He saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis. He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge' now. Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS. GEORGE JOHNSON! And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure Justice of the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. Chapter 50 The 'Original Jacobs' WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back--this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans. It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a STATE-ROOM CABIN ever seen at St. Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress. 'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the low-pressure steamer "Natchez." 'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city. 'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. It has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed. 'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River to Helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed. 'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is,' and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When Missouri was on the Illinois side.' The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.' In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. It so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [The original MS. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans. It reads as follows-- VICKSBURG May 4, 1859. 'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 8. My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. 'I. Sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a 'cub' at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'Mark Twain' to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. 
8479	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 9. Chapter 41 The Metropolis of the South THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a dish-- and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction. The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article. The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left. The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as dusty- looking as ever. Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode. Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad, general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far- seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness. However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate eye and taste; a SUGGESTER, so to speak. The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious, long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep. Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature. The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have been made; and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one of the healthiest cities in the Union. There's plenty of ice now for everybody, manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially, and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our visit, it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking. The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New York, and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in Canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news, let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack- grinding, but literature. As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it may be mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley, from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles. That issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column; an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say, not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book. One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans. I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many- colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking. One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a mansion-and- brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]} the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. Chapter 42 Hygiene and Sentiment THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron. On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that. I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen. But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial, MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however; for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account is always left unsettled. 'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote: "The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted." 'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape. 'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other. In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. 'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 3, VOL. 135. In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:-- 'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880! These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.' For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years. I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless. To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child. He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into. He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months. Chapter 43 The Art of Inhumation ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. I said-- 'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now. Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address.' He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B----, UNDERTAKER.' Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried out-- 'That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. Big fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don't have fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business! People don't wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off right along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line. I just started in with two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the thing! I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.' 'Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?' 'Go-way! How you talk!' Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; 'Look here; there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to jew you down on. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't say--"I'll look around a little, and if I find I can't do better I'll come back and take it." That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That's a coffin. And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin. Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom, and the nobbiest. 'Why, just look at it. A rich man won't have anything but your very best; and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to him-- he won't ever holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he'll bust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman. F'r instance: Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind of moaning. Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says-- '"And fhat might ye ask for that wan?" '"Thirty-nine dollars, madam," says I. '"It 's a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like a gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it. I'll have that wan, sor." '"Yes, madam," says I, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly, to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes, as the saying is." And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually, "This one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid--well, sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, I felt obliged to say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy--" '"D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?" '"Yes, madam." '"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise; and moind you, stick on some extras, too, and I'll give ye another dollar." 'And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don't forget to mention that Mrs. O'Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks and flung as much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin. And of course she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy about four hacks and an omnibus better. That used to be, but that's all played now; that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up hacks so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up. He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.' 'Well,' said I, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times, what must you be in an epidemic?' He shook his head. 'No, you're off, there. We don't like to see an epidemic. An epidemic don't pay. Well, of course I don't mean that, exactly; but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing. Don't it occur to you, why?' No. 'Think.' 'I can't imagine. What is it?' 'It's just two things.' 'Well, what are they?' 'One's Embamming.' 'And what's the other?' 'Ice.' 'How is that?' 'Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice; one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come. Takes a lot of it--melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war-prices for attendance. Well, don't you know, when there's an epidemic, they rush 'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out. No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with Embamming. You take a family that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing. You can mention sixteen different ways to do it--though there AIN'T only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts of it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every time. It's human nature--human nature in grief. It don't reason, you see. Time being, it don't care a dam. All it wants is physical immortality for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. All you've got to do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket. Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't GIVE away; and get your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred--that's what HE'S worth. There ain't anything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine. Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embam. No, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say--hurts it like hell-th, HEALTH, see?--Our little joke in the trade. Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any--I mean, when you're going by, sometime.' In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself, if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him. With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject. As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner-- 'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.' Much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it. Chapter 44 City Sights THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--bears no resemblance to the American end of the city: the American end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America. The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. They are become BRIC-A-BRAC. The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of 'the Grandissimes.' In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it. With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long- sighted native. We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices. There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles. The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole- bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment. We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did not visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept. When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became. Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundings of it. There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite. And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds. We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways. We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano. Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city. He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame. In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones; as large as one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft- shell crabs of a most superior breed. The other dishes were what one might get at Delmonico's, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose. In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade. It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume, and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket. It is a very pretty sight, on private view. When they perform on the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires, it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. I saw them go through their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision. I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom, except sweep. I did not see them sweep. But I know they could learn. What they have already learned proves that. And if they ever should learn, and should go on the war- path down Tchoupitoulas or some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes. But the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really gained, after all. The drill was in the Washington Artillery building. In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson's last interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another-- First Interview between Lee and Jackson. Last Interview between Lee and Jackson. Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee. Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner. Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks. Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat. Jackson Reporting a Great Victory. Jackson Asking Lee for a Match. It tells ONE story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.' The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.' It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.' I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,' and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England. Many Southerners--most Southerners-- put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound. For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter) and speak of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And they have the pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay in the North--of frequently employing the respectful 'Sir.' Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say 'Yes, Suh', 'No, Suh.' But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.' His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at?' And here is the aggravated form--heard a ragged street Arab say it to a comrade: 'I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.' The very elect carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say, 'I didn't go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do it.' The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original--is but little used among Southerners. They say 'reckon.' They haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; they say 'don't' instead. The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.' It is nearly as bad as the Northern 'hadn't ought.' This reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the North) a few days ago: 'He hadn't ought to have went.' How is that? Isn't that a good deal of a triumph? One knows the orders combined in this half- breed's architecture without inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern. To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?' This form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if she had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' I think it would have sounded like an affectation. We picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.' They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish--so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop--or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know--he finishes the operation by saying-- 'Give me something for lagniappe.' The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor--I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans--and you say, 'What, again?--no, I've had enough;' the other party says, 'But just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.' When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'I beg pardon--no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'Oh, that's for lagniappe.' If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says 'For lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cup without extra charge. Chapter 45 Southern Sports IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up. The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside-- 'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. And there is another reason: In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he comes with it. Of course that brings the talk back to the war. You may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result: the most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences, and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop presently, because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've got a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning to fetch out.' The poet was sitting some little distance away; and presently he began to speak--about the moon. The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:' 'There, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war; in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.' The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise to him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator, the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up North; had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans, many years ago, the moon-- Interruption from the other end of the room-- 'Let me explain that. Reminds me of an anecdote. Everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse; but you'll find people down here born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. There was an old negro woman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her presence, "What a wonderful moon you have down here!" She sighed and said, "Ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo' de waw!"' The new topic was dead already. But the poet resurrected it, and gave it a new start. A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between Northern and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined. Moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificial methods of dispelling darkness. Then somebody remembered that when Farragut advanced upon Port Hudson on a dark night--and did not wish to assist the aim of the Confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the decks of his ships white, and thus created a dim but valuable light, which enabled his own men to grope their way around with considerable facility. At this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes not quite up yet. I was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon. I had never seen a cock-fight before. There were men and boys there of all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities. But I noticed one quite conspicuous and surprising absence: the traditional brutal faces. There were no brutal faces. With no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after it began, for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--for the shouting was something prodigious. A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside. The cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called, they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated. The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit. Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting some little time, I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps; I do not know. Then, being set down again, the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more. I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endure it as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight; so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired. We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last. Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not the fox's case. We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race, one day. I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there. I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animal race I ever saw. The grand-stand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of New Orleans. That phrase is not original with me. It is the Southern reporter's. He has used it for two generations. He uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day; or a million times a day-- according to the exigencies. He is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one. He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him. There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people' out of him. No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee' assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount. It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enough of that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of their getting it. The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style; wastes no words, and does not gush. Not so with his average correspondent. In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand; but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that. For instance-- The 'Times-Democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April. This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the Captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him. They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek. That was all there was 'to it.' And that is all that the editor of the 'Times-Democrat' would have got out of it. There was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it. He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them-- 'On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.' Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement. The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women. They unsettle him; they throw him off his balance. He is plain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight. Then he goes all to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic. From reading the above extract, you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothing about handling a pen. On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint. For instance-- 'At 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and presently from the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment. It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay. The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tugging of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature waves in mocking of much larger bodies of water. A lull permitted a start, and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing. As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish themselves nearer home.' There is nothing the matter with that. It is good description, compactly put. Yet there was great temptation, there, to drop into lurid writing. But let us return to the mule. Since I left him, I have rummaged around and found a full report of the race. In it I find confirmation of the theory which I broached just now--namely, that the trouble with the Southern reporter is Women: Women, supplemented by Walter Scott and his knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on. This is an excellent report, as long as the women stay out of it. But when they intrude, we have this frantic result-- 'It will be probably a long time before the ladies' stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday. The New Orleans women are always charming, but never so much so as at this time of the year, when in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath of balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable. The stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feet and seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciated as he never did before the Peri's feeling at the Gates of Paradise, and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit him to their sacred presence. Sparkling on their white-robed breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights, and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appeared on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of King Arthur's gala-days.' There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules, they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects. Some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek, some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocently gay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion. And each mule acted according to his convictions. The result was an absence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort. All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society. If the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleans attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now. It is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion. It is great fun, and cordially liked. The mule-race is one of the marked occasions of the year. It has brought some pretty fast mules to the front. One of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he turned the thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of its best features--variety. But every now and then somebody disguises him with a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again. The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks, satins, and velvets. The thirteen mules got away in a body, after a couple of false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit. As each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his own as to how the race ought to be run, and which side of the track was best in certain circumstances, and how often the track ought to be crossed, and when a collision ought to be accomplished, and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflicting opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion, and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical. Mile heat; time 2:22. Eight of the thirteen mules distanced. I had a bet on a mule which would have won if the procession had been reversed. The second heat was good fun; and so was the 'consolation race for beaten mules,' which followed later; but the first heat was the best in that respect. I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush. Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is to say, every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this is sport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment. A horse-race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison. Still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way, perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts. But then, nobody is ever killed. At least, nobody was ever killed when I was at a horse-race. They have been crippled, it is true; but this is little to the purpose. ===10 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 10. Chapter 46 Enchantments and Enchanters THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it. Chapter 47 Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said-- 'Why, he 's white!' They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves. Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called 'Sellers.' I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.' Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.' He added-- 'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [Figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers' in future editions. Chapter 48 Sugar and Postage ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of Baton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him an apology-- QUESTION. Where are you? ANSWER. In the spirit world. Q. Are you happy? A. Very happy. Perfectly happy. Q. How do you amuse yourself? A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits. Q. What else? A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary. Q. What do you talk about? A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? No reply. Q. Would you like to come back? A. No. Q. Would you say that under oath? A. Yes. Q. What do you eat there? A. We do not eat. Q. What do you drink? A. We do not drink. Q. What do you smoke? A. We do not smoke. Q. What do you read? A. We do not read. Q. Do all the good people go to your place? A. Yes. Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. A. No reply. Q. When did you die? A. I did not die, I passed away. Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in the spirit land? A. We have no measurements of time here. Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for. You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true? A. Yes. Q. Then name the day of the month. (Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? This was granted to be the case. Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it? (More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH. This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' Chapter 49 Episodes in Pilot Life IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two loads. Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; BUT THERE IS NO INSTANCE OF A PILOT DESERTING HIS POST TO SAVE HIS LIFE WHILE BY REMAINING AND SACRIFICING IT HE MIGHT SECURE OTHER LIVES FROM DESTRUCTION. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be lost but me. I will stay.' There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' He was promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. The captain was on the roof at the time. He saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis. He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge' now. Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS. GEORGE JOHNSON! And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure Justice of the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. Chapter 50 The 'Original Jacobs' WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back--this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans. It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a STATE-ROOM CABIN ever seen at St. Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress. 'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the low-pressure steamer "Natchez." 'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city. 'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. It has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed. 'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River to Helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed. 'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is,' and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When Missouri was on the Illinois side.' The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.' In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. It so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [The original MS. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans. It reads as follows-- VICKSBURG May 4, 1859. 'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 8. My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. 'I. Sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a 'cub' at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'Mark Twain' to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. ===11 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 11. Chapter 51 Reminiscences WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot- house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water. The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what time it was. People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to. On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. By means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him. His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be Othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the Walnut Street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for that night, and if I should come I would see him. IF I should come! I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead. I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'How strange it is! WE always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked-- 'Did you see me?' 'No, you weren't there.' He looked surprised and disappointed. He said-- 'Yes, I was. Indeed I was. I was a Roman soldier.' 'Which one?' 'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'That's it! that's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but I've been promoted.' Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go and say, 'My lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make! A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?' A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him. I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how-- 'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. Come in and help.' He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years ago. I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him. I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was. One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the 'Globe- Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 went to church and Sunday-school. Chapter 52 A Burning Brand ALL at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought out Mr. Brown.' Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling, 'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you, if I can do it without breaking down. I must preface it with some explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain State prison, for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $8,000 in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. He fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- St. Louis, June 9th 1872. Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (QUIT STEALING) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather; (ROBBED HER OF HER POCKETBOOK) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (EASY TO GET)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (DISCOVERED) her leather was off (GONE)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work for 3 days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (FOR A DECK HAND)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for moons (LARGE, ROUND SEA-BISCUIT) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (PICKING POCKETS) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $50 green back, & my asking the Lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $16 a month & bord me. You bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the Lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (CLOTHES) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the Lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. When I had been there about a week Mr. Brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a Christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--Well Charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the Lord got me the job when I asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (EXPOSING HIS PAST LIFE) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic, a spelling book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday in July i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50-- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. I send you with this a receipt for a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know what you would like & i told Mr. Brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (REFRESHMENTS) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (LITTLE BOYS) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every Sunday hour before school time, I also got 4 girls to come. tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--Mr. Brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend C---- W---- who you know as Jack Hunt. I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him. Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising. However, he determined to risk it; and did. He got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another triumph. The house wept as one individual. My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach, one day. The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Frye, of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man. If they had only been in Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions. Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. At the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'Do you know that letter to be genuine?' It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. Some talk followed-- 'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. I think it was done by an educated man.' The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer-- Rev. ---- ---- MY DEAR FRIEND,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'Williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school teacher,--sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the State's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to Williams. In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, I think you might take the responsibility and do it. It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. As showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their Master as well? P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went Mr. Williams's stock again. Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. So I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. And the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other Brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. The original is before me, now, and I here append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873. DEAR BRO. PAGE,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. They said: 'Wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison. That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--I WAS AFRAID WHEN YOU WAS BLEEDING YOU WOULD DIE--give my respects,' etc. That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered. And it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis, but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, Williams-- burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. Chapter 53 My Boyhood's Home WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company, and started up the river. When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis. About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years. So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what became of him? 'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy. 'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.' I asked after another of the bright boys. 'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.' I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I was a boy. 'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' I named another boy. 'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' Same verdict concerning other boys. I named three school-girls. 'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'Killed in the war.' I named another boy. 'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!' 'Is that so?' 'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.' 'How do you account for it?' 'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure--if I had a damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people' 'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.' I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' I asked about Miss ----. Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did. After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about MYSELF: 'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith. Chapter 54 Past and Present Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village who slept that night. We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. There was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result: I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair. I was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath, and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery, I meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.' 'It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put the light out. It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory. It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, I would go for a missionary. The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right, Dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!' The laughing stopped. 'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'Somebody must go down and see!' Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'Draw straws!' So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness. The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless I did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as ever. Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into the present and went down the hill. On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was my home when I was a boy. At present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than I am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. They are colored folk. After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember as to that now. By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,' which I had attended as a Sunday- school scholar; and I found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now! I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger Sunday-school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so I was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there; and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size. As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and I did so. If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. Chapter 55 A Vendetta and Other Things DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now. Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good. There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone. Dead, these many years, they said. Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations; I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'O God, it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice-- 'My little friend, can you keep a secret?' I eagerly said I could. 'A dark and dreadful one?' I satisfied him on that point. 'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I MUST relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!' He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch.' That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. Said he-- 'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has been here." You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! But beware--breathe not a word to any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!" You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. I advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet. The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now. Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake. There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. ===12 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 12. Chapter 56 A Question of Law THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said-- 'What is the matter?' 'You talk so much I can't sleep.' I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'What did I say. Quick--out with it--what did I say?' 'Nothing much.' 'It's a lie--you know everything.' 'Everything about what?' 'You know well enough. About THAT.' 'About WHAT?--I don't know what you are talking about. I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you're awake, and I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance.' He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea--I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said-- 'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'This is foolish--I never get drunk.' 'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man. Suppose a MAN should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'How could you load a tomahawk?' 'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. There's been a man killed.' 'What! in this town?' 'Yes, in this town.' 'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.' 'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. Well, would it be murder?' 'No--suicide.' 'No, no. I don't mean HIS act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' After deep thought came this answer-- 'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know.' This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said-- 'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'No.' 'Haven't you the least idea?' 'Not the least.' 'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.' 'Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'Is that so?' 'Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'Let me see. The man was drunk?' 'Yes, he was drunk.' 'Very drunk?' 'Yes.' 'And the boy knew it?' 'Yes, he knew it.' There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict-- 'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. This is certain.' Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said-- 'I know the boy.' I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he added-- 'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!' I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration-- 'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'You told it in your sleep.' I said to myself, 'How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated.' My brother rattled innocently on-- 'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up.' I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked-- 'Are you going to give him up to the law?' 'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.' 'How good you are!' 'Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.' And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by saying-- 'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four. Chapter 57 An Archangel FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions. After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him-- He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean-- The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started-- laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State; but not by the bench of Judges. Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size. We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet. And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know. Chapter 58 On the Upper River THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis. Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept. So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog's fertility. I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger now. In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. Therefore we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a tradition that Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673. The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. She sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic. Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul. The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general. At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. He said-- 'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions. Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's, further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--Death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day, to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles. These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. In that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'Captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. Chapter 59 Legends and Scenery WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. Pardonably proud of it, too. He said-- 'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson points. You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and Trempeleau Island, which isn't like any other island in America, I believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of Indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. And above Winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the Thousand Islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I presently began to suspect-- But no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him-- 'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing Mount Vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'And so we move on. Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful Wabasha, City of the Healing Waters, puissant foe of Bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable Lake Pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. 'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'I have formerly served in that capacity.' My suspicion was confirmed. 'Do you still travel with it?' 'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens. I am helping now to work up the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. Is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one. Perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.' We asked him to tell it. He dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known as Maiden's Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, Not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux Indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. Among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of Wabasha. We-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. But her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. The day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. She appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'Yes.' 'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. And moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend. There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. What became of Winona?' 'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian tales and traditions. But I reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. Why? Because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. I showed him a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and I ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of Winona. He granted these facts, but said that if I would hunt up Mr. Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, I would find some Indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from Schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which Mr. Longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. For instance, there was the legend of 'The Undying Head.' He could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the Indian imagination. He said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly from Indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. I have found the book. The lecturer was right. There are several legends in it which confirm what he said. I will offer two of them-- 'The Undying Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.' The latter is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN. An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. It was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, He appeared very old and very desolate. His locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. Day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. His cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. He walked with a light and quick step. His forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you. Come in. Come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. Let us pass the night together. I will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what I can perform. You shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. When this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. The leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. The animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. The plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. My voice recalls the birds. The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.' At length the sun began to rise. A gentle warmth came over the place. The tongue of the old man became silent. The robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of Peboan.{footnote [Winter.]} Streams began to flow from his eyes. As the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [The trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [See appendix D.]} Chapter 60 Speculations and Conclusions WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended. It is about a ten-day trip by steamer. It can probably be done quicker by rail. I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis to Hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow, In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. But I wander from my theme. St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is the legend. Two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. A recent number of the leading St. Paul paper, the 'Pioneer Press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: Population, autumn of the present year (1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. Last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000. St. Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce. He is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. Last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000. He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State. He has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich Protestant puts up, the kind that the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. What a passion for building majestic churches the Irish hired-girl has. It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. In fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. This is a land of libraries and schools. St. Paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. The error is to be corrected. The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. It is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. All the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey--I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way. This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now occupies, in June 1837. Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians. The result is before us. All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor, Minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. At any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. Thus, this center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--New Orleans. Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. The great flouring-mills here and at St. Paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year. Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--Fort Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth. The beautiful falls of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. The White-bear Lake is less known. It is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the State. It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. There are a dozen minor summer resorts around about St. Paul and Minneapolis, but the White-bear Lake is the resort. Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend. I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE. Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been visited by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. He had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. He began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. She took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the Indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. As the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. He at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. It was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. They had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (The same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) For fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. Instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. Cries and wailings went up from every mouth. What was to be done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. One deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. The animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. Their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for Kis-se-me-pa and Ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. It is a perplexing business. First, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? No--nothing of the sort. You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. A dead man could get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I have ever had the good fortune to make. APPENDIX A (FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.) VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED REGIONS IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie' left the Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is now called the mouth of the Red. Ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe Coupee parish. The water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. The stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. On the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. We pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. The puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. It is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. Their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf. Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. From what was told me by Mr. C. P. Ferguson, a planter near Red River Landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. The negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. On Thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. At sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. The river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. It is in width, from Fort Adams on the left bank of the Mississippi to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance of about sixty miles. A large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the Mississippi and back of the Red. When Red River proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi. After a run of some hours, Black River was reached. Hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. All the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. One man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. At the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. Here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. The boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. The little one looked more like an Indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. She had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. She was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. At its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. The family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. Black River had risen during Thursday, the 23rd, 1{three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. Nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. To add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. A picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. The motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. The dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we started. The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. The blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. The sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. All along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. An old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. He stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. They is dropping off powerful fast. But what can you do? It 's all we've got.' At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water extends from Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine hills of Louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. The tendency of the current up the Black is toward the west. In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country, and the waters of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. The water now in sight of us is entirely from the Mississippi. Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. Their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. Here were seen more pictures of distress. On the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. The buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. Near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. They did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. The sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. A horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. Rounding to we ran alongside, and General York stepped aboard. He was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'Times-Democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. People were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. The water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. It had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. If this occurs, there will be great loss of life. The General spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from Troy, on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. The water was now eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was no land between Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula. At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of Black River. Here on the left comes in Little River; just beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas. These three rivers form the Black River. Troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large Indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. They are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. The houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. When we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. One of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by General York. Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. Children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. He makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of Catahoula. He has made Troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. On the opposite side of Little River, which branches to the left out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita, is situated the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. A strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. The residents of both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General York, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. At Tom Hooper's place, a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. The animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. To-day we go on Little River, where the suffering is greatest. DOWN BLACK RIVER Saturday Evening, March 25. We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General York, to bring out what stock could be reached. Going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. In the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. One or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. When the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. We steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. Looking out of the half of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. These are but two instances of the many. After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at was the Oswald place. Here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. It was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. After much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by Tuesday. All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. An old planter, who has lived on the river since 1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. Luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. The rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of General York is of such a great value. From daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. One unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in New Orleans, is told all along the river. It appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. No response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. It is needless to say he is not popular now on Back River. The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on Black River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River. After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of T. S. Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up Little River to the hills. THE FLOOD STILL RISING Troy: March 27, 1882, noon. The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. General York feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. We intend to go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down Black River to take off families. There is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. The General has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. All are working night and day, and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. The rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. Troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. Reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. One would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula. She is due here now, but has not arrived. Even the mail here is most uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you. It is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. General York desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. It is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. The residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of. He has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. APPENDIX B THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several States. But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at 100 per cent. profit? It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by States. The river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. Neither are the States especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. The work must begin far up the river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore, General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers; Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod, the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency, and Judge Taylor, of Indiana. It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. As in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. It is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. In this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. Through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. The works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. It may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. The ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. The first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. The actual experience with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. Were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi River Commission. The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the United States, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: April 14, 1882. APPENDIX C RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.' In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left the country in July 1831, a couple of years after the shock. I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till July 1830, that I procured a copy of them. One bookseller to whom I applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. Other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. I never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. It was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. The extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he had published his book. I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall had been sent out by the British Government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of England for the Government of the United States,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. So deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England; I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing (he, Basil Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my surprise at their contents. To say that I found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. It is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that Captain Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. When he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the Union to the other. He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had. Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. This has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the United States with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if Captain Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the American character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. He states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the abuse I must meet for stating it. But it is not so. . . . . . . . The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. APPENDIX D THE UNDYING HEAD IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. Seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. Telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. She had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. Thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was Iamo, said to her: 'Sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. Listen to my advice. If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. Take the implements with which we kindle our fires. Go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. When you are in want of food, I will tell you where to find it. You must cook for yourself, and I will for myself. When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. Be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. As for myself, I must do the best I can.' His sister promised to obey him in all he had said. Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. She was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. She had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. Finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. For, thought she, my brother is not at home, and I will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. She went back. Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. He knew what was the matter. 'Oh,' he said, 'did I not tell you to take care. But now you have killed me.' She was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'What can you do there now. The accident has happened. Go in, and stay where you have always stayed. And what will become of you? You have killed me.' He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. Still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near. You must do as I tell you. You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. It contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. When it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. Then hang it up in its former place. Do not forget my bow and arrows. One of the last you will take to procure food. The remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that I can look towards the door. Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.' His sister again promised to obey. In a little time his breast was affected. 'Now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' She was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. Mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'Now,' said the head, 'place me where I told you.' And fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. One day the head said: 'The time is not distant when I shall be freed from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils. So the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.' In this situation we must leave the head. In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of Indians. In this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. It was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. His dreams were propitious. Having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. They all answered they would. The third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'Yes,' said he, 'I will go, and this will be the way I will treat those I am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. The others spoke to him, saying: 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' So he sat down. Then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. The youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. They all promised obedience, and Mudjikewis was the first to say so. The time for their departure drew near. Word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. Mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. Several times his wife asked him the reason. 'Besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'Quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' He thus revealed the secret. That night they met and started. The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. When it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'It was in this way I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not be tracked.' And he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. Near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. The snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was always in the rear. One day, running suddenly forward, he gave the SAW-SAW- QUAN,{footnote [War-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I will serve those we are going to fight.' The leader answered, 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' Again he fell back and thought to himself: 'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' He felt fearful and was silent. Day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. The leader spoke: 'They are the bones of those who have gone before us. None has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. Advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'See, brothers,' said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'Still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom I am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'I wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. Still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'There,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. It is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. You must not be fearful: be manly. We shall find him asleep.' Then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'This,' said he, 'is what we must get. It contains the wampum.' Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. All their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. He tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must run,' and off they started. When one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. Thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. He stood some time before he missed his wampum. Soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'Who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that I can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. Very soon he approached the party. They, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'Brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' A dead silence followed. 'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called CHECAUDUM. Getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'Nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'Who is a great manito?' said he. 'There is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. He closed the door. 'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect you. When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' Then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. Taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'These are the ones I use when I fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. When he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. A terrible combat ensued. The skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. The remaining dog soon took the field. The brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. They had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'Well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' They started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. Again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. All were silent. The leader, running forward, did as before. 'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' Taking courage, they still went on. After going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. They entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. The old man, setting meat before them, said: 'Eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom I fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. The old man opened the door and saw him coming. He shut it slowly, and said: 'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. As he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. Renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. Each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. They could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. First he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. The old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. Not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'Well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this I have but one more.' He advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely pressed, I came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. Do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' And so it was, even as he had said. Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. Scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. Lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. Then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. Meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. Then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. The leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. When only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. Take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' He obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when Mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the SAW- SAW-QUAN. The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. Instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. The earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. Their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. The leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can apply to my guardian spirit. Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' He ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. In him I place great confidence. Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. We shall soon reach his lodge. Run, run,' he cried. Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. One day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. At last it spoke. 'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! How can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure? Nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. When you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "Alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. I was the cause of it." If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. And now you must follow my directions strictly. When the bear is near, go out and meet him. You will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. You must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. As the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. The virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "See, this is my deceased brother's head." He will then fall senseless. By this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' She promised that all should be done as he said. She had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon Iamo for aid. The woman went out and said as her brother had directed. But the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. She invited them in, and placed the meat before them. While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. Untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. When he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. Saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. As it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. The bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. Then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. While thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. The country was soon overspread with these black animals. And it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. In the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. But the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. They were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. One of them spoke and said, 'We have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. It may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. In the meantime take food to our sister.' They went and requested the head. She told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown Indians. The skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. The young men fought desperately till they were all killed. The attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. One of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. However, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. They all looked at the head and made sport of it. Numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. Then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. Then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. We will try to make it shut its eyes.' When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'We will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. The young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. Various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. She searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. She raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. Then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. Then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. She thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. These she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. Here she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. On applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. She made known her errand. The old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. The former are considered as manitoes. She said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. She knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.' They went, and they took their seats near the door. The council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'Ha! ha! It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'Well,' said the chief, 'I thought we would make you do something at last. Look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. The chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'Who have you got there? I have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'Yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. She stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' In the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it is to this lodge I go almost every night to court her.' All the others laughed and continued their games. The young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. Then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'Brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' This she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'Why,' said he, 'I have overslept myself.' 'No, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' The young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. Mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. And they were well matched, for she was a female magician. They then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. They all said they would do so with pleasure. The eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. Toward daylight she returned. She had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. All took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the Indians never could see any one. For ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. This last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. The young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'Prepare the body of our brother.' And as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of Iamo lay. His sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. She cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. In the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring Iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. All rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when Iamo said: 'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. They were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. Only Mudjikewis's place was, however, named. He was to direct the west wind, hence generally called Kebeyun, there to remain for ever. They were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. And they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua, descended into the depths below. 
8481	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 11. Chapter 51 Reminiscences WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot- house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water. The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what time it was. People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to. On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. By means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him. His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be Othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the Walnut Street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for that night, and if I should come I would see him. IF I should come! I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead. I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'How strange it is! WE always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked-- 'Did you see me?' 'No, you weren't there.' He looked surprised and disappointed. He said-- 'Yes, I was. Indeed I was. I was a Roman soldier.' 'Which one?' 'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'That's it! that's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but I've been promoted.' Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go and say, 'My lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make! A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?' A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him. I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how-- 'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. Come in and help.' He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years ago. I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him. I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was. One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the 'Globe- Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 went to church and Sunday-school. Chapter 52 A Burning Brand ALL at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought out Mr. Brown.' Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling, 'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you, if I can do it without breaking down. I must preface it with some explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain State prison, for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $8,000 in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. He fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- St. Louis, June 9th 1872. Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (QUIT STEALING) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather; (ROBBED HER OF HER POCKETBOOK) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (EASY TO GET)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (DISCOVERED) her leather was off (GONE)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work for 3 days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (FOR A DECK HAND)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for moons (LARGE, ROUND SEA-BISCUIT) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (PICKING POCKETS) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $50 green back, & my asking the Lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $16 a month & bord me. You bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the Lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (CLOTHES) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the Lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. When I had been there about a week Mr. Brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a Christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--Well Charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the Lord got me the job when I asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (EXPOSING HIS PAST LIFE) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic, a spelling book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday in July i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50-- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. I send you with this a receipt for a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know what you would like & i told Mr. Brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (REFRESHMENTS) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (LITTLE BOYS) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every Sunday hour before school time, I also got 4 girls to come. tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--Mr. Brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend C---- W---- who you know as Jack Hunt. I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him. Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising. However, he determined to risk it; and did. He got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another triumph. The house wept as one individual. My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach, one day. The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Frye, of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man. If they had only been in Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions. Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. At the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'Do you know that letter to be genuine?' It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. Some talk followed-- 'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. I think it was done by an educated man.' The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer-- Rev. ---- ---- MY DEAR FRIEND,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'Williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school teacher,--sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the State's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to Williams. In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, I think you might take the responsibility and do it. It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. As showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their Master as well? P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went Mr. Williams's stock again. Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. So I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. And the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other Brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. The original is before me, now, and I here append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873. DEAR BRO. PAGE,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. They said: 'Wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison. That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--I WAS AFRAID WHEN YOU WAS BLEEDING YOU WOULD DIE--give my respects,' etc. That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered. And it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis, but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, Williams-- burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. Chapter 53 My Boyhood's Home WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company, and started up the river. When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis. About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years. So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what became of him? 'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy. 'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.' I asked after another of the bright boys. 'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.' I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I was a boy. 'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' I named another boy. 'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' Same verdict concerning other boys. I named three school-girls. 'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'Killed in the war.' I named another boy. 'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!' 'Is that so?' 'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.' 'How do you account for it?' 'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure--if I had a damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people' 'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.' I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' I asked about Miss ----. Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did. After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about MYSELF: 'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith. Chapter 54 Past and Present Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village who slept that night. We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. There was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result: I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair. I was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath, and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery, I meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.' 'It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put the light out. It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory. It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, I would go for a missionary. The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right, Dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!' The laughing stopped. 'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'Somebody must go down and see!' Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'Draw straws!' So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness. The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless I did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as ever. Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into the present and went down the hill. On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was my home when I was a boy. At present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than I am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. They are colored folk. After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember as to that now. By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,' which I had attended as a Sunday- school scholar; and I found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now! I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger Sunday-school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so I was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there; and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size. As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and I did so. If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. Chapter 55 A Vendetta and Other Things DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now. Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good. There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone. Dead, these many years, they said. Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations; I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'O God, it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice-- 'My little friend, can you keep a secret?' I eagerly said I could. 'A dark and dreadful one?' I satisfied him on that point. 'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I MUST relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!' He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch.' That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. Said he-- 'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has been here." You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! But beware--breathe not a word to any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!" You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. I advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet. The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now. Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake. There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. 
8482	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 12. Chapter 56 A Question of Law THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said-- 'What is the matter?' 'You talk so much I can't sleep.' I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'What did I say. Quick--out with it--what did I say?' 'Nothing much.' 'It's a lie--you know everything.' 'Everything about what?' 'You know well enough. About THAT.' 'About WHAT?--I don't know what you are talking about. I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you're awake, and I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance.' He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea--I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said-- 'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'This is foolish--I never get drunk.' 'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man. Suppose a MAN should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'How could you load a tomahawk?' 'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. There's been a man killed.' 'What! in this town?' 'Yes, in this town.' 'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.' 'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. Well, would it be murder?' 'No--suicide.' 'No, no. I don't mean HIS act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' After deep thought came this answer-- 'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know.' This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said-- 'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'No.' 'Haven't you the least idea?' 'Not the least.' 'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.' 'Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'Is that so?' 'Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'Let me see. The man was drunk?' 'Yes, he was drunk.' 'Very drunk?' 'Yes.' 'And the boy knew it?' 'Yes, he knew it.' There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict-- 'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. This is certain.' Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said-- 'I know the boy.' I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he added-- 'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!' I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration-- 'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'You told it in your sleep.' I said to myself, 'How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated.' My brother rattled innocently on-- 'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up.' I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked-- 'Are you going to give him up to the law?' 'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.' 'How good you are!' 'Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.' And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by saying-- 'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four. Chapter 57 An Archangel FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions. After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him-- He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean-- The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started-- laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State; but not by the bench of Judges. Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size. We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet. And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know. Chapter 58 On the Upper River THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis. Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept. So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog's fertility. I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger now. In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. Therefore we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a tradition that Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673. The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. She sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic. Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul. The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general. At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. He said-- 'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions. Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's, further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--Death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day, to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles. These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. In that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'Captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. Chapter 59 Legends and Scenery WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. Pardonably proud of it, too. He said-- 'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson points. You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and Trempeleau Island, which isn't like any other island in America, I believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of Indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. And above Winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the Thousand Islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I presently began to suspect-- But no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him-- 'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing Mount Vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'And so we move on. Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful Wabasha, City of the Healing Waters, puissant foe of Bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable Lake Pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. 'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'I have formerly served in that capacity.' My suspicion was confirmed. 'Do you still travel with it?' 'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens. I am helping now to work up the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. Is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one. Perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.' We asked him to tell it. He dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known as Maiden's Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, Not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux Indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. Among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of Wabasha. We-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. But her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. The day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. She appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'Yes.' 'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. And moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend. There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. What became of Winona?' 'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian tales and traditions. But I reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. Why? Because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. I showed him a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and I ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of Winona. He granted these facts, but said that if I would hunt up Mr. Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, I would find some Indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from Schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which Mr. Longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. For instance, there was the legend of 'The Undying Head.' He could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the Indian imagination. He said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly from Indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. I have found the book. The lecturer was right. There are several legends in it which confirm what he said. I will offer two of them-- 'The Undying Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.' The latter is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN. An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. It was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, He appeared very old and very desolate. His locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. Day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. His cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. He walked with a light and quick step. His forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you. Come in. Come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. Let us pass the night together. I will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what I can perform. You shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. When this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. The leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. The animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. The plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. My voice recalls the birds. The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.' At length the sun began to rise. A gentle warmth came over the place. The tongue of the old man became silent. The robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of Peboan.{footnote [Winter.]} Streams began to flow from his eyes. As the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [The trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [See appendix D.]} Chapter 60 Speculations and Conclusions WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended. It is about a ten-day trip by steamer. It can probably be done quicker by rail. I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis to Hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow, In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. But I wander from my theme. St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is the legend. Two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. A recent number of the leading St. Paul paper, the 'Pioneer Press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: Population, autumn of the present year (1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. Last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000. St. Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce. He is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. Last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000. He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State. He has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich Protestant puts up, the kind that the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. What a passion for building majestic churches the Irish hired-girl has. It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. In fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. This is a land of libraries and schools. St. Paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. The error is to be corrected. The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. It is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. All the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey--I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way. This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now occupies, in June 1837. Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians. The result is before us. All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor, Minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. At any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. Thus, this center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--New Orleans. Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. The great flouring-mills here and at St. Paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year. Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--Fort Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth. The beautiful falls of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. The White-bear Lake is less known. It is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the State. It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. There are a dozen minor summer resorts around about St. Paul and Minneapolis, but the White-bear Lake is the resort. Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend. I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE. Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been visited by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. He had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. He began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. She took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the Indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. As the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. He at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. It was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. They had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (The same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) For fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. Instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. Cries and wailings went up from every mouth. What was to be done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. One deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. The animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. Their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for Kis-se-me-pa and Ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. It is a perplexing business. First, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? No--nothing of the sort. You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. A dead man could get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I have ever had the good fortune to make. APPENDIX A (FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.) VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED REGIONS IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie' left the Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is now called the mouth of the Red. Ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe Coupee parish. The water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. The stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. On the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. We pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. The puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. It is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. Their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf. Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. From what was told me by Mr. C. P. Ferguson, a planter near Red River Landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. The negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. On Thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. At sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. The river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. It is in width, from Fort Adams on the left bank of the Mississippi to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance of about sixty miles. A large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the Mississippi and back of the Red. When Red River proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi. After a run of some hours, Black River was reached. Hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. All the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. One man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. At the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. Here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. The boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. The little one looked more like an Indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. She had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. She was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. At its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. The family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. Black River had risen during Thursday, the 23rd, 1{three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. Nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. To add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. A picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. The motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. The dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we started. The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. The blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. The sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. All along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. An old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. He stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. They is dropping off powerful fast. But what can you do? It 's all we've got.' At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water extends from Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine hills of Louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. The tendency of the current up the Black is toward the west. In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country, and the waters of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. The water now in sight of us is entirely from the Mississippi. Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. Their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. Here were seen more pictures of distress. On the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. The buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. Near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. They did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. The sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. A horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. Rounding to we ran alongside, and General York stepped aboard. He was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'Times-Democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. People were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. The water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. It had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. If this occurs, there will be great loss of life. The General spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from Troy, on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. The water was now eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was no land between Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula. At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of Black River. Here on the left comes in Little River; just beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas. These three rivers form the Black River. Troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large Indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. They are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. The houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. When we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. One of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by General York. Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. Children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. He makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of Catahoula. He has made Troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. On the opposite side of Little River, which branches to the left out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita, is situated the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. A strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. The residents of both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General York, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. At Tom Hooper's place, a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. The animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. To-day we go on Little River, where the suffering is greatest. DOWN BLACK RIVER Saturday Evening, March 25. We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General York, to bring out what stock could be reached. Going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. In the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. One or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. When the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. We steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. Looking out of the half of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. These are but two instances of the many. After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at was the Oswald place. Here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. It was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. After much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by Tuesday. All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. An old planter, who has lived on the river since 1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. Luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. The rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of General York is of such a great value. From daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. One unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in New Orleans, is told all along the river. It appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. No response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. It is needless to say he is not popular now on Back River. The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on Black River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River. After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of T. S. Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up Little River to the hills. THE FLOOD STILL RISING Troy: March 27, 1882, noon. The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. General York feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. We intend to go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down Black River to take off families. There is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. The General has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. All are working night and day, and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. The rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. Troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. Reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. One would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula. She is due here now, but has not arrived. Even the mail here is most uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you. It is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. General York desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. It is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. The residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of. He has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. APPENDIX B THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several States. But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at 100 per cent. profit? It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by States. The river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. Neither are the States especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. The work must begin far up the river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore, General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers; Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod, the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency, and Judge Taylor, of Indiana. It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. As in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. It is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. In this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. Through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. The works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. It may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. The ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. The first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. The actual experience with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. Were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi River Commission. The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the United States, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: April 14, 1882. APPENDIX C RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.' In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left the country in July 1831, a couple of years after the shock. I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till July 1830, that I procured a copy of them. One bookseller to whom I applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. Other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. I never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. It was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. The extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he had published his book. I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall had been sent out by the British Government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of England for the Government of the United States,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. So deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England; I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing (he, Basil Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my surprise at their contents. To say that I found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. It is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that Captain Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. When he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the Union to the other. He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had. Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. This has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the United States with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if Captain Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the American character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. He states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the abuse I must meet for stating it. But it is not so. . . . . . . . The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. APPENDIX D THE UNDYING HEAD IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. Seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. Telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. She had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. Thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was Iamo, said to her: 'Sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. Listen to my advice. If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. Take the implements with which we kindle our fires. Go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. When you are in want of food, I will tell you where to find it. You must cook for yourself, and I will for myself. When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. Be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. As for myself, I must do the best I can.' His sister promised to obey him in all he had said. Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. She was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. She had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. Finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. For, thought she, my brother is not at home, and I will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. She went back. Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. He knew what was the matter. 'Oh,' he said, 'did I not tell you to take care. But now you have killed me.' She was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'What can you do there now. The accident has happened. Go in, and stay where you have always stayed. And what will become of you? You have killed me.' He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. Still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near. You must do as I tell you. You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. It contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. When it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. Then hang it up in its former place. Do not forget my bow and arrows. One of the last you will take to procure food. The remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that I can look towards the door. Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.' His sister again promised to obey. In a little time his breast was affected. 'Now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' She was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. Mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'Now,' said the head, 'place me where I told you.' And fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. One day the head said: 'The time is not distant when I shall be freed from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils. So the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.' In this situation we must leave the head. In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of Indians. In this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. It was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. His dreams were propitious. Having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. They all answered they would. The third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'Yes,' said he, 'I will go, and this will be the way I will treat those I am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. The others spoke to him, saying: 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' So he sat down. Then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. The youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. They all promised obedience, and Mudjikewis was the first to say so. The time for their departure drew near. Word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. Mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. Several times his wife asked him the reason. 'Besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'Quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' He thus revealed the secret. That night they met and started. The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. When it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'It was in this way I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not be tracked.' And he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. Near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. The snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was always in the rear. One day, running suddenly forward, he gave the SAW-SAW- QUAN,{footnote [War-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I will serve those we are going to fight.' The leader answered, 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' Again he fell back and thought to himself: 'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' He felt fearful and was silent. Day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. The leader spoke: 'They are the bones of those who have gone before us. None has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. Advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'See, brothers,' said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'Still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom I am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'I wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. Still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'There,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. It is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. You must not be fearful: be manly. We shall find him asleep.' Then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'This,' said he, 'is what we must get. It contains the wampum.' Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. All their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. He tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must run,' and off they started. When one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. Thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. He stood some time before he missed his wampum. Soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'Who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that I can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. Very soon he approached the party. They, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'Brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' A dead silence followed. 'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called CHECAUDUM. Getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'Nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'Who is a great manito?' said he. 'There is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. He closed the door. 'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect you. When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' Then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. Taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'These are the ones I use when I fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. When he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. A terrible combat ensued. The skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. The remaining dog soon took the field. The brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. They had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'Well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' They started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. Again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. All were silent. The leader, running forward, did as before. 'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' Taking courage, they still went on. After going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. They entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. The old man, setting meat before them, said: 'Eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom I fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. The old man opened the door and saw him coming. He shut it slowly, and said: 'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. As he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. Renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. Each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. They could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. First he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. The old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. Not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'Well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this I have but one more.' He advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely pressed, I came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. Do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' And so it was, even as he had said. Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. Scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. Lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. Then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. Meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. Then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. The leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. When only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. Take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' He obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when Mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the SAW- SAW-QUAN. The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. Instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. The earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. Their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. The leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can apply to my guardian spirit. Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' He ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. In him I place great confidence. Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. We shall soon reach his lodge. Run, run,' he cried. Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. One day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. At last it spoke. 'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! How can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure? Nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. When you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "Alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. I was the cause of it." If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. And now you must follow my directions strictly. When the bear is near, go out and meet him. You will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. You must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. As the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. The virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "See, this is my deceased brother's head." He will then fall senseless. By this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' She promised that all should be done as he said. She had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon Iamo for aid. The woman went out and said as her brother had directed. But the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. She invited them in, and placed the meat before them. While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. Untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. When he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. Saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. As it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. The bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. Then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. While thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. The country was soon overspread with these black animals. And it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. In the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. But the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. They were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. One of them spoke and said, 'We have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. It may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. In the meantime take food to our sister.' They went and requested the head. She told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown Indians. The skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. The young men fought desperately till they were all killed. The attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. One of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. However, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. They all looked at the head and made sport of it. Numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. Then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. Then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. We will try to make it shut its eyes.' When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'We will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. The young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. Various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. She searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. She raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. Then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. Then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. She thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. These she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. Here she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. On applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. She made known her errand. The old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. The former are considered as manitoes. She said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. She knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.' They went, and they took their seats near the door. The council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'Ha! ha! It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'Well,' said the chief, 'I thought we would make you do something at last. Look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. The chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'Who have you got there? I have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'Yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. She stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' In the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it is to this lodge I go almost every night to court her.' All the others laughed and continued their games. The young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. Then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'Brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' This she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'Why,' said he, 'I have overslept myself.' 'No, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' The young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. Mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. And they were well matched, for she was a female magician. They then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. They all said they would do so with pleasure. The eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. Toward daylight she returned. She had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. All took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the Indians never could see any one. For ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. This last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. The young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'Prepare the body of our brother.' And as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of Iamo lay. His sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. She cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. In the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring Iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. All rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when Iamo said: 'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. They were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. Only Mudjikewis's place was, however, named. He was to direct the west wind, hence generally called Kebeyun, there to remain for ever. They were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. And they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua, descended into the depths below. 
8582	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 1. TO CALVIN H. HIGBIE, Of California, an Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a Steadfast Friend. THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED By the Author, In Memory of the Curious Time When We Two WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS. ROUGHING IT BY MARK TWAIN. (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.) PREFATORY. This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada -a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it. Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification. THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. My Brother appointed Secretary of Nevada--I Envy His Prospective Adventures--Am Appointed Private Secretary Under Him--My Contentment Complete--Packed in One Hour--Dreams and Visions--On the Missouri River --A Bully Boat CHAPTER II. Arrive at St. Joseph--Only Twenty-five Pounds Baggage Allowed--Farewell to Kid Gloves and Dress Coats--Armed to the Teeth--The "Allen"--A Cheerful Weapon--Persuaded to Buy a Mule--Schedule of Luxuries--We Leave the "States"--"Our Coach"--Mails for the Indians--Between a Wink and an Earthquake--A Modern Sphynx and How She Entertained Us--A Sociable Heifer CHAPTER III. "The Thoroughbrace is Broke"--Mails Delivered Properly--Sleeping Under Difficulties--A Jackass Rabbit Meditating, and on Business--A Modern Gulliver--Sage-brush--Overcoats as an Article of Diet--Sad Fate of a Camel--Warning to Experimenters CHAPTER IV. Making Our Bed--Assaults by the Unabridged--At a Station--Our Driver a Great and Shining Dignitary--Strange Place for a Frontyard --Accommodations--Double Portraits--An Heirloom--Our Worthy Landlord --"Fixings and Things"--An Exile--Slumgullion--A Well Furnished Table--The Landlord Astonished--Table Etiquette--Wild Mexican Mules--Stage-coaching and Railroading CHAPTER V. New Acquaintances--The Cayote--A Dog's Experiences--A Disgusted Dog--The Relatives of the Cayote--Meals Taken Away from Home CHAPTER VI. The Division Superintendent--The Conductor--The Driver--One Hundred and Fifty Miles' Drive Without Sleep--Teaching a Subordinate--Our Old Friend Jack and a Pilgrim--Ben Holliday Compared to Moses CHAPTER VII. Overland City--Crossing the Platte--Bemis's Buffalo Hunt--Assault by a Buffalo--Bemis's Horse Goes Crazy--An Impromptu Circus--A New Departure --Bemis Finds Refuge in a Tree--Escapes Finally by a Wonderful Method CHAPTER VIII. The Pony Express--Fifty Miles Without Stopping--"Here he Comes"--Alkali Water--Riding an Avalanche--Indian Massacre CHAPTER IX. Among the Indians--An Unfair Advantage--Laying on our Arms--A Midnight Murder--Wrath of Outlaws--A Dangerous, yet Valuable Citizen CHAPTER X. History of Slade--A Proposed Fist-fight--Encounter with Jules--Paradise of Outlaws--Slade as Superintendent--As Executioner--A Doomed Whisky Seller--A Prisoner--A Wife's Bravery--An Ancient Enemy Captured--Enjoying a Luxury--Hob-nobbing with Slade--Too Polite--A Happy Escape CHAPTER XI. Slade in Montana--"On a Spree"--In Court--Attack on a Judge--Arrest by the Vigilantes--Turn out of the Miners--Execution of Slade--Lamentations of His Wife--Was Slade a Coward? CHAPTER XII. A Mormon Emigrant Train--The Heart of the Rocky Mountains--Pure Saleratus--A Natural Ice-House--An Entire Inhabitant--In Sight of "Eternal Snow"--The South Pass--The Parting Streams--An Unreliable Letter Carrier--Meeting of Old Friends--A Spoiled Watermelon--Down the Mountain--A Scene of Desolation--Lost in the Dark--Unnecessary Advice --U.S. Troops and Indians--Sublime Spectacle--Another Delusion Dispelled --Among the Angels CHAPTER XIII. Mormons and Gentiles--Exhilarating Drink, and its Effect on Bemis--Salt Lake City--A Great Contrast--A Mormon Vagrant--Talk with a Saint--A Visit to the "King"--A Happy Simile CHAPTER XIV. Mormon Contractors--How Mr. Street Astonished Them--The Case Before Brigham Young, and How he Disposed of it--Polygamy Viewed from a New Position CHAPTER XV. A Gentile Den--Polygamy Discussed--Favorite Wife and D. 4--Hennery for Retired Wives--Children Need Marking--Cost of a Gift to No. 6 --A Penny-whistle Gift and its Effects--Fathering the Foundlings --It Resembled Him--The Family Bedstead CHAPTER XVI The Mormon Bible--Proofs of its Divinity--Plagiarism of its Authors --Story of Nephi--Wonderful Battle--Kilkenny Cats Outdone CHAPTER XVII. Three Sides to all Questions--Everything "A Quarter"--Shriveled Up --Emigrants and White Shirts at a Discount--"Forty-Niners"--Above Par--Real Happiness CHAPTER XVIII. Alkali Desert--Romance of Crossing Dispelled--Alkali Dust--Effect on the Mules--Universal Thanksgiving CHAPTER XIX. The Digger Indians Compared with the Bushmen of Africa--Food, Life and Characteristics--Cowardly Attack on a Stage Coach--A Brave Driver--The Noble Red Man CHAPTER XX. The Great American Desert--Forty Miles on Bones--Lakes Without Outlets --Greely's Remarkable Ride--Hank Monk, the Renowned Driver--Fatal Effects of "Corking" a Story--Bald-Headed Anecdote CHAPTER XXI. Alkali Dust--Desolation and Contemplation--Carson City--Our Journey Ended--We are Introduced to Several Citizens--A Strange Rebuke--A Washoe Zephyr at Play--Its Office Hours--Governor's Palace--Government Offices --Our French Landlady Bridget O'Flannigan--Shadow Secrets--Cause for a Disturbance at Once--The Irish Brigade--Mrs. O'Flannigan's Boarders--The Surveying Expedition--Escape of the Tarantulas CHAPTER XXII. The Son of a Nabob--Start for Lake Tahoe--Splendor of the Views--Trip on the Lake--Camping Out--Reinvigorating Climate--Clearing a Tract of Land --Securing a Title--Outhouse and Fences CHAPTER XXIII. A Happy Life--Lake Tahoe and its Moods--Transparency of the Waters--A Catastrophe--Fire! Fire!--A Magnificent Spectacle--Homeless Again--We take to the Lake--A Storm--Return to Carson CHAPTER XXIV. Resolve to Buy a Horse--Horsemanship in Carson--A Temptation--Advice Given Me Freely--I Buy the Mexican Plug--My First Ride--A Good Bucker--I Loan the Plug--Experience of Borrowers--Attempts to Sell--Expense of the Experiment--A Stranger Taken In CHAPTER XXV. The Mormons in Nevada--How to Persuade a Loan from Them--Early History of the Territory--Silver Mines Discovered--The New Territorial Government--A Foreign One and a Poor One--Its Funny Struggles for Existence--No Credit, no Cash--Old Abe Currey Sustains it and its Officers--Instructions and Vouchers--An Indian's Endorsement--Toll-Gates CHAPTER XXVI. The Silver Fever--State of the Market--Silver Bricks--Tales Told--Off for the Humboldt Mines CHAPTER XXVII. Our manner of going--Incidents of the Trip--A Warm but Too Familiar a Bedfellow--Mr. Ballou Objects--Sunshine amid Clouds--Safely Arrived CHAPTER XXVIII. Arrive at the Mountains--Building Our Cabin--My First Prospecting Tour --My First Gold Mine--Pockets Filled With Treasures--Filtering the News to My Companions--The Bubble Pricked--All Not Gold That Glitters CHAPTER XXIX. Out Prospecting--A Silver Mine At Last--Making a Fortune With Sledge and Drill--A Hard Road to Travel--We Own in Claims--A Rocky Country CHAPTER XXX. Disinterested Friends--How "Feet" Were Sold--We Quit Tunnelling--A Trip to Esmeralda--My Companions--An Indian Prophesy--A Flood--Our Quarters During It CHAPTER XXXI. The Guests at "Honey Lake Smith's"--"Bully Old Arkansas"--"Our Landlord" --Determined to Fight--The Landlord's Wife--The Bully Conquered by Her --Another Start--Crossing the Carson--A Narrow Escape--Following Our Own Track--A New Guide--Lost in the Snow CHAPTER XXXII. Desperate Situation--Attempts to Make a Fire--Our Horses leave us--We Find Matches--One, Two, Three and the Last--No Fire--Death Seems Inevitable--We Mourn Over Our Evil Lives--Discarded Vices--We Forgive Each Other--An Affectionate Farewell--The Sleep of Oblivion CHAPTER XXXIII. Return of Consciousness--Ridiculous Developments--A Station House--Bitter Feelings--Fruits of Repentance--Resurrected Vices CHAPTER XXXIV. About Carson--General Buncombe--Hyde vs. Morgan--How Hyde Lost His Ranch --The Great Landslide Case--The Trial--General Buncombe in Court--A Wonderful Decision--A Serious Afterthought CHAPTER XXXV. A New Travelling Companion--All Full and No Accommodations--How Captain Nye found Room--and Caused Our Leaving to be Lamented--The Uses of Tunnelling--A Notable Example--We Go into the "Claim" Business and Fail --At the Bottom CHAPTER XXXVI. A Quartz Mill--Amalgamation--"Screening Tailings"--First Quartz Mill in Nevada--Fire Assay--A Smart Assayer--I stake for an advance CHAPTER XXXVII. The Whiteman Cement Mine--Story of its Discovery--A Secret Expedition--A Nocturnal Adventure--A Distressing Position--A Failure and a Week's Holiday CHAPTER XXXVIII. Mono Lake--Shampooing Made Easy--Thoughtless Act of Our Dog and the Results--Lye Water--Curiosities of the Lake--Free Hotel--Some Funny Incidents a Little Overdrawn CHAPTER XXXIX. Visit to the Islands in Lake Mono--Ashes and Desolation--Life Amid Death Our Boat Adrift--A Jump For Life--A Storm On the Lake--A Mass of Soap Suds--Geological Curiosities--A Week On the Sierras--A Narrow Escape From a Funny Explosion--"Stove Heap Gone" CHAPTER XL. The "Wide West" Mine--It is "Interviewed" by Higbie--A Blind Lead--Worth a Million--We are Rich At Last--Plans for the Future CHAPTER XLI. A Rheumatic Patient--Day Dreams--An Unfortunate Stumble--I Leave Suddenly--Another Patient--Higbie in the Cabin--Our Balloon Bursted --Worth Nothing--Regrets and Explanations--Our Third Partner CHAPTER XLII. What to do Next?--Obstacles I Had Met With--"Jack of All Trades"--Mining Again--Target Shooting--I Turn City Editor--I Succeed Finely CHAPTER XLIII. My Friend Boggs--The School Report--Boggs Pays Me An Old Debt--Virginia City CHAPTER XLIV. Flush Times--Plenty of Stock--Editorial Puffing--Stocks Given Me--Salting Mines--A Tragedian In a New Role CHAPTER XLV. Flush Times Continue--Sanitary Commission Fund--Wild Enthusiasm of the People--Would not wait to Contribute--The Sanitary Flour Sack--It is Carried to Gold Hill and Dayton--Final Reception in Virginia--Results of the Sale--A Grand Total CHAPTER XLVI. The Nabobs of Those Days--John Smith as a Traveler--Sudden Wealth--A Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Horse--A Smart Telegraph Operator--A Nabob in New York City--Charters an Omnibus--"Walk in, It's All Free"--"You Can't Pay a Cent"--"Hold On, Driver, I Weaken"--Sociability of New Yorkers CHAPTER XLVII. Buck Fanshaw's Death--The Cause Thereof--Preparations for His Burial --Scotty Briggs the Committee Man--He Visits the Minister--Scotty Can't Play His Hand--The Minister Gets Mixed--Both Begin to See--"All Down Again But Nine"--Buck Fanshaw as a Citizen--How To "Shook Your Mother" --The Funeral--Scotty Briggs as a Sunday School Teacher CHAPTER XLVIII. The First Twenty-Six Graves in Nevada--The Prominent Men of the County --The Man Who Had Killed His Dozen--Trial by Jury--Specimen Jurors--A Private Grave Yard--The Desperadoes--Who They Killed--Waking up the Weary Passenger--Satisfaction Without Fighting CHAPTER XLIX. Fatal Shooting Affray--Robbery and Desperate Affray--A Specimen City Official--A Marked Man--A Street Fight--Punishment of Crime CHAPTER L. Captain Ned Blakely--Bill Nookes Receives Desired Information--Killing of Blakely's Mate--A Walking Battery--Blakely Secures Nookes--Hang First and Be Tried Afterwards--Captain Blakely as a Chaplain--The First Chapter of Genesis Read at a Hanging--Nookes Hung--Blakely's Regrets CHAPTER LI. The Weekly Occidental--A Ready Editor--A Novel--A Concentration of Talent--The Heroes and the Heroines--The Dissolute Author Engaged --Extraordinary Havoc With the Novel--A Highly Romantic Chapter--The Lovers Separated--Jonah Out-done--A Lost Poem--The Aged Pilot Man--Storm On the Erie Canal--Dollinger the Pilot Man--Terrific Gale--Danger Increases--A Crisis Arrived--Saved as if by a Miracle CHAPTER LII. Freights to California--Silver Bricks--Under Ground Mines--Timber Supports--A Visit to the Mines--The Caved Mines--Total of Shipments in 1863 CHAPTER LIII. Jim Blaine and his Grandfather's Ram--Filkin's Mistake--Old Miss Wagner and her Glass Eye--Jacobs, the Coffin Dealer--Waiting for a Customer--His Bargain With Old Robbins--Robbins Sues for Damage and Collects--A New Use for Missionaries--The Effect--His Uncle Lem. and the Use Providence Made of Him--Sad Fate of Wheeler--Devotion of His Wife--A Model Monument--What About the Ram? CHAPTER LIV. Chinese in Virginia City--Washing Bills--Habit of Imitation--Chinese Immigration--A Visit to Chinatown--Messrs. Ah Sing, Hong Wo, See Yup, &c. CHAPTER LV. Tired of Virginia City--An Old Schoolmate--A Two Years' Loan--Acting as an Editor--Almost Receive an Offer--An Accident--Three Drunken Anecdotes --Last Look at Mt. Davidson--A Beautiful Incident CHAPTER LVI. Off for San Francisco--Western and Eastern Landscapes--The Hottest place on Earth--Summer and Winter CHAPTER LVII. California--Novelty of Seeing a Woman--"Well if it ain't a Child!"--One Hundred and Fifty Dollars for a Kiss--Waiting for a turn CHAPTER LVIII. Life in San Francisco--Worthless Stocks--My First Earthquake--Reportorial Instincts--Effects of the Shocks--Incidents and Curiosities--Sabbath Breakers--The Lodger and the Chambermaid--A Sensible Fashion to Follow --Effects of the Earthquake on the Ministers CHAPTER LIX. Poor Again--Slinking as a Business--A Model Collector--Misery loves Company--Comparing Notes for Comfort--A Streak of Luck--Finding a Dime --Wealthy by Comparison--Two Sumptuous Dinners CHAPTER LX. An Old Friend--An Educated Miner--Pocket Mining--Freaks of Fortune CHAPTER LXI. Dick Baker and his Cat--Tom Quartz's Peculiarities--On an Excursion --Appearance On His Return--A Prejudiced Cat--Empty Pockets and a Roving Life CHAPTER LXII. Bound for the Sandwich Islands--The Three Captains--The Old Admiral--His Daily Habits--His Well Fought Fields--An Unexpected Opponent--The Admiral Overpowered--The Victor Declared a Hero CHAPTER LXIII. Arrival at the Islands--Honolulu--What I Saw There--Dress and Habits of the Inhabitants--The Animal Kingdom--Fruits and Delightful Effects CHAPTER LXIV. An Excursion--Captain Phillips and his Turn-Out--A Horseback Ride--A Vicious Animal--Nature and Art--Interesting Ruins--All Praise to the Missionaries CHAPTER LXV. Interesting Mementoes and Relics--An Old Legend of a Frightful Leap--An Appreciative Horse--Horse Jockeys and Their Brothers--A New Trick--A Hay Merchant--Good Country for Horse Lovers CHAPTER LXVI. A Saturday Afternoon--Sandwich Island Girls on a Frolic--The Poi Merchant--Grand Gala Day--A Native Dance--Church Membership--Cats and Officials--An Overwhelming Discovery CHAPTER LXVII. The Legislature of the Island--What Its President Has Seen--Praying for an Enemy--Women's Rights--Romantic Fashions--Worship of the Shark--Desire for Dress--Full Dress--Not Paris Style--Playing Empire--Officials and Foreign Ambassadors--Overwhelming Magnificence CHAPTER LXVIII. A Royal Funeral--Order of Procession--Pomp and Ceremony--A Striking Contrast--A Sick Monarch--Human Sacrifices at His Death--Burial Orgies CHAPTER LXIX. "Once more upon the Waters."--A Noisy Passenger--Several Silent Ones--A Moonlight Scene--Fruits and Plantations CHAPTER LXX. A Droll Character--Mrs. Beazely and Her Son--Meditations on Turnips--A Letter from Horace Greeley--An Indignant Rejoinder--The Letter Translated but too Late CHAPTER LXXI. Kealakekua Bay--Death of Captain Cook--His Monument--Its Construction--On Board the Schooner CHAPTER LXXII. Young Kanakas in New England--A Temple Built by Ghosts--Female Bathers--I Stood Guard--Women and Whiskey--A Fight for Religion--Arrival of Missionaries CHAPTER LXXIII. Native Canoes--Surf Bathing--A Sanctuary--How Built--The Queen's Rock --Curiosities--Petrified Lava CHAPTER LXXIV. Visit to the Volcano--The Crater--Pillar of Fire--Magnificent Spectacle --A Lake of Fire CHAPTER LXXV. The North Lake--Fountains of Fire--Streams of Burning Lava--Tidal Waves CHAPTER LXXVI. A Reminiscence--Another Horse Story--My Ride with the Retired Milk Horse --A Picnicing Excursion--Dead Volcano of Holeakala--Comparison with Vesuvius--An Inside View CHAPTER LXXVII. A Curious Character--A Series of Stories--Sad Fate of a Liar--Evidence of Insanity CHAPTER LXXVIII. Return to San Francisco--Ship Amusements--Preparing for Lecturing --Valuable Assistance Secured--My First Attempt--The Audience Carried --"All's Well that Ends Well." CHAPTER LXXIX. Highwaymen--A Predicament--A Huge Joke--Farewell to California--At Home Again--Great Changes. Moral. APPENDIX. A.--Brief Sketch of Mormon History B.--The Mountain Meadows Massacre C.--Concerning a Frightful Assassination that was never Consummated CHAPTER I. My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory--an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor's absence. A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of "Mr. Secretary," gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word "travel" had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean, and "the isthmus" as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. And so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll! I had nothing more to desire. My contentment was complete. At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey. Not much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece. There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago--not a single rail of it. I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months--I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years! I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River. We were six days going from St. Louis to "St. Jo."--a trip that was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days. No record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our crutches and sparred over. In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo. by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was more "shear" and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so. CHAPTER II. The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada. The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage --because it weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take --twenty-five pounds each. So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in a good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and "stogy" boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some under-clothing and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know--poor innocents--that such things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson City the next. I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only had one fault--you could not hit anything with it. One of our "conductors" practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had a small-sized Colt's revolver strapped around him for protection against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our fellow-traveler. We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original "Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an "Allen" in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else." And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon--the "Allen." Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it. We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest--we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners. By eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left "the States" behind us. It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling--a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach--like the stately heave and swell of the ocean's bosom after a storm. And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its "rolling" character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor! Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description--an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the "conductor," the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags--for we had three days' delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said--"a little for Brigham, and Carson, and 'Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome 'thout they get plenty of truck to read." But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it. We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued. After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction--for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes--watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said: "The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam." "You bet!" "What did I understand you to say, madam?" "You BET!" Then she cheered up, and faced around and said: "Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, b'gosh. Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust'n muskeeters and wonderin' what was ailin' ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say. Wher'd ye come from?" The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation! How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said: "Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o' days, and I'll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edgin' in a word now and then, I'm right thar. Folks'll tell you't I've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all." We resolved not to "lay by at Cottonwood." CHAPTER III. About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road--so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness--when something gave away under us! We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard the driver and conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it--but we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn. But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver's voice said: "By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!" This startled me broad awake--as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do. I said to myself: "Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver's voice. Leg, maybe--and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this? No, it can't be his leg. That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver. Now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder? Well, whatever comes, I shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway." Just then the conductor's face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter. He said: "Gents, you'll have to turn out a spell. Thoroughbrace is broke." We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary. When I found that the thing they called a "thoroughbrace" was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, I said to the driver: "I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can remember. How did it happen?" "Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days' mail --that's how it happened," said he. "And right here is the very direction which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the Injuns for to keep 'em quiet. It's most uncommon lucky, becuz it's so nation dark I should 'a' gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace hadn't broke." I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks. It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out. When they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before. The conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just half full of mail-bags from end to end. We objected loudly to this, for it left us no seats. But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his thoroughbraces. We never wanted any seats after that. The lazy bed was infinitely preferable. I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters would turn out. The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on. It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it. After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our bed for a nap. And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept for an hour or more. That will give one an appreciable idea of those matchless roads. Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no grip is necessary. Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. I saw them do it, often. There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the irons in time when the coach jolts. These men were hard worked, and it was not possible for them to stay awake all the time. By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska. About a mile further on, we came to the Big Sandy--one hundred and eighty miles from St. Joseph. As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert--from Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean--as the "jackass rabbit." He is well named. He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a jackass. When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. All you can see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out straight and "streaking it" through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib. Now and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious. Presently he comes down to a long, graceful "lope," and shortly he mysteriously disappears. He has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him, when he will get under way again. But one must shoot at this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the best he knows how. He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy indifference that is enchanting. Our party made this specimen "hump himself," as the conductor said. The secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old "Allen's" whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic! He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz. I do not remember where we first came across "sage-brush," but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it. This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the "sage-brush" exactly. Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him. It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the "sage-brush." Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea" made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well acquainted with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass." --["Bunch-grass" grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known--so stock-men say.]--The sage-bushes grow from three to six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the "greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like oak. When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use. A hole a foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing coals. Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no swearing. Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining. Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner. Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy. In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople. And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that --manuscript letters written for the home papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground, now. He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public. I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual height. CHAPTER IV. As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation for bed. We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books). We stirred them up and redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible. And we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea. Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had settled, and put them on. Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them--for, there being no ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o'clock in the morning. All things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy Dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as "dark as the inside of a cow," as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. And finally, we rolled ourselves up like silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to recollect where we were--and succeed--and in a minute or two the stage would be off again, and we likewise. We began to get into country, now, threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads. And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of mail-bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose from the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: "Take your elbow out of my ribs!--can't you quit crowding?" Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody. One trip it "barked" the Secretary's elbow; the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis's nose up till he could look down his nostrils--he said. The pistols and coin soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us, and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water down our backs. Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. It wore gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was necessary. By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at our smartest speed. It was fascinating--that old overland stagecoaching. We jumped out in undress uniform. The driver tossed his gathered reins out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity--taking not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health, and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh team out of the stables--for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day, station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures, useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the hostler, the stage-driver was a hero--a great and shining dignitary, the world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the nations. When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day; when he uttered his one jest--old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his coach drove up there--the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives. And how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for his pipe!--but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands. They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from--for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers. The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped. How admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it! And how they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his long whip and went careering away. The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these bricks, and Americans shorten it to 'dobies). The roofs, which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever seen a man's front yard on top of his house. The building consisted of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard. There was no stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes. There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. In a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon. By the door of the station-keeper's den, outside, was a tin wash-basin, on the ground. Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly --but this latter was the station-keeper's private towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it--the stage-driver and the conductor. The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper. We had towels--in the valise; they might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah. We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string--but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since--along with certain impurities. In one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of ammunition. The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode horseback--so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and unspeakably picturesque. The pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. The man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat--in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long "navy" revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife. The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come--and they were not looking for them, either. A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup, were at each man's place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that had seen better days. Of course this duke sat at the head of the table. There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. This was the caster. It was German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation. There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there. The station-keeper upended a disk of last week's bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer. He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees. We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it--there is no gainsaying that. Then he poured for us a beverage which he called "Slum gullion," and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. He had no sugar and no milk--not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with. We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the "slumgullion." And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all. The landlord said: "All! Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six." "But I don't like mackerel." "Oh--then help yourself to the mustard." In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it. Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle. I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed. The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless. At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp: "Coffee! Well, if that don't go clean ahead of me, I'm d---d!" We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and herdsmen--we all sat at the same board. At least there was no conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from one employee to another. It was always in the same form, and always gruffly friendly. Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its charm. It was: "Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!" No, I forget--skunk was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently. However, it is no matter--probably it was too strong for print, anyway. It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains. We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes. Right here we suffered the first diminution of our princely state. We left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place. But they were wild Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready. And when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules' heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon. How the frantic animals did scamper! It was a fierce and furious gallop--and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station-huts and stables. So we flew along all day. At 2 P.M. the belt of timber that fringes the North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the Plains came in sight. At 4 P.M. we crossed a branch of the river, and at 5 P.M. we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney, fifty-six hours out from St. Joe--THREE HUNDRED MILES! Now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific. But the railroad is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch, in the New York Times, of a recent trip over almost the very ground I have been describing. I can scarcely comprehend the new state of things: "ACROSS THE CONTINENT. "At 4.20 P.M., Sunday, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and started westward on our long jaunt. A couple of hours out, dinner was announced--an "event" to those of us who had yet to experience what it is to eat in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels; so, stepping into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves in the dining-car. It was a revelation to us, that first dinner on Sunday. And though we continued to dine for four days, and had as many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results achieved. Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with services of solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could have had no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this --bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling air of the prairies? "You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug, whilst we sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the fastest living we had ever experienced. (We beat that, however, two days afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven minutes, while our Champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not a drop!) After dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as it was Sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns--"Praise God from whom," etc.; "Shining Shore," "Coronation," etc.--the voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the Wild. Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte, three hundred miles from Omaha--fifteen hours and forty minutes out." CHAPTER V. Another night of alternate tranquillity and turmoil. But morning came, by and by. It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand were more than three mile away. We resumed undress uniform, climbed a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and strange to gaze at. Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings! Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!--so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again--another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him--and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub--business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day"--and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude! It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I do not wish any of the pie." The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned army bacon. He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they survive. The cayote of the deserts beyond the Rocky Mountains has a peculiarly hard time of it, owing to the fact that his relations, the Indians, are just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from, as he is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting off at a little distance watching those people strip off and dig out everything edible, and walk off with it. Then he and the waiting ravens explore the skeleton and polish the bones. It is considered that the cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship, while hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their funerals. He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents. We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the cayote as it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow. CHAPTER VI. Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two hundred and fifty miles was called a "division." He purchased horses, mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his "division"--a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all told, on the overland route. Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the "conductor." His beat was the same length as the agent's--two hundred and fifty miles. He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance, night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute charge of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them. Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant man, who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman. It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was always a general in administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination --otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on every stage. Next in real and official rank and importance, after the conductor, came my delight, the driver--next in real but not in apparent importance--for we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flag-ship. The driver's beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time at the stations pretty short, sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one. We took a new driver every day or every night (for they drove backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time), and therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with the conductors; and besides, they would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. Still, we were always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was always, "Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day. As long as everything went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man's work. Once, in the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound asleep on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty--had driven seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees! It sounds incredible, but I remember the statement well enough. The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws--fugitives from justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was without law and without even the pretence of it. When the "division-agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter, and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along smoothly. Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been different. But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate generally "got it through his head." A great portion of this vast machinery--these hundreds of men and coaches, and thousands of mules and horses--was in the hands of Mr. Ben Holliday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my Holy Land note-book: No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday--a man of prodigious energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind--two thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch! But this fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a young New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of Mr. H.) Aged nineteen. Jack was a good boy--a good-hearted and always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful things, his Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected--to such a degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and new to him, and all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear. Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast concerning them. He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them. He never passed a celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem, without illuminating it with an oration. One day, when camped near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like this: "Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds the Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack! Think of it, my boy--the actual mountains of Moab--renowned in Scripture history! We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks--and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively], "our eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot WHERE LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES! Think of it, Jack!" "Moses who?" (falling inflection). "Moses who! Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself--you ought to be ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the great guide, soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot; and where we now stand they entered the Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing! It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack! Think of it!" "Forty years? Only three hundred miles? Humph! Ben Holliday would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!" The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said anything that was wrong or irreverent. And so no one scolded him or felt offended with him--and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing the heedless blunders of a boy. At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the "Crossing of the South Platte," alias "Julesburg," alias "Overland City," four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph--the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with. CHAPTER VII. It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude! We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up suddenly in this. For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before. The reason we had an hour to spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous affair, called a "mud-wagon") and transfer our freight of mails. Presently we got under way again. We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and pigmy islands--a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either bank. The Platte was "up," they said--which made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier. They said it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford it. But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt. Once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be shipwrecked in a "mud-wagon" in the middle of a desert at last. But we dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun. Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down. We were to be delayed five or six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt. It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and finally he said: "Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making themselves so facetious over it. I tell you I was angry in earnest for awhile. I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people--but of course I couldn't, the old 'Allen's' so confounded comprehensive. I wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn't have wanted to laugh so. If I had had a horse worth a cent--but no, the minute he saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the air and stood on his heels. The saddle began to slip, and I took him round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray. Then he came down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle. "Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally prostrate my horse's reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him, and I wish I may die if he didn't stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and shed tears. He was absolutely out of his mind--he was, as sure as truth itself, and he really didn't know what he was doing. Then the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start--and then for the next ten minutes he would actually throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get unsettled, too, and didn't know where to start in--and so he stood there sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast, certain. Well, I was first out on his neck--the horse's, not the bull's--and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels--but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you might say. Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away some of my horse's tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to him to get up and hunt for it. "And then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too--head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a whirlwind! By George, it was a hot race! I and the saddle were back on the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel with both hands. First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left, and as the saddle went down over the horse's rump he gave it a lift with his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I wish I may die in a minute if he didn't. I fell at the foot of the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone. I had the bull, now, if he did not think of one thing. But that one thing I dreaded. I dreaded it very seriously. There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there were greater chances that he would. I made up my mind what I would do in case he did. It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I sat. I cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle----" "Your saddle? Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?" "Take it up in the tree with me? Why, how you talk. Of course I didn't. No man could do that. It fell in the tree when it came down." "Oh--exactly." "Certainly. I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the limb. It was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining tons. I made a slip-noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see the length. It reached down twenty-two feet--half way to the ground. I then loaded every barrel of the Allen with a double charge. I felt satisfied. I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that I dread, all right--but if he does, all right anyhow--I am fixed for him. But don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens? Indeed it is so. I watched the bull, now, with anxiety --anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that at any moment death might come. Presently a thought came into the bull's eye. I knew it! said I--if my nerve fails now, I am lost. Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he started in to climb the tree----" "What, the bull?" "Of course--who else?" "But a bull can't climb a tree." "He can't, can't he? Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a bull try?" "No! I never dreamt of such a thing." "Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then? Because you never saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can't be done?" "Well, all right--go on. What did you do?" "The bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped and slid back. I breathed easier. He tried it again--got up a little higher--slipped again. But he came at it once more, and this time he was careful. He got gradually higher and higher, and my spirits went down more and more. Up he came--an inch at a time--with his eyes hot, and his tongue hanging out. Higher and higher--hitched his foot over the stump of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, 'You are my meat, friend.' Up again--higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he got. He was within ten feet of me! I took a long breath,--and then said I, 'It is now or never.' I had the coil of the lariat all ready; I paid it out slowly, till it hung right over his head; all of a sudden I let go of the slack, and the slipnoose fell fairly round his neck! Quicker than lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in the face. It was an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses. When the smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you could count! I didn't stop to count, anyhow--I shinned down the tree and shot for home." "Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?" "I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn't." "Well, we can't refuse to believe it, and we don't. But if there were some proofs----" "Proofs! Did I bring back my lariat?" "No." "Did I bring back my horse?" "No." "Did you ever see the bull again?" "No." "Well, then, what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as you are about a little thing like that." I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth. This episode reminds me of an incident of my brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward. The European citizens of a town in the neighborhood of Bangkok had a prodigy among them by the name of Eckert, an Englishman--a person famous for the number, ingenuity and imposing magnitude of his lies. They were always repeating his most celebrated falsehoods, and always trying to "draw him out" before strangers; but they seldom succeeded. Twice he was invited to the house where I was visiting, but nothing could seduce him into a specimen lie. One day a planter named Bascom, an influential man, and a proud and sometimes irascible one, invited me to ride over with him and call on Eckert. As we jogged along, said he: "Now, do you know where the fault lies? It lies in putting Eckert on his guard. The minute the boys go to pumping at Eckert he knows perfectly well what they are after, and of course he shuts up his shell. Anybody might know he would. But when we get there, we must play him finer than that. Let him shape the conversation to suit himself--let him drop it or change it whenever he wants to. Let him see that nobody is trying to draw him out. Just let him have his own way. He will soon forget himself and begin to grind out lies like a mill. Don't get impatient --just keep quiet, and let me play him. I will make him lie. It does seem to me that the boys must be blind to overlook such an obvious and simple trick as that." Eckert received us heartily--a pleasant-spoken, gentle-mannered creature. We sat in the veranda an hour, sipping English ale, and talking about the king, and the sacred white elephant, the Sleeping Idol, and all manner of things; and I noticed that my comrade never led the conversation himself or shaped it, but simply followed Eckert's lead, and betrayed no solicitude and no anxiety about anything. The effect was shortly perceptible. Eckert began to grow communicative; he grew more and more at his ease, and more and more talkative and sociable. Another hour passed in the same way, and then all of a sudden Eckert said: "Oh, by the way! I came near forgetting. I have got a thing here to astonish you. Such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard of--I've got a cat that will eat cocoanut! Common green cocoanut--and not only eat the meat, but drink the milk. It is so--I'll swear to it." A quick glance from Bascom--a glance that I understood--then: "Why, bless my soul, I never heard of such a thing. Man, it is impossible." "I knew you would say it. I'll fetch the cat." He went in the house. Bascom said: "There--what did I tell you? Now, that is the way to handle Eckert. You see, I have petted him along patiently, and put his suspicions to sleep. I am glad we came. You tell the boys about it when you go back. Cat eat a cocoanut--oh, my! Now, that is just his way, exactly--he will tell the absurdest lie, and trust to luck to get out of it again. "Cat eat a cocoanut--the innocent fool!" Eckert approached with his cat, sure enough. Bascom smiled. Said he: "I'll hold the cat--you bring a cocoanut." Eckert split one open, and chopped up some pieces. Bascom smuggled a wink to me, and proffered a slice of the fruit to puss. She snatched it, swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more! We rode our two miles in silence, and wide apart. At least I was silent, though Bascom cuffed his horse and cursed him a good deal, notwithstanding the horse was behaving well enough. When I branched off homeward, Bascom said: "Keep the horse till morning. And--you need not speak of this --foolishness to the boys." CHAPTER VIII. In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and watching for the "pony-rider"--the fleet messenger who sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do! The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind! There was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness--just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look. Both rider and horse went "flying light." The rider's dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a "round-about," and a skull-cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider. He carried no arms--he carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter. He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry--his bag had business letters in it, mostly. His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too. He wore a little wafer of a racing-saddle, and no visible blanket. He wore light shoes, or none at all. The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized. The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty. There were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year. We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims: "HERE HE COMES!" Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling--sweeping toward us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm! So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe. We rattled through Scott's Bluffs Pass, by and by. It was along here somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity, and a thing to be mentioned with eclat in letters to the ignorant at home. This water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the ground looked as if it had been whitewashed. I think the strange alkali water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it isn't a common experience. But once in a while one of those parties trips and comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes, and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping grandeur as he nears a three thousand-foot precipice, till at last he waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a raging and tossing avalanche! This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him? We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail robbery and massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor perished, and also all the passengers but one, it was supposed; but this must have been a mistake, for at different times afterward on the Pacific coast I was personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives. There was no doubt of the truth of it--I had it from their own lips. One of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another of them told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the Indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could not restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined. The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a person named Babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was desperately wounded. He dragged himself on his hands and knee (for one leg was broken) to a station several miles away. He did it during portions of two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and bodily pain. The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained, including quite an amount of treasure. CHAPTER IX. We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow (apparently) looming vast and solitary--a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows of storm-cloud. He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right. We breakfasted at Horse-Shoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out from St. Joseph. We had now reached a hostile Indian country, and during the afternoon we passed Laparelle Station, and enjoyed great discomfort all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the trees we dashed by at arm's length concealed a lurking Indian or two. During the preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through the pony-rider's jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except when killed. As long as they had life enough left in them they had to stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had been waiting for them a week, and were entirely out of patience. About two hours and a half before we arrived at Laparelle Station, the keeper in charge of it had fired four times at an Indian, but he said with an injured air that the Indian had "skipped around so's to spile everything--and ammunition's blamed skurse, too." The most natural inference conveyed by his manner of speaking was, that in "skipping around," the Indian had taken an unfair advantage. The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front--a reminiscence of its last trip through this region. The bullet that made it wounded the driver slightly, but he did not mind it much. He said the place to keep a man "huffy" was down on the Southern Overland, among the Apaches, before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route. He said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance, because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he "couldn't hold his vittles." This person's statement were not generally believed. We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile Indian country, and lay on our arms. We slept on them some, but most of the time we only lay on them. We did not talk much, but kept quiet and listened. It was an inky-black night, and occasionally rainy. We were among woods and rocks, hills and gorges--so shut in, in fact, that when we peeped through a chink in a curtain, we could discern nothing. The driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible dangers. We listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels. We listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated breath; every time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "Hark!" and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name--for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams--a sleep that was a chaos. Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild, agonizing shriek! Then we heard--ten steps from the stage-- "Help! help! help!" [It was our driver's voice.] "Kill him! Kill him like a dog!" "I'm being murdered! Will no man lend me a pistol?" "Look out! head him off! head him off!" [Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet, as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object; several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said appealingly, "Don't, gentlemen, please don't--I'm a dead man!" Then a fainter groan, and another blow, and away sped the stage into the darkness, and left the grisly mystery behind us.] What a startle it was! Eight seconds would amply cover the time it occupied--maybe even five would do it. We only had time to plunge at a curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and thundering away, down a mountain "grade." We fed on that mystery the rest of the night--what was left of it, for it was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery, for all we could get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded, through the clatter of the wheels, like "Tell you in the morning!" So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney, and lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled themselves upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was, and the order of their occurrence. And we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were Indians. So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence of something to be anxious about. We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. All that we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station; that we changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region ("for there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't dare show himself in the settlements," the conductor said); he had talked roughly about these characters, and ought to have "drove up there with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him, and begun business himself, because any softy would know they would be laying for him." That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the conductor nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter. They plainly had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive opinions of people and then be so simple as to come into their presence unprepared to "back his judgment," as they pleasantly phrased the killing of any fellow-being who did not like said opinions. And likewise they plainly had a contempt for the man's poor discretion in venturing to rouse the wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws--and the conductor added: "I tell you it's as much as Slade himself want to do!" This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity. I cared nothing now about the Indians, and even lost interest in the murdered driver. There was such magic in that name, SLADE! Day or night, now, I stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something new about Slade and his ghastly exploits. Even before we got to Overland City, we had begun to hear about Slade and his "division" (for he was a "division-agent") on the Overland; and from the hour we had left Overland City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three things --"Californy," the Nevada silver mines, and this desperado Slade. And a deal the most of the talk was about Slade. We had gradually come to have a realizing sense of the fact that Slade was a man whose heart and hands and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity; a man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults or slights, of whatever kind--on the spot if he could, years afterward if lack of earlier opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him day and night till vengeance appeased it--and not an ordinary vengeance either, but his enemy's absolute death--nothing less; a man whose face would light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him at a disadvantage. A high and efficient servant of the Overland, an outlaw among outlaws and yet their relentless scourge, Slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains. CHAPTER X. Really and truly, two thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had been about this man Slade, ever since the day before we reached Julesburg. In order that the eastern reader may have a clear conception of what a Rocky Mountain desperado is, in his highest state of development, I will reduce all this mass of overland gossip to one straightforward narrative, and present it in the following shape: Slade was born in Illinois, of good parentage. At about twenty-six years of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country. At St. Joseph, Missouri, he joined one of the early California-bound emigrant trains, and was given the post of train-master. One day on the plains he had an angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their revolvers. But the driver was the quicker artist, and had his weapon cocked first. So Slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a matter, and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the quarrel settled by a fist-fight. The unsuspecting driver agreed, and threw down his pistol--whereupon Slade laughed at his simplicity, and shot him dead! He made his escape, and lived a wild life for awhile, dividing his time between fighting Indians and avoiding an Illinois sheriff, who had been sent to arrest him for his first murder. It is said that in one Indian battle he killed three savages with his own hand, and afterward cut their ears off and sent them, with his compliments, to the chief of the tribe. Slade soon gained a name for fearless resolution, and this was sufficient merit to procure for him the important post of overland division-agent at Julesburg, in place of Mr. Jules, removed. For some time previously, the company's horses had been frequently stolen, and the coaches delayed, by gangs of outlaws, who were wont to laugh at the idea of any man's having the temerity to resent such outrages. Slade resented them promptly. The outlaws soon found that the new agent was a man who did not fear anything that breathed the breath of life. He made short work of all offenders. The result was that delays ceased, the company's property was let alone, and no matter what happened or who suffered, Slade's coaches went through, every time! True, in order to bring about this wholesome change, Slade had to kill several men--some say three, others say four, and others six--but the world was the richer for their loss. The first prominent difficulty he had was with the ex-agent Jules, who bore the reputation of being a reckless and desperate man himself. Jules hated Slade for supplanting him, and a good fair occasion for a fight was all he was waiting for. By and by Slade dared to employ a man whom Jules had once discharged. Next, Slade seized a team of stage-horses which he accused Jules of having driven off and hidden somewhere for his own use. War was declared, and for a day or two the two men walked warily about the streets, seeking each other, Jules armed with a double-barreled shot gun, and Slade with his history-creating revolver. Finally, as Slade stepped into a store Jules poured the contents of his gun into him from behind the door. Slade was plucky, and Jules got several bad pistol wounds in return. Then both men fell, and were carried to their respective lodgings, both swearing that better aim should do deadlier work next time. Both were bedridden a long time, but Jules got to his feet first, and gathering his possessions together, packed them on a couple of mules, and fled to the Rocky Mountains to gather strength in safety against the day of reckoning. For many months he was not seen or heard of, and was gradually dropped out of the remembrance of all save Slade himself. But Slade was not the man to forget him. On the contrary, common report said that Slade kept a reward standing for his capture, dead or alive! After awhile, seeing that Slade's energetic administration had restored peace and order to one of the worst divisions of the road, the overland stage company transferred him to the Rocky Ridge division in the Rocky Mountains, to see if he could perform a like miracle there. It was the very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes. There was absolutely no semblance of law there. Violence was the rule. Force was the only recognized authority. The commonest misunderstandings were settled on the spot with the revolver or the knife. Murders were done in open day, and with sparkling frequency, and nobody thought of inquiring into them. It was considered that the parties who did the killing had their private reasons for it; for other people to meddle would have been looked upon as indelicate. After a murder, all that Rocky Mountain etiquette required of a spectator was, that he should help the gentleman bury his game --otherwise his churlishness would surely be remembered against him the first time he killed a man himself and needed a neighborly turn in interring him. Slade took up his residence sweetly and peacefully in the midst of this hive of horse-thieves and assassins, and the very first time one of them aired his insolent swaggerings in his presence he shot him dead! He began a raid on the outlaws, and in a singularly short space of time he had completely stopped their depredations on the stage stock, recovered a large number of stolen horses, killed several of the worst desperadoes of the district, and gained such a dread ascendancy over the rest that they respected him, admired him, feared him, obeyed him! He wrought the same marvelous change in the ways of the community that had marked his administration at Overland City. He captured two men who had stolen overland stock, and with his own hands he hanged them. He was supreme judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise--and not only in the case of offences against his employers, but against passing emigrants as well. On one occasion some emigrants had their stock lost or stolen, and told Slade, who chanced to visit their camp. With a single companion he rode to a ranch, the owners of which he suspected, and opening the door, commenced firing, killing three, and wounding the fourth. From a bloodthirstily interesting little Montana book.--["The Vigilantes of Montana," by Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale.]--I take this paragraph: "While on the road, Slade held absolute sway. He would ride down to a station, get into a quarrel, turn the house out of windows, and maltreat the occupants most cruelly. The unfortunates had no means of redress, and were compelled to recuperate as best they could." On one of these occasions, it is said he killed the father of the fine little half-breed boy Jemmy, whom he adopted, and who lived with his widow after his execution. Stories of Slade's hanging men, and of innumerable assaults, shootings, stabbings and beatings, in which he was a principal actor, form part of the legends of the stage line. As for minor quarrels and shootings, it is absolutely certain that a minute history of Slade's life would be one long record of such practices. Slade was a matchless marksman with a navy revolver. The legends say that one morning at Rocky Ridge, when he was feeling comfortable, he saw a man approaching who had offended him some days before--observe the fine memory he had for matters like that--and, "Gentlemen," said Slade, drawing, "it is a good twenty-yard shot--I'll clip the third button on his coat!" Which he did. The bystanders all admired it. And they all attended the funeral, too. On one occasion a man who kept a little whisky-shelf at the station did something which angered Slade--and went and made his will. A day or two afterward Slade came in and called for some brandy. The man reached under the counter (ostensibly to get a bottle--possibly to get something else), but Slade smiled upon him that peculiarly bland and satisfied smile of his which the neighbors had long ago learned to recognize as a death-warrant in disguise, and told him to "none of that!--pass out the high-priced article." So the poor bar-keeper had to turn his back and get the high-priced brandy from the shelf; and when he faced around again he was looking into the muzzle of Slade's pistol. "And the next instant," added my informant, impressively, "he was one of the deadest men that ever lived." The stage-drivers and conductors told us that sometimes Slade would leave a hated enemy wholly unmolested, unnoticed and unmentioned, for weeks together--had done it once or twice at any rate. And some said they believed he did it in order to lull the victims into unwatchfulness, so that he could get the advantage of them, and others said they believed he saved up an enemy that way, just as a schoolboy saves up a cake, and made the pleasure go as far as it would by gloating over the anticipation. One of these cases was that of a Frenchman who had offended Slade. To the surprise of everybody Slade did not kill him on the spot, but let him alone for a considerable time. Finally, however, he went to the Frenchman's house very late one night, knocked, and when his enemy opened the door, shot him dead--pushed the corpse inside the door with his foot, set the house on fire and burned up the dead man, his widow and three children! I heard this story from several different people, and they evidently believed what they were saying. It may be true, and it may not. "Give a dog a bad name," etc. Slade was captured, once, by a party of men who intended to lynch him. They disarmed him, and shut him up in a strong log-house, and placed a guard over him. He prevailed on his captors to send for his wife, so that he might have a last interview with her. She was a brave, loving, spirited woman. She jumped on a horse and rode for life and death. When she arrived they let her in without searching her, and before the door could be closed she whipped out a couple of revolvers, and she and her lord marched forth defying the party. And then, under a brisk fire, they mounted double and galloped away unharmed! In the fulness of time Slade's myrmidons captured his ancient enemy Jules, whom they found in a well-chosen hiding-place in the remote fastnesses of the mountains, gaining a precarious livelihood with his rifle. They brought him to Rocky Ridge, bound hand and foot, and deposited him in the middle of the cattle-yard with his back against a post. It is said that the pleasure that lit Slade's face when he heard of it was something fearful to contemplate. He examined his enemy to see that he was securely tied, and then went to bed, content to wait till morning before enjoying the luxury of killing him. Jules spent the night in the cattle-yard, and it is a region where warm nights are never known. In the morning Slade practised on him with his revolver, nipping the flesh here and there, and occasionally clipping off a finger, while Jules begged him to kill him outright and put him out of his misery. Finally Slade reloaded, and walking up close to his victim, made some characteristic remarks and then dispatched him. The body lay there half a day, nobody venturing to touch it without orders, and then Slade detailed a party and assisted at the burial himself. But he first cut off the dead man's ears and put them in his vest pocket, where he carried them for some time with great satisfaction. That is the story as I have frequently heard it told and seen it in print in California newspapers. It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars. In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees. The most gentlemanly-appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the Overland Company's service was the person who sat at the head of the table, at my elbow. Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I heard them call him SLADE! Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!--looking upon it --touching it--hobnobbing with it, as it were! Here, right by my side, was the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him! I suppose I was the proudest stripling that ever traveled to see strange lands and wonderful people. He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of his awful history. It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody-bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with. And to this day I can remember nothing remarkable about Slade except that his face was rather broad across the cheek bones, and that the cheek bones were low and the lips peculiarly thin and straight. But that was enough to leave something of an effect upon me, for since then I seldom see a face possessing those characteristics without fancying that the owner of it is a dangerous man. The coffee ran out. At least it was reduced to one tin-cupful, and Slade was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty. He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely declined. I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning, and might be needing diversion. But still with firm politeness he insisted on filling my cup, and said I had traveled all night and better deserved it than he--and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid, to the last drop. I thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for I could not feel sure that he would not be sorry, presently, that he had given it away, and proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss. But nothing of the kind occurred. We left him with only twenty-six dead people to account for, and I felt a tranquil satisfaction in the thought that in so judiciously taking care of No. 1 at that breakfast-table I had pleasantly escaped being No. 27. Slade came out to the coach and saw us off, first ordering certain rearrangements of the mail-bags for our comfort, and then we took leave of him, satisfied that we should hear of him again, some day, and wondering in what connection. 
8583	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 2. CHAPTER XI. And sure enough, two or three years afterward, we did hear him again. News came to the Pacific coast that the Vigilance Committee in Montana (whither Slade had removed from Rocky Ridge) had hanged him. I find an account of the affair in the thrilling little book I quoted a paragraph from in the last chapter--"The Vigilantes of Montana; being a Reliable Account of the Capture, Trial and Execution of Henry Plummer's Notorious Road Agent Band: By Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale, Virginia City, M.T." Mr. Dimsdale's chapter is well worth reading, as a specimen of how the people of the frontier deal with criminals when the courts of law prove inefficient. Mr. Dimsdale makes two remarks about Slade, both of which are accurately descriptive, and one of which is exceedingly picturesque: "Those who saw him in his natural state only, would pronounce him to be a kind husband, a most hospitable host and a courteous gentleman; on the contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a gang of armed roughs, would pronounce him a fiend incarnate." And this: "From Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the almighty." For compactness, simplicity and vigor of expression, I will "back" that sentence against anything in literature. Mr. Dimsdale's narrative is as follows. In all places where italics occur, they are mine: After the execution of the five men on the 14th of January, the Vigilantes considered that their work was nearly ended. They had freed the country of highwaymen and murderers to a great extent, and they determined that in the absence of the regular civil authority they would establish a People's Court where all offenders should be tried by judge and jury. This was the nearest approach to social order that the circumstances permitted, and, though strict legal authority was wanting, yet the people were firmly determined to maintain its efficiency, and to enforce its decrees. It may here be mentioned that the overt act which was the last round on the fatal ladder leading to the scaffold on which Slade perished, was the tearing in pieces and stamping upon a writ of this court, followed by his arrest of the Judge Alex. Davis, by authority of a presented Derringer, and with his own hands. J. A. Slade was himself, we have been informed, a Vigilante; he openly boasted of it, and said he knew all that they knew. He was never accused, or even suspected, of either murder or robbery, committed in this Territory (the latter crime was never laid to his charge, in any place); but that he had killed several men in other localities was notorious, and his bad reputation in this respect was a most powerful argument in determining his fate, when he was finally arrested for the offence above mentioned. On returning from Milk River he became more and more addicted to drinking, until at last it was a common feat for him and his friends to "take the town." He and a couple of his dependents might often be seen on one horse, galloping through the streets, shouting and yelling, firing revolvers, etc. On many occasions he would ride his horse into stores, break up bars, toss the scales out of doors and use most insulting language to parties present. Just previous to the day of his arrest, he had given a fearful beating to one of his followers; but such was his influence over them that the man wept bitterly at the gallows, and begged for his life with all his power. It had become quite common, when Slade was on a spree, for the shop-keepers and citizens to close the stores and put out all the lights; being fearful of some outrage at his hands. For his wanton destruction of goods and furniture, he was always ready to pay, when sober, if he had money; but there were not a few who regarded payment as small satisfaction for the outrage, and these men were his personal enemies. From time to time Slade received warnings from men that he well knew would not deceive him, of the certain end of his conduct. There was not a moment, for weeks previous to his arrest, in which the public did not expect to hear of some bloody outrage. The dread of his very name, and the presence of the armed band of hangers-on who followed him alone prevented a resistance which must certainly have ended in the instant murder or mutilation of the opposing party. Slade was frequently arrested by order of the court whose organization we have described, and had treated it with respect by paying one or two fines and promising to pay the rest when he had money; but in the transaction that occurred at this crisis, he forgot even this caution, and goaded by passion and the hatred of restraint, he sprang into the embrace of death. Slade had been drunk and "cutting up" all night. He and his companions had made the town a perfect hell. In the morning, J. M. Fox, the sheriff, met him, arrested him, took him into court and commenced reading a warrant that he had for his arrest, by way of arraignment. He became uncontrollably furious, and seizing the writ, he tore it up, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it. The clicking of the locks of his companions' revolvers was instantly heard, and a crisis was expected. The sheriff did not attempt his retention; but being at least as prudent as he was valiant, he succumbed, leaving Slade the master of the situation and the conqueror and ruler of the courts, law and law-makers. This was a declaration of war, and was so accepted. The Vigilance Committee now felt that the question of social order and the preponderance of the law-abiding citizens had then and there to be decided. They knew the character of Slade, and they were well aware that they must submit to his rule without murmur, or else that he must be dealt with in such fashion as would prevent his being able to wreak his vengeance on the committee, who could never have hoped to live in the Territory secure from outrage or death, and who could never leave it without encountering his friend, whom his victory would have emboldened and stimulated to a pitch that would have rendered them reckless of consequences. The day previous he had ridden into Dorris's store, and on being requested to leave, he drew his revolver and threatened to kill the gentleman who spoke to him. Another saloon he had led his horse into, and buying a bottle of wine, he tried to make the animal drink it. This was not considered an uncommon performance, as he had often entered saloons and commenced firing at the lamps, causing a wild stampede. A leading member of the committee met Slade, and informed him in the quiet, earnest manner of one who feels the importance of what he is saying: "Slade, get your horse at once, and go home, or there will be ---- to pay." Slade started and took a long look, with his dark and piercing eyes, at the gentleman. "What do you mean?" said he. "You have no right to ask me what I mean," was the quiet reply, "get your horse at once, and remember what I tell you." After a short pause he promised to do so, and actually got into the saddle; but, being still intoxicated, he began calling aloud to one after another of his friends, and at last seemed to have forgotten the warning he had received and became again uproarious, shouting the name of a well-known courtezan in company with those of two men whom he considered heads of the committee, as a sort of challenge; perhaps, however, as a simple act of bravado. It seems probable that the intimation of personal danger he had received had not been forgotten entirely; though fatally for him, he took a foolish way of showing his remembrance of it. He sought out Alexander Davis, the Judge of the Court, and drawing a cocked Derringer, he presented it at his head, and told him that he should hold him as a hostage for his own safety. As the judge stood perfectly quiet, and offered no resistance to his captor, no further outrage followed on this score. Previous to this, on account of the critical state of affairs, the committee had met, and at last resolved to arrest him. His execution had not been agreed upon, and, at that time, would have been negatived, most assuredly. A messenger rode down to Nevada to inform the leading men of what was on hand, as it was desirable to show that there was a feeling of unanimity on the subject, all along the gulch. The miners turned out almost en masse, leaving their work and forming in solid column about six hundred strong, armed to the teeth, they marched up to Virginia. The leader of the body well knew the temper of his men on the subject. He spurred on ahead of them, and hastily calling a meeting of the executive, he told them plainly that the miners meant "business," and that, if they came up, they would not stand in the street to be shot down by Slade's friends; but that they would take him and hang him. The meeting was small, as the Virginia men were loath to act at all. This momentous announcement of the feeling of the Lower Town was made to a cluster of men, who were deliberation behind a wagon, at the rear of a store on Main street. The committee were most unwilling to proceed to extremities. All the duty they had ever performed seemed as nothing to the task before them; but they had to decide, and that quickly. It was finally agreed that if the whole body of the miners were of the opinion that he should be hanged, that the committee left it in their hands to deal with him. Off, at hot speed, rode the leader of the Nevada men to join his command. Slade had found out what was intended, and the news sobered him instantly. He went into P. S. Pfouts' store, where Davis was, and apologized for his conduct, saying that he would take it all back. The head of the column now wheeled into Wallace street and marched up at quick time. Halting in front of the store, the executive officer of the committee stepped forward and arrested Slade, who was at once informed of his doom, and inquiry was made as to whether he had any business to settle. Several parties spoke to him on the subject; but to all such inquiries he turned a deaf ear, being entirely absorbed in the terrifying reflections on his own awful position. He never ceased his entreaties for life, and to see his dear wife. The unfortunate lady referred to, between whom and Slade there existed a warm affection, was at this time living at their ranch on the Madison. She was possessed of considerable personal attractions; tall, well-formed, of graceful carriage, pleasing manners, and was, withal, an accomplished horsewoman. A messenger from Slade rode at full speed to inform her of her husband's arrest. In an instant she was in the saddle, and with all the energy that love and despair could lend to an ardent temperament and a strong physique, she urged her fleet charger over the twelve miles of rough and rocky ground that intervened between her and the object of her passionate devotion. Meanwhile a party of volunteers had made the necessary preparations for the execution, in the valley traversed by the branch. Beneath the site of Pfouts and Russell's stone building there was a corral, the gate-posts of which were strong and high. Across the top was laid a beam, to which the rope was fastened, and a dry-goods box served for the platform. To this place Slade was marched, surrounded by a guard, composing the best armed and most numerous force that has ever appeared in Montana Territory. The doomed man had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam. He repeatedly exclaimed, "My God! my God! must I die? Oh, my dear wife!" On the return of the fatigue party, they encountered some friends of Slade, staunch and reliable citizens and members of the committee, but who were personally attached to the condemned. On hearing of his sentence, one of them, a stout-hearted man, pulled out his handkerchief and walked away, weeping like a child. Slade still begged to see his wife, most piteously, and it seemed hard to deny his request; but the bloody consequences that were sure to follow the inevitable attempt at a rescue, that her presence and entreaties would have certainly incited, forbade the granting of his request. Several gentlemen were sent for to see him, in his last moments, one of whom (Judge Davis) made a short address to the people; but in such low tones as to be inaudible, save to a few in his immediate vicinity. One of his friends, after exhausting his powers of entreaty, threw off his coat and declared that the prisoner could not be hanged until he himself was killed. A hundred guns were instantly leveled at him; whereupon he turned and fled; but, being brought back, he was compelled to resume his coat, and to give a promise of future peaceable demeanor. Scarcely a leading man in Virginia could be found, though numbers of the citizens joined the ranks of the guard when the arrest was made. All lamented the stern necessity which dictated the execution. Everything being ready, the command was given, "Men, do your duty," and the box being instantly slipped from beneath his feet, he died almost instantaneously. The body was cut down and carried to the Virginia Hotel, where, in a darkened room, it was scarcely laid out, when the unfortunate and bereaved companion of the deceased arrived, at headlong speed, to find that all was over, and that she was a widow. Her grief and heart-piercing cries were terrible evidences of the depth of her attachment for her lost husband, and a considerable period elapsed before she could regain the command of her excited feelings. There is something about the desperado-nature that is wholly unaccountable--at least it looks unaccountable. It is this. The true desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most infamous advantage of his enemy; armed and free, he will stand up before a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child. Words are cheap, and it is easy to call Slade a coward (all executed men who do not "die game" are promptly called cowards by unreflecting people), and when we read of Slade that he "had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam," the disgraceful word suggests itself in a moment--yet in frequently defying and inviting the vengeance of banded Rocky Mountain cut-throats by shooting down their comrades and leaders, and never offering to hide or fly, Slade showed that he was a man of peerless bravery. No coward would dare that. Many a notorious coward, many a chicken-livered poltroon, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying speech without a quaver in his voice and been swung into eternity with what looked liked the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not moral courage that enabled him to do it. Then, if moral courage is not the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted Slade lacked?--this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman, who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill them whenever or wherever he came across them next! I think it is a conundrum worth investigating. CHAPTER XII. Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon emigrant train of thirty-three wagons; and tramping wearily along and driving their herd of loose cows, were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our stage had come in eight days and three hours--seven hundred and ninety-eight miles! They were dusty and uncombed, hatless, bonnetless and ragged, and they did look so tired! After breakfast, we bathed in Horse Creek, a (previously) limpid, sparkling stream--an appreciated luxury, for it was very seldom that our furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind. We changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours--changed mules, rather--six mules--and did it nearly every time in four minutes. It was lively work. As our coach rattled up to each station six harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable; and in the twinkling of an eye, almost, the old team was out, and the new one in and we off and away again. During the afternoon we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock, Devil's Gate and the Devil's Gap. The latter were wild specimens of rugged scenery, and full of interest--we were in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, now. And we also passed by "Alkali" or "Soda Lake," and we woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the world when the driver said that the Mormons often came there from Great Salt Lake City to haul away saleratus. He said that a few days gone by they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads of a drug that cost them nothing, to Salt Lake, they could sell it for twenty-five cents a pound. In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see. This was what might be called a natural ice-house. It was August, now, and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men could scape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice--hard, compactly frozen, and clear as crystal! Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. He gave us a little Indian news, and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some Plains information in return. He then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one if which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. Think of hotel-keeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. Bemis said he was "a perfect Allen's revolver of dignities." And he said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community. Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with their own eyes, nevertheless--banks of snow in dead summer time. We were now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently encounter lofty summits clad in the "eternal snow" which was so common place a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was August and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was full as much amazed as if I never had heard of snow in August before. Truly, "seeing is believing"--and many a man lives a long life through, thinking he believes certain universally received and well established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but only thought he believed them. In a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws of glittering snow clasping them; and with here and there, in the shade, down the mountain side, a little solitary patch of snow looking no larger than a lady's pocket-handkerchief but being in reality as large as a "public square." And now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned SOUTH PASS, and whirling gayly along high above the common world. We were perched upon the extreme summit of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, toward which we had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing, for days and nights together--and about us was gathered a convention of Nature's kings that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high--grand old fellows who would have to stoop to see Mount Washington, in the twilight. We were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the earth, that now and then when the obstructing crags stood out of the way it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas and continents stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze. As a general thing the Pass was more suggestive of a valley than a suspension bridge in the clouds--but it strongly suggested the latter at one spot. At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there --then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow. In passing, these monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the spectator's head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his impulse was to shrink when they came closet. In the one place I speak of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a thread in it which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees,--a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight--but with a darkness stealing over it and glooming its features deeper and deeper under the frown of a coming storm; and then, while no film or shadow marred the noon brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain drive along the canyon-sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and roar. We had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty. We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it had been all summit to us, and all equally level, for half an hour or more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. The conductor said that one of those streams which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. He said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward --and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by New Orleans and still other chains of bends--and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow-peaks again or regret them. I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped it in the stream. But I put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere. On the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow. In the wofully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition I recognized John -----. Of all persons in the world to meet on top of the Rocky Mountains thousands of miles from home, he was the last one I should have looked for. We were school-boys together and warm friends for years. But a boyish prank of mine had disruptured this friendship and it had never been renewed. The act of which I speak was this. I had been accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third story of a building and overlooked the street. One day this editor gave me a watermelon which I made preparations to devour on the spot, but chancing to look out of the window, I saw John standing directly under it and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head, which I immediately did. I was the loser, for it spoiled the melon, and John never forgave me and we dropped all intercourse and parted, but now met again under these circumstances. We recognized each other simultaneously, and hands were grasped as warmly as if no coldness had ever existed between us, and no allusion was made to any. All animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home, was sufficient to make us forget all things but pleasant ones, and we parted again with sincere "good-bye" and "God bless you" from both. We had been climbing up the long shoulders of the Rocky Mountains for many tedious hours--we started down them, now. And we went spinning away at a round rate too. We left the snowy Wind River Mountains and Uinta Mountains behind, and sped away, always through splendid scenery but occasionally through long ranks of white skeletons of mules and oxen--monuments of the huge emigration of other days--and here and there were up-ended boards or small piles of stones which the driver said marked the resting-place of more precious remains. It was the loneliest land for a grave! A land given over to the cayote and the raven--which is but another name for desolation and utter solitude. On damp, murky nights, these scattered skeletons gave forth a soft, hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague desert. It was because of the phosphorus in the bones. But no scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it. At midnight it began to rain, and I never saw anything like it--indeed, I did not even see this, for it was too dark. We fastened down the curtains and even caulked them with clothing, but the rain streamed in in twenty places, nothwithstanding. There was no escape. If one moved his feet out of a stream, he brought his body under one; and if he moved his body he caught one somewhere else. If he struggled out of the drenched blankets and sat up, he was bound to get one down the back of his neck. Meantime the stage was wandering about a plain with gaping gullies in it, for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road, and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses still. With the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor. As soon as he touched bottom he sang out frantically: "Don't come here!" To which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had disappeared, replied, with an injured air: "Think I'm a dam fool?" The conductor was more than an hour finding the road--a matter which showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking. He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two places. I have always been glad that we were not killed that night. I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad. In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine, large, limpid stream--stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail-bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep bank. But it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any fresh place on us to wet. At the Green River station we had breakfast--hot biscuits, fresh antelope steaks, and coffee--the only decent meal we tasted between the United States and Great Salt Lake City, and the only one we were ever really thankful for. Think of the monotonous execrableness of the thirty that went before it, to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a shot-tower after all these years have gone by! At five P.M. we reached Fort Bridger, one hundred and seventeen miles from the South Pass, and one thousand and twenty-five miles from St. Joseph. Fifty-two miles further on, near the head of Echo Canyon, we met sixty United States soldiers from Camp Floyd. The day before, they had fired upon three hundred or four hundred Indians, whom they supposed gathered together for no good purpose. In the fight that had ensued, four Indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but nobody killed. This looked like business. We had a notion to get out and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four hundred of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians. Echo Canyon is twenty miles long. It was like a long, smooth, narrow street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like mediaeval castles. This was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would "let his team out." He did, and if the Pacific express trains whiz through there now any faster than we did then in the stage-coach, I envy the passengers the exhilaration of it. We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly--and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution! I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it. However, time presses. At four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit of Big Mountain, fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world was glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight. We looked out upon this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow! Even the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed! Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a Mormon "Destroying Angel." "Destroying Angels," as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens. I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one's house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could you respect an Angel with a horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer? There were other blackguards present--comrades of this one. And there was one person that looked like a gentleman--Heber C. Kimball's son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps. A lot of slatternly women flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread, and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of the Angel--or some of them, at least. And of course they were; for if they had been hired "help" they would not have let an angel from above storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one hailed from. This was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution," and it was not very prepossessing. We did not tarry long to observe it, but hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America--Great Salt Lake City. As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt Lake House and unpacked our baggage. CHAPTER XIII. We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables--a great variety and as great abundance. We walked about the streets some, afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes--a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and shoulders--for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary concentric rings of its home circle. By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other "Gentiles," and we spent a sociable hour with them. "Gentiles" are people who are not Mormons. Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely, disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it. This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it "too many for him" and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that something he had eaten had not agreed with him. But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. It was the exclusively Mormon refresher, "valley tan." Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky, or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in Utah. Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone. If I remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful, except they confined themselves to "valley tan." Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim dwellings, built of "frame" and sunburned brick--a great thriving orchard and garden behind every one of them, apparently--branches from the street stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees--and a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole. And everywhere were workshops, factories, and all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked; and in one's ears was the ceaseless clink of hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-wheels. The armorial crest of my own State consisted of two dissolute bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the pertinent remark, "UNITED, WE STAND--(hic!)--DIVIDED, WE FALL." It was always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with the bees all at work! The city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the State of Connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground under a curving wall of mighty mountains whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long. Seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, Great Salt Lake City is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a child's toy-village reposing under the majestic protection of the Chinese wall. On some of those mountains, to the southwest, it had been raining every day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city. And on hot days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious snow-storm going on in the mountains. They could enjoy it at a distance, at those seasons, every day, though no snow would fall in their streets, or anywhere near them. Salt Lake City was healthy--an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having "no visible means of support." They always give you a good substantial article of truth in Salt Lake, and good measure and good weight, too. [Very often, if you wished to weigh one of their airiest little commonplace statements you would want the hay scales.] We desired to visit the famous inland sea, the American "Dead Sea," the great Salt Lake--seventeen miles, horseback, from the city--for we had dreamed about it, and thought about it, and talked about it, and yearned to see it, all the first part of our trip; but now when it was only arm's length away it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest. And so we put it off, in a sort of general way, till next day--and that was the last we ever thought of it. We dined with some hospitable Gentiles; and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and talked long with that shrewd Connecticut Yankee, Heber C. Kimball (since deceased), a saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce. We saw the "Tithing-House," and the "Lion House," and I do not know or remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds and curious names. We flitted hither and thither and enjoyed every hour, and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied. The second day, we made the acquaintance of Mr. Street (since deceased) and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king. He seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that probably belonged there. He was very simply dressed and was just taking off a straw hat as we entered. He talked about Utah, and the Indians, and Nevada, and general American matters and questions, with our secretary and certain government officials who came with us. But he never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding I made several attempts to "draw him out" on federal politics and his high handed attitude toward Congress. I thought some of the things I said were rather fine. But he merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as I have seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling with her tail. By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage. But he was calm. His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook. When the audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother: "Ah--your child, I presume? Boy, or girl?" CHAPTER XIV. Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in one or two of them. Mr. Street's contract was a vast work, every way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader. And after all, Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all. Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! And they made themselves very merry over the matter. Street said--for it was he that told us these things: "I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man--have always been a business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My confidence left me. There was no use in making new contracts--that was plain. I talked with first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any good.' I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But what was a man to do? I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the contractors' names. Finally he said: "'Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or flaw anywhere.' "Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said: 'Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.' "They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to them: "'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?' "'Yes.' "'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!' "And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now, working like bees. And I never hear a word out of them. "There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!" Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well during several years afterward in San Francisco. Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence." [For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow massacre, see Appendices A and B. ] CHAPTER XV. It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about assassinations of intractable Gentiles. I cannot easily conceive of anything more cosy than the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a Gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton galloped in among the pleading and defenceless "Morisites" and shot them down, men and women, like so many dogs. And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying Angel, shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt. And how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing. And how heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley, contentedly waiting for the hearse. And the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder, or a bishop, marries a girl--likes her, marries her sister--likes her, marries another sister--likes her, takes another--likes her, marries her mother--likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more. And how the pert young thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own venerable grandmother have to rank away down toward D 4 in their mutual husband's esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as not. And how this dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest of mother and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her own mother in rank and authority, are things which Mormon women submit to because their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and the more children he rears, the higher the place they will all have in the world to come--and the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say anything about that. According to these Gentile friends of ours, Brigham Young's harem contains twenty or thirty wives. They said that some of them had grown old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and cared for in the henery--or the Lion House, as it is strangely named. Along with each wife were her children--fifty altogether. The house was perfectly quiet and orderly, when the children were still. They all took their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was pronounced to be. None of our party got an opportunity to take dinner with Mr. Young, but a Gentile by the name of Johnson professed to have enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the Lion House. He gave a preposterous account of the "calling of the roll," and other preliminaries, and the carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in. But he embellished rather too much. He said that Mr. Young told him several smart sayings of certain of his "two-year-olds," observing with some pride that for many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of the Eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show Mr. Johnson one of the pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child. He searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide which one it was. Finally he gave it up with a sigh and said: "I thought I would know the little cub again but I don't." Mr. Johnson said further, that Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad thing --"because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride." And Mr. Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing in private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin, remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to No. 6, and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it. Mr. Young reminded her that there was a stranger present. Mrs. Young said that if the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger, he could find room outside. Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she went away. But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and demanded a breast-pin. Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young cut him short. She said No. 6 had got one, and No. 11 was promised one, and it was "no use for him to try to impose on her--she hoped she knew her rights." He gave his promise, and she went. And presently three Mrs. Youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of tears, abuse, and entreaty. They had heard all about No. 6, No. 11, and No. 14. Three more breast-pins were promised. They were hardly gone when nine more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest burst forth and raged round about the prophet and his guest. Nine breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again. And in came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Eleven promised breast-pins purchased peace once more. "That is a specimen," said Mr. Young. "You see how it is. You see what a life I lead. A man can't be wise all the time. In a heedless moment I gave my darling No. 6--excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has escaped me for the moment--a breast-pin. It was only worth twenty-five dollars--that is, apparently that was its whole cost--but its ultimate cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more. You yourself have seen it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars--and alas, even that is not the end! For I have wives all over this Territory of Utah. I have dozens of wives whose numbers, even, I do not know without looking in the family Bible. They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and valleys of my realm. And mark you, every solitary one of them will hear of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or die. No. 6's breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before I see the end of it. And these creatures will compare these pins together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in the family. Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant servitors of mine. If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your hand. Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an exactly similar gift to all my children--and knowing by experience the importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself that you did it, and did it thoroughly. Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle--a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty or ninety children in your house. But the deed was done--the man escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance. I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains. But they never caught him. I am not cruel, sir--I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged--but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death. By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assail!) there was never anything on this earth like it! I knew who gave the whistle to the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me. They believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection could have foreseen: I had to order a hundred and ten whistles--I think we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are off at college now--I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn't have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got tired of the whistles. And if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than Haman! That is the word with the bark on it! Shade of Nephi! You don't know anything about married life. I am rich, and everybody knows it. I am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it. I have a strong fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me. "Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. Why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and she my wife--that I had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could not remember her name. Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me--a common thing in the Territory--and, to cut the story short, I put it in my nursery, and she left. And by the ghost of Orson Hyde, when they came to wash the paint off that child it was an Injun! Bless my soul, you don't know anything about married life. It is a perfect dog's life, sir--a perfect dog's life. You can't economize. It isn't possible. I have tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all occasions. But it is of no use. First you'll marry a combination of calico and consumption that's as thin as a rail, and next you'll get a creature that's nothing more than the dropsy in disguise, and then you've got to eke out that bridal dress with an old balloon. That is the way it goes. And think of the wash-bill--(excuse these tears)--nine hundred and eighty-four pieces a week! No, sir, there is no such a thing as economy in a family like mine. Why, just the one item of cradles--think of it! And vermifuge! Soothing syrup! Teething rings! And 'papa's watches' for the babies to play with! And things to scratch the furniture with! And lucifer matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves with! The item of glass alone would support your family, I venture to say, sir. Let me scrimp and squeeze all I can, I still can't get ahead as fast as I feel I ought to, with my opportunities. Bless you, sir, at a time when I had seventy-two wives in this house, I groaned under the pressure of keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads when the money ought to have been out at interest; and I just sold out the whole stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet long and ninety-six feet wide. But it was a failure, sir. I could not sleep. It appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once. The roar was deafening. And then the danger of it! That was what I was looking at. They would all draw in their breath at once, and you could actually see the walls of the house suck in--and then they would all exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out, and strain, and hear the rafters crack, and the shingles grind together. My friend, take an old man's advice, and don't encumber yourself with a large family--mind, I tell you, don't do it. In a small family, and in a small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford us, and for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth, and no acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us. Take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need--never go over it." Some instinct or other made me set this Johnson down as being unreliable. And yet he was a very entertaining person, and I doubt if some of the information he gave us could have been acquired from any other source. He was a pleasant contrast to those reticent Mormons. CHAPTER XVI. All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet. The title-page reads as follows: THE BOOK OF MORMON: AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI. Wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites; written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the House of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile; written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation. Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that they might not be destroyed; to come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof; sealed by the hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by the way of Gentile; the interpretation thereof by the gift of God. An abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also; which is a record of the people of Jared; who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people when they were building a tower to get to Heaven. "Hid up" is good. And so is "wherefore"--though why "wherefore"? Any other word would have answered as well--though--in truth it would not have sounded so Scriptural. Next comes: THE TESTIMONY OF THREE WITNESSES. Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken; and we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for His voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true; and it is marvellous in our eyes; nevertheless the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with Him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen. OLIVER COWDERY, DAVID WHITMER, MARTIN HARRIS. Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either. Next is this: AND ALSO THE TESTIMONY OF EIGHT WITNESSES. Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that Joseph Smith, Jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shown unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness unto the world that which we have seen; and we lie not, God bearing witness of it. CHRISTIAN WHITMER, JACOB WHITMER, PETER WHITMER, JR., JOHN WHITMER, HIRAM PAGE, JOSEPH SMITH, SR., HYRUM SMITH, SAMUEL H. SMITH. And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am convinced. I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified. The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen "books"--being the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two "books" of Mormon, and three of Nephi. In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the "children of Lehi"; and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a party by the name of Nephi. They finally reached the land of "Bountiful," and camped by the sea. After they had remained there "for the space of many days"--which is more Scriptural than definite--Nephi was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to "carry the people across the waters." He travestied Noah's ark--but he obeyed orders in the matter of the plan. He finished the ship in a single day, while his brethren stood by and made fun of it--and of him, too--"saying, our brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship." They did not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the next day. Then a bit of genuine nature cropped out, and is revealed by outspoken Nephi with Scriptural frankness--they all got on a spree! They, "and also their wives, began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness." Nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings; but they tied him neck and heels, and went on with their lark. But observe how Nephi the prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers: And it came to pass that after they had bound me, insomuch that I could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the Lord, did cease to work; wherefore, they knew not whither they should steer the ship, insomuch that there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters for the space of three days; and they began to be frightened exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea; nevertheless they did not loose me. And on the fourth day, which we had been driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore. And it came to pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea. Then they untied him. And it came to pass after they had loosed me, behold, I took the compass, and it did work whither I desired it. And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord; and after I had prayed, the winds did cease, and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm. Equipped with their compass, these ancients appear to have had the advantage of Noah. Their voyage was toward a "promised land"--the only name they give it. They reached it in safety. Polygamy is a recent feature in the Mormon religion, and was added by Brigham Young after Joseph Smith's death. Before that, it was regarded as an "abomination." This verse from the Mormon Bible occurs in Chapter II. of the book of Jacob: For behold, thus saith the Lord, this people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the Scriptures; for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son. Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord; wherefore, thus saith the Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph. Wherefore, I the Lord God, will no suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old. However, the project failed--or at least the modern Mormon end of it--for Brigham "suffers" it. This verse is from the same chapter: Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none. The following verse (from Chapter IX. of the Book of Nephi) appears to contain information not familiar to everybody: And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into heaven, the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his children, and did return to his own home. And it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was gathered together, behold, Nephi and his brother whom he had raised from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name was Jonas, and also Mathoni, and Mathonihah, his brother, and Kumen, and Kumenenhi, and Jeremiah, and Shemnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah, and Isaiah; now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had chosen. In order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and picturesqueness (as seen by these Mormon twelve) accompanied on of the tenderest episodes in the life of our Saviour than other eyes seem to have been aware of, I quote the following from the same "book"--Nephi: And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the earth, and He said unto them, Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, My joy is full. And when He had said these words, He wept, and the multitude bear record of it, and He took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them. And when He had done this He wept again, and He spake unto the multitude, and saith unto them, Behold your little ones. And as they looked to behold, they cast their eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women, and children. And what else would they be likely to consist of? The Book of Ether is an incomprehensible medley of if "history," much of it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has possibly never heard of; and who inhabited a country which is not set down in the geography. These was a King with the remarkable name of Coriantumr,^^ and he warred with Shared, and Lib, and Shiz, and others, in the "plains of Heshlon"; and the "valley of Gilgal"; and the "wilderness of Akish"; and the "land of Moran"; and the "plains of Agosh"; and "Ogath," and "Ramah," and the "land of Corihor," and the "hill Comnor," by "the waters of Ripliancum," etc., etc., etc. "And it came to pass," after a deal of fighting, that Coriantumr, upon making calculation of his losses, found that "there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children"--say 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 in all--"and he began to sorrow in his heart." Unquestionably it was time. So he wrote to Shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities, and offering to give up his kingdom to save his people. Shiz declined, except upon condition that Coriantumr would come and let him cut his head off first--a thing which Coriantumr would not do. Then there was more fighting for a season; then four years were devoted to gathering the forces for a final struggle--after which ensued a battle, which, I take it, is the most remarkable set forth in history,--except, perhaps, that of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects. This is the account of the gathering and the battle: 7. And it came to pass that they did gather together all the people, upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Ether. And it came to pass that Ether did behold all the doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for Coriantumr, were gathered together to the army of Coriantumr; and the people who were for Shiz, were gathered together to the army of Shiz; wherefore they were for the space of four years gathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. And it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he would, with their wives and their children; both men, women, and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breast-plates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner of war, they did march forth one against another, to battle; and they fought all that day, and conquered not. And it came to pass that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps; and after they had retired to their camps, they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that it did rend the air exceedingly. And it came to pass that on the morrow they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day; nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again, they did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people. 8. And it came to pass that Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people. But behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle. And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and when the night came they slept upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought even until the night came; and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought again; and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty and nine of the people of Shiz. And it came to pass that they slept upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again, and they contended in their mights with their swords, and with their shields, all that day; and when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of Coriantumr. 9. And it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for death on the morrow. And they were large and mighty men, as to the strength of men. And it came to pass that they fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient strength, that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives, but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his wrath that he would slay Coriantumr, or he would perish by the sword: wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them; and they fought again with the sword. And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with loss of blood. And it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz. And it came to pass that after he had smote off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died. And it came to pass that Coriantumr fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life. And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him, go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; and the hundredth part I have not written. It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting. The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable --it is "smouched" [Milton] from the New Testament and no credit given. CHAPTER XVII. At the end of our two days' sojourn, we left Great Salt Lake City hearty and well fed and happy--physically superb but not so very much wiser, as regards the "Mormon question," than we were when we arrived, perhaps. We had a deal more "information" than we had before, of course, but we did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not--for it all came from acquaintances of a day--strangers, strictly speaking. We were told, for instance, that the dreadful "Mountain Meadows Massacre" was the work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly tried to fasten it upon the Mormons; we were told, likewise, that the Indians were to blame, partly, and partly the Mormons; and we were told, likewise, and just as positively, that the Mormons were almost if not wholly and completely responsible for that most treacherous and pitiless butchery. We got the story in all these different shapes, but it was not till several years afterward that Mrs. Waite's book, "The Mormon Prophet," came out with Judge Cradlebaugh's trial of the accused parties in it and revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that the Mormons were the assassins. All our "information" had three sides to it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the "Mormon question" in two days. Still I have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one. I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there--and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not. But presently I remembered with a lightening sense of relief that we had learned two or three trivial things there which we could be certain of; and so the two days were not wholly lost. For instance, we had learned that we were at last in a pioneer land, in absolute and tangible reality. The high prices charged for trifles were eloquent of high freights and bewildering distances of freightage. In the east, in those days, the smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it represented the smallest purchasable quantity of any commodity. West of Cincinnati the smallest coin in use was the silver five-cent piece and no smaller quantity of an article could be bought than "five cents' worth." In Overland City the lowest coin appeared to be the ten-cent piece; but in Salt Lake there did not seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or any smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than twenty-five cents' worth. We had always been used to half dimes and "five cents' worth" as the minimum of financial negotiations; but in Salt Lake if one wanted a cigar, it was a quarter; if he wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter; if he wanted a peach, or a candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little Gentile whiskey to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him from having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price, every time. When we looked at the shot-bag of silver, now and then, we seemed to be wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we referred to the expense account we could see that we had not been doing anything of the kind. But people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices, and fond and vain of both--it is a descent to little coins and cheap prices that is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one's toleration. After a month's acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable five-cent days. How sunburnt with blushes I used to get in gaudy Nevada, every time I thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake. It was on this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and a very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise when they are talking). A young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow-jacket asked me if I would have my boots blacked. It was at the Salt Lake House the morning after we arrived. I said yes, and he blacked them. Then I handed him a silver five-cent piece, with the benevolent air of a person who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty and suffering. The yellow-jacket took it with what I judged to be suppressed emotion, and laid it reverently down in the middle of his broad hand. Then he began to contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnat's ear in the ample field of his microscope. Several mountaineers, teamsters, stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the tableau and fell to surveying the money with that attractive indifference to formality which is noticeable in the hardy pioneer. Presently the yellow-jacket handed the half dime back to me and told me I ought to keep my money in my pocket-book instead of in my soul, and then I wouldn't get it cramped and shriveled up so! What a roar of vulgar laughter there was! I destroyed the mongrel reptile on the spot, but I smiled and smiled all the time I was detaching his scalp, for the remark he made was good for an "Injun." Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without letting the inward shudder appear on the surface--for even already we had overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors, and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well aware that these superior beings despised "emigrants." We permitted no tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, Mountain Meadow assassins--anything in the world that the plains and Utah respected and admired--but we were wretchedly ashamed of being "emigrants," and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way. And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with humiliation that we were "emigrants," and consequently a low and inferior sort of creatures. Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or California, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers "the world," has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and willing to do it for him--yea, who are complacently doing it for him already, wherever he steps his foot. Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts, tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt enough interest in to read about. And all the time that he is thinking what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land, the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting compassion because he is an "emigrant" instead of that proudest and blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a "FORTY-NINER." The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks at all. We had made one alteration, however. We had provided enough bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred miles of staging we had still to do. And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. CHAPTER XVIII. At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been the important military station of "Camp Floyd," some forty-five or fifty miles from Salt Lake City. At four P.M. we had doubled our distance and were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara--an "alkali" desert. For sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that this was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. If my memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the desert. There was a stage station there. It was forty-five miles from the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it. We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night, and at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five-mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to cross a desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect, in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the ignorant thenceforward. And it was pleasant also to reflect that this was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one, the metropolis itself, as you may say. All this was very well and very comfortable and satisfactory--but now we were to cross a desert in daylight. This was fine--novel--romantic--dramatically adventurous --this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for! We would write home all about it. This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour--and then we were ashamed that we had "gushed" so. The poetry was all in the anticipation--there is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the reality of it. The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird--not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. And so the occasional sneezing of the resting mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim stillness, not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one feel more lonesome and forsaken than before. The mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make at stated intervals a "spurt," and drag the coach a hundred or may be two hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back, enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem afloat in a fog. Then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-champing. Then another "spurt" of a hundred yards and another rest at the end of it. All day long we kept this up, without water for the mules and without ever changing the team. At least we kept it up ten hours, which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert. It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon. And it was so hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the middle of the day and we got so thirsty! It was so stupid and tiresome and dull! and the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel deliberation! It was so trying to give one's watch a good long undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been fooling away the time and not trying to get ahead any! The alkali dust cut through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding--and truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality--a thirsty, sweltering, longing, hateful reality! Two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours--that was what we accomplished. It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles an hour. When we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert, we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it. But there could not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three mile pull. To try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were, would be to "gild refined gold or paint the lily." Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit--but no matter, let it stay, anyhow. I think it is a graceful and attractive thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where it would fit, but could not succeed. These efforts have kept my mind distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and disjointed, in places. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary respite from the wear and tear of trying to "lead up" to this really apt and beautiful quotation. CHAPTER XIX. On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood's "Uncivilized Races of Men" clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa. Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless beggars--for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities--a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit. The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, which-ever animal--Adam the Darwinians trace them to. One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots, and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out. And once, in the night, they attacked the stage-coach when a District Judge, of Nevada Territory, was the only passenger, and with their first volley of arrows (and a bullet or two) they riddled the stage curtains, wounded a horse or two and mortally wounded the driver. The latter was full of pluck, and so was his passenger. At the driver's call Judge Mott swung himself out, clambered to the box and seized the reins of the team, and away they plunged, through the racing mob of skeletons and under a hurtling storm of missiles. The stricken driver had sunk down on the boot as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he would manage to keep hold of them until relieved. And after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head between Judge Mott's feet, and tranquilly gave directions about the road; he said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun and left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be at an end, and then if the Judge drove so and so (giving directions about bad places in the road, and general course) he would reach the next station without trouble. The Judge distanced the enemy and at last rattled up to the station and knew that the night's perils were done; but there was no comrade-in-arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly driver was dead. Let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the Overland drivers, now. The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man--even of the scholarly savages in the "Last of the Mohicans" who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks--I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive--and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings--but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine--at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody's. There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company and many of its employees are Goshoots; but it is an error. There is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes. But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains, Heaven knows! If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God's name let us at least not throw mud at them. CHAPTER XX. On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless. On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound telegraph-constructors at Reese River station and sent a message to his Excellency Gov. Nye at Carson City (distant one hundred and fifty-six miles). On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert--forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. We worked our passage most of the way across. That is to say, we got out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step! The desert was one prodigious graveyard. And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured? At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference. Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun again--for the lake has no outlet whatever. There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious fate. They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of them. Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great sheets of water without any visible outlet. Water is always flowing into them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always level full, neither receding nor overflowing. What they do with their surplus is only known to the Creator. On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown. It consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map. This reminds me of a circumstance. Just after we left Julesburg, on the Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said: "I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" A day or two after that we picked up a Denver man at the cross roads, and he told us a good deal about the country and the Gregory Diggings. He seemed a very entertaining person and a man well posted in the affairs of Colorado. By and by he remarked: "I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" At Fort Bridger, some days after this, we took on board a cavalry sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed. From no other man during the whole journey, did we gather such a store of concise and well-arranged military information. It was surprising to find in the desolate wilds of our country a man so thoroughly acquainted with everything useful to know in his line of life, and yet of such inferior rank and unpretentious bearing. For as much as three hours we listened to him with unabated interest. Finally he got upon the subject of trans-continental travel, and presently said: "I can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a Mormon preacher got in with us at a way station--a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom any stranger would warm to at first sight. I can never forget the pathos that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings. No pulpit eloquence was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's picture of the first Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and watering it with tears. His words so wrought upon us that it was a relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came under treatment. One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and at length the stranger said: "I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace. The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago. But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!" Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to die. He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at last. Hunger and fatigue had conquered him. It would have been inhuman to leave him there. We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the coach. It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips we finally brought him to a languid consciousness. Then we fed him a little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a grateful light softened his eye. We made his mail-sack bed as comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats. He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it: "Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at least make one hour of your long journey lighter. I take it you are strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with it. In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley----" I said, impressively: "Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change." We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms. I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. It has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men. I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one. And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote, Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music. I do not think that such things are right. Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race defunct. I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his adventure with Horace Greeley. [And what makes that worn anecdote the more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred. If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this? If I were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called extravagant--but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say? Aha!] 
8584	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 3. CHAPTER XXI. We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing. Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sage-brush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house. We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver--we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the distance envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation. Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen, with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing coach with meditative serenity. By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly things. We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a "wooden" town; its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain. The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the "plaza" which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains --a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering. We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the way up to the Governor's from the hotel--among others, to a Mr. Harris, who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself with the remark: "I'll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that swore I helped to rob the California coach--a piece of impertinent intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man." Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another. When the pistols were emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr. Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal look quite picturesque. I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it recalled to mind that first day in Carson. This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view. Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air--things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust--hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots. It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes. But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats. Carson streets seldom look inactive on Summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider. The "Washoe Zephyr" (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh." That is to say, where it originates. It comes right over the mountains from the West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the other side! It probably is manufactured on the mountain-top for the occasion, and starts from there. It is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward of the point he is aiming at. And yet the first complaint a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there! There is a good deal of human nature in that. We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front--for grandeur--it compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe. The newly arrived Chief and Associate Justices of the Territory, and other machinery of the government, were domiciled with less splendor. They were boarding around privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms. The Secretary and I took quarters in the "ranch" of a worthy French lady by the name of Bridget O'Flannigan, a camp follower of his Excellency the Governor. She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his adversity as Governor of Nevada. Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a visitor--may be two, but not without straining the walls. But the walls could stand it--at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply of one thickness of white "cotton domestic" stretched from corner to corner of the room. This was the rule in Carson--any other kind of partition was the rare exception. And if you stood in a dark room and your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told queer secrets sometimes! Very often these partitions were made of old flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between the common herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with rudimental fresco--i.e., red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks. Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by pasting pictures from Harper's Weekly on them. In many cases, too, the wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a sumptuous and luxurious taste. [Washoe people take a joke so hard that I must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were many honorable exceptions in Carson--plastered ceilings and houses that had considerable furniture in them.--M. T.] We had a carpet and a genuine queen's-ware washbowl. Consequently we were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O'Flannigan "ranch." When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we simply took our lives into our own hands. To prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole room of which the second story consisted. It was a jolly company, the fourteen. They were principally voluntary camp-followers of the Governor, who had joined his retinue by their own election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect to make it better. They were popularly known as the "Irish Brigade," though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor's retainers. His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen created--especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote when desirable! Mrs. O'Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it. They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding-house. So she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the "Brigade." Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence. Then, said he: "Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you --a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by observation and study. I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point! When the legislature meets I will have the necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged." "What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?" "Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!" He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them loose in the desert. It was "recreation" with a vengeance! Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas. "Romantic adventure" could go no further. They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully. They returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly. They brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders--tarantulas--and imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the "ranch." After the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well eastward. They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite "certain point," but got no information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of "How far eastward?" Governor Nye telegraphed back: "To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!--and then bridge it and go on!" This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs. O'Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade's board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass! The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy?--proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch. There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisle between the bedrows. In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H---- sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted: "Turn out, boys--the tarantulas is loose!" No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it. Then followed the strangest silence--a silence of grisly suspense it was, too--waiting, expectancy, fear. It was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a thing could be seen. Then came occasional little interruptions of the silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or changes of position. The occasional voices were not given to much speaking--you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of "Ow!" followed by a solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor. Another silence. Presently you would hear a gasping voice say: "Su--su--something's crawling up the back of my neck!" Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a sorrowful "O Lord!" and then you knew that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it, either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear: "I've got him! I've got him!" [Pause, and probable change of circumstances.] "No, he's got me! Oh, ain't they never going to fetch a lantern!" The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O'Flannigan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed and lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger contract. The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs. I had rather go to war than live that episode over again. Nobody was hurt. The man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken--only a crack in a box had caught his finger. Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again. There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it. We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy. CHAPTER XXII. It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather superb. In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to "the States" awhile. I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in the absence of coat, vest and braces. I felt rowdyish and "bully," (as the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the destruction of the Temple). It seemed to me that nothing could be so fine and so romantic. I had become an officer of the government, but that was for mere sublimity. The office was an unique sinecure. I had nothing to do and no salary. I was private Secretary to his majesty the Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us. So Johnny K---- and I devoted our time to amusement. He was the young son of an Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation. He got it. We had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us thither to see it. Three or four members of the Brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp. We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started--for we intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy. We were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. We were told that the distance was eleven miles. We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination. We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that signified the locality of the camp. I got Johnny to row--not because I mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when I am at work. But I steered. A three-mile pull brought us to the camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly hungry. In a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on a boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper. Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest. It was a delicious supper--hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee. It was a delicious solitude we were in, too. Three miles away was a saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings throughout the wide circumference of the lake. As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains. In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons. Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, any way. The wind rose just as we were losing consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore. It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once, thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness. There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience. That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before --sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to "water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe. I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it. He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future. Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other skeletons. I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. It was yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down three trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to "rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land. Next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary, in order to hold the property. We decided to build a substantial log-house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and so we concluded to build it of saplings. However, two saplings, duly cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a "brush" house. We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much "sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we had achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the surrounding vegetation. But we were satisfied with it. We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the protection of the law. Therefore we decided to take up our residence on our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such an experience can bring. Late the next afternoon, after a good long rest, we sailed away from the Brigade camp with all the provisions and cooking utensils we could carry off--borrow is the more accurate word --and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing. CHAPTER XXIII. If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep. We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us. We never took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. That is, Johnny was--but I held his hat. While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. Then to "business." That is, drifting around in the boat. We were on the north shore. There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white. This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage than it has elsewhere on the lake. We usually pushed out a hundred yards or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour whither it would. We seldom talked. It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought. The shore all along was indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded with tall pines. So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand. Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages." We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week. We could see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite--they could see the line too plainly, perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an annoyed manner, and shift his position. We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it looked so sunny. Sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a mile or two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the immense depth. By official measurement the lake in its centre is one thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep! Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At night, by the camp-fire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind--and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds. We never slept in our "house." It never recurred to us, for one thing; and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it. By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day, and reached home again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot, ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny, and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises! Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the devastation. The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffee-pot was gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high, and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific. We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained, spell-bound. Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges--surmounted them and disappeared in the canons beyond--burst into view upon higher and farther ridges, presently--shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again --flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain-side--threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell! Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination. We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought of supper, and never felt fatigue. But at eleven o'clock the conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness stole down upon the landscape again. Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again, without any property. Our fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep. The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not try to land. So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles beyond the camp. The storm was increasing, and it became evident that it was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following, and I sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to the shore. The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered in the lee of a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night through. In the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp without any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we ate up the rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out to Carson to tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded, upon payment of damages. We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history. CHAPTER XXIV. I resolved to have a horse to ride. I had never seen such wild, free, magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson streets every day. How they rode! Leaning just gently forward out of the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept through the town like the wind! The next minute they were only a sailing puff of dust on the far desert. If they trotted, they sat up gallantly and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and down after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-schools. I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to learn more. I was resolved to buy a horse. While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was "going, going, at twenty-two!--horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars, gentlemen!" and I could hardly resist. A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother) noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous 'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of guileless candor and truthfulness. Said he: "I know that horse--know him well. You are a stranger, I take it, and so you might think he was an American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is not. He is nothing of the kind; but--excuse my speaking in a low voice, other people being near--he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine Mexican Plug!" I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something about this man's way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die. "Has he any other--er--advantages?" I inquired, suppressing what eagerness I could. He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words: "He can out-buck anything in America!" "Going, going, going--at twent--ty--four dollars and a half, gen--" "Twenty-seven!" I shouted, in a frenzy. "And sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican Plug to me. I could scarcely contain my exultation. I paid the money, and put the animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself. In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together, lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! I came as straight down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck--all in the space of three or four seconds. Then he rose and stood almost straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately, slid back into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and stood on his forefeet. And then down he came once more, and began the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I went up I heard a stranger say: "Oh, don't he buck, though!" While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the Genuine, got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended, and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley. I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach. I believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human machinery--for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. Pen cannot describe how I was jolted up. Imagination cannot conceive how disjointed I was--how internally, externally and universally I was unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd around me, though. One elderly-looking comforter said: "Stranger, you've been taken in. Everybody in this camp knows that horse. Any child, any Injun, could have told you that he'd buck; he is the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America. You hear me. I'm Curry. Old Curry. Old Abe Curry. And moreover, he is a simon-pure, out-and-out, genuine d--d Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that, too. Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that bloody old foreign relic." I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all other recreations and attend it. After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch." Such panting and blowing! Such spreading and contracting of the red equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye! But was the imperial beast subjugated? Indeed he was not. His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to go down to the Capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the Capitol--one mile and three quarters--remains unbeaten to this day. But then he took an advantage--he left out the mile, and only did the three quarters. That is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the Capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made the trip on a comet. In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the Genuine towed back behind a quartz wagon. The next day I loaned the animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed. Everybody I loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough exercise any other way. Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him, my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands, or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. But somehow nothing ever happened to him. He took chances that no other horse ever took and survived, but he always came out safe. It was his daily habit to try experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he always got through. Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get his rider through intact, but he always got through himself. Of course I had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met with little sympathy. The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and destroying children, and never got a bid--at least never any but the eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make. The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if they had any. Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew the horse from the market. We tried to trade him off at private vendue next, offering him at a sacrifice for second-hand tombstones, old iron, temperance tracts--any kind of property. But holders were stiff, and we retired from the market again. I never tried to ride the horse any more. Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things. Finally I tried to give him away. But it was a failure. Parties said earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast--they did not wish to own one. As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use of the "Brigade." His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again, and he said the thing would be too palpable. Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks' keeping--stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse, two hundred and fifty! The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let him. I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. During a part of the previous year it had sold at five hundred a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was such scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin! The consequence might be guessed without my telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle valleys were almost literally carpeted with their carcases! Any old settler there will verify these statements. I managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day I gave the Genuine Mexican Plug to a passing Arkansas emigrant whom fortune delivered into my hand. If this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the donation. Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated --but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a fancy sketch, perhaps. CHAPTER XXV. Originally, Nevada was a part of Utah and was called Carson county; and a pretty large county it was, too. Certain of its valleys produced no end of hay, and this attracted small colonies of Mormon stock-raisers and farmers to them. A few orthodox Americans straggled in from California, but no love was lost between the two classes of colonists. There was little or no friendly intercourse; each party staid to itself. The Mormons were largely in the majority, and had the additional advantage of being peculiarly under the protection of the Mormon government of the Territory. Therefore they could afford to be distant, and even peremptory toward their neighbors. One of the traditions of Carson Valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the time I speak of. The hired girl of one of the American families was Irish, and a Catholic; yet it was noted with surprise that she was the only person outside of the Mormon ring who could get favors from the Mormons. She asked kindnesses of them often, and always got them. It was a mystery to everybody. But one day as she was passing out at the door, a large bowie knife dropped from under her apron, and when her mistress asked for an explanation she observed that she was going out to "borry a wash-tub from the Mormons!" In 1858 silver lodes were discovered in "Carson County," and then the aspect of things changed. Californians began to flock in, and the American element was soon in the majority. Allegiance to Brigham Young and Utah was renounced, and a temporary territorial government for "Washoe" was instituted by the citizens. Governor Roop was the first and only chief magistrate of it. In due course of time Congress passed a bill to organize "Nevada Territory," and President Lincoln sent out Governor Nye to supplant Roop. At this time the population of the Territory was about twelve or fifteen thousand, and rapidly increasing. Silver mines were being vigorously developed and silver mills erected. Business of all kinds was active and prosperous and growing more so day by day. The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant States put in authority over them--a sentiment that was natural enough. They thought the officials should have been chosen from among themselves from among prominent citizens who had earned a right to such promotion, and who would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise thoroughly acquainted with the needs of the Territory. They were right in viewing the matter thus, without doubt. The new officers were "emigrants," and that was no title to anybody's affection or admiration either. The new government was received with considerable coolness. It was not only a foreign intruder, but a poor one. It was not even worth plucking --except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such. Everybody knew that Congress had appropriated only twenty thousand dollars a year in greenbacks for its support--about money enough to run a quartz mill a month. And everybody knew, also, that the first year's money was still in Washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and difficult process. Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent haste. There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born Territorial government to get a start in this world. Ours had a trying time of it. The Organic Act and the "instructions" from the State Department commanded that a legislature should be elected at such-and-such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at such-and-such a date. It was easy to get legislators, even at three dollars a day, although board was four dollars and fifty cents, for distinction has its charm in Nevada as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of patriotic souls out of employment; but to get a legislative hall for them to meet in was another matter altogether. Carson blandly declined to give a room rent-free, or let one to the government on credit. But when Curry heard of the difficulty, he came forward, solitary and alone, and shouldered the Ship of State over the bar and got her afloat again. I refer to "Curry--Old Curry--Old Abe Curry." But for him the legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert. He offered his large stone building just outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it was gladly accepted. Then he built a horse-railroad from town to the capitol, and carried the legislators gratis. He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature, and covered the floors with clean saw-dust by way of carpet and spittoon combined. But for Curry the government would have died in its tender infancy. A canvas partition to separate the Senate from the House of Representatives was put up by the Secretary, at a cost of three dollars and forty cents, but the United States declined to pay for it. Upon being reminded that the "instructions" permitted the payment of a liberal rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to the country by Mr. Curry's generosity, the United States said that did not alter the matter, and the three dollars and forty cents would be subtracted from the Secretary's eighteen hundred dollar salary--and it was! The matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of the new government's difficulties. The Secretary was sworn to obey his volume of written "instructions," and these commanded him to do two certain things without fail, viz.: 1. Get the House and Senate journals printed; and, 2. For this work, pay one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" for composition, and one dollar and fifty cents per "token" for press-work, in greenbacks. It was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely impossible to do more than one of them. When greenbacks had gone down to forty cents on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by printing establishments were one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" and one dollar and fifty cents per "token," in gold. The "instructions" commanded that the Secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government. Hence the printing of the journals was discontinued. Then the United States sternly rebuked the Secretary for disregarding the "instructions," and warned him to correct his ways. Wherefore he got some printing done, forwarded the bill to Washington with full exhibits of the high prices of things in the Territory, and called attention to a printed market report wherein it would be observed that even hay was two hundred and fifty dollars a ton. The United States responded by subtracting the printing-bill from the Secretary's suffering salary--and moreover remarked with dense gravity that he would find nothing in his "instructions" requiring him to purchase hay! Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller's understanding. The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it. In the days I speak of he never could be made to comprehend why it was that twenty thousand dollars would not go as far in Nevada, where all commodities ranged at an enormous figure, as it would in the other Territories, where exceeding cheapness was the rule. He was an officer who looked out for the little expenses all the time. The Secretary of the Territory kept his office in his bedroom, as I before remarked; and he charged the United States no rent, although his "instructions" provided for that item and he could have justly taken advantage of it (a thing which I would have done with more than lightning promptness if I had been Secretary myself). But the United States never applauded this devotion. Indeed, I think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its employ. Those "instructions" (we used to read a chapter from them every morning, as intellectual gymnastics, and a couple of chapters in Sunday school every Sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics) those "instructions" commanded that pen-knives, envelopes, pens and writing-paper be furnished the members of the legislature. So the Secretary made the purchase and the distribution. The knives cost three dollars apiece. There was one too many, and the Secretary gave it to the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The United States said the Clerk of the House was not a "member" of the legislature, and took that three dollars out of the Secretary's salary, as usual. White men charged three or four dollars a "load" for sawing up stove-wood. The Secretary was sagacious enough to know that the United States would never pay any such price as that; so he got an Indian to saw up a load of office wood at one dollar and a half. He made out the usual voucher, but signed no name to it--simply appended a note explaining that an Indian had done the work, and had done it in a very capable and satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability in the necessary direction. The Secretary had to pay that dollar and a half. He thought the United States would admire both his economy and his honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a pretended Indian's signature to the voucher, but the United States did not see it in that light. The United States was too much accustomed to employing dollar-and-a-half thieves in all manner of official capacities to regard his explanation of the voucher as having any foundation in fact. But the next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a cross at the bottom of the voucher--it looked like a cross that had been drunk a year--and then I "witnessed" it and it went through all right. The United States never said a word. I was sorry I had not made the voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one. The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two. That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature. They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million. Yet they had their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of the kind. A member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by dispensing with the Chaplain. And yet that short-sighted man needed the Chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with his feet on his desk, eating raw turnips, during the morning prayer. The legislature sat sixty days, and passed private tollroad franchises all the time. When they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress gave the Territory another degree of longitude there would not be room enough to accommodate the toll-roads. The ends of them were hanging over the boundary line everywhere like a fringe. The fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important proportions that there was nearly as much excitement over suddenly acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines. CHAPTER XXVI. By and by I was smitten with the silver fever. "Prospecting parties" were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz. Plainly this was the road to fortune. The great "Gould and Curry" mine was held at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived; but in two months it had sprung up to eight hundred. The "Ophir" had been worth only a mere trifle, a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four thousand dollars a foot! Not a mine could be named that had not experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time. Everybody was talking about these marvels. Go where you would, you heard nothing else, from morning till far into the night. Tom So-and-So had sold out of the "Amanda Smith" for $40,000--hadn't a cent when he "took up" the ledge six months ago. John Jones had sold half his interest in the "Bald Eagle and Mary Ann" for $65,000, gold coin, and gone to the States for his family. The widow Brewster had "struck it rich" in the "Golden Fleece" and sold ten feet for $18,000--hadn't money enough to buy a crape bonnet when Sing-Sing Tommy killed her husband at Baldy Johnson's wake last spring. The "Last Chance" had found a "clay casing" and knew they were "right on the ledge"--consequence, "feet" that went begging yesterday were worth a brick house apiece to-day, and seedy owners who could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday were roaring drunk on champagne to-day and had hosts of warm personal friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from long-continued want of practice. Johnny Morgan, a common loafer, had gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand dollars, in consequence of the decision in the "Lady Franklin and Rough and Ready" lawsuit. And so on--day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us. I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest. Cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest. Every few days news would come of the discovery of a bran-new mining region; immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession. By the time I was fairly inoculated with the disease, "Esmeralda" had just had a run and "Humboldt" was beginning to shriek for attention. "Humboldt! Humboldt!" was the new cry, and straightway Humboldt, the newest of the new, the richest of the rich, the most marvellous of the marvellous discoveries in silver-land was occupying two columns of the public prints to "Esmeralda's" one. I was just on the point of starting to Esmeralda, but turned with the tide and got ready for Humboldt. That the reader may see what moved me, and what would as surely have moved him had he been there, I insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day. It and several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of converting me. I shall not garble the extract, but put it in just as it appeared in the Daily Territorial Enterprise: But what about our mines? I shall be candid with you. I shall express an honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination. Humboldt county is the richest mineral region upon God's footstool. Each mountain range is gorged with the precious ores. Humboldt is the true Golconda. The other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four thousand dollars to the ton. A week or two ago an assay of just such surface developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to the ton. Our mountains are full of rambling prospectors. Each day and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county. The metal is not silver alone. There are distinct ledges of auriferous ore. A late discovery plainly evinces cinnabar. The coarser metals are in gross abundance. Lately evidences of bituminous coal have been detected. My theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous formation. I told Col. Whitman, in times past, that the neighborhood of Dayton (Nevada) betrayed no present or previous manifestations of a ligneous foundation, and that hence I had no confidence in his lauded coal mines. I repeated the same doctrine to the exultant coal discoverers of Humboldt. I talked with my friend Captain Burch on the subject. My pyrhanism vanished upon his statement that in the very region referred to he had seen petrified trees of the length of two hundred feet. Then is the fact established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this remote section. I am firm in the coal faith. Have no fears of the mineral resources of Humboldt county. They are immense--incalculable. Let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better comprehend certain items in the above. At this time, our near neighbor, Gold Hill, was the most successful silver mining locality in Nevada. It was from there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks came. "Very rich" (and scarce) Gold Hill ore yielded from $100 to $400 to the ton; but the usual yield was only $20 to $40 per ton--that is to say, each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars. But the reader will perceive by the above extract, that in Humboldt from one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver! That is to say, every one hundred pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to about three hundred and fifty in it. Some days later this same correspondent wrote: I have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this region--it is incredible. The intestines of our mountains are gorged with precious ore to plethora. I have said that nature has so shaped our mountains as to furnish most excellent facilities for the working of our mines. I have also told you that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill sites in the world. But what is the mining history of Humboldt? The Sheba mine is in the hands of energetic San Francisco capitalists. It would seem that the ore is combined with metals that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain machinery. The proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in my exordium. They are toiling and probing. Their tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet. From primal assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value. I do not know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal. I do know that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the Sheba in primal assay value. Listen a moment to the calculations of the Sheba operators. They purpose transporting the ore concentrated to Europe. The conveyance from Star City (its locality) to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton; from Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton; from thence to Liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton. Their idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net them twelve hundred dollars. The estimate may be extravagant. Cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending any previous developments of our racy Territory. A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield five hundred dollars to the ton. Such fecundity throws the Gould & Curry, the Ophir and the Mexican, of your neighborhood, in the darkest shadow. I have given you the estimate of the value of a single developed mine. Its richness is indexed by its market valuation. The people of Humboldt county are feet crazy. As I write, our towns are near deserted. They look as languid as a consumptive girl. What has become of our sinewy and athletic fellow-citizens? They are coursing through ravines and over mountain tops. Their tracks are visible in every direction. Occasionally a horseman will dash among us. His steed betrays hard usage. He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay office and from thence to the District Recorder's. In the morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again on his wild and unbeaten route. Why, the fellow numbers already his feet by the thousands. He is the horse-leech. He has the craving stomach of the shark or anaconda. He would conquer metallic worlds. This was enough. The instant we had finished reading the above article, four of us decided to go to Humboldt. We commenced getting ready at once. And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding sooner--for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges that would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe. An hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a Gold Hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now I was already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill. CHAPTER XXVII. Hurry, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon. The horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out and walked. It was an improvement. Next, we found that it would be better if a third man got out. That was an improvement also. It was at this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility. But in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked also. It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and never resumed it again. Within the hour, we found that it would not only be better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first, and get reconciled to it. We had learned ours in one afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we accepted the situation, and from that time forth we never rode. More than that, we stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind. We made seven miles, and camped in the desert. Young Clagett (now member of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses; Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking. This division of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey. We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain. We were so tired that we slept soundly. We were fifteen days making the trip--two hundred miles; thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses rest. We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor. Parties who met us, occasionally, advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being "bituminous from long deprivation." The reader will excuse me from translating. What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long word, was a secret between himself and his Maker. He was one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life. He was gentleness and simplicity itself--and unselfishness, too. Although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He did a young man's share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general stand-point of any age--not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning. We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back to his breast and finding great comfort in it. But in the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions." We turned the dog out. It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury. It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of "camping out." Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles (through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond--fifty in all --in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest. To stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price. We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the Humboldt." We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either. It left a taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking. The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet invented. It was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him." But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we entered into our rest. CHAPTER XXVIII. After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little way. People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery grandeur. Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a "river" in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is overheated, and then drink it dry. On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole. Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other five faced them. The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice. It was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before the darkness lifted and revealed Unionville. We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture and interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce. Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when we could catch a laden Indian it was well--and when we could not (which was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it. I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground. I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits. I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself. Yet I was as perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy--and so my fancy was already busy with plans for spending this money. The first opportunity that offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was far beyond sight and call. Then I began my search with a feverish excitement that was brimful of expectation--almost of certainty. I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at them with anxious hope. Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart bounded! I hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute certainty itself could have afforded. The more I examined the fragment the more I was convinced that I had found the door to fortune. I marked the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and down the rugged mountain side I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time. Of all the experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy. It was a delirious revel. By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me! A gold mine, and in my simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver! I was so excited that I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me. Then a fear came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret. Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and ascended a knoll to reconnoiter. Solitude. No creature was near. Then I returned to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my fears were groundless--the shining scales were still there. I set about scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the stream and robbed its bed. But at last the descending sun warned me to give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth. As I walked along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose. In this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or twice I was on the point of throwing it away. The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing. Neither could I talk. I was full of dreams and far away. Their conversation interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too. I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about. But as they proceeded, it began to amuse me. It grew to be rare fun to hear them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment. Smothered hilarity began to oppress me, presently. It was hard to resist the impulse to burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but I did resist. I said within myself that I would filter the great news through my lips calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in their faces. I said: "Where have you all been?" "Prospecting." "What did you find?" "Nothing." "Nothing? What do you think of the country?" "Can't tell, yet," said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines. "Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?" "Yes, a sort of a one. It's fair enough here, may be, but overrated. Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though. "That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work it. We'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid." "So you think the prospect is pretty poor?" "No name for it!" "Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?" "Oh, not yet--of course not. We'll try it a riffle, first." "Suppose, now--this is merely a supposition, you know--suppose you could find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton --would that satisfy you?" "Try us once!" from the whole party. "Or suppose--merely a supposition, of course--suppose you were to find a ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton--would that satisfy you?" "Here--what do you mean? What are you coming at? Is there some mystery behind all this?" "Never mind. I am not saying anything. You know perfectly well there are no rich mines here--of course you do. Because you have been around and examined for yourselves. Anybody would know that, that had been around. But just for the sake of argument, suppose--in a kind of general way--suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges were simply contemptible--contemptible, understand--and that right yonder in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure silver--oceans of it--enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours! Come!" "I should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old Ballou, but wild with excitement, nevertheless. "Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I tossed my treasure before them. There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said: "Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!" So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold." Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that. CHAPTER XXIX. True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough. We went out "prospecting" with Mr. Ballou. We climbed the mountain sides, and clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop with exhaustion, but found no silver--nor yet any gold. Day after day we did this. Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or two listless men still burrowing. But there was no appearance of silver. These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden ledge where the silver was. Some day! It seemed far enough away, and very hopeless and dreary. Day after day we toiled, and climbed and searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the promiseless toil. At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock which projected from the earth high upon the mountain. Mr. Ballou broke off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver. Contained it! I had thought that at least it would be caked on the outside of it like a kind of veneering. He still broke off pieces and critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue and applying the glass. At last he exclaimed: "We've got it!" We were full of anxiety in a moment. The rock was clean and white, where it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue. He said that that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of gold visible. After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly. We were not jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than that. He saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order to determine its value by the process called the "fire-assay." Then we named the mine "Monarch of the Mountains" (modesty of nomenclature is not a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and stuck up the following "notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in the mining recorder's office in the town. "NOTICE." "We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each (and one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode, extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips, spurs, and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty feet of ground on either side for working the same." We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made. But when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Ballou, we felt depressed and dubious. He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "Monarch of the Mountains," extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth --he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet--away down into the bowels of the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys. He said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased between. And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew. Therefore, instead of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock with a shaft till we came to where it was rich--say a hundred feet or so --or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth. To do either was plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few feet a day--some five or six. But this was not all. He said that after we got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver-mill, ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process. Our fortune seemed a century away! But we went to work. We decided to sink a shaft. So, for a week we climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels, cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main. At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well. But the rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into play. But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder. That was the weariest work! One of us held the iron drill in its place and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge--it was like driving nails on a large scale. In the course of an hour or two the drill would reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in diameter. We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and run. When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air, we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz jolted out. Nothing more. One week of this satisfied me. I resigned. Clagget and Oliphant followed. Our shaft was only twelve feet deep. We decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted. So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge. I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer. We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted. We wanted a ledge that was already "developed." There were none in the camp. We dropped the "Monarch" for the time being. Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly growing excitement about our Humboldt mines. We fell victims to the epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet." We prospected and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent names. We traded some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims. In a little while we owned largely in the "Gray Eagle," the "Columbiana," the "Branch Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the "Root-Hog-or-Die," the "Samson and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the "Golconda," the "Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic," the "Grand Mogul," and fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched with a pick. We had not less than thirty thousand "feet" apiece in the "richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant phrased it--and were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement--drunk with happiness--smothered under mountains of prospective wealth--arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous canyon--but our credit was not good at the grocer's. It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine. It was a beggars' revel. There was nothing doing in the district--no mining--no milling --no productive effort--no income--and not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires. Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil--rocks. Nothing but rocks. Every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves. CHAPTER XXX. I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand "feet" in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars--and as often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in the world. Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his "specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part with just a few feet in the "Golden Age," or the "Sarah Jane," or some other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal" with, as the phrase went. And you were never to reveal that he had made you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice. Then he would fish a piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an eyeglass to it, and exclaim: "Look at that! Right there in that red dirt! See it? See the specks of gold? And the streak of silver? That's from the Uncle Abe. There's a hundred thousand tons like that in sight! Right in sight, mind you! And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the richest thing in the world! Look at the assay! I don't want you to believe me--look at the assay!" Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton. I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of rock and get it assayed! Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert, was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton of rubbish it came from! On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy. On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton! And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred? Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those --such raving insanity, rather. Few people took work into their calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people. We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again. Why? Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining! Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased "feet" from various Esmeralda stragglers. We had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments" instead--demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines. These assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally. Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and thence to Esmeralda. I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian--not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings. We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days, and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson river. It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds its melancholy way. Close to the house were the Overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks. There was not another building within several leagues of the place. Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper--a very, very rough set. There were one or two Overland stage drivers there, also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house was well crowded. We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the vicinity. The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could. In their broken English they said, "By'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming. The weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season. There was about a foot of water in the insignificant river--or maybe two feet; the stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely higher than a man's head. So, where was the flood to come from? We canvassed the subject awhile and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the Indians had some better reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an exceedingly dry time. At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story--with our clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there was barely room for the housing of the inn's guests. An hour later we were awakened by a great turmoil, and springing out of bed we picked our way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to the front windows of the long room. A glance revealed a strange spectacle, under the moonlight. The crooked Carson was full to the brim, and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way--sweeping around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of rubbish. A depression, where its bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank. Men were flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear. Close to the old river bed just spoken of, stood a little log stable, and in this our horses were lodged. While we looked, the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin encroaching steadily on the logs. We suddenly realized that this flood was not a mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage--and not only to the small log stable but to the Overland buildings close to the main river, for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations and invading the great hay-corral adjoining. We ran down and joined the crowd of excited men and frightened animals. We waded knee-deep into the log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so fast the waters increased. Then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay-corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of baled hay and roll the bales up on the high ground by the house. Meantime it was discovered that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large stable, and wading in, boot-top deep, discovered him asleep in his bed, awoke him, and waded out again. But Owens was drowsy and resumed his nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed, his hand dropped over the side and came in contact with the cold water! It was up level with the mattress! He waded out, breast-deep, almost, and the next moment the sun-burned bricks melted down like sugar and the big building crumbled to a ruin and was washed away in a twinkling. At eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of water, and our inn was on an island in mid-ocean. As far as the eye could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a level waste of shining water. The Indians were true prophets, but how did they get their information? I am not able to answer the question. We remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew. Swearing, drinking and card playing were the order of the day, and occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety. Dirt and vermin--but let us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivable--it is better that they remain so. There were two men----however, this chapter is long enough. 
8585	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 4. CHAPTER XXXI. There were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort. One was a little Swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one song, and he was forever singing it. By day we were all crowded into one small, stifling bar-room, and so there was no escaping this person's music. Through all the profanity, whisky-guzzling, "old sledge" and quarreling, his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its tiresome sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that I would be content to die, in order to be rid of the torture. The other man was a stalwart ruffian called "Arkansas," who carried two revolvers in his belt and a bowie knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always suffering for a fight. But he was so feared, that nobody would accommodate him. He would try all manner of little wary ruses to entrap somebody into an offensive remark, and his face would light up now and then when he fancied he was fairly on the scent of a fight, but invariably his victim would elude his toils and then he would show a disappointment that was almost pathetic. The landlord, Johnson, was a meek, well-meaning fellow, and Arkansas fastened on him early, as a promising subject, and gave him no rest day or night, for awhile. On the fourth morning, Arkansas got drunk and sat himself down to wait for an opportunity. Presently Johnson came in, just comfortably sociable with whisky, and said: "I reckon the Pennsylvania 'lection--" Arkansas raised his finger impressively and Johnson stopped. Arkansas rose unsteadily and confronted him. Said he: "Wha-what do you know a--about Pennsylvania? Answer me that. Wha--what do you know 'bout Pennsylvania?" "I was only goin' to say--" "You was only goin' to say. You was! You was only goin' to say--what was you goin' to say? That's it! That's what I want to know. I want to know wha--what you ('ic) what you know about Pennsylvania, since you're makin' yourself so d---d free. Answer me that!" "Mr. Arkansas, if you'd only let me--" "Who's a henderin' you? Don't you insinuate nothing agin me!--don't you do it. Don't you come in here bullyin' around, and cussin' and goin' on like a lunatic--don't you do it. 'Coz I won't stand it. If fight's what you want, out with it! I'm your man! Out with it!" Said Johnson, backing into a corner, Arkansas following, menacingly: "Why, I never said nothing, Mr. Arkansas. You don't give a man no chance. I was only goin' to say that Pennsylvania was goin' to have an election next week--that was all--that was everything I was goin' to say --I wish I may never stir if it wasn't." "Well then why d'n't you say it? What did you come swellin' around that way for, and tryin' to raise trouble?" "Why I didn't come swellin' around, Mr. Arkansas--I just--" "I'm a liar am I! Ger-reat Caesar's ghost--" "Oh, please, Mr. Arkansas, I never meant such a thing as that, I wish I may die if I did. All the boys will tell you that I've always spoke well of you, and respected you more'n any man in the house. Ask Smith. Ain't it so, Smith? Didn't I say, no longer ago than last night, that for a man that was a gentleman all the time and every way you took him, give me Arkansas? I'll leave it to any gentleman here if them warn't the very words I used. Come, now, Mr. Arkansas, le's take a drink--le's shake hands and take a drink. Come up--everybody! It's my treat. Come up, Bill, Tom, Bob, Scotty--come up. I want you all to take a drink with me and Arkansas--old Arkansas, I call him--bully old Arkansas. Gimme your hand agin. Look at him, boys--just take a look at him. Thar stands the whitest man in America!--and the man that denies it has got to fight me, that's all. Gimme that old flipper agin!" They embraced, with drunken affection on the landlord's part and unresponsive toleration on the part of Arkansas, who, bribed by a drink, was disappointed of his prey once more. But the foolish landlord was so happy to have escaped butchery, that he went on talking when he ought to have marched himself out of danger. The consequence was that Arkansas shortly began to glower upon him dangerously, and presently said: "Lan'lord, will you p-please make that remark over agin if you please?" "I was a-sayin' to Scotty that my father was up'ards of eighty year old when he died." "Was that all that you said?" "Yes, that was all." "Didn't say nothing but that?" "No--nothing." Then an uncomfortable silence. Arkansas played with his glass a moment, lolling on his elbows on the counter. Then he meditatively scratched his left shin with his right boot, while the awkward silence continued. But presently he loafed away toward the stove, looking dissatisfied; roughly shouldered two or three men out of a comfortable position; occupied it himself, gave a sleeping dog a kick that sent him howling under a bench, then spread his long legs and his blanket-coat tails apart and proceeded to warm his back. In a little while he fell to grumbling to himself, and soon he slouched back to the bar and said: "Lan'lord, what's your idea for rakin' up old personalities and blowin' about your father? Ain't this company agreeable to you? Ain't it? If this company ain't agreeable to you, p'r'aps we'd better leave. Is that your idea? Is that what you're coming at?" "Why bless your soul, Arkansas, I warn't thinking of such a thing. My father and my mother--" "Lan'lord, don't crowd a man! Don't do it. If nothing'll do you but a disturbance, out with it like a man ('ic)--but don't rake up old bygones and fling'em in the teeth of a passel of people that wants to be peaceable if they could git a chance. What's the matter with you this mornin', anyway? I never see a man carry on so." "Arkansas, I reely didn't mean no harm, and I won't go on with it if it's onpleasant to you. I reckon my licker's got into my head, and what with the flood, and havin' so many to feed and look out for--" "So that's what's a-ranklin' in your heart, is it? You want us to leave do you? There's too many on us. You want us to pack up and swim. Is that it? Come!" "Please be reasonable, Arkansas. Now you know that I ain't the man to--" "Are you a threatenin' me? Are you? By George, the man don't live that can skeer me! Don't you try to come that game, my chicken--'cuz I can stand a good deal, but I won't stand that. Come out from behind that bar till I clean you! You want to drive us out, do you, you sneakin' underhanded hound! Come out from behind that bar! I'll learn you to bully and badger and browbeat a gentleman that's forever trying to befriend you and keep you out of trouble!" "Please, Arkansas, please don't shoot! If there's got to be bloodshed--" "Do you hear that, gentlemen? Do you hear him talk about bloodshed? So it's blood you want, is it, you ravin' desperado! You'd made up your mind to murder somebody this mornin'--I knowed it perfectly well. I'm the man, am I? It's me you're goin' to murder, is it? But you can't do it 'thout I get one chance first, you thievin' black-hearted, white-livered son of a nigger! Draw your weepon!" With that, Arkansas began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over benches, men and every sort of obstacle in a frantic desire to escape. In the midst of the wild hubbub the landlord crashed through a glass door, and as Arkansas charged after him the landlord's wife suddenly appeared in the doorway and confronted the desperado with a pair of scissors! Her fury was magnificent. With head erect and flashing eye she stood a moment and then advanced, with her weapon raised. The astonished ruffian hesitated, and then fell back a step. She followed. She backed him step by step into the middle of the bar-room, and then, while the wondering crowd closed up and gazed, she gave him such another tongue-lashing as never a cowed and shamefaced braggart got before, perhaps! As she finished and retired victorious, a roar of applause shook the house, and every man ordered "drinks for the crowd" in one and the same breath. The lesson was entirely sufficient. The reign of terror was over, and the Arkansas domination broken for good. During the rest of the season of island captivity, there was one man who sat apart in a state of permanent humiliation, never mixing in any quarrel or uttering a boast, and never resenting the insults the once cringing crew now constantly leveled at him, and that man was "Arkansas." By the fifth or sixth morning the waters had subsided from the land, but the stream in the old river bed was still high and swift and there was no possibility of crossing it. On the eighth it was still too high for an entirely safe passage, but life in the inn had become next to insupportable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc., and so we made an effort to get away. In the midst of a heavy snow-storm we embarked in a canoe, taking our saddles aboard and towing our horses after us by their halters. The Prussian, Ollendorff, was in the bow, with a paddle, Ballou paddled in the middle, and I sat in the stern holding the halters. When the horses lost their footing and began to swim, Ollendorff got frightened, for there was great danger that the horses would make our aim uncertain, and it was plain that if we failed to land at a certain spot the current would throw us off and almost surely cast us into the main Carson, which was a boiling torrent, now. Such a catastrophe would be death, in all probability, for we would be swept to sea in the "Sink" or overturned and drowned. We warned Ollendorff to keep his wits about him and handle himself carefully, but it was useless; the moment the bow touched the bank, he made a spring and the canoe whirled upside down in ten-foot water. Ollendorff seized some brush and dragged himself ashore, but Ballou and I had to swim for it, encumbered with our overcoats. But we held on to the canoe, and although we were washed down nearly to the Carson, we managed to push the boat ashore and make a safe landing. We were cold and water-soaked, but safe. The horses made a landing, too, but our saddles were gone, of course. We tied the animals in the sage-brush and there they had to stay for twenty-four hours. We baled out the canoe and ferried over some food and blankets for them, but we slept one more night in the inn before making another venture on our journey. The next morning it was still snowing furiously when we got away with our new stock of saddles and accoutrements. We mounted and started. The snow lay so deep on the ground that there was no sign of a road perceptible, and the snow-fall was so thick that we could not see more than a hundred yards ahead, else we could have guided our course by the mountain ranges. The case looked dubious, but Ollendorff said his instinct was as sensitive as any compass, and that he could "strike a bee-line" for Carson city and never diverge from it. He said that if he were to straggle a single point out of the true line his instinct would assail him like an outraged conscience. Consequently we dropped into his wake happy and content. For half an hour we poked along warily enough, but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh trail, and Ollendorff shouted proudly: "I knew I was as dead certain as a compass, boys! Here we are, right in somebody's tracks that will hunt the way for us without any trouble. Let's hurry up and join company with the party." So we put the horses into as much of a trot as the deep snow would allow, and before long it was evident that we were gaining on our predecessors, for the tracks grew more distinct. We hurried along, and at the end of an hour the tracks looked still newer and fresher--but what surprised us was, that the number of travelers in advance of us seemed to steadily increase. We wondered how so large a party came to be traveling at such a time and in such a solitude. Somebody suggested that it must be a company of soldiers from the fort, and so we accepted that solution and jogged along a little faster still, for they could not be far off now. But the tracks still multiplied, and we began to think the platoon of soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regiment--Ballou said they had already increased to five hundred! Presently he stopped his horse and said: "Boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circussing round and round in a circle for more than two hours, out here in this blind desert! By George this is perfectly hydraulic!" Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. He called Ollendorff all manner of hard names--said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much as a logarythm!" We certainly had been following our own tracks. Ollendorff and his "mental compass" were in disgrace from that moment. After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again, with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall. While we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and took his pedestrian way Carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song about his "sister and his brother" and "the child in the grave with its mother," and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white oblivion. He was never heard of again. He no doubt got bewildered and lost, and Fatigue delivered him over to Sleep and Sleep betrayed him to Death. Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became exhausted and dropped. Presently the Overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came. We hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of locality. But our horses were no match for the fresh stage team. We were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep ruts the wheels made for a guide. By this time it was three in the afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came--and not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a cellar door, as is its habit in that country. The snowfall was still as thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us; but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks. Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height--three or four feet; they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side of it--an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of the mounds. But we had not thought of this. Then imagine the chilly thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away from it all the time. Having a cake of ice slipped down one's back is placid comfort compared to it. There was a sudden leap and stir of blood that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the drowsing activities in our minds and bodies. We were alive and awake at once--and shaking and quaking with consternation, too. There was an instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of the road-bed. Useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly could not with one's nose nearly against it. CHAPTER XXXII. We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof. We tested this by walking off in various directions--the regular snow-mounds and the regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the true road, and that the others had found only false ones. Plainly the situation was desperate. We were cold and stiff and the horses were tired. We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning. This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to hopeless if we kept on. All agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us, now, and so we set about building it. We could find no matches, and so we tried to make shift with the pistols. Not a man in the party had ever tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that it could be done, and without any trouble--because every man in the party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and believed that other common book-fraud about Indians and lost hunters making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together. We huddled together on our knees in the deep snow, and the horses put their noses together and bowed their patient heads over us; and while the feathery flakes eddied down and turned us into a group of white statuary, we proceeded with the momentous experiment. We broke twigs from a sage bush and piled them on a little cleared place in the shelter of our bodies. In the course of ten or fifteen minutes all was ready, and then, while conversation ceased and our pulses beat low with anxious suspense, Ollendorff applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile clear out of the county! It was the flattest failure that ever was. This was distressing, but it paled before a greater horror--the horses were gone! I had been appointed to hold the bridles, but in my absorbing anxiety over the pistol experiment I had unconsciously dropped them and the released animals had walked off in the storm. It was useless to try to follow them, for their footfalls could make no sound, and one could pass within two yards of the creatures and never see them. We gave them up without an effort at recovering them, and cursed the lying books that said horses would stay by their masters for protection and companionship in a distressful time like ours. We were miserable enough, before; we felt still more forlorn, now. Patiently, but with blighted hope, we broke more sticks and piled them, and once more the Prussian shot them into annihilation. Plainly, to light a fire with a pistol was an art requiring practice and experience, and the middle of a desert at midnight in a snow-storm was not a good place or time for the acquiring of the accomplishment. We gave it up and tried the other. Each man took a couple of sticks and fell to chafing them together. At the end of half an hour we were thoroughly chilled, and so were the sticks. We bitterly execrated the Indians, the hunters and the books that had betrayed us with the silly device, and wondered dismally what was next to be done. At this critical moment Mr. Ballou fished out four matches from the rubbish of an overlooked pocket. To have found four gold bars would have seemed poor and cheap good luck compared to this. One cannot think how good a match looks under such circumstances--or how lovable and precious, and sacredly beautiful to the eye. This time we gathered sticks with high hopes; and when Mr. Ballou prepared to light the first match, there was an amount of interest centred upon him that pages of writing could not describe. The match burned hopefully a moment, and then went out. It could not have carried more regret with it if it had been a human life. The next match simply flashed and died. The wind puffed the third one out just as it was on the imminent verge of success. We gathered together closer than ever, and developed a solicitude that was rapt and painful, as Mr. Ballou scratched our last hope on his leg. It lit, burned blue and sickly, and then budded into a robust flame. Shading it with his hands, the old gentleman bent gradually down and every heart went with him--everybody, too, for that matter--and blood and breath stood still. The flame touched the sticks at last, took gradual hold upon them--hesitated--took a stronger hold --hesitated again--held its breath five heart-breaking seconds, then gave a sort of human gasp and went out. Nobody said a word for several minutes. It was a solemn sort of silence; even the wind put on a stealthy, sinister quiet, and made no more noise than the falling flakes of snow. Finally a sad-voiced conversation began, and it was soon apparent that in each of our hearts lay the conviction that this was our last night with the living. I had so hoped that I was the only one who felt so. When the others calmly acknowledged their conviction, it sounded like the summons itself. Ollendorff said: "Brothers, let us die together. And let us go without one hard feeling towards each other. Let us forget and forgive bygones. I know that you have felt hard towards me for turning over the canoe, and for knowing too much and leading you round and round in the snow--but I meant well; forgive me. I acknowledge freely that I have had hard feelings against Mr. Ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarythm, which is a thing I do not know what, but no doubt a thing considered disgraceful and unbecoming in America, and it has scarcely been out of my mind and has hurt me a great deal--but let it go; I forgive Mr. Ballou with all my heart, and--" Poor Ollendorff broke down and the tears came. He was not alone, for I was crying too, and so was Mr. Ballou. Ollendorff got his voice again and forgave me for things I had done and said. Then he got out his bottle of whisky and said that whether he lived or died he would never touch another drop. He said he had given up all hope of life, and although ill-prepared, was ready to submit humbly to his fate; that he wished he could be spared a little longer, not for any selfish reason, but to make a thorough reform in his character, and by devoting himself to helping the poor, nursing the sick, and pleading with the people to guard themselves against the evils of intemperance, make his life a beneficent example to the young, and lay it down at last with the precious reflection that it had not been lived in vain. He ended by saying that his reform should begin at this moment, even here in the presence of death, since no longer time was to be vouchsafed wherein to prosecute it to men's help and benefit--and with that he threw away the bottle of whisky. Mr. Ballou made remarks of similar purport, and began the reform he could not live to continue, by throwing away the ancient pack of cards that had solaced our captivity during the flood and made it bearable. He said he never gambled, but still was satisfied that the meddling with cards in any way was immoral and injurious, and no man could be wholly pure and blemishless without eschewing them. "And therefore," continued he, "in doing this act I already feel more in sympathy with that spiritual saturnalia necessary to entire and obsolete reform." These rolling syllables touched him as no intelligible eloquence could have done, and the old man sobbed with a mournfulness not unmingled with satisfaction. My own remarks were of the same tenor as those of my comrades, and I know that the feelings that prompted them were heartfelt and sincere. We were all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the presence of death and without hope. I threw away my pipe, and in doing it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden me like a tyrant all my days. While I yet talked, the thought of the good I might have done in the world and the still greater good I might now do, with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me if I could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me and the tears came again. We put our arms about each other's necks and awaited the warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing. It came stealing over us presently, and then we bade each other a last farewell. A delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding senses, while the snow-flakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered body. Oblivion came. The battle of life was done. CHAPTER XXXIII. I do not know how long I was in a state of forgetfulness, but it seemed an age. A vague consciousness grew upon me by degrees, and then came a gathering anguish of pain in my limbs and through all my body. I shuddered. The thought flitted through my brain, "this is death--this is the hereafter." Then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said, with bitterness: "Will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind?" It was Ballou--at least it was a towzled snow image in a sitting posture, with Ballou's voice. I rose up, and there in the gray dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still saddled and bridled horses! An arched snow-drift broke up, now, and Ollendorff emerged from it, and the three of us sat and stared at the houses without speaking a word. We really had nothing to say. We were like the profane man who could not "do the subject justice," the whole situation was so painfully ridiculous and humiliating that words were tame and we did not know where to commence anyhow. The joy in our hearts at our deliverance was poisoned; well-nigh dissipated, indeed. We presently began to grow pettish by degrees, and sullen; and then, angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at everything in general, we moodily dusted the snow from our clothing and in unsociable single file plowed our way to the horses, unsaddled them, and sought shelter in the station. I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it. We actually went into camp in a snow-drift in a desert, at midnight in a storm, forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn. For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us. Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations. After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back. The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever. Presently an uneasiness came over me--grew upon me--assailed me without ceasing. Alas, my regeneration was not complete--I wanted to smoke! I resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak. I wandered away alone and wrestled with myself an hour. I recalled my promises of reform and preached to myself persuasively, upbraidingly, exhaustively. But it was all vain, I shortly found myself sneaking among the snow-drifts hunting for my pipe. I discovered it after a considerable search, and crept away to hide myself and enjoy it. I remained behind the barn a good while, asking myself how I would feel if my braver, stronger, truer comrades should catch me in my degradation. At last I lit the pipe, and no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did then. I was ashamed of being in my own pitiful company. Still dreading discovery, I felt that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so I turned the corner. As I turned the one corner, smoking, Ollendorff turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat unconscious Ballou deep in a game of "solitaire" with the old greasy cards! Absurdity could go no farther. We shook hands and agreed to say no more about "reform" and "examples to the rising generation." The station we were at was at the verge of the Twenty-six-Mile Desert. If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds. While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never heard of afterward. We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest. This rest, together with preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great land-slide case of Hyde vs. Morgan--an episode which is famous in Nevada to this day. After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired. CHAPTER XXXIV. The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe Valleys--very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous land-slides commence. The reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain's front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place. General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of Territorial officers, to be United States Attorney. He considered himself a lawyer of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it--partly for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was Territorially meagre (which is a strong expression). Now the older citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way--when it gets in the way they snub it. Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a practical joke. One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe's door in Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his horse. He seemed much excited. He told the General that he wanted him to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he achieved a victory. And then, with violent gestures and a world of profanity, he poured out his grief. He said it was pretty well known that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more customary term is) in Washoe District, and making a successful thing of it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above it on the mountain side. And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded land-slides had come and slid Morgan's ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet. Morgan was in possession and refused to vacate the premises--said he was occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else's--and said the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate. "And when I reminded him," said Hyde, weeping, "that it was on top of my ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me why didn't I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him a-coming! Why didn't I stay on it, the blathering lunatic--by George, when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side --splinters, and cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!--trees going end over end in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!--and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn't stay and hold possession! Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out'n the county in three jumps exactly. "But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and won't move off'n that ranch--says it's his'n and he's going to keep it--likes it better'n he did when it was higher up the hill. Mad! Well, I've been so mad for two days I couldn't find my way to town--been wandering around in the brush in a starving condition--got anything here to drink, General? But I'm here now, and I'm a-going to law. You hear me!" Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man's feelings so outraged as were the General's. He said he had never heard of such high-handed conduct in all his life as this Morgan's. And he said there was no use in going to law--Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was --nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge listen to it. Hyde said that right there was where he was mistaken--everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to be tried before a referee, and ex-Governor Roop had already been appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall near the hotel at two that afternoon. The General was amazed. He said he had suspected before that the people of that Territory were fools, and now he knew it. But he said rest easy, rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain as if the conflict were already over. Hyde wiped away his tears and left. At two in the afternoon referee Roop's Court opened and Roop appeared throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his fellow-conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after all, that this was merely a joke. An unearthly stillness prevailed, for at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command: "Order in the Court!" And the sheriffs promptly echoed it. Presently the General elbowed his way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms full of law-books, and on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and it trickled pleasantly through his whole system: "Way for the United States Attorney!" The witnesses were called--legislators, high government officers, ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes. Three fourths of them were called by the defendant Morgan, but no matter, their testimony invariably went in favor of the plaintiff Hyde. Each new witness only added new testimony to the absurdity of a man's claiming to own another man's property because his farm had slid down on top of it. Then the Morgan lawyers made their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones --they did really nothing to help the Morgan cause. And now the General, with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he shouted, and roared, and howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the Glorious Bird of America and the principles of eternal justice! [Applause.] When the General sat down, he did it with the conviction that if there was anything in good strong testimony, a great speech and believing and admiring countenances all around, Mr. Morgan's case was killed. Ex-Governor Roop leant his head upon his hand for some minutes, thinking, and the still audience waited for his decision. Then he got up and stood erect, with bended head, and thought again. Then he walked the floor with long, deliberate strides, his chin in his hand, and still the audience waited. At last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and began impressively: "Gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day. This is no ordinary case. On the contrary it is plain that it is the most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide. Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in favor of the plaintiff Hyde. I have listened also to the remarks of counsel, with high interest--and especially will I commend the masterly and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the plaintiff. But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven. It is plain to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this defendant's ranch for a purpose. We are but creatures, and we must submit. If Heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this marked and wonderful manner; and if Heaven, dissatisfied with the position of the Morgan ranch upon the mountain side, has chosen to remove it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of the act or inquire into the reasons that prompted it. No--Heaven created the ranches and it is Heaven's prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment with them around at its pleasure. It is for us to submit, without repining. "I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle. Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintiff, Richard Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God! And from this decision there is no appeal." Buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the court-room frantic with indignation. He pronounced Roop to be a miraculous fool, an inspired idiot. In all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated with Roop upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out some sort of modification of the verdict. Roop yielded at last and got up to walk. He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up happily and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch underneath the new Morgan ranch still belonged to Hyde, that his title to the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was of opinion that Hyde had a right to dig it out from under there and-- The General never waited to hear the end of it. He was always an impatient and irascible man, that way. At the end of two months the fact that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding. CHAPTER XXXV. When we finally left for Esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the company in the person of Capt. John Nye, the Governor's brother. He had a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle. This is a combination which gives immortality to conversation. Capt. John never suffered the talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the journey. In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two other endowments of a marked character. One was a singular "handiness" about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or organizing a political party, down to sewing on buttons, shoeing a horse, or setting a broken leg, or a hen. Another was a spirit of accommodation that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties and perplexities of anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and all times, and dispose of them with admirable facility and alacrity--hence he always managed to find vacant beds in crowded inns, and plenty to eat in the emptiest larders. And finally, wherever he met a man, woman or child, in camp, inn or desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been acquainted with a relative of the same. Such another traveling comrade was never seen before. I cannot forbear giving a specimen of the way in which he overcame difficulties. On the second day out, we arrived, very tired and hungry, at a poor little inn in the desert, and were told that the house was full, no provisions on hand, and neither hay nor barley to spare for the horses--must move on. The rest of us wanted to hurry on while it was yet light, but Capt. John insisted on stopping awhile. We dismounted and entered. There was no welcome for us on any face. Capt. John began his blandishments, and within twenty minutes he had accomplished the following things, viz.: found old acquaintances in three teamsters; discovered that he used to go to school with the landlord's mother; recognized his wife as a lady whose life he had saved once in California, by stopping her runaway horse; mended a child's broken toy and won the favor of its mother, a guest of the inn; helped the hostler bleed a horse, and prescribed for another horse that had the "heaves"; treated the entire party three times at the landlord's bar; produced a later paper than anybody had seen for a week and sat himself down to read the news to a deeply interested audience. The result, summed up, was as follows: The hostler found plenty of feed for our horses; we had a trout supper, an exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and a surprising breakfast in the morning--and when we left, we left lamented by all! Capt. John had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly valuable ones to offset them with. Esmeralda was in many respects another Humboldt, but in a little more forward state. The claims we had been paying assessments on were entirely worthless, and we threw them away. The principal one cropped out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired Board of Directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the ledge. The tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then strike the ledge at the same dept that a shaft twelve feet deep would have reached! The Board were living on the "assessments." [N.B.--This hint comes too late for the enlightenment of New York silver miners; they have already learned all about this neat trick by experience.] The Board had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren of silver as a curbstone. This reminiscence calls to mind Jim Townsend's tunnel. He had paid assessments on a mine called the "Daley" till he was well-nigh penniless. Finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel two hundred and fifty feet on the Daley, and Townsend went up on the hill to look into matters. He found the Daley cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly sharp-pointed peak, and a couple of men up there "facing" the proposed tunnel. Townsend made a calculation. Then he said to the men: "So you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred and fifty feet to strike this ledge?" "Yes, sir." "Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?" "Why no--how is that?" "Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side; and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your tunnel on trestle-work!" The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous. We took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but never finished any of them. We had to do a certain amount of work on each to "hold" it, else other parties could seize our property after the expiration of ten days. We were always hunting up new claims and doing a little work on them and then waiting for a buyer--who never came. We never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton; and as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for working ore and extracting the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none returned to take its place. We lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves; and altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one--for we never ceased to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day. At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be borrowed on the best security at less than eight per cent a month (I being without the security, too), I abandoned mining and went to milling. That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board. CHAPTER XXXVI. I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it. We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark. This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam. Six tall, upright rods of iron, as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an iron box called a "battery." Each of these rods or stamps weighed six hundred pounds. One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the battery. The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it to a creamy paste. The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great tubs warmed by super-heated steam--amalgamating pans, they are called. The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving "mullers." A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also, about every half hour, through a buckskin sack. Quantities of coarse salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and silver and would not let it unite with the quicksilver. All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly. Streams of dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad wooden troughs to the ravine. One would not suppose that atoms of gold and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and little obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here and there across the troughs also. These riffles had to be cleaned and the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious accumulations--and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day. There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any idle time in that mill. There was always something to do. It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full force of his doom to "earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." Every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop some pulp out of the pans, and tediously "wash" it in a horn spoon--wash it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom. If they were soft and yielding, the pan needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some other chemical rubbish to assist digestion; if they were crisp to the touch and would retain a dint, they were freighted with all the silver and gold they could seize and hold, and consequently the pan needed a fresh charge of quicksilver. When there was nothing else to do, one could always "screen tailings." That is to say, he could shovel up the dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and dash it against an upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and prepare it for working over. The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and this included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the methods employed, involved the principle of milling ore without "screening the tailings." Of all recreations in the world, screening tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most undesirable. At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we "cleaned up." That is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries, and washed the mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating mass of quicksilver, with its imprisoned treasures. This we made into heavy, compact snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap for inspection. Making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold ring--that and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded the ring with the same facility with which water saturates a sponge--separated its particles and the ring crumbled to pieces. We put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a roasting heat. The quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through the pipe into the pail, and the water turned it into good wholesome quicksilver again. Quicksilver is very costly, and they never waste it. On opening the retort, there was our week's work--a lump of pure white, frosty looking silver, twice as large as a man's head. Perhaps a fifth of the mass was gold, but the color of it did not show--would not have shown if two thirds of it had been gold. We melted it up and made a solid brick of it by pouring it into an iron brick-mould. By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained. This mill was but one of many others in operation at the time. The first one in Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and was a small insignificant affair and compared most unfavorably with some of the immense establishments afterwards located at Virginia City and elsewhere. From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the "fire-assay"--a method used to determine the proportions of gold, silver and base metals in the mass. This is an interesting process. The chip is hammered out as thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you weigh a two-inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the paper with a course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take marked notice of the addition. Then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake of silver and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel, made by compressing bone ashes into a cup-shape in a steel mold. The base metals oxydize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the cupel. A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left behind, and by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the proportion of base metal the brick contains. He has to separate the gold from the silver now. The button is hammered out flat and thin, put in the furnace and kept some time at a red heat; after cooling it off it is rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric acid; the acid dissolves the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to be weighed on its own merits. Then salt water is poured into the vessel containing the dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form again and sinks to the bottom. Nothing now remains but to weigh it; then the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick are known, and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its surface. The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the contrary. I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz for an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which was rich in gold and silver--and this was reserved for a fire-assay! Of course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would yield hundreds of dollars--and on such assays many an utterly worthless mine was sold. Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it, occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable. One assayer got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he acquired almost a monopoly of the business. But like all men who achieve success, he became an object of envy and suspicion. The other assayers entered into a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens into the secret in order to show that they meant fairly. Then they broke a little fragment off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take it to the popular scientist and get it assayed. In the course of an hour the result came--whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield $1,184.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold! Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the popular assayer left town "between two days." I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business one week. I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and washing blankets--still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary. He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want? I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times. I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to those days and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand. Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the population, about the mysterious and wonderful "cement mine," and to make preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go and help hunt for it. CHAPTER XXXVII. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvellous Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie. Every now and then it would be reported that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement--because he must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him. In less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules and donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of Whiteman. But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the miners ran out, and they would have to go back home. I have known it reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that Whiteman had just passed through, and in two hours the streets, so quiet before, would be swarming with men and animals. Every individual would be trying to be very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that W. had passed through. And long before daylight--this in the dead of Winter--the stampede would be complete, the camp deserted, and the whole population gone chasing after W. The tradition was that in the early immigration, more than twenty years ago, three young Germans, brothers, who had survived an Indian massacre on the Plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find California before they starved, or died of fatigue. And in a gorge in the mountains they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of dull yellow metal. They saw that it was gold, and that here was a fortune to be acquired in a single day. The vein was about as wide as a curbstone, and fully two thirds of it was pure gold. Every pound of the wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $200. Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it, and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started westward again. But troubles thickened about them. In their wanderings one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on and leave him to die in the wilderness. Another, worn out and starving, gave up by and by, and laid down to die, but after two or three weeks of incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of California exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings. He had thrown away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set everybody wild with excitement. However, he had had enough of the cement country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither. He was entirely content to work on a farm for wages. But he gave Whiteman his map, and described the cement region as well as he could and thus transferred the curse to that gentleman--for when I had my one accidental glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years. Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had not. I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive nature. Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice of fruit cake. The privilege of working such a mine one week would be sufficient for a man of reasonable desires. A new partner of ours, a Mr. Higbie, knew Whiteman well by sight, and a friend of ours, a Mr. Van Dorn, was well acquainted with him, and not only that, but had Whiteman's promise that he should have a private hint in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition. Van Dorn had promised to extend the hint to us. One evening Higbie came in greatly excited, and said he felt certain he had recognized Whiteman, up town, disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication. In a little while Van Dorn arrived and confirmed the news; and so we gathered in our cabin and with heads close together arranged our plans in impressive whispers. We were to leave town quietly, after midnight, in two or three small parties, so as not to attract attention, and meet at dawn on the "divide" overlooking Mono Lake, eight or nine miles distant. We were to make no noise after starting, and not speak above a whisper under any circumstances. It was believed that for once Whiteman's presence was unknown in the town and his expedition unsuspected. Our conclave broke up at nine o'clock, and we set about our preparation diligently and with profound secrecy. At eleven o'clock we saddled our horses, hitched them with their long riatas (or lassos), and then brought out a side of bacon, a sack of beans, a small sack of coffee, some sugar, a hundred pounds of flour in sacks, some tin cups and a coffee pot, frying pan and some few other necessary articles. All these things were "packed" on the back of a led horse--and whoever has not been taught, by a Spanish adept, to pack an animal, let him never hope to do the thing by natural smartness. That is impossible. Higbie had had some experience, but was not perfect. He put on the pack saddle (a thing like a saw-buck), piled the property on it and then wound a rope all over and about it and under it, "every which way," taking a hitch in it every now and then, and occasionally surging back on it till the horse's sides sunk in and he gasped for breath--but every time the lashings grew tight in one place they loosened in another. We never did get the load tight all over, but we got it so that it would do, after a fashion, and then we started, in single file, close order, and without a word. It was a dark night. We kept the middle of the road, and proceeded in a slow walk past the rows of cabins, and whenever a miner came to his door I trembled for fear the light would shine on us an excite curiosity. But nothing happened. We began the long winding ascent of the canyon, toward the "divide," and presently the cabins began to grow infrequent, and the intervals between them wider and wider, and then I began to breathe tolerably freely and feel less like a thief and a murderer. I was in the rear, leading the pack horse. As the ascent grew steeper he grew proportionately less satisfied with his cargo, and began to pull back on his riata occasionally and delay progress. My comrades were passing out of sight in the gloom. I was getting anxious. I coaxed and bullied the pack horse till I presently got him into a trot, and then the tin cups and pans strung about his person frightened him and he ran. His riata was wound around the pummel of my saddle, and so, as he went by he dragged me from my horse and the two animals traveled briskly on without me. But I was not alone--the loosened cargo tumbled overboard from the pack horse and fell close to me. It was abreast of almost the last cabin. A miner came out and said: "Hello!" I was thirty steps from him, and knew he could not see me, it was so very dark in the shadow of the mountain. So I lay still. Another head appeared in the light of the cabin door, and presently the two men walked toward me. They stopped within ten steps of me, and one said: "Sh! Listen." I could not have been in a more distressed state if I had been escaping justice with a price on my head. Then the miners appeared to sit down on a boulder, though I could not see them distinctly enough to be very sure what they did. One said: "I heard a noise, as plain as I ever heard anything. It seemed to be about there--" A stone whizzed by my head. I flattened myself out in the dust like a postage stamp, and thought to myself if he mended his aim ever so little he would probably hear another noise. In my heart, now, I execrated secret expeditions. I promised myself that this should be my last, though the Sierras were ribbed with cement veins. Then one of the men said: "I'll tell you what! Welch knew what he was talking about when he said he saw Whiteman to-day. I heard horses--that was the noise. I am going down to Welch's, right away." They left and I was glad. I did not care whither they went, so they went. I was willing they should visit Welch, and the sooner the better. As soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the gloom; they had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast again. We remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and as day broke we reached the "divide" and joined Van Dorn. Then we journeyed down into the valley of the Lake, and feeling secure, we halted to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry. Three hours later the rest of the population filed over the "divide" in a long procession, and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the Lake! Whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at least one thing was certain--the secret was out and Whiteman would not enter upon a search for the cement mine this time. We were filled with chagrin. We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious Lake. Mono, it is sometimes called, and sometimes the "Dead Sea of California." It is one of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land, but it is hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip. On the morning of our second day, we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on the borders of the Lake, where a stream of fresh, ice-cold water entered it from the mountain side, and then we went regularly into camp. We hired a large boat and two shot-guns from a lonely ranchman who lived some ten miles further on, and made ready for comfort and recreation. We soon got thoroughly acquainted with the Lake and all its peculiarities. CHAPTER XXXVIII. Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth --is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied. The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week's washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies. But it was bad judgment. In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire. The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barked and howled as he went--and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him--for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise. He ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before. He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet. This was about nine years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day. A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though. It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw. [There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it. This joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.] There are no fish in Mono Lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs --nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. Then there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly. These settle on the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see there a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake--a belt of flies one hundred miles long. If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look dense, like a cloud. You can hold them under water as long as you please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it. When you let them go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way. Providence leaves nothing to go by chance. All things have their uses and their part and proper place in Nature's economy: the ducks eat the flies--the flies eat the worms--the Indians eat all three--the wild cats eat the Indians--the white folks eat the wild cats--and thus all things are lovely. Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. One would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas. And in this connection let us observe another instance of Nature's wisdom. The islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava, coated over with ashes and pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that would burn; and sea-gull's eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless they be cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have made during the past fifteen years. Within ten feet of the boiling spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome. So, in that island you get your board and washing free of charge--and if nature had gone further and furnished a nice American hotel clerk who was crusty and disobliging, and didn't know anything about the time tables, or the railroad routes--or--anything--and was proud of it--I would not wish for a more desirable boarding-house. Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery. There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake--and these are, the breaking up of one Winter and the beginning of the next. More than once (in Esmeralda) I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock, and seen the snow fall fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o'clock at night. Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single month in the year, in the little town of Mono. So uncertain is the climate in Summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and her snow shoes under the other. When they have a Fourth of July procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar. And it is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth--wore them out eating gin cocktails and brandy punches. I do not endorse that statement--I simply give it for what it is worth--and it is worth--well, I should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining himself. But I do endorse the snow on the Fourth of July--because I know that to be true. CHAPTER XXXIX. About seven o'clock one blistering hot morning--for it was now dead summer time--Higbie and I took the boat and started on a voyage of discovery to the two islands. We had often longed to do this, but had been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe enough to capsize an ordinary row-boat like ours without great difficulty--and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire, and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea. It was called twelve miles, straight out to the islands--a long pull and a warm one--but the morning was so quiet and sunny, and the lake so smooth and glassy and dead, that we could not resist the temptation. So we filled two large tin canteens with water (since we were not acquainted with the locality of the spring said to exist on the large island), and started. Higbie's brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our destination we judged that we had pulled nearer fifteen miles than twelve. We landed on the big island and went ashore. We tried the water in the canteens, now, and found that the sun had spoiled it; it was so brackish that we could not drink it; so we poured it out and began a search for the spring--for thirst augments fast as soon as it is apparent that one has no means at hand of quenching it. The island was a long, moderately high hill of ashes--nothing but gray ashes and pumice-stone, in which we sunk to our knees at every step--and all around the top was a forbidding wall of scorched and blasted rocks. When we reached the top and got within the wall, we found simply a shallow, far-reaching basin, carpeted with ashes, and here and there a patch of fine sand. In places, picturesque jets of steam shot up out of crevices, giving evidence that although this ancient crater had gone out of active business, there was still some fire left in its furnaces. Close to one of these jets of steam stood the only tree on the island--a small pine of most graceful shape and most faultless symmetry; its color was a brilliant green, for the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always moist. It contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings. It was like a cheerful spirit in a mourning household. We hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the island (two or three miles), and crossing it twice--climbing ash-hills patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture, plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust. But we found nothing but solitude, ashes and a heart-breaking silence. Finally we noticed that the wind had risen, and we forgot our thirst in a solicitude of greater importance; for, the lake being quiet, we had not taken pains about securing the boat. We hurried back to a point overlooking our landing place, and then--but mere words cannot describe our dismay--the boat was gone! The chances were that there was not another boat on the entire lake. The situation was not comfortable--in truth, to speak plainly, it was frightful. We were prisoners on a desolate island, in aggravating proximity to friends who were for the present helpless to aid us; and what was still more uncomfortable was the reflection that we had neither food nor water. But presently we sighted the boat. It was drifting along, leisurely, about fifty yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea. It drifted, and continued to drift, but at the same safe distance from land, and we walked along abreast it and waited for fortune to favor us. At the end of an hour it approached a jutting cape, and Higbie ran ahead and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault. If we failed there, there was no hope for us. It was driving gradually shoreward all the time, now; but whether it was driving fast enough to make the connection or not was the momentous question. When it got within thirty steps of Higbie I was so excited that I fancied I could hear my own heart beat. When, a little later, it dragged slowly along and seemed about to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed as if my heart stood still; and when it was exactly abreast him and began to widen away, and he still standing like a watching statue, I knew my heart did stop. But when he gave a great spring, the next instant, and lit fairly in the stern, I discharged a war-whoop that woke the solitudes! But it dulled my enthusiasm, presently, when he told me he had not been caring whether the boat came within jumping distance or not, so that it passed within eight or ten yards of him, for he had made up his mind to shut his eyes and mouth and swim that trifling distance. Imbecile that I was, I had not thought of that. It was only a long swim that could be fatal. The sea was running high and the storm increasing. It was growing late, too--three or four in the afternoon. Whether to venture toward the mainland or not, was a question of some moment. But we were so distressed by thirst that we decide to try it, and so Higbie fell to work and I took the steering-oar. When we had pulled a mile, laboriously, we were evidently in serious peril, for the storm had greatly augmented; the billows ran very high and were capped with foaming crests, the heavens were hung with black, and the wind blew with great fury. We would have gone back, now, but we did not dare to turn the boat around, because as soon as she got in the trough of the sea she would upset, of course. Our only hope lay in keeping her head-on to the seas. It was hard work to do this, she plunged so, and so beat and belabored the billows with her rising and falling bows. Now and then one of Higbie's oars would trip on the top of a wave, and the other one would snatch the boat half around in spite of my cumbersome steering apparatus. We were drenched by the sprays constantly, and the boat occasionally shipped water. By and by, powerful as my comrade was, his great exertions began to tell on him, and he was anxious that I should change places with him till he could rest a little. But I told him this was impossible; for if the steering oar were dropped a moment while we changed, the boat would slue around into the trough of the sea, capsize, and in less than five minutes we would have a hundred gallons of soap-suds in us and be eaten up so quickly that we could not even be present at our own inquest. But things cannot last always. Just as the darkness shut down we came booming into port, head on. Higbie dropped his oars to hurrah--I dropped mine to help--the sea gave the boat a twist, and over she went! The agony that alkali water inflicts on bruises, chafes and blistered hands, is unspeakable, and nothing but greasing all over will modify it --but we ate, drank and slept well, that night, notwithstanding. In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply imbedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact --for it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion. At the end of a week we adjourned to the Sierras on a fishing excursion, and spent several days in camp under snowy Castle Peak, and fished successfully for trout in a bright, miniature lake whose surface was between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea; cooling ourselves during the hot August noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet deep, under whose sheltering edges fine grass and dainty flowers flourished luxuriously; and at night entertaining ourselves by almost freezing to death. Then we returned to Mono Lake, and finding that the cement excitement was over for the present, packed up and went back to Esmeralda. Mr. Ballou reconnoitred awhile, and not liking the prospect, set out alone for Humboldt. About this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of interest to me, from the fact that it came so near "instigating" my funeral. At a time when an Indian attack had been expected, the citizens hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand when wanted. A neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never thought of it again. We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub. The ancient stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face. Finally it occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of water. Then he returned to his tub. I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind. Fragments of it fell in the streets full two hundred yards away. Nearly a third of the shed roof over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond. I was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless. But the Indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort. He simply stopped washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked: "Mph! Dam stove heap gone!"--and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do. I will explain, that "heap" is "Injun-English" for "very much." The reader will perceive the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance. CHAPTER XL. I now come to a curious episode--the most curious, I think, that had yet accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career. Out of a hillside toward the upper end of the town, projected a wall of reddish looking quartz-croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that extended deep down into the earth, of course. It was owned by a company entitled the "Wide West." There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the rock that came from it--and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing extraordinary. I will remark here, that although to the inexperienced stranger all the quartz of a particular "district" looks about alike, an old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock, separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article. All at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement. In mining parlance the Wide West had "struck it rich!" Everybody went to see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of people about the Wide West shaft that a stranger would have supposed there was a mass meeting in session there. No other topic was discussed but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else. Every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous result. It was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of "native" silver. Higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his amazement was beyond description. Wide West stock soared skywards. It was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars a foot, and promptly refused. We have all had the "blues"--the mere sky-blues--but mine were indigo, now--because I did not own in the Wide West. The world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief. I lost my appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything. Still I had to stay, and listen to other people's rejoicings, because I had no money to get out of the camp with. The Wide West company put a stop to the carrying away of "specimens," and well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some consequence. To show the exceeding value of the ore, I will remark that a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it "packed" it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the mountains, to San Francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that would richly compensate him for his trouble. The Wide West people also commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose. I kept up my "blue" meditations and Higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a different sort. He puzzled over the "rock," examined it with a glass, inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula: "It is not Wide West rock!" He said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the Wide West shaft if he got shot for it. I was wretched, and did not care whether he got a look into it or not. He failed that day, and tried again at night; failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again. Then he lay in ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once, but was premature--one of the men came back for something; tried it again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and slid down the shaft. He disappeared in the gloom of a "side drift" just as a head appeared in the mouth of the shaft and somebody shouted "Hello!"--which he did not answer. He was not disturbed any more. An hour later he entered the cabin, hot, red, and ready to burst with smothered excitement, and exclaimed in a stage whisper: "I knew it! We are rich! IT'S A BLIND LEAD!" I thought the very earth reeled under me. Doubt--conviction--doubt again--exultation--hope, amazement, belief, unbelief--every emotion imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain, and I could not speak a word. After a moment or two of this mental fury, I shook myself to rights, and said: "Say it again!" "It's blind lead!" "Cal, let's--let's burn the house--or kill somebody! Let's get out where there's room to hurrah! But what is the use? It is a hundred times too good to be true." "It's a blind lead, for a million!--hanging wall--foot wall--clay casings--everything complete!" He swung his hat and gave three cheers, and I cast doubt to the winds and chimed in with a will. For I was worth a million dollars, and did not care "whether school kept or not!" But perhaps I ought to explain. A "blind lead" is a lead or ledge that does not "crop out" above the surface. A miner does not know where to look for such leads, but they are often stumbled upon by accident in the course of driving a tunnel or sinking a shaft. Higbie knew the Wide West rock perfectly well, and the more he had examined the new developments the more he was satisfied that the ore could not have come from the Wide West vein. And so had it occurred to him alone, of all the camp, that there was a blind lead down in the shaft, and that even the Wide West people themselves did not suspect it. He was right. When he went down the shaft, he found that the blind lead held its independent way through the Wide West vein, cutting it diagonally, and that it was enclosed in its own well-defined casing-rocks and clay. Hence it was public property. Both leads being perfectly well defined, it was easy for any miner to see which one belonged to the Wide West and which did not. We thought it well to have a strong friend, and therefore we brought the foreman of the Wide West to our cabin that night and revealed the great surprise to him. Higbie said: "We are going to take possession of this blind lead, record it and establish ownership, and then forbid the Wide West company to take out any more of the rock. You cannot help your company in this matter --nobody can help them. I will go into the shaft with you and prove to your entire satisfaction that it is a blind lead. Now we propose to take you in with us, and claim the blind lead in our three names. What do you say?" What could a man say who had an opportunity to simply stretch forth his hand and take possession of a fortune without risk of any kind and without wronging any one or attaching the least taint of dishonor to his name? He could only say, "Agreed." The notice was put up that night, and duly spread upon the recorder's books before ten o'clock. We claimed two hundred feet each--six hundred feet in all--the smallest and compactest organization in the district, and the easiest to manage. No one can be so thoughtless as to suppose that we slept, that night. Higbie and I went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake and think, dream, scheme. The floorless, tumble-down cabin was a palace, the ragged gray blankets silk, the furniture rosewood and mahogany. Each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me bodily over in bed or jerked me to a sitting posture just as if an electric battery had been applied to me. We shot fragments of conversation back and forth at each other. Once Higbie said: "When are you going home--to the States?" "To-morrow!"--with an evolution or two, ending with a sitting position. "Well--no--but next month, at furthest." "We'll go in the same steamer." "Agreed." A pause. "Steamer of the 10th?" "Yes. No, the 1st." "All right." Another pause. "Where are you going to live?" said Higbie. "San Francisco." "That's me!" Pause. "Too high--too much climbing"--from Higbie. "What is?" "I was thinking of Russian Hill--building a house up there." "Too much climbing? Shan't you keep a carriage?" "Of course. I forgot that." Pause. "Cal., what kind of a house are you going to build?" "I was thinking about that. Three-story and an attic." "But what kind?" "Well, I don't hardly know. Brick, I suppose." "Brick--bosh." "Why? What is your idea?" "Brown stone front--French plate glass--billiard-room off the dining-room--statuary and paintings--shrubbery and two-acre grass plat --greenhouse--iron dog on the front stoop--gray horses--landau, and a coachman with a bug on his hat!" "By George!" A long pause. "Cal., when are you going to Europe?" "Well--I hadn't thought of that. When are you?" "In the Spring." "Going to be gone all summer?" "All summer! I shall remain there three years." "No--but are you in earnest?" "Indeed I am." "I will go along too." "Why of course you will." "What part of Europe shall you go to?" "All parts. France, England, Germany--Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Syria, Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Egypt--all over--everywhere." "I'm agreed." "All right." "Won't it be a swell trip!" "We'll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one, anyway." Another long pause. "Higbie, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to stop our--" "Hang the butcher!" "Amen." And so it went on. By three o'clock we found it was no use, and so we got up and played cribbage and smoked pipes till sunrise. It was my week to cook. I always hated cooking--now, I abhorred it. The news was all over town. The former excitement was great--this one was greater still. I walked the streets serene and happy. Higbie said the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third of the mine. I said I would like to see myself selling for any such price. My ideas were lofty. My figure was a million. Still, I honestly believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect than to make me hold off for more. I found abundant enjoyment in being rich. A man offered me a three-hundred-dollar horse, and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note for it. That brought the most realizing sense I had yet had that I was actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt. It was followed by numerous other evidences of a similar nature--among which I may mention the fact of the butcher leaving us a double supply of meat and saying nothing about money. By the laws of the district, the "locators" or claimants of a ledge were obliged to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property within ten days after the date of the location, or the property was forfeited, and anybody could go and seize it that chose. So we determined to go to work the next day. About the middle of the afternoon, as I was coming out of the post office, I met a Mr. Gardiner, who told me that Capt. John Nye was lying dangerously ill at his place (the "Nine-Mile Ranch"), and that he and his wife were not able to give him nearly as much care and attention as his case demanded. I said if he would wait for me a moment, I would go down and help in the sick room. I ran to the cabin to tell Higbie. He was not there, but I left a note on the table for him, and a few minutes later I left town in Gardiner's wagon. 
8586	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 5. CHAPTER XLI. Captain Nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism. But the old gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not go well. He would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into a perfect fury. He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong convictions and a fine fancy could contrive. With fair opportunity he could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him, he was so awkward. However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his own turn had come. He could not disturb me, with all his raving and ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently, night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed. I was altering and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with the dining-room; also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and sunlight; likewise while I was content to put the coachman in a modest livery, I was uncertain about a footman--I needed one, and was even resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet, inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any rate; I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it --everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut, and thence down through the country per caravan. Meantime I was writing to the friends at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land and tender the proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of which I had long been a member in good standing. [This Tennessee land had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less violent way.] When I had been nursing the Captain nine days he was somewhat better, but very feeble. During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the bed again. We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced pain. Gardiner had his shoulders and I his legs; in an unfortunate moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of torture. I never heard a man swear so in my life. He raved like a maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but I got it. He ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again. It was simply a passing fury, and meant nothing. I knew he would forget it in an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at the moment. So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to Esmeralda. I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was on the war path. I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my nine-mile journey, on foot. Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile jaunt without baggage. As I "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of twelve. I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the village massed on and around the Wide West croppings. My heart gave an exulting bound, and I said to myself, "They have made a new strike to-night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt." I started over there, but gave it up. I said the "strick" would keep, and I had climbed hill enough for one night. I went on down through the town, and as I was passing a little German bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in and help her. She said her husband had a fit. I went in, and judged she was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one. Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a success of it. I ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour, and the poor German woman did the crying. He grew quiet, now, and the doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends. It was a little after one o'clock. As I entered the cabin door, tired but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higbie, sitting by the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers, and looking pale, old, and haggard. I halted, and looked at him. He looked at me, stolidly. I said: "Higbie, what--what is it?" "We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!" It was enough. I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed. A minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity; I was a pauper now, and very meek. We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and useless self-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and why didn't I do that," but neither spoke a word. Then we dropped into mutual explanations, and the mystery was cleared away. It came out that Higbie had depended on me, as I had on him, and as both of us had on the foreman. The folly of it! It was the first time that ever staid and steadfast Higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be true to his full share of a responsibility. But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last. He, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a broken pane. Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained undisturbed for nine days: "Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire. W. has passed through and given me notice. I am to join him at Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night. He says he will find it this time, sure. CAL." "W." meant Whiteman, of course. That thrice accursed "cement!" That was the way of it. An old miner, like Higbie, could no more withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this "cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was famishing. Higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered cement veins. They had not been followed this time. His riding out of town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had not attracted any attention. He said they prosecuted their search in the fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could not find the cement. Then a ghastly fear came over him that something might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible), and forthwith he started home with all speed. He would have reached Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great part of the distance. And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda by one road, I entered it by another. His was the superior energy, however, for he went straight to the Wide West, instead of turning aside as I had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late! The "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing. He learned some facts before he left the ground. The foreman had not been seen about the streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said. At any rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were taking note of the fact. At midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men prepared to do the relocating. That was the crowd I had seen when I fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that I was. [We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had, provided we were quick enough.] As midnight was announced, fourteen men, duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the "Johnson." But A. D. Allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the Johnson company some." He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected. They put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary two hundred feet each. Such was the history of the night's events, as Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home. Higbie and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning, glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or two of hardship and disappointment, returned to Esmeralda once more. Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson companies had consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet, or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it. If the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been worth with only our original six hundred in it. It was the difference between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it. We would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade one little day on our property and so secured our ownership! It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history. I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days. A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way. How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill! CHAPTER XLII. What to do next? It was a momentous question. I had gone out into the world to shift for myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends; and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with). I had gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not, after being so wealthy. I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day, but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he could have my custom. I had studied law an entire week, and then given it up because it was so prosy and tiresome. I had engaged briefly in the study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in disgrace, and told me I would come to no good. I had been a bookseller's clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to put a limit to it. I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water. So I had to go. I had made of myself a tolerable printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day, but somehow had missed the connection thus far. There was no berth open in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year." I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never go back home to be pitied--and snubbed." I had been a private secretary, a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than nothing in each, and now-- What to do next? I yielded to Higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more. We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep. Higbie descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out. You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left shoulder. I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck. I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. I inwardly resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel. I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to speak. Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print. My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me that they might have found something better to fill up with than my literature. I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from the hill side, and finally I opened it. Eureka! [I never did know what Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of the Enterprise. I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted to fall down and worship him, now. Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money. But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long array of failures rose up before me. Yet if I refused this place I must presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a humiliation since he was thirteen years old. Not much to be proud of, since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of. So I was scared into being a city editor. I would have declined, otherwise. Necessity is the mother of "taking chances." I do not doubt that if, at that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money. I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation. I was a rusty looking city editor, I am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt. But I secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver. I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a subject of remark. But the other editors, and all the printers, carried revolvers. I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the information gained, and write them out for publication. And he added: "Never say 'We learn' so-and-so, or 'It is reported,' or 'It is rumored,' or 'We understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts, and then speak out and say 'It is so-and-so.' Otherwise, people will not put confidence in your news. Unassailable certainly is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation." It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a reporter commencing his article with "We understand," I gather a suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he ought to have done. I moralize well, but I did not always practise well when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news. I can never forget my first day's experience as a reporter. I wandered about town questioning everybody, boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end of five hours my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He said: "Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when there were no fires or inquests. Are there no hay wagons in from the Truckee? If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know. "It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business like." I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging in from the country. But I made affluent use of it. I multiplied it by sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay as Virginia City had never seen in the world before. This was encouraging. Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was getting along. Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I never was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. I said to the murderer: "Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day which I can never forget. If whole years of gratitude can be to you any slight compensation, they shall be yours. I was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear. Count me your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor." If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely, that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work him up too. Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and had fared rather roughly. I made the best of the item that the circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could add particulars that would make the article much more interesting. However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some judicious inquiries of the proprietor. When I learned, through his short and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to the killed and wounded. Having more scope here, I put this wagon through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history. My two columns were filled. When I read them over in the morning I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last. I reasoned within myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it. Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan. I desired no higher commendation. With encouragement like that, I felt that I could take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and the interests of the paper demanded it. CHAPTER XLIII. However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging noticeably from the domain of fact. I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work. "Regulars" are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups" at the quartz mills, and inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set down among the "regulars." We had lively papers in those days. My great competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union. He was an excellent reporter. Once in three or four months he would get a little intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy. He had the advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school report and I could not, because the principal hated the Enterprise. One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering how I was going to get it. Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going. "After the school report." "I'll go along with you." "No, sir. I'll excuse you." "Just as you say." A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully. He gazed fondly after the boy and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs. I said: "I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't, I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to suppose they will. Good night." "Hold on a minute. I don't mind getting the report and sitting around with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down to the principal's with me." "Now you talk like a rational being. Come along." We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and returned to our office. It was a short document and soon copied. Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch. I gave the manuscript back to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots near by. We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the public, and then we separated. Away at three o'clock in the morning, when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual --for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of Boggs or the school report. We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent. We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey." [Riotous applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours. We dragged him away and put him to bed. Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the misfortune had occurred. But we were perfectly friendly. The day that the school report was next due, the proprietor of the "Genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked us to go down and write something about the property--a very common request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people. In due time we arrived at the "mine"--nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windlass. The workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner. I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk; so I took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft. I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe. I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to Boggs to hoist away. No answer. Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down: "Are you all set?" "All set--hoist away." "Are you comfortable?" "Perfectly." "Could you wait a little?" "Oh certainly--no particular hurry." "Well--good by." "Why? Where are you going?" "After the school report!" And he did. I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock. I walked home, too--five miles--up hill. We had no school report next morning; but the Union had. Six months after my entry into journalism the grand "flush times" of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years. All difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day. Virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. The sidewalks swarmed with people--to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter to stem the human tide. The streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles. The procession was endless. So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street. Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, "hurdy-gurdy houses," wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. The "flush times" were in magnificent flower! Large fire-proof brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden suburbs were spreading out in all directions. Town lots soared up to prices that were amazing. The great "Comstock lode" stretched its opulent length straight through the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development. One of these mines alone employed six hundred and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, "as the 'Gould and Curry' goes, so goes the city." Laboring men's wages were four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three "shifts" or gangs, and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night and day. The "city" of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty miles! It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand, and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the "Comstock," hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same streets. Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office. The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet. The fronts of the houses were level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window of a C street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below him facing D street. It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere, to ascend from D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when you got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a house a-fire--so to speak. The atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the great altitude, that one's blood lay near the surface always, and the scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances were that a grievous erysipelas would ensue. But to offset this, the thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore, to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera glass, either. From Virginia's airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always impressive and beautiful. Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe; and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their long barrier to the filmy horizon--far enough beyond a lake that burned in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles removed. Look from your window where you would, there was fascination in the picture. At rare intervals--but very rare--there were clouds in our skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music. CHAPTER XLIV. My salary was increased to forty dollars a week. But I seldom drew it. I had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar gold pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome abundance of bright half dollars besides? [Paper money has never come into use on the Pacific coast.] Reporting was lucrative, and every man in the town was lavish with his money and his "feet." The city and all the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts. There were more mines than miners. True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, "Wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!" So nobody was discouraged. These were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody believed it then. The "Ophir," the "Gould & Curry," the "Mexican," and other great mines on the Comstock lead in Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as any on the "main lead" and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he "got down where it came in solid." Poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day. So the thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness. How they labored, prophesied, exulted! Surely nothing like it was ever seen before since the world began. Every one of these wild cat mines--not mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines--was incorporated and had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too. It was bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day. You could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. To make money, and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner. Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered his fortune made. Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it! One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought of such a thing. They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy. New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty "feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of it. They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said something. Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide," or that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did--but as a general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down). If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired. If the mine was a "developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock. We would squander half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine --but never utter a whisper about the rock. And those people were always pleased, always satisfied. Occasionally we patched up and varnished our reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting notoriety thus conferred upon it. There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable. We received presents of "feet" every day. If we needed a hundred dollars or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot. I had a trunk about half full of "stock." When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock --and generally found it. The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it. My pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their claims "noticed." At least half of it was given me by persons who had no thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal "thank you;" and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that. If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush times." Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking. Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. Mr. Stewart (Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office. It was worth five or ten dollars a foot. I asked him to make the offer good for next day, as I was just going to dinner. He said he would not be in town; so I risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock. Within the week the price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty, but nothing could make that man yield. I suppose he sold that stock of mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will be found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave us as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar. These were "flush times" indeed! I thought they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet. To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city; and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market. It was small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in Nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to work it. Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder! It has been often done in California. In the middle of one of the principal business streets of Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it. He gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue for damages. I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India" stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely resembled one. One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and sell out while the excitement was up. The process was simple. The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and piled the rest by its side, above ground. Then he showed the property to a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure. Of course the wagon load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase. A most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir." It was claimed that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original "Ophir," a valuable mine on the "Comstock." For a few days everybody was talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir. It was said that it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps. I went to the place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish, unpromising rock. One would as soon expect to find silver in a grindstone. We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle, and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer novelty. The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing that. And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and peculiarly original and outrageous fashion. On one of the lumps of "native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted half-dollars! The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in the bottom of the shaft. It is literally true. Of course the price of the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined. But for this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage. CHAPTER XLV. The "flush times" held bravely on. Something over two years before, Mr. Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of Virginia. They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die. They bought it, type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time. The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and it was a small one, too. The editors and printers slept on the floor, a Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the general dinner table. But now things were changed. The paper was a great daily, printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors; the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates were exorbitant, and the columns crowded. The paper was clearing from six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the "Enterprise Building" was finished and ready for occupation--a stately fireproof brick. Every day from five all the way up to eleven columns of "live" advertisements were left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular "supplements." The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars. Gould & Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the "Comstock." The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in a fine house built and furnished by the company. He drove a fine pair of horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve thousand dollars a year. The superintendent of another of the great mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise. Money was wonderfully plenty. The trouble was, not how to get it,--but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it. And so it was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and money was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals. Right on the heels of it came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram was half a day old. Virginia rose as one man! A Sanitary Committee was hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the committee were flying hither and thither and working with all their might and main, and that if the town would only wait an hour, an office would be ready, books opened, and the Commission prepared to receive contributions. His voice was drowned and his information lost in a ceaseless roar of cheers, and demands that the money be received now --they swore they would not wait. The chairman pleaded and argued, but, deaf to all entreaty, men plowed their way through the throng and rained checks of gold coin into the cart and skurried away for more. Hands clutching money, were thrust aloft out of the jam by men who hoped this eloquent appeal would cleave a road their strugglings could not open. The very Chinamen and Indians caught the excitement and dashed their half dollars into the cart without knowing or caring what it was all about. Women plunged into the crowd, trimly attired, fought their way to the cart with their coin, and emerged again, by and by, with their apparel in a state of hopeless dilapidation. It was the wildest mob Virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket. To use its own phraseology, it came there "flush" and went away "busted." After that, the Commission got itself into systematic working order, and for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous stream. Individuals and all sorts of organizations levied upon themselves a regular weekly tax for the sanitary fund, graduated according to their means, and there was not another grand universal outburst till the famous "Sanitary Flour Sack" came our way. Its history is peculiar and interesting. A former schoolmate of mine, by the name of Reuel Gridley, was living at the little city of Austin, in the Reese river country, at this time, and was the Democratic candidate for mayor. He and the Republican candidate made an agreement that the defeated man should be publicly presented with a fifty-pound sack of flour by the successful one, and should carry it home on his shoulder. Gridley was defeated. The new mayor gave him the sack of flour, and he shouldered it and carried it a mile or two, from Lower Austin to his home in Upper Austin, attended by a band of music and the whole population. Arrived there, he said he did not need the flour, and asked what the people thought he had better do with it. A voice said: "Sell it to the highest bidder, for the benefit of the Sanitary fund." The suggestion was greeted with a round of applause, and Gridley mounted a dry-goods box and assumed the role of auctioneer. The bids went higher and higher, as the sympathies of the pioneers awoke and expanded, till at last the sack was knocked down to a mill man at two hundred and fifty dollars, and his check taken. He was asked where he would have the flour delivered, and he said: "Nowhere--sell it again." Now the cheers went up royally, and the multitude were fairly in the spirit of the thing. So Gridley stood there and shouted and perspired till the sun went down; and when the crowd dispersed he had sold the sack to three hundred different people, and had taken in eight thousand dollars in gold. And still the flour sack was in his possession. The news came to Virginia, and a telegram went back: "Fetch along your flour sack!" Thirty-six hours afterward Gridley arrived, and an afternoon mass meeting was held in the Opera House, and the auction began. But the sack had come sooner than it was expected; the people were not thoroughly aroused, and the sale dragged. At nightfall only five thousand dollars had been secured, and there was a crestfallen feeling in the community. However, there was no disposition to let the matter rest here and acknowledge vanquishment at the hands of the village of Austin. Till late in the night the principal citizens were at work arranging the morrow's campaign, and when they went to bed they had no fears for the result. At eleven the next morning a procession of open carriages, attended by clamorous bands of music and adorned with a moving display of flags, filed along C street and was soon in danger of blockade by a huzzaing multitude of citizens. In the first carriage sat Gridley, with the flour sack in prominent view, the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt lettering; also in the same carriage sat the mayor and the recorder. The other carriages contained the Common Council, the editors and reporters, and other people of imposing consequence. The crowd pressed to the corner of C and Taylor streets, expecting the sale to begin there, but they were disappointed, and also unspeakably surprised; for the cavalcade moved on as if Virginia had ceased to be of importance, and took its way over the "divide," toward the small town of Gold Hill. Telegrams had gone ahead to Gold Hill, Silver City and Dayton, and those communities were at fever heat and rife for the conflict. It was a very hot day, and wonderfully dusty. At the end of a short half hour we descended into Gold Hill with drums beating and colors flying, and enveloped in imposing clouds of dust. The whole population--men, women and children, Chinamen and Indians, were massed in the main street, all the flags in town were at the mast head, and the blare of the bands was drowned in cheers. Gridley stood up and asked who would make the first bid for the National Sanitary Flour Sack. Gen. W. said: "The Yellow Jacket silver mining company offers a thousand dollars, coin!" A tempest of applause followed. A telegram carried the news to Virginia, and fifteen minutes afterward that city's population was massed in the streets devouring the tidings--for it was part of the programme that the bulletin boards should do a good work that day. Every few minutes a new dispatch was bulletined from Gold Hill, and still the excitement grew. Telegrams began to return to us from Virginia beseeching Gridley to bring back the flour sack; but such was not the plan of the campaign. At the end of an hour Gold Hill's small population had paid a figure for the flour sack that awoke all the enthusiasm of Virginia when the grand total was displayed upon the bulletin boards. Then the Gridley cavalcade moved on, a giant refreshed with new lager beer and plenty of it--for the people brought it to the carriages without waiting to measure it--and within three hours more the expedition had carried Silver City and Dayton by storm and was on its way back covered with glory. Every move had been telegraphed and bulletined, and as the procession entered Virginia and filed down C street at half past eight in the evening the town was abroad in the thoroughfares, torches were glaring, flags flying, bands playing, cheer on cheer cleaving the air, and the city ready to surrender at discretion. The auction began, every bid was greeted with bursts of applause, and at the end of two hours and a half a population of fifteen thousand souls had paid in coin for a fifty-pound sack of flour a sum equal to forty thousand dollars in greenbacks! It was at a rate in the neighborhood of three dollars for each man, woman and child of the population. The grand total would have been twice as large, but the streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted to bid could not get within a block of the stand, and could not make themselves heard. These grew tired of waiting and many of them went home long before the auction was over. This was the greatest day Virginia ever saw, perhaps. Gridley sold the sack in Carson city and several California towns; also in San Francisco. Then he took it east and sold it in one or two Atlantic cities, I think. I am not sure of that, but I know that he finally carried it to St. Louis, where a monster Sanitary Fair was being held, and after selling it there for a large sum and helping on the enthusiasm by displaying the portly silver bricks which Nevada's donation had produced, he had the flour baked up into small cakes and retailed them at high prices. It was estimated that when the flour sack's mission was ended it had been sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks! This is probably the only instance on record where common family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market. It is due to Mr. Gridley's memory to mention that the expenses of his sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own pocket. The time he gave to it was not less than three months. Mr. Gridley was a soldier in the Mexican war and a pioneer Californian. He died at Stockton, California, in December, 1870, greatly regretted. CHAPTER XLVI. There were nabobs in those days--in the "flush times," I mean. Every rich strike in the mines created one or two. I call to mind several of these. They were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were themselves--possibly more, in some cases. Two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man and had to take a small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash. They gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming. But not long. Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month--say $100,000 a year. One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered of wore $6,000 worth of diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he could not spend his money as fast as he made it. Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $16,000 a month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine that yielded it, for five dollars a day, when he first came to the country. The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another of these pets of fortune--lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single night--who was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it--but failed to get it, his politics not being as sound as his bank account. Then there was John Smith. He was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul, born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant. He drove a team, and owned a small ranch--a ranch that paid him a comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little it did yield was worth from $250 to $300 in gold per ton in the market. Presently Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped silver mine in Gold Hill. He opened the mine and built a little unpretending ten-stamp mill. Eighteen months afterward he retired from the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable figure. Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was $60,000. Smith was very rich at any rate. And then he went to Europe and traveled. And when he came back he was never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in England, and the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had noticed in the vicinity of Rome. He was full of wonders of the old world, and advised everybody to travel. He said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled. One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours. Next day, toward noon, the figures were all in the purser's hands in sealed envelopes. Smith was serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer. But another party won the prize! Smith said: "Here, that won't do! He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did." The purser said, "Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board. We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday." "Well, sir," said Smith, "that's just where I've got you, for I guessed two hundred and nine. If you'll look at my figgers again you'll find a 2 and two 0's, which stands for 200, don't it?--and after 'em you'll find a 9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine. I reckon I'll take that money, if you please." The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears. Mr. Curry owned two thirds of it--and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch. And he said that Gould sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life. Four years afterward the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin. In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican who lived in a canyon directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water as large as a man's wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises. The Ophir Company segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the stream of water. The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its mill) was $1,500,000. An individual who owned twenty feet in the Ophir mine before its great riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry looking brute he was, too. A year or so afterward, when Ophir stock went up to $3,000 a foot, this man, who had not a cent, used to say he was the most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever seen--because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--yet could not scrape up cash enough to buy a saddle, and was obliged to borrow one or ride bareback. He said if fortune were to give him another sixty-thousand-dollar horse it would ruin him. A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a friend in San Francisco. Once when a private dispatch was sent from Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot, and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the rest at double that figure. Within three months he was worth $150,000, and had resigned his telegraphic position. Another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in San Francisco to furnish him the result of a great Virginia mining lawsuit within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in San Francisco. For this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator. So he went, disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and unable to travel--and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed clicking through the machine from Virginia. Finally the private dispatch announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as he heard it he telegraphed his friend in San Francisco: "Am tired waiting. Shall sell the team and go home." It was the signal agreed upon. The word "waiting" left out, would have signified that the suit had gone the other way. The mock teamster's friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result. For a long time after one of the great Virginia mines had been incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers. The stock became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he had disappeared. Once it was heard that he was in New York, and one or two speculators went east but failed to find him. Once the news came that he was in the Bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried east and sailed for Bermuda--but he was not there. Finally he was heard of in Mexico, and a friend of his, a bar-keeper on a salary, scraped together a little money and sought him out, bought his "feet" for a hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $75,000. But why go on? The traditions of Silverland are filled with instances like these, and I would never get through enumerating them were I to attempt do it. I only desired to give, the reader an idea of a peculiarity of the "flush times" which I could not present so strikingly in any other way, and which some mention of was necessary to a realizing comprehension of the time and the country. I was personally acquainted with the majority of the nabobs I have referred to, and so, for old acquaintance sake, I have shifted their occupations and experiences around in such a way as to keep the Pacific public from recognizing these once notorious men. No longer notorious, for the majority of them have drifted back into poverty and obscurity again. In Nevada there used to be current the story of an adventure of two of her nabobs, which may or may not have occurred. I give it for what it is worth: Col. Jim had seen somewhat of the world, and knew more or less of its ways; but Col. Jack was from the back settlements of the States, had led a life of arduous toil, and had never seen a city. These two, blessed with sudden wealth, projected a visit to New York,--Col. Jack to see the sights, and Col. Jim to guard his unsophistication from misfortune. They reached San Francisco in the night, and sailed in the morning. Arrived in New York, Col. Jack said: "I've heard tell of carriages all my life, and now I mean to have a ride in one; I don't care what it costs. Come along." They stepped out on the sidewalk, and Col. Jim called a stylish barouche. But Col. Jack said: "No, sir! None of your cheap-John turn-outs for me. I'm here to have a good time, and money ain't any object. I mean to have the nobbiest rig that's going. Now here comes the very trick. Stop that yaller one with the pictures on it--don't you fret--I'll stand all the expenses myself." So Col. Jim stopped an empty omnibus, and they got in. Said Col. Jack: "Ain't it gay, though? Oh, no, I reckon not! Cushions, and windows, and pictures, till you can't rest. What would the boys say if they could see us cutting a swell like this in New York? By George, I wish they could see us." Then he put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver: "Say, Johnny, this suits me!--suits yours truly, you bet, you! I want this shebang all day. I'm on it, old man! Let 'em out! Make 'em go! We'll make it all right with you, sonny!" The driver passed his hand through the strap-hole, and tapped for his fare--it was before the gongs came into common use. Col. Jack took the hand, and shook it cordially. He said: "You twig me, old pard! All right between gents. Smell of that, and see how you like it!" And he put a twenty-dollar gold piece in the driver's hand. After a moment the driver said he could not make change. "Bother the change! Ride it out. Put it in your pocket." Then to Col. Jim, with a sounding slap on his thigh: "Ain't it style, though? Hanged if I don't hire this thing every day for a week." The omnibus stopped, and a young lady got in. Col. Jack stared a moment, then nudged Col. Jim with his elbow: "Don't say a word," he whispered. "Let her ride, if she wants to. Gracious, there's room enough." The young lady got out her porte-monnaie, and handed her fare to Col. Jack. "What's this for?" said he. "Give it to the driver, please." "Take back your money, madam. We can't allow it. You're welcome to ride here as long as you please, but this shebang's chartered, and we can't let you pay a cent." The girl shrunk into a corner, bewildered. An old lady with a basket climbed in, and proffered her fare. "Excuse me," said Col. Jack. "You're perfectly welcome here, madam, but we can't allow you to pay. Set right down there, mum, and don't you be the least uneasy. Make yourself just as free as if you was in your own turn-out." Within two minutes, three gentlemen, two fat women, and a couple of children, entered. "Come right along, friends," said Col. Jack; "don't mind us. This is a free blow-out." Then he whispered to Col. Jim, "New York ain't no sociable place, I don't reckon--it ain't no name for it!" He resisted every effort to pass fares to the driver, and made everybody cordially welcome. The situation dawned on the people, and they pocketed their money, and delivered themselves up to covert enjoyment of the episode. Half a dozen more passengers entered. "Oh, there's plenty of room," said Col. Jack. "Walk right in, and make yourselves at home. A blow-out ain't worth anything as a blow-out, unless a body has company." Then in a whisper to Col. Jim: "But ain't these New Yorkers friendly? And ain't they cool about it, too? Icebergs ain't anywhere. I reckon they'd tackle a hearse, if it was going their way." More passengers got in; more yet, and still more. Both seats were filled, and a file of men were standing up, holding on to the cleats overhead. Parties with baskets and bundles were climbing up on the roof. Half-suppressed laughter rippled up from all sides. "Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don't bang anything that ever I saw, I'm an Injun!" whispered Col. Jack. A Chinaman crowded his way in. "I weaken!" said Col. Jack. "Hold on, driver! Keep your seats, ladies, and gents. Just make yourselves free--everything's paid for. Driver, rustle these folks around as long as they're a mind to go--friends of ours, you know. Take them everywheres--and if you want more money, come to the St. Nicholas, and we'll make it all right. Pleasant journey to you, ladies and gents--go it just as long as you please--it shan't cost you a cent!" The two comrades got out, and Col. Jack said: "Jimmy, it's the sociablest place I ever saw. The Chinaman waltzed in as comfortable as anybody. If we'd staid awhile, I reckon we'd had some niggers. B' George, we'll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us." CHAPTER XLVII. Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony. I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our "flush times," the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished rough--possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the philosopher I have quoted from would have needed to see two representative funerals in Virginia before forming his estimate of the people. There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died. He was a representative citizen. He had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel, it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers. He had kept a sumptuous saloon. He had been the proprietor of a dashing helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce. He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very Warwick in politics. When he died there was great lamentation throughout the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society. On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by the visitation of God." What could the world do without juries? Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral. All the vehicles in town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black. Now --let us remark in parenthesis--as all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the "early days." Slang was the language of Nevada. It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood. Such phrases as "You bet!" "Oh, no, I reckon not!" "No Irish need apply," and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips of a speaker unconsciously--and very often when they did not touch the subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything. After Buck Fanshaw's inquest, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood was held, for nothing can be done on the Pacific coast without a public meeting and an expression of sentiment. Regretful resolutions were passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted with the ways of the mines. The committeeman, "Scotty" Briggs, made his visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell about it. Scotty was a stalwart rough, whose customary suit, when on weighty official business, like committee work, was a fire helmet, flaming red flannel shirt, patent leather belt with spanner and revolver attached, coat hung over arm, and pants stuffed into boot tops. He formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student. It is fair to say of Scotty, however, in passing, that he had a warm heart, and a strong love for his friends, and never entered into a quarrel when he could reasonably keep out of it. Indeed, it was commonly said that whenever one of Scotty's fights was investigated, it always turned out that it had originally been no affair of his, but that out of native good-heartedness he had dropped in of his own accord to help the man who was getting the worst of it. He and Buck Fanshaw were bosom friends, for years, and had often taken adventurous "pot-luck" together. On one occasion, they had thrown off their coats and taken the weaker side in a fight among strangers, and after gaining a hard-earned victory, turned and found that the men they were helping had deserted early, and not only that, but had stolen their coats and made off with them! But to return to Scotty's visit to the minister. He was on a sorrowful mission, now, and his face was the picture of woe. Being admitted to the presence he sat down before the clergyman, placed his fire-hat on an unfinished manuscript sermon under the minister's nose, took from it a red silk handkerchief, wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of dismal impressiveness, explanatory of his business. He choked, and even shed tears; but with an effort he mastered his voice and said in lugubrious tones: "Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?" "Am I the--pardon me, I believe I do not understand?" With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined: "Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you--that is, if I've got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door." "I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door." "The which?" "The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises." Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said: "You ruther hold over me, pard. I reckon I can't call that hand. Ante and pass the buck." "How? I beg pardon. What did I understand you to say?" "Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me. Or maybe we've both got the bulge, somehow. You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you. You see, one of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good send-off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome." "My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered. Your observations are wholly incomprehensible to me. Cannot you simplify them in some way? At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now. Would it not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and allegory?" Another pause, and more reflection. Then, said Scotty: "I'll have to pass, I judge." "How?" "You've raised me out, pard." "I still fail to catch your meaning." "Why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me--that's the idea. I can't neither-trump nor follow suit." The clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed. Scotty leaned his head on his hand and gave himself up to thought. Presently his face came up, sorrowful but confident. "I've got it now, so's you can savvy," he said. "What we want is a gospel-sharp. See?" "A what?" "Gospel-sharp. Parson." "Oh! Why did you not say so before? I am a clergyman--a parson." "Now you talk! You see my blind and straddle it like a man. Put it there!"--extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister's small hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent gratification. "Now we're all right, pard. Let's start fresh. Don't you mind my snuffling a little--becuz we're in a power of trouble. You see, one of the boys has gone up the flume--" "Gone where?" "Up the flume--throwed up the sponge, you understand." "Thrown up the sponge?" "Yes--kicked the bucket--" "Ah--has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns." "Return! I reckon not. Why pard, he's dead!" "Yes, I understand." "Oh, you do? Well I thought maybe you might be getting tangled some more. Yes, you see he's dead again--" "Again? Why, has he ever been dead before?" "Dead before? No! Do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat? But you bet you he's awful dead now, poor old boy, and I wish I'd never seen this day. I don't want no better friend than Buck Fanshaw. I knowed him by the back; and when I know a man and like him, I freeze to him--you hear me. Take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier man in the mines. No man ever knowed Buck Fanshaw to go back on a friend. But it's all up, you know, it's all up. It ain't no use. They've scooped him." "Scooped him?" "Yes--death has. Well, well, well, we've got to give him up. Yes indeed. It's a kind of a hard world, after all, ain't it? But pard, he was a rustler! You ought to seen him get started once. He was a bully boy with a glass eye! Just spit in his face and give him room according to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in. He was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath. Pard, he was on it! He was on it bigger than an Injun!" "On it? On what?" "On the shoot. On the shoulder. On the fight, you understand. He didn't give a continental for any body. Beg your pardon, friend, for coming so near saying a cuss-word--but you see I'm on an awful strain, in this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so mild. But we've got to give him up. There ain't any getting around that, I don't reckon. Now if we can get you to help plant him--" "Preach the funeral discourse? Assist at the obsequies?" "Obs'quies is good. Yes. That's it--that's our little game. We are going to get the thing up regardless, you know. He was always nifty himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch --solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and a nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat--how's that for high? And we'll take care of you, pard. We'll fix you all right. There'll be a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just 'scape out and we'll 'tend to it. We've got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in No. 1's house, and don't you be afraid. Just go in and toot your horn, if you don't sell a clam. Put Buck through as bully as you can, pard, for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest men that was ever in the mines. You can't draw it too strong. He never could stand it to see things going wrong. He's done more to make this town quiet and peaceable than any man in it. I've seen him lick four Greasers in eleven minutes, myself. If a thing wanted regulating, he warn't a man to go browsing around after somebody to do it, but he would prance in and regulate it himself. He warn't a Catholic. Scasely. He was down on 'em. His word was, 'No Irish need apply!' But it didn't make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights was--and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em! And he cleaned 'em, too! I was there, pard, and I seen it myself." "That was very well indeed--at least the impulse was--whether the act was strictly defensible or not. Had deceased any religious convictions? That is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance to a higher power?" More reflection. "I reckon you've stumped me again, pard. Could you say it over once more, and say it slow?" "Well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been connected with any organization sequestered from secular concerns and devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?" "All down but nine--set 'em up on the other alley, pard." "What did I understand you to say?" "Why, you're most too many for me, you know. When you get in with your left I hunt grass every time. Every time you draw, you fill; but I don't seem to have any luck. Lets have a new deal." "How? Begin again?" "That's it." "Very well. Was he a good man, and--" "There--I see that; don't put up another chip till I look at my hand. A good man, says you? Pard, it ain't no name for it. He was the best man that ever--pard, you would have doted on that man. He could lam any galoot of his inches in America. It was him that put down the riot last election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man that could have done it. He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes. He had that riot all broke up and prevented nice before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow. He was always for peace, and he would have peace--he could not stand disturbances. Pard, he was a great loss to this town. It would please the boys if you could chip in something like that and do him justice. Here once when the Micks got to throwing stones through the Methodis' Sunday school windows, Buck Fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of six-shooters and mounted guard over the Sunday school. Says he, 'No Irish need apply!' And they didn't. He was the bulliest man in the mountains, pard! He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen counties. Put that in, pard--it'll please the boys more than anything you could say. And you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother." "Never shook his mother?" "That's it--any of the boys will tell you so." "Well, but why should he shake her?" "That's what I say--but some people does." "Not people of any repute?" "Well, some that averages pretty so-so." "In my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own mother, ought to--" "Cheese it, pard; you've banked your ball clean outside the string. What I was a drivin' at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother --don't you see? No indeedy. He give her a house to live in, and town lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her all the time; and when she was down with the small-pox I'm d---d if he didn't set up nights and nuss her himself! Beg your pardon for saying it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly. "You've treated me like a gentleman, pard, and I ain't the man to hurt your feelings intentional. I think you're white. I think you're a square man, pard. I like you, and I'll lick any man that don't. I'll lick him till he can't tell himself from a last year's corpse! Put it there!" [Another fraternal hand-shake--and exit.] The obsequies were all that "the boys" could desire. Such a marvel of funeral pomp had never been seen in Virginia. The plumed hearse, the dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags drooping at half mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines, carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs and windows; and for years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in Virginia was determined by comparison with Buck Fanshaw's funeral. Scotty Briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of the prayer for the dead man's soul ascended, he responded, in a low voice, but with feelings: "AMEN. No Irish need apply." As the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend that was gone; for, as Scotty had once said, it was "his word." Scotty Briggs, in after days, achieved the distinction of becoming the only convert to religion that was ever gathered from the Virginia roughs; and it transpired that the man who had it in him to espouse the quarrel of the weak out of inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof to construct a Christian. The making him one did not warp his generosity or diminish his courage; on the contrary it gave intelligent direction to the one and a broader field to the other. If his Sunday-school class progressed faster than the other classes, was it matter for wonder? I think not. He talked to his pioneer small-fry in a language they understood! It was my large privilege, a month before he died, to hear him tell the beautiful story of Joseph and his brethren to his class "without looking at the book." I leave it to the reader to fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties! CHAPTER XLVIII. The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men. So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will always say and believe. The reason why there was so much slaughtering done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates, and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man." That was the very expression used. If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable, honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man? If he had not, he gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated according to the number of his dead. It was tedious work struggling up to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and his acquaintance sought. In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same level in society, and it was the highest. The cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whisky. I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher rank than any other member of society. His opinion had weight. It was his privilege to say how the elections should go. No great movement could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-keepers. It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen. Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon. To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious. Hence the reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being held in indifferent repute by his associates. I knew two youths who tried to "kill their men" for no other reason--and got killed themselves for their pains. "There goes the man that killed Bill Adams" was higher praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any other speech that admiring lips could utter. The men who murdered Virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished. Why? Because Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive. For how could he imagine that we simpletons would go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? In his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try --but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains. I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia, which we call a jury trial. A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most wanton and cold-blooded way. Of course the papers were full of it, and all men capable of reading, read about it. And of course all men not deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it. A jury-list was made out, and Mr. B. L., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in America: "Have you heard of this homicide?" "Yes." "Have you held conversations upon the subject?" "Yes." "Have you formed or expressed opinions about it?" "Yes." "Have you read the newspaper accounts of it?" "Yes." "We do not want you." A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing, were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside. Each said the public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the facts. But of course such men could not be trusted with the case. Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice. When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled--a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of! It was a jury composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys! It actually came out afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were the same thing. The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty. What else could one expect? The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury. It is a shame that we must continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years ago. In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh, with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs. Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants? Is it right to show the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and equal? I am a candidate for the legislature. I desire to tamper with the jury law. I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and people who do not read newspapers. But no doubt I shall be defeated --every effort I make to save the country "misses fire." My idea, when I began this chapter, was to say something about desperadoism in the "flush times" of Nevada. To attempt a portrayal of that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy. The desperado stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a humble admirer happy for the rest of the day. The deference that was paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who "kept his private graveyard," as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded. When he moved along the sidewalk in his excessively long-tailed frock-coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat tipped over left eye, the small-fry roughs made room for his majesty; when he entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and merchants to overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered his way to a bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized him, and --apologized. They got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud of the established acquaintanceship that permitted such a familiar form of speech as: "How're ye, Billy, old fel? Glad to see you. What'll you take--the old thing?" The "old thing" meant his customary drink, of course. The best known names in the Territory of Nevada were those belonging to these long-tailed heroes of the revolver. Orators, Governors, capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as Sam Brown, Jack Williams, Billy Mulligan, Farmer Pease, Sugarfoot Mike, Pock Marked Jake, El Dorado Johnny, Jack McNabb, Joe McGee, Jack Harris, Six-fingered Pete, etc., etc. There was a long list of them. They were brave, reckless men, and traveled with their lives in their hands. To give them their due, they did their killing principally among themselves, and seldom molested peaceable citizens, for they considered it small credit to add to their trophies so cheap a bauble as the death of a man who was "not on the shoot," as they phrased it. They killed each other on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves --for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than "with their boots on," as they expressed it. I remember an instance of a desperado's contempt for such small game as a private citizen's life. I was taking a late supper in a restaurant one night, with two reporters and a little printer named--Brown, for instance--any name will do. Presently a stranger with a long-tailed coat on came in, and not noticing Brown's hat, which was lying in a chair, sat down on it. Little Brown sprang up and became abusive in a moment. The stranger smiled, smoothed out the hat, and offered it to Brown with profuse apologies couched in caustic sarcasm, and begged Brown not to destroy him. Brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight --abused him, threatened him, impeached his courage, and urged and even implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed himself under our protection in mock distress. But presently he assumed a serious tone, and said: "Very well, gentlemen, if we must fight, we must, I suppose. But don't rush into danger and then say I gave you no warning. I am more than a match for all of you when I get started. I will give you proofs, and then if my friend here still insists, I will try to accommodate him." The table we were sitting at was about five feet long, and unusually cumbersome and heavy. He asked us to put our hands on the dishes and hold them in their places a moment--one of them was a large oval dish with a portly roast on it. Then he sat down, tilted up one end of the table, set two of the legs on his knees, took the end of the table between his teeth, took his hands away, and pulled down with his teeth till the table came up to a level position, dishes and all! He said he could lift a keg of nails with his teeth. He picked up a common glass tumbler and bit a semi-circle out of it. Then he opened his bosom and showed us a net-work of knife and bullet scars; showed us more on his arms and face, and said he believed he had bullets enough in his body to make a pig of lead. He was armed to the teeth. He closed with the remark that he was Mr. ---- of Cariboo--a celebrated name whereat we shook in our shoes. I would publish the name, but for the suspicion that he might come and carve me. He finally inquired if Brown still thirsted for blood. Brown turned the thing over in his mind a moment, and then--asked him to supper. With the permission of the reader, I will group together, in the next chapter, some samples of life in our small mountain village in the old days of desperadoism. I was there at the time. The reader will observe peculiarities in our official society; and he will observe also, an instance of how, in new countries, murders breed murders. CHAPTER XLIX. An extract or two from the newspapers of the day will furnish a photograph that can need no embellishment: FATAL SHOOTING AFFRAY.--An affray occurred, last evening, in a billiard saloon on C street, between Deputy Marshal Jack Williams and Wm. Brown, which resulted in the immediate death of the latter. There had been some difficulty between the parties for several months. An inquest was immediately held, and the following testimony adduced: Officer GEO. BIRDSALL, sworn, says:--I was told Wm. Brown was drunk and was looking for Jack Williams; so soon as I heard that I started for the parties to prevent a collision; went into the billiard saloon; saw Billy Brown running around, saying if anybody had anything against him to show cause; he was talking in a boisterous manner, and officer Perry took him to the other end of the room to talk to him; Brown came back to me; remarked to me that he thought he was as good as anybody, and knew how to take care of himself; he passed by me and went to the bar; don't know whether he drank or not; Williams was at the end of the billiard-table, next to the stairway; Brown, after going to the bar, came back and said he was as good as any man in the world; he had then walked out to the end of the first billiard-table from the bar; I moved closer to them, supposing there would be a fight; as Brown drew his pistol I caught hold of it; he had fired one shot at Williams; don't know the effect of it; caught hold of him with one hand, and took hold of the pistol and turned it up; think he fired once after I caught hold of the pistol; I wrenched the pistol from him; walked to the end of the billiard-table and told a party that I had Brown's pistol, and to stop shooting; I think four shots were fired in all; after walking out, Mr. Foster remarked that Brown was shot dead. Oh, there was no excitement about it--he merely "remarked" the small circumstance! Four months later the following item appeared in the same paper (the Enterprise). In this item the name of one of the city officers above referred to (Deputy Marshal Jack Williams) occurs again: ROBBERY AND DESPERATE AFFRAY.--On Tuesday night, a German named Charles Hurtzal, engineer in a mill at Silver City, came to this place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on B street. The music, dancing and Teutonic maidens awakened memories of Faderland until our German friend was carried away with rapture. He evidently had money, and was spending if freely. Late in the evening Jack Williams and Andy Blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup of coffee. Williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to procure a deck, but not finding any returned. On the stairway he met the German, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled his pockets of some seventy dollars. Hurtzal dared give no alarm, as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or exposed them, they would blow his brains out. So effectually was he frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him. Yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared. This efficient city officer, Jack Williams, had the common reputation of being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado. It was said that he had several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on citizens at dead of night in the public streets of Virginia. Five months after the above item appeared, Williams was assassinated while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the crack of the door and Williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls. It was said, at the time, that Williams had been for some time aware that a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was generally believed among the people that Williams's friends and enemies would make the assassination memorable--and useful, too--by a wholesale destruction of each other. It did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named Reeder was also disposed of permanently. Some matters in the Enterprise account of the killing of Reeder are worth nothing--especially the accommodating complaisance of a Virginia justice of the peace. The italics in the following narrative are mine: MORE CUTTING AND SHOOTING.--The devil seems to have again broken loose in our town. Pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our streets as in early times. When there has been a long season of quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy. Night before last Jack Williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody work, growing out of the killing of Williams, and on the same street in which he met his death. It appears that Tom Reeder, a friend of Williams, and George Gumbert were talking, at the meat market of the latter, about the killing of Williams the previous night, when Reeder said it was a most cowardly act to shoot a man in such a way, giving him "no show." Gumbert said that Williams had "as good a show as he gave Billy Brown," meaning the man killed by Williams last March. Reeder said it was a d---d lie, that Williams had no show at all. At this, Gumbert drew a knife and stabbed Reeder, cutting him in two places in the back. One stroke of the knife cut into the sleeve of Reeder's coat and passed downward in a slanting direction through his clothing, and entered his body at the small of the back; another blow struck more squarely, and made a much more dangerous wound. Gumbert gave himself up to the officers of justice, and was shortly after discharged by Justice Atwill, on his own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o'clock in the evening. In the meantime Reeder had been taken into the office of Dr. Owens, where his wounds were properly dressed. One of his wounds was considered quite dangerous, and it was thought by many that it would prove fatal. But being considerably under the influence of liquor, Reeder did not feel his wounds as he otherwise would, and he got up and went into the street. He went to the meat market and renewed his quarrel with Gumbert, threatening his life. Friends tried to interfere to put a stop to the quarrel and get the parties away from each other. In the Fashion Saloon Reeder made threats against the life of Gumbert, saying he would kill him, and it is said that he requested the officers not to arrest Gumbert, as he intended to kill him. After these threats Gumbert went off and procured a double-barreled shot gun, loaded with buck-shot or revolver balls, and went after Reeder. Two or three persons were assisting him along the street, trying to get him home, and had him just in front of the store of Klopstock & Harris, when Gumbert came across toward him from the opposite side of the street with his gun. He came up within about ten or fifteen feet of Reeder, and called out to those with him to "look out! get out of the way!" and they had only time to heed the warning, when he fired. Reeder was at the time attempting to screen himself behind a large cask, which stood against the awning post of Klopstock & Harris's store, but some of the balls took effect in the lower part of his breast, and he reeled around forward and fell in front of the cask. Gumbert then raised his gun and fired the second barrel, which missed Reeder and entered the ground. At the time that this occurred, there were a great many persons on the street in the vicinity, and a number of them called out to Gumbert, when they saw him raise his gun, to "hold on," and "don't shoot!" The cutting took place about ten o'clock and the shooting about twelve. After the shooting the street was instantly crowded with the inhabitants of that part of the town, some appearing much excited and laughing--declaring that it looked like the "good old times of '60." Marshal Perry and officer Birdsall were near when the shooting occurred, and Gumbert was immediately arrested and his gun taken from him, when he was marched off to jail. Many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given us offence. It was whispered around that it was not all over yet --five or six more were to be killed before night. Reeder was taken to the Virginia City Hotel, and doctors called in to examine his wounds. They found that two or three balls had entered his right side; one of them appeared to have passed through the substance of the lungs, while another passed into the liver. Two balls were also found to have struck one of his legs. As some of the balls struck the cask, the wounds in Reeder's leg were probably from these, glancing downwards, though they might have been caused by the second shot fired. After being shot, Reeder said when he got on his feet --smiling as he spoke--"It will take better shooting than that to kill me." The doctors consider it almost impossible for him to recover, but as he has an excellent constitution he may survive, notwithstanding the number and dangerous character of the wounds he has received. The town appears to be perfectly quiet at present, as though the late stormy times had cleared our moral atmosphere; but who can tell in what quarter clouds are lowering or plots ripening? Reeder--or at least what was left of him--survived his wounds two days! Nothing was ever done with Gumbert. Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no doubt at any rate. Not less than a hundred men have been murdered in Nevada--perhaps I would be within bounds if I said three hundred--and as far as I can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty there. However, four or five who had no money and no political influence have been punished by imprisonment--one languished in prison as much as eight months, I think. However, I do not desire to be extravagant--it may have been less. However, one prophecy was verified, at any rate. It was asserted by the desperadoes that one of their brethren (Joe McGee, a special policeman) was known to be the conspirator chosen by lot to assassinate Williams; and they also asserted that doom had been pronounced against McGee, and that he would be assassinated in exactly the same manner that had been adopted for the destruction of Williams--a prophecy which came true a year later. After twelve months of distress (for McGee saw a fancied assassin in every man that approached him), he made the last of many efforts to get out of the country unwatched. He went to Carson and sat down in a saloon to wait for the stage--it would leave at four in the morning. But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy, and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track. The bar-keeper told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the door, or the window by the stove. But a fatal fascination seduced him to the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the bar-keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to remain there. But he could not. At three in the morning he again returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger. Before the bar-keeper could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired through the window and riddled McGee's breast with slugs, killing him almost instantly. By the same discharge the stranger at McGee's side also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three days. CHAPTER L. These murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of history familiar to all old Californians, and worthy to be known by other peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice unencumbered with nonsense. I would apologize for this digression but for the fact that the information I am about to offer is apology enough in itself. And since I digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome. Capt. Ned Blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not desire to be famous)--sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for many years. He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had been a sailor nearly fifty years--a sailor from early boyhood. He was a rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed simplicity, too. He hated trifling conventionalities--"business" was the word, with him. He had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice. He sailed for the Chincha Islands in command of a guano ship. He had a fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet--on him he had for years lavished his admiration and esteem. It was Capt. Ned's first voyage to the Chinchas, but his fame had gone before him--the fame of being a man who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and would stand no nonsense. It was a fame well earned. Arrived in the islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one Bill Noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship. This man had created a small reign of terror there. At nine o'clock at night, Capt. Ned, all alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight. A form ascended the side, and approached him. Capt. Ned said: "Who goes there?" "I'm Bill Noakes, the best man in the islands." "What do you want aboard this ship?" "I've heard of Capt. Ned Blakely, and one of us is a better man than 'tother--I'll know which, before I go ashore." "You've come to the right shop--I'm your man. I'll learn you to come aboard this ship without an invite." He seized Noakes, backed him against the mainmast, pounded his face to a pulp, and then threw him overboard. Noakes was not convinced. He returned the next night, got the pulp renewed, and went overboard head first, as before. He was satisfied. A week after this, while Noakes was carousing with a sailor crowd on shore, at noonday, Capt. Ned's colored mate came along, and Noakes tried to pick a quarrel with him. The negro evaded the trap, and tried to get away. Noakes followed him up; the negro began to run; Noakes fired on him with a revolver and killed him. Half a dozen sea-captains witnessed the whole affair. Noakes retreated to the small after-cabin of his ship, with two other bullies, and gave out that death would be the portion of any man that intruded there. There was no attempt made to follow the villains; there was no disposition to do it, and indeed very little thought of such an enterprise. There were no courts and no officers; there was no government; the islands belonged to Peru, and Peru was far away; she had no official representative on the ground; and neither had any other nation. However, Capt. Ned was not perplexing his head about such things. They concerned him not. He was boiling with rage and furious for justice. At nine o'clock at night he loaded a double-barreled gun with slugs, fished out a pair of handcuffs, got a ship's lantern, summoned his quartermaster, and went ashore. He said: "Do you see that ship there at the dock?" "Ay-ay, sir." "It's the Venus." "Ay-ay, sir." "You--you know me." "Ay-ay, sir." "Very well, then. Take the lantern. Carry it just under your chin. I'll walk behind you and rest this gun-barrel on your shoulder, p'inting forward--so. Keep your lantern well up so's I can see things ahead of you good. I'm going to march in on Noakes--and take him--and jug the other chaps. If you flinch--well, you know me." "Ay-ay, sir." In this order they filed aboard softly, arrived at Noakes's den, the quartermaster pushed the door open, and the lantern revealed the three desperadoes sitting on the floor. Capt. Ned said: "I'm Ned Blakely. I've got you under fire. Don't you move without orders--any of you. You two kneel down in the corner; faces to the wall --now. Bill Noakes, put these handcuffs on; now come up close. Quartermaster, fasten 'em. All right. Don't stir, sir. Quartermaster, put the key in the outside of the door. Now, men, I'm going to lock you two in; and if you try to burst through this door--well, you've heard of me. Bill Noakes, fall in ahead, and march. All set. Quartermaster, lock the door." Noakes spent the night on board Blakely's ship, a prisoner under strict guard. Early in the morning Capt. Ned called in all the sea-captains in the harbor and invited them, with nautical ceremony, to be present on board his ship at nine o'clock to witness the hanging of Noakes at the yard-arm! "What! The man has not been tried." "Of course he hasn't. But didn't he kill the nigger?" "Certainly he did; but you are not thinking of hanging him without a trial?" "Trial! What do I want to try him for, if he killed the nigger?" "Oh, Capt. Ned, this will never do. Think how it will sound." "Sound be hanged! Didn't he kill the nigger?" "Certainly, certainly, Capt. Ned,--nobody denies that,--but--" "Then I'm going to hang him, that's all. Everybody I've talked to talks just the same way you do. Everybody says he killed the nigger, everybody knows he killed the nigger, and yet every lubber of you wants him tried for it. I don't understand such bloody foolishness as that. Tried! Mind you, I don't object to trying him, if it's got to be done to give satisfaction; and I'll be there, and chip in and help, too; but put it off till afternoon--put it off till afternoon, for I'll have my hands middling full till after the burying--" "Why, what do you mean? Are you going to hang him any how--and try him afterward?" "Didn't I say I was going to hang him? I never saw such people as you. What's the difference? You ask a favor, and then you ain't satisfied when you get it. Before or after's all one--you know how the trial will go. He killed the nigger. Say--I must be going. If your mate would like to come to the hanging, fetch him along. I like him." There was a stir in the camp. The captains came in a body and pleaded with Capt. Ned not to do this rash thing. They promised that they would create a court composed of captains of the best character; they would empanel a jury; they would conduct everything in a way becoming the serious nature of the business in hand, and give the case an impartial hearing and the accused a fair trial. And they said it would be murder, and punishable by the American courts if he persisted and hung the accused on his ship. They pleaded hard. Capt. Ned said: "Gentlemen, I'm not stubborn and I'm not unreasonable. I'm always willing to do just as near right as I can. How long will it take?" "Probably only a little while." "And can I take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?" "If he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay." "If he's proven guilty. Great Neptune, ain't he guilty? This beats my time. Why you all know he's guilty." But at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing underhanded. Then he said: "Well, all right. You go on and try him and I'll go down and overhaul his conscience and prepare him to go--like enough he needs it, and I don't want to send him off without a show for hereafter." This was another obstacle. They finally convinced him that it was necessary to have the accused in court. Then they said they would send a guard to bring him. "No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself--he don't get out of my hands. Besides, I've got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway." The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a Bible and a rope in the other. He seated himself by the side of his captive and told the court to "up anchor and make sail." Then he turned a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes's friends, the two bullies. He strode over and said to them confidentially: "You're here to interfere, you see. Now you vote right, do you hear?--or else there'll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial's off, and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets." The caution was not without fruit. The jury was a unit--the verdict. "Guilty." Capt. Ned sprung to his feet and said: "Come along--you're my meat now, my lad, anyway. Gentlemen you've done yourselves proud. I invite you all to come and see that I do it all straight. Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here." The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the hanging, and-- Capt. Ned's patience was at an end. His wrath was boundless. The subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped. When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man. He opened his Bible, and laid aside his hat. Selecting a chapter at random, he read it through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity. Then he said: "Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for him. Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear inspection. You killed the nigger?" No reply. A long pause. The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress the effect. Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and ended by repeating the question: "Did you kill the nigger?" No reply--other than a malignant scowl. The captain now read the first and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling--paused a moment, closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of satisfaction: "There. Four chapters. There's few that would have took the pains with you that I have." Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the court. A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure, a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience--a misgiving--and he said with a sigh: "Well, p'raps I ought to burnt him, maybe. But I was trying to do for the best." When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the "early days") it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain's popularity in any degree. It increased it, indeed. California had a population then that "inflicted" justice after a fashion that was simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere. 
8587	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 6. CHAPTER LI. Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times." The saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter. Is it not so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush times" are at the flood. This is the birth of the "literary" paper. The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F. was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the Scripture--"in that it passeth understanding." He once said of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their Church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this day our daily stranger!" We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it could not get along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able romancist of the ineffable school--I know no other name to apply to a school whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of high society who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the appetite of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies, followed Mr. F., the third week, introducing a mysterious Roscicrucian who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel. He also introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a salary and set him on the midnight track of the Duke with a poisoned dagger. He also created an Irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed him in the service of the society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to carry billet-doux to the Duke. About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a literary turn of mind--rather seedy he was, but very quiet and unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. He was so gentle, and his manners were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he made friends of all who came in contact with him. He applied for literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel. His chapter was to follow Mr. D.'s, and mine was to come next. Now what does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. The result may be guessed. He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands; made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil! It read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body. But there was war when it came in. The other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not yet more than half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm. When a lull came at last, he said his say gently and appealingly--said he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant and plausible but instructive and---- The bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule. And so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to appease the enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to rewrite the chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation gradually quieted down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him to his own citadel. But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again. And again his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and heroines a wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work. He got the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk! But the chapter cannot be described. It was symmetrically crazy; it was artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as curious as the text. I remember one of the "situations," and will offer it as an example of the whole. He altered the character of the brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-three years. Then he made the blonde discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady. Stung to the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal. But the parents would none of it. What they wanted in the family was a Duke; and a Duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next to the Duke the lawyer had their preference. Necessarily the blonde now went into a decline. The parents were alarmed. They pleaded with her to marry the Duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on. Then they laid a plan. They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end of that time she still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might marry the lawyer with their full consent. The result was as they had foreseen: gladness came again, and the flush of returning health. Then the parents took the next step in their scheme. They had the family physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the thorough restoration of the blonde's strength; and they invited the Duke to be of the party. They judged that the Duke's constant presence and the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest--for they did not invite the lawyer. So they set sail in a steamer for America--and the third day out, when their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their first meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer! The Duke and party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and the vessel neared America. But, by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire; she burned to the water's edge; of all her crew and passengers, only thirty were saved. They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all night long. Among them were our friends. The lawyer, by superhuman exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth two hundred yards and bringing one each time--(the girl first). The Duke had saved himself. In the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene and sent their boats. The weather was stormy and the embarkation was attended with much confusion and excitement. The lawyer did his duty like a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and some others into a boat (the Duke helped himself in); then a child fell overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its mother's screams. Then he ran back--a few seconds too late--the blonde's boat was under way. So he had to take the other boat, and go to the other ship. The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of each other--drove them whither it would. When it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven hundred miles north of Boston and the other about seven hundred south of that port. The blonde's captain was bound on a whaling cruise in the North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port without orders; such being nautical law. The lawyer's captain was to cruise in the North Pacific, and he could not go back or make a port without orders. All the lawyer's money and baggage were in the blonde's boat and went to the blonde's ship--so his captain made him work his passage as a common sailor. When both ships had been cruising nearly a year, the one was off the coast of Greenland and the other in Behring's Strait. The blonde had long ago been well-nigh persuaded that her lawyer had been washed overboard and lost just before the whale ships reached the raft, and now, under the pleadings of her parents and the Duke she was at last beginning to nerve herself for the doom of the covenant, and prepare for the hated marriage. But she would not yield a day before the date set. The weeks dragged on, the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding--a wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses. Five days more and all would be over. So the blonde reflected, with a sigh and a tear. Oh where was her true love--and why, why did he not come and save her? At that moment he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in Behring's Strait, five thousand miles away, by the way of the Arctic Ocean, or twenty thousand by the way of the Horn--that was the reason. He struck, but not with perfect aim--his foot slipped and he fell in the whale's mouth and went down his throat. He was insensible five days. Then he came to himself and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in the whale's roof. He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were hoisting blubber up a ship's side. He recognized the vessel, flew aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar and exclaimed: "Stop the proceedings--I'm here! Come to my arms, my own!" There were foot-notes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the possibilities; he said he got the incident of the whale traveling from Behring's Strait to the coast of Greenland, five thousand miles in five days, through the Arctic Ocean, from Charles Reade's "Love Me Little Love Me Long," and considered that that established the fact that the thing could be done; and he instanced Jonah's adventure as proof that a man could live in a whale's belly, and added that if a preacher could stand it three days a lawyer could surely stand it five! There was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his head. But he had already delayed things so much that there was not time for some one else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out without any novel in it. It was but a feeble, struggling, stupid journal, and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence; at any rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the Weekly Occidental died as peacefully as an infant. An effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of a telling new title, and Mr. F. said that The Phenix would be just the name for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its dead ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor; but some low-priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the Lazarus; and inasmuch as the people were not profound in Scriptural matters but thought the resurrected Lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant that begged in the rich man's gateway were one and the same person, the name became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good and all. I was sorry enough, for I was very proud of being connected with a literary paper--prouder than I have ever been of anything since, perhaps. I had written some rhymes for it--poetry I considered it--and it was a great grief to me that the production was on the "first side" of the issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the light. But time brings its revenges--I can put it in here; it will answer in place of a tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental. The idea (not the chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably suggested by the old song called "The Raging Canal," but I cannot remember now. I do remember, though, that at that time I thought my doggerel was one of the ablest poems of the age: THE AGED PILOT MAN. On the Erie Canal, it was, All on a summer's day, I sailed forth with my parents Far away to Albany. From out the clouds at noon that day There came a dreadful storm, That piled the billows high about, And filled us with alarm. A man came rushing from a house, Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray, [The customary canal technicality for "tie up."] Snub up your boat, snub up, alas, Snub up while yet you may." Our captain cast one glance astern, Then forward glanced he, And said, "My wife and little ones I never more shall see." Said Dollinger the pilot man, In noble words, but few, --"Fear not, but lean on Dollinger, And he will fetch you through." The boat drove on, the frightened mules Tore through the rain and wind, And bravely still, in danger's post, The whip-boy strode behind. "Come 'board, come 'board," the captain cried, "Nor tempt so wild a storm;" But still the raging mules advanced, And still the boy strode on. Then said the captain to us all, "Alas, 'tis plain to me, The greater danger is not there, But here upon the sea. "So let us strive, while life remains, To save all souls on board, And then if die at last we must, Let . . . . I cannot speak the word!" Said Dollinger the pilot man, Tow'ring above the crew, "Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, And he will fetch you through." "Low bridge! low bridge!" all heads went down, The laboring bark sped on; A mill we passed, we passed church, Hamlets, and fields of corn; And all the world came out to see, And chased along the shore Crying, "Alas, alas, the sheeted rain, The wind, the tempest's roar! Alas, the gallant ship and crew, Can nothing help them more?" And from our deck sad eyes looked out Across the stormy scene: The tossing wake of billows aft, The bending forests green, The chickens sheltered under carts In lee of barn the cows, The skurrying swine with straw in mouth, The wild spray from our bows! "She balances! She wavers! Now let her go about! If she misses stays and broaches to, We're all"--then with a shout, "Huray! huray! Avast! belay! Take in more sail! Lord, what a gale! Ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule's tail!" "Ho! lighten ship! ho! man the pump! Ho, hostler, heave the lead!" "A quarter-three!--'tis shoaling fast! Three feet large!--t-h-r-e-e feet! --Three feet scant!" I cried in fright "Oh, is there no retreat?" Said Dollinger, the pilot man, As on the vessel flew, "Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, And he will fetch you through." A panic struck the bravest hearts, The boldest cheek turned pale; For plain to all, this shoaling said A leak had burst the ditch's bed! And, straight as bolt from crossbow sped, Our ship swept on, with shoaling lead, Before the fearful gale! "Sever the tow-line! Cripple the mules!" Too late! There comes a shock! Another length, and the fated craft Would have swum in the saving lock! Then gathered together the shipwrecked crew And took one last embrace, While sorrowful tears from despairing eyes Ran down each hopeless face; And some did think of their little ones Whom they never more might see, And others of waiting wives at home, And mothers that grieved would be. But of all the children of misery there On that poor sinking frame, But one spake words of hope and faith, And I worshipped as they came: Said Dollinger the pilot man, --(O brave heart, strong and true!) --"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, For he will fetch you through." Lo! scarce the words have passed his lips The dauntless prophet say'th, When every soul about him seeth A wonder crown his faith! "And count ye all, both great and small, As numbered with the dead: For mariner for forty year, On Erie, boy and man, I never yet saw such a storm, Or one't with it began!" So overboard a keg of nails And anvils three we threw, Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks, Two hundred pounds of glue, Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat, A box of books, a cow, A violin, Lord Byron's works, A rip-saw and a sow. A curve! a curve! the dangers grow! "Labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so! --Hard-a-port, Dol!--hellum-a-lee! Haw the head mule!--the aft one gee! Luff!--bring her to the wind!" For straight a farmer brought a plank, --(Mysteriously inspired) --And laying it unto the ship, In silent awe retired. Then every sufferer stood amazed That pilot man before; A moment stood. Then wondering turned, And speechless walked ashore. CHAPTER LII. Since I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he chooses. The year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination of the "flush times." Virginia swarmed with men and vehicles to that degree that the place looked like a very hive--that is when one's vision could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally blowing in summer. I will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a sixteenth of an inch thick and present an outside appearance that was a uniform pale yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust in it, thrown there by the wheels. The delicate scales used by the assayers were inclosed in glass cases intended to be air-tight, and yet some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales. Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business going on, too. All freights were brought over the mountains from California (150 miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession, and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals stretched unbroken from Virginia to California. Its long route was traceable clear across the deserts of the Territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freights over that hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads. One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid $10,000 a month freightage. In the winter the freights were much higher. All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500 to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per cent. of its intrinsic value. So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25 each. Small shippers paid two per cent. There were three stages a day, each way, and I have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot and take it off. However, these were extraordinary events. [Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory--which is excellent--we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through that office, during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000; next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000. Thus in a year and a half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion. During the year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863 (though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are under estimating, somewhat). This gives us $6,000,000 for the year. Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us--we will give them $10,000,000. To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000. To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about $30,000,000. Placing the number of mills in the Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing $300,000 in bullion during the twelve months. Allowing them to run three hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes their work average $1,000 a day. Say the mills average twenty tons of rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot"--$1,000 a day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.--Enterprise. [A considerable over estimate--M. T.]] Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars, and the freight on it over $1,000. Each coach always carried a deal of ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six stages going all the time, Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Virginia City business was important and lucrative. All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some of New York's streets. I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample. Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately lattice-work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall street, and a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true. A beggar with a silver mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell. I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the Gould and Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest. If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. It is like tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. When you reach the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone--silver ore; you select choice specimens from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery" to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped "incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it. Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver mills with their rich freight. It is all "done," now, and there you are. You need never go down again, for you have seen it all. If you have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters if so disposed. Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain. I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and from it I will take an extract: AN HOUR IN THE CAVED MINES.--We journeyed down into the Ophir mine, yesterday, to see the earthquake. We could not go down the deep incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places. Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill above the Ophir office, and then by means of a series of long ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery. Traversing a drift, we came to the Spanish line, passed five sets of timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake. Here was as complete a chaos as ever was seen--vast masses of earth and splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through. Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the tremendous mass was still going on. We were in that portion of the Ophir known as the "north mines." Returning to the surface, we entered a tunnel leading into the Central, for the purpose of getting into the main Ophir. Descending a long incline in this tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir. From a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst of the earthquake again--earth and broken timbers mingled together without regard to grace or symmetry. A large portion of the second, third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction--the two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening. At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery, two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come. These beams are solid--eighteen inches square; first, a great beam is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above square, like the framework of a window. The superincumbent weight was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick! Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in that way. Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above. You could hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however. Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten inches of water there, and had to come back. In repairing the damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot. However, the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing. We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft, whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. So, having seen the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline and tunnel, and adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration, to lunch at the Ophir office. During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have] produced $25,000,000 in bullion--almost, if not quite, a round million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well, considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures. Silver mining was her sole productive industry. [Since the above was in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000.] However, the day for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel is to plow through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and hoisting and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. This vast work will absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as soon as it strikes the first end of the vein. The tunnel will be some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches. Cars will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and transportation by mule teams. The water from the tunnel will furnish the motive power for the mills. Mr. Sutro, the originator of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its completion. He has converted several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there. CHAPTER LIII. Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather's old ram--but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time--just comfortably and sociably drunk. They kept this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. I got to haunting Blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk. I never watched a man's condition with such absorbing interest, such anxious solicitude; I never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk before. At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find no fault with it--he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk--not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory. As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder-keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command silence. His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart miner of the period. On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed "the boys" sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes, powder-kegs, etc. They said: "Sh--! Don't speak--he's going to commence." THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM. I found a seat at once, and Blaine said: 'I don't reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois --got him of a man by the name of Yates--Bill Yates--maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon--Baptist--and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west. 'Seth Green was prob'ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson --Sarah Wilkerson--good cretur, she was--one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar'l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don't mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was--no, it warn't Sile Hawkins, after all--it was a galoot by the name of Filkins --I disremember his first name; but he was a stump--come into pra'r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson's head, poor old filly. She was a good soul--had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn't any, to receive company in; it warn't big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn't noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t' other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. 'Grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn't work, somehow--the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, "Your game eye has fetched loose. Miss Wagner dear" --and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again--wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn't much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn't match nohow. 'Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a quilting, or Dorcas S'iety at her house she gen'ally borrowed Miss Higgins's wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much she minded that. She said she couldn't abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops's wig --Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler's wife--a ratty old buzzard, he was, that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that he judged would fit the can'idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the coffin nights. He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old Robbins's place, waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp'inting him. He got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn and got well. The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and 'peared to be powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it. And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that. You see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he took the chances on another, cal'lating that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent. And by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he 'lowed to take his time, now. It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted. He moved back to Indiany pretty soon--went to Wellsville --Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from. Mighty fine family. Old Maryland stock. Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the widder Billings--she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon Dunlap's first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace--et up by the savages. They et him, too, poor feller --biled him. It warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things, that they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of 'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys. That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain't no such a thing as an accident. 'When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn't been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem's dog was there. Why didn't the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under. That's the reason the dog warn't appinted. A dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words it was a put-up thing. Accidents don't happen, boys. Uncle Lem's dog--I wish you could a seen that dog. He was a reglar shepherd--or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd--splendid animal; belonged to parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him. Parson Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece. 'She wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so--full length. The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn't bury him--they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument. And they nailed a sign on it and put--put on--put on it--sacred to--the m-e-m-o-r-y--of fourteen y-a-r-d-s--of three-ply--car---pet--containing all that was--m-o-r-t-a-l--of--of--W-i-l-l-i-a-m--W-h-e--' Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier--his head nodded, once, twice, three times--dropped peacefully upon his breast, and he fell tranquilly asleep. The tears were running down the boys' cheeks --they were suffocating with suppressed laughter--and had been from the start, though I had never noticed it. I perceived that I was "sold." I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep. What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out. CHAPTER LIV. Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia--it is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody--even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the "land of the free"--nobody denies that--nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered. There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen on the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia. They were penned into a "Chinese quarter"--a thing which they do not particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together. Their buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief employment of Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. They always send a bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for it does not enlighten the customer much. Their price for washing was $2.50 per dozen--rather cheaper than white people could afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign on the Chinese houses was: "See Yup, Washer and Ironer"; "Hong Wo, Washer"; "Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing." The house servants, cooks, etc., in California and Nevada, were chiefly Chinamen. There were few white servants and no Chinawomen so employed. Chinamen make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly industrious. They do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward. All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility--pity but all our petted voters could. In California they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless--and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen. This swindle has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same month--but the public treasury was no additionally enriched by it, probably. Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence--they worship their departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man's front yard, back yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in order that he may visit the graves at any and all times. Therefore that huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its centre to its circumference with graves--and inasmuch as every foot of ground must be made to do its utmost, in China, lest the swarming population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead. Since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep. Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends. A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him. Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in case of death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of these. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses--or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that it passed. There was another bill--it became a law--compelling every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it. As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makers thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese immigration. What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like--or, indeed, what the Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like--may be gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting for that paper: CHINATOWN.--Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. At ten o'clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction--or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor--for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue. John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in Paradise. Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies, with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds'-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe. His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage. We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery scheme--in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it. "Tom," who speaks faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago, said that "Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um seventy--may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good." However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are, as a general thing, that "he get whip heself." We could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing is similar to ours. Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell. As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks' feathers. We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and "dickered" for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them with incredible rapidity--in fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano. They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it--they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America. CHAPTER LV. I began to get tired of staying in one place so long. There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar Agricultural Fair to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in--however, the territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum"). I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted--I did not know what I wanted. I had the "spring fever" and wanted a change, principally, no doubt. Besides, a convention had framed a State Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I believed that these gentlemen would "treat" the moneyless and the irresponsible among the population into adopting the constitution and thus well-nigh killing the country (it could not well carry such a load as a State government, since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped mines could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land, there was but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder). I believed that a State government would destroy the "flush times," and I wanted to get away. I believed that the mining stocks I had on hand would soon be worth $100,000, and thought if they reached that before the Constitution was adopted, I would sell out and make myself secure from the crash the change of government was going to bring. I considered $100,000 sufficient to go home with decently, though it was but a small amount compared to what I had been expecting to return with. I felt rather down-hearted about it, but I tried to comfort myself with the reflection that with such a sum I could not fall into want. About this time a schoolmate of mine whom I had not seen since boyhood, came tramping in on foot from Reese River, a very allegory of Poverty. The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have "taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself," as he pleasantly remarked. He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars--twenty-six to take him to San Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it. I found I had but little more than the amount wanted, in my pocket; so I stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker (on twenty days' time, without the formality of a note), and gave it him, rather than walk half a block to the office, where I had some specie laid up. If anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back that forty-six dollars to the banker (for I did not expect it of the Prodigal, and was not disappointed), I would have felt injured. And so would the banker. I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed me. The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon. The second day, I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the "American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this land. The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my personalities had borne fruit. Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it! Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become a reporter again. I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks after being General of the army. So I thought I would depart and go abroad into the world somewhere. Just at this juncture, Dan, my associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured in a new mining district in our neighborhood. He said they offered to pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale. He had refused to go. It was the very opportunity I wanted. I abused him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner. He said it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper. I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle. He said the men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine. My first idea was to kill Dan. But I changed my mind, notwithstanding I was so angry, for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost. Dan said it was by no means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and would not be in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days; that they had requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had promised that he would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them by the time they got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them. It was splendid. I went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody had yet gone East to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white for the sickle. I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan would bring a princely sum in New York, and sell without delay or difficulty. I could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in the air. It was the "blind lead" come again. Next day I got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending departures of old citizens,--for if you have only half a dozen friends out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to go away neglected and unregretted--and Dan promised to keep strict watch for the men that had the mine to sell. The trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred just as we were about to start. A very seedy looking vagabond passenger got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver bricks was thrown in. He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled and let it fall on the bummer's foot. He instantly dropped on the ground and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way. A sympathizing crowd gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between the gasps ejaculated "Brandy! for Heaven's sake, brandy!" They poured half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him. Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done. The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be grateful and content. He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we drove off. He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a crushed foot. "Well," said he, "I hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a cent to my name. I was most perishing--and so, when that duffer dropped that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance. Got a cork leg, you know!" and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it. He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his timely ingenuity. One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. I once heard a gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian bar-room. He entitled it "Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink." It was nothing but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy of Toodles himself. The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes change and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest man fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water holds it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes that people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the quarter again--blushes--puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure of his aim--pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says with a sigh: "Gimme a cigar!" Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man. He said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was--an iron one. He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured to say "Be (hic) begone!" No effect. Then he approached warily, and adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but failed; still approached, saying, "Poor dog!--doggy, doggy, doggy!--poor doggy-dog!" Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till master of the advantages; then exclaimed, "Leave, you thief!"--planted a vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of course. A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a reflective voice: "Awful solid dog. What could he ben eating? ('ic!) Rocks, p'raps. Such animals is dangerous.--' At's what I say--they're dangerous. If a man--('ic!)--if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on rocks; 'at's all right; but let him keep him at home--not have him layin' round promiscuous, where ('ic!) where people's liable to stumble over him when they ain't noticin'!" It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady's handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet above Virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a permanent farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of life I had ever experienced. And this reminds me of an incident which the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it happened must vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies. Late one summer afternoon we had a rain shower. That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing, for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada, and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief wonder. It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness as of midnight. All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson, over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested against. This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain; and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world of darkness. It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was. It was the flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind--a mysterious messenger of good tidings, some were fain to believe. It was the nation's emblem transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the flag--for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the people were wrought up! The superstition grew apace that this was a mystic courier come with great news from the war--the poetry of the idea excusing and commending it--and on it spread, from heart to heart, from lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of artillery! And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen that day in the east--Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at Gettysburg! But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,--as was the custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. Even at this distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity without regret. What a time we might have had! CHAPTER LVI. We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family--redwood, pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh! --don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!" Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall; he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon, and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to pensive musing and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in California, is what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots of barren sand between. One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from "the States" go into ecstasies over the loveliness of "ever-blooming California." And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. But perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer greens of Californian "verdure," stand astonished, and filled with worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and sombre California, when that man has seen New England's meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces--and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest. San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when the longed for rain does come it stays. Even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis---- However there are varying opinions about that. The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there. It has only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was. During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella. Because you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac. If it is Winter, it will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it. You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant. You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony --you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better. And the chances are that you'll get it, too. San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in "the States" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses--I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit --though I thought it grew only in Central America--down on the Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed. I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of Sacramento. One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco--but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe--people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one.--M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition, --and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it. I have seen the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and precipices. CHAPTER LVII. It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness--you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence --all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of California. It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a curious population. It was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For observe, it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land. And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth--or prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all --victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is pitiful to think upon. It was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers --you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says "Well, that is California all over." But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky, fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts --blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant animosity toward what they called a "biled shirt." It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! Men--only swarming hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere! In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the camping-ground--sign of emigrants from over the great plains. Everybody went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was discovered fluttering in the wind! The male emigrant was visible. The miners said: "Fetch her out!" He said: "It is my wife, gentlemen--she is sick--we have been robbed of money, provisions, everything, by the Indians--we want to rest." "Fetch her out! We've got to see her!" "But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she--" "FETCH HER OUT!" He "fetched her out," and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to a memory rather than a present reality--and then they collected twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung their hats again and gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied. Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only two or three years old at the time. Her father said that, after landing from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant leading the party with the little girl in her arms. And presently a huge miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons--just down from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification and astonishment. Then he said, reverently: "Well, if it ain't a child!" And then he snatched a little leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant: "There's a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I'll give it to you to let me kiss the child!" That anecdote is true. But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of kissing the same child, I would have been refused. Seventeen added years have far more than doubled the price. And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office single file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation--a genuine, live Woman! And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-jacks in a frying-pan with the other. And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood, now, I voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.--M.T.] years old, and hadn't a tooth in her head. CHAPTER LVIII. For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo. In a word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars (prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada. Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! And then --all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete. The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the hotel to a very private boarding house. I took a reporter's berth and went to work. I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east. But I could not hear from Dan. My letters miscarried or were not answered. One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed "Marshall"--the Virginia reporter--and contained a request that I should call at the hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for the east in the morning. A postscript added that their errand was a big mining speculation! I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there. And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and arrived just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and under way. I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would amount to nothing--poor comfort at best--and then went back to my slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget all about it. A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright October day. I was coming down Third street. The only objects in motion anywhere in sight in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise, all was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that here was an item!--no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke! And here came the buggy--overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of street. One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends, and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an impaled madman. Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded. Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker. Of the wonders wrought by "the great earthquake," these were all that came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days. The destruction of property was trifling--the injury to it was wide-spread and somewhat serious. The "curiosities" of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up. A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing on but one brief undergarment--met a chambermaid, and exclaimed: "Oh, what shall I do! Where shall I go!" She responded with naive serenity: "If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!" A certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands' purses and arrayed themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no other apology for clothing than--a bath-towel! The sufferer rose superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife: "Now that is something like! Get out your towel my dear!" The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft. A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time,--the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time afterward, was club-footed. However--on second thought,--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own risk. The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said: "However, we will omit the benediction!"--and the next instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood. After the first shock, an Oakland minister said: "Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this"-- And added, after the third: "But outside is good enough!" He then skipped out at the back door. Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before. There was hardly a girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind. Suspended pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the earthquake's humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces to the wall! There was great difference of opinion, at first, as to the course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out of various tanks and buckets settled that. Thousands of people were made so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days afterward.--Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely. The queer earthquake--episodes that formed the staple of San Francisco gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so I will diverge from the subject. By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the Enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow: NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.--G. M. Marshall, Sheba Hurs and Amos H. Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New York City, with ores from mines in Pine Wood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese River range, have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet and called the Pine Mountains Consolidated, for the sum of $3,000,000. The stamps on the deed, which is now on its way to Humboldt County, from New York, for record, amounted to $3,000, which is said to be the largest amount of stamps ever placed on one document. A working capital of $1,000,000 has been paid into the treasury, and machinery has already been purchased for a large quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible. The stock in this company is all full paid and entirely unassessable. The ores of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the Sheba mine in Humboldt. Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber they desired before making public their whereabouts. Ores from there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in silver and gold--silver predominating. There is an abundance of wood and water in the District. We are glad to know that New York capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this region. Having seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the mines of the District are very valuable--anything but wild-cat. Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a million! It was the "blind lead" over again. Let us not dwell on this miserable matter. If I were inventing these things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [True, and yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall, months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to have captured an entire million. In fact I gathered that he had not then received $50,000. Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties. However, when the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.] Suffice it that I so lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings and sighings and foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and became about worthless, as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal. CHAPTER LIX. For a time I wrote literary screeds for the Golden Era. C. H. Webb had established a very excellent literary weekly called the Californian, but high merit was no guaranty of success; it languished, and he sold out to three printers, and Bret Harte became editor at $20 a week, and I was employed to contribute an article a week at $12. But the journal still languished, and the printers sold out to Captain Ogden, a rich man and a pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive luxury without much caring about the cost of it. When he grew tired of the novelty, he re-sold to the printers, the paper presently died a peaceful death, and I was out of work again. I would not mention these things but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs that characterize life on the Pacific coast. A man could hardly stumble into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country. For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at "slinking." I slunk from back street to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money--a silver ten cent piece--and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling. However, I am forgetting. I did have one other occupation beside that of "slinking." It was the entertaining of a collector (and being entertained by him,) who had in his hands the Virginia banker's bill for forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the "Prodigal." This man used to call regularly once a week and dun me, and sometimes oftener. He did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get nothing. He would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me, at five per cent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at fraud in it and no mistakes; and then plead, and argue and dun with all his might for any sum--any little trifle--even a dollar--even half a dollar, on account. Then his duty was accomplished and his conscience free. He immediately dropped the subject there always; got out a couple of cigars and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would have a long, luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would furnish me a world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store in his memory. By and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands and say briskly: "Well, business is business--can't stay with you always!"--and was off in a second. The idea of pining for a dun! And yet I used to long for him to come, and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his visit, when I was expecting him. But he never collected that bill, at last nor any part of it. I lived to pay it to the banker myself. Misery loves company. Now and then at night, in out-of-the way, dimly lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune. He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken, that I yearned toward him as a brother. I wanted to claim kinship with him and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together. The drawing toward each other must have been mutual; at any rate we got to falling together oftener, though still seemingly by accident; and although we did not speak or evince any recognition, I think the dull anxiety passed out of both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively in at home lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much enjoying our dumb companionship. Finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that. For our woes were identical, almost. He had been a reporter too, and lost his berth, and this was his experience, as nearly as I can recollect it. After losing his berth he had gone down, down, down, with never a halt: from a boarding house on Russian Hill to a boarding house in Kearney street; from thence to Dupont; from thence to a low sailor den; and from thence to lodgings in goods boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves. Then; for a while, he had gained a meagre living by sewing up bursted sacks of grain on the piers; when that failed he had found food here and there as chance threw it in his way. He had ceased to show his face in daylight, now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day. This mendicant Blucher--I call him that for convenience--was a splendid creature. He was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a crown. He had an adventure, once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies. He had been without a penny for two months. He had shirked about obscure streets, among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to him. But at last he was driven abroad in daylight. The cause was sufficient; he had not tasted food for forty-eight hours, and he could not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding. He came along a back street, glowering at the loaves in bake-shop windows, and feeling that he could trade his life away for a morsel to eat. The sight of the bread doubled his hunger; but it was good to look at it, any how, and imagine what one might do if one only had it. Presently, in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot--looked again--did not, and could not, believe his eyes--turned away, to try them, then looked again. It was a verity--no vain, hunger-inspired delusion--it was a silver dime! He snatched it--gloated over it; doubted it--bit it--found it genuine --choked his heart down, and smothered a halleluiah. Then he looked around--saw that nobody was looking at him--threw the dime down where it was before--walked away a few steps, and approached again, pretending he did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the luxury of finding it. He walked around it, viewing it from different points; then sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the signs and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill again. Finally he took it up, and went away, fondling it in his pocket. He idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners to take it out and look at it. By and by he went home to his lodgings--an empty queens-ware hogshead,--and employed himself till night trying to make up his mind what to buy with it. But it was hard to do. To get the most for it was the idea. He knew that at the Miner's Restaurant he could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents; or a fish-ball and some few trifles, but they gave "no bread with one fish-ball" there. At French Pete's he could get a veal cutlet, plain, and some radishes and bread, for ten cents; or a cup of coffee--a pint at least--and a slice of bread; but the slice was not thick enough by the eighth of an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that in the cutting of it. At seven o'clock his hunger was wolfish; and still his mind was not made up. He turned out and went up Merchant street, still ciphering; and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving men. He passed before the lights of Martin's restaurant, the most aristocratic in the city, and stopped. It was a place where he had often dined, in better days, and Martin knew him well. Standing aside, just out of the range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the show window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet and some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to go in there and take whatever he wanted. He chewed his stick with a hungry interest as he warmed to his subject. Just at this juncture he was conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger touched his arm. He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an apparition--a very allegory of Hunger! It was a man six feet high, gaunt, unshaven, hung with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and eyes that pleaded piteously. This phantom said: "Come with me--please." He locked his arm in Blucher's and walked up the street to where the passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put out his hands in a beseeching way, and said: "Friend--stranger--look at me! Life is easy to you--you go about, placid and content, as I did once, in my day--you have been in there, and eaten your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good world --but you've never suffered! You don't know what trouble is--you don't know what misery is--nor hunger! Look at me! Stranger have pity on a poor friendless, homeless dog! As God is my judge, I have not tasted food for eight and forty hours!--look in my eyes and see if I lie! Give me the least trifle in the world to keep me from starving--anything --twenty-five cents! Do it, stranger--do it, please. It will be nothing to you, but life to me. Do it, and I will go down on my knees and lick the dust before you! I will kiss your footprints--I will worship the very ground you walk on! Only twenty-five cents! I am famishing --perishing--starving by inches! For God's sake don't desert me!" Blucher was bewildered--and touched, too--stirred to the depths. He reflected. Thought again. Then an idea struck him, and he said: "Come with me." He took the outcast's arm, walked him down to Martin's restaurant, seated him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said: "Order what you want, friend. Charge it to me, Mr. Martin." "All right, Mr. Blucher," said Martin. Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half's worth of destruction had been accomplished, and the stranger's hunger appeased, Blucher went down to French Pete's, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king! Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled from the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps. CHAPTER LX. By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him. We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming hive, the centre of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared--streets, dwellings, shops, everything--and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine.--One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences--dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end. In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called "pocket mining" and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden harvest. There are not now more than twenty pocket miners in that entire little region. I think I know every one of them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box--his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time--and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night was gone. And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum. Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among the sediment you will find half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads. You are delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. If you find gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. If you find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the right scent. You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill--for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the hill your lines have converged to a point--a single foot from that point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest--and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all--$500. Sometimes the nest contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a party who never got $300 out of it afterward. The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a cent for about a year. In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-hammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold. That boulder paid them $800 afterward. But the aggravating circumstance was that these "Greasers" knew that there must be more gold where that boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000. The two American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans--and when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men. I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty. 
8588	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 7. CHAPTER LXI. One of my comrades there--another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes--was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.--He was forty-six, gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light--than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted. Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it--may be even supernatural. I heard him talking about this animal once. He said: "Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which you'd a took an interest in I reckon--most any body would. I had him here eight year--and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see. He was a large gray one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense than any man in this camp--'n' a power of dignity--he wouldn't let the Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him. He never ketched a rat in his life--'peared to be above it. He never cared for nothing but mining. He knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man I ever, ever see. You couldn't tell him noth'n 'bout placer diggin's--'n' as for pocket mining, why he was just born for it. "He would dig out after me an' Jim when we went over the hills prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile, if we went so fur. An' he had the best judgment about mining ground--why you never see anything like it. When we went to work, he'd scatter a glance around, 'n' if he didn't think much of the indications, he would give a look as much as to say, 'Well, I'll have to get you to excuse me,' 'n' without another word he'd hyste his nose into the air 'n' shove for home. But if the ground suited him, he would lay low 'n' keep dark till the first pan was washed, 'n' then he would sidle up 'n' take a look, an' if there was about six or seven grains of gold he was satisfied--he didn't want no better prospect 'n' that--'n' then he would lay down on our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, an' then get up 'n' superintend. He was nearly lightnin' on superintending. "Well, bye an' bye, up comes this yer quartz excitement. Every body was into it--every body was pick'n' 'n' blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on the hill side--every body was put'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the surface. Noth'n' would do Jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n' so we did. We commenced put'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to wonder what in the Dickens it was all about. He hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say--he couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way--it was too many for him. He was down on it, too, you bet you--he was down on it powerful --'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out. But that cat, you know, was always agin new fangled arrangements--somehow he never could abide'em. You know how it is with old habits. But by an' by Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never pannin' out any thing. At last he got to comin' down in the shaft, hisself, to try to cipher it out. An' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel kind o'scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted--knowin' as he did, that the bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent--he would curl up on a gunny sack in the corner an' go to sleep. Well, one day when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we had to put in a blast--the first blast'n' we'd ever done since Tom Quartz was born. An' then we lit the fuse 'n' clumb out 'n' got off 'bout fifty yards--'n' forgot 'n' left Tom Quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack. "In 'bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, 'n' then everything let go with an awful crash, 'n' about four million ton of rocks 'n' dirt 'n' smoke 'n; splinters shot up 'bout a mile an' a half into the air, an' by George, right in the dead centre of it was old Tom Quartz a goin' end over end, an' a snortin' an' a sneez'n', an' a clawin' an' a reachin' for things like all possessed. But it warn't no use, you know, it warn't no use. An' that was the last we see of him for about two minutes 'n' a half, an' then all of a sudden it begin to rain rocks and rubbage, an' directly he come down ker-whop about ten foot off f'm where we stood Well, I reckon he was p'raps the orneriest lookin' beast you ever see. One ear was sot back on his neck, 'n' his tail was stove up, 'n' his eye-winkers was swinged off, 'n' he was all blacked up with powder an' smoke, an' all sloppy with mud 'n' slush f'm one end to the other. "Well sir, it warn't no use to try to apologize--we couldn't say a word. He took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, 'n' then he looked at us --an' it was just exactly the same as if he had said--'Gents, may be you think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that 'ain't had no experience of quartz minin', but I think different'--an' then he turned on his heel 'n' marched off home without ever saying another word. "That was jest his style. An' may be you won't believe it, but after that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he was. An' by an' bye when he did get to goin' down in the shaft agin, you'd 'a been astonished at his sagacity. The minute we'd tetch off a blast 'n' the fuse'd begin to sizzle, he'd give a look as much as to say: 'Well, I'll have to git you to excuse me,' an' it was surpris'n' the way he'd shin out of that hole 'n' go f'r a tree. Sagacity? It ain't no name for it. 'Twas inspiration!" I said, "Well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining was remarkable, considering how he came by it. Couldn't you ever cure him of it?" "Cure him! No! When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was always sot--and you might a blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never a broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining." The affection and the pride that lit up Baker's face when he delivered this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days, will always be a vivid memory with me. At the end of two months we had never "struck" a pocket. We had panned up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to get it to market. We got many good "prospects," but when the gold gave out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only emptiness--the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our own.--At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the hills to try new localities. We prospected around Angel's Camp, in Calaveras county, during three weeks, but had no success. Then we wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night, for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last rose of summer. That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves. In accordance with the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board welcome to tramping miners--they drifted along nearly every day, dumped their paust shovels by the threshold and took "pot luck" with us--and now on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality. Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give the reader a vivid description of the Big Trees and the marvels of the Yo Semite--but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing. Let me be charitable, though I fail in all virtues else. Note: Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely, and may be a little obscure to the general reader. In "placer diggings" the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in "pocket" diggings it is concentrated in one little spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct walls of some other kind of stone--and this is the most laborious and expensive of all the different kinds of mining. "Prospecting" is hunting for a "placer"; "indications" are signs of its presence; "panning out" refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt; a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt--and its value determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is worth while to tarry there or seek further. CHAPTER LXII. After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent. When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me. Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one. It was to go down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees. We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter. The almanac called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise between spring and summer. Six days out of port, it became summer altogether. We had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul by the name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going down to join their vessels. These latter played euchre in the smoking room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think I ever saw. And then there was "the old Admiral--" a retired whaleman. He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest, whole-souled profanity. But nevertheless he was tender-hearted as a girl. He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre where all comers were safe and at rest. Nobody could know the "Admiral" without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know which to choose--to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less efficient person. His Title of "Admiral" was more strictly "official" than any ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps--for it was the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves without any intermediate red tape--the people of the Sandwich Islands. It was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and appreciation of his unpretending merit. And in testimony of the genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave him God-speed in his going. From that time forth, whenever his ship was signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea, that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord. Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life. When I knew him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the salt water sixty-one of them. For sixteen years he had gone in and out of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet and had never had an accident or lost a vessel. The simple natives knew him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children regard a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the roaring Admiral was around. Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would "never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he lived." And he had conscientiously kept it. That is to say, he considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since he "retired," was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the strict letter. The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and all cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and take the part of the weaker side.--And this was the reason why he was always sure to be present at the trial of any universally execrated criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. And this was why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he was the most frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the shadow of the Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down before the sweep of the Northern armies, he ran up the Confederate colors and from that time till the end was a rampant and inexorable secessionist. He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be wary and drink with moderation. And yet if any creature had been guileless enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of "straight" whiskey during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would have spun him to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath. Mind, I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs, for it did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a capacious container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a level tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes on--"to sweeten his bilgewater," he said.--He took another after he got the most of his clothes on, "to settle his mind and give him his bearings." He then shaved, and put on a clean shirt; after which he recited the Lord's Prayer in a fervent, thundering bass that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main cabin. Then, at this stage, being invariably "by the head," or "by the stern," or "listed to port or starboard," he took one more to "put him on an even keel so that he would mind his hellum and not miss stays and go about, every time he came up in the wind."--And now, his state-room door swung open and the sun of his benignant face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he roared his "Shipmets a'hoy!" in a way that was calculated to wake the dead and precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode, a picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention. Stalwart and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of blue navy flannel--roomy and ample; a stately expanse of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and "a hand like the hand of Providence," as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands and sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for the warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink. But these details were only secondary matters--his face was the lodestone that chained the eye. It was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed with scars, "blazed" all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. At his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier "Fan," a creature no larger than a squirrel. The main part of his daily life was occupied in looking after "Fan," in a motherly way, and doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his imagination. The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed anything they said. He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but "The Old Guard," a secession periodical published in New York. He carried a dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all required information. If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing else necessary to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he was a formidable antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of the record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little spark of indignation at his manufactured history--and when it came to indignation, that was the Admiral's very "best hold." He was always ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so, after a while, that whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he would camp on a deserted field. But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At one time or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed, except the quiet passenger Williams. He had never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on politics. But now, just as the Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out, Williams said: "Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the clergymen you mentioned the other day?"--referring to a piece of the Admiral's manufactured history. Every one was amazed at the man's rashness. The idea of deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. The retreat came to a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of it. The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one. He paused in the door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated the daring reptile in the corner. "Certain of it? Am I certain of it? Do you think I've been lying about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don't know that circumstance, don't know anything; a child ought to know it. Read up your history! Read it up-----, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about." Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten. Within three minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably: "Now I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds something like--this is history--this is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now--for until you set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it." Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose. He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his profanity failed him. Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly: "But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit: that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December following. Very well." [Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure, manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.] "Very well, I say. But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan case--though I see by your face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this moment. On the 12th of August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two South Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L. Willis, one a Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised themselves, and went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson--Archibald F. Thompson, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson,--and took thence, at midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an orphan--named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well that even the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant, of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also, that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage. Who, indeed, were the two Massachusetts ministers? and who were the two Southern women they burned? I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H. Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones were justified in retaliating. In your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs." The Admiral was conquered. This sweet spoken creature who swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was "too many" for him. He stammered some awkward, profane sentences about the-----Willis and Morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of giving Fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle and went away, a vanquished man. Then cheers and laughter went up, and Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero. The news went about the vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail. The Admiral's power was broken. After that, if he began argument, somebody would bring Williams, and the old man would grow weak and begin to quiet down at once. And as soon as he was done, Williams in his dulcet, insinuating way, would invent some history (referring for proof, to the old man's own excellent memory and to copies of "The Old Guard" known not to be in his possession) that would turn the tables completely and leave the Admiral all abroad and helpless. By and by he came to so dread Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics altogether, and from that time forward there was entire peace and serenity in the ship. CHAPTER LXIII. On a certain bright morning the Islands hove in sight, lying low on the lonely sea, and everybody climbed to the upper deck to look. After two thousand miles of watery solitude the vision was a welcome one. As we approached, the imposing promontory of Diamond Head rose up out of the ocean its rugged front softened by the hazy distance, and presently the details of the land began to make themselves manifest: first the line of beach; then the plumed coacoanut trees of the tropics; then cabins of the natives; then the white town of Honolulu, said to contain between twelve and fifteen thousand inhabitants spread over a dead level; with streets from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line and few as crooked as a corkscrew. The further I traveled through the town the better I liked it. Every step revealed a new contrast--disclosed something I was unaccustomed to. In place of the grand mud-colored brown fronts of San Francisco, I saw dwellings built of straw, adobies, and cream-colored pebble-and-shell-conglomerated coral, cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement; also a great number of neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I saw these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly clad with green grass, and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate; in place of the customary geranium, calla lily, etc., languishing in dust and general debility, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of San Francisco's pleasure grove, the "Willows," I saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names and stranger appearance --trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green poles; in place of gold fish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming countless shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats--Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep. I looked on a multitude of people, some white, in white coats, vests, pantaloons, even white cloth shoes, made snowy with chalk duly laid on every morning; but the majority of the people were almost as dark as negroes--women with comely features, fine black eyes, rounded forms, inclining to the voluptuous, clad in a single bright red or white garment that fell free and unconfined from shoulder to heel, long black hair falling loose, gypsy hats, encircled with wreaths of natural flowers of a brilliant carmine tint; plenty of dark men in various costumes, and some with nothing on but a battered stove-pipe hat tilted on the nose, and a very scant breech-clout; --certain smoke-dried children were clothed in nothing but sunshine --a very neat fitting and picturesque apparel indeed. In place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners, I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, I walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded street-cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on fleet horses and astride, with gaudy riding-sashes, streaming like banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of Chinadom and Brannan street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India; in place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a Summer calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of the Golden City's skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys--and in front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing against the reef, and further out the dead blue water of the deep sea, flecked with "white caps," and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail --a mere accent-mark to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that were without sound or limit. When the sun sunk down--the one intruder from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them--it was tranced luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was any world but these enchanted islands. It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream--till you got a bite. A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in future. Then came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other--a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching,--a hairy tarantula on stilts--why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals. We had an abundance of fruit in Honolulu, of course. Oranges, pine-apples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangoes, guavas, melons, and a rare and curious luxury called the chirimoya, which is deliciousness itself. Then there is the tamarind. I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a "wire edge" that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said "no, it will come off when the enamel does"--which was comforting, at any rate. I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds--but they only eat them once. CHAPTER LXIV. In my diary of our third day in Honolulu, I find this: I am probably the most sensitive man in Hawaii to-night--especially about sitting down in the presence of my betters. I have ridden fifteen or twenty miles on horse-back since 5 P.M. and to tell the honest truth, I have a delicacy about sitting down at all. An excursion to Diamond Head and the King's Coacoanut Grove was planned to-day--time, 4:30 P.M.--the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies. They all started at the appointed hour except myself. I was at the Government prison, (with Captain Fish and another whaleship-skipper, Captain Phillips,) and got so interested in its examination that I did not notice how quickly the time was passing. Somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up. It was a fortunate circumstance that Captain Phillips was along with his "turn out," as he calls a top-buggy that Captain Cook brought here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Captain Cook came. Captain Phillips takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and to his passion for displaying them I owe it that we were only sixteen minutes coming from the prison to the American Hotel--a distance which has been estimated to be over half a mile. But it took some fearful driving. The Captain's whip came down fast, and the blows started so much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of the journey we rode through an impenetrable fog, and ran by a pocket compass in the hands of Captain Fish, a whaler of twenty-six years experience, who sat there through the perilous voyage as self-possessed as if he had been on the euchre-deck of his own ship, and calmly said, "Port your helm--port," from time to time, and "Hold her a little free --steady--so--so," and "Luff--hard down to starboard!" and never once lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner. When we came to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said, "Sixteen minutes--I told you it was in her! that's over three miles an hour!" I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so I said I had never seen lightning go like that horse. And I never had. The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake them. I said, never mind--I preferred a safe horse to a fast one--I would like to have an excessively gentle horse--a horse with no spirit whatever--a lame one, if he had such a thing. Inside of five minutes I was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. I had no time to label him "This is a horse," and so if the public took him for a sheep I cannot help it. I was satisfied, and that was the main thing. I could see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and so I hung my hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from my face and started. I named him after this island, "Oahu" (pronounced O-waw-hee). The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him. He resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration. He abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill me with apprehension. I said to my self, this creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other--no horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye--for I had heard that the eye of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive. I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I found that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again. He tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high. I saw that I must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as last. I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he saw it, he surrendered. He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter, which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm. And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the American saddle. There is no seat to speak of about it--one might as well sit in a shovel --and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. If I were to write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make a large book, even without pictures. Sometimes I got one foot so far through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet; sometimes both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the legs; and sometimes my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my shins. Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my nervous dread that they were going to slip one way or the other in a moment. But the subject is too exasperating to write about. A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoanut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-nuts--not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be. I once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a cocoanut tree might be poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by lightning. I think that describes it better than a picture--and yet, without any question, there is something fascinating about a cocoa-nut tree--and graceful, too. About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass, nestled sleepily in the shade here and there. The grass cabins are of a grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly bound together in bundles. The roofs are very thick, and so are the walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows. At a little distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made of bear skins. They are very cool and pleasant inside. The King's flag was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and His Majesty was probably within. He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his time there frequently, on sultry days "laying off." The spot is called "The King's Grove." Near by is an interesting ruin--the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice--in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a roofless inclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide --nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a man's head. They will last for ages no doubt, if left unmolested. Its three altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years ago. It is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were slaughtered here, in the presence of naked and howling savages. If these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife; of massed forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by the sacrificial fires; of the background of ghostly trees; of the dark pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in the cloud-rack! When Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ha-may-ah) the Great--who was a sort of a Napoleon in military genius and uniform success--invaded this island of Oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he searched out the dead body of the King of Oahu, and those of the principal chiefs, and impaled their heads on the walls of this temple. Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime. The King and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard rulers. The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong--the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook's time, and their condition to-day. Their work speaks for itself. CHAPTER LXV. By and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which commanded a far-reaching view. The moon rose and flooded mountain and valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the foliage the distant lights of Honolulu glinted like an encampment of fireflies. The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers. The halt was brief.--Gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and I clung to the pommel and cantered after. Presently we came to a place where no grass grew--a wide expanse of deep sand. They said it was an old battle ground. All around everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight. We picked up a lot of them for mementoes. I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones --of great chiefs, may be, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood--and wore the choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go. All sorts of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said, irreverently, that there had been an unusual number of "skull-hunters" there lately--a species of sportsmen I had never heard of before. Nothing whatever is known about this place--its story is a secret that will never be revealed. The oldest natives make no pretense of being possessed of its history. They say these bones were here when they were children. They were here when their grandfathers were children--but how they came here, they can only conjecture. Many people believe this spot to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so; and they believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their proprietors fell in the great fight. Other people believe that Kamehameha I. fought his first battle here. On this point, I have heard a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written concerning these islands--I do not know where the narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all, they would never retreat beyond this boundary. The priests told them that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the oath, and the march was resumed. Kamehameha drove them back step by step; the priests fought in the front rank and exhorted them both by voice and inspiriting example to remember their oath--to die, if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back; with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward--the line was crossed--the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over the plain where Honolulu stands now--up the beautiful Nuuanu Valley --paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand and the frightful precipice of the Pari in front, and then were driven over --a sheer plunge of six hundred feet! The story is pretty enough, but Mr. Jarves' excellent history says the Oahuans were intrenched in Nuuanu Valley; that Kamehameha ousted them, routed them, pursued them up the valley and drove them over the precipice. He makes no mention of our bone-yard at all in his book. Impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the beautiful landscape, and being, as usual, in the rear, I gave voice to my thoughts. I said: "What a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon! How strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the clear sky! What a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the long, curved reef! How calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain! How soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the dream-haunted Mauoa Valley! What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied Pari! How the grim warriors of the past seem flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again--how the wails of the dying well up from the--" At this point the horse called Oahu sat down in the sand. Sat down to listen, I suppose. Never mind what he heard, I stopped apostrophising and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of Court on the part of a horse. I broke the back-bone of a Chief over his rump and set out to join the cavalcade again. Very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at 9 o'clock at night, myself in the lead--for when my horse finally came to understand that he was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he turned his attention strictly to business. This is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information. There is no regular livery stable in Honolulu, or, indeed, in any part of the Kingdom of Hawaii; therefore unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents (who all have good horses), you must hire animals of the wretchedest description from the Kanakas. (i.e. natives.) Any horse you hire, even though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been leading a hard life. If the Kanakas who have been caring for him (inveterate riders they are) have not ridden him half to death every day themselves, you can depend upon it they have been doing the same thing by proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out. At least, so I am informed. The result is, that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or look well or feel well, and so strangers go about the Islands mounted as I was to-day. In hiring a horse from a Kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you, because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with a shrewd unprincipled rascal. You may leave your door open and your trunk unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your property; he has no important vices and no inclination to commit robbery on a large scale; but if he can get ahead of you in the horse business, he will take a genuine delight in doing it. This traits is characteristic of horse jockeys, the world over, is it not? He will overcharge you if he can; he will hire you a fine-looking horse at night (anybody's--may be the King's, if the royal steed be in convenient view), and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning, and contend that it is the same animal. If you make trouble, he will get out by saying it was not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, "who went out in the country this morning." They have always got a "brother" to shift the responsibility upon. A victim said to one of these fellows one day: "But I know I hired the horse of you, because I noticed that scar on your cheek." The reply was not bad: "Oh, yes--yes--my brother all same--we twins!" A friend of mine, J. Smith, hired a horse yesterday, the Kanaka warranting him to be in excellent condition. Smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the Kanaka to put these on the horse. The Kanaka protested that he was perfectly willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the animal, but Smith refused to use it. The change was made; then Smith noticed that the Kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the original blanket on the horse; he said he forgot to change the blankets, and so, to cut the bother short, Smith mounted and rode away. The horse went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some extraordinary capers. Smith got down and took off the saddle, but the blanket stuck fast to the horse--glued to a procession of raw places. The Kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained. Another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native, a day or two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal. He discovered today that the horse was as blind as a bat, in one eye. He meant to have examined that eye, and came home with a general notion that he had done it; but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt his attention was called to something else by his victimizer. One more instance, and then I will pass to something else. I am informed that when a certain Mr. L., a visiting stranger, was here, he bought a pair of very respectable-looking match horses from a native. They were in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it--one horse in each apartment. Mr. L. examined one of them critically through a window (the Kanaka's "brother" having gone to the country with the key), and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on the other side. He said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and paid for the horses on the spot. Whereupon the Kanaka departed to join his brother in the country. The fellow had shamefully swindled L. There was only one "match" horse, and he had examined his starboard side through one window and his port side through another! I decline to believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact--namely, that the Kanaka horse-jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience. You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half. I estimate "Oahu" to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five cents. A good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again to-day for two dollars and twenty-five cents; Williams bought a handsome and lively little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with Mexican saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars--a horse which is well and widely known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and everlasting bottom. You give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from San Francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is not very good it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six foot pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets between the upright bales in search of customers. These hay bales, thus carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital 'H.' The hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse about a day. You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all--you do it at midnight, and stable the beast again before morning. You have been at no expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will cost you from twenty to thirty-five dollars. You can hire a horse, saddle and bridle at from seven to ten dollars a week, and the owner will take care of them at his own expense. It is time to close this day's record--bed time. As I prepare for sleep, a rich voice rises out of the still night, and, far as this ocean rock is toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar home air. But the words seem somewhat out of joint: "Waikiki lantoni oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo." Translated, that means "When we were marching through Georgia." CHAPTER LXVI. Passing through the market place we saw that feature of Honolulu under its most favorable auspices--that is, in the full glory of Saturday afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives. The native girls by twos and threes and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons and companies, went cantering up and down the neighboring streets astride of fleet but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming like banners behind them. Such a troop of free and easy riders, in their natural home, the saddle, makes a gay and graceful spectacle. The riding habit I speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern table cloth brilliantly colored, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently passed between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and floating and flapping behind on both sides beyond the horse's tail like a couple of fancy flags; then, slipping the stirrup-irons between her toes, the girl throws her chest for ward, sits up like a Major General and goes sweeping by like the wind. The girls put on all the finery they can on Saturday afternoon--fine black silk robes; flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out; others as white as snow; still others that discount the rainbow; and they wear their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and encircle their dusky throats with home-made necklaces of the brilliant vermillion-tinted blossom of the ohia; and they fill the markets and the adjacent street with their bright presences, and smell like a rag factory on fire with their offensive cocoanut oil. Occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny isles away down in the South Seas, with his face and neck tatooed till he looks like the customary mendicant from Washoe who has been blown up in a mine. Some are tattooed a dead blue color down to the upper lip--masked, as it were --leaving the natural light yellow skin of Micronesia unstained from thence down; some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck, on both sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin, two inches wide, down the center--a gridiron with a spoke broken out; and some with the entire face discolored with the popular mortification tint, relieved only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness, from under shadowing hat-brims, like stars in the dark of the moon. Moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?" The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and capable of holding from one to three or four gallons. Poi is the chief article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant. The taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled. When boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread. The buck Kanakas bake it under ground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let if ferment, and then it is poi--and an unseductive mixture it is, almost tasteless before it ferments and too sour for a luxury afterward. But nothing is more nutritious. When solely used, however, it produces acrid humors, a fact which sufficiently accounts for the humorous character of the Kanakas. I think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as there is in eating with chopsticks. The forefinger is thrust into the mess and stirred quickly round several times and drawn as quickly out, thickly coated, just as it it were poulticed; the head is thrown back, the finger inserted in the mouth and the delicacy stripped off and swallowed--the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of ecstasy. Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the virtues of its contents. Around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa root. It is said that but for the use of this root the destruction of the people in former times by certain imported diseases would have been far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a fancy. All agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed; but all are not willing to allow to the awa the virtues claimed for it. The natives manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its effects when persistently indulged in. It covers the body with dry, white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decripitude. Although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a Government license of eight hundred dollars a year for the exclusive right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every twelve-month; while saloon keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living. We found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish, and eats the article raw and alive! Let us change the subject. In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed. All the native population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding country journeyed to the city. Then the white folks had to stay indoors, for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades without getting crippled. At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula hula--a dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated notion of limb and arm, hand, head and body, and the exactest uniformity of movement and accuracy of "time." It was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through an infinite variety of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their "time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite piece of mechanism. Of late years, however, Saturday has lost most of its quondam gala features. This weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law here, and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they gradually broke it up. The demoralizing hula hula was forbidden to be performed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities and the payment of ten dollars for the same. There are few girls now-a-days able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of the art. The missionaries have christianized and educated all the natives. They all belong to the Church, and there is not one of them, above the age of eight years, but can read and write with facility in the native tongue. It is the most universally educated race of people outside of China. They have any quantity of books, printed in the Kanaka language, and all the natives are fond of reading. They are inveterate church-goers --nothing can keep them away. All this ameliorating cultivation has at last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity--in other people. Perhaps that is enough to say on that head. The national sin will die out when the race does, but perhaps not earlier.--But doubtless this purifying is not far off, when we reflect that contact with civilization and the whites has reduced the native population from four hundred thousand (Captain Cook's estimate,) to fifty-five thousand in something over eighty years! Society is a queer medley in this notable missionary, whaling and governmental centre. If you get into conversation with a stranger and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and address him as "Captain." Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he preaches. It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I am now personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one-half of the population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian Government. And there are just about cats enough for three apiece all around. A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day, and said: "Good morning, your reverence. Preach in the stone church yonder, no doubt?" "No, I don't. I'm not a preacher." "Really, I beg your pardon, Captain. I trust you had a good season. How much oil"-- "Oil? What do you take me for? I'm not a whaler." "Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. "Major General in the household troops, no doubt? Minister of the Interior, likely? Secretary of war? First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber? Commissioner of the Royal"-- "Stuff! I'm no official. I'm not connected in any way with the Government." "Bless my life! Then, who the mischief are you? what the mischief are you? and how the mischief did you get here, and where in thunder did you come from?" "I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived from America." "No? Not a missionary! Not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's Government! not even Secretary of the Navy! Ah, Heaven! it is too blissful to be true; alas, I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable of--of--anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif. Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this, and"-- Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away. I pitied this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had and "shoved". CHAPTER LXVII. I still quote from my journal: I found the national Legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and some thirty or forty natives. It was a dark assemblage. The nobles and Ministers (about a dozen of them altogether) occupied the extreme left of the hall, with David Kalakaua (the King's Chamberlain) and Prince William at the head. The President of the Assembly, His Royal Highness M. Kekuanaoa, [Kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal. He derives his princely rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great. Under other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing genealogies, but here the opposite is the case--the female line takes precedence. Their reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and I recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe: They say it is easy to know who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.] and the Vice President (the latter a white man,) sat in the pulpit, if I may so term it. The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King--and now look at him; an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men--a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. How the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!" The christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened some of their barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them. I have just referred to one of these. It is still a popular belief that if your enemy can get hold of any article belonging to you he can get down on his knees over it and pray you to death. Therefore many a native gives up and dies merely because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of damaging prayer. This praying an individual to death seems absurd enough at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks plausible. In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of wives was customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise. Some native women of noble rank had as many as six husbands. A woman thus supplied did not reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each in turn. An understood sign hung at her door during these months. When the sign was taken down, it meant "NEXT." In those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place." Her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his dinner. She was not only forbidden, by ancient law, and under penalty of death, to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred, under the same penalty, from eating bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other choice fruits at any time or in any place. She had to confine herself pretty strictly to "poi" and hard work. These poor ignorant heathen seem to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances. But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things. They liberated woman and made her the equal of man. The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children alive when the family became larger than necessary. The missionaries interfered in this matter too, and stopped it. To this day the natives are able to lie down and die whenever they want to, whether there is anything the matter with them or not. If a Kanaka takes a notion to die, that is the end of him; nobody can persuade him to hold on; all the doctors in the world could not save him. A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large funeral. If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour and he will be on hand to the minute--at least his remains will. All the natives are Christians, now, but many of them still desert to the Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of trouble. An irruption of the great volcano of Kilauea, or an earthquake, always brings a deal of latent loyalty to the Great Shark God to the surface. It is common report that the King, educated, cultivated and refined Christian gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers for help when disaster threatens. A planter caught a shark, and one of his christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion forbidden by his abandoned creed. But remorse shortly began to torture him. He grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his sin, refused food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had sinned against the Great Shark God and could never know peace any more. He was proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day or two took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of disease. His young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the week. Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone and it is only natural that it should crop out in time of distress. Wherever one goes in the Islands, he will find small piles of stones by the wayside, covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives to appease evil spirits or honor local deities belonging to the mythology of former days. In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. When the missionaries first took up their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush. It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather indelicate. Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose calico robes, and that ended the difficulty--for the women would troop through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms, march to the missionary houses and then proceed to dress!--The natives soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur. The missionaries imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to come to church naked, next Sunday, as usual. And they did not; but the national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who were not at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers could hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations. In the midst of the reading of a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with a world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a "stovepipe" hat and a pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow, tricked out in a man's shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty; a stately "buck" Kanaka would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side before--only this, and nothing more; after him would stride his fellow, with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of his person untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest. The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious of any absurdity in their appearance. They gazed at each other with happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for; here was the evidence of a dawning civilization. The spectacle which the congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and dismiss the fantastic assemblage. In our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of slender territory and meagre population, play "empire." There is his royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective's income of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the "royal civil list" and the "royal domain." He lives in a two-story frame "palace." And there is the "royal family"--the customary hive of royal brothers, sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy, --all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-so. Few of them can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however; they sport the economical Kanaka horse or "hoof it" with the plebeians. Then there is his Excellency the "royal Chamberlain"--a sinecure, for his majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing. Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually placed under a corporal in other lands. Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting--high dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do. Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber--an office as easy as it is magnificent. Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of "shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him--salary, $4,000 a year, vast consequence, and no perquisites. Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual "budget" with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of "finance," suggests imposing schemes for paying off the "national debt" (of $150,000,) and does it all for $4,000 a year and unimaginable glory. Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds sway over the royal armies--they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed Kanakas, mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with a foreign power we shall probably hear from them. I knew an American whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend: "Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Infantry." To say that he was proud of this distinction is stating it but tamely. The Minister of War has also in his charge some venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port. Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy--a nabob who rules the "royal fleet," (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.) And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the chief dignitary of the "Established Church"--for when the American Presbyterian missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact condition of Christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected the grand dignity of an "Established (Episcopal) Church" over it, and imported a cheap ready-made Bishop from England to take charge. The chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to this day, profanity not being admissible. Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction. Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc., and after them a string of High Sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for computation. Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the French; her British Majesty's Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States; and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state. Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house "kingdom" whose population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls! The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu than a Western Congressman does in New York. And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined "court costume" of so "stunning" a nature that it would make the clown in a circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each Hawaiian official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced uniform peculiar to his office--no two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell which one is the "loudest." The King had a "drawing-room" at stated intervals, like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms congregate there--weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked glass. Is there not a gratifying contrast between this latter-day exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded the missionaries the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing? Behold what religion and civilization have wrought! CHAPTER LXVIII. While I was in Honolulu I witnessed the ceremonious funeral of the King's sister, her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria. According to the royal custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace thirty days, watched day and night by a guard of honor. And during all that time a great multitude of natives from the several islands had kept the palace grounds well crowded and had made the place a pandemonium every night with their howlings and wailings, beating of tom-toms and dancing of the (at other times) forbidden "hula-hula" by half-clad maidens to the music of songs of questionable decency chanted in honor of the deceased. The printed programme of the funeral procession interested me at the time; and after what I have just said of Hawaiian grandiloquence in the matter of "playing empire," I am persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the reader: After reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to "Hawaiian Population Generally" is going to be procured: Undertaker. Royal School. Kawaiahao School. Roman Catholic School. Maemae School. Honolulu Fire Department. Mechanics' Benefit Union. Attending Physicians. Knonohikis (Superintendents) of the Crown Lands, Konohikis of the Private Lands of His Majesty Konohikis of the Private Lands of Her late Royal Highness. Governor of Oahu and Staff. Hulumanu (Military Company). Household Troops. The Prince of Hawaii's Own (Military Company). The King's household servants. Servants of Her late Royal Highness. Protestant Clergy. The Clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. His Lordship Louis Maigret, The Right Rev. Bishop of Arathea, Vicar-Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands. The Clergy of the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church. His Lordship the Right Rev. Bishop of Honolulu. Her Majesty Queen Emma's Carriage. His Majesty's Staff. Carriage of Her late Royal Highness. Carriage of Her Majesty the Queen Dowager. The King's Chancellor. Cabinet Ministers. His Excellency the Minister Resident of the United States. H. B. M's Commissioner. H. B. M's Acting Commissioner. Judges of Supreme Court. Privy Councillors. Members of Legislative Assembly. Consular Corps. Circuit Judges. Clerks of Government Departments. Members of the Bar. Collector General, Custom-house Officers and Officers of the Customs. Marshal and Sheriffs of the different Islands. King's Yeomanry. Foreign Residents. Ahahui Kaahumanu. Hawaiian Population Generally. Hawaiian Cavalry. Police Force. I resume my journal at the point where the procession arrived at the royal mausoleum: As the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which the long column of mourners passed to the tomb. The coffin was borne through the door of the mausoleum, followed by the King and his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign Consuls, Embassadors and distinguished guests (Burlingame and General Van Valkenburgh). Several of the kahilis were then fastened to a frame-work in front of the tomb, there to remain until they decay and fall to pieces, or, forestalling this, until another scion of royalty dies. At this point of the proceedings the multitude set up such a heart-broken wailing as I hope never to hear again. The soldiers fired three volleys of musketry--the wailing being previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard. His Highness Prince William, in a showy military uniform (the "true prince," this --scion of the house over-thrown by the present dynasty--he was formerly betrothed to the Princess but was not allowed to marry her), stood guard and paced back and forth within the door. The privileged few who followed the coffin into the mausoleum remained sometime, but the King soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it. A stranger could have guessed his rank (although he was so simply and unpretentiously dressed) by the profound deference paid him by all persons in his vicinity; by seeing his high officers receive his quiet orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads; and by observing how careful those persons who came out of the mausoleum were to avoid "crowding" him (although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon to pass, for that matter); how respectfully they edged out sideways, scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view of their persons to his Majesty, and never putting their hats on until they were well out of the royal presence. He was dressed entirely in black--dress-coat and silk hat--and looked rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him. On his breast he wore a large gold star, which was half hidden by the lapel of his coat. He remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an order to the men who were erecting the kahilis [Ranks of long-handled mops made of gaudy feathers--sacred to royalty. They are stuck in the ground around the tomb and left there.] before the tomb. He had the good taste to make one of them substitute black crape for the ordinary hempen rope he was about to tie one of them to the frame-work with. Finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly began to drop into his wake. While he was in view there was but one man who attracted more attention than himself, and that was Harris (the Yankee Prime Minister). This feeble personage had crape enough around his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the admiration of the simple Kanakas. Oh! noble ambition of this modern Richelieu! It is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the Princess Victoria with those of her noted ancestor Kamehameha the Conqueror, who died fifty years ago--in 1819, the year before the first missionaries came. "On the 8th of May, 1819, at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he had lived, in the faith of his country. It was his misfortune not to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced his religious aspirations. Judged by his advantages and compared with the most eminent of his countrymen he may be justly styled not only great, but good. To this day his memory warms the heart and elevates the national feelings of Hawaiians. They are proud of their old warrior King; they love his name; his deeds form their historical age; and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails, shared even by foreigners who knew his worth, that constitutes the firmest pillar of the throne of his dynasty. "In lieu of human victims (the custom of that age), a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies--no mean holocaust when their national value and the estimation in which they were held are considered. The bones of Kamehameha, after being kept for a while, were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final resting place is now lost. There was a proverb current among the common people that the bones of a cruel King could not be hid; they made fish-hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations." The account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it which does not mention or illustrate some by-gone custom of the country. In this respect it is the most comprehensive document I have yet met with. I will quote it entire: "When Kamehameha was dangerously sick, and the priests were unable to cure him, they said: 'Be of good courage and build a house for the god' (his own private god or idol), that thou mayest recover.' The chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of worship was prepared for Kukailimoku, and consecrated in the evening. They proposed also to the King, with a view to prolong his life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity; upon which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of death, and concealed themselves in hiding places till the tabu [Tabu (pronounced tah-boo,) means prohibition (we have borrowed it,) or sacred. The tabu was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary; and the person or thing placed under tabu was for the time being sacred to the purpose for which it was set apart. In the above case the victims selected under the tabu would be sacred to the sacrifice] in which destruction impended, was past. It is doubtful whether Kamehameha approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to sacrifice men, as he was known to say, 'The men are sacred for the King;' meaning that they were for the service of his successor. This information was derived from Liholiho, his son. "After this, his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not strength to turn himself in his bed. When another season, consecrated for worship at the new temple (heiau) arrived, he said to his son, Liholiho, 'Go thou and make supplication to thy god; I am not able to go, and will offer my prayers at home.' When his devotions to his feathered god, Kukailimoku, were concluded, a certain religiously disposed individual, who had a bird god, suggested to the King that through its influence his sickness might be removed. The name of this god was Pua; its body was made of a bird, now eaten by the Hawaiians, and called in their language alae. Kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses were constructed to facilitate the experiment; but while dwelling in them he became so very weak as not to receive food. After lying there three days, his wives, children and chiefs, perceiving that he was very low, returned him to his own house. In the evening he was carried to the eating house, where he took a little food in his mouth which he did not swallow; also a cup of water. The chiefs requested him to give them his counsel; but he made no reply, and was carried back to the dwelling house; but when near midnight--ten o'clock, perhaps--he was carried again to the place to eat; but, as before, he merely tasted of what was presented to him. Then Kaikioewa addressed him thus: 'Here we all are, your younger brethren, your son Liholiho and your foreigner; impart to us your dying charge, that Liholiho and Kaahumanu may hear.' Then Kamehameha inquired, 'What do you say?' Kaikioewa repeated, 'Your counsels for us.' "He then said, 'Move on in my good way and--.' He could proceed no further. The foreigner, Mr. Young, embraced and kissed him. Hoapili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after which he was taken back to the house. About twelve he was carried once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered, while his body was in the dwelling house immediately adjoining. It should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from one house to another resulted from the tabu system, then in force. There were at that time six houses (huts) connected with an establishment--one was for worship, one for the men to eat in, an eating house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to manufacture kapa (native cloth) and one where, at certain intervals, the women might dwell in seclusion. "The sick was once more taken to his house, when he expired; this was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which Leleiohoku derived his name. As he breathed his last, Kalaimoku came to the eating house to order those in it to go out. There were two aged persons thus directed to depart; one went, the other remained on account of love to the King, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained. The children also were sent away. Then Kalaimoku came to the house, and the chiefs had a consultation. One of them spoke thus: 'This is my thought--we will eat him raw. [This sounds suspicious, in view of the fact that all Sandwich Island historians, white and black, protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands. However, since they only proposed to "eat him raw" we "won't count that". But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked him.--M. T.] Kaahumanu (one of the dead King's widows) replied, 'Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with his successor. Our part in him--his breath--has departed; his remains will be disposed of by Liholiho.' "After this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the new King. The name of this ceremony is uko; and when the sacred hog was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god, the King at the same time repeating the customary prayers. "Then the priest, addressing himself to the King and chiefs, said: 'I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body. If you obtain one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but after it leaves this house four will be required. If delayed until we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten; but after it is deposited in the grave there must be fifteen. To-morrow morning there will be a tabu, and, if the sacrifice be delayed until that time, forty men must die.' "Then the high priest, Hewahewa, inquired of the chiefs, 'Where shall be the residence of King Liholiho?' They replied, 'Where, indeed? You, of all men, ought to know.' Then the priest observed, 'There are two suitable places; one is Kau, the other is Kohala.' The chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited. The priest added, 'These are proper places for the King's residence; but he must not remain in Kona, for it is polluted.' This was agreed to. It was now break of day. As he was being carried to the place of burial the people perceived that their King was dead, and they wailed. When the corpse was removed from the house to the tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain man who was ardently attached to the deceased. He leaped upon the chiefs who were carrying the King's body; he desired to die with him on account of his love. The chiefs drove him away. He persisted in making numerous attempts, which were unavailing. Kalaimoka also had it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by Hookio. "The morning following Kamehameha's death, Liholiho and his train departed for Kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead. At this time if a chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and the bones tied in a bundle, which being done, the season of defilement terminated. If the deceased were not a chief, the house only was defiled which became pure again on the burial of the body. Such were the laws on this subject. "On the morning on which Liholiho sailed in his canoe for Kohala, the chiefs and people mourned after their manner on occasion of a chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts. Their conduct was such as to forbid description; The priests, also, put into action the sorcery apparatus, that the person who had prayed the King to death might die; for it was not believed that Kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age. When the sorcerers set up by their fire-places sticks with a strip of kapa flying at the top, the chief Keeaumoku, Kaahumaun's brother, came in a state of intoxication and broke the flag-staff of the sorcerers, from which it was inferred that Kaahumanu and her friends had been instrumental in the King's death. On this account they were subjected to abuse." You have the contrast, now, and a strange one it is. This great Queen, Kaahumanu, who was "subjected to abuse" during the frightful orgies that followed the King's death, in accordance with ancient custom, afterward became a devout Christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the missionaries. Dogs were, and still are, reared and fattened for food, by the natives --hence the reference to their value in one of the above paragraphs. Forty years ago it was the custom in the Islands to suspend all law for a certain number of days after the death of a royal personage; and then a saturnalia ensued which one may picture to himself after a fashion, but not in the full horror of the reality. The people shaved their heads, knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised, mutilated or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts, maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment, and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness. And after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare. They were not the salt of the earth, those "gentle children of the sun." The natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be comforting to an invalid. When they think a sick friend is going to die, a couple of dozen neighbors surround his hut and keep up a deafening wailing night and day till he either dies or gets well. No doubt this arrangement has helped many a subject to a shroud before his appointed time. They surround a hut and wail in the same heart-broken way when its occupant returns from a journey. This is their dismal idea of a welcome. A very little of it would go a great way with most of us. CHAPTER LXIX. Bound for Hawaii (a hundred and fifty miles distant,) to visit the great volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish that island above the remainder of the group, we sailed from Honolulu on a certain Saturday afternoon, in the good schooner Boomerang. The Boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one. She was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the inter-island coasters) that when I stood on her deck I felt but little smaller than the Colossus of Rhodes must have felt when he had a man-of-war under him. I could reach the water when she lay over under a strong breeze. When the Captain and my comrade (a Mr. Billings), myself and four other persons were all assembled on the little after portion of the deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full--there was not room for any more quality folks. Another section of the deck, twice as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries and baggage of minor importance. As soon as we set sail the natives all lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked, conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable. The little low-ceiled cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as dark as a vault. It had two coffins on each side--I mean two bunks. A small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale oil lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes. The floor room unoccupied was not extensive. One might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but not a long cat. The hold forward of the bulkhead had but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old rooster, with a voice like Baalam's ass, and the same disposition to use it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and crowed. He usually took dinner at six o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night. He got hoarser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labors in defiance of threatened diphtheria. Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch. He was a source of genuine aggravation and annoyance. It was worse than useless to shout at him or apply offensive epithets to him--he only took these things for applause, and strained himself to make more noise. Occasionally, during the day, I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but he only dodged and went on crowing. The first night, as I lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of bilge water, I felt something gallop over me. I turned out promptly. However, I turned in again when I found it was only a rat. Presently something galloped over me once more. I knew it was not a rat this time, and I thought it might be a centipede, because the Captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. I turned out. The first glance at the pillow showed me repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they struck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck. The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition, when she carries molasses and Kanakas. It was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so beautiful a scene as met my eye--to step suddenly out of the sepulchral gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon--in the centre, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver--to see the broad sails straining in the gale, the ship heeled over on her side, the angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks, and sparkling sheets of spray dashing high over her bows and raining upon her decks; to brace myself and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed down and coat tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his back bone when he knows that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the waves at her utmost speed. There was no darkness, no dimness, no obscurity there. All was brightness, every object was vividly defined. Every prostrate Kanaka; every coil of rope; every calabash of poi; every puppy; every seam in the flooring; every bolthead; every object; however minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline; and the shadow of the broad mainsail lay black as a pall upon the deck, leaving Billings's white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse. Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii. Two of its high mountains were in view--Mauna Loa and Hualaiai. The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of. Mauna Loa is said to be sixteen thousand feet high. The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in. One could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of Winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to production that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal Summer. He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five miles as the bird flies! By and by we took boat and went ashore at Kailua, designing to ride horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee region of Kona, and rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant. This journey is well worth taking. The trail passes along on high ground--say a thousand feet above sea level--and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. It was pleasant to ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever-changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping gently down from the mountain to the sea. It was pleasant also, at intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage. We rode through one orange grove that had ten thousand tree in it! They were all laden with fruit. At one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor. This fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the Sandwich Islands. It takes a sort of almond shape, and is small and bitter. It needs frost, they say, and perhaps it does; if this be so, it will have a good opportunity to go on needing it, as it will not be likely to get it. The trees from which the fine fruit I have spoken of, came, had been planted and replanted sixteen times, and to this treatment the proprietor of the orchard attributed his-success. We passed several sugar plantations--new ones and not very extensive. The crops were, in most cases, third rattoons. [NOTE.--The first crop is called "plant cane;" subsequent crops which spring from the original roots, without replanting, are called "rattoons."] Almost everywhere on the island of Hawaii sugar-cane matures in twelve months, both rattoons and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassels, no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months afterward. In Kona, the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons of sugar, they say. This is only a moderate yield for these islands, but would be astounding for Louisiana and most other sugar growing countries. The plantations in Kona being on pretty high ground--up among the light and frequent rains--no irrigation whatever is required. CHAPTER LXX. We stopped some time at one of the plantations, to rest ourselves and refresh the horses. We had a chatty conversation with several gentlemen present; but there was one person, a middle aged man, with an absent look in his face, who simply glanced up, gave us good-day and lapsed again into the meditations which our coming had interrupted. The planters whispered us not to mind him--crazy. They said he was in the Islands for his health; was a preacher; his home, Michigan. They said that if he woke up presently and fell to talking about a correspondence which he had some time held with Mr. Greeley about a trifle of some kind, we must humor him and listen with interest; and we must humor his fancy that this correspondence was the talk of the world. It was easy to see that he was a gentle creature and that his madness had nothing vicious in it. He looked pale, and a little worn, as if with perplexing thought and anxiety of mind. He sat a long time, looking at the floor, and at intervals muttering to himself and nodding his head acquiescingly or shaking it in mild protest. He was lost in his thought, or in his memories. We continued our talk with the planters, branching from subject to subject. But at last the word "circumstance," casually dropped, in the course of conversation, attracted his attention and brought an eager look into his countenance. He faced about in his chair and said: "Circumstance? What circumstance? Ah, I know--I know too well. So you have heard of it too." [With a sigh.] "Well, no matter--all the world has heard of it. All the world. The whole world. It is a large world, too, for a thing to travel so far in--now isn't it? Yes, yes--the Greeley correspondence with Erickson has created the saddest and bitterest controversy on both sides of the ocean--and still they keep it up! It makes us famous, but at what a sorrowful sacrifice! I was so sorry when I heard that it had caused that bloody and distressful war over there in Italy. It was little comfort to me, after so much bloodshed, to know that the victors sided with me, and the vanquished with Greeley.--It is little comfort to know that Horace Greeley is responsible for the battle of Sadowa, and not me. "Queen Victoria wrote me that she felt just as I did about it--she said that as much as she was opposed to Greeley and the spirit he showed in the correspondence with me, she would not have had Sadowa happen for hundreds of dollars. I can show you her letter, if you would like to see it. But gentlemen, much as you may think you know about that unhappy correspondence, you cannot know the straight of it till you hear it from my lips. It has always been garbled in the journals, and even in history. Yes, even in history--think of it! Let me--please let me, give you the matter, exactly as it occurred. I truly will not abuse your confidence." Then he leaned forward, all interest, all earnestness, and told his story--and told it appealingly, too, and yet in the simplest and most unpretentious way; indeed, in such a way as to suggest to one, all the time, that this was a faithful, honorable witness, giving evidence in the sacred interest of justice, and under oath. He said: "Mrs. Beazeley--Mrs. Jackson Beazeley, widow, of the village of Campbellton, Kansas,--wrote me about a matter which was near her heart --a matter which many might think trivial, but to her it was a thing of deep concern. I was living in Michigan, then--serving in the ministry. She was, and is, an estimable woman--a woman to whom poverty and hardship have proven incentives to industry, in place of discouragements. Her only treasure was her son William, a youth just verging upon manhood; religious, amiable, and sincerely attached to agriculture. He was the widow's comfort and her pride. And so, moved by her love for him, she wrote me about a matter, as I have said before, which lay near her heart --because it lay near her boy's. She desired me to confer with Mr. Greeley about turnips. Turnips were the dream of her child's young ambition. While other youths were frittering away in frivolous amusements the precious years of budding vigor which God had given them for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with information concerning turnips. The sentiment which he felt toward the turnip was akin to adoration. He could not think of the turnip without emotion; he could not speak of it calmly; he could not contemplate it without exaltation. He could not eat it without shedding tears. All the poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious vegetable. With the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when the curtaining night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him. On rainy days he sat and talked hours together with his mother about turnips. When company came, he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip. "And yet, was this joy rounded and complete? Was there no secret alloy of unhappiness in it? Alas, there was. There was a canker gnawing at his heart; the noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavor--viz: he could not make of the turnip a climbing vine. Months went by; the bloom forsook his cheek, the fire faded out of his eye; sighings and abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse. But a watchful eye noted these things and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed the secret. Hence the letter to me. She pleaded for attention--she said her boy was dying by inches. "I was a stranger to Mr. Greeley, but what of that? The matter was urgent. I wrote and begged him to solve the difficult problem if possible and save the student's life. My interest grew, until it partook of the anxiety of the mother. I waited in much suspense.--At last the answer came. "I found that I could not read it readily, the handwriting being unfamiliar and my emotions somewhat wrought up. It seemed to refer in part to the boy's case, but chiefly to other and irrelevant matters--such as paving-stones, electricity, oysters, and something which I took to be 'absolution' or 'agrarianism,' I could not be certain which; still, these appeared to be simply casual mentions, nothing more; friendly in spirit, without doubt, but lacking the connection or coherence necessary to make them useful.--I judged that my understanding was affected by my feelings, and so laid the letter away till morning. "In the morning I read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty still, for I had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed clouded. The note was more connected, now, but did not meet the emergency it was expected to meet. It was too discursive. It appeared to read as follows, though I was not certain of some of the words: "Polygamy dissembles majesty; extracts redeem polarity; causes hitherto exist. Ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and condemn. Boston, botany, cakes, folony undertakes, but who shall allay? We fear not. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.' "But there did not seem to be a word about turnips. There seemed to be no suggestion as to how they might be made to grow like vines. There was not even a reference to the Beazeleys. I slept upon the matter; I ate no supper, neither any breakfast next morning. So I resumed my work with a brain refreshed, and was very hopeful. Now the letter took a different aspect-all save the signature, which latter I judged to be only a harmless affectation of Hebrew. The epistle was necessarily from Mr. Greeley, for it bore the printed heading of The Tribune, and I had written to no one else there. The letter, I say, had taken a different aspect, but still its language was eccentric and avoided the issue. It now appeared to say: "Bolivia extemporizes mackerel; borax esteems polygamy; sausages wither in the east. Creation perdu, is done; for woes inherent one can damn. Buttons, buttons, corks, geology underrates but we shall allay. My beer's out. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.' "I was evidently overworked. My comprehension was impaired. Therefore I gave two days to recreation, and then returned to my task greatly refreshed. The letter now took this form: "Poultices do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes leather to resist. Our notions empower wisdom, her let's afford while we can. Butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean him from his filly. We feel hot. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.' "I was still not satisfied. These generalities did not meet the question. They were crisp, and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence that almost compelled conviction; but at such a time as this, with a human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad taste. At any other time I would have been not only glad, but proud, to receive from a man like Mr. Greeley a letter of this kind, and would have studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all I could; but now, with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, I had no heart for learning. "Three days passed by, and I read the note again. Again its tenor had changed. It now appeared to say: "Potations do sometimes wake wines; turnips restrain passion; causes necessary to state. Infest the poor widow; her lord's effects will be void. But dirt, bathing, etc., etc., followed unfairly, will worm him from his folly--so swear not. Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.' "This was more like it. But I was unable to proceed. I was too much worn. The word 'turnips' brought temporary joy and encouragement, but my strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for the boy, that I relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation further, and resolved to do what I ought to have done at first. I sat down and wrote Mr. Greeley as follows: "DEAR SIR: I fear I do not entirely comprehend your kind note. It cannot be possible, Sir, that 'turnips restrain passion'--at least the study or contemplation of turnips cannot--for it is this very employment that has scorched our poor friend's mind and sapped his bodily strength.--But if they do restrain it, will you bear with us a little further and explain how they should be prepared? I observe that you say 'causes necessary to state,' but you have omitted to state them. "Under a misapprehension, you seem to attribute to me interested motives in this matter--to call it by no harsher term. But I assure you, dear sir, that if I seem to be 'infesting the widow,' it is all seeming, and void of reality. It is from no seeking of mine that I am in this position. She asked me, herself, to write you. I never have infested her--indeed I scarcely know her. I do not infest anybody. I try to go along, in my humble way, doing as near right as I can, never harming anybody, and never throwing out insinuations. As for 'her lord and his effects,' they are of no interest to me. I trust I have effects enough of my own--shall endeavor to get along with them, at any rate, and not go mousing around to get hold of somebody's that are 'void.' But do you not see?--this woman is a widow--she has no 'lord.' He is dead--or pretended to be, when they buried him. Therefore, no amount of 'dirt, bathing,' etc., etc., howsoever 'unfairly followed' will be likely to 'worm him from his folly'--if being dead and a ghost is 'folly.' Your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for; and if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir, with more point and less impropriety. Very Truly Yours, SIMON ERICKSON. "In the course of a few days, Mr. Greely did what would have saved a world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner. To wit, he sent an intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a plain hand by his clerk. Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his heart had been right, all the time. I will recite the note in its clarified form: [Translation.] 'Potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain passive: cause unnecessary to state. Inform the poor widow her lad's efforts will be vain. But diet, bathing, etc. etc., followed uniformly, will wean him from his folly--so fear not. Yours, HORACE GREELEY.' "But alas, it was too late, gentlemen--too late. The criminal delay had done its work--young Beazely was no more. His spirit had taken its flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires gratified, all ambitions realized. Poor lad, they laid him to his rest with a turnip in each hand." So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and abstraction. The company broke up, and left him so.... But they did not say what drove him crazy. In the momentary confusion, I forgot to ask. 
8589	----	ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain 1880 Part 8. CHAPTER LXXI. At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land journey. This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island structure higher and higher. Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves; it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold water--you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter. Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns. The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now living who witnessed it. In one place it enclosed and burned down a grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark; the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at. There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did. It is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is. They probably went away. They went away early, perhaps. However, they had their merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the sounder judgment. Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every school-boy in the wide world--Kealakekua Bay--the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives, nearly a hundred years ago. The setting sun was flaming upon it, a Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows. Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor. Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the Rainbow Islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every day, and frequently at night also--not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call "raindogs"--little patches of rainbow --are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows. Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell, winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from shore to shore. It is bounded on one side--where the murder was done--by a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it. From this wall the place takes its name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of the Gods." They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a hurry. As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages--the men in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay toward the shore--the--but I discovered that I could not do it. It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think, and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten hours and were viciously hungry. Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment. Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly origin with a groan. It was his death-warrant. Instantly a shout went up: "He groans!--he is not a god!" So they closed in upon him and dispatched him. His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of it which were sent on board the ships). The heart was hung up in a native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook's bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships. Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook. They treated him well. In return, he abused them. He and his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation. Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet had a rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every case the execution was wretched. Most of these merely recorded the visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this legend: "Near this spot fell CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, The Distinguished Circumnavigator, Who Discovered these Islands A. D. 1778." After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing. It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight. But there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountain side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him. A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole, and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render it illegible. Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked herself into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent. CHAPTER LXXII. In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the last god Lono. The high chief cook of this temple--the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices--was uncle to Obookia, and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him. Obookia was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country. This resulted in the sending of missionaries there. And this Obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday School book--aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a Bible at all. Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his native land with the first missionaries, had he lived. The other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third, William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to mining, although he was fifty years old. He succeeded pretty well, but the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars, and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age and he resumed service in the pulpit again. He died in Honolulu in 1864. Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times--so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come. He might go around it by water, but he could not cross it. It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain--and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time. You would seldom get to your Amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella. And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands of dead men! Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountain side at dead of night--flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers--appearing and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded away again. Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night. At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk. But they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport. They were finished swimmers and divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree. They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, and filled the air with their laughter. It is said that the first thing an Islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a matter of smaller consequence, comes afterward. One hears tales of native men and women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea--more miles, indeed, than I dare vouch for or even mention. And they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil! I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me. However I will not urge this point. I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono--I may as well furnish two or three sentences concerning him. The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff twelve feet long. Tradition says he was a favorite god on the Island of Hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious services--just our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would have made him a Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. In an angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aiii. Remorse of conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back any more. Therefore, he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day--and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps. But the people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as the restored god. Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death; but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he was a god. Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest--the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. Of course we visited it, and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood. While the first missionaries were on their way around the Horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as tradition reached were suddenly broken up. Old Kamehameha I., was dead, and his son, Liholiho, the new King was a free liver, a roystering, dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu. His assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes. So the case stood. Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down, Kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did the rest. It was probably the rest. It was probably the first time whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization. Liholiho came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved deliberately forward and sat down with the women! They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled! Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld! Then conviction came like a revelation--the superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up, "the tabu is broken! the tabu is broken!" Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic. The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that Captain Cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as a man if it suited his convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled them down--hacked them to pieces--applied the torch--annihilated them! The pagan priests were furious. And well they might be; they had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had been great--they had stood above the chiefs--and now they were vagabonds. They raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their standard, and Bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily persuaded to become their leader. In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua. The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill him. So the King sent his men forth under Major General Kalaimoku and the two host met a Kuamoo. The battle was long and fierce--men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom--and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the land! The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new dispensation. "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak; the army without idols was strong and victorious!" The nation was without a religion. The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel was planted as in a virgin soil. CHAPTER LXXIII. At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at Honaunan in his canoe--price two dollars--reasonable enough, for a sea voyage of eight miles, counting both ways. The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance. I cannot think of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that does not quite convey the correct idea. It is about fifteen feet long, high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out again. It sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger and does not upset easily, if you keep still. This outrigger is formed of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side, and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly feared. Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this knifeblade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also. I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amidships and faced the Kanaka, who occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling. With the first stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow. There was not much to see. While we were on the shallow water of the reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large bunches of branching coral--the unique shrubbery of the sea. We lost that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep. But we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air. There was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the restless sea. When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain with its rich green forests stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at anchor. And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and keeping it up--always circling over, in that way, like so many well-submerged wheels. But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we were thrown upon our own resources. It did not take many minutes to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather was of a melting temperature. It had a drowsing effect, too. In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself.--The board struck the shore in three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly. At the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a tall cocoanut tree growing among them. Here was the ancient City of Refuge--a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other. Within this inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high. In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase for life and liberty began--the outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood following hotly after him! Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold. But sometimes the flying criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm. Where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge--this ancient Oriental custom? This old sanctuary was sacred to all--even to rebels in arms and invading armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth without fear and without danger--he was tabu, and to harm him was death. The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved. Close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve in diameter. This was the place of execution. A high palisade of cocoanut piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. Here criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. If the man had been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned. The walls of the temple are a study. The same food for speculation that is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here--the mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with science and mechanics. The natives have no invention of their own for hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever. Yet some of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size and would weigh tons. How did they transport and how raise them? Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and are very creditable specimens of masonry. The blocks are of all manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest exactness. The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is accurately preserved. No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of resisting storm and decay for centuries. Who built this temple, and how was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled. Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day to use as a lounge! This circumstance is established by the most reliable traditions. He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no "soldiering" done. And no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee. He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead. These facts are all attested by irrefragable tradition. On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for it would take a score of horses to budge it from its position. They say that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. But these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest efforts--for Kaahumanu was six feet high--she was bulky--she was built like an ox--and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that rock would. We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable degree of engineering skill. Some say that that wise old pagan, Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out of the traditions. In either case, however, as the handiwork of an untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest. The stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of Rome which one sees in pictures. The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the base of the foothills--a congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff some fifty feet high to the ground below. The flaming torrent cooled in the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed and rippled a petrified Niagara. It is very picturesque, and withal so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. A smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together. We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a long distance. Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's mining abilities. Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched. Their height is not uniform, however. We passed through one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the waves of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under. The roof is lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles an inch long, which hardened as they dripped. They project as closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of charge. CHAPTER LXXIV. We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau, where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel. Next day we bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces, toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah). We made nearly a two days' journey of it, but that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of the volcano--signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the bowels of the mountain. Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this. Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest, and docile.--But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles in circumference! Here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare. Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small look-out house--say three miles away. It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin --it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel. By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like. A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depressions between. It glowed like a muffled torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of fire." And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a revelation. Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity! The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough. I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The "cellar" was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like the camp-fires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work! You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and far beyond! You could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye! The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-work of angry fire! Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing --and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor--provided one can imagine those ropes on fire. Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of stringy red fire--of about the consistency of mush, for instance--from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of brilliant white sparks--a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snow-flakes! We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display--since any visitor had seen anything more than the now snubbed and insignificant "North" and "South" lakes in action. We had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the "Record Book" at the Volcano House, and were posted. I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a schoolhouse on fire. True, it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides it was so distant from us. I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great, heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct sounds--a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels. The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner. We left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition, because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel. CHAPTER LXXV. The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for we desired to traverse its floor and see the "North Lake" (of fire) which lay two miles away, toward the further wall. After dark half a dozen of us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy, thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and reached the bottom in safety. The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet, to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the underlying fires gleaming vindictively. A neighboring cauldron was threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the situation. So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette. He said he had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could find his way through it at night. He thought that a run of three hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our shoe-soles. His pluck gave me back-bone. We took one lantern and instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run. We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet. Then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence. When we got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky. The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high overhead. By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life. I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet. I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. He said there was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined. We could not find it. The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light. But he was an ingenious man. He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path, but his feet. He had noticed a crisp grinding of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that in the path these were all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good sagacity. The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us in time. It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the North Lake between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle presented was worth coming double the distance to see. Under us, and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent. The glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to look upon it steadily. It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not quite so white. At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they appeared. Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in the darkness--a released soul soaring homeward from captivity with the damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. By and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not. We did not wait to see. We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for the path. We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-out house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it. We reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged out. Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path. The stream was five miles broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep, and the distance it traveled was forty miles. It tore up and bore away acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts--rocks, trees and all intact. At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight. The atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders. Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and drowning a number of natives. The devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. Only a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the story of the irruption immortal. CHAPTER LXXVI. We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very much. We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping--whip and spur could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it economized time to let them have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it. However, at a former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation more natural to the occasion. I remembered how helpless I was that day, and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under suffering that was consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one side of the street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and reviled him in my heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners and failed; how I moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did not succeed; how he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how he finally brought up at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home, and how, when I took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and appeared to blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine, capable animal, and I must have taken great comfort in him in my time--but that if I would take along some milk-tickets next time, and appear to deliver them at the various halting places, it might expedite his movements a little. There was a coolness between us after that. In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high; but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic rather than in spectacular effect. If one desires to be so stirred by a poem of Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows, and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty--the grand, the august and the sublime being barred the contest--it could challenge the old world and the new to produce its peer. In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or shower-wetted leaves. And now it was destructively funny to see them sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid. Finding it liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling, snorting and showing other evidences of fright. When they became convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and proceeded to chew it complacently. We saw a man coax, kick and spur one of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running stream. It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent--and for aught I know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent. In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually pronounced To-a-hi--and before we find fault with this elaborate orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let us lop off the ugh from our word "though"). I made this horseback trip on a mule. I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen dollars. I mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of chalk--for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial transaction I had ever entered into, and come out winner. We returned to Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several weeks there very pleasantly. I still remember, with a sense of indolent luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao Valley. The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom of the gorge--a shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant domes of forest trees. Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with every step of our progress. Perpendicular walls from one to three thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed with varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns. Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it--then swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again. Now and then, as our position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again and hid themselves once more in the foliage. Presently a verdure-clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley. It seemed to me that if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready made--therefore, why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump? But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala--which means, translated, "the house of the sun." We climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night. With the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent wonders. The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley below appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts. Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these things--not down. We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into the sky above us! It was curious; and not only curious, but aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery. However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy. I have spoken of the outside view--but we had an inside one, too. That was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks, half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump; kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our view as they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and only betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet down from where they started! It was magnificent sport. We wore ourselves out at it. The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference. But what are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will not offer any figures of my own, but give official ones--those of Commander Wilkes, U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in circumference! If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a city like London. It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger. Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean --not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world. While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring. It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always. CHAPTER LXXVII. I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Mani. He became a sore annoyance to me in the course of time. My first glimpse of him was in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina. He occupied a chair at the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to reply. I thought it very sociable in a stranger. Presently, in the course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject under discussion--and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a point at issue. I had barely finished when this person spoke out with rapid utterance and feverish anxiety: "Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to have seen my chimney--you ought to have seen my chimney, sir! Smoke! I wish I may hang if--Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney--you must remember that chimney! No, no--I recollect, now, you warn't living on this side of the island then. But I am telling you nothing but the truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and I had to dig it out with a pickaxe! You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff's got a hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy for you to go and examine for yourselves." The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two, and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest. Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to speak. The moment I paused, he said: "Beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation. Sir, contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it instantly becomes commonplace. No, not that--for I will not speak so discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a gentleman--but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of Kamtchatka--a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen feet in solid diameter!--and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn't so! Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old Cap Saltmarsh can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not. I showed him the tree." Captain Saltmarsh--"Come, now, cat your anchor, lad--you're heaving too taut. You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle I ever see, a hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss." "Hear the man talk! Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't I explain it? Answer me, didn't I? Didn't I say I wished you could have seen it when I first saw it? When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years? And did you s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it? I don't see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's never done you any harm." Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds. I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said: "But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the circumstance either--nothing in the world! I mean no sort of offence when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about speed. Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta; there was a beast!--there was lightning for you! Trot! Trot is no name for it--she flew! How she could whirl a buggy along! I started her out once, sir--Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well --I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of eighteen miles! It did, by the everlasting hills! And I'm telling you nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of rain fell on me--not a single drop, sir! And I swear to it! But my dog was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!" For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me. But one evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a sociable time. About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his workmen. Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot--and for a moment I trembled on the imminent verge of profanity: "Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a surprising circumstance. Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as unborn twins! You don't know anything about it! It is pitiable to see you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is perfectly humiliating! Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the eye. John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the State of Mississippi--boyhood friend of mine--bosom comrade in later years. Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now. John James Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do some blasting for them--the "Incorporated Company of Mean Men," the boys used to call it. "Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a skyrocket, him and his crowbar! Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy--and he kept going on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll--and he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a little small bee--and then he went out of sight! Presently he came in sight again, looking like a little small bee--and he came along down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again--and down further and further, till he was as big as a boy again--and further and further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down again, just the same as if nothing had happened! Now do you know, that poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that Incorporated Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!" I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home. And on my diary I entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer. And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. And the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island. Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar. The line of points represents an interval of years. At the end of which time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons. The man Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for that it was the work of his own hands entirely. Yet the jury brought in the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of some person or persons unknown!" They explained that the perfectly undeviating consistency of Markiss's character for thirty years towered aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as a lie. And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead, and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him up. But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he had been in his right mind? No, sir." CHAPTER LXXVIII. After half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco--a voyage in every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may rank as an incident. Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship had not moved out of her place in all that time. The calm was absolutely breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle. For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard of since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely voyage. We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest. We were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were Sundays too. I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation. I showed it to several friends, but they all shook their heads. They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of it. They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the delivery, anyhow. I was disconsolate now. But at last an editor slapped me on the back and told me to "go ahead." He said, "Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket." The audacity of the proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly wisdom, however. The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half price --fifty dollars. In sheer desperation I took it--on credit, for sufficient reasons. In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and frightened creature on the Pacific coast. I could not sleep--who could, under such circumstances? For other people there was facetiousness in the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when I wrote it: "Doors open at 7 1/2. The trouble will begin at 8." That line has done good service since. Showmen have borrowed it frequently. I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin. As those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy. I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared they might not come. My lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage and turn the thing into a funeral. I was so panic-stricken, at last, that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature, and stormy-voiced, and said: "This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette, and help me through." They said they would. Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-box, where the whole house could see them. I explained that I should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when I had been delivered of an obscure joke--"and then," I added, "don't wait to investigate, but respond!" She promised. Down the street I met a man I never had seen before. He had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature. He said: "My name's Sawyer. You don't know me, but that don't matter. I haven't got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you'd give me a ticket. Come, now, what do you say?" "Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?--that is, is it critical, or can you get it off easy?" My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the centre, and be responsible for that division of the house. I gave him minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea. I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days--I only suffered. I had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened for the sale of reserved seats. I crept down to the theater at four in the afternoon to see if any sales had been made. The ticket seller was gone, the box-office was locked up. I had to swallow suddenly, or my heart would have got out. "No sales," I said to myself; "I might have known it." I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight. I thought of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared. But of course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate. I could not wait for half-past seven--I wanted to face the horror, and end it --the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt. I went down back streets at six o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door. I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and stood on the stage. The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness depressing. I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of everything else. Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and ended in a crash, mingled with cheers. It made my hair raise, it was so close to me, and so loud. There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away. The house was full, aisles and all! The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself. Then I recognized the charity and the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright melted away, and I began to talk Within three or four minutes I was comfortable, and even content. My three chief allies, with three auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the feeblest joke that might show its head. And whenever a joke did fall, their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to ear. Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely. Inferior jokes never fared so royally before. Presently I delivered a bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to turn and catch Mrs.--'s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled. She took it for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of the evening. I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself; and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers. But my poor little morsel of pathos was ruined. It was taken in good faith as an intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely let it go at that. All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a abundance of money. All's well that ends well. CHAPTER LXXIX. I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness. I had the field all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in the Pacific market. They are not so rare, now, I suppose. I took an old personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks we roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of it. Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed within two miles of the town. The daring act was committed just at dawn, by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches, presented revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and commanded a general dismount. Everybody climbed down, and the robbers took their watches and every cent they had. Then they took gunpowder and blew up the express specie boxes and got their contents. The leader of the robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous manner and his intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived. The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate "divide" and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there. The lecture done, I stopped to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven. The "divide" was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of twenty midnight murders and a hundred robberies. As we climbed up and stepped out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight at our backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal. A sharp wind swept the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through. "I tell you I don't like this place at night," said Mike the agent. "Well, don't speak so loud," I said. "You needn't remind anybody that we are here." Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia--a man, evidently. He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again. Then I saw that he had a mask on and was holding something in my face--I heard a click-click and recognized a revolver in dim outline. I pushed the barrel aside with my hand and said: "Don't!" He ejaculated sharply: "Your watch! Your money!" I said: "You can have them with pleasure--but take the pistol away from my face, please. It makes me shiver." "No remarks! Hand out your money!" "Certainly--I--" "Put up your hands! Don't you go for a weapon! Put 'em up! Higher!" I held them above my head. A pause. Then: "Are you going to hand out your money or not?" I dropped my hands to my pockets and said: Certainly! I--" "Put up your hands! Do you want your head blown off? Higher!" I put them above my head again. Another pause. Are you going to hand out your money or not? Ah-ah--again? Put up your hands! By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!" "Well, friend, I'm trying my best to please you. You tell me to give up my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands. If you would only--. Oh, now--don't! All six of you at me! That other man will get away while.--Now please take some of those revolvers out of my face--do, if you please! Every time one of them clicks, my liver comes up into my throat! If you have a mother--any of you--or if any of you have ever had a mother--or a--grandmother--or a--" "Cheese it! Will you give up your money, or have we got to--. There --there--none of that! Put up your hands!" "Gentlemen--I know you are gentlemen by your--" "Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and places more fitting. This is a serious business." "You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have attended in my time were comedies compared to it. Now I think--" "Curse your palaver! Your money!--your money!--your money! Hold!--put up your hands!" "Gentlemen, listen to reason. You see how I am situated--now don't put those pistols so close--I smell the powder. "You see how I am situated. If I had four hands--so that I could hold up two and--" "Throttle him! Gag him! Kill him!" "Gentlemen, don't! Nobody's watching the other fellow. Why don't some of you--. Ouch! Take it away, please! "Gentlemen, you see that I've got to hold up my hands; and so I can't take out my money--but if you'll be so kind as to take it out for me, I will do as much for you some--" "Search him Beauregard--and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags it again. Help Beauregard, Stonewall." Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and fell to searching him. I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had received, it was but common prudence to keep still. When everything had been taken from me,--watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small value,--I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up some latent courage--but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the order came again: They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said: "Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush there. Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!" Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia. It was depressingly still, and miserably cold. Now this whole thing was a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the whole operation, listening. Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but I suspected nothing of it. To me it was most uncomfortably genuine. When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, Mike's interest in the joke began to wane. He said: "The time's up, now, aint it?" "No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with these bloody savages?" Presently Mike said: "Now the time's up, anyway. I'm freezing." "Well freeze. Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket. Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by. I mean to give them good measure. I calculate to stand here fifteen minutes or die. Don't you move." So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract. When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my stiffened body. The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again. Moreover, I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken. I was only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally. Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be intentionally spilled. They were not smart; they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree. However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills. Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me. When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent, and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York--a trip that was not much of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day. I found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged. These changes touched me deeply, and I went away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands. Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only three months. However, I usually miss my calculations further than that. MORAL. If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the operation. APPENDIX. A. BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY. Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the end. Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated all "Gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might. Joseph Smith, the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous stones he read their inscriptions with. Finally he instituted his "church" in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it. The neighbors began to persecute, and apostasy commenced. Brigham held to the faith and worked hard. He arrested desertion. He did more--he added converts in the midst of the trouble. He rose in favor and importance with the brethren. He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church. He shortly fought his way to a higher post and a more powerful--President of the Twelve. The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in Missouri. Brigham went with them. The Missourians drove them out and they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois. They prospered there, and built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe. But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors. All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of everything that was bad. Brigham returned from a mission to England, where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him several hundred converts to his preaching. His influence among the brethren augmented with every move he made. Finally Nauvoo was invaded by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed. A Mormon named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government, in Smith's place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two. But a greater than he was at hand. Brigham seized the advantage of the hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will, hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself. He did more. He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he pronounced Rigdon's "prophecies" emanations from the devil, and ended by "handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand years"--probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois. The people recognized their master. They straightway elected Brigham Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their devotion to him from that day to this. Brigham had forecast--a quality which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed. He recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved. By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired! They camped, several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want, hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many succumbed and died--martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have been. Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the hated American nation. Note that. This was in 1847. Brigham moved his people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall again. For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham's refuge to the enemy--the United States! In 1849 the Mormons organized a "free and independent" government and erected the "State of Deseret," with Brigham Young as its head. But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed it and created the "Territory of Utah" out of the same accumulation of mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,--but made Brigham Governor of it. Then for years the enormous migration across the plains to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church remained staunch and true to its lord and master. Neither hunger, thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive the Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst for gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many nations was not able to entice them! That was the final test. An experiment that could survive that was an experiment with some substance to it somewhere. Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of the last things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities, emoluments and authorities, upon "President Brigham Young!" The people accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward he openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a "revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to the day of his death. Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively as a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator." There was but one dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and took that--he proclaimed himself a God! He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and his heavenly status advanced accordingly. Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven, driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed, despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the true one. Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be hard to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our people and our government. That hatred has "fed fat its ancient grudge" ever since Mormon Utah developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was for the Mormons. The United States tried to rectify all that by appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his dominions difficult. Three thousand United States troops had to go across the plains and put these gentlemen in office. And after they were in office they were as helpless as so many stone images. They made laws which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at--for there was nothing to try, nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit, the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict, and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it and no officer could execute it. Our Presidents shipped one cargo of officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same--they sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory. If a brave officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place. In 1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah. And so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge! --two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the dictionary. Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in Utah. Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial record. The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land. He was an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our President--a monarch who laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives. B. THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE. The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long--and which they consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves --they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The now almost forgotten "Mountain Meadows massacre" was their work. It was very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A few items will refresh the reader's memory. A great emigrant train from Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers. And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and other property--and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the "spoil" of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly "delivered it into their hand?" Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite's entertaining book, "The Mormon Prophet," it transpired that-- "A 'revelation' from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee (adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the mandate of Almighty God." The command of the "revelation" was faithfully obeyed. A large party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the sort of scurvy apologies for "Indians" which the southern part of Utah affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them. At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They retired to the upper end of the "Meadows," resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer! And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt, they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag of truce! The leaders of the timely white "deliverers" were President Haight and Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next proceeded: "They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented them as being very mad. They also proposed to intercede and settle the matter with the Indians. After several hours parley they, having (apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages; which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving everything behind them, even their guns. It was promised by the Mormon bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the settlements. The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of saving the lives of their families. The Mormons retired, and subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. The emigrants were marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the Mormon guard being in the rear. When they had marched in this way about a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. The men were almost all shot down at the first fire from the guard. Two only escaped, who fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before they were overtaken and slaughtered. The women and children ran on, two or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid of the Indians they were slaughtered. Seventeen individuals only, of all the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the eldest of them being only seven years old. Thus, on the 10th day of September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known in our history." The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one hundred and twenty. With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded to make Mormondom answer for the massacre. And what a spectacle it must have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory, deriding them by turns, and by turns "breathing threatenings and slaughter!" An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him and of the occasion: "He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson; but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course. "Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged with a scathing rebuke from the judge. And then, sitting as a committing magistrate, he commenced his task alone. He examined witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom was born. At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past eight years." Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use them. But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands of justice. On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh's proceedings. Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony--and the summary is concise, accurate and reliable: "For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten conviction upon them by 'confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ:' "1. The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S. Marshall Rodgers. "2. The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Also his failure to make any allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the occurrence "3. The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a judicial investigation. "4. The failure of the Deseret News, the Church organ, and the only paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre until several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were engaged in it. "5. The testimony of the children saved from the massacre. "6. The children and the property of the emigrants found in possession of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after the massacre. "7. The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who was, in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory. To all these were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians. "8. The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt. 2d Dragoons, who was sent in the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to California and to inquire into Indian depredations." C. CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill, Nevada. If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand. If ever there was an oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand. Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look; and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature? When I met Conrad, he was "Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office"--and he was not only its Superintendent, but its entire force. And he was a street preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he expected to regenerate the universe. This was years ago. Here latterly he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye. It is extravagant grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter sheet. He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block and employs a thousand men. [Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people mercilessly in his little "People's Tribune," and got himself into trouble. Straightway he airs the affair in the "Territorial Enterprise," in a communication over his own signature, and I propose to reproduce it here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor. Long as it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of journalistic literature the history of America can furnish, perhaps:] From the Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1870. SEEMING PLOT FOR ASSASSINATION MISCARRIED. TO THE EDITOR OF THE ENTERPRISE: Months ago, when Mr. Sutro incidentally exposed mining management on the Comstock, and among others roused me to protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that any attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative action, aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in Storey County, must entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its costs, (c) personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then (d) assassination, and after all nothing would be effected. YOUR PROPHECY FULFILLING. In large part at least your prophecies have been fulfilled, for (a) assaying, which was well attended to in the Gold Hill Assay Office (of which I am superintendent), in consequence of my publications, has been taken elsewhere, so the President of one of the companies assures me. With no reason assigned, other work has been taken away. With but one or two important exceptions, our assay business now consists simply of the gleanings of the vicinity. (b) Though my own personal donations to the People's Tribune Association have already exceeded $1,500, outside of our own numbers we have received (in money) less than $300 as contributions and subscriptions for the journal. (c) On Thursday last, on the main street in Gold Hill, near noon, with neither warning nor cause assigned, by a powerful blow I was felled to the ground, and while down I was kicked by a man who it would seem had been led to believe that I had spoken derogatorily of him. By whom he was so induced to believe I am as yet unable to say. On Saturday last I was again assailed and beaten by a man who first informed me why he did so, and who persisted in making his assault even after the erroneous impression under which he also was at first laboring had been clearly and repeatedly pointed out. This same man, after failing through intimidation to elicit from me the names of our editorial contributors, against giving which he knew me to be pledged, beat himself weary upon me with a raw hide, I not resisting, and then pantingly threatened me with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever again I should introduce his name into print, and who but a few minutes before his attack upon me assured me that the only reason I was "permitted" to reach home alive on Wednesday evening last (at which time the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE was issued) was, that he deems me only half-witted, and be it remembered the very next morning I was knocked down and kicked by a man who seemed to be prepared for flight. [He sees doom impending:] WHEN WILL THE CIRCLE JOIN? How long before the whole of your prophecy will be fulfilled I cannot say, but under the shadow of so much fulfillment in so short a time, and with such threats from a man who is one of the most prominent exponents of the San Francisco mining-ring staring me and this whole community defiantly in the face and pointing to a completion of your augury, do you blame me for feeling that this communication is the last I shall ever write for the Press, especially when a sense alike of personal self-respect, of duty to this money-oppressed and fear-ridden community, and of American fealty to the spirit of true Liberty all command me, and each more loudly than love of life itself, to declare the name of that prominent man to be JOHN B. WINTERS, President of the Yellow Jacket Company, a political aspirant and a military General? The name of his partially duped accomplice and abettor in this last marvelous assault, is no other than PHILIP LYNCH, Editor and Proprietor of the Gold Hill News. Despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by John B. Winters, on Saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which I shall be able to afford your readers, so much do I deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not self-wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the time and in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, I am far from sure that I should not have given him space for repentance before exposing him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter as to make it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me. That fact having been made public, all the facts in connection need to be also, or silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with many would be proof either that I was conscious of some unworthy aim in publishing the article, or else that my "non-combatant" principles are but a convenient cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice. I therefore shall try to present a graphic but truthful picture of this whole affair, but shall forbear all comments, presuming that the editors of our own journal, if others do not, will speak freely and fittingly upon this subject in our next number, whether I shall then be dead or living, for my death will not stop, though it may suspend, the publication of the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE. [The "non-combatant" sticks to principle, but takes along a friend or two of a conveniently different stripe:] THE TRAP SET. On Saturday morning John B. Winters sent verbal word to the Gold Hill Assay Office that he desired to see me at the Yellow Jacket office. Though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view of his own recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as a stockholder in the Yellow Jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another for a favor, hoping that some conference with Sharon looking to the betterment of mining matters in Nevada might arise from it, I felt strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in courtesy. But as then it had only been two days since I had been bruised and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was somewhat aroused. Moreover I remembered sensitively his contemptuousness of manner to me at my last interview in his office. I therefore felt it needful, if I went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might secure exemption from insult. Accordingly I asked a neighbor to accompany me. THE TRAP ALMOST DETECTED. Although I was not then aware of this fact, it would seem that previous to my request this same neighbor had heard Dr. Zabriskie state publicly in a saloon, that Mr. Winters had told him he had decided either to kill or to horsewhip me, but had not finally decided on which. My neighbor, therefore, felt unwilling to go down with me until he had first called on Mr. Winters alone. He therefore paid him a visit. From that interview he assured me that he gathered the impression that he did not believe I would have any difficulty with Mr. Winters, and that he (Winters) would call on me at four o'clock in my own office. MY OWN PRECAUTIONS. As Sheriff Cummings was in Gold Hill that afternoon, and as I desired to converse with him about the previous assault, I invited him to my office, and he came. Although a half hour had passed beyond four o'clock, Mr. Winters had not called, and we both of us began preparing to go home. Just then, Philip Lynch, Publisher of the Gold Hill News, came in and said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good news: "Hello, John B. Winters wants to see you." I replied, "Indeed! Why he sent me word that he would call on me here this afternoon at four o'clock!" "O, well, it don't do to be too ceremonious just now, he's in my office, and that will do as well--come on in, Winters wants to consult with you alone. He's got something to say to you." Though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that in an editor's house I ought to be safe, and anyhow that I would be within hail of the street, I hurriedly, and but partially whispered my dim apprehensions to Mr. Cummings, and asked him if he would not keep near enough to hear my voice in case I should call. He consented to do so while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my voice or thought I had need of protection. On reaching the editorial part of the News office, which viewed from the street is dark, I did not see Mr. Winters, and again my misgivings arose. Had I paused long enough to consider the case, I should have invited Sheriff Cummings in, but as Lynch went down stairs, he said: "This way, Wiegand--it's best to be private," or some such remark. [I do not desire to strain the reader's fancy, hurtfully, and yet it would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee--M. T.:] I followed, and without Mr. Cummings, and without arms, which I never do or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless I should yet come to feel I must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a necessary Vigilance Committee. But by following I made a fatal mistake. Following was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be caught should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as I fear events to come will prove. Traps commonly are not set for benevolence. [His body-guard is shut out:] THE TRAP INSIDE. I followed Lynch down stairs. At their foot a door to the left opened into a small room. From that room another door opened into yet another room, and once entered I found myself inveigled into what many will ever henceforth regard as a private subterranean Gold Hill den, admirably adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder, raw or disguised, for from it, with both or even one door closed, when too late, I saw that I could not be heard by Sheriff Cummings, and from it, BY VIOLENCE AND BY FORCE, I was prevented from making a peaceable exit, when I thought I saw the studious object of this "consultation" was no other than to compass my killing, in the presence of Philip Lynch as a witness, as soon as by insult a proverbially excitable man should be exasperated to the point of assailing Mr. Winters, so that Mr. Lynch, by his conscience and by his well known tenderness of heart toward the rich and potent would be compelled to testify that he saw Gen. John B. Winters kill Conrad Wiegand in "self-defence." But I am going too fast. OUR HOST. Mr. Lynch was present during the most of the time (say a little short of an hour), but three times he left the room. His testimony, therefore, would be available only as to the bulk of what transpired. On entering this carpeted den I was invited to a seat near one corner of the room. Mr. Lynch took a seat near the window. J. B. Winters sat (at first) near the door, and began his remarks essentially as follows: "I have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in that---infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself their author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that your motives were malicious." "Hold, Mr. Winters. Your language is insulting and your demand an enormity. I trust I was not invited here either to be insulted or coerced. I supposed myself here by invitation of Mr. Lynch, at your request." "Nor did I come here to insult you. I have already told you that I am here for a very different purpose." "Yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong excitement. If insult is repeated I shall either leave the room or call in Sheriff Cummings, whom I just left standing and waiting for me outside the door." "No, you won't, sir. You may just as well understand it at once as not. Here you are my man, and I'll tell you why! Months ago you put your property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it on prosecution for libel." "It is true that I did convert all my immovable property into personal property, such as I could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape ruin through possible libel suits." "Very good, sir. Having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may God help your soul if you DON'T make precisely such a retraction as I have demanded. I've got you now, and by--before you can get out of this room you've got to both write and sign precisely the retraction I have demanded, and before you go, anyhow--you---low-lived--lying---, I'll teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by--, Sheriff Cummings and all the friends you've got in the world besides, can't save you, you---, etc.! No, sir. I'm alone now, and I'm prepared to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as I have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges, not only here where I am known and universally respected, but where I am not personally known and may be injured." I confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied threat of killing me if I did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified me, especially as I saw he was working himself up to the highest possible pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other than one of seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a raging fire, so I replied: "Well, if I've got to sign--," and then I paused some time. Resuming, I said, "But, Mr. Winters, you are greatly excited. Besides, I see you are laboring under a total misapprehension. It is your duty not to inflame but to calm yourself. I am prepared to show you, if you will only point out the article that you allude to, that you regard as 'charges' what no calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such. Show me the charges, and I will try, at all events; and if it becomes plain that no charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be nothing to retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a retraction. You should beware of making so serious a mistake, for however honest a man may be, every one is liable to misapprehend. Besides you assume that I am the author of some certain article which you have not pointed out. It is hasty to do so." He then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a TRIBUNE article, headed "What's the Matter with Yellow Jacket?" saying "That's what I refer to." To gain time for general reflection and resolution, I took up the paper and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as I hoped, cooling. I then resumed saying, "As I supposed. I do not admit having written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a point, and then base important action upon your assumption. You might deeply regret it afterwards. In my published Address to the People, I notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any article would be given without the consent of the writer. I therefore cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it." "If you are not the author, then I do demand to know who is?" "I must decline to say." "Then, by--, I brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly." "Passing that point, the most important misapprehension which I notice is, that you regard them as 'charges' at all, when their context, both at their beginning and end, show they are not. These words introduce them: 'Such an investigation [just before indicated], we think MIGHT result in showing some of the following points.' Then follow eleven specifications, and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested investigation 'might EXONERATE those who are generally believed guilty.' You see, therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as charges, and this you seem to have overlooked." While making those comments, Mr. Winters frequently interrupted me in such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider candidly the thoughts contained in my words. He insisted upon it that they were charges, and "By--," he would make me take them back as charges, and he referred the question to Philip Lynch, to whom I then appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted. He replied, "if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations," whereupon Mr. Winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did write the article if I did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in my face with more cursings and epithets. When he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively I tried to rise from my chair, but Winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught I could know worse than that after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me. This fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by plan and plot I was purposely made powerless in Mr. Winters' hands, and that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he possessed. Moreover, I then became convinced, that Philip Lynch (and for what reason I wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his own house. I realized then the situation thoroughly. I had found it equally vain to protest or argue, and I would make no unmanly appeal for pity, still less apologize. Yet my life had been by the plainest possible implication threatened. I was a weak man. I was unarmed. I was helplessly down, and Winters was afoot and probably armed. Lynch was the only "witness." The statements demanded, if given and not explained, would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family's eyes, and in the eyes of the community. On the other hand, should I give the author's name how could I ever expect that confidence of the People which I should no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my family was my life than the life of the real author to his friends. Yet life seemed dear and each minute that remained seemed precious if not solemn. I sincerely trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and especially none with families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct proximity to death while obliged to decide the one question I was compelled to, viz.: What should I do--I, a man of family, and not as Mr. Winters is, "alone." [The reader is requested not to skip the following.--M. T.:] STRATEGY AND MESMERISM. To gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at least till I could give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I resolved to write a certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided: First.--That I would studiously avoid every action which might be construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object. "Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird." Therefore, as before without thought, I thereafter by intent kept my hands away from my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my knees. Second.--I resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could possibly be construed into aggression. Third.--I resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress indignation. To do this, I must govern my spirit. To do that, by force of imagination I was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an assumed character. Fourth.--I resolved to try on Winters, silently, and unconsciously to himself a mesmeric power which I possess over certain kinds of people, and which at times I have found to work even in the dark over the lower animals. Does any one smile at these last counts? God save you from ever being obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force unshorn. But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of will, do not despair. Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may help you; try it at all events. In this instance I was conscious of power coming into me, and by a law of nature, I know Winters was correspondingly weakened. If I could have gained more time I am sure he would not even have struck me. It takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them. That time, however, I gained while thinking of my retraction, which I first wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till I got it to suit me, my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact it should tersely speak the truth into Mr. Winters' mind. When it was finished, I copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first draft it should read as follows. In copying I do not think I made any material change. COPY. To Philip Lynch, Editor of the Gold Hill News: I learn that Gen. John B. Winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE of January to contain distinct charges of mine against him personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them unqualifiedly. In compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although Mr. Winters and I see this matter differently, in view of his strong feelings in the premises, I hereby declare that I do not know those "charges" (if such they are) to be true, and I hope that a critical examination would altogether disprove them. CONRAD WIEGAND. Gold Hill, January 15, 1870. I then read what I had written and handed it to Mr. Lynch, whereupon Mr. Winters said: "That's not satisfactory, and it won't do;" and then addressing himself to Mr. Lynch, he further said: "How does it strike you?" "Well, I confess I don't see that it retracts anything." "Nor do I," said Winters; "in fact, I regard it as adding insult to injury. Mr. Wiegand you've got to do better than that. You are not the man who can pull wool over my eyes." "That, sir, is the only retraction I can write." "No it isn't, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your peril, for I'll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by--, sir, I don't pledge myself to spare you even that inch either. I want you to understand I have asked you for a very different paper, and that paper you've got to sign." "Mr. Winters, I assure you that I do not wish to irritate you, but, at the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper than that which I have written. If you are resolved to compel me to sign something, Philip Lynch's hand must write at your dictation, and if, when written, I can sign it I will do so, but such a document as you say you must have from me, I never can sign. I mean what I say." "Well, sir, what's to be done must be done quickly, for I've been here long enough already. I'll put the thing in another shape (and then pointing to the paper); don't you know those charges to be false?" "I do not." "Do you know them to be true?" "Of my own personal knowledge I do not." "Why then did you print them?" "Because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges, but pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable." "Don't you know that I know they are false?" "If you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an investigation." "And do YOU claim the right to make ME come out and deny anything you may choose to write and print?" To that question I think I made no reply, and he then further said: "Come, now, we've talked about the matter long enough. I want your final answer--did you write that article or not?" "I cannot in honor tell you who wrote it." "Did you not see it before it was printed?" "Most certainly, sir." "And did you deem it a fit thing to publish?" "Most assuredly, sir, or I would never have consented to its appearance. Of its authorship I can say nothing whatever, but for its publication I assume full, sole and personal responsibility." "And do you then retract it or not?" "Mr. Winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies, then I ask a few minutes for prayer." "Prayer!---you, this is not your hour for prayer--your time to pray was when you were writing those--lying charges. Will you sign or not?" "You already have my answer." "What! do you still refuse?" "I do, sir." "Take that, then," and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew only a rawhide instead of what I expected--a bludgeon or pistol. With it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it off, and afterwards on the side of the head. As he moved away to get a better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a chance under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the very bottom of my soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power and nobility could, by the temptations of this State, and by unfortunate associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such brutality anything which he could call satisfaction--but the great hope for us all is in progress and growth, and John B. Winters, I trust, will yet be able to comprehend my feelings. He continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely weary, exhausted and panting for breath. I still adhered to my purpose of non-aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to defend my head and face from further disfigurement. The mere pain arising from the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all remaining traces. When I supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and shaking it in my face, he warned me, if I correctly understood him, of more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever I again dared introduce his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he would cut off my left ear (and I do not think he was jesting) and send me home to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning to all low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure their good names. And when he did so operate, he informed me that his implement would not be a whip but a knife. When he had said this, unaccompanied by Mr. Lynch, as I remember it, he left the room, for I sat down by Mr. Lynch, exclaiming: "The man is mad --he is utterly mad--this step is his ruin--it is a mistake--it would be ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage I have here received, to expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the matter. I shall be in no haste." "Winters is very mad just now," replied Mr. Lynch, "but when he is himself he is one of the finest men I ever met. In fact, he told me the reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of a beating in the sight of others." I submit that that unguarded remark of Philip Lynch convicts him of having been privy in advance to Mr. Winters' intentions whatever they may have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me, but I leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves for inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of his own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what is verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the street. While writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly true respecting this most remarkable assault: First--The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the Penitentiary for libel. This, however, seems unlikely, because any statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or could be so explained as to have no force. The statements wanted so badly must have been desired for some other purpose. Second--The other theory has so dark and wilfully murderous a look that I shrink from writing it, yet as in all probability my death at the earliest practicable moment has already been decreed, I feel I should do all I can before my hour arrives, at least to show others how to break up that aristocratic rule and combination which has robbed all Nevada of true freedom, if not of manhood itself. Although I do not prefer this hypothesis as a "charge," I feel that as an American citizen I still have a right both to think and to speak my thoughts even in the land of Sharon and Winters, and as much so respecting the theory of a brutal assault (especially when I have been its subject) as respecting any other apparent enormity. I give the matter simply as a suggestion which may explain to the proper authorities and to the people whom they should represent, a well ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious fact. The scheme of the assault may have been: First--To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after making actual though not legal threats against my life. Second--To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the rich. Third--To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the infamy. Fourth--Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John B. Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring him in as an accomplice. If that was the programme in John B. Winters' mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death. The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr. Winters, that pity only spared my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why I was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible influence, I cannot divine. The more I reflect upon this matter, the more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become. The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr. Winters and to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to this community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it. [Who received the erroneous telegrams?] Though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the publication of this article I feel sure must compel Gen. Winters (with his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it. Notwithstanding I bear him no ill will; and if W. C. Ralston and William Sharon, and other members of the San Francisco mining and milling Ring feel that he above all other men in this State and California is the most fitting man to supervise and control Yellow Jacket matters, until I am able to vote more than half their stock I presume he will be retained to grace his present post. Meantime, I cordially invite all who know of any sort of important villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to communicate with the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE; for until I am murdered, so long as I can raise the means to publish, I propose to continue my efforts at least to revive the liberties of the State, to curb oppression, and to benefit man's world and God's earth. CONRAD WIEGAND. [It does seem a pity that the Sheriff was shut out, since the good sense of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could have a chance to run. When a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it, even if he is a "non-combatant" weakling; but a generous adversary would at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.--M. T.] 
6702	----	[Illustration: Richmond, Del. J. & J. Wilson, So. H.B. Stowe] LIFE OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE COMPILED FROM Her Letters and Journals BY HER SON CHARLES EDWARD STOWE [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1890 Copyright, 1889, BY CHARLES E. STOWE, _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S.A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. [Illustration: Handwritten letter] It seems but fitting, that I should preface this story of my life with a few notes of instruction. The desire to leave behind me some recollections of my life, has been cherished by me, for many years past; but failing strength or increasing infirmities have prevented its accomplishment. At my suggestion and with what assistance I have been able to render, my son, Ross Charles Edward Stowe, has compiled from my letters and journals, this biography. It is this true story of my life, told for the most part, in my own words and has therefore all the force of an autobiography. It is perhaps much more accurate as to detail & impression than is possible with any autobiography, written later in life. If these pages, shall help those who read them to a firmer trust in God & a deeper sense of His fatherly goodness throughout the days of our earthly pilgrimage I can say with Valiant for Truth in the Pilgrim's Progress! I am going to my Father's & tho with great difficulty, I am got thither, get now, I do not repent me of all the troubles I have been at, to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage & my courage & skill to him that can get it. Hartford Sept 30 1889 Harriet Beecher Stowe INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT I DESIRE to express my thanks here to Harper & Brothers, of New York, for permission to use letters already published in the "Autobiography and Correspondence of Lyman Beecher." I have availed myself freely of this permission in chapters i. and iii. In chapter xx. I have given letters already published in the "Life of George Eliot," by Mr. Cross; but in every instance I have copied from the original MSS. and not from the published work. In conclusion, I desire to express my indebtedness to Mr. Kirk Munroe, who has been my co-laborer in the work of compilation. CHARLES E. STOWE. HARTFORD, _September 30, 1889_. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD 1811-1824. DEATH OF HER MOTHER.--FIRST JOURNEY FROM HOME.--LIFE AT NUT PLAINS.--SCHOOL DAYS AND HOURS WITH FAVORITE AUTHORS.--THE NEW MOTHER.--LITCHFIELD ACADEMY AND ITS INFLUENCE.--FIRST LITERARY EFFORTS.--A REMARKABLE COMPOSITION.--GOES TO HARTFORD 1 CHAPTER II. SCHOOL DAYS IN HARTFORD, 1824-1832. MISS CATHERINE BEECHER.--PROFESSOR FISHER.--THE WRECK OF THE ALBION AND DEATH OF PROFESSOR FISHER.--"THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--MISS CATHERINE BEECHER'S SPIRITUAL HISTORY.--MRS. STOWE'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HER SCHOOL DAYS IN HARTFORD.--HER CONVERSION.--UNITES WITH THE FIRST CHURCH IN HARTFORD.--HER DOUBTS AND SUBSEQUENT RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT.--HER FINAL PEACE 22 CHAPTER III. CINCINNATI, 1832-1836. DR. BEECHER CALLED TO CINCINNATI.--THE WESTWARD JOURNEY.--FIRST LETTER FROM HOME.--DESCRIPTION OF WALNUT HILLS.--STARTING A NEW SCHOOL.--INWARD GLIMPSES.--THE SEMI-COLON CLUB.--EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF SLAVERY.--A JOURNEY TO THE EAST.--THOUGHTS AROUSED BY FIRST VISIT TO NIAGARA.--MARRIAGE TO PROFESSOR STOWE 53 CHAPTER IV. EARLY MARRIED LIFE, 1836-1840. PROFESSOR STOWE'S INTEREST IN POPULAR EDUCATION.--HIS DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE.--SLAVERY RIOTS IN CINCINNATI.--BIRTH OF TWIN DAUGHTERS.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S RETURN AND VISIT TO COLUMBUS.--DOMESTIC TRIALS.--AIDING A FUGITIVE SLAVE.--AUTHORSHIP UNDER DIFFICULTIES.--A BEECHER ROUND ROBIN 78 CHAPTER V. POVERTY AND SICKNESS, 1840-1850. FAMINE IN CINCINNATI.--SUMMER AT THE EAST.--PLANS FOR LITERARY WORK.--EXPERIENCE ON A RAILROAD.--DEATH OF HER BROTHER GEORGE.--SICKNESS AND DESPAIR.--A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF HEALTH.--GOES TO BRATTLEBORO' WATER-CURE.--TROUBLES AT LANE SEMINARY.--CHOLERA IN CINCINNATI.--DEATH OF YOUNGEST CHILD.--DETERMINED TO LEAVE THE WEST 100 CHAPTER VI. REMOVAL TO BRUNSWICK, 1850-1852. MRS. STOWE'S REMARKS ON WRITING AND UNDERSTANDING BIOGRAPHY.--THEIR APPROPRIATENESS TO HER OWN BIOGRAPHY.--REASONS FOR PROFESSOR STOWE'S LEAVING CINCINNATI.--MRS. STOWE'S JOURNEY TO BROOKLYN.--HER BROTHER'S SUCCESS AS A MINISTER.--LETTERS FROM HARTFORD AND BOSTON.--ARRIVES IN BRUNSWICK.--HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY AGITATION.--PRACTICAL WORKING OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.--MRS. EDWARD BEECHER'S LETTER TO MRS. STOWE AND ITS EFFECT.--DOMESTIC TRIALS.--BEGINS TO WRITE "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" AS A SERIAL FOR THE "NATIONAL ERA."--LETTER TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS.--"UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" A WORK OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION 126 CHAPTER VII. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, 1852. "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" AS A SERIAL IN THE "NATIONAL ERA."--AN OFFER FOR ITS PUBLICATION IN BOOK FORM.--WILL IT BE A SUCCESS?--AN UNPRECEDENTED CIRCULATION.--CONGRATULATORY MESSAGES.--KIND WORDS FROM ABROAD.--MRS. STOWE TO THE EARL OF CARLISLE.--LETTERS FROM AND TO LORD SHAFTESBURY.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH ARTHUR HELPS 156 CHAPTER VIII. FIRST TRIP TO EUROPE, 1853. THE EDMONDSONS.--BUYING SLAVES TO SET THEM FREE.--JENNY LIND.--PROFESSOR STOWE IS CALLED TO ANDOVER.--FITTING UP THE NEW HOME.--THE "KEY TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN."--"UNCLE TOM" ABROAD.--HOW IT WAS PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND.--PREFACE TO THE EUROPEAN EDITION.--THE BOOK IN FRANCE.--IN GERMANY.--A GREETING FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY.--PREPARING TO VISIT SCOTLAND.--LETTER TO MRS. FOLLEN 178 CHAPTER IX. SUNNY MEMORIES, 1853. CROSSING THE ATLANTIC.--ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND.--RECEPTION IN LIVERPOOL.--WELCOME TO SCOTLAND.--A GLASGOW TEA-PARTY.--EDINBURGH HOSPITALITY.--ABERDEEN.--DUNDEE AND BIRMINGHAM.--JOSEPH STURGE.--ELIHU BURRITT.--LONDON.--THE LORD MAYOR'S DINNER.--CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS WIFE 205 CHAPTER X. FROM OVER THE SEA, 1853. THE EARL OF CARLISLE.--ARTHUR HELPS.--THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF ARGYLL.--MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER.--A MEMORABLE MEETING AT STAFFORD HOUSE.--MACAULAY AND DEAN MILMAN.--WINDSOR CASTLE.--PROFESSOR STOWE RETURNS TO AMERICA.--MRS. STOWE ON THE CONTINENT.--IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS.--EN ROUTE TO SWITZERLAND AND GERMANY.--BACK TO ENGLAND.--HOMEWARD BOUND 228 CHAPTER XI. HOME AGAIN, 1853-1856. ANTI-SLAVERY WORK.--STIRRING TIMES IN THE UNITED STATES.--ADDRESS TO THE LADIES OF GLASGOW.--APPEAL TO THE WOMEN OF AMERICA.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.--THE WRITING OF "DRED."--FAREWELL LETTER FROM GEORGIANA MAY.--SECOND VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 250 CHAPTER XII. DRED, 1856. SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND.--A GLIMPSE AT THE QUEEN.--THE DUKE OF ARGYLL AND INVERARY.--EARLY CORRESPONDENCE WITH LADY BYRON.--DUNROBIN CASTLE AND ITS INMATES.--A VISIT TO STOKE PARK.--LORD DUFFERIN.--CHARLES KINGSLEY AT HOME.--PARIS REVISITED.--MADAME MOHL'S RECEPTIONS 270 CHAPTER XIII. OLD SCENES REVISITED, 1856. EN ROUTE TO ROME.--TRIALS OF TRAVEL.--A MIDNIGHT ARRIVAL AND AN INHOSPITABLE RECEPTION.--GLORIES OF THE ETERNAL CITY.--NAPLES AND VESUVIUS.--VENICE.--HOLY WEEK IN ROME.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--LETTER FROM HARRIET MARTINEAU ON "DRED."--A WORD FROM MR. PRESCOTT ON "DRED."--FAREWELL TO LADY BYRON 294 CHAPTER XIV. THE MINISTER'S WOOING, 1857-1859. DEATH OF MRS. STOWE'S OLDEST SON.--LETTER TO THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND.--LETTER TO HER DAUGHTERS IN PARIS.--LETTER TO HER SISTER CATHERINE.--VISIT TO BRUNSWICK AND ORR'S ISLAND.--WRITES "THE MINISTER'S WOOING" AND "THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND."--MR. WHITTIER'S COMMENTS.--MR. LOWELL ON "THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--LETTER TO MRS. STOWE FROM MR. LOWELL.--JOHN RUSKIN ON "THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--A YEAR OF SADNESS.--LETTER TO LADY BYRON.--LETTER TO HER DAUGHTER.--DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE 315 CHAPTER XV. THE THIRD TRIP TO EUROPE, 1859. THIRD VISIT TO EUROPE.--LADY BYRON ON "THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--SOME FOREIGN PEOPLE AND THINGS AS THEY APPEARED TO PROFESSOR STOWE.--A WINTER IN ITALY.--THINGS UNSEEN AND UNREVEALED.--SPECULATIONS CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM.--JOHN RUSKIN.--MRS. BROWNING.--THE RETURN TO AMERICA.--LETTERS TO DR. HOLMES 343 CHAPTER XVI. THE CIVIL WAR, 1860-1865. THE OUTBREAK OF CIVIL WAR.--MRS. STOWE'S SON ENLISTS.--THANKSGIVING DAY IN WASHINGTON.--THE PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION.--REJOICINGS IN BOSTON.--FRED STOWE AT GETTYSBURG.--LEAVING ANDOVER AND SETTLING IN HARTFORD.--A REPLY TO THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND.--LETTERS FROM JOHN BRIGHT, ARCHBISHOP WHATELY, AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 363 CHAPTER XVII. FLORIDA, 1865-1869. LETTER TO DUCHESS OF ARGYLL.--MRS. STOWE DESIRES TO HAVE A HOME AT THE SOUTH.--FLORIDA THE BEST FIELD FOR DOING GOOD.--SHE BUYS A PLACE AT MANDARIN.--A CHARMING WINTER RESIDENCE.--"PALMETTO LEAVES."--EASTER SUNDAY AT MANDARIN.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR. HOLMES.--"POGANUC PEOPLE."--RECEPTIONS IN NEW ORLEANS AND TALLAHASSEE.--LAST WINTER AT MANDARIN 395 CHAPTER XVIII. OLDTOWN FOLKS, 1869. PROFESSOR STOWE THE ORIGINAL OF "HARRY" IN "OLDTOWN FOLKS."--PROFESSOR STOWE'S LETTER TO GEORGE ELIOT.--HER REMARKS ON THE SAME.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S NARRATIVE OF HIS YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF SPIRITS.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S INFLUENCE ON MRS. STOWE'S LITERARY LIFE.--GEORGE ELIOT ON "OLDTOWN FOLKS" 419 CHAPTER XIX. THE BYRON CONTROVERSY, 1869-1870. MRS. STOWE'S STATEMENT OF HER OWN CASE.--THE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH SHE FIRST MET LADY BYRON.--LETTERS TO LADY BYRON.--LETTER TO DR. HOLMES WHEN ABOUT TO PUBLISH "THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE" IN THE "ATLANTIC."--DR. HOLMES'S REPLY.--THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER 445 CHAPTER XX. GEORGE ELIOT. CORRESPONDENCE WITH GEORGE ELIOT.--GEORGE ELIOT'S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MRS. STOWE.--MRS. STOWE'S LETTER TO MRS. FOLLEN.--GEORGE ELIOT'S LETTER TO MRS. STOWE.--MRS. STOWE'S REPLY.--LIFE IN FLORIDA.--ROBERT DALE OWEN AND MODERN SPIRITUALISM.--GEORGE ELIOT'S LETTER ON THE PHENOMENA OF SPIRITUALISM.--MRS. STOWE'S DESCRIPTION OF SCENERY IN FLORIDA.--MRS. STOWE CONCERNING "MIDDLEMARCH."--GEORGE ELIOT TO MRS. STOWE DURING REV. H. W. BEECHER'S TRIAL.--MRS. STOWE CONCERNING HER LIFE EXPERIENCE WITH HER BROTHER, H. W. BEECHER, AND HIS TRIAL.--MRS. LEWES' LAST LETTER TO MRS. STOWE.--DIVERSE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THESE TWO WOMEN.--MRS. STOWE'S FINAL ESTIMATE OF MODERN SPIRITUALISM 459 CHAPTER XXI. CLOSING SCENES, 1870-1889. LITERARY LABORS.--COMPLETE LIST OF PUBLISHED BOOKS.--FIRST READING TOUR.--PEEPS BEHIND THE CURTAIN.--SOME NEW ENGLAND CITIES.--A LETTER FROM MAINE.--PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT READINGS.--SECOND TOUR.--A WESTERN JOURNEY.--VISIT TO OLD SCENES.--CELEBRATION OF SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY.--CONGRATULATORY POEMS FROM MR. WHITTIER AND DR. HOLMES.--LAST WORDS 489 [Illustration] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE PORTRAIT OF MRS. STOWE. From a crayon by Richmond, made in England in 1853 _Frontispiece_ SILVER INKSTAND PRESENTED TO MRS. STOWE BY HER ENGLISH ADMIRERS IN 1853 xi PORTRAIT OF MRS. STOWE'S GRANDMOTHER, ROXANNA FOOTE. From a miniature painted on ivory by her daughter, Mrs. Lyman Beecher 6 BIRTHPLACE AT LITCHFIELD, CONN.[A] 10 PORTRAIT OF CATHERINE E. BEECHER. From a photograph taken in 1875 30 THE HOME AT WALNUT HILLS, CINCINNATI[A] 56 PORTRAIT OF HENRY WARD BEECHER. From a photograph by Rockwood, in 1884 130 MANUSCRIPT PAGE OF "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" (fac-simile) 160 THE ANDOVER HOME. From a painting by F. Rondel, in 1860, owned by Mrs. H. F. Allen 186 PORTRAIT OF LYMAN BEECHER, AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY-SEVEN. From a painting owned by the Boston Congregational Club 264 PORTRAIT OF THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND. From an engraving presented to Mrs. Stowe 318 THE OLD HOME AT HARTFORD 374 THE HOME AT MANDARIN, FLORIDA 402 PORTRAIT OF CALVIN ELLIS STOWE. From a photograph taken in 1882 422 PORTRAIT OF MRS. STOWE. From a photograph by Ritz and Hastings, in 1884 470 THE LATER HARTFORD HOME 508 FOOTNOTE: [A] From recent photographs and from views in the Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers. LIFE AND LETTERS OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD, 1811-1824. DEATH OF HER MOTHER.--FIRST JOURNEY FROM HOME.--LIFE AT NUT PLAINS.--SCHOOL DAYS AND HOURS WITH FAVORITE AUTHORS.--THE NEW MOTHER.--LITCHFIELD ACADEMY AND ITS INFLUENCE.--FIRST LITERARY EFFORTS.--A REMARKABLE COMPOSITION.--GOES TO HARTFORD. HARRIET BEECHER (STOWE) was born June 14, 1811, in the characteristic New England town of Litchfield, Conn. Her father was the Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, a distinguished Calvinistic divine, her mother Roxanna Foote, his first wife. The little new-comer was ushered into a household of happy, healthy children, and found five brothers and sisters awaiting her. The eldest was Catherine, born September 6, 1800. Following her were two sturdy boys, William and Edward; then came Mary, then George, and at last Harriet. Another little Harriet born three years before had died when only one month old, and the fourth daughter was named, in memory of this sister, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher. Just two years after Harriet was born, in the same month, another brother, Henry Ward, was welcomed to the family circle, and after him came Charles, the last of Roxanna Beecher's children. The first memorable incident of Harriet's life was the death of her mother, which occurred when she was four years old, and which ever afterwards remained with her as the tenderest, saddest, and most sacred memory of her childhood. Mrs. Stowe's recollections of her mother are found in a letter to her brother Charles, afterwards published in the "Autobiography and Correspondence of Lyman Beecher." She says:-- "I was between three and four years of age when our mother died, and my personal recollections of her are therefore but few. But the deep interest and veneration that she inspired in all who knew her were such that during all my childhood I was constantly hearing her spoken of, and from one friend or another some incident or anecdote of her life was constantly being impressed upon me. "Mother was one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic natures in whom all around seemed to find comfort and repose. The communion between her and my father was a peculiar one. It was an intimacy throughout the whole range of their being. There was no human mind in whose decisions he had greater confidence. Both intellectually and morally he regarded her as the better and stronger portion of himself, and I remember hearing him say that after her death his first sensation was a sort of terror, like that of a child suddenly shut out alone in the dark. "In my own childhood only two incidents of my mother twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was of our all running and dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning, and her pleasant voice saying after us, 'Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, children.' "Another remembrance is this: mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John in New York had just sent her a small parcel of fine tulip-bulbs. I remember rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was gone out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, using all the little English I then possessed to persuade my brothers that these were onions such as grown people ate and would be very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole, and I recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd sweetish taste, and thinking that onions were not so nice as I had supposed. Then mother's serene face appeared at the nursery door and we all ran towards her, telling with one voice of our discovery and achievement. We had found a bag of onions and had eaten them all up. "Also I remember that there was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat down and said, 'My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry. Those were not onions but roots of beautiful flowers, and if you had let them alone we should have next summer in the garden great beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.' I remember how drooping and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we regarded the empty paper bag. "Then I have a recollection of her reading aloud to the children Miss Edgeworth's 'Frank,' which had just come out, I believe, and was exciting a good deal of attention among the educational circles of Litchfield. After that came a time when every one said she was sick, and I used to be permitted to go once a day into her room, where she sat bolstered up in bed. I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot on each cheek and her quiet smile. I remember dreaming one night that mamma had got well, and of waking with loud transports of joy that were hushed down by some one who came into the room. My dream was indeed a true one. She was forever well. "Then came the funeral. Henry was too little to go. I can see his golden curls and little black frock as he frolicked in the sun like a kitten, full of ignorant joy. "I recollect the mourning dresses, the tears of the older children, the walking to the burial-ground, and somebody's speaking at the grave. Then all was closed, and we little ones, to whom it was so confused, asked where she was gone and would she never come back. "They told us at one time that she had been laid in the ground, and at another that she had gone to heaven. Thereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to heaven to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing. Lifting his curly head, he answered with great simplicity, 'Why, I'm going to heaven to find mamma.' "Although our mother's bodily presence thus disappeared from our circle, I think her memory and example had more influence in moulding her family, in deterring from evil and exciting to good, than the living presence of many mothers. It was a memory that met us everywhere, for every person in the town, from the highest to the lowest, seemed to have been so impressed by her character and life that they constantly reflected some portion of it back upon us. "The passage in 'Uncle Tom' where Augustine St. Clare describes his mother's influence is a simple reproduction of my own mother's influence as it has always been felt in her family." Of his deceased wife Dr. Beecher said: "Few women have attained to more remarkable piety. Her faith was strong and her prayer prevailing. It was her wish that all her sons should devote themselves to the ministry, and to it she consecrated them with fervent prayer. Her prayers have been heard. All her sons have been converted and are now, according to her wish, ministers of Christ." Such was Roxanna Beecher, whose influence upon her four-year-old daughter was strong enough to mould the whole after-life of the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." After the mother's death the Litchfield home was such a sad, lonely place for the child that her aunt, Harriet Foote, took her away for a long visit at her grandmother's at Nut Plains, near Guilford, Conn., the first journey from home the little one had ever made. Of this visit Mrs. Stowe herself says:-- "Among my earliest recollections are those of a visit to Nut Plains immediately after my mother's death. Aunt Harriet Foote, who was with mother during all her last sickness, took me home to stay with her. At the close of what seemed to me a long day's ride we arrived after dark at a lonely little white farmhouse, and were ushered into a large parlor where a cheerful wood fire was crackling. I was placed in the arms of an old lady, who held me close and wept silently, a thing at which I marveled, for my great loss was already faded from my childish mind. [Illustration: _Roxanna Foote_] "I remember being put to bed by my aunt in a large room, on one side of which stood the bed appropriated to her and me, and on the other that of my grandmother. My aunt Harriet was no common character. A more energetic human being never undertook the education of a child. Her ideas of education were those of a vigorous English woman of the old school. She believed in the Church, and had she been born under that _régime_ would have believed in the king stoutly, although being of the generation following the Revolution she was a not less stanch supporter of the Declaration of Independence. "According to her views little girls were to be taught to move very gently, to speak softly and prettily, to say 'yes ma'am,' and 'no ma'am,' never to tear their clothes, to sew, to knit at regular hours, to go to church on Sunday and make all the responses, and to come home and be catechised. "During these catechisings she used to place my little cousin Mary and myself bolt upright at her knee, while black Dinah and Harry, the bound boy, were ranged at a respectful distance behind us; for Aunt Harriet always impressed it upon her servants 'to order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters,' a portion of the Church catechism that always pleased me, particularly when applied to them, as it insured their calling me 'Miss Harriet,' and treating me with a degree of consideration such as I never enjoyed in the more democratic circle at home. I became proficient in the Church catechism, and gave my aunt great satisfaction by the old-fashioned gravity and steadiness with which I learned to repeat it. "As my father was a Congregational minister, I believe Aunt Harriet, though the highest of High Church women, felt some scruples as to whether it was desirable that my religious education should be entirely out of the sphere of my birth. Therefore when this catechetical exercise was finished she would say, 'Now, niece, you have to learn another catechism, because your father is a Presbyterian minister,'--and then she would endeavor to make me commit to memory the Assembly catechism. "At this lengthening of exercise I secretly murmured. I was rather pleased at the first question in the Church catechism, which is certainly quite on the level of any child's understanding,--'What is your name?' It was such an easy good start, I could say it so loud and clear, and I was accustomed to compare it with the first question in the Primer, 'What is the chief end of man?' as vastly more difficult for me to answer. In fact, between my aunt's secret unbelief and my own childish impatience of too much catechism, the matter was indefinitely postponed after a few ineffectual attempts, and I was overjoyed to hear her announce privately to grandmother that she thought it would be time enough for Harriet to learn the Presbyterian catechism when she went home." Mingled with this superabundance of catechism and plentiful needlework the child was treated to copious extracts from Lowth's Isaiah, Buchanan's Researches in Asia, Bishop Heber's Life, and Dr. Johnson's Works, which, after her Bible and Prayer Book, were her grandmother's favorite reading. Harriet does not seem to have fully appreciated these; but she did enjoy her grandmother's comments upon their biblical readings. Among the Evangelists especially was the old lady perfectly at home, and her idea of each of the apostles was so distinct and dramatic that she spoke of them as of familiar acquaintances. She would, for instance, always smile indulgently at Peter's remarks and say, "There he is again, now; that's just like Peter. He's always so ready to put in." It must have been during this winter spent at Nut Plains, amid such surroundings, that Harriet began committing to memory that wonderful assortment of hymns, poems, and scriptural passages from which in after years she quoted so readily and effectively, for her sister Catherine, in writing of her the following November, says:-- "Harriet is a very good girl. She has been to school all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible. She has a remarkably retentive memory and will make a very good scholar." At this time the child was five years old, and a regular attendant at "Ma'am Kilbourne's" school on West Street, to which she walked every day hand in hand with her chubby, rosy-faced, bare-footed, four-year-old brother, Henry Ward. With the ability to read germinated the intense literary longing that was to be hers through life. In those days but few books were specially prepared for children, and at six years of age we find the little girl hungrily searching for mental food amid barrels of old sermons and pamphlets stored in a corner of the garret. Here it seemed to her were some thousands of the most unintelligible things. "An appeal on the unlawfulness of a man marrying his wife's sister" turned up in every barrel she investigated, by twos, or threes, or dozens, till her soul despaired of finding an end. At last her patient search was rewarded, for at the very bottom of a barrel of musty sermons she discovered an ancient volume of "The Arabian Nights." With this her fortune was made, for in these most fascinating of fairy tales the imaginative child discovered a well-spring of joy that was all her own. When things went astray with her, when her brothers started off on long excursions, refusing to take her with them, or in any other childish sorrow, she had only to curl herself up in some snug corner and sail forth on her bit of enchanted carpet into fairyland to forget all her griefs. In recalling her own child-life Mrs. Stowe, among other things, describes her father's library, and gives a vivid bit of her own experiences within its walls. She says: "High above all the noise of the house, this room had to me the air of a refuge and a sanctuary. Its walls were set round from floor to ceiling with the friendly, quiet faces of books, and there stood my father's great writing-chair, on one arm of which lay open always his Cruden's Concordance and his Bible. Here I loved to retreat and niche myself down in a quiet corner with my favorite books around me. I had a kind of sheltered feeling as I thus sat and watched my father writing, turning to his books, and speaking from time to time to himself in a loud, earnest whisper. I vaguely felt that he was about some holy and mysterious work quite beyond my little comprehension, and I was careful never to disturb him by question or remark. [Illustration: BIRTHPLACE AT LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT.] "The books ranged around filled me too with a solemn awe. On the lower shelves were enormous folios, on whose backs I spelled in black letters, 'Lightfoot Opera,' a title whereat I wondered, considering the bulk of the volumes. Above these, grouped along in friendly, social rows, were books of all sorts, sizes, and bindings, the titles of which I had read so often that I knew them by heart. There were Bell's Sermons, Bonnett's Inquiries, Bogue's Essays, Toplady on Predestination, Boston's Fourfold State, Law's Serious Call, and other works of that kind. These I looked over wistfully, day after day, without even a hope of getting something interesting out of them. The thought that father could read and understand things like these filled me with a vague awe, and I wondered if I would ever be old enough to know what it was all about. "But there was one of my father's books that proved a mine of wealth to me. It was a happy hour when he brought home and set up in his bookcase Cotton Mather's 'Magnalia,' in a new edition of two volumes. What wonderful stories those! Stories too about my own country. Stories that made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's Providence." In continuing these reminiscences Mrs. Stowe describes as follows her sensations upon first hearing the Declaration of Independence: "I had never heard it before, and even now had but a vague idea of what was meant by some parts of it. Still I gathered enough from the recital of the abuses and injuries that had driven my nation to this course to feel myself swelling with indignation, and ready with all my little mind and strength to applaud the concluding passage, which Colonel Talmadge rendered with resounding majesty. I was as ready as any of them to pledge my life, fortune, and sacred honor for such a cause. The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and just now it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account." When Harriet was nearly six years old her father married as his second wife Miss Harriet Porter of Portland, Maine, and Mrs. Stowe thus describes her new mother: "I slept in the nursery with my two younger brothers. We knew that father was gone away somewhere on a journey and was expected home, therefore the sound of a bustle in the house the more easily awoke us. As father came into our room our new mother followed him. She was very fair, with bright blue eyes, and soft auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, and to us she seemed very beautiful. "Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The morning following her arrival we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant, that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must have appeared to her as rough, red-faced, country children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her ways and arrangements, and I used to feel breezy, rough, and rude in her presence. "In her religion she was distinguished for a most unfaltering Christ-worship. She was of a type noble but severe, naturally hard, correct, exact and exacting, with intense natural and moral ideality. Had it not been that Doctor Payson had set up and kept before her a tender, human, loving Christ, she would have been only a conscientious bigot. This image, however, gave softness and warmth to her religious life, and I have since noticed how her Christ-enthusiasm has sprung up in the hearts of all her children." In writing to her old home of her first impressions of her new one, Mrs. Beecher says: "It is a very lovely family, and with heartfelt gratitude I observed how cheerful and healthy they were. The sentiment is greatly increased, since I perceive them to be of agreeable habits and some of them of uncommon intellect." This new mother proved to be indeed all that the name implies to her husband's children, and never did they have occasion to call her aught other than blessed. Another year finds a new baby brother, Frederick by name, added to the family. At this time too we catch a characteristic glimpse of Harriet in one of her sister Catherine's letters. She says: "Last week we interred Tom junior with funeral honors by the side of old Tom of happy memory. Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked for what she called an _epithet_ for the gravestone of Tom junior, which I gave as follows:-- "Here lies our Kit, Who had a fit, And acted queer, Shot with a gun, Her race is run, And she lies here." In June, 1820, little Frederick died from scarlet fever, and Harriet was seized with a violent attack of the same dread disease; but, after a severe struggle, recovered. Following her happy, hearty child-life, we find her tramping through the woods or going on fishing excursions with her brothers, sitting thoughtfully in her father's study, listening eagerly to the animated theological discussions of the day, visiting her grandmother at Nut Plains, and figuring as one of the brightest scholars in the Litchfield Academy, taught by Mr. John Brace and Miss Pierce. When she was eleven years old her brother Edward wrote of her: "Harriet reads everything she can lay hands on, and sews and knits diligently." At this time she was no longer the youngest girl of the family, for another sister (Isabella) had been born in 1822. This event served greatly to mature her, as she was intrusted with much of the care of the baby out of school hours. It was not, however, allowed to interfere in any way with her studies, and, under the skillful direction of her beloved teachers, she seemed to absorb knowledge with every sense. She herself writes: "Much of the training and inspiration of my early days consisted not in the things that I was supposed to be studying, but in hearing, while seated unnoticed at my desk, the conversation of Mr. Brace with the older classes. There, from hour to hour, I listened with eager ears to historical criticisms and discussions, or to recitations in such works as Paley's Moral Philosophy, Blair's Rhetoric, Allison on Taste, all full of most awakening suggestions to my thoughts. "Mr. Brace exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition. The constant excitement in which he kept the minds of his pupils, the wide and varied regions of thought into which he led them, formed a preparation for composition, the main requisite for which is to have something which one feels interested to say." In her tenth year Harriet began what to her was the fascinating work of writing compositions, and so rapidly did she progress that at the school exhibition held when she was twelve years old, hers was one of the two or three essays selected to be read aloud before the august assembly of visitors attracted by the occasion. Of this event Mrs. Stowe writes: "I remember well the scene at that exhibition, to me so eventful. The hall was crowded with all the literati of Litchfield. Before them all our compositions were read aloud. When mine was read I noticed that father, who was sitting on high by Mr. Brace, brightened and looked interested, and at the close I heard him ask, 'Who wrote that composition?' 'Your daughter, sir,' was the answer. It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no mistaking father's face when he was pleased, and to have interested him was past all juvenile triumphs." That composition has been carefully preserved, and on the old yellow sheets the cramped childish handwriting is still distinctly legible. As the first literary production of one who afterwards attained such distinction as a writer, it is deemed of sufficient value and interest to be embodied in this biography exactly as it was written and read sixty-five years ago. The subject was certainly a grave one to be handled by a child of twelve. CAN THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL BE PROVED BY THE LIGHT OF NATURE? It has justly been concluded by the philosophers of every age that "The proper study of mankind is man," and his nature and composition, both physical and mental, have been subjects of the most critical examination. In the course of these researches many have been at a loss to account for the change which takes place in the body at the time of death. By some it has been attributed to the flight of its tenant, and by others to its final annihilation. The questions, "What becomes of the soul at the time of death?" and, if it be not annihilated, "What is its destiny after death?" are those which, from the interest that we all feel in them, will probably engross universal attention. In pursuing these inquiries it will be necessary to divest ourselves of all that knowledge which we have obtained from the light which revelation has shed over them, and place ourselves in the same position as the philosophers of past ages when considering the same subject. The first argument which has been advanced to prove the immortality of the soul is drawn from the nature of the mind itself. It has (say the supporters of this theory) no composition of parts, and therefore, as there are no particles, is not susceptible of divisibility and cannot be acted upon by decay, and therefore if it will not decay it will exist forever. Now because the mind is not susceptible of decay effected in the ordinary way by a gradual separation of particles, affords no proof that that same omnipotent power which created it cannot by another simple exertion of power again reduce it to nothing. The only reason for belief which this argument affords is that the soul cannot be acted upon by decay. But it does not prove that it cannot destroy its existence. Therefore, for the validity of this argument, it must either be proved that the "Creator" has not the power to destroy it, or that he has not the will; but as neither of these can be established, our immortality is left dependent on the pleasure of the Creator. But it is said that it is evident that the Creator designed the soul for immortality, or he would never have created it so essentially different from the body, for had they both been designed for the same end they would both have been created alike, as there would have been no object in forming them otherwise. This only proves that the soul and body had not the same destinations. Now of what these destinations are we know nothing, and after much useless reasoning we return where we began, our argument depending upon the good pleasure of the Creator. And here it is said that a being of such infinite wisdom and benevolence as that of which the Creator is possessed would not have formed man with such vast capacities and boundless desires, and would have given him no opportunity for exercising them. In order to establish the validity of this argument it is necessary to prove by the light of Nature that the Creator _is_ benevolent, which, being impracticable, is of itself sufficient to render the argument invalid. But the argument proceeds upon the supposition that to destroy the soul would be unwise. Now this is arraigning the "All-wise" before the tribunal of his subjects to answer for the mistakes in his government. Can we look into the council of the "Unsearchable" and see what means are made to answer their ends? We do not know but the destruction of the soul may, in the government of God, be made to answer such a purpose that its existence would be contrary to the dictates of wisdom. The great desire of the soul for immortality, its secret, innate horror of annihilation, has been brought to prove its immortality. But do we always find this horror or this desire? Is it not much more evident that the great majority of mankind have no such dread at all? True that there is a strong feeling of horror excited by the idea of perishing from the earth and being forgotten, of losing all those honors and all that fame awaited them. Many feel this secret horror when they look down upon the vale of futurity and reflect that though now the idols of the world, soon all which will be left them will be the common portion of mankind--oblivion! But this dread does not arise from any idea of their destiny beyond the tomb, and even were this true, it would afford no proof that the mind would exist forever, merely from its strong desires. For it might with as much correctness be argued that the body will exist forever because we have a great dread of dying, and upon this principle nothing which we strongly desire would ever be withheld from us, and no evil that we greatly dread will ever come upon us, a principle evidently false. Again, it has been said that the constant progression of the powers of the mind affords another proof of its immortality. Concerning this, Addison remarks, "Were a human soul ever thus at a stand in her acquirements, were her faculties to be full blown and incapable of further enlargement, I could imagine that she might fall away insensibly and drop at once into a state of annihilation. But can we believe a thinking being that is in a perpetual progress of improvement, and traveling on from perfection to perfection after having just looked abroad into the works of her Creator and made a few discoveries of his infinite wisdom and goodness, must perish at her first setting out and in the very beginning of her inquiries?" In answer to this it may be said that the soul is not always progressing in her powers. Is it not rather a subject of general remark that those brilliant talents which in youth expand, in manhood become stationary, and in old age gradually sink to decay? Till when the ancient man descends to the tomb scarce a wreck of that once powerful mind remains. Who, but upon reading the history of England, does not look with awe upon the effects produced by the talents of her Elizabeth? Who but admires that undaunted firmness in time of peace and that profound depth of policy which she displayed in the cabinet? Yet behold the tragical end of this learned, this politic princess! Behold the triumphs of age and sickness over her once powerful talents, and say not that the faculties of man are always progressing in their powers. From the activity of the mind at the hour of death has also been deduced its immortality. But it is not true that the mind is always active at the time of death. We find recorded in history numberless instances of those talents, which were once adequate to the government of a nation, being so weakened and palsied by the touch of sickness as scarcely to tell to beholders what they once were. The talents of the statesman, the wisdom of the sage, the courage and might of the warrior, are instantly destroyed by it, and all that remains of them is the waste of idiocy or the madness of insanity. Some minds there are who at the time of death retain their faculties though much impaired, and if the argument be valid these are the only cases where immortality is conferred. Again, it is urged that the inequality of rewards and punishments in this world demand another in which virtue may be rewarded and vice punished. This argument, in the first place, takes for its foundation that by the light of nature the distinction between virtue and vice can be discovered. By some this is absolutely disbelieved, and by all considered as extremely doubtful. And, secondly, it puts the Creator under an obligation to reward and punish the actions of his creatures. No such obligation exists, and therefore the argument cannot be valid. And this supposes the Creator to be a being of justice, which cannot by the light of nature be proved, and as the whole argument rests upon this foundation it certainly cannot be correct. This argument also directly impeaches the wisdom of the Creator, for the sense of it is this,--that, forasmuch as he was not able to manage his government in this world, he must have another in which to rectify the mistakes and oversights of this, and what an idea would this give us of our All-wise Creator? It is also said that all nations have some conceptions of a future state, that the ancient Greeks and Romans believed in it, that no nation has been found but have possessed some idea of a future state of existence. But their belief arose more from the fact that they wished it to be so than from any real ground of belief; for arguments appear much more plausible when the mind wishes to be convinced. But it is said that every nation, however circumstanced, possess some idea of a future state. For this we may account by the fact that it was handed down by tradition from the time of the flood. From all these arguments, which, however plausible at first sight, are found to be futile, may be argued the necessity of a revelation. Without it, the destiny of the noblest of the works of God would have been left in obscurity. Never till the blessed light of the Gospel dawned on the borders of the pit, and the heralds of the Cross proclaimed "Peace on earth and good will to men," was it that bewildered and misled man was enabled to trace his celestial origin and glorious destiny. The sun of the Gospel has dispelled the darkness that has rested on objects beyond the tomb. In the Gospel man learned that when the dust returned to dust the spirit fled to the God who gave it. He there found that though man has lost the image of his divine Creator, he is still destined, after this earthly house of his tabernacle is dissolved, to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, to a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Soon after the writing of this remarkable composition, Harriet's child-life in Litchfield came to an end, for that same year she went to Hartford to pursue her studies in a school which had been recently established by her sister Catherine in that city. CHAPTER II. SCHOOL DAYS IN HARTFORD, 1824-1832. MISS CATHERINE BEECHER.--PROFESSOR FISHER.--THE WRECK OF THE ALBION AND DEATH OF PROFESSOR FISHER.--"THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--MISS CATHERINE BEECHER'S SPIRITUAL HISTORY.--MRS. STOWE'S RECOLLECTIONS OF HER SCHOOL DAYS IN HARTFORD.--HER CONVERSION.--UNITES WITH THE FIRST CHURCH IN HARTFORD.--HER DOUBTS AND SUBSEQUENT RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT.--HER FINAL PEACE. THE school days in Hartford began a new era in Harriet's life. It was the formative period, and it is therefore important to say a few words concerning her sister Catherine, under whose immediate supervision she was to continue her education. In fact, no one can comprehend either Mrs. Stowe or her writings without some knowledge of the life and character of this remarkable woman, whose strong, vigorous mind and tremendous personality indelibly stamped themselves on the sensitive, yielding, dreamy, and poetic nature of the younger sister. Mrs. Stowe herself has said that the two persons who most strongly influenced her at this period of her life were her brother Edward and her sister Catherine. Catherine was the oldest child of Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote, his wife. In a little battered journal found among her papers is a short sketch of her life, written when she was seventy-six years of age. In a tremulous hand she begins: "I was born at East Hampton, L. I., September 5, 1800, at 5 P. M., in the large parlor opposite father's study. Don't remember much about it myself." The sparkle of wit in this brief notice of the circumstances of her birth is very characteristic. All through her life little ripples of fun were continually playing on the surface of that current of intense thought and feeling in which her deep, earnest nature flowed. When she was ten years of age her father removed to Litchfield, Conn., and her happy girlhood was passed in that place. Her bright and versatile mind and ready wit enabled her to pass brilliantly through her school days with but little mental exertion, and those who knew her slightly might have imagined her to be only a bright, thoughtless, light-hearted girl. In Boston, at the age of twenty, she took lessons in music and drawing, and became so proficient in these branches as to secure a position as teacher in a young ladies' school, kept by a Rev. Mr. Judd, an Episcopal clergyman, at New London, Conn. About this time she formed the acquaintance of Professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher, of Yale College, one of the most distinguished young men in New England. In January of the year 1822 they became engaged, and the following spring Professor Fisher sailed for Europe to purchase books and scientific apparatus for the use of his department in the college. In his last letter to Miss Beecher, dated March 31, 1822, he writes:-- "I set out at 10 precisely to-morrow, in the Albion for Liverpool; the ship has no superior in the whole number of excellent vessels belonging to this port, and Captain Williams is regarded as first on their list of commanders. The accommodations are admirable--fare $140. Unless our ship should speak some one bound to America on the passage, you will probably not hear from me under two months." Before two months had passed came vague rumors of a terrible shipwreck on the coast of Ireland. Then the tidings that the Albion was lost. Then came a letter from Mr. Pond, at Kinsale, Ireland, dated May 2, 1822:-- "You have doubtless heard of the shipwreck of the Albion packet of New York, bound to Liverpool. It was a melancholy shipwreck. It happened about four o'clock on the morning of the 22d of April. Professor Fisher, of Yale College, was one of the passengers. Out of twenty-three cabin passengers, but one reached the shore. He is a Mr. Everhart, of Chester County, Pennsylvania. He informs me that Professor Fisher was injured by things that fetched away in the cabin at the time the ship was knocked down. This was between 8 and 9 o'clock in the evening of the twenty-first. Mr. Fisher, though badly bruised, was calm and resolute, and assisted Captain Williams by taking the injured compass to his berth and repairing it. About five minutes before the vessel struck Captain Williams informed the passengers of their danger, and all went on deck except Professor Fisher, who remained sitting in his berth. Mr. Everhart was the last person who left the cabin, and the last who ever saw Professor Fisher alive." I should not have spoken of this incident of family history with such minuteness, except for the fact that it is so much a part of Mrs. Stowe's life as to make it impossible to understand either her character or her most important works without it. Without this incident "The Minister's Wooing" never would have been written, for both Mrs. Marvyn's terrible soul struggles and old Candace's direct and effective solution of all religious difficulties find their origin in this stranded, storm-beaten ship on the coast of Ireland, and the terrible mental conflicts through which her sister afterward passed, for she believed Professor Fisher eternally lost. No mind more directly and powerfully influenced Harriet's than that of her sister Catherine, unless it was her brother Edward's, and that which acted with such overwhelming power on the strong, unyielding mind of the older sister must have, in time, a permanent and abiding influence on the mind of the younger. After Professor Fisher's death his books came into Miss Beecher's possession, and among them was a complete edition of Scott's works. It was an epoch in the family history when Doctor Beecher came down-stairs one day with a copy of "Ivanhoe" in his hand, and said: "I have always said that my children should not read novels, but they must read these." The two years following the death of Professor Fisher were passed by Miss Catherine Beecher at Franklin, Mass., at the home of Professor Fisher's parents, where she taught his two sisters, studied mathematics with his brother Willard, and listened to Doctor Emmons' fearless and pitiless preaching. Hers was a mind too strong and buoyant to be crushed and prostrated by that which would have driven a weaker and less resolute nature into insanity. Of her it may well be said:-- "She faced the spectres of the mind And laid them, thus she came at length To find a stronger faith her own." Gifted naturally with a capacity for close metaphysical analysis and a robust fearlessness in following her premises to a logical conclusion, she arrived at results startling and original, if not always of permanent value. In 1840 she published in the "Biblical Repository" an article on Free Agency, which has been acknowledged by competent critics as the ablest refutation of Edwards on "The Will" which has appeared. An amusing incident connected with this publication may not be out of place here. A certain eminent theological professor of New England, visiting a distinguished German theologian and speaking of this production, said: "The ablest refutation of Edwards on 'The Will' which was ever written is the work of a woman, the daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher." The worthy Teuton raised both hands in undisguised astonishment. "You have a woman that can write an able refutation of Edwards on 'The Will'? God forgive Christopher Columbus for discovering America!" Not finding herself able to love a God whom she thought of in her own language as "a perfectly happy being, unmoved by my sorrows or tears, and looking upon me only with dislike and aversion," she determined "to find happiness in living to do good." "It was right to pray and read the Bible, so I prayed and read. It was right to try to save others, so I labored for their salvation. I never had any fear of punishment or hope of reward all these years." She was tormented with doubts. "What has the Son of God done which the meanest and most selfish creature upon earth would not have done? After making such a wretched race and placing them in such disastrous circumstances, somehow, without any sorrow or trouble, Jesus Christ had a human nature that suffered and died. If something else besides ourselves will do all the suffering, who would not save millions of wretched beings and receive all the honor and gratitude without any of the trouble? Sometimes when such thoughts passed through my mind, I felt that it was all pride, rebellion, and sin." So she struggles on, sometimes floundering deep in the mire of doubt, and then lifted for the moment above it by her naturally buoyant spirits, and general tendency to look on the bright side of things. In this condition of mind, she came to Hartford in the winter of 1824, and began a school with eight scholars, and it was in the practical experience of teaching that she found a final solution of all her difficulties. She continues:-- "After two or three years I commenced giving instruction in mental philosophy, and at the same time began a regular course of lectures and instructions from the Bible, and was much occupied with plans for governing my school, and in devising means to lead my pupils to become obedient, amiable, and pious. By degrees I finally arrived at the following principles in the government of my school:-- "First. It is indispensable that my scholars should feel that I am sincerely and deeply interested in their best happiness, and the more I can convince them of this, the more ready will be their obedience. "Second. The preservation of authority and order depends upon the certainty that unpleasant consequences to themselves will inevitably be the result of doing wrong. "Third. It is equally necessary, to preserve my own influence and their affection, that they should feel that punishment is the natural result of wrong-doing in such a way that they shall regard themselves, instead of me, as the cause of their punishment. "Fourth. It is indispensable that my scholars should see that my requisitions are reasonable. In the majority of cases this can be shown, and in this way such confidence will be the result that they will trust to my judgment and knowledge, in cases where no explanation can be given. "Fifth. The more I can make my scholars feel that I am actuated by a spirit of self-denying benevolence, the more confidence they will feel in me, and the more they will be inclined to submit to self-denying duties for the good of others. "After a while I began to compare my experience with the government of God. I finally got through the whole subject, and drew out the results, and found that all my difficulties were solved and all my darkness dispelled." Her solution in brief is nothing more than that view of the divine nature which was for so many years preached by her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and set forth in the writings of her sister Harriet,--the conception of a being of infinite love, patience, and kindness who suffers with man. The sufferings of Christ on the cross were not the sufferings of his human nature merely, but the sufferings of the divine nature in Him. In Christ we see the only revelation of God, and that is the revelation of one that suffers. This is the fundamental idea in "The Minister's Wooing," and it is the idea of God in which the storm-tossed soul of the older sister at last found rest. All this was directly opposed to that fundamental principle of theologians that God, being the infinitely perfect Being, cannot suffer, because suffering indicates imperfection. To Miss Beecher's mind the lack of ability to suffer with his suffering creatures was a more serious imperfection. Let the reader turn to the twenty-fourth chapter of "The Minister's Wooing" for a complete presentation of this subject, especially the passage that begins, "Sorrow is divine: sorrow is reigning on the throne of the universe." In the fall of the year 1824, while her sister Catherine was passing through the soul crisis which we have been describing, Harriet came to the school that she had recently established. In a letter to her son written in 1886, speaking of this period of her life, Mrs. Stowe says: "Somewhere between my twelfth and thirteenth year I was placed under the care of my elder sister Catherine, in the school that she had just started in Hartford, Connecticut. When I entered the school there were not more than twenty-five scholars in it, but it afterwards numbered its pupils by the hundreds. The school-room was on Main Street, nearly opposite Christ Church, over Sheldon & Colton's harness store, at the sign of the two white horses. I never shall forget the pleasure and surprise which these two white horses produced in my mind when I first saw them. One of the young men who worked in the rear of the harness store had a most beautiful tenor voice, and it was my delight to hear him singing in school hours:-- [Illustration: Catherine E. Beecher] 'When in cold oblivion's shade Beauty, wealth, and power are laid, When, around the sculptured shrine, Moss shall cling and ivy twine, Where immortal spirits reign, There shall we all meet again.' "As my father's salary was inadequate to the wants of his large family, the expense of my board in Hartford was provided for by a species of exchange. Mr. Isaac D. Bull sent a daughter to Miss Pierce's seminary in Litchfield, and she boarded in my father's family in exchange for my board in her father's family. If my good, refined, neat, particular stepmother could have chosen, she could not have found a family more exactly suited to her desires. The very soul of neatness and order pervaded the whole establishment. Mr. I. D. Bull was a fine, vigorous, white-haired man on the declining slope of life, but full of energy and of kindness. Mr. Samuel Collins, a neighbor who lived next door, used to frequently come in and make most impressive and solemn calls on Miss Mary Anne Bull, who was a brunette and a celebrated beauty of the day. I well remember her long raven curls falling from the comb that held them up on the top of her head. She had a rich soprano voice, and was the leading singer in the Centre Church choir. The two brothers also had fine, manly voices, and the family circle was often enlivened by quartette singing and flute playing. Mr. Bull kept a very large wholesale drug store on Front Street, in which his two sons, Albert and James, were clerks. The oldest son, Watson Bull, had established a retail drug store at the sign of the 'Good Samaritan.' A large picture of the Good Samaritan relieving the wounded traveler formed a striking part of the sign, and was contemplated by me with reverence. "The mother of the family gave me at once a child's place in her heart. A neat little hall chamber was allotted to me for my own, and a well made and kept single bed was given me, of which I took daily care with awful satisfaction. If I was sick nothing could exceed the watchful care and tender nursing of Mrs. Bull. In school my two most intimate friends were the leading scholars. They had written to me before I came and I had answered their letters, and on my arrival they gave me the warmest welcome. One was Catherine Ledyard Cogswell, daughter of the leading and best-beloved of Hartford physicians. The other was Georgiana May, daughter of a most lovely Christian woman who was a widow. Georgiana was one of many children, having two younger sisters, Mary and Gertrude, and several brothers. Catherine Cogswell was one of the most amiable, sprightly, sunny-tempered individuals I have ever known. She was, in fact, so much beloved that it was difficult for me to see much of her. Her time was all bespoken by different girls. One might walk with her to school, another had the like promise on the way home. And at recess, of which we had every day a short half hour, there was always a suppliant at Katy's shrine, whom she found it hard to refuse. Yet, among all these claimants, she did keep a little place here and there for me. Georgiana was older and graver, and less fascinating to the other girls, but between her and me there grew up the warmest friendship, which proved lifelong in its constancy. "Catherine and Georgiana were reading 'Virgil' when I came to the school. I began the study of Latin alone, and at the end of the first year made a translation of 'Ovid' in verse, which was read at the final exhibition of the school, and regarded, I believe, as a very creditable performance. I was very much interested in poetry, and it was my dream to be a poet. I began a drama called 'Cleon.' The scene was laid in the court and time of the emperor Nero, and Cleon was a Greek lord residing at Nero's court, who, after much searching and doubting, at last comes to the knowledge of Christianity. I filled blank book after blank book with this drama. It filled my thoughts sleeping and waking. One day sister Catherine pounced down upon me, and said that I must not waste my time writing poetry, but discipline my mind by the study of Butler's 'Analogy.' So after this I wrote out abstracts from the 'Analogy,' and instructed a class of girls as old as myself, being compelled to master each chapter just ahead of the class I was teaching. About this time I read Baxter's 'Saint's Rest.' I do not think any book affected me more powerfully. As I walked the pavements I used to wish that they might sink beneath me if only I might find myself in heaven. I was at the same time very much interested in Butler's 'Analogy,' for Mr. Brace used to lecture on such themes when I was at Miss Pierce's school at Litchfield. I also began the study of French and Italian with a Miss Degan, who was born in Italy. "It was about this time that I first believed myself to be a Christian. I was spending my summer vacation at home, in Litchfield. I shall ever remember that dewy, fresh summer morning. I knew that it was a sacramental Sunday, and thought with sadness that when all the good people should take the sacrificial bread and wine I should be left out. I tried hard to feel my sins and count them up; but what with the birds, the daisies, and the brooks that rippled by the way, it was impossible. I came into church quite dissatisfied with myself, and as I looked upon the pure white cloth, the snowy bread and shining cups, of the communion table, thought with a sigh: 'There won't be anything for me to-day; it is all for these grown-up Christians.' Nevertheless, when father began to speak, I was drawn to listen by a certain pathetic earnestness in his voice. Most of father's sermons were as unintelligible to me as if he had spoken in Choctaw. But sometimes he preached what he was accustomed to call a 'frame sermon;' that is, a sermon that sprung out of the deep feeling of the occasion, and which consequently could be neither premeditated nor repeated. His text was taken from the Gospel of John, the declaration of Jesus: 'Behold, I call you no longer servants, but friends.' His theme was Jesus as a soul friend offered to every human being. "Forgetting all his hair-splitting distinctions and dialectic subtleties, he spoke in direct, simple, and tender language of the great love of Christ and his care for the soul. He pictured Him as patient with our errors, compassionate with our weaknesses, and sympathetic for our sorrows. He went on to say how He was ever near us, enlightening our ignorance, guiding our wanderings, comforting our sorrows with a love unwearied by faults, unchilled by ingratitude, till at last He should present us faultless before the throne of his glory with exceeding joy. "I sat intent and absorbed. Oh! how much I needed just such a friend, I thought to myself. Then the awful fact came over me that I had never had any conviction of my sins, and consequently could not come to Him. I longed to cry out 'I will,' when father made his passionate appeal, 'Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful friend.' Like a flash it came over me that if I needed conviction of sin, He was able to give me even this also. I would trust Him for the whole. My whole soul was illumined with joy, and as I left the church to walk home, it seemed to me as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of heaven. "As soon as father came home and was seated in his study, I went up to him and fell in his arms saying, 'Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and He has taken me.' I never shall forget the expression of his face as he looked down into my earnest, childish eyes; it was so sweet, so gentle, and like sunlight breaking out upon a landscape. 'Is it so?' he said, holding me silently to his heart, as I felt the hot tears fall on my head. 'Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day.'" If she could have been let alone, and taught "to look up and not down, forward and not back, out and not in," this religious experience might have gone on as sweetly and naturally as the opening of a flower in the gentle rays of the sun. But unfortunately this was not possible at that time, when self-examination was carried to an extreme that was calculated to drive a nervous and sensitive mind well-nigh distracted. First, even her sister Catherine was afraid that there might be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into the fold without being first chased all over the lot by the shepherd; great stress being laid, in those days, on what was called "being under conviction." Then also the pastor of the First Church in Hartford, a bosom friend of Dr. Beecher, looked with melancholy and suspicious eyes on this unusual and doubtful path to heaven,--but more of this hereafter. Harriet's conversion took place in the summer of 1825, when she was fourteen, and the following year, April, 1826, Dr. Beecher resigned his pastorate in Litchfield to accept a call to the Hanover Street Church, Boston, Mass. In a letter to her grandmother Foote at Guilford, dated Hartford, March 4, 1826, Harriet writes:-- "You have probably heard that our home in Litchfield is broken up. Papa has received a call to Boston, and concluded to accept, because he could not support his family in Litchfield. He was dismissed last week Tuesday, and will be here (Hartford) next Tuesday with mamma and Isabel. Aunt Esther will take Charles and Thomas to her house for the present. Papa's salary is to be $2,000 and $500 settlement. "I attend school constantly and am making some progress in my studies. I devote most of my attention to Latin and to arithmetic, and hope soon to prepare myself to assist Catherine in the school." This breaking up of the Litchfield home led Harriet, under her father's advice, to seek to connect herself with the First Church of Hartford. Accordingly, accompanied by two of her school friends, she went one day to the pastor's study to consult with him concerning the contemplated step. The good man listened attentively to the child's simple and modest statement of Christian experience, and then with an awful, though kindly, solemnity of speech and manner said, "Harriet, do you feel that if the universe should be destroyed (awful pause) you could be happy with God alone?" After struggling in vain, in her mental bewilderment, to fix in her mind some definite conception of the meaning of the sounds which fell on her ear like the measured strokes of a bell, the child of fourteen stammered out, "Yes, sir." "You realize, I trust," continued the doctor, "in some measure at least, the deceitfulness of your heart, and that in punishment for your sins God might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as you have made yourself sinful?" "Yes, sir," again stammered Harriet. Having thus effectually, and to his own satisfaction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the good and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her with a fatherly benediction. But where was the joyous ecstasy of that beautiful Sabbath morning of a year ago? Where was that heavenly friend? Yet was not this as it should be, and might not God leave her "to make herself as miserable as she had made herself sinful"? In a letter addressed to her brother Edward, about this time, she writes: "My whole life is one continued struggle: I do nothing right. I yield to temptation almost as soon as it assails me. My deepest feelings are very evanescent. I am beset behind and before, and my sins take away all my happiness. But that which most constantly besets me is pride--I can trace almost all my sins back to it." In the mean time, the school is prospering. February 16, 1827, Catherine writes to Dr. Beecher: "My affairs go on well. The stock is all taken up, and next week I hope to have out the prospectus of the 'Hartford Female Seminary.' I hope the building will be done, and all things in order, by June. The English lady is coming with twelve pupils from New York." Speaking of Harriet, who was at this time with her father in Boston, she adds: "I have received some letters from Harriet to-day which make me feel uneasy. She says, 'I don't know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought that I could wish to die young, and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave, rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to every one. You don't know how perfectly wretched I often feel: so useless, so weak, so destitute of all energy. Mamma often tells me that I am a strange, inconsistent being. Sometimes I could not sleep, and have groaned and cried till midnight, while in the daytime I tried to appear cheerful and succeeded so well that papa reproved me for laughing so much. I was so absent sometimes that I made strange mistakes, and then they all laughed at me, and I laughed, too, though I felt as though I should go distracted. I wrote rules; made out a regular system for dividing my time; but my feelings vary so much that it is almost impossible for me to be regular.'" But let Harriet "take courage in her dark sorrows and melancholies," as Carlyle says: "Samuel Johnson too had hypochondrias; all great souls are apt to have, and to be in thick darkness generally till the eternal ways and the celestial guiding stars disclose themselves, and the vague abyss of life knits itself up into firmaments for them." At the same time (the winter of 1827), Catherine writes to Edward concerning Harriet: "If she could come here (Hartford) it might be the best thing for her, for she can talk freely to me. I can get her books, and Catherine Cogswell, Georgiana May, and her friends here could do more for her than any one in Boston, for they love her and she loves them very much. Georgiana's difficulties are different from Harriet's: she is speculating about doctrines, etc. Harriet will have young society here all the time, which she cannot have at home, and I think cheerful and amusing friends will do much for her. I can do better in preparing her to teach drawing than any one else, for I best know what is needed." It was evidently necessary that something should be done to restore Harriet to a more tranquil and healthful frame of mind; consequently in the spring of 1827, accompanied by her friend Georgiana May, she went to visit her grandmother Foote at Nut Plains, Guilford. Miss May refers to this visit in a letter to Mrs. Foote, in January of the following winter. HARTFORD, _January 4, 1828._ DEAR MRS. FOOTE:--... I very often think of you and the happy hours I passed at your house last spring. It seems as if it were but yesterday: now, while I am writing, I can see your pleasant house and the familiar objects around you as distinctly as the day I left them. Harriet and I are very much the same girls we were then. I do not believe we have altered very much, though she is improved in some respects. The August following this visit to Guilford Harriet writes to her brother Edward in a vein which is still streaked with sadness, but shows some indication of returning health of mind. "Many of my objections you did remove that afternoon we spent together. After that I was not as unhappy as I had been. I felt, nevertheless, that my views were very indistinct and contradictory, and feared that if you left me thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I had been all summer. I felt that my immortal interest, my happiness for both worlds, was depending on the turn my feelings might take. In my disappointment and distress I called upon God, and it seemed as if I was heard. I felt that He could supply the loss of all earthly love. All misery and darkness were over. I felt as if restored, nevermore to fall. Such sober certainty of waking bliss had long been a stranger to me. But even then I had doubts as to whether these feelings were right, because I felt love to God alone without that ardent love for my fellow-creatures which Christians have often felt.... I cannot say exactly what it is makes me reluctant to speak of my feelings. It costs me an effort to express feeling of any kind, but more particularly to speak of my private religious feelings. If any one questions me, my first impulse is to conceal all I can. As for expression of affection towards my brothers and sisters, my companions or friends, the stronger the affection the less inclination have I to express it. Yet sometimes I think myself the most frank, open, and communicative of beings, and at other times the most reserved. If you can resolve all these caprices into general principles, you will do more than I can. Your speaking so much philosophically has a tendency to repress confidence. We never wish to have our feelings analyzed down; and very little, nothing, that we say brought to the test of mathematical demonstration. "It appears to me that if I only could adopt the views of God you presented to my mind, they would exert a strong and beneficial influence over my character. But I am afraid to accept them for several reasons. First, it seems to be taking from the majesty and dignity of the divine character to suppose that his happiness can be at all affected by the conduct of his sinful, erring creatures. Secondly, it seems to me that such views of God would have an effect on our own minds in lessening that reverence and fear which is one of the greatest motives to us for action. For, although to a generous mind the thought of the love of God would be a sufficient incentive to action, there are times of coldness when that love is not felt, and then there remains no sort of stimulus. I find as I adopt these sentiments I feel less fear of God, and, in view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief which is more easily dispelled and forgotten than that I formerly felt." A letter dated January 3, 1828, shows us that Harriet had returned to Hartford and was preparing herself to teach drawing and painting, under the direction of her sister Catherine. MY DEAR GRANDMOTHER,--I should have written before to assure you of my remembrance of you, but I have been constantly employed, from nine in the morning till after dark at night, in taking lessons of a painting and drawing master, with only an intermission long enough to swallow a little dinner which was sent to me in the school-room. You may easily believe that after spending the day in this manner, I did not feel in a very epistolary humor in the evening, and if I had been, I could not have written, for when I did not go immediately to bed I was obliged to get a long French lesson. The seminary is finished, and the school going on nicely. Miss Clarissa Brown is assisting Catherine in the school. Besides her, Catherine, and myself, there are two other teachers who both board in the family with us: one is Miss Degan, an Italian lady who teaches French and Italian; she rooms with me, and is very interesting and agreeable. Miss Hawks is rooming with Catherine. In some respects she reminds me very much of my mother. She is gentle, affectionate, modest, and retiring, and much beloved by all the scholars.... I am still going on with my French, and carrying two young ladies through Virgil, and if I have time, shall commence Italian. I am very comfortable and happy. I propose, my dear grandmamma, to send you by the first opportunity a dish of fruit of my own painting. Pray do not now devour it in anticipation, for I cannot promise that you will not find it sadly tasteless in reality. If so, please excuse it, for the sake of the poor young artist. I admire to cultivate a taste for painting, and I wish to improve it; it was what my dear mother admired and loved, and I cherish it for her sake. I have thought more of this dearest of all earthly friends these late years, since I have been old enough to know her character and appreciate her worth. I sometimes think that, had she lived, I might have been both better and happier than I now am, but God is good and wise in all his ways. A letter written to her brother Edward in Boston, dated March 27, 1828, shows how slowly she adopted the view of God that finally became one of the most characteristic elements in her writings. "I think that those views of God which you have presented to me have had an influence in restoring my mind to its natural tone. But still, after all, God is a being afar off. He is so far above us that anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that the heart needs. But easy and familiar expressions of attachment and that sort of confidential communication which I should address to papa or you would be improper for a subject to address to a king, much less for us to address to the King of kings. The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiæ of our wants and troubles in it. I wish I could describe to you how I feel when I pray. I feel that I love God,--that is, that I love Christ,--that I find comfort and happiness in it, and yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties.... Do you think, my dear brother, that there is such a thing as so realizing the presence and character of God that He can supply the place of earthly friends? I really wish to know what you think of this.... Do you suppose that God really loves sinners before they come to Him? Some say that we ought to tell them that God hates them, that He looks on them with utter abhorrence, and that they must love Him before He will look on them otherwise. Is it right to say to those who are in deep distress, 'God is interested in you; He feels for and loves you'?" Appended to this letter is a short note from Miss Catherine Beecher, who evidently read the letter over and answered Harriet's questions herself. She writes: "When the young man came to Jesus, is it not said that Jesus loved him, though he was unrenewed?" In April, 1828, Harriet again writes to her brother Edward:-- "I have had more reason to be grateful to that friend than ever before. He has not left me in all my weakness. It seems to me that my love to Him is the love of despair. All my communion with Him, though sorrowful, is soothing. I am painfully sensible of ignorance and deficiency, but still I feel that I am willing that He should know all. He will look on all that is wrong only to purify and reform. He will never be irritated or impatient. He will never show me my faults in such a manner as to irritate without helping me. A friend to whom I would acknowledge all my faults must be perfect. Let any one once be provoked, once speak harshly to me, once sweep all the chords of my soul out of tune, I never could confide there again. It is only to the most perfect Being in the universe that imperfection can look and hope for patience. How strange!... You do not know how harsh and forbidding everything seems, compared with his character. All through the day in my intercourse with others, everything has a tendency to destroy the calmness of mind gained by communion with Him. One flatters me, another is angry with me, another is unjust to me. "You speak of your predilections for literature having been a snare to you. I have found it so myself. I can scarcely think, without tears and indignation, that all that is beautiful and lovely and poetical has been laid on other altars. Oh! will there never be a poet with a heart enlarged and purified by the Holy Spirit, who shall throw all the graces of harmony, all the enchantments of feeling, pathos, and poetry, around sentiments worthy of them?... It matters little what service He has for me.... I do not mean to live in vain. He has given me talents, and I will lay them at his feet, well satisfied, if He will accept them. All my powers He can enlarge. He made my mind, and He can teach me to cultivate and exert its faculties." The following November she writes from Groton, Conn., to Miss May:-- "I am in such an uncertain, unsettled state, traveling back and forth, that I have very little time to write. In the first place, on my arrival in Boston I was obliged to spend two days in talking and telling news. Then after that came calling, visiting, etc., and then I came off to Groton to see my poor brother George, who was quite out of spirits and in very trying circumstances. To-morrow I return to Boston and spend four or five days, and then go to Franklin, where I spend the rest of my vacation. "I found the folks all well on my coming to Boston, and as to my new brother, James, he has nothing to distinguish him from forty other babies, except a very large pair of blue eyes and an uncommonly fair complexion, a thing which is of no sort of use or advantage to a man or boy. "I am thinking very seriously of remaining in Groton and taking care of the female school, and at the same time being of assistance and company for George. On some accounts it would not be so pleasant as returning to Hartford, for I should be among strangers. Nothing upon this point can be definitely decided till I have returned to Boston, and talked to papa and Catherine." Evidently papa and Catherine did not approve of the Groton plan, for in February of the following winter Harriet writes from Hartford to Edward, who is at this time with his father in Boston:-- "My situation this winter (1829) is in many respects pleasant. I room with three other teachers, Miss Fisher, Miss Mary Dutton, and Miss Brigham. Ann Fisher you know. Miss Dutton is about twenty, has a fine mathematical mind, and has gone as far into that science perhaps as most students at college. She is also, as I am told, quite learned in the languages.... Miss Brigham is somewhat older: is possessed of a fine mind and most unconquerable energy and perseverance of character. From early childhood she has been determined to obtain an education, and to attain to a certain standard. Where persons are determined to be anything, they will be. I think, for this reason, she will make a first-rate character. Such are my companions. We spend our time in school during the day, and in studying in the evening. My plan of study is to read rhetoric and prepare exercises for my class the first half hour in the evening; after that the rest of the evening is divided between French and Italian. Thus you see the plan of my employment and the character of my immediate companions. Besides these, there are others among the teachers and scholars who must exert an influence over my character. Miss Degan, whose constant occupation it is to make others laugh; Mrs. Gamage, her room-mate, a steady, devoted, sincere Christian.... Little things have great power over me, and if I meet with the least thing that crosses my feelings, I am often rendered unhappy for days and weeks.... I wish I could bring myself to feel perfectly indifferent to the opinions of others. I believe that there never was a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of those around than I am. This desire to be loved forms, I fear, the great motive for all my actions.... I have been reading carefully the book of Job, and I do not think that it contains the views of God which you presented to me. God seems to have stripped a dependent creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered his complaints from the whirlwind; and instead of showing mercy and pity, to have overwhelmed him by a display of his power and justice.... With the view I received from you, I should have expected that a being who sympathizes with his guilty, afflicted creatures would not have spoken thus. Yet, after all, I do believe that God is such a being as you represent Him to be, and in the New Testament I find in the character of Jesus Christ a revelation of God as merciful and compassionate; in fact, just such a God as I need. "Somehow or another you have such a reasonable sort of way of saying things that when I come to reflect I almost always go over to your side.... My mind is often perplexed, and such thoughts arise in it that I cannot pray, and I become bewildered. The wonder to me is, how all ministers and all Christians can feel themselves so inexcusably sinful, when it seems to me we all come into the world in such a way that it would be miraculous if we did not sin. Mr. Hawes always says in prayer, 'We have nothing to offer in extenuation of any of our sins,' and I always think when he says it, that we have everything to offer in extenuation. The case seems to me exactly as if I had been brought into the world with such a thirst for ardent spirits that there was just a possibility, though no hope, that I should resist, and then my eternal happiness made dependent on my being temperate. Sometimes when I try to confess my sins, I feel that after all I am more to be pitied than blamed, for I have never known the time when I have not had a temptation within me so strong that it was certain I should not overcome it. This thought shocks me, but it comes with such force, and so appealingly, to all my consciousness, that it stifles all sense of sin.... "Sometimes when I read the Bible, it seems to be wholly grounded on the idea that the sin of man is astonishing, inexcusable, and without palliation or cause, and the atonement is spoken of as such a wonderful and undeserved mercy that I am filled with amazement. Yet if I give up the Bible I gain nothing, for the providence of God in nature is just as full of mystery, and of the two I think that the Bible, with all its difficulties, is preferable to being without it; for the Bible holds out the hope that in a future world all shall be made plain.... So you see I am, as Mr. Hawes says, 'on the waves,' and all I can do is to take the word of God that He does do right and there I rest." The following summer, in July, she writes to Edward: "I have never been so happy as this summer. I began it in more suffering than I ever before have felt, but there is One whom I daily thank for all that suffering, since I hope that it has brought me at last to rest entirely in Him. I do hope that my long, long course of wandering and darkness and unhappiness is over, and that I have found in Him who died for me all, and more than all, I could desire. Oh, Edward, you can feel as I do; you can speak of Him! There are few, very few, who can. Christians in general do not seem to look to Him as their best friend, or realize anything of his unutterable love. They speak with a cold, vague, reverential awe, but do not speak as if in the habit of close and near communion; as if they confided to Him every joy and sorrow and constantly looked to Him for direction and guidance. I cannot express to you, my brother, I cannot tell you, how that Saviour appears to me. To bear with one so imperfect, so weak, so inconsistent, as myself, implied, long-suffering and patience more than words can express. I love most to look on Christ as my teacher, as one who, knowing the utmost of my sinfulness, my waywardness, my folly, can still have patience; can reform, purify, and daily make me more like himself." So, after four years of struggling and suffering, she returns to the place where she started from as a child of thirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts and storm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, and coming at last to quiet anchorage. There have been, of course, times of darkness and depression, but never any permanent loss of the religious trustfulness and peace of mind indicated by this letter. The next three years were passed partly in Boston, and partly in Guilford and Hartford. Writing of this period of her life to the Rev. Charles Beecher, she says:-- MY DEAR BROTHER,--The looking over of father's letters in the period of his Boston life brings forcibly to my mind many recollections. At this time I was more with him, and associated in companionship of thought and feeling for a longer period than any other of my experience. In the summer of 1832 she writes to Miss May, revealing her spiritual and intellectual life in a degree unusual, even for her. "After the disquisition on myself above cited, you will be prepared to understand the changes through which this wonderful _ego et me ipse_ has passed. "The amount of the matter has been, as this inner world of mine has become worn out and untenable, I have at last concluded to come out of it and live in the external one, and, as F---- S---- once advised me, to give up the pernicious habit of meditation to the first Methodist minister that would take it, and try to mix in society somewhat as another person would. "'_Horas non numero nisi serenas._' Uncle Samuel, who sits by me, has just been reading the above motto, the inscription on a sun-dial in Venice. It strikes me as having a distant relationship to what I was going to say. I have come to a firm resolution to count no hours but unclouded ones, and to let all others slip out of my memory and reckoning as quickly as possible.... "I am trying to cultivate a general spirit of kindliness towards everybody. Instead of shrinking into a corner to notice how other people behave, I am holding out my hand to the right and to the left, and forming casual or incidental acquaintances with all who will be acquainted with me. In this way I find society full of interest and pleasure--a pleasure which pleaseth me more because it is not old and worn out. From these friendships I expect little; therefore generally receive more than I expect. From past friendships I have expected everything, and must of necessity have been disappointed. The kind words and looks and smiles I call forth by looking and smiling are not much by themselves, but they form a very pretty flower border to the way of life. They embellish the day or the hour as it passes, and when they fade they only do just as you expected they would. This kind of pleasure in acquaintanceship is new to me. I never tried it before. When I used to meet persons, the first inquiry was, 'Have they such and such a character, or have they anything that might possibly be of use or harm to me?'" It is striking, the degree of interest a letter had for her. "Your long letter came this morning. It revived much in my heart. Just think how glad I must have been this morning to hear from you. I was glad.... I thought of it through all the vexations of school this morning.... I have a letter at home; and when I came home from school, I went leisurely over it. "This evening I have spent in a little social party,--a dozen or so,--and I have been zealously talking all the evening. When I came to my cold, lonely room, there was your letter lying on the dressing-table. It touched me with a sort of painful pleasure, for it seems to me uncertain, improbable, that I shall ever return and find you as I have found your letter. Oh, my dear G----, it is scarcely well to love friends thus. The greater part that I see cannot move me deeply. They are present, and I enjoy them; they pass and I forget them. But those that I love differently; those that I LOVE; and oh, how much that word means! I feel sadly about them. They may change; they must die; they are separated from me, and I ask myself why should I wish to love with all the pains and penalties of such conditions? I check myself when expressing feelings like this, so much has been said of it by the sentimental, who talk what they could not have felt. But it is so deeply, sincerely so in me, that sometimes it will overflow. Well, there is a heaven,--a heaven,--a world of love, and love after all is the life-blood, the existence, the all in all of mind." This is the key to her whole life. She was impelled by love, and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love. Never could "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "The Minister's Wooing" have been written, unless by one to whom love was the "life-blood of existence, the all in all of mind." Years afterwards Mrs. Browning was to express this same thought in the language of poetry. "But when a soul by choice and conscience doth Throw out her full force on another soul, The conscience and the concentration both Make mere life love. For life in perfect whole And aim consummated is love in sooth, As nature's magnet heat rounds pole with pole." CHAPTER III CINCINNATI, 1832-1836. DR. BEECHER CALLED TO CINCINNATI.--THE WESTWARD JOURNEY.--FIRST LETTER FROM HOME.--DESCRIPTION OF WALNUT HILLS.--STARTING A NEW SCHOOL.--INWARD GLIMPSES.--THE SEMI-COLON CLUB.--EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF SLAVERY.--A JOURNEY TO THE EAST.--THOUGHTS AROUSED BY FIRST VISIT TO NIAGARA.--MARRIAGE TO PROFESSOR STOWE. IN 1832, after having been settled for six years over the Hanover Street Church in Boston, Dr. Beecher received and finally accepted a most urgent call to become President of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. This institution had been chartered in 1829, and in 1831 funds to the amount of nearly $70,000 had been promised to it provided that Dr. Beecher accepted the presidency. It was hard for this New England family to sever the ties of a lifetime and enter on so long a journey to the far distant West of those days; but being fully persuaded that their duty lay in this direction, they undertook to perform it cheerfully and willingly. With Dr. Beecher and his wife were to go Miss Catherine Beecher, who had conceived the scheme of founding in Cincinnati, then considered the capital of the West, a female college, and Harriet, who was to act as her principal assistant. In the party were also George, who was to enter Lane as a student, Isabella, James, the youngest son, and Miss Esther Beecher, the "Aunt Esther" of the children. Before making his final decision, Dr. Beecher, accompanied by his daughter Catherine, visited Cincinnati to take a general survey of their proposed battlefield, and their impressions of the city are given in the following letter written by the latter to Harriet in Boston:-- "Here we are at last at our journey's end, alive and well. We are staying with Uncle Samuel (Foote), whose establishment I will try and sketch for you. It is on a height in the upper part of the city, and commands a fine view of the whole of the lower town. The city does not impress me as being so very new. It is true everything looks neat and clean, but it is compact, and many of the houses are of brick and very handsomely built. The streets run at right angles to each other, and are wide and well paved. We reached here in three days from Wheeling, and soon felt ourselves at home. The next day father and I, with three gentlemen, walked out to Walnut Hills. The country around the city consists of a constant succession and variety of hills of all shapes and sizes, forming an extensive amphitheatre. The site of the seminary is very beautiful and picturesque, though I was disappointed to find that both river and city are hidden by intervening hills. I never saw a place so capable of being rendered a paradise by the improvements of taste as the environs of this city. Walnut Hills are so elevated and cool that people have to leave there to be sick, it is said. The seminary is located on a farm of one hundred and twenty-five acres of fine land, with groves of superb trees around it, about two miles from the city. We have finally decided on the spot where our house shall stand in case we decide to come, and you cannot (where running water or the seashore is wanting) find another more delightful spot for a residence. It is on an eminence, with a grove running up from the back to the very doors, another grove across the street in front, and fine openings through which distant hills and the richest landscapes appear. "I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have the most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from New England. The Second Church, which is the best in the city, will give father a unanimous call to be their minister, with the understanding that he will give them what time he can spare from the seminary. "I know of no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding everything that makes social and domestic life pleasant. Uncle John and Uncle Samuel are just the intelligent, sociable, free, and hospitable sort of folk that everybody likes and everybody feels at home with. "The folks are very anxious to have a school on our plan set on foot here. We can have fine rooms in the city college building, which is now unoccupied, and everybody is ready to lend a helping hand. As to father, I never saw such a field of usefulness and influence as is offered to him here." This, then, was the field of labor in which the next eighteen years of the life of Mrs. Stowe were to be passed. At this time her sister Mary was married and living in Hartford, her brothers Henry Ward and Charles were in college, while William and Edward, already licensed to preach, were preparing to follow their father to the West. [Illustration: THE HOME AT WALNUT HILLS, CINCINNATI.] Mr. Beecher's preliminary journey to Cincinnati was undertaken in the early spring of 1832, but he was not ready to remove his family until October of that year. An interesting account of this westward journey is given by Mrs. Stowe in a letter sent back to Hartford from Cincinnati, as follows:-- "Well, my dear, the great sheet is out and the letter is begun. All our family are here (in New York), and in good health. "Father is to perform to-night in the Chatham Theatre! 'positively for the _last_ time this season!' I don't know, I'm sure, as we shall ever get to Pittsburgh. Father is staying here begging money for the Biblical Literature professorship; the incumbent is to be C. Stowe. Last night we had a call from Arthur Tappan and Mr. Eastman. Father begged $2,000 yesterday, and now the good people are praying him to abide certain days, as he succeeds so well. They are talking of sending us off and keeping him here. I really dare not go and see Aunt Esther and mother now; they were in the depths of tribulation before at staying so long, and now, 'In the lowest depths, _another_ deep!' Father is in high spirits. He is all in his own element,--dipping into books; consulting authorities for his oration; going round here, there, everywhere; begging, borrowing, and spoiling the Egyptians; delighted with past success and confident for the future. "Wednesday. Still in New York. I believe it would kill me dead to live long in the way I have been doing since I have been here. It is a sort of agreeable delirium. There's only one thing about it, it is too _scattering_. I begin to be athirst for the waters of quietness." Writing from Philadelphia, she adds:-- "Well, we did get away from New York at last, but it was through much tribulation. The truckman carried all the family baggage to the wrong wharf, and, after waiting and waiting on board the boat, we were obliged to start without it, George remaining to look it up. Arrived here late Saturday evening,--dull, drizzling weather; poor Aunt Esther in dismay,--not a clean cap to put on,--mother in like state; all of us destitute. We went, half to Dr. Skinner's and half to Mrs. Elmes's: mother, Aunt Esther, father, and James to the former; Kate, Bella, and myself to Mr. Elmes's. They are rich, hospitable folks, and act the part of Gaius in apostolic times.... Our trunks came this morning. Father stood and saw them all brought into Dr. Skinner's entry, and then he swung his hat and gave a 'hurrah,' as any man would whose wife had not had a clean cap or ruffle for a week. Father does not succeed very well in opening purses here. Mr. Eastman says, however, that this is not of much consequence. I saw to-day a notice in the 'Philadelphian' about father, setting forth how 'this distinguished brother, with his large family, having torn themselves from the endearing scenes of their home,' etc., etc., 'were going, like Jacob,' etc.,--a very scriptural and appropriate flourish. It is too much after the manner of men, or, as Paul says, speaking 'as a fool.' A number of the pious people of this city are coming here this evening to hold a prayer-meeting with reference to the journey and its object. For _this_ I thank them." From Downington she writes:-- "Here we all are,--Noah and his wife and his sons and his daughters, with the cattle and creeping things, all dropped down in the front parlor of this tavern, about thirty miles from Philadelphia. If to-day is a fair specimen of our journey, it will be a very pleasant, obliging driver, good roads, good spirits, good dinner, fine scenery, and now and then some 'psalms and hymns and spiritual songs;' for with George on board you may be sure of music of some kind. Moreover, George has provided himself with a quantity of tracts, and he and the children have kept up a regular discharge at all the wayfaring people we encountered. I tell him he is _peppering_ the land with moral influence. "We are all well; all in good spirits. Just let me give you a peep into our traveling household. Behold us, then, in the front parlor of this country inn, all as much at home as if we were in Boston. Father is sitting opposite to me at this table, reading; Kate is writing a billet-doux to Mary on a sheet like this; Thomas is opposite, writing in a little journal that he keeps; Sister Bell, too, has her little record; George is waiting for a seat that he may produce his paper and write. As for me, among the multitude of my present friends, my heart still makes occasional visits to absent ones,--visits full of pleasure, and full of cause of gratitude to Him who gives us friends. I have thought of you often to-day, my G. We stopped this noon at a substantial Pennsylvania tavern, and among the flowers in the garden was a late monthly honeysuckle like the one at North Guilford. I made a spring for it, but George secured the finest bunch, which he wore in his button-hole the rest of the noon. "This afternoon, as we were traveling, we struck up and sang 'Jubilee.' It put me in mind of the time when we used to ride along the rough North Guilford roads and make the air vocal as we went along. Pleasant times those. Those were blue skies, and that was a beautiful lake and noble pine-trees and rocks they were that hung over it. But those we shall look upon 'na mair.' "Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall not _love_ and _leave_. Those skies shall never cease to shine, the waters of life we shall _never_ be called upon _to leave_. We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come. In such thoughts as these I desire ever to rest, and with such words as these let us 'comfort one another and edify one another.'" "Harrisburg, Sunday evening. Mother, Aunt Esther, George, and the little folks have just gathered into Kate's room, and we have just been singing. Father has gone to preach for Mr. De Witt. To-morrow we expect to travel sixty-two miles, and in two more days shall reach Wheeling; there we shall take the steamboat to Cincinnati." On the same journey George Beecher writes:-- "We had poor horses in crossing the mountains. Our average rate for the last four days to Wheeling was forty-four miles. The journey, which takes the mail-stage forty-eight hours, took us eight days. At Wheeling we deliberated long whether to go on board a boat for Cincinnati, but the prevalence of the cholera there at last decided us to remain. While at Wheeling father preached eleven times,--nearly every evening,--and gave them the Taylorite heresy on sin and decrees to the highest notch; and what amused me most was to hear him establish it from the Confession of Faith. It went high and dry, however, above all objections, and they were delighted with it, even the old school men, since it had not been christened 'heresy' in their hearing. After remaining in Wheeling eight days, we chartered a stage for Cincinnati, and started next morning. "At Granville, Ohio, we were invited to stop and attend a protracted meeting. Being in no great hurry to enter Cincinnati till the cholera had left, we consented. We spent the remainder of the week there, and I preached five times and father four. The interest was increasingly deep and solemn each day, and when we left there were forty-five cases of conversion in the town, besides those from the surrounding towns. The people were astonished at the doctrine; said they never saw the truth so plain in their lives." Although the new-comers were cordially welcomed in Cincinnati, and everything possible was done for their comfort and to make them feel at home, they felt themselves to be strangers in a strange land. Their homesickness and yearnings for New England are set forth by the following extracts from Mrs. Stowe's answer to the first letter they received from Hartford after leaving there:-- MY DEAR SISTER (Mary),--The Hartford letter from all and sundry has just arrived, and after cutting all manner of capers expressive of thankfulness, I have skipped three stairs at a time up to the study to begin an answer. My notions of answering letters are according to the literal sense of the word; not waiting six months and then scrawling a lazy reply, but sitting down the moment you have read a letter, and telling, as Dr. Woods says, "How the subject strikes you." I wish I could be clear that the path of duty lay in talking to you this afternoon, but as I find a loud call to consider the heels of George's stockings, I must only write a word or two, and then resume my darning-needle. You don't know how anxiously we all have watched for some intelligence from Hartford. Not a day has passed when I have not been the efficient agent in getting somebody to the post-office, and every day my heart has sunk at the sound of "no letters." I felt a tremor quite sufficient for a lover when I saw your handwriting once more, so you see that in your old age you can excite quite as much emotion as did the admirable Miss Byron in her adoring Sir Charles. I hope the consideration and digestion of this fact will have its due weight in encouraging you to proceed. The fact of our having received said letter is as yet a state secret, not to be made known till all our family circle "in full assembly meet" at the tea-table. Then what an illumination! "How we shall be edified and fructified," as that old Methodist said. It seems too bad to keep it from mother and Aunt Esther a whole afternoon, but then I have the comfort of thinking that we are consulting for their greatest happiness "on the whole," which is metaphysical benevolence. So kind Mrs. Parsons stopped in the very midst of her pumpkin pies to think of us? Seems to me I can see her bright, cheerful face now! And then those well known handwritings! We _do_ love our Hartford friends dearly; there can be, I think, no controverting that fact. Kate says that the word _love_ is used in _six senses_, and I am sure in some one of them they will all come in. Well, good-by for the present. Evening. Having finished the last hole on George's black vest, I stick in my needle and sit down to be sociable. You don't know how coming away from New England has sentimentalized us all! Never was there such an abundance of meditation on our native land, on the joys of friendship, the pains of separation. Catherine had an alarming paroxysm in Philadelphia which expended itself in "The Emigrant's Farewell." After this was sent off she felt considerably relieved. My symptoms have been of a less acute kind, but, I fear, more enduring. There! the tea-bell rings. Too bad! I was just going to say something bright. Now to take your letter and run! How they will stare when I produce it! After tea. Well, we have had a fine time. When supper was about half over, Catherine began: "We have a dessert that we have been saving all the afternoon," and then I held up my letter. "See here, this is from Hartford!" I wish you could have seen Aunt Esther's eyes brighten, and mother's pale face all in a smile, and father, as I unfolded the letter and began. Mrs. Parsons's notice of her Thanksgiving predicament caused just a laugh, and then one or two sighs (I told you we were growing sentimental!). We did talk some of keeping it (Thanksgiving), but perhaps we should all have felt something of the text, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Your praises of Aunt Esther I read twice in an audible voice, as the children made some noise the first time. I think I detected a visible blush, though she found at that time a great deal to do in spreading bread and butter for James, and shuffling his plate; and, indeed, it was rather a vehement attack on her humility, since it gave her at least "angelic perfection," if not "Adamic" (to use Methodist technics). Jamie began his Sunday-school career yesterday. The superintendent asked him how old he was. "I'm four years old now, and when it _snows very hard_ I shall be five," he answered. I have just been trying to make him interpret his meaning; but he says, "Oh, I said so because I could not think of anything else to say." By the by, Mary, speaking of the temptations of cities, I have much solicitude on Jamie's account lest he should form improper intimacies, for yesterday or day before we saw him parading by the house with his arm over the neck of a great hog, apparently on the most amicable terms possible; and the other day he actually got upon the back of one, and rode some distance. So much for allowing these animals to promenade the streets, a particular in which Mrs. Cincinnati has imitated the domestic arrangements of some of her elder sisters, and a very disgusting one it is. Our family physician is one Dr. Drake, a man of a good deal of science, theory, and reputed skill, but a sort of general mark for the opposition of all the medical cloth of the city. He is a tall, rectangular, perpendicular sort of a body, as stiff as a poker, and enunciates his prescriptions very much as though he were delivering a discourse on the doctrine of election. The other evening he was detained from visiting Kate, and he sent a very polite, ceremonious note containing a prescription, with Dr. D.'s compliments to Miss Beecher, requesting that she would take the inclosed in a little molasses at nine o'clock precisely. The house we are at present inhabiting is the most inconvenient, ill-arranged, good-for-nothing, and altogether to be execrated affair that ever was put together. It was evidently built without a thought of a winter season. The kitchen is so disposed that it cannot be reached from any part of the house without going out into the air. Mother is actually obliged to put on a bonnet and cloak every time she goes into it. In the house are two parlors with folding doors between them. The back parlor has but one window, which opens on a veranda and has its lower half painted to keep out what little light there is. I need scarcely add that our landlord is an old bachelor and of course acted up to the light he had, though he left little enough of it for his tenants. * * * * * During this early Cincinnati life Harriet suffered much from ill-health accompanied by great mental depression; but in spite of both she labored diligently with her sister Catherine in establishing their school. They called it the Western Female Institute, and proposed to conduct it upon the college plan, with a faculty of instructors. As all these things are treated at length in letters written by Mrs. Stowe to her friend, Miss Georgiana May, we cannot do better than turn to them. In May, 1833, she writes:-- "Bishop Purcell visited our school to-day and expressed himself as greatly pleased that we had opened such an one here. He spoke of my poor little geography,[1] and thanked me for the unprejudiced manner in which I had handled the Catholic question in it. I was of course flattered that he should have known anything of the book. "How I wish you could see Walnut Hills. It is about two miles from the city, and the road to it is as picturesque as you can imagine a road to be without 'springs that run among the hills.' Every possible variety of hill and vale of beautiful slope, and undulations of land set off by velvet richness of turf and broken up by groves and forests of every outline of foliage, make the scene Arcadian. You might ride over the same road a dozen times a day untired, for the constant variation of view caused by ascending and descending hills relieves you from all tedium. Much of the wooding is beech of a noble growth. The straight, beautiful shafts of these trees as one looks up the cool green recesses of the woods seems as though they might form very proper columns for a Dryad temple. There! Catherine is growling at me for sitting up so late; so 'adieu to music, moonlight, and you.' I meant to tell you an abundance of classical things that I have been thinking to-night, but 'woe's me.' "Since writing the above my whole time has been taken up in the labor of our new school, or wasted in the fatigue and lassitude following such labor. To-day is Sunday, and I am staying at home because I think it is time to take some efficient means to dissipate the illness and bad feelings of divers kinds that have for some time been growing upon me. At present there is and can be very little system or regularity about me. About half of my time I am scarcely alive, and a great part of the rest the slave and sport of morbid feeling and unreasonable prejudice. I have everything but good health. "I still rejoice that this letter will find you in good old Connecticut--thrice blessed--'oh, had I the wings of a dove' I would be there too. Give my love to Mary H. I remember well how gently she used to speak to and smile on that forlorn old daddy that boarded at your house one summer. It was associating with her that first put into my head the idea of saying something to people who were not agreeable, and of saying something when I had nothing to say, as is generally the case on such occasions." Again she writes to the same friend: "Your letter, my dear G., I have just received, and read through three times. Now for my meditations upon it. What a woman of the world you are grown. How good it would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and precludes thought. Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease. How much good it might do me to be where I could not but be thoughtless.... "Now, Georgiana, let me copy for your delectation a list of matters that I have jotted down for consideration at a teachers' meeting to be held to-morrow night. It runneth as follows. Just hear! 'About quills and paper on the floor; forming classes; drinking in the entry (cold water, mind you); giving leave to speak; recess-bell, etc., etc.' 'You are tired, I see,' says Gilpin, 'so am I,' and I spare you. "I have just been hearing a class of little girls recite, and telling them a fairy story which I had to spin out as it went along, beginning with 'once upon a time there was,' etc., in the good old-fashioned way of stories. "Recently I have been reading the life of Madame de Staël and 'Corinne.' I have felt an intense sympathy with many parts of that book, with many parts of her character. But in America feelings vehement and absorbing like hers become still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the constant habits of self-government which the rigid forms of our society demand. They are repressed, and they burn inward till they burn the very soul, leaving only dust and ashes. It seems to me the intensity with which my mind has thought and felt on every subject presented to it has had this effect. It has withered and exhausted it, and though young I have no sympathy with the feelings of youth. All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned in admiration of nature, of writing, of character, in devotional thought and emotion, or in the emotions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity,--felt till my mind is exhausted, and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with trifles, since thought is pain, and emotion is pain." During the winter of 1833-34 the young school-teacher became so distressed at her own mental listlessness that she made a vigorous effort to throw it off. She forced herself to mingle in society, and, stimulated by the offer of a prize of fifty dollars by Mr. James Hall, editor of the "Western Monthly," a newly established magazine, for the best short story, she entered into the competition. Her story, which was entitled "Uncle Lot," afterwards republished in the "Mayflower," was by far the best submitted, and was awarded the prize without hesitation. This success gave a new direction to her thoughts, gave her an insight into her own ability, and so encouraged her that from that time on she devoted most of her leisure moments to writing. Her literary efforts were further stimulated at this time by the congenial society of the Semi-Colon Club, a little social circle that met on alternate weeks at Mr. Samuel Foote's and Dr. Drake's. The name of the club originated with a roundabout and rather weak bit of logic set forth by one of its promoters. He said: "You know that in Spanish Columbus is called 'Colon.' Now he who discovers a new pleasure is certainly half as great as he who discovers a new continent. Therefore if Colon discovered a continent, we who have discovered in this club a new pleasure should at least be entitled to the name of 'Semi-Colons.'" So Semi-Colons they became and remained for some years. At some meetings compositions were read, and at others nothing was read, but the time was passed in a general discussion of some interesting topic previously announced. Among the members of the club were Professor Stowe, unsurpassed in Biblical learning; Judge James Hall, editor of the "Western Monthly;" General Edward King; Mrs. Peters, afterwards founder of the Philadelphia School of Design; Miss Catherine Beecher; Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz; E. P. Cranch; Dr. Drake; S. P. Chase, and many others who afterwards became prominent in their several walks of life. In one of her letters to Miss May, Mrs. Stowe describes one of her methods for entertaining the members of the Semi-Colon as follows:-- "I am wondering as to what I shall do next. I have been writing a piece to be read next Monday evening at Uncle Sam's _soirée_ (the Semi-Colon). It is a letter purporting to be from Dr. Johnson. I have been stilting about in his style so long that it is a relief to me to come down to the jog of common English. Now I think of it I will just give you a history of my campaign in this circle. "My first piece was a letter from Bishop Butler, written in his outrageous style of parentheses and foggification. My second a satirical essay on the modern uses of languages. This I shall send to you, as some of the gentlemen, it seems, took a fancy to it and requested leave to put it in the 'Western Magazine,' and so it is in print. It is ascribed to _Catherine_, or I don't know that I should have let it go. I have no notion of appearing in _propria personæ_. "The next piece was a satire on certain members who were getting very much into the way of joking on the worn-out subjects of matrimony and old maid and old bachelorism. I therefore wrote a set of legislative enactments purporting to be from the ladies of the society, forbidding all such allusions in future. It made some sport at the time. I try not to be personal, and to be courteous, even in satire. "But I have written a piece this week that is making me some disquiet. I did not like it that there was so little that was serious and rational about the reading. So I conceived the design of writing a _set of letters_, and throwing them in, as being the letters of a friend. I wrote a letter this week for the first of the set,--easy, not very sprightly,--describing an imaginary situation, a house in the country, a gentleman and lady, Mr. and Mrs. Howard, as being pious, literary, and agreeable. I threw into the letter a number of little particulars and incidental allusions to give it the air of having been really a letter. I meant thus to give myself an opportunity for the introduction of different subjects and the discussion of different characters in future letters. "I meant to write on a great number of subjects in future. Cousin Elisabeth, only, was in the secret; Uncle Samuel and Sarah Elliot were not to know. "Yesterday morning I finished my letter, smoked it to make it look yellow, tore it to make it look old, directed it and scratched out the direction, postmarked it with red ink, sealed it and broke the seal, all this to give credibility to the fact of its being a real letter. Then I inclosed it in an envelope, stating that it was a part of a _set_ which had incidentally fallen into my hands. This envelope was written in a scrawny, scrawly, gentleman's hand. "I put it into the office in the morning, directed to 'Mrs. Samuel E. Foote,' and then sent word to Sis that it was coming, so that she might be ready to enact the part. "Well, the deception took. Uncle Sam examined it and pronounced, _ex cathedra_, that it must have been a real letter. Mr. Greene (the gentleman who reads) declared that it must have come from Mrs. Hall, and elucidated the theory by spelling out the names and dates which I had erased, which, of course, he accommodated to his own tastes. But then, what makes me feel uneasy is that Elisabeth, after reading it, did not seem to be exactly satisfied. She thought it had too much sentiment, too much particularity of incident,--she did not exactly know what. She was afraid that it would be criticised unmercifully. Now Elisabeth has a tact and quickness of perception that I trust to, and her remarks have made me uneasy enough. I am unused to being criticised, and don't know how I shall bear it." In 1833 Mrs. Stowe first had the subject of slavery brought to her personal notice by taking a trip across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky in company with Miss Dutton, one of the associate teachers in the Western Institute. They visited an estate that afterwards figured as that of Colonel Shelby in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and here the young authoress first came into personal contact with the negro slaves of the South. In speaking, many years afterwards, of this visit, Miss Dutton said: "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened, but sat much of the time as though abstracted in thought. When the negroes did funny things and cut up capers, she did not seem to pay the slightest attention to them. Afterwards, however, in reading 'Uncle Tom.' I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity, and knew at once where the material for that portion of the story had been gathered." At this time, however, Mrs. Stowe was more deeply interested in the subject of education than in that of slavery, as is shown by the following extract from one of her letters to Miss May, who was herself a teacher. She says:-- "We mean to turn over the West by means of _model schools_ in this, its capital. We mean to have a young lady's school of about fifty or sixty, a primary school of little girls to the same amount, and then a primary school for _boys_. We have come to the conclusion that the work of teaching will never be rightly done till it passes into _female_ hands. This is especially true with regard to boys. To govern boys by moral influences requires tact and talent and versatility it requires also the same division of labor that female education does. But men of tact, versatility, talent, and piety will not devote their lives to teaching. They must be ministers and missionaries, and all that, and while there is such a thrilling call for action in this way, every man who is merely teaching feels as if he were a Hercules with a distaff, ready to spring to the first trumpet that calls him away. As for division of labor, men must have salaries that can support wife and family, and, of course, a revenue would be required to support a requisite number of teachers if they could be found. "Then, if men have more knowledge they have less talent at communicating it, nor have they the patience, the long-suffering, and gentleness necessary to superintend the formation of character. We intend to make these principles understood, and ourselves to set the example of what females can do in this way. You see that first-rate talent is necessary for all that we mean to do, especially for the last, because here we must face down the prejudices of society and we must have exemplary success to be believed. We want original, planning minds, and you do not know how few there are among females, and how few we can command of those that exist." During the summer of 1834 the young teacher and writer made her first visit East since leaving New England two years before. Its object was mainly to be present at the graduation of her favorite brother, Henry Ward, from Amherst College. The earlier part of this journey was performed by means of stage to Toledo, and thence by steamer to Buffalo. A pleasant bit of personal description, and also of impressions of Niagara, seen for the first time on this journey, are given in a letter sent back to Cincinnati during its progress. In it she says of her fellow-travelers:-- "Then there was a portly, rosy, clever Mr. Smith, or Jones, or something the like; and a New Orleans girl looking like distraction, as far as dress is concerned, but with the prettiest language and softest intonations in the world, and one of those faces which, while you say it isn't handsome, keeps you looking all the time to see what it can be that is so pretty about it. Then there was Miss B., an independent, good-natured, do-as-I-please sort of a body, who seemed of perpetual motion from morning till night. Poor Miss D. said, when we stopped at night, 'Oh, dear! I suppose Lydia will be fiddling about our room till morning, and we shall not one of us sleep.' Then, by way of contrast, there was a Mr. Mitchell, the most gentlemanly, obliging man that ever changed his seat forty times a day to please a lady. Oh, yes, he could ride outside,--or, oh, certainly, he could ride inside,--he had no objection to this, or that, or the other. Indeed, it was difficult to say what could come amiss to him. He speaks in a soft, quiet manner, with something of a drawl, using very correct, well-chosen language, and pronouncing all his words with carefulness; has everything in his dress and traveling appointments _comme il faut_; and seems to think there is abundant time for everything that is to be done in this world, without, as he says, 'any unnecessary excitement.' Before the party had fully discovered his name he was usually designated as 'the obliging gentleman,' or 'that gentleman who is so accommodating.' Yet our friend, withal, is of Irish extraction, and I have seen him roused to talk with both hands and a dozen words in a breath. He fell into a little talk about abolition and slavery with our good Mr. Jones, a man whose mode of reasoning consists in repeating the same sentence at regular intervals as long as you choose to answer it. This man, who was finally convinced that negroes were black, used it as an irrefragible argument to all that could be said, and at last began to deduce from it that they might just as well be slaves as anything else, and so he proceeded till all the philanthropy of our friend was roused, and he sprung up all lively and oratorical and gesticulatory and indignant to my heart's content. I like to see a quiet man that can be roused." In the same letter she gives her impressions of Niagara, as follows:-- "I have seen it (Niagara) and yet live. Oh, where is your soul? Never mind, though. Let me tell, if I can, what is unutterable. Elisabeth, it is not _like_ anything; it did not look like anything I expected; it did not look like a waterfall. I did not once think whether it was high or low; whether it roared or didn't roar; whether it equaled my expectations or not. My mind whirled off, it seemed to me, in a new, strange world. It seemed unearthly, like the strange, dim images in the Revelation. I thought of the great white throne; the rainbow around it; the throne in sight like unto an emerald; and oh! that beautiful water rising like moonlight, falling as the soul sinks when it dies, to rise refined, spiritualized, and pure. That rainbow, breaking out, trembling, fading, and again coming like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it: great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror. I felt as if I could have _gone over_ with the waters; it would be so beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it. I felt the rock tremble under me with a sort of joy. I was so maddened that I could have gone too, if it had gone." While at the East she was greatly affected by hearing of the death of her dear friend, Eliza Tyler, the wife of Professor Stowe. This lady was the daughter of Dr. Bennett Tyler, president of the Theological Institute of Connecticut, at East Windsor; but twenty-five years of age at the time of her death, a very beautiful woman gifted with a wonderful voice. She was also possessed of a well-stored mind and a personal magnetism that made her one of the most popular members of the Semi-Colon Club, in the proceedings of which she took an active interest. Her death left Professor Stowe a childless widower, and his forlorn condition greatly excited the sympathy of her who had been his wife's most intimate friend. It was easy for sympathy to ripen into love, and after a short engagement Harriet E. Beecher became the wife of Professor Calvin E. Stowe. Her last act before the wedding was to write the following note to the friend of her girlhood, Miss Georgiana May:-- _January 6, 1836._ Well, my dear G., about half an hour more and your old friend, companion, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hatty Beecher and change to nobody knows who. My dear, you are engaged, and pledged in a year or two to encounter a similar fate, and do you wish to know how you shall feel? Well, my dear, I have been dreading and dreading the time, and lying awake all last week wondering how I should live through this overwhelming crisis, and lo! it has come and I feel _nothing at all_. The wedding is to be altogether domestic; nobody present but my own brothers and sisters, and my old colleague, Mary Dutton; and as there is a sufficiency of the ministry in our family we have not even to call in the foreign aid of a minister. Sister Katy is not here, so she will not witness my departure from her care and guidance to that of another. None of my numerous friends and acquaintances who have taken such a deep interest in making the connection for me even know the day, and it will be all done and over before they know anything about it. Well, it is really a mercy to have this entire stupidity come over one at such a time. I should be crazy to feel as I did yesterday, or indeed to feel anything at all. But I inwardly vowed that my last feelings and reflections on this subject should be yours, and as I have not got any, it is just as well to tell you _that_. Well, here comes Mr. S., so farewell, and for the last time I subscribe Your own H. E. B. FOOTNOTE: [1] This geography was begun by Mrs. Stowe during the summer of 1832, while visiting her brother William at Newport, R. I. It was completed during the winter of 1833, and published by the firm of Corey, Fairbank & Webster, of Cincinnati. CHAPTER IV. EARLY MARRIED LIFE, 1836-1840. PROFESSOR STOWE'S INTEREST IN POPULAR EDUCATION.--HIS DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE.--SLAVERY RIOTS IN CINCINNATI.--BIRTH OF TWIN DAUGHTERS.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S RETURN AND VISIT TO COLUMBUS.--DOMESTIC TRIALS.--AIDING A FUGITIVE SLAVE.--AUTHORSHIP UNDER DIFFICULTIES.--A BEECHER ROUND ROBIN. THE letter to her friend Georgiana May, begun half an hour before her wedding, was not completed until nearly two months after that event. Taking it from her portfolio, she adds:-- "Three weeks have passed since writing the above, and my husband and self are now quietly seated by our own fireside, as domestic as any pair of tame fowl you ever saw; he writing to his mother, and I to you. Two days after our marriage we took a wedding excursion, so called, though we would most gladly have been excused this conformity to ordinary custom had not necessity required Mr. Stowe to visit Columbus, and I had too much adhesiveness not to go too. Ohio roads at this season are no joke, I can tell you, though we were, on the whole, wonderfully taken care of, and our expedition included as many pleasures as an expedition at this time of the year _ever_ could. "And now, my dear, perhaps the wonder to you, as to me, is how this momentous crisis in the life of such a wisp of nerve as myself has been transacted so quietly. My dear, it is a wonder to myself. I am tranquil, quiet, and happy. I look _only_ on the present, and leave the future with Him who has hitherto been so kind to me. 'Take no thought for the morrow' is my motto, and my comfort is to rest on Him in whose house there are many mansions provided when these fleeting earthly ones pass away. "Dear Georgy, naughty girl that I am, it is a month that I have let the above lie by, because I got into a strain of emotion in it that I dreaded to return to. Well, so it shall be no longer. In about five weeks Mr. Stowe and myself start for New England. He sails the first of May. I am going with him to Boston, New York, and other places, and shall stop finally at Hartford, whence, as soon as he is gone, it is my intention to return westward." This reference to her husband as about to leave her relates to his sailing for Europe to purchase books for Lane Seminary, and also as a commissioner appointed by the State of Ohio to investigate the public school systems of the old world. He had long been convinced that higher education was impossible in the West without a higher grade of public schools, and had in 1833 been one of the founders in Cincinnati of "The College of Teachers," an institution that existed for ten years, and exerted a widespread influence. Its objects were to popularize the common schools, raise the standard of teachers, and create a demand for education among the people. Professor Stowe was associated in this movement with many of the leading intellects of Ohio at that time, and among them were Albert Pickett, Dr. Drake, Smith Grimke, Archbishop Purcell, President A. H. McGuffey, Dr. Beecher, Lydia Sigourney, Caroline Lee Hentz, and others. Their influence finally extended to the state legislature, and it was concluded to authorize Professor Stowe, when abroad, to investigate and report upon the common school systems of Europe, especially Prussia. He sailed from New York for London in the ship Montreal, Captain Champlin, on June 8, 1836, and carried with him, to be opened only after he was at sea, a letter from his wife, from which the following extract is made:-- "Now, my dear, that you are gone where you are out of the reach of my care, advice, and good management, it is fitting that you should have something under my hand and seal for your comfort and furtherance in the new world you are going to. Firstly, I must caution you to set your face as a flint against the 'cultivation of indigo,' as Elisabeth calls it, in any way or shape. Keep yourself from it most scrupulously, and though you are unprovided with that precious and savory treatise entitled 'Kemper's Consolations,'[2] yet you can exercise yourself to recall and set in order such parts thereof as would more particularly suit your case, particularly those portions wherewith you so much consoled Kate, Aunt Esther, and your unworthy handmaid, while you yet tarried at Walnut Hills. But seriously, dear one, you must give more way to hope than to memory. You are going to a new scene now, and one that I hope will be full of enjoyment to you. I want you to take the good of it. "Only think of all you expect to see: the great libraries and beautiful paintings, fine churches, and, above all, think of seeing Tholuck, your great Apollo. My dear, I wish I were a man in your place; if I wouldn't have a grand time!" During her husband's absence abroad Mrs. Stowe lived quietly in Cincinnati with her father and brothers. She wrote occasionally short stories, articles, and essays for publication in the "Western Monthly Magazine" or the "New York Evangelist," and maintained a constant correspondence with her husband by means of a daily journal, which was forwarded to him once a month. She also assisted her brother, Henry Ward, who had accepted a temporary position as editor of the "Journal," a small daily paper published in the city. At this time the question of slavery was an exciting one in Cincinnati, and Lane Seminary had become a hotbed of abolition. The anti-slavery movement among the students was headed by Theodore D. Weld, one of their number, who had procured funds to complete his education by lecturing through the South. While thus engaged he had been so impressed with the evils and horrors of slavery that he had become a radical abolitionist, and had succeeded in converting several Southerners to his views of the subject. Among them was Mr. J. G. Birney of Huntsville, Alabama, who not only liberated his slaves, but in connection with Dr. Gamaliel Bailey of Cincinnati founded in that city an anti-slavery paper called "The Philanthropist." This paper was finally suppressed, and its office wrecked by a mob instigated by Kentucky slaveholders, and it is of this event that Mrs. Stowe writes to her husband as follows:-- "Yesterday evening I spent scribbling for Henry's newspaper (the 'Journal') in this wise: 'Birney's printing-press has been mobbed, and many of the respectable citizens are disposed to wink at the outrage in consideration of its moving in the line of their prejudices.' "I wrote a conversational sketch, in which I rather satirized this inconsistent spirit, and brought out the effects of patronizing _any_ violation of private rights. It was in a light, sketchy style, designed to draw attention to a long editorial of Henry's in which he considers the subject fully and seriously. His piece is, I think, a powerful one; indeed, he does write very strongly. I am quite proud of his editorials; they are well studied, earnest, and dignified. I think he will make a first-rate writer. Both our pieces have gone to press to-day, with Charles's article on music, and we have had not a little diversion about our _family newspaper_. "I thought, when I was writing last night, that I was, like a good wife, defending one of your principles in your absence, and wanted you to see how manfully I talked about it. Henry has also taken up and examined the question of the Seminole Indians, and done it very nobly." Again:-- "The excitement about Birney continues to increase. The keeper of the Franklin Hotel was assailed by a document subscribed to by many of his boarders demanding that Birney should be turned out of doors. He chose to negative the demand, and twelve of his boarders immediately left, Dr. F. among the number. A meeting has been convoked by means of a handbill, in which some of the most respectable men of the city are invited by name to come together and consider the question whether they will allow Mr. Birney to continue his paper in the city. Mr. Greene says that, to his utter surprise, many of the most respectable and influential citizens gave out that they should go. "He was one of the number they invited, but he told those who came to him that he would have nothing to do with disorderly public meetings or mobs in any shape, and that he was entirely opposed to the whole thing. "I presume they will have a hot meeting, if they have any at all. "I wish father were at home to preach a sermon to his church, for many of its members do not frown on these things as they ought." "Later: The meeting was held, and was headed by Morgan, Neville, Judge Burke, and I know not who else. Judge Burnet was present and consented to their acts. The mob madness is certainly upon this city when men of sense and standing will pass resolutions approving in so many words of things done contrary to law, as one of the resolutions of this meeting did. It quoted the demolition of the tea in Boston harbor as being authority and precedent. "A large body, perhaps the majority of citizens, disapprove, but I fear there will not be public disavowal. Even N. Wright but faintly opposes, and Dr. Fore has been exceedingly violent. Mr. Hammond (editor of the 'Gazette') in a very dignified and judicious manner has condemned the whole thing, and Henry has opposed, but otherwise the papers have either been silent or in favor of mobs. We shall see what the result will be in a few days. "For my part, I can easily see how such proceedings may make converts to abolitionism, for already my sympathies are strongly enlisted for Mr. Birney, and I hope that he will stand his ground and assert his rights. The office is fire-proof, and inclosed by high walls. I wish he would man it with armed men and see what can be done. If I were a man I would go, for one, and take good care of at least one window. Henry sits opposite me writing a most valiant editorial, and tells me to tell you he is waxing mighty in battle." In another letter she writes:-- "I told you in my last that the mob broke into Birney's press, where, however, the mischief done was but slight. The object appeared to be principally to terrify. Immediately there followed a general excitement in which even good men in their panic and prejudice about abolitionism forgot that mobs were worse evils than these, talked against Birney, and winked at the outrage; N. Wright and Judge Burnet, for example. Meanwhile the turbulent spirits went beyond this and talked of revolution and of righting things without law that could not be righted by it. At the head of these were Morgan, Neville, Longworth, Joseph Graham, and Judge Burke. A meeting was convoked at Lower Market Street to decide whether they would permit the publishing of an abolition paper, and to this meeting all the most respectable citizens were by name summoned. "There were four classes in the city then: Those who meant to go as revolutionists and support the mob; those who meant to put down Birney, but rather hoped to do it without a mob; those who felt ashamed to go, foreseeing the probable consequence, and yet did not decidedly frown upon it; and those who sternly and decidedly reprehended it. "The first class was headed by Neville, Longworth, Graham, etc.; the second class, though of some numbers, was less conspicuous; of the third, Judge Burnet, Dr. Fore, and N. Wright were specimens; and in the last such men as Hammond, Mansfield, S. P. Chase,[3] and Chester were prominent. The meeting in so many words voted a mob, nevertheless a committee was appointed to wait on Mr. Birney and ascertain what he proposed to do; and, strange to tell, men as sensible as Uncle John and Judge Burnet were so short-sighted as to act on that committee. "All the newspapers in the city, except Hammond's ('Gazette') and Henry's (the 'Journal'), were either silent or openly 'mobocratic.' As might have been expected, Birney refused to leave, and that night the mob tore down his press, scattered the types, dragged the whole to the river, threw it in, and then came back to demolish the office. "They then went to the houses of Dr. Bailey, Mr. Donaldson, and Mr. Birney; but the persons they sought were not at home, having been aware of what was intended. The mayor was a silent spectator of these proceedings, and was heard to say, 'Well, lads, you have done well, so far; go home now before you disgrace yourselves;' but the 'lads' spent the rest of the night and a greater part of the next day (Sunday) in pulling down the houses of inoffensive and respectable blacks. The 'Gazette' office was threatened, the 'Journal' office was to go next; Lane Seminary and the water-works also were mentioned as probable points to be attacked by the mob. "By Tuesday morning the city was pretty well alarmed. A regular corps of volunteers was organized, who for three nights patrolled the streets with firearms and with legal warrant from the mayor, who by this time was glad to give it, to put down the mob even by bloodshed. "For a day or two we did not know but there would actually be war to the knife, as was threatened by the mob, and we really saw Henry depart with his pistols with daily alarm, only we were all too full of patriotism not to have sent every brother we had rather than not have had the principles of freedom and order defended. "But here the tide turned. The mob, unsupported by a now frightened community, slunk into their dens and were still; and then Hammond, who, during the few days of its prevalence, had made no comments, but published simply the Sermon on the Mount, the Constitution of Ohio, and the Declaration of Independence, without any comment, now came out and gave a simple, concise history of the mob, tracing it to the market-house meeting, telling the whole history of the meeting, with the names of those who got it up, throwing on them and on those who had acted on the committee the whole responsibility of the following mob. It makes a terrible sensation, but it 'cuts its way,' and all who took other stand than that of steady opposition from the first are beginning to feel the reaction of public sentiment, while newspapers from abroad are pouring in their reprehensions of the disgraceful conduct of Cincinnati. Another time, I suspect, such men as Judge Burnet, Mr. Greene, and Uncle John will keep their fingers out of such a trap, and people will all learn better than to wink at a mob that happens to please them at the outset, or in any way to give it their countenance. Mr. Greene and Uncle John were full of wrath against mobs, and would not go to the meeting, and yet were cajoled into acting on that committee in the vain hope of getting Birney to go away and thus preventing the outrage. "They are justly punished, I think, for what was very irresolute and foolish conduct, to say the least." The general tone of her letters at this time would seem to show that, while Mrs. Stowe was anti-slavery in her sympathies, she was not a declared abolitionist. This is still further borne out in a letter written in 1837 from Putnam, Ohio, whither she had gone for a short visit to her brother William. In it she says:-- "The good people here, you know, are about half abolitionists. A lady who takes a leading part in the female society in this place yesterday called and brought Catherine the proceedings of the Female Anti-Slavery Convention. "I should think them about as ultra as to measures as anything that has been attempted, though I am glad to see a better spirit than marks such proceedings generally. "To-day I read some in Mr. Birney's 'Philanthropist.' Abolitionism being the fashion here, it is natural to look at its papers. "It does seem to me that there needs to be an _intermediate_ society. If not, as light increases, all the excesses of the abolition party will not prevent humane and conscientious men from joining it. "Pray what is there in Cincinnati to satisfy one whose mind is awakened on this subject? No one can have the system of slavery brought before him without an irrepressible desire to _do_ something, and what is there to be done?" On September 29, 1836, while Professor Stowe was still absent in Europe, his wife gave birth to twin daughters, Eliza and Isabella, as she named them; but Eliza Tyler and Harriet Beecher, as her husband insisted they should be called, when, upon reaching New York, he was greeted by the joyful news. His trip from London in the ship Gladiator had been unusually long, even for those days of sailing vessels, and extended from November 19, 1836, to January 20, 1837. During the summer of 1837 Mrs. Stowe suffered much from ill health, on which account, and to relieve her from domestic cares, she was sent to make a long visit at Putnam with her brother, Rev. William Beecher. While here she received a letter from her husband, in which he says:-- "We all of course feel proper indignation at the doings of last General Assembly, and shall treat them with merited contempt. This alliance between the old school (Presbyterians) and slaveholders will make more abolitionists than anything that has been done yet." In December Professor Stowe went to Columbus with the extended educational report that he had devoted the summer to preparing; and in writing from there to his wife he says:-- "To-day I have been visiting the governor and legislators. They received me with the utmost kindness, and are evidently anticipating much from my report. The governor communicated it to the legislature to-day, and it is concluded that I read it in Dr. Hodges' church on two evenings, to-morrow and the day after, before both houses of the legislature and the citizens. The governor (Vance) will preside at both meetings. I like him (the governor) much. He is just such a plain, simple-hearted, sturdy body as old Fritz (Kaiser Frederick), with more of natural talent than his predecessor in the gubernatorial chair. For my year's work in this matter I am to receive $500." On January 14, 1838, Mrs. Stowe's third child, Henry Ellis, was born. It was about this time that the famous reunion of the Beecher family described in Lyman Beecher's "Autobiography" occurred. Edward made a visit to the East, and when he returned he brought Mary (Mrs. Thomas Perkins) from Hartford with him. William came down from Putnam, Ohio, and George from Batavia, New York, while Catherine, Harriet, Henry, Charles, Isabella, Thomas, and James were already at home. It was the first time they had ever all met together. Mary had never seen James, and had seen Thomas but once. The old doctor was almost transported with joy as they all gathered about him, and his cup of happiness was filled to overflowing when, the next day, which was Sunday, his pulpit was filled by Edward in the morning, William in the afternoon, and George in the evening. Side by side with this charming picture we have another of domestic life outlined by Mrs. Stowe's own hand. It is contained in the following letter, written June 21, 1838, to Miss May, at New Haven, Conn.:-- MY DEAR, DEAR GEORGIANA,--Only think how long it is since I have written to you, and how changed I am since then--the mother of three children! Well, if I have not kept the reckoning of old times, let this last circumstance prove my apology, for I have been hand, heart, and head full since I saw you. Now, to-day, for example, I'll tell you what I had on my mind from dawn to dewy eve. In the first place I waked about half after four and thought, "Bless me, how light it is! I must get out of bed and rap to wake up Mina, for breakfast must be had at six o'clock this morning." So out of bed I jump and seize the tongs and pound, pound, pound over poor Mina's sleepy head, charitably allowing her about half an hour to get waked up in,--that being the quantum of time that it takes me,--or used to. Well, then baby wakes--quâ, quâ, quâ, so I give him his breakfast, dozing meanwhile and soliloquizing as follows: "Now I must not forget to tell Mr. Stowe about the starch and dried apples"--doze--"ah, um, dear me! why doesn't Mina get up? I don't hear her,"--doze--"a, um,--I wonder if Mina has soap enough! I think there were two bars left on Saturday"--doze again--I wake again. "Dear me, broad daylight! I must get up and go down and see if Mina is getting breakfast." Up I jump and up wakes baby. "Now, little boy, be good and let mother dress, because she is in a hurry." I get my frock half on and baby by that time has kicked himself down off his pillow, and is crying and fisting the bed-clothes in great order. I stop with one sleeve off and one on to settle matters with him. Having planted him bolt upright and gone all up and down the chamber barefoot to get pillows and blankets to prop him up, I finish putting my frock on and hurry down to satisfy myself by actual observation that the breakfast is in progress. Then back I come into the nursery, where, remembering that it is washing day and that there is a great deal of work to be done, I apply myself vigorously to sweeping, dusting, and the setting to rights so necessary where there are three little mischiefs always pulling down as fast as one can put up. Then there are Miss H---- and Miss E----, concerning whom Mary will furnish you with all suitable particulars, who are chattering, hallooing, or singing at the tops of their voices, as may suit their various states of mind, while the nurse is getting their breakfast ready. This meal being cleared away, Mr. Stowe dispatched to market with various memoranda of provisions, etc., and the baby being washed and dressed, I begin to think what next must be done. I start to cut out some little dresses, have just calculated the length and got one breadth torn off when Master Henry makes a doleful lip and falls to crying with might and main. I catch him up and turning round see one of his sisters flourishing the things out of my workbox in fine style. Moving it away and looking the other side I see the second little mischief seated by the hearth chewing coals and scraping up ashes with great apparent relish. Grandmother lays hold upon her and charitably offers to endeavor to quiet baby while I go on with my work. I set at it again, pick up a dozen pieces, measure them once more to see which is the right one, and proceed to cut out some others, when I see the twins on the point of quarreling with each other. Number one pushes number two over. Number two screams: that frightens the baby and he joins in. I call number one a naughty girl, take the persecuted one in my arms, and endeavor to comfort her by trotting to the old lyric:-- "So ride the gentlefolk, And so do we, so do we." Meanwhile number one makes her way to the slop jar and forthwith proceeds to wash her apron in it. Grandmother catches her by one shoulder, drags her away, and sets the jar up out of her reach. By and by the nurse comes up from her sweeping. I commit the children to her, and finish cutting out the frocks. But let this suffice, for of such details as these are all my days made up. Indeed, my dear, I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping. As for thoughts, reflections, and sentiments, good lack! good lack! I suppose I am a dolefully uninteresting person at present, but I hope I shall grow young again one of these days, for it seems to me that matters cannot always stand exactly as they do now. Well, Georgy, this marriage is--yes, I will speak well of it, after all; for when I can stop and think long enough to discriminate my head from my heels, I must say that I think myself a fortunate woman both in husband and children. My children I would not change for all the ease, leisure, and pleasure that I could have without them. They are money on interest whose value will be constantly increasing. In 1839 Mrs. Stowe received into her family as a servant a colored girl from Kentucky. By the laws of Ohio she was free, having been brought into the State and left there by her mistress. In spite of this, Professor Stowe received word, after she had lived with them some months, that the girl's master was in the city looking for her, and that if she were not careful she would be seized and conveyed back into slavery. Finding that this could be accomplished by boldness, perjury, and the connivance of some unscrupulous justice, Professor Stowe determined to remove the girl to some place of security where she might remain until the search for her should be given up. Accordingly he and his brother-in-law, Henry Ward Beecher, both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, at night, by unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her in safety with the family of old John Van Zandt, the fugitive's friend. It is from this incident of real life and personal experience that Mrs. Stowe conceived the thrilling episode of the fugitives' escape from Tom Loker and Marks in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." An amusing and at the same time most interesting account of her struggles to accomplish literary work amid her distracting domestic duties at this time is furnished by the letter of one of her intimate friends, who writes:-- "It was my good fortune to number Mrs. Stowe among my friends, and during a visit to her I had an opportunity one day of witnessing the combined exercise of her literary and domestic genius in a style that to me was quite amusing. "'Come Harriet,' said I, as I found her tending one baby and watching two others just able to walk, 'where is that piece for the "Souvenir" which I promised the editor I would get from you and send on next week? You have only this one day left to finish it, and have it I must.' "'And how will you get it, friend of mine?' said Harriet. 'You will at least have to wait till I get house-cleaning over and baby's teeth through.' "'As to house-cleaning, you can defer it one day longer; and as to baby's teeth, there is to be no end to them, as I can see. No, no; to-day that story must be ended. There Frederick has been sitting by Ellen and saying all those pretty things for more than a month now, and she has been turning and blushing till I am sure it is time to go to her relief. Come, it would not take you three hours at the rate you can write to finish the courtship, marriage, catastrophe, éclaircissement, and all; and this three hours' labor of your brains will earn enough to pay for all the sewing your fingers could do for a year to come. Two dollars a page, my dear, and you can write a page in fifteen minutes! Come, then, my lady housekeeper, economy is a cardinal virtue; consider the economy of the thing.' "'But, my dear, here is a baby in my arms and two little pussies by my side, and there is a great baking down in the kitchen, and there is a "new girl" for "help," besides preparations to be made for house-cleaning next week. It is really out of the question, you see.' "'I see no such thing. I do not know what genius is given for, if it is not to help a woman out of a scrape. Come, set your wits to work, let me have my way, and you shall have all the work done and finish the story too.' "'Well, but kitchen affairs?' "'We can manage them too. You know you can write anywhere and anyhow. Just take your seat at the kitchen table with your writing weapons, and while you superintend Mina fill up the odd snatches of time with the labors of your pen.' "I carried my point. In ten minutes she was seated; a table with flour, rolling-pin, ginger, and lard on one side, a dresser with eggs, pork, and beans and various cooking utensils on the other, near her an oven heating, and beside her a dark-skinned nymph, waiting orders. "'Here, Harriet,' said I, 'you can write on this atlas in your lap; no matter how the writing looks, I will copy it.' "'Well, well,' said she, with a resigned sort of amused look. 'Mina, you may do what I told you, while I write a few minutes, till it is time to mould up the bread. Where is the inkstand?' "'Here it is, close by, on the top of the tea-kettle,' said I. "At this Mina giggled, and we both laughed to see her merriment at our literary proceedings. "I began to overhaul the portfolio to find the right sheet. "'Here it is,' said I. 'Here is Frederick sitting by Ellen, glancing at her brilliant face, and saying something about "guardian angel," and all that--you remember?' "'Yes, yes,' said she, falling into a muse, as she attempted to recover the thread of her story. "'Ma'am, shall I put the pork on the top of the beans?' asked Mina. "'Come, come,' said Harriet, laughing. 'You see how it is. Mina is a new hand and cannot do anything without me to direct her. We must give up the writing for to-day.' "'No, no; let us have another trial. You can dictate as easily as you can write. Come, I can set the baby in this clothes-basket and give him some mischief or other to keep him quiet; you shall dictate and I will write. Now, this is the place where you left off: you were describing the scene between Ellen and her lover; the last sentence was, "Borne down by the tide of agony, she leaned her head on her hands, the tears streamed through her fingers, and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs." What shall I write next?' "'Mina, pour a little milk into this pearlash,' said Harriet. "'Come,' said I. '"The tears streamed through her fingers and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs." What next?' "Harriet paused and looked musingly out of the window, as she turned her mind to her story. 'You may write now,' said she, and she dictated as follows: "'"Her lover wept with her, nor dared he again to touch the point so sacredly guarded"--Mina, roll that crust a little thinner. "He spoke in soothing tones"--Mina, poke the coals in the oven.' "'Here,' said I, 'let me direct Mina about these matters, and write a while yourself.' "Harriet took the pen and patiently set herself to the work. For a while my culinary knowledge and skill were proof to all Mina's investigating inquiries, and they did not fail till I saw two pages completed. "'You have done bravely,' said I, as I read over the manuscript; 'now you must direct Mina a while. Meanwhile dictate and I will write.' "Never was there a more docile literary lady than my friend. Without a word of objection she followed my request. "'I am ready to write,' said I. 'The last sentence was: "What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?" What next?' "'Shall I put in the brown or the white bread first?' said Mina. "'The brown first,' said Harriet. "'"What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?"' said I. "Harriet brushed the flour off her apron and sat down for a moment in a muse. Then she dictated as follows:-- "'"Under the breaking of my heart I have borne up. I have borne up under all that tries a woman,--but this thought,--oh, Henry!"' "'Ma'am, shall I put ginger into this pumpkin?' queried Mina. "'No, you may let that alone just now,' replied Harriet. She then proceeded:-- "'"I know my duty to my children. I see the hour must come. You must take them, Henry; they are my last earthly comfort."' "'Ma'am, what shall I do with these egg-shells and all this truck here?' interrupted Mina. "'Put them in the pail by you,' answered Harriet. "'"They are my last earthly comfort,"' said I. 'What next?' "She continued to dictate,-- "'"You must take them away. It may be--perhaps it _must_ be--that I shall soon follow, but the breaking heart of a wife still pleads, 'a little longer, a little longer.'"' "'How much longer must the gingerbread stay in?' inquired Mina. "'Five minutes,' said Harriet. "'"A little longer, a little longer,"' I repeated in a dolorous tone, and we burst into a laugh. "Thus we went on, cooking, writing, nursing, and laughing, till I finally accomplished my object. The piece was finished, copied, and the next day sent to the editor." The widely scattered members of the Beecher family had a fashion of communicating with each other by means of circular letters. These, begun on great sheets of paper, at either end of the line, were passed along from one to another, each one adding his or her budget of news to the general stock. When the filled sheet reached the last person for whom it was intended, it was finally remailed to its point of departure. Except in the cases of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Perkins, the simple address "Rev. Mr. Beecher" was sufficient to insure its safe delivery in any town to which it was sent. One of these great, closely-written sheets, bearing in faded ink the names of all the Beechers, lies outspread before us as we write. It is postmarked Hartford, Conn., Batavia, N. Y., Chillicothe, Ohio, Zanesville, Ohio, Walnut Hills, Ohio, Indianapolis, Ind., Jacksonville, Ill., and New Orleans, La. In it Mrs. Stowe occupies her allotted space with-- WALNUT HILLS, _April 27, 1839._ DEAR FRIENDS,--I am going to Hartford myself, and therefore shall not write, but hurry along the preparations for my forward journey. Belle, father says you may go to the White Mountains with Mr. Stowe and me this summer. George, we may look in on you coming back. Good-by. Affectionately to all, H. E. STOWE. FOOTNOTES: [2] A ridiculous book from which Mr. Stowe derived endless amusement. [3] Salmon P. Chase. CHAPTER V. POVERTY AND SICKNESS, 1840-1850. FAMINE IN CINCINNATI.--SUMMER AT THE EAST.--PLANS FOR LITERARY WORK.--EXPERIENCE ON A RAILROAD.--DEATH OF HER BROTHER GEORGE.--SICKNESS AND DESPAIR.--A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF HEALTH.--GOES TO BRATTLEBORO' WATERCURE.--TROUBLES AT LANE SEMINARY.--CHOLERA IN CINCINNATI.--DEATH OF YOUNGEST CHILD.--DETERMINED TO LEAVE THE WEST. ON January 7, 1839, Professor Stowe wrote to his mother in Natick, Mass.: "You left here, I believe, in the right time, for as there has been no navigation on the Ohio River for a year, we are almost in a state of famine as to many of the necessities of life. For example, salt (coarse) has sold in Cincinnati this winter for three dollars a bushel; rice eighteen cents a pound; coffee fifty cents a pound; white sugar the same; brown sugar twenty cents; molasses a dollar a gallon; potatoes a dollar a bushel. We do without such things mostly; as there is yet plenty of bread and bacon (flour six and seven dollars a barrel, and good pork from six to eight cents a pound) we get along very comfortably. "Our new house is pretty much as it was, but they say it will be finished in July. I expect to visit you next summer, as I shall deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Dartmouth College; but whether wife and children come with me or not is not yet decided." Mrs. Stowe came on to the East with her husband and children during the following summer, and before her return made a trip through the White Mountains. In May, 1840, her second son was born and named Frederick William, after the sturdy Prussian king, for whom her husband cherished an unbounded admiration. Mrs. Stowe has said somewhere: "So we go, dear reader, so long as we have a body and a soul. For worlds must mingle,--the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out like the grotesque carvings on a gothic shrine; only did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial, since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred." So in writing a biography it is impossible for us to tell what did and what did not powerfully influence the character. It is safer simply to tell the unvarnished truth. The lily builds up its texture of delicate beauty from mould and decay. So how do we know from what humble material a soul grows in strength and beauty! In December, 1840, writing to Miss May, Mrs. Stowe says:-- "For a year I have held the pen only to write an occasional business letter such as could not be neglected. This was primarily owing to a severe neuralgic complaint that settled in my eyes, and for two months not only made it impossible for me to use them in writing, but to fix them with attention on anything. I could not even bear the least light of day in my room. Then my dear little Frederick was born, and for two months more I was confined to my bed. Besides all this, we have had an unusual amount of sickness in our family.... "For all that my history of the past year records so many troubles, I cannot on the whole regard it as a very troublous one. I have had so many counterbalancing mercies that I must regard myself as a person greatly blessed. It is true that about six months out of the twelve I have been laid up with sickness, but then I have had every comfort and the kindest of nurses in my faithful Anna. My children have thriven, and on the whole 'come to more,' as the Yankees say, than the care of them. Thus you see my troubles have been but enough to keep me from loving earth too well." In the spring of 1842 Mrs. Stowe again visited Hartford, taking her six-year-old daughter Hatty with her. In writing from there to her husband she confides some of her literary plans and aspirations to him, and he answers:-- "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Make all your calculations accordingly. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind. Drop the E. out of your name. It only incumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony. Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning. Then my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed. "Our humble dwelling has to-day received a distinguished honor of which I must give you an account. It was a visit from his excellency the Baron de Roenne, ambassador of his majesty the King of Prussia to the United States. He was pleased to assure me of the great satisfaction my report on Prussian schools had afforded the king and members of his court, with much more to the same effect. Of course having a real live lord to exhibit, I was anxious for some one to exhibit him to; but neither Aunt Esther nor Anna dared venture near the study, though they both contrived to get a peep at his lordship from the little chamber window as he was leaving. "And now, my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you, and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many things and so little of so many other things?" In answer to this letter Mrs. Stowe writes from Hartford:-- "I have seen Johnson of the 'Evangelist.' He is very liberally disposed, and I may safely reckon on being paid for all I do there. Who is that Hale, Jr., that sent me the 'Boston Miscellany,' and will he keep his word with me? His offers are very liberal,--twenty dollars for three pages, not very close print. Is he to be depended on? If so, it is the best offer I have received yet. I shall get something from the Harpers some time this winter or spring. Robertson, the publisher here, says the book ('The Mayflower') will sell, and though the terms they offer me are very low, that I shall make something on it. For a second volume I shall be able to make better terms. On the whole, my dear, if I choose to be a literary lady, I have, I think, as good a chance of making profit by it as any one I know of. But with all this, I have my doubts whether I shall be able to do so. "Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable, and need a mother's whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts? "There is one thing I must suggest. If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be _my_ room. I have in my own mind pitched on Mrs. Whipple's room. I can put the stove in it. I have bought a cheap carpet for it, and I have furniture enough at home to furnish it comfortably, and I only beg in addition that you will let me change the glass door from the nursery into that room and keep my plants there, and then I shall be quite happy. "All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet and satisfied. I could not there, for there was all the setting of tables, and clearing up of tables, and dressing and washing of children, and everything else going on, and the constant falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room was a constant annoyance to me, and I never felt comfortable there though I tried hard. Then if I came into the parlor where you were I felt as if I were interrupting you, and you know you sometimes thought so too. "Now this winter let the cooking-stove be put into that room, and let the pipe run up through the floor into the room above. We can eat by our cooking-stove, and the children can be washed and dressed and keep their playthings in the room above, and play there when we don't want them below. You can study by the parlor fire, and I and my plants, etc., will take the other room. I shall keep my work and all my things there and feel settled and quiet. I intend to have a regular part of each day devoted to the children, and then I shall take them in there." In his reply to this letter Professor Stowe says:-- "The little magazine ('The Souvenir') goes ahead finely. Fisher sent down to Fulton the other day and got sixty subscribers. He will make the June number as handsome as possible, as a specimen number for the students, several of whom will take agencies for it during the coming vacation. You have it in your power by means of this little magazine to form the mind of the West for the coming generation. It is just as I told you in my last letter. God has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God? You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the rest of your life with your pen. "If you only could come home to-day how happy should I be. I am daily finding out more and more (what I knew very well before) that you are the most intelligent and agreeable woman in the whole circle of my acquaintance." That Professor Stowe's devoted admiration for his wife was reciprocated, and that a most perfect sympathy of feeling existed between the husband and wife, is shown by a line in one of Mrs. Stowe's letters from Hartford in which she says: "I was telling Belle yesterday that I did not know till I came away how much I was dependent upon you for information. There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you." In this same letter she writes of herself:-- "One thing more in regard to myself. The absence and wandering of mind and forgetfulness that so often vexes you is a physical infirmity with me. It is the failing of a mind not calculated to endure a great pressure of care, and so much do I feel the pressure I am under, so much is my mind often darkened and troubled by care, that life seriously considered holds out few allurements,--only my children. "In returning to my family, from whom I have been so long separated, I am impressed with a new and solemn feeling of responsibility. It appears to me that I am not probably destined for long life; at all events, the feeling is strongly impressed upon my mind that a work is put into my hands which I must be earnest to finish shortly. It is nothing great or brilliant in the world's eye; it lies in one small family circle, of which I am called to be the central point." On her way home from this Eastern visit Mrs. Stowe traveled for the first time by rail, and of this novel experience she writes to Miss Georgiana May:-- BATAVIA, _August 29, 1842._ Here I am at Brother William's, and our passage along this railroad reminds me of the verse of the psalm:-- "Tho' lions roar and tempests blow, And rocks and dangers fill the way." Such confusion of tongues, such shouting and swearing, such want of all sort of system and decency in arrangements, I never desire to see again. I was literally almost trodden down and torn to pieces in the Rochester depot when I went to help my poor, near-sighted spouse in sorting out the baggage. You see there was an accident which happened to the cars leaving Rochester that morning, which kept us two hours and a half at the passing place this side of Auburn, waiting for them to come up and go by us. The consequence was that we got into this Rochester depot aforesaid after dark, and the steamboat, the canal-boat, and the Western train of cars had all been kept waiting three hours beyond their usual time, and they all broke loose upon us the moment we put our heads out of the cars, and such a jerking, and elbowing, and scuffling, and swearing, and protesting, and scolding you never heard, while the great locomotive sailed up and down in the midst thereof, spitting fire and smoke like some great fiend monster diverting himself with our commotions. I do think these steam concerns border a little too much on the supernatural to be agreeable, especially when you are shut up in a great dark depot after sundown. Well, after all, we had to ride till twelve o'clock at night to get to Batavia, and I've been sick abed, so to speak, ever since. The winter of 1842 was one of peculiar trial to the family at Walnut Hills; as Mrs. Stowe writes, "It was a season of sickness and gloom." Typhoid fever raged among the students of the seminary, and the house of the president was converted into a hospital, while the members of his family were obliged to devote themselves to nursing the sick and dying. July 6, 1843, a few weeks before the birth of her third daughter, Georgiana May, a most terrible and overwhelming sorrow came on Mrs. Stowe, in common with all the family, in the sudden death of her brother, the Rev. George Beecher. He was a young man of unusual talent and ability, and much loved by his church and congregation. The circumstances of his death are related in a letter written by Mrs. Stowe, and are as follows: "Noticing the birds destroying his fruit and injuring his plants, he went for a double-barreled gun, which he scarcely ever had used, out of regard to the timidity and anxiety of his wife in reference to it. Shortly after he left the house, one of the elders of his church in passing saw him discharge one barrel at the birds. Soon after he heard the fatal report and saw the smoke, but the trees shut out the rest from sight.... In about half an hour after, the family assembled at breakfast, and the servant was sent out to call him.... In a few minutes she returned, exclaiming, 'Oh, Mr. Beecher is dead! Mr. Beecher is dead!'... In a short time a visitor in the family, assisted by a passing laborer, raised him up and bore him to the house. His face was pale and but slightly marred, his eyes were closed, and over his countenance rested the sweet expression of peaceful slumber.... Then followed the hurried preparations for the funeral and journey, until three o'clock, when, all arrangements being made, he was borne from his newly finished house, through his blooming garden, to the new church, planned and just completed under his directing eye.... The sermon and the prayers were finished, the choir he himself had trained sung their parting hymn, and at about five the funeral train started for a journey of over seventy miles. That night will stand alone in the memories of those who witnessed its scenes! "At ten in the evening heavy clouds gathered lowering behind, and finally rose so as nearly to cover the hemisphere, sending forth mutterings of thunder and constant flashes of lightning. "The excessive heat of the weather, the darkness of the night, the solitary road, the flaring of the lamps and lanterns, the flashes of the lightning, the roll of approaching thunder, the fear of being overtaken in an unfrequented place and the lights extinguished by the rain, the sad events of the day, the cries of the infant boy sick with the heat and bewailing the father who ever before had soothed his griefs, all combined to awaken the deepest emotions of the sorrowful, the awful, and the sublime.... "And so it is at last; there must come a time when all that the most heart-broken, idolizing love can give us is a coffin and a grave! All that could be done for our brother, with all his means and all the affection of his people and friends, was just this, no more! After all, the deepest and most powerful argument for the religion of Christ is its power in times like this. Take from us Christ and what He taught, and what have we here? What confusion, what agony, what dismay, what wreck and waste! But give Him to us, even the most stricken heart can rise under the blow; yea, even triumph! "'Thy brother shall rise again,' said Jesus; and to us who weep He speaks: 'Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are made partakers of Christ's sufferings, that when his glory shall be revealed, ye also may be glad with exceeding joy!'" The advent of Mrs. Stowe's third daughter was followed by a protracted illness and a struggle with great poverty, of which Mrs. Stowe writes in October, 1843:-- "Our straits for money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even our bright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 is the very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1,200. We have a flock of entirely destitute young men in the seminary, as poor in money as they are rich in mental and spiritual resources. They promise to be as fine a band as those we have just sent off. We have two from Iowa and Wisconsin who were actually crowded from secular pursuits into the ministry by the wants of the people about them. Revivals began, and the people came to them saying, 'We have no minister, and you must preach to us, for you know more than we do.'" In the spring of 1844 Professor Stowe visited the East to arouse an interest in the struggling seminary and raise funds for its maintenance. While he was there he received the following letter from Mrs. Stowe:-- "I am already half sick with confinement to the house and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come I should not be able to accomplish a half of what is to be done, and should be only more unfit for my other duties." This struggle against ill-health and poverty was continued through that year and well into the next, when, during her husband's absence to attend a ministerial convention at Detroit, Mrs. Stowe writes to him:-- _June 16, 1845._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--It is a dark, sloppy, rainy, muddy, disagreeable day, and I have been working hard (for me) all day in the kitchen, washing dishes, looking into closets, and seeing a great deal of that dark side of domestic life which a housekeeper may who will investigate too curiously into minutiæ in warm, damp weather, especially after a girl who keeps all clean on the _outside_ of cup and platter, and is very apt to make good the rest of the text in the _inside_ of things. I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything, and then the clothes _will_ not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to eat again. Your letter, which was neither sour nor mouldy, formed a very agreeable contrast to all these things; the more so for being unexpected. I am much obliged to you for it. As to my health, it gives me very little solicitude, although I am bad enough and daily growing worse. I feel no life, no energy, no appetite, or rather a growing distaste for food; in fact, I am becoming quite ethereal. Upon reflection I perceive that it pleases my Father to keep me in the fire, for my whole situation is excessively harassing and painful. I suffer with sensible distress in the brain, as I have done more or less since my sickness last winter, a distress which some days takes from me all power of planning or executing anything; and you know that, except this poor head, my unfortunate household has no mainspring, for nobody feels any kind of responsibility to do a thing in time, place, or manner, except as I oversee it. Georgiana is so excessively weak, nervous, cross, and fretful, night and day, that she takes all Anna's strength and time with her; and then the children are, like other little sons and daughters of Adam, full of all kinds of absurdity and folly. When the brain gives out, as mine often does, and one cannot think or remember anything, then what is to be done? All common fatigue, sickness, and exhaustion is nothing to this distress. Yet do I rejoice in my God and know in whom I believe, and only pray that the fire may consume the dross; as to the gold, that is imperishable. No real evil can happen to me, so I fear nothing for the future, and only suffer in the present tense. God, the mighty God, is mine, of that I am sure, and I know He knows that though flesh and heart fail, I am all the while desiring and trying for his will alone. As to a journey, I need not ask a physician to see that it is needful to me as far as health is concerned, that is to say, all human appearances are that way, but I feel no particular choice about it. If God wills I go. He can easily find means. Money, I suppose, is as plenty with Him now as it always has been, and if He sees it is really best He will doubtless help me. That the necessary funds were provided is evident from the fact that the journey was undertaken and the invalid spent the summer of 1845 in Hartford, in Natick, and in Boston. She was not, however, permanently benefited by the change, and in the following spring it was deemed necessary to take more radical measures to arrest the progress of her increasing debility. After many consultations and much correspondence it was finally decided that she should go to Dr. Wesselhoeft's watercure establishment at Brattleboro', Vt. At this time, under date of March, 1846, she writes: "For all I have had trouble I can think of nothing but the greatness and richness of God's mercy to me in giving me such friends, and in always caring for us in every strait. There has been no day this winter when I have not had abundant reason to see this. Some friend has always stepped in to cheer and help, so that I have wanted for nothing. My husband has developed wonderfully as house-father and nurse. You would laugh to see him in his spectacles gravely marching the little troop in their nightgowns up to bed, tagging after them, as he says, like an old hen after a flock of ducks. The money for my journey has been sent in from an unknown hand in a wonderful manner. All this shows the care of our Father, and encourages me to rejoice and to hope in Him." A few days after her departure Professor Stowe wrote to his wife:-- "I was greatly comforted by your brief letter from Pittsburgh. When I returned from the steamer the morning you left I found in the post-office a letter from Mrs. G. W. Bull of New York, inclosing $50 on account of the sickness in my family. There was another inclosing $50 more from a Mrs. Devereaux of Raleigh, N. C., besides some smaller sums from others. My heart went out to God in aspiration and gratitude. None of the donors, so far as I know, have I ever seen or heard of before. "Henry and I have been living in a Robinson Crusoe and man Friday sort of style, greatly to our satisfaction, ever since you went away." Mrs. Stowe was accompanied to Brattleboro' by her sisters, Catherine and Mary, who were also suffering from troubles that they felt might be relieved by hydropathic treatment. From May, 1846, until March, 1847, she remained at Brattleboro' without seeing her husband or children. During these weary months her happiest days were those upon which she received letters from home. The following extracts, taken from letters written by her during this period, are of value, as revealing what it is possible to know of her habits of thought and mode of life at this time. BRATTLEBORO', _September, 1846._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I have been thinking of all your trials, and I really pity you in having such a wife. I feel as if I had been only a hindrance to you instead of a help, and most earnestly and daily do I pray to God to restore my health that I may do something for you and my family. I think if I were only at home I could at least sweep and dust, and wash potatoes, and cook a little, and talk some to my children, and should be doing something for my family. But the hope of getting better buoys me up. I go through these tedious and wearisome baths and bear that terrible douche thinking of my children. They never will know how I love them.... There is great truth and good sense in your analysis of the cause of our past failures. We have now come to a sort of crisis. If you and I do as we should for _five years_ to come the character of our three oldest children will be established. This is why I am willing to spend so much time and make such efforts to have health. Oh, that God would give me these five years in full possession of mind and body, that I may train my children as they should be trained. I am fully aware of the importance of system and order in a family. I know that nothing can be done without it; it is the keystone, the _sine quâ non_, and in regard to my children I place it next to piety. At the same time it is true that both Anna[4] and I labor under serious natural disadvantages on this subject. It is not all that is necessary to feel the importance of order and system, but it requires a particular kind of talent to carry it through a family. Very much the same kind of talent, as Uncle Samuel said, which is necessary to make a good prime minister.... I think you might make an excellent sermon to Christians on the care of health, in consideration of the various infirmities and impediments to the developing the results of religion, that result from bodily ill health, and I wish you would make one that your own mind may be more vividly impressed with it. The world is too much in a hurry. Ministers think there is no way to serve Christ but to overdraw on their physical capital for four or five years for Christ and then have nothing to give, but become a mere burden on his hands for the next five.... _November 18._ "The daily course I go through presupposes a degree of vigor beyond anything I ever had before. For this week, I have gone before breakfast to the wave-bath and let all the waves and billows roll over me till every limb ached with cold and my hands would scarcely have feeling enough to dress me. After that I have walked till I was warm, and come home to breakfast with such an appetite! Brown bread and milk are luxuries indeed, and the only fear is that I may eat too much. At eleven comes my douche, to which I have walked in a driving rain for the last two days, and after it walked in the rain again till I was warm. (The umbrella you gave me at Natick answers finely, as well as if it were a silk one.) After dinner I roll ninepins or walk till four, then sitz-bath, and another walk till six. "I am anxious for your health; do be persuaded to try a long walk before breakfast. You don't know how much good it will do you. Don't sit in your hot study without any ventilation, a stove burning up all the vitality of the air and weakening your nerves, and above all, do _amuse_ yourself. Go to Dr. Mussey's and spend an evening, and to father's and Professor Allen's. When you feel worried go off somewhere and forget and throw it off. I should really rejoice to hear that you and father and mother, with Professor and Mrs. Allen, Mrs. K., and a few others of the same calibre would agree to meet together for dancing cotillons. It would do you all good, and if you took Mr. K.'s wife and poor Miss Much-Afraid, her daughter, into the alliance it would do them good. Bless me! what a profane set everybody would think you were, and yet you are the people of all the world most solemnly in need of it. I wish you could be with me in Brattleboro' and coast down hill on a sled, go sliding and snowballing by moonlight! I would snowball every bit of the _hypo_ out of you! Now, my dear, if you are going to get sick, I am going to come home. There is no use in my trying to get well if you, in the mean time, are going to run yourself down." _January, 1847._ My dear Soul,--I received your most melancholy effusion, and I am sorry to find it's just so. I entirely agree and sympathize. Why didn't you engage the two tombstones--one for you and one for me? [Illustration: Ding, dong! Dead and gone!] I shall have to copy for your edification a "poem on tombstones" which Kate put at Christmas into the stocking of one of our most hypochondriac gentlemen, who had pished and pshawed at his wife and us for trying to get up a little fun. This poem was fronted with the above vignette and embellished with sundry similar ones, and tied with a long black ribbon. There were only two cantos in very concise style, so I shall send you them entire. CANTO I. In the kingdom of _Mortin_ I had the good fortin' To find these verses On tombs and on hearses, Which I, being jinglish Have done into English. [Illustration] CANTO II. The man what's so colickish When his friends are all frolickish As to turn up his noses And turn on his toses Shall have only verses On tombstones and hearses. But, seriously, my dear husband, you must try and be patient, for this cannot last forever. Be patient and bear it like the toothache, or a driving rain, or anything else that you cannot escape. To see things as through a glass darkly is your infirmity, you know; but the Lord will yet deliver you from this trial. I know how to pity you, for the last three weeks I have suffered from an overwhelming mental depression, a perfect heartsickness. All I wanted was to get home and die. Die I was very sure I should at any rate, but I suppose I was never less prepared to do so. The long exile was ended in the spring of 1847, and in May Mrs. Stowe returned to her Cincinnati home, where she was welcomed with sincere demonstrations of joy by her husband and children. Her sixth child, Samuel Charles, was born in January of 1848, and about this time her husband's health became so seriously impaired that it was thought desirable for him in turn to spend a season at the Brattleboro' water-cure. He went in June, 1848, and was compelled by the very precarious state of his health to remain until September, 1849. During this period of more than a year Mrs. Stowe remained in Cincinnati caring for her six children, eking out her slender income by taking boarders and writing when she found time, confronting a terrible epidemic of cholera that carried off one of her little flock, and in every way showing herself to be a brave woman, possessed of a spirit that could rise superior to all adversity. Concerning this time she writes in January, 1849, to her dearest friend:-- MY BELOVED GEORGY,--For six months after my return from Brattleboro' my eyes were so affected that I wrote scarce any, and my health was in so strange a state that I felt no disposition to write. After the birth of little Charley my health improved, but my husband was sick and I have been so loaded and burdened with cares as to drain me dry of all capacity of thought, feeling, memory, or emotion. Well, Georgy, I am thirty-seven years old! I am glad of it. I like to grow old and have six children and cares endless. I wish you could see me with my flock all around me. They sum up my cares, and were they gone I should ask myself, What now remains to be done? They are my work, over which I fear and tremble. In the early summer of 1849 cholera broke out in Cincinnati, and soon became epidemic. Professor Stowe, absent in Brattleboro', and filled with anxiety for the safety of his family, was most anxious, in spite of his feeble health, to return and share the danger with them, but this his wife would not consent to, as is shown by her letters to him, written at this time. In one of them, dated June 29, 1849, she says:-- MY DEAR HUSBAND,--This week has been unusually fatal. The disease in the city has been malignant and virulent. Hearse drivers have scarce been allowed to unharness their horses, while furniture carts and common vehicles are often employed for the removal of the dead. The sable trains which pass our windows, the frequent indications of crowding haste, and the absence of reverent decency have, in many cases, been most painful. Of course all these things, whether we will or no, bring very doleful images to the mind. On Tuesday one hundred and sixteen deaths from cholera were reported, and that night the air was of that peculiarly oppressive, deathly kind that seems to lie like lead on the brain and soul. As regards your coming home, I am decidedly opposed to it. First, because the chance of your being taken ill is just as great as the chance of your being able to render us any help. To exchange the salubrious air of Brattleboro' for the pestilent atmosphere of this place with your system rendered sensitive by water-cure treatment would be extremely dangerous. It is a source of constant gratitude to me that neither you nor father are exposed to the dangers here. Second, none of us are sick, and it is very uncertain whether we shall be. Third, if we were sick there are so many of us that it is not at all likely we shall all be taken at once. _July 1._ Yesterday Mr. Stagg went to the city and found all gloomy and discouraged, while a universal panic seemed to be drawing nearer than ever before. Large piles of coal were burning on the cross walks and in the public squares, while those who had talked confidently of the cholera being confined to the lower classes and those who were imprudent began to feel as did the magicians of old, "This is the finger of God." Yesterday, upon the recommendation of all the clergymen of the city, the mayor issued a proclamation for a day of general fasting, humiliation, and prayer, to be observed on Tuesday next. _July 3._ We are all in good health and try to maintain a calm and cheerful frame of mind. The doctors are nearly used up. Dr. Bowen and Dr. Peck are sick in bed. Dr. Potter and Dr. Pulte ought, I suppose, to be there also. The younger physicians have no rest night or day. Mr. Fisher is laid up from his incessant visitations with the sick and dying. Our own Dr. Brown is likewise prostrated, but we are all resolute to stand by each other, and there are so many of us that it is not likely we can all be taken sick together. _July 4._ All well. The meeting yesterday was very solemn and interesting. There is more or less sickness about us, but no very dangerous cases. One hundred and twenty burials from cholera alone yesterday, yet to-day we see parties bent on pleasure or senseless carousing, while to-morrow and next day will witness a fresh harvest of death from them. How we can become accustomed to anything! Awhile ago ten a day dying of cholera struck terror to all hearts; but now the tide has surged up gradually until the deaths average over a hundred daily, and everybody is getting accustomed to it. Gentlemen make themselves agreeable to ladies by reciting the number of deaths in this house or that. This together with talk of funerals, cholera medicines, cholera dietetics, and chloride of lime form the ordinary staple of conversation. Serious persons of course throw in moral reflections to their taste. _July 10._ Yesterday little Charley was taken ill, not seriously, and at any other season I should not be alarmed. Now, however, a slight illness seems like a death sentence, and I will not dissemble that I feel from the outset very little hope. I still think it best that you should not return. By so doing you might lose all you have gained. You might expose yourself to a fatal incursion of disease. It is decidedly not your duty to do so. _July 12._ Yesterday I carried Charley to Dr. Pulte, who spoke in such a manner as discouraged and frightened me. He mentioned dropsy on the brain as a possible result. I came home with a heavy heart, sorrowing, desolate, and wishing my husband and father were here. About one o'clock this morning Miss Stewart suddenly opened my door crying, "Mrs. Stowe, Henry is vomiting." I was on my feet in an instant, and lifted up my heart for help. He was, however, in a few minutes relieved. Then I turned my attention to Charley, who was also suffering, put him into a wet sheet, and kept him there until he was in a profuse perspiration. He is evidently getting better, and is auspiciously cross. Never was crossness in a baby more admired. Anna and I have said to each other exultingly a score of times, "How cross the little fellow is! How he does scold!" _July 15._ Since I last wrote our house has been a perfect hospital. Charley apparently recovering, but still weak and feeble, unable to walk or play, and so miserably fretful and unhappy. Sunday Anna and I were fairly stricken down, as many others are, with no particular illness, but with such miserable prostration. I lay on the bed all day reading my hymn-book and thinking over passages of Scripture. _July 17._ To-day we have been attending poor old Aunt Frankie's[5] funeral. She died yesterday morning, taken sick the day before while washing. Good, honest, trustful old soul! She was truly one who hungered and thirsted for righteousness. Yesterday morning our poor little dog, Daisy, who had been ailing the day before, was suddenly seized with frightful spasms and died in half an hour. Poor little affectionate thing! If I were half as good for my nature as she for hers I should be much better than I am. While we were all mourning over her the news came that Aunt Frankie was breathing her last. Hatty, Eliza, Anna, and I made her shroud yesterday, and this morning I made her cap. We have just come from her grave. _July 23._ At last, my dear, the hand of the Lord hath touched us. We have been watching all day by the dying bed of little Charley, who is gradually sinking. After a partial recovery from the attack I described in my last letter he continued for some days very feeble, but still we hoped for recovery. About four days ago he was taken with decided cholera, and now there is no hope of his surviving this night. Every kindness is shown us by the neighbors. Do not return. All will be over before you could possibly get here, and the epidemic is now said by the physicians to prove fatal to every new case. Bear up. Let us not faint when we are rebuked of Him. I dare not trust myself to say more but shall write again soon. _July 26._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--At last it is over and our dear little one is gone from us. He is now among the blessed. My Charley--my beautiful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so full of life and hope and strength--now lies shrouded, pale and cold, in the room below. Never was he anything to me but a comfort. He has been my pride and joy. Many a heartache has he cured for me. Many an anxious night have I held him to my bosom and felt the sorrow and loneliness pass out of me with the touch of his little warm hands. Yet I have just seen him in his death agony, looked on his imploring face when I could not help nor soothe nor do one thing, not one, to mitigate his cruel suffering, do nothing but pray in my anguish that he might die soon. I write as though there were no sorrow like my sorrow, yet there has been in this city, as in the land of Egypt, scarce a house without its dead. This heart-break, this anguish, has been everywhere, and when it will end God alone knows. With this severest blow of all, the long years of trial and suffering in the West practically end; for in September, 1849, Professor Stowe returned from Brattleboro', and at the same time received a call to the Collins Professorship at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, that he decided to accept. FOOTNOTES: [4] The governess, Miss Anna Smith. [5] An old colored woman. CHAPTER VI. REMOVAL TO BRUNSWICK, 1850-1852. MRS. STOWE'S REMARKS ON WRITING AND UNDERSTANDING BIOGRAPHY.--THEIR APPROPRIATENESS TO HER OWN BIOGRAPHY.--REASONS FOR PROFESSOR STOWE'S LEAVING CINCINNATI.--MRS. STOWE'S JOURNEY TO BROOKLYN.--HER BROTHER'S SUCCESS AS A MINISTER.--LETTERS FROM HARTFORD AND BOSTON.--ARRIVES IN BRUNSWICK.--HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY AGITATION.--PRACTICAL WORKING OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.--MRS. EDWARD BEECHER'S LETTER TO MRS. STOWE AND ITS EFFECT.--DOMESTIC TRIALS.--BEGINS TO WRITE "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" AS A SERIAL FOR THE "NATIONAL ERA."--LETTER TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS.--"UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" A WORK OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION. EARLY in the winter of 1849 Mrs. Stowe wrote in a private journal in which she recorded thought and feeling concerning religious themes: "It has been said that it takes a man to write the life of a man; that is, there must be similarity of mind in the person who undertakes to present the character of another. This is true, also, of reading and understanding biography. A statesman and general would read the life of Napoleon with the spirit and the understanding, while the commonplace man plods through it as a task. The difference is that the one, being of like mind and spirit with the subject of the biography, is able to sympathize with him in all his thoughts and experiences, and the other is not. The life of Henry Martyn would be tedious and unintelligible to a mind like that of a Richelieu or a Mazarin. They never experienced or saw or heard anything like it, and would be quite at a loss where to place such a man in their mental categories. It is not strange, therefore, that of all biography in the world that of Jesus Christ should be least understood. It is an exception to all the world has ever seen. 'The world knew Him not.' There is, to be sure, a simple grandeur about the life of Jesus which awes almost every mind. The most hardened scoffer, after he has jested and jeered at everything in the temple of Christianity, stands for a moment uncovered and breathless when he comes to the object of its adoration and feels how awful goodness is, and Virtue in her shape how lovely. Yet, after all, the character of the Christ has been looked at and not sympathized with. Men have turned aside to see this great sight. Christians have fallen in adoration, but very few have tried to enter into his sympathies and to feel as He felt." How little she dreamed that these words were to become profoundly appropriate as a description of her own life in its relation to mankind! How little the countless thousands who read, have read, and will read, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" enter into or sympathize with the feelings out of which it was written! A delicate, sensitive woman struggling with poverty, with weary step and aching head attending to the innumerable demands of a large family of growing children; a devoted Christian seeking with strong crying and tears a kingdom not of this world,--is this the popular conception of the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? Nevertheless it is the reality. When, amid the burning ruins of a besieged city, a mother's voice is heard uttering a cry of anguish over a child killed in her arms by a bursting shell, the attention is arrested, the heart is touched. So "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a cry of anguish from a mother's heart, and uttered in sad sincerity. It was the bursting forth of deep feeling, with all the intense anguish of wounded love. It will be the purpose of this chapter to show this, and to cause to pass before the reader's mind the time, the household, and the heart from which this cry was heard. After struggling for seventeen years with ill health and every possible vexation and hindrance in his work, Professor Stowe became convinced that it was his duty to himself and his family to seek some other field of labor. February 6, 1850, he writes to his mother, in Natick, Mass.: "My health has not been good this winter, and I do not suppose that I should live long were I to stay here. I have done a great deal of hard work here, and practiced no little self-denial. I have seen the seminary carried through a most vexatious series of lawsuits, ecclesiastical and civil, and raised from the depths of poverty to comparative affluence, and I feel at liberty now to leave. During the three months of June, July, and August last, more than nine thousand persons died of cholera within three miles of my house, and this winter, in the same territory, there have been more than ten thousand cases of small-pox, many of them of the very worst kind. Several have died on the hill, and the Jesuits' college near us has been quite broken up by it. There have been, however, no cases in our families or in the seminary. "I have received many letters from friends in the East expressing great gratification at the offer from Bowdoin College, and the hope that I would accept it. I am quite inclined to do so, but the matter is not yet finally settled, and there are difficulties in the way. They can offer me only $1,000 a year, and I must, out of it, hire my own house, at an expense of $75 to $100 a year. Here the trustees offer me $1,500 a year if I will stay, and a good house besides, which would make the whole salary equivalent to $1,800; and to-day I have had another offer from New York city of $2,300.... On the whole, I have written to Bowdoin College, proposing to them if they will give me $500 free and clear in addition to the salary, I will accept their proposition, and I suppose that there is no doubt that they will do it. In that case I should come on next spring, in May or June." This offer from Bowdoin College was additionally attractive to Professor Stowe from the fact that it was the college from which he graduated, and where some of the happiest years of his life had been passed. The professorship was one just established through the gift of Mrs. Collins, a member of Bowdoin Street Church in Boston, and named in her honor, the "Collins Professorship of Natural and Revealed Religion." It was impossible for Professor Stowe to leave Lane Seminary till some one could be found to take his place; so it was determined that Mrs. Stowe, with three of the children, should start for the East in April, and having established the family in Brunswick, Professor Stowe was to come on with the remaining children when his engagements would permit. The following extracts from a letter written by Mrs. Stowe at her brother Henry's, at Brooklyn, April 29, 1850, show us that the journey was accomplished without special incident. [Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher] "The boat got into Pittsburgh between four and five on Wednesday. The agent for the Pennsylvania Canal came on board and soon filled out our tickets, calling my three chicks one and a half. We had a quiet and agreeable passage, and crossed the slides at five o'clock in the morning, amid exclamations of unbounded delight from all the children, to whom the mountain scenery was a new and amazing thing. We reached Hollidaysburg about eleven o'clock, and at two o'clock in the night were called up to get into the cars at Jacktown. Arriving at Philadelphia about three o'clock in the afternoon, we took the boat and railroad line for New York. "At Lancaster we telegraphed to Brooklyn, and when we arrived in New York, between ten and eleven at night, Cousin Augustus met us and took us over to Brooklyn. We had ridden three hundred miles since two o'clock that morning, and were very tired.... I am glad we came that way, for the children have seen some of the finest scenery in our country.... Henry's people are more than ever in love with him, and have raised his salary to $3,300, and given him a beautiful horse and carriage worth $600.... My health is already improved by the journey, and I was able to walk a good deal between the locks on the canal. As to furniture, I think that we may safely afford an outlay of $150, and that will purchase all that may be necessary to set us up, and then we can get more as we have means and opportunity.... If I got anything for those pieces I wrote before coming away, I would like to be advised thereof by you.... My plan is to spend this week in Brooklyn, the next in Hartford, the next in Boston, and go on to Brunswick some time in May or June." May 18, 1850, we find her writing from Boston, where she is staying with her brother, Rev. Edward Beecher:-- MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I came here from Hartford on Monday, and have since then been busily engaged in the business of buying and packing furniture. I expect to go to Brunswick next Tuesday night by the Bath steamer, which way I take as the cheaper. My traveling expenses, when I get to Brunswick, including everything, will have been seventy-six dollars.... And now, lastly, my dear husband, you have never been wanting ... in kindness, consideration, and justice, and I want you to reflect calmly how great a work has been imposed upon me at a time when my situation particularly calls for rest, repose, and quiet. To come alone such a distance with the whole charge of children, accounts, and baggage; to push my way through hurrying crowds, looking out for trunks, and bargaining with hackmen, has been a very severe trial of my strength, to say nothing of the usual fatigues of traveling. It was at this time, and as a result of the experiences of this trying period, that Mrs. Stowe wrote that little tract dear to so many Christian hearts, "Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline." On the eve of sailing for Brunswick, Mrs. Stowe writes to Mrs. Sykes (Miss May): "I am wearied and worn out with seeing to bedsteads, tables, chairs, mattresses, with thinking about shipping my goods and making out accounts, and I have my trunk yet to pack, as I go on board the Bath steamer this evening. I beg you to look up Brunswick on the map; it is about half a day's ride in the cars from Boston. I expect to reach there by the way of Bath by to-morrow forenoon. There I have a house engaged and kind friends who offer every hospitable assistance. Come, therefore, to see me, and we will have a long talk in the pine woods, and knit up the whole history from the place where we left it." Before leaving Boston she had written to her husband in Cincinnati: "You are not able just now to bear anything, my dear husband, therefore trust all to me; I never doubt or despair. I am already making arrangements with editors to raise money. "I have sent some overtures to Wright. If he accepts my pieces and pays you for them, take the money and use it as you see necessary; if not, be sure and bring the pieces back to me. I am strong in spirit, and God who has been with me in so many straits will not forsake me now. I know Him well; He is my Father, and though I may be a blind and erring child, He will help me for all that. My trust through all errors and sins is in Him. He who helped poor timid Jacob through all his fears and apprehensions, who helped Abraham even when he sinned, who was with David in his wanderings, and who held up the too confident Peter when he began to sink,--He will help us, and his arms are about us, so that we shall not sink, my dear husband." May 29, 1850, she writes from Brunswick: "After a week of most incessant northeast storm, most discouraging and forlorn to the children, the sun has at length come out.... There is a fair wind blowing, and every prospect, therefore, that our goods will arrive promptly from Boston, and that we shall be in our own house by next week. Mrs. Upham[6] has done everything for me, giving up time and strength and taking charge of my affairs in a way without which we could not have got along at all in a strange place and in my present helpless condition. This family is delightful, there is such a perfect sweetness and quietude in all its movements. Not a harsh word or hasty expression is ever heard. It is a beautiful pattern of a Christian family, a beautiful exemplification of religion...." The events of the first summer in Brunswick are graphically described by Mrs. Stowe in a letter written to her sister-in-law, Mrs. George Beecher, December 17, 1850. MY DEAR SISTER,--Is it really true that snow is on the ground and Christmas coming, and I have not written unto thee, most dear sister? No, I don't believe it! I haven't been so naughty--it's all a mistake--yes, written I must have--and written I have, too--in the night-watches as I lay on my bed--such beautiful letters--I wish you had only gotten them; but by day it has been hurry, hurry, hurry, and drive, drive, drive! or else the calm of a sick-room, ever since last spring. I put off writing when your letter first came because I meant to write you a long letter--a full and complete one, and so days slid by,--and became weeks,--and my little Charlie came ... etc. and etc.!!! Sarah, when I look back, I wonder at myself, not that I forget any one thing that I should remember, but that I have remembered anything. From the time that I left Cincinnati with my children to come forth to a country that I knew not of almost to the present time, it has seemed as if I could scarcely breathe, I was so pressed with care. My head dizzy with the whirl of railroads and steamboats; then ten days' sojourn in Boston, and a constant toil and hurry in buying my furniture and equipments; and then landing in Brunswick in the midst of a drizzly, inexorable northeast storm, and beginning the work of getting in order a deserted, dreary, damp old house. All day long running from one thing to another, as for example, thus:-- Mrs. Stowe, how shall I make this lounge, and what shall I cover the back with first? _Mrs. Stowe._ With the coarse cotton in the closet. _Woman._ Mrs. Stowe, there isn't any more soap to clean the windows. _Mrs. Stowe._ Where shall I get soap? Here H., run up to the store and get two bars. There is a man below wants to see Mrs. Stowe about the cistern. Before you go down, Mrs. Stowe, just show me how to cover this round end of the lounge. There's a man up from the depot, and he says that a box has come for Mrs. Stowe, and it's coming up to the house; will you come down and see about it? Mrs. Stowe, don't go till you have shown the man how to nail that carpet in the corner. He's nailed it all crooked; what shall he do? The black thread is all used up, and what shall I do about putting gimp on the back of that sofa? Mrs. Stowe, there is a man come with a lot of pails and tinware from Furbish; will you settle the bill now? Mrs. Stowe, here is a letter just come from Boston inclosing that bill of lading; the man wants to know what he shall do with the goods. If you will tell me what to say I will answer the letter for you. Mrs. Stowe, the meat-man is at the door. Hadn't we better get a little beefsteak, or something, for dinner? Shall Hatty go to Boardman's for some more black thread? Mrs. Stowe, this cushion is an inch too wide for the frame. What shall we do now? Mrs. Stowe, where are the screws of the black walnut bedstead? Here's a man has brought in these bills for freight. Will you settle them now? Mrs. Stowe, I don't understand using this great needle. I can't make it go through the cushion; it sticks in the cotton. Then comes a letter from my husband saying he is sick abed, and all but dead; don't ever expect to see his family again; wants to know how I shall manage, in case I am left a widow; knows we shall get in debt and never get out; wonders at my courage; thinks I am very sanguine; warns me to be prudent, as there won't be much to live on in case of his death, etc., etc., etc. I read the letter and poke it into the stove, and proceed.... Some of my adventures were quite funny; as for example: I had in my kitchen elect no sink, cistern, or any other water privileges, so I bought at the cotton factory two of the great hogsheads they bring oil in, which here in Brunswick are often used for cisterns, and had them brought up in triumph to my yard, and was congratulating myself on my energy, when lo and behold! it was discovered that there was no cellar door except one in the kitchen, which was truly a strait and narrow way, down a long pair of stairs. Hereupon, as saith John Bunyan, I fell into a muse,--how to get my cisterns into my cellar. In days of chivalry I might have got a knight to make me a breach through the foundation walls, but that was not to be thought of now, and my oil hogsheads standing disconsolately in the yard seemed to reflect no great credit on my foresight. In this strait I fell upon a real honest Yankee cooper, whom I besought, for the reputation of his craft and mine, to take my hogsheads to pieces, carry them down in staves, and set them up again, which the worthy man actually accomplished one fair summer forenoon, to the great astonishment of "us Yankees." When my man came to put up the pump, he stared very hard to see my hogsheads thus translated and standing as innocent and quiet as could be in the cellar, and then I told him, in a very mild, quiet way, that I got 'em taken to pieces and put together--just as if I had been always in the habit of doing such things. Professor Smith came down and looked very hard at them and then said, "Well, nothing can beat a willful woman." Then followed divers negotiations with a very clever, but (with reverence) somewhat lazy gentleman of jobs, who occupieth a carpenter's shop opposite to mine. This same John Titcomb, my very good friend, is a character peculiar to Yankeedom. He is part owner and landlord of the house I rent, and connected by birth with all the best families in town; a man of real intelligence, and good education, a great reader, and quite a thinker. Being of an ingenious turn he does painting, gilding, staining, upholstery jobs, varnishing, all in addition to his primary trade of carpentry. But he is a man studious of ease, and fully possessed with the idea that man wants but little here below; so he boards himself in his workshop on crackers and herring, washed down with cold water, and spends his time working, musing, reading new publications, and taking his comfort. In his shop you shall see a joiner's bench, hammers, planes, saws, gimlets, varnish, paint, picture frames, fence posts, rare old china, one or two fine portraits of his ancestry, a bookcase full of books, the tooth of a whale, an old spinning-wheel and spindle, a lady's parasol frame, a church lamp to be mended, in short, Henry says Mr. Titcomb's shop is like the ocean; there is no end to the curiosities in it. In all my moving and fussing Mr. Titcomb has been my right-hand man. Whenever a screw was loose, a nail to be driven, a lock mended, a pane of glass set, and these cases were manifold, he was always on hand. But my sink was no fancy job, and I believe nothing but a very particular friendship would have moved him to undertake it. So this same sink lingered in a precarious state for some weeks, and when I had _nothing else to do_, I used to call and do what I could in the way of enlisting the good man's sympathies in its behalf. How many times I have been in and seated myself in one of the old rocking-chairs, and talked first of the news of the day, the railroad, the last proceedings in Congress, the probabilities about the millennium, and thus brought the conversation by little and little round to my sink!... because, till the sink was done, the pump could not be put up, and we couldn't have any rain-water. Sometimes my courage would quite fail me to introduce the subject, and I would talk of everything else, turn and get out of the shop, and then turn back as if a thought had just struck my mind, and say:-- "Oh, Mr. Titcomb! about that sink?" "Yes, ma'am, I was thinking about going down street this afternoon to look out stuff for it." "Yes, sir, if you would be good enough to get it done as soon as possible; we are in great need of it." "I think there's no hurry. I believe we are going to have a dry time now, so that you could not catch any water, and you won't need a pump at present." These negotiations extended from the first of June to the first of July, and at last my sink was completed, and so also was a new house spout, concerning which I had had divers communings with Deacon Dunning of the Baptist church. Also during this time good Mrs. Mitchell and myself made two sofas, or lounges, a barrel chair, divers bedspreads, pillow cases, pillows, bolsters, mattresses; we painted rooms; we revarnished furniture; we--what _didn't_ we do? Then came on Mr. Stowe; and then came the eighth of July and my little Charley. I was really glad for an excuse to lie in bed, for I was full tired, I can assure you. Well, I was what folks call very comfortable for two weeks, when my nurse had to leave me.... During this time I have employed my leisure hours in making up my engagements with newspaper editors. I have written more than anybody, or I myself, would have thought. I have taught an hour a day in our school, and I have read two hours every evening to the children. The children study English history in school, and I am reading Scott's historic novels in their order. To-night I finish the "Abbot;" shall begin "Kenilworth" next week; yet I am constantly pursued and haunted by the idea that I don't do anything. Since I began this note I have been called off at least a dozen times; once for the fish-man, to buy a codfish; once to see a man who had brought me some barrels of apples; once to see a book-man; then to Mrs. Upham, to see about a drawing I promised to make for her; then to nurse the baby; then into the kitchen to make a chowder for dinner; and now I am at it again, for nothing but deadly determination enables me ever to write; it is rowing against wind and tide. I suppose you think now I have begun, I am never going to stop, and in truth it looks like it; but the spirit moves now and I must obey. Christmas is coming, and our little household is all alive with preparations; every one collecting their little gifts with wonderful mystery and secrecy.... To tell the truth, dear, I am getting tired; my neck and back ache, and I must come to a close. Your ready kindness to me in the spring I felt very much; and _why_ I did not have the sense to have sent you one line just by way of acknowledgment, I'm sure I don't know; I felt just as if I had, till I awoke, and behold! I had not. But, my dear, if my wits are somewhat wool-gathering and unsettled, my heart is as true as a star. I love you, and have thought of you often. This fall I have felt often _sad_, lonesome, both very unusual feelings with me in these busy days; but the breaking away from my old home, and leaving father and mother, and coming to a strange place affected me naturally. In those sad hours my thoughts have often turned to George; I have thought with encouragement of his blessed state, and hoped that I should soon be there too. I have many warm and kind friends here, and have been treated with great attention and kindness. Brunswick is a delightful residence, and if you come East next summer you must come to my new home. George[7] would delight to go a-fishing with the children, and see the ships, and sail in the sailboats, and all that. Give Aunt Harriet's love to him, and tell him when he gets to be a painter to send me a picture. Affectionately yours, H. STOWE. The year 1850 is one memorable in the history of our nation as well as in the quiet household that we have followed in its pilgrimage from Cincinnati to Brunswick. The signers of the Declaration of Independence and the statesmen and soldiers of the Revolution were no friends of negro slavery. In fact, the very principles of the Declaration of Independence sounded the death-knell of slavery forever. No stronger utterances against this national sin are to be found anywhere than in the letters and published writings of Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry. "Jefferson encountered difficulties greater than he could overcome, and after vain wrestlings the words that broke from him, 'I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever,' were the words of despair. "It was the desire of Washington's heart that Virginia should remove slavery by a public act; and as the prospects of a general emancipation grew more and more dim ... he did all that he could by bequeathing freedom to his own slaves."[8] Hamilton was one of the founders of the Manumission Society, the object of which was the abolition of slaves in the State of New York. Patrick Henry, speaking of slavery, said: "A serious view of this subject gives a gloomy prospect to future times." Slavery was thought by the founders of our Republic to be a dying institution, and all the provisions of the Constitution touching slavery looked towards gradual emancipation as an inevitable result of the growth of the democracy. From an economic standpoint slave labor had ceased to be profitable. "The whole interior of the Southern States was languishing, and its inhabitants emigrating, for want of some object to engage their attention and employ their industry." The cultivation of cotton was not profitable for the reason that there was no machine for separating the seed from the fibre. This was the state of affairs in 1793, when Eli Whitney, a New England mechanic, at this time residing in Savannah, Georgia, invented his cotton-gin, or a machine to separate seed and fibre. "The invention of this machine at once set the whole country in active motion."[9] The effect of this invention may to some extent be appreciated when we consider that whereas in 1793 the Southern States produced only about five or ten thousand bales, in 1859 they produced over five millions. But with this increase of the cotton culture the value of slave property was augmented. Slavery grew and spread. In 1818 to 1821 it first became a factor in politics during the Missouri compromise. By this compromise slavery was not to extend north of latitude 36° 30´. From the time of this compromise till the year 1833 the slavery agitation slumbered. This was the year that the British set the slaves free in their West Indian dependencies. This act caused great uneasiness among the slaveholders of the South. The National Anti-Slavery Society met in Philadelphia and pronounced slavery a national sin, which could be atoned for only by immediate emancipation. Such men as Garrison and Lundy began a work of agitation that was soon to set the whole nation in a ferment. From this time on slavery became the central problem of American history, and the line of cleavage in American politics. The invasion of Florida when it was yet the territory of a nation at peace with the United States, and its subsequent purchase from Spain, the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, were the direct results of the policy of the pro-slavery party to increase its influence and its territory. In 1849 the State of California knocked at the door of the Union for admission as a free State. This was bitterly opposed by the slaveholders of the South, who saw in it a menace to the slave-power from the fact that no slave State was seeking admission at the same time. Both North and South the feeling ran so high as to threaten the dismemberment of the Union, and the scenes of violence and bloodshed which were to come eleven years afterwards. It was to preserve the Union and avert the danger of the hour that Henry Clay brought forward his celebrated compromise measures in the winter of 1850. To conciliate the North, California was to be admitted as a free State. To pacify the slaveholders of the South, more stringent laws were to be enacted "concerning persons bound to service in one State and escaping into another." The 7th of March, 1850, Daniel Webster made his celebrated speech, in which he defended this compromise, and the abolitionists of the North were filled with indignation, which found its most fitting expression in Whittier's "Ichabod:" "So fallen, so lost, the glory from his gray hairs gone." ... "When honor dies the man is dead." It was in the midst of this excitement that Mrs. Stowe, with her children and her modest hopes for the future, arrived at the house of her brother, Dr. Edward Beecher. Dr. Beecher had been the intimate friend and supporter of Lovejoy, who had been murdered by the slaveholders at Alton for publishing an anti-slavery paper. His soul was stirred to its very depths by the iniquitous law which was at this time being debated in Congress,--a law which not only gave the slaveholder of the South the right to seek out and bring back into slavery any colored person whom he claimed as a slave, but commanded the people of the free States to assist in this revolting business. The most frequent theme of conversation while Mrs. Stowe was in Boston was this proposed law, and when she arrived in Brunswick her soul was all on fire with indignation at this new indignity and wrong about to be inflicted by the slave-power on the innocent and defenseless. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, letter after letter was received by Mrs. Stowe in Brunswick from Mrs. Edward Beecher and other friends, describing the heart-rending scenes which were the inevitable results of the enforcement of this terrible law. Cities were more available for the capturing of escaped slaves than the country, and Boston, which claimed to have the cradle of liberty, opened her doors to the slave-hunters. The sorrow and anguish caused thereby no pen could describe. Families were broken up. Some hid in garrets and cellars. Some fled to the wharves and embarked in ships and sailed for Europe. Others went to Canada. One poor fellow who was doing good business as a crockery merchant, and supporting his family well, when he got notice that his master, whom he had left many years before, was after him, set out for Canada in midwinter on foot, as he did not dare to take a public conveyance. He froze both of his feet on the journey, and they had to be amputated. Mrs. Edward Beecher, in a letter to Mrs. Stowe's son, writing of this period, says:-- "I had been nourishing an anti-slavery spirit since Lovejoy was murdered for publishing in his paper articles against slavery and intemperance, when our home was in Illinois. These terrible things which were going on in Boston were well calculated to rouse up this spirit. What can I do? I thought. Not much myself, but I know one who can. So I wrote several letters to your mother, telling her of various heart-rending events caused by the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. I remember distinctly saying in one of them, 'Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.'... When we lived in Boston your mother often visited us.... Several numbers of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' were written in your Uncle Edward's study at these times, and read to us from the manuscripts." A member of Mrs. Stowe's family well remembers the scene in the little parlor in Brunswick when the letter alluded to was received. Mrs. Stowe herself read it aloud to the assembled family, and when she came to the passage, "I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is," Mrs. Stowe rose up from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and with an expression on her face that stamped itself on the mind of her child, said: "I will write something. I will if I live." This was the origin of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and Professor Cairnes has well said in his admirable work, "The Slave Power," "The Fugitive Slave Law has been to the slave power a questionable gain. Among its first-fruits was 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'" The purpose of writing a story that should make the whole nation feel that slavery was an accursed thing was not immediately carried out. In December, 1850, Mrs. Stowe writes: "Tell sister Katy I thank her for her letter and will answer it. As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I can't do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live. "What are folks in general saying about the slave law, and the stand taken by Boston ministers universally, except Edward? "To me it is incredible, amazing, mournful!! I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea.... I wish father would come on to Boston, and preach on the Fugitive Slave Law, as he once preached on the slave-trade, when I was a little girl in Litchfield. I sobbed aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another. I wish some Martin Luther would arise to set this community right." December 22, 1850, she writes to her husband in Cincinnati: "Christmas has passed, not without many thoughts of our absent one. If you want a description of the scenes in our family preceding it, _vide_ a 'New Year's Story,' which I have sent to the 'New York Evangelist.' I am sorry that in the hurry of getting off this piece and one for the 'Era' you were neglected." The piece for the "Era" was a humorous article called "A Scholar's Adventures in the Country," being, in fact, a picture drawn from life and embodying Professor Stowe's efforts in the department of agriculture while in Cincinnati. _December 29, 1850._ "We have had terrible weather here. I remember such a storm when I was a child in Litchfield. Father and mother went to Warren, and were almost lost in the snowdrifts. "Sunday night I rather watched than slept. The wind howled, and the house rocked just as our old Litchfield house used to. The cold has been so intense that the children have kept begging to get up from table at meal-times to warm feet and fingers. Our air-tight stoves warm all but the floor,--heat your head and keep your feet freezing. If I sit by the open fire in the parlor my back freezes, if I sit in my bedroom and try to write my head aches and my feet are cold. I am projecting a sketch for the 'Era' on the capabilities of liberated blacks to take care of themselves. Can't you find out for me how much Willie Watson has paid for the redemption of his friends, and get any items in figures of that kind that you can pick up in Cincinnati?... When I have a headache and feel sick, as I do to-day, there is actually not a place in the house where I can lie down and take a nap without being disturbed. Overhead is the school-room, next door is the dining-room, and the girls practice there two hours a day. If I lock my door and lie down some one is sure to be rattling the latch before fifteen minutes have passed.... There is no doubt in my mind that our expenses this year will come two hundred dollars, if not three, beyond our salary. We shall be able to come through, notwithstanding; but I don't want to feel obliged to work as hard every year as I have this. I can earn four hundred dollars a year by writing, but I don't want to feel that I must, and when weary with teaching the children, and tending the baby, and buying provisions, and mending dresses, and darning stockings, sit down and write a piece for some paper." January 12, 1851, Mrs. Stowe again writes to Professor Stowe at Cincinnati: "Ever since we left Cincinnati to come here the good hand of God has been visibly guiding our way. Through what difficulties have we been brought! Though we knew not where means were to come from, yet means have been furnished every step of the way, and in every time of need. I was just in some discouragement with regard to my writing; thinking that the editor of the 'Era' was overstocked with contributors, and would not want my services another year, and lo! he sends me one hundred dollars, and ever so many good words with it. Our income this year will be seventeen hundred dollars in all, and I hope to bring our expenses within thirteen hundred." It was in the month of February after these words were written that Mrs. Stowe was seated at communion service in the college church at Brunswick. Suddenly, like the unrolling of a picture, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom passed before her mind. So strongly was she affected that it was with difficulty she could keep from weeping aloud. Immediately on returning home she took pen and paper and wrote out the vision which had been as it were blown into her mind as by the rushing of a mighty wind. Gathering her family about her she read what she had written. Her two little ones of ten and twelve years of age broke into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, "Oh, mamma! slavery is the most cruel thing in the world." Thus Uncle Tom was ushered into the world, and it was, as we said at the beginning, a cry, an immediate, an involuntary expression of deep, impassioned feeling. Twenty-five years afterwards Mrs. Stowe wrote in a letter to one of her children, of this period of her life: "I well remember the winter you were a baby and I was writing 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard. I remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them." It was not till the following April that the first chapter of the story was finished and sent on to the "National Era" at Washington. In July Mrs. Stowe wrote to Frederick Douglass the following letter, which is given entire as the best possible introduction to the history of the career of that memorable work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." BRUNSWICK, _July 9, 1851._ FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ.: _Sir_,--You may perhaps have noticed in your editorial readings a series of articles that I am furnishing for the "Era" under the title of "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly." In the course of my story the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation. I am very desirous, therefore, to gain information from one who has been an actual laborer on one, and it occurred to me that in the circle of your acquaintance there might be one who would be able to communicate to me some such information as I desire. I have before me an able paper written by a Southern planter, in which the details and _modus operandi_ are given from his point of sight. I am anxious to have something more from another standpoint. I wish to be able to make a picture that shall be graphic and true to nature in its details. Such a person as Henry Bibb, if in the country, might give me just the kind of information I desire. You may possibly know of some other person. I will subjoin to this letter a list of questions, which in that case you will do me a favor by inclosing to the individual, with the request that he will at earliest convenience answer them. For some few weeks past I have received your paper through the mail, and have read it with great interest, and desire to return my acknowledgments for it. It will be a pleasure to me at some time when less occupied to contribute something to its columns. I have noticed with regret your sentiments on two subjects--the church and African colonization, ... with the more regret because I think you have a considerable share of reason for your feelings on both these subjects; but I would willingly, if I could, modify your views on both points. In the first place you say the church is "pro-slavery." There is a sense in which this may be true. The American church of all denominations, taken as a body, comprises the best and most conscientious people in the country. I do not say it comprises none but these, or that none such are found out of it, but only if a census were taken of the purest and most high principled men and women of the country, the majority of them would be found to be professors of religion in some of the various Christian denominations. This fact has given to the church great weight in this country--the general and predominant spirit of intelligence and probity and piety of its majority has given it that degree of weight that it has the power to decide the great moral questions of the day. Whatever it unitedly and decidedly sets itself against as moral evil it can put down. In this sense the church is responsible for the sin of slavery. Dr. Barnes has beautifully and briefly expressed this on the last page of his work on slavery, when he says: "Not all the force out of the church could sustain slavery an hour if it were not sustained in it." It then appears that the church has the power to put an end to this evil and does not do it. In this sense she may be said to be pro-slavery. But the church has the same power over intemperance, and Sabbath-breaking, and sin of all kinds. There is not a doubt that if the moral power of the church were brought up to the New Testament standpoint it is sufficient to put an end to all these as well as to slavery. But I would ask you, Would you consider it a fair representation of the Christian church in this country to say that it is pro-intemperance, pro-Sabbath-breaking, and pro everything that it might put down if it were in a higher state of moral feeling? If you should make a list of all the abolitionists of the country, I think that you would find a majority of them in the church--certainly some of the most influential and efficient ones are ministers. I am a minister's daughter, and a minister's wife, and I have had six brothers in the ministry (one is in heaven); I certainly ought to know something of the feelings of ministers on this subject. I was a child in 1820 when the Missouri question was agitated, and one of the strongest and deepest impressions on my mind was that made by my father's sermons and prayers, and the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time. I remember his preaching drawing tears down the hardest faces of the old farmers in his congregation. I well remember his prayers morning and evening in the family for "poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa," that the time of her deliverance might come; prayers offered with strong crying and tears, and which indelibly impressed my heart and made me what I am from my very soul, the enemy of all slavery. Every brother I have has been in his sphere a leading anti-slavery man. One of them was to the last the bosom friend and counselor of Lovejoy. As for myself and husband, we have for the last seventeen years lived on the border of a slave State, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped them with all we had to give. I have received the children of liberated slaves into a family school, and taught them with my own children, and it has been the influence that we found in the church and by the altar that has made us do all this. Gather up all the sermons that have been published on this offensive and unchristian Fugitive Slave Law, and you will find that those against it are numerically more than those in its favor, and yet some of the strongest opponents have not published their sermons. Out of thirteen ministers who meet with my husband weekly for discussion of moral subjects, only three are found who will acknowledge or obey this law in any shape. After all, my brother, the strength and hope of your oppressed race does lie in the church--in hearts united to Him of whom it is said, "He shall spare the souls of the needy, and precious shall their blood be in his sight." Everything is against you, but Jesus Christ is for you, and He has not forgotten his church, misguided and erring though it be. I have looked all the field over with despairing eyes; I see no hope but in Him. This movement must and will become a purely religious one. The light will spread in churches, the tone of feeling will rise, Christians North and South will give up all connection with, and take up their testimony against, slavery, and thus the work will be done. This letter gives us a conception of the state of moral and religious exaltation of the heart and mind out of which flowed chapter after chapter of that wonderful story. It all goes to prove the correctness of the position from which we started, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came from the heart rather than the head. It was an outburst of deep feeling, a cry in the darkness. The writer no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. A few years afterwards Mrs. Stowe, writing of this story, said, "This story is to show how Jesus Christ, who liveth and was dead, and now is alive and forevermore, has still a mother's love for the poor and lowly, and that no man can sink so low but that Jesus Christ will stoop to take his hand. Who so low, who so poor, who so despised as the American slave? The law almost denies his existence as a person, and regards him for the most part as less than a man--a mere thing, the property of another. The law forbids him to read or write, to hold property, to make a contract, or even to form a legal marriage. It takes from him all legal right to the wife of his bosom, the children of his body. He can do nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing, but what must belong to his master. Yet even to this slave Jesus Christ stoops, from where he sits at the right hand of the Father, and says, 'Fear not, thou whom man despiseth, for I am thy brother. Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine.'" "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a work of religion; the fundamental principles of the gospel applied to the burning question of negro slavery. It sets forth those principles of the Declaration of Independence that made Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, and Patrick Henry anti-slavery men; not in the language of the philosopher, but in a series of pictures. Mrs. Stowe spoke to the understanding and moral sense through the imagination. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law an impossibility. It aroused the public sentiment of the world by presenting in the concrete that which had been a mere series of abstract propositions. It was, as we have already said, an appeal to the imagination through a series of pictures. People are like children, and understand pictures better than words. Some one rushes into your dining-room while you are at breakfast and cries out, "Terrible railroad accident, forty killed and wounded, six were burned alive." "Oh, shocking! dreadful!" you exclaim, and yet go quietly on with your rolls and coffee. But suppose you stood at that instant by the wreck, and saw the mangled dead, and heard the piercing shrieks of the wounded, you would be faint and dizzy with the intolerable spectacle. So "Uncle Tom's Cabin" made the crack of the slavedriver's whip, and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every household in the land, till human hearts could endure it no longer. FOOTNOTES: [6] Wife of Professor Upham of Bowdoin College. [7] Her brother George's only child. [8] Bancroft's funeral oration on Lincoln. [9] Greeley's _American Conflict_, vol. i. p. 65. CHAPTER VII. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, 1852. "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" AS A SERIAL IN THE "NATIONAL ERA."--AN OFFER FOR ITS PUBLICATION IN BOOK FORM.--WILL IT BE A SUCCESS?--AN UNPRECEDENTED CIRCULATION.--CONGRATULATORY MESSAGES.--KIND WORDS FROM ABROAD.--MRS. STOWE TO THE EARL OF CARLISLE.--LETTERS FROM AND TO LORD SHAFTESBURY.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH ARTHUR HELPS. THE wonderful story that was begun in the "National Era," June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for about three months, was not completed in that paper until April 1, 1852. It had been contemplated as a mere magazine tale of perhaps a dozen chapters, but once begun it could no more be controlled than the waters of the swollen Mississippi, bursting through a crevasse in its levees. The intense interest excited by the story, the demands made upon the author for more facts, the unmeasured words of encouragement to keep on in her good work that poured in from all sides, and above all the ever-growing conviction that she had been intrusted with a great and holy mission, compelled her to keep on until the humble tale had assumed the proportions of a volume prepared to stand among the most notable books in the world. As Mrs. Stowe has since repeatedly said, "I could not control the story; it wrote itself;" or "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest of instruments in his hand. To Him alone should be given all the praise." Although the publication of the "National Era" has been long since suspended, the journal was in those days one of decided literary merit and importance. On its title-page, with the name of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey as editor, appeared that of John Greenleaf Whittier as corresponding editor. In its columns Mrs. Southworth made her first literary venture, while Alice and Phoebe Cary, Grace Greenwood, and a host of other well-known names were published with that of Mrs. Stowe, which appeared last of all in its prospectus for 1851. Before the conclusion of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Mrs. Stowe had so far outstripped her contemporaries that her work was pronounced by competent judges to be the most powerful production ever contributed to the magazine literature of this country, and she stood in the foremost rank of American writers. After finishing her story Mrs. Stowe penned the following appeal to its more youthful readers, and its serial publication was concluded:-- "The author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' must now take leave of a wide circle of friends whose faces she has never seen, but whose sympathies coming to her from afar have stimulated and cheered her in her work. "The thought of the pleasant family circles that she has been meeting in spirit week after week has been a constant refreshment to her, and she cannot leave them without a farewell. "In particular the dear children who have followed her story have her warmest love. Dear children, you will soon be men and women, and I hope that you will learn from this story always to remember and pity the poor and oppressed. When you grow up, show your pity by doing all you can for them. Never, if you can help it, let a colored child be shut out from school or treated with neglect and contempt on account of his color. Remember the sweet example of little Eva, and try to feel the same regard for all that she did. Then, when you grow up, I hope the foolish and unchristian prejudice against people merely on account of their complexion will be done away with. "Farewell, dear children, until we meet again." With the completion of the story the editor of the "Era" wrote: "Mrs. Stowe has at last brought her great work to a close. We do not recollect any production of an American writer that has excited more general and profound interest." For the story as a serial the author received $300. In the mean time, however, it had attracted the attention of Mr. John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher, who promptly made overtures for its publication in book form. He offered Mr. and Mrs. Stowe a half share in the profits, provided they would share with him the expense of publication. This was refused by Professor Stowe, who said he was altogether too poor to assume any such risk; and the agreement finally made was that the author should receive a ten per cent. royalty upon all sales. Mrs. Stowe had no reason to hope for any large pecuniary gain from this publication, for it was practically her first book. To be sure, she had, in 1832, prepared a small school geography for a Western publisher, and ten years later the Harpers had brought out her "Mayflower." Still, neither of these had been sufficiently remunerative to cause her to regard literary work as a money-making business, and in regard to this new contract she writes: "I did not know until a week afterward precisely what terms Mr. Stowe had made, and I did not care. I had the most perfect indifference to the bargain." The agreement was signed March 13, 1852, and, as by arrangement with the "National Era" the book publication of the story was authorized before its completion as a serial, the first edition of five thousand copies was issued on the twentieth of the same month. In looking over the first semi-annual statement presented by her publishers we find Mrs. Stowe charged, a few days before the date of publication of her book, with "one copy U. T. C. cloth $.56," and this was the first copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" ever sold in book form. Five days earlier we find her charged with one copy of Horace Mann's speeches. In writing of this critical period of her life Mrs. Stowe says:-- "After sending the last proof-sheet to the office I sat alone reading Horace Mann's eloquent plea for these young men and women, then about to be consigned to the slave warehouse of Bruin & Hill in Alexandria, Va.,--a plea impassioned, eloquent, but vain, as all other pleas on that side had ever proved in all courts hitherto. It seemed that there was no hope, that nobody would hear, nobody would read, nobody pity; that this frightful system, that had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada."[10] Filled with this fear, she determined to do all that one woman might to enlist the sympathies of England for the cause, and to avert, even as a remote contingency, the closing of Canada as a haven of refuge for the oppressed. To this end she at once wrote letters to Prince Albert, to the Duke of Argyll, to the Earls of Carlisle and Shaftesbury, to Macaulay, Dickens, and others whom she knew to be interested in the cause of anti-slavery. These she ordered to be sent to their several addresses, accompanied by the very earliest copies of her book that should be printed. Then, having done what she could, and committed the result to God, she calmly turned her attention to other affairs. In the mean time the fears of the author as to whether or not her book would be read were quickly dispelled. Three thousand copies were sold the very first day, a second edition was issued the following week, a third on the 1st of April, and within a year one hundred and twenty editions, or over three hundred thousand copies of the book, had been issued and sold in this country. Almost in a day the poor professor's wife had become the most talked-of woman in the world, her influence for good was spreading to its remotest corners, and henceforth she was to be a public character, whose every movement would be watched with interest, and whose every word would be quoted. The long, weary struggle with poverty was to be hers no longer; for, in seeking to aid the oppressed, she had also so aided herself that within four months from the time her book was published it had yielded her $10,000 in royalties. Now letters regarding the wonderful book, and expressing all shades of opinion concerning it, began to pour in upon the author. Her lifelong friend, whose words we have already so often quoted, wrote:-- "I sat up last night until long after one o'clock reading and finishing 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child, nor could I restrain an almost hysterical sobbing for an hour after I laid my head upon my pillow. I thought I was a thorough-going abolitionist before, but your book has awakened so strong a feeling of indignation and of compassion that I never seem to have had any feeling on this subject until now." The poet Longfellow wrote:-- I congratulate you most cordially upon the immense success and influence of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph of its moral effect. With great regard, and friendly remembrance to Mr. Stowe, I remain, Yours most truly, HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. Whittier wrote to Garrison:-- "What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'" Garrison wrote to Mrs. Stowe:-- "I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you." To Mrs. Stowe, Whittier wrote:-- Ten thousand thanks for thy immortal book. My young friend Mary Irving (of the "Era") writes me that she has been reading it to some twenty young ladies, daughters of Louisiana slaveholders, near New Orleans, and amid the scenes described in it, and that they, with one accord, pronounce it true. Truly thy friend, JOHN G. WHITTIER. From Thomas Wentworth Higginson came the following:-- To have written at once the most powerful of contemporary fictions and the most efficient of anti-slavery tracts is a double triumph in literature and philanthropy, to which this country has heretofore seen no parallel. Yours respectfully and gratefully, T. W. HIGGINSON. A few days after the publication of the book, Mrs. Stowe, writing from Boston to her husband in Brunswick, says: "I have been in such a whirl ever since I have been here. I found business prosperous. Jewett animated. He has been to Washington and conversed with all the leading senators, Northern and Southern. Seward told him it was the greatest book of the times, or something of that sort, and he and Sumner went around with him to recommend it to Southern men and get them to read it." It is true that with these congratulatory and commendatory letters came hosts of others, threatening and insulting, from the Haleys and Legrees of the country. Of them Mrs. Stowe said: "They were so curiously compounded of blasphemy, cruelty, and obscenity, that their like could only be expressed by John Bunyan's account of the speech of Apollyon: 'He spake as a dragon.'" A correspondent of the "National Era" wrote: "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is denounced by time-serving preachers as a meretricious work. Will you not come out in defense of it and roll back the tide of vituperation?" To this the editor answered: "We should as soon think of coming out in defense of Shakespeare." Several attempts were made in the South to write books controverting "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and showing a much brighter side of the slavery question, but they all fell flat and were left unread. Of one of them, a clergyman of Charleston, S. C., wrote in a private letter:-- "I have read two columns in the 'Southern Press' of Mrs. Eastman's 'Aunt Phillis' Cabin, or Southern Life as it is,' with the remarks of the editor. I have no comment to make on it, as that is done by itself. The editor might have saved himself being writ down an ass by the public if he had withheld his nonsense. If the two columns are a fair specimen of Mrs. Eastman's book, I pity her attempt and her name as an author." In due time Mrs. Stowe began to receive answers to the letters she had forwarded with copies of her book to prominent men in England, and these were without exception flattering and encouraging. Through his private secretary Prince Albert acknowledged with thanks the receipt of his copy, and promised to read it. Succeeding mails brought scores of letters from English men of letters and statesmen. Lord Carlisle wrote:-- "I return my deep and solemn thanks to Almighty God who has led and enabled you to write such a book. I do feel indeed the most thorough assurance that in his good Providence such a book cannot have been written in vain. I have long felt that slavery is by far the _topping_ question of the world and age we live in, including all that is most thrilling in heroism and most touching in distress; in short, the real epic of the universe. The self-interest of the parties most nearly concerned on the one hand, the apathy and ignorance of unconcerned observers on the other, have left these august pretensions to drop very much out of sight. Hence my rejoicing that a writer has appeared who will be read and must be felt, and that happen what may to the transactions of slavery they will no longer be suppressed." To this letter, of which but an extract has been given, Mrs. Stowe sent the following reply:-- MY LORD,--It is not with the common pleasure of gratified authorship that I say how much I am gratified by the receipt of your very kind communication with regard to my humble efforts in the cause of humanity. The subject is one so grave, so awful--the success of what I have written has been so singular and so unexpected--that I can scarce retain a self-consciousness and am constrained to look upon it all as the work of a Higher Power, who, when He pleases, can accomplish his results by the feeblest instruments. I am glad of anything which gives notoriety to the book, because it is a plea for the dumb and the helpless! I am glad particularly of notoriety in England because I see with what daily increasing power England's opinion is to act on this country. No one can tell but a _native_ born here by what an infinite complexity of ties, nerves, and ligaments this terrible evil is bound in one body politic; how the slightest touch upon it causes even the free States to thrill and shiver, what a terribly corrupting and tempting power it has upon the conscience and moral sentiment even of a free community. Nobody can tell the thousand ways in which by trade, by family affinity, or by political expediency, the free part of our country is constantly tempted to complicity with the slaveholding part. It is a terrible thing to become used to hearing the enormities of slavery, to hear of things day after day that one would think the sun should hide his face from, and yet, to _get used to them_, to discuss them coolly, to dismiss them coolly. For example, the sale of intelligent, handsome colored females for vile purposes, facts of the most public nature, have made this a perfectly understood matter in our Northern States. I have now, myself, under charge and educating, two girls of whose character any mother might be proud, who have actually been rescued from this sale in the New Orleans market. I desire to inclose a tract[11] in which I sketched down a few incidents in the history of the family to which these girls belong; it will show more than words can the kind of incident to which I allude. The tract is not a published document, only _printed_ to assist me in raising money, and it would not, at present, be for the good of the parties to have it published even in England. But though these things are known in the free States, and other things, if possible, worse, yet there is a terrible deadness of moral sense. They are known by clergymen who yet would not on any account so far commit themselves as to preach on the evils of slavery, or pray for the slaves in their pulpits. They are known by politicians who yet give their votes for slavery extension and perpetuation. This year both our great leading parties voted to suppress all agitation of the subject, and in both those parties were men who knew personally facts of slavery and the internal slave-trade that one would think no man could ever forget. Men _united_ in pledging themselves to the Fugitive Slave Law, who yet would tell you in private conversation that it was an abomination, and who do not hesitate to say, that as a matter of practice they always help the fugitive because they _can't_ do otherwise. The moral effect of this constant insincerity, the moral effect of witnessing and becoming accustomed to the most appalling forms of crime and oppression, is to me the most awful and distressing part of the subject. Nothing makes me feel it so painfully as to see with how much more keenness the English feel the disclosures of my book than the Americans. I myself am blunted by use--by seeing, touching, handling the details. In dealing even for the ransom of slaves, in learning market prices of men, women, and children, I feel that I acquire a horrible familiarity with evil. Here, then, the great, wise, and powerful mind of England, if she will but fully master the subject, may greatly help us. Hers is the same kind of mind as our own, but disembarrassed from our temptations and unnerved by the thousands of influences that blind and deaden us. There is a healthful vivacity of moral feeling on this subject that must electrify our paralyzed vitality. For this reason, therefore, I rejoice when I see minds like your lordship's turning to this subject; and I feel an intensity of emotion, as if I could say, Do not for Christ's sake let go; you know not what you may do. Your lordship will permit me to send you two of the most characteristic documents of the present struggle, written by two men who are, in their way, as eloquent for the slave as Chatham was for us in our hour of need. I am now preparing some additional notes to my book, in which I shall further confirm what I have said by facts and statistics, and in particular by extracts from the _codes of slaveholding States_, and the _records of their courts_. These are documents that cannot be disputed, and I pray your lordship to give them your attention. No disconnected facts can be so terrible as these legal decisions. They will soon appear in England. It is so far from being irrelevant for England to notice slavery that I already see indications that this subject, on _both sides_, is yet to be presented there, and the battle fought on _English ground_. I see that my friend the South Carolinian gentleman has sent to "Fraser's Magazine" an article; before published in this country, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The article in the London "Times" was eagerly reprinted in this country, was issued as a tract and sold by the hundred, headed, "What they think of 'Uncle Tom' in England." If I mistake not, a strong effort will be made to pervert the public mind of England, and to do away the impression which the book has left. For a time after it was issued it seemed to go by acclamation. From quarters the most unexpected, from all political parties, came an almost unbroken chorus of approbation. I was very much surprised, knowing the explosive nature of the subject. It was not till the sale had run to over a hundred thousand copies that reaction began, and the reaction was led off by the London "Times." Instantly, as by a preconcerted signal, all papers of a certain class began to abuse; and some who had at first issued articles entirely commendatory, now issued others equally depreciatory. Religious papers, notably the "New York Observer," came out and denounced the book as _anti-Christian_, anti-evangelical, resorting even to personal slander on the author as a means of diverting attention from the work. All this has a meaning, but I think it comes too late. I can think of no reason why it was not tried sooner, excepting that God had intended that the cause should have a hearing. It is strange that they should have waited so long for the political effect of a book which they might have foreseen at first; but not strange that they should, now they _do_ see what it is doing, attempt to root it up. The effects of the book so far have been, I think, these: 1st. To soften and moderate the bitterness of feeling in _extreme abolitionists_. 2d. To convert to abolitionist views many whom this same bitterness had repelled. 3d. To inspire the free colored people with self-respect, hope, and confidence. 4th. To inspire universally through the country a kindlier feeling toward the negro race. It was unfortunate for the cause of freedom that the first agitators of this subject were of that class which your lordship describes in your note as "well-meaning men." I speak sadly of their faults, for they were men of _noble_ hearts. "But oppression maketh a wise man _mad_," and they spoke and did many things in the frenzy of outraged humanity that repelled sympathy and threw multitudes off to a hopeless distance. It is mournful to think of all the absurdities that have been said and done in the name and for the sake of this holy cause, that have so long and so fatally retarded it. I confess that I expected for myself nothing but abuse from extreme abolitionists, especially as I dared to name a forbidden shibboleth, "Liberia," and the fact that the wildest and extremest abolitionists united with the coldest conservatives, at first, to welcome and advance the book is a thing that I have never ceased to wonder at. I have written this long letter because I am extremely desirous that some leading minds in England should know how _we_ stand. The subject is now on trial at the bar of a civilized world--a Christian world! and I feel sure that God has not ordered this without a design. Yours for the cause, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. In December the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote to Mrs. Stowe:-- MADAM,--It is very possible that the writer of this letter may be wholly unknown to you. But whether my name be familiar to your ears, or whether you now read it for the first time, I cannot refrain from expressing to you the deep gratitude that I feel to Almighty God who has inspired both your heart and your head in the composition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." None but a Christian believer could have produced such a book as yours, which has absolutely startled the whole world, and impressed many thousands by revelations of cruelty and sin that give us an idea of what would be the uncontrolled dominion of Satan on this fallen earth. To this letter Mrs. Stowe replied as follows:-- ANDOVER, _January 6, 1853._ TO THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY: _My Lord_,--The few lines I have received from you are a comfort and an encouragement to me, feeble as I now am in health, and pressed oftentimes with sorrowful thoughts. It is a comfort to know that in other lands there are those who feel as we feel, and who are looking with simplicity to the gospel of Jesus, and prayerfully hoping his final coming. My lord, before you wrote me I read with deep emotion your letter to the ladies of England, and subsequently the noble address of the Duchess of Sutherland, and I could not but feel that such movements, originating in such a quarter, prompted by a spirit so devout and benevolent, were truly of God, and must result in a blessing to the world. I grieve to see that both in England and this country there are those who are entirely incapable of appreciating the Christian and truly friendly feeling that prompted this movement, and that there are even those who meet it with coarse personalities such as I had not thought possible in an English or American paper. When I wrote my work it was in simplicity and in the love of Christ, and if I felt anything that seemed to me like a call to undertake it, it was this, that I had a true heart of love for the Southern people, a feeling appreciation of their trials, and a sincere admiration of their many excellent traits, and that I thus felt, I think, must appear to every impartial reader of the work. It was my hope that a book so kindly intended, so favorable in many respects, might be permitted free circulation among them, and that the gentle voice of Eva and the manly generosity of St. Clare might be allowed to say those things of the system which would be invidious in any other form. At first the book seemed to go by acclamation; the South did not condemn, and the North was loud and unanimous in praise; not a dissenting voice was raised; to my astonishment everybody praised. But when the book circulated so widely and began to penetrate the Southern States, when it began to be perceived how powerfully it affected every mind that read it, there came on a reaction. Answers, pamphlets, newspaper attacks came thick and fast, and certain Northern papers, religious,--so called,--turned and began to denounce the work as unchristian, heretical, etc. The reason of all this is that it has been seen that the book has a direct tendency to do what it was written for,--to awaken conscience in the slaveholding States and lead to emancipation. Now there is nothing that Southern political leaders and capitalists so dread as anti-slavery feeling among themselves. All the force of lynch law is employed to smother discussion and blind conscience on this question. The question is not allowed to be discussed, and he who sells a book or publishes a tract makes himself liable to fine and imprisonment. My book is, therefore, as much under an interdict in some parts of the South as the Bible is in Italy. It is not allowed in the bookstores, and the greater part of the people hear of it and me only through grossly caricatured representations in the papers, with garbled extracts from the book. A cousin residing in Georgia this winter says that the prejudice against my name is so strong that she dares not have it appear on the outside of her letters, and that very amiable and excellent people have asked her if such as I could be received into reputable society at the North. Under these circumstances, it is a matter of particular regret that the "New York Observer," an old and long-established religious paper in the United States, extensively read at the South, should have come out in such a bitter and unscrupulous style of attack as even to induce some Southern papers, with a generosity one often finds at the South, to protest against it. That they should use their Christian character and the sacred name of Christ still further to blind the minds and strengthen the prejudices of their Southern brethren is to me a matter of deepest sorrow. All those things, of course, cannot touch me in my private capacity, sheltered as I am by a happy home and very warm friends. I only grieve for it as a dishonor to Christ and a real injustice to many noble-minded people at the South, who, if they were allowed quietly and dispassionately to hear and judge, might be led to the best results. But, my lord, all this only shows us how strong is the interest we touch. _All the wealth of America_ may be said to be interested in it. And, if I may judge from the furious and bitter tone of some English papers, they also have some sensitive connection with the evil. I trust that those noble and gentle ladies of England who have in so good a spirit expressed their views of the question will not be discouraged by the strong abuse that will follow. England is doing us good. We need the vitality of a disinterested country to warm our torpid and benumbed public sentiment. Nay, the storm of feeling which the book raises in Italy, Germany, and France is all good, though truly 'tis painful for us Americans to bear. The fact is, we have become used to this frightful evil, and we need the public sentiment of the world to help us. I am now writing a work to be called "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin." It contains, in an undeniable form, the facts which corroborate all that I have said. One third of it is taken up with judicial records of trials and decisions, and with statute law. It is a most fearful story, my lord,--I can truly say that I write with life-blood, but as called of God. I give in my evidence, and I hope that England may so fix the attention of the world on the facts of which I am the unwilling publisher, that the Southern States may be compelled to notice what hitherto they have denied and ignored. If they call the fiction dreadful, what will they say of the fact, where I cannot deny, suppress, or color? But it is God's will that it must be told, and I am the unwilling agent. This coming month of April, my husband and myself expect to sail for England on the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of the Ladies and Gentlemen of Glasgow, to confer with friends there. There are points where English people can do much good; there are also points where what they seek to do may be made more efficient by a little communion with those who know the feelings and habits of our countrymen: but I am persuaded that England can do much for us. My lord, they greatly mistake who see, in this movement of English Christians for the abolition of slavery, signs of disunion between the nations. It is the purest and best proof of friendship England has ever shown us, and will, I am confident, be so received. I earnestly trust that all who have begun to take in hand the cause will be in nothing daunted, but persevere to the end; for though everything else be against us, _Christ_ is certainly on our side and He _must at last prevail_, and it will be done, "not by might, nor by power, but by His Spirit." Yours in Christian sincerity, H. B. STOWE. Mrs. Stowe also received a letter from Arthur Helps[12] accompanying a review of her work written by himself and published in "Fraser's Magazine." In his letter Mr. Helps took exception to the comparison instituted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" between the working-classes of England and the slaves of America. In her answer to this criticism and complaint Mrs. Stowe says:-- MR. ARTHUR HELPS: _My dear Sir_,--I cannot but say I am greatly obliged to you for the kind opinions expressed in your letter. On one point, however, it appears that my book has not faithfully represented to you the feelings of my heart. I mean in relation to the English nation as a nation. You will notice that the remarks on that subject occur in the _dramatic_ part of the book, in the mouth of an intelligent Southerner. As a fair-minded person, bound to state for both sides all that could be said in the person of St. Clare, the best that could be said on that point, and what I know _is_ in fact constantly reiterated, namely, that the laboring class of the South are in many respects, as to physical comfort, in a better condition than the poor of England. This is the slaveholder's stereotyped apology,--a defense it cannot be, unless two wrongs make one right. It is generally supposed among us that this estimate of the relative condition of the slaves and the poor of England is correct, and we base our ideas on reports made in Parliament and various documentary evidence; also such sketches as "London Labor and London Poor," which have been widely circulated among us. The inference, however, which _we_ of the freedom party draw from it, is _not_ that the slave is, on the whole, in the best condition because of this striking difference; that in America the slave has not a recognized _human_ character _in law, has not even an existence_, whereas in England the law recognizes and protects the meanest subject, in theory _always_, and in _fact_ to a certain extent. A prince of the blood could not strike the meanest laborer without a liability to prosecution, in _theory_ at least, and that is something. In America any man may strike any slave he meets, and if the master does not choose to notice it, he has no redress. I do not suppose _human nature_ to be widely different in England and America. In both countries, when any class holds power and wealth by institutions which in the long run bring misery on lower classes, they are very unwilling still to part with that wealth and power. They are unwilling to be convinced that it is their duty, and unwilling to do it if they are. It is always so everywhere; it is not English nature or American nature, but human nature. We have seen in England the battle for popular rights fought step by step with as determined a resistance from parties in possession as the slaveholder offers in America. There was the same kind of resistance in certain quarters there to the laws restricting the employing of young children eighteen hours a day in factories, as there is here to the anti-slavery effort. Again, in England as in America, there are, in those very classes whose interests are most invaded by what are called popular rights, some of the most determined supporters of them, and here I think that the balance preponderates in favor of England. I think there are more of the high nobility of England who are friends of the common people and willing to help the cause of human progress, irrespective of its influence on their own interests, than there are those of a similar class among slaveholding aristocracy, though even that class is not without such men. But I am far from having any of that senseless prejudice against the English nation as a nation which, greatly to my regret, I observe sometimes in America. It is a relic of barbarism for two such nations as England and America to cherish any such unworthy prejudice. For my own part, I am proud to be of English blood; and though I do not think England's national course faultless, and though I think many of her institutions and arrangements capable of much revision and improvement, yet my heart warms to her as, _on the whole_, the strongest, greatest, and best nation on earth. Have not England and America one blood, one language, one literature, and a glorious literature it is! Are not Milton and Shakespeare, and all the wise and brave and good of old, common to us both, and should there be anything but cordiality between countries that have so glorious an inheritance in common? If there is, it will be elsewhere than in hearts like mine. Sincerely yours, H. B. STOWE. FOOTNOTES: [10] Introduction to Illustrated Edition of _Uncle Tom_, p. xiii. (Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1879.) [11] Afterwards embodied in the _Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_. [12] Author of _Spanish Conquest in America_.--ED. CHAPTER VIII. FIRST TRIP TO EUROPE, 1853. THE EDMONDSONS.--BUYING SLAVES TO SET THEM FREE.--JENNY LIND.--PROFESSOR STOWE IS CALLED TO ANDOVER.--FITTING UP THE NEW HOME.--THE "KEY TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN."--"UNCLE TOM" ABROAD.--HOW IT WAS PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND.--PREFACE TO THE EUROPEAN EDITION.--THE BOOK IN FRANCE.--IN GERMANY.--A GREETING FROM CHARLES KINGSLEY.--PREPARING TO VISIT SCOTLAND.--LETTER TO MRS. FOLLEN. VERY soon after the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Mrs. Stowe visited her brother Henry in Brooklyn, and while there became intensely interested in the case of the Edmondsons, a slave family of Washington, D. C. Emily and Mary two of the daughters of Paul (a free colored man) and Milly (a slave) Edmondson, had, for trying to escape from bondage, been sold to a trader for the New Orleans market. While they were lying in jail in Alexandria awaiting the making up of a gang for the South, their heartbroken father determined to visit the North and try to beg from a freedom-loving people the money with which to purchase his daughters' liberty. The sum asked by the trader was $2,250, but its magnitude did not appall the brave old man, and he set forth upon his quest full of faith that in some way he would secure it. Reaching New York, he went to the anti-slavery bureau and related his pitiful story. The sum demanded was such a large one and seemed so exorbitant that even those who took the greatest interest in the case were disheartened over the prospect of raising it. The old man was finally advised to go to Henry Ward Beecher and ask his aid. He made his way to the door of the great Brooklyn preacher's house, but, overcome by many disappointments and fearing to meet with another rebuff, hesitated to ring the bell, and sat down on the steps with tears streaming from his eyes. There Mr. Beecher found him, learned his story, and promised to do what he could. There was a great meeting in Plymouth Church that evening, and, taking the old colored man with him to it, Mrs. Stowe's brother made such an eloquent and touching appeal on behalf of the slave girls as to rouse his audience to profound indignation and pity. The entire sum of $2,250 was raised then and there, and the old man, hardly able to realize his great joy, was sent back to his despairing children with their freedom money in his hand. All this had happened in the latter part of 1848, and Mrs. Stowe had first known of the liberated girls in 1851, when she had been appealed to for aid in educating them. From that time forward she became personally responsible for all their expenses while they remained in school, and until the death of one of them in 1853. Now during her visit to New York in the spring of 1852 she met their old mother, Milly Edmondson, who had come North in the hope of saving her two remaining slave children, a girl and a young man, from falling into the trader's clutches. Twelve hundred dollars was the sum to be raised, and by hard work the father had laid by one hundred of it when a severe illness put an end to his efforts. After many prayers and much consideration of the matter, his feeble old wife said to him one day, "Paul, I'm a gwine up to New York myself to see if I can't get that money." Her husband objected that she was too feeble, that she would be unable to find her way, and that Northern people had got tired of buying slaves to set them free, but the resolute old woman clung to her purpose and finally set forth. Reaching New York she made her way to Mr. Beecher's house, where she was so fortunate as to find Mrs. Stowe. Now her troubles were at an end, for this champion of the oppressed at once made the slave woman's cause her own and promised that her children should be redeemed. She at once set herself to the task of raising the purchase-money, not only for Milly's children, but for giving freedom to the old slave woman herself. On May 29, she writes to her husband in Brunswick:-- "The mother of the Edmondson girls, now aged and feeble, is in the city. I did not actually know when I wrote 'Uncle Tom' of a living example in which Christianity had reached its fullest development under the crushing wrongs of slavery, but in this woman I see it. I never knew before what I could feel till, with her sorrowful, patient eyes upon me, she told me her history and begged my aid. The expression of her face as she spoke, and the depth of patient sorrow in her eyes, was beyond anything I ever saw. "'Well,' said I, when she had finished, 'set your heart at rest; you and your children shall be redeemed. If I can't raise the money otherwise, I will pay it myself.' You should have seen the wonderfully sweet, solemn look she gave me as she said, 'The Lord bless you, my child!' "Well, I have received a sweet note from Jenny Lind, with her name and her husband's with which to head my subscription list. They give a hundred dollars. Another hundred is subscribed by Mr. Bowen in his wife's name, and I have put my own name down for an equal amount. A lady has given me twenty-five dollars, and Mr. Storrs has pledged me fifty dollars. Milly and I are to meet the ladies of Henry's and Dr. Cox's churches to-morrow, and she is to tell them her story. I have written to Drs. Bacon and Dutton in New Haven to secure a similar meeting of ladies there. I mean to have one in Boston, and another in Portland. It will do good to the givers as well as to the receivers. "But all this time I have been so longing to get your letter from New Haven, for I heard it was there. It is not fame nor praise that contents me. I seem never to have needed love so much as now. I long to hear you say how much you love me. Dear one, if this effort impedes my journey home, and wastes some of my strength, you will not murmur. When I see this Christlike soul standing so patiently bleeding, yet forgiving, I feel a sacred call to be the helper of the helpless, and it is better that my own family do without me for a while longer than that this mother lose all. _I must redeem her._ "_New Haven, June 2._ My old woman's case progresses gloriously. I am to see the ladies of this place to-morrow. Four hundred dollars were contributed by individuals in Brooklyn, and the ladies who took subscription papers at the meeting will undoubtedly raise two hundred dollars more." Before leaving New York, Mrs. Stowe gave Milly Edmondson her check for the entire sum necessary to purchase her own freedom and that of her children, and sent her home rejoicing. That this sum was made up to her by the generous contributions of those to whom she appealed is shown by a note written to her husband and dated July, 1852, in which she says:-- "Had a very kind note from A. Lawrence inclosing a twenty-dollar gold-piece for the Edmondsons. Isabella's ladies gave me twenty-five dollars, so you see our check is more than paid already." Although during her visit in New York Mrs. Stowe made many new friends, and was overwhelmed with congratulations and praise of her book, the most pleasing incident of this time seems to have been an epistolatory interview with Jenny Lind (Goldschmidt). In writing of it to her husband she says:-- "Well, we have heard Jenny Lind, and the affair was a bewildering dream of sweetness and beauty. Her face and movements are full of poetry and feeling. She has the artless grace of a little child, the poetic effect of a wood-nymph, is airy, light, and graceful. "We had first-rate seats, and how do you think we got them? When Mr. Howard went early in the morning for tickets, Mr. Goldschmidt told him it was impossible to get any good ones, as they were all sold. Mr. Howard said he regretted that, on Mrs. Stowe's account, as she was very desirous of hearing Jenny Lind. 'Mrs. Stowe!' exclaimed Mr. Goldschmidt, 'the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? Indeed, she shall have a seat whatever happens!' "Thereupon he took his hat and went out, returning shortly with tickets for two of the best seats in the house, inclosed in an envelope directed to me in his wife's handwriting. Mr. Howard said he could have sold those tickets at any time during the day for ten dollars each. "To-day I sent a note of acknowledgment with a copy of my book. I am most happy to have seen her, for she is a noble creature." To this note the great singer wrote in answer:-- MY DEAR MADAM,--Allow me to express my sincere thanks for your very kind letter, which I was very happy to receive. You must feel and know what a deep impression "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has made upon every heart that can feel for the dignity of human existence: so I with my miserable English would not even try to say a word about the great excellency of that most beautiful book, but I must thank you for the great joy I have felt over that book. Forgive me, my dear madam: it is a great liberty I take in thus addressing you, I know, but I have so wished to find an opportunity to pour out my thankfulness in a few words to you that I cannot help this intruding. I have the feeling about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that great changes will take place by and by, from the impression people receive out of it, and that the writer of that book can fall asleep to-day or to-morrow with the bright, sweet conscience of having been a strong means in the Creator's hand of operating essential good in one of the most important questions for the welfare of our black brethren. God bless and protect you and yours, dear madam, and certainly God's hand will remain with a blessing over your head. Once more forgive my bad English and the liberty I have taken, and believe me to be, dear madam, Yours most truly, JENNY GOLDSCHMIDT, _née_ LIND. In answer to Mrs. Stowe's appeal on behalf of the Edmonsons, Jenny Lind wrote:-- MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I have with great interest read your statement of the black family at Washington. It is with pleasure also that I and my husband are placing our humble names on the list you sent. The time is short. I am very, very sorry that I shall not be able to _see_ you. I must say farewell to you in this way. Hoping that in the length of time you may live to witness the progression of the good sake for which you so nobly have fought, my best wishes go with you. Yours in friendship, JENNY GOLDSCHMIDT. While Mrs. Stowe was thus absent from home, her husband received and accepted a most urgent call to the Professorship of Sacred Literature in the Theological Seminary at Andover, Mass. In regard to leaving Brunswick and her many friends there, Mrs. Stowe wrote: "For my part, if I _must_ leave Brunswick, I would rather leave at once. I can tear away with a sudden pull more easily than to linger there knowing that I am to leave at last. I shall never find people whom I shall like better than those of Brunswick." As Professor Stowe's engagements necessitated his spending much of the summer in Brunswick, and also making a journey to Cincinnati, it devolved upon his wife to remain in Andover, and superintend the preparation of the house they were to occupy. This was known as the old stone workshop, on the west side of the Common, and it had a year or two before been fitted up by Charles Munroe and Jonathan Edwards[13] as the Seminary gymnasium. Beneath Mrs. Stowe's watchful care and by the judicious expenditure of money, it was transformed by the first of November into the charming abode which under the name of "The Cabin" became noted as one of the pleasantest literary centres of the country. Here for many years were received, and entertained in a modest way, many of the most distinguished people of this and other lands, and here were planned innumerable philanthropic undertakings in which Mrs. Stowe and her scholarly husband were the prime movers. The summer spent in preparing this home was one of great pleasure as well as literary activity. In July Mrs. Stowe writes to her husband: "I had no idea this place was so beautiful. Our family circle is charming. All the young men are so gentlemanly and so agreeable, as well as Christian in spirit. Mr. Dexter, his wife, and sister are delightful. Last evening a party of us went to ride on horseback down to Pomp's Pond. What a beautiful place it is! There is everything here that there is at Brunswick except the sea,--a great exception. Yesterday I was out all the forenoon sketching elms. There is no end to the beauty of these trees. I shall fill my book with them before I get through. We had a levee at Professor Park's last week,--quite a brilliant affair. To-day there is to be a fishing party to go to Salem beach and have a chowder. [Illustration: THE ANDOVER HOME] "It seems almost too good to be true that we are going to have such a house in such a beautiful place, and to live here among all these agreeable people, where everybody seems to love you so much and to think so much of you. I am almost afraid to accept it, and should not, did I not see the Hand that gives it all and know that it is both firm and true. He knows if it is best for us, and His blessing addeth no sorrow therewith. I cannot describe to you the constant undercurrent of love and joy and peace ever flowing through my soul. I am so happy--so blessed!" The literary work of this summer was directed toward preparing articles on many subjects for the "New York Independent" and the "National Era," as well as collecting material for future books. That the "Pearl of Orr's Island," which afterward appeared as a serial in the "Independent," was already contemplated, is shown by a letter written July 29th, in which Mrs. Stowe says: "What a lovely place Andover is! So many beautiful walks! Last evening a number of us climbed Prospect Hill, and had a most charming walk. Since I came here we have taken up hymn-singing to quite an extent, and while we were all up on the hill we sang 'When I can read my title clear.' It went finely. "I seem to have so much to fill my time, and yet there is my Maine story waiting. However, I am composing it every day, only I greatly need living studies for the filling in of my sketches. There is 'old Jonas,' my 'fish father,' a sturdy, independent fisherman farmer, who in his youth sailed all over the world and made up his mind about everything. In his old age he attends prayer-meetings and reads the 'Missionary Herald.' He also has plenty of money in an old brown sea-chest. He is a great heart with an inflexible will and iron muscles. I must go to Orr's Island and see him again. I am now writing an article for the 'Era' on Maine and its scenery, which I think is even better than the 'Independent' letter. In it I took up Longfellow. Next I shall write one on Hawthorne and his surroundings. "To-day Mrs. Jewett sent out a most solemnly savage attack upon me from the 'Alabama Planter.' Among other things it says: 'The plan for assaulting the best institutions in the world may be made just as rational as it is by the wicked (perhaps unconsciously so) authoress of this book. The woman who wrote it must be either a very bad or a very fanatical person. For her own domestic peace we trust no enemy will ever penetrate into her household to pervert the scenes he may find there with as little logic or kindness as she has used in her "Uncle Tom's Cabin."' There's for you! Can you wonder now that such a wicked woman should be gone from you a full month instead of the week I intended? Ah, welladay!" At last the house was finished, the removal from Brunswick effected, and the reunited family was comfortably settled in its Andover home. The plans for the winter's literary work were, however, altered by force of circumstances. Instead of proceeding quietly and happily with her charming Maine story, Mrs. Stowe found it necessary to take notice in some manner of the cruel and incessant attacks made upon her as the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and to fortify herself against them by a published statement of incontrovertible facts. It was claimed on all sides that she had in her famous book made such ignorant or malicious misrepresentations that it was nothing short of a tissue of falsehoods, and to refute this she was compelled to write a "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which should appear the sources from which she had obtained her knowledge. Late in the winter Mrs. Stowe wrote:-- "I am now very much driven. I am preparing a Key to unlock 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' It will contain all the original facts, anecdotes, and documents on which the story is founded, with some very interesting and affecting stories parallel to those told of Uncle Tom. Now I want you to write for me just what you heard that slave-buyer say, exactly as he said it, that people may compare it with what I have written. My Key will be stronger than the Cabin." In regard to this "Key" Mrs. Stowe also wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland upon hearing that she had headed an address from the women of England to those of America:-- It is made up of the facts, the documents, the things which my own eyes have looked upon and my hands have handled, that attest this awful indictment upon my country. I write it in the anguish of my soul, with tears and prayer, with sleepless nights and weary days. I bear my testimony with a heavy heart, as one who in court is forced by an awful oath to disclose the sins of those dearest. So I am called to draw up this fearful witness against my country and send it into all countries, that the general voice of humanity may quicken our paralyzed vitality, that all Christians may pray for us, and that shame, honor, love of country, and love of Christ may be roused to give us strength to cast out this mighty evil. Yours for the oppressed, H. B. STOWE. This harassing, brain-wearying, and heart-sickening labor was continued until the first of April, 1853, when, upon invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow, Scotland, Mrs. Stowe, accompanied by her husband and her brother, Charles Beecher, sailed for Europe. In the mean time the success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" abroad was already phenomenal and unprecedented. From the pen of Mr. Sampson Low, the well-known London publisher, we have the following interesting statement regarding it:-- "The first edition printed in London was in April, 1852, by Henry Vizetelly, in a neat volume at ten and sixpence, of which he issued 7,000 copies. He received the first copy imported, through a friend who had bought it in Boston the day the steamer sailed, for his own reading. He gave it to Mr. V., who took it to the late Mr. David Bogue, well known for his general shrewdness and enterprise. He had the book to read and consider over night, and in the morning returned it, declining to take it at the very moderate price of five pounds. "Vizetelly at once put the volume into the hands of a friendly printer and brought it out on his own account, through the nominal agency of Clarke & Co. The 7,000 copies sold, other editions followed, and Mr. Vizetelly disposed of his interest in the book to the printer and agent, who joined with Mr. Beeton and at once began to issue monster editions. The demand called for fresh supplies, and these created an increased demand. The discovery was soon made that any one was at liberty to reprint the book, and the initiative was thus given to a new era in cheap literature, founded on American reprints. A shilling edition followed the one-and-sixpence, and this in turn became the precursor of one 'complete for sixpence.' From April to December, 1852, twelve different editions (not reissues) were published, and within the twelve months of its first appearance eighteen different London publishing houses were engaged in supplying the great demand that had set in, the total number of editions being forty, varying from fine art-illustrated editions at 15s., 10s., and 7s. 6d., to the cheap popular editions of 1s., 9d., and 6d. "After carefully analyzing these editions and weighing probabilities with ascertained facts, I am able pretty confidently to say that the aggregate number of copies circulated in Great Britain and the colonies exceeds one and a half millions." A similar statement made by Clarke & Co. in October, 1852, reveals the following facts. It says: "An early copy was sent from America the latter end of April to Mr. Bogue, the publisher, and was offered by him to Mr. Gilpin, late of Bishopsgate Street. Being declined by Mr. Gilpin, Mr. Bogue offered it to Mr. Henry Vizetelly, and by the latter gentleman it was eventually purchased for us. Before printing it, however, as there was one night allowed for decision, one volume was taken home to be read by Mr. Vizetelly, and the other by Mr. Salisbury, the printer, of Bouverie Street. The report of the latter gentleman the following morning, to quote his own words, was: 'I sat up till four in the morning reading the book, and the interest I felt was expressed one moment by laughter, another by tears. Thinking it might be weakness and not the power of the author that affected me, I resolved to try the effect upon my wife (a rather strong-minded woman). I accordingly woke her and read a few chapters to her. Finding that the interest in the story kept her awake, and that she, too, laughed and cried, I settled in my mind that it was a book that ought to, and might with safety, be printed.' "Mr. Vizetelly's opinion coincided with that of Mr. Salisbury, and to the latter gentleman it was confided to be brought out immediately. The week following the book was produced and one edition of 7,000 copies worked off. It made no stir until the middle of June, although we advertised it very extensively. From June it began to make its way, and it sold at the rate of 1,000 per week during July. In August the demand became very great, and went on increasing to the 20th, by which time it was perfectly overwhelming. We have now about 400 people employed in getting out the book, and seventeen printing machines besides hand presses. Already about 150,000 copies of the book are in the hands of the people, and still the returns of sales show no decline." The story was dramatized in the United States in August, 1852, without the consent or knowledge of the author, who had neglected to reserve her rights for this purpose. In September of the same year we find it announced as the attraction at two London theatres, namely, the Royal Victoria and the Great National Standard. In 1853 Professor Stowe writes: "The drama of 'Uncle Tom' has been going on in the National Theatre of New York all summer with most unparalleled success. Everybody goes night after night, and nothing can stop it. The enthusiasm beats that of the run in the Boston Museum out and out. The 'Tribune' is full of it. The 'Observer,' the 'Journal of Commerce,' and all that sort of fellows, are astonished and nonplussed. They do not know what to say or do about it." While the English editions of the story were rapidly multiplying, and being issued with illustrations by Cruikshank, introductions by Elihu Burritt, Lord Carlisle, etc., it was also making its way over the Continent. For the authorized French edition, translated by Madame Belloc, and published by Charpentier of Paris, Mrs. Stowe wrote the following:-- PREFACE TO THE EUROPEAN EDITION. In authorizing the circulation of this work on the Continent of Europe, the author has only this apology, that the love of _man_ is higher than the love of country. The great mystery which all Christian nations hold in common, the union of God with man through the humanity of Jesus Christ, invests human existence with an awful sacredness; and in the eye of the true believer in Jesus, he who tramples on the rights of his meanest fellow-man is not only inhuman but sacrilegious, and the worst form of this sacrilege is the institution of _slavery_. It has been said that the representations of this book are exaggerations! and oh, _would_ that this were true! Would that this book were indeed a fiction, and not a close mosaic of facts! But that it is not a fiction the proofs lie bleeding in thousands of hearts; they have been attested by surrounding voices from almost every slave State, and from slave-owners themselves. Since so it must be, thanks be to God that this mighty cry, this wail of an unutterable anguish, has at last been heard! It has been said, and not in utter despair but in solemn hope and assurance may we regard the struggle that now convulses America,--the outcry of the demon of slavery, which has heard the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, and is rending and convulsing the noble nation from which at last it must depart. It cannot be that so monstrous a solecism can long exist in the bosom of a nation which in all respects is the best exponent of the great principle of universal brotherhood. In America the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Swede, and the Irish all mingle on terms of equal right; all nations there display their characteristic excellences and are admitted by her liberal laws to equal privileges: everything is tending to liberalize, humanize, and elevate, and for that very reason it is that the contest with slavery there grows every year more terrible. The stream of human progress, widening, deepening, strengthening from the confluent forces of all nations, meets this barrier, behind which is concentrated all the ignorance, cruelty, and oppression of the dark ages, and it roars and foams and shakes the barrier, and anon it must bear it down. In its commencement slavery overspread every State in the Union: the progress of society has now emancipated the North from its yoke. In Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, at different times, strong movements have been made for emancipation,--movements enforced by a comparison of the progressive march of the adjoining free States with the poverty and sterility and ignorance produced by a system which in a few years wastes and exhausts all the resources of the soil without the power of renewal. The time cannot be distant when these States will emancipate for self-preservation; and if no new slave territory be added, the increase of slave population in the remainder will enforce measures of emancipation. Here, then, is the point of the battle. Unless more slave territory is gained, slavery dies; if it is gained, it lives. Around this point political parties fight and manoeuvre, and every year the battle wages hotter. The internal struggles of no other nation in the world are so interesting to Europeans as those of America; for America is fast filling up from Europe, and every European has almost immediately his vote in her councils. If, therefore, the oppressed of other nations desire to find in America an asylum of permanent freedom, let them come prepared, heart and hand, and vote against the institution of slavery; for they who enslave man cannot themselves remain free. True are the great words of Kossuth: "No nation can remain free with whom freedom is a _privilege_ and not a principle." This preface was more or less widely copied in the twenty translations of the book that quickly followed its first appearance. These, arranged in the alphabetical order of their languages, are as follows: Armenian, Bohemian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romaic or modern Greek, Russian, Servian, Spanish, Wallachian, and Welsh. In Germany it received the following flattering notice from one of the leading literary journals: "The abolitionists in the United States should vote the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' a civic crown, for a more powerful ally than Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her romance they could not have. We confess that in the whole modern romance literature of Germany, England, and France, we know of no novel to be called equal to this. In comparison with its glowing eloquence that never fails of its purpose, its wonderful truth to nature, the largeness of its ideas, and the artistic faultlessness of the machinery in this book, George Sand, with her Spiridion and Claudie, appears to us untrue and artificial; Dickens, with his but too faithful pictures from the popular life of London, petty; Bulwer, hectic and self-conscious. It is like a sign of warning from the New World to the Old." Madame George Sand reviewed the book, and spoke of Mrs. Stowe herself in words at once appreciative and discriminating: "Mrs. Stowe is all instinct; it is the very reason she appears to some not to have talent. Has she not talent? What is talent? Nothing, doubtless, compared to genius; but has she genius? She has genius as humanity feels the need of genius,--the genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but that of the saint." Charles Sumner wrote from the senate chamber at Washington to Professor Stowe: "All that I hear and read bears testimony to the good Mrs. Stowe has done. The article of George Sand is a most remarkable tribute, such as was hardly ever offered by such a genius to any living mortal. Should Mrs. Stowe conclude to visit Europe she will have a triumph." From Eversley parsonage Charles Kingsley wrote to Mrs. Stowe:-- A thousand thanks for your delightful letter. As for your progress and ovation here in England, I have no fear for you. You will be flattered and worshiped. You deserve it and you must bear it. I am sure that you have seen and suffered too much and too long to be injured by the foolish yet honest and heartfelt lionizing which you must go through. I have many a story to tell you when we meet about the effects of the great book upon the most unexpected people. Yours ever faithfully, C. KINGSLEY. March 28, 1853, Professor Stowe sent the following communication to the Committee of Examination of the Theological Seminary at Andover: "As I shall not be present at the examinations this term, I think it proper to make to you a statement of the reasons of my absence. During the last winter I have not enjoyed my usual health. Mrs. Stowe also became sick and very much exhausted. At this time we had the offer of a voyage to Great Britain and back free of expense." This offer, coming as it did from the friends of the cause of emancipation in the United Kingdom, was gladly accepted by Mr. and Mrs. Stowe, and they sailed immediately. The preceding month Mrs. Stowe had received a letter from Mrs. Follen in London, asking for information with regard to herself, her family, and the circumstances of her writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In reply Mrs. Stowe sent the following very characteristic letter, which may be safely given at the risk of some repetition:-- ANDOVER, _February 16, 1853._ MY DEAR MADAM,--I hasten to reply to your letter, to me the more interesting that I have long been acquainted with you, and during all the nursery part of my life made daily use of your poems for children. I used to think sometimes in those days that I would write to you, and tell you how much I was obliged to you for the pleasure which they gave us all. So you want to know something about what sort of a woman I am! Well, if this is any object, you shall have statistics free of charge. To begin, then, I am a little bit of a woman,--somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now. I was married when I was twenty-five years old to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew, Latin and Arabic, and, alas! rich in nothing else. When I went to housekeeping, my entire stock of china for parlor and kitchen was bought for eleven dollars. That lasted very well for two years, till my brother was married and brought his bride to visit me. I then found, on review, that I had neither plates nor teacups to set a table for my father's family; wherefore I thought it best to reinforce the establishment by getting me a tea-set that cost ten dollars more, and this, I believe, formed my whole stock in trade for some years. But then I was abundantly enriched with wealth of another sort. I had two little, curly-headed twin daughters to begin with, and my stock in this line has gradually increased, till I have been the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and the most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincinnati residence. It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. There were circumstances about his death of such peculiar bitterness, of what seemed almost cruel suffering, that I felt that I could never be consoled for it, unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others.... I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book ("Uncle Tom") had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that summer. It has left now, I trust, no trace on my mind, except a deep compassion for the sorrowful, especially for mothers who are separated from their children. During long years of struggling with poverty and sickness, and a hot, debilitating climate, my children grew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principal fields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying my trials, copied and sent a number of little sketches from my pen to certain liberally paying "Annuals" with my name. With the first money that I earned in this way I bought a feather-bed! for as I had married into poverty and without a dowry, and as my husband had only a large library of books and a great deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the most profitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered the philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be needed, or when, at the close of the year, it began to be evident that my family accounts, like poor Dora's, "wouldn't add up," then I used to say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joys and sorrows, "Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to the things in the house for one day, I'll write a piece, and then we shall be out of the scrape." So I became an author,--very modest at first, I do assure you, and remonstrating very seriously with the friends who had thought it best to put my name to the pieces by way of getting up a reputation; and if you ever see a woodcut of me, with an immoderately long nose, on the cover of all the U. S. Almanacs, I wish you to take notice, that I have been forced into it contrary to my natural modesty by the imperative solicitations of my dear five thousand friends and the public generally. One thing I must say with regard to my life at the West, which you will understand better than many English women could. I lived two miles from the city of Cincinnati, in the country, and domestic service, not always you know to be found in the city, is next to an impossibility to obtain in the country, even by those who are willing to give the highest wages; so what was to be expected for poor me, who had very little of this world's goods to offer? Had it not been for my inseparable friend Anna, a noble-hearted English girl, who landed on our shores in destitution and sorrow, and clave to me as Ruth to Naomi, I had never lived through all the trials which this uncertainty and want of domestic service imposed on both: you may imagine, therefore, how glad I was when, our seminary property being divided out into small lots which were rented at a low price, a number of poor families settled in our vicinity, from whom we could occasionally obtain domestic service. About a dozen families of liberated slaves were among the number, and they became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If anybody wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left, as I have been, in feeble health in oppressive hot weather, with a sick baby in arms, and two or three other little ones in the nursery, and not a servant in the whole house to do a single turn. Then, if they could see my good old Aunt Frankie coming with her honest, bluff, black face, her long, strong arms, her chest as big and stout as a barrel, and her hilarious, hearty laugh, perfectly delighted to take one's washing and do it at a fair price, they would appreciate the beauty of black people. My cook, poor Eliza Buck,--how she would stare to think of her name going to England!--was a regular epitome of slave life in herself; fat, gentle, easy, loving and lovable, always calling my very modest house and door-yard "The Place," as if it had been a plantation with seven hundred hands on it. She had lived through the whole sad story of a Virginia-raised slave's life. In her youth she must have been a very handsome mulatto girl. Her voice was sweet, and her manners refined and agreeable. She was raised in a good family as a nurse and seamstress. When the family became embarrassed, she was suddenly sold on to a plantation in Louisiana. She has often told me how, without any warning, she was suddenly forced into a carriage, and saw her little mistress screaming and stretching her arms from the window towards her as she was driven away. She has told me of scenes on the Louisiana plantation, and she has often been out at night by stealth ministering to poor slaves who had been mangled and lacerated by the lash. Hence she was sold into Kentucky, and her last master was the father of all her children. On this point she ever maintained a delicacy and reserve that always appeared to me remarkable. She always called him her husband; and it was not till after she had lived with me some years that I discovered the real nature of the connection. I shall never forget how sorry I felt for her, nor my feelings at her humble apology, "You know, Mrs. Stowe, slave women cannot help themselves." She had two very pretty quadroon daughters, with her beautiful hair and eyes, interesting children, whom I had instructed in the family school with my children. Time would fail to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house. But the letter is already too long. You ask with regard to the remuneration which I have received for my work here in America. Having been poor all my life and expecting to be poor the rest of it, the idea of making money by a book which I wrote just because I could not help it, never occurred to me. It was therefore an agreeable surprise to receive ten thousand dollars as the first-fruits of three months' sale. I presume as much more is now due. Mr. Bosworth in England, the firm of Clarke & Co., and Mr. Bentley, have all offered me an interest in the sales of their editions in London. I am very glad of it, both on account of the value of what they offer, and the value of the example they set in this matter, wherein I think that justice has been too little regarded. I have been invited to visit Scotland, and shall probably spend the summer there and in England. I have very much at heart a design to erect in some of the Northern States a normal school, for the education of colored teachers in the United States and in Canada. I have very much wished that some permanent memorial of good to the colored race might be created out of the proceeds of a work which promises to have so unprecedented a sale. My own share of the profits will be less than that of the publishers', either English or American; but I am willing to give largely for this purpose, and I have no doubt that the publishers, both American and English, will unite with me; for nothing tends more immediately to the emancipation of the slave than the education and elevation of the free. I am now writing a work which will contain, perhaps, an equal amount of matter with "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It will contain all the facts and documents on which that story was founded, and an immense body of facts, reports of trials, legal documents, and testimony of people now living South, which will more than confirm every statement in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I must confess that till I began the examination of facts in order to write this book, much as I thought I knew before, I had not begun to measure the depth of the abyss. The law records of courts and judicial proceedings are so incredible as to fill me with amazement whenever I think of them. It seems to me that the book cannot but be felt, and, coming upon the sensibility awaked by the other, do something. I suffer exquisitely in writing these things. It may be truly said that I write with my heart's blood. Many times in writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" I thought my health would fail utterly; but I prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got through, and still I am pressed beyond measure and above strength. This horror, this nightmare abomination! can it be in my country! It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow; the more so that I feel, as for my own brothers, for the South, and am pained by every horror I am obliged to write, as one who is forced by some awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought that I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see something done. I shall in all probability be in London in May: shall I see you? It seems to me so odd and dream-like that so many persons desire to see me, and now I cannot help thinking that they will think, when they do, that God hath chosen "the weak things of this world." If I live till spring I shall hope to see Shakespeare's grave, and Milton's mulberry-tree, and the good land of my fathers,--old, old England! May that day come! Yours affectionately, H. B. STOWE. FOOTNOTE: [13] Students in the Seminary. CHAPTER IX. SUNNY MEMORIES, 1853. CROSSING THE ATLANTIC.--ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND.--RECEPTION IN LIVERPOOL.--WELCOME TO SCOTLAND.--A GLASGOW TEA-PARTY.--EDINBURGH HOSPITALITY.--ABERDEEN.--DUNDEE AND BIRMINGHAM.--JOSEPH STURGE.--ELIHU BURRITT.--LONDON.--THE LORD MAYOR'S DINNER.--CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS WIFE. THE journey undertaken by Mrs. Stowe with her husband and brother through England and Scotland, and afterwards with her brother alone over much of the Continent, was one of unusual interest. No one was more surprised than Mrs. Stowe herself by the demonstrations of respect and affection that everywhere greeted her. Fortunately an unbroken record of this memorable journey, in Mrs. Stowe's own words, has been preserved, and we are thus able to receive her own impressions of what she saw, heard, and did, under circumstances that were at once pleasant, novel, and embarrassing. Beginning with her voyage, she writes as follows:-- LIVERPOOL, _April 11, 1853._ MY DEAR CHILDREN,--You wish, first of all, to hear of the voyage. Let me assure you, my dears, in the very commencement of the matter, that going to sea is not at all the thing that we have taken it to be. Let me warn you, if you ever go to sea, to omit all preparations for amusement on shipboard. Don't leave so much as the unlocking of a trunk to be done after sailing. In the few precious minutes when the ship stands still, before she weighs her anchor, set your house, that is to say your stateroom, as much in order as if you were going to be hanged; place everything in the most convenient position to be seized without trouble at a moment's notice; for be sure that in half an hour after sailing, an infinite desperation will seize you, in which the grasshopper will be a burden. If anything is in your trunk, it might almost as well be in the sea, for any practical probability of your getting to it. Our voyage out was called "a good run." It was voted unanimously to be "an extraordinary good passage," "a pleasant voyage;" yet the ship rocked the whole time from side to side with a steady, dizzy, continuous motion, like a great cradle. I had a new sympathy for babies, poor little things, who are rocked hours at a time without so much as a "by your leave" in the case. No wonder there are so many stupid people in the world! We arrived on Sunday morning: the custom-house officers, very gentlemanly men, came on board; our luggage was all set out, and passed through a rapid examination, which in many cases amounted only to opening the trunk and shutting it, and all was over. The whole ceremony did not occupy two hours. We were inquiring of some friends for the most convenient hotel, when we found the son of Mr. Cropper, of Dingle Bank, waiting in the cabin to take us with him to their hospitable abode. In a few moments after the baggage had been examined, we all bade adieu to the old ship, and went on board the little steam tender which carries passengers up to the city. This Mersey River would be a very beautiful one, if it were not so dingy and muddy. As we are sailing up in the tender towards Liverpool, I deplore the circumstance feelingly. "What does make this river so muddy?" "Oh," says a by-stander, "don't you know that "'The quality of mercy is not strained'?" I had an early opportunity of making acquaintance with my English brethren; for, much to my astonishment, I found quite a crowd on the wharf, and we walked up to our carriage through a long lane of people, bowing, and looking very glad to see us. When I came to get into the hack it was surrounded by more faces than I could count. They stood very quietly, and looked very kindly, though evidently very much determined to look. Something prevented the hack from moving on; so the interview was prolonged for some time. Our carriage at last drove on, taking us through Liverpool and a mile or two out, and at length wound its way along the gravel paths of a beautiful little retreat, on the banks of the Mersey, called the "Dingle." It opened to my eyes like a paradise, all wearied as I was with the tossing of the sea. I have since become familiar with these beautiful little spots, which are so common in England; but now all was entirely new to me. After a short season allotted to changing our ship garments and for rest, we found ourselves seated at the dinner table. While dining, the sister-in-law of our friends came in from the next door, to exchange a word or two of welcome, and invite us to breakfast with them the following morning. The next morning we slept late and hurried to dress, remembering our engagement to breakfast with the brother of our host, whose cottage stands on the same ground, within a few steps of our own. I had not the slightest idea of what the English mean by a breakfast, and therefore went in all innocence, supposing I should see nobody but the family circle of my acquaintances. Quite to my astonishment, I found a party of between thirty and forty people; ladies sitting with their bonnets on, as in a morning call. It was impossible, however, to feel more than a momentary embarrassment in the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle by whom we were surrounded. In the evening I went into Liverpool to attend a party of friends of the anti-slavery cause. When I was going away, the lady of the house said that the servants were anxious to see me; so I came into the dressing-room to give them an opportunity. The next day was appointed to leave Liverpool. A great number of friends accompanied us to the cars, and a beautiful bouquet of flowers was sent with a very affecting message from a sick gentleman, who, from the retirement of his chamber, felt a desire to testify his sympathy. We left Liverpool with hearts a little tremulous and excited by the vibration of an atmosphere of universal sympathy and kindness, and found ourselves, at length, shut from the warm adieu of our friends, in a snug compartment of the railroad car. "Dear me!" said Mr. S.; "six Yankees shut up in a car together! Not one Englishman to tell us anything about the country! Just like the six old ladies that made their living by taking tea at each other's houses!" What a bright lookout we kept for ruins and old houses! Mr. S., whose eyes are always in every place, allowed none of us to slumber, but looking out, first on his own side and then on ours, called our attention to every visible thing. If he had been appointed on a mission of inquiry, he could not have been more zealous and faithful, and I began to think that our desire for an English cicerone was quite superfluous. Well, we are in Scotland at last, and now our pulse rises as the sun declines in the west. We catch glimpses of Solway Firth and talk about Redgauntlet. The sun went down and night drew on; still we were in Scotland. Scotch ballads, Scotch tunes, and Scotch literature were in the ascendant. We sang "Auld Lang Syne," "Scots wha hae," and "Bonnie Doon," and then, changing the key, sang "Dundee," "Elgin," and "Martyr." "Take care," said Mr. S.; "don't get too much excited." "Ah," said I, "this is a thing that comes only once in a lifetime; do let us have the comfort of it. We shall never come into Scotland for the _first time_ again." While we were thus at the fusion point of enthusiasm, the cars stopped at Lockerbie. All was dim and dark outside, but we soon became conscious that there was quite a number of people collected, peering into the window; and with a strange kind of thrill, I heard my name inquired for in the Scottish accent. I went to the window; there were men, women, and children gathered, and hand after hand was presented, with the words, "Ye're welcome to Scotland!" Then they inquired for and shook hands with all the party, having in some mysterious manner got the knowledge of who they were, even down to little G., whom they took to be my son. Was it not pleasant, when I had a heart so warm for this old country? I shall never forget the thrill of those words, "Ye're welcome to Scotland," nor the "Gude night." After that we found similar welcomes in many succeeding stopping-places; and though I did wave a towel out of the window, instead of a pocket handkerchief, and commit other awkwardnesses, from not knowing how to play my part, yet I fancied, after all, that Scotland and we were coming on well together. Who the good souls were that were thus watching for us through the night, I am sure I do not know; but that they were of the "one blood" which unites all the families of the earth, I felt. At Glasgow, friends were waiting in the station-house. Earnest, eager, friendly faces, ever so many. Warm greetings, kindly words. A crowd parting in the middle, through which we were conducted into a carriage, and loud cheers of welcome, sent a throb, as the voice of living Scotland. I looked out of the carriage, as we drove on, and saw, by the light of a lantern, Argyll Street. It was past twelve o'clock when I found myself in a warm, cosy parlor, with friends whom I have ever since been glad to remember. In a little time we were all safely housed in our hospitable apartments, and sleep fell on me for the first time in Scotland. The next morning I awoke worn and weary, and scarce could the charms of the social Scotch breakfast restore me. Our friend and host was Mr. Bailie Paton. I believe that it is to his suggestion in a public meeting that we owe the invitation which brought us to Scotland. After breakfast the visiting began. First, a friend of the family, with three beautiful children, the youngest of whom was the bearer of a handsomely bound album, containing a pressed collection of the sea-mosses of the Scottish coast, very vivid and beautiful. All this day is a confused dream to me of a dizzy and overwhelming kind. So many letters that it took brother Charles from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon to read and answer them in the shortest manner; letters from all classes of people, high and low, rich and poor, in all shades and styles of composition, poetry and prose; some mere outbursts of feeling; some invitations; some advice and suggestions; some requests and inquiries; some presenting books, or flowers, or fruit. Then came, in their turn, deputations from Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Belfast in Ireland; calls of friendship, invitations of all descriptions to go everywhere, and to see everything, and to stay in so many places. One kind, venerable minister, with his lovely daughter, offered me a retreat in his quiet manse on the beautiful shores of the Clyde. For all these kindnesses, what could I give in return? There was scarce time for even a grateful thought on each. People have often said to me that it must have been an exceeding bore. For my part, I could not think of regarding it so. It only oppressed me with an unutterable sadness. In the afternoon I rode out with the lord provost to see the cathedral. The lord provost answers to the lord mayor in England. His title and office in both countries continue only a year, except in case of re-election. As I saw the way to the cathedral blocked up by a throng of people who had come out to see me, I could not help saying, "What went ye out for to see? a reed shaken with the wind?" In fact I was so worn out that I could hardly walk through the building. The next morning I was so ill as to need a physician, unable to see any one that called, or to hear any of the letters. I passed most of the day in bed, but in the evening I had to get up, as I had engaged to drink tea with two thousand people. Our kind friends, Dr. and Mrs. Wardlaw, came after us, and Mr. S. and I went in the carriage with them. Our carriage stopped at last at the place. I have a dim remembrance of a way being made for us through a great crowd all round the house, and of going with Mrs. Wardlaw up into a dressing-room where I met and shook hands with many friendly people. Then we passed into a gallery, where a seat was reserved for our party, directly in front of the audience. Our friend Bailie Paton presided. Mrs. Wardlaw and I sat together, and around us many friends, chiefly ministers of the different churches, the ladies and gentlemen of the Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society and others. I told you it was a tea-party; but the arrangements were altogether different from any I had ever seen. There were narrow tables stretched up and down the whole extent of the great hall, and every person had an appointed seat. These tables were set out with cups and saucers, cakes, biscuit, etc., and when the proper time came, attendants passed along serving tea. The arrangements were so accurate and methodical that the whole multitude actually took tea together, without the least apparent inconvenience or disturbance. There was a gentle, subdued murmur of conversation all over the house, the sociable clinking of teacups and teaspoons, while the entertainment was going on. It seemed to me such an odd idea, I could not help wondering what sort of a teapot that must be in which all this tea for two thousand people was made. Truly, as Hadji Baba says, I think they must have had the "father of all the tea-kettles" to boil it in. I could not help wondering if old mother Scotland had put two thousand teaspoonfuls of tea for the company, and one for the teapot, as is our good Yankee custom. We had quite a sociable time up in our gallery. Our tea-table stretched quite across, and we drank tea in sight of all the people. By _we_, I mean a great number of ministers and their wives, and ladies of the Anti-Slavery Society, besides our party, and the friends whom I have mentioned before. All seemed to be enjoying themselves. After tea they sang a few verses of the seventy-second psalm in the old Scotch version. _April 17._ To-day a large party of us started on a small steamer to go down the Clyde. It was a trip full of pleasure and incident. Now we were shown the remains of old Cardross Castle, where it was said Robert Bruce breathed his last. And now we came near the beautiful grounds of Roseneath, a green, velvet-like peninsula, stretching out into the widening waters. Somewhere about here I was presented, by his own request, to a broad-shouldered Scotch farmer, who stood some six feet two, and who paid me the compliment to say that he had read my book, and that he would walk six miles to see me any day. Such a flattering evidence of discriminating taste, of course, disposed my heart towards him; but when I went up and put my hand into his great prairie of a palm, I was as a grasshopper in my own eyes. I inquired who he was and was told he was one of the Duke of Argyll's farmers. I thought to myself if all the duke's farmers were of this pattern, that he might be able to speak to the enemy in the gates to some purpose. It was concluded after we left Roseneath that, instead of returning by the boat, we should take carriage and ride home along the banks of the river. In our carriage were Mr. S. and myself, Dr. Robson, and Lady Anderson. About this time I commenced my first essay towards giving titles, and made, as you may suppose, rather an odd piece of work of it, generally saying "Mrs." first, and "Lady" afterwards, and then begging pardon. Lady Anderson laughed and said she would give me a general absolution. She is a truly genial, hearty Scotchwoman, and seemed to enter happily into the spirit of the hour. As we rode on, we found that the news of our coming had spread through the village. People came and stood in their doors, beckoning, bowing, smiling, and waving their handkerchiefs, and the carriage was several times stopped by persons who came to offer flowers. I remember, in particular, a group of young girls bringing to the carriage two of the most beautiful children I ever saw, whose little hands literally deluged us with flowers. At the village of Helensburgh we stopped a little while to call upon Mrs. Bell, the wife of Mr. Bell, the inventor of the steamboat. His invention in this country was at about the same time as that of Fulton in America. Mrs. Bell came to the carriage to speak to us. She is a venerable woman, far advanced in years. They had prepared a lunch for us, and quite a number of people had come together to meet us, but our friends said there was not time for us to stop. We rode through several villages after this, and met everywhere a warm welcome. What pleased me was, that it was not mainly from the literary, nor the rich, nor the great, but the plain, common people. The butcher came out of his stall and the baker from his shop, the miller dusty with flour, the blooming, comely young mother, with her baby in her arms, all smiling and bowing, with that hearty, intelligent, friendly look, as if they knew we should be glad to see them. Once, while we stopped to change horses, I, for the sake of seeing something more of the country, walked on. It seems the honest landlord and his wife were greatly disappointed at this; however, they got into the carriage and rode on to see me, and I shook hands with them with a right good will. We saw several of the clergymen, who came out to meet us; and I remember stopping just to be introduced, one by one, to a most delightful family, a gray-headed father and mother, with comely brothers and fair sisters, all looking so kindly and homelike, that I should have been glad to accept the invitation they gave me to their dwelling. This day has been a strange phenomenon to me. In the first place, I have seen in all these villages how universally the people read. I have seen how capable they are of a generous excitement and enthusiasm, and how much may be done by a work of fiction so written as to enlist those sympathies which are common to all classes. Certainly a great deal may be effected in this way, if God gives to any one the power, as I hope he will to many. The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming a very great agency. We came home quite tired, as you may well suppose. You will not be surprised that the next day I found myself more disposed to keep my bed than go out. Two days later: We bade farewell to Glasgow, overwhelmed with kindness to the last, and only oppressed by the thought of how little that was satisfactory we were able to give in return. Again we were in the railroad car on our way to Edinburgh. A pleasant two hours' trip is this from Glasgow to Edinburgh. When the cars stopped at Linlithgow station, the name started us as out of a dream. In Edinburgh the cars stopped amid a crowd of people who had assembled to meet us. The lord provost met us at the door of the car, and presented us to the magistracy of the city and the committees of the Edinburgh Anti-Slavery Societies. The drab dresses and pure white bonnets of many Friends were conspicuous among the dense moving crowd, as white doves seen against a dark cloud. Mr. S. and myself, and our future hostess, Mrs. Wigham, entered the carriage with the lord provost, and away we drove, the crowd following with their shouts and cheers. I was inexpressibly touched and affected by this. While we were passing the monument of Scott, I felt an oppressive melancholy. What a moment life seems in the presence of the noble dead! What a momentary thing is art, in all its beauty! Where are all those great souls that have created such an atmosphere of light about Edinburgh? and how little a space was given them to live and enjoy! We drove all over Edinburgh, up to the castle, to the university, to Holyrood, to the hospitals, and through many of the principal streets, amid shouts, and smiles, and greetings. Some boys amused me very much by their pertinacious attempts to keep up with the carriage. "Heck," says one of them, "that's her; see the _courls_!" The various engravers who have amused themselves by diversifying my face for the public having all, with great unanimity, agreed in giving prominence to this point, I suppose the urchins thought they were on safe ground there. I certainly think I answered one good purpose that day, and that is of giving the much-oppressed and calumniated class called boys an opportunity to develop all the noise that was in them,--a thing for which I think they must bless me in their remembrances. At last the carriage drove into a deep-graveled yard, and we alighted at a porch covered with green ivy, and found ourselves once more at home. You may spare your anxieties about me, for I do assure you that if I were an old Sèvres china jar I could not have more careful handling than I do. Everybody is considerate; a great deal to say when there appears to be so much excitement. Everybody seems to understand how good-for-nothing I am; and yet, with all this consideration, I have been obliged to keep my room and bed for a good part of the time. Of the multitudes who have called, I have seen scarcely any. To-morrow evening is to be the great tea-party here. How in the world I am ever to live through it I don't know. The amount of letters we found waiting for us here in Edinburgh was, if possible, more appalling than in Glasgow. Among those from persons whom you would be interested in hearing of, I may mention a very kind and beautiful one from the Duchess of Sutherland, and one also from the Earl of Carlisle, both desiring to make appointments for meeting us as soon as we come to London. Also a very kind and interesting note from the Rev. Mr. Kingsley and lady. I look forward with a great deal of interest to passing a little time with them in their rectory. As to all engagements, I am in a state of happy acquiescence, having resigned myself, as a very tame lion, into the hands of my keepers. Whenever the time comes for me to do anything, I try to behave as well as I can, which, as Dr. Young says, is all that an angel could do under the same circumstances. _April 26._ Last night came off the _soirée_. The hall was handsomely decorated with flags in front. We went with the lord provost in his carriage. We went up as before into a dressing-room, where I was presented to many gentlemen and ladies. When we go in, the cheering, clapping, and stamping at first strikes one with a strange sensation; but then everybody looks so heartily pleased and delighted, and there is such an all-pervading atmosphere of geniality and sympathy, as makes me in a few moments feel quite at home. After all, I consider that these cheers and applauses are Scotland's voice to America, a recognition of the brotherhood of the countries. The national penny offering, consisting of a thousand golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver, stood conspicuously in view of the audience. It has been an unsolicited offering, given in the smallest sums, often from the extreme poverty of the giver. The committee who collected it in Edinburgh and Glasgow bore witness to the willingness with which the very poorest contributed the offering of their sympathy. In one cottage they found a blind woman, and said, "Here, at least, is one who will feel no interest, as she cannot have read the book." "Indeed," said the old lady, "if I cannot read, my son has read it to me, and I've got my penny saved to give." It is to my mind extremely touching to see how the poor, in their poverty, can be moved to a generosity surpassing that of the rich. Nor do I mourn that they took it from their slender store, because I know that a penny given from a kindly impulse is a greater comfort and blessing to the poorest giver than even a penny received. As in the case of the other meeting, we came out long before the speeches were ended. Well, of course I did not sleep all night, and the next day I felt quite miserable. From Edinburgh we took cars for Aberdeen. I enjoyed this ride more than anything we had seen yet, the country was so wild and singular. In the afternoon we came in sight of the German Ocean. The free, bracing air from the sea, and the thought that it actually _was_ the German Ocean, and that over the other side was Norway, within a day's sail of us, gave it a strange, romantic charm. It was towards the close of the afternoon that we found ourselves crossing the Dee, in view of Aberdeen. My spirits were wonderfully elated: the grand scenery and fine, bracing air; the noble, distant view of the city, rising with its harbor and shipping,--all filled me with delight. In this propitious state, disposed to be pleased with everything, our hearts responded warmly to the greetings of the many friends who were waiting for us at the station-house. The lord provost received us into his carriage, and as we drove along pointed out to us the various objects of interest in the beautiful town. Among other things, a fine old bridge across the Dee attracted our particular attention. We were conducted to the house of Mr. Cruikshank, a Friend, and found waiting for us there the thoughtful hospitality which we had ever experienced in all our stopping-places. A snug little quiet supper was laid out upon the table, of which we partook in haste, as we were informed that the assembly at the hall were waiting to receive us. There arrived, we found the hall crowded, and with difficulty made our way to the platform. Whether owing to the stimulating effect of the air from the ocean, or to the comparatively social aspect of the scene, or perhaps to both, certain it is that we enjoyed the meeting with great zest. I was surrounded on the stage with blooming young ladies, one of whom put into my hands a beautiful bouquet, some flowers of which I have now, dried, in my album. The refreshment tables were adorned with some exquisite wax flowers, the work, as I was afterwards told, of a young lady in the place. One of these designs especially interested me. It was a group of water-lilies resting on a mirror, which gave them the appearance of growing in the water. We had some very animated speaking, in which the speakers contrived to blend enthusiastic admiration and love for America with detestation of slavery. They presented an offering in a beautiful embroidered purse, and after much shaking of hands we went home, and sat down to the supper-table for a little more chat before going to bed. The next morning--as we had only till noon to stay in Aberdeen--our friends, the lord provost and Mr. Leslie, the architect, came immediately after breakfast to show us the place. About two o'clock we started from Aberdeen, among crowds of friends, to whom we bade farewell with real regret. At Stonehaven station, where we stopped a few minutes, there was quite a gathering of the inhabitants to exchange greetings, and afterwards, at successive stations along the road, many a kindly face and voice made our journey a pleasant one. When we got into Dundee it seemed all alive with welcome. We went in the carriage with the lord provost, Mr. Thoms, to his residence, where a party had been waiting dinner for us for some time. The meeting in the evening was in a large church, densely crowded, and conducted much as the others had been. When they came to sing the closing hymn, I hoped they would sing Dundee; but they did not, and I fear in Scotland, as elsewhere, the characteristic national melodies are giving way before more modern ones. We left Dundee at two o'clock, by cars, for Edinburgh again, and in the evening attended another _soirée_ of the workingmen of Edinburgh. We have received letters from the workingmen, both in Dundee and Glasgow, desiring our return to attend _soirées_ in those cities. Nothing could give us greater pleasure, had we time or strength. The next day we had a few calls to make, and an invitation from Lady Drummond to visit classic Hawthornden, which, however, we had not time to accept. In the forenoon, Mr. S. and I called on Lord and Lady Gainsborough. Though she is one of the queen's household, she is staying here at Edinburgh while the queen is at Osborne. I infer, therefore, that the appointment includes no very onerous duties. The Earl of Gainsborough is the eldest brother of the Rev. Baptist W. Noel. It was a rainy, misty morning when I left my kind retreat and friends in Edinburgh. Considerate as everybody had been about imposing on my time or strength, still you may well believe that I was much exhausted. We left Edinburgh, therefore, with the determination to plunge at once into some hidden and unknown spot, where we might spend two or three days quietly by ourselves; and remembering your Sunday at Stratford-on-Avon, I proposed that we should go there. As Stratford, however, is off the railroad line, we determined to accept the invitation, which was lying by us, from our friend, Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, and take sanctuary with him. So we wrote on, intrusting him with the secret, and charging him on no account to let any one know of our arrival. About night our cars whizzed into the depot at Birmingham; but just before we came in a difficulty was started in the company. "Mr. Sturge is to be there waiting for us, but he does not know us and we don't know him; what is to be done?" C. insisted that he should know him by instinct; and so, after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out and try. Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge. The result verified the truth that "instinct is a great matter." In a few moments our new friend and ourselves were snugly encased in a fly, trotting off as briskly as ever we could to his place at Edgbaston, nobody a whit the wiser. You do not know how pleased we felt to think we had done it so nicely. As we were drinking tea that evening, Elihu Burritt came in. It was the first time I had ever seen him, though I had heard a great deal of him from our friends in Edinburgh. He is a man in middle life, tall and slender, with fair complexion, blue eyes, an air of delicacy and refinement, and manners of great gentleness. My ideas of the "learned blacksmith" had been of something altogether more ponderous and peremptory. Elihu has been for some years operating, in England and on the Continent, in a movement which many in our half-Christianized times regard with as much incredulity as the grim, old warlike barons did the suspicious imbecilities of reading and writing. The sword now, as then, seems so much more direct a way to terminate controversies, that many Christian men, even, cannot conceive how the world is to get along without it. We spent the evening in talking over various topics relating to the anti-slavery movement. Mr. Sturge was very confident that something more was to be done than had ever been done yet, by combinations for the encouragement of free in the place of slave grown produce; a question which has, ever since the days of Clarkson, more or less deeply occupied the minds of abolitionists in England. I should say that Mr. Sturge in his family has for many years conscientiously forborne the use of any article produced by slave labor. I could scarcely believe it possible that there could be such an abundance and variety of all that is comfortable and desirable in the various departments of household living within these limits. Mr. Sturge presents the subject with very great force, the more so from the consistency of his example. The next morning, as we were sitting down to breakfast, our friends sent in to me a plate of the largest, finest strawberries I have ever seen, which, considering that it was only the latter part of April, seemed to me quite an astonishing luxury. Before we left, we had agreed to meet a circle of friends from Birmingham, consisting of the Abolition Society there, which is of long standing, extending back in its memories to the very commencement of the agitation under Clarkson and Wilberforce. The windows of the parlor were opened to the ground; and the company invited filled not only the room, but stood in a crowd on the grass around the window. Among the peaceable company present was an admiral in the navy, a fine, cheerful old gentleman, who entered with hearty interest into the scene. A throng of friends accompanied us to the depot, while from Birmingham we had the pleasure of the company of Elihu Burritt, and enjoyed a delightful run to London, where we arrived towards evening. At the station-house in London we found the Rev. Messrs. Binney and Sherman waiting for us with carriages. C. went with Mr. Sherman, and Mr. S. and I soon found ourselves in a charming retreat called Rose Cottage, in Walworth, about which I will tell you more anon. Mrs. B. received us with every attention which the most thoughtful hospitality could suggest. One of the first things she said to me after we got into our room was, "Oh, we are so glad you have come! for we are all going to the lord mayor's dinner to-night, and you are invited." So, though I was tired, I hurried to dress in all the glee of meeting an adventure. As soon as Mr. and Mrs. B. and the rest of the party were ready, crack went the whip, round went the wheels, and away we drove. We found a considerable throng, and I was glad to accept a seat which was offered me in the agreeable vicinity of the lady mayoress, so that I might see what would be interesting to me of the ceremonial. A very dignified gentleman, dressed in black velvet, with a fine head, made his way through the throng, and sat down by me, introducing himself as Lord Chief Baron Pollock. He told me he had just been reading the legal part of the "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," and remarked especially on the opinion of Judge Ruffin, in the case of _State_ v. _Mann_, as having made a deep impression on his mind. Dinner was announced between nine and ten o'clock, and we were conducted into a splendid hall, where the tables were laid. Directly opposite me was Mr. Dickens, whom I now beheld for the first time, and was surprised to see looking so young. Mr. Justice Talfourd, known as the author of "Ion," was also there with his lady. She had a beautiful, antique cast of head. The lord mayor was simply dressed in black, without any other adornment than a massive gold chain. We rose from table between eleven and twelve o'clock--that is, we ladies--and went into the drawing-room, where I was presented to Mrs. Dickens and several other ladies. Mrs. Dickens is a good specimen of a truly English woman; tall, large, and well developed, with fine, healthy color, and an air of frankness, cheerfulness, and reliability. A friend whispered to me that she was as observing and fond of humor as her husband. After a while the gentlemen came back to the drawing-room, and I had a few moments of very pleasant, friendly conversation with Mr. Dickens. They are both people that one could not know a little of without desiring to know more. After a little we began to talk of separating; the lord mayor to take his seat in the House of Commons, and the rest of the party to any other engagement that might be upon their list. "Come, let us go to the House of Commons," said one of my friends, "and make a night of it." "With all my heart," replied I, "if I only had another body to go into to-morrow." What a convenience in sight-seeing it would be if one could have a relay of bodies as of clothes, and slip from one into the other! But we, not used to the London style of turning night into day, are full weary already. So good-night to you all. CHAPTER X. FROM OVER THE SEA, 1853. THE EARL OF CARLISLE.--ARTHUR HELPS.--THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF ARGYLL.--MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER.--A MEMORABLE MEETING AT STAFFORD HOUSE.--MACAULAY AND DEAN MILMAN.--WINDSOR CASTLE.--PROFESSOR STOWE RETURNS TO AMERICA.--MRS. STOWE ON THE CONTINENT.--IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS.--EN ROUTE TO SWITZERLAND AND GERMANY.--BACK TO ENGLAND.--HOMEWARD BOUND. ROSE COTTAGE, WALWORTH, LONDON, _May 2, 1856._ MY DEAR,--This morning Mrs. Follen called and we had quite a chat. We are separated by the whole city. She lives at the West End, while I am down here in Walworth, which is one of the postscripts of London, for this place has as many postscripts as a lady's letter. This evening we dined with the Earl of Carlisle. There was no company but ourselves, for he, with great consideration, said in his note that he thought a little quiet would be the best thing he could offer. Lord Carlisle is a great friend to America, and so is his sister, the Duchess of Sutherland. He is the only English traveler who ever wrote notes on our country in a real spirit of appreciation. We went about seven o'clock, the dinner hour being here somewhere between eight and nine. We were shown into an ante-room adjoining the entrance hall, and from that into an adjacent apartment, where we met Lord Carlisle. The room had a pleasant, social air, warmed and enlivened by the blaze of a coal fire and wax candles. We had never, any of us, met Lord Carlisle before; but the considerateness and cordiality of our reception obviated whatever embarrassment there might have been in this circumstance. In a few moments after we were all seated, a servant announced the Duchess of Sutherland, and Lord Carlisle presented me. She is tall and stately, with a most noble bearing. Her fair complexion, blonde hair, and full lips speak of Saxon blood. The only person present not of the family connection was my quondam correspondent in America, Arthur Helps. Somehow or other I had formed the impression from his writings that he was a venerable sage of very advanced years, who contemplated life as an aged hermit from the door of his cell. Conceive my surprise to find a genial young gentleman of about twenty-five, who looked as if he might enjoy a joke as well as another man. After the ladies left the table, the conversation turned on the Maine law, which seems to be considered over here as a phenomenon in legislation, and many of the gentlemen present inquired about it with great curiosity. After the gentlemen rejoined us, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll came in, and Lord and Lady Blantyre. These ladies are the daughters of the Duchess of Sutherland. The Duchess of Argyll is of slight and fairy-like figure, with flaxen hair and blue eyes, answering well enough to the description of Annot Lyle in the Legend of Montrose. Lady Blantyre was somewhat taller, of fuller figure, with a very brilliant bloom. Lord Blantyre is of the Stuart blood, a tall and slender young man with very graceful manners. As to the Duke of Argyll, we found that the picture drawn of him by his countrymen in Scotland was in every way correct. Though slight of figure, with fair complexion and blue eyes, his whole appearance is indicative of energy and vivacity. His talents and efficiency have made him a member of the British Cabinet at a much earlier age than is usual; and he has distinguished himself not only in political life, but as a writer, having given to the world a work on Presbyterianism, embracing an analysis of the ecclesiastical history of Scotland since the Reformation, which is spoken of as written with great ability, and in a most liberal spirit. He made many inquiries about our distinguished men, particularly of Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne; also of Prescott, who appears to be a general favorite here. I felt at the moment that we never value our own literary men so much as when we are placed in a circle of intelligent foreigners. The following evening we went to dine with our old friends of the Dingle, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Cropper, who are now spending a little time in London. We were delighted to meet them once more and to hear from our Liverpool friends. Mrs. Cropper's father, Lord Denman, has returned to England, though with no sensible improvement in his health. At dinner we were introduced to Lord and Lady Hatherton. Lady Hatherton is a person of great cultivation and intelligence, warmly interested in all the progressive movements of the day; and I gained much information in her society. There were also present Sir Charles and Lady Trevelyan; the former holds an appointment at the treasury, and Lady Trevelyan is a sister of Macaulay. In the evening quite a circle came in, among others Lady Emma Campbell, sister of the Duke of Argyll; the daughters of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who very kindly invited me to visit them at Lambeth; and Mr. Arthur Helps, besides many others whose names I need not mention. _May 7._ This evening our house was opened in a general way for callers, who were coming and going all the evening. I think there must have been over two hundred people, among them Martin Farquhar Tupper, a little man with fresh, rosy complexion and cheery, joyous manners; and Mary Howitt, just such a cheerful, sensible, fireside companion as we find her in her books,--winning love and trust the very first moment of the interview. The general topic of remark on meeting me seems to be, that I am not so bad-looking as they were afraid I was; and I do assure you that when I have seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been in wondering admiration at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's guide-board, which showed where the road did not go. Before the evening was through I was talked out and worn out; there was hardly a chip of me left. To-morrow at eleven o'clock comes the meeting at Stafford House. What it will amount to I do not know; but I take no thought for the morrow. _May 8._ MY DEAR C.,--In fulfillment of my agreement I will tell you, as nearly as I can remember, all the details of the meeting at Stafford House. At about eleven o'clock we drove under the arched carriage-way of a mansion externally not very showy in appearance. When the duchess appeared, I thought she looked handsomer by daylight than in the evening. She received us with the same warm and simple kindness which she had shown before. We were presented to the Duke of Sutherland. He is a tall, slender man, with rather a thin face, light-brown hair, and a mild blue eye, with an air of gentleness and dignity. Among the first that entered were the members of the family, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Lord and Lady Blantyre, the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, and Lady Emma Campbell. Then followed Lord Shaftesbury with his beautiful lady, and her father and mother, Lord and Lady Palmerston. Lord Palmerston is of middle height, with a keen dark eye and black hair streaked with gray. There is something peculiarly alert and vivacious about all his movements; in short, his appearance perfectly answers to what we know of him from his public life. One has a strange, mythological feeling about the existence of people of whom one hears for many years without ever seeing them. While talking with Lord Palmerston I could but remember how often I had heard father and Mr. S. exulting over his foreign dispatches by our own fireside. There were present, also, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Granville. The latter we all thought very strikingly resembled in his appearance the poet Longfellow. After lunch the whole party ascended to the picture-gallery, passing on our way the grand staircase and hall, said to be the most magnificent in Europe. The company now began to assemble and throng the gallery, and very soon the vast room was crowded. Among the throng I remember many presentations, but of course must have forgotten many more. Archbishop Whateley was there, with Mrs. and Miss Whateley; Macaulay, with two of his sisters; Milman, the poet and historian; the Bishop of Oxford, Chevalier Bunsen and lady, and many more. When all the company were together, Lord Shaftesbury read a very short, kind, and considerate address in behalf of the ladies of England, expressive of their cordial welcome. This Stafford House meeting, in any view of it, is a most remarkable fact. Kind and gratifying as its arrangements have been to me, I am far from appropriating it to myself individually as a personal honor. I rather regard it as the most public expression possible of the feelings of the women of England on one of the most important questions of our day, that of individual liberty considered in its religious bearings. On this occasion the Duchess of Sutherland presented Mrs. Stowe with a superb gold bracelet, made in the form of a slave's shackle, bearing the inscription: "We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken." On two of the links were inscribed the dates of the abolition of the slave-trade and of slavery in English territory. Years after its presentation to her, Mrs. Stowe was able to have engraved on the clasp of this bracelet, "Constitutional Amendment (forever abolishing slavery in the United States)." Continuing her interesting journal, Mrs. Stowe writes, May 9th:-- DEAR E.,--This letter I consecrate to you, because I know that the persons and things to be introduced into it will most particularly be appreciated by you. In your evening reading circles, Macaulay, Sydney Smith, and Milman have long been such familiar names that you will be glad to go with me over all the scenes of my morning breakfast at Sir Charles Trevelyan's yesterday. Lady Trevelyan, I believe I have said before, is a sister of Macaulay. We were set down at Westbourne Terrace somewhere, I believe, about eleven o'clock, and found quite a number already in the drawing-room. I had met Macaulay before, but being seated between him and Dean Milman, I must confess I was a little embarrassed at times, because I wanted to hear what they were both saying at the same time. However, by the use of the faculty by which you play a piano with both hands, I got on very comfortably. There were several other persons of note present at this breakfast, whose conversation I had not an opportunity of hearing, as they sat at a distance from me. There was Lord Glenelg, brother of Sir Robert Grant, governor of Bombay, whose beautiful hymns have rendered him familiar in America. The favorite one, commencing "When gathering clouds around I view," was from his pen. The historian Hallam was also present, and I think it very likely there may have been other celebrities whom I did not know. I am always finding out, a day or two after, that I have been with somebody very remarkable and did not know it at the time. Under date of May 18th she writes to her sister Mary:-- DEAR M.,--I can compare the embarrassment of our London life, with its multiplied solicitations and infinite stimulants to curiosity and desire, only to that annual perplexity which used to beset us in our childhood on Thanksgiving Day. Like Miss Edgeworth's philosophic little Frank, we are obliged to make out a list of what man _must_ want, and of what he _may_ want; and in our list of the former we set down, in large and decisive characters, one quiet day for the exploration and enjoyment of Windsor. The ride was done all too soon. About eleven o'clock we found ourselves going up the old stone steps to the castle. We went first through the state apartments. The principal thing that interested me was the ball-room, which was a perfect gallery of Vandyke's paintings. After leaving the ball-room we filed off to the proper quarter to show our orders for the private rooms. The state apartments, which we had been looking at, are open at all times, but the private apartments can only be seen in the Queen's absence and by a special permission, which had been procured for us on that occasion by the kindness of the Duchess of Sutherland. One of the first objects that attracted my attention upon entering the vestibule was a baby's wicker wagon, standing in one corner. It was much such a carriage as all mothers are familiar with; such as figures largely in the history of almost every family. It had neat curtains and cushions of green merino, and was not royal, only maternal. I mused over the little thing with a good deal of interest. We went for our dinner to the White Hart, the very inn which Shakespeare celebrates in his "Merry Wives," and had a most overflowing merry time of it. After dinner we had a beautiful drive. We were bent upon looking up the church which gave rise to Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," intending when we got there to have a little scene over it; Mr. S., in all the conscious importance of having been there before, assuring us that he knew exactly where it was. So, after some difficulty with our coachman, and being stopped at one church which would not answer our purpose in any respect, we were at last set down by one which looked authentic; embowered in mossy elms, with a most ancient and goblin yew-tree, an ivy-mantled tower, all perfect as could be. Here, leaning on the old fence, we repeated the Elegy, which certainly applies here as beautifully as language could apply. Imagine our chagrin, on returning to London, at being informed that we had not been to the genuine churchyard after all. The gentleman who wept over the scenes of his early days on the wrong doorstep was not more grievously disappointed. However, he and we could both console ourselves with the reflection that the emotion was admirable, and wanted only the right place to make it the most appropriate in the world. The evening after our return from Windsor was spent with our kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Gurney. After breakfast the next day, Mr. S., C., and I drove out to call upon Kossuth. We found him in an obscure lodging on the outskirts of London. I would that some of the editors in America, who have thrown out insinuations about his living in luxury, could have seen the utter bareness and plainness of the reception room, which had nothing in it beyond the simplest necessaries. He entered into conversation with us with cheerfulness, speaking English well, though with the idioms of foreign languages. When we parted he took my hand kindly and said, "God bless you, my child!" I have been quite amused with something which has happened lately. This week the "Times" has informed the United Kingdom that Mrs. Stowe is getting a new dress made! It wants to know if Mrs. Stowe is aware what sort of a place her dress is being made in; and there is a letter from a dressmaker's apprentice stating that it is being made up piecemeal, in the most shockingly distressed dens of London, by poor, miserable white slaves, worse treated than the plantation slaves of America! Now Mrs. Stowe did not know anything of this, but simply gave the silk into the hands of a friend, and was in due time waited on in her own apartment by a very respectable-appearing woman, who offered to make the dress, and lo, this is the result! Since the publication of this piece, I have received earnest missives, from various parts of the country, begging me to interfere, hoping that I was not going to patronize the white slavery of England, and that I would employ my talents equally against oppression in every form. Could these people only know in what sweet simplicity I had been living in the State of Maine, where the only dressmaker of our circle was an intelligent, refined, well-educated woman who was considered as the equal of us all, and whose spring and fall ministrations to our wardrobe were regarded a double pleasure,--a friendly visit as well as a domestic assistance,--I say, could they know all this, they would see how guiltless I was in the matter. I verily never thought but that the nice, pleasant person who came to measure me for my silk dress was going to take it home and make it herself; it never occurred to me that she was the head of an establishment. May 22, she writes to her husband, whose duties had obliged him to return to America: "To-day we went to hear a sermon in behalf of the ragged schools by the Archbishop of Canterbury. My thoughts have been much saddened by the news which I received of the death of Mary Edmonson." "_May 30._ The next day from my last letter came off Miss Greenfield's concert, of which I send a card. You see in what company they have put your poor little wife. Funny!--isn't it? Well, the Hons. and Right Hons. all were there. I sat by Lord Carlisle. "After the concert the duchess asked Lady Hatherton and me to come round to Stafford House and take tea, which was not a thing to be despised, either on account of the tea or the duchess. A lovelier time we never had,--present, the Duchess of Argyll, Lady Caroline Campbell, Lady Hatherton, and myself. We had the nicest cup of tea, with such cream, and grapes and apricots, with some Italian bread, etc. "When we were going the duchess got me, on some pretext, into another room, and came up and put her arms round me, with her noble face all full of feeling. "'Oh, Mrs. Stowe, I have been reading that last chapter in the "Key"; Argyll read it aloud to us. Oh, surely, surely you will succeed,--God surely will bless you!' "I said then that I thanked her for all her love and feeling for us, told her how earnestly all the women of England sympathized with her, and many in America. She looked really radiant and inspired. Had those who hang back from our cause seen her face, it might have put a soul into them as she said again, 'It will be done--it will be done--oh, I trust and pray it may!' "So we kissed each other, and vowed friendship and fidelity--so I came away. "To-day I am going with Lord Shaftesbury to St. Paul's to see the charity children, after which lunch with Dean Milman. "_May 31._ We went to lunch with Miss R. at Oxford Terrace, where, among a number of distinguished guests, was Lady Byron, with whom I had a few moments of deeply interesting conversation. No engravings that ever have been circulated in America do any justice to her appearance. She is of slight figure, formed with exceeding delicacy, and her whole form, face, dress, and air unite to make an impression of a character singularly dignified, gentle, pure, and yet strong. No words addressed to me in any conversation hitherto have made their way to my inner soul with such force as a few remarks dropped by her on the present religious aspect of England,--remarks of such quality as one seldom hears. "According to request, I will endeavor to keep you informed of all our goings-on after you left, up to the time of our departure for Paris. "We have borne in mind your advice to hasten away to the Continent. Charles wrote, a day or two since, to Mrs. C. at Paris to secure very private lodgings, and by no means let any one know that we were coming. She has replied urging us to come to her house, and promising entire seclusion and rest. So, since you departed, we have been passing with a kind of comprehensive skip and jump over remaining engagements. And just the evening after you left came off the presentation of the inkstand by the ladies of Surrey Chapel. "It is a beautiful specimen of silver-work, eighteen inches long, with a group of silver figures on it representing Religion, with the Bible in her hand, giving liberty to the slave. The slave is a masterly piece of work. He stands with his hands clasped, looking up to Heaven, while a white man is knocking the shackles from his feet. But the prettiest part of the scene was the presentation of a _gold pen_ by a band of beautiful children, one of whom made a very pretty speech. I called the little things to come and stand around me, and talked with them a few minutes, and this was all the speaking that fell to my share. "To-morrow we go--go to quiet, to obscurity, to peace--to Paris, to Switzerland; there we shall find the loveliest glen, and, as the Bible says, 'fall on sleep.' "_Paris, June 4._ Here we are in Paris, in a most charming family. I have been out all the morning exploring shops, streets, boulevards, and seeing and hearing life in Paris. When one has a pleasant home and friends to return to, this gay, bustling, vivacious, graceful city is one of the most charming things in the world; and we _have_ a most charming home. "I wish the children could see these Tuileries with their statues and fountains, men, women, and children seated in family groups under the trees, chatting, reading aloud, working muslin,--children driving hoop, playing ball, all alive and chattering French. Such fresh, pretty girls as are in the shops here! _Je suis ravé_, as they say. In short I am decidedly in a French humor, and am taking things quite _couleur de rose_. "_Monday, June 13._ We went this morning to the studio of M. Belloc, who is to paint my portrait. The first question which he proposed, with a genuine French air, was the question of 'pose' or position. It was concluded that, as other pictures had taken me looking at the spectator, this should take me looking away. M. Belloc remarked that M. Charpentier said I appeared always with the air of an observer,--was always looking around on everything. Hence M. Belloc would take me '_en observatrice, mais pas en curieuse_,'--with the air of observation, but not of curiosity. By and by M. Charpentier came in. He began panegyrizing 'Uncle Tom,' and this led to a discussion of the ground of its unprecedented success. In his thirty-five years' experience as a bookseller, he had known nothing like it. It surpassed all modern writings! At first he would not read it; his taste was for old masters of a century or two ago. 'Like M. Belloc in painting,' said I. At length he found his friend M., the first intelligence of the age, reading it. "'What, you, too?' said he. "'Ah, ah!' replied the friend; 'say nothing about this book! There is nothing like it. This leaves us all behind,--all, all, miles behind!' "M. Belloc said the reason was because there was in it more _genuine faith_ than in any book; and we branched off into florid eloquence touching paganism, Christianity, and art. "_Wednesday, June 22._ Adieu to Paris! Ho for Chalons-sur-Saône! After affectionate farewells of our kind friends, by eleven o'clock we were rushing, in the pleasantest of cars, over the smoothest of rails, through Burgundy. We arrived at Chalons at nine P. M. "_Thursday, 23_, eight o'clock A. M. Since five we have had a fine bustle on the quay below our windows. There lay three steamers, shaped for all the world like our last night's rolls. One would think Ichabod Crane might sit astride one of them and dip his feet in the water. They ought to be swift. L'Hirondelle (The Swallow) flew at five; another at six. We leave at nine. "_Lyons._ There was a scene of indescribable confusion upon our arrival here. Out of the hold of our steamer a man with a rope and hook began hauling baggage up a smooth board. Three hundred people were sorting their goods without checks. Porters were shouldering immense loads, four or five heavy trunks at once, corded together, and stalking off Atlantean. Hat-boxes, bandboxes, and valises burst like a meteoric shower out of a crater. '_A moi, à moi!_' was the cry, from old men, young women, soldiers, shopkeepers, and _frères_, scuffling and shoving together. "_Saturday, June 25._ Lyons to Genève. As this was our first experience in the diligence line, we noticed particularly every peculiarity. I had had the idea that a diligence was a ricketty, slow-moulded antediluvian nondescript, toiling patiently along over impassable roads at a snail's pace. Judge of my astonishment at finding it a full-blooded, vigorous monster, of unscrupulous railway momentum and imperturbable equipoise of mind. Down the macadamized slopes we thundered at a prodigious pace; up the hills we trotted, with six horses, three abreast; madly through the little towns we burst, like a whirlwind, crashing across the pebbled streets, and out upon the broad, smooth road again. Before we had well considered the fact that we were out of Lyons we stopped to change horses. Done in a jiffy; and whoop, crick, crack, whack, rumble, bump, whirr, whisk, away we blazed, till, ere we knew it, another change and another. "As evening drew on, a wind sprang up and a storm seemed gathering on the Jura. The rain dashed against the panes of the berlin as we rode past the grim-faced monarch of the 'misty shroud.' It was night as we drove into Geneva and stopped at the Messagerie. I heard with joy a voice demanding if this were _Madame Besshare_. I replied, not without some scruples of conscience, '_Oui, Monsieur, c'est moi_,' though the name did not sound exactly like the one to which I had been wont to respond. In half an hour we were at home in the mansion of Monsieur Fazy." From Geneva the party made a tour of the Swiss Alps, spending some weeks among them. While there Charles Beecher wrote from a small hotel at the foot of the Jura:-- "The people of the neighborhood, having discovered who Harriet was, were very kind, and full of delight at seeing her. It was Scotland over again. We have had to be unflinching to prevent her being overwhelmed, both in Paris and Geneva, by the same demonstrations of regard. To this we were driven, as a matter of life and death. It was touching to listen to the talk of these secluded mountaineers. The good hostess, even the servant maids, hung about Harriet, expressing such tender interest for the slave. All had read 'Uncle Tom;' and it had apparently been an era in their life's monotony, for they said, 'Oh, madam, do write another! Remember, our winter nights here are very long!'" Upon their return to Geneva they visited the Castle of Chillon, of which, in describing the dungeons, Mrs. Stowe writes:-- "One of the pillars in this vault is covered with names. I think it is Bonnevard's Pillar. There are the names of Byron, Hunt, Schiller, and ever so many more celebrities. As we were going from the cell our conductress seemed to have a sudden light upon her mind. She asked a question or two of some of our party, and fell upon me vehemently to put my name also there. Charley scratched it on the soft freestone, and there it is for future ages. The lady could scarce repress her enthusiasm; she shook my hand over and over again, and said she had read 'Uncle Tom.' 'It is beautiful,' she said, 'but it is cruel.' "_Monday, July 18._ Weather suspicious. Stowed ourselves and our baggage into our _voiture_, and bade adieu to our friends and to Geneva. Ah, how regretfully! From the market-place we carried away a basket of cherries and fruit as a consolation. Dined at Lausanne, and visited the cathedral and picture-gallery, where was an exquisite _Eva_. Slept at Meudon. "_Tuesday, July 19._ Rode through Payerne to Freyburg. Stopped at the Zähringer Hof,--most romantic of inns. "_Wednesday, July 20._ Examined, not the lions, but the bears of Berne. Engaged a _voiture_ and drove to Thun. Dined and drove by the shore of the lake to Interlachen, arriving just after a brilliant sunset. "We crossed the Wengern Alps to Grindelwald. The Jungfrau is right over against us,--her glaciers purer, tenderer, more dazzlingly beautiful, if possible, than those of Mont Blanc. Slept at Grindelwald." From Rosenlaui, on this journey, Charles Beecher writes:-- "_Friday, July 22._ Grindelwald to Meyringen. On we came, to the top of the Great Schiedeck, where H. and W. botanized, while I slept. Thence we rode down the mountain till we reached Rosenlaui, where, I am free to say, a dinner was to me a more interesting object than a glacier. Therefore, while H. and W. went to the latter, I turned off to the inn, amid their cries and reproaches. "Here, then, I am, writing these notes in the _salle à manger_ of the inn, where other voyagers are eating and drinking, and there is H. feeding on the green moonshine of an emerald ice cave. One would almost think her incapable of fatigue. How she skips up and down high places and steep places, to the manifest perplexity of the honest guide Kienholz, _père_, who tries to take care of her, but does not exactly know how! She gets on a pyramid of débris, which the edge of the glacier is plowing and grinding up, sits down, and falls--not asleep exactly, but into a trance. W. and I are ready to go on: we shout; our voice is lost in the roar of the torrent. We send the guide. He goes down, and stands doubtfully. He does not know exactly what to do. She hears him, and starts to her feet, pointing with one hand to yonder peak, and with the other to that knife-like edge that seems cleaving heaven with its keen and glistening cimeter of snow, reminding one of Isaiah's sublime imagery, 'For my sword is bathed in heaven.' She points at the grizzly rocks, with their jags and spear-points. Evidently she is beside herself, and thinks she can remember the names of those monsters, born of earthquake and storm, which cannot be named nor known but by sight, and then are known at once perfectly and forever." After traveling through Germany, Belgium, and Holland, the party returned to Paris toward the end of August, from which place Mrs. Stowe writes:-- "I am seated in a snug little room at M. Belloc's. The weather is overpoweringly hot, but these Parisian houses seem to have seized and imprisoned coolness. French household ways are delightful. I like their seclusion from the street by these deep-paned quadrangles. "Madame Belloc was the translator of Maria Edgeworth, by that lady's desire; corresponded with her for years, and still has many of her letters. Her translation of 'Uncle Tom' has to me all the merit and all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it, I enjoy the pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever having been mine." The next letter is from London _en route_ for America, to which passage had been engaged on the Collins steamer Arctic. In it Mrs. Stowe writes:-- "_London, August 28._ Our last letters from home changed all our plans. We concluded to hurry away by the next steamer, if at that late hour we could get a passage. We were all in a bustle. The last shoppings for aunts, cousins, and little folks were to be done by us all. The Palais Royal was to be rummaged; bronzes, vases, statuettes, bonbons, playthings,--all that the endless fertility of France could show,--was to be looked over for the 'folks at home.' "How we sped across the Channel C. relates. We are spending a few very pleasant days with our kind friends the L.'s, in London. "_On board the Arctic, September 7._ On Thursday, September 1, we reached York, and visited the beautiful ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, and the magnificent cathedral. It rained with inflexible pertinacity during all the time we were there, and the next day it rained still, when we took the cars for Castle Howard station. "Lady Carlisle welcomed us most affectionately, and we learned that, had we not been so reserved at the York station in concealing our names, we should have received a note from her. However, as we were safely arrived, it was of no consequence. "Our friends spoke much of Sumner and Prescott, who had visited there; also of Mr. Lawrence, our former ambassador, who had visited them just before his return. After a very pleasant day, we left with regret the warmth of this hospitable circle, thus breaking one more of the links that bind us to the English shore. "Nine o'clock in the evening found us sitting by a cheerful fire in the parlor of Mr. E. Baines at Leeds. The next day the house was filled with company, and the Leeds offering was presented. "Tuesday we parted from our excellent friends in Leeds, and soon found ourselves once more in the beautiful "Dingle," our first and last resting-place on English shores. "A deputation from Belfast, Ireland, here met me, presenting a beautiful bog-oak casket, lined with gold, and carved with appropriate national symbols, containing an offering for the cause of the oppressed. They read a beautiful address, and touched upon the importance of inspiring with the principles of emancipation the Irish nation, whose influence in our land is becoming so great. Had time and strength permitted, it had been my purpose to visit Ireland, to revisit Scotland, and to see more of England. But it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. And now came parting, leave-taking, last letters, notes, and messages. "Thus, almost sadly as a child might leave its home, I left the shores of kind, strong Old England,--the mother of us all." CHAPTER XI. HOME AGAIN, 1853-1856. ANTI-SLAVERY WORK.--STIRRING TIMES IN THE UNITED STATES.--ADDRESS TO THE LADIES OF GLASGOW.--APPEAL TO THE WOMEN OF AMERICA.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.--THE WRITING OF "DRED."--FAREWELL LETTER FROM GEORGIANA MAY.--SECOND VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. AFTER her return in the autumn of 1853 from her European tour, Mrs. Stowe threw herself heart and soul into the great struggle with slavery. Much of her time was occupied in distributing over a wide area of country the English gold with which she had been intrusted for the advancement of the cause. With this money she assisted in the redemption of slaves whose cases were those of peculiar hardship, and helped establish them as free men. She supported anti-slavery lectures wherever they were most needed, aided in establishing and maintaining anti-slavery publications, founded and assisted in supporting schools in which colored people might be taught how to avail themselves of the blessings of freedom. She arranged public meetings, and prepared many of the addresses that should be delivered at them. She maintained such an extensive correspondence with persons of all shades of opinion in all parts of the world, that the letters received and answered by her between 1853 and 1856 would fill volumes. With all these multifarious interests, her children received a full share of her attention, nor were her literary activities relaxed. Immediately upon the completion of her European tour, her experiences were published in the form of a journal, both in this country and England, under the title of "Sunny Memories." She also revised and elaborated the collection of sketches which had been published by the Harpers in 1843, under title of "The Mayflower," and having purchased the plates caused them to be republished in 1855 by Phillips & Sampson, the successors of John P. Jewett & Co., in this country, and by Sampson Low & Co. in London. Soon after her return to America, feeling that she owed a debt of gratitude to her friends in Scotland, which her feeble health had not permitted her adequately to express while with them, Mrs. Stowe wrote the following open letter:-- TO THE LADIES' ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW: _Dear Friends_,--I have had many things in my mind to say to you, which it was my hope to have said personally, but which I am now obliged to say by letter. I have had many fears that you must have thought our intercourse, during the short time that I was in Glasgow, quite unsatisfactory. At the time that I accepted your very kind invitation, I was in tolerable health, and supposed that I should be in a situation to enjoy society, and mingle as much in your social circles as you might desire. When the time came for me to fulfil my engagement with you, I was, as you know, confined to my bed with a sickness brought on by the exertion of getting the "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" through the press during the winter. In every part of the world the story of "Uncle Tom" had awakened sympathy for the American slave, and consequently in every part of the world the story of his wrongs had been denied; it had been asserted to be a mere work of romance, and I was charged with being the slanderer of the institutions of my own country. I knew that if I shrank from supporting my position, the sympathy which the work had excited would gradually die out, and the whole thing would be looked upon as a mere romantic excitement of the passions. When I came abroad, I had not the slightest idea of the kind of reception which was to meet me in England and Scotland. I had thought of something involving considerable warmth, perhaps, and a good deal of cordiality and feeling on the part of friends; but of the general extent of feeling through society, and of the degree to which it would be publicly expressed, I had, I may say, no conception. As through your society I was invited to your country, it may seem proper that what communication I have to make to friends in England and Scotland should be made through you. In the first place, then, the question will probably arise in your minds, Have the recent demonstrations in Great Britain done good to the anti-slavery cause in America? The first result of those demonstrations, as might have been expected, was an intense reaction. Every kind of false, evil, and malignant report has been circulated by malicious and partisan papers; and if there is any blessing in having all manner of evil said against us falsely, we have seemed to be in a fair way to come in possession of it. The sanction which was given in this matter to the voice of the people, by the nobility of England and Scotland, has been regarded and treated with special rancor; and yet, in its place, it has been particularly important. Without it great advantages would have been taken to depreciate the value of the national testimony. The value of this testimony in particular will appear from the fact that the anti-slavery cause has been treated with especial contempt by the leaders of society in this country, and every attempt made to brand it with ridicule. The effect of making a cause generally unfashionable is much greater in this world than it ought to be. It operates very powerfully with the young and impressible portion of the community; therefore Cassius M. Clay very well said with regard to the demonstration at Stafford House: "It will help our cause by rendering it fashionable." With regard to the present state of the anti-slavery cause in America, I think, for many reasons, that it has never been more encouraging. It is encouraging in this respect, that the subject is now fairly up for inquiry before the public mind. And that systematic effort which has been made for years to prevent its being discussed is proving wholly ineffectual. The "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" has sold extensively at the South, following in the wake of "Uncle Tom." Not one fact or statement in it has been disproved as yet. I have yet to learn of even an _attempt_ to disprove. The "North American Review," a periodical which has never been favorable to the discussion of the slavery question, has come out with a review of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which, while rating the book very low as a work of art, they account for its great circulation and success by the fact of its being a true picture of slavery. They go on to say that the system is one so inherently abominable that, unless slaveholders shall rouse themselves and abolish the principle of chattel ownership, they can no longer sustain themselves under the contempt and indignation of the whole civilized world. What are the slaveholders to do when this is the best their friends and supporters can say for them? I regret to say that the movements of Christian denominations on this subject are yet greatly behind what they should be. Some movements have been made by religious bodies, of which I will not now speak; but as a general thing the professed Christian church is pushed up to its duty by the world, rather than the world urged on by the church. The colored people in this country are rapidly rising in every respect. I shall request Frederick Douglass to send you the printed account of the recent colored convention. It would do credit to any set of men whatever, and I hope you will get some notice taken of it in the papers of the United Kingdom. It is time that the slanders against this unhappy race should be refuted, and it should be seen how, in spite of every social and political oppression, they are rising in the scale of humanity. In my opinion they advance quite as fast as any of the foreign races which have found an asylum among us. May God so guide us in all things that our good be not evil spoken of, and that we be left to defend nothing which is opposed to his glory and the good of man! Yours in all sympathy, H. B. STOWE. During the Kansas and Nebraska agitation (1853-54), Mrs. Stowe, in common with the abolitionists of the North, was deeply impressed with a solemn sense that it was a desperate crisis in the nation's history. She was in constant correspondence with Charles Sumner and other distinguished statesmen of the time, and kept herself informed as to the minutest details of the struggle. At this time she wrote and caused to be circulated broadcast the following appeal to the women of America:-- "The Providence of God has brought our nation to a crisis of most solemn interest. "A question is now pending in our national legislature which is most vitally to affect the temporal and eternal interests, not only of ourselves, but of our children and our children's children for ages yet unborn. Through our nation it is to affect the interests of liberty and Christianity throughout the world. "Of the woes, the injustice, and the misery of slavery it is not needful to speak. There is but one feeling and one opinion upon this subject among us all. I do not think there is a mother who clasps her child to her breast who would ever be made to feel it right that that child should be a slave, not a mother among us who would not rather lay that child in its grave. "Nor can I believe that there is a woman so unchristian as to think it right to inflict upon her neighbor's child what she would consider worse than death were it inflicted upon her own. I do not believe there is a wife who would think it right that _her_ husband should be sold to a trader to be worked all his life without wages or a recognition of rights. I do not believe there is a husband who would consider it right that his wife should be regarded by law the property of another man. I do not believe there is a father or mother who would consider it right were they forbidden by law to teach their children to read. I do not believe there is a brother who would think it right to have his sister held as property, with no legal defense for her personal honor, by any man living. "All this is inherent in slavery. It is not the abuse of slavery, but its legal nature. And there is not a woman in the United States, where the question is fairly put to her, who thinks these things are right. "But though our hearts have bled over this wrong, there have been many things tending to fetter our hands, to perplex our efforts, and to silence our voice. We have been told that to speak of it was an invasion of the rights of states. We have heard of promises and compacts, and the natural expression of feeling has in many cases been repressed by an appeal to those honorable sentiments which respect the keeping of engagements. "But a time has now come when the subject is arising under quite a different aspect. "The question is not now, shall the wrongs of slavery exist as they have within their own territories, but shall we permit them to be extended all over the free territories of the United States? Shall the woes and the miseries of slavery be extended over a region of fair, free, unoccupied territory nearly equal in extent to the whole of the free States? "Nor is this all! This is not the last thing that is expected or intended. Should this movement be submitted to in silence, should the North consent to this solemn breach of contract on the part of the South, there yet remains one more step to be apprehended, namely, the legalizing of slavery throughout the free States. By a decision of the supreme court in the Lemmon case, it may be declared lawful for slave property to be held in the Northern States. Should this come to pass, it is no more improbable that there may be four years hence slave depots in New York city than it was four years ago that the South would propose a repeal of the Missouri Compromise. "Women of the free States! the question is not shall we remonstrate with slavery on its own soil, but are we willing to receive slavery into the free States and Territories of this Union? Shall the whole power of these United States go into the hands of slavery? Shall every State in the Union be thrown open to slavery? This is the possible result and issue of the question now pending. This is the fearful crisis at which we stand. "And now you ask, What can the _women_ of a country do? "O women of the free States! what did your brave mothers do in the days of our Revolution? Did not liberty in those days feel the strong impulse of woman's heart? "There was never a great interest agitating a community where woman's influence was not felt for good or for evil. At the time when the abolition of the slave-trade was convulsing England, women contributed more than any other laborers to that great triumph of humanity. The women of England refused to receive into their houses the sugar raised by slaves. Seventy thousand families thus refused the use of sugar in testimony of their abhorrence of the manner in which it was produced. At that time women were unwearied in going from house to house distributing books and tracts upon the subject, and presenting it clearly and forcibly to thousands of families who would otherwise have disregarded it. "The women all over England were associated in corresponding circles for prayer and labor. Petitions to the government were prepared and signed by women of every station in all parts of the kingdom. "Women of America! we do not know with what thrilling earnestness the hopes and the eyes of the world are fastened upon our country, and how intense is the desire that we should take a stand for universal liberty. When I was in England, although I distinctly stated that the raising of money was no part of my object there, it was actually forced upon me by those who could not resist the impulse to do something for this great cause. Nor did it come from the well-to-do alone; but hundreds of most affecting letters were received from poor working men and women, who inclosed small sums in postage-stamps to be devoted to freeing slaves. "Nor is this deep feeling confined to England alone. I found it in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Why do foreign lands regard us with this intensity of interest? Is it not because the whole world looks hopefully toward America as a nation especially raised by God to advance the cause of human liberty and religion? "There has been a universal expectation that the next step taken by America would surely be one that should have a tendency to right this great wrong. Those who are struggling for civil and religious liberty in Europe speak this word 'slavery' in sad whispers, as one names a fault of a revered friend. They can scarce believe the advertisements in American papers of slave sales of men, women, and children, traded like cattle. Scarcely can they trust their eyes when they read the laws of the slave States, and the decisions of their courts. The advocates of despotism hold these things up to them and say: 'See what comes of republican liberty!' Hitherto the answer has been, 'America is more than half free, and she certainly will in time repudiate slavery altogether.' "But what can they say now if, just as the great struggle for human rights is commencing throughout Europe, America opens all her Territories to the most unmitigated despotism? "While all the nations of Europe are thus moved on the subject of American slavery, shall we alone remain unmoved? Shall we, the wives, mothers, and sisters of America, remain content with inaction in such a crisis as this? "The first duty of every American woman at this time is to thoroughly understand the subject for herself, and to feel that she is bound to use her influence for the right. Then they can obtain signatures to petitions to our national legislature. They can spread information upon this vital topic throughout their neighborhoods. They can employ lecturers to lay the subject before the people. They can circulate the speeches of their members of Congress that bear upon the subject, and in many other ways they can secure to all a full understanding of the present position of our country. "Above all, it seems to be necessary and desirable that we should make this subject a matter of earnest prayer. A conflict is now begun between the forces of liberty and despotism throughout the whole world. We who are Christians, and believe in the sure word of prophecy, know that fearful convulsions and overturnings are predicted before the coming of Him who is to rule the earth in righteousness. How important, then, in this crisis, that all who believe in prayer should retreat beneath the shadow of the Almighty! "It is a melancholy but unavoidable result of such great encounters of principle that they tend to degenerate into sectional and personal bitterness. It is this liability that forms one of the most solemn and affecting features of the crisis now presented. We are on the eve of a conflict which will try men's souls, and strain to the utmost the bonds of brotherly union that bind this nation together. "Let us, then, pray that in the agitation of this question between the North and the South the war of principle may not become a mere sectional conflict, degenerating into the encounter of physical force. Let us raise our hearts to Him who has the power to restrain the wrath of men, that He will avert the consequences that our sins as a nation so justly deserve. "There are many noble minds in the South who do not participate in the machinations of their political leaders, and whose sense of honor and justice is outraged by this proposition equally with our own. While, then, we seek to sustain the cause of freedom unwaveringly, let us also hold it to be our office as true women to moderate the acrimony of political contest, remembering that the slaveholder and the slave are alike our brethren, whom the law of God commands us to love as ourselves. "For the sake, then, of our dear children, for the sake of our common country, for the sake of outraged and struggling liberty throughout the world, let every woman of America now do her duty." At this same time Mrs. Stowe found herself engaged in an active correspondence with William Lloyd Garrison, much of which appeared in the columns of his paper, the "Liberator." Late in 1853 she writes to him:-- "In regard to you, your paper, and in some measure your party, I am in an honest embarrassment. I sympathize with you fully in many of your positions. Others I consider erroneous, hurtful to liberty and the progress of humanity. Nevertheless, I believe you and those who support them to be honest and conscientious in your course and opinions. What I fear is that your paper will take from poor Uncle Tom his Bible, and give him nothing in its place." To this Mr. Garrison answers: "I do not understand why the imputation is thrown upon the 'Liberator' as tending to rob Uncle Tom of his Bible. I know of no writer in its pages who wishes to deprive him of it, or of any comfort he may derive from it. It is for him to place whatever estimate he can upon it, and for you and me to do the same; but for neither of us to accept any more of it than we sincerely believe to be in accordance with reason, truth, and eternal right. How much of it is true and obligatory, each one can determine only for himself; for on Protestant ground there is no room for papal infallibility. All Christendom professes to believe in the inspiration of the volume, and at the same time all Christendom is by the ears as to its real teachings. Surely you would not have me disloyal to my conscience. How do you prove that you are not trammeled by educational or traditional notions as to the entire sanctity of the book? Indeed, it seems to me very evident that you are not free in spirit, in view of the apprehension and sorrow you feel because you find your conceptions of the Bible controverted in the 'Liberator,' else why such disquietude of mind? 'Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just.'" In answer to this Mrs. Stowe writes:-- I did not reply to your letter immediately, because I did not wish to speak on so important a subject unadvisedly, or without proper thought and reflection. The greater the interest involved in a truth the more careful, self-distrustful, and patient should be the inquiry. I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place, because, such as it is, it is better than nothing. I notice in Mr. Parker's sermons a very eloquent passage on the uses and influences of the Bible. He considers it to embody absolute and perfect religion, and that no better mode for securing present and eternal happiness can be found than in the obedience to certain religious precepts therein recorded. He would have it read and circulated, and considers it, as I infer, a Christian duty to send it to the heathen, the slave, etc. I presume you agree with him. These things being supposed about the Bible would certainly make it appear that, if any man deems it his duty to lessen its standing in the eyes of the community, he ought at least to do so in a cautious and reverential spirit, with humility and prayer. My objection to the mode in which these things are handled in the "Liberator" is that the general tone and spirit seem to me the reverse of this. If your paper circulated only among those of disciplined and cultivated minds, skilled to separate truth from falsehood, knowing where to go for evidence and how to satisfy the doubts you raise, I should feel less regret. But your name and benevolent labors have given your paper a circulation among the poor and lowly. They have no means of investigating, no habits of reasoning. The Bible, as they at present understand it, is doing them great good, and is a blessing to them and their families. The whole tendency of your mode of proceeding is to lessen their respect and reverence for the Bible, without giving them anything in its place. I have no fear of discussion as to its final results on the Bible; my only regrets are for those human beings whose present and immortal interests I think compromised by this manner of discussion. Discussion of the evidence of the authenticity and inspiration of the Bible and of all theology will come more and more, and I rejoice that they will. But I think they must come, as all successful inquiries into truth must, in a calm, thoughtful, and humble spirit; not with bold assertions, hasty generalizations, or passionate appeals. [Illustration: Lyman Beecher] I appreciate your good qualities none the less though you differ with me on this point. I believe you to be honest and sincere. In Mr. Parker's works I have found much to increase my respect and esteem for him as a man. He comes to results, it is true, to which it would be death and utter despair for me to arrive at. Did I believe as he does about the Bible and Jesus, I were of all creatures most miserable, because I could not love God. I could find no God to love. I would far rather never have been born. As to you, my dear friend, you must own that my frankness to you is the best expression of my confidence in your honor and nobleness. Did I not believe that "an excellent spirit" is in you, I would not take the trouble to write all this. If in any points in this note I appear to have misapprehended or done you injustice, I hope you will candidly let me know where and how. Truly your friend, H. B. STOWE. In addition to these letters the following extracts from a subsequent letter to Mr. Garrison are given to show in what respect their fields of labor differed, and to present an idea of what Mrs. Stowe was doing for the cause of freedom besides writing against slavery:-- ANDOVER, MASS., _February 18, 1854._ DEAR FRIEND,--I see and sincerely rejoice in the result of your lecture in New York. I am increasingly anxious that all who hate slavery be united, if not in form, at least in fact,--a unity in difference. _Our_ field lies in the church, and as yet I differ from you as to what may be done and hoped there. Brother Edward (Beecher) has written a sermon that goes to the very root of the decline of moral feeling in the church. As soon as it can be got ready for the press I shall have it printed, and shall send a copy to every minister in the country. Our lectures have been somewhat embarrassed by a pressure of new business brought upon us by the urgency of the Kansas-Nebraska question. Since we began, however, brother Edward has devoted his whole time to visiting, consultation, and efforts the result of which will shortly be given to the public. We are trying to secure a universal arousing of the pulpit. Dr. Bacon's letter is noble. You must think so. It has been sent to every member of Congress. Dr. Kirk's sermon is an advance, and his congregation warmly seconded it. Now, my good friend, be willing to see that the church is better than you have thought it. Be not unwilling to see some good symptoms, and hope that even those who see not at all at first will gain as they go on. I am acting on the conviction that you love the cause better than self. If anything can be done now advantageously by the aid of money, let me know. God has given me some power in this way, though I am too feeble to do much otherwise. Yours for the cause, H. B. STOWE. Although the demand was very great upon Mrs. Stowe for magazine and newspaper articles, many of which she managed to write in 1854-55, she had in her mind at this time a new book which should be in many respects the complement of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In preparing her Key to the latter work, she had collected much new material. In 1855, therefore, and during the spring of 1856, she found time to weave these hitherto unused facts into the story of "Dred." In her preface to the English edition of this book she writes:-- "The author's object in this book is to show the general effect of slavery on society; the various social disadvantages which it brings, even to its most favored advocates; the shiftlessness and misery and backward tendency of all the economical arrangements of slave States; the retrograding of good families into poverty; the deterioration of land; the worse demoralization of all classes, from the aristocratic, tyrannical planter to the oppressed and poor white, which is the result of the introduction of slave labor. "It is also an object to display the corruption of Christianity which arises from the same source; a corruption that has gradually lowered the standard of the church, North and South, and been productive of more infidelity than the works of all the encyclopædists put together." The story of "Dred" was suggested by the famous negro insurrection, led by Nat Turner, in Eastern Virginia in 1831. In this affair one of the principal participators was named "Dred." An interesting incident connected with the writing of "Dred" is vividly remembered by Mrs. Stowe's daughters. One sultry summer night there arose a terrific thunder-storm, with continuous flashes of lightning and incessant rumbling and muttering of thunder, every now and then breaking out into sharp, crashing reports followed by torrents of rain. The two young girls, trembling with fear, groped their way down-stairs to their mother's room, and on entering found her lying quietly in bed awake, and calmly watching the storm from the windows, the shades being up. She expressed no surprise on seeing them, but said that she had not been herself in the least frightened, though intensely interested in watching the storm. "I have been writing a description of a thunder-storm for my book, and I am watching to see if I need to correct it in any particular." Our readers will be interested to know that she had so well described a storm from memory that even this vivid object-lesson brought with it no new suggestions. This scene is to be found in the twenty-fourth chapter of "Dred,"--"Life in the Swamps." "The day had been sultry and it was now an hour or two past midnight, when a thunder-storm, which had long been gathering and muttering in the distant sky, began to develop its forces. A low, shivering sigh crept through the woods, and swayed in weird whistlings the tops of the pines; and sharp arrows of lightning came glittering down among the branches, as if sent from the bow of some warlike angel. An army of heavy clouds swept in a moment across the moon; then came a broad, dazzling, blinding sheet of flame." What particularly impressed Mrs. Stowe's daughters at the time was their mother's perfect calmness, and the minute study of the storm. She was on the alert to detect anything which might lead her to correct her description. Of this new story Charles Summer wrote from the senate chamber:-- MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I am rejoiced to learn, from your excellent sister here, that you are occupied with another tale exposing slavery. I feel that it will act directly upon pending questions, and help us in our struggle for Kansas, and also to overthrow the slave-oligarchy in the coming Presidential election. We need your help at once in our struggle. Ever sincerely yours, CHARLES SUMNER. Having finished this second great story of slavery, in the early summer of 1856 Mrs. Stowe decided to visit Europe again, in search of a much-needed rest. She also found it necessary to do so in order to secure the English right to her book, which she had failed to do on "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Just before sailing she received the following touching letter from her life-long friend, Georgiana May. It is the last one of a series that extended without interruption over a period of thirty years, and as such has been carefully cherished:-- OCEAN HOUSE, GROTON POINT, _July 26, 1856._ DEAR HATTIE,--Very likely it is too late for me to come with my modest knock to your study door, and ask to be taken in for a moment, but I do so want to _bless_ you before you go, and I have not been well enough to write until to-day. It seems just as if I _could_ not let you go till I have seen once more your face in the flesh, for great uncertainties hang over my future. One thing, however, is certain: whichever of us two gets first to the farther shore of the great ocean between us and the unseen will be pretty sure to be at hand to welcome the other. It is not poetry, but solemn verity between us that we _shall_ meet again. But there is nothing _morbid_ or _morbific_ going into these few lines. I have made "Old Tiff's" acquaintance. _He_ is a verity,--will stand up with Uncle Tom and Topsy, pieces of negro property you will be guilty of holding after you are dead. Very likely your children may be selling them. Hattie, I rejoice over this completed work. Another work for God and your generation. I am glad that you have come out of it alive, that you have pleasure in prospect, that you "walk at liberty" and have done with "fits of languishing." Perhaps some day I shall be set free, but the prospect does not look promising, except as I have full faith that "the Good Man above is looking on, and will bring it all round right." Still "heart and flesh" both "fail me." He will be the "strength of my heart," and I never seem to doubt "my portion forever." If I never speak to you again, this is the farewell utterance. Yours truly, GEORGIANA. Mrs. Stowe was accompanied on this second trip to Europe by her husband, her two eldest daughters, her son Henry, and her sister Mary (Mrs. Perkins). It was a pleasant summer voyage, and was safely accomplished without special incident. CHAPTER XII. DRED, 1856. SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND.--A GLIMPSE AT THE QUEEN.--THE DUKE OF ARGYLL AND INVERARY.--EARLY CORRESPONDENCE WITH LADY BYRON.--DUNROBIN CASTLE AND ITS INMATES.--A VISIT TO STOKE PARK.--LORD DUFFERIN.--CHARLES KINGSLEY AT HOME.--PARIS REVISITED.--MADAME MOHL'S RECEPTIONS. AFTER reaching England, about the middle of August, 1856, Mrs. Stowe and her husband spent some days in London completing arrangements to have an English edition of "Dred" published by Sampson Low & Co. Professor Stowe's duties in America being very pressing, he had intended returning at once, but was detained for a short time, as will be seen in the following letter written by him from Glasgow, August 29, to a friend in America:-- DEAR FRIEND,--I finished my business in London on Wednesday, and intended to return by the Liverpool steamer of to-morrow, but find that every berth on that line is engaged until the 3d of October. We therefore came here yesterday, and I shall take passage in the steamer New York from this port next Tuesday. We have received a special invitation to visit Inverary Castle, the seat of the Duke of Argyll, and yesterday we had just the very pleasantest little interview with the Queen that ever was. None of the formal, drawing-room, breathless receptions, but just an accidental, done-on-purpose meeting at a railway station, while on our way to Scotland. The Queen seemed really delighted to see my wife, and remarkably glad to see me for her sake. She pointed us out to Prince Albert, who made two most gracious bows to my wife and two to me, while the four royal children stared their big blue eyes almost out looking at the little authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Colonel Grey handed the Queen, with my wife's compliments, a copy of the new book ("Dred"). She took one volume herself and handed the other to Prince Albert, and they were soon both very busy reading. She is a real nice little body with exceedingly pleasant, kindly manners. I expect to be in Natick the last week in September. God bless you all. C. E. STOWE. After her husband's departure for the United States, Mrs. Stowe, with her son Henry, her two eldest daughters, and her sister Mary (Mrs. Perkins), accepted the Duke of Argyll's invitation to visit the Highlands. Of this visit we catch a pleasant glimpse from a letter written to Professor Stowe during its continuance, which is as follows:-- INVERARY CASTLE, _September 6, 1856._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--We have been now a week in this delicious place, enjoying the finest skies and scenery, the utmost of kind hospitality. From Loch Goil we took the coach for Inverary, a beautiful drive of about two hours. We had seats on the outside, and the driver John, like some of the White Mountain guides, was full of song and story, and local tradition. He spoke Scotch and Gaelic, recited ballads, and sung songs with great gusto. Mary and the girls stopped in a little inn at St. Catherine's, on the shores of Loch Fine, while Henry and I took steamboat for Inverary, where we found the duchess waiting in a carriage for us, with Lady Emma Campbell.... The common routine of the day here is as follows: We rise about half past eight. About half past nine we all meet in the dining-hall, where the servants are standing in a line down one side, and a row of chairs for guests and visitors occupies the other. The duchess with her nine children, a perfectly beautiful little flock, sit together. The duke reads the Bible and a prayer, and pronounces the benediction. After that, breakfast is served,--a very hearty, informal, cheerful meal,--and after that come walks, or drives, or fishing parties, till lunch time, and then more drives, or anything else: everybody, in short, doing what he likes till half past seven, which is the dinner hour. After that we have coffee and tea in the evening. The first morning, the duke took me to see his mine of nickel silver. We had a long and beautiful drive, and talked about everything in literature, religion, morals, and the temperance movement, about which last he is in some state of doubt and uncertainty, not inclining, I think, to have it pressed yet, though feeling there is need of doing something. If "Dred" has as good a sale in America as it is likely to have in England, we shall do well. There is such a demand that they had to placard the shop windows in Glasgow with,-- "To prevent disappointment, 'Dred' Not to be had till," etc. Everybody is after it, and the prospect is of an enormous sale. God, to whom I prayed night and day while I was writing the book, has heard me, and given us of worldly goods more _than_ I asked. I feel, therefore, a desire to "walk softly," and inquire, for what has He so trusted us? Every day I am more charmed with the duke and duchess; they are simple-hearted, frank, natural, full of feeling, of piety, and good sense. They certainly are, apart from any considerations of rank or position, most interesting and noble people. The duke laughed heartily at many things I told him of our Andover theological tactics, of your preaching, etc.; but I think he is a sincere, earnest Christian. Our American politics form the daily topic of interest. The late movements in Congress are discussed with great warmth, and every morning the papers are watched for new details. I must stop now, as it is late and we are to leave here early to-morrow morning. We are going to Staffa, Iona, the Pass of Glencoe, and finally through the Caledonian Canal up to Dunrobin Castle, where a large party of all sorts of interesting people are gathered around the Duchess of Sutherland. Affectionately yours, HARRIET. From Dunrobin Castle one of his daughters writes to Professor Stowe: "We spent five most delightful days at Inverary, and were so sorry you could not be there with us. From there we went to Oban, and spent several days sight-seeing, finally reaching Inverness by way of the Caledonian Canal. Here, to our surprise, we found our rooms at the hotel all prepared for us. The next morning we left by post for Dunrobin, which is fifty-nine miles from Inverness. At the borders of the duke's estate we found a delightfully comfortable carriage awaiting us, and before we had gone much farther the postilion announced that the duchess was coming to meet us. Sure enough, as we looked up the road we saw a fine cavalcade approaching. It consisted of a splendid coach-and-four (in which sat the duchess) with liveried postilions, and a number of outriders, one of whom rode in front to clear the way. The duchess seemed perfectly delighted to see mamma, and taking her into her own carriage dashed off towards the castle, we following on behind." At Dunrobin Mrs. Stowe found awaiting her the following note from her friend, Lady Byron:-- LONDON, _September 10, 1856._ Your book, dear Mrs. Stowe, is of the "little leaven" kind, and must prove a great moral force,--perhaps not manifestly so much as secretly, and yet I can hardly conceive so much power without immediate and sensible effects; only there will be a strong disposition to resist on the part of all the hollow-hearted professors of religion, whose heathenisms you so unsparingly expose. They have a class feeling like others. To the young, and to those who do not reflect much on what is offered to their belief, you will do great good by showing how spiritual food is adulterated. The Bread from Heaven is in the same case as baker's bread. I feel that one perusal is not enough. It is a "mine," to use your own simile. If there is truth in what I heard Lord Byron say, that works of fiction _lived_ only by the amount of _truth_ which they contained, your story is sure of long life.... I know now, more than before, how to value communion with you. With kind regards to your family, Yours affectionately, A. T. NOEL BYRON. From this pleasant abiding-place Mrs. Stowe writes to her husband:-- DUNROBIN CASTLE, _September 15, 1856._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Everything here is like a fairy story. The place is beautiful! It is the most perfect combination of architectural and poetic romance, with home comfort. The people, too, are charming. We have here Mr. Labouchere, a cabinet minister, and Lady Mary his wife,--I like him very much, and her, too,--Kingsley's brother, a very entertaining man, and to-morrow Lord Ellsmere is expected. I wish you could be here, for I am sure you would like it. Life is so quiet and sincere and friendly, that you would feel more as if you had come at the hearts of these people than in London. The Sutherland estate looks like a garden. We stopped at the town of Frain, four miles before we reached Sutherlandshire, where a crowd of well-to-do, nice-looking people gathered around the carriage, and as we drove off gave three cheers. This was better than I expected, and looks well for their opinion of my views. "Dred" is selling over here wonderfully. Low says, with all the means at his command, he has not been able to meet the demand. He sold fifty thousand in two weeks, and probably will sell as many more. I am showered with letters, private and printed, in which the only difficulty is to know what the writers would be at. I see evidently happiness and prosperity all through the line of this estate. I see the duke giving his thought and time, and spending the whole income of this estate in improvements upon it. I see the duke and duchess evidently beloved wherever they move. I see them most amiable, most Christian, most considerate to everybody. The writers of the letters admit the goodness of the duke, but denounce the system, and beg me to observe its effects for myself. I do observe that, compared with any other part of the Highlands, Sutherland is a garden. I observe well-clothed people, thriving lands, healthy children, fine schoolhouses, and all that. Henry was invited to the tenants' dinner, where he excited much amusement by pledging every toast in fair water, as he has done invariably on all occasions since he has been here. The duchess, last night, showed me her copy of "Dred," in which she has marked what most struck or pleased her. I begged it, and am going to send it to you. She said to me this morning at breakfast, "The Queen says that she began 'Dred' the very minute she got it, and is deeply interested in it." She bought a copy of Lowell's poems, and begged me to mark the best ones for her; so if you see him, tell him that we have been reading him together. She is, taking her all in all, one of the noblest-appointed women I ever saw; real old, genuine English, such as one reads of in history; full of nobility, courage, tenderness, and zeal. It does me good to hear her read prayers daily, as she does, in the midst of her servants and guests, with a manner full of grand and noble feeling. _Thursday Morning, September 25._ We were obliged to get up at half past five the morning we left Dunrobin, an effort when one doesn't go to bed till one o'clock. We found breakfast laid for us in the library, and before we had quite finished the duchess came in. Our starting off was quite an imposing sight. First came the duke's landau, in which were Mary, the duke, and myself; then a carriage in which were Eliza and Hatty, and finally the carriage which we had hired, with Henry, our baggage, and Mr. Jackson (the duke's secretary). The gardener sent a fresh bouquet for each of us, and there was such a leave-taking, as if we were old and dear friends. We did really love them, and had no doubt of their love for us. The duke rode with us as far as Dornach, where he showed us the cathedral beneath which his ancestors are buried, and where is a statue of his father, similar to one the tenants have erected on top of the highest hill in the neighborhood. We also saw the prison, which had but two inmates, and the old castle. Here the duke took leave of us, and taking our own carriage we crossed the ferry and continued on our way. After a very bad night's rest at Inverness, in consequence of the town's being so full of people attending some Highland games that we could have no places at the hotel, and after a weary ride in the rain, we came into Aberdeen Friday night. To-morrow we go on to Edinburgh, where I hope to meet a letter from you. The last I heard from Low, he had sold sixty thousand of "Dred," and it was still selling well. I have not yet heard from America how it goes. The critics scold, and whiffle, and dispute about it, but on the whole it is a success, so the "Times" says, with much coughing, hemming, and standing first on one foot and then on the other. If the "Times" were sure we should beat in the next election, "Dred" would go up in the scale; but as long as there is that uncertainty, it has first one line of praise, and then one of blame. Henry Stowe returned to America in October to enter Dartmouth College, while the rest of the party pursued their way southward, as will be seen by the following letters:-- CITY OF YORK, _October 10, 1856._ DEAR HUSBAND,--Henry will tell you all about our journey, and at present I have but little time for details. I received your first letter with great joy, relief, and gratitude, first to God for restoring your health and strength, and then to you for so good, long, and refreshing a letter. Henry, I hope, comes home with a serious determination to do well and be a comfort. Seldom has a young man seen what he has in this journey, or made more valuable friends. Since we left Aberdeen, from which place my last was mailed, we have visited in Edinburgh with abounding delight; thence yesterday to Newcastle. Last night attended service in Durham Cathedral, and after that came to York, whence we send Henry to Liverpool. I send you letters, etc., by him. One hundred thousand copies of "Dred" sold in four weeks! After that who cares what critics say? Its success in England has been complete, so far as sale is concerned. It is very bitterly attacked, both from a literary and a religious point of view. The "Record" is down upon it with a cartload of solemnity; the "Athenæum" with waspish spite; the "Edinburgh" goes out of its way to say that the author knows nothing of the society she describes; but yet it goes everywhere, is read everywhere, and Mr. Low says that he puts the hundred and twenty-fifth thousand to press confidently. The fact that so many good judges like it better than "Uncle Tom" is success enough. In my journal to Henry, which you may look for next week, you will learn how I have been very near the Queen, and formed acquaintance with divers of her lords and ladies, and heard all she has said about "Dred;" how she prefers it to "Uncle Tom," how she inquired for you, and other matters. Till then, I am, as ever, your affectionate wife, H. B. STOWE. After leaving York, Mrs. Stowe and her party spent a day or two at Carlton Rectory, on the edge of Sherwood Forest, in which they enjoyed a most delightful picnic. From there they were to travel to London by way of Warwick and Oxford, and of this journey Mrs. Stowe writes as follows to her son Henry:-- "The next morning we were induced to send our things to London, being assured by Mr. G. that he would dispatch them immediately with some things of his own that were going, and that they should certainly await us upon our arrival. In one respect it was well for us that we thus rid ourselves of the trouble of looking after them, for I never saw such blind, confusing arrangements as these English railroads have. "When we were set down at the place where we were to change for Warwick, we were informed that probably the train had gone. At any rate it could only be found on the other side of the station. You might naturally think we had nothing to do but walk across to the other side. No, indeed! We had to ascend a flight of stairs, go through a sort of tubular bridge, and down another pair of stairs. When we got there the guard said the train was just about to start, and yet the ticket office was closed. We tried the door in vain. 'You must hurry,' said the guard. 'How can we?' said I, 'when we can't get tickets.' He went and thumped, and at last roused the dormant intelligence inside. We got our tickets, ran for dear life, got in, and then _waited ten minutes_! Arrived at Warwick we had a very charming time, and after seeing all there was to see we took cars for Oxford. "The next day we tried to see Oxford. You can have no idea of it. Call it a college! it is a city of colleges,--a mountain of museums, colleges, halls, courts, parks, chapels, lecture-rooms. Out of twenty-four colleges we saw only three. We saw enough, however, to show us that to explore the colleges of Oxford would take a week. Then we came away, and about eleven o'clock at night found ourselves in London. "It was dripping and raining here, for all the world, just as it did when we left; but we found a cosy little parlor, papered with cheerful crimson paper, lighted by a coal-fire, a neat little supper laid out, and the Misses Low waiting; for us. Wasn't it nice? "We are expecting our baggage to-night. Called at Sampson Low's store to-day and found it full everywhere of red 'Dreds.'" Upon reaching London Mrs. Stowe found the following note from Lady Byron awaiting her:-- OXFORD HOUSE, _October 15, 1856._ DEAR MRS. STOWE,--The newspapers represent you as returning to London, but I cannot wait for the chance, slender I fear, of seeing you there, for I wish to consult you on a point admitting but of little delay. Feeling that the sufferers in Kansas have a claim not only to sympathy, but to the expression of it, I wish to send them a donation. It is, however, necessary to know what is the best application of money and what the safest channel. Presuming that you will approve the object, I ask you to tell me. Perhaps you would undertake the transmission of my £50. My present residence, two miles beyond Richmond, is opposite. I have watched for instructions of your course with warm interest. The sale of your book will go on increasing. It is beginning to be understood. Believe me, with kind regards to your daughters, Your faithful and affectionate A. T. NOEL BYRON. To this note the following answer was promptly returned:-- GROVE TERRACE, KENTISH TOWN, _October 16, 1856._ DEAR LADY BYRON,--How glad I was to see your handwriting once more! how more than glad I should be to see _you!_ I do long to see you. I have so much to say,--so much to ask, and need to be refreshed with a sense of a congenial and sympathetic soul. Thank you, my dear friend, for your sympathy with our poor sufferers in Kansas. May God bless you for it! By doing this you will step to my side; perhaps you may share something of that abuse which they who "know not what they do" heap upon all who so feel for the right. I assure you, dear friend, I am _not_ insensible to the fiery darts which thus fly around me.... Direct as usual to my publishers, and believe me, as ever, with all my heart, Affectionately yours, H. B. S. Having dispatched this note, Mrs. Stowe wrote to her husband concerning their surroundings and plans as follows:-- "_Friday, 16th._ Confusion in the camp! no baggage come, nobody knows why; running to stations, inquiries, messages, and no baggage. Meanwhile we have not even a clean collar, nothing but very soiled traveling dresses; while Lady Mary Labouchere writes that her carriage will wait for us at Slough Station this afternoon, and we must be off at two. What's to be done? Luckily I did not carry all my dresses to Dunrobin; so I, of all the party, have a dress that can be worn. We go out and buy collars and handkerchiefs, and two o'clock beholds us at the station house. "_Stoke Park._ I arrived here alone, the baggage not having yet been heard from. Mr. G., being found in London, confessed that he delayed sending it by the proper train. In short, Mr. G. is what is called an easy man, and one whose easiness makes everybody else uneasy. So because he was easy and thought it was no great matter, and things would turn out well enough, without any great care, _we_ have had all this discomfort. "I arrived alone at the Slough Station and found Lady Mary's carriage waiting. Away we drove through a beautiful park full of deer, who were so tame as to stand and look at us as we passed. The house is in the Italian style, with a dome on top, and wide terraces with stone balustrades around it. "Lady Mary met me at the door, and seemed quite concerned to learn of our ill-fortune. We went through a splendid suite of rooms to a drawing-room, where a little tea-table was standing. "After tea Lady Mary showed me my room. It had that delightful, homelike air of repose and comfort they succeed so well in giving to rooms here. There was a cheerful fire burning, an arm-chair drawn up beside it, a sofa on the other side with a neatly arranged sofa-table on which were writing materials. One of the little girls had put a pot of pretty greenhouse moss in a silver basket on this table, and my toilet cushion was made with a place in the centre to hold a little vase of flowers. Here Lady Mary left me to rest before dressing for dinner. I sat down in an easy-chair before the fire, and formed hospitable resolutions as to how I would try to make rooms always look homelike and pleasant to tired guests. Then came the maid to know if I wanted hot water,--if I wanted anything,--and by and by it was time for dinner. Going down into the parlor I met Mr. Labouchere and we all went in to dinner. It was not quite as large a party as at Dunrobin, but much in the same way. No company, but several ladies who were all family connections. "The following morning Lord Dufferin and Lord Alfred Paget, two gentlemen of the Queen's household, rode over from Windsor to lunch with us. They brought news of the goings-on there. Do you remember one night the Duchess of S. read us a letter from Lady Dufferin, describing the exploits of her son, who went yachting with Prince Napoleon up by Spitzbergen, and when Prince Napoleon and all the rest gave up and went back, still persevered and discovered a new island? Well, this was the same man. A thin, slender person, not at all the man you would fancy as a Mr. Great Heart,--lively, cheery, and conversational. "Lord Alfred is also very pleasant. "Lady Mary prevailed on Lord Dufferin to stay and drive with us after lunch, and we went over to Clifden, the duchess's villa, of which we saw the photograph at Dunrobin. For grace and beauty some of the rooms in this place exceed any I have yet seen in England. "When we came back my first thought was whether Aunt Mary and the girls had come. Just as we were all going up to dress for dinner they appeared. Meanwhile, the Queen had sent over from Windsor for Lady Mary and her husband to dine with her that evening, and such invitations are understood as commands. "So, although they themselves had invited four or five people to dinner, they had to go and leave us to entertain ourselves. Lady Mary was dressed very prettily in a flounced white silk dress with a pattern of roses woven round the bottom of each flounce, and looked very elegant. Mr. Labouchere wore breeches, with knee and shoe buckles sparkling with diamonds. "They got home soon after we had left the drawing-room, as the Queen always retires at eleven. No late hours for her. "The next day Lady Mary told me that the Queen had talked to her all about 'Dred,' and how she preferred it to 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' how interested she was in Nina, how provoked when she died, and how she was angry that something dreadful did not happen to Tom Gordon. She inquired for papa, and the rest of the family, all of whom she seemed to be well informed about. "The next morning we had Lord Dufferin again to breakfast. He is one of the most entertaining young men I have seen in England, full of real thought and noble feeling, and has a wide range of reading. He had read all our American literature, and was very flattering in his remarks on Hawthorne, Poe, and Longfellow. I find J. R. Lowell less known, however, than he deserves to be. "Lord Dufferin says that his mother wrote him some verses on his coming of age, and that he built a tower for them and inscribed them on a brass plate. I recommend the example to you, Henry; make yourself the tower and your memory the brass plate. "This morning came also, to call, Lady Augusta Bruce, Lord Elgin's daughter, one of the Duchess of Kent's ladies-in-waiting; a very excellent, sensible girl, who is a strong anti-slavery body. "After lunch we drove over to Eton, and went in to see the provost's house. After this, as we were passing by Windsor the coachman suddenly stopped and said, 'The Queen is coming, my lady.' We stood still and the royal cortége passed. I only saw the Queen, who bowed graciously. "Lady Mary stayed at our car door till it left the station, and handed in a beautiful bouquet as we parted. This is one of the loveliest visits I have made." After filling a number of other pleasant engagements in England, among which was a visit in the family of Charles Kingsley, Mrs. Stowe and her party crossed the Channel and settled down for some months in Paris for the express purpose of studying French. From the French capital she writes to her husband in Andover as follows:-- PARIS, _November 7, 1856._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--On the 28th, when your last was written, I was at Charles Kingsley's. It seemed odd enough to Mary and me to find ourselves, long after dark, alone in a hack, driving towards the house of a man whom we never had seen (nor his wife either). My heart fluttered as, after rumbling a long way through the dark, we turned into a yard. We knocked at a door and were met in the hall by a man who stammers a little in his speech, and whose inquiry, "Is this Mrs. Stowe?" was our first positive introduction. Ushered into a large, pleasant parlor lighted by a coal fire, which flickered on comfortable chairs, lounges, pictures, statuettes, and book-cases, we took a good view of him. He is tall, slender, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a hale, well-browned face, and somewhat loose-jointed withal. His wife is a real Spanish beauty. How we did talk and go on for three days! I guess he is tired. I'm sure we were. He is a nervous, excitable being, and talks with head, shoulders, arms, and hands, while his hesitance makes it the harder. Of his theology I will say more some other time. He, also, has been through the great distress, the "Conflict of Ages," but has come out at a different end from Edward, and stands with John Foster, though with more positiveness than he. He laughed a good deal at many stories I told him of father, and seemed delighted to hear about him. But he is, what I did not expect, a zealous Churchman; insists that the Church of England is the finest and broadest platform a man can stand on, and that the thirty-nine articles are the only ones he could subscribe to. I told him you thought them the best summary (of doctrine) you knew, which pleased him greatly. Well, I got your letter to-night in Paris, at No. 19 Rue de Clichy, where you may as well direct your future letters. We reached Paris about eleven o'clock last night and took a carriage for 17 Rue de Clichy, but when we got there, no ringing or pounding could rouse anybody. Finally, in despair, we remembered a card that had been handed into the cars by some hotel-runner, and finding it was of an English and French hotel, we drove there, and secured very comfortable accommodations. We did not get to bed until after two o'clock. The next morning I sent a messenger to find Mme. Borione, and discovered that we had mistaken the number, and should have gone to No. 19, which was the next door; so we took a carriage and soon found ourselves established here, where we have a nice parlor and two bedrooms. There are twenty-one in the family, mostly Americans, like ourselves, come to learn to speak French. One of them is a tall, handsome, young English lady, Miss Durant, who is a sculptress, studying with Baron de Triqueti. She took me to his studio, and he immediately remarked that she ought to get me to sit. I said I would, "only my French lessons." "Oh," said he, smiling, "we will give you French lessons while you sit." So I go to-morrow morning. As usual, my horrid pictures do me a service, and people seem relieved when they see me; think me even handsome "in a manner." Kingsley, in his relief, expressed as much to his wife, and as beauty has never been one of my strong points I am open to flattery upon it. We had a most agreeable call from Arthur Helps before we left London. He, Kingsley, and all the good people are full of the deepest anxiety for our American affairs. They really do feel very deeply, seeing the peril so much plainer than we do in America. _Sunday night._ I fear I have delayed your letter too long. The fact is, that of the ten days I have been here I have been laid up three with severe neuralgia, viz., _toothache in the backbone_, and since then have sat all day to be modeled for my bust. We spent the other evening with Baron de Triqueti, the sculptor. He has an English wife, and a charming daughter about the age of our girls. Life in Paris is altogether more simple and natural than in England. They give you a plate of cake and a cup of tea in the most informal, social way,--the tea-kettle sings at the fire, and the son and daughter busy themselves gayly together making and handing tea. When tea was over, M. de Triqueti showed us a manuscript copy of the Gospels, written by his mother, to console herself in a season of great ill-health, and which he had illustrated all along with exquisite pen-drawings, resembling the most perfect line engravings. I can't describe the beauty, grace, delicacy, and fullness of devotional feeling in these people. He is one of the loveliest men I ever saw. We have already three evenings in the week in which we can visit and meet friends if we choose, namely, at Madame Mohl's, Madame Lanziel's, and Madame Belloc's. All these salôns are informal, social gatherings, with no fuss of refreshments, no nonsense of any kind. Just the cheeriest, heartiest, kindest little receptions you ever saw. A kiss to dear little Charley. If he could see all the things that I see every day in the Tuileries and Champs Elysées, he would go wild. All Paris is a general whirligig out of doors, but indoors people seem steady, quiet, and sober as anybody. _November 30._ This is Sunday evening, and a Sunday in Paris always puts me in mind of your story about somebody who said, "Bless you! they make such a noise that the Devil couldn't meditate." All the extra work and odd jobs of life are put into Sunday. Your washerwoman comes Sunday, with her innocent, good-humored face, and would be infinitely at a loss to know why she shouldn't. Your bonnet, cloak, shoes, and everything are sent home Sunday morning, and all the way to church there is such whirligiging and pirouetting along the boulevards as almost takes one's breath away. To-day we went to the Oratoire to hear M. Grand Pierre. I could not understand much; my French ear is not quick enough to follow. I could only perceive that the subject was "La Charité," and that the speaker was fluent, graceful, and earnest, the audience serious and attentive. Last night we were at Baron de Triqueti's again, with a party invited to celebrate the birthday of their eldest daughter, Blanche, a lovely girl of nineteen. There were some good ladies there who had come eighty leagues to meet me, and who were so delighted with my miserable French that it was quite encouraging. I believe I am getting over the sandbar at last, and conversation is beginning to come easy to me. There were three French gentlemen who had just been reading "Dred" in English, and who were as excited and full of it as could be, and I talked with them to a degree that astonished myself. There is a review of "Dred" in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" which has long extracts from the book, and is written in a very appreciative and favorable spirit. Generally speaking, French critics seem to have a finer appreciation of my subtle shades of meaning than English. I am curious to hear what Professor Park has to say about it. There has been another review in "La Presse" equally favorable. All seem to see the truth about American slavery much plainer than people can who are in it. If American ministers and Christians could see through their sophistical spider-webs, with what wonder, pity, and contempt they would regard their own vacillating condition! We visit once a week at Madame Mohl's, where we meet all sorts of agreeable people. Lady Elgin doesn't go into society now, having been struck with paralysis, but sits at home and receives her friends as usual. This notion of sitting always in the open air is one of her peculiarities. I must say, life in Paris is arranged more sensibly than with us. Visiting involves no trouble in the feeding line. People don't go to eat. A cup of tea and plate of biscuit is all,--just enough to break up the stiffness. It is wonderful that the people here do not seem to have got over "Uncle Tom" a bit. The impression seems fresh as if just published. How often have they said, That book has revived the Gospel among the poor of France; it has done more than all the books we have published put together. It has gone among the _les ouvriers_, among the poor of Faubourg St. Antoine, and nobody knows how many have been led to Christ by it. Is not this blessed, my dear husband? Is it not worth all the suffering of writing it? I went the other evening to M. Grand Pierre's, where there were three rooms full of people, all as eager and loving as ever we met in England or Scotland. Oh, if Christians in Boston could only see the earnestness of feeling with which Christians here regard slavery, and their surprise and horror at the lukewarmness, to say the least, of our American church! About eleven o'clock we all joined in singing a hymn, then M. Grand Pierre made an address, in which I was named in the most affectionate and cordial manner. Then followed a beautiful prayer for our country, for America, on which hang so many of the hopes of Protestantism. One and all then came up, and there was great shaking of hands and much effusion. Under date of December 28, Mrs. Perkins writes: "On Sunday we went with Mr. and Mrs. (Jacob) Abbott to the Hôtel des Invalides, and I think I was never more interested and affected. Three or four thousand old and disabled soldiers have here a beautiful and comfortable home. We went to the morning service. The church is very large, and the colors taken in battle are hung on the walls. Some of them are so old as to be moth-eaten. The service is performed, as near as possible, in imitation of the service before a battle. The drum beats the call to assemble, and the common soldiers march up and station themselves in the centre of the church, under the commander. All the services are regulated by the beat of the drum. Only one priest officiates, and soldiers are stationed around to protect him. The music is from a brass band, and is very magnificent. "In the afternoon I went to vespers in the Madeleine, where the music was exquisite. They have two fine organs at opposite ends of the church. The 'Adeste Fidelis' was sung by a single voice, accompanied by the organ, and after every verse it was taken up by male voices and the other organ and repeated. The effect was wonderfully fine. I have always found in our small churches at home that the organ was too powerful and pained my head, but in these large cathedrals the effect is different. The volume of sound rolls over, full but soft, and I feel as though it must come from another sphere. "In the evening Mr. and Mrs. Bunsen called. He is a son of Chevalier Bunsen, and she a niece of Elizabeth Fry,--very intelligent and agreeable people." Under date of January 25, Mrs. Stowe writes from Paris:-- "Here is a story for Charley. The boys in the Faubourg St. Antoine are the children of _ouvriers_, and every day their mothers give them two sous to buy a dinner. When they heard I was coming to the school, of their own accord they subscribed half their dinner money to give to me for the poor slaves. This five-franc piece I have now; I have bought it of the cause for five dollars, and am going to make a hole in it and hang it round Charley's neck as a medal. "I have just completed arrangements for leaving the girls at a Protestant boarding-school while I go to Rome. "We expect to start the 1st of February, and my direction will be, E. Bartholimeu, 108 Via Margaretta." CHAPTER XIII OLD SCENES REVISITED, 1856. EN ROUTE TO ROME.--TRIALS OF TRAVEL.--A MIDNIGHT ARRIVAL AND AN INHOSPITABLE RECEPTION.--GLORIES OF THE ETERNAL CITY.--NAPLES AND VESUVIUS.--VENICE.--HOLY WEEK IN ROME.--RETURN TO ENGLAND.--LETTER FROM HARRIET MARTINEAU ON "DRED."--A WORD FROM MR. PRESCOTT ON "DRED."--FAREWELL TO LADY BYRON. AFTER leaving Paris Mrs. Stowe and her sister, Mrs. Perkins, traveled leisurely through the South of France toward Italy, stopping at Amiens, Lyons, and Marseilles. At this place they took steamer for Genoa, Leghorn, and Civita Vecchia. During their last night on shipboard they met with an accident, of which, and their subsequent trials in reaching Rome, Mrs. Stowe writes as follows:-- About eleven o'clock, as I had just tranquilly laid down in my berth, I was roused by a grating crash, accompanied by a shock that shook the whole ship, and followed by the sound of a general rush on deck, trampling, scuffling, and cries. I rushed to the door and saw all the gentlemen hurrying on their clothes and getting confusedly towards the stairway. I went back to Mary, and we put on our things in silence, and, as soon as we could, got into the upper saloon. It was an hour before we could learn anything certainly, except that we had run into another vessel. The fate of the Arctic came to us both, but we did not mention it to each other; indeed, a quieter, more silent company you would not often see. Had I had any confidence in the administration of the boat, it would have been better, but as I had not, I sat in momentary uncertainty. Had we then known, as we have since, the fate of a boat recently sunk in the Mediterranean by a similar carelessness, it would have increased our fears. By a singular chance an officer, whose wife and children were lost on board that boat, was on board ours, and happened to be on the forward part of the boat when the accident occurred. The captain and mate were both below; there was nobody looking out, and had not this officer himself called out to stop the boat, we should have struck her with such force as to have sunk us. As it was, we turned aside and the shock came on a paddle-wheel, which was broken by it, for when, after two hours' delay, we tried to start and had gone a little way, there was another crash and the paddle-wheel fell down. You may be sure we did little sleeping that night. It was an inexpressible desolation to think that we might never again see those we loved. No one knows how much one thinks, and how rapidly, in such hours. In the Naples boat that was sunk a short time ago, the women perished in a dreadful way. The shock threw the chimney directly across the egress from below, so that they could not get on deck, and they were all drowned in the cabin. We went limping along with one broken limb till the next day about eleven, when we reached Civita Vecchia, where there were two hours more of delay about passports. Then we, that is, Mary and I, and a Dr. Edison from Philadelphia, with his son Alfred, took a carriage to Rome, but they gave us a miserable thing that looked as if it had been made soon after the deluge. About eight o'clock at night, on a lonely stretch of road, the wheel came off. We got out, and our postilions stood silently regarding matters. None of us could speak Italian, they could not speak French; but the driver at last conveyed the idea that for five francs he could get a man to come and mend the wheel. The five francs were promised, and he untackled a horse and rode off. Mary and I walked up and down the dark, desolate road, occasionally reminding each other that we were on classic ground, and laughing at the oddity of our lonely, starlight promenade. After a while our driver came back, Tag, Rag, and Bobtail at his heels. I don't think I can do greater justice to Italian costumes than by this respectable form of words. Then there was another consultation. They put a bit of rotten timber under to pry the carriage up. Fortunately, it did not break, as we all expected it would, till after the wheel was on. Then a new train of thought was suggested. How was it to be kept on? Evidently they had not thought far in that direction, for they had brought neither hammer nor nail, nor tool of any kind, and therefore they looked first at the wheel, then at each other, and then at us. The doctor now produced a little gimlet, with the help of which the broken fragments of the former linchpin were pushed out, and the way was cleared for a new one. Then they began knocking a fence to pieces to get out nails, but none could be found to fit. At last another ambassador was sent back for nails. While we were thus waiting, the diligence, in which many of our ship's company were jogging on to Rome, came up. They had plenty of room inside, and one of the party, seeing our distress, tried hard to make the driver stop, but he doggedly persisted in going on, and declared if anybody got down to help us he would leave him behind. An interesting little episode here occurred. It was raining, and Mary and I proposed, as the wheel was now on, to take our seats. We had no sooner done so than the horses were taken with a sudden fit of animation and ran off with us in the most vivacious manner, Tag, Rag, and Co. shouting in the rear. Some heaps of stone a little in advance presented an interesting prospect by way of a terminus. However, the horses were lucidly captured before the wheel was off again; and our ambassador being now returned, we were set right and again proceeded. I must not forget to remark that at every post where we changed horses and drivers, we had a pitched battle with the driver for more money than we had been told was the regular rate, and the carriage was surrounded with a perfect mob of ragged, shock-headed, black-eyed people, whose words all ended in "ino," and who raved and ranted at us till finally we paid much more than we ought, to get rid of them. At the gates of Rome the official, after looking at our passports, coolly told the doctor that if he had a mind to pay him five francs he could go in without further disturbance, but if not he would keep the baggage till morning. This form of statement had the recommendation of such precision and neatness of expression that we paid him forthwith, and into Rome we dashed at two o'clock in the morning of the 9th of February, 1857, in a drizzling rain. We drove to the Hotel d'Angleterre,--it was full,--and ditto to four or five others, and in the last effort our refractory wheel came off again, and we all got out into the street. About a dozen lean, ragged "corbies," who are called porters and who are always lying in wait for travelers, pounced upon us. They took down our baggage in a twinkling, and putting it all into the street surrounded it, and chattered over it, while M. and I stood in the rain and received first lessons in Italian. How we did try to say something! but they couldn't talk anything but in "ino" as aforesaid. The doctor finally found a man who could speak a word or two of French, and leaving Mary, Alfred, and me to keep watch over our pile of trunks, he went off with him to apply for lodgings. I have heard many flowery accounts of first impressions of Rome. I must say ours was somewhat sombre. A young man came by and addressed us in English. How cheering! We almost flew upon him. We begged him, at least, to lend us his Italian to call another carriage, and he did so. A carriage which was passing was luckily secured, and Mary and I, with all our store of boxes and little parcels, were placed in it out of the rain, at least. Here we sat while the doctor from time to time returned from his wanderings to tell us he could find no place. "Can it be," said I, "that we are to be obliged to spend a night in the streets?" What made it seem more odd was the knowledge that, could we only find them, we had friends enough in Rome who would be glad to entertain us. We began to speculate on lodgings. Who knows what we may get entrapped into? Alfred suggested stories he had read of beds placed on trap-doors,--of testers which screwed down on people and smothered them; and so, when at last the doctor announced lodgings found, we followed in rather an uncertain frame of mind. We alighted at a dirty stone passage, smelling of cats and onions, damp, cold, and earthy, we went up stone stairways, and at last were ushered into two very decent chambers, where we might lay our heads. The "corbies" all followed us,--black-haired, black-browed, ragged, and clamorous as ever. They insisted that we should pay the pretty little sum of twenty francs, or four dollars, for bringing our trunks about twenty steps. The doctor modestly but firmly declined to be thus imposed upon, and then ensued a general "chatteration;" one and all fell into attitudes, and the "inos" and "issimos" rolled freely. "For pity's sake get them off," we said; so we made a truce for ten francs, but still they clamored, forced their way even into our bedroom, and were only repulsed by a loud and combined volley of "No, no, noes!" which we all set up at once, upon which they retreated. Our hostess was a little French woman, and that reassured us. I examined the room, and seeing no trace of treacherous testers, or trap-doors, resolved to avail myself without fear of the invitation of a very clean, white bed, where I slept till morning without dreaming. The next day we sent our cards to M. Bartholimeu, and before we had finished breakfast he was on the spot. We then learned that he had been watching the diligence office for over a week, and that he had the pleasant set of apartments we are now occupying all ready and waiting for us. _March 1._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Every day is opening to me a new world of wonders here in Italy. I have been in the Catacombs, where I was shown many memorials of the primitive Christians, and to-day we are going to the Vatican. The weather is sunny and beautiful beyond measure, and flowers are springing in the fields on every side. Oh, my dear, how I do long to have you here to enjoy what you are so much better fitted to appreciate than I,--this wonderful combination of the past and the present, of what has been and what is! Think of strolling leisurely through the Forum, of seeing the very stones that were laid in the time of the Republic, of rambling over the ruined Palace of the Cæsars, of walking under the Arch of Titus, of seeing the Dying Gladiator, and whole ranges of rooms filled with wonders of art, all in one morning! All this I did on Saturday, and only wanted you. You know so much more and could appreciate so much better. At the Palace of the Cæsars, where the very dust is a _mélange_ of exquisite marbles, I saw for the first time an acanthus growing, and picked my first leaf. Our little _ménage_ moves on prosperously; the doctor takes excellent care of us and we of him. One sees everybody here at Rome, John Bright, Mrs. Hemans' son, Mrs. Gaskell, etc., etc. Over five thousand English travelers are said to be here. Jacob Abbot and wife are coming. Rome is a world! Rome is an astonishment! Papal Rome is an enchantress! Old as she is, she is like Niñon d'Enclos,--the young fall in love with her. You will hear next from us at Naples. Affectionately yours, H. B. S. From Rome the travelers went to Naples, and after visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum made the ascent of Vesuvius, a graphic account of which is contained in a letter written at this time by Mrs. Stowe to her daughters in Paris. After describing the preparations and start, she says:-- "Gradually the ascent became steeper and steeper, till at length it was all our horses could do to pull us up. The treatment of horses in Naples is a thing that takes away much from the pleasure and comfort of such travelers as have the least feeling for animals. The people seem absolutely to have no consideration for them. You often see vehicles drawn by one horse carrying fourteen or fifteen great, stout men and women. This is the worse as the streets are paved with flat stones which are exceedingly slippery. On going up hill the drivers invariably race their horses, urging them on with a constant storm of blows. "As the ascent of the mountain became steeper, the horses panted and trembled in a way that made us feel that we could not sit in the carriage, yet the guide and driver never made the slightest motion to leave the box. At last three of us got out and walked, and invited our guide to do the same, yet with all this relief the last part of the ascent was terrible, and the rascally fellows actually forced the horses to it by beating them with long poles on the back of their legs. No Englishman or American would ever allow a horse to be treated so. "The Hermitage is a small cabin, where one can buy a little wine or any other refreshment one may need. There is a species of wine made of the grapes of Vesuvius, called 'Lachryma Christi,' that has a great reputation. Here was a miscellaneous collection of beggars, ragged boys, men playing guitars, bawling donkey drivers, and people wanting to sell sticks or minerals, the former to assist in the ascent, and the latter as specimens of the place. In the midst of the commotion we were placed on our donkeys, and the serious, pensive brutes moved away. At last we reached the top of the mountain, and I gladly sprang on firm land. The whole top of the mountain was covered with wavering wreaths of smoke, from the shadows of which emerged two English gentlemen, who congratulated us on our safe arrival, and assured us that we were fortunate in our day, as the mountain was very active. We could hear a hollow, roaring sound, like the burning of a great furnace, but saw nothing. 'Is this all?' I said. 'Oh, no. Wait till the guide comes up with the rest of the party,' and soon one after another came up, and we then followed the guide up a cloudy, rocky path, the noise of the fire constantly becoming nearer. Finally we stood on the verge of a vast, circular pit about forty feet deep, the floor of which is of black, ropy waves of congealed lava. "The sides are sulphur cliffs, stained in every brilliant shade, from lightest yellow to deepest orange and brown. In the midst of the lava floor rises a black cone, the chimney of the great furnace. This was burning and flaming like the furnace of a glass-house, and every few moments throwing up showers of cinders and melted lava which fell with a rattling sound on the black floor of the pit. One small bit of the lava came over and fell at our feet, and a gentleman lighted his cigar at it. "All around where we stood the smoke was issuing from every chance rent and fissure of the rock, and the Neapolitans who crowded round us were every moment soliciting us to let them cook us an egg in one of these rifts, and, overcome by persuasion, I did so, and found it very nicely boiled, or rather steamed, though the shell tasted of Glauber's salt and sulphur. "The whole place recalled to my mind so vividly Milton's description of the infernal regions, that I could not but believe that he had drawn the imagery from this source. Milton, as we all know, was some time in Italy, and, although I do not recollect any account of his visiting Vesuvius, I cannot think how he should have shaped his language so coincidently to the phenomena if he had not. "On the way down the mountain our ladies astonished the natives by making an express stipulation that our donkeys were not to be beaten,--why, they could not conjecture. The idea of any feeling of compassion for an animal is so foreign to a Neapolitan's thoughts that they supposed it must be some want of courage on our part. When, once in a while, the old habit so prevailed that the boy felt that he must strike the donkey, and when I forbade him, he would say, 'Courage, signora, courage.' "Time would fail me to tell the whole of our adventures in Southern Italy. We left it with regret, and I will tell you some time by word of mouth what else we saw. "We went by water from Naples to Leghorn, and were gloriously seasick, all of us. From Leghorn we went to Florence, where we abode two weeks nearly. Two days ago we left Florence and started for Venice, stopping one day and two nights _en route_ at Bologna. Here we saw the great university, now used as a library, the walls of which are literally covered with the emblazoned names and coats of arms of distinguished men who were educated there. "_Venice._ The great trouble of traveling in Europe, or indeed of traveling anywhere, is that you can never _catch_ romance. No sooner are you in any place than being there seems the most natural, matter-of-fact occurrence in the world. Nothing looks foreign or strange to you. You take your tea and your dinner, eat, drink, and sleep as aforetime, and scarcely realize where you are or what you are seeing. But Venice is an exception to this state of things; it is all romance from beginning to end, and never ceases to seem strange and picturesque. "It was a rainy evening when our cars rumbled over the long railroad bridge across the lagoon that leads to the station. Nothing but flat, dreary swamps, and then the wide expanse of sea on either side. The cars stopped, and the train, being a long one, left us a little out of the station. We got out in a driving rain, in company with flocks of Austrian soldiers, with whom the third-class cars were filled. We went through a long passage, and emerged into a room where all nations seemed commingling; Italians, Germans, French, Austrians, Orientals, all in wet weather trim. "Soon, however, the news was brought that our baggage was looked out and our gondolas ready. "The first plunge under the low, black hood of a gondola, especially of a rainy night, has something funereal in it. Four of us sat cowering together, and looked, out of the rain-dropped little windows at the sides, at the scene. Gondolas of all sizes were gliding up and down, with their sharp, fishy-looking prows of steel pushing their ways silently among each other, while gondoliers shouted and jabbered, and made as much confusion in their way as terrestrial hackmen on dry land. Soon, however, trunks and carpet-bags being adjusted, we pushed off, and went gliding away up the Grand Canal, with a motion so calm that we could scarce discern it except by the moving of objects on shore. Venice, _la belle_, appeared to as much disadvantage as a beautiful woman bedraggled in a thunder-storm." "_Lake Como._ We stayed in Venice five days, and during that time saw all the sights that it could enter the head of a _valet-de-place_ to afflict us with. It is an affliction, however, for which there is no remedy, because you want to see the things, and would be very sorry if you went home without having done so. From Venice we went to Milan to see the cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper.' The former is superb, and of the latter I am convinced, from the little that remains of it, that it _was_ the greatest picture the world ever saw. We shall run back to Rome for Holy Week, and then to Paris. "_Rome._ From Lake Como we came back here for Holy Week, and now it is over. "'What do you think of it?' "Certainly no thoughtful or sensitive person, no person impressible either through the senses or the religious feelings, can fail to feel it deeply. "In the first place, the mere fact of the different nations of the earth moving, so many of them, with one accord, to so old and venerable a city, to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, is something in itself affecting. Whatever dispute there may be about the other commemorative feasts of Christendom, the time of this epoch is fixed unerringly by the Jews' Passover. That great and solemn feast, therefore, stands as an historical monument to mark the date of the most important and thrilling events which this world ever witnessed. "When one sees the city filling with strangers, pilgrims arriving on foot, the very shops decorating themselves in expectancy, every church arranging its services, the prices even of temporal matters raised by the crowd and its demands, he naturally thinks, Wherefore, why is all this? and he must be very careless indeed if it do not bring to mind, in a more real way than before, that at this very time, so many years ago, Christ and his apostles were living actors in the scenes thus celebrated to-day." As the spring was now well advanced, it was deemed advisable to bring this pleasant journey to a close, and for Mrs. Stowe at least it was imperative that she return to America. Therefore, leaving Rome with many regrets and lingering, backward glances, the two sisters hurried to Paris, where they found their brother-in-law, Mr. John Hooker, awaiting them. Under date of May 3 Mrs. Stowe writes from Paris to her husband: "Here I am once more, safe in Paris after a fatiguing journey. I found the girls well, and greatly improved in their studies. As to bringing them home with me now, I have come to the conclusion that it would not be expedient. A few months more of study here will do them a world of good. I have, therefore, arranged that they shall come in November in the Arago, with a party of friends who are going at that time. "John Hooker is here, so Mary is going with him and some others for a few weeks into Switzerland. I have some business affairs to settle in England, and shall sail from Liverpool in the Europa on the sixth of June. I am _so_ homesick to-day, and long with a great longing to be with you once more. I am impatient to go, and yet dread the voyage. Still, to reach you I must commit myself once more to the ocean, of which at times I have a nervous horror, as to the arms of my Father. 'The sea is his, and He made it.' It is a rude, noisy old servant, but it is always obedient to his will, and cannot carry me beyond his power and love, wherever or to whatever it bears me." Having established her daughters in a Protestant boarding-school in Paris, Mrs. Stowe proceeded to London. While there she received the following letter from Harriet Martineau:-- AMBLESIDE, _June 1._ DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I have been at my wits' end to learn how to reach you, as your note bore no direction but "London." Arnolds, Croppers, and others could give no light, and the newspapers tell only where you _had_ been. So I commit this to your publishers, trusting that it will find you somewhere, and in time, perhaps, bring you here. _Can't_ you come? You are aware that we shall never meet if you don't come soon. I see no strangers at all, but I hope to have breath and strength enough for a little talk with you, if you could come. You could have perfect freedom at the times when I am laid up, and we could seize my "capability seasons" for our talk. The weather and scenery are usually splendid just now. Did I see you (in white frock and black silk apron) when I was in Ohio in 1835? Your sister I knew well, and I have a clear recollection of your father. I believe and hope you were the young lady in the black silk apron. Do you know I rather dreaded reading your book! Sick people _are_ weak: and one of my chief weaknesses is dislike of novels,--(except some old ones which I almost know by heart). I knew that with you I should be safe from the cobweb-spinning of our modern subjective novelists and the jaunty vulgarity of our "funny philosophers"--the Dickens sort, who have tired us out. But I dreaded the alternative,--the too strong interest. But oh! the delight I have had in "Dred!" The genius carries all before it, and drowns everything in glorious pleasure. So marked a work of genius claims exemption from every sort of comparison; but, _as you ask for my opinion of the book_, you may like to know that I think it far superior to "Uncle Tom." I have no doubt that a multitude of people will say it is a falling off, because they made up their minds that any new book of yours must be inferior to that, and because it is so rare a thing for a prodigious fame to be sustained by a second book; but, in my own mind I am entirely convinced that the second book is by far the best. Such faults as you have are in the artistic department, and there is less defect in "Dred" than in "Uncle Tom," and the whole material and treatment seem to me richer and more substantial. I have had critiques of "Dred" from the two very wisest people I know--perfectly unlike each other (the critics, I mean), and they delight me by thinking exactly like each other and like me. They distinctly prefer it to "Uncle Tom." To say the plain truth, it seems to me so splendid a work of genius that nothing that I can say can give you an idea of the intensity of admiration with which I read it. It seemed to me, as I told my nieces, that our English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it, for one will have no patience with any but didactic writing after yours. My nieces (and you may have heard that Maria, my nurse, is very, very clever) are thoroughly possessed with the book, and Maria says she feels as if a fresh department of human life had been opened to her since this day week. I feel the freshness no less, while, from my travels, I can be even more assured of the truthfulness of your wonderful representation. I see no limit to the good it may do by suddenly splitting open Southern life, for everybody to look into. It is precisely the thing that is most wanted,--just as "Uncle Tom" was wanted, three years since, to show what negro slavery in your republic was like. It is plantation-life, particularly in the present case, that I mean. As for your exposure of the weakness and helplessness of the churches, I deeply honor you for the courage with which you have made the exposure; but I don't suppose that any amendment is to be looked for in that direction. You have unburdened your own soul in that matter, and if they had been corrigible, you would have helped a good many more. But I don't expect that result. The Southern railing at you will be something unequaled, I suppose. I hear that three of us have the honor of being abused from day to day already, as most portentous and shocking women, you, Mrs. Chapman, and myself (as the traveler of twenty years ago). Not only newspapers, but pamphlets of such denunciation are circulated, I'm told. I'm afraid now I, and even Mrs. Chapman, must lose our fame, and all the railing will be engrossed by you. My little function is to keep English people tolerably right, by means of a London daily paper, while the danger of misinformation and misreading from the "Times" continues. I can't conceive how such a paper as the "Times" can fail to be _better informed_ than it is. At times it seems as if its New York correspondent was making game of it. The able and excellent editor of the "Daily News" gives me complete liberty on American subjects, and Mrs. Chapman's and other friends' constant supply of information enables me to use this liberty for making the cause better understood. I hope I shall hear that you are coming. It is like a great impertinence--my having written so freely about your book: but you asked my opinion,--that is all I can say. Thank you much for sending the book to me. If you come you will write our names in it, and this will make it a valuable legacy to a nephew or niece. Believe me gratefully and affectionately yours, HARRIET MARTINEAU. In London Mrs. Stowe also received the following letter from Prescott, the historian, which after long wandering had finally rested quietly at her English publishers awaiting her coming. PEPPERELL, _October 4, 1856._ MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I am much obliged to you for the copy of "Dred" which Mr. Phillips put into my hands. It has furnished us our evening's amusement since we have been in the country, where we spend the brilliant month of October. The African race are much indebted to you for showing up the good sides of their characters, their cheerfulness, and especially their powers of humor, which are admirably set off by their peculiar _patois_, in the same manner as the expression of the Scottish sentiment is by the peculiar Scottish dialect. People differ; but I was most struck among your characters with Uncle Tiff and Nina. The former a variation of good old Uncle Tom, though conceived in a merrier vein than belonged to that sedate personage; the difference of their tempers in this respect being well suited to the difference of the circumstances in which they were placed. But Nina, to my mind, is the true _hero_ of the book, which I should have named after her instead of "Dred." She is indeed a charming conception, full of what is called character, and what is masculine in her nature is toned down by such a delightful sweetness and kindness of disposition as makes her perfectly fascinating. I cannot forgive you for smothering her so prematurely. No _dramatis personæ_ could afford the loss of such a character. But I will not bore you with criticism, of which you have had quite enough. I must thank you, however, for giving Tom Gordon a guttapercha cane to perform his flagellations with. I congratulate you on the brilliant success of the work, unexampled even in this age of authorship; and, as Mr. Phillips informs me, greater even in the old country than in ours. I am glad you are likely to settle the question and show that a Yankee writer can get a copyright in England--little thanks to our own government, which compels him to go there in order to get it. With sincere regard, believe me, dear Mrs. Stowe, Very truly yours, WM. H. PRESCOTT. From Liverpool, on the eve of her departure for America, Mrs. Stowe wrote to her daughters in Paris:-- I spent the day before leaving London with Lady Byron. She is lovelier than ever, and inquired kindly about you both. I left London to go to Manchester, and reaching there found the Rev. Mr. Gaskell waiting to welcome me in the station. Mrs. Gaskell seems lovely at home, where besides being a writer she proves herself to be a first-class housekeeper, and performs all the duties of a minister's wife. After spending a delightful day with her I came here to the beautiful "Dingle," which is more enchanting than ever. I am staying with Mrs. Edward Cropper, Lord Denman's daughter. I want you to tell Aunt Mary that Mr. Ruskin lives with his father at a place called Denmark Hill, Camberwell. He has told me that the gallery of Turner pictures there is open to me or my friends at any time of the day or night. Both young and old Mr. Ruskin are fine fellows, sociable and hearty, and will cordially welcome any of my friends who desire to look at their pictures. I write in haste, as I must be aboard the ship to-morrow at eight o'clock. So good-by, my dear girls, from your ever affectionate mother. Her last letter written before sailing was to Lady Byron, and serves to show how warm an intimacy had sprung up between them. It was as follows:-- _June 5, 1857._ DEAR FRIEND,--I left you with a strange sort of yearning, throbbing feeling--you make me feel quite as I did years ago, a sort of girlishness quite odd for me. I have felt a strange longing to send you something. Don't smile when you see what it turns out to be. I have a weakness for your pretty Parian things; it is one of my own home peculiarities to have strong passions for pretty tea-cups and other little matters for my own quiet meals, when, as often happens, I am too unwell to join the family. So I send you a cup made of primroses, a funny little pitcher, quite large enough for cream, and a little vase for violets and primroses--which will be lovely together--and when you use it think of me and that I love you more than I can say. I often think how strange it is that I should _know_ you--you who were a sort of legend of my early days--that I should love you is only a natural result. You seem to me to stand on the confines of that land where the poor formalities which separate hearts here pass like mist before the sun, and therefore it is that I feel the language of love must not startle you as strange or unfamiliar. You are so nearly there in spirit that I fear with every adieu that it may be the last; yet did you pass within the veil I should not feel you lost. I have got past the time when I feel that my heavenly friends are _lost_ by going there. I feel them _nearer_, rather than farther off. So good-by, dear, dear friend, and if you see morning in our Father's house before I do, carry my love to those that wait for me, and if I pass first, you will find me there, and we shall love each other _forever_. Ever yours, H. B. STOWE. The homeward voyage proved a prosperous one, and it was followed by a joyous welcome to the "Cabin" in Andover. The world seemed very bright, and amid all her happiness came no intimation of the terrible blow about to descend upon the head of the devoted mother. CHAPTER XIV. THE MINISTER'S WOOING, 1857-1859. DEATH OF MRS. STOWE'S OLDEST SON.--LETTER TO THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND.--LETTER TO HER DAUGHTERS IN PARIS.--LETTER TO HER SISTER CATHERINE.--VISIT TO BRUNSWICK AND ORR'S ISLAND.--WRITES "THE MINISTER'S WOOING" AND "THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND."--MR. WHITTIER'S COMMENTS.--MR. LOWELL ON THE "MINISTER'S WOOING."--LETTER TO MRS. STOWE FROM MR. LOWELL.--JOHN RUSKIN ON THE "MINISTER'S WOOING."--A YEAR OF SADNESS.--LETTER TO LADY BYRON.--LETTER TO HER DAUGHTER.--DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE. IMMEDIATELY after Mrs. Stowe's return from England in June, 1857, a crushing sorrow came upon her in the death of her oldest son, Henry Ellis, who was drowned while bathing in the Connecticut River at Hanover, N. H., where he was pursuing his studies as a member of the Freshman class in Dartmouth College. This melancholy event took place the 9th of July, 1857, and the 3d of August Mrs. Stowe wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland:-- DEAR FRIEND,--Before this reaches you you will have perhaps learned from other sources of the sad blow which has fallen upon us,--our darling, our good, beautiful boy, snatched away in the moment of health and happiness. Alas! could I know that when I parted from my Henry on English shores that I should never see him more? I returned to my home, and, amid the jubilee of meeting the rest, was fain to be satisfied with only a letter from him, saying that his college examinations were coming on, and he must defer seeing me a week or two till they were over. I thought then of taking his younger brother and going up to visit him; but the health of the latter seeming unfavorably affected by the seacoast air, I turned back with him to a water-cure establishment. Before I had been two weeks absent a fatal telegram hurried me home, and when I arrived there it was to find the house filled with his weeping classmates, who had just come bringing his remains. There he lay so calm, so placid, so peaceful, that I could not believe that he would not smile upon me, and that my voice which always had such power over him could not recall him. There had always been such a peculiar union, such a tenderness between us. I had had such power always to call up answering feelings to my own, that it seemed impossible that he could be silent and unmoved at my grief. But yet, dear friend, I am sensible that in this last sad scene I had an alleviation that was not granted to you. I recollect, in the mournful letter you wrote me about that time, you said that you mourned that you had never told your own dear one how much you loved him. That sentence touched me at the time. I laid it to heart, and from that time lost no occasion of expressing to my children those feelings that we too often defer to express to our dearest friends till it is forever too late. He did fully know how I loved him, and some of the last loving words he spoke were of me. The very day that he was taken from us, and when he was just rising from the table of his boarding-house to go whence he never returned, some one noticed the seal ring, which you may remember to have seen on his finger, and said, How beautiful that ring is! Yes, he said, and best of all, it was my mother's gift to me. That ring, taken from the lifeless hand a few hours later, was sent to me. Singularly enough, it is broken right across the name from a fall a little time previous.... It is a great comfort to me, dear friend, that I took Henry with me to Dunrobin. I hesitated about keeping him so long from his studies, but still I thought a mind so observing and appreciative might learn from such a tour more than through books, and so it was. He returned from England full of high resolves and manly purposes. "I may not be what the world calls a Christian," he wrote, "but I will live such a life as a Christian ought to live, such a life as every true man ought to live." Henceforth he became remarkable for a strict order and energy, and a vigilant temperance and care of his bodily health, docility and deference to his parents and teachers, and perseverance in every duty.... Well, from the hard battle of this life he is excused, and the will is taken for the deed, and whatever comes his heart will not be pierced as mine is. But I am glad that I can connect him with all my choicest remembrances of the Old World. Dunrobin will always be dearer to me now, and I have felt towards you and the duke a turning of spirit, because I remember how kindly you always looked on and spoke to him. I knew then it was the angel of your lost one that stirred your hearts with tenderness when you looked on another so near his age. The plaid that the duke gave him, and which he valued as one of the chief of his boyish treasures, will hang in his room--for still we have a room that we call his. [Illustration: Aunty Sutherland] You will understand, you will feel, this sorrow with us as few can. My poor husband is much prostrated. I need not say more: you know what this must be to a father's heart. But still I repeat what I said when I saw you last. Our dead are ministering angels; they teach us to love, they fill us with tenderness for all that can suffer. These weary hours when sorrow makes us for the time blind and deaf and dumb, have their promise. These hours come in answer to our prayers for nearness to God. It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.... I have poured out my heart to you because you can understand. While I was visiting in Hanover, where Henry died, a poor, deaf old slave woman, who has still five children in bondage, came to comfort me. "Bear up, dear soul, she said; you must bear it, for the Lord loves ye." She said further, "Sunday is a heavy day to me, 'cause I can't work, and can't hear preaching, and can't read, so I can't keep my mind off my poor children. Some on 'em the blessed Master's got, and they's safe; but, oh, there are five that I don't know where they are." What are our mother sorrows to this! I shall try to search out and redeem these children, though, from the ill success of efforts already made, I fear it will be hopeless. Every sorrow I have, every lesson on the sacredness of family love, makes me the more determined to resist to the last this dreadful evil that makes so many mothers so much deeper mourners than I ever can be.... Affectionately yours, H. B. STOWE. About this same time she writes to her daughters in Paris: "Can anybody tell what sorrows are locked up with our best affections, or what pain may be associated with every pleasure? As I walk the house, the pictures he used to love, the presents I brought him, and the photographs I meant to show him, all pierce my heart. I have had a dreadful faintness of sorrow come over me at times. I have felt so crushed, so bleeding, so helpless, that I could only call on my Saviour with groanings that could not be uttered. Your papa justly said, 'Every child that dies is for the time being an only one; yes--his individuality no time, no change, can ever replace.' "Two days after the funeral your father and I went to Hanover. We saw Henry's friends, and his room, which was just as it was the day he left it. "'There is not another such room in the college as his,' said one of his classmates with tears. I could not help loving the dear boys as they would come and look sadly in, and tell us one thing and another that they remembered of him. 'He was always talking of his home and his sisters,' said one. The very day he died he was so happy because I had returned, and he was expecting soon to go home and meet me. He died with that dear thought in his heart. "There was a beautiful lane leading down through a charming glen to the river. It had been for years the bathing-place of the students, and into the pure, clear water he plunged, little dreaming that he was never to come out alive. "In the evening we went down to see the boating club of which he was a member. He was so happy in this boating club. They had a beautiful boat called the Una, and a uniform, and he enjoyed it so much. "This evening all the different crews were out; but Henry's had their flag furled, and tied with black crape. I felt such love to the dear boys, all of them, because they loved Henry, that it did not pain me as it otherwise would. They were glad to see us there, and I was glad that we could be there. Yet right above where their boats were gliding in the evening light lay the bend in the river, clear, still, beautiful, fringed with overhanging pines, from whence our boy went upward to heaven. To heaven--if earnest, manly purpose, if sincere, deliberate strife with besetting sin is accepted of God, as I firmly believe it is. Our dear boy was but a beginner in the right way. Had he lived, we had hoped to see all wrong gradually fall from his soul as the worn-out calyx drops from the perfected flower. But Christ has taken him into his own teaching. "'And one view of Jesus as He is, Will strike all sin forever dead.' "Since I wrote to you last we have had anniversary meetings, and with all the usual bustle and care, our house full of company. Tuesday we received a beautiful portrait of our dear Henry, life-size, and as perfect almost as life. It has just that half-roguish, half-loving expression with which he would look at me sometimes, when I would come and brush back his hair and look into his eyes. Every time I go in or out of the room, it seems to give so bright a smile that I almost think that a spirit dwells within it. "When I am so heavy, so weary, and go about as if I were wearing an arrow that had pierced my heart, I sometimes look up, and this smile seems to say, 'Mother, patience, I am happy. In our Father's house are many mansions.' Sometimes I think I am like a gardener who has planted the seed of some rare exotic. He watches as the two little points of green leaf first spring above the soil. He shifts it from soil to soil, from pot to pot. He watches it, waters it, saves it through thousands of mischiefs and accidents. He counts every leaf, and marks the strengthening of the stem, till at last the blossom bud was fully formed. What curiosity, what eagerness,--what expectation--what longing now to see the mystery unfold in the new flower. "Just as the calyx begins to divide and a faint streak of color becomes visible,--lo! in one night the owner of the greenhouse sends and takes it away. He does, not consult me, he gives me no warning; he silently takes it and I look, but it is no more. What, then? Do I suppose he has destroyed the flower? Far from it; I know that he has taken it to his own garden. What Henry might have been I could guess better than any one. What Henry is, is known to Jesus only." Shortly after this time Mrs. Stowe wrote to her sister Catherine:-- If ever I was conscious of an attack of the Devil trying to separate me from the love of Christ, it was for some days after the terrible news came. I was in a state of great physical weakness, most agonizing, and unable to control my thoughts. Distressing doubts as to Henry's spiritual state were rudely thrust upon my soul. It was as if a voice had said to me: "You trusted in God, did you? You believed that He loved you! You had perfect confidence that he would never take your child till the work of grace was mature! Now He has hurried him into eternity without a moment's warning, without preparation, and where is he?" I saw at last that these thoughts were irrational, and contradicted the calm, settled belief of my better moments, and that they were dishonorable to God, and that it was my duty to resist them, and to assume and steadily maintain that Jesus in love had taken my dear one to his bosom. Since then the Enemy has left me in peace. It is our duty to assume that a thing which would be in its very nature unkind, ungenerous, and unfair has not been done. What should we think of the crime of that human being who should take a young mind from circumstances where it was progressing in virtue, and throw it recklessly into corrupting and depraving society? Particularly if it were the child of one who had trusted and confided in Him for years. No! no such slander as this shall the Devil ever fix in my mind against my Lord and my God! He who made me capable of such an absorbing, unselfish devotion for my children, so that I would sacrifice my eternal salvation for them, He certainly did not make me capable of more love, more disinterestedness than He has himself. He invented mothers' hearts, and He certainly has the pattern in his own, and my poor, weak rush-light of love is enough to show me that some things can and some things cannot be done. Mr. Stowe said in his sermon last Sunday that the mysteries of God's ways with us must be swallowed up by the greater mystery of the love of Christ, even as Aaron's rod swallowed up the rods of the magicians. Papa and mamma are here, and we have been reading over the "Autobiography and Correspondence." It is glorious, beautiful; but more of this anon. Your affectionate sister, HATTIE. ANDOVER, _August 24, 1857._ DEAR CHILDREN,--Since anniversary papa and I have been living at home; Grandpa and Grandma Beecher are here also, and we have had much comfort in their society.... To-night the last sad duty is before us. The body is to be removed from the receiving tomb in the Old South Churchyard, and laid in the graveyard near by. Pearson has been at work for a week on a lot that is to be thenceforth ours. "Our just inheritance consecrated by his grave." How little he thought, wandering there as he often has with us, that his mortal form would so soon be resting there. Yet that was written for him. It was as certain then as now, and the hour and place of our death is equally certain, though we know it not. It seems selfish that I should yearn to lie down by his side, but I never knew how much I loved him till now. The one lost piece of silver seems more than all the rest,--the one lost sheep dearer than all the fold, and I so long for one word, one look, one last embrace.... ANDOVER, _September 1, 1857._ MY DARLING CHILDREN,--I must not allow a week to pass without sending a line to you.... Our home never looked lovelier. I never saw Andover look so beautiful; the trees so green, the foliage so rich. Papa and I are just starting to spend a week in Brunswick, for I am so miserable;--so weak--the least exertion fatigues me, and much of my time I feel a heavy languor, indifferent to everything. I know nothing is so likely to bring me up as the air of the seaside.... I have set many flowers around Henry's grave, which are blossoming; pansies, white immortelle, white petunia, and verbenas. Papa walks there every day, often twice or three times. The lot has been rolled and planted with fine grass, which is already up and looks green and soft as velvet, and the little birds gather about it. To-night as I sat there the sky was so beautiful, all rosy, with the silver moon looking out of it. Papa said with a deep sigh, "I am submissive, but not reconciled." BRUNSWICK, _September 6, 1857._ MY DEAR GIRLS,--Papa and I have been here for four or five days past. We both of us felt so unwell that we thought we would try the sea air and the dear old scenes of Brunswick. Everything here is just as we left it. We are staying with Mrs. Upham, whose house is as wide, cool, and hospitable as ever. The trees in the yard have grown finely, and Mrs. Upham has cultivated flowers so successfully that the house is all surrounded by them. Everything about the town is the same, even to Miss Gidding's old shop, which is as disorderly as ever, presenting the same medley of tracts, sewing-silk, darning-cotton, and unimaginable old bonnets, which existed there of yore. She has been heard to complain that she can't find things as easily as once. Day before yesterday papa, Charley, and I went down to Harpswell about seven o'clock in the morning. The old spruces and firs look lovely as ever, and I was delighted, as I always used to be, with every step of the way. Old Getchell's mill stands as forlorn as ever in its sandy wastes, and More Brook creeps on glassy and clear beyond. Arriving at Harpswell a glorious hot day, with scarce a breeze to ruffle the water, papa and Charley went to fish for cunners, who soon proved too _cun_ning for them, for they ate every morsel of bait off the hooks, so that out of twenty bites they only secured two or three. What they did get were fried for our dinner, reinforced by a fine clam-chowder. The evening was one of the most glorious I ever saw--a calm sea and round, full moon; Mrs. Upham and I sat out on the rocks between the mainland and the island until ten o'clock. I never did see a more perfect and glorious scene, and to add to it there was a splendid northern light dancing like spirits in the sky. Had it not been for a terrible attack of mosquitoes in our sleeping-rooms, that kept us up and fighting all night, we should have called it a perfect success. We went into the sea to bathe twice, once the day we came, and about eight o'clock in the morning before we went back. Besides this we have been to Middle Bay, where Charley, standing where you all stood before him, actually caught a flounder with his own hand, whereat he screamed loud enough to scare all the folks on Eagle Island. We have also been to Maquoit. We have visited the old pond, and, if I mistake not, the relics of your old raft yet float there; at all events, one or two fragments of a raft are there, caught among rushes. I do not realize that one of the busiest and happiest of the train who once played there shall play there no more. "He shall return to his house no more, neither shall his place know him any more." I think I have felt the healing touch of Jesus of Nazareth on the deep wound in my heart, for I have golden hours of calm when I say: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight." So sure am I that the most generous love has ordered all, that I can now take pleasure to give this little proof of my unquestioning confidence in resigning one of my dearest comforts to Him. I feel very near the spirit land, and the words, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me," are very sweet. Oh, if God would give to you, my dear children, a view of the infinite beauty of Eternal Love,--if He would unite us in himself, then even on earth all tears might be wiped away. Papa has preached twice to-day, and is preaching again to-night. He told me to be sure to write and send you his love. I hope his health is getting better. Mrs. Upham sends you her best love, and hopes you will make her a visit some time. Good-by, my darlings. Come soon to your affectionate mother. H. B. S. The winter of 1857 was passed quietly and uneventfully at Andover. In November Mrs. Stowe contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly" a touching little allegory, "The Mourning Veil." In December, 1858, the first chapter of "The Minister's Wooing" appeared in the same magazine. Simultaneously with this story was written "The Pearl of Orr's Island," published first as a serial in the "Independent." She dictated a large part of "The Minister's Wooing" under a great pressure of mental excitement, and it was a relief to her to turn to the quiet story of the coast of Maine, which she loved so well. In February, 1874, Mrs. Stowe received the following words from Mr. Whittier, which are very interesting in this connection: "When I am in the mood for thinking deeply I read 'The Minister's Wooing.' But 'The Pearl of Orr's Island' is my favorite. It is the most charming New England idyl ever written." "The Minister's Wooing" was received with universal commendation from the first, and called forth the following appreciative words from the pen of Mr. James Russell Lowell:-- "It has always seemed to us that the anti-slavery element in the two former novels by Mrs. Stowe stood in the way of a full appreciation of her remarkable genius, at least in her own country. It was so easy to account for the unexampled popularity of 'Uncle Tom' by attributing it to a cheap sympathy with sentimental philanthropy! As people began to recover from the first enchantment, they began also to resent it and to complain that a dose of that insane Garrison-root which takes the reason prisoner had been palmed upon them without their knowing it, and that their ordinary water-gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with moral, had been hocussed with the bewildering hasheesh of Abolition. We had the advantage of reading that truly extraordinary book for the first time in Paris, long after the whirl of excitement produced by its publication had subsided, in the seclusion of distance, and with a judgment unbiased by those political sympathies which it is impossible, perhaps unwise, to avoid at home. We felt then, and we believe now, that the secret of Mrs. Stowe's power lay in that same genius by which the great successes in creative literature have always been achieved,--the genius that instinctively goes right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black, and which disregards as trivial the conventional and factitious notions which make so large a part both of our thinking and feeling. Works of imagination written with an aim to immediate impression are commonly ephemeral, like Miss Martineau's 'Tales,' and Elliott's 'Corn-law Rhymes;' but the creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in 'Don Quixote' and of Fielding in 'Joseph Andrews,' overpowered the narrow specialty of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the cosmopolitanism of genius. "It is a proverb that 'There is a great deal of human nature in men,' but it is equally and sadly true that there is amazingly little of it in books. Fielding is the only English novelist who deals with life in its broadest sense. Thackeray, his disciple and congener, and Dickens, the congener of Smollett, do not so much treat of life as of the strata of society; the one studying nature from the club-room window, the other from the reporters' box in the police court. It may be that the general obliteration of distinctions of rank in this country, which is generally considered a detriment to the novelist, will in the end turn to his advantage by compelling him to depend for his effects on the contrasts and collisions of innate character, rather than on those shallower traits superinduced by particular social arrangements, or by hereditary associations. Shakespeare drew ideal, and Fielding natural men and women; Thackeray draws either gentlemen or snobs, and Dickens either unnatural men or the oddities natural only in the lowest grades of a highly artificial system of society. The first two knew human nature; of the two latter, one knows what is called the world, and the other the streets of London. Is it possible that the very social democracy which here robs the novelist of so much romance, so much costume, so much antithesis of caste, so much in short that is purely external, will give him a set-off in making it easier for him to get at that element of universal humanity which neither of the two extremes of an aristocratic system, nor the salient and picturesque points of contrast between the two, can alone lay open to him? "We hope to see this problem solved by Mrs. Stowe. That kind of romantic interest which Scott evolved from the relations of lord and vassal, of thief and clansman, from the social more than the moral contrast of Roundhead and Cavalier, of far-descended pauper and _nouveau riche_ which Cooper found in the clash of savagery with civilization, and the shaggy virtue bred on the border-land between the two, Indian by habit, white by tradition, Mrs. Stowe seems in her former novels to have sought in a form of society alien to her sympathies, and too remote for exact study, or for the acquirement of that local truth which is the slow result of unconscious observation. There can be no stronger proof of the greatness of her genius, of her possessing that conceptive faculty which belongs to the higher order of imagination, than the avidity with which 'Uncle Tom' was read at the South. It settled the point that this book was true to human nature, even if not minutely so to plantation life. "If capable of so great a triumph where success must so largely depend on the sympathetic insight of her mere creative power, have we not a right to expect something far more in keeping with the requirements of art, now that her wonderful eye is to be the mirror of familiar scenes, and of a society in which she was bred, of which she has seen so many varieties, and that, too, in the country, where it is most _naïve_ and original? It is a great satisfaction to us that in 'The Minister's Wooing' she has chosen her time and laid her scene amid New England habits and traditions. There is no other writer who is so capable of perpetuating for us, in a work of art, a style of thought and manners which railways and newspapers will soon render as palæozoic as the mastodon or the megalosaurians. Thus far the story has fully justified our hopes. The leading characters are all fresh and individual creations. Mrs. Kate Scudder, the notable Yankee housewife; Mary, in whom Cupid is to try conclusions with Calvin; James Marvyn, the adventurous boy of the coast, in whose heart the wild religion of nature swells till the strait swathings of Puritanism are burst; Dr. Hopkins, the conscientious minister come upon a time when the social _prestige_ of the clergy is waning, and whose independence will test the voluntary system of ministerial support; Simeon Brown, the man of theological dialectics, in whom the utmost perfection of creed is shown to be not inconsistent with the most contradictory imperfection of life,--all these are characters new to literature. And the scene is laid just far enough away in point of time to give proper tone and perspective. "We think we find in the story, so far as it has proceeded, the promise of an interest as unhackneyed as it will be intense. There is room for the play of all the passions and interests that make up the great tragi-comedy of life, while all the scenery and accessories will be those which familiarity has made dear to us. We are a little afraid of Colonel Burr, to be sure, it is so hard to make a historical personage fulfill the conditions demanded by the novel of every-day life. He is almost sure either to fall below our traditional conception of him, or to rise above the natural and easy level of character, into the vague or the melodramatic. Moreover, we do not want a novel of society from Mrs. Stowe; she is quite too good to be wasted in that way, and her tread is much more firm on the turf of the "door-yard" or the pasture, and the sanded floor of the farmhouse, than on the velvet of the _salôn_. We have no notion how she is to develop her plot, but we think we foresee chances for her best power in the struggle which seems foreshadowed between Mary's conscientious admiration of the doctor and her half-conscious passion for James, before she discovers that one of these conflicting feelings means simply moral liking and approval, and the other that she is a woman and that she loves. And is not the value of dogmatic theology as a rule of life to be thoroughly tested for the doctor by his slave-trading parishioners? Is he not to learn the bitter difference between intellectual acceptance of a creed and that true partaking of the sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if it have become almost conventional. "In the materials of character already present in the story, there is scope for Mrs. Stowe's humor, pathos, clear moral sense, and quick eye for the scenery of life. We do not believe that there is any one who, by birth, breeding, and natural capacity, has had the opportunity to know New England so well as she, or who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have been scenes in 'The Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet truth, contrast as charmingly with the humid vagueness of the modern school of novel-writers as 'The Vicar of Wakefield' itself, and we are greatly mistaken if it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and therefore that on which her fame will chiefly rest with posterity." "The Minister's Wooing" was not completed as a serial till December, 1859. Long before its completion Mrs. Stowe received letters from many interested readers, who were as much concerned for the future of her "spiritual children," as George Eliot would call them, as if they had been flesh and blood. The following letter from Mr. Lowell is given as the most valuable received by Mrs. Stowe at this time:-- CAMBRIDGE, _February 4, 1859._ MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I certainly did mean to write you about your story, but only to cry _bravissima!_ with the rest of the world. I intended no kind of criticism; deeming it wholly out of place, and in the nature of a wet-blanket, so long as a story is unfinished. When I got the first number in MS., I said to Mr. Phillips that I thought it would be the best thing you had done, and what followed has only confirmed my first judgment. From long habit, and from the tendency of my studies, I cannot help looking at things purely from an æsthetic point of view, and what _I_ valued in "Uncle Tom" was the genius, and not the moral. That is saying a good deal, for I never use the word _genius_ at haphazard, and always (perhaps, too) sparingly. I am going to be as frank as I ought to be with one whom I value so highly. What especially charmed me in the new story was, that you had taken your stand on New England ground. You are one of the few persons lucky enough to be born with eyes in your head,--that is, with something behind the eyes which makes them of value. To most people the seeing apparatus is as useless as the great telescope at the observatory is to me,--something to stare through with no intelligent result. Nothing could be better than the conception of your plot (so far as I divine it), and the painting-in of your figures. As for "theology," it is as much a part of daily life in New England as in Scotland, and all I should have to say about it is this: let it crop out when it naturally comes to the surface, only don't dig down to it. A moral aim is a fine thing, but in making a story an artist is a traitor who does not sacrifice everything to art. Remember the lesson that Christ gave us twice over. First, he preferred the useless Mary to the dish-washing Martha, and next, when that exemplary moralist and friend of humanity, Judas, objected to the sinful waste of the Magdalen's ointment, the great Teacher would rather it should be wasted in an act of simple beauty than utilized for the benefit of the poor. Cleopatra was an artist when she dissolved her biggest pearl to captivate her Antony-public. May I, a critic by profession, say the whole truth to a woman of genius? Yes? And never be forgiven? I shall try, and try to be forgiven, too. In the first place, pay no regard to the advice of anybody. In the second place, pay a great deal to mine! A Kilkenny-cattish style of advice? Not at all. My advice is to follow your own instincts,--to stick to nature, and to avoid what people commonly call the "Ideal;" for that, and beauty, and pathos, and success, all lie in the simply natural. We all preach it, from Wordsworth down, and we all, from Wordsworth down, don't practice it. Don't I feel it every day in this weary editorial mill of mine, that there are ten thousand people who can write "ideal" things for one who can see, and feel, and reproduce nature and character? Ten thousand, did I say? Nay, ten million. What made Shakespeare so great? Nothing but eyes and--faith in them. The same is true of Thackeray. I see nowhere more often than in authors the truth that men love their opposites. Dickens insists on being tragic and makes shipwreck. I always thought (forgive me) that the Hebrew parts of "Dred" were a mistake. Do not think me impertinent; I am only honestly anxious that what I consider a very remarkable genius should have faith in itself. Let your moral take care of itself, and remember that an author's writing-desk is something infinitely higher than a pulpit. What I call "care of itself" is shown in that noble passage in the February number about the ladder up to heaven. That is grand preaching and in the right way. I am sure that "The Minister's Wooing" is going to be the best of your products hitherto, and I am sure of it because you show so thorough a mastery of your material, so true a perception of realities, without which the ideality is impossible. As for "orthodoxy," be at ease. Whatever is well done the world finds orthodox at last, in spite of all the Fakir journals, whose only notion of orthodoxy seems to be the power of standing in one position till you lose all the use of your limbs. If, with your heart and brain, _you_ are not orthodox, in Heaven's name who is? If you mean "Calvinistic," no woman could ever be such, for Calvinism is logic, and no woman worth the name could ever live by syllogisms. Woman charms a higher faculty in us than reason, God be praised, and nothing has delighted me more in your new story than the happy instinct with which you develop this incapacity of the lovers' logic in your female characters. Go on just as you have begun, and make it appear in as many ways as you like,--that, whatever creed may be true, it is _not_ true and never will be that man can be saved by machinery. I can speak with some chance of being right, for I confess a strong sympathy with many parts of Calvinistic theology, and, for one thing, believe in hell with all my might, and in the goodness of God for all that. I have not said anything. What could I say? One might almost as well advise a mother about the child she still bears under her heart, and say, give it these and those qualities, as an author about a work yet in the brain. Only this I will say, that I am honestly delighted with "The Minister's Wooing;" that reading it has been one of my few editorial pleasures; that no one appreciates your genius more highly than I, or hopes more fervently that you will let yourself go without regard to this, that, or t'other. Don't read any criticisms on your story: believe that you know better than any of us, and be sure that everybody likes it. That I know. There is not, and never was, anybody so competent to write a true New England poem as yourself, and have no doubt that you are doing it. The native sod sends up the best inspiration to the brain, and you are as sure of immortality as we all are of dying,--if you only go on with entire faith in yourself. Faithfully and admiringly yours, J. R. LOWELL. After the book was published in England, Mr. Ruskin wrote to Mrs. Stowe:-- "Well, I have read the book now, and I think nothing can be nobler than the noble parts of it (Mary's great speech to Colonel Burr, for instance), nothing wiser than the wise parts of it (the author's parenthetical and under-breath remarks), nothing more delightful than the delightful parts (all that Virginie says and does), nothing more edged than the edged parts (Candace's sayings and doings, to wit); but I do not like the plan of the whole, because the simplicity of the minister seems to diminish the probability of Mary's reverence for him. I cannot fancy even so good a girl who would not have laughed at him. Nor can I fancy a man of real intellect reaching such a period of life without understanding his own feelings better, or penetrating those of another more quickly. "Then I am provoked at nothing happening to Mrs. Scudder, whom I think as entirely unendurable a creature as ever defied poetical justice at the end of a novel meant to irritate people. And finally, I think you are too disdainful of what ordinary readers seek in a novel, under the name of 'interest,'--that gradually developing wonder, expectation, and curiosity which makes people who have no self-command sit up till three in the morning to get to the crisis, and people who have self-command lay the book down with a resolute sigh, and think of it all the next day through till the time comes for taking it up again. Still, I know well that in many respects it was impossible for you to treat this story merely as a work of literary art. There must have been many facts which you could not dwell upon, and which no one may judge by common rules. "It is also true, as you say once or twice in the course of the work, that we have not among us here the peculiar religious earnestness you have mainly to describe. "We have little earnest formalism, and our formalists are for the most part hollow, feeble, uninteresting, mere stumbling-blocks. We have the Simeon Brown species, indeed; and among readers even of his kind the book may do some good, and more among the weaker, truer people, whom it will shake like mattresses,--making the dust fly, and perhaps with it some of the sticks and quill-ends, which often make that kind of person an objectionable mattress. I write too lightly of the book,--far too lightly,--but your letter made me gay, and I have been lighter-hearted ever since; only I kept this after beginning it, because I was ashamed to send it without a line to Mrs. Browning as well. I do not understand why you should apprehend (or rather anticipate without apprehension) any absurd criticism on it. It is sure to be a popular book,--not as 'Uncle Tom' was, for that owed part of its popularity to its dramatic effect (the flight on the ice, etc.), which I did not like; but as a true picture of human life is always popular. Nor, I should think, would any critics venture at all to carp at it. "The Candace and Virginie bits appear to me, as far as I have yet seen, the best. I am very glad there is this nice French lady in it: the French are the least appreciated in general, of all nations, by other nations.... My father says the book is worth its weight in gold, and he knows good work." * * * * * When we turn from these criticisms and commendations to the inner history of this period, we find that the work was done in deep sadness of heart, and the undertone of pathos that forms the dark background of the brightest and most humorous parts of "The Minister's Wooing" was the unconscious revelation of one of sorrowful spirit, who, weary of life, would have been glad to lie down with her arms "round the wayside cross, and sleep away into a brighter scene." Just before beginning the writing of "The Minister's Wooing" she sent the following letter to Lady Byron:-- ANDOVER, _June 30, 1858._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I did long to hear from you at a time when few knew how to speak, because I knew that you did know everything that sorrow can teach,--you whose whole life has been a crucifixion, a long ordeal. But I believe that the "Lamb," who stands forever in the midst of the throne "as it had been slain," has everywhere his followers, those who are sent into the world, as he was, to suffer for the redemption of others, and like him they must look to the joy set before them of redeeming others. I often think that God called you to this beautiful and terrible ministry when He suffered you to link your destiny with one so strangely gifted, so fearfully tempted, and that the reward which is to meet you, when you enter within the veil, where you must soon pass, will be to see the angel, once chained and defiled within him, set free from sin and glorified, and so know that to you it has been given, by your life of love and faith, to accomplish this glorious change. I think very much on the subject on which you conversed with me once,--the future state of retribution. It is evident to me that the spirit of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love which wholly revolts from the old doctrine on the subject, and I observe the more Christ-like any one becomes, the more impossible it seems for him to accept it; and yet, on the contrary, it was Christ who said, "Fear Him that is able to destroy soul and body in hell," and the most appalling language on this subject is that of Christ himself. Certain ideas once prevalent certainly must be thrown off. An endless infliction for past sins was once the doctrine that we now generally reject. The doctrine as now taught is that of an eternal persistence in evil necessitating eternal punishment, since evil induces misery by an eternal nature of things, and this, I fear, is inferable from the analogies of nature, and confirmed by the whole implication of the Bible. Is there any fair way of disposing of the current of assertion, and the still deeper undercurrent of implication, on this subject, without one which loosens all faith in revelation, and throws us on pure naturalism? But of one thing I am sure,--probation does not end with this life, and the number of the redeemed may therefore be infinitely greater than the world's history leads us to suppose. The views expressed in this letter certainly throw light on many passages in "The Minister's Wooing." The following letter, written to her daughter Georgiana, is introduced as revealing the spirit in which much of "The Minister's Wooing" was written:-- _February 12, 1859._ MY DEAR GEORGIE,--Why haven't I written? Because, dear Georgie, I am like the dry, dead, leafless tree, and have only cold, dead, slumbering buds of hope on the end of stiff, hard, frozen twigs of thought, but no leaves, no blossoms; nothing to send to a little girl who doesn't know what to do with herself any more than a kitten. I am cold, weary, dead; everything is a burden to me. I let my plants die by inches before my eyes, and do not water them, and I dread everything I do, and wish it was not to be done, and so when I get a letter from my little girl I smile and say, "Dear little puss, I will answer it;" and I sit hour after hour with folded hands, looking at the inkstand and dreading to begin. The fact is, pussy, mamma is tired. Life to you is gay and joyous, but to mamma it has been a battle in which the spirit is willing but the flesh weak, and she would be glad, like the woman in the St. Bernard, to lie down with her arms around the wayside cross, and sleep away into a brighter scene. Henry's fair, sweet face looks down upon me now and then from out a cloud, and I feel again all the bitterness of the eternal "No" which says I must never, never, in this life, see that face, lean on that arm, hear that voice. Not that my faith in God in the least fails, and that I do not believe that all this is for good. I do, and though not happy, I am blessed. Weak, weary as I am, I rest on Jesus in the innermost depth of my soul, and am quite sure that there is coming an inconceivable hour of beauty and glory when I shall regain Jesus, and he will give me back my beloved one, whom he is educating in a far higher sphere than I proposed. So do not mistake me,--only know that mamma is sitting weary by the wayside, feeling weak and worn, but in no sense discouraged. Your affectionate mother, H. B. S. So is it ever: when with bold step we press our way into the holy place where genius hath wrought, we find it to be a place of sorrows. Art has its Gethsemane and its Calvary as well as religion. Our best loved books and sweetest songs are those "that tell of saddest thought." The summer of 1859 found Mrs. Stowe again on her way to Europe, this time accompanied by all her children except the youngest. CHAPTER XV. THE THIRD TRIP TO EUROPE, 1859. THIRD VISIT TO EUROPE.--LADY BYRON ON "THE MINISTER'S WOOING."--SOME FOREIGN PEOPLE AND THINGS AS THEY APPEARED TO PROFESSOR STOWE.--A WINTER IN ITALY.--THINGS UNSEEN AND UNREVEALED.--SPECULATIONS CONCERNING SPIRITUALISM.--JOHN RUSKIN.--MRS. BROWNING.--THE RETURN TO AMERICA.--LETTERS TO DR. HOLMES. MRS. STOWE'S third and last trip to Europe was undertaken in the summer of 1859. In writing to Lady Byron in May of that year, she says: "I am at present writing something that interests me greatly, and may interest you, as an attempt to portray the heart and life of New England, its religion, theology, and manners. Sampson Low & Son are issuing it in numbers, and I should be glad to know how they strike you. It is to publish this work complete that I intend to visit England this summer." The story thus referred to was "The Minister's Wooing," and Lady Byron's answer to the above, which is appended, leaves no room for doubt as to her appreciation of it. She writes:-- LONDON, _May 31, 1859._ DEAR FRIEND,--I have found, particularly as to yourself, that if I did not answer from the first impulse, all had evaporated. Your letter came by the Niagara, which brought Fanny Kemble, to learn the loss of her _best_ friend, that Miss Fitzhugh whom you saw at my house. I have an intense interest in your new novel. More power in these few numbers than in any of your former writings, relatively, at least to my own mind. More power than in "Adam Bede," which is _the_ book of the season, and well deserves a high place. Whether Mrs. Scudder will rival Mrs. Poyser, we shall see. It would amuse you to hear my granddaughter and myself attempting to foresee the future of the "love story," being quite persuaded for the moment that James is at sea, and the minister about to ruin himself. We think that she will labor to be in love with the self-devoting man, under her mother's influence, and from that hyper-conscientiousness so common with good girls,--but we don't wish her to succeed. Then what is to become of her older lover? He--Time will show. I have just missed Dale Owen, with whom I wished to have conversed about the "Spiritualism." Harris is lecturing here on religion. I do not hear him praised. People are looking for helps to believe everywhere but in life,--in music, in architecture, in antiquity, in ceremony,--and upon all is written, "Thou shalt _not_ believe." At least, if this be faith, happier the unbeliever. I am willing to see _through_ that materialism, but if I am to rest there, I would rend the veil. _June 1._ The day of the packet's sailing. I shall hope to be visited by you here. The best flowers sent me have been placed in your little vases, giving life, as it were, to the remembrance of you, though not to pass away like them. Ever yours, A. T. NOEL BYRON. The entire family, with the exception of the youngest son, was abroad at this time. The two eldest daughters were in Paris, having previously sailed for Havre in March, in company with their cousin, Miss Beecher. On their arrival in Paris, they went directly to the house of their old friend, Madame Borione, and soon afterwards entered a Protestant school. The rest of the family, including Mrs. Stowe, her husband and youngest daughter, sailed for Liverpool early in August. At about the same time, Fred Stowe, in company with his friend Samuel Scoville, took passage for the same port in a sailing vessel. A comprehensive outline of the earlier portion of this foreign tour is given in the following letter written by Professor Stowe to the sole member of the family remaining in America: CASTLE CHILLON, SWITZERLAND, _September 1, 1859._ DEAR LITTLE CHARLEY,--We are all here except Fred, and all well. We have had a most interesting journey, of which I must give a brief account. We sailed from New York in the steamer Asia, on the 3d of August [1859], a very hot day, and for ten days it was the hottest weather I ever knew at sea. We had a splendid ship's company, mostly foreigners, Italians, Spaniards, with a sprinkling of Scotch and Irish. We passed one big iceberg in the night close to, and as the iceberg wouldn't turn out for us we turned out for the iceberg, and were very glad to come off so. This was the night of the 9th of August, and after that we had cooler weather, and on the morning of the 13th the wind blew like all possessed, and so continued till afternoon. Sunday morning, the 14th, we got safe into Liverpool, landed, and went to the Adelphi Hotel. Mamma and Georgie were only a little sick on the way over, and that was the morning of the 13th. As it was court time, the high sheriff of Lancashire, Sir Robert Gerauld, a fine, stout, old, gray-haired John Bull, came thundering up to the hotel at noon in his grand coach with six beautiful horses with outriders, and two trumpeters, and twelve men with javelins for a guard, all dressed in the gayest manner, and rushing along like Time in the primer, the trumpeters too-ti-toot-tooing like a house a-fire, and how I wished my little Charley had been there to see it! Monday we wanted to go and see the court, so we went over to St. George's Hall, a most magnificent structure, that beats the Boston State House all hollow, and Sir Robert Gerauld himself met us, and said he would get us a good place. So he took us away round a narrow, crooked passage, and opened a little door, where we saw nothing but a great, crimson curtain, which he told us to put aside and go straight on; and where do you think we all found ourselves? Right on the platform with the judges in their big wigs and long robes, and facing the whole crowded court! It was enough to frighten a body into fits, but we took it quietly as we could, and your mamma looked as meek as Moses in her little, battered straw hat and gray cloak, seeming to say, "I didn't come here o' purpose." That same night we arrived in London, and Tuesday (August 16th), riding over the city, we called at Stafford House, and inquired if the Duchess of Sutherland was there. A servant came out and said the duchess was in and would be very glad to see us; so your mamma, Georgie, and I went walking up the magnificent staircase in the entrance hall, and the great, noble, brilliant duchess came sailing down the stairs to meet us, in her white morning dress (for it was only four o'clock in the afternoon, and she was not yet dressed for dinner), took your mamma into her great bosom, and folded her up till the little Yankee woman looked like a small gray kitten half covered in a snowbank, and kissed and kissed her, and then she took up little Georgie and kissed her, and then she took my hand, and didn't kiss me. Next day we went to the duchess's villa, near Windsor Castle, and had a grand time riding round the park, sailing on the Thames, and eating the very best dinner that was ever set on a table. We stayed in London till the 25th of August, and then went to Paris and found H. and E. and H. B. all well and happy; and on the 30th of August we all went to Geneva together, and to-day, the 1st of September, we all took a sail up the beautiful Lake Leman here in the midst of the Alps, close by the old castle of Chillon, about which Lord Byron has written a poem. In a day or two we shall go to Chamouni, and then Georgie and I will go back to Paris and London, and so home at the time appointed. Until then I remain as ever, Your loving father, C. E. STOWE. Mrs. Stowe accompanied her husband and daughter to England, where, after traveling and visiting for two weeks, she bade them good-by and returned to her daughters in Switzerland. From Lausanne she writes under date of October 9th:-- MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Here we are at Lausanne, in the Hotel Gibbon, occupying the very parlor that the Ruskins had when we were here before. The day I left you I progressed prosperously to Paris. Reached there about one o'clock at night; could get no carriage, and finally had to turn in at a little hotel close by the station, where I slept till morning. I could not but think what if anything should happen to me there? Nobody knew me or where I was, but the bed was clean, the room respectable; so I locked my door and slept, then took a carriage in the morning, and found Madame Borione at breakfast. I write to-night, that you may get a letter from me at the earliest possible date after your return. Instead of coming to Geneva in one day, I stopped over one night at Macon, got to Geneva the next day about four o'clock, and to Lausanne at eight. Coming up-stairs and opening the door, I found the whole party seated with their books and embroidery about a centre-table, and looking as homelike and cosy as possible. You may imagine the greetings, the kissing, laughing, and good times generally. From Lausanne the merry party traveled toward Florence by easy stages, stopping at Lake Como, Milan, Verona, Venice, Genoa, and Leghorn. At Florence, where they arrived early in November, they met Fred Stowe and his friend, Samuel Scoville, and here they were also joined by their Brooklyn friends, the Howards. Thus it was a large and thoroughly congenial party that settled down in the old Italian city to spend the winter. From here Mrs. Stowe wrote weekly letters to her husband in Andover, and among them are the following, that not only throw light upon their mode of life, but illustrate a marked tendency of her mind:-- FLORENCE, _Christmas Day, 1859._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I wish you all a Merry Christmas, hoping to spend the next one with you. For us, we are expecting to spend this evening with quite a circle of American friends. With Scoville and Fred came L. Bacon (son of Dr. Bacon); a Mr. Porter, who is to study theology at Andover, and is now making the tour of Europe; Mr. Clarke, formerly minister at Cornwall; Mr. Jenkyns, of Lowell; Mr. and Mrs. Howard, John and Annie Howard, who came in most unexpectedly upon us last night. So we shall have quite a New England party, and shall sing Millais' Christmas hymn in great force. Hope you will all do the same in the old stone cabin. Our parlor is all trimmed with laurel and myrtle, looking like a great bower, and our mantel and table are redolent with bouquets of orange blossoms and pinks. _January 16, 1860._ MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Your letter received to-day has raised quite a weight from my mind, for it shows that at last you have received all mine, and that thus the chain of communication between us is unbroken. What you said about your spiritual experiences in feeling the presence of dear Henry with you, and, above all, the vibration of that mysterious guitar, was very pleasant to me. Since I have been in Florence, I have been distressed by inexpressible yearnings after him,--such sighings and outreachings, with a sense of utter darkness and separation, not only from him but from all spiritual communion with my God. But I have become acquainted with a friend through whom I receive consoling impressions of these things,--a Mrs. E., of Boston, a very pious, accomplished, and interesting woman, who has had a history much like yours in relation to spiritual manifestations. Without doubt she is what the spiritualists would regard as a very powerful medium, but being a very earnest Christian, and afraid of getting led astray, she has kept carefully aloof from all circles and things of that nature. She came and opened her mind to me in the first place, to ask my advice as to what she had better do; relating experiences very similar to many of yours. My advice was substantially to try the spirits whether they were of God,--to keep close to the Bible and prayer, and then accept whatever came. But I have found that when I am with her I receive very strong impressions from the spiritual world, so that I feel often sustained and comforted, as if I had been near to my Henry and other departed friends. This has been at times so strong as greatly to soothe and support me. I told her your experiences, in which she was greatly interested. She said it was so rare to hear of Christian and reliable people with such peculiarities. I cannot, however, think that Henry strikes the guitar,--that must be Eliza. Her spirit has ever seemed to cling to that mode of manifestation, and if you would keep it in your sleeping-room, no doubt you would hear from it oftener. I have been reading lately a curious work from an old German in Paris who has been making experiments in spirit-writing. He purports to describe a series of meetings held in the presence of fifty witnesses, whose names he gives, in which writing has come on paper, without the apparition of hands or any pen or pencil, from various historical people. He seems a devout believer in inspiration, and the book is curious for its mixture of all the phenomena, Pagan and Christian, going over Hindoo, Chinese, Greek, and Italian literature for examples, and then bringing similar ones from the Bible. One thing I am convinced of,--that spiritualism is a reaction from the intense materialism of the present age. Luther, when he recognized a personal devil, was much nearer right. We ought to enter fully, at least, into the spiritualism of the Bible. Circles and spiritual jugglery I regard as the lying signs and wonders, with all deceivableness of unrighteousness; but there is a real scriptural spiritualism which has fallen into disuse, and must be revived, and there are, doubtless, people who, from some constitutional formation, can more readily receive the impressions of the surrounding spiritual world. Such were apostles, prophets, and workers of miracles. _Sunday evening._ To-day I went down to sit with Mrs. E. in her quiet parlor. We read in Revelation together, and talked of the saints and spirits of the just made perfect, till it seemed, as it always does when with her, as if Henry were close by me. Then a curious thing happened. She has a little Florentine guitar which hangs in her parlor, quite out of reach. She and I were talking, and her sister, a very matter-of-fact, practical body, who attends to temporals for her, was arranging a little lunch for us, when suddenly the bass string of the guitar was struck loudly and distinctly. "Who struck that guitar?" said the sister. We both looked up and saw that no body or thing was on that side of the room. After the sister had gone out, Mrs. E. said, "Now, that is strange! I asked last night that if any spirit was present with us after you came to-day, that it would try to touch that guitar." A little while after her husband came in, and as we were talking we were all stopped by a peculiar sound, as if somebody had drawn a hand across all the strings at once. We marveled, and I remembered the guitar at home. What think you? Have you had any more manifestations, any truths from the spirit world? About the end of February the pleasant Florentine circle broke up, and Mrs. Stowe and her party journeyed to Rome, where they remained until the middle of April. We next find them in Naples, starting on a six days' trip to Castellamare, Sorrento, Salerno, Pæstum, and Amalfi; then up Vesuvius, and to the Blue Grotto of Capri, and afterwards back to Rome by diligence. Leaving Rome on May 9th, they traveled leisurely towards Paris, which they reached on the 27th. From there Mrs. Stowe wrote to her husband on May 28th:-- Since my last letter a great change has taken place in our plans, in consequence of which our passage for America is engaged by the Europa, which sails the 16th of June; so, if all goes well, we are due in Boston four weeks from this date. I long for home, for my husband and children, for my room, my yard and garden, for the beautiful trees of Andover. We will make a very happy home, and our children will help us. Affectionately yours, HATTY. This extended and pleasant tour was ended with an equally pleasant homeward voyage, for on the Europa were found Nathaniel Hawthorne and James T. Fields, who proved most delightful traveling companions. While Mrs. Stowe fully enjoyed her foreign experiences, she was so thoroughly American in every fibre of her being that she was always thankful to return to her own land and people. She could not, therefore, in any degree reciprocate the views of Mr. Ruskin on this subject, as expressed in the following letter, received soon after her return to Andover:-- GENEVA, _June 18, 1860._ DEAR MRS. STOWE,--It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless, I very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the Norwood Hills, and were expecting you and the children to breakfast to-morrow. I had very serious thoughts, when I received your note, of running home; but I expected that very day an American friend, Mr. S., who I thought would miss me more here than you would in London; so I stayed. What a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of "United" States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here. My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any more than you. I was waiting for S. at the railroad station on Thursday, and thinking of you, naturally enough,--it seemed so short a while since we were there together. I managed to get hold of Georgie as she was crossing the rails, and packed her in opposite my mother and beside me, and was thinking myself so clever, when you sent that rascally courier for her! I never forgave him any of his behavior after his imperativeness on that occasion. And so she is getting nice and strong? Ask her, please, when you write, with my love, whether, when she stands now behind the great stick, one can see much of her on each side? So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances? I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like "Positively the last appearance on any stage." What was the use of thinking about _him_? You should have had your own thoughts about what was to come after him. I don't mean that Roman Catholicism will die out so quickly. It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism, which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next. That is the main question just now for everybody. So you are coming round to Venice, after all? We shall all have to come to it, depend upon it, some way or another. There never has been anything in any other part of the world like Venetian strength well developed. I've no heart to write about anything in Europe to you now. When are you coming back again? Please send me a line as soon as you get safe over, to say you are all--wrong, but not lost in the Atlantic. I don't know if you will ever get this letter, but I hope you will think it worth while to glance again at the Denmark Hill pictures; so I send this to my father, who, I hope, will be able to give it you. I really am very sorry you are going,--you and yours; and that is absolute fact, and I shall not enjoy my Swiss journey at all so much as I might. It was a shame of you not to give me warning before. I could have stopped at Paris so easily for you! All good be with you! Remember me devotedly to the young ladies, and believe me ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN. In Rome Mrs. Stowe had formed a warm friendship with the Brownings, with whom she afterwards maintained a correspondence. The following letter from Mrs. Browning was written a year after their first meeting. ROME, 126 VIA FELICE, _14 March, 1861._ MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--Let me say one word first. Your letter, which would have given me pleasure if I had been in the midst of pleasures, came to me when little beside could have pleased. Dear friend, let me say it, I had had a great blow and loss in England, and you wrote things in that letter which seemed meant for me, meant to do me good, and which did me good,--the first good any letter or any talk did me; and it struck me as strange, as more than a coincidence, that your first word since we parted in Rome last spring should come to me in Rome, and bear so directly on an experience which you did not know of. I thank you very much. The earnest stanzas I sent to England for one who wanted them even more than I. I don't know how people can keep up their prejudices against spiritualism with tears in their eyes,--how they are not, at least, thrown on the "wish that it might be true," and the investigation of the phenomena, by that abrupt shutting in their faces of the door of death, which shuts them out from the sight of their beloved. My tendency is to beat up against it like a crying child. Not that this emotional impulse is the best for turning the key and obtaining safe conclusions,--no. I did not write before because I always do shrink from touching my own griefs, one feels at first so sore that nothing but stillness is borne. It is only after, when one is better, that one can express one's self at all. This is so with me, at least, though perhaps it ought not to be so with a poet. If you saw my "De Profundis" you must understand that it was written nearly twenty years ago, and referred to what went before. Mr. Howard's affliction made me think of the MS. (in reference to a sermon of Dr. Beecher's in the "Independent"), and I pulled it out of a secret place and sent it to America, not thinking that the publication would fall in so nearly with a new grief of mine as to lead to misconceptions. In fact the poem would have been an exaggeration in that case, and unsuitable in other respects. It refers to the greatest affliction of my life,--the only time when I felt _despair_,--written a year after or more. Forgive all these reticences. My husband calls me "peculiar" in some things,--peculiarly _lâche_, perhaps. I can't articulate some names, or speak of certain afflictions;--no, not to _him_,--not after all these years! It's a sort of _dumbness_ of the soul. Blessed are those who can speak, I say. But don't you see from this how I must want "spiritualism" above most persons? Now let me be ashamed of this egotism, together with the rest of the weakness obtruded on you here, when I should rather have congratulated you, my dear friend, on the great crisis you are passing through in America. If the North is found noble enough to stand fast on the moral question, whatever the loss or diminution of territory, God and just men will see you greater and more glorious as a nation. I had much anxiety for you after the Seward and Adams speeches, but the danger seems averted by that fine madness of the South which seems judicial. The tariff movement we should regret deeply (and do, some of us), only I am told it was wanted in order to persuade those who were less accessible to moral argument. It's eking out the holy water with ditch water. If the Devil flees before it, even so, let us be content. How you must feel, _you_ who have done so much to set this accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of hideousness! They should raise a statue to you in America and elsewhere. Meanwhile I am reading you in the "Independent," sent to me by Mr. Tilton, with the greatest interest. Your new novel opens beautifully.[14] Do write to me and tell me of yourself and the subjects which interest us both. It seems to me that our Roman affairs may linger a little (while the Papacy bleeds slowly to death in its finances) on account of this violent clerical opposition in France. Otherwise we were prepared for the fall of the house any morning. Prince Napoleon's speech represents, with whatever slight discrepancy, the inner mind of the emperor. It occupied seventeen columns of the "Moniteur" and was magnificent. Victor Emmanuel wrote to thank him for it in the name of Italy, and even the English papers praised it as "a masterly exposition of the policy of France." It is settled that we shall wait for Venice. It will not be for long. Hungary is _only_ waiting, and even in the ashes of Poland there are flickering sparks. Is it the beginning of the restitution of all things? Here in Rome there are fewer English than usual, and more empty houses. There is a new story every morning, and nobody to cut off the head of the Scheherazade. Yesterday the Pope was going to Venice directly, and, the day before, fixed the hour for Victor Emmanuel's coming, and the day before _that_ brought a letter from Cavour to Antonelli about sweeping the streets clean for the feet of the king. The poor Romans live on these stories, while the Holy Father and king of Naples meet holding one another's hands, and cannot speak for sobs. The little queen, however, is a heroine in her way and from her point of view, and when she drives about in a common fiacre, looking very pretty under her only crown left of golden hair, one must feel sorry that she was not born and married nearer to holy ground. My husband prays you to remember him, and I ask your daughters to remember both of us. Our boy rides his pony and studies under his abbé, and keeps a pair of red cheeks, thank God. I ought to send you more about the society in Rome, but I have lived much alone this winter, and have little to tell you. Dr. Manning and Mr. De Vere stay away, not bearing, perhaps, to see the Pope in his agony. Your ever affectionate friend, ELIZABETH B. BROWNING. Soon after her return to America Mrs. Stowe began a correspondence with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, which opened the way for the warm friendship that has stood the test of years. Of this correspondence the two following letters, written about this time, are of attention. ANDOVER, _September 9, 1860._ DEAR DR. HOLMES,--I have had an impulse upon me for a long time to write you a line of recognition and sympathy, in response to those that reached me monthly in your late story in the "Atlantic" ("Elsie Venner"). I know not what others may think of it, since I have seen nobody since my return; but to me it is of deeper and broader interest than anything you have done yet, and I feel an intense curiosity concerning that underworld of thought from which like bubbles your incidents and remarks often seem to burst up. The foundations of moral responsibility, the interlacing laws of nature and spirit, and their relations to us here and hereafter, are topics which I ponder more and more, and on which only one medically educated can write _well_. I think a course of medical study ought to be required of all ministers. How I should like to talk with you upon the strange list of topics suggested in the schoolmaster's letter! They are bound to agitate the public mind more and more, and it is of the chiefest importance to learn, if we can, to think soundly and wisely of them. Nobody can be a sound theologian who has not had his mind drawn to think with reverential fear on these topics. Allow me to hint that the monthly numbers are not long enough. Get us along a little faster. You must work this well out. Elaborate and give us all the particulars. Old Sophie is a jewel; give us more of her. I have seen her. Could you ever come out and spend a day with us? The professor and I would so like to have a talk on some of these matters with you! Very truly yours, H. B. STOWE. ANDOVER, _February 18, 1861._ DEAR DOCTOR,--I was quite indignant to hear yesterday of the very unjust and stupid attack upon you in the ----. Mr. Stowe has written to them a remonstrance which I hope they will allow to appear as he wrote it, and over his name. He was well acquainted with your father and feels the impropriety of the thing. But, my dear friend, in being shocked, surprised, or displeased personally with such things, we must consider other people's natures. A man or woman may wound us to the quick without knowing it, or meaning to do so, simply through difference of fibre. As Cowper hath somewhere happily said:-- "Oh, why are farmers made so coarse, Or clergy made so fine? A kick that scarce might move a horse Might kill a sound divine." When once people get ticketed, and it is known that one is a hammer, another a saw, and so on, if we happen to get a taste of their quality we cannot help being hurt, to be sure, but we shall not take it ill of them. There be pious, well-intending beetles, wedges, hammers, saws, and all other kinds of implements, good--except where they come in the way of our fingers--and from a beetle you can have only a beetle's gospel. I have suffered in my day from this sort of handling, which is worse for us women, who must never answer, and once when I wrote to Lady Byron, feeling just as you do about some very stupid and unkind things that had invaded my personality, she answered me, "Words do not kill, my dear, or I should have been dead long ago." There is much true religion and kindness in the world, after all, and as a general thing he who has struck a nerve would be very sorry for it if he only knew what he had done. I would say nothing, if I were you. There is eternal virtue in silence. I must express my pleasure with the closing chapters of "Elsie." They are nobly and beautifully done, and quite come up to what I wanted to complete my idea of her character. I am quite satisfied with it now. It is an artistic creation, original and beautiful. Believe me to be your true friend, H. B. STOWE. FOOTNOTE: [14] _The Pearl of Orr's Island._ CHAPTER XVI. THE CIVIL WAR, 1860-1865. THE OUTBREAK OF CIVIL WAR.--MRS. STOWE'S SON ENLISTS.--THANKSGIVING DAY IN WASHINGTON.--THE PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION.--REJOICINGS IN BOSTON.--FRED STOWE AT GETTYSBURG.--LEAVING ANDOVER AND SETTLING IN HARTFORD.--A REPLY TO THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND.--LETTERS FROM JOHN BRIGHT, ARCHBISHOP WHATELY, AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. IMMEDIATELY after Mrs. Stowe's return from Europe, it became only too evident that the nation was rapidly and inevitably drifting into all the horrors of civil war. To use her own words: "It was God's will that this nation--the North as well as the South--should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the ill-gotten wealth, which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free States; that the slave mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers, North and South,--Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free States, who refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous cruelty, as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold, hunger, and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of these slave-masters, with whose sins our nation had connived." Mrs. Stowe spoke from personal experience, having seen her own son go forth in the ranks of those who first responded to the President's call for volunteers. He was one of the first to place his name on the muster-roll of Company A of the First Massachusetts Volunteers. While his regiment was still at the camp in Cambridge, Mrs. Stowe was called to Brooklyn on important business, from which place she writes to her husband under the date June 11, 1861:-- "Yesterday noon Henry (Ward Beecher) came in, saying that the Commonwealth, with the First (Massachusetts) Regiment on board, had just sailed by. Immediately I was of course eager to get to Jersey City to see Fred. Sister Eunice said she would go with me, and in a few minutes she, Hatty, Sam Scoville, and I were in a carriage, driving towards the Fulton Ferry. Upon reaching Jersey City we found that the boys were dining in the depot, an immense building with many tracks and platforms. It has a great cast-iron gallery just under the roof, apparently placed there with prophetic instinct of these times. There was a crowd of people pressing against the grated doors, which were locked, but through which we could see the soldiers. It was with great difficulty that we were at last permitted to go inside, and that object seemed to be greatly aided by a bit of printed satin that some man gave Mr. Scoville. "When we were in, a vast area of gray caps and blue overcoats was presented. The boys were eating, drinking, smoking, talking, singing, and laughing. Company A was reported to be here, there, and everywhere. At last S. spied Fred in the distance, and went leaping across the tracks towards him. Immediately afterwards a blue-overcoated figure bristling with knapsack and haversack, and looking like an assortment of packages, came rushing towards us. "Fred was overjoyed, you may be sure, and my first impulse was to wipe his face with my handkerchief before I kissed him. He was in high spirits, in spite of the weight of blue overcoat, knapsack, etc., etc., that he would formerly have declared intolerable for half an hour. I gave him my handkerchief and Eunice gave him hers, with a sheer motherly instinct that is so strong within her, and then we filled his haversack with oranges. "We stayed with Fred about two hours, during which time the gallery was filled with people, cheering and waving their handkerchiefs. Every now and then the band played inspiriting airs, in which the soldiers joined with hearty voices. While some of the companies sang, others were drilled, and all seemed to be having a general jollification. The meal that had been provided was plentiful, and consisted of coffee, lemonade, sandwiches, etc. "On our way out we were introduced to the Rev. Mr. Cudworth, chaplain of the regiment. He is a fine-looking man, with black eyes and hair, set off by a white havelock. He wore a sword, and Fred, touching it, asked, 'Is this for use or ornament, sir?' "'Let me see you in danger,' answered the chaplain, 'and you'll find out.' "I said to him I supposed he had had many an one confided to his kind offices, but I could not forbear adding one more to the number. He answered, 'You may rest assured, Mrs. Stowe, I will do all in my power.' "We parted from Fred at the door. He said he felt lonesome enough Saturday evening on the Common in Boston, where everybody was taking leave of somebody, and he seemed to be the only one without a friend, but that this interview made up for it all. "I also saw young Henry. Like Fred he is mysteriously changed, and wears an expression of gravity and care. So our boys come to manhood in a day. Now I am watching anxiously for the evening paper to tell me that the regiment has reached Washington in safety." In November, 1862, Mrs. Stowe was invited to visit Washington, to be present at a great thanksgiving dinner provided for the thousands of fugitive slaves who had flocked to the city. She accepted the invitation the more gladly because her son's regiment was encamped near the city, and she should once more see him. He was now Lieutenant Stowe, having honestly won his promotion by bravery on more than one hard-fought field. She writes of this visit:-- Imagine a quiet little parlor with a bright coal fire, and the gaslight burning above a centre-table, about which Hatty, Fred, and I are seated. Fred is as happy as happy can be to be with mother and sister once more. All day yesterday we spent in getting him. First we had to procure a permit to go to camp, then we went to the fort where the colonel is, and then to another where the brigadier-general is stationed. I was so afraid they would not let him come with us, and was never happier than when at last he sprang into the carriage free to go with us for forty-eight hours. "Oh!" he exclaimed in a sort of rapture, "this pays for a year and a half of fighting and hard work!" We tried hard to get the five o'clock train out to Laurel, where J.'s regiment is stationed, as we wanted to spend Sunday all together; but could not catch it, and so had to content ourselves with what we could have. I have managed to secure a room for Fred next ours, and feel as though I had my boy at home once more. He is looking very well, has grown in thickness, and is as loving and affectionate as a boy can be. I have just been writing a pathetic appeal to the brigadier-general to let him stay with us a week. I have also written to General Buckingham in regard to changing him from the infantry, in which there seems to be no prospect of anything but garrison duty, to the cavalry, which is full of constant activity. General B. called on us last evening. He seemed to think the prospect before us was, at best, of a long war. He was the officer deputed to carry the order to General McClellan relieving him of command of the army. He carried it to him in his tent about twelve o'clock at night. Burnside was there. McClellan said it was very unexpected, but immediately turned over the command. I said I thought he ought to have expected it after having so disregarded the President's order. General B. smiled and said he supposed McClellan had done that so often before that he had no idea any notice would be taken of it this time. Now, as I am very tired, I must close, and remain as always, lovingly yours, HATTY. During the darkest and most bitter period of the Civil War, Mrs. Stowe penned the following letter to the Duchess of Argyll:-- ANDOVER, _July 31, 1863._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--Your lovely, generous letter was a real comfort to me, and reminded me that a year--and, alas! a whole year--had passed since I wrote to your dear mother, of whom I think so often as one of God's noblest creatures, and one whom it comforts me to think is still in our world. _So many_, good and noble, have passed away whose friendship was such a pride, such a comfort to me! Your noble father, Lady Byron, Mrs. Browning,--their spirits are as perfect as ever passed to the world of light. I grieve about your dear mother's eyes. I have thought about you all, many a sad, long, quiet hour, as I have lain on my bed and looked at the pictures on my wall; one, in particular, of the moment before the Crucifixion, which is the first thing I look at when I wake in the morning. I think how suffering is, and must be, the portion of noble spirits, and no lot so brilliant that must not first or last dip into the shadow of that eclipse. Prince Albert, too, the ideal knight, the _Prince Arthur_ of our times, the good, wise, steady head and heart we--that is, our world, we Anglo-Saxons--need so much. And the Queen! yes, I have thought of and prayed for her, too. But could a woman hope to have _always_ such a heart, and yet ever be weaned from earth "all this and heaven, too"? Under my picture I have inscribed, "Forasmuch as Christ also hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same mind." This year has been one long sigh, one smothering sob, to me. And I thank God that we have as yet one or two generous friends in England who understand and feel for our cause. The utter failure of Christian, anti-slavery England, in those _instincts_ of a right heart which always can see where the cause of liberty lies, has been as bitter a grief to me as was the similar prostration of all our American religious people in the day of the Fugitive Slave Law. Exeter Hall is a humbug, a pious humbug, like the rest. Lord Shaftesbury. Well, let him go; he is a Tory, and has, after all, the instincts of his class. But I saw _your_ duke's speech to his tenants! That was grand! If _he_ can see these things, they are to be seen, and why cannot Exeter Hall see them? It is simply the want of the honest heart. Why do the horrible barbarities of _Southern_ soldiers cause no comment? Why is the sympathy of the British Parliament reserved for the poor women of New Orleans, deprived of their elegant amusement of throwing vitriol into soldiers' faces, and practicing indecencies inconceivable in any other state of society? Why is _all_ expression of sympathy on the _Southern_ side? There is a class of women in New Orleans whom Butler protects from horrible barbarities, that up to his day have been practiced on them by these so-called New Orleans ladies, but British sympathy has ceased to notice _them_. You see I am bitter. I am. You wonder at my brother. He is a man, and feels a thousand times more than I can, and deeper than all he ever has expressed, the spirit of these things. You must not wonder, therefore. Remember it is the moment when every nerve is vital; it is our agony; we tread the winepress alone, and they whose cheap rhetoric has been for years pushing us into it now desert _en masse_. I thank my God I always loved and trusted most those who now _do_ stand true,--your family, your duke, yourself, your noble mother. I have lost Lady Byron. Her great heart, her eloquent letters, would have been such a joy to me! And Mrs. Browning, oh such a heroic woman! None of her poems can express what _she_ was,--so grand, so comprehending, so strong, with such inspired insight! She stood by Italy through its crisis. Her heart was with all good through the world. Your prophecy that we shall come out better, truer, stronger, will, I am confident, be true, and it was worthy of yourself and your good lineage. Slavery will be sent out by this agony. We are only in the throes and ravings of the exorcism. The roots of the cancer have gone everywhere, but they must die--will. Already the Confiscation Bill is its natural destruction. Lincoln has been too slow. He should have done it sooner, and with an impulse, but come it must, come it will. Your mother will live to see slavery abolished, _unless_ England forms an alliance to hold it up. England is the great reliance of the slave-power to-day, and next to England the faltering weakness of the North, which palters and dare not fire the great broadside for fear of hitting friends. These things _must_ be done, and sudden, sharp remedies are _mercy_. Just now we are in a dark hour; but whether God be with us or not, I know He is with the slave, and with his redemption will come the solution of our question. I have long known _what_ and who we had to deal with in this, for when I wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" I had letters addressed to me showing a state of society perfectly _inconceivable_. That they violate graves, make drinking-cups of skulls, that _ladies_ wear cameos cut from bones, and treasure scalps, is no surprise to me. If I had written what I knew of the obscenity, brutality, and cruelty of that society down there, society would have cast out the books; and it is for their interest, the interest of the whole race in the South, that we should succeed. I wish _them_ no ill, feel no bitterness; they have had a Dahomian education which makes them savage. We don't expect any more of _them_, but if slavery is destroyed, one generation of education and liberty will efface these stains. They will come to themselves, these States, and be glad it is over. I am using up my paper to little purpose. Please give my best love to your dear mother. I am going to write to her. If I only could have written the things I have often thought! I am going to put on her bracelet, with the other dates, that of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Remember me to the duke and to your dear children. My husband desires his best regards, my daughters also. I am lovingly ever yours, H. B. STOWE. Later in the year we hear again from her son in the army, and this time the news comes in a chaplain's letter from the terrible field of Gettysburg. He writes:-- GETTYSBURG, PA., _Saturday, July 11_, 9.30 P. M. MRS. H. B. STOWE: _Dear Madam_,--Among the thousands of wounded and dying men on this war-scarred field, I have just met with your son, Captain Stowe. If you have not already heard from him, it may cheer your heart to know that he is in the hands of good, kind friends. He was struck by a fragment of a shell, which entered his right ear. He is quiet and cheerful, longs to see some member of his family, and is, above all, anxious that they should hear from him as soon as possible. I assured him I would write at once, and though I am wearied by a week's labor here among scenes of terrible suffering, I know that, to a mother's anxious heart, even a hasty scrawl about her boy will be more than welcome. May God bless and sustain you in this troubled time! Yours with sincere sympathy, J. M. CROWELL. The wound in the head was not fatal, and after weary months of intense suffering it imperfectly healed; but the cruel iron had too nearly touched the brain of the young officer, and never again was he what he had been. Soon after the war his mother bought a plantation in Florida, largely in the hope that the out-of-door life connected with its management might be beneficial to her afflicted son. He remained on it for several years, and then, being possessed with the idea that a long sea voyage would do him more good than anything else, sailed from New York to San Francisco around the Horn. That he reached the latter city in safety is known; but that is all. No word from him or concerning him has ever reached the loving hearts that have waited so anxiously for it, and of his ultimate fate nothing is known. Meantime, the year 1863 was proving eventful in many other ways to Mrs. Stowe. In the first place, the long and pleasant Andover connection of Professor Stowe was about to be severed, and the family were to remove to Hartford, Conn. They were to occupy a house that Mrs. Stowe was building on the bank of Park River. It was erected in a grove of oaks that had in her girlhood been one of Mrs. Stowe's favorite resorts. Here, with her friend Georgiana May, she had passed many happy hours, and had often declared that if she were ever able to build a house, it should stand in that very place. Here, then, it was built in 1863, and as the location was at that time beyond the city limits, it formed, with its extensive, beautiful groves, a particularly charming place of residence. Beautiful as it was, however, it was occupied by the family for only a few years. The needs of the growing city caused factories to spring up in the neighborhood, and to escape their encroachments the Stowes in 1873 bought and moved into the house on Forest Street that has ever since been their Northern home. Thus the only house Mrs. Stowe ever planned and built for herself has been appropriated to the use of factory hands, and is now a tenement occupied by several families. Another important event of 1863 was the publishing of that charming story of Italy, "Agnes of Sorrento," which had been begun nearly four years before. This story suggested itself to Mrs. Stowe while she was abroad during the winter of 1859-60. The origin of the story is as follows: One evening, at a hotel in Florence, it was proposed that the various members of the party should write short stories and read them for the amusement of the company. Mrs. Stowe took part in this literary contest, and the result was the first rough sketch of "Agnes of Sorrento." From this beginning was afterwards elaborated "Agnes of Sorrento," with a dedication to Annie Howard, who was one of the party. Not the least important event of the year to Mrs. Stowe, and the world at large through her instrumentality, was the publication in the "Atlantic Monthly" of her reply to the address of the women of England. The "reply" is substantially as follows:-- _January, 1863._ A REPLY To "The affectionate and Christian Address of many thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America," (signed by) ANNA MARIA BEDFORD (Duchess of Bedford). OLIVIA CECILIA COWLEY (Countess Cowley). CONSTANCE GROSVENOR (Countess Grosvenor). HARRIET SUTHERLAND (Duchess of Sutherland). ELIZABETH ARGYLL (Duchess of Argyll). ELIZABETH FORTESCUE (Countess Fortescue). EMILY SHAFTESBURY (Countess of Shaftesbury). MARY RUTHVEN (Baroness Ruthven). M. A. MILMAN (wife of Dean of St. Paul). R. BUXTON (daughter of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton). CAROLINE AMELIA OWEN (wife of Professor Owen). MRS. CHARLES WINDHAM. C. A. HATHERTON (Baroness Hatherton). ELIZABETH DUCIE (Countess Dowager of Ducie). CECILIA PARKE (wife of Baron Parke). MARY ANN CHALLIS (wife of the Lord Mayor of London). E. GORDON (Duchess Dowager of Gordon). ANNA M. L. MELVILLE (daughter of Earl of Leven and Melville). GEORGIANA EBRINGTON (Lady Ebrington). A. HILL (Viscountess Hill). MRS. GOBAT (wife of Bishop Gobat of Jerusalem). E. PALMERSTON (Viscountess Palmerston). (And others). SISTERS,--More than eight years ago you sent to us in America a document with the above heading. It is as follows:-- "A common origin, a common faith, and, we sincerely believe, a common cause, urge us, at the present moment, to address you on the subject of that system of negro slavery which still prevails so extensively, and, even under kindly disposed masters, with such frightful results, in many of the vast regions of the Western world. "We will not dwell on the ordinary topics,--on the progress of civilization, on the advance of freedom everywhere, on the rights and requirements of the nineteenth century; but we appeal to you very seriously to reflect, and to ask counsel of God, how far such a state of things is in accordance with his Holy Word, the inalienable rights of immortal souls, and the pure and merciful spirit of the Christian religion. We do not shut our eyes to the difficulties, nay, the dangers, that might beset the immediate abolition of that long-established system. We see and admit the necessity of preparation for so great an event; but, in speaking of indispensable preliminaries, we cannot be silent on those laws of your country which, in direct contravention of God's own law, 'instituted in the time of man's innocency,' deny in effect to the slave the sanctity of marriage, with all its joys, rights, and obligations; which separate, at the will of the master, the wife from the husband, and the children from the parents. Nor can we be silent on that awful system which, either by statute or by custom, interdicts to any race of men, or any portion of the human family, education in the truths of the gospel and the ordinances of Christianity. A remedy applied to these two evils alone would commence the amelioration of their sad condition. We appeal to you then, as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world. "We do not say these things in a spirit of self-complacency, as though our nation were free from the guilt it perceives in others. "We acknowledge with grief and shame our heavy share in this great sin. We acknowledge that our forefathers introduced, nay compelled the adoption, of slavery in those mighty colonies. We humbly confess it before Almighty God; and it is because we so deeply feel and unfeignedly avow our own complicity, that we now venture to implore your aid to wipe away our common crime and our common dishonor." * * * * * This address, splendidly illuminated on vellum, was sent to our shores at the head of twenty-six folio volumes, containing considerably more than half a million of signatures of British women. It was forwarded to me with a letter from a British nobleman, now occupying one of the highest official positions in England, with a request on behalf of these ladies that it should be in any possible way presented to the attention of my countrywomen. This memorial, as it now stands in its solid oaken case, with its heavy folios, each bearing on its back the imprint of the American eagle, forms a most unique library, a singular monument of an international expression of a moral idea. No right-thinking person can find aught to be objected against the substance or form of this memorial. It is temperate, just, and kindly; and on the high ground of Christian equality, where it places itself, may be regarded as a perfectly proper expression of sentiment, as between blood relations and equals in two different nations. The signatures to this appeal are not the least remarkable part of it; for, beginning at the very steps of the throne, they go down to the names of women in the very humblest conditions in life, and represent all that Great Britain possesses, not only of highest and wisest, but of plain, homely common sense and good feeling. Names of wives of cabinet ministers appear on the same page with the names of wives of humble labourers,--names of duchesses and countesses, of wives of generals, ambassadors, savants, and men of letters, mingled with names traced in trembling characters by hands evidently unused to hold the pen, and stiffened by lowly toil. Nay, so deep and expansive was the feeling, that British subjects in foreign lands had their representation. Among the signatures are those of foreign residents, from Paris to Jerusalem. Autographs so diverse, and collected from sources so various, have seldom been found in juxtaposition. They remain at this day a silent witness of a most singular tide of feeling which at that time swept over the British community and _made_ for itself an expression, even at the risk of offending the sensibilities of an equal and powerful nation. No reply to that address, in any such tangible and monumental form, has ever been possible. It was impossible to canvass our vast territories with the zealous and indefatigable industry with which England was canvassed for signatures. In America, those possessed of the spirit which led to this efficient action had no leisure for it. All their time and energies were already absorbed in direct efforts to remove the great evil, concerning which the minds of their English sisters had been newly aroused, and their only answer was the silent continuance of these efforts. From the slaveholding States, however, as was to be expected, came a flood of indignant recrimination and rebuke. No one act, perhaps, ever produced more frantic irritation, or called out more unsparing abuse. It came with the whole united weight of the British aristocracy and commonalty on the most diseased and sensitive part of our national life; and it stimulated that fierce excitement which was working before, and has worked since, till it has broken out into open war. The time has come, however, when such an astonishing page has been turned, in the anti-slavery history of America, that the women of our country, feeling that the great anti-slavery work to which their English sisters exhorted them is almost done, may properly and naturally feel moved to reply to their appeal, and lay before them the history of what has occurred since the receipt of their affectionate and Christian address. Your address reached us just as a great moral conflict was coming to its intensest point. The agitation kept up by the anti-slavery portion of America, by England, and by the general sentiment of humanity in Europe, had made the situation of the slaveholding aristocracy intolerable. As one of them at the time expressed it, they felt themselves under the ban of the civilized world. Two courses only were open to them: to abandon slave institutions, the sources of their wealth and political power, or to assert them with such an overwhelming national force as to compel the respect and assent of mankind. They chose the latter. To this end they determined to seize on and control all the resources of the Federal Government, and to spread their institutions through new States and Territories until the balance of power should fall into their hands and they should be able to force slavery into all the free States. A leading Southern senator boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves on Bunker Hill; and for a while the political successes of the slave-power were such as to suggest to New England that this was no impossible event. They repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had hitherto stood like the Chinese wall, between our Northwestern Territories and the irruptions of slaveholding barbarians. Then came the struggle between freedom and slavery in the new territory; the battle for Kansas and Nebraska, fought with fire and sword and blood, where a race of men, of whom John Brown was the immortal type, acted over again the courage, the perseverance, and the military-religious ardor of the old Covenanters of Scotland, and like them redeemed the ark of liberty at the price of their own blood, and blood dearer than their own. The time of the Presidential canvass which elected Mr. Lincoln was the crisis of this great battle. The conflict had become narrowed down to the one point of the extension of slave territory. If the slaveholders could get States enough, they could control and rule; if they were outnumbered by free States, their institutions, by the very law of their nature, would die of suffocation. Therefore Fugitive Slave Law, District of Columbia, Inter-State Slave-trade, and what not, were all thrown out of sight for a grand rally on this vital point. A President was elected pledged to opposition to this one thing alone,--a man known to be in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law and other so-called compromises of the Constitution, but honest and faithful in his determination on this one subject. That this was indeed the vital point was shown by the result. The moment Lincoln's election was ascertained, the slaveholders resolved to destroy the Union they could no longer control. They met and organized a Confederacy which they openly declared to be the first republic founded on the right and determination of the white man to enslave the black man, and, spreading their banners, declared themselves to the Christian world of the nineteenth century as a nation organized with the full purpose and intent of perpetuating slavery. But in the course of the struggle that followed, it became important for the new confederation to secure the assistance of foreign powers, and infinite pains were then taken to blind and bewilder the mind of England as to the real issues of the conflict in America. It has been often and earnestly asserted that slavery had nothing to do with this conflict; that it was a mere struggle for power; that the only object was to restore the Union as it was, with all its abuses. It is to be admitted that expressions have proceeded from the national administration which naturally gave rise to misapprehension, and therefore we beg to speak to you on this subject more fully. And first the declaration of the Confederate States themselves is proof enough, that, whatever may be declared on the other side, the maintenance of slavery is regarded by them as the vital object of their movement. We ask your attention under this head to the declaration of their Vice-President, Stephens, in that remarkable speech delivered on the 21st of March, 1861, at Savannah, Georgia, wherein he declares the object and purposes of the new Confederacy. It is one of the most extraordinary papers which our century has produced. I quote from the _verbatim_ report in the "Savannah Republican" of the address as it was delivered in the Athenæum of that city, on which occasion, says the newspaper from which I copy, "Mr. Stephens took his seat amid a burst of enthusiasm and applause such as the Athenæum has never had displayed within its walls within the recollection 'of the oldest inhabitant.'" Last, not least, the new Constitution has put at rest _forever_ all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution,--African slavery as it exists among us, the proper _status_ of the negro in our form of civilization. _This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution._ Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was a conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock _stood_ and _stands_ may be doubted. _The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically._ In the mean while, during the past year, the Republican administration, with all the unwonted care of organizing an army and navy, and conducting military operations on an immense scale, have proceeded to demonstrate the feasibility of overthrowing slavery by purely constitutional measures. To this end they have instituted a series of movements which have made this year more fruitful in anti-slavery triumphs than any other since the emancipation of the British West Indies. The District of Columbia, as belonging strictly to the national government and to no separate State, has furnished a fruitful subject of remonstrance from British Christians with America. We have abolished slavery there, and thus wiped out the only blot of territorial responsibility on our escutcheon. By another act, equally grand in principle, and far more important in its results, slavery is forever excluded from the Territories of the United States. By another act, America has consummated the long-delayed treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave-trade. In ports whence slave vessels formerly sailed with the connivance of the port officers, the administration has placed men who stand up to their duty, and for the first time in our history the slave-trader is convicted and hung as a pirate. This abominable secret traffic has been wholly demolished by the energy of the Federal Government. Lastly, and more significant still, the United States government has in its highest official capacity taken distinct anti-slavery ground, and presented to the country a plan of peaceable emancipation with suitable compensation. This noble-spirited and generous offer has been urged on the slaveholding States by the chief executive with earnestness and sincerity. But this is but half the story of the anti-slavery triumphs of this year. We have shown you what has been done for freedom by the simple use of the ordinary constitutional forces of the Union. We are now to show you what has been done to the same end by the constitutional war-power of the nation. By this power it has been this year decreed that every slave of a rebel who reaches the lines of our army becomes a free man; that all slaves found deserted by their masters become free men; that every slave employed in any service for the United States thereby obtains his liberty; and that every slave employed against the United States in any capacity obtains his liberty; and lest the army should contain officers disposed to remand slaves to their masters, the power of judging and delivering up slaves is denied to army officers, and all such acts are made penal. By this act the Fugitive Slave Law is for all present purposes practically repealed. With this understanding and provision, wherever our armies march they carry liberty with them. For be it remembered that our army is almost entirely a volunteer one, and that the most zealous and ardent volunteers are those who have been for years fighting, with tongue and pen, the abolition battle. So marked is the character of our soldiers in this respect, that they are now familiarly designated in the official military dispatches of the Confederate States as "the Abolitionists." Conceive the results when an army so empowered by national law marches through a slave territory. One regiment alone has to our certain knowledge liberated two thousand slaves during the past year, and this regiment is but one out of hundreds. Lastly, the great decisive measure of the war has appeared,--_the President's Proclamation of Emancipation_. This also has been much misunderstood and misrepresented in England. It has been said to mean virtually this: Be loyal and you shall keep your slaves; rebel and they shall be free. But let us remember what we have just seen of the purpose and meaning of the Union to which the rebellious States are invited back. It is to a Union which has abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, and interdicted slavery in the Territories; which vigorously represses the slave-trade, and hangs the convicted slaver as a pirate; which necessitates emancipation by denying expansion to slavery, and facilitates it by the offer of compensation. Any slaveholding States which should return to such a Union might fairly be supposed to return with the purpose of peaceable emancipation. The President's Proclamation simply means this: Come in and emancipate peaceably with compensation; stay out and I emancipate, nor will I protect you from the consequences. Will our sisters in England feel no heartbeat at that event? Is it not one of the predicted voices of the latter day, saying under the whole heavens, "It is done; the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ"? And now, sisters of England, in this solemn, expectant hour, let us speak to you of one thing which fills our hearts with pain and solicitude. It is an unaccountable fact, and one which we entreat you seriously to ponder, that the party which has brought the cause of freedom thus far on its way, during the past eventful year, has found little or no support in England. Sadder than this, the party which makes slavery the chief corner-stone of its edifice finds in England its strongest defenders. The voices that have spoken for us who contend for liberty have been few and scattering. God forbid that we should forget those few noble voices, so sadly exceptional in the general outcry against us! They are, alas! too few to be easily forgotten. False statements have blinded the minds of your community, and turned the most generous sentiments of the British heart against us. The North are fighting for supremacy and the South for independence, has been the voice. Independence? for what? to do what? To prove the doctrine that all men are _not_ equal; to establish the doctrine that the white may enslave the negro! In the beginning of our struggle, the voices that reached us across the water said: "If we were only sure you were fighting for the abolition of slavery, we should not dare to say whither our sympathies for your cause might not carry us." Such, as we heard, were the words of the honored and religious nobleman who draughted this very letter which you signed and sent us, and to which we are now replying. When these words reached us we said: "We can wait; our friends in England will soon see whither this conflict is tending." A year and a half have passed; step after step has been taken for liberty; chain after chain has fallen, till the march of our armies is choked and clogged by the glad flocking of emancipated slaves; the day of final emancipation is set; the border States begin to move in voluntary consent; universal freedom for all dawns like the sun in the distant horizon, and still no voice from England. No voice? Yes, we have heard on the high seas the voice of a war-steamer, built for a man-stealing Confederacy, with English gold, in an English dockyard, going out of an English harbor, manned by English sailors, with the full knowledge of English government officers, in defiance of the Queen's proclamation of neutrality! So far has English sympathy overflowed. We have heard of other steamers, iron-clad, designed to furnish to a slavery-defending Confederacy their only lack,--a navy for the high seas. We have heard that the British Evangelical Alliance refuses to express sympathy with the liberating party, when requested to do so by the French Evangelical Alliance. We find in English religious newspapers all those sad degrees in the downward-sliding scale of defending and apologizing for slaveholders and slaveholding, with which we have so many years contended in our own country. We find the President's Proclamation of Emancipation spoken of in those papers only as an incitement to servile insurrection. Nay, more,--we find in your papers, from thoughtful men, the admission of the rapid decline of anti-slavery sentiments in England. This very day the writer of this has been present at a solemn religious festival in the national capital, given at the home of a portion of those fugitive slaves who have fled to our lines for protection,--who, under the shadow of our flag, find sympathy and succor. The national day of thanksgiving was there kept by over a thousand redeemed slaves, and for whom Christian charity had spread an ample repast. Our sisters, we wish _you_ could have witnessed the scene. We wish you could have heard the prayer of a blind old negro, called among his fellows John the Baptist, when in touching broken English he poured forth his thanksgivings. We wish you could have heard the sound of that strange rhythmical chant which is now forbidden to be sung on Southern plantations,--the psalm of this modern exodus,--which combines the barbaric fire of the Marseillaise with the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet:-- "Oh, go down, Moses, Way down into Egypt's land! Tell King Pharaoh To let my people go! Stand away dere, Stand away dere, And let my people go!" As we were leaving, an aged woman came and lifted up her hands in blessing. "Bressed be de Lord dat brought me to see dis first happy day of my life! Bressed be de Lord!" In all England is there no Amen? We have been shocked and saddened by the question asked in an association of Congregational ministers in England, the very blood relations of the liberty-loving Puritans,--"Why does not the North let the South go?" What! give up the point of emancipation for these four million slaves? Turn our backs on them, and leave them to their fate? What! leave our white brothers to run a career of oppression and robbery, that, as sure as there is a God that ruleth in the armies of heaven, will bring down a day of wrath and doom? Remember that wishing success to this slavery-establishing effort is only wishing to the sons and daughters of the South all the curses that God has written against oppression. _Mark our words!_ If we succeed, the children of these very men who are now fighting us will rise up to call us blessed. Just as surely as there is a God who governs in the world, so surely all the laws of national prosperity follow in the train of equity; and if we succeed, we shall have delivered the children's children of our misguided brethren from the wages of sin, which is always and everywhere death. And now, sisters of England, think it not strange if we bring back the words of your letter, not in bitterness, but in deepest sadness, and lay them down at your door. We say to you, Sisters, you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death. We have sealed our devotion by desolate hearth and darkened homestead,--by the blood of sons, husbands, and brothers. In many of our dwellings the very light of our lives has gone out; and yet we accept the life-long darkness as our own part in this great and awful expiation, by which the bonds of wickedness shall be loosed, and abiding peace established on the foundation of righteousness. Sisters, what have _you_ done, and what do you mean to do? We appeal to you as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world. In behalf of many thousands of American women. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. WASHINGTON, _November 27, 1862._ The publication of this reply elicited the following interesting letter from John Bright:-- ROCHDALE, _March 9, 1863._ DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I received your kind note with real pleasure, and felt it very good of you to send me a copy of the "Atlantic Monthly" with your noble letter to the women of England. I read every word of it with an intense interest, and I am quite sure that its effect upon opinion here has been marked and beneficial. It has covered some with shame, and it has compelled many to think, and it has stimulated not a few to act. Before this reaches you, you will have seen what large and earnest meetings have been held in all our towns in favor of abolition and the North. No town has a building large enough to contain those who come to listen, to applaud, and to vote in favor of freedom and the Union. The effect of this is evident on our newspapers and on the tone of Parliament, where now nobody says a word in favor of recognition, or mediation, or any such thing. The need and duty of England is admitted to be a strict neutrality, but the feeling of the millions of her people is one of friendliness to the United States and its government. It would cause universal rejoicing, among all but a limited circle of aristocracy and commercially rich and corrupt, to hear that the Northern forces had taken Vicksburg on the great river, and Charleston on the Atlantic, and that the neck of the conspiracy was utterly broken. I hope your people may have strength and virtue to win the great cause intrusted to them, but it is fearful to contemplate the amount of the depravity in the North engendered by the long power of slavery. New England is far ahead of the States as a whole,--too instructed and too moral; but still I will hope that she will bear the nation through this appalling danger. I well remember the evening at Rome and our conversation. You lamented the election of Buchanan. You judged him with a more unfriendly but a more correct eye than mine. He turned out more incapable and less honest than I hoped for. And I think I was right in saying that your party was not then sufficiently consolidated to enable it to maintain its policy in the execution, even had Frémont been elected. As it is now, six years later, the North but falteringly supports the policy of the government, though impelled by the force of events which then you did not dream of. President Lincoln has lived half his troubled reign. In the coming half I hope he may see land; surely slavery will be so broken up that nothing can restore and renew it; and, slavery once fairly gone, I know not how all your States can long be kept asunder. Believe me very sincerely yours, JOHN BRIGHT. It also called forth from Archbishop Whately the following letter:-- PALACE, DUBLIN, _January, 1863._ DEAR MADAM,--In acknowledging your letter and pamphlet, I take the opportunity of laying before you what I collect to be the prevailing sentiments here on American affairs. Of course there is a great variety of opinion, as may be expected in a country like ours. Some few sympathize with the Northerns, and some few with the Southerns, but far the greater portion sympathize with neither completely, but lament that each party should be making so much greater an expenditure of life and property than can be compensated for by any advantage they can dream of obtaining. Those who are the least favorable to the Northerns are not so from any approbation of slavery, but from not understanding that the war is waged in the cause of abolition. "It was waged," they say, "ostensibly for the restoration of the Union," and in attestation of this, they refer to the proclamation which announced the confiscation of slaves that were the property of secessionists, while those who adhered to the Federal cause should be exempt from such confiscation, which, they say, did not savor much of zeal for abolition. And if the other object--the restoration of the Union--could be accomplished, which they all regard as hopeless, they do not understand how it will tend to the abolition of slavery. On the contrary, "if," say they, "the separation had been allowed to take place peaceably, the Northerns might, as we do, have proclaimed freedom to every slave who set foot on their territory; which would have been a great check to slavery, and especially to any cruel treatment of slaves." Many who have a great dislike to slavery yet hold that the Southerns had at least as much right to secede as the Americans had originally to revolt from Great Britain. And there are many who think that, considering the dreadful distress we have suffered from the cotton famine, we have shown great forbearance in withstanding the temptation of recognizing the Southern States and to break the blockade. Then, again, there are some who are provoked at the incessant railing at England, and threats of an invasion of Canada, which are poured forth in some of the American papers. There are many, also, who consider that the present state of things cannot continue much longer if the Confederates continue to hold their own, as they have done hitherto; and that a people who shall have maintained their independence for two or three years will be recognized by the principal European powers. Such appears to have been the procedure of the European powers in all similar cases, such as the revolt of the Anglo-American and Spanish-American colonies, of the Haytians and the Belgians. In these and other like cases, the rule practically adopted seems to have been to recognize the revolters, not at once, but after a reasonable time had been allowed to see whether they could maintain their independence; and this without being understood to have pronounced any decision either way as to the justice of the cause. Moreover, there are many who say that the negroes and people of color are far from being kindly or justly treated in the Northern States. An emancipated slave, at any rate, has not received good training for earning his bread by the wages of labor; and if, in addition to this and his being treated as an outcast, he is excluded, as it is said, from many employments, by the refusal of white laborers to work along with him, he will have gained little by taking refuge in the Northern States. I have now laid before you the views which I conceive to be most prevalent among us, and for which I am not myself responsible. For the safe and effectual emancipation of slaves, I myself consider there is no plan so good as the gradual one which was long ago suggested by Bishop Hinds. What he recommended was an _ad valorem tax_ upon slaves,--the value to be fixed by the owner, with an option to government to purchase at that price. Thus the slaves would be a burden to the master, and those the most so who should be the most valuable, as being the most intelligent and steady, and therefore the best qualified for freedom; and it would be his interest to train his slaves to be free laborers, and to emancipate them, one by one, as speedily as he could with safety. I fear, however, that the time is gone by for trying this experiment in America. With best wishes for the new year, believe me Yours faithfully, RD. WHATELY. Among the many letters written from this side of the Atlantic regarding the reply, was one from Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which he says:-- I read with great pleasure your article in the last "Atlantic." If anything could make John Bull blush, I should think it might be that; but he is a hardened and villainous hypocrite. I always felt that he cared nothing for or against slavery, except as it gave him a vantage-ground on which to parade his own virtue and sneer at our iniquity. With best regards from Mrs. Hawthorne and myself to yourself and family, sincerely yours, NATH'L HAWTHORNE. CHAPTER XVII. FLORIDA, 1865-1869. LETTER TO DUCHESS OF ARGYLL.--MRS. STOWE DESIRES TO HAVE A HOME AT THE SOUTH.--FLORIDA THE BEST FIELD FOR DOING GOOD.--SHE BUYS A PLACE AT MANDARIN.--A CHARMING WINTER RESIDENCE.--"PALMETTO LEAVES."--EASTER SUNDAY AT MANDARIN.--CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR. HOLMES.--"POGANUC PEOPLE."--RECEPTIONS IN NEW ORLEANS AND TALLAHASSEE.--LAST WINTER AT MANDARIN. IN 1866, the terrible conflict between the North and South having ended, Mrs. Stowe wrote the following letter to the Duchess of Argyll:-- HARTFORD, _February 19, 1866._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--Your letter was a real spring of comfort to me, bringing refreshingly the pleasant library at Inverary and the lovely days I spent there. I am grieved at what you say of your dear mother's health. I showed your letter to Mrs. Perkins, and we both agreed in saying that _we_ should like for a time to fill the place of maid to her, as doubtless you all feel, too. I should so love to be with her, to read to her, and talk to her! and oh, there is so much that would cheer and comfort a noble heart like hers that we could talk about. Oh, my friend, when I think of what has been done these last few years, and of what is now doing, I am lost in amazement. I have just, by way of realizing it to myself, been reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" again, and when I read that book, scarred and seared and burned into with the memories of an anguish and horror that can never be forgotten, and think it is all over now, all past, and that now the questions debated are simply of more or less time before granting legal suffrage to those who so lately were held only as articles of merchandise,--when this comes over me I think no private or individual sorrow can ever make me wholly without comfort. If my faith in God's presence and real, living power in the affairs of men ever grows dim, this makes it impossible to doubt. I have just had a sweet and lovely Christian letter from Garrison, whose beautiful composure and thankfulness in his hour of victory are as remarkable as his wonderful courage in the day of moral battle. His note ends with the words, "And who but God is to be glorified?" Garrison's attitude is far more exalted than that of Wendell Phillips. He acknowledges the great deed done. He suspends his "Liberator" with words of devout thanksgiving, and devotes himself unobtrusively to the work yet to be accomplished for the freedmen; while Phillips seems resolved to ignore the mighty work that has been done, because of the inevitable shortcomings and imperfections that beset it still. We have a Congress of splendid men,--men of stalwart principle and determination. We have a President[15] honestly seeking to do right; and if he fails in knowing just what right is, it is because he is a man born and reared in a slave State, and acted on by many influences which we cannot rightly estimate unless we were in his place. My brother Henry has talked with him earnestly and confidentially, and has faith in him as an earnest, good man seeking to do right. Henry takes the ground that it is unwise and impolitic to endeavor to force negro suffrage on the South at the point of the bayonet. His policy would be, to hold over the negro the protection of our Freedman's Bureau until the great laws of free labor shall begin to draw the master and servant together; to endeavor to soothe and conciliate, and win to act with us, a party composed of the really good men at the South. For this reason he has always advocated lenity of measures towards them. He wants to get them into a state in which the moral influence of the North can act upon them beneficially, and to get such a state of things that there will be a party _at the South_ to protect the negro. Charles Sumner is looking simply at the abstract _right_ of the thing. Henry looks at actual probabilities. We all know that the state of society at the South is such that laws are a very inadequate protection even to white men. Southern elections always have been scenes of mob violence _when only white men voted_. Multitudes of lives have been lost at the polls in this way, and if against their will negro suffrage was forced upon them, I do not see how any one in their senses can expect anything less than an immediate war of races. If negro suffrage were required as a condition of acquiring political position, there is no doubt the slave States would grant it; grant it nominally, because they would know that the grant never could or would become an actual realization. And what would then be gained for the negro? I am sorry that people cannot differ on such great and perplexing public questions without impugning each other's motives. Henry has been called a back-slider because of the lenity of his counsels, but I cannot but think it is the Spirit of Christ that influences him. Garrison has been in the same way spoken of as a deserter, because he says that a work that is done shall be called done, and because he would not keep up an anti-slavery society when slavery is abolished; and I think our President is much injured by the abuse that is heaped on him, and the selfish and unworthy motives that are ascribed to him by those who seem determined to allow to nobody an honest, unselfish difference in judgment from their own. Henry has often spoken of you and your duke as pleasant memories in a scene of almost superhuman labor and excitement. He often said to me: "When this is all over,--when we have won the victory,--_then_ I will write to the duchess." But when it was over and the flag raised again at Sumter his arm was smitten down with the news of our President's death! We all appreciate your noble and true sympathy through the dark hour of our national trial. You and yours are almost the only friends we now have left in England. You cannot know what it was, unless you could imagine your own country to be in danger of death, extinction of nationality. _That_, dear friend, is an experience which shows us what we are and what we can feel. I am glad to hear that we may hope to see your son in this country. I fear so many pleasant calls will beset his path that we cannot hope for a moment, but it would give us _all_ the greatest pleasure to see him here. Our dull, prosy, commonplace, though good old Hartford could offer few attractions compared with Boston or New York, and yet I hope he will not leave us out altogether if he comes among us. God bless him! You are very happy indeed in being permitted to keep all your dear ones and see them growing up. I want to ask a favor. Do you have, as we do, _cartes de visite_? If you have, and could send me one of yourself and the duke and of Lady Edith and your eldest son, I should be so very glad to see how you are looking now; and the dear mother, too, I should so like to see how she looks. It seems almost like a dream to look back to those pleasant days. I am glad to see you still keep some memories of our goings on. Georgie's marriage is a very happy one to us. They live in Stockbridge, the loveliest part of Massachusetts, and her husband is a most devoted pastor, and gives all his time and property to the great work which he has embraced, purely for the love of it. My other daughters are with me, and my son, Captain Stowe, who has come with weakened health through our struggle, suffering constantly from the effects of a wound in his head received at Gettysburg, which makes his returning to his studies a hard struggle. My husband is in better health since he resigned his professorship, and desires his most sincere regards to yourself and the duke, and his profound veneration to your mother. Sister Mary also desires to be remembered to you, as do also my daughters. Please tell me a little in your next of Lady Edith; she must be very lovely now. I am, with sincerest affection, ever yours, H. B. STOWE. Soon after the close of the war Mrs. Stowe conceived the idea of making for herself and her family a winter home in the South, where she might escape the rigors of Northern winters, and where her afflicted son Frederick might enjoy an out-of-door life throughout the year. She was also most anxious to do her share towards educating and leading to a higher life those colored people whom she had helped so largely to set free, and who were still in the state of profound ignorance imposed by slavery. In writing of her hopes and plans to her brother Charles Beecher, in 1866, she says:-- "My plan of going to Florida, as it lies in my mind, is not in any sense a mere worldly enterprise. I have for many years had a longing to be more immediately doing Christ's work on earth. My heart is with that poor people whose cause in words I have tried to plead, and who now, ignorant and docile, are just in that formative stage in which whoever seizes has them. "Corrupt politicians are already beginning to speculate on them as possible capital for their schemes, and to fill their poor heads with all sorts of vagaries. Florida is the State into which they have, more than anywhere else, been pouring. Emigration is positively and decidedly setting that way; but as yet it is mere worldly emigration, with the hope of making money, nothing more. "The Episcopal Church is, however, undertaking, under direction of the future Bishop of Florida, a wide-embracing scheme of Christian activity for the whole State. In this work I desire to be associated, and my plan is to locate at some salient point on the St. John's River, where I can form the nucleus of a Christian neighborhood, whose influence shall be felt far beyond its own limits." During this year Mrs. Stowe partially carried her plan into execution by hiring an old plantation called "Laurel Grove," on the west side of the St. John's River, near the present village of Orange Park. Here she established her son Frederick as a cotton planter, and here he remained for two years. This location did not, however, prove entirely satisfactory, nor did the raising of cotton prove to be, under the circumstances, a profitable business. After visiting Florida during the winter of 1866-67, at which time her attention was drawn to the beauties and superior advantages of Mandarin on the east side of the river, Mrs. Stowe writes from Hartford, May 29, 1867, to Rev. Charles Beecher:-- MY DEAR BROTHER,--We are now thinking seriously of a place in Mandarin much more beautiful than any other in the vicinity. It has on it five large date palms, an olive tree in full bearing, besides a fine orange grove which this year will yield about seventy-five thousand oranges. If we get that, then I want you to consider the expediency of buying the one next to it. It contains about two hundred acres of land, on which is a fine orange grove, the fruit from which last year brought in two thousand dollars as sold at the wharf. It is right on the river, and four steamboats pass it each week, on their way to Savannah and Charleston. There is on the place a very comfortable cottage, as houses go out there, where they do not need to be built as substantially as with us. [Illustration: THE HOME AT MANDARIN, FLORIDA.] I am now in correspondence with the Bishop of Florida, with a view to establishing a line of churches along the St. John's River, and if I settle at Mandarin, it will be one of my stations. Will you consent to enter the Episcopal Church and be our clergyman? You are just the man we want. If my tasks and feelings did not incline me toward the Church, I should still choose it as the best system for training immature minds such as those of our negroes. The system was composed with reference to the wants of the laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant as our negroes now are. I long to be at this work, and cannot think of it without my heart burning within me. Still I leave all with my God, and only hope He will open the way for me to do all that I want to for this poor people. Affectionately yours, H. B. STOWE. Mrs. Stowe had some years before this joined the Episcopal Church, for the sake of attending the same communion as her daughters, who were Episcopalians. Her brother Charles did not, however, see fit to change his creed, and though he went to Florida he settled a hundred and sixty miles west from the St. John's River, at Newport, near St. Marks, on the Gulf coast, and about twenty miles from Tallahassee. Here he lived every winter and several summers for fifteen years, and here he left the impress of his own remarkably sweet and lovely character upon the scattered population of the entire region. Mrs. Stowe in the mean time purchased the property, with its orange grove and comfortable cottage, that she had recommended to him, and thus Mandarin became her winter home. No one who has ever seen it can forget the peaceful beauty of this Florida home and its surroundings. The house, a story and a half cottage of many gables, stands on a bluff overlooking the broad St. John's, which is five miles wide at this point. It nestles in the shade of a grove of superb, moss-hung live-oaks, around one of which the front piazza is built. Several fine old orange trees also stand near the cottage, scenting the air with the sweet perfume of their blossoms in the early spring, and offering their golden fruit to whoever may choose to pluck it during the winter months. Back of the house stretches the well-tended orange grove in which Mrs. Stowe took such genuine pride and pleasure. Everywhere about the dwelling and within it were flowers and singing birds, while the rose garden in front, at the foot of the bluff, was the admiration of all who saw it. Here, on the front piazza, beneath the grand oaks, looking out on the calm sunlit river, Professor Stowe enjoyed that absolute peace and restful quiet for which his scholarly nature had always longed, but which had been forbidden to the greater part of his active life. At almost any hour of the day the well-known figure, with snow-white, patriarchal beard and kindly face, might be seen sitting there, with a basket of books, many of them in dead and nearly forgotten languages, close at hand. An amusing incident of family life was as follows: Some Northern visitors seemed to think that the family had no rights which were worthy of a a moment's consideration. They would land at the wharf, roam about the place, pick flowers, peer into the house through the windows and doors, and act with that disregard of all the proprieties of life which characterizes ill-bred people when on a journey. The professor had been driven well-nigh distracted by these migratory bipeds. One day, when one of them broke a branch from an orange tree directly before his eyes, and was bearing it off in triumph with all its load of golden fruit, he leaped from his chair, and addressed the astonished individual on those fundamental principles of common honesty, which he deemed outraged by this act. The address was vigorous and truthful, but of a kind which will not bear repeating. "Why," said the horror-stricken culprit, "I thought that this was Mrs. Stowe's place!" "You thought it was Mrs. Stowe's place!" Then, in a voice of thunder, "I would have you understand, sir, that I am the proprietor and protector of Mrs. Stowe and of this place, and if you commit any more such shameful depredations I will have you punished as you deserve!" Thus this predatory Yankee was taught to realize that there is a God in Israel. In April, 1869, Mrs. Stowe was obliged to hurry North in order to visit Canada in time to protect her English rights in "Oldtown Folks," which she had just finished. About this time she secured a plot of land, and made arrangements for the erection on it of a building that should be used as a schoolhouse through the week, and as a church on Sunday. For several years Professor Stowe preached during the winter in this little schoolhouse, and Mrs. Stowe conducted Sunday-school, sewing classes, singing classes, and various other gatherings for instruction and amusement, all of which were well attended and highly appreciated by both the white and colored residents of the neighborhood. Upon one occasion, having just arrived at her Mandarin home, Mrs. Stowe writes:-- "At last, after waiting a day and a half in Charleston, we arrived here about ten o'clock Saturday morning, just a week from the day we sailed. The house looked so pretty, and quiet, and restful, the day was so calm and lovely, it seemed as though I had passed away from all trouble, and was looking back upon you all from a secure resting-place. Mr. Stowe is very happy here, and is constantly saying how pleasant it is, and how glad he is that he is here. He is so much improved in health that already he is able to take a considerable walk every day. "We are all well, contented, and happy, and we have six birds, two dogs, and a pony. Do write more and oftener. Tell me all the little nothings and nowheres. You can't imagine how they are magnified by the time they have reached into this remote corner." In 1872 she wrote a series of Florida sketches, which were published in book form, the following year, by J. R. Osgood & Co., under the title of "Palmetto Leaves." May 19, 1873, she writes to her brother Charles at Newport, Fla.:-- "Although you have not answered my last letter, I cannot leave Florida without saying good-by. I send you the 'Palmetto Leaves' and my parting love. If I could either have brought or left my husband, I should have come to see you this winter. The account of your roses fills me with envy. "We leave on the San Jacinto next Saturday, and I am making the most of the few charming hours yet left; for never did we have so delicious a spring. I never knew such altogether perfect weather. It is enough to make a saint out of the toughest old Calvinist that ever set his face as a flint. How do you think New England theology would have fared if our fathers had been landed here instead of on Plymouth Rock? "The next you hear of me will be at the North, where our address is Forest Street, Hartford. We have bought a pretty cottage there, near to Belle, and shall spend the summer there." In a letter written in May of the following year to her son Charles, at Harvard, Mrs. Stowe says: "I can hardly realize that this long, flowery summer, with its procession of blooms and fruit, has been running on at the same time with the snowbanks and sleet storms of the North. But so it is. It is now the first of May. Strawberries and blackberries are over with us; oranges are in a waning condition, few and far between. Now we are going North to begin another summer, and have roses, strawberries, blackberries, and green peas come again. "I am glad to hear of your reading. The effect produced on you by Jonathan Edwards is very similar to that produced on me when I took the same mental bath. His was a mind whose grasp and intensity you cannot help feeling. He was a poet in the intensity of his conceptions, and some of his sermons are more terrible than Dante's 'Inferno.'" In November, 1874, upon their return to Mandarin, she writes: "We have had heavenly weather, and we needed it; for our house was a cave of spider-webs, cockroaches, dirt, and all abominations, but less than a week has brought it into beautiful order. It now begins to put on that quaint, lively, pretty air that so fascinates me. Our weather is, as I said, heavenly, neither hot nor cold; cool, calm, bright, serene, and so tranquillizing. There is something indescribable about the best weather we have down here. It does not debilitate me like the soft October air in Hartford." During the following February, she writes in reply to an invitation to visit a Northern watering place later in the season: "I shall be most happy to come, and know of nothing to prevent. I have, thank goodness, no serial story on hand for this summer, to hang like an Old Man of the Sea about my neck, and hope to enjoy a little season of being like other folks. It is a most lovely day to-day, most unfallen Eden-like." In a letter written later in the same season, March 28, 1875, Mrs. Stowe gives us a pleasant glimpse at their preparations for the proper observance of Easter Sunday in the little Mandarin schoolhouse. She says: "It was the week before Easter, and we had on our minds the dressing of the church. There my two Gothic fireboards were to be turned into a pulpit for the occasion. I went to Jacksonville and got a five-inch moulding for a base, and then had one fireboard sawed in two, so that there was an arched panel for each end. Then came a rummage for something for a top, and to make a desk of, until it suddenly occurred to me that our old black walnut extension table had a set of leaves. They were exactly the thing. The whole was trimmed with a beading of yellow pine, and rubbed, and pumice-stoned, and oiled, and I got out my tubes of paint and painted the nail-holes with Vandyke brown. By Saturday morning it was a lovely little Gothic pulpit, and Anthony carried it over to the schoolhouse and took away the old desk which I gave him for his meeting-house. That afternoon we drove out into the woods and gathered a quantity of superb Easter lilies, papaw, sparkleberry, great fern-leaves, and cedar. In the evening the girls went over to the Meads to practice Easter hymns; but I sat at home and made a cross, eighteen inches long, of cedar and white lilies. This Southern cedar is the most exquisite thing; it is so feathery and delicate. "Sunday morning was cool and bright, a most perfect Easter. Our little church was full, and everybody seemed delighted with the decorations. Mr. Stowe preached a sermon to show that Christ is going to put everything right at last, which is comforting. So the day was one of real pleasure, and also I trust of real benefit, to the poor souls who learned from it that Christ is indeed risen for them." During this winter the following characteristic letters passed between Mrs. Stowe and her valued friend, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, called forth by the sending to the latter of a volume of Mrs. Stowe's latest stories:-- BOSTON, _January 8, 1876._ MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I would not write to thank you for your most welcome "Christmas Box," "A box whose sweets compacted lie," before I had read it, and every word of it. I have been very much taken up with antics of one kind and another, and have only finished it this afternoon. The last of the papers was of less comparative value to me than to a great fraction of your immense parish of readers, because I am so familiar with every movement of the Pilgrims in their own chronicles. "Deacon Pitkin's Farm" is full of those thoroughly truthful touches of New England in which, if you are not unrivaled, I do not know who your rival may be. I wiped the tears from one eye in reading "Deacon Pitkin's Farm." I wiped the tears, and plenty of them, from both eyes, in reading "Betty's Bright Idea." It is a most charming and touching story, and nobody can read who has not a heart like a pebble, without being melted into tenderness. How much you have done and are doing to make our New England life wholesome and happy! If there is any one who can look back over a literary life which has pictured our old and helped our new civilization, it is yourself. Of course your later books have harder work cut out for them than those of any other writer. They have had "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for a rival. The brightest torch casts a shadow in the blaze of a light, and any transcendent success affords the easiest handle for that class of critics whose method is the one that Dogberry held to be "odious." I think it grows pleasanter to us to be remembered by the friends we still have, as with each year they grow fewer. We have lost Agassiz and Sumner from our circle, and I found Motley stricken with threatening illness (which I hope is gradually yielding to treatment), in the profoundest grief at the loss of his wife, another old and dear friend of mine. So you may be assured that I feel most sensibly your kind attention, and send you my heartfelt thanks for remembering me. Always, dear Mrs. Stowe, faithfully yours, O. W. HOLMES. To this letter Mrs. Stowe replied as follows:-- MANDARIN, _February 23, 1876._ DEAR DOCTOR,--How kind it was of you to write me that very beautiful note! and how I wish you were just where I am, to see the trees laden at the same time with golden oranges and white blossoms! I should so like to cut off a golden cluster, leaves and all, for you. Well, Boston seems very far away and dreamy, like some previous state of existence, as I sit on the veranda and gaze on the receding shores of the St. John's, which at this point is five miles wide. Dear doctor, how time slips by! I remember when Sumner seemed to me a young man, and now he has gone. And Wilson has gone, and Chase, whom I knew as a young man in society in Cincinnati, has gone, and Stanton has gone, and Seward has gone, and yet how lively the world races on! A few air-bubbles of praise or lamentation, and away sails the great ship of life, no matter over whose grave! Well, one cannot but feel it! To me, also, a whole generation of friends has gone from the other side of the water since I was there and broke kindly bread with them. The Duchess of Sutherland, the good old duke, Lansdowne, Ellesmere, Lady Byron, Lord and Lady Amberly, Charles Kingsley, the good Quaker, Joseph Sturge, all are with the shadowy train that has moved on. Among them were as dear and true friends as I ever had, and as pure and noble specimens of human beings as God ever made. They are living somewhere in intense vitality, I must believe, and you, dear doctor, must not doubt. I think about your writings a great deal, and one element in them always attracts me. It is their pitiful and sympathetic vein, the pity for poor, struggling human nature. In this I feel that you must be very near and dear to Him whose name is Love. You wrote some verses once that have got into the hymn-books, and have often occurred to me in my most sacred hours as descriptive of the feelings with which I bear the sorrows and carry the cares of life. They begin,-- "Love Divine, that stooped to share." I have not all your books down here, and am haunted by gaps in the verses that memory cannot make good; but it is that "Love Divine" which is my stay and comfort and hope, as one friend after another passes beyond sight and hearing. Please let me have it in your handwriting. I remember a remark you once made on spiritualism. I cannot recall the words, but you spoke of it as modifying the sharp angles of Calvinistic belief, as a fog does those of a landscape. I would like to talk with you some time on spiritualism, and show you a collection of very curious facts that I have acquired through mediums _not_ professional. Mr. Stowe has just been wading through eight volumes of "La Mystique," by Goerres, professor for forty years past in the University of Munich, first of physiology and latterly of philosophy. He examines the whole cycle of abnormal psychic, spiritual facts, trances, ecstasy, clairvoyance, witchcraft, spiritualism, etc., etc., as shown in the Romish miracles and the history of Europe. I have long since come to the conclusion that the marvels of spiritualism are natural, and not supernatural, phenomena,--an uncommon working of natural laws. I believe that the door between those _in_ the body and those _out_ has never in any age been entirely closed, and that occasional perceptions within the veil are a part of the course of nature, and therefore not miraculous. Of course such a phase of human experience is very substantial ground for every kind of imposture and superstition, and I have no faith whatever in mediums who practice for money. In their case I think the law of Moses, that forbade consulting those who dealt with "familiar spirits," a very wise one. Do write some more, dear doctor. You are too well off in your palace down there on the new land. Your Centennial Ballad was a charming little peep; now give us a full-fledged story. Mr. Stowe sends his best regards, and wishes you would read "Goerres."[16] It is in French also, and he thinks the French translation better than the German. Yours ever truly, H. B. STOWE. Writing in the autumn of 1876 to her son Charles, who was at that time abroad, studying at Bonn, Mrs. Stowe describes a most tempestuous passage between New York and Charleston, during which she and her husband and daughters suffered so much that they were ready to forswear the sea forever. The great waves as they rushed, boiling and seething, past would peer in at the little bull's-eye window of the state-room, as if eager to swallow up ship and passengers. From Charleston, however, they had a most delightful run to their journey's end. She writes: "We had a triumphal entrance into the St. John's, and a glorious sail up the river. Arriving at Mandarin, at four o'clock, we found all the neighbors, black as well as white, on the wharf to receive us. There was a great waving of handkerchiefs and flags, clapping of hands and cheering, as we drew near. The house was open and all ready for us, and we are delighted to be once more in our beautiful Florida home." In the following December she writes to her son: "I am again entangled in writing a serial, a thing I never mean to do again, but the story, begun for a mere Christmas brochure, grew so under my hands that I thought I might as well fill it out and make a book of it. It is the last thing of the kind I ever expect to do. In it I condense my recollections of a bygone era, that in which I was brought up, the ways and manners of which are now as nearly obsolete as the Old England of Dickens's stories is.' "I am so hampered by the necessity of writing this story, that I am obliged to give up company and visiting of all kinds and keep my strength for it. I hope I may be able to finish it, as I greatly desire to do so, but I begin to feel that I am not so strong as I used to be. Your mother is an old woman, Charley mine, and it is best she should give up writing before people are tired of reading her. "I would much rather have written another such a book as 'Footsteps of the Master,' but all, even the religious papers, are gone mad on serials. Serials they demand and will have, and I thought, since this generation will listen to nothing but stories, why not tell them?" The book thus referred to was "Poganuc People," that series of delightful reminiscences of the New England life of nearly a century ago, that has proved so fascinating to many thousands of readers. It was published in 1878, and, as Mrs. Stowe foresaw, was her last literary undertaking of any length, though for several years afterwards she wrote occasional short stories and articles. In January, 1879, she wrote from Mandarin to Dr. Holmes:-- DEAR DOCTOR,--I wish I could give to you and Mrs. Holmes the exquisite charm of this morning. My window is wide open; it is a lovely, fresh, sunny day, and a great orange tree hung with golden balls closes the prospect from my window. The tree is about thirty feet high, and its leaves fairly glisten in the sunshine. I sent "Poganuc People" to you and Mrs. Holmes as being among the few who know those old days. It is an extremely quiet story for these sensational days, when heaven and earth seem to be racked for a thrill; but as I get old I do love to think of those quiet, simple times when there was not a poor person in the parish, and the changing glories of the year were the only spectacle. We, that is the professor and myself, have been reading with much interest Motley's Memoir. That was a man to be proud of, a beauty, too (by your engraving). I never had the pleasure of a personal acquaintance. I feel with you that we have come into the land of leave-taking. Hardly a paper but records the death of some of Mr. Stowe's associates. But the river is not so black as it seems, and there are clear days when the opposite shore is plainly visible, and now and then we catch a strain of music, perhaps even a gesture of recognition. They are thinking of us, without doubt, on the other side. My daughters and I have been reading "Elsie Venner" again. Elsie is one of my especial friends,--poor, dear child!--and all your theology in that book I subscribe to with both hands. Does not the Bible plainly tell us of a time when there shall be no more pain? That is to be the end and crown of the Messiah's mission, when God shall wipe all tears away. My face is set that way, and yours, too, I trust and believe. Mr. Stowe sends hearty and affectionate remembrance both to you and Mrs. Holmes, and I am, as ever, truly yours, H. B. STOWE. About this time Mrs. Stowe paid a visit to her brother Charles, at Newport, Fla., and, continuing her journey to New Orleans, was made to feel how little of bitterness towards her was felt by the best class of Southerners. In both New Orleans and Tallahassee she was warmly welcomed, and tendered public receptions that gave equal pleasure to her and to the throngs of cultivated people who attended them. She was also greeted everywhere with intense enthusiasm by the colored people, who, whenever they knew of her coming, thronged the railway stations in order to obtain a glimpse of her whom they venerated above all women. The return to her Mandarin home each succeeding winter was always a source of intense pleasure to this true lover of nature in its brightest and tenderest moods. Each recurring season was filled with new delights. In December, 1879, she writes to her son, now married and settled as a minister in Saco, Me.:-- DEAR CHILDREN,--Well, we have stepped from December to June, and this morning is sunny and dewy, with a fresh sea-breeze giving life to the air. I have just been out to cut a great bunch of roses and lilies, though the garden is grown into such a jungle that I could hardly get about in it. The cannas, and dwarf bananas, and roses are all tangled together, so that I can hardly thread my way among them. I never in my life saw anything range and run rampant over the ground as cannas do. The ground is littered with fallen oranges, and the place looks shockingly untidy, but so beautiful that I am quite willing to forgive its disorder. We got here Wednesday evening about nine o'clock, and found all the neighbors waiting to welcome us on the wharf. The Meads, and Cranes, and Webbs, and all the rest were there, while the black population was in a frenzy of joy. Your father is quite well. The sea had its usual exhilarating effect upon him. Before we left New York he was quite meek, and exhibited such signs of grace and submission that I had great hopes of him. He promised to do exactly as I told him, and stated that he had entire confidence in my guidance. What woman couldn't call such a spirit evidence of being prepared for speedy translation? I was almost afraid he could not be long for this world. But on the second day at sea his spirits rose, and his appetite reasserted itself. He declared in loud tones how well he felt, and quite resented my efforts to take care of him. I reminded him of his gracious vows and promises in the days of his low spirits, but to no effect. The fact is, his self-will has not left him yet, and I have now no fear of his immediate translation. He is going to preach for us this morning. The last winter passed in this well-loved Southern home was that of 1883-84, for the following season Professor Stowe's health was in too precarious a state to permit him to undertake the long journey from Hartford. By this time one of Mrs. Stowe's fondest hopes had been realized; and, largely through her efforts, Mandarin had been provided with a pretty little Episcopal church, to which was attached a comfortable rectory, and over which was installed a regular clergyman. In January, 1884, Mrs. Stowe writes:-- "Mandarin looks very gay and airy now with its new villas, and our new church and rectory. Our minister is perfect. I wish you could know him. He wants only physical strength. In everything else he is all one could ask. "It is a bright, lovely morning, and four orange-pickers are busy gathering our fruit. Our trees on the bluff have done better than any in Florida. "This winter I study nothing but Christ's life. First I read Farrar's account and went over it carefully. Now I am reading Geikie. It keeps my mind steady, and helps me to bear the languor and pain, of which I have more than usual this winter." FOOTNOTES: [15] Andrew Johnson. [16] _Die Christliche Mystik_, by Johann Joseph Görres, Regensburg, 1836-42. CHAPTER XVIII. OLDTOWN FOLKS, 1869. PROFESSOR STOWE THE ORIGINAL OF "HARRY" IN "OLDTOWN FOLKS."--PROFESSOR STOWE'S LETTER TO GEORGE ELIOT.--HER REMARKS ON THE SAME.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S NARRATIVE OF HIS YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF SPIRITS.--PROFESSOR STOWE'S INFLUENCE ON MRS. STOWE'S LITERARY LIFE.--GEORGE ELIOT ON "OLDTOWN FOLKS." THIS biography would be signally incomplete without some mention of the birth, childhood, early associations, and very peculiar and abnormal psychological experiences of Professor Stowe. Aside from the fact of Dr. Stowe's being Mrs. Stowe's husband, and for this reason entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and "Oldtown Fireside Stories" embody the experiences of his childhood and youth among the grotesque and original characters of his native town. March 26, 1882, Professor Stowe wrote the following characteristic letter to Mrs. Lewes:-- MRS. LEWES,--I fully sympathize with you in your disgust with Hume and the professing mediums generally. Hume spent his boyhood in my father's native town, among my relatives and acquaintances, and he was a disagreeable, nasty boy. But he certainly has qualities which science has not yet explained, and some of his doings are as real as they are strange. My interest in the subject of spiritualism arises from the fact of my own experience, more than sixty years ago, in my early childhood. I then never thought of questioning the objective reality of all I saw, and supposed that everybody else had the same experience. Of what this experience was you may gain some idea from certain passages in "Oldtown Folks." The same experiences continue yet, but with serious doubts as to the objectivity of the scenes exhibited. I have noticed that people who have remarkable and minute answers to prayer, such as Stilling, Franke, Lavater, are for the most part of this peculiar temperament. Is it absurd to suppose that some peculiarity in the nervous system, in the connecting link between soul and body, may bring some, more than others, into an almost abnormal contact with the spirit-world (for example, Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg), and that, too, without correcting their faults, or making them morally better than others? Allow me to say that I have always admired the working of your mind, there is about it such a perfect uprightness and uncalculating honesty. I think you are a better Christian without church or theology than most people are with both, though I am, and always have been in the main, a Calvinist of the Jonathan Edwards school. God bless you! I have a warm side for Mr. Lewes on account of his Goethe labors. Goethe has been my admiration for more than forty years. In 1830 I got hold of his "Faust," and for two gloomy, dreary November days, while riding through the woods of New Hampshire in an old-fashioned stagecoach, to enter upon a professorship in Dartmouth College, I was perfectly dissolved by it. Sincerely yours, C. E. STOWE. In a letter to Mrs. Stowe, written June 24, 1872, Mrs. Lewes alludes to Professor Stowe's letter as follows: "Pray give my special thanks to the professor for his letter. His handwriting, which does really look like Arabic,--a very graceful character, surely,--happens to be remarkably legible to me, and I did not hesitate over a single word. Some of the words, as expressions of fellowship, were very precious to me, and I hold it very good of him to write to me that best sort of encouragement. I was much impressed with the fact--which you have told me--that he was the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and it must be deeply interesting to talk with him on his experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the influence of the facts, physiological and psychological, which have been gathered of late years, to give larger place to the interpretation of vision-seeing as subjective than the professor would approve. It seems difficult to limit--at least to limit with any precision--the possibility of confounding sense by impressions derived from inward conditions with those which are directly dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the division between within and without in this sense seems to become every year a more subtle and bewildering problem." In 1834, while Mr. Stowe was a professor in Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, he wrote out a history of his youthful adventures in the spirit-world, from which the following extracts are taken:-- [Illustration: Signature: C. S. Stowe.] "I have often thought I would communicate to some scientific physician a particular account of a most singular delusion under which I lived from my earliest infancy till the fifteenth or sixteenth year of my age, and the effects of which remain very distinctly now that I am past thirty. "The facts are of such a nature as to be indelibly impressed upon my mind they appear to me to be curious, and well worth the attention of the psychologist. I regard the occurrences in question as the more remarkable because I cannot discover that I possess either taste or talent for fiction or poetry. I have barely imagination enough to enjoy, with a high degree of relish, the works of others in this department of literature, but have never felt able or disposed to engage in that sort of writing myself. On the contrary, my style has always been remarkable for its dry, matter-of-fact plainness; my mind has been distinguished for its quickness and adaptedness to historical and literary investigations, for ardor and perseverance in pursuit of the knowledge of facts,--_eine verständige Richtung_, as the Germans would say,--rather than for any other quality; and the only talent of a higher kind which I am conscious of possessing is a turn for accurate observation of men and things, and a certain broad humor and drollery. "From the hour of my birth I have been constitutionally feeble, as were my parents before me, and my nervous system easily excitable. With care, however, I have kept myself in tolerable health, and my life has been an industrious one, for my parents were poor and I have always been obliged to labor for my livelihood. "With these preliminary remarks, I proceed to the curious details of my psychological history. As early as I can remember anything, I can remember observing a multitude of animated and active objects, which I could see with perfect distinctness, moving about me, and could sometimes, though seldom, hear them make a rustling noise, or other articulate sounds; but I could never touch them. They were in all respects independent of the sense of touch, and incapable of being obstructed in any way by the intervention of material objects; I could see them at any distance, and through any intervening object, with as much ease and distinctness as if they were in the room with me, and directly before my eyes. I could see them passing through the floors, and the ceilings, and the walls of the house, from one apartment to another, in all directions, without a door, or a keyhole, or crevice being open to admit them. I could follow them with my eyes to any distance, or directly through or just beneath the surface, or up and down, in the midst of boards and timbers and bricks, or whatever else would stop the motion or intercept the visibleness of all other objects. These appearances occasioned neither surprise nor alarm, except when they assumed some hideous and frightful form, or exhibited some menacing gesture, for I became acquainted with them as soon as with any of the objects of sense. As to the reality of their existence and the harmlessness of their character, I knew no difference between them and any other of the objects which met my eye. They were as familiar to me as the forms of my parents and my brother; they made up a part of my daily existence, and were as really the subjects of my consciousness as the little bench on which I sat in the corner by my mother's knee, or the wheels and sticks and strings with which I amused myself upon the floor. I indeed recognized a striking difference between them and the things which I could feel and handle, but to me this difference was no more a matter of surprise than that which I observed between my mother and the black woman who so often came to work for her; or between my infant brother and the little spotted dog Brutus of which I was so fond. There was no time, or place, or circumstance, in which they did not occasionally make their appearance. Solitude and silence, however, were more favorable to their appearance than company and conversation. They were more pleased with candle-light than the daylight. They were most numerous, distinct, and active when I was alone and in the dark, especially when my mother had laid me in bed and returned to her own room with the candle. At such times, I always expected the company of my ærial visitors, and counted upon it to amuse me till I dropped asleep. Whenever they failed to make their appearance, as was sometimes the case, I felt lonely and discontented. I kept up a lively conversation with them,--not by language or by signs, for the attempt on my part to speak or move would at once break the charm and drive them away in a fret, but by a peculiar sort of spiritual intercommunion. "When their attention was directed towards me, I could feel and respond to all their thoughts and feelings, and was conscious that they could in the same manner feel and respond to mine. Sometimes they would take no notice of me, but carry on a brisk conversation among themselves, principally by looks and gestures, with now and then an audible word. In fact, there were but few with whom I was very familiar. These few were much more constant and uniform in their visits than the great multitude, who were frequently changing, and too much absorbed in their own concerns to think much of me. I scarcely know how I can give an idea of their form and general appearance, for there are no objects in the material world with which I can compare them, and no language adapted to an accurate description of their peculiarities. They exhibited all possible combinations of size, shape, proportion, and color, but their most usual appearance was with the human form and proportion, but under a shadowy outline that seemed just ready to melt into the invisible air, and sometimes liable to the most sudden and grotesque changes, and with a uniform darkly bluish color spotted with brown, or brownish white. This was the general appearance of the multitude; but there were many exceptions to this description, particularly among my more welcome and familiar visitors, as will be seen in the sequel. "Besides these rational and generally harmless beings, there was another set of objects which never varied in their form or qualities, and were always mischievous and terrible. The fact of their appearance depended very much on the state of my health and feelings. If I was well and cheerful they seldom troubled me; but when sick or depressed they were sure to obtrude their hateful presence upon me. These were a sort of heavy clouds floating about overhead, of a black color, spotted with brown, in the shape of a very flaring inverted tunnel without a nozzle, and from ten to thirty or forty feet in diameter. They floated from place to place in great numbers, and in all directions, with a strong and steady progress, but with a tremulous, quivering, internal motion that agitated them in every part. "Whenever they approached, the rational phantoms were thrown into great consternation; and well it might be, for if a cloud touched any part of one of the rational phantoms it immediately communicated its own color and tremulous motion to the part it touched. "In spite of all the efforts and convulsive struggles of the unhappy victim, this color and motion slowly, but steadily and uninteruptedly, proceeded to diffuse itself over every part of the body, and as fast as it did so the body was drawn into the cloud and became a part of its substance. It was indeed a fearful sight to see the contortions, the agonizing efforts, of the poor creatures who had been touched by one of these awful clouds, and were dissolving and melting into it by inches without the possibility of escape or resistance. "This was the only visible object that had the least power over the phantoms, and this was evidently composed of the same material as themselves. The forms and actions of all these phantoms varied very much with the state of my health and animal spirits, but I never could discover that the surrounding material objects had any influence upon them, except in this one particular, namely, if I saw them in a neat, well furnished room, there was a neatness and polish in their form and motions; and, on the contrary, if I was in an unfinished, rough apartment, there was a corresponding rudeness and roughness in my ærial visitors. A corresponding difference was visible when I saw them in the woods or in the meadows, upon the water or upon the ground, in the air or among the stars. "Every different apartment which I occupied had a different set of phantoms, and they always had a degree of correspondence to the circumstances in which they were seen. (It should be noted, however, that it was not so much the place where the phantoms themselves appeared to me to be, that affected their forms and movements, as the place in which I myself actually was while observing them. The apparent locality of the phantoms, it is true, had some influence, but my own actual locality had much more.) "Thus far I have attempted only a general outline of these curious experiences. I will now proceed to a detailed account of several particular incidents, for the sake of illustrating the general statements already made. I select a few from manifestations without number. I am able to ascertain dates from the following circumstances:-- "I was born in April, 1802, and my father died in July, 1808, after suffering for more than a year from a lingering organic disease. Between two and three years before his death he removed from the house in which I was born to another at a little distance from it. What occurred, therefore, before my father's last sickness, must have taken place during the first five years of my life, and whatever took place before the removal of the family must have taken place during the first three years of my life. Before the removal of the family I slept in a small upper chamber in the front part of the house, where I was generally alone for several hours in the evening and morning. Adjoining this room, and opening into it by a very small door, was a low, dark, narrow, unfinished closet, which was open on the other side into a ruinous, old chaise-house. This closet was a famous place for the gambols of the phantoms, but of their forms and actions I do not now retain any very distinct recollection. I only remember that I was very careful not to do anything that I thought would be likely to offend them; yet otherwise their presence caused me no uneasiness, and was not at all disagreeable to me. "The first incident of which I have a distinct recollection was the following:-- "One night, as I was lying alone in my chamber with my little dog Brutus snoring beside my bed, there came out of the closet a very large Indian woman and a very small Indian man, with a huge bass-viol between them. The woman was dressed in a large, loose, black gown, secured around her waist by a belt of the same material, and on her head she wore a high, dark gray fur cap, shaped somewhat like a lady's muff, ornamented with a row of covered buttons in front, and open towards the bottom, showing a red lining. The man was dressed in a shabby, black-colored overcoat and a little round, black hat that fitted closely to his head. They took no notice of me, but were rather ill-natured towards each other, and seemed to be disputing for the possession of the bass-viol. The man snatched it away and struck upon it a few harsh, hollow notes, which I distinctly heard, and which seemed to vibrate through my whole body, with a strange, stinging sensation. The woman then took it and appeared to play very intently and much to her own satisfaction, but without producing any sound that was perceptible by me. They soon left the chamber, and I saw them go down into the back kitchen, where they sat and played and talked with my mother. It was only when the man took the bow that I could hear the harsh, abrupt, disagreeable sounds of the instrument. At length they arose, went out of the back door, and sprang upon a large heap of straw and unthreshed beans, and disappeared with a strange, rumbling sound. This vision was repeated night after night with scarcely any variation while we lived in that house, and once, and once only, after the family had removed to the other house. The only thing that seemed to me unaccountable and that excited my curiosity was that there should be such a large heap of straw and beans before the door every night, when I could see nothing of it in the daytime. I frequently crept out of bed and stole softly down into the kitchen, and peeped out of the door to see if it was there very early in the morning. "I attempted to make some inquiries of my mother, but as I was not as yet very skillful in the use of language, I could get no satisfaction out of her answers, and could see that my questions seemed to distress her. At first she took little notice of what I said, regarding it no doubt as the meaningless prattle of a thoughtless child. My persistence, however, seemed to alarm her, and I suppose that she feared for my sanity. I soon desisted from asking anything further, and shut myself more and more within myself. One night, very soon after the removal, when the house was still, and all the family were in bed, these unearthly musicians once made their appearance in the kitchen of the new house, and after looking around peevishly, and sitting with a discontented frown and in silence, they arose and went out of the back door, and sprang on a pile of cornstalks, and I saw them no more. "Our new dwelling was a low-studded house of only one story, and, instead of an upper chamber, I now occupied a bedroom that opened into the kitchen. Within this bedroom, directly on the left hand of the door as you entered from the kitchen, was the staircase which led to the garret; and, as the room was unfinished, some of the boards which inclosed the staircase were too short, and left a considerable space between them and the ceiling. One of these open spaces was directly in front of my bed, so that when I lay upon my pillow my face was opposite to it. Every night, after I had gone to bed and the candle was removed, a very pleasant-looking human face would peer at me over the top of that board, and gradually press forward his head, neck, shoulders, and finally his whole body as far as the waist, through the opening, and then, smiling upon me with great good-nature, would withdraw in the same manner in which he had entered. He was a great favorite of mine; for though we neither of us spoke, we perfectly understood, and were entirely devoted to, each other. It is a singular fact that the features of this favorite phantom bore a very close resemblance to those of a boy older than myself whom I feared and hated: still the resemblance was so strong that I called him by the same name, Harvey. "Harvey's visits were always expected and always pleasant; but sometimes there were visitations of another sort, odious and frightful. One of these I will relate as a specimen of the rest. "One night, after I had retired to bed and was looking for Harvey, I observed an unusual number of the tunnel-shaped tremulous clouds already described, and they seemed intensely black and strongly agitated. This alarmed me exceedingly, and I had a terrible feeling that something awful was going to happen. It was not long before I saw Harvey at his accustomed place, cautiously peeping at me through the aperture, with an expression of pain and terror on his countenance. He seemed to warn me to be on my guard, but was afraid to put his head into the room lest he should be touched by one of the clouds, which were every moment growing thicker and more numerous. Harvey soon withdrew and left me alone. On turning my eyes towards the left-hand wall of the room, I thought I saw at an immense distance below me the regions of the damned, as I had heard them pictured in sermons. From this awful world of horror the tunnel-shaped clouds were ascending, and I perceived that they were the principal instruments of torture in these gloomy abodes. These regions were at such an immense distance below me that I could obtain but a very indistinct view of the inhabitants, who were very numerous and exceedingly active. Near the surface of the earth, and as it seemed to me but a little distance from my bed, I saw four or five sturdy, resolute devils endeavoring to carry off an unprincipled and dissipated man in the neighborhood, by the name of Brown, of whom I had stood in terror for years. These devils I saw were very different from the common representations. They had neither red faces, nor horns, nor hoofs, nor tails. They were in all respects stoutly built and well-dressed gentlemen. The only peculiarity that I noted in their appearance was as to their heads. Their faces and necks were perfectly bare, without hair or flesh, and of a uniform sky-blue color, like the ashes of burnt paper before it falls to pieces, and of a certain glossy smoothness. "As I looked on, full of eagerness, the devils struggled to force Brown down with them, and Brown struggled with the energy of desperation to save himself from their grip, and it seemed that the human was likely to prove too strong for the infernal. In this emergency one of the devils, panting for breath and covered with perspiration, beckoned to a strong, thick cloud that seemed to understand him perfectly, and, whirling up to Brown, touched his hand. Brown resisted stoutly, and struck out right and left at the cloud most furiously, but the usual effect was produced,--the hand grew black, quivered, and seemed to be melting into the cloud; then the arm, by slow degrees, and then the head and shoulders. At this instant Brown, collecting all his energies for one desperate effort, sprang at once into the centre of the cloud, tore it asunder, and descended to the ground, exclaiming, with a hoarse, furious voice that grated on my ear, 'There, I've got out; dam'me if I haven't!' This was the first word that had been spoken through the whole horrible scene. It was the first time I had ever seen a cloud fail to produce its appropriate result, and it terrified me so that I trembled from head to foot. The devils, however, did not seem to be in the least discouraged. One of them, who seemed to be the leader, went away and quickly returned bringing with him an enormous pair of rollers fixed in an iron frame, such as are used in iron-mills for the purpose of rolling out and slitting bars of iron, except instead of being turned by machinery, each roller was turned by an immense crank. Three of the devils now seized Brown and put his feet to the rollers, while two others stood, one at each crank, and began to roll him in with a steady strain that was entirely irresistible. Not a word was spoken, not a sound was heard; but the fearful struggles and terrified, agonizing looks of Brown were more than I could endure. I sprang from my bed and ran through the kitchen into the room where my parents slept, and entreated that they would permit me to spend the remainder of the night with them. After considerable parleying they assured me that nothing could hurt me, and advised me to go back to bed. I replied that I was not afraid of their hurting me, but I couldn't bear to see them acting so with C. Brown. 'Poh! poh! you foolish boy,' replied my father, sternly. 'You've only been dreaming; go right back to bed, or I shall have to whip you.' Knowing that there was no other alternative, I trudged back through the kitchen with all the courage I could muster, cautiously entered my room, where I found everything quiet, there being neither cloud, nor devil, nor anything of the kind to be seen, and getting into bed I slept quietly till morning. The next day I was rather sad and melancholy, but kept all my troubles to myself, through fear of Brown. This happened before my father's sickness, and consequently between the four and six years of my age. "During my father's sickness and after his death I lived with my grandmother; and when I had removed to her house I forever lost sight of Harvey. I still continued to sleep alone for the most part, but in a neatly furnished upper chamber. Across the corner of the chamber, opposite to and at a little distance from the head of my bed, there was a closet in the form of an old-fashioned buffet. After going to bed, on looking at the door of this closet, I could see at a great distance from it a pleasant meadow, terminated by a beautiful little grove. Out of this grove, and across this meadow, a charming little female figure would advance, about eight inches high and exquisitely proportioned, dressed in a loose black silk robe, with long, smooth black hair parted up her head and hanging loose over her shoulders. She would come forward with a slow and regular step, becoming more distinctly visible as she approached nearer, till she came even with the surface of the closet door, when she would smile upon me, raise her hands to her head and draw them down on each side of her face, suddenly turn round, and go off at a rapid trot. The moment she turned I could see a good-looking mulatto man, rather smaller than herself, following directly in her wake and trotting off after her. This was generally repeated two or three times before I went to sleep. The features of the mulatto bore some resemblance to those of the Indian man with the bass-viol, but were much more mild and agreeable. * * * * * "I awoke one bright, moonlight night, and found a large, full-length human skeleton of an ashy-blue color in bed with me! I screamed out with fright, and soon summoned the family around me. I refused to tell the cause of my alarm, but begged permission to occupy another bed, which was granted. "For the remainder of the night I slept but little; but I saw upon the window-stools companies of little fairies, about six inches high, in white robes, gamboling and dancing with incessant merriment. Two of them, a male and female, rather taller than the rest, were dignified with a crown and sceptre. They took the kindest notice of me, smiled upon me with great benignity, and seemed to assure me of their protection. I was soothed and cheered by their presence, though after all there was a sort of sinister and selfish expression in their countenances which prevented my placing implicit confidence in them. "Up to this time I had never doubted the real existence of these phantoms, nor had I ever suspected that other people had not seen them as distinctly as myself. I now, however, began to discover with no little anxiety that my friends had little or no knowledge of the ærial beings among whom I have spent my whole life; that my allusions to them were not understood, and all complaints respecting them were laughed at. I had never been disposed to say much about them, and this discovery confirmed me in my silence. It did not, however, affect my own belief, or lead me to suspect that my imaginations were not realities. "During the whole of this period I took great pleasure in walking out alone, particularly in the evening. The most lonely fields, the woods, and the banks of the river, and other places most completely secluded, were my favorite resorts, for there I could enjoy the sight of innumerable ærial beings of all sorts, without interruption. Every object, even every shaking leaf, seemed to me to be animated by some living soul, whose nature in some degree corresponded to its habitation. I spent much of my life in these solitary rambles; there were particular places to which I gave names, and visited them at regular intervals. Moonlight was particularly agreeable to me, but most of all I enjoyed a thick, foggy night. At times, during these walks, I would be excessively oppressed by an indefinite and deep feeling of melancholy. Without knowing why, I would be so unhappy as to wish myself annihilated, and suddenly it would occur to me that my friends at home were suffering some dreadful calamity, and so vivid would be the impression, that I would hasten home with all speed to see what had taken place. At such seasons I felt a morbid love for my friends that would almost burn up my soul, and yet, at the least provocation from them, I would fly into an uncontrollable passion and foam like a little fury. I was called a dreadful-tempered boy; but the Lord knows that I never occasioned pain to any animal, whether human or brutal, without suffering untold agonies in consequence of it. I cannot, even now, without feelings of deep sorrow, call to mind the alternate fits of corroding melancholy, irritation, and bitter remorse which I then endured. These fits of melancholy were most constant and oppressive during the autumnal months. "I very early learned to read, and soon became immoderately attached to books. In the Bible I read the first chapters of Job, and parts of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, with most intense delight, and with such frequency that I could repeat large portions from memory long before the age at which boys in the country are usually able to read plain sentences. The first large book besides the Bible that I remember reading was Morse's 'History of New England,' which I devoured with insatiable greediness, particularly those parts which relate to Indian wars and witchcraft. I was in the habit of applying to my grandmother for explanations, and she would relate to me, while I listened with breathless attention, long stories from Mather's 'Magnalia' or (Mag-nilly, as she used to call it), a work which I earnestly longed to read, but of which I never got sight till after my twentieth year. Very early there fell into my hands an old school-book, called 'The Art of Speaking,' containing numerous extracts from Milton and Shakespeare. There was little else in the book that interested me, but these extracts from the two great English poets, though there were many things in them that I did not well understand, I read again and again, with increasing pleasure at every perusal, till I had nearly committed them to memory, and almost thumbed the old book into nonentity. But of all the books that I read at this period, there was none that went to my heart like Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.' I read it and re-read it night and day; I took it to bed with me and hugged it to my bosom while I slept; every different edition that I could find I seized upon and read with as eager a curiosity as if it had been a new story throughout; and I read with the unspeakable satisfaction of most devoutly believing that everything which 'Honest John' related was a real verity, an actual occurrence. Oh that I could read that most inimitable book once more with the same solemn conviction of its literal truth, that I might once more enjoy the same untold ecstacy! "One other remark it seems proper to make before I proceed further to details. The appearance, and especially the motions, of my ærial visitors were intimately connected, either as cause or effect, I cannot determine which, with certain sensations of my own. Their countenances generally expressed pleasure or pain, complaisance or anger, according to the mood of my own mind: if they moved from place to place without moving their limbs, with that gliding motion appropriate to spirits, I felt in my stomach that peculiar tickling sensation which accompanies a rapid, progressive movement through the air; and if they went off with an uneasy trot, I felt an unpleasant jarring through my frame. Their appearance was always attended with considerable effort and fatigue on my part: the more distinct and vivid they were, the more would my fatigue be increased; and at such times my face was always pale, and my eyes unusually sparkling and wild. This continued to be the case after I became satisfied that it was all a delusion of the imagination, and it so continues to the present day." It is not surprising that Mrs. Stowe should have felt herself impelled to give literary form to an experience so exceptional. Still more must this be the case when the early associations of this exceptional character were as amusing and interesting as they are shown forth in "Oldtown Fireside Stories." None of the incidents or characters embodied in those sketches are ideal. The stories are told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips, with little or no alteration. Sam Lawson was a real character. In 1874 Mr. Whittier wrote to Mrs. Stowe: "I am not able to write or study much, or read books that require thought, without suffering, but I have Sam Lawson lying at hand, and, as Corporal Trim said of Yorick's sermon, 'I like it hugely.'" The power and literary value of these stories lie in the fact that they are true to nature. Professor Stowe was himself an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him. Not only was he possessed of a bright, quick mind, but wonderful retentiveness of memory. Mrs. Stowe was never at a loss for reliable information on any subject as long as the professor lived. He belonged to that extinct species, the "general scholar." His scholarship was not critical in the modern sense of the word, but in the main accurate, in spite of his love for the marvelous. It is not out of place to give a little idea of his power in character-painting, as it shows how suggestive his conversation and letters must have been to a mind like that of Mrs. Stowe:-- NATICK, _July 14, 1839._ I have had a real good time this week writing my oration. I have strolled over my old walking places, and found the same old stone walls, the same old foot-paths through the rye-fields, the same bends in the river, the same old bullfrogs with their green spectacles on, the same old terrapins sticking up their heads and bowing as I go by; and nothing was wanting but my wife to talk with to make all complete.... I have had some rare talks with old uncle "Jaw" Bacon, and other old characters, which you ought to have heard. The Curtises have been flooding Uncle "Jaw's" meadows, and he is in a great stew about it. He says: "I took and tell'd your Uncle Izic to tell them 'ere Curtises that if the Devil didn't git 'em far flowing my medder arter that sort, I didn't see no use o' havin' any Devil." "Have you talked with the Curtises yourself?" "Yes, hang the sarcy dogs! and they took and tell'd me that they'd take and flow clean up to my front door, and make me go out and in in a boat." "Why don't you go to law?" "Oh, they keep alterin' and er tinkerin'-up the laws so here in Massachusetts that a body can't git no damage fur flowing; they think cold water can't hurt nobody." Mother and Aunt Nabby each keep separate establishments. First Aunt Nabby gets up in the morning and examines the sink, to see whether it leaks and rots the beam. She then makes a little fire, gets her little teapot of bright shining tin, and puts into it a teaspoonful of black tea, and so prepares her breakfast. By this time mother comes creeping down-stairs, like an old tabby-cat out of the ash-hole; and she kind o' doubts and reckons whether or no she had better try to git any breakfast, bein' as she's not much appetite this mornin'; but she goes to the leg of bacon and cuts off a little slice, reckons sh'll broil it; then goes and looks at the coffee-pot and reckons sh'll have a little coffee; don't exactly know whether it's good for her, but she don't drink much. So while Aunt Nabby is sitting sipping her tea and munching her bread and butter with a matter-of-fact certainty and marvelous satisfaction, mother goes doubting and reckoning round, like Mrs. Diffidence in Doubting Castle, till you see rising up another little table in another corner of the room, with a good substantial structure of broiled ham and coffee, and a boiled egg or two, with various et ceteras, which Mrs. Diffidence, after many desponding ejaculations, finally sits down to, and in spite of all presentiments makes them fly as nimbly as Mr. Ready-to-Halt did Miss Much-afraid when he footed it so well with her on his crutches in the dance on the occasion of Giant Despair's overthrow. I have thus far dined alternately with mother and Aunt Susan, not having yet been admitted to Aunt Nabby's establishment. There are now great talkings, and congresses and consultations of the allied powers, and already rumors are afloat that perhaps all will unite their forces and dine at one table, especially as Harriet and little Hattie are coming, and there is no knowing what might come out in the papers if there should be anything a little odd. Mother is very well, thin as a hatchet and smart as a steel trap; Aunt Nabby, fat and easy as usual; for since the sink is mended, and no longer leaks and rots the beam, and she has nothing to do but watch it, and Uncle Bill has joined the Washingtonians and no longer drinks rum, she is quite at a loss for topics of worriment. Uncle Ike has had a little touch of palsy and is rather feeble. He says that his legs and arms have rather gi'n out, but his head and pluck are as good as they ever were. I told him that our sister Kate was very much in the same fix, whereat he was considerably affected, and opened the crack in his great pumpkin of a face, displaying the same two rows of great white ivories which have been my admiration from my youth up. He is sixty-five years of age, and has never lost a tooth, and was never in his life more than fifteen miles from the spot where he was born, except once, in the ever-memorable year 1819, when I was at Bradford Academy. In a sudden glow of adventurous rashness he undertook to go after me and bring me home for vacation; and he actually performed the whole journey of thirty miles with his horse and wagon, and slept at a tavern a whole night, a feat of bravery on which he has never since ceased to plume himself. I well remember that awful night in the tavern in the remote region of North Andover. We occupied a chamber in which were two beds. In the unsuspecting innocence of youth I undressed myself and got into bed as usual; but my brave and thoughtful uncle, merely divesting himself of his coat, put it under his pillow, and then threw himself on to the bed with his boots on his feet, and his two hands resting on the rim of his hat, which he had prudently placed on the apex of his stomach as he lay on his back. He wouldn't allow me to blow out the candle, but he lay there with his great white eyes fixed on the ceiling, in the cool, determined manner of a bold man who had made up his mind to face danger and meet whatever might befall him. We escaped, however, without injury, the doughty landlord and his relentless sons merely demanding pay for supper, lodging, horse-feed, and breakfast, which my valiant uncle, betraying no signs of fear, resolutely paid. Mrs. Stowe has woven this incident into chapter thirty-two of "Oldtown Folks," where Uncle Ike figures as Uncle Jacob. Mrs. Stowe had misgivings as to the reception which "Oldtown Folks" would meet in England, owing to its distinctively New England character. Shortly after the publication of the book she received the following words of encouragement from Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot), July 11, 1869:-- "I have received and read 'Oldtown Folks.' I think that few of your readers can have felt more interest than I have felt in that picture of an elder generation; for my interest in it has a double root,--one in my own love for our old-fashioned provincial life, which had its affinities with a contemporary life, even all across the Atlantic, and of which I have gathered glimpses in different phases from my father and mother, with their relations; the other is my experimental acquaintance with some shades of Calvinistic orthodoxy. I think your way of presenting the religious convictions which are not your own, except by the way of indirect fellowship, is a triumph of insight and true tolerance.... Both Mr. Lewes and I are deeply interested in the indications which the professor gives of his peculiar psychological experience, and we should feel it a great privilege to learn much more of it from his lips. It is a rare thing to have such an opportunity of studying exceptional experience in the testimony of a truthful and in every way distinguished mind." "Oldtown Folks" is of interest as being undoubtedly the last of Mrs. Stowe's works which will outlive the generation for which it was written. Besides its intrinsic merit as a work of fiction, it has a certain historic value as being a faithful study of "New England life and character in that particular time of its history which may be called the seminal period." Whether Mrs. Stowe was far enough away from the time and people she attempts to describe to "make (her) mind as still and passive as a looking-glass or a mountain lake, and to give merely the images reflected there," is something that will in great part determine the permanent value of this work. Its interest as a story merely is of course ephemeral. CHAPTER XIX. THE BYRON CONTROVERSY, 1869-1870. MRS. STOWE'S STATEMENT OF HER OWN CASE.--THE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH SHE FIRST MET LADY BYRON.--LETTERS TO LADY BYRON.--LETTER TO DR. HOLMES WHEN ABOUT TO PUBLISH "THE TRUE STORY OF LADY BYRON'S LIFE" IN THE "ATLANTIC."--DR. HOLMES'S REPLY.--THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER. IT seems impossible to avoid the unpleasant episode in Mrs. Stowe's life known as the "Byron Controversy." It will be our effort to deal with the matter as colorlessly as is consistent with an adequate setting forth of the motives which moved Mrs. Stowe to awaken this unsavory discussion. In justification of her action in this matter, Mrs. Stowe says:-- "What interest have you and I, my brother and my sister, in this short life of ours, to utter anything but the truth? Is not truth between man and man, and between man and woman, the foundation on which all things rest? Have you not, every individual of you, who must hereafter give an account yourself alone to God, an interest to know the exact truth in this matter, and a duty to perform as respects that truth? Hear me, then, while I tell you the position in which I stood, and what was my course in relation to it. "A shameless attack on my friend's memory had appeared in the 'Blackwood' of July, 1869, branding Lady Byron as the vilest of criminals, and recommending the Guiccioli book to a Christian public as interesting from the very fact that it was the avowed production of Lord Byron's mistress. No efficient protest was made against this outrage in England, and Littell's 'Living Age' reprinted the 'Blackwood' article, and the Harpers, the largest publishing house in America, perhaps in the world, republished the book. "Its statements--with those of the 'Blackwood,' 'Pall Mall Gazette,' and other English periodicals--were being propagated through all the young reading and writing world of America. I was meeting them advertised in dailies, and made up into articles in magazines, and thus the generation of to-day, who had no means of judging Lady Byron but by these fables of her slanderers, were being foully deceived. The friends who knew her personally were a small, select circle in England, whom death is every day reducing. They were few in number compared with the great world, and were _silent_. I saw these foul slanders crystallizing into history, uncontradicted by friends who knew her personally, who, firm in their own knowledge of her virtues, and limited in view as aristocratic circles generally are, had no idea of the width of the world they were living in, and the exigency of the crisis. When time passed on and no voice was raised, I spoke." It is hardly necessary to recapitulate, at any great length, facts already so familiar to the reading public; it may be sufficient simply to say that after the appearance in 1868 of the Countess Guiccioli's "Recollections of Lord Byron," Mrs. Stowe felt herself called upon to defend the memory of her friend from what she esteemed to be falsehoods and slanders. To accomplish this object, she prepared for the "Atlantic Monthly" of September, 1869, an article, "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life." Speaking of her first impressions of Lady Byron, Mrs. Stowe says:-- "I formed her acquaintance in the year 1853, during my first visit to England. I met her at a lunch party in the house of one of her friends. When I was introduced to her, I felt in a moment the words of her husband:-- "'There was awe in the homage that she drew; Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne.'" It was in the fall of 1856, on the occasion of Mrs. Stowe's second visit to England, as she and her sister were on their way to Eversley to visit the Rev. C. Kingsley, that they stopped by invitation to lunch with Lady Byron at her summer residence at Ham Common, near Richmond. At that time Lady Byron informed Mrs. Stowe that it was her earnest desire to receive a visit from her on her return, as there was a subject of great importance concerning which she desired her advice. Mrs. Stowe has thus described this interview with Lady Byron:-- "After lunch, I retired with Lady Byron, and my sister remained with her friends. I should here remark that the chief subject of the conversation which ensued was not entirely new to me. "In the interval between my first and second visits to England, a lady who for many years had enjoyed Lady Byron's friendship and confidence had, with her consent, stated the case generally to me, giving some of the incidents, so that I was in a manner prepared for what followed. "Those who accuse Lady Byron of being a person fond of talking upon this subject, and apt to make unconsidered confidences, can have known very little of her, of her reserve, and of the apparent difficulty she had in speaking on subjects nearest her heart. Her habitual calmness and composure of manner, her collected dignity on all occasions, are often mentioned by her husband, sometimes with bitterness, sometimes with admiration. He says: 'Though I accuse Lady Byron of an excess of self-respect, I must in candor admit that, if ever a person had excuse for an extraordinary portion of it, she has, as in all her thoughts, words, and deeds she is the most decorous woman that ever existed, and must appear, what few I fancy could, a perfectly refined gentlewoman, even to her _femme de chambre_.' "This calmness and dignity were never more manifested than in this interview. In recalling the conversation at this distance of time, I cannot remember all the language used. Some particular words and forms of expression I do remember, and those I give; and in other cases I give my recollection of the substance of what was said. "There was something awful to me in the intensity of repressed emotion which she showed as she proceeded. The great fact upon which all turned was stated in words that were unmistakable." Mrs. Stowe goes on to give minutely Lady Byron's conversation, and concludes by saying:-- Of course I did not listen to this story as one who was investigating its worth. I received it as truth, and the purpose for which it was communicated was not to enable me to prove it to the world, but to ask my opinion whether she should show it to the world before leaving it. The whole consultation was upon the assumption that she had at her command such proofs as could not be questioned. Concerning what they were I did not minutely inquire, only, in answer to a general question, she said that she had letters and documents in proof of her story. Knowing Lady Byron's strength of mind, her clear-headedness, her accurate habits, and her perfect knowledge of the matter, I considered her judgment on this point decisive. I told her that I would take the subject into consideration and give my opinion in a few days. That night, after my sister and myself had retired to our own apartment, I related to her the whole history, and we spent the night in talking it over. I was powerfully impressed with the justice and propriety of an immediate disclosure; while she, on the contrary, represented the fatal consequences that would probably come upon Lady Byron from taking such a step. Before we parted the next day, I requested Lady Byron to give me some memoranda of such dates and outlines of the general story as would enable me better to keep it in its connection, which she did. On giving me the paper, Lady Byron requested me to return it to her when it had ceased to be of use to me for the purpose intended. Accordingly, a day or two after, I inclosed it to her in a hasty note, as I was then leaving London for Paris, and had not yet had time fully to consider the subject. On reviewing my note I can recall that then the whole history appeared to me like one of those singular cases where unnatural impulses to vice are the result of a taint of constitutional insanity. This has always seemed to me the only way of accounting for instances of utterly motiveless and abnormal wickedness and cruelty. These, my first impressions, were expressed in the hasty note written at the time: LONDON, _November 5, 1856._ DEAREST FRIEND,--I return these. They have held mine eyes waking. How strange! How unaccountable! Have you ever subjected the facts to the judgment of a medical man, learned in nervous pathology? Is it not insanity? "Great wits to madness nearly are allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide." But my purpose to-night is not to write to you fully what I think of this matter. I am going to write to you from Paris more at leisure. (The rest of the letter was taken up in the final details of a charity in which Lady Byron had been engaged with me in assisting an unfortunate artist. It concludes thus:) I write now in all haste, _en route_ for Paris. As to America, all is not lost yet. Farewell. I love you, my dear friend, as never before, with an intense feeling that I cannot easily express. God bless you. H. B. S. The next letter is as follows:-- PARIS, _December 17, 1856._ DEAR LADY BYRON,--The Kansas Committee have written me a letter desiring me to express to Miss ---- their gratitude for the five pounds she sent them. I am not personally acquainted with her, and must return these acknowledgments through you. I wrote you a day or two since, inclosing the reply of the Kansas Committee to you. On that subject on which you spoke to me the last time we were together, I have thought often and deeply. I have changed my mind somewhat. Considering the peculiar circumstances of the case, I could wish that the sacred veil of silence, so bravely thrown over the past, should never be withdrawn during the time that you remain with us. I would say then, leave all with some discreet friends, who, after both have passed from earth, shall say what was due to justice. I am led to think this by seeing how low, how unworthy, the judgments of this world are; and I would not that what I so much respect, love, and revere should be placed within reach of its harpy claw, which pollutes what it touches. The day will yet come which will bring to light every hidden thing. "There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known;" and so justice will not fail. Such, my dear friend, are my thoughts; different from what they were since first I heard that strange, sad history. Meanwhile I love you forever, whether we meet again on earth or not. Affectionately yours, H. B. S. Before her article appeared in print, Mrs. Stowe addressed the following letter to Dr. Holmes in Boston:-- HARTFORD, _June 26, 1869._ DEAR DOCTOR,--I am going to ask help of you, and I feel that confidence in your friendship that leads me to be glad that I have a friend like you to ask advice of. In order that you may understand fully what it is, I must go back some years and tell you about it. When I went to England the first time, I formed a friendship with Lady Byron which led to a somewhat interesting correspondence. When there the second time, after the publication of "Dred" in 1856, Lady Byron wrote to me that she wished to have some private confidential conversation with me, and invited me to come spend a day with her at her country-seat near London. I went, met her alone, and spent an afternoon with her. The object of the visit she then explained to me. She was in such a state of health that she considered she had very little time to live, and was engaged in those duties and reviews which every thoughtful person finds who is coming deliberately, and with their eyes open, to the boundaries of this mortal life. Lady Byron, as you must perceive, has all her life lived under a weight of slanders and false imputations laid upon her by her husband. Her own side of the story has been told only to that small circle of confidential friends who needed to know it in order to assist her in meeting the exigencies which it imposed on her. Of course it has thrown the sympathy mostly on his side, since the world generally has more sympathy with impulsive incorrectness than with strict justice. At that time there was a cheap edition of Byron's works in contemplation, meant to bring them into circulation among the masses, and the pathos arising from the story of his domestic misfortunes was one great means relied on for giving it currency. Under these circumstances some of Lady Byron's friends had proposed the question to her whether she had not a responsibility to society for the truth; whether she did right to allow these persons to gain influence over the popular mind by a silent consent to an utter falsehood. As her whole life had been passed in the most heroic self-abnegation and self sacrifice, the question was now proposed to her whether one more act of self-denial was not required of her, namely, to declare _the truth_, no matter at what expense to her own feelings. For this purpose she told me she wished to recount the whole story to a person in whom she had confidence,--a person of another country, and out of the whole sphere of personal and local feelings which might be supposed to influence those in the country and station in life where the events really happened,--in order that I might judge whether anything more was required of her in relation to this history. The interview had almost the solemnity of a death-bed confession, and Lady Byron told me the history which I have embodied in an article to appear in the "Atlantic Monthly." I have been induced to prepare it by the run which the Guiccioli book is having, which is from first to last an unsparing attack on Lady Byron's memory by Lord Byron's mistress. When you have read my article, I want, _not_ your advice as to whether the main facts shall be told, for on this point I am so resolved that I frankly say advice would do me no good. But you might help me, with your delicacy and insight, to make the _manner of telling_ more perfect, and I want to do it as wisely and well as such story can be told. My post-office address after July 1st will be Westport Point, Bristol Co., Mass., care of Mrs. I. M. Soule. The proof-sheets will be sent you by the publisher. Very truly yours, H. B. STOWE. In reply to the storm of controversy aroused by the publication of this article, Mrs. Stowe made a more extended effort to justify the charges which she had brought against Lord Byron, in a work published in 1869, "Lady Byron Vindicated." Immediately after the publication of this work, she mailed a copy to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, accompanied by the following note:-- BOSTON, _May 19, 1869._ DEAR DOCTOR,--... In writing this book, which I now take the liberty of sending to you, I have been in ... a "critical place." It has been a strange, weird sort of experience, and I have had not a word to say to anybody, though often thinking of you and wishing I could have a little of your help and sympathy in getting out what I saw. I think of you very much, and rejoice to see the _hold_ your works get on England as well as this country, and I would give more for your opinion than that of most folks. How often I have pondered your last letter to me, and sent it to many (friends)! God bless you. Please accept for yourself and your good wife, this copy. From yours truly, H. B. STOWE. Mrs. Stowe also published in 1870, through Sampson Low & Son, of London, a volume for English readers, "The History of the Byron Controversy." These additional volumes, however, do not seem to have satisfied the public as a whole, and perhaps the expediency of the publication of Mrs. Stowe's first article is doubtful, even to her most ardent admirers. The most that can be hoped for, through the mention of the subject in this biography, is the vindication of Mrs. Stowe's purity of motive and nobility of intention in bringing this painful matter into notice. While she was being on all hands effectively, and evidently in some quarters with rare satisfaction, roundly abused for the article, and her consequent responsibility in bringing this unsavory discussion so prominently before the public mind, she received the following letter from Dr. O. W. Holmes:-- BOSTON, _September 25, 1869._ MY DEAR MRS. STOWE,--I have been meaning to write to you for some time, but in the midst of all the wild and virulent talk about the article in the "Atlantic," I felt as if there was little to say until the first fury of the storm had blown over. I think that we all perceive now that the battle is not to be fought here, but in England. I have listened to a good deal of talk, always taking your side in a quiet way, backed very heartily on one occasion by one of my most intellectual friends, reading all that came in my way, and watching the course of opinion. And first, it was to be expected that the Guiccioli fanciers would resent any attack on Lord Byron, and would highly relish the opportunity of abusing one who, like yourself, had been identified with all those moral enterprises which elevate the standard of humanity at large, and of womanhood in particular. After this scum had worked itself off, there must necessarily follow a controversy, none the less sharp and bitter, but not depending essentially on abuse. The first point the recusants got hold of was the error of the two years which contrived to run the gauntlet of so many pairs of eyes. Some of them were made happy by mouthing and shaking this between their teeth, as a poodle tears round with a glove. This did not last long. No sensible person could believe for a moment you were mistaken in the essential character of a statement every word of which would fall on the ear of a listening friend like a drop of melted lead, and burn its scar deep into the memory. That Lady Byron believed and told you the story will not be questioned by any but fools and malignants. Whether her belief was well founded there may be positive evidence in existence to show affirmatively. The fact that her statement is not peremptorily contradicted by those most likely to be acquainted with the facts of the case, is the one result so far which is forcing itself into unwilling recognition. I have seen nothing, in the various hypotheses brought forward, which did not to me involve a greater improbability than the presumption of guilt. Take that, for witness, that Byron accused himself, through a spirit of perverse vanity, of crimes he had not committed. How preposterous! He would stain the name of a sister, whom, on the supposition of his innocence, he loved with angelic ardor as well as purity, by associating it with such an infamous accusation. Suppose there are some anomalies hard to explain in Lady Byron's conduct. Could a young and guileless woman, in the hands of such a man, be expected to act in any given way, or would she not be likely to waver, to doubt, to hope, to contradict herself, in the anomalous position in which, without experience, she found herself? As to the intrinsic evidence contained in the poems, I think it confirms rather than contradicts the hypothesis of guilt. I do not think that Butler's argument, and all the other attempts at invalidation of the story, avail much in the face of the acknowledged fact that it was told to various competent and honest witnesses, and remains without a satisfactory answer from those most interested. I know your firm self-reliance, and your courage to proclaim the truth when any good end is to be served by it. It is to be expected that public opinion will be more or less divided as to the expediency of this revelation.... Hoping that you have recovered from your indisposition, I am Faithfully yours, O. W. HOLMES. While undergoing the most unsparing and pitiless criticism and brutal insult, Mrs. Stowe received the following sympathetic words from Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot):-- THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, _December 10, 1869._ MY DEAR FRIEND,-- ... In the midst of your trouble I was often thinking of you, for I feared that you were undergoing a considerable trial from the harsh and unfair judgments, partly the fruit of hostility glad to find an opportunity for venting itself, and partly of that unthinking cruelty which belongs to hasty anonymous journalism. For my own part, I should have preferred that the Byron question should never have been brought before the public, because I think the discussion of such subjects is injurious socially. But with regard to yourself, dear friend, I feel sure that, in acting on a different basis of impressions, you were impelled by pure, generous feeling. Do not think that I would have written to you of this point to express a judgment. I am anxious only to convey to you a sense of my sympathy and confidence, such as a kiss and a pressure of the hand could give if I were near you. I trust that I shall hear a good account of Professor Stowe's health, as well as your own, whenever you have time to write me a word or two. I shall not be so unreasonable as to expect a long letter, for the hours of needful rest from writing become more and more precious as the years go on, but some brief news of you and yours will be especially welcome just now. Mr. Lewes unites with me in high regards to your husband and yourself, but in addition to that I have the sister woman's privilege of saying that I am always Your affectionate friend, M. H. LEWES. CHAPTER XX. GEORGE ELIOT. CORRESPONDENCE WITH GEORGE ELIOT.--GEORGE ELIOT'S FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MRS. STOWE.--MRS. STOWE'S LETTER TO MRS. FOLLEN.--GEORGE ELIOT'S LETTER TO MRS. STOWE.--MRS. STOWE'S REPLY.--LIFE IN FLORIDA.--ROBERT DALE OWEN AND MODERN SPIRITUALISM.--GEORGE ELIOT'S LETTER ON THE PHENOMENA OF SPIRITUALISM.--MRS. STOWE'S DESCRIPTION OF SCENERY IN FLORIDA.--MRS. STOWE CONCERNING "MIDDLEMARCH."--GEORGE ELIOT TO MRS. STOWE DURING REV. H. W. BEECHER'S TRIAL.--MRS. STOWE CONCERNING HER LIFE EXPERIENCE WITH HER BROTHER, H. W. BEECHER, AND HIS TRIAL.--MRS. LEWES' LAST LETTER TO MRS. STOWE.--DIVERSE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THESE TWO WOMEN.--MRS. STOWE'S FINAL ESTIMATE OF MODERN SPIRITUALISM. IT is with a feeling of relief that we turn from one of the most disagreeable experiences of Mrs. Stowe's life to one of the most delightful, namely, the warm friendship of one of the most eminent women of this age, George Eliot. There seems to have been some deep affinity of feeling that drew them closely together in spite of diversity of intellectual tastes. George Eliot's attention was first personally attracted to Mrs. Stowe in 1853, by means of a letter which the latter had written to Mrs. Follen. Speaking of this incident she (George Eliot) writes: "Mrs. Follen showed me a delightful letter which she has just had from Mrs. Stowe, telling all about herself. She begins by saying, 'I am a little bit of a woman, rather more than forty, as withered and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very well worth looking at in my best days, and now a decidedly used-up article.' The whole letter is most fascinating, and makes one love her."[17] The correspondence between these two notable women was begun by Mrs. Stowe, and called forth the following extremely interesting letter from the distinguished English novelist:-- THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, _May 8, 1869._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I value very highly the warrant to call you friend which your letter has given me. It lay awaiting me on our return the other night from a nine weeks' absence in Italy, and it made me almost wish that you could have a momentary vision of the discouragement,--nay, paralyzing despondency--in which many days of my writing life have been passed, in order that you might fully understand the good I find in such sympathy as yours, in such an assurance as you give me that my work has been worth doing. But I will not dwell on any mental sickness of mine. The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet, generous feeling in you which dictated them. I shall always be the richer because you have in this way made me know you better. I must tell you that my first glimpse of you as a woman came through a letter of yours, and charmed me very much. The letter was addressed to Mrs. Follen, and one morning I called on her in London (how many years ago!); she was kind enough to read it to me, because it contained a little history of your life, and a sketch of your domestic circumstances. I remember thinking that it was very kind of you to write that long letter, in reply to inquiries of one who was personally unknown to you; and, looking back with my present experience, I think it was kinder than it then appeared, for at that time you must have been much oppressed with the immediate results of your fame. I remember, too, that you wrote of your husband as one who was richer in Hebrew and Greek than in pounds or shillings; and as an ardent scholar has always been a character of peculiar interest to me, I have rarely had your image in my mind without the accompanying image (more or less erroneous) of such a scholar by your side. I shall welcome the fruit of his Goethe studies, whenever it comes. I have good hopes that your fears are groundless as to the obstacles your new book ("Oldtown Folks") may find here from its thorough American character. Most readers who are likely to be really influenced by writing above the common order will find that special aspect an added reason for interest and study; and I dare say you have long seen, as I am beginning to see with new clearness, that if a book which has any sort of exquisiteness happens also to be a popular, widely circulated book, the power over the social mind for any good is, after all, due to its reception by a few appreciative natures, and is the slow result of radiation from that narrow circle. I mean that you can affect a few souls, and that each of these in turn may affect a few more, but that no exquisite book tells properly and directly on a multitude, however largely it may be spread by type and paper. Witness the things the multitude will say about it, if one is so unhappy as to be obliged to hear their sayings. I do not write this cynically, but in pure sadness and pity. Both traveling abroad and staying at home among our English sights and sports, one must continually feel how slowly the centuries work toward the moral good of men, and that thought lies very close to what you say as to your wonder or conjecture concerning my religious point of view. I believe that religion, too, has to be modified according to the dominant phases; that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent must express less care of personal consolation, and the more deeply awing sense of responsibility to man springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us,--the difficulty of the human lot. Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary, and when one writes on wide subjects, are likely to create more misunderstanding than illumination. But I have little anxiety in writing to you, dear friend and fellow-laborer; for you have had longer experience than I as a writer, and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and known a mother's history from the beginning. I trust your quick and long-taught mind as an interpreter little liable to mistake me. When you say, "We live in an orange grove, and are planting many more," and when I think you must have abundant family love to cheer you, it seems to me that you must have a paradise about you. But no list of circumstances will make a paradise. Nevertheless, I must believe that the joyous, tender humor of your books clings about your more immediate life, and makes some of that sunshine for yourself which you have given to us. I see the advertisement of "Oldtown Folks," and shall eagerly expect it. That and every other new link between us will be reverentially valued. With great devotion and regard, Yours always, M. L. LEWES. Mrs. Stowe writes from Mandarin to George Eliot:-- MANDARIN, _February 8, 1872._ DEAR FRIEND,--It is two years nearly since I had your last very kind letter, and I have never answered, because two years of constant and severe work have made it impossible to give a drop to anything beyond the needs of the hour. Yet I have always thought of you, loved you, trusted you all the same, and read every little scrap from your writing that came to hand. One thing brings you back to me. I am now in Florida in my little hut in the orange orchard, with the broad expanse of the blue St. John's in front, and the waving of the live-oaks, with their long, gray mosses, overhead, and the bright gold of oranges looking through dusky leaves around. It is like Sorrento,--so like that I can quite dream of being there. And when I get here I enter another life. The world recedes; I am out of it; it ceases to influence; its bustle and noise die away in the far distance; and here is no winter, an open-air life,--a quaint, rude, wild wilderness sort of life, both rude and rich; but when I am here I write more letters to friends than ever I do elsewhere. The mail comes only twice a week, and then is the event of the day. My old rabbi and I here set up our tent, he with German, and Greek, and Hebrew, devouring all sorts of black-letter books, and I spinning ideal webs out of bits that he lets fall here and there. I have long thought that I would write you again when I got here, and so I do. I have sent North to have them send me the "Harper's Weekly," in which your new story is appearing, and have promised myself leisurely to devour and absorb every word of it. While I think of it I want to introduce to you a friend of mine, a most noble man, Mr. Owen, for some years our ambassador at Naples, now living a literary and scholar life in America. His father was Robert Dale Owen, the theorist and communist you may have heard of in England some years since. Years ago, in Naples, I visited Mr. Owen for the first time, and found him directing his attention to the phenomena of spiritism. He had stumbled upon some singular instances of it accidentally, and he had forthwith instituted a series of researches and experiments on the subject, some of which he showed me. It was the first time I had ever seriously thought of the matter, and he invited my sister and myself to see some of the phenomena as exhibited by a medium friend of theirs who resided in their family. The result at the time was sufficiently curious, but I was interested in his account of the manner in which he proceeded, keeping records of every experiment with its results, in classified orders. As the result of his studies and observations, he has published two books, one "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World," published in 1860, and latterly, "The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next." I regard Mr. Owen as one of the few men who are capable of entering into an inquiry of this kind without an utter drowning of common sense, and his books are both of them worth a fair reading. To me they present a great deal that is intensely curious and interesting, although I do not admit, of course, all his deductions, and think he often takes too much for granted. Still, with every abatement there remains a residuum of fact, which I think both curious and useful. In a late letter to me he says:-- "There is no writer of the present day whom I more esteem than Mrs. Lewes, nor any one whose opinion of my work I should more highly value." I believe he intends sending them to you, and I hope you will read them. Lest some of the narratives should strike you, as such narratives did me once, as being a perfect Arabian Nights' Entertainment, I want to say that I have accidentally been in the way of confirming some of the most remarkable by personal observation.... In regard to all this class of subjects, I am of the opinion of Goethe, that "it is just as absurd to deny the facts of spiritualism now as it was in the Middle Ages to ascribe them to the Devil." I think Mr. Owen attributes too much value to his facts. I do not think the things contributed from the ultra-mundane sphere are particularly valuable, apart from the evidence they give of continued existence after death. I do not think there is yet any evidence to warrant the idea that they are a supplement or continuation of the revelations of Christianity, but I do regard them as an interesting and curious study in psychology, and every careful observer like Mr. Owen ought to be welcomed to bring in his facts. With this I shall send you my observations on Mr. Owen's books, from the "Christian Union." I am perfectly aware of the frivolity and worthlessness of much of the revealings purporting to come from spirits. In my view, the worth or worthlessness of them has nothing to do with the question of fact. Do invisible spirits speak in any wise,--wise or foolish?--is the question _a priori_? I do not know of any reason why there should not be as many foolish virgins in the future state as in this. As I am a believer in the Bible and Christianity, I don't need these things as confirmations, and they are not likely to be a religion to me. I regard them simply as I do the phenomena of the Aurora Borealis, or Darwin's studies on natural selection, as curious studies into nature. Besides, I think some day we shall find a law by which all these facts will fall into their places. I hope now this subject does not bore you: it certainly is one that seems increasingly to insist on getting itself heard. It is going on and on, making converts, who are many more than dare avow themselves, and for my part I wish it were all brought into the daylight of inquiry. Let me hear from you if ever you feel like it. I know too well the possibilities and impossibilities of a nature like yours to ask more, but it can do you no harm to know that I still think of you and love you as ever. Faithfully yours, H. B. STOWE. THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, REGENT'S PARK, _March 4, 1872._ DEAR FRIEND,--I can understand very easily that the two last years have been full for you of other and more imperative work than the writing of letters not absolutely demanded either by charity or business. The proof that you still think of me affectionately is very welcome now it has come, and more cheering because it enables me to think of you as enjoying your retreat in your orange orchard,--your western Sorrento--the beloved rabbi still beside you. I am sure it must be a great blessing to you to bathe in that quietude, as it always is to us when we go out of reach of London influences and have the large space of country days to study, walk, and talk in.... When I am more at liberty I will certainly read Mr. Owen's books, if he is good enough to send them to me. I desire on all subjects to keep an open mind, but hitherto the various phenomena, reported or attested in connection with ideas of spirit intercourse and so on, have come before me here in the painful form of the lowest charlatanerie.... But apart from personal contact with people who get money by public exhibitions as mediums, or with semi-idiots such as those who make a court for a Mrs. ----, or other feminine personages of that kind, I would not willingly place any barriers between my mind and any possible channel of truth affecting the human lot. The spirit in which you have written in the paper you kindly sent me is likely to touch others, and arouse them at least to attention in a case where you have been deeply impressed.... Yours with sincere affection, M. L. LEWES. (Begun April 4th.) MANDARIN, FLORIDA, _May 11, 1872._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I was very glad to get your dear little note,--sorry to see by it that you are not in your full physical force. Owing to the awkwardness and misunderstanding of publishers, I am not reading "Middlemarch," as I expected to be, here in these orange shades: they don't send it, and I am too far out of the world to get it. I felt, when I read your letters, how glad I should be to have you here in our Florida cottage, in the wholly new, wild, woodland life. Though resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance of nature,--the plants, the birds, the animals, all different. The green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and rugged savageness of beauty. Every tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet here, in the great sandy plains back of our house, there is a constant wondering sense of beauty in the wild, wonderful growths of nature. First of all, the pines--high as the stone pines of Italy--with long leaves, eighteen inches long, through which there is a constant dreamy sound, as if of dashing waters. Then the live-oaks and the water-oaks, narrow-leaved evergreens, which grow to enormous size, and whose branches are draped with long festoons of the gray moss. There is a great, wild park of these trees back of us, which, with the dazzling, varnished green of the new spring leaves and the swaying drapery of moss, looks like a sort of enchanted grotto. Underneath grow up hollies and ornamental flowering shrubs, and the yellow jessamine climbs into and over everything with fragrant golden bells and buds, so that sometimes the foliage of a tree is wholly hidden in its embrace. This wild, wonderful, bright and vivid growth, that is all new, strange, and unknown by name to me, has a charm for me. It is the place to forget the outside world, and live in one's self. And if you were here, we would go together and gather azaleas, and white lilies, and silver bells, and blue iris. These flowers keep me painting in a sort of madness. I have just finished a picture of white lilies that grow in the moist land by the watercourses. I am longing to begin on blue iris. Artist, poet, as you are by nature, you ought to see all these things, and if you would come here I would take you in heart and house, and you should have a little room in our cottage. The history of the cottage is this: I found a hut built close to a great live-oak twenty-five feet in girth, and with overarching boughs eighty feet up in the air, spreading like a firmament, and all swaying with mossy festoons. We began to live here, and gradually we improved the hut by lath, plaster, and paper. Then we threw out a wide veranda all round, for in these regions the veranda is the living-room of the house. Ours had to be built around the trunk of the tree, so that our cottage has a peculiar and original air, and seems as if it were half tree, or a something that had grown out of the tree. We added on parts, and have thrown out gables and chambers, as a tree throws out new branches, till our cottage is like nobody else's, and yet we settle into it with real enjoyment. There are all sorts of queer little rooms in it, and we are accommodating at this present a family of seventeen souls. In front, the beautiful, grand St. John's stretches five miles from shore to shore, and we watch the steamboats plying back and forth to the great world we are out of. On all sides, large orange trees, with their dense shade and ever-vivid green, shut out the sun so that we can sit, and walk, and live in the open air. Our winter here is only cool, bracing out-door weather, without snow. No month without flowers blooming in the open air, and lettuce and peas in the garden. The summer range is about 90°, but the sea-breezes keep the air delightfully fresh. Generally we go North, however, for three months of summer. Well, I did not mean to run on about Florida, but the subject runs away with me, and I want you to visit us in spirit if not personally. My poor rabbi!--he sends you some Arabic, which I fear you cannot read: on diablerie he is up to his ears in knowledge, having read all things in all tongues, from the Talmud down.... Ever lovingly yours, H. B. STOWE. [Illustration: H B Stowe] BOSTON, _September 26, 1872._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I think when you see my name again so soon, you will think it rains, hails, and snows notes from this quarter. Just now, however, I am in this lovely, little nest in Boston, where dear Mrs. Fields, like a dove, "sits brooding on the charmed wave." We are both wishing we had you here with us, and she has not received any answer from you as yet in reply to the invitation you spoke of in your last letter to me. It seems as if you must have written, and the letter somehow gone astray, because I know, of course, you would write. Yesterday we were both out of our senses with mingled pity and indignation at that dreadful stick of a Casaubon,--and think of poor Dorothea dashing like a warm, sunny wave against so cold and repulsive a rock! He is a little too dreadful for anything: there does not seem to be a drop of warm blood in him, and so, as it is his misfortune and not his fault, to be cold-blooded, one must not get angry with him. It is the scene in the garden, after the interview with the doctor, that rests on our mind at this present. There was such a man as he over in Boston, high in literary circles, but I fancy his wife wasn't like Dorothea, and a vastly proper time they had of it, treating each other with mutual reverence, like two Chinese mandarins. My love, what I miss in this story is just what we would have if you would come to our tumble-down, jolly, improper, but joyous country,--namely, "jollitude." You write and live on so high a plane! It is all self-abnegation. We want to get you over here, and into this house, where, with closed doors, we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun, and say anything and everything, no matter what, and won't be any properer than we's a mind to be. I am wishing every day you could see our America,--travel, as I have been doing, from one bright, thriving, pretty, flowery town to another, and see so much wealth, ease, progress, culture, and all sorts of nice things. This dovecot where I now am is the sweetest little nest imaginable; fronting on a city street, with back windows opening on a sea view, with still, quiet rooms filled with books, pictures, and all sorts of things, such as you and Mr. Lewes would enjoy. Don't be afraid of the ocean, now! I've crossed it six times, and assure you it is an overrated item. Froude is coming here--why not you? Besides, we have the fountain of eternal youth here, that is, in Florida, where I live, and if you should come you would both of you take a new lease of life, and what glorious poems, and philosophies, and whatnot, we should have! My rabbi writes, in the seventh heaven, an account of your note to him. To think of his setting-off on his own account when I was away! Come now, since your answer to dear Mrs. Fields is yet to come; let it be a glad yes, and we will clasp you to our heart of hearts. Your ever loving, H. B. S. During the summer of 1874, while Mrs. Stowe's brother, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, was the victim of a most revolting, malicious, and groundless attack on his purity, Mrs. Lewes wrote the following words of sympathy:-- MY DEAR FRIEND,--The other day I had a letter from Mrs. Fields, written to let me know something of you under that heavy trouble, of which such information as I have had has been quite untrustworthy, leaving me in entire incredulity in regard to it except on this point, that you and yours must be suffering deeply. Naturally I thought most of you in the matter (its public aspects being indeterminate), and many times before our friend's letter came I had said to Mr. Lewes: "What must Mrs. Stowe be feeling!" I remember Mrs. Fields once told me of the wonderful courage and cheerfulness which belonged to you, enabling you to bear up under exceptional trials, and I imagined you helping the sufferers with tenderness and counsel, but yet, nevertheless, I felt that there must be a bruising weight on your heart. Dear, honored friend, you who are so ready to give warm fellowship, is it any comfort to you to be told that those afar off are caring for you in spirit, and will be happier for all good issues that may bring you rest? I cannot, dare not, write more in my ignorance, lest I should be using unreasonable words. But I trust in your not despising this scrap of paper which tells you, perhaps rather for my relief than yours, that I am always in grateful, sweet remembrance of your goodness to me and your energetic labors for all. It was two years or more before Mrs. Stowe replied to these words of sympathy. Orange-blossom time, MANDARIN, _March 18, 1876._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I always think of you when the orange trees are in blossom; just now they are fuller than ever, and so many bees are filling the branches that the air is full of a sort of still murmur. And now I am beginning to hear from you every month in Harper's. It is as good as a letter. "Daniel Deronda" has succeeded in awaking in my somewhat worn-out mind an interest. So many stories are tramping over one's mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized, so to speak. It takes something unusual to make a sensation. This does excite and interest me, as I wait for each number with eagerness. I wish I could endow you with our long winter weather,--not winter, except such as you find in Sicily. We live here from November to June, and my husband sits outdoors on the veranda and reads all day. We emigrate in solid family: my two dear daughters, husband, self, and servants come together to spend the winter here, and so together to our Northern home in summer. My twin daughters relieve me from all domestic care; they are lively, vivacious, with a real genius for practical life. We have around us a little settlement of neighbors, who like ourselves have a winter home here, and live an easy, undress, picnic kind of life, far from the world and its cares. Mr. Stowe has been busy on eight volumes of Görres on the mysticism of the Middle Ages.[18] This Görres was Professor of Philosophy at Munich, and he reviews the whole ground of the shadow-land between the natural and the supernatural,--ecstacy, trance, prophecy, miracles, spiritualism, the stigmata, etc. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and the so-called facts that he reasons on seem to me quite amazing; and yet the possibilities that lie between inert matter and man's living, all-powerful, immortal soul may make almost anything credible. The soul at times can do anything with matter. I have been busying myself with Sainte-Beuve's seven volumes on the Port Royal development. I like him (Sainte-Beuve). His capacity of seeing, doing justice to all kinds of natures and sentiments, is wonderful. I am sorry he is no longer our side the veil. There is a redbird (cardinal grosbeak) singing in the orange trees fronting my window, so sweetly and insistently as to almost stop my writing. I hope, dear friend, you are well--better than when you wrote last. It was very sweet and kind of you to write what you did last. I suppose it is so long ago you may have forgotten, but it was a word of tenderness and sympathy about my brother's trial; it was womanly, tender, and sweet, such as at heart you are. After all, my love of you is greater than my admiration, for I think it more and better to be really a woman worth loving than to have read Greek and German and written books. And in this last book I read, I feel more with you in some little, fine points,--they stare at me as making an amusing exhibition. For, my dear, I feel myself at last as one who has been playing and picnicking on the shores of life, and waked from a dream late in the afternoon to find that everybody almost has gone over to the beyond. And the rest are sorting their things and packing their trunks, and waiting for the boat to come and take them. It seems now but a little time since my brother Henry and I were two young people together. He was my two years junior, and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him drawing and heard his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes mature and womanly long before a boy. I saw him through college, and helped him through the difficult love affair that gave him his wife; and then he and my husband had a real German, enthusiastic love for each other, which ended in making me a wife. Ah! in those days we never dreamed that he, or I, or any of us, were to be known in the world. All he seemed then was a boy full of fun, full of love, full of enthusiasm for protecting abused and righting wronged people, which made him in those early days write editorials, and wear arms and swear himself a special policeman to protect the poor negroes in Cincinnati, where we then lived, when there were mobs instigated by the slaveholders of Kentucky. Then he married, and lived a missionary life in the new West, all with a joyousness, an enthusiasm, a chivalry, which made life bright and vigorous to us both. Then in time he was called to Brooklyn, just as the crisis of the great anti-slavery battle came on, and the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. I was then in Maine, and I well remember one snowy night his riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking, till near morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks. My husband was then away lecturing, and my heart was burning itself out in indignation and anguish. Henry told me then that he meant to fight that battle in New York; that he would have a church that would stand by him to resist the tyrannic dictation of Southern slaveholders. I said: "I, too, have begun to do something; I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves." "That's right, Hattie," he said; "finish it, and I will scatter it thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa," and so came "Uncle Tom," and Plymouth Church became a stronghold where the slave always found refuge and a strong helper. One morning my brother found sitting on his doorstep poor old Paul Edmonson, weeping; his two daughters, of sixteen and eighteen, had passed into the slave warehouse of Bruin & Hill, and were to be sold. My brother took the man by the hand to a public meeting, told his story for him, and in an hour raised the two thousand dollars to redeem his children. Over and over again, afterwards, slaves were redeemed at Plymouth Church, and Henry and Plymouth Church became words of hatred and fear through half the Union. From that time until we talked together about the Fugitive Slave Law, there was not a pause or stop in the battle till we had been through the war and slavery had been wiped out in blood. Through all he has been pouring himself out, wrestling, burning, laboring everywhere, making stump speeches when elections turned on the slave question, and ever maintaining that the cause of Christ was the cause of the slave. And when all was over, it was he and Lloyd Garrison who were sent by government once more to raise our national flag on Fort Sumter. You must see that a man does not so energize without making many enemies. Half of our Union has been defeated, a property of millions annihilated by emancipation, a proud and powerful slave aristocracy reduced to beggary, and there are those who never saw our faces that, to this hour, hate him and me. Then he has been a progressive in theology. He has been a student of Huxley, and Spencer, and Darwin,--enough to alarm the old school,--and yet remained so ardent a supernaturalist as equally to repel the radical destructionists in religion. He and I are Christ-worshippers, adoring Him as the Image of the Invisible God and all that comes from believing this. Then he has been a reformer, an advocate of universal suffrage and woman's rights, yet not radical enough to please that reform party who stand where the Socialists of France do, and are for tearing up all creation generally. Lastly, he has had the misfortune of a popularity which is perfectly phenomenal. I cannot give you any idea of the love, worship, idolatry, with which he has been overwhelmed. He has something magnetic about him that makes everybody crave his society,--that makes men follow and worship him. I remember being at his house one evening in the time of early flowers, and in that one evening came a box of flowers from Maine, another from New Jersey, another from Connecticut,--all from people with whom he had no personal acquaintance, who had read something of his and wanted to send him some token. I said, "One would think you were a _prima donna_. What does make people go on so about you?" My brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. His inability to believe evil is something incredible, and so has come all this suffering. You said you hoped I should be at rest when the first investigating committee and Plymouth Church cleared my brother almost by acclamation. Not so. The enemy have so committed themselves that either they or he must die, and there has followed two years of the most dreadful struggle. First, a legal trial of six months, the expenses of which on his side were one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and in which he and his brave wife sat side by side in the court-room, and heard all that these plotters, who had been weaving their webs for three years, could bring. The foreman of the jury was offered a bribe of ten thousand dollars to decide against my brother. He sent the letter containing the proposition to the judge. But with all their plotting, three fourths of the jury decided against them, and their case was lost. It was accepted as a triumph by my brother's friends; a large number of the most influential clergy of all denominations so expressed themselves in a public letter, and it was hoped the thing was so far over that it might be lived down and overgrown with better things. But the enemy, intriguing secretly with all those parties in the community who wish to put down a public and too successful man, have been struggling to bring the thing up again for an ecclesiastical trial. The cry has been raised in various religious papers that Plymouth Church was in complicity with crime,--that they were so captivated with eloquence and genius that they refused to make competent investigation. The six months' legal investigation was insufficient; a new trial was needed. Plymouth Church immediately called a council of ministers and laymen, in number representing thirty-seven thousand Congregational Christians, to whom Plymouth Church surrendered her records,--her conduct,--all the facts of the case, and this great council unanimously supported the church and ratified her decision; recognizing the fact that, in all the investigations hitherto, nothing had been proved against my brother. They at his request, and that of Plymouth Church, appointed a committee of five to whom within sixty days any one should bring any facts that they could prove, or else forever after hold their peace. It is thought now by my brother's friends that this thing must finally reach a close. But you see why I have not written. This has drawn on my life--my heart's blood. He is myself; I know you are the kind of woman to understand me when I say that I felt a blow at him more than at myself. I, who know his purity, honor, delicacy, know that he has been from childhood of an ideal purity,--who reverenced his conscience as his king, whose glory was redressing human wrong, who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it. Never have I known a nature of such strength, and such almost childlike innocence. He is of a nature so sweet and perfect that, though I have seen him thunderously indignant at moments, I never saw him fretful or irritable,--a man who continuously, in every little act of life, is thinking of others, a man that all the children on the street run after, and that every sorrowful, weak, or distressed person looks to as a natural helper. In all this long history there has been no circumstance of his relation to any woman that has not been worthy of himself,--pure, delicate, and proper; and I know all sides of it, and certainly should not say this if there were even a misgiving. Thank God, there is none, and I can read my New Testament and feel that by all the beatitudes my brother is blessed. His calmness, serenity, and cheerfulness through all this time has uplifted us all. Where he was, there was no anxiety, no sorrow. My brother's power to console is something peculiar and wonderful. I have seen him at death-beds and funerals, where it would seem as if hope herself must be dumb, bring down the very peace of Heaven and change despair to trust. He has not had less power in his own adversity. You cannot conceive how he is beloved, by those even who never saw him,--old, paralytic, distressed, neglected people, poor seamstresses, black people, who have felt these arrows shot against their benefactor as against themselves, and most touching have been their letters of sympathy. From the first, he has met this in the spirit of Francis de Sales, who met a similar plot,--by silence, prayer, and work, and when urged to defend himself said "God would do it in his time." God was the best judge how much reputation he needed to serve Him with. In your portrait of Deronda, you speak of him as one of those rare natures in whom a private wrong bred no bitterness. "The sense of injury breeds, not the will to inflict injuries, but a hatred of all injury;" and I must say, through all this conflict my brother has been always in the spirit of Him who touched and healed the ear of Malchus when he himself was attacked. His friends and lawyers have sometimes been aroused and sometimes indignant with his habitual caring for others, and his habit of vindicating and extending even to his enemies every scrap and shred of justice that might belong to them. From first to last of this trial, he has never for a day intermitted his regular work. Preaching to crowded houses, preaching even in his short vacations at watering places, carrying on his missions which have regenerated two once wretched districts of the city, editing a paper, and in short giving himself up to work. He cautioned his church not to become absorbed in him and his trials, to prove their devotion by more faithful church work and a wider charity; and never have the Plymouth missions among the poor been so energetic and effective. He said recently, "The worst that can befall a man is to stop thinking of God and begin to think of himself; if trials make us self-absorbed, they hurt us." Well, dear, pardon me for this outpour. I loved you--I love you--and therefore wanted you to know just what I felt. Now, dear, this is over, don't think you must reply to it or me. I know how much you have to do,--yes, I know all about an aching head and an overtaxed brain. This last work of yours is to be your best, I think, and I hope it will bring you enough to buy an orange grove in Sicily, or somewhere else, and so have lovely weather such as we have. Your ancient admirer,[19] who usually goes to bed at eight o'clock, was convicted by me of sitting up after eleven over the last installment of "Daniel Deronda," and he is full of it. We think well of Guendoline, and that she isn't much more than young ladies in general so far. Next year, if I can possibly do it, I will send you some of our oranges. I perfectly long to have you enjoy them. Your very loving H. B. STOWE. P. S. I am afraid I shall write you again when I am reading your writings, they are so provokingly suggestive of things one wants to say. H. B. S. In her reply to this letter Mrs. Lewes says, incidentally: "Please offer my reverential love to the Professor, and tell him I am ruthlessly proud of having kept him out of his bed. I hope that both you and he will continue to be interested in my spiritual children." After Mr. Lewes's death, Mrs. Lewes writes to Mrs. Stowe:-- THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, _April 10, 1879._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I have been long without sending you any sign (unless you have received a message from me through Mrs. Fields), but my heart has been going out to you and your husband continually as among the chief of the many kind beings who have given me their tender fellow-feeling in my last earthly sorrow.... When your first letter came, with the beautiful gift of your book,[20] I was unable to read any letters, and did not for a long time see what you had sent me. But when I did know, and had read your words of thankfulness at the great good you have seen wrought by your help, I felt glad, for your sake first, and then for the sake of the great nation to which you belong. The hopes of the world are taking refuge westward, under the calamitous conditions, moral and physical, in which we of the elder world are getting involved.... Thank you for telling me that you have the comfort of seeing your son in a path that satisfies your best wishes for him. I like to think of your having family joys. One of the prettiest photographs of a child that I possess is one of your sending to me.... Please offer my reverential, affectionate regards to your husband, and believe me, dear friend, Yours always gratefully, M. L. LEWES. As much as has been said with regard to spiritualism in these pages, the subject has by no means the prominence that it really possessed in the studies and conversations of both Professor and Mrs. Stowe. Professor Stowe's very remarkable psychological development, and the exceptional experiences of his early life, were sources of conversation of unfailing interest and study to both. Professor Stowe had made an elaborate and valuable collection of the literature of the subject, and was, as Mrs. Stowe writes, "over head and ears in _diablerie_." It is only just to give Mrs. Stowe's views on this perplexing theme more at length, and as the mature reflection of many years has caused them to take form. In reference to professional mediums, and spirits that peep, rap, and mutter, she writes:-- "Each friend takes away a portion of ourselves. There was some part of our being related to him as to no other, and we had things to say to him which no other would understand or appreciate. A portion of our thoughts has become useless and burdensome, and again and again, with involuntary yearning, we turn to the stone at the door of the sepulchre. We lean against the cold, silent marble, but there is no answer,--no voice, neither any that regardeth. "There are those who would have us think that in _our_ day this doom is reversed; that there are those who have the power to restore to us the communion of our lost ones. How many a heart, wrung and tortured with the anguish of this fearful silence, has throbbed with strange, vague hopes at the suggestion! When we hear sometimes of persons of the strongest and clearest minds becoming credulous votaries of certain spiritualist circles, let us not wonder: if we inquire, we shall almost always find that the belief has followed some stroke of death; it is only an indication of the desperation of that heart-hunger which in part it appeases. "Ah, _were_ it true! Were it indeed so that the wall between the spiritual and material is growing thin, and a new dispensation germinating in which communion with the departed blest shall be among the privileges and possibilities of this our mortal state! Ah, were it so that when we go forth weeping in the gray dawn, bearing spices and odors which we long to pour forth for the beloved dead, we should indeed find the stone rolled away and an angel sitting on it! "But for us the stone must be rolled away by an _unquestionable_ angel, whose countenance is as the lightning, who executes no doubtful juggle by pale moonlight or starlight, but rolls back the stone in fair, open morning, and sits on it. Then we could bless God for his mighty gift, and with love, and awe, and reverence take up that blessed fellowship with another life, and weave it reverently and trustingly into the web of our daily course. "But no such angel have we seen,--no such sublime, unquestionable, glorious manifestation. And when we look at what is offered to us, ah! who that had a friend in heaven could wish them to return in such wise as this? The very instinct of a sacred sorrow seems to forbid that our beautiful, our glorified ones should stoop lower than even to the medium of their cast-off bodies, to juggle, and rap, and squeak, and perform mountebank tricks with tables and chairs; to recite over in weary sameness harmless truisms, which we were wise enough to say for ourselves; to trifle, and banter, and jest, or to lead us through endless moonshiny mazes. Sadly and soberly we say that, if this be communion with the dead, we had rather be without it. We want something a little in advance of our present life, and not below it. We have read with some attention weary pages of spiritual communication purporting to come from Bacon, Swedenborg, and others, and long accounts from divers spirits of things seen in the spirit land, and we can conceive of no more appalling prospect than to have them true. "If the future life is so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable as we might infer from these readings, one would have reason to deplore an immortality from which no suicide could give an outlet. To be condemned to such eternal prosing would be worse than annihilation. "Is there, then, no satisfaction for this craving of the soul? There is One who says: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of hell and of death;" and this same being said once before: "He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself unto him." This is a promise direct and personal; not confined to the first apostles, but stated in the most general way as attainable by any one who loves and does the will of Jesus. It seems given to us as some comfort for the unavoidable heart-breaking separations of death that there should be, in that dread unknown, one all-powerful Friend with whom it is possible to commune, and from whose spirit there may come a response to us. Our Elder Brother, the partaker of our nature, is not only in the spirit land, but is all-powerful there. It is he that shutteth and no man openeth, and openeth and no man shutteth. He whom we have seen in the flesh, weeping over the grave of Lazarus, is he who hath the keys of hell and of death. If we cannot commune with our friends, we can at least commune with Him to whom they are present, who is intimately with them as with us. He is the true bond of union between the spirit world and our souls; and one blest hour of prayer, when we draw near to Him and feel the breadth, and length, and depth, and heighth of that love of his that passeth knowledge, is better than all those incoherent, vain, dreamy glimpses with which longing hearts are cheated. "They who have disbelieved all spiritual truth, who have been Sadduceeic doubters of either angel or spirit, may find in modern spiritualism a great advance. But can one who has ever really had communion with Christ, who has said with John, "Truly our fellowship is with the Father and the Son,"--can such an one be satisfied with what is found in the modern circle? "For Christians who have strayed into these inclosures, we cannot but recommend the homely but apt quotation of old John Newton:-- "'What think ye of Christ is the test To try both your word and your scheme.' "In all these so-called revelations, have there come any echoes of the _new song_ which no man save the redeemed from earth could learn; any unfoldings of that love that passeth knowledge,--anything, in short, such as spirits might utter to whom was unveiled that which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath entered the heart of man to conceive? We must confess that all those spirits that yet have spoken appear to be living in quite another sphere from John or Paul. "Let us, then, who long for communion with spirits, seek nearness to Him who has promised to speak and commune, leaving forever this word to his church:-- "'I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you.'" FOOTNOTES: [17] George Eliot's Life, edited by J. W. Cross, vol. i. [18] _Die Christliche Mystik._ [19] Professor Stowe. [20] _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, new edition, with introduction. CHAPTER XXI. CLOSING SCENES, 1870-1889. LITERARY LABORS.--COMPLETE LIST OF PUBLISHED BOOKS.--FIRST READING TOUR.--PEEPS BEHIND THE CURTAIN.--SOME NEW ENGLAND CITIES.--A LETTER FROM MAINE.--PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT READINGS.--SECOND TOUR.--A WESTERN JOURNEY.--VISIT TO OLD SCENES.--CELEBRATION OF SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY.--CONGRATULATORY POEMS FROM MR. WHITTIER AND DR. HOLMES.--LAST WORDS. BESIDES the annual journeys to and from Florida, and her many interests in the South, Mrs. Stowe's time between 1870 and 1880 was largely occupied by literary and kindred labors. In the autumn of 1871 we find her writing to her daughters as follows regarding her work:-- "I have at last finished all my part in the third book of mine that is to come out this year, to wit 'Oldtown Fireside Stories,' and you can have no idea what a perfect luxury of rest it is to be free from all literary engagements, of all kinds, sorts, or descriptions. I feel like a poor woman I once read about,-- "'Who always was tired, 'Cause she lived in a house Where help wasn't hired,' and of whom it is related that in her dying moments, "'She folded her hands With her latest endeavor, Saying nothing, dear nothing, Sweet nothing forever.' "I am in about her state of mind. I luxuriate in laziness. I do not want to do anything or go anywhere. I only want to sink down into lazy enjoyment of living." She was certainly well entitled to a rest, for never had there been a more laborious literary life. In addition to the twenty-three books already written, she had prepared for various magazines and journals an incredible number of short stories, letters of travel, essays, and other articles. Yet with all she had accomplished, and tired as she was, she still had seven books to write, besides many more short stories, before her work should be done. As her literary life did not really begin until 1852, the bulk of her work has been accomplished within twenty-six years, as will be seen from the following list of her books, arranged in the chronological order of their publication:-- 1833. An Elementary Geography. 1843. The Mayflower. 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1853. Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1854. Sunny Memories. 1856. Dred. 1858. Our Charley. 1859. Minister's Wooing. 1862. Pearl of Orr's Island. 1863. Agnes of Sorrento. 1864. House and Home Papers. 1865. Little Foxes. 1866. Nina Gordon (Formerly "Dred"). 1867. Religious Poems. 1867. Queer Little People. 1868. The Chimney Corner. 1868. Men of Our Times. 1869. Oldtown Folks. 1870. Lady Byron Vindicated. 1871. The History of the Byron Controversy (London). 1870. Little Pussy Willow. 1871. Pink and White Tyranny. 1871. Old Town Fireside Stories. 1872. My Wife and I. 1873. Palmetto Leaves. 1873. Library of Famous Fiction. 1875. We and Our Neighbors. 1876. Betty's Bright Idea. 1877. Footsteps of the Master. 1878. Bible Heroines. 1878. Poganuc People. 1881. A Dog's Mission. In 1872 a new and remunerative field of labor was opened to Mrs. Stowe, and though it entailed a vast amount of weariness and hard work, she entered it with her customary energy and enthusiasm. It presented itself in the shape of an offer from the American Literary (Lecture) Bureau of Boston to deliver a course of forty readings from her own works in the principal cities of the New England States. The offer was a liberal one, and Mrs. Stowe accepted it on condition that the reading tour should be ended in time to allow her to go to her Florida home in December. This being acceded to, she set forth and gave her first reading in Bridgeport, Conn., on the evening of September 19, 1872. The following extracts from letters written to her husband while on this reading tour throw some interesting gleams of light on the scenes behind the curtain of the lecturer's platform. From Boston, October 3d, she writes: "Have had a most successful but fatiguing week. Read in Cambridgeport to-night, and Newburyport to-morrow night." Two weeks later, upon receipt of a letter from her husband, in which he fears he has not long to live, she writes from Westfield, Mass:-- "I have never had a greater trial than being forced to stay away from you now. I would not, but that my engagements have involved others in heavy expense, and should I fail to fulfill them, it would be doing a wrong. "God has given me strength as I needed it, and I never read more to my own satisfaction than last night. "Now, my dear husband, please do _want_, and try, to remain with us yet a while longer, and let us have a little quiet evening together before either of us crosses the river. My heart cries out for a home with you; our home together in Florida. Oh, may we see it again! Your ever loving wife." From Fitchburg, Mass., under date of October 29th, she writes:-- "In the cars, near Palmer, who should I discover but Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Fields, returning from a Western trip, as gay as a troubadour. I took an empty seat next to them, and we had a jolly ride to Boston. I drove to Mr. Williams's house, where I met the Chelsea agent, who informed me that there was no hotel in Chelsea, but that they were expecting to send over for me. So I turned at once toward 148 Charles Street, where I tumbled in on the Fields before they had got their things off. We had a good laugh, and I received a hearty welcome. I was quickly installed in my room, where, after a nice dinner, I curled up for my afternoon nap. At half-past seven the carriage came for me, and I was informed that I should not have a hard reading, as they had engaged singers to take part. So, when I got into the carriage, who should I find, beshawled, and beflowered, and betoggled in blue satin and white lace, but our old friend ---- of Andover concert memory, now become Madame Thingumbob, of European celebrity. She had studied in Italy, come out in Milan, sung there in opera for a whole winter, and also in Paris and London. "Well, she sings very sweetly and looks very nice and pretty. Then we had a little rosebud of a Chelsea girl who sang, and a pianist. I read 'Minister's Housekeeper' and Topsy, and the audience was very jolly and appreciative. Then we all jogged home." The next letter finds Mrs. Stowe in Maine, and writing in the cars between Bangor and Portland. She says:-- MY DEAR HUSBAND,--Well, Portland and Bangor are over, and the latter, which I had dreaded as lonesome and far off, turned out the pleasantest of any place I have visited yet. I stayed at the Fays; he was one of the Andover students, you remember; and found a warm, cosy, social home. In the evening I met an appreciative audience, and had a delightful reading. I read Captain Kittridge, apparently to the great satisfaction of the people, who laughed heartily at his sea stories, and the "Minister's Housekeeper" with the usual success, also Eva and Topsy. One woman, totally deaf, came to me afterwards and said: "Bless you. I come jist to see you. I'd rather see you than the Queen." Another introduced her little girl named Harriet Beecher Stowe, and another, older, named Eva. She said they had traveled fifty miles to hear me read. An incident like that appeals to one's heart, does it not? The people of Bangor were greatly embarrassed by the horse disease; but the mayor and his wife walked over from their house, a long distance off, to bring me flowers, and at the reading he introduced me. I had an excellent audience notwithstanding that it rained tremendously, and everybody had to walk because there were no horses. The professors called on me, also Newman Smith, now a settled minister here. Everybody is so anxious about you, and Mr. Fay made me promise that you and I should come and spend a week with them next summer. Mr. Howard, in Portland, called upon me to inquire for you, and everybody was so delighted to hear that you were getting better. It stormed all the time I was in Portland and Bangor, so I saw nothing of them. Now I am in a palace car riding alongside the Kennebec, and recalling the incidents of my trip. I certainly had very satisfactory houses; and these pleasant little visits, and meetings with old acquaintance, would be well worth having, even though I had made nothing in a pecuniary sense. On the whole it is as easy a way of making money as I have ever tried, though no way of making money is perfectly easy,--there must be some disagreeables. The lonesomeness of being at a hotel in dull weather is one, and in Portland it seems there is nobody now to invite us to their homes. Our old friends there are among the past. They have gone on over the river. I send you a bit of poetry that pleases me. The love of the old for each other has its poetry. It is something sacred and full of riches. I long to be with you, and to have some more of our good long talks. The scenery along this river is very fine. The oaks still keep their leaves, though the other trees are bare; but oaks and pines make a pleasant contrast. We shall stop twenty minutes at Brunswick, so I shall get a glimpse of the old place. Now we are passing through Hallowell, and the Kennebec changes sides. What a beautiful river! It is now full of logs and rafts. Well, I must bring this to a close. Good-by, dear, with unchanging love. Ever your wife. From South Framingham, Mass., she writes on November 7th:-- Well, my dear, here I am in E.'s pretty little house. He has a pretty wife, a pretty sister, a pretty baby, two nice little boys, and a lovely white cat. The last is a perfect beauty! a Persian, from a stock brought over by Dr. Parker, as white as snow, with the softest fur, a perfect bunch of loving-kindness, all purr and felicity. I had a good audience last evening, and enjoyed it. My audiences, considering the horse disease and the rains, are amazing. And how they do laugh! We get into regular gales. E. has the real country minister turn-out: horse and buggy, and such a nice horse too. The baby is a beauty, and giggles, and goos, and shouts inquiries with the rising inflection, in the most inspiring manner. _November 13._ Wakefield. I read in Haverhill last night. It was as usual stormy. I had a good audience, but not springy and inspiriting like that at Waltham. Some audiences seem to put spring into one, and some to take it out. This one seemed good but heavy. I had to lift them, while in Framingham and Waltham they lifted me. The Lord bless and keep you. It grieves me to think you are dull and I not with you. By and by we will be together and stay together. Good-by dear. Your ever loving wife, H. B. S. _November 24._ "I had a very pleasant reading in Peabody. While there visited the library and saw the picture of the Queen that she had painted expressly for George Peabody. It was about six inches square, enameled on gold, and set in a massive frame of solid gold and velvet. The effect is like painting on ivory. At night the picture rolls back into a safe, and great doors, closed with a combination lock, defend it. It reminded me of some of the foreign wonders we have seen. "Well, my course is almost done, and if I get through without any sickness, cold, or accident, how wonderful it will seem. I have never felt the near, kind presence of our Heavenly Father so much as in this. 'He giveth strength to the faint, and to them of no might He increaseth strength.' I have found this true all my life." From Newport she writes on November 26th:-- "It was a hard, tiring, disagreeable piece of business to read in New London. Had to wait three mortal hours in Palmer. Then a slow, weary train, that did not reach New London until after dark. There was then no time to rest, and I was so tired that it did seem as though I could not dress. I really trembled with fatigue. The hall was long and dimly lighted, and the people were not seated compactly, but around in patches. The light was dim, except for a great flaring gas jet arranged right under my eyes on the reading desk, and I did not see a creature whom I knew. I was only too glad when it was over and I was back again at my hotel. There I found that I must be up at five o'clock to catch the Newport train. "I started for this place in the dusk of a dreary, foggy morning. Traveled first on a ferry, then in cars, and then in a little cold steamboat. Found no one to meet me, in spite of all my writing, and so took a carriage and came to the hotel. The landlord was very polite to me, said he knew me by my trunk, had been to our place in Mandarin, etc. All I wanted was a warm room, a good bed, and unlimited time to sleep. Now I have had a three hours' nap, and here I am, sitting by myself in the great, lonely hotel parlor. "Well, dear old man, I think lots of you, and only want to end all this in a quiet home where we can sing 'John Anderson, my Jo' together. I check off place after place as the captive the days of his imprisonment. Only two more after to-night. Ever your loving wife." Mrs. Stowe made one more reading tour the following year, and this time it was in the West. On October 28, 1873, she writes from Zanesville, Ohio, to her son at Harvard:-- You have been very good to write as often as you have, and your letters, meeting me at different points, have been most cheering. I have been tired, almost to the last degree. Read two successive evenings in Chicago, and traveled the following day for thirteen hours, a distance of about three hundred miles, to Cincinnati. We were compelled to go in the most uncomfortable cars I ever saw, crowded to overflowing, a fiend of a stove at each end burning up all the air, and without a chance to even lay my head down. This is the grand route between Chicago and Cincinnati, and we were on it from eight in the morning until nearly ten at night. Arrived at Cincinnati we found that George Beecher had not received our telegram, was not expecting us, had no rooms engaged for us, and that we could not get rooms at his boarding-place. After finding all this out we had to go to the hotel, where, about eleven o'clock, I crept into bed with every nerve aching from fatigue. The next day was dark and rainy, and I lay in bed most of it; but when I got up to go and read I felt only half rested, and was still so tired that it seemed as though I could not get through. Those who planned my engagements failed to take, into account the fearful distances and wretched trains out here. On none of these great Western routes is there a drawing-room car. Mr. Saunders tried in every way to get them to put one on for us, but in vain. They are all reserved for the night trains; so that there is no choice except to travel by night in sleeping cars, or take such trains as I have described in the daytime. I had a most sympathetic audience in Cincinnati; they all seemed delighted and begged me to come again. The next day George took us for a drive out to Walnut Hills, where we saw the seminary buildings, the house where your sisters were born, and the house in which we afterwards lived. In the afternoon we had to leave and hurry away to a reading in Dayton. The next evening another in Columbus, where we spent Sunday with an old friend. By this time I am somewhat rested from the strain of that awful journey; but I shall never again undertake such another. It was one of those things that have to be done once, to learn not to do it again. My only reading between Columbus and Pittsburgh is to be here in Zanesville, a town as black as Acheron, and where one might expect to see the river Styx. Later. I had a nice audience and a pleasant reading here, and to-day we go on to Pittsburgh, where I read to-morrow night. I met the other day at Dayton a woman who now has grandchildren; but who, when I first came West, was a gay rattling girl. She was one of the first converts of brother George's seemingly obscure ministry in the little new town of Chillicothe. Now she has one son who is a judge of the supreme court, and another in business. Both she and they are not only Christians, but Christians of the primitive sort, whose religion is their all; who triumph and glory in tribulation, knowing that it worketh patience. She told me, with a bright sweet calm, of her husband killed in battle the first year of the war, of her only daughter and two grandchildren dying in the faith, and of her own happy waiting on God's will, with bright hopes of a joyful reunion. Her sons are leading members of the Presbyterian Church, and most active in stirring up others to make their profession a reality, not an empty name. When I thought that all this came from the conversion of one giddy girl, when George seemed to be doing so little, I said, "Who can measure the work of a faithful minister?" It is such living witnesses that maintain Christianity on earth. Good-by. We shall soon be home now, and preparing for Florida. Always your own loving mother, H. B. S. Mrs. Stowe never undertook another reading tour, nor, after this one, did she ever read again for money, though she frequently contributed her talent in this direction to the cause of charity. The most noteworthy event of her later years was the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of her birthday. That it might be fittingly observed, her publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of Boston, arranged a reception for her in form of a garden party, to which they invited the _literati_ of America. It was held on June 14, 1882, at "The Old Elms," the home of Ex-Governor Claflin of Massachusetts, in Newtonville, one of Boston's most beautiful suburbs. Here the assembly gathered to do honor to Mrs. Stowe, that lovely June afternoon, comprised two hundred of the most distinguished and best known among the literary men and women of the day. From three until five o'clock was spent socially. As the guests arrived they were presented to Mrs. Stowe by Mr. H. O. Houghton, and then they gathered in groups in the parlors, on the verandas, on the lawn, and in the refreshment room. At five o'clock they assembled in a large tent on the lawn, when Mr. Houghton, as host, addressed to his guest and her friends a few words of congratulation and welcome. He closed his remarks by saying:-- "And now, honored madam, as "'When to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at sea northeast winds blow Sabean odors from the spicy shore Of Arabie the blest,' so the benedictions of the lowly and the blessings of all conditions of men are brought to you to-day on the wings of the wind, from every quarter of the globe; but there will be no fresher laurels to crown this day of your rejoicing than are brought by those now before you, who have been your co-workers in the strife; who have wrestled and suffered, fought and conquered, with you; who rank you with the Miriams, the Deborahs, and the Judiths of old; and who now shout back the refrain, when you utter the inspired song:-- "'Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously.' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'The Almighty Lord hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman.'" In reply to this Mrs. Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, said: "Of course you all sympathize with me to-day, but, standing in this place, I do not see your faces more clearly than I see those of my father and my mother. Her I only knew as a mere babe-child. He was my teacher and my companion. A more guileless soul than he, a more honest one, more free from envy, from jealousy, and from selfishness, I never knew. Though he thought he was great by his theology, everybody else knew he was great by his religion. My mother is to me what the Virgin Mary is to a devout Catholic. She was a woman of great nature, profound as a philosophical thinker, great in argument, with a kind of intellectual imagination, diffident, not talkative,--in which respect I take after her,--the woman who gave birth to Mrs. Stowe, whose graces and excellences she probably more than any of her children--we number but thirteen--has possessed. I suppose that in bodily resemblance, perhaps, she is not like my mother, but in mind I presume she is most like her. I thank you for my father's sake and for my mother's sake for the courtesy, the friendliness, and the kindness which you give to Mrs. Stowe." The following poem from John Greenleaf Whittier was then read:-- "Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers And golden-fruited orange bowers To this sweet, green-turfed June of ours! To her who, in our evil time, Dragged into light the nation's crime With strength beyond the strength of men, And, mightier than their sword, her pen; To her who world-wide entrance gave To the log cabin of the slave, Made all his wrongs and sorrows known, And all earth's languages his own,-- North, South, and East and West, made all The common air electrical, Until the o'ercharged bolts of heaven Blazed down, and every chain was riven! "Welcome from each and all to her Whose Wooing of the Minister Revealed the warm heart of the man Beneath the creed-bound Puritan, And taught the kinship of the love Of man below and God above; To her whose vigorous pencil-strokes Sketched into life her Oldtown Folks, Whose fireside stories, grave or gay, In quaint Sam Lawson's vagrant way, With Old New England's flavor rife, Waifs from her rude idyllic life, Are racy as the legends old By Chaucer or Boccaccio told; To her who keeps, through change of place And time, her native strength and grace, Alike where warm Sorrento smiles, Or where, by birchen-shaded isles Whose summer winds have shivered o'er The icy drift of Labrador, She lifts to light the priceless Pearl Of Harpswell's angel-beckoned girl. To her at threescore years and ten Be tributes of the tongue and pen, Be honor, praise, and heart thanks given, The loves of earth, the hopes of heaven! "Ah, dearer than the praise that stirs The air to-day, our love is hers! She needs no guaranty of fame Whose own is linked with Freedom's name. Long ages after ours shall keep Her memory living while we sleep; The waves that wash our gray coast lines, The winds that rock the Southern pines Shall sing of her; the unending years Shall tell her tale in unborn ears. And when, with sins and follies past, Are numbered color-hate and caste, White, black, and red shall own as one, The noblest work by woman done." It was followed by a few words from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also read the subjoined as his contribution to the chorus of congratulation:-- "If every tongue that speaks her praise For whom I shape my tinkling phrase Were summoned to the table, The vocal chorus that would meet Of mingling accents harsh or sweet, From every land and tribe, would beat The polyglots of Babel. "Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane, Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, Arab, Armenian, and Mantchoo Would shout, 'We know the lady.' "Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom And her he learned his gospel from, Has never heard of Moses; Full well the brave black hand we know That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe That killed the weed that used to grow Among the Southern roses. "When Archimedes, long ago, Spoke out so grandly, '_Dos pou sto_,-- Give me a place to stand on, I'll move your planet for you, now,'-- He little dreamed or fancied how The _sto_ at last should find its _pou_ For woman's faith to land on. "Her lever was the wand of art, Her fulcrum was the human heart, Whence all unfailing aid is; She moved the earth! Its thunders pealed Its mountains shook, its temples reeled, The blood-red fountains were unsealed, And Moloch sunk to Hades. "All through the conflict, up and down Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown, One ghost, one form ideal; And which was false and which was true, And which was mightier of the two, The wisest sibyl never knew, For both alike were real. "Sister, the holy maid does well Who counts her beads in convent cell, Where pale devotion lingers; But she who serves the sufferer's needs, Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds, May trust the Lord will count her beads As well as human fingers. "When Truth herself was Slavery's slave Thy hand the prisoned suppliant gave The rainbow wings of fiction. And Truth who soared descends to-day Bearing an angel's wreath away, Its lilies at thy feet to lay With heaven's own benediction." Poems written for the occasion by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Allen (Mrs. Stowe's daughter), Mrs. Annie Fields, and Miss Charlotte F. Bates, were also read, and speeches were made by Judge Albion W. Tourgée and others prominent in the literary world. Letters from many noted people, who were prevented from being present by distance or by other engagements, had been received. Only four of them were read, but they were all placed in Mrs. Stowe's hands. The exercises were closed by a few words from Mrs. Stowe herself. As she came to the front of the platform the whole company rose, and remained standing until she had finished. In her quiet, modest, way, and yet so clearly as to be plainly heard by all, she said:-- "I wish to say that I thank all my friends from my heart,--that is all. And one thing more,--and that is, if any of you have doubt, or sorrow, or pain, if you doubt about this world, just remember what God has done; just remember that this great sorrow of slavery has gone, gone by forever. I see it every day at the South. I walk about there and see the lowly cabins. I see these people growing richer and richer. I see men very happy in their lowly lot; but, to be sure, you must have patience with them. They are not perfect, but have their faults, and they are serious faults in the view of white people. But they are very happy, that is evident, and they do know how to enjoy themselves,--a great deal more than you do. An old negro friend in our neighborhood has got a new, nice two-story house, and an orange grove, and a sugar-mill. He has got a lot of money, besides. Mr. Stowe met him one day, and he said, 'I have got twenty head of cattle, four head of "hoss," forty head of hen, and I have got ten children, all _mine, every one mine_.' Well, now, that is a thing that a black man could not say once, and this man was sixty years old before he could say it. With all the faults of the colored people, take a man and put him down with nothing but his hands, and how many could say as much as that? I think they have done well. "A little while ago they had at his house an evening festival for their church, and raised fifty dollars. We white folks took our carriages, and when we reached the house we found it fixed nicely. Every one of his daughters knew how to cook. They had a good place for the festival. Their suppers were spread on little white tables with nice clean cloths on them. People paid fifty cents for supper. They got between fifty and sixty dollars, and had one of the best frolics you could imagine. They had also for supper ice-cream, which they made themselves. "That is the sort of thing I see going on around me. Let us never doubt. Everything that ought to happen is going to happen." * * * * * Mrs. Stowe's public life ends with the garden party, and little more remains to be told. She had already, in 1880, begun the task of selection from the great accumulation of letters and papers relating to her life, and writes thus to her son in Saco, Maine, regarding the work:-- _September 30, 1880._ MY DEAR CHARLEY,--My mind has been with you a great deal lately. I have been looking over and arranging my papers with a view to sifting out those that are not worth keeping, and so filing and arranging those that are to be kept, that my heirs and assigns may with the less trouble know where and what they are. I cannot describe (to you) the peculiar feelings which this review occasions. Reading old letters--when so many of the writers are gone from earth, seems to me like going into the world of spirits--letters full of the warm, eager, anxious, busy life, that is _forever_ past. My own letters, too, full of by-gone scenes in my early life and the childish days of my children. It is affecting to me to recall things that strongly moved me years ago, that filled my thoughts and made me anxious when the occasion and emotion have wholly vanished from my mind. But I thank God there is _one_ thing running through all of them from the time I was thirteen years old, and that is the intense unwavering sense of Christ's educating, guiding presence and care. It is _all_ that remains now. The romance of my youth is faded, it looks to me now, from my years, so _very_ young--those days when my mind only lived in _emotion_, and when my letters never were dated, because they were only histories of the _internal_, but now that I am no more and never can be young in this world, now that the friends of those days are almost all in eternity, what remains? Through life and through death, through sorrowing, through sinning, Christ shall suffice me as he hath sufficed. Christ is the end and Christ the beginning, The beginning and end of all is Christ. [Illustration: THE LATER HARTFORD HOME.] I was passionate in my attachments in those far back years, and as I have looked over files of old letters, they are all gone (except one, C. Van Rensselaer), Georgiana May, Delia Bacon, Clarissa Treat, Elisabeth Lyman, Sarah Colt, Elisabeth Phenix, Frances Strong, Elisabeth Foster. I have letters from them all, but they have been long in spirit land and know more about how it is there than I do. It gives me a sort of dizzy feeling of the shortness of life and nearness of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it--my letters when my whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived their earthly life and gone to the eternal one,--my two little boys, each in their way good and lovely, whom Christ has taken in youth, and my little one, my first Charley, whom He took away before he knew sin or sorrow,--then my brother George and sister Catherine, the one a companion of my youth, the other the mother who assumed the care of me after I left home in my twelfth year--and they are gone. Then my blessed father, for many years so true an image of the Heavenly Father,--in all my afflictions he was afflicted, in all my perplexities he was a sure and safe counselor, and he too is gone upward to join the angelic mother whom I scarcely knew in this world, who has been to me only a spiritual presence through life. In 1882 Mrs. Stowe writes to her son certain impressions derived from reading the "Life and Letters of John Quincy Adams," which are given as containing a retrospect of the stormy period of her own life-experience. "Your father enjoys his proximity to the Boston library. He is now reading the twelve or fourteen volumes of the life and diary of John Q. Adams. It is a history of our country through all the period of slavery usurpation that led to the war. The industry of the man in writing is wonderful. Every day's doings in the house are faithfully daguerreotyped,--all the mean tricks, contrivances of the slave-power, and the pusillanimity of the Northern members from day to day recorded. Calhoun was then secretary of state. Under his connivance even the United States census was falsified, to prove that freedom was bad for negroes. Records of deaf, dumb, and blind, and insane colored people were distributed in Northern States, and in places where John Q. Adams had means of _proving_ there were no negroes. When he found that these falsified figures had been used with the English embassador as reasons for admitting Texas as a slave State, the old man called on Calhoun, and showed him the industriously collected _proofs_ of the falsity of this census. He says: 'He writhed like a trodden rattlesnake, but said the census was full of mistakes; but one part balanced another,--it was not worth while to correct them.' His whole life was an incessant warfare with the rapidly advancing spirit of slavery, that was coiling like a serpent around everything. "At a time when the Southerners were like so many excited tigers and rattlesnakes,--when they bullied, and scoffed, and sneered, and threatened, this old man rose every day in his place, and, knowing every parliamentary rule and tactic of debate, found means to make himself heard. Then he presented a petition from _negroes_, which raised a storm of fury. The old man claimed that the right of petition was the right of every human being. They moved to expel him. By the rules of the house a man, before he can be expelled, may have the floor to make his defense. This was just what he wanted. He held the floor for _fourteen days_, and used his wonderful powers of memory and arrangement to give a systematic, scathing history of the usurpations of slavery; he would have spoken fourteen days more, but his enemies, finding the thing getting hotter and hotter, withdrew their motion, and the right of petition was gained. "What is remarkable in this journal is the minute record of going to church every Sunday, and an analysis of the text and sermon. There is something about these so simple, so humble, so earnest. Often differing from the speaker--but with gravity and humility--he seems always to be so self-distrustful; to have such a sense of sinfulness and weakness, but such trust in God's fatherly mercy, as is most beautiful to see. Just the record of his Sunday sermons, and his remarks upon them, would be most instructive to a preacher. He was a regular communicant, and, beside, attended church on Christmas and Easter,--I cannot but love the old man. He died without seeing even the dawn of liberty which God has brought; but oh! I am sure he sees it from above. He died in the Capitol, in the midst of his labors, and the last words he said were, 'This is the last of earth; I am content.' And now, I trust, he is with God. "All, all are gone. All that raged; all that threatened; all the cowards that yielded; truckled, sold their country for a mess of pottage; all the _men_ that stood and bore infamy and scorn for the truth; all are silent in dust; the fight is over, but eternity will never efface from their souls whether they did well or ill--whether they fought bravely or failed like cowards. In a sense, our lives are irreparable. If we shrink, if we fail, if we choose the fleeting instead of the eternal, God may forgive us; but there must be an eternal regret! This man lived for humanity when hardest bestead; for truth when truth was unpopular; for Christ when Christ stood chained and scourged in the person of the slave." In the fall of 1887 she writes to her brother Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher of Brooklyn, N. Y.:-- 49 FOREST STREET, HARTFORD, CONN., _October 11, 1887._ DEAR BROTHER,--I was delighted to receive your kind letter. _You_ were my earliest religious teacher; your letters to me while a school-girl in Hartford gave me a high Christian aim and standard which I hope I have never lost. Not only did they do me good, but also my intimate friends, Georgiana May and Catherine Cogswell, to whom I read them. The simplicity, warmth, and childlike earnestness of those school days I love to recall. I am the _only one living_ of that circle of early friends. _Not one_ of my early schoolmates is living,--and now Henry, younger by a year or two than I, has gone--my husband also.[21] I often think, _Why_ am I spared? Is there yet anything for me to do? I am thinking with my son Charles's help of writing a review of my life, under the title, "Pebbles from the Shores of a Past Life." Charlie told me that he has got all written up to my twelfth or thirteenth year, when I came to be under sister Catherine's care in Hartford. I am writing daily my remembrances from that time. You were then, I think, teacher of the Grammar School in Hartford.... So, my dear brother, let us keep good heart; no evil can befall us. Sin alone is evil, and from that Christ will keep us. Our journey is _so_ short! I feel about all things now as I do about the things that happen in a hotel, after my trunk is packed to go home. I may be vexed and annoyed ... but what of it! I am going home soon. Your affectionate sister, HATTIE. To a friend she writes a little later:-- "I have thought much lately of the possibility of my leaving you all and going home. I am come to that stage of my pilgrimage that is within sight of the River of Death, and I feel that now I must have all in readiness day and night for the messenger of the King. I have sometimes had in my sleep strange perceptions of a vivid spiritual life near to and with Christ, and multitudes of holy ones, and the joy of it is like no other joy,--it cannot be told in the language of the world. What I have then I _know_ with absolute certainty, yet it is so unlike and above anything we conceive of in this world that it is difficult to put it into words. The inconceivable loveliness of Christ! It seems that about Him there is a sphere where the enthusiasm of love is the calm habit of the soul, that without words, without the necessity of demonstrations of affection, heart beats to heart, soul answers soul, we respond to the Infinite Love, and we feel his answer in us, and there is no need of words. All seemed to be busy coming and going on ministries of good, and passing each gave a thrill of joy to each as Jesus, the directing soul, the centre of all, "over all, in all, and through all," was working his beautiful and merciful will to redeem and save. I was saying as I awoke:-- "''Tis joy enough, my all in all, At thy dear feet to lie. Thou wilt not let me lower fall, And none can higher fly.' "This was but a glimpse; but it has left a strange sweetness in my mind." FOOTNOTE: [21] Professor Stowe died August, 1886. INDEX. ABBOTT, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob, 292. Aberdeen, reception in, 221. Abolition, English meetings in favor of, 389. Abolition sentiment, growth of, 87. Abolitionism made fashionable, 253. Adams, John Quincy, crusade of, against slavery, 509; holds floor of Congress fourteen days, 510; his religious life and trust, 511; died without seeing dawn of liberty, 511; life and letters of, 510. "Agnes of Sorrento," first draft of, 374; date of, 490; Whittier's praise of, 503. "Alabama Planter," savage attack of, on H. B. S., 187. Albert, Prince, Mrs. Stowe's letter to, 160; his reply, 164; meeting with, 271; death, 368. America, liberty in, 193; Ruskin on, 354. American novelist, Lowell on the, 330. Andover, Mass., beauty of, 186; Stowe family settled in, 188. Anti-slavery cause: result of English demonstrations, 252; letters to England, 160; feeling dreaded in South, 172; movement in Cincinnati, 81; in Boston, 145; Beecher family all anti-slavery men, 152. "Arabian Nights," H. B. S.'s delight in, 9. Argyll, Duke and Duchess of 229, 232; warmth of, 239; H. B. S. invited to visit, 270, 271; death of father of Duchess, 368. Argyll, Duchess of, letter from H. B. S. to, on England's attitude during our Civil War, 368; on _post bellum_ events, 395. "Atlantic Monthly," contains "Minister's Wooing," 327; Mrs. Stowe's address to women of England, 375; "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," 447, 453. BAILEY, Gamaliel, Dr., editor of "National Era," 157. Bangor, readings in, 493. Bates, Charlotte Fiske, reads a poem at Mrs. Stowe's seventieth birthday, 505. Baxter's "Saints' Rest," has a powerful effect on H. B. S., 32. Beecher, Catherine, eldest sister of H. B. S., 1; her education of H. B. S., 22; account of her own birth, 23; strong influence over Harriet, 22; girlhood of, 23; teacher at New London, 23; engagement, 23; drowning of her lover, 23; soul struggles after Prof. Fisher's death, 25, 26; teaches in his family, 25; publishes article on Free Agency, 26; opens school at Hartford, 27; solution of doubts while teaching, 28, 29; her conception of Divine Nature, 28; school at Hartford described by H. B. S., 29; doubts about Harriet's conversion, 35; hopes for "Hartford Female Seminary," 37; letter to Edward about Harriet's doubts, 38; note on Harriet's letter, 43; new school at Cincinnati, 53, 64, _et seq._; visits Cincinnati with father, 54; impressions of city, 54; homesickness, 62; at water cure, 113; a mother to sister Harriet, 509; letters to H. B. S. to, on her religious depression, 37; on religious doubts, 322. Beecher, Charles, brother of H. B. S., 2; in college, 56; goes to Florida, 402; letters from H. B. S., on mother's death, 2-4, 49. Beecher, Edward, Dr., brother of H. B. S., 1; influence over her, 22, 25; indignation against Fugitive Slave Act, 144; efforts to arouse churches, 265; letters from H. B. S. to, on early religious struggles, 36, 37; on her feelings, 39; on views of God, 42, 43, 44, 48; on death of friends and relatives, and the writing of her life by her son Charles, 512. Beecher, Esther, aunt of H. B. S., 53, 56, 57. Beecher family, famous reunion of, 89; circular letter to, 99. Beecher, Frederick, H. B. S.'s half-brother, death of, 13. Beecher, George, brother of H. B. S., 1; visit to, 45; enters Lane as student, 53; music and tracts, 58; account of journey to Cincinnati, 59; sudden death, 108; H. B. S. meets at Dayton one of his first converts, 499; his letters cherished, 508. Beecher, George, nephew of H. B. S., visit to, 498. Beecher, Mrs. George, letter from H. B. S. to, describing new home, 133. Beecher, Harriet E. first; death of, 1; second, (H. B. S.) birth of, 1. Beecher, Mrs. Harriet Porter, H. B. S.'s stepmother, 11; personal appearance and character of, 11, 12; pleasant impressions of new home and children, 12; at Cincinnati, 62. Beecher, Henry Ward, brother of H. B. S., birth of, 1; anecdote of, after mother's death, 2; first school, 8; conception of Divine Nature, 28; in college, 55; H. B. S. attends graduation, 73; editor of Cincinnati "Journal," 81; sympathy with anti-slavery movement, 84, 85, 87; at Brooklyn, 130; saves Edmonson's daughters, 178; H. B. S. visits, 364; views on Reconstruction, 397; George Eliot on Beecher trial, 472; his character as told by H. B. S., 475; love for Prof. Stowe, 475; his youth and life in West, 476; Brooklyn and his anti-slavery fight, 476; Edmonsons and Plymouth Church, 477; his loyalty and energy, 477; his religion, 477; popularity and personal magnetism, 478; terrible struggle in the Beecher trial, 478; bribery of jury, but final triumph, 479; ecclesiastical trial of, 479; committee of five appointed to bring facts, 479; his ideal purity and innocence, 480; power at death-beds and funerals, 480; beloved by poor and oppressed, 481; meets accusations by silence, prayer, and work, 481; his thanks and speech at Stowe Garden Party, 501; tribute to father, mother, and sister Harriet, 502; death, 512. Beecher, Isabella, H. B. S.'s half-sister, birth of, 13; goes to Cincinnati, 53. Beecher, James, H. B. S.'s half-brother, 45; goes to Cincinnati, 53; begins Sunday-school, 63. Beecher, Rev. Dr. Lyman, H. B. Stowe's father, 1; "Autobiography and Correspondence of," 2, 89; verdict on his wife's remarkable piety, 3; pride in his daughter's essay, 14; admiration of Walter Scott, 25; sermon which converts H. B. S., 33, 34; accepts call to Hanover Street Church, Boston, 35; president of Lane Theological Seminary, 53; first journey to Cincinnati, 53; removal and westward journey, 56 _et seq._; removes family to Cincinnati, 56; Beecher reunion, 89; powerful sermons on slave question, 152; his sturdy character, H. W. Beecher's eulogy upon, 502; death and reunion with H. B. S's mother, 509. Beecher, Mary, sister of H. B. S., 1; married, 55; letter to, 61; accompanies sister to Europe, 269; letters from H. B. S. to, on love for New England, 61; on visit to Windsor, 235. Beecher, Roxanna Foote, mother of H. B. S., 1; her death, 2; strong, sympathetic nature, 2; reverence for the Sabbath, 3; sickness, death, and funeral, 4; influence in family strong even after death, 5; character described by H. W. Beecher, 502; H. B. S.'s resemblance to, 502. Beecher, William, brother of H. B. S., 1; licensed to preach, 56. Bell, Henry, English inventor of steamboat, 215. Belloc, Mme., translates "Uncle Tom," 247. Belloc, M., to paint portrait of H. B. S., 241. Bentley, London publisher, offers pay for "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 202. "Betty's Bright Idea," date of, 491. Bible, 48; Uncle Tom's, 262; use and influence of, 263. "Bible Heroines," date of, 491. Bibliography of H. B. S., 490. Biography, H. B. S.'s remarks on writing and understanding, 126. Birney, J. G., office wrecked, 81 _et seq._; H. B. S.'s sympathy with, 84. Birthday, seventieth, celebration of by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 500. Blackwood's attack on Lady Byron, 448. Blantyre, Lord, 230. Bogue, David, 189-191. Boston opens doors to slave-hunters, 144. Boston Library, Prof. Stowe enjoys proximity to, 509. Bowdoin College calls Prof. Stowe, 125, 129. Bowen, H. C., 181. Bruce, John, of Litchfield Academy, H. B. S.'s tribute to, 14; lectures on Butler's "Analogy," 32. Brigham, Miss, character of, 46. Bright, John, letter to H. B. S. on her "Appeal to English Women," 389. Brooklyn, Mrs. Stowe's visit to brother Henry in, 130; visit in 1852, when she helps the Edmonson slave family, 178-180; Beecher, H. W. called to, 476; Beecher trial in, 478. Brown and the phantoms, 431. Brown, John, bravery of, 380. Browning, Mrs., on life and love, 52. Browning, E. B., letter to H. B. S., 356; death of, 368, 370. Browning, Robert and E. B, friendship with, 355. Brunswick, Mrs. Stowe's love of, 184; revisited, 324. Buck, Eliza, history of as slave, 201. Bull, J. D. and family, make home for H. B. S. while at school in Hartford, 30, 31. Bunsen, Chevalier, 233. Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Prof. Stowe's love of, 437. Burritt, Elihu, writes introduction to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 192; calls on Mrs. Stowe, 223. Butler's "Analogy," study of, by H. B. S., 32. "Byron Controversy," 445; history of, 455; George Eliot on, 458; Dr. Holmes on, 455. Byron, Lady, 239; letters from, 274, 281; makes donation to Kansas sufferers, 281; on power of words, 361; death of, 368, 370; her character assailed, 446; her first meeting with H. B. S., 447; dignity and calmness, 448; memoranda and letters about Lord Byron shown to Mrs. Stowe, 450; solemn interview with H. B. S., 453; letters to H. B. S. from, 274, 282; on "The Minister's Wooing," 343; farewell to, 313, 339; her confidences, 440; Mrs. Stowe's counsels to, 451. Byron, Lord, Mrs. Stowe on, 339; she suspects his insanity, 450; cheap edition of his works proposed, 453; Recollections of, by Countess Guiccioli, 446; his position as viewed by Dr. Holmes, 457; evidence of his poems for and against him, 457. "CABIN, The," literary centre, 185. Cairnes, Prof., on the "Fugitive Slave Law," 146. Calhoun falsifies census, 509. Calvinism, J. R. Lowell's sympathy with, 335. Cambridgeport, H. B. S. reads in, 491. Carlisle, Lord, praises "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 164; Mrs. Stowe's reply, 164; writes introduction to "Uncle Tom," 192; H. B. S. dines with, 228; farewell to, 248; letter from H. B. S. to on moral effect of slavery, 164; letter to H. B. S. from, 218. Cary, Alice and Phoebe, 157. Casaubon and Dorothea, criticism by H. B. S. on, 471. Catechisms, Church and Assembly, H. B. S.'s early study of, 6, 7. Chapman, Mrs. Margaret Weston, 310. Charpentier of Paris, publishes "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 192; eulogy of that work, 242. Chase, Salmon P., 69, 85. Chelsea, H. B. S. reads in, 492. Chicago, readings in, 498. Children of H. B. S., picture of three eldest, 90; appeal to, by H. B. S. 157; described by H. B. S., 198; letters to, from H. B. S. on European voyage and impressions, 205; on life in London, 228; on meeting at Stafford House, 232; on Vesuvius, 301, 416. "Chimney Corner, The," date of, 490. Cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, 120. Christ, life of, little understood, 127; communion with Him possible, 487; love and faith in, 513; study of his life, 418; his presence all that remains now, 507; his promises comfort the soul for separations by death, 486. "Christian Union," contains observations by H. B. S. on spiritualism and Mr. Owen's books, 465. Christianity and spiritualism, 487. Church, the, responsible for slavery, 151. Cincinnati, Lyman Beecher accepts call to, 53; Catherine Beecher's impressions of, 54, 55; Walnut Hills and Seminary, 54, 55; famine in, 100; cholera, 119; sympathetic audience in, 498. Civil War, Mrs. Stowe on causes of, 363. Clarke & Co. on English success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 190; offer author remuneration, 202. Clay, Henry, and his compromise, 143. Cogswell, Catherine Ledyard, school-friend of H. B. S., 31. College of Teachers, 79. Collins professorship, 129. Colored people, advance of, 255. Confederacy, A. H. Stephens on object of, 381. Courage and cheerfulness of H. B. S., 473. Cranch, E. P., 69. Cruikshank illustrates "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 192. "DANIEL DERONDA," appears, in "Harper's," 473; his nature like H. W. Beecher's, 481; admiration of Prof. Stowe for, 482. Da Vinci's Last Supper, H. B. S.'s impressions of, 305. Death of youngest-born of H. B. S., 124; anguish at, 198. Death, H. B. S. within sight of the River of, 513. "Debatable Land between this World and the Next," 464. Declaration of Independence, H. B. S.'s feeling about, 11; death-knell to slavery, 141. Degan, Miss, 32, 41, 46. Democracy and American novelists, Lowell on, 329. "De Profundis," motive of Mrs. Browning's, 357. De Staël, Mme., and Corinne, 67. Dickens, first sight of, 226; J. R. Lowell on, 328. "Dog's Mission, A," date of, 491. Domestic service, H. B. S.'s trouble with, 200. Doubters and disbelievers may find comfort in spiritualism, 487. Doubts, religious, after death of eldest son, 321. Douglass, Frederick, 254; letters from H. B. S. to, on slavery, 149. Drake, Dr., family physician, 63; one of founders of "College of Teachers," 79. "Dred," 266; Sumner's letter on, 268; Georgiana May on, 268; English edition of, 270; presented to Queen Victoria, 271; her interest in, 277, 285; demand for, in Glasgow, 273; Duchess of Sutherland's copy, 276; Low's sales of, 278, 279; "London Times," on, 278; English reviews on, severe, 279; "Revue des Deux Mondes" on, 290; Miss Martineau on, 309; Prescott on, 311; Lowell on, 334; now "Nina Gordon," publication of, 490. Dudevant, Madame. See Sand, George. Dufferin, Lord and Lady, their love of American literature, 284, 285. Dundee, meeting at, 222. Dunrobin Castle, visit to, 276. E----, letter from H. B. S. to, on breakfast at the Trevelyans', 234. "Earthly Care a Heavenly Discipline," 131. East Hampton, L. I., birthplace of Catherine Beecher, 23. Eastman, Mrs., writes a Southern reply to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 163. Edgeworth, Maria, 247. Edinburgh, H. B. S. in, 216; return to, 222. Edmonson slave family; efforts to save, 179; Mrs. Stowe educates and supports daughters, 179; raises money to free mother and two slave children, 180. Edmonson, death of Mary, 238. Education, H. B. S.'s interest in, 72, 73. Edwards, Jonathan, the power of, 406; his treatise on "The Will," refuted by Catherine Beecher, 26. Eliot, George, 419; a good Christian, 420; on psychical problems, 421; on "Oldtown Folks," 443; her despondency in "writing life" and longing for sympathy, 460; on power of fine books, 461; on religion, 462; desires to keep an open mind on all subjects, 467; on impostures of spiritualism, 467; lack of "jollitude" in "Middlemarch," 471; invited to visit America, 471; sympathy with H. B. S. in Beecher trial, 472; proud of Stowes' interest in her "spiritual children," 482; on death of Mr. Lewes and gratitude for sympathy of H. B. S., 483; a "woman worth loving," H. B. S.'s love for greater than her admiration, 475; letters from H. B. S. to, on spiritualism, 463; describes Florida nature and home, 468; reply to letter of sympathy giving facts in the Beecher case, 473; from Professor Stowe on spiritualism, 419; letter to H. B. S. from, 421; with sympathy on abuse called out by the Byron affair, 458; on effect of letter of H. B. S. to Mrs. Follen upon her mind, 460; on joy of sympathy, 460; reply to letter on spiritualism, 466; sympathy with her in the Beecher trial, 472. Elmes, Mr., 57. "Elms, The Old," H. B. S.'s seventieth birthday celebrated at, 500. "Elsie Venner," Mrs. Stowe's praise of, 360, 362, 415. Emancipation, Proclamation of, 384. Emmons, Doctor, the preaching of, 25. England and America compared, 177. England, attitude of, in civil war, grief at, 369; help of to America on slave question, 166, 174. English women's address on slavery, 374; H. B. S.'s reply in the "Atlantic Monthly," 374. Europe, first visit to, 189; second visit to, 268; third visit to, 343. FAITH in Christ, 513. Famine in Cincinnati, 100. Fiction, power of, 216. Fields, Mrs. Annie, in Boston, 470; her tribute to Mrs. Stowe's courage and cheerfulness, 473; George Eliot's mention of, 483; her poem read at seventieth birthday, 505. Fields, Jas. T., Mr. and Mrs., visit of H. B. S. to, 492. Fisher, Prof. Alexander Metcalf, 23; engagement to Catherine Beecher, 23; sails for Europe, 23, 24; his death by drowning in shipwreck of Albion, 24; Catherine Beecher's soul struggles, over his future fate, 25; influence of these struggles depicted in "The Minister's Wooing," 25. Florence, Mrs. Stowe's winter in, 349. Florida, winter home in Mandarin, 401; like Sorrento, 463; wonderful growth of nature, 468; how H. B. S.'s house was built, 469; her happy life in, 474; longings for, 482; her enjoyment of happy life of the freedmen in, 506. Flowers, love of, 405, 406, 416, 469; painting, 469. Follen, Mrs., 197; letter from H. B. S. to, on her biography, 197. Foote, Harriet, aunt of H. B. S., 5; energetic English character, 6; teaches niece catechism, 6, 7. Foote, Mrs. Roxanna, grandmother of H. B. S., first visit to, 5-7; visit to in 1827, 38. "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World," 464. "Footsteps of the Master," published, 491. "Fraser's Magazine" on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 168; Helps's review of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 175. "Free Agency," Catherine Beecher's refutation of Edwards on "The Will," 26. French critics, high standing of, 291. Friends, love for, 51; death of, 410; death of old, whose letters are cherished, 508; death of, takes away a part of ourselves, 485. Friendship, opinion of, 50. Fugitive Slave Act, suffering caused by, 144; Prof. Cairnes on, 146; practically repealed, 384. Future life, glimpses of, leave strange sweetness, 513. Future punishment, ideas of, 340. GARRISON, W. L., to Mrs. Stowe on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 161; in hour of victory, 396; his "Liberator," 261; sent with H. W. Beecher to raise flag on Sumter, 477; letters to H. B. S. from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 161; on slavery, 251-262; on arousing the church, 265. Gaskell, Mrs., at home, 312. Geography, school, written by Mrs. Stowe, 65 _note_, 158. Germany's tribute to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 195. Gladstone, W. E., 233. Glasgow, H. B. S. visits, 210; Anti-slavery Society of, 174, 189, 213. Glasgow Anti-slavery Society, letter from H. B. S. to, 251. God, H. B. S.'s views of, 30, 42, 43, 46, 47; trust in, 112, 132, 148, 341; doubts and final trust in, 321, 396; his help in time of need, 496. Goethe and Mr. Lewes, 420; Prof. Stowe's admiration of, 420. Goldschmidt, Madame. See Lind, Jenny. Görres on spiritualism and mysticism, 412, 474. Grandmother, letter from H. B. S. to, on breaking up of Litchfield home, 35; on school life in Hartford, 41. Granville, Lord, 233. "Gray's Elegy," visit to scene of, 236. Guiccioli, Countess, "Recollections of Lord Byron," 446. HALL, Judge James, 68, 69. Hallam, Arthur Henry, 235. Hamilton and Manumission Society, 141. Harper & Brothers reprint Guiccioli's "Recollections of Byron," 446. Hartford, H. B. S. goes to school at, 21; the Stowes make their home at, 373. Harvey, a phantom, 430. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 353; letter on, 187; on slavery, 394; letter to H. B. S. on, from English attitude towards America, 394. Health, care of, 115. Heaven, belief in, 59. Helps, Arthur, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 175; meets H. B. S., 229; letter from H. B. S. to, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 175. Henry, Patrick, on slavery, 141. Hentz, Mrs. Caroline Lee, 69, 80. Higginson, T. W., letter to H. B. S. from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 162. "History, The, of the Byron Controversy," 490. Holmes, O. W., correspondence with, 360, _et seq._; attacks upon, 361; H. B. S. asks advice from, about manner of telling facts in relation to Byron Controversy, 452, 454; sends copy of "Lady Byron Vindicated" to, 454; on facts of case, 455; on sympathy displayed in his writings, 411; poem on H. B. S.'s seventieth birthday, 503; tribute to Uncle Tom, 504; letters from H. B. S. to, 359, 410; on "Poganuc People," 414; asking advice about Byron Controversy and article for "Atlantic Monthly," 452; letters to H. B. S. from, 360, 409; on facts in the Byron Controversy, 456. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., celebrate H. B. S.'s seventieth birthday, 500. Houghton, H. O., presents guests to H. B. S., on celebration of seventieth birthday, 500; address of welcome by, 501. "House and Home Papers" published, 490. Howitt, Mary, calls on H. B. S., 231. Human life, sacredness of, 193. Human nature in books and men, 328. Hume and mediums, 419. Humor of Mrs. Stowe's books, George Eliot on, 462. Husband and wife, sympathy between, 105. IDEALISM _versus_ Realism, Lowell on, 334. "Independent," New York, work for, 186; Mrs. Browning reads Mrs. Stowe in, 357. Inverary Castle, H. B. S.'s, visit to, 271. Ireland's gift to Mrs. Stowe, 248. JEFFERSON, Thomas, on slavery, 141. Jewett, John P., of Boston, publisher of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 158. KANSAS Nebraska Bill, 255; urgency of question, 265. "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" projected, 174; written, 188; contains facts, 203; read by Pollock, 226; by Argyll, 239; sickness caused by, 252; sale, 253; facts woven into "Dred," 266; date of in chronological list, 490. Kingsley, Charles, upon effect of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 196; visit to, 286; letters to H. B. S. from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 196, 218. Kossuth, on freedom, 195; Mrs. Stowe calls upon, 237. LABOUCHERE, Lady Mary, visit to, 283. "Lady Byron Vindicated," 454; date, 490. Letters, circular, writing of, a custom in the Beecher family, 99; H. B. S.'s love of, 62, 63; H. B. S.'s peculiar emotions on re-reading old, 507. Lewes, G. H., George Eliot's letter after death of, 483. Lewes, Mrs. G. H. See Eliot, George, 325. "Library of Famous Fiction," date of, 491. "Liberator," The, 261; and Bible, 263; suspended after the close of civil war, 396. Lincoln and slavery, 380; death of, 398. Lind, Jenny, liberality of, 181; H. B. S. attends concert by, 182; letter to H. B. S. from, on her delight in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 183; letters from H. B. S. to, with appeal for slaves, 183, 184. Litchfield, birthplace of H. B. S., 1; end of her child-life in, 21; home at broken up, 35. Literary labors, early, 15-21; prize story, 68; club essays, 69-71; contributor to "Western Monthly Magazine," 81; school geography, 65; described in letter to a friend, 94; price for, 103; fatigue caused by, 489; length of time passed in, with list of books written, 490. Literary work _versus_ domestic duties, 94 _et seq._, 139; short stories--"New Year's Story" for "N. Y. Evangelist," 146; "A Scholar's Adventures in the Country" for "Era," 146. Literature, opinion of, 44. "Little Pussy Willow," date of, 491. Liverpool, warm reception of H. B. S. at, 207. London poor and Southern slaves, 175. London, first visit to, 225; second visit to, 281. Longfellow, H. W., congratulations of, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 161; letter on, 187; Lord Granville's likeness to, 233; letters to H. B. S. from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 161. Love, the impulse of life, 51, 52. Lovejoy, J. P., murdered, 143, 145; aided by Beechers, 152. Low, Sampson, on success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" abroad, 189. Low, Sampson & Co. publish "Dred," 269; their sales, 279. Lowell, J. R., Duchess of Sutherland's interest in, 277; less known in England than he should be, 285; on "Uncle Tom," 327; on Dickens and Thackeray, 327, 334; on "The Minister's Wooing," 330, 333; on idealism, 334; letter to H. B. S. from, on "The Minister's Wooing," 333. MACAULAY, 233, 234. McClellan, Gen., his disobedience to the President's commands, 367. "Magnalia," Cotton Mather's, a mine of wealth to H. B. S., 10; Prof. Stowe's interest in, 427. Maine law, curiosity about in England, 229. Mandarin, Mrs. Stowe at, 403; like Sorrento, 463; how her house was built, 469; her happy out-door life in, relieved from domestic care, 474; longings for home at, 492; freedmen's happy life in South, 506. Mann, Horace, makes a plea for slaves, 159. Martineau, Harriet, letter to H. B. S. from, 208. May, Georgiana, school and life-long friend of H. B. S., 31, 32; Mrs. Sykes, 132; her ill-health and farewell to H. B. S., 268; letters from H. B. S. to, 44, 49, 50; account of westward journey, 56; on labor in establishing school, 65, 66; on education, 72; just before her marriage to Mr. Stowe, 76; on her early married life and housekeeping, 89; on birth of her son, 101; describing first railroad ride, 106; on her children, 119; her letter to Mrs. Foote, grandmother of H. B. S., 38; letters to H. B. S. from, 161, 268. "Mayflower, The," 103, 158; revised and republished, 251; date of, 490. Melancholy, 118, 341; a characteristic of Prof. Stowe in childhood, 436. "Men of Our Times," date of, 410. "Middlemarch," H. B. S. wishes to read, 468; character of Casaubon in, 471. Milman, Dean, 234. Milton's hell, 303. "Minister's Wooing, The," soul struggles of Mrs. Marvyn, foundation of incident, 25; idea of God in, 29; impulse for writing, 52; appears in "Atlantic Monthly," 326; Lowell, J. R. on, 327, 330, 333; Whittier on, 327; completed, 332; Ruskin on, 336; undertone of pathos, 339; visits England in relation to, 343; date of, 490; "reveals warm heart of man" beneath the Puritan in Whittier's poem, 502. Missouri Compromise, 142, 257; repealed, 379. Mohl, Madame, and her _salon_, 291. Money-making, reading as easy a way as any of, 494. Moral aim in novel-writing, J. R. Lowell on, 333. "Mourning Veil, The," 327. "Mystique La," on spiritualism, 412. NAPLES and Vesuvius, 302. "National Era," its history, 157; work for, 186. Negroes, petition from, presented by J. Q. Adams, 510. New England, Mrs. Stowe's knowledge of, 332; in "The Minister's Wooing," 333; life pictured in "Oldtown Folks," 444. New London, fatigue of reading at, 496. Newport, tiresome journey to, on reading tour, 497. Niagara, impressions of, 75. Normal school for colored teachers, 203. "North American Review" on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 254. North _versus_ South, England on, 388, 391. Norton, C. E., Ruskin on the proper home of, 354. "OBSERVER, New York," denunciation of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 168, 172. "Oldtown Fireside Stories," 438; strange spiritual experiences of Prof. Stowe, 438; Sam Lawson a real character, 439; relief after finishing, 489; date of in chronological list, 491; in Whittier's poem on seventieth birthday "With Old New England's flavor rife," 503. "Oldtown Folks," 404; Prof. Stowe original of "Harry" in, 421; George Eliot on its reception in England, 443, 461, 463; picture of N. E. life, 444; date of, 490; Whittier's praise of, "vigorous pencil-strokes" in poem on seventieth birthday, 503. Orthodoxy, 335. "Our Charley," date of, 490. Owen, Robert Dale, his "Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World" and "The Debatable Land between this World and the Next," 464; H. B. S. wishes George Eliot to meet, 464. PALMERSTON, Lord, meeting with, 232. "Palmetto Leaves" published, 405; date, 491. Papacy, The, 358. Paris, first visit to, 241; second visit, 286. Park, Professor Edwards A., 186. Parker, Theodore, on the Bible and Jesus, 264. Paton, Bailie, host of Mrs. Stowe, 211. Peabody, pleasant reading in, 496; Queen Victoria's picture at, 496. "Pearl of Orr's Island, The," 186, 187; first published, 327; Whittier's favorite, 327; date of, 490. "Pebbles from the Shores of a Past Life," a review of her life proposed to be written by H. B. S. with aid of son Charles, 512. Phantoms seen by Professor Stowe, 425. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, writes poem on H. B. S.'s seventieth birthday, 505. "Philanthropist, The," anti-slavery paper, 81, 87. Phillips, Wendell, attitude of after war, 396. "Pink and White Tyranny," date of, 491. Plymouth Church, saves Edmonson's daughters, 179; slavery and, 477; clears Henry Ward Beecher by acclamation, 478; calls council of Congregational ministers and laymen, 479; council ratifies decision of Church, 479; committee of five appointed to bring facts which could be proved, 479; missions among poor particularly effective at time of trial, 481. "Poganuc People," 413; sent to Dr. Holmes, 414; date of, 491. Pollock, Lord Chief Baron, 226. Poor, generosity of touches H. B. S., 219. Portland, H. B. S.'s friends there among the past, 494; her readings in, 493. Portraits of Mrs. Stowe, 231; Belloc to paint, 241; untruth of, 288. Poverty in early married life, 198. Prescott, W. H., letter to H. B, S. from, on "Dred," 311. "Presse, La," on "Dred," 291. Providential aid in sickness, 113. "QUEER Little People," date of, 490. READING and teaching, 139. Religion and humanity, George Eliot on, 462. "Religious poems," date of, 490. "Revue des Deux Mondes" on "Dred," 290. Riots in Cincinnati and anti-slavery agitation, 85. Roenne, Baron de, visits Professor Stowe, 102. Roman politics in 1861, 358. Rome, H. B. S.'s journey to, 294; impressions of, 300. Ruskin, John, letters to H. B. S. from, on "The Minister's Wooing," 336; on his dislike of America, but love for American friends, 354. Ruskin and Turner, 313. SAINT-BEUVE, H. B. S.'s liking for, 474. Sales, Francis de, H. W. Beecher compared with, 481. Salisbury, Mr., interest of in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 191. Salons, French, 289. Sand, George, reviews "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 196. Scotland, H. B. S.'s first visit to, 209. Scott, Walter, Lyman Beecher's opinion of, when discussing novel-reading, 25; monument in Edinburgh, 217. Sea, H. B. S.'s nervous horror of, 307. Sea-voyages, H. B. S. on, 205. Semi-Colon Club, H. B. S. becomes a member of, 68. Shaftesbury, Earl of, letter of, to Mrs. Stowe, 170. Shaftesbury, Lord, to H. B. S., letter from, 170; letter from H. B. S. to, 170; America and, 369. Skinner, Dr., 57. Slave, aiding a fugitive, 93. Slave-holding States on English address, 378; intensity of conflict in, 379. Slavery, H. B. S.'s first notice of, 71; anti-slavery agitation, 81; death-knell of, 141; Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry on, 141; growth of, 142; résumé of its history, 143; responsibility of church for, 151; Lord Carlisle's opinion on, 164; moral effect of, 165; sacrilege of, 193; its past and future, 194; its injustice, 255; its death-blow; 370; English women's appeal against, 375; J. Q. Adams' crusade against, 509; gone forever, 506. Slaves, H. B. S.'s work for and sympathy with, 152; family sorrows of, 318. Smith, Anna, helper to Mrs. S., 115; _note_, 200. Soul, immortality of, H. B. S.'s essay written at age of twelve: first literary production, 15-21; Addison's remarks upon, 18; Greek and Roman idea of immortality, 20; light given by Gospel, 20, 21; Christ on, 109. South, England's sympathy with the, 370, 386. South Framingham, good audience at reading in, 495. "Souvenir, The," 105. Spiritualism, Mrs. Stowe on, 350, 351, 464; Mrs. Browning on, 356; Holmes, O. W., on, 411; "La Mystique" and Görres on, 412, 474; Professor Stowe's strange experiences in, 420, 423; George Eliot on psychical problems of, 421; on "Charlatanerie" connected with, 467; Robert Dale Owen on, 464; Goethe on, 465; H. B. S.'s letter to George Eliot on, 466; her mature views on, 485; a comfort to doubters and disbelievers, 487; from Christian standpoint, 487. Stafford House meeting, 233. Stephens, A. H., on object of Confederacy, 381. Storrs, Dr. R. S., 181. Stowe, Calvin E., 56; death of first wife, 75; his engagement to Harriet E. Beecher, 76; their marriage, 76, 77; his work in Lane Seminary, 79; sent by the Seminary to Europe on educational matters, 80; returns, 88; his Educational Report presented, 89; aids a fugitive slave, 93; strongly encourages his wife in her literary aspirations, 102, 105; care of the sick students in Lane Seminary, 107; is "house-father" during his wife's illness and absence, 113; goes to water cure after his wife's return from the same, 119; absent from Cincinnati home at death of youngest child, 124; accepts the Collins Professorship at Bowdoin, 125; gives his mother his reasons for leaving Cincinnati, 128; remains behind to finish college work, while wife and three children leave for Brunswick, Me., 129; resigns his professorship at Bowdoin, and accepts a call to Andover, 184; accompanies his wife to Europe, 205; his second trip with wife to Europe, 269; sermon after his son's death, 322; great sorrow at his bereavement, 324; goes to Europe for the fourth time, 345; resigns his position at Andover, 373; in Florida, 403; failing health, 417; his letter to George Eliot, 420; H. B. S. uses his strange experiences in youth as material for her picture of "Harry" in "Oldtown Folks," 421; the psychological history of his strange child-life, 423; curious experiences with phantoms, and good and bad spirits, 427; visions of fairies, 435; love of reading, 437; his power of character-painting shown in his description of a visit to his relatives, 439; George Eliot's mental picture of his personality, 461; enjoys life and study in Florida, 463; his studies on Prof. Görres' book, "Die Christliche Mystik," and its relation to his own spiritual experience, 474; love for Henry Ward Beecher returned by latter, 475; absorbed in "Daniel Deronda," 482; "over head and ears in _diablerie_," 484; fears he has not long to live, 491; dull at wife's absence on reading tour, 496; enjoys proximity to Boston Library, and "Life of John Quincy Adams," 509; death, 512 and _note_; letters from H. B. S. to, 80, 106; on her illness, 112, 114, 117; on cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, 120; on sickness, death of son Charley, 122; account of new home, 133; on her writings and literary aspirations, 146; on success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 162; on her interest in the Edmonson slave family, 180; on life in London, 238; on visit to the Duke of Argyle, 271; from Dunrobin Castle, 275; on "Dred," 282; other letters from abroad, 282; on life in Paris, 286; on journey to Rome, 294; on impressions of Rome, 300; on Swiss journey, 348; from Florence, 349; from Paris, 353; on farewell to her soldier son, 364; visit to Duchess of Argyle, 366; on her reading tour, 491; on his health and her enforced absence from him, 492; on reading, at Chelsea, 492; at Bangor and Portland, 493; at South Framingham and Haverhill, 495; Peabody, 496; fatigue at New London reading, 496; letters from to H. B. S. on visit to his relatives and description of home life, 440; to mother on reasons for leaving the West, 128; to George Eliot, 420; to son Charles, 345. Stowe, Charles E., seventh child of H. B. S., birth of, 139; at Harvard, 406; at Bonn, 412; letter from Calvin E. Stowe to, 345; letter from H. B. S. to, on her school life, 29; on "Poganuc People," 413; on her readings in the West, 497; on selection of papers and letters for her biography, 507; on interest of herself and Prof. Stowe in life and anti-slavery career of John Quincy Adams, 509. Stowe, Eliza Tyler (Mrs. C. E.), death of, 75; twin daughter of H. B. S., 88. Stowe, Frederick William, second son of H. B. S., 101; enlists in First Massachusetts, 364; made lieutenant for bravery, 366; mother's visit to, 367; severely wounded, 372; subsequent effects of the wound, never entirely recovers, his disappearance and unknown fate, 373; ill-health after war, Florida home purchased for his sake, 399. Stowe, Georgiana May, daughter of H. B. S., birth of, 108; family happy in her marriage, 399; letter from H. B. S. to, 340. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, birth and parentage of, 1; first memorable incident, the death of her mother, 2; letter to her brother Charles on her mother's death, 2; incident of the tulip bulbs and mother's gentleness, 2; first journey a visit to her grandmother, 5; study of catechisms under her grandmother and aunt, 6; early religious and Biblical reading, 8; first school at the age of five, 8; hunger after mental food, 9; joyful discovery of "The Arabian Nights," in the bottom of a barrel of dull sermons, 9; reminiscences of reading in father's library, 10; impression made by the Declaration of Independence, 11; appearance and character of her stepmother, 11, 12; healthy, happy child-life, 13; birth of her half-sister Isabella and H. B. S.'s care of infant, 14; early love of writing, 14; her essay selected for reading at school exhibitions, 14; her father s pride in essay, 15; subject of essay, arguments for belief in the Immortality of the Soul, 15-21; end of child-life in Litchfield, 21; goes to sister Catherine's school at Hartford, 29; describes Catherine Beecher's school in letter to son, 29; her home with the Bulls, 30, 31; school friends, 31, 32; takes up Latin, her study of Ovid and Virgil, 32; dreams of being a poet and writes "Cleon," a drama, 32; her conversion, 33, 34; doubts of relatives and friends, 34, 35; connects herself with First Church, Hartford, 36; her struggle with rigid theology, 36; her melancholy and doubts, 37, 38; necessity of cheerful society, 38; visit to grandmother, 38; return to Hartford, 41; interest in painting lessons, 41; confides her religious doubts to her brother Edward, 42; school life in Hartford, 46; peace at last, 49; accompanies her father and family to Cincinnati, 53; describes her journey, 56; yearnings for New England home, 60; ill-health and depression, 64; her life in Cincinnati and teaching at new school established by her sister Catherine and herself, 65; wins prize for short story, 68; joins "Semicolon Club," 68; slavery first brought to her personal notice, 71; attends Henry Ward Beecher's graduation, 73; engagement, 76; marriage, 76; anti-slavery agitation, 82; sympathy with Birney, editor of anti-slavery paper in Cincinnati, 84; birth of twin daughters, 88; of her third child, 89; reunion of the Beecher family, 89; housekeeping _versus_ literary work, 93; birth of second son, 101; visits Hartford, 102; literary work encouraged, 102, 105; sickness in Lane Seminary, 107; death of brother George, 108; birth of third daughter, 108; protracted illness and poverty, 110; seminary struggles, 110; goes to water cure, 113; returns home, 118; birth of sixth child, 118; bravery in cholera epidemic, 120; death of youngest child Charles, 123; leaves Cincinnati, 125; removal to Brunswick, 126; getting settled, 134; husband arrives, 138; birth of seventh child, 139; anti-slavery feeling aroused by letters from Boston, 145; "Uncle Tom's Cabin," first thought of, 145; writings for papers, 147; "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appears as a serial, 156; in book form, 159; its wonderful success, 160; praise from Longfellow, Whittier, Garrison, Higginson, 161; letters from English nobility, 164, _et seq._; writes "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," 174, 188; visits Henry Ward in Brooklyn, 178; raises money to free Edmondson family, 181; home-making at Andover, 186; first trip to Europe, 189, 205; wonderful success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" abroad, 189; her warm reception at Liverpool, 207; delight in Scotland, 209; public reception and tea-party at Glasgow, 212; warm welcome from Scotch people, 214; touched by the "penny offering" of the poor for the slaves, 219; Edinburgh soirée, 219; meets English celebrities at Lord Mayor's dinner in London, 226; meets English nobility, 229; Stafford House, 232; breakfast at Lord Trevelyan's, 234; Windsor, 235; presentation of bracelet, 233; of inkstand, 240; Paris, first visit to, 241; _en route_ for Switzerland, 243; Geneva and Chillon, 244; Grindelwald to Meyringen, 245; London, _en route_ for America, 247; work for slaves in America, 250; correspondence with Garrison, 261, _et seq._; "Dred," 266; second visit to Europe, 268; meeting with Queen Victoria, 270; visits Inverary Castle, 271; Dunrobin Castle, 275; Oxford and London, 280; visits the Laboucheres, 283; Paris, 289; _en route_ to Rome, 294; Naples and Vesuvius, 301; Venice and Milan, 305; homeward journey and return, 306, 314; death of oldest son, 315; visits Dartmouth, 319; receives advice from Lowell on "The Pearl of Orr's Island," 327; "The Minister's Wooing," 327, 330, 334; third trip to Europe, 342; Duchess of Sutherland's warm welcome, 346; Switzerland, 348; Florence, 349; Italian journey, 352; return to America, 353; letters from Ruskin, Mrs. Browning, Holmes, 353, 362; bids farewell to her son, 364; at Washington, 366; her son wounded at Gettysburg, 372; his disappearance, 373; the Stowes remove to Hartford, 373; Address to women of England on slavery, 374; winter home in Florida, 401; joins the Episcopal Church, 402; erects schoolhouse and church in Florida, 404; "Palmetto, Leaves," 405; "Poganuc People," 413; warm reception at South, 415; last winter in Florida, 417; writes "Oldtown Folks," 404; her interest in husband's strange spiritual experiences, 438; H. B. S. justifies her action in Byron Controversy, 445; her love and faith in Lady Byron, 449; reads Byron letters, 450; counsels silence and patience to Lady Byron, 451; writes "True Story of Lady Byron's Life," 447, 453; publishes "Lady Byron Vindicated," 454; "History of the Byron Controversy," 455; her purity of motive in this painful matter, 455; George Eliot's sympathy with her in Byron matter, 458; her friendship with George Eliot dates from letter shown by Mrs. Follen, 459, 460; describes Florida life and peace to George Eliot, 463; her interest in Mr. Owen and spiritualism, 464; love of Florida life and nature, 468; history of Florida home, 469; impressions of "Middlemarch," 471; invites George Eliot to come to America, 472; words of sympathy on Beecher trial from George Eliot, and Mrs. Stowe's reply, 473; her defense of her brother's purity of life, 475; Beecher trial drawn on her heart's blood, 480; her mature views on spiritualism, 484; her doubts of ordinary manifestations, 486; soul-cravings after dead friends satisfied by Christ's promises, 486; chronological list of her books, 490; accepts offer from N. E. Lecture Bureau to give readings from her works, 491; gives readings in New England, 491, _et seq._; warm welcome in Maine, 493; sympathetic audiences in Massachusetts, 495; fatigue of traveling and reading at New London, 496; Western reading tour, 497; "fearful distances and wretched trains," 498; seventieth anniversary of birthday celebrated by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 500; H. O. Houghton's welcome, 501; H. W. Beecher's reply and eulogy on sister, 502; Whittier's poem at seventieth birthday, 502; Holmes' poem, 503; other poems of note written for the occasion, 505; Mrs. Stowe's thanks, 505; joy in the future of the colored race, 506; reading old letters and papers, 507; her own letters to Mr. Stowe and letters from friends, 508; interest in Life of John Quincy Adams and his crusade against slavery, 510; death of husband, 512 and _note_; of Henry Ward Beecher, 512; thinks of writing review of her life aided by son, under title of "Pebbles from the Shores of a Past Life," 512; her feelings on the nearness of death, but perfect trust in Christ, 513; glimpses of the future life leave a strange sweetness in her mind, 513. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, twin daughter of H. B. S., 88. Stowe, Henry Ellis, first son of H. B. S., 89; goes to Europe, 269; returns to enter Dartmouth, 278; death of, 315; his character, 317; his portrait, 320; mourning for, 341, 350. Stowe, Samuel Charles, sixth child of H. B. S., birth of, 118; death of, 124; anguish at loss of, 198; early death of, 508. Study, plans for a, 104. Sturge, Joseph, visit to, 223. Suffrage, universal, H. W. Beecher advocate of, 477. Sumner, Charles, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 196; letter to H. B. S. from, 268. Sumter, Fort, H. W. Beecher raises flag on, 477. "Sunny Memories," 251; date of, 491. Sutherland, Duchess of, 188, 218; friend to America, 228; at Stafford House presents gold bracelet, 233; visit to, 274, 276; fine character, 277; sympathy with on son's death, 319; warm welcome to H. B. S., 346; death of, 410; letters from H. B. S. to, on "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," 188; on death of eldest son, 315. Sutherland, Lord, personal appearance of, 232. Swedenborg, weary messages from spirit-world of, 486. Swiss Alps, visit to, 244; delight in, 246. Swiss interest in "Uncle Tom," 244. Switzerland, H. B. S. in, 348. Sykes, Mrs. See May, Georgiana. TALFOURD, Mr. Justice, 226. Thackeray, W. M., Lowell on, 328. Thanksgiving Day in Washington, freed slaves celebrate, 387. "Times, London," on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 168; on Mrs. Stowe's new dress, 237; on "Dred," 278; Miss Martineau's criticism on, 310. Titcomb, John, aids H. B. S. in moving, 137. Tourgée, Judge A. W., his speech at seventieth birthday, 505. Trevelyan, Lord and Lady, 231; breakfast to Mrs. Stowe, 234. Triqueti, Baron de, models bust of H. B. S., 289. Trowbridge, J. T., writes on seventieth birthday, 505. "True Story of Lady Byron's Life, The," in "Atlantic Monthly," 447. Tupper, M. F., calls on H. B. S., 231. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," description of Augustine St. Clair's mother's influence a simple reproduction of Mrs. Lyman Beecher's influence, 5; written under love's impulse, 52; fugitives' escape, foundation of story, 93; popular conception of author of, 127; origin and inspiration of, 145; Prof. Cairnes on, 146; Uncle Tom's death, conception of, 148; letter to Douglas about facts, 149; appears in the "Era," 149, 156; came from heart, 153; a religious work, object of, 154; its power, 155; begins a serial in "National Era," 156; price paid by "Era," 158; publisher's offer, 158; first copy of books sold, 159; wonderful success, 160; praise from Longfellow, Whittier, Garrison, and Higginson, 161, 162; threatening letters, 163; Eastman's, Mrs., rejoinder to, 163; reception in England, "Times," on, 168; political effect of, 168, 169; book under interdict in South, 172; "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," 174, 188; Jenny Lind's praise of, 183; attack upon, 187; Sampson Low upon its success abroad, 189; first London publisher, 189; number of editions sold in Great Britain and abroad, 190; dramatized in U.S. and London, 192; European edition, preface to, 192; fact not fiction, 193; translations of, 195; German tribute to, 195; George Sand's review, 196; remuneration for, 202; written with heart's blood, 203; Swiss interest in, 244, 245; Mme. Belloc translates, 247; "North American Review" on, 254; in France, 291; compared with "Dred," 285, 309; J. R. Lowell on, 327, 330; Mrs. Stowe rereads after war, 396; later books compared with, 409; H. W. Beecher's approval of, 476; new edition with introduction sent to George Eliot, 483; date of, 490; Whittier's mention of, in poem on seventieth birthday, 502; Holmes' tribute to, in poem on same occasion, 504. UPHAM, Mrs., kindness to H. B. S., 133; visit to, 324. VENICE, 304. Victoria, Queen, H. B. S.'s interview with, 270; gives her picture to Geo. Peabody, 496. Vizetelly, Henry, first London publisher of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 189, 191. WAKEFIELD, reading at, 495. Walnut Hills, picture of, 65; and old home revisited, 499. Waltham, audience inspires reader, 496. Washington, Mrs. Stowe visits soldier son at, 366. Washington on slavery, 141. Water cure, H. B. S. at, 113. "We and our Neighbors," date of, 491. Webster, Daniel, famous speech of, 143. Weld, Theodore D. in the anti-slavery movement, 81. Western travel, discomforts of, 498. Whately, Archbishop, letter to H. B. S. from, 391. Whitney, A. D. T., writes poem on seventieth birthday, 505. Whitney, Eli, and the cotton gin, 142. Whittier's "Ichabod," a picture of Daniel Webster, 143. Whittier, J. G., 157; letter to W. L. Garrison from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 161; letter to H. B. S. from, on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 162; on "Pearl of Orr's Island," 327; on "Minister's Wooing," 327; poem on H. B. S's seventieth birthday, 502. Windsor, visit to, 235. Womanhood, true, H. B. S. on intellect _versus_ heart, 475. Woman's rights, H. W. Beecher, advocate of, 478. Women of America, Appeal from H. B. S. to, 255. Women's influence, power of, 258. ZANESVILLE, description of, 499. _A LIST OF THE WORKS OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. NOVELS, STORIES, SKETCHES, AND POEMS, BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. _It is the great happiness of Mrs. Stowe not only to have written many delightful books, but to have written one book which will be always famous not only as the most vivid picture of an extinct evil system, but as one of the most powerful influences in overthrowing it. . . . No book was ever more a historical event than "Uncle Tom's Cabin." . . . If all whom she has charmed and quickened should unite to sing her praises, the birds of summer would be outdone._--GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. _UNCLE TOM'S CABIN._ A Story of American Slavery. 12mo, $2.00. New _Popular Edition_ from new plates. With account of the writing of this story by Mrs. STOWE, and frontispiece. 16mo, $1.00. _Holiday Edition._ With an Introduction of more than thirty pages by Mrs. STOWE, describing the circumstances under which the story was written, and a Bibliography of the various editions and languages in which the work has appeared, by GEORGE BULLEN, of the British Museum. With more than one hundred illustrations, and red-line border. 8vo, full gilt, $3.00; half calf, $5.00; morocco, or tree calf, $6.00. The publication of this remarkable story was an event in American history as well as in American literature. It fixed the eyes of the nation and of the civilized world on the evils of slavery, presenting these so vividly and powerfully that the heart and conscience of mankind were thenceforth enlisted against them. But, aside from its graphic portrayal of slavery, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a story of thrilling power, and abounds in humorous delineations of negro and Yankee character. Its extraordinary annual sale of thousands of copies, and its translation into numerous foreign languages, attest its universal and permanent interest. _DRED (NINA GORDON)._ A Story of Slavery. New Edition from new plates. 12mo, $1.50. This volume was originally published under the title "Dred." It has a close connection with "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the object of both being to picture life at the South as it was under the régime of slavery. "Uncle Tom" and "Dred" will assure Mrs. Stowe a place in that high rank of novelists who can give us a national life in all its phases, popular and aristocratic, humorous and tragic, political and religious.--_Westminster Review_ (London). _AGNES OF SORRENTO._ An Italian Romance. 12mo, $1.50. In this story a plot of rare interest is wrought out, amid the glowing scenery of Italy, with the author's well-known dramatic skill. _THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND._ 12mo, $1.50. The scene of this charming tale is laid upon the coast of Maine. The author's familiar knowledge of New England rural life renders the volume especially attractive. A story of singular pathos and beauty.--_North American Review._ _THE MINISTER'S WOOING._ 12mo, $1.50. In this volume Mrs. Stowe has reproduced the New England of two generations ago. It deals with the noblest and most rugged traits of New England character. _MY WIFE AND I_; or, Harry Henderson's History. New Edition. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50. This book first appeared as a serial in the _Christian Union_, New York. The author dedicates it to "the many dear, bright young girls whom she is so happy as to number among her choicest friends." _WE AND OUR NEIGHBORS._ New Edition. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50. This is a sequel to "My Wife and I." _POGANUC PEOPLE._ Their Loves and Lives. New Edition. Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50. A story of a New England town, its men and its manners. _OLD TOWN FOLKS._ 12mo, $1.50. Full to repletion of delicate sketches of very original characters, and clever bits of dialogue, and vivid descriptions of natural scenery.--_The Spectator_ (London). _SAM LAWSON'S OLDTOWN FIRESIDE STORIES._ Illustrated. New Edition, enlarged. 12mo, $1.50. CONTENTS: The Ghost in the Mill; The Sullivan Looking-Glass; The Minister's Housekeeper; The Widow's Bandbox; Captain Kidd's Money; "Mis' Elderkin's Pitcher"; The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House; Colonel Eph's Shoe-Buckles; The Bull-Fight; How to Fight the Devil; Laughin' in Meetin'; The Toothacre's Ghost Story; The Parson's Horse Race; Oldtown Fireside Talks of the Revolution; A Student's Sea Story. These stories will prove a mine of genuine fun; pictures of a time, place, and state of society which are like nothing on this side of the world, and which, we suppose, are becoming rapidly erased.--_The Athenæum_ (London). _THE MAYFLOWER, AND OTHER SKETCHES._ 12mo, $1.50. A series of New England sketches, many of which have become household stories throughout the land. The above eleven 12mo volumes, uniform, in box, $16.00. _LITTLE PUSSY WILLOW, ETC._ Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.25. _A DOG'S MISSION, ETC._ Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.25. _QUEER LITTLE PEOPLE._ Illustrated. Square 12mo, $1.25. These three Juvenile books, $3.75. Three collections of delightful stories--the best of reading for young folks. _PALMETTO LEAVES._ Sketches of Florida. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.50. Any one who wishes a delightful excursion to the land of flowers has only to turn over these "Palmetto Leaves" and he has it.--_New York Observer._ _HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS_. 16mo, $1.50. CONTENTS: The Ravages of a Carpet; Home-Keeping _versus_ House-Keeping; What is a Home? The Economy of the Beautiful; Raking up the Fire; The Lady who does her own Work; What can be got in America; Economy; Servants; Cookery; Our House; Home Religion. An invaluable volume, and one which should be owned and consulted by every one who has a house, or who wants a home.--_The Congregationalist_ (Boston.) _LITTLE FOXES._ Common Household Faults. 16mo, $1.50. The foxes are,--Fault-Finding, Irritability, Repression, Persistence, Intolerance, Discourtesy, Exactingness. Mrs. Stowe has made essays as entertaining as stories, enlivened with wit, seasoned with sense, glowing with the most kindly feeling.--_Hartford Press._ _THE CHIMNEY CORNER._ 16mo, $1.50. A series of papers on Woman's Rights and Duties, Health, Amusements, Entertainment of Company, Dress, Fashion, Self-Discipline, etc. The genial, practical wisdom of these subjects gives this volume great value. These three Household Books, uniform, in box, $4.50. _RELIGIOUS POEMS._ Illustrated. 16mo, $1.50. All characterized by the genius of Mrs. Stowe.... In all, there is a profound appreciation of the _inner life_ of religion,--a wrestling for nearness to God.--_American Christian Review._ _FLOWERS AND FRUIT_, selected from the Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 16mo, $1.00. A charming little book ... full of sweet passages, and bright, discerning, wise, and in the best sense of the term, witty sayings of our greatest American novelist.--_Chicago Advance._ _DIALOGUES AND SCENES FROM THE WRITINGS OF MRS. STOWE._ For use in School Entertainments. Selected by EMILY WEAVER. In Riverside Literature Series, extra number _E_. 16mo, paper, 15 cents, _net_. The selections are from some of Mrs. Stowe's most true-to-life scenes,--full of pathos and mirth.... Nine most charming dialogues.--_School Journal_ (New York). *** _For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by the Publishers_, HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 4 PARK STREET, BOSTON; 11 EAST 17TH STREET, NEW YORK. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Punctuation errors repaired. Page 146, repeated word "the" removed from text. Original read (make the the whole nation) Page 179, "propect" changed to "prospect" (over the prospect of raising) Page 205, "everywere" changed to "everywhere" (affection that everywhere) Page 205, "Frith" changed to "Firth" (of Solway Firth and) Page 416, "neigbors" changed to "neighbors" (all the neigbors waiting) Page 437, "nonenity" changed to "nonentity" (old book into nonentity) Page 438, "aerial" changed to "ærial" (of my ærial visitors) Page 505, "Tourgee" changed to "Tourgée" (Tourgée and others prominent) Page 516, Stowe, Catherine, page reference added to (visits Cincinnati with father, 54;) Page 522, Lowell, J. R. "interesti n" changed to "interest in" (Sutherland's interest in, 277) 
8641	----	[Illustration: Concord Elms, on Main Street.] SKETCHES FROM CONCORD AND APPLEDORE CONCORD THIRTY YEARS AGO; NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE; LOUISA M. ALCOTT; RALPH WALDO EMERSON; MATTHEW ARNOLD; DAVID A. WASSON; WENDELL PHILLIPS; APPLEDORE AND ITS VISITORS; JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER BY FRANK PRESTON STEARNS TO A JACQUEMINOT ROSE. CONTENTS. PREFACE CONCORD THIRTY-ODD YEARS AGO HAWTHORNE LOUISA M. ALCOTT EMERSON HIMSELF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LECTURE DAVID A. WASSON WENDELL PHILLIPS APPLEDORE AND THE LAIGHTONS WHITTIER ILLUSTRATIONS. CONCORD ELMS, ON MAIN STREET THE CONCORD RIVER, NEAR BATTLE GROUND HAWTHORNE, AFTER AN ENGRAVING FROM THE PAINTING BY C. G. THOMPSON THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY LOUISA ALCOTT, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1868 THE ALCOTT HOUSE KING'S BUST OF EMERSON, MODELLED IN 1854 AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD DAVID A. WASSON IN 1878, FROM A PORTRAIT BY HIS SON GEORGE WENDELL PHILLIPS AS HE APPEARED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA TWILIGHT AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS CELIA THAXTER, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MISS ANNIE RICHARDS IN 1890 WHITTIER'S HOUSE AT AMESBURY JOHN G. WHITTIER IN HIS SEVENTY-SECOND YEAR, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMPSON THE MERRIMAC RIVER, NEAR AMESBURY, BY MOONLIGHT PREFACE. A volume of reminiscences is commonly the last book that an author publishes, if indeed he does not leave the task to his literary administrator. There are not wanting, however, instances to the contrary; and in the present case my object is more especially to attract public attention to the lives and works of two distinguished men, one of whom has hitherto been little appreciated, and the other, as it seems to me, greatly misunderstood. My position in regard to David A. Wasson has already been challenged, but I have faith that it will endure the test of time. If these pages shall also succeed in restoring to Wendell Phillips a portion of the fame which he lost by the wayward course of his declining years, they will not have been written in vain. The other characters that I have brought upon this stage are such as both the writer and the public have long taken an interest in. To the few living personages who have been introduced, I would apologize, and excuse myself on the ground that the picture would be imperfect without them. SKETCHES FROM CONCORD AND APPLEDORE CONCORD THIRTY YEARS AGO. To one looking westward from Boston State House there appears a line of rugged, precipitous hills extending across the country from southwest to northeast. Having ascended these heights, we perceive beyond them an irregular line of pale blue mountains, of which Wachusett is the most southerly peak, and which is in fact a portion of the White Mountain range extending through New Hampshire and into the northern part of Maine. The watershed between these two forms the valley of the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, which is the first military line of defence in New England west of the sea-coast. It is for this reason that the first struggle for American independence took place on the banks of the Concord River, and not elsewhere; a fact that might have been predicted, though not of course with certainty, when Boston was first settled. One would like to know how this rural community with martial destiny before it happened to obtain the name of Concord. Did the Rev. Peter Bulkley, descendant of the Plantagenets, who first organized society in that valley, did he come there for peace and repose after a religious controversy in Boston? No doubt the sloping hillsides and broad sunny plain with the sluggish river winding through it looked very restful to him, after the rugged country through which he had passed; but we fear that he found discord and contention already before him, as many have who came there since for a like purpose. Was there a strange fatality in the name, so that Patrick Henry might say with added force, "Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace"? Is it true that peace and war are reciprocal like night and day,--one a rest and preparation for the other, and at the same time its natural consequence? Certain it is that no individual life is interesting or valuable in which there has not been a severe struggle; and periods of warfare have often proved to be powerful stimulants for human energy and intellect. In one respect, however, the Rev. Peter Bulkley was fully justified, for Concord has become more famous in the arts of peace than if a Marengo or Gravelotte had been fought there. It has a place in the history of literature, and its name is pleasant either to speak or think of. The town is beautifully situated and seems to sleep in the hollow of the hills. It is now a suburb of Boston, with artistic bridges, water from Sandy Pond, a bronze statue of the minute man, and a good deal of suburban elegance; but thirty years ago it was one of the neat, unpretending, yet so respectable looking, New England villages, such as are still to be met with in the central part of Massachusetts. The country roads wound into the town and wound out of it; the river crept lazily by with only a slight swirl or eddy on its surface; and the wild flowers on its banks bloomed and faded without attracting more attention than in the days of the Indians. Early in the morning ten or a dozen well-dressed gentlemen might be seen hastening to the railway station; then after the children had gone to school there was a nearly unbroken silence until they came out again. Occasionally a farmer in his hay-cart or other rude vehicle would jingle through the village, or a woman with a shawl and sun-bonnet would call at one of the stores, make some small purchase, and return as she came. Towards evening the children would come out of school, and fill the streets with noise and excitement for a time; the gentlemen would return from Boston looking quite as much fatigued as if they had been working all day in a cornfield. The houses on Main Street were mostly so white as to be hardly distinguishable from the snow in winter, though many of them belonged, architecturally at least, to the last century, and had brass knockers on the doors. Yet there was a certain harmony among them; and it seemed as if the place must always have been as it was at that time. There is, however, a compensation in the dullness of country life, which may be expressed in the word nature. The real architecture of Concord was not in private or public edifices, but in its magnificent elms, whose branches spanned the streets like the arches of a Gothic cathedral. The largest of them stands in front of the town hall, and its trunk measures just sixteen feet in circumference; though Doctor Holmes has failed to enumerate it in his list of the great trees of the State. Another on the road to Lexington is remarkable for its straight stem and perfect wineglass form. In autumn the scarlet maples set between the elms are no bad substitute for stained-glass windows. There were no fine pictures in the town, but every turn of the river disclosed a landscape equal to a Claude or a Kenset. It is rare good fortune to live by a river of clear, pure water which serves equally well for boating and swimming or skating. There are very few such rivers. In the larger ones the current is usually too strong to make a long rowing expedition pleasant entertainment, and tide rivers are always inconvenient. In small rivers shoals and sand-bars commonly abound. River skating, also, is a science by itself, and requires, like Alpine climbing, well-seasoned knowledge and experience. It is a very different matter from whirling around in a city rink with half an inch of snow on the ice. The young men of Concord used to skate to Lowell, on favorable occasions, and back again, nearly thirty miles in all, and thought nothing of it. Concord River with its grassy banks, picturesque bridges and continual change of hill and meadow scenery is one of the prettiest that can be found anywhere. Then such walks and drives as there were in the town! From Concord Common roads branch off in all directions like the spokes of a wheel. The oldest road, by which the British troops made their entry and exit, runs northeasterly to the Hawthorne house and Lexington with a firm, dry sidewalk for more than a mile; another goes northwesterly to the battle-ground and Esterbrook farm, where there were magnificent chestnut trees equal in size and shape to the Persian walnuts of Europe, as well as huge granite boulders scattered about from some pre-historic glacier. The Emerson farm lies between two interesting roads, one going straight over the hills of Boston, and the other to Walden Lake and Thoreau's hermitage, or where it was. Between them runs a lively, gurgling brook, which used to be frequented by woodcock, and the Virginia rail, and passes close by Mrs. Emerson's garden. Two or three miles to the south there is another lakelet called Fairhaven Bay, the south branch of the river flowing through it, quite equal in its way to Walden, or to an Irish lake, for that matter. On the outskirts of the village, there was many a quaint old weather-beaten house with a well-sweep, perhaps, for accompaniment,--excellent subjects for a sketchbook,--and Walden woods were always full of natural side-shows and those charming effects of color and shadow which artists delight in. On the western side, there were the two mile square, the three mile square, and five mile square, for those who liked an exact measure for their constitutional exercise; and on the north the road went straight to Sleepy Hollow, now one of the famous cemeteries of the world. Thence, paths went through the fields and woods to the Lexington road on one side and to the north bridge on the other; and these paths are memorable from the fact that they were Hawthorne's favorite walk during the last years of his life. A curious accident happened somewhere about 1860 just beyond Sleepy Hollow. A farmer returning to the next town felt the earth shaking under his wagon, and looked behind him just in time to see a piece of the road disappear into a pool of black water. The natives thought it had gone down to China for they were all summer filling the place up, and the expense was not less than that of a new district school-house. The Indian name of the river was Muskataquid, and there was formerly an Indian encampment on the site of the old Ripley manse and battleground. A great quantity of arrow-heads of flint, jasper and quartz have been found in the neighboring fields, and Emerson used sometimes to bring his visitors to search for them. The Ripley family had a fine collection of Indian relics, and it is almost pathetic to think of the pains and labor the aborigines must have expended in manufacturing those household and warlike implements,--the arrows especially being often so soon lost again. It is likely that they chose this situation for its sunny exposure, and as a favorable landing for their canoes, rather than from a decided feeling for landscape beauty. No doubt they had their battles and invasions, and perhaps repulsed their enemies from the same ground where the British line was afterwards formed. What one wonders at, in regard to the Concord fight, is that the English commander should have drawn off his men after the first volley and so slight a loss. He had as good a position as his opponents, and after an obstinate struggle might have succeeded in carrying the bridge, the bayonets of his soldiers giving him a certain advantage. This would seem to have been more prudent than to retreat so long a distance before a confident enemy. It has been agreed that the position of the minute men was the best they could have selected, for after repulsing the British troops they were able to send a detachment across by Sleepy Hollow and Hawthorne's path to attack them again in flank on the Lexington road. This success was as fortunate for the colonies as in the summer of 1861 Bull Run was unlucky for our Southern friends. The men who were drawn up to be shot at on Lexington Common were no doubt as brave as their friends who contested the battle of the old north bridge, but their position was not a favorable one to hold against a superior force. It was an excellent position to retreat from, and perhaps that is what their commander had in view. Evidently they should have withdrawn to Concord, or have intrenched themselves on the nearest hillside commanding the Boston and Concord road. Such was the difference between these two fights. [Illustration: The Concord river, near battleground.] The life of Concord, at the time of which we write, was not its celebrated people so much as Mr. Frank B. Sanborn's school for youth of both sexes. There were not young people enough in the town to make a dance or a picnic out of, and this school introduced an element from the outside world which was both useful and improving. Most of his pupils came from the vicinity of Boston, but there were many also from Springfield, now and then one from the West Indies, and finally a Sandwich Islander, a genuine Kanaka. They supported several boarding-houses, the candy-store and the corner grocery, besides greatly increasing the revenue of the post-office. It was a cheerful sight to see these ruddy youths and blooming maidens of a winter's day come trooping in to get the evening mail with their skates in their hands. There was also a daily delegation of farmers' boys from Acton, staunch, worthy fellows, and generally better behaved than their more aristocratic companions. Mr. Sanborn himself, (afterwards for more than twenty years the efficient inspector of our state charities,) was the most genial and good-humored of schoolmasters. He enjoyed teaching, and wished his scholars to enjoy learning. He liked to see the bright young faces about him, and it was their own fault if he was not liked by his pupils. He was impartial, frank, and perfectly sincere; knew how to keep discipline without being a martinet. He was especially a good instructor for young ladies for he never showed them any sentimental tenderness. It was not a very good training school, like the Boston Latin School, or Phillips Academy at Exeter, and this is usually the case in a school where there are pretty young women; but, as Emerson indeed said, much could be learned with Mr. Sanborn which was not to be had at other schools,--especially this, that the true aim of life should not be riches or success or even scholarship, but moral and intellectual development. Mr. Sanborn's ideal of his profession was a high one, and but for his interest in the larger field of philanthropy he might have succeeded in realizing it. Mr. Sanborn's most troublesome boy had a scriptural name, which we will call David,--afterwards quite a distinguished lawyer. There was no harm in David, but an immense deal of mischief. In fact he was irrepressible. "David, stand up on the floor," was part of the customary routine; and when this was accompanied by the use of a large lexicon his situation was a truly amusing one. If he succeeded in escaping this penalty of transgression until the first recess he was considered fortunate. He usually returned from the school sports too much exhausted for any further exertion, but in half an hour was as lively again as ever. All veneration for authority seemed to have been replaced in David by a strong sense of the ridiculous. His seat was immediately under the eye of the master, with his face to the wall, and a large map of ancient Rome before him, but this did not prevent him from turning about on all possible occasions and expressing his various states of mind in such ludicrous pantomime as would set off the young girls and small boys like a row of torpedoes. Whatever might be said or done in the school without bringing condign punishment on his head David was sure to say or do; and his criticism of passing events and comments during recitations were quite as edifying as those of the instructor,--which is saying a good deal. He had committed to memory one of the longest lists of exceptions in the Latin grammar, and never missed an opportunity of repeating it as rapidly as possible and with a comical look. His one object of aversion was Mr. Sanborn's rattan, and what to do about it he did not know; until coming to school one morning very early with another youth of the same disposition, they cut it into sections and smoked it. After this he was in great terror for several days lest the theft should be discovered, but as the rattan was more for ornament than exercise, its absence did not appear to have been noticed. Of course these performances made quite a hero of him with the girls, and he was rewarded with their smiles and favor at the school dances and other social occasions. As an artistic contrast to this picture we remember three beautiful girls who boarded with the wife of the village blacksmith, in one of the whitest and most neatly kept houses in the town. They were not merely pretty young women, but each possessed a style of beauty peculiarly her own. One was a bright, rosy blonde, with sparkling eyes and a lively, spirited manner; another more quiet and composed, with an ivory-white complexion, and large, dreamy, tender-looking eyes; and the third was a light brunette with an oval face and regular features, reserved and dignified. Slightly idealized, with these fine qualities, they might have served for a picture of the Three Graces. They had the advantage of pretty manners, and being fast friends and of a single mind, made a strong impression wherever they went. Though the eldest was not more than seventeen, the Bigelow girls, as they were called from the blacksmith's family name, took the lead in Concord social life for the time being, and gave a tone to it. Their influence helped to make the boys more manly and the other girls more respectful. Such a trio could not long escape the notice of the Harvard students, a number of whom made their acquaintance through graduates of the school; and one of them, inspired with admiration, composed a song which was quite popular at the time, beginning thus: "There was an old lady in Concord did dwell, Who had but three boarders, and each one a belle; Grace, Jennie and Maggie, more priceless than pearls; Then here's to the health of the Bigelow girls." Truly the days of their youth were the days of their glory; but it is not so for everyone. In fact many of us never obtain any glory. And who is that plainly dressed girl with the meekly determined look who goes back and forth so quietly and regularly? If you speak to her she will smile, but her voice is not often heard. It is Miss Evans' Mary Garth, or the prototype of Louisa Alcott's "Old Fashioned Girl." She is the best scholar in school, and already has important plans in her mind for the future. Mr. Alcott would sometimes come in on a Wednesday afternoon, listen to the declamations and afterwards give his young friends a conversation on the faculties of the human mind. He was an agreeable speaker, and knew how to hold the attention of his youthful audience. On one of these occasions while he was discoursing on the higher mental faculties which are not possessed by the lower animals, a small boy suddenly called out from his corner, "Dogs have a conscience; I've seen it." The whole school roared at this, and it nearly disconcerted Mr. Alcott; but he quickly recovered himself, and explained that the apprehension of punishment often supplies the place of a conscience in dogs, as well as in boys and men; and a highly interesting discussion ensued on this subject. Such a method of instruction was highly refreshing after the dry routine in Latin and mathematics. There was a yearly nutting excursion in October to Esterbrook farm where there were tall chestnut trees, flying squirrels and plenty of wood for a bonfire. May-day was usually celebrated at Conantum,--a pine-clad hill on the south side of Fairhaven Bay, opposite the cliffs. As soon as winter came committees were chosen to provide dancing or theatricals for every Friday evening; but the climax of pleasure was a half-holiday for a skating carnival on Walden Pond,--where Thoreau was sure to be present, and also a Miss Caroline Moore, daughter of the deputy sheriff, and afterwards widely known in Europe and America as the skatorial queen. "Three cheers for the Giver of this glorious afternoon," and then the caps would go up in the air, and the rocks and hills echo the hoarse shouts of the boys. I can hear now the jingling of the skates, the crackling of the snow and the merry laughter as we came from under the pine trees of Walden into the keen starlight, with the great comet streaming in front of us. On the first of May, 1859, Emerson wrote in a letter to Carlyle: "My boy divides his time between Cicero and cricket,--and will go to college next year. Sam Ward and I tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the newcomers a marked improvement on their parents." There are those who still remember seeing the two distinguished men on the Concord playground, and wondering what they thought of it. Mr. Ward came to place his boy under Mr. Sanborn's care; and a remarkable boy he proved to be,--equally generous, fearless and high-minded. Twenty years later, that same boy, looking out of his New York office window, saw his former guide and preceptor striding through Wall Street. He rushed down the stairs, and out upon the sidewalk, but the friend of his youth had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. With two or three exceptions, Mr. Sanborn's young men held him in high regard, and when, in 1860, the United States marshals tried to carry him off by force to testify at Washington in regard to the Harper's Ferry invasion, they all rushed to his rescue, and foremost among them a Baltimore boy, who had been cursing his teacher as an infernal abolitionist for the previous six months. Mr. Sanborn is much better known for his connection with the Harper's Ferry invasion than for his Concord school, or later service on the board of State Charities. He was secretary of the Kansas Aid Committee in Boston during 1856, and in this way became acquainted with John Brown, who visited the school, and the two were afterwards intimate friends. None of Brown's New England supporters approved of his invasion of Virginia, and Mr. Sanborn especially argued the matter with him and endeavored to dissuade him from it. He thus became acquainted, however, with Brown's plans, and was the only person outside of Brown's immediate followers who knew of the proposed attack on Harper's Ferry. When the attempt failed and John Brown was a prisoner in Charlestown jail, Mr. Sanborn found himself, as an accessory before the act, in a most trying situation. If carried to Virginia either as a witness or as "particeps criminis" his chance for life would be a slight one. The question was, would General Banks, who was then governor of Massachusetts, refuse to surrender him. John A. Andrew did not consider it safe to rely on him; and Mr. Sanborn accordingly disappeared for the winter, his school being carried on meanwhile by an assistant and some public spirited Concord ladies, one of whom was a sister of Hon. E. R. Hoar. In the spring Mr. Sanborn reappeared, and was almost immediately summoned by a United States marshal to give an account of himself before the senate committee in Washington. This he declined to do, believing that the townspeople would forcibly resist any attempts to carry him off. The marshal, however, set a trap for him that missed little of being successful. He came to Concord at midnight, and secreted himself in an old barn which was close to the school-house, and belonged to one Mr. Holbrook, a custom-house officer. There he remained all the next day, keeping watch of Mr. Sanborn's movements through the cracks in the boards. A little after nine in the evening he was joined by four assistants in a carriage. They then proceeded to Mr. Sanborn's house, seized him at the door, and in spite of his great size and strength, would certainly have carried him off had it not been for the courage and energy of his sister Sarah. She screamed "murder," and seizing the carriage-whip, made such good use of it that the horses were with difficulty prevented from running away. Her cries waked up the blacksmith in the next house, and he quickly came to the rescue. The "Bigelow girls" ran through the village like wild cats ringing door-bells and calling on the people. In less than twenty minutes nearly every man in town, Emerson included, was on the spot. The crowd showed a determined spirit, and the marshals were probably glad enough when Judge Hoar appeared with a writ of "habeas corpus," and took the prisoner out of their hands in a legal manner. The case was tried in Boston next day, and Mr. Sanborn was adjudged to have the right of it. A lively celebration followed in the Concord town hall that evening, and Miss Sarah Sanborn was presented with an elegant revolver; but the old borough had not been so stirred up since '75. The place was not without some small entertainments. Every autumn there was an annual cattle-show at which the same bulls, horses and poultry were brought for exhibition, and one might suppose also the same fruit and vegetables; for they differed little in appearance from one year to another. A live bittern in a cage of laths was an unusual curiosity. Ventriloquists and every kind of a juggler, as well as native Indians and the wild men of Borneo, came to perform in the town hall. Then there was the Concord Lyceum. People in those days believed in obtaining nourishment for the mind as well as the body. Pretty dry nourishment it often proved to be; but it served to bring them together for an hour or two, and take them out of themselves and their dull routine. Wiser remarks and more fresh information were sometimes heard upon the stairway than in the lecture-hall. Yet Emerson was always good, and every man and woman who came to hear him probably felt better for it, even if they were unable to comprehend what he said to them. In the mind's eyes one can see now his spare figure standing at the desk between two large kerosene lamps, bending forward slightly to catch the familiar sentence with his eye, and then calmly surveying his audience as if to see where he could deliver it most effectively. Henry Ward Beecher drew the largest house, and produced great enthusiasm by comparing the United States to an elephant,--though at that time there can hardly be said to have been any United States; but the fine oratory of Wendell Phillips made the strongest impression, rather too rhetorical to be permanent--but it was intense while it lasted. A young lady who was obliged to take laughing-gas a few days after his lecture on Toussaint L'Ouverture repeated passages from it with appropriate gestures, in the dentist's chair, and finally concluded, not with the name of the negro statesman, but of the Concord high-school teacher. Phillips was an especial favorite with the older ladies of the town, who organized a local anti-slavery society in his honor, and held a meeting of it whenever he came there. But neither Phillips nor Beecher could equal a lecture by the Unitarian clergyman on the naval policy of England, which was based on valuable facts and might well be compared to a few grains of wheat in the midst of infinite chaff. Judge Hoar did not lecture before the lyceum, which seemed strange, for he was not only a man of vigorous intellect, but had, as Lowell said, "More wit and gumption and shrewd Yankee sense Than there are mosses on an old stone-fence," and he could have made any subject interesting in which he was interested himself. The Hoar family for some time past had been almost kings in Concord, as frequently happens where there is an uncommonly strong man, either a lawyer or a manufacturer, in a town of two or three thousand inhabitants. They were a hardy New England race, lawyers by an inherited tendency, and had now made their mark in public affairs for three generations. They can count among their immediate relatives more senators and representatives to Congress than any other American family. It was said in 1775 that while Samuel Adams represented the force and virtue of New England life, John Adams was the best product of its cultivated side; and it would seem as if old Samuel Hoar, the founder of his line, were a mean between the two. Fortunate is such a father if he has a son who inherits his talents and virtues as well as his property; and fortunate is the son whose father knows from his own experience what is best to do for him. The Judge was always an interesting figure in the Concord streets, and also a pleasant person to meet, for there was never the least pretention about him. He usually had the air of a man with an object before him, and yet it was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to claim more than his rightful share. He walked the ground with a tenacious step, but with no unseemly haste. There was a keen, frosty sparkle in his eye, and a certain severity of manner which, however, covered a great deal of kindness. He liked successful men such as were his own equal in ability, but he was quite as likely to take an interest in those who were unfortunate. A brother of Dr. Holmes, a constant invalid and great sufferer, who required much consideration, was a more frequent visitor at his house than Lowell or Agassiz. His face bore a striking resemblance to Raphael's portrait of the war-like Pope Julius Second, the last of the great popes. He admired Emerson, and was frequently seen in his company; but Alcott and Thoreau he seemed to have little respect for. Mr. Alcott once said, "I suppose Judge Hoar looks on me as the most useless person on the continent; but I can at least appreciate _him_." He was the youngest judge that had ever been appointed to the supreme bench of Massachusetts, member of Congress, president of the Harvard Alumni, etc.; but his real distinction now is that as a member of General Grant's cabinet he was the first American in public life to take a determined stand in regard to civil-service reform. For thirty years he had seen the government patronage turned into an enormous engine of political corruption, and endure it longer he could not. He went to Washington, much to his own inconvenience, mainly to strike a blow at this monster. Did he realize the magnitude of the work before him--one which thousands of patriotic men have since attempted and signally failed to accomplish? It was like taking the meat away from a tiger, or trying to lift the Mitgard serpent. Judge Hoar found himself quite alone in the president's cabinet, and with the exception of Sumner, Garfield, and a few others, senators and representatives united against him in a massive phalanx. Even the friendship of General Grant was unable to protect him from the fury of his opponents. He returned, not unwillingly, to his native heath and the practice of a better profession than Washington politics. In his report to Congress on the battle of Bull Run, General Winfield Scott gave the opinion that it was lost through the lack of capable officers for the volunteer regiments; and it is generally true that men who like to play soldier in time of peace are not the best material to make real soldiers out of. This would not apply however to Captain George L. Prescott of Concord, who commanded the embattled farmers in that engagement. He was leading an advance on the enemy's centre--"a magnificent sight to look at," his colonel said--when the right wing of the army was outflanked by General Kirby Smith, and the Union forces obliged to retreat. The colonel also appears to have done his duty there, and being severely wounded at this juncture could hear nothing in the feverish condition he was in for the next few days but Prescott saying, "Steady, men, steady!" to the soldiers. Previous to 1861 he was station master at Concord, and also carried on a business in lumber, cement, and other building materials, which he could easily do, for trains in those days were not so very numerous. He was the first person that attracted the attention of visitors to the town; for he had a commanding figure and a frank, manly countenance, only too fearless and kindly,--a very handsome man. The Hoar family were evidently Yankees, and so were Emerson, Alcott, and Sanborn, but Captain Prescott was an American without seeming to belong to any particular part of the country. His cordial frankness and independence of manner reminded one of a Virginian. The refined side of his nature is indicated by an anecdote of his first few days in camp on the Potomac. A cadet freshly graduated from West Point was directed by General McDowell to drill the different companies of the regiment in succession, and having but slight respect for volunteer soldiers, he gave an emphasis to his orders by the plentiful use of profane language. When he came to the Concord company, Captain Prescott, who was standing at one side, walked across to him and said, "I must request you, Sir, to give your orders in the plain terms of the military code, for my men do not like profanity. If you do otherwise, I shall order them to march off the ground; and they will obey me and not you." This brought the cadet to terms very quickly. In the spring of 1862 he recruited another company for the Massachusetts Thirty-second; soon rose to the rank of colonel; and after escaping the peril of a dozen hard-fought battles, he was finally killed, with nearly half his command, in Grant's advance upon Richmond. Perhaps no other man would have been so greatly missed in his native town. Thoreau used to walk through Concord with the long step of an Indian, looking straight before him, but at the same time observing everything. Occasionally he would stop, make an incision in the bark of a tree with his knife, or pick up a stone and examine it. It was not often that he was met with in anybody's house, or seen in company with other men. His profession was that of a surveyor; and it is easy to imagine how, with his poetic temperament, while laying out roads and measuring wood-lots, he came to be what he was. Many people thought his peculiar ways were an affectation, but I believe that he was one of the plainest and simplest of men; as plain and single-minded as President Lincoln himself. It was his theory of the way men should live. He was a Diogenes without being a cynic. James Russell Lowell (as he himself tells us) was sent to Concord to rusticate while he was at college, and conceived at that time an aversion for Thoreau which never left him. In his celebrated "Fable for Critics" he satirized him as an imitator of Emerson, and so plainly that there was no mistaking the portrait. This could not have troubled Thoreau much for he was a perfect stoic, and cared little for the opinions of others so long as he satisfied his own conscience. Emerson, however, felt it keenly, for it was equally a reflection on his friend and his own sagacity. In his last volume of poems Lowell also speaks of Emerson in a way which indicates rather a diminished respect for him. It is true that Thoreau imitated Emerson's manner of speech a good deal--and it was often difficult to avoid doing this while in Emerson's company--but Lowell also in his younger days affected a grave and reserved demeanor which he afterwards became tired of and threw entirely aside. About the time of which we speak Emerson complained that he saw too little of Thoreau, and was afraid that he avoided him. The man was sufficiently original. He did not pretend to be a poet, and his prose writing is not at all like Emerson. In point of style it is purer and more classic than either Emerson's or Lowell's; and these two lines of his, "In the good then who can trust. Only the wise are just," certainly deserve to be set up somewhere in letters of gold. He had a strong dislike of matrimony. Once while walking across a field with David A. Wasson he kicked a skunk-cabbage with his boot and said, "There, marriage is like that." Lowell was without doubt right about him in this respect. Thoreau's notions of life, like the socialistic theories of Henry George, would if generally adopted put an end to civilization. He wanted like the French theorists of the last century to separate himself from the history of his race; a most dangerous attempt. It is like cutting a tree from its roots. Wasson had many a hard argument with him on this point, and tried to show him that customs are the good logic of the human race: but it was too late. However, logic is one thing and character another. The best eulogy of Thoreau is to be found in Emerson's poetry. He is evidently the subject of the beautiful little poem called "Forbearance." The opening lines, "Thou who hast named the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk; At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;--" This describes the hermit of blue Walden exactly. A large portion of "Woodnotes" is devoted to an account of his pilgrimage in the forests of Maine; and the ode to "Friendship" must have been inspired either by him or Carlyle. "I fancied he was fled-- And after many a year, Glowed unexhausted kindliness, Like daily sunrise there." He delivered a lecture one winter before the Concord lyceum on wild apple-trees. The subject made his audience laugh, but their laughter was of short duration. The man who had lived there so long unknown was at last revealed before them, It was the best lecture of the season, and at its close there was long continued applause. HAWTHORNE. The literary celebrities of Concord, with the exception of Thoreau, were not indigenous. Emerson may have gone there from an hereditary tendency, but more likely because his cousins the Ripleys dwelt there. Hawthorne came there by way of the Brook Farm experiment. How, with his reserved and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in such a gregarious enterprise is not very clear; but the election of General Harrison had deprived him of a small government office--it seems as if Webster might have interfered in his behalf--his writings brought him very little, and perhaps he hardly knew what to do with himself. All accounts agree that he joined the West Roxbury association of his own free-will, and without solicitation of any kind. He not only threw himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which was nearly a thousand dollars. He has left no explanation from which we might infer what his hopes or his motives were. Since three wise men went to sea in a bowl, or the army of German children set out for the Holy Land in the twelfth century, there was never a more hare-brained or chimerical undertaking. I once knew of a boy who after much reading of Robinson Crusoe, started for the woods at five o'clock of a summer afternoon, with the full intention of spending the night there alone. He took with him a light fowling-piece, and some crackers in his jacket pocket. He gathered some berries and shot some small birds, and cooked them after the Indian fashion. When it grew dark, however, he became frightened and climbed into a tree; but he could not sleep there, and finally returned home about one o'clock in the morning to find his family in great agitation. This was not very unlike the Brook Farm enterprise, which was inspired by the writings of Fourier, a seductive French socialist and one of the most unreasonable of men. He considered, like Diogenes, that since all men could not be rich and comfortable, it was better that they should all be needy and miserable. It was one of the sentimental out-growths of the French Revolution, for which Napoleonism is always the proper remedy. One of his peculiar notions was that every man should black his own boots. George Ripley and his friends do not seem to have made any definite calculation of what might be the result of their experiment. They expected, by working six hours a day and limiting themselves to the simplest and most frugal living, to have six left for literary pursuits and the enjoyment of profound conversation. Any practical farmer would have told them that this could not be done and make both ends meet at the close of the year. Any political economist would have told them that a community which disregards the advantage of division of labor, could not compete with one which recognizes that advantage. The principles of Fourier, if generally adopted, would produce general starvation and soon reduce the population of Europe to one fourth of its present numbers. London, which depends for its size on its commercial and political importance, would become almost as desolate as ancient Thebes. There was lately an essay published in one of our magazines entitled, "Why Socialism appeals to Artists," and the reason alleged was that artists, being more sensitive and delicately organized than most people, were less capable of enduring the hard struggle with the world which all are obliged to sustain who make their own way in it. This is no doubt the true explanation of the Brook Farm enterprise, and it carries with it its own contradiction. The more realistic sort of literature might survive in the communistic order, but sculpture and painting, which depend upon the undivided surplus of production which we call wealth, would inevitably perish. Even literature would disappear at length, then science, or at least all advancement of science, precedent in law would be disregarded, and the dark ages come again. The present organization of society is the accumulated wisdom of mankind for thousands of years. Like the language we speak, it was rather an intellectual growth than the invention of an individual or any number of individuals. Those who have done the most for it have added but little to the whole. It may be subverted by revolution for a time, but will always reassert itself again. It may be amended or modified by reason, but cannot be replaced, either by the ingenuity of one man or that of a whole generation. The logic of custom is the most cogent of all reasoning, for it is inherited in our veins from our ancestors. The man who tries to escape from it is like a plant being pulled up by the roots. It is exactly this which writers like Fourier and Henry George leave out of their reckoning. They see that in individual cases custom is often blind, cruel, and oppressive, and being kind-hearted and sympathetic they hate it; but they might as well hate the earth itself because there are deserts and swamps and malarious places on its surface. It is, no doubt, the special business of man to remodel the earth as much as possible; to drain its swamps, and level its forests; but in spite of that its rivers and mountains will always remain the same, and separate ourselves from it we cannot. The greater number of the Brook Farm community were transcendentalists, and we have no desire to depreciate the work which the transcendentalists accomplished. They were the needful men and women of their time; the importers of fresh thought and a more elevated mental activity. The most critical and conservative of American reviews has said of them: "They put aside worldly ambition and desire as truly as ever did medieval monk or oriental ascetic, and thus gave what was essential in their surroundings, a practical proof of their sincerity. The result was almost startling. Their Yankee audience first ridiculed them as dreamers; but when they found that what the transcendentalists actually recommended to them was dreaming, their ridicule changed to wonder, and finally to a sort of awe-struck admiration, something like that we imagine a Roman to have felt on learning that a Christian was capable of giving up his fish-ponds and nightingales' tongues, and his afternoons at the amphitheatre, for the sake of what he called 'Truth' proclaimed by an obscure few." This is not saying too much, but if anything too little. Since the time of the early Christians there was never a more pure-minded and loyal-hearted congregation than that which was gathered at Brook Farm. They were really the best society of the day. George Ripley himself, one of the finest scholars and most agreeable writers of that time, afterwards found his right place as literary editor of the New York Tribune, where for twenty-five years he disseminated the knowledge of the best thought and literature broadcast over the land. When we consider the immense circulation of that periodical and the quality of its readers, we can hardly overestimate the value of his work. Many have become famous for less. There were poets, painters, musicians in the community; especially John S. Dwight, who as the life-long editor of the "Journal of Music," also deserves a place on the roll of our public educators. George William Curtis was one of the youngest members of the community, but always one of the most brilliant. Sometimes of a rainy day there was very good cheer and entertainment in the "Hive" as they called their most commodious building, but generally the men were too drowsy and fatigued after their work was done for much intellectual activity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the New England transcendentalists and the German school of philosophy, from which they are supposed to have derived their inspiration. A German critic has said of them that they were not so much philosophers as poetical rhapsodists, and this is about the truth of it. Their business was not so much thinking, as to celebrate thinking. There was also in the composition of their creed a strong element of French naturalism, which is not easily reconciled with the teachings of the German transcendentalists. Kant, Fichte, and Schelling were true metaphysicians, and would never have encouraged their pupils to establish a socialistic community in the suburbs of Leipsic, nor would they have approved of Emerson's lines: "Who liveth with the stalwart pine Foundeth an heroic line; Who liveth in the palace hall Waneth fast and spendeth all;--" for they would have said, "There are the Hohenzollerns; and the experience of mankind is also worth something." It was this empirical French quality in New England transcendentalism which gave it a certain popularity, but at the same time prevented it from striking its roots deeply into the national soil. The law of nature has its value, but where it conflicts with the historical method it is invariably defeated. Emerson was the elected chief of the transcendental movement on account of his influence with the public, but its true leader and representative character was Margaret Fuller. This remarkable woman, whose life was adventure from the cradle, who lived in everybody's house except her own, who went everywhere and did everything on nothing a year, who made enemies by the dozen and friends by the score, still remains one of the most distinguished persons of that period. With some faults of character, she still possessed those strong qualities which are required for the conduct of a great enterprise. She had that personal magnetism which comes from courage, confidence, and clear perceptions. She inspired great enthusiasm in others for whatever she was interested in herself. As a talker, she was the rival of Carlyle and Coleridge; the best we have ever had on this side of the water, and with such an artistic style that one could hardly decide whether it was studied or natural. She was a terrible antagonist; for she united the tongue of a woman to the logical faculty of a man, and it was impossible to get the better of her. Her faults were the faults of youth, as she was occasionally vain, saucy or overbearing, and always self-conscious. It was this last trait that Lowell referred to when he represented her as saying that since her earliest years she had "lived cheek by jowl with the Infinite Soul." Much youthful vanity, however, can be forgiven to those who are generous and faithful. Besides, Margaret Fuller was splendidly domestic. She advocated women's rights to a certain extent; but she was no forerunner to the modern brood of platform women who fumble their night-keys while they discourse on the duties of wives and mothers. She carried a helping hand into the families that she entered, as well as stirring all the inmates to an unwonted mental activity. She would knit socks while she talked Plato: but the best testimony to her character is the character of her friends. People are known by the company they keep. The one quality which Hawthorne had in common with the transcendentalists, except such qualities as are common to all good people, was ideality. Next to the grand structure of his head, this is the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. He seems to have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a transcendentalist by Edgar A. Poe, and was attacked by that fiery Virginian in a most belligerent manner. At Brook Farm, however, he soon began to differentiate from them, and finally acquired for them something like an aversion. Neither is this to be wondered at. Hawthorne was an artist pure and simple. He looked for ideality in human life; not in the ideas that control and direct it. He was not like Raphael and Shakspeare, men who could enjoy philosophy and make their art so much the richer and deeper for it. He saw everything in a pictorial form; facts and conditions which did not make a picture had no value for him, and reasoning was a weariness and a disagreeable effort. Nevertheless he did the best he could. It is delightful to think of the tremendous energy with which he worked at Brook Farm. No one else seems to have done so much hard labor there. He was better fitted for this than many of his colleagues, having a strong, full-chested frame, and is said in his youth to have been a very swift runner and skater; but nothing indicates better the latent force that was in this quiet and usually inactive man. Many of the Brook Farm adventurers were not physically equal to a solid day's work, but this was a contingency which nobody had foreseen. [Illustration: HAWTHORNE. AFTER AN ENGRAVING FROM THE PAINTING BY C. G. THOMPSON.] Hawthorne was one of the first to discover the futility of the experiment. Early in the following year he wrote to Miss Sophia Peabody to whom he was then engaged: "It has become quite evident to me that our fortunes are not to be found in this place;" a conclusion which he no doubt arrived at from an examination of the accounts of the association. It was Hawthorne's salvation in the difficult path of life he had chosen; a path as difficult and dangerous as that of an Alpine climber, that, poet as he was, he always looked facts sternly in the face and did not permit himself to be misled by romantic or sentimental illusions. It had been expected that the more brilliant members of the community would be able to write magazine articles, or other remunerative literature, in their hours of leisure, and money thus obtained would go into the common fund. Hawthorne found that he could do nothing of the kind. Two or three hours' work in the sun did not quite deprive him of the use of his brains, but it left him without either fancy or imagination. He also felt the want of that external refinement which a nature like Hawthorne's requires as a fulfilment of its internal condition. The lack of nicety in the housekeeping became continually more and more unpleasant to him. The expenditures at the end of the first year were largely in excess of the receipts; in fact the inmates had eaten up nearly everything that the farm produced. His friend Franklin Pierce, who was just beginning to be prominent in politics, asked him the salutary question, "What are you gaining by this peculiar mode of life?" His experience there served as a foundation for the "Blithedale Romance," and caused no further injury than the loss of his money. It would have required a Thackeray to have realized and described the humorous side of it--the highly practical joke of so many well-educated and cultivated people making life unnecessarily hard for themselves. In the autumn of 1841 a reverend gentleman, the brother of Mrs. L. Maria Child, went to visit his friend at Brook Farm accompanied by his niece, who is one of the few persons now living who have a distinct memory of the place. On calling at the "Hive" they learned that only a few members of the association were present at that moment, but Mr. Ripley himself could be found in the turnip field, where they soon discovered him with two others, throwing turnips into a cart. On the approach of his friends, Mr. Ripley came forward and said, "Dr. Francis, this is really kind of you, to come such a distance to see an old fellow. You perceive I am occupied with the philosophy of 'de cart.'" This referred to some writings he had lately published on Descartes' philosophy, and made his audience laugh heartily. Mr. Dwight then appeared and gave an interesting account of a flock of wild geese which he had discovered early in the morning marching through the cornfield. He said they looked exactly like tame geese, but as soon as he came in sight of them they flew away in a most surprising manner. Mr. Bradford, who is frequently mentioned in Hawthorne's note-book, looked sunburnt and very thin, and averred that milking the cows on a frosty morning was a chilly kind of business. Hawthorne himself had gone to Boston; probably to sell the pig referred to in his conversation with Franklin Pierce. The visitors walked about the premises and were shown through the "Hive," but found it rather a dreary and comfortless building. The farm did not appear to be well kept. There was too evidently a lack of order and discipline there; and without order and discipline no enterprise in which numbers are concerned can succeed. Having discovered nothing better than fool's gold at Brook Farm, Hawthorne suddenly came across the true metal in the domestic privacy of his married life at Concord. It would appear from one of Mrs. Hawthorne's letters that George Ripley was so sanguine of the success of his experiment that he had given Hawthorne a sort of guarantee for the thousand dollars which the latter had invested in it. When, at the close of the first year, Hawthorne had decided to withdraw from the association, he naturally hoped to regain a portion of his capital. Mr. Ripley was too deeply involved to accommodate him in that way, and offered instead the rent of the old Ripley mansion in Concord, which then happened to be vacant. So Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were happily married, with no immediate fund save the rent of an ancient house in the country, and no better expectations than the uncertain income from his pen. It was a hazardous undertaking, but he was now nearly forty years old, his _fiancee_ more than thirty, nor could the sharpest foresight discover any advantage from waiting longer. Emerson, in his lecture on heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and selected as an example the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron, who worked his passage on a vessel to India, and then worked his way, mostly on foot, through Afghanistan and Persia, learning languages as he went, in order to obtain copies of the sacred books of the Persians, which were then unknown in Europe. Were it not for fear of giving offence he might have found a finer heroism in literary genius, and selected an example from his own village. For fifteen years Hawthorne had been like a ship detained from port by adverse winds. The handsomest and most gifted man in America had nearly reached to forty years without being married or finding a home of his own. It was a life of hardship; of social starvation almost like exile. It tested his courage, his faith in human nature, to the utmost. How difficult were the earlier years of Irving and Bryant and Longfellow. That he remained always true to himself and never lost sight of that ideal of excellence which was his guiding-star. We are not surprised to learn that his difficulties were rather augmented than diminished by matrimony. Even in plain, rural Concord he found at the end of three years, that his expenses had exceeded his income by what seemed to him quite a formidable debt. This distressed him the more because he had not yet learned that all men must lose in some manner, and that the whole community is bound to take a share in such losses as are honestly incurred. This is what charity and philanthropy, as well as the various forms of insurance, finally result in. But Hawthorne was the last man to apply such a principle to his own case. He had continually hoped that when a balance-sheet was drawn up at Brook Farm some portion of his investment there would be returned to him; but this resource also failed him. At last Bancroft the historian, whom James K. Polk strangely enough had made secretary of the navy, heard of his situation, and had him appointed collector of the port at Salem. He was again removed from that position by President Taylor, and it has been said that his wife heroically supported him by her skill in drawing and painting until the "Scarlet Letter" could be finished and money procured from its publication. The nomination of Franklin Pierce for the presidency was a piece of good fortune for Hawthorne such as the wildest expectation could never have imagined; and at length in his fiftieth year, with the consulate of Liverpool, he finally saw the wolves driven from his door. This realistic side of his life seems to have escaped the attention of his biographers. Yet he may be called fortunate to have lived when he did. It is easy to say that we should have appreciated Emerson and Hawthorne better than their cotemporaries appreciated them, but it is one thing to recognize a genius when we meet him and a very different matter to admire him after we have been informed that he is a famous man. It is doubtful if writers in whom the ideality is so strongly marked would be received with favor at the present time either by editors or the public. The tendency to materialism would have been too strong for them. Lyceum lectures, on which Emerson depended chiefly, are not what they were; and either of them in a magazine would appear in too startling a contrast with the smooth impersonal writing of to-day. The two cardinal sins of a writer now are to have a style of his own and ideas of his own. Complaint is frequently made that we have no great men like those of the past; but such grand individualities as Hawthorne and Webster, or even self-centred characters like Horace Greeley, are no longer possible. Everywhere, in the college, in the market, and in society, war is waged upon originality and independence of character. It is the same in politics as in literature. Our novelist critic said of the rage for Christmas cards, some years since, "The truth is that art must obey the popular will or cease to be." There was not much art certainly in Christmas cards; but nothing could express better the truculent spirit of the age. Most husbands are fortunate if their honeymoon lasts a month, but Hawthorne's lasted two years. It would seem as if during that space not a cloud came across his sky. He gathered flowers for his wife--water lilies, which he must have sought for in a boat, fringed gentians and the queenly "Lilium Canadensis"--and then felt that the most beautiful of them were unequal to the loveliness of her nature. After the first months, few visitors came to see them. "George Prescott," he says, "sometimes enters our paradise to bring us the products of the soil, but for weeks the snow in our avenue has been untrodden by any other guest." Mrs. Hawthorne's letters at this period are exceedingly interesting, for nowhere in her husband's writings, or in those of others, do we come so close to this rare and remarkable man. The following description of his character seems to have been a genuine case of thought transferrence, so much is it like his own writing in grace and purity of expression: "He loves power as little as any mortal I ever knew; and it is never a question of private will between us, but of absolute right. His conscience is too fine and high to permit him to be arbitrary. His will is strong, but not to govern others. He is so simple, so transparent, so just, so tender, so magnanimous, that my highest instinct could only correspond to his will. I never knew such delicacy of nature." This is a classic gem, and nothing could be added to it. The character of Hilda in "The Marble Faun," is simply Mrs. Hawthorne at the age of twenty-two. She was a pure-hearted, unselfish person, but not self-reliant or over wise. There is a golden edge or rainbow hue to his description of the old manse which distinguishes it from his other writings and betrays the deeply penetrating happiness he felt there. It is like a morning landscape painted while the dew is on the grass. One notices especially his delight in the great yellow squash-blossoms and the way in which he idealizes them. This, and the three years he spent in Europe after the expiration of his consulate, were the holidays of his life and the reward of all the rest. With the exception of William Ellery Channing, he made no friends in Concord, though he speaks kindly of Thoreau, and compares Channing to him. It is to be suspected that this was largely on account of his political principles--or the lack of them. He had held office under a democratic administration and felt that his interests were connected with that party. Further than that, he does not appear to have distinguished between the two parties. Of his most intimate friends, one was a democrat and the other a whig. But the annexation of Texas was now in sight, and Concord was stirred again with the spirit of '75. Hawthorne, as is well known, did not take interest in the antislavery movement, and a heated discussion of any subject must have been jarring and unpleasant to him. It is not impossible that in this way he came into conflict with Margaret Fuller and conceived an abiding dislike to her. Miss Fuller would not have spared her eloquence in regard to what she considered a matter of principle, nor is it likely that she would have been more considerate of the respect which is due in such matters from a woman to a man. There were not a few persons whom she offended by too much "bounce." To a reverend gentleman who asked her, as they were parting at the house of a mutual friend, where her office was in Boston, she replied, "Oh! look in the directory for it"; instead of politely giving him the street and number. Thus she lost a pleasant acquaintance and a subscriber to "The Dial." Hawthorne and his wife had not been four days in Concord before she came to them with a proposition that they should take Ellery Channing and his wife, who was her own sister, into their family as boarders. One cannot help some astonishment at this proceeding, for it is an instinct with all women to know that a newly married couple do not like to be interfered with. No word has ever been published from which we can infer how the grievance between them originated, but it is morally certain that there was a grievance of some kind, and as Hawthorne was the most inoffensive of men, it is not likely that he was responsible for it. Now in regard to what follows, it is well to carry in mind two important points. In the first place, a writer of fiction acquires a habit, very naturally, of dealing with all tales and anecdotes as if they were subjects for his art, and is not therefore so accurate a judge of their veracity as a lawyer or a critic might be. Whatever holds together as a story is to him as good as true. The second point is that although Hawthorne understood human nature better than the rest of us, it is nevertheless with certain limitations. His romance characters are of a rare sort and are well sustained, but they form a group by themselves. He has not the range of Scott, Thackeray, or Goethe. There is not the slightest evidence that he appreciated the character of Emerson; and if so, he would not be likely to appreciate Emerson's intimate friends. A man like John Brown, always ready to rush upon destruction for an idea, must have been an inexplicable riddle to him. Yet John Brown was the only American who could match Hawthorne in ideality--totally different as they were in other respects. Twelve years later, while Hawthorne was in Rome, he became acquainted with a sculptor named Mosier, who gave him a most disparaging account of Margaret Fuller's marriage to Count D'Ossoli. This informant said that the D'Ossoli family, though pretending to be noble, actually lived like peasants; that the count's brother had for some years been a servant to a gentleman he knew of; that the count himself was an exceedingly handsome man, but ignorant and clownish; that he could not even speak Italian; and that Margaret Fuller had become a good deal demoralized in Rome, and could neither write nor converse with her former brilliancy. Hawthorne accepted this statement and entered it in his diary with inferences of his own which are still more unfavorable to Miss Fuller. We like to believe that he wrote this rather to relieve his own mind than with the expectation of influencing the minds of others. We can easily forgive him for it, for in the whole course of his life there is no other instance of the same kind; but he was most certainly in error to believe such an imputation on the character of a respectable lady from the authority of a single witness. C. P. Cranch, the poet and landscape-painter, says that this Mr. Mosier was the veriest Munchausen, and nobody in Rome thought of crediting his stories. But Mosier's statement shows on its face signs of internal weakness. When he says that Count D'Ossoli in attempting to model a foot placed the big-toe on the wrong side, he states what is altogether incredible, and discloses his own splenetic humor. Neither is it more likely that Margaret Fuller permitted him to examine her manuscripts so that she might obtain his assistance in regard to their publication. Whatever may be said of her, she was not a fool, and was better acquainted with both English and American publishers than all the sculptors in Italy. Miss Fuller's marriage was rather a peculiar one, but nothing is more common than for a highly intellectual woman to select a mate who is a decided contrast to her. Hawthorne has given us an example of this in the romance of Monte Beni--the brilliant Miriam falling in love with that Italian child of nature Donatello. Margaret Fuller was always attracted strongly by personal beauty, and when she was a girl at school she chose her favorites rather for that than for their mental endowments. The handsome D'Ossoli was no doubt all the more interesting to her because he belonged to a noble family which had come to misfortune. Is it not better for us to look at the matter in this way? Margaret Fuller's marriage, voyage, and final destruction against the rocks of her native land, would form the subject for a magnificent poem. How could it happen that Hawthorne deceived himself? Is it possible that he was in the right, and men like Emerson, Ripley, and James Freeman Clarke in the wrong? Why does he consider Miss Fuller to have had a strong, coarse nature, and to have been morally unsound? Here we enter into the deepest recesses of the author's nature. Hawthorne was not wholly a fatalist, or he never could have conceived the character of Donatello, but he was very largely so. A man for whom a life of action is impossible, and who is thus unable to escape wholly from his own shadow, naturally comes to look on any series of events as an inevitable chain of cause and effect. He speaks somewhere of Byron's virtues and vices as being so closely interwoven that he could not have had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them. His story of "The Birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. He did not agree with Shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain essentially till the end. He says that whenever Margaret Fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but internally quite different. There is a certain truth in this, but it is not a whole truth; for there is Socrates--a compendium of all the ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the manner Hawthorne describes. It is true that in a search after rare and exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind which form the bone and sinew of human-life. But is not this effort a virtue in itself? Is not all progress in this world accomplished as the frog escaped from the well, by jumping up three feet and falling back two? Is not the very crown of character that which we derive from failure, penitence, and self-reproach? Human nature is a mysterious labyrinth and the wisest have only found a partial clue to it. George S. Hillard--a brilliant amateur sort of writer, orator and editor--came to visit Hawthorne one of the last Sundays while he remained in the Old Manse, and the two went together to spend the forenoon in Walden woods, calling on Emerson by the way to inquire what the best road might be. Emerson prudently detained them until after the townspeople were safely in their churches, and then accompanied them. It is a pleasant retrospect to think of those two mighty men, so like and yet so unlike, together with their amiable and gifted friend, going off on this Sunday excursion. Mr. Hillard was a fortunate companion for him, for no one could serve better as a mean between two extremes. At the close of Hawthorne's rehearsal of this episode, he makes this note, in commentary:-- "I find that my respect for clerical people, as such, and my faith in the utility of their office, decrease daily. We certainly do need a new Revelation, a new system; for there seems to be no life in the old one." Was this the summary and net result of their stroll in Walden woods? It must be confessed that such was the opinion of the most thoughtful and high-minded people in those days; but we do not feel so now. Schism and separation have done their work, and liberal thinkers everywhere are now returning to the Christian fold. * * * * * About the first of June 1860 the Hawthorne family returned from their long residence in England and Italy. There was no little curiosity concerning them in the quiet old settlement, which was increased by the fact that nothing was seen of them for several months after they came. If Thoreau was a recluse, Hawthorne was an anchorite. He brought up his children in such purity and simplicity as is scarcely credible,--not altogether a wise plan. It was said that he did not even take a daily paper. In the following year Martin F. Conway, the first United States representative from Kansas, went to Concord to call on Emerson, and Emerson invited Hawthorne to dine with them. Judge Conway afterwards remarked that Mr. Hawthorne said very little during the dinner, and whenever he spoke he blushed. Imagine a man five times as sensitive as a young lady in her first season, with the will of a Titan, and a mind like a crown-glass mirror, and you have Nathaniel Hawthorne. While he was in a state of observation, the expression of his face reflected everything that was going on about him; in his reflective moods, it was like looking in at the window of a dark room, or perhaps a picture-gallery; and if any accident disturbed him his look was something like a cracked pane of glass. Moreover there was something unearthly or superterrestrial about him, as if he had been born and brought up in the planet Saturn. Wherever he went he seemed to carry twilight with him. He walked in perfect silence looking furtively about for fear he might meet some one that he knew. His large frame and strong physique ought to have lasted him till the year 1900. There would seem to be something strange and mysterious about his death, as there was in his life. His head was massive, and his face handsome without being attractive. [Footnote: This, however, was near the close of his life.] The brow was finely chiseled, and the eyes beneath it were dark, luminous and fathomless. I never saw him smile, except slightly with his eyes. If his son invited a friend to dinner it was always when his father was away from home. Neither do I remember seeing him at his daughter's out-coming party,--an occasion when the town musician declined to appear because the sister of his particular friend had not been invited. Emerson has given an account of this trait in Hawthorne's character, but he has failed to discover the mainspring of it. Who indeed can explain it? It was part of the man, and without it we could not have had Hawthorne. Perhaps the easiest solution is that of Thoreau's wild apple-tree. When the sprout from an apple-seed comes up in the grass a cow pretty soon bites it off. The next year it puts out two more shoots, and the ends of these are again nipped off. Thus it continues to grow under severe restrictions and forms at length a large thorn-bush, from which finally the tree is able to shoot up beyond the cow's reach and bears its proper fruit. So no doubt Hawthorne in his youth, being a tender plant, was greatly annoyed by brutal and inconsiderate people. A sensitive, proud and refined nature inevitably becomes a target for all the cheap wits and mischievous idlers in the neighborhood. To escape from this we may suppose that Hawthorne surrounded himself with an invisible network of reserve, behind which his pure and lofty spirit could develop itself in a harmonious manner. This he certainly succeeded in doing. In purity of expression and a graceful diction Hawthorne takes the lead of his century. He was the romance writer of the Anglo-Saxon race; in that line only Goethe has surpassed him. Nor is it possible for pure and beautiful work to emanate from a mind which is not equally pure and beautiful. Wells of English undefiled cannot flow from a turbid spring. In purity Emerson probably equaled him, but not in his sense of beauty. Where he surpassed Hawthorne was in manliness, and in his broad humanitarian interests. Otherwise no two men could be more unlike than these, and it would seem to be part of the irony of fate that they should have lived on the same street, and been obliged to meet and speak with each other. One was like sunshine, the other shadow. Emerson was transparent, and wished to be so, he had nothing to conceal from friend or enemy. Hawthorne was simply impenetrable. Emerson was cordial and moderately sympathetic. Hawthorne was reserved, but his sympathies were as profound as the human soul itself. To study human nature as Hawthorne and Shakespeare did, and to make models of their acquaintances for works of fiction, Emerson would have considered a sin; while the evolution of sin and its effect on character was the principal study of Hawthorne's life. One was an optimist, and the other what is sometimes unjustly called a pessimist: that is, one who looks facts in the face and sees people as they are. Hawthorne could not have felt quite comfortable in the presence of a man who asked such searching questions as Emerson frequently did, and Emerson could scarcely have found satisfaction in conversing with one who never had any opinion to express. A good many people claimed to have been Hawthorne's friends after his death who were sufficiently afraid of him while he was alive. He does not appear to have ever had but two very intimate friends, Franklin Pierce and George S. Hillard, both remarkably amiable and sympathetic men,--qualities to which they owed equally their successes and failures in life. Ex-president Pierce used to come to Concord and carry Hawthorne off to the White Mountains, the Isles of Shoals or Philadelphia, just as two college-students will drop their books and go off somewhere to have a good time. Once while Hawthorne was in Boston, Mr. Hillard tried to persuade him to go to Cambridge and dine with Longfellow; but he would not, and went home by the next train. He was pro-slavery in politics, partly because his two friends were so, and partly because he disliked the abolitionists. It is not necessary to suppose that the pro-slavery people of the North in those days believed that human slavery was morally right. It is doubtful if any one believed that. A great many considered it, as Webster did, a serious evil but a dangerous matter to interfere with (and so it proved); some were influenced by mercenary motives; and the northern Democrats, misled by the illogical doctrine of State Sovereignty, believed they had no right to interfere with it. Mr. Hillard held the first of these positions, and General Pierce the last. Very likely Hawthorne shared in both of them; but he never explained himself, and what he thought on the subject will always remain a mystery. The political element seems almost to have been left out of his composition; and in one of his books he speaks of the Concord fight with a certain kind of indifference. Alcott was almost the only man in Concord who had the courage to call on Hawthorne. Sometimes they even went to walk together. How much satisfaction Hawthorne found in these visits it would be difficult to say, for the very philosophic breadth and extension of Alcott's interest were enough to make Hawthorne feel rather shy of him. Alcott's conversation about books and literature was often very fine, but even this could not have given Hawthorne much entertainment. His own library, as he states himself somewhere, was of a miscellaneous character, and contained the works of scarcely any author of repute except Shakespeare. Alcott's sense of humor and keen knowledge of human nature may have been a sort of common ground between them. Meanwhile Hawthorne, as afterwards appeared, was making a study of Alcott to see whether he would serve his purpose as the mainspring for a new work of fiction. The manuscript plot of a romance was found among Hawthorne's papers in which he describes a personage in general outline like his neighbor Alcott, but without his ideality and good-humor. This imaginary character was supposed to live in a retired manner, together with an old housekeeper, a boy of whom he is the legal guardian, and a huge spider in which his interest and solicitude are more especially centred. What the catastrophe of this strange story was to have been, we are not informed, but it naturally would have arisen from the unhealthy and oppressive social position in which the boy must have found himself as he advanced towards manhood. At the close of his memoranda Hawthorne says, "In person and figure Mr. Alcott--". To be selected as the mainspring of a romance is properly a compliment. [Illustration: THE OLD MANSE, RESIDENCE OF DR. RIPLEY.] There was a certain Dutch artist who made a specialty of sheep, and painted them so well that Goethe said of him, "This painter so entered into the life of his subject that I think he must have been a sheep, and I shall become one if I continue to look at his pictures." In the same way Hawthorne had such penetrating sympathy for all living things, that he unconsciously absorbed certain qualities from those with which he was most familiar. He would sometimes write a letter to his publisher, Mr. Fields, which was almost like what Mr. Fields would have written to him. Venomous creatures appeared to have been especially interesting to him, and he even fancied a poisonous influence in the Roman sunshine. Perhaps his liking for spiders may account for a certain cobwebby feeling which comes over one at times while reading his books. There can be no doubt of this, for when I once spoke of it, a lawyer who was present replied, "I have said the same myself; and when I was in Paris reading a French newspaper, I had a feeling as if cobwebs were being drawn across my face, and looking down to the end of the column, I saw that it was a translation from Hawthorne." But these peculiarities are like the soil which gives flavor to the grape, and the wine that comes from the grape. If the reader thinks that in these few paragraphs Hawthorne has hardly received proper justice, he may not be far wrong. Yet how can any personal account of such a man do him justice. It may be said of him that he was a model husband, a kind father, and an exemplary citizen, and that is all. During his lifetime there were people who did him great injustice. His reserved life was looked upon as a morbid selfishness. The rare publication of his writings was supposed to arise from indolence. It was thought that he wrote the life of Franklin Pierce for the sake of a government office, and when he was actually appointed consul at Liverpool, the case was proved beyond a doubt. The anti-slavery people looked upon him as a lamentable exception to the other literary men of America, who were all on their side: they doubted if he had been born with any sense of right and wrong. What answer can be made to such accusations? When it is a question of motive, of moral consciousness, how are such charges to be refuted? So President Garfield has often been accused of appointing an efficient and honest collector for the port of New York, in the interest of mercenary politics. Charles Sumner for preventing the annexation of San Domingo, was called a traitor to the negro race, and it was said that his speech on the subject was delivered under the influence of brandy. A college-professor informed his class that Sumner was a man of small erudition, and Garrison spoke of him as one who had evidently joined the anti-slavery cause from interested motives. A Boston merchant whose word had been as good as his note for thirty years was gibbetted soon after his death by a high-minded journalist, as the type of mendacious duplicity. But why multiply these unpleasant examples of misrepresentation? Hardly a great and good man has ever lived without suffering from it at one time or another. They originate in bad temper, in partisan malice, and those believe them who have no just criterion to distinguish truth from falsehood. After all, what other American has accomplished a literary work equal to Hawthorne's. He was an artist, purely an artist, and of the finest quality. The raw material may be in us, but to develop it requires pains and labor. The greater the talent the more difficult is its fruition. Hawthorne's life was absorbed in this. His habitual mood was a dreamy, brooding observation. When Englishmen say that no great work of art has been produced in America; that Allston's magnificent pictures remain half-finished; that neither Emerson or Lowell has been able to write a book, but only essays; that we have no historian as good as Macaulay, and that the best of our poetry consists of ballads and other short pieces; my reply is, "The Scarlet Letter" and "The Marble Faun." These are great works of art. The most unique and original, perhaps, of the present century; and if they have not the lyrical form they are exquisitely written, and none the less poetic. There is a difference in kind between a great work and a small one. A good sonnet may be finished in an hour, and is a pleasant recreation; but the composition of a tragedy requires a severe, protracted and laborious effort. Goethe's finest songs were written in a moment, a flash of inspiration; but Faust may be called the work of his lifetime. He himself describes the difficulties which attend the composition of a tragedy, in such a manner as may well deter others from attempting it. How few, indeed, are the dramatic poets in all times and countries! Even Byron did not succeed in this. Mrs. Hawthorne said that during the period while her husband was occupied with the "Scarlet Letter," there were a contraction of his brow, and a look of care and anxiety in his face, which were reflected in her own nerves and made her unhappy, although she knew little of what he was writing. Both these romances are tragedies; and there is something in tragedy that places it at the top of all literature. Their subjects also indicate that he was in full sympathy with his own time, and perhaps understood the nineteenth century better than it does itself. Emerson has been called a Greek, but Hawthorne was more Hellenic than he. This may be perceived in his version of the Greek legends in "Tanglewood Tales." His style is much like that of Isocrates. Where Webster or Emerson would use Saxon words, Hawthorne would use Greek or Latin ones, and gain in grace and flexibility what he lost in force and vigor. He would seem to have been a southerner by nature, fond of warm weather and an inactive life. His short stories are of equal value comparatively with those that are longer and more complete. I remember in my youth being attracted by the title of one of them. It was called "The Unpardonable Sin," and described a man, who, having spent many years in search of this iniquity, finds it too heavy a burden for his soul to carry, and destroys himself one night in a limekiln. Next morning the lime-burner discovered a marble heart floating on the surface of the seething lime. This was the unpardonable sin,--to have a cold, unfeeling heart. Such allegories make a more lasting impression than many sermons. His note-books also are of great value, especially the American ones. He makes dramatic situations out of the simplest incidents, and we read between the lines sentences he never wrote. We remember them without in the least intending to do so, and find ourselves reflecting upon them as if they were important events. No writer since Fielding has given so faithful a picture of the time in which he lived. One can envy such a man the three years he spent in Italy. During that time he resided chiefly in a villa on the height called Bellosguardo, near Florence, a villa which he has described with some changes, in the "Marble Faun," as the mountain residence of Donatello. A more delightful summer abode cannot be conceived, for it has the advantage of mountain air, and the view from it is unsurpassable. Picturesque Florence, with its towers and battlements, lies almost beneath it, while the green and sylvan valley of the Arno stands before it, with the far-off purple mists of the Mediterranean. Behind it the Apennines stretch from Livorno to Rome. The interior of this chateau, finished in ancient marble, he has described himself. Hawthorne's life was not a very easy one, as judged by ordinary standards; and until he went to England it was a weary and uncomfortable struggle. Let us be thankful that for once he had a full measure of rest and enjoyment, and let us be grateful to the man who made this possible for him. More than ten years after his death on a summer afternoon Mr. Alcott was entertaining some friends, and as they looked towards the Hawthorne house one of them said, "Would you be surprised, Mr. Alcott, to see Nathaniel Hawthorne some day gliding past your rustic fence as he used to do?" "No, sir, I should not," replied the old philosopher, "for while he lived he always seemed to me like an apparition from some other world. I used to see him coming down from the woods between five and six o'clock, and if he caught sight of any one in the road he would go under cover like a partridge. Then those strange suspicious side-glances of his! They are not anywhere in his writings. I believe they were inherited from some ancestor who was a smuggler, or perhaps even an old pirate. In his investigation of sin he was expiating the sins of his progenitors." There is reason for believing that Alcott was not far wrong in this conjecture. Julian Hawthorne, in the biography of his father, says of their ancestors: "His forefathers, whatever their less obvious qualities may have been, were at all events enterprising, active, practical men, stern and courageous, accustomed to deal with and control lawless and rugged characters; they were sea-captains, farmers, soldiers, magistrates; and, in whatever capacity, they were used to see their iron will prevail, and to be answerable to no man." A man who does not subordinate his will to the common law and the common good must eventually become a lawless man; unless restrained by such natural refinement and rare sense of propriety as we meet with in Hawthorne himself. It is not necessary to suppose that any of them were pirates, which was probably a mere flourish of Alcott's rhetoric. * * * * * There is another legend that Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all distantly related through the Batchelder family. There are said to be red and black Batchelders, like the Douglas family in Scotland; and the black Batchelders have a rare gift of intellect which only comes to the surface when united with some other stock. One would like to know how much truth there is in this. There are indeed certain striking points of resemblance between these three; each in his own line surpassing all others of the same period. Their complexion, and their great physical strength, their deeply arched eye-brows, their genius for language, their reticent and contemplative habits, and especially a certain pregnant gloominess of expression, would seem to indicate a nearer unity than the general one of the Aryan races. Yet the case remains to be proven by documentary evidence. LOUISA M. ALCOTT. Mr. Alcott's house in Concord was situated on the Lexington road about three-quarters of a mile from the village centre. It was the best-looking house almost in the town, being of simple but faultless architecture, while the others were mostly either too thin or too thick, or out of proportion in some way. It lacked a coat of fresh paint sometimes, but this was to its advantage from an artistic point of view. Fine old elm-trees shaded the path in front of it, and across the road a broad level meadow stretched away to Walden woods. In the rear it was half surrounded by low pine-wooded hills, which protected it from the north-easterly storms and the cold draughts of winter. Mr. Alcott had quite a genius for rustic architecture, as is proved by the summer-house which he and Thoreau built for Emerson, and the fences, seats and arbors with which he adorned his little place added a final charm to the rural picture. In summer nights the droning of the bittern could be heard across the meadows, and woodcock came down familiarly from the hills to look for worms in the vegetable-garden. The snow melted here in Spring and the grass grew green earlier than in other places. It was the fitting abode and haven of rest for a family that had found the conflict of life too hard for them. Within the house was as pleasant as without. There is no better decoration for a room than a good library, and though Mr. Alcott's books were not handsomely bound one could see at a glance they were not of a common sort. They gave his study an air of distinction, which was well carried out by the refined look and calm demeanor of its occupant. The room opposite, which was both parlor and living-room, always had a cheerful homelike appearance; and after the youngest daughter May entered on her profession as a painter, it soon became an interesting museum of sketches, water-colors and photographs. I remember an engraving of Murillo's Virgin, with the moon under her feet, hanging on the wall, and some excellent copies of Turner's water-color studies. The Alcotts were a hospitable family, not easily disturbed by callers, and ready to share what they had with others. The house had a style of its own. How Emerson accomplished what he did, with his slight physique and slender strength, will always be one of the marvels of biography. His is the only instance, I believe, on record of a man who was able to support a family by writing and talking on abstract subjects. It is true he inherited a small property, enough to support a single man in a modest way, and without this his career would not have been possible; but the main source of his income was winter lecturing--a practice which evidently killed Theodore Parker, naturally a strong and powerful man. Yet he was not satisfied with this, but wished also to provide for others who had no claims of relationship upon him. His generous efforts in behalf of Carlyle have long since been made public; but the help he gave Mr. Alcott will probably never be known. Least of all would Emerson have wished it to be known. One can imagine that he said to himself: "Here is a man of rare spiritual quality, with whom I am in the closest sympathy: I cannot permit him to suffer any longer." So after the philosophic school in the Masonic Temple had come to an end, he invited him to Concord and cared for him like a brother. Mr. Alcott deserved this, for though he was not more a philosopher than Thoreau was a naturalist, and equally with Thoreau he was a character. The primal tenet in his creed was like the ancient mariner's, to harm neither man nor bird nor beast; and he exemplified this doctrine with incredible consistency for full fifty years. He lived a blameless life. Many laughed at him for his unpractical theories; but the example of one such man, even in a reactionary way, is worth more to the community than the practical efforts of ten ordinary men. He has besides the distinction of being the person, whom, during the middle portion of his life, Emerson most liked to converse with. Froude the historian calls Charles the Fifth one of nature's gentlemen: so was Mr. Alcott. It is easy to distinguish the man whose behavior is an emanation of himself from people of well-bred manners or of cultivated manners. Well-bred manners come from habit and association, and though always pleasant may be nothing more than a superficial varnish; while cultivated manners imply a certain amount of self-restraint. No man was ever more free from formality or affectation. He was neither condescending to inferiors nor would he yield ground to those who considered themselves above him, but met all people on the broad equality of self-respect. He was always most respected where society was most polite and refined. Neither was he lacking in personal courage. During the Anthony Burns excitement in Boston in 1852, he took a prominent position among the rescuers, and if a collision of the guards had taken place he would likely have been killed. He had a fine philosophical mind, and if it had only been trained properly in early life he might have won a distinguished place among metaphysicians. That however was hardly possible in the America of that time. He was not a philosopher in the modern sense, but he was in the ancient sense--a disciple of Pythagoras, dropped down from the pure Grecian sky into the restless turmoil of the nineteenth century. He wished to discover everything anew for himself, instead of building upon the discoveries of others. His conversations, usually in the parlors of some philanthropic gentlemen, were made up partly of Pythagorean speculation and partly of fine ethical rhapsody which sometimes rose to genuine eloquence. They served to interest neophytes in the operations of their own minds, and the more experienced found much the same satisfaction in it as in Emerson's discourses. He was an excellent speaker; confident, quick-witted and conciliatory. I remember a very eloquent address that he delivered at an anniversary meeting in 1868, and at an anti-slavery convention, where Garrison and Phillips fell out, Mr. Alcott made the best speech of the occasion, discriminating between the two leaders in a just and sensible manner. He was memorable for shrewd observations. He said once to a lady who was fretting because the clergyman did not cone in time, "Meanwhile, Mrs. D., there is providence." Of a good-humored young radical who wished to make war on all conventional forms, religious and political parties, he remarked, "Unless our friend changes his ideas he will not be the happy man at forty that he is now;" and the saying came true. If we are to judge the value of Alcott's thought by the constant cheerfulness and contentment of his daily life, his ideas must have been of an excellent quality. His flowing white hair, and the calmness and purity of his aspect, gave him quite an apostolic look; and once while visiting at the house of a friend, a certain small boy--the same for whom John Brown afterwards wrote his autobiography of a boy--asked his mother if that man was one of Christ's disciples. Such was the father of "Little Women." The Alcotts received their friends weather permitting on Monday evenings, and some favored youths of Mr. Sanborn's school would go there to play whist, make poker-sketches, and talk with the ladies; while Mrs. Alcott, who had played with the famous automaton in her younger days, would have a quiet game of chess with some older person in a corner. Louisa usually sat by the fire-place, knitting rapidly with an open book in her lap, and if required to make up a table would come forward with a quiet look of resignation and some such remark as "You know I am not a Sarah Battles." Then after a while her love of fun would break forth, and her bright flashes of wit would play about the heads of all who were in the room. Just after ten Mr. Alcott would come in with a dish of handsome apples and his wife produce some ginger cakes; a lively chat for fifteen or twenty minutes would follow, and then the guests would walk home. It was in this way Louisa acquired that stock of information about young people and their affairs which she made such good use of afterwards. Human nature to the poet and novelist is like a Calumet and Hecla mine which never becomes exhausted. Louisa Alcott resembled her mother in figure, features and color, and in her ardent and impulsive temperament. In the greater number of families the eldest child resembles the father; the second and third are more like their mother, and the fifth (if there be so many) is often like the grandparents. In the Alcott family however it was just the reverse of this, for May the youngest daughter was the only one like her father, inheriting the artistic side of his nature, instead of the philosophical. Neither did Louisa resemble her grandmother's family, the Sewalls. She was emphatically a May, and the best of all the Mays, though there have been many of them who were excellent. I think she was indebted to her father for her enterprising spirit and keen sense of character. Mr. Alcott knew the people of Concord much better than they understood him, and was always most interesting when he talked of the distinguished people with whom he had been acquainted. May was fond of society, and a walk to and from the school dances cold winter nights; and then ready next morning for a skating party on Walden pond; but she said her sisters had little entertainment in their youth, dressing always in the plainest manner and practising a stoical self-denial. Louisa liked to look at other people dancing, and generally it made her happy to see the young folks enjoy themselves. This shows the true woman in her. The portrait she has given of herself as Jo in "Little Women" is not to be taken too literally. Like Thackeray in "Pendennis" she has purposely left out the noble side of her nature,--for indeed that was only disclosed at rare intervals and for those who had eyes to see. She had the strongest features of the family, and a quick decisive manner which was sometimes mistaken for arrogance. [Illustration: LOUISA ALCOTT. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1858.] Louisa and her sister Annie (now Mrs. Pratt) were excellent actresses, and were always in demand when private theatricals were on foot. To see them perform in the "Two Buzzards" with her sister and F. B. Sanborn was a treat of the first order. I can hear Louisa now saying, "Brother Benjamin, brother Benjamin!" in a scene of which all the rest is gone from my memory. Another favorite _role_ of hers was Dickens' character of Sarah Gamp in the nocturnal interview with her friend Betsy Prig. As Mrs. Jarley exhibiting her wax tableaux she was inimitable. She did it with a snap. Once she was called upon to assist at an entertainment given at the house of the village blacksmith: she invented a charade which was both novel and appropriate. She arranged her father to look like the Boston statue of Franklin--and the resemblance was a very striking one--and then came in with another gentleman in a travelling dress, and surveyed and criticized him. When she said, "He seems to have rather a brassy expression," Mr. Alcott could scarcely hold his face. This was the first part: the second consisted of the scene from the "Two Buzzards" already mentioned, and for the third a witty dialogue about Mr. Sanborn's school. As more than half of the audience was composed of Mr. Sanborn's pupils this charade produced a great effect. Her acting had this peculiarity, that she seemed always to be herself and the character she was representing at the same time. This is the case also with some professional actors and actresses, notably with Madame Ristori and Edwin Booth: but it is not the finest kind of acting. The anti-slavery conflict and the civil-war with which it ended appealed strongly to her ardent and sympathetic nature; and this finally resulted in her enlisting as a nurse to tend the wounded soldiers. Her lively and picturesque "Hospital Sketches" written at Washington for the "Boston Commonwealth" are the echo of this period. Very few passed through that crisis without bearing the scars of it for life, and the fever which Louisa Alcott contracted in the camp sapped her vitality and probably shortened her days. She was one of the veterans, and deserved a pension. While she was convalescing she said to a friend who condoled with her on her misfortunes, "The loss of my hair was the worst of it" (this had been cut off by order of the doctor); "I felt as if that were a disgrace." When some one asked her how she amused herself she replied, "I think out sketches of stories and put them away in little pigeon-holes in my brain for future use." On the Fourth of July 1864 there was an evening-party at the house of Hon. E. R. Hoar, and nearly at the close of it Miss Alcott came to me with a humorous twinkle in her eye and said: "A few of us are going to have a picnic to-morrow at Conantum"--a picturesque bluff owned by one Conant, about three miles up the river--"and Mrs. Austin and I have engaged a boat for the occasion and are now looking for a muscular heathen to row it. Will you come?" Nothing could have pleased me better; so next morning we all started in the best of spirits. There was however a head wind, the boat was without a rudder, and the Concord River is very crooked. I think Miss May Alcott was also in the party. I found it terribly hard rowing, and finally exclaimed, "This is the darnedest boat I ever pulled." "Frank," said Louisa, "never say darn. Much better to be profane than vulgar. I had rather live in hell than in some places on earth. Strong language, but true. Here, take some cold tea." She had a claret-bottle full of this beverage, and gave me a good drink of it. Her vigorous piece of common-sense was also very refreshing, and Conantum being now in sight, Miss Alcott and her sister insisted on landing at the next bridge, leaving Mrs. Austin [Footnote: Mrs. Jane G. Austin, a bright little story-writer of those days and very much like her English namesake.] and myself to continue the way alone. Unluckily there was no one now to care for the bottle of cold tea, and rolling about in the stern of the boat the cork came out and the tea was spilled. This was a severe loss to Miss Alcott who was not yet strong enough for an all-day picnic, and when I explained it to her she said, "Don't talk to me. I know you college-boys. That cork never came out by accident. You drank the tea yourself, and now in what way I am going to punish you for it I cannot tell." With such biting humor she partly relieved and partly concealed her just vexation. Characteristic writers are commonly the last to be appreciated, and Miss Alcott's first novel did not meet with an encouraging reception from the public. Some tender critics even complained that the story was subversive of conservative morality. "I cannot help that," Louisa remarked in her emphatic manner, "I did not make morality or human nature, and am not responsible for either: but people who are given to moods act as I have described; sometimes they like one person and sometimes another." Perhaps she was thinking not so much of moody natures as of those contradictory characters who have inherited the traits of very dissimilar ancestors. She wrote another novel which she herself liked much better and had great hopes of, which was lost in some miraculous way by her publisher Mr. Fields. He paid her for it what many people would consider a handsome compensation--exactly the sum that Stuart Mill paid Carlyle for burning up the first volume of his "French Revolution"--but it was a trying affair for both sides. How so bulky an object as a novel in manuscript could have been lost without its falling into the hands of some person who knew what to do with it, is most difficult to imagine. That so many of the world's benefactors are doomed to incalculable torments here on earth may be a good argument for immortality, but for Divine Providence it is no better evidence than the Lisbon earthquake which so startled the optimists and thinking men of the last century. There is no telling why this is so; for misfortune falls upon the just as well as the unjust, and often no human foresight can prevent it. Louisa Alcott supposed that she was nearly well of her fever when inflammatory rheumatism set in. The worst of this was the loss of sleep which it occasioned. Long continued wakefulness is a kind of nervous cremation, and resembles in its physical effect the perpetual drop of water on the head with which the Spanish inquisitors used to torment their heretics. Any mental agitation makes the case very much worse, and it requires great self-control to prevent this. It was melancholy to behold her at that time. Her pallid face, the dark rings about her eyes, and her dreary, hopeless expression might have penetrated the most obdurate heart. "I don't suppose it is going to kill me," she said, "but I shall never get over it. I go to bed at nine o'clock and think steadily of the wood-box in order to keep my mind from more serious subjects." It is not always darkest before dawn, especially when the moon is on its last quarter, but happily it was so in this instance. Three years later she was in much better health, and had published "Little Women." First the young people read it; then their fathers and mothers; and then the grandparents read it. Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said to each other, "Have you read 'Little Women'"; and laughed as they said it. The clerks in my office read it, so also did the civil engineer, and the boy in the elevator. It was the rage in '69 as "Pinafore" was in '78. It was re-published in London,--a rare compliment for a book of its kind. Rumors of this unusual success had reached the little household in Concord and filled their home with pleasant expectations; but they had no idea of the extent of it. The evening papers announced on the night before Christmas that Miss Alcott's publishers had sent her that day a very large cheque. There were many glad hearts at this news beside those in the Alcott family; where, I fancy, tears and prayers were not wanting to complete the sacrament. The long struggle was ended, and peace and rest had come at last. Louisa had won a glorious victory, and the laurel wreath was on her brow. The style of "Little Women" is not classic; but as Goldsmith says in his preface to the "Vicar of Wakefield," "It matters not." It filled a vacant place in American and perhaps also in English literature, and must continue to fill it. Novelists usually take up their characters at the age of twenty-one, or somewhere in the twenties, and there have also been many excellent books written for children; but to describe the transition period between fifteen and twenty there had not as yet been anything adequate--if we partially except Thomas Hughes' sketches of life at Rugby and Oxford. It is a period of life which deserves much more consideration than it often receives. It is the integrating period, during which we make our characters and form those habits of thought and action which mainly determine our destiny. The bloom of youth may conceal this internal conflict, but it is there none the less, and frequently a very severe one. "You have no idea how many trials I have," I once heard a schoolgirl of sixteen say, the perfect picture of health and happiness; and those who remember well their own youth will not be inclined to laugh at this. The tragedy of childhood is the commonest form of tragedy; and youth is a melodrama in which pathos and humor are equally mingled. Those who by some chance have escaped this experience and have had the path of early life made smooth for them, may grow to be thrifty trees but are not likely to bear much fruit. It is for her clear perception of these conditions and her skill and address in dealing with them that Miss Alcott deserves the celebrity that is now attached to her name. Her simple pictures of domestic country life are drawn with a firm and confident hand. They stand out in strong relief, and take their color from her own warm-hearted womanly nature. Her characters act unconsciously before us as if we looked at them through a window. In American fiction "Little Women" holds the next place to the "Scarlet Letter" and "Marble Faun." There is one of Boccaccio's stories which differs so much from the others in closeness of statement and fulness of detail that it is judged to have been an experience of his own. As the critics say, he knew too much about his subject. Louisa Alcott wisely avoided this error. Her characters are always real, but,--in her best work at least,--not realistic. There are people in natural life, full of peculiarities, whom it would take pages to describe, while others can be hit off in a few sentences. Miss Alcott knew that characters of a few simple traits were best suited to her purpose; and she was too good an artist to imitate her model. Her impersonation of herself as Jo was pretty near the truth, but Beth, Amy, and Meg only resemble her sisters in a very general way. If the book were more of a biography it would not be good fiction. Some of the incidents in it were taken from her own or the family experiences, but more are either imaginary or conventional. It is said that her primary intention was to leave Jo in a state of single blessedness, and that Roberts Brothers fairly declined to publish the second volume unless she was married off to somebody. Thus originated the episode of the German Professor, one of the best in the story. Laurie was supposed to have been taken from Julian Hawthorne, because he lived in the next house and was rather an attractive kind of boy. Louisa herself said there was no ground for this: and yet Laurie seems to me a good deal like him. I remember meeting her at the radical club in Boston in January 1868, and her drawing me into a corner where she told me that she was writing a book for young people and would like to know about the game of cricket. This fixes the time pretty closely when "Little Women" was begun. She was frequently to be seen at the meetings of the radical club, afterwards called the Chestnut Street club, where her father was one of the leading members. She did not care for lectures, but greatly enjoyed listening to the discussion of learned and thoughtful men. It was an era of large designs and great mental activity; and in such periods the best literary work is always accomplished. Once she said (in her father's presence), "It requires three women to take care of a philosopher, and when the philosopher is old the three women are pretty well used up." But at another time she said, "To think of the money I make by writing this trash, while my father's, words of immortal wisdom only bring him a little celebrity." She honored her father, and lived more for him than for anybody else, including herself. Her journey through Europe was like a triumphal procession. Doors were opened to her everywhere; not the palace of the Rothschilds or the apartments of the ex-Queen of Naples, but those of distinguished artists and literary people. Mr. Healy, the best American painter in Rome, requested permission to paint her portrait. This she consented to, and was rather surprised when he afterwards presented it to her. "I wondered," she said while we were looking at the picture, "what was going to come next; when one day Mr. Healy's daughter appeared with a novel in manuscript which she wished I would give an opinion of. I found it to be good and sent it to my London publisher, who happily published it for her." Posterity ought to be grateful for Healy's little manoeuvre. [Illustration: THE ALCOTT HOUSE.] The same attentions followed her on her return to Boston; but she did not care for them. She had learned that the satisfaction of good work is the only one which we never have to regret. She was busy with plans for the future, considering especially how she might order and arrange her affairs for the benefit of her family. Ladies whose names she had never heard, came in fine carriages and sent in their cards to her. This amused her very much. "I don't care who their grandfathers and grandmothers were," she said. "John Hancock was my great-great-grandfather, but nobody ever came to see me on his account." If she had leisure she received them: otherwise not. In her next novel, the "Old Fashioned Girl," she introduces herself with the name of Katie King, and says to her young friends: "Beware of popularity; it is a delusion and a snare; it puffeth up the heart of man, and just as one gets to liking the taste of this intoxicating draught, it suddenly faileth." When "Little Men" was published a rather censorious critic complained that Miss Alcott's boys and girls had no very good manners, and made some inquiry after the insipid "Rollo" books which were in circulation forty years ago. It is true their manners are not of the best, but they are the Concord manners of that period. Were they otherwise they would not be true to life. Very few boys and girls of sixteen have fine manners; and even after they have acquired the art of good behavior in company they continue to act in quite a different fashion towards each other. What else can we expect of them? Exactly the same objection has been made to "School Days at Rugby"; and when some one complained of Goethe that the characters in "Wilhelm Meister" did not belong to good society he replied in verse, "I have often been in society called 'good,' from which I could not obtain an idea for the smallest poem." Concord was large enough for Thoreau, but not for Louisa Alcott. She had no proclivity for paddling up and down Concord River in search of ideas. She had a broad cosmopolitan mind, and the slow routine of a country-town was irksome to her. She did not care for nature; and the great world was not too large a field of observation for her. Even in Rome she preferred the living image of a healthy bambino to the statue of the gladiator who has been dying in marble for so many centuries. She loved the society of people who were abreast of the times, who could give her fresh thought and valuable information. The books she read were of the most vigorous description. When some one asked her if she had read Mallock's "New Republic" she replied, "I do not read cotemporary writers; only Emerson and the classics." "Louisa," said I, "you speak to my soul." "Do I?" said she, with a tenderness of feeling such as I had never noticed before. Her attachments were strong; but her resentments were of long duration. EMERSON HIMSELF. Emerson might be seen on his way to the post-office at precisely half-past five every afternoon, after the crowd there had dispersed. His step was deliberate and dignified, and though his tall lean figure was not a symmetrical one, nor were his movements graceful, yet there was something very pleasant in the aspect of him even at a distance. The same has also been said of good statuary, even before we know what is its subject. He knew all the people old and young in the village, and had a kindly word or a smile for every one of them. His smile was better than anything he said. There is no word in the language that describes it. It was neither sweet nor saintly, but more like what a German poet called the mild radiance of a hidden sun. No picture, photograph or bust of Emerson has ever done him justice for this reason; only such a master as Giorgione could have painted his portrait. Every morning after reading the "Boston Advertiser" he would go to his study, to take up the work of the day previous and cross out every word in it that could possibly be spared. This procedure and his taste for unusual words is what gives the peculiar style to his writing. It was characteristic of him physically and mentally. He had a spare figure; was sparing of speech, sparing of praise, and sparing of time; in all things temperate and stoical. He had an aquiline face, made up of powerful features without an inch of spare territory. "With beams December planets dart His keen eye truth and conduct scanned." His eyes were sometimes exceedingly brilliant; his nose was strong and aquiline; and the lower part of his face, especially the mouth, was notably like the busts of Julius Caesar. His voice was a baritone of rapid inflections, and when he was very much in earnest it changed to a deep bass. He once said, "Whenever I look in the glass I feel a depression of spirits"; but his friends did not feel so. He was always an agreeable object to them, even in his last years when he looked in his study like an old eagle in his eyrie. Mental power is more attractive than beauty even to ladies. He was a modern Stoic, and carried that kind of life to a high degree of perfection. He sometimes smoked a cigar, and sometimes drank a glass of wine, but the only real luxury he indulged in was dining with the Atlantic Club once a month in Boston. During his lecturing tours he was the recipient of a great deal of hospitality, and became the objective centre of many a social gathering; but how much he enjoyed this it would be difficult to tell. He was too modest and genuine to like being lionized. He had neither pride, vanity, nor self-conceit; and his great celebrity never weighed heavily upon him, or discovered itself in his manners. In this respect he carried his stoicism a little too far, for he never would permit any one to talk with him about himself, and enthusiastic admirers of his genius commonly met with a rather cold reception. He repelled everything in the shape of a compliment. Dr. Edward Emerson says somewhere that his father was used to eat whatever was set before him with Spartan-like indifference. This mistake may have arisen from the good quality of Mrs. Emerson's housekeeping, and the excellent fare which she provided for her husband and his friends. Emerson wished to bear the hardships of life without complaining, but he also knew that to make life unnecessarily hard is not only unwise but has an injurious effect on character. As he would have said, it is not according to nature. A horse seeks the best of the road, and a cow the freshest grass in the pasture. Studious people and others who live mostly indoors are obliged to be careful of what they eat. You could not call Emerson an epicure, but he knew how to appreciate a fine dinner. Several witnesses have given their testimony in regard to his partiality for what he called "pie." He was also fond of pears; knew the best varieties and the order in which they ripened. He used to say that there is only ten minutes in which a pear is fairly ripe: before that it is too hard and afterwards too soft. His friend Dr. F. H. Hedge once made a similar remark concerning ripe scholars. Perhaps the most remarkable trait in his character was his absolute self-poise. He had a balanced mind if there ever was one. Carlyle considered the "Conduct of Life" to be Emerson's best book, and there was reason why it should be. It was the subject of all others which he knew most about. Conduct had been the study of his life. Behavior was a fine art with him, cultivated partly from motives of prudence but more for its own sake. From early morning till bed-time he was always the same, always self-possessed. There was no relaxation of it; he was like an athlete in full training. It was difficult to place him in a position where he did not appear to advantage. But he expected nearly as much from others, and had small patience with those who from ignorance or carelessness infringed the rules of etiquette. One of his expressions was, that death or mutilation was the only excuse for being late to dinner. The notion that poets are an unpractical class of people is pure illusion. The lives of our chief American poets will be sufficient to contradict it; if Dante had not been a just governor of Florence and Aeschylus had not fought like a tiger in the battle of Salamis. Bryant was the able editor of a newspaper; Lowell made an excellent ambassador; and Longfellow also had the reputation with his publishers of being a very shrewd man of business. So was Emerson in all things eminently practical. He would sometimes say, "I allow myself to be cheated by one Irishman"; but I do not think he was cheated very much. In fair weather he always left his books half an hour or so before dinner and walked out, to get fresh-air and see what was going forward on his little place. The poem called "Hamatreya" and many of his best thoughts were evidently suggested by these short excursions. He says in the "Conduct of Life": "The scholar goes into his garden to obtain a juster statement of his thought. He puts down his hand to pull up a weed. Behind that is a second; behind the second is a third; behind the third a fourth; and beyond that a thousand and four." Who can doubt that this was a personal experience with him, as it has been with some others? There are many anecdotes of his good sense and sagacity, and the following is perhaps equal to any of them. One summer there was a camp-meeting of spiritualists at Walden Pond, and every evening they held an entertainment of speeches, singing and music, to which a small admittance-fee was charged. It happened, however, that the picnic pavilion was situated close to Mr. Emerson's land, and numbers of Concord people went out of curiosity and leaning against his fence heard and saw everything that went on. A committee of spiritualists consequently called on Mr. Emerson and requested permission to collect fees from those who stole their entertainment in this manner. At first thought this might not seem to be unreasonable; but Emerson replied, "No, I have always enjoyed the privilege of walking upon my neighbors' fields, and I cannot now refuse the same right to them." Could a chief justice have decided the case better? Emerson's _no_ was always decisive, and if one person could not induce him to change his mind I do not believe twenty millions would have succeeded in doing so. When he was involved in a lawsuit regarding some property, and the suggestion was made that he should compromise it, he said: "By no means. If it is mine I want the whole of it; if it is not mine I do not want any of it." He avoided controversies and often showed great tact in escaping from an argument. What he had once published was of no consequence to him, and he cared little whether others liked it or not. If people advanced opinions or judgments with which he disagreed he made a plain statement of the fact and then changed the subject of conversation. Opponents who wished to corner him, and had perhaps set snares for him to fall into, found themselves outwitted by his unfailing desire for peace and harmony. He went to the polls and voted; he attended town-meetings and political caucuses, but never took an active share in them. The prohibition of liquor, the tariff question, the woman suffrage movement, and other like vexatious matters he left severely alone. I doubt if any one discovered from first to last what his real opinions were on these subjects. At the Boston Radical Club in 1868 he was asked to give an opinion on woman suffrage, and he replied that he had no doubt that when all women had agreed as to what they wanted, what was in fact best for them, they could easily obtain it through the home influence. These he would say are questions of judgment. The slavery question was a matter of principle; and on that point he gave forth no uncertain sound. He did not, however, engage actively in the controversy till the passage of the fugitive-slave bill warned him how seriously the republic was in danger. Then he threw himself into the struggle with all the energy of his nature, and stumped the Middlesex district for the free-soil candidate Dr. Palfrey. In one of his speeches at this time referring to Webster's support of the bill, he forged this terrible figure, "Every drop of blood in the man's veins has eyes that look downward." The final test of a deep mind is to respect forms and at the same time recognize how little comparatively they are worth. The technical skill of the pianist requires years of laborious effort, and yet it has no value unless he can also appreciate the intention and spirit of the composer whose music he plays. So it is in art, politics, religion,--and all human affairs. When the national government was captured by the slavocracy, and converted in all its branches into an engine for the oppression of the negro race and white laborers as well, Emerson saw clearly that the season of respect for law had passed by, and he celebrated John Brown as the apostle and martyr of a holy cause. This accurate historical penetration on the part of one who knew but little of history is the finest flower in the poet's crown. What he said of John Brown may now seem somewhat exaggerated; but the importance of the event has never been exaggerated. An argument, however, is not always to be avoided even at such times as we are least inclined for it. In February 1865 the good people of Concord called a town-meeting to consider the advisability of building a new high-school house. Alcott, who held some office connected with the town schools, was strongly in favor of the project, and on his way to the meeting called on Emerson to secure his vote for it. He soon found, however, that he had waked up the wrong person. Emerson, who was finishing his dinner, considered that in time of war retrenchment and economy were first to be thought of, and that the new school-house had better be deferred for three years at least. But Alcott had also good reasons for his opinion, and with all his deference for Emerson in philosophy and literature he did not seem inclined to yield on the present occasion. So the two friends argued the case together with equal good humor and determination, and the discussion had not ceased when they left the house. The popular legend that during the Mexican war Mr. Alcott refused to pay taxes that supported an unjust invasion, and was imprisoned for this, is so far true; but it can not be true that when Emerson came to visit him in jail to pay the tax-bill he said, "Bronson, why are you here?" and that Alcott answered, "Waldo, why are you not here?"; for they never called each other anything but Mr. Emerson and Mr. Alcott. The story of Emerson's going with Margaret Fuller to see Fanny Ellsler, the danseuse, was a pure invention of the enemy and had not even the corner-stone of a foundation in fact. Goethe says in his analysis of manners that the man of noble manners may sometimes give way to his emotions, the man of well-bred manners never. Emerson's manners were half way between these two; a fortunate union of natural courtesy and dignified reserve. It was not possible to be familiar with him. They were better than fine manners, or even well-bred manners, for they were so natural and simple as scarcely to attract attention. Yet he was not a man of noble manners, for he never fully acted out himself. Carlyle had noble manners, but was lacking in courtesy. Emerson's house stands about twenty-five yards from the street, and there is a smooth white-marble walk from his gate to the front-door. This, together with the pine trees he planted for protection against the north wind, had a cool refreshing effect in midsummer, but at other seasons gave the visitor rather a chilly reception. There was something in Emerson himself that reminded one of this white-marble walk; not that he was cold-hearted, far from it, nor was he lacking in tenderness; but warmth of color he had not. He was too purely moral to be altogether human. He never could have written a tragedy, or made a speech like that of John Adams on the question of separation. How could it be otherwise? Can the descendant of five generations of New England clergymen have the same blood in his veins that warmed the hearts of Marshal Ney and Mirabeau? Perpetual constraint and self-denial may strengthen character, but will human nature be better for it in the end? Constant trimming must finally weaken the tree; and if we consider history we find that the greatest services to mankind have been those ardent, self-forgetful natures who lived in a large, grand manner, and who cared more for the affairs they have in hand than for their reputations or the salvation of their souls. It was not the just and virtuous Aristides but the bold reckless Themistocles who saved Greece from the Persian invasion. Luther and Shakespeare are brilliant examples of it. Our American poets have all except Poe a high reputation for virtue and good behavior, but I do not find in them the summer climate of Burns or the magnetism of Byron and Heine. There is such a thing as valuing our faults too highly. Emerson did not like such men, and was apt to do them injustice. He admired Napoleon and Goethe--a generous nature cannot help that--and his estimate of Napoleon's character is the best that has yet been made; but he preferred Lafayette to Mirabeau, considered Caesar wholly lacking in principle, and thought Machiavelli was the fiend incarnate. His friends were like himself, cool-headed and scrupulous; but they were not the persons who cared most for him and appreciated him the best. Such men as Theodore Parker, M. D. Conway, David A. Wasson and Wendell Phillips did more for Emerson almost than his own writings, in spreading his reputation and celebrating his genius. Wherever Phillips and Parker lectured in the west and were asked, as often happened, who were the best of the New England lecturers, they always placed Emerson at the head of the list. They served as mediators between him and the large class of persons who could not readily understand him. If he was an exacting moralist, he was never a narrow or pettifogging one. It is true he laid down the rule that a young lady had always the right to break off an engagement, but not so a gentleman, for he has the opportunity, which she has not, of making his own choice,--what no man would have said who was aware of the arts and stratagems which women often practise to obtain the man they desire; but he was not generally a censorious man. [Illustration: KING'S BUST OF EMERSON. MODELLED IN 1854.] He believed firmly in the old saying of every man to his trade. He never preached sermons on week-days; or discoursed on public and private duties; or lectured about self-sacrifice and the necessity of living for others. He believed that such talk did quite as much harm as good. "Do not try to be good," he would say, "but true to yourself." Wisdom was the best of all virtues because it included all. He thought there were cases in which divorce from incompatibility is justifiable. When a certain transcendentalist left his wife and children in Newport, and came to Concord to write poetry and live the life of an old bachelor, there were many who blamed him severely; but Emerson said, "He is no doubt to blame, but you cannot tell how much; perhaps this is the only way in which he can live." So that there was a large portion of liberality mixed with his natural severity. Literature is the most satisfactory of all professions, but it is also the most difficult to succeed in. The high-minded writer easily finds themes congenial to his own lofty thoughts, and in the contemplation of these and the companionship of fine books he escapes the weariness and loneliness which often pursue those who are engaged in the busiest avocations. His life is like working in a rose-garden: beautiful images are always before him. His time is his own: he can arrange his own hours for study, rest, and recreation. Especially he can avoid the friction and annoyance of dealing with rude and uncongenial people. But how is he to persuade others to take an interest in these subjects? The currents of men's thoughts run in certain habitual channels, and to change their course, as every writer who becomes popular is sure to do, is sometimes as great an undertaking as changing the bed of a river. It requires many years for some to be appreciated, and others never are. "We know those who have reached the goal, but who can tell how many have fallen by the way?" Emerson's term of probation, however, was a short one. More fortunate than many, there was a demand for him before he came. Besides the so-called transcendental movement carried him forward in a swift current. He said of it: "At first everybody laughed at me. Then I had ten readers; then a hundred; and then a thousand." And those who laughed at him at first were his most devoted admirers after he had become famous. If Emerson had not inherited a good property early in life, his career would hardly have been possible. He never was able to publish more than a third of what he wrote, and his books were not a source of large profit to him. He was obliged to make up the deficiency by lecturing. With what fortitude he did this, considering his slender physique, travelling long distances in the coldest weather over such railroads as then were, with a dismal hotel and bad food at the end of every journey, will always be remembered of him. No wonder that he consoled himself with such maxims as, "No man has ever estimated his own troubles too lightly," and such verses as, "Cast the bantling on the rock." Truly it was severe discipline. At Niagara Falls in 1863 the hotel caught fire and Emerson rushed forth at midnight, manuscripts in hand, as Caesar formerly swam with his "Commentaries" from a sinking vessel. The compensation for it was that in this way he made the acquaintance of many interesting and distinguished persons. It also added to his celebrity. He was the same under all circumstances. It has been said that in his poems we feel the essayist; but perhaps even more we recognize the poet in his essays. So too in his conversation at table and in the parlor, there was something that reminded one of the lecturer: when he appeared on the platform before his audience he was always the plain country gentleman. He affected no graces of oratory, and shunned everything like rhetorical flourish. He was the first of our public speakers to introduce this improvement which has since found its way into the court-room and the theatre. His manner was direct, terse and earnest, with an habitual pause or hesitation to select just the right verb or adjective that would convey the idea he wished to express. His delivery was suited to his thought. His hearers were not commonly pleased with it at first, but if they continued to listen most of them came to have a great liking for it. He had a habit of pausing now and then and turning over the pages before him, as if he had lost his place or was looking for a passage which he could not find; but he never made any explanation for it, and his own family did not know the reason. It may have been done to rest himself; or perhaps to give time for his ideas to settle in the minds of his audience. Some people were foolishly annoyed by it; but not those who understood him. He used to say that either a speaker commands his audience, or his audience commands him. He was the best lecturer of his time: the one who wore the best. Between 1860 and 1870 he gave four courses of lectures in Boston which were well and profitably attended. No one else could have done this, except perhaps Agassiz. There were others who drew larger houses, but the quality was not so good. Very rarely have such cultivated and intellectual audiences been brought together. A few of his most ardent admirers used to carry opera-glasses with them in order to watch the expression of his face. William Robinson, the ablest political critic of that time, wrote in 1868, "In spite of an increased hesitation in his delivery Emerson is of all men the one most worth hearing, even better than Phillips and his matchless oratory." He had the most telling way of saying a thing, and knew how to give their full force to his wonderfully brilliant sentences. These would sometimes electrify his hearers, as people are roused on the announcement of some great and fortunate event. He liked the society of statesmen, scientists, business men, railroad managers, of all who could tell him about what was going on in the world--something, he complained, that the newspapers would not do for him. He preferred their society to that of other poets and scholars. Though an unlimited reader of books he was not properly a scholar himself, and perhaps he felt his own limitation too much in their company. He studied little at college and it is doubtful if he afterwards made a thorough and systematic investigation of any subject. He was called a philosopher, but he knew little more than the outlines of metaphysics. He could read French fairly, but Latin was the only language with which he was well acquainted. Carlyle tried to persuade him to study German. He did not believe in study, but in the inspiration of nature. This did well enough for him, but he made a mistake in applying the same principle to others. He was wont to excuse Alcott's rambling rhapsodical conversations on the ground that it was the only talent the man had, that he must do that or nothing; but many people considered that Emerson was more to blame in the matter than Alcott himself. A person who makes a profession of philosophy, as Alcott certainly did, ought to be well acquainted with the writings of other philosophers of his own time; and it surely would have done no harm for Emerson to have suggested this to him. When the Boston Radical Club was formed Emerson thought it would be a good opportunity for Alcott to place his ideas before the public, but Alcott found himself at a disadvantage among the scholarly minds he encountered there. At the close of his essay on Plato Emerson says, "I am sorry to see him after so many fine thoughts throwing a little mathematical dust in our eyes." Does he partially expose here a peculiarity in his literary procedure? Other people do not read Plato for his fine thoughts, though there are many such, but for the charm of his discourse and his beautiful exposition of Greek Philosophy. From this and from hints let fall in conversation we may suspect that he read books not so much for what was in them as for ideas which they suggested to him, and which he might make use of in his essays and lectures. Alcott said that he carried slips of paper with him on which to jot down these considerations by the way. Thus he came to value books too much from a single point of view, and his friends were sometimes surprised at what he recommended them to read. He would estimate a second-rate novel like "Christie Johnstone" above Thackeray's "Newcomes." However, it may generally be said that the greater and more high-minded an author might be the better was Emerson a judge of him. He liked in a writer what he called the eternal spirit, that is, what makes his work valuable for all time. He prized Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe above others; and gave the next place to Homer, Dante, and Swedenborg. He gave Carlyle a very high rank: considered his history of Frederick the Second even better than Thucydides. During the last year of his life, when he had almost lost his memory for names and people, he said to a visitor who called on him, "I have lately been reading a most interesting book about--" he hesitated for some time, "the greatest man that has lived for more than two centuries." Then he walked across the room and pointing to a long row of books added, "About that man." His friend looked and saw it was an edition of Goethe's forty volumes. Grimm's lectures on Goethe had lately been published. The colored students of Howard University requested Emerson to give them a conversation on books, and tell them what they had better read; and he, remembering his own maxim, that the greatest prudence lies in concentration, limited himself purposely to a very few. He recommended Shakespeare and Milton of course; Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"; Boswell's "Life of Johnson"; Goethe's conversations with Eckermann and Goethe's autobiography. "Faust" he spoke of in rather a slighting manner; he did not think it possessed the eternal spirit. That so much of a puritan as Emerson should have admired Goethe is as remarkable as Goethe's admiration for so stanch an old puritan as Milton. The English writers of his own time, with the exception of Carlyle and possibly Tennyson, he did not like. He met Macaulay at one of Lady Holland's celebrated show dinners, and conceived a decided aversion for him. Such severely critical writers as Froude, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold he never could like. He once had an interview with Ruskin, but it did not prove to be satisfactory. They differed on all points, and Ruskin complained that Emerson did not understand him. Six months afterwards Emerson remarked with his most amiable smile, "I expect Mr. Ruskin is still miserable because I could not understand him." But Ruskin's province lay outside of Emerson's, who cared little either for painting, sculpture, or music, or even for literature considered as an art. He had in his study a copy of Giotto's portrait of Dante which he evidently prized; and also Raphael Morghen's engraving of Guido's Aurora: but these were presents from his friends, and it is doubtful if he ever purchased a picture himself. He was a frequent visitor at the Boston Athenaeum, and seized upon every new book of value as soon as it appeared: was the first to read translations of the Zendavesta and Confucius. He read almost every readable book in the English language as well as translations from all languages. He said he would as soon think of swimming across Charles River when he might make use of a bridge as to read a foreign book in the original if he could obtain a good translation. This statement contains a good deal of truth, though it has been often traversed by those who learn languages easily and think because they get the literal meaning of Tacitus or Rousseau that they know all about the matter. The full significance, however, of any good writer can only be obtained by reflecting while we read, and the continuous exertion required to decipher a foreign tongue interferes with this not a little. If the reader can think in the language before him well and good, but few are so fortunate; and of those few not more than one in ten will be able to think in three or four different languages. Any person who has merely a conversational knowledge of Italian, for instance, would do much better to read the excellent translation we now have of Machiavelli than to read the original; and no one except a Greek professor would think of stumbling over Thucydides instead of using Jowett's version of it. So it is with Taine's "English Literature" and Von Hoist's history of American politics. On the other hand it may be said that no translation of the "Odes" of Horace has any value at all; and a faithful study of one book of the "Iliad" is worth all the translations from Homer that have ever been made. But the subject is an extensive one. The tendency of pure democracy to Caesarism or imperialism has often been noticed, and the frequent change from one to the other has now become an established historical fact. Of this principle there is a curious illustration in Emerson's political opinions. He was in theory a pure democratist, but he would now and then make a remark which showed that he also believed in the rule of the strong hand. In his prose writings may be found two distinct lines of political thought emanating from these opposite views. He wrote a poem on Cromwell, and an essay on Napoleon, and evidently admired them both. In his "Boston Hymn" and in several other poems he comes very close to socialism. In "Woodnotes" he says: "The lord is the peasant that was; The peasant the lord that shall be, The lord is the hay, the peasant the grass; One dry, and one the living tree." Democracy is limited in America by the conservative structure of our government and the good sense of the community. During Jackson's administration we came rather close to pure democracy, and nearly as close also to absolute despotism. Emerson was far from knowing this, but he felt that something was wrong. He wrote to Carlyle, "We have a most unfit man for President." On another occasion he wrote, "Politics are now in such a condition that the best principles are in one party, and the best men in the other." He appears to have voted with the best men. Again he would say, "If we can only once get the best man at the head of affairs we should be only too glad to turn everything over to him." Emerson, however, did not allow these theories to affect his practice. He always voted the whig ticket till 1844, and after that the free-soil and republican tickets. It was the same with his doctrine of living according to nature. He never thought of doing this himself, except so far as a sensible mode of life and unaffected behavior may be considered so. He was the most conventional man in Concord, and as scrupulous of etiquette as an English clergyman. He was oftener seen with a silk-hat--what Mr. Howells calls a cylinder-hat--than any other person in the town. In his later years he declined to wear a wig, because it was not according to nature; but neither had he formerly worn a beard, which was quite as little according to nature. In his earlier writings he celebrates the advantages of living in the country, but at sixty he concludes that the city is after all the best, if one has sufficient means,--especially for women, who require a current of human life to keep their minds healthy and cheerful. This reminds one of Thorwaldsen's four seasons; in which spring and summer are represented by an out-of-door life, in autumn the corner of a house appears, and winter is wholly within doors. We expect a certain change of opinion in the course of years: it is the sign of a veracious character. Neither is it inconsistent for a practical man to sometimes deviate from the rules he has laid down for himself. Emerson's real fault, if he may be said to have had one, was his optimism. Because he had been born with genius and was otherwise fortunate he thought every one else might succeed as easily as he had. In this way he often did people great injustice. If they were unfortunate he concluded that it must be their own fault. "Wherever there is failure," he said, "there is some giddiness, some lack of adaptation of means to ends." If he heard of anyone who could not obtain work he would say there is always plenty to do for willing hands. Those who were incapacitated by nature from earning their own living fared no better. He thought there was something which every one could do better than anybody else--which might possibly be true if there were as many professions as individuals. When some one spoke of a young German poet, whom it was thought but for his untimely death might have been the rival of Schiller, he said, "Yes, but he died: that was against him." This line of thought logically resulted also in a kind of pessimism. He seemed at times to despise human nature. Somewhere about 1860 he wrote to a friend, "There is not one man in twenty that is worth the ground he stands on"; and speaking of Napoleon he affirms that, in the well-nigh universal negligence and inefficiency of mankind, we cannot be too thankful for this prompt and ready actor. No one who realizes the hard and bitter struggle for daily bread with which three-fourths of the human race are constantly occupied, would have written such a sentence. The transition from optimism to pessimism is very much like that from democracy to imperialism. [Footnote: The peculiar type of Emerson's optimism is illustrated in his poem called "Sea Shore" where he makes a fine catalogue of the gifts and advantages which the ocean brings to mankind, but says nothing of the terrible destructive power of the sea. He forgot that his old friend the Greek represented Neptune as even more cruel than the god of war. Did this man of heroic nature lack the courage to face tragedy?] We regret to see him deciding the discovery of etherization in favor of his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson; a question which a Congressional committee found itself unable to determine. He had one trait of character which his biographers have not mentioned, and which might pass by the name of incredulity. He was the most difficult of men to persuade of any strange and remarkable event. Neither did he take the least pains to conceal his disbelief; and when you were telling him the living truth this was rather difficult to bear. When we said that a woodpecker had been seen in Walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine trees. That was not according to his idea of a woodpecker. Neither did he like to hear anything which tended to prove the depravity of human nature. Stories of fraud and corruption in commercial or political life were not pleasant to his ears; and if the perpetrators escaped punishment he was evidently much annoyed. He liked to tell the truth better than he did to hear it. When nearly sixty years of age both Emerson and Alcott fell in love with a charming young school-teacher of the transcendental sort, and it is rather pleasant to think that there was so much human nature still left in those grave old philosophers. He was the most famous American of his time; not so celebrated perhaps in his own country as President Lincoln, but in foreign countries he surpassed all others,--such is the deep impression which a great writer makes on the minds of men. In Europe he was looked upon as the best representative of our Western Hemisphere. Carlyle celebrated him in England, and Grimm in Germany. The latter said, "There is no other living writer to whom I feel that I owe so much." He had no public receptions in foreign cities, but everywhere the finest people united to honor him. On his second visit to England he complained that his time was almost consumed in answering letters of invitation. An English guest at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa dinner said that when he returned home he would be asked two questions,--if he had seen Niagara Falls, and if he had met Emerson. He was a particular favorite with the English nobility, and whenever we saw a glittering carriage rolling down Concord turn-pike we felt sure it contained some earl or viscount who was paying his compliments to the poet of the pines. Emerson liked to entertain these distinguished visitors in his modest little parlor, but he never slighted his old friends for them; for he lived the wisdom that he taught, and the final virtue of this man was the religious humility of his nature. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S LECTURE. During the earlier part of Emerson's career his religious philosophy met with such decided opposition that his friends were, very properly, all the more enthusiastic in his defence; and when the tide turned in his favor, and his fame rose continually higher and higher, the enthusiasm of his admirers reached a climax, and, like Webster before him, he became a veritable subject of idolization. His opponents, finding the current too strong for them, retreated into smooth water, waiting, like a defeated political party, for a favorable change of the tide. When, therefore, Matthew Arnold came to America in the autumn of 1883 expressly to lecture on Emerson, as a writer and thinker, there was great expectation on both sides, and both were equally disappointed. His friends who knew that he liked Emerson, thought he had found too much fault with him, and the other party considered he had praised him too highly. Few men have ever done so much good in England as Matthew Arnold. Somewhere about the year 1830 Goethe remarked, that Englishmen, as such, were without reflection; party politics and the interests of trade interfered to prevent it; but they were great as practical men. This continued to be the order of the day, in spite of an occasional warning from Macaulay, for thirty years more, until finally Matthew Arnold came forward and said, "Do not be blinded any longer by the prejudices of self-interest, but endeavor to see things as they actually are." This was the continual chant of his life, repeated in a hundred different forms. He made use of the popularity he had gained by his fine, classic poetry, to teach his countrymen a lesson in culture. [Footnote: Lowell also made an excellent point when he warned Englishmen, at the Coleridge memorial, that if they were to regain the intellectual altitude of their ancestors, they must give up the adoration of common-sense, and pay more respect to imagination and ideality.] Never did Demosthenes expose their faults to the Athenians more frankly and fearlessly, and with such manliness that at the time of his death there was no person in the British Islands more generally respected. On a trial vote that was taken by a London newspaper for membership to a proposed British Academy, Gladstone received the largest number of ballots, Tennyson the next and Matthew Arnold came third. He was considered the best literary critic in England, and if he had outlived Tennyson he would have succeeded him as laureate. He showed a dignified reserve in only publishing a very few books. Two small volumes of poetry, his "Essays in Criticism", which has become a standard work, and his American essays, are all that I know of. For all that, few writers were more celebrated in his own time, and it may be said that he fully deserved his monument in Westminster Abbey. However, it must be admitted that as a critic he had certain peculiarities. He was, perhaps, too sensitive and impressible; too easily thrown off his guard by qualities in a writer for which he had an aversion. He would not only mention them once, but again and again. He ignored Schiller, who was at least one of the world's greatest dramatists; he was dissatisfied with Tennyson and could not endure Shelley at all. His attack on Francis Newman's translation of the "Iliad" was so severe that he finally discovered the fact himself. His preference for the classic style in literature was rather too decided; for we must never forget that Shakespeare himself was chiefly romantic. He liked poetry which was like his own, and seems to have unconsciously judged other poets by that standard. He had no patience with idiomatic writing like that of Carlyle or Jean Paul; and he made incessant warfare on the subjective method. It is true that subjectivity may be called the peculiar vice of the nineteenth century, and yet it is a vice like the self-consciousness of the early Christians, that ought finally to end in virtue. There are thousands of readers whose minds cannot be reached in any other way. Allowances must sometimes be made also for the physical condition of a writer. Not always; for Carlyle wrote the greatest of dramatic histories while he was suffering from dyspepsia in the most distressing manner. However, I think in Matthew Arnold's case something may be conceded to him. He came to lecture in America for a double purpose--to tell the truth and to repair his fortunes. It was a sad story. His son had failed in business; his father, of course, had endorsed his notes, and he found himself at the threshold of old age as poor as in the beginning. Such a shock is felt severely enough by tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crushing blow. There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind with gloomy forebodings. The opening of his address was very beautiful. He recalls the impression made upon him in his youth by the writing of Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson and Francis Newman, and says: "Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to him forever. No such voices are there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination still; his genius and his style are things of power..... A greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the century,--came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day,--such is the force of youthful associations,--I read his 'Wilhelm Meister' with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in 'Wilhelm Meister,' how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel..... And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic,--a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe.... He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of all influences!" I confess I enjoy these clear classic sentences so full of tenderness, and yet with the latent fire of manhood in them, much better than Emerson's weird, concentrated epigrams, wonderful as those sometimes are. Comparatively speaking it is like the difference between a living elm and oak timber. But the writer does not long maintain this elevated tone. He soon becomes despondent, and his glorious sunrise, like that in Shakespeare's sonnet, is lost to him again. "For out alack, he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath veiled him from me now." He remembers that Francis Newman is now Cardinal Newman; that Carlyle's career had ended with his furious "Latter-day Pamphlets," and even in Emerson he had found a certain kind of disappointment. Yet there may be a deeper reason in this;--the reason that sometimes underlies a coincidence. We too in early life were strengthened and filled with enthusiasm by the earnest voice of Emerson, the trenchant eloquence of Wendell Phillips, and the brilliant wit and penetrating humor of Lowell; but the public activity of Emerson soon afterwards ceased; Phillips became a socialist and ultimately a demagogue; while Lowell changed his verses for foreign missions and after-dinner speeches. There is a prevalent feeling that the nineteenth century, which was ushered in to the sound of Napoleon's cannon and is now going rather tamely out in a discussion of the laws of economics, has not more than half accomplished the work that was assigned it. There is everywhere among thinking men a feeling of distrust and half disappointment. Lowell felt it here, George Eliot in England; and Herman Grimm in Germany, a sanguine man, speaks of the deep-seated unrest which almost drives us to despair. As I turn from my desk to the morning's newspaper I find in it the following extract from one of Emerson's earlier essays: "Trust the time. What a fatal prodigality to condemn our age--we cannot overvalue it--it is our all. As the wandering sea-bird which, crossing the ocean, alights on some rock or islet to rest for a moment its wings, and to look back on the wilderness of waves behind, and onward to the wilderness of waters before--so stand we perched on this rock or shoal of time, arrived out of the immensity of the past, bound and road-ready to plunge into immensity again. Not for nothing it dawns out of everlasting peace, this great discontent, this self-accusing reflection. The very time sees for us, thinks for us. It is a microscope such as philosophy never had. Insight is for us which was never for any, and doubt not, the moment and the opportunity are divine. Wondering we come into this lodge of watchmen, this office of espial; let us not retreat astonished and ashamed. Let us go out of the hall door, and doubt never but a good genius brought us in and will carry us out." Now this is a prose poem, so beautiful that it seems hardly to need the help of rhyme and metre to make it sing; and, as high art always must, it covers a profound truth,--truth that lies at the foundation of all tragedy,--namely, that we are obliged to trust time though time destroys us; that we must trust our fellow men though they often deceive us; that we must trust the ground we stand on though the earthquake devour us. But Emerson does not say this, and I doubt if he anywhere says it. He was too much of an optimist to perceive it. He wished all the stories he read to turn out fortunately, and if they did not so much the worse for them. Gladstone is the same kind of a man. He believes that the right will always finally conquer; and so it may when the day of judgment arrives and the affairs of the universe are at last wound up. It gives him, as it did Emerson, a tremendous energy,--almost like fanaticism, but it must in the nature of things affect his political judgment. The lives of these two stretch nearly across the nineteenth century, and their popularity is evidence that they represent their own time better than most others. What does Emerson intend by trusting the time? Does he mean the spirit of the age? If we replace the word time by Divine Providence, the passage becomes intelligible and notably significant; but if he meant the prevailing spirit of the time, the earlier part of Emerson's career is a perfect contradiction of it. If in his youth he had trusted the prevailing tendency of his time he would have become a conservative formalist, and never heard of as an independent thinker. It might even be said that few men have ever trusted their own time less. Like Gladstone, he was dissatisfied with the present and looked toward the future. They both exerted themselves with all their might to revolutionize public opinion and give to the future the stamp of their own ideas. The old Hebrew prophets whom Emerson so much resembled did not trust their own time, but were constantly complaining of it. So Cicero cried out, "O tempora, O mores!" and Savonarola, and many others. It would seem as if in this poetic rhapsody the writer had lost sight of his subject almost immediately upon stating it, and had substituted Providence for it in his mind. This was not unfrequently the case with him, and may account for those vague aerial flights which his commentators have referred to. Hawthorne says, "Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp." However, it was not facts but ideas that he was in quest of. The whole of Matthew Arnold's essay is thoughtful and interesting, but it has one grand defect. After saying that Emerson's writings constituted the most important prose work of the nineteenth century, he fails to support the statement by sufficient arguments. If he had developed this point to such a length as its importance deserved, and then finished his discourse with a glowing tribute to Emerson as a man, his audience might have found slight cause to complain of him; but after simply stating the fact, he proceeded to a lengthy discussion of Emerson's stoical philosophy, and finally branched off on a criticism of Carlyle and the consideration of happiness as the true end of life. We will only pause here to remark that the true end of life does not seem to us to be happiness so much as development, and the evolution of such characters as Emerson and Matthew Arnold. His condemnation of Emerson's poetry was a still severer blow. Emerson's friends had endured enough already on that score. Nothing was ever made so much fun of by parodists and other small wits. In any social company, if Emerson's poetry was mentioned somebody was sure to raise a laugh; and there was nothing that could be done about it. It was hoped that Matthew Arnold's prestige would put a final end to this nonsense, which was nothing but a fashionable habit; but he added the weight of his position as professor of literature to the other side of the scale. He praised certain portions very highly, but averred that these were exceptional, and concluded with what seems to be a "reductio ad absurdum," namely, that Longfellow's poem of "The Bridge" or Whittier's "School Days" was worth the whole body of Emerson's verse. As these were anything but the best of Longfellow and Whittier it seemed rather inconsistent in Matthew Arnold to have praised Emerson's poetry at all; and this was the more surprising after his courageous defence of Wadsworth a short time before. Those who like Emerson's poetry usually like Wordsworth's and _vice versa_. But Emerson's poetry is a peculiar subject. Carlyle and Lowell, both eminent critics, did not condemn it, but at the same time they were slow to praise it. Dr. F. H. Hedge, who probably knew more about literature than either of them, considered it poetry of a very high order, and Rev. William Furness of Philadelphia, when some one spoke slightingly of Emerson as a poet, exclaimed, "He is heaven high above our other poets!" In many obituary notices at the time of his death, he was mentioned as being easily the first of American poets. Professor Tyndall has a great admiration for his poetry; and so has another professor we know of whom we will not mention, but who is an equally good chemist. Dr. O. W. Holmes' life of Emerson was dreaded by many for fear of the position he might assume on this question, but to the general surprise of the public, he took strong grounds in favor of it; so that since that time, whenever people laugh at Emerson's poetry it is only necessary to ask them if they have read Dr. Holmes' biography of him. Immediately after the lecture, a lively discussion began about it in the newspapers, in which leading writers, scholars and professors took an active part. How much soever they might disagree in regard to Emerson, they all united in a disapproval of the lecturer's estimate of him. Matthew Arnold did not seem to have a partisan in the country. The discussion was renewed a year later when his book of discourses in America was published, and then David A. Wasson wrote the following letter which was published in the "Christian Register": ARNOLD ON EMERSON. "It may be doubted whether Matthew Arnold's critical estimate of Emerson as a prose writer is well understood by most of those who take it in ill part. The judgment expressed is that Emerson is the pre-eminent prose writer of his century, not as being either a great philosopher or great in his style of workmanship, but for the reason that he is a great spiritual light, the purest, whitest, serenest, of a century now drawing toward its close. This taken together is valuable praise, and converted into disparagement by its denial to Emerson of two special distinctions; and in respect to both, the denial is taken, I think, to cover much more ground than it was intended to cover. To keep within the limits, I will here attend to but one of these, where it must be confessed, Mr. Arnold is himself to blame for the misconstruction put upon him, since he has expressed himself in a way to facilitate, if not to invite, such a mistake. Emerson, it is said, was the most important writer of this century, yet was not a great writer. How should this be, unless, indeed, the century as a whole is inferior, and prominence in it is no token of greatness? In truth, Mr. Arnold has used the term 'writer' in two widely different senses. In the one use it refers to the content of the writing, to its intellectual and moral import, its spiritual significance; in the other use it refers to the writing itself considered as showing more or less of literary power,--that is, of power in the ordering and verbal embodiment of thoughts and conceptions. "Declining to be misled by this ambiguity, let us inquire what is meant, when it is said that Emerson was not a great writer. To my apprehension the meaning is simply that his literary execution, taken by and for itself, was not of the highest order. A cotton fabric may be better woven than one of silk, a chain of copper be better wrought and linked than a chain of gold. He that should recognize the better workmanship where it exists would not thereby set the cheaper material above the more precious, for he would not institute a comparison to any effect whatsoever between the two. Nor would he betray a shallow and petty mind, as making much of things trivial. Mr. Arnold says of Emerson's writings, the matter is gold, but the workmanship does not evince the highest skill. Were this last urged as determining the value of the writer we might indeed say that the critic offends by exalting a subordinate distinction to the first place. But it is not so urged, nor is there anything to indicate that Mr. Arnold makes perfection of literary execution the be-all and end-all of excellence in literature; indeed one does not see that he at all exaggerates its importance. Those whom he mentions as great writers were for the most part second-rate men--second-rate men that is as measured by the standard of the ages; and it does not appear that he thinks of them otherwise than as such. Cicero receives the title while it is not given to Marcus Antoninus; but it is sufficiently apparent that Mr. Arnold sets a higher value upon Marcus Antoninus than upon Cicero. Voltaire is one of the great writers; but in the world's literature he is at best but first among the lesser lights, and there is no sign that Matthew Arnold attributed to him a higher importance. Or take the case of Swift. The literary talents of this unhappy man were indeed prodigious: he performed feats to which we cannot say that any other would have been equal: he is as unique as Shakespeare,--though, of course, in a vastly lower way. But did he contribute one great thought or one grand and salutary imagination to the world's stock? Not to my knowledge. Did he shed light upon any important province of human interest, upon religion, morals, politics, art, science, history, education, manners or whatever else? I cannot report that he did so. Did he lay a noble emphasis upon any great truth or order of truths and so recommend it effectually to the attention and consideration of mankind? Or did he even write a single sentence which one treasures up as an imperishable jewel? In fine, does his work serve to enlarge the souls, enlighten the minds, direct the wills or quicken and inspire the better powers of man? Does it so much as breathe upon them a salubrious air? Alas no! To all such questions the answer, or mine own at least, will be negative. Yet he was indeed a great writer: that is, he had a great, a truly wonderful power of conception and representation. Mr. Arnold, who for aught one can discover to the contrary, distinguishes the nature of Swift's genius and prizes it only for what it is worth, does not claim that Emerson was a greater writer in the same sense, but thinks his deliverance somewhat faulty, especially as wanting that continuity which belongs to good literary tissue, as to every other. "Suppose him quite wrong in this, still the error is not one to be warm about, since it leaves the Concord essayist in his place of pre-eminence, and is put forth only by way of determining the kind of value which shall be attributed to his writings. "D. A. Wasson." This was forwarded to Matthew Arnold, who was then at his own home, and in due time this reply was received from him: "COBHAM, SURREY, "Jan. 7th., 1886. "Dear Sir, "I have just had, on my return to England, your letter and Mr. Wasson's paper, and must thank you for them. "Very much of what Mr. Wasson says is true; yet literary style is more than he makes it--the mere dressing up of a material which may be inferior; it is itself in the material and has an extraordinary value. No great writer is to be disposed of as Mr. Wasson disposes of Addison and Swift; he says, nothing is to be learned from Swift; why, a sense for the blatant nonsense and claptrap which constitutes three-fourths of our public writing and speaking, and which is a greater curse to your country that even to ours, is to be got from him. Addison has his valuable criticism of life too; I doubt whether to a Taine, a hundred years hence, he will not seem of more importance than Emerson, who was above all things of value in his own day. But I love Emerson. "Truly yours, "Matthew Arnold." [Illustration: AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD.] [Illustration: AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM MATTHEW ARNOLD.] Taine, who preferred Macaulay to Carlyle, might also prefer Addison to Emerson; but it is not likely that a future Grimm or another Sainte-Beuve would do so. In his "Essays in Criticism," Matthew Arnold enters a general complaint against English prose writers for a lack of mental flexibility, and against Addison particularly for the commonplaceness of his ideas. He was a severe and exacting critic. DAVID A. WASSON. Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whittier were all nearly of the same age, and formed a literary galaxy such as has been rare enough in any country or period of history. They are distinguished, however, by one peculiarity--a slight sentimentalism which belonged to the time in which they grew up, and is most strongly marked in Longfellow and least so in Hawthorne. Fifteen or twenty years later there appeared, as usually happens, a number of talented imitators or admirers, and with them two men of equal genius who may be looked upon as the corrective and antidote for their predecessors. These were James Russell Lowell and David Atwood Wasson. They were as different as Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Lowell was a fine poet, a humorist and man of the world. He wrote easily and lived easily. He was the companion of wealthy and distinguished men. He acquired prosperity, as it were, by natural inclination. Next to the King of Prussia he was the most fortunate man of his time. He knew something of sorrow, but of hardship and misfortune only by hearsay. He was the child of summer, and revelled in it; but this continual happiness brought with it certain limitations. Though he was a veracious man, he was rarely a serious one. He never became thoroughly in earnest until he was stimulated by partisan feeling. His best poems were inspired by the anti-slavery conflict, and the rendition of Mason and Slidell; and it was just on these occasions that his humor was most brilliant and pleasant flavored. His productiveness was not great, and his other writings do not make a strong impression. It is said that he often tried to write a book, but was never able to concentrate himself on one subject for a sufficient length of time. He is easily the first of American humorists. The greatest compliment ever paid Thoreau was that such a man as Lowell could not understand him. Wasson must have been born under the constellation of the Little Bear. As the Germans say, his life was always winter. Every possible obstacle was placed in his way, and misfortune came to him at one time or another in almost every shape. The difficulties he encountered in life were too great for him, and prevented the full fruition of his genius. The wonder is that they did not crush him altogether. He never acquired the sufficient public influence nor received the recognition his merit deserved. He was by nature a thinker--a seeker after truth. There was no problem,--social, political or philosophical,--which he was not ready to grapple with. He could plunge into these subjects like a pearl-diver who means to touch bottom, and would never come out till his last breath was spent. This mental habit and his continual suffering made him only too serious, too much in earnest. Jests were not in his line, but he sometimes wrote poetry of the very highest order. He is the first and most original of American thinkers. What these two dissimilar men had in common was good Anglo-Saxon manliness--which is after all the foundation of common-sense. They wished to live as other men had lived before them, and not in any new, unusual, or eccentric manner. They believed that virtue was to be found in the great world rather than out of it; among human habitations, and in dealing with all kinds of people rather than by an isolated life at Brook Farm or in Walden Woods. They sought not after any rare and Utopian excellencies, but contented themselves with a plain, sensible, every-day morality. They were neither vegetarians, teetotalers, non-resistants, nor socialists. They considered it no sin to love a woman or to fight a man. They may be called anti-sentimentalists. Neither were they blind followers of custom and tradition. They wished to be in the vanguard of civilization, and they were conscious that to do this they must not only accept the results of others, but add something of their own. They endeavored to become acquainted with the best that was thought and known in their time, both in literature and in other matters. They thus became excellent critics, as well as versatile and many-sided men. They were among the most cultivated men of the century, and are the most cosmopolitan of American writers. That they should not have possessed greater influence was largely owing to the tendencies of their time. The current of the age was too strong for them, and in their later years they both expressed gloomy forebodings of the future, both for their own country and the rest of the civilized world. Wasson went to Concord in 1859 intending to make it his permanent abode, but the offer of a philanthropic gentleman who wished to take him into his own house for a year and care for him, as Mr. Badams of Manchester entertained Carlyle, induced him to emigrate again. He continued however in friendly communication with the literary people there, often visited them, and now lies buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery, so that he deserves to be classed among them, rather than with any other group of literary men. He was born in Brooksville, Maine, on the fourteenth of May, 1823. He was named David for his father, and Atwood for Miss Harriet Atwood, a female preacher and missionary who was at that time his mother's devoted friend,--and it has been said that Wasson attributed his unusual mental activity largely to her influence. His mother died while he was still too young to recollect her, but her place was fortunately supplied by a kindly and sensible stepmother; not such a rare phenomenon as some people think. His father belonged to a class of men only to be found on the coast of Maine, who are at once fishermen, farmers and navigators; a much more intelligent and cultivated class than the agricultural people of the interior. It is a beautiful sail among the islands from Rockland to Mount Desert, and the pleasantest part of it, to me at least, is the sight of the well kept farms with their handsome cattle and clean-shaven hay-fields, which line the coast. Our best ship-builders have originated among these people. Brooksville is a thinly scattered settlement on the westerly side of a rocky and even mountainous peninsula. A deep and narrow strait separates it from Castine, which has to be crossed in a ferry-boat. The house of David Wasson, Senior, is something more than half-a-mile from the ferry landing; a large, commodious, two-story house, much better than the average of farm-houses, with two large barns and numerous out-buildings. Between it and the street is an orchard, and on one side a latticed porch or piazza. West of it there is a trout-brook and beyond that a hemlock grove, and the blue hills of Camden in the distance. On the south side the sea comes up to the edge of the farm, and the road to Sedgwick winds about the ridge on the East. It was a fitting birthplace for a poet or a painter. He has left us a valuable and quite unique sketch of his early boyhood, [Footnote: Essays, Religious, Social, Political. D. A. Wasson. Boston: Lee and Shepard.] in which he confesses to having been a sensitive, excitable and passionate little fellow such as the more cool-headed and phlegmatic sort could tease and worry at pleasure. Since he was also very high-spirited, this resulted inevitably in a good many fights, and from being naturally peaceable and tender-hearted he became at last the most noted pugilist in that community. It is said that at seventeen he could smash a door-panel with his fist. That he disliked work on the farm is not surprising. Manual labor is injurious to boys physically and mentally; and they should be saved from it, except perhaps in the haying or harvesting seasons, as much as possible. Otherwise he was modest, orderly, truthful, and the finest scholar that had ever been known about Castine. His father recognized his superior abilities, and made an effort to send him to Bowdoin College. There were many obstacles in the way, however, and he did not enter until 1845. He never told me much about his college life. He was older than his companions and more serious. The light spirit that makes it a joyous festival to many was not in him. Of the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty he knew nothing. He distinguished himself in mathematics (especially in geometry, which is the most logical of studies) and in the students' debating-societies. He was also an excellent gymnast. In almost every college class there are a number of over-grown boys who had better have been sent to the reform-school. On the occasion of a class supper, or some such celebration, young Wasson saved half-a-dozen of these roaring blades from disgrace and suspension, by his timely interference. It was already far into the night, and being fairly intoxicated, they took it into their minds to return and attend morning prayers in the college chapel. In order to prevent this catastrophe, Wasson arranged a bowling match for a fictitious sum of money with the most sober man he could find, and in that way delayed the party until the dangerous hour had passed. It was supposed to have been some of the same set who the following autumn set fire to and consumed the college wood-pile--a severe loss, and a dangerous precedent. No trace of the incendiaries could be discovered and the college faculty suspended on suspicion right and left. Among those whom the lightning struck were several that Wasson knew or felt sure could have had nothing to do with it; and he accordingly went to the president and argued the case with him. This resulted in his being summoned before the next faculty meeting. When asked whether he knew who the perpetrators of the outrage were, he declined to answer, not because he had positive knowledge but because he felt morally certain in regard to them. A few weeks later, after he had gone into the country to teach school for the winter, he received word that he had been suspended. Indignant at what he considered an injustice to his character and scholarship, he left Bowdoin forever: nor did he perhaps lose much by this. The philosophical studies of the senior year could be mastered as easily by a mind like Wasson's without an instructor as with one. He never studied for rank and cared little or nothing for college honors or degrees. There is no good art without a sense of delicacy; and this mental delicacy is usually matched by some kind of physical sensitiveness. Artists are, according to the vulgar phrase, more thin-skinned than other people. Both at Bowdoin College, and afterwards while at the divinity-school, Wasson worked hard in summer and taught school in winter so as to help in defraying the expense of his education. In this mode of life he encountered many hardships that were too severe for him. I notice among my own classmates that very few of those who lived in this manner reached the age of thirty-five. The food which Wasson encountered during his winter peregrinations was anything but what human beings are intended to eat. On one occasion he returned from his school to dine as usual in a cold room, and found himself provided there with the skeleton of a chicken, two large beets, a pie made of preserved barberries, and biscuits which pulled out when separated, like a telescope. The meat, unless fried, was always cooked too much; bread and vegetables insufficiently. Like many another young hero he believed in facing these obstacles, and overcoming them by main force. A strain which he received in a wrestling match during the celebrated Tippecanoe campaign may have done him harm; but a more serious injury was incurred while on a trip to Bangor in one of his father's schooners the summer after he was suspended from college. The captain of the schooner appears to have been a sea-faring brute who had a secret grudge, a sort of town-and-gown feeling, against the scholar, and was ready to do him any mischief he could. They were to take on a cargo of lumber at Bangor and the captain requested Wasson, who was not actually under his orders, to stow it away in the hold while two men on deck handed the boards to him as fast as possible. Wasson felt that something was wrong and might have protested against it, but his youthful pride, and perhaps a feeling of indifference in regard to his fate, prevented him. I believe he finally fainted from over-exertion and the close air, and was never a well man again. The trouble was not very bad at first, and might easily have been cured by suitable treatment, and a quiet, methodical life: but there was no doctor in that part of Maine who could prescribe properly for him. He tried some short sea-voyages, but these did him little good. So Prescott injured his eyesight through the same proud spirit; but it was this pride which made him afterwards what he was. His ill-health however did not prevent him from studying and writing. The following autumn he went into the office of a lawyer and member of Congress in Castine and read "Blackstone," "Chitty on Bills," and some other law-books. The study of law is in itself an excellent nerve tonic, balancing the mind and strengthening the character. Nothing could have been better for him at this juncture, and it is an unlimited pity that he did not continue it longer. But the law could never have satisfied the aspirations of his nature any more than Columbus might have been satisfied with sailing a packet in the Mediterranean. He liked the study of it, and once spoke with great respect of "Chitty on Bills" wishing he could find a work on theology or politics that contains so much good sense; but he longed for something beyond it. The congressman had a good opinion of his abilities and held out the prospect of a partnership to him, but personal ambition was not an ingredient in Wasson's nature. He was discontented and ready for a change. One day in June 1849 he was sent to a distant town on what was to his sensitive moral nature a most disgusting expedition; namely, to help a lucrative client take the poor debtor's oath, and so avoid a partially unjust debt. On his return home he stopped at a country store to make a small purchase, and there at the end of the shelf he saw a cheap dingy copy of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." He purchased it, and read it in his wagon by the evening light. He had tried to read it before, but failed to make his way in it. It was the first clear message and sure token of a spiritual life that had yet reached him. He had lived through the "everlasting no," and here was the "everlasting yea" set plainly before him. Years afterward M. D. Conway told Carlyle of walking in the woods at Groveland with Wasson, and how his face became radiant with internal light when he spoke of "Sartor Resartus." This new-birth from above seized upon him like a fever. He now felt that he had a mission in life; a message to mankind. And in what way could he deliver this message? How could he make known to others what was in his full heart, except from the pulpit? For the first time he conceived the ministry as a high-minded and ennobling profession. He decided accordingly to go into the church. His family were Calvinists, and Calvinism was the only mode of faith of which he knew very much. That such a step should have been inspired by the writings of a heretic like Carlyle was in itself a contradiction which foreboded an ultimate collision. Yet no man perhaps ever lived who had a clearer sense of a Divine Presence in the universe than Thomas Carlyle, and it was this which Wasson recognized in him. Poets and philosophers are naturally heretical, because they take the short road of genius which others find it difficult to follow. But all believers finally arrive at the same destination. He entered the theological seminary at Bangor in 1849 and graduated in 1851. It may be he went there with a youthful idea of reforming the church. At any rate his boldness of thought and free utterance brought him into suspicion with his fellow students, and at one time reports were in circulation that he was to be expelled for heresy. With his customary directness he went to the president, Dr. Pond, and inquired if there was any truth in this. The doctor, who really liked Wasson, received him with a kindly, patriarchal manner and said: "Do not be troubled, my young friend, we all have our seasons of doubt. I have had mine; but take my word for it that it is all right. For look at those saints up there in glory. How did they get there?" Such an argument was not likely to relieve the fermentation in his mind. Walking the streets of Bangor at this time was Dr. Frederick Henry Hedge, the man of all others who might have solved Wasson's doubts in a satisfactory manner, and with whom Wasson afterwards found himself in more complete moral and intellectual sympathy than with any other of his friends. Wasson saw him frequently, but had no opportunity of making his acquaintance. So nearly do we either hit it, or miss it, all through life! The only person who sympathized with him in his progressive views of religion was Miss Abbie Smith, the daughter of an apothecary in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She was visiting at the house of her brother who was one of the instructors at the Seminary. That he should have fallen in love with her, and soon become engaged to her is therefore not surprising. They were married the year after his graduation, and she continued a faithful, industrious and uncomplaining wife; his mainstay in ill-health and misfortune till the end. They were not always happy together; but it is a rare marriage where that is the case. Wasson's struggle with the world was often reflected in his own family, disturbing the harmony and comfort of it. His wife once said quite gravely, that there were others from whom her husband would probably have made a selection if he had not offered himself to her. He was always a favorite with the other sex, and equally fond of their society. As he never troubled himself much as to what people said of him, this gave rise to a good deal of talk which his opponents took advantage of to disparage his character. He was once a witness in a divorce case, and a rather tricky lawyer who had a remarkable faculty for what Bacon calls "turning the cat in the pan," succeeded in making him appear at a disadvantage; but Mrs. Wasson told me that he was in the right. If his wife had no suspicion of him we need have none. He went directly from Bangor to Groveland, a pleasant village beautifully situated on the Merrimack, which from Haverhill to the sea is one of the finest American rivers. His _fiancee_ had numerous relatives in the place, and it was owing to her influence that he received a call there. At first all the signs were favorable; the young minister was well liked, and his parishioners were only afraid that a man of such rare ability would soon gravitate to a larger congregation. So he might have done, if his ardent, aspiring soul would have permitted him to temporize with his conscience, and to be content with mere popularity and doing good on a small scale. But the thought that was matured within him could no longer be restrained. The dangerous seed sown by reading "Sartor Resartus" had now become a strong young tree and must have air and light or it would perish. In October 1852 he preached a sermon that fairly astounded his amiable parishioners. He argued that regeneration and salvation were not to be obtained by blind faith in Jesus, but by intelligent moral culture and spiritual development. This view was, as far as I know, original with Wasson, and should be distinguished from the anti-miraculous standpoint of Parker and the natural supernaturalism of Emerson. Almost at the same hour an English naturalist was applying the same principle to the origin of species, and the evolution of the human race from the lower animals. The Englishman's clear, inductive insight was matched by the philosophical penetration of an American. The Darwinian theory now stands uncontested among scientific men, and whether admitted or not there is quite as surely an evolution apparent in the history of religion, not very unlike it. This is the lesson of the nineteenth century. The following day one of the deacons of the church called upon Wasson to inform him that his sermon had given offence and that he must retract from his position. "But," replied the minister, "I cannot! I am not going to retract it." Thirty years after this Wasson laughed as heartily, as a suffering person very well could, while he recollected the expression of astonishment on the worthy deacon's face. That a man should do wrong for the sake of money or some material advantage was conceivable to him--he had known instances of that; but that any man should so stand in his own light both for this world and the next, was a moral incongruity which he could not understand. Wasson would not withdraw from his position, but followed it up the next Sunday by a still more energetic statement. There was nothing left now but deposition. A conference was called and Wasson regularly expelled from the Congregational brotherhood. Even some Unitarians also shared in the horror. About a third part of his congregation, however, were converted by him and established an independent church; so that after all he achieved a kind of victory. Wasson had now escaped in a two-fold sense from the fog-banks and shallow waters of his native coast and henceforward was to sail forth bravely upon the high seas. The conflict he had passed through attracted no little attention from thoughtful and cultivated people, and even those who did not wholly agree with him admired the honest manliness with which he defended his views. Polite society opened its doors to him. Wherever he went now he was received as a distinguished guest. He soon made the acquaintance of eminent scholars and men of letters,--of Sumner, Parker and Emerson. He made friends everywhere. He began to publish essays and poems; at first in the "Christian Examiner," and afterwards in the "Atlantic Monthly." In those days of plain living and high thinking it was not customary for magazine writers to sign their names, (so modest were they,) to their contributions; and in this way Wasson just missed the general celebrity which they might have brought him, but their merit was recognized by those of whose good opinion he was chiefly desirous. The effort, however, had been too much for him. The only chance of recovery from a nervous disorder lies in freedom from mental agitation. An injured nerve requires a longer time to heal than a broken bone and quite as much care and self-denial. Any serious disturbance to the circulation produces a pressure in the blood vessels of the nervous centres, and tears away the improvement that has commenced there. Then nature has to begin her work over again; and if this happens repeatedly nature becomes tired of working in vain and refuses to give further assistance. This was Wasson's misfortune. He was sensitive and excitable by temperament, the injury to his spine had made him still more so, and the mental agitation he experienced during 1852 and 1853 was enough to prevent him from ever being restored to perfect health. During these two years he must have endured nothing less than the tortures of the inquisition; and no doubt some of his Calvinistic neighbors considered it a judgment on him for his heresy. A mutilated life is not so very bad after one is used to it, but the beginning is terrible. It is like being surrounded with invisible barbed fences, which we inevitably run against and lacerate ourselves with, until we learn to bear in mind their exact position. Accidents too happen to nervous invalids which other people seem generally to escape from. Wasson was at one time making fair progress in his condition when suddenly one day, as he was walking through Boston, the door of a house opened and a lady slipping on some ice and tripping over the steps fell right into his arms. This was a highly diverting adventure for a young clergyman, but it cost him weeks of suffering. A somewhat similar strain came upon him when his first child was born. He does not seem to have ever met with a physician who understood his case. One worthy doctor in Worcester invited him to his house and drove with him in his sulky for more than half a year, without accomplishing anything for him. He went on a voyage to London and another to Smyrna, without any better result than suffering from bad food and stormy weather. After the first voyage his condition was so bad that, as he said of it once, he scarcely knew whether it was day or night: but the climate of Asia Minor agreed with him and he returned from Smyrna at least better for so much experience. I think his first real improvement came during his stay at my father's house. There he had plentiful repose, both of mind and body, and if good medical treatment had been added he might have made a substantial gain. In the spring of 1864 Bradford, the marine artist, being ambitious to paint icebergs in their native wilds, organized a sailing party for Labrador and invited Wasson to go with them. This was the first enterprise of the kind that gave him permanent benefit. Fortunately they encountered no severe storms. The cool, bracing air of the polar regions was better than galvanism and stimulated his nerves to work in the proper way. Sailing along the coast they were able to anchor almost every night in smooth water. The fish they caught, the strange birds they saw and stranger human creatures, were a cheerful entertainment to him. He became quite a sportsman, and even joined one day in the pursuit of a polar bear. He returned in the autumn practically cured of his trouble, but to regain his strength was out of the question: he suffered besides very badly from dyspepsia. However he was able to preach regularly, to make speeches in public, to work in his garden and write perhaps three hours a day. Such a person is not greatly to be pitied, and if he had fortunately possessed a small competency we might now look upon him as a prosperous man: but his only property consisted of a good working library and five hundred dollars which a friend had given him. The next eight years were the best and most productive of his life; and he might have continued in the same course but for another most unfortunate accident. The supply of coal in his government office gave out, and the requisition for a fresh quantity was not promptly filled. Wasson sat writing in a cold room. There was a sudden change of weather, a severe snow squall, and the result was--pleurisy. This changed to bronchitis which worried and weakened him for the following ten years, and finally carried him off in his sixty-fifth year. That he went through a severe fever at the house of his friend Henry A. Page of Medford is hardly worth considering, for he was so tenderly and beautifully cared for there as almost to make it an enviable experience; but in 1879 cataracts formed on both eyes, one of which had been injured long before, and when they were operated on, two years later, the sight was restored to his injured eye (such as it was previously) but not to the other, so that he was left very nearly blind. He attributed this catastrophe to the quantity of belladonna which had been prescribed for him. Such was his pathological history and a truly terrible one it is. Who can remember the like of it? Certainly Job's trials were not heavier nor were they borne with more fortitude and patience. In the midst of his severest troubles he wrote "All is well:" a noble religious poem equal to the hymn of Cleanthes or the twelfth ode of Horace; and in one of his earlier essays he speaks of tragedy as possessing such beauty and grandeur that he is almost ready to believe it is the proper goal and destination of earthly life. In "Epic Philosophy" he says: "Strife is around man, and strife is within him; the lightning thrusts its blazing scymitar through his roof, the thief creeps in at his door, and remorse at his heart. Who, looking on these things, does not acknowledge that man is indeed fearfully as well as wonderfully made? Who would not sometimes cry, 'O that my eyes were a fountain of tears, that I might weep, not the desolations of Israel alone, but the hate of Israel to Edom and of Edom to Israel, the jar, the horror, the ensanguined passion and ferocity of Nature'? But when we would despair, behold we cannot. Out of the conscious heart of humanity issues forever, more or less clearly, a voice of infinite, pure content. 'Through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for THOU art with me.' Sometimes, when our trial is sorest, that voice is clearest, singing as from the jaws of death and the gates of hell. And now, though the tears fall, they become jewels as they fall; and the sorrow that begot them wears them in the diadem of its more than regal felicity." This is the echo of his own experience; the spiritual diagnosis of his case. With what fortitude he endured his maladies those who knew him best can bear witness. He was no ideal Stoic nor self-conscious martyr; but more like an Homeric hero fighting his troubles, bearing them bravely, talking of them sensibly, always glad to receive sympathy but never seeking it, and complaining when he could endure no longer. He never tried to comfort himself by sophistical reflections, but elevated thoughts were always his chief consolation. Conversation about great writers and thinkers always seemed to strengthen him. Mr. Frothingham in his excellent memoir speaks of Wasson as a self-consuming nature. Such a statement may apply to men like Schiller and John Sterling but it can hardly be said of one who lived to be sixty-four years old. If he had not been a remarkably patient, prudent, temperate and altogether practical man his disorder would have consumed him long before that time. It gave him no margin for wilfulness. Except when he spoke in public, his life was regulated with mathematical accuracy. There was something almost death-like in his self-control, and yet at times that also had to give way. If he had lived otherwise his case would have grown continually worse. The only recreation he had was working in his garden, and an occasional game of billiards. Four or five times a year he would go to a symphony concert, to hear Matthew Arnold lecture, or to see a distinguished actor. People who blamed him for not recovering his health knew not what they did. A Philadelphia doctor has made himself quite famous by curing women who have become nervous and debilitated from an unhealthy mode of life and drinking strong tea, but that is a very different thing from curing a true nervous disorder. Sumner's case was almost exceptional. He was cured in three years by Dr. Brown-Sequard and made perfectly well; but he had temperament, climate, and everything that money might give, in his favor. A good many invalids have been helped by Brown-Sequard after other doctors had failed to help them. A sturdy New Hampshire farmer wounded his foot with an axe and was supposed to have split a nerve in it. The wound healed perfectly but he never was able to do a whole day's work afterward. An oarsman in the international regatta of 1869 who was a man of enormous physical strength, deranged his nerves in some way and shot himself rather than endure the kind of life that was forced upon him. The Wasson family was of Ulster-Irish descent, or as it is often improperly called Scotch-Irish. There is little Scotch blood in Ulster however, and the Wassons claimed to be descended from the Lollard heretics who were driven out of England in Henry the Fifth's time. John C. Calhoun belonged also to this class of men, who are noted for their industry, sobriety, mental vigor and inflexible tenacity. The county of Ulster contains only about one-eighth of the population of Ireland and yet it pays forty-six per cent of the Irish taxes. David Wasson, Senior, was trial justice for Brooksville, and was greatly dreaded by disorderly persons. He presided with dignity, and maintained better order than is often found in a country court-room. Wasson himself was more than Saxon; he was a German in mind, body and character, though he never went to Germany till after he was fifty. He had a German figure, much like his father's but broader; high square shoulders, a straight forehead and wide mouth. His features were strong and refined without being specially handsome. His brow was very fine and the eyes beneath it of so clear a blue as to be noticeable even at some distance. There are men whom it is a delight to be with, whose "actions are as pleasant as roses," whose absence we regret as soon as they leave the room; but Wasson was not one of these. He had no personal charm like Longfellow or Wendell Phillips. He was more of a gentleman than many who pride themselves on that distinction, and he had very good manners, but not a very good style. A noted snob of those days and parasite of distinguished people said that he could have no faith in the genius of a man who dressed like Mr. Wasson. He would probably have dressed much better if he had possessed more abundant means, but I never saw him dressed in a way that anyone could rightfully complain of. His voice was pleasant but there was neither grace nor elegance in his speech. Usually it was direct, forcible, monotonous, with a very distinct enunciation; but sometimes it became drawling and wearisome with a peculiar accent on certain words which struck the ear too pointedly. This however was only among his friends; it did not happen in public. But all thought of human imperfections vanished as soon as he began to talk on one of his favorite topics; and there was a long list of them. You recognized that you were in the presence of a master mind, an analytical genius, who could take the world to pieces and put it together before your very eyes. His conversation was better than his writing; in form, in freedom, and in warmth of feeling. He must have been the finest talker of his time. Carlyle could match him perhaps in quite a different manner; but I have never heard of any others. Lowell was what would have been called in Shakespeare's time a "witty and conceited gentleman" and John Weiss still more so; but neither of them could give the flow of original thought which came from Wasson like a pure mountain stream. Neither were they such complete masters of their subject. Like Carlyle he required suitable auditors to bring him forth at his best: but while Carlyle was mightiest when, his hearers were opposed to him Wasson always needed a somewhat sympathetic audience. If he saw unfriendly faces around him his ideas became congealed and his discourse controversial. At other times it was like following the course of a great unknown river, full of grand views and surprising discoveries. Nothing interests like imagination, or is more wholesome than good criticism. Yet he had no desire to be an autocrat of the drawing-room. He welcomed the opinions of others and encouraged free discussion. No man could be more ready to accept amendments to his propositions. Pride of opinion was nowhere to be found in him: he was only too modest and unassuming. If his friends did not agree with him he would reply with a mildly interrogative "Yes?" and then proceed as before. The finest rhetoric and even splendid oratory seemed poor compared with the plain statement of this unswerving seeker of the truth. His knowledge was prodigious. He was a good linguist, a fine mathematician and versed in all the different schools of philosophy. He knew English literature as well as Macaulay; French and German as well as Carlyle. There seemed to be no period of history with which he was unacquainted. He remembered everything. If he had not read a book he had heard of it and had a pretty clear notion of what it contained. The only picture-gallery he ever visited was the small National Gallery in London, but from the few master-pieces he saw there he formed a quite correct judgment of the art of painting and could talk about any picture in an interesting way. He had also a good ear for music and divided with Lowell the honor among American literati of being able to appreciate music of the best quality. Besides this, his knowledge of practical affairs such as farming, gardening, housebuilding, fishing, sailing and other industrial arts was well-nigh endless also. How his head, which was not one of the largest, could contain it all I do not know. He could not recite the odes of Horace from memory; but he was able to repeat lengthy quotations from both English and foreign authors, and that without ever having committed them. In religious writings and controversies he was as much at home as a good lawyer in the statutes. In his wanderings he had become acquainted with many curious, strange and original people, and had gained their confidence by his friendly, open-hearted manner. Perhaps he had learned as much from the great book of human nature as from all other books; so that his fund of information was fairly inexhaustible. He may almost be said to have contained the material for another Shakespeare. In 1877 just after the Turco-Russian war had begun we found him one evening in a smoking-car on the railway, surrounded by a crowd of young men who were listening eagerly to his account of the various wars which had already taken place between Russia and Turkey, and the political significance of the present one. "A man who possesses such a fund within has need of little from without." He cannot be called poor so long as he has a roof to shelter him and a single suit of clothes. Yet the acquisition of knowledge was never with Wasson for its own sake, though a good deal of adventitious knowledge came to him incidentally, but always for the attainment of wisdom. He did not believe in the Emersonian doctrine of obtaining inspiration through nature. "That was not the way," he would say, "in which the great minds of history became what they were. If we are to do lasting work we must know what the world is made of. Emerson himself does not work in that way." He quoted Schiller as saying, "He who would do benefit to the age in which he lives must bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity and then return to his own time to be in it, but not of it." That is, if we are to move the world with Archimedes' lever, we must have an historical basis to rest on. If a man ever had this it was Wasson. He went back to the Vedas in his study of religion; to the German forests and the pyramids in his investigation of politics and history. It was this which gave his arguments such cogency and made his discourse so fresh, vigorous and original. Arguments, however, will only serve for reasonable people. The ram that butted the locomotive had to learn from experience. His sincerity was absolute. A devoted friend says of him: "During twelve years of familiar intercourse and eight more of less frequent communication, I never knew him once to take on the slightest color of insincerity. For it is not only in the use of words but in the tone of voice, the expression of the face and the movement of the body that duplicity can be detected." Like Sumner, he would rather lose a case than make use of an unfair argument. This may seem to many a super-sensitive morality, but it was not so for the work which these men had to do. Wasson believed in telling lies; to save life, to protect innocence, or even to prevent people from obtaining information which they had no right to. He considered it justifiable not only to deceive insane people, but also those demented creatures who do more mischief than lunatics because they cannot be shut up. The more honor to him therefore for his truthfulness. In the case of a strong temperance woman who refused to allow a gentleman to marry her daughter unless he took the pledge, which he did with the deliberate intention of breaking it afterwards, he said, "I do not like to approve of his action, but she might just as well have held a pistol to his head." Neither did his own virtue make him uncharitable towards others. He recognized how impossible it is for servants and many other people to be always veracious, and claimed that the impostures practised by Frederick in the Seven Years' War might be justified by the strait he was in and the importance of the matter in hand. The main thing was to do honest work. For careless, sleazy, or fraudulent work he had no patience. He was greatly amused at the story of Dr. Francia ordering an army contractor who had cheated the government of Paraguay to be promenaded for an hour under the gallows, and he wished that more of them might be treated in that manner. He thought the torrent of mendacity which accompanies our presidential elections must have a bad influence on the morals of the American people. The question of veracity was once discussed at the Chestnut Street Club, and Emerson said that Desdemona's lie seemed to him the best thing in the play of Othello. But there is, as Plato remarks, a more insidious evil than the deception of others and that is deceiving oneself. To detect an intentional falsehood is not very difficult, but when people tell lies with perfect assurance of their own sincerity the confusion that results is endless. The wisest of men are some times misled in this way. When we try to deceive others we have before us the danger of public exposure, while in self-deception we have only our own consciences to deal with. Neither do the two always go hand in hand. There are persons who are formally careful in regard to the truth, and yet live in perpetual delusion. Wasson recognized this danger and protected himself against it by a constant and severe self-examination. He knew himself at least better than most, and if he erred anywhere it was in too moderate an opinion of his own value. He had visually a clear consciousness of what he was about, in spite of his lively imagination. He was in fact an American Doctor Johnson: a large hearted, high minded, sympathetic and logical _man_; and it is only a pity that he had not some Boswell of a friend who could have recorded his wise sayings and valuable criticism of men and things. He was more of an idealist than Doctor Johnson, and at the same time like Doctor Johnson in personal solidity, his English aplomb of character. They were both men of sterling quality. He was in all things especially human. His sympathies equalled the breadth of his mind. There was scarcely a subject in which he did not take an interest, and was not ready to converse on. As soon as he obtained a little money he wanted to help those who were in lack of it. His sister's husband being out of work, he designed the model for a small yacht and gave him an order for it. He had known the depths of human misery, and could make his experience of benefit to his friends. Poignant grief for the loss of a relative I think he never knew, and yet he did not neglect his duty to those in affliction, little as such duty might be expected of him. He was not a humorist or wit, and his conversation was only saved from dryness by its elevated tone; but he had a quick appreciation of the wit of others, and would sometimes laugh as heartily as Carlyle's professor in "Sartor Resartus." Ridicule and those books which are written to make people laugh were intolerable to him. He had a large stock of anecdotes at command, but he used them wisely and sparingly. He was refined as only a poet can be. The general public, as Balzac says, judges only by results; and those who were themselves only practical in some specialty, or had made fortunes for themselves out of the gratuity of nature, were wont to look upon Wasson as a visionary and unpractical person. To those who acted only from motives of self-interest he was a perpetual puzzle. Neither was he ignorant of this unfavorable opinion, for he could see through people almost as if they were glass, and he endured it with true Emersonian serenity. If they had known what he thought of them they would not have felt so very comfortable. He was sufficiently practical for the profession to which he belonged, though not so diplomatic as some of them are. He could be diplomatic enough on occasion, and knew how to preserve an impenetrable secrecy when necessity required. He was too sensitive, and too dead-in-earnest to make much of an orator, but he was an effective speaker, and if he had remained in the law he would no doubt have made a success of it, and very likely would have become a member of Congress. His adventure with a drunken sea-captain, while crossing from England in a sailing vessel has become proverbial. He probably saved the ship, and the lives of all on board, for a terrific storm arose immediately afterwards, the worst he had ever known, such as only a sober captain could possibly have weathered. There never was a better seaman when he was himself, so Wasson said. His judgment in regard to the investment of money, buying or selling a house, or in most of the small affairs of life, was excellent, and his advice in more serious matters so good that wise men might well have gone far to obtain it. Wherever he lived his house soon became conspicuous among all others for its refined air and tasteful appearance. In his half acre of a garden, he raised as fine fruit and vegetables as the most accomplished horticulturist, and even made wine from his own grapes equal to the best Californian. No man ever accomplished more with inadequate means. The interior of his house at West Medford had a pleasant style peculiarly its own. It reminded one of an old Dutch painting. In one of the last summers of his life he hybridized a seedling grape of large size and excellent flavor. He hoped to make a valuable property of this but his strength failed him too rapidly. The house in West Medford was the only one he ever owned, and he gave a number of good reasons for purchasing it. It was cheap, and large enough for three people; there was a small garden with two fine apple-trees attached to it, and the salt water came almost to the foot of the garden. He had noticed also that the streets became dry after a rain more quickly in that portion of the town than elsewhere and judged from that it must be a healthy locality. He very quickly remodelled the place giving it the stamp of his own style and character. He showed good judgment also in the education of his son George, now a marine-painter of well recognized merit. The boy inherited his father's sincerity and artistic feeling but not his intellectual tastes. In many respects he was more like his mother. He did not take to his studies nor was he fond of games, but liked bathing and sailing. When he was thirteen his father remarked that he did not know what he should be able to do with him. Well-intending friends said, you should get him a place in a store so that he may be earning something to help his parents, but Wasson replied: "No! I care too much for my boy to make a drudge of him for life, if it is possible for him to do better." Soon after this George began to draw ships and naval engagements on the black-boards at school, and one of these was so good that the teacher gave an order to have it remain until his father could be called in to look at it. Wasson took notice of this talent in the boy and encouraged it, watching its development as time went on. There were no schools of art in Boston then, and one reason for his going to Germany in 1872 was to obtain systematic instruction for him in drawing and painting. Wasson's friends were now greatly discouraged. "What hope is there for him," they said, "in such a profession? It is not likely the boy is a genius, and who is going to purchase his pictures?" Yet his father persevered bravely in spite of many "outs" and temporary failures and finally lived to see the merit of his son admitted by those who were at first most sceptical of it. The son is now a fairly successful artist; especially noted for his skill in representing the motion of water and the attitude of floating vessels. He was never prone to think evil, but he considered it a mischievous habit to try to think better of people than they were--an injustice to character and virtue. "Treat people better than they deserve," he would say, "but see them as they are." His kindness of heart now and then led him into difficulties which those who care more for their reputation than anything else, would have avoided. During his Arctic expedition Bradford took a number of stereopticon-views from icebergs and other indigenous scenery with the intention of exhibiting them in public on his return. This he finally did, more as a private celebration than with a hope of making money from it, and requested Wasson to assist him by giving an oral explanation of the pictures. Wasson wanted to say, "That is not my business," but he felt under great obligation to Mr. Bradford for the partial recovery of his strength, and did not like to refuse. He had no conception however of what was in store for him. He sent to Bradford for a list of the different views and prepared an address suitable for the occasion; but when the performance took place Bradford either forgot this or lost his presence of mind, for he exhibited the pictures without order or regularity, so that Wasson soon became confused and was able to give but a very poor account of them. This affair was the more vexatious because it was quite impossible to give any explanation of it. Matthew Arnold distinguishes between Plato as a great writer and thinker and Aristotle, who is only a great thinker. In this respect Wasson was more like Aristotle, though he resembled Plato again in being always an idealist. His writing shows the influence of his early studies in the law, and derives much of its virtue as well as some peculiarities from that source. It usually takes the form of an argument and is clear, logical and accurate, but also in style rather hard and dry. What it lacks is the pictorial element--what Carlyle possessed in such luxuriance. No law book ever was or could be written for entertainment, and those who expect to be amused by reading Wasson or Aristotle had better look elsewhere. His essays are like hard wood. He worked hard in writing them and we must work also when we read them. Sometimes we meet with passages in them of the purest, most limpid English, though these are more common in his later than his earlier writings. He said once, "I make no effort to please my readers, or even to obtain a graceful diction, I only try to say what I have to in the plainest manner." There is a decided charm in this perfect plainness, this absence of all decoration. One likes to think how old Vanderbilt had the brass and ornaments taken off the locomotives on the New York Central road. Telling the truth was Wasson's business in life, and he turned neither to the right nor the left in doing it. However, he did not reach this philosophy at once. His earlier work is marred slightly by a love of the grotesque, a sort of plough-boy rhetoric, which is ill-assorted with the elevated character of his ideas. He suffers also occasionally by an hair-splitting attempt to prove his point beyond the possibility of contradiction. In two or three of his essays there is an unsuccessful effort for liveliness, the result of complaints from his magazine editors, and now and then will appear an unconscious imitation of Carlyle; but what does it all amount to? We are inundated now-a-days with writing that is perfect, or nearly so, in form and yet brings no message to mankind. It pleases the understanding, but it does not satisfy the soul. It gives us no new ideas: in fact ideas are hateful to it. "Time and space conquering steam, And the light-out-speeding telegraph Bears nothing on its beam." Wasson's writing compared with this is as an old-time stage-coach journey in which an interesting conversation, moral or political, is carried on by men like Fisher Ames and Rev. David Osgood, compared with the empty elegance and despatch of a modern railway-train. It is fresh because it is genuine; vigorous because it is manly; and original because it is true. He is more original than Carlyle, and so profound that it seems as if only a pearl-diver could follow him to such a depth. Yet his natural element is so pure, calm and tranquil, that we easily accomplish what seems at first an impossible descent. In "Epic Philosophy" he has dealt with the problem of good and evil in a manner more noble and penetrating than was ever before attempted. In his essay on the "Genius of Woman" he enters on a new and important field of investigation, a virgin soil as yet untried. In "Unity," the greatest of his essays, he boldly climbs the Jacob's ladder of philosophy and walks serene among the stars, grappling even with Infinity. He had achieved unity for himself; the one complete cosmopolitan mind of his time. In his highest flights he is never cold or inexorable, but always human, tender, and sympathetic. He loved the unkind, heedless world; life was wonderful to him. "What do I think of Wasson?" said Professor James of Harvard, a few days after his death, "I look upon him as one of the great instructors of mankind." It was complained by a critic of Emerson's "Parnassus" that only two of Wasson's poems were to be found in that collection; and Alcott, who had a keen scent for superior literature, once turned a visitor out of his study for denying the superiority of Wasson's poetry. Many of his sonnets are gems, unsurpassed in any language, and the one called "Pride" seems to me in its grand simplicity to be without a rival. If there is any American poem which sings itself like "All's well," it is Longfellow's ballad of "Mary Garvin." "The Plover" has a pensive grace which is as rare as its subtile and elevated thought. They are however few in number and he did not think there was enough of them to publish in a volume. They were finally published _post mortem_ in what was, if the truth be told, a rather unfortunate manner. Two of his finest sonnets, on "Silence" and "Wendell Phillips," were by mischance omitted, and a good many included that were either failures or written for some trifling occasion, and never intended for publication. As if to prevent all chance of popularity, the best pieces were placed at the close of the book and a long unfinished Hegelian poem at the beginning. Even the paper they were printed on was such as Wasson especially disliked. It seems a pity that he should have been denied this little celebrity. He received better justice from Mr. Frothingham, who has published an excellent memoir of his life and work together with a number of his essays,--a handsome volume well bound and printed. Yet one cannot help thinking that here also the author's fame, as well as the interest of the general public, might have been better consuited by a more careful selection and a wider range of subjects. "Epic Philosophy" at least ought by no means to have been omitted, nor is there any example given of Wasson's fine literary criticism, in itself enough to have made a writer celebrated. His essay on Whittier is not only a just estimate, but seems also in its wise and tender application to include Whittier poetically, as the sea encircles an island. In this department of writing he was the equal of Lessing and almost of Goethe; but with characteristic modesty he celebrated Lowell as the first of American critics. Wasson's book notices in the "Boston Commonwealth" were most interesting reading and contained much of his finest thought. His famous Groveland address was not directed against a faith in the divinity of Christ, for he held that belief in profound respect, as signifying the divine origin and mission of mankind. He considered every spiritually gifted person to be the result of an immaculate conception. At the close of the essay on "Unity" he says: "Verily, I believe that he who was born at Bethlehem, that majestic witness for the soul, was Messias, Christ, one sent from the Father; that the eternal Godhood concurred in the production of his being; that the consciousness of a divine inhabitation lived in his heart." It was no new evil he complained of, but one older than the brazen serpent in the wilderness. It might be called the fossilization of religious ideas. He called to his support the testimony of a witness whose orthodoxy has never been questioned. This was the poet Milton, who says: "A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." Then Wasson adds: "And it is no more than a different application of this aphorism to say that one may be an idolater in the reverence of that which is truly venerable; for if he render it homage only in blind conformity to custom, and in implicit submission to the discipline of ancient use and wont, though the object be worthy, yet his worship is an idolatry." It is indeed a type of idolatry which becomes continually more subtle and dangerous with the progress of civilization. In politics Wasson was a republican without being a democrat. He hailed the advent of the republican party in 1856 as indicating an improvement in our political consciousness. Democracy, he said, led to political selfishness and disintegration. He pointed out many years before Von Holst that the secession of the southern states was the legitimate fruit of democratic principles. He thought that suffrage ought not to be a right, but a privilege, the privilege of good citizenship. He was also the first to argue in favor of civil-service reform, and a selection of officials by competitive examination. He might have found sufficient arguments from experience, but he was not content with that. He went back to the first principles of political science as indicated in the social organization of mankind. He laid down the rule that society is not more for the benefit of the individual than the individual for the benefit of society; and our last war sufficiently proved the truth of this. When he first brought forward these arguments at the Boston Radical Club in 1879 he was met by a storm of opposition and almost personal invective. One reason for this was that a large portion of his audience was composed of what is sometimes called strong-minded women, who fully expected to acquire the right of suffrage on democratic principles. His hearers had been accustomed to think of a republic and a democracy as one and the same thing, and they could not understand Wasson at all. They concluded that he must be a monarchist, an emissary of Bismarck. They had no arguments to oppose him with, for it was a subject they had never reflected upon; so they complained that he was illiberal, re-actionary, and lacked faith in human nature. Since they were in a numerical majority they thought they had the best of the discussion, but the most impartial of his listeners did not find it so. Louisa Alcott said once after a lively discussion, in her decisive manner, "I like Mr. Wasson, and I admire the way in which he fights against odds." His views on politics were similar to those held by Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and most of the founders of the Constitution, as also by all the great minds of history, by Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Leibnitz. Wasson however did not look to the past, but wished to improve in a rational manner on what we already have. He considered woman suffrage as a political monstrosity, and considered it even more dangerous in its tendencies than socialism. The true reward of a man of genius lies not in his fame but in his influence. His celebrity is of more value to those who receive the rich gifts of his intellect than to himself. Wasson's direct influence during his life was limited to a very small circle; but who can tell how far it extended indirectly beyond this? To those who knew him the thought of this patient, indomitable truth-seeking hero was like an elixir of moral and spiritual vitality. So the orders of a field-marshal are carried to the generals of division, and from these pass onward till every private-soldier feels the impulse of a single will. Perhaps the time will come when he will be better appreciated. The future historian of our literature cannot well neglect so independent and original a thinker, and perhaps Americans of the next century may find him more congenial to their modes of thought than do those of the present era. If he lives at all, it is likely he will outlive every other writer of his time. One may read Plato or Bacon or Goethe, and then return to Wasson and still find something new and instructive in his essays--something we did not know before. WENDELL PHILLIPS If Hawthorne was the antipodes of Emerson, Wendell Phillips was of Wasson. One might form a proportion out of these four, in which Phillips and Hawthorne would be the extremes, and Emerson and Wasson the mean terms. He was, in his way, as perfect an artist as Hawthorne, while he differed from him as the sea does from the land. He was more like Emerson in his mental methods, and was a man of action. While he took the same interest in public affairs as Wasson, the slavery question was the only point on which the two could ever agree. One was an ardent and unreflecting revolutionist; the other a systematic thinker and conservative supporter of the general order of affairs. When in 1870 he was candidate for governor of Massachusetts, on a hopeless ticket, and was taunted with being ambitious, he proudly replied, "Born of six generations of Yankees, I knew the way to office and turned my back on it thirty years ago." His family was one of the earliest and most generally respected in New England; and at one time was influential and flourishing, but now nearly extinct. Rev. George Phillips of Rainham in Norfolk, England, was a graduate of Cambridge University, and entered the Church of England, but soon became a dissenter, and embarked with Governor Winthrop on the ship Arabella, in 1630, for the western world. He was the first minister at Watertown; a position in those days as important as the presidency of a trunk line is in our own. Cotton Mather and the early writers speak of him almost as the founder of the Congregational Church in New England; and he and his descendants were all cultivated gentlemen. Two of his great-grandsons founded the preparatory academies at Andover and Exeter, called by that name. John Phillips, the father of Wendell, graduated at Harvard in 1788. He was the president of the Massachusetts senate for one term, and the first mayor of Boston, distinctly so called. His wife was a Miss Sarah Walley of Brookline, and Wendell himself was their eighth child, born November 29th, 1811--a year memorable for the appearance of a comet with six tails. During his boyhood, the family lived in a large mansion house in Old Cambridge, which has since been occupied by Professor Andrews Norton and his son. In a large and amiable household, with a mother for whom he always showed the deepest respect, his earlier years must have been happy much beyond the lot of ordinary mortals. He was fitted for college at the Boston Latin School, where he was distinguished both for scholarship, faultless behavior, and fine declamations. Charles Sumner was his companion there, as well as in college and at the law-school. They are both said to have given striking proof of their oratorical talent, though perhaps not more so than many others have before and since. He entered at Harvard in 1827, while Sumner was a sophomore, and Dr. Holmes and his celebrated twenty-niners were in their junior year. His college life was a dream of wonder-land. Rich, gifted, full of good-humor, handsome in form and feature, a brilliant scholar, he seemed above all others to be Fortune's favored child. Work was easy to him, and his play was the sport of genius. He was everywhere among the first; president of the Porcellian Club, president and orator of the Hasty Pudding Club--the Apollo Belvedere of his classmates. He also belonged to a society called "The Owls," which only met at midnight, and the one who could control his face so as to look most like an owl was considered the best fellow. Yet in the midst of this happiness, like the Hindoo prince, the spirit of sadness comes over him when he reflects that very few are so fortunate as himself, and that a great many seem to be born to positive misfortune. The change in him was so marked that his classmates took notice of it and attributed it to too much of a religious interest; but it was not that. He accepted religion as he found it, and lived and died in the faith of his ancestors. What is called a religious experience never came to him; but from this time forward he showed an especial tenderness and consideration for unfortunate people. It is well we bear this trait of his character in mind, for it is the interpretation of the various phases of his career. He studied law, but does not appear to have ever taken a serious interest in it. Sumner, on the contrary, became a shining light in the law-school, and there laid the solid foundation of his future eminence. Looking back at the past, we see now how the lives of these two men diverged. In tact and readiness, in mental gifts, and fineness of nature, Phillips was slightly the superior of Sumner, but Sumner easily surpassed him in greatness of design. Phillips wished to be an orator, and afterwards confessed that at this period of his life his admiration for Webster knew no legitimate bounds. But oratory is an art which requires a liberal profession for its basis; and Webster and Sumner became orators by virtue of their profession. An orator merely as such is simply an actor, and it requires a strong and well-balanced character to withstand the temptations of the stage and the platform. Wendell Phillips afterwards found a basis for his oratory in the anti-slavery conflict; and then, when that came to an end, his occupation was gone. It is also to be doubted if he had the right sort of intellect to make a lawyer of, though no man could be better qualified in other respects for practice in the courts. Although one of his professors predicted a term in Congress for him, he did not obtain any clients for several years; which is more remarkable as there could have been no question in regard to his capacity or popularity. Another strange fact is that when he went to Europe and asked Judge Story for letters-of-introduction, he failed to obtain them; while Sumner, who was Story's favorite, was presented a few days later with more than a dozen. Had Judge Story already discovered a centrifugal and uncontrollable element in the man? It is difficult to understand, at this distance, the persecution of the early abolitionists. They were the most harmless and inoffensive of men, and the spirit in which they approached the slavery question, and the arguments they used in regard to it, were like those by which the Christian Church obtained the abolition of serfdom in Europe. They were the most purely Christian people of their time; certainly much better Christians than those ministers of the gospel who denounced them as disturbers of a hollow peace. So Suetonius speaks of the Christians as being disturbers of the peace, and Tacitus, like a late writer in the "Atlantic Monthly," refers to them as enemies of society. It is true they finally became narrow-minded, intolerant, and almost misanthropic, as always happens when a small minority are fatally enclosed within an unfriendly community; but they were not so in the beginning. Their methods were mild and pacific: they wished to influence public-opinion, and even hoped to persuade the slaveholders to assist in general emancipation. That the slave-holder should have been somewhat irritated at this suggestion to part with so much valuable property is not surprising; but why should it have disturbed their neighbors in Massachusetts and Connecticut where the question of free and slave labor had been agitated forty years before, and satisfactorily settled? The same speakers who harangued against the abolitionists, would say in the next breath that it was contrary to democratic principles for people in one section of the country to concern themselves about the affairs of those in another. Was it an inherited public tendency from the spirit of intolerance which formerly persecuted the Quakers? However that may be, it is an historical fact that great social reformers always have begun in a similar manner, and their importance can fairly be measured by the violence and duration of the opposition to them. Wendell Phillips did not at first take an interest in the anti-slavery cause. The abolitionists were not personally known to him, and his mind was largely occupied with the pleasures of fashionable society, where he shone before all others. There was a certain strength and good sense in this; the reserve of a man who waits for opportunity, and who does not risk shipwreck at the start by rushing hastily into troubled waters. In October 1837, he was married to Miss Mary Anna Green, the daughter of Benjamin Green of Boston, and cousin, or other near relative, to Mrs. Maria Chapman, a friend of Harriet Martineau and other English philanthropists. In November occurred the riot at Alton, Illinois, and the assassination of Lovejoy. Dr. Channing's first petition for an indignation-meeting in Faneuil Hall was refused by the authorities; but a second and more urgent one was granted: evidently with the anticipation that the anti-slavery people might, after all, find themselves in a minority. As it happened, the audience was nearly divided between the two parties, but the pro-slavery faction, led by government officials, had the advantage of being able to make all the noise and disturbance they wished without being interfered with by the police for it. It seemed as if the meeting would end in confusion and a vote of disagreement. Twenty-five years later Wendell Phillips said of it: "I went there without the least intention of making a speech or taking any part in the proceedings. My wife and Mrs. Chapman wished to go, and I accompanied them. I remember wearing a long surtout, a brand-new one, with a small cape (as was the fashion of the day), and after the attorney-general made his speech denouncing Lovejoy as a fool, I suddenly felt myself inspired, and tearing off my overcoat, started for the platform. My wife seized me by the arm, half terrified, and said, 'Wendell, what are you going to do?' I replied, 'I am going to _speak_, if I can make myself heard.'" The uproar was so great that the chairman asked Dr. Channing if he could stand thunder; but the personal beauty and intrepidity of Phillips,--coming like a meteor out of the night,--so surprised all hearers, that they paused to listen to him, and were so charmed by his eloquence that they neglected to make any further disturbance. The attorney-general was wholly discomfited, and Dr. Channing's resolutions were carried by a substantial majority. It is surprising that so thorough an historian as Von Holst should have omitted to make mention of this speech, which really struck the key-note of the anti-slavery movement from first to last. As we have it now, revised by its author from the newspaper reports of the time, it is one of the purest, most spontaneous and magnetic pieces of oratory in existence. It deserves a place beside those two famous speeches of James Otis and Patrick Henry which ushered in the war of separation from England. It possesses even a certain advantage, in the fact that it never has been nor is likely to be made use of for school declamations. It will always remain fresh, vigorous, and original as when it was first delivered. But Phillips was not content merely with silencing the opposition. He claimed that the cause for which he spoke, and for which the meeting had been called, was one of higher importance than any that had preceded it in Faneuil Hall. When the audience murmured at this, he boldly continued: "Insomuch as _thought_ is better than _money_, is the cause for which Lovejoy died superior to that for which our ancestors contended. James Otis thundered within these walls when the king did but touch his pocket; imagine his indignant eloquence if they had attempted to put a gag upon his lips." For this statement, if for nothing else, Wendell Phillips deserves an immortality in the history of his country. With such an achievement at the age of twenty-six, what might not have been expected of his maturer years,--of the full fruition of his genius? What but a future candidate for the senate of the United States, or even for the presidency? The full fruition of his genius, the development that nature intended for him, never was realized. It is true, he accomplished much, and was in himself even more,--but by no means what he might have been. Even in the first hour of success, the temptation comes to us which determines our future destiny in one way or another. The two ladies were of course delighted at his triumph, and overwhelmed him with congratulations; but Mrs. Chapman, "the born duchess", as she was called, saw instantly what an advantage would accrue to the small band of abolitionists from the alliance of this able young aristocrat, with his suddenly revealed gift. That evening she used all the arts of persuasion to induce him to relinquish his profession and cast his fortune to sink or swim on the broad ocean of reform. She argued that Webster and Everett had the field; that years must elapse before he could win equality with those veterans; while as an anti-slavery orator, a fresh field would be open to his genius, in which he would meet with no competitor. The hour only waited for the man, and what a glorious reward to have finally secured--the freedom of a whole race! Unhappily this coincided with a natural inclination in Phillips, of which we have already spoken, and a few days later he decided to follow her advice. One could heartily wish that the born duchess had left Wendell Phillips to work out his own salvation. It is hardly the sign of a strong character for a man to be guided in the choice of a profession by feminine counsel; but he was still young, tender-hearted, and susceptible, and if left to himself might have escaped the impending danger. It was a temptation at once to his ambition as an orator and the latent heroism in him,--his disposition to self-sacrifice. His law practice was not satisfactory, and he could not look forward to immediate success in that direction--especially since the Faneuil Hall meeting. Much better however for him to have gone patiently forward in the path already cleared by Webster and Everett, until, fully equipped in experience and maturity, he could have carried his anti-slavery principles into the arena of practical politics and become a leader in the House of Representatives, or have stood by Sumner in the Senate. A woman can hardly be expected to understand the long-drawn persistent struggle by which a man rises to the top of his profession; but it seems as if Mrs. Chapman might have been more considerate of the fortune and prospects of this young Apollo, himself of more value than many negroes. He did not properly belong with the abolitionists. They always felt so. They were excellent people, stainless in thought and in action, but limited in education and ability. Men of the highest mental endowments naturally form a class by themselves, though not an exclusive one. If Phillips had consulted John Quincy Adams on the subject, he would have been answered with a "No" such as might have been heard across Court Street. His life was now as much changed as if spring had suddenly been succeeded by winter. It was like a penitential pilgrimage. He had inherited from his father a moderate property upon which he and his wife, who was already much of an invalid, could live in a moderate way. He resided for a time in Florence, Massachusetts, and then purchased a small house in Essex Street, Boston, which has since been torn down to make room for the extension of Harrison Avenue. It was a house of very small dimensions, such as is commonly occupied by a mechanic's family; but possessed the advantage of admitting as much sunshine as possible into Mrs. Phillips' lonely chamber, which was probably his reason for selecting it. He wished to live economically in order to save money for the cause of freedom, and also for private charities. The number of persons whom he assisted in the course of his life may be called countless; and he was even too careful in preventing a knowledge of this from being made public. He selected for his motto the Latin sentence which he had translated while at school, "Phocian always remained poor, though he might have been very rich." His fashionable friends deserted from him in a body, and old family acquaintances passed him in the street without recognition. The only society he had was his wife and Mrs. Chapman and the families of the few abolitionists who lived in Boston. He was as careful of his diet, exercise, and sleep, as a trainer is in regard to a race-horse; and was rewarded for this with the most magnificent health. In all things he illustrated the words of the poet:-- "The hero is not fed on sweets; Daily his own heart he eats: The chambers of the great are jails And head winds right for royal sails." He never lost an opportunity of speaking on the slavery question. He joined the corps of lyceum-lecturers, and soon won the first place among them. If they would listen to him on slavery, or "Toussaint L'Ouverture," his lecture was free; otherwise it must be paid for. No one else did so much to arouse public consideration in regard to this great evil, as the conservative Webster had already designated it. All through the northern states, wherever the railroads went, there Wendell Phillips was also, exhorting the people with burning words, and warning especially the farmers and laboring classes that free and slave labor could not exist together, and unless the negroes were emancipated they would ultimately become enslaved themselves. Stumping New England, it was said, made Wendell Phillips an orator; and that, after all, was the right name for it. It was refined and elegant as could be, but still stump-oratory. It became so inevitably from the nature of the case, and in one sense this is to his credit, for it would seem to prove that he cared more for the cause than for his own reputation. He never attained to the well-considered architectural oratory of Webster and Burke, though in his best period he sometimes came very close to this, but neither did he speak to the House of Commons, nor before a bench of judges. Nothing is more fatiguing to untrained minds than a consistent and elaborate argument; and the mixed character of Phillips' speeches, like a bonfire made out of all inflammable materials, was remarkably well suited to the audiences whom he addressed. It is said that even Burke often emptied the benches, as if his associates in parliament did not appreciate him so well as those who now enjoy reading his works. An artist who draws with a free hand, will be able to develop his talent to its full extent, but one who draws in a cramped or false manner will always suffer more or less from the effects of it; but this was not the worst of the matter. Self-control does much for the artist, but unprejudiced criticism is also necessary. This Phillips never could obtain. There were persons who judged him impartially, but he was not in the way of obtaining their opinions. He was surrounded by a small band of adherents who praised him without discrimination, and who fiercely repelled the attacks of those who found fault with him. The newspapers all took sides against him, for both political parties dreaded the agitation of the slavery question, and Phillips could rarely look into one of them without meeting with a savage attack on himself by some subaltern who knew of no better use for his quill than the manufacture of these venomous darts. Neither could he walk through the streets of Boston without hearing himself cursed and execrated. Meanwhile Mrs. Chapman and Mrs. L. Maria Child extolled him to the skies. Faithful and undistorted picture of himself he could meet with nowhere. We read of saintly characters who have endured persecution with Christian humility and resignation, who have blessed those who cursed them, and loved those who hated them; but how many such have we been personally acquainted with? If we except Desdemona there are none in the great dramatists. It is an excellent principle, this of returning good for evil; but is it not also true that nature has planted hatred in us as a protection against future imposition? There may be such personages, but Wendell Phillips was not one of them. He endured the stings of the pro-slavery hornets, as they were called, with stoical dignity and forbearance, but in spite of all good resolutions, they had an effect upon the inner man. Like the good Maritornes when Sancho Panza mistook her for an evil spirit, he endured the drubbing as long as flesh-and-blood would stand it, and then retaliated in good earnest. It was discovered at length, that Wendell Phillips had a sharp tongue, as well as a silver one, and could use it also with some temper. Of course he was blamed for this, and very few considered what provocation he had, or gave him credit for his previous forbearance. The habit increased rather than abated in him with age, and finally acquired the nature of a familiar demon that would appear unexpectedly in the midst of a brilliant discourse and sadly mar the effect of it. His tendency to exaggeration, disregard of fact, and recklessness of statement, may all be attributed to his irregular, improvised manner of working. There are few public speakers, indeed, who escape these faults. What preparation he made for his speeches will probably never be known. He was always as mysterious on this point as a professional juggler. To a lady who once asked him about it, he replied, that he never made any preparation. For those of his speeches that have been published, we are obliged to a skilful short-hand writer named Yerrinton, who was Wendell Phillips' devoted admirer, and never missed an opportunity of hearing him on a fresh subject in Boston or New York. To judge from internal evidence, it would seem likely that having divided his subject, as a lawyer does his argument, into a number of points, and having filled his mind somewhat full of them, he wrote out a careful and well-studied opening to his address, and then committed it to memory. This would enable him to make terms, as it were, with his audience in those first critical moments of his speech, and afterwards he could rely on his native wit and genius to carry him through. When his subject was a criticism of public events, this was not so difficult, and it gave him the advantage of a certain vivacious energy which appealed strongly to his hearers; but it was a dangerous practice. An orator who has a certain length of time to fill, and a reputation to sustain, is obliged to go on at all hazards. He cannot afford to be dull, nor to stop for a moment's reflection. If his memory fails him for an instant, imagination must supply its place. In this manner he often made misstatements which were quite unintentional, and must have been deeply regretted afterwards. Some allowance too should be made for a man who feels himself in a desperate position. His historical lectures on "The Lost Arts," "Daniel O'Connel," and "Toussaint," must sooner or later have been committed to memory, and were repeated again and again in a nearly identical form. To amend for these deficiencies, his delivery was perfect, and even more than that. One of our best critics has called him matchless in this respect, and no other orator of the century, except possibly Canning, may be compared to him. Webster was more effective, but rather ponderous. Choate's style was peculiar, and Everett's cold and studied. Gladstone resembles him more, perhaps, than any other, but Gladstone has a decided solemnity of manner which is a help to him among his countrymen, but a defect as judged by classic standards. With Wendell Phillips, it was not only that every phase of thought and feeling was portrayed at once in his face, attitude, and gestures, but this was done with such grace and purity as only belongs to the very highest art. It was as if a figure in Raphael's "School at Athens" had suddenly stepped out from the picture and explained the thought of the master to us in words. There is nothing I can compare with the unconscious grace and purity of Phillips in his best moments except a picture by Raphael, or one of Milton's shorter poems. It was no lurid brilliancy or artificial light that shone from him, but rather the cheerful radiance of spring sunshine. No matter how gloomy the political outlook might be, or in what sombre colors he depicted it, this light from the man himself illuminated his subject and gave encouragement to his hearers. The most prolonged applause could not disturb a muscle in his countenance, and a storm of hisses appeared to have as little effect on him. From the first word to the last, he was master of the platform, and no one dreamed of contesting his right to it. His gestures were his own, and could not be imitated, for they were the creation of the moment. There was something magical in this art of his, and if his wisdom and judgment had only equalled it, he might have counted among the greatest of men. Emerson sent one of Webster's orations to Carlyle, and the latter complained that it was monotonous and lacked the poetic quality of Demosthenes. This is quite true, but at the same time it may be said that Webster's speeches, judged simply as literature, have not been surpassed by five other American writers. The grand roll of his sentences does not become wearisome to a lover of sound reasoning, and in the presentation of his subject he has rarely been equalled. An oration of his is not like a picture hanging on the wall, but rather a public building which one can walk around and look at from the four cardinal points. Even his speech on the fugitive-slave bill, for which he has been so much blamed, contains the best analysis of the slavery question up to that time which had yet been made. He considered slavery a great evil, and his mistake evidently consisted in supposing that a great evil could exist in one part of the nation without vitiating the whole of it. [Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS. AS HE APPEARED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA.] Phillips looked upon slavery as a crime, and attacked it in an uncompromising manner. His speeches are not much like Webster's, but they are excellent reading; full of keen, vivid thought, bright sayings, and genial humor. He had the imagination of Demosthenes, but without the logical faculty. Many of them possess historical value, and but for too much _voix blanc_, like the brightness of new silver, might be compared with Emerson's essays. Certain passages and individual sentences are of rare beauty. Speaking of Lovejoy thirty years after his death, he said, "How cautiously men sink into nameless graves, while now and then one forgets himself into immortality." At the time of the Dred Scott decision, he exclaimed: "Is Liberty dead? Is the valley of the Mississippi her grave? Are the Rocky Mountains her monument; and shall the Falls of Niagara chant forever her requiem?" In his Brooklyn address of November 1st, 1859, the finest of his orations, and one which he must have prepared with exceptional care, after telling the story of Tsar Nicholas, who insisted on building a straight railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg in spite of the opposition of the engineers, he continued: "An intelligent democracy says of slavery, or a law, or a creed, 'This is justice, or it is not'; the track of God's thunderbolt is a straight line from justice to iniquity, and the church or state that cannot stand it must get out of the way." Or take this illustration of his subject from Athenian life--which is itself Athenian, and very much in the vein of Demosthenes:-- "Anacharsis went into the forum at Athens, and heard a case argued by the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. He walked out into the streets, and somebody said to him, 'What think you of Athenian liberty?' 'I think,' said he, 'wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.' Just what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the United States says today of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide them. But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity and right and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the caprices of the mob to-morrow,--that very Athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy: God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain-peaks of civilization." At a memorial meeting of Sumner's friends in 1874, Phillips concluded his remarks with the same expression that Cicero used in regard to Homer:--"There was no one like Sumner." He was not a mellow-toned orator of peace and conciliation, but soul-stirring, and one could detect the distant flash of a sword-blade in his periods. In private life, he was the most delightful of men. Good orators always have the finest manners, for it is from them that we learn the art of behavior; but Wendell Phillips never brought the great man of the world to the drawing-room or dining-table, but was so perfectly a gentleman that he seemed almost like a prince who had abdicated his hereditary possessions. He did not seem to have been bred to good manners, but born to them, so natural and unconstrained was everything he said and did. Never self-conscious and never self-forgetful; where consideration was needed he was sure to be at hand. He was at once dignified and deferential, even to children and servants, whom he was sure to remember in the homes where he visited, and usually had a kind word for them at the right moment. I do not think he could have treated even the meanest of women with disrespect. He never talked too long or too brilliantly, but seemed to be on the watch to give everyone present a fair chance. His presence in a room was stimulating, and made people brighter than their ordinary wont. Of small conversation, conversational pleasantries, and what is called table-talk, he happily knew nothing. He had no sharp wit or repartee, but plenty of genial humor, and could of course tell a story to perfection. His imitations of other orators were highly amusing, especially what he called Webster's Rochester speech: "The public debt; it must be paid; and it _shall_ be paid;--how much is it?" He would go through the performance and then resume his seat at the table, laughing like a child. When Emerson and Phillips dined together they would look at one another, as it seemed, with a kind of awe, as if they were more wonderful to each other than to ordinary mortals. It was after such an occasion that Emerson said, "This man is such a perfect artist that he ought to be walking all the galleries of Europe, and yet here he is fighting these hard questions." He did not appear to care much for society however, and always declined an invitation where he was in danger of being lionized, or otherwise made use of. A characteristic anecdote is told of him during the expedition of the abolitionists to England in 1853. They were entertained there by their British allies, and also by members of the nobility. A certain duchess (or countess perhaps) invited them to a lawn-party, and while they were engaged in drinking coffee on her lawn, an uncomfortable drizzling mist came down on the company. The gentlemen all carried their hats in their hands, out of respect for the duchess, who wore a sort of lace tiara; but in this emergency Phillips, who had a speech to make at Birmingham next evening, placed his on his head and continued to wear it. The consequence was that when the duchess gave them a second entertainment Phillips was not invited. He was as independent as this on all occasions. The anti-slavery movement carried along with it a variety of other social and political movements such as spiritualism, total abstinence, and the prevention of capital punishment; which prevented many sympathetic friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint, and sometimes even a comical aspect. These Utopian and impracticable notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly on the log-rolling principle, and partly from a tendency of those people to separate themselves from what is real and tangible. It seems strange that a man of Wendell Phillips' culture and mental endowments should not have been able to distinguish between a necessary and possible reform, and those vague theories of human happiness and perfection which are not based on the logic of experience, but indicate rather a wayward mental condition in the devotees. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, what should be said of unripe and superficial thinking? We wonder what were Wendell Phillips' reflections concerning the women in Bloomer costume, and the paradoxical persons who frequented the anti-slavery fairs, and created disturbances at the anti-slavery conventions. If questioned about them he would probably have said, with a laugh, "Oh, those are our barnacles;" but they were only extreme cases of the general tendency. It was not the right element for a man of his calibre: he did not become a spiritualist, nor was he so intolerant as to object to the use of brandy for cooking purposes; but he published an injudicious and even intemperate letter to the chief-justice of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard College, arraigning them for drinking wine at a public banquet. He exerted himself strenuously to obtain the repeal of capital punishment; and when that failed, and also an attempt to obtain a pardon for a miserable murderer, whom it was merely a kindness to hang, he attacked the governor of the state in a sermon before the Theodore Parker Society, which was little better than a tirade of invectives. He never appeared as an advocate of woman suffrage before the public, but he is said to have approved of it. Neither would he go to the polls to vote; at first because the national constitution supported slavery, and afterwards because the government maintained an army and encouraged war. He missed a fine opportunity to escape from this narrow routine and enter the arena of practical politics when the Free-soil party was formed to prevent the extension of slavery. However, he either did not think of it, or preferred to hold fast to his former friends, though he little knew how little they cared for him, and he continued for ten years longer to lecture on Toussaint and talk moral-suasion,--riding hard on the Garrisonian formula. It seems like small business when we recollect the work that Seward and Sumner and Chase were doing meanwhile. It was the attack on Harper's Ferry that broke the spell at last, and awoke Wendell Phillips to a higher and more useful life. It is difficult to realize now, the courage that was required to appear before the public in defence of what was generally considered the outrage of a madman. It is easier for men to understand the differential calculus, than that rebellion against government is either the greatest of crimes or the highest of virtues. When government becomes so bad that honesty and virtue cannot endure it, revolution is imminent. Phillips, Emerson and Thoreau, John A. Andrew and Rev. J. M. Manning, pastor of the Old South church, were the ones who asserted this. Andrew and his friends called a meeting, nominally to obtain funds for the wife and daughters of John Brown. The hall was crowded with a remarkably intelligent looking class of people. Andrew presided, and claimed that whatever might be thought of his Virginia raid, John Brown himself, considered from his own standpoint, was in the right. Rev. Mr. Manning said, if John Brown had consulted him in regard to inciting a slave insurrection he should certainly have advised him not to do it, but he was far from regretting that the attempt had been made. Phillips was the last speaker, and treated his subject in the boldest revolutionary manner; and before he had finished the applause was deafening. A judge of the superior-court sat on the front bench clapping his hands with a noise like pistol shots. This served him as a preparation for the Brooklyn address already referred to, which, if it had been equal throughout, might be classed among the world's great speeches, and it is certainly one of the most brilliant orations of either ancient or modern times. Certain passages in it remind one of a shower of falling stars. It is remarkable for its light and shade. He began with a gay and graceful compliment to Thomas Corwin, an old statesman of the Henry Clay school, who was seated on the platform; but he soon became intensely serious. "The lesson of the hour is insurrection. And why is it? Because we are all recreant Americans; recreant to the principles of our ancestors." After a while he changed to a sort of rippling humor, which was peculiar to him, and delighted his audience immensely, describing the subterfuges which had come into fashion to escape using the word slavery. "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Then he became deeply pathetic as he referred to the heroic man condemned to death and lying wounded in a Virginia prison; and concluded with an outburst of spiritual triumph like that in Goethe's tragedy of Egmont. "They have brave men in Virginia: it was not an old, grey-headed man entering Harper's Ferry that they were afraid of, it was the John Brown in every man's own conscience that made them tremble." He achieved an equal success of a different kind soon after, in attempting to deliver the same speech in New York city. A portion of the hall was filled with pro-slavery roughs who cursed and reviled him, and threw various missiles at him. A stone which struck a chair near him on the platform might have done him very serious injury. Nothing dismayed, he continued his speech, and taking his text from the insults of his enemies, hurled defiance back in their teeth. His friends who accompanied him and were ready to defend him from personal violence, said that on this occasion Phillips surpassed any thing they had known of him before; and fairly quelled the mob by his courage, address, and personal magnetism. It was during the following eight years that Wendell Phillips proved himself the great orator. Wasson, who never quite approved of him, said that Webster might have excelled him, but that Choate or Everett could not be compared with him. The largest halls could not contain the people who wished to hear him. He was several times mobbed, and his life was in continual danger. A body-guard of devoted young friends escorted him to and from his house. He never ceased calling for the emancipation of the negroes, and when that was accomplished, for their enlistment as volunteers and a more vigorous prosecution of the war. His criticism of public affairs was not always judicious, but it warmed the hearts of the people and strengthened the hands of the anti-slavery party in Washington. The real difficulty at that time was best known to Lincoln and his cabinet; the difficulty of organizing such large armies with so small a number of trained and experienced officers. Good judges have given an opinion that the practice of appointing noted politicians to important commands lengthened the war at least two years, and one after another, all these men had to be removed; but what else could the government do? The officers of the regular army nearly all belonged to the democratic party, and President Lincoln hardly knew whom he could trust. Phillips knew as little of military affairs as Grant did of oratory. Just one year after the Brooklyn address, he was called upon to celebrate the election of Abraham Lincoln in Boston Music Hall. For once Phillips and his audience were in perfect harmony, and also in the best of spirits. Men little dreamed at that time of the awful chasm that was to open beneath them. His speech was full of the most delicious humor; rather a biting humor at times, as we read it now, but it did not seem so in the way he spoke it. It was like a wedding feast: laughter and applause were so frequent that the wonder is that the speaker was able to keep the thread of his discourse. Among a dozen witty passages, he said, "Now I would like to have a law that one-third of our able men should not be eligible for the presidency. Then every third man could be depended on to tell the truth. Listen to Mr. Seward on the prairies; what magnificent speeches he has made there since Mr. Lincoln's nomination. When he ceased to be a candidate for the presidency, he became a man again." In the winter of 1863 he went to Washington for the first time, and lectured on the lesson of the hour. "Old Abe" went to hear him and expressed himself as being greatly pleased with the exhibition, as he called it. Next day a committee of influential citizens called on him to inquire if he could deliver his oration on "Toussaint" that evening for the benefit of his admirers; and then that was not enough, but they must have his lecture on "The Lost Arts" the evening afterward. This was a fine triumph for him after twenty-five years of social ostracism but his anxiety in regard to the condition of the country, prevented him from enjoying it as he might have. Meanwhile a storm was preparing for him in the quarter he least expected it. The old abolitionists, whom nobody had thought of since the repeal of the Missouri compromise and who were beginning to feel a good deal neglected, looked upon Phillips now as a deserter from their standard of non-resistance and moral suasion, and perhaps also eyed his brilliant course with some little jealousy. In the spring of 1865 Garrison returned from hoisting the flag at Fort Sumter, fully satisfied that the negroes could be safely trusted in future to the patriarchal care of the central government. Phillips thought otherwise. He argued that the black man still suffered from the effects of slavery; that they were very much at the mercy of their former masters, who would naturally bear them no good-will; that their future political position would depend on the action of Congress and not on the administration; and that it was still advisable for northern friends to keep watch over their interests. From this private difference of opinion an obstinate controversy soon developed itself, in which a large portion of the public took part on one side or the other. Senator Sumner and his friends supported Phillips; while Governor Andrew, who disliked him for no very good reason, and Senator Wilson for a much better one, supported Garrison. Both parties being thus strongly reinforced, the dispute rose to a high pitch. Phillips finally carried the day, and was fully justified afterwards for doing so; but the Garrison party took mortal offence at him for this, and would never afterwards recognize him except by a cold and distant courtesy. George Thompson, an English friend of Garrison who came over providentially at that time, quoted Phillips' earlier speeches against him (an inconsistency which was rather to his credit) and exclaimed, "I appeal from Phillips drunk to Phillips sober:" nor was this the worst of it. [Footnote: A year after this he said to two Rhode Island ladies, who were among the few friends that remained faithful to him all through life, "It seems hard that of the men whom I worked with for thirty years only three or four are willing to speak to me now."] But Phillips endured the storm like a man. He argued his case with all the ardor and energy of his nature, but there escaped from him not one opprobrious or resentful sentence towards his former associates. Emerson said (to quote him again, and we hope for the last time): "How handsomely Mr. Phillips has behaved in his controversy with Mr. Garrison. In fact Phillips was the same we have always known him." But the wound went deep into him; and seven years later, when he said at the Radical Club, "I have known cases in which it only took _one_ to make a quarrel," we all recognized what he was thinking of. This was the acme of his career, and alas! how soon he fell away from it. About a year before this time, his friends began to notice certain expressions in his speeches which puzzled them not a little. At length a severe and unjust attack on Senator Wilson as a frequenter of drinking-saloons explained the new departure to them. Phillips was evidently taking a hand in practical politics, and as Wilson's term was nearly expiring, wished to make General Butler his successor. So strangely are good and evil united in us, that this happened about the same period as the Garrison controversy. The less said about General Butler perhaps the better. At the same time Wendell Phillips' support of him would seem to be no worse than Judge Hoar's continued support of Blaine for the presidency; and it is also true that General Butler's reputation was better at this time than it afterwards became; he was well received at the political clubs, and even considered in the light of a presidential candidate by prominent republicans. Phillips' subsequent explanation of the matter was, that the negro was his client, and General Butler was the only person who had the will and ability to manage his case. He was not inconsistent in this, for he afterwards supported General Grant in the machine governments at the south for the same reason. Another bond of mutual interest between them was socialism. When or where Phillips became a socialist is uncertain. He was conservative in religion, and there is no more necessary connection between the abolition of slavery and socialism than between socialism and free-trade. On the contrary, the votes of the Irish laborers, who now divided his interest with the negroes, had always been the chief bulwark and mainstay of the slave power in the northern states. It must however, have been a question of principle with him, a theory of abstract right, for the course and conduct of his whole life is a true witness against any meaner motive. But General Butler's socialism was doubtless a matter of personal ambition--a bait to catch the popular vote. Nobody except Phillips, not even the laborers themselves, imagined anything else in his case. [Footnote: In the autumn of 1884 my brother asked a plumber then working for him, if he intended to vote for General Butler, who was presidential candidate that year for the labor-party. "No," replied the fellow, "Butler is a bad man; he will do for Governor of Massachusetts, but for President of the United States we want something different."] This unholy alliance was productive of no good to either party: Phillips injured his reputation by it, and what advantage Butler may have gained is yet to be discovered. In 1870 Phillips injured himself still more by a public attack on the Bird Club; a company of merchants and politicians who met together for a Saturday-afternoon dinner. This was done so evidently in Butler's interest that the general's future plans were disclosed by it. He wished to obtain the nomination for governor the following year, and looked upon the Bird Club as the chief obstacle in the way of his doing so. Frank W. Bird, who usually presided at the table, was one of the most patriotic and single-minded men that ever labored for the good of his country. He was so sincere and warm-hearted that there was no possibility of mistaking his character. He was in the legislature for nearly twenty years, and a member of the governor's council; but offices were not what he cared for. He was at once the most intimate friend of Andrew and Sumner,--two men who never could agree because one wanted to organize all men under his banner, and the other was equally determined to be independent of everybody. He might almost have been called the balance-wheel of Massachusetts politics. At the State House he was the terror of all mean and mischievous members; a sentinel always on the watch to prevent extravagance, fraud, and political chicanery. His persistent opposition to that monstrous abortion the Houssac tunnel, for which our children and grandchildren will be taxed _ad infinitum_, cost him an election to Congress. Upon this account he had numerous enemies, but even General Butler could not discover the smallest reproach against his character. He was one of the most useful men in the State. The club was called by his name because it had neither name nor organization. It originated with a few friends who used to meet at Chevalier Howe's office during the Kansas excitement; and Wendell Phillips' charge against them that they managed the politics of Massachusetts, had less than half a leg to stand on. While the governor and both senators were members of the club it must have been of course an influential body. Sumner certainly never made use of official patronage to promote his private interests. Yet this was the only charge, mixed with some dark insinuations, that Phillips could bring against them; and even this might have had some excuse if it had not been in the interest of General Butler. The remainder of his life was a wreck, though he may not have been aware of it. Frank Bird and his associates were the best friends that Wendell Phillips ever had. They were friends who would have held fast to him through everything except such an attack as he made on them. Alone now with his invalid wife, childless and well-nigh friendless, his life must have been gloomy and miserable. No company was ever invited to his house, and it was by the rarest chance that he went to any entertainment. Who his associates were in this new phase of his life, is often a matter of conjecture. Revolutionary socialists mostly, practical and unpractical--not of the harmless theoretical sort: but he never was seen on the street in company with other men. Whoever they were, they could not have been either cheerful or elevating society. The audiences that went to hear him were composed of quite a different class of people from those of the preceding era, and could not sustain him with the same moral force as formerly. No wonder if his temper became sharp and his mind melancholic; if the lines deepened in his face and the quick, bright look of his eye changed to a fitful, suspicious and desperate expression; if his splendid talent deteriorated too much into mannerism. Although this was his own fault, we could not help feeling pity for him, and the kind of regret with which we look on the fragments of a beautiful statue. He was evidently carried away with the ambition of becoming a world reformer. There is a sentence in his speech on Lincoln's election which may cast light on Wendell Phillips' socialistic views. He says, "Caesar crossed the Rubicon borne in the arms of a people trodden into poverty and chains by an oligarchy of slaveholders; but that oligarchy proved too strong even for Caesar and his legions." This was a bold and original opinion in those days, for Mommsen's history, to which we are mainly indebted for our change of sentiment in regard to Caesar, had not yet been translated. There is at the present time an oligarchy of land owners and capitalists in England of whom Froude has predicted that they will come to the same catastrophe as the Roman oligarchy did finally, and as that of Bohemia in the sixteenth century, and of France in the eighteenth, unless the present course of events shall be arrested by judicious legislation and magnanimous sacrifices. Phillips had already taken a hand in suppressing one American oligarchy, who have been compared by Mommsen to the Roman senatorial party, and he thought he foresaw another rising in our midst from the iron kings, and other great industrial magnates. He may have been far-sighted in this, for he often proved to be a true prophet, and there are many now who think the same; but that would not justify the methods by which he undertook to provide against the evil. The condition of the laboring classes in America, where a thrifty and temperate mechanic can occupy as good a house as a country doctor in Europe, is the most favorable yet known in history; much more favorable, comparatively, than that of our professional classes; but Phillips had seen the most wealthy and highly educated people ranged against him throughout the long conflict with slavery, and had acquired the habit of considering them a dangerous element in the community. There is a certain artistic perfection in the contrasts of his life. Thirty-seven years after his Lovejoy speech, he appeared again in Faneuil Hall attended by a retinue of government employees, with intent to capture a meeting called to protest against the interference of the government at Washington in Louisiana politics. There was wrong no doubt on both sides of this question, but the interference of the government was equally illegal and injudicious. Phillips appeared now more on the side of the oppressor than for the oppressed, and though his speech was, as formerly, the best of the occasion, it failed to win the sympathy of the audience. He was consistent in his devotion to the interests of the freed, men, but he would have been more true to himself if he had been willing to recognize, as the more reasonable anti-slavery people did, how absurd and even abominable, were the negro governments in the southern states; but he had long since lost his good judgment, and when President Hayes removed the troops for whose maintenance he could obtain no appropriation from Congress, and the pyramid which had been so long supported on its apex suddenly fell over, Phillips could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express his rage and exasperation. His attacks on the Hayes administration might fairly be called philippics had they possessed the saving grace of Hellenic self-control, but they remind us rather of Carlyle's furious "Latter Day Pamphlets." Yet even in December there are bright days, and when in his seventieth year the veteran orator was invited to deliver an address before the graduates of his own college, from whose festivities he had been excluded since the time of his Lovejoy speech, warmed with the recollections of his youth, his genius blazed forth with all its former brilliancy. With customary hardihood he selected for his subject "The Danger from the Educated Classes"; that is, the tendency of intellectual culture to exclusiveness and separation from the less fortunate portion of mankind. It is not to be supposed that the Harvard Alumni were well pleased with this topic, but he presented it with so much skill, and even eloquence, as to win applause from some of his most inveterate opponents. This sympathy for the unfortunate had been the key-note and true explanation of his course in life. It came to him there in the days of his youthful gayety like a dream, and now after fifty years he had returned to celebrate his last triumph in the same place where this vision of Heavenly mercy had appeared to him. He looked like Cicero, and there is a bust of Cicero on the Pincian hill at Rome, which if placed in Boston would certainly be mistaken for him. His figure, however, was better than Cicero's, who is reported to have had a long neck and rather slender legs. He resembled Cicero in his refined tastes, his admiration for great writers his command of language, his tact, fluency, fiery invective, and in the anti-climax of his career. If he had prepared his speeches for a body of men like the Roman senate, he might have been more nearly Cicero's equal. He used to wear a high-crowned soft felt hat, which was remarkably suited to the Roman-like contour of his face. He was skillful in all things, and might have been equally celebrated as a writer, an actor, or possibly as an artist, if his interest and inclination had led him in either of these directions. What we feel the lack of in him is contemplative depth: he was more Gallic than Germanic. He possessed a deep nature, but his character was not equal to it. He was too refined, too much of an artist perhaps, for the rough work fortune gave him to do. He had the heart of a lion, but the mind of a woman. Yet as we view his life from a distance it has grand outlines. When the western continent was discovered, it seemed as if it were a paradise which had been kept in reserve for the most civilized races; but this had no sooner happened, than a curse was fastened upon it,--the curse of slavery, which had already been abolished in Europe in its mildest type. This may have been necessary at first in the tropical portions of America, where it is impossible for a white man to labor in the sun; but it was contrary to the spirit of Christianity and inimical to true civilization. To eradicate this wide-spread, deep-rooted evil was a tremendous undertaking, one of the most gigantic in history; and among those who contributed to this, none, except perhaps John Brown and Charles Sumner, accomplished more--and few have done so much as Wendell Phillips. The right aspect then in which to regard his career, is as a sacrifice to this great cause. Let it be said of him that he loved mankind not wisely, but too well. APPLEDORE AND THE LAIGHTONS. The Isles of Shoals are seven: Duck, Appledore, Cedar, Haley's, Star, Londoner's, and White. Besides these there are Square Rock, Mingo Rock, and a number of other out-lying rocks and reefs. Appledore, Haley's, Cedar, Star, and Londoner's form almost a semi-circle, or horse-shoe, nearly a mile in width with the tips turned toward the west. Duck Island lies a mile-and-a-half to the north of this group, and White Island with it's light-house about the same distance to the south-east. They are mostly bare rocks, like mountain tops rising above the water. They are not however submerged mountains, for as their name indicates the sea is nowhere very deep about them. If the points of the horse-shoe had been turned toward the east instead of the west they would not have been habitable and the place would have been known to navigators as the Devil's Reef, the Devil's Horse-shoe or by some other term ominous of shipwrecks. The group of islands now form a cosy though not very safe harbor where every evening in the mackerel season a small fleet of fishing-vessels sail in there to anchor for the night. As might be expected the fauna and flora of the Shoals is neither rare nor extensive. Gulls are to be seen of course at all times,--especially the large burgomaster gull, one of the finest of birds in size and ferocity, and in power of sight nearly equal to an eagle. In spring and fall flocks of coot and the more fishy sort of ducks are to be found there together with a good many loons. Snowy owls are not uncommon in cold weather, and during winter almost any kind of Arctic bird may arrive there. A flock of eider ducks once took refuge and were shot under the same overhanging rock where the terrified servant-girl concealed herself when pursued by the murderer Wagner. There are probably more green snakes on Appledore than anywhere else in America. Wild roses and morning-glories are the only flowers large enough to attract the notice of a passing tourist, but Celia Thaxter has also written a pretty poem on the pimpernel. There are no trees to speak of. Their geological structure is more interesting. It is generally supposed that the soil of New England rests on a foundation of primeval granite, but it is not exactly that. There is very little true granite in New England, what is taken for it commonly being syenite, a rock indeed that differs from granite only in the substitution of hornblend for mica. The so-called Quincy granite is a finer sort of syenite, and the White Mountains are composed of syenite capped with granite. The Isles of Shoals are also mostly syenite, but there are large boulders of coarse granite lying about, and in some places the syenite changes suddenly to granite as if the two had been welded together. Then there are dykes of dark brown trap or ancient lava, from four to ten feet wide running across the islands from south-west to north-east, and others again at right-angles to these. This would seem to indicate that the elevation above the surrounding plateau was due to volcanic action. The structure of White Island is very different from the others, a large portion of the rock being studded with innumerable small garnets, while veins of some grayish white minerals run through it in which there are still smaller garnets. How did these bare, bleak and barren rocks come to be inhabited? Originally it was from love of gold. Men will go wherever there is money to be made, and wherever men go women are pretty sure to follow. In 1879 a city suddenly arose in the most desolate and uncomfortable part of the Rocky Mountains; and in the middle of the last century there was a large settlement on the Isles of Shoals, with a young ladies' boarding-school at Appledore, and a fort on Star Island for protection against pirates and Indians. Fish merchants carried on a flourishing trade with France and Spain. In course of time however cod and haddock became largely fished out and the settlement on Appledore disappeared with them, boarding-school and all. So it is predicted that some day Leadville will again become a silent wilderness. In 1850 the population of the Shoals had dwindled to about a dozen families of poor fishermen when a fresh impulse was given to the activity of the place from a direction that nobody could ever have imagined. The Laightons were residents of Portsmouth. The father of Thomas B. Laighton was a spar-maker and did a considerable business when shipbuilding was thriving in those times. Thomas B. in his youth was afflicted with a fever which confined him to his room for many months and from the effects of which he never recovered. He married Miss Eliza Rymes, a woman of remarkable good-sense and strong physique. He preferred journalism to spar-making, and his connection with the New Hampshire Gazette soon led him into politics. He was an ardent supporter of "old Hickory" and rewarded for it finally with the position of postmaster for his native city. Whether he surrendered this position for the forlorn and less lucrative one of White Island lighthouse on account of ill-health or from a different motive, is uncertain. There was formerly a story in circulation that he was defeated as a candidate for some political office and retired in disgust from the haunts and ways of men. This however is not likely. Thomas Laighton was a man of a blunt and rugged sincerity, tenacious and determined; such as would not be likely to lose his mental balance at the first unfavorable turn of fortune. [Illustration: TWILIGHT AT THE ISLES OF SHOALS.] He went to White Island in 1838, was removed by Harrison the First and reappointed by Tyler. His life there must have been a rough one. Of all the Isles of Shoals, White Island is the most difficult of access. It is not easy to land there in good summer weather, and during winter communication with the outer world is as rare as cold days in July. From December till May the breakers thunder on the cliff beneath the light-house like the roar of artillery. One would like to know what his reflections may have been during this Alexander Selkirk kind of life,--how he and his wife managed to entertain themselves. Rev. John Weiss and a friend going to Portsmouth in the summer of '46 visited the lighthouse and made friends with the family there. They found old Laighton a pretty rough customer, but good humored enough, and his wife uncommonly glad to see them. Their daughter Celia was a very bright looking, rosy faced girl, and the two boys Oscar and Cedric had their hair cut straight across their foreheads to keep it out of their eyes. Mr. Weiss thought that when they were in the water they must have looked a good deal like seals. In 1848 he resigned his position and removed to Appledore; then as always on the charts of the coast-survey known as Hog Island. It would seem to be the last stretch of a fisherman's imagination to call every long sloping island by that name. There he and his brother Joseph, who had thus far been a grocer in Portsmouth, built cottages for themselves and went into the fishing business, purchasing boats, seines, and hiring a large number of men. This lasted for some years and finally came to an end through the death of Joseph and the invalidism of Thomas, who was always lame and unable to give the work his personal supervision. Meanwhile their friends came over from the mainland to visit them, and admired the climate so much and remained so long that the brothers concluded to build a small hotel where these and others could pay for their entertainment. It was a three-story building, almost square, the parent stem of that great banyan-tree which has since spread over a large portion of the island. The accomodations at first were primitive. A visitor in '51 was obliged to wait an hour for a room and an opportunity to wash his hands, though he was at the time the only guest in the house. An empty flour-barrel turned upside down served for a wash-stand. However, the sailing and fishing were good, as also were Mrs. Laighton's doughnuts, of which there was always an unfailing supply, so that numbers of people came there. Among them was a recent graduate of Harvard, from the vicinity of Boston, named Levi Thaxter. He was a young man of refined tastes and rare intellectual endowment; afterwards widely known as the apostle of Browning's poetry in America. He was not one of those college graduates who seemed to have been run in a mould like bullets, but already possessed character and a mind of his own. He was by nature rather an admirer of art than an artist; in fact he was a critic, and with a right opportunity he might have become a Froude, a Taine, or a Ruskin. A wise father might have done much for him, but his father belonged to that class of men who are only acquainted with a small circle of their own affairs; he had not the least conception of what was needed for his brilliant son. So the best years of young Thaxter's life were consumed in fruitless efforts to harmonize his lofty aspirations with the stubborn facts about him. It was like a fruit-tree planted in a stone quarry. Too late he learned from experience the wisdom that should have come to him from his ancestors. He might have succeeded better if he had been less unwilling to compromise his sincerity,--to duck his head to the golden calf. But he would not do that, he intended to remain Levi Thaxter or die in the attempt: and once he came very near doing so. He was a romance character, and if his biography could be written it would be more interesting than that of some of our most celebrated men. Socially he was delightful; and a hundred friends could bear witness to his integrity, his fidelity, his kindly nature, his wit, humor, and keen appreciation. William Hunt the painter and Doctor Henry I. Bowditch were his two most intimate friends. He studied dramatic reading, and nearly made a profession of it. Actors sometimes studied with him to learn a good pronunciation and dramatic effect. His partiality for Browning's poetry is quite generally known. He first read it to his friends; then in private companies; and finally in public halls. When in 1882 he went to Philadelphia to read Browning there he created such enthusiasm for the subject that the libraries and bookstores were quickly exhausted and fresh copies of Browning had to be sent for from other cities to supply the demand. He considered Browning, Aeschylus and Shakespeare the three most dramatic writers. All the Browning clubs that have nourished so extensively for many years past might be considered Levi Thaxter's lineal descendants. His conversation on art and literature was often so interesting that it is a pity his occasional bursts of eloquence could not have been preserved. But the important matter at this moment is that he fell in love with Celia Laighton, married her and carried her off to the environs of Boston, where she made valuable friends and met with larger opportunities for intellectual development. Hawthorne came to the Shoals on the thirtieth of August, 1852, and has given a full account of his visit in his usual minute and pictorial manner. He left Franklin Pierce, who was then candidate for the presidency, in Concord, New Hampshire, and embarked at Portsmouth in a small schooner which was then the only mode of conveyance,---and often a very dilatory one. On the way two of his fellow passengers became sea-sick, and another "sat in the stern looking very white." On arriving at Appledore he was met in the doorway by Mr. Laighton of whom he gives rather a realistic description; adding, however, "He addressed me in a hearty, hospitable tone, and judging that it must be my landlord, I delivered a letter of introduction from Pierce, which of course gave me the best the house afforded." It seems strange that Hawthorne, who understood human nature better than any other American writer, should have so rarely penetrated into the character of the people whom he mentions in his note-books. Old Laighton was a solid rock of sense and grit, and the chief impression he made upon strangers was of a man whom it was best to keep on the right side of. The detonations of his frankness sometimes cleared the air in a truly remarkable manner, and would scatter all light spirits to a prudent distance. He reminded one of Longfellow's description of Simon Danz: "Restless at times with heavy strides He paces his parlor to and fro; He is like a ship that at anchor rides, And swings with the rising and falling tides, And tugs at her anchor-tow." Hawthorne seems to have found a kindred spirit in Mr. Thaxter, who invited him to their cottage to meet the ladies and drink apple-jack. There he also found John Weiss, a man of wit and genius little inferior to his own. Neither did Celia Thaxter impress him, except in a rather external way. He says, "We found Mrs. Thaxter sitting in a neat little parlor, very simply furnished, but in good taste. She is not now, I believe, more than eighteen years old, very pretty, and with the manners of a lady,--not prim and precise, but with enough of freedom and ease." The ideality in her face, which probably attracted her husband and is visible in her earliest pictures, was not observed by the idealist himself. He spent the next two weeks in company with Mr. Thaxter, roaming about on the water, visiting different islands, and conversing with the inhabitants. It must have been a rare occasion for young Thaxter, and Hawthorne for once found a companion who could either be silent or talk in an interesting manner. Hawthorne's account of it would suffice as a guide-book for the Shoals. He tells the story of Betty Moody, who was said to have concealed herself with her baby in a sort of cave on Star Island in order to escape from the Indians who had made a raid on the place while her husband was fishing out at sea. Unhappily the child screamed, and the wretched mother is said to have murdered it to prevent discovery. How the other wives and mothers on the island saved themselves at this juncture is not reported; and the myth no doubt originated from a dark red lichen growing on the rocks there which resembles blood-stains and has a scientific name to that effect. Much more probable is the tradition that a large heap of stones formed like an Esquimaux hut on the highest point of Appledore, was built there by Captain John Smith and his men as a memorial of their discovery of the islands. This heap of stones is a veritable cairn, such as climbers of the Alps build on the summits of those peaks which they have ascended for the first time. It is customary in such cases to insert a champagne bottle among the stones, containing the card of the fortunate explorer; but perhaps Captain Smith was not provided with these articles while cruising off the coast of North America. It is at least more interesting and more in keeping with the rugged aspect of the place than the delicate triangular plinth that has been erected to his memory on Star Island. Another poetic subject is the Spaniards' graves on Smutty Nose: hapless mariners, wrecked where no friendly or kindred eye will look on the cold stones which mark their interment! Eleven years elapsed before Hawthorne visited the Shoals again, and for the last time in his life. Meanwhile much had changed there. The hotel had grown by the addition of a large dormitory; and the boys, Oscar and Cedric, had grown up with it to be vigorous and very healthy looking young men. The Hon. Thomas P. Laighton had become a confirmed invalid; nor did he live very long after this time. The management of the property was wholly in the hands of his sons. Mrs. Thaxter had grown to a bright, self-possessed woman with three small boys to look after, and with her reputation as a poet now well assured to her both by critics and the general public. Her face, figure and manner all gave evidence of a concentrated personality. Her husband, a handsome and full-bearded man, was now in the prime of life and intellectual vigor. Rev. John Weiss, their never-failing friend and a constant habitue of the place, had written the life of Theodore Parker, and received due recognition as a gifted man and elegant speaker. And there was another, more distinguished than them all,--a tall figure, more erect than a soldier, pacing across the long piazza, or watching a game in the billiard-room, or seated in a retired corner of Mrs. Thaxter's parlor, whose face had long since been known to Hawthorne as that of John G. Whittier. Social life at the Shoals has had its incipient childhood, its period of youthful strength and gaiety, its bright noontide of maturity, and seems now to be lapsing into a serene and comfortable old age. Many, at least, of the brilliant men and women who made it what it was, are gone, and others do not appear to take their places. The Isles of Shoals are changing as all things change except the rocks and sea. The south-easterly parlor in Mrs. Thaxter's cottage is historic ground. "There have been fine people here," she said one day in September, about ten years ago, as the house was closing for the season, "but the summer is gone, and they have gone with it." Nowhere else since Margaret Fuller's time have so many wits, geniuses and brilliant women been gathered together. Whittier and Hawthorne are enough to have consecrated it, but there have been many others. Hunt, the painter, came there, and Professor Paine, the composer, as well as other fine artists and musicians. Even Ole Bull, that Norwegian waif and celebrated violinist, wandered in there of a forenoon, and entertained the company with accounts of sea-serpents standing on their tails in front of water-falls, and other marvels only visible in Norway:--supposing, I presume, that his hearers would believe anything that he told them. Mrs. Thaxter's poetry, like all genuine poetry, is indigenous,--native to the soil. She has taken her subjects from the life and incidents about her: the little sand-piper, the burgomaster gull, the pimpernel, and the wreck on White Island--where a vessel was once wrecked in a dense fog right under the light-house. [Footnote: In the winter of 1876, centennial year, a schooner laden with salt somehow ran on to the southerly reef of White Island and lost its rudder. The vessel consequently became unmanageable, and was finally thrown up on Londoner's, where the island is so low that at high tide the sea nearly divides it in two. The crew tried to escape by jumping on to the rocks. Only three succeeded in doing this, the captain, the cabin-boy and one sailor, A tremendous wave washed over them, and when it had subsided the sailor found himself alone. Fortunately he knew where he was, and by clinging flat to the rocks, like a starfish, and watching his chances, he succeeded after a time in reaching a point of safety. But no sooner was he fairly out of the water than his clothes became a mass of ice. There is a rude, unplastered house on Londoner's. The door was fastened, but he broke through it with a blow of his foot, then wiping his hands as well as he could on the rough boards, he felt along the first transverse beam-joist until, to his great delight, he came upon some matches. These saved his life, for there can be no doubt that otherwise he would have been frozen to death before morning. There was a stove in the house, and even a few sticks of wood. For kindling-wood he tore off splinters from the edges of the boards. He could see nothing within the house, and it is said that after his fire was lighted, he had only one match left. Next morning people on Haley's Island saw the wreck and the smoke from his fire, and went to his rescue. Mrs. Rymes is authority for the statement that White Island was not called so from its color, but from a family of Whites who lived on it before the light-house was built, and that the miser White who was murdered by Crowninshield in Salem was born on that island.] [Illustration: CELIA THAXTER. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1890.] [Illustration: DAVID A. WASSON. FROM A PORTRAIT BY HIS SON GEORGE, TAKEN IN 1878.] She made the best use of her material, which after all is much the same as Emerson's, with the difference between a barren island and a well-wooded country town taken into account. Another difference is that she looks at her subject objectively, and then treats it subjectively; whereas Emerson does exactly the reverse. It is like the difference between Schiller and Goethe, or Longfellow and Browning; and is the manner in which a poet always must write in order to be popular. Her verses are graceful, refined, and--as they should be--feminine. Yet there is a good deal of strength in it also: or if the phrase is permissible, a good deal of back-bone. Her style reminds one of Whittier, but is sufficiently original. Sometimes she escapes from concrete things into abstract subjects; and her short poem on "Heroism" seems to me the best she ever wrote. There was formerly a strong prejudice against this kind of poetry, but it seems to be disappearing. Those of her poems which Whittier included in his collection of English and American poetry are also fine, and may be said to deserve their place. Her criticism was better than is usually the case with poets; and her conversation about authors and literature always interesting. It was not didactic at all, but frank, spontaneous and open to correction. She liked the most diverse writers; Tennyson, and Dickens, and Browning. In early years I remember her speaking of Hawthorne in a tone of veneration; but later in life she preferred Emerson, even to Whittier. There was formerly a portrait of Goethe in her parlor with Emerson's lines about him underneath it, copied in her own picturesque hand-writing. It seems strange that she never tried her hand at a novel, for of all resorts on the coast the Isles of Shoals is the best ground to study human nature on. People lose their artificial ways in that atmosphere and their peculiarities are brought out distinctly, as oil brings out the veins in black walnut. The epic gift, however, is very different from the lyric and the two are not often united in the same person. Mrs. Thaxter's prose writings are almost as rare as Whittier's. She published a detailed account of a murder that was committed on Haley's Island about twenty years ago;--what would seem to be a peculiar subject for a cultivated person to fasten on--and yet she succeeded in giving it a good deal of dignity. One consequence of this has been that hundreds of people cross over every summer to Smutty Nose to stare at the miserable old shanty where the event took place, though there is absolutely nothing to be seen there. It was a choice occasion in the old Shoals days when Mrs. Thaxter consented to read Browning or Tennyson to her friends. I think it was the finest reading I ever heard, simply because it was neither dramatic, rhetorical, nor elocutionary. It was plain, distinct reading with just enough of the dramatic element to give fullness to the meaning,--and with such a voice! Why is it that some people who have unpleasant voices are yet able to sing sweetly, and others who cannot sing are able to read or converse so it is music to hear them? I was formerly acquainted with an old man, much beyond the period of life when singers retire from the stage, whose voice was nevertheless, as one heard it at some distance, as musical as a Stradivarius. With all her frankness and fearlessness, she was as sensitive to personal influences as poets usually are; and persons who called on her, who lacked delicacy of feeling, not only wearied her, but sometimes caused her positive suffering. In such cases she fortified herself with what she called a strong dose of conversation; would talk with great volubility on all possible subjects, as if in this manner to keep the unpleasant influence at a distance. "I wish all good people," she said, "were pleasant, and all the bad people disagreeable; for then life would be a more simple affair than it is now. The world is such a mixture that I never quite know how to take it." At times she was a merciless critic. An admiring Quaker in Philadelphia wrote some verses in honor of Whittier, which were presented to Mrs. Thaxter for her approval. When she was asked how she liked them, she replied, "I do not like it all; it goes humpety, lumpety, dumpety, bump;" and immediately changed the subject of conversation. On another occasion she took up a volume of poetry which had been printed for private circulation, and said, "There are two really fine poems in this, which is more than can be usually said of such collections." Then she read them to us with such expressive grace as might almost make poetry out of Latin grammar. One was called the "Whip of the Sky," and the other was a sonnet about Pompeii. She early discovered in herself the mesmeric power of a spiritist; and Wasson was present at a _seance_ which she gave at the house of a friend in Newburyport, reporting messages from another world to various persons in the room. She thus naturally became a believer in spiritism, and finally a Theosophist; but she found that such supernatural performances were physically injurious and mentally demoralizing, so that in later years she rarely indulged in them. One cold, foggy evening in August, 1868, we were gathered in the parlor of the Thaxter cottage, when some one proposed that we should make an experiment with planchette. So the little triangular board was produced, with a long pencil in the apex, and a large sheet of brown paper. Mrs. Thaxter placed her left hand on it, and Mrs. H., a New York lady, placed her right hand, while the rest of us formed a circle around the table. In five or ten minutes, planchette began to move, and wrote out "John Laighton," in plain, bold letters. "He was my great-uncle," said Mrs. Thaxter; "and there used to be a proverb in Portsmouth, 'As honest as John Laighton.'" Then she wrote on the paper: "Where is my father?" A few minutes afterward, Mrs. H. closed her eyes, and fell back in her chair, as if she were fainting. Suddenly coming to herself, she seized the pencil from planchette and wrote rapidly on the paper, while Mrs. Thaxter held her other hand. She was at the left of Mrs. Thaxter, but I cannot remember now whether Mrs. H. wrote with her right or left hand. Mrs. Thaxter was greatly excited and looked all the time in Mrs. H.'s face in the most earnest and impressive manner. Mrs. H. behaved like a person under the influence of strong emotion, and continued to write intermittently until the sheet of paper was nearly covered. Mrs. Thaxter read the sentences eagerly, but without saying a word. Several times Mr. H. entreated his wife to desist, but she paid no attention to him. The whole performance lasted nearly half an hour, and when it was over, Mrs. Thaxter said, "They are all answers to questions which I asked of my father," and remained very grave and quiet during the rest of the evening. The next forenoon we examined the paper and found the writing on it was intelligible, but at the same time conveyed no real information. They were such answers as a woman might herself suggest to a person who was slow in making a reply. One of them was, "You will know everything perfectly when the right time comes." Mr. H. said, "My wife never could have imagined all this; there must have been some occult communication between her and Mrs. Thaxter. Neither do I think she ever heard before of John Laighton." Mrs. Thaxter evidently was satisfied that she had received messages from her father, who had been dead about two years; and though the rest of us did not credit this, the fact in itself seemed marvellous enough. When some one remarked that he would give five dollars at any time to see a ghost, Mrs. Thaxter retorted, "I think you would give fifty to have him leave you again." Where the poetical talent of the Laighton family came from is a rare mystery. Both of Mrs. Thaxter's brothers inherited a share of it. A poem of Oscar's was published in the "Atlantic" many years ago, and afterwards included in her first volume of poetry. Cedric wrote a very amusing parody on his sister's "Little Sandpiper," and sent it to her when she was staying in Boston. The scene was represented in winter when there wasn't any little sandpiper. Mrs. Thaxter's poetry, however, was the making of Appledore as a summer resort. Between 1865 and 1875 thousands of people came there every summer to catch a sight of her. How she dared to go to the dinner-table in the face of such a multitude, I do not know; but after a time she retained a body-guard of friends, old and young, who were quite sufficient to keep intruders at a distance; and they could not be prevented from walking around her cottage, peering in at the windows, and stealing an occasional flower from her garden. Some even walked boldly into her parlor to demand an autograph. She received strange letters also from her unknown admirers. One was from a woman who wished to come to see her, but was afraid to do so on account of the green snakes which Hawthorne speaks of as inhabiting Appledore. (Hawthorne accidentally caught one of these pretty reptiles by the tail, and was not a little startled by it.) Another was from a naval officer who had been forcibly retired to a plantation in Maryland. I suppose she was secretly pleased by this rude homage of the vulgar, but no one knew better that the approval of her friends Weiss and Whittier was worth the whole of it. Meanwhile social life at Appledore had risen to a height. Mrs. Thaxter welcomed every one who had a claim upon her recognition. Open table was her motto, rather than exclusiveness; but those who considered themselves of superior clay found no chairs to sit on in her parlor. Her cottage was a scene of gaiety by day, and revelry at night. Beautiful girls, charming women, and distinguished men dazzled the beholder. Singing and laughter as well as instrumental music could often be heard there at a late hour. There are no people who are so full of good spirits in vacation as clergymen and college-professors--it is the reaction from their well-sustained gravity during the remainder of the year--and there was no lack of either. Among them all none was so brilliant as John Weiss, though Eichberg the violinist came pretty close to him. Both were German Jews; Weiss, however, having been born in America. He belonged to the same type of men as James Russell Lowell and David A. Wasson. He was the friend of both and equal to either in genius. He was the most eloquent preacher in New England at that time, and as a humorist only second to Lowell, if indeed second to any. His wit and his preaching were not, however, of a popular character: something more than phlegmatic common-sense was required to appreciate them. If he was not so popular as Lowell with the public, he was more so among his friends, in whose list might be counted almost every man of note and influence in Boston and vicinity. Bright flashes of his imagination came like the sudden gleam of a diamond, and would often convulse the company with laughter when one would least have expected it. He was an excellent pantomimist; could perform all the parts in a comedy himself, and with the help of Fred Loring, or some other, would improvise a burlesque on almost any well-known play. It was after one of these performances that Whittier (who sat in his quiet corner enjoying it as much as an honest Quaker dared to) said to Mrs. Thaxter, "Celia, thou knowest I have never been to the theatre, but I think at last the theatre has come to me." Weiss was gay with the gay, but could be profoundly serious again at a moment's warning, and the biting shafts of his satire never wounded a human soul. When some one spoke of the peculiarity of John Brown's spelling he exclaimed: "So much the better, so much the better! What good would a Webster's dictionary have been at Harper's Ferry? A whole edition of them could not have accomplished anything." He was always ailing, and his friends in college doubted if he would ever reach maturity; yet he lived to be a grey-haired man, and published a number of excellent books. When he died, in 1878, there were not wanting malicious people to spread the report that he died of intemperance, though the wonder is how he could have lived so long. His death cast a shadow over the social life at Appledore so that it never quite recovered its former gaiety. About the same time several millionaires made their appearance; cottages began to arise upon the rocks; a small steam-yacht plied like a water-bug between the different islands, and the place became continually more fashionable and conventional. Whittier, feeling that he did not belong to this new order of things, retired to a quiet little inn at West Ossipee, in the White Mountains. It was now that Professor John K. Paine, the musical composer, introduced a new element into the Shoals life. One morning he walked into Mrs. Thaxter's parlor with a large folio under his arm and said, "I am going to play you one of Beethoven's sonatas, for I think you will like it." Mrs. Thaxter was not quite sure that she would, but listened attentively. There had been a good deal of music before, in a small way; pupils of Eichberg playing on the violin with piano accompaniment, and even Eichberg himself,--which was quite a treat, though a single violin can never express a wide range of musical ideas. Beethoven's music she had also heard indifferently performed by young lady amateurs; but this was another affair. Professor Paine is rather an organist than a pianist, and does not pretend to rare technical skill; but what is much better, he understands the music as only players like Rubinstein and Von Bulow can understand it, and he brought out the meaning with such joyous fullness as even the master himself might have been pleased to hear. It was a revelation to Celia Thaxter: it was easy to see there was no affectation in her enjoyment; neither did she lack words to express her delight. "Mr. Paine," said a classical gentleman who was present, "your playing reminds me of what Cicero said of Caesar's Commentaries, that a fool might think he could improve on it, but a wise man would not like to try." The Professor was so much pleased with Mrs. Thaxter's frank enthusiasm, that he dedicated a sonata he was composing to her, which was performed the following winter in Boston, and greatly praised also by the critics. Piano recitals and concertos thus became the fashion at Appledore, and classical music was in good demand. Its refining and quieting influence on the little community was quite perceptible. It produced a change like the transition from flamboyant Gothic architecture to the pure Grecian style. At first only a few came to hear it: then the parlor was filled. The piazza became crowded, and finally gentlemen were obliged to find places on the rocks outside. It is one thing to hear music in a crowded concert-room with gas-light and bad air just after we have left the jarring discords of the street; and quite a different affair to listen to it with congenial spirits in the summer air of these islands, which seems to have been made for attuning the senses to fine perceptions. To enjoy any kind of art, the mind needs to be like a clean slate on which every mark tells. In 1881 Professor Paine improved his good reputation both here and in Europe by composing what is called his Greek music; that is, an overture to the play of "Oedipus Tyrannus," which was acted at Harvard in the spring of that year. Of course his seashore friends wished to hear him play it himself, and after the applause which followed had subsided, he said: "A little approbation is all the reward I get for my compositions. A good deal of money was made out of the Greek play by speculators, but none of it came to me." There was a general expression of regret; and then Mrs. Thaxter said, as if to herself, "If I were only the Commonwealth of Massachusetts I know what I would do." A physician at the house that summer warned Mrs. Paine never to let her husband work so hard again as he had that year. I remember William Hunt, the portrait painter, in 1872 wheeling his youngest child, a beautiful boy named Paul, in a go-cart in front of the cottage. He looked like an Arab, with a beard nearly to his waist, and a decidedly Semitic head; but he had an aristocratic style, and the air of a man who was used to command. His friends congratulated themselves on his resemblance to Titian, and to the French artist Horace Vernet. Despite his proud bearing he was a tender-hearted man, and when in trouble always went to Levi Thaxter, who was a rarely sympathetic person. In 1879 he came again to the Shoals, flying from domestic affliction. He was also suffering from a severe nervous strain, the result of painting two immense pictures in the hall of the New York Assembly, at Albany; and was no longer able to work. Either of these by itself he might have contended against, but both together were too much for him. One dark, rainy night he left the Thaxter cottage at a late hour, looking very sad and gloomy. The next morning his body was found in a freshwater cistern which had been built in a hollow between the rocks. There were some who thought that his death might have been accidental, but old Doctor Bowditch said, "My friends, there was only too much reason for it." Of all the wrecks on that dangerous coast was not this the most piteous and tragical! William Hunt narrowly missed being one of the greatest of painters. Though some of his portraits are wretched failures, there are others of his pictures that might grace any gallery in Europe. Mountain air is better than sea air, both for those who are well and strong, and generally speaking for invalids; but people go to the sea because they like it,--for love of the dark blue ocean. Few things are more monotonous than sailing in a yacht. It is a confining sort of existence, subjects of conversation soon become exhausted, there are many inconveniences about it, and being becalmed in a ground swell is worse than riding in a stage coach on a hot and dusty road; yet how many men prefer spending their summer vacation in this manner to any other. It is that rolling, lisping, gurgling, mysterious, unfathomable unity which attracts them. Earth is the masculine element, sea the feminine; and all the cycles and epicycles of organic nature have resulted from these two. It develops imagination and romance in persons who would never have been suspected of possessing either. No wonder that the sailor delights in marvelous tales. It is a terrible destroyer, but at the same time a friend that we cannot do without. Nowhere perhaps is that closeness to the ocean, this familiarity with the sea, so strongly felt as at the Isles of Shoals. There is really no land there: nothing but sky, rock and water. Living there is like a sea-voyage without the discomforts thereof. During the great storm of March '52, when the light-house on Minot's Ledge was overturned, an immense wave rolled across the centre of Appledore from side to side. There are windows in the hotel on Star Island where one can drop a pebble into the sea, and go to sleep listening to the murmur of the waves. Even in summer the surf sometimes runs so high that it is dangerous to approach the edge of the cliffs; and few people know how pleasant it is to watch the eddying swirl of the water round the promontories on the westerly side. One can sail in every direction, and if the wind does not suit one quarter it always will another. Better than any sailing, however, is rowing in an open boat at sunset or by moonlight, with one or two friends. Their climate is equally remarkable, and Doctor Bowditch considered it, from its soothing and also stimulating quality, one of the finest in the world, and much the best on the Atlantic coast. This is owing to their geographical position, islands on the coast of Maine being afflicted with cold fogs, and those south of Cape Cod with warm ones. There are no sultry nights in summer, and the cutting east-winds of Mount Desert are unknown there. The climate is warmer in April and November than on the mainland; in May and October about the same. The winters are disagreeable enough; but there is a kind of glory there in summer, and the view at night from the piazza of the Oceanic is beautiful beyond all faculty of description. WHITTIER. From under the north star's beam, Through a region wild and free, The waters of a mighty stream Roll onward to the sea. In the deep clefts of the mountain, Lie never melting snows; And there from an icy fountain A clear cold torrent flows. When we go to see the Falls of Niagara, we expect to be astonished, and are not disappointed; though the expectation takes away somewhat from our sensation. The grand phenomenon makes a strong and permanent impression on us, and yet there is no feeling of affection mingled with this. We have seen it once and do not care to visit the place again. Many pictures have been painted of it, but they are not genuine pictures, for the human element is wanting in them. Niagara can turn no mill-wheels, and will float no ships. How different is it with those scenes of natural beauty which we never heard of and come upon by surprise--which we remember always with affection and a kindred interest. Such were my thoughts many years ago at Amesbury, as I walked on the banks of the Merrimac and watched the calm, clear current of the river, as it hastened by, irresistible as time itself. I also reflected how often the poet Whittier must have walked in that same path; how dear to him must be that silent flood with its elm-trees, and great rolling hills; and how in times of darkness and discouragement he must have come to it for strength and consolation. The beauty of a river depends very much on its clearness and purity. The Rhine and the Tiber are more famous than the Merrimac; but their water is muddy and undrinkable. Indeed the current of Whittier's life might not improperly be compared to the river beside which he dwelt so long. Commencing in the pure mountain air of the social and religious seclusion of his sect, the difficulties and limitations, which in his case waited upon the acquisition of knowledge, may well be compared to the passage through a rocky and unfruitful region, leaping as it were from one granite boulder to another; then no sooner has he gained depth and fulness from contact with natures like his own than he is caught in the mill-wheels of a great political revolution, he enters ardently into the anti-slavery conflict--as he says of himself in the "Tent on the Beach," "And one there was a dreamer born, Who with a mission to fulfill Had left the muses' haunts to turn The crank of an opinion mill"-- and finally having escaped past all expectation from this turmoil, victorious and laurel-crowned, he goes calmly and steadily forward to the end. What makes this parallel rather surprising in its perfection is that Concord River empties itself into the Merrimac, and one might fancy that its waters carried Emerson's magnetic thought and influence to Whittier's own door. May not the career of any great man be compared to the course of a river? and especially the lives of our American poets would seem to resemble in their purity and transparency the rivers of New England. Whittier's house, however, does not stand by the river's brim, but near the centre of the village, almost a mile away. It was a modest looking structure, in appearance much like the Alcott house at Concord, but not nearly so well situated. It faces towards the north, and has little land about it, though there is a vegetable-garden in the rear. Neither is there any protection for it from the cold blasts of winter. Here he lived, at first with his sister and after her death with his niece, Miss Lizzie Whittier, and I believe with another niece, who married a Mr. Caldwell; but also a large portion of the time quite alone, except for one or two servants, reading, meditating and writing poetry. A man who has that kind of work to do, can never be very lonely. The interior of the house, was plainly and comfortably furnished, and contained some fine pictures and handsome books, the gifts of Boston friends; but its chief ornament was the quiet dignity and amiable courtesy of the poet himself. The eastern coast of New England is famous for its thunder-storms, and in the summer of 1872 there was one in the midst of nearly every afternoon. A number of persons were killed by the lightning that season, and Whittier also met with a narrow escape. It was one of the last days of June, and from our piazza we could see the masses of black cloud rolling down the Merrimac Valley, not thinking of the imminent peril, which they were bringing to our poet. At the same time Miss Lizzie Whittier and a lady friend were seated in the room on the right hand of the front-door, when crash! an electric bolt came through the wall like a rifle-shot, just above her friend's head, laying her out upon the floor, shivering a mirror into splinters; then went through the doorway and meeting John G. Whittier in the front hall, knocked him senseless, and seizing two slats from a blind it escaped through an open window into the garden. Miss Lizzie was the first to regain her feet, and her anxiety and terror, when she saw her uncle lying senseless on the floor, may readily be surmised. It proved, however, that none of them were seriously injured, though their heads were confused and unserviceable for several days, and they did not wholly recover from the effects of this _coup d' eclair_ until after an excursion to the Isles of Shoals. [Illustration: WHITTIER'S HOUSE AT AMESBURY.] When Whittier was asked how the stroke felt, he said, "It was like a blow from a pile-driver,--and I would not like to have it repeated." The hole which the lightning made in the side of the house, could scarcely be distinguished from that of a large rifle bullet. A few days afterwards I saw a small house set on fire by the lightning, and it was consumed in a very few minutes, so one may infer how narrowly the Whittier family escaped a double danger. He was a tall, and rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like two brilliant lights; even the Emperor dared not look into them. Whittier's were not like this, but seemed to be lighted by hidden fires; very large, dark, and powerful. He had a sensitive and refined mouth, which was closed, as if by an effort of the will. In general appearance he resembled men of the Revolutionary period, as if a cotemporary of Washington had luckily been dropped out of the eighteenth century. He looked like Copley's portrait of Samuel Adams, but with a more intellectual, and less stubborn expression. From boyhood he was always fragile and ailing, could not sleep well at night, and would repeat poetry to himself (for he knew any quantity of it, without making an effort to memorize it) until he fell asleep again: yet to what an age he lived, and how much work he accomplished! I am tempted here to quote from an essay by David A. Wasson, written nearly thirty years ago:-- "God gave Whittier a deep, hot, simple, strenuous and yet ripe and spherical, nature, whose twin necessities were, first that it _must_ lay an intense grasp upon the elements of its experience, and, secondly, that it _must_ work these up into some form of melodious completeness. History and the world gave him Quakerism, America, and Rural Solitude; and through this solitude went winding the sweet, old Merrimac Stream, the river that we would not wish to forget, even by the waters of the river of life! And it is into these elements that his genius, with its peculiar vital simplicity and intensity, strikes root. Historic reality, the great _facts_ of his time, are the soil in which he grows, as they are with all natures of depth and energy." "We did not wish," said Goethe, "to learn, but to live." The anti-slavery movement originated with the Quakers. It seems to have been their mission in America. Benjamin Lundy was a Quaker: Garrison and his friends were non-resistants, which is political Quakerism. Whittier was one of the first to join them, and none of them afterwards, except Wendell Phillips, had such influence with the public. Neither was he content with writing poetry for the cause, controversial lyrics and war-songs of freedom, but he took a lively interest in the affairs of the New England Society, went to its meetings and served on committees. Phillips said that once, when the socialistic element in the movement was threatening to come to open rupture with the more moderate Garrisonian party, Whittier by his tact and good sense, and a few timely remarks, did more than any other to harmonize matters, and prevent a dissolution. When Emerson was informed of this, he remarked, "I have always held Mr. Whittier in great respect; but this is the finest flower in the poet's wreath." It is astonishing enough now to reflect what the early abolitionists attempted to do, and the manner in which they expected to do it. The empire of Christianity, and of true civilization, was to be established here in America for the first time and finally; the slaves were to be emancipated, intemperance prevented, and all warfare ended. This was to happen in a world where the Malthusian theory of population is a dominant reality, where millions are fighting every day for the bread of life, and thousands are dying from the lack of proper food, raiment and shelter. One of their number whose name will not appear in history, published a book, entitled "True Civilization an Immediate Necessity." Surely enough true civilization is and always has been an immediate necessity: a necessity like the feast of Tantalus: but how is it to be realized? The purest saints and noblest statesmen have struggled and died in despair in the attempt to elevate humanity a single inch above the condition in which they found it. Of course such a chimera as that of the abolitionists could only be entertained by young, inexperienced and slightly educated men. Their effort was a noble one, a blunder in the right direction; but they had no conception of the explosive material which was contained in the doctrine of non-resistance. Instead of moral persuasion and an era of peace, there followed a desolating war in itself worse than fifty years of African Slavery. The abolitionists were blamed for that calamity very much as the Protestants have been blamed for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and yet without doubt they were responsible for a portion of it. Gunpowder cannot be made of sulphur and carbon alone, but saltpetre also must be added. Those who remain in this immature condition of fixed ideas throughout life, purchase their experience at too high a rate. Whittier's poetic art saved him from this and separated him finally from his Garrisonian allies. With Garrison himself he always remained the best of friends; but after the Kansas troubles began he did not continue to look upon him as a leader, and in 1872 they were in political antagonism, Whittier endorsing Sumner, and Garrison supporting Grant. Perhaps the writing of "Ichabod" and Webster's subsequent death gave an indication to Whittier of deeper life currents than he had known before; for about that time, it seems to have dawned on him that didactic poetry was not after all the best kind of poetry, and a work of art to be pure and holy, must exist for its own sake, and be justified by its own excellence. He refers to this intellectual change, not only in the lines already quoted, but in a sort of confession, written at an earlier period. He says-- "Art's perfect forms no moral need, And beauty is its own excuse," and regrets that the highest reward of merit will never come to him on this account. He realizes now that he belongs to a party and has been looking at the world from the stand-point of party interest. In devoting himself more closely to his vocation as a poet he acquired that moral repose and better mental balance with which alone it is possible to see things as they are. From this time forward the quality of his verses shows a steady improvement. The man possessed a deep nature and true breadth of character in spite of the limitations of his environment; yet there were certain prejudices and antipathies that adhered to him still. His unwillingness to listen to music, is rather to be attributed to the old quaker, puritanical notion that all sensuous enjoyment is sinful, than to the well known indifference of poets, for that sister art to which they owe so much. He once went so far as to take an interest in some musical glasses, and seemed to be pleased with the simple tunes that were played on them; but pianos and violins he had no liking for. He enjoyed looking at portraits of distinguished men, but did not approve of religious pictures. Bayard Taylor presented him with a copy of his translation of "Faust," and he read it, for the sake of old acquaintance, but he did not like it and wondered especially what explanation "Goethe's apologists could make for the strange, and extraordinary characters in the second part." When some one asked him why he did not make a trip to Europe he said: "Travelling does not seem to agree with me; but beside that, I do not think I should find pleasure in it. Their great cathedrals which people go to see, would not be of any account to me; and I am afraid I should not enjoy the works of art. I should like to see Switzerland; but there are also fine mountains over there"--pointing to New Hampshire. His prohibitory friends alleged that he was a good deal disturbed by the five kinds of wine provided for the seventieth birth-day dinner, with which his Boston publishers honored him. He endeavored to escape from this dinner, and Messrs. Osgood and Company were obliged to send for him three times, and most urgently, before he could be persuaded to come. It is doubtful however if he objected to people's drinking wine in their own homes. [Footnote: To a friend, who sent him on his seventy-fifth birth-day a bottle of rare old Andalusian "Olovosa" with a bouquet of flowers, he wrote:-- "I hasten to thank thee, dear Mrs. ----, for thy kind note, and accompanying flowers, wreathing like Hafiz on Omar Khayyam's roses, the wine--not of Shiraz, but of storied Andalusia. "I am not accustomed to tarry long at the wine--in this case I shall remember Paul's advice to Timothy. "I am gratefully thy old friend, "JOHN G. WHITTIER. "Boston, Dec. 17, 1892."] He is the only American poet who may be fairly said to have earned his living by his poems, though Longfellow might have done so, if it had been his fortune to reside in a country town. Whittier may have assisted sometimes in editing the local newspaper, and he once published a volume of rather tame prose-studies of the Shakers and other strange people who are found in the southern counties of New Hampshire. I never met with but one copy of it, and it could not have had a large circulation. He was not so much an observer of life and manners, as an imaginative thinker,--one whose reflections took the shape of ideal pictures. This, as Shakespeare would have called it, is the right complexion of the lyric poet. His exchequer suffered however in the earlier part of his career on account of his principles. All the anti-slavery people suffered for their convictions in one way or another--just as the slave-holders suffered for theirs, in the end. Garrison was mobbed: Phillips, who might have amassed wealth, like Phocian, died in poverty: Sumner was murderously assaulted: John Brown, lost his life; and George L. Stearns, died of unresting toil during the war, and wrecked his fortune: but Whittier represented the heart of the American people, and after the publication of "Barbara Frietchie" the tide turned in his favor. "Snow-bound" had an extensive sale, and brought him in nearly ten-thousand dollars. "The Tent on the Beach" paid almost as well; and his collection of English and American poetry was a fortunate hit, on the part of his publishers, which Whittier's modest nature would not otherwise have thought of; so that he was well provided for, in old age, and could even have made a journey around the world like General Grant, if he had been so disposed. [Illustration: WHITTIER IN HIS SEVENTY-SECOND YEAR. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMPSON.] His popularity soon attracted the attention of politicians who hoped to make use of it for the good of the country. He was too influential a member of the community to be overlooked. Senator Wilson, Speaker Colfax, Governor Claflin and others called upon him, congratulated him on the fortunate turn of affairs, and hoped they might be of service to him. Quakers have always had a good reputation for shrewdness, and Whittier was not lacking in that quality. He understood perfectly well what they wanted of him, and was a good deal amused by it, but he liked to converse with vigorous and experienced men, and could obtain from them a better understanding of affairs than was to be found in the newspaper. His letters on politics were always able and interesting; and he sometimes adopted exactly the opposite view from what his advisors would have liked to have him. It is true he formerly dedicated a poem to Colfax as an ideal statesman, but perhaps Whittier was more nearly right in this than public opinion has been, since that time. He disliked being lionized and was rarely seen in public. The adoration of young women was of all things the most disagreeable to him. He created quite a sensation by appearing at one of Emerson's noon-day lectures in May, 1866, and as soon as the discourse was over he became the centre of a small circle of celebrities. Yet he seemed even more glad to meet his humbler and more familiar friends. He said, "If I come again, it will be to hear that man," referring to Wendell Phillips, who stood a little at one side watching Emerson and Whittier with the air of an art critic. He said of the Boston Radical Club (which nevertheless contained the best intellectual life of its time) that he feared the saints went there not only to worship but to be worshipped:--a large part of the audience consisting of pretty young women. Yet he finally went there himself, for the sake of an interview with the most distinguished of his admirers, the Emperor of Brazil. This magnificent monarch, who may even be called the Marcus Aurelius of modern times, openly declared that there was nothing in North America that he wished so much to see as the poet Whittier. A meeting was accordingly arranged, and no sooner had Dom Pedro caught sight of Whittier (whom he recognized from the pictures he possessed) than he hastened to embrace him, and would certainly have kissed the astonished Quaker, after the fashion that prevails among the Latin races, if Whittier had permitted him the least opportunity. After paying his compliments in a handsome manner to the assembled company the Emperor took his leave again, and insisted on carrying off the poet with him. One might like to know what sort of a conversation two such different and almost antipodal friends had together for that one hour in a lifetime. The climate of the Isles of Shoals exactly suited Whittier's dreamy nature. He would wander from the piazza into the billiard-room, and back again to the piazza, and then look at the sea for an hour or more without speaking a word to any one. Indeed he talked very little even with those who knew him best, and strangers had no chance at all with him. There was something respectful in the hush of conversation whenever he approached a group of people who were talking loudly or laughing. I never met him walking over the rocks, or knew of his going out on the water either for sailing or fishing. One foggy evening when some of us were playing a game of writing verses in the hotel parlor, one of the ladies seeing Whittier alone, in a corner of the room, boldly invited him to join us, which he did with a very pleasant alacrity. It was noticed however that his compositions were not any better or even so good as those of the others, and we suspected that he took pains not to excel the rest of the company. Yet he could talk in a vigorous manner when the right occasion presented itself. There was a certain Colonel Greene who frequented Appledore in those years: a high-minded socialistic thinker, who had resigned a commission in the United States Army, during the war with the Florida Indians, on account of the government's breach of faith with Osceola. He was a born controversialist and always ready to discuss any subject in politics, religion or philosophy. John Weiss was not far behind him in this line, and delighted to set him going for the benefit of those who liked to hear. No sea air was sufficiently narcotic to dull the edge of Colonel Greene's argument. When these two were once discussing a book on pantheism, which had lately been published by Rev. J. W. Manning of the Old South Church, Whittier, who had been walking to and fro on the piazza just within reach of their voices, finally, came up and said: "I told Manning that the one kind of pantheist he had omitted from his book, was the orthodox pantheist. For that matter, I believe there are pantheists in every religious sect. They start like Professor Parsons the Swedenborgian, with the proposition that as even God could not make the universe out of nothing, he must have made it out of Himself; and you cannot argue them away from it. At the same time, they will insist that they are perfectly good Christians." He then cited several instances of this which had come under his own observation: and Colonel Greene also remembered some cases; but this was the only time we knew Whittier to speak on a religious question. Longfellow, Tennyson and Whittier were the three most popular poets of the latter part of the present century, and it is difficult to determine which of them may be considered the best. While neither of them rises to the very highest rank, each has excellences peculiarly his own. Whittier does not equal the others in their graceful diction and rare metrical skill, but he surpasses them in earnestness and intensity. He paints in deeper colors, and with a firmer touch. The longer and more ambitious poems of Tennyson and Longfellow are interesting, but they lack the strength, vigor and greatness of design which are inseparable from all the noblest works of art. They are written to please, rather than to educate the human race. Their shorter pieces are the best ones. Whittier's chief excellence is to be found in his ballads; in the "Wreck at Rivermouth," "Skipper Ireson," "The Relief of Lucknow," "Barbara Frietchie" and others. Nothing is more rare than a fine ballad. Coleridge's ballad of the "Ancient Mariner" is probably the greatest English poem written since Milton's time, and there are many old English ballads which are nearly equal to it. The ballad of "Mary Garvin," simply as a work of art, takes the first place among Longfellow's poems. Tennyson and Whittier both tried their hands on the siege of Lucknow, and Whittier carried off the prize. His verses are always sensible, healthy and elevating. Complaint has been made that they are too much haunted by the spectre of his schoolmate; but without saying this, we could wish that such an immature affection had been replaced afterwards by a deeper and more manly attachment. He was assisted in the arrangement of his collection of poetry (which Lowell and other good critics considered the best we have) by his poetical friend Miss Lucy Larcom, and this was chiefly no doubt that she might receive a share of the profits from its publication. The sonnets from Shakespeare and many others, were of her selection. The art of poetry came so naturally to Whittier, that he said he could not understand why every one did not write it as well as or better than he could. At the time of Hawthorne's last visit to the Isles of Shoals in company with his friend the ex-President, there was also a party of business men from Concord, New Hampshire, who tried to make his acquaintance, but without much success. Afterwards we went to Portsmouth with the same party and were becalmed on the way for nearly four hours, so that we had an excellent chance to become acquainted with our fellow passengers. One of them said:--"Nathaniel Hawthorne was a very reserved man. There's Franklin Pierce: he has been President of the United States, and yet anyone can go up and speak to him; but we found Hawthorne very different." Of course we had to tell this on our return, and Whittier laughed heartily. Mrs. Thaxter said, "Reserved was no word for it;" and Whittier added, "Hawthorne was a strange puzzle. I never felt quite sure whether I knew him or not. He never seemed to be doing anything, and yet he did not like to be disturbed at it." He disliked to hear people say that Hawthorne wrote the life of General Pierce for the sake of a government office. They were old college friends, and without doubt he would have obtained the office whether he wrote it or not. If he wished to live in Italy Buchanan should have given him the consulship of Leghorn or Venice. He looked on "Septimus Felton" as a failure, and thought that probably Hawthorne considered it so himself. He thought it not unlikely that Hawthorne would outlive every other writer of his time. At another time he came to me and said, "What deep problems of government are you thinking over there all by yourself?" I laughed and told him that I was thinking of Rome; and how much that little patch of water looked like the piece of sea in Guido's Aurora; but I was glad to have him speak of politics, for the present condition of affairs was such as to give every serious man anxiety for the moral welfare of the country. "Indeed it is," he replied. "What we read in the newspapers is bad enough; but I have information from private sources which represents matters as being even worse than is generally supposed." [Footnote: This was in 1875.] "Perhaps," I said, "it is one of those evils which will cure itself after a certain time." "It will, no doubt," he answered, "bring about a strong reaction against the Republican party; but even that is a thing to be deplored. Meanwhile what an example we present to the monarchical governments of Europe!" [Illustration: THE MERRIMAC RIVER, NEAR AMESBURY, BY MOONLIGHT.] "I suppose," said I, "that it is one of the consequences of our civil war." "Yes," said he, "I am ready to agree to that,--a long and protracted war must have a hardening and brutalizing influence on the community even when it is fought for a good cause." "Did not Hawthorne," I said, "predict something like this in an article in the 'Atlantic Monthly'?" "Yes," he replied, "I remember that article,--it was just a year before his death,--and there was a good deal of wisdom in it. Some of my friends are inclined to think that woman suffrage would improve the present condition of politics, but I do not feel sure that it would." "I have no doubt it would do good if only the sensible women were permitted to vote," I said. "My faith is that what we need to purify politics in America is not an extension, but a restriction of the suffrage. It is easy to see, for instance, how favorably that would work in the city of New York, which with its custom-house is now the heaviest burden we have to bear." What Whittier thought of this idea I never knew; he seemed to be reflecting on it when the ladies of his party came in sight and we both rose to meet them. Though he was not fond of travelling, he liked to read books of travel; and once, according to his doctor's advice, spent a winter at Amesbury reading everything of the kind that he could hear of and obtain. He spoke of Wilson's book on the Himalaya Mountains as the most interesting of them. "It seems as if there was nothing that a cultivated Englishman could not and would not go through with," he said. I mentioned Humboldt. "Yes," he replied, "Humboldt certainly accomplished wonderful things, but the Germans are generally more cautious and prudent. A cultivated Englishman seems to be equal to anything." Among modern travellers however, Vambery, the Hungarian, takes the highest rank. At a later period, I was journeying through the White Mountains and reached West Ossipee one afternoon tired with travelling and weary from a sleepless night. I hastened to my room and threw myself upon the bed, but had scarcely closed my eyes when there was a knock at the door and there stood Mr. Whittier,--the pleasantest of all apparitions for some years. The next few days were like dwelling in the islands of the blest, compared with the ordinary current of human life. It was a holiday within a holiday. He was surrounded by charming ladies, among them his niece Mrs. Caldwell, and as it was late in the season we had the Bear Camp House--a place that now ought to be historic--almost to ourselves. We had never known Whittier to be so friendly and companionable before. We walked under the elms, talked about books, and our absent friends, gazed at the mountains, and admired the sunsets which just at that time were remarkably brilliant. There was one, I remember, composed largely of luminous clouds, and a general translucent effect of the atmosphere, which Whittier could not remember he had ever seen the like of. He said, "I don't believe Emerson loves Nature any better than I do, though he has written more about it." There was a delightful lady in the party who told us pleasant and amusing stories of New York social life. She could go on in this way for a very good length of time, and Whittier would listen to her without saying a word, exactly as if she were reading to him. The magnates of West Ossipee had named a mountain near Chocorua for Whittier and challenged him to climb to the top of it and christen it properly with a bottle of champagne, but he said No, that his days for climbing were over; that he thought mountains belonged to the whole country and he had no desire to appropriate any of them. He liked such names as Chocorua, Katahdin and Wachusett much better for mountains than Washington and Adams. The Bear Camp House is a rare sort of a tasteful country inn, and its proprietor was of course very proud of his distinguished guest, but at the same time sufficiently dignified to prevent this from being too apparent. It was there Whittier spent the last summers of his life, as long as he was able to leave his own home. In his old age he enjoyed the celebrity of his more vigorous years as if it had been the fame of a constant friend; but I think he enjoyed still more the consciousness of having succeeded in living through life as he intended to do in the beginning. 
8777	----	Proofreading Team. AUTHORS AND FRIENDS by ANNIE FIELDS '"The Company of the Leaf" wore laurel chaplets "whose lusty green may not appaired be." They represent the brave and steadfast of all ages, the great knights and champions, the constant lovers and pure women of past and present times.' Keping beautie fresh and greene For there nis storme that ne may hem deface. GEOFFREY CHAUCER. CONTENTS LONGFELLOW: 1807-1882 GLIMPSES OF EMERSON OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS AND UNPUBLISHED LETTERS DAYS WITH MRS. STOWE CELIA THAXTER WHITTIER: NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND OF HIS FRIENDSHIPS TENNYSON LADY TENNYSON LONGFELLOW: 1807-1882 Every year when the lilac buds begin to burst their sheaths and until the full-blown clusters have spent themselves in the early summer air, the remembrance of Longfellow--something of his presence--wakes with us in the morning and recurs with every fragrant breeze. "Now is the time to come to Cambridge," he would say; "the lilacs are getting ready to receive you." It was the most natural thing in the world that he should care for this common flower, because in spite of a fine separateness from dusty levels which everyone felt who approached him, he was first of all a seer of beauty in common things and a singer to the universal heart. Perhaps no one of the masters who have touched the spirits of humanity to finer issues has been more affectionately followed through his ways and haunts than Longfellow. But the lives of men and women "who rule us from their urns" have always been more or less cloistral. Public curiosity appeared to be stimulated rather than lessened in Longfellow's case by the general acquaintance with his familiar figureand by his unceasing hospitality. He was a tender father, a devoted friend, and a faithful citizen, and yet something apart and different from all these. From his early youth Longfellow was a scholar. Especially was his power of acquiring language most unusual. As his reputation widened, he was led to observe this to be a gift as well as an acquirement. It gave him the convenient and agreeable power of entertaining foreigners who sought his society. He said one evening, late in life, that he could not help being struck with the little trouble it was to him to recall any language he had ever studied, even though he had not spoken it for years. He had found himself talking Spanish, for instance, with considerable ease a few days before. He said he could not recall having even read anything in Spanish for many years, and it was certainly thirty since he had given it any study. Also, it was the same with German. "I cannot imagine," he continued, "what it would be to take up a language and try to master it at this period of my life, I cannot remember how or when I learned any of them;--to-night I have been speaking German, without finding the least difficulty." A scholar himself, he did not write for scholars, nor study for the sole purpose of becoming a light to any university. It was the energy of a soul looking for larger expansion; a spirit true to itself and its own prompting, finding its way by labor and love to the free use and development of the power within him. Of his early years some anecdotes have been preserved in a private note-book which have not appeared elsewhere; among them this bit of reminiscence from Hawthorne, who said, in speaking of his own early life and the days at Bowdoin College, where he and Longfellow were in the same class, that no two young men could have been more unlike. Longfellow, he explained, was a tremendous student, and always carefully dressed, while he himself was extremely careless of his appearance, no student at all, and entirely incapable at that period of appreciating Longfellow. The friendship between these two men ripened with the years. Throughout Longfellow's published correspondence, delightful letters are found to have been exchanged. The very contrast between the two natures attracted them more and more to each other as time went on; and among the later unpublished letters I find a little note from Longfellow in which he says he has had a sad letter from Hawthorne, and adds: "I wish we could have a little dinner for him, of two sad authors and two jolly publishers, nobody else!" As early as 1849, letters and visits were familiarly exchanged between Fields and himself, and their friendship must have begun even earlier. He writes:-- "My dear Fields,--I am extremely glad you like the new poems so well. What think you of the enclosed instead of the sad ending of 'The Ship'? Is it better?... I send you also 'The Lighthouse,' once more: I think it is improved by your suggestions. See if you can find anything more to retouch. And finally, here is a letter from Hirst. You see what he wants, but I do not feel like giving my 'Dedication' to the 'Courier.' Therefore I hereby give it to you so that I can say it is disposed of. Am I right or wrong?" Of Longfellow's student days, Mr. Fields once wrote: "I hope they keep bright the little room numbered twenty-seven in Maine Hall in Bowdoin College, for it was in that pleasant apartment, looking out on the pine groves, that the young poet of nineteen wrote many of those beautiful earlier pieces, now collected in his works. These early poems were all composed in 1824 and 1825, during his last years in college, and were printed first in a periodical called 'The United States Literary Gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle down to the study of law! 'No good can come of it,' he said; 'don't let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' But the pine-trees waving outside his window kept up a perpetual melody in his heart, and he could not choose but sing back to them." One of the earliest pictures I find of the every-day life of Longfellow when a youth is a little anecdote told by him, in humorous illustration of the woes of young authors. I quote from a brief diary. "Longfellow amused us to-day by talking of his youth, and especially with a description of the first poem he ever wrote, called 'The Battle of Lovell's Pond.' It was printed in a Portland newspaper one morning, and the same evening he was invited to the house of the Chief Justice to meet his son, a rising poet just returned from Harvard. The judge rose in a stately manner during the evening and said to his son: 'Did you see a poem in to-day's paper upon the Battle of Lovell's Pond?' 'No, sir,' said the boy, 'I did not.' 'Well, sir,' responded his father, 'it was a very stiff production. G----, get your own poem on the same subject, and I will read it to the company.' The poem was read aloud, while the perpetrator of the 'stiff production' sat, as he said, very still in a corner." The great sensitiveness of his nature, one of the poetic qualities, was observed very early, and the description of him as a little boy was the description of the heart and nature of the man. "Active, eager, impressionable; quick-tempered, but as quickly appeased; kind- hearted and affectionate,--the sunlight of the house." One day when a child of ten he came home with his eyes full of tears. His elder brother was fond of a gun, and had allowed Henry to borrow his. To the little boy's great distress, he had aimed at and shot a robin. He never tried to use a gun again. Longfellow was said to be very like his mother. His brother wrote of him: "From her must have come to Henry the imaginative and romantic side of his nature. She was fond of poetry and music, and in her youth, of dancing and social gayety. She was a lover of nature in all its aspects. She would sit by a window during a thunderstorm enjoying the excitement of its splendors. Her disposition, through all trials and sorrows, was always cheerful, with a gentle and tranquil fortitude." No words could describe her son's nature more nearly. When he was only sixteen years old we find him writing to his father: "I wish I could be in Washington during the winter, though I suppose it is rather vain to wish when it is almost impossible for our wishes to become realities. It would be more pleasant to get a peep at Southern people and draw a breath of Southern air, than to be always freezing in the North; but I have very resolutely concluded to enjoy myself heartily wherever I am. I find it most profitable to form such plans as are least liable to failure." His mother's sympathy with his literary tastes was certainly unusual. He writes to her from college when he was sixteen years old. "I have this evening been reading a few pages in Gray's odes. I am very much pleased with them." ... To which she replies: "I wish you would bring Gray home with you. I have a strong inclination to read the poems, since you commend them so highly. I think I should be pleased with them, though Dr. Johnson was not. I do not think the Doctor possessed much sensibility to the charms of poetry, and he was sometimes most unmerciful in his criticism." The single aim of Longfellow's life, the manner in which from his earliest days he dedicated himself to Letters, would prove alone, if other signs were lacking, the strength of his character. When he was only eighteen he wrote to his mother: "With all my usual delinquency, however, I should have answered your letter before this, had I not received, on Monday, Chatterton's Works, for which I had some time since sent to Boston. It is an elegant work in three large octavo volumes; and since Monday noon I have read the greater part of two of them, besides attending two lectures a day, of an hour each, and three recitations of the same length, together with my study-hours for preparation." This is said to have been the first handsome book the young student owned, and it was earned by the work of his pen. In this same year, too, we find him hurrying with his lessons (not slighting them), that he might get leisure to read and think. "Leisure," he wrote his father, "which is to me one of the sweetest things in the world." ... "I wish I could read and write at the same time." The eager activity of his mind was already asserting itself, an activity which hardly slackened to the very end. The severe criticism of his poem on the Battle of Lovell's Pond may have cost him a few tears one night, but it did not alter his determination. He continued to send contributions to the newspapers, and when his father somewhat later suggested that he should consider the question of "studying for a profession," he replied: "If so, what profession? I have a particular and strong prejudice for one course of life to which you, I fear, will not agree." He was not unwilling to pay the price for what he intended to attain. He knew himself, and his only suffering was at the thought of being obliged to turn aside from the aims which Nature held before him. He was seventeen years old when he wrote to a friend: "Somehow, and yet I hardly know why, I am unwilling to study a profession. I cannot make a lawyer of any eminence, because I have not a talent for argument; I am not good enough for a minister,--and as to Physic, I utterly and absolutely detest it." To his father the same year he wrote: "I have already hinted to you what would best please me. I want to spend one year at Cambridge for the purpose of reading history, and of becoming familiar with the best authors in polite literature; whilst at the same time I can be acquiring the Italian language, without an acquaintance with which I shall be shut out from one of the most beautiful departments of letters.... The fact is--and I will not disguise it in the least, for I think I ought not--the fact is, I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centres in it.... Whether Nature has given me any capacity for knowledge or not, she has at any rate given me a very strong predilection for literary pursuits, and I am almost confident in believing that, if I can ever rise in the world, it must be by the exercise of my talent in the wide field of literature. With such a belief I must say that I am unwilling to engage in the study of the law.... Whatever I do study ought to be engaged in with all my soul,-- for I WILL BE EMINENT in something.... Let me reside one year at Cambridge; let me study belles-lettres; and after that time it will not require a spirit of prophecy to predict with some degree of certainty what kind of a figure I could make in the literary world. If I fail here, there is still time left for the study of a profession." ...His father could not make up his mind to trust his son to the uncertain reed of literature. "As you have not had the fortune (I will not say whether good or ill) to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation." There was, however, a friendly compromise between father and son, and the young student was allowed to pass a year in Cambridge. He replied to his father: "I am very much rejoiced that you accede so readily to my proposition of studying general literature for one year at Cambridge. My grand object in doing this will be to gain as perfect knowledge of the French and Italian languages as can be gained without travelling in France and Italy,--though to tell the truth I intend to visit both before I die.... The fact is, I have a most voracious appetite for knowledge. To its acquisition I will sacrifice everything.... Nothing could induce me to relinquish the pleasures of literature;... but I can be a lawyer. This will support my real existence, literature an IDEAL one. "I purchased last evening a beautiful pocket edition of Sir William Jones's Letters, and have just finished reading them. Eight languages he was critically versed in; eight more he read with a dictionary: and there were twelve more not wholly unknown to him. I have somewhere seen or heard the observation that as many languages as a person acquires, so many times is he a man." Happily--how happily we can hardly say--Madam Bowdoin had left the sum of one thousand dollars towards establishing a professorship of modern languages at the college which was then only a few years older than Longfellow. No steps had yet been taken; but one of the Board, Mr. Orr, having been struck, it appears, by the translation of an ode from Horace made by Longfellow for the senior examination, warmly presented his name for the new chair. It is impossible to overestimate the value of these benefactions to men of talent and genius. Where would Wordsworth have been, what could he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by Raisley Calvert! In America such assistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships. No method less personal or more elevating for the development of the scholar and man of genius could easily be adopted. The informal proposal of the Board that Longfellow should go to Europe to fit himself for his position was precisely in a line with his most cherished wishes. It was nearly a year from that time, however, before he was actually on his way, "winter and rough weather" and the infrequency of good ships causing many delays. Possibly also the thought of the mother's heart that he was not yet twenty--still young to cut himself off from home and friends--weighed something in the balance. He read law in his father's office, and wrote and read with ceaseless activity on his own account; publishing his poems and prose papers in the newspapers and annuals of the day. He sailed from New York at last, visiting Boston on his way. There he heard Dr. Channing preach and passed part of an evening with him afterward. Also Professor Ticknor was kind to him, giving him letters to Washington Irving, Professor Eichhorn, and Robert Southey. Dr. Charles Lowell, the father of the future poet, gave him a letter to Mrs. Grant, of Laggan, and President Kirkland was interested in his welfare. Thus he started away with such help and advice as the world could give him. From that moment his career was simply a question of development. How he could turn the wondrous joys, the strange and solitary experiences of life into light and knowledge and wisdom which he could give to others; this was the never-ending problem of his mind; to this end he turned the labor of his days. His temperament did not allow him the effervescent expression common to the young. On the contrary, when writing to his sisters from Italy during these student days, he says: "But with me all deep impressions are silent ones." And thus the sorrows of life, of which he early bore so heavy a burden, found little expression. He wore them in his heart, whence they came again in his poems to soothe the spirit of humanity. The delightful story of his three years of study and absence can be traced step by step in the journals and letters edited by his brother; but however interesting it is to follow him in every detail, it is nevertheless true that the singleness of aim and strength of character which distinguished Longfellow, combined with extreme delicacy and sensitiveness of perception, were his qualities from the beginning and remained singularly unchanged to the end. His history is not without its tragedies, but they were coördinated in his spirit to a sense of the unity of life. He was the psalmist, the interpreter. How could he render again the knowledge of divine goodness and divine love which were revealed to him? First came the duty of acquiring learning; of getting the use of many languages and thus of many forms of thought, in order to master the vehicles of expression. To this end he labored without ceasing, laughing at himself for calling that labor which gave him in the acquisition great pleasure. "If you call it labor!" he wrote in one of his letters home after speaking of his incessant studies. His journals and letters, except the few early ones to his father, seldom speak either of the heat of composition or of the toils of study. He kept any mention of these, like all his deeper experiences, to himself, but writes chiefly of more external matters; of his relaxations and pleasures,--such as are surely indispensable to an author and student after extreme tension of the brain and hours of emotion. Longfellow was twenty-two years old when he took up his residence as professor at Bowdoin College, where he translated and prepared the French grammar and the French and Spanish text-books which he desired for his classes. He was also made college librarian--a duty which required only one hour a day in those early times, but, added to his other duties, gave him all the occupation he needed. "The intervals of college duty I fill up with my own studies," he wrote to his friend, George W. Greene, with whom he had already formed a friendship which was to continue unbroken during their lives. At the age of twenty-four Longfellow married a lovely young lady, the daughter of Judge Potter, of Portland. She was entirely sympathetic with his tastes, having herself received a very unusual education for those days in Greek and Latin among her other studies. In the "Footsteps of Angels" she is commemorated as "the Being Beauteous Who unto my youth was given, More than all things else to love me." His brother writes of this period: "They were tenderly devoted to each other: and never was a home more happy than theirs, when, soon after their marriage, they began housekeeping in Brunswick.... In this pleasant home, and with this blessed companionship, Mr. Longfellow devoted himself with fresh interest to his literary pursuits." The monetary returns for all his labors at this period in America were inconceivably small. He amused his friends one day in later years by confessing that Mr. Buckingham paid him by one year's subscription to the "New England Magazine" for his translation of the "Coplas de Manrique" and several prose articles. After this he sent his poems to Messrs. Allen and Ticknor, who presented him the volume in which they appeared and sundry other books as compensation. What a singular contrast was this beginning to his future literary history! Late in life his publisher wrote: "I remember how instantaneously in the year 1839 'The Voices of the Night' sped triumphantly on its way. At present his currency in Europe is almost unparalleled. Twenty-four publishing houses in England have issued the whole or a part of his works. Many of his poems have been translated into Russian and Hebrew. 'Evangeline' has been translated three times into German, and 'Hiawatha' has not only gone into nearly all the modern languages, but can now be read in Latin. I have seen translations of all Longfellow's principal works, in prose and poetry, in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. The Emperor of Brazil has himself translated and published 'Robert of Sicily,' one of the poems in 'Tales of a Wayside Inn,' into his native tongue, and in China they use a fan which has become immensely popular on account of the 'Psalm of Life' being printed on it in the language of the Celestial Empire. Professor Kneeland, who went to the national millennial celebration in Iceland, told me that when he was leaving that faraway land, on the verge almost of the Arctic Circle, the people said to him: 'Tell Longfellow that we love him; tell him we read and rejoice in his poems; tell him that Iceland knows him by heart.' To-day there is no disputing the fact that Longfellow is more popular than any other living poet; that his books are more widely circulated, command greater attention, and bring more copyright money than those of any other author, not excepting Tennyson, now writing English verse." Meanwhile the young professor, after four years of retirement and work at Bowdoin, began to look about him and to contemplate another flight. Before his plans were laid, however, Professor Ticknor relinquished his position at Harvard, which was immediately offered to Mr. Longfellow under what were for that period the most delightful conditions possible. President Quincy wrote to him, "The salary will be fifteen hundred dollars a year. Residence in Cambridge will be required.... Should it be your wish, previously to entering upon the duties of the office, to reside in Europe, at your own expense, a year or eighteen months for the purpose of a more perfect attainment of the German, Mr. Ticknor will retain his office till your return." During his second visit to Europe in the year 1835, this time accompanied by his wife, she became ill and died at Rotterdam, "closing her peaceful life by a still more peaceful death." Longfellow continued his journey and his studies. Into his lonely hours, which no society and no occupation could fill, came, his brother tells us, "the sense and assurance of the spiritual presence of her who had loved him and who loved him still, and whose dying lips had said, 'I will be with you and watch over you.'" At Christmas of the same year a new grief fell upon him in the death of his brother-in-law and dearest friend. He received it as an added admonition "to set about the things he had to do in greater earnestness." "Henceforth," he wrote, "let me bear upon my shield the holy cross." No history of Longfellow can hope to trace the springs which fed his poetic mind without recording the deep sorrows, the pain, the loneliness of his days. Born with especial love of home and all domesticities, the solitary years moved on, bringing him a larger power for soothing the grief of others because he had himself known the darkest paths of earthly experience. He continued his lonely studies at Heidelberg during the winter, but with the spring, when the almond-trees were blossoming, the spirit of youth revived and he again took up his pilgrimage and began the sketches published some years later as the consecutive story of "Hyperion." In the opening chapter of that book he says: "The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone. Shadows of evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection,--itself a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night. The soul withdraws into itself. Then stars arise and the night is holy. Paul Flemming had experienced this, though still young." Seven long, weary years elapsed between the death of his young wife and the second and perfect marriage of his maturity. In spite of the sorrow and depression which had overwhelmed him, he knew that his work was the basis upon which his life must stand, and in those few years he planted himself firmly in his professorship, published "Outre Mer," and the early poems which won for him an undying reputation as a poet. During this period, too, he made the great friendships of his life, of which he allowed no thread to break during the long years to come. His characteristic steadiness of aim never failed even in this trying period. He enjoyed the singular advantage of travel in a Europe which is now chiefly a demesne of the past and of the imagination. Having known all the picturesqueness and beauty of England, he settled himself in the old Vassall (or Craigie) House, in Cambridge, with serene enjoyment and appreciation. This house was then in a retired spot, and overwrought as he frequently found himself, the repose of the place was helpful to him. In 1842 he again visited Europe, for the third time. His health suffered from solitude and the continued activities of his mind. "I sometimes think," he said, "that no one with a head and a heart can be perfectly well." Therefore in the spring he obtained leave of absence for six months, and went abroad to try the water cure at Marienberg. One of the chief events of this journey was the beginning of his friendship with Freiligrath. The two men never met again face to face, but they began a correspondence which only ended with their lives. It is in one of his letters to Freiligrath that he writes: "Be true to yourself and burn like a watch-fire afar off there in your Germany." His mind was full of poems; much of his future work was projected although little was completed. He wrote one sonnet called "Mezzo Cammin," never printed until after his death; perhaps he thought it too expressive of personal sadness. Upon the return voyage, which was a stormy one, he accomplished a feat that many a storm-tossed traveler would consider marvelous indeed. "Not out of my berth," he wrote, "more than twelve hours the first twelve days. There cabined, cribbed, confined, I passed fifteen days. During this time I wrote seven poems on slavery. I meditated upon them in the stormy, sleepless nights, and wrote them down with a pencil in the morning. A small window in the side of the vessel admitted light into my berth, and there I lay on my back and soothed my soul with songs." These poems, with one added as a dedication to Dr. Channing, "threw the author's influence on the side against slavery; and at that time it was a good deal simply to take that unpopular side publicly." He took up his correspondence at this period with renewed fervor, and what other life can show such devotion to friendship or such a circle of friends? Through good report and evil report his friends were dear to him, and the disparagements of others failed to reach the ear of his heart. In one of his letters to G. W. Greene he says: "It is of great importance to a man to know how he stands with his friends; at least, I think so. The voice of a friend has a wonder-working power; and from the very hour we hear it, 'the fever leaves us.'" Upon his return home in December, 1836, he began his life in Cambridge among the group of men who became inseparable friends,--Felton, Sumner, Hillard, and Cleveland. They called themselves the "Five of Clubs," and saw each other continually. Later came Agassiz and a few others. How delightful the little suppers were of those days! He used to write: "We had a gaudiolem last night." When, several years after, he married Frances Appleton and began, as it were, "the new life," his wife wrote to Mr. Greene: "Felton and the rest of the club flourish in immortal youth, and are often with us to dine or sup. I have never seen such a beautiful friendship between men of such distinct personalities, though closely linked together by mutual tastes and affections. They criticise and praise each other's performances, with a frankness not to be surpassed, and seem to have attained that happy height of faith where no misunderstanding, no jealousy, no reserve, exists." It appears, however, that even these delightful friendships had left something to be desired. In his journal he wrote: "Came back to Cambridge and went to Mr. Norton's. There I beheld what perfect happiness may exist on this earth, and felt how I stood alone in life, cut off for a while from those dearest sympathies for which I long." His brother said of him that having known the happiness of domestic life for which his nature was especially formed, "he felt the need of more intimate affection." Thus, after many years of lonely wandering, another period of Longfellow's life opened with his marriage in 1843. Had he himself been writing of another, he might have divided his story into cantos, each one with a separate theme. One of aspiration, one of endeavor, one with the despair of young sorrow, and one of triumphant love. Advancing thus through the gamut of human experience he might have closed the scene with the immortal line loved of all poets:-- "In sua voluntade e nostra pace." Thus indeed, reviewing Longfellow's life as a whole, we discern his days to be crowded with incident and experience. Every condition of human life presented itself at his door, and every human being found a welcome there,--incidents and experience coming as frequently to him through the lives of others as through the gate of his own being. The note of love and unity with the Divine will was the dominant one which controlled his spirit and gave him calm. He early chose Craigie House as the most desirable place for his abode in all the world. The poems and journals are full of his enjoyment of nature as seen from its windows. In the beginning of his residence there he persuaded Mrs. Craigie to allow him to have two rooms; but he soon controlled the second floor, and at the time of his marriage to Miss Appleton her father presented them with the whole of the beautiful estate. Here his life took shape and his happiness found increase with the days. It was like him to say little in direct speech of all this; but we find a few words describing his wife, of whom his brother wrote that "her calm and quiet face wore habitually a look of seriousness." And then evidently quoting from Henry, he adds, "at times it seemed to make the very air bright with its smiles." She was a beautiful woman of deep but reserved feeling and cultivated tastes and manners. She understood and sympathized in his work, and, even more, she became often its inspiration. During their wedding journey they passed through Springfield, whence she wrote: "In the Arsenal at Springfield we grew quite warlike against war, and I urged H. to write a peace poem." Finally established in Craigie House, as the children grew and his library enlarged, and guests, attracted by personal love and by his fame, became more numerous, he found the days almost overburdened with responsibilities. He wrote one day to Charles Sumner: "What you quote about the _père de famille_ is pretty true. It is a difficult role to play; particularly when, as in my case, it is united with that of _oncle d'Amérique_ and general superintendent of all the dilapidated and tumble-down foreigners who pass this way!" The regulation of such a house in New England was far more difficult than it is at present, and Cambridge farther away from Boston, with its conveniences and privileges, than appeared. What anxieties if the hourly omnibus should be crowded! and what a pleasant slow ride into the far green land it seemed! Nevertheless, this was his chosen home, his house beautiful, and such he made it, not only to his own eyes, but to the eyes of all who frequented it. The atmosphere of the man pervaded his surroundings and threw a glamour over everything. Even those who were most intimate at Craigie House felt the indescribable influence of tenderness, sweetness, and calm which filled the place. Neither Longfellow nor his wife was a brilliant talker; indeed, there were often periods of speechlessness; but in spite of mental absences, a habit of which he got the better in later years, one was always sure of being taken at one's best and of coming away with a sense of having "breathed a nobler air." "Society and hospitality meant something real to him," his eldest daughter writes. "I cannot remember that there were ever any formal or obligatory occasion of entertainment. All who came were made welcome without any special preparation, and without any thought of personal inconvenience." The decorations and splendors of the great world neither existed nor were needed there. His orange-tree, "that busie plant," always stood in his study window, and remains, still cherished, to-day. The statuette of Goethe, to which he refers in "Hyperion," stands yet on the high desk at which he stood to write, and books are everywhere. Even closets supposed to be devoted to pails and dust-cloths "have three shelves for books and one for pails." In his own bedroom, where the exquisite portrait of his wife by Rowse hangs over the fireplace, there is a small bookcase near his bed which contains a choice collection of the English poets. Vaughan, Henry King, and others of that lovely company of the past. These were his most intimate friends. In the copy of Henry King, I found the following lines marked by him in "The Exequy:"-- "Sleep on, my love, in thy cold bed, Never to be disquieted! My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake, Till I thy fate shall overtake; Till age, or grief, or sickness, must Marry my body to the dust It so much loves." His daughter says, "This library was carefully arranged by subjects; and although no catalogue was ever made, he was never at a loss where to look for any needed volume. His books were deeply beloved and tenderly handled." Such was Craigie House and such was the poet's life within it from the beginning to the end. "His poetry was not worked out from his brain," his daughter again writes, and who should know better than herself! "it was the blossoming of his inward life." In a brief paper upon Longfellow written by Mr. William Winter I find the universal sentiment towards him more fully and tenderly expressed, perhaps, than elsewhere. Mr. Winter writes: "I had read every line he had then published; and such was the affection he inspired, even in a boyish mind, that on many a summer night I have walked several miles to his house, only to put my hand upon the latch of his gate, which he himself had touched. More than any one else among the many famous persons whom, since then, it has been my fortune to know, he aroused this feeling of mingled tenderness and reverence." The description of his person, too, as given by Mr. Winter, seems to me clearer and closer to the truth than any other I have chanced to see. "His dignity and grace, and the beautiful refinement of his countenance, together with his perfect taste in dress and the exquisite simplicity of his manners, made him the absolute ideal of what a poet should be. His voice, too, was soft, sweet, and musical, and, like his face, it had the innate charm of tranquillity. His eyes were blue-gray, very bright and brave, changeable under the influence of emotion (as afterward I often saw), but mostly calm, grave, attentive, and gentle. The habitual expression of his face was not that of sadness; and yet it was pensive. Perhaps it may be best described as that of serious and tender thoughtfulness. He had conquered his own sorrows thus far; but the sorrows of others threw their shadow over him.... There was a strange touch of sorrowful majesty and prophetic fortitude commingled with the composure and kindness of his features.... His spontaneous desire, the natural instinct of his great heart, was to be helpful,--to lift up the lowly, to strengthen the weak, to bring out the best in every person, to dry every tear, and make every pathway smooth." Although naturally of a buoyant disposition and fond of pleasure, Longfellow lived as far as possible from the public eye, especially during the last twenty years of his life. The following note gives a hint of his natural gayety, and details one of the many excuses by which he always declined to speak in public; the one memorable exception being that beautiful occasion at Bowdoin, when he returned in age to the scenes of his youth and read to the crowd assembled there to do him reverence his poem entitled "Morituri Salutamus." After speaking of the reasons which must keep him from the Burns festival, he adds:-- "I am very sorry not to be there. You will have a delightful supper, or dinner, whichever it is; and human breath enough expended to fill all the trumpets of Iskander for a month or more. "I behold as in a vision a friend of ours, with his left hand under the tails of his coat, blowing away like mad; and alas! I shall not be there to applaud. All this you must do for me; and also eat my part of the haggis, which I hear is to grace the feast. This shall be your duty and your reward." The reference in this note to the trumpets of Iskander is the only one in his letters regarding a poem which was a great favorite of his, by Leigh Hunt, called "The Trumpets of Doolkarnein." It is a poem worthy to make the reputation of a poet, and is almost a surprise even among the varied riches of Leigh Hunt. Many years after this note was written, Longfellow used to recall it to those lovers of poetry who had chanced to escape a knowledge of its beauty. In spite of his dislike of grand occasions where he was a prominent figure, he was a keen lover of the opera and theatre. He was always the first to know when the opera season was to begin and to plan that our two houses might take a box together. He was always ready to hear "Lucia" or "Don Giovanni" and to make a festival time at the coming of Salvini or Neilson. There is a tiny notelet among his letters, with a newspaper paragraph neatly cut out and pasted across the top, detailing the names of his party at a previous appearance at a theatre, a kind of notoriety which he particularly shuddered at; but in order to prove his determination in spite of everything, he writes below:-- "Now for 'Pinafore,' and another paragraph! Saturday afternoon would be a good time." He easily caught the gayety of such occasions, and in the shadow of the curtains in the box would join in the singing or the recitative of the lovely Italian words with a true poet's delight. The strange incidents of a life subject to the taskmaster Popularity are endless. One day he wrote:-- "A stranger called here and asked if Shakespeare lived in this neighborhood. I told him I knew no such person. Do you?" Day by day he was besieged by every possible form of interruption which the ingenuity of the human brain could devise; but his patience and kindness, his determination to accept the homage offered him in the spirit of the giver, whatever discomfort it might bring himself, was continually surprising to those who observed him year by year. Mr. Fields wrote: "In his modesty and benevolence I am reminded of what Pope said of his friend Garth: 'He is the best of Christians without knowing it.'" In one of Longfellow's notes he alludes humorously to the autograph nuisance:--"Do you know how to apply properly for autographs? Here is a formula I have just received, on a postal card: "'DEAR SIR: As I am getting a collection of the autographs of all honorable and worthy men, and think yours such, I hope you will forfeit by next mail. Yours, etc.'" And of that other nuisance, sitting for a portrait, he laughingly wrote one day: "'Two or three sittings'--that is the illusory phrase. Two or three sittings have become a standing joke." And yet how seldom he declined when it was in his power to serve an artist! His generosity knew no bounds. When a refusal of any kind was necessary, it was wonderful to see how gently it was expressed. A young person having written from a western city to request him to write a poem for her class, he said: "I could not write it, but tried to say 'No' so softly that she would think it better than 'Yes.'" He was distinguished by one grace which was almost peculiar to himself in the time in which he lived--his tenderness toward the undeveloped artist, the man or woman, youth or maid, whose heart was set upon some form of ideal expression, and who was living for that. Whether they possessed the power to distinguish themselves or not, to such persons he addressed himself with a sense of personal regard and kinship. When fame crowned the aspirant, no one recognized more keenly the perfection of the work, but he seldom turned aside to attract the successful to himself. To the unsuccessful he lent the sunshine and overflow of his own life, as if he tried to show every day afresh that he believed noble pursuit and not attainment to be the purpose of our existence. In a letter written in 1860 Longfellow says:-- "I have no end of poems sent me for candid judgment and opinion. Four cases on hand at this moment. A large folio came last night from a lady. It has been chasing me round the country; has been in East Cambridge and in West Cambridge, and finally came by the hands of Policeman S---- to my house. I wish he had waived examination, and committed it (to memory). What shall I do? These poems weaken me very much. It is like so much water added to the Spirit of Poetry." And again he writes:-- "I received this morning a poem with the usual request to give 'my real opinion' of it. I give you one stanza." After quoting the verse and giving the subject of the poem, he continues:-- "In his letter the author says, 'I did so much better on poetry than I thought I could as a beginner, that I really have felt a little proud of my poems.' He also sends me his photograph 'at sixty-five years of age,' and asks for mine 'and a poem' in return. I had much rather send him these than my 'real opinion,' which I shall never make known to any man, except on compulsion and under the seal of secrecy." His kindness and love of humor carried him through many a tedious interruption. He generously overlooked the fact of the subterfuges to which men and women resorted in order to get an interview, and to help them out made as much of their excuses as possible. Speaking one day of the persons who came to see him at Nahant, he said: "One man, a perfect stranger, came with an omnibus full of ladies. He descended, introduced himself, then returning to the omnibus took out all the ladies, one, two, three, four, and five, with a little girl, and brought them in. I entertained them to the best of my ability, and they stayed an hour. They had scarcely gone when a forlorn woman in black came up to me on the piazza, and asked for a dipper of water. 'Certainly,' I replied, and went to fetch her a glass. When I brought it she said, 'There is another woman just by the fence who is tired and thirsty; I will carry this to her.' But she struck her head as she passed through the window and spilled the water on the piazza. 'Oh, what have I done!' she said. 'If I had a floor-cloth, I would wipe it up.' 'Oh, no matter about the water,' I said, 'if you have not hurt yourself.' Then I went and brought more water for them both, and sent them on their way, at last, refreshed and rejoicing." Once Longfellow drew out of his pocket a queer request for an autograph, saying "that the writer loved poetry in most any style, and would he please copy his 'Break, break, break' for the writer?" He also described in a note a little encounter in the street, on a windy day, with an elderly French gentleman in company with a young lady, who introduced them to each other. The Frenchman said:-- "'Monsieur, vous avez un fils qui fait de la peinture.' "'Oui, monsieur.' "'Il a du mérite. Il a beaucoup d'avenir.' "'Ah,' said I, 'c'est une belle chose que l'avenir.' "The elderly French gentleman rolled up the whites of his eyes and answered:-- "'Oui, c'est une belle chose; mais vous et moi, nous n'en avons pas beaucoup!' "Superfluous information!--H. W. L." It would be both an endless and unprofitable task to recall more of the curious experiences which popularity brought down upon him. There is a passage among Mr. Fields's notes, however, in which he describes an incident during Longfellow's last visit to England, which should not be overlooked. Upon his arrival, the Queen sent a graceful message, and invited him to Windsor Castle, where she received him with all the honors; but he told me no foreign tribute touched him deeper than the words of an English hod-carrier, who came up to the carriage door at Harrow, and asked permission to take the hand of the man who had written the "Voices of the Night." There was no break nor any change in the friendship with his publisher during the passing of the years; but in 1861 there is a note containing only a few words, which shows that a change had fallen upon Longfellow himself, a shadow which never could be lifted from his life. He writes:-- "MY DEAR FIELDS,--I am sorry to say No instead of Yes; but so it must be. I can neither write nor think; and I have nothing fit to send you but my love, which you cannot put into the magazine." For ever after the death of his wife he was a different man. His friends suffered for him and with him, but he walked alone through the valley of the shadow of death. "The blow fell entirely without warning, and the burial took place upon the anniversary of her marriage day. Some hand placed on her beautiful head, lovely and unmarred in death, a wreath of orange blossoms." There was a break in his journal at this time. After many days he inscribed in it the following lines from Tennyson's poem addressed to James Spedding:-- "Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace. Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul! While the stars burn, the moons increase, And the great ages onward roll." His friends were glad when he turned to his work again, and still more glad when he showed a desire for their interest in what he was doing. It was not long before he began to busy himself continuously with his translation of the "Divina Commedia," and in my diary of 1863, two years later, I find:-- "_August._--A delightful day with Longfellow at Nahant. He read aloud the last part of his new volume of poems, in which each one of a party of friends tells a story. Ole Bull, Parsons, Monti, and several other characters are introduced." "_September_ 1st.--A cold storm by the seashore, but there was great pleasure in town in the afternoon. Longfellow, Paine, Dwight, and Fields went to hear Walcker play the new organ in the Music Hall for the first time since its erection. Afterwards they all dined together. Longfellow comes in from Cambridge every day, and sometimes twice a day, to see George Sumner, who is dying at the Massachusetts General Hospital." "_September_ 19th.--Longfellow and his friend George W. Greene, Charles Sumner, and Dempster the singer, came in for an early dinner. A very cosy, pleasant little party. The afternoon was cool, and everybody was in kindly humor. Sumner shook his head sadly when the subject of the English iron-clads was mentioned. The talk prolonged itself upon the condition of the country. Longfellow's patriotism flamed. His feeling against England runs more deeply and strongly than he can find words to express. There is no prejudice nor childish partisanship, but it is hatred of the course she has pursued at this critical time. Later, in speaking of poetry and some of the less known and younger poets, Longfellow recalled some good passages in the poems of Bessie Parkes and Jean Ingelow. As evening approached we left the table and came to the library. There in the twilight Dempster sat at the piano and sang to us, beginning with Longfellow's poem called 'Children,' which he gave with a delicacy and feeling that touched every one. Afterwards he sang the 'Bugle Song' and 'Turn, Fortune,' which he had shortly before leaving England sung to Tennyson; and then after a pause he turned once more to the instrument and sang 'Break, break, break.' It was very solemn, and no one spoke when he had finished, only a deep sob was heard from the corner where Longfellow sat. Again and again, each time more uncontrolled, we heard the heartrending sounds. Presently the singer gave us another and less touching song, and before he ceased Longfellow rose and vanished from the room in the dim light without a word." "_September_ 27th.--Longfellow and Greene came in town in the evening for a walk and to see the moonlight in the streets, and afterwards to have supper.... He was very sad, and seemed to have grown an old man since a week ago. He was silent and absent-minded. On his previous visit he had borrowed Sidney's 'Arcadia' and Christina Rossetti's poems, but he had read neither of the books. He was overwhelmed with his grief, as if it were sometimes more than he could endure." "_Sunday, October_.--Took five little children to drive in the afternoon, and stopped at Longfellow's. It was delightful to see their enjoyment and his. He took them out of the carriage in his arms and was touchingly kind to them. His love for children is not confined to his poetic expressions or to his own family; he is uncommonly tender and beautiful with them always." I remember there was one little boy of whom he was very fond, and who came often to see him. One day the child looked earnestly at the long rows of books in the library, and at length said:-- "Have you got 'Jack the Giant-Killer'?" Longfellow was obliged to confess that his library did not contain that venerated volume. The little boy looked very sorry, and presently slipped down from his knee and went away; but early the next morning Longfellow saw him coming up the walk with something tightly clasped in his little fists. The child had brought him two cents with which he was to buy a "Jack the Giant-Killer" to be his own. He did not escape the sad experiences of the war. His eldest son was severely wounded, and he also went, as did Dr. Holmes and other less famous but equally anxious parents, in search of his boy. The diary continues:-- "_December_ 14th.--Went to pass the afternoon with Longfellow, and found his son able to walk about a little. He described his own arrival at a railway station south of Washington. He found no one there but a rough-looking officer, who was walking up and down the platform. At each turn he regarded Longfellow, and at length came up, and taking his hand said: "'Is this Professor Longfellow? It was I who translated "Hiawatha" into Russian. I have come to this country to fight for the Union.'" In the year 1865 began those Wednesday evenings devoted to reading the new translation of Dante. They were delightful occasions. Lowell, Norton, Greene, Howells, and such other Dante scholars or intimate friends as were accessible, made up the circle of kindly critics. Those evenings increased in interest as the work progressed, and when it was ended and the notes written and read, it was proposed to re-read the whole rather than to give up the weekly visit to Longfellow's house. In 1866 he wrote to Mr. Fields:-- "Greene is coming expressly to hear the last canto of 'Paradiso' to- morrow night, and will stay the rest of the week. I really hoped you would be here, but as you say nothing about it I begin to tremble. Perhaps, however, you are only making believe and will take us by surprise. So I shall keep your place for you. "This is not to be the end of all things. I mean to begin again in September with the dubious and difficult passages; and if you are not in too much of a hurry to publish, there is still a long vista of pleasant evenings stretching out before us. We can pull them out like a spyglass. I am shutting up now to recommence the operation." In December of the same year he wrote:-- "The first meeting of the Dante Club Redivivus is on Wednesday next. Come and be bored. Please not to mention the subject to any one yet awhile, as we are going to be very quiet about it." "_January_, 1867.--Dante Club at Longfellow's again. They are revising the whole book with the minutest care. Lowell's accuracy is surprising and of great value to the work; also Norton's criticisms. Longfellow stands apart at his desk taking notes and making corrections, though of course no one can know yet what he accepts." Longfellow's true life was that of a scholar and a dreamer; everything else was a duty, however pleasurable or bountiful the experience might become in his gentle acceptation. He was seldom stimulated to external expression by others. Such excitement as he could express again was always self-excitement; anything external rendered him at once a listener and an observer. For this reason, it is peculiarly difficult to give any idea of his lovely presence and character to those who have not known him. He did not speak in epigrams. It could not be said of him,-- "His mouth he could not ope, But out there flew a trope." Yet there was an exquisite tenderness and effluence from his presence which was more humanizing and elevating than the eloquence of many others. One quotation from a letter to Charles Sumner is too characteristic to be omitted even in the slightest sketch of Longfellow. He writes: "You are hard at work; and God bless you in it. In every country the 'dangerous classes' are those who do no work; for instance, the nobility in Europe and the slaveholders here. It is evident that the world needs a new nobility,--not of the gold medal and _sangre azul_ order; not of the blood that is blue because it stagnates, but of the red arterial blood that circulates, and has heart in it and life and labor." Speaking one day of his own reminiscences, Longfellow said, that "however interesting such things were in conversation, he thought they seldom contained legitimate matter for book-making; and ----'s life of a poet, just then printed, was, he thought, peculiarly disagreeable chiefly because of the unjustifiable things related of him by others. This strain of thought brought to his mind a call he once made with a letter of introduction, when a youth in Paris, upon Jules Janin. The servant said her master was at home, and he was ushered immediately into a small parlor, in one corner of which was a winding stairway leading into the room above. Here he waited a moment while the maid carried in his card, and then returned immediately to say he could go up. In the upper room sat Janin under the hands of a barber, his abundant locks shaken up in wild confusion, in spite of which he received his guest, quite undisturbed, as if it were a matter of course. There was no fire in the room; but the fireplace was heaped with letters and envelopes, and a trail of the same reached from his desk to the grate. After a brief visit Longfellow was about to withdraw, when Janin detained him, saying: 'What can I do for you in Paris? Whom would you like to see?' "'I should like to know Madame George Sand.' "'Unfortunately that is impossible! I have just quarreled with Madame Sand!' "'Ah! then, Alexandra Dumas,--I should like to take him by the hand!' "'I have quarreled with him also, but no matter! _Vous perdriez vos illusions.'_ "However, he invited me to dine the next day, and I had a singular experience; but I shall not soon forget the way in which he said, 'vous perdriez vos illusions.' "When I arrived on the following day I found the company consisted of his wife and himself, a little red-haired man who was rather quiet and cynical, and myself. Janin was amusing and noisy, and carried the talk on swimmingly with much laughter. Presently he began to say hard things about women, when his wife looked up reproachfully and said, 'Déjà, Jules!' During dinner a dramatic author arrived with his play, and Janin ordered him to be shown in. He treated the poor fellow brutally, who in turn bowed low to the great power. He did not even ask him to take a chair. Madame Janin did so, however, and kindly, too. The author supplicated the critic to attend the first appearance of his play. Janin would not promise to go, but put him off indefinitely, and presently the poor man went away. He tingled all over with indignation at the treatment the man received, but Janin looked over to his wife, saying, 'Well, my dear, I treated this one pretty well, didn't I?' "'Better than sometimes, Jules,' she answered." Altogether it was a strange scene to the young American observer. "_July_, 1867.--Passed the day at Nahant. As Longfellow sat on the piazza wrapped in his blue cloth cloak, he struck me for the first time as wearing a venerable aspect. Before dinner he gathered wild roses to adorn the table, and even gave a careful touch himself to the arrangement of the wines and fruits. He was in excellent spirits, full of wit and lively talk. Speaking of the use and misuse of words, he quoted Chateaubriand's mistake (afterwards corrected) in his translation of 'Paradise Lost,' when he rendered "'Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God,' as "'Le ruisseau de Siloa qui coulait rapidement.'" In talking about natural differences in character and temperament, he said of his own children that he agreed with one of the old English divines who said, "Happy is that household wherein Martha still reproves Mary!" In February, 1868, it was decided that Longfellow should go to Europe with his family. He said that the first time he went abroad it was to see places alone and not persons; the second time he saw a few persons, and so pleasantly combined the two; he thought once that on a third visit he should prefer to see persons only; but all that was changed now. He had returned to the feeling of his youth. He was eager to seek out quiet places and wayside nooks, where he might rest in retirement and enjoy the consecrated memorials of Europe undisturbed. The following year found him again in Cambridge, refreshed by his absence. The diary continues: "He has been trying to further the idea of buying some of the lowlands in Cambridge for the colleges. If this can be done, it will save much future annoyance to the inhabitants from wretched hovels and bad odors, beside holding the land for a beautiful possession forever. He has given a good deal of money himself. This might be called 'his latest work.'" "_January_, 1870.--Longfellow and Bayard Taylor came to dine. Longfellow talked of translators and translating. He advanced the idea that the English, from the insularity of their character, were incapable of making a perfect translation. Americans, French, and Germans, he said, have much larger adaptability to and sympathy in the thought of others. He would not hear Chapman's Homer or anything else quoted on the other side, but was zealous in enforcing this argument. He anticipates much from Taylor's version of 'Faust.' All this was strikingly interesting, as showing how his imagination wrought with him, because he was arguing from his own theory of the capacity of the races and in the face of his knowledge of the best actual translations existing to-day, the result of the scholarship of England. "Longfellow speaks of difficulty in sleeping. In his college days and later he had the habit of studying until midnight and rising at six in the morning, finding his way as soon as possible to his books. Possibly this habit still prevents him from getting sufficient rest. However light may be the literature in which he indulges before going to bed, some chance thought may strike him as he goes up the stairs with the bedroom candle in his hand which will preclude all possibility of sleep until long after midnight. "His account of Sainte-Beuve during his last visit to Europe was an odd little drama. He had grown excessively fat, and could scarcely move. He did not attempt to rise from his chair as Longfellow entered, but motioned him to a seat by his side. Talking of Victor Hugo and Lamartine, 'Take them for all in all, which do you prefer?' asked Longfellow. "'Charlatan pour charlatan, je crois que je préfère Monsieur de Lamartine,' was the reply. "Longfellow amused me by making two epigrams:-- "'What is autobiography? It is what a biography ought to be.' "And again:-- "'When you ask one friend to dine, Give him your best wine! When you ask two, The second best will do!' "He brought in with him two poems translated from Platen's 'Night Songs.' They are very beautiful. "'What dusky splendors of song there are in King Alfred's new volume,' he said. 'It is always a delight to get anything new from him. His "Holy Grail" and Lowell's "Cathedral" are enough for a holiday, and make this one notable.'" When Longfellow talked freely as at this dinner, it was difficult to remember that he was not really a talker. The natural reserve of his nature made it sometimes impossible for him to express himself in ordinary intercourse. He never truly made a confidant of anybody except his Muse. "I never thought," he wrote about this time, "that I should come back to this kind of work." He was busying himself with collecting and editing "The Poems of Places." "It transports me to my happiest years, and the contrast is too painful to think of." And again in calmer mood: "The 'ruler of the inverted year' (whatever that may mean) has, you perceive, returned again, like a Bourbon from banishment, and is having it all his own way, and it is not a pleasant way. Very well, one can sit by the fire and read, and hear the wind roar in the chimney, and write to one's friends, and sign one's self 'yours faithfully,' or as in the present instance, 'yours always.'" His sympathetic nature was ever ready to share and further the gayety of others. He wrote one evening:-- "I have been kept at home by a little dancing-party to-night.... I write this arrayed in my dress-coat with a rose in my buttonhole, a circumstance, I think, worth mentioning. It reminds me of Buffon, who used to array himself in his full dress for writing 'Natural History.' Why should we not always do it when we write letters? We should, no doubt, be more courtly and polite, and perhaps say handsome things to each other. It was said of Villemain that when he spoke to a lady he seemed to be presenting her a bouquet. Allow me to present you this postscript in the same polite manner, to make good my theory of the rose in the buttonhole." How delightful it is to catch the intoxication of the little festival in this way. In his endeavor to further the gayeties of his children he had received a reflected light and life which his love for them had helped to create. "_December_ 14, 1870.--Taylor's 'Faust' is finished, and Longfellow is coming with other friends to dinner to celebrate the ending of the work.... "A statuette of Goethe was on the table. Longfellow said Goethe never liked the statue of himself by Rauch, from which this copy was made. He preferred above all others a bust of himself by a Swiss sculptor, a copy of which Taylor owns. He could never understand, he continued, the story of that unpleasant interview between Napoleon and Goethe. Eckermann says Goethe liked it, but Longfellow thought the emperor's manner of address had a touch of insolence in it. The haunts of Goethe in Weimar were pleasantly recalled by both Longfellow and Taylor, to whom they were familiar; also that strange portrait of him taken standing at a window, and looking out over Rome, in which nothing but his back can be seen. "I find it impossible to recall what Longfellow said, but he scintillated all the evening. It was an occasion such as he loved best. His _jeux d'esprit_ flew rapidly right and left, often setting the table in a roar of laughter, a most unusual thing with him." There was evidently no such pleasure to Longfellow as that of doing kindnesses. One of many notes bearing on such subjects belongs to this year, and begins:-- "A thousand thanks for your note and its inclosure. There goes a gleam of sunshine into a dark house, which is always pleasant to think of. I have not yet got the senator's sunbeam to add to it; but as soon as I do, both shall go shining on their way." "_January_, 1871.--Dined at Longfellow's, and afterwards went upstairs to see an interesting collection of East Indian curiosities. Passing through his dressing-room, I was struck with the likeness of his private rooms to those of a German student or professor; a Goethean aspect of simplicity and space everywhere, with books put in the nooks and corners and all over the walls. It is surely a most attractive house!" Again I find a record of a dinner at Cambridge: "The day was springlike, and the air full of the odors of fresh blossoms. As we came down over the picturesque old staircase, he was standing with a group of gentlemen near by, and I heard him say aloud unconsciously, in a way peculiar to himself, 'Ah, now we shall see the ladies come downstairs!' Nothing escapes his keen observation--as delicate as it is keen." And in the same vein the journal rambles on:-- "_Friday._--Longfellow came into luncheon at one o'clock. He was looking very well;... his beautiful eyes fairly shone. He had been at Manchester-by-the-Sea the day before to dine with the Curtises. Their truly romantic and lovely place had left a pleasant picture in his mind. Coming away by the train, he passed in Chelsea a new soldiers' monument which suggested an epigram to him that he said, laughingly, would suit any of the thousand of such monuments to be seen about the country. He began somewhat in this style:-- "'The soldier asked for bread, But they waited till he was dead, And gave him a stone instead, Sixty and one feet high!' "We all returned to Cambridge together, and, being early for our own appointment elsewhere, he carried us into his library and read aloud 'The Marriage of Lady Wentworth.' E----, with pretty girlish ways and eyes like his own, had let us into the old mansion by the side door, and then lingered to ask if she might be allowed to stay and hear the reading too. He, consenting, laughingly, lighted a cigar and soon began. His voice in reading was sweet and melodious, and it was touched with tremulousness, although this was an easier poem to read aloud than many others, being strictly narrative. It is full of New England life and is a beautiful addition to his works. He has a fancy for making a volume, or getting some one else to do it, of his favorite ghost stories, 'The Flying Dutchman,' 'Peter Rugg,' and a few others." On another occasion the record says:-- "Passed the evening at Longfellow's. As we lifted the latch and entered the hall door, we saw him reading an old book by his study lamp. It was the 'Chansons d'Espagne,' which he had just purchased at what he called the massacre of the poets; in other words, at the sale that day of the library of William H. Prescott. He was rather melancholy, he said: first, on account of the sacrifice and separation of that fine library; also because he is doubtful about his new poem, the one on the life of our Saviour. He says he has never before felt so cast down. "What an orderly man he is! Well-ordered, I should have written. Diary, accounts, scraps, books,--everything where he can put his hand upon it in a moment." "_December_, 1871.--Saturday Mr. Longfellow came in town and went with us to hear twelve hundred school children sing a welcome to the Russian Grand Duke in the Music Hall. It was a fine sight, and Dr. Holmes's hymn, written for the occasion, was noble and inspiring. Just before the Grand Duke came in I saw a smile creep over Longfellow's face. 'I can never get over the ludicrousness of it,' he said. 'All this array and fuss over one man!' He came home with us afterwards, and lingered awhile by the fire. He talked of Russian literature,-- its modernness, and said he had sent us a delightful novel by Tourguéneff, 'Liza,' in which we should find charming and vivid glimpses of landscape and life like those seen from a carriage window. We left him alone in the library for a while, and returning found him amusing himself over the 'Ingoldsby Legends.' He was reading the 'Coronation of Victoria,' and laughing over Count Froganoff, who could not get 'prog enough,' and was 'found eating underneath the stairs.' He wants to have a dinner for Bayard Taylor, whose coming is always the signal for a series of small festivities. His own 'Divine Tragedy' is just out, and everybody speaks of its simplicity and beauty." "_April._--In the evening Longfellow came in town for the purpose of hearing a German gentleman read an original poem, and he persuaded me to go with him. The reader twisted his face up into frightful knots, and delivered his poem with vast apparent satisfaction to himself if not to his audience. It was fortunate on the whole that the production was in a foreign tongue, because it gave us the occupation, at least, of trying to understand the words,--the poem itself possessing not the remotest interest for either of us. It was in the old sentimental German style familiar to the readers of that literature. Longfellow amused me as we walked home by imitating the sing-song voice we had been following all the evening. He also recited in the original that beautiful little poem by Platen, 'In der Nacht, in der Nacht,' in a most delightful manner. 'Ah,' he said, 'to translate a poem properly it must be done into the metre of the original, and Bryant's "Homer," fine as it is, has this great fault, that it does not give the music of the poem itself.' He came in and took a cigar before walking home over the bridge alone.... "Emerson asked Longfellow at dinner about his last visit to England, of Ruskin and other celebrities. Longfellow is always reticent upon such subjects, but he was eager to tell us how very much he had enjoyed Mr. Ruskin. He said it was one of the most surprising things in the world to see the quiet, gentlemanly way in which Ruskin gave vent to his extreme opinions. It seems to be no effort to him, but as if it were a matter of course that every one should give expression to the faith that is in him in the same unvarnished way as he does himself, not looking for agreement, but for conversation and discussion. 'It is strange,' Ruskin said, 'being considered so much out of harmony with America as I am, that the two Americans I have known and loved best, you and Norton, should give me such a feeling of friendship and repose.' Longfellow then spoke of Mrs. Matthew Arnold, whom he liked very much,--thought her, as he said, 'a most lovely person.' Also of the 'beautiful Lady Herbert,' as one of the most delightful of women.... "Longfellow came in to an early dinner to meet Mr. Joseph Jefferson, Mr. William Warren, and Dr. Holmes. He said he felt like one on a journey. He had left home early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in Boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterwards. The talk naturally turned upon the stage. Longfellow said he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust in his criticisms upon Mr. Forrest's King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest's rendering of the part as very fine and close to nature. He could not understand why Mr. Mathews should underrate it as he did. Longfellow showed us a book given him by Charles Sumner. In it was an old engraving (from a painting by Giulio Clovio) of the moon, in which Dante is walking with his companion. He said it was a most impressive picture to him. He knew it in the original; also there is a very good copy in the Cambridge Library among the copies of illuminated manuscripts." There is a little note belonging to this period full of poetic feeling and giving more than a hint at the wearifulness of interrupting visitors:-- "I send you the pleasant volume I promised you yesterday. It is a book for summer moods by the seaside, but will not be out of place on a winter night by the fireside.... You will find an allusion to the 'blue borage flowers' that flavor the claret-cup. I know where grows another kind of bore-age that embitters the goblet of life. I can spare you some of this herb, if you have room for it in your garden or your garret. It is warranted to destroy all peace of mind, and finally to produce softening of the brain and insanity. "'Better juice of vine Than berry wine! Fire! fire! steel, oh, steel! Fire! fire! steel and fire!'" The following, written in the spring of the same year, gives a hint of what a festival season it was to him while the lilacs which surround his house were in bloom:-- "Here is the poem, copied for you by your humble scribe. I found it impossible to crowd it into a page of note paper. Come any pleasant morning, as soon after breakfast or before as you like, and we will go on with the 'Michael Angelical' manuscript. I shall not be likely to go to town while the lilacs are in bloom." The rambling diary continues: "To-day Longfellow sent us half a dozen bottles of wine, and after them came a note saying he had sent them off without finding time to label them. 'They are wine of Avignon,' he added, 'and should bear this inscription from Redi:-- "'Benedetto Quel claretto Che si spilla in Avignone.'" About this period Longfellow invited an old friend, who had fallen into extreme helplessness from ill health, to come and make him a visit. It was a great comfort to his friend, a scholar like himself, "to nurse the dwindling faculty of joy" in such companionship, and he lingered many weeks in the sunshine of the old house. Longfellow's patience and devoted care for this friend of his youth was a signal example of what a true and constant heart may do unconsciously, in giving expression and recognition to the bond of a sincere friendship. Long after his friend was unable to rise from his chair without assistance or go unaccompanied to his bedroom, Longfellow followed the lightest unexpressed wish with his sympathetic vision and performed the smallest offices unbidden. "Longfellow, will you turn down my coat collar?" I have heard him say in a plaintive way, and it was a beautiful lesson to see the quick and cheerful response which would follow many a like suggestion. In referring to this trait of his character, I find among the notes made by Mr. Fields on Longfellow: "One of the most occupied of all our literary men and scholars, he yet finds time for the small courtesies of existence, those minor attentions that are so often neglected. One day, seeing him employed in cutting something from a newspaper, I asked him what he was about. 'Oh,' said he, 'here is a little paragraph speaking kindly of our poor old friend Blank; you know he seldom gets a word of praise, poor fellow, nowadays; and thinking he might not chance to see this paper, I am snipping out the paragraph to mail to him this afternoon. I know that even these few lines of recognition will make him happy for hours, and I could not bear to think he might perhaps miss seeing these pleasant words so kindly expressed.'" "_May Day_, 1876.--Longfellow dined with us. He said during the dinner, when we heard a blast of wintry wind howling outside, 'This is May day enough; it does not matter to us how cold it is outside.' He was inclined to be silent, for there were other and brilliant talkers at the table, one of whom said to him in a pause of the conversation, 'Longfellow, tell us about yourself; you never talk about yourself.' 'No,' said Longfellow gently, 'I believe I never do.' 'And yet,' continued the first speaker eagerly, 'you confessed to me once'--'No,' said Longfellow, laughing, 'I think I never did.'" And here is a tiny note of compliment, graceful as a poet's note should be:-- "I have just received your charming gift, your note and the stately lilies; but fear you may have gone from home before my thanks can reach you. "How beautiful they are, these lilies of the field; and how like American women! Not because 'they neither toil nor spin,' but because they are elegant and 'born in the purple.'" There is a brief record in 1879 of a visit to us in Manchester-by-the- Sea. Just before he left he said, "After I am gone to-day, I want you to read Schiller's poem of the 'Ring of Polycrates,' if you do not recall it too distinctly. You will know then how I feel about my visit." He repeated also some English hexameters he had essayed from the first book of the Iliad. He believes the work may be still more perfectly done than has ever yet been achieved. We drove to Gloucester wrapped in a warm sea fog. His enjoyment of the green woods and the sea breeze was delightful to watch. "Ay me! ay me! woods may decay," but who can dare believe such life shall cease from the fair world! Seeing the Portland steamer pass one night, a speck on the horizon, bearing as he knew his daughter and her husband, he watched it long, then said, "Think of a part of yourself being on that moving speck." The Sunday following that visit he wrote from Portland:-- "Church bells are ringing; clatter of church-going feet on the pavement; boys crying 'Boston Herald;' voices of passing men and women: these are the sounds that come to me at this upper window, looking down into the street. "I contrast it all with last Sunday's silence at Manchester-by-the- Sea, and remember my delightful visit there. Then comes the thought of the moonlight and the music and Shelley's verses,-- "'As the moon's soft splendor O'er the faint, cold starlight of heaven Is thrown;' and so on "'Of some world far from ours, Where moonlight and music and feeling Are one.' "How beautiful this song would sound if set to music by Mrs. Bell and chanted by her in the twilight." Later he enclosed the song, which is as follows, and I venture to reprint it because it is seldom found among Shelley's poems:-- AN ARIETTE FOR MUSIC. _To a lady singing to her accompaniment on the guitar._ As the moon's soft splendor O'er the faint, cold starlight of heaven Is thrown, So thy voice most tender To the strings without soul has given. Its own. The stars will awaken, Though the moon sleep a full hour later To-night; No leaf will be shaken, Whilst the dews of thy melody scatter Delight. Though the sound overpowers, Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one. He added:-- "I find the song in my scrapbook, and send it to save you the trouble of hunting for it. "H. W. L." It was first reprinted in "The Waif," a thin volume of selections published by Longfellow many years ago. "The Waif" and "The Estray" preserved many a lovely poem from oblivion, till it should find its place at length among its fellows. Already in 1875 we find Longfellow at work upon his latest collection of poems, which he called "Poems of Places." It was a much more laborious and unrewarding occupation than he had intended, and he was sometimes weary of his self-imposed task. He wrote at this period:-- No politician ever sought for Places with half the zeal that I do. Friend and Foe alike have to give Place to Yours truly, H. W. L. Again he says:-- "What evil demon moved me to make this collection of 'Poems of Places'? Could I have foreseen the time it would take, and the worry and annoyance it would bring with it, I never would have undertaken it. The worst of it is, I have to write pieces now and then to fill up gaps." More and more his old friends grew dear to him as the years passed and "the goddess Neuralgia," as he called his malady, kept him chiefly at home. He wrote in 1877:-- "When are you coming back from your Cottage on the Cliffs? The trees on the Common and the fountains are calling for you. "'Thee, Tityrus, even the pine-trees, The very fountains, the very Copses are calling.' Perhaps also your creditors. At all events I am, who am your debtor." The days were fast approaching when the old things must pass away. He wrote tenderly:-- "I am sorry to hear that you are not quite yourself. I sympathize with you, for I am somebody else. It is the two W's, Work and Weather, that are playing the mischief with us.... You must not open a book; you must not even look at an inkstand. These are both contraband articles, upon which we have to pay heavy duties. We cannot smuggle them in. Nature's custom-house officers are too much on the alert." In 1880 he again wrote, describing the wedding of the daughter of an old friend:-- "A beautiful wedding it was; an ideal village wedding, in a pretty church, and the Windmill Cottage of our friend resplendent with autumnal flowers. In one of the rooms there was a tea-kettle hanging on a crane in the fireplace. "So begins a new household. But Miss Neilson's death has saddened me, and yesterday Mrs. Horsford came with letters from Norway, giving particulars of Ole Bull's last days, his death and burial. The account was very touching. All Bergen's flags at half-mast; telegrams from the King; funeral oration by Björnson. The dear old musician was carried from his island to the mainland in a steamer, followed by a long line of other steamers. No Viking ever had such a funeral." And here the extracts from letters and journals must cease. It was a golden sunset, in spite of the increasing infirmities which beset him; for he could never lose his pleasure in making others happy, and only during the few last days did he lose his own happiness among his books and at his desk. The influence his presence gave out to others, of calm good cheer and tenderness, made those who knew him feel that he possessed, in larger measure than others, what Jean Paul Richter calls "a heavenly unfathomableness which makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite." Indeed, this "heavenly unfathomableness" was a strong characteristic of his nature, and the gracious silence in which he often dwelt gave a rare sense of song without words. Therefore, perhaps on that day when we gathered around the form through which his voice was never again to utter itself, and heard his own words repeated upon the air saying, "Weep not, my friends! rather rejoice with me. I shall not feel the pain, but shall be gone, and you shall have another friend in heaven," it was impossible not to believe that he was with us still, the central spirit, comforting and uplifting the circle of those who were most dear to him. GLIMPSES OF EMERSON The perfect consistency of a truly great life, where inconsistencies of speech become at once harmonized by the beauty of the whole nature, gives even to a slight incident the value of a bit of mosaic which, if omitted, would leave a gap in the picture. Therefore we never tire of "Whisperings" and "Talks" and "Walks" and "Letters" relating to the friends of our imagination, if not of our fireside; and in so far as such fragments bring men and women of achievement nearer to our daily lives, without degrading them, they warm and cheer us with something of their own beloved and human presence. From this point of view the publication of so many of these side lights on the lives of what Emerson himself calls "superior people," is easily accounted for, and the following glimpses will only confirm what he expresses of such natures when he says, "In all the superior people I have met I notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away." In reading the correspondence between Carlyle and Emerson, few readers could fail to be impressed with the generosity shown by Emerson in giving his time and thought without stint to the publication of Carlyle's books in this country. Nor was this the single instance of his devotion to the advancement of his friends. In a brief memoir, lately printed, of Jones Very, as an introduction to a collection of his poems, we find a like record there. After the death of Thoreau, Emerson spared no trouble to himself that his friend's papers might be properly presented to the reading world. He wrote to his publisher, Mr. Fields: "I send all the poems of Thoreau which I think ought to go with the letters. These are the best verses, and no other whole piece quite contents me. I think you must be content with a little book, since it is so good. I do not like to print either the prison piece or the John Brown with these clear sky- born letters and poems." After all his labor and his care, however, it was necessary to hold consultation with Thoreau's sister, and she could not find it in her heart to leave out some of the tender personalities which had grown more dear to her since her brother's death, and which had been omitted in the selection. She said that she was sure Mr. Emerson was not pleased at the restorations she made after his careful work of elimination was finished, but he was too courteous and kind to say much, or to insist on his own way; he only remarked, "You have spoiled my Greek statue." Neither was he himself altogether contented with his work, and shortly afterward said he would like to include "The Maiden in the East," partly because it was written of Mrs. W----n, and partly because other persons liked it so well. "I looked over the poems again and again," he said, "and at last reserved but ten, finding some blemish in all the others which prevented them from seeming perfect to me. How grand is his poem about the mountains! As it is said of Goethe that he never spoke of the stars but with respect, so we may say of Thoreau and the mountains." It could hardly be expected of Thoreau's sister to sympathize with such a tribunal, especially when the same clear judgment was brought to bear upon the letters. Even touching the contract for publication he was equally painstaking--far more so than for his own affairs. He wrote, "I inclose the first form of contract, as you requested, with the alterations suggested by Miss Thoreau." After this follows a careful reiteration in his own handwriting of such alterations as were desired. The early loss of Thoreau and his love for him were, I had believed, the root and flower which brought forth fruit in his noble discourse on "Immortality;" but Miss Emerson generously informs me that I am mistaken in this idea. "Most of its framework," she says, "was written seven or eight years earlier and delivered in September, 1855. Some parts of it he may have used at Mr. Thoreau's funeral and some sentences of it may have been written then, but the main work was done long before, and it was enlarged twice afterwards." Happy were they who heard him speak at the funeral of Henry Thoreau. At whatever period he first framed his intuitions upon the future in prose, on that day a light was flashed upon him which he reflected again upon the soul of his listeners, and to them it seemed that a new-born glory had descended. Whatever words are preserved upon the printed page, the spirit of what was given on that day cannot be reproduced. He wrote, the day after Thoreau's death, to Mr. Fields: "Come tomorrow and bring ---- to my house. We will give you a very early dinner. Mr. Channing is to write a hymn or dirge for the funeral, which is to be from the church at three o'clock. I am to make an address, and probably Mr. Alcott may say something." This was the only announcement, the only time for preparation. Thoreau's body lay in the porch, and his townspeople filled the church, but Emerson made the simple ceremony one never to be forgotten by those who were present. Respecting the publication of this address I find the following entry in a diary of the time: "We have been waiting for Mr. Emerson to publish his new volume, containing his address upon Henry Thoreau; but he is careful of words, and finds many to be considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to extort a manuscript from his hands." There is a brief note among the few letters I have found concerning the poetry of some other writer whose name does not appear, but in the publication of whose work Emerson was evidently interested. He writes: "I have made the fewest changes I could. So do not shock the _amour propre_ of the poet, and yet strike out the bad words. You must, please, if it comes to question, keep my agency out of sight, and he will easily persuade himself that your compositor has grown critical, and struck out the rough syllables." Emerson stood, as it were, the champion of American letters, and whatever found notice at all challenged his serious scrutiny. The soul and purpose must be there; he must find one line to win his sympathy, and then it was given with a whole heart. He said one day at breakfast that he had found a young man! A youth in the far West had written him, and inclosed some verses, asking for his criticism. Among them was the following line, which Emerson said proved him to be a poet, and he should watch his career in future with interest: "Life is a flame whose splendor hides its base." We can imagine the kindly letter which answered the appeal, and how the future of that youth was brightened by it. "Emerson's young man" was a constant joke among his friends, because he was constantly filled with a large hope; and his friend of the one line was not by any means his only discovery. His feeling respecting the literary work of men nearer to him was not always one of satisfaction. When Hawthorne's volume of "English Sketches" was printed, he said, "It is pellucid, but not deep;" and he cut out the dedication and letter to Franklin Pierce, which offended him. The two men were so unlike that it seemed a strange fate which brought them together in one small town. An understanding of each other's methods or points of view was an impossibility. Emerson spoke once with an intimate friend of the distance which separated Hawthorne and himself. They were utterly at variance upon politics and every theory of life. Mr. Fields was suggesting to Emerson one day that he should give a series of lectures, when, as they were discussing the topics to be chosen, Emerson said: "One shall be on the Doctrine of Leasts, and one on the Doctrine of Mosts; one shall be about Brook Farm, for ever since Hawthorne's ghastly and untrue account of that community, in his 'Blithedale Romance,' I have desired to give what I think the true account of it." The sons of Henry James, Senior, being at school in Concord for a period, Emerson invited Mr. James, who had gone to visit his boys, to stay over and be present at one of Mr. Alcott's conversations, which were already "an institution" of the time. Mr. Alcott began to speak upon subjects which interested Mr. James; and the latter, not understanding, naturally enough, that these so-called "Conversations" were in truth monologues, replied to Mr. Alcott in his own striking style. Finding the audience alive to what he wished to say, he continued, and "did the talking himself." Miss Mary Emerson, Emerson's well-beloved aunt, the extraordinary original of one of his most delightful papers, was present. She had never met Mr. James before, and became greatly excited by some of the opinions he advanced. She thought he often used the word "religion," when, to her mind, he appeared to mean, sometimes "dogmatism" and sometimes, "ecclesiasticism." She bided her time, though a storm had gathered within her. At last, when a momentary silence fell and no one appeared ready to refute certain opinions advanced by Mr. James, "Amita" rose, took a chair, and, placing it in front of him, exclaimed, "Let me confront the monster!" The discussion was then renewed, excited by this sally of "Amita's" wit, and the company parted with a larger understanding of the subject and greater appreciation of each other. "It was a glorious occasion for those who love a battle of words," said one who was present. Mr. James delighted his host by his remarks upon the character of the beloved "Amita." He had many reservations with regard to Dickens. He could not easily forgive any one who made him laugh immoderately. The first reading of "Dr. Marigold" in Boston was an exciting occasion, and Emerson was invited to "assist." After the reading he sat talking until a very late hour, for he was taken by surprise at the novelty and artistic perfection of the performance. His usual calm had quite broken down under it; he had laughed as if he might crumble to pieces, his face wearing an expression of absolute pain; indeed, the scene was so strange that it was mirth-provoking to those who were near. But when we returned home he questioned and pondered much upon Dickens himself. Finally he said: "I am afraid he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound, and he can never be freed from it nor set at rest. You see him quite wrong evidently, and would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities, and superior to his talents; but I fear he is harnessed to them. He is too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left. He daunts me. I have not the key." When Mr. Fields came in he repeated: "---- would persuade me that Dickens is a man easy to communicate with, sympathetic and accessible to his friends; but her eyes do not see clearly in this matter, I am sure!" The tenor of his way was largely stayed by admiration and appreciation of others, often far beyond their worth. He gilded his friends with his own sunshine. He wrote to his publisher: "Give me leave to make you acquainted with ----" (still unknown to fame), "who has written a poem which he now thinks of publishing. It is, in my judgment, a serious and original work of great and various merit, with high intellectual power in accosting the questions of modern thought, full of noble sentiment, and especially rich in fancy, and in sensibility to natural beauty. I remember that while reading it I thought it a welcome proof, and still more a prediction, of American culture. I need not trouble you with any cavils I made on the manuscript I read, as ---- assures me that he has lately revised and improved the original draft. I hope you will like the poem as heartily as I did." I find a record of one very warm day in Boston in July when, in spite of the heat, Mr. Emerson came to dine with us:-- "He talked much of Forceythe Willson, whose genius he thought akin to Dante's, and says E---- H---- agrees with him in this, or possibly suggested it, she having been one of the best readers and lovers of Dante outside the reputed scholars. 'But he is not fertile. A man at his time should be doing new things.' 'Yes,' said ----, 'I fear he never will do much more.' 'Why, how old is he?' asked Emerson; and hearing he was about thirty-five, he replied, with a smile, 'There is hope till forty-five.' He spoke also of Tennyson and Carlyle as the two men connected with literature in England who were most satisfactory to meet, and better than their books. His respect for literature in these degenerate days is absolute. It is religion and life, and he reiterates this in every possible form. Speaking of Jones Very, he said he seemed to have no right to his rhymes; they did not sing to him, but he was divinely led to them, and they always surprised you." We were much pleased and amused at his quaint expressions of admiration for a mutual friend in New York at whose hospitable house we had all received cordial entertainment. He said: "The great Hindoo, Hatim Tayi, was nothing by the side of such hospitality as hers. Hatim Tayi would soon lose his reputation." His appreciation of the poems of H. H. was often expressed. He made her the keynote of a talk one day upon the poetry of women. The poems entitled "Joy," "Thought," "Ariadne," he liked especially. Of Mrs. Hemans he found many poems which still survive, and he believed must always live. Matthew Arnold was one of the minds and men to whom he constantly reverted with pleasure. Every traveler was asked for the last news of him; and when an English professor connected with the same university as Arnold, whom Emerson had been invited to meet, was asked the inevitable question, and found to know nothing, Emerson turned away from him, and lost all interest in his conversation. A few days afterward some one was heard to say, "Mr. Emerson, how did you like Professor ----?" "Let me see," he replied; "is not he the man who was at the same university with Matthew Arnold, and who could tell us nothing of him?" "How about Matthew Arnold?" he said to B---- on his return from England. "I did not see him," was the somewhat cool reply. "Yes! but he is one of the men one wishes not to lose sight of," said Emerson. "Arnold has written a few good essays," rejoined the other, "but his talk about Homer is all nonsense." "No, no, no!" said Emerson; "it is good, every word of it!" When the lecture on Brook Farm really came, it was full of wit and charm, as well as of the truth he so seriously desired to convey. The audience was like a firm, elastic wall, against which he threw the balls of his wit, while they bounded steadily back into his hand. Almost the first thing he said was quoted from Horatio Greenough, whom he esteemed one of the greatest men of our country. But there is nothing more elusive and difficult to retain than Emerson's wit. It pierces and is gone. Some of the broader touches, such as the clothes- pins dropping out of the pockets of the Brook Farm gentlemen as they danced in the evening, were apparent to all, and irresistible. Nothing could be more amusing than the boyish pettishness with which, in speaking of the rareness of best company, he said, "We often found ourselves left to the society of cats and fools." I find the following note in a brief diary: "October 20, 1868. Last night Mr. Emerson gave his second lecture. It was full of touches of light which dropped from him, to us, his listeners, and made us burn as with a kind of sudden inspiration of truth. He was beautiful both to hear and see. He spoke of poetry and criticism.... "He discovered two reporters present and spoke to them, saying, 'It is not allowed.' Whereat they both replied: 'They were only at work for their own gratification. Of course I could say nothing more; but afterward the Lord smote one of them and he came and confessed.' When he returned after speaking he brought one of the two bouquets which he found upon his desk. 'I bring you back your flowers,' he said gently. There was no loud applause last evening; but there were little shivers of delight or approbation running over the audience from time to time, like breezes over a cornfield." Emerson was always faithful to his appreciation of Channing's poems. When "Monadnock" was written, he made a special visit to Boston to talk it over, and the fine lines of Channing were always ready in his memory, to come to the front when called for. His love and loyalty to Elizabeth Hoar should never be forgotten, in however imperfect a rehearsal of his valued companionships. One morning at breakfast I heard him describing her attributes and personality in the most tender and engaging way to Mrs. Stowe, who had never known her, which I would give much to be able to reproduce. Emerson's truthfulness was often the cause of mirth even to himself. I remember that he thought he did not care for the work of Bayard Taylor, but he confessed one day with sly ruefulness that he had taken up the last "Atlantic" by chance, and found there some noble hexameters upon "November;" and "I said to myself, 'Ah! who is this? this is as good as Clough.' When to my astonishment, and not a little to my discomfiture, I discovered they were Bayard Taylor's! But how about this 'Faust'? We have had Dante done over and over, and even now done, I see, again by a new hand, and Homer forever being done, and now 'Faust'! I quarrel somewhat with the overmuch labor spent upon these translations, but first of all I quarrel with Goethe. 'Faust' is unpleasant to me. The very flavor of the poem repels me, and makes me wish to turn away." The "Divina Commedia," too, he continued, was a poem too terrible to him to read. He had never been able to finish it. It is probable that poor translations of both "Faust" and Dante read in early youth were at the bottom of these opinions. Emerson was a true appreciator of Walter Scott. At one of the Saturday Club dinners it was suggested that Walter Scott be made the subject of conversation, and the occasion be considered as his birthday. Emerson spoke with brilliant effect two or three times. He was first called out by his friend Judge Hoar, who said he was chopping wood that morning in his woodshed, when Emerson came in and said so many delightful things about Sir Walter that if he would now repeat to the table only a portion of the excellent sayings heard in the woodshed he would delight them all. Emerson rose, and, referring pleasantly to the brilliancy of the judge's imagination, began by expressing his sense of gratitude to Walter Scott, and concluded a fine analysis of his work by saying that the root and gist of his genius was to be found, in his opinion, in the Border Minstrelsy. His loyalty to the Saturday Club was quite as sincere as Dr. Holmes's, but the difficulties in the way of his constant attendance were somewhat greater. Emerson kept a friendly lookout over absent members, and greeted with approval any one who arrived at the monthly tryst in spite of hindrances. Seeing Mr. Fields appear one day, bag in hand, at a time when he was living in the country, Emerson glanced at him affectionately, saying half aloud, "Good boy! good boy!" At this meeting it appeared that Lowell and Emerson had chanced to go together, while in Paris, to hear Renan. They spoke of the beauty and perfection of his Hebrew script upon the blackboard; it was faultless, they said. Emerson added that he could not understand Renan's French, so he looked at Lowell, who wore a very wise expression, instead. Emerson was no lover of the sentimental school. The sharp arrow of his wit found a legitimate target there. Of one person in especial, whom we all knew and valued for extraordinary gifts, he said: "---- is irreclaimable. The sentimentalists are the most dangerous of the insane, for they cannot be shut up in asylums." The labor bestowed upon his own work before committing himself to print was limitless. I have referred to this already in speaking of the publication of his address after the death of Thoreau. Sometimes in joke a household committee would be formed to sit in judgment on his essays, and get them out of his hands. The "May-day" poem was long in reaching its home in print. There were references to it from year to year, but he could never be satisfied to yield it up. In April, 1865, after the fall of Richmond, he dined with us, full of what he said was "a great joy to the world, not alone to our little America." That day he brought what he then called some verses on Spring to read aloud; but when the reading was ended, he said they were far "too fragmentary to satisfy him," and quietly folded them up and carried them away again. This feeling of unreadiness to print sprang as much from the wonderful modesty as from the sincerity of his character. He wrote shortly after to his publisher:-- "I have the more delight in your marked overestimate of my poem that I have been vexed with a belief that what skill I had in whistling was nearly or quite gone, and that I might henceforth content myself with guttural consonants or dissonants, and not attempt warbling. On the strength of your note, I am working away at my last pages of rhyme. But this has been and is a week of company. Yet I shall do the best I can with the quarters of hours." Again, with his mind upon the "May-day" poem, he wrote:-- "I have long seen with some terror the necessity closing round me, in spite of all my resistance, that shall hold me from home. It now seems fixed to the 20th or 21st March. I had only consented to 1st March. But in the negotiations of my agent it would still turn out that the primary engagements made a year ago, and to which the others were only appendages--the primaries, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh--must needs thrust themselves into March, and without remedy. But I cannot allow the 'May-day' to come till I come. There were a few indispensable corrections made and sent to the printer, which he reserved to be corrected on the plates, but of which no revise was ever sent to me; and as good publish no book as leave these _errata_ unexpunged. Then there is one quatrain, to which his notice was not called, for which I wish to substitute another. So I entreat you not to finish the book except for the fire until I come. As the public did not die for the book on the 1st January, I presume they can sustain its absence on the 1st April.... Though I do not know that your courage will really hold out to publish it on the 1st April if I were quite ready." Again in the same spirit he writes to his editor and publisher:-- You ask in your last note for "Leasts and Mosts" for the "Atlantic." You have made me so popular by your brilliant advertising and arrangements (I will say, not knowing how to qualify your social skill) that I am daily receiving invitations to read lectures far and near, and some of these I accept, and must therefore keep the readable lectures by me for a time, though I doubt not that this mite, like the mountain, will fall into the "Atlantic" at last. Ever your debtor, R. W. EMERSON. At another time he wrote:-- "I received the account rendered of the Blue and Gold Edition of the 'Essays' and 'Poems.' I keep the paper before me and study it now and then to see if you have lost money by the transaction, and my prevailing impression is that you have." It was seldom he showed a sincere willingness or desire to print. One day, however (it was in 1863), he came in bringing a poem he had written concerning his younger brother, who, he said, was a rare man, and whose memory richly deserved some tribute. He did not know if he could finish it, but he would like to print _that_. It was about the same period that he came to town and took a room at the Parker House, bringing with him the unfinished sketch of a few verses which he wished Mr. Fields to hear. He drew a small table into the centre of the room, which was still in disorder (a former occupant having slept there the previous night), and then read aloud the lines he proposed to give to the press. They were written on separate slips of paper, which were flying loosely about the room and under the bed. A question arose of the title, when Mr. Fields suggested "Voluntaries," which was cordially accepted and finally adopted. He was ever seeking suggestions, and ready to accept corrections. He wrote to his publisher: "I thank you for both the corrections, and accept them both, though in reading, one would always say, 'You pet,' so please write, though I grudge it [Thou pet], and [mass], and [minster]. Please also to write [arctic], in the second line with small [a] if, as I think, it is now written large [A]. And I forgot, I believe, to strike out a needless series of quotation commas with which the printing was encumbered." His painstaking never relaxed, even when he was to read a familiar lecture to an uncritical audience. He had been invited by the members of the Young Ladies' Saturday Morning Club to read one of his essays in their parlor. This he kindly consented to do, as well as to pass the previous night with his friends in Charles Street, and read to them an unpublished paper, which he called "Amita." Some question having arisen as to the possibility of his keeping both the engagements, he wrote as follows:-- "DEAR MRS. F.,--I mean surely to obey your first command, namely, for the visit to you on Friday evening next, and I fully trust that I wrote you that I would.... And now I will untie the papers of 'Amita,' and see if I dare read them on Friday, or must find somewhat less nervous." I find the following brief record of the occasion:-- "Mr. Emerson arrived from Concord. He said he took it for granted we should be occupied at that hour, but he would seize the moment to look over his papers. So I begged him to go into the small study and find quiet there as long as he chose.... Presently Emerson came down to tea; the curtains were drawn, and a few guests arrived. We sat round the tea table in the library, while he told us of ----'s life in Berlin, where Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Grimm and Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft had opened a pleasant social circle for him. He also talked much of the Grimms. His friendship for Hermann Grimm had extended over many years, and an interesting correspondence has grown up between them. More guests arrived, and the talk became general until the time came to listen to 'Amita.'" The charm of that reading can never be forgotten by those who heard it. The paper itself can now be found upon the printed page; but Emerson's enjoyment of his own wit, as reflected back from the faces of his listeners, cannot be reproduced, nor a kind of squirrel-like shyness and swiftness which pervaded it. The diary continues:-- "C---- and ---- were first at breakfast, but Mr. Emerson soon followed. The latter had been some time at work, and his hands were cold. I had heard him stirring before seven o'clock. He came down bright and fresh, however, with the very spirit of youth in his face. At table they fell upon that unfailing resource in conversation, anecdotes of animals and birds. Speaking of parrots, Mr. Emerson said he had never heard a parrot say any of these wonderful things himself, but the Storer family of Cambridge, who were very truthful people, had told him astonishing anecdotes of a bird belonging to them, which he could not disbelieve because they told him. "At ten o'clock we went to Miss L----'s, where the young ladies' club was convened to hear Mr. Emerson on 'Manners.' He told us we should do better to stay at home, as we had heard this paper many times. Happily we did not take his advice. There were many good things added, beside the pleasure of hearing the old ones revived. One of the things new to me was the saying of a wise woman, who remarked that she 'did not think so much of what people said as of what made them say it.' It was pretty to see the enthusiasm of the girls, and to hear what Celia Thaxter called their 'virile applause.'" During the same season Emerson consented to give a series of readings in Boston. He was not easily persuaded to the undertaking until he felt assured of the very hearty coöperation which the proposed title of "Conversations" made evident to him. The following note will give some idea of his feeling with regard to the plan. CONCORD, 24th February, 1872. DEAR ----: You are always offering me kindness and eminent privileges, and for this courageous proposition of "Conversations on Literature with Friends, at Mechanics' Hall," I pause and poise between pleasure and fear. The name and the undertaking are most attractive; but whether it can be adequately attempted by me, who have a couple of tasks which Osgood and Company know of, now on my slow hands, I hesitate to affirm. Well, the very proposal will perhaps arm my head and hands to drive these tasks to a completion. And you shall give me a few days' grace, and I will endeavor to send you a considerate answer. Later, in March, he wrote:-- "For the proposed 'Conversations,' which is a very good name, I believe I must accept your proposition frankly, though the second week of April looks almost too near." As the appointed time approached, a fresh subject for nervousness suggested itself, which the following note will explain:-- CONCORD, 12th April, 1872. MY DEAR ----: I entreat you to find the correspondent of the New York "Tribune," who reports Miss Vaughan's and Henry James's lectures in Boston, and adjure her or him, as he or she values honesty and honor, not to report any word of what Mr. Emerson may say or do at his coming "Conversations." Tell the dangerous person that Mr. E. accepted this task, proffered to him by private friends, on the assurance that the audience would be composed of his usual circle of private friends, and that he should be protected from any report; that a report is so distasteful to him that it would seriously embarrass and perhaps cripple or silence much that he proposes to communicate; and if the individual has bought tickets, these shall gladly be refunded, and with thanks and great honor of your friend, R. W. EMERSON. In spite of all these terrors, the "Conversations" were an entire success, financially as well as otherwise. I find in the diary:-- "This afternoon Mr. Emerson gave his first 'Conversation' in this course, which ---- has arranged for him. He will make over fourteen hundred dollars by these readings. There was much new and excellent matter in the discourse to-day, and it was sown, as usual, with felicitous quotations. His introduction was gracefully done. He said he regarded the company around him as a society of friends whom it was a great pleasure to him to meet. He spoke of the value of literature, but also of the superior value of thought if it can be evolved in other ways, quoting that old saying of Catherine de Medicis, who remarked, when she was told of some one who could speak twenty languages: 'That means he has twenty words for one idea. I would rather have twenty ideas to one word.'" And again:-- "_April_ 22.--To-day is the second of Mr. Emerson's 'Readings,' or 'Conversations,' and he is coming with Longfellow and the Hunts to have dinner afterward.... We had a gay, lovely time at the dinner; but, first about the lecture. Emerson talked of poetry, and the unity which exists between science and poetry, the latter being the fine insight which solves all problems. The _un_written poetry of to-day, the virgin soil, was strongly, inspiringly revealed to us. He was not talking, he said, when he spoke of poetry, of the smooth verses of magazines, but of poetry itself wherever it was found. He read favorite single lines from Byron's 'Island,' giving Byron great praise, as if in view of the injustice which has been done him in our time. After Byron's poem he read a lyric written by a traveler to the Tonga Islands, which is in Martin's 'Travels;' also a noble poem called 'The Soul,' and a sonnet, by Wordsworth. We were all entranced as the magic of his sympathetic voice passed from one poetic vision to another. Indeed, we could not bear to see the hour fade away." I find the following fragment of a note written during May of that year:-- I received on my return home last night, with pleasure which is quite ceasing to surprise, the final installment of one hundred and seven dollars from the singular soliloquies called "Conversations," inaugurated by the best of directors. Evermore thanks. R. W. EMERSON. Again, in the journal I find:-- "Another lecture from Emerson--'Poetry, Religion, Love'--'superna respicit amor.' His whole discourse was a storehouse of delights and inspirations. There was a fine contribution from Goethe; a passage where he bravely recounts his indebtedness to the great of all ages. Varnhagen von Ense, Jacob Böhmen, Swedenborg, and the poets brought their share. "There was an interlude upon domestic life, 'where alone the true man could be revealed,' which was full of beauty. "He came in to-day to see ----. He flouts the idea of 'that preacher, Horace Greeley,' being put up as candidate for president. 'If it had been Charles Francis Adams, now, we should all have voted for him. To be sure, it would be his father and his grandfather for whom we were voting, but we should all believe in him.' "We think this present course of lectures more satisfactory than the last. One thing is certain, he flings his whole spirit into them. He reads the poems he loves best in literature, and infuses into their rendering the pure essence of his own poetic life. We can never forget his reading of 'The Wind,' a Welsh poem by Taliesin--the very rush of the elements was in it." Emerson was perfectly natural and at ease in manner and speech during these readings. He would sometimes bend his brows and shut his eyes, endeavoring to recall a favorite passage, as if he were at his own library table. One day, after searching thus in vain for a passage from Ben Jonson, he said: "It is all the more provoking as I do not doubt many a friend here might help me out with it." When away from home on his lecture tours, Emerson did not fail to have his share of disasters. He wrote from Albany, in 1865, to Mr. Fields: --An unlucky accident drives me here to make a draft on you for fifty dollars, which I hope will not annoy you. The truth is that I lost my wallet--I fear to some pickpocket--in Fairhaven, Vermont, night before last (some $70 or $80 in it), and had to borrow money of a Samaritan lady to come here. I pray you do not whisper it to the swallows for fear it should go to ----, and he should print it in "Fraser." I am going instantly to the best book-shop to find some correspondent of yours to make me good. I was to have read a lecture here last night, but the train _walked_ all the way through the ice, sixty miles, from six in the morning, and arrived here at _ten_ at night. I hope still that Albany will entreat me on its knees to read to-night. One other piece of bad news if you have not already learned it. Can you not burn down the Boston Athenaeum to-night? for I learned by chance that they have a duplicate of the "Liber Amoris." I hope for great prosperity on my journey as the necessary recoil of such adversities, and specially to pay my debts in twenty days. Yours, with constant regard, R. W. EMERSON. The apprehensions which assailed him before his public addresses or readings were not of a kind to affect either speech or behavior. He seemed to be simply detained by his own dissatisfaction with his work, and was forever looking for something better to come, even when it was too late. His manuscripts were often disordered, and at the last moment, after he began to read, appeared to take the form in his mind of a forgotten labyrinth through which he must wait to find his way in some more opportune season. In the summer of 1867 he delivered the address before the Phi Beta at Harvard. He seemed to have an especial feeling of unreadiness on that day, and, to increase the trouble, his papers slipped away in confusion from under his hand as he tried to rest them on a poorly arranged desk or table. Mr. Hale put a cushion beneath them finally, after Emerson began to read, which prevented them from falling again, but the whole matter was evidently out of joint in the reader's eyes. He could not be content with it, and closed without warming to the occasion. It was otherwise, however, to those who listened; they did not miss the old power: but after the reading he openly expressed his own discontent, and walked away dissatisfied. Miss Emerson writes to me of this occasion: "You recall the sad Phi Beta day of 1867. The trouble that day was that for the first time his eyes refused to serve him; he could not see, and therefore could hardly get along. His work had been on the whole satisfactory to him, and if he could have read it straight all would have been happy instead of miserable." On another and more private occasion, also, he came away much disappointed himself, because, the light being poor and his manuscript disarranged, he had not been just, he thought, even to such matter as lay before him. And who can forget the occasion of the delivery of the Boston Hymn?--that glad New Year when the people were assembled in our large Music Hall to hear read the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. When it was known that Emerson was to follow with a poem, a stillness fell on the vast assembly as if one ear were waiting to catch his voice; but the awful moment, which was never too great for his will and endeavor, was confusing to his fingers, and the precious leaves of his manuscript fell as he rose, and scattered themselves among the audience. They were quickly gathered and restored, but for one instant it seemed as if the cup so greatly desired was to be dashed from the lips of the listeners. His perfect grace in conversation can hardly be reproduced, even if one could gather the arrows of his wit. But I find one or two slight hints of the latter which are too characteristic to be omitted. Speaking of some friends who were contemplating a visit to Europe just after our civil war, when exchange was still very high, he said that "the wily American would elude Europe for a year yet, hoping exchange would go down." On being introduced to an invited guest of the Saturday Club, Emerson said: "I am glad to meet you, sir. I often see your name in the papers and elsewhere, and am happy to take you by the hand for the first time." "Not for the first time," was the reply. "Thirty-three years ago I was enjoying my school vacation in the woods, as boys will. One afternoon I was walking alone, when you saw me and joined me, and talked of the voices of nature in a way which stirred my boyish pulses, and left me thinking of your words far into the night." Emerson looked pleased, but rejoined that it must have been long ago indeed when he ventured to talk of such fine subjects. In conversing with Richard H. Dana ("Two Years Before the Mast") the latter spoke of the cold eyes of one of our public men. "Yes," said Emerson meditatively, "holes in his head! holes in his head!" In speaking once of education and of the slight attention given to the development of personal influence, he said "he had not yet heard of Rarey" (the famous horse-tamer of that time) "having been made Doctor of Laws." After an agreeable conversation with a gentleman who had suffered from ill health, Emerson remarked, "You formerly bragged of bad health, sir; I trust you are all right now." Emerson's reticence with regard to Carlyle's strong expressions against America was equally wise and admirable. His friends crowded about him, urging him to denounce Carlyle, as a sacred duty, but he stood serene and silent as the rocks until the angry sea was calm. Of his grace of manner, what could be more expressive than the following notes of compliment and acknowledgment? "When I came home from my pleasant visit to your house last week (or was it a day or two before last week?), Mrs. Hawthorne, arriving in Concord a little later than I, brought me the photograph of Raffaelle's original sketch of Dante, and from you. It appears to be a fixed idea in your mind to benefit and delight me, and still in ingenious and surprising ways. Well, I am glad that my lot is cast in the time and proximity of excellent persons, even if I do not often see their faces. I send my thanks for this interesting picture, which so strangely brings us close to the painter again, and almost hints that a supermarine and superaerial telegraph may bring us thoughts from him yet." And, again, with reference to a small photograph from a very interesting _rilievo_ done by a young Roman who died early, leaving nothing in more permanent form to attest his genius:-- "'The Star-led Wizards' arrived safely at my door last night, as the beauty and splendid fancy of their figures, and not less the generous instructions of their last entertainer and guide, might well warrant and secure. "It was surely a very unlooked-for but to me most friendly inspiration of yours which gave their feet this direction. But they are and shall be gratefully and reverently received and enshrined, and in the good hope that you will so feel engaged at some time or times to stop and make personal inquiry after the welfare of your guests and wards." And again:-- How do you suppose that unskillful scholars are to live, if Fields should one day die? _Serus in coelum redeat_! Affectionately yours and his, R. W. EMERSON. Surely the grace and friendly charm of these conversational notes warrant their preservation even to those who are not held by the personal attraction which lay behind them. Again he writes:-- "I have been absent from home since the noble Saturday evening, or should have sent you this book of Mr. Stirling's, which you expressed a wish to see. The papers on Macaulay, Tennyson, and Coleridge interest me, and the critic is master of his weapons. "Meantime, in these days, my thoughts are all benedictions on the dwellers in the happy home of number 148 Charles Street." His appreciation of the hospitality of others was only a reflection from his own. I find a few words in the journal as follows: "Mr. Emerson was like a benediction in the house, as usual. He was up early in the morning looking over books and pictures in the library." I find also the mention of one evening when he brought his own journal to town and read us passages describing a visit in Edinburgh, where he was the guest of Mrs. Crowe. She was one of those ladies of Edinburgh, he said, "who could turn to me, as she did, and say, 'Whom would you like to meet?' Of course I said, Lord Jeffrey, De Quincey, Samuel Brown, called the alchemist by chemists, and a few others. She was able, with her large hospitality, to give me what I most desired. She drove with Samuel Brown and myself to call on De Quincey, who was then living most uncomfortably in lodgings with a landlady who persecuted him continually. While I was staying at Mrs. Crowe's, De Quincey arrived there one evening, after being exposed to various vicissitudes of weather, and latterly to a heavy rain. Unhappily Mrs. Crowe's apparently unlimited hospitality was limited at pantaloons, and poor De Quincey was obliged to dry his water-soaked garments at the fireside." Emerson read much also that was interesting of Tennyson and of Carlyle. Of the latter he said that the last time he was in England he drove directly to his house. "Jane Carlyle opened the door for me, and the man himself stood behind and bore the candle. 'Well, here we are, shoveled together again,' was his greeting. Carlyle's talk is like a river, full and never ceasing; we talked until after midnight, and again the next morning at breakfast we went on. Then we started to walk to London; and London bridge, the Tower, and Westminster were all melted down into the river of his speech." After the reading that evening there was singing, and Emerson listened attentively. Presently he said, when the first song ended, "I should like to know what the words mean." The music evidently signified little to his ears. Before midnight, when we were alone, he again reverted to Tennyson. He loves to gather and rehearse what is known of that wonderful man. Early in the morning he was once more in the library. I found him there laughing over a little book he had discovered. It was Leigh Hunt's copy of "English Traits," and was full of marginal notes, which amused Emerson greatly. Not Mrs. Crowe's hospitality nor any other could ever compare in his eyes with that of the New York friend to whom I have already alluded. We all agreed that her genius was preeminent. Here are two brief notes of graceful acknowledgment to his Boston friends which, however, may hardly be omitted. In one of these he says:-- "My wife is very sensible of your brave hospitality, offered in your note a fortnight since, and resists all my attempts to defend your hearth from such a crowd. Of course I am too glad to be persuaded to come to you, and so it is our desire to spend the Sunday of my last lecture at your house." In the other he says:-- "I ought to have acknowledged and thanked you for the plus-Arabian hospitality which warms your note. It might tempt any one but a galley-slave, or a scholar who is tied to his book-crib as the other to his oar, to quit instantly all his dull surroundings, and fly to this lighted, genial asylum with doors wide open and nailed back." There is a brief glimpse of Emerson upon his return from California which it is a pleasure to recall. He came at once, even before going to Concord, to see Mr. Fields. "We must not visit San Francisco too young," he said, "or we shall never wish to come away. It is called the 'Golden Gate,' not because of its gold, but because of the lovely golden flowers which at this season cover the whole face of the country down to the edge of the great sea." He smiled at the namby- pamby travelers who turned back because of the discomforts of the trip into the valley of the Yosemite. It was a place full of marvel and glory to him. The only regret attending the trip seems to have been that he was obliged to miss the meetings of the Saturday Club, which were always dear to him. The following extract gives a picture of him about this time:--"A call from Mr. Emerson, who talked of Lowell's 'joyous genius.' He said: 'I have read what he has done of late with great interest, and am sorry to have been so slow as not to have written him yet, especially as I am to meet him at the club dinner to-day. How is Pope?' he continued, crossing the room to look at an authentic portrait by Richardson of that great master of verse. 'Such a face as this should send us all to re-reading his works again.' Then turning to the bust of Tennyson, by Woolner, which stood near, he said, 'The more I think of this bust and the grand self-assertion in it, the more I like it....' Emerson came in after the club dinner; Longfellow also. Mrs. G---- was present, and bragged grandly, and was very smart in talk. Afterward Emerson said he was reminded of Carlyle's expression with regard to Lady Duff Gordon, whom he considered a female St. Peter walking fearlessly over the waves of the sea of humbug." Opportunities for social communication were sacred in his eyes, and never to be lightly thrown aside. He wore an expectant look upon his face in company, as if waiting for some new word from the last comer. He was himself the stimulus, even when disguised as a listener, and his additions to the evenings called Mr. Alcott's Conversations were marked and eagerly expected. Upon the occasion of Longfellow's last departure for Europe in 1869, a private farewell dinner took place, where Emerson, Agassiz, Holmes, Lowell, Greene, Norton, Whipple, and Dana all assembled in token of their regard. Emerson tried to persuade Longfellow to go to Greece to look after the Klephs, the supposed authors of Romaic poetry, so beautiful in both their poetic eyes. Finding this idea unsuccessful, he next turned to the Nile, to those vast statues which still stand awful and speechless witnesses of the past. He was interesting and eloquent, but Longfellow was not to be persuaded. It was an excellent picture of the two contrasting characters,--Longfellow, serene, considerate, with his plans arranged and his thought resting in his home and his children's requirements; Emerson, with eager, unresting thought, excited by the very idea of travel to plunge farther into the strange world where the thought of mankind was born. This lover of hospitalities was also king in his own domain. In the winter of 1872 Mr. Fields was invited to read a lecture in Concord, and an early invitation came bidding us to pass the time under his roof-tree. A few days before, a note was received, saying that Emerson himself was detained in Washington, and could not reach home for the occasion. His absence, however, was to make no difference about our visit. He should return at the earliest possible moment. The weather turned bitterly cold before we left Boston. It was certainly no less bleak when we reached Concord. Even the horse that carried us from the station to the house had on his winter coat. Roaring fires were blazing when we reached the house, which were only less warm than our welcome. After supper, just as the lecture hour was approaching, I suddenly heard the front door open. In another moment there was the dear sage himself ready with his welcome. He had lectured the previous evening in Washington, and left in the earliest possible train, coming through without pause to Concord. In spite of the snow and cold, he said he should walk to the lecture-room as soon as he had taken a cup of tea, and before the speaker had finished his opening sentence Mr. Emerson's welcome face appeared at the door. After the lecture the old house presented a cheerful countenance. Again the fire blazed, friends sent flowers, and Mr. Alcott joined in conversation. "Quite swayed out of his habit," said Emerson, "by the good cheer." The spirit of hospitality led the master of the house to be swayed also, for it was midnight before the talk was ended. It was wonderful to see how strong and cheerful and unwearied he appeared after his long journey. "I would not discourage this young acolyte," he said, turning to the lecturer of the evening and laughing, "by showing any sense of discomfort." When we arose the next morning the sun was just dawning over the level fields of snow. The air was fresh, the sky cloudless, the glory of the scene indescribable. The weight of weariness I had brought from the city was lifted by the scene before me, and by the influence of the great nature who was befriending us within the four walls. It was good to look upon the same landscape which was the source of his own inspirations. Emerson was already in the breakfast-room at eight o'clock. There was much talk about the lack of education in English literature among our young people. Emerson said a Boston man who usually appeared sufficiently well informed asked him if he had ever known Spinoza. He talked also of Walt Whitman and Coventry Patmore, and asked the last news of Allingham: when suddenly, as it seemed, the little horse came again, in his winter coat, and carried us to the station, and that day was done. There is a bit of description of Emerson as he appeared at a political meeting in his earlier years which I love to remember. The meeting was called in opposition to Daniel Webster, and Emerson was to address the people. It was in Cambridgeport. When he rose to speak he was greeted by hisses, long and full of hate; but a friend said, who saw him there, that he could think of nothing but dogs baying at the moon. He was serene as moonlight itself. The days came, alas! when desire must fail, and the end draw near. One morning he wrote from Concord: "I am grown so old that, though I can read from a paper, I am no longer fit for conversation, and dare not make visits. So we send you our thanks, and you shall not expect us." It has been a pleasure to rehearse in my memory these glimpses of Emerson, and, covered with imperfections as they are, I have found courage for welding them together in the thought that many minds must know him through his work who long to ask what he was like in his habit as he lived, and whose joy in their teacher can only be enhanced by such pictures as they can obtain of the righteousness and beauty of his personal behavior. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS AND UNPUBLISHED LETTERS Dr. Holmes's social nature, as expressed in conversation and in his books, drew him into communication with a very large number of persons. It cannot be said, however, in this age marked by altruisms, that he was altruistic; on the contrary, he loved himself, and made himself his prime study--but as a member of the human race, he had his own purposes to fulfill, his own self-appointed tasks, and he preferred to take men only on his own terms. He was filled with righteous indignation, in reading Carlyle, to find a passage where, hearing the door-bell ring one morning when he was very busy, he exclaimed that he was afraid it was "the man Emerson!" Yet Dr. Holmes was himself one of the most carefully guarded men, through his years of actual production, who ever lived and wrote. His wife absorbed her life in his, and mounted guard to make sure that interruption was impossible. Nevertheless, he was eminently a lover of men, or he could not have drawn them perpetually to his side. His writings were never aimed too high; his sole wish was to hit the heart, if possible; but if a shot hit the head also, he showed a childlike pride in the achievement. When the moment came to meet men face to face, what unrivaled gayety and good cheer possessed him! He was king of the dinner-table during a large part of the century. He loved to talk, but he was excited and quickened by the conversation of others, for reverence was never absent from his nature. How incomparable his gift of conversation was, it will be difficult, probably impossible, for any one to understand who had never known him. It was not that he was wiser, or wittier, or more profound, or more radiant with humor, than some other distinguished men; the shades of Macaulay, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, and Coleridge rise up before us from the past, and among his contemporaries we recall the sallies of Tom Appleton, the charm of Agassiz, of Cornelius Felton, and others of the Saturday Club; but with Dr. Holmes sunshine and gayety came into the room. It was not a determination to be cheerful or witty or profound; but it was a natural expression, like that of a child, sometimes overclouded and sometimes purely gay, but always open to the influences around him, and ready for "a good time." His power of self-excitement seemed inexhaustible. Given a dinner-table, with light and color, and somebody occasionally to throw the ball, his spirits would rise and coruscate astonishingly. He was not unaware if men whom he considered his superiors were present; he was sure to make them understand that he meant to sit at their feet and listen to them, even if his own excitement ran away with him. "I've talked too much," he often said, with a feeling of sincere penitence, as he rose from the table. "I wanted to hear what our guest had to say." But the wise guest, seizing the opportunity, usually led Dr. Holmes on until he forgot that he was not listening and replying. It was this sensitiveness, perhaps, which made his greatest charm--a power of sympathy which led him to understand what his companion would say if he should speak, and made it possible for him to talk in a measure for others as well as to express himself. Nothing, surely, could be more unusual and beautiful than such a gift, nor any more purely his own. His conversation reminded one of those beautiful _danseuses_ of the South upon whom every eye is fastened, by whom every sense is fascinated, but who dance up to their companions, and lead them out, and make them feel all the exhilaration of the occasion, while the leader alone possesses all the enchantment and all the inspiration. Of course conversation of this kind is an outgrowth of character. His reverence was one source of its inspiration, and a desire to do everything well which he undertook. He was a faithful friend and a keen appreciator; he disliked profoundly to hear the depreciation of others. His character was clear-cut and defined, like his small, erect figure; perfect of its kind, and possessed of great innate dignity, veiled only by delightful, incomparable gifts and charms. Our acquaintance and friendship with him lasted through many years, beginning with my husband's early association. I think their acquaintance began about the time when the doctor threatened to hang out a sign, "The smallest fevers gratefully received," and when the young publisher's literary enthusiasm led him to make some excuse for asking medical advice. The very first letter I find in Dr. Holmes's handwriting is the following amusing note accompanying the manuscript copy of "Astraea: The Balance of Illusions." The note possibly alludes to "Astraea" as the poem to be written. $100.00. MY DEAR SIR,--The above is an argument of great weight to all those who, like the late John Rogers, are surrounded by a numerous family. I will incubate this golden egg two days, and present you with the resulting chicken upon the third. Yours very truly, O. W. HOLMES. P. S. You will perceive that the last sentence is figurative, and implies that I shall watch and fast over your proposition for forty- eight hours. But I couldn't on any account be so sneaky as to get up and recite poor old "Hanover" over again. Oh, no! If anything, it must be of the "paullo majora." "Silvae sint consule dignae." Let us have a brand-new poem or none. Yours as on the preceding page. The next letters which I find as having passed between the two friends are dated in the year 1851, and it must have been about this period that their relations began to grow closer. In every succeeding year they became more and more intimate; and when death interrupted their communication, Dr. Holmes's untiring kindness to me continued to the end. Unfortunately for this record, the friendship was not maintained by correspondence. Common interests brought the two men together almost daily, long before Dr. Holmes bought a house in Charles Street within a few doors of our own, and such contiguity made correspondence to any great extent unnecessary. The removal from Montgomery Place, where he had lived some years, to Charles Street was a matter of great concern. He says in the "Autocrat" that "he had no idea until he pulled up his domestic establishment what an enormous quantity of roots he had been making during the years he had been planted there." Before announcing his intention, he came early one morning, with his friend Lothrop Motley, to inspect our house, which was similar to the one he thought of buying. I did not know his intention at the time, but I was delighted with his enthusiasm for the view over Charles River Bay, which in those days was wider and more beautiful than it can ever be again. Nothing would satisfy him but to go to the attic, which he declared, if it were his, he should make his study. Shortly after, the doctor took possession of his new house, but characteristically made no picturesque study in which to live. He passed many long days and evenings, even in summer, in a lower room opening on the street, which wore the air of a physician's office, and solaced his love for the picturesque by an occasional afternoon at his early home in Cambridge. Of a visit to this latter house I find the following description in my note-book: "Drove out in the afternoon and overtook Professor Holmes" (he liked to be called "Professor" then), "with his wife and son, who were all on their way to his old homestead in Cambridge. They asked us to go there with them, as it was only a few steps from where we were. The professor went to the small side door, and knocked with a fine brass knocker which had just been presented to him from the old Hancock House. It was delightful to see his pleasure in everything about the old house. There hung a portrait of his father, Abiel Holmes, at the age of thirty-one,--a beautiful face it was; there also a picture of the reverend doctor's first wife, fair, and perhaps a trifle coquettish, or what the professor called 'a little romantic;' the old chairs from France were still there; but no modern knickknacks interfered with the old-fashioned, quiet effect of the whole. He has taken for his writing-room the former parlor looking into the garden. He loves to work there, and he and his wife evidently spend a good deal of time at the old place. There is a legend that Washington spent three nights there, and that Dr. Bradshaw stepped from the door to make a prayer upon the departure of the troops from that point. Behind the house are some fine trees where we sat in the shade talking until the shadows grew long upon the grass." During the very last years of Dr. Holmes's life he used to talk often of the old Cambridge home and the days of his childhood there. "I can remember, when I shut my eyes," he said one day, "just as if it were yesterday, how beautiful it was looking out of the windows of my father's house, how bright and sunshiny the Common was in front, and the figures which came and went of persons familiar to me. One day some one said, 'There go Russell Sturgis and his bride;' and I looked, and saw what appeared to me then two radiant beings! All this came back to me as I read a volume of his reminiscences lately privately printed, not published, by his children." Dr. Holmes's out-of-door life was not limited, however, to his excursions to Cambridge. Early in the morning, sometimes before sunrise, standing at my bedroom window overlooking the bay, I have seen his tiny skiff moving quickly over the face of the quiet water; or, later, drifting down idly with the tide, as if his hour of exercise was over, and he was now dreamily floating homeward while he drank in the loveliness of the morning. Sometimes the waves were high and rough, and adventures were to be had; then every muscle was given a chance, and he would return to breakfast tired but refreshed. There was little to be learned about a skiff and its management which he did not acquire. He knew how many pounds a boat ought to weigh, and every detail respecting it. In the "Autocrat" he says,--"My present fleet on the Charles River consists of three rowboats: 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy 'dory' for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a 'skeleton' or 'shell' race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-foot sculls, alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out if he does not mind what he is about." The description is all delightful, and a little later on there is a reference to such a morning as I have already attempted to recall. "I dare not publicly name the rare joys," he says, "the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on some sweet June morning when the river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me, like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.... To take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean,--lying there, moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the desert could not seem more remote from life, --the cool breeze on one's forehead,--... why should I tell of these things!" Since the Autocrat has himself told the story of this episode so beautifully, no one else need attempt it. He drank in the very wine of life with the air of those summer mornings. Returning to some of Dr. Holmes's early letters, written before he moved to Charles Street, I find him addressing his correspondent from Pittsfield, where for seven years he enjoyed a country house in summer. "But," he said one day many years later, "a country house, you will remember, has been justly styled by Balzac '_une plaie ouverte_.' There is no end to the expenses it entails. I was very anxious to have a country retreat, and when my wife had a small legacy of about two thousand dollars a good many years ago, we thought we would put up a perfectly plain shelter with that money on a beautiful piece of ground we owned in Pittsfield. Well, the architect promised to put the house up for that. But it cost just twice as much, to begin with; that wasn't much! Then we had to build a barn; then we wanted a horse and carryall and wagon; so one thing led to another, and it was too far away for me to look after it, and at length, after seven years, we sold it. I couldn't bear to think of it or to speak of it for a long time. I loved the trees, and while our children were little it was a good place for them; but we had to sell it; and it was better in the end, although I felt lost without it for a great while." Here is a letter from Pittsfield which describes him there upon his arrival one year in spring:-- PITTSFIELD, June 13, 1852. MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--I have just received your very interesting note, and the proof which accompanied it. I don't know when I ever read anything about myself that struck me so piquantly as that story about the old gentleman. It is almost too good to be true, but you are not in the habit of quizzing. The trait is so naturelike and Dickens-like, no American--no living soul but a peppery, crotchety, good-hearted, mellow old John Bull--could have done such a thing. God bless him! Perhaps the verses are not much, and perhaps he is no great judge whether they are or not: but what a pleasant thing it is to win the hearty liking of any honest creature who is neither your relation nor compatriot, and who must fancy what pleases him for itself and nothing else! I will not say what pleasure I have received from Miss Mitford's kind words. I am going to sit down, and write her a letter with a good deal of myself in it, which I am quite sure she will read with indulgence, if not with gratification. If you see her, or write to her, be sure to let her know that she must make up her mind to such a letter as she will have to sit down to. I am afraid I have not much of interest for you. It is a fine thing to see one's trees and things growing, but not so much to tell of. I have been a week in the country now, and am writing at this moment amidst such a scintillation of fireflies and chorus of frogs as a cockney would cross the Atlantic to enjoy. During the past winter I have done nothing but lecture, having delivered between seventy and eighty all round the country from Maine to western New York, and even confronted the critical terrors of the great city that holds half a million and P---- M----. All this spring I have been working on microscopes, so that it is only within a few days I have really got hold of anything to read--to say nothing of writing, except for my lyceum audiences. I had a literary rencontre just before I came away, however, in the shape of a dinner at the Revere House with Griswold and Epes Sargent. What a curious creature Griswold is! He seems to me a kind of naturalist whose subjects are authors, whose memory is a perfect fauna of all flying, running, and creeping things that feed on ink. Epes has done mighty well with his red-edged school-book, which is a very creditable-looking volume, to say the least. It would be hard to tell how much you are missed among us. I really do not know who would make a greater blank if he were abstracted. As for myself, I have been all lost since you have been away in all that relates to literary matters, to say nothing of the almost daily aid, comfort, and refreshment I imbibed from your luminous presence. Do come among us as soon as you can; and having come, stay among your devoted friends, of whom count O. W. HOLMES. From this letter also we get a glimpse of the literary world of New England at that time, and an idea of his own occupations. By degrees, as the intimacy between the two friends and neighbors grew closer, we find the publisher asking his opinion of certain manuscripts. I have no means of knowing who was the author of the poems frankly described in the following note, [Footnote: The name of the writer has been sent to me kindly. He was George H. Miles, Professor of English Literature at St. Mary's (Catholic) College, Baltimore, Maryland.] but one can only wish that writers, especially young writers, could sometimes see themselves in such a glass--not darkly! 8 MONTGOMERY PLACE, July 24, 1857. MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--I return the three poems you sent me, having read them with much gratification. Each of them has its peculiar merits and defects, as it seems to me, but all show poetical feeling and artistic skill. "Sleep On!" is the freshest and most individual in its character. You will see my pencil comment at the end of it. "Inkerman" is comparatively slipshod and careless, though not without lyric fire and vivid force of description. "Raphael Sanzio" would deserve higher praise if it were not so closely imitative. In truth, all these poems have a genuine sound; they are full of poetical thought, and breathed out in softly modulated words. The music of "Sleep On!" is very sweet, and I have never seen heroic verse in which the rhyme was less obtrusive or the rhythm more diffluent. Still it would not be fair to speak in these terms of praise without pointing out the transparent imitativeness which is common to all these poems. "Inkerman" is a poetical Macaulay stewed. The whole flow of its verse and resonant passion of its narrative are borrowed from the "Lays of Ancient Rome." There are many crashing lines in it, and the story is rather dashingly told; but it is very inferior in polish, and even correctness, to both the other poems. I have marked some of its errata. "Raphael," good as it is, is nothing more than Browning browned over. Every turn of expression, and the whole animus, so to speak, is taken from those poetical monologues of his. _Call it_ an imitation, and it is excellent. The best of the three poems, then, is "Sleep On!" I see Keats in it, and one or both of the Brownings; but though the form is borrowed, the passion is genuine--the fire has passed along there, and the verse has followed before the ashes were quite cool. Talent, certainly; taste very fine for the melodies of language; deep, quiet sentiment. Genius? If beardless, yea; if in sable silvered,--and I think this cannot be a very young hand,--why, then ... we will suspend our opinion. Faithfully yours, O. W. HOLMES. I find several amusing personal letters of this period which are characteristic enough to be preserved. Among them is the following: 21 CHARLES STREET, July 6, 8:33 A. M. Barometer at 30-1/10. MY DEAR FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR,--Your most unexpected gift, which is not a mere token of remembrance, but a permanently valuable present, is making me happier every moment I look at it. It is so pleasant to be thought of by our friends when they have so much to draw their thoughts away from us; it is so pleasant, too, to find that they have cared enough about us to study our special tastes,--that you can see why your beautiful gift has a growing charm for me. Only Mrs. Holmes thinks it ought to be in the parlor among the things for show, and I think it ought to be in the study, where I can look at it at least once an hour every day of my life. I have observed some extraordinary movements of the index of the barometer during the discussions that ensued, which you may be interested enough to see my notes of. BAROMETER. _Mrs. H._ My dear, we shall of course keep this beautiful barometer in the parlor. _Fair._ _Dr. H._ Why, no, my clear; the study is the place. _Dry._ _Mrs. H._ I'm sure it ought to go in the parlor. It's too handsome for your old den. _Change._ _Dr. H._ I shall keep it in the study. _Very dry._ _Mrs. H._ I don't think that's fair. _Rain._ _Dr. H._ I'm sorry. Can't help it. _Very dry._ _Mrs. H._ It's--too--too--ba-a-ad. _Much rain._ _Dr. H._ (Music omitted.) 'Mid pleas-ures and paaal-a-a-c-es. _Set Fair._ _Mrs. H._ I _will_ have it! You horrid-- _Stormy._ You see what a wonderful instrument this is that you have given me. But, my dear Mr. Fields, while I watch its changes it will be a constant memorial of unchanging friendship; and while the dark hand of fate is traversing the whole range of mortal vicissitudes, the golden index of the kind affections shall stand always at SET FAIR. Yours ever, O. W. HOLMES. There are many notes also showing how the two friends played into each other's hands. This one is a sample:-- 21 CHARLES STREET, July 17, 1864. MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--_Can_ you tell me anything that will get this horrible old woman of the C---- California off from my shoulders? Do you know anything about this pestilent manuscript she raves about? This continent is not big enough for me and her together, and if she doesn't jump into the Pacific I shall have to leap into the Atlantic --I mean the original damp spot so called. Yours always, O. W. HOLMES. P. S. To avoid the necessity of the latter, I have written to her, cordially recommending suicide as adapted to her case. Surely there must have been something peculiarly exasperating about this applicant for literary honors, because Dr. Holmes erred, if at all, in the opposite direction. He was far more apt to write and to behave as the following note recommends: "Will you read this young lady's story, and let me know what you propose to do with it? A young woman of tender feelings, I think, and to be treated very kindly." Again: "Will it be too late for a few paragraphs about Forcey the Willson? If not, in what paper? And can you tell me anything? Will you do it yourself?" The number of these notes is legion, bringing every variety of form and subject and problem to his friend as editor or publisher, or for private advice. In one of them he says, "Please give me your grandpaternal council." But I have quoted enough upon this head to give an idea of the kind and busy brain not too deeply immersed in its own projects to have a tender regard for those of others. Meanwhile his own work was continually progressing. Lowell had already made him feel that he was the mainspring of the "Atlantic," which at the time of the war attained the height of its popularity, and achieved a position where it found no peer. The care which Dr. Holmes bestowed upon the finish of his work, the endless labor over its details, are almost inconceivable when we remember that "this power of taking pains," which Carlyle calls one of the attributes of genius, was combined with a gay, mercurial temperament ready to take fire at every chance spark. One Sunday afternoon in the sad spring of 1864, during the terrible days of the war, he came in to correct a poem. "I am ashamed," he said, "to be troubled by so slight a thing when battles are raging about us; but I have written:-- Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown. Now Columbus sailed from Palos, and I must change the verse before it is too late." This habit of always doing his best is surely one of the fine lessons of his life. It has given his prose a perfection which will carry it far down the shores of time. The letter sent during the last summer of his life to be read at the celebration of Bryant's birthday was a model of simplicity in the expression of feeling. It was brief, and at another time would have been written and revised in half a day; but in his enfeebled condition it was with the utmost difficulty that he could satisfy himself. He worked at it patiently day after day, until his labor became a pain; nevertheless, he continued, and won what he deserved--the applause of men practiced in his art who were there to listen and appreciate. Any record of Dr. Holmes's life would be imperfect which contained no mention of the pride and pleasure he felt in the Saturday Club. Throughout the forty years of its prime he was not only the most brilliant talker of that distinguished company, but he was also the most faithful attendant. He was seldom absent from the monthly dinners either in summer or in winter, and he lived to find himself at the head of the table where Agassiz, Longfellow, Emerson, and Lowell had in turn preceded him. Could a shorthand writer have been secretly present at those dinners, what a delightful book of wise talk and witty sayings would now lie open before us! Fragments of the good things were sometimes brought away, as loving parents bring sugar- plums from a feast to the children at home; but they are only fragments, and bear out but inefficiently the reputation which has run before them. The following pathetic incident, related on one of those occasions by Dr. Holmes, need not, however, be omitted:-- "Just forty years ago," he said one day, "I was whipped at school for a slight offense--whipped with a ferule right across my hands, so that I went home with a blue mark where the blood had settled, and for a fortnight my hands were stiff and swollen from the blows. The other day an old man called at my house and inquired for me. He was bent, and could just creep along. When he came in he said: 'How do you do, sir; do you recollect your old teacher Mr. ----?' I did, perfectly! He sat and talked awhile about indifferent subjects, but I saw something rising in his throat, and I knew it was that whipping. After a while he said, 'I came to ask your forgiveness for whipping you once when I was in anger; perhaps you have forgotten it, but I have not.' It had weighed upon his mind all these years! He must be rid of it before lying down to sleep peacefully." Speaking of dining at Taft's, an excellent eating-house at Point Shirley for fish and game, Dr. Holmes said: "The host himself is worth seeing. He is the one good _un_cooked thing at his table." He had been to Philadelphia with one of his lectures, but he did not have a free chance at any conversation afterward. "I did go to Philadelphia," he said, "with _one_ remark, but I brought it back unspoken. It struck in." Soon after Dr. Holmes's removal to Charles Street began a long series of early morning breakfasts at his publisher's house--feasts of the simplest kind. Many strangers came to Boston in those days, on literary or historical errands--men of tastes which brought them sooner or later to the "Old Corner" where the "Atlantic Monthly" was already a power. Of course one of the first pleasures sought for was an interview with Dr. Holmes, the fame of whose wit ripened early-- even before the days of the "Autocrat." It came about quite naturally, therefore, that they should gladly respond to any call which gave them the opportunity to listen to his conversation; and the eight-o'clock breakfast hour was chosen as being the only time the busy guests and host could readily call their own. Occasionally these breakfasts would take place as frequently as two or three times a week. The light of memory has a wondrous gift of heightening most of the pleasures of this life, but the conversation of those early hours was far more stimulating and inspiring than any memory of it can ever be. There were few men, except Poe, famous in American or English literature of that era who did not appear once at least. The unexpectedness of the company was a great charm; for a brief period Boston enjoyed a sense of cosmopolitanism, and found it possible, as it is really possible only in London, to bring together busy guests with full and eager brains who are not too familiar with one another's thought to make conversation an excitement and a source of development. Of Dr. Holmes's talk on these occasions it is impossible to give any satisfactory record. The simple conditions of his surroundings gave him a sense of perfect ease, and he spoke with the freedom which marked his nature. It was one of the charms by which he drew men to himself that he not only wore a holiday air of finding life full and interesting, but that he believed in freedom of speech for himself, and therefore wished to find it in others. This emancipation in expression did not extend altogether into the practical working of his life. Conventionalities had a strong hold upon him. He loved to avoid the great world when it was inconvenient, and to get a certain freedom outside of it; but once in the current, the manners of the Romans were his own. He reminded one sometimes of Hawthorne's saying that "in these days men are born in their clothes," although Dr. Holmes's conventions were more easily shuffled off than a casual observer would believe. Nothing could be farther from the ordinary idea of the romantic "man of genius" than was his well-trimmed little figure, and nothing more surprising and delightful than the way in which his childlikeness of nature would break out and assert itself. He declared one morning that he had discovered the happiest animal in creation-- "next to a poet, of course, if we may call him an animal; it is the acheron, the parasite of the honey-bee. And why? Because he attaches himself to the wing of the bee, is carried without exertion to the sweetest flowers, where the bee gathers the honey while the acheron eats it; and all the while the music of the bee attends him as he is borne through the air." He met Hawthorne for the first time, I think, in this informal way. Holmes had been speaking of Renan, whose books interested him. "A long while ago," he began, "I said Rome or Reason; now I am half inclined to put it, Rome or Renan." Then suddenly turning to Hawthorne, he said, "By the way, I would write a new novel if you were not in the field, Mr. Hawthorne." "I am not," said Hawthorne; "and I wish you would do it." There was a moment's silence. Holmes said quickly, "I wish you would come to the club oftener." "I should like to," said Hawthorne, "but I can't drink." "Neither can I." "Well, but I can't eat." "Nevertheless, we should like to see you." "But I can't talk, either." After which there was a shout of laughter. Then said Holmes, "You can listen, though; and I wish you would come." On another occasion, when Lowell was present, he was talking of changes in physical conditions. Dr. Holmes said, now, at the age of fifty-four, he could eat almost anything set before him, which he could by no means do formerly. Lowell found opportunity somehow at this point to laugh at Holmes for having lately said in print that "Beecher was a man whose thinking marrow was not corrugated by drink or embrowned by meerschaum." Lowell said _he_ had no "thinking marrow," and objected to such anatomical terms applied to the best part of a man. By and by Lowell came out of his critical mood, and said pleasantly, after some talk upon lyric poetry in general, "I like your lyrics, you know, Holmes." "Well," said Holmes, pleased, but speaking earnestly and with a childlike honesty, "but there is something too hopping about them. To tell the truth, nothing has injured my reputation so much as the too great praise which has been bestowed upon my 'windfalls.' After all, the value of a poet to the world is not so much his reputation as a writer of this or that poem, as the fact that the poet is known to be one who is rapt out of himself at times, and carried away into the region of the divine; it is known that the spirit has descended upon him, and taught him what he should speak." Holmes's admiration of Dickens's genius was very sincere. "He is the greatest of all of them," he loved to say. "Such fertility, such Shakespearean breadth,--there is enough of him; you feel as you do when you see the ocean." Speaking of the difficulty of being a good listener, he said that it was a terrible responsibility for him to listen to a story. He could never be rid of the feeling that he must remember accurately, or all would be lost. There was one story in particular, told by a friend remarkable as a raconteur, which tried him more than anything he knew in the world,--of the kind. He felt like one of the old Greek chorus with strophe and antistrophe, and it was a weight upon his mind lest he should not laugh properly at the end. I recall one day, when the subject of Walt Whitman's poetry was introduced, Dr. Holmes said he abhorred playing the critic, partly because he was not a good reader, --had read too cursorily and carelessly; but he thought the right thing had not been said about Walt Whitman. "His books sell largely, and there is a large audience of friends in Washington who praise and listen. Emerson believes in him; Lowell not at all; Longfellow finds some good in his 'yaup;' but the truth is, he is in an amorphous condition." Longfellow was once speaking of an address he had heard which he considered quite a perfect performance. "Yes--yes," said Dr. Holmes; "I don't doubt it was very good; but the speaker is such an unpleasant person! He is just one of those fungi that always grow upon universities." The following extract is from a brief diary: "Charles Sumner, Longfellow, Greene, Dr. Holmes, came to dine. The latter sparkled and coruscated as I have seldom heard him before. We are more than ever convinced that no one since Sydney Smith was ever so brilliant, so witty, spontaneous, naïf, and unfailing as he." In speaking of his own class in college he said: "There never was such vigor in any class before, it seems to me. Almost every member turns out sooner or later distinguished for something. We have had every grade of moral status from a criminal to a chief justice, and we never let any one of them drop. We keep hold of their hands year after year, and lift up the weak and failing ones till they are at last redeemed. Ah, there was one exception! Years ago we voted to cast a man out who had been a defaulter or who had committed some offense of that nature. The poor fellow sank down, and before the next year, when we repented of this decision, he had gone too far down and presently died. But we have kept all the rest! "Every fourth man in our class is a poet. Sam. Smith belongs to our class, who wrote 'My Country 't is of Thee.' Sam. Smith will live when Longfellow, Whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into oblivion.... "Queer man, ----. Looked ten years older than he was, like Caliban. Calibans look always ten years older than they are. A perfect potato of a man. If five hundred pieces of a man had been flung together from different points and stuck, they could not have been more awkwardly concocted than he was. "James Freeman Clarke was in our class. Ever read his history of the 'Ten Great Religions?' Very good book. Nobody knows how much Clarke is until he reads that book. How he surprises us from time to time. Came out well about 'bolting,' with regard to Butler the other day. Writes good verses, too,--not as good as mine, but good verses." ... Holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking. "Most men write too much. I would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes. But I have said 'Boston is the hub of the Universe;' I will rest upon that." He spoke also with great feeling of the women who came to him for literary advice and assistance. ----, he says, is his daughter in letters. He has only seen her once, but he has been a faithful correspondent and assistant to her. Sumner said some one had called ---- "an impediment in the path of science." What did he mean? "It means just this," said Holmes: "---- is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed that he might be carried home and his brains beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thought or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own." The talk went on for about four hours, when the company broke up. One evening the doctor came in after the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge. "I can't stop," he said. "I only came to read you my verses which I gave at the dinner to-day: they made such a queer impression! I didn't mean to go, but James Lowell was to preside, and sent me word that I really must be there, so I just wrote these off, and here they are. I don't know that I should have brought them in to read to you, but Hoar declares they are the best I have ever done." After some delay, and in the fading light of sunset reflected from the river, he read the well-known verses "Bill and Joe." He must have been still warm with the excitement of the first reading, for I can never forget the tenderness with which he recited the lines. They are still pleasant on the printed page, but to those who heard him they are divested of the passion of affection with which they were written and read. Late in life he said to a friend who was speaking of the warm friendships embalmed in his poetry, and which would help to make it endure: "I don't know how that may be; but the writing of these poems has been a passionate joy." The following amusing note gives a picture of Dr. Holmes in his most natural and social mood:-- 296 BEACON STREET, February 11, 1872. My dear Mr. Fields,--On Friday evening last I white-cravated myself, took a carriage, and found myself at your door at 8 of the clock P. M. A cautious female responded to my ring, and opened the chained portal about as far as a clam opens his shell to see what is going on in Cambridge Street, where he is waiting for a customer. Her first glance impressed her with the conviction that I was a burglar. The mild address with which I accosted her removed that impression, and I rose in the moral scale to the comparatively elevated position of what the unfeeling world calls a "sneak-thief." By dint, however, of soft words, and that look of ingenuous simplicity by which I am so well known to you and all my friends, I coaxed her into the belief that I was nothing worse than a rejected contributor, an autograph collector, an author with a volume of poems to dispose of, or other disagreeable but not dangerous character. She unfastened the chain, and I stood before her. "I calmed her fears, and she was calm And told" me how you and Mrs. F. had gone to New York, and how she knew nothing of any literary debauch that was to come off under your roof, but would go and call another unprotected female who knew the past, present, and future, and could tell me why this was thus, that I had been lured from my fireside by the ignis fatuus of a deceptive invitation. It was my turn to be afraid, alone in the house with two of the stronger sex; and I retired. On reaching home, I read my note and found it was Friday the 16th, not the 9th, I was invited for.... Dear Mr. Fields, I shall be very happy to come to your home on Friday evening, the 16th February, at 8 o'clock, to meet yourself and Mrs. Fields and hear Mr. James read his paper on Emerson. Always truly yours, O. W. HOLMES. On occasions of social dignity few men have ever surpassed Dr. Holmes in grace of compliment and perfection of easy ceremony. It was an acquired gift; perhaps it always must be. But as soon as human nature was given a chance to show itself, he was always eager, bringing an unsated store of intellectual curiosity to bear upon every new person or condition. He was generous to a fault in showing his own hand, moving with "infinite jest" over the current of his experiences until he could tempt his interlocutor out upon the same dangerous waters. If others were slow to embark, he nevertheless interested them in the history of his own voyage of life. Dr. Holmes had never known any very difficult hand to hand struggle with life, but he was quite satisfied with its lesser difficulties. He could laugh at his own want of courage, as he called a certain lack of love for adventure, and he could admire the daring of others. He was happy in the circle of his home affections, and never cared to stray faraway. He had a golden sense of comfort in his home life, an entire satisfaction, which made his rare absences a penance. Added to this was his tendency to asthma, from which he suffered often very severely. In a letter written in 1867 from Montreal, whither he had gone to obtain a copyright of one of his books, we can see how his domestic habits, as well as his asthma, made any long absence intolerable to him. MONTREAL, October 23, 1867. Dear Mr. Fields:... I am as comfortable here as I can be, but I have earned my money, for I have had a full share of my old trouble. Last night was better, and to-day I am going about the town. Miss Frothingham sent me a basket of black Hamburg grapes to-day, which were very grateful after the hotel tea and coffee and other 'pothecary's stuff. Don't talk to me about taverns! There is just one genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to be had in them,--namely, a boiled egg. The soups _taste_ pretty good sometimes, but their sources are involved in a darker mystery than that of the Nile. Omelettes taste as if they had been carried in the waiter's hat, or fried in an old boot. I ordered scrambled eggs one day. It must be that they had been scrambled for by _somebody_, but who--who in the possession of a sound reason _could_ have scrambled for what I had set before me under that name? Butter! I am thinking just now of those exquisite little pellets I have so often seen at your table, and wondering why the taverns _always_ keep it until it is old. Fool that I am! As if the taverns did not know that if it was good it would be eaten, which is not what they want. Then the waiters, with their napkins,--what don't they do with those napkins! Mention any one thing of which you think you can say with truth, "_That_ they do not do."... I have a really fine parlor, but every time I enter it I perceive that "Still, sad 'odor' of humanity" which clings to it from my predecessor. Mr. Hogan got home yesterday, I believe. I saw him for the first time to-day. He was civil--they all are civil. I have no fault to find except with taverns here and pretty much everywhere. Every six months a tavern should burn to the ground, with all its traps, its "properties," its beds and pots and kettles, and start afresh from its ashes like John Phoenix-Squibob. No; give me home, or a home like mine, where all is clean and sweet, where coffee has preëxisted in the berry, and tea has still faint recollections of the pigtails that dangled about the plant from which it was picked, where butter has not the prevailing character which Pope assigned to Denham, where soup could look you in the face if it had "eyes" (which it has not), and where the comely Anne or the gracious Margaret takes the place of these napkin-bearing animals. Enough! But I have been forlorn and ailing and fastidious--but I am feeling a little better, and can talk about it. I had some ugly nights tell you; but I am writing in good spirits, as you see. I have written once before to Low, as I think I told you, and on the 25th mean to go to a notary with Mr. Dawson, as he tells me it is the right thing to do. Yours always, O. W. H. P. S. Made a pretty good dinner, after all; but better a hash at home than a roast with strangers. With much the same experience of asthma as a result, he visited Princeton three or four years later, and wrote after his return:-- 296 BEACON STREET, August 24, 1871. My dear Fields:... I only sat up one whole night, it is true, which was a great improvement on Montreal; but I do not feel right yet, and it is quite uncertain whether I shall be in a condition to enjoy the club by Saturday. So if I come, all the better for me; and if I don't come, you can say that you have in your realm at Parker's not "five hundred as good as he," but a score or so that will serve your turn. I cut the first leaves I wanted to meddle with in the last "Atlantic" for No. IX. of the "Whispering Gallery," and took it all down like an oyster in the height of the season. It is captivating, like all the rest. Why don't you make a book as big as Allibone's out of your store of unparalleled personal recollections? It seems too bad to keep them for posterity. When I think of your bequeathing them for the sole benefit of people that are unborn, I want to cry out with Horace:-- "Eheu--_Postume, Postume!_" Always yours, O. W. HOLMES. Again, three years later, he writes: "I hope you are reasonably careful of yourself during this cold weather. Look out! A hot lecture- room, a cold ride, the best-chamber sheets like slices of cucumber, and one gives one's friends the trouble of writing an obituary, when he might just as well have lived and written theirs. We had a grand club last Saturday. Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, Adams, Tom Appleton (just home a few weeks ago), and Norton (who has been sick a good while) were there, and lots of others, and Lord Hought on as a guest. You ought to have been there; it was the best club for a long time." The following note, written in 1873, shows how closely Dr. Holmes kept the growth of the club in mind, and his eagerness to bring into it the distinguished intellectual life of Boston. 296 BEACON STREET, February 21, 1873. My dear Mr. Fields,--I doubt whether I shall feel well enough to go to the club to-morrow, as I am somewhat feverish and sore-throaty to-day, though I must crawl out to my lecture. Mr. Parkman and Professor Wolcott Gibbs are to be voted for, you know. President Eliot, who nominated Professor Gibbs, will, I suppose, urge his claims if he thinks it necessary, or see that some one does it. As for Mr. Francis Parkman, proposed by myself, I suppose his reputation is too solidly fixed as a scholar and a writer to need any words from me or others of his friends who may be present. He has been a great sufferer from infirmities which do not prevent him from being very good company, and which I have thought the good company he would find at the Saturday Club would perhaps enable him to forget for a while more readily. It has seemed to me so clear that he ought to belong to the club, if he were inclined to join it, that I should have nominated him long ago had I not labored under the impression that he must have been previously proposed.... Yours very truly, O. W. HOLMES. For many years it seemed that time stood still with the Autocrat. His happy home and his cheerful temper appeared to stay the hand of the destroyer. At last a long illness fell upon his wife; and after her death, when his only daughter, who had gone to keep her father's house, was suddenly taken from his side, the shadows of age gathered about him; then we learned that he was indeed an old man. For the few years that remained to him before his summons came he accepted the lot of age with extraordinary good cheer. His hearing became very imperfect. "I remind myself sometimes," he said, "of those verses I wrote some years ago. I wonder if you would remember them! I called the poem 'The Archbishop and Gil Bias: A Modernized Version.'" He then repeated with great humor and pathos a few of the lines:-- "_Can you read as once you used to?_ Well, the printing is so bad, No young folks' eyes can read it like the books that once we had. _Are you quite as quick of hearing?_ Please to say that once again. _Don't I use plain words, your Reverence?_ Yes, I often use a cane." "As to my sight," he continued, "I have known for some years that I have cataracts slowly coming over my eyes; but they increase so very slowly that I often wonder which will win the race first--the cataracts or death." He was most carefully watched over during the succeeding years of disability by his distinguished son and his daughter-in-law, of whose talent he was sincerely proud. Nevertheless, he suffered of necessity many lonely hours, in spite of all that devotion could do for him. Such a wife and such a loving daughter could not pass from his side and find their places filled. But he did not "mope," as he wrote me one day, "I am too busy for that;" or, he might have said truthfully, too well sustained. His habit of carrying himself with an air of kindliness toward all, and of enjoyment in the opportunities still left him, was very beautiful and unusual. "If the Lord thinks it best for me to stay until I tumble to pieces, I'm willing--I'm willing," he said. He was always capable of amusing his friends on the subject, as in the former days when Old Age came and offered him "a cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of overshoes. 'No; much obliged to you,' said I.... So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way, and walked out alone; got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with lumbago, and had time to think over the whole matter." Who that heard him can ever forget the exquisite reading of "The Last Leaf" at the Longfellow memorial meeting. The pathos of it was then understood for the first time. The poem had become an expression of his later self, and it was given with a personal significance which touched the hearts of all his hearers. His wit has left the world sparkling with the shafts it has let fly on every side. They are taken up continually and sent out again both by those who heard him utter them and by those who repeat them, unmindful of their origin. His attention was turned on some occasion to a young aspirant for artistic fame. He referred to the youthful person later as "one who performed a little on the lead pencil." He said to me one day, "I've sometimes made new words. In 'Elsie Venner' I made the word 'chrysocracy,' thinking it would take its place; but it didn't: 'plutocracy,' meaning the same thing, was adopted instead. Oddly enough, I had a letter from a man to-day, asking if I did not make the word 'anaesthesia,' which I certainly did." In the sick-room he was always a welcome guest. A careful maid once asked if he minded climbing two flights of stairs to see his friend. "I laughed when she asked me," he said; "for I shall have to climb a good many more than that before I see the angels." "I gave two dinners to two parties of old gentlemen just before I left town," he said, the year before his death; and then added, "our baby was seventy-three!" His letters in the later years were full of feeling. He says in one of them, written on a Christmas day, speaking of an old friend: "How many delightful hours the photographs bring back to me!... Under his roof I have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. But for his hospitality I should never have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom I can now recall as I saw them, talked with them, heard them, in that pleasant library, that most lively and agreeable dining-room. How could it be otherwise, with such guests as he entertained, and with his own unflagging vivacity and his admirable social gifts? Let me live in happy recollections to-day." Only two years before Dr. Holmes's death he said in a letter received by me in Italy: "But for this troublesome cold, which has so much better come out than I feared, I have been doing well enough--kept busy with letters and dictation of my uneventful history. It is strange how forgotten events and persons start out of the blank oblivion in which they seem to have been engulfed, as I fix my memory steadily on the past. I find it very easy, even fascinating, to call up the incidents, trivial oftentimes, but having for me a significance of their own, which lie in my past track like the broken toys of childhood. It seems as if the past was for each of us a great collection of negatives laid away, from which we can take positive pictures when we will--from many of them, that is; for only the Recording Angel can reproduce the pictures of every instant of our lives from these same negatives, of which he must have an infinite collection, with which sooner or later we are liable to be confronted." In another letter from Beverly Farms, when he was eighty-three, he says:-- Where this will find you, in a geographical point of view, I do not know; but I know your heart will be in its right place, and accept kindly the few barren words this sheet holds for you. Yes; barren of incident, of news of all sorts, but yet having a certain flavor of Boston, of Cape Ann, and, above all, of dear old remembrances, the suggestion of any one of which is as good as a page of any common letter. So, whatever I write will carry the fragrance of home with it, and pay you for the three minutes it costs you to read it.... I find great delight in talking over cathedrals and pictures and English scenery, and all the sights my traveling friends have been looking at, with Mrs. Bell. It seems to me that she knew them all beforehand, so that she was journeying all the time among reminiscences which were hardly distinguishable from realities. My recollections are to those of other people around me who call themselves old,--the sexagenarians, for instance,--something like what a cellar is to the ground-floor of a house. The young people in the upper stories (American spelling, _story_) go down to the basement in their inquiries, and think they have got to the bottom; but I go down another flight of steps, and find myself below the surface of the earth, as are the bodies of most of my contemporaries. As to health, I am doing tolerably well. I have just come in from a moderate walk in which I acquitted myself creditably. I take two-hour drives in the afternoon, in the open or close carriage, according to the weather; but I do not pretend to do much visiting, and I avoid all excursions when people go to have what they call a "good time." I am reading right and left--whatever turns up, but especially re- reading old books. Two new volumes of Dr. Johnson's letters have furnished me part of my reading. As for writing, when my secretary-- Miss Gaudelet--comes back, I shall resume my dictation. No literary work ever seemed to me easier or more agreeable than living over my past life, and putting it on record as well as I could. If anybody should ever care to write a sketch or memoir of my life, these notes would help him mightily. My friends too might enjoy them--if I do not have the misfortune to outlive them all. With affectionate regards and all sweet messages to Miss Jewett. Always your friend, O. W. HOLMES. This letter gives a very good picture of his life to the end. Few incidents occurred to break the even current of the order he describes. He still dined out occasionally, and I find a few reminiscences of his delightful talk which linger with me. "I've several things bothering me," he confessed one day. "First, I am anxious to find a suitable inscription for a child's porringer. I never wrote a poem to a child, I believe. I love children dearly; I always want to stop them on the street: but I have never written about them; nor have I ever written much about women. I don't know why, but I _care_ too much to do the Tom Moore style of thing." He was eager to frame a letter to President Eliot, and also one to President Cleveland, in order to advance some one in need of help; but the grasshopper had become a burden. "I feel such things now when I have to do them," he said; "nevertheless, when young men and maidens come skipping in with an air of saying, 'Please give me your autograph, and be quick about it; there may not be much time left,' I want to say, 'Take care, young folks; I may be dancing over your graves yet!'" There was a clock which stood upon his table, the bequest of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow. This remembrance from his dying friend was one of his most valued possessions. He loved to talk of Dr. Bigelow, and in a published discourse he has said of him: "He read men and women as great scholars read books. He took life at first hand, and not filtered through alphabets....He would get what he wanted out of a book as dexterously as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its shell.... He handled his rapidly acquired knowledge so like an adept in book-lore that one might have thought he was born in an alcove and cradled on a book-shelf." Dr. Bigelow was so frequently in Dr. Holmes's thought in the latter days that one can hardly give a picture of his later life without rehearsing something of his expression with regard to him. He says further: "Dr. Bigelow was unquestionably a man of true genius.... Inexorable determination to have the truth, if nature could be forced to yield it, characterized his powerful intelligence." The doctor would often look up when the little clock was striking musically on his writing-table, and say, "It always reminds me tenderly of my dead friend." When the time came that writing was a burden, and indeed, except for limited periods, impossible, Dr. Holmes lived more and more in his affections. Often, as I entered his room on a dull afternoon, he would say, "Ah, now let's sit up by the fire and talk of all our friends." Then would begin a series of opinions, witty and tender by turns, and interspersed with tears and smiles. On one such occasion he said: "There are very few modern hymns which have the old ring of saintliness in them. Sometimes when I am disinclined to listen to the preacher at church, I turn to the hymn-book, and when one strikes my eye, I cover the name at the bottom, and guess. It is almost invariably Watts or Wesley; after those, there are very few which are good for much. "'Calm on the listening ear of night' is a fine hymn, but even that lacks the virility of the old saints." Our minds that day were full of one thought,--the death of Phillips Brooks,--and when, a moment later, he said:-- "'Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood'-- there is nothing like that," it seemed quite natural that his voice should break and the tears come as he added, without mentioning the bishop's name, "How hard it is to think he is gone! I don't like to feel that I must live without him." His days grew gradually shorter, as the days of late October dwindle into golden noons. During the few hours when he was at his best he was wonderfully active, driving to his publisher's or to make an occasional visit, besides a daily walk. If to those who saw him continually the circle of his subjects of conversation began to appear somewhat circumscribed, upon those who met him only occasionally the old fascination still exerted itself. He set his door wide open when he made up his mind to receive and converse with any human being. There is nothing left to say of him which he did not cheerfully and truthfully say of himself. "I am intensely interested in my own personality," he began one day; "but we are all interesting to ourselves, or ought to be. I _know_ I am, and I see why. We take, as it were, a mold of our own thought. Now let us compare it with the mold of another man on the same subject. His mold is either too large or too small, or the veins and reticulations are altogether different. No one mold fits another man's thought. It is our own, and as such has especial interest and value." It was really amazing to see his intellectual vigor in society even at this late period. When the conditions were satisfactory, at a small luncheon for instance, he would soon grow warm with excitement, his eyes would glow, and he would talk with his accustomed fire. He was like an old war-horse hearing the trumpet that called to battle. His activity and versatility of mind could still distance many a clever man in the prime of life. He responded in the most generous way to the expectations of strangers and foreigners who came to visit him as if on pilgrimage. He always found some entertainment for them. Sometimes he would read them one of his poems; sometimes he would have a pretty scientific toy for their amusement; or again he would write his autograph in a volume of his works for them to carry away in remembrance. Such guests could not help feeling that they had seen more than the Dr. Holmes of their imagination. He entered into their curiosity regarding himself with such charming sympathy that they came away thinking the half-hour they had passed in his study was one always to be remembered. As I think of those latest days, I recall what he himself wrote once, long ago, about old age: "One that remains walking," he says, "while others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little night-lamp flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not upset and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That's what I call an old man." "Now," said the professor, "you don't mean to tell me that I have got to that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time!" Dr. Holmes left this world, which he had found pleasant and had filled with pleasantness for others, after an illness that was happily brief. He passed, in the words of that great physician, Sir Thomas Browne, "in drowsy approaches of sleep;... believing with those resolved Christians who, looking on the death of this world but as a nativity of another, do contentedly submit unto the common necessity, and envy not Enoch or Elias." DAYS WITH MRS. STOWE In recalling Mrs. Stowe's life, with the remembrance of what she has been to her friends, to her country, and to the world, I am overborne by the sense of a soul instinct from its early consciousness with power working in her beyond her own thought or knowledge or will. Her attitude seemed by nature to be that of contemplation. Her heart was like a burning coal laid upon the altar of humanity; and when she stole up, as it were, in the night and laid it down for the slave with tears and supplications, it awakened neither alarm nor wonder in her spirit that in the morning she saw a bright fire burning there and lighting the whole earth. Mrs. Stowe had already passed through this great experience when I saw her for the first time in Italy. It was only a few weeks before the war against slavery was openly declared, and she was like one who having "done all" must now "stand." This year indeed was one of the happiest of her life. She did not yet see the terrible feet of War already close upon us, yet she was convinced that the end of slavery was at hand. She was released at last from the toils which poverty had laid upon her overtasked body. Her children were with her, and she was enjoying, as few persons know how to enjoy, the loveliness of Italy. She delighted, too, in the congenial society of Mr. and Mrs. Browning and the agreeable friends who were that winter grouped around them. After her long trial and her years of suffering she was to have "her day" in the world of beauty and love which lay about her. In one of her early letters to Georgiana May, in 1833, she says, speaking of some relaxation which had come to her friend: "How good it would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and precludes thought. Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease. How much good it might do me to be where I could not but be thoughtless." This letter was written when she was twenty-two years old, and there had never been any respite in her life until those sweet Italian days of the winter of 1859 and '60. It was only about a year later than the date of the above letter when the subject of slavery was first brought under her own observation during a brief visit in Kentucky. Her father had received a call in Boston, where he had been preaching for six years, to go to Cincinnati, which at that period was considered the far West and almost like banishment; but the call was one not to be refused; the need of such preaching as Dr. Beecher's being greatly felt at that distant post. About a year after their arrival an invitation came to Harriet to cross the river and to see something of Kentucky in company with a young friend. She found herself on the estate which was later known as Colonel Shelby's in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Her companion said later, in recalling their experience: "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened, but sat most of the time as though abstracted in thought. When the negroes did funny things and cut up capers, she did not seem to pay the slightest attention to them. Afterwards, however, in reading Uncle Tom, I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the utmost fidelity, and knew at once where the material for that part of the story had been gathered." To show how completely her "style" was herself, there is a passage from one of her early letters describing her experience at Niagara which burns with her own fire. "Let me tell you," she says, "if I can, what is unutterable.... I did not once think if it were high or low; whether it roared or didn't roar.... My mind whirled off, it seemed to me, in a new strange world.... That rainbow, breaking out, trembling, fading, and again coming like a beautiful spirit walking the waters. Oh, it is lovelier than it is great; it is like the Mind that made it; great, but so veiled in beauty that we gaze without terror. I felt as if I could have gone over with the waters; it would be so beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it. I felt the rock tremble under me with a sort of joy. I was so maddened I could have gone, too, if that had gone." The first wife of Mr. Stowe was her most intimate friend, and his suffering at her death moved her to intense pity, which finally ripened into love. At the last moment of her maidenhood she wrote again to Georgiana May: "In about half an hour more your old friend, companion, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hatty Beecher and change to nobody knows who. My dear, you are engaged and pledged in a year or two to encounter a similar fate, and do you wish to know how you shall feel? Well, my dear, I have been dreading and dreading the time, and lying awake all last week wondering how I should live through this overwhelming crisis, and lo! it has come and I feel _nothing at all_." Her marriage with Professor Stowe was a congenial one. He discovered very early what her career must be and wrote to her once during a brief absence: "God has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God?" His admiration for her was perfect, a feeling which she reciprocated in a somewhat different form. "I did not know," she once wrote to him, "until I came away how much I was dependent upon you for information. There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband, I should certainly fall in love with you." She can speak to him with an openness which she uses to no one else; she says, and in this sentence she gives the secret of much which has appeared inexplicable to the world: "One thing more in regard to myself. The absence and wandering of mind and forgetfulness that so often vexes you is a physical infirmity with me. It is the failing of a mind not calculated to endure a great pressure of care, and so much do I feel the pressure I am under, so much is my mind darkened and troubled by care that life seriously holds out few allurements,--only my children." She used to say laughingly sometimes in later years, "My brother Henry and I are something like anacondas: we have our winter; when we are tired we curl up and disappear, within ourselves, as it were; nobody can get anything out of us; we move about and attend to our affairs and appear like other folks perhaps, but we are not there." The trouble was that no one could be prepared for these vanishings, not even herself. Perhaps a dinner company of invited guests were eagerly listening to her conversation, when at some suggestion of a new train of ideas, she would suddenly become silent and hardly speak again. Occasionally at a reception she would wander away, only to be found strolling about in the conservatory, if there were one, or quietly observant in some coign of vantage where she was not likely to be disturbed. My first meeting with Mrs. Stowe found her in one of her absent moods. We were in Florence, and she was delighting herself in the fascinations of that lovely city. Not alone every day but every second as it passed was full of eager interest to her. She could say with Thoreau, "I moments live who lived but years." We had both been invited to a large reception, on a certain evening, in one of the old palaces on the Arno. There were music and dancing, and there were lively groups of ladies and gentlemen strolling from room to room, contrasting somewhat strangely in their gayety with the solemn pictures hanging on the walls, and a sense of shadowy presence which seems to haunt those dusky interiors. An odd discrepancy between the modern company and the surroundings, a weird mingling of the past and the present, made any apparition appear possible, and left room only for a faint thrill of surprise when a voice by my side said, "There is Mrs. Stowe." In a moment she approached and I was presented to her, and after a brief pause she passed on. All this was natural enough, but a wave of intense disappointment swept over me. Why had I found no words to express or even indicate the feeling that had choked me? Was the fault mine? Oh, yes, I said to myself, for I could not conceive it to be otherwise, and I looked upon my opportunity, the gift of the gods, as utterly and forever wasted. I was depressed and sorrowing over the vanishing of a presence I might perhaps never meet again, and no glamour of light, or music or pictures or friendly voices could recall any pleasure to my heart. Meanwhile, the unconscious object of all this disturbance was strolling quietly along, leaning on the arm of a friend, hardly ever speaking, followed by a group of traveling companions, and entirely absorbed in the gay scene around her. She was a small woman; and her pretty curling hair and far-away dreaming eyes, and her way of becoming occupied in what interested her until she forgot everything else for the time, all these I first began to see and understand as I gazed after her retreating figure. Mrs. Stowe's personal appearance has received scant justice and no mercy at the hand of the photographer. She says herself, during her triumphal visit to England after the publication of "Uncle Tom:" "The general topic of remark on meeting me seems to be that I am not so bad looking as they were afraid I was; and I do assure you, when I have seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been lost in wondering imagination at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's guideboard which showed 'where the road did not go.'" I remember once accompanying her to a reception at a well-known house in Boston, where, before the evening was over, the hostess drew me aside, saying, "Why did you never tell me that Mrs. Stowe was beautiful?" And indeed, when I observed her in the full ardor of conversation, with her heightened color, her eyes shining and awake, but filled with great softness, her abundant curling hair rippling naturally about her head and falling a little at the sides (as in the portrait by Richmond), I quite agreed with the lady of the house. Nor was that the first time her beauty had been revealed to me, but she was seldom seen to be beautiful by the great world, and the pleasure of this recognition was very great to those who loved her. She was never afflicted with a personal consciousness of her reputation, nor was she trammeled by it. The sense that a great work had been accomplished through her only made her more humble, and her shy, absent-minded ways were continually throwing her admirers into confusion. Late in life (when her failing powers made it impossible for her to speak as one living in a world which she seemed to have left far behind) she was accosted, I was told, in the garden of her country retreat, in the twilight one evening, by a good old retired sea captain who was her neighbor for the time. "When I was younger," said he respectfully, holding his hat in his hand while he spoke, "I read with a great deal of satisfaction and instruction 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' The story impressed me very much, and I am happy to shake hands with you, Mrs. Stowe, who wrote it." "I did not write it," answered the white-haired old lady gently, as she shook the captain's hand. "You didn't?" he ejaculated in amazement. "Why, who did, then?" "God wrote it," she replied simply. "I merely did his dictation." "Amen," said the captain reverently, as he walked thoughtfully away. This was the expression in age of what lay at the foundation of her life. She always spoke and behaved as if she recognized herself to be an instrument breathed upon by the Divine Spirit. When we consider how this idea absorbed her to the prejudice of what appeared to others a wholesome exercise of human will and judgment, it is not wonderful that the world was offended when she once made conclusions contrary to the opinion of the public, and thought best to publish them. Mrs. Stowe was a delightful talker. She loved to gather a small circle of friends around a fireside, when she easily took the lead in fun and story telling. This was her own ground, and upon it she was not to be outdone. "Let me put my feet upon the fender," she would say, "and I can talk till all is blue." It appeared to those who listened most frequently to her conversation that a large part of the charm of her tales was often lost in the writing down; yet with all her unusual powers she was an excellent listener herself. Her natural modesty was such that she took keen pleasure in gathering fresh thought and inspiration from the conversation of others. Nor did the universal homage she received from high and low leave any unworthy impression upon her self-esteem. She was grateful and pleased and humble, and the only visible effect produced upon her was the heightened pleasure she received from the opportunities of knowing men and women who excited her love and admiration. Her name was a kind of sacred talisman, especially in New and Old England. It was a banner which had led men to battle against slavery. Therefore it was often a cause of surprise and social embarrassment when the bearer of this name proved to be sometimes too modest, and sometimes too absent-minded, to remember that anything was expected of her or anything arranged for her special entertainment. She was utterly taken by surprise once in a foreign city by being invited out to breakfast, as she supposed privately, and finding herself suddenly in a large hall, upon a raised platform crowded with local dignitaries, and greeted before she could get her breath by a chorus of children's voices singing an anthem in her honor, especially composed for the occasion. Her love of fun was greatly excited by this unexpected situation, and she used to relate the anecdote, with details about her unprepared condition which were irresistibly amusing. In a letter home she refers incidentally to the large breakfast party and says: "I could not help wondering if old mother Scotland had put into 'the father of all the tea-kettles' two thousand teaspoonfuls of tea for the company and one for the teapot, as is our good Yankee custom." The tributes paid to her were ceaseless, and her house in Hartford testifies to many of them. "There," as her friend and neighbor the Reverend Joseph Twichell wrote once in a brief sketch of her--a sketch full of deep feeling--"there, an observant stranger would soon discover whose house he was in, and be reminded of the world-wide distinction her genius has won and of that great service of humanity with which her name is forever identified. He would, for instance, remark on its pedestal in the bow-window a beautiful bronze statuette by Cumberworth called 'The African Woman of the Fountain,' and on an easel in the back parlor a lovely engraving of the late Duchess of Sutherland and her daughter--a gift from her son, the present Duke of that name, subscribed 'Mrs. Stowe, with the Duke of Sutherland's kind regards, 1869.' Should he look into a low oaken case standing in the hall, he would find there the twenty-six folio volumes of the 'Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women in Great Britain and Ireland to their Sisters in the United States of America' pleading the cause of the slave, and signed with over half a million names, which was delivered to Mrs. Stowe in person at a notable gathering at Stafford House, in England, in 1853; and with it similar addresses from the citizens of Leeds, of Glasgow, and Edinburgh, presented at about the same time. The house, indeed, is a treasury of such relics, testimonials of reverence and regard, trophies of renown from many lands, enough to furnish a museum, all of the highest historic interest and value.... There are relics, too, of more private sort; for example, a smooth stone of two or three pounds weight, and a sketch or study of it by Ruskin made at a hotel on Lake Neuchâtel, where he and Mrs. Stowe chanced to meet.... One of her most prized possessions is a gold chain of ten links, which, on occasion of the gathering at Stafford House that has been referred to, the Duchess of Sutherland took from her own arm and clasped upon Mrs. Stowe's, saying, 'This is the memorial of a chain which we trust will soon be broken.' On several of the ten links were engraved the great dates in the annals of emancipation in England; and the hope was expressed that she would live to add to them other dates of like import in the progress of liberty this side the Atlantic. That was in 1853. Twelve years later every link had its inscription, and the record was complete." It was my good fortune to be in Mrs. Stowe's company once in Rome when she came unexpectedly face to face with an exhibition of the general feeling of reverence and gratitude towards herself. We had gone together to the rooms of the brothers Castellani, the world-famous workers in gold. The collection of antique gems and the beautiful reproductions of them were new to us. Mrs. Stowe was full of enthusiasm, and we lingered long over the wonderful things which the brothers brought forward to show. Among them was the head of an Egyptian slave carved in black onyx. It was an admirable work of art, and while we were enjoying it one of them said to Mrs. Stowe, "Madam, we know what you have been to the poor slave. We ourselves are but poor slaves still in Italy: you feel for us; will you keep this gem as a slight recognition of what you have done?" She took the jewel in silence; but when we looked for some response, her eyes were filled with tears, and it was impossible for her to speak. This feeling often found less refined manifestation. One day when she was shopping in Boston, after making her purchase she gave her name in a low but distinct voice to the clerk who was to send the goods. "Dear me," said a lively woman, audibly by my side, "I should be ashamed to give that name; I should as soon think of giving Angel Gabriel!" Of course we were all greatly amused by this sally, but Mrs. Stowe smiled quietly according to her wont and passed on. Great human tenderness was one of her chief characteristics. Although she was a reformer by nature there was no sternness in her composition. Forgetfulness of others there was certainly sometimes, arising from her hopeless absent-mindedness and the preoccupation consequent upon her work; but her whole life was swayed and ruled by her affections. Her love was a sheet anchor which held in the stormiest seas. Of her household devotion it is impossible to speak fitly; but there are few natures that can be said to have been more dependent upon human love. Her tender ways were inexpressibly touching. Early in life she had written to her brother while hardly more than a girl: "I wish I could bring myself to feel perfectly indifferent to the opinions of others. I believe there never was a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of those around than I am. This desire to be loved forms, I fear, the great motive for all my actions." Such a nature was quite unlikely to play the part of a famous woman of the world with any success, and she did not attempt it. She was always reaching out to the friends of her adoption and drawing them closer to her side. In those days of our early acquaintance in Italy we had ample opportunity to discover the affectionate qualities of her character. If my first interview was a disappointment, her second greeting a few days later had the warmth of old acquaintance. From that moment we (my husband and I) were continually meeting her, in galleries and out of them; at Bellosguardo, which Hawthorne had just quitted, but where Isa Blagden and Frances Power Cobbe still lingered, or in Florence itself with Francesca Alexander and her family; at the Trollopes', or elsewhere, while our evenings were commonly spent in each other's apartments. As the hours of our European play-days drew near the end, she began to lay plans for returning home in the steamer with those who had grown dear to her, and in one of her notes of that period she wrote to me:-- "On the strength of having heard that you were going home in the Europa June 16th, we also have engaged passage therein for that time, and hope that we shall not be disappointed.... It must be true, we can't have it otherwise.... Our Southern Italy trip was a glory--it was a rose--a nightingale--all, in short, that one ever dreams; but alas! it is over." It was a delightful voyage homeward in every sense. At that period a voyage was no little matter of six days, but a good fourteen days of sitting together on deck in pleasant summer weather, and having time enough and to spare. Hawthorne and his family also concluded to join the party. Mrs. Hawthorne, who was always the romancer in conversation, filled the evening hours by weaving magic webs of her fancies, until we looked upon her as a second Scheherazade, and the day the head was to be cut off was the day we should come to shore. "Oh," said Hawthorne, "I wish we might never get there." But the good ship moved steadily as fate. Meanwhile, Mrs. Stowe often took her turn at entertaining the little group. She was seldom tired of relating stories of New England life and her early experiences. When the ship came to shore, Mrs. Stowe and her daughters went at once to Andover, where Professor Stowe had remained at his post during their long absence in Europe. She went also with equal directness to her writing-desk; and though there are seldom any dates upon her letters, the following note must have been written shortly after her return:-- MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--"Agnes of Sorrento" was conceived on the spot,--a spontaneous tribute to the exceeding loveliness and beauty of all things there. One bright evening, as I was entering the old gateway, I saw a beautiful young girl sitting in its shadow selling oranges. She was my Agnes. Walking that same evening through the sombre depths of the gorge, I met "Old Elsie," walking erect and tall, with her piercing black eyes, Roman nose, and silver hair,--walking with determination in every step, and spinning like one of the Fates glittering silver flax from a distaff she carried in her hands. A few days after, our party, being weatherbound at Salerno, had resort to all our talents to pass the time, and songs and stories were the fashion of the day. The first chapter was my contribution to that entertainment. The story was voted into existence by the voices of all that party, and by none more enthusiastically than by one young voice which will never be heard on earth more. It was kept in mind and expanded and narrated as we went on to Rome over a track that the pilgrim Agnes is to travel. To me, therefore, it is fragrant with love of Italy and memory of some of the brightest hours of life. I wanted to write something of this kind as an author's introduction to the public. Could you contrive to print it on a fly-leaf, if I get it ready, and put a little sort of dedicatory poem at the end of it? I shall do this at least in the book, if not now. A network of difficulties seems to have closed about her at this time, because in spite of her interest in the new story and the hopeful view which she took of its speedy completion, several months passed by before anything definite came respecting her literary plans. Meanwhile she had been tempted into beginning a story for "The Independent," which proved to be "The Pearl of Orr's Island," a story good enough, if she had been left to herself and not overridden by greedy editors and publishers, to have added a lustre even to her name. It is to this she refers in the following letter when she speaks of her "Maine story." Unhappily this first number drew off power which belonged to "Agnes of Sorrento," and Agnes served to prevent her from ending "The Pearl of Orr's Island" in a manner worthy of its first promise. She says, writing in January, 1861, "Authors are apt, I suppose, like parents, to have their unreasonable partialities. Everybody has,--and I have a pleasure in writing 'Agnes of Sorrento' that gilds this icy winter weather. I write my Maine story with a shiver, and come back to this as to a flowery home where I love to rest. "My manuscripts are always left to the printers for punctuation,--as you will observe,--I have no time for copying." Mrs. Stowe's health was not vigorous at this period. Incessant drafts upon her energy had enfeebled her; but her spirit was indomitable, and when she was weary a brief visit to Boston was, she considered, sufficient to restore her nervous force. During these visits she sometimes rehearsed the story of the early days of her married life, when she fought her way through difficulties and under the burden of sorrows which would have crushed many another woman. The tale of the arrival of the family on a wintry day in Brunswick, Me., where her husband had been appointed to a professorship in Bowdoin College, of the dreary season, the bitter cold, the unopened door of an empty house, their future home, left a vivid impression upon the minds of her listeners; not because of its forlornness, but because of the splendid energy and patience which she brought to the occasion and the light she was able to cast over the grimness of circumstance. Of course, at the date in which this is written, it is difficult to conceive anything like grimness as associated with the comfortable and social town of Brunswick, but we must not fail to remember how rapid the growth of winter comfort has been throughout New England. This house in the village of Brunswick was the birthplace of "Uncle Tom's Cabin;" but long before her pen could be allowed to touch the paper the door of the house must be unlocked, the fire made, and her little children warmed and fed. The walls too must be freshly papered and painted with her own unassisted hands, and a long table spread which could serve as a family dining-table and her own and only place for writing. Here, as Mr. Fields once said in one of his lectures, "A New England woman once wrote a great novel while beset with difficulties, pinched by poverty, and surrounded by hard work from sunrise to midnight, year in and year out. She was a pallid, earnest, tired little body, who sat in her white cottage down in Brunswick in the state of Maine. She had been busy all day, perhaps painting a room, for her means would not allow her to hire it done. Besides that labor she cooked for the family, and had done all her other household duties, without assistance, and without flinching or groaning. The children were hushed to sleep; all was still about the house, and she trimmed the solitary lamp for a long session at her writing-table. "Thus she sat many a night and wrote, and wept, and wrote again, until she had poured out her soul before the Lord for humanity's sake. And then came, a little slowly at first, but rolling surely with an awful sound, that great universal response; the voice of the people of the whole earth speaking as one." The labor, the shock, were past, but the fatigue and the strain of the long struggle for freedom which she carried always on her own heart could never be over-lived. She was already, as Mrs. Hawthorne used to say, "tired far into the future." The woman who had written "Uncle Tom" was not to continue a series of equally exciting stories, but she was to bear the burden and heat of much everyday labor with the patience and the rejoicing of all faithful souls. We are reminded, as we study Mrs. Stowe's life, of Swinburne's noble tribute to Sir Walter Scott after reading his Journals which appeared in full only five or six years ago. He says: "Now that we have before us in full--in all reasonable or desired completeness--the great man's own record of his troubles, his emotions, and his toils, we find it, from the opening to the close, a record, not only of dauntless endurance, but of elastic and joyous heroism.... It is no longer pity that any one may presume to feel for him at the lowest ebb of his fortunes or his life; it is rapture of sympathy, admiration, and applause. 'This was a man.'" The war, the enlistment of her second son, the eldest having already died, filled her heart and mind afresh with new problems and anxieties. She wrote the following hurried note from Hartford in 1862, which gives some idea of her occupations and frame of mind: "I am going to Washington to see the heads of departments myself, and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality and a substance, not a fizzle out at the little end of the horn, as I should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in Europe to any such impotent conclusion.... I mean to have a talk with 'Father Abraham' himself, among others." Mrs. Stowe lost no time, but proceeded to carry out her plan as soon as practicable. Of this visit to Washington she says little in her letters beyond the following meagre words: "It seems to be the opinion here, not only that the President will stand up to his proclamation, but that the Border States will accede to his proposition for emancipation. I have noted the thing as a glorious expectancy!... To- day to the home of the contrabands, seeing about five hundred poor fugitives eating a comfortable Thanksgiving dinner, and singing, 'Oh, let my people go!' It was a strange and moving sight." It was left for others to speak of her interview with President Lincoln. Her daughter was told that when the President heard her name he seized her hand, saying, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" He then led her apart to a seat in the window, where they were withdrawn from other guests, and undisturbed. No one but those two souls will ever know what waves of thought and feeling swept over them in that brief hour. Afterwards she heard these words pronounced in the Senate Chamber in the Message of President Lincoln; it was in the darkest hour of the war, Mrs. Stowe wrote, when defeat and discouragement had followed the Union armies and all hearts were trembling with fear: "If this struggle is to be prolonged till there be not a home in the land where there is not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave shall be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we can only bow and say, 'Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints'!" During her Boston visits Mrs. Stowe was always interested to observe the benevolent work going on about her and to lend a hand if it were possible. One incident flavored with a strong touch of the ludicrous still lingers in my memory. We had fallen in somewhere with a poor little waif of a boy, one easily to be recognized by the practiced eye of to-day as a good specimen of the street Arab. This little being was taken up by us and brought home. His arrival was looked upon with horror by the servants, who recognized existing facts and foresaw future miseries veiled from our less educated vision. A visit to the bathroom was at once suggested; but as none of the house maidens offered to take charge of the business, Mrs. Stowe announced herself as more than equal to the occasion, and proceeded to administer the first bath probably ever known to that specimen of the human family. Hawthorne's clasping the leprous child was but a shadow compared to that hour, but happily Mrs. Stowe was not Hawthorne and she combed and scrubbed faithfully. I cannot recall the precise ending of the tale. I can only remember the whole house being aroused at some unearthly hour of that night by the child's outcries, from his unusual indulgence in a good supper, and Mrs. Stowe's amusement at the situation. She declared the household was far better constituted to look after young cherubim than young male humans. Something of the canary-bird order would be much more in its line, she said. I believe he ran away the next day, probably understanding the fitness of things better than ourselves. At any rate I find a comforting note on the subject from Andover saying: "If we can do no more we must let him go. He certainly stands a better chance in his life's journey for the little good we have been able to put into him. When we try a little to resist the evil current and to pull here and there one out, we learn how dreadful is the downward gravitation, the sweep and whirl of the maelstrom. Let us hope all these have a Father, who charges himself with them somewhere further on in their eternal pilgrimage when our weak hold fails." In the autumn of 1862 a plan for leaving Andover altogether was finally matured. She wrote, "You have heard that we are going to Hartford to live, and I am now in all the bustle of house planning, to say nothing of grading, under-draining, and setting out trees around our future home. It is four acres and a half of lovely woodland on the banks of a river and yet within an easy walk of Hartford; in fact, in the city limits; and when our house is done you and yours must come and see us. I would rather have made the change in less troublous times, but the duties here draw so hardly on Mr. Stowe's strength that I thought it better to live on less and be in a place of our own, and with no responsibilities except those of common gentlefolk." Mrs. Stowe's love of home, of the fireside, and her faith in family ties were marked characteristics of her nature. For the first time in her life she was now to make the material house at least after her own idea, and for many months she was entirely absorbed in the enjoyment of forming plans for her Hartford home. In November, 1862, she was in Hartford superintending the growing establishment. She wrote: "My house with _eight_ gables is growing wonderfully. I go over every day to see it. I am busy with drains, sewers, sinks, digging, trenching, and above all with manure! You should see the joy with which I gaze on manure heaps in which the eye of faith sees Delaware grapes and D'Angoulême pears, and all sorts of roses and posies, all which at some future day I hope you will be able to enjoy. "Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch-traitor Pierce in his preface and your loyal firm publishes it. I never read the preface, and have not yet seen the book, but they say so here, and I can scarcely believe it of you, if I can of him. I regret that I went to see him last summer. What! patronize such a traitor to our faces! I can scarce believe it." In the month of May, 1863, came her first letter from the new place. Already we find that the ever-present need has driven her on to print her thoughts about "House and Home." HARTFORD, OAKWOLD, May 1st. My dear friend,--I came here a month ago to hurry on the preparations for our house, in which I am now writing, in the high bow window of Mr. Stowe's study, overlooking the wood and river. We are not moved in yet, only our things, and the house presents a scene of the wildest chaos, the furniture having been tumbled in and lying boxed and promiscuous. I sent the sixth number of "House and Home" papers a week ago, and, not having heard from it, am a little anxious. I always want faith that a bulky manuscript will go safe,--for all I never lost one.... I should like to show you the result here when we are fairly in, and the spring leaves are out. It is the brightest, cheerfullest, homeliest home that you could see,--not even excepting yours. The pursuit of literature under such circumstances is neither natural nor profitable. In Mrs. Stowe's case it proved that she was pursuing, not literature, but the necessities of life. Everything in the household economy now depended upon her; and however strong her tendencies were naturally, she no longer possessed the reserved strength to forge the work from her brain. In the writing of "Uncle Tom," great as were the odds against her, she had been preparing to that end from the moment of her birth. Her father's fiery powers of expression; her mother's nature absorbed in one still dream of love and duty; her own solitary childhood in spite of the enormous household in which she was brought up; above all her brooding nature quietly absorbing and assimilating the knowledge and thought which were finding expression around her; the first years of married life in Cincinnati, where the slaves were continually harbored and assisted, notwithstanding the risks to life and property;--everything, in short, within and around her was nourishing the child of her genius which was to leap into being and gather the armies of America. On the whole we may rather wonder at the high average value of the literary work by which she lived, especially when we follow the hints given in her letters of her interrupted and crowded existence. In June, 1863, she says: "I wrote my piece in a sea of troubles. I had, as you see, to write by amanuensis, and yet my little senate of girls say they like it better than anything I have written yet." It was a touching characteristic to see how the "senate of girls," or of such household friends as she could muster wherever she might be, were always called in to keep up her courage and to give her a sympathetic stimulus. During the days when she was writing, it was never safe to be far away, for she was rapid as light itself, and before a brief hour was ended we were pretty sure to hear her voice calling "Do come, come and hear, and tell me how you like it." Her June letter continues: "Can I begin to tell you what it is to begin to keep house in an unfinished home and place, dependent on a carpenter, a plumber, a mason, a bell-hanger, who come and go at their own sweet will, breaking in, making all sorts of chips, dust, dirt, going off in the midst leaving all standing,--reappearing at uncertain intervals and making more dust, chips, and dirt. One parlor and my library have thus risen piecemeal by disturbance and convulsions. They are now almost done, and the last box of books is almost unpacked, but my head aches so with the past confusion that I cannot get up any feeling of rest. I can't enjoy--can't feel a minute to sit down and say 'it is done.' "The fountain plays, the plants flourish, and our front hall minus the stair railing looks beautifully; my pictures are all hung in parlor and library, and yet I feel so unsettled. Well, in a month more perhaps I shall get my brains right side up." The following year was made memorable in Mrs. Stowe's life by the marriage of her youngest daughter. Again I find that no description can begin to give as clearly as the glimpses in her own letters the multifarious responsibilities which beset her. She says: "I am in trouble,--have been in trouble ever since my turtledoves announced their intention of pairing in June instead of August, because it entailed on me an immediate necessity of bringing everything out of doors and in to a state of completeness for the wedding exhibition in June. The garden must be planted, the lawn graded, harrowed, rolled, seeded, and the grass up and growing, stumps got out and trees got in, conservatory made over, belts planted, holes filled,--and all by three very slippery sort of Irishmen who had rather any time be minding their own business than mine. I have back doorsteps to be made, and troughs, screens, and what not; papering, painting, and varnishing, hitherto neglected, to be completed; also spring house-cleaning; also dressmaking for one bride and three ordinary females; also ---- and ---- and ----'s wardrobes to be overlooked; also carpets to be made and put down; also a revolution in the kitchen cabinet, threatening for a time to blow up the whole establishment altogether." And so the letter proceeds with two more sheets, adding near the end: "I send you to-day a 'Chimney-Corner' on 'Our Martyrs,' which I have written out of the fullness of my heart.... It is an account of the martyrdom of a Christian boy of our own town of Andover, who died of starvation and want in a Southern prison on last Christmas Day." Just one month before the marriage she writes again: "The wedding is indeed an absorbing whirlpool, but amid it all I have the next 'Chimney-Corner' in good train and shall send it on to-morrow or next day." How small a portion of the world outside can understand the lives of writers, actors, and those whose professions compel them to depend directly upon the public! No private joy, no private sorrow, no rest, no change, is recognized by this taskmaster. It is well: on the whole we would not have it otherwise; because those who can minister to the great Public embrace their profession in a spirit of conscious or unconscious self-denial. In either case the result is the same: development, advancement, and sometimes attainment. The wedding is not two days over when another letter arrives full of her literary work, yet adding that she longs for rest and if we will only tell her where Campton is, whither we had gone, she would gladly join us. "I was a weary idiot," she continues, "by the time the wedding was over, and said 'yes ma'am' to the men and 'no sir' to the women in sheer imbecility." Nevertheless she did not get to Campton, but kept on, with the exception of a few brief visits at Peekskill and elsewhere until the autumn. In one of her notes she says: "I have returned to my treadmill. A---- is to leave as soon as she can get ready, and I am trying to see her off--helping her to get her things together, and trying to induce her to take a new stand in a new place and make herself a respectable woman. When she is gone a load will be off my back. If it were not for the good that is still left in our fellows our task would be easier than it is; we could cut them adrift and let them swim; but while we see much that may be turned to good account in them we hang on, or let them hang on, and our boat moves slow. So behold me fighting my good fight of womanhood against dust and disorganization and the universal downward tendency of everybody, hoping for easier times by and by." With her heroic nature she was always ready to lead the forlorn hope. The child no one else was willing to provide for, the woman the world despised, were brought into her home and cared for as her own. Unhappily, her delicate health at this time (though she was naturally strong), her constant literary labors, her uncertain income, her private griefs, all united, caused her to fall short in ability to accomplish what she undertook; hence there were often crises from sudden illness and non-fulfillment of engagements which were very serious in their effects, but the elasticity of her spirits was something marvelous and carried her over many a hard place. In the autumn of 1864 she wrote: "I feel I need to write in these days, to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy and blind, and fill my eyes with tears so that I cannot see the paper. I mean such things as are being done where our heroes are dying as Shaw died. It is not wise that all our literature should run in a rut cut through our hearts and red with our blood. I feel the need of a little gentle household merriment and talk of common things, to indulge which I have devised the following." Notwithstanding her view of the need and her skillfully devised plans to meet it, she soon sent another epistle, showing how impossible it was to stem the current of her thought. November 29, 1864. My dear friend,--I have sent my New Year's article, the result of one of those peculiar experiences which sometimes occur to us writers. I had planned an article, gay, sprightly, wholly domestic; but as I began and sketched the pleasant home and quiet fireside, an irresistible impulse _wrote for me_ what followed,--an offering of sympathy to the suffering and agonized whose homes have forever been darkened. Many causes united at once to force on me this vision, from which generally I shrink, but which sometimes will not be denied,--will make itself felt. Just before I went to New York two of my earliest and most intimate friends lost their oldest sons, captains and majors,--splendid fellows physically and morally, beautiful, brave, religious, uniting the courage of soldiers to the faith of martyrs,--and when I went to Brooklyn it seemed as if I were hearing some such thing almost every day; and Henry, in his profession as minister, has so many letters full of imploring anguish, the cry of hearts breaking that ask help of him.... It was during one of Mrs. Stowe's visits to Boston in the ensuing year that she chanced to talk with greater fullness and openness than she had done with us before on the subject of Spiritualism. In the simplest way she affirmed her entire belief in manifestations of the nearness and individual life of the unseen, and gave vivid illustrations of the reasons why her faith was thus assured. She never sought after such testimony, so far as I am aware, unless it may have been to sit with others who were interested, but her conclusions were definite and unvarying. At that period such a declaration of faith required a good deal of bravery; now the subject has assumed a different phase, and there are few thinking people who do not recognize a certain truth hidden within the shadows. She spoke with tender seriousness of "spiritual manifestations" as recorded in the New Testament and in the prophets. From his early youth her husband had possessed the peculiar power of seeing persons about him who could not be perceived by others; visions so distinct that it was impossible for him to distinguish at times between the real and the unreal. I recall one illustration which had occurred only a few years previous to their departure from Andover. She had been called to Boston one day on business. Making her preparations hurriedly, she bade the household farewell, and rushed to the station, only to see the train go out as she arrived. There was nothing to do but to return home and wait patiently for the next train; but wishing not to be disturbed, she quietly opened a side door and crept noiselessly up the staircase leading to her own room, sitting down by her writing-table in the window. She had been seated about half an hour when Professor Stowe came in, looked about him with a preoccupied air, but did not speak to her. She thought his behavior strange, and amused herself by watching him; at last the situation became so extraordinary that she began to laugh. "Why," he exclaimed, with a most astonished air, "is that you? I thought it was one of my visions!" It may seem a singular antithesis to say of the writer of one of the greatest stories the world has yet produced that she was not a student of literature. Books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion, were of course like the breath of her life; but a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present was outside the pale of her occupations, and for the larger portion of her life outside of her interest. During the riper season of her activity with the pen, the necessity of studying style and the thoughts of others gained a larger hold upon her mind; but she always said, with a twinkle of amusement and pride, that she never could have done anything without Mr. Stowe. He knew everything, and all she had to do was to go to him. Of her great work she has written, in that noble introduction to the illustrated edition of "Uncle Tom" speaking of herself in the third person: "The story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her.... The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial." It is easily seen that it was neither a spirit of depreciation of knowledge nor lack of power to become a student which made her fail to obtain adjuncts indispensable to great writers, but her feet were led in other paths and her strength was needed for other ends. Madame George Sand said, writing of "Uncle Tom" soon after its publication: "If its judges, possessed with the love of what they call 'artistic work,' find unskillful treatment in the book, look well at them to see if their eyes are dry when they are reading this or that chapter.... I cannot say that Mrs. Stowe has talent, as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius, as humanity feels the need of genius,--the genius of goodness, not that of the rules of letters, but of the saint." All her life she stimulated the activity of her pen rather by her sympathy with humanity than by studies of literature. In one of her letters she says: "You see whoever can write on home and family matters, on what people think of and are anxious about and want to hear from, has an immense advantage. The success of the 'House and Home Papers' shows me how much people want this sort of thing, and now I am bringing the series to a close I find I have ever so much more to say; in fact, the idea has come in this shape.... A set of papers for the next year to be called 'Christopher's Evenings,' which will allow great freedom and latitude; a capacity of striking anywhere when a topic seems to be in the public mind and that will comprise a little series of sketches or rather little groups of sketches out of which books may be made. You understand Christopher writes these for the winter-evening amusement of his family. One set will be entitled 'An Account of the Seven Little Foxes that spoil the Vines.' This will cover seven sketches of certain domestic troubles. Another set is the 'Cathedral; or, the Shrines of Home Saints,' under which I shall give certain sketches of home characters contrasting with that of the legends of the saints: the shirt-making, knitting, whooping-cough- tending saints, the Aunt Esthers and Aunt Marias.... Hum (her humming bird) is well--notwithstanding the dull weather; we keep him in a sunny upper chamber and feed him daily on sugar and water, and he catches his own mutton." Thus in swift succession we find, not only charming little idylls here and there like her story of "Hum the Son of Buzz" in the "Young Folks Magazine," being the tale of her captured and tamed humming-bird, but also "Little Foxes," "The Chimney-Corner," a volume of collected Poems, "Oldtown Folks," "Sam Lawson's Fireside Tales" and others, following with tireless rapidity, bearing the same stamp of living sympathy with difficulties of the time and breathing a spirit of helpfulness and faith. At this period, as she had an accessible home in the pleasant city of Hartford, strangers and travelers often sought and found her. In one of her familiar notes of 1867 she wrote: "The Amberleys have written that they are coming to us to-morrow, and of all times, accordingly, our furnace must spring a leak. We are hoping to make all right before they get here, but I am really ashamed to show such weather at this time of year. Poor America! It's like having your mother expose herself by a fit of ill temper before strangers.... Do, I beg, write to a poor sinner laboring under a book." And again, a little later: "_The book_ is almost done--hang it! but done _well_, and will be a good thing for young men to read, and young women too, and so I'll send you one. You'll find some things in it, I fancy, that I know and you don't, about the times before you were born, when I was 'Hush, hush, my dear-ing' in Cincinnati.... I smell spring afar off --sniff--do you? Any smell of violets in the distance? I think it comes over the water from the Pamfili Doria." Among other responsibilities assumed by her at this time was that of getting Professor Stowe to consent to publish a book. This was no laughing matter; at first the book was planned merely as an article on the "Talmud" for the "Atlantic Magazine." Afterwards Professor Stowe enlarged the design. Later in speaking of his manuscript she says: "You must not scare him off by grimly declaring that you must have the _whole manuscript complete_ before you set the printer to work; you must take the three quarters he brings you and at least make believe begin printing, and he will immediately go to work and finish up the whole; otherwise what with lectures and the original sin of laziness, it will all be indefinitely postponed. I want to make a crisis that he shall feel that _now_ is the accepted time, and that this must be finished first and foremost." And again she says: "My poor _Rab_ has been sick with a heavy cold this week, and if it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have had this article which I send in triumph. I plunged into the sea of Rabbis and copied Mr. Stowe's insufferable chaldonic characters so that you might not have your life taken by wrathful printers.... Thus I have ushered into the world a document which I venture to say condenses more information on an obscure and curious subject than _any_ in the known world--Hosanna!" In these busy years she went away upon her Boston trips more and more rarely, but she writes after her return from one of them in 1868: "I don't think I _ever_ enjoyed Boston so much as in this visit. Why was it! Every cloud seemed to turn out its silver lining, everybody was delightful, and the music has really done me good. I feel it all over me now. I think of it with a sober certainty of waking bliss! our little 'hub' is a grand 'hub.' Three cheers for it!... I have had sent me through the War Department a French poem which I think is full of real nerve and strength of feeling. I undertook the reading only as a duty, but found myself quite waked up. The indignation and the feeling with which he denounces modern skepticism, that worst of all unbelief, the denial of all good, all beauty, all generosity, all heroism, is splendid. He is a live man this, and I wish you would read his poem and send it to Longfellow, for it does one's heart good to see the French made the vehicle of so much real heroic sentiment. The description of a slave hunt is splendidly and bitterly satirical and indignant and full of fine turns of language. Thank God _that_ is over. No matter what happens to you and me, _that_ great burden of sin and misery has tumbled off from our backs and rolled into the sepulchre, where it shall never arise more.... I have been the most industrious of beings since my return, and am steaming away on the obstacle that stands between me and my story, which I long to be at.... I want to get one or two special bits of information out of Garrison, and so instead of sending my letter at random to Boston I will trouble you (who have little or nothing to do!) to get this letter to him. _My own book_, instead of cooling, boils and bubbles daily and nightly, and I am pushing and spurring like fury to get to it. I work like a drag-horse, and I'll _never_ get in such a scrape again. It isn't my business to make up books, but to make them. I have lots to say."... The story which had so taken possession of her mind and heart was "Oldtown Folks," the one which she at the time fancied the best calculated of all her works to sustain the reputation of the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The many proofs of her own interest in it seem to show that she had been moved to a livelier and deeper satisfaction in this creation than in any of her later productions. She writes respecting it: "It is more to me than a story; it is my résumé of the whole spirit and body of New England, a country that is now exerting such an influence on the civilized world that to know it truly becomes an object." But there were weary lengths of roads to be traveled by a woman already overladen with responsibilities and in delicate health before such a book could reach its consummation. "I must cry you mercy," she begins one of the notes to her publisher, "and explain my condition to you as well as possible." The "condition" was frequently to be explained! Proofs were not ready when they were promised, the press was stopped, and both author and publisher required all the tender regard they really had for each other and all the patience they possessed to keep in tune. She says, "I am sorry to trouble you or derange your affairs, but one can't always tell in driving such horses as we drive where they are going to bring up." She started off in this long journey very hopefully, writing that she would like to begin printing at once, because "to have the first part of my book in type will greatly assist me in the last." A month later she writes: "Here goes the first of my nameless story, of which I can only say it is as unlike everything else as it is like the strange world of folks I took it from. There is no fear that there will not be as much matter as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'--there will. There could be an endless quantity if I only said all I can see and think that is strange and curious. I partake in ----'s disappointment that it is not done, but it is of that class of things that cannot be commanded; as my friend Sam Lawson (_vide_ MSS.) says, 'There's things that can be druv and then agin there's things that can't,' and this is that kind--as had to be humored. Instead of rushing on, I have often turned back and written over with care, that nothing that I wanted to say might be omitted; it has cost me a good deal of labor to elaborate this first part, namely, to build my theatre and to introduce my actors. My labor has all, however, been given to the literary part. My printers always inform me that I know nothing of punctuation, and I give thanks that I have no responsibility for any of its absurdities! Further than beginning my sentence with a capital, I go not,--so I hope my friend Mr. Bigelow, who is a direct and lineal descendant of 'my Grandmother,' will put those things all right." Who so well as authors can fully understand and sympathize with the burden of a long story in the head, long bills on the table, tempting offers to write for this and that in order to bring in two hundred dollars from a variety of pleasant editors who desire the name on their list, house and grounds to be looked after, cooks to be pacified, visits to be made;--it is no wonder that Mrs. Stowe wrote: "The thing has been an awful tax and labor, for I have tried to do it well. I say also to you confidentially, that it has seemed as if every private care that could hinder me as woman and mother has been crowded into just this year that I have had this to do." Happily more peaceful days were in store for her. Her daughters, now grown to womanhood, were beginning to take the reins of home work and government into their own hands; and as the darkest hour foreruns the dawn, so almost imperceptibly to herself her cares began to fade away from her. A new era opened in Mrs. Stowe's life when she made her first visit to Florida, in the winter of 1867. She was tired and benumbed with care and cold. Suddenly the thought came to her that she would go to the South, herself, and see what the stories were worth which she was constantly hearing about its condition. In the mean time, if she could, she would enjoy the soft air, and find retirement in which she might continue her book. She says in one of her letters:-- "Winter weather and cold seem always a kind of nightmare to me. I am going to take my writing-desk and go down to Florida to F----'s plantation, where we have now a home, and abide there until the heroic agony of betweenity, the freeze and thaw of winter, is over, and then I doubt not I can write my three hours a day. Meanwhile, I have a pretty good pile of manuscript.... The letters I have got about blossoming roses and loungers in linen coats, while we have been frozen and snowed up, have made my very soul long to be away. Cold weather really seems to torpify my brain. I write with a heavy numbness. I have not yet had a _good_ spell of writing, though I have had all through the story abundant clairvoyance, and see just how it must be written; but for writing some parts I want _warm_ weather, and not to be in the state of a 'froze and thawed apple.'... The cold affects me precisely as extreme hot weather used to in Cincinnati,--gives me a sort of bilious neuralgia. I hope to get a clear, bright month in Florida, when I can say something to purpose. "I did want to read some of my story to you before I went. I have read it to my husband; and though one may think a husband a partial judge, yet mine is so nervous and so afraid of being bored that I feel as if it were something to hold him; and he likes it--is quite wakeful, so to speak, about it. All I want now, to go on, is a good _frame_, as father used to say about his preaching. I want calm, soft, even dreamy, enjoyable weather, sunshine and flowers. Love to dear A----, whom I so much want to see once more." Unhappily, she could not get away so soon as she desired. There were contracts to be signed and other business to arrange. These delays made her visit southward much shorter than she intended, but it proved to be only the introduction, the first brief chapter, as it were, of her future winter life in Florida. Before leaving she wrote as follows to her publisher:-- "I am so constituted that it is absolutely fatal to me to agree to have _any_ literary work done at certain dates. I _mean_ to have this story done by the 1st of September. It would be greatly for my pecuniary interest to get it done before that, because I have the offer of eight thousand dollars for the newspaper use of the story I am planning to write after it. But I am bound by the laws of art. Sermons, essays, lives of distinguished people, I can write to order at times and seasons. A story comes, grows like a flower, sometimes will and sometimes won't, like a pretty woman. When the spirits will help, I can write. When they jeer, flout, make faces, and otherwise maltreat me, I can only wait humbly at their gates, watch at the posts of their doors. "This story grows even when I do not write. I spent a month in the mountains in Stockbridge _composing_ before I wrote a word. "I only ask now a good physical condition, and I go to warmer climes hoping to save time there. I put everything and everybody off that interferes with this, except 'Pussy Willow,' which will be a pretty story for a child's 'series.'" At last she sailed away, about the 1st of March, 1867, with that delightful power of knowing what she wanted, and being content when she attained her end, which is too rare, alas! Her letters glowed and blossomed and shone with the fruit and flowers and sunshine of the South. It was hardly to be expected that her literary work could actually reach the printers' hands under these circumstances as rapidly as if she had been able to write at home: therefore it was with no sense of surprise that we received from her, during the summer of 1868, what proved to be a chapter of excuses instead of a chapter of her book: "I have a long story to tell you of _what_ has prevented my going on with my story, which you must see would so occupy all the nerve and brain force I have that I have not been able to write a word except to my own children. To them in their needs I _must_ write _chapters_ which would otherwise go into my novel." About this period she found herself able to come again to Boston for a few days' visit. There were often long croonings over the fire far into the night; her other-worldliness and abstractions brought with them a dreamy quietude, especially to those whose harried lives kept them only too much awake. Her coming was always a pleasure, for she made holidays by her own delightful presence, and she asked nothing more than what she found in the companionship of her friends. After her return to Hartford and in December of the same year, I find some curious notes showing how easily she was attracted by new subjects of interest away from the work she had in hand; not that she saw it in that light, or was aware that her story was in the least retarded by such digressions, but her keen sympathy with everything and everybody made it more and more difficult for her to concentrate her power upon the long story which she considered after all of the first importance. She writes to the editor of the "Atlantic Monthly:" "I see that all the leading magazines have a leading article on 'Planchette.' "There is a lady of my acquaintance who has developed more remarkable facts in this way than any I have ever seen; I have kept a record of these communications for some time past, and everybody is very much struck with them. "I have material to prepare a very curious article. Shall you want it? And when?" We can imagine the feeling of a publisher waiting for copy of her promised story on reading this note! Also the following of a few days later:-- "I am beginning a series of articles called 'Learning to Write,' designed to be helpful to a great many beginners.... I shall instance Hawthorne as a model and speak of his 'Note Book' as something which every young author aspiring to write should study.... My materials for the 'Planchette' article are really very extraordinary,... but I don't want to write it now when I am driving so hard upon my book.... It costs some patience to you and certainly to me to have it take so long, yet I have conscientiously done all I could, since I began. Now the end of it is in plain sight, but there is a good deal to be done to bring it out worthily, and I work upon it steadily and daily. I never put so much work into anything before." A week later she says again:-- "I thank you very much for your encouraging words, for I really need them. I have worked so hard that I am almost tired. I hope that you will still continue to read, and that you will not find it dull.... I have received the books. What a wonderful fellow Hawthorne was!" There is something truly touching to those who knew her in that phrase "almost tired." Indeed, she was truly tired through and through, and these later letters from which I have made the foregoing extracts are all written by an amanuensis. Happily the time was near for a second flight to Florida, and she wrote with her own rested hand en route from Charleston:-- "Room fragrant with violets, banked up in hyacinths, flowers everywhere, windows open, birds singing." She enclosed some fans, upon which she had been painting flowers busily during the journey in order to send them back to Boston to be sold at a fair in behalf of the Cretans: "Make them do the Cretes all the good you can," she said. It appears that by this time "Oldtown Folks" was fairly off her hands, and she was free once more. She evidently found Mandarin very much to her mind, and wrote contentedly therefrom, save for a vision of having to go to Canada in the early spring to obtain the copyright of her story. The visits to Florida had now become necessary to her health. She saw the next step to take was to surrender her large house in Hartford and pass her winters altogether at the South. She wrote from Florida: "I am leaving the land of flowers on the 1st of June with tears in my eyes, but having a house in Hartford, it must be lived in. I wish you and ---- would just come to see it. You have no idea what a lovely place it has grown to be, and I am trying to sell it as hard as a snake to crawl out of his skin. Thus on, till reason is pushed out of life. There's no earthly sense in having anything,--lordy massy, no! By the bye, I must delay sending you the ghost in the Captain Brown house till I can go to Natick and make a personal inspection of the premises and give it to you hot." Her busy brain was again at work with new plans for future books and articles for magazines. "Gladly would I fly to you on the wings of the wind," she says, "but I am a slave, a bound thrall to _work_, and I cannot work and play at the same time. After this year I hope to have a little rest, and above all things I won't be hampered with a serial to write.... We have sold out in Hartford." All this routine of labor was to have a new form of interruption, which gave her intense joy. "I am doing just what you say," she wrote, "being first lady-in-waiting on his new majesty. He is very pretty, very gracious and good, and his little mamma and he are a pair.... I am getting to be an old fool of a grandma, and to think there is no bliss under heaven to compare with a baby." Later she wrote on the same subject: "You ought to see my baby. I have discovered a way to end the woman controversy. Let the women all say that they won't take care of the babies till the laws are altered. One week of this discipline would bring all the men on their marrow-bones. Only tell us what you want, they would say, and we will do it. Of course you may imagine me trailing after our little king,--first granny-in-waiting." In the summer of 1869 there was a pleasant home at St. John's Wood, in London, which possessed peculiar attractions. Other houses were as comfortable to look at, other hedges were as green, other drawing rooms were gayer, but this was the home of George Eliot, and on Sunday afternoons the resort of those who desired the best that London had to give. Here it was that George Eliot told us of her admiration and deep regard, her affection, for Mrs. Stowe. Her reverence and love were expressed with such tremulous sincerity that the speaker won our hearts by her love for our friend. Many letters had already passed between Mrs. Stowe and herself, and she confided to us her amusement at a fancy Mrs. Stowe had taken that Casaubon, in "Middlemarch," was drawn from the character of Mr. Lewes. Mrs. Stowe took it so entirely for granted in her letters that it was impossible to dispossess her mind of the illusion. Evidently it was the source of much harmless household amusement at St. John's Wood. I find in Mrs. Stowe's letters some pleasant allusions to this correspondence. She writes: "We were all full of George Eliot when your note came, as I had received a beautiful letter from her in answer to one I wrote from Florida. She is a noble, true woman; and if anybody doesn't see it, so much the worse for _them_, and not her." In a note written about that time Mrs. Stowe says she is "coming to Boston, and will bring George Eliot's letters with her that we may read them together;" but that pleasant plan was only one of the imagination, and was never carried out. Her own letter to Mrs. Lewes, written from Florida in March, 1876, may be considered one of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of writing she ever achieved. Although this letter is accessible in a life of Mrs. Stowe published by her son during her life, I am tempted to reproduce a portion of it in these pages for those who have not seen it elsewhere. It is a positive loss to cut such a letter, but it covers too much space to quote in full. She dates in ORANGE BLOSSOM TIME, MANDARIN, March 18, 1876. MY DEAR FRIEND,--I always think of you when the orange-trees are in blossom; just now they are fuller than ever, and so many bees are filling the branches that the air is full of a sort of still murmur. And now I am beginning to hear from you every month in "Harper's." It is as good as a letter. "Daniel Deronda" has succeeded in awaking in my somewhat worn-out mind an interest. So many stories are tramping over one's mind in every modern magazine nowadays that one is macadamized, so to speak. It takes something unusual to make a sensation. This does excite and interest me, as I wait for each number with eagerness. I wish I could endow you with our long winter weather,--not winter, except such as you find in Sicily. We live here from November to June, and my husband sits outdoors on the veranda and reads all day. We emigrate in solid family; my two dear daughters, husband, self, and servants come together to spend the winter here, and so together to our Northern home in summer. My twin daughters relieve me from all domestic care; they are lively, vivacious, with a real genius for practical life.... It was very sweet and kind of you to write what you did last. I suppose it is so long ago you may have forgotten, but it was a word of tenderness and sympathy about my brother's trial; it was womanly, tender, and sweet, such as at heart you are. After all, my love of you is greater than my admiration, for I think it more and better to be really a woman worth loving than to have read Greek and German and written books.... It seems now but a little while since my brother Henry and I were two young people together. He was my two years junior, and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him drawing and heard his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes mature and womanly long before a boy.... Then he married and lived a missionary life in the new West, all with a joyousness, an enthusiasm, a chivalry, which made life bright and vigorous to us both. Then in time he was called to Brooklyn.... I well remember one snowy night his riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking, till near morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks. My husband was then away lecturing, and my heart was burning itself out in indignation and anguish. Henry told me he meant to fight that battle in New York; that he would have a church that would stand by him to resist the tyrannic dictation of Southern slaveholders. I said: "I, too, have begun to do something; I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves." "That's right, Hattie," he said; "finish it, and I will scatter it thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa,"--and so came "Uncle Tom," and Plymouth Church became a stronghold.... And when all was over, it was he and Lloyd Garrison who were sent by government once more to raise our national flag on Fort Sumter. You must see that a man does not so energize without making many enemies. Half of our Union has been defeated ... and there are those who never saw our faces that to this hour hate him and me. Then he has been a progressive in theology. He has been a student of Huxley and Spencer and Darwin,--enough to alarm the old school,--and yet remained so ardent a supernaturalist as equally to repel the radical destructionists in religion. He and I are Christ-worshipers, adoring Him as the Image in the Invisible God and all that comes from believing this. Then he has been a reformer, an advocate of universal suffrage and woman's rights, yet not radical enough to please that reform party who stand where the socialists of France do, and are for tearing up all creation generally. Lastly, he had had the misfortune of a popularity which is perfectly phenomenal. I cannot give you any idea of the love, worship, idolatry, with which he has been overwhelmed. He has something magnetic about him, that makes everybody crave his society, that makes men follow and worship him.... My brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. His inability to believe evil is something incredible, and so has come all this suffering.... But you see why I have not written. This has drawn on my life,--my heart's blood. He is myself; I know you are the kind of woman to understand me when I say I felt a blow at him more than at myself. I who know his purity, honor, delicacy, know that he has been from childhood of an ideal purity,--who reverenced his conscience as his king, whose glory was redressing human wrong, who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it.... My brother's power to console is something peculiar and wonderful. I have seen him at deathbeds and funerals, where it would seem as if hope herself must be dumb, bring down the very peace of Heaven and change despair to trust. He has not had less power in his own adversity.... Well, dear, pardon me for this outpour. I loved you,--I love you,--and therefore wanted you to know just what I felt.... This friendship was one that greatly enlisted Mrs. Stowe's sympathies and enriched her life. Her interest in any woman who was supporting herself, and especially in any one who found a daily taskmaster in the pen, and above all when, as in this case, the woman was one possessed of great moral aspiration half paralyzed in its action because she found herself in an anomalous and (to the world in general) utterly incomprehensible position, made such a woman like a magnet to Mrs. Stowe. She inherited from her father a faith in the divine power of sympathy, which only waxed greater with years and experience. Wherever she found a fellow-mortal suffering trouble or dishonor, in spite of hindrance her feet were turned that way. The genius of George Eliot and the contrasting elements of her life and character drew Mrs. Stowe to her side in sisterly solicitude. Her attitude, her sweetness, her sincerity, could not fail to win the heart of George Eliot. They became loving friends. It was the same inborn sense of fraternity which led her, when a child, on hearing of the death of Lord Byron, to go out into the fields and fling herself, weeping, on the mounded hay, where she might pray alone for his forgiveness and salvation. It is wonderful to observe the influence of Byron upon that generation. It is on record that when Tennyson, a boy of fifteen, heard some one say, "Byron is dead," he thought the whole world at an end. "I thought," he said one day, "everything was over and finished for every one; that nothing else mattered. I remember that I went out alone and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone." From this time forward Mrs. Stowe was chiefly bound up in her life and labors at the South. In 1870, speaking of some literary work she was proposing to herself, she said: "I am writing as a pure recreative movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful present.... I am being _châtelaine_ of a Florida farm. I have on my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the St. John. The three years since we came this side of the river have called into life and growth a thousand peach-trees, a thousand orange-trees, about five hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines. A peach orchard, a vineyard, a lemon grove, will carry my name to posterity. I am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old Stowe place.... You can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it. Here I sit with open windows, the orange buds just opening and filling the air with sweetness, the hens drowsily cackling, the men planting in the field, and callas and wild roses blossoming out of doors. We keep a little fire morning and night. We are flooded with birds; and by the bye, it is St. Valentine's Day.... I think a uniform edition of Dr. Holmes's works would be a good thing. Next to Hawthorne he is our most exquisite writer, and in many passages he goes far beyond him. What is the dear Doctor doing? If you know any book good to inspire dreams and visions, put it into my box. My husband chews endlessly a German cud. I must have English. Has the French book on Spiritualism come yet? If it has, put it in.... I wish I could give you a plateful of our oranges.... We had seventy-five thousand of these same on our trees this year, and if you will start off quick, they are not all picked yet. Florida wants one thing,--grass. If it had grass, it would be paradise. But nobody knows what grass is till had grass, it would be paradise. But nobody knows what grass is till they try to do without it." Three months later she wrote: "I hate to leave my calm isle of Patmos, where the world is not, and I have such quiet long hours for writing. Emerson could _insulate_ himself here and keep his electricity. Hawthorne ought to have lived in an orange grove in Florida.... You have no idea how small you all look, you folks in the world, from this distance. All your fusses and your fumings, your red-hot hurrying newspapers, your clamor of rival magazines,--why, we see it as we see steamboats fifteen miles off, a mere speck and smoke." Again she writes: "You ought to see us riding out in our mule-cart. Poor 'Fly!' the last of pea-time, who looks like an animated hair- trunk and the wagon and harness to match! It is too funny, but we enjoy it hugely. There are now in our solitude five Northern families, and we manage to have quite pleasant society. "But think of our church and school-house being burned down just as we were ready to do something with it. I feel it most for the colored people, who were so anxious to have their school and now have no place to have it in. We have all been trying to raise what we can for a new building and intend to get one up by March. "If I were North now I would try giving some readings for this and perhaps raise something." It was a strange contrast and one at variance with her natural taste, which brought her before the public as a reader of her own stories in the autumn and winter of 1872-73. She was no longer able to venture on the effort of a long story, and yet it was manifestly unwise for her to forego the income which was extended to her through this channel. She wrote: "I have had a very urgent business letter, saying that the lyceums of different towns were making up their engagements, and that if I were going into it I must make my engagements now. It seems to me that I cannot do this. The thing will depend so much on my health and ability to do. You know I could not go round in cold weather.... I feel entirely uncertain, and, as the Yankees say, 'didn't know what to do nor to don't. My state in regard to it may be described by the phrase 'Kind o' love to--hate to--wish I didn't--want ter.' I suppose the result will be I shall not work into their lecture system." In April she wrote from Mandarin: "I am painting a _Magnolia grandiflora,_ which I will show you.... I am appalled by finding myself booked to read. But I am getting well and strong, and trust to be equal to the emergency. But I shrink from Tremont Temple, and--does not think I can fill it. On the whole I should like to begin in Boston." And in August she said: "I am to begin in Boston in September.... It seems to me that is a little too early for Boston, isn't it? Will there be anybody in town then? I don't know as it's my business, which is simply to speak my piece and take my money." Her first reading actually took place in Springfield, not Boston, and the next day she unexpectedly arrived at our cottage at Manchester-by- the-Sea. She had read the previous evening in a large public hall, had risen at five o'clock that morning, and found her way to us. Her next readings were given in Boston, the first, in the afternoon, at the Tremont Temple. She was conscious that her effort at Springfield had not been altogether successful,--she had not held her large audience; and she was determined to put the whole force of her nature into this afternoon reading at the Tremont Temple. She called me into her bedroom, where she stood before the mirror, with her short gray hair, which usually lay in soft curls around her brow, brushed erect and standing stiffly. "Look here, my dear," she said; "now I am exactly like my father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, when he was going to preach," and she held up her forefinger warningly. It was easy to see that the spirit of the old preacher was revived in her veins, and the afternoon would show something of his power. An hour later, when I sat with her in the anteroom waiting for the moment of her appearance to arrive, I could feel the power surging up within her. I knew she was armed for a good fight. That reading was a great success. She was alive in every fibre of her being: she was to read portions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to men, women, and children many of whom had taken no part in the crisis which inspired it, and she determined to effect the difficult task of making them feel as well as hear. With her presence and inspiration they could not fail to understand what her words had signified to the generation that had passed through the struggle of our war. When her voice was not sufficient to make the audience hear, the people rose from their seats and crowded round her, standing gladly, that no word might be lost. It was the last leap of the flame which had burned out a great wrong. From this period, although she continued to write, she lived chiefly for several winters in the retirement of the Florida orange grove, which she always enjoyed. Her sympathy was strong with the new impetus benevolent work in cities had received, and she helped it from her "grotto" in more ways than one. Sometimes she would write soothing or inspiriting letters, as the case might demand, to individuals. The following note, written at the time of the Boston fire in 1872, will show how alive she was to the need of that period. "I send inclosed one hundred dollars to the fund for the Firemen. I could wish it a hundred times as much, and then it would be inadequate to express how much I honor those brave, devoted men who put their own lives between Boston and mine. No soldiers that fell in battle for our common country ever deserved of us all greater honor than the noble men whose charred and blackened remains have been borne from the ruins of Boston; they are worthy to be inscribed on imperishable monuments. "I would that some such honorary memorial might commemorate their heroism." Meanwhile, the comfort she drew in from the beauty of nature and the calm around her seemed yearly to nourish and renew her power of existence. Questions which were difficult to others were often solved to her mind by practical observation. It amused her to hear persons agitating the question as to where they should look to supply labor for the South. "Why," she remarked once, "there was a negro, one of those fearfully hot days in the spring, who was digging muck from a swamp just in front of our house, and carrying it in a wheelbarrow up a steep slope, where he dumped it down, and then went back for more. He kept this up when it was so hot that we thought either one of us would die to be five minutes in the sun. We carried a thermometer to the spot where he was working, to see how great the heat was, and it rose at once to one hundred and thirty-five degrees. The man, however, kept cheerfully at his work, and when he went to his dinner sat with the other negroes out in the white sand without a bit of shade. Afterward they all lay down for a nap in the same unsheltered locality. Toward evening, when the sun was sufficiently low to enable me to go out, I went to speak to this man. 'Martin,' said I, 'you've had a warm day's work. How do you stand it? Why, I couldn't endure such heat for five minutes.' 'Hoh! hoh! No, I s'pose you couldn't. Ladies can't, missus.' 'But, Martin, aren't you very tired?' 'Bress your heart, no, missus.' So Martin goes home to his supper, and after supper will be found dancing all the evening on the wharf near by! After this, when people talk of bringing Germans and Swedes to do such work, I am much entertained." Many were the pleasant descriptions of her home sent forth to tempt her friends away from the busy North. "Here is where we read books," she said in one of her letters, written in the month of March. "Up North nobody does,--they don't have time; so if ---- will mail his book to Mandarin, I will 'read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.' We are having a carnival of flowers. I hope you read my 'Palmetto Leaves,' for then you will see all about us.... Our home is like a martin-box.... I cannot tell you the quaint odd peace we have here in living under the oak. 'Behold, she dwelleth under the oak at Mamre.' All that we want is friends, to whom we may say that solitude is sweet. We have some neighbors, however, who have made pretty places near us. Mr. Stowe keeps up a German class of three young ladies, with whom he is reading Faust for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, and in the evening I read aloud to a small party of the neighbors. We have made up our home as we went along, throwing out a chamber here and there, like twigs out of the old oak.... The orange blossoms have come like showers of pearl, and the yellow jessamine like golden fleeces, and the violets and the lilies, and azaleas. This is glorious, budding, blossoming spring, and we have days when merely to breathe and be is to be blessed. I love to have a day of mere existence. Life itself is a pleasure when the sun shines warm, and the lizards dart from all the shingles of the roof, and the birds sing in so many notes and tones the yard reverberates; and I sit and dream and am happy, and never want to go back North, nor do anything with the toiling, snarling world again. I do wish I could gather you both in my little nest." She was like her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, in many things. The scorching fire of the brain seemed to devour its essence, and she endured, as he did before her, some years of existence when the motive power almost ceased to act. She became "like a little child," wandering about, pleased with flowers, fresh air, the sound of a piano, or a voice singing hymns, but the busy, inspiring spirit was asleep. Gradually she faded away, shrouded in this strange mystery, hovered over by the untiring affection of her children, sweet and tender in her decadence, but "absent." At the moment when this brief memorial was receiving a final revision before going to the press, the news reached me of the unloosing of the last threads of consciousness which bound Mrs. Stowe to this world. The sweetness and patience of her waiting years can only be perfectly told by the daughters who hung over her. She knew her condition, but there was never a word of complaint, and so long as her husband lived she performed the office of nurse and attendant upon his lightest wishes as if she felt herself strong. Her near friends were sometimes invited to dine or to have supper with her at that period, but they could see even then how prostrated she became after the slightest mental effort. It was upon occasion of such a visit that she told me, with a twinkle of the eye, that "Mr. Stowe was sometimes inclined to be a little fretful during the long period of his illness, and said to her one day that he believed the Lord had forgotten him." "Oh, no, He hasn't," she answered; "cheer up! your turn will come soon." She was always fond of music, especially of the one kind she had known best; and the singing of hymns never failed to soothe her at the last; therefore when the little group stood round her open grave on a lovely July day and sang quite simply the hymns she loved, it seemed in its simplicity and broken harmony a fitting farewell to the faded body she had already left so far behind. A great spirit has performed its mission and has been released. The world moves on unconscious; but the world's children have been blessed by her coming, and they who know and understand should praise God reverently in her going. "As a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof." In the words of the prophet we can almost hear her glad cry:-- "My sword shall be bathed in heaven." CELIA THAXTER. BORN JUNE, 1835; DIED AUGUST, 1894. If it were ever intended that a desolate island in the deep sea should be inhabited by one solitary family, then indeed Celia Thaxter was the fitting daughter of such a house. In her history of the group of islands, which she calls "Among the Isles of Shoals," she portrays, in a prose which for beauty and wealth of diction has few rivals, the unfolding of her own nature under influences of sky and sea and solitude and untrammeled freedom, such as have been almost unknown to civilized humanity in any age of the world. She speaks also of the effect produced, as she fancied, upon the minds of men by the eternal sound of the sea: a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception. But this was far from being the case with regard to herself. Her eyesight was keener, her speech more distinct, the lines of her thoughts more clearly defined, her verse more strongly marked in its form, and the accuracy of her memory more to be relied upon than was the case with almost any one of her contemporaries. Her painting, too, upon porcelain possessed the same character. Her knowledge of the flowers, and especially of the seaweeds, with which she decorated it, was so exact that she did not require the originals before her vision. They were painted upon her mind's eye, where every filament and every shade seemed to be recorded. These green "growing things" had been the beloved companions of her childhood, as they continued to be of her womanhood, and even to reproduce their forms in painting was a delight to her. The written descriptions of natural objects give her history a place among the pages which possess a perennial existence. While White's "Selborne," and the pictures of Bewick, and Thoreau's "Walden," and the "Autobiography of Richard Jefferies" endure, so long will "Among the Isles of Shoals" hold its place with all lovers of nature. She says in one place, "All the pictures over which I dream are set in this framework of the sea, that sparkled and sang, or frowned and threatened, in the ages that are gone as it does to-day." The solitude of Celia Thaxter's childhood, which was not solitude, surrounded as she was with the love of a father and a mother, all tenderness, and brothers dear to her as her own life, developed in the child strange faculties. She was five years old when the family left Portsmouth,--old enough, given her inborn power of enjoyment of nature, to delight in the free air and the wonderful sights around her. She gives in her book a pretty picture of the child watching the birds that flew against the lighthouse lantern, when they lived at White Island. The birds would strike it with such force as to kill themselves. "Many a May morning," she says, "have I wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many- colored warblers and flycatchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oriole, and many more beside,--enough to break the heart of a small child to think of! Once a great eagle flew against the lantern and shivered the glass." Her father seems to have been a man of awful energy of will. Some disappointment in his hope of a public career, it has been said, decided him to take the step of withdrawing himself forever from the world of the mainland, and this attitude he appears to have sustained unflinchingly to the end. Her mother, with a heart stayed as unflinchingly upon love and obedience, seems to have followed him without a murmur, leaving every dear association of the past as though it had not been. From this moment she became, not the slave, but the queen of her affections; and when she died, in 1877, the sun appeared to set upon her daughter's life. On the morning after Mrs. Thaxter's sudden death, seventeen years later, a friend asked her eldest son where his mother was, with the intent to discover if she had been well enough to leave her room. "Oh," he replied, "her mother came in the night and took her away." This reply showed how deeply all who were near to Celia Thaxter were impressed with the fact that to see her mother again was one of the deepest desires of her heart. The development wrought in her eager character by those early days of exceptional experience gives a new sense of what our poor humanity may achieve, left face to face with the vast powers of nature. In speaking of the energy of Samuel Haley, one of the early settlers of the islands, she says he learned to live as independently as possible of his fellow-men; "for that is one of the first things a settler on the Isles of Shoals finds it necessary to learn." Her own lesson was learned perfectly. The sunrise was as familiar to her eyes as the sunset, and early and late the activity of her mind was rivaled by the ceaseless industry of her hands. She pays a tribute to the memory of Miss Peabody, of Newburyport, who went to Star Island in 1823 and "did wonders for the people during the three years of her stay. She taught the school, visited the families, and on Sundays read to such audiences as she could collect, took seven of the poor female children to live with her at the parsonage, instructed all who would learn in the arts of carding, spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, braiding mats, etc. Truly she remembered what 'Satan finds for idle hands to do,' and kept all her charges busy, and consequently happy. All honor to her memory! She was a wise and faithful servant. There is still an affectionate remembrance of her among the present inhabitants, whose mothers she helped out of their degradation into a better life." If it was not in Celia Thaxter's nature to teach in this direct way herself, she did not fail to appreciate and to stimulate excellence of every kind in others. Appledore was too far away in winter from the village at Star Island for any regular or frequent communication between them. Even so late as in the month of May she records watching a little fleet beating up for shelter under the lee of Appledore to ride out a storm. "They were in continual peril.... It was not pleasant to watch them as the early twilight shut down over the vast weltering desolation of the sea, to see the slender masts waving helplessly from one side to another.... Some of the men had wives and children watching them from lighted windows at Star. What a fearful night for them! They could not tell from hour to hour, through the thick darkness, if yet the cables held; they could not see till daybreak whether the sea had swallowed up their treasures. I wonder the wives were not white haired when the sun rose and showed them those little specks yet rolling in the breakers!" How clearly these scenes were photographed on the sensitive plate of her mind! She never forgot nor really lost sight of her island people. Her sympathy drew them to her as if they were her own, and the little colony of Norwegians was always especially dear to her. "How pathetic," she says, "the gathering of women on the headlands, when out of the sky swept the squall that sent the small boat staggering before it, and blinded the eyes, already drowned in tears, with sudden rain that hid sky and sea and boats from their eager gaze!" What she was, what her sympathy was, to those people, no one can ever quite express. The deep devotion of their service to her brothers and to herself, through the long solitude of winter and the storm of summer visitors, alone could testify. Such service cannot be bought: it is the devotion born of affection and gratitude and admiration. Speaking of one of the young women who grew up under her eye, she often said: "What could I do in this world without Mine Burntssen? I hope she will be with me when I die." And there indeed, at the last, was Mine, to receive the latest word and to perform the few sad offices. To tell of the services Mrs. Thaxter rendered to some of the more helpless people about her, in the dark season, when no assistance from the mainland could be hoped for, would make a long and noble story in itself. Her good sense made her an excellent doctor; the remedies she understood she was always on hand to apply at the right moment. Sometimes she was unexpectedly called to assist in the birth of a child, when knowledge and strength she was hardly aware of seemed to be suddenly developed. But the truth was she could do almost anything; and only those who knew her in these humbler human relations could understand how joyous she was in the exercise of such duties, or how well able to perform them. Writing to Mine from the Shoals once in March, she says: "This is the time to be here; this is what I enjoy! To wear my old clothes every day, grub in the ground, dig dandelions and eat them too, plant my seeds and watch them, fly on the tricycle, row in a boat, get into my dressing-gown right after tea, and make lovely rag rugs all the evening, and nobody to disturb us,-- _this_ is fun!" In the house and out of it she was capable of everything. How beautiful her skill was as a dressmaker, the exquisite lines in her own black or gray or white dresses testified to every one who ever saw her. She never wore any other colors, nor was anything like "trimming" ever seen about her; there were only the fine, free outlines, and a white handkerchief folded carefully about her neck and shoulders. In her young days it was the same, with a difference! She was slighter in figure then, and overflowing with laughter, the really beautiful but noisy laughter which died away as the repose of manner of later years fell upon her. I can remember her as I first saw her, with the seashells which she always wore then around her neck and wrists, and a gray poplin dress defining her lovely form. She talked simply and fearlessly, while her keen eyes took in everything around her; she paid the tribute of her instantaneous laughter to the wit of others, --never too eager to speak, and never unwilling. Her sense of beauty, not vanity, caused her to make the most of the good physical points she possessed; therefore, although she grew old early, the same general features of her appearance were preserved. She was almost too well known even to strangers, in these later years at the Shoals, to make it worth while to describe the white hair carefully put up to preserve the shape of the head, and the small silver crescent which she wore above her forehead; but her manner had become very quiet and tender, more and more affectionate to her friends, and appreciative of all men. One of those who knew her latterly wrote me: "Many of her letters show her boundless sympathy, her keen appreciation of the best in those whom she loved, and her wonderful growth in beauty and roundness of character. And how delightful her enthusiasms were,--as pure and clear as those of a child! She was utterly unlike any one in the world, so that few people really understood her. But it seems to me that her trials softened and mellowed her, until she became like one of her own beautiful flowers, perfect in her full development; then in a night the petals fell, and she was gone." The capabilities which were developed in her by the necessities of the situation, during her life at the Shoals in winter, were more various and remarkable than can be fitly told. The glimpses which we get in her letters of the many occupations show what energy she brought to bear upon the difficulties of the place. In "Among the Isles of Shoals" she says: "After winter has fairly set in, the lonely dwellers at the Isles of Shoals find life quite as much as they can manage, being so entirely thrown upon their own resources that it requires all the philosophy at their disposal to answer the demand.... One goes to sleep in the muffled roar of the storm, and wakes to find it still raging with senseless fury.... The weather becomes of the first importance to the dwellers on the rock; the changes of the sky and sea, the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sea-fowl, sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night,--all are noted with a love and careful scrutiny that is seldom given by people living in populous places.... For these things make our world: there are no lectures, operas, concerts, theatres, no music of any kind, except what the waves may whisper in rarely gentle moods; no galleries of wonders like the Natural History rooms, in which it is so fascinating to wander; no streets, shops, carriages; no postman, no neighbors, not a door-bell within the compass of the place!... The best balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity and stagnate, in this isolation. One learns immediately the value of work to keep one's wits clear, cheerful, and steady; just as much real work of the body as it can bear without weariness being always beneficent, but here indispensable.... No one can dream what a charm there is in taking care of pets, singing birds, plants, etc., with such advantages of solitude; how every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! A whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas and brilliant with forests of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart so much delight as I have known a single rose to give, unfolding in the bleak bitterness of a day in February, when this side of the planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, with the Isles of Shoals the most hopeless spot upon its surface. One gets close to the heart of these things; they are almost as precious as Picciola to the prisoner, and yield a fresh and constant joy such as the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of cities could not find in their whole round of shifting diversions. With a bright and cheerful interior, open fires, books and pictures, windows full of thrifty blossoming plants and climbing vines, a family of singing birds, plenty of work, and a clear head and quiet conscience, it would go hard if one could not be happy even in such loneliness. Books, of course, are inestimable. Nowhere does one follow a play of Shakespeare's with greater zest, for it brings the whole world, which you need, about you; doubly precious the deep thoughts which wise men have given to help us, doubly sweet the songs of all the poets; for nothing comes between to distract you." It was not extraordinary that the joy of human intercourse, after such estrangement, became a rapture to so loving a nature as Celia Laighton's; nor that, very early, before the period of fully ripened womanhood, she should have been borne away from her island by a husband, a man of birth and education, who went to preach to the wild fisher folk on the adjacent island called Star. The exuberant joy of her unformed maidenhood, with its power of self- direction, attracted the reserved, intellectual nature of Mr. Thaxter. He could not dream that this careless, happy creature possessed the strength and sweep of wing which belonged to her own sea-gull. In good hope of teaching and developing her, of adding much in which she was uninstructed to the wisdom which the influences of nature and the natural affections had bred in her, he carried his wife to a quiet inland home, where three children were very soon born to them. Under the circumstances, it was not extraordinary that his ideas of education were not altogether successfully applied; she required more strength than she could summon, more adaptability than many a grown woman could have found, to face the situation, and life became difficult and full of problems to them both. Their natures were strongly contrasted, but perhaps not too strongly to complement each other, if he had fallen in love with her as a woman, and not as a child. His retiring, scholarly nature and habits drew him away from the world; her overflowing, sun-loving being, like a solar system in itself, reached out on every side, rejoicing in all created things. Her introduction to the world of letters was by means of her first poem, "Land-Locked," which, by the hand of a friend, was brought to the notice of James Russell Lowell, at that time editor of the "Atlantic." He printed it at once, without exchanging a word with the author. She knew nothing about it until the magazine was laid before her. This recognition of her talent was a delight indeed, and it was one of the happiest incidents in a life which was already overclouded with difficulties and sorrow. It will not be out of place to reprint this poem here, because it must assure every reader of the pure poetic gift which was in her. In form, in movement, and in thought it is as beautiful as her latest work. LAND-LOCKED Black lie the hills; swiftly doth daylight flee; And, catching gleams of sunset's dying smile, Through the dusk land for many a changing mile The river runneth softly to the sea. O happy river, could I follow thee! O yearning heart, that never can be still! O wistful eyes, that watch the steadfast hill, Longing for level line of solemn sea! Have patience; here are flowers and songs of birds, Beauty and fragrance, wealth of sound and sight, All summer's glory thine from morn till night, And life too full of joy for uttered words. Neither am I ungrateful; but I dream Deliciously how twilight falls to-night Over the glimmering water, how the light Dies blissfully away, until I seem To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek, To catch the sound of dusky, flapping sail, And dip of oars, and voices on the gale Afar off, calling low,--my name they speak! O Earth! thy summer song of joy may soar Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave The sad, caressing murmur of the wave That breaks in tender music on the shore. With the growth of Mrs. Thaxter's children and the death of her father, the love and duty she owed her mother caused her to return in winter to the Shoals, although a portion of every summer was passed there. This was her husband's wish; his sense of loyalty to age and his deep attachment to his own parents made such a step appear necessary to him under the circumstances. But she had already tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the world outside beckoned to her with as fascinating a face as it ever presented to any human creature. It was during one of these returning visits to the Shoals that much of the delightful book from which I have quoted was written; a period when she had already learned something of the charms of society,--sufficient to accentuate her appreciation of her own past, and to rejoice in what a larger life now held in store for her. Lectures, operas, concerts, theatres, pictures, music above all,--what were they not to her! Did artists ever before find such an eye and such an ear? She brought to them a spirit prepared for harmony, but utterly ignorant of the science of painting or music until the light of art suddenly broke upon her womanhood. Of what this new world was to her we find some hint, of course, in her letters; but no human lips, not even her own exuberant power of expression, could ever say how her existence was enriched and made beautiful through music. Artists who sang to her, or those who rehearsed the finest music on the piano or violin or flute, or those who brought their pictures and put them before her while she listened,--they alone, in a measure, understood what these things signified, and how she was lifted quite away by them from the ordinary level of life. They were inspired to do for her what they could seldom do for any other creature; and her generous response, overflowing, almost extravagant in expression, was never half enough to begin to tell the new life they brought to her. The following lines from a sonnet addressed to the tenor singer William J. Winch, a singer who has given much pleasure to many persons by his beautiful voice, will convey some idea of the deep feeling which his ardent rendering of great songs stirred in her:-- "Carry us captive, thou with the strong heart And the clear head, and nature sweet and sound! Most willing captives we to thy great art. * * * * * Sing, and we ask no greater joy than this, Only to listen, thrilling to the song, * * * * * Borne skyward where the wingèd hosts rejoice." Mrs. Thaxter found herself, as the years went on, the centre of a company who rather selected themselves than were selected from the vast number of persons who frequented her brothers' "house of entertainment" at the islands. Her "parlor," as it was called, was a _milieu_ quite as interesting as any of the "salons" of the past. Her pronounced individuality forbade the intrusion even of a fancy of comparison with anything else, and equally forbade the possibility of rivalry. There was only one thought in the mind of the frequenters of her parlor,--that of gratitude for the pleasure and opportunity she gave them, and a genuine wish to please her and to become her friends. She possessed the keen instincts of a child with regard to people. If they were unlovable to her, if they were for any reason unsympathetic, nothing could bring her to overcome her dislike. She was in this particular more like some wild thing than a creature of the nineteenth century; indeed, one of her marked traits was a curious intractability of nature. I believe that no worldly motive ever influenced her relation with any human creature. Of course these native qualities made her more ardently devoted in her friendships; but it went hardly with her to ingratiate those persons for whom she felt a natural repulsion, or even sometimes to be gentle with them. Later in life she learned to call no man "common or unclean;" but coming into the world, as she did, full grown, like Minerva in the legend, with keen eyes, and every sense alive to discern pretension, untruth, ungodliness in guise of the church, and all the uncleanness of the earth, these things were as much a surprise to her as it was, on the other hand, to find the wondrous world of art and the lives of the saints. Perhaps no large social success was ever achieved upon such unworldly conditions; she swung as free as possible of the world of society and its opinions, forming a centre of her own, built up on the sure foundations of love and loyalty. She saw as much as any woman of the time of large numbers of people, and she was able to give them the best kind of social enjoyment: music, pictures, poetry, and conversation; the latter sometimes poor and sometimes good, according to the drift which swept through her beautiful room. Mrs. Thaxter was generous in giving invitations to her parlor, but to its frequenters she said, "If people do not enjoy what they find, they must go their way; my work and the music will not cease." The study of nature and art was always going forward either on or around her work-table. The keynote of conversation was struck there for those who were able to hear it. We were reminded of William Blake's verse:-- "I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate, Built in Jerusalem wall." Here it was that Whittier could be heard at his best, sympathetic, stimulating, uplifting, as he alone could be, and yet as he, with his Quaker training to silence, was so seldom moved to prove himself. Here he would sit near her hour after hour; sometimes mending her aeolian harp while they talked together, sometimes reading aloud to the assembled company. Here was Rose Lamb, artist and dear friend; and here Mrs. Mary Hemenway was a most beloved presence, with her eager enthusiasm for reform, yet with a modesty of bearing which made young and old press to her side. She loved Celia Thaxter, who in her turn was deeply and reverently attached to Mrs. Hemenway. The early affection of both Mr. Thaxter and his wife for William Morris Hunt grew to be the love of a lifetime. Hunt's grace, versatility, and charm, not to speak of his undoubted genius, exerted their combined fascination over these appreciative friends in common with the rest of his art-loving contemporaries; but to these two, each in their several ways, Hunt felt himself equally attracted, and the last sad summer of his life he gladly turned to Celia Thaxter in her island home as a sure refuge in time of trouble. It was she who watched him day by day, listening to his words, which came clothed with a kind of inspiration. "Whatever genius may be," said Tom Appleton, "we all feel that William Hunt had it. His going is the extinction of a great light; a fervent hand is cold; and the warmth which glowed through so many friends and disciples is like a trodden ember, extinguished." It was Celia Thaxter's hurrying footsteps which traced her friend to the spot where, in extreme weakness, he fell in death. She wrote, "It was that pretty lake where my wild roses had been blooming all summer, and where the birds dipped and sang at sunrise." Her gratitude to the men and women who brought music to her door knew no limit; it was strong, deep, and unforgetting. "What can I ever do for them," she would say, "when I remember the joy they bring me!" Julius Eichberg was one of the earliest friends who ministered in this way to her happiness. Her letters of the time overflow with the descriptions of programmes for the day, when Mr. Paine and Mr. Eichberg would play, together or alone, during long mornings and afternoons. "I am lost in bliss," she wrote; "every morning, afternoon, and evening, Beethoven! I am emerging out of all my clouds by help of it; it is divine!" And again, writing of Mr. Paine in his own house, she said: "I am in the midst of the awful and thrilling music of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and it curdles my blood; we are all steeped in it, for J. K. P. goes on and on composing it all the time, and the tremendous chords thrill the very timbers of the house. It is _most_ interesting!" Of Arthur Whiting, too, and his wife, whose musical gifts she placed among the first, she frequently wrote and spoke with loving appreciation. These friendships were a never failing source of gladness to her. Later in life came Mr. William Mason, who was the chief minister to her joy in music, her enlightener, her consoler, to the end. Those who loved her best must always give him the tribute of their admiration and grateful regard. Mr. Mason must have known her keen gratitude, for who understood better than he the feeling by which she was lifted away from the things of this world by the power of music. "The dignity of labor" is a phrase we have often heard repeated in modern life, but it was one unnecessary to be spoken by Celia Thaxter. It may easily be said of her that one of the finest lessons she unconsciously taught was not only the value of labor, but the joy of doing things well. The necessities of her position, as I have already indicated, demanded a great deal, but she responded to the need with a readiness and generosity great enough to extort admiration from those who knew her. How much she contributed to the comfort of the lives of those she loved at the Shoals we have endeavored to show; how beautiful her garden was there, in the summer, all the world could see; but at one period there was also a farm at Kittery Point, to be made beautiful and comfortable by her industry, where one of her sons still lives; and a _pied à terre_ in Boston or in Portsmouth, whither she came in the winter with her eldest son, who was especially dependent upon her love and care: and all these changes demanded much of her time and strength. She was certainly one of the busiest women in the world. Writing from Kittery Point September 6, 1880, she says: "It is divinely lovely here, and the house is charming. I have brought a servant over from the hotel, and it is a blessing to be able to make them all comfortable; to set them down in the charming dining-room overlooking the smooth, curved crescent of sandy beach, with the long rollers breaking white, and the shoals looming on the far sea-line.... But oh, how tired we all get! I shall be quite ready for my rest!" This note gives a picture of her life. She was always seeking to make a bright spot around her; to give of herself in some way. There is a bit in her book which illustrates this instinct. The incident occurred during a long, dreary storm at the Shoals. Two men had come in a boat asking for help. "A little child had died at Star Island, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means to construct a coffin among themselves. All day I watched the making of that little chrysalis; and at night the last nail was driven in, and it lay across a bench, in the midst of the litter of the workshop, and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards. I went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geranium, and returned with it through the rain. The brilliant blossoms were sprinkled with glittering drops. I laid them in the little coffin, while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured against the windows. Two men came through the mist and storm, and one swung the light little shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away, and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed among the waves. I never saw the little girl, but where they buried her I know; the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet, constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say, with a caress, 'Sleep well! Be thankful you are spared so much that I see humanity endure, fixed here forever where I stand.'" We have seen the profound love she felt for, and the companionship she found in, nature and natural objects; but combined with these sentiments, or developed simply by her love to speak more directly, was a very uncommon power of observation. This power grew day by day, and the delightful correspondence which existed between Bradford Torrey and herself, although they had never met face to face, bears witness to her constant mental record and memory respecting the habits of birds and woodland manners. Every year we find her longing for larger knowledge; books and men of science attracted her; and if her life had been less intensely laborious, in order to make those who belonged to her comfortable and happy, what might she not have achieved! Her nature was replete with boundless possibilities, and we find ourselves asking the old, old question, Must the artist forever crush the wings by which he flies against such terrible limitations?-- a question never to be answered in this world. Her observations began with her earliest breath at the islands. "I remember," she says, "in the spring, kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over. Better than a shopful of toys they were to me! Whence came their color? How did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light? Chemistry was not at hand to answer me, and all her wisdom would not have dispelled the wonder. Later, the little scarlet pimpernel charmed me. It seemed more than a flower; it was like a human thing. I knew it by its homely name of 'poor man's weather glass.' It was so much wiser than I; for when the sky was yet without a cloud, softly it clasped its small red petals together, folding its golden heart in safety from the shower that was sure to come. How could it know so much?" Whatever sorrows life brought to her, and they were many and of the heaviest, this exquisite enjoyment of nature, the tender love and care for every created thing within her reach, always stayed her heart. To see her lift a flower in her fingers,--fingers which gave one a sense of supporting everything which she touched, expressive, too, of fineness in every fibre, although strong and worn with labor,--to see her handle these wonderful creatures which she worshiped, was something not to be forgotten. The lines of Keats,-- "Open afresh your rounds of starry folds, Ye ardent marigolds!" were probably oftener flitting through her mind or from her lips than through the mind or from the lips of any since Keats wrote them. She remembered that he said he thought his "intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of flowers," but she was sure he never felt their beauty more devoutly "than the little half-savage being who knelt, like a fire-worshiper, to watch the unfolding of those golden disks." The time came at last, as it comes to every human being, for asking the reason of the faith that was in her. It was difficult for her to reply. Her heart had often questioned whether she believed, and what; and yet, as she has said, she could not keep her faith out of her poems if she would. We find the following passage in "Among the Isles of Shoals," which throws a light beyond that of her own lantern. "When the boat was out late," she says, "in soft, moonless summer nights, I used to light a lantern, and going down to the water's edge take my station between the timbers of the slip, and with the lantern at my feet sit waiting in the darkness, quite content, knowing my little star was watched for, and that the safety of the boat depended in a great measure upon it.... I felt so much a part of the Lord's universe, I was no more afraid of the dark than the waves or winds; but I was glad to hear at last the creaking of the mast and the rattling of the rowlocks as the boat approached." "A part of the Lord's universe,"--that Celia Thaxter always felt herself to be, and for many years she was impatient of other teaching than what nature brought to her. As life went on, and the mingled mysteries of human pain and grief were unfolded, she longed for a closer knowledge. At first she sought it everywhere, and patiently, save in or through the churches; with them she was long _im_patient. At last, after ardent search through the religious books and by means of the teachers of the Orient, the Bible was born anew for her, and the New Testament became her stay and refreshment. At this period she wrote to her friend, Mrs. H. M. Rogers: "K. and I read the Bhagavad Gîtâ every day of our lives, and when we get to the end we begin again! It is a great thing to keep one's mind full of it, permeated as it were; and I think Mohini's own words are a great help and inspiration every- where, all through it as well as in the beautiful introduction. I have written out clearly on the margin of my copy every text which he has quoted from the Scriptures, and find it most interesting. 'Truth is one.'" Nothing was ever "born anew" in Celia Thaxter which she did not strive to share with others. She could keep nothing but secrets to herself. Joys, experiences of every kind, sorrows and misfortunes, except when they could darken the lives of others, were all brought open handed and open hearted, to those she loved. Her generosity knew no limits. There is a description by her of the flood which swept over her being, and seemed to carry her away from the earth, when she once saw the great glory of the Lord in a rainbow at the island. She hid her face from the wonder; it was more than she could bear. "I felt then," she said, "how I longed to speak these things which made life so sweet, --to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird's flight, the sea's murmur, --and ever the wish grew;" and so it was she became, growing from and with this wish, a poet the world will remember. Dr. Holmes said once in conversation that he thought the value of a poet to the world was not so much the pleasure that this or that poem might give to certain readers, or even perchance to posterity, as the fact that a poet was known to be one who was sometimes rapt out of himself into the region of the Divine; that the spirit had descended upon him and taught him what he should speak. This is especially true of Celia Thaxter, whose life was divorced from worldliness, while it was instinct with the keenest enjoyment of life and of God's world. She liked to read her poems aloud when people asked for them; and if there was ever a genuine reputation from doing a thing well, such a reputation was hers. From the first person who heard her the wish began to spread, until, summer after summer, in her parlor, listeners would gather if she would promise to read to them. Night after night she has held her sway, with tears and smiles from her responsive little audiences, which seemed to gain new courage and light from what she gave them. Her unspeakably interesting nature was always betraying itself and shining out between the lines. Occasionally she yielded to the urgent claims brought to bear upon her by her friend Mrs. Johnson, of the Woman's Prison, and would go to read to the sad-eyed audience at Sherborn. Even those hearts dulled by wrong and misery awakened at the sound of her voice. It was not altogether this or that verse or ballad that made the tears flow, or brought a laugh from her hearers; it was the deep sympathy which she carried in her heart and which poured out in her voice; a hope, too, for them, and for what they might yet become. She could not go frequently,--she was too deeply laden with responsibilities nearer home; but it was always a holiday when she was known to be coming, and a season of light-heartedness to Mrs. Johnson as well as to the prisoners. It is a strange fallacy that a poet may not read his own verses well. Who besides the writer should comprehend every shade of meaning which made the cloud or sunshine of his poem? Mrs. Thaxter certainly read her own verse with a fullness of suggestion which no other reader could have given it; and her voice was sufficient, too, although not loud or striking, to fill and satisfy the ear of the listener. But at the risk of repetition we recall that it was her own generous, beautiful nature, unlike that of any other, which made her reading helpful to all who heard her. She speaks somewhere of the birds on her island as "so tame, knowing how well they are beloved, that they gather on the window-sills, twittering and fluttering gay and graceful, turning their heads this way and that, eying you askance without a trace of fear." And so it was with the human beings who came to know her. They were attracted, they came near, they flew under her protection, and were not disappointed of their rest. Four years before Mrs. Thaxter left this world, when she was still only fifty-five years old, she was stricken with a shaft of death. Her overworked body was prostrated in sudden agony, and she, well, young, vigorous beyond the ordinary lot of mortals, found herself weak and unable to rise. "I do so hate figuring as an interesting invalid," she wrote. "Perhaps I have been doing too much, getting settled. But oh, I used to be able to do _any_thing! Where is my old energy and vigor and power gone! It should not ebb away quite so soon!" She recovered her wonted tone and sufficient strength for every-day needs, and still found "life so interesting." But her keen observation had been brought to bear upon her own condition, and she suspected that she might flit away from us quickly some day. Except for one who was especially dependent upon her she was quite ready. The surprises of this life were so wonderful, it was easy for her to believe in the surprises of the unseen; but her letters were full as usual of the things which feed the springs of joy around us in this world. One summer it was the first volume of poems of Richard Watson Gilder which gave her great happiness. She talked of them, recited them, sent them to her friends, and finally wrote to Mr. Gilder himself. Since her death he has said, "I never saw Mrs. Thaxter but once, and that lately; but her immediate and surprising and continuous appreciation and encouragement I can never forget." How many other contemporaneous writers and artists could say the same! The transparent simplicity of her character and manners, her love and capacity for labor, were combined with equal capacities for enjoying the complex in others and a pure appetite for pleasure. It would be impossible to find a more childlike power of enjoyment. A perfect happiness came to her, during the last eight years of her life, with the birth of her grandchildren. The little boy who surprised her into bliss one day by crying out "I 'dore you, I 'dore you, granna! I love you every breff!" was the creature perhaps dearest to her heart; but she loved them all, and talked and wrote of them with abandonment of rejoicing. Writing to her friend Mrs. Rogers, she says: "Little E. stayed with his 'granna,' who worships the ground he walks on, and counted every beat of his quick-fluttering little heart. Oh, I never meant, in my old age, to become subject to the thrall of a love like this; it is almost dreadful, so absorbing, so stirring down to the deeps. For the tiny creature is so old and wise and sweet, and so fascinating in his sturdy common sense and clear intelligence; and his affection for me is a wonderful, exquisite thing, the sweetest flower that has bloomed for me in all my life through." Her enjoyment of art could not fade nor lose its keenness. Her life had been shut, as we have seen, into very narrow limits. She never had seen the city of New York, and life outside the circle we have described was an unknown world to her. She went to Europe once with her eldest brother, when he was ill, for three months, and she has left in her letters some striking descriptions of what she saw there; but her days were closely bounded by the necessities we have suggested. Nevertheless the great world of art was more to Celia Thaxter than to others; perhaps for the very reason that her mind was open and unjaded. Her rapture over the great players from England; her absolute agony, after seeing "The Cup" played by them in London, lest she could never, never tell the happiness it was to her, with Tennyson's words on her own tongue, as it were, to follow Miss Terry's perfect enunciation of the lines,--these enjoyments, true pleasures as indeed they are, did not lose their power over her. Gilbert and Sullivan, too, could not have found a more amused admirer. "Pinafore" never grew stale for her, and her brothers yielded to her fancy, or pleased it, by naming their little steamer Pinafore. She went to the theatre again and again to see this, and all the succeeding comedies by the same hands. She never seemed to weary of their fun. But the poets were her great fountain of refreshment; "Siloa's brook" was her chief resort. Tennyson was her chosen master, and there were few of his lines she did not know by heart. Her feeling for nature was satisfied by the incomparable verses in which he portrays the divine light shining behind the life of natural things. How often have we heard her murmuring to herself,-- "The wind sounds like a silver wire," or, "To watch the emerald-colored water falling," or, "Black as ash-buds on the front of March." Whatever it might be she was observing, there was some line of this great interpreter of nature ready to make the moment melodious. Shakespeare's sonnets were also her close companions; indeed, she seized and retained a cloud of beautiful things in her trustworthy memory. They fed and cheered her on her singing way. In the quiet loveliness of early summer, and before the tide of humanity swept down upon Appledore, she went for the last time, in June, 1894, with a small company of intimate friends, to revisit the different islands and the well-known haunts most dear to her. The days were still and sweet, and she lingered lovingly over the old places, telling the local incidents which occurred to her, and touching the whole with a fresh light. Perhaps she knew that it was a farewell; but if it had been revealed to her, she could not have been more tender and loving in her spirit to the life around her. How suddenly it seemed at last that her days with us were ended! She had been listening to music, had been reading to her little company, had been delighting in one of Appleton Brown's new pictures, and then she laid her down to sleep for the last time, and flitted away from her mortality. The burial was at her island, on a quiet afternoon in the late summer. Her parlor, in which the body lay, was again made radiant, after her own custom, with the flowers from her garden, and a bed of sweet bay was prepared by her friends Appleton Brown and Childe Hassam, on which her form was laid. William Mason once more played the music from Schumann which she chiefly loved, and an old friend, James De Normandie, paid a brief tribute of affection, spoken for all those who surrounded her. She was borne by her brothers and those nearest to her up to the silent spot where her body was left. The day was still and soft, and the veiled sun was declining as the solemn procession, bearing flowers, followed to the sacred place. At a respectful distance above stood a wide ring of interested observers, but only those who knew her and loved her best drew near. After all was done, and the body was at rest upon the fragrant bed prepared for it, the young flower-bearers brought their burdens to cover her. The bright, tear-stained faces of those who held up their arms full of flowers to be heaped upon the spot until it became a mound of blossoms, allied the scene, in beauty and simplicity, to the solemn rites of antiquity. It was indeed a poet's burial, but it was far more than that: it was the celebration of the passing of a large and beneficent soul. WHITTIER. NOTES OF HIS LIFE AND HIS FRIENDSHIPS BORN DECEMBER 17, 1807; DIED SEPTEMBER 7, 1892 The figure of the Quaker poet, as he stood before the world, was unlike that of any other prominent figure which has walked across the stage of life. This may be said, of course, of every individual; yet the likenesses between men of a given era, or between modern men of strong character and those of the ancient world, cause us sometimes to exclaim with wonder at the evident repetitions in development. One can hardly walk through the galleries of antique statues, nor read the passages of Plutarch or Thucydides, without finding this idea thrust upon the mind. But with regard to Whittier, such comparisons were never made, even in fancy. His lithe, upright form, full of quick movement, his burning eye, his keen wit, bore witness to a contrast in himself with the staid, controlled manner and the habit of the sect into which he was born. The love and devotion with which he adhered to the Quaker Church and doctrines served to accentuate his unlikeness to the men of his time, because he early became also one of the most determined contestants in one of the sternest combats which the world has witnessed. Neither in the ranks of poets nor divines nor philosophers do we find his counterpart. He felt a certain brotherhood with Robert Burns, and early loved his genius; but where were two more unlike? A kind of solitude of life and experience, greater than that which usually throws its shadow on the human soul, invested him in his passage through the world. The refinement of his education, the calm of nature by which, in youth, he was surrounded, the few books which he made his own, nearly all serious in their character, and the religious atmosphere in which he was nurtured, all tended to form an environment in which knowledge developed into wisdom, and the fiery soul formed a power to restrain or to express its force for the good of humanity. But as surely as he was a Quaker, so surely also did he feel himself a part of the life of New England. He believed in the ideals of his time; the simple ways of living; the eager nourishing of all good things by the sacrifice of many private wishes; in short, he made one cause with Garrison and Phillips, Emerson and Lowell, Longfellow and Holmes. His standards were often different from those of his friends, but their ideals were on the whole made in common. His friends were to Whittier, more than to most men, an unfailing source of daily happiness and gratitude. With the advance of years, and the death of his unmarried sister, his friends became all in all to him. They were his mother, his sister, and his brother; but in a certain sense they were always friends of the imagination. He saw some of them only at rare intervals, and sustained his relations with them chiefly in his hurried correspondence. He never suffered himself to complain of what they were not; but what they were, in loyalty to chosen aims, and in their affection for him, was an unending source of pleasure. With the shortcomings of others he dealt gently, having too many shortcomings of his own, as he was accustomed to say, with true humility. He did not, however, look upon the failings of his friends with indifferent eyes. "How strange it is!" he once said. "We see those whom we love going to the very verge of the precipice of self-destruction, yet it is not in our power to hold them back!" A life of invalidism made consecutive labor of any kind an impossibility. For years he was only able to write for half an hour or less, without stopping to rest, and these precious moments were devoted to some poem or other work for the press, which was almost his only source of income. His correspondence suffered, from a literary point of view; but his letters were none the less delightful to his friends. To the world of literature they are perhaps less important than those of most men who have achieved a high place. Whittier was between twenty and thirty years of age when his family left the little farm near Haverhill, where he was born, and moved into the town of Amesbury, eight miles distant. Long before that period he had identified himself with the antislavery cause, and had visited, in the course of his ceaseless labors for the slaves, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. These brief journeys bounded his travels in this world. In the year 1843 he wrote anxiously to his publisher, Mr. Fields, "I send with this 'The Exiles,' a kind of John Gilpin legend. I am in doubt about it. Read it, and decide for thyself whether it is worth printing." He began at this rather late period (he was then thirty-six years old) to feel a touch of satisfaction in his comparatively new occupation of writing poetry, and to speak of it without reserve to his chosen friends. His poems were then beginning to bring him into personal relation with the reading world. Many years later, when speaking of the newspaper writing which absorbed his earlier life, he said that he had written a vast amount for the press; he thought that his work would fill nearly ten octavo volumes; but he had grown utterly weary of throwing so much out into space from which no response ever came back to him. At length he decided to put it all aside, discovering that a power lay in him for more congenial labors. From the moment of the publication of his second volume of poems, Whittier felt himself fairly launched upon a new career, and seemed to stand with a responsive audience before him. The poems "Toussaint L'Ouverture," "The Slave-Ships," and others belonging to the same period, followed in quick succession. Sometimes they took the form of appeal, sometimes of sympathy, and again they are prophetic or dramatic. He hears the slave mother weep:-- "Gone--gone--sold and gone To the rice-swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters-- Woe is me, my stolen daughters!" Such voices could not be silenced. Though men might turn away and refuse to read or to listen, the music once uttered rang out into the common air, and would not die. A homely native wit pointed Whittier's familiar correspondence. Writing in 1849, while revising his volume for publication, he speaks of one of his poems as "that rascally old ballad 'Kathleen,'" and adds that it "wants something, though it is already too long." He adds: "The weather this morning is cold enough for an Esquimau purgatory-- terrible. What did the old Pilgrims mean by coming here?" With the years his friendship with his publisher became more intimate. In writing him he often indulged his humor for fun and banter: "Bachelor as I am, I congratulate thee on thy escape from single (misery!) blessedness. It is the very wisest thing thee ever did. Were I autocrat, I would see to it that every young man over twenty-five and every young woman over twenty was married without delay. Perhaps, on second thought, it might be well to keep one old maid and one old bachelor in each town, by way of warning, just as the Spartans did their drunken helots." Discussing the question of some of his "bad rhymes," and what to do about them, he wrote once: "I heartily thank thee for thy suggestions. Let me have more of them. I had a hearty laugh at thy hint of the 'carnal' bearing of one of my lines. It is now simply _rural._ I might have made some other needful changes had I not been suffering with headache all day." Occasionally the fire which burned in him would flame out, as when he writes in 1851: "So your Union-tinkers have really caught a 'nigger' at last! A very pretty and refreshing sight it must have been to Sabbath-going Christians yesterday--that _chained_ court-house of yours. And Bunker Hill Monument looking down upon all! But the matter is too sad for irony. God forgive the miserable politicians who gamble for office with dice loaded with human hearts!" From time to time, also, we find him expressing his literary opinions eagerly and simply as friend may talk with friend, and without aspiring to literary judgment. "Thoreau's 'Walden' is capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs." It would be unjust to Whittier to quote this talk on paper as his final opinion upon Thoreau, for he afterwards read everything he wrote, and was a warm appreciator of his work. His enthusiasm for books and for the writers of books never faded. "What do we not all owe you," he writes Mr. Fields, "for your edition of De Tocqueville! It is one of the best books of the century. Thanks, too, for Allingham's poems. After Tennyson, he is my favorite among modern British poets." And again: "I have just read Longfellow's introduction to his 'Tales of the Inn'--a splendid piece of painting! Neither Boccaccio nor Chaucer has done better. Who wrote 'A Loyal Woman's No?' Was it Lucy Larcom? I thought it might be." In 1866 he says: "I am glad to see 'Hosea Biglow' in book form. It is a grand book--the best of its kind for the last half-century or more. It has wit enough to make the reputation of a dozen English satirists." This appreciation of his contemporaries was a strong feature of his character. His sympathy with the difficulties of a literary life, particularly for women, was very keen. There seem to be few women writers of his time who have failed to receive from his pen some token of recognition. Of Edith Thomas he once said in one of his notelets, "She has a divine gift, and her first book is more than a promise--an assurance." Of Sarah Orne Jewett he was fond as of a daughter, and from their earliest acquaintance his letters are filled with appreciation of her stories. "I do not wonder," he wrote one day, "that 'The Luck of the Bogans' is attractive to the Irish folks, and to everybody else. It is a very successful departure from New England life and scenery, and shows that Sarah is as much at home in Ireland and on the Carolina Sea Islands as in Maine or Massachusetts. I am very proud that I was one of the first to discover her." This predisposition to think well of the work of others gave him the happy opportunity in more than one instance of bringing authors of real talent before the public who might otherwise have waited long for general recognition. This was especially the case with one of our best beloved New England writers, Lucy Larcom. As early as 1853 he wrote a letter to his publisher introducing her work to his notice. "I inclose," he says, "what I regard as a very unique and beautiful little book in MS. I don't wish thee to take my opinion, but the first leisure hour thee have, read it, and I am sure thee will decide that it is exactly the thing for publication.... The little prose poems are unlike anything in our literature, and remind me of the German writer Lessing. They are equally adapted to young and old.... The author, Lucy Larcom, of Beverly, is a novice in writing and book-making, and with no ambition to appear in print; and were I not perfectly certain that her little collection is worthy of type, I would be the last to encourage her to take even this small step to publicity. Read 'The Impression of Rain-drops,' 'The Steamboat and Niagara,' 'The Laughing Water,' 'My Father's House,' etc." He thus early became the foster-father of Lucy Larcom's children of the brain, and, what was far more to her, a life-long friend, adviser, and supporter. One of his most intimate personal friends for many years was Lydia Maria Child. Beginning in the earliest days of the anti-slavery struggle, their friendship lasted into the late and peaceful sunset of their days. As Mrs. Child advanced in years, it was her custom in the winter to leave her cottage at Wayland for a few months, and to take lodgings in Boston. The dignity and independence of Mrs. Child's character were so great that she knew her friends would find her wherever she might live, and her desire to help on the good work of the world led her to practice the most austere economies. Therefore, instead of finding a comfortable boarding-place, which she might well have excused herself for doing at her advanced age of eighty years, she took rooms in a very plain little house in a remote quarter of the city, and went by the street cars daily to the North End, to get her dinner at a restaurant which she had discovered as being clean, and having wholesome food at the very lowest prices. This enabled her to give away sums which were surprisingly large to those who knew her income. Wendell Phillips, who had always taken charge of her affairs, said to me at the time of her death that when the negroes made their flight into Kansas, Mrs. Child came in as soon as the news arrived and asked him to forward fifty dollars for their assistance. "I am afraid you cannot afford to send that sum just now," said Mr. Phillips. "Perhaps you will do well to think it over." "So I will," said Mrs. Child, and departed. In the course of the day he received a note from her, saying she had made a mistake. It was one hundred dollars that she wished to send. Mrs. Child's chief pleasure in coming to town was the opportunity she found of seeing her friends. Whittier always sought her out, and their meetings at the houses of their mutual cronies were festivals indeed. They would sit side by side, while memories crowded up and filled their faces with a tenderness they could not express in words. As they told their tales and made merry, they would sit with their hands on each other's knees, and with glances in which tears and laughter were closely intermingled. "It was good to see Mrs. Child," some one remarked, after one of those interviews. "Yes," said Whittier, "Lyddy's bunnets aren't always in the fashion" (with a quaint look, as much as to say, "I wonder what you think of anything so bad"), "but we don't like her any the worse for that." Shortly after Mrs. Child's death he wrote from Amesbury: "My heart has been heavy ever since I heard of dear Maria Child's death. The true, noble, loving soul! _Where_ is she? _What_ is she? _How_ is she? The moral and spiritual economy of God will not suffer such light and love to be lost in blank annihilation. She was herself an evidence of immortality. In a letter written to me at seventy years of age she said: 'The older I grow the more I am awe-struck (not frightened, but awed) by the great mystery of an existence here and hereafter. No thinking can solve the problem. Infinite wisdom has purposely sealed it from our eyes.'" There was never a moment of Whittier's life when, prostrated by illness, or overwhelmed by private sorrows, or removed from the haunts of men, he forgot to take a living interest in public affairs, and to study closely the characteristics and works of the men who were our governors. He understood the characters of our public officers as if he had lived with them continually, and his quick apprehension with regard to their movements was something most unusual. De Quincey, we remember, surprised his American friends by taking their hands, as it were, and showing them about Boston, so familiar was he with our localities. Whittier could sit down with politicians and easily prove himself the better man on contested questions. In 1861 he wrote:-- "Our government needs more wisdom than it has thus far had credit for to sustain the national honor and avert a war with England. What a pity that Welles _indorsed_ the act of Wilkes in his report! Why couldn't we have been satisfied with the thing without making such a cackling over it? Apologies are cheap, and we could afford to make a very handsome one in this case. A war with England would ruin us. It is too monstrous to think of. May God in His mercy save us from it!" In 1862 and 1863 Whittier was in frequent correspondence with Mr. Fields. Poems suggested by the stirring times were crowding thick upon his mind. "It is a great thing to live in these days. I am thankful for what I have lived to see and hear," he says. "There is nothing for us but the old Methodist ejaculation, 'Glory to God!'" The volume entitled "In War-time" appeared at this period, though, as usual, he seems to have had little strength and spirit for the revision of his poems. For this, however unwillingly, he would often throw himself upon the kindness of his friend and publisher. In writing to ask some consideration for the manuscript of an unknown lady during this year, he adds: "I ought to have sent to you about this lady's MS. long ago, but the fact is, I hate to bother you with such matters. I am more and more impressed with the Christian tolerance and patience of publishers, beset as you are with legions of clamorous authors, male and female. I should think you would hate the very sight of one of these importunates. After all, Fields, let us own the truth: writing folks are bores. How few of us (let them say what they will of our genius) have any common sense! I take it that it is the providential business of authors and publishers to torment each other." These little friendly touches in his correspondence show us the man far more distinctly than many pages of writing about him. Some one has said that Whittier's epistolary style was perfect. Doubtless he could write as good a letter on occasion as any man who ever lived, but he sustained no such correspondence. His notes and letters were homely and affectionate, with the delightful carelessness possible in the talk of intimate friends. They present no ordinary picture of human tenderness, devotion, and charity, and these qualities gain a wonderful beauty when we remember that they come from the same spirit which cried out with Ezekiel:-- "The burden of a prophet's power Fell on me in that fearful hour; From off unutterable woes The curtain of the future rose; I saw far down the coming time The fiery chastisement of crime; With noise of mingling hosts, and jar Of falling towers and shouts of war, I saw the nations rise and fall Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall." "The fire and fury of the brain" were his indeed; a spirit was in him to redeem the land; he was one of God's interpreters; but there was also the tenderness of divine humanity, the love and patience of those who dwell in the courts of the Lord. Whittier's sister Elizabeth was a sensitive woman, whose delicate health was a constant source of anxiety to her brother, especially after the death of their mother, when they were left alone together in the home at Amesbury. As one of their intimate friends said, no one could tell which would die first, but they were each so anxious about the other's health that it was a question which would wear away into the grave first, for the other's sake. It was Whittier's sad experience to be deprived of the companionship of all those most dear to him, and for over twenty years to live without that intimate household communion for the loss of which the world holds no recompense. For several years, before and after his sister Elizabeth's death, Whittier wore the look of one who was very ill. His large dark eyes burned with peculiar fire, and contrasted with his pale brow and attenuated figure. He had a sorrowful, stricken look, and found it hard enough to reconstruct his life, missing the companionship and care of his sister, and her great sympathy with his own literary work. There was a likeness between the two; the same speaking eyes marked the line from which they sprang, and their kinship and inheritance. Old New England people were quick to recognize "the Bachiler eyes," not only in the Whittiers, but in Daniel Webster, Caleb Cushing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Bachiler Greene, a man less widely known than these distinguished compatriots. Mr. Greene was, however, a man of mark in his own time, a daring thinker, and one who was possessed of much brave originality, whose own deep thoughtfulness was always planting seeds of thought in others, and who can certainly never be forgotten by those who were fortunate enough to be his friends. These men of the grand eyes were all descended from a gifted old preacher of great fame in early colonial days, a man of true distinction and devoted service, in spite of the dishonor with which he let his name be shadowed in his latest years. It would be most interesting to trace the line still further back into the past; but when the Bachiler eyes were by any chance referred to in Whittier's presence, he would look shyly askance, and sometimes speak, half with pride, half with a sort of humorous compassion, of his Hampton ancestor. The connection of the Whittiers of Haverhill with the Greenes was somewhat closer than with other branches of the Bachiler line. One of the poet's most entertaining reminiscences of his boyhood was the story of his first visit to Boston. Mr. William Greene's mother was an interesting woman of strong, independent character and wide interests, wonted to the life of cities, and one of the first, in spite of his boyish shyness, to appreciate her young relative. Her kind eagerness, during one of her occasional visits to the Whittiers, that Greenleaf should come to see her when he came to Boston, fell in with his own dreams, and a high desire to see the sights of the great town. One can easily see how his imagination glorified the natural expectations of a country boy, and when the time arrived how the whole household lent itself to furthering so great an expedition. He was not only to have a new suit of clothes, but they were, for the first time, to be trimmed with "boughten buttons," to the lad's complete satisfaction, his mind being fixed upon those as marking the difference between town and country fashions. When the preparations were made, his fresh homespun costume, cut after the best usage of the Society of Friends, seemed to him all that heart could desire, and he started away bravely by the coach to pass a week in Boston. His mother had not forgotten to warn him of possible dangers and snares; it was then that he made her a promise which, at first from principle and later from sentiment, he always most sacredly kept--that he would not enter a playhouse. As he told the story, it was easy for a listener to comprehend how many good wishes flew after the adventurer, and how much wild beating of the heart he himself experienced as the coach rolled away; how bewildering the city streets appeared when he found himself at the brief journey's end. After he had reported himself to Mrs. Greene, and been received with most affectionate hospitality, and had promised to reappear at tea-time, he sallied forth to the great business of sight-seeing. "I wandered up and down the streets," he used to say. "Somehow it wasn't just what I expected, and the crowd was worse and worse after I got into Washington Street; and when I got tired of being jostled, it seemed to me as if the folks might get by if I waited a little while. Some of them looked at me, and so I stepped into an alleyway and waited and looked out. Sometimes there didn't seem to be so many passing, and I thought of starting, and then they'd begin again. 'Twas a terrible stream of people to me. I began to think my new clothes and the buttons were all thrown away. I stayed there a good while." (This was said with great amusement.) "I began to be homesick. I thought it made no difference at all about my having those boughten buttons." How long he waited, or what thoughts were stirred by this first glimpse at the ceaseless procession of humanity, who can say? But there was a sequel to the tale. He was invited to return to Mrs. Greene's to drink tea and meet a company of her guests. Among them were some ladies who were very gay and friendly; we can imagine that they were attracted by the handsome eyes and quaint garb of the young Friend, and by his quick wit and homely turns of speech, all the more amusing for a rustic flavor. They tried to tease him a little, but they must have quickly found their match in drollery, while the lad was already a citizen of the commonwealth of books. No doubt the stimulus of such a social occasion brought him, as well as the strangers, into new acquaintance with his growing gifts. But presently one of the ladies, evidently the favorite until this shocking moment, began to speak of the theatre, and asked for the pleasure of his presence at the play that very night, she herself being the leading player. At this disclosure, and the frank talk of the rest of the company, their evident interest in the stage, and regard for a young person who had chosen such a profession, the young Quaker lad was stricken with horror. In after years he could only remember it with amusement, but that night his mother's anxious warnings rang in his ears, and he hastened to escape from such a snare. Somehow this pleasant young companion of the tea party hardly represented the wickedness of playhouses as Puritan New England loved to picture them; but between a sense of disappointment and homesickness and general insecurity, he could not sleep, and next morning when the early stage-coach started forth, it carried him as passenger. He said nothing to his amazed family of the alarming episode of the playing-woman, nor of his deep consciousness of the home-made clothes, but he no doubt reflected much upon this Boston visit in the leisure of the silent fields and hills. It is impossible to convey to those who never saw Mr. Whittier the charm of his gift of story telling; the exactness and simplicity of his reminiscences were flavored by his poetical insight and dramatic representation. It was a wonderful thing to hear him rehearse in the twilight the scenes of his youth, and the figures that came and went in that small world; the pathos and humor of his speech can never be exceeded; and there can never be again so complete a linking of the ancient provincial lore and the new life and thought of New England as there was in him. While he was with us, his poems seemed hardly to give sufficient witness of that rich store of thought and knowledge; he was always making his horizon wider, at the same time that he came into closer sympathy with things near at hand. For him the ancient customs of a country neighborhood, the simple characters, the loves and hates and losses of a rural household, stood for a type of human life in every age, and were never trivial or narrow. As he grew older, these became less and less personal. He sometimes appeared to think of death rather than the person who had died, and of love and grief rather than of those who felt their influence. His was the life of the poet first of all, and yet the tale of his sympathetic friendliness, and his generosities and care-taking for others will never be fully told. The dark eyes had great powers of insight; they could flash scorn as well as shine with the soft light of encouragement. He accustomed himself, of course, to more frequent visits to Boston after his sister's death, but he was seldom, if ever, persuaded to go to the Saturday Club, to which so many of his friends belonged. Sometimes he would bring a new poem for a private first reading, and for that purpose would stay to breakfast or luncheon; but late dinners were contrary to the habit of his life, and he seldom sat down to one. "I take the liberty," he wrote one day, "of inclosing a little poem of mine which has beguiled some weary hours. I hope thee will like it. How strange it seems not to read it to my sister! If thee have read Schoolcraft, thee will remember what he says of the 'Little Vanishers.' The legend is very beautiful, and I hope I have done it justice in some sort." In the spring of 1865 he came to Campton, on the Pemigewasset River, in New Hampshire, a delightful place for those who love green hills and the mystery of rivers. We were passing a few weeks there by ourselves, and it was a great surprise and pleasure to see our friend. He drove up to the door one afternoon just as the sun was slanting to the west, too late to drive away again that day. In our desire to show him all the glories of the spot, we carried him out at once, up the hillside, leaping across the brook, gathering pennyroyal and Indian posy as we went, past the sheep and on and up, until he, laughing, said: "Look here, I can't follow thee; besides, I think I've seen more of this life than thee have, and it isn't all so new to me! Come and sit down here; I'm tired." We sat a while overlooking the wonderful panorama, the winding river, the hills and fields all green and radiant, listening at times to a mountain stream which came with wild and solitary roar from its solemn home among the farther heights. Presently we returned to supper; and afterwards, sitting in the little parlor which looked towards the sunset on the high hills far away, his mind seemed to rise into a higher atmosphere. He began by quoting the last verse of Emerson's "Sphinx:"-- "Uprose the merry Sphinx, And couched no more in stone; She melted into purple cloud, She silvered in the moon; She spired into a yellow flame; She flowered in blossoms red; She flowed into a foaming wave; She stood Monadnock's head." He talked long and earnestly upon the subject of our spiritual existence independent of the body. I have often heard him dwell upon this subject since; but the awful glory of the hills, the dark and silence of our little parlor, the assured speech touching the unseen, of one who had thought much and suffered much, and found a refuge in the tabernacle not made with hands, were very impressive. We felt that "it was good for us to be there." Speaking of his faith in the visions of others--though he did not have these visions himself, and believed they were not vouchsafed to all-- he told us of a prophecy that was written down twenty-five years before by an old man in Sandwich (a village among the hills, about fifteen miles from Campton), predicting the terrible civil war which had just been raging between the North and the South. This man was in the fields at noonday, when a darkness fell upon his sight and covered the earth. He beheld the divided nation and the freed people and the final deliverance from the terrors of war. The whole series of events were clearly detailed, and Whittier had stored them away in his memory. He said that only one thing was wrong. He foretold foreign intervention, from which we were happily spared. The daughter of this prophet was living; he knew her well,--an excellent woman and a Friend who was often impressed to speak in meeting. "She is good," said Whittier, "and speaks from her experience, and for that reason I like to hear her." Spiritualism, as it is called in our day, was a subject which earnestly and steadily held his attention. Having lived very near to the Salem witchcraft experience in early times, the topic was one that came more closely home to his mind than to almost any one else in our century. There are many passages in his letters on this question which state his own mental position very clearly. "I have had as good a chance to see a ghost," he once said, "as anybody ever had, but not the slightest sign ever came to me. I do not doubt what others tell me, but I sometimes wonder over my own incapacity. I should like to see some dear ghost walk in and sit down by me when I am here alone. The doings of the old witch days have never been explained; and as we are so soon to be transferred to another state, how natural it appears that some of us should have glimpses of it here! We all feel the help we receive from the Divine Spirit. Why deny, then, that some men have it more directly and more visibly than others?" In his memories of New England country life when he was a child, this subject was closely interwoven with every association. He had an uncle, who made one of the family, a man by no means devoid of the old-fashioned faith in witches, and who was always ready to give his testimony. He remembered an old woman in the neighborhood who was accused of being a witch, and that when his uncle's opinion was asked about her, he replied that he _knew she was a witch._ "How do you know?" they said. "Oh," he replied, "I've seen her!" Whittier recalled this uncle's returning one night from a long drive through the woods; and when he came in and sat down by the fire after supper, he told them that he had seen three old women in a clearing around a kettle, "a-stirrin'of it." When they saw him, they moved off behind the trees, but he distinctly saw the smoke from the kettle, and he recognized the old woman in question as one of the three beyond the shadow of a doubt. No doubt some curious rustic remedy or charm was being brewed in the dark of the moon. Nothing escaped his observation that was printed or circulated upon this topic. In the summer of 1882 he discovered that Old Orchard Beach had been made a theatre of new wonders. Dr. ---- had been there, "working Protestant miracles, and the lame walk and the deaf hear under his manipulation and holy oil. There seems no doubt that cures of nervous diseases are really sometimes effected, and I believe in the efficacy of prayer. The nearer we are drawn to Him who is the source of all life, the better it must be for soul and body." In Robert Dale Owen he always took a strong and friendly interest; and when, late in life, reverses fell upon Mr. Owen in the shape of humiliating revelations of his own credulity, Whittier's relations to him were unchanged. "I have read with renewed interest," he wrote, "the paper of R. D. Owen. I had a long talk with him years ago on the subject. He was a very noble and good man, and I was terribly indignant when he was so deceived by the pretended materialized 'Katie King.' I could never quite believe in 'materialization,' as I had reason to know that much of it was fraudulent. It surely argues a fathomless depth of depravity to trifle with the yearning love of those who have lost dear ones, and 'long for the touch of a vanished hand.'" In the year 1866 a very fine portrait of Abraham Lincoln was engraved by Marshall. A copy of it was presented to Whittier, who wrote concerning it: "It was never my privilege to know Abraham Lincoln personally, and the various pictures have more or less failed to satisfy my conception of him. They might be, and probably were, what are called 'good likenesses,' so far as outline and detail were concerned; but to me they always seemed to lack one great essential of a true portrait,--the informing spirit of the man within. This I find in Marshall's portrait. The old harsh lines and unmistakable mouth are there, without flattery or compromise; but over all and through all the pathetic sadness, the wise simplicity and tender humanity of the man are visible. It is the face of the speaker at Gettysburg, and the writer of the second inaugural." It was during this year, also, that the "Tent on the Beach" was written. He had said again and again in his notes that he had this work in hand, but always declared he was far too ill to finish it during the year. Nevertheless, in the last days of December the package was forwarded to his publisher. "Tell me," he wrote, "if thee object to the personal character of it. I have represented thee and Bayard Taylor and myself living a wild tent life for a few summer days on the beach, where, for lack of something better, I read my stories to the others. My original plan was the old 'Decameron' one, each personage to read his own poems; but the thing has been so hackneyed by repetition that I abandoned it in disgust, and began anew. The result is before thee. Put it in type or the fire. I am content--like Eugene Aram, 'prepared for either fortune.'" He had intended also to accomplish some work in prose at this period, but the painful condition of his health forbade it. "I am forbidden to use my poor head," he said, "so I have to get along as I can without it. The Catholic St. Leon, thee knows, walked alert as usual after his head was cut off." I am tempted to quote still further from a letter of this period: "I inclose a poem of mine which has never seen the light, although it was partly in print from my first draft to spare me the trouble of copying. It presents my view of Christ as the special manifestation of the love of God to humanity.... Let me thank the publisher of Milton's prose for the compliment of the dedication. Milton's prose has long been my favorite reading. My whole life has felt the influence of his writings." There is a delightful note on the subject of the popularity of the "Tent on the Beach," which shows his natural pleasure in success. "Think," he says, "of bagging in this tent of ours an unsuspecting public at the rate of a thousand a day! This will never do. The swindle is awful. Barnum is a saint to us. I am bowed with a sense of guilt, ashamed to look an honest man in the face. But Nemesis is on our track; somebody will puncture our tent yet, and it will collapse like a torn balloon. I know I shall have to catch it; my back tingles in anticipation." It was perhaps in this same year, 1866, that we made an autumn visit to Whittier which is still a well-remembered pleasure. The weather was warm and the fruit was ripening in the little Amesbury garden. We loitered about for a while, I remember, in the afternoon, among the falling pear leaves and in the sweet air, but he soon led the way into his garden-room, and fell into talk. He was an adept in the art of conversation, having trained himself in the difficult school of a New England farmhouse, fit ground for such athletics, being typically bare of suggestion and of relief from outside resources. The unbroken afternoons and the long evenings, when the only hope of entertainment is in such fire as one brain can strike from another, produce a situation as difficult to the unskilled as that of an untaught swimmer when first cast into the sea. Persons long habituated to these contests could face the position calmly, and see the early "tea-things" disappear and the contestants draw their chairs around the fire with a kind of zeal; but to one new to such experience there was room for heart-sinkings when preparations were made, by putting fresh sticks on the fire, for sitting from gloaming to vespers, and sometimes on again unwearied till midnight. Mrs. Stowe and Whittier were the invincible Lancelots of these tourneys, and any one who has had the privilege of sitting by the New England hearthstone with either of them will be ready to confess that no playhouse, or game, or any of the distractions the city may afford, can compare with the satisfaction of such an experience. Upon the visit in question Whittier talked of the days of his anti-slavery life in 1835 or 1836, when the English agitator, George Thompson, first came to this country. The latter was suffering from the attack of many a mob, and was fatigued by frequent speaking and as frequent abuse. Whittier invited him to his home in the neighborhood of Haverhill, where he could find quiet and rest during the warm weather. Thompson accepted the invitation, and remained with him a fortnight. They used to rake hay together, and go about the farm unmolested. At length, however, a pressing invitation came for Thompson to go to Concord, New Hampshire, to speak in the cause of freedom, and afterwards to continue on to the village of Plymouth and visit a friend in that place. Whittier was included in the invitation, and it was settled that they should accept the call. They traveled peaceably enough in their own chaise as far as Concord, where the speech was delivered without interruption; but when they attempted to leave the hall after the address was ended, they found it almost impossible. A crowd followed them with the apparent intention of stoning and killing them. "I understood how St. Paul felt when he was thrice stoned," said Whittier. The missiles fell around them and upon them like hail, not touching their heads, providentially, although he could still remember the sound of the stones when they missed their aim and struck the wooden fence behind them. They were made very lame by the blows, but they managed to reach their friend's house, where they sprang up the steps three at a time, before the crowd knew where they were going. Their host was certainly a brave man, for he took them in at the door, and then throwing it open, exclaimed, "Whoever comes in here must come over my dead body." The door was then barricaded, and the crowd rushed round to the back of the house, thinking that their victims intended to go out that way; but the travelers waited until it was dark, when Whittier exchanged his Friend's hat for that of his host, and, everything else peculiar about his dress being well disguised, the two managed to pass out unperceived by the crowd, and go on their way to Plymouth. They stopped one night on their journey at a small inn, where the landlord asked if they had heard anything of the riot in Concord. Two men had been there, he said, one an Englishman by the name of Thompson, who had been making abominable and seditious speeches, stirring up people about "the niggers;" the other was a young Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was always making speeches. He heard him lecture once himself, he said (a base lie, Whittier told us, because he had never "lectured" in his life), and it was well that active measures had been taken against them. "We heard him all through," said Whittier; "and then, just as I had my foot on the step of the chaise, ready to drive away from the door, I remarked to him, 'Wouldn't you like to see that Thompson of whom you have been speaking?' I took good care not to use 'plain' language (that is, the Quaker form). 'I rather think I should,' said the man. 'Well, this is Mr. Thompson,' I said, as I jumped into the chaise. And this is the Quaker, Whittier,' said Thompson, driving away as fast as he could. I looked back, and saw him standing, mouth wide open, gazing after us in the greatest astonishment." The two kept on to Plymouth, where they were nearly mobbed a second time. Years after, Whittier said that once when he was passing through Portland, a man, seeing him go by, stepped out of his shop and asked if his name were Whittier, and if he were not the man who was stoned, years before, by a mob at Concord. The answer being in the affirmative, he said he believed a devil possessed him that night; for he had no reason to wish evil either to Whittier or Thompson, yet he was filled with a desire to kill them, and he thought he should have done so if they had not escaped. He added that the mob was like a crowd of demons, and he knew one man who had mixed a black dye to dip them in, which would be almost impossible to get off. He could not explain to himself or to another the state of mind he was in. The next morning we walked with Whittier again in his little garden, and saw his grapes, which were a source of pride and pleasure. One vine, he told us, came up from a tiny rootlet sent to him by Charles Sumner, in a letter from Washington. Later we strolled forth into the village street as far as the Friends' meeting-house, and sat down upon the steps while he told us something of his neighbors. He himself, he said, had planted the trees about the church: they were then good-sized trees. He spoke very earnestly about the worship of the Friends. All the associations of his youth and all the canons of his education and development were grounded on the Friends' faith and doctrine, and he was anxious that they should show a growth commensurate with the age. He disliked many of the innovations, but his affectionate spirit clung to his people, and he longed to see them drawing to themselves a larger measure of spiritual life, day by day. He loved the old custom of sitting in silence, and hoped they would not stray away into habits of much speaking. The old habits of the meeting-house were very dear to him. One cold, clear morning in January I heard his early ring at the door. He had been ill, but was so much better that he was absolutely gay. He insisted upon blowing the fire, which, as sometimes happens, will struggle to do its worst on the coldest days; and as the flames at last began to roar, his spirits rose with them. He was rejoicing over Garibaldi's victory. The sufferings of Italy had been so terrible that even one small victory in their behalf seemed a great gain. He said that he had been trying to arouse the interest of the Friends, but it usually took about two years to awaken them thoroughly on any great topic! He remained several hours that morning talking over his hopes for the country,--of politics, of Charles Sumner, of whom he said, "Sumner is always fundamentally right;" and of John Bright, for whose great gifts he had sincere admiration. Soon afterwards, at the time of this great man's death, Whittier wrote to us: "Spring is here to-day, warm, birdfull.... It seems strange that I am alive to welcome her when so many have passed away with the winter, and among them that stalwartest of Englishmen, John Bright, sleeping now in the daisied grounds of Rochdale, never more to move the world with his surpassing eloquence. How I regret that I have never seen him! We had much in common in our religious faith, our hatred of war and oppression. His great genius seemed to me to be always held firmly in hand by a sense of duty, and by the practical common sense of a shrewd man of business. He fought through life like an old knight-errant, but without enthusiasm. He had no personal ideals. I remember once how he remonstrated with me for my admiration for General Gordon. He looked upon that wonderful personality as a wild fighter, a rash adventurer, doing evil that good might come. He could not see him as I saw him, giving his life for humanity, alone and unfriended, in that dreadful Soudan. He did not like the idea of fighting Satan with Satan's weapons. Lord Salisbury said truly that John Bright was the greatest orator England had produced, and his eloquence was only called out by what he regarded as the voice of God in his soul." When at length Whittier rose to go that winter morning, with the feeling that he had already taken too large a piece out of the day, we pressed him to stay longer, since it was already late. "Why can't you stay?" urged his host. "Because, I tell you, I don't want to," which set us all laughing, and settled the question. Our first knowledge of his arrival in town was usually that early and punctual ring at the door to which I have referred. He would come in looking pale and thin, but full of fire, and, as we would soon find, of a certain vigor. He became interested one morning in a plan proposed to him for making a collection of poems for young people, one which he finally completed with the aid of Miss Lucy Larcom. We got down from the shelf Longfellow's "Poets and Poetry of Europe," and looked it over together. "Annie of Tharaw" was a great favorite of his, and the poem by Dirk Smit, on "The Death of an Infant," found his ready appreciation. Whittier easily fell from these into talk of Burns, who was his master and ideal. "He lives, next to Shakespeare," he said, "in the heart of humanity." In speaking of Rossetti and of his ballad of "Sister Helen," he confessed to being strangely attracted to this poem because he could remember seeing his mother, "who was as good a woman as ever lived," and his aunt performing the same strange act of melting a waxen figure of a clergyman of their time. The solemnity of the affair made a deep impression on his mind, as a child, for the death of the clergyman in question was confidently expected. His "heresies" had led him to experience this cabalistic treatment. There was some talk, also, that morning of the advantages, in these restless days, accruing to those who "stay put" in this world, instead of to those who are forever beating about, searching for greater opportunities from position or circumstance. He laughed heartily over the tale, which had just then reached us, of Carlyle going to hunt up a new residence in London with a map of the world in his pocket. We asked Whittier if he never felt tempted to go to Quebec from his well-beloved haunts in the White Mountains. "Oh no," he replied. "I know it all by books and pictures just as well as if I had seen it." This talk of traveling reminded him of a circus which came one season to Amesbury. "I was in my garden," he said, "when I saw an Arab wander down the street, and by and by stop and lean against my gate. He held a small book in his hand, which he was reading from time to time when he was not occupied with gazing about him. Presently I went to talk with him, and found he had lived all his life on the edge of the Desert until he had started for America. He was very homesick, and longed for the time of his return. He had hired himself for a term of years to the master of the circus. He held the Koran in his hand, and was delighted to find a friend who had also read his sacred book. He opened his heart still further then, and said how he longed for his old, wild life in the Desert, for a sight of the palms and the sands, but, above all, for its freedom." This interview made a deep impression, naturally, upon Whittier's mind, he, who was no traveler himself, having thus sung:-- "He who wanders widest, lifts No more of beauty's jealous veil Than he who from his doorway sees The miracle of flowers and trees." The memory of a visit to Amesbury, made once in September, vividly remains with me. It was early in the month, when the lingering heat of summer seems sometimes to gather fresh intensity from the fact that we are so soon to hear the winds of autumn. Amesbury had greatly altered of late years; large enough to be a city," our friend declared; "but I am not fat enough to be an alderman." To us it was still a small village, though somewhat dustier and less attractive than when we first knew it. As we approached the house, we saw him from a distance characteristically gazing down the road for us, from his front yard, and then at the first glimpse suddenly disappearing, to come forth again to meet us, quite fresh and quiet, from his front door. It had been a very hot, dry summer, and everything about that place, as about every other, was parched and covered with dust. There had been no rain for weeks, and the village street was then quite innocent of watering carts. The fruit hung heavily from the nearly leafless trees, and the soft thud of the pears and apples as they fell to the ground could be heard on every side in the quiet house-yards. The sun struggled feebly through the mists during the noontide hours, when a still heat pervaded rather than struck the earth; and then in the early afternoon, and late into the next morning, a stirless cloud seemed to cover the face of the world. These mists were much increased by the burning of peat and brush, and, alas! of the very woods themselves in every direction. Altogether, as Whittier said, quaintly, "it was very encouraging weather for the Millerites." His niece, who bears the name of his beloved sister, was then the mistress of his house, and we were soon made heartily welcome. Everything was plain and neat as became a Friend's household; but as the village had grown to be a stirring place, and the house stood close upon the dusty road, such charming neatness must sometimes have been a difficult achievement. The noonday meal was soon served and soon ended, and then we sat down behind the half-closed blinds, looking out upon the garden, the faded vines, and almost leafless trees. It was a cosy room, with its Franklin stove, at this season surmounted by a bouquet, and a table between the windows, where was a larger bouquet, which Whittier himself had gathered that morning in anticipation of our arrival. He seemed brighter and better than we had dared to hope, and was in excellent mood for talking. Referring again to the Millerites, who had been so reanimated by the forest fires, he said he had been deeply impressed lately with their deplorable doctrines. "Continually disappointed because we don't all burn up on a sudden, they forget to be thankful for their preservation from the dire fate they predict with so much complacency." He had just received a proof of his poem "Miriam," with the introduction, and he could not be content until they had both been read aloud to him. After the reading they were duly commented upon, and revised until he thought he could do no more; yet twice before our departure the proofs were taken out of the hand-bag where they were safely stowed away, and again more or less altered. Whittier's ever-growing fame was not taken by him as a matter of course. "I cannot think very well of my own things," he used to say; "and what is mere fame worth when thee is at home, alone, and sick with headaches, unable either to read or to write?" Nevertheless, he derived very great pleasure and consolation from the letters and tributes which poured in upon him from hearts he had touched or lives he had quickened. "That I like," he would say sometimes; "that is worth having." But he must often have known the deeps of sadness in winter evenings when he was too ill to touch book or pen, and when he could do nothing during the long hours but sit and think over the fire. We slept in Elizabeth's chamber. The portrait of their mother, framed in autumn leaves gathered in the last autumn of her life, hung upon the wall. Here, too, as in our bedroom at Dickens's, the Diary of Pepys lay on the table. Dickens had read his copy faithfully, and written notes therein. Of this copy the leaves had not been cut; but with it lay the "Prayers of the Ages," and volumes of poems, which had all been well read, and "Pickwick" upon the top. In the year 1867 Charles Dickens came to America to give his famous Readings. Whittier, as we have seen, was seldom tempted out of his country home and habitual ways, but Dickens was for one moment too much for him. To our surprise, he wrote to ask if he could possibly get a seat to hear him. "I see there is a crazy rush for tickets." A favorable answer was dispatched to him as soon as practicable, but he had already repented of the indiscretion. "My dear Fields," he wrote, "up to the last moment I have hoped to occupy the seat so kindly promised me for this evening. But I find I must give it up. Gladden with it the heart of some poor wretch who dangled and shivered all in vain in your long _queue_ the other morning. I must read my 'Pickwick' alone, as the Marchioness played cribbage. I should so like, nevertheless, to see Dickens and shake that creative hand of his! It is as well, doubtless, so far as he is concerned, that I cannot do it; he will have enough and too much of that, I fear. I dreamed last night I saw him surrounded by a mob of ladies, each with her scissors snipping at his hair, and he seemed in a fair way to be 'shaven and shorn,' like the Priest in 'The House that Jack Built.'" The large events of humanity were to Whittier a portion of his own experience, his personal life being, in the ordinary sense, devoid of incident. The death of Charles Dickens, in 1871, was a personal loss, just as his life had been a living gain to this remote and invalid man. One long quiet summer afternoon shortly after, Whittier joined us for the sake of talking about Dickens. He told us what sunshine came from him into his own solemn and silent country life, and what grateful love he must ever bear to him. He wished to hear all that could be told of him as a man. Tea came, and the sun went down, and still he talked and questioned, and then, after a long silence, he said suddenly: "What's he doing now? Sometimes I say, in Shakespeare's phrase, O for some 'courteous ghost,' but nothing ever comes to me. He was so human I should think thee must see him sometimes. It seems as if he were the very person to manifest himself and give us a glimpse beyond. I believe I have faith; I sometimes think I have; but this desire to see just a little way is terribly strong in me. I have expressed something of it in my verses to Mrs. Child about Loring." He spoke also of the significance of our prayers; of their deep value to our spirit in constantly renewing the sense of dependence; and further, since we "surely find that our prayers are answered, what blindness and fatuity there is in neglect or abuse of our privilege!" He was thinking of editing a new edition of John Woolman. He hoped to induce certain people who would read his own books to read that, by writing a preface for it. The death of Henry Ward Beecher was also a loss and a sadness to him in his solitary life. "I am saddened by the death of Beecher," he wrote; "he was so strong, so generous, so warm hearted, and so brave and stalwart in so many good causes. It is a mighty loss. He had faults, like all of us, and needed forgiveness; but I think he could say, with David of old, that he would rather fall into the Lord's hands than into the hands of man." It is anticipating the years and interrupting the narrative to mention here a few of the men who gladdened his later life by their friendship, but the subject demands a brief space before we return to the current story of his days. Matthew Arnold went to see him upon his arrival in this country, and it is needless to say that Whittier derived sincere pleasure from the visit; but Arnold's delightful recognition of Whittier's "In School Days" as one of the perfect poems which must live, gave him fresh assurance of fulfilled purpose in existence. He had followed Arnold with appreciation from his earliest appearance in the world of letters, and knew him, as it were, "by heart" long before a personal interview was possible. In a letter written after Arnold's return to England, he says: "I share thy indignation at the way our people have spoken of him--one of the foremost men of our time, a true poet, a wise critic, and a brave, upright man, to whom all the English-speaking people owe a debt of gratitude. I am sorry I could not see him again." When the end came, a few years later, he was among the first to say, "What a loss English literature has sustained in the death of Matthew Arnold!" As I have already suggested, he kept the run of all the noteworthy persons who came to Boston quite as surely as they kept in pursuit of him. "I hope thee will see the wonderful prophet of the Bramo Somaj, Mozoomdar, before he leaves the country. I should have seen him in Boston but for illness last week. That movement in India is the greatest event in the history of Christianity since the days of Paul. "So the author of 'Christie Johnstone' is dead. I have read and re-read that charming little story with ever-increasing admiration. I am sorry for the coarseness of some of his later writings; but he was, after all, a great novelist, second only in our times to George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray.... I shall be glad to hear more about Mr. Wood's and Mrs. ----'s talks. Any hint or sign or token from the unseen and spiritual world is full of solemn interest, standing as I do on the shore of 'that vast ocean I must sail so soon.'... "You will soon have Amelia Edwards again with you. I am sorry that I have not been able to call on her. Pray assure her of my sincere respect and admiration." And again: "Have thee seen and heard the Hindoo Mohini? He seems to have really converted some people. I hear that one of them has got a Bible!" The phrase that he is "beset by pilgrims" occurs frequently in his letters, contrasted with pleased expressions, and descriptions of visits from Phillips Brooks, Canon Farrar, Governor and Mrs. Claflin, and other friends whose faces were always a joy to him. I have turned aside from the narrative of every-day life to mention these friends; but it is interesting to return and recall the earlier years, when he came one day to dine in Charles Street with Mr. Emerson. As usual, his coming had been very uncertain. He was never to be counted upon as a visitor, but at length the moment came when he was in better health than ordinary, and the stars were in conjunction. I can recall his saying to Emerson: "I had to choose between hearing thee at thy lecture and coming here to see thee. I chose to see thee. I could not do both." Emerson was heard to say to him solicitously: "I hope you are pretty well, sir! I believe you formerly bragged of bad health." It was Whittier's custom, however, to make quite sure that all "lions" and other disturbing elements were well out of the way before he turned his steps to the library in Charles Street. I recall his coming one Sunday morning when we were at church, and waiting until our return. He thought that would be a safe moment! He was full, as Madame de Sévigné says, "_de conversations infinies_" being especially interested just then in the question of schools for the freedmen, and eagerly discussed ways and means for starting and supporting them. We were much amused by his ingenuity in getting contributions from his own town. It appears he had taken into consideration the many carriage-makers in Amesbury. He suggested that each one of these men should give some part of a carriage--one the wheels, one the body, one the furnishings, thus dividing it in all among twenty workmen. When it was put together, there stood a carriage which was sold for two hundred dollars, exactly the sum requisite for Amesbury to give. He had just parted from his niece, who had gone to teach the freed people in a small Southern village. He could not help feeling anxious for her welfare. She and her young co-workers would be the only Northerners in the place. Of course, such new comers would be regarded with no friendly eye by the "mean whites," and their long distance from home and from any protection would make their position a very forlorn one indeed if the natives should turn against them. He was fearful lest they should be half starved. However, they had departed in excellent spirits, which went a long way to cheer everybody concerned. He was also full of sympathy and anxiety regarding the well being of a young colored girl here at the North, whose sad situation he had been called upon to relieve; and after discussing ways and laying plans for her comfort (which he afterwards adhered to, until in later years she was placed in a happy home of her own), he went on to discuss the needs of yet a third young person, another victim of the war, who was then teaching in Amesbury. He was almost as remarkable as Mrs. Child in his power of making his own small provision into a broad mantle to cover many shoulders. He was undaunted, too, in his efforts, where his own resources failed, to get what was needed by the help of others. His common sense was so great and his own habits so frugal, that no one could imagine a dollar wasted or misapplied that was confided to his stewardship. His benefactions were ceaseless, and they were one of the chief joys of his later life. The subject of what may be done for this or that person or cause is continually recurring in his letters. Once I find this plea in verse after the manner of Burns:-- "O well-paid author, fat-fed scholar, Whose pockets jingle with the dollar, No sheriff's hand upon your collar, No duns to bother, Think on 't, a tithe of what ye swallow Would save your brother!" And again and again there are passages in his letters like the following: "I hope the Industrial Home may be saved, and wish I was a rich man just long enough to help save it. As it is, if the subscription needs $30 to fill it up, I shall be glad to give the mite." "I have long followed Maurice," he says again, "in his work as a religious and social reformer--a true apostle of the gospel of humanity. He saw clearly, and in advance of his clerical brethren, the necessity of wise and righteous dealing with the momentous and appalling questions of labor and poverty." He wrote one day: "If you go to Richmond, why don't you visit Hampton and Old Point Comfort, where that Christian knight and latter-day Galahad, General Armstrong, is making his holy experiment? I think it would be worth your while." General Armstrong and his brave work in founding and maintaining the Hampton School for the education, at first, of the colored people alone, and finally for the Indians also, was one of the near and living interests of Whittier's life. Often and often in his letters do we find references to the subject; either he regrets having to miss seeing the general, upon one of his Northern trips, or he rejoices in falling in with some of the teachers at Asquam Lake or elsewhere, or his note is jubilant over some new gift which will make the general's work for the year less difficult. Once he writes: "I am grieved to hear of General Armstrong's illness. I am not surprised at it. He has been working in his noble cause beyond any mortal man's strength. He must have a rest if it is possible for him, and his friends must now keep up the school by redoubled efforts. Ah me! There is so much to be done in this world! I wish I were younger, or a millionaire." And yet again: "I had the pleasure of sending General Armstrong at Christmas, with my annual subscription, one thousand dollars which a friend placed in my hand. I wish our friend could be relieved from the task of raising money by a hundred such donations." The choice of the early breakfast hour for his visits was his own idea. He was glad to hit upon a moment which was not subject to interruptions, one when he could talk at his ease of books and men. These visits were always a surprise. He liked to be abroad in good season, and had rarely missed seeing the sun rise in forty years. He knew, too, that we were not late people, and that his visits could never be untimely. Occasionally, with the various evening engagements of a city, we were not altogether fit to receive him, but it was a pleasure to hear his footstep in the morning, and to know that we should find him in the library by the fire. He was himself a bad sleeper, seldom, as he said, putting a solid bar of sleep between day and day, and therefore often early abroad to question the secrets of the dawn. We owe much of the intimate friendship of our life to these morning hours spent in private, uninterrupted talk. "I have lately felt great sympathy with ----," he said one morning, "for I have been kept awake one hundred and twenty hours--an experience I should not care to try again." One of Whittier's summer pleasures, in which he occasionally indulged himself, was a visit to the Isles of Shoals. He loved to see his friend Celia Thaxter in her island home, and he loved the freedom of a large hotel. He liked to make arrangements with a group of his more particular friends to meet him there; and when he was well enough to leave his room, he might be seen in some carefully chosen corner of the great piazzas, shady or sunny, as the day invited him, enjoying the keenest happiness in the voluntary society and conversation of those dear to him. Occasionally he would pass whole days in Celia Thaxter's parlor, watching her at her painting in the window, and listening to the talk around him. He wished to hear and know what interested others. He liked nothing better, he once said, than going into the "store" in the old days at Amesbury, when it was a common centre, almost serving the purpose of what a club may be in these later days, and sitting upon a barrel to hear "folks talk." The men there did not know much about his poetry, but they understood his politics, and he was able to put in many a word to turn the vote of the town. In Celia Thaxter's parlor he found a different company, but his relations to the people who frequented that delightful place were practically the same. He wished to understand their point of view, if possible, and then, if he could find opportunity, he would help them to a higher standpoint. I remember one season in particular, when the idle talk of idle persons had been drifting in and out during the day, while he sat patiently on in the corner of the pretty room. Mrs. Thaxter was steadily at work at her table, yet always hospitable, losing sight of no cloud or shadow or sudden gleam of glory in the landscape, and pointing the talk often with keen wit. Nevertheless, the idleness of it all palled upon him. It was Sunday, too, and he longed for something which would move us to "higher levels." Suddenly, as if the idea struck him like an inspiration, he rose, and taking a volume of Emerson from the little library he opened to one of the discourses, and handing it to Celia Thaxter said: "Read that aloud, will thee? I think we should all like to hear it." She read it through at his bidding; then he took up the thread of the discourse, and talked long and earnestly upon the beauty and necessity of worship--a necessity consequent upon the nature of man, upon his own weakness, and his consciousness of the Divine Spirit within him. His whole heart was stirred, and he poured himself out towards us as if he longed, like the prophet of old, to breathe a new life into us. I could see that he reproached himself for not having spoken out in this way before, but his enfranchised spirit took only a stronger flight for the delay. I have never heard of Whittier's speaking in the meeting-house, although he was doubtless often "moved" to do so; but to us who heard him on that day he became more than ever a light unto our feet. It was not an easy thing to do to stem the accustomed current of life in this way, and it is a deed only possible to those who, in the Bible phrase, "walk with God." Such an unusual effort was not without its consequences. It was followed by a severe headache, and he was hardly seen abroad again during his stay. We heard from him again, shortly after, under the shadow of the great hills where he always passed a part of every year. He loved them, and wrote eloquently of the loveliness of nature at Ossipee: "the Bearcamp winding down," the long green valley close by the door, the long Sandwich and Waterville ranges, and Chocorua filling up the horizon from west to northeast. The frequent loneliness of his life often found expression. Once he says:-- "I wish I could feel that I deserved a tithe even of the kind things said of me by my personal friends. If one could but _be_ as easily as preach! The confession of poor Burns might, I fear, be made of the best of us:-- "'God knows I'm no the thing I would be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.' And yet I am thankful every day of my life that God has put it into the hearts of so many whom I love and honor and reverence to send me so many messages of good will and kindness. It is an unspeakable comfort in the lonely and darkening afternoon of life. Indeed, I can never feel quite alone so long as I know that all about me are those who turn to me with friendly interest, and, strange to say, with gratitude. A sense of lack of desert on my part is a drawback, of course; but then, I say to myself, if my friends judge me by my aim and desire, and not by my poor performance, it may be all right and just." The painful solitude of his life after his dear niece's marriage was softened when he went to live with his cousins at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a pleasant country seat, sheltered and suited to his needs. Of this place Mrs. Spofford says, in a delightful biographical paper: "The estate of Oak Knoll is one of some historical associations, as here once lived the Rev. George Burroughs, the only clergyman in the annals of Salem witchcraft who was hung for dark dealings, Danvers having originally been a part of the town of Salem, where witchcraft came to a blaze, and was stamped out of existence.... The only relic on the place of its tragedy is the well of the Burroughs' house, which is still in the hay-field, and over which is the resting-place of the sounding-board of the pulpit in the church where the witches were tried." At Danvers he was able to enjoy the free open air. He loved to sit under the fine trees which distinguished the lawn, to play with the dogs, and wander about unmolested until he was tired. The ladies of the house exerted themselves to give him perfect freedom and the tenderest care. The daughter became his playmate, and she never quite grew up, in his estimation. She was his lively and loving companion. Writing from Danvers, one December, he says, "What with the child, and the dogs, and Rip Van Winkle the cat, and a tame gray squirrel who hunts our pockets for nuts, we contrive to get through the short dark days." Again: "I am thankful that February has come, and that the sun is getting high on his northern journey. The past month has been trying to flesh and spirit.... I am afraid my letter has a complaining tone, and I am rather ashamed of it, and shall be more so when my head is less out of order.... There are two gray squirrels playing in my room. Phoebe calls them Deacon Josiah and his wife Philury, after Rose Terry Cooke's story of the minister's 'week of works' in the place of a 'week of prayer.'" He showed more physical vitality after he went to Danvers, and his notes evince a wide interest in matters private and public outside his own library life. He still went to Portland to see his niece and her husband whenever he was able, and now and then to Boston also. But Philadelphia at the time of the Centennial was not to be thought of. "I sent my hymn," he wrote from Amesbury in 1876, "with many misgivings, and am glad it was so well received. I think I should like to have heard the music, but probably I should not have understood. The gods have made me most unmusical. "I have just got J. T. F.'s charming little book of 'Barry Cornwall and His Friends.' It is a most companionable volume, and will give rare pleasure to thousands.... I write in the midst of our Quaker quarterly meeting, and our house has been overrun for three days. We had twelve to dine to-day; they have now gone to meeting, but I am too tired for preaching. "I don't expect to visit Philadelphia. The very thought of that Ezekiel's vision of machinery and the nightmare confusion of the world's curiosity shop appalls me. I shall not venture." He was full of excellent resolutions about going often to Boston, but he never could make a home there. "I see a great many more things in the city than thee does," he would say, "because I go to town so seldom. The shop windows are a delight to me, and everything and everybody is novel and interesting. I don't need to go to the theatre. I have more theatre than I can take in every time I walk out." No sketch of Whittier, however slight, should omit to mention his friendship for Bayard Taylor. Their Quaker parentage helped to bring the two poets into communion; and although Taylor was so much the younger and more vigorous man, Whittier was also to see him pass, and to mourn his loss. He took a deep interest in his literary advancement, and considered "Lars" his finest poem. Certainly no one knew Taylor's work better, or brought a deeper sympathy into his reading of it. "I love him too well to be a critic of his verse," he says in one of his letters. "But what a brave worker he was!" The reading of good books was, very late in life, as it had been very early, his chief pleasure. His travels, his romance, his friendships, were indulged in chiefly by proxy of the printed page. "I felt very near Dr. Mulford through his writings," he said. "He was the strongest thinker of our time, and he thought in the right direction. 'The Republic of God' is intellectually greater than St. Augustine's 'City of God,' and infinitely nearer the Christian ideal." "That must be a shrewd zephyr," Charles Lamb used to say, speaking of his Gentle Giantess, "that can escape her." And so we may say of Whittier and a book. "Has thee seen the new book by the author of 'Mr. Isaacs'?" he asked (having sent me "Mr. Isaacs" as soon as it appeared, lest I should miss reading so novel and good a story). In the same breath he adds: "I have been reading 'The Freedom of Faith,' by the author of 'On the Threshold,' just published by Houghton & Co. It is refreshing and tonic as the northwest wind. The writer is one of the leaders of the new departure from the ultra-Calvinism. Thank thee just here for the pleasure of reading Annie Keary's biography. What a white, beautiful soul! Her views of the mission of spiritualism seem very much like ----'s. I do not know when I have read a more restful, helpful book. "How good Longfellow's poem is! A little sad, but full of 'sweetness and light.' Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, and myself are all getting to be old fellows, and that swan-song might serve for us all. 'We who are about to die.' God help us all! I don't care for fame, and have no solicitude about the verdicts of posterity. "'When the grass is green above us And they who know us and who love us Are sleeping by our side, Will it avail us aught that men Tell the world with lip and pen That we have lived and died?' "What we _are_ will then be more important than what we have done or said in prose or rhyme, or what folks that we never saw or heard of think of us." The following hitherto unpublished poem was written about this period upon the marriage of the daughter of his friend Mrs. Leonowens:-- TO A. L. WITH THE CONGRATULATIONS OF HER MOTHER'S FRIEND The years are many, the years are old, My dreams are over, my songs are sung, But, out of a heart that has not grown cold, I bid God-speed to the fair and young. Would that my prayer were even such As the righteous pray availing much, But nothing save good can Love befall, And naught is lacking since Love is all, Thy one great blessing of life the best, Like the rod of Moses swallows the rest! (Signed) JOHN G. WHITTIER. Oak Knoll, 6th mo. 7, 1878. Later he describes himself as listening to the "Life of Mrs. Stowe." "It is a satisfying book, a model biography, or, rather, autobiography for dear Mrs. Stowe speaks all through it. Dr. Holmes's letters reveal him as he is--wise, generous, chivalrous. Witness the kindliness and delicate sympathy of his letters during the Lord Byron trouble.... Miss W. has read us some of Howells's 'Hazard of New Fortunes.' It strikes me that it is a strong book. That indomitable old German, Linden--that saint of the rather godless sect of dynamiters and anarchists--is a grand figure; one can't help loving him." The poet's notes and letters are full of passages showing how closely he followed public affairs. "If I were not sick, and to-morrow were not election day," he says, "I should go to Boston. I hope to be there in a few days, at any rate. You must 'vote early and often,' and elect Hooper. Here we are having Marryat's triangular duel acted over by our three candidates. I wish they were all carpet-bagging among the Kukluxes. It wouldn't hurt us to go without a representative until we can raise one of our own." ... And again: "I am somewhat disappointed by the vote on the suffrage question. It should be a lesson to us not to trust to political platforms. A great many Republicans declined to vote for it or against it. They thought the leaders of the suffrage movement had thrown themselves into the hands of Butler and the Democrats. However, it is only one of those set-backs which all reforms must have--temporary, but rather discouraging. "I worked hard in our town, and we made a gain of nearly one hundred votes over last year." "I am happy," he says later, "in the result of the election--thankful that the State has sat down heavily on ----. I never thought of taking an active interest in politics this year, but I could not help it when the fight began." And still later in life: "I am glad of the grand overturn in Boston, and the courage of the women voters. How did it seem to elbow thy way to the polls through throngs of men folk?" Whittier never relinquished his house at Amesbury, where his kind friends, Judge Cate and his wife, always made him feel at home. As the end of his life drew near, it was easy to see that the village home where his mother and his sister lived and died was the place he chiefly loved; but he was more inaccessible to his friends in Amesbury, and the interruptions of a fast-growing factory town were sometimes less agreeable to him than the country life at Oak Knoll. He was a great disbeliever in too much solitude, however, and used to say, "The necessary solitude of the human soul is enough; it is surprising how great that is." Once only he expresses this preference for the dear old village home in his letters. "I have been at Amesbury for a fortnight. Somehow I seem nearer to my mother and sister; the very walls of the rooms seem to have become sensitive to the photographs of unseen presences." As the end drew near, he passed more and more time with his beloved cousins Gertrude and Joseph Cartland in Newburyport, whose interests and aims in life were so close to his own. The habit of going to the White Mountains in their company for a few weeks during the heat of summer was a fixed one. He grew to love Asquam, with its hills and lakes, almost better than any other place for this sojourn. It was there he loved to beckon his friends to join him. "Do come, if possible," he would write. "The years speed on; it will soon be too late. I long to look on your dear faces once more." His deafness began to preclude general conversation; but he delighted in getting off under the pine-trees in the warm afternoons, or into a quiet room upstairs at twilight, and talking until bedtime. He described to us, during one visit, his first stay among the hills. His parents took him where he could see the great wooded slope of Agamenticus. As he looked up and gazed with awe at the solemn sight, a cloud drooped, and hung suspended as it were from one point, and filled his soul with astonishment. He had never forgotten it. He said nothing at the time, but this cloud hanging from the breast of the hill filled his boyish mind with a mighty wonder, which had never faded away. Notwithstanding his strong feeling for Amesbury, and his presence there always at "quarterly meeting," he found himself increasingly comfortable in the companionship of his devoted relatives. Something nearer "picturesqueness" and "the beautiful" came to please the sense and to soothe the spirit at Oak Knoll. He did not often make record in his letters of these things; but once he speaks charmingly of the young girl in a red cloak, on horseback, with the dog at her side, scampering over the lawn and brushing under the sloping branches of the trees. The sunset of his life burned slowly down; and in spite of illness and loss of power, he possessed his soul in patience. After a period when he usually felt unable to write, he revived and wrote a letter, in which he spoke as follows of a poem which had been sent for his revision: "The poem is solemn and tender; it is as if a wind from the Unseen World blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow is sweeter than that of gladness--a holy fear mingled with holier hope. For myself, my hope is always associated with dread, like the shining of a star through mist. I feel, indeed, that Love is victorious, that there is no dark it cannot light, no depth it cannot reach; but I imagine that between the Seen and the Unseen there is a sort of neutral ground, a land of shadow and mystery, of strange voices and undistinguished forms. There are some, as Charles Lamb says, 'who stalk into futurity on stilts,' without awe or self-distrust. But I can only repeat the words of the poem before me.".... One of the last, perhaps the very last visit he made to his friends in Boston was in the beautiful autumn weather. The familiar faces he hoped to find were absent. He arrived without warning, and the very loveliness of the atmosphere which made it possible for him to travel had tempted younger people out among the falling leaves. He was disappointed, and soon after sent these verses to rehearse his experience:-- "I stood within the vestibule Whose granite steps I knew so well, While through the empty rooms the bell Responded to my eager pull. "I listened while the bell once more Rang through the void, deserted hall; I heard no voice, nor light foot-fall, And turned me sadly from the door. "Though fair was Autumn's dreamy day, And fair the wood-paths carpeted With fallen leaves of gold and red, I missed a dearer sight than they. "I missed the love-transfigured face, The glad, sweet smile so dear to me, The clasp of greeting warm and free; What had the round world in their place? "O friend, whose generous love has made My last days best, my good intent Accept, and let the call I meant Be with your coming doubly paid." But even this journey was beyond his strength. He wrote: "Coming back from Boston in a crowded car, a window was opened just behind me and another directly opposite, and in consequence I took a bad cold, and am losing much of this goodly autumnal spectacle. But Oak Knoll woods were never, I think, so beautiful before." In future his friends were to seek him; he could go no more to them: the autumn had indeed set in. Now began a series of birthday celebrations, which were blessings not unmixed in his cup of life. He was in the habit of writing a brief note of remembrance on these anniversaries; in one of which, after confessing to "a feeling of sadness and loneliness," he turns to the Emerson Calendar, and says, "I found for the day some lines from his 'World Soul:'-- "'Love wakes anew this throbbing heart, And we are never old; Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild piled snow-drift The warm rose-buds blow.' Reading them, I took heart." On another occasion he says: "In the intervals of visitation on that day my thoughts were with dear friends who have passed from us; among whom, I need not say, was thy dearest friend. How vividly the beautiful mornings with you were recalled! Then I wondered at my age, and if it was possible that I was the little boy on the old Haverhill farm, unknown, and knowing nobody beyond my home horizon. I could not quite make the connection of the white-haired man with the black- locked boy. I could not help a feeling of loneliness, thinking of having outlived many of my life-companions; but I was still grateful to God that I had not outlived my love for them and for those still living. Among the many tokens of good will from all parts of the country and beyond the sea, there were some curious and amazing missives. One Southern woman took the occasion to include me in her curse of the 'mean, hateful Yankees.' To offset this, I had a telegram from the Southern Forestry Congress assembled in Florida, signed by president and secretary, informing me that 'In remembrance of your birthday, we have planted a live-oak tree to your memory, which, like the leaves of the tree, will be forever green.'" Birthdays, on the whole, in the face of much sadness, brought him also much that was agreeable and delightful in remembrance. One old friend always gave him great pleasure by sending a huge basket of gilded wicker, in which were placed fruits of every variety from all quarters of the globe, and covered with rare flowers and ferns. In this way he visited the gardens of the Orient, and could see in his imagination the valleys of Napa and of Shiraz. On the occasion of a dinner given him at the Brunswick Hotel, on his seventieth birthday, he wrote: "I missed my friend. In the midst of so much congratulation, I do not forget his earlier appreciation and encouragement, and every kind word which assured and cheered me when the great public failed to recognize me. I dare not tell thee, for fear of seeming to exaggerate, how much his words have been to me." Thus the long years and the long days passed on with scarcely perceptible diminution of interest in the affairs of this world. "I am sorry to find that the hard winter has destroyed some handsome spruces I planted eight years ago," he wrote one May day; "they had grown to be fine trees. Though rather late for me, I shall plant others in their places; for I remember the advice of the old Laird of Dumbiedikes to his son Jock: 'When ye hae naething better to do, ye can be aye sticking in a tree; it'll aye be growin' when ye are sleeping.' There is an ash-tree growing here that my mother planted with her own hands at threescore and ten. What agnostic folly to think that tree has outlived her who planted it!" The lines of Whittier's life stretched "between heaven and home" during the long period of eighty-four years. A host of friends, friends of the spirit, were, as we have seen, forever clustering around him; and what a glorious company it was! Follen, Shipley, Chalkley, Lucy Hooper, Joseph Sturge, Channing, Lydia Maria Child, his sister Elizabeth--a shining cloud too numerous to mention; the inciters of his poems and the companions of his fireside. In the silence of his country home their memories clustered about him and filled his heart with joy. "He loved the good and wise, but found His human heart to all akin Who met him on the common ground Of suffering and of sin." His "Home Ballads" grew out of this very power of clinging to the same places and the old loves, and what an incomparable group they make! "Telling the Bees," "Skipper Ireson's Ride," "My Playmate," "In School Days," are sufficient in themselves to set the seal to his great fame. As a traveler, too, he is unrivaled, giving us, without leaving his own garden, the fine fruit of foreign lands. In reading his poems of the East, it is difficult to believe that he never saw Palestine, nor Ceylon, nor India; and the wonder is no less when he writes of our own wide country. Indeed, the vividness of his poems about the slaves at St. Helena's Island and elsewhere make them among the finest of all his local poems. One called "The Pass of the Sierra" may easily bear the palm among much descriptive writing. He watched over his last remaining brother during a long illness and death, during the autumn and winter of 1882 and 1883 in Boston. The family all left Oak Knoll and came to be with him at a hotel, whence he could make frequent visits to his brother's bedside; but the unwonted experience of passing several months in town, and the wearing mission which brought him there, told seriously upon his health, and caused well-grounded anxiety as to the result. The day after the last services had been performed he wrote to a friend: "Indeed, it was a great comfort to sit beside you and to feel that if another beloved one had passed into the new life beyond sight and hearing, the warm hearts of loved friends were beating close to my own. You do not know how grateful it was to me. Dr. Clarke's presence and words were full of comfort. My brother did not approve of a display of flowers, but he loved violets, and your simple flowers were laid in his hand.... Give my love to S., and kiss the dear child for me." It was not, however, until 1890 that we could really feel he had left the years of active service and of intellectual achievement as things of the past. He was shut out from much that gave him pleasure, but the spirit which animated the still breathing frame, though waiting and at times longing for larger opportunity, seemed to us like a loving sentinel, covering his dear ones as with a shield, and watching over the needs of humanity. The advance of the colored people, the claims of the Indians and their wrongs, opportunities for women, statesmen, and politicians, the private joys and sorrows of those dear to him, were all present and kept alive, though in the silence of his breast. The end came, the door opened, while he was staying with the daughter of an old friend at Hampton Falls, in New Hampshire--that saintly woman whom we associate with one of the most spiritual and beautiful of his poems, "A Friend's Burial." After a serious illness in the winter of 1892 he was almost too frail for any summer journeying; but with his usual wisdom and instinctive turning of the heart towards old familiar places, he thought of this hospitable house where he seemed to gain strength, and where he found much happiness and the quietness that he loved. His last illness was brief; he was ministered to by those who stood nearest him. And thus the waves of time passed over him and swept him from our sight. It is a pleasure now to recall many a beautiful scene in summer afternoons, under the trees at Danvers, when his spirit animated the air and made the landscape shine with a radiance not its own. Such memories serve to keep the whole world beautiful wherein he moved, and add to his poetry a sense of presence and a living light. Old age appears in comparison to every other stage of human existence as a most undesirable state. We look upon its approaches and its ravages with alarm. Death itself is far less dreadful, and "the low door," if it will only open quickly, brings little fear to the thoughtful mind. But the mystery of decadence, the long sunsetting, the loss of power--what do they mean? The Latin word _saga_, from which the French get _la sagesse_, and we "the sage," gives us a hint of what we do not always understand--the spiritual beauty and the significance even of loss in age. Whittier, wearing his silver crown, brought the antique word into use again, and filled it with fresh meaning for modern men. TENNYSON It is difficult at the present time, when Tennyson's poetry has become a part of the air we breathe, to look back into the world of literature as it existed before he came. There is a keen remembrance, lingering ineradicably with the writer, of a little girl coming to school once upon recitation day, with a "piece" of her own selection safely stored away in her childish memory. It was a new poem to the school, and when her turn came to recite her soul was full of the gleam and glory of Camelot. She felt as if she were unlocking a treasure-house, and it was with unspeakable pleasure to herself that she gave, verse after verse, the entire poem of "The Lady of Shalott." Doubtless the child's voice drifted away into sing-song, as her whole little self seemed to drift away into the land of faery, and doubtless also the busy teacher, who was more familiar with Jane Taylor and Cowper, was sadly puzzled. When the child at length sat down, scarcely knowing where she was in her sudden descent from the land of marvel, she heard the teacher say, to her amazement and discouragement, after an ominous pause, "I wonder if any young lady can tell me what this poem means?" There was no reply. "Can _you_ tell us?" was the next question, pointed at the poor little girl who had just dropped out of cloudland. "I thought it explained itself," was the plaintive reply. With a slight air of depreciation, in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull clouds of routine shut down over the sudden glory. "Shades of the prison-house" then and there began to close over the growing child. One joy had for the present faded from her life, that of a sure sympathy and understanding. Not even her teacher could see what she saw, nor could feel what lay deep down in her own glowing heart. Nevertheless Tennyson was henceforth a seer and a prophet to this child and to the growing world; but for some, who could never learn his language, he was born too late. The picturesqueness of Scott and Byron, the simple piety of Cowper, had satisfied the poetic and religious nature of the world up to that time. Shelley and Keats had indeed lived, but men had scarcely then learned generally to read them. Tennyson may be looked upon as their interpreter, in a measure, to the common world. Even Wordsworth, the mountain-top of poetry, the leader, whom Tennyson called his master-- even he failed to give the common mind, which looks for drama, any long poem which he who runs may read. This humanity in poetry is distinctly, first of all, Shakespearian; but if this quality should seem to any reader not also Tennysonian, let him re-read "Guinevere," in the "Idylls of the King," and reverse his decision. The hearts of men were largely attuned by Tennyson, and taught to understand the affinities and symbolisms of nature. This new era in literature opened about the year 1830, when Tennyson gave a few poems to the world, which were chiefly canceled by his later judgment. A small book in green paper covers lies before me as I write, "privately printed" in 1862, containing his poems printed between 1830 and 1833, and giving the first readings of some which have been sanctioned in his later editions. The volume "privately printed" has been most privately treasured lest anything should appear from it to "vex the poet's mind." For thirty years it has lain in a secret drawer, with these words inscribed upon the cover: "Not to be lent; not to be stolen; not to be given away." Some of these poems have been wrought over until we are reminded of his own line, "Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere," and incorporated in his later editions; others seem to have been gathered up and published without permission by an American publisher, who in some way gained possession of the book. The present perfected edition, however, published by Macmillan, evidently contains all the poems Tennyson wished to have remembered. The chief interest in the small green book is in the early readings, which are a good study for those who pursue the art of poetry. We see in them the sure integrity of the master-hand. "Isabel" was not, perhaps, one of the very earliest poems, although it stands among the early poems of character in the perfected edition. It does not appear in the green book, yet the title already stands in the table of contents. In his own revised editions it has always appeared unchanged from the first. There is a flawless loveliness in this poem which makes it especially worthy of admiration. "Isabel" possesses a peculiar interest, because it is understood to be the poet's tribute to his wife, and indeed even his imaginative eye could hardly elsewhere have found another to whom this description would so properly fit:-- "The intuitive decision of a bright And thorough-edged intellect to part Error from crime; a prudence to withhold The laws of marriage character'd in gold Upon the blanched tablets of her heart; A love still burning upward, giving light To read those laws; an accent very low In blandishment, but a most silver flow Of subtle-paced counsel in distress, Right to the heart and brain, tho' undescried, Winning its way with extreme gentleness Thro' all the outworks of suspicious pride A courage to endure and to obey; A hate of gossip parlance and of sway,-- Crown'd Isabel, thro' all her placid life, The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife." The relation of Tennyson's life to that of other men has been but imperfectly understood. There was indeed a natural sublimity in his character which gave him, as he has himself said of the poet's mind, a power for scorn of things fit to be scorned; but his capacity for friendship has been proved again and again. The tree, as of old, is known by its fruits, and we need only recall the poems to James Spedding, to F. D. Maurice, to Mary Boyle, to Lord Dufferin, his correspondence with Edward Fitzgerald, and the great note of grief and consolation in "In Memoriam," to know a man capable of friendship, and one who has drawn to himself the noble lovers of his time. There was an unconsciousness of outward things, of the furniture of life, which left him freer than most men to face the individual soul that approached him. There was also a fine consistency in his personality,--no tampering with the world; no trying to serve two masters. The greatness of his presence was felt, we believe, by all who approached him; he seemed to be invested by a strange remoteness from the affairs of the world. Yet it was easy for the spirits to draw near to him who really wanted what he could give. His hospitality was large and sincere. In his own words of the "Great Duke" we read his perfect likeness:-- "As the greatest only are, In his simplicity sublime." A friend who knew him wrote once: "Tennyson found out in the golden season of his life, his youth, just what kind of work he was fitted to do, and he never squandered an hour in search of his primary bearings.... There is always a gravity about him, a becoming nobleness, which reminds one of what St. Simon said of Fénélon, 'When he is present it requires an effort to cease looking at him.'" When this friend returned after his first interview with Tennyson, many years ago, we can well recall the eagerness with which we listened. His excitement as he described the hours they had passed together was hardly less than that of his hearer. Every minute detail of the interview was impatiently demanded. "How did he look?" was asked immediately in the first pause, and "What did he say?" followed before there was quite time to speak. In reply came a full description of the tall figure, clad in a long gray dressing-gown, presenting itself in the half-opened doorway of his chambers in the Temple, and looking cautiously out at the new comer. "'Oh! it is you,' he said, drawing his visitor in through the narrow space with a most cordial welcome. He was sitting before the fire, with his books about him, which he put aside, and while he talked he began to toast sundry slices of bread for our repast. As for his looks, his head is a very grand one, and his voice has a deep swelling richness in it. He had just received from the printers some proof sheets of the 'Idylls of the King,' and then and there he chanted the story of Enid and Elaine: chanted is the true word to apply to his recitations. He had a theory that poetry should always be given out with the rhythm accentuated, and the music of the verse strongly emphasized, and he did it with a power that was marvelous." The next recollection, and one that sweeps vividly across my memory, is that of going to Farringford for the first time, and seeing Tennyson among the surroundings so admirably suited to his tastes and necessities. The place was much more retired than at present; indeed, there was neither sight nor sound of any intrusion during those summer days. The island might have been Prospero's own, it seemed so still and far away. Beyond the gardens and the lawn the great downs sloped to the sea, and in the distance on either hand could be seen the cliffs and shores as they wound away and were lost in the dim haze that lay between us and the horizon. We found ourselves suddenly walking as in a dream, surrounded with the scenery of his poems. It is still easy to distinguish with perfect clearness to the "inward eye" two figures rambling along the downs that lovely day, and pausing at a rude summer-house, a kind of forgotten shelter, a relic of some other life. The great world was still as only the noon of summer knows how to be; the air blew freshly up from the sea, and the figures stopped a moment to look and rest. The door of the shelter hung idly on rusted hinges, and the two entered to enjoy the shade. Turning, they saw the whole delicious scene framed in the rude doorway. "Ah," the lady said, "I have found one of your haunts. I think you must sometimes write here." Tennyson looked at her with a smile which said, "I can trust my friends;" and putting his hand up high over the door, he took from the tiny ledge a bit of pencil and paper secreted there, held them out to her for one moment, and then carefully put them back again. There was not much said, but it was an immediate revelation, and a cherished bit of confidence. Perhaps on that sheet was already inscribed, "Ask me no more; the moon may draw the sea, The cloud may stoop from heaven and lake the shape, With fold on fold, of mountain or of cape;" or perhaps the page was waiting for "The Sailor-Boy," or glimpses of the great "Tyntagel," or "Lyonesse." I could not know, nor did he, what he was yet to do. I only felt--all who knew him felt--that he knew his work demanded from him the sacrifice of what the world calls pleasure. He endeavored to hold his spirit ready, and his mind trained and responsive. His constant preoccupation with the business of his life rendered him often impatient of wasting hours in mere "personal talk." He was always eager and ready to hear of large matters of church or state from those who were competent to inform him; but it was his chief joy, when his friends were gathered about him, to read from other poets or from his own books. In this same visit there was much talk of Milton, of whom he spoke as "the great organist of verse, who always married sound to sense when he wrote." Surely no one ever gave the lines of that great poet as he did. It was wonderful to hear. It would be impossible to forget that grand voice as he repeated:-- "The imperial ensign which full high advanced Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed, Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds." Tennyson's chanting of his own "Boädicea" was very remarkable. "Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated, Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable." But nothing could excel the effect of his rendering of "Guinevere," his voice at times tremulous with emotion, and his face turned from the light as he read, "Let no man dream but that I love thee still," and all the noble context glowing with a white heat. It was easy then to find that his own ideal, "Flos regum Arthuris," was not a legend to him alone, but a vision of the Holy Grail toward which he aspired. It were easy, indeed it is a temptation, to record every detail, stamped as they all are on the memory after several visits at Farringford and at Aldworth; but the beautiful paper printed only a few years ago by Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, now given to the world in a volume, where Tennyson stands as one of "The Light-Bearers," would make any repetition of the history of his family life worse than unnecessary. Mrs. Ritchie's friendship with the members of that household, and her familiarity with the houses and scenery which surrounded them, have given her the opportunity to do what her genius has executed. Summer was again here, with a touch of autumn in the air--this autumn in which we write--when we last saw Lord Tennyson at Aldworth. He was already unwell and suffering from a cold. He sat, however, on his couch, which was drawn across the great window, where he could look off, when he turned his head, and see the broad green valley and the hills beyond, or, near at hand, could watch the terrace and his own trees, and catch a glimpse of the garden. The great frame had lost its look of giant strength; the hands were thinner; but the habit of his mind and spirit was the same. Again we heard the voice; again we felt the uplift of his presence. He was aware that he was not to stay here much longer, and when we bent over him to say good-by, we knew and he knew it was indeed "farewell." He was surrounded with deep love and tenderness and the delightful presence of his little grandchildren, and when, shortly after, his weakness increased, he doubtless heard the words sounding in his mind:-- "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages." He asked for "Cymbeline" that he might carry the noble lines clearly in remembrance. Later the moon shone full into the room, and in that dim splendor, and to the music of the autumn wind, his spirit passed. EMILY, LADY TENNYSON When I first saw Lady Tennyson she was in the prime of life. Her two sons, boys of eight and ten years of age perhaps, were by her side. Farringford was at that time almost the same beautiful solitude the lovers had found it years before, when it was first their home. Occasionally a curious sight-seer, or a poet-worshiper, had been known to stray across the grounds or to climb a tree in order to view the green retired spot; but as a rule Tennyson could still wander unwatched and unseen through the garden, over the downs, and stand alone on the shore of the great sea. It was already afternoon when we arrived dusty and travel-stained at the hospitable door, which was wide open, shaded by vines, showing the interior dark and cool. Mrs. Tennyson, in her habitual and simple costume of a long gray dress and lace kerchief over her head, met us with her true and customary cordiality, leading us to the low drawing- room, where a large oriel window opening on the lawn and the half- life-size statue of Wordsworth were the two points which caught my attention as we entered. Her step as she preceded us was long and free. Something in her bearing and trailing dress, perhaps, gave her a mediaeval aspect which suited with the house. The latter, I have been told, was formerly a baronial holding, and the fair Enid and the young Elaine appeared to be at one with her own childhood. They were no longer centuries apart from the slender fair-haired lady who now lay on a couch by our side,--they were a portion of her own existence, of a nature obedient to tradition, obedient to home, obedient to love. The world has made large advance, and the sound of the wheels of progress were not unheard in the lady's room at Farringford. She was ready to sympathize with every form of emancipation; but for herself, her poet's life was her life, and his necessity was her great opportunity. I recall Mrs. Browning once saying to me, "Ah, Tennyson is too much indulged. His wife is too much his second self; she does not criticise enough." But Tennyson was not a second Browning. The delicate framework of his imagination, filled in by elemental harmonies, was not to be carelessly touched. She understood his work and his nature, and he stood firm where he had early planted himself by her side in worshiping affection and devotion. "Alfred carried the sheets of his new poem up to London," she said one day, "and showed them to Mr. Monckton Milnes, who persuaded him to leave out one of the best lines; but I persuaded him to replace it when he came home. It is a mistake in general for him to listen to the suggestions of others about his poems." All this was long ago, and the finger of memory has left faint tracings for me to follow; but I recall her figure at dinner as she sat in her soft white muslin dress, tied with blue, at that time hardly whiter than her face or bluer than her eyes, and how the boys stood sometimes one on either side of her in their black velvet dresses, like Millais' picture of the princes in the tower, and sometimes helped to serve the guests. By and by we adjourned to another room, where there was a fire and a shining dark table with fruit and wine after her own picturesque fashion, and where later the poet read to us, while she, being always delicate in health, took her accustomed couch. I remember the quaint apartment for the night, on different levels, and the faded tapestry,--recalling "the faded mantle and the faded veil," her tender personal care, and her friendly good- night, the silence, the sweetness, and the calm. She sometimes joined our out-door expeditions, but could not walk with us. For years she used a wheeled chair, as Mrs. Ritchie has charmingly described in her truthful and sympathetic sketch of the life at Aldworth. I only associated her with the interior, where her influence was perfect. The social atmosphere of Farringford, which depended upon its mistress, was warm and simple. A pleasant company of neighbors and friends was gathered when "Maud" was read aloud to us, a wide group, grateful and appreciative, and one to which he liked to read. After this the mists of time close over! I can recall her again in the gray dress and kerchief following our footsteps to the door. I can see her graceful movement of the head as she waved her adieux; I can see the poet's dusky figure standing by her side, and that is all. Sometimes she lives confusedly to the world of imagination as the Abbess at Almesbury; and sometimes, as one who knew her has said, she was like the first of the three queens, "the tallest of them all, and fairest," who bore away the body of Arthur. She was no less than these, being a living inspiration at the heart of the poet's every-day life. It would seem to be upon another visit that we were talking in the drawing-room about Browning. "We should like to see him oftener," she said, "he is delightful company, but we cannot get him to come here; we are too quiet for him!" I found food for thought in this little speech when I remembered the fatuous talk at dinner-tables where I had sometimes met Browning, and thought of Tennyson's great talk and the lofty serenity of his lady's presence. My last interview with Lady Tennyson was scarcely two months before Tennyson's death. The great grief of their life in the loss of their son Lionel had fallen upon them meanwhile. They were then at Aldworth, which, although a house of their own building, was far more mediaeval in appearance than Farringford. She was alone, and still on the couch in the large drawing-room, and there she spoke with the same youth of heart, the same deep tenderness, the same simple affection which had never failed through years of intercourse. When she rose to say farewell and to follow me as far as possible, she stepped with the same spirited sweep I had first seen. The happiness of welcoming her lovely face, which wore to those who knew her an indescribable heavenliness, is mine no more; but the memory cannot be effaced of one lady who held the traditions of high womanhood safe above the possible deteriorations of human existence. 
2988	----	MARK TWAIN A BIOGRAPHY THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE VOLUME I. Part 1: 1835-1866 TO CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE TO WRITE HISTORY RATHER THAN EULOGY AS THE STORY OF HER FATHER'S LIFE AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT Dear William Dean Howells, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Joseph T. Goodman, and other old friends of Mark Twain: I cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their making. First, I want to confess how I have envied you your association with Mark Twain in those days when you and he “went gipsying, a long time ago.” Next, I want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me so unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in the nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who follow him. And, lastly, I want to tell you that I do not envy you so much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your grace, I have gone gipsying with you all. Neither do I wonder now, for I have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory would have contented your hearts. My gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed to the story. Only, I seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words. Albert Bigelow Paine. PREFATORY NOTE Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of Mr. Clemens himself. Mark Twain's spirit was built of the very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance--seeking, as he said, “only to tell a good story”--while in later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made history difficult, even when, as in his so-called “Autobiography,” his effort was in the direction of fact. “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not,” he once said, quaintly, “but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer of this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items. MARK TWAIN--A BIOGRAPHY I. ANCESTORS On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide repute “for his want of energy,” and in a marginal note he has written: “I guess this is where our line starts.” It was like him to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in his work. Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry. The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in Rome. There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and again in the annals of the Middle Ages. More lately there was a Gregory Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. Afterward he was tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall. Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall Clemens, the father of Mark Twain. Perhaps the line could be traced, and its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be written. Of Mark Twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be said. His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man of culture and literary taste. In 1797 he married a Virginia girl, Pamela Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born August 11, 1798, was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising. The family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work. As a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at Lynchburg, and doubtless studied at night. At all events, he acquired an education, but injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother and the younger children, removed to Adair County, Kentucky, where the widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock, a good man. In due course, John Clemens was sent to Columbia, the countyseat, to study law. When the living heirs became of age he administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three negro slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the Clemens effects to this day. This was in 1821. John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three, never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and a heart full of hope and dreams. Sober, industrious, and unswervingly upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark. That he was likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then regarded as a misfortune. It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a Casey--a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons) of Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all Kentucky. The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had been Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved her life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer. The Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery County somewhat farther east. As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom in the English family, and there were claimants even then in the American branch. All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it was rare Jane Lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his feet almost at the moment of their meeting. Many of the characteristics that made Mark Twain famous were inherited from his mother. His sense of humor, his prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her contribution to his fame. Speaking of her in a later day, he once said: “She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not knowing it to be humorous.” She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion; her wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and the pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and perfect setting. It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and John Marshall Clemens. All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband, and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness. She stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and on May 6, 1823, they were married. She was then twenty; her husband twenty-five. More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long been dead, she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old Settlers' Convention, because among the names of those attending she had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. She meant to humble herself to him and ask forgiveness after all the years. She arrived too late; the convention was over, and he was gone. Mark Twain once spoke of this, and added: “It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime.” II. THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived. About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him Orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown, Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court. It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants could be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of 75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500. The great tract lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown. Standing in the door of the Court House he had built, looking out over the “Knob” of the Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he said: “Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure. I may not live to see these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will.” Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the “Tennessee land,” which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of phantom riches, The Gilded Age. Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true he was in no wise to blame. The land is priceless now, and a corporation of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some survey. Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to present needs. He built himself a house, unusual in its style and elegance. It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen before. He was regarded as an aristocrat. He wore a swallow-tail coat of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth. The blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time. His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls--there were continuous balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful dancers. Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed. It attained almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log houses--and stopped there. The country, too, was sparsely settled; law practice was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to court was very bad for one of his physique. John Clemens saw his reserve of health and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise. He built himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods. These he exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and other produce of the country, which he took to Louisville every spring and fall in six-horse wagons. In the mean time he would seem to have sold one or more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital. There was a second baby now--a little girl, Pamela,--born in September, 1827. Three years later, May 1830, another little girl, Margaret, came. By this time the store and home were in one building, the store occupying one room, the household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were declining. About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf. The Tennessee land was safe, of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time the struggle for daily substance was becoming hard. He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where a post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as postmaster, usually addressed as “Squire” or “Judge.” A store was run in connection with the postoffice. At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another boy, Benjamin, was born. The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank of the river. He no longer practised law. In The Gilded Age we have Mark Twain's picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother Orion; and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time. The chapter is too long and too depressing to be set down here. The reader may look it up for himself, if he chooses. If he does he will not wonder that Jane Clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that John Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment--was rapidly getting out of heart. After all the bright promise of the beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away. A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than his years. Every spring he was prostrated with what was called “sunpain,” an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all persistent effort. Yet he did not retreat from his moral and intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community. He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten. Gray and deep-set under bushy brows, they literally looked you through. Absolutely fearless, he permitted none to trample on his rights. It is told of John Clemens, at Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according to the custom of that community. For some reason, the minister put the document aside and neglected it. At the close of the service Clemens rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the congregation. Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall in him certain of his father's legacies. The arrival of a letter from “Colonel Sellers” inviting the Hawkins family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age. In reality the letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister, Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. It was a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to do with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is likely to last as long as American history. III. A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if less celebrity. The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively unknown. Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river. St. Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted region. There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines of any consequence--scarcely any maps. For all that one could see or guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to the world outside. In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and others of the Lampton race. It was natural that they should want Jane Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee venture and join them in this new and promising land. It was natural, too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write the letter. There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set down the number at fifty-four. Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be certain to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer. Yet there would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens must have hungered for her people. In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter ends: “Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!” The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away. The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family “flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.” They had a two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their earlier fortunes. The barouche held the parents and the three younger children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin. There were also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the house-girl, a slave, rode. This was early in the spring of 1835. They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a visit to relatives. At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for St. Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into what was then the Far West, the promised land. They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in appearance that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with John Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans. The great Mississippi was less than fifty miles away. Salt River, with a system of locks and dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with Florida as its head of navigation. It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely character in The Gilded Age. That was another relative--James Lampton, a cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial dreams. John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was prospering in a small way. He had also acquired a good farm, which he worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading citizen of the community. He offered John Clemens a partnership in his store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land. Furthermore, he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law. Thus far, at least, the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could not be worse than they had been in Tennessee. In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane Clemens established their household. It was a humble one-story affair, with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for its size, and comparatively new. It is still standing and occupied when these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as a shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost American-born author--the man most characteristically American in every thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king. It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the domain he was to conquer. Long, afterward, one of those who knew him best said: “He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never quite of this race or kind.” He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns. But nobody thought of this, then. He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his coming. Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all. One Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any sort on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[This honor has been claimed also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell. Probably all were present and assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then. It was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. Still, John Clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear Virginia friend, Langhorne. The family fortunes would seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have regarded the arrival of another son as a good omen. With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room was badly needed, and he began building without delay. The result was not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but it was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair. The rooms were larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and dining-room uses. This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the Clemens family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was often in later days pointed out as Mark Twain's birthplace. It missed that distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having sheltered his early childhood.--[This house is no longer standing. When it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off and manufactured into souvenirs. Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as his birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: “No, it is too stylish, it is not my birthplace.”] IV. BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY It was not a robust childhood. The new baby managed to go through the winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors. Added strength came, but slowly; “Little Sam,” as they called him, was always delicate during those early years. It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his children. He looked after their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave advice on occasion. He bought a book now and then--sometimes a picture-book--and subscribed for Peter Parley's Magazine, a marvel of delight to the older children, but he did not join in their amusements, and he rarely, or never, laughed. Mark Twain did not remember ever having seen or heard his father laugh. The problem of supplying food was a somber one to John Clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion machine at this period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the inventor at least, was not a mirthful occupation. Jane Clemens was busy, too. Her sense of humor did not die, but with added cares and years her temper as well as her features became sharper, and it was just as well to be fairly out of range when she was busy with her employments. Little Sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret at intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little lad whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother, three years his junior. But in addition to these associations, there were the still more potent influences Of that day and section, the intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of the slaves. All the children of that time were fond of the negroes and confided in them. They would, in fact, have been lost without such protection and company. It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all work--apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment. Wonderful entertainment it was. That was a time of visions and dreams, small. gossip and superstitions. Old tales were repeated over and over, with adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events. At evening the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting legends. Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and delight of its curdling thrill. The tales always began with “Once 'pon a time,” and one of them was the story of the “Golden Arm” which the smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider audiences in many lands. Briefly it ran as follows: “Once 'Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and one night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and tuck it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she was his wife; and she says: “W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm? W-h-a-r-r's my g-o-l-den arm?” As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like claws, while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms before him. The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting each time for a reply. The culmination came with a pounce on one of the group, a shake of the shoulders, and a shout of: “YOU'VE got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!” And the children would shout “Lordy!” and look furtively over their shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods. “Once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and he come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and a-rattlin' and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and got under his stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse galloped or went slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his stirrup till he got plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say: 'My Gord, dat's devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive it away.” “How big was it, Uncle Ned?” “Oh, 'bout as big as your head, and I 'spect it's likely to come down dis yere chimney 'most any time.” Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs, all learned of their negro guardians. But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the children, they were likewise one of their discomforts. The greatest real dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves. A runaway slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when caught. Once the children saw one brought into Florida by six men who took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound him with ropes. His groans were loud and frequent. Such things made an impression that would last a lifetime. Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household. Jennie especially was often saucy and obstreperous. Jane Clemens, with more strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand. John Clemens was sent for in haste. He came at once, tied Jennie's wrists together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the shoulders with a cowhide. These were things all calculated to impress a sensitive child. In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting berries and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine, picking the petals from daisies to the formula “Love me-love me not,” always accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their small darky followers. Shoes were taken off the first of April. For a time a pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon disappeared, leaving the feet bare for the summer. One of their dreads was the possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was liable to cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror. They knew what lockjaw was--Uncle John Quarles's black man, Dan, was subject to it. Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt the joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained a fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural position by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh lifted an ox. Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of never-ending delight. Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these things were never apparent. There was a halo about anything that belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man. To visit at his house was for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually. When the children came for eggs he would say: “Your hens won't lay, eh? Tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and drive 'em uphill,” and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his small hearers. Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven. He would make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but never executed any of them. When they were out fishing and returned late he would say: “You--if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like a burnt horn!” Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children, with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if it ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar savor. Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam had--at least it seems so to us now. Doubtless it was commonplace enough for that time and locality. V. THE WAY OF FORTUNE Perhaps John Quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general conduct did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens's more taciturn business methods. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of dreams, Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in order. He had a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and confusion, which very likely were the chief features of John Quarles's storekeeping. At all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of two or three years, and Clemens opened business for himself across the street. He also practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected justice of the peace, acquiring the permanent title of “Judge.” He needed some one to assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was by this time twelve or thirteen years old; but, besides his youth, Orion--all his days a visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with no taste for commerce. Then a partnership was formed with a man who developed neither capital nor business ability, and proved a disaster in the end. The modest tide of success which had come with John Clemens's establishment at Florida had begun to wane. Another boy, Henry, born in July, 1838, added one more responsibility to his burdens. There still remained a promise of better things. There seemed at least a good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was likely to become operative. With even small boats (bateaux) running as high as the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an emporium of trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap a harvest. An act of the Legislature was passed incorporating the navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its president. Congress was petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement. So confident was the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever of excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual construction of a bateau; but a Democratic Congress turned its back on the proposed improvement. No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned, puffing up the stream. An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of it, said: “I don't doubt a word they say. In Scotland, it often happens that when people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-glass. That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat.” But John Quarles, who was present, laughed: “If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were,” he said. “They were the Democratic candidates at the last election. They killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them. Their ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat.” It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled far, was the origin of the term “Going up Salt River,” as applied to defeated political candidates.--[The dictionaries give this phrase as probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it seems more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles's witty comment.] No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River. Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such thought. Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and dams. Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and became mere scenery. Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day. Perhaps such close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain. VI. A NEW HOME The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the Clemens family in Florida. Doubtless it hastened their departure. There was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to bring about a judgment. Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family. That same day, when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school, Margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down. She was never in her right mind again. The doctor was sent for and diagnosed the case “bilious fever.” One evening, about nine o'clock, Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in from his bedroom, fast asleep. He came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled at the bedding near Margaret's shoulder for some time before he woke. Next day the little girl was “picking at the coverlet,” and it was known that she could not live. About a week later she died. She was nine years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks, black hair, and bright eyes. This was in August, 1839. It was Little Sam's first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it left a sad household. The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have seen several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the funeral-procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery, exactly as it happened. Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land. It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill. “When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right,” was the refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days. Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress. When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb, it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes. When conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was always refused after a little consideration. “We will struggle along somehow, Jane,” he would say. “We will not throw away the children's fortune.” There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens's favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always had “millions in it”--everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as “our kindred,” casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the “present earl.” Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days. The words “Tennessee land,” with their golden promise, became his earliest remembered syllables. He grew to detest them in time, for they came to mean mockery. One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered. Then, of course, it was scornfully refused. In some autobiographical chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said: “If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations.” What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in the beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which, though little more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a steamboat town with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade already established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well chosen, as shown by its prosperity to-day. He did not delay matters. When he came to a decision, he acted quickly. He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland; then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set out for the new home. Orion records that, for some reason, his father did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion. “The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache. The wagon had gone a few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter. How I wished they had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal. Then the world would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'” This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused with another, in Mark Twain's mind. In an autobiographical chapter published in The North American Review he tells of the move to Hannibal and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family. The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and somewhat differently. It would indeed be an absent-minded family if the parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age, should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four, behind. --[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory played him many tricks in later life. Incidents were filtered through his vivid imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual occurrence. Some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally they worked an unintentional injustice. It is the author's purpose in every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.] VII. THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL. Hannibal in 1839 was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere of its own. It was a town with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather more astir than the true Southern community of that period; more Western in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is to say, dead--and it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the dense forest away on the other side.” The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way of setting. The river, of course, was the great highway. Rafts drifted by; steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away. Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on airs accordingly. It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and the town drunkards (“General” Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats, ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive color-blue, snuff-brown, and green. These and their families constituted the true aristocracy of the Southern town. Most of them had pleasant homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said, accessible to the builders of those days. Most of them, also, had means--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their professional earnings. They lived in such style as was considered fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable. It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the comforts or the ostentation of his class. He settled his family and belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a new suit of clothes, as clerk. Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed ambition for mercantile life, but this waned. Business did not begin actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time. A little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the Hannibal Journal, at his father's suggestion. Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here. He was to be much associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration. He was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater or less degree were to go with him through life. Of a kindly, loving disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of those who knew him best. His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the whole, of a negative kind. Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency to bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits of any sort. That was his chief misfortune. Full of whims and fancies, unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and influence. Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose. Such a life is bound to be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and despair. In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men. Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it keenly. A gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land, he was entitled to a profession. To him it was punishment, and the disgrace weighed upon him. Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his dinner. Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only a biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should electrify the world with his eloquence. He was surprised to find how clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade. Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put to school. They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby, was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household. Little Sam was the least promising of the flock. He remained delicate, and developed little beyond a tendency to pranks. He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in the direction of the river. He walked in his sleep, too, and often the rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him fretting with cold in some dark corner. The doctor was summoned for him oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days. Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of ailments, and was ambitious for more. An epidemic of measles--the black, deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint. He yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into bed with the infection. The success of this venture was complete. Some days later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed to see him die. According to his own after-confession, this gratified him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene. However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search of fresh laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the precise period of this illness. With habitual indifference he assigned it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required. Without doubt the “measles” incident occurred when he was very young.]--He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens, with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort. “You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had,” she said to him once, in her old age. “I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live,” he suggested, in his tranquil fashion. She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty years. “No; afraid you would,” she said. But that was only her joke, for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of her mother's care. It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John Quarles's farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that an incident already mentioned occurred. It was decided that the whole family should go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June Mrs. Clemens, with the three elder children and the baby, accompanied by Jennie, the slave-girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive, leaving Judge Clemens to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning. The hour was early when Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and Little Sam was still asleep. The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind far away, mounted and rode off without once remembering the little boy, and in the course of the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm. Then he was confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam. “Why,” said the judge, aghast, “I never once thought of him after I left him asleep.” Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal. He arrived in the early dusk. The child was safe enough, but he was crying with loneliness and hunger. He had spent most of the day in the locked, deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream. He was fed and comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and lent a coloring to his later years. VIII. THE FARM We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle John Quarles's farm. To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver. With his small cousin, Tabitha,--[Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs. Greening, of Palmyra, Missouri, has supplied most of the material for this chapter.]--just his own age (they called her Puss), he wandered over that magic domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere. A slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes, indeed, it was necessary for her to threaten to tell “Miss Patsey” or “Miss Jane,” when her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic dream of summer-time and freedom. The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in the pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and then took her turn and “balanced” herself so high that their one wish was to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods were full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those watermelons, and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to die forthwith. Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned. “Sammy will pull through,” she said; “he wasn't born to die that way.” It is the slender constitution that bears the strain. “Sammy” did pull through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure. There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from the fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy loads; the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat. This last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would dart between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would pretend not to see. Then in the evening when the black woman came along, going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows running and jingling their bells--especially Little Sam, for he was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the grass. His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health, and the encouragement of John Quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves. The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive. In one cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a thousand years old and to have talked with Moses. The negroes believed this; the children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt. The bald spot on her head was caused by fright at seeing Pharaoh drowned. She also knew how to avert spells and ward off witches, which added greatly to her prestige. Uncle Dan'l was a favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw gave him an unusual distinction. Long afterward he would become Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men. Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings. It was a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting the two divisions. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left only room for rows of plates around the edge. Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be served here. If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed. His mother kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather around the wide, blazing fireplace. Sixty years later he wrote of that scene: I can see the room yet with perfect clearness. I can see all its buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low- spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we scraped it off and ate it;... the lazy cat spread out on the rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs, blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle --out of service, but waiting with confidence. One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal everywhere in his work in the years to come. For him it was education of a more valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from books. IX. SCHOOL-DAYS Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little Sam was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other children put together. “He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house,” she used to say; “and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some one will bring him home half dead.” He did, in fact, achieve the first of his “nine narrow escapes from drowning” about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition. When with mullein tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: “I guess there wasn't much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water.” She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands for a part of each day and try to teach him manners. Perhaps this is a good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer's “Aunt Polly,” and her portrait as presented in that book is considered perfect. Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older than her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes severe, she was regarded as a “character” by her friends, and beloved by them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know. Her sense of pity was abnormal. She refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice. She, would drown the young kittens, when necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose. On coming to Hannibal, she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of that clean-cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell and Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for being obliged to surround himself with such poor society. Her children she directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and growing in grace except Little Sam. Even baby Henry at two was lisping the prayers that Sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded. His sister Pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him dearly, usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle care earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom Sawyer. He would say his prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister Pamela, but he much preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long. They did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius that would one day amaze and entertain the nations. Neighbors hearing of these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with Mrs. Clemens. “You don't believe anything that child says, I hope.” “Oh yes, I know his average. I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is pure gold.” At another time she said: “Sammy is a well of truth, but you can't bring it all up in one bucket.” This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat later. A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him mentally and morally in the mean time. Her school was then in a log house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to long division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of spelling. Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in that school. Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to a Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now the Public Square. Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with explanations, and the rules of conduct. Then the A B C class was called, because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no preparation. The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam. He calculated how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and still avoid disaster. He made a miscalculation during the forenoon and received warning; a second offense would mean punishment. He did not mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned Miss Horr yet, and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a stick for his own correction. This was certainly disturbing. It was sudden, and then he did not know much about the selection of sticks. Jane Clemens had usually used her hand. It required a second command to get him headed in the right direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside. He had the forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult. Everything looked too big and competent. Even the smallest switch had a wiry, discouraging look. Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many shavings outside. One had blown across and lay just in front of him. It was an inspiration. He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room, meekly handed it to Miss Herr. Perhaps Miss Horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained. “Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” she said (he had never heard it all strung together in that ominous way), “I am ashamed of you! Jimmy Dunlap, go and bring a switch for Sammy.” And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch was of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for school. He informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did not care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown such people as Miss Horr. Down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him in hand. He returned to school, but he never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of liberty. A School was ruled with a rod in those days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended. Of the smaller boys Little Sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend with his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair, as he had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures. When the days of early summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the purple distance beyond, and the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a Webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human nature could bear. Among the records preserved from that far-off day there remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is inscribed: MISS PAMELA CLEMENS Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies. E. Horr, Teacher. If any such testimonial was ever awarded to Little Sam, diligent search has failed to reveal it. If he won the love of his teacher and playmates it was probably for other reasons. Yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was soon regarded as a good speller for his years. His spelling came as a natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later. It has already been mentioned that Miss Horr opened her school with prayer and Scriptural readings. Little Sam did not especially delight in these things, but he respected them. Not to do so was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that. He also respected Miss Horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text “Ask and ye shall receive” and assured them that whoever prayed for a thing earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it. A small schoolmate, the balker's daughter, brought gingerbread to school every morning, and Little Sam was just “honing” for some of it. He wanted a piece of that baker's gingerbread more than anything else in the world, and he decided to pray for it. The little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had kept the gingerbread out of sight. Now, however, when he finished his prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front of him. Perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look in his eyes. Possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his prayer bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved Holliday's Hill. He decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when he tried the gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result. Grieved, but still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no gingerbread; and when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew despairing and silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt. His mother said: “What's the matter, Sammy; are you sick?” “No,” he said, “but I don't believe in saying prayers any more, and I'm never going to do it again.” “Why, Sammy, what in the world has happened?” she asked, anxiously. Then he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith. Jane Clemens gathered him to her heart and comforted him. “I'll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that,” she said, “and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to Uncle John's farm.” And so passed and ended Little Sam's first school-days. X. EARLY VICISSITUDE AND SORROW Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household. The year 1840 brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return; law practice was not much more remunerative. Judge Clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent. By the end of the year it became necessary to part with Jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as “her family.” She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price. A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his home farther South. As the steamboat moved away from the landing the child's mother stood at the water's edge, shrieking her anguish. We are prone to consider these things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam. One could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment. Mark Twain once said of his mother: “Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.” Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit. After Jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far from family and friends. He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy. All day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became monotonous, maddening. One day Little Sam said: “Ma--[that was the Southern term]--make Sandy stop singing all the time. It's awful.” Tears suddenly came into his mother's eyes. “Poor thing! He is sold away from his home. When he sings it shows maybe he is not remembering. When he's still I am afraid he is thinking, and I can't bear it.” Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was held in abhorrence. An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone out of the community. The children held the name in horror, as belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail. The money received for the sale of Jennie made judge Clemens easier for a time. Business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive piece of real estate on Hill and Main streets. This property, acquired in November, 1839, meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and was a credit purchase, beyond doubt. It was well rented, but the tenants did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent of creditors--and John: Clemens at forty-four found himself without business and without means. He offered everything--his cow, his household furniture, even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who protested that he must not strip himself. They assured him that they admired his integrity so much they would aid him to resume business; but when he went to St. Louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met, and the venture came to nothing. He now made a trip to Tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts and to raise money on the Tennessee land. He took along a negro man named Charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to make something through his disposal in a better market. The trip was another failure. The man who owed him a considerable sum of money was solvent, but pleaded hard times: It seems so very hard upon him--[John Clemens wrote home]--to pay such a sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it. .. I still have Charlie. The highest price I had offered for him in New Orleans was $50, in Vicksburg $40. After performing the journey to Tennessee, I expect to sell him for whatever he will bring. I do not know what I can commence for a business in the spring. My brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can't relieve myself of it. The future, taking its completion from the state of my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over- shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose. I want bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first place; and, in the next place, I want to be paid for it, if possible. This letter is dated January 7, 1842. He returned without any financial success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the levee. The proprietor found some fault one day, and Judge Clemens walked out of the premises. On his way home he stopped in a general store, kept by a man named Sehns, to make some purchases. When he asked that these be placed on account, Selms hesitated. Judge Clemens laid down a five-dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took the goods, and never entered the place again. When Jane Clemens reproached him for having made the trip to Tennessee, at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best. “I am not able to dig in the streets,” he added, and Orion, who records this, adds: “I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face.” During a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into the Clemens home. It came again now. Little Benjamin, a sensitive, amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, May 12, 1842. He was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow. Little Sam long remembered the picture of his parents' grief; and Orion recalls that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown. Judge Clemens went back to his law and judicial practice. Mrs. Clemens decided to take a few boarders. Orion, by this time seventeen and a very good journeyman printer, obtained a place in St. Louis to aid in the family support. The tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle stage of improvement set in. Times grew better in Hannibal after those first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent. Within another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to build a modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St. Louis cousin, James Clemens, had preserved for him. It was the house which is known today as the “Mark Twain Home.”--[This house, in 1911, was bought by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mahan, and presented to Hannibal for a memorial museum.]--Near it, toward the corner of Main Street, was his office, and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it did not bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the entire community. One example will serve: Next to his office was a stone-cutter's shop. One day the proprietor, Dave Atkinson, got into a muss with one “Fighting” MacDonald, and there was a tremendous racket. Judge Clemens ran out and found the men down, punishing each other on the pavement. “I command the peace!” he shouted, as he came up to them. No one paid the least attention. “I command the peace!” he shouted again, still louder, but with no result. A stone-cutter's mallet lay there, handy. Judge Clemens seized it and, leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, MacDonald, a smart blow on the head. “I command the peace!” he said, for the third time, and struck a considerably smarter blow. That settled it. The second blow was of the sort that made MacDonald roll over, and peace ensued. Judge Clemens haled both men into his court, fined them, and collected his fee. Such enterprise in the cause of justice deserved prompt reward. XI. DAYS OF EDUCATION The Clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in Hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period of occupation of each can no longer be established. Mark Twain once said: “In 1843 my father caught me in a lie. It is not this fact that gives me the date, but the house we lived in. We were there only a year.” We may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his memory of the place, for his father seldom punished him. When he did, it was a thorough and satisfactory performance. It was about the period of moving into the new house (1844) that the Tom Sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of Samuel Clemens--may be said to have begun. Up to that time he was just Little Sam, a child--wild, and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed. Now, at nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger child to claim a mother's protecting care. So “Sam,” as they now called him, “grew up” at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years. Not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not acquired at school. They were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a kind startling to a boy, even terrifying. Once Little Sam--he was still Little Sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at noonday. He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family Bible which looked as heavy as an anvil. He though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old dying man would not breathe so heavily. He saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of life-blood that followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver which failed to go off. Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the “Welshman's” house one dark threatening night--he saw that, too. A widow and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village with his coarse challenges and obscenities. Sam Clemens and a boon companion, John Briggs, went up there to look and listen. The man was at the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the dark porch. The boys heard the elder woman's voice warning the man that she had a loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where he was. He replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would count ten-that if he remained a second longer she would fire. She began slowly and counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering. At six he grew silent, but he did not go. She counted on: seven--eight--nine--The boys watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop. There was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame. The man dropped, his breast riddled. At the same instant the thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. The boys fled wildly, believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul. Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. And there were events incident to slavery. He saw a slave struck down and killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. He saw an abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He did not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but he added: “I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the saddest faces I ever saw.” It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge amid such happenings as these. They were wild, disturbing things. They got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican--a common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious citizens got out of her way, but Jane Clemens opened her door wide to the refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way. The man swore and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear. She stood there and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the rope and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered. Any one who could do that must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought. In the fearsome darkness he would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life in the morning. He detested Sunday-school as much as day-school, and once Orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got louder Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday without being invited. Fortunately there were pleasanter things than these. There were picnics sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions. Once there was a great Fourth-of-July celebration at which it was said a real Revolutionary soldier was to be present. Some one had discovered him living alone seven or eight miles in the country. But this feature proved a disappointment; for when the day came and he was triumphantly brought in he turned out to be a Hessian, and was allowed to walk home. The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed almost at will were never disappointing. There was the cave with its marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had learned to swim. It had cost him heavily to learn to swim. He had seen two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a slaveman--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel. In the end he had conquered; he could swim better than any boy in town of his age. It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest. Its charm was permanent. It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world. The river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the sea! He would sit by it for hours and dream. He would venture out on it in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough to lift an oar out of the water. He learned to know all its moods and phases. He felt its kinship. In some occult way he may have known it as his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep, its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues, its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea. His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion. To be even the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to be a god. “You can hardly imagine what it meant,” he reflected once, “to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never to take a trip on them.” He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no longer. One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal, he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck. Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into midstream; he was really going at last. He crept from beneath the boat and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery. Then it began to rain--a terrific downpour. He crept back under the boat, but his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him. So he was taken down into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore. It was the town of Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home. Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way. These were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and partridges by day, for coons and possums by night. Sometimes the little boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant just in time for breakfast. So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer “Little Sam,” but Sam Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men and things and a variety of accomplishments. He had even learned to smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing, though that was a failure. He had been stung to this effort by a big girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly attended. “Do you use terbacker?” the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it. “No,” he said, abashed at the confession. “Haw!” she cried to the other scholars; “here's a boy that can't chaw terbacker.” Degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made him very ill; and he did not try again. He had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant. He had an impression that she would “skin him alive” if she heard him swear. His education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom. He was not a particularly attractive lad. He was not tall for his years, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. He had a “great ruck” of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling; keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features. Still, he had a fair, delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a gentle, winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of speaking, made him a favorite with his companions. He did not speak much, and his mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some reason, whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever he was doing and listened. Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing. Whatever it was, they considered it worth while. His mother always referred to his slow fashion of speaking as “Sammy's long talk.” Her own speech was still more deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it. Henry--a much handsomer lad and regarded as far more promising--did not have it. He was a lovable, obedient little fellow whom the mischievous Sam took delight in teasing. For this and other reasons the latter's punishments were frequent enough, perhaps not always deserved. Sometimes he charged his mother with partiality. He would say: “Yes, no matter what it is, I am always the one to get punished”; and his mother would answer: “Well, Sam, if you didn't deserve it for that, you did for something else.” Henry Clemens became the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though Henry was in every way a finer character than Sid. His brother Sam always loved him, and fought for him oftener than with him. With the death of Benjamin Clemens, Henry and Sam were naturally drawn much closer together, though Sam could seldom resist the temptation of tormenting Henry. A schoolmate, George Butler (he was a nephew of General Butler and afterward fought bravely in the Civil War), had a little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all. Mrs. Clemens finally made Sam and Henry suits of blue cotton velvet, and the next Sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the woods. They walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead Sam spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse took a running leap over it. There were splinters on the stump where the tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly. Henry wanted to match the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared him. He kept daring him until Henry was goaded to the attempt. He cleared the stump, but the highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the cloth gave way. He escaped injury, but the precious trousers were damaged almost beyond repair. Sam, with a boy's heartlessness, was fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at Henry's appearance. “Cotton-tail rabbit!” he shouted. “Cotton-tail rabbit!” while Henry, weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road. Let us hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper locality. These two brothers were of widely different temperament. Henry, even as a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable. Sam was volatile and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind. Once his father set him to work with a hatchet to remove some plaster. He hacked at it for a time well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach. Henry would have worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and the room swept clean. The home incidents in 'Tom Sawyer', most of them, really happened. Sam Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat. There was a cholera scare that year, and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive. Sam had been ordered to take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be safeguarded. As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to the conditions. In the introduction to Tom Sawyer Mark Twain confesses to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its characters. “Huck Finn was drawn from life,” he tells us. “Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.” The three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs and Will Bowen. John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper in that book. As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship, neither elaborated nor qualified. There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father, who had succeeded “General” Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to say, Huck--who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of rags, a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to any living soul. He could came and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys longed to do and were forbidden. He represented to them the very embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters, such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion. The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm. The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom--a fame founded on irresponsibility and inconsequence. Orion Clemens, who was concerned with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the Blankenships spiritually. Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to his heart. He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the Bowen boys, Will Pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits. They were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the comforts and the rights of others. XII. TOM SAWYER'S BAND They ranged from Holliday's Hill on the north to the Cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the woods about. They navigated the river from Turtle Island to Glasscock's Island (now Pearl, or Tom Sawyer's Island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the Illinois shore. They could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one. No orchard or melon patch was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that they did not sooner or later elude it. They borrowed boats when their owners were not present. Once when they found this too much trouble, they decided to own a boat, and one Sunday gave a certain borrowed craft a coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for a season up Bear Creek. They borrowed the paint also, and the brush, though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall, so the painter could have them Monday morning. Tom Blankenship rigged up a sail for the new craft, and Sam Clemens named it Cecilia, after which they didn't need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did; and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his. Some of their expeditions were innocent enough. They often cruised up to Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day feasting. You could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish. Fishing and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for adventure. Where the railroad-bridge now ends on the Missouri side was their favorite swimming-hole--that and along Bear Creek, a secluded limpid water with special interests of its own. Sometimes at evening they swam across to Glasscock's Island--the rendezvous of Tom Sawyer's “Black Avengers” and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim; then, when they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile, breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or fear. They could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless young scamps. Once--though this was considerably later, when he was sixteen--Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, and then turned and swam back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles, as he had to go. He was seized with a cramp on the return trip. His legs became useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms. It was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they ever did any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes. One of their Sunday pastimes was to climb Holliday's Hill and roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church. Holliday's Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly swiftness of a twelve-inch shell. The boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give it a start. Dropping down behind the bushes, they would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great missile shot across the road a few yards before them. This was Homeric sport, but they carried it too far. Stones that had a habit of getting loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited suspicion, and the “Patterollers” (river patrol--a kind of police of those days) were put on the watch. So the boys found other diversions until the Patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling line. A rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good position to go down hill, once, started. They decided it would be a glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded church-goer. Quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left their picks and shovels over Sundays. The boys borrowed these, and went to work to undermine the big stone. It was a heavier job than they had counted on, but they worked faithfully, Sunday after Sunday. If their parents had wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they were being killed. Finally one Sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and started down. They were not quite ready for it. Nobody was coming but an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted. It was not quite wasted, however. They had planned for a thrilling result; and there was thrill enough while it lasted. In the first place, the stone nearly caught Will Bowen when it started. John Briggs had just that moment quit digging and handed Will the pick. Will was about to step into the excavation when Sam Clemens, who was already there, leaped out with a yell: “Look out, boys, she's coming!” She came. The huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a wild momentum, it went bounding into the air. About half-way down the hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off. This turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to whip up his horse. It was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the road. The boys watched it with growing interest. It made longer leaps with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would fly. They were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the cooper-shop. The shop was empty, it being Sunday, but the rest of the catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results. They wanted to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land. It was making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get directly in its path. They stood holding their breath, their mouths open. Then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it. Half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty years; then it was blasted up for milling purposes. It was the last rock the boys ever rolled down. They began to suspect that the sport was not altogether safe. Sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those days. On one occasion of this sort, Tom Blankenship had the skin of a coon he had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd. At Selms's store on Wild Cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents, but that was not enough. They arranged a plan which would make it pay a good deal more than that. Selins's window was open, it being summer-time, and his pile of pelts was pretty handy. Huck--that is to say, Tom--went in the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to Selms, who tossed it back on the pile. Tom came back with the money and after a reasonable period went around to the open window, crawled in, got the coonskin, and sold it to Selms again. He did this several times that afternoon; then John Pierce, Selins's clerk, said: “Look here, Selms, there is something wrong about this. That boy has been selling us coonskins all the afternoon.” Selms went to his pile of pelts. There were several sheepskins and some cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought. Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke. Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain's reputation to say that the boy Sam Clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would be less than historic. If the band had a leader, it was he. They were always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his projects. They looked to him for ideas and organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe. When they played “Bandit” or “Pirate” or “Indian,” Sam Clemens was always chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less distinguished. Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership. When the Christian Sons of Temperance came along with a regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude. Then even the red sash could not hold him in bondage. He looked up Tom Blankenship and said: “Say, Tom, I'm blamed tired of this! Let's go somewhere and smoke!” Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a precious thing. Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died. It seems almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet, venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown. He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor. His ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement. It is true that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting in bodily damage. But any literary ambition he may have had in those days was a fleeting thing. His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law. The river kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background for those other things. The cave was an enduring and substantial joy. It was a real cave, not merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth's black silences, even below the river, some said. For Sam Clemens the cave had a fascination that never faded. Other localities and diversions might pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door. With its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band, it contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for. In Tom Sawyer Indian Joe dies in the cave. He did not die there in real life, but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found him. He was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there came up a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home and in bed was certain that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's wicked soul. He covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the fear that the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him along, too. The treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact. There was a tradition concerning some French trappers who long before had established a trading-post two miles above Hannibal, on what is called the “bay.” It is said that, while one of these trappers was out hunting, Indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others. The hunter on returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the Indians had failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest. He left it there, swam across to Illinois, and made his way to St. Louis, where he told of the massacre and the burial of the chest of gold. Then he started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and died. Later some men came up from St. Louis looking for the chest. They did not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good many people tried to find the gold. Tom Blankenship one morning came to Sam Clemens and John Briggs and said he was going to dig up the treasure. He said he had dreamed just where it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide up. The boys had great faith in dreams, especially Tom's dreams. Tom's unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes. The dreams of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something. They followed Tom to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to dig. Then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders. They dug nearly all day. Now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to wonder a little why Tom didn't dig some himself; but, of course, he had done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share. They did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground until they struck something hard. Then they would dig down to see what it was, but it never turned out to be money. That night the boys declared they would not dig any more. But Tom had another dream. He dreamed the gold was exactly under the little papaw-tree. This sounded so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day. It was hot weather too, August, and that night they were nearly dead. Even Tom gave it up, then. He said there was something about the way they dug, but he never offered to do any digging himself. This differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original of Huckleberry Finn.--[Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished to the writer by John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.]--Tom Blankenship's brother, Ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at least so far as one important phase of Huck's character is concerned. He was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than Tom. He was inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out, and they had no deep love for him. But somewhere in Ben Blankenship there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided Mark Twain with that immortal episode in the story of Huck Finn--in sheltering the Nigger Jim. This is the real story: A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river into Illinois. Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and one day found him. It was considered a most worthy act in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it. Besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged outcast Ben Blankenship. That money and the honor he could acquire must have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the marshes all summer. The negro would fish and Ben would carry him scraps of other food. Then, by and by, it leaked out. Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him to what was called “Bird Slough.” There trying to cross a drift he was drowned. In the book, the author makes Huck's struggle a psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other. With Ben Blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably between sympathy and cupidity. He would care very little for conscience and still less for law. His sympathy with the runaway, however, would be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure of that reward. There was a gruesome sequel to this incident. Some days following the drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out of the water. He had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had released him. The boys did not stop to investigate. They thought he was after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached human habitation. How many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early days! In 'The Innocents Abroad' Mark Twain tells of the murdered man he saw one night in his father's office. The man's name was McFarlane. He had been stabbed that day in the old Hudson-McFarlane feud and carried in there to die. Sam Clemens and John Briggs had run away from school and had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair. Sam decided that his father's office was safer for him than to face his mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting. He tells us how he lay on the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly stabbed breast. “I went out of there,” he says. “I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went; that is sufficient. I went out of the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.” He was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy reached that age. Certainly these were disturbing, haunting things. Then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco. Sam Clemens spent some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of Lucifer matches--a brand new invention then, scarce and high. The tramp started a fire with the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it. For weeks the boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he had not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened. Remorse was always Samuel Clemens's surest punishment. To his last days on earth he never outgrew its pangs. What a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years! It is not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of Sam Clemens and his scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad doings. They were an unpromising lot. Ministers and other sober-minded citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and considered them hardly worth praying for. They must have proven a disappointing lot to those prophets. The Bowen boys became fine river-pilots; Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank director; John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer; even Huck Finn--that is to say, Tom Blankenship--is reputed to have ranked as an honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western town. But in those days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little respect for order and even less for ordinance. XIII. THE GENTLER SIDE His associations were not all of that lawless breed. At his school (he had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross's on the Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically better playmates. There was George Robards, the Latin scholar, and John, his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying in the wind. And there was Jimmy McDaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy and cake to school. Also there was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John Meredith, the doctor's son, and John Garth, who was one day to marry little Helen Kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old school. Furthermore, there were a good many girls. Tom Sawyer had an impressionable heart, and Sam Clemens no less so. There was Bettie Ormsley, and Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady; also Mary Miller, who was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart. “I believe I was as miserable as a grown man could be,” he said once, remembering. Tom Sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions at such times were the emotions of Sam Clemens, say at the age of ten. But, as Tom Sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he. They were one and the same. Becky Thatcher in the book was Laura Hawkins in reality. The acquaintance of these two had begun when the Hawkins family moved into the Virginia house on the corner of Hill and Main streets.--[The Hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that name in The Gilded Age. Judge Hawkins of The Gilded Age, as already noted, was John Clemens. Mark Twain used the name Hawkins, also the name of his boyhood sweetheart, Laura, merely for old times' sake, and because in portraying the childhood of Laura Hawkins he had a picture of the real Laura in his mind.]--The Clemens family was then in the new home across the way, and the children were soon acquainted. The boy could be tender and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex. They visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there were nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses. So they played “keeping house,” and if they did not always agree well, since the beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in Arcady. Once when they were building a house--and there may have been some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened to let a brick fall on the little girl's finger. If there had been any disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune. He tried to comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most of the two, no doubt. So, you see, he was just a little boy, after all, even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the “Black Avengers of the Spanish Main.” He was always a tender-hearted lad. He would never abuse an animal, unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away with him. He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket. When he ate, it sat in a chair beside him at the table. His sympathy included inanimate things as well. He loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist or gardener, but as a personal friend. He pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were ended, and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another spring. His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit meadow and the drifted hill. That his observation of all nature was minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation of sympathetic love. We are wandering away from his school-days. They were brief enough and came rapidly to an end. They will not hold us long. Undoubtedly Tom Sawyer's distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home--usually some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the boyhood of Sam Clemens. His mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately. He detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to church. “Church ain't worth shucks,” said Tom Sawyer, but it was better than school. As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now the Square in Hannibal. The Square was only a grove then, grown up with plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children. At recess and the noon hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-vine swings. There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for Sam the only endurable event of the school exercises. He could hold the floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown. This was spectacular and showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well. One day Sam Clemens wrote on his slate: Cross by name and cross by nature Cross jumped over an Irish potato. He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius. He urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet's ambition did not go so far. “Oh, pshaw!” said John. “I wouldn't be afraid to do it. “I dare you to do it,” said Sam. John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home at dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet. When the teacher returned and “books” were called he looked steadily at John Briggs. He had recognized the penmanship. “Did you do that?” he asked, ominously. It was a time for truth. “Yes, sir,” said John. “Come here!” And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius heavily. Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for “author,” but for some reason the investigation ended there. It was unusual for him to escape. His back generally kept fairly warm from one “frailing” to the next. His rewards were not all of a punitive nature. There were two medals in the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability. They were awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck conspicuously, and were envied accordingly. John Robards--he of the golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while Sam Clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling. Sometimes they traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the week. Once Sam Clemens lost the medal by leaving the first “r” out of February. He could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but Laura Hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant boy. The picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty years later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a tender-hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and longing only for freedom. It was a boon which would come to him sooner even than he had dreamed. XIV. THE PASSING OF JOHN CLEMENS Judge Clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune by devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of achieving disaster. He endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute, and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything vanished again. The St. Louis cousin took over the home and agreed to let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after an attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and Pamela's piano--all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the street into a portion of the Virginia house, then occupied by a Dr. Grant. The Grants proposed that the Clemens family move over and board them, a welcome arrangement enough at this time. Judge Clemens had still a hope left. The clerkship of the Surrogate Court was soon to be filled by election. It was an important remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for the position. His disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his nomination and election were considered sure. He took no chances; he made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to overcome. He was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he could hold the office as long as he chose. There seemed no further need of worry. As soon as he was installed in office they would live in style becoming their social position. About the end of February he rode to Palmyra to be sworn in. Returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and sleet, arriving at last half frozen. His system was in no condition to resist such a shock. Pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments of plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief. Orion returned from St. Louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his bed, encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew daily weaker. Now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the Tennessee land as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last. He uttered no regrets, no complaints. Once only he said: “I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee I might have been worth twenty thousand dollars to-day.” On the morning of the 24th of March, 1847, it was evident that he could not live many hours. He was very weak. When he spoke, now and then, it was of the land. He said it would soon make them all rich and happy. “Cling to the land,” he whispered. “Cling to the land, and wait. Let nothing beguile it away from you.” A little later he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and, putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in years. “Let me die,” he said. He never spoke after that. A little more, and the sad, weary life that had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: A dreamer and a moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier. He ended life with less than he had begun. XV. A YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN For a third time death had entered the Clemens home: not only had it brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the very threshold. The disaster seemed complete. The children were dazed. Judge Clemens had been a distant, reserved man, but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his uprightness and nobility of purpose. Mrs. Clemens confided to a neighbor that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted, with a deep affection for his family. They remembered that he had never returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however trifling. Orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old Abram Kurtz, and heard him laugh. He wondered how anybody could still laugh. The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. “It is all right, Sammy,” she said. “What's done is done, and it does not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to promise me----” He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her arms. “I will promise anything,” he sobbed, “if you won't make me go to school! Anything!” His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said: “No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.” So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A thought struck Mrs. Clemens: “Sam!” she said. He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in succession after that. Then he slept more soundly. Orion returned to St. Louis. He was a very good book and job printer by this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family. Pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and guitar, went to the town of Paris, in Monroe County, about fifty miles away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund. It was a hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she was resolute and patient, and won success. Pamela Clemens was a noble character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this work. Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to Hannibal and bought a weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier. The apprentice terms were not over-liberal. They were the usual thing for that time: board and clothes--“more board than clothes, and not much of either,” Mark Twain used to say. “I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but I didn't get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough.” There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. Ament's clothes were too small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales McCormick together, fitted out with Ament's clothes, must have been a picturesque pair. There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory of him has become dim. The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's “devils” made it so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table, where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one journeyman, Pet McMurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. What those young scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them. Sam Clemens had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood. He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office; but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes, onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office stove. Wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate never forgot. It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of Sam Clemens at this period. But we may imagine him from a letter which, long years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain. He said: If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy- haired boy--[The color of Mark Twain's hair in early life has been variously referred to as red, black, and brown. It was, in fact, as stated by McMurry, “sandy” in boyhood, deepening later to that rich, mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen by the wayside: “If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I kin.”... Do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that diminutive creature Wales McCormick--how you used to call upon me to hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him? This is good testimony, without doubt. When he had been with Ament little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief standby. Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to Sam Clemens. He could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as Pet McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than Pet; and he could run the job-press to the tune of “Annie Laurie” or “Along the Beach at Rockaway,” without missing a stroke or losing a finger. Sometimes, at odd moments, he would “set up” one of the popular songs or some favorite poem like “The Blackberry Girl,” and of these he sent copies printed on cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to Puss Quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. He had charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers. During the last year of the Mexican War, when a telegraph-wire found its way across the Mississippi to Hannibal--a long sagging span, that for some reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors that won plaudits and success. He became a sort of subeditor. When the forms of the paper were ready to close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw literature in the making. It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry; to drift up and down the world in Pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the first negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent “middle man” or even the “end-man” of that combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his performance. In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree, but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never could be. Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely “showing off” and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he concluded to stick to printing as a trade. We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament's he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was usually done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with Laura Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the river, Lover's Leap. He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where old-fashioned games--Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the like--were regarded as rare amusements. He was a favorite with girls of his own age. He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them, too, and was often a severe trial. He was with Laura Hawkins more than the others, usually her escort. On Saturday afternoons in winter he carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on. After which they skated “partners,” holding hands tightly, and were a likely pair of children, no doubt. In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at twelve is pictured “with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron... a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest.” The author had the real Laura of his childhood in his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance to her life. They were never really sweethearts, those two. They were good friends and comrades. Sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the printing--office--Godey's and others. These were a treat, for such things were scarce enough. He cared little for reading, himself, beyond a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for general knowledge. It needed only to be awakened. XVI. THE TURNING-POINT There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal proportions. He was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. He caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history of Joan of Arc. The “maid” was described in the cage at Rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes. There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches and their ribald replies. He had never heard of the subject before. He had never read any history. When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl. The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained with him until his very last day on earth. From the moment when that fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's mentally elect was assured. It gave him his cue--the first word of a part in the human drama. It crystallized suddenly within him sympathy with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for the divine rights of kings. A few months before he died he wrote a paper on “The Turning-point of My Life.” For some reason he did not mention this incident. Yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal when a stray leaf from another life was blown into his hands. He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French wars, and to Joan in particular. He acquired an appetite for history in general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a student. Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and German. There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to teach his native tongue. Sam Clemens got a friend--very likely it was John Briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for lessons. The shoemaker had little or no English. They had no German. It would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a “word-book,” and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence: “De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer.” “Dere!” he said, triumphantly; “you know dose vord?” The students looked at each other helplessly. The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he asked if they recognized it. Then in despair he showed them the book. It was an English primer, and the sentence was: “The hen, it flies up in the air.” They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn, not English--not under the circumstances. Later, Sam made an attempt at Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying: “No, that language is not for me. I'll do well enough to learn English.” A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar. His prejudice against oppression he put into practice. Boys who were being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. Sometimes, watching a game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way: “You mustn't cheat that boy.” And the cheating stopped. When it didn't, there was a combat, with consequences. XVII. THE HANNIBAL “JOURNAL” Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight; there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward display of affection was new to him. The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least a semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always, he had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy has it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons. “It was the most earnest ambition I ever had,” Mark Twain once remarked, thoughtfully. “Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.” A periodical ambition of Orion's was to own and conduct a paper in Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was for sale under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which would secure ownership. Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete, and Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven was taken out of school to learn typesetting. Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and independence. “I followed all the advice I received,” he says in his record. “If two or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the last.” He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help: wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote afterward: I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty proofs. Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became still more exacting. It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter's night when with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about in the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and they set out for home forthwith. It was moonlight, and they could tell the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. They were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they came to a broad space of water. The ice was lifting and falling and crunching all around them. They waited as long as they dared and decided to leap from cake to cake. Sam made the crossing without accident, but his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. He was a good swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. He was taken very ill. One disease followed another, ending with scarlet fever and deafness. There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him, tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied. They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping at night and left him “holding the bag” in the old traditional fashion while they slipped off home and went to bed. But Jim Wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela Clemens. Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could hear the candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the roof from somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing to throw at them, but he said: “For two cents I'd get out there and knock their heads off.” “You wouldn't dare to do it,” Sam said, purringly. This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit. “I would too,” he said, “and I will if you say that again.” “Why, Jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. You might catch cold.” “You wait and see,” said Jim Wolfe. He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow, but Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze. Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats were on the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his way in that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was doing well enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was nearly solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing yielded. A second later Jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there with their pans of cooling taffy. There were wild shrieks and a general flight. Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but Jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam was in an agony of laughter. “You did it splendidly, Jim,” he drawled, when he could speak. “Nobody could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did you ever think of it?” It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete. An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story Mark Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy McDaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success. XVIII. THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE Orion's paper continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. Then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. A publisher must lead his subscription list, not follow it. “I was walking backward,” he said, “not seeing where I stepped.” In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in charge of the office. It was a journey without financial results; yet it bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain's literary career. Sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the circulation. He had never done any writing--not for print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. His local items were of a kind known as “spicy”; his personals brought prompt demand for satisfaction. The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. Sam gave a picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the affair. Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water. When this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large. The press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. The satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more. The embryo Mark Twain also wrote a poem. It was addressed “To Mary in Hannibal,” but the title was too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a dash, with a startling result. Such were the early flickerings of a smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. He reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his mistake. “I could have distanced all competitors even then,” he said, “if I had recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from offending worthy persons.” Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had got his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted--without payment, of course, in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851. “Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since,” he said, nearly sixty years later. Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post. Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved. High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is likely to be. He was not especially precocious--not in literature. His literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain's sketch “My First Literary Venture” he has set down with characteristic embroideries some account of this early authorship.] Those were hard financial days. Orion could pay nothing on his mortgage--barely the interest. He had promised Sam three dollars and a half a week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes--“poor, shabby clothes,” he says in his record. “My mother and sister did the housekeeping. My mother was cook. She used the provisions I supplied her. We therefore had a regular diet of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.” Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up teaching for a time, organized another music class. Orion became despondent. One night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two composition rollers. Orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand. Another disaster quickly followed. Fire broke out in the office, and the loss was considerable. An insurance company paid one hundred and fifty dollars. With it Orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the Clemens dwelling. He raised the one-story part of the building to give them an added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along. It was the fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe sketch. In it he stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a mile and had then come back after the wash-pan. In the meantime Pamela Clemens married. Her husband was a well-to-do merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St. Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home. Orion tried the experiment of a serial story. He wrote to a number of well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay. Finally he obtained a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was five dollars. It did not save the sinking ship, however. He made the experiment of a tri-weekly, without success. He noticed that even his mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news. This was a final blow. “I sat down in the dark,” he says, “the moon glinting in at the open door. I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float.” He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to dispose of it on those terms. This was in 1853. His brother Samuel was no longer with him. Several months before, in June, Sam decided he would go out into the world. He was in his eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had grown restless in unrewarded service. Beyond his mastery of the trade he had little to show for six years of hard labor. Once when he had asked Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion, exasperated by desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking of such extravagance. Soon afterward Sam confided to his mother that he was going away; that he believed Orion hated him; that there was no longer a place for him at home. He said he would go to St. Louis, where Pamela was. There would be work for him in St. Louis, and he could send money home. His intention was to go farther than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her. His mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little Testament: “I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam,” she said, “and make me a promise.” If one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own. Mother and son, they were of the same metal and the same mold. “I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words,” Jane Clemens said. “I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone.” He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him. “Remember that, Sam, and write to us,” she said. “And so,” Orion records, “he went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish. I not only missed his labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.” XIX. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News. He remained on the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world. The “world” was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then going on. The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not traveled on it. It had not many comforts; several days and nights were required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful experience. He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done anything to surpass it. He arrived in New York with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat. New York was a great and amazing city. It almost frightened him. It covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens boasted that one day it would cover it all. The World's Fair building, the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out. It was where Bryant Park is now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Young Clemens classed it as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels. A portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing specimen of his composition. The fragment concludes what was doubtless an exhaustive description. From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description. The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1 o'clock). It would take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and I was only in a little over two hours to-night. I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal objects. The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the population of Hannibal. The price of admission being 50 cents, they take in about $3,000. The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace --from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country around. The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder yet. Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County, where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New York. From the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred barrels of water per day! I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick. He ought to go to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he is. If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely. Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise. I am used to it now, though, and it is no trouble. Where is it Orion's going to? Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the spring--I shall save money for this. Tell Jim (Wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give me all the news.... (It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings. Where would you suppose, with a free printer's library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to? Write soon. Truly your brother, SAM P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not read by it. Write, and let me know how Henry is. It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things. Double the population of Hannibal visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles! Doubtless these were amazing statistics. Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home. He did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location. From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had ever seen together before. We have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line. The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum. He lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away. He did not like the board. He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have “hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way. On the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself with its wonders. He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853, and found it not easy to go. In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked. Among other things he says: I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly, because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause. I think I shall get off Tuesday, though. Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night. The play was the “Gladiator.” I did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid. In the latter part of the last act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling to see him. I am sorry I did not see him play “Damon and Pythias” --the former character being the greatest. He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night. I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a “Journal” the other day, in which I see the office has been sold.... If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it. I am not afraid, however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall be) as “independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.”... Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than that in the summer. “I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York” is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase. He might have said that fifty years later. He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work “subbing” on a daily paper, 'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at night when he returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast. He tried his hand at writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success. For some reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary kind. Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print. “My efforts were not received with approval,” was all he ever said of it afterward. There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did not forget. One of these was an old compositor who had “held a case” in that office for many years. His name was Frog, and sometimes when he went away the “office devils” would hang a line over his case, with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel. They never got tired of this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been in the beginning. Another old fellow there furnished amusement. He owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of fire. Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air: “Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in the northwestern part of the city?” or “There go the fire-bells again!” and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate. It was not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens had his share in it. He found that he liked Philadelphia. He could save a little money there, for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt. In a letter to Orion--whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October 26th, he incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and “to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia.” Further along he adds: Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it. There is only one thing that gets my “dander” up--and that is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me “it's no use to get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work here than you can do!” “Downhearted,” the devil! I have not had a particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four months ago. I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants. When I was in Hannibal, before I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from home. He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its inscription “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin,” and one is sharply reminded of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Clemens. Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and of incredible popularity. The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the Fairmount stage. It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment. The Wire Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in review. A fine residence about completed impressed him: It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite. The pillars in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful, ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front windows.... To see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar. Marble is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia. There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further along: I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--“For Wissahickon and Manayunk 25 cents.” Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon.... There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady's money for her. Yesterday I sat in the front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat opposite me. She handed me her money, which was right. But, Lord! a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so familiar with a stranger. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare. There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th, to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th. Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says: I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one's ideas amazingly.... I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink. One young fellow makes $18 for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent of it. How do you like “free soil”?--I would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned negro. My love to all. Truly your brother, SAM In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick. “I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,” is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those “not written as they should be.” “One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don't like our present prospect for cold weather at all.” He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due. The novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it. Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed: “An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.” He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer. In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital. His stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there. He returned to Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American. Finally he went back to New York. There are no letters of this period. His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered. It was late in the summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West. His 'Wanderjahr' had lasted nearly fifteen months. He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey. He was worn out when he arrived, but stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela. It was his mother he was anxious for. He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine. For a long time that missing day confused his calculations. When he reached Orion's house the family sat at breakfast. He came in carrying a gun. They had not been expecting him, and there was a general outcry, and a rush in his direction. He warded them off, holding the butt of the gun in front of him. “You wouldn't let me buy a gun,” he said, “so I bought one myself, and I am going to use it, now, in self-defense.” “You, Sam! You, Sam!” cried Jane Clemens. “Behave yourself,” for she was wary of a gun. Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms. XX. KEOKUK DAYS Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office, but the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money before he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place on the St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or early spring of the following year. He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli. Burrough had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were comrades and close friends. Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time. Clemens wrote: MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is what I was at 19-20. Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk. He had married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness. He tells it himself; he says: At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage for Muscatine. We halted for dinner at Burlington. After despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove up, ready for departure. I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further to do. A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, “Miss, do you go by this stage?” I said, “Oh, I forgot!” and sprang out and helped her in. A wife was a new kind of possession to which I had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her. Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's girlhood. She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk. Brother Sam came up from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five dollars a week and board to remain. He accepted. The office at this time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street, in the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company. Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the name of Dick Hingham. Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came in for social evenings. Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who clerked in the book-store on the ground floor. These were likely to be lively evenings. A music dealer and teacher, Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for their diversions. He objected, but hardly in the right way. Had he gone to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to make any concessions. Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on the office floor. This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to join the game. Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no attention. Next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them wildly. They merely ignored him, and that night organized a military company, made up of themselves and a new German apprentice-boy, and drilled up and down over the singing-class. Dick Hingham led these military manoeuvers. He was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a natural taste for soldiering. The others used to laugh at him. They called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were really pointed in his direction. They were mistaken; seven years later Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the way. Isbell now adopted new tactics. He came up very pleasantly and said: “I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies. You see how it is yourself. You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw recruits drilling overhead--now, could you? Won't you please stop it? It bothers my pupils.” Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise. “Does it?” he said, very deliberately. “Why didn't you mention it before? To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies.” They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but joined one of the singing--classes. Samuel Clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class. They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint fashion of speech. The young ladies called him openly and fondly a “fool”--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all. He was twenty now and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none. Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella Patterson (related through Orion's wife and generally known as “Ick”), and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were many more. He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late, sometimes. Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed, and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety, because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular short pipe of daytime use. But it had its disadvantages. Sometimes it would go out, and that would mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the bowl which stood on the floor. Young Brownell from below was passing upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam Clemens call. The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked his head in at the door. “What will you have, Sam?” he asked. “Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I am in trouble. I want somebody to light my pipe.” “Why don't you get up and light it yourself?” Brownell asked. “I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for me.” Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it. “What are you reading, Sam?” he asked. “Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I'll write a funnier book than that, myself.” Brownell laughed. “No, you won't, Sam,” he said. “You are too lazy ever to write a book.” A good many years later when the name “Mark Twain” had begun to stand for American humor the owner of it gave his “Sandwich Island” lecture in Keokuk. Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: “The king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth, except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell.” The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain's life was neither very long nor very actively important. It extended over a period of less than two years--two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they were not years of startling occurrence. Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of a primitive kind. Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard. He had entered a field of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival. They impressed him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the floor. Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German apprentice music. “There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song beginning: “Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine, Turkey came along and yanked him from behind.” The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word “yanked” the proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers across the strings. With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort. Without intending it, Fritz had his revenge. One day his tormentor's hand was caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel. Sam called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the situation. The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken. In due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the scars remained. Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of prosperity in any form. When he found it difficult to pay his brother's wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water. The junior partner was not disturbed, however. He cared little for money in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough. His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for. Orion himself tells how his business dwindled away. He printed a Keokuk directory, but it did not pay largely. He was always too eager for the work; too low in his bid for it. Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as “an antiquarian” a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost. Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved. The first indicates the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction. It is addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856. I don't like to work at too many things at once. They take Henry and Dick away from me, too. Before we commenced the Directory, --[Orion printed two editions of the directory. This was probably the second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.... I am not getting along well with the job-work. I can't work blindly--without system. I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains untouched. Through all the great pressure of job- work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind... The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th. It was written to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now possessed the writer. Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration was being widely read. Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had been seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American river, there to collect coca and make a fortune. All his life he was subject to such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered. It did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their achievement. In the “Turning-point” article already mentioned he refers to this. He says: That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think. In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full confidence. Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from Orion. She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St. Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South America. He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements. He fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various influences to bear. I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South American books: They have Herndon's report now. Ward and the Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the office. We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company. He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin and the young man, Ward. They were very much in earnest, but the start was not made as planned, most likely for want of means. Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea. He made up his mind to work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by money for the venture. But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career. One of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities. As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel), it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift. It was a day in early November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were indoors. Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building. Something about it attracted him and he captured it. It was a fifty-dollar bill. He had never seen one before, but he recognized it. He thought he must be having a pleasant dream. The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing. His need of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome conscience; in the end he advertised his find. “I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my fortune. By and by I couldn't stand it any longer. My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it. I felt that I must take that money out of danger.” In the “Turning-point” article he says: “I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day,” a statement which we may accept with a literary discount. As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the money. It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind from some counting-room table. It may have materialized out of the unseen--who knows? At all events it carried him the first stage of a journey, the end of which he little dreamed. XXI. SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler, jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.] This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any, will serve. I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought, but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and “guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin' --and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they got her off. This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on his hands. From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first for which he received a cash return. He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain views and philosophies which he never forgot. He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended. Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened. What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define. Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race. They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their impress upon him for life. XXII. THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition. He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of his early dreams. The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable. The winter had been bleak and hard. “Spring fever” and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to take his time. Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he “ran away,” vowing never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory. This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition had never entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade good-by to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed them. In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing from that standpoint he records incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others. He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting. He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the talk of their trade. One at least of the Bowen boys was already on the river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and had often been home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work. That learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well knew. Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old “permanent ambition” of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away Amazon, with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint. Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a slow, pleasant voice say: “Good morning.” Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man. “Good morning, sir,” he said, briskly, without looking around. As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house. This one presently came up and stood a little behind him. “How would you like a young man to learn the river?” he said. The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of auburn hair. “I wouldn't like it. Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth. A great deal more trouble than profit.” The applicant was not discouraged. “I am a printer by trade,” he went on, in his easy, deliberate way. “It doesn't agree with me. I thought I'd go to South America.” Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his voice. “What makes you pull your words that way?” (“pulling” being the river term for drawling), he asked. The young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench. “You'll have to ask my mother,” he said, more slowly than ever. “She pulls hers, too.” Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the manner of the reply amused him. His guest made another advance. “Do you know the Bowen boys?” he asked--“pilots in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade?” “I know them well--all three of them. William Bowen did his first steering for me; a mighty good boy, too. Had a Testament in his pocket when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of cards. I know Sam, too, and Bart.” “Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal. Sam and Will especially were my chums.” “Come over and stand by the side of me,” he said. “What is your name?” The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water. “Do you drink?” “No.” “Do you gamble?” “No, Sir.” “Do you swear?” “Not for amusement; only under pressure.” “Do you chew?” “No, sir, never; but I must smoke.” “Did you ever do any steering?” was Bixby's next question. “I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.” “Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag.” Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief. He sat down on the bench and kept a careful eye on the course. By and by he said: “There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river: that is, for money.” “What do you charge?” “Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever.” In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or “cub,” board free. Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for incidentals. His terms looked rather discouraging. “I haven't got five hundred dollars in money,” Sam said; “I've got a lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I'll give you two thousand acres of that.” Bixby dissented. “No; I don't want any unimproved real estate. I have too much already.” Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela's husband without straining his credit. “Well, then, I'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I earn it.” Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart. His slow, pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the world love Mark Twain. The terms proposed were agreed upon. The deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and was receiving pilot's wages. During Mr. Bixby's daylight watches his pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing him and nursing his sore foot. Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a directing hand had taken charge of his affairs. From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St. Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering front of trade. It was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet. At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up his first payment, and so concluded his contract. Then, when he suddenly found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain--a “sumptuous temple”--his happiness seemed complete. XXIII. THE SUPREME SCIENCE In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and keeping a knowledge requisite for that work. He has not exaggerated this part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple confession. Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features. As already suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant. His statement that he “supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river” is not to be accepted literally. Still he could hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that--not until afterward. Horace Bixby was a “lightning” pilot with a method of instruction as direct and forcible as it was effective. He was a small man, hot and quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off. After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of imparting and acquiring information he said: “My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.” So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it “fairly bristled” with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set down; for, as the “watches” were four hours off and four hours on, there were long gaps during which he had slept. The little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black water-proof covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that first trip. Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily deciphered now. Here and there is an easier line: MERIWEATHER'S BEND 1/4 less 3--[Depth of water. One-quarter less than three fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in willows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year. One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated. It would take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such statistics. And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-ache is still in them. He got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and laid this one away. There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world knew as Mark Twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--ever persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast, the absolutely limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting. It lies in the fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige. Wherever he has written of the river--and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him. In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days with Huck and Nigger Jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the lifting mists of morning--we can fairly “smell” the river, as Huck himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days. So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil. Horace Bixby has more than once declared: “Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him.” Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the size of its appalling task. It can only be presented in his own words. In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had begun to take on airs. His chief was a constant menace at such moments: One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler: “What is the shape of Walnut Bend?” He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.... I waited. By and by he said: “My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime.” “How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?” “How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it.” “Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?” “On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.” “I wish I was dead!” “Now, I don't want to discourage you, but----” “Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.” “You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways. You see----” “Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.” “No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.” “Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend on it? Will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?” Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, and he said: “Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point about 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore snag now.” So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and “thort-ships,”--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion: “How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The- Wall, trip before last?” I considered this an outrage. I said: “Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?” “My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate.” When I came to myself again, I said: “When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.” “Now drop that! When I say I'll learn a man the river I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.” We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very positive importance here. It is one of the most luminous in the book so far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows better than could any other combination of words something of what is required of the learner. It does not cover the whole problem, by any means--Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles. XXIV. THE RIVER CURRICULUM He acquired other kinds of knowledge. As the streets of Hannibal in those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished an added course to that vigorous education. Morally, its atmosphere could not be said to be an improvement on the others. Navigation in the West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude, hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports, coarse in their wit, profane in everything. Steam-boatmen were the natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought less profane, a veneer less barbaric. But these things were mainly “above stairs.” You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find the old keel-boatman savagery. Captains were overlords, and pilots kings in this estate; but they were not angels. In Life on the Mississippi Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he envied the mate's manner of giving an order. It was easier to acquire those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker. One could improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for terms. That Samuel Clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men. He acquired a vast knowledge of human character. He says: In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well- drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known him before--met him on the river. Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort that in Europe are known as “American” and in America are known as “Western.” Let us be thankful that Mark Twain's school was no less than it was--and no more. The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot, but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J. Roe. The Roe was a freight-boat, “as slow as an island and as comfortable as a farm.” In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam Clemens thought if John Quarles's farm could be set afloat it would greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship, hospitality, and speed. It was said of her that up-stream she could even beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the current, but was a “love of a steamboat” nevertheless. The Roe was not licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen “family guests” aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight frolics, also a piano in the cabin. The young pilot sometimes played on the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the “grasshopper on the sweet-potato vine,” or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem: Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem, A long time ago. There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his efforts won him laurels. He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and then came what seemed inferno by contrast. Bixby returned, made a trip or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named Brown. Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by the arrangement. But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and malicious. In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview with Brown, also his last one. For good reasons these occasions were burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially correct. Brown had an offensive manner. His first greeting was a surly question. “Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?” “Bixby” was usually pronounced “Bigsby” on the river, but Brown made it especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and orders still more odious. His subordinate soon learned to detest him thoroughly. It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification of slaying Brown. Time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time planning punishments of his own. I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that, and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed. Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment. Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went to bed and killed him in “seventeen different ways--all of them new.” He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use. Brown was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully his subordinate steered, he as always at him. “Here,” he would shout, “where are you going now? Pull her down! Pull her down! Don't you hear me? Dod-derned mud-cat!” His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even took occasion now and then to stir him up. One day they were steaming up the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward some unusual point. “Here, where are you heading for now?” he yelled. “What in nation are you steerin' at, anyway? Deyned numskull!” “Why,” said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, “I didn't see much else I could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank.” “Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!” yelled Brown. “You ain't fit to become no pilot!” Which was what Sam wanted. Any temporary relief from the carping tyranny of Brown was welcome. He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages. There had been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals. The Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or two of idle time at either end. The young pilot found that he could get night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch. Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six dollars he accounted himself rich. “It was a desolate experience,” he said, long afterward, “watching there in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir. But it was not a profitless one: I used to have inspirations as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book came out of those long night-watches. It was a good time to think of such things. XXV. LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow. At either end of the trip there was respite and recreation. In St. Louis, at Pamela's there was likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of course. At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the John J. Roe, where he was generously welcomed. One such visit on the Roe he never forgot. A young girl was among the boat's guests that trip--another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful. They met, and were mutually attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance, love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued. “I was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for the next three days.” Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft shouting: “The Pennsylvania is backing out.” A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over. He wrote her, but received no reply. He never saw her again, never heard from her for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old. She had not received his letter. Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests. A letter dated March 9, 1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice. Then the fun commenced. We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on the shore. Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller. We would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat. After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars. Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (George Ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men and tried it again. This time we found the channel in less than half an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came along and took us off. The next day was colder still. I was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us.... We sounded Hat Island, warped up around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane. It would have been impossible to get back to the boat. But the Maria Denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside, and they hoisted us in and thawed us out. We had then been out in the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock- candy statuary. This was the sort of thing he loved in those days. We feel the writer's evident joy and pride in it. In the same letter he says: “I can't correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is not allowed to do or think about anything else.” Then he mentions his brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which, though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself responsible. Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent him to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles, counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily. He may go down with us again. Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud. He did go on the next trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of promotion. It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to have Henry along. The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other pilot, George Ealer, who “was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't,” and quoted Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and inspiring audience. These were things worth while. The young steersman could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching across the path ahead. Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive warning, though of a kind seldom heeded. One night, when the Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister's house and had this vivid dream: He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-room, supported on two chairs. On his breast lay a bouquet of flowers, white, with a single crimson bloom in the center. When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he believed it real. Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at his dead brother. Instead, he went out on the street in the early morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly flashed upon him that it was only a dream. He bounded back, rushed to the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he found it really empty. He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his mind as quickly as he could. The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans. A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with Brown, already mentioned. It is recorded in the Mississippi book, but cannot be omitted here. Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle Bend) Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain for a landing to be made a little lower down. Brown was somewhat deaf, but would never confess it. He may not have understood the order; at all events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead. He disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition. They were passing the landing when Captain Klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him to let the boat come around, adding: “Didn't Henry tell you to land here?” “No, sir.” Captain. Klinefelter turned to Sam: “Didn't you hear him?” “Yes, sir.” Brown said: “Shut your mouth! You never heard anything of the kind.” By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble. Brown set upon him in his ugliest manner. “Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?” he demanded. Henry was always polite, always gentle. “I did tell you, Mr. Brown.” “It's a lie.” Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry. He said: “You lie yourself. He did tell you.” Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted: “I'll attend to your case in half a minute!” and ordered Henry out of the pilot-house. The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and struck him in the face.--[In the Mississippi book the writer states that Brown started to strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a letter written soon after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he says: “Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared him--turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six feet high-struck my little brother. I was wild from that moment. I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and the captain said I was right.”]--Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a heavy stool, and stretched him on the floor. Then all the bitterness and indignation that had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon Brown and holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength and fury gave out. Brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got into trouble. Seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass as a weapon. “Get out of this here pilot-house,” he raged. But his subordinate was not afraid of him now. “You should leave out the 'here,'” he drawled, critically. “It is understood, and not considered good English form.” “Don't you give me none of your airs,” yelled Brown. “I ain't going to stand nothing more from you.” “You should say, 'Don't give me any of your airs,'” Sam said, sweetly, “and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction.” A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck forward, applauded the victor. Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling. Clemens went below, where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot. The officer took him into his private room and closed the door. At first he looked at the culprit thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries: “Did you strike him first?” Captain Klinefelter asked. “Yes, sir.” “What with?” “A stool, sir.” “Hard?” “Middling, sir.” “Did it knock him down?” “He--he fell, sir.” “Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?” “Yes, sir.” “What did you do?” “Pounded him, sir.” “Pounded him?” “Yes, sir.” “Did you pound him much--that is, severely?” “One might call it that, sir, maybe.” “I am deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing; do you hear? I'll pay the expenses.”--[“Life on the Mississippi.”] Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him. Brown, of course, forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip “an emancipated slave” listening to George Ealer's flute and his readings from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years--that of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he saw defeat. Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go. Then when another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a little more than a year at the wheel. But Clemens himself had less confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis. He would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as steersman when Brown was gone. Without knowing it, he may have saved his life by that decision. It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the Pennsylvania sailed. Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the round chatting together. On this particular night the elder spoke of disaster on the river. Finally he said: “In case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the passengers will do that. Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-boat, and obey the mate's orders. When the boat is launched, help the women and children into it. Don't get in yourself. The river is only a mile wide. You can swim ashore easily enough.” It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow. XXVI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE “PENNSYLVANIA” Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey, which left two days behind the Pennsylvania. This was pleasant, for Bart Bowen had become captain of that fine boat. The Lacey touched at Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted: “The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island! One hundred and fifty lives lost!” Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a Memphis extra reported some of the particulars. Henry Clemens's name was mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury. Still farther up the river they got a later extra. Henry was again mentioned; this time as being scalded beyond recovery. By the time they reached Memphis they knew most of the details: At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning, while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with fearful results. All the forward end of the boat had been blown out. Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and crippled and would die. It was one of those hopeless, wholesale steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the Mississippi a river of death and tears. Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty others more or less desperately injured. He was told that Henry had inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded. His case was considered hopeless. Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the explosion. He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt, he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others. What he did after that could not be clearly learned. The vessel had taken fire; the rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the wreck. The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and landed. There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours until help could come. Henry was among those who were insensible by that time. Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded in his work of rescue; it will never be known. His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and remorse. He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy. He wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew. He sent word of the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless task of trying to bring Henry back to life. Many Memphis ladies were acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's youth and striking features, joined in the desperate effort. Some medical students had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special interest in Henry's case. Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis practitioner, declared that with such care the boy might pull through. But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying. Half delirious with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee. The letter to Orion Clemens's wife has been preserved. MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858. DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you my poor Henry--my darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head to-night. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair. Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know not what they say. I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings perished by that fearful disaster. But may God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth. She has done her duty by these poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has had. Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours. There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he passes, “May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!” The ladies have done well, too. Our second mate, a handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die. Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him a pretty bouquet. The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lips quivered out a gentle “God bless you, Miss,” and he burst into tears. He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not forget it. Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother. Your unfortunate brother, SAML. L. CLEMENS. P. S.--I got here two days after Henry. But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst. It would seem that Samuel Clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull. The final draft that would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident--the night that Henry died. He could never bring himself to write it. He was never known to speak of it but twice. Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination. He said: “I believe he is out of danger and will get well. He is likely to be restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will disturb him. If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine.” The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining of the other sufferers. His brother told the young medical student in charge what the doctor had said about the morphine. But morphine was a new drug then; the student hesitated, saying: “I have no way of measuring. I don't know how much an eighth of a grain would be.” Henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless. His brother was half beside himself with the torture of it. He went to the medical student. “If you have studied drugs,” he said, “you ought to be able to judge an eighth of a grain of morphine.” The young man's courage was over-swayed. He yielded and ladled out in the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to be the right amount. Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep. He died before morning. His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing in his self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it. He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end overcame him. A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and surrender. It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he dressed and went to where Henry lay. The coffin provided for the dead were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry Clemens had aroused a special interest. The ladies of Memphis had made up a fund of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case. Samuel Clemens entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream, lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a single red rose. Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home. The death of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[For a fine characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred to a letter written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood. See Appendix A, at the end of the last volume.] From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela's home in St. Louis. There one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the floor of his room. By and by Sam came in to where Orion was. He could endure it no longer, he said; he must, “tell somebody.” Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night. It has been set down here because it accounts for much in his after-life. It magnified his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane of the human being as a divine invention. Two of Mark Twain's chief characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt for it. In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry's death. He never really looked young again. Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did not disappear. His face took on the serious, pathetic look which from that time it always had in repose. At twenty-three he looked thirty. At thirty he looked nearer forty. After that the discrepancy in age and looks became less notable. In vigor, complexion, and temperament he was regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks. XXVII. THE PILOT The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi River pilot.--[In Life on the Mississippi he gives his period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary evidence as well as Mr. Bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at eighteen months]--Bixby had returned by this time, and they were again together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new boat called the New Falls City. Clemens was still a steersman when Bixby returned; but as soon as his license was granted (September 9, 1858) his old chief took him as full partner. He was a pilot at last. In eighteen months he had packed away in his head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river sovereign. He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day. He could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as an open page. At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United States. Boys generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens's head, or with his knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world. “Not only was he a pilot, but a good one.” These are Horace Bixby's words, and he added: “It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam's piloting. Men who were born since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was never much of a pilot. Most of them will tell you that he was never a pilot at all. As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill and application than it does now. There were no signal-lights along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.” He had plenty of money now. He could help his mother with a liberal hand, and he did it. He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice. From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new conditions. Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to renewed consistent effort: What is a government without energy?--[he says]--. And what is a man without energy? Nothing--nothing at all. What is the grandest thing in “Paradise Lost”--the Arch-Fiend's terrible energy! What was the greatest feature in Napoleon's character? His unconquerable energy! Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it! I want a man to--I want you to--take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil. Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for something in the way of a business opportunity. His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and council. Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry's death, and the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant. In the exhilaration of youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human outlet, self-approval. He not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses it with characteristic freedom. Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up. The other night I was about to “round to” for a storm, but concluded that I could find a smoother bank somewhere. I landed five miles below. The storm came, passed away and did not injure us. Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. We couldn't have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado. And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages--for that is a secondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank” in the neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers). Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago, I could enter the “Rooms,” and receive only the customary fraternal greeting now they say, “Why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?” And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow my horn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a “stern joy” in it. We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain's life, for it was a period that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years. He became completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his days. Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph. Where before he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in a moment he had been transformed into a high chief. The fullest ambition of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that day he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately proportions. Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot, he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats. Single-handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings. And we may pardon his vanity. He could hardly fail to feel his glory and revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the Association Rooms. To this day he is remembered as a figure there, though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not entirely because of his success. As the boys of Hannibal had gathered around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when he had an observation to make or a tale to tell. He was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it must have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that. Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers. He may have written them himself. Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens tell: We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always talking of such things; then he said: “Boys, I had great presence of mind once. It was at a fire. An old man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help. Everybody in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything. The ladders weren't long enough. Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me. I came to the rescue. I yelled for a rope. When it came I threw the old man the end of it. He caught it and I told him to tie it around his waist. He did so, and I pulled him down.” This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far. Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for Horace Bixby remembers that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.” But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge it later--with one exception. The exception was not intended for publication, either. It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his immediate friends. He has told the story himself, more than once, but it belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain. That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers--a sort of “oldest inhabitant” of the river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of his reminiscent knowledge. He contributed paragraphs of general information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and signed them “Mark Twain.” They were quaintly egotistical in tone, usually beginning: “My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans,” and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as 1811. Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots, who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of speech. But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a broadly burlesque imitation signed “Sergeant Fathom,” with an introduction which referred to the said Fathom as “one of the oldest cub pilots on the river.” The letter that followed related a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer “the old first Jubilee” with a “Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew.” It is a gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[See Appendix B, at the end of the last volume.] The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens's pilot partner on the Edward J. Gay at the time. He insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it. Clemens was reluctant, but consented. It appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and boisterously enjoyed. It broke Captain Sellers's literary heart. He never contributed another paragraph. Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly wounded. If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him, and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved--immortality. XXVIII. PILOTING AND PROPHECY Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When not at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the Association Rooms. He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were taught, one in each of three rooms. The price was twenty-five dollars for one language, or three for fifty dollars. The student was provided with a set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to another, changing tongues at each threshold. With his unusual enthusiasm and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present French would do. He did not return to the school, but kept his cards and bought text-books. He must have studied pretty faithfully when he was off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a French exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the Dialogues of Voltaire. This old note-book is interesting for other things. The notes are no longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the authority of one in supreme command. Under the head of “2d high-water trip--Jan., 1861--Alonzo Child,” we have the story of a rising river with its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the circumstance and uncertainty of change. Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank --could have gone up shore above General Taylor's--too much drift.... Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8 ft. bank on main shore Ozark Chute.... And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda. It means little enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers, picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot as well as a man knows the hall of his own home. All the qualifications must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of steering. “Steering is a very high, art,” he says; “one must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river fast.” He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the Alonzo Child. Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the dark, he recalled it. He said: “There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a perfectly wonderful creature. I do not know that Jack knew anymore about the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness. “I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it. I had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when Jack Leonard took the wheel. I had a chance one night to verify that for myself. We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest nights I ever saw. Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it. It was one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height--all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it--and not a thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of the river. Some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position and was generally pretty useless. “I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get through it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked in. He was a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard. I was just about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a squirrel. “'Sam,' he said, 'let me take the wheel. Maybe I have been over this place since you have.' “I didn't argue the question. Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could possibly hit. I never saw anything so beautiful. He stayed my watch out for me, and I hope I was decently grateful. I have never forgotten it.” The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative dreams. He was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were always a marvel to him. A love of astronomy--the romance of it, its vast distances, and its possibilities--began with those lonely river-watches and never waned to his last day. For a time a great comet blazed in the heavens, a “wonderful sheaf of light” that glorified his lonely watch. Night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or afterward. He speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny. It was a fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had conferred the magic gift of phrase. Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered. In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as a sort of creed. It is an interesting little document--a prophetic one, the reader may concede: HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for your coming. Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother. Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. The old note-book contains no record of disasters. Horace Bixby, who should know, has declared: “Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and then.” Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and a letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two enjoyed at a “French restaurant” in New Orleans--“dissipating on a ten-dollar dinner--tell it not to Ma!”--where they had sheepshead fish, oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, “after which the day was too far gone to do anything.” So it appears that he was not always reading Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend. Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in St. Louis where was being exhibited Church's “Heart of the Andes.” He describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm. “I have seen it several times,” he concludes, “but it is always a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you saw the first.” Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his cousin Ella Creel and another--for a trip down the river to New Orleans. Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the 'schottische' as performed by Miss Castle and myself. She was perfectly willing for me to dance until 12 o'clock at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the 'schottische'. I took Ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of New Orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and, although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. To use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were “hell-bent” on stealing some of the luscious- looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but I restrained them. In another letter of this period we get a hint of the future Mark Twain. It was written to John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J. Roe. What a fool old Adam was. Had everything his own way; had succeeded in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood, but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable little apple. Ah, John, if you had been in his place you would not have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any exertion. I have noticed that you shun exertion. There comes in the difference between us. I court exertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment. Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long. There remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious document. There was in those days a famous New Orleans clairvoyant known as Madame Caprell. Some of the young pilot's friends had visited her and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results. From time to time they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he concluded to make the experiment. As soon as he came away he wrote to Orion in detail. She's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28--say 5 feet 2 1/4--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I do. She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age. Then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in. Something after this style: 'Madame.' Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then I can almost promise you 86, when you will surely die; otherwise, look out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a long- lived race, that is, on your father's side; you are the only healthy member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be careful of yourself.... In some respects you take after your father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived, energetic side of the house.... You never brought all your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated. 'S. L. C.' Which proves nothing. 'Madame.' Don't interrupt. When you sought your present occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account. To do all this requires the qualities which I have named. 'S. L. C.' You flatter well, Madame. 'Madame.' Don't interrupt. Up to within a short time you had always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances --for which you need give credit to no one but yourself. The turning-point in your life occurred in 1840-7-8. 'S. L. C.' Which was? 'Madame.' A death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did. You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune. You will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now.... What is your brother's age? 23--and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an office? Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do --tell him I said so. He is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their confidence by displaying his instability of character.... The land he has now will be very valuable after a while---- 'S. L. C.' Say 250 years hence, or thereabouts, Madame---- 'Madame.' No--less time--but never mind the land, that is a secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices under Government.... After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary --try the law--you will certainly succeed. I am done now. If you have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, I will answer without reserve--without reserve. I asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller's was just as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more --ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other amusements fail. Now isn't she the devil? That is to say, isn't she a right smart little woman? When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it. She and Pamela are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till I get back, I reckon. SAM. In the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that Madame Caprell was “indeed a right smart little woman.” She made mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of his father's death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read. minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother Orion's; that she outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly had knowledge of Orion's legal bent and his connection with the Tennessee land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course, she had no material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know certainly about such things. XXIX. THE END OF PILOTING It is curious, however, that Madame Caprell, with clairvoyant vision, should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two months distant: the breaking-out of the Civil War, with the closing of the river and the end of Mark Twain's career as a pilot. Perhaps these things were so near as to be “this side” the range of second sight. There had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that war was really coming. Traveling that great commercial highway, the river, with intercourse both of North and South, they did not believe that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the nation's trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street corners, in the halls of legislation, and at the polls. True, several States, including Louisiana, had declared the Union a failure and seceded; but the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a State had rights in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of secession might be. Comparatively few believed it meant war. Samuel Clemens had no such belief. His Madame Caprell letter bears date of February 6, 1861, yet contains no mention of war or of any special excitement in New Orleans--no forebodings as to national conditions. Such things came soon enough: President Lincoln was inaugurated on the 4th of March, and six weeks later Fort Sumter was fired upon. Men began to speak out then and to take sides. It was a momentous time in the Association Rooms. There were pilots who would go with the Union; there were others who would go with the Confederacy. Horace Bixby was one of the former, and in due time became chief of the Union River Service. Another pilot named Montgomery (Samuel Clemens had once steered for him) declared for the South, and later commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet. They were all good friends, and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but they took sides. A good many were not very clear as to their opinions. Living both North and South as they did, they saw various phases of the question and divided their sympathies. Some were of one conviction one day and of another the next. Samuel Clemens was of the less radical element. He knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he was not then bloodthirsty. A pilot-house with its elevated position and transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on. “I'll think about it,” he said. “I'm not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I'll go home and reflect on the matter.” He did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot. It is rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with his future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--“mark twain,” and should end with the words “no lead.” He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the Uncle Sam. Zeb Leavenworth was one of the pilots, and Sam Clemens usually stood watch with him. They heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations, but they were not molested, though at Memphis they basely escaped the blockade. At Cairo, Illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later commanded by Grant. The Uncle Sam came steaming up toward St. Louis, those on board congratulating themselves on having come through unscathed. They were not quite through, however. Abreast of Jefferson Barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl of smoke drifting in their direction. They did not realize that it was a signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on. Less than a minute later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of the upper decoration. Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a yell. “Good Lord Almighty! Sam;” he said, “what do they mean by that?” Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. “I guess they want us to wait a minute, Zeb,” he said. They were examined and passed. It was the last steamboat to make the trip from New Orleans to St. Louis. Mark Twain's pilot-days were over. He would have grieved had he known this fact. “I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since,” he long afterward declared, “and I took a measureless pride in it.” The dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly. A sovereign and an autocrat, the pilot's word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a crown. As long as he lived Samuel Clemens would return to those old days with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more. XXX. THE SOLDIER Clemens spent a few days in St. Louis (in retirement, for there was a pressing war demand for Mississippi pilots), then went up to Hannibal to visit old friends. They were glad enough to see him, and invited him to join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to “help Gov. 'Claib' Jackson repel the invader.” A good many companies were forming in and about Hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting and badly mixed. Some of the volunteers did not know for a time which invader they intended to drive from Missouri soil, and more than one company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might eventually espouse. --[The military organizations of Hannibal and Palmyra, in 1861, were as follows: The Marion Artillery; the Silver Grays; Palmyra Guards; the W. E. Dennis company, and one or two others. Most of them were small private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half Union and Confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or conditions, and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the regular service according as they developed convictions. The general idea of these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good time. One such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements. They saw the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.] Samuel Clemens had by this time decided, like Lee, that he would go with his State and lead battalions to victory. The “battalion” in this instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age, mostly pilots and schoolmates, including Sam Bowen, Ed Stevens, and Ab Grimes, about a dozen, all told. They organized secretly, for the Union militia was likely to come over from Illinois any time and look up any suspicious armies that made an open demonstration. An army might lose enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose. So they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill, just as Tom Sawyer's red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of them were of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing “War,” instead of “Indian” and “Pirate” and “Bandit” with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches. Then, on the evening before marching away, they stealthily called on their sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others pretended sweethearts for the occasion--and when it was dark and mysterious they said good-by and suggested that maybe those girls would never see them again. And as always happens in such a case, some of them were in earnest, and two or three of the little group that slipped away that night never did come back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves. The “two Sams”--Sam Bowen and Sam Clemens--called on Patty Gore and Julia Willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls to “walk through the pickets” with them, which they did as far as Bear Creek Hill. The girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were away calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn't be back to begin picketing for some time. So the girls stood there and watched the soldiers march up Bear Creek Hill and disappear among the trees. The army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush and vines toward New London, though this sort of thing grew rather monotonous by morning. When they took a look at themselves by daylight, with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing about it all which appealed to one's sense of humor rather than to his patriotism. Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, however, received them cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some encouraging words. He was authorized to administer the oath of office, he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to Col. Bill Splawn, Farmer Nuck Matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands and perhaps ought to do something for it. This brought in a number of contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it possible for it to move on to the front without further delay. Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, Paint Brush, upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade. The proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they did it. They went over on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not far from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as headquarters. Somebody suggested that when they went into battle they ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of it. Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the stable and acted as barber. They were not very sharp shears, but the army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance. The army then elected its officers. William Ely was chosen captain, with Asa Glasscock as first lieutenant. Samuel Clemens was then voted second lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies. There were only three privates when the election was over, and these could not be distinguished by their deportment. There was scarcely any discipline in this army. Then it set in to rain. It rained by day and it rained by night. Salt River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. Twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over. Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk. The rank and file did not care for picket duty. Sam Bowen--ordered by Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior and had to be threatened with court-martial and death. Sam went finally, but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun. These things began to tell on patriotism. Presently Lieutenant Clemens developed a boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war and the fools that invented it. Then word came that “General” Tom Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse two miles away, living on the fat of the land. That settled it. Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his neglect of them as perfidy. They broke camp without further ceremony. Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the little mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of rope, hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to Paint Brush's neck. Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it was necessary for Paint Brush to follow. Arriving at the farther bank, Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope led down in the water with no horse and rider in view. He spurred up the bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears of Paint Brush appeared. “Ah,” said Clemens, as he mopped his face, “do you know that little devil waded all the way across?” A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them back to camp. They admonished him to “go there himself.” They said they had been in that camp and knew all about it. They were going now where there was food--real food and plenty of it. Then he begged them, but it was no use. By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies. A tall, bony woman came to the door: “You're secesh, ain't you?” They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they wanted to buy provisions. The request seemed to inflame her. “Provisions!” she screamed. “Provisions for secesh, and my husband a colonel in the Union Army. You get out of here!” She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army moved on. When they arrived at Col. Bill Splawn's that night Colonel Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb them. The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep. Presently somebody yelled “Fire!” One of the boys had been smoking and started the hay. Lieutenant Clemens suddenly wakened, made a quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barnyard below. The rest of the army, startled into action, seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window. The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his disabilities. Literally and figuratively this was the final straw. With a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his last vestige of interest in the war. The others, now that the fire was, out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing. Whereupon the lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the Confederacy, and of the human race at large. They helped him in, then, for his ankle was swelling badly. Next morning, when Colonel Splawn had given them a good breakfast, the army set out for New London. But Lieutenant Clemens never got any farther than Nuck Matson's farm-house. His ankle was so painful by that time that Mrs. Matson had him put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the injury and stress of war. A little negro boy was kept on watch for Union detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed. When he was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the Confederacy. He decided to visit Orion in Keokuk. Orion was a Union abolitionist and might lead him to mend his doctrines. As for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field. Its members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their occupations, some to continue in the trade of war. Sam Bowen is said to have been caught by the Federal troops and put to sawing wood in the stockade at Hannibal. Ab (A. C.) Grimes became a noted Confederate spy and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set down. Properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have made as brave soldiers as any. Military effectiveness is a matter of leaders and tactics. Mark Twain's own Private History of a 'Campaign that Failed' is, of course, built on this episode. He gives us a delicious account, even if it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence. The story might have been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier in the dark. The incident was invented, of course, to present the real horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and, to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention. --[In a book recently published, Mark Twain's “nephew” is quoted as authority for the statement that Mark Twain was detailed for river duty, captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-warehouse in St. Louis, etc. Mark Twain had but one nephew: Samuel E. Moffett, whose Biographical Sketch (vol. xxii, Mark Twain's Works) contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.] XXXI. OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY When Madame Caprell prophesied that Orion Clemens would hold office under government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision. The inauguration of Abraham Lincoln brought Edward Bates into his Cabinet, and Bates was Orion's friend. Orion applied for something, and got it. James W. Nye had been appointed Territorial governor of Nevada, and Orion was made Territorial secretary. You could strain a point and refer to the office as “secretary of state,” which was an imposing title. Furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor's absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors. When Lieutenant Clemens arrived in Keokuk, Orion was in the first flush of his triumph and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor. The late lieutenant C. S. A. had accumulated money out of his pilot salary, and there was no comfortable place just then in the active Middle West for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the service. He agreed that if Orion would overlook his recent brief defection from the Union and appoint him now as his (Orion's) secretary, he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer. The offer was a boon to Orion. He was always eager to forgive, and the money was vitally necessary. In the briefest possible time he had packed his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the brothers were on their way to St. Louis for final leave-taking before setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the Pacific West. From St. Louis they took the boat for St. Jo, whence the Overland stage started, and for six days “plodded” up the shallow, muddy, snaggy Missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the Father of Waters. In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a “bully” boat, and all she wanted was some “shear” and a bigger wheel. I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.'--['Roughing It'.]-- At St. Jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad Rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo and Carson City (including a two-day halt in Salt Lake City) in nineteen glorious days. What an inspiration in such a trip! In 'Roughing It' he tells it all, and says: “Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my face on those fine Overland mornings.” The nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not mind. All things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and pistols where we could find them in the dark. Then we smoked a final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes, tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail- bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it. And finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep. Youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience. And sometimes the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at five dollars apiece and making the Overland trip in eight days; just a quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and the even, swinging gallop of the mules. Sometimes they got a glimpse of the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by. And every morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, Mormonism. They spent two wonderful days at Salt Lake City, that mysterious and remote capital of the great American monarchy, who still flaunts her lawless, orthodox creed the religion of David and Solomon--and thrives. An obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in 'Roughing It' by and by. The Overland travelers set out refreshed from Salt Lake City, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while. The author of 'Roughing It' assures us of this: Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a “down-grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. But one must read all the story of that long-ago trip. It was a trip so well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and rereading to-day. We can only read of it now. The Overland stage long ago made its last trip, and will not start any more. Even if it did, the life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same. XXXII. THE PIONEER It was a hot, dusty August 14th that the stage reached Carson City and drew up before the Ormsby Hotel. It was known that the Territorial secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception, with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned. Governor Nye, formerly police commissioner in New York City, had arrived a short time before, and with his party of retainers (“heelers” we would call them now), had made an imposing entrance. Perhaps something of the sort was expected with the advent of the secretary of state. Instead, the committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage, unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same they had put on at St. Jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust. It is not likely there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother: Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again. Soap and water and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had been fatal to festivities of welcome. Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a “wooden town,” with a population of two thousand souls. Its main street consisted of a few blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing. In 'Roughing It' the author writes: In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a “Plaza,” which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large, unfenced, level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the Plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering. One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to populate it. The mineral excitement was at its height in those days of the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as only the greed for precious metal can assemble. The sidewalks and streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a motley aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze upon. Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as it was--“no better and no worse.” Well--[he says]--, “Gold Hill” sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; “Wild Cat” isn't worth ten cents. The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits. I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was “the d---dest country under the sun,” and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, “sage- brush,” ventures to grow.... I said we are situated in a flat, sandy desert--true. And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the insignificant village of Carson, in that instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it. As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but, like that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe “they don't run her now.” Carson has been through several phases of change since this was written--for better and for worse. It is a thriving place in these later days, and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout. But it was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every whirlwind of discovery sweeps along. Gold and silver hunting and mine speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder were the diversions--of the Nevada capital. Politics developed in due course, though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time. The Clemens brothers took lodging with a genial Irishwoman, Mrs. Murphy, a New York retainer of Governor Nye, who boarded the camp-followers.--[The Mrs. O'Flannigan of 'Roughing It'.]--This retinue had come in the hope of Territorial pickings and mine adventure--soldiers of fortune they were, and a good-natured lot all together. One of them, Bob Howland, a nephew of the governor, attracted Samuel Clemens by his clean-cut manner and commanding eye. “The man who has that eye doesn't need to go armed,” he wrote later. “He can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner without saying a single word.” It was the same Bob Howland who would be known by and by as the most fearless man in the Territory; who, as city marshal of Aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with general massacre, sent the famous message to Governor Nye: “All quiet in Aurora. Five men will be hung in an hour.” And it was quiet, and the programme was carried out. But this is a digression and somewhat premature. Orion Clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother, finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position, devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under frontier conditions. Sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would build a fire in the office stove, and, with Bob Howland and a few other choice members of the “Brigade” gathered around, would tell river yarns in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his days. His river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling to convey. His hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not likely ever to set the world afire. They did not happen to think that the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud would one day win for him the attention of all mankind. Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was never known as otherwise than “Sam” among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on the Carson streets. His great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress, drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to look a second time and then inquire as to his identity. He had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode. Lately a river sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had become the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots Always something of a barbarian in love with the loose habit of unconvention, he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray. The more energetic citizens of Carson did not prophesy much for his future among them. Orion Clemens, with the stir and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time against an awning support at the corner of King and Carson streets, smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying, lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless enough, of course, but how could any one ever get a return out of employment like that? Samuel Clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was too much to see at first to consider any special undertaking. The mere coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans. His chief purpose was to see the world beyond the Rockies, to derive from it such amusement and profit as might fall in his way. The war would end, by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt. He was already not far from homesick for the “States” and his associations there. He closed one letter: I heard a military band play “What Are the Wild Waves Saying” the other night, and it brought Ella Creel and Belle (Stotts) across the desert in an instant, for they sang the song in Orion's yard the first time I ever heard it. It was like meeting an old friend. I tell you I could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them. His friends contracted the mining mania; Bob Howland and Raish Phillips went down to Aurora and acquired “feet” in mini-claims and wrote him enthusiastic letters. With Captain Nye, the governor's brother, he visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of the mine; but his enthusiasm still languished. He was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those concealed under it. He had heard that the timber around Lake Bigler (Tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking. The lake itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the dream of art. He decided to locate a timber claim on its shores. He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the account of this trip as set down in 'Roughing It' is one of the best things in the book. The lake proved all they had expected--more than they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high aloft in mid-nothingness. They staked out a timber claim and made a semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among the trees, lounging along the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea. They did not sleep in their house, he says: “It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We did not wish to strain it.” They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day--it was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fence and habitation. His picture in 'Roughing It' of the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid. The reader may wish to compare it with this extract from a letter written to Pamela at the time. The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard- bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air. Then we could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a gleaming, fiery mirror. The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very impressive. Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his mouth and say, “Superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the Lord God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night, we'll never live till morning!” This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of phrasing which would develop later. The fire ended their first excursion to Tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in which the “folks at home,” Mr. Moffett, James Lampton, and others, were included. It was the same James Lampton who would one day serve as a model for Colonel Sellers. Evidently Samuel Clemens had a good opinion of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes: This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in. I don't believe it would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000 to commence with. I suppose he can't leave his family, though. Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller's optimism develops. Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that if the war lets us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever costing him a cent or a particle of trouble. This letter bears date of October 25th, and from it we gather that a certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed. We have got about 1,650 feet of mining ground, and, if it proves good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in, and if not I can get “feet” for him in the spring. You see, Pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with after you get it. He refers to Pamela's two little children, his niece Annie and Baby Sam,--[Samuel E. Moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.]--and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims probably--for he was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines. That was a long time ago. Tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents. Those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit of precious ores. XXXIII. THE PROSPECTOR It was not until early winter that Samuel Clemens got the real mining infection. Everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not fallen an earlier victim. The wildest stories of sudden fortune were in the air, some of them undoubtedly true. Men had gone to bed paupers, on the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires. Others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be fairly stuffed with precious ores. Cart-loads of bricks--silver and gold--daily drove through the streets. In the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened Humboldt region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding. The papers declared that Humboldt County “was the richest mineral region on God's footstool.” The mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold and silver. A correspondent of the daily Territorial Enterprise fairly wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the measureless wealth of the Humboldt mines. No wonder those not already mad speedily became so. No wonder Samuel Clemens, with his natural tendency to speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as “frenzied as the craziest.” The air to him suddenly began to shimmer; all his thoughts were of “leads” and “ledges” and “veins”; all his clouds had silver linings; all his dreams were of gold. He joined an expedition at once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having started earlier. Hurry was the word! We wasted no time. Our party consisted of four persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses. We put 1,800 pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon. In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of killikinick, Watts's Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the “Carmina Sacra.” The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in 'Roughing It'), and W. H. Clagget. Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a law student in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association. Both Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in time. The blacksmith's name was Tillou (Ballou), a sturdy, honest soul with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools. There were also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed mongrel, Curney, the property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound. The combination seemed a strong one. It proved a weak one in the matter of horses. Oliver and Clemens had furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best. It was two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand. The horses could not drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out. Then they found it necessary to push. Not because we were fond of it, Ma--oh, no! but on Bunker's account. Bunker was the “near” horse on the larboard side, named after the attorney-general of this Territory. My horse--and I am sorry you do not know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my horse--I was going to say, was the “off” horse on the starboard side. But it was on Bunker's account, principally, that we pushed behind the wagon. In fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind all the way to Humboldt.--[S. L. C. to his mother. Published in the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.]-- So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never know want or fatigue any more. There were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food satisfying. They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their discomforts. Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent letter to the writer of this history, says: He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two. One day a pack of wolves chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead. Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: This was disturbing enough. Then they came to that desolation of desolations, the Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water. They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless waste to reach camp on the other side. It was three o'clock in the morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted. Judge Oliver in his letter tells what happened then: The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of Piute warriors. We were upon our feet in an instant. The pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were in our minds. Our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors. Sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: “Boys, they have left us our scalps. Let's give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.” And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful. They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving snow-storm. Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other. They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton. Stones used to roll down on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock--specifically of a mule and cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last “an entire cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of everything.”--['The Innocents Abroad.'] Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow. He says there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive. Judge Oliver's name will go down with it to posterity. In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they found in Unionville. “National” there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per ton at the mint in San Francisco. And the “Alda Nueva,” “Peru,” “Delirio,” “Congress,” “Independent,” and others were immensely rich leads. And moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get “feet” enough to make us all rich one of these days. “I confess with shame,” says the author of 'Roughing It', “that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground.” And he adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold. His account in 'Roughing It' of the Humboldt mining experience is sufficiently good history to make detail here unnecessary. Tillou instructed them in prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim. They went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and blasting-powder. Then they gave it up. “One week of this satisfied me. I resigned.” They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again. It was pleasanter to prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new ledge than it was to dig-and about as profitable. The golden reports of Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were mainly delirium and insanity. The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel, though their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately die. Billy Clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and Gus Oliver put out his as probate judge. Sam Clemens and Tillou, with a fat-witted, arrogant Prussian named Pfersdoff (Ollendorf) set out for Carson City. It is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs. The Carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the Carson River (the scene of the “Arkansas” sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot. Pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded in getting them absolutely lost in the snow. The author of 'Roughing It' tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow. He further tells us how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and, deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: It was the 29th of January when they reached Carson City. They had been gone not quite two months, one of which had been spent in travel. It was a brief period, but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years. XXXIV. TERRITORIAL CHARACTERISTICS Meantime, the Territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching the ship of state. There was no legislative hall in Carson City; and if Abram Curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated Gould and Curry mine--“Curry--old Curry--old Abe Curry,” as he called himself--had not tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would have been obliged to “sit in the desert.” Furthermore, Orion had met with certain acute troubles of his own. The government at Washington had not appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and it had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing and various other services-prices fixed according to Eastern standards. These prices did not obtain in Nevada, and when Orion, confident that because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point and allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual thick-headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid was deducted from his slender salary. With a man of less conscience this condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates, less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official deficit. With Orion Clemens such a remedy was not even considered; yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was, Orion's integrity was a rock. Governor Nye was among those who presently made this discovery. Old politician that he was--former police commissioner of New York City--Nye took care of his own problems in the customary manner. To him, politics was simply a game--to be played to win. He was a popular, jovial man, well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as Orion did, planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges out of his salary. To him Nevada was simply a doorway to the United States Senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official recognition and perquisites. The governor found Orion Clemens an impediment to this policy. Orion could not be brought to a proper political understanding of “special bills and accounts,” and relations between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained. It was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the pilot-house of a Mississippi River steamer returned from Humboldt. He was fond of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family integrity. When he had heard Orion's troubled story, he called on Governor Nye and delivered himself in his own fashion. In his former employments he had acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient to his needs. We may regret that no stenographic report was made of the interview. It would be priceless now. But it is lost; we only know that Orion's rectitude was not again assailed, and that curiously enough Governor Nye apparently conceived a strong admiration and respect for his brother. Samuel Clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in Carson City--only long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture. He did not confess his Humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to Humboldt after a brief investigation of the Esmeralda mines. He had been paying heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining gained at Unionville, he felt that his personal attention at Aurora might be important. As a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft on the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for company. His earlier praises of the wonders and climate of Tahoe had inspired his sister Pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving land. Perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too highly. “By George, Pamela,” he said, “I begin to fear that I have invoked a spirit of some kind or other, which I will find more than difficult to allay.” He proceeds to recommend California as a residence for any or all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning Nevada. Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go back to hell again.... Why, I have had my whiskers and mustaches so full of alkali dust that you'd have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel. But then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism. How could he, with a fortune so plainly in view? It was already in his grasp in imagination; he was on the way home with it. I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer. I don't say that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I expect to--you bet. I came down here from Humboldt, in order to look after our Esmeralda interests. Yesterday, Bob Howland arrived here, and I have had a talk with him. He owns with me in the “Horatio and Derby” ledge. He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a “big thing” by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a mill. Now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to 50 or 100 inches, we wouldn't care whether school kept or not. If the ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the water for money enough to give us quite a lift. But, you see, the ledge will not prove to be worthless. We have located, near by, a fine site for a mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill- site, water-power, and payrock, all handy. Then we sha'n't care whether we have capital or not. Mill folks will build us a mill, and wait for their pay. If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in June--and if we do, I'll be home in July, you know. He pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic and crystal-clear. So, just keep your clothes on, Pamela, until I come. Don't you know that undemonstrated human calculations won't do to bet on? Don't you know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing? Don't you know that I have expended money in this country but have made none myself? Don't you know that I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that belonged to me? Don't you know that it's all talk and no cider so far? Don't you know that people who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ of Hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and exaggerate with 40-horse microscopic power? But-but In the bright lexicon of youth, There is no such word as Fail-- and I'll prove it! Whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt: By George, if I just had a thousand dollars I'd be all right! Now there's the “Horatio,” for instance. There are five or six shareholders in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and they are pressed for money, but I am hard up myself, and can't buy --and in June they'll strike the ledge, and then “good-by canary.” I can't get it for love or money. Twenty dollars a foot! Think of it! For ground that is proven to be rich. Twenty dollars, Madam- and we wouldn't part with a foot of our 75 for five times the sum. So it will be in Humboldt next summer. The boys will get pushed and sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune. But I am at the helm now. I have convinced Orion that he hasn't business talent enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not connected with the secretary's office. So, you see, if mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me--and me only. I'm the “firm,” you know. There are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and plans. Ah, well! we have all written such letters home at one time and another-of gold-mines of one form or another. He closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother. Ma says: “It looks like a man can't hold public office and be honest.” Why, certainly not, Madam. A man can't hold public office and be honest. Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose. And I don't remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in Nevada. He even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, Ma, but I wasn't brought up in that way, you know. You showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised me, Madam. But then you ought to have raised me first, so that Orion could have had the benefit of my example. Do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an 8-stamp quartz-mill one night, and brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room? XXXV. THE MINER He had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary that Orion should become the financier. The brothers owned their Esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that Orion, out of his modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would go actively into the field and develop their riches. Neither had the slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks. It was February when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in Aurora, that rough, turbulent camp of the Esmeralda district lying about one hundred miles south of Carson City, on the edge of California, in the Sierra slopes. Everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for “feet” in this ledge and that, buried deep under the ice and drift. The new arrival camped with Horatio Phillips (Raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof (the ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together and combined their resources in a common fund. Bob Howland joined them presently, and later an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie (Cal), one day to be immortalized in the story of 'Roughing It' and in the dedication of that book. Around the cabin stove they would gather, and paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and “horn” spoon, after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective wealth. Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all the rivers ran gold. Bob Howland declared later that they used to go out at night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile them in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of affluence and high living. When they lacked for other employment and were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would “ride the bunk” and smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills. At other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings. They thought he was writing letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during this period. It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print. One or two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a Keokuk paper--the 'Gate City'. Copies containing them had gone back to Orion, who had shown them to a representative of the Territorial Enterprise, a young man named Barstow, who thought them amusing. The Enterprise reprinted at least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with this encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution direct to that paper over the pen-name “Josh.” He did not care to sign his own name. He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp scribbler. He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none. They were sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of humor that belongs to the frontier. They were not especially promising efforts. One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of preliminary study for “Oahu,” of the Sandwich Islands, or “Baalbec” and “Jericho,” of Syria. If any one had told him, or had told any reader of this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to doubt. Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed. A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places. The saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer. Our Aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin. Once there was a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and Sam Clemens is said to have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous enjoyment of the tripping harmony. Cal Higbie, who was present, writes: In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to his surroundings. Sometimes he would act as though there was no use in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone, talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so much pleasure to be obtained at a ball. It was all as natural as a child's play. By the second set, all the ladies were falling over themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with laughter. What a child he always was--always, to the very end? With the first break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies, and assailed the hills. There came then a period of madness, beside which the Humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication. Higbie says: It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific coast. In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack- drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people would club together and send agents representing all the way from $5,000 to $500,000 or more to buy mines. They would buy anything. in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or not. The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of which mining is the ultimate form. An extract from a letter of April is a fair exhibit: Work not yet begun on the “Horatio and Derby”--haven't seen it yet. It is still in the snow. Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks --strike the ledge in July: Guess it is good--worth from $30 to $50 a foot in California.... Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on Last Chance Hill. Expect he will die. These mills here are not worth a d--n--except Clayton's--and it is not in full working trim yet. Send me $40 or $50--by mail-immediately. I go to work to-morrow with pick and shovel. Something's got to come, by G--, before I let go here. By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the snow in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost. On the 28th he writes: I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of our new claims--“Dashaway”--which I don't think a great deal of, but which I am willing to try. We are down, now, 10 or 12 a feet. We are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out. If we get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see whether it is worth anything or not. It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the cold; and the “Dashaway” would seem to have proven a disappointment, for there is no promising mention of it again. Instead, we hear of the “Flyaway;” and “Annipolitan” and the “Live Yankee” and of a dozen others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and then passes from notice forever. In May it is the “Monitor” that is sure to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as immediate. To use a French expression, I have “got my d---d satisfy” at last. Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything. Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but just lie still and put up with privation for six months. Perhaps 3 months will “let us out.” Then, if government refuses to pay the rent on your new office we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will come there is no shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty. I own one-eighth of the new “Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company,” and money can't buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our fortune. The ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it.... When you and I came out here we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have accepted it gladly. Now, it is made. I am willing, now, that “Neary's tunnel” or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed. Some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate. I would hate to swap chances with any member of the tribe.... It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it, share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype. He adds: But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but those which I can superintend myself. I am a citizen here now, and I am satisfied, although Ratio and I are “strapped” and we haven't three days' rations in the house.... I shall work the “Monitor” and the other claims with my own hands. I prospected 3/4 of a pound of “Monitor” yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got about 10 or 12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get.... I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling “Monitor” which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all splintered up, and I send you the scraps. I call that “choice”--any d---d fool would. Don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't. It don't need it. It is simply able to speak for itself. It is six feet wide on top, and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth. What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in the invincible bomb-proof “Monitor”? There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending with demands for money. The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and the help eat it up faster than Orion's salary can grow. “Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel.” The letters are full of such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother, is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. He is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane protests from Aurora. “The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,” the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. “My back is sore, and my hands are blistered with handling them to-day.” But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later. He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still hope to strike it some day. “But--if we strike it rich--I've lost my guess, that's all.” Then he adds: “Couldn't go on the hill to-day. It snowed. It always snows here, I expect”; and the final heart-sick line, “Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?” This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels the dreary uselessness of the quest. Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things were as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a still subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the “Banner State,” until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than desperation in the words. In 'Roughing It' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining and went to milling “as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week.” This statement requires modification. It was not entirely for the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing “riffles” and “screening tailings.” The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. It is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim humor in the confession. That he abandoned the milling experiment at the end of a week is a true statement. He got a violent cold in the damp place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, “working in the quicksilver and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment again. It is a confining business, and I will not be confined for love or money.” As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour, prospecting for the traditional “Cement Mine,” a lost claim where, in a deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins in a fruitcake. They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono Lake--that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in 'Roughing It' he has so vividly pictured. It was good to get away from the stress of things; and they repeated the experiment. They made a walking trip to Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far, tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever visited at all. Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft. Amid mountain-peaks and giant forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth while. More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind. XXXVI. LAST MINING DAYS It was late in July when he wrote: If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from Wide West ledge a while ago. Raish and I have secured 200 out of a company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a spur from the W. W.--our shaft is about 100 ft. from the W. W. shaft. In order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft. We have sublet to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening tools. This was the “Blind Lead” claim of Roughing It, but the episode as set down in that book is somewhat dramatized. It is quite true that he visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the “Cement” 'ignus fatuus' and that the “Wide West” holdings were forfeited through neglect. But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the letters fail to show it. It is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not the claim was ever of any value. A well-known California author--[Ella Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc]--declares: No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire through the “Wide West” mine, for the writer, as a child, played over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk thousands and thousands, that they never recovered. The “Blind Lead” episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality. It is vividly true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any liberties he may have taken for art's sake. In reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender. The “Josh” letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest, and Orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made for similar material. Orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. A letter from the Aurora miner written near the end of July presents the situation very fully. An extract or two will be sufficient: My debts are greater than I thought for--I bought $25 worth of clothing and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings. I owe about $45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket. But how in the h--l I am going to live on something over $100 until October or November is singular. The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too.... Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or to Marsh, and tell them I'll write as many letters a week as they want for $10 a week. My board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent and other papers--and the Enterprise. If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night collecting material cheaper? I'll write a short letter twice a week, for the present for the 'Age', for $5 per week. Now it has been a long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long time before I loaf another year. Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of the Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of the paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the “Josh” letters to their local staff. Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary perception as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the Pacific coast (and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them had “something in him.” Two of the sketches in particular he thought promising. One of them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred to as “Professor Personal Pronoun.” It closed by stating that it was “impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out of capital I's.” But it was the other sketch which settled Goodman's decision. It was also a burlesque report, this time of a Fourth-of-July oration. It opened, “I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam.” This was followed by a string of stock patriotic phrases absurdly arranged. But it was the opening itself that won Goodman's heart. “That is the sort of thing we want,” he said. “Write to him, Barstow, and ask him if he wants to come up here.” Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum. This was at the end of July, 1862. In 'Roughing It' we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the “call.” To Orion he wrote Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail, if possible. There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure. On August 7th he wrote again to Orion. He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they thought he might be needed. He was playing for time to consider. Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of 60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely possible that mail facilities may prove infernally “slow.” But do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you. So he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone. But eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision. In a letter to Pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts of his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in San Francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects--nor to the mines, for that matter. Phillips, Howland, and Higbie would seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with Dan Twing and a dog, a combination amusingly described. It is a pleasant enough letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in: I did think for a while of going home this fall--but when I found that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. This country suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no. He was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase the old form of Christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean, in another sphere, “a brighter resurrection” than even his rainbow imagination could paint? XXXVII. THE NEW ESTATE It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day when a worn, travel-stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the Virginia City Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist. Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia. He had walked that distance, carrying his heavy load. Editor Goodman was absent at the moment, but the other proprietor, Denis E. McCarthy, signified that the caller might state his errand. The wanderer regarded him with a far-away look and said, absently and with deliberation: “My starboard leg seems to be unshipped. I'd like about one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces.” Then he added: “I want to see Mr. Barstow, or Mr. Goodman. My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper.” It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom: William Wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the Coast as Dan de Quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival. He was going on a trip to the States soon; it was mainly on this account that the new man had been engaged. The “Josh” letters were very good, in Dan's opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him around to his boarding-place. It was the beginning of an association that continued during Samuel Clemens's stay in Virginia City and of a friendship that lasted many years. The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers ever published. Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man with rare appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper policy. Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech, provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge. His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows: “Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and say it is so and so. In the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public confidence.” Goodman was not new to the West. He had come to California as a boy and had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns. Early in '61, when the Comstock Lode--[Named for its discoverer, Henry T. P. Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his stupendous find.]--was new and Virginia in the first flush of its monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars and bought the paper. It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while, but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast. It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless, picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere. Goodman himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett (afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative of Enterprise men.--[The Comstock of that day became famous for its journalism. Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W. J. Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R. Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen, and Sam Davis--a great array indeed for a new Territory.]--Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group. He added the fresh, rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more lavish, more overwhelming scale. There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were there. Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world. The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold. Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better. The town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them. Everybody had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time. The Enterprise, “Comstock to the backbone,” did what it could to help things along. It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself. Goodman let the boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any subject. Often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.--[The indifference to 'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully unconscious. Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: “Arthur McEwen”]--It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better for him than that. He was peculiarly fitted for the position. Unspoiled humanity appealed to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape forms. Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he; any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune. His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering. Remembering marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news. He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error. He was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics--measurements and figures--were concerned. These he gave “a lick and a promise,” according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of their associations. De Quille says further: Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the items of news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent to work up. However, we wrote at the same table and frequently helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters of importance. Never was there an angry word between us in all the time we worked together. De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time took on the semblance “of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a thousand rays.” The author of 'Roughing It' has given us a better picture of the Virginia City of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write. He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how “feet” in any one of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell when any of the claims made a stir on the market. He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days. The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece--is a complete epitome of the social frontier. It would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive presentation of Comstock conditions. We may only hope to add a few details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from the drift of years. XXXVIII. ONE OF THE “STAFF” The new reporter found acquaintance easy. The office force was like one family among which there was no line of caste. Proprietors, editors, and printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none at all outside of the office.--[“The paper went to press at two in the morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-songs of the day until dawn.”--S. L. C., in 1908.]--Samuel Clemens immediately became “Sam,” or “Josh,” to his associates, just as De Quille was “Dan” and Goodman “Joe.” He found that he disliked the name of Josh, and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped. The office, and Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his originality and measured speech. Enterprise readers began to identify his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it was only the usual local item or mining notice. True to its name and reputation, the paper had added a new attraction. It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast. With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is not a single file of the Enterprise in existence. Only a few stray copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of these literary pranks and of their results. They were usually intended as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive web. Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set down something concerning the first of these, “The Petrified Man,” and of another, “My Bloody Massacre,” but in neither case has he told it all. “The Petrified Man” hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and justice of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the matter of supplying news. The story, told with great circumstance and apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, “with that delicacy so characteristic of him,” Sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting him from his position. The account further stated that the hands of the deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the description of the arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first, or even second, reading one might not see that the position indicated was the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose and in many ages has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word “sold.” But the description was a shade too ingenious. The author expected that the exchanges would see the jolt and perhaps assist in the fun he would have with Sewall. He did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves. As a matter of fact, no one saw the “sell” and most of the papers printed his story of the petrified man as a genuine discovery. This was a surprise, and a momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had builded better than he knew. He gathered up a bundle of the exchanges and sent them to Sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in various parts of the United States. The papers had taken it seriously; perhaps the scientists would. Some of them did, and Sewall's days became unhappy because of letters received asking further information. As literature, the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure official it was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the Coast exchanges and press generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as yet unnamed, acquired prestige. Inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in Virginia that did these things. The papers became wary and read Enterprise items twice before clipping them. Clemens turned his attention to other matters to lull suspicion. The great “Dutch Nick Massacre” did not follow until a year later. Reference has already been made to the Comstock's delight in humor of a positive sort. The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia. One might protest and swear, but he must take it. An example of Comstock humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of Leslie Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about town. They were coming down C Street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a fruit-stand at the International Hotel corner. Watermelons were rare and costly in that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars apiece. Blackburn said: “Pat, let's get one of those watermelons. You engage that fellow in conversation while I stand at the corner, where I can step around out of sight easily. When you have got him interested, point to something on the back shelf and pitch me a melon.” This appealed to Holland, and he carried out his part of the plan perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon Blackburn simply put his hands in his pockets, and stepped around the corner, leaving the melon a fearful disaster on the pavement. It was almost impossible for Pat to explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along C Street. Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock. It appealed to his vigorous, elemental nature. He seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim. Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E. Gillis (Steve, of course--one of the “fighting Gillises”), a small, fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-points. “Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds,” Mark Twain once wrote of him, “but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might.” Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first. The two became closely associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he “resist the temptation of making Sam swear,” claiming that his profanity was grander than any music. A word hereabout Mark Twain's profanity. Born with a matchless gift of phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in a rare perfection. To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves. Every characterization seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next. And somehow his profanity was seldom an offense. It was not mere idle swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious. His selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might be from the Bible or the gutter. Some one has defined dirt as misplaced matter. It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered. It is absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering Mark Twain's profanity. For it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not often offend. It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine. When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle; forgiving, and even tender. Once following an outburst he said, placidly: “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and clear intent. Led by Steve Gillis, the Enterprise force used to devise tricks to set him going. One of these was to hide articles from his desk. He detested the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a candle. To hide “Sam's candle” was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous return. He would look for it a little; then he would begin a slow, circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the pilot-house--and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great orchestration of wrong. By and by the office boy, supposedly innocent, would find another for him, and all would be forgotten. He made a placard, labeled with fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one against touching his candle; but one night both the placard and the candle were gone. Now, among his Virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a Mr. Rising, “the fragile, gentle new fledgling” of the Buck Fanshaw episode. Clemens greatly admired Mr. Rising's evident sincerity, and the young minister had quickly recognized the new reporter's superiority of mind. Now and then he came to the office to call on him. Unfortunately, he happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the latest theft of his property, Samuel Clemens was engaged in his rotary denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance. Mr. Rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and at last his friend became dimly aware of him. He did not halt in his scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech: “I know, Mr. Rising, I know it's wicked to talk like this; I know it is wrong. I know I shall certainly go to hell for it. But if you had a candle, Mr. Rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night, I know that you would say, just as I say, Mr. Rising, G-d d--n their impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years.” The little clergyman caught his breath. “Maybe I should, Mr. Clemens,” he replied, “but I should try to say, 'Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.'” “Oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that alters the case, as I am one of that class myself. Come in and we'll try to forgive them and forget about it.” Mark Twain had a good many experiences with young ministers. He was always fond of them, and they often sought him out. Once, long afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung a number of times without getting any response. Presently, he thought he heard somebody approaching in the hall outside. He flung open the door, and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily. Clemens grabbed him by the collar. “Look here,” he said, “I've been waiting and ringing here for half an hour. Now I want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick. Do you hear?” The slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: “I would, Mr. Clemens, I would indeed, sir, if I could. But I'm a minister of the Gospel, and I'm not prepared for such work.” XXXIX. PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY There was a side to Samuel Clemens that in those days few of his associates saw. This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative side. Joseph Goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted in it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its exhibition. It is rather curious that with all his literary penetration Goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for Clemens. He afterward said: “If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or Sam, would become distinguished, I should have said De Quille. Dan was talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant. Of course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam's gifts, but he was eccentric and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should have prophesied fame for him then.” Goodman, like MacFarlane in Cincinnati, half a dozen years before, though by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein. Often the two, dining together in a French restaurant, discussed life, subtler philosophies, recalled various phases of human history, remembered and recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment. “The Burial of Moses,” with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed strongly to Clemens, and he recited it with great power. The first stanza in particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as well. With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of the stately lines. By Nebo's lonely mountain, On this side Jordan's wave, In a vale in the land of Moab, There lies a lonely grave. And no man knows that sepulchre, And no man saw it e'er, For the angels of God, upturned the sod, And laid the dead man there. Another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning: And had he not high honor --The hill-side for a pall, To lie in state while angels wait With stars for tapers tall, And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes, Over his bier to wave, And God's own hand in that lonely land, To lay him in the grave? Without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem, for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it copied into his notebook in full. It would seem to have become to him a sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time “he made use of the purest English of any modern writer.” These are Goodman's words, though William Dean Howells has said them, also, in substance, and Brander Matthews, and many others who know about such things. Goodman adds, “The simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a parallel, except in the common version of the Bible,” which is also true. One is reminded of what Macaulay said of Milton: “There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distance near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead.” One drifts ahead, remembering these things. The triumph of words, the mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are writing now. He was twenty-seven. At that age Rudyard Kipling had reached his meridian. Samuel Clemens was still in the classroom. Everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination; nothing escaped unvalued. The poetic phase of things particularly impressed him. Once at a dinner with Goodman, when the lamp-light from the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically “Look, Joe,” he said, “the angry tint of wine.” It was at one of these private sessions, late in '62, that Clemens proposed to report the coming meeting of the Carson legislature. He knew nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary proceedings. Formerly it had been done by a man named Gillespie, but Gillespie was now clerk of the house. Goodman hesitated; then, remembering that whether Clemens got the reports right or not, he would at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work. XL. “MARK TWAIN” The early Nevada legislature was an interesting assembly. All State legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier. No attempt can be made to describe it. It was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor, and plenty of brains. How fortunate Mask Twain was in his schooling, to be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind! Sometimes, in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training. Well for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight. For the study of human nature the Nevada assembly was a veritable lecture-room. In it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his self-assuredness grew like Jack's bean-stalk, which in time was ready to break through into a land above the sky. He made some curious blunders in his reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance and in his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early letters became their chief charm. Gillespie coached him on parliamentary matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as artistically good. Clemens in return christened Gillespie “Young, Jefferson's Manual,” a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for many years. Another “entitlement” growing out of those early reports, and possibly less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to Clement T. Rice, of the Virginia City Union. Rice knew the legislative work perfectly and concluded to poke fun at the Enterprise letters. But this was a mistake. Clemens in his next letter declared that Rice's reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and even crime. He avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the author of them “The Unreliable,” and in future letters never referred to him by any other term. Carson and the Comstock and the papers of the Coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and Rice was “The Unreliable” for life. Rice and Clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of friends, and there was never any real animosity between them. Clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters, with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general friendship. Jack Simmons, speaker of the house, and Billy Clagget, the Humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside of the political machine. Clagget had remained in Unionville after the mining venture, warned his Keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into politics and law. In due time he would become a leading light and go to Congress. He was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and tousled, unkempt hair. Simmons, Clagget, and Clemens were easily the three conspicuous figures of the session. It must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come back to Carson City a person of consequence, where less than a year before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow, a figure to smile at, but unimportant. There is a photograph extant of Clemens and his friends Clagget and Simmons in a group, and we gather from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a starched shirt, and polished boots. Once more he had become the glass of fashion that he had been on the river. He made his residence with Orion, whose wife and little daughter Jennie had by this time come out from the States. “Sister Mollie,” as wife of the acting governor, was presently social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its chief ornament. His merriment and songs and good nature made him a favorite guest. His lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford to smile at the hard Esmeralda days. He was not altogether satisfied. His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned. They were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the 'nom de plume' was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing. Just then--this was early in 1863--news came to him that the old pilot he had wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead. At once the pen-name of Captain Sellers recurred to him. That was it; that was the sort of name he wanted. It was not trivial; it had all the qualities--Sellers would never need it again. Clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and new association in this far-away land. He went up to Virginia City. “Joe,” he said, to Goodman, “I want to sign my articles. I want to be identified to a wider audience.” “All right, Sam. What name do you want to use 'Josh'?” “No, I want to sign them 'Mark Twain.' It is an old river term, a leads-man's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet. It has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe water.” He did not then mention that Captain Isaiah Sellers had used and dropped the name. He was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense was still too recent for confession. Goodman considered a moment: “Very well, Sam,” he said, “that sounds like a good name.” It was indeed a good name. In all the nomenclature of the world no more forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the man for whom they stood. The name Mark Twain is as infinite, as fundamental as that of John Smith, without the latter's wasting distribution of strength. If all the prestige in the name of John Smith were combined in a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it the carrying power of Mark Twain. Let this be as it may, it has proven the greatest 'nom de plume' ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with the man, his work, and his career. It is not surprising that Goodman did not recognize this at the moment. We should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we had never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction. We should have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result. It was first signed to a Carson letter bearing date of February 2, 1863, and from that time was attached to all Samuel Clemens's work. The work was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired identification and special interest. Members of the legislature and friends in Virginia and Carson immediately began to address him as “Mark.” The papers of the Coast took it up, and within a period to be measured by weeks he was no longer “Sam” or “Clemens” or “that bright chap on the Enterprise,” but “Mark”--“Mark Twain.” No 'nom de plume' was ever so quickly and generally accepted as that. De Quille, returning from the East after an absence of several months, found his room and deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame. It is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that period there is no mention of his new title and its success. In fact, the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and prospective values. However, many of the letters are undoubtedly missing. Such as have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of his abounding joy of life and good nature. Also they bear evidence of the renewal of his old river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars in each letter, with intervals of a week or so between. XLI. THE CREAM OF COMSTOCK HUMOR With the adjournment of the legislature, Samuel Clemens returned to Virginia City distinctly a notability--Mark Twain. He was regarded as leading man on the Enterprise--which in itself was high distinction on the Comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect. When visitors of note came along--well-known actors, lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as one of the Comstock features which it was proper to see, along with the Ophir and Gould and Curry mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill. He was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several collections had been taken up in the Enterprise office to present various members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to him. He mentioned this apparent slight to Steve Gillis: “Nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe,” he said, plaintively. “Don't I deserve one yet?” Unhappy day! To that remorseless creature, Steve Gillis, this was a golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul. This is the story, precisely as Gillis himself told it to the writer of these annals more than a generation later: “There was a German kept a cigar store in Virginia City and always had a fine assortment of meerschaum pipes. These pipes usually cost anywhere from forty to seventy-five dollars. “One day Denis McCarthy and I were walking by the old German's place, and stopped to look in at the display in the window. Among other things there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long stem, marked a dollar and a half. “I decided that that would be just the pipe for Sam. We went in and bought it, also a very much longer stem. I think the stem alone cost three dollars. Then we had a little German-silver plate engraved with Mark's name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the presentation. Charlie Pope--[afterward proprietor of Pope's Theater, St. Louis]--was playing at the Opera House at the time, and we engaged him to make the presentation speech. “Then we let in Dan de Quille, Mark's closest friend, to act the part of Judas--to tell Mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to Pope's. It was awful low-down in Dan. We arranged to have the affair come off in the saloon beneath the Opera House after the play was over. “Everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful occasion, and some of us had a hang-dog look; for Sam took it in such sincerity, and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches I ever heard him make. Pope's presentation, too, was beautifully done. He told Sam how his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so great an expense, was but a small token of their affection. But Sam's reply, which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to the eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with applause. I never felt so sorry for anybody. “Still, we were bent on seeing the thing through. After Sam's speech was finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling Moselle. Then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to drown our sorrow. “Well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe. It wouldn't color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was. Sam would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn't seem to taste right, and that it wouldn't color. Finally Denis said to him one day: “'Oh, Sam, don't you know that's just a damned old egg-shell, and that the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for a joke?' “Then Sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on Dan de Quille. He had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the Local Room, where Dan was. He went in and closed the door behind him, and locked it, and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign. Dan was there alone, writing at his table. “Sam said, 'Dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech, that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?' “There was no way for Dan to escape, and he confessed. Sam walked up and down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay Dan. Finally he said: “'Oh, Dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little money I had, and how hard I would work to prepare a speech that would show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the Judas, to betray me with a kiss! Dan, I never want to look on your face again. You knew I would spend every dollar I had on those pirates when I couldn't afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.' “Of course Dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one, this time. But Sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few days later, I went in with the pipe and said, 'Sam, here's the pipe the boys meant to give you all the time,' and tried to apologize, he looked around a little coldly, and said: “'Is that another of those bogus old pipes?' “He accepted it, though, and general peace was restored. One day, soon after, he said to me: “'Steve, do you know that I think that that bogus pipe smokes about as well as the good one?'” Many years later (this was in his home at Hartford, and Joe Goodman was present) Mark Twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe. “Joe,” he said, “that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me; but, for the feeling I had during the moment when they presented me with that pipe and when Charlie Pope was making his speech and I was making my reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more precious to me than any pipe in the world!” Eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the Comstock. Every mine was working full blast. Every mill was roaring and crunching, turning out streams of silver and gold. A little while ago an old resident wrote: When I close my eyes I hear again the respirations of hoisting- engines and the roar of stamps; I can see the “camels” after midnight packing in salt; I can see again the jam of teams on C Street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert. Those were lively times. In the midst of one of his letters home Mark Twain interrupts himself to say: “I have just heard five pistol-shots down the street--as such things are in my line, I will go and see about it,” and in a postscript added a few hours later: 5 A.M. The pistol-shot did its work well. One man, a Jackson County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart--both died within three minutes. The murderer's name is John Campbell. “Mark and I had our hands full,” says De Quille, “and no grass grew under our feet.” In answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they printed a sort of editorial manifesto: Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay-wagons, and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper. It is easy to recognize Mark Twain's hand in that compendium of labor, which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction. It may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not Mark Twain's habit to strive for humor. He saw facts at curious angles and phrased them accordingly. In Virginia City he mingled with the turmoil of the Comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech. The Comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements. On the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and missed its purpose. We have already recalled the instance of the “Petrified Man” hoax, which was taken seriously; but the “Empire City Massacre” burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered serious for a time. It is remembered to-day in Virginia City as the chief incident of Mark Twain's Comstock career. This literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the San Francisco Bulletin for its persistent attacks on Washoe interests; the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant attention to a certain Carson saloon, the Magnolia, which was supposed to dispense whisky of the “forty rod” brand--that is, a liquor warranted to kill at that range. It was the Bulletin that was to be made especially ridiculous. This paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the “dividend-cooking” system of certain of the Comstock mines, at the same time calling invidious attention to safer investments in California stocks. Samuel Clemens, with “half a trunkful” of Comstock shares, had cultivated a distaste for California things in general: In a letter of that time he says: “How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!” With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California less than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that Nazareth. To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, “cooked” a dividend of its own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash. This afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal. With Goodman's consent he planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe. He believed the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the result would show he was not mistaken. There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City, known as “Dutch Nick's,” and also as Empire City, the two being identical. There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush. In the one cabin there lived a bachelor with no household. Everybody in Virginia and Carson, of course, knew these things. Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one Phillip Hopkins, living “just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and 'Dutch Nick's',” had suddenly gone insane and murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years. The wife had been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might recover. The murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into Carson City, dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon, the red-haired scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand. The article further stated that the cause of Mr. Hopkins's insanity was pecuniary loss, he having withdrawn his savings from safe Comstock investments and, through the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, invested them in the Spring Valley Water Company. This absurd tale with startling head-lines appeared in the Enterprise, in its issue of October 28, 1863. It was not expected that any one in Virginia City or Carson City would for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was it that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance. Even when these things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess themselves sold. As for the Bulletin and other California papers, they were taken-in completely, and were furious. Many of them wrote and demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they would never copy another line from the Enterprise, or exchange with it, or have further relations with a paper that had Mark Twain on its staff. Citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions. The joker was in despair. “Oh, Joe,” he said, “I have ruined your business, and the only reparation I can make is to resign. You can never recover from this blow while I am on the paper.” “Nonsense,” replied Goodman. “We can furnish the people with news, but we can't supply them with sense. Only time can do that. The flurry will pass. You just go ahead. We'll win out in the long run.” But the offender was in torture; he could not sleep. “Dan, Dan,” he said, “I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.” “Mark,” said Dan. “It will all blow over. This item of yours will be remembered and talked about when the rest of your Enterprise work is forgotten.” Both Goodman and De Quille were right. In a month papers and people had forgotten their humiliation and laughed. “The Dutch Nick Massacre” gave to its perpetrator and to the Enterprise an added vogue. --[For full text of the “Dutch Nick” hoax see Appendix C, at the end of last volume: also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made by Alf. Doten and Mark Twain.]-- XLII REPORTORIAL DAYS. Reference has already been made to the fashion among Virginia City papers of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule of one another. This custom was especially in vogue during the period when Dan de Quille and Mark Twain and The Unreliable were the shining journalistic lights of the Comstock. Scarcely a week went by that some apparently venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not appear either in the Union or the Enterprise, with one of those jokers as its author and another as its target. In one of his “home” letters of that year Mark Twain says: I have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and giving The Unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct himself in church. The advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with The Unreliable in San Francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother. We fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without rocking every night. When I go down Montgomery Street shaking hands with Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is just like being on Main Street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces. I do hate to go back to Washoe. We take trips across the bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro and Alameda, and we go out to the Willows and Hayes Park and Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific coast. Rice says: “Oh no--we are not having any fun, Mark --oh no--I reckon it's somebody else--it's probably the gentleman in the wagon” (popular slang phrase), and when I invite Rice to the Lick House to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret, and then we do put on the most disgusting airs. The Unreliable says our caliber is too light--we can't stand it to be noticed. Three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully “to the snows and the deserts of Washoe,” but that he has “lived like a lord to make up for two years of privation.” Twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a bribe to Jane Clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal. But apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he complains that his mother is “slinging insinuations” at him again, such as “where did you get that money” and “the company I kept in San Francisco.” He explains: Why, I sold Wild Cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit was always good at the bank for $2,000 or $3,000, and I never gamble in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously temperate in this place. As for company, I went in the very best company to be found in San Francisco. I always move in the best society in Virginia and have a reputation to preserve. He closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and that she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid. Then he cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life: “Put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to live.” De Quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade's absence to payoff some old scores. At the end of the editorial column of the Enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent one and his “protege,” The Unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of the day. It is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, Dan himself]--. The diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no doubt highly regarded by the Enterprise readers. What revenge Mark Twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to The Unreliable. It was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local work in the hands of that properly named person a little later. Clemens was laid up with a cold, and Rice assured him on his sacred honor that he would attend faithfully to the Enterprise locals, along with his own Union items. He did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long. What was Mark Twain's amazement on looking over the Enterprise next morning to find under the heading “Apologetic” a statement over his own nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to the various injured ones. To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters, Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position, we say to these gentlemen we acknowledge our faults, and, in all weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for anything but the best of feeling toward us. To “Young Wilson” and The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have given them. Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality. We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were. We will now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days. This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had the effect of curing his cold. He was back in the office forthwith, and in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer. We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great extent at the result. We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras. We have done. These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism. Once in a boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to an unusual size and shape. He went out of town for a few days, during which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune, describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain's ever supposing himself to be a boxer. De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written. Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and bruised considerably. This was Mark's opportunity. He gave an account of Dan's disaster; then, commenting, he said: The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a newspaper man. The author of 'Roughing It' tells of a literary periodical called the Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F. This was the silver-tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer, vastly popular on the Coast. Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he was thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of the venture. Clemens said: “You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h--l!” Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished with the third issue. It was of no consequence except that it contained what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the composite novel. Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain's first verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--“The Aged Pilot Man”--which were thereby saved for 'Roughing It.' Visiting Virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could have happened there. The Comstock has become little more than a memory; Virginia and Gold Hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute scarcely an echo of the past. The International Hotel, that once so splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now. One may wander at will through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day. Those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up and down the stair and billowed up C Street, an ebullient tide of metals and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals known in national affairs. William M. Stewart who would one day become a United States Senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and John Mackay and James G. Fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor enough then--Fair with a pick on his shoulder and Mackay, too, at first, though he presently became a mine superintendent. Once in those days Mark Twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with Mackay. “No,” Mackay said, “I can't trade. My business is not worth as much as yours. I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now.” Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose statues to their memory. Such things came out of the Comstock; such things spring out of every turbulent frontier. XLIII. ARTEMUS WARD Madame Caprell's warning concerning Mark Twain's health at twenty-eight would seem to have been justified. High-strung and neurotic, the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him. As in later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel. He contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form than any of his previous work. “Curing a Cold” is a more or less exaggerated account of his ills. [Included in Sketches New and Old. “Information for the Million,” and “Advice to Good Little Girls,” included in the “Jumping Frog” Collection, 1867, but omitted from the Sketches, are also believed to belong to this period.] A portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs, still exists. You have given my vanity a deadly thrust. Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me “if I work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place on a big San Francisco daily some day.” There's a comment on human vanity for you! Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it. But I don't want it. No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my place on the Enterprise is worth. If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account. I lead an easy life, though, and I don't care a cent whether school keeps or not. Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other. And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory. You think that picture looks old? Well, I can't help it--in reality I'm not as old as I was when I was eighteen. Which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was concerned. At eighteen, in New York and Philadelphia, his letters had been grave, reflective, advisory. Now they were mostly banter and froth, lightly indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps only pretendedly so, for the picture did look old. From the shock and circumstance of his brother's death he--had never recovered. He was barely twenty-eight. From the picture he might have been a man of forty. It was that year that Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) came to Virginia City. There was a fine opera-house in Virginia, and any attraction that billed San Francisco did not fail to play to the Comstock. Ward intended staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the Comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks. He made the Enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in the company he found there. He and Mark Twain became boon companions. Each recognized in the other a kindred spirit. With Goodman, De Quille, and McCarthy, also E. E. Hingston--Ward's agent, a companionable fellow--they usually dined at Chaumond's, Virginia's high-toned French restaurant. Those were three memorable weeks in Mark Twain's life. Artemus Ward was in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found brother-humorist and prophesied great things of him. Clemens, on his side, measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start. If he had lacked ambition before Ward's visit, the latter's unqualified approval inspired him with that priceless article of equipment. He put his soul into entertaining the visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their associates that he was at least Ward's equal in mental stature and originality. Goodman and the others began to realize that for Mark Twain the rewards of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and ability to hold out. On Christmas Eve Artemus lectured in Silver City and afterward came to the Enterprise office to give the boys a farewell dinner. The Enterprise always published a Christmas carol, and Goodman sat at his desk writing it. He was just finishing as Ward came in: “Slave, slave,” said Artemus. “Come out and let me banish care from you.” They got the boys and all went over to Chaumond's, where Ward commanded Goodman to order the dinner. When the cocktails came on, Artemus lifted his glass and said: “I give you Upper Canada.” The company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then Goodman said: “Of course, Artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us Upper Canada?” “Because I don't want it myself,” said Ward, gravely. Then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the world to-day. Mark Twain had awakened to a fuller power; Artemus Ward was in his prime. They were giants of a race that became extinct when Mark Twain died. The youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life, the tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a dazzling, scintillating whirl. All gone--as evanescent, as forgotten, as the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and entertainment only a trifling morsel remains. Ward now and then asked Goodman why he did not join in the banter. Goodman said: “I'm preparing a joke, Artemus, but I'm keeping it for the present.” It was near daybreak when Ward at last called for the bill. It was two hundred and thirty-seven dollars. “What”' exclaimed Artemus. “That's my joke.” said Goodman. “But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much,” returned Ward. He paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air. It was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly. Artemus threw his face up to the sky and said: “I feel glorious. I feel like walking on the roofs.” Virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the houses almost touched the ground behind them. “There is your chance, Artemus,” Goodman said, pointing to a row of these houses all about of a height. Artemus grabbed Mark Twain, and they stepped out upon the long string of roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm. Presently the others noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim in their direction. Goodman called to him: “Wait a minute. What are you going to do?” “I'm going to shoot those burglars,” he said. “Don't for your life. Those are not burglars. That's Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.” The roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a corner across from the International Hotel. A saloon was there with a barrel lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign. Artemus climbed astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his hand. Virginia City looks out over the Eastward Desert. Morning was just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the sunrise beams across the plain of Memnon. The city was not yet awake. The only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners, with Artemus Ward, as King Gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise. That was the beginning of a week of glory. The farewell dinner became a series. At the close of one convivial session Artemus went to a concert-hall, the “Melodeon,” blacked his face, and delivered a speech. He got away from Virginia about the close of the year. A day or two later he wrote from Austin, Nevada, to his new-found comrade as “My dearest Love,” recalling the happiness of his stay: “I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or rather cannot be, as it were.” Then reflectively he adds: “Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor.” Rare Artemus Ward and rare Mark Twain! If there lies somewhere a place of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those closing days of '63. XLIV. GOVERNOR OF THE “THIRD HOUSE” With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Clemens began to think of extending his audience eastward. The New York Sunday Mercury published literary matter. Ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write a special letter to the editors, introducing Mark Twain and his work. Clemens prepared a sketch of the Comstock variety, scarcely refined in character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the present-day reader. Its general subject was children; it contained some absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend Zeb Leavenworth, and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured soul as for profit or reputation. “I wrote it especially for Beck Jolly's use,” the author declares, in a letter to his mother, “so he could pester Zeb with it.” We cannot know to-day whether Zeb was pestered or not. A faded clipping is all that remains of the incident. As literature the article, properly enough, is lost to the world at large. It is only worth remembering as his metropolitan beginning. Yet he must have thought rather highly of it (his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter above quoted he adds: I cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by a local daily paper. And if Fitzhugh Ludlow (author of the 'Hasheesh Eater') comes your way, treat him well. He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain (the same being eminently just and truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority I ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do. But I preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly and brilliantly, so I concluded to remain here. He was in Carson City when this was written, preparing for the opening of the next legislature. He was beyond question now the most conspicuous figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his influence had become very large. It was said that he could control more votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, Simmons and Clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered. The Enterprise was a powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and Mark Twain had become its chief tribune. That he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible, without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session. He reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it. He got a bill passed, largely increasing Orion's official fees, but this was a crying need and was so recognized. He made no secret promises, none at all that he did not intend to fulfill. “Sam's word was as fixed as fate,” Orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as fearless. The two Houses of the last territorial legislature of Nevada assembled January 12, 1864.--[Nevada became a State October 31, 1864.]--A few days later a “Third House” was organized--an institution quite in keeping with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a burlesque organization, and Mark Twain was selected as its “Governor.” The new House prepared to make a public occasion of this first session, and its Governor was required to furnish a message. Then it was decided to make it a church benefit. The letters exchanged concerning this proposition still exist; they explain themselves: CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864. GOV. MARK TWAIN, Understanding from certain members of the Third House of the territorial Legislature that that body will have effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready for the reception of your Third Annual Message,--[ There had been no former message. This was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire to ask your permission, and that of the Third House, to turn the affair to the benefit of the Church by charging toll-roads, franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of listening to your communication. S. PIXLEY, G. A. SEARS, Trustees. CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864. GENTLEMEN,--Certainly. If the public can find anything in a grave state paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing they should pay that amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty Christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself if it might derive benefit thereby. You can charge what you please; I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable amount of instruction. I am responsible to the Third House only, and I hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the Church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not. Respectfully, MARK TWAIN. Mark Twain's reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and thought. It might have been written by him at almost any subsequent period. Perhaps his association with Artemus Ward had awakened a new perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of understatement. He forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more. His address as Governor of the Third House has not been preserved, but those who attended always afterward referred to it as the “greatest effort of his life.” Perhaps for that audience and that time this verdict was justified. It was his first great public opportunity. On the stage about him sat the membership of the Third House; the building itself was packed, the aisles full. He knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire, and he did. He was unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens. From the beginning to the end of his address the audience was in a storm of laughter and applause. With the exception of the dinner speech made to the printers in Keokuk, it was his first public utterance--the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs. Only one thing marred his success. Little Carrie Pixley, daughter of one of the “trustees,” had promised to be present and sit in a box next the stage. It was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to send a carriage for her. Often during his address he glanced toward the box; but it remained empty. When the affair was ended, he drove home with her father to inquire the reason. They found the little girl, in all her finery, weeping on the bed. Then he remembered he had forgotten to send the carriage; and that was like him, too. For his Third House address Judge A. W. (Sandy) Baldwin and Theodore Winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to “Governor Mark Twain.” He was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was regarded as complete without him. His doings were related daily and his sayings repeated on the streets. Most of these things have passed away now, but a few are still recalled with smiles. Once, when conundrums were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one. “Well,” he sand, “why am I like the Pacific Ocean?” Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him. Finally all gave it up. “Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?” “I don't know,” he drawled. “I was just asking for information.” At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal length, the chorus of which was, “I'm going home, I'm going home, I'm going home tomorrow,” Mark Twain put his head in the window and said, pleadingly: “For God's sake go to-night.” But he was also fond of quieter society. Sometimes, after the turmoil of a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp's school and listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry--“old Curry, old Abe Curry”--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures, and keep her laughing until the tears ran. He was a great pedestrian in those days. Sometimes he walked from Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest and refreshment. “Mrs. Curry,” he said once, “I have seen tireder men than I am, and lazier men, but they were dead men.” He liked the home feeling there--the peace and motherly interest. Deep down, he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred. Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken, who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House. All men--kings, poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell. Dan de Quille and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise. The latter carried her his literary work to criticize. He confesses this in one of his home letters, perhaps with a sort of pride. I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's wife. She is a literary cuss herself. She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus: “My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and beauty always? Because you fool away devilish little of it on your manuscript.” But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later, in San Francisco, his “madness” would have seemed to have been allayed. XLV. A COMSTOCK DUEL. The success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the New York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's ambition for a wider field of labor. Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered assistance, though in an unexpected form. Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge. As in that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble. It was just at the time of the “Flour Sack Sanitary Fund,” the story of which is related at length in 'Roughing It'. In the general hilarity of this occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle. Very soon the original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between Mark Twain and the Chronicle editor, then a Mr. Laird. A point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two papers. Men were killed every week for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other. Joe Goodman himself, not so long before, had fought a duel with a Union editor--Tom Fitch--and shot him in the leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life. In Joe's absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained. Mark Twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of course, Steve Gillis. The account is from Mr. Gillis's own hand: When Joe went away, he left Sam in editorial charge of the paper. That was a dangerous thing to do. Nobody could ever tell what Sam was going to write. Something he said stirred up Mr. Laird, of the Chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind. He said some things that we told Mark could only be wiped out with blood. Those were the days when almost every man in Virginia City had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels. I had been in several, but then mine didn't count. Most of them were of the impromptu kind. Mark hadn't had any yet, and we thought it about time that his baptism took place. He was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally prevailed upon him to send Laird a challenge, and when Laird did not send a reply at once we insisted on Mark sending him another challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do. Laird concluded to fight, at last. I helped Mark get up some of the letters, and a man who would not fight after such letters did not belong in Virginia City--in those days. Laird's acceptance of Mark's challenge came along about midnight, I think, after the papers had gone to press. The meeting was to take place next morning at sunrise. Of course I was selected as Mark's second, and at daybreak I had him up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting Laird. I didn't have to wake him. He had not been asleep. We had been talking since midnight over the duel that was coming. I had been telling him of the different duels in which I had taken part, either as principal or second, and how many men I had helped to kill and bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not much to leave. It always looked well, I told him, and seemed to be a proper thing to do before going into a duel. So Mark made a will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting- place, and I set up a board for him to shoot at. He would step out, raise that big pistol, and when I would count three he would shut his eyes and pull the trigger. Of course he didn't hit anything; he did not come anywhere near hitting anything. Just then we heard somebody shooting over in the next ravine. Sam said: “What's that, Steve?” “Why,” I said, “that's Laud. His seconds are practising him over there.” It didn't make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go off every few seconds over there. Just then I saw a little mud-hen light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away. “Mark,” I said, “let me have that pistol. I'll show you how to shoot.” He handed it to me, and I let go at the bird and shot its head off, clean. About that time Laird and his second came over the ridge to meet us. I saw them coming and handed Mark back the pistol. We were looking at the bird when they came up. “Who did that?” asked Laird's second. “Sam,” I said. “How far off was it?” “Oh, about thirty yards.” “Can he do it again?” “Of course,” I said; “every time. He could do it twice that far.” Laud's second turned to his principal. “Laird,” he said, “you don't want to fight that man. It's just like suicide. You'd better settle this thing, now.” So there was a settlement. Laird took back all he had said; Mark said he really had nothing against Laird--the discussion had been purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. He said that both he and Laird were probably the victims of their friends. I remember one of the things Laird said when his second told him he had better not fight. “Fight! H--l, no! I am not going to be murdered by that d--d desperado.” Sam had sent another challenge to a man named Cutler, who had been somehow mixed up with the muss and had written Sam an insulting letter; but Cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got back we had received word from Jerry Driscoll, foreman of the Grand jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be the first examples to test the new law. We concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for San Francisco we were on the outside seat. Joe Goodman had returned by this time and agreed to accompany us as far as Henness Pass. We were all in good spirits and glad we were alive, so Joe did not stop when he got to Henness Pass, but kept on. Now and then he would say, “Well, I had better be going back pretty soon,” but he didn't go, and in the end he did not go back at all, but went with us clear to San Francisco, and we had a royal good time all the way. I never knew any series of duels to close so happily. So ended Mark Twain's career on the Comstock. He had come to it a weary pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive. XLVI. GETTING SETTLED IN SAN FRANCISCO This was near the end of May, 1864. The intention of both Gillis and Clemens was to return to the States; but once in San Francisco both presently accepted places, Clemens as reporter and Gillis as compositor, on the 'Morning Call'. From 'Roughing It' the reader gathers that Mark Twain now entered into a life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be derived from the “half a trunkful of mining stocks,” and that presently, when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper. But a good many liberties have been taken with the history of this period. Undoubtedly he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was disappointed, particularly in an investment in Hale and Norcross shares, held too long for the large profit which could have been made by selling at the proper time. The fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in “butterfly idleness,” at the Lick House before he was hard at work on the 'Call', living modestly with Steve Gillis in the quietest place they could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and cats and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the mornings hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted to rest. They went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable elegance; but their recreations were more likely to consist of private midnight orgies, after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations in whatever they could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of beer, and perhaps a game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort. A printer by the name of Ward--“Little Ward,”--[L. P. Ward; well known as an athlete in San Francisco. He lost his mind and fatally shot himself in 1903.]--they called him--often went with them for these refreshments. Ward and Gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes would stir up trouble for the very joy of combat. Clemens never cared for that sort of thing and discouraged it, but Ward and Gillis were for war. “They never assisted each other. If one had offered to assist the other against some overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have followed between that pair of little friends.”--[S. L. C., 1906.]--Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in shaping Mark Twain's career. Of course, the more strenuous nights were not frequent. Their home-going was usually tame enough and they were glad enough to get there. Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. Then, as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English or French history until sleep conquered. His room-mate did not approve of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion. Knowing his companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture which would induce him to put out the light. Once he tied a nail to a string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed. Pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and lift it gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor, maddening to a nervous man. Clemens would listen a moment and say: “What in the nation is that noise” Gillis's pretended sleep and the ticking would continue. Clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently. “Steve, what is that d--d noise?” he would say. Steve would pretend to rouse sleepily. “What's the matter, Sam? What noise? Oh, I guess that is one of those death-ticks; they don't like the light. Maybe it will stop in a minute.” It usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to continue. But no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick, tick, tick. With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across the floor and the light would disappear. Sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the cruel Steve slept like the criminal that he was. At last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught. His tortured room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put him to shame. It was curious, but they always loved each other, those two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last days Mark Twain never could speak of Steve Gillis without tenderness. They moved a great many times in San Francisco. Their most satisfactory residence was on a bluff on California Street. Their windows looked down on a lot of Chinese houses--“tin-can houses,” they were called--small wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans. Steve and Mark would look down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds. The Chinamen would swarm out and look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists, and pour out Chinese vituperation. By and by, when they had retired and everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle. This was their Sunday amusement. At a place on Minna Street they lived with a private family. At first Clemens was delighted. “Just look at it, Steve,” he said. “What a nice, quiet place. Not a thing to disturb us.” But next morning a dog began to howl. Gillis woke this time, to find his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement. “Came here, Steve,” he said. “Come here and kill him. I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead on him.” “Sam,” said Steve, “don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily kill him at that range with your profanity.” Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching, singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a Mexican hairless dog. We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month. A home letter of September 25, 1864, says: We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. We are the only lodgers-in a well-to-do private family.... But I need change and must move again. This was the Minna Street place--the place of the dog. In the same letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles at twelve dollars each. XLVII. BOHEMIAN DAYS Mark Twain's position on the 'Call' was uncongenial from the start. San Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was necessarily more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery. He once set down his own memories of it: At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights in the week. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we “wrote up” those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man. On the Enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to license. He could write what he wished, and was personally responsible to the readers. On the Call he was simply a part of a news-machine; restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater machine--politics. Once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an unoffending Chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest. He wrote an indignant article criticizing the city government and raking the police. In Virginia City this would have been a welcome delight; in San Francisco it did not appear. At another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat. Going to a near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him. It would be wasted effort to make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own fashion. He stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large crowd collected. When he thought it was large enough he went away. Next day the joke was all over the city. Only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker whose establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office. The management of this place one day refused information to a Call reporter, and the next morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his firm. It began, “Those body-snatchers” and continued through half a column of such scorching strictures as only Mark Twain could devise. The Call's policy of suppression evidently did not include criticisms of deputy coroners. Such liberty, however, was too rare for Mark Twain, and he lost interest. He confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy, and that George E. Barnes, one of the publishers of the Call, at last allowed him an assistant. He selected from the counting-room a big, hulking youth by the name of McGlooral, with the acquired prefix of “Smiggy.” Clemens had taken a fancy to Smiggy McGlooral--on account of his name and size perhaps--and Smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked like a slave gathering news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all of which was demoralizing to a man who had small appetite for his place anyway. It was only a question of time when Smiggy alone would be sufficient for the job. There were other and pleasanter things in San Francisco. The personal and literary associations were worth while. At his right hand in the Call office sat Frank Soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who believed himself a poet. Mark Twain deferred to Frank Soule in those days. He thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of praise from Soule gave him happiness. In a luxurious office up-stairs was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four, who was secretary of the Mint, and who presently became editor of a new literary weekly, the Californian, which Charles Henry Webb had founded. This young man's name was Francis Bret Harte, originally from Albany, later a miner and school-teacher on the Stanislaus, still later a compositor, finally a contributor, on the Golden Era. His fame scarcely reached beyond San Francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of writing folk that clustered about the Era office his rank was high. Mark Twain fraternized with Bret Harte and the Era group generally. He felt that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of Bohemia, that Ultima Thule of every young literary dream. San Francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and a literature of its own. Its coterie of writers had drifted from here and there, but they had merged themselves into a California body-poetic, quite as individual as that of Cambridge, even if less famous, less fortunate in emoluments than the Boston group. Joseph E. Lawrence, familiarly known as “Joe” Lawrence, was editor of the Golden Era,--[The Golden Era, California's first literary publication, was founded by Rollin M. Daggett and J. McDonough Foard in 1852.]--and his kindness and hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary acknowledgments were modest enough. He had a handsome office, and the literati, local and visiting, used to gather there. Names that would be well known later were included in that little band. Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time. The Era office would seem to have been a sort of Mount Olympus, or Parnassus, perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to the dignity of gods. Miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the place. The Era rooms were elegant--[he says]--the most grandly carpeted and most gorgeously furnished that I have ever seen. Even now in my memory they seem to have been simply palatial. I have seen the world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as I turn to look back. More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras, which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several years. They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as if it had been a great deal more. They felt that they were creating literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters mustered there. Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group. They were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he would be remembered later. They were a good deal together, and it was when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put on the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate. The Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a heavier financial backing. With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first of San Francisco periodicals. A number of the sketches collected by Webb later, in Mark Twain's first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog, Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865. They were smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of the day. Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches. They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they present, though some of them are still delightful enough. “The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized” is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad. The Answers to Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist, could hardly have been better done at any later period. The Jumping Frog itself was not originally of this harvest. It has a history of its own, as we shall see a little further along. The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration. Even the great San Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain any permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'Call'. He had lost interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as he was concerned. His conclusion of service with the Call was certain, and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long. The connection had become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee. They had a heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that Mark Twain was free. He used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been variously told. George Barnes himself has declared that Clemens resigned with great willingness. It is very likely that the paragraph at the end of Chapter LVIII in 'Roughing It' presents the situation with fair accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for himself as possible: “At last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.” As an extreme contrast with the supposititious “butterfly idleness” of his beginning in San Francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty. “I became an adept at slinking,” he says. “I slunk from back street to back street.... I slunk to my bed. I had pawned everything but the clothes I had on.” This is pure fiction. That he occasionally found himself short of funds is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he ever clung to a single “silver ten-cent piece,” as he tells us, and became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an artistic need. Almost immediately following his separation from the 'Call' he arranged with Goodman to write a daily letter for the Enterprise, reporting San Francisco matters after his own notion with a free hand. His payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he had an additional return from his literary sketches. The arrangement was an improvement both as to labor and income. Real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a liberal offer for the Tennessee land. But alas! it was from a wine-grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and Orion had a prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made. Orion further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be obliged to import horticultural labor from Europe, and that those people might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far eastern Tennessee mountains. Such was Orion's way. XLVIII. THE REFUGE OF THE HILLS Those who remember Mark Twain's Enterprise letters (they are no longer obtainable)--[Many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple Web search. D.W.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily philippics ever written. However this may be, it is certain that they made a stir. Goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased upon any subject. San Francisco was fairly weltering in corruption, official and private. He assailed whatever came first to hand with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained. Quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and penetration that as soon as copies of the Enterprise came from Virginia the City Hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble. Martin G. Burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the Enterprise, prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as soon as the stage brought them. Mark Twain really let himself go then. He wrote a letter that on the outside was marked, “Be sure and let Joe see this before it goes in.” He even doubted himself whether Goodman would dare to print it, after reading. It was a letter describing the city's corrupt morals under the existing police government. It began, “The air is full of lechery, and rumors of lechery,” and continued in a strain which made even the Enterprise printers aghast. “You can never afford to publish that,” the foreman said to, Goodman. “Let it all go in, every word,” Goodman answered. “If Mark can stand it, I can!” It seemed unfortunate (at the time) that Steve Gillis should select this particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself and Clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to punish. Passing a saloon one night alone, Gillis heard an altercation going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it. Including the barkeeper, there were three against two. Steve ranged himself on the weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the fight was over, was ready for the hospital. It turned out that he was one of Chief Burke's minions, and Gillis was presently indicted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. He knew some of the officials in a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into temporary retirement. Clemens, of course, went his bail, and Steve set out for Virginia City, until the storm blew over. This was Burke's opportunity. When the case was called and Gillis did not appear, Burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman, with an execution against his loose property. The watch that had been given him as Governor of the Third House came near being thus sacrificed in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation. Now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that Steve Gillis's brother, James N. Gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the halcyon Tuolumne district--the Truthful James of Bret Harte--happened to be in San Francisco at this time, and invited Clemens to return with him to the far seclusion of his cabin on Jackass Hill. In that peaceful retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more than one weary writer besides Bret Harte had found shelter there. James Gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the Arcadian life, the companionship of his books, the occasional Bohemian pilgrim who found refuge in his retreat. It is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. One could mine there if he wished to do so; Jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside. He regularly shared his cabin with one Dick Stoker (Dick Baker, of 'Roughing It'), another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this forgotten land, also with Dick's cat, Tom Quartz; but there was always room for guests. In 'Roughing It', and in a later story, “The Californian's Tale,” Mark Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills. Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life--the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast bleaching drift, literally the “picked bones of the land.” At one place stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to Sacramento, a possible State capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a ruined church. It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim Gillis's cabin. He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass. It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors. A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that the family numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat. On rainy days they would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. He had a startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place. His stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, Dick Stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. He always pretended that these extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly true; and Stoker--“forty-six and gray as a rat”--earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word. What did it matter to him? He had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there; his affairs all had ended long ago. A number of the stories used in Mark Twain's books were first told by Jim Gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass Hill. The story of Dick Baker's cat was one of these; the jaybird and Acorn story of 'A Tramp Abroad' was another; also the story of the “Burning Shame,” and there are others. Mark Twain had little to add to these stories; in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when Jim Gillis had told them. James Gillis's imagination sometimes led him into difficulties. Once a feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green plums. Stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody eating it, which set Gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights, all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon Stoker told him if he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it. There was no escape after that; Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the luscious health-giving joys of the “Californian plums.” Jackass Hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were neighbors. Another pocket-miner; named Carrington, had a cabin not far away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of pretty daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called the “Chapparal Quails.” Young men from far and near paid court to them, and on Sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front fence as to suggest an afternoon service there. Young “Billy” Gillis knew them, and one Sunday morning took his brother's friend, Sam Clemens, over for a call. They went early, with forethought, and promptly took the girls for a walk. They took a long walk, and went wandering over the hills, toward Sandy Bar and the Stanislaus--through that reposeful land which Bret Harte would one day light with idyllic romance--and toward evening found themselves a long way from home. They must return by the nearest way to arrive before dark. One of the young ladies suggested a short cut through the Chemisal, and they started. But they were lost, presently, and it was late, very late, when at last they reached the ranch. The mother of the “Quails” was sitting up for them, and she had something to say. She let go a perfect storm of general denunciation, then narrowed the attack to Samuel Clemens as the oldest of the party. He remained mildly serene. “It wasn't my fault,” he ventured at last; “it was Billy Gillis's fault.” “No such thing. You know better. Mr. Gillis has been here often. It was you.” “But do you realize, ma'am, how tired and hungry we are? Haven't you got a bite for us to eat?” “No, sir, not a bite--for such as you.” The offender's eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a corner. “Isn't that a guitar over there?” he asked. “Yes, sir, it is; what of it?” The culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little and struck the chords. Then he began to sing. He began very softly and sang “Fly Away, Pretty Moth,” then “Araby's Daughter.” He could sing very well in those days, following with the simpler chords. Perhaps the mother “Quail” had known those songs herself back in the States, for her manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes. When he had finished she was the first to ask him to go on. “I suppose you are just like all young folks,” she said. “I was young myself once. While you sing I'll get some supper.” She left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked whatever she could find for the belated party. XLIX. THE JUMPING FROG It was the rainy season, the winter of 1864 and 1865, but there were many pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and Samuel Clemens soon added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other acquirements. Sometimes he worked with Dick Stoker, sometimes with one of the Gillis boys. He did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he only laid its corner-stone. In the old note-book he kept of that sojourn we find that, with Jim Gillis, he made a trip over into Calaveras County soon after Christmas and remained there until after New Year's, probably prospecting; and he records that on New Year's night, at Vallecito, he saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain. A lunax rainbow is one of the things people seldom see. He thought it an omen of good-fortune. They returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the they crossed over into Calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far from Angel's Camp. The note-book records that the bill of fare at the Camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name of coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy. January 27. Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to rush back. They had what they believed to be a good claim. Jim Gillis declared the indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work it, they were sure of rich returns. For himself, he would have been willing to work, rain or shine. Clemens, however, had different views on the subject. His part was carrying water for washing out the pans of dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not very fascinating work. Dick Stoker came over before long to help. Things went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in the bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp, enjoying the company of a former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon,--[This name has been variously given as “Ros Coon,” “Coon Drayton,” etc. It is given here as set down in Mark Twain's notes, made on the spot. Coon was not (as has been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a Frenchman), but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or application. Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay. To Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a delight. It was soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor. Even when his yarns had point, he did not recognize it. One dreary afternoon, in his slow, monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the trained jumper with shot. The story had circulated among the camps, and a well-known journalist, named Samuel Seabough, had already made a squib of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis had ever happened to hear it before. They thought the tale in itself amusing, and the “spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd.” When Coon had talked himself out, his hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would remark to the other: “I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” and perhaps the other would answer: “I ain't got no frog, but if I had a frog I'd bet you.” Out on the claim, between pails of water, Clemens, as he watched Jim Gillis or Dick Stoker “washing,” would be apt to say, “I don't see no p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt,” and so they kept it up. Then the rain would come again and interfere with their work. One afternoon, when Clemens and Gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long slope, the chill downpour set in. Gillis, as usual, was washing, and Clemens carrying water. The “color” was getting better with every pan, and Jim Gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to be rewarded. Possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of everything. Clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each pail of water was his last. His teeth were chattering and he was wet through. Finally he said, in his deliberate way: “Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable.” Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt. “Bring one more pail, Sam,” he pleaded. “Oh, hell, Jim, I won't do it; I'm freezing!” “Just one more pail, Sam,” he pleaded. “No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan.” Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel's Camp. It kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back. A few days later a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San Francisco. With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--“the first I ever saw in California,” he says in his notes. In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of nuggets-pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and, observing it, had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice posted by Jim Gillis should expire. They did not mind the rain--not with all that gold in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars. In either case it was a good pocket. Mark Twain missed it by one pail of water. Still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers that vaster nugget of Angel's Camp--the Jumping Frog. Jim Gillis always declared, “If Sam had got that pocket he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me.” In Mark Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a mere casual entry of its main features: Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no frog, and C. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled C.'s frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won. It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame. The hills along the Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no other of such size as that. L. BACK TO THE TUMULT FROM the note-book: February 25. Arrived in Stockton 5 p.m. Home again home again at the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco--find letters from Artemus Ward asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory Travels which is soon to come out. Too late--ought to have got the letters three months ago. They are dated early in November. He was sorry not to oblige Ward, sorry also not to have representation in his book. He wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story of his absence. Steve Gillis, meantime, had returned to San Francisco, and settled his difficulties there. The friends again took up residence together. Mark Twain resumed his daily letters to the Enterprise, without further annoyance from official sources. Perhaps there was a temporary truce in that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic, private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing for himself the title of the “Moralist of the Main.” The letters were reprinted in San Francisco and widely read. Now and then some one had the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a discreet silence. In one of these letters he told of the Mexican oyster, a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand criticism, and presently disappeared from the market. It was a mistake, however, for him to attack an Alta journalist by the name of Evans. Evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended: Gone, gone, gone --Gone to his endeavor; Gone, gone, gone, Forever and forever. In the Enterprise letter following its publication Mark Twain referred to this poem. He parodied the refrain and added, “If there is any criticism to make on it I should say there is a little too much 'gone' and not enough 'forever.'” It was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous quotable flavor, and it made Evans mad. In a squib in the Alta he retaliated: Mark Twain has killed the Mexican oyster. We only regret that the act was not inspired by a worthier motive. Mark Twain's sole reason for attacking the Mexican oyster was because the restaurant that sold them refused him credit. A deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print. To deny or recriminate would be to appear ridiculous. One could only sweat and breathe vengeance. “Joe,” he said to Goodman, who had come over for a visit, “my one object in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and murder Evans.” He wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his Enterprise letters with jingles. One of these concerned Tom Maguire, the autocrat manager of San Francisco theaters. It details Maguire's assault on one of his actors. Tom Maguire, Roused to ire, Lighted on McDougal; Tore his coat, Clutched his throat, And split him in the bugle. For shame! oh, fie! Maguire, why Will you thus skyugle? Why curse and swear, And rip and tear The innocent McDougal? Of bones bereft, Almost, you've left Vestvali, gentle Jew gal; And now you've smashed And almost hashed The form of poor McDougall Goodman remembers that Clemens and Gillis were together again on California Street at this time, and of hearing them sing, “The Doleful Ballad of the Rejected Lover,” another of Mark Twain's compositions. It was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which Mark and Steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists, did not render it less objectionable. Such memories as these are set down here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built of the same primeval material from which the world was created--built of every variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human being--equally capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest and most tender of all characterizations, the 'Recollections of JOAN of ARC'. LI. THE CORNER-STONE Along with his Enterprise work, Clemens continued to write occasionally for the Californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of the jumping frog. For one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary material. He knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form. By and by Artemus Ward turned up in San Francisco, and one night Mark Twain told him his experiences with Jim Gillis, and in Angel's Camp; also of Ben Coon and his tale of the Calaveras frog. Ward was delighted. “Write it,” he said. “There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York.”--[This is in accordance with Mr. Clemens's recollection of the matter. The author can find no positive evidence that Ward was on the Pacific coast again in 1865. It seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--Clemens promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the time the sketch reached Carleton, Ward's book was about ready for the press. It did not seem worth while to Carleton to make any change of plans that would include the frog story. The publisher handed it over to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press, a perishing sheet, saying: “Here, Clapp, here's something you can use in your paper.” Clapp took it thankfully enough, we may believe. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”--[This was the original title.]--appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865, and was immediately copied and quoted far and near. It brought the name of Mark Twain across the mountains, bore it up and down the Atlantic coast, and out over the prairies of the Middle West. Away from the Pacific slope only a reader here and there had known the name before. Now every one who took a newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful Calaveras frog, and received a mental impress of the author's signature. The name Mark Twain became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong bid for national acceptance. As for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a considerable time. The telegraph did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”--a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book. But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco Alta: “Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day. Cannot the 'Californian' afford to keep Mark all to itself? It should not let him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the California press.” The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co. gave the sketch to the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book. It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day. It has the intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop's Fables.--[The resemblance of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof. Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book, Greek Prose Composition. Through this originated the impression that the story was of Athenian root. Mark Twain himself was deceived, until in 1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek version was the translation and Mark Twain's the original; that he had thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known. See The Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]--It contains a basic idea which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling is convincing and full of charm. It appeared in print at a time when American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed. We had a vast appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities for showing it. We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it. Whether the story of “Jim Smiley's Frog,” offered for the first time today, would capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is another matter. That the author himself underrated it is certain. That the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment, may have overrated it is by no means impossible. In any case, it does not matter now. The stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice. As such it is immortal. In the letter already quoted, Clemens speaks of both Bret Harte and himself as having quit the 'Californian' in future expecting to write for Eastern papers. He adds: Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest. He wants me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book. I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble. But I want to know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first. However, he has written to a New York publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume for the press. Nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes these two had then in mind. Neither of them would seem to have been optimistic as to their future place in American literature; certainly in their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of letters--the two most talked-of men in America. LII. A COMMISSION TO THE SANDWICH ISLANDS Whatever his first emotions concerning the success of “Jim Smiley's Frog” may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into American literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as in distant parts. Those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute accordingly. Special honors began to be shown to him. A fine new steamer, the Ajax, built for the Sandwich Island trade, carried on its initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make one. He did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward. If the Ajax were back I would go quick, and throw up my correspondence. She had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the town--gentlemen and ladies, and a splendid brass band. I could not accept because there would be no one to write my correspondence while I was gone. In fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous. He was restless, and the Ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more dissatisfied. An idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands was a matter of great commercial interest to California, while the life and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general reader. He was on excellent terms with James Anthony and Paul Morrill, of the Sacramento Union; he proposed to them that they send him as their special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of letters, life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands. To his vast delight, they gave him the commission. He wrote home joyously now: I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they pay as much money as I would get if I stayed at home. He adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the continent by way of the Columbia River, the Pend Oreille Lakes, through Montana and down the Missouri River. “Only two hundred miles of land travel from San Francisco to New Orleans.” So it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on. He sailed by the Ajax on her next trip, March 7 (1866), beginning his first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge of navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information passengers and sailors could furnish. It was a happy, stormy voyage altogether. In 'Roughing It' he has given us some account of it. It was the 18th of March when he arrived at Honolulu, and his first impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always. In fact, his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of golden sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past. The letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which had preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality. Officials and private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and he fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft repose. Oh, islands there are on the face of the deep Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep, he quotes in his note-book, and adds: Went with Mr. Damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment. God, what a contrast with California and the Washoe! And in another place: They live in the S. I.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more of business till next day. D--n San F. style of wearing out life. He fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for business, and he lost not much time. He found there a number of friends from Washoe, including the Rev. Mr. Rising, whose health had failed from overwork. By their direction, and under official guidance, he set out on Oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print, and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its various battle-fields, returning to Honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but triumphant. His letters home, better even than his Union correspondence, reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms. I have got a lot of human bones which I took from one of these battle-fields. I guess I will bring you some of them. I went with the American Minister and took dinner this evening with the King's Grand Chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though darker than a mulatto he has an excellent English education, and in manners is an accomplished gentleman. He is to call for me in the morning; we will visit the King in the palace, After dinner they called in the “singing girls,” and we had some beautiful music, sung in the native tongue. It was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he should air it a little. In the same letter he states: “I will sail in a day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months.” 'In Roughing It' he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands, their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders. He was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one. The very name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to be off. No discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him. With a single daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death. By and by Marlette shouted “Stop!” I never stopped quicker in my life. I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge down 1,000 feet. I thought Boo would answer for me, and was about to say so, when Marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits. They made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a veritable lake of fire. They had risked their lives for that scene, but it seemed worth while. His open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared Samuel Clemens for adventurous hardships. He was thirty years old, with his full account of mental and physical capital. His growth had been slow, but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for conquest of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power. LIII. ANSON BURLINGAME AND THE “HORNET” DISASTER It was near the end of June when he returned to Honolulu from a tour of all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils. He expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have a part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career. The Ajax had just come in, bringing his Excellency Anson Burlingame, then returning to his post as minister to China; also General Van Valkenburg, minister to Japan; Colonel Rumsey and Minister Burlingame's son, Edward,--[Edward L. Burlingame, now for many years editor of Scribner's Magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen. Young Burlingame had read “The Jumping Frog,” and was enthusiastic about Mark Twain and his work. Learning that he was in Honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the party sent word that they would call on him next morning. Clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well. He crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible, and drove to the American minister's, where the party was staying. They had a hilariously good time. When he returned to his hotel he sent them, by request, whatever he had on hand of his work. General Van Valkenburg had said to him: “California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people will be, too, no doubt.” There has seldom been a more accurate prophecy. But a still greater event was imminent. On that very day (June 21, 1866) there came word of the arrival at Sanpahoe, on the island of Hawaii, of an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days! A vessel, the Hornet, from New York, had taken fire and burned “on the line,” and since early in May, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land. A few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital. Mark Twain recognized the great news importance of the event. It would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to his paper. There was no cable in those days; a vessel for San Francisco would sail next morning. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he must not miss it. Bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his strength. But just at this time the Burlingame party descended on him, and almost before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted by the heads of the joint legations of China and Japan. Once there, Anson Burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their long privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three distempered days and four thousand miles of sea. All that Mark Twain had to do was to listen and make the notes. He put in the night-writing against time. Next morning, just as the vessel for the States was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived his great beat was sure. It did arrive, and the three-column story on the front page of the Sacramento Union, in its issue of July 19th, gave the public the first detailed history of the terrible Hornet disaster and the rescue of those starving men. Such a story occupied a wider place in the public interest than it would in these crowded days. The telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation. Mark Twain always adored the name and memory of Anson Burlingame. In his letter home he tells of Burlingame's magnanimity in “throwing away an invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries” to help him. “You know I appreciate that kind of thing,” he says; which was a true statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying an instalment on his debt of gratitude. It was proper that he should do so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted in obtaining the tale of the Hornet disaster. It was the debt which one owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice. Anson Burlingame said to Samuel Clemens: “You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb.” Clemens never forgot that advice. He did not always observe it, but he rarely failed to realize its gospel. Burlingame urged him to travel. “Come to Pekin next winter,” he said, “and visit me. Make my house your home. I will give you letters and introduce you. You will have facilities for acquiring information about China.” It is not surprising then that Mark Twain never felt his debt to Anson Burlingame entirely paid. Burlingame came more than once to the hotel, for Clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future betterment. He promised, of course, to visit China, and when he was alone put in a good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include the great capitals. When not otherwise employed he read; though there was only one book in the hotel, a “blue and gold” edition of Dr. Holmes's Songs in Many Keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from title-page to finis. He was soon up and about. No one could remain ill long in those happy islands. Young Burlingame came, and suggested walks. Once, when Clemens hesitated, the young man said: “But there is a Scriptural command for you to go.” “If you can quote one I'll obey it,” said Clemens. “Very well. The Bible says, 'If any man require thee to walk a mile, go with him, Twain.'” The command was regarded as sufficient. Clemens quoted the witticism later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years, ascribed to Warner, Ward, and a dozen others. Its origin was as here set down. Under date of July 4 (1866), Mark Twain's Sandwich Island note-book says: Went to a ball 8.30 P.M.--danced till 12.30; stopped at General Van Valkenburg's room and talked with him and Mr. Burlingame and Ed Burlingame until 3 A.M. From which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered. A few days later the legation party had sailed for China and Japan, and on the 19th Clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to San Francisco. They were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage. Captain Mitchell and others of the wrecked Hornet were aboard, and he put in a good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world. The vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a regular playground at sea. Sundays they had services and Mark Twain led the choir. “I hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than I have down here,” he says in his notes. “If they don't, a thunderbolt will knock this vessel endways.” It is perhaps worthy of mention that on the night of the 27th of July he records having seen another “splendidly colored, lunar rainbow.” That he regarded this as an indication of future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the previous year. It was August 13th when he reached San Francisco, and the note-book entry of that day says: Home again. No--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again! There were compensations, however. He went over to Sacramento, and was abundantly welcomed. It was agreed that, in addition to the twenty dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the Hornet report. “How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?” James Anthony asked. “Oh, I'm a modest man; I don't want the whole Union office. Call it $100 a column.” There was a general laugh. The bill was made out at that figure, and he took it to the business office for payment. “The cashier didn't faint,” he wrote, many years later, “but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it. It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a newspaper.”--[“My Debut as a Literary Person.”--Collected works.]--Though inferior to the descriptive writing which a year later would give him a world-wide fame, the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his prestige on the Pacific coast. They were convincing, informing; tersely--even eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their audience. Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their popularity. They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day. Their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated. Here and there are attempts at verse. He had a fashion in those days of combining two or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect. Examples of these dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will present the general idea: The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, The turf with their bayonets turning, And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold, And our lanterns dimly burning. Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich Island chapters of 'Roughing It', five years later. They do, however, reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the Comstock and the mellowness of his later style. He was learning to see things with better eyes, from a better point of view. It is not difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame. VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875 LIV. THE LECTURER It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves. The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided. Another intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect. To his delight the article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its publication as the beginning of a real career. He intended to follow it up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book and an income. He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The Innocents Abroad'. A third plan of action was to take advantage of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same subject. But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought of it. As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had been thrust upon him. To come forward now, offering himself in the same capacity, was a different matter. He believed he could entertain, but he lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his slender capital. He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement. “Do it, by all means!” urged McComb. “It will be a grand success--I know it! Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket.” Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half rates. The next day this advertisement appeared: MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY THE SANDWICH ISLANDS MARK TWAIN (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION) WILL DELIVER A LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d (1866) In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics of the natives duly discussed and described. The great volcano of Kilauea will also receive proper attention. A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA is in town, but has not been engaged ALSO A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS will be on exhibition in the next block MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please. Dress Circle, $1.00 Family Circle, 50c Doors open at 7 o'clock The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful one, and need only be summarized here. Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights to the walls. Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage. Then, came reaction--these were his friends, and he began to talk to them. Fear melted away, and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came breaking at his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo when he declared “The world is mine!” It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded. It was particularly gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper harness. Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article, the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into “Mark Swain,” and his literary dream perished. As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had, been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining fragments. One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence. It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been uttered or written. It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands, dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal. --[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--There was a gross return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with his usual business insight, which was never foresight, he had made an arrangement by which, after paying bills and dividing with his manager, he had only about one-third of, this sum left. Still, even this was prosperity and triumph. He had acquired a new and lucrative profession at a bound. The papers lauded him as the “most piquant and humorous writer and lecturer on the Coast since the days of the lamented John Phoenix.” He felt that he was on the highroad at last. Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was willing to become his manager. Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens was fond of him. They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson City, Virginia, and Gold Hill. It was an exultant and hilarious excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain. Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across the footlights of some pretentious “opera-house” or between the two tallow candles of some camp “academy.” Whatever the building, it was packed, and the returns were maximum. Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm, looked like a ruffled hen. It was, in fact, originally written on sheets of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered. There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour. At one place, when the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said: “Be them your natural tones of eloquence?” At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope walker and her husband. It was a small place, and the tight-rope attraction seemed likely to fail. The lady's husband had formerly been a compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of brotherhood between him and Mark Twain. “Look here,” he said. “Let's combine our shows. I'll let my wife do the tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture.” The arrangement was not made. Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find the proper person. At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice. He went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and dodged but could not escape. Denis led him to the stage, a good deal frightened. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the celebrated Mark Twain from the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about the celebrated Sandwich Islands.” That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough. Mark Twain never had a better introduction. The audience was in a shouting humor from the start. Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where his sponsor said: “Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why.” But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much “Mark Twain” in it. When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him: “Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you. There's a piano on the stage in the theater. Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours, 'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries.” This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with general hilarity and applause. LV. HIGHWAY ROBBERY His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful. The people regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the houses overflowed. At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined. “I have only one lecture yet,” he said. “I cannot bring myself to give it twice in the same town.” But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia, conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to lecture again, but would supply him with a subject. Steve's plan was very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new lecture. In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are lacking. Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present, Steve Gillis made his “death-bed” confession as is here set down: “Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866. The Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were mere sideshows compared with Mark's. It could have been run to crowded houses for a week. We begged him to give the common people a chance; but he refused to repeat himself. He was going down to Carson, and was coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis would be coming home with the money. The Divide was a good lonely place, and was famous for its hold-ups. We got City Marshal George Birdsall into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends. We all loved him, and would have fought for him in a moment. That's the kind of friends Mark had in Nevada. If he had any enemies I never heard of them. “We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's guest, and we were afraid he would tell him. We didn't take in Dan because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big sensation. That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear Mark tell the story. “Well, everything went off pretty well. About the time Mark was finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along. By and by I went back to see what was the matter. Sam and Denis were coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between them. I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place. I heard Sam say to Denis: “'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide. They never had one in my day.' “Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their hands. The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall Jackson.' Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark wasn't a bit scared or excited. He talked to the robbers in his regular fashion. He said: “'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously. They might go off by accident.' “They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to take his hands down they made him put them up again. Then he asked how they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the sky. He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven. He told them not to take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same. “Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again. Once he said: “'Don't you fellows be so rough. I was tenderly reared.' “Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and be settled when they came along. As we were going away Mark called: “'Say, you forgot something.' “'What is it?' “Why, the carpet-bag.' “He was cool all the time. Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography, tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'. “Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but Mark said: “'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or so for good measure.' “We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came along. We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake. He told us they had been robbed, and asked me if I had any money. I gave him a hundred dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody. Then we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward, and Dan de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other newspapers. Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject. He entered right into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats. It would have been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off. But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke. We took in Joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which made it hard for Joe afterward. But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us. He had Mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart thing to let Mark into what was really going on. “Mark didn't see it our way. He was mad clear through.” At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story. He said: “Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things into my hands. I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine. “I felt terribly guilty when he said: “'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk. Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?' “I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black. Then I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man who is trying to hide a murder. Sam did not ask for his key that day, and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner. I thought he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said: “'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.' “Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they excused themselves and left him alone with me. We played a good while; then he said: “'Joe, these cards are greasy. I have got some new ones in my trunk. Did you get that key to-day?' “I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling. But he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the cards. Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to happen. By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said: “'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night. Now, Joe, I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.' “He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I believed he was in dead earnest. “I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to talk him out of that resolution. I used all the arguments about the boys being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the table; but for a time it seemed hopeless. And I could imagine those fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in California; and just as I was about to give it up he said: “'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning over my hand, I wouldn't do it!' “He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for California. The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would make no show of relenting. When they introduced themselves as Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said: “'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day. There's been a good deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did it.' They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers had worn. He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends; good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.' So the heaviest joke was on his tormentors after all.” This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from headquarters. It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth setting down in full. Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San Francisco, received a little more punishment there. “What kind of a trip did you boys have?” a friend asked of them. Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had given him, smiled grimly: “Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree.” He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as given later in 'Roughing It'. People were deadly tired of that story out there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they thought he must be failing mentally. They did not laugh--they only felt sorry. He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led around to it and told it again. The audience was astonished still more, and pitied him thoroughly. He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again, and told it for the third time. The audience suddenly saw the joke then, and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a narrow escape. He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had not came when it did. --[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman: When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I started. “Mr. Goodman,” he said, “you tell Horace Greeley that I want to come East, and ask him to send me a pass.” “All right, Hank,” I said, “I will.” It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first men I met was Greeley. “Mr. Greeley,” said, “I have a message for you from Hank Monk.” Greeley bristled and glared at me. “That--rascal?” he said, “He has done me more injury than any other man in America.”] LVI. BACK TO THE STATES In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during his proposed trip around the world. However, he meant to visit his people first, and his old home. He could go back with means now, and with the prestige of success. “I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day,” he wrote on December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says: Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America, Capt. Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866. Pleasant sunny day, hills brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery. So he was really going home at last! He had been gone five and a half years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned. He had came away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his class. He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing--also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away. In some degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and returns with gifts and honors. The homeward voyage was a notable one. It began with a tempest a little way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them praying. Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the Bible miracles. He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work--the memory of him was an unfailing delight. Captain “Ned Blakely,” in 'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman. Captain “Stormfield,” who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain Wakeman; and he appears in the “Idle Excursion” and elsewhere. Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip across the lake and down the San Juan River--a brand-new experience, between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life. The luxuriance got into his note-book. Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses. Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for to make it perfect. But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions somber and terrible. The vessel they took there, the San Francisco, sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year in Mark Twain's life. Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were reported in the steerage. There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but no one expected it on the ship. The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of the men died. Soon after midnight, the other followed. A minister making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service. The gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the Pacific voyage, was subdued. When the word “cholera” went among them, faces grew grave and frightened. On the morning of January 4th Reverend Fackler's services were again required. The dead man was put overboard within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe. Gloom settled upon the ship. All steam was made to put into Key West. Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made. The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold. Time and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat, listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side. On the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported. One of the crew, a man called “Shape,” was said to be dying. A few hours later he was dead. By this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken. “So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy,” says the note-book. General consternation now began to prevail. Then it was learned that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised. Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its melancholy tidings. When I think of poor “Shape” and the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I myself may be dead to-morrow. Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers. By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive. He died at two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days. The machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag. The ship's doctor confessed to Clemens that he was helpless. There were eight patients in the hospital. But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason were not quarantined. Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the ship and were heard of no more. “I am glad they are gone. D--n them,” says the notebook. Apparently he had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained. The doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea again. Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers. On the 8th another of the patients died. Then the cooler weather seemed to check the contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred. There were no new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent. A certificate was made out that the last man had died of “dropsy.” There would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and landing the passengers. The matter would probably be handled differently to-day. LVII. OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York. Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home. Now a veteran, he was as eager to return. He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches, including “The Jumping Frog,” for book publication. Clemens himself decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the fame of the “Frog” once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for it now. But Carleton was wary; the “Frog” had won favor, and even fame, in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter. Books were undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days. Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain: “My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your first book.” Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it, but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith. The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful first year of the war. They thought he looked old, which was true enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same. Jane Clemens had grown older, too. She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn he petted, comforted, and teased her. She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy. He went up to Hannibal to see old friends. Many were married; some had moved away; some were dead--the old story. He delivered his lecture there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk, where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned to St. Louis for a more extended visit. It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean. No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of happiness. His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this idyllic dream. Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party; General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the best minds of the nation. Anson Burlingame had told him to associate with persons of refinement and intellect. He lost no time in writing to the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company. Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in Mark Twain would be sound. A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime he could contribute letters from New York City. The rate for all letters was to be twenty dollars each. The arrangement was a godsend, in the fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain. It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his passage. The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the 5th, and he was there on that day. Almost the first man he met was the chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, “Ship Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage.” --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential: ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK. Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York. DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land. In obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and convenience. Your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California. I have the honor to remain, with high respect and esteem, Your ob'dt. Servant, JOHN J. MURPHY.] The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was fearful he might not be accepted. Quite casually he was enlightened on this point. While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going. A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names: “Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also probably General Banks.” So he was billed as an attraction. It was his first surreptitious taste of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight. The story often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature of a joke, and mainly apocryphal. Clemens was a good deal in House's company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers. LVIII. A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along. The proofs had been read and the volume was about ready for issue. Clemens wrote to his mother April 15th: My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two weeks. After that I shall lecture. Since I have been gone, the boys have gotten up a “call” on me signed by two hundred Californians. The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of his future career. Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was doubtful. “I have no reputation with the general public here,” he said. “We couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me.” But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were infectious. He insisted that the idea was sound. It would solidify Mark Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken. Clemens had partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the “Inimitable Mark Twain” to appear before a New York audience. Fuller made Nye agree to be there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in the prospect. But Mark Twain was not happy. He looked at that spacious hall and imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day. He begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get. But only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller. He would have taken a larger one if he could have found it. The lecture was announced for May 6th. Its subject was “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands”--tickets fifty cents. Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's book should appear, so that one event might help the other. Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact, appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important event. Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying to fill it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with this. Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to fly. At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an infection of Fuller's faith. He devised a hundred schemes for the sale of seats. Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying: “Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company. I have promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is manufactured by Chickering.”' “But you don't want a piano, Mark,” said Fuller, “do you?” “No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not.” Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages, omnibuses, and horse-cars. Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to see if anybody noticed the bills. The little dangling bunches seemed untouched. Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and glanced at it. His friend asked: “Who's Mark Twain?” “God knows; I don't!” The lecturer could not ride any more. He was desperate. “Fuller,” he groaned, “there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest.” Fuller assured him that everything was working all right “working underneath,” Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless. He reported his impressions to the folks at home: Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent; but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the largest house in New York and cannot back water. He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: “The Flying Scud” was at Wallack's, the “Black Crook” was at Niblo's, John Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser attractions. New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days; these things could gather in the public to the last man. When the day drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate. “Fuller,” he said, “there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but you and me. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I had the pluck and the outfit. You must paper the house, Fuller. You must send out a flood of complementaries.” “Very well,” said Fuller; “what we want this time is reputation anyway--money is secondary. I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent audience that ever was gathered in New York City. I will bring in the school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world.” Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom. This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear. Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster, where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not coming. At last Clemens said: “Fuller, you've got to introduce me.” “No,” suggested Fuller; “I've got a better scheme than that. You get up and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there. That will be better anyway.” Clemens said: “Well, Fuller, I can do that. I feel that way. I'll try to think up something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief.” They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation. Suppose, after all, the school-teachers had declined to come? They went half an hour before the lecture was to begin. Forty years later Mark Twain said: “I couldn't keep away. I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die. But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked with people, and that traffic had stopped. I couldn't believe that these people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't room enough left for a child. “I was happy and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise.” And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient time and event have vanished, has added: “When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome. When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for something. Then he said: 'There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to introduce me. I don't seem to discover them anywhere. The piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I can make with your help. As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go and did as he promised about Senator Nye. He said things that made men from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight. After that came his lecture. The first sentence captured the audience. From that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages. People were positively ill for days, laughing at that lecture.” So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers were kind, congratulations numerous. --[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of headlines. A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an artistic triumph, would be a news event. On the other hand, Schuyler Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a column, nonpareil. His lecture was of no literary importance, and no echo of it now remains. But those were political, not artistic, days. Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said: “Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark Twain's quaint remarks last evening. The large hall of the Union was filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success. Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter.... During a description of the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded. “Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he should repeat his experiment at an early date.”] COOPER INSTITUTE By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and Citizens of New York, MARK TWAIN WILL DELIVER A SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE CONERNING KANAKDOM OR THE SANDWICH ISLANDS, COOPER INSTITUTE, On Monday Evening, May 6,1867. TICKETS FIFTY GENTS. For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal Hotel Doors open at 7 o'clock. The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8. Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night. Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall, he gladly gave his services without charge. Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure. In spite of the flood of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account. That was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and in the winning of the larger stake for a friend. “Mark,” he said, “it is all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are going to be the most talked-of man in the country. Your letters for the Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of travel ever written.” LIX. THE FIRST BOOK With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other Sketches, became a matter of more interest. The book was a neat blue-and-gold volume printed by John A. Gray & Green, the old firm for which the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before. The title-page bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company as selling agents. It further stated that the book was edited by “John Paul,” that is to say by Webb himself. The dedication was in keeping with the general irresponsible character of the venture. It was as follows: TO JOHN SMITH WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy. If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about to burst upon THE AUTHOR. The “advertisement” stated that the author had “scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the 'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'” and that as such he would be likely to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character, as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.] Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery. But it was a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement. Every one who ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery. Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work made it. Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very dull. It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet. Even in the Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking. The answer to Moral Statistician--[In “Answers to Correspondents,” included now in Sketches New and Old. An extract from it, and from “A Strange Dream,” will be found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous wrath. The “Strange Dream,” though ending in a joke, is aglow with poetry. Webb's “advertisement” was playfully written, but it was earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a discovery, but as a matter of course. The discoveries came along later, when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations. It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that his personality was in itself so essentially humorous. His physiognomy, his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events--all these were distinctly diverting. When we add to this that his medium of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be overlooked. On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the comic phrase. The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being Mark Twain's first book. The selections in it were made for a public that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most of them have properly found oblivion. Fewer than a dozen of them were included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work. The reader may investigate and judge for himself. Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book. To Bret Harte he wrote: The book is out and it is handsome. It is full of damnable errors of grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch, because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say nothing about these things. When my hurry is over, I will send you a copy to pisen the children with. That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we may gather from his letter home: As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a cent. I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope of making anything out of it. He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had pronounced it “the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America”; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed no more than a casual regard. A Sandwich Island book (he had collected his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald. Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some measure of truth. Lecture propositions came from various directions. Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated the remarks with lightning caricatures. But the time was too short; the Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta correspondent was far behind with his New York letters. On May 29th he wrote: I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust. I have refused all invitations to lecture. Don't know how my book is coming on. He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean up matters before his departure. Then came days of idleness and reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him. My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the morning we sail. All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move --move--move! Curse the endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month. I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and sit down than ever I get forgiveness for. Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'. I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's supervision. I don't mind it. I am fixed. I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence. But send on the professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good companions. The “splendid immoral room-mate” was Dan Slote--“Dan,” of The Innocents, a lovable character--all as set down. Samuel Clemens wrote one more letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic letter of good-by written the night before sailing. Referring to the Alta letters he says: I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York. Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the States. If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and Alta folk will think. He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had received statehood. I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily. I wish I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West. I could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that would have atoned for the loss of my home visit. But I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from place to place. If I could only say I had done one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there --and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame. There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no worth to me save in the way of business. I tried to gather up its compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped it. You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. I can get away from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean! Yrs. forever, SAM LX. THE INNOCENTS AT SEA HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION Steamer: Quaker City. Captain C. C. Duncan. Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867. Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night. That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain regardless of size is of more importance than any other link. Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it now, in retrospect. The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging. No such thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before. A similar project had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in the East it had been abandoned. Now the dream had become a fact--a stupendous fact when we consider it. Such an important beginning as that now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day. But they had different ideas of news in those days. There were no headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction. Every name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except General Hancock will ever be heard of again. The New York Times, however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion. The writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers. He referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and press, whereby he would “skilfully utilize the brains of the company for their mutual edification.” Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other such excursions, and wishing the travelers “good speed, a happy voyage, and a safe return.” That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day, when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior purpose.] That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster. The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place. The sixty-seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and devised amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free from contention as families of that size are likely to be. The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time. She was registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails. Altogether she was a cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying. She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower. It was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of last volume.] They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City. Clemens found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying “Doctor” of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey (“Jack”); Julius Moulton, of St. Louis (“Moult”), and other care-free fellows, the smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief watchword. There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also--fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for her husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established Mark Twain's larger fame. She was an able writer herself; her judgment was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort. She understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his letters aloud to her, became in reality “Mother Fairbanks,” as they termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly offices. In one of his home letters, later, he said of her: She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship, and altogether the kindest and best. She sewed my buttons on, kept my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits. I am under lasting obligations to her. She looks young because she is so good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home. In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way. We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit. There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter, and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly mirth-provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests and attracts. I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage- looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint, odd manners. It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read his letters. Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S. L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen. Dan Slote was likely to be there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira, New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the brilliant writer. They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear those daring, wonderful letters. But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment, and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of immediate audience and the boon of criticism. Mrs. Fairbanks especially was frankly sincere. Mr. Severance wrote afterward: One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper- copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that manner. “Well,” he drawled, “Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed, and, like as not, she is right.” And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say: “Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for me.” Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist. “I am sure I was right, too,” she declares; “heroism came natural to him.” Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial enough, but not easy to forget: We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs. Duncan, wife of our captain. Mark Twain got up and made a little speech, in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of. Then he mentioned a number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, “What did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?” Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books. The notes for it were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new experience, plenty of incident to set down. His idea of descriptive travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps, he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions. We may believe that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded. There is little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to elucidate. The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting. It is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills. They are all dead now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its “five thousand slow-revolving years.” Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words--serious, humorous, sometimes profane. Others are statistical, descriptive, elaborated. Also there are drawings--“not copied,” he marks them, with a pride not always justified by the result. The earlier notes are mainly comments on the “pilgrims,” the freak pilgrims: “the Frenchy-looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of him to the passengers”; the “long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to Fortress Monroe, and quotes eternally from his experiences”; also, there is reference to another young man, “good, accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green.” This young person would become the “Interrogation Point,” in due time, and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on page 70, would appear the “oracle,” identified as one Doctor Andrews, who (the note-book says) had the habit of “smelling in guide-books for knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been festering in his brain.” Sometimes there are abstract notes such as: How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing that no one had ever said it before. Of the “character” notes, the most important and elaborated is that which presents the “Poet Lariat.” This is the entry, somewhat epitomized: BLOODGOOD H. CUTTER He is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses in homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with a strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on all possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his portrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comes along, whether he has anything against him or not.... Dan said: “It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and Shakespeare and those fellows.” “Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in the night when it comes on me: Whether we're on the sea or the land We've all got to go at the word of command-- “Hey! how's that?” A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said: “Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say: “'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.' “Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.” Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew. We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was “generally writing.” He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics. That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men. LXI. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. The Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then. They show them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-stone to test their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has heard the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their marvels into myths, their relics into bywords. It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months' imprisonment if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law. It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so weary of hearing: We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state. The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the time it required: That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong suit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it; they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for bothering with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco. They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He tells how the address was presented: August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at twelve we were at the palace.... The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently, “Good--very good; indeed”--and at the close, “I am very, very grateful.” It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his own note-book--not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper record--for today. One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book, perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident. “The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,” he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he could laugh enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception. He set down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost: There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece of ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of color struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. So I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my lapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. He was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service to me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to? I said, “I didn't belong to any.” Then he asked me what order of knighthood I belonged to? I said, “None.” Then he asked me what the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what an ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and embarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, and that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more of Count Festetic's attentions. Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens, slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! I almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again. Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings. At Constantinople his room-mate writes: I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last, but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved and gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy a Circassian slave next. It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made the “long trip” through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags “Jericho,” “Baalbec,” and the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now. Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo: We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig- trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and when the next one came. It was terrible. He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church, of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he thought him sinful, irreverent, profane. “He was the worst man I ever knew,” Church said; then he added, “And the best.” What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on--he might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter all around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan as well as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained with Dan, suddenly appeared and said: “Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here alone. I'll be d---d if I do!” And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few days late, but convalescent. Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip. It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee, and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said: “Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?” It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent. “Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where Moses lies buried.” “Moses who!” said Jack. “Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land.” “Forty years!” said Jack. “How far was it?” “It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought them through in safety.” Jack regarded him with scorn. “Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six hours!”--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.] Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only one of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary method at that impressionable age. We have already noted his earlier admiration for that noble and simple poem, “The Burial of Moses,” which in the Palestine note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes. The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine. He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It was a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-leaf is inscribed: Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867. There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip. Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the “Charley” once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain. There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and spiritual. On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens, visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked at it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even begged to be allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature, resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of the first beginning. LXII. THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th: At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy. Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two small land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full of flying-fish. That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th: We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve at night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part of our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken things comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain often. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were possible characters. But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that--but then when one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created them. We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs. Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows: Lo! other ships of that parted fleet Shall suffer this fate or that: One shall be wrecked, another shall sink, Or ground on treacherous flat. Some shall be famed in many lands As good ships, fast and fair, And some shall strangely disappear, Men know not when or where. The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message. Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander chord, the throbbing cadence of human story. Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes. This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or two of that word-picture: After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow-revolving years.... The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God. Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form. We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that old land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but because they were the chosen savages of God. The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written--one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of that solemn land: Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes. Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege. The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival, and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying. LXIII. IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written, about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August, he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he referred to the arrangement: “I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.”] There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement. When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing: DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the Patent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where there is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right. I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts of the Union--have declined them all. I am for business now. Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Am offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will not interfere. Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known. Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs for no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friends than I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue on the Alta. Yours affectionately, SAM. P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel. But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the secretary of Senator Stewart. --[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he (Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. He adds that Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements, save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for himself.] Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship,” “Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine. There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating to his “late senatorial secretaryship” he puts the joke, so far as it is a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. “One of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere,” he tells us in a brief sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings. Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his outlook was bright. The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington political contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize officially the author of them in his own person and personality. Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, “Women,” was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be “the best after dinner speech ever made.” Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether into his own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.] He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in arrival. His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money return, in which he had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune. Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford. Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and the American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his downfall. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the letter above mentioned. It ran as follows: OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO. HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York. DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be proper. We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full justice to his productions as any other house in the country. We are perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000 copies of Richardson's F. D. and E. ['Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders ahead. If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience. Very truly etc., E. BLISS, JR., Secretary. After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly. WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867. E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co. DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence. I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky Mountains. I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write. When those letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places. If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line, specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money I might possibly make out of it. The latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. But you understand that, of course. I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson, and learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it looks safe. I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an “occasional,” among other things, and a note from you addressed to Very truly, etc., SAM. L. CLEMENS, New York Tribune Bureau, Washington will find me, without fail. The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most notable publishing connections in American literary history. Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month later. In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid. Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then, and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an expensive process. Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more on his Great American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and emphasized a “humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined.” He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to arrange terms. LXIV. OLIVIA LANGDON Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It was no matter. Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's. He wrote home about it: Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over old times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our reminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world. This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day. Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of his waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon its reality. Long afterward he said: “It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of my mind.” Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them. He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still more clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side. Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another, had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope had died. Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by “laying on of hands,” was brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room and said: “Open the windows--we must have light!” They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl, delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation came back to her limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk. He left then, saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well, though probably never very strong. On the same day he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever. It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first meeting. Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across her sky. To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start, and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of going--soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see Elmira for the better part of a year. He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he set forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first. With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and Emma Beach. It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with pick and shovel. It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too--everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of the minature was not there. Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: “Henry Ward Beecher is a brick.” LXV. A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR. He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters. A little later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington--on very brief notice indeed. The arrangement for his appearance had been made by a friend during his absence--“a friend,” Clemens declared afterward, “not entirely sober at the time.” To his mother he wrote: I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved. I hardly knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style. The title of the lecture delivered was “The Frozen Truth”--“more truth in the title than in the lecture,” according to his own statement. What it dealt with is not remembered now. It had to do with the Quaker City trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was welcome enough. Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but little memory of it in later years. There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter. Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a trifle disappointed with his appearance. Mark Twain's traveling costume was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power. His general make-up was hardly impressive. Bliss's disturbance was momentary. Once he began to talk the rest did not matter. He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that personally he was even greater than they. The publisher, confined to his home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household. Also, he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a fourth more than Richardson had received. He advised the latter arrangement. Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation, but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--“the best business judgment I ever displayed,” he was wont to declare. A letter written to his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting pretty fully here, for the information and “character” it contains. It bears date of January 24th. This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office, as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about anybody and everything I wanted to. I said I must have the very fullest possible swing, and he said, “All right.” I said, “It's a contract--” and that settled that matter. I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow. But the best thing that has happened is here. This great American Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance, he said: “Now, here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do it.” And he did. And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one. There was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley. Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this. These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week, occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to this and that and the other paper any more. I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno. Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss also, who is head of the publishing firm). Puritans are mighty straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don't make any better people. I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of May. So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a task which he regarded as not difficult. He had only to collate the Alta and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be required for completeness. Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return. In addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian) to supply letters to a list of newspapers. “I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article in less than two days,” he wrote home, and by the end of January he had also prepared several chapters of his book. The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put the temptation behind him. He refers to this more than once in his home letters, and it is clear that he wavered. Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee me the Senate's confirmation. It was a great temptation, but it would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to drop the idea.... And besides I did not want the office. He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter. “I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket,” he said. But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment. This was sharper than a serpent's tooth. Clemens got confirmation of the report by telegraph. By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose. Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait. He reported his troubles to Orion: I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never sees the light. Don't you let the folks at home hear that. That thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition to let me use them. I have done all I can by telegraph, and now await the final result by mail. I only charged them for 50 letters what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form themselves to get back that pitiful sum. Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis. He was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely. Then he says: We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half. I am in for it. I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then. He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on the Chinese embassy. Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book prospects. His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time. In one of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant, an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at home. He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything particular to say. Grant nodded slightly and waited. His caller wished something would happen. It did. His inspiration returned. “General,” he said, “I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” That broke the ice. There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain has variously related this incident. It is given here in accordance with the letters of the period.] LXVI. BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising. It spoke rather vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities. Clemens gathered that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the venture. There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately. He must confer with them in person. He was weary of Washington, anyway. The whole pitiful machinery of politics disgusted him. In his notebook he wrote: Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues. And in a letter: This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There are some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn't one man in Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame, and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to the world this government would have discarded him when his time was up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special ambassador to the nations.] Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington. He decided to go to San Francisco and see “those Alta thieves face to face.” Then, if a book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends. Also, he could lecture. He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were too urgent to permit delay. He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days. The name of Mark Twain was already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him with refreshments and entertainment. Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a resident of that southern land, was one of the group. Beyond the isthmus Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. He made the first draft of this story soon after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular. Clemens, then and later, had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of publication.--[Mr. John P. Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond the isthmus. The notorious crippled gambler, “Smithy,” figured in it, and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.] In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped. Colonel McComb was his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid. The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around. The way was now clear, the book assured. First, however, he must provide himself with funds. He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City excursion as his subject. On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss: I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the house; every seat taken and paid for before night. He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with the completed manuscript about the middle of June. But this was a miscalculation. Clemens found that the letters needed more preparation than he had thought. His literary vision and equipment had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence. Some of the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely. It required two months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together. Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly, then recently established. Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about this time. His “Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine office or the city of their publication. That these two friends, each supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious coincidences of literary history. Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before. He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not to give his new lecture to his old friends. The result justified that opinion. At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a returned conqueror. He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had there been time and paraphernalia. Even the robbers had reformed, and entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold Hill. At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to Damascus on the backs of camels. “Sam,” she said, “that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so.” But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew. He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would ever give in California. His preparatory advertising for that occasion was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree. It assumed the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States without inflicting himself further upon them. As signatures he made free with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of organizations, institutions, “Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage.” Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, “To the fifteen hundred and others,” in which he insisted on another hearing: I will torment the people if I want to.... It only costs the people $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?... My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it? He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him talk just this once. Continuing, the handbill presented a second protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy, ending with the brief word: You had better go. Yours, CHIEF OF POLICE. All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end. Nothing short of a seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco audience after that. Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last volume.] He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco, caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford. But a further difficulty had arisen. Bliss was having troubles himself, this time, with his directors. Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone. The title selected, The New Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege. Hartford was a conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of orthodox persuasion. They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this impending disaster of heresy. When the author arrived one or more of them labored with him in person, without avail. As for Bliss, he was stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint. He declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the management and publish the book himself. This was an alarming suggestion to the stockholders. Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too rare in the company's former history. The objectors retired and were heard of no more. The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox, illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures. Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known illustrators of that day. Williams was a man of great talent--of fine imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold water as a beverage. Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had brought home. LXVII. A VISIT TO ELMIRA Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a week in the Langdon home. He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon concluded to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When the New York train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car, travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give him comfort. Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--“You've got some other clothes, haven't you?” The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed. “Oh yes,” he said with enthusiasm, “I've got a fine brand-new outfit in this bag, all but a hat. It will be late when we get in, and I won't see any one to-night. You won't know me in the morning. We'll go out early and get a hat.” This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey was happy enough. True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured the hat. A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--“Livy,” as they all called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the gentle girl had made some discoveries, too. No word had passed between them. Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at least, was regarded as honor. On the morning of the final day he said to young Langdon: “Charley, my week is up, and I must go home.” The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not wholly unqualified. His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for a trip to the White Mountains, had said: “Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy. You mustn't let him carry her off before our return.” The idea was a disturbing one. The young man did not urge his guest to prolong his-visit. He said: “We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night.” “I ought to go by the first train,” Clemens said, gloomily. “I am in love.” “In what!” “In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here.” The young man was now very genuinely alarmed. To him Mark Twain was a highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether admirable--lovable. But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a saint. No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous soldier of letters from the West. Delightful he was beyond doubt, adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy. “Look here, Clemens,” he said, when he could get his voice. “There's a train in half an hour. I'll help you catch it. Don't wait till to-night. Go now.” Clemens shook his head. “No, Charley,” he said, in his gentle drawl, “I want to enjoy your hospitality a little longer. I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go to-night.” That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a light two-seated wagon was at the gate. The coachman was in front, and young Langdon and his guest took the back seat. For some reason the seat had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with force on the cobbled street. Neither passenger was seriously hurt; Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment. Then came an inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit. Evidently it was not intended that he should take that train. When the Langdon household gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly. He allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an arm-chair and apply remedies. The young daughter of the house especially showed anxiety and attention. This was pure happiness. He was perjuring himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things. He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced. He was still there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife. LXVIII. THE REV. “JOE” TWICHELL. He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book. Some of it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such things he was naturally interested in the process. He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts. Mrs. Bliss took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to enjoy. Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the spire. It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures. The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the “stub-tailed church,” on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the “Church of the Holy Speculators.” He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed and hanging on the wall. “Why, yes,” he commented, in his slow fashion, “this is the 'Church of the Holy Speculators.'” “Sh,” cautioned Mrs. Bliss. “Its pastor is just behind you. He knows your work and wants to meet you.” Turning, she said: “Mr. Twichell, this is Mr. Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain.” And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for more than forty years. Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide understanding of the frailties of humankind. He had been “port waist oar” at Yale, and had left college to serve with General “Dan” Sickles as a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the field. Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize than to convey. He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to creeds. Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty roused only his resentment and irony. Yet something in his heart always warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind. Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words, “liberty, justice, humanity.” It may be put into one word, “humanity.” Ministers always loved Mark Twain. They did not always approve of him, but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward Beecher cultivated his company. In a San Francisco letter of two years before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her: I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins. I am laying for the Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone. I am running on preachers now altogether, and I find them gay. So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort and uplift mankind. But it was only a little time till the impulse had grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for “Joe” Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race. He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household. He had a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their fireside. He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not establish a household of his own. Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote: Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he was heard may be imagined): “I am taking thought of it. I am in love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole world. I don't suppose she will marry me. I can't think it possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn't I shall be sure that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and proud to have it known that I tried to win her!” It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him. He came and went, and presently it was “Mark” and “Joe,” as by and by it would be “Livy” and “Harmony,” and in a few years “Uncle Joe” and “Uncle Mark,” “Aunt Livy” and “Aunt Harmony,” and so would remain until the end. LXIX. A LECTURE TOUR James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the platform celebrities. Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year before had interested Redpath. He had offered engagements then and later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit. Now there was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract. Redpath was eager for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of 1868-9. With his new lecture, “The Vandal Abroad,” he was presently earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights count. This was affluence indeed. He had become suddenly a person of substance-an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income. He could help his mother lavishly now, and he did. His new lecture was immensely popular. It was a resume of the 'Quaker City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow. Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings. He caught such drifting exclamations as, “There he is! There goes Mark Twain!” People came out on the street to see him pass. That marvelous miracle which we variously call “notoriety,” “popularity,” “fame,” had come to him. In his notebook he wrote, “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only, earthly certainty oblivion.” The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and method. His delivery was described as a “long, monotonous drawl, with the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause.” His appearance at this time is thus set down: Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache. His features are fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript. No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day. It was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method. As to his manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all. He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of the subject-matter underneath new head. Certain columns represented the Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on. His manuscript lay there in case of accident, but the accident did not happen. A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at points not far distant from Elmira. He had a standing invitation to visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of that happiness. His was not an unruffled courtship. When at last he reached the point of proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit. Many absurd anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the subject, but they are altogether without foundation. It was a proper and dignified discussion of a very serious matter. Mr. Langdon expressed deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these views. The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not remain discouraged or sad. He lectured at Cleveland with vast success, and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira. He was referred to by Cleveland papers as a “lion” and “the coming man of the age.” Two days later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he “played” against Fanny Kemble, the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain. The news of this went to Elmira, too. It was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero--a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house must be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away. It was on the second morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family were gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in at the door, and a low, humble voice said: “The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?” No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon, who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this eccentric visitor. Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start. In truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged to them. The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully. He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the crudest of them, a classic charm. As for Olivia Langdon's mother and sister, their happiness lay in hers. Where her heart went theirs went also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found its rightful keeper. Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation. There was only a provisional engagement at first. Jervis Langdon suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official parental sanction should be given. When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials, Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no value. The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also wrote one on his own account. It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days. It might be two months before replies would come from those ministers. The lecturer set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy. He went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts. LXX. INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND “THE INNOCENTS ABROAD” He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks that proofs of the book be sent there. He arrived at the Langdon home, anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say, “the happiest or the most miserable of men.” Jervis Langdon had a rather solemn look when they were alone together. Clemens asked: “You've heard from those gentlemen out there?” “Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you.” “They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner.” “Well, yes, some of them were.” “I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?” “Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man, a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on record.” The applicant for favor had a forlorn look. “There's nothing very evasive about that,” he said: There was a period of reflective silence. It was probably no more than a few seconds, but it seemed longer. “Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?” Langdon said. “Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable.” Jervis Langdon held out his hand. “You have at least one,” he said. “I believe in you. I know you better than they do.” And so came the crown of happiness. The engagement of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869. But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the marriage with scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm. Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but it was not availing. The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of a different sort. Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor. That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and body for her position seemed hard to believe. Their faith overbore such questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified. To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote: She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom. I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the girl--she don't care anything about luxuries).... She spends no money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife, without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in that--you couldn't help it if you were to try. I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is her willing slave forevermore. To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote: DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens, who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it, so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an inspiration in writing you... Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to Elmira. He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the circuit. He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel. Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always. It was always a temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was none the less distasteful. In a letter of that spring he wrote: I most cordially hate the lecture field. And after all, I shudder to think I may never get out of it. In all conversation with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business. I don't want to get wedded to it as they are. He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to getting out his book. The revised proofs were coming now, and he and gentle Livy Langdon read them together. He realized presently that with her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception. What he lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away. She became his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held to her death. The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world, whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed. Those early days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to day, and from year to year, even to the very end. The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that would refine and beautify the text. In one of them he settles the question of title, which he says is to be: THE INNOCENTS ABROAD or THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words. The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it, as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass. At the end of April Clemens wrote: “Your printers are doing well. I will hurry the proofs”; but it was not until the early part of June that the last chapters were revised and returned. Then the big book, at last completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number for any new book, even to-day. In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and unnecessarily delayed. But this was manifestly a mistake. The book went to press in June. It was a big book and a large edition. The first copy was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound volumes were shipped that month. Even with the quicker mechanical processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between the final return of proofs and the date of publication. So it is only another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, “the thing that didn't happen.”--[In an article in the North American Review (September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately issued. In none of the letters covering this period is there any suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude the possibility of such a circumstance. At some period of his life he doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact, through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the first edition of The Innocents Abroad.] LXXI. THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL. 'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start. The machinery for its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year. It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars. No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record only up to 1910. D.W.] If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now. As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful. They applauded--most of them--but with reservation. Doctor Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the “frequently quaint and amusing conceits,” but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally wrote “those kind.” William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the humor of the book, its “delicious impudence,” the charm of its good-natured irony. The review closed: It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best. This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-the “Lincoln of our literature.” This was later. The public--the silent public--with what Howells calls “the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude,” reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a seer. The writer well remembers a little group of “the simple-hearted multitude” who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was the “best book of modern times.” It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him smile, too. It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere. Without doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with kindliness always. The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel. The critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict. Brander Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of the literary technician. The 'Tramp' contains better usage without doubt, but it lacks the “color” which gives the Innocents its perennial charm. In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the saints, and down through ancient lands. There is an atmosphere about it all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever since. Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word would be “youth.” That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its inspiration is certain. We may believe that Williams was not a great draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit of the author's text. Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part of it, and they ought never to perish. 'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book, but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm. The public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict. The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other book of travel. LXXII.THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER. It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as a literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely looked forward to the publication of another book. He considered himself a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home. During his travels he had already been casting about for a congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald. But Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the purchase was decided upon. His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby), then immensely popular, in his lecture “Cussed Be Canaan.” Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him. The two had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes; this by the way. Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the trip-doubtful about his lecture: Your proposition takes my breath away. If I had my new lecture completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't “Cussed Be Canaan” too old? You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as he was in his day, has been squeezed dry. Why howl about his wrongs after said wrongs have been redressed? Why screech about the “damnable spirit of Cahst” when the victim thereof sits at the first table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves? You see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted “Cussed Be Canaan.” I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse of our enemy? The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more. Give me a week to think of your proposition. If I can jerk a lecture in time I will go with you. The Lord knows I would like to. --[Nasby's lecture, “Cussed Be Canaan,” opened, “We are all descended from grandfathers!” He had a powerful voice, and always just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this sentence. Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and twenty-five nights--he went home to rest. That evening he sat, musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight. Without a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, “We are all descended from grandfathers!”] Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of setting out alone on that long tour. Furthermore, Jervis Langdon promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash. I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill, or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to that at all. Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his mother.] The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col. George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk was business manager, Lamed was political editor. With the purchase of Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor, with a more or less “roving commission”--his hours and duties not very clearly defined. It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade. The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869). The members of the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the “new enemy in their midst.” There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there happened to be no one present who knew him. A young man rose very bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see. It is reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation: “Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a chair.” It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it seems of doubtful circumstance. In any case it deserves to be true. His “Salutatory” (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine: Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble.... I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers. Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law and must be obeyed. John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days, has written: I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his work. I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on a task delayed. It was impossible to be conscious of the man sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of himself and his work. I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call the “sanguine.” I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow of one of the swift craft of the Vikings. His eyes, which have been variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black.... Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now “well groomed,” and that consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished Reminiscences kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills] LXXIII. THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and experiences, usually humorous in character. His wedding-day had been set for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account for that occasion. Before October he was out on the lecture circuit, billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive in consequence, though with good hope. To Pamela he wrote (November 9th): To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future success in New England. But I am not distressed. Nasby is in the same boat. Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture. He has just left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed. I have convinced him that he has little to fear. Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted. His success with the New England public was immediate and complete. He made his headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center. It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean Howells, his future friend and literary counselor. Howells was assistant editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor. Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to express his thanks for it. He sat talking to Fields, when Howells entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He said: “When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white.”] His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the Atlantic rooms. And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary affairs. It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that day. Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and friendless in Brooklyn. Clemens states that he does not know the poet, but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and started; it would be like him. LXXIV. THE WEDDING-DAY The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided to wait until these were filled. February 2d, a date near the anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with no “tour.” The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious, as the husband's financial situation justified. At least that was Samuel Clemens's understanding of the matter. He felt that he was heavily in debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation. There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he received there was no inkling of any new purpose. He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife, and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity. In due time Slee replied that, while boarding was a “miserable business anyhow,” he had been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most pleasant streets--“the family a small one and choice spirits, with no predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company.” The price, Slee added, would be reasonable. As a matter of fact a house on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom. It stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period. It was completely appointed. Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings. Everything was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils. Even the servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked. It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise out of those daily letters. A surprise like that is always watching a chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to reveal it. However, the traveler remained completely in the dark. He may have wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale. If only the Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now! But these were all incalculable things. All that he could be sure of was the coming of his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks between. At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira with the smallest possible delay. Once there, the intervening days did not matter. He could join in the busy preparations; he could write exuberantly to his friends. To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently belongs here: Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870. DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere among my relics I have your remembrance stored away. It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it--I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since. Four or five months ago I bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear of it). I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day. And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of Rinalds in the “Burning Shame!” Where is Dick and what is he doing? Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances. A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and lovelier than the peerless “Chapparal Quails.” You can't come so far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I invite Dick too. And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome. Truly your friend, SAML. L. CLEMENS. P.S.---California plums are good. Jim, particularly when they are stewed. It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how long ago and how far away it seemed to him now! So much had happened since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to cross, and not alone. A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of February 2d. He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant, but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the world. And so came the wedding-day. It began pleasantly; the postman brought a royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months' sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher in solemnizing the marriage. Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland. Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of the story of life and death that made its beginning there. The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a meeting at the church soon after that hour. Afterward followed the wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride. To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[Perhaps for a younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a brother of Henry Ward Beecher. He lived and died in Elmira, the almost worshiped pastor of the Park Congregational Church. He was a noble, unorthodox teacher. Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed “S'cat!” in the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by the more orthodox Elmira clergy. For the “S'cat” article see Appendix I, at the end of last volume.] It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one or two others of that happy company. It was nine o'clock at night when they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to convey the party to the “boarding-house” he had selected. They drove and drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to receive their guests. He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning the richness of the locality. They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of lights and decoration was revealed within. The friends who had gone ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom. Servants hurried forward to take bags and wraps. They were ushered inside; they were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished. The bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the apparent ownership and completeness of possession. At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm: “Don't you understand, Youth,” she said; that was always her name for him. “Don't you understand? It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift from father!” But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds. Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made then; but either then or a little later he said: “Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come right here. Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to. It sha'n't cost you a cent!” They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the young wedded pair were alone. Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ, and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all. Then they were gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness remained. And so it was they entered the enchanted land. LXXV. AS TO DESTINY If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered, even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events. Mark Twain had but to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the beginning. Once he said: “When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my dressing-gown at this instant talking to you.” It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal atom felt the vital thrill. Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly recorded, exemplifies this postulate. If through the years still ahead of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace. The web becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end. LXXVI. ON THE BUFFALO “EXPRESS” With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a world character--a man of large consequence and events. He had no proper realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a modest estimate of his talents. He “worked like a horse,” is the verdict of those who were closely associated with him on the Express. His hours were not regular, but they were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and remained there until ten or eleven at night. His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show. With coat, vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease, pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him. J. L. Lamed, his co-worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his mind. “I doubt,” writes Lamed, “if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original plate, with accompanying explanations and comments. His half-day of whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find pleasant to remember. Indeed, my whole experience of association with him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest charm.” Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his characteristics. The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and what might be termed the sentimental side. There was no friction in the division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them. Clemens had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as little regard for Lamed's conception of humor. Once when the latter attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said: “Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed”; and once when Lamed was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings. I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to learn.... I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough. I always like to know before I shout. But I go for Mr. Curtis with all my strength! Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know how. But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket, or whatever you call it. I will let it alone for the present. It will keep. The other young man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no split, rest assured of that. He will prance into this political ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a crash and see the scalps fly. He has none of my diffidence. He knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in such a natural way as to deceive the most critical. He knows everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not he is perfectly willing to discuss it. When he gets back he will tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day. I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and a ticket to win; but wait till he comes. In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the chances. MARK TWAIN. He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely “desouthernized” by this time. From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier, he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had there been anything left to abolish. His sympathy had been always with the oppressed, and he had now become their defender. His work on the paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer sketches and more editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak. They were fearless, scathing, terrific. Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be a detriment to the community, he wrote: “The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking, cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very bastards of the devil.” He appended a full list of their names, and added: “If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a Cohocton rough be like?” But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those various old interests and labors here. It is enough to say that Mark Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog. Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire. In this editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble statesman. He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt lovingly on his hero's nobility of character. At the close he said: “He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America, lost a son, and all the world a servant, when he died.” Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called “Around the World,” an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave the letters his literary stamp. At least some of the contributions were written in this way, such as “Adventures in Hayti,” “The Pacific,” and “Japan.” These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that paper. It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has disappeared. Here and there is a sentence worth remembering. Of two practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even contemplating matrimony, he said: “This deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides.” Some of the sketches have been preserved. “Journalism in Tennessee,” one of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when written. “A Curious Dream” made a lasting impression on his Buffalo readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect of the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been effective elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town at all, but “particularly and venomously at the next town.” LXXVII. THE “GALAXY” Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his literary activities during his Buffalo residence. The Galaxy, an ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co. at 498 and 500 Broadway]--proposed to him that he conduct for them a humorous department. They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and allow him a free hand. There was some discussion as to book rights, but the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the general title of “Memoranda,” appeared in the May number, 1870. In his Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as “exhaustive statistical tables,” “Patent Office reports,” and “complete instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the harrowing of the matured crops.” He declared that he would throw a pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight the world. He added that the “Memoranda” was not necessarily a humorous department. I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself outraged.... Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department.... No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun. The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still flicker here and there in its literary twilight. The new department appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches for it. They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in his own paper. The first number of the “Memoranda” was fairly representative of those that followed it. “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,” a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was its initial contribution. Besides the “Beef Contract,” there was a tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco, depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of the Sunday-school “good little boy” story,--[“The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” and the “Beef Contract” are included in Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.”]--and several shorter skits--and anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract. Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches it would drive the better class of worshipers away. Among other things he said: I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end, would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is, if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work of evangelization. Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth preserving. He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he contrasts him with them. They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a villainous odor every day. If the subject of these remarks had been chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of Galilee. He would have resigned his commission with some such remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: “Master, if thou art going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work of evangelization.” He is a disciple, and makes that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it in the nineteenth instead of the first century. Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco. It did not matter. He was not likely to worry over the friends he would lose because of any stand taken for human justice. Lamed said of him: “He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself popular.” Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his convictions. The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the campaign that was to follow. Not that each month's contribution contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did. In the October number he began a series of letters under the general title of “Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again,” supposed to have been written by a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a note the author says: “No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufficient.” The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court. They are scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them. Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the “Memoranda.” The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.--[“The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine”; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it complete under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.] The “Little Church Around the Corner” on Twenty-ninth Street received that happy title from this incident. “There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit the service,” Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends. The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it the new name, which it still bears. It has sheltered a long line of actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence, gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration. Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin Booth.] Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and Old. “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper” is one of the best of these--an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor. It is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is still played. A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the “Burlesque Map of Paris,” reprinted from the Express. The Franco-Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely. It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and delightful then. Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to him: “I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely.” The “Official Commendations,” which accompany the map, are its chief charm. They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the best one coming from one J. Smith, who says: My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain. But, sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her. She has nothing but convulsions now. It is said that the “Map of Paris” found its way to Berlin, where the American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be present. Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch results. The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of everybody. The larger number of “Memoranda” sketches have properly found oblivion to-day. They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate, C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again. Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before Routledge could bring out the authorized edition. Routledge later published the “Memoranda” under the title of Sketches, including the contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed. Only about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as literature. “To Raise Poultry,” “John Chinaman in New York,” and “History Repeats Itself” are valuable only as examples of his work at that period. The reader may consult them for himself. LXXVIII. THE PRIMROSE PATH But we are losing sight of more important things. From the very beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work. The life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with health and love; constitute married happiness. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: “Sue, we are two as happy people as you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no shadow in them.” In the same letter the husband added: “Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was a whole pine forest let loose.” To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he wrote: DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing. Therefore, old man, count me out. And still later, in May: I guess I am out of the field permanently. Have got a lovely wife, a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform? The subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least. So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish, accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day, still clung to him. Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative, dainty, cultured, spiritual. He adored her as little less than a saint, and she became, indeed, his saving grace. She had all the personal refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each achievement. She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather, she did not understand them in those days. That he should be fond of history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it, and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it. She did not realize then his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book contained what Mr. Howells calls “the root of the human matter,” the inner revelation of the human being at first hand. Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own. His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was likely to be. It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a Bible chapter. Joe Goodman, who made a trip East, and visited them during the early days of their married life, was dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship. Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now living. It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change. The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation. To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. From such material humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its faith. After a little while he could stand it no longer. “Livy,” he said one day, “you may keep this up if you want to, but I must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don't believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can't sit here and listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the light of gospel, the word of God.” He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and modern. It contained these paragraphs: The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely and inadequately figured to the mind.... If you make figures to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star. --[His figures were far too small. A map drawn on the scale of 400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take in both the earth and the nearest fixed star. On such a map the earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded.... The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies. Its God was strictly proportioned to its dimensions. His sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them. When the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and dumb cattle.... To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things, taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us. We shall not need to require anything more. It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we traveled in forty years. But such a declaration then would have shocked a great number of sincerely devout persons. His wife prevailed upon him not to print it. She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless. In time she saw more clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the proportions of created things. They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo. They received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so they remained more and more in their own environment. There is an anecdote which seems to belong here. One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of the house across the street. The owner and his wife, comparatively newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending danger. The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street. Bowing with leisurely politeness, he said: “My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on fire.” Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier. Gray was a gentle, lovable man. “The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest,” Mark Twain once said of him. Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their families soon became intimate. Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever it might have become, was no longer a consideration. LXXIX. THE OLD HUMAN STORY Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to the new home. His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South. In a letter written at Richmond he said, “I have thrown off all care,” and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved. Under “number 5,” he included “everything,” adding, “so you see how good I am to follow the counsel of my children.” He closed: “Samuel, I love your wife and she loves me. I think it is only fair that you should know it, but you need not flare up. I loved her before you did, and she loved me before she did you, and has not ceased since. I see no way but for you to make the most of it.” He was already a very ill man, and this cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote. He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack early in May; in June his condition became critical. Clemens and his wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night. Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse. His delicacy and thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always amused and interested the patient. In later years Mark Twain once said: “How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight to four in the morning, nearly four hours. My other watch was a midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours. The two sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four hours between them, and each of them tried generously and persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. I went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched, straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white face of the patient. I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand, and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock. During all that dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came. When the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship appear against the sky. I was well and strong, but I was a man, afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance.” He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were about him then have left a different story. It was all without avail. Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there was hope for his recovery. He failed again, and on the afternoon of the 6th of August he died. To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one. It was the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire remaining period of their Buffalo residence. There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks. Both of these projects were now abandoned. Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a Miss Emma Nye, to visit her. But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household. Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever. There followed another long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor in the new home, September 29th. The young wife was now in very delicate health; genuinely ill, in fact. The happy home had become a place of sorrow-of troubled nights and days. Another friend came to cheer them, and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station. It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train. She was prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first child, Langdon, was prematurely born. A dangerous illness followed, and complete recovery was long delayed. But on the 12th the crisis seemed passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as coming from the late arrival: DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and consequently am about five days old now. I have had wretched health ever since I made my appearance... I am not corpulent, nor am I robust in any way. At birth I only weighed four and one-half pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all things considered.... My little mother is very bright and cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what about. She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed. P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family. A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote: Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as not, I assure you. (Livy will be certain to read this letter.) Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too, though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall off. I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry. He is always thinking about something. He is a patient, good little baby. Further along he refers to one of his reforms: Smoke? I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night. But when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday. I'm boss of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more. Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang. But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind it, if I remember rightly. Ah, it is turning one's back upon a kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable as well as useful. To go quit smoking, when there ain't any sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then shut off again. LXXX. LITERARY PROJECTS The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like Bliss anxious for a second experiment. He had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued. Clemens at one time developed a plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others. He really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely lost track of. All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from those ancient voyagers. One of the earlier entries will show the style and purpose of the undertaking. It is from Shem's record: Friday: Papa's birthday. He is 600 years old. We celebrated it in a big, black tent. Principal men of the tribe present. Afterward they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about wages. Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we are past our one hundredth year and married. He still calls me Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty. I am still but a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like this.... Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath. Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work. The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used to a quiet, country life. It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary attempt. The author had faith in it, however. To Bliss he wrote: I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book; maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done. You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a fair, open, and honorable way with me. I do not think you will ever find me doing otherwise with you. I can get a book ready for you any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next year, so I have plenty of time. Bliss was only temporarily appeased. He realized that to get a book ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate action than his author seemed to contemplate. Futhermore, he knew that other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a disquieting thought. In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West. It was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake the volume. He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of 100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an equivalent, and the contract was so arranged. In after-years, when the cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly. The figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly. Seven and one-half per cent. of a subscription book did represent half profits up to 100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years to sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed. Bliss could hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead when the book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust matters, whatever might have been his inclination. Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made. To Orion he wrote July 15 (1870): Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day. The subject of it is a secret, because I may possibly change it. But as it stands I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip across the country in the stage. Have you a memorandum of the route we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at? Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days' talk with you. I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a subscription book in this country. The work so promptly begun made little progress. Hard days of illness and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really under way. His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed him. On the 4th he wrote Bliss: During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book, and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat it. It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity the first month it is issued. He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and declared, “I see the capabilities of the subject.” But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the idea of it less inspiring. Other plans presented themselves, and at one time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his sketches. In October he wrote Bliss that he was “driveling along tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of manuscript a day.” Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription sales. He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely. The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, then newly opened and of wide public interest. Clemens did not propose to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion. His adaptation of the letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--[“Riley-Newspaper Correspondent.” See Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do the traveling. At the end of November he wrote Bliss: I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa within a fortnight at my expense... that the book will have a perfectly beautiful sale. He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea. Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to see Riley to South Africa and return. Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing letter to Bliss. He took it for granted that Riley, always an adventurous sort, would go. When Riley wrote him that he felt morally bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes. You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any obligation for any money. The boundless confidence that I have in you is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great things. I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but not off yonder in Africa. His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond mines as might be found lying about handy. Upon his return he was to take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody concerned. In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and was off for the diamond mines and fortune. Poor fellow! He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he really located a mining claim that would have made him and his independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer then), and he was only able to get home to die. His memoranda were never used, his mining claim was never identified. Certainly, death was closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days of his married life. On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures were attended by ill-fortune. For some reason Mark Twain's connection with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not largely increased its subscription. Perhaps his work on it was too varied and erratic. Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept steadily to one line. His farmer public knew always just what to expect when their weekly edition arrived. Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and surroundings. They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the Express for sale. They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived, and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located. Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his relatives. Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind. When Pamela and her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they might find a pleasant home. “I went in there by night and out by night,” he said, “so I saw none of it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience. Prospect Fredonia and let me know what it is like. Try to select a place where a good many funerals pass. Ma likes funerals. If you can pick a good funeral corner she will be happy.” It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular passion. She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies and attend those that were easy of access. Watching the processions go by gave her a peculiar joy. Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to Fredonia immediately following the wedding. They found it residentially attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and his new wife. Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and the like, with zest and enjoyment. Onion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place, originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Onion, said: If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself, never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest, entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of thing is fatal to advancement. I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil. LXXXI. SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper. Its author ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the “Frog of Calaveras” had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers. At the end of a year from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly. “You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style,” Clemens wrote to Bliss. “On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell me I am a benefactor! I guess that is a part of the program we didn't expect, in the first place.” Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade. One hundred and fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and quoted. Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado, wrote: I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere. The occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the former in good repair. Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being translated into many and strange tongues. By what seems now some veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal. The consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress. “Yes, indeed, I have read it!” the mandarin said, eagerly. “We are enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language. It is by Mark Twain.” In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation. Indeed, as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class of readers at home. There were exceptions, of course. There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there were American critics who did. Among the latter was a certain William Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon. Ward did not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank. He was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet. His article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby, down to Mark Twain. With the exception of the first and last named he says of them: They have all had, or will have, their day. Some of them are resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will scarcely survive them. Since Irving no humorist in prose has held the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer. Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences indicate more than mediocrity. The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx, comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it. He was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read him at any length. Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most doubtful. It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest. Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself. A paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint. The paragraph closed: We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next monthly “Memoranda.” The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to “reproduce” in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in solemn and serious earnest. The pretended review began: Lord Macaulay died too soon. We never felt this so deeply as when we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work. Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance of this author. The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception. It says: Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book. For instance: He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave, and the first “rake” the barber gave him with his razor it loosened his “hide,” and lifted him out of the chair. This is unquestionably extravagant. In Florence he was so annoyed by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a frantic spirit of revenge. There is, of course, no truth in this. He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish. It is a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast- iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances. There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor. But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing. Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and was therefore the one sold. This was certainly startling, and by no means gratifying. In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on the truth of the explanation. Then he said: If any man doubts my word now I will kill him. No, I will not kill him; I will win his money. I will bet him twenty to one, and let any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have above made as to the authorship of the article in question are entirely true. But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in “rubbing it in,” as we say now. The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his explanation in the Galaxy was “ingenious, but unfortunately not true.” The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did contain the article exactly as printed in the “Memoranda,” and advised Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it. This was enraging. Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the limits. He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a “pitiful, deliberate falsehood,” in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper editorial abuse. He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in conclusion: “Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they send an agent to the Galaxy office? I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.” He promised that if they did not accept his financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue. The incident closed there. He was prevented, by illness in his household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue following was his final “Memoranda” installment. So the matter perished and was forgotten. It was his last editorial hoax. Perhaps he concluded that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely to go off at the wrong end. It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with the Galaxy. In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons: I have now written for the Galaxy a year. For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish “humorous” matter, once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the “humor” I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. The “Memoranda” will cease permanently with this issue of the magazine. To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but I have other views now. To be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time is drearier. Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent, imperative demand. He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500, and preferred not to do it at all. The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's farewell to journalism; for the “Memoranda” was essentially journalistic, almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position. Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy or restriction. The result was not always pleasant, and it was not always refined. We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the “Memoranda” contributions were permitted to see the light of print. As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression--in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker City journey. Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature, and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea of the Mediterranean. LXXXII. THE WRITING OF “ROUGHING IT” The third book published by Mark Twa in was not the Western book he was preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co., entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance. The Romance was the “Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance” which had appeared in the Express at the beginning of 1870. The burlesque autobiography had not previously appeared. The two made a thin little book, which, in addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring, presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of “The House That Jack Built.” The “House” was the Erie headquarters, the purpose being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring. The faces of Jay Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination, are chiefly conspicuous. The publication was not important, from any standpoint. Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from Mark Twain's best form of expression. A year or two later he realized the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them. Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill. To Orion, in March, he wrote: I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out. We shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three months. But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific siege. He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon. Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters fixed to send to Bliss.... I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford will be the place. He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of $10,000 on the purchase price. Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm. Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills. It was bought quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening, stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements during vacation days. When the place had first been purchased, they had debated on a name for it. They had tried several, among them “Go-as-you-please Hall,” “Crane's Nest,” and had finally agreed upon “Rest and Be Thankful.” But this was only its official name. There was an abandoned quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue. The place became Quarry Farm, and so remains. Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford. They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited them. Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home for the literary man. It held a distinguished group of writers, most of whom the Clemenses already knew. Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests. Their plans for going were not very definite as to time. Clemens found that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the delicate baby daily improved. They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean so much to them in the years to come. It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh enthusiasm in the new book. Goodman arrived just when the author's spirits were at low ebb. “Joe,” he said, “I guess I'm done for. I don't appear to be able to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable. I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents Abroad' again. Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if that is your opinion.” Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens went over to a table and pretended to work. Goodman read page after page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it. Clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen, exclaiming: “I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot. You have sat there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am making of myself. But I am not wholly to blame. I am not strong enough to fight against fate. I have been trying to write a funny book, with dead people and sickness everywhere. Mr. Langdon died first, then a young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at the point of death all winter! Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!” “Mark,” said Joe, “I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you have ever written. I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a great book!” Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel. He was a changed man instantly. He was all enthusiasm, full of his subject, eager to go on. He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from him. Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. They imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period, and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions, developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful good time. Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff, who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder. The papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning. It was said that he had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages. Goodman and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind, even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence. They decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering to supply a substitute for Ruloff. He signed it simply “Samuel Langhorne,” and it was published as a serious communication, without comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned. Other papers, however, took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon. Apparently no one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which, by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under Appendix K, at the end of last volume.] Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction. Of Mr. Beecher's farming he said: “His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat turnips.” The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he wrote: MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming. I never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the inspiration of genius. If you will really betake yourself to farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging criticism, but will give you my blessing. Yours, HORACE GREELEY. The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing. Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm. By the middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day. He was in high spirits by this time. The family health had improved, and prospects were bright. I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings) about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done. I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single moment of the inspiration. So I will stay here and peg away as long as it lasts. My present idea is to write as much more as I have already written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and discard the rest. When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it and not finish it. Nothing grieves me now; nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention. I don't think of anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not. The book will be done soon now. It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be worth the price of the volume. Thus: TO THE LATE CAIN THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent insanity plea. Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the literary tribute to Cain. The impulse that inspired it, however, was characteristic. In a postscript to this letter he adds: My stock is looking up. I am getting the bulliest offers for books and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length, and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise. He set in to make hay while the sun was shining. In addition to the California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the “Arkansas” incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford; prospected the latter place for a new home. The shadow which had hung over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted. He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June he sent three sketches. In an accompanying letter he says: Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for the lot. If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has received it all. He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with Redpath for the coming season. He found himself in a lecture-writing fever. He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward, another on “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met,” and a third one based on chapters from the new book. Of the “Reminiscence” lecture he wrote Redpath: “It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all.” Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another lecture, “title to be announced later.” “During July I'll decide which one I like best,” he said. He instructed Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches. “I never made a success of a lecture in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church.” Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him. Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices that were likely to change overnight. In August he wrote: DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener. People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo. See? Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it. You must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business, being the agent, and it always was too many for me.... Now about the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the Western engagements. But what I shall want next week is still with God. Yours, MARK. He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence there and the removal of his belongings. He finally leased the fine Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. He arranged for possession of the premises October 1st. So the new home was settled upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors. Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed. The Buffalo property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away. The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again. In the year and a half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life. LXXXIII. LECTURING DAYS Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than in the spirit. The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness. As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He dreaded, as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury of home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered on the platform. His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that lie between Boston and Chicago. There were opportunities to run into Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he lectured there on Artemus Ward. He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with the “Reminiscences,” the lecture which he said would treat of all those whom he had met, “idiots, lunatics, and kings,” but he did not like it, or it did not go well. He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address: “It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences' any more.” But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on December 8th he wrote again: Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'. Tried it twice last night; suits me tiptop. And somewhat later: Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out here.... I don't care now to have any appointments canceled. I'll even “fetch” those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture. Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness. You are the last on my list. Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man again. Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion. During those early weeks the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add to his comfort. Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in prospect, one could endure much. In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations. He could spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the year collected there. Their lectures were never tried immediately in Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded. When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final. test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the rest of the season was safe. Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or talking shop. Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns, Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford. There is no such a condition to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great reputations made on the platform. Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just mentioned. Humor has become universal since then. Few writers of this age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's sterner phases and philosophies with a smile. Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of laughter. The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name, but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's lips at the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W. Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them and make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with Nasby's work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was regarded as a part of humor a generation ago. Even the aphorisms that were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling. “When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,” could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a few more gems which have survived that deadly blight. “Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” “Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to.” “The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much that isn't so.” Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends. They had themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry going on among them. Josh Billings once wrote on “Lekturing,” and under the head of “Rule Seven,” which treated of unwisdom of inviting a lecturer to a private house, he said: Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance. Yure good wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun; everything is just in the right place. Yu don't smoke in yure house, never. Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order and ekonemy governs yure premises. But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the tender things out ov yure parlor. Yu hav got to skatter all the latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist. Yu hav got to ketch and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors and hide yure poodle. These are things that hav to be done, or Mark will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time begins. As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at this period. At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee, and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association with distinction and fame. Clemens was a great disappointment to these officials. He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more effectively than any one else. His usual formula was to present himself as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality, to begin his lecture. It was always startling and amusing, always a success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others. Sometimes he got up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no introduction at all. Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this country has ever seen. It was the art that makes you forget the artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a long way for his particular benefit. One listener has written that he sat “simmering with laughter” through what he supposed was the continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was over. The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an hour. He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most. Many have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them, but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a silent voice. There were other pleasant associations in Boston. Howells was there, and Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across the continent to join the Atlantic group. Clemens appears not to have met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier, when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem entitled, “The Three Aces,” which had appeared in the Buffalo Express. Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had characterized it as “a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen Chinee.'” Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic explanation. A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship. One of the letters has a special interest here. Clemens had followed his protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of the matter. Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent “doing him justice,” as his explanation was already on the press, but that if Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue. Clemens then wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for literary schooling in the California days. Continuing he said: Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte's brain? It was this. When they were trying to decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed with him in it. As a bear he was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing, signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive! I just think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The “bear” was that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the “two lines” formed a railway track under his feet. Clemens's original letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.] Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known on the Pacific slope. Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and was grateful and happy accordingly. He was poor of purse, but inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune. He was unfailingly buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful. On an infinitesimal capital he had made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic. In that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been admitted to the company of the gods. Keeler was affectionately regarded by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return. He often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast, where they had good, enjoyable talks together. Once Keeler came eagerly to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room. “Come with me,” he said. “Quick!” “What is it? What's happened?” “Don't wait to talk. Come with me.” They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a row of shelves filled with books. He pointed at one of them, his face radiant with joy. “Look,” he said. “Do you see it?” Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a still-born novel which Keeler had published. “This is a library,” said Keeler, eagerly, “and they've got it!” His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it. He had been investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book had been there it had been taken out and read three times! It never occurred to Clemens even to smile. Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears. In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and Howells himself--a merry informal occasion. Says Howells: Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat- lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why, fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark's life,” and I remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's triumph; it would be like him. Keeler's end was a mystery. The New York Tribune commissioned him to go to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages. He sailed from New York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel reached Havana. He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed it in his frank, innocent way. There were some Spanish military men on the ship. Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said: “It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was general that that was what had happened.” In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand, accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social shortcomings. The reason is not difficult to understand. Harte had made his appeal with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified. Harte spoke a language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view were all recognizable. It was an art already standardized by a master. It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid achievements to those of Charles Dickens. Much of Harte's work is in no way inferior to that of his great English prototype. Dickens never wrote a better short story than “The Outcasts of Poker Flats.” He never wrote as good a short story as “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Boston critics promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating. That they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he spoke to them in new and startling tongues. His gospels were likely to be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified. Of the ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof. Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified approval. The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells. Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on the throne. LXXXIV. “ROUGHING IT”. Telegram to Redpath: How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst, and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would fill it. S. L. CLEMENS. This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and his income he accounted ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He resolved in the future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship. The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year, it was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception. Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life, scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression. In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without charm. There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the first day's overland travel: It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his “Hi-yi! g'lang!” were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it. Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of the desert in passing: The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh, not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. “Buck Fanshaw's Funeral” has become a classic, and the purchase of the “Mexican Plug.” But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail. We have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew. Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself, as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. It was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There could hardly be any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad. 'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke; when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order to survive the stress of its warfares. A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. “Western humor” was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it. 'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was. It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on fact. The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in three. LXXXV. A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life. At Elmira, on March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan Olivia, was born. On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died. He had never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning. In later years, whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse himself of having been the cause of the child's death. It was Mrs. Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead. “I should not have been permitted to do it,” he said, remembering. “I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming. After a while the coachman looked around and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air. He called my attention to it, but it was too late. Tonsilitis or something of the sort set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford. There it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died.” So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived. The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast. It seemed to her that death was pursuing her. In one of her letters she says: “I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,” and she expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant. They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in charge of the house at Hartford. Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer, but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and sold as the “Mark Twain Scrap-Book.” He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm. The idea had grown out of the inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of scrap-book keeping. His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the gum laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or other moist substance to be ready for the clipping. He states that he intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner, and have it manufactured for the trade. About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright. Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy was a recognized institution. On both sides of the water books were appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the author. To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying heavily for this recognition. Furthermore, he decided that he was forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something which it was in his nature to resent. When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher, who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously unfamiliar. Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of 'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it. This was gratifying. Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power. He decided to visit it and spy out the land. He would make the acquaintance of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these things justice. He gave out no word of his real purpose. He merely said that he was going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a few lectures. He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21, 1872. Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him. His “first hour in England was an hour of delight,” he records; “of rapture and ecstasy. These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate; they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision of rural England brought me.” Then he noticed that the gentleman opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was absorbed in a green-covered volume. He was so absorbed in it that, by and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused. He shifted his position a little and his eye caught the title. It was the first volume of the English edition of The Innocents Abroad. This was gratifying for a moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even smiled during the hour of his steady reading. Clemens recalled what he had heard of the English lack of humor. He wondered if this was a fair example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word he was reading. Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity. It did not come. During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the compartment remained heavy with gloom. He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established himself, and went to look up his publishers. He found the Routledges about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their publishing house. He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table again until evening. The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him. Various refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering if America had any more of that sort at home. By and by dinner was served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star. Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens had first known Stanley as a newspaper man. “I first met him when he reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis,” he said once in a conversation where the name of Stanley was mentioned.] LXXXVI. ENGLAND From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called a gloomy one. Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it. Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift. The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin Miller writes: He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand. Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel. Indeed, it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts concerning him in America, there was no question in England. Howells says: In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England, referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English comment was likely to be: “Never mind those. We can turn out academic Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot match these; they interest us.” And it was true. History could not match them, for they were unique. Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the folks at home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his happiness. After one memorable affair he wrote: I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of guests was called. I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett. This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests he had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his “excellent friend,” Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He joined in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir John: “Whose name was that we were just applauding?” “Mark Twain's.” Whereupon the support was needed. Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as “John Camden Hottentot,” an unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one. But these were only to relieve his mind. He did not print them. In one of them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen to the Zoological Gardens. It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem to be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man, but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between the man and the hyena. Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called. biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against Stanley in England. Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick at him. In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew out of it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the reader may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents Abroad. It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation. Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens himself regard it as such in the beginning. But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was in London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this. He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he spoke of it with deep sorrow. LXXXVII. THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too seriously or not at all. He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose: AN EXPATRIATE There was once an American thief who fled his country and took refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality. STANLEY AND THE QUEEN See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago, the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up without salt or sauce. The Queen says, “Come four hundred miles up into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes”; which, being translated, means, “Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take him under my protection”; and not another yelp is heard. AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM What a place it is! Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing! They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold, worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks, Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of Xerxes. I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones. WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put on my coat and boots again, and we drove away. “Where is it? Where are we going?” “Don't worry. You'll see.” He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away. The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on, till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry! “It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.”... We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting, standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness --reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away. Effigies they were--statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn of history, more than twelve hundred years ago.... Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would say: “Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years --and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it --every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border, was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals; there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now. Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one--Charles Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr.... “That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey. Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is, sure enough-stood up on end.” The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs. Clemens, in September, he wrote: Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough with work. In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs. Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his mother and sister, in November, he wrote: I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step. All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,--[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote: If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me, and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship nature. And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over. He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide celebrity. Closing, the writer said: As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized world. The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind. An election had taken place during his absence--an election which gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote: Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of you. Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him: “He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking for Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk, writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little. I asked him if he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't.” Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not have been out of character with either of the men. LXXXVIII. “THE GILDED AGE” Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written: “Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars in engagements recorded for you,” and he named a list of towns ranging geographically from Boston to St. Paul. But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath): “When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I haven't any intention of yelling at any price.” Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without food, he said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers. He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return. Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he urged annexation. “We must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to specify the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.” We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train. We can give them lecturers! I will go myself. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need! “Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?” His success in England became an incentive to certain American institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or but little later, said: “Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past fifty years.” So he was beginning to be “discovered” in high places. It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place. The little family had comparatively good health. Their old friends were stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all certain of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little while ago, remembering, said: “The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories.” Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity of ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 'The Gilded Age'. A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural development. At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399 pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before the early flush of enthusiasm waned. Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, “in the superstition,” as Mark Twain long afterward declared, “that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent ones.”--[The reader may be interested in the division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV, XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII, XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX, and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided. There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.] The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good reading. Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating, or at least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before Clemens had written to Orion: Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property. But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story. Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly. Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of the tale remain divisions rather than unity. As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. Whether this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not justified. Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There could be no poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed her future, taken away her life. The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth. LXXXIX. PLANNING A NEW HOME Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine, sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, sloping down to a pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. They were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote: Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by sliding around on his feet.... For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving us the same prismatic effect. This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description, given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in 'Following the Equator', in more extended form. In that book he likens an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision: “When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume.” It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all, though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost. The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses of that period were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square, typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was the result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture has lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine that Potter's “English violet” order of design, as he himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible amount of room. Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes), while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday. XC. A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man, and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he could make no use of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years' struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note commented: How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly and odiously out of the question. Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave, long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment. However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us. Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know it; he wasn't disturbed. In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr. Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor as mine. They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote: We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor, our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street). Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west. I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back. I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time. Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “It is perfectly discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.” It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent letter she says: I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr. Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had seen Mr. Home do. I remember I wanted so much to see him float out of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord Dunraven said he had seen him do many times. But Mr. Home had been very ill, and said his power had left him. My great regret was that we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits. Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a word on any subject. “The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met,” Clemens once wrote. “Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all the while, except now and then when he answered a question.” At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide celebrity. Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, “Excuse me, I have an engagement,” and without further ceremony, she went off to meet it. This would have been doubtful etiquette in America. Lord Houghton told a number of delightful stories. He told them in French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs. Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it wore on Mrs. Clemens. She delighted in the English cordiality and culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying. Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness. In the end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for Scotland. On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place such as Mark Twain always loved to describe. In a letter to Mrs. Langdon he wrote: For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date, say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this moment. They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one. But this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival. Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there. He learned his address, and that he was still a practising physician. He walked around to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known. Dr. Brown came forthwith, and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring treatment. The association did not end there. For nearly a month Dr. Brown was their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new friends along. Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a following throughout Christendom. He was an unpretentious sovereign. Clemens once wrote of him: His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever known. Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love that filled his heart. He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people. It has been told of him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look. “Who was it?” asked his companion. “Some one you know?” “No,” he said. “A dog I don't know.” He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite a year and a half old. He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy. In a collection of Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period. In one place he says: Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a century! And in another place: I am attending the wife of Mark Twain. His real name is Clemens. She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes! Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in their play with grown-ups. They played “bear,” and the “bear” (which was a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of fear. Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him. He always carried a basket of grapes for his patients. His guests brought along books to read while they waited. When he stopped for a call he would say: “Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population.” There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite escape social affairs. There were teas and luncheons and dinners with the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce. They were very gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first wanderings. August 24th she wrote to her sister: We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as indeed they never did]. They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I. read the story of his doom. Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days. Then they were in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris, sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home. Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time. I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote]. I suppose what makes me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London another month. There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will lose his copyright. And then his friends feel that it will be better for him to lecture in London before his book is published, not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable reputation. I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to stay.... The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going home. It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and then. Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to regard her as altogether of another race and kind. XCI. A LONDON LECTURE Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few nights in London before starting. He would then accompany his little family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and protect his copyright. This plan was carried out. In a communication to the Standard, October 7th, he said: SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing subject. And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable intentions. I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is absolutely necessary at this juncture. I feel and know that I am equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by lecturing upon it. I have saved many communities in this way. I have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength. Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your obedient servant, MARK TWAIN. A day later the following announcement appeared: QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS, HANOVER SQUARE. MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that MR. MARK TWAIN WILL DELIVER A LECTURE OF A HUMOROUS CHARACTER, AS ABOVE, ON MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873, AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th, WEDNESDAY “ “ 15th, THURSDAY “ “ 16th, FRIDAY “ “ 17th, At Eight o'Clock, AND SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th, At Three o'Clock. SUBJECT: “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish matter of interest. STALLS, 5s. UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s. The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public. Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege. The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note: WELCOME TO A LECTURER “'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves.” 'Twas said By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head: By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again: Therefore, “go with me, friends, to bless this Twain.” --Punch. Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London for Mark Twain. On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England. The subject was “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” the old lecture with which he had made his first great successes. He was not introduced. He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the character of a manager announcing a disappointment. Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present. He paused and loud murmurs arose from the audience. He lifted his hand and they subsided. Then he added, “I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present, and will now give his lecture.” Whereupon the audience roared its approval. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was a regal one. For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their “fellow savages.” It was a lecture event wholly without precedent. The lectures of Artemus Ward,--[“Artemus the delicious,” as Charles Reade called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his “piece” in Egyptian Hall. The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with laughter. There was something magical about it. Every sentence was a surprise. He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily when most effectively. Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his Italian pianist--“a count in his own country, but not much account in this”--who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an “affecting incident” that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on his panorama of the Far West. The music stormed on-we could see only lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we heard-it was all we heard “and, she fainted in Reginald's arms.” His tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was inimitable. And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway, Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch. On no occasion in his own country had he won such a complete triumph. The papers for a week devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment. The Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text. The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures: They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a criterion. The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms.... At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion: “Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this suffocating atmosphere. I simply wish to say that this is the last lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return from America, four weeks from now. I only wish to say (here Mr. Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very grateful. I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world and be received so handsomely as I have been. I simply thank you.” The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of “Cracking jokes,” gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture methods of the new American humorist. With the promise of speedy return, he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party (October 21st) set sail for home. In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him: We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a span and a whisper would bridge the distance. So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-year, that of Dr. Brown was the most present, the most tender. XCII. FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS Orion Clemens records that he met “Sam and Livy” on their arrival from England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library Association sent up his card “four times,” in the hope of getting a chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance. Orion himself was by this time engaged in various projects. He was inventing a flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field. This great blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over the dirty proof, made him gasp. They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet, the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately. Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth! To what heights had this printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate. So far as is known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.] Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence. He gave the “Roughing It” address, this time under the title of “Roughing It on the Silver Frontier,” and if his audiences were any less enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of that day have left no record of it. It was the height of the season now, and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London. The Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments, as before; were besieged by callers. Afternoons one was likely to find him in “Poets' Corner” of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others--frankly rioting in his bold fancies. Charles Warren Stoddard was in London at the time, and acted as his secretary. Stoddard was a gentle poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him. His only complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous yarns. Clemens once said: “Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie there on the couch and snore. Otherwise, as a secretary, he was perfect.” The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter of this period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's “Evenings.”]--He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of that now forgotten farce. The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the earldom of Durham. This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had “somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents.” Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds: During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he said to me: “I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald's office. There is nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation, not in the same family at all. But I'll tell you what: if you'll put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to him.” It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen sometimes. The “Rightful Earl of Durham” continued to send letters for a long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish his claim. No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it. Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book. Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family. Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford, of California. In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his optimistic and practical psychologies. Through them he lifted himself out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to others. His “White Cross Library” had a wide reading and a wide influence; perhaps has to this day. But in 1873 Mulford had not found the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming: Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you deserve to be. I can't ask this on the score of any past favors, for there have been none. I have not always spoken of you in terms of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due, I suppose, in part to an envious spirit. I am simply human. Some people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of those more successful. I can't. They are divine; I am not. It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge, to get him a hearing for his work. He adds: I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from yours. Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right service.... Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation. Certainly, if I was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier than ever I did before. I have occasionally thought of London Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever. Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal more, no doubt, for that was his way. Mulford came up, as he had prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he had contemplated. Years after he was one day found drifting off the shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead. Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second London lecture period. His response to the toast of the “Ladies,” delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was the sensational event of the evening. He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner, whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the finale, when the welcome would be “none the less hearty,” and bespoke his attendance for any future dinners. Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of diminishing. Early in January he wrote to Twichell: I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large enough. I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall and wonders that I could fill it so long. I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can come to pass in so uncertain a world as this. In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's paintings at the Royal Academy: Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights and dusks in the “Challenge” and the “Combat,” and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which. I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a cartoon for Punch. It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a pedestal in the center of the room. I suggested that some of Landseer's best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning attitudes. He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at home, where all was going well. The Gilded Age had been issued a day or two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition. By the end of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to 40,000 a month later. The new house was progressing, though it was by no means finished. Mrs. Clemens was in good health. Little Susy was full of such American activities as to earn the name of “The Modoc.” The promise of the year was bright. XCIII. THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say. It was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure of the collaborated novel. Warner had known it as the name of an obscure person, or perhaps he had only heard of it. At all events, it seemed a good one for the character and had been adopted. But behold, the book had been issued but a little while when there rose “out of the vasty deeps” a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person. He was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old. He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission to look at the book. Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently arrived. The visitor rose and introduced himself. “My name is Eschol Sellers,” he said. “You have used it in one of your publications. It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule. My people wish me to sue you for $10,000 damages.” He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to be done; he must be satisfied. Bliss agreed to recall as many of the offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates. He contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the offending Eschol. It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several branches. This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his fiction namesake. He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer and an antiquarian. He was said to have been a grandson of the famous painter, Rembrandt Peale. Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter. The irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally. Following it with a letter of explanation, he added: “I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave you for one day.'” But Redpath was a persistent devil. He used arguments and held out inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there during February. Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his tormentor: “Why don't you congratulate me? I never expect to stand on a lecture platform again after Thursday night.” Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to Hartford just at this period. Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to welcome them. In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors to prepare something which canvassers could handle. “Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,” he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold right along, “just like the Bible.” On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book which would sell straight along, like the Bible. It was to be called “Twelve Memorable Murders.” They had dreamed two or three fortunes by the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there. “We never killed a single soul,” Howells said once to the writer of this memoir. Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that. He offered all sorts of inducements. You will find us the most reasonable people in the world. We had thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles Perkins and wife another. Only those--simply members of our family they are. But I'll close the door against them all, which will “fix” all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to climb in the back window than nothing. And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please, talk when you please, read when you please. A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come to Hartford to live. Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000. You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you? Come! Will one of you boys buy that house? Now, say yes. Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says, the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least, for the old group that made them no longer assembles there. Hartford about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas. It was the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in either direction rested there. It is said that travelers arriving in America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara Falls and Mark Twain. But the Falls had no such recent advertising advantage as that spectacular success in London. Visitors were apt to begin in Hartford. Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed with great rejoicing. They visited and ate around at one place and another among that pleasant circle of friends. But they were happiest afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, “soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch,” says Howells, “while we both talked, and talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.” Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, “the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over again.” XCIV. BEGINNING “TOM SAWYER” The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house once more in the hands of the architect and builders. It was costing a vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land. Mrs. Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly remunerative, and would be more so. They were justified in living in ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they could have lived for the rest of their days! Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown: Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce him and prove him. In my opinion he don't exist. I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago, and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me. Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed. Every mail brought great bundles of letters that sang his praises. Robert Watt, who had translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among his people. Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'. All the world seemed ready to do him honor. Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one. Bores stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories. Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of the press. Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name. Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from his daily mail. Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he prepared a “form” letter of reply: DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound judgment. Yours truly, S. L. C. Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts and proposals of schemes. Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises before the first eggs were hatched. Orion Clemens was as delightful a character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial now and then to Mark Twain. We may gather something of this from a letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period: I can't “encourage” Orion. Nobody can do that conscientiously, for the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off on some new wild-goose chase. Would you encourage in literature a man who the older he grows the worse he writes? I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him. I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and activities of a hen farm. If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that. I can do it every day and all day long. But one can't “encourage” quicksilver; because the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there. No, I am saying too much. He does stick to his literary and legal aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the fact that it is a pension. He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of it. Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'. The success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and the rest. He had recognized these things as material--inviting material it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin the fabric of youth. He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house--overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below. Vines were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there was a tiny fireplace for chilly days. To Twichell, of his new retreat, Clemens wrote: It is the loveliest study you ever saw. It is octagonal, with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it. He worked steadily there that summer. He would go up mornings, after breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon. Other members of the family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they blew a horn. Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read to the assembled family. He felt the need of audience and approval. Usually he earned the latter, but not always. Once, when for a day he put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval. His voice lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak: “Youth, let's walk a little,” she said. The “Undertaker's Love Story” is still among the manuscripts of that period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.--[This tale bears no relation to “The Undertaker's Story” in Sketches New and Old.] The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily. Clemens wrote Dr. Brown: I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently have been so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing.... On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of. He incloses some photographs in this letter. The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of the farm-house. On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her German nurse-maid. I am sitting behind them. Mrs. Crane is in the center. Mr. Crane next to her. Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby. Her Irish nurse stands at her back. Then comes the table waitress, a young negro girl, born free. Next to her is Auntie Cord (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self- satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background, under the archway, you glimpse my study. The “new baby,” “Bay,” as they came to call her, was another little daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household. In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy. There is nothing selfish about the Modoc. She is fascinated with the new baby. The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an Indian. She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys, and guinea-hens on the place. Yesterday, as she marched along the winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can look over the Modoc's head. The devotion of these vassals has been purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc, attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes. There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens. Howells's “Foregone Conclusion” was running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it. Clemens wrote the author: I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do. If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter Scott's artificialities shall continue to live. At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane. These two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in which they were mutually interested. They had portable-hammock arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and discussed through summer afternoons. The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest. Also there were certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and reread. 'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the Andes were reliable favorites. Mark Twain read not so many books, but read a few books often. Those named were among the literature he asked for each year of his return to Quarry Farm. Without them, the farm and the summer would not be the same. Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox ways. Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky. He made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral history--notes not always quotable in the family circle. Mainly, however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval. In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being “that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of happiness.” Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the margin, “Sound and true.” It was the philosophy which he himself would always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man? Privately printed in 1906.]--In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says: Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on others. Co-operation and organization are essential to our happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being placed upon our appetites. Laws are made to secure this restraint, and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the interest of the individual to regard that of the community. “Correct!” comments Clemens. “He has proceeded from unreasoned selfishness to reasoned selfishness. All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish.” It was a conclusion he logically never departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but one easier to deny than to disprove. On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary declaration of this period. “I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange happenings, and science. And I detest novels, poetry, and theology.” But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion to history and science. His interest in these amounted to a passion. XCV. AN “ATLANTIC” STORY AND A PLAY The reference to “Auntie Cord” in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly. Howells in his Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain Western contributors, says: Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system, not to say the universe. He came first with “A True Story,” one of those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the negro. Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages. Twichell remembers his “mingled astonishment and triumph” when he was invited to send something to the magazine. He was obliged to “send something” once or twice before the acceptance of “A True Story,” the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The “True Story,” he said, with its “realest king of black talk,” won him, and a few days later he wrote again: “This little story delights me more and more. I wish you had about forty of 'em.” And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of the elect. In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said: I inclose also “A True Story,” which has no humor in it. You can pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman's story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle, as she did--and traveled both ways. Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value. Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent newspapers! But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic history. Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years. Even in '74 he had received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly rewarded. “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” was precisely what it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included in Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale, cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought $1,000 on the block. All her children had been sold away from her, but it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly without care. She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was reluctant. One evening, however, when the family sat on the front veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her in conversation. He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact words in which it was set down by him next morning. It gave Mark Twain a chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal. He was always greater at these things than at invention. Auntie Cord's story is a little masterpiece. He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for they were extraordinarily interesting. Two other negroes on the place, John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disagreed on religion, and there were frequent battles in the kitchen. These depressed the mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain. His Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification. He would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife of battle, and hug himself with delight. Sometimes they resorted to missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was preparing for the oven. Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter. Wherever the discussion began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult. Auntie Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard. Auntie Cord was ignorant and dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent. Theology invariably led to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and victuals. How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer warfare! The fun was not all one-sided. An incident of that summer probably furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it did for Mark Twain. Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must like and is willing to get up early to hear. Mark Twain did not care for it. He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from the house to stop it. It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up stealthily with a stout stick. The bird was pouring out its heart, tearing the moonlight to tatters. Stealing up close, Clemens made a vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward a little, and he missed. The stroke and his explosion frightened the fowl, and it started to run. Clemens, with his mind now on the single purpose of revenge, started after it. Around the trees, along the paths, up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the fields, they raced, “pursuer and pursued.” The guinea nor longer sang, and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear. Hour after hour the silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then up again and away. It was like something in a dream. It was nearly breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush. Later in the day Clemens gave orders to Lewis to “kill and eat that guinea-hen,” which Lewis did. Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was served him, he remembered and said: “And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to eat him instead of me.” The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures, gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand. As early as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there, presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S. Densmore and played by John T. Raymond. Goodman immediately wrote Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in San Francisco papers announcements of the play. Of course Clemens would take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance. Then began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor. This in time resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to dispose of his version to Clemens. Clemens did not wait for it to arrive, but began immediately a version of his own. Just how much or how little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now. Howells conveys the impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the character of Sellers as taken from the book. But in a letter still extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says: I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last Wednesday. I believe it will go. The newspapers have been complimentary. It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel Sellers. As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in force. The Warners are as charming as ever. They go shortly to the devil for a year--that is, to Egypt. Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874, declared that “not one line” of Densmore's dramatization was used, “except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.” During the newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for the Hartford Post. This letter was suppressed, but it still exists. In it he says: I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but little of his plot. I do not think there are now twenty sentences of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had already paid him in case the play proved a success. I shall keep my word. This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is undoubtedly in accordance with the facts. That Densmore was fully satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says: “Your letter reached me on the ad, with check. In this place permit me to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this matter.” Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic venture and reap such rewards as might result. Various stories have been told of this matter, most of them untrue. There was no bitterness between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort. Warner very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount to. Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood. Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the start. He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in the management and in the division of spoil. The agent had instructions to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits. Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune was at its flood: One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air, before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in. Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said “He was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream.” Which was a true word. Mark Twain with money was like a child with a heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then presently to throw them all away and begin gathering anew. XCVI. THE NEW HOME The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house “ready,” though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new or improved habitations. The carpenters were still on the lower floor, but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were more or less free from the invader. They had stopped in New York ten days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms at evening. Mrs. Clemens wrote home: We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you all to see it. Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished it: Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform an intelligent function? I have been bully-ragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified. Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man who loathes details with all his heart! But I haven't lost my temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody make her lie down all the time? Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state of affairs, but added, “I would rather fit out three houses and fill them with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'.” Warner was at that moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile. The new home was not entirely done for a long time. One never knows when a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done. But they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that one. So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household. None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere; and these are elusive things to convey in words. We can only see and feel and recognize; we cannot translate them. Even Howells, with his subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom. As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was unlike any other house ever built. People asked him why he built the kitchen toward the street, and he said: “So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the front yard.” But this was probably an after-thought. The kitchen end of the house extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful. It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme. The main entrance faced at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall. In turn, the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory, semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Says Howells: The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies. There, while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, “The ornament of a house is the friends that frequent it,” surely never more appropriately inscribed. There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings. There was a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in winter-time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling snow. The library windows looked out over the valley with the little stream in it, and through and across the tree-tops. At the top of the house was what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and here and there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out upon for the view. Below was a wide, covered veranda, the “ombra,” as they called it, secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on pleasant days. But a house might easily have all these things without being more than usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants. Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may accept his statement. It was unique. It was the home of one of the most unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly and serenely ordered. Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful condition. He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its affairs steadily revolved. If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known. In a way her education had been no less notable than his. She had worked and studied, and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence. Her vision of life had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of practicalities had become firm and sure. In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house, and supervised its economies. Any one of her undertakings was sufficient for one woman, but she compassed them all. No children had more careful direction than hers. No husband had more devoted attendance and companionship. No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler grace, or with greater perfection of detail. When the great ones of the world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion. Says Howells: She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells declared: “She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular intellectual power. I never knew any one quite like her.” Then he added: “Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate, her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be, the most outrageous creature that ever breathed.” Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover the wrong and to repair it only too fully. Then, too, Howells may have meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite sense of decorum. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders. I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of “Oh, Youth!” He was continually doing such things as the “crippled colored uncle,”; partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--“shock” would be too strong a word. And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of her gentle nature. Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a group, he said: You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: “Indeed, I do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument --none!” Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant over some offense of his; perhaps he would say: “Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly pretty soon.” She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would steal over her face. He liked to produce that glow. Yet always his manner toward her was tenderness itself. He regarded her as some dainty bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about with a chair. Their union has been regarded as ideal. That is Twichell's opinion and Howells's. The latter sums up: Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. XCVII. THE WALK TO BOSTON The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places, as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their landscape. Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens wrote: The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden with autumn leaves. And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story. Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage. We have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to rest and left the west balcony to me. There is a shining and most marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful.... There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a sea-shell. But now a muskrat is swimming through it and obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from his shoulders. The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in the grounds discussing the house. Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada habit of pedestrian wandering. Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away almost unnoticed. How many things they talked of in those long walks! They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature and history and politics. Unorthodox discussions they were, illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever. Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from Bloomfield home. It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion. It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from Hartford to Boston. This was early in November. They did not delay the matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain. Clemens wrote Redpath: DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more. We shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow for a low average of pedestrianism. It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge, and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a basket of lunch. The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result. They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road, arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight miles from the starting-point. There was no real hotel at Westford, only a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest. “Also,” says Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, “a sublimely profane hostler whom you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths.” This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to divert the hostler's blasphemy. There was also a mellow inebriate there who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it was a notable evening. Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot. Clemens was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it up. They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach. To Redpath: We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This demonstrates that the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail. Did you have any bets on us? To Howells: Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by us. The next will take place next year. Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect. Howells made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men. He telegraphed to Young's Hotel: “You and Twichell come right up to 37 Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory. Party waiting for you.” They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were waiting. Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind. Howells tells in his book how Clemens, with Twichell, “suddenly stormed in,” and immediately began to eat and drink: I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the rest. The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition; some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time. Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and Aldrich as for her. It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written. It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to “Limerick,” and Hartford to “Dublin.” In it, Twichell has become the “Archbishop of Dublin,” Howells “Duke of Cambridge,” Aldrich “Marquis of Ponkapog,” Clemens the “Earl of Hartford.” It was too whimsical and delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.] A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter. He said: “It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the Republic a thing of the past.” What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion. To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added: Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share. I have tried hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a shining success of it. XCVIII. “OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI” Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic, specifically something for the January number. Clemens cudgeled his brains, but finally declared he must give it up: Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to go to work and do that something, but it's no use. I find I can't. We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head won't go. Two hours later he sent another hasty line: I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number, for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house. He said, “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” I hadn't thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say? Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought. He had come from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain could put into such a series. Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his chief claims to immortality. His first number was in the nature of an experiment. Perhaps, after all, the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers. “Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom,” he wrote, and awaited the result. The “result” was that Howells expressed his delight: The piece about the Mississippi is capital. It almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it. I don't think I shall meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion. The sketch of the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there was more of it. I want the sketches, if you can make them, every month. Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture. He was fairly saturated with memories. He was writing on the theme that lay nearest to his heart. Within ten days he reported that he had finished three of the papers, and had begun the fourth. And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don't care to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the only new subject I know of. He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book. Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to get away. He began to temporize and finally backed out. Clemens tried to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but Hay had a new baby at his house just then--“three days old, and with a voice beyond price,” he said, offering it as an excuse for non-acceptance. So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years. Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic, constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time. In some respects they are his best literature of any time. As pictures of an intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long, they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day they were penned. In them the atmosphere of, the river and its environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced with what is no less than literary necromancy. Not only does he make you smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe. On the appearance of the first number John Hay wrote: “It is perfect; no more nor less. I don't see how you do it,” and added, “you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you.” Howells wrote: You are doing the science of piloting splendidly. Every word interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it. He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself. Once he said: If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual fact and character in the thing and give things in detail. All that belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly historical. Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn it off as if into my sympathetic ear. Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to “paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it.” The “Old Times” papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic. They were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form in Canada. They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the latter could be placed on sale. It so happened that in the January Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on “Spiritualism,” which brought such humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press. Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at Quarry Farm: While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers. The awful humiliation of it unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse. XCIX. A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later. At all events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to Orion Clemens. In the latter he says: I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon easily acquire a fine facility in its use. I saw the thing in Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it. He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt is a very creditable performance. With his usual enthusiasm over an innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and proclaims its advantages. This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved: You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing. I notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters & punctuation marks. I am simply using you for a target to bang at. Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it just right. In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to see it perform. In the same article he states that he was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside. The first type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.] The new enthusiasm ran its course and died. Three months later, when the Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he replied that he had entirely stopped using it. The typewriter was not perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily. He declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him “want to swear.” He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway. Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a side-saddle. But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in due time he brought it back. Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this time was lost. What eventually became of the machine is not history. One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about the end of that year. It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there; and Aldrich, and the rest of that group. “Don't you dare to refuse the invitation,” said Howells, and naturally Clemens didn't, and wrote back: I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take breakfast with me in the morning. I will have a good room for you and a fire. Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home late at night or something like that? That sort of thing arouses Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily. Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day. Aldrich and Howells were not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the old-fashioned black “string” tie, a Western survival), so they made him a present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford. Next day he wrote: You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful --Mrs. Clemens. For months--I may even say years--she has shown an unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also getting so far as to threaten it. When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being near to a door, went without, perceiving danger. It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more to the earlier mode. Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of Clemens that night, for his photograph. Clemens, returning to Hartford, put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea of sending one a week for a year. Then he concluded that this was too slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to “His Grace of Ponkapog.” Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested. “The police,” he said, “are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort.” On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings. Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was known to the police as Mark Twain, alias “The Jumping Frog,” a well-known California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to Ponkapog to face his victim. This letter was signed “T. Bayleigh, Chief of Police,” and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the post-office had been blown up. The jolly farce closed there. It was the sort of thing that both men enjoyed. Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western mining incident and environment. He sent the manuscript to Clemens for “expert” consideration and advice. Clemens wrote him at great length and in careful detail. He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the most brilliant of men. Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said: “Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and humorous sayings. None has equaled him, certainly none has surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of his fancy. Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes, he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell-you will see.” Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, “I hope not.” “Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset.”--[North American Review, September, 1906.] C. RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC. The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many people as could crowd into the Opera House. Raymond had reached the perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw the play and the actor at their best. Kate Field played the part of Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers as any playwright or actor that America has produced. His name was William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of Secret Service and of the dramatic “Sherlock Holmes” got a fair public start. Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars which tided him through his period of dramatic education. Their faith in his ability was justified. Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first “Sellers-Raymond” night. At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the author of the play, who was supposed to be present. He was not there in person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read: MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to add my hearty welcome also, through this note. I cannot come to the theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so touching about your acting that I can't stand it. (I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would prefer it if they were rights and lefts.) And then there is another thing. I have always taken a pride in earning my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening myself upon the spoils of my brethren! Can I support such grief as this? (This is literary emotion, you understand. Take the money at the door just the same.) Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond, but as for me let me stay at home and blush. Yours truly, MARK. The play was equally successful wherever it went. It made what in that day was regarded as a fortune. One hundred thousand dollars is hardly too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor. Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way. The finer side, the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook. Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created a much greater part than Mark Twain had written. Doubtless from the point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was naturally obnoxious to Clemens. In course of time their personal relations ceased. Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley. In reply to an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven there by lack of bread. But he added: By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack of bread-among Father Hawley's flock. He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is a sample: I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did. I mean I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me; there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells “kow” with a large “K.” Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow. He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation, was spelled down on the word “chaldron,” which he spelled “cauldron,” as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as authority gave that form as second choice. Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a paper on “Universal Suffrage,” which is still remembered by the surviving members of that time. A paragraph or two will convey its purport: Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever; he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women. The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev. Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner, and Twichell, with others of their kind. Clemens had been elected after his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper on the “License of the Press.” The club met alternate Mondays, from October to May. There was one paper for each evening, and, after the usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion. Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it had not previously known. His papers were serious in their purpose he always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry. Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain. In thought-transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest awakened and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we call them now. In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently happened that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these are things familiar to us all. A more startling example of thought-communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the subject before. (He was always having these vehement interests--rages we may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads, inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or progress, or reform.) Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, “suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp.” The idea was that the time was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the Nevada silver mines. It seemed to him that the person best qualified for the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille. He had not heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge him to take up the idea. He prepared the letter, going fully into the details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a publishing standpoint. Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's. To a visitor who was present he said: “Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal.” He stated what he believed was in the letter. Then he opened it and showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed. In an article on “Mental Telegraphy” (he invented the name) he relates this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere he records other such happenings. It was one of the “mysteries” in which he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive one. The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded. Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended visit. De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully published a year later. Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with him. Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he would come, and for as long as he would stay. Clemens dropped his own affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were literary he found them a publisher. He did this for Joaquin Miller and for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a home. The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it. The printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter. To Twichell he said: “His quibbling was fatal. Innocent or guilty, he should have made an unqualified statement in the beginning.” Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself was on the witness-stand. The tension was very great; the excitement was painful. Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced. The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it. They are all forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead. Any feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while. Howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended, and was tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the event. Says Howells: He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it. It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration. The Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited to Cambridge for the celebration. Only Clemens could go, which in the event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided to wait for it at Cambridge. Apparently it did not occur to them that the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance. They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only mockeries now. It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in search of some sort of a conveyance. They tramped around in the mud and raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and occupants were inclined to jeer at them. Clemens was taken with an acute attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage. Their effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop. The students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race. They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment and cheers. Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery mud, and soon “dropped by the wayside.” “I am glad,” says Howells, “I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me.” They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth. They proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had been to Concord and returned. But it was no use. Their statements were flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces. Howells recalls this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual visit to Concord would have been. Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration. He had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more successful kind. Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to Hartford. He wrote it to Howells: Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by rail at 7.30 A.M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M., seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an hour and a half; then took 9 P.M. train, sat down in a smoking-car, and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M. Thinks he had simply a glorious time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world. He would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and me. CI. CONCLUDING “TOM SAWYER”--MARK TWAIN's “EDITORS” Meantime the “inspiration tank,” as Clemens sometimes called it, had filled up again. He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily. The family remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he brought the story to a close. On the 5th he wrote Howells: I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults. He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the wisdom of serialization. “By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for it.” From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures. Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story. It was a tremendous favor to ask, he said, and added, “But I know of no other person whose judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely. Don't hesitate to say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need to blush if you said yes.” “Send on your MS.,” wrote Howells. “You've no idea what I may ask you to do for me some day.” But Clemens, conscience-stricken, “blushed and weakened,” as he said. When Howells insisted, he wrote: But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows: dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely if you chose. I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play Tom and Huck. Howells in his reply urged. Clemens to do the playwriting himself. He could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter into the spirit of another man's story. Clemens did begin a dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed. Mrs. Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone. He carried the manuscript over to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's subsequent letter set them at rest. He wrote that he had sat up till one in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible to leave off. It is altogether the best boy story I ever read. It will be an immense success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story; grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you give the wrong key to it. Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified. Clemens was delighted. He wrote concerning a point here and there, one inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word. Howells's reply left no doubt: I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children. It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of reform and tells how they comb him “all to thunder.” In the original, “They comb me all to hell,” says Huck; which statement, one must agree, is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say. Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic: Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her tongue, “Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?” Then I had to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little one-sided? The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year. The children's health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin. The balls would not stay on the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles. It reminded him of the old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same uncertainty of play. It was his delight, after he had become accustomed to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his suffering and his frantic effort to score. CII. “SKETCHES NEW AND OLD” The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was issued that autumn. “The Jumping Frog,” which he had bought from Webb, was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance in its literal rendition of the French idiom. One example will suffice here. It is where the stranger says to Smiley, “I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.” Says the French, retranslated: “Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog” (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune grenouille). (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no judge.--M. T.) “Possible that you not it saw not,” said Smiley; “possible that you you comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing; possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but an amateur. Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras.” He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also a selection from the “Memoranda” and Buffalo Express contributions, and he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never hitherto appeared. True Williams illustrated the book, but either it furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort, for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work. Among the new matter in the book were-“Some Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls,” in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific excursion into a place at some time occupied by men. It is the most pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any. Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also interest. Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this volume. He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that meant to any book the difference between success and failure. Howells's review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point. It was highly commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been, or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter. Yet after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors. We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except “The Jumping Frog,” and possibly “A True Story” (and the latter was altogether out of place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its contents will escape oblivion. The greater number of the sketches, as Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have been allowed to die. Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain. He particularly called attention to “A True Story,” which the reviewers, at the time of its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy people. Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume, and of its “perfect fidelity to the tragic fact.” He urged the reader to turn to it again, and to read it as a “simple dramatic report of reality,” such as had been equaled by no other American writer. It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating against literary ownership by statute of limitation. He did this in the form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership limited to a “beneficent term of forty-two years.” Generally this was regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's jokes it was founded on reason and justice. The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led him to still further flights. He began a determined crusade for international copyright laws. It was a transcendental beginning, but it contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion. In this first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to pirate the books of any foreign author. He wrote to Howells, urging him to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this petition. I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at. I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush, but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go on stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, “American lawmakers do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,”.... If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around. The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in the United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end of last volume.] CIII. “ATLANTIC” DAYS It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms. His paper on “Universal Suffrage” had sounded a first note, and his copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to say that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, “The Curious Republic of Gondour.” In this article was developed the idea that the voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where this plan had been established: It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten. So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be specified by statute.... The victory was complete. The new law was framed and passed. Under it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes, even though he owned no property. The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward enlightenment and industry. No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was the author of this fable. It contained almost no trace of his usual literary manner. Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name, as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume. Howells urged him to follow up the “Gondour” paper; to send some more reports from that model land. But Clemens was engaged in other things by that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms. He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner. A certain car line had recently adopted the “punch system,” and posted in its cars, for the information of passengers and conductor, this placard: A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare, A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents Fare, A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare, For Coupon And Transfer, Punch The Tickets. Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said: “Brooks, it's poetry. By George, it's poetry!” Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice, giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result: Conductor, when you receive a fare, Punch in the presence of the passenjare! A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare. Punch in the presence of the passenjare! CHORUS Punch, brothers! Punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare! It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular. Different papers had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other examples, as far as perpetrated. Clemens discovered the lines, and on one of their walks recited them to Twichell. “A Literary Nightmare” was written a few days later. In it the author tells how the jingle took instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain; how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say: Punch in the presence of the passenjare. He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is, Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results. It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day. Its publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry all over the world. Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each other to “Punch with care.” The Longfellow ladies had it by heart. Boston was devastated by it. At home, Howells's children recited it to him in chorus. The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an epidemic. It was transformed into other tongues. Even Swinburne, the musical, is said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'. * A St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this chorus: Pungite, fratres, pungite, Pungite cum amore, Pungite pro vectore, Diligentissime pungite. * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR Ayant ete paye, le conducteur Percera en pleine vue du voyageur, Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert, Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire, Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur. CHOEUR Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc. CIV. MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes: I “caught it” for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her coffee, when it was a “good deal better than we get at home.” I “caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I “caught it” once more for personating that drunken Colonel James. I “caught it” for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: “How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--” “Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a man who--” She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because it saved the babies. Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully, perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her. He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving, accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and turned to find that the door was open! There was only one door to the bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick, and sat down for a few moments to consider. He decided to assume that she was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had nothing on his conscience. He attempted it, but without success. Half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. The humor of it struck him. “Livy,” he said, “did it sound like that?” “Of course it did,” she said, “only worse. I wanted you to hear just how it sounded.” “Livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune.” Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender loyalty to her as the “most moving quality of his most faithful soul.” It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the discarded manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are amusing--some of them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed. Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories “unavailable” for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference. That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a literary disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake. Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to become a book, “The Second Advent,” a story which opens with a very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery and literary disorder. There is another, “The Autobiography of a Damn Fool,” a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript, thought it especially good. “Livy wouldn't have it,” he said, “so I gave it up.” There is another, “The Mysterious Chamber,” strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. This he thought sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device. Clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall. “Captain Stormfield” lay under the ban for many a year, though never entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done even in this day of wider toleration. It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She became his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded, clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would have been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt. LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world. Every day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression will continue on to the end. Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed. So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades! VOLUME II, Part 1: 1875-1886 CV. MARK TWAIN AT FORTY In conversation with John Hay, Hay said to Clemens: “A man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. From that time forward he begins to descend. If you have any great undertaking ahead, begin it now. You will never be so capable again.” Of course this was only a theory of Hay's, a rule where rules do not apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of individualities. John Hay did as great work after forty as ever before, so did Mark Twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and public honor to the very end. Yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and achievement. His name was on every lip; in whatever environment observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark Twain. “As Mark Twain says,” or, “You know that story of Mark Twain's,” were universal and daily commonplaces. It was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure of immortality. He was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal ingenuity can invent. His ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous exhibition of the human species on undress parade. True, there were hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually unwarranted, often impertinent. Politicians, public speakers, aspiring writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to their abilities and projects. Young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand puns, and invited Mark Twain to father this terrific progeny in book form for a share of the returns. But the list is endless. He said once: “The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.” Even P. T. Barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was perpetually trying to grind it on Mark Twain's reputation; in other words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize “The Greatest Show on Earth.” There were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be and genuine. A bright man in Duluth sent him an old Allen “pepper-box” revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine Allen which Bemis had lost on that memorable Overland buffalo-hunt. Mark Twain enjoyed that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. There were letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description; curious letters even from friends. Reginald Cholmondeley, that lovely eccentric of Condover Hall, where Mr. and Mrs. Clemens had spent some halcyon days in 1873, wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to meet him. Cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to improve his collection. Once he wrote Clemens asking him to collect for him two hundred and five American specimens, naming the varieties and the amount which he was to pay for each. Clemens was to catch these birds and bring them over to England, arriving at Condover on a certain day, when there would be friends to meet him, of course. Then there was a report which came now and then from another English castle--the minutes of a certain “Mark Twain Club,” all neatly and elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another eccentric; for there was no Mark Twain Club, the reports being just the mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[In Following the Equator Clemens combined these two pleasant characters in one story, with elaborations.] Letters came queerly addressed. There is one envelope still in existence which bears Clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette likeness, the work of some talented artist. “Mark Twain, United States,” was a common address; “Mark Twain, The World,” was also used; “Mark Twain, Somewhere,” mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and “Mark Twain, Anywhere,” found its way to Hartford in due season. Then there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time), mailed by Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson, addressed, “Mark Twain, God Knows Where.” It found him after traveling half around the world on its errand, and in his answer he said, “He did.” Then some one sent a letter addressed, “The Devil Knows Where.” Which also reached him, and he answered, “He did, too.” Surely this was the farthest horizon of fame. Countless Mark Twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period, and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of his generation remains alive. For seventy years longer, perhaps, there will be those who will relate “personal recollections” of Mark Twain. Many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them will become history at last. It is too soon to make history of much of this drift now. It is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples. It happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least elaborated. It is the one about his call on Mrs. Stowe. Twichell's journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it: Mrs. Stowe was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran over early to say good-by. On his return Mrs. Clemens regarded him disapprovingly: “Why, Youth,” she said, “you haven't on any collar and tie.” He said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line: “Herewith receive a call from the rest of me.” Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments, and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat, and boots and be otherwise excused. Col. Henry Watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the Brevoort House, where Murat Halstead, Mark Twain, and himself were present. A reporter sent in a card for Colonel Watterson, who was about to deny himself when Clemens said: “Give it to me; I'll fix it.” And left the table. He came back in a moment and beckoned to Watterson. “He is young and as innocent as a lamb,” he said. “I represented myself as your secretary. I said that you were not here, but if Mr. Halstead would do as well I would fetch him out. I'll introduce you as Halstead, and we'll have some fun.” Now, while Watterson and Halstead were always good friends, they were political enemies. It was a political season and the reporter wanted that kind of an interview. Watterson gave it to him, repudiating every principle that Halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed opinion. Halstead was for hard money and given to flying the “bloody shirt” of sectional prejudice; Watterson lowered the bloody shirt and declared for greenbacks in Halstead's name. Then he and Clemens returned to the table and told frankly what they had done. Of course, nobody believed it. The report passed the World night-editor, and appeared, next morning. Halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the World, denying the interview throughout. The World printed his note with the added line: “When Mr. Halstead saw our reporter he had dined.” It required John Hay (then on the Tribune) to place the joke where it belonged. There is a Lotos Club anecdote of Mark Twain that carries the internal evidence of truth. Saturday evening at the Lotos always brought a gathering of the “wits,” and on certain evenings--“Hens and chickens” nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. On one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a very long poem. One by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted away, until no one remained but Mark Twain. Perhaps he saw the earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. He may have remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive auditor. At all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line. Douglas Taylor, one of the faithful Saturday-night members, said to him later: “Mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?” “Well,” he said, “that young man thought he had a divine message to deliver, and I thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so I stayed with him.” We may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to sacrifice all the others. One might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. But anecdotes are not all of history. These are set down because they reflect a phase of the man and an aspect of his life at this period. For at the most we can only present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting each reader from his fancy construct the rest. CVI. HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE Once that winter the Monday Evening Club met at Mark Twain's home, and instead of the usual essay he read them a story: “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” It was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of “William Wilson” idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the tale, though the allegory is always present. The club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. One of its ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next Sunday if Mark Twain would deliver it to his congregation. Howells welcomed it for the Atlantic, and published it in June. It was immensely successful at the time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered to-day. Now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm. Howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded Clemens to let Osgood bring it out, with “A True Story,” in dainty, booklet form. If the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again. Meantime Tom Sawyer remained unpublished. “Get Bliss to hurry it up!” wrote Howells. “That boy is going to make a prodigious hit.” But Clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the Canadian pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were clamoring at the Atlantic because there was no more to steal. Moncure D. Conway was in America, and agreed to take the manuscript of Sawyer to London and arrange for its publication and copyright. In Conway's Memoirs he speaks of Mark Twain's beautiful home, comparing it and its surroundings with the homes of Surrey, England. He tells of an entertainment given to Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sort of animated jarley wax-works. Clemens and Conway went over as if to pay a call, when presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed. figures. Clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful fashion. He began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an aside, “Bring along that tinshop,” and went on to tell the romance of the knight's achievements. Conway read Tom Sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it. Later, in London, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its publication with Chatto & Windus, thus establishing a friendly business relation with that firm which Mark Twain continued during his lifetime. Clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year, and on the 26th of April, 1876, made his first public appearance on the dramatic stage. It was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. There was genuine dramatic talent in Hartford, and the old play of the “Loan of the Lover,” with Mark Twain as Peter Spuyk and Miss Helen Smith--[Now Mrs. William W. Ellsworth.]--as Gertrude, with a support sufficient for their needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. Mark Twain had in him the making of a great actor. Henry Irving once said to him: “You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a greater actor than a writer.” Yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage. He had too many original literary ideas. He would never have been satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night from week to month, and from month to year. He could not stick to the author's lines even for one night. In his performance of the easy-going, thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it delighted the audience beyond measure. No such impersonation of that. character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. It was repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter, and it could have been put on for a long run. Augustin Daly wrote immediately, offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a “benefit” performance, and again, a few days later, urging acceptance. “Not for one night, but for many.” Clemens was tempted, no doubt. Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would today have had one more claim on immortality. CVII. HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND “GEORGE” Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just then. Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich, Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext or another. No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to play the part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. His dinners were elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and sometimes their wives) gathered. They were happy reunions, those fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich, Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow one seems never to find any more. On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took his son John, then a small boy, with him. John was about six years old at the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other Arabian fancies. On the way over his father said to him: “Now, John, you will see a perfect palace.” They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash off the dust of travel. There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap. “Why,” he said, “they've even got their soap painted!” Next morning he woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor--and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the dining-room, he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal George--setting the breakfast-table. He hurriedly tiptoed back and whispered to his father: “Come quick! The slave is setting the table!” This being the second mention of George, it seems proper here that he should be formally presented. Clemens used to say that George came one day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. He was precisely the sort of character that Mark Twain loved. He had formerly been the body-servant of an army general and was typically racially Southern, with those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go with the best type of negro character. The children loved him no less than did their father. Mrs. Clemens likewise had a weakness for George, though she did not approve of him. George's morals were defective. He was an inveterate gambler. He would bet on anything, though prudently and with knowledge. He would investigate before he invested. If he placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. If he invested in an election, he knew all about the candidates. He had agents among his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with information. He kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at ruinous interest. He buttonholed Mark Twain's callers while he was removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked George and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities. Mrs. Clemens's disapproval of George reached the point, now and then, where she declared he could not remain. She even discharged him once, but next morning George was at the breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. Mrs. Clemens looked at him gravely: “George,” she said, “didn't I discharge you yesterday?” “Yes, Mis' Clemens, but I knew you couldn't get along without me, so I thought I'd better stay a while.” In one of the letters to Howells, Clemens wrote: When George first came he was one of the most religious of men. He had but one fault--young George Washington's. But I have trained him; and now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front door and lie to an unwelcome visitor. George was a fine diplomat. He would come up to the billiard-room with a card or message from some one waiting below, and Clemens would fling his soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge before it reached the front door. The “slave” must have been setting the table in good season, for the Clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. They usually came along about nine o'clock, by which time Howells and John were fairly clawing with hunger. Clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good one. Breakfast and dinner were his important meals. He seldom ate at all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating, talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. Sometimes Mrs. Clemens would say: “Oh, Youth, do come and sit down with us. We can listen so much better.” But he seldom did. At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could never quite equal with his pen. It's the opinion of most people who knew Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius. When Clemens came to Boston the Howells household was regulated, or rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. Mark Twain's personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general attendance of any household. The reader may recall Josh Billings's remark on the subject. Howells tells how they kept their guest to themselves when he visited their home in Cambridge, permitting him to indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how Clemens would take a room at the Parker House, leaving the gas burning day and night, and perhaps arrive at Cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went for a walk. Also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house, smoked during every waking moment, and how Howells, mindful of his insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after he was asleep. Clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. Once, when he arrived in Boston, Howells said: “Clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you.” But he answered: “Oh, that's no good any more. Beer's the thing.” So Howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm. He invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he stretched himself on the bath-room floor. He was a perpetual joy to the Howells family when he was there, even though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone. Mildred Howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. Miss Howells declares that while Mark Twain was their guest she nearly starved because it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and Mrs. Howells, after one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said: “Well, it 'most kills me, but it pays,” a remark which Clemens vastly enjoyed. Howells himself once wrote: Your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping and longing to have you back again.... CVIII. SUMMER LABORS AT QUARRY FARM They went to Elmira, that summer of '76, to be “hermits and eschew caves and live in the sun,” as Clemens wrote in a letter to Dr. Brown. They returned to the place as to Paradise: Clemens to his study and the books which he always called for, Mrs. Clemens to a blessed relief from social obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends. Susy was really growing up. She had had several birthdays, quite grand affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. She was a strange, thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of infinity, for she was religiously taught. Down in the city, one night, there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and Susy was ordered to bed. She said, thoughtfully: “I wish I could sit up all night, as God does.” The baby, whom they still called “Bay,” was a tiny, brown creature who liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song. Clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing Bay in her carriage. Once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it started downhill, gaining speed rapidly. He awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. Before he could overtake the runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. Bay was lying among the stones and her head was bleeding. Hastily binding the wound with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the house, calling for restoratives as he came. It was no serious matter. The little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction. The children were unlike: Susy was all contemplation and nerves; Bay serene and practical. It was said, when a pet cat died--this was some years later--that Susy deeply reflected as to its life here and hereafter, while Bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral. Susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark. Once they bought her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. She was not in the best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her mother said, “Now, Susy, put your thoughts on God,” she answered, “Mama, I can't with those shoes.” Clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. He had given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken another long manuscript. By the middle of August he had written several hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of Tam Sawyer--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, here is a curious phase of genius. The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale, he says: “I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done”--this of the story which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. He did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years. He wrote one short tale, “The Canvasser's Story,” a burlesque of no special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of “blindfold novelettes,” a series of stories to be written by well-known authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last, of inherent misconstruction. The title was to be, “A Murder and a Marriage.” Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day. The Atlantic started its “Contributors' Club,” and Howells wrote to Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject, assuring him that he could “spit his spite” out at somebody or something as if it were a passage from a letter. That was a fairly large permission to give Mark Twain. The paragraph he sent was the sort of thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of Howells's necessity of rejecting it. In the accompanying note he said: Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? I suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so. He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. Yet they were constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water gem. Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and again, and finally said: “I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted.” In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary, that captivating old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. He had been reading diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of the period. The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601. The “conversation,” recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy, vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's “Elizabethan breadth of parlance,” and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which Clemens had “loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.” “I could not bear to burn them,” he declares, “and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them.” In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field. It was written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs. Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a Sunday at Elmira. Gray said: “Print it and put your name to it, Mark. You have never done a greater piece of work than that.” John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a “most exquisite bit of old English morality.” Hay surreptitiously permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated privately, though sparingly, ever since. At one time a special font of antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-made paper. They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day. 1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.--[In a note-book of a later period Clemens himself wrote: “It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not. I once wrote a conversation between Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk. “There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years younger than the boy Beaumont. I built a conversation which could have happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601. I sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender! But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, 'O that we had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one.”] Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year--the year of the Hayes-Tilden campaign. Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life. Before his return to Hartford he announced himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes's letter of acceptance, which, he said, “expresses my own political convictions.” His politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden and Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising. He wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added: “You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr. Tilden's Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag.” He wrote Howells: “If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells's bad place.” Howells was writing a campaign biography of Hayes, which he hoped would have a large sale, and Clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save the country. Howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged Clemens to take the field in the cause. Returning to Hartford, Clemens presided at a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the campaign. All papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy. Yet conditions did not improve. When Howells's book had been out a reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand copies. “There's success for you,” he said. “It makes me despair of the Republic, I can tell you.” Clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for Hayes and damning Tilden till the final vote was cast. In later life he changed his mind about Tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. Sympathy could make--Mark Twain change his mind any time. He stood for the right, but, above all, for justice. He stood for the wronged, regardless of all other things. CIX. THE PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF “TOM SAWYER” Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and could not leave home. As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent admiration of the whole family. Millet was young, handsome, and lively; Clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the “Holy Family,” Clemens called it. Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. She was afraid of losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. Millet went to the city for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him. While Millet was doing his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. He left word with a clerk to tell Millet that he had gone across the street. By and by the artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a success. He tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness, but it never satisfied Millet. The 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' appeared late in December (1876), and immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life, a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. We have already considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain's own boyhood. It is only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in literary form. From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart Tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to “fear God and dread the Sunday-school,” as Howells puts it in his review. As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance, would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this: They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn “pone” stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage and the festooning vines. There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island. Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook. No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it: The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr. Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written: Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of the sea-shore. Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy's story it has not been equaled. Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It. Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember. --[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote: “I have just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It is immense! I read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of honorable and pious people. Once I had to get to one side and have a cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no end to it.... The 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck and Aunt Polly--makes a cross between Dickens's skill and Thackeray's nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original.”] CX. MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE WRITE A PLAY It was the fall and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and collaborated with Mark Twain on the play “Ah Sin,” a comedy-drama, or melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for another venture. Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive invention. He also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor that Mark Twain could furnish. Furthermore, he believed that a play backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages. Clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made. Speaking of their method of working, Clemens once said: “Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect.” Which is hardly a fair statement of the case. They both worked on the play, and worked hard. During the period of its construction Harte had an order for a story which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. It must be delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting at it without a moment's delay. Still he seemed in no haste to begin. The evening passed; bedtime came. Then he asked that an open fire might be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed something to keep him awake. George attended to these matters, and nothing more was heard of Harte until very early next morning, when he rang for George and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of whisky. At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the announcement that his story was complete. That forenoon the Saturday Morning Club met at the Clemens home. It was a young women's club, of which Mark Twain was a sort of honorary member--a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the order of the Monday Evening Club of men, except that the papers read before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in some field of intellectual progress. Bret Harte had agreed to read to them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the story just finished, “Thankful Blossom,” a tale which Mark Twain always regarded as one of Harte's very best. The new play, “Ah Sin,” by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, was put on at Washington, at the National Theater, on the evening of May 7, 1877. It had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors insured a crowded opening. Clemens was unable to go over on account of a sudden attack of bronchitis. Parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the presence of Harte does not seem to have added to his happiness. “I am not very well myself,” he wrote to Clemens. “The excitement of the first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I have is too much for a new beginner.” Nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with Parsloe as Ah Sin--a Chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and entertaining Ah Sin. It was not a great play. It was neither very coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. At the end of each act not only Parsloe, but also the principal members of the company, were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments. When it was over there was a general call for Ah Sin, who came before the curtain and read a telegram. CHARLES T. PARSLOE,--I am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to Washington; but I have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of failure of the play, and the other if successful. Please tell me which I shall send. May be better to put it to vote. MARK TWAIN. The house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than true. J. I. Ford, of the theater management, wrote to Clemens, next morning after the first performance, urging him to come to Washington in person and “wet nurse” the play until “it could do for itself.” Ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and concludes: I inclose notices. Come if you can. “Your presence will be worth ten thousand men. The king's name is a tower of strength.” I have urged the President to come to-night. The play made no money in Washington, but Augustin Daly decided to put it on in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theater, with a company which included, besides Parsloe, Edmund Collier, P. A. Anderson, Dora Goldthwaite, Henry Crisp, and Mrs. Wells, a very worthy group of players indeed. Clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at the end of the third act. “Ah Sin” did not excite much enthusiasm among New York dramatic critics. The houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. It set out on its provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it was heard of no more. Just why “Ah Sin” did not prosper it would not become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. Poorer plays have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. A touch somewhere, a pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved “Ali Sin,” but the pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. Perhaps it still lies in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. Who knows? Or it may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no returning. As between Harte and Clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. In the course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time friendship disappeared. CXI. A BERMUDA HOLIDAY On the 16th of May, 1877, Mark Twain set out on what, in his note-book, he declared to be “the first actual pleasure-trip” he had ever taken, meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other than that of mere enjoyment. He took with him his, friend and pastor, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and they sailed for Bermuda, an island resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day. They did not go to a hotel. Under assumed names they took up quarters in a boarding-house, with a Mrs. Kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether happy in their wanderings through four golden days. Mark Twain could not resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character and incident, just as he had always done. He was impressed with the cheapness of property and living in the Bermuda of that period. He makes special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: “All as beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty dollars each.” To Twichell he remarked: “Joe, this place is like Heaven, and I'm going to make the most of it.” “Mark,” said Twichell, “that's right; make the most of a place that is like Heaven while you have a chance.” In one of the entries--the final one--Clemens says: “Bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways, telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. I propose to spend next year here and no more.” When they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, Twichell made an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark Twain. “Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?” asked Twichell. The daughter answered. “Yes,” she said, “until I'm tired of the name. I know a young man who never talks of anything else.” “Well,” said Twichell, “that gentleman with me is Mark Twain.” The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep sorrow that they had not known it earlier. Twichell promised that he and Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead. On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks, trying to get to New York. She had no cargo and was pretty helpless. Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford paper, telling the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew, on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a “pleasure-excursion!” Clemens dwelt on this fancy: I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn solitudes of the ocean. Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time; one would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out. That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To Twichell he wrote that it was the “joyousest trip” he had ever made: Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four. There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens denounced him for his absence: If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. Clemens would not fail to write about his trip. He could not help doing that, and he began “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” as soon as he landed in Hartford. They were quite what the name would signify--leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. They are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of Bermuda. Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them delightful enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him. The story of “Isaac and the Prophets of Baal” was one that Capt. Ned Wakeman had told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to Aspinwall with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the “Rambling Notes” Wakeman appears as Captain Hurricane Jones, probably a step in the evolution of the later name of Stormfield. The best feature of the series (there were four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the brightest ripple of humor is the reference to Bermuda's mahogany-tree: There was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. I know this to be reliable because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a haze lip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. Such men are all too few. Clemens cared less for these papers than did Howells. He had serious doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with Howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let them all go in. They did not especially advance his reputation, but perhaps they did it no harm. CXII. A NEW PLAY AND A NEW TALE He wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the first time. “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a reality--long-distance communication. His work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one of which he completed without delay. He still had the dramatic ambition, and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely from his own resources. To Howells, in June, he wrote: To-day I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal character an old detective. I skeletoned the first act and wrote the second to-day, and am dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of MS. in seven hours. Seven days later, the Fourth of July, he said: I have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. The first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too. To-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. Never had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest and delight. And just think! I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie. He was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. Even Howells caught his enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it contained told for the Atlantic. But in the end it proved a mistake. Dion Boucicault, when he read the manuscript, pronounced it better than “Ah Sin,” but that was only qualified praise. Actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have Mark Twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't “go.” John Brougham wrote: There is an absolute “embarrassment of riches” in your “Detective” most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable form. The quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the necessary manipulation to extract the gold. In narrative structure the story would be full of life, character, and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its present condition for dramatic representation, and I confess I do not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if I had the time, which on reflection I find I have not) to undertake what, under different circumstances, would be a “labor of love.” Yours sincerely, JOHN BROUGHAM. That was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly. “Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective,” had plenty of good material in it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play, and the situations wouldn't act. Clemens realized that perhaps the drama was not, after all, his forte; he dropped “Simon Wheeler,” lost his interest in “Ah Sin,” even leased “Colonel Sellers” for the coming season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his mind. He had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. One day he picked up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an English story of the thirteenth century by Charlotte M. Yonge, entitled, The Prince and the Page. It was a story of Edward I. and his cousins, Richard and Henry de Montfort; in part it told of the submerged personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as a blind beggar for a period of years. It was a story of a sort and with a setting that Mark Twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative idea. Not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as a prince. He would have them change places in the world, and each learn the burdens of the other's life.--[There is no point of resemblance between the Prince and the Pauper and the tale that inspired it. No one would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other, and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.] The plot presented physical difficulties. He still had some lurking thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince. The old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in Pudd'nhead Wilson) presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had in mind. Finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and personality of Tom Canty, of Offal Court, for those of the son of Henry VIII., little Edward Tudor, more lately sixth English king of that name. This little prince was not his first selection for the part. His original idea had been to use the late King Edward VII. (then Prince of Wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose a prince among the slums of modern London, and have his proud estate denied and jeered at by a modern mob. He felt that he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the proper time and prince, till he came to little Edward, who was too young--but no matter, he would do. He decided to begin his new venture in story form. He could dramatize it later. The situation appealed to him immensely. The idea seemed a brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and detail of that delightful old time. He put away all thought of cheap, modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most entertaining and instructive tales of old English life. He decided to be quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old London very carefully. He bought a pocket-map which he studied in the minutest detail. He wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer; then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. It was a long wait, as usual. He did not touch it again for more than three years. CXIII. TWO DOMESTIC DRAMAS Some unusual happenings took place that summer of 1877. John T. Lewis (colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of Auntie Cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of Mrs. Clemens's sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles (“Charley”) Langdon, her little daughter Julia, and her nurse-maid. They were in a buggy, and their runaway horse was flying down East Hill toward Elmira to certain destruction, when Lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon, saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill. The Clemens and Crane families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe. Everybody contributed in rewarding Lewis. He received money ($1,500) and various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also, what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold watch. Clemens, writing a full account to Dr. Brown of the watch, says: And if any scoffer shall say, “behold this thing is out of character,” there is an inscription within which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer. In another paragraph he says: When Lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives by a feat which I think is the most marvelous I can call to mind, when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked. They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too, and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past seven years that he has occupied this farm. Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of rare native loftiness: But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed. Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and Langdon households, for twenty-nine years. When he was too old to work there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers. So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace. Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death: He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told stories, and was able to eat almost everything. Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite impossible to give in his home. He died on his way there. Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his great deed. A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford. There had been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and no longer wished to marry her. The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time being. He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway. Finally his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have satisfied even Tom Sawyer. He asked Twichell to procure a license for the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room. He arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with Lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. He had already made an appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a “matter of business,” and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt, that it was something which would lead to profitable employment. When he came in Clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her; how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (Clemens) was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life. But the young man was not enthusiastic. He was a Swede and slow of action. He resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and in the end refused to do so. Then came the dramatic moment. Clemens quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. There was a brief discussion of this point. Finally Clemens gave him five minutes to make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting, and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge. The young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for him to get a license and a preacher. But Clemens stepped to the door of the bath-room, opened it, and let out Twichell, who had been sweltering there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being August. The delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the scene, dressed for the occasion. Behind her ranged the rest of the servants and a few invited guests. Before the young man knew it he had a wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. It ended with a gay supper and festivities. Then Clemens started them handsomely by giving each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and prosperously ever after. Some years later Mark Twain based a story on this episode, but it was never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished. CXIV. THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G. Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Clemens had attended a number of the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had provided a part of the entertainment. It is only fair to say that his after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. But on this particular occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual, startling, something altogether unheard of. When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. This time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. It was a sort of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. It was an imaginary presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had imposed themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory fashion. At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. A feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did not show his effort to any one beforehand. He wanted its full beauty to burst upon the entire company as a surprise. It did that. Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost contributors and dearest friends. Here, he said, was “a humorist who never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke.” Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to deliver his speech. I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures, sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good- fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctness across this abyss of time. William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme. “And then,” to quote Howells, “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us.” After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end. And somehow he did it, while “there fell a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.” Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that Bishop didn't last long. It was not many sentences after his first before he began to hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile. The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up. Howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom: “Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow.” He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford in a writhing agony of spirit. He believed that he was ruined forever, so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake could never be wholly repaired. The fact that certain papers quoted the speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. But perhaps his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon Howells. He put his heart into a brief letter: MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances. I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages now. So it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion? It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it. The whole matter is a dreadful subject. Let me drop it here--at least on paper. Penitently yours, MARK So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. But Howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope. “It was a fatality,” Howells said. “One of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why.” Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. Howells declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain's work from the Atlantic. You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world. Especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well. I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this thing happened than I could before. It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them. Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. Emerson had not been offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so completely shut him away. Longfellow's letter made light of the whole matter. The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief. A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it in the morning papers is another. One needs the lamplight and the scenery. These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious aspect. I do not believe that anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not, and Holmes tells me that he was not. So I think you may dismiss the matter from your mind, without further remorse. It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very much. Holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle. It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel wounded by your playful use of my name. I have heard some mild questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open question. Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly defended it against the charge of impropriety. More than this, one of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly delighted with it. Miss Emerson's letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England fashion did much to lift the gloom. DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,--At New Year's our family always meets, to spend two days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with him Mr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sister said, “Oh, let father write!” but my mother said, “No, don't wait for him. Go now; don't stop to pick that up. Go this minute and write. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so.” First let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr. Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when she read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you will want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We were disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seen over Mark Twain's signature. It has made us like the man, and we have delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeat certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to enjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seem good or funny, and he said, “No, it was unfortunate. Still some of those quotations were very good”; and he gave them with relish and my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he couldn't understand them like his children. My mother read it lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my father it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think it doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much- liked author, and restores our former feeling about him. ELLEN T. EMERSON. The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas Clemens wrote to Howells: I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I'm going to try to-morrow. How could I ever---- Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all his work must be contemplated with respect. So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said: “I find it gross, coarse--well, I needn't go on with particulars. I don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don't know.” But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: --[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in the volume of “Speeches.” (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last volume.)--I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.] It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied. Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The speech was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation. CXV. HARTFORD AND BILLIARDS Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study. “Magnanimous Incident Literature” (for the Atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with the “Visit to Heaven,” and after one reconstruction Howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The story continued to lie in seclusion. Clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. Dan Slote's firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn. Slote issued another little book for him soon after Punch, Brothers, Punch!--which, besides that lively sketch, contained the “Random Notes” and seven other selections. Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant. Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and Clemens, recalling Nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive. He wrote characteristically: MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform again until the time was come for me to say, “I die innocent.” But the same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, just as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual. Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2) shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility. Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten years ago (when I was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the little ones), with you for company. My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the artist and lecturer, “absorb these.” For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities to be visited]. The letter continues: Call the gross receipts $100,00 for four months and a half, and the profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them). I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more. I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats. I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying remarks, to see how the thing would go. I was charmed. Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should have some fun. Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. So Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort. The children were at an age “to be entertaining, and to be entertained.” In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write. They had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. They sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. They would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay. Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. If they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration. Once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a “bawgunstrictor,” but he was equal to it. On one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures. At one end was the head of a girl, that they called “Emeline,” and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat. When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with “Emeline.” This was the unvarying program. He was not allowed to begin with “Emeline” and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room. He could vary the story as much as he liked. In fact, he was required to do that. The trend of its chapters, from the cat to “Emeline,” was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way. He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration. The billiard-room became his headquarters. He received his callers there and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. Every Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship. Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. It amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. S. C. Dunham was among those who belonged to the “Friday Evening Club,” as they called it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G. Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. Clemens quoted to them sometimes: Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring Your winter garment of repentance fling; The bird of time has but a little way To flutter, and the bird is on the wing. Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy, in Fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early converts. Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited: For some we loved, the loveliest and best That from his vintage rolling time has prest, Have drunk their cup a round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the dust descend; Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie, Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans End.' --[The 'Rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichell immediately wrote Clemens a card: “Read (if you haven't) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page of this morning's Courant. I think we'll have to get the book. I never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so. adequately. And it's only a translation. Read it, and we'll talk it over. There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought. “Surely this Omar was a great poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning. “Hoping that you are better, J. H. T.” Twichell's “only a translation” has acquired a certain humor with time. CXVI. OFF FOR GERMANY The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home during the early months of 1878. The Clemenses had long looked forward to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of travel furnished an added reason for their going. They planned for the spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making their headquarters in Germany. So they entered into the study of the language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. There was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the household presently became lingually Teutonic. It amused Mark Twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined English and German words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. Necessarily the new study would infect his literature. He conceived a plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying district. They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip, persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them. They wrote to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come to Hartford for a good-by visit. Howells and his wife came. The Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell calls. The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home made ready for closing. They were to have pleasant company on the ship. Bayard Taylor, then recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to sail on the same vessel; Murat Halstead's wife and daughter were listed among the passengers. Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor's “farewell dinner.” The “Mark Twain” party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss Spaulding, little Susy and Clara (“Bay”), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom no program had been made. There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. As the weather began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word of good-by. When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself, was willing to lend him. Halstead was accused of having intentionally allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious look; but in any event they were glad to have him along. In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit. And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to ignore it or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed under your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my other stuff does need so much. In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which to some extent has gone now forever. He cannot entirely escape the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all encumbering cares of life. Among the first note-book entries Mark Twain wrote: To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--“I am no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much consequence when I am with ye and of ye. I know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of reach and cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the dead.” It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within. Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions. Taylor had a large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. He would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show them the music and construction of it. He sang German folk-lore songs for them, and the “Lorelei,” then comparatively unknown in America. Such was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. He was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he did not fill it long. Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have heart trouble. Halstead, however, survived many years. Taylor died December 19, 1878. CXVII. GERMANY AND GERMAN From the note-book: It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the bull's-eye in a fog--as we did. When the fog fell on us the captain said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen hours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearing so and so, and about so many miles away. Hove the lead and got forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were. Another idea. For ages man probably did not know why God carpeted the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so on. But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the soundings. They reached Hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. They rested a few days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg early in May. They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others at an inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments. Chance or direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany. He did not go back after his party. He sent a message telling them to take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to enjoy the view. Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat in welcome. He led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed to the view. They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle, densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled valley of the Rhine. By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the hilltop, he said: “I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over there; the one with the gable in the roof. Mine is the middle room on the third floor.” Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his room. Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and referred to it as his office. They amused themselves by watching his “people” and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, “Moblirte Wohnung zu Vermiethen.” A day or two later he was established in the very room he had selected, it being the only room but one vacant. In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg environment. To Howells he wrote: Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in these. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them.... It must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is no hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song.... I have waited for a “call” to go to work--I knew it would come. Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move my manuscripts over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided at last. So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I'll go to work again (perhaps in Munich). The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left Hartford. Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible. Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings. I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. I labor with my felicities. How I shall get to sleep to-night I don't know, though I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. Oh, my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together --why, it's my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morning deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another degree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her being left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me. SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon your shoes. Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that department. Meantime, the struggle with the “awful German language” went on. It was a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down to little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of nightmare. Once in his note-book he says: “Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and wished they had gone to the other place”; and a little farther along, “I wish I could hear myself talk German.” To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles: Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, “Oh, there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!” Then Livy takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her pillow murmuring, “Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that packed away so it will stay till morning”--and about an hour after midnight she wakes me up and says, “I do so hate to disturb you, but is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?” And Mrs. Clemens wrote: Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving these days. I am just interested in German. Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German, though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she said, pathetically: “Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English.” Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue: I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars to see the lovely woods that we see. Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a letter in German, though he hastened to add, “Or do you prefer English by this time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least possible personal inconvenience.” Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the “outrageous and impossible German grammar,” and abandoned it altogether. In his note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured: “Gott im Himmel!” He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his own lack of them. In the notes he comments: Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately the person tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when I stop him. They naturally despise such an ignoramus. Our doctor here speaks as pure English, as I. On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift. The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family, and he was a great delight to them. He practised his German on them, and interested himself in their daily affairs. Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the Atlantic. “I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular demand,” he said. “People are constantly asking when you are going to begin.” Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were persistently enterprising. I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now--separatable stuff, that is--but I shall have by and by. It is very gratifying to hear that it is wanted by anybody. I stand always prepared to hear the reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long. Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes. The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways. The children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music. Clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. Art and opera did not appeal to him. The note-book says: I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of “Trovatore” and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have made entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delighted enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But oh, how far between they are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching “between-times” of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down. Sunday night, 11th. Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play the “Fremersberg.” I suppose it is very low-grade music--I know it must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting. The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music, for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, but with all my heart. What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives me wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the higher music because the higher and better like it. But you see I want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the thing the necessary amount of time and attention. The natural suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a lie--we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives to opera what support it has in America. And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner's “Slave Ship” is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as it throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to see water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes swimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the “Slave Ship” reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'. He confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner, though perhaps never of the “Slave Ship” picture. In fact, Mark Twain was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an “artistic” kind. CXVIII. TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL. Twichell arrived on time, August 1st. Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp through the Black Forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. They did not always walk, but they often did. At least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and Clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him. But they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened along. They did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. They crossed on into Switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of the Alps. The family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their wanderings. Mark Twain found an immunity from attention in Switzerland, which for years he had not known elsewhere. His face was not so well known and his pen-name was carefully concealed. It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. In one of his letters home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially delighted with Mark Twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity. “I could not forbear telling him who Mark was,” he says, “and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so.” They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his comrade a chance to rest. Then away again to Interlaken, where the Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemini Pass, with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger that directs mankind to God. This was true Alpine wandering--sweet vagabondage. The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words. Clemens records in his notes: Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon, last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage which has thus far hit me with force--Tito compromising with his conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best thing. Joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later --and without prelude said, “I read that book you've got there six years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.” This is Joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty- four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. He said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came and that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in another room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment. Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112, Tauchnitz edition. And again: The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. This evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the Matterhorn. Then Joe said, “We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and inquire for Livy's telegram.” If he had been but one instant later I should have said those words instead of him. Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “And there's the man!” Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling. Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom. The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making “Harris” (Twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story: Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in certain directions. Then generalizing, Twichell adds: He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finely regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to pass another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedingly timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask a question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals. When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day, when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a little, Mark said, “The fellow's got the notion that we are in a hurry.” He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of everything--or most things. The days were not all sunshine. Sometimes it rained and they took shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote--a good while sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead. After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home: Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. He scrambled around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest pleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his specimens and wanted more room. So I stopped the guide and got out my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel advertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like, and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose admirably. He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box and sent it by mail to Livy. A strange Mark he is, full of contradictions. I spoke last night of his sensitive to others' feelings. To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. Mark paused, went aside and busied himself a minute picking a flower. In the halt the guide got by and resumed his place in front. Mark threw the flower away, saying, “I didn't want that. I only wanted to give the old man a chance to go on without seeming to pass us.” Mark is splendid to walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish you might have heard him to-day. His vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw. In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another pretty incident of their travels. They had been toiling up the Gorner Grat. As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him. On the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at a very gradual rate. It was a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy over it all the rest of the day. The matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their discussions. It was Twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every night at the hotels, and Clemens was willing to join in the observances. Once Twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. Clemens listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. A day or two later, as they were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out. “Joe,” he said, “I'm going to make a confession. I don't believe in your religion at all. I've been living a lie right straight along whenever I pretended to. For a moment, sometimes, I have been almost a believer, but it immediately drifts away from me again. I don't believe one word of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book. I believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement and all. The problem of life and death and eternity and the true conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in that book.” So the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was never afterward reopened. They joined Mrs. Clemens and the others at Lausanne at last, and their Swiss holiday was over. Twichell set out for home by way of England, and Clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings. Then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade: DEAR OLD JOE, It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! it has been such a rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy's. It is justifiable to do this; for why should I let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps? Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. But you are, and we cannot get around it. So take our love with you, and bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both. MARK. CXIX. ITALIAN DAYS The Clemens party wandered down into Italy--to the lakes, Venice, Florence, Rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the Hartford home. In Venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old Venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. It was a furniture with a long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. It would become a stately institution in the Clemens household. The cupids on the posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with. It was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years. They spent three weeks in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then a week in Florence and a fortnight in Rome. --[From the note-book: “BAY--When the waiter brought my breakfast this morning I spoke to him in Italian. “MAMA--What did you say? “B.--I said, 'Polly-vo fransay.' “M.--What does it mean? “B.--I don't know. What does it mean, Susy? “S.--It means, 'Polly wants a cracker.'”] Clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat concerning the old masters. He no longer found the bright, new copies an improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake his enthusiasm. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding spent long hours wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not always willingly. He wrote his sorrow to Twichell: I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me. Rome interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which the average tourist feels an interest in. There are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara are having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them. Once when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. “Youth,” said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, “if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others”; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: “Now, you've been spoke to!” He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. He realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of general sight-seeing. One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the story of travel. Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he said: I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me. Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem to have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later attempt: “Am a shining success as a courier,” he records, “by the use of francs. Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with confidence.” He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. When, after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery. And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a private place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south of France. The rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their proprietress, Fraulein Dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her ability to make them happy. It was a faith that was justified. Next morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. Fraulein Dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. She arranged larger rooms and better conveniences for them. Their location was central and there was a near-by park. They had no wish to change. Clemens, in his letter to Howells, boasts that he brought the party through from Rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he commented, “Probably a lie.” He secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not find his Swiss note-book. He wrote Twichell that he had lost it, and that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels. But the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. For a time it went badly. He wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside. He had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive narrative. He had become, as it seemed, too didactic. He thought his description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured. These impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it enthusiasm and confidence. In a letter to Twichell he reported his progress: I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work, tore up a great part of the MS. written in Heidelberg--wrote and tore up, continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again! Since then I'm glad that Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss notebook than I did. Further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer to that voice of the Alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent: O Switzerland! The further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it grow. Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. And what a voice it was! And how real! Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! That stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so! How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of the mountains! Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. I wonder what the secret of it is. Well, time and time and again it has seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more. It is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. That is the word. We must go again, Joe. CXX. IN MUNICH That winter in Munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in after-years. His work went well enough--always a chief source of gratification. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding found interest in the galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that beautiful old Bavarian town. The children also liked Munich. It was easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom. The German Christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial delight. The German language they seemed fairly to absorb. Writing to his mother Clemens said: I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do English. Susy often translates Livy's orders to the servants. I cannot work and study German at the same time; so I have dropped the latter and do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news. In Munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many callers. Most Americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on Mark Twain. It was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. Mrs. Clemens, in a letter written from Venice, where they had received even more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost wished she might never see a visitor again. Originally there was a good deal about Munich in the new book, and some of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. They were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the French chapters. Only a few Italian memories were left to follow the Switzerland wanderings. The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to Heilsbronn. It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the vast bedroom. It may interest the reader to compare what really happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written for publication: Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself for two interminable hours I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch-dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment --all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand. Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it up. At first I only said to myself, “Blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer. My expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article. I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. Livy screamed, then said, “Who is it? What is the matter?” I said, “There ain't anything the matter. I'm hunting for my sock.” She said, “Are you hunting for it with a club?” I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves. So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction. He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the magazine now and then: the “Gambetta Duel” burlesque, which would make a chapter in the book later, and the story of “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn.”--[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume. The “Pitcairn” and “Elephant” tales were originally chapters in 'A Tramp Abroad'; also the unpleasant “Coffin-box” yarn, which Howells rejected for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a favorite with its author.] Howells's novel, 'The Lady of the Aroostook', was then running through the 'Atlantic', and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general deep satisfaction of his household in that tale: If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph.... Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day I shall be in the encyclopedias too, thus: “Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells.” Though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. Clemens always regarded with awe William Dean Howells's ability to dissect and photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain's ability to light, with a single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon. CXXI. PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe, arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy, uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their rooms. A paragraph will serve: Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same --uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty white and the rest a faded red. How those hideous chairs do swear at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I have seen in Europe. Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is! It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l'Echelle. But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. It was one of those French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is distressingly foggy and chill between times. Clemens received a bad impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from which he never entirely recovered. In his note-book he wrote: “France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.” The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no great love for the French as a nation. Conversely, the French as a nation did not care greatly for Mark Twain. There were many individual Frenchmen that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who admired the work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side was there the warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout Europe he invited and returned. His book was not yet finished. In Paris he worked on it daily, but without enthusiasm. The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. His note-book says: May 7th. I wish this terrible winter would come to an end. Have had rain almost without intermission for two months and one week. May 28th. This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and interminable winter. It was not all gloom and discomfort. There was congenial company in Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. Aldrich the scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: “When Aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other side.” Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing. The Parisian note-book has this memorandum: “Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'”]--was there, also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife, Hjalinar Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, artist people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy. Turgenieff, as in London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly born philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at his personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his own. Tauchnitz had early published the 'Innocents', following it with other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all. He traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects to him. “A mighty nice old gentleman,” Clemens found him. Richard Whiteing was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young American painters whom it was good to know. They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose purpose was indicated by its name. Mark Twain occasionally attended its sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there, speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. Mark Twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its way into published literature. Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party. He could go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather kept the others housed in. He did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. They were all studying French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to France. Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of that lovely character. The Reign of Terror interested him. He reread Carlyle's Revolution, a book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'A Tale of Two Cities'. When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of that grim period. In his note-book he comments: “The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the people were savages. Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they each figure in due proportion to their crafts.” And again: “For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre; every now and then a big massacre or a little one. The spirit is peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had it. In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese. Their chief traits--love of glory and massacre.” Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of quittance: “You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourists' custom. When I see a man jump from the Vendome Column I say, 'They like to do that in Paris.'” Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn doubtless from Parisian reading and observation: “Childish race and great.” “I'm for cremation.” “I disfavor capital punishment.” “Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with their hands. There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade. “They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy.” “Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good.” A curious thing happened one day in Paris. Boyesen; in great excitement, came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments. He was pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. He asked immediately if his wife had come to their rooms. On learning that she had not, he declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. She had been gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had never done before. He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her, to do something to help him find her. Clemens, without showing the least emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly: “I will.” “Where will you go first,” Boyesen demanded. Still in the same even voice Clemens said: “To the elevator.” He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall. The elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out. She had been delayed by a breakdown and a blockade. Clemens said afterward that he had a positive conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. It was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are privileged to do so. Paris, June 1, 1879. Still this vindictive winter continues. Had a raw, cold rain to-day. To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire. They stood it for another month, and then on the 10th of July, when it was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for Brussels, which he calls “a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town.” Two days in Brussels, then to Antwerp, where they dined on the Trenton with Admiral Roan, then to Rotterdam, Dresden, Amsterdam, and London, arriving there the 29th of July, which was rainy and cold, in keeping with all Europe that year. Had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all day. A remarkable summer, truly! London meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs, too far away to recall. A letter written by Mrs. Clemens at the time preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom. Clara [Spaulding] went in to dinner with Mr. Henry James; she enjoyed him very much. I had a little chat with him before dinner, and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. I had expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by him and criticized. Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract me. Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart, who was Washington Irving's love, and she is said to have been his only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave. --[Mrs. Clemens was misinformed. Irving's only “love” was a Miss Hoffman.]--She was also an intimate friend of Madame Bonaparte. You would judge Mrs. Stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone, before the gentlemen came up. It was lovely to see such a sweet old age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible; you had not the least sense that she was aged. She quoted French in her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such a kindly, lovely way. When she entered the room, before dinner, Mr. James, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said, “Good evening, you wonderful lady.” After she had passed... he said, “She is the youngest person in London. She has the youngest feelings and the youngest interests.... She is always interested.” It was a perfect delight to hear her and see her. For more than two years they had had an invitation from Reginald Cholmondeley to pay him another visit. So they went for a week to Condover, where many friends were gathered, including Millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of Ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. It was one of the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[Moncure D. Conway, who was in London at the time, recalls, in his Autobiography, a visit which he made with Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Stratford-on-Avon. “Mrs. Clemens was an ardent Shakespearian, and Mark Twain determined to give her a surprise. He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not to meet us himself, but send his carriage. On arrival at the station we directed the driver to take us straight to the church. When we entered, and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare's grave, 'Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am I?' Mark received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady enjoy a visit more than that to Avonbank. Mrs. Charles Flower (nee Martineau) took Mrs. Clemens to her heart, and contrived that every social or other attraction of that region should surround her.”] From the note-book: Sunday, August 17,'79. Raw and cold, and a drenching rain. Went to hear Mr. Spurgeon. House three-quarters full-say three thousand people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him. A wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in their salvation an important matter. Tuesday, August 19th. Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer. Talked with the great Darwin. They had planned to visit Dr. Brown in Scotland. Mrs. Clemens, in particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. Clemens in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which there was no real excuse. There is documentary evidence against this harsh conclusion. They were, in fact, delayed here and there by misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching Liverpool in time for their sailing date, August 23d. Unquestionably he was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. Time would magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his conscience with the entire burden of blame. Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for the third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different from a day rainbow. It is not given to many persons in this world to see even one of these phenomena. After each previous vision there had come to him a period of good-fortune. Perhaps this also boded well for him. CXXII. AN INTERLUDE The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879. A report of his arrival, in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence; that only his drawl seemed natural. His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia, was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. He looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned quite gray. It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens, anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the baggage. But the official was dubious. Clemens argued eloquently, and a higher authority was consulted. Again Clemens stated his case and presented his arguments. A still higher chief of inspection was summoned, evidently from his bed. He listened sleepily to the preamble, then suddenly said: “Oh, chalk his baggage, of course! Don't you know it's Mark Twain and that he'll talk all night?” They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had been longing through all their days of absence. Mrs. Clemens, in her letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop. From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell: “You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place that was so divine as the farm. Why don't you come here and take a foretaste of Heaven?” Clemens declared he would roam no more forever, and settled down to the happy farm routine. He took up his work, which had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed. In the letter to Twichell he said: I am revising my MS. I did not expect to like it, but I do. I have been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. Day before yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them, reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. I believe it will be a readable book of travels. I cannot see that it lacks anything but information. Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. Yet she had enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his. Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond all counting. She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. One day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed, timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her orthodox views. She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul. The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change. Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts its care of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower, dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life and love. Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. It was a sweet day there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of both so long as life lasted. Certainly it was the larger faith; though the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. Long afterward, in the years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, Clemens once said to his wife, “Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the Christian faith do so,” and she answered, “I can't, Youth. I haven't any.” And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then, all his days. CXXIII. THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879 If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and December of that year. The first of these was delivered at Chicago, on the occasion of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the Tennessee, on the evening of November 73, 1879. Grant had just returned from his splendid tour of the world. His progress from San Francisco eastward had been such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty. Clemens received an invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at first moved to decline. He prepared a letter in which he made “business” his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see and hear the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee at the moment when their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak. “Besides,” he said, “I wanted to see the General again anyway and renew the acquaintance. He would remember me, because I was the person who did not ask him for an office.” He did not send the letter. Reconsidering, it seemed to him that there was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a Confederate soldier who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through Ralls and Monroe counties, Missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to his old imaginary pursuer. It was in the nature of an imperative command, which he could not refuse to obey. He accepted and agreed to speak. They had asked him to respond to the toast of “The Ladies,” but for him the subject was worn out. He had already responded to that toast at least twice. He telegraphed that there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take that class for a toast: the babies. Necessarily they agreed, and he prepared himself accordingly. He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome. Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had been built out from the second story of the Palmer House. Clemens had not seen the General since the “embarrassing” introduction in Washington, twelve years before. Their meeting was characteristic enough. Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped over to Clemens, and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented. Grant also came forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying: “General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as yourself.” They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant said, looking at him gravely: “Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?” So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. It was a conspicuous performance. The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men. Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at Haverly's Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him. Clemens, writing of it that evening to Mrs. Clemens, said: I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on. What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair. You note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent. But Grant! He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and congratulation; but as true as I'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane. But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. This was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut, and Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G. Ingersoll and Mark Twain. Chicago has never known a greater event than that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there. To Howells Clemens wrote: Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers, most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the midst of it all somebody struck up “When we were marching through Georgia.” Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. I sha'n't ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. I ever looked upon! Grand times, my boy, grand times! Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that night which he would remember as long as he lived. One of them was by Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a flame. The Howells letter continues: I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll's music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. “They fought, that a mother might own her child.” The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me! he borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only test! People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet. Clemens's own speech came last. He had been placed at the end to hold the house. He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary speech had made them unresponsive. They gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in front of him--a tribute to his name. Then he began the opening words of that memorable, delightful fancy. “We haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies--we stand on common ground--” The tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first half of the sentence. He made one of his effective pauses on the word “babies,” and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, “we stand on common ground,” they let go a storm of applause. There was no weariness and inattention after that. At the end of each sentence, he had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. When he reached the beginning of the final paragraph, “Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are,” the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. Step by step he led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would be his way. Then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the opening of his final sentence: “And now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect) the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some fifty-six years ago.” He paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. After all, he seemed likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. No one ever knew better than Mark Twain the value of a pause. He waited now long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was painful, then wheeling to Grant himself he said, with all the dramatic power of which he was master: “And if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded!” The house came down with a crash. The linking of their hero's great military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. Even Grant's iron serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his cheeks. They swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their efforts to seize his hand. He was borne up and down the great dining-hall. Grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments. “It tore me all to pieces,” he said; and Sherman exclaimed, “Lord bless you, my boy! I don't know how you do it!” The little speech has been in “cold type” so many years since then that the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of response it kindled so long ago. But that was another day--and another nation--and Mark Twain, like Robert Ingersoll, knew always his period and his people. CXXIV. ANOTHER “ATLANTIC” SPEECH The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr. Holmes. Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first impulse had been to decline. It would be something of an ordeal; for though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify. Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on condition that he be allowed to speak. If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too. But you may read what I say beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose. Howells advised against any sort of explanation. Clemens accepted this as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of honor. It was a noble gathering. Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner were present, and this time there were ladies. Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John Bigelow, old even then.--[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.] Howells was conservative in his introduction this time. It was better taste to be so. He said simply: “We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark Twain.” Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural manner. It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he really felt. Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. It seems fitting that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not elsewhere recorded. This is the speech in full: MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN,--I would have traveled a much greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience. You never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you. Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new a friend of mine said, “The dedication is very neat.” Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said, “I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.” I naturally said, “What do you mean? Where did you ever see it before?” “Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes's dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.” Of course my first impulse was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a book-store. and he did prove it. I had stolen that dedication almost word for word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing out and solved the mystery. Some years before I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr. Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I unconsciously took it. Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along, right from the start.--[Holmes in his letter had said: “I rather think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in Many Keys... You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than you will borrow from other people.”] I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said--However, I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can truthfully say, “He is growing old.” Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. So the year for him closed prosperously. The rainbow of promise was justified. CXXV. THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. His days and his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world. The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of peace. Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood circles. Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were likely to be brilliant affairs. The best minds, the brightest wits, gathered around Mark Twain's table. Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan, Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. There was always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain fireside. Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual World, in a letter of this time, said: I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday.... Called on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace Bushnell. I was wishing A----had been at the Mark Twain interview. He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the poor and struggling.--[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam Smith.] The quieter evenings were no less delightful. Clemens did not often go out. He loved his own home best. The children were old enough now to take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial pleasure-acting charades. These he invented for them, and costumed the little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John Quarles's farm. The Warner and Twichell children were often there and took part in the gay amusements. The children of that neighborhood played their impromptu parts well and naturally. They were in a dramatic atmosphere, and had been from infancy. There was never any preparation for the charades. A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer. Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or interference. Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist joining in these. At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the children joining in these moving melodies. He loved to read aloud to them. It was his habit to read his manuscript to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to include them in his critical audience. It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe that this custom was inaugurated, for 'The Prince and the Pauper' manuscript was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on this tale. Each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter, he assembled his little audience and read them the result. The children were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was adapted in that early day of its creation. Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from 'A Tramp Abroad', which had become a veritable nightmare. He had thought it finished when he left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to complete its bulk. It seemed to him that he had been given a life-sentence. He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two hundred and eighty-eight. He was about to destroy these and begin again, when Mrs. Clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to Elmira, though it was then midwinter. To Howells he wrote: I said, “if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I get it if I don't do that thing.” So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600 pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and last). I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has been roosting more than a year and a half. They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed work on 'The Prince and the Pauper'. He reported to Howells that if he never sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no diminution. A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased: I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547. He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely accounts for the unity of the tale. Then he adds: My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which distinguished Edward VI.'s reign from those that precede it and follow it. Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir. He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance. CXXVI. “A TRAMP ABROAD” 'A Tramp Abroad' came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880. It had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five thousand copies. It was of the same general size and outward character as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its publishers as a satisfactory book. It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close examination. Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced; tended to bring them still further into disrepute. A few drawings by True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens himself had a value of their own. The book would have profited had there been more of what the author calls his “works of art.” Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception. But Howells wrote: Well, you are a blessing. You ought to believe in God's goodness, since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as yours to lighten its troubles. Clemens replied: Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest. Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done. A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added satisfaction. To be in a Tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of the book's merit. To Twichell, Clemens presented a special copy of the Tramp with a personal inscription, which must not be omitted here: MY DEAR “HARRIS”--NO, I MEAN MY DEAR JOE,--Just imagine it for a moment: I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains! Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material. You have saved me an intolerable whole world of hated labor, and I'll not forget it, my boy. You'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where they were invented. You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded. That horse-student is on page 192. The “Fremersberg” is neighboring. The Black Forest novel is on page 211. I remember when and where we projected that: in the leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen. There's the “new member,” page 213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at 281 is “Harris,” and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an equally familiar one. This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have shed the credit of it upon him. Well, you'll find more reminders of things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been printed, in many books. All the “legends of the Neckar,” which I invented for that unstoried region, are here; one is in the Appendix. The steel portrait of me is just about perfect. We had a mighty good time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never. With love, Yours, MARK. Hartford, March 16, 1880. Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public generally was a great comfort. When the Howells letter was read to him he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals: “Howells said that, did he? Old Howells said that!” There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary merits of 'A Tramp Abroad'. Human tastes differ, and a “mixed” book of this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. The word “uneven” pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special application to this one. Written under great stress and uncertainty of mind, it could hardly be uniform. It presents Mark Twain at his best, and at his worst. Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain at his worst: Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable. It is inevitable that 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'The Innocents Abroad' should be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. The books are as different as was their author at the periods when they were written. 'A Tramp Abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. The Innocents Abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young sight-seers could find along the way. The note-books of that trip fairly glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and denunciation. In the 'Innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a sense of humor. In the 'Tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. In the 'Innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. In the 'Tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to smash them. Very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all, but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. In later life his gentler laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return, but just now he was in that middle period, when the “damned human race” amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (It seems proper to explain that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.) Reading the 'Innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults, it is literature from beginning to end. Reading the 'Tramp', the suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its percentage of literature is not large. Yet, as noted in an earlier volume, so eminent a critic as Brander Matthews has pronounced in its favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; Howells expressed. his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. He reviewed 'A Tramp Abroad' adequately and finely in the Atlantic, and justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not overpraise it. 'A Tramp Abroad' had an “Introduction” in the manuscript, a pleasant word to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted. Fortunately the appendix remained. Beyond question it contains some of the very best things in the book. The descriptions of the German Portier and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful German language is one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of humor. It is Mark Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival, the field of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. The present Emperor of Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when all other amusements fail. It is delicious beyond words to express; it is unique. In the body of the book there are also many delights. The description of the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm. Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from Interlaken: There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile; now they had no desire to break them. Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of God. Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. The reader's chief regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. The main difficulty with the humor is that it seems overdone. It is likely to be carried too far, and continued too long. The ascent of Riffelberg is an example. Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to say, exaggeration. Without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a fuller enjoyment in 'A Tramp Abroad' than in the 'Innocents'; only, the burden of the world's opinion lies the other way. The world has a weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more. It answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque. The Innocents Abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic; more sentimental, if you will. The Tramp contains better English usage, without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of romance. The heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book in fewer numbers.--[The sales of the Innocents during the earlier years more than doubled those of the Tramp during a similar period. The later ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. It has been repeatedly stated that in England the Tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion not sustained by the publisher's accountings.] CXXVII. LETTERS, TALES, AND PLANS The reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which Samuel Clemens wrote to his friend William Dean Howells; yet comparatively few can even be mentioned. He was always writing to Howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind--business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to Howells. Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might carry comfort.--[“Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages:” (My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells.)] Whatever of picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for Howells's entertainment. Some of these domestic incidents carry the flavor of his best humor. Once he wrote: Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, “George didn't take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in the conservatory.” So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat). About three in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, “I do believe I hear that cat in the drawing-room. What did you do with him?” I answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and said, “I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar.” Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. But the sense of what she said was, “He couldn't have done any harm in the conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you I should have admired, but not have been astonished, because I should know that together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately blunder all by yourself is what I cannot understand.” So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.... I knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence. So I am writing to you, not because I have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon. The rightful earl has---- Friday, 7th. Well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow money. I never knew an American earl that didn't. After a trip to Boston, during which Mrs. Clemens did some bric-a-brac shopping, he wrote: Mrs. Clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons which she collected and your dinner. It is hard to tell which she admires the most. Sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the other; but I lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because I can appreciate that, whereas I am no prophet in andirons. There has been a procession of Adams Express wagons filing before the door all day delivering andirons. In a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist Ole Bull and his wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that gentle-hearted pair. Clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way into the Atlantic. “Edward Mills and George Benton,” one of the contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal. It brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular criminals. That fashion has gone out, largely. Mark Twain wrote frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this particular instance. “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” was another Atlantic story, a companion piece to “Mrs. McWilliams's Experience with the Membranous Croup,” and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which Mark Twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not so far removed in character from that in the “cat” letter just quoted: something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened, approximately as set down. Rose Terry Cooke wrote: Horrid man, how did you know the way I behave in a thunderstorm? Have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof? I hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating levity. I really hate you, but you are funny. In addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for Orion. Clemens himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. He had found it an impossible task. He confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he believed Orion equal to the task. He knew how rigidly honest he was, how ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some literary occupation. It was Mark Twain's belief that if Orion would record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human documents such as have been left by Benvenuto Cellini, Cazenova, and Rousseau. “Simply tell your story to yourself,” he wrote, “laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and all hampering things.” Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a variety of other enterprises. He had prospected insurance, mining, journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his law shingle between each of these seizures. Aside from business, too, he had been having a rather spectacular experience. He had changed his politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more. Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night, a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for them the day before. Finally, after delivering a series of infidel lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by the Presbyterian Church. He was therefore ripe for any new diversion, and the Autobiography appealed to him. He set about it with splendid enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for inspection. They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected. He forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers. But Howells's taste for realism had its limitations. He found the story interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising strongly against its publication, returned it. Onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now, forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the fires warm. Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally desperate. He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the end. This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end. And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. But he drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked human interest. In old age Mark Twain once referred to Orion's autobiography in print and his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to Orion's having departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. A quantity of Orion's manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain to show its fidelity to the original plan. It is just one long record of fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. It is the story of a life of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to surrender.--[Howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters, said that they would some day make good material. Fortunately the earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.] Whatever may have been Mark Twain's later impression of his brother's manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite action at the time. Several years before, in Hartford, Orion had urged him to make his publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the royalty plan. Clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an arrangement for the publication of 'A Tramp Abroad', and when his first statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to his advantage. He remembered Orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing. Out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this result, to wit: that I shall within the twelve months get $40,000 out of this Tramp, instead of $20,000. $20,000, after taxes and other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a month, so I shall tell Mr. Perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your check that amount per month hereafter.... This ends the loan business, and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine. From that time forward Orion Clemens was worth substantially twenty thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow. Far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands. CXXVIII. MARK TWAIN's ABSENT-MINDEDNESS. A number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported concerning Mark Twain's dim perception of certain physical surroundings, and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say. It was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing seemed not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness. By no means was Mark Twain's absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength. Especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut most of the world away. Soon after his return from Europe, when he was still struggling with 'A Tramp Abroad', he wearily put the manuscript aside, one day, and set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house, a stone's-throw away, was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it. It was unchanged, but its outlines had left no impress upon his mind. He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned and got the coachman, Patrick McAleer, to show him the way. The second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this period. One day, when he was playing billiards with Whitmore, George, the butler, came up with a card. “Who is he, George?” Clemens asked, without looking at the card. “I don't know, suh, but he's a gentleman, Mr. Clemens.” “Now, George, how many times have I told you I don't want to see strangers when I'm playing billiards! This is just some book agent, or insurance man, or somebody with something to sell. I don't want to see him, and I'm not going to.” “Oh, but this is a gentleman, I'm sure, Mr. Clemens. Just look at his card, suh.” “Yes, of course, I see--nice engraved card--but I don't know him, and if it was St. Peter himself I wouldn't buy the key of salvation! You tell him so--tell him--oh, well, I suppose I've got to go and get rid of him myself. I'll be back in a minute, Whitmore.” He ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed water-color pictures on the floor near his feet. “Ah, ha!” he thought, “I see. A picture agent. I'll soon get rid of him.” He went in with his best, “Well, what can I do for you?” air, which he, as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough, but not encouraging. The gentleman rose and extended his hand. “How are you, Mr. Clemens?” he said. Of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or goods to sell. Clemens did not extend a very cordial hand. He merely raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand. “And how is Mrs. Clemens?” asked the uninvited guest. So this was his game. He would show an interest in the family and ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children next. “Well--Mrs. Clemens is about as usual--I believe.” “And the children--Miss Susie and little Clara?” This was a bit startling. He knew their names! Still, that was easy to find out. He was a smart agent, wonderfully smart. He must be got rid of. “The children are well, quite well,” and (pointing down at the pictures)--“We've got plenty like these. We don't want any more. No, we don't care for any more,” skilfully working his visitor toward the door as he talked. The man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be talked into the hall and toward the front door. Here he paused a moment: “Mr. Clemens, will you tell me where Mr. Charles Dudley Warner lives?” This was the chance! He would work him off on Charlie Warner. Perhaps Warner needed pictures. “Oh, certainly, certainly! Right across the yard. I'll show you. There's a walk right through. You don't need to go around the front way at all. You'll find him at home, too, I'm pretty sure”; all the time working his caller out and down the step and in the right direction. The visitor again extended his hand. “Please remember me to Mrs. Clemens and the children.” “Oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure. Good day. Yes, that's the house Good-by.” On the way back to the billiard-room Mrs. Clemens called to him. She was ill that day. “Youth!” “Yes, Livy.” He went in for a word. “George brought me Mr. B----'s card. I hope you were very nice to him; the B----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.”, “The B----s--Why, Livy----” “Yes, of course, and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to Hartford.” He gazed at her helplessly. “Well, he's been here.” “Oh, Youth, have you done anything?” “Yes, of course I have. He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I sent him over to Warner's. I noticed he didn't take them with him. Land sakes, Livy, what can I do?” “Which way did he go, Youth?” “Why, I sent him to Charlie Warner's. I thought----” “Go right after him. Go quick! Tell him what you have done.” He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual. Warner and B----were in cheerful and friendly converse. They had met before. Clemens entered gaily: “Oh Yes, I see! You found him all right. Charlie, we met Mr. B----and his wife in Europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us. I wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just then. Livy isn't very well, but she seems a good deal better, so I just followed along to have a good talk, all together.” He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B----'s mind faded long before the hour ended. Returning home Clemens noticed the pictures still on the parlor floor. “George,” he said, “what pictures are those that gentleman left?” “Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures. I've been straightening up the room a little, and Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how they would look in new places. The gentleman was looking at them while he was waiting for you to come down.” CXXIX. FURTHER AFFAIRS AT THE FARM It was at Elmira, in July (1880), that the third little girl came--Jane Lampton, for her grandmother, but always called Jean. She was a large, lovely baby, robust and happy. When she had been with them a little more than a month Clemens, writing to Twichell, said: DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he “didn't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog,” I should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer. She is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the Bay and Susy were her size. I will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in Hartford, where I have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle. It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the Affection Board brought about by throwing this new security on the market. Four weeks ago the children still put Mama at the head of the list right along, where she had always been. But now: Jean Mama Motley |cats Fraulein | Papa That is the way it stands now. Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped from No. 4, and am become No. 5. Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats “developed” I didn't stand any more show. Been reading Daniel Webster's Private Correspondence. Have read a hundred of his diffuse, conceited, “eloquent,” bathotic (or bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he was a student. And Lord! to think that this boy, who is so real to me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the world's eyes on him, and then----fzt! where is he? Why, the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie along its remote verge. Well, we are all getting along here first-rate. Livy gains strength daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----But no more of this. Somebody may be reading this letter eighty years hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960), save yourself the trouble of looking further. I know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh! MARK. It is the ageless story. He too had written his youthful letters, and later had climbed the Alps of fame and was still outlined against the sun. Happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age. Mrs. Clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to his: “We are all going so fast. Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred years.” Clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'The Prince and the Pauper' and on the story about 'Huck Finn', which he had begun four years earlier. He read the latter over and found in it a new interest. It did not fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales. He always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly, and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the long stair that led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his audience, would read to them the result of his industry; that is to say, he proceeded with the story of the Prince. Apparently he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to friends. The reference (in the letter to Twichell) to the cats at the farm introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort. There were always cats at the farm. Mark Twain himself dearly loved cats, and the children inherited this passion. Susy once said: “The difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and papa loves cats.” The cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always welcomed and adored. They were commendable cats, with such names as Fraulein, Blatherskite, Sour Mash, Stray Kit, Sin, and Satan, and when, as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies. Naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories, which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams. One of these stories, as remembered and set down later, began: Once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was Catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn't have any surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and didn't need one. It is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even dishonorable, in a manx. Well, Catasaqua had a beautiful family of cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their characters. Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. He was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and eat with the king. And so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end could wait. There was less enthusiasm over dogs at Quarry Farm. Mark Twain himself had no great love for the canine breed. To a woman who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part: By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a “noble” animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again. He was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them. There was once at the farm a gentle hound, named Bones, that for some reason even won his way into his affections. Bones was always a welcome companion, and when the end of summer came, and Clemens, as was his habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to the entrance, was waiting for him. Clemens stooped down, put his arms around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by. He always recalled Bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm. CXXX. COPYRIGHT AND OTHER FANCIES The continued assault of Canadian pirates on his books kept Mark Twain's interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform. He invented one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject, and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger number of voters. There were too few authors to be of much value at the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally concerned. For the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection. Bliss suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing. Clemens wrote to his old friend Rollin M. Daggett, who by this time was a Congressman. Daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill that the authors might agree upon, and Clemens made at least one trip to Washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end. It was a Presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year. Any legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign. Clemens's idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one. Somewhat later, when an international treaty which would include protection for authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change. He wrote, asking Howells: Will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against Canadian piracy? Because, if it doesn't, there is not a single argument in favor of international copyright which a rational American Senate could entertain for a moment. My notions have mightily changed lately. I can buy Macaulay's History, three vols.; bound, for $1.25; Chambers's Cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for $7.25 (we paid $60), and other English copyrights in proportion; I can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from three cents to thirty cents apiece. These things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country. A generation of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and the best-read nation in the world. International copyright must becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel reading. Morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right. For it is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out simply for their own. International copyright would benefit a few English authors and a lot of American publishers, and be a profound detriment to twenty million Americans; it would benefit a dozen American authors a few dollars a year, and there an end. The real advantages all go to English authors and American publishers. And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $5,000 a year, I'm down on it anyway, and I'd like cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty. It is a characteristic expression. Mark Twain might be first to grab for the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity in greater need. He could damn the human race competently, but in the final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his heart. Mention has been made in an earlier chapter of Clemens's enthusiasms or “rages” for this thing and that which should benefit humankind. He was seldom entirely without them. Whether it was copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental easement for his species. Howells tells how once he was going to save the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor saving proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all. The fountain-pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about the same time, and Clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own one. For a while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon since the invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or suddenly deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the outer darkness. After which, the stylo-graphic pen. He tried one, and wrote severally to Dr. Brown, to Howells, and to Twichell, urging its adoption. Even in a letter to Mrs. Howells he could not forget his new possession: And speaking of Howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won't --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what a nice, clean, uniform MS. it makes. And at the same time to Twichell: I am writing with a stylographic pen. It takes a royal amount of cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the stylographic a genuine God's blessing. I carry one in each breeches pocket, and both loaded. I'd give you one of them if I had you where I could teach you how to use it--not otherwise. For the average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the lack lieth in himself, God of his mercy damn him. It was not easy to withstand Mark Twain's enthusiasm. Howells, Twichell, and Dr. Brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively) over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in their conquest. But in the midst of one letter, at last, Howells broke down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: “No white man ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!” Then, with the more ancient implement, continued in a calmer spirit. It was only a little later that Clemens himself wrote: You see I am trying a new pen. I stood the stylograph as long as I could, and then retired to the pencil. The thing I am trying now is that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate itself to any kind of pen. So I selected an ordinary gold pen--a limber one--and sent it to New York and had it cut and fitted to this thing. It goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the devil will be in it by tomorrow. Mark Twain's schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion. He was likely at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the time of which we are writing he proposed what was called the “Modest” Club. He wrote to Howells, about it: At present I am the only member, and as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible. Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted to offer you the distinction of membership. I do not know that we can find any others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner, Twichell, Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more, together with Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the sex. I have long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind. He appends the by-laws, the main ones being: The object of the club shall be to eat and talk. Qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty, unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence, unassailable character. There shall be no officers except a president, and any member who has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president for the time being. Any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at what cost, and call the police. Any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and have the first chance to talk about it. It was one of his whimsical fancies, and Howells replied that he would like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to confess that he was modest enough for membership. He added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to Hay, but doubted his modesty. He said: “He will think he has a right to belong as much as you or I.” Howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems never to have gone any further. Perhaps the requirements of membership were too severe. CXXXI. WORKING FOR GARFIELD Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year. General Garfield was nominated on the Republican ticket (against General Hancock), and Clemens found him satisfactory. Garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote Howells]. I prefer him to Grant's friends. The Presidency can't add anything to Grant; he will shine on without it. It is ephemeral; he is eternal. That was the year when the Republican party became panicky over the disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of Grant in the convention, and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated Platt and Conkling and brought them into the field. General Grant also was induced to save the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that purpose. He arrived in Hartford with his family on the 16th of October, and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous event. A vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere houses and grounds were decorated. To Mrs. Clemens, still in Elmira, Clemens wrote: I found Mr. Beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations. With a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged; thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds. Against each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate, stands a knight in complete armor. Piles of still-bundled flags clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes in big letters. I broke Mr. Beals's heart by persistently and inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, “The Home of Mark Twain,” in letters as big as your head. Oh, we're going to be decorated sufficient, don't you worry about that, madam. Clemens was one of those delegated to receive Grant and to make a speech of welcome. It was a short speech but an effective one, for it made Grant laugh. He began: “I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built.” He seemed to be at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to Grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on Grant's achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished: “I nearly forgot that part of my speech,” which evoked roars of laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from Grant. He spoke of Grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities closed against him, and added, “But your country will reward you, never fear.” Then he closed: When Wellington won Waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one of a dozen of your victories, sordid England tried to pay him for that service with wealth and grandeurs. She made him a duke and gave him $4,000,000. If you had done and suffered for any other country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have been affronted in the same sordid way. But, thank God! this vast and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy which will forever preserve her from so degrading you. Your country loves you--your country's proud of you--your country is grateful to you. Her applauses, which have been many, thundering in your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the flag you saved continues to wave. Your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable--inexpensive way. Welcome to Hartford, great soldier, honored statesman, unselfish citizen. Grant's grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and when Clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him in “every conceivable--inexpensive way” his composure broke up completely and he “nearly laughed his entire head off,” according to later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval. Grant's son, Col. Fred Grant,--[Maj.-Gen'l, U. S. Army, 1906. Died April, 1912.]--dined at the Clemens home that night, and Rev. Joseph Twichell and Henry C. Robinson. Twichell's invitation was in the form of a telegram. It said: I want you to dine with us Saturday half past five and meet Col. Fred Grant. No ceremony. Wear the same shirt you always wear. The campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of October 26th there was a grand Republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry C. Robinson, and Mark Twain. It was an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their audience. The place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and the gallery railings full. Hundreds who came as late as the hour announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had been thronged long before. Mark Twain's speech that night is still remembered in Hartford as the greatest effort of his life. It was hardly that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment, the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the political tide. The roaring delight of the audience showed that to them at least it was convincing. Howells wrote that he had read it twice, and that he could not put it out of his mind. Whatever its general effect was need not now be considered. Garfield was elected, and perhaps Grant's visit to Hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed contributed their mite to that result. Clemens saw General Grant again that year, but not on political business. The Educational Mission, which China had established in Hartford--a thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened now by certain Chinese authorities with abolishment. Yung Wing (a Yale graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the Rev. Joseph Twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal one. Yung Wing declared that if influence could be brought upon Li Hung Chang, then the most influential of Chinese counselors, the mission might be saved. Twichell, remembering the great honors which Li Hung Chang had paid to General Grant in China, also Grant's admiration of Mark Twain, went to the latter without delay. Necessarily Clemens would be enthusiastic, and act promptly. He wrote to Grant, and Grant replied by telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in New York. They met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Grant was in fine spirits, and by no means the “silent man” of his repute. He launched at once into as free and flowing talk as I have ever heard [says Twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of China, her wants, disadvantages, etc. Now and then he asked a question, but kept the lead of the conversation. At last he proposed, of his own accord, to write a letter to Li Hung Chang, advising the continuance of the Mission, asking only that I would prepare him some notes, giving him points to go by. Thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations, thanks, very largely, to Clemens's assistance. Clemens wrote Howells of the interview, detailing at some length Twichell's comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given time to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come loaded. It was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered a thousand before he could unfold his case. CXXXII. A NEW PUBLISHER It was near the end of the year that Clemens wrote to his mother: I have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy says they're not, and by George! she ought to know. She says they're going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine too. I anticipate that publisher's melancholy surprise when he calls here Tuesday. However, let him suffer; it is his own fault. People who fix up agreements with me without first finding out what Livy's plans are take their fate into their own hands. I said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three months' work on it yet. I shall tackle it Wednesday or Thursday; that is, if Livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book, which I hope she won't. The reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded story--was 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The other tale--the unfinished and less considered one was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Nobody appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the publisher. The publisher was not the American Company. Elisha Bliss, after long ill health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to listen to offers from other makers of books. The revelation made by the “half-profit” returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the profits had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile. To Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters stood he would sever the long connection. It seemed a pity, later, that he did this, but the break was bound to come. Clemens was not a business man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist. He was, in fact, a shrewd, capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most bitterly against him--that of 'Roughing It'--had been made in good faith and in accordance with the conditions, of that period. In most of the later contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in human nature--business human nature--for Bliss to encourage the size of these percentages. If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded it and then to lose him by the result. Perhaps that would be also a proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the urgency of demand. Never mind. Mark Twain revised 'The Prince and the Pauper', sent it to Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or manufacture should be spared. It was to be a sort of partnership arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were anticipated. Among the many letters which Clemens was just then writing to Howells one was dated “Xmas Eve.” It closes with the customary pleasantries and the final line: “But it is growing dark. Merry Christmas to all of you!” That last was a line of large significance. It meant that the air was filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with the mystery of preparation. Christmas was an important season in the Clemens home. Almost the entire day before, Patrick was out with the sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the home preparations were no less busy. There was always a tree--a large one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when Elmira and Fredonia had delivered their contributions, and Orion and his wife in Keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of this later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been gathered, and the dusk of Christmas Eve had hurried the children off to bed, it was Mrs. Clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her husband assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill, and with a boy's anticipation in the surprise of it next morning. Then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and little plays, with the Warner and Twichell children. To the Clemens home the Christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile happiness--the spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the merrymaking, the gladness and tenderness and mystery that belong to no other season, and have been handed down through all the ages since shepherds watched on the plains of Bethlehem. CXXXIII. THE THREE FIRES--SOME BENEFACTIONS The tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the Clemens household that winter. On each of three successive days flames started that might have led to ghastly results. The children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little Clara's bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy. Rosa, the nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started. She did not lose her presence of mind,--[Rosa was not the kind to lose her head. Once, in Europe, when Bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade, and was hanging out over destruction, Rosa, discovering her, did not scream but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw the burning bedding on the lawn. The child was only slightly scorched, but the escape was narrow enough. Next day little Jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the crib's lace covering. Jean's nurse, Julia, arrived to find the lace a gust of flame and the fire spreading. She grabbed the sleeping Jean and screamed. Rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes. Clemens himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire. On the third morning, just before breakfast-time, Susy was practising at the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery. At one end of the room a fire of large logs was burning. Susy was at the other end of the room, her back to the fire. A log burned in two and fell, scattering coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel. Just as the blaze was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens's hair, chanced to look in and saw what was going on. He stepped into the nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the flames. This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as the “three days of fire.” Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted. He said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property. He did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose. He was willing to rest with the event. Logically he did not believe in reasons for things, but only that things were. Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in their improvement. Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too, was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been minutely embodied there. In that charming volume, 'My Mark Twain', Howells tells us of Clemens's consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to repair the wrong done by his nation. Mark Twain's writings are full of similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to the humbler race. He would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand. He would read for a negro church when he would have refused a cathedral. Howells mentions the colored student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial reparation “due from every white man to every black man.”--[Mark Twain paid two colored students through college. One of them, educated in a Southern institution, became a minister of the gospel. The other graduated from the Yale Law School.]--This incident belongs just to the period of which we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough, indicates the same tendency. Garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that Frederick Douglass might lose his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia. Clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence with the Administration, and in every case had refused. Douglass had made no such, application. Clemens, learning that the old negro's place was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord. He closed his letter to General Garfield: A simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the matter of recommendation to office, and so I beg permission to hope that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his present office of Marshal of the District of Columbia, if such a course will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your Administration. I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race. He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point; his history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them, too. Douglass wrote to Clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he said: I think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting it. I mean to ask, and I will use your letter as a part of my petition. It will put the President-elect in a good humor, in any case, and that is very important. With great respect, Gratefully yours, FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Mark Twain's benefactions were not all for the colored race. One morning in February of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast, George came in to announce “a lady waiting to see Mr. Clemens in the drawing-room.” Clemens growled. “George,” he said, “it's a book agent. I won't see her. I'll die, in my tracks first.” He went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature of the intruder's business. Then he saw that she was very young and modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a chance to speak. She told him that a young man employed in Pratt & Whitney's machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to have Mark Twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of future achievement. His name, she said, was Karl Gerhardt, and he was her husband. Clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the young woman's manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a child) won him. He wavered, and finally promised that he would come the first chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the next week. On her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he specified Monday, “without fail.” When she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came upon him. He said to himself: “Why didn't I go now? Why didn't I go with her now?” She went from Clemens's over to Warner's. Warner also resisted, but, tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at once. When he returned he urged Clemens to go without fail, and, true to promise, Clemens took Patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place. Clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed, and was struck by its evident merit. Mrs. Gerhardt told him the story of her husband's struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop his talent. He had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have lessons what might he not accomplish? Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding called next day, and were equally carried away with Karl Gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to win his way in art. Clemens and Warner made up their minds to interest themselves personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter J. Wells Champney to come over from New York and go with them to the Gerhardts' humble habitation, to see his work. Champney approved of it. He thought it well worth while, he said, for the people of Hartford to go to the expense of Gerhardt's art education. He added that it would be better to get the judgment of a sculptor. So they brought over John Quincy Adams Ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with these young people and their struggles for the sake of art. Ward said: “If any stranger had told me that this 'prentice did not model that thing from plaster-casts I should not have believed it. It's full of crudities, but it's full of genius, too. Hartford must send him to Paris for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three more.” When he was gone Mrs. Clemens said: “Youth, we won't wait for Hartford to do it. It would take too long. Let us send the Gerhardts to Paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to any one else.” So the Gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would enable them to live for five years in Paris if necessary, were started across the sea without further delay. Clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort. There was seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man or woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for development in some special field of industry. CXXXIV. LITERARY PROJECTS AND A MONUMENT TO ADAM Mark Twain's literary work languished during this period. He had a world of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or conclusion. “A Curious Experience,” which relates a circumstance told to him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed manuscripts of this period. Of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of etiquette would seem to have been the most promising. Howells had faith in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting: AT BILLIARDS If your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the count. AT THE DOG-FIGHT If it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers desiring a view, particularly ladies. Avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the feelings of the other one. Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one--this is business. AT POKER If you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the conflict. If you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived. If you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse yourself; let him call again another time. WALL STREET If you live in the country, buy at 80, sell at 40. Avoid all forms of eccentricity. IN THE RESTAURANT When you wish to get the waiter's attention, do not sing out “Say!” Simply say “Szt!” His old abandoned notion of “Hamlet” with an added burlesque character came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even Howells manifested deep interest in the matter. One reflects how young Howells must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now. Clemens proposed almost as many things to Howells as his brother Orion proposed to him. There was scarcely a letter that didn't contain some new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation. Now it was some book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something that he wanted Howells to write. Once he urged Howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of Orion. At another time he suggested as material the “Rightful Earl of Durham.” He is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put on the market. You must get his entire biography out of him and have it ready for Osgood's magazine. Even if it isn't worth printing, you must have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or in a play. It was this notion about 'The American Claimant' which somewhat later would lead to a collaboration with Howells on a drama, and eventually to a story of that title. But Clemens's chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather than in writing. His association with Osgood inspired him to devise new ventures of profit. He planned a 'Library of American Humor', which Howells (soon to leave the Atlantic) and “Charley” Clark--[Charles Hopkins Clark, managing editor of the Hartford Courant.]--were to edit, and which Osgood would publish, for subscription sale. Without realizing it, Clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher. His contract with Osgood for 'The Prince and the Pauper' made him essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the money for the making of the book, and to pay Osgood a royalty of seven and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions. The contract for the Library of Humor was to be a similar one, though in this case Osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share proportionately in the expense and risk. Mark Twain was entering into a field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only disaster and regret. One curious project came to an end in 1881--the plan for a monument to Adam. In a sketch written a great many years later Mark Twain tells of the memorial which the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher and himself once proposed to erect to our great common ancestor. The story is based on a real incident. Clemens, in Elmira one day (it was October, 1879), heard of a jesting proposal made by F. G. Hall to erect a monument in Elmira to Adam. The idea promptly caught Mark Twain's fancy. He observed to Beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by Darwin's simian, not to pay him the tribute of a single monument. Mankind, he said, would probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of Adam would be forgotten. He declared Mr. Hall's suggestion to be a sound idea. Beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be erected to Adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the purpose. Certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large sums in the interest of the enterprise. Then it was agreed that Congress should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to Elmira, prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere. A document to this effect was prepared, headed by F. G. Hall, and signed by other leading citizens of Elmira, including Beecher himself. General Joe Hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour. Clemens introduced him, and Hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in Congress. What had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable look. But alas! in the end Hawley's courage had failed him. He began to hate his undertaking. He was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse, the jeers of the newspapers. It was certain to leak out that Mark Twain was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that it was one of his colossal jokes. Now and then, in the privacy of his own room at night, Hawley would hunt up the Adam petition and read it and feel the cold sweat breaking out. He postponed the matter from one session to another till the summer of 1881, when he was about to sail for Europe. Then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to Clemens, and ignominiously fled. [For text of the petition in full, etc., see Appendix P, at the end of last volume.] Mark Twain's introduction of Hawley at Elmira contained this pleasantry: “General Hawley was president of the Centennial Commission. Was a gallant soldier in the war. He has been Governor of Connecticut, member of Congress, and was president of the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln.” General Hawley: “That nominated Grant.” Twain: “He says it was Grant, but I know better. He is a member of my church at Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he will deny that. But I am only here to give him a character from his last place. As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden joins mine, why--why, I watch him. That's nothing; we all do that with any neighbor. General Hawley keeps his promises, not only in private, but in public. He is an editor who believes what he writes in his own paper. As the author of 'Beautiful Snow' he added a new pang to winter. He is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and religious responsibilities. Whenever the contribution-box was passed I never knew him to take out a cent.” CXXXV. A TRIP WITH SHERMAN AND AN INTERVIEW WITH GRANT. The Army of the Potomac gave a dinner in Hartford on the 8th of June, 1881. But little memory remains of it now beyond Mark Twain's speech and a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered authors, such as Johnson, Milton, and Carlyle. A pleasant incident followed, however, which Clemens himself used to relate. General Sherman attended the banquet, and Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln. Next morning Clemens and Twichell were leaving for West Point, where they were to address the military students, guests on the same special train on which Lincoln and Sherman had their private car. This car was at the end of the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, Sherman and Lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude. Clemens and Twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them. As the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was under good headway before they came in. Sherman came up to Clemens, who sat smoking unconcernedly. “Well,” he said, “who told you you could go in this car?” “Nobody,” said Clemens. “Do you expect to pay extra fare?” asked Sherman. “No,” said Clemens. “I don't expect to pay any fare.” “Oh, you don't. Then you'll work your way.” Sherman took off his coat and military hat and made Clemens put them on. “Now,” said he, “whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and represent me and make a speech.” It was not long before the train stopped, and Clemens, according to orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd. There was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform. Then the cheer waned, became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion. Presently somebody said: “Say, that ain't Sherman, that's Mark Twain,” which brought another cheer. Then Sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke. They kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes Lincoln came out with them. When there was time all three spoke, much to the satisfaction of their audiences. President Garfield was shot that summer--July 2, 1881.--[On the day that President Garfield was shot Mrs. Clemens received from their friend Reginald Cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband in Australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting than otherwise, for the reason that the “Mark Twain” who had died in Australia was a very persistent impostor. Clemens wrote Cholmondeley: “Being dead I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that kind of a corpse. May I never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a far land.” Out of this incident grew a feature of an anecdote related in Following the Equator the joke played by the man from Bendigo.]--He died September 19th, and Arthur came into power. There was a great feeling of uncertainty as to what he would do. He was regarded as “an excellent gentleman with a weakness for his friends.” Incumbents holding appointive offices were in a state of dread. Howells's father was consul at Toronto, and, believing his place to be in danger, he appealed to his son. In his book Howells tells how, in turn, he appealed to Clemens, remembering his friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. He asked Clemens to write to Grant, but Clemens would hear of nothing less than a call on the General, during which the matter would be presented to him in person. Howells relates how the three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of the office, on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by restaurant: The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain. Clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting details: “I asked Grant if he wouldn't write a word on a card which Howells could carry to Washington and hand to the President. But, as usual, General Grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do a great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do. He said he was going to Washington in a couple of days to dine with the President, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it a personal matter. Grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time. It was baked beans, but how 'he sits and towers,' Howells said, quoting Dame. Grant remembered 'Squibob' Derby (John Phoenix) at West Point very well. He said that Derby was always drawing caricatures of the professors and playing jokes on every body. He told a thing which I had heard before but had never seen in print. A professor questioning a class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, 'Suppose a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. Now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed?' “Derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question. He said, 'I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days I would change places with him.' “I tried hard, during that interview, to get General Grant to agree to write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn't listen to the suggestion. His inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an author. He had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style. He was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would be a humility too. I argued that the book would have an enormous sale, and that out of my experience I could save him from making unwise contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such a way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity for any addition to his income. Of course he could not foresee that he was camping on a volcano; that as Ward's partner he was a ruined man even then, and of course I had no suspicion that in four years from that time I would become his publisher. He would not agree to write his memoirs. He only said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into a book they could do so. We came away then. He fulfilled his promise entirely concerning Howells's father, who held his office until he resigned of his own accord.” CXXXVI. “THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER” During the summer absence alterations were made in the Hartford home, with extensive decorations by Tiffany. The work was not completed when the family returned. Clemens wrote to Charles Warren Stoddard, then in the Sandwich Islands, that the place was full of carpenters and decorators, whereas what they really needed was “an incendiary.” If the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more. They had acquired more ground. One morning in the spring Mark Twain had looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to cut down a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his neighbor. He had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether too close to him for comfort and privacy. Leaning out of the window he called sonorously, “Woodman, spare that tree!” Then he hurried down, obtained a stay of proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from the next-door neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet of extra ground and a greenhouse which occupied it. It was a costly purchase; the owner knew he could demand his own price; he asked and received twelve thousand dollars for the strip. In November, Clemens found that he must make another trip to Canada. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was ready for issue, and to insure Canadian copyright the author must cross the line in person. He did not enjoy the prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt Howells to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading Osgood, who would do anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant company and junket. It was by no means an unhappy fortnight. Clemens took a note-book, and there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion. He found the Canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now and then to see a plain one. On another page he tells how one night in the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and hunted for it, hoping to destroy it. He made a rebus picture for the children of this incident in a letter home. We get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as literary material--human material--an example from which some literary aspect or lesson may be drawn. Following the mouse adventure we find it thus dramatized: Trace Father Brebeuf all through this trip, and when I am in a rage and can't endure the mouse be reading of Brebeuf's marvelous endurances and be shamed. And finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway I read Brebeuf's magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering. By and by the thought occurs to me, Brebeuf, with his good, great heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so will I--I will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two minutes dead. They gave him a dinner in Montreal. Louis Frechette, the Canadian poet, was there and Clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made to the speech of welcome. From that moment Frechette never ceased to adore Mark Twain, and visited him soon after the return to Hartford. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was published in England, Canada, Germany, and America early in December, 1881. There had been no stint of money, and it was an extremely handsome book. The pen-and-ink drawings were really charming, and they were lavish as to number. It was an attractive volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated “To those good-mannered and agreeable children, Susy and Clara Clemens.” The story itself was totally unlike anything that Mark Twain had done before. Enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here. The story of the wandering prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the realm of pure romance. Unlike its great successor, the 'Yankee at King Arthur's Court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. Only here and there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of some ultra-modern phrase or word. Mark Twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes in 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The picture of Old London Bridge; the scene in the vagabond's retreat, with its presentation to the little king of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of the jail where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of the splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle of England acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a beggar, is one which only genius could create. One might quote here, but to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the story's charm. How breathlessly interesting is the tale of it! We may imagine that first little audience at Mark Twain's fireside hanging expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more. Of all Mark Twain's longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as to plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to workmanship. This is not to say that it is his greatest story. Probably time will not give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly constructed story, and it has an imperishable charm. It was well received, though not always understood by the public. The reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in Mark Twain's work, that he found it hard to estimate this new product. Some even went so far as to refer to it as one of Mark Twain's big jokes, meaning probably that he had created a chapter in English history with no foundation beyond his fancy. Of course these things pained the author of the book. At one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having done so. Yet there were many gratifying notices. The New York Herald reviewer gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation. In part he said: To those who have followed the career of Mark Twain, his appearance as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant building material and ample training at command. Of his capacity they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which they felt he was able to take. Through all his publications may be traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height. His humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy purpose. His work has been characterized by a manly love of truth, a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant. A genial warmth and whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic and finished. And in closing: The characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of fiction. CXXXVII. CERTAIN ATTACKS AND REPRISALS Beyond the publication of The Prince and the Pauper Clemens was sparingly represented in print in '81. A chapter originally intended for the book, the “Whipping Boy's Story,” he gave to the Bazaar Budget, a little special-edition sheet printed in Hartford. It was the story of the 'Bull and the Bees' which he later adapted for use in Joan of Arc, the episode in which Joan's father rides a bull to a funeral. Howells found that it interfered with the action in the story of the Prince, and we might have spared it from the story of Joan, though hardly without regret. The military story “A Curious Episode” was published in the Century Magazine for November. The fact that Clemens had heard, and not invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his opening paragraphs. Nevertheless, a “Captious Reader” thought it necessary to write to a New York publication concerning its origin: I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Mark Twain, and consequently, when I saw the table of contents of the November number of the Century, I bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his name, and entitled, “A Curious Episode.” When I began to read it, it struck me as strangely familiar, and I soon recognized the story as a true one, told me in the summer of 1878 by an officer of the United States artillery. Query: Did Mr. Twain expect the public to credit this narrative to his clever brain? The editor, seeing a chance for Mark Twain “copy,” forwarded a clipping to Clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter. Clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something to say, not for print, but for the editor's private ear. The newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think it justifiable. Your correspondent is not stupid, I judge, but purely and simply malicious. He knew there was not the shadow of a suggestion, from the beginning to the end of “A Curious Episode,” that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for trying to persuade the public that I had stolen the narrative and was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it before the public. I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to print that communication; no right, neither any excuse. As to publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of bandying words in public with any other prostitute. The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error. He had not looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the communication. “Your letter has taught me a lesson,” he said. “The blame belongs to me for not hunting up the proofs. Please accept my apology.” Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos. Not always. Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly indifferent. Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to any comment of the press. His strong sense of humor, and still stronger sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and plan violence. Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel suits with heavy damages. Sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which Mrs. Clemens would not let him print. At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness. Clemens had heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper; friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause general remark. This was enough. He promptly began to collect data--damaging data--relating to that editor's past history. He even set a man to work in England collecting information concerning his victim. One of his notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was to be the onslaught. When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in the interest of science. No matter if it is an unpleasant animal. This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be written up. He is the polecat of our species.... He is purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out.... Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him. But never mind the rest. When he had got thoroughly interested in his project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just what had been said of him. So he subscribed for the paper himself and set a man to work on the back numbers. We will let him tell the conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells: The result arrived from my New York man this morning. Oh, what a pitiable wreck of high hopes! The “almost daily” assaults for two months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about. There, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! Can you conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts? Boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this: one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it). One jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's newspaper.... Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work has got to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. Howells refers to this episode, and concludes: So the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. CXXXVIII. MANY UNDERTAKINGS To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to defy perusal. Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject, but the reader. He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything relating to him was regarded as news. Daily and hourly he mingled with important matters or spoke concerning them. A bare list of the interesting events of Mark Twain's life would fill a large volume. He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every human aspect. He read the papers through, and there was always enough to arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve himself. His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly with the idea of reform. There were many public and private abuses, and he wanted to correct them all. He covered reams of paper with lurid heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no hope of publication. Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Past-office Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes seemed to him unwarranted. He assailed it, and directly the nation was being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the Postmaster-General's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field. At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which began: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear. On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious collection of human documents. Many of them could be printed to-day, without distress to any one. The conditions that invited them are changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. He may have had some thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote: Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the result. I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech there, and no harm to the family. It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as literature. He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it. He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr. Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for Tennyson's “Bugle Song,” outlining an attractive scheme for it which the order of his fancy had formulated. Dr. Parker replied that the “Bugle Song,” often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians. He was interested in business affairs. Already, before the European trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income. The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those restless mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort; but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and the like. He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the American Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture, and deserves to be remembered for that reason. Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a permanent good-by. Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars from his bank account in a period of sixteen months. By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand dollars being the price of this adventure. A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment. Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an accident insurance company, and such was Jones's confidence in the venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss. Mark Twain's only profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance author of repute. Jones was paying back the money presently, and about that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. At almost any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture that he refused to respond to the happy “hello” call of fortune. In some memoranda made thirty years later he said: I declined. I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcat speculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I said I didn't want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I take five hundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later. About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world. That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage. He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or “chalk-plate” process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface. This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. It was Clemens's notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. Howells tells how, at one time, Clemens thought the “damned human race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. This was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. The process was doomed, in any case. It was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. The kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. Clemens brought his niece's husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. Webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. The history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor. Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that. Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story. Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises. She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not encourage them. She did not see their need. Their home was beautiful; they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. She knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers. She was willing to let well enough alone. Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. In the midst of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother: Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. It comes mainly from business responsibilities and annoyances. He had no moral right to be connected with business at all. He had a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its requirements--its difficulties and details. He was the soul of honor, but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child. During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset. Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith in speculative ventures. Human traits are sometimes modified, but never eliminated. The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to victimize him. The man who believes in himself as an investor will uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has money to back his judgments. CXXXIX. FINANCIAL AND LITERARY By a statement made on the 1st of January, 1882, of Mark Twain's disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve months. It is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. It would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for Mark Twain. It required all that the books could earn, all the income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. There is a good deal of biography in the statement. Of the amount expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the “ventures” from whose bourne no dollar would ever return. Also, a large sum had been spent for the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and securities could earn. It was with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with “millions in it.” Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. His natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company. He had the Southern hospitality. Much company appealed to a very large element in his strangely compounded nature. For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there. In one of her letters she says: The house has been full of company, and I have been “whirled around.” How can a body help it? Oh, I cannot help sighing for the peace and quiet of the farm. This is my work, and I know that I do very wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right about it? Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive me mad. I am all wrong; if I would simply accept the fact that this is my work and let other things go, I know I should not be so fretted; but I want so much to do other things, to study and do things with the children, and I cannot. I have the best French teacher that I ever had, and if I could give any time to it I could not help learning French. When we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. But that was not possible. The game was of far larger proportions than any that could be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life. Mark Twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established in a cottage. It is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame Mark Twain was still not regarded by certain American arbiters of reputations as a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of important meaning and serious purport. In Boston, at that time still the Athens of America, he was enjoyed, delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect. Howells tells us that: In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. Even at the Atlantic dinners his place was “below the salt”--a place of honor, but not of the greatest honor. He did not sit on the dais with Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Howells, and Aldrich. We of a later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target of every eye-find it hard to realize the Cambridge conservatism that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne itself. Howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners had ventured heresy. Now in 1882 he seems to have determined to declare himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of Mark Twain. He prepared for the Century Magazine a biographical appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that Mark Twain's work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance indeed. Whether or not Howells then realized the “inspired knowledge of the multitude,” and that most of the nation outside of the counties of Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material. Very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. His Century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular Atlantic contributor. In the open field of the Century Magazine Howells ventured to declare: Mark Twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. When I think how purely and wholly American it is I am a little puzzled at its universal acceptance.... Why, in fine, should an English chief-justice keep Mark Twain's books always at hand? Why should Darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at midnight, when spent with scientific research? I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists in the universal qualities. He deals very little with the pathetic, which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize it only as something satirized. There is always the touch of nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully open and deliciously shrewd. Elsewhere I have tried to persuade the reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustly to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some joke is always intended. This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes has pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. There was a paper of Mark Twain's printed in the Atlantic Monthly some years ago and called, “The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” which ought to have won popular recognition of the ethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course, funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human conscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist; though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain. Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and the strength of understatement. To him Mark Twain was already the moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the reader should take his time to realize these things. The article, with his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for September, 1882. If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already established in their hearts. CXL. DOWN THE RIVER Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--The Stolen White Elephant. It was not an especially important volume, though some of the features, such as “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” and the “Carnival of Crime,” are among the best of their sort, while the “Elephant” story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called the spectacular detective. The interview between Inspector Blunt and the owner of the elephant is typical. The inspector asks: “Now what does this elephant eat, and how much?” “Well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything. He will eat a man, he will eat a Bible; he will eat anything between a man and a Bible.” “Good-very good, indeed, but too general. Details are necessary; details are the only valuable thing in our trade. Very well, as to men. At one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men will he eat if fresh?” “He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal he would eat five ordinary men.” “Very good; five men. We will put that down. What nationalities would he prefer?” “He is indifferent about nationalities. He prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced against strangers.” “Very good. Now, as to Bibles. How many Bibles would he eat at a meal?” “He would eat an entire edition.” Clemens and Osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand. The long-deferred completion of the Mississippi book was to be accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken. Howells was going abroad, but the charming Osgood was willing to make the excursion, and a young man named Roswell Phelps, of Hartford, was engaged as a stenographer to take the notes. Clemens made a farewell trip to Boston to see Howells before his departure, and together they went to Concord to call on Emerson; a fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. They went again in the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at his house. This was in April. Longfellow had died in March. The fact that Howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad. Just what breach Clemens committed during this visit is not remembered now, and it does not matter; but his letter to Howells, after his return to Hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the time. Half-way in it he breaks out: But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me, because there is no cure, no cure. If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I could conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the earth down to his chin. When he merely supposed he was being entertaining. Next day he was off with Osgood and the stenographer for St. Louis, where they took the steamer Gold Dust down the river. He intended to travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the Southern Hotel and on the boat. In 'Life on the Mississippi' he has given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily remembered him. “I did not write that story in the book quite as it happened,” he reflected once, many years later. “We went on board at night. Next morning I was up bright and early and out on deck to see if I could recognize any of the old landmarks. I could not remember any. I did not know where we were at all. It was a new river to me entirely. I climbed up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel. I said 'Good morning.' He answered pleasantly enough. His face was entirely strange to me. Then I sat down on the high seat back of the wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such as a landsman would ask. He began, in the old way, to fill me up with the old lies, and I enjoyed letting him do it. Then suddenly he turned round to me and said: “'I want to get a cup of coffee. You hold her, will you, till I come back?' And before I could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door and down the steps. It all came so suddenly that I sprang to the wheel, of course, as I would have done twenty years before. Then in a moment I realized my position. Here I was with a great big steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, without any further knowledge than that fact, and the pilot out of sight. I settled my mind on three conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he had recognized me and thought I knew the river; third, that we were in a perfectly safe place, where I could not possibly kill the steamboat. But that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely doubtful one. I knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were standing by the greenhorn's side. Of course, by force of habit, when I grabbed the wheel, I had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and I made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but I could feel myself getting old and gray. Then all at once I recognized where we were; we were in what is called the Grand Chain--a succession of hidden rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. There were two rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly between them or wreck the boat. There was a time when I could have done it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now. I would have given any reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. I think I was about ready to drop dead when I heard a step on the pilothouse stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth, and took the wheel, and I crawled weakly back to the seat. He said: “'You thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you? You thought I didn't know who you were. Why, I recognized that drawl of yours as soon as you opened your mouth.' “I said, 'Who the h--l are you? I don't remember you.' “'Well,' he said, 'perhaps you don't, but I was a cub pilot on the river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and I couldn't get a license when I was qualified for one, because the Pilots' Association was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they wanted to, and the law was that I had to be examined by two licensed pilots, and for a good while I could not get any one to make that examination. But one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application for a license. I had never seen you before, and I have never seen you since until now, but I recognized you.' “'All right,' I said. 'But if I had gone half a mile farther with that steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.' “We got to be good friends, of course, and I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before.” From the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house. He was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and truly enough the years had slipped away. He was the young fellow in his twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortune in the stars. To heighten the illusion, he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings.--[It will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of Life on the Mississippi, and consider Mark Twain's word-picture of the river sunrise.] The majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever before, especially its solitude. It had been so full of life in his time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the loneliness of God. At one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle. Once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out to be the Mark Twain. There had been varied changes in twenty-one years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. To Bixby afterward he wrote: “I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in my life. How do you run Plum Point?” He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was captain now on a splendid new Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge. The Anchor Line steamers were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. They were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat travel. Mark Twain made his trip down the river just in time. In New Orleans he met George W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old French Quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. He made a trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will. Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and beloved Dr. Brown. Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge. Bixby had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself, so that with “Sam Clemens” in the pilot-house with him, it was wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the fifties. “Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did,” said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time. “I was sorry I had to stay at the wheel so much. I wanted to have more time with Sam without thinking of the river at all. Sam was sorry, too, from what he wrote after he got home.” Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. It was a tender, heart-spoken letter: I didn't see half enough of you. It was a sore disappointment. Osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--I expected to have you with me all the time. Altogether, the most pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St. Louis, and you were your old natural self again. Twenty years have not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your loveliness. Said Bixby: “When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters' Hotel; to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had a couple of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. After he returned to New York he sent for my picture. He wanted to use it in his book.” At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the Mississippi toward St. Paul. Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal. Delightful days [he wrote home]. Loitering around all day long, examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago. I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house. They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates. That world which I knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again. He had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying. His note-book says: The bluffs all along up above St. Paul are exquisitely beautiful where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky above the steep, verdant slopes. They are inexpressibly rich and mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very tints to make an artist worship. In a final entry he wrote: The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboat man is no longer the god. CXLI. LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own account. Not only did he contract to supply funds for the Mississippi book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to swear at, he had his niece's husband, Webster, installed as Osgood's New York subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. There was no delay in this move. Webster must get well familiarized with the work before the Mississippi book's publication. He had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort. Even at the farm he worked without making much headway. At the end of October he wrote Howells: The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still lacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the thing is done or break down at it. The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day (mainly stolen from books though credit given), 9,500 words, so I reduced my burden by one-third in one day. It was five days' work in one. I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written. It is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finished in five. He had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'A Tramp Abroad', that he would never limit himself as to time again. But he had forgotten that vow, and was suffering accordingly. Howells wrote from London urging him to drop everything and come over to Europe for refreshment. We have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made of; but I would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in London. Clemens answered: Yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently interminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not boss here, and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter season. This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. He declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait. I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably--write when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer... I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness. It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said: Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his faculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the floor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint. Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with “Life on the Mississippi” as his subject. Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to Osgood has not been preserved. Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday Evening Club on “What is Happiness?” presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his “gospel,” and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'What is Man'? It is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort: “Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.” It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory--the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. He made a birthday aphorism on the subject: “The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little.” He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. In practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable Colonel Sellers to the end of his days. CXLII. “LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI” The Mississippi book was completed at last and placed in Osgood's hands for publication. Clemens was immensely fond of Osgood. Osgood would come down to Hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards, which to Mark Twain's mind was the proper way to conduct business. Besides, there was Webster, who by this time, or a very little later, had the word “publisher” printed in his letter-heads, and was truly that, so far as the new book was concerned. Osgood had become little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. It should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. He was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. His taste ran to the artistic, expensive product. “That book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make,” Clemens once declared. “Bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. But Osgood was a lovely fellow.” Life on the Mississippi was issued about the middle of May. It was a handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. It was experimental, and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the final result. Among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. The artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately discovered photographic processes was used. Furthermore, the latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of Clemens himself to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work. Webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books. As literature, the Mississippi book will rank with Mark Twain's best--so far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. Earlier in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. They constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself. Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature, but of a different class. The difference is about the same as that between 'A Tramp Abroad' and the 'Innocents'. It is the difference between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature and journalism. But the last is hardly fair. It is journalism, but it is literary journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary, and not journalistic at all. There would always be those in any book of travel he might write. The story of the river revisited is an interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less that is otherwise valuable. 'Life on the Mississippi' has been always popular in Germany. The Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the author's lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor's opinion. Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview at the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of his countrymen in its author. When he was asked, “But have not the Germans been offended by Mark Twain's strictures on their customs and language in his 'Tramp Abroad'” he replied, “We know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the foremost humorist of the age.” Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau's final sentiment echoed elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already highly regarded as a serious writer. Thomas Hardy said to Howells one night at dinner: “Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great humorist? He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way.” The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that, wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twain; also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his reputation for veracity. That the Mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign opinion of Mark Twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men. CXLIII. A GUEST OF ROYALTY For purposes of copyright another trip to Canada was necessary, and when the newspapers announced (May, 1883) that Mark Twain was about to cross the border there came one morning the following telegram: Meeting of Literary and Scientific Society at Ottawa from 22d to 26th. It would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my guest during that time. LORNE. The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise. The invitation was therefore in the nature of a command. Clemens obeyed it graciously enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. He had been honored by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--English royalty--paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen. They had invited him because they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home. Mark Twain was democratic. A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not a good king. But there was something national in this tribute; and, besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it. It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of America's foremost men of letters. The honor was no greater than many others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of Canon Kingsley and Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind. Clemens enjoyed his visit. Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. Once they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience. It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist: “Your Highness,” he said, “I have had other compliments paid to me, but none equal to this one. I have never before had a salute fired in my honor.” Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written an introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood ['83) as a joke. Clemens in the introduction says: “Its delicious, unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare's sublimities.” An extract, the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his meaning: “We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him, and for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.”] CXLIV. A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for stories of many lengths and varieties. His note-book of that time is full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and extravagant kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether humorous or otherwise. It seems worth while setting down one or more of these here, for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that came and went, and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind. Here is a fair example of many: Two men starving on a raft. The pauper has a Boston cracker, resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it. Millionaire agrees. Pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four hours later asks him a million for the cracker. Millionaire agrees. Pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker; backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered $100,000,000, every cent he has in the world. Pauper accepts. Millionaire: “Now give it to me.” Pauper: “No; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of the transaction and make an oath to pay.” While pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship. When pauper says, “Sign and take the cracker,” millionaire smiles a smile, declines, and points to the ship. Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very good story indeed. IDEA FOR “STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN” In modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures him is the means of making the righteous comfortable. Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as “Lockjaw Harris,” “Influenza Smith,” “Sinapism Davis,” and a dozen or two more, a perfect outbreak of disorders. Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game. An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night, in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the Sultan to death. That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was “made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from Scheherazade's prolixity.” “On the whole,” he said, “it is not your best, nor your second best; but all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in.” And that was the truth. So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to seclusion, and there remains to this day. Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary, but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates. He wrote Twichell: Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left the study, but I couldn't hold in--had to do something; so I spent eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which shall fill the children's heads with dates without study. I give each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the children call the stake by the king's name. You can stand in the door and take a bird's-eye view of English monarchy, from the Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye view the rest of it to 1883. You can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the varying distances of the stakes apart. You can see Richard II., two feet; Oliver Cromwell, two feet; James II., three feet, and so on --and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty, fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward III., Henry III., and George III.). By the way, third's a lucky number for length of days, isn't it? Yes, sir; by my scheme you get a realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns. The reason it took me eight hours was because, with little Jean's interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the end of Henry VI. three times over, and besides I had to whittle out all those pegs. I did a full day's work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of my game after I went to bed trying to fit it for indoors. So I didn't get to sleep till pretty late; but when I did go off I had contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board. We may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair start like that. He decided to save the human race that year with a history game. When he had got the children fairly going and interested in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology. He would have a game not only of the English kings, but of the kings of every other nation; likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities in every line. He would prepare a book to accompany these games. Each game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain eight thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia. He would organize clubs throughout the United States for playing the game; prizes were to be given. Experts would take it up. He foresaw a department in every newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and whist and other useless diversions. He wrote to Orion, and set him to work gathering facts and dates by the bushel. He wrote to Webster, sent him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay. Patents must also be applied for abroad. With all nations playing this great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so, in the true Sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and larger, until finally it blew up. The game on paper had become so large, so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it. Yet the first idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up the hillside of Quarry Farm. The children enjoyed it, and played it through many sweet summer afternoons. Once, in the days when he had grown old, he wrote, remembering: Among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and that they compelled brisk exercise. The peg of William the Conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the Conqueror and have all English history skeletonized and landmarked and mile-posted under his eye.... The eye has a good memory. Many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but I still see them and each in its place; and no king's name falls upon my ear without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet of space he takes up along the road. It turned out an important literary year after all. In the Mississippi book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from time to time for a number of years, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp and fresh, his inspiration renewed. The trip down the river had revived it. The interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to finish the story at a dead heat. To Howells, August 22 (1883), he wrote: I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn't name the number of days; I shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to. I used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days in the week, but this time I have wrought from breakfast till 5.15 P.M. six days in the week, and once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly. He refers to the game, though rather indifferently. When I wrote you I thought I had it; whereas I was merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn't be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done. Notwithstanding the fact that he was working at Huck with enthusiasm, he seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a serial or as a book. But the fact that he persevered until Huck Finn at last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for congratulation. CXLV. HOWELLS AND CLEMENS WRITE A PLAY Before Howells went abroad Clemens had written: Now I think that the play for you to write would be one entitled, “Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Age” (75), with Lafayette Hawkins (at 50) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him “My lord.” He [Sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various ways. Your refined people and purity of speech would make the best possible background, and when you are done, I could take your manuscript and rewrite the Colonel's speeches, and make him properly extravagant, and I would let the play go to Raymond, and bind him up with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read it. Shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense? Howells, returned and settled in Boston once more, had revived an interest in the play idea. He corresponded with Clemens concerning it and agreed that the American Claimant, Leathers, should furnish the initial impulse of the drama. They decided to revive Colonel Sellers and make him the heir; Colonel Sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes, new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind. Howells came down to Hartford from Boston full of enthusiasm. He found Clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme of action. Howells, telling of it, says: I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. Howells, in turn, proposed a plan which Clemens approved, and they set to work. Howells could imitate Clemens's literary manner, and they had a riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors. Howells has told about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this memoir. He said: “Clemens took one scene and I another. We had loads and loads of fun about it. We cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along. We thought it mighty good, and I think to this day that it was mighty good. We called the play 'Colonel Sellers.' We revived him. Clemens had a notion of Sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of Sellers leading a women's temperance crusade. We conceived the idea of Sellers wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who had fallen, through drink. Sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew performance on the stage. He always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher, one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency, he could give proof of its effectiveness.” In connection with the extinguisher, Howells provided Sellers with a pair of wings, which Sellers declared would enable him to float around in any altitude where the flames might break out. The extinguisher, was not to be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with Greek fire, on the principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be inoculated with Greek fire against the ordinary conflagration. Of course the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of the scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not wholly warranted by the previous character of Sellers, unless, indeed, he had gone stark mad. It is, in fact, Sellers caricatured. The gentle, tender side of Sellers--the best side--the side which Clemens and Howells themselves cared for most, is not there. Chapter III of Mark Twain's novel, The American Claimant, contains a scene between Colonel Sellers and Washington Hawkins which presents the extravagance of the Colonel's materialization scheme. It is a modified version of one of the scenes in the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any. The authors' rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors in particular, were waiting. Howells went back to Boston tired out, but elate in the prospect of imminent fortune. CXLVI. DISTINGUISHED VISITORS Meantime, while Howells had been in Hartford working at the play with Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston. On inquiring for Howells, at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain. Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not accepted Mark Twain at his larger value. He seemed surprised and said: “Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?” To which Mrs. Howells replied: “He likes Mr. Clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew.” Arnold proceeded to Hartford to lecture, and one night Howells and Clemens went to meet him at a reception. Says Howells: While his hand laxly held mine in greeting I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. “Who--who in the world is that?” I looked and said, “Oh, that is Mark Twain.” I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish; but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house. He came there to dine with the Twichells and the Rev. Dr. Edwin P. Parker. Dr. Parker and Arnold left together, and, walking quietly homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just left. Clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best. He had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment and anecdote of a kind which Twichell once declared the world had never before seen and would never see again. Arnold seemed dazed by it, unable to come out from under its influence. He repeated some of the things Mark Twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic. Then he asked solemnly: “And is he never serious?” And Dr. Parker as solemnly answered: “Mr. Arnold, he is the most serious man in the world.” Dr. Parker, recalling this incident, remembered also that Protap Chunder Mazoomdar, a Hindoo Christian prelate of high rank, visited Hartford in 1883, and that his one desire was to meet Mark Twain. In some memoranda of this visit Dr. Parker has written: I said that Mark Twain was a friend of mine, and we would immediately go to his house. He was all eagerness, and I perceived that I had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated gentleman's estimation. Arriving at Mr. Clemens's residence, I promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they were introduced and spent a long while together. In due time Mazoomdar came forth with Mark's likeness and autograph, and as we walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with Simeon of old, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!” CXLVII. THE FORTUNES OF A PLAY Howells is of the impression that the “Claimant” play had been offered to other actors before Raymond was made aware of it; but there are letters (to Webster) which indicate that Raymond was to see the play first, though Clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he hopes Raymond will not take it. Then he says: Why do I offer him the play at all? For these reasons: he plays that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of right. Therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice. Let us have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business. I decline to have any correspondence with R. myself in any way. This was at the end of November, 1883, while the play was still being revised. Negotiations with Raymond had already begun, though he does not appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it to be strictly a Raymond play. The thing was hanging fire for nearly a year, altogether, while they were waiting on Raymond, who had a profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of Sellers. Howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to Raymond, whom he found “in a mood of sweet reasonableness” at one of Osgood's luncheons. Raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like it for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it. In due time Raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far as the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization feature and to Sellers as claimant for the English earldom. He asked that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, Clemens and Howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while. Raymond finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger towns--Howells thinks in Buffalo. A week later the manuscript came back to Webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as indeed he had of all Mark Twain's affairs at this time, and with it a brief line: DEAR SIR,--I have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced that in its present form it would not prove successful. I return the manuscript by express to your address. Thanking you for your courtesy, I am, Yours truly, JOHN T. RAYMOND. P.S.--If the play is altered and made longer I will be pleased to read it again. In his former letter Raymond had declared that “Sellers, while a very sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for a moment imagine that he had done such a work” (meaning the materialization). Clearly Raymond wanted a more serious presentation, something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly blame him. But the authors had faith in their performance as it stood, and agreed they would make no change. Finally a well-known elocutionist, named Burbank, conceived the notion of impersonating Raymond as well as Sellers, making of it a sort of double burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms. Burbank came to Hartford and showed what he could do. Howells and Clemens agreed to give him the play, and they hired the old Lyceum Theater for a week, at seven hundred dollars, for its trial presentation. Daniel Frohman promoted it. Clemens and Howells went over the play and made some changes, but they were not as hilarious over it or as full of enthusiasm as they had been in the beginning. Howells put in a night of suffering--long, dark hours of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising next morning from a tossing bed, wrote: “Here's a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools.” Clemens hurried over to Boston to consult with Howells, and in the end they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the play off and give Burbank his freedom. But Clemens's faith in it did not immediately die. Howells relinquished all right and title in it, and Clemens started it out with Burbank and a traveling company, doing one-night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own expense. It never reached New York. “And yet,” says Howells, “I think now that if it had come it would have been successful. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist die.”--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells's faith in the play was exceedingly shaky. In one letter he wrote: “It is a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might amuse, I'm afraid that in three he would simply bore.” And again: “As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace to have it succeed.”] CXLVIII. CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent impetuosity than ever. Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he wrote: Now let's write a tragedy. The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read the incident in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a possible tragedy, to see how it might work. If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey? It's right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big, picturesque power, and all that. Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn't Florence want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure here. It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which he would later make his story, “The Death Disc.” Howells was too tired and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so Clemens went steaming ahead alone. My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized. And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale's leper business. When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand. He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize 'The Prince and the Pauper' and 'Tom Sawyer', and was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs. Mark Twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea. It is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain. The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home. Henry Irving was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable. Cable had now permanently left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford. Clemens took Cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes. Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles. He suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one. It required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through. In the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. At one of these gatherings, Cable produced a curious book, which he said had been lent to him by Prof. Francis Bacon, of New Haven, as a great rarity. It was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a Southern youth, named S. Watson Wolston, a Yale student of 1845, and was an absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, “Love Triumphant, or the Enemy Conquered.” Its heroine's name was Ambulinia, and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations delighted Clemens beyond measure. He begged Cable to lend it to him, to read at the Saturday Morning Club, declaring that he certainly must own the book, at whatever cost. Henry C. Robinson, who was present, remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and Twichell thought he recalled such a book on sale in New Haven during his college days. Twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat later, being in New Haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author. Twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still be obtained. “Well,” was the answer, “I undertook to put my cellar in order the other day, and found about a cord of them down there. I think I can supply you.” Twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their first spring walk to Talcott's Tower casually mentioned to Clemens the quest for the rare Ambulinia. But Clemens had given up the pursuit. New York dealers had reported no success in the matter. The book was no longer in existence. “What would you give for a copy?” asked. Twichell. Clemens became excited. “It isn't a question of price,” he said; “that would be for the owner to set if I could find him.” Twichell drew a little package from his pocket. “Well, Mark,” he said, “here are six copies of that book, to begin with. If that isn't enough, I can get you a wagon-load.” It was enough. But it did not deter Clemens in his purpose, which was to immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms. He did this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in one of his own volumes. Clemens and Twichell did not always walk that spring. The early form of bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each got one and attempted its conquest. They practised in the early morning hours on Farmington Avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an instructor, a young German, who, after a morning or two, regarded Mark Twain helplessly and said: “Mr. Clemens, it's remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more different ways than the man that invented it.” They were curious things, those old high-wheel machines. You were perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with damaging results. Frequently that is what happened. The word “header” seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period. Perhaps Mark Twain invented it. He had enough experience to do it. He always declared afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that has since come into general use. Once he wrote: There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true; but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practise. They all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog. He conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and Twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as Wethersfield or to the tower. It was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one; but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with Mark Twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the “safety” came along. He had his machine sent out to Elmira, but there were too many hills in Chemung County, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and pushing his wheel, and did not try it again. To return to Cable. When the 1st of April (1884) approached he concluded it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his recent entertainment in the Clemens's home. He went to work at it systematically. He had a “private and confidential” circular letter printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's literary friends in Boston, Hartford, Springfield, New York, Brooklyn, Washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that their letters would reach him simultaneously April 1st, asking for his autograph. No stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was requested that “no stranger to Mr. Clemens and no minor” should take part. Mrs. Clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to it that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames unopened. It would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have responded to it, for on the morning of April 1st a stupefying mass of letters was unloaded on Mark Twain's table. He did not know what to make of it, and Mrs. Clemens stood off to watch the results. The first one he opened was from Dean Sage, a friend whom he valued highly. Sage wrote from Brooklyn: DEAR CLEMENS,--I have recently been asked by a young lady who unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance. In enumerating them to her, after mentioning the names of Geo. Shepard Page, Joe Michell, Capt. Isaiah Ryndus, Mr. Willard, Dan Mace, and J. L. Sullivan, I came to yours. “Oh!” said she, “I have read all his works--Little Breeches, The Heathen Chinee, and the rest--and think them delightful. Do oblige me by asking him for his autograph, preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it is not too short.” Of course I promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some little thing addressed to Miss Oakes. We are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has been among us for the past fortnight. With regards to Mrs. Clemens and the children, in which my wife joins, Yours truly, DEAN SAGE. It amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but when he picked up a letter from Brander Matthews, asking, in some absurd fashion, for his signature, and another from Ellen Terry, and from Irving, and from Stedman, and from Warner, and Waring, and H. C. Bunner, and Sarony, and Laurence Hutton, and John Hay, and R. U. Johnson, and Modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him. He was delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way, and most of the letters were distinctly amusing. Some of them asked for autographs by the yard, some by the pound. Henry Irving said: I have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very tired--but there will be no rest till I get your autograph. Some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from The Innocents Abroad for them or to send an original manuscript. Others requested that his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size. John Hay suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's “Night Thoughts,” and an equal amount of Pollak's “Course of Time.” I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your handwriting. Altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his admiration for Cable grew accordingly. Cable, too, was pleased with the success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing again. A newspaper of the time reports him as saying: I never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the 1st of April. I was afraid the letters would reach Mark when he was in affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying to make it up to him. When I visited Mark we used to open our budgets of letters together at breakfast. We used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph- hunter. I think the idea came from that. The first person I spoke to about it was Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century. My most enthusiastic ally was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. We never thought it would get into the papers. I never played a practical joke before. I never will again, certainly. Mark Twain in those days did not encourage the regular autograph-collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests for his signature. He changed all this in later years, and kept a supply always on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he had no patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly pleasing application to obtain his signature. CXLIX. MARK TWAIN IN BUSINESS Samuel Clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing business. Webster had a complete office with assistants at 658 Broadway, and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge of subscription publishing. He was a busy, industrious young man, tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means unnecessary to commercial success. He placed this mental and physical capital against Mark Twain's inspiration and financial backing, and the combination of Charles L. Webster & Co. seemed likely to be a strong one. Already, in the spring of 1884., Webster had the new Mark Twain book, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', well in hand, and was on the watch for promising subscription books by other authors. Clemens, with his usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the petty distractions and difficulties as they came along. Certain plays he was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness. To Howells he wrote: My days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for I am reading the 'Huck Finn' proofs. They don't make a very great many mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man swear his teeth loose. Whereupon Howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the Huck Finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story. Clemens, among other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by Howells's father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for the heavy obligation. That it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent acknowledgment: It took my breath away, and I haven't recovered it yet, entirely--I mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck Finn. Now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in God's name, and be by me forever blessed. I can't conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself. But if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on. The proof-reading of 'The Prince and the Pauper' cost me the last rags of my religion. Clemens decided to have the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his own ideas. He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy. In the pages of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc. The style and the spirit of these things amused him. He instructed Webster to look up the artist, who proved to be a young man, E. W. Kemble by name, later one of our foremost cartoonists. Webster engaged Kemble and put the manuscript in his hands. Through the publication of certain chapters of Huck Finn in the Century Magazine, Kemble was brought to the notice of its editors, who wrote Clemens that they were profoundly indebted to him for unearthing “such a gem of an illustrator.” Clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of patience was light and the details were many. His early business period resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in Esmeralda, his letters to Webster being not unlike those to Orion in that former day. They are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane. It required effort for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence. A criticism of one of Webster's assistants will serve as an example of his less quiet method: Charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but blind; and not only blind, but partly dead. Of course, one must regard many of Mark Twain's business aspects humorously. To consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light altogether. He wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing. There were few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener, than himself. It is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which he sometimes manifested. He had observed the methods of Bliss and Osgood, and had drawn his conclusions. In the beginning of the Huck Finn canvass he wrote Webster: Keep it diligently in mind that we don't issue till we have made a big sale. Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with an intent and purpose of issuing on the 10th or 15th of next December (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the trade); but if we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone publication till we've got them. It is a plain, simple policy, and would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed. [That is to say, 'The Prince and the Pauper' and the Mississippi book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the initial canvass.] CL. FARM PICTURES Gerhardt returned from Paris that summer, after three years of study, a qualified sculptor. He was prepared to take commissions, and came to Elmira to model a bust of his benefactor. The work was finished after four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but Gerhardt, attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely. The family gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a fine likeness. It was decided that a cut of it should be used as a frontispiece for the new book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the Huck Finn pages, a labor in which Mrs. Clemens and the children materially assisted. In the childish biography which Susy began of her father, a year later, she says: Ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated --[Susy's spelling is preserved]--them. Papa read Huckleberry Finn to us in manuscript,--[Probably meaning proof.]--just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate, while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully terrible part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so terrible, that Clara and I used to delight in and oh, with what despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would almost be ruined without it. But we gradually came to think as mama did. Commenting on this phase of Huck's evolution Mark Twain has since written: I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the “expergator” alive. It is possible, for I had that custom. Little Jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary arbitration. She was four, and had more interest in cows. In some memoranda which her father kept of that period--the “Children's Book”--he says: She goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six o'clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can express her feeling for them. She sits rapt and contented while David milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about the cows. The time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant, but not for her. She could stand a week of it. When the milking is finished, and “Blanche,” “Jean,” and “the cross cow” are turned into the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set Jean on a shed in that lot, and stay by her half an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse, comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, “Ain't this a sweet little garden?” Yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by Jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture and left her bereft. I thought I was going to get back home, now, but that was an error. Jean knew of some more cows in a field somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward. When we turned the corner and took the right-hand road, I saw that we should presently be out of range of call and sight; so I began to argue against continuing the expedition, and Jean began to argue in favor of it, she using English for light skirmishing and German for “business.” I kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her arguments in detail, one after the other, till I judged I had her about cornered. She hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply: “Wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!” (We won't talk any more about it.) It nearly took my breath away, though I thought I might possibly have misunderstood. I said: “Why, you little rascal! Was hast du gesagt?” But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way. I suppose I ought to have been outraged, but I wasn't; I was charmed. His own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are fewer literary ideas and more philosophies. There was an excitement, just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda says: I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature whom God concerns himself about and not us. And there is another which says: People, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the myriads of stars. We sha'n't need that. We could use up two eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished, and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. He records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to Howells: Before I forget it I must tell you that Mrs. Clemens has said a bright thing. A drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here for a church debt. I began to rage over the exceedingly cool wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said: “I think I know that church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know how to write a polished letter. How should he?” My manner changed so suddenly and so radically that Mrs. C. said: “I will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: 'Consider every man colored till he is proved white.'” It is dern good, I think. One of the note-books contains these entries: Talking last night about home matters, I said, “I wish I had said to George when we were leaving home, 'Now, George, I wish you would take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while I am away----'” “To learn to let my matches alone,” interrupted Livy. The very words I was going to use. Yet George had not been mentioned before, nor his peculiarities. Several years ago I said: “Suppose I should live to be ninety-two, and just as I was dying a messenger should enter and say----” “You are become Earl of Durham,” interrupted Livy. The very words I was going to utter. Yet there had not been a word said about the earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation calculated to suggest any such subject. CLI. MARK TWAIN MUGWUMPS The Republican Presidential nomination of James G. Blaine resulted in a political revolt such as the nation had not known. Blaine was immensely popular, but he had many enemies in his own party. There were strong suspicions of his being connected with doubtful financiering-enterprises, more or less sensitive to official influence, and while these scandals had become quieted a very large portion of the Republican constituency refused to believe them unjustified. What might be termed the intellectual element of Republicanism was against Blame: George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, James Russell Lowell, Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Nast, the firm of Harper & Brothers, Joseph W. Hawley, Joseph Twichell, Mark Twain--in fact the majority of thinking men who held principle above party in their choice. On the day of the Chicago nomination, Henry C. Robinson, Charles E. Perkins, Edward M. Bunce, F. G. Whitmore, and Samuel C. Dunham were collected with Mark Twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game and discussing the political situation, with George, the colored butler, at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in. As fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town, it was telephoned up to the house and George reported it through the speaking-tube. The opposition to Blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of the assembled players seriously expected his nomination. What was their amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon George suddenly announced through the speaking-tube that Blaine was the nominee. The butts of the billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the players were speechless. Then Henry Robinson said: “It's hard luck to have to vote for that man.” Clemens looked at him under his heavy brows. “But--we don't--have to vote for him,” he said. “Do you mean to say that you're not going to vote for him?” “Yes, that is what I mean to say. I am not going to vote for him.” There was a general protest. Most of those assembled declared that when a party's representatives chose a man one must stand by him. They might choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained. Clemens said: “No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote. If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.” There was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of those there present remained loyal to Blaine. General Hawley and his paper stood by Blaine. Warner withdrew from his editorship of the Courant and remained neutral. Twichell stood with Clemens and came near losing his pulpit by it. Open letters were published in the newspapers about him. It was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families, and congregations. If we except the Civil War period, there never had been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the parties of James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland in 1884. That Howells remained true to Blaine was a grief to Clemens. He had gone to the farm with Howells on his political conscience and had written fervent and imploring letters on the subject. As late as September 17th, he said: Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for Blaine. I believe you said something about the country and the party. Certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first. I don't ask you to vote at all. I only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for Blaine.... Don't be offended; I mean no offense. I am not concerned about the rest of the nation, but well, good-by. Yours ever, MARK. Beyond his prayerful letters to Howells, Clemens did not greatly concern himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to Hartford, he went vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties, and were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper's convictions. It was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his remarks, a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so loudly as to drown his voice. He waited till the band got by, but by the time he was well under way again another band passed, and once more he was obliged to wait till the music died away in the distance. Then he said, quite serenely: “You will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper.” In introducing Carl Schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at Hartford, October 20, 1884., he remarked that he [Clemens] was the only legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great favor by acting as vice-presidents. Then he said: As far as my own political change of heart is concerned, I have not been convinced by any Democratic means. The opinion I hold of Mr. Blaine is due to the comments of the Republican press before the nomination. Not that they have said bitter or scandalous things, because Republican papers are above that, but the things they said did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply editorial disapproval of Mr. Blame and the belief that he was not qualified to be President of the United States. It is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest newspaper in Colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has recently nominated me for President. It is hardly fit for me to preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with a Presidential madness. If I had realized that this canvass was to turn on the candidate's private character I would have started that Colorado paper sooner. I know the crimes that can be imputed and proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands. This cannot be said of any other Presidential candidate in the field. Inasmuch as the Blaine-Cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded. Mark Twain voted for Grover Cleveland, though up to the very eve of election he was ready to support a Republican nominee in whom he had faith, preferably Edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by which Edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the country. It was probably Dr. Burchard's ill-advised utterance concerning the three alleged R's of Democracy, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” that defeated Blaine, and by some strange, occult means Mark Twain's butler George got wind of this damning speech before it became news on the streets of Hartford. George had gone with his party, and had a considerable sum of money wagered on Blaine's election; but he knew it was likely to be very close, and he had an instant and deep conviction that these three fatal words and Blaine's failure to repudiate them meant the candidate's downfall. He immediately abandoned everything in the shape of household duties, and within the briefest possible time had changed enough money to make him safe, and leave him a good margin of winnings besides, in the event of Blame's defeat. This was evening. A very little later the news of Blaine's blunder, announced from the opera-house stage, was like the explosion of a bomb. But it was no news to George, who went home rejoicing with his enemies. CLII. PLATFORMING WITH CABLE The drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing house had told heavily on Clemens's finances. It became desirable to earn a large sum of money with as much expedition as possible. Authors' readings had become popular, and Clemens had read in Philadelphia and Boston with satisfactory results. He now conceived the idea of a grand tour of authors as a commercial enterprise. He proposed to Aldrich, Howells, and Cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest. He offered to be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day apiece as their net return from the “circus,” as he called it. Howells and Aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing prospect, but only Cable was willing to realize it. He had been scouring the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces with Mark Twain. Clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already stated, the need of much money had become important. He arranged with J. B. Pond for the business side of the expedition, though in reality he was its proprietor. The private-car idea was given up, but he employed Cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a week and expenses, and he paid Pond a commission. Perhaps, without going any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and yielded a large return of the needed funds. Clemens and Cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for the absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there would have been little to regret. They were a curiously associated pair. Cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to Sunday-school, Bible reading, and church affairs in general. Clemens--well, Clemens was different. On the first evening of their tour, when the latter was comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, Cable appeared with his Bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud. Clemens made no comment, and this went on for an evening or two more. Then he said: “See here, Cable, we'll have to cut this part of the program out. You can read the Bible as much as you please so long as you don't read it to me.” Cable retired courteously. He had a keen sense of humor, and most things that Mark Twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him. Cable did not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car. One day Clemens sand to him: “Cable, why do you sit in here? You don't smoke, and you know I always smoke, and sometimes swear.” Cable said, “I know, Mark, I don't do these things, but I can't help admiring the way you do them.” When Sunday came it was Mark Twain's great happiness to stay in bed all day, resting after his week of labor; but Cable would rise, bright and chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the various churches and Sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief address at each, being always invited to do so. It seems worth while to include one of the Clemens-Cable programs here--a most satisfactory one. They varied it on occasion, and when they were two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here given was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its worth: PROGRAM Richling's visit to Kate Riley GEO. W. CABLE King Sollermun MARK TWAIN (a) Kate Riley and Ristofolo (b) Narcisse in mourning for “Lady Byron” (c) Mary's Night Ride GEO. W. CABLE (a) Tragic Tale of the Fishwife (b) A Trying Situation (c) A Ghost Story MARK TWAIN At a Mark Twain memorial meeting (November 30, 1910), where the few who were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories, George Cable recalled their reading days together and told of Mark Twain's conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself, regardless of all other concerns. He told how when they had been traveling for a while Clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they would forget before they had left the entertainment hall. Cable said that up to that time he had supposed Clemens's chief thought was the entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was satisfied. He told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against the footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his colleague to be glorying in that triumph. What was his surprise, then, on the way to the hotel in the carriage, when Clemens groaned and seemed writhing in spirit and said: “Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer.” Cable added that all that night and the next day Mark Twain devoted himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified not only as humor, but as literature and art. A good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour. Many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain memoranda have been preserved. Grover Cleveland had been elected when they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in Albany as Governor of New York. When they reached Albany Cable and Clemens decided to call on him. They drove to the Capitol and were shown into the Governor's private office. Cleveland made them welcome, and, after greetings, said to Clemens: “Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow-citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many months some years ago, but you never called on me then. How do you explain this?” Clemens said: “Oh, that is very simple to answer, your Excellency. In Buffalo you were a sheriff. I kept away from the sheriff as much as possible, but you're Governor now, and on the way to the Presidency. It's worth while coming to see you.” Clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the Executive desk. He leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if waiting for orders. No one spoke for a moment; then the Governor said to this collection of attendants: “You are dismissed, young gentlemen. Your services are not required. Mr. Clemens is sitting on the bells.” In Buffalo, when Clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered the audience for a moment; then he said: “I miss a good many faces. They have gone--gone to the tomb, to the gallows, or to the White House. All of us are entitled to at least one of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for all.” On Thanksgiving Eve the readers were in Morristown, New Jersey, where they were entertained by Thomas Nast. The cartoonist prepared a quiet supper for them and they remained overnight in the Nast home. They were to leave next morning by an early train, and Mrs. Nast had agreed to see that they were up in due season. When she woke next morning there seemed a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious. Going to the servants' room, she found them sleeping soundly. The alarm-clock in the back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired. The studio clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises had retired from business. Clemens had found that the clocks interfered with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early trains and reading engagements. On being accused of duplicity he said: “Well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway. They will feel much better for a night's rest.” A few days later Nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which showed Mark Twain getting rid of the offending clocks. At Christmas-time they took a fortnight's holiday and Clemens went home to Hartford. A surprise was awaiting him there. Mrs. Clemens had made an adaptation of 'The Prince and the Pauper' play, and the children of the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special delectation. He knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across the grounds to George Warner's home, into the large room there where it was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage. Gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general construction of scenery and effects. The result was really imposing; but presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what it was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was deeply moved and supremely gratified. There was but one hitch in the performance. There is a place where the Prince says, “Fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll's temper.” This was Susy's part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to remember its literal appropriateness. There was a moment's silence, then a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the little actors joined. They did not see the humor and were disturbed and grieved. Curiously enough, Mrs Clemens herself, in arranging and casting the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect. The parts were all daintily played. The children wore their assumed personalities as if native to them. Daisy Warner played the part of Tom Canty, Clara Clemens was Lady Jane Grey. It was only the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper productions. The play was repeated, Clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself playing the role of Miles Hendon. In her childish biography Susy says: Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure that he could do it. The scene that he acted in was the scene between Miles Hendon and the Prince, the “Prithee, pour the water” scene. I was the Prince and papa and I rehearsed together two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. He was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait! Papa made the Miles Hendon scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene, and papa too. We had great fun with our “Prince and Pauper,” and I think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it. He certainly could have been an actor as well as an author. The holidays over, Cable and Clemens were off on the circuit again. At Rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of Mark Twain's important books, 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'. Clemens and Cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of finding something to read. Pulling over some volumes on one of the tables, Clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book, and after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and with increasing interest. “Cable,” he said, “do you know anything about this book, the Arthurian legends of Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Arthure?” Cable answered: “Mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the world. Let me buy it for you. You will love it more than any book you ever read.” So Clemens came to know the old chronicler's version of the rare Round Table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last days of his life seldom let the book go far from him. He read and reread those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day. Sir Ector's lament he regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in the English tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most ridiculous absurdities in romance. Presently he conceived the idea of linking that day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the progress of the present, or carrying back into that age of magicians and armor and superstition and cruelties a brisk American of progressive ideas who would institute reforms. His note-book began to be filled with memoranda of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind. These were vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time before the story would become a fact. This was the first entry: Dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the Middle Ages. Have the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can't scratch. Cold in the head and can't blow. Can't get a handkerchief; can't use iron sleeve; iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can't dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down and can't get up. Twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said: “As I read those quaint and curious old legends I suppose I naturally contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century down into the sixth century and observe the consequences.” The reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year and carried them as far west as Chicago. They read in Hannibal and Keokuk, and Clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now living with Orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time force of character. Mark Twain, arranging for her Keokuk residence, had written: Ma wants to board with you, and pay her board. She will pay you $20 a month (she wouldn't pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content I will add $25 a month to the sum Perkins already sends you. Jane Clemens attended the Keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one tripped as lightly as a girl. It was the last time that Mark Twain ever saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a part of her personality. Clemens saw another relative on that trip; in St. Louis, James Lampton, the original of Colonel Sellers, called. He was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to myself: “I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was; and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him.” Clemens opened the door into Cable's room and allowed the golden dream-talk to float in. It was of a “small venture” which the caller had undertaken through his son. “Only a little thing--a mere trifle--a bagatelle. I suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, I think; still, for a boy, you know----” It was the same old Cousin Jim. Later, when he had royally accepted some tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, Cable put his head in at the door. “That was Colonel Sellers,” he said. CLIII. HUCK FINN COMES INTO HIS OWN In the December Century (1884) appeared a chapter from 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', “The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud,” a piece of writing which Edmund Clarence Stederian, Brander Matthews, and others promptly ranked as among Mark Twain's very best; when this was followed, in the January number, by “King Sollermun,” a chapter which in its way delighted quite as many readers, the success of the new book was accounted certain.--[Stedman, writing to Clemens of this instalment, said: “To my mind it is not only the most finished and condensed thing you have done but as dramatic and powerful an episode as I know in modern literature.”] 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was officially published in England and America in December, 1884, but the book was not in the canvassers' hands for delivery until February. By this time the orders were approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased to fifty thousand a few weeks later. Webster's first publication venture was in the nature of a triumph. Clemens wrote to him March 16th: “Your news is splendid. Huck certainly is a success.” He felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and Webster had proved his efficiency as an executive. He had no further need of an outside publisher. The story of Huck Finn will probably stand as the best of Mark Twain's purely fictional writings. A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is greater than its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate interest for the juvenile reader. In fact, the books are so different that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success of the later one. Sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in Huckleberry Finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment, atmosphere, purpose, character, everything. The tale of Huck and Nigger Jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language. It has been ranked greater than Gil Blas, greater even than Don Quixote; certainly it is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “It is a book I have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again to-morrow.” It is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough. The illusion of Huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the “four dialects” are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad burlesque detracts from the tale's reality. We are inclined to resent this. We never wish to feel that Huck is anything but a real character. We want him always the Huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary, rather than sacrifice Nigger Jim; the Huck who watched the river through long nights, and, without caring to explain why, felt his soul go out to the sunrise. Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there --sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by- and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers.... And next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! This is the Huck we want, and this is the Huck we usually have, and that the world has long been thankful for. Take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique pictures. The cabin in the swamp which Huck and his father used together in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with Jim on the wrecked steamboat; Huck's night among the towheads; the Grangerford-Shepherdson battle; the killing of Boggs--to name a few of the many vivid presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion and will never lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity itself does not change. The terse, unadorned Grangerford-Shepherdson episode--built out of the Darnell--Watson feuds--[See Life on the Mississippi, chap. xxvi. Mark Twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near witnessing the battle he describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid casualness, and the same may be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative. It is the way things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which Huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in literary art. To Huck, apparently, the killing of Boggs and Colonel Sherburn's defiance of the mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents of the day's travel. When Colonel Sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse Huck says: The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I could a staid if I'd a wanted to, but I didn't want to. I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. That is all. No reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed, all without a single moral comment. And when the Shepherdsons had got done killing the Grangerfords, and Huck had tugged the two bodies ashore and covered Buck Grangerford's face with a handkerchief, crying a little because Buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up Jim and the raft and sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and greens: There ain't nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right; and while I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. It was Huck Finn's morality that caused the book to be excluded from the Concord Library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day. The orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature could not condone Huck's looseness in the matter of statement and property rights, and in spite of New England traditions, Massachusetts librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that, after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of abolition, he had decided that he'd go to hell rather than give Jim over to slavery. Poor vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode of an immortal book. Able critics have declared that the psychology of Huck Finn is the book's large feature: Huck's moral point of view--the struggle between his heart and his conscience concerning the sin of Jim's concealment, and his final decision of self-sacrifice. Time may show that as an epic of the river, the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater. The problems of conscience we have always with us, but periods once passed are gone forever. Certainly Huck's loyalty to that lovely soul Nigger Jim was beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard for Huck, who could be loyal to anything. Huck was loyal to his father, loyal to Tom Sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps and frauds, the King and the Duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to Mary Wilks. The King and the Duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction. The Duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer Clemens had known in Virginia City, but the King was created out of refuse from the whole human family--“all tears and flapdoodle,” the very ultimate of disrepute and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love, him. “Hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?” he asks in a critical moment--a remark which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. We are full of pity at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a rail, and feel some of Huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful truth of his comment: “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” The “poor old king” Huck calls him, and confesses how he felt “ornery and humble and to blame, somehow,” for the old scamp's misfortunes. “A person's conscience ain't got no sense,” he says, and Huck is never more real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. Huck is what he is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. He is a boy throughout--such a boy as Mark Twain had known and in some degree had been. One may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's construction if so minded, but the moral character of Huck himself is not open to criticism. And indeed any criticism of this the greatest of Mark Twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the granite of an imperishable structure. Huck Finn is a monument that no puny pecking will destroy. It is built of indestructible blocks of human nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not always agree, we need not fear. Time will blur the incongruities and moss over the mistakes. The edifice will grow more beautiful with the years. CLIV. THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL GRANT The success of Huck Finn, though sufficiently important in itself, prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it dwindled to small proportions. One night (it was early in November, 1884), when Cable and Clemens had finished a reading at Chickering Hall, Clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear Richard Watson Gilder's voice say to some unseen companion: “Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them. He has said so to-day, in so many words.” Of course Clemens was immediately interested. It was the thing he had proposed to Grant some three years previously, during his call that day with Howells concerning the Toronto consulship. With Mrs. Clemens, he promptly overtook Gilder and accompanied him to his house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars. Gilder said that the Century Editors had endeavored to get Grant to contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial disaster, as a member of the firm of Grant & Ward, had he been willing to consider the matter. He said that Grant now welcomed the idea of contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment of five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart and relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[Somewhat later the Century Company, voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.] Gilder added that General Grant seemed now determined to continue his work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a prospect. Clemens was in the habit of calling on Grant, now and then, to smoke a cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication. He found the General and his son, Colonel Fred Grant, discussing some memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the Century Company for the book publication of his memoirs. Clemens asked to be allowed to look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said: “General, it is clear that the Century people do not realize the importance--the commercial magnitude of your book. It is not strange that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have had little or no experience with books of this class. The terms they propose indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies. A book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum. It should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the royalty here proposed. I do not believe it is to your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation. Write to the American Publishing Company at Hartford and see what they will do for you.” But Grant demurred. He said that, while no arrangements had been made with the Century Company, he thought it only fair and right that they should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater than he could obtain elsewhere. He said that, all things being equal, the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him. Clemens spoke up: “General, if that is so, it belongs to me.” Grant did not understand until Clemens recalled to him how he had urged him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him, agreeing to superintend the book's publication. Then he said: “General, I am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready it is quite possible that I shall have the best equipped subscription establishment in the country. If you will place your book with my firm--and I feel that I have at least an equal right in the consideration--I will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if you prefer, I will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and I will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent.” General Grant was really grieved at this proposal. It seemed to him that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted. He intimated that he had asked the Century Company president, Roswell Smith, a careful-headed business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as Sherman's, which the Scribners had published at a profit to Sherman of twenty-five thousand dollars, and that Smith had been unwilling to guarantee that amount to the author.--[Mark Twain's note-book, under date of March, 1885, contains this memorandum: “Roswell Smith said to me: 'I'm glad you got the book, Mr. Clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough to take it, under the circumstances. What do you think the General wanted to require of me?' “'He wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his book. I wouldn't risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever published.'” Yet Roswell Smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his views of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully invested a million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the fact that the market was already thought to be supplied.] Clemens said: “General, I have my check-book with me. I will draw you a check now for twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs, and will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this amount has been reached.” Colonel Fred Grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed, at least until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of publishing could be made. Clemens left then, and set out on his trip with Cable, turning the whole matter over to Webster and Colonel Fred for settlement. Meantime, the word that General Grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers and various publishing propositions came to him. In the end the General sent over to Philadelphia for his old friend, George W. Childs, and laid the whole matter before him. Childs said later it was plain that General Grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly wished to give the book to Mark Twain. It seemed not to be a question of how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely. Webster's complete success with Huck Finn being now demonstrated, Colonel Fred Grant agreed that he believed Clemens and Webster could handle the book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation Childs was of the same opinion. The decision was that the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the contract were made. General Grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms. He thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a proportion of the profits. He wrote to Clemens, asking him which of his two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy per cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around. Clemens sent Webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement. Whereupon Grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, Clemens would not be obliged to pay him anything. He could not consent to the thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss. Meantime, Grant had developed a serious illness. The humiliation of his business failure had undermined his health. The papers announced his malady as cancer of the tongue. In a memorandum which Clemens made, February 26, 1885, he states that on the 21st he called at the Grant home, 3 East 66th Street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak the General looked. He was astonished because the newspaper, in a second report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the cancer alarm was a false one. I took for granted the report, and said I had been glad to see that news. He smiled and said, “Yes--if it had only been true.” One of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the General's condition was the opposite of encouraging. Then the talk drifted to business, and the General presently said: “I mean you shall have the book--I have about made up my mind to that--but I wish to write to Mr. Roswell Smith first, and tell him I have so decided. I think this is due him.” From the beginning the General has shown a fine delicacy toward those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the man who put into the Appomattox terms of surrender the words, “Officers may retain their side-arms,” to save General Lee the humiliation of giving up his sword. [Note-book.] The physician present was Dr. Douglas, and upon Clemens assuming that the General's trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a warning to those who smoked to excess, himself included, Dr. Douglas said that General Grant's affliction could not be attributed altogether to smoking, but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long depression of spirit, the grief of his financial disaster. Dr. Douglas's remark started General Grant upon the subject of his connection with Ward, which he discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of mind. Never at any time did he betray any resentment toward Ward, but characterized him as one might an offending child. He spoke as a man who has been deeply wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a venomous expression or one with revengeful nature. Clemens confessed in his notes that all the time he himself was “inwardly boiling--scalping Ward--flaying him alive--breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a jelly.” While he was talking Colonel Grant said: “Father is letting you see that the Grant family are a pack of fools, Mr. Clemens.” The General objected to this statement. He said that the facts could be produced which would show that when Ward laid siege to a man he was pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the Grant family. He said that nobody could call the president of the Erie Railroad a fool, yet Ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand dollars, robbed him of every cent of it. He cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in Ward to the extent of half a million. He went on to recall many such cases. He told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of departure for Europe and handed Ward a check for fifty thousand dollars, saying: “I have no use for it at present. See what you can do with it for me.” By and by this investor, returning from Europe, dropped in and said: “Well, did anything happen?” Ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over, with the casual remark: “Well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon.” The man stared at the check, then thrust it back into Ward's hand. “That's all right. It's plenty good enough for me. Set that hen again,” and left the place. Of course Ward made no investments. His was the first playing on a colossal scale of the now worn-out “get rich quick” confidence game. Such dividends as were made came out of the principal. Ward was the Napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not. Clemens agreed that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they would undoubtedly have trusted Ward. Colonel Grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the first volume was complete and fully half the second. Three days later the formal contract was closed, and Webster & Co. promptly advanced. General Grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome arrangement, for Grant's debts and expenses were many, and his available resources restricted to the Century payments for his articles. Immediately the office of Webster & Co. was warm with affairs. Reporters were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which Mark Twain was to publish the life of General Grant. No publishing enterprise of such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no publishing event, before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper comment. The names of General Grant and Mark Twain associated would command columns, whatever the event, and that Mark Twain was to become the publisher of Grant's own story of his battles was of unprecedented importance. The partners were sufficiently occupied. Estimates and prices for vast quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the Grant book. Clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution. Webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign. Applications for agencies poured in. In those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the country into districts, and the heads of these agencies Webster summoned to New York and laid down the law to them concerning the new book. It was not a time for small dealings, and Webster rose to the occasion. By the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the Grant Memoirs, and this estimate they believed to be conservative. Webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters. He took a store-room at 42 East 14th Street, Union Square, and surrounded himself with a capable force of assistants. He had become, all at once, the most conspicuous publisher in the world. CLV. DAYS WITH A DYING HERO The contract for the publication of the Grant Life was officially closed February 27, 1885. Five days later, on the last day and at the last hour of President Arthur's administration, and of the Congress then sitting, a bill was passed placing Grant as full General, with full pay, on the retired army list. The bill providing for this somewhat tardy acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said that the Congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. Clemens was with General Grant when the news of this action was read to him. Grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to him than to any one present, yet Clemens in his notes records: Every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one --General Grant's. He read the telegram, but not a shade or suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance. The volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression of it and make no sign. Grant's calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days astonished even those most familiar with his noble character. One night Gerhardt came into the library at Hartford with the announcement that he wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of General Grant. Clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic. He declared it was the first likeness he had ever seen of General Grant that approached reality. He agreed that the Grant family ought to see it, and that he would take Gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within reach in case they had any suggestions. They went to New York next morning, and called at the Grant home during the afternoon. From the note-book: Friday, March 20, 1885. Gerhardt and I arrived at General Grant's about 2.30 P.m. and I asked if the family would look at a small clay bust of the General which Gerhardt had made from a photograph. Colonel Fred and Jesse were absent to receive their sister, Mrs. Sartoris, who would arrive from Europe about 4.30; but the three Mrs. Grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it, and also great gratification that Mr. Gerhardt had undertaken it. Mrs. Jesse Grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in Huck Finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the same artist to make one of General Grant. The ladies examined the bust critically and pointed out defects, while Gerhardt made the necessary corrections. Presently Mrs. General Grant suggested that Gerhardt step in and look at the General. I had been in there talking with the General, but had never thought of asking him to let a stranger come in. So Gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and the inspection and cross-fire began: “There, I was sure his nose was so and so,” and, “I was sure his forehead was so and so,” and, “Don't you think his head is so and so?” And so everybody walked around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely as if he were used to being served so. One marked feature of General Grant's character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness, sweetness. Every time I have been in his presence--lately and formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature. I wonder it has not been more spoken of. Presently he said, let Gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if Gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude. Of course we were glad. A table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies left the room; I got a book; Gerhardt went to work; and for an hour there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day the General got a good, sound, peaceful nap. General Badeau came in, and probably interrupted that nap. He spoke out as strongly as the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness. He had some sheets of MS. in his hand, and said, “I've been reading what you wrote this morning, General, and it is of the utmost value; it solves a riddle that has puzzled men's brains all these years and makes the thing clear and rational.” I asked what the puzzle was, and he said, “It was why Grant did not immediately lay siege to Vicksburg after capturing Port Hudson” (at least that is my recollection, now toward midnight, of General Badeau's answer). The little bust of Grant which Gerhardt worked on that day was widely reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most nearly correct likeness of Grant. The original is in possession of the family. General Grant worked industriously on his book. He had a superb memory and worked rapidly. Webster & Co. offered to supply him with a stenographer, and this proved a great relief. Sometimes he dictated ten thousand words at a sitting. It was reported at the time, and it has been stated since, that Grant did not write the Memoirs himself, but only made notes, which were expanded by others. But this is not true. General Grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then had the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions. He wrote against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal. Fortunately the lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though the last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be finished by another hand. Early in April General Grant's condition became very alarming, and on the night of the 3d it was believed he could not live until morning. But he was not yet ready to surrender. He rallied and renewed his task; feebly at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. Now and then he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. Once Colonel Fred Grant suggested to Clemens that if he could encourage the General a little it might be worth while. Clemens had felt always such a reverence and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting his literature. “I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.” He did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience. Grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity, with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and therefore the best of all literary methods. It happened that Clemens had been comparing some of Grant's chapters with Caesar's Commentaries, and was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech. “I placed the two books side by side upon the same level,” he said, “and I still think that they belong there. I learned afterward that General Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author.” Within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the Grant Memoirs--which is to say by the 1st of May, 1885--orders for sixty thousand sets had been received, and on that day Mark Twain, in his note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each. Then he says: If these chickens should really hatch according to my account, General Grant's royalties will' amount to $420,000, and will make the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history. Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on his History of England, L20,000. If I pay the General in silver coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons. Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see by and by in how far this calculation was justified. Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. On the 26th of May he makes this memorandum: It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that cancer. He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages--not a bad fault. A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of being enough. To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great Missouri campaign in 1861. He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher. Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by the very announcement that Grant was coming. Some word of this got to the Century editors, who immediately proposed that Mark Twain contribute to the magazine War Series the story of his share in the Rebellion, and particularly of his war relations with General Grant. So the “Private History of a Campaign that Failed” was prepared as Mark Twain's side-light on the history of the Rebellion; and if it was not important history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in Mark Twain's inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful those last sad days of his ancient enemy. During one of their talks General Grant spoke of the question as to whether he or Sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea. Grant said: “Neither of us originated the idea of that march. The enemy did it.” Reports were circulated of estrangements between General Grant and the Century Company, and between Mark Twain and the Century Company, as a result of the book decision. Certain newspapers exploited and magnified these rumors--some went so far as to accuse Mark Twain of duplicity, and to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the expense of General Grant and his family. All of which was the merest nonsense. The Century Company, Webster & Co., General Grant, and Mark Twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the most cordial relations and understanding prevailed. As to the charge of unfair dealing on the part of Mark Twain, this was too absurd, even then, to attract more than momentary attention. Webster & Co., somewhat later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that General Grant had been unable to complete his work. CLVI. THE CLOSE OF A GREAT CAREER The Clemens household did not go to Elmira that year until the 27th of June. Meantime General Grant had been taken to Mount McGregor, near the Adirondacks. The day after Clemens reached Elmira there came a summons saying that the General had asked to see him. He went immediately, and remained several days. The resolute old commander was very feeble by this time. It was three months since he had been believed to be dying, yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak. He was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript, writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words each. His conversation was carried on in the same way. Mark Twain brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them are still preserved. The writing is perfectly legible, and shows no indication of a trembling hand. On one of these slips is written: There is much more that I could do if I was a well man. I do not write quite as clearly as I could if well. If I could read it over myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest themselves to me. On another: Have you seen any portion of the second volume? It is up to the end, or nearly so. As much more work as I have done to-day will finish it. I have worked faster than if I had been well. I have used my three boys and a stenographer. And on still another: If I could have two weeks of strength I could improve it very much. As I am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to make a point clear here and there. Certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart. As long as his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task. Once he asked if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his family from the publication. Clemens's prompt reply, that more than one hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort. Clemens told him that the country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year. Grant made no further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any one. When Clemens left, General Grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a shawl about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him. It was a picture that would never fade from the memory. In a later memorandum he says: I then believed he would live several months. He was still adding little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other things. He was entirely through a few days later. Since then the lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the tedious weariness to kill him. I think his book kept him alive several months. He was a very great man and superlatively good. This note was made July 23, 1885, at 10 A.M., on receipt of the news that General Grant was dead. To Henry Ward Beecher, Clemens wrote: One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later. It can be truly said that all the nation mourned. General Grant had no enemies, political or sectional, in those last days. The old soldier battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was a figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity remained to utter a single word that was not kind. Memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other. Those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory. Twichell, from the mountains of Vermont, wrote: I suppose I have said to Harmony forty times since I got up here, “How I wish I could see Mark!” My notion is that between us we could get ourselves expressed. I have never known any one who could help me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many a time, dear old fellow. I'd give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon, while we twined a wreath together for Launcelot's grave, than to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips. The death of Grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for his Memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in time for the delivery, which had been promised for December 1st. J. J. Little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract. In the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each were sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and fifty thousand dollars was paid to Mrs. Grant. The first check of two hundred thousand dollars, drawn February 27, 1886, remains the largest single royalty check in history. Mark Twain's prophecy had been almost exactly verified. CLVII. MINOR MATTERS OF A GREAT YEAR The Grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally overshadowed other events of 1885. Mark Twain was so deeply absorbed in this great publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy in other directions. Yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember. Howells has told something of the Authors' Reading given for the Longfellow Memorial, an entertainment managed by George Parsons Lathrop, though Howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of admission at five dollars. Then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the attractions. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. Howells tells of Mark Twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter at the time he wrote: “You simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.” Howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars. This was early in May. Of literary work, beyond the war paper, the “Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (published December, 1885), Clemens appears to have done very little. His thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military Memoir to follow literary ventures of his own. At one time he was impelled to dictate an autobiography--Grant's difficulties in his dying hour suggesting this--and he arranged with Redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent and understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work. He dictated a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to continue. Also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the result unsatisfactory. Two open communications from Mark Twain that year deserve to be remembered. One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century Magazine, and expressed the need for a “universal tinker,” the man who can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household, such as--“to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of doors that won't shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints, glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc.” The letter was signed X. Y. Z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world. None of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in Kansas City a business was founded on the idea, adopting “The Universal Tinker” as its firm name. The other letter mentioned was written to the 'Christian Union', inspired by a tale entitled, “What Ought We to Have Done?” It was a tale concerning the government of children; especially concerning the government of one child--John Junior--a child who, as it would appear from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own notion. The performance of John junior, and of his parents in trying to manage him, stirred Mark Twain considerably--it being “enough to make a body's blood boil,” as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to John Junior as a member of the Clemens household. He did not dare to show the communication to Mrs. Clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well what its fate would be in that case. So he took chances and printed it without her knowledge. The letter was published July 16, 1885. It is too long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be altogether omitted. After relating, in considerable detail, Mrs. Clemens's method of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet firmness of her discipline--he concludes: The mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch of her hand has made sacred. They know her for the best and truest friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing. In a word, they know her, and I know her, for the best and dearest mother that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest.... In all my life I have never made a single reference to my wife in print before, as far as I can remember, except once in the dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence, perhaps I may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or indelicacy. I will institute one other novelty: I will send this manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her to edit it. This will save it from getting edited into the stove. Susy's biography refers to this incident at considerable length. She states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the Christian Union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found it too late. She sets down some comments of her own on her mother's government, then tells us of the appearance of the article: When the Christian Union reached the farm and papa's article in it, all ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn't the courage to show it to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't, but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but finally he gave his consent to her seeing it, and told Clara and I we could take it to her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood around mama while she read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it. She was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered that this article was to be read by every one that took the Christian Union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased. Susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort. One of the latter fell into her mother's hands, after which there was general regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer discussed at Quarry Farm. Susy's biography is a unique record. It was a sort of combined memoir and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight. She used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in its quaint entries. It is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of Mark Twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune. Susy's beginning has a special value here:--[Susy's' spelling and punctuation are preserved.] We are a very happy family! We consist of papa, mama, Jean, Clara and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking character. Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too thick, or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man. All his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extraordinary teeth. His complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard: He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded! That this is a fair statement of the Clemens home, and the truest picture of Mark Twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be doubted. His hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the auburn tints everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would mantle it like a silver crown. He did not look young for his years, but he was still young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and bodily vigor. Susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the children, filling the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play with the cats, and come clear down from his study on the hill to see how “Sour Mash,” then a kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem for Jean's donkey, Cadichon (which they made Kiditchin): She quotes the poem: KIDITCHIN O du lieb' Kiditchin Du bist ganz bewitchin, Waw- - - -he! In summer days Kiditchin Thou'rt dear from nose to britchin Waw----he! No dought thoult get a switchin When for mischief thou'rt itchin' Waw- - - -he! But when you're good Kiditchin You shall feast in James's kitchin Waw- - - -he! O now lift up thy song Thy noble note prolong Thou living Chinese gong! Waw---he! waw---he waw Sweetest donkey man ever saw. Clemens undertook to ride Kiditchin one day, to show the children how it should be done, but Kiditchin resented this interference and promptly flung him over her head. He thought she might have been listening to the poem he had written of her. Susy's discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown by the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not entirely unconscious: Papa said the other day, “I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from the marrow out.” (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of him, and he said this for it.) He doesn't like to go to church at all, why I never understood, until just now. He told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no doubt it was founded on truth. Susy's picture of life at Quarry Farm at this period is realistic and valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography: There are eleven cats at the farm here now. Papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named “Sour Mash,” and a little spotted one “Fannie.” It is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. Old Minniecat headed, (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt Susie, then Clara on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and Jean hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and I made up the audience. Our varius occupations are as follows. Papa rises about 1/2 past 7 in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with Clara and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius things in P.M., and in the evening plays tennis with Clara and me and amuses Jean and the donkey. Mama rises about 1/4 to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches Jean German reading from 9-10; reads German with me from 10-11. Then she reads studdies or visits with aunt Susie for a while, and then she reads to Clara and I till lunch time things connected with English history (for we hope to go to England next summer) while we sew. Then we have lunch. She studdies for about half an hour or visits with aunt Susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies writes reads and rests till supper time. After supper she sits out on the porch and works till eight o'clock, from eight o'clock to bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she reads and studdies German for a while. Clara and I do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and playing tag. While Jean's time is spent in asking mama what she can have to eat. It is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant to the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and girlhood which they spent there. It was the paradise, the dreamland they looked forward to during all the rest of the year. Through the long, happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the joy of life. Their cousins Julia, Jervis, and Ida Langdon ranged about their own ages and were almost their daily companions. Their games were mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures were their playground. Susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. One afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a rare hiding-place. She ran breathlessly to her aunt: “Can I have it? Can Clara and I have it all for our own?” The petition was granted, of course, and the place was named Helen's Bower, for they were reading Thaddeus of Warsaw and the name appealed to Susy's poetic fancy. Then Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of building a house for the children just beyond the bower. It was a complete little cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by friends and members of the family. There was a stove--a tiny affair, but practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom. The little house was named Ellerslie, out of Grace Aguilar's Days of Robert Bruce, and became one of the children's most beloved possessions. But alas for Helen's Bower! A workman was sent to clear away the debris after the builders, and being a practical man, he cut away Helen's Bower--destroyed it utterly. Susy first discovered the vandalism, and came rushing to the house in a torrent of sorrow. For her the joy of life seemed ended, and it was long before she could be comforted. But Ellerslie in time satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around which the children's summer happiness centered. To their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven. Once to Orion's wife Clemens wrote: This is a superb Sunday.... The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas- curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest) point; the cats are loafing over at Ellerslie, which is the children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie Crane), a hundred yards from the study, among the clover and young oaks and willows. Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods, Susie and Clara horseback and Jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and assistant at need. It is a perfect day indeed. The ending of each year's summer brought only regret. Clemens would never take away all his things. He had an old superstition that to leave some article insured return. Mrs. Clemens also left something--her heart's content. The children went around bidding various objects good-by and kissed the gates of Ellerslie too. CLVIII. MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events of that year. There was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly messages, and The Critic, then conducted by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder, made a feature of it. Miss Gilder wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes and invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent, though in his accompanying note he said: “I had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all marked immediate, when your note came.” Dr. Holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit: TO MARK TWAIN (On his fiftieth birthday) Ah, Clemens, when I saw thee last, We both of us were younger; How fondly mumbling o'er the past Is Memory's toothless hunger! So fifty years have fled, they say, Since first you took to drinking; I mean in Nature's milky way Of course no ill I'm thinking. But while on life's uneven road Your track you've been pursuing, What fountains from your wit have flowed What drinks you have been brewing! I know whence all your magic came, Your secret I've discovered, The source that fed your inward flame, The dreams that round you hovered. Before you learned to bite or munch, Still kicking in your cradle, The Muses mixed a bowl of punch And Hebe seized the ladle. Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day Your ripe half-century rounded, Your books the precious draught betray The laughing Nine compounded. So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, Each finds its faults amended, The virtues that to each belong In happiest union blended. And what the flavor can surpass Of sugar, spirit, lemons? So while one health fills every glass Mark Twain for Baby Clemens! OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris sent pleasing letters. Warner said: You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it's not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. Many wrote letters privately, of course, and Andrew Lang, like Holmes, sent a poem that has a special charm. FOR MARK TWAIN To brave Mark Twain, across the sea, The years have brought his jubilee. One hears it, half in pain, That fifty years have passed and gone Since danced the merry star that shone Above the babe Mark Twain. We turn his pages and we see The Mississippi flowing free; We turn again and grin O'er all Tom Sawyer did and planned With him of the ensanguined hand, With Huckleberry Finn! Spirit of Mirth, whose chime of bells Shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells Across the Atlantic main, Grant that Mark's laughter never die, That men through many a century May chuckle o'er Mark Twain! Assuredly Mark Twain was made happy by these attentions; to Dr. Holmes he wrote: DEAR DR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud you have made me. If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the trouble you took. And then the family: If I could convey the electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared. For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a special ray and transfigure me before their faces. I knew what that poem would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise should come. Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened. With reverence and affection, Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. So Samuel Clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint. If he was not yet the foremost American man of letters, he was at least the most widely known he sat upon the highest mountain-top. Furthermore, it seemed to him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap. His unfortunate investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him to larger successes. As a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield incalculable wealth. His connection with the Grant family had associated him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from Constantinople to the Persian Gulf. Charles A. Dana, of the Sun, had put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the Pope, Leo XIII, officially authorized by the Pope himself, and this he regarded as a certain fortune. Now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune from almost any venture. The Grant book, even on the liberal terms allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers. Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more. The sales of his other books had considerably increased. Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. If there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. If there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. So sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend at his home one night he said: “I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.” CLIX. THE LIFE OF THE POPE As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed. There were two chief ventures--the business of Charles L. Webster & Co. and the promotion of the Paige type-setting machine. They were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other; yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story. The success of the Grant Life had given the Webster business an immense prestige. It was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for publication. They came uninvited. Other war generals preparing their memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander. McClellan's Own Story was arranged for without difficulty. A Genesis of the Civil War, by Gen. Samuel Wylie Crawford, was offered and accepted. General Sheridan's Memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with Webster & Co. for their appearance were not delayed. Probably neither Webster nor Clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would approach those of the Grant Life, but they expected them to be large, for the Grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature, and anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was considered literary legal-tender. Moreover, these features, and even the Grant book itself, seemed likely to dwindle in importance by the side of The Life of Pope Leo XIII., who in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of a memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[By Bernard O'Reilly, D.D., LL.D. “Written with the Encouragement, Approbation, and Blessings of His Holiness the Pope.”]--Clemens and Webster--every one, in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book, with the exception of the Holy Scripture itself or the Koran, would have a wider acceptance than the biography of the Pope. It was agreed by good judges--and they included Howells and Twichell and even the shrewd general agents throughout the country--that every good Catholic would regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary to his salvation. Howells, recalling Clemens's emotions of this time, writes: He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe. The formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in Rome in April, 1886, and Webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with his Holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview. It was decided to carry a handsome present to the Pope in the form of a specially made edition of the Grant Memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was Clemens's idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this to be done by Tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand dollars. In the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the handsomest that could be designed of less precious and more appropriate materials. Webster sailed toward the end of June, and was warmly received and highly honored in Rome. The great figures of the Grant success had astonished Europe even more than America, where spectacular achievements were more common. That any single publication should pay a profit to author and publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing which belonged with the wonders of Aladdin's garden. It was natural, therefore, that Webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result, who was Mark Twain's partner, and who had now traveled across the seas to confer with the Pope himself, should be received with royal honors. In letters written at the time, Webster relates how he found it necessary to have an imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the dignity of his mission, and how, after various impressive formalities, he was granted a private audience, a very special honor indeed. Webster's letter gives us a picture of his Holiness which is worth preserving. We--[Mrs. Webster, who, the reader will remember, was Annie Moffett, a daughter of Pamela Clemens, was included in the invitation to the Presence Chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material. Against the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven snow. His head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered slippers with a design of a cross. A golden chain was about his neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious stones. Upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter. His countenance was smiling, and beamed with benevolence. His face at once impressed us as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good. This was the Pope of Rome, and as we advanced, making the three genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us. We advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his ring. He took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience and made us perfectly at our ease. They remained as much as half an hour in the Presence; and the Pope conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of General Grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book. The figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when Webster assured him that already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished. “We in Italy cannot comprehend such things,” he said. “I know you do great work in America; I know you have done a great and noble work in regard to General Grant's book, but that my Life should have such a sale seems impossible.” He asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him. Then he gave them his final blessing and the audience closed. We each again kissed the seal on his ring. As Annie was about to kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, “And will you, a little Protestant, kiss the Pope's ring?” As he said this, his face was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it. He immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring. We now withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before. Just as we reached the door he called to Dr. O'Reilly, “Now don't praise me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth.” CLX. A GREAT PUBLISHER AT HOME Men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even harsh. Success made Samuel Clemens merely elate, more kindly, more humanly generous. Every day almost he wrote to Webster, suggesting some new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to suggestions from other points of view. Once, when it seemed to him that matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from Webster showed him that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that he did not understand. Whereupon he wrote: DEAR CHARLEY,--Good--it's all good news. Everything is on the pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so. I blame myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have prevented all trouble. I mean to stand to my duty better now. At another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that Webster was not entirely well, he sent a warning from Mrs. Clemens against overwork. He added: Your letter shows that you need such a warning. So I warn you myself to look after that. Overwork killed Mr. Langdon and it can kill you. Clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied. His connection with the firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or wrote him personal letters concerning them. Furthermore, he was beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom. His affairs became so numerous at length that he employed a business agent, F. G. Whitmore, to relieve him of a part of his burden. Whitmore lived close by, and was a good billiard-player. Almost anything from the morning mail served as an excuse to send for Whitmore. Clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous. It is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of fortune than just at this time. Certainly his home life was never happier. Katie Leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set down some impressions of that pleasant period. Mr. Clemens was a very affectionate father. He seldom left the house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children until bedtime, afterward to Mrs. Clemens. He usually read Browning to her. They were very fond of it. The children played charades a great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped them. They were very fond of private theatricals. Every Saturday of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room and we all had to help. Gerhardt painted the scenery. They frequently played the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” and several plays they wrote themselves. Now and then we had a big general performance of “The Prince and the Pauper.” That would be in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open. The place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back against the conservatory. The children were crazy about acting and we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who was the best actor of all. I had a part, too, and George. I have never known a happier household than theirs was during those years. Mr. Clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing or playing billiards. One day when I went in, and he was shooting the balls around the tables, I noticed smoke coming up from the hearth. I called Patrick, and John O'Neill, the gardener, and we began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter. Mr. Clemens kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what we were doing. Finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame and smoke came out into the room. The house was on fire. Mr. Clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers. He took one down and threw it into the flames. This put them out a good deal, and he took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the balls around again as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Clemens came in just then and said, “Why, the house is afire!” “Yes, I know it,” he said, but went on playing. We had a telephone and it didn't work very well. It annoyed him a good deal and sometimes he'd say: “I'll tear it out.” One day he tried to call up Mrs. Dr. Tafft. He could not hear plainly and thought he was talking to central. “Send down and take this d---thing out of here,” he said; “I'm tired of it.” He was mad, and using a good deal of bad language. All at once he heard Mrs. Dr. Tafft say, “Oh, Mr. Clemens, good morning.” He said, “Why, Mrs. Tafft, I have just come to the telephone. George, our butler, was here before me and I heard him swearing as I came up. I shall have to talk to him about it.” Mrs. Tafft often told it on him.--[ Mark Twain once wrote to the telephone management: “The time is coming very soon when the telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably as he would if that man were in San Francisco.”] Mrs. Clemens, before I went there, took care of his desk, but little by little I began to look after it when she was busy at other things. Finally I took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it for a long time. One morning he caught me at it. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Dusting, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “You have no business here,” he said, very mad. “I've been doing it for a year, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “Mrs. Clemens told me to do it.” After that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he would ring for me. “Katie,” he would say, “you have lost that manuscript.” “Oh, Mr. Clemens,”, I would say, “I am sure I didn't touch it.” “Yes, you did touch it, Katie. You put it in the fire. It is gone.” He would scold then, and fume a great deal. Then he would go over and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which I was never to cross. “Katie,” he would say, “you are never to go nearer to my desk than that line. That is the dead-line.” Often after he had scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where I was dressing Mrs. Clemens to go out and say, “Katie, I found that manuscript.” And I would say, “Mr. Clemens, I felt so bad this morning that I wanted to go away.” He had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf. It was an awful old dirty one, and I didn't know that he ever used it. I took it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it away as far as I could throw it. Next day he asked, “Katie, did you see my pipe-cleaner? You did see it; I can tell by your looks.” I said, “Yes, Mr. Clemens, I threw it away.” “Well,” he said, “it was worth a thousand dollars,” and it seemed so to me, too, before he got done scolding about it. It is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period. One would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings alone. They remained always fresh in Mark Twain's memory. Once he wrote of them: We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas- light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us. CLXI. HISTORY: MAINLY BY SUSY Suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes: Mama and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promonading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published. The book locked in the safe was Captain Stormfield, and the one he expected to write was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of 1886, and once wrote of it to Webster: I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition; I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work. If I peg away for some weeks without a break I am safe. But he could not peg away. He had too many irons in the fire for that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than “two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English,” and said: There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.--[Address to Army and Navy Club. For full text see Appendix] Clemens worked at the Yankee now and then, and Howells, when some of the chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its continuance. Howells was often in Hartford at this time. Webster & Co. were planning to publish The Library of Humor, which Howells and “Charley” Clark had edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable. Howells tells us that, after he and Clark had been at great trouble to get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, Clemens pulled it all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the average reader's mind; and Howells admits that this was probably the truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction of the reader. One of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on a delicious little book by Caroline B. Le Row--English as She Is Taught--being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by pupils in our public schools. Mark Twain was amused by such definitions as: “Aborigines, system of mountains”; “Alias--a good man in the Bible”; “Ammonia--the food of the gods,” and so on down the alphabet. Susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read to them a little article which he had just written, entitled “Luck,” and that they thought it very good. It was a story which Twichell had heard and told to Clemens, who set it down about as it came to him. It was supposed to be true, yet Clemens seemed to think it too improbable for literature and laid it away for a number of years. We shall hear of it again by and by. From Susy's memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be healed of all evils and sorrows through “mind cure.” Papa has been very much interested of late in the “mind-cure” theory. And, in fact, so have we all. A young lady in town has worked wonders by using the “mind cure” upon people; she is constantly busy now curing peoples' diseases in this way--and curing her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all. A little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it. This starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many severe colds. Now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his colds, but the trust in the starving, the “mind cure” connected with the starving. I shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in “mind cure.” The next time papa has a cold I haven't a doubt he will send for Miss Holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the “mind-cure” theory, to cure him of it. Again, a month later, she writes: April 19, 1886. Yes, the “mind cure” does seem to be working wonderfully. Papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a year, has laid them off entirely. And my near-sightedness is really getting better. It seems marvelous. When Jean has stomack-ache Clara and I have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her side and try “mind cure.” The novelty of it has made her willing to try it, and then Clara and I would exclaim about how wonderful it was she was getting better. And she would think it realy was finally, and stop crying, to our delight. The other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the sofa with her back toward the door. She said, “Why, Jean, what's the matter? Don't you feel well?” Jean said that she had a little stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down. Mama said, “Why don't you try 'mind cure'?” “I am,” Jean answered. Howells and Twichell were invited to try the “mind cure,” as were all other friends who happened along. To the end of his days Clemens would always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress. It was a good trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity. The “mind cure” did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he always allowed for it a wide efficacy. Once, in later years, commenting on Susy's record, he said: The mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the help of physician or surgeon. Susy records another burning interest of this time: Clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played solotaire with cards a great deal. While Clara was sick and papa saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then Jean took it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; Jean's and papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now Jean brings the cards every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is playing alone, with great interest. Mama and Clara next are made subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but “Fill up the place,” etc. It is dreadful! But a little further along Susy presents her chief subject more seriously. He is not altogether absorbed with “mind cure” and solitaire, or even with making humorous tales. Papa has done a great deal in his life I think that is good and very remarkable, but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples' pleasure and benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even. He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. He has a keen sense of the ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them. And again: When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I think. I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. It was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that Susy estimated, and there is little to add to her valuation. Susy's biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a visit which they all made to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens. They went by way of the Lakes and down the Mississippi from St. Paul. A pleasant incident happened that first evening on the river. Soon after nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. Clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads. Then came the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. Presently the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call of “Mark Twain, Mark Twain” floated up to him like a summons from the past. All at once a little figure came running down the deck, and Clara confronted him, reprovingly: “Papa,” she said, “I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don't you know they are calling for you?” They remained in Keokuk a week, and Susy starts to tell something of their visit there. She begins: “We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant----” The sentence remains unfinished. We cannot know what was the interruption or what new interest kept her from her task. We can only regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant history. Years later, when Susy had passed from among the things we know, her father, commenting, said: When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. But that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a longing, not a mental product; the same that lured Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his daughter. VOLUME II, Part 2: 1886-1900 CLXII. BROWNING, MEREDITH, AND MEISTERSCHAFT The Browning readings must have begun about this time. Just what kindled Mark Twain's interest in the poetry of Robert Browning is not remembered, but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to do with it. Whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of 1886 and 1887, studiously, even violently, interested in Browning's verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the Payleyings--“With Bernard de Mandeville,” “Daniel Bartoli,” or “Christopher Smart.” Members of the Saturday Morning Club were among his listeners and others-friends of the family. They were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which Mark Twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures. They did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose. No student of Browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's intent--in such poems as “Sordello,” for instance--than Mark Twain. Just what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it is difficult to know. Once, at a class-meeting, after finishing “Easter Day,” he made a remark which the class requested him to “write down.” It is recorded on the fly-leaf of Dramatis Personae as follows: One's glimpses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with your hand, not clock-work). You toil across dark spaces which are (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars & suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. Feb. 23, 1887. In another note he speaks of the “vague dim flash of splendid hamming-birds through a fog.” Whatever mental treasures he may or may not have laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification in the discovery of those splendors of “stars and suns” and the flashing “humming-birds,” as there must also have been in pointing out those wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. It all seemed so worth while. It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite. There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation. The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain. He read but few novels at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator. Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he was likely to say: “It doesn't seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation. The author keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana's smart utterances.” He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care for, and he never learned to care for Meredith. He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of view. He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the farm, and to Howells he wrote: How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps! When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences. People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. Well, that's loss. To have house & Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets & comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into the field. Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi. I haven't got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning. In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at regular intervals at the Clemens home to study “der, die, and das” and the “gehabt habens” out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as Professor Schleutter could provide. They had monthly conversation days, when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary. Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors. Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play “Meisterschaft”--a literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor. It seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. No one but Mark Twain could have written it. It was given twice by the class with enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century Magazine (January, 1888). It is included to-day in his “Complete Works,” but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight of it.--[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote: “There is some tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece. It is attributable to the proof-reader.” Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it out, for it does not appear as published.] Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. The Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the salvation of oppressed humanity. He wrote a vehement and convincing paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form, and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. Howells wrote that he had read the essay “with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction,” and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. The essay closed: He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. He is the greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have known. You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. He has before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand of man to do; and he will do it. Yes, he is here; and the question is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken dam this time--he is the Flood! It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense, even if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the species. He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he noticed the sign, PROFESSOR LOISETTE SCHOOL OF MEMORY The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting Clemens went inside. When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette's literature on “predicating correlation,” and for the next several days was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere diversion. It was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the Mississippi River in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering a boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, and it is fair to say that, for the time he gave it, he achieved a like success. He was so enthusiastic over this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was sending out a printed letter recommending Loisette to the public at large. Here is an extract: ... I had no SYSTEM--and some sort of rational order of procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. Well, Loisette furnished me a system. I cannot undertake to say it is the best, or the worst, because I don't know what the other systems are. Loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or meaning--there are perhaps 500 of these words, arranged in maniacal lines of 6 to 8 or 9 words in each line--71 lines in all. Of course your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four hours you find to your surprise that you've GOT them and can deliver them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. Now, don't you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed? --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to trust with the Latin motto of the U. S. lest it mislay it and the country suffer. Loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories that already exist. Isn't that valuable? Indeed it is to me. Whenever hereafter I shall choose to pack away a thing properly in that refrigerator I sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; I shall know I'm going to find it sound and sweet when I go for it again. Loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the public with Mark Twain testimonials. But presently Clemens decided that after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at large. He recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon Loisette to suppress his circulars. Later he decided that the whole system was a humbug. CLXIII. LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND It was one day in 1887 that Clemens received evidence that his reputation as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices. A formidable envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers and a very large printed document all about the income tax which the Queen's officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of a report that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was to become an English resident. The matter amused and interested him. To Chatto & Windus he wrote: I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake. I was not in England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why... But we won't resist. We'll pay as if I were really a resident. The country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me. Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it. He conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire herself. He began: HARTFORD, November 6, 2887. MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr. Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers, for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that I write your Majesty. The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of an omnibus. He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat. “I remember him,” he said, “as easily as I would a comet.” He explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he was taxed. There was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was taxed under “Schedule D, section 14.” He had turned to that place and found these three things: “Trades, Offices, Gas Works.” He did not regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not consider that he was taxable under “Schedule D, section 14.” The letter concludes: Having thus shown your Majesty that I am not taxable, but am the victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your justice, annul my letter that I spoke of, so that my publisher can keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration caused by the Document, I ordered him to pay. You will not miss the sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures I do not suppose your Majesty ever saw such a dull season. With always great and ever-increasing respect, I beg to sign myself your Majesty's servant to command, MARK TWAIN. Her Majesty the Queen, London. The letter, or “petition,” as it was called, was published in the Harper's Magazine “Drawer” (December, 1889), and is now included in the “Complete Works.” Taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of Mark Twain's minor humors. What other humorist could have refrained from hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious “Gas Works”? Yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore that detail. The little skit was widely copied and reached the Queen herself in due time, and her son, Prince Edward, who never forgot its humor. Clemens read a notable paper that year before the Monday Evening Club. Its subject was “Consistency”--political consistency--and in it he took occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the Blaine-Cleveland campaign. It was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years, before, had denounced Twichell and himself for standing by their convictions.--[ Characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found under Appendix R, at the end of last volume.] CLXIV. SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO. Flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of Charles L. Webster & Co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its beginning. Most of the books published--the early ones at least-were profitable. McClellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series. Even The Life of Pope Leo XIII. paid. What a statement to make, after all their magnificent dreams and preparations! It was published simultaneously in six languages. It was exploited in every conceivable fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the general agents had promised for their first orders. It was amazing, it was incredible, but, alas! it was true. The prospective Catholic purchaser had decided that the Pope's Life was not necessary to his salvation or even to his entertainment. Howells explains it, to his own satisfaction at least, when he says: We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often, when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish to read The Life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with sanction from the Vatican. Howells, of course, is referring to the laboring Catholic of that day. There are no Catholics of this day--no American Catholics, at least--who do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. Perhaps had the Pope's Life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its success might have been less sadly told. A variety of books followed. Henry Ward Beecher agreed to write an autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return. A book of Sandwich Islands tales and legends, by his Hawaiian Majesty King Kalakaua, edited by Clemens's old friend, Rollin M. Daggett, who had become United States minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by General Hancock was still less fortunate. The running expenses of the business were heavy. On the strength of the Grant success Webster had moved into still larger quarters at No. 3 East Fifteenth Street, and had a ground floor for a salesroom. The force had become numerous and costly. It was necessary that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious establishment. A number of books were published at a heavy loss. Never mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and returned but a trifling sum. By the end of 1887 there were three works in prospect on which great hopes were founded--'The Library of Humor', which Howells and Clark had edited; a personal memoir of General Sheridan's, and a Library of American Literature in ten volumes, compiled by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. It was believed these would restore the fortunes and the prestige of the firm. They were all excellent, attractive features. The Library of Humor was ably selected and contained two hundred choice drawings by Kemble. The Sheridan Memoir was finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general. The Library of American Literature was a collection of the best American writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every American reading-home. It was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books, for the profit made from the Grant Life and less fortunate ventures was pretty well exhausted. Clemens presently found a little drift of his notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time, and it was costing a pretty sum. Meantime, Webster was no longer active in the management. In two years he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time. Its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, Fred J. Hall, a willing, capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and experience. Hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to success. He explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just why its profits would be greater during the next. Webster finally retired from the business altogether, and Hall was given a small partnership in the firm. He reduced expenses, worked desperately, pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat. The Library of Humor, the Life of Sheridan, and The Library of American Literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the sales yielded a fair profit. It was thought that if Clemens himself would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something of its original standing. We may believe that Clemens had not been always patient, not always gentle, during this process of decline. He had differed with Webster, and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own notions. Once he wrote to Orion that he had suddenly awakened to find that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a nurse. “But,” he added, “I have spent a good deal of time there since, and reduced everything to exact order and system.” Just what were the new features of order instituted it would be interesting to know. That the financial pressure was beginning to be felt even in the Clemens home is shown by a Christmas letter to Mrs. Moffett. HARTFORD, December 18, 1887. DEAR PAMELA,--Will you take this $15 & buy some candy or other trifle for yourself & Sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you? If we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter I'd send a check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like that. However, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at $3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the first 17 months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, & promised to take a thousand years. We'll be through now in 3 or 4 months, I reckon, & then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether success ensues or failure. Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to blame. All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your prosperity. Affectionately, SAM. CLXV. LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting. America, were entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens's son, with his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual. Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like to retire. Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible, and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their talk could not have been preserved. Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work. He said that during a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn. In one of Stevenson's letters to Clemens he wrote: My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening spent with the book he declared: “I am frightened. It cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.” What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or another, chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income, conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said: ... You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure; 3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3; everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with trouble. When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always wrongs one--yourself. You have grown weary of wronging yourself and repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die. But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time --your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. You give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say it over again to make you understand. This kind of thing goes on all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything; you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. You go to bed at last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were in the beginning. Thus we see what you have been doing for nine hours--on the outside. But what were you doing on the inside? You were writing letters--in your mind. And enjoying it, that is quite true; that is not to be denied. You have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then--doing it all over again. For nine hours. It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this insanity on paper and mailing it. Yes, you know that, and confess it--but what were you to do? Where was your remedy? Will anybody contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed? No, he cannot; that is certainly true. Well, then, what is he to do? I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening paragraph. During the nine hours he has written as many as forty- seven furious letters--in his mind. If he had put just one of them on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides. He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano: imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief. Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there. He degenerates into good-nature from that point. Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there. He pigeonholes these and then does one of two things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the proper sort of letter and mails it. To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more frequently telegram--two or three times a year. But that is better than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago. Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them. They ought not to be thrown away. Such a letter a year or so old is as good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. It makes him feel small and shabby, but--well, that wears off. Any sermon does; but the sermon does some little good, anyway. An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing. The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. One specimen will suffice. It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee. DEAR SIR,--If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get behind something and blush. According to your report, “the politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support” of so humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. And do your “people” propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow. Oh, come, these are not “people”--they are cowed school-boys with backbones made of boiled macaroni. If you are not misreporting those “people” you are just in the right business passing the mendicant hat for them. Dear sir, communities where anything like citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we have one proposing to get up a great “exposition” of its dishonor and advertise it all it can. It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those graveyards called a “Fair paper,” and so I have doubtless lost the knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you. This was from a burning heart and well deserved. One may almost regret that he did not send it. Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New York, announcing that the said Clements's pension had been allowed. But this was amusing. When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner at Washington: DEAR SIR,--I have not applied for a pension. I have often wanted a pension--often--ever so often--I may say, but in as much as the only military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it. However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel strengthened. I haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but I can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures, dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard “rheumatism and sore eyes” as mere recreation and refreshment after the serious occupations of his day. If you grant me the pension, dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States Senator--I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. He thinks I've already got the pension, whereas I've only got the rheumatism; but didn't want that--I had that before. I wish it were catching. I know a man that I would load up with it pretty early. Lord, but we all feel that way sometimes. I've seen the day when but never mind that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley--the certificate, you understand, is not transferable. Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence with the President to obtain this or that favor. He always declined, though once--a few years later, in Europe--when he learned that Frank Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens, of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it. MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a Republican and a Democrat wants his place. He went on to recall Mason's high and honorable record, suggesting that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands. Then he said: I can't send any message to the President, but the next time you have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so treats its efficient officials. Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington, inclosing this note in President Cleveland's handwriting: Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain's letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information, and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the Frankfort Consulate. The President also desires Miss Cleveland to say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his earliest convenience. Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing, warning him about his deportment. Being presented to Mrs. Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written “He didn't,” and asked her to sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested that she couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately afterward all about it. She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's note, which was very brief. It said: “Don't wear your arctics in the White House.” Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford. He was not always so well provided against disaster. Once, without consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. In his letter he said: I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. He explained his position, and added: I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it out. CLVXI. A “PLAYER” AND A MASTER OF ARTS One morning early in January Clemens received the following note: DALY'S THEATER, NEW YORK, January 2, 1888. Mr. Augustin Daly will be very much pleased to have Mr. S. L. Clemens meet Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Palmer and a few friends at lunch on Friday next, January 6th (at one o'clock in Delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is thought will claim your (sic) interest. R. S. V. P. There were already in New York a variety of literary and artistic societies, such as The Kinsmen and Tile clubs, with which Clemens was more or less associated. It was proposed now to form a more comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the various associated arts. The conception of this new club, which was to be called The Players, had grown out of a desire on the part of Edwin Booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession. It had been discussed during a summer cruise on Mr. E. C. Benedict's steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of Booth himself, Aldrich, Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, and Laurence Hutton. Booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors' home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best plan. Some one proposed a club, and Aldrich, with never-failing inspiration, suggested its name, The Players, which immediately impressed Booth and the others. It was then decided that members of all the kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and perfected at the Daly luncheon. The guests became charter members, and The Players became an incorporated fact early in January, 1888.--[Besides Mr. Booth himself, the charter members were: Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, Samuel L. Clemens, Augustin Daly, Joseph F. Daly, John Drew, Henry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, Joseph Jefferson, John A. Lane, James Lewis, Brander Matthews, Stephen H. Olin, A. M. Palmer, and William T. Sherman.]--Booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at 16 Gramercy Park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of Stanford White to adapt it for club purposes. He bore the entire cost, furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his rare collections of every sort. Laurence Hutton, writing of it afterward, said: And on the first Founder's Night, the 31st of December, 1888, he transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely without parallel in its way. The pleasure it gave to Booth during the few remaining years of his life was very great. He made it his home. Next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and consolation. He nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and honored him. He died in it. And it is certainly his greatest monument. There is no other club quite like The Players. The personality of Edwin Booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long establishment. Mark Twain was always fond of The Players, and more than once made it his home. It is a true home, and its members are a genuine brotherhood. It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Samuel Clemens the degree of Master of Arts. It was his first honor of this kind, and he was proud of it. To Charles Hopkins (“Charley”) Clark, who had been appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote: I felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact I could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain of it. And why shouldn't I be? I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as far as I know. To which Clark answered: MY DEAR FRIEND, You are “the only literary animal of your particular subspecies” in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the fact. Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and “don't you forget it.” C. H. C. Clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at Elmira and unable to get away, but in an address he made at Yale College later in the year he thus freely expressed himself: I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by this great and venerable University, and I would have come last June to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that privilege. Along at first, say for the first month or so, I, did not quite know hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but after that I consulted some students of Trinity--in Hartford--and they made everything clear to me. It was through them that I found out that my title made me head of the Governing Body of the University, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible powers. I was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time, and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off till I could make a better showing; for indeed I have been so pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty that it would be difficult to prove that the University is really in any better shape now than it was when I first took charge. By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of Greek- written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelt. Let us draw the curtain there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man. I ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was I couldn't understand it, and I didn't want things going on in the college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. I told him to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions; we didn't want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles of the earth's surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties?--I said you just let that thing alone; it's plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway. His reception of these instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that I felt obliged to take his number and report him. I found the astronomer of the University gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty plainly that we couldn't have that. I told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock. At bottom I don't really mind comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids. There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn't sit up nights the way that man does if I could get a basketful of them. He said it was the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae, and trade the nebula to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets. I felt obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn't have the University turned into an astronomical junk shop. And while I was at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval, I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law students in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable, also cheaper. It is true he cannot be intrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his hand in. I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the nature of surprises I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at this time. Very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing body, that he wrote one morning to Clark advising him as to the misuse of a word in the Courant, though he thought it best to sign the communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it weight with the public, as he afterward explained. SIR,--The word “patricide” in your issue of this morning (telegrams) was an error. You meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you should have used “parricide” instead. Patricide merely means the killing of an Irishman--any Irishman, male or female. Respectfully, J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL. N. J. BURTON. J. H. TWICHELL. CLXVII. NOTES AND LITERARY MATTERS Clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders. Aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing and trying to catch them. Man who lost his false teeth over Brooklyn Bridge when he was on his way to propose to a widow. One believes St. Simon and Benvenuto and partly believes the Margravine of Bayreuth. There are things in the confession of Rousseau which one must believe. What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is romance? Adorned biography. Adorn it less and it will be better than it is. If God is what people say there can be none in the universe so unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might well say “as unhappy as God.” In spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. He was deeply interested in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress at the moment, and from photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized in the moving picture. Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart, etc., & the other Bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--Valley of the Shadow of Death; to other effective places & photo them along with the scenery; to Paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the Arc de l'Etoile & photo them with the crowd-Vanity Fair; to Cairo, Venice, Jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume. Take them to Zululand. It would take two or three years to do the photographing & cost $10,000; but this stereopticon panorama of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would clear a fortune in a year. By & by I will do this. If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of buying Christopher Columbus's bones & burying them under the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World I will give the idea to somebody who is rich enough. Incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. Early in the year, with Brander Matthews, he instructed and entertained the public with a copyright controversy in the Princeton Review. Matthews would appear to have criticized the English copyright protection, or rather the lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with American conditions. Clemens, who had been amply protected in Great Britain, replied that America was in no position to criticize England; that if American authors suffered in England they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble and precautions required by the English law, that is to say, “previous publication” on English soil. He declared that his own books had been as safe in England as at home since he had undertaken to comply with English requirements, and that Professor Matthews was altogether mistaken, both as to premise and conclusion. “You are the very wrong-headedest person in America,” he said; “and you are injudicious.” And of the article: “I read it to the cat--well, I never saw a cat carry on so before.... The American author can go to Canada, spend three days there and come home with an English and American copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad iron.” Matthews replied that not every one could go to Canada, any more than to Corinth. He said: “It is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in Florida or Texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to Canada.” Clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his reply. It was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. Perhaps he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. In his heart he loved Matthews. He laid the deadly thing away and maintained a dignified reserve. Clemens often felt called upon to criticize American institutions, but he was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an alien. When Matthew Arnold offered some strictures on America. Clemens covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. He even defended American newspapers, which he had himself more than once violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky British institution, touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. He did not print--not then--[An article on the American press, probably the best of those prepared at this time, was used, in part, in The American Claimant, as the paper read before the Mechanics' Club, by “Parker,” assistant editor of the 'Democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success, however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. He was at Quarry Farm and he plunged into his neglected story--A Yankee in King Arthur's Court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his doctrines. He worked with an inspiration and energy born of his ferocity. To Whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote: I've got 16 working-days left yet, and in that time I will add another 120,000 words to my book if I have luck. In his memoranda of this time he says: There was never a throne which did not represent a crime. There is no throne to-day which does not represent a crime.... Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he doesn't do it. But his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the Yankee in the sixteen days as planned. He brought the manuscript back to Hartford, but found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. He went over to Twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. They gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. From a letter written to Theodore Crane we gather that it was not altogether quiet. Friday, October 5, 1888. DEAR THEO, I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of the children and an army of carpenters to help: Of course they don't help, but neither do they hinder. It's like a boiler factory for racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it. I began here Monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. I was so tired last night that I thought I would lie abed and rest to-day; but I couldn't resist. I mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if I do. I want to finish the day the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss fire as usual. The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to furnish the money--a dollar and a half. Jean discouraged the idea. She said, “We haven't got any money. Children, if you would think, you would remember the machine isn't done.” It's billiards to-night. I wish you were here. With love to you both, S. L. C. P. S. I got it all wrong. It wasn't the children, it was Marie. She wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. Jean reproved her and said, “Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now. The machine isn't done.” Neither the Yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. The financial pinch was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax. A memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to Charles and Susan Warner in their own home. The guests assembled at the Clemens home, the Twichells among them, and slipped across to Warner's, entering through a window. Dinner was then announced to the Warners, who were sitting by their library fire. They came across the hall and opened the dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted and an array of guests already seated. CLXVIII. INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY AND OTHERS It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley entertainment combination set out on its travels. Mark Twain introduced them to their first Boston audience. Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them. Pond happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that nothing would do but he must introduce them. In his book of memories which he published later Pond wrote: He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined that he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. He consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier poet to the platform. Mark's presence was a surprise to the audience, and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as impressive as the noise had been. He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins. “I saw them first,” he sand, “a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best hold then, but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff.” He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of mind, when he had finished, to welcome the “Twins of Genius” who were to entertain them: Pond says: It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. Bostonians will not have another such treat in this generation. Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley. He wrote: I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley's time and give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston. Let it be announced that you will introduce the “Twins of Genius.” Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. I will take one-third of the profits and you two-thirds. I can tell you it will be the biggest thing that can be brought before the American public. But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this temptation behind him. His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous appearances. He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as a benefaction. That he was beginning to need the money may have added a zest to the joy of his giving. He did not respond to all invitations; he could have been traveling constantly had he done so. He consulted with Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. In January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore. Page's wife fell ill and died, and Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in Page's place. Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens, who promptly wired that he would come. They read to a packed house, and when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. Clemens pushed his share over to Johnston, saying: “That's yours, Colonel. I'm not reading for money these days.” Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but he only said: “Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little favor. You can pass it on some day.” As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. The type-setting machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the offing. However, we shall come to this later. Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of institutions and on many special occasions. He usually gave chapters from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning with the Yankee's impression of the curious country and its people, ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his fifty-four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand dead men lying about them. He gave this at West Point, including the chapter where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King Arthur's reign. In April, '89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich Islands. He was on familiar ground there. His heart was in his words. He began: I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude, and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another. And these boys have played baseball there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries! He told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him: Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the inextinguishable vision of their beauty. No alien land in all the earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. CLXIX. THE COMING OF KIPLING It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal, The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was at General Langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad, and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries. Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling's visit. Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it an additional value in Susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon. Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said: “He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.” He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known. From that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first-class--by cable. About a year after Kipling's visit in Elmira George Warner came into our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, “No.” He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the United States. According to this sketch he had passed through Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from India, attracted my attention--also Susy's. She went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified. Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording it he says: You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward. A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying: “Well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me so. That's what I call squaring a debt handsomely.” “Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior. The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute's thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk--this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away. Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. The meeting of those two men made the summer of '89 memorable in later years. But it was recalled sadly, too. Theodore Crane, who had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring attack and died July 3d. It was the first death in the immediate families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings. CLXX. “THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER” ON THE STAGE There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn. Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized 'The Prince and the Pauper', and Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role of the Prince and Tom Canty. The rehearsals were going on, and the Clemens children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome. Susy Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty Greek fancy, called “The Triumph of Music,” and when it was given on Thanksgiving night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner, it was really a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of Arcady. Clemens was proud of Susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it. He insisted on having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year. Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household. She was very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions and romped together in the hay-loft. She was also a favorite of William Gillette. One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. They agreed to embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. Writing to her of it, Mark Twain said: Either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of us to think of two slippers. In fact, one of us did think of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other one. It shows how wonderful the human mind is.... Gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and splendor, but I have been a long time pulling through with mine. You see, it was my very first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly get the hang of it along at first. And then I was so busy that I couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers afraid. They didn't like the light that flared into my eye when I had an inspiration. And even the most fair-minded people doubted me when I explained what it was I was making--especially brakemen. Brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people do about art. They wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper; they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of disease. He went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how Dr. Root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell Mrs. Clemens what had been happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a “subject” with a scalp-wound, working with a “lovely surgical stitch,” never hesitating a moment in his talk except to say “Ouch!” when he stuck himself with the needle. Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear; for every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood. I've got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have; and you would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself to art. Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you. Merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many, many people who think all the world of you is your friend, MARK TWAIN. The play of “The Prince and the Pauper,” dramatized by Mrs. Richardson and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve. It was a success, but not a lavish one. The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty. The strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played both Tom Canty and the little Prince. The play came to New York--to the Broadway Theater--and was well received. On the opening night there Mark Twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of “The Prince and the Pauper” realized a dream which fifteen years before had possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he said, he had found the embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right of an inborn supremacy in art. It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed. Edward House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt a dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction. By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince were separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever be absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a play for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable “twin” interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper being its only drawback. CLXXI. “A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT” From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'Yankee in King Arthur's Court' an important and pretentious publication. It was Mark Twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a waiting public. It was determined to spare no expense on the manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate and, indeed, to elaborate the text. Clemens had admired some pictures made by Daniel Carter (“Dan”) Beard for a Chinese story in the Cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that Beard was the man for the Yankee. The manuscript was sent to Beard, who met Clemens a little later in the office of Webster & Co. to discuss the matter. Clemens said: “Mr. Beard, I do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but I wish you would read the book before you make the pictures.” Beard replied that he had already read it twice. “Very good,” Clemens said; “but I wasn't led to suppose that that was the usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results I have seen. You know,” he went on, “this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver, he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus, nevertheless. I am not going to tell you what to draw. If a man comes to me and says, 'Mr. Clemens, I want you to write me a story,' I'll write it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write I'll say, 'Go hire a typewriter.'” To Hall a few days later he wrote: Tell Beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it serious. I want his genius to be wholly unhampered. I sha'n't have any fear as to results. Without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court justified the author's faith in the artist of his selection. They are far and away Dan Beard's best work. The socialism of the text strongly appealed to him. Beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. Clemens examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write: My pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. I do not know of any quality they lack. Grace, dignity, poetry, spirit, imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful; and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept under, masterly, and delicious. He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings were complete he wrote again: Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you! There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and caught a meteor. Live forever! This was not too much praise. Beard realized the last shade of the author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss. Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling her so that she could not read for herself. Stedman suggested certain eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book. Howells was enthusiastic. It appealed to him as it had appealed to Beard. Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that could be said on those subjects. When he had partly finished it he wrote: It's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. It seems that God didn't forget to put a soul in you. He shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely. A few days later he wrote again: The book is glorious-simply noble. What masses of virgin truth never touched in print before! And when he had finished it: Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole book, it's titanic. Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells: I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics, and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my swan song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded.... Well, my book is written--let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell. In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote: When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing link: “We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of the nation.” He was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and human privileges. That is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be more than that. It is a pity that he should have been beset by his old demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the strength to bring it under control. There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain's work than his introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande. There is nothing more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's worth, that her baby might have bread. Such things as these must save the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. As an example of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks supreme. It is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. In the midst of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner purpose. Howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant. This is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the artistic worthiness of its construction. One must believe in a story like that to be convinced of its logic. To lose faith in it--in its narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. The Yankee in King Arthur's Court not only offended the English nation, but much of it offended the better taste of Mark Twain's own countrymen, and in time it must have offended even Mark Twain himself. Reading it, one can visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth, trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. Howells likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain's chivalry away. The comparison was hardly justified. It was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain, who loved Sir Thomas Malory to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had written 'The Prince and the Pauper', and would one day write that divine tale of the 'Maid of Orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out of romance. And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking the Yankee among Mark Twain's highest achievements in the way of “a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale.” It is of that class, beyond doubt. Howells goes further: Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and about him. The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens is illimitable. Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. Howells, summarizing Mark Twain's gifts (1901), has written: He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the small, and I blame him that he does not rule his fancy better. All of which applies precisely to the writing of the Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice--man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but, more than any other of Mark Twain's pretentious works, it needs editing--trimming by a fond but relentless hard. CLXXII. THE “YANKEE” IN ENGLAND The London publishers of the Yankee were keenly anxious to revise the text for their English readers. Clemens wrote that he had already revised the Yankee twice, that Stedman had critically read it, and that Mrs. Clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others. He added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where Englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. Then he said: Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word. We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is you who are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate. Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands. I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can. I want you to read it carefully. If you can publish it without altering a single word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense. This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn. So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English editions. The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as they were frank. It was referred to as a “lamentable failure” and as an “audacious sacrilege” and in terms still less polite. Not all of the English critics were violent. The Daily Telegraph gave it something more than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time at least, spared neither the author nor his work. Strictures on the Yankee extended to his earlier books. After all, Mark Twain's work was not for the cultivated class. These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting Lang to stand as his advocate before the English public. In part he said: The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable... The critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army.... If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it. It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath! That mass will never see the old masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a cleaner life. ... I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere.. .. My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure. He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for them might be judged. “No voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind,” he said, “or carry greater weight of authority.” There was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest. Lang's response was an article published in the Illustrated London News on the art of Mark Twain. He began by gently ridiculing hyperculture--the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn. It seems worth while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself. I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion, and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of Paradise was Camelot. To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this quite seriously, but “we, too, have played” at it, and know all about it. Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture. I can talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien Rops; I could rhyme “Ballades” when they were “in,” and knew what a “pantoom” was.... And yet I have not culture. My works are but tinkling brass because I have not culture. For culture has got into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse, I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the ban of culture. He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel like one of those Liberal politicians who are always “sitting on the fence,” and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey. He further confesses that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling. This is not the worst of it. Culture has hardly a new idol but I long to hurl things at it. Culture can scarcely burn anything, but I am impelled to sacrifice to that same. I am coming to suspect that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses; who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest artistic fashion; who prate about “style,” without the faintest acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or English; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the original. Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. Take, for example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--Mark Twain. [Here follow some observations concerning the Yankee, which Lang confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading because----]. Here Mark Twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper point of view. He has not the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the ideals of the Middle Ages. An Arthurian Knight in New York or in Washington would find as much to blame, and justly, as a Yankee at Camelot. Of Mark Twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion: Mark Twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. But his art is not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. I have no hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest contemporary makers of fiction.... I can never forget or be ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time years ago. I read it again last night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I had finished it. I perused several passages more than once, and rose from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever. What is it that we want in a novel? We want a vivid and original picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action; and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that adventure possible and plausible, I so far differ from the newest school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for gratitude. If, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in the narrator we have a masterpiece, and Huckleberry Finn is, nothing less. He reviews Huck sympathetically in detail, and closes: There are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of humor. The world appreciates it, no doubt, but “cultured critics” are probably unaware of its singular value. The great American novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet swim into their ken. And will Mark Twain never write such another? One is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not enough for our desire. In the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of Andrew Lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of Mark Twain's work as was ever written. W. T. Stead, of the Review of Reviews, was about the only prominent English editor to approve of the Yankee and to exploit its merits. Stead brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected with this heresy. The Yankee in King Arthur's Court was dramatized in America by Howard Taylor, one of the Enterprise compositors, whom Clemens had known in the old Comstock days. Taylor had become a playwright of considerable success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his plays. The Yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems not to have reached the point of production. CLXXIII. A SUMMER AT ONTEORA With the exception of one article--“A Majestic Literary Fossil”--[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the “Complete Works.”]--Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. This article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at the farm. A sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians--was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new Paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought to be complete. There seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story, but at the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had got themselves into a predicament from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the plot was suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came. Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder, which made writing difficult. Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the malady. They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up the idea. There were too many business complications; also the health of Clemens's mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet. It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades, in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought them up with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews remembers that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on business connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens and the girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite of the colony. Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season. At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way. It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest at his side. She was in her eighty-eighth year. The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own mother, in Elmira. Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken suddenly ill he returned to Hartford. Watching by the little girl's bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a birthday letter, telling of Jean's improved condition and sending other good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. But it proved a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and beautiful soul went out from among them. The foreboding she had felt at the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified. She had a dread that the harvest of death was not yet ended. Matters in general were going badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America, and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. Clemens, near the end of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said: Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself before I die. The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn Mawr. Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long idleness, was hard. A diversion was another portrait of himself, this time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg. Clemens rather enjoyed portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him a tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing. “Never mind the apology,” said Clemens. “The compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out.” When Flagg's portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane came to the studio to look at it. Mrs. Clemens complained only that the necktie was crooked. “But it's always crooked,” said Flagg, “and I have a great fancy for the line it makes.” She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked again. Clemens said: “If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'Good portrait, but there is something the matter with it. I don't know where it is.'” The tie was left unchanged. CLXXIV. THE MACHINE The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain's finances were in a critical condition. The publishing business had managed to weather along. It was still profitable, and could have been made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine. The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting type by hand. In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later, when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some account of the matter. This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old. Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt's Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock. I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing, for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not “justify” the lines. This was done by the operator's assistant. I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work. William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It is here that the music begins. It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W. Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute perfection--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so. Clemens' used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike. He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that later. Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says of him: “He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel.” It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize them. Paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market. By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by hand. Several contracts had been made with Paige, and several new attachments had been added to the machine. It seemed to require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man. Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the extra man's wage was unimportant. He must have his machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away. Clemens, in his memoranda, says: End of 1885. Paige arrives at my house unheralded. I had seen little or nothing of him for a year or two. He said: “What will you complete the machine for?” “What will it cost?” “Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000.” “What will you give?” “I'll give you half.” Clemens was “flush” at this time. His reading tour with Cable, the great sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities. He said: “I'll do it, but the limit must be $30,000.” They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had already invested and for legal advice. Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the Fourth Estate. By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens's business affairs, and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. Among other things, it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine, but promote it, capitalize it commercially. Whitmore said: “Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you.” Clemens answered: “Never mind that, Whitmore; I've considered that. I can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can get a perfect machine.” He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett, visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by. Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive. It was an undertaking for a millionaire. Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of completion and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in particular, was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. The moment their machine was complete all other machines would disappear. Even the fact that the Tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them. Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently. It was too bad people would waste their money so. In January, 1888, Paige promised that the machine would be done by the 1st of April. On the 1st of April he promised it for September, but in October he acknowledged there were still eighty-five days' work to be done on it. In November Clemens wrote to Orion: The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be. By the end of '88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs. Clemens's Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable securities. The whole household interest by this time centered in the machine. What the Tennessee land had been to John and Jane Clemens and their children, the machine had now become to Samuel Clemens and his family. “When the machine is finished everything will be all right again” afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, “When the Tennessee land is sold.” They would have everything they wanted then. Mrs. Clemens planned benefactions, as was her wont. Once she said to her sister: “How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost.” Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! In his notebook on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum: EUREKA! Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done. Present: J. W. Paige, the inventor; Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants Earll | & mechanical Graham | experts Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens. This record is made immediately after the prodigious event. Two days later he made another note: Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m. The first proper name ever set by this new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; & I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either misspelled it then or I've misspelled it now. The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam & separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space. It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. He wrote overflowing letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims, to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America and Europe. One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example. The machine is finished! An hour and forty minutes ago a line of movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first time in the history of the world. And I was there to see. That was the final function. I had before seen the machine set type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. So now I have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it. This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of massive steel, and will last a century. She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men that ever stood at a case. The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified. And automatically, mind you. There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types. Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have used if the dirt had been absent. But when I send you the details you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in the world put together. His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end he said: All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned. All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing- machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and far in the land of human inventions. In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a “cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.” That was a profound truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of James Paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and added something on its own account. It was discovered presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops did not cease. In February the machine was again setting and justifying type “to a hair,” and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the world. His speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. No type-setter invented to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing point. It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear, and Paige would discover other needed corrections. Once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added. But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? The steady expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. Still he struggled on. It was the old mining fascination--“a foot farther into the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold.” He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends, were to be represented. He never for a moment lost faith in the final outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. Pratt & Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. With their own factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated entirely to the production of type-setters. Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and labored with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during the following year, through which that “cunning devil,” the machine, consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and savings of the Clemens family resources. With all of Mark Twain's fame and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one. It was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare. Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was passing through, reported that Mark Twain's success in life had made him crusty and sour. Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear Mark Twain's voice calling: “Joe, are you awake?” “Yes, Mark, what is it?” “Oh, nothing, only I can't sleep. Won't you talk awhile? I know it's wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can't help it.” Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in millions until breakfast-time. Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines. Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business twenty million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince the capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to be postponed. Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had “sicklied over the bloom” of Jones's original enthusiasm. Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote: Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap until he died. He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was handled on the instalment plan. The collections from this source were deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years. CLXXV. “THE CLAIMANT”--LEAVING HARTFORD For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this time he reviewed his stock in trade-- ... I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see. Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction. And I've done “pocket-mining” during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision. And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them exteriorly. And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like other folk. And I was for some years a traveling “jour” printer, and wandered from city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly. And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets --and so I know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience. And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming. And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General Grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen --aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year. And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55. Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped for that trade. I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books. This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. Mark Twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. It is true that he was no longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and his energy had not waned. His need was imminent and he lost no time. He dug out from his pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled, “Mental Telegraphy,” written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it, in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as a joke. He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of Harper's Magazine. Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come to be rather more seriously regarded. The article was accepted promptly!--[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as Telepathy. A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as one of Mark Twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.]--The old sketch, “Luck,” also found its way to Harper's Magazine, and other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their disposal. Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit. Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest. Within a week after the collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the transmigration of the old “Claimant” play into a novel. Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was evidently a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of Henry George as the central idea. Letters from every direction had urged him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious purpose for the Claimant book. A motif in which there is a young lord who renounces his heritage and class to come to America and labor with his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by readings of 'Progress and Poverty' and 'Looking Backward' address their brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while. Clemens inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and had he developed this element further, and abandoned Colonel Sellers's materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result might have been more fortunate. But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation to use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be resisted. The result was incongruous enough. The author, however, admired it amazingly at the time. He sent Howells stirring reports of his progress. He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, “not a single one short of that.” Then suddenly, at the end of February, the rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five thousand words. I don't want to erase any of them. My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell. I write 2,000 words a day. I think I can dictate twice as many. But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead and do it all the same. Howells replied encouragingly. He had talked a letter into a phonograph and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly written out. If a man had the “cheek” to dictate his story into a phonograph, Howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy. Clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. It was only a partial success. He said he couldn't write literature with it because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the devil--a poor audience. I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then I found I could have said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. Then I resigned. He did not immediately give it up. To relieve his aching arm he alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly. Early in May he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the McClure Syndicate, who placed it with a number of papers in America and with the Idler Magazine in England. W. M. Laffan, of the Sun, an old and tried friend, combined with McClure in the arrangement. Laffan also proposed to join with McClure in paying Mark Twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six European letters. This was toward the end of May, 1891, when Clemens had already decided upon a long European sojourn. There were several reasons why this was desirable. Neither Clemens nor his wife was in good health. Both of them were troubled with rheumatism, and a council of physicians had agreed that Mrs. Clemens had some disturbance of the heart. The death of Charles L. Webster in April--the fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings. Susy, who had been at Bryn Mawr, had returned far from well. The European baths and the change of travel it was believed would be beneficial to the family health. Furthermore, the maintenance of the Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective income. The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years must be closed. A great period had ended. They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to help in breaking the news to the servants. John and Ellen O'Neill (the gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for George and Patrick. Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family. It was a sad dissolution. The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. Mrs. Clemens did not come immediately. She was looking into the rooms, bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its memories. Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer drove them together for the last time. They were going on a long journey. They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be home to them again. CLXXVI. A EUROPEAN SUMMER They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained about a week. From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys, of the Churchman, had fallen through. “Therefore,” he said, “you will have to modify your instalment system to meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it.” The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health. Clemens began writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of observations at that “paradise of rheumatics.” This letter is really a careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular drift of humor in it. He tells how in his own case the baths at first developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all of it. “I've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away now,” he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy. At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object of your trip--Lake Annecy. It is a revelation. It is a miracle. It brings the tears to a body's eyes. It is so enchanting. That is to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. He was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard. From Bayreuth he wrote “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” one of the best descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words. He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner devotion, confessing its genuineness. This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always during service I feel like a heretic in heaven. He tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected; but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were not real music at all. Then he says: Well, I ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money back on those two operas. His third letter was from Marienbad, in Bohemia, another “health-factory,” as he calls it, and is of the same general character as those preceding. In his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge of the family fortunes and became courier from Aix to Bayreuth. It is a very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued or exaggerated in its details. It is included now in the “Complete Works,” as fresh and delightful as ever. They returned to Germany at the end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the “city of exquisite glimpses,” and to Heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with its wonderful prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the Rhine. They remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally resting at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake Leman. Clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from Interlaken, its subject, “Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty.” He wrote to Hall that it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year or two to collect the material. The Century editors were after him for a series after the style of Innocents Abroad. He considered this suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to Hall that he intended to write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters. He said: To write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six detached chapters. Each of these letters requires the same variety of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself. He suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped. At Ouchy Clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature. He engaged Joseph Very, a courier used during their earlier European travels, and highly recommended in the Tramp Abroad. He sent Joseph over to Lake Bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down the river Rhone. For five dollars Joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. A few days later--September 19--Clemens followed. They stopped overnight on an island in Lake Bourget, and in his notes Clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of Chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. They started on their drift next morning. To Mrs. Clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said: The lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining. Our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning. 11.20. We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. Shall presently be in the Rhone. Noon. Nearly down to the Rhone, passing the village of Chanaz. Sunday, 3.15 P.M. We have been in the Rhone three hours. It is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. No rowing or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8 miles an hour--the swiftest current I've ever boated in. We have the entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind. Pleasant it must have been in the warm September days to go swinging down that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of Switzerland into France, fed from a thousand glaciers. He sent almost daily memoranda of his progress. Half-way to Arles he wrote: It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness. Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for next to nothing. My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where we stayed last night! I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or I believe I should have fainted. Little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted white pine table--void the furniture! Had a good firm bed, solid as a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster. These six hours have been entirely delightful. I want to do all the rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather. Still further along he described one of their shore accommodations. Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows & calves, also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas. Neither fleas nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of tobacco.]--The latter had a ball & I was the ballroom; but they were very friendly and didn't bite. The peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their best to make us comfortable. This morning I breakfasted on the shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. Clean cloth, napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught. Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally dirty house. An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no harm. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat management I ever saw. Our admiral knew his business. We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry, although we have had many heavy showers this morning. Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he adds: “I'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight.” The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as literary material. Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages with his notes of it, then gave it up. Traveling alone with no one but Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. He tried to rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters, such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris, from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and Mark Twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction, found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon. It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while. They were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later as a soul-stirring shock. Pointing to the outline of the distant range he said to the courier: “Name it. Who is it?” The courier said, “Napoleon.” Clemens assented. The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of the great commander himself. They watched and discussed the phenomenon until they reached the village. Next morning Clemens was up for a first daybreak glimpse of his discovery. Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens: I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& I saw it all, from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the final explosion of glory. But it had an interest private to itself & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which I had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire--& now this prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun. It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty & beauty. He made a pencil-sketch of the Napoleon head in his note-book, and stated that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of Beauchastel; but in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above Arles, and named it the “Lost Napoleon,” because those who set out to find it did not succeed. He even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he urged tourists to take steamer from Arles and make a short trip upstream, keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering the natural wonder. Fortunately this sketch was not published. It would have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers. One of Mark Twain's friends, Mr. Theodore Stanton, made a persistent effort to find the Napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed. It required ten days to float to Arles. Then the current gave out and Clemens ended the excursion and returned to Lausanne by rail. He said: “It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and somebody would have to row. That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it.” To Twichell in America he wrote: You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily, & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn't begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements & extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. In fact, there's nothing that's so lovely. But it's all over. I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles & am loafing along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy, Lausanne, where the tribe are staying at the Beau Rivage and are well and prosperous. CLXXVII. KORNERSTRASSE,7 They had decided to spend the winter in Berlin, and in October Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent, went up to that city to engage an apartment. The elevator had not reached the European apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on Mrs. Clemens's account, to have a ground floor. The sisters searched a good while without success, and at last reached Kornerstrasse, a short, secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. The apartment they examined in Kornerstrasse was Number 7, and they were so much pleased with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not notice closely its, general social environment. The agent supplied an assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled in the attractive, roomy place. Clemens and the children, arriving somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied. Their contentment was somewhat premature. When they began to go out socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location, they noticed that the address produced a curious effect. Semi-acquaintances said, “Ah, yes, Kornerstrasse”; acquaintances said, “Dear me, do you like it?” An old friend exclaimed, “Good gracious! How in the world did you ever come to locate there?” Then they began to notice what they had not at first seen. Kornerstrasse was not disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. There were rag warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to gossip. The street itself was thronged with children. They played on a sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. It was eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters. The family began to be sensitive on the subject of their address. Clemens, of course, made humor out of it. He wrote a newspaper letter on the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him not to print. But the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its humor may be preserved. He takes upon himself the renting of the place, and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant. He was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and lovingly: “Ah, Korner Street, Korner Street, why did I not think of you before! A place fit for the gods, dear sir. Quiet?--notice how still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. It is but one block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. And----” “This building is handsome, but I don't think much of the others. They look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of Berlin.” “Dear! dear! have you noticed that? It is just an affectation of the nobility. What they want----” “The nobility? Do they live in----” “In this street? That is good! very good, indeed! I wish the Duke of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that. When the Duke first moved in here he----” “Does he live in this street?” “Him! Well, I should say so! Do you see the big, plain house over there with the placard in the third floor window? That's his house.” “The placard that says 'Furnished rooms to let'? Does he keep boarders?” “What an idea! Him! With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand marks a year? Oh, positively this is too good.” “Well, what does he have that sign up for?” The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light beaming in his eye: “Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by your innocent questions. Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities, eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board there is one of them. They all hang them out. And it's regulated by an unwritten law. A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count five, a duke fifteen----” “Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup----” “Every one of them. Now the old Duke of Backofenhofenschwartz not the present Duke, but the last but one, he----” “Does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?” “No, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is chewing the door-mat----” “But all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats.” “Yes, but I mean the eighteenth one. Count. No, never mind; there's a lot more come. I'll get you another mark. Let me see---” They could not remain permanently in Komerstrasse, but they stuck it out till the end of December--about two months. Then they made such settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome apartment at the Hotel Royal, Unter den Linden. There was no need to be ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in Berlin. As for Komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. It is still not aristocratic, but it is eminently respectable. There is a new post-office that takes in Number 7, where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the Fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by uniformed officials, who have all heard of Mark Twain, but have no knowledge of his former occupation of their premises. CLXXVIII. A WINTER IN BERLIN Clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. Closing a letter to Hall, he said: “I must stop-my arm is howling.” He put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books, pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. These projects appear never to have been really undertaken, Hall very likely fearing that a flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. It seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and Clemens was willing enough to agree with this view. Clemens had still another letter to write for Laffan and McClure, and he made a pretty careful study of Berlin with that end in view. But his arm kept him from any regular work. He made notes, however. Once he wrote: The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only gospel of any monarchy, should be Rebellion--against Church and State. And again: I wrote a chapter on this language 13 years ago and tried my level best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the result--a word of thirty-nine letters. It merely concentrates the alphabet with a shovel. It hurts me to know that that chapter is not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the university. Socially, that winter in Berlin was eventful enough. William Walter Phelps, of New Jersey (Clemens had known him in America), was United States minister at the German capital, while at the Emperor's court there was a cousin, Frau von Versen, nee Clemens, one of the St. Louis family. She had married a young German officer who had risen to the rank of a full general. Mark Twain and his family were welcome guests at all the diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished men and women from every circle of achievement. Labouchere of 'Truth' was there, De Blowitz of the 'Times', and authors, ambassadors, and scientists of rank. Clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at these assemblies. His popularity in Germany was openly manifested. At any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him honor. He was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the historian Mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features. His books were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them was issued at a few cents per copy. Captain Bingham (later General Bingham, Commissioner of Police in New York City) and John Jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them popular with the public in general, and especially so with the Clemens family. Susy Clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence, tells of a party at Mrs. Jackson's, and especially refers to Captain Bingham in the most complimentary terms. “He never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind, but always came cordially to the rescue. My gratitude toward him was absolutely limitless.” She adds that Mrs. Bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most attractive lady present. Berlin was Susy's first real taste of society, and she was reveling in it. In her letter she refers to Minister Phelps by the rather disrespectful nickname of “Yaas,” a term conferred because of his pronunciation of that affirmative. The Clemens children were not entirely happy in the company of the minister. They were fond of him, but he was a great tease. They were quite young enough, but it seemed always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. In the letter above quoted Susy says: When I saw Mr. Phelps I put out my hand enthusiastically and said, “Oh, Mr. Phelps, good evening,” whereat he drew back and said, so all could hear, “What, you here! why, you're too young. Do you think you know how to behave?” As there were two or three young gentlemen near by to whom I hadn't been introduced I wasn't exactly overjoyed at this greeting. We may imagine that the nickname “Yaas” had been invented by Susy in secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he was kindness itself at heart. In one of his later dictations Clemens related an anecdote concerning a dinner with Phelps, when he (Clemens) had been invited to meet Count S----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. Clemens, and Phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry. Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose Phelps was in the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught now and then just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough. But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that tried Charles I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table. Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with exulting indifference: “An ancestor of mine.” I put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness: “Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others.” Clemens was sincerely fond of Phelps and spent a good deal of time at the legation headquarters. Sometimes he wrote there. An American journalist, Henry W. Fischer, remembers seeing him there several times scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one occasion he delivered an address to a German and English audience on the “Awful German Tongue.” This was probably the lecture that brought Clemens to bed with pneumonia. With Mrs. Clemens he had been down to Ilsenburg, in the Hartz Mountains, for a week of change. It was pleasant there, and they would have remained longer but for the Berlin lecture engagement. As it was, they found Berlin very cold and the lecture-room crowded and hot. When the lecture was over they stopped at General von Versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. Clemens awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. He remained in bed, a very sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. It was unpleasant enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. He could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers. Fischer brought him Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, always a favorite.--[Clemens was deeply interested in the Margravine, and at one time began a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. He gave it up, probably feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the Margravine's own story.]--The Emperor sent Frau von Versen with an invitation for him to attend the consecration of some flags in the palace. When she returned, conveying thanks and excuses, his Majesty commanded her to prepare a dinner at her home for Mark Twain and himself and a few special guests, the date to be arranged when Clemens's physician should pronounce him well enough to attend. Members of the Clemens household were impressed by this royal attention. Little Jean was especially awed. She said: “I wish I could be in papa's clothes”; then, after reflection, “but that wouldn't be any use. I reckon the Emperor wouldn't recognize me.” And a little later, when she had been considering all the notables and nobilities of her father's recent association, she added: “Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but God,” which Mark Twain decided was not quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed. It was during the period of his convalescence that Clemens prepared his sixth letter for the New York Sun and McClure's syndicate, “The German Chicago,” a finely descriptive article on Berlin, and German customs and institutions generally. Perhaps the best part of it is where he describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in honor of Professor Virchow's seventieth birthday.--[Rudolph Virchow, an eminent German pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of the most prominent figures of the German Reichstag. He died in 1902.]--He tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of Professor Helmholtz--[Herman von Helmholtz, an eminent German physicist, one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. He died in 1894.]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a mighty 'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand German students. This letter has been published in Mark Twain's “Complete Works,” and is well worth reading to-day. His place had been at the table of the two heroes of the occasion, Virchow and Helmholtz, a place where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely impressed at the honor which Germany paid to her men of science. The climax came when Mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), an eminent German historian and archeologist, a powerful factor in all liberal movements. From 1874-1895 permanent secretary of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences.] There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle. Three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing the way and conducting the guest down to his place. The songs were stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs, the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of excitement. It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit, that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift devisable for me. When apparently the last eminent guest had long ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. Who might this late comer be? Nobody was interested to inquire. Still, indolent eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the remote crowds. Then we saw that end of the house rising to its feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave. This supreme honor had been offered to no one before. There was an excited whisper at our table--“Mommsen!”--and the whole house rose --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs. Just simply a storm! Then the little man with his long hair and Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could have touched him with my hand--Mommsen!--think of it! This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few times in one's life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations. During his convalescent days, Clemens had plenty of time to reflect and to look out of the window. His notebook preserves some of his reflections. In one place he says: The Emperor passes in a modest open carriage. Next that happy 12-year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up & so proud! How fast they drive-nothing like it but in London. And the horses seem to be of very fine breed, though I am not an expert in horses & do not speak with assurance. I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary. The “Court Gazette” of a German paper can be covered with a playing- card. In an English paper the movements of titled people take up about three times that room. In the papers of Republican France from six to sixteen times as much. There, if a Duke's dog should catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and cry about it. In Germany they respect titles, in England they revere them, in France they adore them. That is, the French newspapers do. Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different. On February 14th he records that Professor Helmholtz called, but unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. He was quite recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the severe weather. In the final entry he says: Thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself. Don't know what a 'Schelgesetzentwurf' is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it was my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world. Especially now that I've lost the 'offentliche Militargericht circus'. I read all the debates on that question with a never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple of days ago & did something by a vote of 100 to 143, but I couldn't find out what it was. CLXXIX. A DINNER WITH WILLIAM II. The dinner with Emperor William II. at General von Versen's was set for the 20th of February. A few days before, Mark Twain entered in his note-book: In that day the Imperial lion and the Democratic lamb shall sit down together, and a little General shall feed them. Mark Twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the Emperor's right hand. The Emperor's brother, Prince Heinrich, sat opposite; Prince Radolin farther along. Rudolf Lindau, of the Foreign Office, was also present. There were fourteen at the table, all told. In his memorandum made at the time, Clemens gave no account of the dinner beyond the above details, only adding: After dinner 6 or 8 officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the big room out of the smoking-room and held a “smoking parliament” after the style of the ancient Potsdam one, till midnight, when the Emperor shook hands and left. It was not until fourteen years later that Mark Twain related some special matters pertaining to that evening. He may have expanded then somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. He told it as here given, premising: “This may appear in print after I am dead, but not before. “From 1891 until day before yesterday I had never mentioned the matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any way--not even to my wife, to whom I was accustomed to tell everything that happened to me. “At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests. When the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. I noticed that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. If I had been in the Emperor's chair and he in mine I should have felt infinitely comfortable and at home, but I was guest now, and consequently felt less at home. From old experience I was familiar with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammeled and less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little strange and out of place. But there was no animosity--no, the Emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him a rest and a quiet time. “In one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only human, although I regret it. When a guest answered a question he did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. The Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood; maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously complimentary to my books--and I will remark here that the happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another. I once mentioned the high compliment which he paid to the book 'Old Times on the Mississippi'; but there were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'A Tramp Abroad' of certain striking phases of German student life. “Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then, without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich. The Prince replied, endorsing the Emperor's view of the matter. Then I followed with my own view of it. I said that in the beginning our government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate and was a danger besides. I think that that was about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. I seemed to perceive this quite plainly. I had committed an indiscretion. Possibly it was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion promulgated by his Majesty. I do not know which it was, but I quite clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting prevailed until about midnight. I am sure that the Emperor's good night was the only thing he said to me in all that time. “Was this rebuke studied and intentional? I don't know, but I regarded it in that way. I can't be absolutely sure of it because of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances. For example: the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from my books.” It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later recalled to him this curious circumstance. A gentleman whom Clemens knew went on a diplomatic mission to Germany. Upon being presented to Emperor William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his work. He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language as wonderful; then he said: “Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that dinner at Von Versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at that dinner.” It seemed a mysterious message. Clemens thought it might have been meant to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant that Mark Twain's breach and the Emperor's coolness on that occasion were purely imaginary, and that the Emperor had really expected him to talk far more than he did. Returning to the Royal Hotel after the Von Versen dinner, Mark Twain received his second high compliment that day on the Mississippi book. The portier, a tow-headed young German, must have been comparatively new at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually present in the flesh. Clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late an admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and smiles. The young German then poured out a stream of welcome and compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, German translations of Mark Twain. “There,” he said; “you wrote them. I've found it out. Lieber Gott! I did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons. That one there, Old Times on the Mississippi, is the best you ever wrote.” The note-book records only one social event following the Emperor's dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. The note says: At the Emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered. Tonight I went in a black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. Just my luck. The Berlin activities came to an end then. He was still physically far from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or to go to a warmer climate. This was March 1st. Clemens and his wife took Joseph Very, and, leaving the others for the time in Berlin, set out for Mentone, in the south of France. CLXXX. MANY WANDERINGS Mentone was warm and quiet, and Clemens worked when his arm permitted. He was alone there with Mrs. Clemens, and they wandered about a good deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon. Clemens wrote to Susy: Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but I noticed she didn't take the plug out, as a rule. When she did she took nine pictures on top of each other--composites. They remained a month in Mentone, then went over to Pisa, and sent Joseph to bring the rest of the party to Rome. In Rome they spent another month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to Clemens pretty profitless. “I do not expect to be able to write any literature this year,” he said in a letter to Hall near the end of April. “The moment I take up my pen my rheumatism returns.” Still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in the course of weeks. From Rome to Florence, at the end of April, and so pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter. They inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through Prof. Willard Fiske, were directed to the Villa Viviani, near Settignano, on a hill to the eastward of Florence, with vineyard and olive-grove sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace. They closed the arrangement for Viviani, and about the middle of May went up to Venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back to Germany. William Gedney Bunce, the Hartford artist, was in Venice, and Sarah Orne Jewett and other home friends. From Venice, by way of Lake Como and “a tangled route” (his note-book says) to Lucerne, and so northward to Berlin and on to Bad Nauheim, where they had planned to spend the summer. Clemens for some weeks had contemplated a trip to America, for matters there seemed to demand his personal attention. Summer arrangements for the family being now concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the Havel for New York. To Jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may believe, than he felt. BREMEN, 7.45 A.M., June 14, 1892. DEAR JEAN CLEMENS,--I am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel mighty fine, & am going down to show off before I put on the rest of my clothes. Perhaps mama & Mrs. Hague can persuade the Hauswirth to do right; but if he don't you go down & kill his dog. I wish you would invite the Consul-General and his ladies down to take one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the Government. Clemens felt that his presence in America, was demanded by two things. Hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual statements were less encouraging. The Library of Literature and some of the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy one. Clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the Library or an interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing. The uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a nightmare which interfered with his sleep. It seemed hard enough to earn a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care. The second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the machine. Clemens had left the matter in Paige's hands, and Paige, with persuasive eloquence, had interested Chicago capital to a point where a company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city. Paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a sort of general “consulting omniscient” at five thousand dollars a month. Clemens, who had been negotiating again with the Mallorys for the disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just what was going on. He remained in America less than two weeks, during which he made a flying trip to Chicago and found that Paige's company really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines. It was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but Clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the negotiations with the Mallorys which had promised considerable cash in hand. He had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with Hall for some reason had seemed comforting. The business had been expanding; they would now “concentrate.” He returned on the Lahn, and he must have been in better health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the passage. He told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court was convened to try him on the charge of “inordinate and unscientific lying.” Many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench. He was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period every day until the steamer should reach port. It is said that he faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the Seamen's Fund. Clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare time during the trip writing an article on “All Sorts and Conditions of Ships,” from Noah's Ark down to the fine new Havel, then the latest word in ship-construction. It was an article written in a happy vein and is profitable reading to-day. The description of Columbus as he appeared on the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing: If the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. If the weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings, clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings; deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank; rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires. CLXXXI. NAUHEIM AND THE PRINCE OF WALES Clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in Nauheim and turned off a quantity of copy. He completed several short articles and stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'Tom Sawyer Abroad' and 'Those Extraordinary Twins'--the latter being the original form of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. As early as August 4th he wrote to Hall that he had finished forty thousand words of the “Tom Sawyer” story, and that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, Harper's Young People or St. Nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative method was altogether wrong. To Hall on the 10th he wrote: I have dropped that novel I wrote you about because I saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, & somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional) way. I have written 12,000 words of this new narrative, & find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so I shall go along and make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words. It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any boy between 8 years & 80. When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas, wrote and offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for boys 50,000 words long. I wrote back and declined, for I had other matter in my mind then. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. Now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine --it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a syndicate. I don't swear it, but I think so. Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of the Extraordinary Twins: By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel entitled, 'Those Extraordinary Twins'. It's the howling farce I told you I had begun awhile back. I laid it aside to ferment while I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now. I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the common order--it is a fresh idea--I don't think it resembles anything in literature. He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to literature would eventually grow out of it. In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then consul-general at Frankfort, he refers to “that happy summer at Nauheim.” Mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of the summer was justified. For one thing, Clemens himself was in better health and spirits and able to continue his work. But an even greater happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced Mrs. Clemens free from any organic ills. To Orion, Clemens wrote: We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles and will soon be well again. That was worth going to Europe to find out. It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and financial worries were less considered. Another letter to Orion relates history: The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with them. Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort, Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales. I found him a most unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman. Twichell has reported Mark Twain's meeting with the Prince (later Edward VII) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through the British ambassador. “The meeting,” he says, “was a most cordial one on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince, solid, erect, and soldier-like, Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most scandalous description.” When they parted Clemens said: “It has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your Royal Highness.” The Prince answered: “And it is a pleasure, Mr. Clemens, to have met you--again.” Clemens was puzzled to reply. “Why,” he said, “have we met before?” The Prince smiled happily. “Oh yes,” he said; “don't you remember that day on the Strand when you were on the top of a bus and I was heading a procession and you had on your new overcoat with flap-pockets?”--[See chap. clxiii, “A Letter to the Queen of England.”] It was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he had read, and had remembered all those years. Clemens expressed to Twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the Prince's sister, Louise, in Ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a dinner next day. Later the Prince had him to supper and they passed an entire evening together. There was a certain uneasiness in the Nauheim atmosphere that year, for the cholera had broken out at Hamburg, and its victims were dying at a terrific rate. It was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the spread of the epidemic, for the German papers were curiously conservative in their reports. Clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded not to print it. A paragraph will convey its tenor. What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be if the stage were in China. We sit “in front,” & the audience is in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into history as the disaster without a history. He closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says “gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there.” For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four dead ones. CLXXXII. THE VILLA VIVIANI. 'The American Claimant', published in May l (1892), did not bring a very satisfactory return. For one thing, the book-trade was light, and then the Claimant was not up to his usual standard. It had been written under hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid, and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings. The conditions at Nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until well into September. To Mrs. Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens wrote on the 18th, from Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy: We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left four or five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days. Hard trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7 minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. It took us 3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours. We shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible. Next day we shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day, Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk. Phelps came to Frankfort and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons, supper at our inn--Livy not in it. She was merely allowed a glimpse, no more. Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending to be ill; was never looking so well & fine. A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of its correspondents with cholera. A man said yesterday he wished to God they would inoculate all of them. Yes, the interest is quite general and strong & much hope is felt. Livy says I have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves & shut up. Which I do--and shut up. They lingered at Lucerne until Mrs. Clemens was rested and better able to continue the journey, arriving at last in Florence, September 26th. They drove out to the Villa Viviani in the afternoon and found everything in readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and on the table. Clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds: It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in it. Some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest which gives reality and charm. The 'contadino' brought up their trunks from the station, and Clemens wrote: The 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely independent without making any offensive show of it. He charged too much for the trunks, I was told. My informer explained that this was customary. September 27. The rest of the trunks brought up this morning. He charged too much again, but I was told that this was also customary. It's all right, then. I do not wish to violate the customs. Hired landau, horses, & coachman. Terms, 480 francs a month & a pourboire to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but nothing else. The landau has seen better days & weighs 30 tons. The horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion. This causes delay. But it entertains the people along the road. They came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets & discussed the matter with each other. I was told that they said that a 30-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what they needed was a wheelbarrow. His description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then, for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in the centuries since it was built. It is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light yellow & has green window-shutters. It stands in a commanding position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is walled around with masonry. From the walls the vineyards & olive orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. There are several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of breeds not familiar to me. Roses overflow the retaining-walls, & the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters. The house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls--all brick covered with plaster--are about 3 feet thick. I have several times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities baffle me. There seem to be 28. There are plenty of windows & worlds of sunlight. The floors are sleek & shiny & full of reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. The curious feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious & lofty vacuum which occupies the center of the house. All the rest of the house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. The sense of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your eyes around it & aloft. There are divans distributed along its walls. They make little or no show, though their aggregate length is 57 feet. A piano in it is a lost object. We have tried to reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things, but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. Whatever stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled. He describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it), dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors, Florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners of the estate. The date of one of them is 1305--middle-aged, then, & a judge--he could have known, as a youth, the very greatest Italian artists, & he could have walked & talked with Dante, & probably did. The date of another is 1343--he could have known Boccaccio & spent his afternoons wandering in Fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking Florence & listening to that man's improper tales, & he probably did. The date of another is 1463--he could have met Columbus & he knew the magnificent Lorenzo, of course. These are all Cerretanis --or Cerretani-Twains, as I may say, for I have adopted myself into their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been heretofore too recent to suit me. We are considering the details of Viviani at some length, for it was in this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most important work of this later time--in some respects his most important of any time--the 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc'. If the reader loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration. The outdoor picture of Viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere. Clemens added it to his notes several months later, but it belongs here. The situation of this villa is perfect. It is three miles from Florence, on the side of a hill. Beyond some hill-spurs is Fiesole perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the imposing mass of the Ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant plain lies Florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, & flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel & on the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; all around the horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with innumerable villas. After nine months of familiarity with this panorama I still think, as I thought in the beginning, that this is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim & faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy. The Clemens household at Florence consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Susy, and Jean. Clara had soon returned to Berlin to attend Mrs. Willard's school and for piano instruction. Mrs. Clemens improved in the balmy autumn air of Florence and in the peaceful life of their well-ordered villa. In a memorandum of October 27th Clemens wrote: The first month is finished. We are wonted now. This carefree life at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence. The weather is divine, the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as satisfactory as a dream. Late in the afternoons friends come out from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon Florence & the daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look. It is not a time for talk. No wonder he could work in that environment. He finished 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', also a short story, 'The L 1,000,000 Bank-Note' (planned many years before), discovered the literary mistake of the 'Extraordinary Twins' and began converting it into the worthier tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', soon completed and on its way to America. With this work out of his hands, Clemens was ready for his great new undertaking. A seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was ready to bloom. He would write the story of Joan of Arc. CLXXXIII. THE SIEUR DE CONTE AND JOAN In a note which he made many years later Mark Twain declared that he was fourteen years at work on Joan of Arc; that he had been twelve years preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it. There is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that he contemplated the story of Joan as early as the eighties; but there is a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled for him not much later than 1880, for the latest published work of the list bears that date. He was then too busy with his inventions and publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf from that tragic life into his own. Joan of Arc, by Janet Tuckey, was apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still exists, is filled with his marginal notes. He did not speak of this volume in discussing the matter in after-years. He may have forgotten it. He dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug out and put into modern French by Quicherat; the 'Jeanne d'Arc' of J. Michelet, and the splendid 'Life of the Maid' of Lord Ronald Gower, these being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[The book of Janet Tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are credited as “authorities examined in verification” on a front page of his published book. In a letter written at the conclusion of “Joan” in 1895, the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one French and one English authority, while in the last third he had constantly drawn from five French and five English sources.] “I could not get the Quicherat and some of the other books in English,” he said, “and I had to dig them out of the French. I began the story five times.” None of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they were wisely put aside, for no story of the Maid could begin more charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by Sieur Louis de Conte, secretary of Joan of Arc, and translated by Jean Francois Alden for the world to read. The impulse which had once prompted Mark Twain to offer The Prince and the Pauper anonymously now prevailed. He felt that the Prince had missed a certain appreciation by being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion piece (he so regarded Joan) should be accepted on its merits and without prejudice. Walking the floor one day at Viviani, smoking vigorously, he said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy: “I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature. People always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they don't find a joke in it. This is to be a serious book. It means more to me than anything I have ever undertaken. I shall write it anonymously.” So it was that that gentle, quaint Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and the tale of Joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling. He wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material arranged. The reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not merely as reading, but as fact. Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he remained in that still garden with Joan as his companion--the old Sieur de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic tale. At the end of each day he would read to the others what he had written, to their enjoyment and wonder. How rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to Hall in February, in which he said: I am writing a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper', which is half done & will make 200,000 words. That is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign source. He had always, more or less, kept up his study of the French, begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead now. Still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along the margin of his French authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness and the magnitude of his toil. No previous work had ever required so much of him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely commanded his interest. He would have been willing to remain shut away from visitors, to have been released altogether from social obligations; and he did avoid most of them. Not all, for he could not always escape, and perhaps did not always really wish to. Florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people--some of them his old friends. There were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress somewhere, and not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed author who was no longer himself, but sad old Sieur de Conte, following again the banner of the Maid of Orleans, marshaling her twilight armies across his illumined page. CLXXXIV. NEW HOPE IN THE MACHINE If all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to America. But it was necessary for him to go. Even Hall was no longer optimistic. His letters provided only the barest shreds of hope. Times were hard and there was every reason to believe they would be worse. The World's Fair year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest financial periods this country has ever seen. Chicago could hardly have selected a more profitless time for her great exposition. Clemens wrote urging Hall to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do anything, indeed, that would avoid the necessity of further liability and increased dread. Every payment that could be spared from the sales of his manuscript was left in Hall's hands, and such moneys as still came to Mrs. Clemens from her Elmira interests were flung into the general fund. The latter were no longer large, for Langdon & Co. were suffering heavily in the general depression, barely hoping to weather the financial storm. It is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a tempering influence on Mark Twain's nature. Instead of becoming harsh and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly. He wrote often to Hall, always considerately, even tenderly. Once, when something in Hall's letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote: Mrs. Clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something. But most assuredly that cannot be. I tell her that although I am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit likely to write such things to you. I can't believe I have done anything so ungrateful. If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head for I deserve it. You have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor. He was fond of Hall. He realized how honest and resolute and industrious he had been. In another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had been able to “keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down”; and he added: “Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power.” The type-setter situation seemed to promise something. In fact, the machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation. The new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: About the middle of March Clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he had written at odd times and forwarded them to Hall, in the hope that they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a week later, March 22, 1893, he sailed from Genoa on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, a fine, new boat. One of the manuscripts was 'The Californian's Tale' and the other was 'Adam's Diary'.--[It seems curious that neither of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines. “The Californian's Tale” was published in the Liber Scriptorum, an Authors' Club book, edited by Arthur Stedman. The 'Diary' was disposed of to the Niagara Book, a souvenir of Niagara Falls, which contained sketches by Howells, Clemens, and others. Harper's Magazine republished both these stories in later years--the Diary especially with great success.] Some joke was likely to be played on Mark Twain during these ocean journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned. They knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with dutiable goods and held up in the Custom House, and they planned for this effect. A few days before arriving in New York one passenger after another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or a dozen very choice boxes of smoking material. He took them all with gratitude and innocence. He had never declared any dutiable baggage, entering New York alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need to do so now. His trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the North German Lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of Customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion. They had not calculated well; the Custom-House official came along presently with the usual “Open your baggage, please,” then suddenly recognizing the owner of it he said: “Oh, Mr. Clemens, excuse me. We have orders to extend to you the courtesies of the port. No examination of your effects is necessary.” It was the evening of Monday, April 3d, when he landed in New York and went to the Hotel Glenham. In his notes he tells of having a two-hour talk with Howells on the following night. They had not seen each other for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off. It was a happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies. They had reached an age where some one they loved died every year. Writing to Mrs. Crane, Clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says: I dreamed I was born & grew up & was a pilot on the Mississippi & a miner & a journalist in Nevada & a pilgrim in the Quaker City & had a wife & children & went to live in a villa at Florence--& this dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real. He was made handsomely welcome in New York. His note-book says: Wednesday. Dined with Mary Mapes Dodge, Howells, Rudyard Kipling & wife, Clarke,--[ William Fayal Clarke, now editor of St. Nicholas Magazine.]--Jamie Dodge & wife. Thursday, 6th. Dined with Andrew Carnegie, Prof. Goldwin Smith, John Cameron, Mr. Glenn. Creation of league for absorbing Canada into our Union. Carnegie also wants to add Great Britain & Ireland. It was on this occasion that Carnegie made his celebrated maxim about the basket and the eggs. Clemens was suggesting that Carnegie take an interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should not put all of his eggs into one basket. Carnegie regarded him through half-closed lids, as was his custom, and answered: “That's a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that basket.” He had not come to America merely for entertainment. He was at the New York office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to be good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken care of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place him far beyond the fear of want. He forwarded this good news to Italy, where it was sorely needed, for Mrs. Clemens found her courage not easy to sustain in his absence. That he had made his letter glowing enough, we may gather from her answer. It does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to spend. I think I will jump around and spend money just for fun, and give a little away, if we really get some. What should we do and how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet how many people are situated in that way? He decided to make another trip to Chicago to verify, with his own eyes, the manufacturing reports, and to see Paige, who would appear to have become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied. He took Hall with him, and wrote Orion to meet him at the Great Northern Hotel. This would give him a chance to see Orion and would give Orion a chance to see the great Fair. He was in Chicago eleven days, and in bed with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time. Paige came to see him at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full of protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled in, they would share and share alike. The note-book says: Paige shed even more tears than usual. What a talker he is! He could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he is present I always believe him; I can't help it. Clemens returned to New York as soon as he was able to travel. Going down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing violently. Clemens, leaning over to Hall, with his hand to his mouth, and in a whisper audible to every one, said: “Bishop of Chicago.” The man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and subsided. On May 13th Clemens took the Kaiser Wilhelm II. for Genoa. He had accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine. If only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a moment! Night and day it was always with him. Hall presently wrote that the condition of the money-market was “something beyond description. You cannot get money on anything short of government bonds.” The Mount Morris Bank would no longer handle their paper. The Clemens household resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of. Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money would come from. She reported that her husband got up in the night and walked the floor in his distress. He wrote again to Hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and responsibilities at whatever sacrifice: I am terribly tired of business. I am by nature and disposition unfit for it, & I want to get out of it. I am standing on the Mount Morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--& doubtless a long way further off than the Connecticut company imagine. Get me out of business! He knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and he had little faith in any near relief from that source. He wrote again go Hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties. They should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market there was no sale for anything. Clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany for the baths. Clara, who had graduated from Mrs. Willard's school in Berlin, joined them in Munich, and somewhat later Susy also joined them, for Madame Marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would undertake to teach her. In spite of his disturbed state of mind Clemens must have completed some literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter to Hall, of his immortal defense of Harriet Shelley, a piece of writing all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its performance. Characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which Arthur Stedman or his father will edit, and the Webster company will publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded. But we hear no more of this project. But by August he was half beside himself with anxiety. On the 6th he wrote Hall: Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can do that--but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly. I have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months' supply & can't see any sure daylight beyond. The bloody machine offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much better for a long time to come; for when the “three weeks” are up, there will be three months' tinkering to follow, I guess. That is unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen the light. And three days later: Great Scott, but it's a long year--for you & me! I never knew the almanac to drag so. At least not since I was finishing that other machine. I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the telegram saying the machine's finished--but when “next week certainly” suddenly swelled into “three weeks sure” I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much. W----don't know what sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out. And finally, on the 4th: I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to see any daylight ahead. To me none is visible. I strongly advise that every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts. I may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course open. We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders --none to Clemenses. In very prosperous times we might regard our stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up & quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present condition of things. What I am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties. If they come into danger I hope you will cable me so that I can come over & try to save them, for if they go I am a beggar. I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family & help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors. A few days later he could stand it no longer, and on August 29 (1893) sailed, the second time that year, for New York. CLXXXV. AN INTRODUCTION TO H. H. ROGERS Clemens took a room at The Players--“a cheap room,” he wrote, “at $1.50 per day.” It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long half-year, during which Mark Twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak Esmeralda hills. Then he had no one but him self and was young. Now, at fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down with a vast burden of debt. The liabilities of Charles L. Webster & Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like sixty thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but the vast remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers in various publishing materials. Somehow it must be paid. As for their assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very doubtful indeed. What he was to do Clemens did not know. He could not even send cheerful reports to Europe. There was no longer anything to promise concerning the type-setter. The fifty machines which the company had started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary years. Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players, reading or trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what. Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any other of his myriad of friends. One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said: “Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers. He is an admirer of your books.” Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt among his kind. “Mr. Clemens,” said Mr. Rogers, “I was one of your early admirers. I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands. I was interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain was a man who had been there. I didn't suppose I'd have any difficulty getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed. When I came away I realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of yours since that I could get hold of.” They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories. Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter. When at last he rose to go the author and the financier were as old friends. Mr. Rogers urged him to visit him at his home. He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said, who was also his warm admirer. It was only a little while after this that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire: “Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens's finances a little: I am afraid they are a good deal confused.” This would be near the end of September, 1893. On October 18 Clemens wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John Brisben Walker, of the 'Cosmopolitan', and added: I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type- setter. He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and yesterday he said to me: “I find the machine to be all you represent it. I have here exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and all about its inventor's character. I know that the New York company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle.” Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said: “If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money they need. In the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'.” Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again. Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a sum which provided for the more insistent creditors. There was hope that the worst was over. Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor, and for the time, at least, found happier diversions. He must not return to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from conclusion. On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by the Lotos Club in its new building. Introducing him, President Frank Lawrence said: “What name is there in literature that can be likened to his? Perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I know of none. Himself his only parallel, it seems to me. He is all our own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil.” CLXXXVI. “THE BELLE OF NEW YORK” Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair. By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amusements, suppers, balls, and the like. He was besieged with invitations, sought for by the gayest and the greatest; “Jamie” Dodge conferred upon him the appropriate title: of “The Belle of New York.” In his letters home he describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of health, his absolute immunity from fatigue. He attributes this to his indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to stronger financial shoulders. Henry Rogers had taken his load upon him. “It rests me,” Rogers said, “to experiment with the affairs of a friend when I am tired of my own. You enjoy yourself. Let me work at the puzzle a little.” And Clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit at such times. To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he wrote: He is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate. I did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster & Co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford --to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & I was ashamed that I went. It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I got the money and was by it saved. And then--while still a stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence. He gave time to me --time, which could not be bought by any man at $100,000 a month--no, nor for three times the money. He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual. I wanted to say the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat & blood to save me & mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not. But I didn't say that. I said I didn't want any book; I wanted to get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here for that purpose & would accomplish it if I could. He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always, until the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked: “Don't you ever get tired?” And he answered: “I don't know what it is to get tired. I wish I did.” He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James J. Corbett. Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and Edward Simmons, from The Players. They had five seats in a box, and Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion's dressing-room. Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the world. I said: “You have whipped Mitchell & maybe you will whip Jackson in June --but you are not done then. You will have to tackle me.” He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in earnest: “No, I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation would be gone & you would have a double one. You have got fame enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me.” Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank, in San Francisco. There were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd; then at last Corbett appeared in the ring & the 8,000 people present went mad with enthusiasm. My two artists went mad about his form. They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equalling its perfection except Greek statues, & they didn't surpass it. Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion --oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a perfect mash of humanity. When we reached the street I found I had left my arctics in the box. I had to have them, so Simmons said he would go back & get them, & I didn't dissuade him. I wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full 50 yards. He was back with the shoes in 3 minutes! How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle? By saying: “Way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch Mr. Corbett's overshoes.” The word flew from mouth to mouth, the Red Sea divided, & Simmons walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod. This is Fire-escape Simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: Exit--in case of Simmons. I had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to The Players for 10.30; I was there by 10.45. Thirty cultivated & very musical ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them personal friends of mine. That wonderful Hungarian band was there (they charge $500 for an evening). Conversation and band until midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly grouped before me & I told them about Dr. B. E. Martin & the etchings, & followed it with the Scotch-Irish christening. My, but the Martin is a darling story! Next, the head tenor from the Opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch accompanying on the piano. Just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of weird and tremendous dance-music, a Hungarian celebrity & his wife took the floor; I followed--I couldn't help it; the others drifted in, one by one, & it was Onteora over again. By half past 4. I had danced all those people down--& yet was not tired; merely breathless. I was in bed at 5 & asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 & presently at work on this letter to you. I think I wrote until 2 or half past. Then I walked leisurely out to Mr. Rogers's (it is called 3 miles, but is short of it), arriving at 3.30, but he was out--to return at 5.30--so I didn't stay, but dropped over and chatted with Howells until five. --[Two Mark Twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at The Players: Just before Christmas a member named Scott said one day: “Mr. Clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom. I've got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard. I'd like to wear it.” The coat was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and what not. “Scott,” he said, “if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that coat you may wear it.” An hour or two later Clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a package for him was in the office. He called for it and found a neat bundle, which somehow had a Christmas look. He carried it up to the reading-room with a showy, air. “Now, boys,” he said, “you may make all the fun of Christmas you like, but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered.” They gathered around and he undid the package. It was filled with the pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat. Scott had taken special precautions against losing them. Mark Twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled: “Well--, d---n Scott. I hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!” The second anecdote concerns The Player egg-cups. They easily hold two eggs, but not three. One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast order. Clemens said: “Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me.” By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast. Clemens looked at the egg portion and asked: “Boy, what was my order?” “Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens.” “And you've filled that order, have you?” “Yes, Mr. Clemens.” “Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I've been trying all winter to get three eggs into that cup.”] In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John Mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous moments, thirty years before. “The guests were old gray Pacific coasters,” he said, “whom I knew when they were young and not gray. The talk was of the days when we went gipsying-along time ago--thirty years.” Indeed, it was a talk of the dead. Mainly that. And of how they looked & the harum-scarum things they did & said. For there were no cares in that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy. Of the midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but me, the victim. Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime. In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at Robert Reid's studio. There were present, he says: Coquelin; Richard Harding Davis; Harrison, the great outdoor painter; Wm. H. Chase, the artist; Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph; Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about him in Jan. or Feb. Century. John Drew, actor; James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him! Smedley, the artist; Zorn, “ ” Zogbaum, “ ” Reinhart, “ ” Metcalf, “ ” Ancona, head tenor at the Opera; Oh, & a great lot of others. Everybody there had done something & was in his way famous. Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew did the like for me in English, & then the fun began. Coquelin did some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French. It nearly killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it. I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever, which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast fascinating (for what reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems, “On the Road to Mandalay,” sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper & charmed me more than the Deever. Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all danced about an hour. There couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was. Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is. In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty. He refers to Susy's recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens's own poor state of health. Dear, dear Susy! My strength reproaches me when I think of her and you. It is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, I've got to stick right where I am till I find out whether we are rich or whether the poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody's kitchen is better off than we are.. I stand on the land-end of a springboard, with the family clustered on the other end; if I take my foot---- He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he wrote: The ship is in sight now.... When the anchor is down then I shall say: “Farewell--a long farewell--to business! I will never touch it again!” I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will swim in ink! 'Joan of Arc'--but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet. Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope. Mrs. Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said: Mr. Clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me word that Paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no despatch comes.... On the 5th of this month I received a cable, “Expect good news in ten days.” On the 15th I receive a cable, “Look out for good news.” On the 19th a cable, “Nearing success.” It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days. She added: They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved “Colonel.” Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and with Clemens made a trip to Chicago. All agreed now that the machine promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody could be concluded--Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and dicker as to terms. Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that Paige had agreed to terms. On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book: This is a great date in my history. Yesterday we were paupers with but 3 months' rations of cash left and $160,000 in debt, my wife & I, but this telegram makes us wealthy. But it was not until a fortnight later that Paige did actually sign. This was on the 1st of February, '94, and Clemens that night cabled to Paris, so that Mrs. Clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the morning of their anniversary: “Wedding news. Our ship is safe in port. I sail the moment Rogers can spare me.” So this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance again--the grand hope. He was as concerned with it as if it had been an actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that farce, that nightmare. One longs to go back through the years and face him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all. CLXXXVII. SOME LITERARY MATTERS Clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and Major Pond did his best to persuade him; but Rogers agreed that his presence in New York was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence. He went once to Boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure in the experience was a sufficient reward. On the evening before the lecture Mrs. James T. Fields had him to her house to dine with Dr. Holmes, then not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[He died that same year, October, 1894.] Clemens wrote to Paris of their evening together: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes never goes out (he is in his 84th year), but he came out this time--said he wanted to “have a time” once more with me. Mrs. Fields said Aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because she wouldn't let him. She allowed only her family (Sarah Orne Jewett & sister) to be present, because much company would overtax Dr. Holmes. Well, he was just delightful! He did as brilliant and beautiful talking (& listening) as he ever did in his life, I guess. Fields and Jewett said he hadn't been in such splendid form for years. He had ordered his carriage for 9. The coachman sent in for him at 9, but he said, “Oh, nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these? Tell him to go away & come in an hour!” At 10 he was called for again, & Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever. Twice more Mrs. Fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past 10--an unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days. He was prodigiously complimentary about some of my books, & is having Pudd'nhead read to him. I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the loveletters, & it pleased him. One other address Clemens delivered that winter, at Fair Haven, on the opening of the Millicent Library, a present to the town from Mrs. Rogers. Mrs. Rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps Mr. Clemens would be willing to say a few words there. Mr. Rogers had replied, “Oh, Clemens is in trouble. I don't like to ask him,” but a day or two later told him of Mrs. Rogers's wish, adding: “Don't feel at all that you need to do it. I know just how you are feeling, how worried you are.” Clemens answered, “Mr. Rogers, do you think there is anything I could do for you that I wouldn't do?” It was on this occasion that he told for the first time the “stolen watermelon” story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its place. In spite of his cares and diversions Clemens's literary activities of this time were considerable. He wrote an article for the Youth's Companion--“How to Tell a Story”--and another for the North American Review on Fenimore Cooper's “Literary Offenses.” Mark Twain had not much respect for Cooper as a literary artist. Cooper's stilted artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the Deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. Clemens had also promised some stories to Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his Christmas number, “Traveling with a Reformer,” which had grown out of some incidents of that long-ago journey with Osgood to Chicago, supplemented by others that had happened on the more recent visit to that city with Hall. This story had already appeared when Clemens and Rogers had made their Chicago trip. Rogers had written for passes over the Pennsylvania road, and the president, replying, said: “No, I won't give Mark Twain a pass over our road. I've been reading his 'Traveling with a Reformer,' in which he abuses our road. I wouldn't let him ride over it again if I could help it. The only way I'll agree to let him go over it at all is in my private car. I have stocked it with everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there is anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get it.” “Pudd'nhead Wilson” was appearing in the Century during this period, and “Tom Sawyer Abroad” in the St. Nicholas. The Century had issued a tiny calendar of the Pudd'nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy, the very gems of Mark Twain mental riches, were in everybody's mouth. With all this going on, and with his appearance at various social events, he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever before. From the note-book: The Haunted Looking-glass. The guest (at midnight a dim light burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have looked into the glass during 3 centuries. Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. No man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash--that one is the cat. Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. CLXXXVIII. FAILURE It was the first week in March before it was thought to be safe for Clemens to return to France, even for a brief visit to his family. He hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time, a bare three weeks, and was back again in New York by the middle of April. The Webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage. Mr. Rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the 16th of April, 1894, Hall arrived at Clemens's room at The Players in a panic. The Mount Morris Bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes of five thousand dollars each in a few days when due. Mr. Rogers was immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and advise them next day. He did not believe that the bank would really push them to the wall. The next day was spent in seeing what could be done, and by evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was raised a voluntary assignment was the proper course. The end of the long struggle had come. Clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife's account. He knew that to her the word failure would be associated with disgrace. She had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the business afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this final disaster. Mr. Rogers said: “Mr. Clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of disgrace in making this assignment. By doing it you will relieve yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay everything and stand clear before the world. If you don't do it you will probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and Mrs. Clemens both. If there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance for their claims. Most of them will be glad enough to help you.” It was on the afternoon of the next day, April 18, 1894, that the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. executed assignment papers and closed its doors. A meeting of the creditors was called, at which H. H. Rogers was present, representing Clemens. For the most part the creditors were liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement. But there were a few who were grumpy and fussy. They declared that Mark Twain should turn over his copyrights, his Hartford home, and whatever other odds and ends could be discovered. Mr. Rogers, discussing the matter in 1908, said: “They were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking the bones afterward, as Clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they should do. I was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently I got on my feet and said, 'Gentlemen, you are not going to have this thing all your way. I have something to say about Mr. Clemens's affairs. Mrs. Clemens is the chief creditor of this firm. Out of her own personal fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars. She will be a preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until her claim is paid in full. As for the home in Hartford, it is hers already.' “There was a good deal of complaint, but I refused to budge. I insisted that Mrs. Clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to tell the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year the sale of books was small enough. Besides Mrs. Clemens's claim the debts amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must be a definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that Clemens should pay fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized upon, and receive a quittance. Clemens himself declared that sooner or later he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though I believe there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who believed he would ever be able to do it. Clemens himself got discouraged sometimes, and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in years--nearly sixty--and he was in poor health. Once when we found the debt, after the Webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy thousand dollars, he said, 'I need not dream of paying it. I never could manage it.' But he stuck to it. He was at my house a good deal at first. We gave him a room there and he came and went as he chose. The worry told upon him. He became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange how brilliant he was, how cheerful.” The business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade before had dwindled to its end. The last book it had in hand was 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', just ready for issue. It curiously happened that on the day of the failure copies of it were filed in Washington for copyright. Frank Bliss came over from Hartford, and Clemens arranged with him for the publication of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', thereby renewing the old relationship with the American Publishing Company after a break of a dozen years. Naturally, the failure of Mark Twain's publishing firm made a public stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready they were with sympathy and help of a more material kind. Those who understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement. Poultney Bigelow, Douglas Taylor, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Dudley Warner, and others extended financial help, Bigelow and Taylor each inclosing him a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities. He was touched by these things, but the checks were returned. Many of his creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was to forget his obligation to them completely until such time as the remembering would cost him no uneasiness. Clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote bright letters home. In one he said: Mr. Rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come. And again: Now & then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with me & says, “Cheer up-don't be downhearted,” and some other friend says, “I'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how bravely you stand it,” & none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me & how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face. For in the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons. You only seem to see rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--& we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, “Sho, Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.” Which didn't convince me. Olivia Clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said: The hideous news of Webster & Co.'s failure reached me by cable on Thursday, and Friday morning Galignani's Messenger had a squib about it. Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope that it would be in some way averted. Mr. Rogers was so sure there was no way out but failure that I suppose it was true. But I have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it. I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it always will mean that to me. We have put a great deal of money into the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep putting it in and losing it. We certainly now have not much to lose. We might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing I could think of to do. Mr. Clemens felt that there would never be any end, and perhaps he was right. At any rate, I know that he was convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so if only on account of my sentiment in the matter. Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year. I have wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I should at once desire to live. Clemens now hurried back to Paris, arriving about the middle of May, his second trip in two months. Scarcely had he got the family settled at La Bourboule-les-Bains, a quiet watering-place in the southern part of France, when a cable from Mr. Rogers, stating that the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to America to assist in securing the new fortune. He did not go, however. Rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the Times-Herald office, Chicago, for a long and thorough trial. There would be plenty of time, and Clemens concluded to rest with his family at La Bourboule-les-Bains. Later in the summer they went to Etretat, where he settled down to work. CLXXXIX. AN EVENTFUL YEAR ENDS That summer (July, '94.) the 'North American Review' published “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” a rare piece of literary criticism and probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured, ill-fated woman. An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife. It had become the fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been without blame for Shelley's behavior. A Shelley biography by Professor Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating. In the midst of his tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention. There were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough, with no large, logical idea. He pursued no such method in this instance. The paper on Harriet Shelley is a brief as direct and compact and cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human wrong. By no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm. The characterization of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley as a “literary cake-walk” is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the “Defense of Harriet Shelly,” with those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; “Was it Heaven or Hell?”; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last with those exquisite memories, in his final days. The summer of 1894 found Mark Twain in the proper frame of mind for literary work. He was no longer in a state of dread. At Etretat, a watering-place on the French coast, he returned eagerly to the long-neglected tale of Joan--“a book which writes itself,” he wrote Mr. Rogers”--a tale which tells itself; I merely have to hold the pen.” Etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day, and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means. Clemens worked steadily at Etretat for more than a month, finishing the second part of his story, then went over to Rouen to visit the hallowed precincts where Joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to the stake. Susy Clemens was taken ill at Rouen, and they lingered in that ancient city, wandering about its venerable streets, which have been changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories. They returned to Paris at length--to the Brighton; their quarters of the previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of the artist Pomroy at 169 rue de l'Universite, beyond the Seine. Mark Twain wrote of it once: It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain and full of surprises. You were always getting lost in it, and finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and whose presence you had not suspected before. It was built by a rich French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it himself. The studio was coziness itself. With us it served as a drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it for everything. We couldn't get enough of it. It is odd that it should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and 30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle, and a musicians' gallery at one end. Mrs. Clemens had hoped to return to America, to their Hartford home. That was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering. Her letters were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an eternity. In its way, the Pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had found. Its belongings were of the kind she loved. Susy had better health, and her husband was happy in his work. They had much delightful and distinguished company. Her letters tell of these attractive things, and of their economies to make their income reach. It was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the machine--came finally to a conclusion. Reports from the test had been hopeful during the summer. Early in October Clemens, receiving a copy of the Times-Herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: “The Herald has just arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes. It affects me like Columbus sighting land.” And again on the 28th: It seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago than they are. There's no other machine that can set type eight hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness. The others do rather more stopping than working. By and by our machines will be perfect; then they won't stop at all. But that was about the end of the good news. The stoppages became worse and worse. The type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it was too delicately adjusted--too complicated. “Great guns, what is the matter with it?” wrote Clemens in November when he received a detailed account of its misconduct. Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago to investigate. They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the type-setter in action. Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer of these chapters. He said: “Certainly it was a marvelous invention. It was the nearest approach to a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have ever known. But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human being and not enough of a machine. It had all the complications of the human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being. It was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up. I took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes. We watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating, but it was not practical--that to me was clear.” It had failed to stand the test. The Times-Herald would have no more of it. Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor. He instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain. His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell the story. 169 rue de l'Universite, PARIS, December 22, 1894. DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves. It hit me like a thunder-clap. It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing, and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and size it up. Have you ever been like that? Not so much, I reckon. There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it die. That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk. So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling, and walked over to the rue Scribe--4 p.m.--and asked a question or two and was told I should be running a big risk if I took the 9 p.m. train for London and Southampton; “better come right along at 6.52 per Havre special and step aboard the New York all easy and comfortable.” Very! and I about two miles from home and no packing done. Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made available unless at least a month's time could be secured. So I cabled you, and said to myself that I would take the French steamer to-morrow (which will be Sunday). By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long. So I went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once an hour--until dawn this morning. Result--a sane resolution; no matter what your answer to my cable might be I would hold still and not sail until I should get an answer to this present letter which I am now writing or a cable answer from you saying “Come” or “Remain.” I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment of my 70,000 projects to be of this character: He follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using brass type, etc., and concludes: Don't say I'm wild. For really I'm sane again this morning. I am going right along with Joan now, and wait untroubled till I hear from you. If you think I can be of the least use cable me “Come.” I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time. Also I could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe Joan, time being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here, cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in America. The second letter followed five days later: 169 rue de l'Universite, PARIS, December 27, 1894. DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is “old and hard” you make a body choke up. I know you “mean every word you say” and I do take it “in the same spirit in which you tender it.” I shall keep your regard while we two live--that I know; for I shall always remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it. It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you. I put in the rest of that day till 7 P.m. plenty comfortably enough writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking Clara along, and we had a good time. I have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in keeping them out--through watchfulness. I have done a good week's work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great Trial [of Joan], which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most thought and carefulness. I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but I am on the road. I am creeping surely toward it. “Why not leave them all to me?” My business brothers? I take you by the hand! I jump at the chance! I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet I do jump at the chance in spite of it. I don't want to write Irving and I don't want to write Stoker. It doesn't seem as if I could. But I can suggest something for you to write them; and then if you see that I am unwise you can write them something quite different. Now this is my idea: 1. To return Stoker's $100 to him and keep his stock. 2. And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make good to him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him of his $500. [P. S. Madam says No, I must face the music. So I inclose my effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.] We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy matter, for it costs heavily to live in. We can never live in it again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could believe it. Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her --which is the reason I haven't drowned myself. I got the Xmas journals which you sent and I thank you for that Xmas remembrance. We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of yours and a Happy New Year! S. L. CLEMENS. --[Brain Stoker and Sir Henry Irving had each taken a small interest in the machine. The inclosure for Stoker ran as follows:] MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this, because it is not to be mailed at present. When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the aspect of a dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me --I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet--that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him the rest. I'm not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home. Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker. I gave up that London lecture-project entirely. Had to--there's never been a chance since to find the time. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject: Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn't seem to be any other wise course. There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it reverses my horoscope. The proverb says, “Born lucky, always lucky.” It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. When the Pennsylvania blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “it means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half--he was born lucky.” Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain that the machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn't shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck. Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck --the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss. I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ashore. So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever. Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family. It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live one. A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's interest, but accomplished nothing. Eventually--irony of fate--the Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery, for its size, ever constructed. Mark Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement. He replied: DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions. Send them by express. Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. The collapse of the “great hope” meant to the Clemens household that their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to become more rigid. In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a (1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister: As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr. Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me, saying: “It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present.” It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that twenty-five years had brought. Literary matters, however, prospered. The new book progressed amazingly. The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead. He was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation, and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a reality. As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle. The story was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr; the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts. Susy would say, “Wait, wait till I get a handkerchief,” and one night when the last pages had been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, “To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake,” meaning that the book was finished. Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been that she desired to sing. There are fragments of her writing that show the true literary touch. Her father, in an unpublished article which he once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to take its place at the end of a story: And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence. It is always so. Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human life has fulfilled its earthly destiny. Poor human life! It may not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and greater consummations. She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant, flowing, scintillating speech. From her father she had inherited a rare faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and forceful phrasing. Her father wrote of her gift: Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket- like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility. I seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of colored fire. We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that winter. She was more at home than the others. Her health did not permit her to go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship. They discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life, philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art. He recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of the open that one feels in “the days when we went gipsying a long time ago” and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested by the simple words, “departed this life.” Both Susy and her father cared more for Joan than any of the former books. To Mr. Rogers, Clemens wrote: “Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love.” A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it. Do you know that shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has happened. Do you know that shock? The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the printer. He steps into his study at the hour established by the habit of months--& he gets that little shock. All the litter & confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference-books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home- like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through & send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist there, as may happen; & that I will do. CXC. STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL. The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid illustrations by Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been issued by the American Publishing Company. It proved not one of Mark Twain's great books, but only one of his good books. From first to last it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely written. The character of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough. There are not many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells his mother down the river into slavery. The negro character is well drawn, of course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books--in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom, Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter. But it is chiefly Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter, that will stick in the memory of men. Perhaps the book would live without these, but with them it is certainly immortal. Such aphorisms as: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits”; “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”; “When angry count four, and when very angry swear,” cannot perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of Following the Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for all time.--[The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized by Frank Mayo, who played it successfully as long as he lived. It is by no means dead, and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates.] Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters there. They were a good deal confused. The Harpers had arranged for the serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the Webster contracts. Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American Company at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be satisfactory and profitable to all concerned. It was time that Clemens was on the scene of action. He sailed on the New York on the end of February, and a little more than a month later returned by the Paris--that is, at the end of March. By this time he had altogether a new thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in 1872 and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds. Loathing the platform as he did, he was going back to it. Major Pond had proposed a lecture tour soon after his failure. “The loss of a fortune is tough,” wrote Pond, “but there are other resources for another fortune. You and I will make the tour together.” Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not contemplated. He would go platforming around the world! He would take Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the Pacific. He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning such a tour. Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and how Smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own. He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves once more at beautiful Quarry Farm. We may imagine how happy they were to reach that peaceful haven. Mrs. Clemens had written: “It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open our house. But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our friends.” Little at the farm was changed. There were more vines on the home--the study was overgrown--that was all. Even Ellerslie remained as the children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place. Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane were missing. The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places. Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone which she had found, knowing Mark Twain's interest in geology. Later, when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages should solve their problems. He wrote it in verse: If you prove right and I prove wrong, A million years from now, In language plain and frank and strong My error I'll avow To your dear waking face. If I prove right, by God His grace, Full sorry I shall be, For in that solitude no trace There'll be of you and me. A million years, O patient stone, You've waited for this message. Deliver it a million hence; (Survivor pays expressage.) MARK TWAIN Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895. Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged. Clemens decided to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to start without much delay. He dreaded the prospect of setting out on that long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to consent to such a plan. It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm. Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop. She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to go. Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver. They left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July. When the train pulled away their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by. CXCI. Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in that fierce summer heat. He was fearful of failure. “I sha'n't be able to stand on a platform,” he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along steadily with few delays. They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly, with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time. It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed them. Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the “seas” and “ocean” of wheat. There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to it, and so not intruding. The scattering, far-off homesteads, with trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring world, so reposeful and enticing. The most distant and faintest under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea. The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of the latter. Entering Port Huron he wrote: The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far- reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging. It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead. No doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome everywhere and their prosperity were accountable. Everywhere they were entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were always waiting. It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large. From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers: At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go, but they said “go on,” and I did. He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against his debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a month's travel in that deadly season. At no more than two places were the houses less than crowded. One of these was Anaconda, then a small place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager to have him. He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken “all he had” Clemens said: “And you took the last cent that poor fellow had. Send him one hundred dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me. I'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my commercial value. I don't want to get money that way.” “I sent the money,” said Pond afterward, “and was glad of the privilege of standing my share.” Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip. He had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength. But in a presentation copy of 'Roughing It', given to Pond as a souvenir, he wrote: “Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the continent that any group of five has ever made.” There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke everywhere. The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th, went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week. While they were waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and Lady Aberdeen and their little son in the audience. His note-book says: They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that time the late-comers are all in. Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver. In one of them to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that his name might now be printed as the author of “Joan,” which had begun serially in the April Magazine. He thought it might, help his lecturing tour and keep his name alive. But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens's help, he had reconsidered, and wrote: My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to the “Joan of Arc” so soon. She thinks it might go counter to your plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the matter. All right-so be it. I wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers. As a matter of fact the authorship of “Joan” had been pretty generally guessed by the second or third issue. Certain of its phrasing and humor could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain's. The authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of the book, the following May. Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India. This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great compliment some day. I shall arrive next January & you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty. To the press he gave this parting statement: It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit. This is an error. I intend the lectures as well as the property for the creditors. The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never outlaw. From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and unincumbered start in life. I am going to Australia, India, and South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great cities of the United States. I meant, when I began, to give my creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than theirs. There was one creditor, whose name need, not be “handed down to infamy,” who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for all. But this was momentary. He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers to “pay Shylock in full,” and to assure any others that he would pay them, too, in the end. But none of the others annoyed him. It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at last. Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by as long as they could see the vessel. The far voyage which was to carry them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had begun. CXCII. “FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR” Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great a master. We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch here and there, perhaps, from another point of view. They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and many were dying daily. They could not land. It was a double disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of his youth. There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore. In his book he says: We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that we could hear. The town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss. The silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists. I recognized it all. It was just as I had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting. In his note-book he wrote: “If I might, I would go ashore and never leave.” This was the 31 st of August. Two days later they were off again, sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia. They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara kodaked it. A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern horizon. Then presently they were among the islands of the southern Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group. They had twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with only one rough day. A ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip of that length and character. They mingle in all sorts of diversions to while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many years. On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship, setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: “Like glorified serpents thirty to fifty feet long. Every curve of the tapering long body perfect. The whole snake dazzlingly illumined. It was a weird sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the solid gloom and stream past like a meteor.” They were in Sydney next morning, September 16, 1895, and landed in a pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought. Clemens announced that he had brought Australia good-fortune, and should expect something in return. Mr. Smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to work. All Australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that faraway Pacific continent. Crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more than two weeks after arrival Clemens was able to send back another two thousand dollars to apply on his debts. But he had hard luck, too, for another carbuncle developed at Melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly a week. When he was able to go before an audience again he said: “The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man. Well, that may be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don't take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.” In his book Clemens has told us his joy in Australia, his interest in the perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-mines, and in the advanced industries. The climate he thought superb; “a darling climate,” he says in a note-book entry. Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his entertainment. His readings were mainly from his earlier books, 'Roughing It' and 'Innocents Abroad'. The story of the dead man which, as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often told, and the “Mexican Plug” and his “Meeting with Artemus Ward” and the story of Jim Blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'Huck Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer'. He was likely to finish with that old fireside tale of his early childhood, the “Golden Arm.” But he sometimes told the watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam's Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it entirely where he appeared twice in one city. Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went when the hour of entertainment came: They enjoyed seeing his triumph with the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art. One story, the “Golden Arm,” had in it a pause, an effective, delicate pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize its full value. Somewhere before we have stated that no one better than Mark Twain knew the value of a pause. Mrs. Clemens and Clara were willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for its effect on each new, audience. From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: “The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary.”]--and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell: I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city. Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise. Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night & find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here--land, but it would be fine! Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark. “I do not like it one single bit,” she wrote to her sister. “Fifty years old-think of it; that seems very far on.” And Clemens wrote: Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (underworld time) & tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60--no thanks for it! From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to Ceylon. Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races. Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions. The papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in India until the time of the great heat. He was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself. He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling, to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi--old cities of romance--and to Jeypore--through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story. One railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car. In his book he says: That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty- five miles of it, instead of five hundred. Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more. “INDIA THE MARVELOUS” he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote: So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. “Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime. It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest. There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated. DEAR KUMAR SAHIB,--It would be hard for me to put into words how much my family & I enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house. It was our first glimpse of the home of an Eastern Prince, & the charm of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel & Oriental tales. We shall not forget that happy experience, nor your kind courtesies to us, nor those of her Highness to my wife & daughter. We shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them again, & how welcome they will be! We make our salutation to your Highness & to all members of your family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little sprite of a Princess--& I beg to sign myself Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. BENARES, February 5, 1896. They had been entertained in truly royal fashion by Prince Kumar, who, after refreshments, had ordered in “bales of rich stuffs” in the true Arabian Nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and allow his guests to select for themselves. With the possible exception of General Grant's long trip in '78 and '79 there has hardly been a more royal progress than Mark Twain's trip around the world. Everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and invitations, and their gifts became so many that Mrs. Clemens wrote she did not see how they were going to carry them all. In a sense, it was like the Grant trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not only to a beloved personality, but to the American character and people. The story of that East Indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and Mark Twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume of Following the Equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story of Indian travel. Clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less profitable than in Australia, because in India the houses were not built for such audiences as he could command. He had to lecture three times in Calcutta, and then many people were turned away. At one place, however, his hall was large enough. This was in the great Hall of the Palace, where durbars are held, at Bombay. Altogether they were two months in India, and then about the middle of March an English physician at Jeypore warned them to fly for Calcutta and get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in. They sailed toward the end of March, touched at Madras and again at Ceylon, remaining a day or two at Colombo, and then away to sea again, across the Indian Ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless, tropic voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears the whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream. From the note-book: Here in the wastes of the Indian Ocean just under the equator the sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game- playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish. I would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue forever. The Injian Ocean sits and smiles So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue, There aren't a wave for miles an' miles Excep' the jiggle of the screw. --KIP. How curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going English are--I believe I haven't told an anecdote or heard one since I left America, but Americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as they get a little acquainted. Preserve your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but not live. Swore off from profanity early this morning--I was on deck in the peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn. Went down, dressed, bathed, put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no profanity. Then started to breakfast. Remembered my tonic--first time in 3 months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass, held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth --reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of fragments, but the bottom hunk whole. Picked it up to throw out of the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then I released my voice. Mrs. Clemens behind me in the door. “Don't reform any more. It is not an improvement.” This is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep. It invites to dreams, to study, to reflection. Seventeen days ago this ship sailed out of Calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in Ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea & a cloudless blue sky. All down the Bay of Bengal it was so. It is still so in the vast solitudes of the Indian Ocean--17 days of heaven. In 11 more it will end. There will be one passenger who will be sorry. One reads all day long in this delicious air. Today I have been storing up knowledge from Sir John Lubbock about the ant. The thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is the ant's extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his friend's person. I will quote something which he says about Formica fusca. Formica fusca is not something to eat; it's the name of a breed of ants. He does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his book. In another note he says: In the past year have read Vicar of Wakefield and some of Jane Austen--thoroughly artificial. Have begun Children of the Abbey. It begins with this “Impromptu” from the sentimental heroine: “Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy! Content and innocence reside beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it renders.... Here unmolested may I wait till the rude storm of sorrow is overblown and my father's arms are again extended to receive me.” Has the ear-marks of preparation. They were at the island of Mauritius by the middle of April, that curious bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of Paul and Virginia, a story supposed by some in Mauritius to be “a part of the Bible.” They rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for South Africa on the ship Arundel Castle, which he tells us is the finest boat he has seen in those waters. It was the end of the first week in May when they reached Durban and felt that they were nearing home. One more voyage and they would be in England, where they had planned for Susy and Jean to join them. Mrs. Clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not finding one from Susy. The reports from Quarry Farm had been cheerful, and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting, but her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that Susy did not send letters. She had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had come to Susy which made her loath to write. Susy was, in fact, far from well, though no one, not even Susy herself, suspected how serious was her condition. Mrs. Clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is often depressed. Mr. Clemens has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old. Naturally I combat that thought all I can, trying to make him rejoice that he is not seventy.... He does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must all our lives live in poverty. He says he never wants to go back to America. I cannot think that things are as black as he paints them, and I trust that if I get him settled down for work in some quiet English village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact, I believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is the work that he loves: The platform he likes for the two hours that he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says he is ashamed of what he is doing. Still, in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip. People are so nice, and with people Mr. Clemens seems cheerful. Then the ocean trips are a great rest to him. Mrs. Clemens and Clara remained at the hotel in Durban while Clemens made his platform trip to the South African cities. It was just at the time when the Transvaal invasion had been put down--when the Jameson raid had come to grief and John Hares Hammond, chief of the reformers, and fifty or more supporters were lying in the jail at Pretoria under various sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, Hammond himself having received the latter award. Mrs. Hammond was a fellow-Missourian; Clemens had known her in America. He went with her now to see the prisoners, who seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be pardoned presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a joke. Clemens, writing of it to Twichell, said: A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous & polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) & wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the ground--the “deathline,” one of the prisoners called it. Not in earnest, though, I think. I found that I had met Hammond once when he was a Yale senior & a guest of General Franklin's. I also found that I had known Captain Mein intimately 32 years ago. One of the English prisoners had heard me lecture in London 23 years ago.... These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & I believe they are all educated men. They are well off; some of them are wealthy. They have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech--sitting down. It just happened so. I don't prefer that attitude. Still, it has one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech.... I advised them at considerable length to stay where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; & I promised to go and see the President & do what I could to get him to double their jail terms.... We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &. a little over & we outsiders had to go. I went again to-day, but the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly Boer named Du Plessis, explained that his orders wouldn't allow him to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday. Du Plessis descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200 years ago--but he hasn't any French left in him now--all Dutch. Clemens did visit President Kruger a few days later, but not for the purpose explained. John Hayes Hammond, in a speech not long ago (1911), told how Mark Twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the jail, and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated Clemens had replied that he didn't think so, adding: “As a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the West.” Said Hammond in his speech: “The result of this was that the interview was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning's issue protesting against such lenience. The privations, already severe enough, were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three or four days' search on the part of some of our friends who were already outside of jail to get hold of Mark Twain and have him go and explain to Kruger that it was all a joke.” Clemens made as good a plea to “Oom Paul” as he could, and in some degree may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the shortened terms of the unlucky reformers. They did not hurry away from South Africa. Clemens gave many readings and paid a visit to the Kimberley mines. His note-book recalls how poor Riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey. It was the 14th of July, 1896, a year to a day since they left Elmira, that they sailed by the steamer Norman for England, arriving at Southampton the 31st. It was from Southampton that they had sailed for America fourteen months before. They had completed the circuit of the globe. CXCIII. THE PASSING OF SUSY It had been arranged that Katie Leary should bring Jean and Susy to England. It was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than the 12th, by which time the others would be established. The travelers proceeded immediately to London and engaged for the summer a house in Guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though Mark Twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself free. Altogether, the trip had been prosperous. Now that it was behind him, his health and spirits had improved. The outlook was brighter. August 12th came, but it did not bring Katie and the children. A letter came instead. Clemens long afterward wrote: It explained that Susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence. But we were disquieted and began to cable for later news. This was Friday. All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next day at noon. Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in case the news should be bad. Finally came a cablegram saying, “Wait for cablegram in the morning.” This was not satisfactory--not reassuring. I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to Southampton, for the day was now closing. I waited in the post- office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message. We sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for we knew not what. Then we took the earlier morning train, and when we reached Southampton the message was there. It said the recovery would be long but certain. This was a great relief to me, but not to my wife. She was frightened. She and Clara went aboard the steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy. I remained behind to search for another and larger house in Guildford. That was the 15th of August, 1896. Three days later, when my wife and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, “Susy was peacefully released to-day.” Some of those who in later years wondered at Mark Twain's occasional attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his logic of gloom. For years he and his had been fighting various impending disasters. In the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a penance in which all, without complaint, had joined. Now, just when it seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more, when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of supreme triumph had come the message that Susy's lovely and blameless life was ended. There are not many greater dramas in fiction or in history than this. The wonder is not that Mark Twain so often preached the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact. Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that equaled this one. This time none of the elements were lacking--not the smallest detail. The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would never see it again. The blow had found him alone absolutely alone among strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to comfort them. Clemens sought no comfort for himself. Just as nearly forty years before he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother, and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so now he crucified himself as the slayer of Susy. To Mrs. Clemens he poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their downfall, the separation from Susy, and this final incredible disaster. Only a human being, he said, could have done these things. Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home. She had been well for a time at Quarry Farm, well and happy, but during the summer of '96 she had become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways. Her health seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in mental science, always with the approval of her parents. Clemens had great faith in mind over matter, and Mrs. Clemens also believed that Susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit from a serene and confident mental attitude. From Bombay, in January, she wrote Mrs. Crane: I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. Last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter. Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. Like Stevenson, she had “a soul of flame in a body of gauze,” a body to be guarded through the spirit. She worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. Early in the year she went over to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing. Her health did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her. “Miss Susy; you are sick,” she said. “You must have the doctor come.” Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for. He thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork. He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. It was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to England. Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also Charles Langdon. Mr. Twichell was notified and came down from his summer place in the Adirondacks. Susy did not improve. She became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. This was on the 15th of August--that hot, terrible August of 1896. Susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. She lay down at last, and once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie's face and said, “mama.” She did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame went out forever. To Twichell Clemens wrote of it: Ah, well, Susy died at home. She had that privilege. Her dying eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon things which they had known & loved always & which had made her young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & & John & Ellen. This was happy fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her. If she had died in another house--well, I think I could not have borne that. To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved. And could we now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod. A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twichell, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and Clara on board. It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to Clara. There had been little need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. Susy already had been taken to Elmira, and at half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by the through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world. And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born. They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia: Warm summer sun shine kindly here; Warm southern wind blow softly here; Green sod above lie light, lie light Good night, dear heart, good night, good night. --[These lines at first were generally attributed to Clemens himself. When this was reported to him he ordered the name of the Australian poet, Robert Richardson, cut beneath them. The word “southern” in the original read “northern,” as in Australia, the warm wind is from the north. Richardson died in England in 1901.] CXCIV. WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England without delay. Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter. They did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known except to a few of their closest friends. They wanted to be alone with their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention. Perhaps not a dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was ignorant of it altogether. It was through this that a wild report started that Mark Twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts. This report--exploited in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period received wide attention. James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von Versen, was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto & Windus, begging Mark Twain to command his relative's purse. The reply to this kind offer was an invitation to tea, and “Young Doctor Jim,” as he was called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal. The general impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and the New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his debts. The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account, and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he was able to take care of them through his own efforts. Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for October 24, 1896, says: “Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'Around the World'.” He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual heresies. His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death of Susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things in general and the human race in particular. “Man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to,” was one of his maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature subject to such afflictions and for a Providence that could invent them. Even Mrs. Clemens felt the general sorrow of the race. “Poor, poor human nature,” she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter. Many of Mark Twain's notes refer to Susy. In one he says: “I did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in Hartford a month or two before the end.” Notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the hopelessness of it all. In one place he records her accomplishment of speech, adding: “And I felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my sorrow I remember it now. But I come of an undemonstrative race.” He wrote to Twichell: But I have this consolation: that dull as I was I always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if Livy had done it herself--& I took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had greatness in her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it. And now she is dead--& I can never tell her. And closing a letter to Howells: Good-by. Will healing ever come, or life have value again? And shall we see Susy? Without doubt! without a shadow of doubt if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again. On November 26th, Thanksgiving, occurs this note: “We did not celebrate it. Seven years ago Susy gave her play for the first time.” And on Christmas: London, 11.30 Xmas morning. The Square & adjacent streets are not merely quiet, they are dead. There is not a sound. At intervals a Sunday-looking person passes along. The family have been to breakfast. We three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day was not mentioned. It was in our minds, but we said nothing. And a little later: Since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with us. Our cook's sweetheart was healthy. He is rushing for the grave now. Emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the other is in danger. Wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case. We began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the Bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died. Next Wilson got his skull fractured. January 23, 1897. I wish the Lord would disguise Himself in citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings of the poor in London. He would be moved & would do something for them Himself. CXCV. “PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC”. Meantime certain publishing events had occurred. During his long voyage a number of Mark Twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among them “Mental Telegraphy Again,” in Harpers, and in the North American Review that scorching reply to Paul Bourget's reflections upon America. Clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would hardly be patient under the strictures of a Frenchman, especially upon American women. There had been book publication also during this period. The Harpers had issued an edition of 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', which included another Tom and Huck story 'Tom Sawyer, Detective', written in Paris, and the contents of the old White Elephant book. But there had been a much more important book event. The chapters of his story of Joan having run their course in Harper's Magazine had been issued as a volume. As already mentioned, Joan had been early recognized as Mark Twain's work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page. It is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing. Those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. Some who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain's, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. When the book itself appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. The early sales were disappointing. Nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule. Perhaps they did not read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a sort of general verdict that, in attempting 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain had gone out of his proper field. Furthermore, there were a number of Joan books published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which Joan was pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything else--never being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life, to be a human being, in fact, at all. But this is just the very wonder of Mark Twain's Joan. She is a saint; she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a human being besides. Considered from every point of view, Joan of Arc is Mark Twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work. It is so from the first word of its beginning, that wonderful “Translator's Preface,” to the last word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of Joan with the martyr's crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through all time. The idyllic picture of Joan's childhood with her playmates around the fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to recall it here would disturb its bloom. The little poem, “L'Arbre fee de Bourlemont,” Mark Twain's own composition, is a perfect note, and that curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong. Joan's girlhood, the picture of her father's humble cottage, the singing there by the wandering soldier of the great song of Roland which stirred her deepest soul with the love of France, Joan's heroism among her playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only Mark Twain could give? And the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first appearance before the wavering king. And then the great coronation scene at Rheims, and the dramatic moment when Joan commands the march on Paris--the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day of execution, what can surpass these? Nor must we forget those charming, brighter moments where Joan is shown just as a human being, laughing until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home prattle of her aged father and uncle. Only here and there does one find a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the burlesque note which was so likely to be Mark Twain's undoing. It seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these chapters without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of Joan was a book such as had not before been written. Let any one who read it then and doubted, go back and consider it now. A surprise will await him, and it will be worth while. He will know the true personality of Joan of Arc more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved her, for “the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have produced.” The tale is matchless in its workmanship. The quaint phrasing of the old Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on Joan's tomb. Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away. We are within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for Joan--with him only would we mingle our tears. It is all bathed in the atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard, sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to no particular class or school--a creation apart. Not all of Mark Twain's tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his Joan that we doubt. We believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened, for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant wavers. Aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes. The fight before Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than these. Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in Joan herself. But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as final. Five years later he wrote: “She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past have been realized in fiction.” As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan's warfare. It is from the attack on the Tourelles: Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard. Joan rode straight to the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress. Presently he said: “It touches.” “Now, then,” said Joan to the waiting battalions, “the place is yours--enter in! Bugles, sound the assault! Now, then--all together--go!” And go it was. You never saw anything like it. We swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our property. Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again.... We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the Tourelles from that side. A fireboat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that. “God pity them!” said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle. She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender. That was their leader, Sir William Glasdale, a most valorous knight. He was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no more. We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans from friends and supplies. Before the sun was quite down Joan's forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of Orleans! England had resented the Yankee, but it welcomed Joan. Andrew Lang adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book, 'The Maid of France', to Mark Twain.'--[His letter proposing this dedication, received in 1909, appears to have been put aside and forgotten by Mr. Clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing health.] Brander Matthews ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is understandable. His literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is pure magic. Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West--the character of that section and the Mississippi River, especially of an older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing things. Joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a far-vanished life and time. To reincarnate, as in a living body of the present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more. It is the apotheosis of history. Throughout his life Joan of Arc had been Mark Twain's favorite character in the world's history. His love for her was a beautiful and a sacred thing. He adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character, and he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed. The combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an individuality and of a career like hers. It is fitting that in his old age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written this marvelously beautiful thing. He could not have written it at an earlier time. It had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement of feeling, necessary to the achievement. It was the only book of all he had written that Mark Twain considered worthy of this dedication: 1870 To MY WIFE 1895 OLIVIA LANGDON CLEMENS THIS BOOK is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor. THE AUTHOR The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was a book not understood in the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in the end, has reversed its earlier verdict. The demand for Joan has multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year. Its author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it, for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his glory in the tale of Joan never died. On his seventy-third birthday, when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict: Nov. 30, 1908 I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation & a years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none. MARK TWAIN. CXCVI. MR. ROGERS AND HELEN KELLER It was during the winter of '96, in London, that Clemens took an active interest in the education of Helen Keller and enlisted the most valuable adherent in that cause, that is to say, Henry H. Rogers. It was to Mrs. Rogers that he wrote, heading his letter: For & in behalf of Helen Keller, Stone blind & deaf, & formerly dumb. DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his wife. If she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other people to try. Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at Lawrence Hutton's house when she was fourteen years old. Last July, in Boston, when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for admission to Radcliffe College. She passed without a single condition. She was allowed only the same amount of time that is granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. Yet she scored an average of 90, as against an average of 78 on the part of the other applicants. It won't do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. Along her special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages. There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college degree for lack of support for herself & for Miss Sullivan (the teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will remember her). Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich Englishmen in her case, & I would gladly try, but my secluded life will not permit it. I see nobody. Nobody knows my address. Nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in time. So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband & get him to interest himself and Messrs. John D. & William Rockefeller & the other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen's case; get them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years, until she has completed her college course. I'm not trying to limit their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that Standard Oil Helen Keller College Fund as high as they please; they have my consent. Mrs. Hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon which shall support Helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear of want. I sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that miraculous girl? No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to plead with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & I think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer. “Here!” when its name is called in this one. There--I don't need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal that I am making; I know you too well for that: Good-by, with love to all of you, S. L. CLEMENS. The result of this letter was that Mr. Rogers personally took charge of Helen Keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen. Mr. Rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to him from Mrs. Hutton on the same morning that Mrs. Rogers had received hers from Tedworth Square. Clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to Mrs. Rogers. DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb! And I am beyond measure grateful to you both. I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl, & that Mr. Rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; & I was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you have gone far & away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall in pleasant places here, & Hereafter for it! The Huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & I am glad for their sakes as well as for Helen's. I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself on the same old cross between Bliss & Harper; & goodness knows I hope he will come to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has about it the elements of stability & permanency. However, at any time that he says sign we're going to do it. Ever sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CXCVII. FINISHING THE BOOK OF TRAVEL. One reading the Equator book to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. The author himself wondered at it, and to Howells wrote: I don't mean that I am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent. Indifferent to nearly everything but work. I like that; I enjoy it, & stick to it. I do it without purpose & without ambition; merely for the love of it. Indeed, I am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. It is the law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it. He saw little company. Now and, then a good friend, J.Y.W. MacAlister, came in for a smoke with him. Once Clemens sent this line: You speak a language which I understand. I would like to see you. Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine, but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome. Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. He dined with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who wrote, “Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again”; with the Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a government official he had met in India. But in all such affairs he was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the public. Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point of death. A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square with cabled instructions from his paper. He was a young man, and innocently enough exhibited his credentials. His orders read: “If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one thousand.” Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable. “You don't need as much as that,” he said. “Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.” The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was nearly to his office that he saw the joke. Then, of course, it was flashed all over the world. Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large volume--larger than he had ever written before. To MacAlister, April 6, 1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation: Ah, but I mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through. I am up at work now--4 o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me through. You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a working-man to strike & go to tea. And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli. When I saw her last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me. On April 13th he makes a note-book entry: “I finished my book to-day,” and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript: I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last part is indelicate. Now, there's a nice distinction for you--& correctly stated, too, & perfectly true. It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark Twain's “editor” dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this particular book remain as examples. That he was not always entirely tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously, is clearly shown. In one of her comments Mrs. Clemens wrote: Page 597. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the aboriginals. I felt it in the boomerang-throwing. And Clemens just below has written: Boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, I've turned it into “Appendix.” Will that answer? Page 1002. I don't like the “shady-principled cat that has a family in every port.” Then I'll modify him just a little. Page 1020. 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be better than “stench.” You have used that pretty often. But can't I get it in anywhere? You've knocked it out every time. Out it goes again. And yet “stench” is a noble, good word. Page 1038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy. It's out, and my father is whitewashed. Page 1050. 2d line from the bottom. Change breech-clout. It's a word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and “offal” out of the language. You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. Page 1095. Perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the Prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth. They were superb emeralds. Those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over Bombay. All right, I'll make them emeralds, but it loses force. Green rubies is a fresh thing. And besides it was one of the Prince's own staff liars that told me. That the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of April 13th, is shown by another note which followed something more than a month later: May 18, 1897. Finished the book again--addition of 30,000 words. And to MacAlister he wrote: I have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this time. Now I am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. What night will you come down & smoke? His book finished, Clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening allowed MacAlister to take him around to the Savage Club. There happened to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion Mark Twain was elected an honorary life member. There were but three others on whom this distinction had been conferred--Stanley, Nansen, and the Prince of Wales. When they told Mark Twain this he said: “Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine.”--[In a volume of Savage Club anecdotes the date of Mark Twain's election to honorary membership is given as 1899. Clemens's notebook gives it in 1897.] He did not intend to rest; in another entry we find: May 23, 1897. Wrote first chapter of above story to-day. The “above story” is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. In this particular form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into a doze. The smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period of years following. Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. Clemens tried the psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought none of them to conclusion. Perhaps the most weird of these attempts, and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has become a vast tempestuous sea. Mark Twain had the imagination for these undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his literary ventures to the rocks. CXCVIII. A SUMMER IN SWITZERLAND The Queen's Jubilee came along--June 22, 1897, being the day chosen to celebrate the sixty-year reign. Clemens had been asked to write about it for the American papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating some of his material with pictures of his own selection. The selections were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination. Under his portrait of Henry V. (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and overcoat) he wrote: In the original the King has a crown on. That is no kind of a thing for the King to wear when he has come home on business. He ought to wear something he can collect taxes in. You will find this representation of Henry V. active, full of feeling, full of sublimity. I have pictured him looking out over the battle of Agincourt and studying up where to begin. Mark Twain's account of the Jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but James Tufts, then managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, had a rather matter-of-fact Englishman on the staff, who, after reading the report, said: “Well, Jim Tufts, I hope you are satisfied with that Mark Twain cable.” “Why, yes,” said Tufts; “aren't you?” “I should say not. Just look what he says about the number of soldiers. He says, 'I never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of a theater.' Why, Tufts, don't you know that the soldiers in the theater are the same old soldiers marching around and around? There aren't more than a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage.” It was decided to vacate the house in Tedworth Square and go to Switzerland for the summer. Mrs. Crane and Charles Langdon's daughter, Julia, joined them early in July, and they set out for Switzerland a few days later. Just before leaving, Clemens received an offer from Pond of fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the platform in America. It was too great a temptation to resist at once, and they took it under advisement. Clemens was willing to accept, but Mrs. Clemens opposed the plan. She thought his health no longer equal to steady travel. She believed that with continued economy they would be able to manage their problem without this sum. In the end the offer was declined. They journeyed to Switzerland by way of Holland and Germany, the general destination being Lucerne. They did not remain there, however. They found a pretty little village farther up the lake--Weggis, at the foot of the Rigi--where, in the Villa Buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at very moderate rates indeed. Weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across the blue water to Mount Pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white villages. Down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure, and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where Clemens often sat to rest and smoke. The fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded. A small tablet has engraved upon it “Mark Twain Ruhe.” Farther along the shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people agreed to rent him an upper room for a study. It was a sunny room with windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily. To Twichell he wrote: This is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and new inventions. We shall always come here for the summers if we can. The others have climbed the Rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if Twichell will come and climb it with him. They had climbed it together during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before. He was full of enthusiasm over his work. To F. H. Skrine, in London, he wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed to write. But of the books begun that summer at Weggis none appears to have been completed. There still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about Tom and Huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there is the tale already mentioned, the “dream” story; and another tale with a plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning title of “Hell-Fire Hotchkiss”--a story of Hannibal life--and some short stories. Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction. Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention. He realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them. The fact that proofs of the big book were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty. As was his habit, Clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and daily affairs. They were usually proud and glad of these attentions, quick to see the humor of his remarks. But there was an old watchmaker-an 'Uhrmacher' who remained indifferent. He would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled. Clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs. “Be very careful of this watch,” he said. “It is a fine one.” The old man merely glared at him. “It is not a valuable watch. It is a worthless watch.” “But I gave six francs for it in Paris.” “Still, it is a cheap watch,” was the unsmiling answer. Defeat waits somewhere for every conqueror. Which recalls another instance, though of a different sort. On one of his many voyages to America, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair when two little girls stopped before him. One of them said, hesitatingly: “Are you Mr. Mark Twain?” “Why, yes, dear, they call me that.” “Won't you please say something funny?” And for the life of him he couldn't make the required remark. In one of his letters to Twichell of that summer, Clemens wrote of the arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his, and of his great delight in them. We went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of German & Swiss men & women sat grouped around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted & disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the jubilees in a row. The singers got up & stood--the talking & glass- jingling went on. Then rose & swelled out above those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house. It was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of it. No one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished the camp was theirs. It was a triumph. It reminded me of Lancelot riding in Sir Kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who thought they had struck a soft thing. The jubilees sang a lot of pieces. Arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. Away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; & that early notion is emphasized now. It is entirely beautiful to me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the jubilees & their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages; & I wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly crazy over it. Now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it were native. It is true they praise God, but that is merely a formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no foreigner. As the first anniversary of Susy's death drew near the tension became very great. A gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint. On the morning of the 18th Clemens went early to his study. Somewhat later Mrs. Clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the house. The others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no inquiries as to her destination. They guessed that she would take the little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore. This she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would leave it. One of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day in reading Susy's letters. It was evening when she returned, and her husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing. He had put in the day writing the beautiful poem, “In Memoriam,” a strain lofty, tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in form.--[Now included in the Uniform Edition.] CXCIX. WINTER IN VIENNA They remained two months in Weggis--until toward the end of September; thence to Vienna, by way of Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, “where the mountains seem more approachable than in Switzerland.” Clara Clemens wished to study the piano under Leschetizky, and this would take them to Austria for the winter. Arriving at Vienna, they settled in the Hotel Metropole, on the banks of the Danube. Their rooms, a corner suite, looked out on a pretty green square, the Merzimplatz, and down on the Franz Josef quay. A little bridge crosses the river there, over which all kinds of life are continually passing. On pleasant days Clemens liked to stand on this bridge and watch the interesting phases of the Austrian capital. The Vienna humorist, Poetzl, quickly formed his acquaintance, and they sometimes stood there together. Once while Clemens was making some notes, Poetzl interested the various passers by asking each one--the errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender, cabmen, and others--to guess who the stranger was and what he wanted. Most of them recognized him when their attention was called, for the newspapers had proudly heralded his arrival and his picture was widely circulated. Clemens had scarcely arrived in Vienna, in fact, before he was pursued by photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters. The Viennese were his fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him they were determined not to be outdone. The 'Neues Viener Tageblatt', a fortnight after his arrival, said: It is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception in Vienna as that accorded to Mark Twain, who not only has the reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized. world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar interest on account of the genuine American character which sways it. He was the guest of honor at the Concordia Club soon after his arrival, and the great ones of Vienna assembled to do him honor. Charlemagne Tower, then American minister, was also one of the guests. Writers, diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in Vienna that was worth while, was there. Clemens gave them a surprise, for when Ferdinand Gross, Concordia president, introduced him first in English, then in German, Mark Twain made his reply wholly in the latter language. The paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that old 'Festkneipe' when it says: At 9 o'clock Mark Twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of applause took his seat at the head of the table. His characteristic shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance attracted the attention at once of all present. After a few formal convivial commonplaces the president of the Concordia, Mr. Ferdinand Gross, delivered an excellent address in English, which he wound up with a few German sentences. Then Mr. Tower was heard in praise of his august countryman. In the course of his remarks he said he could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the presence of the popular American. Then followed the greatest attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by Mark Twain in the German language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent. He had entitled his speech, “Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache” (the terrors of the German language). At times he would interrupt himself in English and ask, with a stuttering smile, “How do you call this word in German” or “I only know that in mother-tongue.” The Festkneipe lasted far into the morning hours. It was not long after their arrival in Vienna that the friction among the unamalgamated Austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the Austrian Reichsrath, or Imperial Parliament. We need not consider just what the trouble was. Any one wishing to know can learn from Mark Twain's article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there than elsewhere. It is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly between the Hungarian and German wings of the house; and in the midst of it Dr. Otto Lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces. Clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with its riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--[“When that house is legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice.” From Mark Twain's report, “Stirring Times in Austria,” in Literary Essays,]--He was intensely interested. Nothing would appeal to him more than that, unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change. He was also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge. It was a very great occasion, a “tremendous episode,” he says. The memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day. In the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes imposing place among the world's unforgetable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once. Wild reports were sent to the American press; among them one that Mark Twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his handkerchief and shouted “Hoch die Deutschen!” he had been struck by an officer of the law. Of course nothing of the kind happened. The sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend who suggested that Clemens be allowed to remain: “Oh, I know him very well. I recognize him by his pictures, and I should be very glad to let him stay, but I haven't any choice because of the strictness of the order.” Clemens, however, immediately ran across a London Times correspondent, who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit. Mark Twain's report of the Austrian troubles, published in Harper's Magazine the following March and now included with the Literary Essays, will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history. It was during these exciting political times in Vienna that a representative of a New York paper wrote, asking for a Mark Twain interview. Clemens replied, giving him permission to call. When the reporter arrived Clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his habit. At the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to enter. The door was ajar and he heard Mrs. Clemens say: “Youth, don't you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your being in bed?” And he heard Mark Twain's easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply: “Why, Livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for him.” Clemens became a privileged character in Vienna. Official rules were modified for his benefit. Everything was made easy for him. Once, on a certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge suddenly rode up: “Let him pass,” he commanded. “Lieber Gott! Don't you see it's Herr Mark Twain?” The Clemens apartments at the Metropole were like a court, where with those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists, diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of Europe, and therefore of the world. A sister of the Emperor of Germany lived at the Metropole that winter and was especially cordial. Mark Twain's daily movements were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as usual, invitations and various special permissions poured in. A Vienna paper announced: He has been feted and dined from morn till eve. The homes of the aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter. Deaths never came singly in the Clemens family. It was on the 11th of December, 1897, something more than a year after the death of Susy, that Orion Clemens died, at the age of seventy-two. Orion had remained the same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother's doings, his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat; loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood his gentle nature. He had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother's success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering enthusiastically into some literary plans which Mark Twain then had in prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed. I would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the Tennessee mountaineers predicted, that I would grow up to be a great man and go to Congress. I did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man like Andy Johnson. I wouldn't give a pinch of snuff, little as I needed it, to be anybody, less than Napoleon. So when a farmer took my father's offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day I said to myself, “Would Napoleon Bonaparte have taken under advisement till the next day an offer to sell him some chickens?” To his last day and hour Orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan. It was one morning early that he died. He had seated himself at a table with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new hope. There came also, just then, news of the death of their old Hartford butler, George. It saddened them as if it had been a member of the household. Jean, especially, wept bitterly. CC. MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS 'Following the Equator'--[In England, More Tramps Abroad.]--had come from the press in November and had been well received. It was a large, elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic in appearance. Clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young Harry Rogers: “With recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the author.” Following the Equator was Mark Twain's last book of travel, and it did not greatly resemble its predecessors. It was graver than the Innocents Abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the Tramp. It was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest, but only his eager, first enthusiasm. It is a gentler book than the Tramp Abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one. It is better history and more informing. Its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less likely to be forced and overdone. The holy Hindoo pilgrim's “itinerary of salvation” is one of the richest of all Mark Twain's fancies, and is about the best thing in the book. The revised philosophies of Pudd'nhead Wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily speech. That some of Mark Twain's admirers were disappointed with the new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it enough. James Whitcomb Riley wrote: DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a solid week-night sessions--I have been glorying in your last book-and if you've ever done anything better, stronger, or of wholesomer uplift I can't recall it. So here's my heart and here's my hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest countryman! It's just a hail I'm sending you across the spaces--not to call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you. As gratefully as delightedly, Your abiding friend, JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. Notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes had about ended, Bliss did well with the new book. Thirty or forty thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated royalties paid into Mr. Rogers's hands. The burden of debt had become a nightmare. Clemens wrote: Let us begin on those debts. I cannot bear the weight any longer. It totally unfits me for work. This was November 10, 1897. December 29th he wrote: Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing. For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it in. To Howells, January 3d, Clemens wrote that they had “turned the corner,” and a month later: We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash. There are only two claims which I dispute & which I mean to look into personally before I pay them. But they are small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I hope you will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3 years ago. And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble after all. Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; & the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning. By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt. At the time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to clear himself of the heavy obligation. He had achieved that result in less than three. The world heralded it as a splendid triumph. Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers's secretary, who had been in charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom: “I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it ten days ahead of this letter.” Miss Harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped away. Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made the most of it. Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just himself. One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might suppose this; but it would not be true. Within a month after the debts were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor, Szczepanik, and his business manager for the American rights of a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-weaving industries of the world. He records in his note-book that a certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet interests, called upon him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he would sell his option. I declined, and got away from the subject. I was afraid he would offer me $500,000 for it. I should have been obliged to take it, but I was born with a speculative instinct & I did not want that temptation put in my way. He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test of Mr. Rogers's scrutiny, and is heard of no more. Szczepanik had invented the 'Fernseher', or Telelectroscope, the machine by which one sees at a distance. Clemens would have invested heavily in this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the 'Fernseher' was already controlled for the Paris Exposition; so he could only employ Szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: “The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” and “From the London Times of 1904”--magazine articles published in the Century later in the year. He was fond of Szczepanik and Szczepanik's backer, Mr. Kleinburg. In one of his note-book entries he says: Szczepanik is not a Paige. He is a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinburg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens--that is to say, he is not an ass. Clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, Rogers, any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, Twichell, or his literary adviser, Howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective provinces. Somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an interest in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which the human race was going to be healed of most of its ills. When Clemens heard that Virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of which was plasmon, he promptly provided MacAlister with five thousand pounds to invest in a company then organizing in London. It should be added that this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it paid very good dividends for several years. We shall hear of it again. For the most part Clemens was content to let Henry Rogers do his financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, Rogers put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently had some fifty thousand dollars to Mark Twain's credit, a very comfortable balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt only a few years before. It has been asserted most strenuously, by those in a position to know least about the matter, that Henry Rogers lent, and even gave, Mark Twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make heavily by speculation. No one of these statements is true. Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money for investment, and he never allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it. He invested for him wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by Clemens himself. What he did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--boons that Mark Twain could accept without humiliation. He did accept them and was unceasingly grateful.--[Mark Twain never lost an opportunity for showing his gratitude to Henry Rogers. The reader is referred to Appendix T, at the end of the last volume, for a brief tribute which Clemens prepared in 1902. Mr. Rogers would not consent to its publication.] CCI. SOCIAL LIFE IN VIENNA Clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light. I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden. Work is become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer. He was the lion of the Austrian capital, and it was natural that he should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute. Mrs. Clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description: Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper women, etc. I find so far, without exception, that the high-up aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable. When Clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive rank. Once a royal introduction led to an adventure. He had been giving a charity reading in Vienna, and at the end of it was introduced, with Mrs. Clemens, to her Highness, Countess Bardi, a princess of the Portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the Austrian Archduchess Maria Theresa. They realized that something was required after such an introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or two and pay their respects by writing their names in the visitors' book, kept in a sort of anteroom of the royal establishment. A few days later, about noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to the royal anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they wished to write their names in the visitors' book. The portier did not produce the book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and directed him to take them up-stairs, remarking that her Royal Highness was out, but would be in presently. They protested that her Royal Highness was not looking for them, that they were not calling, but had merely come to sign the visitors' book, but he said: “You are Americans, are you not?” “Yes, we are Americans.” “Then you are expected. Please go up-stairs.” Mrs. Clemens said: “Oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake. Please let us sign the book and we will go away.” But it was no use. He insisted that her Royal Highness would be back in a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they must wait. They were shown up-stairs, Clemens going willingly enough, for he scented an adventure; but Mrs. Clemens was far from happy. They were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her last stand, refusing to enter. She declared that there was certainly some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and go, without parleying. It was no use. Their conductor insisted that they remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--Mrs. Clemens miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation. Writing of it to Twichell that night he said: I was hoping and praying that the Princess would come and catch us up there, & that those other Americans who were expected would arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely. Livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically ridiculous & that I would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that I would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she tried to make me promise. “Promise what?” I said. “To be quiet about this.” “Indeed I won't; it's the best thing ever happened. I'll tell it and add to it & I wish Joe & Howells were here to make it perfect; I can't make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this. I would just like to see Howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his futile & inventionless subterfuges when that Princess comes raging in here & wanting to know.” But Livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be funny. We were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it --Just then the door spread wide & our Princess & 4 more & 3 little Princes flowed in! Our Princess & her sister, the Archduchess Maria Theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl Archduchesses present, & aunt to the 3 little Princes), & we shook hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel. We were invited for a o'clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour & a half. Wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation? Seems a kind of pity we were the right ones. It would have been such nuts to see the right ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably & nobody suspecting us for impostors. Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Crane: Of course I know that I should have courtesied to her Imperial Majesty & not quite so deep to her Royal Highness, and that Mr. Clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected that I had no time to prepare, and if I had had I should not have been there; I only went in to help Mr. C. with my bad German. When our minister's wife is going to be presented to the Archduchess she practises her courtesying beforehand. They had met royalty in simple American fashion and no disaster had followed. We have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered in the Clemens apartments at the Hotel Metropole. They were of many nations and ranks. It was the winter in London of twenty-five years before over again. Only Mark Twain was not the same. Then he had been unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and princes, authors and ambassadors and kings. Such famous ones were there as Vereshchagin, Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai, with diplomats of many nations. A list of foreign names may mean little to the American reader, but among them were Neigra, of Italy; Paraty, of Portugal; Lowenhaupt, of Sweden; and Ghiki, of Rumania. The Queen of Rumania, Carmen Sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm admirer of Mark Twain. The Princess Metternich, and Madame de Laschowska, of Poland, were among those who came, and there were Nansen and his wife, and Campbell-Bannerman, who was afterward British Premier. Also there was Spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of Clara Clemens and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is too long. Those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in Vienna today. They were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in the air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely expressed. Clemens and his family, as Americans, did not always have a happy time of it. It was the eve of the Spanish American War and most of continental Europe sided with Spain. Austria, in particular, was friendly to its related nation; and from every side the Clemenses heard how America was about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker nation for the sole purpose of annexing Cuba. Charles Langdon and his son Jervis happened to arrive in Vienna about this time, bringing straight from America the comforting assurance that the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense of the weak. Mrs. Clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides some American students, were Mark Hambourg, Gabrilowitsch, and the great Leschetizky himself. Leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took this occasion to inform the American visitors that their country was only shamming, that Cuba would soon be an American dependency. No one not born to the language could argue with Leschetizky. Clemens once wrote of him: He is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, I think. What life, energy, fire in a man past 70! & how he does play! He is easily the greatest pianist in the world. He is just as great & just as capable today as ever he was. Last Sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for 3 hours, and everybody was glad to let him. He told his experiences as a revolutionist 50 years ago in '48, & his battle-pictures were magnificently worded. Poetzl had never met him before. He is a talker himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the blood come & go in his face & never said a word. Whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the Cuban War, Mark Twain, by the end of May, had made up his mind as to its justice. When Theodore Stanton invited him to the Decoration Day banquet to be held in Paris, he replied: I thank you very much for your invitation and I would accept if I were foot-free. For I should value the privilege of helping you do honor to the men who rewelded our broken Union and consecrated their great work with their lives; and also I should like to be there to do, homage to our soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most righteous war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive work of it and leave Cuba free and fed when they face for home again. And finally I should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which, more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth-flags which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself, competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together. That is to say, the flags of England and America. To an Austrian friend he emphasized this thought: The war has brought England and America close together--and to my mind that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid. If this feeling is ever to grow cold again I do not wish to live to see it. And to Twichell, whose son David had enlisted: You are living your war-days over again in Dave & it must be strong pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension.... I have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as I am enjoying this one, for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. It is a worthy thing to fight for one's own country. It is another sight finer to fight for another man's. And I think this is the first time it has been done. But it was a sad day for him when he found that the United States really meant to annex the Philippines, and his indignation flamed up. He said: “When the United States sent word to Spain that the Cuban atrocities must end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since the Almighty made the earth. But when she snatched the Philippines she stained the flag.” CCII. LITERARY WORK IN VIENNA One must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how Clemens could find time to write as much as he did during those Vienna days. He piled up a great heap of manuscript of every sort. He wrote Twichell: There may be idle people in the world, but I am not one of them. And to Howells: I couldn't get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours--8 & 9 on a stretch sometimes. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died. He projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels, autobiography, even plays; he covered the whole literary round. Among these activities are some that represent Mark Twain's choicest work. “Concerning the Jews,” which followed the publication of his “Stirring Times in Austria” (grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best presentation of the Jewish character and racial situation. Mark Twain was always an ardent admirer of the Jewish race, and its oppression naturally invited his sympathy. Once he wrote to Twichell: The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose. Yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his summary of Hebrew character. It was a reply to a letter written to him by a lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically, categorically, conclusively. The result pleased him. To Mr. Rogers he wrote: The Jew article is my “gem of the ocean.” I have taken a world of pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it. Neither Jew nor Christian will approve of it, but people who are neither Jews nor Christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they see it. Clemens was not given to race distinctions. In his article he says: I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can't be any worse. We gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars is the French, and this, just then, mainly because of the Dreyfus agitations. He also states in this article: I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way on account of his not having a fair show. Clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward Satan (at least, as he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters to him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. A good deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print. An interview with Satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and some further comment on Austrian politics, are among the condemned manuscripts. Mark Twain's interest in Satan would seem later to have extended to his relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which he has attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one “Young Satan,” a nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and promoted some astonishing adventures in Austria several centuries ago. The idea of a mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit the earth and perform mighty wonders, was always one which Mark Twain loved to play with, and a nephew of Satan's seemed to him properly qualified to carry out his intention. His idea was that this celestial visitant was not wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and suffering, having no personal knowledge of any of these things. Clemens tried the experiment in various ways, and portions of the manuscript are absorbingly interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked out--other portions being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of reality vanishes. Among the published work of the Vienna period is an article about a morality play, the “Master of Palmyra,”--[About play-acting, Forum, October, 1898.]--by Adolf Wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting Death, the all-powerful, as the principal part. The Cosmopolitan Magazine for August published “At the Appetite-Cure,” in which Mark Twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in October the same magazine published his first article on “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy.” As we have seen, Clemens had been always deeply interested in mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through the imagination work physical benefits: “Within the last quarter of a century,” he says, “in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines.” Clemens was willing to admit that Mrs. Eddy and her book had benefited humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of her formulas and her phrasing invited. The delightful humor of the Cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout Christian Scientists were inclined to join.--[It was so popular that John Brisben Walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars to the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--Nothing that he ever did exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame rests. But there is another story of this period that will live when most of those others mentioned are but little remembered. It is the story of “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” This is a tale that in its own way takes its place with the half-dozen great English short stories of the world-with such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Poe; “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” by Harte; “The Man Who Would be King,” by Kipling; and “The Man Without a Country,” by Hale. As a study of the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties, it outranks all the rest. In it Mark Twain's pessimistic philosophy concerning the “human animal” found a free and moral vent. Whatever his contempt for a thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we can imagine him a gigantic Pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin, throwing himself back and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its pitiful antics. The temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace. For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community--of making its “nineteen leading citizens” ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world. And it is all wonderfully done. The mechanism of the story is perfect, the drama of it is complete. The exposure of the nineteen citizens in the very sanctity of the church itself, and by the man they have discredited, completing the carefully prepared revenge of the injured stranger, is supreme in its artistic triumph. “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” is one of the mightiest sermons against self-righteousness ever preached. Its philosophy, that every man is strong until his price is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things blaze out in a way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them. It is Mark Twain's greatest short story. It is fine that it should be that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a story-teller. He had become more than ever a moralist and a sage. Having seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at its hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing show and recording his philosophies. CCIII. AN IMPERIAL TRAGEDY For the summer they went to Kaltenleutgeben, just out of Vienna, where they had the Villa Paulhof, and it was while they were there, September 10, 1898, that the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated at Geneva by an Italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to gain notoriety. The news was brought to them one evening, just at supper-time, by Countess Wydenbouck-Esterhazy. Clemens wrote to Twichell: That good & unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, & I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen's Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, & now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening & say, in a voice broken with tears, “My God! the Empress is murdered,” & fly toward her home before we can utter a question --why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it & personally interested; it is as if your neighbor Antony should come flying & say, “Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!” Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday, when the funeral cortege marches. Clemens and the others went into Vienna for the funeral ceremonies and witnessed them from the windows of the new Krantz Hotel, which faces the Capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried. It was a grandly impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that made up the Empire of Austria. Clemens wrote of it at considerable length, and sent the article to Mr. Rogers to offer to the magazines. Later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear. In one place he wrote: Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state; the first time was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless pomp through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled on both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin, & moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness now & a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance, forty-four years before, when she & they were young & unaware.... She was so blameless--the Empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in person & spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it & nameless, a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its creation; would be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt. They passed a quiet summer at Kaltenleutgeben. Clemens wrote some articles, did some translating of German plays, and worked on his “Gospel,” an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one's soul through selfishness, later to be published as 'What is Man?' A. C. Dunham and Rev. Dr. Parker, of Hartford, came to Vienna, and Clemens found them and brought them out to Kaltenleutgeben and read them chapters of his doctrines, which, he said, Mrs. Clemens would not let him print. Dr. Parker and Dunham returned to Hartford and reported Mark Twain more than ever a philosopher; also that he was the “center of notability and his house a court.” CCIV. THE SECOND WINTER IN VIENNA The Clemens family did not return to the Metropole for the winter, but went to the new Krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and commodious suite looking down on the Neuer Markt and on the beautiful facade of the Capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step away. There they passed another brilliant and busy winter. Never in Europe had they been more comfortably situated; attention had been never more lavishly paid to them. Their drawing-room was a salon which acquired the name of the “Second Embassy.” Clemens in his note-book wrote: During 8 years now I have filled the position--with some credit, I trust, of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the United States of America--without salary. Which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for Mark Twain, more than any other American in Europe, was regarded as typically representing his nation and received more lavish honors. It had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether seriously or otherwise. When the Tsar of Russia proposed the disarmament of the nations William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, wrote for Mark Twain's opinion. He replied: DEAR MR. STEADY,--The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now. MARK TWAIN. He was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now until the end. He no longer had any serious financial qualms. He could afford to be independent. He refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions. He declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted. He declined lecture propositions from Pond at the rate of about one a month. He could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some remnants of self-respect. In a letter to Rogers he said: Pond offers me $10,000 for 10 nights, but I do not feel strongly tempted. Mrs. Clemens ditto. Early in 1899 he wrote to Howells that Mrs. Clemens had proved to him that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his English and American copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand dollars' accumulation in the bank. “I have been out and bought a box of 6c. cigars,” he says; “I was smoking 4 1/2c. before.” The things that men are most likely to desire had come to Mark Twain, and no man was better qualified to rejoice in them. That supreme, elusive thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy of human bereavement and the torture of human ills. That he did rejoice--reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and in all that gay Viennese life-there is no doubt. He could wave aside care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by his path. Once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote: All these things might move and interest one. But how, desperately more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy in the nursery of 'At the Back of the North Wind'. Oh, what happy days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!... Death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us others & will not look our way. And to Twichell a few days later: A Hartford with no Susy in it--& no Ned Bunce!--It is not the city of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak.... It seems only a few weeks since I saw Susy last--yet that was 1895 & this is 1899.... My work does not go well to-day. It failed yesterday--& the day before & the day before that. And so I have concluded to put the MS. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject. I was trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an official dress for them to wear. It seems an easy theme, yet I couldn't do the thing to my satisfaction. All I got out of it was an article on Monaco & Monte Carlo--matters not connected with the subject at all. Still, that was something--it's better than a total loss. He finished the article--“Diplomatic Pay and Clothes”--in which he shows how absurd it is for America to expect proper representation on the trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those allowed by other nations. He prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked Hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a generation ago. Now and again he worked on some one of the several unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion. The German drama interested him. Once he wrote to Mr. Rogers that he had translated “In Purgatory” and sent it to Charles Frohman, who pronounced it “all jabber and no play.” Curious, too, for it tears these Austrians to pieces with laughter. When I read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when I see it on the stage it is exceedingly funny. He undertook a play for the Burg Theater, a collaboration with a Vienna journalist, Siegmund Schlesinger. Schlesinger had been successful with several dramas, and agreed with Clemens to do some plays dealing with American themes. One of them was to be called “Die Goldgraeberin,” that is, “The Woman Gold-Miner.” Another, “The Rival Candidates,” was to present the humors of female suffrage. Schlesinger spoke very little English, and Clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire German. So the work did not progress very well. By the time they had completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they good-naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they understood each other's language more perfectly before they could go on with the project. Frau Kati Schratt, later morganatic wife of Emperor Franz Josef, but then leading comedienne of the Burg Theater, is said to have been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and Director-General Herr Schlenther, head of the Burg Theater management, was deeply disappointed. He had never doubted that a play built by Schlesinger and Mark Twain, with Frau Schratt in the leading role, would have been a great success. Clemens continued the subject of Christian Science that winter. He wrote a number of articles, mainly criticizing Mrs. Eddy and her financial methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on the subject. The new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him. He realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and complete. To Twichell he wrote: Somehow I continue to feel sure of that cult's colossal future.... I am selling my Lourdes stock already & buying Christian Science trust. I regard it as the Standard Oil of the future. He laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be far more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in any quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use, making them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the payee. It seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted by the government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form or another several times since then, and still remains at this writing unadopted. He wrote John Hay about it, remarking at the close that the government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they found they couldn't kill Christians with it. He prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making it all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the magazines would take it. Perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too obvious. Great ideas, once developed, are often like that. CCV. SPEECHES THAT WERE NOT MADE In a volume of Mark Twain's collected speeches there is one entitled “German for the Hungarians--Address at the jubilee Celebration of the Emancipation of the Hungarian Press, March 26, 1899.” An introductory paragraph states that the ministers and members of Parliament were present, and that the subject was the “Ausgleich”--i.e., the arrangement for the apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria. The speech as there set down begins: Now that we are all here together I think that it will be a good idea to arrange the Ausgleich. If you will act for Hungary I shall be quite willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for it. It is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it was never delivered. It is only a speech that Mark Twain intended to deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press before he started for Budapest. It was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, Mark Twain was presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something the introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared speech wholly disappeared from his memory. I think I will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote Twichell]. My memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain. But I had this luck. What I did was to furnish a text for a part of the splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of the European world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to, although I did not understand any word of it, it being in Hungarian. I was glad I came, it was a great night, & I heard all the great men in the German tongue. The family accompanied Clemens to Budapest, and while there met Franz, son of Louis Kossuth, and dined with him. I assure you [wrote Mrs. Clemens] that I felt stirred, and I kept saying to myself “This is Louis Kossuth's son.” He came to our room one day, and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together. He is a man one likes immensely. He has a quiet dignity about him that is very winning. He seems to be a man highly esteemed in Hungary. If I am not mistaken, the last time I saw the old picture of his father it was hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for Susy at the farm. They were most handsomely treated in Budapest. A large delegation greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed continually at their disposal. They remained several days, and Clemens showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity. It was hinted to Mark Twain that spring, that before leaving Vienna, it would be proper for him to pay his respects to Emperor Franz Josef, who had expressed a wish to meet him. Clemens promptly complied with the formalities and the meeting was arranged. He had a warm admiration for the Austrian Emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he wanted to say to him. He claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort of speech into a single German sentence of eighteen words. He did not make use of it, however. When he arrived at the royal palace and was presented, the Emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared German sentence. When he returned from the audience he said: “We got along very well. I proposed to him a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes. I said Szczepanik would invent it for him. I think it impressed him. After a while, in the course of our talk I remembered and told the Emperor I had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had forgotten it. He was very agreeable about it. He said a speech wasn't necessary. He seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him. Necessarily he must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did. I couldn't unbend if I were an emperor. I should feel the stiffness of the position. Franz Josef doesn't feel it. He is just a natural man, although an emperor. I was greatly impressed by him, and I liked him exceedingly. His face is always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of humor. It is the Emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have in him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside appearance of being the opposite. He is a man as well as an emperor--an emperor and a man.” Clemens and Howells were corresponding with something of the old-time frequency. The work that Mark Twain was doing--thoughtful work with serious intent--appealed strongly to Howells. He wrote: You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else.... You have pervaded your century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and it is astonishing how you keep spreading.... You are my “shadow of a great rock in a weary land” more than any other writer. Clemens, who was reading Howells's serial, “Their Silver-Wedding journey,” then running in Harper's Magazine, responded: You are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate & delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way. I don't know how you can--but I suspect. I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived. Since I wrote my Bible--[The “Gospel,” What is Man?]--(last year), which Mrs. Clemens loathes & shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before, & so I have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily nor praisefully about him any more.... Next morning. I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair. He was not greatly changed. Perhaps he had fewer illusions and less iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to Howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before. There is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to Mrs. Clemens's violence. I mustn't stop to play now or I shall never get those helfiard letters answered. (That is not my spelling. It is Mrs. Clemens's, I have told her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never remembers.) All through this Vienna period (as during several years before and after) Henry Rogers was in full charge of Mark Twain's American affairs. Clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large, that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings. The complications growing out of the type machine and Webster failures were endless.--[“I hope to goodness I sha'n't get you into any more jobs such as the type-setter and Webster business and the Bliss-Harper campaigns have been. Oh, they were sickeners.” (Clemens to Rogers, November 15, 1898.)]--The disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for a literary agent. The consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time. Yet Mr. Rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt, perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention. Clemens once wrote him: Oh, dear me, you don't have to excuse yourself for neglecting me; you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling me out of a hole every little while. It makes me lazy, the way that Steel stock is rising. If I were lazier--like Rice--nothing could keep me from retiring. But I work right along, like a poor person. I shall figure up the rise, as the figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till I get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family. (N. B.--Look here, are you charging storage? I am not going to stand that, you know.) Meantime, I note those encouraging illogical words of yours about my not worrying because I am to be rich when I am 68; why didn't you have Cheiro make it 90, so that I could have plenty of room? It would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play out of “Is He Dead?”--[Clemens himself had attempted to make a play out of his story “Is He Dead?” and had forwarded the MS. to Rogers. Later he wrote: “Put 'Is He Dead?' in the fire. God will bless you. I too. I started to convince myself that I could write a play, or couldn't. I'm convinced. Nothing can disturb that conviction.”] --From what I gather from dramatists, he will have his hands something more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle. Is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy of Mayo's play, “Pudd'nhead Wilson,” for me? There is a capable young Austrian here who saw it in New York and wants to translate it and see if he can stage it here. I don't think these people here would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to try. A couple of London dramatists want to bargain with me for the right to make a high comedy out of the “Million-Pound Note.” Barkis is willing. This is but one of the briefer letters. Most of them were much longer and of more elaborate requirements. Also they overflowed with the gaiety of good-fortune and with gratitude. From Vienna in 1899 Clemens wrote: Why, it is just splendid! I have nothing to do but sit around and watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my living for me. Don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into gold. I mean to raise your wages again--I begin to feel that I can afford it. I think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called Unberufen. That is a German word which is equivalent to it “sh! hush' don't let the spirits hear you!” The superstition is that if you happen to let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you've had or are hoping to have you must shut square off and say “Unberufen!” and knock wood. The word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your game. Set her again--do! Oh, look here! You are just like everybody; merely because I am literary you think I'm a commercial somnambulist, and am not watching you with all that money in your hands. Bless you, I've got a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in Christendom, with the remark appended: “Look out for a handsome, tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name of Smith.” Don't you try to get away--it won't work. From the note-book: Midnight. At Miss Bailie's home for English governesses. Two comedies & some songs and ballads. Was asked to speak & did it. (And rung in the “Mexican Plug.”) A Voice. “The Princess Hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan.” “With pleasure--where is she?” “At your elbow.” I turned & took the fan & said, “Your Highness's place is in a fairy tale; & by & by I mean to write that tale,” whereat she laughed a happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that I could see her better. Beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways & sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the fairy tales. She is 16 or 17, I judge. Mental Telegraphy. Mrs. Clemens was pouring out the coffee this morning; I unfolded the Neue Freie Presse, began to read a paragraph & said: “They've found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----” “By the Roentgen ray!” she exclaimed. That is what I was going to say. She had not seen the paper, & there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me. It was a plain case of telegraphy. No man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please God --primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next. The Being who to me is the real God is the one who created this majestic universe & rules it. He is the only originator, the only originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from without; the originator of colors & of all their possible combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms & shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one. He is the only originator. He made the materials of all things; He made the laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him. He made character--man can portray it but not “create” it, for He is the only creator. He, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist. CCVI. A SUMMER IN SWEDEN A part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the development in Jean Clemens of a malady which time had identified as epilepsy. The loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the burden which this household had now to bear. Of course they did not for a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief. They decided now to go to London, in the hope of obtaining beneficial treatment. They left Vienna at the end of May, followed to the station by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the train pulled away. Leschetizky himself was among them, and Wilbrandt, the author of the Master of Palmyra, and many artists and other notables, “most of whom,” writes Mrs. Clemens, “we shall probably never see again in this world.” Their Vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their life, as well as one of the saddest. The memory of Susy had been never absent, and the failing health of Jean was a gathering cloud. They stopped a day or two at Prague, where they were invited by the Prince of Thurn and Taxis to visit his castle. It gave them a glimpse of the country life of the Bohemian nobility which was most interesting. The Prince's children were entirely familiar with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which they had read both in English and in the translation. They journeyed to London by way of Cologne, arriving by the end of May. Poultney Bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great benefit by osteopathy (then known as the Swedish movements), as practised by Heinrick Kellgren at Sanna, Sweden. Clemens was all interest concerning Kellgren's method and eager to try it for his daughter's malady. He believed she could be benefited, and they made preparation to spend some months at least in Sanna. They remained several weeks in London, where they were welcomed with hospitality extraordinary. They had hardly arrived when they were invited by Lord Salisbury to Hatfield House, and by James Bryce to Portland Place, and by Canon Wilberforce to Dean's Yard. A rather amusing incident happened at one of the luncheon-parties. Canon Wilberforce was there and left rather early. When Clemens was ready to go there was just one hat remaining. It was not his, and he suspected, by the initials on the inside, that it belonged to Canon Wilberforce. However, it fitted him exactly and he wore it away. That evening he wrote: PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL, DE VERE GARDENS, July,3, 1899. DEAR CANON WILBERFORCE,--It is 8 P.M. During the past four hours I have not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all that time I have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth try as I might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners have gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to. This mystery is causing my family much alarm. It is difficult to account for it. I find I haven't my own hat. Have you developed any novelties of conduct since you left Mr. Murray's, & have they been of a character to move the concern of your friends? I think it must be this that has put me under this happy charm; but, oh dear! I tremble for the other man! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Scarcely was this note on its way to Wilberforce when the following one arrived, having crossed it in transit: July 3, 1899. DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--I have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of expression this afternoon beyond the normal and I have just discovered the reason!! I have seen the historic signature “Mark Twain” in my hat!! Doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have wondered why. I departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and was a new Lincoln & Bennett--it fitted me exactly and I did not discover the mistake till I got in this afternoon. Please forgive me. If you should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats? or shall I send it to the hotel? I am, very sincerely yrs., 20 Dean's Yard. BASIL WILBERFORCE. Clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the White Friars, the Vagabonds, the Savage, the Beefsteak, and the Authors. He spoke to them, and those “Mark Twain Evenings” have become historic occasions in each of the several institutions that gave him welcome. At the Vagabonds he told them the watermelon story, and at the White Friars he reviewed the old days when he had been elected to that society; “days,” he said, “when all Londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had discovered Livingstone, and that the lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been found and they were trying him for it.” At the Savage Club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and particularly that first London visit, his days in the club twenty-seven years before. “I was 6 feet 4 in those days,” he said. “Now I am 5 feet 8 1/2 and daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes on .... Irving was here then, is here now. Stanley is here, and Joe Hatton, but Charles Reade is gone and Tom Hood and Harry Lee and Canon Kingsley. In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a lunch-basket; now he fills the world. I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.” At the Authors Club he paid a special tribute to Rudyard Kipling, whose dangerous illness in New York City and whose daughter's death had aroused the anxiety and sympathy of the entire American nation. It had done much to bring England and America closer together, Clemens said. Then he added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a pun and had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their indulgence, but for their applause. It was this: “Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be severed in Twain.” Hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably his first and only attempt, and it still remains the best. They arrived in Sweden early in July and remained until October. Jean was certainly benefited by the Kellgren treatment, and they had for a time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens became enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one, urging each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore universal health. He wrote long articles on Kellgren and his science, largely justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were recorded; though Clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which appealed to both his imagination and his reason. Writing to Twichell he concluded, with his customary optimism over any new benefit: Ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife must be used--& such cases will be rare. The educated physician will himself be an osteopath. Dave will become one after he has finished his medical training. Young Harmony ought to become one now. I do not believe there is any difference between Kellgren's science and osteopathy; but I am sending to America to find out. I want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures a wider range of ailments than the doctor's methods can reach. Twichell was traveling in Europe that summer, and wrote from Switzerland: I seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those glorious Alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly talking the days through-days forever memorable to me. That was twenty-one years ago; think of it! We were youngsters then, Mark, and how keen our relish of everything was! Well, I can enjoy myself now; but not with that zest and rapture. Oh, a lot of items of our tramp travel in 1878 that I had long forgotten came back to me as we sped through that enchanted region, and if I wasn't on duty with Venice I'd stop and set down some of them, but Venice must be attended to. For one thing, there is Howells's book to be read at such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which our rustling leader keeps us. However, in Venice so far we want to be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion. Really I am drunk with Venice. But Clemens was full of Sweden. The skies there and the sunsets be thought surpassed any he had ever known. On an evening in September he wrote: DEAR JOE,--I've no business in here-I ought to be outside. I shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. Venice? land, what a poor interest that is! This is the place to be. I have seen about 60 sunsets here; & a good 40 of them were away & beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty & exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety. America? Italy? the tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. And this one--this unspeakable wonder! It discounts all the rest. It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful. Clemens read a book during his stay in Sweden which interested him deeply. It was the Open Question, by Elizabeth Robbins--a fine study of life's sterner aspects. When he had finished he was moved to write the author this encouraging word: DEAR MISS ROBBINS,--A relative of Matthew Arnold lent us your 'Open Question' the other day, and Mrs. Clemens and I are in your debt. I am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and great literary art and grace of the setting. At your age you cannot have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret? how have you written this miracle? Perhaps one must concede that genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. Well, in any case, I am grateful to you. I have not been so enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one. I seem to be using strong language; still, I have weighed it. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCVII. 30, WELLINGTON COURT Clemens himself took the Kellgren treatment and received a good deal of benefit. “I have come back in sound condition and braced for work,” he wrote MacAlister, upon his return to London. “A long, steady, faithful siege of it, and I begin now in five minutes.” They had settled in a small apartment at 30, Wellington Court, Albert Gate, where they could be near the London branch of the Kellgren institution, and he had a workroom with Chatto & Windus, his publishers. His work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape. His note-book became a mere jumble of engagements. He did write an article or a story now and then, one of which, “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,” was made the important Christmas feature of the 'New York Sunday World.'--[Now included in the Hadleyburg volume; “Complete Works.”] Another article of this time was the “St. Joan of Arc,” which several years later appeared in Harper's Magazine. This article was originally written as the Introduction of the English translation of the official record of the trials and rehabilitation of Joan, then about to be elaborately issued. Clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to prepare the Introduction of this important volume, but a smug person with pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to edit Mark Twain's manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his own ideas of the Queen's English. Then he had it all nicely typewritten, and returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive thanks and compliments. He did not receive any thanks. Clemens recorded a few of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript: I will not deny that my feelings rose to 104 in the shade. “The idea! That this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this.....” But I stopped there, for this was not the Christian spirit. His would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript, after which Clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well here. DEAR MR. X.,--I have examined the first page of my amended Introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your corrections. If I find any changes which shall not seem to me to be improvements I will point out my reasons for thinking so. In this way I may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as much as you have desired to profit me. First Paragraph. “Jeanne d'Arc.” This is rather cheaply pedantic, & is not in very good taste. Joan is not known by that name among plain people of our race & tongue. I notice that the name of the Deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the Trials which you have favored me with. To be consistent, it will be necessary that you strike out “God” & put in “Dieu.” Do not neglect this. Second Paragraph. Now you have begun on my punctuation. Don't you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that with your limitations? And do you think that you have added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the sentence? Third Paragraph. Ditto. Fourth Paragraph. Your word “directly” is misleading; it could be construed to mean “at once.” Plain clarity is better than ornate obscurity. I note your sensitive marginal remark: “Rather unkind to French feelings--referring to Moscow.” Indeed I have not been concerning myself about French feelings, but only about stating the facts. I have said several uncourteous things about the French --calling them a “nation of ingrates” in one place--but you have been so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them & failed to get scared at them. The next paragraph ends with a slur at the French, but I have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a compliment. It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out & dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now & then along through life it would not have petrified. Fifth Paragraph. Thus far I regard this as your masterpiece! You are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. Sixth Paragraph. You have a singularly fine & aristocratic disrespect for homely & unpretending English. Every time I use “go back” you get out your polisher & slick it up to “return.” “Return” is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with a simper & a smirk. Seventh Paragraph. “Permission” is ducal. Ducal and affected. “Her” great days were not “over,” they were only half over. Didn't you know that? Haven't you read anything at all about Joan of Arc? The truth is you do not pay any attention; I told you on my very first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, & you have forgotten it already. You really must get your mind out and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked together. Eighth Paragraph. She “rode away to assault & capture a stronghold.” Very well; but you do not tell us whether she succeeded or not. You should not worry the reader with uncertainties like that. I will remind you once more that clarity is a good thing in literature. An apprentice cannot do better than keep this useful rule in mind. Ninth Paragraph. “Known” history. That word has a polish which is too indelicate for me; there doesn't seem to be any sense in it. This would have surprised me last week. ... “Breaking a lance” is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & I honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in the prize-composition of the school-girl, but I have ceased from employing it since I got my puberty, & must solemnly object to fathering it here. And, besides, it makes me hint that I have broken one of those things before in honor of the Maid, an intimation not justified by the facts. I did not break any lances or other furniture; I only wrote a book about her. Truly yours, MARK TWAIN. It cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half- flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but I did it, & have never regretted it. For it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a shad like him than just.... I could have said hundreds of unpleasant things about this tadpole, but I did not even feel them. Yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter. Writing it had served every purpose. An important publishing event of 1899 was the issue by the American Publishing Company of Mark Twain's “Complete Works in Uniform Edition.” Clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship. Brander Matthews was selected to write the Introduction and prepared a fine “Biographical Criticism,” which pleased Clemens, though perhaps he did not entirely agree with its views. Himself of a different cast of mind, he nevertheless admired Matthews. Writing to Twichell he said: When you say, “I like Brander Matthews, he impresses me as a man of parts & power,” I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same way. And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather-stockings & the Vicar I ain't making any objection. Dern your gratitude! His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature & loves it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him even when you don't agree with him; & he can discover & praise such merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a critic. To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. I haven't any right to criticize books, & I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; & therefore I have to stop every time I begin.'--[Once at a dinner given to Matthews, Mark Twain made a speech which consisted almost entirely of intonations of the name “Brander Matthews” to express various shades of human emotion. It would be hopeless, of course, to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of vocalization.] Clemens also introduced the “Uniform Edition” with an Author's Preface, the jurisdiction of which, he said, was “restricted to furnishing reasons for the publication of the collection as a whole.” This is not easy to do. Aside from the ordinary commercial reasons I find none that I can offer with dignity: I cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit; I cannot say without immodesty that the public want a “Uniform Edition”; I cannot say without immodesty that a “Uniform Edition” will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; I cannot say without immodesty that a “Uniform Edition” will eradicate crime, though I think it will. I find no reason that I can offer without immodesty except the rather poor one that I should like to see a “Uniform Edition” myself. It is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens. Still, I believe I will stand upon that. I have to have a Preface & a reason, by law of custom, & the reason which I am putting forward is at least without offense. CCVIII. MARK TWAIN AND THE WARS English troubles in South Africa came to a head that autumn. On the day when England's ultimatum to the Boers expired Clemens wrote: LONDON, 3.07 P.m., Wednesday, October 11, 1899. The time is up! Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in South Africa at this moment. Some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. Whose heart is broken by this murder? For, be he Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company. Mark Twain would naturally sympathize with the Boer--the weaker side, the man defending his home. He knew that for the sake of human progress England must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other way. In January, 1900, he wrote a characteristic letter to Twichell, which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars then in progress. DEAR JOE,--Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests & confiscate their property. If these things are so the war out there has no interest for me. I have just been examining Chapter LXX of Following the Equator to see if the Boer's old military effectiveness is holding out. It reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war. I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly conceived. He is popularly called uncivilized; I do not know why. Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest & rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation, absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher & better form of civilization than this I am not aware of it & do not know where to look for it. I suppose that we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other artificialities must be added or it isn't complete. We & the English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those others I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies. Provided we could get something better in the place of it. But that is not possible perhaps. Poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public) praise it. And so we must not utter any hurtful word about England in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race. Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, & no (instructed) Englishman doubts it. At least that is my belief. Writing to Howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in South Africa, a “sordid and criminal war,” and says that every day he is writing (in his head) bitter magazine articles against it. But I have to stop with that. Even if wrong--& she is wrong England must be upheld. He is an enemy of the human race who shall speak against her now. Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it?... I talk the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man introduces the topic. Then I say, “My head is with the Briton, but my heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer--now we will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice.” And so we discuss & have no trouble. I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself. But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side only. Clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the Times. But when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and addressed to Moberly Bell--he reconsidered and withheld it. It still lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says: Don't give me away, whether you print it or not. But I think you ought to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable. CCIX. PLASMON, AND A NEW MAGAZINE Clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. The financial interest which he had taken in the new milk albumen, “a food for invalids,” tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon. MacAlister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was anxious to get the product adopted by the army. He believed, if he could get an interview with the Medical Director-General, he could convince him of its merits. Discussing the matter with Clemens, the latter said: “MacAlister, you are going at it from the wrong end. You can't go direct to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. Who is his nearest friend?” MacAlister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official. Clemens said, “That is the man to speak to the Director-General.” “But I don't know him, either,” said MacAlister. “Very good. Do you know any one who does know him?” “Yes, I know his most intimate friend.” “Then he is the man for you to approach. Convince him that plasmon is what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it. Let him understand that what you want is to get this to the Director-General, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way. You'll see.” This proved to be a true prophecy. It was only a little while until the British army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. MacAlister reported the success of the scheme to Clemens, and out of it grew the story entitled, “Two Little Tales,” published in November of the following year (1901) in the Century Magazine. Perhaps the reader will remember that in the “Two Little Tales” the Emperor is very ill and the lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the Emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken Majesty. Clemens had the courage of his investments. He adopted plasmon as his own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate. He kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot. It was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still. There was another business opportunity came along just at this time. S. S. McClure was in England with a proposition for starting a new magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly American, with Mark Twain as its editor. The magazine was to be called 'The Universal', and by the proposition Clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate increase as his holdings grew. The scheme appealed to Clemens, it being understood in the beginning that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. He wrote of the matter to Mr. Rogers, explaining in detail, and Rogers replied, approving the plan. Mr. Rogers said he knew that he [Rogers] would have to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added: One thing I shall insist upon, however, if I have anything to do with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your mind on the subject you will stick to it. I have not found in your composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which, when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and fifty-cent pieces. If you accept the position, of course that means that you have to come to this country. If you do, the yachting will be a success. There was considerable correspondence with McClure over the new periodical. In one letter Clemens set forth his general views of the matter quite clearly: Let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if it can be prevented. This is not to be comic magazine. It is to be simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written & enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class; not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all of them. It will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. I should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for lack of interest in the work. I value humor highly, & am constitutionally fond of it, but I should not like it as a steady diet. For its own best interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the proximity of sober hues. For me to edit a comic magazine would be an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books which I have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. I think I have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to its fancy. Although I have many times been asked to write something humorous for an editor or a publisher I have had wisdom enough to decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man watching him like that. I have never tried to write a humorous lecture; I have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way not to succeed. I shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but I look for my largest entertainment in editing. I have been edited by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & I have often longed to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue others. My opportunity is come, but I hope I shall not abuse it overmuch. I mean to do my best to make a good magazine; I mean to do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. There are plenty of distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers, philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend. Meanwhile McClure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain existing facts. Something more than a month later he wrote from America at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the magazine. He went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his daily rounds. It was pretty evident that Clemens would not be able to go sailing about on Mr. Rogers's yacht or live at will in London or New York or Vienna or Elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he would be most likely to dread The scheme appears to have died there--the correspondence to have closed. Somewhat of the inducement in the McClure scheme had been the thought in Clemens's mind that it would bring him back to America. In a letter to Mr. Rogers (January 8, 1900) he said, “I am tired to death of this everlasting exile.” Mrs. Clemens often wrote that he was restlessly impatient to return. They were, in fact, constantly discussing the practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the Hartford home. Clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere permanently. He was tired of the wandering life they had been leading. Besides the long trip of '95 and '96 they had moved two or three times a year regularly since leaving Hartford, nine years before. It seemed to him that they were always packing and unpacking. “The poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay put,” wrote Mrs. Clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land. Mrs. Clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the Hartford home no longer held any attraction for her. There had been a time when her every letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. Now the thought filled her with dread. To her sister she wrote: Do you think we can live through the first going into the house in Hartford? I feel if we had gotten through the first three months all might be well, but consider the first night. The thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up again of the old life-disheartened her, too. She had added years and she had not gained in health or strength. When I was comparatively young I found the burden of that house very great. I don't think I was ever fitted for housekeeping. I dislike the practical part of it so much. I hate it when the servants don't do well, and I hate the correcting them. Yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or ever commanded more devoted service. Her strength of character and the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this confession. They planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing. Jean was still under Kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. They began to look about for summer quarters in or near London. CCX. LONDON SOCIAL AFFAIRS All this time Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide. There was a call for him everywhere. No distinguished visitor of whatever profession or rank but must meet Mark Twain. The King of Sweden was among his royal conquests of that season. He was more happy with men of his own kind. He was often with Moberly Bell, editor of the Times; E. A. Abbey, the painter; Sir Henry Lucy, of Punch (Toby, M.P.); James Bryce, and Herbert Gladstone; and there were a number of brilliant Irishmen who were his special delight. Once with Mrs. Clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'European Morals', William E. H. Lecky. Lady Gregory was there and Sir Dennis Fitz-Patrick; who had been Governor-General at Lahore when they were in India, and a number of other Irish ladies and gentlemen. It was a memorable evening. To Twichell Clemens wrote: Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch gentleman & the Scotch lady? These are darlings, every one. Night before last it was all Irish--24. One would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these fine qualities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish, & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. You will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle.... Sir William Butler said, “the Celt is the spearhead of the British lance.” He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. The dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. Now everybody was smiling again. In a note-book entry of this time he wrote: Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900). The news came at 9.17 P.M. Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy. By then the news was all over the American continent. Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and introducing it into his speeches. Finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the House of Lords to explain his views. His old idea that the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. The committee consisted of Lords Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing. When they asked for his views he said: “In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect. I consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law.” Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws. He was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee. He kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted. The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing. A few days after the copyright session, Clemens, responding to the toast, “Literature,” at the Royal Literary Fund Banquet, made London laugh again, and early in June he was at the Savoy Hotel welcoming Sir Henry Irving back to England after one of his successful American tours. On the Fourth of July (1900) Clemens dined with the Lord Chief-Justice, and later attended an American banquet at the Hotel Cecil. He arrived late, when a number of the guests were already going. They insisted, however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening ended. It was not quite over. A sequel to his “Luck” story, published nine years before, suddenly developed. To go back a little, the reader may recall that “Luck” was a story which Twichell had told him as being supposedly true. The hero of it was a military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders. Clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which took place after the first collapse of the machine. It was published in Harper's Magazine for August, 1891, and something less than a year later, in Rome, an English gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him: “Mr. Clemens, shall you go to England?” “Very likely.” “Shall you take your tomahawk with you?” “Why--yes, if it shall seem best.” “Well, it will. Be advised. Take it with you.” “Why?” “Because of that sketch of yours entitled 'Luck.' That sketch is current in England, and you will surely need your tomahawk.” “What makes you think so?” “I think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your scalp, and will probably apply for it. Be advised. Take your tomahawk along.” “Why, even with it I sha'n't stand any chance, because I sha'n't know him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before I know what his errand is.” “Come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch is?” “Indeed I haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is. Who is it?” His informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide military significance. As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said: “Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time,” and he was looking down into the face of the hero of “Luck.” “I was caught unprepared,” he said in his notes of it. “I didn't sit down--I fell down. I didn't have my tomahawk, and I didn't know what would happen. But he was, composed, and pretty soon I got composed and we had a good, friendly time. If he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took my scalp home intact.” CCXI. DOLLIS HILL AND HOME It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of London. It was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. Gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English empire from that retired spot. Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement. “Was he always really tranquil within,” he says, “or was he only externally so--for effect? We cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. Facts like this speak louder than words.” The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in 1900. Clemens says: The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand, splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? That they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-office District, N. W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am aware of it, but that is all. It is not possible to realize it. For there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple, & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea. They all loved Dollis Hill. Mrs. Clemens wrote as if she would like to remain forever in that secluded spot. It is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful;... the great old trees are beyond everything. I believe nowhere in the world do you find such trees as in England.... Jean has a hammock swung between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond, which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass & trees & Clara & Jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug on the grass in the shade & read & sleep. They all spent most of their time outdoors at Dollis Hill under those spreading trees. Clemens to Twichell in midsummer wrote: I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I am working & deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendous defect. Livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from it. Much company came to them at Dollis Hill. Friends drove out from London, and friends from America came often, among them--the Sages, Prof. Willard Fiske, and Brander Matthews with his family. Such callers were served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to leave that idyllic spot. “Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied,” he wrote when the summer was about over. But there was still a greater attraction than Dollis Hill. Toward the end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long. They were all eager enough to go--Clemens more eager than the rest, though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which in a brief summer they had so learned to love. Writing to W. H. Helm, a London newspaper man who had spent pleasant hours with him chatting in the shade, he said: ... The packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the removal to America &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred & its contents & satisfactions are departing. There is not much choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a funeral, substantially, & I am tired of attending them. They closed Dollis Hill, spent a few days at Brown's Hotel, and sailed for America, on the Minnehaha, October 6, 1900, bidding, as Clemens believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. They reached New York on the 15th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years of wandering. How glad Mark Twain was to get home may be judged from his remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him. “If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't, get away again.” VOLUME III, Part 1: 1900-1907 CCXII. THE RETURN OF THE CONQUEROR It would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the public generally made over the homecoming of Mark Twain. He had left America, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of redemption. At the moment when this Mecca, was in view a great sorrow had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human sympathy. Then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having made his financial fight single-handed-and won. He was heralded literally as a conquering hero. Every paper in the land had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his triumphs. “He had behaved like Walter Scott,” says Howells, “as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens.” Howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the vast acclaim of the American public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a national fickleness. Says Howells: He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider “the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn't expect people to keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. Clemens went to the Earlington Hotel and began search for a furnished house in New York. They would not return to Hartford--at least not yet. The associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became more so. Five days after Mark Twain's return to America, his old friend and co-worker, Charles Dudley Warner, died. Clemens went to Hartford to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. To Sylvester Baxter, of Boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days later: It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, & there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford & the house again; but I realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our hearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough to endure that strain. Even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that Clemens would have returned to Hartford at this time. He had become a world-character, a dweller in capitals. Everywhere he moved a world revolved about him. Such a figure in Germany would live naturally in Berlin; in England London; in France, Paris; in Austria, Vienna; in America his headquarters could only be New York. Clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and Mr. Frank N. Doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished residence at 14 West Tenth Street, which was promptly approved. Doubleday, who was going to Boston, left orders with the agent to draw the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. To Clemens he said: “The house is as good as yours. All you've got to do is to sign the lease. You can consider it all settled.” When Doubleday returned from Boston a few days later the agent called on him and complained that he couldn't find Mark Twain anywhere. It was reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. Doubleday was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. He walked over to 14 West Tenth Street and found what he had suspected--Mark Twain had moved in. He had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right and he was quite at home. Doubleday said: “Why, you haven't executed the lease yet.” “No,” said Clemens, “but you said the house was as good as mine,” to which Doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the premises. Doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however. Clemens began to find defects in his new home and assumed to hold Doubleday responsible for them. He sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace, the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to Doubleday's life. As a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. To MacAlister he wrote: We were very lucky to get this big house furnished. There was not another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned, great size. The house at 14 West Tenth Street became suddenly one of the most conspicuous residences in New York. The papers immediately made its appearance familiar. Many people passed down that usually quiet street, stopping to observe or point out where Mark Twain lived. There was a constant procession of callers of every kind. Many were friends, old and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. Hundreds came merely to express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the war in Africa, the troubles in China; on anything under the sun, important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one might possibly hold an opinion. He was unfailing “copy” if they could but get a word with him. Anything that he might choose to say upon any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with head-lines. Sometimes opinions were invented for him. If he let fall a few words they were multiplied into a column interview. “That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes,” he said of one such performance. Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that. Eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation. Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause. Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts. He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them. He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. He confined his work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an arrangement with the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books. The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens. We do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred. Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, “Some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal to Samuel L. Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate. Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent.” Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled--as he himself once humorously suggested-to the “thanks of Congress” for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered. The thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. The paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the American expression of good-will. But this was an unneeded suggestion. If he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. As it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin. Even so the strain told on him. “His friends saw that he was wearing himself out,” says Howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough. He did not spare himself as often as he should have done. Once to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets: In bed with a chest cold and other company--Wednesday. DEAR GILDER,--I can't. If I were a well man I could explain with this pencil, but in the cir---ces I will leave it all to your imagination. Was it Grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and speeching? No, old man, no, no! Ever yours, MARK. He became again the guest of honor at the Lotos Club, which had dined him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse. That former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before had the Lotos Club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the second great occasion. In closing his introductory speech President Frank Lawrence said, “We hail him as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious,” and the assembled diners roared out their applause. Clemens in his reply said: Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weighted with. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I wanted--to speak of those debts. You all knew what he meant when he referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster & Co. No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-six creditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated me well; they treated me handsomely. I never knew I owed them anything; not a sign came from them. It was like him to make that public acknowledgment. He could not let an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it. He also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes. How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away from home! We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history. We have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own gates, but in our own neighborhood. We have set Cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. We started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know. We have also been making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all the other powers can say. The “Yellow Terror” is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no part in it. Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver. We have watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child, but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something. I fear we will never raise that child. We've done more than that. We elected a President four years ago. We've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again. One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain--the Aldine, the St. Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies. His old friends were at these dinners--Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers, ex-Speaker Reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts' content. It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject. At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep irony: Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world, and the most fragrant and the purest. The very angels of heaven envy you and wish they had a government like it up there. You got it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person, or any assault was made upon her fair fame. It is you who have made this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and despair of the other capitals of the world--and God bless you for it, gentlemen, God bless you! And when you get to heaven at last they'll say with joy, “Oh, there they come, the representatives of the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel's box and turn on the limelight!” Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to Mark Twain's more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible expression. He still might make them laugh, but he also made them think, and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. He did not preach a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In an article, perhaps it was a speech, begun at this time he wrote: We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter --exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. Howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in “an upper room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where,” he says, “we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and Boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China.” Howells at the time expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain's countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious. But the American people were quite ready to accept him in any of his phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would somewhere be wisdom in it. He had in reality changed little; for a generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. The man who in '64 had written against corruption in San Francisco, who a few years later had defended the emigrant Chinese against persecution, who at the meetings of the Monday Evening Club had denounced hypocrisy in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able to speak out against similar abuses now. And a newer generation as willing to herald Mark Twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells. CCXIII. MARK TWAIN--GENERAL SPOKESMAN Clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform. At a dinner given by the Nineteenth Century Club in November, 1900, he spoke on the “Disappearance of Literature,” and at the close of the discussion of that subject, referring to Milton and Scott, he said: Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern epics like “Paradise Lost.” I guess he's right. He talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of you have ever read “Paradise Lost,” and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics. I guess that's true. That fact of the business is you've got to be one of two ages to appreciate Scott. When you're eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some of the rest. It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to live ninety years. But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China. It was there that he declared himself a Boxer. Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home what a pleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allow Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there. China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. The Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success. We drive the Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of his country. I am a Boxer, too, on those terms. Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in China as Germany had done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea. The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, “I seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think.” Still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure. Again to MacAlister: I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite & presently I'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time. He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government. The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform. Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening. “Think of it!” he wrote Twichell. “Two old rebels functioning there: I as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank God!” The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said: It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson's forebears had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess --Abraham Lincoln! Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are the Blue and the Gray one to-day? By authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a Rebellion--that incident is closed. I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner; and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate service. For a while. This second cousin of mine, Colonel Watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared in a slave State, was a colonel in the Confederate service, and rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great task of annihilating the Federal armies and breaking up the Union. I laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if Colonel Watterson had obeyed my orders I should have succeeded in my giant undertaking. It was my intention to drive General Grant into the Pacific--if I could get transportation--and I told Colonel Watterson to surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came. But he was insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the Union was saved. This is the first time that this secret has been revealed. Until now no one outside the family has known the facts. But there they stand: Watterson saved the Union. Yet to this day that man gets no pension. Those were great days, splendid days. What an uprising it was! For the hearts of the whole nation, North and South, were in the war. We of the South were not ashamed; for, like the men of the North, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and when men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is consecrated. To-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved; and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins answers when I say it--you are proud of the record we made in those mighty collisions in the fields. What an uprising it was! We did not have to supplicate for soldiers on either side. “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong!” That was the music North and South. The very choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from Maine to the Gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it; just as men flocked to the Crusades, sacrificing all they possessed to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe five times over. North and South we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the immortal Gettysburg speech which said: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other has yet produced. The old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable by one common great name--Americans! CCXIV. MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner. His housekeeper, Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street. No contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer. Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an extortion. He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused. In the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity. In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he wrote: If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing--he will decide it against you every time. And so will the New York policeman. In London if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it. In New York--but no one carries a cab case into court there. It is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there. Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship. At the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: “This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. It is simply practical business. You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal interest whatever. I am doing this just as any citizen should do. He has no choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel with him. My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way.” The driver's license was suspended. The case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in New York City. But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. His many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral. He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing. The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese. In his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for New-Year's Eve, 1900, had written: A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao- Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking- glass.--[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which was postponed until March. Clemens recalled his “Greeting” for that reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: “The list of greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and one definite name--mine: 'Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.' Now I am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. It makes me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard.”] This was a sort of preliminary. Then, restraining himself no longer, he embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review entitled, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” There was crying need for some one to speak the right word. He was about the only one who could do it and be certain of a universal audience. He took as his text some Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had been saving for this purpose. The Tribune clipping said: Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment and happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what is the matter with him, and pass on. A Sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts “--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York. The Sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. But it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named. Another clipping from the same paper reported the “Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions,” as having collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity.” It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, “head for head”--in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected. The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough. Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred. The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. He printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said: By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve--just the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes; taels I win, heads you lose. He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument--subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel “to the benighted native”--how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in Darkness.” Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it. Howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added, “with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but you'd better hang yourself afterward.” Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said: “So if you make the pictures, you hang with me.” But pictures were not required. It was published in the North American Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the cyclone. Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his principles, the other all against him. Every paper in England and America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions. At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home. It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone. Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened. Clemens reveled in it. W. A. Rogers, in Harper's Weekly, caricatured him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, “having the time of his life.” Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him as Huck Finn with a gun. The American Board was naturally disturbed. The Ament clipping which Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries. The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr. Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked Mark Twain, whose “brilliant article,” he said, “would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument,” not to do an innocent man an injustice. Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself. Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had “grossly exaggerated” the amount of Mr. Ament's collections. Instead of thirteen times the indemnity it should have read “one and a third times” the indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded retraction and apology. Clemens would not fail to make the apology--at least he would explain. It was precisely the kind of thing that would appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third times the correct amount. “To My Missionary Critics,” in the North American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy reply. “I have no prejudice against apologies,” he wrote. “I trust I shall never withhold one when it is due.” He then proceeded to make out his case categorically. Touching the exaggerated indemnity, he said: To Dr. Smith the “thirteen-fold-extra” clearly stood for “theft and extortion,” and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. He manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere “one-third” a little thing like that was some other than “theft and extortion.” Why, only the board knows! I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an idea of it. If a pauper owes me a dollar and I catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is “theft and extortion.” If I make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the thirty-three and a third cents are “theft and extortion,” just the same. I will put it in another way still simpler. If a man owes me one dog--any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and I--but let it go; the board would never understand it. It can't understand these involved and difficult things. He offered some further illustrations, including the “Tale of a King and His Treasure” and another tale entitled “The Watermelons.” I have it now. Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows, I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a scrupulously good fellow though devious. He was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down South, in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro then, as now, to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard. But in the private patches of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. I consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. He said that if I would approve his arrangements he would arrange. I said, “Consider me the board; I approve; arrange.” So he took a gun and went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the- halfshell, and one over. I was greatly pleased and asked: “Who gets the extra one?” “Widows and orphans.” “A good idea, too. Why didn't you take thirteen?” “It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion.” “What is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?” It caused him to reflect. But there was no result. The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he found fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based our strange conduct--as he called it. The understudy said: “On the custom of the niggers. They all do it.”--[The point had been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of the slain converts.] The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm. “Custom of the niggers! Are our morals so inadequate that we have to borrow of niggers?” Then he said to the jury: “Three melons were owing; they were collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they were collected by compulsion: this is extortion. A melon was added for the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is another theft, another extortion. Return it whence it came, with the others. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it.” He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not seem very kind. It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie: DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I know it. N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count. Yours, MARK. P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself. Carnegie answered: Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall have it. There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I like better than anything I've read for many a day. I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred message in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send that sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible for. Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little missals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become a classic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the author. Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader: Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, wrote: “I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades.” Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: “I want to thank you for your matchless article in the current North American. It must make converts of well-nigh all who read it.” But a Boston school-teacher was angry. “I have been reading the North American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.” On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note: “Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my own, instead of waiting and copying hers. I never thought. I suppose she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the country.” A critic with a sense of humor asked: “Please excuse seeming impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? Be honest. How much money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary causes?” But there were more of the better sort. Edward S. Martin, in a grateful letter, said: “How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much seriousness.” Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: “I give you my candid opinion that what you have done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. There is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes.” Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism: “Do right and you will be conspicuous.” CCXV. SUMMER AT “THE LAIR” In June Clemens took the family to Saranac Lake, to Ampersand. They occupied a log cabin which he called “The Lair,” on the south shore, near the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return another summer. There were swimming and boating and long walks in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. They gave little enough attention to the mails. They took only a weekly paper, and were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. Clemens, especially, loved the place, and wrote to Twichell: I am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of a dwelling-house. The lake edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under me that I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour. It is charmingly like sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a deep sense of comfort & contentment. The heavy forest shuts us solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors. There are beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. They take tea 5 P.M. (not invited) at the table in the woods where Jean does my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon Jean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food. They come to dinner 7 P.M. on the front porch (not invited), but Clara drives them away. It is an occupation which requires some industry & attention to business. They all have the one name --Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend--& none of them answers to it except when hungry. Clemens could work at “The Lair,” often writing in shady seclusions along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[ Published in Harper's Magazine for January and February, 1902.]--“The Double-Barrelled Detective Story,” intended originally as a burlesque on Sherlock Holmes. It did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly to be ranked as one of Mark Twain's successes. It contains, however, one paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his last one--on the reader. It runs as follows: It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God. The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. The careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird. But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. Some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote: MY DEAR MARK TWAIN,--Reading your “Double-Barrelled Detective Story” in the January Harper's late one night I came to the paragraph where you so beautifully describe “a crisp and spicy morning in early October.” I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its woozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagus in the empty sky. Then I read the paragraph again. Oh, Mark Twain! Mark Twain! How could you do it? Put a trap like that into the midst of a tragical story? Do serenity and peace brood over you after you have done such a thing? Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? When did larches begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon? What are deciduous flowers, and do they always “bloom in the fall, tra la”? I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the author. They say, “Very well done.” “The alliteration is so pretty.” “What's an oesophagus, a bird?” “What's it all mean, anyway?” I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow. Am I right? Or is it a gull? Or a gullet? Hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kind as to label them? Very sincerely yours, ALLETTA F. DEAN. Mark Twain to Miss Dean: Don't you give that oesophagus away again or I'll never trust you with another privacy! So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of that city. After some opening comment he said: I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the oesophagus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother some people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been larger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered in the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for the innocent--the innocent and confiding. He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which “slept upon motionless wings.” Said Clemens: Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one word. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for the deception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was my intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching, and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. Alas! if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a suspicion behind. The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England university. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no harm: “DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--'Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing.' “It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature, but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much gratification and edification, your 'Double-Barrelled Detective Story.' “But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it never sleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal with words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it. But, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'I'll be eternally, co-eternally cussed' if I can make it out. Is it a joke or am I an ignoramus?” Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man, but for pride's sake I was not going to say so. I wrote and told him it was a joke--and that is what I am now saying to my Springfield inquirer. And I told him to carefully read the whole paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of it. This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer. I have confessed. I am sorry--partially. I will not do so any more--for the present. Don't ask me any more questions; let the oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing. He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force', twenty-five thousand words, and he adds: How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! This seed was planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a book not heard of by me until then--Sherlock Holmes.... I've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for publication soon, if ever. I did write two satisfactory articles for early print, but I've burned one of them & have buried the other in my large box of posthumous stuff. I've got stacks of literary remains piled up there. Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on a cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Rogers had made up a party, including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col. A. G. Paine. Young Harry Rogers also made one of the party. Clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. On the 11th, at Yarmouth, he wrote: Fog-bound. The garrison went ashore. Officers visited the yacht in the evening & said an anvil had been missed. Mr. Rogers paid for the anvil. August 13th. There is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff photographed the garrison, with the exception of Harry (Rogers) and Mr. Clemens. August 14th. Upon complaint of Mr. Reed another dog was procured. He said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it. Poker, for a change. August 15th. To Rockland, Maine, in the afternoon, arriving about 6 P.M. In the night Dr. Rice baited the anchor with his winnings & caught a whale 90 feet long. He said so himself. It is thought that if there had been another witness like Dr. Rice the whale would have been longer. August 16th. We could have had a happy time in Bath but for the interruptions caused by people who wanted Mr. Reed to explain votes of the olden time or give back the money. Mr. Rogers recouped them. Another anvil missed. The descendant of Captain Kidd is the only person who does not blush for these incidents. Harry and Mr. Clemens blush continually. It is believed that if the rest of the garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. Mr. Clemens & Harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from this out. Evening. Judge Cohen came over from another yacht to pay his respects to Harry and Mr. Clemens, he having heard of their reputation from the clergy of these coasts. He was invited by the gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. Mr. Rogers lent him clothes to go home in. August 17th. The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again --not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore, while letting on to be talking to himself. This time he was dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date, untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with the Waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc. But he was not allowed to finish. We put him ashore at Portland. That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht. “We had a noble good time in the yacht,” Clemens wrote Twichell on their return. “We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him.” Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted. CCXVI. RIVERDALE--A YALE DEGREE The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street. They spent a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home. They had permanently concluded not to return to Hartford. They had put the property there into an agent's hands for sale. Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again. They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration. They decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light. The Appleton homestead provided these things. It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the Morris family, so long prominent in New York history. On passing into the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named “Holbrook Hall.” It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades. It had associations: the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature. Clemens once remembered: “We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.” There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal. They loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore. They were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own. Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a liberal-minded minister with whom Clemens easily affiliated. Clemens and Carstensen visited back and forth and exchanged views. Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the Reverend Gottheil, a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the Confucian faith, after which they were all going to a Yiddish theater. Clemens said: “Well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete--that is, either Satan or me.” Howells often came to Riverdale. He was living in a New York apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. He says: “I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New-Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth.” Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year and went over in October to receive their degrees. It was Mark Twain's second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American institution of learning could confer. Twichell wrote: I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever. Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality. Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home. I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration? Their plans did not avail. Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to receive their honors. When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank: DEAR SIR,--I have long been an admirer of your complete works, several of which I have read, and I am with you shoulder to shoulder in the cause of foreign missions. I would respectfully request a personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most inconvenient to you I will call at your baronial hall. I cannot doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the Twelve Apostles, who once visited you in your Hartford home and were mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will be mutually agreeable. Yours truly, W. D. HOWELLS. DR. CLEMENS. CCXVII. MARK TWAIN IN POLITICS There was a campaign for the mayoralty of New York City that fall, with Seth Low on the Fusion ticket against Edward M. Shepard as the Tammany candidate. Mark Twain entered the arena to try to defeat Tammany Hall. He wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police reform. He was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of Croker, individually and collectively. He joined a society called 'The Acorns'; and on the 17th of October, at a dinner given by the order at the Waldorf-Astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he characterized Croker as the Warren Hastings of New York. His speech was really a set of extracts from Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Hastings, substituting always the name of Croker, and paralleling his career with that of the ancient boss of the East India Company. It was not a humorous speech. It was too denunciatory for that. It probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort. There is hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end. It concluded with this paraphrase of Burke's impeachment: I impeach Richard Croker of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of all the people of America, whose national character he has dishonored. I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. The Acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the Tammany ranks, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and circulated.--[The “Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany” speech had originally been written as an article for the North American Review.] Clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign. He even joined a procession that marched up Broadway, and he made a speech to a great assemblage at Broadway and Leonard Street, when, as he said, he had been sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then. But I would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what I've got. Now, don't let this leak out all over town, but I've been doing some indiscreet eating--that's all. It wasn't drinking. If it had been I shouldn't have said anything about it. I ate a banana. I bought it just to clinch the Italian vote for fusion, but I got hold of a Tammany banana by mistake. Just one little nub of it on the end was nice and white. That was the Shepard end. The other nine-tenths were rotten. Now that little white end won't make the rest of the banana good. The nine-tenths will make that little nub rotten, too. We must get rid of the whole banana, and our Acorn Society is going to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of good government all over the United States. We will elect the President next time. It won't be I, for I have ruined my chances by joining the Acorns, and there can be no office-holders among us. There was a movement which Clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a political party after him. “I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me,” he wrote, “and I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for political preferment.” In other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could for the betterment of his people. He had his reward, for when Election Day came, and the returns were in, the Fusion ticket had triumphed and Tammany had fallen. Clemens received his share of the credit. One paper celebrated him in verse: Who killed Croker? I, said Mark Twain, I killed Croker, I, the jolly joker! Among Samuel Clemens's literary remains there is an outline plan for a “Casting-Vote party,” whose main object was “to compel the two great parties to nominate their best man always.” It was to be an organization of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of which should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the man be of clean record and honest purpose. From constable up to President [runs his final clause] there is no office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean, and acceptable men. Whenever the balance of power shall be lodged in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by the Republicans and Democrats, these two parties will select the best man they have in their ranks. Good and clean government will follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country will be quite content. It was a Utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of that native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his gloomier logic. Clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he formulated that document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in these closing lines: If in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. They can be improved, and American citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment and see that it is done. Had this document been put into type and circulated it might have founded a true Mark Twain party. Clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at last with the “Founder's Night” speech at The Players, the short address which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year to the memory of Edwin Booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup passed in his honor. CCXVIII. NEW INTERESTS AND INVESTMENTS The spirit which a year earlier had prompted Mark Twain to prepare his “Salutation from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century” inspired him now to conceive the “Stupendous International Procession,” a gruesome pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten pages which begin: THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION At the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order: The Twentieth Century A fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of Satan. Banner with motto, “Get What You Can, Keep What You Get.” Guard of Honor--Monarchs, Presidents, Tammany Bosses, Burglars, Land Thieves, Convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the symbols of their several trades. Christendom A majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood. On her head a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads of patriots who died for their countries Boers, Boxers, Filipinos; in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a Bible, open at the text “Do unto others,” etc. Protruding from pocket bottle labeled “We bring you the blessings of civilization.” Necklace-handcuffs and a burglar's jimmy. Supporters--At one elbow Slaughter, at the other Hypocrisy. Banner with motto--“Love Your Neighbor's Goods as Yourself.” Ensign--The Black Flag. Guard of Honor--Missionaries and German, French, Russian, and British soldiers laden with loot. And so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture, mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses. At the end of all, banners inscribed: “All White Men are Born Free and Equal.” “Christ died to make men holy, Christ died to make men free.” with the American flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of Lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful aspect over the far-reaching pageant. With much more of the same sort. It is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for Mrs. Clemens ever to consent to its publication. Advancing years did little toward destroying Mark Twain's interest in human affairs. At no time in his life was he more variously concerned and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary, political, religious, financial, scientific. He was always alive, young, actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise, though never less than important to him. He had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find dazzlingly new ways for investing it. As in the old days, he was always putting “twenty-five or forty thousand dollars,” as he said, into something that promised multiplied returns. Howells tells how he found him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he learned that it was plasmon. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped for,” and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon. It was just at this period (the beginning of 1902) that he was promoting with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in America, investing in it one of the “usual amounts,” promising to make Howells over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate. Once he wrote him explicit instructions: Yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer of desired results. If you wish to be elaborate--which isn't necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink. Or, stir it into your soup. Or, into your oatmeal. Or, use any method you like, so's you get it down--that is the only essential. He put another “usual sum” about this time in a patent cash register which was acknowledged to be “a promise rather than a performance,” and remains so until this day. He capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and protection. It was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands. He invested a lesser sum in shares of the Booklover's Library, which was going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a few dividends. Even the old Tennessee land will-o'-the-wisp-long since repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest, and was added to his list of ventures. He made one substantial investment at this period. They became more and more in love with the Hudson environment, its beauty and its easy access to New York. Their house was what they liked it to be--a gathering--place for friends and the world's notables, who could reach it easily and quickly from New York. They had a steady procession of company when Mrs. Clemens's health would permit, and during a single week in the early part of this year entertained guests at no less than seventeen out of their twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven nights--not an unusual week. Their plan for buying a home on the Hudson ended with the purchase of what was known as Hillcrest, or the Casey place, at Tarrytown, overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the Tappan Zee, close to the Washington Irving home. The beauty of its outlook and surroundings appealed to them all. The house was handsome and finely placed, and they planned to make certain changes that would adapt it to their needs. The price, which was less than fifty thousand dollars, made it an attractive purchase; and without doubt it would have made them a suitable and happy home had it been written in the future that they should so inherit it. Clemens was writing pretty steadily these days. The human race was furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time to touch more or less on most of them. He wreaked his indignation upon the things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the expectation of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively at such times as he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner courses, amplifying on the poverty of an invention that had produced mankind as a supreme handiwork. In a letter to Howells he wrote: Your comments on that idiot's “Ideals” letter reminds me that I preached a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the human race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the Creator. It was a good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to take up a collection. He once told Howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how Mrs. Clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in the reflection that now she would not hear so much about the “damned human race.” Yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he never invited, never expected gratitude. One wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did. Besides his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always writing letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of subjects, carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every sort. He even formed a curious society, whose members were young girls--one in each country of the earth. They were supposed to write to him at intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest, to which letters he agreed to reply. He furnished each member with a typewritten copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut Club, as he called it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after this fashion: I have a club--a private club, which is all my own. I appoint the members myself, & they can't help themselves, because I don't allow them to vote on their own appointment & I don't allow them to resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me. By the laws of my club there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don't know --they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good deal. It is a matter, which the club shall decide. I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You as a member for Scotland--oh, this good while! a young citizeness of Joan of Arc's home region as a member for France; a Mohammedan girl as member for Bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member for the United States--for I do not represent a country myself, but am merely member-at-large for the human race. You must not try to resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that. You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company; that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!). One of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of Europe, for the only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good- will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count. May I send you the constitution & laws of the club? I shall be so glad if I may. It was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their reports, as he did in his replies, to the end. One of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter of detail. Some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the platform. I will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character. He was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such obituaries, with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself drawn by his own hand--really appeared in Harper's Weekly later in the year. Naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful, burlesque. Some of them were quite worth while. The obvious “Death loves a shining Mark” was of course numerously duplicated, and some varied it “Death loves an Easy Mark,” and there was “Mark, the perfect man.” The two that follow gave him especial pleasure. OBITUARY FOR “MARK TWAIN” Worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place among his “perennial-consolation heirlooms”: “Got up; washed; went to bed.” The subject's own words (see Innocents Abroad). Can't go back on your own words, Mark Twain. There's nothing “to strike out”; nothing “to replace.” What more could be said of any one? “Got up!”--Think of the fullness of meaning! The possibilities of life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual. Got up to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth! “Washed”--Every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts, purposes. “Went to bed”--Work all done--to rest, to sleep. The culmination of the day well spent! God looks after the awakening. Mrs. S. A. OREN-HAYNES. Mark Twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth more than a whole lot of fossilized priests' eternal truths. D. H. KENNER. CCXIX. YACHTING AND THEOLOGY Clemens made fewer speeches during the Riverdale period. He was as frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially the evening functions. He attended a good many luncheons with friendly spirits like Howells, Matthews, James L. Ford, and Hamlin Garland. At the end of February he came down to the Mayor's dinner given to Prince Henry of Prussia, but he did not speak. Clemens used to say afterward that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of his supposed breach of etiquette at the Kaiser's dinner in Berlin; but the fact that Prince Henry sought him out, and was most cordially and humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is against the supposition. Clemens attended a Yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally visited Twichell in Hartford. The old question of moral responsibility came up and Twichell lent his visitor a copy of Jonathan Edwards's 'Freedom of the Will' for train perusal. Clemens found it absorbing. Later he wrote Twichell his views. DEAR JOE,--(After compliments.)--[Meaning “What a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again,” etc. See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. No, not all through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism & its God begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That's sound! Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane. Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my suppressed Gospel. But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man's authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words, & acts. It is frank insanity. I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when. After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk --for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to God. And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result: Man is commanded to do so & so. It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men sha'n't & others can't. These are to blame: let them be damned. I enjoy the Colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight. Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours! MARK. Clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in a manuscript which he entitled, “If I Could Be There.” It is in the dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing. It is a colloquy between the Master of the Universe and a Stranger. It begins: I. If I could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, I should hear conversations like this: A STRANGER. Lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been overlooked. It is in the record. I have found it. LORD. By searching? S. Yes, Lord. L. Who is it? What is it? S. A man. L. Proceed. S. He died in sin. Sin committed by his great-grandfather. L. When was this? S. Eleven million years ago. L. Do you know what a microbe is? S. Yes, Lord. It is a creature too small to be detected by my eye. L. He commits depredations upon your blood? S. Yes, Lord. L. I give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this offense. Go! Work your will upon him. S. But, Lord, I have nothing against him; I am indifferent to him. L. Why? S. He is so infinitely small and contemptible. I am to him as is a mountain-range to a grain of sand. L. What am I to man? S. (Silent.) L. Am I not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand? S. It is true, Lord. L. Some microbes are larger than others. Does man regard the difference? S. No, Lord. To him there is no difference of consequence. To him they are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential. L. To me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a microbe. Man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with indifference; I look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a size. To me both are inconsequential. Man kills the microbes when he can? S. Yes, Lord. L. Then what? Does he keep him in mind years and years and go on contriving miseries for him? S. No, Lord. L. Does he forget him? S. Yes, Lord. L. Why? S. He cares nothing more about him. L. Employs himself with more important matters? S. Yes, Lord. L. Apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities. Why does he affront me with the fancy that I interest Myself in trivialities--like men and microbes? II. L. Is it true the human race thinks the universe was created for its convenience? S. Yes, Lord. L. The human race is modest. Speaking as a member of it, what do you think the other animals are for? S. To furnish food and labor for man. L. What is the sea for? S. To furnish food for man. Fishes. L. And the air? S. To furnish sustenance for man. Birds and breath. L. How many men are there? S. Fifteen hundred millions. L. (Referring to notes.) Take your pencil and set down some statistics. In a healthy man's lower intestine 28,000,000 microbes are born daily and die daily. In the rest of a man's body 122,000,000 microbes are born daily and die daily. The two sums aggregate-what? S. About 150,000,000. L. In ten days the aggregate reaches what? S. Fifteen hundred millions. L. It is for one person. What would it be for the whole human population? S. Alas, Lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that multitude. It is billions of billions multiplied by billions of billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions. The figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space on both sides. L. To what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the human race? S. That they may eat. L. Now then, according to man's own reasoning, what is man for? S. Alas-alas! L. What is he for? S. To-to-furnish food for microbes. L. Manifestly. A child could see it. Now then, with this common-sense light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean for? S. To furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply and replenish the microbes. L. Manifestly. Does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders? S. Certainly for the sake of the boarders. L. Man's a boarding-house. S. I perceive it, Lord. L. He is a boarding-house. He was never intended for anything else. If he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early. As concerns the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief that in life he did his duty by his microbes? S. Undoubtedly, Lord. He could not help it. L. Then why punish him? He had no other duty to perform. Whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least original and has a conclusive sound. Mark Twain had very little use for orthodoxy and conservatism. When it was announced that Dr. Jacques Loeb, of the University of California, had demonstrated the creation of life by chemical agencies he was deeply interested. When a newspaper writer commented that a “consensus of opinion among biologists” would probably rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus idea. I wish I could be as young as that again. Although I seem so old now I was once as young as that. I remember, as if it were but thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or another of nature's safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they had found something valuable was plenty for me. It settled it. But it isn't so now-no. Because in the drift of the years I by and by found out that a Consensus examines a new thing with its feelings rather oftener than with its mind. There was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in Greek times: a Consensus made fun of it. There was the Marquis of Worcester's steam-engine 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it. There was Fulton's steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including the great Napoleon, made fun of it. There was Priestley, with his oxygen: a Consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out, banished him. While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship did it. And so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an extract from Adam's Diary. Then there was a Consensus about it. It was the very first one. It sat six days and nights. It was then delivered of the verdict that a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and years if there was considerable many of them. Then the Consensus got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit, spinning and sparkling in space! You never saw such a disappointed lot. ADAM. He was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though now and then he offered one of his reflections for print. That beautiful fairy tale, “The Five Boons of Life,” of which the most precious is “Death,” was written at this period. Maeterlinck's lovely story of the bee interested him; he wrote about that. Somebody proposed a Martyrs' Day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion. In his note-book, too, there is a memorandum for a love-story of the Quarternary Epoch which would begin, “On a soft October afternoon 2,000,000 years ago.” John Fiske's Discovery of America, Volume I, he said, was to furnish the animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as to-day; but apparently this idea was carried no further. He ranged through every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning, ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested neither night nor day. In April Clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the Kanawha, which this time would sail for the Bahama and West India islands. The guests were to be about the same.--[The invited ones of the party were Hon. T. B. Reed, A. G. Paine, Laurence Hutton, Dr. C. C. Rice, W. T. Foote, and S. L. Clemens. “Owners of the yacht,” Mr. Rogers called them, signing himself as “Their Guest.”] He sent this telegram: H. H. ROGERS, Fairhaven, Mass. Can't get away this week. I have company here from tonight till middle of next week. Will Kanawha be sailing after that & can I go as Sunday-school superintendent at half rate? Answer and prepay. DR. CLEMENS. The sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy cruise among those balmy islands. Mark Twain was particularly fond of “Tom” Reed, who had been known as “Czar” Reed in Congress, but was delightfully human in his personal life. They argued politics a good deal, and Reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge of the subject, confessed that he “couldn't argue with a man like that.” “Do you believe the things you say?” he asked once, in his thin, falsetto voice. “Yes,” said Clemens. “Some of them.” “Well, you want to look out. If you go on this way, by and by you'll get to believing nearly everything you say.” Draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion. Clemens in his notes reports that off the coast of Florida Reed won twenty-three pots in succession. It was said afterward that they made no stops at any harbor; that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told them they were about to enter some important port he received peremptory orders to “sail on and not interrupt the game.” This, however, may be regarded as more or less founded on fiction. CCXX. MARK TWAIN AND THE PHILIPPINES Among the completed manuscripts of the early part of 1902 was a North American Review article (published in April)--“Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?”--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal weakness. There were also some papers on the Philippine situation. In one of these Clemens wrote: We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God--the phrase is the government's, not mine--we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a back seat in the family. With tacks in it. At least we are letting on to be glad and proud; it is the best way. Indeed, it is the only way. We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking. We are a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the best of it. And again he wrote: I am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around now and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration. But a much more conspicuous comment on the Philippine policy was the so-called “Defense of General Funston” for what Funston himself referred to as a “dirty Irish trick”; that is to say, deception in the capture of Aguinaldo. Clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to-any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular campaign. The article appeared in the North American Review for May, 1902, and stirred up a good deal of a storm. He wrote much more on the subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished. CCXXI. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE One day in April, 1902, Samuel Clemens received the following letter from the president of the University of Missouri: MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS, Although you received the degree of doctor of literature last fall from Yale, and have had other honors conferred upon you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of the University of Missouri. In asking your permission to confer upon you the degree of LL.D. the University of Missouri does not aim to confer an honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you. The rules of the University forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia. I hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on the fourth day of next June, when we shall hold our Annual Commencement. Very truly yours, R. H. JESSE. Clemens had not expected to make another trip to the West, but a proffered honor such as this from one's native State was not a thing to be declined. It was at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby--as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before. “I have become an old man. You are still thirty-five,” Clemens said. They went to the Planters Hotel, and the news presently got around that Mark Twain was there. There followed a sort of reception in the hotel lobby, after which Bixby took him across to the rooms of the Pilots Association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his return. A few of his old comrades were still alive, among them Beck Jolly. The same afternoon he took the train for Hannibal. It was a busy five days that he had in Hannibal. High-school commencement day came first. He attended, and willingly, or at least patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of those young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished time. A few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among the audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future. Their heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded years. Laura Hawkins was there and Helen Kercheval (Mrs. Frazer and Mrs. Garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering. He was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the graduates, and told them some things of the young people of that earlier time that brought their laughter and their tears. He was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in his own way. He took an armful of them and said to the graduates: “Take one. Pick out a good one. Don't take two, but be sure you get a good one.” So each took one “unsight and unseen” aid made the more exact distributions among themselves later. Next morning it was Saturday--he visited the old home on Hill Street, and stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of photographers made pictures of “this return of the native” to the threshold of his youth. “It all seems so small to me,” he said, as he looked through the house; “a boy's home is a big place to him. I suppose if I should come back again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse.” He went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked out the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and the rest--that is to say, Tom Blankenship, John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the Bowen boys--set out on their nightly escapades. Of that lightsome band Will Pitts and John Briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less adventurous sort. Buck Brown, who had been his rival in the spelling contests, was still there, and John Robards, who had worn golden curls and the medal for good conduct, and Ed Pierce. And while these were assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old man came up and put out his hand, and it was Jimmy MacDaniel, to whom so long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had first told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats. They put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the hills and resorts and rendezvous of Tom Sawyer and his marauding band. He was entertained that evening by the Labinnah Club (whose name was achieved by a backward spelling of Hannibal), where he found most of the survivors of his youth. The news report of that occasion states that he was introduced by Father McLoughlin, and that he “responded in a very humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the conclusion. Commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother was too much for the great humorist. Before him as he spoke were sitting seven of his boyhood friends.” On Sunday morning Col. John Robards escorted him to the various churches and Sunday-schools. They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he pretended not to recognize this fact. In each one he was asked to speak a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old home Sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings. At one place he told a moral story. He said: Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were. It is a story very proper for a Sunday-school. When I was a little boy in Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday's Hill, which of course you all know. John Briggs and I played up there. I don't suppose there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is not to be expected. Little boys in those days were 'most always good little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was better than it is now, but never mind that. Well, once upon a time, on Holliday's Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for a blast. He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast. Then he put in the powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched him. He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller. First he looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. John Briggs was with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just persevering, you see, and sticking to his work. Little boys and girls, that's the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on Holliday's Hill. Of course you won't always be appreciated. He wasn't. His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never mind, he had his reward. He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was in a storm of enjoyment when he finished. There still remains a doubt in Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its acceptability. That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday's Hill--the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer. It was jest such a Sunday as that one when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a cooper-shop. They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in the sun. Standing there together and looking across to the low-lying Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to Lover's Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said: “John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw. Down there by the island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank. Down there on Lover's Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven. None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have gone now.” John Briggs said: “Sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man Price and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we made up our minds that we'd catch that nigger and drown him?” They came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had so nearly brought them to grief. Sam Clemens said: “John, if we had killed that man we'd have had a dead nigger on our hands without a cent to pay for him.” And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while that his career was about to close. “Once, near the shore, I thought I would let down,” he said, “but was afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally my knees struck the sand and I crawled out. That was the closest call I ever had.” They drove by the place where the haunted house had stood. They drank from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that most beautiful of all our possessions, the past. “Sam,” said John, when they parted, “this is probably the last time we shall meet on this earth. God bless you. Perhaps somewhere we shall renew our friendship.” “John,” was the answer, “this day has been worth thousands of dollars to me. We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now. Good-by, John. I'll try to meet you--somewhere.” CCXXII. A PROPHET HONORED IN HIS COUNTRY Clemens left next day for Columbia. Committees met him at Rensselaer, Monroe City, Clapper, Stoutsville, Paris, Madison, Moberly--at every station along the line of his travel. At each place crowds were gathered when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with flowers. Sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full of tears--his voice would not come. There is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one's native State--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned. No other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for there is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir emotions as old as life itself. It was on the 4th of June, 1902, that Mark Twain received his doctor of laws degree from the State University at Columbia, Missouri. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior, were among those similarly honored. Mark Twain was naturally the chief attraction. Dressed in his Yale scholastic gown he led the procession of graduating students, and, as in Hannibal, awarded them their diplomas. The regular exercises were made purposely brief in order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees. This ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one. Gardner Lathrop read a brief statement introducing “America's foremost author and best-loved citizen, Samuel Langhorne Clemens--Mark Twain.” Clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused. He seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply express his thanks and retire. Suddenly, and without a signal, the great audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet. He bowed, but he could not speak. Then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word Missouri, with a pause between each letter. It was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness. He had recovered himself when they finished. He said he didn't know whether he was expected to make a speech or not. They did not leave him in doubt. They cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy humor, gentle and dramatic pathos. He closed by telling the watermelon story for its “moral effect.” He was the guest of E. W. Stevens in Columbia, and a dinner was given in his honor. They would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in St. Louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to be held a World's Fair, to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase. Another ceremony he attended was the christening of the St. Louis harbor-boat, or rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name from the St. Louis--[Originally the Elon G. Smith, built in 1873.]--to the Mark Twain. A short trip was made on it for the ceremony. Governor Francis and Mayor Wells were of the party, and Count and Countess Rochambeau and Marquis de Lafayette, with the rest of the French group that had come over for the dedication of the World's Fair grounds. Mark Twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned for the last time to his old place at the wheel. They all collected in the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion. They were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running out from the shore across the bow. In the old days he could have told whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he could not be sure any more. Turning to the pilot languidly, he said: “I feel a little tired. I guess you had better take the wheel.” Luncheon was served aboard, and Mayor Wells made the christening speech; then the Countess Rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of Governor Francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, “I christen thee, good boat, Mark Twain.” So it was, the Mississippi joined in according him honors. In his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious visitors from France and recounted something of the story of French exploration along that great river. “The name of La Salle will last as long as the river itself,” he said; “will last until commerce is dead. We have allowed the commerce of the river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be grateful.” Carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon, and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been identified as Eugene Field's birthplace. A bronze tablet recording this fact had been installed, and this was to be the unveiling. The place was not in an inviting quarter of the town. It stood in what is known as Walsh's Row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen into disrepute. Ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty lodgers were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms. A curious nondescript audience assembled around the little group of dedicators, wondering what it was all about. The tablet was concealed by the American flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached cord. Governor Francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had gathered here to unveil a tablet to an American poet, and that it was fitting that Mark Twain should do this. They removed their hats, and Clemens, his white hair blowing in the wind, said: “My friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life, made bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts cheered the thoughts of thousands who never knew him. I take pleasure in unveiling the tablet of Eugene Field.” The flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed. By this time the crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking. A working-man proposed three cheers for Mark Twain, and they were heartily given. Then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood collected to regard the old house with a new interest. It was reported to Clemens later that there was some dispute as to the identity of the Field birthplace. He said: “Never mind. It is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace or not. A rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet.” CCXXIII. AT YORK HARBOR They decided to spend the summer at York Harbor, Maine. They engaged a cottage, there, and about the end of June Mr. Rogers brought his yacht Kanawha to their water-front at Riverdale, and in perfect weather took them to Maine by sea. They landed at York Harbor and took possession of their cottage, The Pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges. Howells, at Kittery Point, was not far away, and everything promised a happy summer. Mrs. Clemens wrote to Mrs. Crane: We are in the midst of pines. They come up right about us, and the house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the veranda that we are right in the branches. We drove over to call on Mr. and Mrs. Howells. The drive was most beautiful, and never in my life have I seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space. Howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and how he used to sit with Clemens that summer at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where they could read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and laugh their hearts out without disturbing her. Clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage “in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman”: There was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him. The story was one which Clemens had heard in Hannibal, and he doubtless related it in his vivid way. Howells, writing at a later time, quite naturally included it among the several manuscripts which Clemens read aloud to him. Clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have begun it, though this is unlikely. The incidents were too well known and too notorious in his old home for fiction. Among the stories that Clemens did show, or read, to Howells that summer was “The Belated Passport,” a strong, intensely interesting story with what Howells in a letter calls a “goat's tail ending,” perhaps meaning that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact, altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader. A far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident which Howells related to Clemens as they sat chatting together on the veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon. It was a pathetic episode in the life of some former occupants of The Pines--the tale of a double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip away. Out of this grew the story, “Was it Heaven? or Hell?” a heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul. Next to “Hadleyburg,” it is Mark Twain's greatest fictional sermon. Clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem. One day at Riverdale, when Mrs. Clemens had been with him on the lawn, they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs. It was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day Clemens conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion. It was built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living, and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy. It is an impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer it for publication.--[This poem was completed on the anniversary of Susy's death and is of considerable length. Some selections from it will be found under Appendix U, at the end of this work.] Mrs. Clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became very seriously ill at York Harbor. Howells writes: At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale. She had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks after the arrival at York. Then, early in August, there came a great celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks at night. Mrs. Clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested. She went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and enjoying all that was going on. She was finally persuaded to forego the remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home; but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable. Howells and two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the Queen of Rumania, a Madame Hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter which closed in this simple and modest fashion: I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship! People don't always realize what a happiness that is! God bless you for every beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every smile on a weary way. CARMEN SYLVA. This was the occasion mentioned by Howells when Mrs. Clemens made tea for them in the parlor for the last time. Her social life may be said to have ended that afternoon. Next morning the break came. Clemens, in his notebook for that day, writes: Tuesday, August 12, 1902. At 7 A.M. Livy taken violently ill. Telephoned and Dr. Lambert was here in 1/2 hour. She could not breathe-was likely to stifle. Also she had severe palpitation. She believed she was dying. I also believed it. Nurses were summoned, and Mrs. Crane and others came from Elmira. Clara Clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence. Clemens slipped about with warnings of silence. A visitor found notices in Mark Twain's writing pinned to the trees near Mrs. Clemens's window warning the birds not to sing too loudly. The patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated. On September 3d the note-book says: Always Mr. Rogers keeps his yacht Kanawha in commission & ready to fly here and take us to Riverdale on telegraphic notice. But Mrs. Clemens was unable to return by sea. When it was decided at last, in October, that she could be removed to Riverdale, Clemens and Howells went to Boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey from York Harbor to Riverdale without change. Howells tells us that Clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these details, and that they absorbed him. There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master.... With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail. They made the journey on the 16th, in nine and a half hours. With the exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was apparently no worse on their arrival. The stout English butler carried her to her room. It would be many months before she would leave it again. In one of his memoranda Clemens wrote: Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night devotion to the children & me. We did not know how to value it. We know now. And in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the world's enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said: Livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the people do not know. Yet she is entitled to the lion's share. He wrote Twichell at the end of October: Livy drags along drearily. It must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again. It is a most pathetic case. I wish I could transfer it to myself. Between ripping & raging & smoking & reading I could get a good deal of holiday out of it. Clara runs the house smoothly & capitally. Heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering Twichell a little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder: I should like to know how & where it happened. In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to conceal it. This is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by “banging the Bible”--(your own words). You have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks. You would better jump around. We all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon us. Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark. Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great hopes of her complete recovery. Clemens took up some work--a new Huck Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal. It was to have two parts--Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age. He did some chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan. Howells answered: It is a great lay-out: what I shall enjoy most will be the return of the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying. There is a matchless chance there. I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in this prefatory part. But the new story did not reach completion. Huck and Tom would not come back, even to go over the old scenes. CCXXIV. THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col. George Harvey, president of the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-seventh birthday. The actual date fell three days later; but that would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen. Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a poem, “A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain,” which closed: Still, to have everything beyond cavil right, We will dine with you here till Sunday night. Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by maintaining an attitude of “thinking ambassador” for the guest of the evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes. “The limit has been reached,” he announced at the close of Dr. van Dyke's poem. “More that is better could not be said. Gentlemen, Mr. Clemens.” It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than he delivered then. He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the nation, men assembled to do him honor. They expected much of him--to Mark Twain always an inspiring circumstance. He was greeted with cheers and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready to end. When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the stillness for his voice; then he said, “I think I ought to be allowed to talk as long as I want to,” and again the storm broke. It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of after-dinner eloquence,--[The “Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech” entire is included in the volume Mark Twain's Speeches.]--full of humorous stories and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twichell, and Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well. He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. This peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had shared in long friendship--demands admission: Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is not present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and I think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twichell together --and what I am I owe to them. Twichell--why, it is such a pleasure to look upon Twichell's face! For five and twenty years I was under the Rev. Mr. Twichell's tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a pew in his church and held him in due reverence. That man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long. I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now, there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank-account. Well, I liked the poetry. I liked all the speeches and the poetry, too. I liked Dr. van Dyke's poem. I wish I could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought of at all. And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday. The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially: For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents. It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that birthday evening, passed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his death keenly, and in a “good-by” which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he said: His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and met it half-way. Hence, he was “Tom” to the most of his friends and to half of the nation.... I cannot remember back to a time when he was not “Tom” Reed to me, nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible. Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to dust in a moment. The appreciation closes: I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant journey. CCXXV. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment of the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna several years before. He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and his admiration for Mrs. Eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism toward her had augmented in the mean time. Howells refers to the “mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy”: He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more formidable in its control of the minds of men.... An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not. only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines. Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. He acknowledged good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to materia medica. It is true that his animosity for the founder of the Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. Furthermore, he frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and indifferently employed hitherto. His quarrel with Mrs. Eddy lay in the belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was “a very unsound Christian Scientist.” I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [But he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it. Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form. “Mrs. Eddy in Error,” in the North American Review for April, 1903, completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time. He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various published papers and some added chapters. It would not be a large volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it with him, stating their side of the case. Mr. William D. McCrackan, one of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate. McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at considerable length. Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote McCrackan a pretty savage letter. He threw it on the hall table for mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. It was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. Next evening a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter, which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. Their friendship began there. For some reason, however, the collaborated volume did not materialize. In the end, publication was delayed a number of years, by which time Clemens's active interest was a good deal modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his attention. Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time in another manuscript entitled, “Eddypus,” an imaginary history of a thousand years hence, when Eddyism should rule the world. By that day its founder would have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her birth. It was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such. It was just one of the things which Mark Twain wrote to relieve mental pressure. CCXXVI. “WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?” The Christmas number of Harper's Magazine for 1902 contained the story, “Was it Heaven? or Hell?” and it immediately brought a flood of letters to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An Englishman wrote: “I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so profoundly true a story”; and an American declared it to be the best short story ever written. Another letter said: I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them --then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise. There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort. It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter had even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her mother was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy. I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful & pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened, three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings. Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote: Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed. As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature. Three days later he added: It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103 & 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story in the Christmas Harper's “Was it Heaven? or Hell?”--has been enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having outdoors in the winter sports. That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs. Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In an account which Clemens once set down of the “Siege and Season of Unveracity,” as he called it, he said: Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a small and simple one the case would have been different. I was never able to get a reputation like Clara's. Mrs. Clemens questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits, clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention, she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income justified. Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period, as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane: Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be) toward train-time dressed in a wrapper. LIVY. Why, Clara, aren't you going to your lesson? CLARA (almost caught). Yes. L. In that costume? CL. Oh no. L. Well, you can't make your train; it's impossible. CL. I know, but I'm going to take the other one. L. Indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for your lesson. CL. No, the lesson-time has been put an hour later. L. (satisfied, then suddenly). But, Clara, that train and the late lesson together will make you late to Mrs. Hapgood's luncheon. CL. No, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to. L. (satisfied). Tell Mrs. Hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which Clara promises to do). Clara, dear, after the luncheon--I hate to put this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands for me? CL. Oh, it won't trouble me a bit-I can do it. (Takes a list of the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to another.) At 3 or 4 P.M. Clara takes the things brought from New York, studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room. LIVY. It's very good of you, dear. Of course, if I had known it was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy I wouldn't have asked you to buy them. Did you get wet? CL. Oh, nothing to hurt. L. You took a cab both ways? CL. Not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough till that was over. L. Well, now, tell me everything Mrs. Hapgood said. Clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the 5,000 Livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was and how the fishes were served. By and by, while talking of something else: LIVY. Clams!--in the end of December. Are you sure it was clams? CL. I didn't say cl---I meant Blue Points. L. (tranquilized). It seemed odd. What is Jean doing? CL. She said she was going to do a little typewriting. L. Has she been out to-day? CL. Only a moment, right after luncheon. She was determined to go out again, but---- L. How did you know she was out? CL. (saving herself in time). Katie told me. She was determined to go out again in the rain and snow, but I persuaded her to stay in. L. (with moving and grateful admiration). Clara, you are wonderful! the wise watch you keep over Jean, and the influence you have over her; it's so lovely of you, and I tied here and can't take care of her myself. (And she goes on with these undeserved praises till Clara is expiring with shame.) To Twichell: I am to see Livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad night; and I stand in dread, for with all my practice I realize that in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth anything in a sick-chamber. Now, Joe, just see what reputation can do. All Clara's life she has told Livy the truth and now the reward comes; Clara lies to her three and a half hours every day, and Livy takes it all at par, whereas even when I tell her a truth it isn't worth much without corroboration.... Soon my brief visit is due. I've just been up listening at Livy's door. 5 P.M. A great disappointment. I was sitting outside Livy's door waiting. Clara came out a minute ago and said L ivy is not so well, and the nurse can't let me see her to-day. That pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month. All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on life. Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. He spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages which he was allowed to push under her door. He was always waiting there long before the moment he was permitted to enter. Her illness and her helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly characterized as his “beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul.” CCXXVII. THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER Most of Mark Twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another, and with more or less success. He had two plays going that winter, one of them the little “Death Disk,” which--in story form had appeared a year before in Harper's Magazine. It was put on at the Carnegie Lyceum with considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a long continuance. Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by Lee Arthur. This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and locality. Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent; certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse. Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver and Omaha. It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence. Certain entries in Mark Twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and thought at this period. We find such entries as this: Saturday, January 3, 1903. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny. Sunday, January 4, 1903. The offspring of poverty: Greed, sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking, cheating, stealing, murder. Monday, February 2, 1903. 33d wedding anniversary. I was allowed to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day. She makes but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some, we are sure. Sunday, March 1, 1903. We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. Thursday, March 19, 1903. Susy's birthday. She would be 31 now. The family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself, his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. Once he wrote: Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. And again: Adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received that was worth having--death. The Riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that spring. Jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was attacked by measles, and Clara also fell a victim to the infection. Fortunately Mrs. Clemens's health had somewhat improved. It was during this period that Clemens formulated his eclectic therapeutic doctrine. Writing to Twichell April 4, 1903, he said: Livy does make a little progress these past 3 or 4 days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye. The physicians are doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is the best for all ills. I should distribute the ailments around: surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist; nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to the allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism, gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist. He had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond his reply to Mrs. Eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque, “Instructions in Art,” with pictures by himself, published in the Metropolitan for April and May. Howells called his attention to some military outrages in the Philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one of his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[The torture to death of Private Edward C. Richter, an American soldier, by orders of a commissioned officer of the United States army on the night of February 7, 1902. Private Richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his face, a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life became extinct.] Clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject, but he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print. Then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his fury at the race that had produced such a specimen. Mrs. Clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests, now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note. Among the books that Clemens read, or tried to read, during his confinement were certain of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He had never been able to admire Scott, and determined now to try to understand this author's popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority. He wrote to Brander Matthews: DEAR BRANDER,--I haven't been out of my bed for 4 weeks, but-well, I have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, & jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a good turn. 1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English --English which is neither slovenly nor involved? 2. Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin & commonplace, but is of a quality above that? 3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox- fire, make-believe? 4. Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses? 5. Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their characters as described by him? 6. Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and knows why? 7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? 8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to lay the book down? 9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere & in earnest? 10. Did he know how to write English, & didn't do it because he didn't want to? 11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't know the right one when he saw it? 12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day? Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens. I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can't stand any more Mannering --I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly.... My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. But a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott--Quentin Durward. Hastily he wrote to Matthews again: I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took up Quentin Durward & finished that. It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University. I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?--[This letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years later, June, 1910 message from the dead.] Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen Keller's 'The Story of My Life', then recently published. That he finished it in a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he wrote her--a letter in which he said: I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss Sullivan, I mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete & perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are all there. When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned to mathematics. With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results. When the problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic. The expenditures were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income. The result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin. He put in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that the cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the money-supply. Writing to MacAlister three days later he said: It was a mistake. When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two. By God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood! Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream. It was a great comfort & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the board again. Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality about a well-arranged unreality. It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive a man to suicide. He would refuse to examine the figures, they would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there was nothing serious about them. I cannot get that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: In any other year of these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you can, cut your cloth to fit your income. You can't do that when your wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next. The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially. They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage. So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look around among the villas for us in the regions near that city. CCXXVIII. PROFFERED HONORS Mark Twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his popularity showed no signs of diminishing. So far from having waned, it had surged to a higher point than ever before. His crusade against public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of reform. When a writer in a New York newspaper said, “Let us go outside the realm of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the Presidency,” and asked, “Who is our ablest and most conspicuous private citizen?” another editorial writer, Joseph Hollister, replied that Mark Twain was “the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to the fullest measure of recognition.” But Clemens was without political ambitions. He knew the way of such things too well. When Hollister sent him the editorial he replied only with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny seed of a Presidential boom. One would like to publish many of the beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful, most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in length--beautiful in that they overflow with the writers' sincerity and gratitude. So many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply, some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to the suspicion of being seekers for his autograph. Almost more than any other reward, Mark Twain valued this love of the children. A department in the St. Nicholas Magazine offered a prize for a caricature drawing of some well-known man. There were one or two of certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally a wheelbarrow load of Mark Twain. When he was informed of this he wrote: “No tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the children.” Tributes came to him in many forms. In his native State it was proposed to form a Mark Twain Association, with headquarters at Hannibal, with the immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the St. Louis World's Fair, to be called the Mark Twain week, with a special Mark Twain day, on which a national literary convention would be held. But when his consent was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote characteristically: It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a Mark Twain day at the great St. Louis Fair, but such compliments are not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. I value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors. I value it as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in a sort of terror of the honors themselves. So long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships. I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for I might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to regret having done me that honor. After I shall have joined the dead I shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct that can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race. The committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him. But again he wrote: While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of Hannibal to confer these great honors upon me I must still forbear to accept them. Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis, and at the village stations all down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without solicitation; but I am a Missourian, and so I shrink from distinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity, for I then become a party to my own exalting. I am humanly fond of honors that happen, but chary of those that come by canvass and intention. Somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from New Orleans to St. Louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the safety-valve. In his letter to President Francis he said: As to particulars, I think that the race should be a genuine reproduction of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that it should cover the whole course. I think the boats should begin the trip at New Orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end it at North St. Louis, a mile or two above the Big Mound. In a subsequent letter to Governor Francis he wrote: It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great Fair & get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered.... I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most prodigious Fair the planet has ever seen. Very well, you have indeed earned it, and with it the gratitude of the State and the nation. Newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him. They invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or short. One reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour talk. Another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he pleased. One wrote asking him two questions: the first, “Your favorite method of escaping from Indians”; the second, “Your favorite method of escaping capture by the Indians when they were in pursuit of you.” They inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered most important to a young man's success; his definition of a gentleman. They wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles. But they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity. To one applicant he wrote: No, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof. Your proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it never tempts me. The price isn't the objection; you offer plenty. It is the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which I could not do well enough to satisfy me. To multiply the price by twenty would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence would make no impression upon me. Once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the Herald, when from Mr. Rogers's yacht he had watched Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock go down to defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose. CCXXXIX. THE LAST SUMMER AT ELMIRA The Clemenses were preparing to take up residence in Florence, Italy. The Hartford house had been sold in May, ending forever the association with the city that had so long been a part of their lives. The Tarrytown place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for it was the belief now that Mrs. Clemens's health would never greatly prosper there. Howells says, or at least implies, that they expected their removal to Florence to be final. He tells us, too, of one sunny afternoon when he and Clemens sat on the grass before the mansion at Riverdale, after Mrs. Clemens had somewhat improved, and how they “looked up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly.” It was a greeting to Howells the last he would ever receive from her. Mrs. Clemens was able to make a trip to Elmira by the end of June, and on the 1st of July Mr. Rogers brought Clemens and his wife down the river on his yacht to the Lackawanna pier, and they reached Quarry Farm that evening. She improved in the quietude and restfulness of that beloved place. Three weeks later Clemens wrote to Twichell: Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at the old stand. During three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea. Clemens did some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built so many of his stories had been written. 'A Dog's Tale'--that pathetic anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever completed in the spot consecrated by Huck and Tom, and by Tom Canty the Pauper and the little wandering Prince. It was October 5th when they left Elmira. Two days earlier Clemens had written in his note-book: Today I placed flowers on Susy's grave--for the last time probably --& read words: “Good-night, dear heart, good-night.” They did not return to Riverdale, but went to the Hotel Grosvenor for the intervening weeks. They had engaged passage for Italy on the Princess Irene, which would sail on the 24th. It was during the period of their waiting that Clemens concluded his final Harper contract. On that day, in his note-book, he wrote: THE PROPHECY In 1895 Cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my 68th year (1903) I would become suddenly rich. I was a bankrupt & $94,000 in debt at the time through the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Two years later--in London--Cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, & added that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. I am superstitious. I kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it. When at last it came true, October 22, 1903, there was but a month & 9 days to spare. The contract signed that day concentrates all my books in Harper's hands & now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune. They guarantee me $25,000 a year for 5 years, and they will yield twice as much as that.--[In earlier note-books and letters Clemens more than once refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized. The Harper contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher (negotiated for him by Mr. Rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune. The books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that amount, as he had foreseen.] During the conclusion of this contract Clemens made frequent visits to Fairhaven on the Kanawha. Joe Goodman came from the Pacific to pay him a good-by visit during this period. Goodman had translated the Mayan inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and publication by the British Museum. It was a fine achievement for a man in later life and Clemens admired it immensely. Goodman and Clemens enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk over the old tales. Another visitor of that summer was the son of an old friend, a Hannibal printer named Daulton. Young Daulton came with manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so Clemens wrote a letter which would insure that favor: INTRODUCING MR. GEO. DAULTON: TO GILDER, ALDEN, HARVEY, McCLURE, WALKER, PAGE, BOK, COLLIER, and such other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them friends-these: Although I have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, I have what is better: He comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not likely to happen in any of your families, I reckon. I ask you, as a favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity of its spelling. I wish to God you cared less for that particular. I set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in Hannibal, more than 50 years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business. A true man he was; and if I can be of any service to his son--and to you at the same time, let me hope--I am here heartily to try. Yours by the sanctions of time & deserving, Sincerely, S. L. CLEMENS. Among the kindly words which came to Mark Twain before leaving America was this one which Rudyard Kipling had written to his publisher, Frank Doubleday: I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. Cervantes was a relation of his. It curiously happened that Clemens at the same moment was writing to Doubleday about Kipling: I have been reading “The Bell Buoy” and “The Old Man” over and over again-my custom with Kipling's work--and saving up the rest for other leisurely and luxurious meals. A bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being. In these many recent trips up and down the Sound in the Kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and I got his meaning--now I have his words! No one but Kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. Some day I hope to hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of the distance. P. S.--Your letter has arrived. It makes me proud and glad--what Kipling says. I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are there. I would rather see him than any other man. CCXXX. THE RETURN TO FLORENCE From the note-book: Saturday, October 24, 1903. Sailed in the Princess Irene for Genoa at 11. Flowers & fruit from Mrs. Rogers & Mrs. Coe. We have with us Katie Leary (in our domestic service 23 years) & Miss Margaret Sherry (trained nurse). Two days later he wrote: Heavy storm all night. Only 3 stewardesses. Ours served 60 meals in rooms this morning. On the 27th: Livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well. As well as Clara & Jean, I think, & far better than the trained nurse. She has been out on deck an hour. November 2. Due at Gibraltar 10 days from New York. 3 days to Naples, then 2 day to Genoa. At supper the band played “Cavalleria Rusticana,” which is forever associated in my mind with Susy. I love it better than any other, but it breaks my heart. It was the “Intermezzo” he referred to, which had been Susy's favorite music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular opera-night long ago, and Susy's face rose before him. They were in Naples on the 5th; thence to Genoa, and to Florence, where presently they were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace built by Cosimo more than four centuries ago. In later times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of Wurtemberg and Russia. Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom Clemens had leased it. They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. The Villa Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. Yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid. Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of Italy should be--such a garden as Maxfield Parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's “Todteninsel,” and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence. The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful. The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never entered. There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was, was not always in order. The place was approached by narrow streets, along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent. Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope meant always so much.--[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by Signor P. de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]--Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had hoped for. Their former sunny winter had misled them. Tradition to the contrary, Italy--or at least Tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of sunlight. It is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold. Writing to MacAlister, Clemens said: Florentine sunshine? Bless you, there isn't any. We have heavy fogs every morning & rain all day. This house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling. His dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing after another went wrong. With it all, however, Mrs. Clemens seemed to gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of company--to brighten her surroundings. Clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles about the Italian language. To Twichell he reported progress: I have a handsome success in one way here. I left New York under a sort of half-promise to furnish to the Harper magazines 30,000 words this year. Magazining is difficult work because every third page represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article & are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10 cents a word instead of 30. But this time I had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start right in each case. I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; & the reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have I approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort (Livy) has done the same. On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle & not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I am dead. I shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of the year I expect to put in on a couple of long books (half- completed ones). No more magazine work hanging over my head. This secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this enchanting view of Florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that frame it, are the right conditions for work. They are a persistent inspiration. To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest. On this (second) floor Clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that. I go in from time to time every day & trade sass for a look. The central detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun- polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in Switzerland in the days of our youth. From this letter, which is of January 7, 1904, we gather that the weather had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens's health, notwithstanding she had an alarming attack in December. One of the stories he had finished was “The $30,000 Bequest.” The work mentioned, which would not see print until after his death, was a continuation of those autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the mood seized him. He experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with Redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking. He dictated some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued. Among these notes there is one elaborate description of the Villa di Quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not surprised to find he had become much attached to the place. The Italian spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his surroundings. Some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us here: We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south. This one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion. This little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the south end of the house. The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light through the 33 glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time & at no particular place, so far as I can see. Again at the end of March he wrote: Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very homelike to me. Under certain conditions I should like to go on living in it indefinitely. I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet. I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter. Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to Mrs. Clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to continued and almost continuous house-hunting. Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just the right elevation and surroundings. There were plenty of villas; but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. Still it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and new hope always to the invalid at home. “Even if we find it,” he wrote Howells, “I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her.” She had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more discouraging. On February 22d Clemens wrote in his note-book: At midnight Livy's pulse went to 192 & there was a collapse. Great alarm. Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her. And to MacAlister toward the end of March: We are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring effects for Mrs. Clemens. But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid. “But it will not last,” he said. The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which Clara Clemens sang. Clemens in his note-book says: April 8. Clara's concert was a triumph. Livy woke up & sent for her to tell her all about it, near midnight. But a day or two later she was worse again--then better. The hearts in that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and despair. One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with forebodings. Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens, Orion's wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the death of Aldrich's son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which occurred that spring. Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships. Clemens wrote Twichell: Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid in England was to Stanley's. Lord! how my friends & acquaintances fall about me now in my gray-headed days! Vereshchagin, Mommsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley. I have known Stanley 37 years. Goodness, who is there I haven't known? CCXXXI. THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more, as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens's room except for the briefest moment at a time. But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he reported: For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens (unberufen). After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks bright & young & pretty. She remains what she always was, the most wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and recuperative power that ever was. But ah, dear! it won't last; this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit! May 13, A.M. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute visits per day to the sick-room. And found what I have learned to expect--retrogression. There was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair to see the wonder of the early Italian summer. She had been a prisoner so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the more so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it. It was on Sunday, the 5th of June, that the end came. Clemens and Jean had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which promised to fulfil most of the requirements. They came home full of enthusiasm concerning it, and Clemens, in his mind, had decided on the purchase. In the corridor Clara said: “She is better to-day than she has been for three months.” Then quickly, under her breath, “Unberufen,” which the others, too, added hastily--superstitiously. Mrs. Clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all about the new property which was to become their home. She urged him to sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once, when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were. He remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well. Their talk was as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached himself, as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he had brought into her life. When he was summoned to go at last he chided himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and kissed him, saying: “You will come back,” and he answered, “Yes, to say good night,” meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom. He stood a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning them, her face bright with smiles. He was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation. He went to his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom done since Susy died. He went to the piano up-stairs and sang the old jubilee songs that Susy had liked to hear him sing. Jean came in presently, listening. She had not done this before, that he could remember. He sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “My Lord He Calls Me.” He noticed Jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on. Mrs. Clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her attendant: “He is singing a good-night carol to me.” The music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be lifted up. Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound. Clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed, Clara and Jean standing as if dazed. He went and bent over and looked into her face, surprised that she did not greet him. He did not suspect what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask: “Katie, is it true? Oh, Katie, is it true?” He realized then that she was gone. In his note-book that night he wrote: At a quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!... I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of married life that hurt Livy's heart. He envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace upon her face. He wrote to Howells and to Twichell, and to Mrs. Crane, those nearest and dearest ones. To Twichell he said: How sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing! This rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death; & when I went down again (2.30) it was complete. In all that night & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed strange. To Howells he recalled the closing scene: I bent over her & looked in her face & I think I spoke--I was surprised & troubled that she did not notice me. Then we understood & our hearts broke. How poor we are to-day! But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended! I would not call her back if I could. To-day, treasured in her worn, old Testament, I found a dear & gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 13, 1896, about our poor Susy's death. I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy. And in a few days: It would break Livy's heart to see Clara. We excuse ourself from all the friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come. Intimates--but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed. Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the old times & could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, & ease my heart! CCXXXII. THE SAD JOURNEY HOME A tidal wave of sympathy poured in. Noble and commoner, friend and stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence to the friend of mankind. The cablegrams came first--bundles of them from every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow. Howells, Twichell, Aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves learned the meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the language can supply to allay a heart's mourning, each recalling the rarity and beauty of the life that had slipped away. Twichell and his wife wrote: DEAR, DEAR MARK,--There is nothing we can say. What is there to say? But here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the living. HARMONY AND JOE. Howells in his letter said: She hallowed what she touched far beyond priests.... What are you going to do, you poor soul? A hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not, however, the beam of hope out of Helen Keller's illumined night: Do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as I reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and the light in their eyes though mine are closed. They were adrift again without plans for the future. They would return to America to lay Mrs. Clemens to rest by Susy and little Langdon, but beyond that they could not see. Then they remembered a quiet spot in Massachusetts, Tyringham, near Lee, where the Gilders lived, and so, on June 7th, he wrote: DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to do; at last I went to the girls with an idea--to ask the Gilders to get us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have not shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to be in time. An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was carried silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. She who is gone was our head, she was our hands. We are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. If she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near to death she would have told us where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were we. She was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing. We send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her heart when she died. S. L. CLEMENS. They arranged to sail on the Prince Oscar on the 29th of June. There was an earlier steamer, but it was the Princess Irene, which had brought them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel. During the period of waiting a curious thing happened. Clemens one day got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high window-sash. It did not move easily and his hand slipped. It was only by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far below. He mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to Frederick Duneka, he said: “Had I fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide. It was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and being misunderstood.” The homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically conveyed in his notes: June 29, 1904. Sailed last night at 10. The bugle-call to breakfast. I recognized the notes and was distressed. When I heard them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear unheeded. In my life there have been 68 Junes--but how vague & colorless 67 of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one! July 1, 1904. I cannot reproduce Livy's face in my mind's eye--I was never in my life able to reproduce a face. It is a curious infirmity--& now at last I realize it is a calamity. July 2, 1904. In these 34 years we have made many voyages together, Livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; I above with the crowd & lonely. July 3, 1904. Ship-time, 8 A.M. In 13 hours & a quarter it will be 4 weeks since Livy died. Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is our last one in company. Susy was a year old then. She died at 24 & had been in her grave 8 years. July 10, 1904. To-night it will be 5 weeks. But to me it remains yesterday--as it has from the first. But this funeral march--how sad & long it is! Two days more will end the second stage of it. July 14, 1904 (ELMIRA). Funeral private in the house of Livy's young maidenhood. Where she stood as a bride 34 years ago there her coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife then committed her departed spirit to God now. It was Joseph Twichell who rendered that last service. Mr. Beecher was long since dead. It was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this tender word of farewell: Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. Nor do we believe in it. We who journeyed through the bygone years in companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old. The way behind is long; the way before is short. The end cannot be far off. But what of that? Can we not say, each one: “So long that power hath blessed me, sure it still Will lead me on; O'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn, their angel faces smile, Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!” And so good-by. Good-by, dear heart! Strong, tender, and true. Good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away. Dr. Eastman, who had succeeded Mr. Beecher, closed the service with a prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we love was finished. Clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave, bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the German line: 'Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne'! CCXXXIII. BEGINNING ANOTHER HOME There was an extra cottage on the Gilder place at Tyringham, and this they occupied for the rest of that sad summer. Clemens, in his note-book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents. July 24, 1904. Rain--rain--rain. Cold. We built a fire in my room. Then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted. July 31. LEE, MASSACHUSETTS (BERKSHIRE HILLS). Last night the young people out on a moonlight ride. Trolley frightened Jean's horse--collision--horse killed. Rodman Gilder picked Jean up, unconscious; she was taken to the doctor, per the car. Face, nose, side, back contused; tendon of left ankle broken. August 10. NEW YORK. Clam here sick--never well since June 5. Jean is at the summer home in the Berkshire Hills crippled. The next entry records the third death in the Clemens family within a period of eight months--that of Mrs. Moffett, who had been Pamela Clemens. Clemens writes: September 1. Died at Greenwich, Connecticut, my sister, Pamela Moffett, aged about 73. Death dates this year January 14, June 5, September 1. That fall they took a house in New York City, on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, No. 21, remaining for a time at the Grosvenor while the new home was being set in order. The home furniture was brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange environment. Clemens wrote: We have not seen it for thirteen years. Katie Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years, cried when she told me about it to-day. She said, “I had forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely.” Clara Clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement with the care of a trained nurse. The life at 21 Fifth Avenue, therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family--Clemens and Jean. Clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tyringham, though without much success. He was not well; he was restless and disturbed; his heart bleak with a great loneliness. He prepared an article on Copyright for the 'North American Review',--[Published Jan., 7905. A dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to Thorwald Stolberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, D. C. One of the best of Mark Twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'Eve's Diary', which in the widest and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away. Adam's single comment at the end, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden,” was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. These two books, Adam's Diary and Eve's--amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. Only here the likeness ceases. No Serpent ever entered their Eden. And they never left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together. In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published “Saint Joan of Arc”--the same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before. Joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the public heart. Those who read it were likely to go back and read the Recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece. In his later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large, the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding. Letters came from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume. A distinguished educator wrote: I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any other piece of literature in any language. And this sentiment grew. The demand for the book increased, and has continued to increase, steadily and rapidly. In the long and last analysis the good must prevail. A day will come when there will be as many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain's works. [The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for the three years following 1904. The sales for that year in America were 1,726; for 1905, 2,445 for 1906, 5,381; for 1907, 6,574. At this point it passed Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Yankee, The Gilded Age, Life on the Mississippi, overtook the Tramp Abroad, and more than doubled The American Claimant. Only The Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Roughing It still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.] CCXXXIV. LIFE AT 21 FIFTH AVENUE The house at 21 Fifth Avenue, built by the architect who had designed Grace Church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within. It was a proper residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome Hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable setting for Mark Twain. But it was lonely for him. It lacked soul. He added, presently, a great AEolian Orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different moods. He believed that he would play it himself when he needed the comfort of harmony, and that Jean, who had not received musical training, or his secretary could also play to him. He had a passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures, though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical compositions. For Wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a letter to Mrs. Crane he said: Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so divinely beautiful as “Tannhauser.” It ought to be used as a religious service. Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply. Once, writing to Jean, he asked: What is your favorite piece of music, dear? Mine is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I have found that out within a day or two. It was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer themes of Chopin's nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the “Lorelei” and the “Erlking” and the Scottish airs never wearied him. Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known and laid away. He went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and intimate friends. Once he attended a small dinner given him by George Smalley at the Metropolitan Club; but it was a private affair, with only good friends present. Still, it formed the beginning of his return to social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning. As the months wore on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time habit. Then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises. The improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be maimed and destroyed each year, interested him. He estimated that the railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for publication. Once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim of a frightful trolley and train collision in Newark, New Jersey, he wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print. DEAR MISS MADELINE, Your good & admiring & affectionate brother has told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that bygone time. I wish I could take you sound & whole out of your bed & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there. For in my spirit I am merciful, and would not break their necks & backs also, as some would who have no feeling. It is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not an intrusion, you see. May you get well-& soon! Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. A very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to St. Clair McKelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway accident. DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful. As I understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before.... The government's official report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to take care of our railroad business. But it is characteristically American--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages. A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric Russia. Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote: It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest & peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan, or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference--if they have a preference. An article, “The Tsar's Soliloquy,” written at this time, was published in the North American Review for March (1905). He wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside. On a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type. “The Soliloquy,” however, is severe enough. It represents the Tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he presents: Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and worship?--manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle which is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately, none knows better than I: it is my clothes! Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. Then who is the real Emperor of Russia! My clothes! There is no other. The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote “King Leopold's Soliloquy,” the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields. Seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture of them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo, a domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the ward of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen nations, America and thirteen European states. Leopold promptly seized the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever committed by an assemblage of civilized people.] Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and Clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His interest did not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared: “I have said all I can say on that terrible subject. I am heart and soul in any movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot write any more.” His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely. His final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold when time should have claimed him. It ran: Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages after all the Caesars and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium. Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the Philippines, and in his letters to Twichell he did not hesitate to criticize the President's attitude in this and related matters. Once, in a moment of irritation, he wrote: DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the President. If I could only find the words to define it with! Here they are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome: “For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated Roosevelt the statesman and politician.” It's mighty good. Every time in twenty-five years that I have met Roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman & politician I find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy. It is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware of them; ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in his way.... But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it & (ought to) concede it. We are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane & irresponsible. He wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but that is the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or otherwise, it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people. It is set down here, because it is a part of Mark Twain's history, and also because a little while after his death there happened to creep into print an incomplete and misleading note (since often reprinted), which he once made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind. It seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded concerning the nation's servants. Clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the “War Prayer.” It pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters that tremendous invocation: God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder, Thy clarion, and lightning, Thy sword! and the “long prayer” for victory to the nation's armies. As the prayer closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the preacher's place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he begins: “I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!.... He has heard the prayer of His servant, your shepherd, & will grant it if such shall be your desire after I His messenger shall have explained to you its import--that is to say its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think. “God's servant & yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused & taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two--one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken & the unspoken.... “You have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently prayed, silently. And ignorantly & unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is completed into those pregnant words. “Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen! “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun- flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of one who is the Spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble & contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord; & Thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen.” (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits.” ............... It was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said. To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the “War Prayer,” stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. “Still you--are going to publish it, are you not?” Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. “No,” he said, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind. To Twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely: Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude. It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine. To Twichell he pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the very best methods known of diminishing the human race. What a life it is!--this one! Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes & obstructs it. After years of thought & labor I have arrived within one little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life. Damn such a world anyway. He generally wrote Twichell when he had things to say that were outside of the pale of print. He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least understand him and be honored by his confidence. In one letter of that year he said: I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow. If I tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I couldn't afford the risk. No, the certainty! The certainty that I wouldn't be satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again to-morrow; burn that and try again the next day. It happens so nearly every time. I have a family to support, & I can't afford this kind of dissipation. Last winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article three times before I got it to suit me. I Put $500 worth of work on it every day for ten days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained but 3,000 words-$900. I burned it & said I would reform. And I have reformed. I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically, because I don't have to make it suit me. It may not suit you, but that isn't any matter; I'm not writing it for that. I have used you as an equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I guess. I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions besides; I can't use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it; I dasn't use Clara, there's things I have to say which she wouldn't put up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws. And so--you're It. [See the preface to the “Autobiography of Mark Twain”: 'I am writing from the grave. On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it.' D.W.] CCXXXV. A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope. It was in a lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people, and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends. Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the painter, and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family, and many more. Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said: I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest- cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the middle of October. Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer and I were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago. Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired wanting for that man to get old. They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer colony which congregated there. There was much going to and fro among the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship. The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming outlook. Clemens wrote to Twichell: We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock. It is a woody solitude. We have no near neighbors. We have neighbors and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we live on a hill. I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friendship. It is the most remarkable thing I ever heard of. This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has turned out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.. It was a fantastic tale entitled “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” a sort of scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn him into a bird. His habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic nations and fantastic life problems. It was a satire, of course--Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree. He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had attained the proportions of a book of size. As a whole it would hardly have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous passages, and certainly not without interest. Its chief mission was to divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For extracts from “3,000 Years among the Microbes” see Appendix V, at the end of this work.] MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE BOOK: 3000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES By a Microbe WITH NOTES added by the same Hand 7000 years later Translated from the Original Microbic by Mark Twain His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an increasing calamity. Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair, perhaps for a day when we may claim them again. Once he wrote to Mrs. Crane: SUSY DEAR,--I have had a lovely dream. Livy, dressed in black, was sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet as she used to when she was in health. She said, “What is the name of your sweet sister?” I said, “Pamela.” “Oh yes, that is it, I thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write it down for me?” I reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands upon both, then said to myself, “It is only a dream,” and turned back sorrowfully & there she was still. The conviction flamed through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality. I said, “How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!” She only smiled and did not ask what dream I meant, which surprised me. She leaned her head against mine & kept saying, “I was perfectly sure it was a dream; I never would have believed it wasn't.” I think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory. I woke & did not know I had been dreaming. She was gone. I wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but I did not spend any thought upon that. I was too busy thinking of how vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still ours & with us. He had the orchestrelle moved to Dublin, although it was no small undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief drifted farther behind him. Sometimes, in the afternoon or in the evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land and sea, of the past and of the future, “Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,” of the friends he had known and of the things he had done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world. It was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which Howells once said: “We shall never know its like again. When he dies it will die with him.” It was during the summer at Dublin that Clemens and Rogers together made up a philanthropic ruse on Twichell. Twichell, through his own prodigal charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which Rogers knew. Rogers was a man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many of them of which the world will never know: In this case he said: “Clemens, I want to help Twichell out of his financial difficulty. I will supply the money and you will do the giving. Twichell must think it comes from you.” Clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a false light to them, and that Twichell should learn the truth of the gift, sooner or later. So the deed was done, and Twichell and his wife lavished their thanks upon Clemens, who, with his wife, had more than once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now. Clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them to Clara in Norfolk, and later to Rogers himself. He pretended to take great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed delight. To Rogers he wrote: I wanted her [Clara] to see what a generous father she's got. I didn't tell her it was you, but by and by I want to tell her, when I have your consent; then I shall want her to remember the letters. I want a record there, for my Life when I am dead, & must be able to furnish the facts about the Relief-of-Lucknow-Twichell in case I fall suddenly, before I get those facts with your consent, before the Twichells themselves. I read those letters with immense pride! I recognized that I had scored one good deed for sure on my halo account. I haven't had anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon. P. S.-I am hurrying them off to you because I dasn't read them again! I should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe I gave that money. Mr. Rogers hastily replied: MY DEAR CLEMENS,--The letters are lovely. Don't breathe. They are so happy! It would be a crime to let them think that you have in any way deceived them. I can keep still. You must. I am sending you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape detection. Don't get rattled. Seriously. You have done a kindness. You are proud of it, I know. You have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience. Joe Wadsworth and I once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a Christmas present. No crime in that. I always put my counterfeit money on the plate. “The passer of the sasser” always smiles at me and I get credit for doing generous things. But seriously again, if you do feel a little uncomfortable wait until I see you before you tell anybody. Avoid cultivating misery. I am trying to loaf ten solid days. We do hope to see you soon. The secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically) passed out of Clemens's mind altogether. He never remembered to tell Twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish. The Russian-Japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement occurred in August. The terms of it did not please Mark Twain. When a newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the subject he wrote: Russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and intolerable slavery. I was hoping there would be no peace until Russian liberty was safe. I think that this was a holy war, in the best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever charged with a higher mission. I think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and Russia's chain riveted; this time to stay. I think the Tsar will now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him, and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an immeasurable joy. I think Russian liberty has had its last chance and has lost it. I think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely comparable to what has been sacrificed by it. One more battle would have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of unborn Russians, and I wish it could have been fought. I hope I am mistaken, yet in all sincerity I believe that this peace is entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history. It was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells. It was the message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance of knowledge and human understanding. Clemens, a few days later, was invited by Colonel Harvey to dine with Baron Rosen and M. Sergius Witte; but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance. His telegram of declination apparently pleased the Russian officials, for Witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to take it home to show to the Tsar. It was as follows: To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as the impossible & achieved it. MARK TWAIN. But this was a modified form. His original draft would perhaps have been less gratifying to that Russian embassy. It read: To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence & hard work is acquiring it. MARK. There was still another form, brief and expressive: DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. Clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words. Charles Francis Adams wrote him: It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views I have myself all along entertained. And this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to him. Clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay entitled, “The Privilege of the Grave”--that is to say, free speech. He was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away, could be published without damage to his friends or family. An article entitled, “Interpreting the Deity,” he counted as among the things to be uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege. It is an article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the intentions of the Almighty, with historical examples of God's judgments and vindications. Here is a fair specimen. It refers to the chronicle of Henry Huntington: All through this book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions of God and with the reasons for the intentions. Sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out the one that brought the worms. Worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people. This has gone out now, but in the old times it was a favorite. It always indicated a case of “wrath.” For instance: “The just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end” (p. 400). It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt. The entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might well enough be printed to-day. It is not altogether clear why it was withheld, even then. He finished his Eve's Diary that summer, and wrote a story which was originally planned to oblige Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, to aid her in a crusade against bullfighting in Spain. Mrs. Fiske wrote him that she had read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection, and urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring. Her letter closed: I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring. The story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Spain. We would translate and circulate the story in that country. I have wondered if you would ever write it. With most devoted homage, Sincerely yours, MINNIE MADDERN FISKE. Clemens promptly replied: DEAR MRS. FISKE, I shall certainly write the story. But I may not get it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire. Later I will try it again--& yet again--& again. I am used to this. It has taken me twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I think.--[Probably “The Death Disk:”]--So do not be discouraged; I will stick to this one in the same way. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. It was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately. Within a month from the time he received Mrs. Fiske's letter he had written that pathetic, heartbreaking little story, “A Horse's Tale,” and sent it to Harper's Magazine for illustration. In a letter written to Mr. Duneka at the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds: This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional--it was a good while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. May you find an artist who has lost an idol. He explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls. We are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat. It is not one of Mark Twain's greatest stories, but its pathos brings the tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which it was intended to oppose. When it was published, a year later, Mrs. Fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have it printed for pamphlet circulation m Spain. A number of more or less notable things happened in this, Mark Twain's seventieth year. There was some kind of a reunion going on in California, and he was variously invited to attend. Robert Fulton, of Nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to Reno for a great celebration which was to be held there. Clemens replied that he remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the Overland stage in front of the Ormsby Hotel, in Carson City, and told how he would like to accept the invitation. If I were a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly, and I would go. I would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me I would talk--just talk. I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk--and have the time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent hail and farewell as they passed--Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry, Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart, Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton, North, Root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the “slaughter-house,” a precious possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake, Jack Williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and so on. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are going now. Those were the days!--those old ones. They will come no more; youth will come no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Would you like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my white head. Good-by. I drink to you all. Have a good time-and take an old man's blessing. In reply to another invitation from H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, he wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his “remnant of life.” A man who, like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does --that shameless old fictitious butterfly. (But if he comes don't tell him I said it, for it would hurt him & I wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his wing for anything. I only say it in envy of his indestructible youth anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.) And it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after this fashion: I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was suggested. Which, by the way, is a perfect example of Mark Twain's humorous manner, the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought. Most humorists would have been contented to end with the statement, “I could have gone earlier.” Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--“it was suggested.” CCXXXVI. AT PIER 70 Mark Twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and the returns were coming in. Some one of the old group was dying all the time. The roll-call returned only a scattering answer. Of his oldest friends, Charles Henry Webb, John Hay, and Sir Henry Irving, all died that year. When Hay died Clemens gave this message to the press: I am deeply grieved, & I mourn with the nation this loss which is irreparable. My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him endured 38 years without impairment. It was only a little earlier that he had written Hay an anonymous letter, a copy of which he preserved. It here follows: DEAR & HONORED SIR,--I never hear any one speak of you & of your long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride & praise--& out of the heart. I think I am right in believing you to be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one. There are majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation's great servants, but I believe, & I think I know, that you are the only one of whom the entire nation is proud. Proud & thankful. Name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who would lighten your burdens if I could, not add to them. Irving died in October, and Clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral. To MacAlister he wrote: I profoundly grieve over Irving's death. It is another reminder. My section of the procession has but a little way to go. I could not be very sorry if I tried. Mark Twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him to celebrate; and when Colonel Harvey proposed a birthday gathering in his honor, Clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and sandwiches in some snug place, with Howells, Henry Rogers, Twichell, Dr. Rice, Dr. Edward Quintard, Augustus Thomas, and such other kindred souls as were still left to answer the call. But Harvey had something different in view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh birthday feast, more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary gathering. He felt that the attainment of seventy years by America's most distinguished man of letters and private citizen was a circumstance which could not be moderately or even modestly observed. The date was set five days later than the actual birthday--that is to say, on December 5th, in order that it might not conflict with the various Thanksgiving holidays and occasions. Delmonico's great room was chosen for the celebration of it, and invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any distinction in America, and to many abroad. Of these nearly two hundred accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic regrets. What an occasion it was! The flower of American literature gathered to do honor to its chief. The whole atmosphere of the place seemed permeated with his presence, and when Colonel Harvey presented William Dean Howells, and when Howells had read another double-barreled sonnet, and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, “I will not say, 'O King, live forever,' but, 'O King, live as long as you like!'” and Mark Twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause and welcome. With a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. Those who had gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life but in theirs. They were there to see this supreme embodiment of the American spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. He, too, realized the drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he had himself once expressed it, “for a single, splendid moment on the Alps of fame outlined against the sun.” He must have remembered; for when he came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very first banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, “I hadn't any hair; I hadn't any teeth; I hadn't any clothes.” He sketched the meagerness of that little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully, delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far beneath the surface. He told of his habits of life, how he had attained seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no other regularity of habits. Then, at last, he reached that wonderful, unforgetable close: Threescore years and ten! It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time- expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable. The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, “Your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.” The tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now. If there were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these lines failed to see them or to hear of them. There was not one who was ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears. Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for him--Brander Matthews, Cable, Kate Douglas Riggs, Gilder, Carnegie, Bangs, Bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning. No other arrival at Pier 70 ever awoke a grander welcome. CCXXXVII. AFTERMATH The announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news accounts of it precipitated another avalanche. The carriers' bags were stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from every class of humanity. They were all full of love and tender wishes. A card signed only with initials said: “God bless your old sweet soul for having lived.” Aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the hall at Delmonico's. A group of English authors in London combined in a cable of congratulations. Anstey, Alfred Austin, Balfour, Barrie, Bryce, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Gosse, Hardy, Hope, Jacobs, Kipling, Lang, Parker, Tenniel, Watson, and Zangwill were among the signatures. Helen Keller wrote: And you are seventy years old? Or is the report exaggerated, like that of your death? I remember, when I saw you last, at the house of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said: “If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little.” Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the “seven-terraced summit” of knowing little. So probably you are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven! Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but only by premeditation. It was his observation and his logic that led him to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope. To Miss Keller he wrote: “Oh, thank you for your lovely words!” He was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the Society of Illustrators. Dan Beard, president, was also toast-master; and as he presented Mark Twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely girl, costumed as Joan of Arc, entered and, approaching him, presented him with a laurel wreath. It was planned and carried out as a surprise to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a reality. He was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments. Clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause was a worthy one. He spoke for the benefit of the Russian sufferers at the Casino on December 18th. Madame Sarah Bernhardt was also there, and spoke in French. He followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude English after hearing that divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue. It has always been a marvel to me--that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is! How expressive it seems to be! How full of grace it is! And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid it is! And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to understand it. It is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her. I have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but I have always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself--her fiery self. I have wanted to know that beautiful character. Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself--for I always feel young when I come in the presence of young people. And truly, at seventy, Mark Twain was young, his manner, his movement, his point of view-these were all, and always, young. A number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime. They all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas! they likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as surprising as it sounds, for with Mark Twain humor was never mere fun-making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his philosophy--its bloom and fragrance. When the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and a moment of calm had followed, Mark Twain set down some reflections on the new estate he had achieved. The little paper, which forms a perfect pendant to the “Seventieth Birthday Speech,” here follows: OLD AGE I think it likely that people who have not been here will be interested to know what it is like. I arrived on the thirtieth of November, fresh from carefree & frivolous 69, & was disappointed. There is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, “Oh, it is wonderful, perfectly wonderful!” Yes, it is disappointing. You say, “Is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked about them & told what they saw & felt? Why, it looks just like 69.” And that is true. Also it is natural, for you have not come by the fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the change; 70 looks like 69; 69 looked like 68; 68 looked like 67--& so on back & back to the beginning. If you climb to a summit & look back--ah, then you see! Down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country & climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the ice-summit where you are perched. You can make out where Infancy verged into Boyhood; Boyhood into down-lipped Youth; Youth into bearded, indefinite Young-Manhood; indefinite Young-Manhood into definite Manhood; definite Manhood, with large, aggressive ambitions, into sobered & heedful Husbandhood & Fatherhood; these into troubled & foreboding Age, with graying hair; this into Old Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself, “Would you do it again if you had the chance?” CCXXXVIII. THE WRITER MEETS MARK TWAIN We have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of egotism, the form of the telling must change. It was at the end of 1901 that I first met Mark Twain--at The Players Club on the night when he made the Founder's Address mentioned in an earlier chapter. I was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as I reached the head of the stairs I saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as I remember it, did not enter into my consciousness at all. I saw only that crown of white hair, that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured speech. I was surprised to see how frail and old he looked. From his pictures I had conceived him different. I did not realize that it was a temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of social demands. I have no idea how long I stood there watching him. He had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him nothing less than a hero to his readers. He rose presently to go, and came directly toward me. A year before I had done what new writers were always doing--I had sent him a book I had written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with a kindly letter. I made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him. It warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the time I confess I thought it doubtful. Then he was gone; but the mind and ear had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always clear. It was the following spring that I saw him again--at an afternoon gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because I met Mrs. Clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her, however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit. I think I spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon, and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are wells of human sympathy and free from guile. Bret Harte had just died, and during the afternoon Mr. Clemens asked me to obtain for him some item concerning the obsequies. It was more than three years before I saw him again. Meantime, a sort of acquaintance had progressed. I had been engaged in writing the life of Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, and I had found among the material a number of letters to Nast from Mark Twain. I was naturally anxious to use those fine characteristic letters, and I wrote him for his consent. He wished to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness itself. His admiration of Nast was very great. It was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book when it appeared; but that was 1904, his year of sorrow and absence, and the matter was postponed. Then came the great night of his seventieth birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use of the letters. There was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the next day, I think, that I sent him a copy of the book. It did not occur to me that I should hear of it again. We step back a moment here. Something more than a year earlier, through a misunderstanding, Mark Twain's long association with The Players had been severed. It was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the club. There was a movement among what is generally known' as the “Round Table Group”--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at a large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again. David Munro, associate editor of the North American Review--“David,” a man well loved of men--and Robert Reid, the painter, prepared this simple document: TO MARK TWAIN from THE CLANSMEN Will ye no come back again? Will ye no come back again? Better lo'ed ye canna be, Will ye no come back again? It was signed by Munro and by Reid and about thirty others, and it touched Mark Twain deeply. The lines had always moved him. He wrote: TO ROBT. REID & THE OTHERS-- WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charlie's heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine. I shall be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long. I hope you can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate. It will be many months before I can foregather with you, for this black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one whose memory is the only thing I worship. It is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver what I feel, anyway. I will put the contents of your envelope in the small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to me. S. L. C. So the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return to social life. At the completion of his seventieth year the club had taken action, and Mark Twain had been brought back, not in the regular order of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties. There was only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving. The Players, as a club, does not give dinners. Whatever is done in that way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room, where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty when expanded to its limit. That room and that table have mingled with much distinguished entertainment, also with history. Henry James made his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed it was his first, though this is by the way. A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the Prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on the 5th of January. It was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege. I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and I think David Munro was the first person I met at The Players. As he greeted me his eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to hear. He had been delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the Nast book. I suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of his. The night of January 5, 1906, remains a memory apart from other dinners. Brander Matthews presided, and Gilder was there, and Frank Millet and Willard Metcalf and Robert Reid, and a score of others; some of them are dead now, David Munro among them. It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of The Players, is placed at the side and not at the end of the long table. He was no longer frail and thin, as when I had first met him. He had a robust, rested look; his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting. Lit by the glow of the shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of the walls, he made a picture of striking beauty. One could not take his eyes from it, and to one guest at least it stirred the farthest memories. I suddenly saw the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West, where I had first heard uttered the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a group gathered around the evening lamp to hear the tale of the first pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had seemed only a wonderful poem and fairy tale. To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to me, I whispered something of this, and how, during the thirty-six years since then, no other human being to me had meant quite what Mark Twain had meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable thing which means more than either, and which we call “inspiration,” for lack of a truer word. Now here he was, just across the table. It was the fairy tale come true. Genung said: “You should write his life.” His remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such. When he persisted I attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the second, has proved its quality. He urged, in support of his idea, the word that Munro had brought concerning the Nast book, but nothing of what he said kindled any spark of hope. I could not but believe that some one with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and abilities had already been selected for the task. By and by the speaking began--delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the matter went out of my mind. When the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in general talk, I found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of the evening about his Joan of Arc, which I had recently re-read. To my happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all literature. I think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower rooms. At any rate, I presently found the faithful Charles Genung privately reasserting to me the proposition that I should undertake the biography of Mark Twain. Perhaps it was the brief sympathy established by the name of Joan of Arc, perhaps it was only Genung's insistent purpose--his faith, if I may be permitted the word. Whatever it was, there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of honor, which prompted me to say: “May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?” And something--dating from the primal atom, I suppose--prompted him to answer: “Yes, come soon.” This was on Wednesday night, or rather on Thursday morning, for it was past midnight, and a day later I made an appointment with his secretary to call on Saturday. I can say truly that I set out with no more than the barest hope of success, and wondering if I should have the courage, when I saw him, even to suggest the thought in my mind. I know I did not have the courage to confide in Genung that I had made the appointment--I was so sure it would fail. I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue and was shown into that long library and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep interest in the books and ornaments along the shelves as I waited. Then I was summoned, and I remember ascending the stairs, wondering why I had come on so futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer for having come at all. He was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit, with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard. He was delving through a copy of Huckleberry Finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which some random correspondent had asked explanation. He was commenting unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in general. He pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters ran along and blended into others more or less personal. By and by I told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had meant to me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large, black-and-gilt-covered book with its wonderful pictures and adventures--the Mediterranean pilgrimage. Very likely it bored him--he had heard it so often--and he was willing enough, I dare say, to let me change the subject and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro had brought. I do not remember what he said then, but I suddenly found myself suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though certainly it was something less--that I might some day undertake a book about himself. I expected the chapter to end at this point, and his silence which followed seemed long and ominous. He said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the undertaking, and had put it aside. He added that he had hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--a detailed story of personality and performance, of success and failure--was of course another matter, and that for such a work no arrangement had been made. He may have added one or two other general remarks; then, turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me, he said: “When would you like to begin?” There was a dresser with a large mirror behind him. I happened to catch my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it mentally: “This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams.” But even in a dream one must answer, and I said: “Whenever you like. I can begin now.” He was always eager in any new undertaking. “Very good,” he said. “The sooner, then, the better. Let's begin while we are in the humor. The longer you postpone a thing of this kind the less likely you are ever to get at it.” This was on Saturday, as I have stated. I mentioned that my family was still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get established in the city. I asked if Tuesday, January 9th, would be too soon to begin. He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired something about my plan of work. Of course I had formed nothing definite, but I said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with a stenographer, who had made the notes while I prompted the subject to recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary accumulations. Then he said: “I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. My manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed. I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key and come and go as you please.” That was always his way. He did nothing by halves; nothing without unquestioning confidence and prodigality. He got up and showed me the lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material. I did not believe it true yet. It had all the atmosphere of a dream, and I have no distinct recollection of how I came away. When I returned to The Players and found Charles Harvey Genung there, and told him about it, it is quite certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it true and pretended that he was not surprised. CCXXXIX. WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN On Tuesday, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable stenographer--Miss Josephine Hobby, who had successively, and successfully, held secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand. Clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some features of his own. He proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier autobiographical chapters, begun with Redpath in 1885, and continued later in Vienna and at the Villa Quarto. He said he did not think he could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical order. It was his purpose, he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him an especial gratification.--[As early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Harper & Brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the details were exchanged with Mr. Rogers. The document, however, was not completed.] He wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said, allowing me free access to them for any material I might find valuable. I could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any special episode or period. I believe this covered the whole arrangement, which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without further prologue. I ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. On the little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers, pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his shining hair. There was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the winter days were dull. Also the walls of the room were a deep, unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old. The outlines of that vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of classic value. He dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the Comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again to the more modern period, and closed, I think, with some comments on current affairs. It was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were accepted or waved aside. We were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. We constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment. When he turned at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away. “And how much I have enjoyed it!” he said. “It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table--always a most inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it.” The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind. It was always delightful, and always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of these at one instant, and another the next. I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just in the way that I first imagined. It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvelous reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished truth. It was his constant effort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syllable--worse than the worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. Those vividly real personalities that he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history. They often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years. His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded now. The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were true--marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the actual detail of these mattered little in such a record. The rest was history only as 'Roughing It' is history, or the 'Tramp Abroad'; that is to say, it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point. In a prefatory note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain's own lovely and whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings's sayings in the remark: “It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.” I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale. It is far from that. It is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself. It is only not reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history. Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials. It is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art. In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value. Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present. It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves. Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to Howells or Twichell, or to some member of his family. Such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation. It was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom. He had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which preceded his brother's death, and the talk of foreknowledge had continued. I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance that the future was a fixed quantity. “As absolutely fixed as the past,” he said; and added the remark already quoted.--[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued: “Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of events once it is started. It is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come.” It was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day. I have never been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-note of eternity. At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he burst out: “Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!” He had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much to say. I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he surprised me by answering: “Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity's boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age.” It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character. CCXL. THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN That was a busy winter for him socially. He was constantly demanded for this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a central figure. Once he presided at a Valentine dinner given by some Players to David Munro. He had never presided at a dinner before, he said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one, suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real Scotch occasion, with the Munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in honor of Scotland's gentlest son. An important meeting of that winter was at Carnegie Hall--a great gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding Booker T. Washington in his work for the welfare of his race. The stage and the auditorium were thronged with notables. Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain presided, and both spoke; also Robert C. Ogden and Booker T. Washington himself. It was all fine and interesting. Choate's address was ably given, and Mark Twain was at his best. He talked of politics and of morals--public and private--how the average American citizen was true to his Christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year, and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best to damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work. I used to be an honest man, but I am crumbling--no, I have crumbled. When they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago I went out and tried to borrow the money and couldn't. Then when I found they were letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in New York at a third of the price they were charging me I was hurt, I was indignant, and said, this is the last feather. I am not going to run this town all by myself. In that moment--in that memorable moment, I began to crumble. In fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. In fifteen minutes I was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and I lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property I've got in the world. I had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience. It was marvelous to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will. He did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only prepared the way with cheerfulness. Clemens and Choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind. Helen Keller was to be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork. She sent to Clemens one of her beautiful letters, in which she said: I should be happy if I could have spelled into my hand the words as they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind. Clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with Helen Keller at a little gathering in Lawrence Hutton's home, when she was about the age of fourteen. It was an incident that invited no elaboration, and probably received none. Henry Rogers and I went together. The company had all assembled and had been waiting a while. The wonderful child arrived now with her about equally wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan, and seemed quite well to recognize the character of her surroundings. She said, “Oh, the books, the books, so many, many books. How lovely!” The guests were brought one after another. As she shook hands with each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against Miss Sullivan's lips, who spoke against them the person's name. Mr. Howells seated himself by Helen on the sofa, and she put her fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face. After a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if Helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands and name the possessors of them. Miss Sullivan said, “Oh, she will have no difficulty about that.” So the company filed past, shook hands in turn, and with each hand-shake Helen greeted the owner of the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without hesitation. By and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down to the luncheon. I had to go away before it was over, and as I passed by Helen I patted her lightly on the head and passed on. Miss Sullivan called to me and said, “Stop, Mr. Clemens, Helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand. Won't you come back and do that again?” I went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, “Oh, it's Mr. Clemens.” Perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but I have never been able to do it. Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her hair? Some one else must answer this. It was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a very simple and rather amusing solution. Helen had come to pay a visit to Mark Twain's Connecticut home, Stormfield, then but just completed. He had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask her how she had recognized him that morning at Hutton's, in what had seemed such a marvelous way. She remembered, and with a smile said: “I smelled you.” Which, after all, did not make the incident seem much less marvelous. On one of the mornings after Miss Hobby had gone Clemens said: “A very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke.” He was shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken relays, suited to a performance of that sort. The reader may perhaps imagine the effect without further indication of it. “I was going on a yachting trip once, with Henry Rogers, when a reporter stopped me with the statement that Mrs. Astor had said that there had never been a gentleman in the White House, and he wanted me to give him my definition of a gentleman. I didn't give him my definition; but he printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper. I was angry at first, and wanted to bring a damage suit. When I came to read the definition it was a satisfactory one, and I let it go. Now to-day comes a letter and a telegram from a man who has made a will in Missouri, leaving ten thousand dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the State, on which shall be inscribed Mark Twain's definition of a gentleman. He hasn't got the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in which one of my books or speeches he can find it. I couldn't think, when I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me.” It was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no conclusion in the matter. Another telegram was brought in just then, which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old coachman, Patrick McAleer, who had begun in the Clemens service with the bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not survive more than a few days. This led him to speak of Patrick, his noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad. Clemens gave orders that everything possible should be done for Patrick's comfort. When the end came, a few days later, he traveled to Hartford to lay flowers on Patrick's bier, and to serve, with Patrick's friends--neighbor coachmen and John O'Neill, the gardener--as pall-bearer, taking his allotted place without distinction or favor. It was the following Sunday, at the Majestic Theater, in New York, that Mark Twain spoke to the Young Men's Christian Association. For several reasons it proved an unusual meeting. A large number of free tickets had been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it had been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the admission would be free to the public. The subject chosen for the talk was “Reminiscences.” When we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a considerable distance and a riot was in progress. A great crowd had swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the doors wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had locked them. As a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that presently dashed itself against the entrance. Windows and doors gave way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance. A moment later the house was packed solid. A detachment of police had now arrived, and in time cleared the street. It was said that amid the tumult some had lost their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did not learn until later. We had been taken somehow to a side entrance and smuggled into boxes.--[The paper next morning bore the head-lines: “10,000 Stampeded at the Mark Twain Meeting. Well-dressed Men and Women Clubbed by Police at Majestic Theater.” In this account the paper stated that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had been made.] It was peaceful enough in the theater until Mark Twain appeared on the stage. He was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously, “I thank you for this signal recognition of merit,” there was a still noisier outburst. In the quiet that followed he began his memories, and went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his daily dictations. At last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel suited to young men. It is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our education of life. We string them into jewels or into tinware, as we may choose. I have received recently several letters asking for counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident that may prove helpful to the young. It is my mission to teach, and I am always glad to furnish something. There have been a lot of incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me along faster than I wanted to go. He took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them; then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking. The answer came, “Thirty-five minutes.” He made as if to leave the stage, but the audience commanded him to go on. “All right,” he said, “I can stand more of my own talk than any one I ever knew.” Opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read: “In which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?” Then he added: I have not answered that telegram. I couldn't. I never wrote any such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just, merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would need nothing else in this world. He opened a letter. “From Howells,” he said. My old friend, William Dean Howells--Howells, the head of American literature. No one is able to stand with him. He is an old, old friend of mine, and he writes me, “To-morrow I shall be sixty-nine years old.” Why, I am surprised at Howells writing so. I have known him myself longer than that. I am sorry to see a man trying to appear so young. Let's see. Howells says now, “I see you have been burying Patrick. I suppose he was old, too.” The house became very still. Most of them had read an account of Mark Twain's journey to Hartford and his last service to his faithful servitor. The speaker's next words were not much above a whisper, but every syllable was distinct. No, he was never old-Patrick. He came to us thirty-six years ago. He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our new home. He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. He really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but he never regarded that a separation. As the children grew up he was their guide. He was all honor, honesty, and affection. He was with us in New Hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day we first met. In all the long years Patrick never made a mistake. He never needed an order; he never received a command. He knew. I have been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and I give it to you--Patrick McAleer. It was the sort of thing that no one but Mark Twain has quite been able to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to see him and to hear his voice. CCXLI. GORKY, HOWELLS, AND MARK TWAIN Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-making that had claimed him on his return from England, five years before. He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter, and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be called upon for remarks. He fell out of the habit of preparing his addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him confidence for this departure from his earlier method. There was seldom an afternoon or an evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning that the papers did not have some report of his doings. Once more, and in a larger fashion than ever, he had become “the belle of New York.” But he was something further. An editorial in the Evening Mail said: Mark Twain, in his “last and best of life for which the first was made,” seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American metropolis--an Aristides for justness and boldness as well as incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of his person. Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement. If he deigns to make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which overtaxes the energy and ability of the police. We must be glad that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand and his wit and wisdom continually on tap. His sound, breezy Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of snobbery. He cultivates respect for human rights by always making sure that he has his own. He talked one afternoon to the Barnard girls, and another afternoon to the Women's University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported to be moral tales. He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner Mr. Charles Putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had said, “When in doubt tell the truth,” he replied that he had invented that maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity. The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and searching satire in the body of what he said. It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals. The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied: DEAR SIR,--I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you so. Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood. If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that questionable companionship? Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me. Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the following March. The “tip” was sufficient. Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark Twain's door-steps. At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out, for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the letter without his authority, and Clemens replied: Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! The newspaper boys want that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and I'll take care of this end of the line. In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds: There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion. He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. But any one who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul, in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the scene with deep and true moral feeling. The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission. He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells, too, was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says: I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. Clemens's interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky at the “A Club,” No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners. Also he wrote a letter to be read by Tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs. The letter ran: DEAR MR. TCHAYKOFFSKY,--My sympathies are with the Russian revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will succeed, and now that I have talked with you I take heart to believe it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery, and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven. Most sincerely yours, MARK TWAIN. Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a literary dinner to be given in his honor. The movement was really assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously. Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue, one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study, and on opening the door I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had clipped a cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said: “Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens.” He shook his head violently. “No, I can't see anything now,” and in another moment had disappeared into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if, after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by I went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. When I had bought one, and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreieva, a Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected; but it was not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens, and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the dinner. Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreieva were evicted from a procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines. An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and standing guard at the door below. In 'My Mark Twain' he says: That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens. “How many?” he demanded. “Five,” the butler faltered. “Reporters?” The butler feigned uncertainty. “What would you do?” he asked me. “I wouldn't see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky but the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the impossibility of its being given now. Then he said: “American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs of morning at the lightest touch.” Later in the day he made this memorandum: Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's customs are and refrain from offending against them. The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.--[To Dan Beard he said, “Gorky made an awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his shirt-tail.”] The Gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the 18th of April I heard, at The Players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later, perhaps, I met Clemens coming out of No. 21. He asked: “Have you heard the news about San Francisco?” I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with big scare-heads; but I supposed the matter was exaggerated. “No,” he said, “I am afraid it isn't. We have just had a telephone message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is consuming the city. Come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there is a later edition.” We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and got some fresh extras. The news was indeed worse, than at first reported. San Francisco was going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in the perishing city. CCXLII. MARK TWAIN'S GOOD-BY TO THE PLATFORM It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that Mark Twain gave a “Farewell Lecture” at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier Gen. Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand dollars for a Mark Twain lecture; but Clemens' had replied that he was permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience that had to pay to hear him. “I always expect to talk as long as I can get people to listen to me,” he sand, “but I never again expect to charge for it.” Later came one of his inspirations, and he wrote: “I will lecture for one thousand dollars, on one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association.” It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices, “Mark Twain's Farewell Lecture,” were published without delay. I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called. Clemens came into the study where I was working; he often wandered in and out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying: “I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on the stage and help me.” I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. Then he said: “I am going to lecture on Fulton--on the story of his achievements. It will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair. Now and then, when I seem to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and I want you to pretend to prompt me. You don't need to laugh, or to pretend to be assisting in the performance any more than just that.” HANDBILL OF MARK TWAIN'S “FAREWELL LECTURE”: MARK TWAIN Will Deliver His Farewell Lecture CARNEGIE HALL. APRIL 19TH, 1906 FOR THE BENEFIT OF Robert Fulton Memorial Association MILITARY ORGANIZATION OLD GUARD IN FULL DRESS UNIFORM WILL BE PRESENT MUSIC BY OLD GUARD BAND TICKETS AND BOXES ON SALE AT CARNEGIE HALL AND WALDORF-ASTORIA SEATS $1.50, $1.00, 50 CENTS It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not for the moment occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to my immeasurable relief. It was a magnificent occasion. That spacious hall was hung with bunting, the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the republic. The band played “America” as Mark Twain entered, and the great audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events, he did a different thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means of livelihood. Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands. I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think few took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the entertainment would last, he had replied: I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour. There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. It did not matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a heroic chapter in a unique career. CCXLIII. AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters, already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant, and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief. It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of it, said: “I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars after I'm dead.” A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she might sit face to face with the great man. It was in the morning hour before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. She kept her contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of deepest reverence: “May I kiss your hand?” It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous. Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small, exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as she went, she said: “How God must love you!” “I hope so,” he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice “I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations.” Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell naturally into the habit of referring to him as “the King,” and in time the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others who loved him. He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prints, a few days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, “Why didn't you make more?” Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he had not donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since. “Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; I have tried to get it suppressed.” Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring. I had located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive, he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write a check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means. The purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres, to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres, and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the location. CCXLIV. TRAITS AND PHILOSOPHIES I brought to the dictation one morning the Omar Khayyam card which Twichell had written him so long ago; I had found it among the letters. It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said: How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omar Khayyam! When that card arrived I had already read the dozen quatrains or so in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of delight which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been from under my hand all these years. He had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him, and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation, some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony. He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said: “Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any crime she wishes in my name.” It was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very charming young lady. “I'm very glad,” he said, “and I am glad the Lord made her; I hope He will make some more just like her. I don't always approve of His handiwork, but in this case I do.” Then suddenly he added: “Well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these things.” He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift. “Yes,” he said, “it is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation and smoking. I seem to have inherited all those.” Continuing, he spoke of inherited traits in general. “There was Paige,” he said; “an ignorant man who could not make a machine himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one; but he invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the world has ever known. He watched over the expert draftsmen, and superintended the building of that marvel. Pratt & Whitney built it; but it was Paige's machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous gift. We don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them. They have come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals. Man is the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes that preceded him. One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world. In these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to that law is blameless. Man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of God. He widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race. You can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid, and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you describe all the lambs. There is hardly a creature that you cannot definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except man. Men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house-fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all frisky like the monkey. These things are all in him somewhere, and they develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment: We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or by his fine traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit for their possession. It is comical. He did not invent these things; he did not stock himself with them. God conferred them upon him in the first instant of creation. They constitute the law, and he could not escape obedience to the decree any more than Paige could have built the type-setter he invented, or the Pratt & Whitney machinists could have invented the machine which they built.” He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them. He halted in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added: “What an amusing creature the human being is!” It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and manner which carried an ineffable charm. It was difficult, indeed, to record the substance. I did not know shorthand, and I should not have taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or I would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts where he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them verbally. In these cases I have not hesitated to amend my notes where it seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality. CCXLV. IN THE DAY'S ROUND A number of dictations of this period were about Susy, her childhood, and the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his chapters. More than once after such dictations he reproached himself bitterly for the misfortunes of his house. He consoled himself a little by saying that Susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which might have made her childhood still more bright. Once he spoke of the biography she had begun, and added: “Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work! If I had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her, and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me told in her own way, year after year! If I had shown her that I cared, she might have gone on with it. We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw it away on those who care for it so little.” Then, after a moment of silence: “But we are repaid for it at last. There comes a time when we want their company and their interest. We want it more than anything in the world, and we are likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago. There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. Theirs is the praise we want, and the praise we are least likely to get.” His moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times. He spoke of Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both. He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens's life with privations, that the sorrow of Susy's death had hastened her own end. How darkly he painted it! One saw the jester, who for forty years had been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of tragedy. But such moods were evanescent. He was oftener gay than somber. One morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before. An artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most amusing thing in the world. But he had not been satisfied with it, and had attempted to improve on it at the party. He had told it with what he considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had followed. “A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine,” he said, “and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed an hour and a half. Then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'Lord, how pathetic!' For a moment I was stupefied. Then the fountains of my great deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty days and forty nights during as much as three minutes. By that time I realized it was my fault. I had overdone the thing. I started in to deceive them with elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at the end; but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to the humor you couldn't find it.” He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested. Once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the Back Number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its publisher and I its editor. I think I assented, and the dictation proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently. He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom could find the one most needed. Once, after a feverishly impatient search for a few moments, he invited Miss Hobby to leave the room temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear. He got up and we began to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment. It was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the size of it. “One could lose a dog in this bed,” he declared. Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his hand. He did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted. Its discovery was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to volume. Then he said: “There ought to be a room in this house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.” A moment later, when Miss Hobby returned, he was serene and happy again. He was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those around him--remarkably so, I thought, as a rule. But there were moments that involved risk. He had requested me to interrupt his dictation at any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me. At first I hesitated to do this, and cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished. Then he was likely to say: “Why didn't you stop me? Why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me?” So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and nearly always stopped him at the time. But if it happened that I upset his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly. He would say: “Now you've knocked everything out of my head.” Then, of course, I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again. I became lightning-proof at last; also I learned better to select the psychological moment for the correction. There was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps I have not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and life, and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals. But poetry was there as well. His presence was full of it: the grandeur of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured speech. Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all. At such times he had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed. His hands were so fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child. Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane, his eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and meaning to his words. I cannot recall the picture too often, or remind myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and to hear him. I do not know why I have not said before that he smoked continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to thought--though he smoked at most other times, for that matter. His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco; but I had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one. They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early training in the printing-office and on the river that had seasoned him to tobacco of that temper. Rich, admiring friends used to send him quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched them, and they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors. Once, to a minister who proposed to send him something very special, he wrote: I should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that I couldn't do it and remain honest. That is to say, if I allowed you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of the kind. I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had 60 years' experience. No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than anybody else. I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents I know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me. I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cents apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all presents; they are an accumulation of several years. I have never smoked one of them & never shall; I work them off on the visitor. You shall have a chance when you come. He smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent; and once, when he had bought a new, expensive English brier-root he regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me, saying: “I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you can't stand it, maybe it will suit me.” I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild. One day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey Depew was to resign his Senatorial seat and Mark Twain was to be nominated in his place. The fancy of this appealed to him, and the reporter was allowed to come up. He was a young man, and seemed rather nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated. His chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain's comment on the matter. Clemens said very little at the time. He did not wish to be a Senator; he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't think he would care for the job, anyway. When the reporter was gone, however, certain humorous possibilities developed. The Senatorship would be a stepping-stone to the Presidency, and with the combination of humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the Presidential chair the nation could expect an interesting time. Nothing further came of the matter. There was no such report. The young newspaper man had invented the whole idea to get a “story” out of Mark Twain. The item as printed next day invited a good deal of comment, and Collier's Weekly made it a text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the place. If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came. Sometimes we walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good while I could not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most people turned to look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the least come into their scope of vision. They saw only Mark Twain. The feeling was a more comfortably one at The Players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities. We sat at the Round Table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him. Once we went to the “Music Master,” that tender play of Charles Klein's, given by that matchless interpreter, David Warfield. Clemens was fascinated, and said more than once: “It is as permanent as 'Rip Van Winkle.' Warfield, like Jefferson, can go on playing it all his life.” We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed with Mark Twain's unstinted approval. Later, when I saw him at The Players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so happy. There were some billiard games going on between the champions Hoppe and Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them. He did not like to go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him. Just as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause. The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot had been made. Then they caught the figure of Mark Twain and realized that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction. The audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs. Such a tribute is not often paid to a private citizen. Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppe, which the billiardist's extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his game with intense eagerness. When it was over the referee said a few words and invited Mark Twain to speak. He rose and told them a story-probably invented on the instant. He said: “Once in Nevada I dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked up a cue and began to knock the balls around. The proprietor, who was a red-haired man, with such hair as I have never seen anywhere except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play. I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can shoot.' So I knocked them around, and thought I was doing pretty well, when he said, 'That's all right; I'll play you left-handed.' It hurt my pride, but I played him. We banked for the shot and he won it. Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and I went on chalking my cue; and he played and I chalked all through that game. When he had run his string out I said: “That's wonderful! perfectly wonderful! If you can play that way left-handed what could you do right-handed?' “'Couldn't do anything,' he said. 'I'm a left-handed man.'” How it delighted them! I think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season. A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire, for the summer--this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a year before, the Copley Greene place being now occupied by its owner. CCXLVI. THE SECOND SUMMER AT DUBLIN The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two or three miles from Dublin, just under Monadnock--a good way up the slope. It is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the handiwork of God is there. I had seen these things in paintings, but I had not dreamed that such a view really existed. The immediate foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and just at the right hand Monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end. It was a masterpiece of the Greater Mind, and of the highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man. A church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field, or stone wall, or cultivated land. It was lonely; it was unfriendly; it cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if God, after creating all the world, had wrought His masterwork here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that He had forgotten to give it a soul. In a sense this was true, for He had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men. It lacked the human touch; the human interest, and I could never quite believe in its reality. The time of arrival heightened this first impression. It was mid-May and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year's end to year's end. It seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty. Warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent. I believe Jean Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place. Something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods. She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit. She had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion. Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all. She was not yet strong, and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet retirement and have her physician's care. Miss Hobby came, and on the 21st of May the dictations were resumed. We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. Nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse of scenery. “I think I shall like it,” he said, “when I get acquainted with it, and get it classified and labeled, and I think we'll do our dictating out here hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place.” So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that panoramic background. During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now and then to look across the far-lying horizon. When it stormed we moved into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies. Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world--a commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the usual way. When the dictation finished early, there would be music--the music that he loved most--Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.--[Schubert, Op. 142, No. 2; Chopin, Op. 37, No. 2.]--It is easy to understand that this carried one a remove farther from the customary things of life. It was a setting far out of the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation. In my notes, made from day to day, I find that I have set down more than once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy. I had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the dictations, but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for he was not much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was through such a growth of beech timber as I have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. Then came a more open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume; and this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral, where the columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the top: a veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play. You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees. The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side. He sat more often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be looking through half-dosed lids toward the Monadnock heights, that were always changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted by or gathered in those lofty hollows. White and yellow butterflies hovered over the grass, and there were some curious, large black ants--the largest I have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip in and out of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us. Now and then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies. On June 1st I find in my note-book this entry: Warm and pleasant. The dictation about Grant continues; a great privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his associations with that foremost man of arms. He remained seated today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze. He wears his worn morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a measured accuracy that seldom calls for change. He is speaking just now of a Grant dinner which he attended where Depew spoke. One is impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of many; an honored figure of all. Earlier, when he had been chastising some old offender, he added, “However, he's dead, and I forgive him.” Then, after a moment's reflection, “No; strike that last sentence out.” When we laughed, he added, “We can't forgive him yet.” A few days later--it was June 4th, the day before the second anniversary of the death of Mrs. Clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor from the long dictation of the day before. Then his mind reverted to the tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it. It was hard work. He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost nothing. He gave it up at last, remarking, “We will not work to-morrow.” So we went away. He did not dictate on the 5th or the 6th, but on the 7th he resumed the story of Mrs. Clemens's last days at Florence. The weather had changed: the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on the mountains; Monadnock was blotted out. We expected him to go to the fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in his mind. A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders, which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture. For two hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life of the woman he had loved. It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very little literary work during these months. He had brought his “manuscript trunk” as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the “microbe” story and other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his “stock in trade,” as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into “autobiography.” Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone, made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring and suppressing so long. He wrote Howells in June: The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on. With intervals. I find that I've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for 155 days since January 9. To be exact, I've dictated 75 hours in 80 days & loafed 75 days. I've added 60,000 words in the month that I've been here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of that time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour. It's a plenty, & I'm satisfied. There's a good deal of “fat.” I've dictated (from January 9) 210,000 words, & the “fat” adds about 50,000 more. The “fat” is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which I or editors didn't das't to print. For instance, I am dumping in the little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago & which you said “publish & ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do it” (Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven). It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't to see print until I am dead. To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs & assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006--which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited. The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox, scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the constellations. Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence and the lack of it: “I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence. Reverence for what--for whom? Who is to decide what ought to command my reverence--my neighbor or I? I think I ought to do the electing myself. The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed--it is his privilege; the Christian doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough. They haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in. Each says that the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it. If you could do that you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles and get a reputation.” He was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but I remember that he read aloud 'After the Wedding' and 'The Mother'--those two beautiful word-pictures by Howells--which he declared sounded the depths of humanity with a deep-sea lead. Also he read a book by William Allen White, 'In Our Town', a collection of tales that he found most admirable. I think he took the trouble to send White a personal, hand-written letter concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as he said, to “loathe the use of the pen.” There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did not often leave the house. Once, at least, he assisted in an afternoon entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his invention of the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith, to the very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors. The “art” consisted mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set formula which would lead directly to them from any given subject. Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford days. Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk. But these things were seldom. Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a semi-business nature, usually going by the way of Fairhaven, where he would visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr. Rogers's yacht. Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar Harbor and elsewhere. Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs. Rogers after such a visit: DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--In packing my things in your house yesterday morning I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around, I thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does in similar circumstances like these. Two books, Mr. Rogers' brown slippers, & a ham. I thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used to have. I am very sorry it happened, but it sha'n't occur again & don't you worry. He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & I will send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't keep. CCXLVI. DUBLIN, CONTINUED In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In one of his dictations he said: The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine. Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes.... But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor. Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe.... I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden.... The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society.... I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it --furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness, the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac. Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me. This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber, and in its way regal. It was the loneliness of a king--King Lear. Yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence. It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this happened. When the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a series to illustrate what he called “The Progress of a Moral Purpose.” He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each photograph, numbering them from 1 to 7, laying each set in a sheet of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written: This series of q photographs registers with scientific precision, stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the mind of the human race's Oldest Friend. S. L. C. He added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others, because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into it, and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats, and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a neighbor. He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. These kittens he called Sackcloth and Ashes--Ashes being the joint name of the two that looked exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambols always amused him. He would stop any time in the midst of dictation to enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting. With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped back and said: “Walk in, gentlemen. I always give precedence to royalty.” And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of disappointment and disgust. I remember once, when he was walking up and down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its action. At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air, exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded away. Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies. In that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers. Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. Even newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman, celebrated his seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in '91, and in Vienna in '98, in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. His tribute ran: To HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRITISH PREMIER,--Congratulations, not condolences. Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave unless we want to. When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was hardly even respected. MARK TWAIN. He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he did not recall it. Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters, supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations, after reading them aloud with great effect. To tell the truth, they did seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas. The letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form. Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents: DEAR MISS STOCKBRIDGE (if she really exists), 257 Benefit Street (if there is any such place): Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter. This whole fake is delightful; & I tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself & that I am your guileless prey. (But never mind, it isn't any matter.) Now as to publication---- He set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the letters should be completed. Clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or writing. His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its favor. His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all, so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand. He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life. Once he said: “Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as much.” He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading, as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, and his verdict: “That is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English, and written when we had no vocabulary.” “A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?” “It is indeed.” Still I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. Mark Twain's English always focused exactly. CCXLVIII. “WHAT IS MAN?” AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately, the Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before and added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the De Vinne Press was engaged to do the work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the superintendent of the De Vinne company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually distributed to intimate friends.--[In an introductory word (dated February, 1905) the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred to the Monday Evening Club essay, “What Is Happiness?” (February, 1883). See chap. cxli.]--A number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. It was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and “man the irresponsible machine” are the main features of 'What Is Man' and both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, “upward and still upward,” no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. Once admitting the postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. It was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of created life. Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to “surround every thing, like the sky,” he answered: “Yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere.” Colonel Harvey came to Dublin that summer and persuaded Clemens to let him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the North American Review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly. The matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned. Colonel Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out. It may be said that most of the chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been possible to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications might have been avoided. It does not matter now, and it was not a matter of very wide import then. The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars--a comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the property at Redding. He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some preliminary plans. Clara Clemens, at Norfolk, was written to of the matter. A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the family to see that beautiful hilltop. She was well pleased with the situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand. Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it “Autobiography House,” as it was to be built out of the Review money, and he said: “If you will build on my farm and live there it will set Mrs. Howells's health up for sure. Come and I'll sell you the site for twenty-five dollars. John will tell you it is a choice place.” The unusual summer was near its close. In my notebook, under date of September 16th, appears this entry: Windy in valleys but not cold. This veranda is protected. It is peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer's end. This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days later. I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and apparently I made no record of it; but I do not think it could have been later than the 20th. It had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvelous summer such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech--always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be; whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of human-kind. CCXLIX. BILLIARDS The return to New York marked the beginning of a new era in my relations with Mark Twain. I have not meant to convey up to this time that there was between us anything resembling a personal friendship. Our relations were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature. He was twenty-six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments was not measurable. With such conditions friendship must be a deliberate growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf. Truth requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid, material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a billiard-table.--[Clemens had been without a billiard-table since 1891, the old one having been disposed of on the departure from Hartford.] It was a present from Mrs. Henry H. Rogers, and had been intended for his Christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested delicately that if he had it “right now” he could begin using it sooner. So he went one day with Mr. Rogers to the Balke-Collender Company, and they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the best that money could buy. He was greatly excited over the prospect, and his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it was large enough for billiard purposes. Then his bed was moved into the study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed and hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling. The billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting. Meantime, Clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the notion of spending the winter in Egypt, on the Nile. He had gone so far, within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he might continue his dictations. He was quite full of the idea just at the moment when the billiard table was being installed. He had sent for a book on the subject--the letters of Lady Duff-Gordon, whose daughter, Janet Ross, had become a dear friend in Florence during the Viviani days. He spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the New York dictations, a month or more following the return from Dublin. When the dictation ended he said: “Have you any special place to lunch to-day?” I replied that I had not. “Lunch here,” he said, “and we'll try the new billiard-table.” I said what was eminently true--that I could not play--that I had never played more “than a few games of pool, and those very long ago. “No matter,” he answered; “the poorer you play, the better I shall like it.” So I remained for luncheon and we began, November 2d, the first game ever played on the Christmas table. We played the English game, in which caroms and pockets both count. I had a beginner's luck, on the whole, and I remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association. When it was ended he said: “I'm not going to Egypt. There was a man here yesterday afternoon who said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it's too far away from this billiard-table.” He suggested that I come back in the evening and play some more. I did so, and the game lasted until after midnight. He gave me odds, of course, and my “nigger luck,” as he called it, continued. It kept him sweating and swearing feverishly to win. Finally, once I made a great fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets. “Well,” he said, “when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at every pore.” After that the morning dictations became a secondary interest. Like a boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never seemed to come quick enough to suit him. I remained regularly for luncheon, and he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might the sooner get up-stairs to the billiard-room. His earlier habit of not eating in the middle of the day continued; but he would get up and dress, and walk about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that marvelous, marvelous talk which I was always trying to remember, and with only fractional success at best. To him it was only a method of killing time. I remember once, when he had been discussing with great earnestness the Japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was about ending, and he said: “Now we'll proceed to more serious matters--it's your--shot.” And he was quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a much larger interest. To the donor of his new possession Clemens wrote: DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--The billiard-table is better than the doctors. I have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles every day with the cue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, I think. Through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body & exercises them all. The games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until midnight, with 2 hours' intermission for dinner & music. And so it is 9 hours' exercise per day & 10 or 12 on Sunday. Yesterday & last night it was 12--& I slept until 8 this morning without waking. The billiard-table as a Sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in Pennsylvania & give it 30 in the game. If Mr. Rogers will take to daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, I think. We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half from New York. It is decided. With love & many thanks. S. L. C. Naturally enough, with continued practice I improved my game, and he reduced my odds accordingly. He was willing to be beaten, but not too often. Like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his favor. We set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed him winner. It was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and I wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to Mrs. Rogers for her gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me. The disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer mattered. The pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do not count. To recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early billiard-days would be to fill a large volume. I can preserve no more than a few characteristic phases. He was not an even-tempered player. When the balls were perverse in their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with his opponent--critical and even fault-finding. Then presently a reaction would set in, and he would be seized with remorse. He would become unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as I knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt, an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation. Naturally, this was a mood that I enjoyed less than that which had induced it. I did not wish him to humble himself; I was willing that he should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet I am glad, as I remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes the sum of his great humanity. Indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man, but superman. Nor does this term apply only to his psychology. In no other human being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth. At three or four o'clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue. He played always at high pressure. Now and then, in periods of adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general. But, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and humor of it, even in the moment of his climax. Once, when he found it impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and more restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds blackened. Finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one or two of them on the floor. I do not recall his exact remarks during the performance; I was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and those sublime utterances were lost. I gathered up the balls and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet, like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by. After a little he said: “This is a most amusing game. When you play badly it amuses me, and when I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you.” His enjoyment of his opponent's perplexities was very keen. When he had left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously. I used to affect to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule. Once, when he had made the conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation accordingly, I was tempted to remark: “Whenever I see you laugh at a thing like that I always doubt your sense of humor.” Which seemed to add to his amusement. Sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer ostensible advice, suggesting that I should shoot here and there--shots that were possible, perhaps, but not promising. Often I would follow his advice, and then when I failed to score his amusement broke out afresh. Other billiardists came from time to time: Colonel Harvey, Mr. Duneka, and Major Leigh, of the Harper Company, and Peter Finley Dunne (Mr. Dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were not dependable for daily and protracted sessions. Any number of his friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to a single individual. Even I could not have done it--could not have afforded it, however much I might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not been contributory to my work. To me the association was invaluable; it drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream of picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate insight into his character. He was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he might have met pleasantly elsewhere. One afternoon a young man whom he had casually invited to “drop in some day in town” happened to call in the midst of a very close series of afternoon games. It would all have been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the couch and “bet on the game,” as Clemens suggested, after the greetings were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of being entertaining. He insisted on walking about the room and getting in the way, and on talking about the Mark Twain books he had read, and the people he had met from time to time who had known Mark Twain on the river, or on the Pacific coast, or elsewhere. I knew how fatal it was for him to talk to Clemens during his play, especially concerning matters most of which had been laid away. I trembled for our visitor. If I could have got his ear privately I should have said: “For heaven's sake sit down and keep still or go away! There's going to be a combination of earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this thing up.” I did what I could. I looked at my watch every other minute. At last, in desperation, I suggested that I retire from the game and let the visitor have my cue. I suppose I thought this would eliminate an element of danger. He declined on the ground that he seldom played, and continued his deadly visit. I have never been in an atmosphere so fraught with danger. I did not know how the game stood, and I played mechanically and forgot to count the score. Clemens's face was grim and set and savage. He no longer ventured even a word. By and by I noticed that he was getting white, and I said, privately, “Now, this young man's hour has come.” It was certainly by the mercy of God just then that the visitor said: “I'm sorry, but I've got to go. I'd like to stay longer, but I've got an engagement for dinner.” I don't remember how he got out, but I know that tons lifted as the door closed behind him. Clemens made his shot, then very softly said: “If he had stayed another five minutes I should have offered him twenty-five cents to go.” But a moment later he glared at me. “Why in nation did you offer him your cue?” “Wasn't that the courteous thing to do?” I asked. “No!” he ripped out. “The courteous and proper thing would have been to strike him dead. Did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?” He was blowing off steam, and I knew it and encouraged it. My impulse was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but I suspected that would be indiscreet. He made some further comment on the propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a travesty of an old hymn: “How tedious are they Who their sovereign obey,” and so loudly that I said: “Aren't you afraid he'll hear you and come back?” Whereupon he pretended alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in boundless good-humor. I have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods. He was not to be learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him longest did not learn him at all. We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day. He invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with almost every shot. It happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday. Ill health had banished every one, even the secretary. Flowers, telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers; but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the Gilders--late in the afternoon. When they had gone we went down to dinner. We were entirely alone, and I felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an occasion. Once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from “Faust.” It was a thing I had not seen him do before, and I never saw him do it again. When he came back to the table he said: “Speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become only shadows and might as well be in the grave. Only those whom one has really loved mean anything at all. Of my playmates I recall John Briggs, John Garth, and Laura Hawkins--just those three; the rest I buried long ago, and memory cannot even find their graves.” He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night, when he stopped playing, he said: “I have never had a pleasanter day at this game.” I answered, “I hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing it.” “Yes,” he said, “still playing the best game on earth.” CCL. PHILOSOPHY AND PESSIMISM In a letter to MacAlister, written at this time, he said: The doctors banished Jean to the country 5 weeks ago; they banished my secretary to the country for a fortnight last Saturday; they banished Clara to the country for a fortnight last Monday.... They banished me to Bermuda to sail next Wednesday, but I struck and sha'n't go. My complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the very best assets I've got, for it excuses me from every public function this winter--& all other winters that may come. If he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of a very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which were more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period. I conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on occasion. For a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants. It was a holiday most of the time. We hurried through the mail in the morning and the telephone calls; then, while I answered such letters as required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to Miss Hobby, after which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening. When callers were reported by the butler, I went down and got rid of them. Clara Clemens, before her departure, had pinned up a sign, “NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M.,” which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed. Clemens occasionally planned excursions to Bermuda and other places; but, remembering the billiard-table, which he could not handily take along, he abandoned these projects. He was a boy whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time. There were likely to be irritations in his morning's mail, and more often he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully sifted. So many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made the claim of more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long and trivial letters. “I have stirred up three generations,” he said; “first the grandparents, then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren will begin to arrive soon.” His mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting. One could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the contents. Going over one assortment he burst out: “Look at them! Look how trivial they are! Every envelope looks as if it contained a trivial human soul.” Many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of one pattern. He was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible to bear more than a line or two of them. Yet a fresh, well-expressed note of appreciation always pleased him. “I can live for two months on a good compliment,” he once said. Certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him relentlessly. Of one such he remarked: “That woman intends to pursue me to the grave. I wish something could be done to appease her.” And again: “Everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to me--writes to me to get it.” These morning sessions were likely to be of great interest. Once a letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist. “That word perfectly disgusts me,” he said, and his features materialized the disgust, “just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that one can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he can change the color of his hair. The reason why a man is a pessimist or an optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so; and this man [a minister of the Gospel who was going to explain life to him] is going to tell me why he isn't a pessimist. Oh, he'll do it, but he won't tell the truth; he won't make it short enough.” Yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages, theological arguments, and consolations. He might have said to them: “Oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that long ago I played with and set aside.” He could have said it and spoken the truth; but I believe he did not even think it. He listened to any one for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his behalf. One morning he read aloud a lecture given in London by George Bernard Shaw on religion, commenting as he read. He said: “This letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were equally frank]. There is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird, and so on down; that is their business. There is always enough for each one to live on. It is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man's property or life if he is strong enough and wants to take it. It is not immoral to create the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly these things.” At one place in the lecture Shaw had said: “No one of good sense can accept any creed to-day without reservation.” “Certainly not,” commented Clemens; “the reservation is that he is a d--d fool to accept it at all.” He was in one of his somber moods that morning. I had received a print of a large picture of Thomas Nast--the last one taken. The face had a pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years. Clemens looked at the picture several moments without speaking. Then he broke out: “Why can't a man die when he's had his tragedy? I ought to have died long ago.” And somewhat later: “Once Twichell heard me cussing the human race, and he said, 'Why, Mark, you are the last person in the world to do that--one selected and set apart as you are.' I said 'Joe, you don't know what you are talking about. I am not cussing altogether about my own little troubles. Any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when I read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on I realize what a creature the human animal is. Don't you care more about the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?' Joe said he did, and shut up.” It occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers. “No difference,” he said. “I read books printed two hundred years ago, and they hurt just the same.” “Those people are all dead and gone,” I objected. “They hurt just the same,” he maintained. I sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by his tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and stirred even to violence. Once following the dictation, when I came to the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently much depressed. He said: “I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end to it all. I will kill myself.” “You have much to live for----” “But I am so tired of the eternal round,” he interrupted; “so tired.” And I knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had come to him that day in Florence, and would never pass away. I referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief he would find in his country home. He shook his head. “The country home I need,” he said, fiercely, “is a cemetery.” Yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began. He was gay and hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game. H. H. Rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very long calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long, and whose interests were so vast and innumerable. He would come in where we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would pick up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then. More often, however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the morning. They were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or perhaps Clemens would read aloud something he had written. But once, after greetings, he began: “Well, Rogers, I don't know what you think of it, but I think I have had about enough of this world, and I wish I were out of it.” Mr. Rogers replied, “I don't say much about it, but that expresses my view.” This from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers of the time was impressive. Each at the mountain-top of his career, they agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a desire to experiment with the next stage. One could remember a thousand poor and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling and starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling. Well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth. One could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over. CCLI. A LOBBYING EXPEDITION Clara Clemens came home now and then to see how matters were progressing, and very properly, for Clemens was likely to become involved in social intricacies which required a directing hand. The daughter inherited no little of the father's characteristics of thought and phrase, and it was always a delight to see them together when one could be just out of range of the crossfire. I remember soon after her return, when she was making some searching inquiries concerning the billiard-room sign, and other suggested or instituted reforms, he said: “Oh well, never mind, it doesn't matter. I'm boss in this house.” She replied, quickly: “Oh no, you're not. You're merely owner. I'm the captain--the commander-in-chief.” One night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that year. During several previous summers she had planned to visit Vienna to see her old music-master, Leschetizky, once more before his death. She said: “Leschetizky is getting so old. If I don't go soon I'm afraid I sha'n't be in time for his funeral.” “Yes,” said her father, thoughtfully, “you keep rushing over to Leschetizky's funeral, and you'll miss mine.” He had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection, and the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment. During a moment between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his exercise in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a doubt of her father's gift for social management. I said: “Oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong.” “Yes, I know,” she answered. “The king can do no wrong; but he frightens me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it.” He came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent performance of Roosevelt's, which had stirred up a good deal of newspaper amusement--it was the Storer matter and those indiscreet letters which Roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship which Storer so much desired. Miss Clemens was inclined to defend the President, and spoke with considerable enthusiasm concerning his elements of popularity, which had won him such extraordinary admiration. “Certainly he is popular,” Clemens admitted, “and with the best of reasons. If the twelve apostles should call at the White House, he would say, 'Come in, come in! I am delighted to see you. I've been watching your progress, and I admired it very much.' Then if Satan should come, he would slap him on the shoulder and say, 'Why, Satan, how do you do? I am so glad to meet you. I've read all your works and enjoyed every one of them.' Anybody could be popular with a gift like that.” It was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her: “Ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the ranch, Paine and I are going to Washington on a vacation. You don't seem to admire our society much, anyhow.” There were still other reasons for the Washington expedition. There was an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible means to get the measure through. Clemens, during Cleveland's first administration, some nineteen years before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through S. S. (“Sunset”) Cox had obtained the “privileges of the floor” of the House, which had enabled him to canvass the members individually. Cox assured the doorkeeper that Clemens had received the thanks of Congress for national literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege. This was not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those days, and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded excellent results. Clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and believed that his friendship with Speaker Cannon--“Uncle Joe”--would obtain for him a similar privilege. The Copyright Association working in its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body. “I canvassed the entire House personally that other time,” he said. “Cox introduced me to the Democrats, and John D. Long, afterward Secretary of the Navy, introduced me to the Republicans. I had a darling time converting those members, and I'd like to try the experiment again.” I should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season. On the return from Dublin he had said: “I can't bear to put on black clothes again. I wish I could wear white all winter. I should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized. Their clothing makes a great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and to the spirit--a garden of Eden for charm and color. “The men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the garden like so many charred stumps. If we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? I should like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes, and so would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it. If I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning clothed as I would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant and the congregation would come tagging after me. They would scoff, of course, but they would envy me, too. When I put on black it reminds me of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round.” It was not long after this that he said: “I have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let the critics say what they will.” So his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening dress and on special occasions. It was a gratifying change, and though the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened by the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person. He had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive. This departure of costume came along a week or two before the Washington trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon Washington in December in that snowy plumage. I ventured: “This is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to invite any half-way measures. I should vote in favor of the white suit.” I think Miss Clemens was for it, too. She must have been or the vote wouldn't have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea. At all events, the white suits came along. We were off the following afternoon: Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the Appletons, one of the Putnams, George Bowker, and others were on the train. On the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into the possibility of originating a new one. Clemens said: “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.” We put up at the Willard, and in the morning drove over to the Congressional Library, where the copyright hearing was in progress. There was a joint committee of the two Houses seated round a long table at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill, mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical music-rolls. The fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was not viewed with favor by most of the writers. Clemens referred to the musical contingent as “those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of their own.” I should mention that early that morning Clemens had written this letter to Speaker Cannon: December 7, 1906. DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next week, but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish this for your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. I have arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it. Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don't wait for others--there isn't time. I have stayed away and let Congress alone for seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks. Congress knows it perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered. Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick. When shall I come? With love and a benediction; MARK TWAIN. We went over to the Capitol now to deliver to “Uncle Joe” this characteristic letter. We had picked up Clemens's nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, at the Library, and he came along and led the way to the Speaker's room. Arriving there, Clemens laid off his dark overcoat and stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians. He had been noticed as he entered the Capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close behind. Within less than a minute word was being passed through the corridors that Mark Twain was at the Capitol in his white suit. The privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall outside. Speaker Cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he “billowed” in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with such a rush and tide of life. After greetings, Clemens produced the letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition. Uncle Joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it were really a petition, as in fact it was. He smiled, but he said, quite seriously: “That is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by when I am permitted any such liberties. Tom Reed, when he was Speaker, inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of the floor of the House.” “I got in the other time,” Clemens insisted. “Yes,” said Uncle Joe; “but that ain't now. Sunset Cox could let you in, but I can't. They'd hang me.” He reflected a moment, and added: “I'll tell you what I'll do: I've got a private room down-stairs that I never use. It's all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to. I'll let you have it as long as you want to stay here, and I'll give you my private servant, Neal, who's been here all his life and knows every official, every Senator and Representative, and they all know him. He'll bring you whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him. You can have the members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much as you please. I'd give you a key to the room, only I haven't got one myself. I never can get in when I want to, but Neal can get in, and he'll unlock it for you. You can have the room, and you can have Neal. Now, will that do you?” Clemens said it would. It was, in fact, an offer without precedent. Probably never in the history of the country had a Speaker given up his private room to lobbyists. We went in to see the House open, and then went down with Neal and took possession of the room. The reporters had promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author, led him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired questions at him, and kept their note-books busy. He made a great figure, all in white there among them, and they didn't fail to realize the value of it as “copy.” He talked about copyright, and about his white clothes, and about a silk hat which Howells wore. Back in the Speaker's room, at last, he began laying out the campaign, which would begin next day. By and by he said: “Look here! I believe I've got to speak over there in that committee-room to-day or to-morrow. I ought to know just when it is.” I had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it, which I did at once. I hurried back faster than I had gone. “Mr. Clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded full; people waiting to hear you.” “The devil!” he said. “Well, all right; I'll just lie down here a few minutes and then we'll go over. Take paper and pencil and make a few headings.” There was a couch in the room. He lay down while I sat at the table with a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently he rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready. It was half past three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with people and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside. Herbert Putnam, the librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and Clemens, removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white armor. There was a perceptible stir. Howells, startled for a moment, whispered: “What in the world did he wear that white suit for?” though in his heart he admired it as much as the others. I don't remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying nothing important. Whoever it was, he was followed by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited interest. Then it was Mark Twain's turn. He did not stand by his chair, as the others had done, but walked over to the Speaker's table, and, turning, faced his audience. I have never seen a more impressive sight than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room. He never touched his notes; he didn't even remember them. He began in that even, quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for a word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, I suppose, had ever heard. Certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading. The weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull, statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and dreary platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as copyright champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded for the long waiting. They began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and smile, like flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the refreshing shower that means renewed life and vigor. Every listener was as if standing on tiptoe. When the last sentence was spoken the applause came like an explosion.--[Howells in his book My Mark Twain speaks of Clemens's white clothing as “an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.” He adds: “The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.”] There came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a word and to shake his hand. But he was anxious to get away. We drove to the Willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner. He was elated, and said the occasion required full-dress. We started down at last, fronted and frocked like penguins. I did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect. I supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room without passing through the long corridor known as “Peacock Alley,” because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables of the national capital. When we reached the entrance of the dining-room he said: “Isn't there another entrance to this place?” I said there was, but that it was very conspicuous. We should have to go down the long corridor. “Oh, well,” he said, “I don't mind that. Let's go back and try it over.” So we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine, stately flight of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into “Peacock Alley.” To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner. I did not again make the mistake of taking him around to the more secluded elevator. I aided and abetted him every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway, and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of “Peacock Alley.” The dinner was a continuous reception. No sooner was he seated than this Congressman and that Senator came over to shake hands with Mark Twain. Governor Francis of Missouri also came. Eventually Howells drifted in, and Clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes. Back in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed over “Uncle Joe's” surrender to the “copyright bandits,” and turned in for the night. We were at the Capitol headquarters in Speaker Cannon's private room about eleven o'clock next morning. Clemens was not in the best humor because I had allowed him to oversleep. He was inclined to be discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members would come down to see him. He expressed a wish for some person of influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking gloomily. I slipped out and found the Speaker's colored body-guard, Neal, and suggested that Mr. Clemens was ready now to receive the members. That was enough. They began to arrive immediately. John Sharp Williams came first, then Boutell, from Illinois, Littlefield, of Maine, and after them a perfect procession, including all the leading lights--Dalzell, Champ Clark, McCall--one hundred and eighty or so in all during the next three or four hours. Neal announced each name at the door, and in turn I announced it to Clemens when the press was not too great. He had provided boxes of cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, Clemens in his white suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully excited. There were chairs, but usually there was only standing room. He was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when at last it was over, and Champ Clark, who I believe remained longest and was most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared that he was not a particle tired, and added: “I believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass.” He was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success. Neal, who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill. We drove to the hotel and dined that night with the Dodges, who had been neighbors at Riverdale. Later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered around him, among them I remember the minister from Costa Rica, the Italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he had known during his European residence. Some one told of traveling in India and China, and how a certain Hindu “god” who had exchanged autographs with Mark Twain during his sojourn there was familiar with only two other American names--George Washington and Chicago; while the King of Siam had read but three English books--the Bible, Bryce's American Commonwealth, and The Innocents Abroad. We were at Thomas Nelson Page's for dinner next evening--a wonderfully beautiful home, full of art treasures. A number of guests had been invited. Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted to reading. He told of Mrs. Clemens's embarrassment when Stepniak had visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of Balzac, Thackeray, and the others. She had been obliged to say that he had not read them. “'How interesting!' said Stepniak. But it wasn't interesting to Mrs. Clemens. It was torture.” He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs. Clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey: “If I had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible that she might have died in my arms. Sometimes I think that perhaps there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was dying and that I was not there.” In New York I had once brought him a print of the superb “Adams Memorial,” by Saint-Gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still court in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington. On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast, he said: “Engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the Saint-Gaudens bronze.” It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such a visit. We entered the little inclosure of cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of the great human mystery of life and death. Instinctively we removed our hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away. Then: “What does he call it?” he asked. I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that great line of Shakespeare's--“the rest is silence.” “But that figure is not silent,” he said. And later, as we were driving home: “It is in deep meditation on sorrowful things.” When we returned to New York he had the little print framed, and kept it always on his mantelpiece. CCLII. THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION From the Washington trip dates a period of still closer association with Mark Twain. On the way to New York he suggested that I take up residence in his house--a privilege which I had no wish to refuse. There was room going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late billiard sessions. So, after that, most of the days and nights I was there. Looking back on that time now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures. One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant of play. Then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same figure stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the rich organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which others do not see. This was the hour between dinner and billiards--the hour which he found most restful of the day. Sometimes he rose, walking the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought. Of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown up, and like a lion's, rather large for his body. But oftener he lay among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and heightening his brilliant coloring. The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid, and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there. He did not always talk; but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of him when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some new angle of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech. These are the pictures that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof, and they will not fade while memory lasts. Of Mark Twain's table philosophies it seems proper to make rather extended record. They were usually unpremeditated, and they presented the man as he was, and thought. I preserved as much of them as I could, and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and other unprinted writings. This dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the billiard-room. The latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through a great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and religious. His talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled with heresies of his own devising. Once, after a period of general silence, he said: “No one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. It is too nicely assembled and regulated. There is, of course, a great Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness.” It was objected, by one of those present, that as the Infinite Mind suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that Mind must feel and eventually regulate. “Yes,” he said, “not a sparrow falls but He is noticing, if that is what you mean; but the human conception of it is that God is sitting up nights worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race.” Then he recalled a fancy which I have since found among his memoranda. In this note he had written: The suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes, through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in the veins of God; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and wiggle & brag in each, & think God can tell them apart at that distance & has nothing better to do than try. This--the entertainment of an eternity. Who so poor in his ambitions as to consent to be God on those terms? Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, He is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it. “The Bible,” he said, “reveals the character of its God with minute exactness. It is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil impulses far beyond the human limit. In the Old Testament He is pictured as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed by their proprietors. It is the most damnatory biography that ever found its way into print. Its beginning is merely childish. Adam is forbidden to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. How could that impress Adam? He could have no idea of what death meant. He had never seen a dead thing. He had never heard of one. If he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just as much as the other one. The watery intellect that invented that notion could be depended on to go on and decree that all of Adam's descendants down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in the beginning. “There is a curious poverty of invention in Bibles. Most of the great races each have one, and they all show this striking defect. Each pretends to originality, without possessing any. Each of them borrows from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as fresh and new inspirations from on high. We borrowed the Golden Rule from Confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted it without a blush. We went back to Babylon for the Deluge, and are as proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble; whereas we know now that Noah's flood never happened, and couldn't have happened--not in that way. The flood is a favorite with Bible-makers. Another favorite with the founders of religions is the Immaculate Conception. It had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as a new idea. It was old in Egypt several thousand years before Christ was born. The Hindus prized it ages ago. The Egyptians adopted it even for some of their kings. The Romans borrowed the idea from Greece. We got it straight from heaven by way of Rome. We are still charmed with it.” He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about the room. Once, considering the character of God--the Bible God-he said: “We haven't been satisfied with God's character as it is given in the Old Testament; we have amended it. We have called Him a God of mercy and love and morals. He didn't have a single one of those qualities in the beginning. He didn't hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for his innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to exhibit His power just to show off--and He kept hardening Pharaoh's heart so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit samples of His workmanship. Now and then, during the forty years' wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with the Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of the two. That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own.” He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which had projected the universe. He said: “In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly. “Two things are quite certain: one is that God, the limitless God, manufactured those things, for no man could have done it. The man has never lived who could create even the humblest of God's creatures. The other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man's welfare or comfort, or He wouldn't have created those things to disturb and destroy him. The human conception of pity and morality must be entirely unknown to that Infinite God, as much unknown as the conceptions of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded. “If God ever contemplates those qualities in man He probably admires them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves; probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would look as big to Him as a constellation. He could create a constellation with a thought; but He has been all the measureless ages, and He has never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy and morality. He goes on destroying a whole island of people with an earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race. The human being needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done it already; but most of them don't dare to say so.” He pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly immoral now. He pointed out that even the Decalogue made no reference to lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor. Also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: The general conclusion being that the morals of the Lord had been the morals of the beginning; the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with necessity, whereas those of the Lord had remained unchanged. It is hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any statements of this sort from him. In the first place, there was no desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less vigorous phrase. It was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of happiness to be silent and listen. On another evening he began: “The mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. Somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his imagination. Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. I wonder where he got that asset. It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of God. Wallace says that the whole universe was made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the center of it, which we call the world. It looks like a good deal of trouble for such a small result; but it's dangerous to dispute with a learned astronomer like Wallace. Still, I don't think we ought to decide too soon about it--not until the returns are all in. There is the geological evidence, for instance. Even after the universe was created, it took a long time to prepare the world for man. Some of the scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old. Lord Kelvin doesn't agree with them. He says that it isn't more than a hundred million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about thirty thousand years of that time. Even so, it was 99,970,000 years getting ready, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see man and admire him. That was because God first had to make the oyster. You can't make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can't do it in a day. You've got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen. Some of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop gradually into encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another, as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed; the oyster is done. Now an oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him. That would be just like an oyster, and, anyway, this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet. “The oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the world for man was fish. So the old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in. It took twenty million years to make the fish and to fossilize him so we'd have the evidence later. “Then, the Paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to start a new age to make the reptiles. Man would have to have some reptiles--not to eat, but to develop himself from. Thirty million years were required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left were made those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy world in remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and their sixty feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them. They are all gone now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them left on this far-flung fringe of time. “It took all those years to get one of those creatures properly constructed to proceed to the next step. Then came the pterodactyl, who thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been intended to produce him, for there wasn't anything too foolish for a pterodactyl to imagine. I suppose he did attract a good deal of attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course of time. You can't say too much for the picturesqueness of the pterodactyl--he was the triumph of his period. He wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy-looking creature. But the progression went right along. “During the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the Bering Strait and wandered around in Asia and died, all except a few to carry on the preparation with. There were six of those glacial periods, with two million years or so between each. They chased those poor orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty degrees below. They never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land. Sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose just as they got located. They led that uncertain, strenuous existence for about twenty-five million years, always wondering what was going to happen next, never suspecting that it was just a preparation for man, who had to be done just so or there wouldn't be any proper or harmonious place for him when he arrived, and then at last the monkey came, and everybody could see at a glance that man wasn't far off now, and that was true enough. The monkey went on developing for close upon five million years, and then he turned into a man--to all appearances. “It does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination. It makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly different. Those earlier animals didn't have it, and the monkey hasn't it or he wouldn't be so cheerful.” [Paine records Twain's thoughts in that magnificent essay: “Was the World Made for Man” published long after his death in the group of essays under the title “Letters from the Earth.” There are minor additions in the published version: “coal to fry the fish”; and the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole “without a dry rag on them,”; and the “coat of paint” on top of the bulb on top the Eiffel Tower representing “man's portion of this world's history.” Ed.] He often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this final creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the imagination. Once (this was in the billiard-room) I started him by saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here. He said: “Is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions of this planet?” I began to qualify, rather weakly; but what I said did not matter. He was off on his favorite theme. “Man adapted to the earth?” he said. “Why, he can't sleep out-of-doors without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always under going repairs. A machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. The original cave man, the troglodyte, may have got his that way. But now they come through months and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able to bear it. As soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night's rest. The second set will answer for a while; but he will never get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one. The animals are not much troubled that way. In a wild state, a natural state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age. But man starts in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet. He has mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-fever, as a matter of course. Afterward, as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza, carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another. He's just a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes. Look at the workmanship of him in some of its particulars. What are his tonsils for? They perform no useful function; they have no value. They are but a trap for tonsilitis and quinsy. And what is the appendix for? It has no value. Its sole interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble. What is his beard for? It is just a nuisance. All nations persecute it with the razor. Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it, instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be. You seldom see a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head. A man wants to keep his hair. It is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and Nature half the time puts it on so it won't stay. “Man's sight and smell and hearing are all inferior. If he were suited to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies. The robin hears the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound follows a scent that is two days old. Man isn't even handsome, as compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the Bengal tiger--that ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty. Think of the lion and the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that poor thing!--the animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth, the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe--a creature that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom. If he can't get renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like? He has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect. It makes him supreme--the higher animals can't match him there. It's very curious.” A letter which he wrote to J. Howard Moore concerning his book The Universal Kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here. DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently & irascibly for me. There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones --morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural & healthy instincts. Yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans. Sincerely yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCLIII. AN EVENING WITH HELEN KELLER I recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party given at the Clemenses' home on New-Year's Eve, with charades and story-telling and music. It was the music feature of this party that was distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private houses. The music came over the regular telephone wire, and was delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those used for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers at the central station. Just why the telharmonium has not made good its promises of popularity I do not know. Clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea. He made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions. He did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed. It was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and “Auld Lang Syne” and “America.” The other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in honor of Helen Keller. It was fascinating to watch her, and to realize with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her physical life. To see Mark Twain and Helen Keller together was something not easily to be forgotten. When Mrs. Macy (who, as Miss Sullivan, had led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to her with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated every shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic. Helen visited the various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the usual observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail. Her sensitive fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the exclamations she uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow visualized each thing in all its particulars. There was a bronze cat of handsome workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those all--seeing fingers of hers over it she said: “It is smiling.” CCLIV. BILLIARD-ROOM NOTES The billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter. My play improved, and Clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds altogether, and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in subjection. Frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments over the legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us quite as enjoyable as the rest of the game. Sometimes he would count a shot which was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always a delight to him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of conscience, and whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of repair. It would always end by him saying: “I don't wish even to seem to do anything which can invite suspicion. I refuse to count that shot,” or something of like nature. Sometimes when I had let a questionable play pass without comment, he would watch anxiously until I had made a similar one and then insist on my scoring it to square accounts. His conscience was always repairing itself. He had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player. It consisted in turning out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve balls to play on. He had learned that the average player would seldom make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a position where he couldn't play at all. The thing looked absurdly easy. It looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred; but for more than an hour I tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing. Long after the play itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter, the tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail. It was very soon after that that Peter Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”) came down for luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, Clemens quietly--as if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve balls and asked Dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss. Dunne said he thought he could make a thousand. Clemens quite indifferently said that he didn't believe he could make fifty. Dunne offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made. Dunne scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until Clemens had twenty-five dollars of Dunne's money, and Dunne was sweating and swearing, and Mark Twain rocking with delight. Dunne went away still unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again. Perhaps he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned something. He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something more added. Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement. Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the game was actually in progress. If there was anything to be said on either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on the couch, until the matter was concluded. Such interruptions happened pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests. Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by. On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent dreams. All of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering. “There is never a month passes,” he said, “that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. “Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house. “My other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my night-garments. People don't seem to notice me there at first, and then pretty soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me suspiciously, and I can see that they are wondering who I am and why I am there in that costume. Then it occurs to me that I can fix it by making myself known. I take hold of some man and whisper to him, 'I am Mark Twain'; but that does not improve it, for immediately I can hear him whispering to the others, 'He says he is Mark Twain,' and they all look at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and I can see that they don't believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that confession. Sometimes, in that dream, I am dressed like a tramp instead of being in my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go away and leave me standing there, ashamed. I generally enjoy my dreams, but not those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest.” Quite often some curious episode of the world's history would flash upon him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the game to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date and circumstance. He had a natural passion for historic events and a gift for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom reliable. He was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at all. He had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper, he wrote, for his own reminder: The accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail. I prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while I shave--and I always forget to pour it. Yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail, something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks afterward would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune moment. Perhaps this also was a part of his old pilot-training. Once Clara Clemens remarked: “It always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember. Some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping that he didn't, will suddenly come back to him just when you least expect it or care for it.” My note-book contains the entry: February 11, 1907. He said to-day: “A blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the game afterward, while we can't remember from one shot to the next.” I mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do if he wished. “Yes,” he answered, “those are special memories; a pilot will tell you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can't remember what he had for breakfast.” “How long did you keep your pilot-memory?” I asked. “Not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for when I went to report on a paper a year or two later I never had to make any notes.” “I suppose you still remember some of the river?” “Not much. Hat Island, Helena and here and there a place; but that is about all.” CCLV. FURTHER PERSONALITIES Like every person living, Mark Twain had some peculiar and petty economies. Such things in great men are noticeable. He lived extravagantly. His household expenses at the time amounted to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest, and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number. His clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to his children; his gratuities were always liberal. He never questioned pecuniary outgoes--seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account so long as there was plenty. He smoked cheap cigars because he preferred their flavor. Yet he had his economies. I have seen him, before leaving a room, go around and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against that waste. I have known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and object to an apparent overcharge of a few cents. It seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: He abhorred extortion and visible waste. Furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership. One evening, while we were playing billiards, I noticed a five-cent piece on the floor. I picked it up, saying: “Here is five cents; I don't know whose it is.” He regarded the coin rather seriously, I thought, and said: “I don't know, either.” I laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room. The play went on, and I forgot the circumstance. When the game ended that night I went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word. As he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked the assortment over and said: “That five-cent piece you found was mine.” I brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again. It may have been one of his jokes, but I think it more likely that he remembered having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that it was missing. More than once, in Washington, he had said: “Draw plenty of money for incidental expenses. Don't bother to keep account of them.” So it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious attention to a trifling detail. He had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed Subway, which he called the Underground. Sometimes he would say: “I'll pay your fare on the Underground if you want to take a ride with me.” And he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when I rode far up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had taken him to the door, he turned and said, gravely: “Here is five cents to pay your way home.” And I took it in the same spirit in which it had been offered. It was probably this trait which caused some one occasionally to claim that Mark Twain was close in money matters. Perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was parsimonious; but, if so, I must believe that it was when he was sorely pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation. He wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and properties. He took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying to get an unfair division of profits. Then it became something besides greed. It became an indignation that amounted to malevolence. I was concerned in a number of dealings with Mark Twain, and at a period in his life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small, or greedy in his money dealings I think I should have seen it. Personally, I found him liberal to excess, and I never observed in him anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him. Once that winter, when a letter came from Steve Gillis saying that he was an invalid now, and would have plenty of time to read Sam's books if he owned them, Clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed each of those twenty-five volumes. Then he sent them, charges paid, to that far Californian retreat. It was hardly the act of a stingy man. He had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from an authoritative source, and I remember how pleased he was that winter with Prof. William Lyon Phelps's widely published opinion, which ranked Mark Twain as the greatest American novelist, and declared that his fame would outlive any American of his time. Phelps had placed him above Holmes, Howells, James, and even Hawthorne. He had declared him to be more American than any of these--more American even than Whitman. Professor Phelps's position in Yale College gave this opinion a certain official weight; but I think the fact of Phelps himself being a writer of great force, with an American freshness of style, gave it a still greater value. Among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with Eugene F. Ware, of Kansas, with whose penname--“Ironquill”--Clemens had long been familiar. Ware was a breezy Western genius of the finest type. If he had abandoned law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached. There was in his work that same spirit of Americanism and humor and humanity that is found in Mark Twain's writings, and he had the added faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart. I had known Ware personally during a period of Western residence, and later, when he was Commissioner of Pensions under Roosevelt. I usually saw him when he came to New York, and it was a great pleasure now to bring together the two men whose work I so admired. They met at a small private luncheon at The Players, and Peter Dunne was there, and Robert Collier, and it was such an afternoon as Howells has told of when he and Aldrich and Bret Harte and those others talked until the day faded into twilight, and twilight deepened into evening. Clemens had put in most of the day before reading Ware's book of poems, 'The Rhymes of Ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American poetry--I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one he had met before. Among Ware's poems he had been especially impressed with the “Fables,” and with some verses entitled “Whist,” which, though rather more optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy. They have a distinctly “Western” feeling. WHIST Hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled, And fairly dealt, and still I got no hand; The morning came; but I, with mind unruffled, Did simply say, “I do not understand.” Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. Blind are our efforts to control the forces That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt. I do not like the way the cards are shuffled, But still I like the game and want to play; And through the long, long night will I, unruffled, Play what I get, until the break of day. VOLUME III, Part 2: 1907-1910 CCLVI. HONORS FROM OXFORD Clemens made a brief trip to Bermuda during the winter, taking Twichell along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before. They had been comparatively young men then. They were old now, but they found the green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever. They did not find their old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and then Twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain schoolbooks in his youth, and Clemens promptly said, “Kirkham's Grammar.” Kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she was dead, and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier time, reigned in her stead and entertained the successors of her mother's guests. They walked and drove about the island, and it was like taking up again a long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of the same tale. It gave Mark Twain a fresh interest in Bermuda, one which he did not allow to fade again. Later in the year (March, 1907) I also made a journey; it having been agreed that I should take a trip to the Mississippi and to the Pacific coast to see those old friends of Mark Twain's who were so rapidly passing away. John Briggs was still alive, and other Hannibal schoolmates; also Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis, and a few more of the early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as I had in hand. The billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside in view of prospective benefits. Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials. It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none too soon. John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in the cave and on Holliday's Hill. I think it was six weeks later that he died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not reach the end of the year. Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures. When I left he said: “Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die. This is the last word I'll ever send to him.” Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late, though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner, and to send back a parting word. I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding genius, Horace Bixby,--[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of 86]--still alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his headquarters at St. Louis. Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to receive from Oxford University the literary doctor's degree. There had been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden and too good to be true. That the little barefoot lad that had played along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages in the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be likely to happen outside of a fairy tale. Returning to New York, I ran out to Tuxedo, where he had taken a home for the summer (for it was already May), and walking along the shaded paths of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the Oxford matter. Moberly Bell, of the London Times, had been over in April, and soon after his return to England there had come word of the proposed honor. Clemens privately and openly (to Bell) attributed it largely to his influence. He wrote to him: DEAR MR. BELL,--Your hand is in it & you have my best thanks. Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me I am glad to do it for an Oxford degree. I shall plan to sail for England a shade before the middle of June, so that I can have a few days in London before the 26th. A day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he overtook his letter with a cable: I perceive your hand in it. You have my best thanks. Sail on Minneapolis June 8th. Due in Southampton ten days later. Clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram to himself had confirmed it. “I never expected to cross the water again,” he said; “but I would be willing to journey to Mars for that Oxford degree.” He put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of Jim Gillis and the others I had visited, dwelling especially on Gillis's astonishing faculty for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his back to the fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other guide than his fancy. It was a long, happy walk we had, though rather a sad one in its memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close the gate of those early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to them afterward. He was back at 21 Fifth Avenue presently, arranging for his voyage. Meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and what not, and it was clear enough that his English sojourn was to be a busy one. He had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but two invitations--a dinner-party given by Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and a luncheon proposed by the “Pilgrims.” But it became clear that this would not do. England was not going to confer its greatest collegiate honor without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute. Clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--Mr. Ralph W. Ashcroft, a young Englishman familiar with London life. They sailed on the 8th of June, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had sailed on the Quaker City to win his great fame. I went with him to the ship. His first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little sad, remembering, I think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor with him but could not share it now. CCLVII. A TRUE ENGLISH WELCOME Mark Twain's trip across the Atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant one. The Minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of company. Prof. Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw's biographer, was aboard;--[Professor Henderson has since then published a volume on Mark Twain-an interesting commentary on his writings--mainly from the sociological point of view.]--also President Patton, of the Princeton Theological Seminary; a well-known cartoonist, Richards, and some very attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through his life had appealed to Mark Twain. Indeed, in his later life they made a stronger appeal than ever. The years had robbed him of his own little flock, and always he was trying to replace them. Once he said: “During those years after my wife's death I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.” He adopted several on that journey to England and on the return voyage, and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life. These companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as we shall see by and by. There were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit of the Seamen's Orphanage. One of his adopted granddaughters--“Charley” he called her--played a violin solo and Clemens made a speech. Later his autographs were sold at auction. Dr. Patton was auctioneer, and one autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the record price for a single Mark Twain signature. He wore his white suit on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it. He told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of his household had always tried to keep him straight. The children, he said, had fallen into the habit of calling it “dusting papa off.” Then he went on: When my daughter came to see me off last Saturday at the boat she slipped a note in my hand and said, “Read it when you get aboard the ship.” I didn't think of it again until day before yesterday, and it was a “dusting off.” And if I carry out all the instructions that I got there I shall be more celebrated in England for my behavior than for anything else. I got instructions how to act on every occasion. She underscored “Now, don't you wear white clothes on ship or on shore until you get back,” and I intended to obey. I have been used to obeying my family all my life, but I wore the white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes in it is in the cellar. I am not apologizing for the white clothes; I am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her. He received a great welcome when the ship arrived at Tilbury. A throng of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers. It was the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day during the four weeks of his English sojourn. In a dictation following his return, Mark Twain said: Who began it? The very people of all people in the world whom I would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the stevedores! They stood in a body on the dock and charged their masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of me. J. Y. W. MacAlister was at the St. Pancras railway station to meet him, and among others on the platform was Bernard Shaw, who had come down to meet Professor Henderson. Clemens and Shaw were presented, and met eagerly, for each greatly admired the other. A throng gathered. Mark Twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at Brown's Hotel, “a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned English inn,” he called it, “well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort now rare in England, and becoming rarer every year.” But Brown's was not placid and subdued during his stay. The London newspapers declared that Mark Twain's arrival had turned Brown's not only into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of visitors and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement. It was, in fact, an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and magnificence anything he had hitherto known. His former London visits, beginning with that of 1872, had been distinguished by high attentions, but all of them combined could not equal this. When England decides to get up an ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish Americans. An assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it sometimes required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled and busy men to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence. A pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in. Lady Stanley, widow of Henry M. Stanley, wrote: You know I want to see you and join right hand to right hand. I must see your dear face again.... You will have no peace, rest, or leisure during your stay in London, and you will end by hating human beings. Let me come before you feel that way. Mary Cholmondeley, the author of Red Pottage, niece of that lovable Reginald Cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and urgent invitations. Archdeacon Wilberforce wrote: I have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel king of the Belgians and telling my people to buy the book. I am only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial welcome in England, but we long to see you again, and I should like to change hats with you again. Do you remember? The Athenaeum, the Garrick, and a dozen other London clubs had anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period of his stay. Every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings. It was such a reception as Charles Dickens had received in America in 1842, and again in 1867. A London paper likened it to Voltaire's return to Paris in 1778, when France went mad over him. There is simply no limit to English affection and, hospitality once aroused. Clemens wrote: Surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: I had seen nothing like them before; I shall see nothing approaching them again! Sir Thomas Lipton and Bram Stoker, old friends, were among the first to present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers. Clemens's resolutions for secluding himself were swept away. On the very next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with J. Henniker Heaton, father of International Penny Postage, at the Bath Club, just across Dover Street from Brown's. He lunched at the Ritz with Marjorie Bowen and Miss Bisland. In the afternoon he sat for photographs at Barnett's, and made one or two calls. He could no more resist these things than a debutante in her first season. He was breakfasting again with Heaton next morning; lunching with “Toby, M.P.,” and Mrs. Lucy; and having tea with Lady Stanley in the afternoon, and being elaborately dined next day at Dorchester House by Ambassador and Mrs. Reid. These were all old and tried friends. He was not a stranger among them, he said; he was at home. Alfred Austin, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Alma Tadema, E. A. Abbey, Edmund Goss, George Smalley, Sir Norman Lockyer, Henry W. Lucy, Sidney Brooks, and Bram Stoker were among those at Dorchester House--all old comrades, as were many of the other guests. “I knew fully half of those present,” he said afterward. Mark Twain's bursting upon London society naturally was made the most of by the London papers, and all his movements were tabulated and elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the situation it was not left unimproved. The celebrated Ascot racing-cup was stolen just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively mingled their head-lines, “Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen,” and kept the joke going in one form or another. Certain state jewels and other regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of Mark Twain's doings. English reporters adopted American habits for the occasion, and invented or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent. Once, when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across narrow Dover Street to the Bath Club, the papers flamed next day with the story that Mark Twain had wandered about the lobby of Brown's and promenaded Dover Street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide attention. Clara Clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by such reports, and cabled this delicate “dusting off”: “Much worried. Remember proprieties.” To which he answered: “They all pattern after me,” a reply to the last degree characteristic. It was on the fourth day after his arrival, June 22d, that he attended the King's garden-party at Windsor Castle. There were eighty-five hundred guests at the King's party, and if we may judge from the London newspapers, Mark Twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng as any member of the royal family. His presentation to the King and the Queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their conversation is quite fully given. Clemens himself reported: His Majesty was very courteous. In the course of the conversation I reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when I had the honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at Homburg, in Germany. I said that I had often told about that episode, and that whenever I was the historian I made good history of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged thereby. I said I should like to go on repeating this history, but that I should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while I should probably never tell it twice in the same way I should at least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands. His Majesty intimated his willingness that I should continue to disseminate that piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts he would trust me to furnish that improvement. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the Queen looked as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when I saw her first. I did not say this to her, because I learned long ago never to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace and inexperienced people to say. That she still looked to me as young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have mentioned it to her. I could have said it and spoken the truth, but I was too wise for that. I kept the remark unuttered and saved her Majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time. All that report about my proposal to buy Windsor Castle and its grounds was a false rumor. I started it myself. One newspaper said I patted his Majesty on the shoulder--an impertinence of which I was not guilty; I was reared in the most exclusive circles of Missouri and I know how to behave. The King rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting, but he did it of his own accord. The newspaper which said I talked with her Majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable. Rain was threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the Queen said, “Please put your hat on, Mr. Clemens.” I begged her pardon and excused myself from doing it. After a moment or two she said, “Mr. Clemens, put your hat on”--with a slight emphasis on the word “on” “I can't allow you to catch cold here.” When a beautiful queen commands it is a pleasure to obey, and this time I obeyed--but I had already disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; I did talk with the Queen of England with my hat on, but it wasn't fair in the newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there were reasons for it which he could not know of. Nearly all the members of the British royal family were there, and there were foreign visitors which included the King of Siam and a party of India princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which Clemens admired openly and said he would like to wear himself. The English papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most distinguished parties ever given at Windsor. Clemens attended it in company with Mr. and Mrs. J. Henniker Heaton, and when it was over Sir Thomas Lipton joined them and motored with them back to Brown's. He was at Archdeacon Wilberforce's next day, where a curious circumstance developed. When he arrived Wilberforce said to him, in an undertone: “Come into my library. I have something to show you.” In the library Clemens was presented to a Mr. Pole, a plain-looking man, suggesting in dress and appearance the English tradesman. Wilberforce said: “Mr. Pole, show to Mr. Clemens what you have brought here.” Mr. Pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view at last a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in appearance, and cunningly overlaid with green glass. The archdeacon took it and handed it to Clemens as some precious jewel. Clemens said: “What is it?” Wilberforce impressively answered: “It is the Holy Grail.” Clemens naturally started with surprise. “You may well start,” said Wilberforce; “but it's the truth. That is the Holy Grail.” Then he gave this explanation: Mr. Pole, a grain merchant of Bristol, had developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed several times with great vividness the location of the true Grail. Another dreamer, a Dr. Goodchild, of Bath, was mixed up in the matter, and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet, or any of the traditional things, had been discovered. Mr. Pole seemed a man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed the discovery to be genuine and authentic. Of course there could be no positive proof. It was a thing that must be taken on trust. That the vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations had conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to the natural suggestion of fraud. Clemens, to whom the whole idea of the Holy Grail was simply a poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated, like his own Connecticut Yankee, back into the Arthurian days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. Whatever it was, it was to them the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only second to the cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the honor of having been one of the first permitted to see the relic. In a subsequent dictation he said: I am glad I have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half- hour. In its way it stands alone in my life's experience. In the belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was brought by night and secretly delivered to Nicodemus, nearly nineteen centuries ago, after the Creator of the universe had delivered up His life on the cross for the redemption of the human race; the very cup which the stainless Sir Galahad had sought with knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in Arthur's time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a stately name required--no Sir Galahad, no Sir Bors de Ganis, no Sir Lancelot of the Lake--nothing but a mere Mr. Pole.--[From the New York Sun somewhat later: “Mr. Pole communicated the discovery to a dignitary of the Church of England, who summoned a number of eminent persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it. Forty attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests, Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, Professor Crookas, and ministers of various religious bodies, including the Rev. R. J. Campbell. They heard Mr. Pole's story with deep attention, but he could not prove the genuineness of the relic.”] Clemens saw Mr. and Mrs. Rogers at Claridge's Hotel that evening; lunched with his old friends Sir Norman and Lady Lockyer next day; took tea with T. P. O'Connor at the House of Commons, and on the day following, which was June a 5th, he was the guest of honor at one of the most elaborate occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the Pilgrims at the Savoy Hotel. It would be impossible to set down here a report of the doings, or even a list of the guests, of that gathering. The Pilgrims is a club with branches on both sides of the ocean, and Mark Twain, on either side, was a favorite associate. At this luncheon the picture on the bill of fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a great pen for his staff, turning his back on the Mississippi River and being led along his literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is attached by a string. On a guest-card was printed: Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout “Mark Twain!”--that serves you for a deathless sign --On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line-- Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten thousand fathoms deep! --O. S. [OWEN SEAMAN]. Augustine Birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this paragraph: Mark Twain is a man whom Englishmen and Americans do well to honor. He is a true consolidator of nations. His delightful humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. His truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor --overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his presence, and we rejoice to see him here. Long may he live to reap a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection. The toast was drunk standing. Then Clemens rose and made a speech which delighted all England. In his introduction Mr. Birrell had happened to say, “How I came here I will not ask!” Clemens remembered this, and looking down into Mr. Birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused, he said: “Mr. Birrell doesn't know how he got here. But he will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came.” He told stories about Howells and Twichell, and how Darwin had gone to sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been shocked to read on a great placard, “Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen.” No doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way. I have no doubt my character has suffered from it. I suppose I ought to defend my character, but how can I defend it? I can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that I am sincere--that I speak the truth, and that I have never seen that Cup. I have not got the Cup, I did not have a chance to get it. I have always had a good character in that way. I have hardly ever stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had discretion enough to know about the value of it first. I do not steal things that are likely to get myself into trouble. I do not think any of us do that. I know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts to any great thing. I do confess that when I was here seven years ago I stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. It was not a good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway. I was at a luncheon-party and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I dare say he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the Westminster Battery, if that is the proper term. I do not know, as you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much. He recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver things. He closed: I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing. I must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that I am of the human race. I have my cares and griefs, and I therefore noticed what Mr. Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it --something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of the program: He lit our life with shafts of sun And vanquished pain. Thus two great nations stand as one In honoring Twain. I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since I have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions of people in England, men, women, and children, and there is compliment, praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of affection. Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward. All these letters make me feel that here in England, as in America, when I stand under the English or the American flag I am not a stranger, I am not an alien, but at home. CCLVIII. DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, OXFORD He left, immediately following the Pilgrim luncheon, with Hon. Robert P. Porter, of the London Times, for Oxford, to remain his guest there during the various ceremonies. The encenia--the ceremony of conferring the degrees--occurred at the Sheldonian Theater the following morning, June 26, 1907. It was a memorable affair. Among those who were to receive degrees that morning besides Samuel Clemens were: Prince Arthur of Connaught; Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman; Whitelaw Reid; Rudyard Kipling; Sidney Lee; Sidney Colvin; Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland; Sir Norman Lockyer; Auguste Rodin, the sculptor; Saint-Saens, and Gen. William Booth, of the Salvation Army-something more than thirty, in all, of the world's distinguished citizens. The candidates assembled at Magdalen College, and led by Lord Curzon, the Chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant procession to the Sheldonian Theater, a group of men such as the world seldom sees collected together. The London Standard said of it: So brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been selected by Oxford University on Convocation to receive degrees, 'honoris causa', in this first year of Lord Curzon's chancellorship, that it is small wonder that the Sheldonian Theater was besieged today at an early hour. Shortly after 11 o'clock the organ started playing the strains of “God Save the King,” and at once a great volume of sound arose as the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the assemblage. Every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office, the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership of Lord Curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar- board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting, thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late Viceroy of India. Following him came the members of Convocation, a goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. Robes of salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of letters. The encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. There is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of Greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the Oxford undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the expense of those honored guests. The degrees of doctor of law were conferred first. Prince Arthur was treated with proper dignity by the gallery; but when Whitelaw Reid stepped forth a voice shouted, “Where's your Star-spangled Banner?” and when England's Prime Minister-Campbell-Bannerman--came forward some one shouted, “What about the House of Lords?” and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until General Booth was introduced as the “Passionate advocate of the dregs of the people, leader of the submerged tenth,” and “general of the Salvation Army,” when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm that a few minutes later became, according to the Daily News, “a veritable cyclone,” for Mark Twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray, had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which the world has to give. The undergraduates went wild then. There was such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, “Have you brought the jumping Frog with you?” “Where is the Ascot Cup?” “Where are the rest of the Innocents?” that it seemed as if it would not be possible to present him at all; but, finally, Chancellor Curzon addressed him (in Latin), “Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment,” and the great degree was conferred. If only Tom Sawyer could have seen him then! If only Olivia Clemens could have sat among those who gave him welcome! But life is not like that. There is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across the path. Rudyard Kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with the chorus, “For he's a jolly good fellow,” and then came Saint-Satins. The prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly created doctors left the theater with Lord Curzon at their head. So it was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey to Mars. The world had nothing more to give him now except that which he had already long possessed-its honor and its love. The newly made doctors were to be the guests of Lord Curzon at All Souls College for luncheon. As they left the theater (according to Sidney Lee): The people in the streets singled out Mark Twain, formed a vast and cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college gates. But before and after the lunch it was Mark Twain again whom everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. The Maharajah of Bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to Mrs. Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), and hearing that she knew Mark Twain, asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the quadrangle. At the garden-party given the same afternoon in the beautiful grounds of St. John's, where the indefatigable Mark put in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. On the following day, when the Oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. “Mark Twain's Pageant,” it was called by one of the papers.--[There was a dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken information, Clemens wore black evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet gown. “When I arrived,” he said, “the place was just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. I looked as out of place as a Presbyterian in hell.”] Clemens remained the guest of Robert Porter, whose house was besieged with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. If he went on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds assembled. At a luncheon which the Porters gave him the proprietor of the catering establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction of serving Mark Twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment of his life. This gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery. Clemens, learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a talk with him. “I found,” he said, “that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much about my books as I knew about them myself.” Mark Twain viewed the Oxford pageant from a box with Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of paper, on the outside of which was written, “Not true.” Opening it, they read: East is East and West is West, And never the Twain shall meet, --a quotation from Kipling. They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages. The lanes and streets and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in its long history. History was realized in a manner which no one could appreciate more fully than Mark Twain. “I was particularly anxious to see this pageant,” he said, “so that I could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a large scale.” He was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up. He easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by, and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by and by, Henry VIII. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and Charles I. took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and Henry II. and Rosamond and Queen Elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead centuries. CCLIX. LONDON SOCIAL HONORS We may not detail all the story of that English visit; even the path of glory leads to monotony at last. We may only mention a few more of the great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a dinner given to members of the Savage Club by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, also a dinner given by the American Society at the Hotel Cecil in honor of the Fourth of July. Clemens was the guest of honor, and responded to the toast given by Ambassador Reid, “The Day we Celebrate.” He made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to the American habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks. To English colonists he gave credit for having established American independence, and closed: We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own, and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by that great American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and beautiful tribute--Abraham Lincoln: a proclamation which not only set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. The owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of slaves when he did not want to be. That proclamation set them all free. But even in this matter England led the way, for she had set her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her example. We always follow her example, whether it is good or bad. And it was an English judge, a century ago, that issued that other great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he may, sets his foot upon English soil his fetters, by that act, fall away and he is a free man before the world! It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of them, England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the Emancipation Proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this debt to her. Let us be able to say to old England, this great- hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our Fourths of July, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the Declaration of Independence, which is the charter of our rights; you, the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Champion and Protector of Anglo-Saxon Freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most honestly thank you for them. It was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to having stolen the Ascot Cup. He lunched one day with Bernard Shaw, and the two discussed the philosophies in which they were mutually interested. Shaw regarded Clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great frankness that America had produced just two great geniuses--Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Later Shaw wrote him a note, in which he said: I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire. I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which a priest says, “Telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world,” a piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me. Clemens saw a great deal of Moberly Bell. The two lunched and dined privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the public gatherings. The bare memorandum of the week following July Fourth will convey something of Mark Twain's London activities: Friday, July 5. Dined with Lord and Lady Portsmouth. Saturday, July 6. Breakfasted at Lord Avebury's. Lord Kelvin, Sir Charles Lyell, and Sir Archibald Geikie were there. Sat 22 times for photos, 16 at Histed's. Savage Club dinner in the evening. White suit. Ascot Cup. Sunday, July 7. Called on Lady Langattock and others. Lunched with Sir Norman Lockyer. Monday, July 8. Lunched with Plasmon directors at Bath Club. Dined privately at C. F. Moberly Bell's. Tuesday, July 9. Lunched at the House with Sir Benjamin Stone. Balfour and Komura were the other guests of honor. Punch dinner in the evening. Joy Agnew and the cartoon. Wednesday, July 10. Went to Liverpool with Tay Pay. Attended banquet in the Town Hall in the evening. Thursday, July 11. Returned to London with Tay Pay. Calls in the afternoon. The Savage Club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own account, and their dinner of July 6th was a handsome, affair. He felt at home with the Savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in England. He made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his association with them on his first visit to London, thirty-seven years before. Then he said: That is a long time ago, and as I had come into a very strange land, and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. I am glad to be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that I shall not see you again. I have been received, as you know, in the most delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here. It keeps me choked up all the time. Everybody is so generous, and they do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. Nobody in the world can appreciate it higher than I do. The club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. A note was sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to contain a gilded plaster replica of the Ascot Gold Cup. The note said: Dere Mark, i return the Cup. You couldn't keep your mouth shut about it. 'Tis 2 pretty 2 melt, as you want me 2; nest time I work a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches. There was a postcript which said: “I changed the acorn atop for another nut with my knife.” The acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled head of Mark Twain. So, after all, the Ascot Cup would be one of the trophies which he would bear home with him across the Atlantic. Probably the most valued of his London honors was the dinner given to him by the staff of Punch. Punch had already saluted him with a front-page cartoon by Bernard Partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of that paper, Mr. Punch himself, presents him with a glass of the patronymic beverage with the words, “Sir, I honor myself by drinking your health. Long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!” Mr. Agnew, chief editor; Linley Sambourne, Francis Burnand, Henry Lucy, and others of the staff welcomed him at the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie Street, in the historic Punch dining-room where Thackeray had sat, and Douglas Jerrold, and so many of the great departed. Mark Twain was the first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. In the course of the dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy Agnew presented him with the original drawing of Partridge's cartoon. Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory from all other feastings. Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening that he postponed his sailing until the 13th. Before leaving America, he had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July 10th, they carried him, with T. P. O'Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince of Wales's special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall. Clemens was too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived rested and fresh to respond to his toast. Perhaps because it was his farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career: He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and with even greater variety. Then laying all levity aside, he told them, like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart. ... Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. It is the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state. During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too. Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. One day a majestic Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, “Ship ahoy! What ship is that? And whence and whither?” In a deep and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking- trumpet, “The Begum, of Bengal--142 days out from Canton--homeward bound! What ship is that?” Well, it just crushed that poor little creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, “Only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point --with nothing to speak of!” Oh, what an eloquent word that “only,” to express the depths of his humbleness! That is just my case. During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble. Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound! He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances, an American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls. It took the dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the poor and the rich alike. One day they visited the home of an old bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his old age. He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. He was sailing away from them for the last time. They hoped he would make a speech, but that would not have been possible. To the reporters he gave a farewell message: “It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I am sorry the end of it has come. I have met a hundred, old friends, and I have made a hundred new ones. It is a good kind of riches to have; there is none better, I think.” And the London Tribune declared that “the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. For Mark Twain has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more for the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the Hague Conference. He has made the world laugh again.” His ship was the Minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard to be adopted as grandchildren. On July 5th, in a fog, the Minnetonka collided with the bark Sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. On the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached New York nearly a day in advance of their schedule. Some ceremonies of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil only a few who had received special information were there to greet him. But perhaps he did not notice it. He seldom took account of the absence of such things. By early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the announcement that Mark Twain was home again. It is a sorrow to me that I was not at the dock to welcome him. I had been visiting in Elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a 2d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. When I saw the announcement that he had already arrived I called a greeting over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. I confess I went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently achieved, and I prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when I arrived he was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot night. As I entered he said: “Get your cue. I have been inventing a new game.” And I think there were scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. The pageant was over; the curtain was rung down. Business was resumed at the old stand. CCLX. MATTERS PSYCHIC AND OTHERWISE He returned to Tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely with the social life; but the contrast between his recent London experience and his semi-retirement must have been very great. When I visited him now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for companionship, but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great career which in a sense now had been completed since he had touched its highest point. There was no billiard-table at Tuxedo, and he spoke expectantly of getting back to town and the games there, also of the new home which was then building in Redding, and which would have a billiard-room where we could assemble daily--my own habitation being not far away. Various diversions were planned for Redding; among them was discussed a possible school of philosophy, such as Hawthorne and Emerson and Alcott had established at Concord. He spoke quite freely of his English experiences, but usually of the more amusing phases. He almost never referred to the honors that had been paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and cherished them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid to a private citizen; he must have known that in his heart. He spoke amusingly of his visit to Marie Corelli, in Stratford, and of the Holy Grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all psychic manifestations. I said to him: “But remember your own dream, Mr. Clemens, which presaged the death of your brother.” He answered: “I ask nobody to believe that it ever happened. To me it is true; but it has no logical right to be true, and I do not expect belief in it.” Which I thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole characteristic. He was invited to be a special guest at the Jamestown Exposition on Fulton Day, in September, and Mr. Rogers lent him his yacht in which to make the trip. It was a break in the summer's monotonies, and the Jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in London. When he entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a demonstration which lasted more than five minutes. Every person in the hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas. He made them a brief, amusing talk on Fulton and other matters, then introduced Admiral Harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed by Martin W. Littleton, the real orator of the day. Littleton acquitted himself so notably that Mark Twain conceived for him a deep admiration, and the two men quickly became friends. They saw each other often during the remainder of the Jamestown stay, and Clemens, learning that Littleton lived just across Ninth Street from him in New York, invited him to come over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard games. So it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, Mr. and Mrs. Littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way. Clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave advice, while Littleton and I played. He had a favorite shot that he frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot. He played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected results with it. He was even inspired to write a poem on the subject. “CUSHION FIRST” When all your days are dark with doubt, And dying hope is at its worst; When all life's balls are scattered wide, With not a shot in sight, to left or right, Don't give it up; Advance your cue and shut your eyes, And take the cushion first. The Harry Thaw trial was in progress just then, and Littleton was Thaw's chief attorney. It was most interesting to hear from him direct the day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of Thaw. Littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one afternoon. I had been absent the evening before, and Littleton had been over. It was after luncheon now, and Clemens and I began preparing for the customary games. We were playing then a game with four balls, two white and two red. I began by placing the red balls on the table, and then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls. When I had made the round of the table I had found but one white ball. I thought I must have overlooked the other, and made the round again. Then I said: “There is one white ball missing.” Clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and said: “It was here last night.” He felt in the pockets of the little white-silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets were empty. He said: “I'll bet Littleton carried that ball home with him.” Then I suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off the table, and I looked carefully under the furniture and in the various corners, but without success. There was another set of balls, and out of it I selected a white one for our play, and the game began. It went along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets, and as constantly being replaced on the table. This had continued for perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that Clemens reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon the table. The one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball. We looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at all. No one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence, though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot. The pocket from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied again and again. Then Clemens said: “We must be dreaming.” We stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no material explanation. I suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils, letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one's eyes. Clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic at heart, said: “But that, so far as I know, has never happened to more than one person at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental blindness. This thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no question as to the positive absence of the object.” “How about dematerialization?” “Yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an explanation.” He went on to recall that Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had written of such things, and cited instances which Wallace had recorded. In the end he said: “Well, it happened, that's all we can say, and nobody can ever convince me that it didn't.” We went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever after, so far as I know. I am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period. Clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his Christian Union article concerning Mrs. Clemens's government of children, published in 1885. I had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was wishing very much that he could see one. Somewhat later, as he was walking down Fifth Avenue, the thought of this article and his desire for it suddenly entered his mind. Reaching the corner of Forty-second Street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass. As he did so a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand. “Mr. Clemens,” he said, “you don't know me, but here is something you may wish to have. I have been saving them for more than twenty years, and this morning it occurred to me to send them to you. I was going to mail them from my office, but now I will give them to you,” and with a word or two he disappeared. The clippings were from the Christian Union of 1885, and were the much-desired article. Clemens regarded it as a remarkable case of mental telegraphy. “Or, if it wasn't that,” he said, “it was a most remarkable coincidence.” The other circumstance has been thought amusing. I had gone to Redding for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle and the knee. I mention the hour because it seems important. Next morning I received a note, prompted by Mr. Clemens, in which he said: Tell Paine I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. I was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote: I did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how did you find it out? I followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same hour on the same afternoon Clemens himself had fallen up the front steps and, as he said, peeled off from his “starboard shin a ribbon of skin three inches long.” The disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for no particular reason. Clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another, being superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing little faith in these prognostics. Once when a clairvoyant, of whom he had never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of his family history, told him more about it than he knew himself, besides reading a list of names from a piece of paper which Clemens had concealed in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed. The clairvoyant added that he would probably live to a great age and die in a foreign land--a prophecy which did not comfort him. CCLXI. MINOR EVENTS AND DIVERSIONS Mark Twain was deeply interested during the autumn of 1907 in the Children's Theater of the Jewish Educational Alliance, on the lower East Side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived. A Miss Alice M. Herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and health to build up an institution through which the interest of the children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements. She had interested a great body of Jewish children in the plays of Shakespeare, and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time to time with great success. The admission fee to the performance was ten cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay. It required patrons. Miss Herts obtained permission to play “The Prince and the Pauper,” and Mark Twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to assist financially in this worthy work. “The Prince and the Pauper” evening turned out a distinguished affair. On the night of November 19, 1907, the hall of the Educational Alliance was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on the East Side; the finance and the fashion of New York were there. It was a gala night for the little East Side performers. Behind the curtain they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens. The performance they gave was an astonishing one. So fully did they enter into the spirit of Tom Canty's rise to royalty that they seemed absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the Ghetto. They had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments were gems and their raiment cloth of gold. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime heights in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in its bigness. Both Mark Twain and Miss Herts made brief addresses, and the audience shouted approval of their words. It seems a pity that such a project as that must fail, and I do not know why it happened. Wealthy men and women manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the Children's Theater exists to-day only as history.--[In a letter to a Mrs. Amelia Dunne Hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the Howland School, Chicago, Mark Twain once wrote: “If I were going to begin life over again I would have a children's theater and watch it, and work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get out of any other, constituted as I am. Yes, you are easily the most fortunate of women, I think.”] It was at a dinner at The Players--a small, private dinner given by Mr. George C. Riggs-that I saw Edward L. Burlingame and Mark Twain for the only time together. They had often met during the forty-two years that had passed since their long-ago Sandwich Island friendship; but only incidentally, for Mr. Burlingame cared not much for great public occasions, and as editor of Scribner's Magazine he had been somewhat out of the line of Mark Twain's literary doings. Howells was there, and Gen. Stewart L. Woodford, and David Bispham, John Finley, Evan Shipman, Nicholas Biddle, and David Munro. Clemens told that night, for the first time, the story of General Miles and the three-dollar dog, inventing it, I believe, as he went along, though for the moment it certainly did sound like history. He told it often after that, and it has been included in his book of speeches. Later, in the cab, he said: “That was a mighty good dinner. Riggs knows how to do that sort of thing. I enjoyed it ever so much. Now we'll go home and play billiards.” We began about eleven o'clock, and played until after midnight. I happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly. He vowed that it was not a gentleman's game at all, that Riggs's wine had demoralized the play. But at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said: “Well, those were good games. There is nothing like billiards after all.” We did not play billiards on his birthday that year. He went to the theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with Jesse Lynch Williams, I attended the same performance--the “Toy-Maker of Nuremberg”--written by Austin Strong. It proved to be a charming play, and I could see that Clemens was enjoying it. He sat in a box next to the stage, and the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for his benefit. When later I mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of his pleasure in it. “It is a fine, delicate piece of work,” he said. “I wish I could do such things as that.” “I believe you are too literary for play-writing.” “Yes, no doubt. There was never any question with the managers about my plays. They always said they wouldn't act. Howells has come pretty near to something once or twice. I judge the trouble is that the literary man is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright thinks only of how it will play. One is thinking of how it will sound, the other of how it will look.” “I suppose,” I said, “the literary man should have a collaborator with a genius for stage mechanism. John Luther Long's exquisite plays would hardly have been successful without David Belasco to stage them. Belasco cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction his genius is supreme.” “Yes, so it is; it was Belasco who made it possible to play 'The Prince and the Pauper'--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of it.” Clemens attended few public functions now. He was beset with invitations, but he declined most of them. He told the dog story one night to the Pleiades Club, assembled at the Brevoort; but that was only a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away before the exercises were concluded. He also spoke at a banquet given to Andrew Carnegie--Saint Andrew, as he called him--by the Engineers Club, and had his usual fun at the chief guest's expense. I have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and I know what brother Andrew is feeling like now. He has been receiving compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is another side to him that needs censure. I am going to vary the complimentary monotony. While we have all been listening to the complimentary talk Mr. Carnegie's face has scintillated with fictitious innocence. You'd think he never committed a crime in his life. But he has. Look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. Imagine the calamity on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on the whole human race. We've got it all now so that nobody could spell.... If Mr. Carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn't have had any spots on the sun, or any San Francisco quake, or any business depression. There, I trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse more than he did his compliments. And now that I think I have him smoothed down and feeling comfortable I just want to say one thing more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far. As he was about to go, Carnegie called his attention to the beautiful souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest's plate. Carnegie said: “The club had those especially made at Tiffany's for this occasion. They cost ten dollars apiece.” Clemens sand: “Is that so? Well, I only meant to take my own; but if that's the case I'll load my cab with them.” We made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards. The continued strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good. More than once I journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of his evening games, quickly brought me back again. It was my wish only to serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness. Billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then. He walked out a good deal, and especially of a pleasant Sunday morning he liked the stroll up Fifth Avenue. Sometimes we went as high as Carnegie's, on Ninety-second Street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always one of Mark Twain's favorite diversions. From that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the streets, and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference. Oftener, however, we turned at Fifty-ninth Street, walking both ways. When it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in Central Park; and once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note. Its finder, a Mr. Lockwood, received a reward, for Mark Twain wrote him: There is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that never went to the wash at all. Heaven will reward you, I know it will. On Sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour that the churches would be dismissed. On the first Sunday morning we had started a little early, and I thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached Fifty-ninth Street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the throng. He said, quietly: “I like the throng.” So we rested in the Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour. Men and women noticed him, and came over to shake his hand. The gigantic man in uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word. He had opened carriages for Mr. Clemens at the Twenty-third Street station, and now wanted to claim that honor. I think he received the most cordial welcome of any one who came. I am sure he did. It was Mark Twain's way to warm to the man of the lower social rank. He was never too busy, never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to his story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy remembering them. We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the expression of that affection which in his London and Liverpool speeches he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. It was his final harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his years of honorable labor and noble living. CCLXII. FROM MARK TWAIN's MAIL. If the reader has any curiosity as to some of the less usual letters which a man of wide public note may inspire, perhaps he will find a certain interest in a few selected from the thousands which yearly came to Mark Twain. For one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks. It is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of his occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise: DEAR SIR [or MADAM],--I try every remedy sent to me. I am now on No. 87. Yours is 2,653. I am looking forward to its beneficial results. Of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks. One of these sent an advertisement of a certain Elixir of Life, which was guaranteed to cure everything--to “wash and cleanse the human molecules, and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting.” Anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. They were not mercenary compliments. The writer had nothing to gain. Two such letters follow--both written in England just at the time of his return. MARK TWAIN. DEAR SIR,--Please accept a poor widow's good-by and kindest wishes. I have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very much--only wish I could afford to buy some. I should very much like to have seen you. I have many photos of you which I have cut from several papers which I read. I have one where you are writing in bed, which I cut from the Daily News. Like myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest. I am 70 and I find I need plenty. Please forgive the liberty I have taken in writing to you. If I can't come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river. May God guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow. Yours sincerely, The other letter also tells its own story: DEAR, KIND MARK TWAIN,--For years I have wanted to write and thank you for the comfort you were to me once, only I never quite knew where you were, and besides I did not want to bother you; but to-day I was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the Savoy that you looked sad and I thought it might cheer you a little tiny bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes with crying every night for long months. Ten years ago I had to leave home and earn my living as a governess and Fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country family in the depths of Staffordshire. According to the genial English custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, I took my evening meal alone in the school-room, where “Henry Tudor had supped the night before Bosworth,” and there I had to stay without a soul to speak to till I went to bed. At first I used to cry every night, but a friend sent me a copy of your Huckleberry Finn and I never cried any more. I kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and when Henry Tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me I grabbed my dear Huck and he never once failed me; I opened him at random and in two minutes I was in another world. That's why I am so grateful to you and so fond of you, and I thought you might like to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger. I am a stenographer now and live at home, but I shall never forget how you helped me. God bless you and spare you long to those you are dear to. A letter which came to him soon after his return from England contained a clipping which reported the good work done by Christian missionaries in the Congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible sleeping sickness. The letter itself consisted merely of a line, which said: Won't you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this? The writer's name was signed, and Mark Twain answered: In China the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be decent & go away. But I have not heard that in the Congo the missionary servants of God are unwelcome to the native. Evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind. How it would improve God to take a lesson from them! He invented & distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless, poor savages, & now He sits with His elbows on the balusters & looks down & enjoys this wanton crime. Confidently, & between you & me --well, never mind, I might get struck by lightning if I said it. Those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a measureless satire upon their Master. To which the writer answered: O wicked Mr. Clemens! I have to ask Saint Joan of Arc to pray for you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the Golden Gates and we no longer “see through a glass darkly and know only in part,” there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between Joan of Arc and St. Peter, but your blessed Joan will conquer and she'll lead Mr. Clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead for him. Of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel. DEAR SIR,--I have written a book--naturally--which fact, however, since I am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice. Nor need you grieve, though I am sending you a copy. If I knew of any way of compelling you to read it I would do so, but unless the first few pages have that effect I can do nothing. Try the first few pages. I have done a great deal more than that with your books, so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages. If after that attempt you put it aside I shall be sorry--for you. I am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden book, written by himself. To such a one much is due in the way of indulgence. Will you remember that? Have you forgotten early twitterings of your own? In a memorandum made on this letter Mark Twain wrote: Another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject humorous--to me. Commenting further, he said: As I have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way. One beggar is too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into society; another does not care for society, but he wants a postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and then sponge on him for free advice. The man who wouldn't do any of these things will beg for the Presidency. Each admires his own dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven't any. Mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no human being is without some form of it. I know my own form, you know yours. Let us conceal them from view and abuse the others. There is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him with an ax to grind. By and by the ax's aspect becomes familiar to the proprietor of the grindstone. He perceives that it is the same old ax. If you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an office. The first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out such noble praises of you and your political record that you are moved to tears; there's a lump in your throat and you are thankful that you have lived for this happiness. Then the stranger discloses his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race. Six repetitions will cure you. After that you interrupt the compliments and say, “Yes, yes, that's all right; never mind about that. What is it you want?” But you and I are in the business ourselves. Every now and then we carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet. I don't carry mine to strangers--I draw the line there; perhaps that is your way. This is bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers. I do not know how to answer that stranger's letter. I wish he had spared me. Never mind about him--I am thinking about myself. I wish he had spared me. The book has not arrived yet; but no matter, I am prejudiced against it. It was a few days later that he added: I wrote to that man. I fell back upon the old Overworked, polite lie, and thanked him for his book and said I was promising myself the pleasure of reading it. Of course that set me free; I was not obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was gone, and as soon as the book came I opened it to see what it was like. I was not able to put it down until I had finished. It was an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that fact, but I had to do it. That first letter was merely a lie. Do you think I wrote the second one to give that man pleasure? Well, I did, but it was second-hand pleasure. I wrote it first to give myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie. Mark Twain's interest was once aroused by the following: DEAR SIR,--I have had more or less of your works on my shelves for years, and believe I have practically a complete set now. This is nothing unusual, of course, but I presume it will seem to you unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the owner regrets ever having read. Every time my glance rests on the books I do regret having read them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not who may know my feelings. You, who must be kept busy attending to your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, I believe, are sound and are probably shared by more people than you are aware of. Probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has signed it, but if you do, and care to know why I wish I had left your work unread, I will tell you as briefly as possible if you will ask me. GEORGE B. LAUDER. Clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps intending to do so, and a few days later, in Boston, when a reporter called, he happened to remember it. The reporter asked permission to print the queer document, and it appeared in his Mark Twain interview next morning. A few days later the writer of it sent a second letter, this time explaining: MY DEAR SIR,--I saw in to-day's paper a copy of the letter which I wrote you October 26th. I have read and re-read your works until I can almost recall some of them word for word. My familiarity with them is a constant source of pleasure which I would not have missed, and therefore the regret which I have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness. Believe me, the regret which I feel for having read your works is entirely due to the unalterable fact that I can never again have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. Your sincere admirer, GEORGE B. LADDER. Mark Twain promptly replied this time: DEAR SIR, You fooled me completely; I didn't divine what the letter was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very competent deceiver. Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. It was about the end of 1907 that the new St. Louis Harbor boat, was completed. The editor of the St. Louis Republic reported that it has been christened “Mark Twain,” and asked for a word of comment. Clemens sent this line: May my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us will need any fire insurance. CCLXIII. SOME LITERARY LUNCHEONS Howells, in his book, refers to the Human Race Luncheon Club, which Clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species in concert. It was to consist, beside Clemens himself, of Howells, Colonel Harvey, and Peter Dunne; but it somehow never happened that even this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh, and therefore potent. Out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings which Clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his own table. The first of these came along toward the end of 1907, when Howells was planning to spend the winter in Italy. “Howells is going away,” he said, “and I should like to give him a stag-party. We'll enlarge the Human Race Club for the occasion.” So Howells, Colonel Harvey, Martin Littleton, Augustus Thomas, Robert Porter, and Paderewski were invited. Paderewski was unable to come, and seven in all assembled. Howells was first to arrive. “Here comes Howells,” Clemens said. “Old Howells a thousand years old.” But Howells didn't look it. His face was full of good-nature and apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or action. Thomas, Porter, Littleton, and Harvey drifted in. Cocktails were served and luncheon was announced. Claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its center a mass of roses. There was to be no woman in the neighborhood--Clemens announced this fact as a sort of warrant for general freedom of expression. Thomas's play, “The Witching Hour,” was then at the height of its great acceptance, and the talk naturally began there. Thomas told something of the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that it would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work. I believe there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks from a managerial point of view. When the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, Colonel Harvey, who was seated at Clemens's left, said: “Uncle Mark”--he often called him that--“Major Leigh handed me a report of the year's sales just as I was leaving. It shows your royalty returns this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars. I don't believe there is another such return from old books on record.” This was said in an undertone, to Clemens only, but was overheard by one or two of those who sat nearest. Clemens was not unwilling to repeat it for the benefit of all, and did so. Howells said: “A statement like that arouses my basest passions. The books are no good; it's just the advertising they get.” Clemens said: “Yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise. It costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement out of the magazines.” “And three hundred every time we put it in,” said Harvey. “We often debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to leave it out.” The talk switched back to plays and acting. Thomas recalled an incident of Beerbohm Tree's performance of “Hamlet.” W. S. Gilbert, of light-opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play ended Mrs. Tree hurried over to him and said: “Oh, Mr. Gilbert, what did you think of Mr. Tree's rendition of Hamlet?” “Remarkable,” said Gilbert. “Funny without being vulgar.” It was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed. Not much of it all is left to me, but I remember Howells saying, “Did it ever occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell? Well, they did--it was never done by the church. There was a consensus of newspaper opinion that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated institution; in fact a dead letter.” And again, “I was coming down Broadway last night, and I stopped to look at one of the street-venders selling those little toy fighting roosters. It was a bleak, desolate evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and kept those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more and more cheerless and sardonic. “'Japanese game chickens,' he said; 'pretty toys, amuse the children with their antics. Child of three can operate it. Take them home for Christmas. Chicken-fight at your own fireside.' I tried to catch his eye to show him that I understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no use. He went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over, 'Chicken-fight at your own fireside.'” The luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently all left but Colonel Harvey. Clemens and the Colonel went up to the billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five cents a game. I was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful one. It ended the day much to Mark Twain's satisfaction, for he was oftenest winner. That evening he said: “We will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month. Howells will be gone, but we must have the others. We cannot have a thing like that too often.” There was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which George Riggs was present and that rare Irish musician, Denis O'Sullivan. It was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of the music made by O'Sullivan on some Hindu reeds-pipes of Pan. But we shall have more of O'Sullivan presently--all too little, for his days were few and fleeting. Howells could not get away just yet. Colonel Harvey, who, like James Osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two drawing-room cars, and with Mrs. Harvey took a party of fifty-five or sixty congenial men and women to Lakewood for a good-by luncheon to Howells. It was a day borrowed from June, warm and beautiful. The trip down was a sort of reception. Most of the guests were acquainted, but many of them did not often meet. There was constant visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches. Denis O'Sullivan was among the guests. He looked in the bloom of health, and he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the tin-whistle of Ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering fairies invented a long time ago. This was on the train going down. There was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an informal program fitting to that sunny day. It opened with some recitations by Miss Kitty Cheatham; then Colonel Harvey introduced Howells, with mention of his coming journey. As a rule, Howells does not enjoy speaking. He is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him. This time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no speech. He was among friends. He looked even happy when he got on his feet, and he spoke like a happy man. He talked about Mark Twain. It was all delicate, delicious chaffing which showed Howells at his very best--all too short for his listeners. Clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among his fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of “Godspeed and safe return” to his old comrade and friend. Then once more came Denis and his pipes. No one will ever forget his part of the program. The little samples we had heard on the train were expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps Denis himself wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful as he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds were silent. It never occurred to us then that Denis could die; and as he finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition, and I think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it might not even divert death. It was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky. The evening, like the day, was warm, and some of the party left the ferry-cabin to lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere on the earth. CCLXIV. “CAPTAIN STORMFIELD” IN PRINT During the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication of the “Gates Ajar” and the perpetration of Mark Twain's intended burlesque, built on Captain Ned Wakeman's dream, the Christian religion in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. It was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. Clemens re-read his extravaganza, Captain Stormfields Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the December and January numbers (1907-8) of Harper's Magazine, and was also issued as a small book. If there were any readers who still found it blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters that came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that Mark Twain “had returned to his earlier form.” The publication of this story recalled to Clemens's mind another heresy somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of 1891 and 1892 in Berlin. This was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a train with the evangelist Sam Jones and the Archbishop of Canterbury for the other world. He had noticed that his ticket was to a different destination than the Archbishop's, and so, when the prelate nodded and finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with disturbing results. Clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he wrote it, and when Mrs. Clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he had laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed. Clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry. “What a childish notion it was,” he said, “and how curious that only a little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile evidences about a place of so much importance. If we should find somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful and blooming tropical Paradise secreted in the center of eternal icebergs--an account written by men who did not even claim to have seen it themselves--no geographical society on earth would take any stock in that book, yet that account would be quite as authentic as any we have of heaven. If God has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, He could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations and misinterpretation. God has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world, and such things as that, none of which agree with His so-called book. As to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no evidence that appeals to logic and reason. I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life.” Then, after a long pause, he added: “And yet--I am strongly inclined to expect one.” CCLXV. LOTOS CLUB HONORS It was on January 11, 1908, that Mark Twain was given his last great banquet by the Lotos Club. The club was about to move again, into splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its old rooms. He wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white moth among a horde of beetles. The room fairly swarmed with them, and they seemed likely to overwhelm him. President Lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his customary address by introducing Robert Porter, who had been Mark Twain's host at Oxford. Porter told something of the great Oxford week, and ended by introducing Mark Twain. It had been expected that Clemens would tell of his London experiences. Instead of doing this, he said he had started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments. He had picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home. He read selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and merriment until just before the close of his speech. Then he repeated, in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his Liverpool speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim. It may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now the closing words, “homeward bound,” had only the deeper meaning. Dr. John MacArthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying: “I do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on earth, and it is such men as Mark Twain who make other men not fit to die, but fit to live.” Andrew Carnegie also spoke, and Colonel Harvey, and as the speaking ended Robert Porter stepped up behind Clemens and threw over his shoulders the scarlet Oxford robe which had been surreptitiously brought, and placed the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners vociferated their approval. Clemens was quite calm. “I like this,” he said, when the noise had subsided. “I like its splendid color. I would dress that way all the time, if I dared.” In the cab going home I mentioned the success of his speech, how well it had been received. “Yes,” he said; “but then I have the advantage of knowing now that I am likely to be favorably received, whatever I say. I know that my audiences are warm and responseful. It is an immense advantage to feel that. There are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones, and it is hard to warm up again. Perhaps there haven't been so many lately; but I have been acquainted with them more than once.” And then I could not help remembering that deadly Whittier birthday speech of more than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning to end. “We have just time for four games,” he said, as we reached the billiard-room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games were over. We were winning alternately, and neither noted the time. I was leaving by an early train, and was willing to play all night. The milk-wagons were rattling outside when he said: “Well, perhaps we'd better quit now. It seems pretty early, though.” I looked at my watch. It was quarter to four, and we said good night. CCLXVI. A WINTER IN BERMUDA Edmund Clarence Stedman died suddenly at his desk, January 18, 1908, and Clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message: I do not wish to talk about it. He was a valued friend from days that date back thirty-five years. His loss stuns me and unfits me to speak. He recalled the New England dinners which he used to attend, and where he had often met Stedman. “Those were great affairs,” he said. “They began early, and they ended early. I used to go down from Hartford with the feeling that it wasn't an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time. Choate and Depew and Stedman were in their prime then--we were all young men together. Their speeches were always worth listening to. Stedman was a prominent figure there. There don't seem to be any such men now--or any such occasions.” Stedman was one of the last of the old literary group. Aldrich had died the year before. Howells and Clemens were the lingering “last leaves.” Clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and added the feature of “doe” luncheons--pretty affairs where, with Clara Clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as Mrs. Kate Douglas Riggs, Geraldine Farrax, Mrs. Robert Collier, Mrs. Frank Doubleday, and others. I cannot report those luncheons, for I was not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too fragmentary a form to be used as history; but I gathered from Clemens himself that he had done all of the talking, and I think they must have been very pleasant afternoons. Among the acknowledgments that followed one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from Mrs. Riggs: N. B.--A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe. The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe? If so is she extinct and can never attend a third? Luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial attack, and toward the end of January he sailed away to Bermuda, where skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom. His sojourn was brief this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of happiness. He had been driving about over the island with a newly adopted granddaughter, little Margaret Blackmer, whom he had met one morning in the hotel dining-room. A part of his dictated story will convey here this pretty experience. My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend: it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection. As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said: “I don't seem to remember your name; what is it?” By the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her. She said: “Why, you've never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you've never seen me before.” “Why, that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true, and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name. But I remember it now perfectly--it's Mary.” She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle, and she said: “Oh no, it isn't; it's Margaret.” I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said: “Ah, well, I couldn't have made that mistake a few years ago; but I am old, and one of age's earliest infirmities is a damaged memory; but I am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just as if it were yesterday. It's Margaret Holcomb.” She was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine, and she said: “Oh, you are wrong again; you don't get anything right. It isn't Holcomb, it's Blackmer.” I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then: “How old are you, dear?” “Twelve; New-Year's. Twelve and a month.” We were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days. Every day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and rough-coated donkey by the name of Maud. Maud was four feet long; she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight. Her tender was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the ground. This battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified, gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose name, for some reason or other, was Reginald. Reginald and Maud--I shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood for. The trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it generally took us three hours to make it. This was because Maud set the pace. Whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected it; she stopped and said with her ears: “This is getting unsatisfactory. We will camp here.” The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were oftener in the cart than out of it. She drove and I superintended. In the course of the first excursions I found a beautiful little shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and the two halves came apart in my hand. I gave one of them to Margaret and said: “Now dear, sometime or other in the future I shall run across you somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will be some girl that only resembles you. I shall be saying to myself 'I know that this is a Margaret by the look of her, but I don't know for sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else's'; but, no matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of my pocket and say, 'I think you are my Margaret, but I am not certain; if you are my Margaret you can produce the other half of this shell.'” Next morning when I entered the breakfast-room and saw the child I approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly: “No, I am mistaken; it looks like my Margaret,--but it isn't, and I am so sorry. I shall go away and cry now.” Her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out: “No, you don't have to. There!” and she fetched out the identifying shell. I was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed it from every pore. The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage. Many times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of the shell. She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last that I was not only old, but very smart. Sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little Margaret by making grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king's reign. For William the Conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years, he drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms. It was the proper method of impressing facts upon the mind of a child. It carried him back to those days at Elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the game of kings. A Miss Wallace, a friend of Margaret's, and usually one of the pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those Bermudian days.--[Mark Twain and the Happy Islands, by Elizabeth Wallace.] Miss Wallace says: Margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an older person who understands them and treats them with respect. Mr. Clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a sweet dignity. There were some pretty sequels to the shell incident. After Mark Twain had returned to New York, and Margaret was there, she called one day with her mother, and sent up her card. He sent back word, saying: “I seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom I think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell I once gave her, of which I have the other half. If the two halves fit, I shall know that this is the same little Margaret that I remember.” The message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent up. Mark Twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to Margaret. He afterward corresponded with Margaret, and once wrote her: I'm already making mistakes. When I was in New York, six weeks ago, I was on a corner of Fifth Avenue and I saw a small girl--not a big one--start across from the opposite corner, and I exclaimed to myself joyfully, “That is certainly my Margaret!” so I rushed to meet her. But as she came nearer I began to doubt, and said to myself, “It's a Margaret--that is plain enough--but I'm afraid it is somebody else's.” So when I was passing her I held my shell so she couldn't help but see it. Dear, she only glanced at it and passed on! I wondered if she could have overlooked it. It seemed best to find out; so I turned and followed and caught up with her, and said, deferentially; “Dear Miss, I already know your first name by the look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?” She was vexed and said pretty sharply, “It's Douglas, if you're so anxious to know. I know your name by your looks, and I'd advise you to shut yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish. I am surprised that they allow you to run' at large. You are likely to get run over by a baby-carriage any time. Run along now and don't let the cows bite you.” What an idea! There aren't any cows in Fifth Avenue. But I didn't smile; I didn't let on to perceive how uncultured she was. She was from the country, of course, and didn't know what a comical blunder. she was making. Mr. Rogers's health was very poor that winter, and Clemens urged him to try Bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to the summer island, and though Margaret was gone, there was other entertaining company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new friends and old friends, and diversions of many sorts. Mr. Rogers's son-in-law, William Evarts Benjamin, came down and joined the little group. It was one of Mark Twain's real holidays. Mr. Rogers's health improved rapidly, and Mark Twain was in fine trim. To Mrs. Rogers, at the end of the first week, he wrote: DEAR MRS. ROGERS, He is getting along splendidly! This was the very place for him. He enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat. But he will get a backset if Benjamin goes home. Benjamin is the brightest man in these regions, & the best company. Bright? He is much more than that, he is brilliant. He keeps the crowd intensely alive. With love & all good wishes. S. L. C. Mark Twain and Henry Rogers were much together and much observed. They were often referred to as “the King” and “the Rajah,” and it was always a question whether it was “the King” who took care of “the Rajah,” or vice versa. There was generally a group to gather around them, and Clemens was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the verses of Kipling. “I am not fond of all poetry,” he would say; “but there's something in Kipling that appeals to me. I guess he's just about my level.” Miss Wallace recalls certain Kipling readings in his room, when his friends gathered to listen. On those Kipling evenings the 'mise-en-scene' was a striking one. The bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose windows which rattled in the sea-wind. Once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the hallway. Yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and Mark Twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch) still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten like frosted threads. In one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he used principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages. Margaret's small successors became the earliest members of the Angel Fish Club, which Clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the spectacular Bermuda aquarium. The pretty angel-fish suggested youth and feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish to him from that time forward. He bought little enamel angel-fish pins, and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could create membership on short notice. It was just another of the harmless and happy diversions of his gentler side. He was always fond of youth and freshness. He regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary part of life. Often he said: “If I had been helping the Almighty when, He created man, I would have had Him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! One would not mind then if he were looking forward to a joyful youth. Think of the joyous prospect of growing young instead of old! Think of looking forward to eighteen instead of eighty! Yes, the Almighty made a poor job of it. I wish He had invited my assistance.” To one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return: I miss you, dear. I miss Bermuda, too, but not so much as I miss you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and Ltd.; whereas Bermuda's charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly upon the just, but whenever I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him. CCLXVII. VIEWS AND ADDRESSES [As I am beginning this chapter, April 16, 1912, the news comes of the loss, on her first trip, of the great White Star Line steamer Titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are Frank D. Millet, William T. Stead, Isadore Straus, John Jacob Astor, and other distinguished men. They died as heroes, remaining with the ship in order that the women and children might be saved. It was the kind of death Frank Millet would have wished to die. He was always a soldier--a knight. He has appeared from time to time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the Clemens household. One of America's foremost painters; at the time of his death he was head of the American Academy of Arts in Rome.] Mark Twain made a number of addresses during the spring of 1908. He spoke at the Cartoonists' dinner, very soon after his return from Bermuda; he spoke at the Booksellers' banquet, expressing his debt of obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered a fine address at the dinner given by the British Schools and University Club at Delmonico's, May 25th, in honor of Queen Victoria's birthday. In that speech he paid high tribute to the Queen for her attitude toward America, during the crisis of the Civil Wax, and to her royal consort, Prince Albert. What she did for us in America in our time of storm and stress we shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in it and sustained and supported her--Prince Albert's. We need not talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane and the son of Victoria and Albert sits upon the throne. In conclusion, I believe I may justly claim to utter the voice of my country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign. But perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the great City College (May 14, 1908), where President John Finley, who had been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last for his freer and fuller educational undertakings. A great number of honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture of medieval design. These distinguished guests were clad in their academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different from that one at Oxford of a year before. But there was something rather fearsome about it, too. A kind of scaffolding had been reared in the center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly suggestive of one of George Cruikshank's drawings of an execution scene at the Tower of London. Many of the robes were black--these would be the priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have assembled for some royal martyrdom. There was a bright May sunlight over it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten the weird effect. I am sure that others felt it besides myself, for everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no occasion for silence. There was something of another age about the whole setting, to say the least. We left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after. As Clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell, ending with “Twain! Twain! Twain!” and added three cheers for Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. They called for a speech, but he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request. He made a speech to them that night at the Waldorf--where he proposed for the City College a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty applause. In the same address he referred to the “God Trust” motto on the coins, and spoke approvingly of the President's order for its removal. We do not trust in God, in the important matters of life, and not even a minister of the Gospel will take any coin for a cent more than its accepted value because of that motto. If cholera should ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from the plague, but we would put our main trust in the Board of Health. Next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said: “If only the reporters would not try to improve on what I say. They seem to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in its delicacy, and as they can't reproduce the manner and intonation in type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the reader.” I pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed in their sense of literary art. “Yes,” he agreed, “they are so afraid their readers won't see my good points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong. They mean well, but I wish they wouldn't do it.” He referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the coins. He had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that we do not really trust in God in any financial matter. “I wanted to answer it,” he said; “but I destroyed it. It didn't seem worth noticing.” I asked how the motto had originated. “About 1853 some idiot in Congress wanted to announce to the world that this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other Congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course. It took courage in those days to do a thing like that; but I think the same thing would happen to-day.” “Still the country has become broader. It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read the 'Age of Reason'.” “So it did, and yet that seems a mild book now. I read it first when I was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power. I read it again a year or two ago, for some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become. It seemed that Paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the reader.” He drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the Knickerbocker Trust Company's suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in God for the return of these imperiled sums. Clemens himself, at this time, did not expect to come out whole from that disaster. He had said very little when the news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were locked up, and it came near stopping the building activities at Redding. It was only the smaller things of life that irritated him. He often met large calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference. In the Knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and wrote a number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print. It should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the Knickerbocker depositors. CCLXVIII. REDDING The building of the new home at Redding had been going steadily forward for something more than a year. John Mead Howells had made the plans; W. W. Sunderland and his son Philip, of Danbury, Connecticut, were the builders, and in the absence of Miss Clemens, then on a concert tour, Mark Twain's secretary, Miss I. V. Lyon, had superintended the furnishing. “Innocence at Home,” as the place was originally named, was to be ready for its occupant in June, with every detail in place, as he desired. He had never visited Redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or discussed any of the decorations of the new home. He had required only that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations for guests. He had required that the billiard-room be red, for something in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly in moments of diversion. Besides, his other billiard-rooms had been red, and such association may not be lightly disregarded. His one other requirement was that the place should be complete. “I don't want to see it,” he said, “until the cat is purring on the hearth.” Howells says: “He had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was without interest.” But it was rather, I think, that he was afraid of losing interest by becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also, he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been conjured into existence as with a word. It was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but there were delays, and it was not until the 18th of June that he took possession. The plan, at this time, was only to use the Redding place as a summer residence, and the Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled. A few days before the 18th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the new house, Clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of No. 21, attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest of the time, waiting for the appointed day and train. It was really a pleasant three days. He invented a new game, and we were riotous and laughed as loudly as we pleased. I think he talked very little of the new home which he was so soon to see. It was referred to no oftener than once or twice a day, and then I believe only in connection with certain of the billiard-room arrangements. I have wondered since what picture of it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph. He had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its architecture was of the Italian villa order. I confess I had moments of anxiety, for I had selected the land for him, and had been more or less accessory otherwise. I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs. It had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those who were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a pleasant day for his arrival. Both petitions were granted; June 18th would fall on Thursday, and Monday night there came a good, thorough, and refreshing shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the dust. The morning of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool. Clemens was up and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time, though the train did not leave until four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to stop at Redding--its first trip scheduled for the day of Mark Twain's arrival. We were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab was waiting. My daughter, Louise, whose school on Long Island had closed that day, was with us. Clemens wore his white flannels and a Panama hat, and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others, to interview him and speed him to his new home. He was cordial and talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation. A reporter or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his arrival. The new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the Sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify him, and when he spoke at all it was approvingly. The hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short. As the train slowed down for the Redding station, he said: “We'll leave this box of candy”--he had bought a large box on the way--“those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some more.” He drew out a great handful of silver. “Give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service.” There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting. Redding had recognized the occasion as historic. A varied assemblage of vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome. It was now a little before six o'clock of that long June day, still and dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something which was not quite reality in the scene. There was a tendency to be very still. They nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer. It would have been a pity if they had done so. A noise, and the illusion would have been shattered. His carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind. No first impression of a fair land could have come at a sweeter time. Hillsides were green, fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the trees. And over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of June. He was very quiet as we drove along. Once with gentle humor, looking over a white daisy field, he said: “That is buckwheat. I always recognize buckwheat when I see it. I wish I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat. It seems to be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside.” And a little later: “This is the kind of a road I like; a good country road through the woods.” The water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the Saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little river, one of those charming Connecticut streams. A little farther on a brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the tiny streams of Switzerland, I believe the Giessbach. The lane that led to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he said, “This is just the kind of a lane I like,” thus completing his acceptance of everything but the house and the location. The last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane, and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict. They had not long to wait. As the carriage ascended higher to the open view he looked away, across the Saugatuck Valley to the nestling village and church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one's soul. Then came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an Italian villa, such as he had known in Florence, adapted now to American climate and needs. The scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there always. Neither did the house itself look new. The soft, gray stucco had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background. At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. It was an anxious moment, and no one spoke immediately. But presently his eye had taken in the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open French windows to an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills. He said, very gently: “How beautiful it all is? I did not think it could be as beautiful as this.” He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only color-harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight. Then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening hills. When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final verdict: “It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail. It might have been here always.” He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home, for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in his adaptation. To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later, one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had “been there always.” Only the presence of his daughters was needed now to complete his satisfaction in everything. There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely room. A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar, neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival. “I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me,” he said, softly. “I never go to any trouble for anybody”--a statement which all who heard it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny. That first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in the rack, there was none to say that Mark Twain's first day in his new home had not been a happy one. CCLXIX. FIRST DAYS AT STORMFIELD I went up next afternoon, for I knew how he dreaded loneliness. We played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property. Presently he said: “In one way I am sorry I did not see this place sooner. I never want to leave it again. If I had known it was so beautiful I should have vacated the house in town and moved up here permanently.” I suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered immediately into the idea. By and by we turned down a deserted road, grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land. At one side was a slope facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of New England. He had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told it was he said: “I would like Howells to have a house there. We must try to give that to Howells.” At the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow. I told him that I had often caught fine trout there, and that soon I would bring in some for breakfast. He answered: “Yes, I should like that. I don't care to catch them any more myself. I like them very hot.” We passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little house. He noticed it and said: “The man who built that had some memory of Greece in his mind when he put on that little porch with those columns.” My second daughter, Frances, was coming from a distant school on the evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her. I suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive. “Yes,” he agreed, “I should enjoy that.” So I took the reins, and he picked up little Joy, who came running out just then, and climbed into the back seat. It was another beautiful evening, and he was in a talkative humor. Joy pointed out a small turtle in the road, and he said: “That is a wild turtle. Do you think you could teach it arithmetic?” Joy was uncertain. “Well,” he went on, “you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent arithmetic--and teach that turtle.” We passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike. “Those,” he said, “are elephant woods.” But Joy answered: “They are fairy woods. The fairies are there, but you can't see them because they wear magic cloaks.” He said: “I wish I had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes. I had one once, but it is worn out now.” Joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a piece of fairyland. It was a sweet drive to and from the village. There are none too many such evenings in a lifetime. Colonel Harvey's little daughter, Dorothy, came up a day or two later, and with my daughter Louise spent the first week with him in the new home. They were created “Angel-Fishes”--the first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of Bermuda fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls. Each visiting member was required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her name upon it. It was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in this room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of reach. His snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture. The place did not retain its original name. He declared that it would always be “Innocence at Home” to the angel-fish visitors, but that the title didn't remain continuously appropriate. The money which he had derived from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven had been used to build the loggia wing, and he considered the name of “Stormfield” as a substitute. When, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate. Standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he rechristened the place, and “Stormfield” it became and remained. The last day of Mark Twain's first week in Redding, June 25th, was saddened by the news of the death of Grover Cleveland at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. Clemens had always been an ardent Cleveland admirer, and to Mrs. Cleveland now he sent this word of condolence-- Your husband was a man I knew and loved and honored for twenty-five years. I mourn with you. And once during the evening he said: “He was one of our two or three real Presidents. There is none to take his place.” CCLXX. THE ALDRICH MEMORIAL. At the end of June came the dedication at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, of the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Museum, which the poet's wife had established there in the old Aldrich homestead. It was hot weather. We were obliged to take a rather poor train from South Norwalk, and Clemens was silent and gloomy most of the way to Boston. Once there, however, lodged in a cool and comfortable hotel, matters improved. He had brought along for reading the old copy of Sir Thomas Malory's Arthur Tales, and after dinner he took off his clothes and climbed into bed and sat up and read aloud from those stately legends, with comments that I wish I could remember now, only stopping at last when overpowered with sleep. We went on a special train to Portsmouth next morning through the summer heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back portion of the opera-house, behind the scenes: Clemens was genial and good-natured with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy, with Howells, who had come over from Kittery Point, how Aldrich must be amused at the whole circumstance if he could see them punishing themselves to do honor to his memory. Richard Watson Gilder was there, and Hamilton Mabie; also Governor Floyd of New Hampshire; Colonel Higginson, Robert Bridges, and other distinguished men. We got to the more open atmosphere of the stage presently, and the exercises began. Clemens was last on the program. The others had all said handsome, serious things, and Clemens himself had mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and he rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered an address that certainly would have delighted Aldrich living, and must have delighted him dead, if he could hear it. It was full of the most charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous. The audience, that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine waves of laughter. He spoke out his regret for having worn black clothes. It was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn time--Aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered. He had been a man who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make life merry and delightful. Certainly, if he could know, he would not wish this dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless occasion. Outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile writer, J. T. Trowbridge, came up to Clemens with extended hand. Clemens said: “Trowbridge, are you still alive? You must be a thousand years old. Why, I listened to your stories while I was being rocked in the cradle.” Trowbridge said: “Mark, there's some mistake. My earliest infant smile was wakened with one of your jokes.” They stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were photographed--an interesting picture. We returned to Boston that evening. Clemens did not wish to hurry in the summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool of the evening. Once, remembering Aldrich, he said: “I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the 'Story of a Bad Boy'. When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up mine, but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do. He thought my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of New England, and of course he was right.” He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company. He said: “Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of intellect we call a group, or school, and name it. “Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group. Now there's been still another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable. It will soon be gone. I suppose they will have to name it by and by.” He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited in other days. The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and more distinguished sights. Clemens mildly but firmly refused any variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to twinkle among the trees. CCLXXI. DEATH OF “SAM” MOFFETT Clemens' next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey shore. Moffett was his nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents. He was superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and large-hearted, and of noble ideals. With much of the same sense of humor which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data. Once as a child he had visited Hartford when Clemens was laboring over his history game. The boy was much interested, and asked permission to help. His uncle willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts. But he did not need to consult the books; he already had English history stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it. At the time of his death Moffett held an important editorial position on Collier's Weekly. Clemens was fond and proud of his nephew. Returning from the funeral, he was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill. He was in bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the journey. Then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion. We were all alone one very still, warm August afternoon playing, when he suddenly said: “I feel a little dizzy; I will sit down a moment.” I brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose and started to play I thought he had a dazed look. He said: “I have lost my memory. I don't know which is my ball. I don't know what game we are playing.” But immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it, considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey. I have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first indication of a more serious malady. He became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore. In a letter to Mrs. Crane, August 12th, he spoke of recent happenings: DEAR AUNT SUE,--It was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight, the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family. I came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but I am all right again, though the doctor from New York has given peremptory orders that I am not to stir from here before frost. O fortunate Sam Moffett! fortunate Livy Clemens! doubly fortunate Susy! Those swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment that I am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have escaped. How Livy would love this place! How her very soul would steep itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley! You must come, Aunt Sue, & stay with us a real good visit. Since June 26 we have had 21 guests, & they have all liked it and said they would come again. To Howells, on the same day, he wrote: Won't you & Mrs. Howells & Mildred come & give us as many days as you can spare & examine John's triumph? It is the most satisfactory house I am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated.. .. I have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a holiday whose other end is the cemetery. CCLXXII. STORMFIELD ADVENTURES Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being dismantled. He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half a million words of comment and reminiscence. His general idea had been to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had plenty now for any such purpose. He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading, though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts... He read the daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public affairs. New York politics did not concern him any more, and national politics not much. When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied: If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt & loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated. But it is too late, & my mouth is closed. I have become a citizen & taxpayer of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in matters which are none of my business. I could not do it with impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another. Howells speaks of Mark Twain's “absolute content” with his new home, and these are the proper words' to express it. He was like a storm-beaten ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven. The days began and ended in tranquillity. There were no special morning regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any place. He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or livingroom, or billiard-room. He might even have it in the diningroom, or on the terrace, just outside. Guests--there were usually guests--might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons. The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew billiards, otherwise hearts. Those two games were his safety-valves, and while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions. Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset; if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly. If not--well, the fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the consequences. Sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there were drives among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding Glen. The cat was always “purring on the hearth” at Stormfield--several cats--for Mark Twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics. There were never too many cats at Stormfield, and the “hearth” included the entire house, even the billiard-table. When, as was likely to happen at any time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards would decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance, and the uninvited player was not disturbed. The cats really owned Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment. Mark Twain held the title deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others that possessed the premises. They occupied any portion of the house or its furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention. Mark Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due deference, and complimented and made comfortable. Clemens would arise from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of appreciation. One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the cats were not supreme. In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams. It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying off some bundles of silver when they were discovered. Claude, the butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and Clemens, wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went to sleep again. It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer received a bullet-wound. Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven miles. The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there. Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train came down, and there the capture was made. It was a remarkably prompt and shrewd piece of work. Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him. The thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing. Subsequently they received severe sentences. Clemens tacked this notice on his front door: NOTICE TO THE NEXT BURGLAR There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not make a noise--it disturbs the family. You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that. Please close the door when you go away! Very truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. CCLXXIII. STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn. The change of the landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain. There were several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-gallery. The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture of its own that was changing almost hourly. The red tones that began to run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums could furnish. He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the foot of a natural garden. If a friend came, he was willing to walk much farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the “gorge,” a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not go far. He liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down into it, and let his talk follow his mood. He liked to contemplate the geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of construction required to build the world. The marvels of science always appealed to him. He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the sounding figures. I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high, the long story of geological creation is written. I had stopped there during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of its wonders. I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with him. He said: “I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things again.” I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his head. “That would only make me more conspicuous.” “How about a disguise?” “Yes,” he said, “I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name, but I couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me out.” It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too. His fame had deprived him of valued privileges. He talked of many things during these little excursions. Once he told how he had successively advised his nephew, Moffett, in the matter of obtaining a desirable position. Moffett had wanted to become a reporter. Clemens devised a characteristic scheme. He said: “I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise faithfully to follow out my instructions.” The applicant agreed, eagerly enough. Clemens said: “Go to the newspaper of your choice. Say that you are idle and want work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no wages, and will support yourself. All that you ask is work. That you will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run errands, and be generally useful. You must never ask for wages. You must wait until the offer of wages comes to you. You must work just as faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it. Then see what happens.” The scheme had worked perfectly. Young Moffett had followed his instructions to the letter. By and by he attracted attention. He was employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the confidence of the office. In obedience to further instructions, he began to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk. No pay was asked; none was expected. Occasionally one of the items was used. Then, of course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he was given a small news assignment. There was no trouble about his progress after that. He had won the confidence of the management and shown that he was not afraid to work. The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed. The idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning. Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind. He thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident. He referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[See chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]--He would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming. “I'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may be sooner than we think. There are two special reasons for it and one condition. The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a God and King, for example. The second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not. And the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions.” He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a Presidential succession. He did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently. He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently. “The gospel of peace,” he said, “is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a soldier-camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest. “Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create.” Once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said: “To him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A, when to a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident. For instance, to the soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill was an Achievement with an A as big as the Pyramids of Cheops; whereas, if Napoleon had fought it, he would have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had happened. But that is all natural and human enough. We are all like that.” The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed to furnish him with themes more or less amusing. I remember one Sunday, when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade and fell to talking of Herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said could not have happened. “Tacitus makes no mention of it,” he said, “and he would hardly have overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like Herod. Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects. Why, the Emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and dismissed Herod. That tradition is probably about as authentic as those connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to have been built by Satan. The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time. Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.” He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons always exactly on schedule time. “The Great Law” was a phrase often on his lips. The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but only of justice. Once he wrote on a card for preservation: From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong & misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness. No “civilization,” no “advance,” has ever modified these proportions by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures. CCLXIV. CITIZEN AND FARMER The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily. Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters he diligently did it himself after they were gone. Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; “angel-fish” swam in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new home; Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--“Mrs. Sally,” as Clemens liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed with the architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place he was about to build in Newfoundland. Helen Keller, with Mr. and Mrs. Macy, came up for a week-end visit. Mrs. Crane came over from Elmira; and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood, little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the seventies, with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up. That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October: I've grown young in these months of dissipation here. And I have left off drinking--it isn't necessary now. Society & theology are sufficient for me. To Helen Allen, a Bermuda “Angel-Fish,” he wrote: We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop. The moment I saw the house I was glad I built it, & now I am gladder & gladder all the time. I was not dreaming of living here except in the summer-time--that was before I saw this region & the house, you see--but that is all changed now; I shall stay here winter & summer both & not go back to New York at all. My child, it's as tranquil & contenting as Bermuda. You will be very welcome here, dear. He interested himself in the affairs and in the people of Redding. Not long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance, and threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house. He appointed Mrs. Lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome each visitor in person. It was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled with the visitors. In the dining-room there were generous refreshments. Again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however great or small, in the building of his home. Mr. and Mrs. Littleton were visiting Stormfield at this time, and both Clemens and Littleton spoke to these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their efforts had been worth while. Presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to much reading-matter. He had been for years flooded with books by authors and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city. When these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as the nucleus of a public library. An unused chapel not far away--it could be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the Mark Twain Library of Redding was duly established. Clemens himself was elected its first president, with the resident physician, Dr. Ernest H. Smith, vice-president, and another resident, William E. Grumman, librarian. On the afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address. He said: I am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers. I suppose you are all farmers: I am going to put in a crop next year, when I have been here long enough and know how. I couldn't make a turnip stay on a tree now after I had grown it. I like to talk. It would take more than the Redding air to make me keep still, and I like to instruct people. It's noble to be good, and it's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. I am glad to help this library. We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books --theoretically at least. Mr. Beard or Mr. Adams will give some land, and by and by we are going to have a building of our own. This statement was news to both Mr. Beard and Mr. Adams and an inspiration of the moment; but Mr. Theodore Adams, who owned a most desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library purposes. Clemens continued: I am going to help build that library with contributions from my visitors. Every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. --[A characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a dollar to the Library Building Fund was later placed on the billiard-room mantel at Stormfield with good results.]--If those burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library they would have read a few books and led a better life. Now they are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill you can never tell where he's going to stop. I am sorry for those burglars. They got nothing that they wanted and scared away most of my servants. Now we are putting in a burglar-alarm instead of a dog. Some advised the dog, but it costs even more to entertain a dog than a burglar. I am having the ground electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in Europe. Now I will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know already--Dr. Smith. So a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and there was a feeling that Redding, besides having a literary colony, was to be literary in fact. It might have been mentioned earlier that Redding already had literary associations when Mark Twain arrived. As far back as Revolutionary days Joel Barlow, a poet of distinction, and once Minister to France, had been a resident of Redding, and there were still Barlow descendants in the township. William Edgar Grumman, the librarian, had written the story of Redding's share in the Revolutionary War--no small share, for Gen. Israel Putnam's army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter. Charles Burr Todd, of one of the oldest Redding families, himself--still a resident, was also the author of a Redding history. Of literary folk not native to Redding, Dora Reed Goodale and her sister Elaine, the wife of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, had, long been residents of Redding Center; Jeanette L. Gilder and Ida M. Tarbell had summer homes on Redding Ridge; Dan Beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the banks of the Saugatuck, while Kate V. St. Maur, also two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's granddaughters had recently located adjoining the Stormfield lands. By which it will be seen that Redding was in no way unsuitable as a home for Mark Twain. CCLXV. A MANTEL AND A BABY ELEPHANT Mark Twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year. The first of these, a mantel from Hawaii, presented to him by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the morning of his seventy-third birthday. This committee had written, proposing to build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as he might prefer, the same to be carved from the native woods. Clemens decided on a billiard-room mantel, and John Howells forwarded the proper measurements. So, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in fine condition, with the Hawaiian word, “Aloha,” one of the sweetest forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament. To the donors of the gift Clemens wrote: The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its friendly “Aloha” was the first uttered greeting received on my 73d birthday. It is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such things which was born in me & which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & I beg to thank the committee for providing me that pleasure. To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word: I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it. It is worthy of the choicest place in the house and it has it. It was the second beautiful mantel in Stormfield--the Hartford library mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the Stormfield living-room. Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one. Clemens, in the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods. He recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing I said: “I hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game.” And he answered, as then: “Yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth.” And he held out his hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted, though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine. Mark Twain's second present came at Christmas-time. About ten days earlier, a letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had bought a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a Christmas gift. He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum & Bailey's headquarters at Bridgeport. The news created a disturbance in Stormfield. One could not refuse, discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a disaster to accept it. An elephant would require a roomy and warm place, also a variety of attention which Stormfield was not prepared to supply. The telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by the secretary. There was no good place to put an elephant in Stormfield, but Mr. Collier said, quite confidently: “Oh, put him in the garage.” “But there's no heat in the garage.” “Well, put him in the loggia, then. That's closed in, isn't it, for the winter? Plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant.” “But we play cards in the loggia. We use it for a sort of sun-parlor.” “But that wouldn't matter. He's a kindly, playful little thing. He'll be just like a kitten. I'll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and I'll send up several bales of hay in advance. It isn't a large elephant, you know: just a little one--a regular plaything.” There was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the Christmas present's arrival. A few days before Christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels of carrots. This store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at Stormfield. It would seem there was no escape now. On Christmas morning Mr. Lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from Barnum & Bailey's, sent by Mr. Collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him settled when he should arrive. Orders were given to bring the man over. The day of doom was at hand. But Lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play. He had seen a good many elephant-trainers at Bridgeport, and he thought this one had a doubtful look. “Where is the elephant?” he asked, as they drove along. “He will arrive at noon.” “Where are you going to put him?” “In the loggia.” “How big is he?” “About the size of a cow.” “How long have you been with Barnum and Bailey?” “Six years.” “Then you must know some friends of mine” (naming two that had no existence until that moment). “Oh yes, indeed. I know them well.” Lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that perhaps the dread at Stormfield had grown unnecessarily large. Something told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet, than an elephant-trainer. They drove to Stormfield, and the trainer looked over the place. It would do perfectly, he said. He gave a few instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven back to the station to bring it. Lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the trainer. It didn't need a trainer. It was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small--suited to the loggia, as Collier had said--for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the forest toy elephants ever seen anywhere. It was a good joke, such as Mark Twain loved--a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. He wrote Robert Collier, threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating Stormfield. “To send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or stuffed!” he said. “The animal came to life, as you knew it would, and began to observe Christmas, and we now have no furniture left and no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars--nothing but the elephant. Be kind, be merciful, be generous; take him away and send us what is left of the earthquake.” Collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant in the trunk. And with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end. CCLXXVI. SHAKESPEARE-BACON TALK When the bad weather came there was not much company at Stormfield, and I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill, and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion. My own home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the walk, whatever the weather. I usually managed to arrive about three o'clock. He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop, and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might be no delay in getting at the games. Or, if it happened that he wished to show me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding down the stair. Once, when I arrived, I heard him calling, and going up I found him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair, placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling. He said: “They seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors. Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent.” He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on them. “How beautifully they light up!” he said; “some of them in the sunlight, some still in the shadow.” He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields. “The lights and colors are always changing there,” he said. “I never tire of it.” To see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck. More than any one I ever knew, he lived in the present. Most of us are either dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow. Mark Twain's step was timed to the march of the moment. There were days when he recalled the past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future; but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular locality where he found it. The thing which caught his fancy, however slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if never afterward. He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare-Bacon problem. He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published, 'The Shakespeare Problem Restated', by George Greenwood, and another one in press, 'Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon', by William Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon, and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas. I was ardently opposed to this idea. The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater, and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was something I did not wish to let perish. I produced all the stock testimony--Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept any of it. He declared that there was not a single proof to show that Shakespeare had written one of them. “Is there any evidence that he didn't?” I asked. “There's evidence that he couldn't,” he said. “It required a man with the fullest legal equipment to have written them. When you have read Greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for Shakespeare's authorship.” I was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise. “Perhaps,” I said, “Shakespeare was the Belasoo of that day--the managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme gift of making effective drama from the plays of others. In that case it is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare's. Even in this day John Luther Long's 'Madam Butterfly' is sometimes called Belasco's play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of it.” He considered this view, but not very favorably. The Booth book was at this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction: “I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to believe he did not touch the text in any way.” “How can you be so positive?” I asked. He replied: “I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned.” I now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest. “It is the great discovery of the age,” he said, quite seriously. “The world will soon ring with it. I wish I could tell you about it, but I have passed my word. You will not have long to wait.” I was going to sail for the Mediterranean in February, and I asked if it would be likely that I would know this great secret before I sailed. He thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would be given to the world while I was on the water, and it might come to me on the ship by wireless. I confess I was amazed and intensely curious by this time. I conjectured the discovery of some document--some Bacon or Shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the authorship. I hinted that he might write me a letter which I could open on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal. He had passed his word, he repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he assured me more than once that wherever I might be, in whatever remote locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it. I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time of the upheaval. Naturally the Shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days that we were together. He had engaged another stenographer, and was now dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated with those of Mr. Greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished and decorated in his own gay manner. These were chapters for his autobiography, he said, and I think he had then no intention of making a book of them. I could not quite see why he should take all this argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, had written the plays. I thought the whole matter very curious. The Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. One evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: “There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known,” and he added, “Jesus Christ.” He reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value. I agreed that they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with justice and reason; but I said I thought there was truth in them, too. “Why do you think so?” he asked. “Because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally and essentially just.” “Then you make your own Bible?” “Yes, from those materials combined with human reason.” “Then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?” I admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from Shakespeare, Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the Scriptures. We were on common ground now. He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and their blameless lives. I, still pursuing the thought of Jesus, asked: “Do you not think it strange that in that day when Christ came, admitting that there was a Christ, such a character could have come at all--in the time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was ceremony and unbelief?” “I remember,” he said, “the Sadducees didn't believe in hell. He brought them one.” “Nor the resurrection. He brought them that, also.” He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels. “It is all a myth,” he said. “There have been Saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus.” “But,” I argued, “even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is genuine. Suppose that we admit there was no physical Saviour--that it is only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't that make it worthy?” “But then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it crumbles the very foundations of any established church. You can create your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you've got to give up your atonement.” “As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of atonement, doesn't it?” He said: “A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon's plays. You are preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few centuries ago. I have preached that in my own Gospel.” I remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, I had merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training the ideals to a higher contentment of soul. CCLXXVII. “IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?” I set out on my long journey with much reluctance. However, a series of guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a good time to go. Clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me Godspeed. It would be near the end of April before I should see him again. Now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, I remembered the great news I was to hear concerning Shakespeare. In Cairo, at Shepheard's, I looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed. Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any particular Shakespeare news. Arriving in New York, I found that Clemens himself had published his Shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, 'Is Shakespeare Dead?' The title certainly suggested spiritistic matters, and I got a volume at Harpers', and read it going up on the train, hoping to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery. But it was only matter I had already known; the secret was still unrevealed. At Redding I lost not much time in getting up to Stormfield. There had been changes in my absence. Clara Clemens had returned from her travels, and Jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her father's secretary. He was greatly pleased with these things, and declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about him. He was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great living-room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans. For one thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, Mark Twain, in order that the protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in general should not require his personal attention. He seemed to find a relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of responsibility. When we went in for billiards I spoke of his book, which I had read on the way up, and of the great Shakespearian secret which was to astonish the world. Then he told me that the matter had been delayed, but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the revelation was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively to any one who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic name of Francis Bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many--probably through all of the so-called Shakespeare plays. He said it was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that Ignatius Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of this book, William Stone Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there. The book would be issued in a few days, he said. He had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind. He confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in, attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it. He had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had understood the rule, and had been able to work out several Bacon signatures. He complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the book came I would have no trouble with it. Without going further with this matter, I may say here that the book arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down. It was certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not there. Just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it would be hard to say. Certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in the literary world, and the name of William Shakespeare still continues to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long associated with his name. Mark Twain's own book on the subject--'Is Shakespeare Dead?'--found a wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers. It contained no new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was certainly readable.--[Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis, we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said, quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”] Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells. Clemens had called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to attend. We will let him tell of his visit: We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close- knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the place.... My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugar-snow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's father when they were first married, and had been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[This carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to Mrs. Crane when the Hartford house was closed. When Stormfield was built she returned it to its original owner.]--Its springs had not grown yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. Howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration. Clemens started to write him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of letters of James Russell Lowell. Then, next morning, he was seized with the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as Howells, Twichell, and Rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for some future public. He wrote two of these immediately--to Howells and to Twichell. The Howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran: 3 in the morning, April 17, 1909. My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, did you write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it? In my mind's eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelope in the mail-pile. I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. Was it an illusion? I am reading Lowell's letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have just margined a note: “Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now.” It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah me, the pathos of it is that we were young then. And he--why, so was he, but he didn't know it. He didn't even know it 9 years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying: “Don't say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is old, & broods over it.” Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter. Time to go to sleep. Yours ever, MARK The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is to write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing that the letter is not to be mailed. ...The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment. And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to Twichell, because it will make him writhe and squirm & break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on Twichell; you'll save it for Howells, who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is done, yet a vast advantage is gained. The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there. The Twichell letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already said on the subject. He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again. CCLXXVIII. THE DEATH OF HENRY ROGERS Clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to Norfolk, Virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the Virginia Railway. He had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public tribute to Henry Rogers, and told something of his personal obligation to the financier. He began by telling what Mr. Rogers had done for Helen Keller, whom he called “the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc.” Then he said: That is not all Mr. Rogers has done, but you never see that side of his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping hand daily out of that generous heart of his. You never hear of it. He is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright. But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not God. I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if I don't look at him I can tell it now. In 1894, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. If you will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and I was on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and I could not give away my copyrights. Mr. Rogers had long-enough vision ahead to say, “Your books have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support you again,” and that was a correct proposition. He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising at the end of four years I would pay dollar for dollar. That arrangement was made, otherwise I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that. You see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is always trying to look like me--I don't blame him for that). These are only emblematic of his character, and that is all. I say, without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever known. This had been early in April. Something more than a month later Clemens was making a business trip to New York to see Mr. Rogers. I was telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he started. I do not remember why I was not to go along that day, for I usually made such trips with him. I think it was planned that Miss Clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the Grand Central Station. At all events, she did meet him there, with the news that during the night Mr. Rogers had suddenly died. This was May 20, 1909. The news had already come to the house, and I had lost no time in preparations to follow by the next train. I joined him at the Grosvenor Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. He was upset and deeply troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend. He had a helpless look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him adrift. “And how I hate to do anything,” he added, “that requires the least modicum of intelligence!” We remained at the Grosvenor for Mr. Rogers's funeral. Clemens served as one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to Fairhaven. He wanted to be very quiet, he said. He could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime. Once he asked me to write a letter to Jean: “Say, 'Your father says every little while, “How glad I am that Jean is at home again!”' for that is true and I think of it all the time.” But by and by, after a long period of silence, he said: “Mr. Rogers is under the ground now.” And so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so largely to the comfort of Mark Twain's old age. He was a man of fine sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor. One Christmas, when he presented Mark Twain with a watch and a match-case, he wrote: MY DEAR CLEMENS,--For many years your friends have been complaining of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality. Complaints are now coming in of your use of time. Most of your friends think that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief complaint is in regard to the quality. I have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box. Therefore, I take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that will furnish only the best. Please use it with the kind wishes of Yours truly, H. H. ROGERS. P. S.--Complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you make in your trousers in scratching matches. You will find a furrow on the bottom of the article inclosed. Please use it. Compliments of the season to the family. He was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to Clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried. One reading them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy that at last he was crushed beneath their weight. CCLXXIX. AN EXTENSION OF COPYRIGHT One of the pleasant things that came to Mark Twain that year was the passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an extension of fourteen years. Champ Clark had been largely instrumental in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily since Mark Twain's visit to Washington in 1906. Following that visit, Clark wrote: ... It [the original bill] would never pass because the bill had literature and music all mixed together. Being a Missourian of course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you. What I want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating only to the copyright of books; send it to me and I will try to have it passed. Clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[Similar to the “Open Letter to the Register of Copyrights,” North American Review, January, 1905.]--which would instruct Congress, but this he did not complete. Meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in 1909 it became a law. In June Clark wrote: DR. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, Stormfield, Redding, Conn. MY DEAR DOCTOR,--I am gradually becoming myself again, after a period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration. After a long lecture tour last summer I went immediately into a hard campaign; as soon as the election was over, and I had recovered my disposition, I came here and went into those tariff hearings, which began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until midnight. Listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take Uncle Joe's rules away from him; on the heels of that “Campaign that Failed” came the tariff fight in the House. I am now getting time to breathe regularly and I am writing to ask you if the copyright law is acceptable to you. If it is not acceptable to you I want to ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and I will give my best endeavors to the work. I believe that your ideas and wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what should be done in the case. Your friend, CHAMP CLARK. To this Clemens replied: STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN, June 5, 1909. DEAR CHAMP CLARK,--Is the new copyright law acceptable to me? Emphatically yes! Clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined & just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United States. Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision. The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting & apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said “the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos nothing can be built.” But we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning-rods out of the statute book I think. When I think of that other bill, which even the Deity couldn't understand, and of this one, which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. Was it R. U. Johnson? Was it the Authors' League? Was it both together? I don't know, but I take off my hat, anyway. Johnson has written a valuable article about the new law--I inclose it. At last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are ahead of England! Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. Does this sound like shouting? Then I must modify it: all we possessed of copyright justice before the 4th of last March we owed to England's initiative. Truly yours, S. L. CLEMENS. Clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed would regulate the whole matter. It was a generous, even if a somewhat Utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author. The new fourteen-year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other compromise seem inadvisable.--[The reader may consider this last copyright document by Mark Twain under Appendix N, at the end of this volume.] CCLXXX. A WARNING Clemens had promised to go to Baltimore for the graduation of “Francesca” of his London visit in 1907--and to make a short address to her class. It was the eighth of June when we set out on this journey,--[The reader may remember that it was the 8th of June, 1867, that Mark Twain sailed for the Holy Land. It was the 8th of June, 1907, that he sailed for England to take his Oxford degree. This 8th of June, 1909, was at least slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement made with Francesca in London, and my notes show that he discussed, on the way to the station, some incidents of his Holy Land trip and his attitude at that time toward Christian traditions. As he rarely mentioned the Quaker City trip, the coincidence seems rather curious. It is most unlikely that Clemens himself in any way associated the two dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain. Clemens had a number of errands to do in New York, and we drove from one place to another, attending to them. Finally, in the afternoon, the rain ceased, and while I was arranging some matters for him he concluded to take a ride on the top of a Fifth Avenue stage. It was fine and pleasant when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned he complained that he had felt a little chilly. He seemed in fine condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way to Baltimore. Chauncey Depew was on the train and they met in the dining-car--the last time, I think, they ever saw each other. He was tired when we reached the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore and did not wish to see the newspaper men. It happened that the reporters had a special purpose in coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his Shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in publication, full credit had not been given to Mr. Greenwood for the long extracts quoted from his work. The sensational head-lines in a morning paper, “Is Mark Twain a Plagiarist?” had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what he would have to say on the subject. It was a simple matter, easily explained, and Clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody. He felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact that he had been stealing and caught at it would give Mr. Greenwood's book far more advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had intended. He found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only worry being that Clara and Jean would see the paper and be troubled. He had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading. After a little he got up and began walking up and down the room. Presently he stopped and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast. He said: “I think I must have caught a little cold yesterday on that Fifth Avenue stage. I have a curious pain in my breast.” I suggested that he lie down again and I would fill his hot-water bag. The pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing. I stepped into the next room and busied myself with some writing. By and by I heard him stirring again and went in where he was. He was walking up and down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries--something relating to prehistoric man. “What a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been,” he said--“the very first one! Think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms, practising and getting ready for the pulpit.” The fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put his hand on his breast, saying: “That pain has come back. It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of pain. I never had anything just like it.” It seemed to me that his face had become rather gray. I said: “Where is it, exactly, Mr. Clemens?” He laid his hand in the center of his breast and said: “It is here, and it is very peculiar indeed.” Remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart, and the “peculiar deadly pain” he had mentioned seemed ominous. I suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had again relieved it. This time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for it did not return while we were in Baltimore. It was the first positive manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us. The weather was pleasant in Baltimore, and his visit to St. Timothy's School and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most to him. The flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses, assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to any one. Edward S. Martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great feasting in the big assembly-hall. It was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the death of Edward Everett Hale--another of the old group. Clemens said thoughtfully, after a moment: “I had the greatest respect and esteem for Edward Everett Hale, the greatest admiration for his work. I am as grieved to hear of his death as I can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended.” We were leaving the Belvedere next morning, and when the subject of breakfast came up for discussion he said: “That was the most delicious Baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday morning. I think we'll just repeat that order. It reminds me of John Quarles's farm.” We had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast that morning down in the diningroom, and “Francesca” and her mother were there. As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me how once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars there for Washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd yelling at him as he ran. We remained overnight in New York, and that evening, at the Grosvenor, he read aloud a poem of his own which I had not seen before. He had brought it along with some intention of reading it at St. Timothy's, he said, but had not found the occasion suitable. “I wrote it a long time ago in Paris. I'd been reading aloud to Mrs. Clemens and Susy--in '93, I think--about Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, from Macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell. Then I took an imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former state. I described him, and repeated some of his mumblings. Susy and Mrs. Clemens said, 'Write it'--so I did, by and by, and this is it. I call it 'The Derelict.'” He read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of which follows: You sneer, you ships that pass me by, Your snow-pure canvas towering proud! You traders base!--why, once such fry Paid reverence, when like a cloud Storm-swept I drove along, My Admiral at post, his pennon blue Faint in the wilderness of sky, my long Yards bristling with my gallant crew, My ports flung wide, my guns displayed, My tall spars hid in bellying sail! --You struck your topsails then, and made Obeisance--now your manners fail. He had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the figure and phrasing were full of vigor. “It is strong and fine,” I said, when he had finished. “Yes,” he assented. “It seems so as I read it now. It is so long since I have seen it that it is like reading another man's work. I should call it good, I believe.” He put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor talking. “There is no figure for the human being like the ship,” he said; “no such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such men as Clive and Hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless, tossed by every wind and tide.” We returned to Redding next day. On the train going home he fell to talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able to read. “When I take up one of Jane Austen's books,” he said, “such as Pride and Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know, what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.” He recalled again how Stepniak had come to Hartford, and how humiliated Mrs. Clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with the writings of Thackeray and others. “I don't know anything about anything,” he said, mournfully, “and never did. My brother used to try to get me to read Dickens, long ago. I couldn't do it--I was ashamed; but I couldn't do it. Yes, I have read The Tale of Two Cities, and could do it again. I have read it a good many times; but I never could stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities.” By and by he handed me the Saturday Times Review, saying: “Here is a fine poem, a great poem, I think. I can stand that.” It was “The Palatine (in the 'Dark Ages'),” by Willa Sibert Cather, reprinted from McClure's. The reader will understand better than I can express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to Mark Twain: THE PALATINE “Have you been with the King to Rome, Brother, big brother?” “I've been there and I've come home, Back to your play, little brother.” “Oh, how high is Caesar's house, Brother, big brother?” “Goats about the doorways browse; Night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree, Home of the wild bird and home of the bee. A thousand chambers of marble lie Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. Poppies we find amongst our wheat Grow on Caesar's banquet seat. Cattle crop and neatherds drowse On the floors of Caesar's house.” “But what has become of Caesar's gold, Brother, big brother?” “The times are bad and the world is old --Who knows the where of the Caesar's gold? Night comes black on the Caesar's hill; The wells are deep and the tales are ill. Fireflies gleam in the damp and mold, All that is left of the Caesar's gold. Back to your play, little brother.” Farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to these lines of Kipling: How is it not good for the Christian's health To hurry the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, And he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white And the name of the late deceased: And the epitaph drear: “A fool lies here Who tried to hustle the East.” “I could stand any amount of that,” he said, and presently: “Life is too long and too short. Too long for the weariness of it; too short for the work to be done. At the very most, the average mind can only master a few languages and a little history.” I said: “Still, we need not worry. If death ends all it does not matter; and if life is eternal there will be time enough.” “Yes,” he assented, rather grimly, “that optimism of yours is always ready to turn hell's back yard into a playground.” I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French, and mentioned Bayard Taylor's having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need it in heaven. Clemens said, reflectively: “Yes--but you see that was Greek.” CCLXXXI. THE LAST SUMMER AT STORMFIELD I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year. At first I went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, I remained most of the nights as well. Our rooms were separated only by a bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake. In the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his glasses on, the reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or earlier. Sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and I would go in, and we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather, he would settle them while I dropped in a remark here and there, merely to hold the matter a little longer in solution. The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as the summer advanced; also, they became more severe. Dr. Edward Quintard came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens's lifetime habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs. There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking, and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other direction, when it was not too warm or windy. Once we went as far as the river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment. On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division line. I told him I was going to build a study on it, and call it “Markland.” He thought it an admirable building-site, and I think he was pleased with the name. Later he said: “If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the Rogers table, which had been left in New York] I would turn it over to you.” I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a billiard-table, and he said: “Now that will be very good. Then, when I want exercise, I can walk down and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up and play billiards with me. You must build that study.” So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lounsbury had undertaken the work. During the walks Clemens rested a good deal. There were the New England hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that weariness sometimes brought on the pain. As I remember now, I think how bravely he bore it. It must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain, for I have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack. We had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready. At the first hint from him I would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that deadly gripping did not soon release him. Yet there would come a week or a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or less. We were alone together most of the time. He did not appear to care for company that summer. Clara Clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part of her time to study. For Jean, who was in love with every form of outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy. Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared, even at meal-times. So it came about that there could hardly have been a closer daily companionship than was ours during this the last year of Mark Twain's life. For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in this world. One is not likely to associate twice with a being from another star. CCLXXXII. PERSONAL MEMORANDA In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of personality and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve these things than to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in which they were set down. One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's Science and Theology, which he called a lovely book.--['A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'.] June 21. A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual, resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to Jean's farm-house. I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution. “Yes,” he said, “those are the great evidences; no one who reasons can doubt them.” And presently he added: “That is a most amusing book of White's. When you read it you see how those old theologians never reasoned at all. White tells of an old bishop who figured out that God created the world in an instant on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and proved it. And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world. He said that God could create the rocks with those fossils in them for ornaments if He wanted to. Why, it takes twenty years to build a little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually believed that God created the whole world and all that's in it in six days. White tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons for thunder; one being that God wanted to show the world His power, and another that He wished to frighten sinners to repent. Now consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest way you can think of it. Consider the idea of God thinking of all that. Consider the President of the United States wanting to impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome of the Capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire.” He followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards. June 23. I came up this morning with a basket of strawberries. He was walking up and down, looking like an ancient Roman. He said: “Consider the case of Elsie Sigel--[Granddaughter of Gen. Franz Sigel. She was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement work among the Chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!” Then turning upon me fiercely, he continued: “Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living. Not a single child ever begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime. Suppose a community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again. They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do it--that much can be counted on. Suppose those people go to a community in a far neighborhood and say, 'We'd like to change places with you. Come take our homes and let us have yours.' Those people would say, 'Never mind, we are not interested in your country. We know what has happened there, and what will happen again.' We don't care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment; and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse. Formerly it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal fires of damnation. He knew that in all probability that child would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep. But since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome. I wrote a fairy story once. It was published somewhere. I don't remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a fairy gave a man the customary wishes. I was interested in seeing what he would take. First he chose wealth and went away with it, but it did not bring him happiness. Then he came back for the second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness either. Finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy said, in substance, 'If you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen that in the first place.' “The papers called me a pessimist for writing that story. Pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool.” But this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance. Under date of July 5th I find this happier entry: We have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins. It is a game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly pleased with it. He said this afternoon: “I have never enjoyed billiards as I do now. I look forward to it every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work.”--[His work at this time was an article on Marjorie Fleming, the “wonder child,” whose quaint writings and brief little life had been published to the world by Dr. John Brown. Clemens always adored the thought of Marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked almost next to Joan of Arc in his affections.] We went out in the loggia by and by and Clemens read aloud from a book which Professor Zubelin left here a few days ago--'The Religion of a Democrat'. Something in it must have suggested to Clemens his favorite science, for presently he said: “I have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and I have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' The Himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man.” I spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world. “Could a man live on a world so small as that?” I asked. “Oh yes,” he said. “The gravitation that holds it together would hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here. His horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could walk around in half a day.” He talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy. He had no real knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. He was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama of the universe. The fact that Alpha Centauri was twenty-five trillions of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole, toward the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, at the rate of forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him. The astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate; but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that he was going to figure it for himself. I came in one morning, to find that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory. I am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and when he added that the nearest fixed star--Alpha Centauri--was between four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up as with the stimulation of these stupendous facts. By and by he said: “I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that.” And a little later he added: “I've got some kind of a heart disease, and Quintard won't tell me whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so. I was in hopes that Quintard would tell me that I was likely to drop dead any minute; but he didn't. He only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong. He didn't give me any schedule; but I expect to go with Halley's comet.” I seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his notes I find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own: July 14, 1909. Yesterday's dispute resumed, I still maintaining that, whereas we can think, we generally don't do it. Don't do it, & don't have to do it: we are automatic machines which act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, & without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 thinking apparatus. This reminded me of something: thirty years ago, in Hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & I wrote my letters there the first thing every morning. My table lay two points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that position, consequently you could see the door across the length of the billiard-table, but you couldn't see the floor by the said table. I found I was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my letters down-stairs for the mail, so I concluded to lay them on the floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, & that would indicate to him what they were there for. Did it? No, it didn't. He was a machine, & had habits. Habits take precedence of thought. Now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor --lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder couldn't see it there without immediately divining that it was not there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a definite purpose. Very well--it may surprise you to learn that that most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the most brilliant of thinkers. For he is always an automatic machine & has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers. My scheme failed because every human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced thing & placing it where it won't be stepped on. My first intruder was George. He went and came without saying anything. Presently I found the letters neatly piled up on the billiard-table. I was astonished. I put them on the floor again. The next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word. I was profoundly moved, profoundly interested. So I set the trap again. Also again, & again, & yet again--all day long. I caught every member of the family, & every servant; also I caught the three finest intellects in the town. In every instance old, time-worn automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking apparatus never got a chance. I do not remember this particular discussion, but I do distinctly recall being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed, and being properly classified for doing it. Clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about his room. I gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of these characteristic bits may be offered here. KNEE It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them. JEHOVAH He is all-good. He made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other--take your choice. He made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get into hell. He commended man to multiply & replenish-what? Hell. MODESTY ANTEDATES CLOTHES & will be resumed when clothes are no more. [The latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:] MODESTY DIED when clothes were born. MODESTY DIED when false modesty was born. HISTORY A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. MORALS are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind & spirit. SUGGESTION There is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both come from outside--whence all ideas come. DUELS I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me. I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do; I merely do not respect 'em. In some serious matters (relig.) I would have them burnt. I am old now and once was a sinner. I often think of it with a kind of soft regret. I trust my days are numbered. I would not have that detail overlooked. She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay. He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him--moral ideas, he called them. One fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.--[Under Appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the “Bessie” dialogues.]--He read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor. Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end. Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to bring to any conclusion. Both of these have been mentioned in former chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious visitant from another realm. He had experimented with each of these ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow fallen short of his conception. “The Mysterious Stranger” in one of its forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that he could probably end it without much labor. He discussed something of his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion. But I suppose he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him to complete it. CCLXXXIII. ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert's Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it. “No,” he said, “I didn't like any of it.” “But you read it?” “Yes, I read every line of it.” “You admitted its literary art?” “Well, it's like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book.” “But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in history.” “Yes, that is so. But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and slaughter and stench it worries me. It has great art--I can see that. That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene are marvelous, but I wouldn't read that book again without a salary.” August 16. He is reading Suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome. This afternoon he began talking about Claudius. “They called Claudius a lunatic,” he said, “but just see what nice fancies he had. He would go to the arena between times and have captives and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special enjoyment. Sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say, 'Well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.' Carpentering around the arena wasn't a popular job in those days. He went visiting once to a province and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no executioner on hand. No matter; the Emperor of Rome was in no hurry--he would wait. So he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came.” I said, “How do you account for the changed attitude toward these things? We are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering.” “Ah! but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the quality of compassion. Relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same. Why, I read somewhere a letter written just before the Lisbon catastrophe in 1755 about a scene on the public square of Lisbon: A lot of stakes with the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning. The square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the enjoyment of the scene. The Greeks don't seem to have done these things. I suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion.” Colonel Harvey and Mr. Duneka came up to spend the night. Mr. Clemens had one of his seizures during the evening. They come oftener and last longer. One last night continued for an hour and a half. I slept there. September 7. To-day news of the North Pole discovered by Peary. Five days ago the same discovery was reported by Cook. Clemens's comment: “It's the greatest joke of the ages.” But a moment later he referred to the stupendous fact of Arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the sun. September 21. This morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had had just before wakening. He said: “I was in an automobile going slowly, with 'a little girl beside me, and some uniformed person walking along by us. I said, 'I'll get out and walk, too'; but the officer replied, 'This is only one of the smallest of our fleet.' “Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two cannons mounted where the front should be. I noticed, too, that we were traveling very low, almost down on the ground. Presently we got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found myself walking ahead of the 'mobile. I turned around to look for the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all admiration.' Then all at once we were in a great group of people and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when I tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving remark.” The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came. One morning he said: “I was awake a good deal in the night, and I tried to think of interesting things. I got to working out geological periods, trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical periods. Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles--twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then I took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there was an average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty pages, and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as one line, there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two thousand to reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort of dim idea of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into space.” Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty thousand years (Lord Kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000 souls. I assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in Paradise and the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago. Traveling at the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in Alpha Centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart. Few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures as these. We made occasional business trips to New York, and during one of them visited the Museum of Natural History to look at the brontosaur and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall. To him these were the most fascinating things in the world. He contemplated the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence they had come down to us. Mark Twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life. Dwelling mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely, or minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness, or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical occurrence. It not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and startling forms. More than once I have known him to relate an occurrence of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed. If his attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of his mistake. I do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often surprised and, I think, amused him. Insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical shapes about him. He would fix you keenly with his attention, but you realized, at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part of the material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world in which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed, but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere literal scrutiny. And this was, mainly, of course, because the routine of life did not appeal to him. Even members of his household did not always stir his consciousness. He knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon them; but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that Mount Everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its slopes, useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant's existence, and in no important matter a part of its greater life. CCLXXXIV. A LIBRARY CONCERT In a letter which Clemens wrote to Miss Wallace at this time, he tells of a concert given at Stormfield on September 21st for the benefit of the new Redding Library. Gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was up and about and able to play. David Bispham, the great barytone, always genial and generous, agreed to take part, and Clara Clemens, already accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program. The letter to Miss Wallace supplies the rest of the history. We had a grand time here yesterday. Concert in aid of the little library. TEAM Gabrilowitsch, pianist. David Bispham, vocalist. Clara Clemens, ditto. Mark Twain, introduces of team. Detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere --Danbury, New Haven, Norwalk, Redding, Redding Ridge, Ridgefield, and even from New York: some in 60-h.p. motor-cars, some in buggies and carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot from miles around--525 altogether. If we hadn't stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the performance we should have been swamped. We jammed 160 into the library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining- room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the brick-paved square outside the dining-room door. The artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up, and I tell you they performed to the Queen's taste! The program was an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to it. The enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting. They all stayed an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate. We had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated $372 for the Building Fund. We had tea at half past six for a dozen--the Hawthornes, Jeannette Gilder, and her niece, etc.; and after 8-o'clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the bare-stripped library until 10; nobody present but the team and Mr. and Mrs. Paine and Jean and her dog. And me. Bispham did “Danny Deever” and the “Erlkonig” in his majestic, great organ-tones and artillery, and Gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were never played before, I do suppose. There is not much to add to that account. Clemens, introducing the performers, was the gay feature of the occasion. He spoke of the great reputation of Bispham and Gabrilowitsch; then he said: “My daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so much better-looking.” The music of the evening that followed, with Gabrilowitsch at the piano and David Bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated. Bispham sang the “Erlkonig” and “Killiecrankie” and the “Grenadiers” and several other songs. He spoke of having sung Wagner's arrangement of the “Grenadiers” at the composer's home following his death, and how none of the family had heard it before. There followed dancing, and Jean Clemens, fine and handsome, apparently full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as care-free as if there was no shadow upon her life. And the evening was distinguished in another way, for before it ended Clara Clemens had promised Ossip Gabrilowitsch to become his wife. CCLXXXV. A WEDDING AT STORMFIELD The wedding of Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens was not delayed. Gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in Europe, and unless the marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months. It followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement. They were busy days. Clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to make the list. October 6th was a perfect wedding-day. It was one of those quiet, lovely fall days when the whole world seems at peace. Claude, the butler, with his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room with gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods and fields. They blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and furnishings, and I do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful room. Only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to the ceremony. The Twichells came over a day ahead, for Twichell, who had assisted in the marriage rites between Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon, was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now. A fellow-student of the bride and groom when they had been pupils of Leschetizky, in Vienna--Miss Ethel Newcomb--was at the piano and played softly the Wedding March from “Taunhauser.” Jean Clemens was the only bridesmaid, and she was stately and classically beautiful, with a proud dignity in her office. Jervis Langdon, the bride's cousin and childhood playmate, acted as best man, and Clemens, of course, gave the bride away. By request he wore his scarlet Oxford gown over his snowy flannels, and was splendid beyond words. I do not write of the appearance of the bride and groom, for brides and grooms are always handsome and always happy, and certainly these were no exception. It was all so soon over, the feasting ended, and the principals whirling away into the future. I have a picture in my mind of them seated together in the automobile, with Richard Watson Gilder standing on the step for a last good-by, and before them a wide expanse of autumn foliage and distant hills. I remember Gilder's voice saying, when the car was on the turn, and they were waving back to us: “Over the hills and far away, Beyond the utmost purple rim, Beyond the night, beyond the day, Through all the world she followed him.” The matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the eve of the wedding, when the Associated Press had been notified. A representative was there; but Clemens had characteristically interviewed himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter a typewritten copy. Replying to the question (put to himself), “Are you pleased with the marriage?” he answered: Yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other father. There are two or three solemn things in life and a happy marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come. I am glad of this marriage, and Mrs. Clemens would be glad, for she always had a warm affection for Gabrilowitsch. There was another wedding at Stormfield on the following afternoon--an imitation wedding. Little Joy came up with me, and wished she could stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she expressed a wish that she could get married like that. Clemens said: “Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it.” Then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of himself from one of the Rogerses' Christmas trees. He knew where it was, and he got it out. Then he said: “Now, Joy, we will have another wedding. This is Mr. Colonel Williams, and you are to become his wedded wife.” So Joy stood up very gravely and Clemens performed the ceremony, and I gave the bride away, and Joy to him became Mrs. Colonel Williams thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate. CCLXXXVI. AUTUMN DAYS A harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will. In his interview Clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many begged him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with him, urging him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his continued life and health. They cited the comfort he had brought to world-weary humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as reasons why he should live. Such letters could not fail to cheer him. A letter of this period, from John Bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its own. Clemens had written Bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on the tariff: Thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff. I guess the government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself. Bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce. In sending his regrets he said: The sentiment I would propose if I dared to be present would be the words of Mark Twain, the statesman: “The government that robs its own people earns the future it is preparing for itself.” Now to Clemens himself he wrote: Rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor Dr. Franklin a wiser one.... Be careful, or the Demos will be running you for President when you are not on your guard. Yours more than ever, JOHN BIGELOW. Among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the Rev. Fred Window Adams, of Schenectady, New York, with Mark Twain as its subject. Mr. Adams chose for his text, “Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable for the ministry,” and he placed the two Marks, St. Mark and Mark Twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized him as “a fearless knight of righteousness.” A few weeks later Mr. Adams himself came to Stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the Gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with Mark Twain. In spite of the good-will and the good wishes Clemens's malady did not improve. As the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer indoors. The cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the doctor's orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise. To Miss Wallace he wrote: I can't walk, I can't drive, I'm not down-stairs much, and I don't see company, but I drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; I read, and read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as formerly), and it's a contented and comfortable life. But this was not altogether accurate as to details. He did come down-stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless of the paroxysms. We found, too, that the seizures were induced by mental agitation. One night he read aloud to Jean and myself the first chapter of an article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” which he was preparing for Harper's Bazar. He had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word had been said. Suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said, “I must lie down,” and started toward the stair. I supported him to his room and hurriedly poured out the hot water. He drank it and dropped back on the bed. “Don't speak to me,” he said; “don't make me talk.” Jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence. I think we both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of his own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards. We played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for the attack. It is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause. Clemens's general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal of trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint. The writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation and a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health. One day he sent for his attorney, Mr. Charles T. Lark, and made some final revisions in his will.--[Mark Twain's estate, later appraised at something more than $600,000 was left in the hands of trustees for his daughters. The trustees were Edward E. Loomis, Jervis Langdon, and Zoheth S. Freeman. The direction of his literary affairs was left to his daughter Clara and the writer of this history.] To see him you would never have suspected that he was ill. He was in good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his face as full of bloom as at any time during the period I had known him; also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good wine. And of course he would find amusement in his condition. He said: “I have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the first time, I have got a genuine excuse. It makes me feel so honest.” And once, when Jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said: “Jean, I can't see her. Tell her I am likely to drop dead any minute and it would be most embarrassing.” But he did see her, for it was a poet--Angela Morgan--and he read her poem, “God's Man,” aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her to Collier's Weekly. He still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather inclusively, as an idiot, he said: “I wish to God the lightning would strike me; but I've wished that fifty thousand times and never got anything out of it yet. I have missed several good chances. Mrs. Clemens was afraid of lightning, and would never let me bare my head to the storm.” The element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent and less frequent. I was at Stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally alone; for Jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors, seldom appeared except at meal-times. Occasionally she joined in the billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not great. She would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the science of angles as she had mastered tennis and French and German and Italian. She had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her friend. Katie Leary, who had been Jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child, Jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the Lisbon earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she had said: “Poor things!” Katie said: “Why, you didn't say that about the people!” But Jean answered: “Oh, they could speak.” One night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it must be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work. “That is why the Rogerses kill themselves,” he said. “They would rather kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time. They have forgotten how to rest. They know nothing but to keep on till they drop.” I told of something I had read not long before. It was about an aged lion that had broken loose from his cage at Coney Island. He had not offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began pacing up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage. They had come and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed eagerly into it. I noticed that Jean was listening anxiously, and when I finished she said: “Is that a true story?” She had forgotten altogether the point in illustration. She was concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his liberty. Among the letters that Clemens wrote just then was one to Miss Wallace, in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his windows. The autumn splendors passed you by? What a pity! I wish you had been here. It was beyond words! It was heaven & hell & sunset & rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you couldn't look at it and keep the tears back. Such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing, & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then --then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it! In the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his own satisfaction--'Letters from the Earth'; said letters supposed to have been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other immortals in some remote sphere. I'll read passages to you. This book will never be published --in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony... Paine enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose. I very well remember his writing those 'Letters from the Earth'. He read them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human race. The immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his special conceit in believing that he was the Creator's pet--the particular form of life for which all the universe was created. Clemens allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to the possibility of print or public offense. He enjoyed them himself, too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold imaginings. One admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these chapters. It is where the celestial correspondent describes man's religion. His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists--utterly and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. Isn't it curious? Isn't it interesting? You must not think I am exaggerating, for it is not so. I will give you the details. Most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short-cut. More men go to church than want to. To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore. Further, all sane people detest noise. All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now then, you have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like? In fifteen hundred years you couldn't do it. They have left out the very things they care for most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer! In man's heaven everybody sings. There are no exceptions. The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth sings there. Thus universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is one hymn alone. The words are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is no rhyme--there is no poetry. “Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the highest!” and a few such phrases constitute the whole service. Meantime, every person is playing on a harp! Consider the deafening hurricane of sound. Consider, further, it is a praise service--a service of compliment, flattery, adulation. Do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it, requires it, commands it? Hold your breath: It is God! This race's God I mean--their own pet invention. Most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human absurdities were new only as to phrasing. He had exhausted the topic long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he never lost interest. Many subjects became stale to him at last; but the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end. From my note-book: October 25. I am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all history--religious, political, military. He seems to have read everything in the world concerning Rome, France, and England particularly. Last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of Rome's decline. Such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--I could not help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public effort to work of that sort. No one could have equaled him at it. He concluded with some comments on the possibility of America following Rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism. November 1. To-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in shorthand. “It is the only rational alphabet,” he declared. “All this spelling reform is nonsense. What we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing. Take the letter M, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three. The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand. I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet.” I said: “There is this objection: the characters are so slightly different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is seldom that two can read each other's notes.” “You are talking of stenographic reporting,” he said, rather warmly. “Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet. It is perfectly clear and legible.” “Would you have it in the schools, then?” “Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic purposes, but only for use in writing to save time.” He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article on the subject. November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments. “I have always been the victim of somebody,” he said, “and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. I can't see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing.” I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'Letters from the Earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. Somewhat on the defensive I said, “But we must admit that the so- called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive.” He answered, “Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born. “I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter,” he said later, “and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm.” He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin's father, “Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians.” “I was glad to find and identify that saying,” he said; “it is so good.” He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles. I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them. “Yes,” he said, “but he is the best one that ever lived.” November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said: “I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It has made me cry. I want you to read it.” (It was Booth Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) “Tarkington has the true touch,” he said; “his work always satisfies me.” Another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history. CCLXXVII. MARK TWAIN'S READING Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain's reading in general. On the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. They were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. All, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or concluding comments. They were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading. There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--'The Memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. On the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote-- This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of French & English high life of that epoch. All through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin. He found little to admire in the human nature of Saint-Simon's period--little to approve in Saint-Simon himself beyond his unrestrained frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he wrote: “Oh, incomparable Saint-Simon!” Saint-Simon is always frank, and Mark Twain was equally so. Where the former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of Louis XIV., the latter has commented: We have to grant that God made this royal hog; we may also be permitted to believe that it was a crime to do so. And on another page: In her memories of this period the Duchesse de St. Clair makes this striking remark: “Sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only by his manner of using his fork.” His comments on the orthodox religion of Saint-Simon's period are not marked by gentleness. Of the author's reference to the Edict of Nantes, which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and “authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of both sexes were killed by thousands,” Clemens writes: So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code. In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote: It is all so true, all so human. God made these animals. He must have noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him. There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest. Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand. Here and there are marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and circumstance. There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most. Francis Parkman's Canadian Histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North America. As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old Regime: Very interesting. It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from France and colonized Canada. He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. “What manner of men are these?” he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to “dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois.” Clemens was likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism. In one place he wrote: That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp. Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read them--read and digested every word and line. There were two volumes of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White's 'Science and Theology'--a chief interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'Modern English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects', by Henry H. Breen. On the title-page of this book Clemens had written: HARTFORD, 1876. Use with care, for it is a scarce book. England had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh falsely. He once wrote a paper for the Saturday Morning Club, using for his text examples of slipshod English which Breen had noted. Clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history. Greville's 'Journal of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV.' he had read much and annotated freely. Greville, while he admired Byron's talents, abhorred the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious person and a debauchee. He adds: Then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does not belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the time conscious they are not in reality. Clemens wrote on the margin: But, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason. Do you admire the race (& consequently yourself)? A little further along--where Greville laments that Byron can take no profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully, Clemens commented: If Byron--if any man--draws 50 characters, they are all himself--50 shades, 50 moods, of his own character. And when the man draws them well why do they stir my admiration? Because they are me--I recognize myself. A volume of Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Two Years Before the Mast he loved, and never tired of. The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the Letters of Lowell. A volume of the Letters of Madame de Sevigne had some annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or for that matter to Sevigne herself, whom he once designates as a “nauseating” person, many of whose letters had been uselessly translated, as well as poorly arranged for reading. But he would read any volume of letters or personal memoirs; none were too poor that had the throb of life in them, however slight. Of such sort were the books that Mark Twain had loved best, and such were a few of his words concerning them. Some of them belong to his earlier reading, and among these is Darwin's 'Descent of Man', a book whose influence was always present, though I believe he did not read it any more in later years. In the days I knew him he read steadily not much besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle. These and his simple astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling were seldom far from his hand. CCLXXXVIII. A BERMUDA BIRTHDAY It was the middle of November, 1909, when Clemens decided to take another Bermuda vacation, and it was the 19th that we sailed. I went to New York a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the 18th received the news that Richard Watson Gilder had suddenly died. Next morning there was other news. Clemens's old friend, William M. Laffan, of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation. I met Clemens at the train. He had already heard about Gilder; but he had not yet learned of Laffan's death. He said: “That's just it. Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come along and I never get anything.” Then, suddenly remembering, he added: “How curious it is! I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on the train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy affair.” I asked when he had begun thinking of Laffan. He said: “Within the hour.” It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in my mind had carried it instantly to him. Perhaps there was something telepathic in it. He was not at all ill going down to Bermuda, which was a fortunate thing, for the water was rough and I was quite disqualified. We did not even discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important news--the reported discovery of a new planet. But there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in the Hamilton Hotel. It was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying and bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance that the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still a satellite. The report had said that it was probably four hundred billions of miles distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become a near neighbor. He was a good deal excited at first, having somehow the impression that this new planet traveled out beyond the nearest fixed star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the plane of the sky. He had brought along a small book called The Pith of Astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read from it about the great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the deeps of the universe. If I dwell unwarrantably on this phase of Mark Twain's character, it is because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed akin to him in its proportions. He had been born under a flaming star, a wanderer of the skies. He was himself, to me, always a comet rushing through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and systems. It is not likely to rain long in Bermuda, and when the sun comes back it brings summer, whatever the season. Within a day after our arrival we were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and by that marvelously variegated water. We went often to the south shore, especially to Devonshire Bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem more beautiful than elsewhere. Usually, when we reached the bay, we got out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade, the imperial garment of the Lord. At first we went alone with only the colored driver, Clifford Trott, whose name Clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting resemblances with ludicrous results. A little later Helen Allen, an early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a place that was not attractive. Clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel. He kept a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to Bay House--the lovely and quiet home of Helen's parents--and prolonged it from day to day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place with affectionate attention and limitless welcome. Clifford Trott had orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to Bay House for Mark Twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a dainty paradise, that never, I believe, becomes quite a reality even to those who know it best. Clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not likely to be severe or protracted; and I have no doubt the peace of his surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the balmy temperature, all contributed to his improved condition. He talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means restricted his subjects to juvenile matters. He discussed history and his favorite sciences and philosophies, and I am sure that his drift was rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was Mark Twain's gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth. I remember that once he talked, during an afternoon's drive, on the French Revolution and the ridiculous episode of Anacharsis Cloots, “orator and advocate of the human race,” collecting the vast populace of France to swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block. The very name of Cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more delightful and graphic than the whole episode as he related it. Helen asked if he thought such a thing as that could ever happen in America. “No,” he said, “the American sense of humor would have laughed it out of court in a week; and the Frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in the world.” On the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness, his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor. I presented him with a pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the Bermuda lily, and I thought he seemed pleased with them. It was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he was usually kept happy by winning. There were no visitors, and after dinner Helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from Tom Sawyer, so he read the whitewashing scene, Peter and the Pain-killer, and such chapters until tea-time. Then there was a birthday cake, and afterward cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening. Once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor memory: “I'll forget the Lord's middle name some time,” he declared, “right in the midst of a storm, when I need all the help I can get.” Later he said: “Nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that I would be in Bermuda now.” And I thought he meant a good deal more than the words conveyed. It was during this Bermuda visit that Mark Twain added the finishing paragraph to his article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” which, at Howells's suggestion, he had been preparing for Harper's Bazar. It was a characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of human life, may be repeated here. Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the literary guild. Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, “Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable.” The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament--which he did not create and had no authority over. For the temperament is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger's temperament is, Thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is, Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can't be obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law of temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other authorities. I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments. Not in them, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted. What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could Satan have beguiled them to eat the apple. There would have been results! Indeed yes. The apple would be intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated. CCLXXXIX. THE DEATH OF JEAN He decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now that he did so! We sailed for America on the 18th of December, arriving the 21st. Jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and I had the feeling that she should not have come. She went directly, I think, to Stormfield, he following a day or two later. On the 23d I was lunching with Jean alone. She was full of interest in her Christmas preparations. She had a handsome tree set up in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones constantly arriving. With her farm management, her housekeeping, her secretary work, and her Christmas preparations, it seemed to me that she had her hands overfull. Such a mental pressure could not be good for her. I suggested that for a time at least I might assume a part of her burden. I was to remain at my own home that night, and I think it was as I left Stormfield that I passed jean on the stair. She said, cheerfully, that she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would be fresh for the evening. I did not go back, and I never saw her alive again. I was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the men from Stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately. When I went out he said: “Miss Jean is dead. They have just found her in her bath-room. Mr. Clemens sent me to bring you.” It was as incomprehensible as such things always are. I could not realize at all that Jean, so full of plans and industries and action less than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we call death. Harry Iles drove me rapidly up the hill. As I entered Clemens's room he looked at me helplessly and said: “Well, I suppose you have heard of this final disaster.” He was not violent or broken down with grief. He had come to that place where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept it, and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for Jean at least, the fortune was not ill. Her malady had never been cured, and it had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him. It was believed, at first; that Jean had drowned, and Dr. Smith tried methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath. The Gabrilowitsches were by this time in Europe, and Clemens cabled them not to come. Later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield. He said that he should probably go back to Bermuda before long; but that he wished to keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any time that he might need it. We came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but for his comfort and peace of mind. Jervis Langdon was summoned from Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others. In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in Jean's room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages. Nobody had been forgotten. For her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one. Once when I went into his room he said: “I have been looking in at Jean and envying her. I have never greatly envied any one but the dead. I always envy the dead.” He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time. While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a critical condition. He had written this playful answer: MANAGER ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York. I hear the newspapers say I am dying. The charge is not true. I would not do such a thing at my time of life. I am behaving as good as I can. Merry Christmas to everybody! MARK TWAIN. Jean telephoned it for him to the press. It had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered. She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again. The reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears. Later, when I went in again, he was writing: “I am setting it down,” he said--“everything. It is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking.” He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next. It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey. Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for Clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not seen. No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life. They were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before that time Clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had been her favorite music. I said that she seemed always to care most for the Schubert Impromptu.--[Op. 142, No. 2.]--Then he said: “Play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the Intermezzo for Susy and the Largo for Mrs. Clemens. When I hear the music I shall know that they are starting. Tell them to set lanterns at the door, so I can look down and see them go.” So I sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away. A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was closing in. There was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was muffled. The lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly falling flakes. I remained at the organ; but the little group at the door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he stood mournfully gazing down, watching Jean going away from him for the last time. I played steadily on as he had instructed, the Impromptu, the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria,” and Handel's Largo. When I had finished I went up and found him. “Poor little Jean,” he said; “but for her it is so good to go.” In his own story of it he wrote: From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were babies together--he and her beloved old Katie--Were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon. He did not come down to dinner, and when I went up afterward I found him curiously agitated. He said: “For one who does not believe in spirits I have had a most peculiar experience. I went into the bath-room just now and closed the door. You know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts. All at once I felt a cold current of air about me. I thought the door must be open; but it was closed. I said, 'Jean, is this you trying to let me know you have found the others?' Then the cold air was gone.” I saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but I don't remember that he ever mentioned it afterward. Next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop was a raging, driving mass of white. He wrote most of the day, but stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of condolence which came flooding in. Sometimes he walked over to the window to look out on the furious tempest. Once, during the afternoon, he said: “Jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at Elmira they are burying her.” Later he read aloud some lines by Alfred Austin, which Mrs. Crane had sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for Susy: When last came sorrow, around barn and byre Wind-careen snow, the year's white sepulchre, lay. “Come in,” I said, “and warm you by the fire”; And there she sits and never goes away. It was that evening that he came into the room where Mrs. Paine and I sat by the fire, bringing his manuscript. “I have finished my story of Jean's death,” he said. “It is the end of my autobiography. I shall never write any more. I can't judge it myself at all. One of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you think of it. If it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published.” It was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing in the language. He had ended his literary labors with that perfect thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of his soul. It was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close. A paragraph which he omitted may be printed now: December 27. Did I know jean's value? No, I only thought I did. I knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all. It is always so, with us, it has always been so. We are like the poor ignorant private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the great Sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for a franc. Later he knew what he had done. Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament. And I know that the temperament is master of the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in all things do as it commands. A man's temperament is born in him, and no circumstances can ever change it. My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time. That was a feature of Jean's temperament, too. She inherited it from me. I think she got the rest of it from her mother. Jean Clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a genuine passion for all nature. In a little paper found in her desk she had written: I know a few people who love the country as I do, but not many. Most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer months, but very few care much for it the year round. A few people are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some warm April day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others. To me it is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since I have never lost interest in it. It is simple and frank, like Thoreau. Perhaps, had she exercised it, there was a third gift--the gift of written thought. Clemens remained at Stormfield ten days after Jean was gone. The weather was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy. He kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps of letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he prepared a simple card of acknowledgment. He was for the most part in gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then, and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of illness on Jean and shadowed her life. They were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy sort. Many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: “God does not willingly punish us.” When he had read a number of these he said: “Well, why does He do it then? We don't invite it. Why does He give Himself the trouble?” I suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the writer of it. “So it does,” he said, “and I am glad of it--glad of anything that gives comfort to anybody.” He spoke of the larger God--the God of the great unvarying laws, and by and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came more and more to him each day with the thought that Jean and Susy and their mother could not be troubled any more. To Mrs. Gabrilowitsch he wrote: REDDING, CONN, December 29, 1909. O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe! I am not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think. You see, I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& I could die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her! For she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable. You can't imagine what a darling she was that last two or three days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank Heaven! --& how intellectually brilliant. I had never been acquainted with Jean before. I recognized that. But I mustn't try to write about her--I can't. I have already poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two. I will send you that--& you must let no one but Ossip read it. Good-by. I love you so! And Ossip. FATHER. CCXC. THE RETURN TO BERMUDA I don't think he attempted any further writing for print. His mind was busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write, rather even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few quiet games--the last we should ever play together. Evenings he asked for music, preferring the Scotch airs, such as “Bonnie Doon” and “The Campbells are Coming.” I remember that once, after playing the latter for him, he told, with great feeling, how the Highlanders, led by Gen. Colin Campbell, had charged at Lucknow, inspired by that stirring air. When he had retired I usually sat with him, and he drifted into literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the universe and man. One evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and stopped there. He mentioned “Ben Bolt.” “I met that man once,” he said. “In my childhood I sang 'Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,' and in my old age, fifteen years ago, I met the man who wrote it. His name was Brown.--[Thomas Dunn English. Mr. Clemens apparently remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by Edgar Allan Poe, “Thomas Dunn Brown.”]--He was aged, forgotten, a mere memory. I remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of 'Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt.' He was just an accident. He had a vision and echoed it. A good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt. 'Twenty Years Ago' is just like it 'I have wandered through the village, Tom, and sat beneath the tree'--and Holmes's 'Last Leaf' is another: the memory of the hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love. It is all so beautiful--the past is always beautiful.” He quoted, with great feeling and effect: The massy marbles rest On the lips that we have pressed In their bloom, And the names we love to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb. He continued in this strain for an hour or more. He spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes. “Why,” he said, “humor is mankind's greatest blessing.” “Your own case is an example,” I answered. “Without it, whatever your reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters.” “Yes,” he said, gently, “they have liked to be amused.” I tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to Bermuda, with Claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in two days more. He was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny island, and for the quiet peace of the Allen home. His niece, Mrs. Loomis, came up to spend the last evening in Stormfield, a happy evening full of quiet talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that had been his wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station. This was on January 4, 1910. He was to sail next day, and that night, at Mr. Loomis's, Howells came in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they had so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away. I remember that at dinner Clemens spoke of his old Hartford butler, George, and how he had once brought George to New York and introduced him at the various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and sometimes rather embarrassing results. The talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which Clemens defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain recognition of his rights. Howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says “was made memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong.” They discussed dreams, and then in a little while Howells rose to go. I went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of Mark Twain's supremacy. He said: “I turn to his books for cheer when I am down-hearted. There was never anybody like him; there never will be.” Clemens sailed next morning. They did not meet again. CCXCI. LETTERS FROM BERMUDA Stormfield was solemn and empty without Mark Twain; but he wrote by every steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by the hand of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the Allen family usually Helen. His letters were full of brightness and pleasantry--always concerned more or less with business matters, though he was no longer disturbed by them, for Bermuda was too peaceful and too far away, and, besides, he had faith in the Mark Twain Company's ability to look after his affairs. I cannot do better, I believe, than to offer some portions of these letters here. He reached Bermuda on the 7th of January, 1910, and on the 12th he wrote: Again I am living the ideal life. There is nothing to mar it but the bloody-minded bandit Arthur,--[A small playmate of Helen's of whom Clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous. Once he wrote a memorandum to Helen: “Let Arthur read this book. There is a page in it that is poisoned.”]--who still fetches and carries Helen. Presently he will be found drowned. Claude comes to Bay House twice a day to see if I need any service. He is invaluable. There was a military lecture last night at the Officers' Mess Prospect; as the lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he wanted to lecture to me particularly, I naturally took Helen and her mother into the private carriage and went. As soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the Governor came to me& was very cordial. I “met up” with that charming Colonel Chapman [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the regiment & had a good time. A few days later he wrote: Thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you & Loomis & Lark and other beloved friends are. I had a letter from Clara this morning. She is solicitous & wants me well & watchfully taken care of. My, my, she ought to see Helen & her parents & Claude administer that trust. Also she says, “I hope to hear from you or Mr. Paine very soon.” I am writing her & I know you will respond to your part of her prayer. She is pretty desolate now after Jean's emancipation--the only kindness that God ever did that poor, unoffending child in all her hard life. Send Clara a copy of Howells's gorgeous letter. The “gorgeous letter” mentioned was an appreciation of his recent Bazar article, “The Turning-Point in My Life,” and here follows: January 18, 1910. DEAR CLEMENS,--While your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet I want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours. I shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone “He was born in the same century and general section of Middle Western country with Dr. S. L. Clemens, Oxon., and had his degree three years before him through a mistake of the University.” I hope you are worse. You will never be riper for a purely intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a worn-out material body on top of your soul. Yours ever, W. D. HOWELLS. On the margin of this letter Clemens had written: I reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day is good to keep, ain't it, Paine? January 24th he wrote again of his contentment: Life continues here the same as usual. There isn't a fault in it --good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day without a break. I know familiarly several very satisfactory people & meet them frequently: Mr. Hamilton, the Sloanes, Mr. & Mrs. Fells, Miss Waterman, & so on. I shouldn't know how to go about bettering my situation. On February 5th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health might require him to stay in Bermuda pretty continuously, but that he wished Stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time. And he added: Yesterday Mr. Allen took us on an excursion in Mr. Hamilton's big motor-boat. Present: Mrs. Allen, Mr. & Mrs. & Miss Sloane, Helen, Mildred Howells, Claude, & me. Several hours' swift skimming over ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place. The Orotava is arriving with 260 passengers--I shall get letters by her, no doubt. P. S.--Please send me the Standard Unabridged that is on the table in my bedroom. I have no dictionary here. There is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they would seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to disturb him, and much that contributed to his peace. Among the callers at the Bay House to see him was Woodrow Wilson, and the two put in some pleasant hours at miniature golf, “putting” on the Allen lawn. Of course a catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not always be guarded against. In a letter toward the end of February he wrote: It is 2.30 in the morning & I am writing because I can't sleep. I can't sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow afternoon to play for me. My God! I wouldn't allow Paderewski or Gabrilowitsch to do that. I would rather have a leg amputated. I knew he was coming, but I never dreamed it was to play for me. When I heard the horrible news 4 hours ago, be d---d if I didn't come near screaming. I meant to slip out and be absent, but now I can't. Don't pray for me. The thing is just as d---d bad as it can be already. Clemens's love for music did not include the piano, except for very gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a professional player. He did not report the sequel of the matter; but it is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures. Sometimes his letters were pure nonsense. Once he sent a sheet, on one side of which was written: BAY HOUSE, March s, 1910. Received of S. L. C. Two Dollars and Forty Cents in return for my promise to believe everything he says hereafter. HELEN S. ALLEN. and on the reverse: FOR SALE The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it reciprocate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow. Clearly, however serious Mark Twain regarded his physical condition, he did not allow it to make him gloomy. He wrote that matters were going everywhere to his satisfaction; that Clara was happy; that his household and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal surroundings were of the pleasantest sort. Sometimes he wrote of what he was reading, and once spoke particularly of Prof. William Lyon Phelps's Literary Essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he had finished the book.--[To Phelps himself he wrote: “I thank you ever so much for the book, which I find charming--so charming, indeed, that I read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night's sleep. I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me; & even if I don't I am proud & well contented, since you think I deserve it.”] So his days seemed full of comfort. But in March I noticed that he generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small photographs I thought he looked thinner and older. Still he kept up his merriment. In one letter he said: While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you with my own hand, so that I may use with utter freedom & without embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my secretary's hearing. You are forgiven, but don't let it occur again. He had still made no mention of his illness; but on the 25th of March he wrote something of his plans for coming home. He had engaged passage on the Bermudian for April 23d, he said; and he added: But don't tell anybody. I don't want it known. I may have to go sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty considerable. I don't want to die here, for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition. I should have to lie in the undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down there & unpleasant. The Colliers will meet me on the pier, & I may stay with them a week or two before going home. It all depends on the breast pain. I don't want to die there. I am growing more and more particular about the place. But in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting that we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library entertainments could be given at Stormfield. I confess that this letter, in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and I was tempted to sail for Bermuda to bring him home. Three days later he wrote again: I have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the heart, just as I originally suspected. The news from New York is to the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last; therefore, if I can get my breast trouble in traveling condition I may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed. The same mail that brought this brought a letter from Mr. Allen, who frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed. Mr. Clemens had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his condition critical. These letters arrived April 1st. I went to New York at once and sailed next morning. Before sailing I consulted with Dr. Quintard, who provided me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic needle. He also joined me in a cablegram to the Gabrilowitsches, then in Italy, advising them to sail without delay. CCXCII. THE VOYAGE HOME I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when on the second morning I arrived at Hamilton, I stepped quickly ashore from the tender and hurried to Bay House. The doors were all open, as they usually are in that summer island, and no one was visible. I was familiar with the place, and, without knocking, I went through to the room occupied by Mark Twain. As I entered I saw that he was alone, sitting in a large chair, clad in the familiar dressing-gown. Bay House stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at the window, had an unusual quality. He was not yet shaven, and he seemed unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner. I was too startled, for the moment, to say anything. When he turned and saw me he seemed a little dazed. “Why,” he said, holding out his hand, “you didn't tell us you were coming.” “No,” I said, “it is rather sudden. I didn't quite like the sound of your last letters.” “But those were not serious,” he protested. “You shouldn't have come on my account.” I said then that I had come on my own account; that I had felt the need of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him. “That's--very--good,” he said, in his slow, gentle fashion. “Now I'm glad to see you.” His breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite. When he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed to me, after all, that I must have been mistaken in thinking him so changed. Certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in danger. He told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed “hypnotic injunctions” and “subcutaneous applications,” and he had his humor out of it, as of course he must have, even though Death should stand there in person. From Mr. and Mrs. Allen and from the physician I learned how slender had been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had already engaged passage on the Oceana for the 12th, and the one purpose now was to get him physically in condition for the trip. How devoted those kind friends had been to him! They had devised every imaginable thing for his comfort. Mr. Allen had rigged an electric bell which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly at any hour of the night. Clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around. When the pains were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as ever. On the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way. He had been rereading Macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the hypocrisy and intrigue of the English court under James II. He spoke, too, of the Redding Library. I had sold for him that portion of the land where Jean's farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the money for some sort of a memorial to Jean. I had written, suggesting that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the Adams lot faced the corner where Jean had passed every day when she rode to the station for the mail. He had been thinking this over, he said, and wished the idea carried out. He asked me to write at once to his lawyer, Mr. Lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a memorial library fund. The pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several succeeding days. He was gay and quite himself, and he often went out on the lawn; but we did not drive out again. For the most part, he sat propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way; and as I looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life that I could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all. I found that he had been really very much alive during those three months--too much for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been careful of his hours or his diet, and had suffered in consequence. He had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the Allens and receiving their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my benefit. As it would seem to have been the last bit of continued writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a few paragraphs may be admitted. The “advice” is concerning deportment on reaching the Gate which St. Peter is supposed to guard-- Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not your place to begin. Do not begin any remark with “Say.” When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation. If you must talk let the weather alone. St. Peter cares not a damn for the weather. And don't ask him what time the 4.30 train goes; there aren't any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you. You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness. He has heard that before. Don't try to kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake. Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit you would stay out and the dog would go in. You will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don't you try it. You would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that. Explain to Helen why I don't come. If you can. There were several pages of this counsel. One paragraph was written in shorthand. I meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other things to think of, and I did not remember. I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading while he himself read or dozed. His nights were wakeful--he found it easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there. He became interested in Hardy's Jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous reading. I noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and I could see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day. It was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks returned. The night of the 8th was a hard one. The doctors were summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the pain had been eased. When I returned in the early morning he was sitting in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit. He took my hand and said: “Well, I had a picturesque night. Every pain I had was on exhibition.” He looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted islands. “'Sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'” he quoted. “That's Hoffman. Anything left of Hoffman?” “No,” I said. “I must watch for the Bermudian and see if she salutes,” he said, presently. “The captain knows I am here sick, and he blows two short whistles just as they come up behind that little island. Those are for me.” He said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and I placed a card-table in front of him. His breakfast came in, and a little later he became quite gay. He drifted to Macaulay again, and spoke of King James's plot to assassinate William II., and how the clergy had brought themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in battle and by assassination. He had taken his seat by the window to watch for the Bermudian. She came down the bay presently, her bright red stacks towering vividly above the green island. It was a brilliant morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue. He watched her anxiously and without speaking. Suddenly there were two white puffs of steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her. “Those are for me,” he said, his face full of contentment. “Captain Fraser does not forget me.” There followed another bad night. My room was only a little distance away, and Claude came for me. I do not think any of us thought he would survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed. In the morning he said: “That breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day. I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. I want a jugful of that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning.” We began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the 12th; but by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the 12th, so much so that I began to believe, if once he could be in Stormfield, where the air was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer. The humid atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing. That evening he was unusually merry. Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and myself went in to wish him good night. He was loath to let us leave, but was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest. He was never one to be very obedient. A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda. We went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all. He hadn't felt sleepy, he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good. Perhaps it did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing. Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing in the morning and take him to the ship. He was carried in a little hand-chair to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an invalid: The sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room, and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away. As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of that homeward voyage. It was a brief two days as time is measured; but as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by the side of which even years do not count. At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess of Cardigan for his reading. He asked also for the second volume of Carlyle's French Revolution, which he had with him. But we ran immediately into the more humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and his breathing became at first difficult, then next to impossible. There were two large port-holes, which I opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better outside. It was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were there. I had a steamer-chair brought, and with Claude supported him to it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his breathing did not improve. It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort for breath he managed to say: “I am going--I shall be gone in a moment.” Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than this. I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly dampness. He asked for the “hypnotic 'injunction” (for his humor never left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not deny it. It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without great distress. The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air would bring him upright. During the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side. I held the match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction. Then the peace of it would bring drowsiness, and while I supported him there would come a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep. Only a few moments, for the devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh tortures. Over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth. In spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense of humor, and tender consideration for another. Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the circuit of the cabin floor, he said: “The ship is passing the hat.” Again he said: “I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this dying business. Can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?” He thought if I could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it would not be necessary to support him, and then I could sit on the couch and read while he tried to doze. He wanted me to read Jude, he said, so we could talk about it. I got all the pillows I could and built them up around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him contentment. He would doze off a little and then come up with a start, his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if I was still there. Over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated. When I could deny him no longer I administered the opiate, but it never completely possessed him or gave him entire relief. As I looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, I could not but remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the world had paid to him. Something of this may have entered his mind, too, for once, when I offered him some of the milder remedies which we had brought, he said: “After forty years of public effort I have become just a target for medicines.” The program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch, from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely uttering any complaint; but once he said: “I never guessed that I was not going to outlive John Bigelow.” And again: “This is such a mysterious disease. If we only had a bill of particulars we'd have something to swear at.” Time and again he picked up Carlyle or the Cardigan Memoirs, and read, or seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the book would fall. Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the old way. Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: “Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it.” Then realizing, he said: “I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.” And, somewhat later: “Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long.” Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked: “How long have we been on this voyage?” I answered that this was the end of the first day. “How many more are there?” he asked. “Only one, and two nights.” “We'll never make it,” he said. “It's an eternity.” “But we must on Clara's account,” I told him, and I estimated that Clara would be more than half-way across the ocean by now. “It is a losing race,” he said; “no ship can outsail death.” It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak, and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery. I wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance. I have dwelt upon these hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more nor less, and never less than brave. Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said, earnestly: “When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life. I want to be made comfortable to go.” There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws, no suggestion of dread. Somehow those two days and nights went by. Once, when he was partially relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in the fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold, bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep. Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome him. He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which, fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage. It was not a prolonged attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one. An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there two years before. Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended him, and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe now, and in the relief came back old interests. Half reclining on the couch, he looked through the afternoon papers. It happened curiously that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four years earlier, had been so largely responsible for my association with Mark Twain, was on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at New Hartford. Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years before. Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green. As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said: “Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?” The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him. “It looks quite imposing,” he said. I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything. He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910. CCXCIII. THE RETURN TO THE INVISIBLE There would be two days more before Ossip and Clara Gabrilowitsch could arrive. Clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this interval, though he clearly was not improving. The physicians denied him the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely. But he craved it, and once, when I went in, he said, rather mournfully: “They won't give me the subcutaneous any more.” It was Sunday morning when Clara came. He was cheerful and able to talk quite freely. He did not dwell upon his condition, I think, but spoke rather of his plans for the summer. At all events, he did not then suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became evident to all that his stay was very brief. His breathing was becoming heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort. His articulation also became affected. I think the last continuous talking he did was to Dr. Halsey on the evening of April 17th--the day of Clara's arrival. A mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to talk himself to sleep. He recalled one of his old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact. He became drowsier as he talked. He said at last: “This is a peculiar kind of disease. It does not invite you to read; it does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment. What kind of a disease is that? Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about them. You can read and smoke and have only to lie still.” And a little later he added: “It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity. I put out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it.” He coughed violently, and afterward commented: “If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand and is meddling with you. That is my opinion--of seventy-four years' growth.” The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of letters, but he could not see them. A few messages were reported to him. At intervals he read a little. Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a paragraph or a page. Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color still in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--I said: “It is not reality. He is not going to die.” On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to tell Clara to come and sing to him. It was a heavy requirement, but she somehow found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved, and he seemed soothed and comforted. When she came away he bade her good-by, saying that he might not see her again. But he lingered through the next day and the next. His mind was wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite vigorous, and he apparently suffered little. We did not know it, then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by him, appeared that night in the sky.--[The perihelion of Halley's Comet for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.] On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle. Early in the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to “throw away,” as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left now. I assured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my hand. It was his last word to me. Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could not put into intelligible words. And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him better than the others. Most of the time he dozed. Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her hand, and seemed to speak with less effort. “Good-by,” he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he added: “If we meet”--but the words were very faint. He looked at her for a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more. Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and lower. It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become more subdued, broke a little. There was no suggestion of any struggle. The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh, and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous years had stopped forever. He had entered into the estate envied so long. In his own words--the words of one of his latest memoranda: “He had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is not artificial--the only safe one. The others are traps that can beguile to humiliation. “Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved.” CCXCIV. THE LAST RITES It is not often that a whole world mourns. Nations have often mourned a hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really united in tender sorrow for the death of any man. In one of his aphorisms he wrote: “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” And it was thus that Mark Twain himself had lived. No man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even attempt to explain just why. Let us only say that it was because he was so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or circumstance, responded to his touch. From every remote corner of the globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in Christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor. No king ever died that received so rich a homage as his. To quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast offering. We took him to New York to the Brick Church, and Dr. Henry van Dyke spoke only a few simple words, and Joseph Twichell came from Hartford and delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for Harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended. Mark Twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time. The flowers, of which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket itself lay a single laurel wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill. He was never more beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on. All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but no one offered even to pick a flower. Howells came, and in his book he says: I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. Then in the quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De Soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be associated with his name. CCXCV. MARK TWAIN'S RELIGION There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state--orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind; never of his heart. Once a woman said to him: “Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are.” And she might have added, with equal force and truth: “You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are.” Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself. Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives. In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and various talks, 1906-07, etc.] Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky. At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. The document follows: I believe in God the Almighty. I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less inspired by Him. I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works: I perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one. I do not believe in special providences. I believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man's family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in favor of the other. I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it. To chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable--even the atrocious God imagined by the Jews would tire of the spectacle eventually. There may be a hereafter and there may not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about it. I believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's experience. It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from them. If I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it, for He is beyond the reach of injury from me--I could as easily injure a planet by throwing mud at it. It seems to me that my misconduct could only injure me and other men. I cannot benefit God by obeying these moral laws--I could as easily benefit the planet by withholding my mud. (Let these sentences be read in the light of the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man --none whatever from God.) Consequently I do not see why I should be either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I do here. If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony. I never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during the last year of his life. He was never intentionally dogmatic. In a memorandum on a fly-leaf of Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology he wrote: RELIGION The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. MARK TWAIN, 19th Cent. A.D. And in another note: I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him. Mark Twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. He despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. It was a religion identified with his daily life and his work. He lived as he wrote, and he wrote as he believed. His favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded. “He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time,” says Howells, “with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity.” Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. In one of his dictations he said: I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small or a large way. When it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. With his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind. With him, as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily flitted by. With him, as with another, the spirit of desire led him often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but lingeringly--and often invited to return. With him, as with another, a crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others, daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul. With him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word, Humanity. Certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself constitutes an epitome of Mark Twain's creed. His paraphrase, “When in doubt tell the truth,” is one of these, and he embodied his whole attitude toward Infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote: Why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the welfare of his child to the extent of his ability. It is all that we require of God. CCXCVI. POSTSCRIPT Every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce, tragedy--all the elements are there. To examine in detail any life, however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate. The biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past. In so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success. At best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human soul can ever really know. Mark Twain's appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of dramatic moments. He was always exactly in the setting. Whatever he did, or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest effect. At the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored than ever before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he died. How little one may tell of such a life as his! He traveled always such a broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following after. Such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change! I have written so much, and yet I have put so much aside--and often the best things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best and the variety infinite. One may only strive to be faithful--and I would have made it better if I could. APPENDIX. APPENDIX A LETTER FROM ORION CLEMENS TO MISS WOOD CONCERNING HENRY CLEMENS (See Chapter xxvi) KEOKUK, Iowa, October 3, 1858. MISS WOOD,--My mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request that myself and wife should write to you, I hasten to do so. In my memory I can go away back to Henry's infancy; I see his large, blue eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his credulity in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his marbles, expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection of the time when, standing we three alone by our father's grave, I told them always to remember that brothers should be kind to each other; afterward I see Henry returning from school with his books for the last time. He must go into my printing-office. He learned rapidly. A word of encouragement or a word of discouragement told upon his organization electrically. I could see the effects in his day's work. Sometimes I would say, “Henry!” He would stand full front with his eyes upon mine--all attention. If I commanded him to do something, without a word he was off instantly, probably in a run. If a cat was to be drowned or shot Sam (though unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work. If a stray kitten was to be fed and taken care of Henry was expected to attend to it, and he would faithfully do so. So they grew up, and many was the grave lecture commenced by ma, to the effect that Sam was misleading and spoiling Henry. But the lectures were never concluded, for Sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean out of my mother's mind, and change it to a laugh. Those were happier days. My mother was as lively as any girl of sixteen. She is not so now. And sister Pamela I have described in describing Henry; for she was his counterpart. The blow falls crushingly on her. But the boys grew up--Sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow, Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection; Sam and I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading. Henry is gone! His death was horrible! How I could have sat by him, hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and ministered to every want in my power that I could discover. This was denied to me, but Sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost extreme of every feeling, was there. Both his capacity of enjoyment and his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would have affected me to see so sad a scene, I can somewhat appreciate Sam's sufferings. In this time of great trouble, when my two brothers, whose heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the utmost stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel, to aid and console, and I bless and thank you for it with my whole heart. I thank all who helped them then; I thank them for the flowers they sent to Henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and when he died, and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed upon the poor boys. We thank the physicians, and we shall always gratefully remember the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense to himself enabled us to deposit Henry's remains by our father. With many kind wishes for your future welfare, I remain your earnest friend, Respectfully, ORION CLEMENS. APPENDIX B MARK TWAIN'S BURLESQUE OF CAPTAIN ISAIAH SELLERS (See Chapter xxvii) The item which served as a text for the “Sergeant Fathom” communication was as follows: VICKSBURG, May 4, 1859. My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 1815. My opinion is that the water will be four feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. I. SELLERS.--[Captain Sellers, as in this case, sometimes signed his own name to his communications.] THE BURLESQUE INTRODUCTORY Our friend Sergeant Fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river, and now on the Railroad Line steamer Trombone, sends us a rather bad account concerning the state of the river. Sergeant Fathom is a “cub” of much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his prophecy will not be verified in this instance. While introducing the Sergeant, “we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend of his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase, 'close,' as well as superhumanly 'safe.'” It is a well-known fact that he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the New Orleans and St. Louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat. This astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his boat after early candle-light. It is related of the Sergeant that upon one occasion he actually ran the chute of Glasscock's Island, down-stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was scarcely more than bank full. His method of accomplishing this feat proves what we have just said of his “safeness”--he sounded the chute first, and then built a fire at the head of the island to run by. As to the Sergeant's “closeness,” we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right of the “Old Hen,”--[Glasscock's Island and the “Old Hen” were phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the Sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect, his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and, more than all, he hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and sweetness, if you will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an exhaustless fund of funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream, without beginning, or middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of the ancient Mississippi, which, taken together, form a 'tout ensemble' which is sufficient excuse for the tender epithet which is, by common consent, applied to him by all those ancient dames aforesaid, of “che-arming creature!”). As the Sergeant has been longer on the river, and is better acquainted with it than any other “cub” extant, his remarks are entitled to far more consideration, and are always read with the deepest interest by high and low, rich and poor, from “Kiho” to Kamschatka, for let it be known that his fame extends to the uttermost parts of the earth: THE COMMUNICATION R.R. Steamer Trombone, VICKSBURG, May 8, 1859. The river from New Orleans up to Natchez is higher than it has been since the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of 1813) and my opinion is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now entirely under water. However, Mr. Editor, the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley should not act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of this prophecy of mine, for I shall proceed to convince them of a great fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the Mississippi is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional variation of the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and eventually that it will cease to rise at all. Therefore, I would hint to the planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game commonly called “draw,” that if they can only “stand the rise” this time they may enjoy the comfortable assurance that the old river's banks will never hold a “full” again during their natural lives. In the summer of 1763 I came down the river on the old first Jubilee. She was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff “nowhere,” for I steered her with a window-shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and “rounded her to” with a yoke of oxen. Well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above Selmathe only dry land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing “seven up” with the Indians, waiting for the river to fall. Finally, it fell about a hundred feet, and we went on. One day we rounded to, and I got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the Indians up there at Selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around No. 8, and while I was gone my partner got aground on the hills at Hickman. After three days' labor we finally succeeded in sparring her off with a capstan bar, and went on to Memphis. By the time we got there the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where the Gayoso House now stands. We finished loading at Memphis, and loaded part of the stone for the present St. Louis Court House (which was then in process of erection), to be taken up on our return trip. You can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the water was in 1763. In 1775 it did not rise so high by thirty feet; in 1790 it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in 1797, one hundred and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and fifty feet. These were “high-water” years. The “high waters” since then have been so insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to notice them. Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel uneasy. The river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood, but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether. In conclusion, sir, I will condescend to hint at the foundation of these arguments: When me and De Soto discovered the Mississippi I could stand at Bolivar Landing (several miles above “Roaring Waters Bar”) and pitch a biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded across at Donaldsonville. The gradual widening and deepening of the river is the whole secret of the matter. Yours, etc. SERGEANT FATHOM. APPENDIX C. I. MARK TWAIN'S EMPIRE CITY HOAX (See Chapter xli) THE LATEST SENSATION. A Victim to Jeremy Diddling Trustees--He Cuts his Throat from Ear to Ear, Scalps his Wife, and Dashes Out the Brains of Six Helpless Children! From Abram Curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from Carson, we learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was committed in Ormsby County night before last. It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick's. The family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy, about a year and a half. Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins, while visiting Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence, and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take her life. It was Mrs. Hopkins's misfortune to be given to exaggeration, however, and but little attention was given to what she said. About 10 o'clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long, red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to Hopkins's house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes. The scalpless corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open and her right hand almost severed from the wrist. Near her lay the ax with which the murderous deed had been committed. In one of the bedrooms six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about the floor. They were all dead. Their brains had evidently been dashed out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with a blunt instrument. The children must have struggled hard for their lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the room in the utmost confusion. Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it is thought their recovery is possible. The eldest girl, Mary, must have sought refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been inflicted still sticking in her side. The two girls Julia and Emma, who had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on them. They think they were the first attacked. They further state that Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no violence. He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind. Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family. He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company, of San Francisco. He was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently. Hopkins had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead, however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down to nothing. It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family. The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the villainy at work. We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove the saddest result of their silence. II. NEWS-GATHERING WITH MARK TWAIN. Alfred Doten's son gives the following account of a reporting trip made by his father and Mark Twain, when the two were on Comstock papers: My father and Mark Twain were once detailed to go over to Como and write up some new mines that had been discovered over there. My father was on the Gold Hill News. He and Mark had not met before, but became promptly acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names. They went to a little hotel at Carson, agreeing to do their work there together next morning. When morning came they set out, and suddenly on a corner Mark stopped and turned to my father, saying: “By gracious, Alf! Isn't that a brewery?” “It is, Mark. Let's go in.” They did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer, and lunching, going back to the hotel that night. The next morning precisely the same thing occurred. When they were on the same corner, Mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and sand: “Good gracious, Alf! Isn't that a brewery?” “It is, Mark. Let's go in.” So again they went in, and again stayed all day. This happened again the next morning, and the next. Then my father became uneasy. A letter had come from Gold Hill, asking him where his report of the mines was. They agreed that next morning they would really begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that overlooked the mines, and write it from there. But the next morning, as before, Mark was surprised to discover the brewery, and once more they went in. A few moments later, however, a man who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with them--came in. He was a godsend. My father set down a valuable, informing story, while Mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out of him. Next day Virginia City and Gold Hill were gaining information from my father's article, and entertainment from Mark's story of the mines. APPENDIX D FROM MARK TWAIN'S FIRST LECTURE, DELIVERED OCTOBER 2, 1866. (See Chapter liv) HAWAIIAN IMPORTANCE TO AMERICA. After a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the Sandwich Islands, its profits and possibilities, he said: I have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a genuine importance to America--an importance which is not generally appreciated by our citizens. They pay revenues into the United States Treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year. I do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years ago, according to the Patent Office reports, it was 800,000 hogsheads. The Sandwich Islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead Americans, are capable of providing one-third as much themselves. With the Pacific Railroad built, the great China Mail Line of steamers touching at Honolulu--we could stock the islands with Americans and supply a third of the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest, longest-stapled cotton this side of the Sea Islands, and the very best quality of rice.... The property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the United States? NATIVE PASSION FOR FUNERALS They are very fond of funerals. Big funerals are their main weakness. Fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are things they take a generous delight in. They are fond of their chief and their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will experience in burying them. They will beg, borrow, or steal money enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral on Oahu. Years ago a Kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for murder. They received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it gave an opening for a funeral, you know. All they care for is a funeral. It makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon attend their own funeral as anybody else's. This couple were people of consequence, and had landed estates. They sold every foot of ground they had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in. And the woman appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw-hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. As the noose was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. I never, never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did. VIEW FROM HALEAKALA It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the tremendous abyss ages ago. The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly have reached in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a grasshopper. This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are hidden from sight. And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless ocean. But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things. You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room. You look up at everything; nothing is below you. It has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple and crimson splendors of the setting sun! And so firm does this grand cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below. Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and night and solitude and death! NOTICE OF MARK TWAIN'S LECTURE “THE TROUBLE IS OVER” “The inimitable Mark Twain, delivered himself last night of his first lecture on the Sandwich Islands, or anything else. “Some time before the hour appointed to open his head the Academy of Music (on Pine Street) was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in this city. The Elite of the town were there, and so was the Governor of the State, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. The audience promptly notified Mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging out from the left of the stage. His very manner produced a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. He opened with an apology, by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last moment the party engaged backed out. He explained that he had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play. This placed Mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied, 'That he wasn't going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself.' After the applause subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with the following well-known sentence: 'When, in the course of human events,' etc. He lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power.” APPENDIX E FROM “THE JUMPING FROG” BOOK (MARK TWAIN'S FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME) (See Chapters lviii and lix) I. ADVERTISEMENT “Mark Twain” is too well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. By his story of the Frog he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope. He is also known to fame as The Moralist of the Main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. It is in his secondary character, as humorist, however, rather than in the primal one of moralist, that I aim to present him in the present volume. And here a ready explanation will be found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches; for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found--very often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled. Originally written for newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. Further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. But there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the staple of his writing. J. P. II. FROM ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS “MORAL STATISTICIAN”--I don't want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc.... Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement of your income. Now you all know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as “ornery” and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous “moral statistics”? Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor-stove. III. FROM “A STRANGE DREAM” (Example of Mark Twain's Early Descriptive Writing) ... In due time I stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast caldron which the natives, ages ago, named 'Hale mau mau'--the abyss wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might never tread above them. We stood there, at dead of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance; started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens with an infernal splendor. “What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to this?” My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. We came at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old King Kamehameha the First--that invincible old pagan Alexander--had found other sepulture than the burning depths of the 'Hale mau mau'. I grew interested at once; I knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; I was aware that there was a legend connected with this matter; and I felt as if there could be no more fitting time to listen to it than the present. The descendant of the Kamehamehas said: The dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the 'Hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in the distance. The guards were set and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. In the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings; the funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. The mourners and watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that the phantom messengers of the dread Goddess of Fire had been in their midst. When at last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead monarch had been spirited away! APPENDIX F THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (See Chapter lx) NEW YORK “HERALD” EDITORIAL ON THE RETURN OF THE “QUAKER CITY” PILGRIMAGE, NOVEMBER 19, 1867. In yesterday's Herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of that most amusing American genius, Mark Twain, giving an account of that most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the 'Quaker City'. It has been amusing all through, this Quaker City affair. It might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at Jaffa, Alexandria, or Yalta, in the Black Sea, as it appears might have happened. In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship. The descendants of the Puritan pilgrims have, naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly sharp eye to business. It was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims, although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as Mark Twain should have found admission into the sacred circle. We are not aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale. There are varieties of genius peculiar to America. Of one of these varieties Mark Twain is a striking specimen. For the development of his peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. Besides, there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know, about this last edition of the Mayflower. APPENDIX G MARK TWAIN AT THE CORRESPONDENTS CLUB, WASHINGTON (See Chapter lxiii) WOMAN A EULOGY OF THE FAIR SEX. The Washington Correspondents Club held its anniversary on Saturday night. Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, responded to the toast, “Woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours.” He said: Mr. President,--I do not know why I should have been singled out to receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age. [Applause.] I do not know why I have received this distinction, unless it be that I am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club. But, be this as it may, Mr. President, I am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more gladly, or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice, than I. Because, Sir, I love the sex. [Laughter.] I love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color. [Laughter.] Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. She sews on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes us in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives good advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind sometimes--and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our children. (Ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence appears in Twain's published speeches and may have been added later. D.W.] In all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to woman to say of her that she is a brick. [Great laughter.] Wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain resumed his eulogy.] Look at the noble names of history! Look at Cleopatra! Look at Desdemona! Look at Florence Nightingale! Look at Joan of Arc! Look at Lucretia Borgia! [Disapprobation expressed. “Well,” said Mr. Twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, “suppose we let Lucretia slide.”] Look at Joyce Heth! Look at Mother Eve! I repeat, sir, look at the illustrious names of history! Look at the Widow Machree! Look at Lucy Stone! Look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton! Look at George Francis Train! [Great laughter.] And, sir, I say with bowed head and deepest veneration, look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not lie--could not lie. [Applause.] But he never had any chance. It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondents' club. [Laughter, groans, hisses, cries of “put him out.” Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and resumed.] I repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart she has few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a wet nurse she has no equal among men! [Laughter.] What, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir. (Mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the published 'Speeches'. D.W.] Then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves, if we get a chance. [Laughter.] But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored the very best one of them all--his own mother! [Applause.] APPENDIX H ANNOUNCEMENT FOR LECTURE OF JULY 2, 1868 (See Chapter lxvi) THE PUBLIC TO MARK TWAIN--CORRESPONDENCE SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Hearing that you are about to sail for New York in the P. M. S. S. Company's steamer of the 6th July, to publish a book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. We beg and implore you do not. There is a limit to human endurance. We are your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. Yours truly, 60 names including: Bret Harte, Maj.-Gen. Ord, Maj.-Gen. Halleck, The Orphan Asylum, and various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on Foot and Horseback, and 1500 in the Steerage. (REPLY) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th TO THE 1,500 AND OTHERS,--It seems to me that your course is entirely unprecedented. Heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public, but as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? Am I to go away and let them have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only lecture them twice? What do you take me for? No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know about VENICE. I wish to tell them about the City of the Sea--that most venerable, most brilliant, and proudest Republic the world has ever seen. I wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it lost in two hundred. I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it? Let me talk only just this once, and I will sail positively on the 6th of July, and stay away until I return from China--two years. Yours truly, MARK TWAIN. (FURTHER REMONSTRANCE) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN,--Learning with profound regret that you have concluded to postpone your departure until the 6th July, and learning also, with unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book, or lecture again before you go, at the New Mercantile Library, we hasten to beg of you that you will not do it. Curb this spirit of lawless violence, and emigrate at once. Have the vessel's bill for your passage sent to us. We will pay it. Your friends, Pacific Board of Brokers [and other financial and social institutions] SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Will you start now, without any unnecessary delay? Yours truly, Proprietors of the Alta, Bulletin, Times, Call, Examiner [and other San Francisco publications]. SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Do not delay your departure. You can come back and lecture another time. In the language of the worldly--you can “cut and come again.” Your friends, THE CLERGY. SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--You had better go. Yours, THE CHIEF OF POLICE. (REPLY) SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th. GENTLEMEN,--Restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail. Read: NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868 One Night Only FAREWELL LECTURE of MARK TWAIN Subject: The Oldest of the Republics VENICE PAST AND PRESENT Box-Office open Wednesday and Thursday No extra charge for reserved seats ADMISSION........... ONE DOLLAR Doors open at 7 Orgies to commence at 8 P. M. The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the 4th. The lecture will be delivered certainly on the 2d, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the 4th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars. AT NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868 APPENDIX I. MARK TWAIN'S CHAMPIONSHIP OF THOMAS K. BEECHER (See Chapter lxxiv) There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the Opera House. Mr. Beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira Advertiser, over the signature of “S'cat.” It created a stir, of course. The article follows: MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY “The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting. This has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action.”--N. Y. Evangelist. Poor Beecher! All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it. He could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could promote discord in the church of Christ, and those parties had to make it right with the Deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it! But he went too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity. We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. Mr. Beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent Congregational Church, in this city. The meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. Mr. Beecher regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. So, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by a passage of Scripture which says, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature.” Opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of “all the world.” He looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of “every creature.” These ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the Saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira. And there was. Wherefore, blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ. Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the Opera House meetings. They declined with great unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of. The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera House at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal I do not. Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the Opera House experiment. And he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. He could have relied on any he had in his barrel. The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast. Every Sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera House to be damned. The community talked, talked, talked. Everybody discussed the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera House meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. Everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering. Mr. Beecher asked the Ministerial Union to state their objections to the Opera House matter. They could not--at least they did not. He said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them. They declined to do that. Why should they have declined? They had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion. (That is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around.) But the Opera House meetings went on. That was the mischief of it. And so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B. appeared at the usual Ministers' meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more. He asked why. They gave no reason. They simply declined to have his company longer. Mr. B. said he could not accept of this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever. And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's importunate affection. The Ministerial Union had ruled out Beecher--a point gained. He would get up an excitement about it in public. But that was a miscalculation. He never mentioned it. They waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came. After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. Beecher had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them. The opportunity was slipping away. Alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! And after all, their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. They had ceased to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it. Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently, to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones's child has the measles are chronicled there with avidity. Something must be done. As the Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print. And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this article. They have got their excommunication-bull started at last. It is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope. They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be. It excited a two-line paragraph there. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow! Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira! And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher! For the Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to God for his shortcomings. (Excuse these tears.) (For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that Mr. Beecher did not write this article. And further still, that he did not inspire it. And further still, the Ministerial Union of Elmira did not write it. And finally, the Ministerial Union did not ask me to write it. No, I have taken up this cudgel in defense of the Ministerial Union of Elmira solely from a love of justice. Without solicitation, I have constituted myself the champion of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they are busy, and have not the time to ask me, I will cheerfully do it anyhow. In closing this I must remark that if any question the right of the clergymen of Elmira to turn Mr. Beecher out of the Ministerial Union, to such I answer that Mr. Beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got warmed up.) Cheerfully, S'CAT. APPENDIX J THE INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS OF GEORGE HOLLAND BY THE REV. MR. SABINE. (See Chapter lxxvii) What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity!--even upon the vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pigmy skin. If we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay--hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, “You are unworthy; you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; I cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of Heaven.” It must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, “We are all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes; it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or to revile it; I have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor.” It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated the letter of the Gospel, and judged George Holland--not George Holland, either, but his profession through him. Then it is, in a measure, fair that we judge this creature's guild through him. In effect he has said, “We are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such are obstacles to moral progress.” Pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable. And his congregation forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George Holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward! Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, “I do not think it teaches moral lessons”? Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of “King Lear”? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of “Othello”? And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? It is almost fair and just to aver (although it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not from the drowsy pulpit. All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts, were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity, sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy. And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself. Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? (For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a specter.) No, I am not saying that. The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time. The theater teaches large audiences seven times a week--28 or 30 hours altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, “You unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven.” How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had Crooks and Kallochs and Sabines in it! No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ; but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should protest. And having protested, it is also fair and just--being driven to it, as it were--to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, “Ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!” Sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out. But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not pitiable--that spectacle? Honored and honorable old George Holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! APPENDIX K A SUBSTITUTE FOR RULOFF HAVE WE A SIDNEY CARTON AMONG US? (See Chapter lxxxii) To EDITOR of 'Tribune'. SIR,--I believe in capital punishment. I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. The fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. The fact that in England the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen, and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in France only one to thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of retaining the death-penalty. It is better to hang one murderer in sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all. Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged, but I am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. In this, mine and the public's is a common regret. For it is plain that in the person of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr. Richmond, and other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day. His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with. But his memory is the least of his great endowments. By the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature, and while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted translations; and in the latter case, if exceptions be taken to his judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaustless knowledge, and builds a very Chinese wall of evidence around his position. Every learned man who enters Ruloff's presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments. One scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject, and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Ruloff's intellectual equal. What miracles this murderer might have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! But what if the law could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. If a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder Ruloff did, will that suffice? If so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth I aver that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who, in the interests of learning and science, will take Ruloff's crime upon himself, and submit to be hanged in Ruloff's place. I can, and will do this thing; and I propose this matter, and make this offer in good faith. You know me, and know my address. SAMUEL LANGHORNE. April 29, 1871. APPENDIX L. ABOUT LONDON ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY THE SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 28, 1872. (See Chapter lxxxvii) Reported by Moncure D. Conway in the Cincinnati Commercial It affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. I hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and fluttering] you will excuse these clothes. I am going to the theater; that will explain these clothes. I have other clothes than these. Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about “Twain and one flesh” and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush that man into the earth--no. I feel like saying, “Let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks.” We will deal in palpable puns. We will call parties named King “your Majesty” and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. Such is human nature. We cannot alter this. It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose. Let us not repine. But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it--a week. I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. Its wonders seem to me to be limitless. I go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvelous. Hour after hour I stand--I stand spellbound, as it were-and gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square. [Leicester Square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.] I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most. I go to that matchless Hyde Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble Arch--and am induced to “change my mind.” [Cabs are not permitted in Hyde Park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] It is a great benefaction--is Hyde Park. There, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and of heaven. And if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle. I drive round and round Hyde Park and the more I see of the edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive. And I have been to the Zoological Gardens. What a wonderful place that is! I have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild-animals in any garden before--except Mabille. I never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there--and I don't believe it yet. I have been to the British Museum. I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there. It seems to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her greatness. I say to her, our greatness--as a nation. True, she has built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world's stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust--I refer to the Wellington and Nelson monuments, and--the Albert memorial. [Sarcasm. The Albert memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.] The Library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding. I have read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it. I revere that library. It is the author's friend. I don't care how mean a book is, it always takes one copy. [A copy of every book printed in Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained of by publishers.] And then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work. And what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons for Sunday! You will pardon my referring to these things. Everything in this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. People here seem always to express distances by parables. To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak. I collar a citizen, and I think I am going to get some valuable information out of him. I ask him how far it is to Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence. Now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn. I find myself down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, “How far is it to Charing Cross?” “Shilling fare in a cab,” and off he goes. I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin. But I am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and historical reflections. I will not longer keep you from your orgies. 'Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it. The name of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home--Artemus Ward. Asking that you will join me, I give you his Memory. APPENDIX M LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING A MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS. (See Chapter xcvii) BOSTON, November 16, 1935. DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick. The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed, holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads “communing” I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and “rot,” mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation. It is sixty years since I was here before. I walked hither then with my precious old friend. It seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat. My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I was nearly an hour on my journey. But by the goodness of God thirteen of the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to lose the time. I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever. Our game was neatly played, and successfully. None expected us, of course. You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said, “Announce his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Right Honorable the Earl of Hartford.” Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours. In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age. He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, “Come to my arms! Away with titles--I'll know ye by no names but Twain and Twichell!” Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: “God bless you, old Howells, what is left of you!” We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot “communings” for us--of the olden time. We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the Lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter, forgotten name of New York. In truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O'Mulligan the First established that faith in the empire. And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor; but he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston; but there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace of God he got the opportunity. The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny. His granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the Howellses may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. Keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. Would you believe it?--the Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. They call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says, “Come in.” But she has become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now, except when uncommonly vexed. God knows, my dear, it would be a happy thing if you and old Lady Harmony would imitate this spirit. But indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. When I throw chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it. But you--you are but a creature of passion. The monument to the author of 'Gloverson and His Silent Partners' is finished.--[Ralph Keeler. See chap. lxxxiii.]--It is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. This noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures. Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great-grandchildren. I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it. Perhaps his best effort of late years is this: O soul, soul, soul of mine! Soul, soul, soul of throe! Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, And sing thy lauds in crystal wine! This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him. But I must desist. There are draughts here everywhere and my gout is something frightful. My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder. God be with you. HARTFORD. These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion of the city of Dublin. APPENDIX N MARK TWAIN AND COPYRIGHT I. PETITION Concerning Copyright (1875) (See Chapter cii) TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED. We, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: That justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike. All such men will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that American authors should be protected by copyright in Europe; also, that European authors should be protected by copyright here. Both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant to foreign authors with all convenient despatch a full and effective copyright in America without marring the grace of the act by stopping to inquire whether a similar justice will be done our own authors by foreign governments. If it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice to us it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right from their authors. If a thing is right it ought to be done--the thing called “expediency” or “policy” has no concern with such a matter. And we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right--a right received from God, and only denied them by man. We hold no ownership in these authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without their consent, it is robbery. The fact that the handiwork of our own authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor mitigates our sin. With your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the entry in the office of the Congressional Librarian to be the same as we pay ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be made without a single hampering stipulation that American authors shall receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments. Since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted we could have procured the signature of every writer in the United States, great and small, obscure or famous. As it is, the list comprises the names of about all our writers whose works have at present a European market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter. No objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of our greatest publishing firms will attest. A European copyright here would be a manifest advantage to them. As the matter stands now the moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half the gains. Then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms will object to granting an American copyright to foreign authors and artists, who can there be to object? Surely nobody whose protest is entitled to any weight. Trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will ever pray, etc. With great respect, Your Ob't Serv'ts. CIRCULAR TO AMERICAN AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS DEAR SIR,--We believe that you will recognize the justice and the righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the accompanying petition. And we believe that you will be willing that our country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under. If the sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor to sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our secretary? }Committee Address -------------------Secretary of the Committee. II. Communications supposed to have been written by the Tsar of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey to Mark Twain on the subject of International Copyright, about 1890. ST. PETERSBURG, February. COL. MARK TWAIN, Washington. Your cablegram received. It should have been transmitted through my minister, but let that pass. I am opposed to international copyright. At present American literature is harmless here because we doctor it in such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with Siberia as a summer resort. But your bill would spoil this. We should be obliged to let you say your say in your own way. 'Voila'! my empire would be a republic in five years and I should be sampling Siberia myself. If you should run across Mr. Kennan--[George Kennan, who had graphically pictured the fearful conditions of Siberian exile.]--please ask him to come over and give some readings. I will take good care of him. ALEXANDER III. 144--Collect. CONSTANTINOPLE, February. DR. MARK TWAIN, Washington. Great Scott, no! By the beard of the Prophet, no! How can you ask such a thing of me? I am a man of family. I cannot take chances, like other people. I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a man's wife is as good as the man himself. Such a doctrine cannot do any particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person, like me, and go to teaching that his wife is 964 times as good as he is, and what's hell to that harem, dear friend? I never saw such a fool as you. Do not mind that expression; I already regret it, and would replace it with a softer one if I could do it without debauching the truth. I beseech you, do not pass that bill. Roberts College is quite all the American product we can stand just now. On top of that, do you want to send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can't edit the poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is? My friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years. ABDUL II. III. MARK TWAIN'S LAST SUGGESTION ON COPYRIGHT. A MEMORIAL RESPECTFULLY TENDERED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. (Prepared early in 1909 at the suggestion of Mr. Champ Clack but not offered. A bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed about this time.) The Policy of Congress:--Nineteen or twenty years ago James Russell Lowell, George Haven Putnam, and the under signed appeared before the Senate Committee on Patents in the interest of Copyright. Up to that time, as explained by Senator Platt, of Connecticut, the policy of Congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years, with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an author had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income from literary property created by his hand and brain the property should then be transferred “to the public” as a free gift. That is still the policy of Congress to-day. The Purpose in View:--The purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was still under the protection of copyright. The Purpose Defeated:--This purpose has always been defeated. That is to say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was permanent and secure. The Reason:--The reason is simple: Congress has never made a reduction compulsory. Congress was convinced that the removal of the author's royalty and the book's consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the competition. It was an error. It has not turned out so. The reason is, a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must divide the market with competitors. Proposed Remedy:--The natural remedy would seem to be, amended law requiring the issue of cheap editions. Copyright Extension:--I think the remedy could be accomplished in the following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing as follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book's forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest edition hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years. This extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive months to furnish the ten per cent. book upon demand of any person or persons desiring to buy it. The Result:--The result would be that no American classic enjoying the thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any American purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might. He would get a two-dollar book for 20 cents, and he could get none but copyright-expired classics at any such rate. The Final Result:--At the end of the thirty-year extension the copyright would again die, and the price would again advance. This by a natural law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an advantage to any publisher. Reconstruction of The Present Law Not Necessary:--A clause of the suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again: All books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form of said book or article at a price of 90 per cent. below the cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years. REMARKS If the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present Congress and become law--and I hope it will--I shall have personal experience of its effects very soon. Next year, in fact, in the person of my first book, 'The Innocents Abroad'. For its forty-two-year copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and with the latter the permanent low-rate edition. At present the highest price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars per copy. Thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy. A sweeping reduction like this is what Congress from the beginning has desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk. Respectfully submitted, S. L. CLEMENS. (A full and interesting elucidation of Mark Twain's views on Copyright may be found in an article entitled “Concerning Copyright,” published in the North American Review for January, 1905.) APPENDIX O (See Chapter cxiv) Address of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) from a report of the dinner given by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in the Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1877. MR. CHAIRMAN, This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic, and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly California-ward. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'. I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to me. When he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than before. He let me in-pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, “You're the fourth--I'm going to move.” “The fourth what?” said I. “The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move.” “You don't tell me!” said I; “who were the others?” “Mr. Longfellow. Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!” You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he: “They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down in his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole and says he: “'Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!”' “Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.' Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans when Mr. Emerson came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says: “'Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes.' “Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.' You see, it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of Jittery swells. But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and buttonholes me and interrupts me. Says he: “'Honor be to Mudjekeewis! You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--' “But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get this grub ready, you'll do me proud.' Well, sir, after they'd filled up I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells: “'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine! For I would drink to other days.' “By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes and says I, 'Looky here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' Them's the very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous Littery people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing onreasonable 'bout me. I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.' Well, between drinks they'd swell around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr. Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says: “'I am the doubter and the doubt--' and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out. Says he: “'They reckon ill who leave me out; They know not well the subtle ways I keep. I pass and deal again!' Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one! Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already corralled two tricks and each of the others one. So now he kind of lifts a little in his chair and says, “'I tire of globes and aces! Too long the game is played!' and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie and says, “'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught,' and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! Emerson claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the first man that draws I'll lay down on him and smother him!' All quiet on the Potomac, you bet! “They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow. Emerson says, 'The noblest thing I ever wrote was “Barbara Frietchie.”' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my “Bigelow Papers.”' Says Holmes, 'My “Thanatopsis” lays over 'em both.' They mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more company, and Mr. Emerson pointed to me and says: “'Is yonder squalid peasant all That this proud nursery could breed?' He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so they made me stand up and sing, 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' till I dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at seven they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on and his'n under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em, because-- “'Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime; And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.' “As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours and I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a Littery atmosphere.” I said to the miner, “Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors.” The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, “Ah! impostors, were they? Are you?” I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not traveled on my 'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. APPENDIX P THE ADAM MONUMENT PETITION (See Chapter cxxxiv) TO THE HONORABLE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED. WHEREAS, A number of citizens of the city of Elmira in the State of New York having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument in memory of Adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the following facts and append to the same our humble petition. 1. As far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials. 2. The common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire neglect, although even the Father of our Country has now, and has had for many years, a monument in course of construction. 3. No right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe, should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the people of Elmira. His labors were not in behalf of one locality, but for the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which go therewith; hence all races and all colors and all religions are interested in seeing that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument. 4. It will be to the imperishable credit of the United States if this monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have sprung from his loins after 6,000 years of unappreciation on the part of its elders. 5. The idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of Elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage through the exercise of its great authority. Therefore, Your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to Adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the United States that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other memorial to the said Adam, and to this end we will ever pray. NAMES: (100 signatures) APPENDIX Q GENERAL GRANT'S GRAMMAR (Written in 1886. Delivered at an Army and Navy Club dinner in New York City) Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grant's English. That would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in General Grant's book than they do in Arnold's criticism on the book--but they do not. It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author--but they are not. In fact, General Grant's derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors as exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a random statement: it is a fact, and easily demonstrable. I have a book at home called Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a countryman of Mr. Arnold. In it I find examples of bad grammar and slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam, Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole, Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray (who made the grammar). In Mr. Arnold's criticism on General Grant's book we find two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English, enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of delinquents just named. The following passage all by itself ought to elect him: “Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc.” To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk. Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark: “To suppose that because a man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder of medicine.” People may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all, the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant's book is a great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece. In their line there is no higher literature than those modest, simple memoirs. Their style is at least flawless and no man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, “Unconditional and immediate surrender,” “I propose to move immediately upon your works,” “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Mr. Arnold would doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another mouth could not have done. And finally we have that gentler phrase, that one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his soldier heart there was room for other than gory war mottoes and in his tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: “Let us have peace.” APPENDIX R PARTY ALLEGIANCE. BEING A PORTION OF A PAPER ON “CONSISTENCY,” READ BEFORE THE MONDAY EVENING CLUB IN 1887. (See Chapter clxiii) ... I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain language. That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that it is true. Desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. Their military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them: to him a political party is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily a political party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by compulsion. Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers. Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. The volunteer soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? Must he prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? Does he take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? It goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises, enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army; he is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man. There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic. Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise one of them. If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn against him. I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul, and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and dishonor. Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is a slave? What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat and any other kind of lifelong slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to the lash of one master than another? This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. It enables them to foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name. Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no, you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things. This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is Consistency--with a capital C. With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-end never will. APPENDIX S ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR “A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT” (See Chapter clxxii) My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story. There was never a time when America applied the death-penalty to more than fourteen crimes. But England, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death! And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes England has distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws. Those Blue Laws should have been spared English criticism for two reasons: 1. They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence. 2. The Blue Laws never had any existence. They were the fancy-work of an English clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. And yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if they had been injected into the English law the dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol. I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of hell and Russia. To have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the State. APPENDIX T A TRIBUTE TO HENRY H. ROGERS (See Chapter cc and earlier) April 25, 1902. I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I have known. He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is my junior by four years. He was graduated from the high school there in 1853, when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. When he was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in Pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. He prospered, and by and by established the Standard Oil Trust with Mr. Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors. In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. Ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and I have had no further trouble with them. Obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and furnished him no difficulties. He released me from my entanglements with Paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when Charles L. Webster & Company failed he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way entitled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm; when I started lecturing around the world to make the money to pay off the Webster debts he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between Harper & Brothers and the American Publishing Company and patch up a working-contract between them and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as I earned money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the 96 alike; when I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return; when I had earned $28,500 more, $18,500 of which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter into Federal Steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $17,500, but sold it in two months at $25,000 profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to “give the other man a chance” (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken). That was at the end of '99 and beginning of 1900; and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. I do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for what I have done. His soul was born superhumanly sweet, and I do not think anything can sour it. I have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities. But for his cool head and wise guidance I should never have come out of the Webster difficulties on top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me. His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. With the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. He invests $100,000 for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $31,000. I invest (in London and here) $66,000 and must wait considerably for results (in case there shall be any). I tell him about it and he finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. He was born serene, patient, all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. Such a man is entitled to the high gift of humor: he has it at its very best. He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known. S. L. CLEMENS. APPENDIX U FROM MARK TWAIN'S LAST POEM BEGUN AT RIVERDALE, NEW YORK. FINISHED AT YORK HARBOR, MAINE, AUGUST 18, 1902 (See Chapter ccxxiii) (A bereft and demented mother speaks) ... O, I can see my darling yet: the little form In slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white, Pink-belted waist with ample bows, Blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--Capering in delight and choked with glee. It was a summer afternoon; the hill Rose green above me and about, and in the vale below The distant village slept, and all the world Was steeped in dreams. Upon me lay this peace, And I forgot my sorrow in its spell. And now My little maid passed by, and she Was deep in thought upon a solemn thing: A disobedience, and my reproof. Upon my face She must not look until the day was done; For she was doing penance... She? O, it was I! What mother knows not that? And so she passed, I worshiping and longing... It was not wrong? You do not think me wrong? I did it for the best. Indeed I meant it so. She flits before me now: The peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, The plaited tails of hair, The ribbons floating from the summer hat, The grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care. O, dainty little form! I see it move, receding slow along the path, By hovering butterflies besieged; I see it reach The breezy top clear-cut against the sky,... Then pass beyond and sink from sight-forever! Within, was light and cheer; without, A blustering winter's right. There was a play; It was her own; for she had wrought it out Unhelped, from her own head-and she But turned sixteen! A pretty play, All graced with cunning fantasies, And happy songs, and peopled all with fays, And sylvan gods and goddesses, And shepherds, too, that piped and danced, And wore the guileless hours away In care-free romps and games. Her girlhood mates played in the piece, And she as well: a goddess, she,--And looked it, as it seemed to me. 'Twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was And innocent. It made us cry, we elder ones, To live our lost youth o'er again With these its happy heirs. Slowly, at last, the curtain fell. Before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped In roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, So radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm Of praise that crowned her triumph.... O, Across the mists of time I see her yet, My Goddess of the Flowers! ... The curtain hid her.... Do you comprehend? Till time shall end! Out of my life she vanished while I looked! ... Ten years are flown. O, I have watched so long, So long. But she will come no more. No, she will come no more. It seems so strange... so strange... Struck down unwarned! In the unbought grace, of youth laid low--In the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--In the morning of her life cut down! And I not by! Not by When the shadows fell, the night of death closed down The sun that lit my life went out. Not by to answer When the latest whisper passed the lips That were so dear to me--my name! Far from my post! the world's whole breadth away. O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me For mother-help, and got for answer Silence! We that are old--we comprehend; even we That are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide; Their tale complete: Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision fades. We know them lost to us--Forever lost; we cannot have them back; We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead. APPENDIX V. SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, “3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES” THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI. (WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905) (See Chapter ccxxxv) Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. Our tramp is mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison. As for our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American custom-house. Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be hidden from him? He says: “A billion, that is a million millions,[?? Trillion D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still.” The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. But with my microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago. There are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. Heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of His creatures. He gave them life, He gave them humble services to perform, they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have their reward. Man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the majority there. He will be disappointed. Let him humble himself. But for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. He has a mission, therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet. Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and feel; I have lived 3,000 years since then [microbic time], and I see the foolishness of it now. We live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it. In matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here over the scientist of the earth, because, as I have just been indicating, we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made microscope can detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which exist for him as theories only. Indeed, we know as facts several things which he has not yet divined even by theory. For example, he does not suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness, great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections and aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own. Yet such is the case. Some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature and will not associate with them--and would not be allowed to, if they tried. Nothing is more particular about society than a molecule. And so there are no end of castes; in this matter India is not a circumstance. “Tell me, Franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an individual, an animal, a creature?” “Yes.” “Then water--any water-is an individual?” “Yes.” “Suppose you remove a drop of it? Is what is left an individual?” “Yes, and so is the drop.” “Suppose you divide the drop?” “Then you have two individuals.” “Suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?” “Again you have two individuals. But you haven't water any more.” “Of course. Certainly. Well, suppose you combine them again, but in a new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of hydrogen?” “But you know you can't. They won't combine on equal terms.” I was ashamed to have made that blunder. I was embarrassed; to cover it I started to say we used to combine them like that where I came from, but thought better of it, and stood pat. “Now then,” I said, “it amounts to this: water is an individual, an animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third individual--and yet each continues to be an individual.” I glanced at Franklin, but... upon reflection, held my peace. I could have pointed out to him that here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously--that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed. But he would not have known what I was talking about. After a moment I resumed: “Listen--and see if I have understood you rightly, to wit: All the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another. Is that it?” “Yes, that is correct.” “By George, it beats the band!” He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets. “Franklin, we've got it down fine. And to think--there are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute that it could get into a microbe's eye and he wouldn't know it was there!” “Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us, and rot us with disease: Ah, what could they have been created for? They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? Ah, friend Bkshp [microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go. We only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well! We shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after all we have suffered. Let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust. The humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!” You notice that? He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature--he and all the swarming billions of his race. None of them suspects it. That is significant. It is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive--insistently suggestive. It hints at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of space--is what men name the Universe. Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious! I wanted to see them! I was in a fever to see them! I had lenses to two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. The boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed. I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile. He said it was a quite simple thing-he had it at home. I was eager to bargain for the secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. He said: “Hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray to an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you are?” Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing! You could have knocked me down with a feather. We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away, green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills. And there was a great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting. We had hit a lucky moment, evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that. At the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent, with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell kind. The warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed. They were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail high.--[My own expression, and a quite happy one. I said to the Duke: “Your Grace, they're just about finger-milers!” “How do you mean, m'lord?” “This. You notice the stately General standing there with his hand resting upon the muzzle of a cannon? Well, if you could stick your little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh.” The Duke said “finger-milers was good”--good and exact; and he afterward used it several times himself.]--Everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about, and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad. Many wife-swinks [“Swinks,” an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-swinks were about--crying, mainly. It seemed to indicate that this was a case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry? The cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a command which we couldn't hear) and a division came tearing down on a gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch--the Duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it. Before long the real business of the occasion began. A battalion of priests arrived carrying sacred pictures. That settled it: this was war; these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front. Their little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever travestied the human shape I think, and he lifted up his hands and blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could, and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy pictures. It was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those serried masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under the long array of fluttering flags. Evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable little unwatched country for them somewhere. But the little fellow and his brethren didn't fall in--that was a noticeable particular. They didn't fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the swag. Very well, then-what ought we to do? Had we no moral duty to perform? Ought we to allow this war to begin? Was it not our duty to stop it, in the name of right and righteousness? Was it not our duty to administer a rebuke to this selfish and heartless Family? The Duke was struck by that, and greatly moved. He felt as I did about it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour boiling water on the Family and extinguish it, which we did. It extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended. We both regretted this, but the Duke said that these people were nothing to us, and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve such a Family. He was loyally doing the like himself, and so was I, but I don't think we thought of that. And it wasn't just the same, anyway, because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks. Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of this world some day and continue their life in a happier one. Old Tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and always has been. Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that. It could make me sad, only I know better. D. T. will fetch Blitzy yet one of these days. But these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate that I do not want this tramp to go on living. What would become of me if he should disintegrate? My molecules would scatter all around and take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new estate, but where should I be? I should not have a rag of a feeling left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete. Nothing to think with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with. There would be no more me. I should be musing and thinking and dreaming somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of Nature--heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit of those others, and I not in it at all. I should be gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years went on, and at last I should be all distributed, and nothing left of what had once been Me. It is curious, and not without impressiveness: I should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that I would not know it. I should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but I should be the next thing to it. And to think what centuries and ages and aeons would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone turned to gas and blown away! I wish I knew what it is going to feel like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome! My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years longer--500,000 of my microbe years. So may it be. Oh, dear, we are all so wise! Each of us knows it all, and knows he knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded. One man knows there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know it isn't so. There is not a mind present among this multitude of verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude. Yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade. Mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt. Why do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived? I swear I don't know. Why do I respect my own? Well--that is different. APPENDIX W LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE (See Chapter cclxxxii) [It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and distractions; so I will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.] Little Bessie was nearly three years old. She was a good child, and not shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with results. One day she said: “Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering? What is it all for?” It was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it: “It is for our good, my child. In His wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us these afflictions to discipline us and make us better.” “Is it He that sends them?” “Yes.” “Does He send all of them, mama?” “Yes, dear, all of them. None of them comes by accident; He alone sends them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better.” “Isn't it strange?” “Strange? Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way. I have not heard any one call it strange before. It has always seemed natural and right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful.” “Who first thought of it like that, mama? Was it you?” “Oh no, child, I was taught it.” “Who taught you so, mama?” “Why, really, I don't know--I can't remember. My mother, I suppose; or the preacher. But it's a thing that everybody knows.” “Well, anyway, it does seem strange. Did He give Billy Norris the typhus?” “Yes.” “What for?” “Why, to discipline him and make him good.” “But he died, mama, and so it couldn't make him good.” “Well, then, I suppose it was for some other reason. We know it was a good reason, whatever it was.” “What do you think it was, mama?” “Oh, you ask so many questions! I think it was to discipline his parents.” “Well, then, it wasn't fair, mama. Why should his life be taken away for their sake, when he wasn't doing anything?” “Oh, I don't know! I only know it was for a good and wise and merciful reason.” “What reason, mama?” “I think--I think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for some sin they had committed.” “But he was the one that was punished, mama. Was that right?” “Certainly, certainly. He does nothing that isn't right and wise and merciful. You can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are just and wise.” After a pause: “Did He make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the crippled old woman from the fire, mama?” “Yes, my child. Wait! Don't ask me why, because I don't know. I only know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to show His power.” “That drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into Mrs. Welch's baby when--” “Never mind about it, you needn't go into particulars; it was to discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway.” “Mama, Mr. Burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does He send them?” “Oh, certainly, child, certainly. Of course.” “What for?” “Oh, to discipline us! Haven't I told you so, over and over again?” “It's awful cruel, mama! And silly! and if I----” “Hush, oh, hush! Do you want to bring the lightning?” “You know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new church, and burnt it down. Was it to discipline the church?” (Wearily.) “Oh, I suppose so.” “But it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything. Was it to discipline the hog, mama?” “Dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while? If you would like to----” “Mama, only think! Mr. Hollister says there isn't a bird, or fish, or reptile, or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that Providence has sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its blood and discipline it and make it good and religious. Is that true, mother--because if it is true why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it?” “That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don't want you to listen to anything he says.” “Why, mama, he is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good. He says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise God for His infinite mercies. I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----Dear mama, have you fainted! I will run and bring help! Now this comes of staying in town this hot weather.” APPENDIX X. A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MARK TWAIN'S WORK PUBLISHED AND OTHERWISE--FROM 1851-1910 Note 1.--This is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list of Mark Twain's literary undertakings, in the order of performance, showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first published, etc. An excellent Mark Twain bibliography has been compiled by Mr. Merle Johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important items. Note 2.--Only a few of the more important speeches are noted. Volumes that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted. Note 3.--Titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as “Huck Finn” or “Huck” for “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Names of periodicals are abbreviated. The initials U. E. stand for the “Uniform Edition” of Mark Twain's works. The chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the place in this work where the items are mentioned. 1851. (See Chapter xviii of this work.) Edited the Hannibal Journal during the absence of the owner and editor, Orion Clemens. Wrote local items for the Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. Wrote two sketches for The Sat. Eve. Post (Philadelphia). To MARY IN H-l. Hannibal Journal. 1852-53. (See Chapter xviii.) JIM WOLFE AND THE FIRE--Hannibal Journal. Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal. 1853. (See Chapter xix.) Wrote obituary poems--not published. Wrote first letters home. 1855-56. (See Chapters xx and xxi.) First after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, Iowa. Letters from Cincinnati, November 16, 1856, signed “Snodgrass”--Saturday Post (Keokuk). 1857. (See Chapter xxi.) Letters from Cincinnati, March 16, 1857, signed “Snodgrass”--Saturday Post (Keokuk). 1858. Anonymous contributions to the New Orleans Crescent and probably to St. Louis papers. 1859. (See Chapter xxvii; also Appendix B.) Burlesque of Capt. Isaiah Sellers--True Delta (New Orleans), May 8 or 9. 1861. (See Chapters xxxiii to xxxv.) Letters home, published in The Gate City (Keokuk). 1862. (See Chapters xxxv to xxxviii.) Letters and sketches, signed “Josh,” for the Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, Nevada). REPORT OF THE LECTURE OF PROF. PERSONAL PRONOUN--Enterprise. REPORT OF A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION--Enterprise. THE PETRIFIED MAN--Enterprise. Local news reporter for the Enterprise from August. 1863. (See Chapters xli to xliii; also Appendix C.) Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. First used the name “Mark Twain,” February 2. ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE--Enterprise. CURING A COLD--Enterprise. U. E. INFORMATION FOR THE MILLION--Enterprise. ADVICE TO GOOD LITTLE GIRLS--Enterprise. THE DUTCH NICK MASSACRE--Enterprise. Many other Enterprise sketches. THE AGED PILOT MAN (poem)--“ROUGHING IT.” U. E. 1864. (See. Chapters xliv to xlvii.) Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise. Speech as “Governor of the Third House.” Letters to New York Sunday Mercury. Local reporter on the San Francisco Call. Articles and sketches for the Golden Era. Articles and sketches for the Californian. Daily letters from San Francisco to the Enterprise. (Several of the Era and Californian sketches appear in SKETCHES NEW AND OLD. U. E.) 1865. (See Chapters xlix to li; also Appendix E.) Notes for the Jumping Frog story; Angel's Camp, February. Sketches etc., for the Golden Era and Californian. Daily letter to the Enterprise. THE JUMPING FROG (San Francisco) Saturday Press. New York, November 18. U. E. 1866. (See Chapters lii to lv; also Appendix D.) Daily letter to the Enterprise. Sandwich Island letters to the Sacramento Union. Lecture on the Sandwich Islands, San Francisco, October 2. FORTY-THREE DAYS IN AN OPEN BOAT--Harper's Magazine, December (error in signature made it Mark Swain). 1867. (See Chapters lvii to lxv; also Appendices E, F, and G.) Letters to Alta California from New York. JIM WOLFE AND THE CATS--N. Y. Sunday Mercury. THE JUMPING FROG--book, published by Charles Henry Webb, May 1. U. E. Lectured at Cooper Union, May, '66. Letters to Alta California and New York Tribune from the Quaker City--Holy Land excursion. Letter to New York Herald on the return from the Holy Land. After-dinner speech on “Women” (Washington). Began arrangement for the publication of THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. 1868. (See Chapters lxvi to lxix; also Appendices H and I.) Newspaper letters, etc., from Washington, for New York Citizen, Tribune, Herald, and other papers and periodicals. Preparing Quaker City letters (in Washington and San Francisco) for book publication. CAPTAIN WAKEMAN'S (STORMFIELD'S) VISIT TO HEAVEN (San Francisco), published Harper's Magazine, December, 1907-January, 1908 (also book, Harpers). Lectured in California and Nevada on the “Holy Land,” July 2. S'CAT! Anonymous article on T. K. Beecher (Elmira), published in local paper. Lecture-tour, season 1868-69. 1869. (See Chapters lxx to lxxni.) THE INNOCENTS ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July 20. U. E. Bought one-third ownership in the Buffalo Express. Contributed editorials, sketches, etc., to the Express. Contributed sketches to Packard's Monthly, Wood's Magazine, etc. Lecture-tour, season 1869-70. 1870. (See Chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also Appendix J.) Contributed various matter to Buffalo Express. Contributed various matter under general head of “MEMORANDA” to Galaxy Magazine, May to April, '71. ROUGHING IT begun in September (Buffalo). SHEM'S DIARY (Buffalo) (unfinished). GOD, ANCIENT AND MODERN (unpublished). 1871. (See Chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also Appendix K.) MEMORANDA continued in Galaxy to April. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND FIRST ROMANCE--[THE FIRST ROMANCE had appeared in the Express in 1870. Later included in SKETCHES.]--booklet (Sheldon & Co.). U. E. ROUGHING IT finished (Quarry Farm). Ruloff letter--Tribune. Wrote several sketches and lectures (Quarry Farm). Western play (unfinished). Lecture-tour, season 1871-72. 1872. (See Chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also Appendix L.) ROUGHING IT--book (Am. Pub. Co.), February. U. E. THE MARK TWAIN SCRAP-BOOK invented (Saybrook, Connecticut). TOM SAWYER begun as a play (Saybrook, Connecticut). A few unimportant sketches published in “Practical jokes,” etc. Began a book on England (London). 1873. (See Chapters lxxxviii to xcii.) Letters on the Sandwich Islands-Tribune, January 3 and 6. THE GILDED AGE (with C. D. Warner)--book (Am. Pub. Co), December. U. E. THE LICENSE OF THE PRESS--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Lectured in London, October 18 and season 1873-74. 1874. (See Chapters xciii to xcviii; also Appendix M.) TOM SAWYER continued (in the new study at Quarry Farm). A TRUE STORY (Quarry Farm)-Atlantic, November. U. E. FABLES (Quarry Farm). U. E. COLONEL SELLERS--play (Quarry Farm) performed by John T. Raymond. UNDERTAKER'S LOVE-STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Hartford) Atlantic, January to July, 1875. Monarchy letter to Mrs. Clemens, dated 1935 (Boston). 1875. (See Chapters c to civ; also Appendix N.) UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE--paper for The Monday Evening Club. SKETCHES NEW AND OLD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July. U. E. TOM SAWYER concluded (Hartford). THE CURIOUS REP. OF GONDOUR--Atlantic, October (unsigned). PUNCH, CONDUCTOR, PUNCH--Atlantic, February, 1876. U. E. THE SECOND ADVENT (unfinished). THE MYSTERIOUS CHAMBER (unfinished). AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DAMN FOOL (unfinished). Petition for International Copyright. 1876. (See Chapters cvi to cx.) Performed in THE LOAN OF THE LOVER as Peter Spuyk (Hartford). CARNIVAL OF CRIME--paper for The Monday Evening Club--Atlantic, June. U. E. HUCK FINN begun (Quarry Farm). CANVASSER'S STORY (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, December. U. E. “1601” (Quarry Farm), privately printed. [And not edited by Livy. D.W.] AH SIN (with Bret Harte)--play, (Hartford). TOM SAWYER--book (Am. Pub. Co.), December. U. E. Speech on “The Weather,” New England Society, December 22. 1877. (See Chapters cxii to cxv; also Appendix O.) LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ-CLARENCE, ETC. (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic. IDLE EXCURSION (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, October, November, December. U. E. SIMON WHEELER, DETECTIVE--play (Quarry Farm) (not produced). PRINCE AND PAUPER begun (Quarry Farm). Whittier birthday speech (Boston), December. 1878. (See Chapters cxvii to cxx.) MAGNANIMOUS INCIDENT (Hartford)--Atlantic, May. U. E. A TRAMP ABROAD (Heidelberg and Munich). MENTAL TELEGRAPHY--Harper's Magazine, December, 1891. U. E. GAMBETTA DUEL--Atlantic, February, 1879 (included in TRAMP). U. E. REV. IN PITCAIRN--Atlantic, March, 1879. U. E. STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT--book (Osgood & Co.), 1882. U. E. (The three items last named were all originally a part of the TRAMP ABROAD.) 1879. (See Chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also Chapter cxxxiv and Appendix P.) A TRAMP ABROAD continued (Paris, Elmira, and Hartford). Adam monument scheme (Elmira). Speech on “The Babies” (Grant dinner, Chicago), November. Speech on “Plagiarism” (Holmes breakfast, Boston), December. 1880. (See Chapters cxxv to cxxxii.) PRINCE AND PAUPER concluded (Hartford and Elmira). HUCK FINN continued (Quarry Farm, Elmira). A CAT STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished). A TRAMP ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), March 13. U. E. EDWARD MILLS AND GEO. BENTON (Hartford)--Atlantic, August. U. E. MRS. McWILLIAMS AND THE LIGHTNING (Hartford)--Atlantic, September. U. E. 1881. (See Chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.) A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE--Century, November. U. E. A BIOGRAPHY OF ----- (unfinished). PRINCE AND PAUPER--book (Osgood R; CO.), December. BURLESQUE ETIQUETTE (unfinished). [Included in LETTERS FROM THE EARTH D.W.] 1882. (See Chapters cxl and cxli.) LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Elmira and Hartford). 1883. (See Chapters cxlii to cxlviii.) LIFE ON THE Mississippi--book (Osgood R CO.), May. U. E. WHAT Is HAPPINESS?--paper for The Monday Evening Club. Introduction to Portuguese conversation book (Hartford). HUCK FINN concluded (Quarry Farm). HISTORY GAME (Quarry Farm). AMERICAN CLAIMANT (with W. D. Howells)--play (Hartford), produced by A. P. Burbank. Dramatized TOM SAWYER and PRINCE AND PAUPER (not produced). 1884. (See Chapters cxlix to cliii.) Embarked in publishing with Charles L. Webster. THE CARSON FOOTPRINTS--the San Franciscan. HUCK FINN--book (Charles L. Webster & Co.), December. U. E. Platform-readings with George W. Cable, season '84-'85. 1885. (See Chapters cliv to clvii.) Contracted for General Grant's Memoirs. A CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED--Century, December. U. E. THE UNIVERSAL TINKER--Century, December (open letter signed X. Y. Z. Letter on the government of children--Christian Union.) KIDITCHIN (children's poem). 1886. (See Chapters clix to clxi; also Appendix Q.) Introduced Henry M. Stanley (Boston). CONNECTICUT YANKEE begun (Hartford). ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT--Century, April, 1887. LUCK--Harper's, August, 1891. GENERAL GRANT AND MATTHEW ARNOLD--Army and Navy dinner speech. 1887. (See Chapters clxii to clxiv; also Appendix R.) MEISTERSCHAFT--play (Hartford)-Century, January, 1888. U. E. KNIGHTS OF LABOR--essay (not published). To THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. CONSISTENCY--paper for The Monday Evening Club. 1888. (See Chapters clxv to clxviii.) Introductory for “Unsent Letters” (unpublished). Master of Arts degree from Yale. Yale Alumni address (unpublished). Copyright controversy with Brander Matthews--Princeton Review. Replies to Matthew Arnold's American criticisms (unpublished). YANKEE continued (Elmira and Hartford). Introduction of Nye and Riley (Boston). 1889. (See Chapters clxix to clxxiii; also Appendix S.) A MAJESTIC LITERARY FOSSIL Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. U. E. HUCK AND TOM AMONG THE INDIANS (unfinished). Introduction to YANKEE (not used). LETTER To ELSIE LESLIE--St Nicholas, February, 1890. CONNECTICUT YANKEE--book (Webster & Co.), December. U. E. 1890. (See Chapters clxxii to clxxiv.) Letter to Andrew Lang about English Criticism. (No important literary matters this year. Mark Twain engaged promoting the Paige typesetting-machine.) 1891. (See Chapters clxxv to clxxvii.) AMERICAN CLAIMANT (Hartford) syndicated; also book (Webster & Co.), May, 1892. U. E. European letters to New York Sun. DOWN THE RHONE (unfinished). KORNERSTRASSE (unpublished). 1892. (See Chapters clxxx to clxxxii.) THE GERMAN CHICAGO (Berlin--Sun.) U. E. ALL KINDS OF SHIPS (at sea). U. E. Tom SAWYER ABROAD (Nauheim)--St. Nicholas, November, '93, to April, '94. U. E. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS (Nauheim). U. E. PUDD'NHEAD WILSON (Nauheim and Florence)--Century, December, '93, to June, '94 U. E. $100,000 BANK-NOTE (Florence)--Century, January, '93. U. E. 1893. (See Chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.) JOAN OF ARC begun (at Villa Viviani, Florence) and completed up to the raising of the Siege of Orleans. CALIFORNIAN'S TALE (Florence) Liber Scriptorum, also Harper's. ADAM'S DIARY (Florence)--Niagara Book, also Harper's. ESQUIMAU MAIDEN'S ROMANCE--Cosmopolitan, November. U. E. IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?--Cosmopolitan, September. U. E. TRAVELING WITH A REFORMER--Cosmopolitan, December. U. E. IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY (Florence)--N. A.--Rev., July, '94. U. E. FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENSES--[This may not have been written until early in 1894.]--(Players, New York)--N. A. Rev., July, '95 U. E. 1894. (See Chapters clxxxviii to cxc.) JOAN OF ARC continued (Etretat and Paris). WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US (Etretat)--N. A. Rev., January, '95 U. E. TOM SAWYER ABROAD--book (Webster & Co.), April. U. E. PUDD'NHEAD WILSON--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November. U. E. The failure of Charles L. Webster & Co., April 18. THE DERELICT--poem (Paris) (unpublished). 1895. (See Chapters clxxxix and cxcii.) JOAN OF ARC finished (Paris), January 28, Harper's Magazine, April to December. MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN--Harper's, September. U. E. A LITTLE NOTE TO PAUL BOURGET. U. E. Poem to Mrs. Beecher (Elmira) (not published). U. E. Lecture-tour around the world, begun at Elmira, July 14, ended July 31. 1896. (See Chapters cxci to cxciv.) JOAN OF ARC--book (Harpers) May. U. E. TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE, and other stories-book (Harpers), November. FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR begun (23 Tedworth Square, London). 1897. (See Chapters cxcvii to cxcix.) FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November. QUEEN'S JUBILEE (London), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed. JAMES HAMMOND TRUMBULL--Century, November. WHICH WAS WHICH? (London and Switzerland) (unfinished). TOM AND HUCK (Switzerland) (unfinished). HELLFIRE HOTCHKISS (Switzerland) (unfinished). IN MEMORIAM--poem (Switzerland)-Harper's Magazine. U. E. Concordia Club speech (Vienna). STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, March, 1898. U. E. 1898. (See Chapters cc to cciii; also Appendix T.) THE AUSTRIAN EDISON KEEPING SCHOOL AGAIN (Vienna) Century, August. U. E. AT THE APPETITE CURE (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, August. U. E. FROM THE LONDON TIMES, 1904 (Vienna)--Century, November. U. E. ABOUT PLAY-ACTING (Vienna)--Forum, October. U. E. CONCERNING THE JEWS (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, September, '99. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MRS. EDDY (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, October. U. E. THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, December, '99 U. E. Autobiographical chapters (Vienna); some of them used in the N. A. Rev., 1906-07. WHAT IS MAN? (Kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), August, 1906. ASSASSINATION OF AN EMPRESS (Kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished). THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER (unfinished). Translations of German plays (unproduced). 1899. (See Chapters cciv to ccviii.) DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES (Vienna)--Forum, March. U. E. MY LITERARY DEBUT (Vienna)--Century, December. U. E. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE (Vienna)--N. A. Rev., December, 1902, January and February, 1903. Translated German plays (Vienna) (unproduced). Collaborated with Siegmund Schlesinger on plays (Vienna) (unfinished). Planned a postal-check scheme (Vienna). Articles about the Kellgren treatment (Sanna, Sweden) (unpublished). ST. JOAN OF ARC (London)--Harper's Magazine, December, 1904. U. E. MY FIRST LIE, AND How I GOT OUT OF IT (London)--New York World. U. E. Articles on South African War (London) (unpublished) Uniform Edition of Mark Twain's works (Am. Pub. Co.). 1900. (See Chapters ccix to ccxii.) TWO LITTLE TALES (London)--Century, November, 1901. U. E. Spoke on “Copyright” before the House of Lords. Delivered many speeches in London and New York. 1901. (See Chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.) TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--N. A. Rev., February. TO MY MISSIONARY CRITICS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--N. A. Rev., April. DOUBLE-BARREL DETECTIVE STORY (Saranac Lake, “The Lair”) Harper's Magazine, January and February, 1902. Lincoln Birthday Speech, February 11. Many other speeches. PLAN FOR CASTING VOTE PARTY (Riverdale) (unpublished). THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION (Riverdale) (unpublished). ANTE-MORTEM OBITUARIES--Harper's Weekly. Received degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale. 1902. (See Chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also Appendix U.) DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD? (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. U. E. FIVE BOONS of LIFE (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5. U. E. WHY NOT ABOLISH IT? (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5. DEFENSE OF GENERAL FUNSTON (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., May. IF I COULD BE THERE (Riverdale unpublished). Wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished. Received degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri, June. THE BELATED PASSPORT (York Harbor)--Harper's Weekly, December 6. U. E. WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL? (York Harbor)--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. Poem (Riverdale and York Harbor) (unpublished) Sixty-seventh Birthday speech (New York), November 27. 1903. (See Chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.) MRS. EDDY IN ERROR (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April. INSTRUCTIONS IN ART (Riverdale)-Metropolitan, April and May. EDDYPUS, and other C. S. articles (unfinished). A DOG'S TALE (Elmira)--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E. ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, January 21, 1904. U. E. ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR (Florence)--Harper's Magazine, August, U. E. THE $30,000 BEQUEST (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, December 10, 1904. U. E. 1904. (See Chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.) AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Florence)--portions published, N. A. Rev. and Harper's Weekly. CONCERNING COPYRIGHT (Tyringham, Massachusetts)--N. A. Rev., January, 1905. TSARS SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--N. A. Rev., March, 1905. ADAM'S DIARY--book (Harpers), April. 1905. (See Chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also Appendix V.) LEOPOLD'S SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--pamphlet, P. R. Warren Company. THE WAR PRAYER (21 Fifth Avenue, New York) (unpublished). EVE'S DIARY (Dublin, New Hampshire)--Harper's Magazine, December. 3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES (unfinished). INTERPRETING THE DEITY (Dublin New Hampshire) (unpublished). A HORSE'S TALE (Dublin, New Hampshire)-Harper's Magazine, August and September, 1906. Seventieth Birthday speech. W. D. HOWELLS (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)-Harper's Magazine, July, 1906. 1906. (See Chapters ccxxxix to ccli.) Autobiography dictation (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Dublin, New Hampshire)--selections published, N. A. Rev., 1906 and 1907. Many speeches. Farewell lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19. WHAT IS MAN?--book (privately printed). Copyright speech (Washington), December. 1907. (See Chapters cclvi to cclxiii.) Autobiography dictations (27 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Tuxedo). Degree of Doctor of Literature conferred by Oxford, June 26. Made many London speeches. Begum of Bengal speech (Liverpool). CHRISTIAN SCIENCE--book (Harpers), February. U. E. CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT To HEAVEN--book (Harpers). 1908. (See Chapters cclxiv to cclxx.) Autobiography dictations (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Redding, Connecticut). Lotos Club and other speeches. Aldrich memorial speech. 1909. (See Chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also Appendices N and W.) IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?--book (Harpers), April. A FABLE--Harper's Magazine December. Copyright documents (unpublished). Address to St. Timothy School. MARJORIE FLEMING (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, December. THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, February, 1910 BESSIE DIALOGUE (unpublished). LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (unfinished). THE DEATH OF JEAN--Harper's, December, 1910. THE INTERNATIONAL LIGHTNING TRUST (unpublished). 1910. (See Chapter ccxcii.) VALENTINES TO HELEN AND OTHERS (not published). ADVICE TO PAINE (not published).